HEROES WOMEN LIKE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2784, 24 July 1907, Page 77

HEROES WOMEN LIKE.

By Jessib Mackat.

The English hero is in a bad! way just Bow. He has been stripped' of the, impeccability thai Trapped him as a garment in his early Victorian days, and in certain quarters he has reverted to the Tom Jones type, bu* wearing his moral rue with a difference and a twentieth century swagger of defiance that the primitive brain children of Le Sage and Fielding would certainly not have copied. In other quarters his impalpability ha* *ot onlj : been retained. l>u]t, it has been strained to I breaking point. H« has, ia fact, 'been turned into a clotheshorse to air all * manner of heavy platitude and. theory, like * the hysterical heroei of Guy Thome's later * romances, or he has* been turned into a f bit of slender drawing room, bric-a-brac, &3 in the books of John .Strange Winter. It has ■ been remarked by one writer of colonial standing how a recent perverted trend of taste has run in favour of the - brutal butcher-fed hero who beat* his wife . into undying affection, and the last few : years' yield in fiction gees to show the - criticism nob unfounded. - - But such perversion and such banalities - pass, like the starch-eating stage in a . schoolgirl's life. There are some types of - permanence that the feminine heart. returns to, as the needle to the gale ; it may be not to the prototype of 50 years ago, but to whatever "form the Phra of romence has elected to be reborn In to-day. Have women creators a monopoly in women's favourite heroes? It cannot be 6aid so. Adam Bede is a fine fellow, but neither he nor any other hero of George Eliot's has caused women readers to lie awake, thinking of him. Even Tito, her BDcst masterly study in rascality, has been shrewdly discerned by Leslie Stephen to be a feline feminine creature in man's shape. Mrs Humphry Ward's heroes are often prosier, but also often more convincing. If Robert Elsrosre ond David Grieve, to say nothing of Sir G<orge Trcssady, are "weariful" persons, the all but superhuman virtues of Jacob Delafield are not oonnted against him by the yearning . hero-seeker ; not counted agai»&t Jiim as, say, the clip-hedge excellences of that * unendurable Cric'iton,* S'epben Brice in th* ,' "Crisis." For Jacob Delafield is such a . tireless, selfless, patient lover, and that as the AFpha ana Omega' of the whole " matter of herohood. Only the woman ', mind is aware, albeit blindly, that the " makings of a perfect lover are to be found : only in a perfect man. This is a point obscure to the second-rate impressionist, ■who sets out to construct a erwd pession out of cigar smoke, an old playbill, and a French rrenu. But the result is a deal less convincing than stage thunder, though it was the method of Ovida — poor, dis- . crowned Ouida, whose grey years- of misfortune have gathered thick iincc her audacious successes of long ago! And yet Ouida gave women one hero almost live enough to love — Tricotrin, the homeless musician ; Tricotr ; n. lihe white-living rover, lardless lord of t he open road, the open hard, the op=n heart! But it wa& a different wainan who gave the girls of the mid- Victorian days the her© of a hundred dreams. Dinah Muloch's art and Oukla's were as far asunder as the poles ; but each had her - court in those .Jar-off <i. - iys of the- poke ' bonnet. And for my own part, I disclaim * thb obvious and excellent John Halifax in - this connection, and "affirm instead that * Dinah Muloob's hero pf a hundred dreams ' was Nathaniel Harper hi "Agatha's Hus- - band"— Nathaniel Harper, the gentle, * goldsn-haired knight errant, whcee harrying. by the high-handed gipsy Agatha made every right -minded maiden long to box her earc — till her none too speedy repentance in the last chapter. It is a triumph to create even a ktandiric; lik-eness in the fading phantaum^oiiu of hitter-day fiction ; and the golden hair of Nathan'?!, the great reverent child eves and tense, slight frame, all go to make up a lasting picture in the gallery of memory. T) o pure, strong, se!f-cr stained spirit of the young man is so finely shown against lho , weak, poisTnous sentimentali.-m of the egot:6t Frederick, whore vanity so nearly wrecked the l'ves of 'Nathaniel and Agatha. The optimist Sixfe satisfaction, however, in confessing tliaf, far from women monopolising the. creation of favourite : heroes^-au unusual, number of tlie best owe .' existence to4.be .presumably- more accurate ' delineation of writers of their own sex. Who h;;s read "H\patia." vithont falling under the haH-fant-Vst ; c, hnlf idaalistic. but ■wholly " nw.sterfnl spell of Raphael Aben Ezra? Here, again.- we hove a living physical, presentment tha* renv>iis in the * lithe, ojivc-tinted young Jew. blase. .cynical, -world -&pot*.ed, yet neve<- lan;ciikl, . neves base, never cruel : i man in whom * the, quenchless pride of race l.ad held the * inner citadel oi his life from the utter pro- ' fanenient of the world in his lot w,.s cast, until he was saved utterly by a noble love and a living faith. ' The chapter v.-here Abon Ezjvj, cynic and fugitive, hoMin« his ov,ti life and the worMs pesib'c '»f socd at a straw's value, throws hi* keen intellect co the vrieds anc' turns for Ktfidar.ce to th? c?nin« instincts of his faithful dog seems a counterpart in romance of the basic record ruction in philosophy of Descartes— "l think, therefore I am." And the beautiful story of his V*ve for yietoria and •neceptanoe of her faith is all, the more al]urix3<r to t.l-e reader because the"keen aiwMi^ nature "Tof the man fights every inch nf the way ho travels towards wrfect faith in tho f human ivA in the divine. T'-'e pow*T of - his creator is evinced, however, in the fioeminc anomaly that Alxm Ezra's rhief ■ charm is not as a Wer, but as a friend— m •all tte varied relations of nupi', critic, teacher, brother almost, which \\p -<SEum^s in turn towards the ill-starred Hypatia. whose fate was folded unwitting in th" idle schemes of his recklere youth. Few finer studies jf the final trinnmli of thr soul over impersonal irresponpib'r intellect have been penned in English. Nowhere

