Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  If we reduce the question which is Hawthorne’s greatest heroine to a choice between Hester Prynne and Zenobia, I must give my voice for Zenobia. Few heroines survive so far beyond their story, and remain in a sort so fully a part of experience as she; I know of no other in Anglo-Saxon fiction, and only three or four outside of it She is not a very great or noble character. She has moments of being rather hard and jealous with Priscilla and rather “nasty” to Coverdale, who doubtless deserves it; but she is largely planned and generously built. She has, as I have owned, a touch of vulgarity, and we are allowed to suspect her of a lawless and sufficiently foolish fancy. She is a half-caste literary talent, and some of her ideals are apparently tawdry; but she is a very woman-soul; what she does and suffers is by the law of her womanhood, which in her death as in her life asserts itself in defeat so cruel as to leave the reader with a lasting pang for her.

  THACKERAY’S BAD HEROINES

  WITH Hawthorne there was a return, after a whole generation, to a conception of entire womanhood in fiction. His Zenobia and Hester Prynne are really women, and this cannot be unqualifiedly said of Scott’s, or Bulwer’s, or Dickens’s women. At the most it can be said that these novelists caught certain feminine traits and personified them; but femininity never posed for them in the ensemble. If, upon a theory I have before advanced, this fact is to judge them and class them as inferior imaginations, in spite of certain prime powers which cannot be denied them, I am unable to intervene in their behalf. I must still believe that novelists are great in proportion to the accuracy and fulness with which they portray women; but what really embarrasses me is that I have claimed this pre-eminence hitherto for the realists only, and Hawthorne can scarcely be counted a realist. He was at least, however, not a romanticist, but a romancer, pure and simple, standing electly aloof from both the antagonistic schools, and breathing a finer ether than our common air in a region as different as poetry from our every-day world.

  In this environment he conceived of two women natures, grandly permanent, and of one subordinate woman nature, who resembles these and certain others who resemble one another. They are all alike in menacing withdrawal into the ideal from moment to moment; and the true restorer of the great age of heroinism is a novelist whose women never threaten thus to abandon the light of open day.

  I

  Thackeray I take to have been an author whose native bent was towards reality in fiction. But he lived in a literary time when it was all but impossible for one to be directly true; one must somehow bring the truth in circuitously, apologetically, almost shamefacedly. A direct rendering of life was then supposed to be wanting in “imagination,” and though Thackeray despised and mocked the false in fiction as much as any man who ever lived, he could not help being a man of his time. He put on a fine literary air of being above his business; he talked of fiction as fable-land, when he ought to have known it and proclaimed it the very home of truth, where alone we can see men through all their disguises; he formed the vicious habit of spoiling the illusion, or clouding the clear air of his art, by the intrusion of his own personality; and in fine he showed himself in spite of his right instincts a survival of the romanticistic period whose traces in others (especially Bulwer and Disraeli) he knew how so deliciously to burlesque.

  I shall affront some of those who like Thackeray most (but not most wisely) by saying that he came short of his great possibilities by his willingness to dawdle (and shall I say twaddle?) over his scene when it was strictly his affair to represent it, and by his preference of caricature to character, and sentimentality to sentiment. All the same he was a great talent, and the Ever-Womanly knew his ultimate truth so well that she revealed herself to him as she had not to any other English novelist since Jane Austen’s time. It is to be distinguished, though, that she did not fully show herself at her best to him. Her best, indeed, she gave him glimpses of, but it was her worst that she fully imparted, trusting him to render it again so that it should not seem so very, very bad, after all.

  Thackeray’s bad heroines are truer than his good ones. These he was apt to make a little too good; whereas, with that tenderness which the Ever-Womanly expected of him, he let us like his bad ones almost as much. Some people like them even more; and it cannot be denied that Becky Sharp, and Blanche Amory, and Beatrix Esmond are at least more amusing than Amelia Sedley, and Laura Pendennis, and Lady Castle, wood; in fact, these virtuous ladies show rather factitious in the baleful light of those wicked ones.

  II

  I suppose the primacy among Thackeray’s women, good, bad, and indifferent, would be awarded to Becky Sharp, by nine-tenths of his critics, and one cannot deny her a high degree of wicked perfection. She had the advantage of coming earliest among his leading heroines, for, though Catharine Hayes preceded Becky Sharp, she was too clearly a satire upon a certain sort of criminal heroines to survive as a personality. But Becky Sharp had just that blend of good and bad which — convinces of reality in a creation; she was selfish and cruel, but she had her moments of generosity when she was willing to do a good action which could not disadvantage her, and she was, with all her wickedness, ostensibly kept within those limits of decency dear to Anglo-Saxon fiction which the franker history of Catharine transcends. She ran her course largely in good society, and bad people in good society are somehow more memorable. She has the help of circumstance, though without adventitious aid Becky Sharp would still be a great figure. She is great almost in spite of her inventor, who had such a boyish delight in having found out a character that he could not forbear nudging the reader, and even shouting his satisfaction into the reader’s ear, lest he should fail of some point of the discovery. In the retrospect, however, this want of taste, which was want of art, ceases to affect the result, and any one who knows his “Vanity Fair” sees Becky Sharp as the author imagined her, and as she shows herself in the drama, and does not see Thackeray at all.

