People are always telling us that fashions in women have changed: what seems to me almost more interesting is that fashions in men (the stable sex) have changed to match. The new woman (by which I mean the very newest) would not fall in love with Mr. Rochester. It is therefore 'up to' the novelists to create heroes whom the modern heroine will fall in love with. This, to the popular satisfaction, they have done. And not only in fiction have the men changed; in life, too, the men of to-day are quite different. I know, because my friends marry them.
It is immensely interesting, this difference. One by one, the man has sloughed off his most masculine (as we knew them) characteristics. Gone are Mr. Rochester, who fought the duel with the vicomte at dawn, and Burgo Fitzgerald (the only love of that incomparable woman, Lady Glencora Palliser), who breakfasted on curaçao and pâté de foie gras. No longer does Blanche Ingram declare, 'An English hero of the road would be the next best thing to an Italian bandit, and that could only be surpassed by a Levantine pirate.' Blanche Ingram wants--and gets--the Humanitarian Hero; some one who has particular respect for convicts and fallen women, and whose favorite author is Tolstoï. He must qualify for the possession of her hand by long, voluntary residence in the slums; he may inherit ancestral acres only if he has, concerning them, socialistic intentions. He must be too altruistic to kill grouse, and if he is to be wholly up-to-date, he must refuse to eat them. He must never order 'pistols and coffee': his only permitted weapon is benevolent legislation.
I do not mean that he is to be a milk-sop--'muscular Christianity' has at least taught us that it is well for the hero to be in the pink of condition, as he may any day have a street fight on his hands. And he should have the tongue of men and of angels. Gone is the inarticulate Guardsman--gone forever. The modern hero has read books that Burgo Fitzgerald and Guy Livingstone and Mr. Rochester never heard of. He is ready to address any gathering, and to argue with any antagonist, until dawn. He is, preferably, personally unconscious of sex until the heroine arrives; but he is by no means effeminate. He is a very complicated and interesting creature. Some mediæval traits are discernible in him; but the eighteenth century would not have known him for human.