ladies "lead up to it," but heroines occasionally go much further than
that, and do more than prompt an inexperienced wooer. But all these
things are only known to the world through the confessions of novelists,
who, perhaps, themselves receive confessions. M. Goncourt not long ago
requested all his fair readers to send him notes of their own private
experience. How did you feel when you were confirmed? How did Alphonse
whisper his passion? These and other questions, quite as intimate, were
set by M. Goncourt. He meant to use the answers, with all discreet
reserve, in his next novel. Do English novelists receive any private
information, and if they do not, how are we to reconcile their
knowledge--they are all love-adepts--with the morality of their lives?
"We live like other people, only more purely," says the author of "Some
Private Views," which is all very well. No man is bound to incriminate
himself. But as in the course of his career a successful novelist
describes many hundreds of proposals, all different, are we to believe
that he is so prompted merely by imagination? Are there no "documents,"
as M. Zola says, for all this prodigious deal of love-making? These are
questions which await a reply in the interests of ethics and of art.
Meanwhile an editor of enterprise has selected five-and-thirty separate
examples of "popping the question," as he calls it, from the tomes of
British fiction. To begin with an early case--when Tom Jones returned to
his tolerant Sophia, he called her "Madam," and she called him "Mr.
Jones," not Tom. She asked Thomas how she could rely on his constancy,
when the lover of Miss Segrim drew a mirror from his pocket (like
Strephon in "Iolanthe"), and cried, "Behold that lovely figure, that
shape, those eyes," with other compliments; "can the man who shall be in
possession of these be inconstant?" Sophia was charmed by the "man in
possession," but forced her features into a frown. Presently Thomas
"caught her in his arms," and the rest was in accordance with what Mr.
Trollope and the best authorities recommend. How differently did Arthur