Читать книгу Heroines Of Fiction - William Dean Howells - Страница 46

As I have said, the blind girl Nydia remains to me from " The Last Days of Pompeii " not only chief but almost sole among Bulwer's heroines, in the sort that heroines outlive the definite recollection of their environment, their individuality, and sometimes of their very names. She is not without rivalry in her native pages: there are the Greek lone whom the hero Glaucus loves, and the Roman Julia who loves him, and who, in the make-up of a Pompeian grande dame, relumes her baleful fires more distinctly under the old eyes reviewing the scenes of the story. On the other hand, however, the slave girl has to contend in this later impression with the disadvantage of being a flower girl, now after flower girls have been done so much. But in her day flower girls in fiction were not yet so faded, and she came with such a freshness of appeal to a much simpler-hearted age than this, that youth in all ranks of life were touched and won by her. The romance, in fact, had an acceptance as great in its time as we have since given "Quo Vadis," which it is not saying much to say it surpassed in most essentials, and certainly preceded in such interest as the contrasts of late paganism and early Christianity always awaken.