Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Dorothea is here spiritually outlined almost as strongly as she is physically intimated in this fine bit of portraiture.

  “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, — or from one of our elder poets, — in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper.”

  But it would be doing wrong to the human part which is so great a part of Dorothea (as it is with all George Eliot’s real heroines) not to let her be seen in yet another phase, where her beauty is contrasted with the different beauty of Rosamond Vincy, and the very difference of their souls is suggested in the difference of their styles.

  “Let those who know tell us exactly what stuff it was that Dorothea wore in those days of mild autumn — that thin, white woollen stuff, soft to the touch and soft to the eye. It always seemed to have been lately washed, and to smell of the sweet hedges — was always in the shape of a pelisse with sleeves hanging all out of the fashion. The grace and dignity were in her limbs and neck; and about her simply parted hair and candid eyes the large round poke which was then in the fate of women, seemed no more odd as a head-dress than the gold trencher we call a halo... Dorothea put out her hand with her usual simple kindness, and looked admiringly at Lydgate’s lovely bride....

  They were both tall, and their eyes were on a level; but imagine Rosamond’s infantile blondness and wondrous crown of hair-plaits, with her pale-blue dress of a fit and fashion so perfect that no dressmaker could look at it without emotion; her small hands duly set off with rings, and that controlled self-consciousness of manner which is the expensive substitute for simplicity.”

  Outlines, I have called these sketches of Dorothea, and perhaps she is never more than outlined. The inferior nature can be fully shown, because it is of a material which can be palpably handled without loss or hurt; but in the superior nature there is something elusive, something sensitive that escapes or perishes under the touch, and leaves the exhaustive study a dumb image and not a speaking likeness. Rosamond Vincy can be decanted to the dregs, and be only more and more Rosamond; but if you pour out all Dorothea her essence flies from you in a vital aroma. She seems hardly to be contained in the story of her life, but to exist mainly somewhere outside of it. That story is indeed very slight, and without the incidents that lend themselves to remembrance as powerful dramatic moments, though it is of such a fatal pathos. It is reportably that of a magnanimous young girl who falls in love with the notion of being the helpmeet of an eminent scholar because she believes in the importance of his work to the world, and in her own fitness to be of use to him in it, and so marries a dull, passionless pedant of mean soul and mistaken mind, who forces her out of his life from first to last because there is no room in it for any but his paltry self. The tragedy of Edward Casaubon is that he has undertaken work inconceivably beyond his powers, and that to a real scholarship his devoted labors are worse than useless: but his wife’s tragedy is that he himself is a greater error, a sadder solecism, than even these. He cannot see her divine good-will any more than he can feel value in the facts with which his learning deals; it is the law of his narrow being that he must forbid almost her sympathy, restrict her help to the merest mechanical effect, and scarcely suffer her the efficiency of a trained nurse, when his health fails. It is to be said in his defence that he cannot admit her to his inner life because he has none, and if on that mere outside which is his whole being, he is cold and jealous and repellent, that he was made so and cannot help it. But Dorothea’s fate is not the less cruel because it is his fate, too; and she is all the greater because she rises above it, not constantly, but finally.

