Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  MRS. HUMPHRY WARD’S HEROINES

  VOLUME I.

  SOME NINETEENTH-CENTURY HEROINES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  IN proposing to confine these studies to the nineteenth-century heroines of Anglo-Saxon fiction, I find myself confronted by a certain question, which I should like to share with the reader.

  A day, a month, a year, these are natural divisions of time, and must be respected as such; but a century, like a week or a fortnight, is a mere convention of the chronologers, and need not be taken very literally in its claim to be exactly a hundred years long. As to its qualities and characteristics, it had much better not be taken so; and in a study like the present one is by no means bound to date the heroines of nineteenth-century fiction from the close of the eighteenth century, even if the whole world were agreed just when that was. In fact, since the heroines of fiction are of a race so mixed that there is no finding out just where they came from, there is some reason why a study of nineteenth-century heroines should go back to their greatest-grandmothers in the Byzantine romances, or even beyond these, to the yet elder Greek lineages in the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” But there is still more reason why it should not do anything of the sort We may amuse ourselves, if we choose, in tracing resemblances and origins; but, after all, the heroines of English and American fiction are of easily distinguishable types, and their evolution in their native Anglo-Saxon environment has been, in no very great lapse of time, singularly uninfluenced from without. They have been responsive at different moments to this ideal and to that, but they have always been English and American; and they have constantly grown more interesting as they have grown more modern.

  I

  The best thing in the expression of any sort of modernity is a voluntary naturalness, an instructed simplicity; and there is no writer of the present moment, not Mr. Hardy, not Count Tolstoy himself, who is more modem than De Foe in these essentials, though De Foe wrote two hundred and fifty years ago. But we cannot go back to De Foe in this place any more than we could turn, say, to M. Zola. De Foe is distinctly of the nineteenth century in the voluntary naturalness and instructed simplicity of his art, but he is no more of the English nineteenth-century tradition, or principle or superstition, call it what you will, than M. Zola. He wrote the clearest, purest English, the most lifelike English; and his novels are of a self-evident and most convincing fidelity to life. But he was, frankly, of the day before we began to dwell in decencies, before women began to read novels so much that the novel had to change the subject, or so limit its discussion that it came to the same thing. De Foe was of a vastly nobler morality than Fielding, and his books are less corrupting; they are not corrupting at all, in fact; they are as well intentioned as Richardson’s, which sometimes deal with experiences far from edifying in order to edify. He is a greater, a more modem artist than either of the others; but because of his matter, and not because of his manner or motive, his heroines must remain under lock and key, and cannot be so much as named in mixed companies. De Foe’s novels cannot be freely read and criticised; only his immortal romance is open to all comers, of every age and sex, and it is a thousand pities that “Robinson Crusoe” has no heroine. We must not begin to study our heroines of nineteenth-century fiction with him, though, aesthetically and ethically, nineteenth-century fiction derives from him in some things that are best in it, especially in that voluntary naturalness and instructed simplicity which are the chiefest marks of modernity.

  We cannot begin a hundred years later with the heroines of Samuel Richardson, though one of them at least is as freshly modem as any girl of yesterday or tomorrow. Clarissa Harlowe, in spite of her eighteenth-century costume and keeping, remains a masterpiece in the portraiture of that Ever-Womanly which is of all times and places. The form of the novel in which she appears, the epistolary novel, is of all forms the most averse to the apparent unconsciousness so fascinating in a heroine; yet the cunning of Richardson (it was in some things an unrivalled cunning) triumphs over the form and shows us Clarissa with no more of pose than she would confront herself with in the glass. It is in her own words that she gives herself to our knowledge, but we feel that she gives herself truly, and with only the mental reserves that a girl would actually use: there is always some final fact that a girl must withhold.

  She gives not herself alone, but all her environment, vividly, credibly, convincingly, in the letters she writes. She persuades us that she lives and suffers; and though it is preposterous in the novelist to study her love-affair so minutely as he does, it is not preposterous but most simple and natural for her to dwell upon it in every detail It is all the world, the centre of the universe to her experience, and however the author permits her to tire the reader, she cannot be supposed to tire herself or tire her ardent friend and correspondent, Miss Anna Howe, in her unstinted outpourings. Indeed, when the reader has once put himself in sympathy with a heroine who does not always deserve it, he too is eager for the smallest particulars of her pathetic fate.