ifi this more evident than in the scene where he meets Cyril after the murder of Hypatia, his stem, terrible gravity cutting like a knife through the stormy mind of the fanatic monk whose triumph is already ashes. A weaker proselyte would have cried out on the murderer, abjured the faith whose tenets the Alexandrian Church had go miserably misread, spent itself in a quest for vengeance. The piercing insight of Aben Ezra is supreme even in that awful hour; he sees Christ's "Yea" a thing apart from the frightful negations of the so-called Christians around him, and departs "to his owm place," the strenuous road that in -these days could lead nowhere but to martyrdom. It is a far cry from Alexandria to Yankeeland, but the next hero has the breezy twang and the audacious resourcefulness, of the far West. The most charming of Kipling's heroes is before vs — t<he Honourable Nioholas Tarvin in the "Naulakha," — instinct, one fancies, with • too much of the elusive American magnetism not to owe most of bis personality to the delicate collaborative touch of Walcot Balestier. And it is an irresistible personality, crammed with as much commercialism, as much fighting grit, as much quaint local patriotism, and as much love as would do for a dozen, all packed away under a Yankee drawl and the sun-dried, wind- wrinkled, lank exterior of a western cowboy. Ta-rvin is king of the game at all times, whether pushing the destiny of Topaz City, playing guardian angel to his beloved devotee, the missionary Kate, or playing for deadly stakes with the passi on at?. Indian Queen wtose murderous hand holds the costly bauble that means the rise or fall of Topaz City. Stronsr, true, and a lover — that is what a woman's hero amounts to, we have seen ; and the Honourable Nicholas shows himself all this, an»l more in the upshot, when, after braving danger and death in half a dozen forms to gain his end, a second thought makes him toes the Queen's bauble back. For he onnnot, will not. face Kate with a lie. and Kate's straigbt-laced morality would call the thing stealing. Topaz falls, but Kafce-is won, and the Honourable Nicholas has ro tear for any quantity of secondary spilt milk.

And it is well to pull in ?iere and rest on the memory of the Honourable Nicholas Tarvin, for the pen. that gets adrift among American heroes is ]ike to stray far.