  The great moments of her history present themselves in successive tableaux, and Becky flinging Miss Pinkerton’s parting gift back into the garden as she leaves Miss Pinkerton’s school; Becky in her manifold flirtations with Jos. Sedley, and George Osborne, and Rawdon Crawley; Becky making her way into the esteem of Sir Pitt Crawley after her marriage with his brother; Becky’s first appearance in high society, cruelly ignored by the women and at last mercifully recognized by her unwilling hostess, the Marchioness of Steyne; Becky surprised by her husband in the Marquis of Steyne’s company at her own house; Becky in the shabby hotel at Ostend courted as an “Engel Englanderinn” by those raffish German admirers of hers; Becky doing the good angel when she tells the stupid, constant Amelia that George Osborne had made love to her and asked her to fly with him, and so renders it possible for the widow to renounce her allegiance to the memory of her false husband and marry the faithful Major Dobbin: these are scenes which remain from any reading of the book, and have the property of keeping the mind like facts of one’s experience.

  In Becky’s admirably naughty presence, Beatrix Esmond shows thin and factitious, and Blanche Amory dwindles to the measure of her literary affectations.

  Becky Sharp is indeed of that ideal perfection which we find nowhere outside of nature. If Thackeray had done nothing else, she must have immortalized him; and he did a multitude of figures, all so much better than his method of doing them that one hesitates whether to wonder more at means so false or results so true. This greatest creation of his is first of all so tempered that she cannot even illogically arrive at any other end than she reaches, though she sometimes stands at the parting of the ways, and now and then advances a little in the right way. She is destined to make others her prey, not because she is stronger, but because she is weaker; she might be willing to be good if she thought goodness would avail; and she is at her worst because certain things are left out of her rather than because she has done certain things. She has defects of nature: she is incapable either of passion or affection; she loves neither her husband nor her son; and these defects are imputed t
o her for evil, but they hardly constitute guilt. Her guilt is in telling and acting lies; but she tells them and acts them because she is weak and has no other means of offence or defence that seem to her so effectual. She is not incapable of gratitude, and when she can with safety do others a good turn she sometimes does it; she would probably always do it rather than an ill turn. Thackeray’s hand is heavy throughout “Vanity Fair,” which is ‘prentice work compared with “Pendennis” and “The Newcomes”; and he exults in Becky’s decline and fall, as perhaps he might not in a maturer work. He is boisterously sarcastic at her expense, as if she were responsible for the defects of her nature, and must be punished for her sins as well as by them. His morality regarding her is the old conventional morality which we are now a little ashamed of, but in his time and place he could scarcely have any other; after all, he was a simple soul, and strictly of his epoch. A later and subtler time must do finer justice to a woman badly born, and reared in dependence and repression; liberated from school to a world where she must fight her own way; taught the evil consciousness of the fascination which she had but which she never felt for men; married to a reprobate aristocrat not her superior in nature, and distinctly her inferior in mind; tempted by ambition and spurred by necessity the greater since she had her husband as well as herself to care for, she was predestined to the course she ran; and she could not have run any other, made as she was, so clever, so pretty, so graceful, so unprincipled.

  III

  It is difficult to know what may be the lesson of a character so evilly conditioned that its evil was inevitable, but possibly it may be to move the spectator less to “justice “ than to mercy. To this effect Becky Sharp seems to come in spite of her creator, whom we may safely leave to his mistaken severities with her, while we rejoice in the æsthetic side of his performance, so altogether better than the ethical. His art is quite unerring in result, though it is mostly, as I think, so bad in process. There are a hundred proofs of Thackeray’s greatness in the story; whenever he deals with Rebecca Sharp he is great, but at which moment he is greatest I could not well say. The obvious climax, of course, comes when Becky, having made her way into society under the patronage of Lord Steyne, and preyed upon his purse to the common advantage of her husband and herself, has her husband — still in their joint interest — shut up for debt. While she is receiving Lord Steyne at her own house, Rawdon Crawley, getting out of prison, unexpectedly comes home.

  “He took out his door-key and let himself into his house. He could hear laughter in the upper rooms. He was in the ball-dress in which he had been captured the night before. He went silently up the stairs, leaning against the banisters at the stair head....

  Becky was singing a snatch of the song of the night before; a hoarse voice shouted ‘Brava! Brava!’ — it was Lord Steyne. Rawdon opened the door and went in. A little table with a dinner was laid out — and wine and plate. Steyne was hanging over the sofa on which Becky sat. The wretched woman was in a brilliant full toilette, her arms and all her fingers sparkling with bracelets and rings; and the brilliants on her breast that Steyne had given her. He had her hand in his and was bowing over it to kiss it, when Becky started up with a faint scream as she caught sight of Rawdon’s white face.... There was that in Rawdon’s face which caused Becky to fling herself before him. ‘I am innocent, Rawdon,’ she said, ‘before God I am innocent!’ She clung hold of his coat, of his hands; her own were all covered with serpents, and rings, and baubles. ‘I am innocent. Say I am innocent,’ she said to Lord Steyne. He thought a trap had been laid for him, and was as furious with the wife as with the husband. ‘You innocent! Damn you,’ he screamed out ‘You innocent!.. You’re as innocent as your mother the ballet dancer and your husband the bully. Make way, sir, and let me pass;’ and Lord Steyne seized up his hat, and with flame in his eyes, and looking his enemy fiercely in the face, marched upon him....

