Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  This is true of the work of Scott’s greatest follower and disciple, James Fenimore Cooper. It would be pleasant to believe that he was of his own initiative, but it would not be true; and though Cooper was so far original through his patriotism as to prefer American scenes and themes in his fiction, he most distinctly was because Scott had been. His literature was both better and worse than Scott’s. It was more compact and more dramatic, no doubt from his more strenuous temperament; but it lacked that depth of humanity which one always feels under Scott’s turbid surfaces, and it is wholly without the sweet play of his humor, the sudden flashes of his inspiration. So far as I know it, his romance has never the grace that Scott wins now and again for his from the presence of a genuine heroine. But on this point I was willing to own myself not very well fitted to judge, since my knowledge of Cooper was at best vague and of remote date; and in my misgiving I turned to a literary friend who had made rather a special study of him, and entreated him to help me out with a heroine from him. He answered in effect that the heroines of Cooper did not exist even in the imagination of his readers; there were certain figures in his pages, always introduced as “females,” and of such an extremely conventional and ladylike deportment in all circumstances that you wished to kill them. But he added, in a magnanimous despair, that if I would I might read “The Last of the Mohicans,” and possibly come away with a heroine. I have just finished the book, with a true regret that I was not a boy of fourteen, or else a man in the second quarter of the century, when I read it; but I have not come away with a heroine. This is not because I have killed either Cora Munro or her sister Alice; but since I am guiltless of their death I am glad they are dead. Long ago I read several romances of Charles Brockden Brown, but of those dreams nothing more remains to me now than of some that I dreamed myself about the year 1875. Certainly, no shadow of a heroine remains from them, and I am sure that if there had been the shadow of a heroine in them she would have remained. In fact, the heroine of a romantic novel seldom does, or can, remain with the reader, for the plain reason that she seldom exists. Apparently the ever-womanly refuses herself to the novelist who proposes anything but truth to nature; apparently she cannot trust him. She may not always be so very sincere herself, but she requires sincerity in the artist who would take her likeness, and it is only in the fiction of one who faithfully reports his knowledge of things seen that she will deign to show her face, to let her divine presence be felt. That is the highest and best fiction, and her presence is the supreme evidence of its truth to the whole of life.

  A HEROINE OF BULWER’S

  MANY proofs of the fact that a novel is great or not, as its women are important or unimportant, might be alleged. There are exceptions to the rule, but they are among novels of ages and countries different from ours. As we approach our own time, women in fiction become more and more interesting, and are of greater consequence than the men in fiction, and the skill with which they are portrayed is more and more a test of mastery. By this test the romantic novel shows its inferiority, if by no other; we have only to compare the work of Richardson, Goldsmith, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. George Moore, Mr. Henry James, Harold Frederic, Mr. George W. Cable, Miss Mary E. Wilkins, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and the other realistic or realescent novelists with that of the romanticists, in order to see how vast this inferiority is. If we go outside of our own language, we must note the supremacy of women in the fiction of Goethe, Manzoni, Balzac, Tourguénief, Zola, Maupassant, Bjômsen, Valdés, Galdôs, Verga, and Sudermann. These masters have presented women livingly, winningly, convincingly as no master of romance has. The greatest exception that occurs to me is, of course, Hawthorne; but even he created his most lifelike woman character, Zenobia, in his most realistic story, “The Blithedale Romance.” Women, above all others, should love the fiction which is faithful to life, for no other fiction has paid the homage and done the justice due to women, or recognized their paramount interest.

  I

  Mrs. Radcliffe inspired our Charles Brockden Brown, just as Scott inspired our James Fenimore Cooper. Scott, of course, influenced all Europe, as Richardson and Goldsmith had done in their time; and until the rise of Balzac a whole generation wrote little else but historical novels, though in Germany the romantic movement eventuated in something that was more purely romance, like the “Undine “ of De la Motte Fouqué. To a certain extent among the English the romantic impulse resulted in a yet more psychological type, of which Mrs. Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is a superlative example. But in that thin air woman, who is far more of “this sensible warm motion” than man, gasped for breath; and scarcely a palpable heroine remains to us from all that generation of romancers. Such diaphanous embodiments as they could give her traits, waned more and more into symbols; the art of presenting her with her vital charm, distinct, individual, actual as the early realists had known her, seemed lost; and when a realescent talent like Balzac arrived, and began to cast about him in every-day life for the bizarre contrasts and eccentricities, the surprising accidents and tremendous catastrophes which the romancers had sought afar in remote times and under strange skies, he did little to give woman her old importance in fiction. The pathetic and beautiful vision of his Eugénie Grandet rises to reproach me for saying this, and I hasten to acknowledge in her a heroine worthy of the best age of fiction. But still I think that what I say holds true, and that again, as with Hawthorne, the exception proves the rule.

