Choosing Wife from Heroines of Fiction.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XL, Issue 8, 22 February 1908, Page 60

Choosing Wife from Heroines of Fiction.

(By

Andrew Laing.)

If I were compelled to choose a wife from among the heroines of fiction, my, heroine, if I am to be monogamous, is certainly Sophia in “Tom Jones,” that peerless lady who was Fielding’s wife, Happy Harry Fielding! though perhaps it needed all Sophia’s humour, good humour, and sense, to be equally blessed in her lord. Every man who has had the liberal education of knowing Sophia has wanted to marry her, and if to want to marry a woman makes her your favourite heroine, then Sophia would assuredly be elected by a vast majority of votes. But, in real life, any man who knew both Sophia and Beatrix Esmond would have been captured by Beatrix. The thing could not occur; the most fascinating girl in fiction (not counting Shakspeare’s women) was the elderly baroness de Berstein, when Sophia was in her bloom, in 1743. She captured the hearts of men even as elderly women with alluring attainments attract to-day. Bewitching madcaps of fiction entertain unlearned youth, but men of mark spend time only with those heroines who perform worthy feats. They like in their reading the same qualities they demand in life. Still, masculine nature is so made that if Sophia and Beatrix had bloomed together the exquisite and excellent Sophia would have been eclipsed by the most splendid of coquettes, whose history, by the way, is quite correctly narrated. She could not have been with the king in Paris and betrayed him to my Lord Stair, because Paris was about the last place in the world where the king could seek shelter. Diana Vernon was Beatrix’s coeval, and had a better chance than Sophia of being her successful rival. If Thackeray’s King James, a character at the opposite pole from the real chevalier de St. George, had met both Beatrix and Diana his heart would have been in a condition with which Robert Burns, like many less celebrated men, was tod familiar. Nobody in his sense could want to marry Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, but that heroine is as taking, in one way, as the Consuelo of George Sand is in another. Consuelo is, I think, what George Eliot would have liked Romola to be, more or less. To marry Romola was indeed “to. domesticate the Recording Angel,” a quotation which reminds one that Mr. Ste. venson’s Barbara Grant was indeed a fascinating heroine, and knew it, and frankly confessed her knowledge. She was her author’s own favourite, not Catriona or another. In the novels of to? day I remember no peers to any of these women, but perhaps the young men are capable of remembering them a month after reading about them. One could say to any of these new sirens, if one had for a moment vowed fidelity, It was last night I swore to thee . s That fond impossibility. But “youth will be served,” and may be served, in the way of a satisfactory hero, ine by Lady Rose’s Daughter, or Tess of the d’Urberviiles, or any of Mr. An* thony Hope’s young women, for example, Peggy, who was bewitching, or some ere* ations of Mr. Hall Caine. But it is astonishing how “the senile heart” remains true to early impressions, and how modern heroines need to have their names written down in an innocent kind of Leperello’s if one is to remember them at all. The fault is not in the women nor the authors, likely, but in the “memorial tablets” of the brain. Moreover, most modern heroines are married women, whereas the nice ones in Shakspeare and in novels before 1890 were almost always unwedded maids. Yoit like Beatrice, and Portia, and above all things, Rosalind. You do not lose heart to Lady Macbeth, though a fine figure of a woman, and you do not desire to compete with Othello in the affections of Desdemona. This may be a too nice! morality, hut, to Victorian tastes, even widows, in novels at least, come under; the ban of the elder Mr. Weller. Nobody but Col. Esmond ever cared for Lady Castlewood, and Dobbin is alone in his passion for Amelia.