Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  I

  Charles Reade was not helplessly a dramatist like Charles Dickens, who brought the theatre into life; but he saw life so dramatically that he was consciously arranging it for the theatre at every moment; and his novels were often confessedly, as eventually they often became, plays, and very good plays. I have seldom seen a better melodrama than “Foul Play,” which is also a most delightful story, with a heroine in Helen Rolleston, who is of the author’s very best sort, and almost fit to match with Margaret in “The Cloister and the Hearth.” Margaret, indeed, is his finest creation, being less mechanically operated, less of a Jill-in-the-Box, more vitalized from within, than the others. She is very sweet and simple and noble, and is found a true woman in that remote mediaeval twilight where she obediently abides, without insubordinately getting over into the glare of modem times, as people in historical novels are apt to do.

  Upon the whole, I think that book Charles Reade’s greatest book — at least in a show of the past, which must always be a gymnastic; his ground and lofty tumbling is not so offensive there as it is amidst a representation of actual life. But all his novels bear reading again after many years; they are no more boyish now than they were at first; they were never as deep as wells nor as wide as church doors, but they served: served to surprise, to amuse, almost to convince. “A Terrible Temptation “ is a mighty good book, with a charming heroine; and “Put Yourself in His Place” is another. So is “Griffith Gaunt;” Katharine Gaunt is finely imagined; “It is Never Too Late to Mend” is a good story, but the heroine has not remained with me. I dare say she would come back with a little coaxing.

  II

  I am not sure whether “Peg Woffington” is to be put among the author’s minor works or not; but as an historical novel, dealing with the nature of an actress, it has every chance of falling very low in the scale of fiction. Perhaps, however, one condition of unreality offsets the other, and the theatricality neutralizes the historicality. At any rate, the result is a story which, if not true, is such a story as every actress could wish to be true. What better could the histrionic heart desire than the case of a country gentleman leaving his young bride behind him, and coming for a few days on business up to London, where he falls in love with the divine Mistress Woffington, and remains wooing and winning her for weeks and months, till the neglected wife follows him to town, and finds him giving a dinner to La Peg (as Reade would call her), and throws herself on Mistress Woffington’s mercy? There is a situation which no woman need be long upon the stage to find exquisitely natural; if you add the fact that Peg has never known her lover was married, it is almost too natural. For the éclaircissement what could be more profitable and feasible than for Mabel Vane to seek her rival in the studio of the scene-painter who is doing her portrait, and there succeed an audience of connoisseurs who have been trapped into criticising Mrs. Woffington’s real face in the hole cut out of the canvas where the painted face was? The connoisseurs have been mocked and driven out by the actress, who has hidden behind her portrait when the hapless wife appears, and who now puts back her face into the hole in the canvas, the better to witness the scene between the painter and her rival. Mrs. Vane pours out her artless tale of grief to the powerless Triplet, and avows her purpose of trying to see Mrs. Woffington, and appeal to her as her sole hope.

