Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  There is nature here, almost naturally expressed; but if the reader is not willing that the heroine should keep this aspect of petulant jealousy he may take leave of her in that supreme moment when Nydia acts more like a heroine and talks altogether like one. She has saved Glaucus from the lion; she has helped him save lone from the Egyptian; she has guided him, “half leading, half carrying lone,” to the sea-shore; she has done all that a blind girl could do, and perhaps more; and now the lovers are dreaming away the terrors of yesterday in the early dawn after their escape, and the bark on which they have set sail seems to be laying its own course for the Piraeus.

  “In the silence of the general sleep Nydia rose gently. She bent over the face of Glaucus — she inhaled the deep breath of his heavy slumber — timidly and sadly she kissed his brow, his lips; she felt for his hand — it was locked in that of lone; she sighed deeply and her face darkened. Again she kissed his brow, and with her hair wiped from it the damp of night. ‘May the gods bless you, Athenian,’ she murmured; ‘may you be happy with your beloved one! — may you sometimes remember Nydia! Alas, she is of no further use on earth!’ Slowly she crept along the fori, or platform, to the further side of the vessel, and, passing, bent low over the deep; the cool spray dashed upward over her fevered brow. ‘It is the kiss of death,’ she said; ‘it is welcome,’ The balmy air played through her waving tresses — and she raised those eyes, so tender though sightless, to the sky whose soft face she had never seen. ‘No, no!’ she said, half aloud, and in a musing and thoughtful tone, ‘I cannot endure it; this jealous, exacting love, it shatters my whole soul in madness.... Oh, sacred Sea! I hear thy voice invitingly.... They say that. in thy embrace is dishonor — that thy victims cross not the fatal Styx. Be it so! I would not meet him in the Shades, for I should meet him still with her! Rest — rest — rest! — there is no other Elysium for a heart like mine!’ A sailor, half dozing on the deck, heard a slight splash on the waters; drowsily he looked up, and behind, as the vessel bounded merrily on, he fancied he saw something white above the waves, but it vanished in an instant.”

  It may seem hard that a novelist whose fiction afterwards went so far and wide in the great English world of society and politics, should have lodged no other heroine so securely in the memory of his public as she of his early romance; but this appears to have been the fate of Bulwer. Yet, after all, it is no mean achievement. She was so well imagined, in a time when her type was fresher than now, that one’s regret is rather for the heroine than the author; one wishes that she had been the creature of a talent able to do her full justice in the realization.

  THE EARLIER HEROINES OF CHARLES DICKENS

  I SHOULD be at a loss to say exactly why Bulwer holds in my mind some such relation to English fiction as Balzac holds to the French. Perhaps it is because they were so nearly contemporaneous in their work, and dealt in it so largely both with criminals and with swells, and both dabbled in mysticism. They were alike in theorizing about their art, and in meaning greater things than they ever did, though Balzac did so much greater things than Bulwer. They escaped together from the hold of decadent romance, but not without continuing in certain things very romanticistic. Bulwer, it is true, wrote a number of historical novels, and Balzac wrote one or two novels (notably “Eugénie Grandet” and “César Birotteau”), almost purely realistic, and of a truth never approached by Bulwer in any of the stories where he tried so hard for the likeness of life. Another talent, far greater than he, and of a quality still unique in English literature, resembled Balzac in the employment of bizarre and eccentric characters, while he led all the other romanticists in the use of such effectisms as people keeping their identity concealed through a whole action, or good people masking as bad people, or clever persons sustaining the part of foolish persons, in order to confound the wicked. Of course I am speaking of Charles Dickens, a mighty imagination, whose vices grew upon him with his virtues, tinder the immense favor he almost instantly achieved.

  I

  In the characterization of women I do not think Dickens ever struck a truer note than in some of his very earliest heroines, who were so much more real than the more elaborate figures that follow them in interminable procession through the long perspective of his fiction. The scheme of his first novel, if “Pickwick Papers” can be called a novel, is so desultory that the young ladies in it have little to do in bringing about its comedy closes, and are there, in such action as they share, solely for the purpose of being pretty and provoking, and ensnaring the hearts of their lovers, and then being easily won by them. This is not a very high conception of woman’s business in the world, but so very many women seem to be in the world for nothing else that we can hardly blame those who are restricted to it in fiction. It is to be said in their defence, besides, that when Dickens began to draw women of a different type, he did not seem to get them so true; he made us believe in them by dint of appealing to our consciences or our sensibilities, and he achieved a moral rather than an artistic triumph in heroines who are for our good rather than our pleasure.

