TYPICAL HEROINES OP RECENT FICTION.

Otago Witness, Issue 2289, 13 January 1898, Page 46

TYPICAL HEROINES OP RECENT FICTION.

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

V. " Lord Ormonfc and his Aminta " is a much more recent novel, and it shows, if not a falling off in power, at least a stronger bias towards the highly artificial setting which seems to suit Meredith best. 'Watson says of him that his characters " do literally talk in epigrams," and ha is apt to place them in situations such as could exist only in the selectest circles of an artificial society. He has given a looser rein to this taste in Aminta than in Diana.

With his usual infidelity to the bright and beautiful English girl, Meredith makes this heroine half Spanish. A3 a schoolgirl she is the sweetheart of a very fine schoolboy, Matey W^yburn, and both are tha worshippers of a certain famous general, Lord Ormont;, whose deeds have helped to win the Empire. After Aminta has left school, arid while tha is still a young girl steeped in hero-worship, she meets oa board a steamer this very Lord Ormont, who proves to be in the flesh a harsdsome and distinguished bachelor of GO. Although exceedingly fastidious, and aware that Aminta has ill-bred ielative3 and no pedigree to speak of, ho falls in love with the beautiful brunette, and they are privately married at the Ergiish Embassy in Madrid. On Lard Onncni's return to Ea^land, he findb his public popularity gone, and in a rage with the ingratitude of the nation, ho hits upon a novel method of showing his disdain for its opinion. He keeps Aminta in sec'usion, refusing to introduce her to his own family, the Court, or th- 5 social world. As, in accord with his idsas of woman's need?, he takes this course without making any explanation to Aminta, she is left to suppose either that their marriage was illegal or that ho is ashamed of her.

By the ennui and world-weariness into which she falls, Aininta is now taught that her marriage was a mistake. Hero-worship is not the passion on which one can safely marry. Lord Ormont is klad to her — they have no vulgar differences such as embittered Diana's life ; but " a larigour past delivery in sighs was on the ycuog woman's breast. She could have heard without a regret that the heart was to cease beating. Had it been downright misery she would have looked about her with less exanimate glassiness. The unhappy have a form of life. Until they are worn out they feel keenly." She felt nothing. There are two influences in Aminta's life " which, like two spirits, do suggest her still." Oce is the recollection of her boy-lover. The thought of his manliness, his ardent nature, his soldierly ambition has besn vaguely consoling to her, as a guarantee that however maTrings may dissolve illusion there are atill gallant hearts and great thoughts in the world. By a turn of Fortune's whtei, Weyburn appears on the scene in the capacity of Lord Ormont's secretary. Aminta asks him of his career. Ha is going to be— not a soldier, but of all homely and respectable professions, a tchoolmaster! Aminta imagines him "toppling over in a long-skirted brown coat with spectacles and cane." All the poetry of her memories is turned into cold prose. Weyburn apparently is no eagle, but'a plain barndoor fowl. To her ideas, " the meanness of the ambition which he had taken in exchange for the thirst of glory accused his na'ure."

Now the other influence comes into play. la her mood of languor Aminta opens h&r jewel box and takes out love-letters which she has received from a certain Morsfield, a well-known man about town, notorious for intrigue, who, fired by her beauty, expresses, in the lines she reads, an ardent admiration. Aminta knows the man's repute, and is so indifferent to him personally that she scarcely recollects his appearance. She is as chaste as Imogen. Yet. to her these letters have a certain value. Driven by the instinctive cravicg fcr passion, she finds refreshment in the mere proof that passion, no matter of what quality, anywhere exists. She wanted love, and said to herself " that unless by this man she had never baen loved." Har husband did not love her, else he would treat her before tb.B world as a true and honourable wife. She summed Lorfl Ormont up with loveless precision. Ha was a " splendid military man, a chivalrous man, a man of inflexible honour ; but he had no understanding of how to treat a woman, or belief in har having equal life with him on earth." Lord Ormont's inherited ideas of women reduced them to " pretty insect or tricky reptile." Aminta felt thafc she belonged to neither of those classes, and " her rage of being chafed at the yoke of marrif gs." To occupy her idle heait she began to intrigue with her lady friends to secure presentation at Court and the social status to which her rank entitled her. With apparent inconsequence she charged her yielding to this ignoble ambition on Morsfield's letters. They were, she said, like a poison in her blood, developing all the latent evil in her nature. In truth, they had stirred in her primeval forces with which great-hearted women, in Meredith's view of life, must reckon. She is as free from love for Morsfield as Imogen from love for lachimo. Yet assailed by compulsive thirst for simple human feelings such as corns to any village girl, she extends to the thought of Morfcfield neither hate nor ecorn — rather a languid kind of hospitality. It is in such traits that Meredith proves himself a matter. Where he bag to choose between fidelity to the tradition of feminine purity and fidelity to the actual throbbing reality of life, he throws the tradition overboard. We feel that Imogen herself might have shared Aminta's experience but for the safeguard of her love fcr Pos 1 humous, and Ainiata does not love Lord Ormont.

