Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “‘I hope you are not sorry to see me, ma, dear,’ kissing her; ‘and I hope you are not sorry to see me, Lavvy,’ kissing her too; ‘and as I notice the lettuce ma mentioned, on the table, I’ll make the salad,’ Bella playfully setting herself about the task, Mrs. Wilfer’s impressive countenance followed her with glaring eyes, presenting a combination of the once popular sign of the Saracen’s Head with a piece of Dutch clock-work.... The cherub not presuming to address so tremendous an object, transacted her supper through the agency of a third person, as ‘Mutton to your ma, Bella, my dear,’ and ‘Lavvy, I dare say your ma would take some lettuce if you were to put it on her plate.’ Mrs. Wilfer’s manner of receiving those viands was marked by petrified absence of mind; in which state, likewise, she partook of them, occasionally laying down her knife and fork, as saying within her own spirit, ‘What is this I am doing?’ and glaring at one or other of the party, as if in indignant search of information....

  Miss Lavinia... made a dash at her stately parent now, with the greatest impetuosity. ‘Ma, pray don’t sit staring at me in that intensely aggravating manner! If you see a black on my nose, tell me so; if you don’t, leave me alone.” Do you address Me in those words?’ said Mrs. Wilfer. ‘Do you presume?’ ‘Don’t talk about presuming, ma, for goodness’ sake. A girl who is old enough to be engaged is quite old enough to object to be stared at as if she was a clock....

  I am not going to be eyed as if had come from the Boffins’, and sit silent under it I am not going to have George Sampson eyed as if he had come from the Boffins’, and sit silent under it. If pa thinks proper to be eyed as if he had come from the Boffins’ also, well and good. I don’t choose to. And I won’t!’ Lavinia’s engineering having made this crooked opening at Bella, Mrs. Wilfer strode into it ‘You rebellious spirit! You mutinous child! Tell me this, Lavinia. If, in violation of your mother’s sentiments, you had condescended to allow yourself to be patronized by the Boffins, and if you had come from those halls of slavery—” That’s mere nonsense, ma,’ said Lavinia. ‘How!’ exclaimed Mrs. Wilfer, with sublime severity. ‘Halls of slavery, ma, is mere stuff and nonsense,’ returned the unmoved Irrepressible.... Bella rose and said, ‘Good-night, dear ma. I have had a tiring day, and I’ll go to bed.’ This broke up the agreeable party. Mrs. Wilfer, washing her hands of the Boffins, went to bed after the manner of Lady Macbeth; and R. W. was left alone among the dilapidations of the supper-table, in a melancholy attitude. But, a light footstep roused him from his meditations, and it was Bella’s. Her pretty hair was hanging all about her, and she had tripped down softly, brush in hand, and barefoot, to say good-night to him. ‘My dear, you most unquestionably are a lovely woman,’ said the cherub, taking up a tress in his hand. ‘Look here, sir,’ said Bella; ‘when your lovely woman marries, you shall have that piece if you like, and she’ll make you a chain of it. Would you prize that remembrance of the dear creature?’ ‘Yes, my precious.’ ‘Then you shall have it if you’re good, sir. I am sorry, very sorry, dearest pa, to have brought home all this trouble.’ ‘My pet,’ returned her father, in the simplest good faith, ‘don’t make yourself uneasy about that. It really is not worth mentioning, because things at home would have taken pretty much the same turn, anyway. If your mother and sister don’t find one subject to get at times a little wearing on, they find another. We’re never out of a wearing subject, my dear, I assure you. I am afraid you find your old room with Lavvy dreadfully inconvenient, Bella,” No, I don’t, pa; I don’t mind. Why don’t I mind, do you think, pa.... Because I am so thankful and so happy!’ Here she choked him until her long hair made him sneeze, and then she laughed until she made him laugh, and then she choked him again that they might not be overheard. ‘Listen, sir,’ said Bella. ‘Your lovely woman was told her fortune to-night on her way home. It won’t be a large fortune, because if the lovely woman’s Intended gets a certain appointment that he hopes to get soon, she will marry on a hundred and fifty pounds a year. But that’s at first, and even if it should never be more the lovely woman will make it quite enough. But that’s not all, sir. In the fortune there’s a certain fair man — a little man, the fortuneteller said — who, it seems, will always find himself near the lovely woman, and will always have kept, expressly for him, such a peaceful corner in the lovely woman’s little house as never was. Dear pa, the lovely woman means to look forward to this fortune that has been told for her, so delightfully, and to cause it to make her a much better lovely woman than she ever has been yet. What the little fair man is expected to do, sir, is to look forward to it also, by saying to himself when he is in danger of being over-worried, “I see land at last!” “I see land at last!’ repeated her father. ‘There’s a dear Knave of Wilfers!’ exclaimed Bella; then, putting out her small, white, bare foot, ‘That’s the mark, sir. Come to the mark. Put your boot against it. We keep to it together, mind! Now, sir, you may kiss the lovely woman before she runs away, so thankful and so happy. Oh, yes, fair little man, so thankful and so happy!”’

