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It is a hearty outbreak against that apparent necessity for elegance and sexual specialisation that undercuts so much feminine achievement, that reduces so much feminine art and writing to vapidity, and holds back women from the face of danger and brave and horrible deaths. It is West to Miss Robins' East.
All that makes woman ugly in the North: the cold, the thick, ugly clothes that the peasant women wear, the doublet of embarrassment and vapidity which they drag about with them, the strait- waistcoat of Christiansfeldt morality in which they are confined by the priests, by protestantism, by fashion, by custom and convention none of this oppressed, confined or contracted women here.
She found her in a corner of their room, reading a worn novel by a certain author whose very name she had been taught to regard as a synonym for vapidity and sentimentalism of the most highly flavoured sort, and she could not keep back a quick exclamation at sight of it. Lucy looked up with a frown and a flush.
Many of her judgments, both here and in her Biographic Sketches, are stern; and some like that on Macaulay, for instance may even pass for harsh. But they are never the product of mere anger or heatedness, and it is a great blunder to suppose that reasoned severity is incompatible with perfect composure, or that calm is another name for amiable vapidity.
On the other hand, it not unfrequently publishes jokes the birth of which considerably antedates that of the United States itself; and it sometimes descends to a level of trifling flatness and vapidity which no English paper of the kind can hope to equal.
Much was to be laid to the difference of race, religion, and education; but something, they feared, to the personal vapidity of acquaintances whose meridional liveliness made them yawn, and in whose society they did not always find compensation for the sacrifices they made for it. "But it is right," said Elmore. "It would be a sort of treason to associate with the Austrians.
When we had been there half an hour or so, the case in progress if I may use a phrase so ridiculous in such a connexion seemed to die out of its own vapidity, without coming, or being by anybody expected to come, to any result. The Lord Chancellor then threw down a bundle of papers from his desk to the gentlemen below him, and somebody said, "Jarndyce and Jarndyce."
These simple romancers in nowise resemble the vitriolic melo-dramatists scarcely caricatured by Punch in "Mokeanna," who try to drug, in default of intoxicating their audience; the liquor they proffer in their pretty flimsy cups, if not exciting, is far from deleterious; not unfrequently you catch glimpses of an under-current of honest pathos, soon smothered by garish flowers of language; and sometimes the style sparkles into mild effervescence, redeeming itself from utter vapidity; these ephemerals, indeed, belong rather to the lemonade than the milk-and-water class; but, throughout, there is a woeful want of verve and virility.
But when he is your companion for life, and all to yourself, and you find that, when he does talk, he has neither an idea nor a sentiment alas! alas for you, young bride, if you have ever known the charm of intellect, or the sweetness of sympathy. But it was not for Caroline to complain; struggling against her own weight of sorrow, she had no immediate perception of her companion's vapidity.
Again, from another point of view, he is tolerably sure to find that the common opinion of society about unequal unions is not so unsound as he used scornfully to suppose it to be. The vapidity of a polite woman is bad, but the vapidity of a woman who is not polite is decidedly worse.
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