The Delicious Vice | Page 4

even if hopeless. And, of course, there have been gallantries--mere
affaires du jour--such as every man occasionally engages in.
Sometimes they seemed serious, but only for a moment. There was
Beatrix Esmond, for whom I could certainly have challenged His Grace
of Hamilton, had not Lord Mohun done the work for me. Wandering
down the street in London one night, in a moment of weak admiration
for her unrivalled nerve and aplomb, I was hesitating--whether to call
on Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, knowing that her thick-headed husband was
in hoc for debt--when the door of her house crashed open and that old
scoundrel, Lord Steyne, came wildly down the steps, his livid face

blood-streaked, his topcoat on his arm and a dreadful look in his eye.
The world knows the rest as I learned it half an hour later at the
greengrocer's, where the Crawleys owed an inexcusably large bill.
Then the Duchess de Langeais--but all this is really private.
After all, a man never truly loves but once. And somewhere in Scotland
there is a mound above the gentle, tender and heroic Helen Mar, where
lies buried the first love of my soul. That mound, O lovely and loyal
Helen, was watered by the first blinding and unselfish tears that ever
sprang from my eyes. You were my first love; others may come and
inevitably they go, but you are still here, under the pencil pocket of my
waistcoat.
Who can write in such a state? It is only fair to take a rest and brace up.
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II
NOVEL-READERS
AS DISTINGUISHED FROM WOMEN AND NIBBLERS AND
AMATEURS
There is, of course, but one sort of novel-reader who is of any
importance He is the man who began under the age of fourteen and is
still sticking to it--at whatever age he may be--and full of a terrifying
anxiety lest he may be called away in the midst of preliminary
announcements of some pet author's "next forthcoming." For my own
part I cannot conceive dying with resignation knowing that the
publishers were binding up at the time anything of Henryk
Sienckiewicz's or Thomas Hardy's. So it is important that a man begin
early, because he will have to quit all too soon.
There are no women novel-readers. There are women who read novels,
of course; but it is a far cry from reading novels to being a novel-reader.
It is not in the nature of a woman. The crown of woman's character is
her devotion, which incarnate delicacy and tenderness exalt into perfect
beauty of sacrifice. Those qualities could no more live amid the
clashings of indiscriminate human passions than a butterfly wing could
go between the mill rollers untorn. Women utterly refuse to go on with
a book if the subject goes against their settled opinions. They despise a
novel--howsoever fine and stirring it may be--if there is any taint of
unhappiness to the favorite at the close. But the most flagrant of all

their incapacities in respect to fiction is the inability to appreciate the
admirable achievements of heroes, unless the achievements are solely
in behalf of women. And even in that event they complacently consider
them to be a matter of course, and attach no particular importance to
the perils or the hardships undergone. "Why shouldn't he?" they argue,
with triumphant trust in ideals; "surely he loved her!"
There are many women who nibble at novels as they nibble at
luncheon--there are also some hearty eaters; but 98 per cent of them
detest Thackeray and refuse resolutely to open a second book of Robert
Louis Stevenson. They scent an enemy of the sex in Thackeray, who
never seems to be in earnest, and whose indignant sarcasm and
melancholy truthfulness they shrink from. "It's only a story, anyhow,"
they argue again; "he might, at least write a pleasant one, instead of
bringing in all sorts of disagreeable people--some of them positively
disreputable." As for Stevenson, whom men read with the thrill of
boyhood rising new in their veins, I believe in my soul women would
tear leaves out of his novels to tie over the tops of preserve jars, and
never dream of the sacrilege.
Now I hold Thackeray and Stevenson to be the absolute test of capacity
for earnest novel-reading. Neither cares a snap of his fingers for
anybody's prejudices, but goes the way of stern truth by the light of
genius that shines within him.
If you could ever pin a woman down to tell you what she thought,
instead of telling you what she thinks it is proper to tell you, or what
she thinks will please you, you would find she has a religious
conviction that Dot Perrybingle in "The Cricket of the Hearth," and
Ouida's Lord Chandos were actually a materializable an and