The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (9.1896)

16 A Birthday Letter

of her sex ; and then it is of an ugliness to chill and kill romance, and
scatter love’s young dream, and almost break the heart.

“And all for the sake of a high heel and a ridiculously pointed toe
*—mean things, at the best !

“ Conversely, when Mother Seigel-”

Ah, no—I beg your pardon—it is “Mother Nature.” But
doesn’t one instinctively expect “ Mother Seigel ” ? And wouldn’t
the effect have been better if one had found “ Mother Seigel ” ? And
hadn’t the author of Trilby a sound commercial inspiration when he
selected the style of Mother Seigel’s circulars as the model on
which to form his own ? No doubt the selection was unconscious;
but there it stands ; and I cannot but believe it has had much to
do with the book’s success. When we remember that the over-
whelming majority of people who read, in these degenerate days,
belong to the class of society one doesn’t know, that they are
destitute of literary traditions, that they have received what they
fondly misname their “education” at the expense of the parish
and that they come to Trilby hot from the works of Mr. All
Kine, surely we need not marvel that the Mother Seigel style of
writing is the style of writing that “ mostly takes their hearts.”

The peculiarly insidious kind of silliness which, hand in hand
with its sister graces, a peculiarly insidious kind of vulgarity, and
a peculiarly insidious kind of slipshod writing, is presumably a
super-inducing cause of Trilby's popularity, one would have diffi-
culty in characterising by a single word. One feels it everywhere;
everywhere, everywhere, from first line to last; but the appropriate
epithet eludes one. Is it a sentimental silliness ? A fatuously
genial silliness ? A priggish silliness ? A pruriently prudish silli-
ness ? Yes, yes; it is all this; but it is something else. The
essential flavour of it is in something else. If you will permit
me to use the word, sir, I would suggest that the crowning

quality