  But Rawdon Crawley, springing out, seized him by the neckcloth until Steyne, almost strangled, writhed and bent under his arm. ‘You lie, you dog!’ said Rawdon. ‘You lie, you coward and villain,’ And he struck the peer twice over the face with his open hand, and flung him bleeding to the ground. It was all done before Rebecca could interpose. She stood there trembling before him. She admired her husband, strong, brave, victorious. ‘Come here!’ he said. She came up at once. ‘Take off those things.’ She began, trembling, pulling the jewels from her arms, and the rings from her shaking fingers, and held them up, all in a heap, looking at him. ‘Throw them down,’ he said, and she dropped them. He tore the diamond ornament out of her breast, and flung it at Lord Steyne. It cut him on his bald forehead. ‘Come up stairs,’ Rawdon said to his wife. ‘Don’t kill me, Rawdon,’ she said. He laughed savagely. ‘I want to see if that man lies about the money as he has about me. Has he given you any?’ ‘No,’ said Rebecca. ‘That is— “Give me your keys,’ Rawdon answered, and they went out together. Rawdon flung open boxes and wardrobes, throwing the multifarious trumpery of their contents here and there, and at last he found the desk. It... contained a pocket-book with banknotes,... and one was quite a fresh one — a note for a thousand pounds which Lord Steyne had given her. ‘Did he give you this?’ Rawdon said. ‘Yes,’ Rebecca answered. ‘I’ll send it to him to-day, ‘... and he left her without another word.”

  Left her; and the reader is left with the impression that this blackguard, who had as literally lived upon his wife as if all that Lord Steyne said were true, is somehow better than she. But he is not; and in this case as in most others of the kind the injured husband, who poses so finely as the defender of marriage and the avenger of his own honor, has had more agency in his own ignominy than the world will ever own. It is a false and wrong touch in the scene, but still it is a very great scene, and managed very quietly, very intensely. It implicates pretty nearly all there is of poor Becky, past, present, and future, without any apparent interference of the author’s. For once, he is not on the stage, and he does not even come in with an epilogue, at least for the time being, He could not often hold his hand; when he painted a saint, he wanted to paint “Saint” all over the halo; and when he did a devil, he thought it well to tag his forked tail with a label proclaiming his demoniacal quality. But in this great instance, he trusts the meaning of Becky Sharp to the spectator’s intelligence, with scarcely the waste of a word

  IV

  There are half a dozen passages in Becky’s history almost as good, but not one in the history of Beatrix Esmond which approaches this in power. To be sure she is never directly seen, but always through the eyes of that intolerable prig Henry Esmond, which are fixed mainly upon his own perfections. Even if she had been directly seen, however, I doubt if there would have been much real drama in her, though plenty of theatre. Several coups de théâtre there are in her career, and chiefly that when Esmond and her brother find her at Castlewood with the young Pretender, and prevent her for the time from giving her worthlessness to his worthlessness. If one reads the story in cold blood it is hard to believe in it at all, it is at every moment so palpably and visibly fabricated; and perhaps Beatrix is no more a doll than those other eighteenth-century marionettes; but compared with Becky Sharp a doll she certainly is. It is only in her avatar of Madame Bernstein, in “The Virginians,” that she begins to persuade you she is at best anything more than a nineteenth-century actress made up for her part. She suffers, of course, from the self-parade of Esmond, and has not, poor girl, half a chance to show herself for what she is. Her honest, selfish worldliness is, however, more interesting than her mother’s much-manipulated virtues; but it is to be remembered in behalf of Lady Castlewood that Beatrix has at no turn of her career such a false part to play as that of a woman who falls in love with a boy, and then promotes his passion for her daughter, and at last takes him herself when her daughter will not. Indeed, I do not know why she should be so much blamed for her heartlessness; people cannot go and have heart unless nature has provided them the means; and, after all, the heartlessness of B
eatrix is shown chiefly in her not loving Mr. Esmond, who is not an unprejudiced witness. The solemn scolding he gives her when he breaks the Duke of Hamilton’s death to her seems to me quite preposterous; but then he is at all times preposterous. When he interferes in her intrigue with the Stuart whom he is helping put on the English throne, it is no wonder she hates him: mischief for mischief, hers is far the less. Esmond, it will be remembered, scolds the prince in much the same temper that he has scolded Beatrix, for running down into the country after her, when he ought to have been waiting Queen Anne’s death in London. He burns up the patent of Marquis which the Stuarts had given his father, and once more renounces his right to the title of Castlewood — he does it half a dozen times in all — and then the prince gives him and Lord Castlewood the satisfaction of a gentleman for his pursuit of their sister and cousin, by crossing swords with them.