  The situation in “Clarissa Harlowe” is one which the author was apparently much more at home in than in the situations of either “Pamela” or “Sir Charles Grandison.” Richardson was not native to the low life of the one or the high life of the other, but to the middle-class life where Clarissa Harlowe belongs. There, at ease in the setting, he had merely to imagine an impulsive, affectionate, right-principled girl, persecuted by her philistine family, who try to force her into a hateful marriage, till they drive her to the protection of the lover who plots her ruin. It is very imaginable that when she cannot save herself from him, she should reject the offer of his hand, and that she should die of her griefs; but these are not the vital facts of the case from an artistic point of view. From such a point of view, the heroine’s gentle and lovable nature, the characters of the different personages, and the incidents that arise from them and reveal them, are the main matters, and it is here that Richardson has his greatest success. Clarissa is more lifelike in what she does than in what she says, for she has to say too much, though in her spirited resentment of her wrongs from her detestable family, she brings palpably before us her weak mother and father, her hateful sister and brutal brother, and all the abetting cousins and aunts and uncles. Her waverings, however, her hesitations and withdrawals, her resistances and persistences, it is in these that the author most truly finds her and reveals her. As he finds her and reveals her she is like girls of our widely different circumstance in the measure that many great-grandmotherly miniatures are like the photographs of their great-granddaughters. She is, in her character, of the nineteenth century, but in her environment she is almost as impossible as the heroines of De Foe, from whom she derives in the right realistic line.

  II

  It remained for a still later, but not much later, novelist to portray in the sister-heroines of “The Vicar of Wakefield,” two dear girls who are far more appreciable and acceptable to our nineteenth-century notions. They are as distinctly of the eighteenth-century circumstance as Clarissa Harlowe, but they are somehow so transcendently imagined that they have survived into our time with the effect of being born in it.

  It can hardly be claimed that Goldsmith was a greater imagination than Richardson; but he was certainly a greater artist. He had the instinct of reticence, which Richardson had not, and it is not going much too far to say that the nineteenth-century English novel, as we understand it now, with its admirable limitations, was invented by Oliver Goldsmith. The novel that respects the right of innocence to pleasure in a true picture of manners, and honors the claim of inexperience to be amused and edified without being abashed, was his creation. He did not know himself, perhaps, how wonderfully he was prophesying, in “The Vicar of Wakefield,” the best modem fiction of England and America.

  He does not portray the incidents or characters which Richardson studies with a pious abhorrence, or Fielding with a blackguardly sympathy. His realism stops short of the facts which may appall or which may defile the fancy. It contents itself
with the gentle domestic situation of the story and its change from happiness to misery through chances none the less probable because they are operated by the author so much more obviously than they would be now by an author of infinitely less inspiration. Such an artist would not now accumulate disaster upon Dr. Primrose’s head so clearly with his own hand; disaster has become much more accustomed to the affliction of fictitious character and makes its approaches with the indirectness and delays noticeable in the actual world. Neither would such an artist have employed means so little psychological as the good man’s sudden loss of fortune and his swift precipitation to misery by the wretch who breaks the heart of his daughter, and spoils the joy of all those harmless lives. Happily for the finer art of our time, the betrayer does not now imaginably find his way into the family of a country clergyman with the intent to dishonor and destroy it; but even in the brutal time when such things were justly imaginable the author spares us the worst with a sort of prophetic sensibility. The fair Olivia is, indeed, eloped with if not quite abducted; things could not be otherwise managed in that day without defiance of the traditions alike of fiction and of fact; but she stoops to folly only through a mock marriage, and this in the end, as is well known, proves a real marriage, thanks to the twofold duplicity of the wicked lover’s agent, who, for purposes of his own, has had the ceremony performed by a real clergyman. Her tragic fate gives her a sort of dignity not innate in her; and in her potential relenting towards the ultimate disaster of the scoundrel who has so cruelly misused her, she has the highest charm of the Ever-Womanly — at least to the Ever-Manly witness. But it is at no time pretended that she is a wise person, even by the fond father who tells the story of his family. “Olivia, now about eighteen,” he says in such antithetical portraiture of his daughters as the age delighted in, “had that luxuriancy of beauty with which painters generally draw Hebe; open, sprightly and commanding. Sophia’s features were not so striking at first, but often did more execution; for they were soft, modest and alluring. Olivia wished for many lovers; Sophia to secure one. Olivia was often affected from too great desire to please; Sophia even repressed excellence from her fear to offend.... I have often seen them exchange characters for a whole day together. A suit of mourning has transformed my coquette into a prude, and a new set of ribbands has given her younger sister more than natural vivacity.”