  In her case, as in the case of Lydgate, we see a meaner nature making a noble nature its prey, but Dorothea is more enduringly built than Lydgate, or else she is more favored by chance. Perhaps it is scientifically accurate to say this rather than the other thing, for Rosamond outlives Lydgate instead of dying and releasing him to new chances, while Casaubon suddenly, in the most critical moment, dies of heart failure and leaves Dorothea free. He has been on the point of enslaving her forever, of holding her by mortmain from that happiness to which his death must liberate her; for her morbid conscience has sided with him in his jealousy of the man whom she is unconsciously tending to love; and when he has put the crudest pressure upon her to make her promise to be ruled by his wish after his death, she comes out after a sleepless night to consent “When Dorothea was out on the gravel walks, she lingered among the nearer clumps of trees, hesitating, as she had done once before, though from a different cause. Then she had feared lest her effort at fellowship should be unwelcome; now she dreaded going to the spot where she foresaw that she must bind herself to a fellowship from which she shrank. Neither law nor the world’s opinion compelled her to this — only her husband’s nature and her own compassion, only the ideal and not the real yoke of marriage.... When she entered the Yew-tree walk she could not see her husband; but the walk had bends, and she went, expecting to catch sight of his figure wrapped in a blue cloak, which, with a warm velvet cap, was his outer garment on chill days for the garden. It occurred to her that he might be resting in the summer-house, toward which the path diverged a little. Turning the angle, she could see him seated on the bench, and his brow was bowed down on them, the blue cloak being dragged forward and screening the face on each side. ‘He exhausted himself last night,’ Dorothea said to herself, thinking at first that he was asleep, and that the summer-house was too damp a place to rest in.... She went into the summer-house and said, ‘I am come, Edward; I am ready.’ He took no notice, and she thought that he must be fast asleep. She laid her hand on his shoulder, and repeated, T am ready!’ Still he was motionless, and with a sudden, confused fear, she leaned down to him, close to his head, crying, in a distressed tone: ‘Wake, dear, wake! Listen to me. I am come to answer. ‘But Dorothea never gave her answer.”

  This end, with whatever skill it is managed, must be confessed a mechanical means of extricating Dorothea from her difficulty. It is to be condemned for that, and it is to be regretted that George Eliot had not had the higher courage of her art, and the clearer vision of her morality, and shown Dorothea capable of breaking a promise extorted from her against her reason and against her heart. It was from Ladislaw and her chance of happiness with him that her husband would have withheld her, and she could not have been more recreant to his will in being recreant to her word.

  Her marriage to Ladislaw at last is one of the finest things, and one of the truest things in a book so great that it almost persuades one to call it the greatest in English fiction. It is not because “ Middlemarch” is an immense canvas, thronged with such a multitude of marvellously distinguished and differenced figures, that it so richly represents life. Other huge novels have been of as great scope and greater dramatic effect; but “ Middlemarch” alone seems to me akin in spiritual power to “War and Peace.” It is in its truth to motives as well as results that it is so tremendously convincing. After a lapse of years one comes to it not with a sense of having overmeasured it before, but with the perception that one had not at first realized its grandeur. It is as large as life in those moral dimensions which deepen inwardly and give the real compass of any artistic achievement through the impression received. There are none of its incidents that I find were overestimated in my earlier knowledge of them; and there are some that are far greater than I had remembered. I have had especially to correct my former judgment — I am not sure that it was mine at first hand — of the character of Ladislaw and his fitness to be Dorothea’s lover. I had thought him a slight, if not a light man, a poorish sort of Bohemian, existing by her preference, in the reader’s tolerance, and perhaps, as h
er husband, half a mistake. But in this renewed acquaintance with him, I must own him a person of weight by those measures which test the value of precious stones or precious metals: an artist through and through, a man of high courage and high honor, and of a certain social detachment which leaves him free to see the more easily and honestly himself. Dorothea made great and sorrowful mistakes through her generous and loyal nature; but Ladislaw was one of her inspirations: a centre of truth in which her love and her duty, otherwise so sadly at odds, could meet and be at peace.

  GEORGE ELIOT’S GWENDOLEN HARLETH AND JANET DEMPSTER

  THERE was such strength and such promise of strenuous continuance in the work which made Marian Evans’s pseudonym known that her public could await each of her successive novels in reliance upon some fresh evidence of her power. This could scarcely be shown in greater measure than at first, and there are people of sound judgment who consider her “Scenes of Clerical Life” still her best fiction, though it was followed by “Silas Marner,” and “Adam Bede,” and “The Mill on the Floss,” and “Romola “ and “Middlemarch,” and “Daniel Deronda.” The last stands at the other end of the great line, and until we reach “ Theophrastus Such,” there is scarcely, after the first, a sign of failing skill in the cunning hand. It has seemed to me therefore the more interesting, in this concluding study of George Eliot’s heroines, to deal with types drawn from the extremes parted by so many and such splendid performances.

