Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  This is altogether fine, and one of the best parts of the book is that relating to Pendennis’s sickness, where she and Laura come up to London, and in the delusion of a superior virtue spurn poor Fanny from his bedside. The whole episode, down to the son’s quarrel with his mother for her mistaken condemnation of Fanny, is most admirable, but out of it all I believe I prefer that exalted moment when Helen and Laura arrive upon the scene.

  “As Fanny saw the two ladies and the anxious countenance of the elder, who regarded her with a look of inscrutable alarm and terror, the poor girl knew at once that Pen’s mother was before her.... Fanny looked wistfully at Mrs. Pendennis and afterwards at Laura; there was no more expression in the latter’s face than if it had been a mass of stone. Hard-heartedness and gloom dwelt in the figures of both of the newcomers; neither showed any the faintest gleam of mercy or sympathy for Fanny. She looked desperately from them to the Major behind them. Old Pendennis dropped his eyelids, looking up ever so stealthily from under them at Arthur’s poor little nurse. ‘I — I wrote to you yesterday, if you please, ma’am,’ Fanny said, trembling in every limb as she spoke; and as pale as Laura, whose sad, menacing face looked over Mrs. Pendennis’s shoulder. ‘Did you, madam?’ Mrs. Pendennis said, ‘I suppose I may now relieve you from nursing my son. I am his mother, you understand.’ ‘Yes, ma’am. I — this is the way to his — oh, wait a minute,’ cried out Fanny. ‘I must prepare you for his—’ The widow, whose face had been hopelessly cruel and ruthless, started back with a little gasp and cry, which she speedily stifled. ‘He’s been so since yesterday,’ Fanny said, trembling very much and with chattering teeth. A horrid shriek of laughter came out of Pen’s room,... and after several shouts the poor wretch began to sing a college drinking-song.... He was quite delirious. ‘He does not know me, ma’am,’ said Fanny. ‘Indeed! Perhaps he will know his mother; let me pass, if you please, and go in to him,’ and the widow hastily pushed by little Fanny, and through the dark passage into Pen’s sitting-room. Laura sailed by Fanny, too, without a word; and Major Pendennis followed them. Fanny sat down on a bench in the passage and cried.’

  The story seldom rises into so much of pure drama as this; Thackeray seems rather ashamed of drama, and shrugs it away when he can, or spoils it by too much chorussing; but here we have it almost pure, at least for an instant, and it makes us wish we had it oftener from him.

  Of subjective drama there is a constant abundance, and that of Laura’s high and wise soul is always good and genuine, through the whole progress of her love for Pendennis, with its phases and changes, and its total eclipse at one time by her passion for Warrington. She has no other; she owns to Pendennis that she has had this, and that if it had not been for Warrington’s fatal entanglement she would gladly have married him. Out of what she knows of Pendennis she knows comparatively little that is good, and yet somehow she divines his essential goodness, and confides her future to it Laura is, in fact, a most generous as well as most sensible creature. Her relation to money is that of the highest-minded woman; she does not want to waste it, but she will give it without a care, though not without a thought, for herself. Her relation to Helen Pendennis is wholly beautiful, and without idealizing that over-idealizing lady she is utterly devoted to her. She makes her tacit criticisms of her, but they make no difference in her conduct towards her adoptive mother.

  She has a girl’s fondness for the pleasures of the world, but she gets only good from it. Even from such a hardened worldling as Blanche Amory she gets only good, both in her illusion and her disillusion concerning her. Towards Pendennis in his long, insincere flirtation with Blanche she has a cool contempt which fires into a single instant of jealousy. Her cruelty to Fanny Bolton is of ignorant purity; it is almost a necessary evil.

