The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-06-14
UNCANNY PRACTICE .OF MANY WRITER'S Commenter Discusses Methods
 of Officers KILL MANY CHARAC TIERS High Tension of Heroism Is Not Life. like-No One Cares To Read
 of Impossible Char.
 acters.
KILL MANY CHARACT TIERS

From the Washington Herald
 After a decade or two of steady novel
 reading, during which time the reader is
 blindly willing to regard the writer as
 Wisdom high mounted on Pegasus and
 is perfectly content to watch his flights
 and his vagaries whenever it pleases him
 to spur, there comes d moment when
 the blindest follower calls a halt. tears
 the bandage from his eyes and demands
 to know why he is being hoodwinked and
 put upon.
 You led me on to the deepest admi-
 ration for this book man and that book
 woman You made me admire to the
 point of fancying them ideal toward
 which I myself might strive, and then | you made this man do a dastardly and | cowardly thing, you made this woman | responsible for the total wreckage of an- 1 others life, and you dil it merely be- l cause the power was yours and because l they were your creaturs your puppets
 to move at your whim and pleasure. For , that you have deprived me of my faith
 in book women and boo,- men forever"
 It is a nice question. this of the rights
 ard the responsibilities of the novelist. l Whether he may assume the power of creator and deal as he pleases with the l fate of those he has created, or whether, l having brought them into the world of literature, he should not rather leave 1 tEem to work out their own salvation ac- l cording to the virtues and vices with which he has endowed them, says the l New York Times.
 Mrs. Wharton Should Repent
 Surely Mrs. Wharton must have felt i some compunction some twinge of con- 1 science, when she tempted Lily Bart oe- nf st i1tc .e ] the Three Tricky Sisters were beginning 1 to weave golden thread into the web Of l Ter life. Or, if not then, most certainly | Pegasus should have baked when she led the finely tempered Justine to murder her friend and over her dead body to marry l the husband.
 As Robert Ingersoll used to say, That s the weak spot in the Macbeth case" l What actual right had Mrs. Wharton to l create for us woman who possessed ev- i cry quality of the highest type of sur i Sical nurse. woman who by her severe l training was accustomed to the sufferings l of a surgical ward whose instinct was to 1 rattle to the very last breath for the life of her patient. and who. when that pa- l tent was her friend whom she could not l bear to see suffer ''mercifully" put her l oUt of her misery by administering an 1 overdose of morphia, acknowledging in her act no sense of shame or of injustice l tI WTOnSQOn1S. yet keeping the fearful | eecret from the man she married? It
 almost seems as if the author of the hid-
 cous crime shuddered to think what she
 mad done, for she no sooner married Jus
 tine to her unheroic John than her inter
 est in the tale flags. and the book is fin-
 ished half-heartedly, though repent
 ing in gray ashes for her sinister climax
 High Tension Not ,Lifelike.
 Of course, a high tension of heroism IS not like life and no one cares to read of l the impossible character, but certainly
 one has every right to expect and de-
 mand that the characters of a book should be true to themselves as their au- thors have made us see and love them. Was George Meredith ever quite satis- 1 fled with himself or comfortable in his own mind after he had betrayed his spir- 1 tied, splendid Diana into selling a state secret for a paltry sum of money? And do not the ghosts of these wronged book 1 folk come back to haunt and torment their creators? Surely, ii there is justice
 in the patron saint of literature, some such arrangement should be made by which l the sufferers might retaliate and their l rerjurers be made to expiate their sins. l Benson a favorite of the hour, lowers tte vitality of his readers by treating l constantly of sickness and disease. His l invalid books have made him famous, yet i each is composed in a minor key on dull l gray background. Depression is their
 theme, the half-sick fancies of the inva- l I'd or convalescent thei, only variation. l Few readers fancy such literature, though 1 Cor the exquisitely .ple language in which the books are written and their | intimate, almost autobographical, nature
 there is some fascination about them. l Yet here, too, comes the question of the
 authors rght to create an invalid and keep him on the tenterhooks of suffering | through all his life of several hundred ,,ages. Mrs. Humphrey Wards Eleanor" is of the same type-an exquisite woman who is, however so long time a-dyinS
 that the reader instinctivey guards 1 against tuberculosis germs that gather :, thick and fast as the book and invalid near their end.
 Shaw Is Sinner.
 Bernard Shaw is ar abominable sinner in his sinister creations of book women. l Not one of the lot is lovable, not one s womanly. Each represents type, a phase of womanhood; whereas in actual i life one woman-any woman-combines In her personality all of it's phases. Even history and historians are at fault. That i demon in a toga, Nero, whom we have 1 oeen taught to regard in the light of
 livid and magnificent devil, is now ac- l 'xnowledged to be merelv an up-to-date 1 health officer who gathered his people of l 1he SlumS into huge pdNlnofl, IurfllSneu l them with all the necessaries of life, and | then set fire to their squalid and misera- ble quarters, only that he might rebuild them on the most practical and health
 promoting plan.
 What right-to go little deeper still l into the subject-has an author to com- pei his heroine to fall in love with lan- 1 tern-Jawed, beetle-browed, taciturn hero whom in real life she would never look at a second time and certainly not con- sider marrying? Was Rochester the type
 If man to appeal to real Jane Eyre in | actual life or Romeo the complement of
 Juliet's sentiment and bubbling freshness,
 or the athletic and absurd Orlando the proper match for witty, enchanting
 sprightly Rosalind? Propinquity seems | to work with book creatures as it does i with human beings, but must the author
 be allowed quarter on such score? And yet fret and fume as we may ani do at the irresponsible attitude of authors 1 to their brain children, we go on piling
 up royalties for them quite if we were 1 on the best of terms. Only now and then we have chance to have the last laugh. l when some aspiring playwright in his dramatization of best seller plays the | af I,a ind fai and marripS the