  III

  It is a picture that makes one wish the more that the good doctor had carried his complaisance a little farther and told us what color his girls’ eyes and hair were of, and which was the taller or slighter. In the absence of positive information one is left to suppose from the internal evidence that Olivia was large and fair, and Sophia of a low stature and a brunette complexion; or the reverse, as one likes. As to their dress, that is not so wholly matter of conjecture, for their father tells us that even after the loss of his fortune, when they were forced to live humbly like their country neighbors, he “still found them attached to their former finery. They still loved laces, ribbands, bugles and catgut; my wife herself retained a passion for her crimson paduasoy.... When we were to assemble in the morning at breakfast, down came my wife and daughters dressed out in all their former splendor: their hair plastered up with pomatum, their faces patched to taste, their trains bundled up into a heap behind, and rustling at every motion.”

  It is well known how the ladies were portrayed in the famous picture of the Primrose family, which, when the wandering limner had finished it out-doors, was found too big to be got into the house. “My wife desired to be represented as Venus, and the painter was requested not to be too frugal of his diamonds in her stomacher and hair... Olivia would be drawn as an Amazon, sitting upon a bank of flowers, dressed in a green joseph, richly laced with gold, and a whip in her hand. Sophia was to be a shepardess, with as many sheep as the painter could put in for nothing.”

  The behavior of the ladies was in conformity to the dispositions respectively assigned to them; but all the world has long been too familiar with it to suffer more than one or two illustrative instances. When young Thornhill first presented himself without invitation among them, it is known how coldly they received him, but how, when he refused to be repulsed, they relented, and the girls, at their mother’s bidding, played and sang for him. “Mr. Thornhill seemed highly delighted with their performance and choice, and then took up the guitar himself. He played very indifferently; but my eldest daughter repaid his former applause with interest, and assured him that his tones were louder even than those of her master.... As soon as he was gone my wife called a council.... ‘Tell me, Sophia, my dear, what do you think of our new visitor? Don’t you think he seemed to be very good-natured?’ ‘Immensely so, indeed, mamma,’ replied she. ‘I think he has a great deal to say upon every subject, and is never at a loss; and the more trifling the subject the more he has to say.’ ‘Yes,’ cried Olivia, ‘he is well enough for a man, but for my part I don’t much like him, he is so extremely impudent and familiar; but on the guitar he is shocking.’”

  It is of course in keeping with her character that this mother meets her hapless daughter with cruel upbraiding when she comes back to her ruined home, but wholly forgives her in the end when she finds that Olivia has been incontestably “made an honest woman of” by the machinations of her betrayer’s betrayer. Mrs. Primrose, however, is by no means a harsh nature, even if she is a woman so little wiser than some men. She is always a most acceptable presence in the story, and never more so than when she is most foolish. She is very modem in being of the illogical and inconsequent type of her sex which fiction has rather over-delighted in painting since her day. Probably there were hints of her in fiction from the very beginning, but it was Goldsmith who first painted one of the many ancestresses of Mrs. Nickleby in full length. She reasons from her wishes and believes from her-hopes, with those vast leaps from premises to conclusions which we have all witnessed in ladies of her mental make, both in and out of novels. She prevails by the qualities of her heart, and her adequacy to most domestic occasions shows that the home may be governed with as little wisdom as the world. She influences the sage Sophia as strongly as the giddy Olivia, and it is pleasant to see how she is held in her motherly supremacy by the affection of her children, and the love of her husband, who perfectly understands her. In fact, a very pretty case might be made out of her as the real heroine of the book.

