Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  V

  In “David Copperfield” there are perhaps as many monsters as in “ Dombey and Son,” but they are not so merely monsters, and there are many more personalities. The first of these is David’s poor, pretty young widowed mother, who in her hapless second marriage is very tenderly and truly portrayed, and the next are David’s successive and contrasted wives, Dora Spenlow and Agnes Wickfield. Mrs. Steerforth, in her proud love of her son, is also a personality; so, in a way, is the faithful Peggotty; so is Miss Murdstone; so, in less measure, is Little Emily; so is Miss Trotwood; so is Rosa Dartle.

  This is not saying that these personalities are not every one overdone, and at times each carried to the verge of monstrosity; but the autobiographical form of the novel seems somehow to have held the author in, check, and saved him in some measure from his besetting sin of excess. It remains the best of his novels, the shapeliest, the sanest; and the necessity which he was in, through the form, of working out character inductively, kept him truer to what he had seen of life. In no other book, probably, did he draw so much and so directly from life. It was autobiographical in fact as well as in form, and it was biographical through the introduction, with little disguise, of Dickens’s father and family circumstance. Through subsequent study of its origins, the point where the fiction begins in most cases has been ascertained, but there is always a borderland where such figures move unconscious whether they are quite fiction or fact. No doubt they are always much more fiction than fact; the autobiography of David Copperfield is so transmuted that it is no longer Dickens’s autobiography; and probably, if there was any living original for Dora Spenlow, Dora Spenlow bears her far less allegiance than Flora Casby, in “Our Mutual Friend,” bears Dora Spenlow, whom Dickens ultimated in her.

  All this does not in the least matter. The question is of the treatment of such a nature as Dora’s, and the affair being that of a first love, in which anything fantastic may happen, the answer to the question seems to be that the author has given us here perhaps his first entirely living heroine. It is one of the saving facts concerning a talent who left his adorers several things to regret, that he had beyond any other novelist the inspiration of innocent young girlhood. At times it was almost little girlhood that inspired him, so sexless do such natures, or supernatures, as Florence Dombey and Esther Summerson and Little Dorrit appear. He predicates marriage of them, and contrives a shadowy wooing for them, however incredibly and almost shockingly; but Dora has sex, and the witchery of it; childish and slight as she is, she is a woman, with a woman’s, not an angel’s, charm. She is not more innocent than David himself, and she is quite as passionately in love, in their mutually innocent way, as he; she is as immediately in love, and wants him as badly as he wants her. I do not know in all fiction a purer study of young love, of the entirely human sort, than their courtship; and it is a pity that it has to go off into the pathos of her early death after her marriage. It is true that it was no true solution of life’s problem for David; and in the background all the while, is Agnes Wickfield, waiting for her innings. But a truer art than Dickens’s, or Dickens’s time (these things are apparently chronical, rather than personal, in great measure), would have recognized a higher duty than the reader’s comfort in the situation. A child-wife is really quite as likely to live as to die; and she is apt to outlive her husband and to marry again. This was what David’s mother did; and it might have been better for fiction to testify merely of the indefinitely continued marriage of the young lovers. That might not have done so badly. David was good, and Dora, after all, though she was spoiled, was sweet, and of a final good sense.

  DICKENS’S LATER HEROINES

  “DAVID COPPERFIELD” was a shapelier book than any that Dickens had yet written, or, for that matter, than any he was yet to write; though “Hard Times,”

  “A Tale of Two Cities,” and “Great Expectations “ all had more form than his other novels. In fact, he seems to have done most of his best in “ David Copperfield,” and least of his worst. He set himself to represent life as the hero lived it and witnessed it, and the terms of his intention were such that he could not always stray very wide of it. In spite of his Gothic tendency to grotesque and monstrous decoration, he did something primarily structural for once; and though certain parts of the work were overlaid with adventitious and impertinent episodes, it was not weakened by them. It comes together in the retrospect; it does not straggle about or tumble apart; one can almost recall it as a whole. The characters obey the law of the comprehensive yet coherent story, and have an uncommon logic and unity. They are sometimes, of course, personifications of this or that quality, this or that propensity; but very often they are persons, and very real persons.