  IV

  To have imagined a creature so just and fine and real is a high effect both of mind and heart in Thackeray, who has a right to be judged as much by Laura Bell as by Becky Sharp; by Ethel Newcome as by Blanche Amory. Between those two “ good” heroines of his, I should be puzzled which to choose as the better, or, more importantly, as the truer study in girlhood. They have both great qualities, and I am not going to decide for Ethel Newcome because she has more the defects of her qualities, and figures on a larger stage, though I like to have the limitations of virtue shown, and incline to believe that those are the best portraits in which I find not only the realization of beauty, but the suggestion of what is unlovely. After all, unless a girl comes outright to folly or evil, even her potentialities of wrong have their charm, and Ethel Newcome is the more interesting because at a certain time she is ready to reverse the old saw and count love well lost for the world. She does not finally change her mind so much as have it changed for her by events and circumstances; and in this she, even more than Laura Bell, is like girls in life, and justifies herself as a work of the author’s highest art

  THACKERAY’S ETHEL NEWCOME AND CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S JANE EYRE

  THERE are so many of Thackeray’s women that to choose any eight or ten of them must seem like ignoring as many others equally worthy of study. The reader may demand in fit dudgeon why this one or that one, whom he has always thought a significant figure, is left out; and against such censure it is not easy to provide. All one can say is that by universal consent such and such women have been chosen the novelist’s great heroines, and that these must represent him, even if injustice seems done to others. In “The Newcomes,” for instance, there are half a score of women who will come to mind at the mention of the novel: Lady Kew and her daughter Lady Anne Newcome, Mrs. Mackenzie and her daughter Rosie, Miss Honeyman, Madame de Florac, Mrs. Pendennis, Mrs. Hobson Newcome, Lady Clara Pulleyn; these all have claims, nicely differenced and distinguished, and yet it is Ethel Newcome who remains first, and has the largest share of our interest if not our sympathy.

  I

  It seems to me that in Ethel Newcome the author has done his utmost to imagine a character of noble but not unnatural beauty. He has fancied her of a station of life in which her qualities could best show themselves, with the light of the great world upon them. He has not pretended that she was at once perfect, or ever perfect, but he has wished her to appear capable of learning from her own faults, and from the errors and miseries of others. He is admirably successful in making us feel her growth: she really grows in our knowledge from a young, unformed girl, to a mature woman, who has come to the knowledge of right and wrong by the use of her own sense, and has finally chosen the right through a love of it. Her youthful love-making with Clive Newcome is pretty and winning, though she gives him up at the bidding of the world in the terrible old Lady Kew, her grandmother, and for a while she thinks she cares more for rank and splendor than for love. She might not so unjustly have them with Clive married; but it is of her own motion, from the instruction of the unhappiness she has seen so near her in her brother’s marriage, that she breaks with the Marquis of Farintosh whom she does not love, and prefers a life of such usefulness as she can lead in her family, with her kind, dull, capricious mother and her younger brothers and sisters. She is never an insipid saint; and she fights evil in her wicked brother, as well as eschews it, chiefly employing the powers of sarcasm with which she is gifted. She is rather satirical with most people and is not afraid to measure wits even with her grandmother, who has a very trenchant wit, and wields it so mercilessly that all the rest of her family are in terror of her. In short, Ethel sums up in her character the virtues and defects of the highest type of Thackeray women, and, as women go, the type is not so low as might be, though he used to be accused of such a cynical hatred of women. Her greatest fault as a creation is that she talks too much in the interest of the author for the pleasure of the reader. I am far from implying that a woman in choosing the better part cannot express herself with a breadth and depth worthy of any novelist, but if she is really doing it for herself she will do it in her own way and, as it were, in her own words. This is certainly not the case with Ethel Newcome in her last
conversation with the Marquis of Farintosh, where her simple-heartedly selfish lover, not having the author or reader in mind, talks straight from himself, and is perfectly mean and natural. It is not that Ethel says anything out of character; but the critic who reads that scene can hardly help feeling its æsthetic deficiency, in the sort I have suggested.

