Mothers in Fiction

— A sick youth was lying in bed, watching with quiet eyes his mother’s form moving gently about the room where for weeks she had been ministering to him with tenderest heart and hands. There had been a stillness there for a little while, when the boy spoke : “ I wonder why there are no mothers in fiction.” " Why, there are, dear; there must be,” the mother answered quickly; but when she tried to name one, she found that none came at the call. When she related to me the little incident, I too immediately said that our memory must be strangely at fault that it did not furnish us with examples in plenty. So obvious and so pregnant a theme had surely not been neglected by novelists. Maternal love ! Why, art was filled with illustrations of it, and so was literature. And yet, on making search, I too have failed to find the typical mother where it seems she would so easily be found. I have no large acquaintance with the imaginative literature of any language but our own, and the fiction of other countries may afford examples in this kind of which I know nothing. But recalling the work of our own finest and best known writers, their treatment of the subject appears both scant and slight. Calling the roll of them from Fielding and Scott to Hawthorne and Hardy, it strikes one as singular that they have one and all omitted to delineate with any peculiar force and beauty a human type which suggests itself so naturally as full of opportunity for artistic representation. There are many figures in fiction movingly illustrative of paternal, filial, fraternal, and sisterly affection. Clive Newcome’s love for his old father is outdone by the Colonel’s devotion to his son; Romola’s dutiful affection for her father is beautiful, and so is the mutual love of Mollie Gibson and her father in Wives and Daughters; Harry and George Warrington, Seth and Adam Bede, are delightful portraitures of mutual brotherly love ; Scott, in Jeanie Deans, has immortalized a sister’s devotion, and in Florence Dombey Dickens has given it a pathetic loveliness. We find mothers sketched in as subordinate characters here and there in novels. Mrs. Garth in Middlemarch is a good specimen of motherhood, and so is Bell Robson in Mrs. Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers; both of these, however, are not depicted as mothers only or chiefly, but also as wives, true and faithful. The Robson family is one of the most finely drawn groups in fiction ; the passionate mutual devotion of the father and the daughter whose ardent, undisciplined nature was derived from his, and the deep and steadfast love of Bell’s finely balanced character, are portrayed with an admirable force. Rufus Lyon and Esther are another pair that cannot be overlooked. Dolly Winthrop — dear soul!—contains all the sweet essence of motherhood in her ample person, although it is not in relation to any child of hers that this deep instinct displays itself. Dolly is a type of the genuine womanhood which includes motherhood, and with what wonderful simplicity she is set before us! Mrs. Yoebright, in Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, is a sketch, firmly and strongly drawn, as all that able writer’s are, and the filial sentiment in the unfortunate Clym responds to the maternal feeling in his mother’s intense soul. I know of no author who has shown a finer appreciation of maternal character than Miss Yonge, who has written too much for her own reputation, and whose work has been so self-restricted within a certain rather narrow sphere of observation that it has not appealed to a wide audience. Yet her earlier and best novels contain much fine and admirably true portraiture of character, and the influence of the mother in family life has never been better depicted. In the Heir of Redclyffe the most natural and charming figure is that of Mrs. Edmondston, who so gently manages for his good her kind-hearted, hasty-tempered husband, and lends to each member of the household in turn the counsels of her mild wisdom. In the Daisy Chain, though Mrs. May dies and departs from the scene after the first chapter or two, she remains vividly present as a memory and an influence throughout the whole of the two volumes. Dr. May, always his wife’s lover, is as real and charming a man and as good a father of a much too numerous family as can be found anywhere.