Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Of course, this is playing to the gallery openly, but not so very grossly, and although the human nature is as impossible as the wit and caprice in the circumstances, it is still human nature. It represents the heroine in thoughtful repose; but if the reader is of a mind to see her in high dramatic action, here is the scene of her rescuing Gatty from the high tide, to which he has heedlessly committed himself.

  “The poor fellow, whom Sandy, by aid of his glass, now discovered to be in a worn-out condition, was about half a mile east of Newhaven pier-head, and unfortunately the wind was nearly due east. Christie was standing north-northeast, her boat-hook jammed against the sail, which stood as flat as a knife. The natives of the Old Town were now seen pouring down to the pier and the beach, and strangers were collecting like bees.... ‘That boat is not going to the poor man,’ said Mrs. Gatty, ‘it is turning its back upon him. ‘ ‘She canna lie in the wind’s eye, for as clever as she is,’ answered a fish-wife. ‘I ken wha it is,’ suddenly squeaked a little fish-wife; ‘it’s Christie Johnstone’s lad; it’s you daft painter fr’ England. Hechl’ cried she suddenly, observing Mrs. Gatty, ‘it’s your son, woman.’ The unfortunate woman gave a fearful scream, and, flying like a tiger on Liston, commanded him to ‘go straight out to sea and save her son.’ Jean Camie seized her arm. ‘Div ye see you boat?’ cried she; ‘and div ye mind Christie, the lass wha’s hairt ye hae broken? aweel, woman, — it’s just a race between deeth and Cirsty Johnstone for your son.’ The poor old woman swooned dead away; they carried her into Christie Johnstone’s house, and laid her down, then hurried back, — the greater terror absorbed the less. Lady Barbara Sinclair was there from Leith; and seeing Lord Ipsden standing in the boat with a fisherman, she asked him to tell her what it was; neither he nor any one answered her. ‘Why doesn’t she come about, Liston?’ cried Lord Ipsden, stamping with anxiety and impatience. ‘She’ll no be lang,’ said Sandy; ‘but they’ll mak a mess o’ ‘t wi’ ne’er a man i’ the boat.’ ‘Ye’re sure o’ thaat?’ put in a woman. ‘Ay, about she comes,’ said Liston, as the sail came down on the first tack. He was mistaken; they dipped the lug as cleverly as any man in the town could. ‘Hech! look at her hauling on the rope like a mon,’ cried a woman. The sail flew up on the other tack....— ‘She’ll no let him dee.

  Ah! she’s in the bows, hailing him an’ waving the lad’s bonnet ower her head to gie him coorage. Gude bless ye, lass; Gude bless ye!’ Christie knew it was no use hailing him against the wind, but the moment she got the wind she darted into the bows, and pitched in its highest key her full and brilliant voice; after a moment of suspense she received proof that she must be heard by him, for on the pier now hung men and women, clustered like bees, breathless with anxiety, and the moment after she hailed the drowning man she saw and heard a wild yell of applause burst from the pier, and the pier was more distant than the man. She snatched Flucker’s cap, planted her foot on the gunwale, held on by a rope, hailed the poor fellow again, and waved the cap round and round her head, to give him courage; and in a moment, at the sight of this, thousands of voices thundered back their cheers to her across the water. Blow, wind, — spring, boat, — and you, Christie, still ring life towards those despairing ears, and wave hope to those sinking eyes; cheer the boat on, you thousands that look upon this action; hurrah! from the pier; hurrah! from the town; hurrah! from the shore; hurrah! now, from the very ships in the roads, whose crews are swarming on the yards to look; five minutes ago they laughed at you; three thousand eyes and hearts hang upon you now; ay, these are the moments we live for!... And now dead silence. The boat is within fifty yards, they are all three consulting together round the mast; an error now is death; his forehead only seems above water. ‘If they miss him on that tack?’ said Lord Ipsden, significantly, to Liston. ‘He’ll never see London Brigg again,’ was the whispered reply. They carried on till all on shore thought they would run over him, or past him; but no, at ten yards distant they were all at the sail, and had it down like lightning; and then Flucker sprang to the bows, the other boy to the helm. Unfortunately, there were but two Johnstones in the boat; and this boy, in his hurry, actually put the helm to port, instead of to starboard. Christie, who stood amidships, saw the error; she sprang aft, flung the boy from the helm, and jammed it hard a-starboard with her foot The boat answered the helm, but too late for Flucker; the man was four yards from him as the boat drifted by. ‘He’s a deed mon!’ cried Liston, on shore. The boat’s length gave one more little chance; the after part must drift nearer him, — thanks to Christie. Flucker flew aft; flung himself on his back, and seized his sister’s petticoats. ‘Fling yourself over the gunwale,’ screamed he. ‘Ye’ll no hurt; I’se haud ye. ‘She flung herself boldly over the gunwale; the man was sinking, her nails touched his hair, her fingers entangled themselves in it, she gave him a powerful wrench and brought him alongside; the boys pinned him like wild-cats. Christie darted away forward to the mast, passed a rope round it, threw it the boys, in a moment it was under his shoulders. Christie hauled on it from the fore-thwart, the boys lifted him, and they tumbled him, gasping and gurgling like a dying salmon, into the bottom of the boat, and flung net and jackets and sail over him, to keep the life in him.”

