insistence, a shrillness, a certain quality of multiloquence. With a few
exceptions, the chief of whom are Jane Austen and Alice Meynell, the
greatest of them suffer from this garrulous, _gesticulating_
inefficacy. It runs abroad in _Wuthering Heights_ and _Aurora
Leigh_ and _Sonnets from the Portuguese_. And George Eliot, for
all her spurious masculinity, is as the rest. You may trace the disease in
her most admired passages. For example:--

"It was to Adam the time that a man can least forget in after life,
--the time when he believes that the first woman he has ever loved
betrays by a slight something--a word, a tone, a glance, the quivering
of a lip or an eyelid--that she is at least beginning to love him in
return. The sign is so slight, it is scarcely perceptible to the ear
or eye--he could describe it to no one--it is a mere feather-touch,
yet it seems to have changed his whole being, to have merged an uneasy
yearning into a delicious consciousness of everything but the present
moment." (_Adam Bede_, p. 187.)

Observe here the eager iteration of the woman, making haste to say what
she means, and, conscious of failure, falling back on insistence and
loquacity. Exactly the same vehement spirit of pseudo-forcefulness
characterises women's journalism to-day. And the worst is that these
tactics inevitably induce formlessness and exaggeration; the one by reason
of mere verbiage, the other as the result of a too feverish anxiety to be
effective.

I submit that this lack of restraint shown by women writers as a class is
due (like other defects) less to sex than to training. The value of
restraint is seldom inculcated upon women. Indeed, its opposites--gush and
a tendency to hysteria--are regarded, in many respectable quarters, as