  I

  Few students of “Daniel Deronda,” if they were readers of the novel when it began to appear, will have forgotten the characteristic terms which form Gwendolen Harleth’s introduction. “Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the evil genius dominant in those beams?

  Probably the evil; else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the whole being consents?”

  She who raised these questions in Daniel Deronda’s mind was occupied in gambling in one of those splendid Continental resorts now mostly closed to their rich and noble patrons; and the talk about her goes on — rather too much for the reader’s ear — among the spectators. “The Nereid in sea-green robes and silver ornaments, with a pale sea-green feather fastened in silver falling backward over her green hat and light brown hair, was Gwendolen Harleth. She was under the wing, or rather soared by the shoulder, of the lady who had sat by her at the roulette-table.... ‘A striking girl — that Miss Harleth — unlike others. ‘ ‘Yes, she has got herself up a sort of serpent now — all green and silver, and winds her neck about a little more than usual.’ ‘Oh, she must always be doing something extraordinary. She is that kind of girl, I fancy. ‘...—’ You like a nez retroussé, then, and long, narrow eyes V ‘When they go with such an ensemble.’ ‘The ensemble du serpent?’ ‘She is certainly very graceful; but she wants a tinge of color in her cheeks. It is a sort of Lamia beauty she has,’ ‘On the contrary, I think her complexion one of her charms. It is a warm paleness; it looks thoroughly healthy. And that delicate nose with its gradual little upward curve is distracting. And then her mouth — there never was a prettier mouth, the lips curled backward so finely, eh?’ ‘Think so? I cannot endure that sort of mouth. It looks so self-complacent, as if it knew its own beauty — the curves are too immovable. I like a mouth that trembles more.’”

  It appears, of course, that the girl is gambling, this once, for the distraction of the experience, that she is of good family in good society, and that she is chaperoned at the roulette-table by her elderly cousin, who is a baroness. The impression that she is wilful, conscious, selfish, and spoiled is not corrected by anything in her very ugly history as it ensues, though there is throughout the suggestion of potentialities for good in her nature, eventuating at last in a magnanimous penitence, of which we have at once some hint in the interest which Deronda’s quality inspires in her. A young girl in the first pages of a novel does not betray for nothing the curiosity Gwendolen confesses; it is obvious to the meanest intelligence that she is going to be in love with him; and her passion though unrequited, and not very well justified to the reader by anything shown in the elaborated personality of that fine young Jew, proves the saving factor in her life. It does not keep her from the great error and wickedness of marrying so brutally bad a man as Grandcourt out of sordid ambition and lust of the things that money can buy; but those who like to condone the faults of pretty women will find some excuse for Gwendolen Harleth in her failure to win the love of Deronda. It may be also urged in her behalf that she is poor as well as proud and pretty, and that she is tempted and flattered out of her better self by the sense of inherent power; I hope there are none who go so far as to find merit in her letting her abominable husband come so near drowning before her eyes that when she has made up her mind to save him it is too late.

  Even the reader who is not acquainted with Gwendolen Harleth at first hands will perceive from these intimations that she is a person of very mixed qualities, very daringly composed. The ordinary observer who discovers that a woman is a poseuse is apt rashly to decide that she is also a fool, but this by no means follows. She is often a person of a great deal of sense, and perhaps principle, and she may behave wisely up to that point where the brain requires the help of the heart in achieving final wisdom. She may even have a heart, and experience its compunctions at all times except in the deliriums of triumphant will or of gratified vanity. Flirts are by no means wholly wicked, or the world, which is pretty full of them, would be a much worse world than it is; flirts even of the deadly quality of Gwendolen Harleth are tempered to mercy by their womanly weaknesses, and are very rarely quite demoniacal. The histrionic strain in her nature, which makes her a poseuse would, if it had gone a little deeper, have made her an artist, and depersonalized its effects. It is in fact very pitiful when, while hesitating to accept Grandcourt, she turns her thoughts to art with the modest ambition of excelling in opera, for in society she has been admired both for her acting and singing. She determines not to take this step without due authorization, and she asks the advice of Klesmer the musician. That conscientious artist is kindly merciless concerning her gifts, and he leaves her to a mortification and despair after which there is nothing for her worldliness but a loveless marriage with a man of whom she knows nothing but evil. One very black chapter of his past is revealed to her by a woman whom he has wronged and who comes to plead with her not to marry him, bringing Grandcourt’s children with her in proof that he should be her husband and not Gwendolen’s. She promises, and she breaks her promise. She marries Grandcourt, and he takes her home to the splendor and luxury for which she marries him.

