There are no "heroes" among these honest gentlemen of a hundred years ago. Wentworth has indeed won credit and fortune at sea. Bertram and Knightley do nothing to entitle them to the name, beyond marrying the heroine. Edward Ferrars merely behaves properly in keeping faith { 156} with Lucy as long as she wants him. Darcy is heroic in taking Mrs. Bennet for a mother-in-law; Henry Tilney makes fun of his chosen mate in a way that would have cost him her heart in a more conventional novel. "Il y a des héros en mal comme en bien," says Rochefoucauld, but of the evil-doing kind there are none here, unless, indeed, the effrontery with which, after jilting Marianne for a rich wife, Willoughby comes to her sister Elinor and asks for her sympathy for his sad fate, or the coolness of Wickham in the presence of the people he has wronged may be regarded as evidence of heroism.
It is to the wonderfully true presentation of the hearts and minds of girls that these novels chiefly owe their immense power of attraction even for readers who miss the greater part of the humour. Fanny Price and Elinor Dashwood are themselves but poorly endowed with humour, and Catherine Morland only possesses it in the rudimentary way of a lively school-girl. With how much of understanding, how clearly and fully are the hopes and fears, the innocent little plans of Fanny and Catherine, the more mature and reasoned ways of Elinor shown to us, without the least apparent effort.
The trustful reader nurtured on the successful fiction of our own time, especially that of the last ten years, during which English novelists have been able to indulge themselves and their public by the introduction of incidents and types of character which up to about the commencement of that decade would have secured the ban of the circulating libraries, has been led to believe that sensual impulse plays as large a part in woman's life as in man's. That such women as Lady Bellaston in _Tom Jones_, Arabelle in _Le Lys dans la Vallée_, or the Bellona of _Richard Feverel_ exist, and in great numbers, is certain, but they are not representative of woman. Balzac, who was not: much restrained by any fear of the libraries, knew that many faithless wives (so very common in French fiction and drama, whatever they might be in life) gave themselves to men their love for whom contained much less of sensuality than of other instincts. Esther, the unhappy Jewess of _Splendeurs et Misèes de Courtisanes_, loves Lucien with an affection far more chaste than that which many a correct heroine is made to display for the man with whom she goes to the altar in the last chapter. The mistresses of famous men, as known to us from memoirs and histories, have not { 158} generally been of a sensual nature. Aspasia, most distinguished of them all, was of the intellectual, not the sensual, type. Strangely indelicate as was Madame du Châtelet, her relations with Voltaire were based on affinity of literary taste and critical appreciation much more than on physical attraction. Even among the unintellectual women who have figured among the _grandes amoureuses_ of history, the passion of the woman does not in most instances appear to have been of the coarser kind. Louise de la Vallière is at least more typical of womanhood than Barbara Villiers.