TYPICAL HEROINES OF RECENT FICTION.

Otago Witness, Issue 2287, 30 December 1897, Page 45

TYPICAL HEROINES OF RECENT FICTION.

(By the late Marion S. W. White, M.A.)

111. The best study I have met of the Primitive Woman we 'owe to a writer who is to Moore (in the opinion of the" romantic) Hyperion to a satyr— the aristocrat of letters, Robert Louis Stevenson. In his earlier novels Stevenson never drew any women — he said " that he was afraid of them ; and even later, when called upon to indicate their characters, he usually passes - them over with brief phrases 6uch as remind ■ us of Huck Finn's immortal panegyric on Miss Mar j Anne — " She had the most sand I ever see in a girl," or .'his appreciation of the young lady who " bad a hare-lip, and ■ gave herself np to good works." But in " Weir of Hermiston," his last work, Stevenson takes his courage in both hands, and makes the eternal feminine the pivot round ■which the fates revolve. So far as the story goes, it is Archie, the pale slim young hero, who is treated with a certain distance and aloofness, while the three women — Archie*

mother and the two Kirsties — come out vividly under the master's brush.

Archie's mother, who dies soon after the story opens, is the wife of the savage "hanging judge " — a study in negatives.

" She withered in the growiDg ; and whether it was the sins of her Bircs or the sorrows of her mothers, came to her maturity depressed and, as it were, defaced — no blood of life in her, no grasp or gaiety, pious, anxious, tender, tearful, and incompetent."

But the elder Kirstie, who is housekeeper at the country house of Hermiston, to which Archie is banished after a quarrel with his father in Edinburgh, is of very different mettle :

" Kirstie was over 50, and might have sat to a sculptor. Long of limb and still light of foot, deep-breaßted, robust-loined, her golden hair not yet mingled with any trace cf silver, the years had but caressed and embellished her. By the lines of a rich and vigorous maternity ehe seemed destined to be the bride of herces and the mother of their children, and behold ! by the iniquity of fate, she had passed through her youth alone, and drew near to the confines of age a childless woman. . . .

" Her feeling [for Heimiston] partook of the loyalty of a clanswoman, the heroworship of a maiden aunt, and the idolatry due to a prod."

Thte Kirstie is completely saved from mawkiehness, however, by the possession of a very stiff temper and a tongue that can be the terror of the neighbourhood when it chooses. In her relations with the world outside Hermiiton she is something of a Scotch Mrs Poyser ; in her attitude towards Archie, somethirg of a Scotch Lady Oastlewood ; and the combination, as delineated by Stevenson, gives us a figure unique in fiction. Until the yonDger Kirstie and Frank Innes — si college acquaintance of Archie's — come upon the f.oene the elder Kirstie is divinely happy in lavishing upon her young master the lover's and mothet's passion garnered in her heart through empty years. But their arrival not only deprives her of the opportunities for intercourse, but alters Archie's moods so that be has no longer the inclination for her evening chat, on wbicb her day's happiness had depended. Then she rebels, in bitter jealousy, against the ways of Fate :

" She had a vision of herself, the day over for her old-world tales and local gossip, bidding farewell to her last link with life and brightness and love, and behind and beyond ehe saw only the blank butt end where she roust crawl to die. Had she, then, come to the lees 1 She— so great, so beautiful — with a heart as fresh as a girl's and strong as womanhood? It could not be.' And yet it was so."

