ABSTRACT
The precise ground and range of those views which Mr Gissing intends to represent in operation among the chief personages of his story, calling them The Emancipated, cannot be identified with any set ofopinions hitherto acknowledged as prevailing in respectable English society. There are some people who have left off going to church, or who, like Mrs Baske, after her Neapolitan experiences and her studies of art and literature, give up the Dissenting Chapel at Bartles; there are some who admit a sceptical criticism of the historical Scriptures, and who do not conceive of Inspiration, or of Revelation, from the orthodox point of view. If such persons are to form a class ironically called The Emancipated, or sincerely considering themselves to be so, there is still no warrant for ascribing to them an injurious affinity with other persons who have lax notions about marriage, who have no sense of honour, fidelity, or integrity, who deny all moral responsibility, who are selfish, idle, profligate, and deceitful. Mr Reuben Elgar, the brother ofMrs Baske, is a sheer blackguard ofthe latter description, whereas she, educated in a narrow puritanism, becomes wisely tolerant and gentle, devoting the leisure of her widowhood to a liberal self culture, and finally marries the high-minded, conscientious, sagacious Mallard, a type of stern veracity, and rigorous honesty, equally one of the 'Emancipated' class. We fail to see that in the behaviour and lives of these persons, or of Cecily Doran, the youthful beauty and heiress, who imprudently runs away with Elgar from her guardian and her aunt, and becomes the happy wife ofa dissolute scoundrel, there is any common ground of action furnished by their opinions concerning the Church and the Bible. Ross Mallard is as good a man, and Miriam Baske as good a woman, before and after the change ofopinion in the mind of the latter, as one would be likely to meet in any sect of religionists; Cecily, a charming, generous, enthusiastic girl, afterwards sorely tried by a vicious husband, is scrupulously faithful to conjugal duty. If they had all remained punctual churchgoers, and had never read a word ofmodern science or philosophy, it does not appear manifest that their conduct in domestic and social relations would have been much better than it was. On the other hand, such a man as Elgar, an utter egotist, a base sensualist, with vanity enough to affect lofty sentiments and win the admiration ofignorant young women, a reck-
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less spendthrift, libertine, and gambler, wasting his friends' money, excusing himself by gross falsehoods, idling away his manhood, inveigling an orphan heiress, then treating his wife with cool neglect, and sinking into the coarsest kind of vulgar vice, is not the product of 'advanced thought' in our age. His stale and hollow pretext that 'one cannot help being what one is', and that there is no moral responsibility, no merit or blame, for what one does, has in all ages been the natural sophistry of self-indulgence, and often compatible with the profession of a reputed orthodox creed.