  V

  Dickens created a new school, or rather he characterized every young writer of his generation; and in a less measure Thackeray did the like. But Reade had no imitators and left none, though in certain things he was cleverer than either of these betters of his. He knew women better than they, and he could paint their manners, if not their minds, better than both his betters put together.

  Why should I say his betters? If I do I am again controverting my prime position that the highest type of novelist is he who can most winningly impart the sense of womanhood. Charles Reade could do this beyond Dickens and beyond Thackeray; and so let the fact praise him as it may.

  GEORGE ELIOT’S MAGGIE TULLIVER AND HETTY SORREL

  IN George Eliot we come to the greatest talent in English fiction after Jane Austen, but a talent of vastly wider and deeper reach than that delicate and delightful artist, and of a far more serious import. It is useless to compare any of her contemporaries with this great woman in the expectation of finding them her equals except in that poorer expression which was from their singularities rather than their qualities. Neither Dickens with his dramatic, or theatric, picturesqueness, nor Thackeray with his moralized mockery, his sentimentalized satire, nor Reade with his self-celebrated discoveries in character and manners, nor Anthony Trollope with his immense, quiet, ruminant reality, ox-like cropping the field of English life and converting its succulent juices into the nourishing beef of his fiction — none of these writers can match with the author of “Adam Bede” and “The Mill on the Floss” and “Romola” and “Middlemarch” in the things which give a novelist the highest claim to the reader’s interest. Hawthorne, arriving at effects of equal seriousness from a quarter so opposite to hers, among her contemporaries can alone rival her in the respect, not to say the reverence, of criticism. It was not till the wide canvases of Thomas Hardy began to glow with the light and color, the mystery and the comedy and tragedy with which he best knows how to paint, and which became the expression of a supreme mastery in his “Jude” — it was not till these appeared that it could be felt George Eliot had a peer in late English fiction. But if there is a power in the Christianity which she disowned but which never disowned her, profounder than the farthest reach of fatalism, even Mr. Hardy cannot stand beside her. She had many and lamentable defects; the very seriousness and sincerity of her motive implied them; her learning over-weighted her knowledge; her conscience clogged her art; her strong grasp of human nature was weakened by foibles of manner; the warmth of her womanly sympathies and the subtlety of her womanly intuitions failed of their due effect because the sympathies were sometimes hysterical and the intuitions were sometimes over-intellectualized. Her immense reading, which freed her from the worst influences of the English example in fiction, cumb
ered her with pedantic acquisitions, under which her style labored conscious and diffuse; her just sense of her own power fostered a kind of intellectual vanity, fatal to art, in which she first-personally intruded herself into the story, and Thackerayesquely commented upon the facts and persons without the Thackerayesque lightness, or the Thackerayesque convention that it is all a make-believe anyway. This foible becomes positive, offensive, and pernicious in “The Mill on the Floss,” but it is right to add that it has there its worst effect, and that in later stories it gradually disappears.