The story of the younger K'rstie, like that of Juliet, is a. study in erotic love. We never Fee her except under a spell that has in it from the first a threat of tragedy. She is nob so much a woman as Woman — piimitive, emotional, receptive, and weak. She^sees Arcbio in chmch — she; a daughter of the ruoorc, bub Glasgow-bred and Glasgowdressed in spring colours of violet and yellow. After two looks exchanged during the service and half a d< zm sentences on the way home Kir.*»ie has drunk her love philtre. Her passion for Archie, like -Juliet's for Borneo, has in its inception nothing to do with Archie's real nature. It is the sudden sensuous clutch of a newly-awakened instinct, throwiog reason from her throne, and mastering, like an irresistible exterior force, the untrained faculties of the girl. If it be sacrilege to analyse the phenomenon of romantic love, it is a sacrilege which Stevenson himself commits. In this book be, ia his own phrase, " looks into the ambiguous face of woman as she is." He applies the dissecting knife to his heroine's mood as ruthlessly as any realist. He analyses, too, without making his subject guilty of introspection. Kirstie is no thinker ; she cannot make her own consciousness objective to herself. Stevenson's description of Kirstie's afternoon mood afcer her meeting with Archie at church is a masterpiece of intuition. Juliet felt so, bat Juliet bad a quick brain that gave her feelirg relief in thought, and Shakespeare's rhetoric to give her thought expression in words. Kirstie is drawn on the lower inarticulate plane of the peasant woman. Both had the dash of superstitious fear across their sensuous happiness. "I have no joy of this contract to-night," says Juliet; "it is too rasb, too unadvised, too sudden." And Kirstie on the Sunday afternoon "Jay for the most part in a mere stupor of unconeenting pleasure and unreasoning fear. The fear was superetitiouß." She was not actively swimming, bnt passively soaking in the flood of primitive feeling that had been suddenly released from some subterranean lake in her soul. Stevenson does not lend Kirstie his mind, as a smaller artist might have done. She ia never granted the fiery and melting eloquence to which the tlder Kirstie has so good a right. Stevenson's object is rather to indicate the absence of intellect, even of imagination, from the whole ecstasy. Yet — and this trait is equally great— he introduces , no sense of moral danger . nor suggestion of mcral wrong into Kira tie's mood. Archie is from the first alive to the equivocal nature of the situation, in which he loves a girl whom he cannot, and dare not, marry. But Kirstie has that faculty of passive surrender to emotion which is characteristic generally of women, especially of women untrained to think, and more especially of peasant women in whose blood submission runs. There is a fatalism bred of clcse bending over the black soil, and bequeathed by mother to daughter as arTirjsticct. Like the poor Oorsican girl in " Gramigna's Mistress," Kirstie accepts her fate as something not to be striven against. "It is the will of God," said Gramigna'e mistress on reviewing the passion of her life and all the sordid tragedy that grew out of it. And Kirstie inarticulately feels the same. The story, broken by Stevenson's death, gives evidence of powers iv that author which he himself had not suspected — powers cf analysis and psnetration which have little play in his romances. Take ttie scene from 11 Weir," where Archie meets Kirstie on the moor after their morning encounter at the church. Archie — a scholar and something of a melancholy poet in his habitual mental oolouring — speaks of the mood into which the spring day throws him. "He was sounding ' er, oem.i*OonjQiQusly, to see if she could

understand him — to learn if ehe .were only an animal, the colour of flowers, or bad a soul in her to keep her sweet. She on her part, her means well in hand, watched woman-like for any opportunity to Bbine, to abound in his humour, whatever that might be. The dramatic artist that lies dormant or only half awake in most human beings bad in her sprung to his feet in a divine fury, and chance had served her well. She looked upon him with a subdued twilight look that became the hour of the day and the train of thought ; earnestness shone through her like stars in the purple west." Kirstie sang to him a verse of a little song her poet brother bad made, and Weir decided that " she was a human being, tuned to a sense of the tragedy of life. There were pathos and music and a great heart in the girl." Yet Kirstie was merely acting —responding with a transient effectiveness to the masculine stimulus on her nature — rather than revealing any genuine depth in herself. She is a study of the primitive woman of an average grade, refusing to think, thirsty to feel, deaf to reasoning, blind to danger, and petulant to correction ; yet all without detriment to the sex-magnetism with which she is bo strongly charged. In " Diana of the Crossways " there is a scene where a party of those intellectual patricians in whom the soul of George Meredith delights sit discussing men's knowledge or ignorance of feminine character. Lady Pennon asserts that men and women are two different species : " There's no resemblance, and they Rnow nothing of us." ' "• I have heard,' Westlake observes, * that j a step to the riddle is gained by a serious contemplation of boys.' "' We are two different species I ' thumped Lady Pennon. . . . ' I am sure I read what they write of women 1 And their heroines 1 ' " Lady Esquart acquiesced. *We are utter fools, or hcrrid knaves.' " ' Nature's original hieroglypbf, which have that appearance to the peruser,' Westlake assented. " ' They know nothing of us whatever, Lady Pennon harped on her original dictnm." {To le continued.)