  II

  Of course the psychological climax of the story is in the chapter detailing the conversations at Paris between Ethel and Madame de Florae, Ethel and Clive, and finally Clive and Madame de Florae, where the girl definitely refuses her cousin, after long wishing to accept him, and after more or less indecisive love-making between them. The voices are not the very voices of life, nor the words the very words, but the thoughts and feelings are, and at times the voices and the words are. Inevitably the writer who has written much becomes confirmed in his manner, and it is not surprising that there is so much, but that there is so little, of the Thackeray manner in these conversations, which are based upon a familiar Thackeray convention. Here is the make-believe that an old woman like Madame de Florae has kept a love-disappointment alive through a long, loveless marriage, and is promoting, against all the French proprieties, the meeting of her lost lover’s son with the girl he loves, out of a romantic tenderness for her own past; here is the clever aristocratic girl who is better than her aristocracy (as we poor plebeians like to fancy some aristocrats) and who has her dreams, that come and go, of well-losing the world for love; here is the youth, handsome, witty, gifted, who is tempting her to the better part. The girl is letting her heart go, and he is drawing it, and in the background is the old woman with her romantic wishes for his success. The lovers talk it all over with openness on Clive’s part, and on Ethel’s with at least transparent insincerity; and the result is, like the conception, more natural than the representation, as mostly happens with Thackeray, though in this case the representation is unusually good. I have been reading that chapter over again, and I am not sure but that in Ethel’s final speech the author has insinuated a fine satire of her which escaped the unspectacled eyes of my youth. If this is true, he has done it so delicately that it does not audibly clash with the romantic sentiment of the closing passage between Clive and Madame de Florac.

  “Ethel. ‘You spoke quite scornfully of palaces, just now, Clive. I won’t say a word about the — the regard which you express for me. I think you have it. Indeed, I do. But it were best not said, Clive; best for me, perhaps, not to own that I know it. In your speeches, my poor boy — and you will please not make any more, or I never can see you or speak to you again, never — you forgot one part of a girl’s duty: obedience to her parents. They would never agree to my marrying any one below — any one whose union would not be advantageous in a worldly point of view. I never would give such pain to the poor father, or to the kind soul who has never said a harsh word to me since I was born. My grandmamma, too, is very kind in her way. I came to her of my own free will. When she said that she would leave me her fortune, do you think it was for myself alone that I was glad? My father’s passion is to make an estate, and all my brothers and sisters will be but slenderly portioned. Lady Kew said she would help them if I came to her — it is the welfare of those little people that depends upon me, Clive. Now do you see, brother, why you must speak to me so no more? There is the carriage. God bless you, dear Clive.’

  “(Clive sees the carriage drive away after Miss Newcome has entered it without once looking up to the window where he stands. When it is gone he goes to the opposite windows of the salon, which are open, towards the garden. The chapel music begins to play from the convent, next door. As he hears it he sinks down, his head in his hands.)

  “Enter Madame de Florac. (She goes to him with anxious looks.) ‘What hast thou, my child? Hast thou spoken?’

  “Clive (very steadily). ‘Yes.’

  “Madame de F. ‘And she loves thee? I know she loves thee.’

  “Clive. ‘You hear the organ of the convent?’

  “Madame de F. ‘Qu’as tu?’

  “Clive. ‘I might as well hope to marry one of the sisters of yonder convent, dear lady.’ (He sinks down again and she kisses him.)

  “Clive. ‘I never had a mother, but you seem like one.’

  “Madame de F. ‘Mon fils! Oh, mon fils!”’

  This is not melodrama; but it is the highest mood of the theatre, a supreme moment of genteel comedy that sends the play-goers home fancying they have been profoundly stirred. For the rest, does not Ethel talk a little too like an amateur of eighteenth-century English, who has been doing French exercises? Yet she is a genuine girl of the late forenoon or early afternoon of our century; a living personality; a true character, and a noble spirit in spite of her world. If you compare her with some of the bad characters of the book you may say she is not so good as Mrs. Mackenzie, the mother-in-law of Clive; but then there are very, very few women in fiction as good as that horrible shrew, who afflicts the reader with the same quality of pain that Clive and his father suffer from her. She is wonderfully done; she surpasses in her narrower sphere even Becky Sharp, and no goodness can, aesthetically, hold a candle to her badness. But I incline to think that the goodness of Ethel is artistically better than the badness of Lady Kew; and Ethel’s own touches of badness are extremely good. I am not sure that she is as perfectly done as poor, slight, sick Rosa, Clive’s wife, but she was much harder to do.