  “She fell silent in spite of herself as they approached the gates, and when her husband said, ‘Here we are at home!’ and for the first time kissed her on the lips, she hardly knew of it: it was no more than the passive acceptance of a greeting in the midst of an absorbing show.... But there was a brilliant light in the hall — warmth, matting, carpets, full-length portraits, Olympian statues, assiduous servants.... Gwendolen felt herself being led by Grandcourt along a subtly scented corridor, into an anteroom where she saw an open doorway sending out a rich glow of light and color. ‘These are our dens,’ said Grandcourt. ‘You will like to be quiet here till dinner. We shall dine early,’ He pressed her hand to his lips and moved away, more in love than he had ever expected to be. Gwendolen yielded up her hat and mantle, threw herself into a chair by the glowing hearth, and saw herself repeated in glass panels with all her faint-green satin surroundings. The housekeeper had passed into this boudoir from the adjoining dressing-room and seemed disposed to linger.... ‘Here is a packet, madam, which I was ordered to give into nobody’s hands but yours, when you were alone. The person who brought it said it was a present particularly ordered by Mr. Grandcourt; but he was not to know of its arrival till he saw you wear it. Excuse me, madam; I felt
it right to obey orders,’ Gwendolen took the packet and let it lie on her lap till she heard the doors close. It came into her mind that the packet might contain the diamonds which Grandcourt had spoken of as being deposited somewhere and to be given to her on her marriage. In this moment of confused feeling and creeping luxurious languor she was glad of this diversion — and glad of such an event as having her own diamonds to try on. Within all the sealed paper coverings was a box, but within the box there was a jewel-case; and now she felt no doubt that she had the diamonds. But on opening the case, in the same instant that she saw them gleam she saw a letter lying above them. It was as if an adder had lain on them. Her heart gave a leap which seemed to have spent all her strength; and as she opened the bit of thin paper, it shook with the trembling of her hands. But it was legible as print, and thrust its words upon her. ‘These diamonds, which were once given with ardent love to Lydia G lasher, she passes on to you. You have broken your word to her, that you might possess what was hers. Perhaps you think of being happy, as she once was, and of having beautiful children such as hers, who will thrust hers aside. God is too just for that The man you have married has a withered heart. His best young love was mine; you could not take that from me when you took the rest... He would have married me at last, if you had not broken your word. You will have your punishment I desire it with all my soul....

  You took him with your eyes open. The willing wrong you have done me will be your curse.’ It seemed at first as if Gwendolen’s eyes were spellbound in reading the horrible words of the letter over and over again as a doom of penance; but suddenly a new spasm of terror made her lean forward and stretch out the paper toward the fire, lest accusation and proof at once should meet all eyes. It flew like a feather from her trembling fingers and was caught up in a great draught of flame. In her movement the casket fell to the floor and the diamonds rolled out She took no notice, but fell back in her chair again helpless. She could not see the reflections of herself then; they were like so many women petrified white; but coming near herself you might have seen the tremor in her lips and hands.... After that long while, there was a tap at the door and Grandcourt entered, dressed for dinner. The sight of him brought a new nervous shock, and Gwendolen screamed again and again with hysterical violence. He had expected to see her dressed and smiling, ready to be led down. He saw her pallid, shrieking as it seemed with terror, the jewels scattered around her on the floor.”