  I

  If we choose Maggie Tulliver for the representative,’. woman of George Eliot, as we chose Lucy Fountain in the case of Charles Reade, we shall at least be going no farther wrong, I think. She is at any rate typical of that order of heroine which her author most strongly imagined, not quite upon the Miltonian formula for a poem of “simple, sensuous, passionate,” but upon such a vernation of it as should read complex, sensuous, passionate. She is, of all the kinds of heroines, the most difficult for men justly to appreciate, and in their failure something of the ignoble slight they feel for her attaches also to her creator. They are ashamed for a woman who could give herself with her heart as passionately as they seek women without their hearts. The fact will not be easily put into words, and if it be forced it demands terms too plain for print; but it underlies the vital difference between the grosser make of men and the finer make of women. Above all others Tolstoy has suggested it in the Natasha Rostoff in his “War and Peace “; but most novelists shy off from it, leaving their readers to make what they can of the recorded events; and in English fiction George Eliot has alone recognized it so recognizably as not to leave it to the reader. Her heroines’ souls are incarnate in bodies that glow with passion none the less but all the more pure because it is a flame. Maggie Tulliver, conscientious, intellectual, is compact of it; Dorothea Casaubon in “Middlemarch” loves Ladislaw from it, as Romola loves Tito Melema in the romance of her name; poor little Hetty Sorrel in “Adam Bede” is betrayed as much by it as by her vanity; Dinah Morris herself is not without it; in “Daniel Deronda “ Gwendolen Harleth is redeemed by it, at least in the reader’s pity.

  II

  It is by her nature, complex, passionate, sensuous, by her sex, intellectualized and spiritualized, that she is most important to the reader. In her relations to her brother, which are apparently the chief interest of the book, she is interestingly and novelly studied; but these, though they involve the catastrophe, do not involve the climax. That is reached, as it seems to me, not when she and Tom are drowned together in the flood of the Floss, but when her reason and her conscience are provisionally overborne by her love for Stephen Guest, and she floats with him down a tide and out upon a sea more perilous than any inundation, and saves herself only by a powerful impulse of her will, which is almost a convulsion. The fruition of her love would have been a double treason, treason to her cousin Lucy, who was Guest’s betrothed, and treason to Philip Waken, to whom she was herself pledged; and the sense of this blackened it with guilt, and turned it to despair, even while she yielded and yielded to the love of being loved. Never has an unhappy passion been more faithfully studied in a character with strength enough finally to forbid it; or more subtly felt from that first moment when Maggie begins to rejoice in her beauty because of her love for the man who loves it, till that last moment when she refuses to marry him, and goes back to suffer shame rather than to merit shame. Every step of the way is accurately and firmly traced up to that passage where Stephen Guest comes to ask her to row with him on the river, and from which there seems no retreat.

