Читать книгу Heroines Of Fiction - William Dean Howells - Страница 39

THE nature of Scott's heroines is such that the choice of this one or that, as the most representative, is a question of intellectual preference rather than of passion, and could hardly rouse feeling in any but their duly appointed lovers. Fortunately for Scott, he does not live by them; one cannot quite say that without them he would still be one of the greatest novelists, and chief of the great romancers; but one may very safely say that such general impression as one keeps of his fiction is not strengthened by a vivid sense of these ladies. Only now and then, and here and there, are they essential to the lasting effect; one recalls them vaguely and with an effort; they are not voluntarily constant to the fancy like the women of Thackeray, of George Eliot, of Charles Reade, even of Dickens; and of some other more modern novelists, above all Mr. Hardy. In the imaginary world of Scott's creation, woman remained as subordinate as he found her in the civic world about him. He invented a man's world, and perhaps because women did not come into their rights in it, his man's world has now mostly lapsed to a boy's world, where there is little need of the glamour which women cast upon life.