  As for the nautical romance which Cooper popularized, and which Captain Marryat carried forward upon the impulse Cooper had given him, it was, still less than the historical or psychological romance, the habitat of the true heroine. In my time I read every one of Marryat’s novels, but no gleam of a woman’s eye, or drift of a woman’s drapery haunts my remembrance of them. Cooper could occasionally find use for a “female” as a captive among his Indians; and no doubt there were figures which passed for heroines in Marryat’s landgoing stories. Until Mr. Clark Russell’s time, however, the marine novel was unfavorable to the heroine. He alone seems to have had the secret of divining lovely girls on water-logged wrecks, or of having his heroes marooned with them on palmy islands of the Spanish Main; though it is due to the many-sidedness of Charles Reade to recall that in “Foul Play,” which is so largely a sea story, there is a heroine of such charm, so sweetly and truly a woman, that any man would be willing to be cast away with her on a desert coast, and very loath to be rescued, except in her company.

  II

  We may explain the absence of genuine women in romantic fiction less charitably than I have already explained it, and suppose that it was a revulsion from their extreme prevalence in the early realistic fiction. Or, we may allow that in all the more active adventures and more tremendous exigencies, a heroine was so difficult to manage that she had to be left out as much as the hero’s functional requirement of some one to love would permit. In a representation of every-day life she could always very credibly give a good account of herself, but in what may be called every-other-day life she apparently did not know what to do. Her simple and single device of a “falling lifeless,’ as in the case of “females” of “sensibility,’ was soon exhausted, and, even when in a dead faint, she was apt to be a burden on the action; the hero had to lug her off, either in his arms or on his saddle-bow, or else leave her to the villain, who could seldom be trusted with the care of a lady.

  The possibilities of the swoon, indeed, had been pretty well exhausted, when the novel began slowly to return to the study of human nature under the ordinary social conditions. Heroines were confronted with situations to which they were more equal as women, and they fainted less as time went on, until now a lady “falls lifeless “ in fiction almost as rarely as in life. The effect in these matters is largely reciprocal, and no doubt the evanescence of the swoon in life is due in turn to its disappearance in fiction. At any rate, fainting is as obsolete as “ bursting a blood-vessel,” which used to be so common
in novels; and the habit of carrying salts which every lady had who wished to pass for a “ delicate female,” and which continued till the middle of the century, would seem something too funny to her golfing granddaughters, who talk of each other as “women” and share the hardy sports of “men.” The novelists themselves began to find hysterics funny, and some employed them to move the mirth of their readers, while the heroines of others were still swooning seriously. To this day they still “burst into tears,” and “choke with sobs “; but so do women in life, and so did men once. In the novels of Richardson men weep quite as copiously as women, and upon as little provocation; and possibly one of the few good effects of the novel of adventure was to steel the nerves of the hero, at least, against the melting mood. It may be supposed that in the stress of saving his own life or taking the life of some one else, he could not find the moment for bursting into tears, or choking with sobs; and that he behaved something more like a man from mere pressure of business.

  One may go further than this, and imagine that the two schools profited by each other both in the way of warning and the way of example. Certainly the realescents, like Balzac and Hugo, and like Bulwer and Dickens, who followed the romancers, copied some of their virtues as well as their faults; and if they did not copy all the virtues of the early realists, they eschewed most of their faults.