  She and Olivia are both of much more readily perceptible quality than Sophia. One expects Olivia to do what she does; it is almost inevitable; and then one expects an interval of good sense in her after her misfortunes, which, it is intimated, have chastened without essentially changing her. Sophia is a more difficult nature to deal with, for her charm has to be shown in negative ways. She has a great deal more mind than either her mother or sister, but she is mostly subject to them, and follows their lead as younger daughters and sisters do, or at least used to do. She will practically share in many of Olivia’s absurdities in spite of her greater light and knowledge, and she is preserved from her disasters apparently by a fate that does not always befriend passive principle. It is just in her passivity, however, that she is so dear to the heart, so like so many other nice girls who are often so much wiser than anything they do, or even say. One of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s heroines is reported to have been able to converse like a philosopher, but to be apt, in emergency, to behave like a robin in a green-house. If this was not quite the case with Sophia, it must be owned that her main superiority to Olivia was shown in her being fallen in love with by a better man, and in her refusing to be carried off by the villain who had deceived her sister; though it ought to be said in Olivia’s behalf that it is much easier to resist being carried off against your will than with it.

  IV

  It was the age of moral sentiments, and to have them at hand was the sovereignest thing against temptation from without and within. Heroines used to express them whenever the least danger threatened, and sometimes when they were in perfect safety. Under instruction of th
e good Samuel Richardson they sought the welfare of themselves, their lovers, and their correspondents in formularies prescribing the virtues for every exigency, and praising right conduct with a constancy which ought to have availed rather more promptly than it did. But neither of the girls in “The Vicar of Wakefield” is very profuse of them, and this marks either a lapsing faith in their efficacy, or a rising art in the novelist. Goldsmith, at any rate, confines the precepts and reflections to the father of his heroines, as he might fitly do in the case of the supposed narrator; Richardson, or rather the epistolary form of his novels, obliges his heroines to make them. Yet he was a great master, and, in spite of his preaching, a great artist He was a man of a mighty middle-class conscience, and in an age not so corrupt as some former ages, but still of abominable social usages, he could not withhold the protest of a righteous soul, though he risked rendering a little tedious the interesting girls who uttered it for him.

  He was blamed for portraying facts which were not so edifying as the morals to be drawn from them; and this may have been why he made his heroines so didactic. Somehow he had to trim the balance, and if the faithful portraiture of vice involved danger of contamination to the reader, virtue must be the more explicit and prodigal of its prophylactics and antidotes. His excess in both directions was corrected by the wiser art if not the purer instinct of the group of great women novelists who inherited his moral ideals and refined upon his materials and methods. Society had perhaps not grown much less licentious when Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen began to write, but it was growing less openly licentious, and it might be studied in pictures less alarming to propriety, if not to innocence. These women, who fixed the ideal of the Anglo-Saxon heroines, wrote at the close of the last century and the beginning of this, some thirty years after the masterpieces of Richardson appeared, and fifteen or twenty years after “The Vicar of Wakefield” imparted to all Europe the conception of a more exquisite fiction. In some sort Richardson served them as a model, and Goldsmith as an inspiration, but it was they who characterized the modem Anglo-Saxon novel which these masters had perhaps invented. The most beautiful, the most consoling of all the arts owes its universal acceptance among us, its opportunity of pleasing and helping readers of every age and sex, to this group of high-souled women. They forever dedicated it to decency; as women they were faithful to their charge of the chaste mind; and as artists they taught the reading world to be in love with the sort of heroines who knew how not only to win the wandering hearts of men, but to keep their homes pure and inviolable. They imagined the heroine who was above all a Nice Girl; who still remains the ideal of our fiction; to whom it returns with a final constancy, after whatever aberration; so that probably if a composite photograph of the best heroines of our day could be made, it would look so much like a composite miniature of their great-great-grandmothers in the novels of these authors that the two could not well be told apart