A REBELLIOUS HEROINE - A Story

The professional funny man has a peculiar advantage that in a measure compensates him for his task of living up to public expectations— namely, that he can say extraordinary things which, if they make sense and are admired for their wisdom, may be fathered in "propriâ personá," and if not are set down for jesting in his role of clown. Of this privilege it is evident that John Kendrick Bangs is well aware. He fires, as it were, to hit if it is deer and miss if it is cow. "A Rebellious Heroine", for instance, may be a broad satire of the realists of the day, a species of allegory based upon the well-known propensity of characters in fiction to run away from their authors, or it may be simply a fantastical tale contrived for an hour's diversion. It possesses humorous situations, but there is something rather bewildering about the story of a young author, Stuart Harley, who begins to write a novel only to find that the heroine he has selected balks him at every turn. He has planned that she is to go abroad, but she, resenting being thus ordered about, elects to remain at home and to show him by her conduct toward the lovers he offers her that although he can lead her to the altar he cannot make her wed, until through the intervention of a friend, who takes up the story at this point, he woos her himself.

Frankly whimsical as the idea is, it might be suggested that a certain amount of verisimilitude is owing to the reader, which is totally destroyed by the heroine's being permitted an independent existence in which she comments upon her author's arbitrary intentions. If Bangs had stuck to his plan of making her appear only in Harley's narrative, the story would have been less "tiré par les cheveux." As it is, the accommodating reader is called upon to bear a good deal, for he finds, after having docilely adapted himself to Mr. Bangs's concatenation ot fantasies, that he has been duped, and that Stuart Harley himself is a myth like Marguerite Andrews, and likewise the professor and the doctor, and that among this shadowy chaos there stands out palpable only Bangs. But it is a way this vivacious gentleman has, this of rising superior to mere mundane restrictions; and no one should essay to go after him who cannot upon occasion believe that the sum of two and two is five.

Nonetheless, it is fun to read!

***

An excerpt from the beginning of:

CHAPTER I: STUART HARLEY: REALIST

"—if a word could save me, and that word were not the Truth, nay, if it did but swerve a hair's-breadth from the Truth, I would not say it!"
—Longfellow.


Stuart Harley, despite his authorship of many novels, still considered himself a realist. He affected to say that he did not write his books; that he merely transcribed them from life as he saw it, and he insisted always that he saw life as it was.

"The mission of the novelist, my dear Professor," he had once been heard to say at his club, "is not to amuse merely; his work is that of an historian, and he should be quite as careful to write truthfully as is the historian. How is the future to know what manner of lives we nineteenth century people have lived unless our novelists tell the truth?"

"Possibly the historians will tell them," observed the Professor of Mathematics. "Historians sometimes do tell us interesting things."

"True," said Harley. "Very true; but then what historian ever let you into the secret of the every-day life of the people of whom he writes? What historian ever so vitalized Louis the Fourteenth as Dumas has vitalized him? Truly, in reading mere history I have seemed to be reading of lay figures, not of men; but when the novelist has taken hold properly—ah, then we get the men."

"Then," objected the Professor, "the novelist is never to create a great character?"

"The humorist or the mere romancer may, but as for the novelist with a true ideal of his mission in life he would better leave creation to nature. It is blasphemy for a purely mortal being to pretend that he can create a more interesting character or set of characters than the Almighty has already provided for the use of himself and his brothers in literature; that he can involve these creations in a more dramatic series of events than it has occurred to an all-wise Providence to put into the lives of His creatures; that, by the exercise of that misleading faculty which the writer styles his imagination, he can portray phases of life which shall prove of more absorbing interest or of greater moral value to his readers than those to be met with in the every-day life of man as he is."

"Then," said the Professor, with a dexterous jab of his cue at the pool-balls—"then, in your estimation, an author is a thing to be led about by the nose by the beings he selects for use in his books?" ....