But Aminta's " batter aHgel is a man right fair," and his silent hifluesace is working powerfully. Wey'uurn is Meredith's typical hero. He is the tutor in tho " Egoist," Dartrey Fenellan in " One of Our Conqnerors," and Tom Redworth in "Diana." Weyburn is muscular and healthy, a hearty eater, a good boxer, fencer, and cricketer ; he is ardent, yet strongly self-controlled, practical, nprighb, and loyal. Meredith describes him as having " cheerful courage,

skill, the ready mind, easy adroitness, and self-command ." He is a man of ideas, too, and has chosen his profession in order to illustrate his theories of education. He means to keep a cosmopolitan school, where not only the nationalities but the sexes shall

"All the devilry between the sexss," he gays, "begins at their separation. They're foreigners when they meet, and their alliances are not always binding. The chief object in life, if happiness be the aim and the growing belter than we are, is to teaoh men and women how to be one, for if they're not, then each is a morsel for the other to prey on. Lady Charlotte Eglett'a view is that the greater number of them on both sides hate one another. . . . One may say they are trained at present to be hostile. Some of them fall in love and strike a truce, and still they are foreigners. They have not the same standard of honour. They might have it from an education in common."

By such talk and by the force of his daily commonplace integrity Weyburn not only removes Aminta's prejudice against his profession, but reveals to her a new use of life, and gradually shifts the centre of her circle. She sees a world now ia which personal happiness is not the main object. She sees duty in its austere fascination. The petty ambition to enter society, now grown despicable, gives place to a wish for freedom snd work. Weyburn, you must observe, never gives Aminta any advice, nor ever m^kes an organised effort to influence her. He does nothing but attend to his business like a sober, practical young man ; but the fact of hk so Jivicg his life and so filling his place affects Aminta, though in a converse direction, like the fact of Morsfield'n flame. That, she thought, was a poison in her nature developing its worst instincts. Weyburn'g ia the effect of mountain winds and sea breezes, making har wholesome and simple sgaip, killing off the fungus growth of morbid ambitions and vaguely unholy feelings.

Although with growing respect for each other passion also grows, it is a proof of Aminta's sound moral nature that she prepares to separate herself not only from Lord Ormont — that bond has grown intolerable — but at the same time from Weyburn. Her plan is to live in solitary freedom and work for a living 1 Fioally, however, she consents to share Wt-y burn's life and work, and she last appears as the matron of bis flourishing cofmopolitan school in Swi'zerland.

Barring only the circumstances of her anomalous social position, Aminta is a more typical woman than Diana, because in her unhappy times she has a less exalted mental endowment to atone for the poverty of her exalted life. Diana, besides being a beauty and a wit, i 3 a genius, and can clothe heraeif at will in her intellectual purple. She has the entree of society— not merely of the vulgar society of cards and compliments, but of the artistic world, where the really great are met. Nay, she ia a leader among the leader?, a bom princess, in the exercise of whose powers the sense of living cannot remain torpid. Bat Aminta has none of these compersationa. She is not a ganius, sot a politician, nor a wit ; he has not even Diarsa's sour privi'ege of working for a livelihood She i 3 simply a youßg woman who fiuds herself at 25 bound by a loveless marriage to an eld man, ignorant of her nature or its nteds. She has to child, no necessary occupation — that opiate for ali anguish — no strong taste for art or science, no conversational brilliance. Though beautiful and dangerously attractive, she has no fancy for playing Cleop?tra. Though a woman " born for rsctitude," rectitude offers her an intolerably arid prospect. Unlike ihe bright- witted and introspective Diana, Anrata has in her nature a mass of the inarticulate and unreasoned element, which so sorely puzzles the student of women. The motif of the whole book is the play on this nature of " the subtle thinff that's spirU," and the author bestows his ble&E-iog on the final triumph of a pure passion over conventional barriers.

(7b he continued. J