  “‘Oh, we can’t go,’ said Maggie, sinking into her chair again. ‘Lucy did not expect — she would be hurt. Why is not Philip come?’ ‘He is not well; he asked me to come instead. ‘ ‘Lucy is gone to Lindum,’ said Maggie, taking off her bonnet, with hurried, trembling fingers. ‘We must not go.’ ‘Very well,’ said Stephen, dreamily, looking at her, as he rested his arm on the back of his chair. ‘Then we’ll stay here.’ He was looking into her deep, deep eyes — far off and mysterious as the starlit blackness, and yet very near and timidly loving. Maggie sat perfectly still, perhaps for moments, perhaps for minutes — until the helpless trembling had ceased, and there was a warm glow on her cheek.... ‘Let us go,’ Stephen murmured, entreatingly, rising, and taking her hand to raise her too. ‘We shall not be long together. ‘And they went. Maggie felt that she was being led down the garden among the roses, being helped with firm, tender care into the boat, having the cushion and cloak arranged for her feet, and her parasol opened for her (which she had forgotten) — all by this stronger presence that seemed to bear her along without any act of her own will, like the added self which comes with the sudden exalting influence of a strong tonic — and she felt nothing else. Memory was excluded.... ‘Oh, have we passed Luckreth — where we were to stop?’ she exclaimed, looking back to see if the place were out of sight. No village was to be seen. She turned round again, with a look of distressed questioning at Stephen. He went on watching the water, and said in a strange, dreamy, absent tone, ‘Yes, a long way.’ ‘Oh, what shall I do?’ cried Maggie in an agony. ‘We shall not get home for hours — and Lucy — O God, help me I’ She clasped her hands and broke into a sob, like a frightened child: she thought of nothing but of meeting Lucy, and seeing her look of pained surprise and doubt — perhaps of just upbraiding. Stephen moved and sat near her, and gently drew down the clasped hands. ‘Maggie,’ he said, in a deep tone of slow decision, ‘let us never go home again — till no one can part us — till we are married. ‘The unusual tone, the startling words, arrested Maggie’s sob, and she sat quite still — wondering: as if Stephen might have seen some possibilities that would alter everything, and annul the wretched facts.... ‘Let me go!’ she said, in an agitated tone, flashing an indignant look at him, and trying to get her hands free. ‘You have wanted to deprive me of any choice. You knew we were come too far — you have dared to take advantage of my thoughtlessness. It is unmanly to bring me into such a position. ‘Stung by this reproach, he released her hands, moved back to his former place, and folded his arms, in a sort of desperation at the difficulty Maggie’s words had made present to him. The indignant fire in her eyes was quenched, and she began to look at him with timid distress. She had reproached him for being hurried into irrevocable trespass — she, who had been so weak herself. ‘As if I shouldn’t feel what happened to you — just the same,’ she said, with reproach of another kind — the reproach of love, asking for more trust. This yielding to the idea of Stephen’s suffering was more fatal than the other yielding, because it was less distinguishable from that sense of others’ claims which was the moral basis of her resistance. He felt all the relenting in her look and tone — it was heaven opening again. He moved to her side, and took her hand, leaning his elbow on the back of the boat, and saying nothing. They glided along in this way, both resting in that silence as in a haven, both dreading lest their feelings should be divided again — till they became aware that the clouds had gathered, and that the slightest perceptible freshening of the breeze was growing and growing, so that the whole character of the day was altered. ‘You will be chill, Maggie, in this thin dress. Let me raise the cloak over your shoulders. Get up an instant, dearest.’ Maggie obeyed: there was an unspeakable charm in being told what to do, and having everything decided for her.... Presently Stephen observed a vessel coming after them.... ‘Maggie, dearest,’ he said, at last, ‘if this vessel should be going to Mudport, or to any convenient place on the coast northward, it would be our best plan to get them to take us on board.’ Maggie’s heart began to beat with reawakened alarm at this new proposition; but she was silent; one course seemed as difficult as another. Stephen hailed the vessel. It was a Dutch vessel going to Mudport, the English mate informed him, and, if this wind held out, would be there in less than two days.... Maggie was to sleep all night in the poop; it was better than going below; and she was covered with the warmest w
rappings the ship could furnish. It was still early, when the fatigues of the day brought on a drowsy longing for perfect rest, and she laid down her head, looking at the faint dying flush in the west, where the one golden lamp was getting brighter and brighter. Then she looked up at Stephen, who was still seated by her, hanging over her as he leaned against the vessel’s side. Behind all the delicious visions of these last hours, which had flowed over her like a soft stream, and made her entirely passive, there was the dim consciousness that the condition was a transient one, and that the morrow must bring back the old life of struggle — that there were thoughts which would presently avenge themselves for this oblivion.... Daybreak came and the reddening eastern light, while her past life was grasping her in this way, with that tightening clutch which comes in the last moments of possible rescue. She could see Stephen now lying on the deck still fast asleep, and with the sight of him there came a wave of anguish that found its way in a long, suppressed sob....

  ‘Here we are in sight of Mudport,’ he said, at last. ‘Now dearest,’ he added, turning toward her with a look that was half beseeching, ‘the worst part of your fatigue is over. On the land we can command swiftness. In another hour and a half we shall be in a chaise together — and that will seem rest to you after this.’ Maggie felt it was time to speak; it would only be unkind now to assent by silence. She spoke in the lowest tone, as he had done, but with distinct decision. ‘We shall not be together — we shall have parted.’ The blood rushed to Stephen’s face. ‘We shall not,’ he said. ‘I’ll die first. ‘It was as he had dreamed — there was a struggle coming. But neither of them dared to say another word, till the boat was let down, and they were taken to the landing-place.... A porter guided them to the nearest inn and posting-house, and Stephen gave the order for the chaise as they passed through the yard. Maggie took no notice of this, and only said, ‘Ask them to show us into a room where we can sit down. We must not wait,’ she said, in a low but distinct voice; ‘we must part at once.’ ‘We will not part,’ Stephen burst out, instinctively placing his back against the door — forgetting everything he had said a few moments before; ‘I will not endure it You’ll make me desperate — I sha’n’t know what I do. ‘Maggie trembled....