The Morris County chronicle. [volume] (Morristown, N.J.) 1877-1915, 1901-09-27
VARIOUS HEROINES.
THOSE OF THE OLD DAYS AND
THOSE or THE PRESENT.

The Poets sweet Creatures Who
Have Captured Men--The Difference
Between Marce1Ea and TriIby-Wo-
mans Triumph at Hand.
Even the most genuine and sincere of
girls are so certain at the age when they
are plant to impressions more or less
consciously to shape themselves upon
some beau ideal embodied in fiction or the
drama that one is inclined to wonder
which Of the very opposite types of char
acter in certain books which we have all
read with the excitement, the animation,
Of making vital discovery Of the posi-
bilities of life is likely to be most deep
and permanent in its effects.
A bright girls restlessness, her aspira-
tions, her misgivings her curiosity, her
desire in some way to possess the whole
world, all help her to find a penetrative
suggestiveness in the experience OF some
happily constituted being who does easily
and admirably what she herself longs to
do. Emerson says that we must read his
tory actively and not passively, esteeming
history the text and our own lives the
commentary. And this is precisely what
youth does in reading history and to some
degree poetry.
From Homer down the poets We'd with
each other in drawing heroines who have
captivated generation after generation of
men. Take Shakespeare alone, and in
Juliet, Portia, Beatrice Imogen, Perdita,
Cornelia, Volumnia and Constance, not
to say Cleopatra, he has with curious
felicity anticipated every charming phase
Of womanhood-in Portia and Beatrice
even the well equipped college bred girl
of today.
1t is a pleasing modern fallacy that
woman has lately been, If not invented,
at least discovered, or, perhaps, evolved,
out of peculiar conditions in answer to
the crying needs of the end of the nine
teenth century. There is a growing be-
lief, too, that the twentieth century is to
witness the triumph of woman. Never
theless, ever since her creation woman
aas been doing half the work of the world
and doing it fairly well, without any
theorizing on the subject, and it is only
in these later days that she has been re-
quired to bring such proof of her clear
brain. large heart and practical efficacy
as can be written out for examination.
''You would never have asked" says
George Eliot of one of her heroines Eat
any period of Mrs. Amos Barton's life if
she sketcbed or played the piano. You
would even, perhaps, have been rather
scandalized if she had descended from the
serene dignity of being to the assiduous
unrest of doing" Now, the heroine of
Mrs. Humphry Wards finest book is an
example of the 'assiduous unrest of do
ing" She is a fine creature; her serious
ness puts to shame our frivolity, her cour-
age our faint heartedness, her living en-
ergy our Incidence. No heroine was ever
more absolutely up to date than Marcella.
She is humanitarian, political economist,
socialist, and is besides a beautiful girl,
with whom every man in the book falls
in love, and nice girl, who makes every
woman anxious to be her friend. She
gives herself freely to the cause of the
poor, longs for nothing so much as to live
in the closest relations with them, work
with them and suffer with them. The in
justice of things the sorrow of half Of
humanity, its bruises, aches and wounds,
are part of her consciousness, and she
overwhelms with her girlish disdain q
great peer who will not rebuild the cot
tages for the poor tenants on his estate.
For her the impossible does not exist; no
sense of Contradiction between the large
desire and the limited efficacy of man.
Ones heart ki6dles over the girl, with
her patience and her inpatience, her i'm
petuous haste, her logged tenacity of per-
severance, her pride and her humility, her
love of sympathy, yet her disdain of any
need Of it; her .girlish vanity, yet her
womanly self depreciation; her sensitive
ness, her high courage, and one weighs
her self assertion and willfulness AGAINST