  It is all of stage quality, but it is very sweet, as to Bella and her father, and very amusing as to Lavinia and her mother. If it were only on the stage as well as of it, we should cry out over its truth to nature; and as it is, why should we quarrel with it? We understand the conditions on which Dickens was able to work his miracles; and it is accurate to say that what he did was largely and loosely inclusive of life rather than exclusive of it. The impersonation of a quality or a propensity was misrepresentative only as far as it was single. Human nature is never single; it is warm as well as cold; it is light as well as dark; it is noble as well as ignoble; it is good as well as bad; and, in view of this fact, his one-sided types are not characters. But having got this well in mind, we can allow for the truth that is in them, and permit ourselves the pleasure they can give, without treason to a clearer ideal. When, now and then, as in Dora Spenlow, and yet more distinctly in Belle Wilfer, he creates a figure with something like the living woman’s moral complexity, we have a glimpse of the great possibilities to which a clearer conception of his art would have enlarged him.

  HAWTHORNE’S HESTER PRYNNE

  THERE had been among the friendlier prophets overseas a vague expectation that the genuine American fiction, when it came, would be somehow aesthetically responsive to our vast continental spaces and the mighty forces that were taming the forests and prairies, the lakes and rivers, to the use of man. But when it came, the American fiction which owed nothing to English models differed from English fiction in nothing so much as its greater refinement, its subtler beauty, and its delicate perfection of form. While Dickens was writing in England, Hawthorne was writing in America; and for all the ostensible reasons the romances of Hawthorne ought to have been rude, shapeless, provisional, the novels of Dickens ought to have been fastidiously elect in method and material and of the last scrupulosity in literary finish. That is, they ought to have been so, if the obvious inferences from an old civilization ripened in its native air, and the same civilization so newly conditioned under alien skies that it seemed essentially new, were the right inferences. But there were some facts which such hasty conclusions must have ignored: chiefly the fact that the first impulse of a new artistic life is to escape from crude conditions; and subordinately the fact that Hawthorne was writing to and from a sensitiveness of nerve in the English race that it had never known in its English home. We need not deny the greatness of Dickens in order to feel a patriotic content in the reflection that he represented English Action in his time, and Hawthorne represented American fiction, as with the same implications Carlyle represented English thought and Emerson American thought

  I

  Apart from the racial differences of the two writers, there was the widest possible difference of ideal in Dickens and Hawthorne; the difference between the romanticistic and the romantic, which is almost as great as that between the romantic and the realistic. Romance, as in Hawthorne, seeks the effect of reality in — visionary conditions; romanticism, as in Dick
ens, tries for a visionary effect in actual conditions. These different ideals eventuated with Hawthorne in characters being, doing, and suffering as vitally as any we have known in the world; with Dickens in types, outwardly of our every-day acquaintance, but inwardly moved by a single propensity and existing to justify in some fantastic excess the attribution of their controlling quality. In their mystical world, withdrawn afar from us in the past, or apart from us in anomalous conditions, the characters of Hawthorne speak and act for themselves, and from an authentic individuality compact of good and evil; in times, terms, and places analogous to those in which actual men have their being, the types of Dickens are always speaking for him, in fulfilment of a mechanical conception and a rigid limitation of their function in the drama. They are, in every sense, parts, and Hawthorne’s creations are Persons, rounded, whole. This fact appears in what has already been shown of Dickens, and it will appear concerning Hawthorne from any critical study of his romances.

  II

  There is, of course, a choice in Hawthorne’s romances, and I myself prefer “The Blithedale Romance” and “The Scarlet Letter” to “The Marble Faun” and “The House of the Seven Gables.” The last, indeed, I have found as nearly tiresome as I could find anything of Hawthorne’s. I do not think it is censuring it unjustly to say that it seems the expansion of a short story motive to the dimensions of a novel; and the slight narrative in which the concept is nursed with whimsical pathos to the limp end, appears sometimes to falter, and alarms the sympathetic reader at other times with the fear of an absolute lapse. The characters all lack the vitality which the author gives the people of his other books. The notion of the hapless Clifford Pyncheon, who was natured for happiness and beauty, but was fated to such a hard and ugly doom, is perhaps too single for the realization of a complete personality; and poor old Hepzibah, his sister, is of scarcely more sufficient material. They move dim, forlorn wraiths before the fancy, and they bring only such proofs of their reality as ghosts seen by others can supply. The careful elaboration with which they are studied seems only to render them more doubtful, and there is not much in the pretty, fresh-hearted little Phoebe Pyncheon, or her lover Holgrave, with all his generous rebellion against the obsession of the present by the past, to render the central figures convincing. Hawthorne could not help giving form to his work, but as nearly as any work of his could be so “ The House of the Seven Gables” is straggling. There is at any rate no great womanly presence to pull it powerfully together, and hold it in the beautiful unity characteristic of “The Blithedale Romance “ and “The Scarlet Letter,’ What solidarity it has is in the simple Salem circumstance of the story, where the antique Puritanic atmosphere merges with the modem air in a complexion of perennial provinciality.

