the sex of the consummate author
of the story. She is quite alive to Hetty's plump arms and pretty
cheeks. She likes to pat her and watch her, as if Hetty were a cat, or
some other sleek and supple animal. But we feel that the writer of _Adam
Bede_ is eyeing Hetty all over from the beginning to the end, and
considering in herself the while what fools men are. It would be unjust
and untrue to say that George Eliot in all her works does not do ample
justice, in a noble and generous way, to the power of female beauty. The
heroines of _Romola_ and _Felix Holt_ prove distinctly that she does.
But one may fairly doubt whether a man could have painted Hetty. When
one sees the picture, one understands its truth; but men who draw pretty
faces usually do so with more enthusiasm.

A similar sort of protest may be found lurking in a great many women's
novels against the popular opinion that man is the more powerful animal,
and that a wife is at best a domestic appanage of the husband.
Authoresses are never weary of attempts to set this right. They like to
prove, what is continually true, that feminine charms are the lever that
moves the world, and that the ideal woman keeps her husband and all
about her straight. In religious novels woman's task is to exercise the
happiest influence on the man's theological opinions. Owing to the
errors he has imbibed from the study of a false and shallow philosophy,
he sees no good in going to church twice on Sundays, or feels that he
cannot heartily adopt all the expressions in the Athanasian creed. It is
the heroine's mission to cure this mental malady; to point out to him,
from the impartial point of view of those who have never committed the
folly of studying Kant or Hegel, how thoroughly superficial Kant and
Hegel are; and to remind him by moonlight, and in the course of
spiritual flirtation on a balcony, of the unutterable truths in theology
which only a woman can naturally discern. We are far from wishing to
intimate that there is not a good deal of usefulness in such feminine
points of view. The _argumentum ad sexum_, if not a logical, is often no
doubt a practical one, and women are right to employ it whenever they
can make it tell. And as it would be impossible to develop it to any
considerable extent in a dry controversial work, authoresses have no
other place to work it in except in a romance. What they do for religion
in pious novels, they do for other things in productions of a more