Like Fanny he has his faults, but they are not the major ones of heartless selfishness and false values that many others in the book either deliberately or unthinkingly act out. I'll take up the question of why we like some Austen heroes better than others. Still, I'll bite. As Rhett Butler says, they're gentlemen caught in a world which worships handsomeness, suavity, the man who can master others. Disloyalty, having sex with another woman, insouciance, a certain callous indifference in order to make a joke, selfishness, the ability to be endlessly idle, and, more important, the inability to look into themselves and see they're wrong and ought to change, because they cannot feel the kind of joy intense love, and all that comes with it, can bring.
Love here includes love of people other than the individual with whom one is sexually involved.
That Austen seems to suggest that as a group these men are very shallow in their emotions is interesting, because the Lovelace s and Rhett Butlers of novels are given an intensity of emotion that is overpowering. He's the boy who's not sorry he's had a good time, but terribly sorry he's not to have his candy after all. That is so for Darcy , although he has been called a millionaire playboy. If he's that, he's not having much fun sitting next to Miss Bingley . Darcy has been the object of continual sycophancy, overindulgence, and the utterly cold heartless materialistic proud values of the Lady Catherine de Bourgh s of the world.