  From the first there is no affectation of shadowy uncertainty in the setting of the great tragedy of “ The Scarlet Letter.” As nearly as can be, the scenes of the several events are ascertained, and are identified with places in actual Boston. With a like inward sense of strong reality in his material, and perhaps compelled to its expression by that force in the concept, each detail of the drama, in motive, action, and character, is substantiated, so that from first to last it is visible, audible, tangible. From Hester Prynne in her prison — before she goes out to stand with her unlawful child in her arms and the scarlet letter on her breast before the Puritan magistracy and ministry and people, and be charged by the child’s own father, as her pastor, to give him up to like ignominy — to Hester Prynne, kneeling over her dying paramour, on the scaffold, and mutely helping him to own his sin before all that terrible little world, there is the same strong truth beating with equal pulse from the core of the central reality, and clothing all its manifestations in the forms of credible, of indisputable personality.

  In its kind the romance remains sole, and it is hard to see how it shall ever be surpassed, or even companioned. It is not without faults, without quaint foibles of manner which strike one oddly in the majestic movement of the story; but with the exception of the love-child or sin-child, Pearl, there is no character, important or unimportant, about which you are asked to make believe: they are all there to speak and act for themselves, and they do not need the help of your fancy. They are all of a verity so robust that if one comes to declare Hester chief among them, it is with instant misgivings for the right of her secret paramour, Arthur Dimmesdale, and her secret husband, Roger Chillingworth, to that sorrowful supremacy. A like doubt besets the choice of any one moment of her history as most specific, most signal. Shall it be that dread moment on the pillory, when she faces the crowd with her child in her arms, and her lover adjures her to name its father, while her old husband on the borders of the throng waits and listens?

  “The Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, in silent prayer, as it seemed, and then came forward. ‘Hester Prynne,’ said he, leaning over the balcony and looking down steadfastly into her eyes,. — ...... ‘if thou feelest it to be for thy soul’s peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer! Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life.... Heaven hath granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou mayest work out an open triumph over the evil within thee, and the sorrow without. Take heed how thou deniest to him — who, perchance, hath not the courage to grasp it for himself — the bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips!’ The young pastor’s voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken. The feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than the direct purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts, and brought the listeners into one accord of sympathy. Even the poor baby, at Hester’s bosom, was affected by the same influence; for it directed its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr. Dimmesdale, and held up its little arms, with a half - pleased, half - plaintive murmur....

  Hester shook her head. ‘Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven’s mercy!’ cried the Rev. Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before.... ‘Speak out the name! That, and thy repentance, may avail to take the scarlet letter off thy breast.” Never!’ replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wilson, but into the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman. ‘It is too deeply branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his agony, as well as mine!’ ‘Speak, woman!’ said another voice, coldly and sternly, proceeding from the crowd about the scaffold. ‘Speak; and give your child a father!’ ‘I will not speak!’ answered Hester, turning pale as death, but responding to this voice, which she too surely recognized. ‘And my child must seek a heavenly Father; she shall never know an earthly one!’ ‘She will not speak!’ murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of his appeal. He now drew back, with a long respiration. ‘Wondrous strength and generosity of a woman’s heart! She will not speak!’”

  III

  One could hardly read this aloud without some such gasp and catch as must have been in the minister’s own breath as he spoke. Yet piercing as the pathos of it is, it wants the ripened richness of anguish, which the passing years of suffering bring to that meeting between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale in the forest, when she tells him that his physician and closest companion is her husband, and that Chillingworth’s subtlety has divined the minister’s relation to herself and her child. The reader must go to the book itself for a full comprehension of the passage, but no one can fail of its dramatic sense who recalls that Hester has by this time accustomed the little Puritan community to the blazon of her scarlet letter, and in her lonely life of usefulness has conciliated her fellow-townsfolk almost to forgiveness and forgetfulness of her sin. She has gone in and out among them, still unaccompanied, but no longer unfriended, earning her bread with her needle and care of the sick, and
Dimmesdale has held aloof from her like the rest, except for their one meeting by midnight, when he stands with her and their child upon the scaffold, and in that ghastly travesty forecasts the union before the people which forms the catastrophe of the tremendous story.

  In certain things “The Scarlet Letter,” which was the first of Hawthorne’s romances, is the modernest and maturest. The remoteness of the time and the strangeness of the Puritan conditions authorize that stateliness of the dialogue which he loved. The characters may imaginably say “methinks” and “peradventure,” and the other things dear to the characters of the historical romancer; the narrator himself may use an antiquated or unwonted phrase in which he finds color, and may eschew the short-cuts and informalities of our actual speech, without impeaching himself of literary insincerity. In fact, he may heighten by these means the effect he is seeking; and if he will only keep human nature strongly and truly in mind, as Hawthorne does in “The Scarlet Letter,” we shall gratefully allow him a privilege which may or may not be law. Through the veil of the quaint parlance, and under the seventeenth-century costuming, we see the human heart beating there the same as in our own time and in all times, and the antagonistic motives working which have governed human conduct from the beginning and shall govern it forever, world without end.