  “At this moment, in spite of Triplet’s precaution, Mrs. Vane, casting her eye accidentally round, caught sight of the picture, and instantly started up, crying, ‘She is there!’ Triplet was thunderstruck. ‘What a likeness!’ cried she, and moved towards the supposed picture. ‘Don’t go to it!’ cried Triplet, aghast; ‘the color is wet.’ She stopped; but her eye and her very soul dwelt upon the supposed picture; and Triplet stood quaking. ‘How like! It seems to breathe. You are a great painter, sir. A glass is not truer.’ Triplet, hardly knowing what he said, muttered something about ‘critics and lights and shades.’ ‘Then they are blind!’ cried Mabel, never for a moment removing her eye from the object. ‘Tell me not of lights and shades. The pictures I see have a look of paint; but yours looks like life. O that she were here, as this wonderful image of hers is. I would speak to her. I am not wise or learned; but orators never pleaded as I would plead to her for my Ernest’s heart.’ Still her eye glanced upon the picture; and I suppose her heart realized an actual presence, though her judgment did not; for by some irresistible impulse she sank slowly down and stretched her clasped hands towards it, while sobs and words seemed to break direct from her bursting heart. ‘O yes! you are beautiful, you are gifted, and the eyes of thousands wait upon your very word and look. What wonder that he, ardent, refined, and genial, should lay his heart at your feet? And I have nothing but my love to make him love me. I cannot take him from you. O, be generous to the weak! O, give him back to me! What is one heart more to you? You are so rich, and I am so poor, that without his love I have nothing, and can do nothing but sit me down and cry till my heart breaks. Give him back to me, beautiful, terrible woman! for, with all your gifts, you cannot love him as his poor Mabel does; and I will love you longer perhaps than men can love. I will kiss your feet, and Heaven above will bless you; and I will bless you and pray for you to my dying day. Ah! it is alive! I am frightened! I am frightened!’ She ran to Triplet and seized his arm. ‘No!’ cried she, quivering close to him; ‘I’m not frightened, for it was for me she — O Mrs. Woffington!’ and, hiding her face on Mr. Triplet’s shoulder, she blushed, and wept, and trembled. What was it had betrayed Mrs. Woffington? A tear! During the whole of this interview (which had taken a turn so unlooked for by the listener) she might have said with Beatrice, ‘What fire is in mine ears?’ and what self-reproach and chill misgiving in her heart too. She had passed through a hundred emotions, as the young innocent wife told her sad and simple story. But, anxious now above all things to escape without being recognized, — for she had long repented having listened at all, or placed herself in her present position, — she fiercely mastered her countenance; but, though she ruled her features, she could not rule her heart. And when the young wife, instead of inveighing against her, came to her as a supplicant, with faith in her goodness, and sobbed to her for pity, a big tear rolled down her cheek, and proved her something more than a picture or an actress. Mrs. Vane, as we have related, screamed and ran to Triplet. Mrs. Woffington came instantly from her frame, and stood before them in a despairing attitude, with one hand upon her brow. For a single moment her impulse was to fly from the apartment, sc ashamed was she of having listened, and of meeting her rival in this way; but she conquered this feeling, and, as soon as she saw Mrs. Vane too had recovered some composure, she said to Triplet, in a low but firm voice: ‘Leave us, sir. No living creature must hear what I say to this lady!’”

  III

  This is quite as an actress would wish things to be; and they fall out in this wise so often on the stage that the great wonder is they have never begun falling out so in life yet. The time must come for that if the stage only keeps on; and in the meanwhile it must be owned that in the less dramatic moments of the story the nature of La Peg (it is impossible to escape the contagion of the author’s example) is studied much more in the light of fact. She is of really a far simpler nature than many women who are actresses merely off the stage. The actress has had her disillusions, but she lives in a world of illusions, and when one is gone she goes and gets more from the vast property-room of fable. Without having been a very good woman, Reade’s Peg Woffington is never so bad as not to wish being better: she has her dream of being purely loved, and is willing to love so again, and in her trust of Vane she has given him her heart. That is the pity of it, and the probability; but there perhaps the fable parts company with fact. Would the actress in real life (if she is ever there) give back the foolish husband to the faithful wife? This may be too much to ask of any one profession; but in the world at large would she do it? This may be too much to ask of any one sex.

  Probability was what Reade was always trying to get away from, and he justifie
d himself by the example of reality as recorded in the manifold incidents of the voluminous scrap-books of newspaper cuttings which he kept. His simple philosophy was that the marvelous, the bizarre, the high-heroic, the monstrous, was fit material for art because it was to be found in experience, and that it was preferable to the wonted aspect of life. So his books, put together of characters and events which could every one be matched in contemporaneous history, and wearing the air of lively reality, fail to convince the reader that the things in them happened, or persuade him no longer than a thrilling passage on the stage.