  I

  Dora Spenlow is as little dependent upon any mechanical means for recognition as much more important conceptions of Dickens’s, though when it comes to importance, I do not know why she should not be considered important, if in art the question is not of what the thing is, but how the thing is done. Perhaps the natural exuberance of Dickens is less unnatural in the affair of young love than it is in other matters, and certainly it is less offensive; one is willing to stand it, though always with the doubt whether a sense of the rapture and the bliss could not have been as perfectly imparted in saner terms. Still, it is all very sweet, and essentially it is all very true. The identity of Dora is admirably preserved; with comparatively little insistence upon the trick of her, she is kept vividly present; and she is herself quite to the end. To be sure, there is a measure of make-believe required; you are expected to suppose that a human creature, capable of being taught polite accomplishments, of playing a part in society, and of imagining self-devotion in love and marriage, can be otherwise rather less than a child; but women are of all impossible kinds, and perhaps Dora is of as possible a sort as some others. The charm of her does not cease with courtship; after her marriage she is more intoxicating, to the reader at least, than before; and though one may have known her for forty years — it is nearer fifty years, in a certain case — the charm does not stale. The tragicomedy of their young housekeeping is as funny as ever, and the comitragedy of David’s attempts to turn Dora to any serious account, as sad. The humor of it all is very lovely, but is so pervasive and so diffused in the story that it can scarcely be detached for proof in a separate passage; and I think that the following passage is merely as well as another. It presents the scene between David and Dora when, after his aunt has lost her money, he goes to tell her, and release her, if she wishes, from her engagement.

  “Dora came to the drawing-room door to meet me; and Jip came scrambling out, tumbling over his own growls, under the impression that I was a bandit; and we all three went in, as happy and loving as could be. I soon carried desolation into the bosom of our joys — not that I meant to do it, but that I was so full of the subject — by asking Dora, without the smallest preparation, if she could love a beggar? My pretty, little startled Dora! Her only association with the word was a yellow face and a flight-cap, or a pair of crutches, or a wooden leg, or a dog with a decanter-stand in his mouth, or something of that kind; and she stared at me with the most delightful wonder. ‘How can you ask me anything so foolish?’ pouted Dora. ‘Love a beggar!’ ‘Dora, my own dearest!’ said I. ‘am a beggar!’ ‘How can you be such a silly thing,’ replied Dora, slapping my hand, ‘as to sit there, telling such stories? I’ll make Jip bite you! I declare I’ll make Jip bite you!’ said Dora, shaking her curls, ‘if you are so ridiculous.’ But I looked so serious that Dora left off shaking her curls, and laid her trembling little hand upon my shoulder, and first looked scared and anxious, and then began to cry.... Then I told her with my arms clasped round her, how I loved her, so dearly, and so dearly; how I felt it right to offer to release her from her engagement, because now I was poor.

  ... ‘Is your heart mine still, dear Dora?’ said I, rapturously, for I knew by her clinging to me that it was. Oh, yes!’ cried Dora. ‘Oh, yes, it’s all yours. Oh, don’t be
dreadful!’ I dreadful! To Dora! ‘Don’t talk about being poor and working hard!’ said Dora, nestling closer to me. I drew a picture of our frugal home, made independent by my labor — sketching in the little house I had seen at Highgate, and my aunt in her room up-stairs. ‘I am not dreadful now, Dora?’ said I, tenderly. ‘Oh, no, no!’ cried Dora. ‘But I hope your aunt will keep her own room a good deal! And I hope she’s not a scolding old thing!’... ‘My love, no. Perseverance and strength of character will enable us to bear much worse things.’ ‘But I haven’t got any strength at all,’ said Dora, shaking her curls. ‘Have I, Jip? Oh, do kiss Jip, and be agreeable!’ It was impossible to resist kissing Jip, when she held him up to me for that purpose, putting her own bright, rosy little mouth into kissing form, as she directed the operation, which she insisted should be performed symmetrically, on the centre of his nose. I did as she bade me — rewarding myself afterwards for my obedience — and she charmed me out of my graver character for I don’t know how long. ‘But, Dora, my beloved!’ said I, at last resuming it; ‘I was going to mention something.... If you will sometimes think — not despondingly, you know; far from that! — but if you will sometimes think — just to encourage yourself — that you are engaged to a poor man—” Don’t, don’t! Pray don’t!” cried Dora. ‘It’s so very dreadful.’”

