Novel Notes. Jerome Klapka Jerome

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      “With a bad heroine, on the other hand, you can never be quite sure what is going to happen. Out of the fifty or so courses open to her, she may take the right one, or she may take one of the forty-nine wrong ones, and you watch her with curiosity to see which it will be.”

      “But surely there are plenty of good heroines who are interesting,” I said.

      “At intervals – when they do something wrong,” answered Jephson. “A consistently irreproachable heroine is as irritating as Socrates must have been to Xantippe, or as the model boy at school is to all the other lads. Take the stock heroine of the eighteenth-century romance. She never met her lover except for the purpose of telling him that she could not be his, and she generally wept steadily throughout the interview. She never forgot to turn pale at the sight of blood, nor to faint in his arms at the most inconvenient moment possible. She was determined never to marry without her father’s consent, and was equally resolved never to marry anybody but the one particular person she was convinced he would never agree to her marrying. She was an excellent young woman, and nearly as uninteresting as a celebrity at home.”

      “Ah, but you’re not talking about good women now,” I observed. “You’re talking about some silly person’s idea of a good woman.”

      “I quite admit it,” replied Jephson. “Nor, indeed, am I prepared to say what is a good woman. I consider the subject too deep and too complicated for any mere human being to give judgment upon. But I am talking of the women who conformed to the popular idea of maidenly goodness in the age when these books were written. You must remember goodness is not a known quantity. It varies with every age and every locality, and it is, generally speaking, your ‘silly persons’ who are responsible for its varying standards. In Japan, a ‘good’ girl would be a girl who would sell her honour in order to afford little luxuries to her aged parents. In certain hospitable islands of the torrid zone the ‘good’ wife goes to lengths that we should deem altogether unnecessary in making her husband’s guest feel himself at home. In ancient Hebraic days, Jael was accounted a good woman for murdering a sleeping man, and Sarai stood in no danger of losing the respect of her little world when she led Hagar unto Abraham. In eighteenth-century England, supernatural stupidity and dulness of a degree that must have been difficult to attain, were held to be feminine virtues – indeed, they are so still – and authors, who are always among the most servile followers of public opinion, fashioned their puppets accordingly. Nowadays ‘slumming’ is the most applauded virtue, and so all our best heroines go slumming, and are ‘good to the poor.’”

      “How useful ‘the poor’ are,” remarked MacShaughnassy, somewhat abruptly, placing his feet on the mantelpiece, and tilting his chair back till it stood at an angle that caused us to rivet our attention upon it with hopeful interest. “I don’t think we scribbling fellows ever fully grasp how much we owe to ‘the poor.’ Where would our angelic heroines and our noble-hearted heroes be if it were not for ‘the poor’? We want to show that the dear girl is as good as she is beautiful. What do we do? We put a basket full of chickens and bottles of wine on her arm, a fetching little sun-bonnet on her head, and send her round among the poor. How do we prove that our apparent scamp of a hero is really a noble young man at heart? Why, by explaining that he is good to the poor.

      “They are as useful in real life as they are in Bookland. What is it consoles the tradesman when the actor, earning eighty pounds a week, cannot pay his debts? Why, reading in the theatrical newspapers gushing accounts of the dear fellow’s invariable generosity to the poor. What is it stills the small but irritating voice of conscience when we have successfully accomplished some extra big feat of swindling? Why, the noble resolve to give ten per cent of the net profits to the poor.