Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  In the story which resounds with them, there is one young lady who divides the honors of heroine with the gypsy; and in her, for once, Scott is able to impart the charm of a lively girlishness. Julia Mannering is sinuously true, after the manner of her sex, and light of tongue and heart rather than head. She is a genuine personality; and she carries off an impossible part in the plot with so much vivacity and naturalness that one is almost as much in love with her as with any of the ignorant and amusing housewives and farm-bodies.

  “Waverley “ offers no such figure as this young lady in “Guy Mannering,’ to my liking. Rose Bradwardine is a nice girl, and fit to be married by a hero who repents being fool enough to have fought for the Pretender. But the farthest stretch of charity cannot find her a character. She does what a young lady ought because she is bidden; her speech is the effect of that ventriloquism which Scott too obviously practised in speaking his own words from whatever lips were convenient. She is not the worst instrument of this sort; and Flora Mac Ivor is not the most diaphanous of the author’s failures to construct a credible image of historic motive and personality. It is not that the sister of a Highland chieftain, supporting the rebellion of Charles Edward Stuart, might not play the part assigned to Flora Mac Ivor; but that she does not play it in a way to make us feel that she is deeply interested in it. We are told much about her, but we are shown very little; and are made witnesses of but one moment of poignant feeling in a woman who must have had many, if she were really a woman. This climax is fitly reached in that last interview of Waverley’s with Flora when he finds her sewing upon the shroud of her brother who is about to be executed for treason. Then she blames herself for her brother’s doom as something that her own impassioned loyalty to the Stuarts had urged him forward to. She realizes that the cause was always hopeless, and while she still believes it just and sacred, she agonizes at her part in it for her brother’s sake. This point is really fine — the finest in a story whose course is loose and straggling, and whose effects have rarely the compactness that deep passion alone can give.

  SCOTT’S JEANIE DEANS AND COOPER’S LACK OF HEROINES

  THE nature of Scott’s heroines is such that the choice of this one or that, as the most representative, is a question of intellectual preference rather than of passion, and could hardly rouse feeling in any but their duly appointed lovers. Fortunately for Scott, he does not live by them; one cannot quite say that without them he would still be one of the greatest novelists, and chief of the great romancers; but one may very safely say that such general impression as one keeps of his fiction is not strengthened by a vivid sense of these ladies. Only now and then, and here and there, are they essential to the lasting effect; one recalls them vaguely and with an effort; they are not voluntarily constant to the fancy like the women of Thackeray, of George Eliot, of Charles Reade, even of Dickens; and of some other more modem novelists, above all Mr. Hardy. In the imaginary world of Scott’s creation, woman remained as subordinate as he found her in the civic world about him. He invented a man’s world, and perhaps because women did not come into their rights in it, his man’s world has now mostly lapsed to a boy’s world, where there is little need of the glamour which women cast upon life.

  I

  I have already noted one chief exception to the prevailing nullity of Scott’s heroines in the sad reality of Lucy Ashton, and I shall hardly contrary any critical reader in suggesting Jeanie Deans as another. No characters could well be more strongly contrasted, and one cannot think of them without feeling that in this direction, as in so many others, Scott’s performance was a very imperfect measure of his possibility. If he had not been driven to make quantity, what quality might not he have given us! If he had not had the burden of telling a story upon him, how much more he might have told us of life! If he had not felt bound to portray swashbucklers, with what gracious and touching portraits of womanhood might not he have enriched his page! The man himself was so modest and single of heart that the secret of the ever-womanly would gladly have imparted itself to him if he had not been, as it were, too shy to suffer the confidence. Whenever he caught some hint of it by chance, how clearly he set it down! But for the most part, as I have already said, these chances addressed him from low life; gentlewomen seem rarely to have confided their more complex natures to him. For once, indeed, he saw a Lucy Ashton in the plain air of day, where many Lucy Ashtons dwell and have dwelt, and not less importantly he saw Jeanie Deans; but it was more in his way to see such as Jeanie than to see such as Lucy, and I cannot help thinking it was less an achievement to have fixed her presence lastingly in the reader’s consciousness.

  Such as she is, however, she stands foremost, I believe, in the critical appreciation of Scott’s heroines, and it will be useless to oppose the figure of Effie Deans as somewhat unfairly overshadowed by her. Jeanie has the great weight of moral sentiment on her side; and yet I have a fancy that Scott himself, if he could really have been got at, would have owned he thought it a little finer to keep Effie impenitently true to herself throughout than to show Jeanie equal to the burden which her sister’s lightness cast upon her. At any rate, it seems to me an effect of great mastery (once more surprising than now) to let us see that Effie was always the same nature, in the shame of her unlawful motherhood, in the stress of her trial for the crime against her child’s life which she was guiltless of, in the horror of the scaffold to which she was unjustly doomed, and in the rebound from the danger and disgrace when Jeanie’s devotion had won her release from both. She was wrought upon by the passing facts, but not changed in her nature by them, as Jeanie was not changed in hers. We judge one another so inadequately and unfairly in the actual world, however, that beings of the imaginary world must not expect better treatment. There as here, the light nature will be condemned for the deeds done in it as if they were done in a serious nature, and a serious nature will be honored for truth to itself as if it had overcome in this the weakness of a light nature. Especially among all peoples of Anglo-Saxon birth and breeding will the same inflexible measure of morality be applied, and the characterization of one who has done nobly will be thought greater than that of one who has not done nobly.