  All this is very pretty and very winning. But one is aware, as one reads, of joining in the make-believe; one knows that given these very characters, in that very situation, it would not have happened just so; though if it had happened so upon the stage, it would have been delightful, and would have seemed very lifelike.

  II

  When it is a question of Little Emily and her betrayal in the same story, or of Agnes Wickfield and her long tacit love for David, the affair is still further from nature. The part which each of these is forced to play limits her to the expression of a single intention of the author, without regard to the complexity of motive, the contrariety of action, recognizable in every human being. It is happily not possible that a girl like Agnes, however good and high, shall patiently see the man she loves give himself to another woman, and live in tender sisterly friendship with the wife till she dies, and then inherit the husband with the confession that she has always loved him. This is not only impossible, but love being the simple, selfish, honest thing it is, the pretence is odious, and even repulsive. Neither is it credible that a girl like Emily, all humility, all sincerity, all unselfishness, shall become the prey of her pure love for her seducer. Without some alloy of vanity, of duplicity, of self-love in her it cannot happen, and never did happen since woman began to stoop to folly. To have made Agnes and Emily without the defects of their qualities is to have made them half-natures, half-persons, and aesthetically altogether inferior to such whole natures, whole persons, as Dora and as Rosa Dartle. There is more truth, there is more true art, in Rosa’s outburst of furious and revengeful hate against Emily because she has loved Steerforth than in all the long-drawn tragedy of Emily’s betrayal.

  Rosa Dartle is the second of the deadly-haughty heroines whom Dickens first discovered or invented in Edith Dombey, and whom he elaborated to the last degree in Lady Dedlock, who is, more than any one else, the heroine of “Bleak House.” She is a tremendously effective figure, as she is seen against the background of her mysterious past, with the shadow of a guilty love dimly present in it, and in the foreground the offspring of that love, the journalizing Esther Summerson, forever gelatinously quivering on the verge of discovering her secret, but withheld by her mother’s pride and shame. Till the curtain is rung down you abandon yourself to the luxury of the illusion, the transport of the make-believe; but when you have got on your rubbers and overcoat, and found your umbrella, and the ushers are beginning to flap the seats up and to look for missing articles on the floor, Lady Dedlock has already ceased to convince, and you are aware of her washing the paint off in the dressing-room.

  There is vastly more reality in Mrs. Lou Bounderby in “Hard Times,’ but the probabilities are in favor of her going off with James Harthouse, rather than of her taking refuge in her father’s house from both her husband and her lover. In this novel, as in all the fiction of its author, the means of any effect to be accomplished are so far beyond the requisite that one is inclined to ask with the Irishman challenged to astonishment at the prodigious fall of water at Niagara, “What’s to hinder it?” There is a glut of material, ethical, emotional, economic, and political, in “Hard Times,” of which the moral that you must not leave fancy and affection out of life enforces itself by the mere statement; and the wonder would be that anything less happens than could possibly happen. Yet in spite of this plethora, the book has more affinity with the actual world than most other novels of Dickens. He bears on, he rubs in here, as always, as everywhere; he never could hold his hand, and we of the generation who adored him must have been thick-skinned and coarse-fibred beyond all present imagination not to have felt it a heavy affliction. We did not feel it such; every repeated pressure lulled and delighted us; and there was no make-believe too frantically impossible for us to join in. In “A Tale of Two Cities,” where Lucie Manette passes for the heroine, we worshipfully accepted the atrocious and abominable notion of Sidney Carton seeking to be guillotined in place of the husband of the woman he loves. In “Great Expectations,” we eagerly agreed to the proposition of a woman, defeated of marriage, and keeping all her life long her bridal-room in the decaying appointments of her wedding-day, who, against her own will, perverted and poisoned the nature of her adopted daughter, but not so finally that Estella (who passes for the heroine of the story) does not give herself in true love to the boyish lover of her childhood.

  It would be injustice as gross as these ridiculous fables to pretend that they were all, or more than the beginning, or a very small part of either story. The sorcery which wrought the preposterous ends was of such a force, somehow, that a world lived by it in every book: not the world of men and women we know, but a world of characteristics, of propensities, of purposes singly impersonated and active to a single end; and in all these and around them was accumulated such vast wealth of action and situation that to refuse it was to leave one’s self poorer than one could well afford to be.

