manufacture of many unwholesome commodities, from bad pickles to bad
poetry. But society, like "matter," and Her Majesty's Government, and
other lofty abstractions, has its share of excessive blame as well as
excessive praise. Where there is one woman who writes from necessity, we
believe there are three women who write from vanity; and besides, there
is something so antispetic in the mere healthy fact of working for one's
bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind of feminine literature is not
likely to have been produced under such circumstances. "In all labor
there is profit;" but ladies' silly novels, we imagine, are less the
result of labor than of busy idleness.

Happily, we are not dependent on argument to prove that Fiction is a
department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully
equal men. A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our
memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but
among the very finest--novels, too, that have a precious speciality,
lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience. No
educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of
fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid
requirements. Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be
beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements--genuine
observation, humor, and passion. But it is precisely this absence of
rigid requirement which constitutes the fatal seduction of novel-writing
to incompetent women. Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as
to their power of playing on the piano; here certain positive
difficulties of execution have to be conquered, and incompetence
inevitably breaks down. Every art which had its absolute _technique_ is,
to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of mere left-handed
imbecility. But in novel-writing there are no barriers for incapacity to
stumble against, no external criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking
foolish facility for mastery. And so we have again and again the old
story of La Fontaine's ass, who pats his nose to the flute, and, finding
that he elicits some sound, exclaims, "Moi, aussie, je joue de la
flute"--a fable which we commend, at parting, to the consideration of any
feminine reader who is in danger of adding to the number of "silly novels
by lady novelists."

VII. WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS: THE POET YOUNG. {205}

The study of me