  II

  In this I hope I am not giving the notion that I wish to undervalue the character of Jeanie Deans as a piece of art. I value it above that of any other woman, except Lucy Ashton, or except Effie Deans, in all Scott’s romances; but that is saying less than I should like in praise of it. Her character grows upon you, as no doubt it grew upon Scott himself, who must have found that he had something constantly greater and truer in hand than he first imagined. The simple girl matures slowly into shapeliness and strength, much as the straggling story of “The Heart of Midlothian” itself does, and it is not till her young sister’s misfortune and the suspicion of child-murder begins to blacken about the hapless Effie that Jeanie shows the force of a heroine. She stands nearest the Covenanter conscience of their “dour” old father, and she stands between his conscience and her sister’s blame when it comes to that, with a hold upon the reader’s heart that tightens to suffocation at that awful moment in court when her helpless truth gives away her sister’s life.

  The intensity of this feeling for her increases rather than lessens after Effie’s sentence, when Jeanie goes up to London, alone and unfriended, to sue for the King’s mercy. It is finely shown how she does not change, but enlarges in character to the measure of her tremendous mission. Through all her difficulties and dangers, and in every demand upon her truth to herself and faith in her sister’s innocence of the crime which Effie is doomed to die for, she is still the same plain Scotch country body that we saw her at first, of a presence which the author is too wise to flatter. “She was short, and rather too stoutly made for her size, her gray eyes, light-colored hair, a round, good-humored face, much tanned by the sun; and her only peculiar charm was an air of inexpressible serenity, which a good conscience, kind feelings, contented temper and the regular discharge of all her duties, spre
ad over her features.” In this figure she visits the Duke of Argyle, the embodiment to her unworldliness of all worldly greatness under royalty, and wins his promise to help her see the King. Not only her calm, wholesome goodness, her sore-tried love for her sister, and her innocent naïveté appear in the interview, but there are charming hints of the Scotch canniness which qualifies and quickens her virtues, if it is indeed not one of them.

  ‘“I wad hae putten on a cap, sir,’ said Jeanie, when Argyle bids her go dressed as she is to the audience he has got for her, ‘but your honor knows it isna the fashion of my country for single women; and I judged that being sae mony hundred miles frae home, your Grace’s heart wad warm to the tartan,’ looking at the corner of her plaid. ‘You judged quite right,’ said the Duke. ‘Macallumore’s heart will be as cold as death can make it, when it does not warm to the tartan. Now, go away, and do not be out of the way when I send.’ ‘There is little fear of that, sir.... But if I might say to your gracious honor, that if ye ever condescend to speak to ony ane that is of greater degree than yoursel’, though maybe it isna civil in me to say sae, just if ye wad think there canna be any sic odds as between poor Jeanie Deans of St. Leonard’s and the Duke of Argyle; and so dinna be chappit back or cast down by the first rough answer!’ ‘I am not apt,’ said the Duke, laughing, ‘to mind rough answers much.... I will do my best, but God has the hearts of kings in His own hand.’ “The incidents of Jeanie’s audience with Caroline, whom the girl does not know for the Queen till the end, when Caroline gives her a little needle-book for remembrance, are of note too common for reproduction; but I like so much a pretty touch in her ensuing conversation with Argyle, that I wish I could believe myself the first to feel it. “‘And that leddy was the Queen hersel’?’ said Jeanie. ‘I misdoubted it when I saw your honor didna put on your hat.’ ‘It was certainly Queen Caroline.... Have you no curiosity to see what is in the little pocket-book?” Do you think the pardon will be in it?’ said Jeanie with the eager animation of hope. ‘Why, no.... They seldom carry these things about them... and besides, her Majesty told you it was the King, not she, who was to grant it.” That is true,’ said Jeanie, ‘but I am so confused in my mind.’” In such slight things, such casual, lateral touches, the master shows himself rather than in what Scott called “the big bow-bow,” and abandoned himself to, alas! so much, because the big bow-bow is so pleasing. A student of human nature will find more of Jeanie in these than in the signal moments of the story where she has the heroine’s official part to play; as he will find more of Effie in her flying with her lover, when her pardon comes, without staying Jeanie’s return, than in the incidents of her imprisonment and trial. It is from a yet deeper and bolder knowledge of the heart that the author ventures to show, when Effie is married and comes back a lady of rank to visit poor Jeanie, that they both perceive how little they have in common, and willingly part again. Still, that is a great scene, a piece of mighty drama, at the trial, when Jeanie is called to testify concerning Effie under the atrocious law which judged the mother guilty of her child’s death if this happened because she had not sought the needed help in the hour of her agony and dishonor. It was the hope of the defence that Effie might be shown to have trusted Jeanie with her secret, and “the poor prisoner instantly started up, and stretched herself half-way over the bar, toward the side at which her sister was to enter. And when, slowly following the official, the witness advanced to the foot of the table, Effie, with the whole expression of her countenance altered from that of confused shame and dismay to an eager, imploring and almost ecstatic earnestness of entreaty, with outstretched hand, hair streaming back, eyes raised eagerly to her sister’s face and glistening through tears, exclaimed, in a tone that went to the heart of all who heard her, ‘O, Jeanie, Jeanie, save me, save me!’... Old Deans drew himself still further back under cover of the bench so that... his venerable form was no longer visible. “Fairbrother, Effie’s counsel, “saw the necessity of letting the witness compose herself. In his heart he suspected that she came to bear false witness in her sister’s cause....

