THERE than for a man to portray characters of both sexes with equal success. In the drama it is easier than in other literary forms; but this is perhaps because the drama, per se, is only a quasi-literary genre, depending for its success on the wholly incalculable element of the actor's personality, which may supplement the author's invention and conceal his ineptitudes to unlimited extent. The great novelists have been far from successful in this respect. Richardson, with a singularly feminine perception, is able to trace the emotions and perplexities in the soul of Clarissa Harlowe; but he cannot make of Lovelace a villain of flesh and blood, any more than Shakespeare could create such a being as we might ever fear to meet 91 in Iago, or Goethe such an one in Mephistopheles. Fielding draws no women in whose verisimilitude we can believe, with the possible, and even then only occasional, exceptions in the daughters of delight who stray into his pages. The mutual antipathy between the two is only another instance of the same thing in a highly specialized form. Dickens shows the same inability to present female character in its completeness; and Thackeray, for all his exceptional achievement in Becky Sharp, must bear the same criticism. In view of all this, it is small wonder that neither George Eliot nor Thomas Hardy should succeed especially notably in the representation of both men and women. Of her ambitious studies of men, as distinguished from her vignettes, George Eliot has only three of unquestioned success-Adam Bede, Silas Marner, and Tito Melema. Hardy has scarcely more. The rough, self-tormenting Mayor of Casterbridge, Henchard, is one of these; Diggory Venn the reddleman is another. These are the most conspicuous examples, standing almost alone, for reasons which will presently appear. What is significant is the manner of Hardy's failure to depict upright, straight living men. It is lacking in exactly the same degree that George Eliot is lacking, and for almost the same reasons. If one may lay down a maxim in such a case, ignoring that other venerable fallacy Woman's at best a contradiction still, it may be said that women are not able to represent the healthy animal vitality, which in its lowest forms becomes brutality, through an artistic medium. This is due to the same mental qualities which credit them with the preponderance of wit over humor. It follows, therefore, that characters in which they seek to represent the degenerative forces, let us say, must be of the subtler types. This explains the extraordinary insight which could produce Tito Melema. Such a character as Tom Jones could never come from a woman's brain. There is nothing in her understanding to correspond with it. When these subtler forms of degener a. E ating or disintegrating character are brought into the realm of the physical passions, they become studies of decadence. This is what Hardy does. Where George Eliot traces the influence of mental traits on actual conduct, Hardy indicates the effect of physical traits on behavior; and these studies form the basis of masculine character in their respective novels. The danger is that which actually results in several of George Eliot's novels—the substitution of a man of straw for a flesh-and-blood mortal. That this should be the case with her is not so surprising as that it should be true also of Hardy. Yet examination proves the truth of the contention. One of the most conspicuous failures is George Eliot's figure of Daniel Deronda, a creature "without form and void," to whom Stevenson could refer in this delightful fashion: "Accepted lovers treat women to Grandisonian airs marked with a suspicion of fatuity. I am not quite certain that women do not like this kind of thing; but really, after having bemused myself over 'Daniel Deronda,' I have given up trying to understand what they like." This is an attempt to reproduce, through the medium of literature, a man whose sympathies are sufficiently alert, whose sensitiveness is sufficiently great, and whose intelligence is sufficiently keen to lift him above his fellows by force of character and talents. George Eliot's description of her hero illustrates both her ideal and her shortcomings: "His face had that disturbing kind of form and expression which threatens to affect opinion-as if one's standard were somehow wrong. His voice, heard now for the first time, was to Grandcourt's toneless drawl, which had been in her ears every day, as the deep notes of a violoncello to the broken discourse of poultry and other lazy gentry in the afternoon sunshine. Grandcourt, she inwardly conjectured, was perhaps right in saying that Deronda thought too much of himself:-a favorite way of explaining a superiority that humiliates." That this is the consistent and permanent impression, a later quotation will show. It is taken from the period of Gwendolen's confession to |