A Plea for the Black Sheep

I HAVE always felt a profound sympathy for characters in fiction who are evidently disliked by their authors. Theirs is perhaps the most miserable of all human lots. To be disliked by a parent would be sufficiently painful; but these wretches are in the state of children disliked by a parent who has complete control over their every word and act, who is their sole reporter and interpreter, and who has unlimited power to punish. They are much in the condition of those unhappy ones who in the old Calvinistic theology were predestined by their Creator to damnation. In one respect the Calvinistic non-elect had the advantage: they might find consolation in reflecting that they were sacrificed by Inscrutable Justice, whereas their brothers and sisters in fiction seem often the victims of very human prejudice or whim.

This imperfect sympathy between creator and creation in fiction is most commonly seen, I think, in novels written by women. Various cynical wits and epigrammatists have hinted that women do not tend to sympathize keenly with one another, and a good many things both in life and literature seem to bear out the imputation. A year or two ago I was standing on the rear platform of a crowded street-car in a large city. All the seats in the car were occupied by women, most of them well-dressed, many of them young. An old woman, plainly dressed, with a crutch and a large bundle, got on the car. No one offered to give her a seat; not one even moved. At last the conductor, by forcing the women on one side of the car to crowd closer together, succeeded in securing for the old woman a few inches on the edge of a seat. The incident is of course conclusive of nothing, but it sets one thinking. Is it a similar (if much more refined) lack of generosity toward others of their own sex that causes even the great women novelists sometimes to seem unfair to the women in their stories ?

I am a warm admirer of Jane Austen; but I nearly always lose my temper when I try to read Mansfield Park. I cannot believe that Mary Crawford is as selfish or base as the novelist insists on making her appear. When Mary meets the “Mr. Bertrams,” for instance, she prefers Tom, the elder, to Edmund, as any sensible girl would, Edmund being an intolerable prig. Miss Austen interprets this preference in the worst possible light. “ She has felt an early presentiment that she should like the eldest best. She knew it was her way.” I have never quite forgiven Miss Austen for using so human and delightful a girl as Mary merely to set off the virtues of that tediously unimpeachable little martyr, Fanny Price.

Few novelists, men or women, have been broader in their sympathies than George Eliot; yet it seems impossible for her to like her heroines if they are pretty. I have always felt that a little less than justice is done to Hetty in Adam Bede. Certainly not much mercy is shown her; and one gets rather tired of the eternal contrast between her and Dinah, and wishes that Dinah were not quite so pale and spiritual. I am more doubtful about Rosamond Vincy; but I have an uncomfortable feeling that in her creator’s eyes her prettiness is her gravest sin. I cannot help wondering how Thackeray’s Amelia would have fared in George Eliot’s hands.

In reading The House of Mirth I constantly felt that Lily Bart must be either a good deal better or a good deal worse than she is represented. Since her creator seems to dislike her, it is plausible as well as charitable to suppose that she is not so black as she is painted. A woman who has the occasional good impulses and gleams of true insight that the novelist rather grudgingly grants to Lily, must, one would think, make a greater effort to follow them than Lily is allowed to make. I feel a similar doubt about Bessie Amherst, in The Fruit of the Tree, and wish I could read another version of the story, told from Bessie’s point of view.

It might be fairer, as well as less unchivalrous, to attribute these imperfect sympathies to a moral bias of the novelists. Yet the fact remains that human nature excuses the sins of people it likes, and reserves its moral indignation for the faults of those whom it dislikes; so that after all we seem to come back to a basis of natural antipathies.

. Not many writers are “ of a constitution so general that it consorts and sympathizeth with all ” and is untouched by “ those natural repugnancies,” or have the power which Browning showed in Mr. Sludge the Medium of representing with perfect sympathy a character they detest. I wish not so much to ascertain the motives of the injustice as to plead for the injured, who have to contend not only with destiny and their own innate wickedness, but with the constant hostility of their creators. Considered in this light, how tragic is the career of Rosamond Vincy or of Bessie Amherst! No protagonist of Greek drama is so cruelly overmatched by Fate, or demands our sympathy with so urgent an appeal.