  After all, though, why should not Arabella Allen and Emily Wardle be for our good, too? They are nice girls, of the true Anglo-Saxon tradition in heroines. But their innocent lures are more obvious than those of Jane Austen’s or Frances Burney’s nice girls; they are something more of romps, and were such girls as the young reporter had probably himself known in the society which he then frequented. At the Christmas festivities, where we first meet Miss Allen, she is a guest of the hospitable Wardle household which comes out to meet Mr. Pickwick and his friends, and is “the black-eyed young lady in a very nice little pair of boots with fur round the top,” who was “ observed to scream very loudly when Mr. Winkle offered to help her over” the stile. At an allusion to an approaching marriage this “ young lady with the black eyes and the fur round the boots whispered something in Emily’s ear, and then glanced archly at Mr. Snodgrass.” In the evening, after the dance, when it was a question of being kissed under the mistletoe, and the young ladies all “ screamed and struggled, and ran into comers, and threatened and remonstrated, and did everything but leave the room,... Mr. Winkle kissed the young lady with the black eyes, and Mr. Snodgrass kissed Emily.” Several chapters later, when the Pickwickians are again at Manor Farm, Miss Allen is still there, and at the pond where they all go to skate she urges Mr. Winkle to skate, and then is not ashamed of him for having pretended to know how, and fallen down on the ice, and had his skates ignominiously taken off him by Mr. Pickwick’s order. After this it is only an affair of time, and not much time, as to her elopement with Mr. Winkle, whose father provisionally disowns him till he decides to see Arabella, and judge of his son’s folly for himself. “Arabella’s tears flowed fast, as she pleaded in extenuation that she was young and inexperienced;... that she had been deprived of the counsel and guidance of her parents almost from infancy. ‘It was my fault, all my fault, sir,’ replied poor Arabella, weeping. ‘Nonsense,’ said the old gentleman, ‘it was not your fault that he fell in love with you, I suppose. Yes, it was, though,’ said the old gentleman, looking rather shyly at Arabella. ‘It was your fault; he couldn’t help it.’”

  All this is supposed to have happened when our century was in its early thirties, and people took life much less psychologically than they do now, and had spirits for anything. “Pickwick Papers” themselves seem the effect of the most robust high spirits, sometimes the most resolute high spirits, as we read them in this late twilight, and wonder a little what used to make us laugh so much. A serious heroine, or even a heroine seriously treated, would have been out of place in that rollicking atmosphere, and Arabella Allen does better than a finer personality. As for the love-making, there is none to the reader’s direct knowledge, and only inferentially a little at the Christmas dance, when the absence of the lovers keeps the music waiting. “ ‘Where’s Arabella Allen?’ cried a dozen voices. ‘And Winkle?’ added Mr. Tupman. ‘Here we are!’ exclaimed that gentleman, emerging with his pretty c
ompanion from the corner; as he did so it would have been hard to tell which was the redder in the face, he or the young lady with the black eyes. ‘What an extraordinary thing it is, Winkle,’ said Mr. Pickwick, rather pettishly, ‘that you couldn’t have taken your place before.’ ‘Not at all extraordinary,’ said Mr. Winkle. ‘Well,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with a very expressive smile, as his eyes rested upon Arabella— ‘well, I don’t know that it was extraordinary, either, after all.’”

  II

  The love in “Pickwick Papers” is, in fact, all readymade; but there is no subtlety in the author that leaves you in doubt of its being love. He put on subtlety enough of all sorts afterwards, except of the sort that really conceals something, and that is perhaps why he became and remains such a universal favorite, for there is nothing that the average novel-reader (who is nearly as low an intelligence as the average play-goer) likes so much as a deep mystery which he is in the secret of. Dickens attempted something finer in his next novel than anything he tried in “Pickwick Papers,’ and in “Nicholas Nickleby” we have the choice of two heroines, Kate Nickleby and Madeline Gray, who are as far as possible from the elemental arts of Arabella Allen, but who exist more to touch than to take the reader’s heart. We have no longer the pure comedy of “Pickwick Papers,” but the tragedy is not so good as the comedy in “Nicholas Nickleby,” and the farcical people are all more real, grotesque caricatures as they mostly are, than the serious people. Of the women, Mrs. Nickleby is the most vital, and yet in the part of absolute fool Mrs. Nickleby is not to be spoken of in the same breath with Mrs. Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice.” Her folly is burlesqued, and the charm of Mrs. Bennet’s folly is that it is never burlesqued. You can always go back to the book and laugh at her as gladly any time as the first time; but your pleasure in Mrs. Nickleby soon passes. You get the trick of her, the parenthetical incoherence which Dickens worked afterwards in Flora Casby, Mrs. Lirriper, David Copperfield’s landlady, Mrs. Plornish, and I do not know how many others, and then, if one is not in one’s prime, she very quickly stales. In my own prime, however, I used to take my life in my hand, so killingly funny I found it all, when I ventured to read of the mad gentleman next door, throwing vegetables over the wall as a token of his love for Mrs. Nickleby, and afterwards scrambling down her chimney in further proof of his passion, and being pulled out over the grate and dropped floundering on the floor by Frank Cheeryble.

  “‘Oh, yes, yes,’ said Kate, directly the whole figure of this singular visitor appeared in this abrupt manner. ‘I know who it is.... Is he hurt? I hope not — oh, pray, see if he is hurt.’ ‘He is not, I assure you,’ said Frank, handling the object of his surprise, after this appeal, with sudden tenderness and respect.... ‘But may I ask you what this means, and whether you expected this old gentleman? ‘Oh, no,’ said Kate; ‘of course not; but he — mamma does not think so, I believe — but he is a mad gentleman who has escaped from the next house, and must have found an opportunity of secreting himself there.’ ‘Kate,’ interposed Mrs. Nickleby, with severe dignity, ‘I am surprised at you.... I am quite astonished that you should join the persecutors of this unfortunate gentleman....