  Bulwer and Dickens both brought fiction back to the study of life upon terms as novel as their respective points of view were different. Bulwer was some ten years before Dickens in imparting the surprise they each had for his contemporaries; and the surprise that Bulwer operated in “Pelham” must have been much greater than we can imagine now when we look back and find the story so vulgarly and viciously commonplace under the glare of its worldly splendor. He called it “ The Adventures of a Gentleman,” and so it might have been, as gentlemen went in those days; but now it would rather be called “The Adventures of a Blackguard,” so much have gentlemen or blackguards since improved. In abandoning the fanciful realm of the romancers, and returning to the world of actualities, Bulwer did not return to the unsparing ideal of the first realists, and seek the good of his reader by pointing the moral of his tale; still less did he conceive of the principle which has vitalized the later realists, and leave a faithful study of life, in cause and effect, to enforce its own lesson. In his early fiction we move in a region where the moral law is apparently suspended, as it often seems to be in this unhappy world of ours, and where good does not follow from good or evil from evil, as it finally does to our experience. Cynical conventions, and not the mysterious statutes written in all hearts, govern the world in which Henry Pelham adventures; and in this malarial, this mephitic air, the womanly gasps and perishes.

  The literary technique is so much better than Scott’s; the story is so much shapelier, the style so much clearer and quicker, the diction so much more accurate, that one at first feels a certain joy in escaping to it But this soon fades, and you find yourself longing for the foolishest page of romance, for the worst of Scott, of Cooper, of Brockden Brown, of Mrs. Radcliffe, as something truer and better, after all; for these authors, at their worst, were untrue only to the manifestations of human nature, and Bulwer, at his best, misrepresents the surface of life, and he is untrue to its essence.

  In the long stretch of his novels, from “Pelham,” which was not the first, to “My Novel,” which was not the last, but which respectively mark the extremes of his ill-doing and well-doing, there is an apparent effort to retrieve the primal error, the original sin of “Pelham.” But one does not feel that Bulwer ever quite works out his redemption. Womanhood, at least, does not forgive him; or it does not countenance his work by its presence so far as to suffer him any memorable heroine. I read all his books at that most impressionable time of life when but to name a woman’s name is to conjure up a phantom of delight in the young fancy; but nothing remains to me now from the multitude of his inventions in the figure of women but the vague image of the blind girl Nydia in “The Last Days of Pompeii.” I think this sort of general remembrance or oblivion no bad test in such matters, and I feel pretty sure that if Bulwer had imagined any other heroine of equal authenticity I should find some trace of her charm in my memory. But I find none from the books of an author whom I once thought so brilliant and profound, and whom I now think so solemnly empty, so imposingly unimportant. He was a clever artificer, and he is to be credited with doing much to stay the decadence of British prose in fiction, and to rebuild the British novel upon shapely lines. But in all he has written there is an air of meditated purpose, a lack of impulse, an absence of spontaneity. He meant extremely well by literature; he had ideals so tall that he enjoyed something like a moral elevation from them; he respected the novelist so highly that he wished to call him the Poet, and did call him so in his prefaces; he was a man of polite learning, or at least, of scholarly reading; he wished always to do better than he did; in the lack of artistic instincts he had artistic principles, which if mistaken were sincere; and with all he was thoroughly mediocre. He did not grow as an artist, and his “ Last Days of Pompeii,” which was one of his early novels, is one of his best.

  III

  As I have said, the blind girl Nydia remains to me from “The Last Days of Pompeii” not only chief but almost sole among Bulwer’s heroines, in the sort that heroines outlive the definite recollection of their environment, their individuality, and sometimes of their very names. She is not without rivalry in her native pages: there are the Greek lone whom the hero Glaucus loves, and the Roman Julia who loves him, and who, in the make-up of a Pompeian grande dame, resumes her baleful fires more distinctly under the old eyes reviewing the scenes of the story. On the other hand, however, the slave girl has to contend in this later impression with the disadvantage of being a flower girl, now after flower girls have been done so much. But in her day flower girls in fiction were not yet so faded, and she came with such a freshness of appeal to a much simpler-hearted age than this, that youth in all ranks of life were touched and won by her. The romance, in fact, had an acceptance as great in its time as we have since given “Quo Vadis,’ which it is not saying much to say it surpassed in most essentials, and certainly preceded in such interest as the contrasts of late paganism and early Christianity always awaken.

