Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  As we see her here Zenobia is always present to the fancy in a warm reality not affected even by that mechanical device of the exotic in her hair, which the author uses to identify her to our consciousness, and insists upon so constantly. But even of this, the great defect in her characterization, I write my censure with a tremor of remorse, for it was precisely this exotic which once seemed to me the most exquisite, the most precious expression of her personality. Now I know that it was merely a survival of an earlier æsthetical faith than that from which Hawthorne wrote “The Blithedale Romance,” though doubtless he still believed himself fully living in it.

  II

  Only the art of Hawthorne could impart a perfect sense of the situation of his story, and as I cannot transfer the whole book to my page, I must trust the reader’s remembrance of this art for its effect here. Priscilla grows into health and happiness without growing out of character, in the Arcadian air of the Blithedale community; and Zenobia is more and more compassed about by the tragical shadows which the effulgence of her own passion casts, till her despair ends with the defeat of her last vanity in the ugliness of her self-sought death. The history is always without the concealment of the fact that from first to last her fineness was intellectual, and that emotionally, spiritually, she was of a coarse fibre, with even a strain of vulgarity. A certain kind of New England woman, to specialize a little more than to say American woman, has never been so clearly seen or boldly shown as in Zenobia; and in her phase of tragedy she stands as impressively for the nineteenth century as Hester Prynne for the seventeenth in hers. It is with pity almost to heart-break that one witnesses her sacrifice of her belief in the cause of women to Hollingsworth’s greedy and relentless philanthropy, and her meek abeyance before his savage proclamation of man’s superiority, his brute avowal of contempt for women except as the helpers and comforters of men. When her sacrifice proves vain, and the love which she cannot help betraying to him is without response, we come, in the twilight of the drama, to that great moment where Coverdale meets Hollingsworth and Zenobia and Priscilla together for the last time, in an eddy of the masquerade which has flowed away from them at Blithedale, and left them beside the rock in the forest called Eliot’s Pulpit. Both Coverdale and Zenobia have returned from a brief absence in town, where he has seen her with Priscilla, fulfilling a mysterious part of her destiny which relates her to the malign Westervelt.

  “Hollingsworth was in his ordinary working-dress. Priscilla wore a pretty and simple gown, with a kerchief about her neck, and a calash, which she had flung back from her head, leaving it suspended by the strings. But Zenobia (whose part among the maskers, as may be supposed, was no inferior one) appeared in a costume of fanciful magnificence, with her jewelled flower as the central ornament of what resembled a leafy crown, or coronet... Her attitude was free and noble; yet, if a queen’s, it was not that of a queen triumphant.

  .... ‘Hollingsworth — Zenobia — I have just returned to Blithedale,’ said I, ‘and had no thought of finding you here. We shall meet again at the house. I will retire.’ ‘This place is free to you,’ answered Hollingsworth. ‘As free as to ourselves,’ added Zenobia. ‘This long while past, you have been following up your game, groping for human emotions in the dark comers of the heart. Had you been here a little sooner, you might have seen them dragged into daylight. I could even wish to have my trial over again, with you standing by to see fair play! Do you know, Mr. Coverdale, I have been on trial for my life?’... ‘You forced this on me,’ replied Hollingsworth, looking her sternly in the face. ‘Did I call you hither from among the masqueraders yonder? Do I assume to be your judge?’... The more I looked at them, and the more I heard, the stronger grew my impression that a crisis had just come and gone.... In Zenobia’s whole person, beholding her more closely, I saw a riotous agitation; the almost delirious disquietude of a great struggle, at the close of which the vanquished one felt her strength and courage still mighty within her, and longed to renew the contest... ‘Ah, do we part so?’ exclaimed she, seeing Hollingsworth about to retire. ‘And why not?’ said he, with almost rude abruptness. ‘What is there further to be said between us?’ ‘Well, perhaps nothing,’ answered Zenobia, looking him in the face, and smiling.... ‘You have put many queries to me at this, which you design to be our last, interview; and being driven, as I must acknowledge, into a comer, I have responded with reasonable frankness. But, now, with your free consent, I desire the privilege of asking a few questions, in my turn.’ ‘I have no concealments,’ said Hollingsworth. ‘We shall see,’ answered Zenobia. ‘I would first inquire whether you have supposed me to be wealthy?’ ‘On that point,’ observed Hollingsworth, ‘I have had the opinion which the world holds.’ ‘And I held it, likewise,’ said Zenobia. ‘Had I not, Heaven is my witness, the knowledge should have been as free to you as me. I fancied myself affluent. You are aware, too, of the disposition which I purposed making of the larger portion of my imaginary opulence; nay, were it all, I had not hesitated. Let me ask you, further, did I ever propose or intimate any terms of compact, on which depended this — as the world would consider it — so important sacrifice?’ ‘You certainly spoke of none,’ said Hollingsworth. ‘Nor meant any,’ she responded. ‘I was willing to realize your dream... though it should prove the ruin of my fortune.... And now, one other question. Do you love this girl?’ ‘Oh, Zenobia!’ exclaimed Priscilla, shrinking back, as if longing for the rock to topple over and hide her. ‘Do you love her?’ repeated Zenobia. ‘Had you asked me that question a short time since,’ replied Hollingsworth, after a pause, during which, it seemed to me, even the birch-trees held their whispering breath, ‘I should have told you — No!’... ‘And what is your answer now?’ persisted Zenobia. ‘I do love her! ‘said Hollingsworth, uttering the words with a deep inward breath, instead of speaking them outright ‘As well declare it thus as in any other way. I do love her!’ ‘Now, God be judge between us,’ cried Zenobia, breaking into sudden passion, ‘which of us two has most mortally offended him! At least, I am a woman, with every fault, it may be, that a woman ever had — weak, vain, unprincipled (like most of my sex; for our virtues, when we have any, are merely impulsive and intuitive), passionate, too, and pursuing my foolish and unattainable ends by indirect and cunning, though absurdly chosen means, as an hereditary bond-slave must; false, moreover, to the whole circle of good, in my reckless truth to the little good I saw before me — but still a woman!... But how is it with you? Are you a man?