  People were very primitive in the early fifties, and author and public both accepted a convention of fiction which no author or public of prime quality would accept now, though it still embodies the creed of those who write and read the novels which sell their halfmillions to-day. In Reade’s books it is a comedy-convention, for except “The Cloister and the Hearth,” the greatest of them all, they all “ end well,” and we are expected to suppose every manner of substantiated facts which would be important if true. The range of his later novels includes many exciting interests, such as deportations and shipwrecks, labor strikes, abuses in private insane asylums, and doings in gold-diggings; but, after all, these have not the charm of such an earlier story as “Christie Johnstone,” which deals with a series of sweet impossibilities among gentlefolk and simple folk in the little Scotch fishing-town of Newhaven. It is such a very early book that I may safely trust the elder reader’s oblivion and the younger reader’s ignorance for my excuse if I briefly sketch the plot. Lord Ipsden, crossed in love with his cousin Lady Barbara, and sick from it, goes down to Newhaven with a famous doctor’s prescription directing him to get well by doing good among the poor, just about the time that Charles Gatty, a youthful artist, full of the new truth that you must paint life from life, has set up his easel in the same port, and has there given his heart for that of Christie Johnstone, the prettiest fishing-lass of the place. Lord Ipsden does good right and left with an unsparing hand in drawing checks; he early makes the acquaintance of Christie, and at a hint from her goes and buys pictures of Gatty, who is on the point of imprisonment for debt, at the same time that Christie herself surprises a school of herring unknown to other fisher-folk, and comes to her lover with the money for them. But before this, Gatty’s mother, who has been a cook and is a cockney, has heard of Christie, and has appeared to prevent his marrying beneath him.. Through Lord Ipsden’s beneficence she is able to thank Christie kindly and tell her that she and her son do not need her herring money, and nothing then remains for Christie to do but to save Gatty’s life, and she promptly manages this by putting out in her boat, and rescuing him from a flood-tide, such as is apt to overtake people in fiction. His mother then naturally gives way, and at the same moment Lady Barbara, who has always wanted to marry an earnest man, convinces herself of Lord Ipsden’s earnestness and marries him.

  IV

  In order to begin doing good as soon as possible, Lord Ipsden has his valet go out and get him some of the lower orders directly after his arrival in Newhaven; and Saunders returns with Christie Johnstone and her friend Jean Camie.

  “On their heads they wore caps of Dutch or Flemish origin, with a broad lace border, stiffened and arched over the forehead, about three inches high, leaving the brow and cheeks unencumbered. They had cotton jackets, bright red and yellow, mixed in patterns, confined at the waist by the apron-strings, but bobtailed below the waist; short woollen petticoats, with broad vertical stripes, red and white, most vivid in color; white worsted stockings, and neat, though high-quartered, shoes. Under their jackets they wore a thick spotted cotton handkerchief, about one inch of which was visible round the lower part of the throat. Of their petticoats, the outer one was kilted, or gathered up towards the front, and the second, of the same color, hung in the usual way. Of these young women, one had an olive complexion, with the red blood mantling under it, and black hair, and glorious black eyebrows. The other was fair, with a massive but shapely throat, as white as milk; glossy brown hair, the loose threads of which glittered like gold, and a blue eye, which, being contrasted with dark eyebrows and lashes, took the luminous effect peculiar to that rare beauty. Their short petticoats revealed a neat ankle, and a leg with a noble swell; for Nature, when she is in earnest, builds beauty on the ideals of ancient sculptors and poets, not of modem poetasters, who, with their airy-like sylphs and their smokelike verses, fight for want of flesh in woman and want of fact in poetry as parallel beauties. — are, my lads. — Continuez! These women had a grand corporeal trait; they had never known a corset! so they were straight as javelins; they could lift their hands above their heads! — actually! Their supple persons moved as Nature intended; every gesture was ease, grace, and freedom. What with their own radiance, and the snowy cleanliness and brightness of their costume, they came like meteors into the apartment. Lord Ipsden, rising gently from his seat, with the same quiet politeness with which he would have received two princes of the blood, said, ‘How do you do?’ and smiled a welcome. ‘Fine! hoow’s yoursel?’ answered the dark lass, whose name was Jean Camie, and whose voice was not so sweet as her face. ‘What ‘n lord are ye?” continued she; ‘are you a juke? I wad like fine to hae a crack wi’ a juke. ‘Saunders who knew himself the cause of this question, replied, sotto, ‘His Lordship is a viscount,’ ‘I didna ken ‘t,’ was Jean’s remark. ‘But it has a bonny soond,’ ‘What mair would ye hae?’ said the fair beauty, whose name was Christie Johnstone. Then, appealing to his Lordship as the likeliest to know, she added, ‘Nobeelity is just a soond itsel, I’m tauld.’ The Viscount, finding himself expected to say something on a topic he had not attended much to, answered dryly: ‘We must ask the republicans; they are the people that give their minds to such subjects.’... The fair lass, who had watched the Viscount all this time as demurely as a cat cream, now approached him. This young woman was the thinker; her voice was also rich, full, and melodious, and her manner very engaging; it was half advancing, half retiring, not easy to resist or to describe. ‘Noo,’ said she, with a very slight blush stealing across her face, ‘ye maun let me catecheeze ye, wull ye?’ The last two words were said in a way that would have induced a bear to reveal his winter residence. He smiled assent. Saunders retired to the door, and, excluding every shade of curiosity from his face, took an attitude, half majesty, half obsequiousness. Christie stood by Lord Ipsden, with one hand on her hip (the knuckles downwards), but graceful as Antinous, and began. ‘Hoo muckle is the Queen greater than y’ are?’ His Lordship was obliged to reflect. ‘Let me see, — as is the moon to a wax taper, so is her Majesty the Queen to you and me, and the rest,’.... ‘Noo,’ said the fair inquisitor, ‘ye shall tell me how ye came to be Lorrds, your faemily... ‘Five hundred years ago—’ ‘Listen, Jean,’ said Christie; ‘we’re gaun to get a boeny story. “Five hundred years ago,” ‘added she, with interest and awe. ‘Was a great battle,’ resumed the narrator, in cheerful tones, as one larking with history, ‘between a King of England and his rebels. He was in the thick of the fight—’ ‘That’s the King, Jean, he was in the thick o’t.’ ‘My ancestor killed a fellow who was sneaking behind him, but the next moment a man-at-arms prepared a thrust at his Majesty, who had his hands full with three assailants.’ ‘Eh! that’s no fair,’ said Christie, ‘as sure as deeth.’ ‘My ancestor dashed forward, and, as the king’s sword passed through one of them, he clove another to the waist with a blow.’ ‘Weel done! weel done!... Aweel, I hae gotten a heap out o’ ye; sae noow I’ll gang, since ye are no for herrin’; come away, Jean.’ At this their host remonstrated, and inquired why bores are at one’s service night and day, and bright people are always in a hurry; he was informed in reply, ‘Labor is the lot o’ man. Div ye no ken that muckle? And abune a’ o’ women.’ ‘Why, what can two such pretty creatures have to do except to be admired?’ This question coming within the dark beauty’s scope, she hastened to reply. ‘To sell our herrin’, — we hae three hundre’ left in the creel.’
‘What is the price?’ At this question the poetry died out of Christie Johnstone’s face, she gave her companion a rapid look, indiscernible by male eye, and answered: ‘Three a penny, sirr; they are no plenty the day,’ added she, in smooth tones that carried conviction. (Little liar; they were selling six a penny everywhere.)

