The Hero of My Dreams

ALL the beautiful red and yellow and blue best-sellers had been swept away before I got to the library. Even the best-sellers-before-last, dully rebound but still re-readable, were gone, for it was Saturday afternoon, and our town was laying in its supply of Sunday reading. So I took home three slim, dingy volumes standing neglectedly on a shelf, lettered, ‘ The Head of the Family, By Miss Mulock,’ and proceeded to investigate them.

The woodcuts were hoopskirted or bearded. The chapter-headings were long quotations, mostly from Shakespeare. Every one, even the villain, went to church twice on Sunday and held Family Prayers in the front parlor during the week: and I curled down on a couch with a feeling as of rest after toyle, port after stormie seas. I knew I was on the track of one loved and long-lost. Presently I found him. ‘He turned aside in stern self-mastery,’ said the first line on page 73 — and I sighed happily. He was come back to me — the Lover of the English ladynovelist of the sixties and seventies!

His particular avatar in The Head of the Family was named Ninian Græme, and for the whole three volumes did he continue to fight his emotions sternly down. I did n’t like him as well as John Halifax or Eugen Courvoisier, because he had long, loop-shaped whiskers. But ah, the heart that beat beneath those whiskers! His life was one long, eager self-immolation. He immolated himself for his sweetheart — or, rather, the Object of his Affections; he paid his wayward brother’s debts whenever he could most ill afford it; he kept the villain’s secrets, and succored the same villain’s insane victim, who afterwards made a hit on the stage; he got the Object’s trying father out of debtors’ prison, managing meanwhile to bring up strictly six halfbrothers and sisters, and keep his office-hours intact — he was a Writer to the Signet and worked hard.

Everything he did was done well and thoroughly; still, one could scarcely wonder that at thirty-eight he explained to the drooping heroine, too well brought up by himself to contradict him, that he was too old and worn to think of love or marriage more. A life like his would fatigue the keeper of the Fountain of Youth.

Yet it was not an unusually strenuous life for his class and time. Others did as much, or more, and throve on it. John Halifax worked quite as hard, and had greater calls on his emotions. And Eugen Courvoisier, the beloved First Violin of our teens, he supported not only himself and his son, but a load of unmerited obloquy. Will there ever be another hero as winning as Eugen ? He was a widower with a child, and — as we and the heroine discovered with the same shock of horror — he won his bread by performing in a small orchestra, whereas we had thought him a count at least! But when he did turn out to be a count after all, and not to have forged the check, though he had always insisted he did, and not to have cared a bit about his first wife - will there ever be joy like that joy?

Jean Ingelow had some pleasant heroes, too. The one in Off the Skelligs was a trifle given to hobbies, and once in a while came dangerously near failing. He wrote a book, for instance, which was not a success; something no hero should do. But he let his younger brother have his sweetheart in the approved manner, and succored the widow and the orphan whenever they came his way. Also, he married the heroine in the end, and kept several entirely unnecessary secrets. He was very satisfactory, on the whole, if he did make small jokes.

Miss Braddon was a producer of heroes not to be despised. They were silent, purposeful gentlemen, not as religious as some of their confrères, but to the full as iron-virtued and tenderhearted. Sometimes they combined the business of hero and villain in one person. Their wickedness was wicked then, and no mistake! But it had this saving grace, that they never forgot it, nor allowed you to. Nowadays villains have a trying trait in common with mere human beings — they consider themselves, on the whole, admirable and virtuous persons. Not so in Miss Braddon’s day. No well-regulated villain ever allowed the fire of remorse to die in his seared bosom. It glowed to the end of his days, regardless of how long he had been a philanthropist. And when, thirty-eight years after its commission, his sin found him out, he was unaffectedly pleased to have it off his mind, and owned up handsomely. Yes, he had made away with his aged grand-aunt and interred her privately beneath the cellar floor. He had regretted it ever since, but at the time his debts pressed — and, with several anguished expressions of repentance, and the assurance that this was the happiest day he had known since the grand-aunt’s burial, he would help them find the skeleton. He might even throw in details about outlying victims at rest under apple trees and hencoops, whom no one had been so rude as to think of laying at his door. Then he killed himself, always with the sincerity, and belief in himself and a personal devil, which had characterized him straight through. Ah, villains were villains in those days! They believed it and so did their friends, and there was nobody to undeceive them.

It was, also, quite easy to pass yourself off as a villain, to the trusting public of that day, on ridiculously insufficient evidence. Many a spotless hero brightened a life of monotonous virtue and adulation by such a course. Eugen Courvoisier did it to admiration. Ouida’s guardsmen, too, were greatly given to the practice. They were generally stately gentlemen of title, whose brocaded sofas and unusual muscle, coupled with wonderful impassivity, superior intellect, and great beauty, made them well known and much admired. But his furniture and personal attractions were only a passing trifle to the Guardsman — a mere bagatelle, as he was in the habit of saying recklessly. What his heart really yearned after was a chance to sacrifice all his home comforts, including his hitherto stainless honor, for any worthless male connection. The more undeserving, the better. Like the Duke in Patience, he was so tired of adulation that a little hearty contempt cheered him up immensely. He never could be brought to admit his guiltlessness till the very last page, and then it was reluctantly. As he did own up — it was generally in the heroine’s expensive boudoir, on a sofa such as he had been used to in his better days — he always dashed away a silent tear to the memory of some poor girl who had vainly loved him. Yes, indeed, he was made of the same manly yet melting stuff as John Halifax, scratch him deep enough. Though none would have dared to scratch, even ever so lightly, a Ouida guardsman.

He had his drawbacks, the MidVictorian Hero — for it was indeed he. He wept on all the available articles of furniture when his manly heart was wrung. He was certain to observe a noble silence at exactly the wrong time, enabling the gay and glittering gentleman who was more than suspected of being an Atheist to get the girl. He was cross once in a while, when he was keeping Another’s secret at the expense of his own character, and somebody took him at his word.

But oh, how dependable he was! How sure to meet a train, or make an excellent omelet if the fragile heroine had mislaid the cook-book! How strong he was, and how fond of carrying people upstairs! How well he brought up his first wife’s children, if he was a widower, or the heroine, if he was her guardian!

He will not come again — not he nor such as he. He has passed, always with a certain dignity, his heroine’s drooping curls brushing his protecting arm, into the country of last year’s snow, and year-before-last’s presidential candidate, and all forgotten, irrecoverable things. And, as his favorite author, the Swan of Avon, said, We shall not gaze upon his like again. He is gone — the Mid-Victorian Hero is gone, and none so poor to do him reverence. His position is filled by a set of sunny, irresponsible young gentlemen who have to be coaxed and mothered by the stalwart, all-sufficing young women of to-day’s fiction — young gentlemen who would have had short shrift as Wayward Younger Brothers, or Awful Examples, how few brief years ago! They are doubtless easier to entertain, and pleasanter around the house. And John Halifax and Ann Veronica would lead but a sad, cat-and-dog life.

But I am sentimental, and I have ideals. I want the old hero back. Thinking of him, I brush away the silent tear.