  No; but a monster! A cold, heartless, self-beginning and self-ending piece of mechanism! Nothing else; nothing but self, self, self l The fiend, I doubt not, has made his choicest mirth of you, these seven years past, and especially in the mad summer which we have spent together.... You have embodied yourself in a project.... The utmost that can be said in your behalf — and because I would not be wholly despicable in my own eyes, but would fain excuse my wasted feelings, nor own it wholly a delusion, therefore I say it — is, that a great and rich heart has been ruined in your breast. Leave me now. You have done with me, and I with you. Farewell! “Priscilla,’ said Hollingsworth, ‘come.’ She rose up, stood shivering like the birch leaves that trembled over her head, and then slowly tottered, rather than walked, toward Zenobia. Arriving at her feet, she sank down there.... ‘Ah, Priscilla!... You kneel to a dethroned princess.

  You, the victorious one! But he is waiting for you. Say what you wish, and leave me.’ ‘We are sisters!’ gasped Priscilla.... It meant the offering of herself, and all she had, to be at Zenobia’s disposal. But the latter would not take it thus. ‘True, we are sisters!’ she replied; and, moved by the sweet word, she stooped down and kissed Priscilla; but not lovingly, for a sense of fatal harm received through her seemed to be lurking in Zenobia’s heart.... ‘Poor child!

  Methinks you have but a melancholy lot before you, sitting all alone in that wide, cheerless heart, where, for aught you know — and as I, alas! believe — the fire which you have kindled may soon go out....


  What will you do, Priscilla, when you find no spark among the ashes?’ ‘Die!’ she answered. ‘That was well said I’ responded Zenobia, with an approving smile. ‘There is all a woman in your little compass, my poor sister. Meanwhile, go with him, and live!’ She waved her away, with a queenly gesture, and turned her own face to the rock. I watched Priscilla.... Hollingsworth drew her arm within his, and soon disappeared with her among the trees. I cannot imagine how Zenobia knew when they were out of sight; she never glanced again toward them. But, retaining a proud attitude so long as they might have thrown back a retiring look, they were no sooner departed — utterly departed — than she began slowly to sink down. It was as if a great, invisible, irresistible weight were pressing her to the earth. Settling upon her knees, she leaned her forehead against the rock, and sobbed convulsively; dry sobs they seemed to be, such as have nothing to do with tears.”