  ‘Saunders, buy them all, and be ever so long about it; count them, or some nonsense.’ ‘He’s daft! he’s daft! O, ye ken, Jean, an Englishman and a lorrd, twa daft things thegither, he could na’ miss the road. Coont them, lassie.’ ‘Come away, Sandy, till I count them till ye,’ said Jean. Saunders and Jean disappeared. Business being out of sight, curiosity revived. ‘An’ what brings ye here from London, if ye please?’ recommenced the fair inquisitor. ‘You have a good countenance; there is something in your face. I could find it in my heart to tell you, but I should bore you.’ ‘De’el a fear! Bore me, bore me! whaat’s thaat, I wonder?’ ‘ What is your name, madam? Mine is Ipsden.’ ‘They ca’ me Christie Johnstone.’ ‘Well, Christie Johnstone, I am under the doctor’s hands.’ ‘Puir lad. What’s the trouble?’ (solemnly and tenderly).—’ Ennui! ‘(rather piteously). ‘Yawn-we? I never heerd tell o’t.’ ‘O you lucky girl,’ burst out he; ‘but the doctor has undertaken to cure me; in one thing you could assist me, if I am not presuming too far on our short acquaintance. I am to relieve one poor distressed person every day, but I mustn’t do two: is not that a bore?’ ‘Gie’s your hand, gie’s your hand. I’m vexed for ca’ing you daft. Hech!what a saft hand ye hae. Jean, I’m saying, come here, feel this. ‘Jean, who had run in, took the Viscount’s hand from Christie. ‘It never wroucht any,’ explained Jean. ‘And he has bonny hair,’ said Christie, just touching his locks on the other side. ‘He’s a bonny lad,’ said Jean, inspecting him scientifically and point-blank.”