  Probably so long as any fiction can last that of Dickens will remain a monument of the contemporary excess alike in author and in reader. It will stand like some vast, fantastic structure, left aside by the course of art, and visited by the curious student of our century with amaze for the age that could have found it beautiful, but not without a certain awe for the mighty talent which reared it with such unbridled strength in obedience to the forces animating the long revolt of romanticism against the classical conventions. The revolution must waste with fire and sword, but its works are not the patterns and the examples of after-time; these will always be the things done in the serene veracity which is the sole law of beauty and lord of all moods and times. We need not totally condemn the mistaken achievements of a false taste in an age of debauched ideals; and the criticism of Dickens which denied him great power and great deed in fiction would be more dishonest than his worst faking. But in his fiction there is never the open air, never the light of day, always the air of the theatre, always the light of the lamps. It is not to be supposed that he knew this, or that he wittingly wrought to the effect he produced. But the convention of his fiction was really the man himself; it was the make-believe by which, as an artist, he lived. In its glamour he was learning to the last to do his sort of things better and better, to fasten the theatre more firmly, in tragedy, melodrama, comedy, and broad farce, around the spectator, and to make him share his own illusion that it was life.

  I have spoken of “ A Tale of Two Cities” and “Great Expectations” before “Little Dorrit,” but they followed in order of time that far more characteristic romance, and they were followed by “Our Mutual Friend,” in which Dickens was still more himself again. Their heroines were sufficiently unconvincing as to their womanhood, bu
t they were not so entirely, so angelically sexless as Little Dorrit, in the long elaboration of whom Dickens returned in greater force than before to his falsest note. Fortunately, however, Little Dorrit had a selfish sister, vulgar, ungrateful, worldly, but not so very bad, according to her lights; and therefore the novel has a genuine heroine. There is uncommon reason as well as logic in the conception of Fanny Dorrit, and in her Dickens has come near portraying, on a certain low level, a real woman. A ballet-dancer when we first know her, in the days when her father seems destined to die in a debtor’s prison, she lives to be a lady of fashion, and wins a high place in the world by those gifts for winning a man with more money than brains which it would be unfit to call arts. In fact, Fanny Dorrit, for all the blame cast upon her, is a very honest creature in her way, with a conscience which she keeps clean after a fashion of her own; and when the rich Mrs. Merdle, whose weak-witted son by her first husband Fanny has captured, makes a cogent appeal to her, she means to give him up and abide by her bargain. The famous scene of their final interview, in which she makes Little Dorrit participate as the representative of her family, is as characteristic of Dickens’s later manner as anything in Dickens’s work, and subordinated it is very characteristic of Fanny.

  In “Our Mutual Friend” there are again two sister heroines; but as the better of these is never so insufferably good as Dickens’s other good girls, Bella Wilfer is a very good heroine. She has a most preposterous part to play, as the ward of the rich Boffin, who pretends to be a wicked miser in order to test her, and find whether she is a selfish worldling or not; and as the beloved of John Rokesmith, who maintains a long disguise, to make sure, as the poor secretary of the pseudo-bad Boffin, that she loves him for himself. But she remains, superior to all this absurdity, a charming, natural girl, not without faults, but humaner on account of them, and sweeter and dearer, at least to the reader. Her relations to her vixenish sister Lavinia, to her majestic shrew of a mother, and to her poor little persecuted cherub of a father, are all most amusingly substantialized, and if her relations to her lover are left somewhat more shadowy, that is because of the utter impossibility of the situation, which denies him anything like true character. She quarrels with Boffin, as he and Rokesmith mean she shall, about his pseudo-bad treatment of Rokesmith, and in leaving the house v of her rich protectors, to return home with her father, she engages herself to marry Rokesmith. He comes home with her and her father as far as the gate, where they are delivered over to Mrs. Wilfer, Lavinia, and her young man, George Sampson, and welcomed with a mystified and icy grandeur to the family supper-table by Mrs. Wilfer, who fears that after “Mr. Boffin’s board “ a “ cold neck of mutton and a lettuce “ will seem meagre fare to Bella. But Bella disperses the mystery, and, heroically backed by her father, tells why she has come home.