About the Women.

Auckland Star, Volume XXV, Issue 66, 17 March 1894, Page 9 (Supplement)

About the Women.

Thackeray Replied :41 Paint Your Sex as I Have Found Them.

An American woman once asked Thackeray why be made his women either knaves or fools. To which he replied, ' Madame, I paint; your sex as I have found them.' Yeb I do not think ho was the harsh cynic these words imply him to have been. I imagine rather his meagre portraits of women tc have arisen from two causes: (1) The sad* ness of his personal lot; and (2) that he painted only from one narrow section of social life, the artificial society phaso of it, upon whose barren soil blossoms little feminine mental or moral loveliness. Its ia true that, amid the same conditions of life, his men emerge far nobler than hi* women; yet may thie not be due to the fact of men, even in fashionable life, being called to the more active business of life— the fighting branch—in foreign countries and winning their way in professions more or less arduous ? His finest men—the characters for whom he seems to have had the greatest love—are oftenest old soldiers, such as Colonel Newcome and Major Dobbin. Their lives, ovon amid worldly surround ings, were red earned from the futility and pet?t&«|Bs pf thbae ofthejr jriyes |a| daughters; Thackeray's business was to portray the women of his fashionable world—' the world which amuses itself' most generally at its neighbour's expense; and though ha dwelt upon the traditional weakness of the sex, its jealousies, small deceits, envy and petty spite, still, at times, who has written more tenderly, more reverently, with loftier moral justice, of women than he? Take, for instance, for simple tenderness and reverence these words from 'Vanity Fair,' when George loaves Amelia in the cold dawn of Waterloo: • Heart stained and shame stricken he stood at the bed's foot; and looked at the sleeping girl. How dared he—who was he—to pray for one so spotless ? God bless her! God bless her! He came to the bedside and looked at the hand, the little soft hand, lying asleep, and he bent over the pillow noiselessly toward the gentle pale face. Two fair arms closed tenderly round his neck as he stooped down. "lam awake, George," the poor child said with a sob.' His heroines had, indeed, a fatal knack of loving blindly the wrong man, when a better might" have been theirs • for a word or a look.' But even George Elliot, with her larger brained, more generously moulded woman, makes her nobler heroines fall into the same error. Tina loves a brainless fop, with loyal Mr Gilfi.b standing by ; Maggie Tulliverloves the somewhat shallow Stephen instead of sensitive Philip. I doubt, heroes and heroines would have to bo drawn quite irrespective of human reality could they ba made to love only that which wero worth the loving.