  You ought not to allow your feelings to be influenced; it’s not right, very far from it. What should my feelings be, do you suppose? If anybody ought to be indignant, who is it? I, of course, and very properly so. Still, at the same time, I wouldn’t commit such an injustice for the world. No,’ continued Mrs. Nickleby, drawing herself up and looking another way with a kind of bashful stateliness, ‘this gentleman will understand me when I tell him that I repeat the answer I gave the other day — that I always will repeat it, though I do believe him to be sincere when I find him placing himself in such dreadful situations on my account — and that I request him to go away immediately.... I am obliged to him, very much obliged to him, but I cannot listen to his addresses for a moment. It’s quite impossible,’... The old gentleman, with his nose and cheeks embellished with large patches of soot, sat upon the ground with his arms folded, eying the spectators in profound silence, and with a very majestic demeanor. He did not take the smallest notice of what Mrs. Nickleby had said, but when she had ceased to speak he honored her with a long stare and inquired if she had quite finished. ‘I have nothing more to say,’ replied that lady modestly.... ‘Very good,’ said the old gentleman, raising his voice, ‘then bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew,’ Nobody executing this order, the old gentleman, after a short pause, raised his voice again, and demanded a thunder sandwich. This article not being forthcoming, either, he requested to be served with fricassee of boot-tops and gold-fish sauce, and then, laughing heartily, he gratified his hearers with a very long, loud, and melodious bellow. But still Mrs. Nickleby, in reply to the significant looks of those about her, shook her head as though to assure them that she saw nothing in all this, unless indeed it were a slight degree of eccentricity.”

  III

  When some misgivings of the infallibility of Dickens’s wonderful powers began to insinuate themselves among his worshippers, certain of the more candid were inclined to own that he might err on the side of pathos, but held that on the side of humor really he was without sin. Yet it cannot be denied that there was always a touch of horse-play in his humor, and at times it was all horse-play. It grew better, it grew finer, there is no denying that, either, but at the very end it was not the best, not the finest humor. His pathos was not the finest pathos, but that improved in quality, too, and the pathos of his latest books is no such swash of sentimentality as flooded the readers of “Old Curiosity Shop.” A whole generation, on either side of the Atlantic, used to fall sobbing at the name of Little Nell, which will hardly bring tears to the eyes of any one now, though it is still apparent that the child was imagined with real feeling, and her sad little melodrama was staged with sympathetic skill. When all is said against the lapses of taste and truth, the notion of the young girl wandering up and down the country with her demented grandfather, and meeting good and evil fortune with the same devotion, till death overtakes her, is something that must always touch the heart. It is preposterously overdone, yes, and the author himself falls into pages of hysterical rhythm, which once moved people, when he ought to have been writing plain, straight prose; yet there is in all a sense of the divinity in common and humble lives, which is the most precious quality of literature, as it is almost the rarest, and it is this which moves and consoles. It is this quality in Dickens which Tolstoy prizes and accepts as proof of his great art, and which the true critic must always set above any effect of literary mastery. It remained with Dickens to the last, and long after success had spoiled him and made him conscious. He still had it, and could impart it, but not so sweetly and purely as in the poor, rude people among whom Little Nell and her grandfather wandered till she died, and who opened their hearts to her helplessness with a tenderness that the reader cannot but share. She lives in this compassion, and not in the shadowy and purposeless objectivity which the author gives her.

  IV

  In “Oliver Twist” Dickens goes on to another ideal in Nancy Sykes, who, like Little Nell, is a heroine by default, for the book has no other, though it is duly supplied in Rose Maylie with the sort of sexless lay-figure, with a semblance of personality, which he learned more and more to arrive at. The story is not so loosely contrived as that of “ Old Curiosity Shop,’ but it is not easy to find out why any one, rather than another, does this or that in it, and the best that can be said of Nancy is that her function is more distinct and her presence more reasonably accounted for than some others’. First she is useful in trapping little Oliver, and getting him back into the power of Fagin, the Jewish professor of petty larceny, and then she is useful in repentantly saving him from a life of crime, and restoring him to his friends. But her chief office is to illustrate the constancy of woman’s nature by her devotion to the burglar, her brutal paramour, and to die by his hand when he suspects her of treachery. It cannot be said that she i
s convincingly identified with her class in manner or parlance; all the attempts so to characterize her are limp and crude; we must take her upon faith, and believe, because the author tells us so, that a girl of her hapless sort would speak and act as she does. In fact, she is evolved, as a personality, from a convention of lost womanhood, and is clothed and colored by the author’s fancy to the effect we were once all so familiar with. She is helped out with tremendous situations and grisly catastrophes, and she dies a death of bloodcurdling horror at the hands of her lover, which has so often been represented on the stage that she might well seem native there. Yet, for the theatre, where it belongs, the scene is, as such things go, potently imagined, and we may look upon it once more, supposing the lights down and the quivering violins muted, and realize the greatness of the author’s strictly melodramatic gift.