HEROINES.
]1.1R. HOWELLS has recently published a set of papers on "The Heroines of Fiction" (London : Harper and Brothers, 15s. net), and very pleasant reading they are. The American novelist inclines to believe that the greatest writers have shown their highest genius in their portraits of women, so that in studying their heroines we study their best work. If Scott is left out of account, the theory can be easily maintained ; and true or false, it has served Mr. Howells's turn in the writing of two exceptionally entertaining Lvolumes. The book deals chiefly — almost entirely—with the novels of the far or the near past. The reader goes with the author to Evelina's ball and "explores to Box Hill" with Emma's picnic party, drifts down the river with Stephen and Maggie Tulliver, and visits among Trollope's parsons and politicians. At parting he feels he has been living in a very pleasant and interest- ing world, where there is some tragedy and much comedy. peopled by heroes and heroines with whom be is on terms of intimacy, and of whom he instinctively makes use when he classifies his actual acquaintance. So-and-so is like Emma or Mary Garth or Lily Dale, be may find himself saying ; under such-and-such circumstances she would do such.and-such things. Nor is this feeling of friendly intimacy confined to the creations of the greatest writers. Many novelists who cannot be placed higher than the second class offer these friendships to their readers. How many men over fifty count the Baroness Tautphoeus Hildegarde among their early loves ? Her reading lovers rejoiced in her final happiness, not because it made an artistic finish to the book, but because they knew her, and cared for her, and wished her to get what she wanted. The misfortunes of the book-people of the past give real pain to their acquaintance. One wonders how George Eliot could find it in her heart to drown Maggie Tulliver, and one feels sure she did it with compunction. Very sad things happened in that land of yesterday's fancy about which Mr. Howells has been talking to his readers; but somehow they happened in a setting which was not altogether sad; there was almost always some relief in the sombre picture. The author was still the creator, not merely the showman, of his characters ; he seemed sorry when they suffered; and all the while the reader kept the feeling that the canvas of life is very large, and that however much suffering may go on in places, some chosen people are still joyful. Such was the old world of fiction. In such waters sailed "the old three-decker."
But how greatly that world has changed in the last few years! What a different experience we should have bad had Mr. Howells chosen to take us visiting among the fashionable heriones of to-day. What different women ! What a much heavier atmosphere ! The author or authoress of to-day does not seek to give his or her reader a friend or an enemy in his or her hero or heroine. As a rule, with a very few notable exceptions, we do not care a bit what happens to them, we only care to know how they are made. The authors of their being pick them to pieces before our eyes, and we watch to see bow lifelike he has made them and how naturally they squeal. Their mental anatomy is copied minutely from many modern women, and their makers have pushed the study of mental anatomy farther than it ever was pushed before. Their environment, too, often is extraordinarily natural, and well depicted. No god out of a machine interferes in the misfortunes of a modern heroine, and the old theory of poetic justice has been long thrown aside as lumber, together with other worn-out proper- ties of a passed-away fiction. To ask at the present day how it story ends, whether happily or unhappily, is to give one- self away for an old man, or one without feeling for literature. Novels are not intended to supply us with agreeable society,— they are essays in art. Yet these dreary stories, whose dramatis personae agonise under a leaden sky, can seldom be dignified with the name of tragedy ; they have nothing of 'the conse- cration and the poet's dream." Their sordidness is too often wholly unrelieved by any touch of poetry. What is the meaning of this change ? Have all our hearts become hard, so that we cannot be moved by any tale of suffering or feel any desire to see the sunshine of success, so that our romance writers awake in us nothing but an intellectual sensation of critical enjoyment? Are we so weary and so blase that, having exhausted all pleasant sensations, we must turn to watch pain as something new ? We do not believe for an instant that this is the true explanation of this curious phenomenon. We believe the fault, or rather the failure, lies at the door of the new writers of fiction. Their characters do not live. They are imitation people ; the most wonderful, the most perfect imitations which have ever been produced,—but they are not alive. They, have never passed that mysterious barrier between consciousness and unconsciousness. Their very authors do not believe they live—if they did they would feel for them—and the readers do not believe they live either.
They regard them as children regard dolls, who, having no wills of their own through which to yield interest to their possessors, must be made to yield it by means of the "strong situations" in which they can be placed, and are there- fore continually vivisected, hanged, and beaten by youthful romance-makers innocent of more refined methods of torture.
The better made the doll the better the fun,—real hair and joints are an almost essential feature of a thoroughly enjoyable
hanging scene. Children are carried away by such play, but at the back of their heads they know very well that these puppets do not feel, and probably nothing would induce them to ill-treat a kitten. But they would sooner play with dolls than kittens, because the former give more scope for a lawless imagination, and make less tax upon the conscience and con- sideration of the dramatist.
Truth in detail is the idol of these new writers, and many readers delight in photographic minutia) just as an audience
at a cinematograph show will clap their hands if a cat runs across a street scene or become enthusiastic over a cloud of photographic dust; but though they may depict the haunts and dissect the hearts of men more scientifically than the older writers, we do not believe that they succeed in giving as true an impression of life. They show a selection of facts in a thoroughly false atmosphere. If life were just as they paint it, it would certainly be a doubtful matter whether it were worth having at all; whereas the vast majority of people desire to go on living, and to go on looking at life. Neither the sight nor the sensation is always pleasurable. Nevertheless, they remain eminently desirable. Of course, we may be told that this is an instinct implanted in the race to keep it from extinction, and no doubt in a sense this explana- tion is the true one. It may also be said that the scientific explanation of the beauty of a sunset is the truest explana- tion possible; nevertheless, it is not the whole explanation. There is about life itself some sort of glory, some impal- pable shining attraction, which can neither be adequately conveyed nor truthfully ignored. This glory was per- ceived by the older and greater novelists, and they indicated it by various devices, chief among which was the theory of poetic justice. Now there can be no doubt that in the long run poetic justice not infrequently comes about; but the run is very long, and though the mills of God grind small, they cannot always be seen to move. To make them get round in the length of time occupied by the action of an ordinary novel is of the nature of an artistic expedient. But if we would represent life truly we must accept some artistic devices. All perspective, for instance, is of the nature of an illusion. The great majority of people admit some sort of government in the affairs of men; some sense of an overruling Providence abides with most of us, and a clumsy indication of this truth imparts, we believe, a greater veri- similitude to a picture than a determination to ignore what cannot be accurately described.
Will there never be any more heroines with whom a man may fall in love; for whose fate we may care sufficiently to forget the intricacies of their manufacture ; who will be sufficiently real and sufficiently charming to induce their own authors to set them in pleasanter places, or at least to pity their inevit- able misfortunes ? No doubt their day will come round again. There are a few even now lost in the dismal crowd. Mean- while till the sun of English fancy shines a little more cheer- fully old-fashioned folk can always return to their old friends.
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