The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎625v] (141/239)

110
THE POSITION OF WOMEN.
And so ends The Dark Lantern, a powerfully written modern
version of the repellent old story of Patient Griselda, with the
difference that the mediaeval ruffian is by many degrees less of a
bully and a coward than his almost inconceivable twentieth
century prototype. Our old friend Rochester is a polished, deli
cately refined person beside him !
What has become of the noble ideal of the knight and the
gentleman bequeathed to us from the days of chivalr} ? Is the
book a simple study of that magnetic type of character which
attracts in spite of every odious attribute? But one is driven
from the supposition at every sentence, for the writer The lowest of the four classes into which East India Company civil servants were divided. A Writer’s duties originally consisted mostly of copying documents and book-keeping. betrays
sympathy with the submission of the heroine, not only to cruelty
but to unremitting and apparently purposeless insult of the coarsest
kind. The drift of the book is set—as violently as the current of
a great river—towards the old order of sex-relationship in its most
brutal, least decorative form. The wife is to be subject to the rule
of the husband, and she is to rejoice in her submergence in him
and in his children, for it is his children not hers that she is to
spend herself for, body and soul. Katharine’s child is only hers
as far as suffering and service are concerned ; when it comes to
matters of direction she has no further part to play. Her husband
calmly orders the child to be sent to the country without her
consent or even knowledge, and when she follows it he telegraphs
to the nurse to bring it back to town again—for its “ good,” of
course, as all such deeds are done.
And now Lucas Malet comes forward, not to defend her sex—
and, be it added, humanity—from the primitive barbarism here
threatened, but to fasten yet another stone round the neck of the
drowning—if, in fact, those who have toiled for what they claim
to be a more human relation of the sexes, have toiled in vain, as
the authoress seems to believe.
Her only doubt is of the possibility of persuading those
w T omen who have escaped from their prison to return to it. We
have the advantage of seeing that prison-” home ” pictured for
us in The Dark Lantern (no ” emancipated ” writer The lowest of the four classes into which East India Company civil servants were divided. A Writer’s duties originally consisted mostly of copying documents and book-keeping. would have
dared to paint it in such colours !) and a ” dark lantern ” in very
truth that ‘ ‘ proper sphere ’ ’ must be if the authoress has painted
it aright. For once, we view it without the usual decorations
that sentimentality loves to hang upon its grim walls.
Miss Robins does not pretend that it is garlanded with roses;
she seems to say : “Here women must seek their career, and
what little of happiness they can hope for in absolute subservi
ence, for so nature has fashioned their souls.”
Lucas Malet, applauding President Roosevelt’s proclamation
that woman’s mission is that of unlimited maternity, seems to