TITLED VILLAINS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 12 June 1924, Page 12

TITLED VILLAINS.

v Oil, i’iiOh-E WICK ED VISCOUNTS! liaui vou noticed what a bad time i i )c ’ ei> . arc having just now in popular viie Dion s' asms .Ralph Strauss in the l>aiiy vjnomcle. Earls have never been haughtier, or yiseo-unts so- vicious. For some reason or other the landed gentry seem to have offended the novelists, particularly the lady novelists. Indeed,' it is almost enough to be told in the ffrst chapter that the tall, superbly dressed, handsome young man with the superior air possesses a hereditary title to know that he is fated to do all"kinds of horrible things. \\ hat have they done to deserve such a fate;- 1 Well, there is a tradition in the business. Look back a century and you will find that the society novelists of that day had apparently convinced themselves that a peer was a beinp- entirely different from everybody else. He followed surprising rules and regulations of his own and the ordinary conventions could not rightly be applied to his lordly self. He had only to walk across a room for you to know that he belonged to a separate order of beings. And che tradition seems to have persisted. All through the Victorian era the minor novelists were, busily engaged in creating titled villains. Dukes, it is true, were fairly immune, but marquises, earls, viscounts, barons, and even baronets (particularly when their name happened to be Jasper! simply wallowed in crime. The public, moreover. seems to have accepted all these villainies as entirely natural and proper. Viscount Plantagenet, with his aristocratic nose and- his £40,000 a year, treats his inferiors like dogs, subordinates everything to his own selfish pleasures, treats innocent heroines abominably, and is without a single redeeming feature, except, perhaps, an ability to sit a. horse and bring down his biikh Christen this monster John Smith, anti nobodv would believe in him for a moment/ Give-him a viscounty, however, and he becomes a- live figure. YM to-day when half the world must be aware of the difficult position ir which so man v of our older and ! titled families are finding themselves, j is it not curious that this absimLtradition is allowed to continue? Take up I a novel in which the chief characters belono- (as they so often do) to the avid as likely asuot yov will find an entirely' impossible young viscount who has every vice under the sun. The Lady Alary, however, who u his sister or his fiancee, will mabably drink if she doesn’t drug, and her hte is one lono- round of hectic gaiety, even if her family are as poor as the proverbial church mouse. Tn reality of course, the young peep e of the dav who happen to bear historr names are no different from anybody else Then whv does the ir add ion per cist! J Breath" it not m Gath, but am more afraid that the nornhsts vM(.roo!e so many peers, and dr""- suet Terrible nidi'res of our anstocracy Live vet io meet one in real me.