  III

  In Miriam and Hilda of “The Marble Faun” there are again two heroines in some such proportion as Zenobia and Priscilla are the heroines of “The Blithedale Romance.” But Miriam, though of much the same moral frame and material complexion as Zenobia, is not so great and living a figure; while Hilda, perhaps, is rather more vitalized than Priscilla. I cannot think her of a very ample importance. She represents the implacable morality of ignorant purity; and when she has seen the hapless Donatello do the murder to which Miriam’s glance has bidden him, it is essentially impossible for her to have pity on Miriam’s despair. Relentlessly and unerringly Hilda fixes the blame on her; she casts Miriam off, but the knowledge of Miriam’s guilt obsesses her, and so blackens and burdens her white soul that she cannot get back to the peace by which she lived until, utter Puritan as she is, she has imparted the secret to the confessional.

  All this is most truly and delicately felt, most beautifully shown; though, again, the typific white doves of Hilda’s tower affect my elderly sense with something of the mechanical superfluity and inadequacy of Zenobia’s sumptuous exotic, as an expression of character. Miriam, who is not so novel a conception, has no such adventitious aid in realizing herself to us, and in that degree she is truer. Physically, she is of like make with Hester Prynne, as well as Zenobia, and of a type which represented passion in Hawthorne’s imagination; though as to blond women it is by no means clear that “nature made them lighter motions” than the dark complexions, whom he prefers as the exponents of deep and tragic feeling. In any case, however, Miriam is of a tropical beauty, whose splendor is veiled like Zenobia’s by the shadows of a past in which she has been sinned against, to the lurid trouble, if not the contamination, of her soul. Perhaps she has even shared in the sinning, but that question is left in the pale limbo where the beginnings and the endings of the story are obscured. What we know is that she is on the scene, with the demon and the destined victim of her past: the mysterious model who persecutes and menaces her, and with that glad earth-nature, Donatello, who grows into spiritual consciousness through the crime he commits in her behalf.

  Shall it be owned that once more Miriam recalls Zenobia in that spice of vulgarity which Hawthorne must have meant us to taste in her character? There is something almost coarse in her light way of repulsing the young Italian’s love; but this is all atoned for by her devotion to him when their joint crime has united them in one black destiny. The deed is his, but the guilt is hers, as they both instantly recognized; and it is their fatal necessity that they must expiate it, so far as it may be expiated, by a common suffering.

  It is in a manner impossible not to choose the instant of the homicide as the supreme scene of the story, and as that in which Miriam leaves the shadow of her suffering to enter the shadow of her sinning; and it is evident that Hawthorne has lavished upon it the richest treasures of his art. It is done so deftly indeed that it would be hard to tell in other words how casually, almost unconsciously, Miriam and Donatello are left alone looking over the brink of the Tarpeian Rock, while the companions of their long ramble through the Roman moonlight have wandered as involuntarily away.