  He asked whether she had not remarked her sister’s state of health to be altered. ‘And she told you the cause of it, my dear, I suppose?... Take courage, — speak out.’ ‘I asked her,’ replied Jeanie, ‘what ailed her.’ ‘Very well — take your own time — and what was the answer she made?’... Jeanie was silent, and looked deadly pale. It was not that she at any one instant entertained an idea of the possibility of prevarication — it was the natural hesitation to extinguish the last spark of hope that remained for her sister. ‘Take courage, young woman,’ said Fairbrother. ‘I asked what she said ailed her when you inquired.’ ‘Nothing,’ answered Jeanie, with a faint voice which was yet distinctly heard in the most distant corner of the court-room, such an awful and profound silence had been preserved.... Fairbrother’s countenance fell.

  ... ‘Nothing? True, you mean nothing at first, but when you asked her again, did she not tell you what ailed her?’ The question was put in a tone meant to make her comprehend the importance of her answer... With less pause than at first she now replied, ‘Alack, alack! she never breathed a word to me about it. ‘A deep groan passed through the court. It was echoed by one deeper and more agonized from the unfortunate father... and the venerable old man fell forward senseless... with his head at the foot of his terrified daughter.... The unfortunate prisoner... strove with the guards.... ‘Let me gang to my father! I will gang to him! He is dead — he is killed — I hae killed him!’ Even in this moment of agony Jeanie did not lose that superiority which a deep and firm mind assures to its possessor.... ‘He is my father — he is our father,’ she mildly repeated to those who endeavored to separate them, as she stooped, shaded aside his gray hairs and began assiduously to chafe his temples.”

  III

  The loose, inaccurate and ineffectual languaging of this scene is partially concealed by the condensation of the foregoing passages. I know that to many it will seem irreverence little short of sacrilege to speak of Scott’s work in these terms; but truth is more precious than sentiment, and no harm but much help can come from recognizing the facts. In verse, Scott was a master of diction, compact, clear, simple; in prose, at least the prose of his novels, he was shapeless, tautological, heavy, infirm, wandering, melodramatic and over-literary. The incident, however, is here so nobly imagined that the reader is held above the course of its feeble and inadequate realization, and shares with the author in the greatness of his concept. It is quite useless to pretend otherwise, and one has only to think how Tolstoy, for instance, or Tourguénief would have presented the scene, in order to feel the vast imperfection, the deficiency in surplus, of Scott’s treatment. But the world has done him justice, in such things, and where his idea is great, it has measured him by the affluence of his concept, and not by the poverty of his product.

  He was of an age which was over-literary, and which the influence of his error was making more and more so. His error was not wholly his; it was largely the effect of precedent conditions; but it was not the necessary effect. He fell into it, because it was easy, and offered itself to his hurry and his careless hand, as a ready means of satisfying a public ignorant of truth and indifferent to beauty. Artifice can hide the lack of art, melodrama can conceal the absence of drama; and the time for which Scott wrote really preferred artifice and melodrama. In an admirable essay on the romances of Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist to give us standing in the world of fiction, Colonel T. W. Higginson justly notes in defence of Brown’s turgidity that “the general style of the period... was itself melodramatic.... One has only to read over the private letters of any educated family of that period to see that people did not then express themselves as they now do; that they were far more ornate in utterance, more involved in statement, more impassioned in speech.” All this is very true, but it is also true that, in spite of the common tendency, there was a strong, lucid undercurrent back to nature in the writings of authors whose excel
lence Scott himself generously recognized. He praised these as his superiors, and it is hard in the face of his fine modesty to blame him for not emulating their sanity and verity. But he must be blamed for doing what he knew better than to do; and the student of his work will always be to blame if he fails to declare that with all his moral virtues Scott in fiction was of a low aesthetic ideal. He consciously preferred, with his great poetic soul, the folly and the falsity of the romantic to the beauty of the natural, and he wittingly, however unwillingly, extended the realm of Anne Radcliffe rather than the realm of Jane Austen. It was easier to do this, far easier; for the true, the only beautiful, is exigent of patience and of pains that Scott would not or could not give. Whether he could not or would not, he made it harder for his contemporaries and successors to be of a higher ideal than that by which he won his immense success. I believe the badness of Scott’s prose in fiction is owing to the lowness of his ideal rather than to the general style of his own period. Sometimes the greatness of a concept can show through the hollow and pompous forms of the product; but this happens rarely. What happens often is that the artificiality of the product is a fair expression of the concept.