  Nydia fairly operates the whole action, in which the machinery creaks more audibly than it once did; but she is imagined upon old-fashioned lines of girlhood which have their charm. Like Milton’s ideal of poetry, she is “simple, sensuous, passionate,’ and from her first meeting with Glaucus, the young Athenian swell who goes about snubbing the Latin civilization at Pompeii, she loves him. He saves her from the scourge of the savage virago who owns her, but when he has bought her he sends her to bear the declaration of his love to the beautiful lone; and Nydia has to hear, if not to see, the tenderness of the lovers. The rich Julia makes interest with the jealous child, and they visit together a potent witch who gives the Roman a philter to win her the love of Glaucus. Nydia steals the potion and administers it herself to Glaucus; he drinks and goes mad, and during his frenzy he is implicated in the murder of Ione’s brother, whom Arbaces, the Egyptian high-priest of Isis, has slain. Glaucus is condemned to the lions in the arena; but Nydia contrives to escape from the durance of Arbaces, and manages the release of the priest Calenas, who has witnessed the murder; together they rouse the good voluptuary Sallust from the morrow of a debauch and fly with him to the arena. Glaucus has already been exposed to one lion which has forborne to harm him, and has crept back into his cage, so that Sallust appeals to the ædile in time to save the Greek. Then, as is well known, the eruption of Vesuvius takes place. Through the storm of fire Nydia and Glaucus rush to the house of Arbaces where lone is imprisoned, and the three save themselves from the universal calamity. It must be owned that all this is a good deal for one poor Thessalian girl, a slave and blind, to do; but she has the author to her friend, and she does not fail. When her task is finished, and she finds herself on th
e bark which is bearing the reunited lovers back to Athens, she quietly drowns herself while they are asleep.

  Though they profess to live in the first century, the characters of the story are naturally nineteenth-century people, unless indeed Glaucus speaks of Nydia, in the letter he writes Sallust from Athens, with rather the rhetorical sensibility of the eighteenth:— “Our beloved, our remembered Nydia! I have reared a tomb to her shade, and I see it every day from the window of my study. It keeps alive in me a tender recollection — a not unpleasing sadness — which are but a fitting homage to her fidelity and the mysteriousness of her early death lone gathers the flowers, but my own hand daily wreathes them round the tomb.”

  By this time lone must have suspected why, and would naturally have limited her gratitude for Nydia’s self-sacrifice to gathering the flowers. If not, she must have been less or more a woman than the blind girl, whose jealousy of her is one of the truest things in a book not superabounding in true things. The situation is of the stage; and for the stage the conception of a slave girl rescued from a cruel mistress, to become the servant of the woman whose lover she loves, is not too fine. In all Bulwer’s novels there is a strain which suggests that he would have been a better dramatist, or melodramatist, than novelist. But in the case of Nydia, at least, the execution is not so good as the conception, even, and it is hard to find a passage which will do the conception justice.

  “When Glaucus returned to Pompeii, Nydia had told another year of life; that year with its sorrows, its loneliness, its trials, had greatly developed her mind and heart.... Nydia felt suddenly, and as by revelation, that these feelings she had long and innocently cherished, were of love.... Sometimes she dreaded lest Glaucus should discover her secret; sometimes she felt indignant that it should be suspected; it was a sign of contempt.... Her feelings for lone ebbed and flowed with every hour; now she loved her because he did; now she hated her for the same cause. There were moments when she could have murdered her unconscious mistress, moments when she could have laid down her life for her.... One morning when she repaired to her usual task in the garden... she found Glaucus under the columns of the peristyle, with a merchant of the town; he was selecting jewels for his destined bride.... ‘Come hither, Nydia; put down thy vase and come hither. Thou must take this chain from me — stay — there, I have put it on. There, Servillius, does it not become her?’ ‘Wonderfully!’ answered the jeweller.... ‘But when these ear-rings glitter in the ears of the noble lone, then, by Bacchus! you will see whether my art adds anything to beauty!’ ‘Ione?’ repeated Nydia, who had hitherto acknowledged by smiles and blushes the gift of Glaucus. ‘Yes,’ replied the Athenian, carelessly toying with the gems; ‘I am choosing a present for lone; but there are none worthy of her.’ He was startled as he spoke by an abrupt gesture of Nydia; she tore the chain violently from her neck, and dashed it on the ground. ‘How is this? Why, Nydia, dost thou not like the bauble? Art thou offended?” You treat me ever as a slave and a child,’ replied the Thessalian, with a breast heaving with ill-suppressed sobs.”