  III

  The heroines of the mid-century English novelists can hardly be considered in a distinct chronological order. The greatest of these novelists were contemporaries and were synchronously writing the books by which they were best known. Bulwer was still thought a prime talent and was producing his most pretentious fiction when Dickens was of world-wide fame, and Thackeray, always of less popularity than Dickens, had taken a higher place. By this time Kingsley had written “Alton Locke” and was soon to write “Hypatia.” George Eliot was beginning to make her way towards the primacy which she finally achieved; Charles Reade was corruscating with all the rockets and pin-wheels and Roman candles of his pseudo-realism; Trollope, a truer artist than any of them, was making himself known by the novels which, until we had Mr. Thomas Hardy’s and Mr. George Moore’s, reflected English life with a fidelity unapproached since that of Jane Austen’s books. Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Oliphant, and others were coming forward in the second order of talents; the weird genius who gave us “Paul Ferroll “ had already made her vivid impression; from her isolation in the alien keeping of Bavaria, Baroness Tautphoeus had sent out that great and beautiful story, “The Initials,” a product as purely English as if not “made in Germany.” In the retrospect these writers seem simultaneous as well as contemporaneous, and one can as well be taken up first as another; but perhaps it will be generally allowed that the Bronte sisters, especially Charlotte and Emily, have a peculiar right to early mention because of the fresh and emphatic character of their contribution to fiction, and I feel it peculiarly fit to speak of Charlotte Brontë after Thackeray because of the malignant error which connected her first novel with his name as a supposed “satire” of the man whom she idolized as a novelist, and because of the noble-minded kindness with which he received the shy girl after she had hurried to London to own “Jane Eyre” to her publisher, and to deny the monstrous imputation. There is somewhere a story of Thackeray sitting by while Charlotte Brontë read with silent tears a cruel review of her book, and ignoring her anguish with silent compassion, which is enough to make one sorry for not finding his fiction always as great as his nature. It makes me feel it in a sort my misfortune that I cannot now give my whole heart and soul in admiration of his work as I used in my younger days; it makes me almost regret the more perfect models of art which I have since known in Jane Austen, in Hawthorne, in George Eliot, in Anthony Trollope, in Thomas Hardy, in George Moore, in Zola and Maupassant and Flaubert, in Tourguénief and Tolstoy, in Galdôs and Valdés. How shall I venture to say, then, that no heroine of Thackeray’s except Becky Sharp seems to me qu
ite so alive as the Jane Eyre of Charlotte Brontë, whom I do not class with him intellectually, any more than I class her artistically with the great novelists I have mentioned? She was the first English novelist to present the impassioned heroine; impassioned not in man’s sense, but woman’s sense, in which love purifies itself of sensuousness without losing fervor.

  IV

  From the beginning to the ending of her story, Jane Eyre moves a living and consistent soul; from the child we know grow the girl and woman we know, vivid, energic, passionate, as well as good, conscientious, devoted. It was a figure which might have well astonished and alarmed the little fastidious world of fifty years ago, far more smug and complacent than the larger world of to-day, and far more intolerant of any question of religious or social convention; and it is no wonder that the young author should have been attainted of immorality and infidelity, not to name that blacker crime, impropriety. In fact, it must be allowed that “Jane Eyre” does go rather far in a region where women’s imaginations are politely supposed not to wander; and the frank recognition of the rights of love as love, and its claims in Rochester as paramount to those of righteous self-will in St. John, is still a little startling. It is never pretended that Rochester is a good man, or that he is in any accepted sense worthy of the girl who listens so fearlessly to his account of the dubious life he has led. The most that can be said for him is that he truly values and loves her, and this is his best, his sole defence in his attempt to marry her while he still has a wife living under his own roof, a hopeless and horrible maniac. When the attempt is frustrated at the altar, and nothing remains for Jane Eyre but to be his on the only possible terms, or to fly, it is not feigned that she is not for a moment tempted. She loves him and she is tempted, but only for a moment, and then she chooses the right, owning that the wrong has allured her with a courage that was once very novel, but without a suggestion of the pruriency which has often characterized later fiction (especially the fiction of women) in dealing with like situations.