  ‘“It would be a fatal fall, still,’ she said to herself, looking over the parapet, and shuddering as her eye measured the depth.... Donatello, of whose presence she was possibly not aware, now pressed closer to her side; and he, too, like Miriam, bent over the low parapet and trembled violently.... ‘What are you thinking of, Donatello?’ asked Miriam. ‘Who are they,’ said he, looking earnestly in her face, ‘who have been flung over here in days gone by?’ ‘Men that cumbered the world,’ she replied. ‘Men whose lives were the bane of their fellow-creatures. Men who poisoned the air, which is the common breath of all, for their own selfish purposes,’... ‘Was it well done?’ asked the young man. ‘It was well done,’ answered Miriam; ‘innocent persons were saved by the destruction of a guilty one, who deserved his doom,’... Looking round, she perceived that all her company of merry friends had retired, and Hilda, too, in whose soft and quiet presence she had always an indescribable feeling of security. All gone; and only herself and Donatello left hanging over the brow of the ominous precipice. Not so, however; not entirely alone! In the basement wall of the palace, shaded from the moon, there was a deep, empty niche, that had probably once contained a statue; not empty, either; for a figure now came forth from it and approached Miriam. She must have had cause to dread some unspeakable evil from this strange persecutor, and to know that this was the very crisis of her calamity.... Miriam seemed dreamily to remember falling on her knees; but, in her whole recollection of that wild moment, she beheld herself as in a dim show, and could not well distinguish what was done and suffered; no, not even whether she were really an actor and sufferer in the scene. Hilda, meanwhile, had separated herself from the sculptor, and turned back to rejoin her friend. At a distance, she still heard the mirth of her late companions, who were going down the cityward descent of the Capitoline Hill.... The door of the little court-yard had swung upon its hinges, and partly closed itself. Hilda (whose native gentleness pervaded all her movements) was quietly opening it, when she was startled, midway, by the noise of a struggle within, beginning and ending all in one breathless instant. Along with it, or closely succeeding it, was a loud, fearful cry, which quivered upward through the air, and sank quivering downward to the earth. Then, a silence! The door of the court-yard swung slowly, and closed itself of its own accord. Miriam and Donatello were now alone there. She clasped her hands, and looked wildly at the young man, whose form seemed to have dilated, and whose eyes blazed with the fierce energy that had suddenly inspired him. It had kindled him into a man; it had developed within him an intelligence which was no native characteristic of the Donatello whom we have heretofore known. But that simple and joyous creature was gone forever. ‘What have you done?’ said Miriam, in a horror-stricken whisper. The glow of rage was still lurid on Donatello’s face, and now flashed out again from his eyes. ‘I did what ought to be done to a traitor!’ he replied. ‘I did what your eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over the precipice!’ These last words struck Miriam like a bullet. Could it be so? Had her eyes provoked or assented to this deed? She had not known it But, alas! looking back into the frenzy and turmoil of the scene just acted, she could not deny — she was not sure whether it might be so or no — that a wild joy had flamed up in her heart, when she beheld her persecutor in his mortal peril.... It had blazed up more madly when Donatello flung his victim off the cliff, and more and more while his shriek went quivering downward. With the dead thump upon the stones below had come an unutterable horror. ‘And my eyes bade you do it?’ repeated she. They both leaned over the parapet, and gazed downward as earnestly as if some inestimable treasure had fallen over and were yet recoverable. On the pavement, below, was a dark mass, lying in a heap, with little or nothing human in its appearance, except that the hands were stretched out, as if they might have clutched, for a moment, at the small, square stones. But there was no motion in them, now.... No stir; not a finger moved! ‘You have killed him, Donatello! H
e is quite dead!’ said she.... She turned to him — the guilty, blood-stained, lonely woman — she turned to her fellow-criminal, the youth, so lately innocent, whom she had drawn into her doom. She pressed him close, close to her bosom, with a clinging embrace that brought their two hearts together, till the horror and agony of each was combined in one emotion, and that a kind of rapture. ‘Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth!” said she; ‘my heart consented to what you did. We two slew yonder wretch. The deed knots us together for time and eternity, like the coil of a serpent!” They threw one other glance at the heap of death below, to assure themselves that it was there; so like a dream was the whole thing. Then they turned from that fatal precipice, and came out of the court-yard, arm in arm, heart in heart.”

  IV

  Now that I have obeyed a sort of imperious necessity in selecting the passage given as supremely illustrative, I have my misgiving whether I had not better chosen that scene in the Medici Gardens, where shortly after the murder Miriam and Donatello are together. Their terrible exaltation is past, that “freedom of a broken law ‘“ which was briefly theirs has already lapsed into the bondage of remorse; and she realizes that all the love of her blood-stained soul avails nothing to purge his listless spirit of its new-found sense of guilt. This is a great scene; and that again is a great scene where Miriam goes to Hilda in her dove-haunted tower, and the girl’s cruel truth accuses and convicts the unhappy woman, and casts her off and disowns her. Did Hawthorne here, I wonder, mean to let us see something ugly in the angelic Hilda’s effort for self-protection and her ruthless self-pity for her own involuntary privity to Miriam’s guilt? That would be like his subtlety; and it is certain that the effect is to enlist the sympathy of the witness for Miriam, and to render her for the moment less abhorrent than Hilda. In fact, if I must empty the sack altogether, I cannot conceal that at the bottom of it is a dislike for that cold spirit of Hilda and a sense of something selfish in her relation to the whole affair. Perhaps it is not a real relation. The whole action loses vitality after the parting of Hilda and Miriam; and though it is bravely and beautifully managed to the end, it is managed, and does not manage itself. The rest of the story is as intentional, as operated, as the second part of “Faust”; and in this “ The Marble Faun “ must rank below “ The Scarlet Letter “ and “ The Blithedale Romance,” which are of a vitality that carries them strongly to the close. For the same reason Miriam cannot be placed with Hester Prynne and Zenobia, who have no galvanic palingenesis, but live warmly and richly in the memory, while the Miriam of the second volume has to be recalled with a constant effort. It may be said in her defence that the author put upon her a burden to which she was not equal; he was not equal to it himself, as Goethe also was not; and, indeed, no man is. The problem of evil will not be solved.