Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  ‘You defy us, then?’ said Mrs. Proudie. ‘My lord, I grant your authority as bishop to be great, but even a bishop can only act as the law allows him.’ ‘God forbid that I should do more,’ said the bishop. ‘Sir, you will find that your wicked threats will fall back upon your own head,’ said Mrs. Proudie. ‘Peace, woman,’ Mr. Crawley said, addressing her at last. The bishop jumped out of his chair at hearing the wife of his bosom called a woman. But he jumped rather in admiration than in anger. He had already begun to perceive that Mr. Crawley was a man who had better be left to take care of the souls at Hogglestock, at any rate till the trial should come on. ‘Woman!’ said Mrs. Proudie, rising to her feet as though she really intended some personal encounter. ‘Madam,’ said Mr. Crawley, ‘you should not interfere in these matters. You simply debase your husband’s high office. The distaff were more fitting for you. My lord, good-morning.’ And before either of them could speak again, he was out of the room, and through the hall, and beyond the gate, and standing beneath the towers of the cathedral.”

  III

  After all, I find that it is rather the character of Josiah Crawley than of Mrs. Proudie which is developed in the foregoing scene. In another scene she suffers a like defeat at the hands of the topping Dr. Tempest, one of the chief clergy at Barchester, whom she attempts to instruct in his duty respecting Mr. Crawley. He, too, ignores her presence, and if he does so with less majestic dignity than Crawley, he brings the bishop a yet keener sense of his degradation through his wife. “ The bishop did not again speak a word of kindness to her, and he tried not to speak to her at all. ‘You have broken my heart,’ he said again and again. Her own efforts to bring him back to something like life, to some activity of mind if not of body, were made constantly; and when she failed, as she did fail day after day, she would go slowly to her own room, and lock her door, and look back in her solitude at all the days of her life. She had agonies in these minutes of which no one near her knew anything. She would seize with her arm the part of the bed near which she would stand, and hold by it, grasping it, as though she were afraid to fall; and then, when it was at the worst with her, she would go to her closet, — a closet that no eyes ever saw unlocked but her own, — and fill for herself and swallow some draught; and then she would sit down with the Bible before her, and read it sedulously. She spent hours every day with her Bible before her, repeating to herself whole chapters, which she almost knew by heart. It cannot be said that she was a bad woman, though she had in her time done an indescribable amount of evil. She still longed to rule the diocese by means of her husband, — but was made to pause and hesitate by the unwonted mood that had fallen upon him,”

  When Crawley at last wrote resigning his perpetual curacy, she determined to rouse the bishop to action. But when she went to speak with him, he would not look at her.

  “ ‘Why do you not turn round and speak to me properly?’ she said. ‘I do not want to speak to you at all,’ the bishop answered. This was very bad; — almost anything would be better than this. He was sitting now over the fire, with his elbows on his knees, and his face buried in his hands. She had gone round the room so as to face him, and was now standing almost over him, but still she could not see his countenance. ‘This will not do at all,’ she said. ‘My dear, do you know that you are forgetting yourself altogether?’ ‘I wish I could forget myself.’ ... And now he got up and looked at her. For a moment he stood upon his legs, and then again he sat down with his face turned towards her. ‘It is the truth. You have brought on me such disgrace that I cannot hold up my head. You have ruined me. I wish I were dead; and it is all through you that I am driven to wish it’ Of all that she had suffered in her life this was the worst. She clasped both her hands to her side as she listened to him, and for a minute or two she made no reply.... ‘Bishop,’ she said, ‘the words that you speak are sinful, very sinful.’ ‘You have made them sinful,’ he replied. ‘I will not hear that from you. I will not indeed. I have endeavored to do my duty by you, and I do not deserve it.... All I want of you is that you should arouse yourself, and go to your work.’ ‘I could do my work very well,’ he said, ‘if you were not here.’ ‘I suppose, then, you wish I were dead?’ said Mrs. Proudie. To this he made no reply, nor did he stir himself. How could flesh and blood bear this, — female flesh and blood, — Mrs. Proudie’s flesh and blood? Now, at last, her temper once more got the better of her judgment, probably much to her immediate satisfaction, and she spoke out. ‘I tell you what it is, my lord; if you are imbecile, I must be active. It is very sad that I should have to assume your authority—’ ‘I will not allow you to assume my authority.’ ... ‘What do you mean to say to Mr. Thumble when you see him?’ ‘That is nothing to you.’ She came up to him and put her hand upon his shoulder, and spoke to him very gently. ‘Tom,’ she said, ‘is that the way in which you speak to your wife?’ ‘Yes, it is. You have driven me to it. Why have you taken upon yourself to send that man to Hogglestock?’ ‘Because it was right to do so. I came to you for instructions, and you would give none.’ ‘I should have given what instructions I pleased in proper time. Thumble shall not go to Hogglestock next Sunday.’ ‘Who shall go then?’ ‘Nevermind. Nobody. It does not matter to you. If you will leave me now I shall be obliged to you. There will be an end of all this very soon, — very soon.’ Mrs. Proudie after this stood for a while thinking what she would say; but she left the room without uttering another word. As she looked at him a hundred different thoughts came into her mind. She had loved him dearly, and she loved him still; but she knew now, — at this moment felt absolutely sure, — that by him she was hated! In spite of all her roughness and temper, Mrs. Proudie was in this like other women, — that she would fain have been loved had it been possible. She had always meant to serve him. She was conscious of that; conscious also in a way that, although she had been industrious, although she had been faithful, although she was clever, yet she had failed. At the bottom of her heart she knew that she had been a bad wife. And yet she had meant to be a pattern wife!... She was preparing to go up to her chamber, with her hand on the banisters and with her foot on the stairs, when she saw the servant who had answered the bishop’s bell. ‘John,’ she said, ‘when Mr. Thumble comes to the palace, let me see him before he goes to my lord.’ Then Mrs. Proudie went up stairs to her chamber, and locked her door. Mr. Thumble returned to Barchester that day, leading the broken-down cob, and a dreadful walk he had.... John was peremptory with him, insisting that he must wait first upon Mrs. Proudie and then upon the bishop. Mr. Thumble might perhaps have turned a deaf ear to the latter command, but the former was one which he felt himself bound to obey. So he entered the palace, rather cross, very much soiled as to his outer man; and in this condition went up a certain small staircase which was familiar to him, to a small parlor which adjoined Mrs. Proudie’s room, and there awaited the arrival of the lady.... Mrs.

  Proudie’s own maid, Mrs. Draper by name, came to him and said that she had knocked twice at Mrs. Proudie’s door and would knock again. Two minutes after that she returned, running into the room with her arms extended, and exclaiming, ‘Oh, heavens, sir; — mistress is dead!’ Mr. Thumble, hardly knowing what he was about, followed the woman into the bed-room, and there he found himself standing awestruck before the corpse of her who had so lately been the presiding spirit of the palace. The body was still resting on its legs, leaning against the end of the side of the bed, while one of the arms was clasped around the bedpost. The mouth was rigidly closed, but the eyes were open as though staring at him. Nevertheless there could be no doubt from the first glance that the woman was dead. He went up close to it, but did not dare to touch it. There was no one as yet there but he and Mrs. Draper; — no one else knew what had happened.’?

  IV

  The type of mere termagant is not hard to catch; but the woman who is conscientious as well as arrogant, who means well to those she most wrongs and outrages, is one of those mixed characters far more difficult to achieve, and it is such a
woman who constitutes the author’s triumph in Mrs. Proudie. One cannot say she is his greatest triumph; a cloud of witnesses would rise in protest if one said that. There would be Lady Glencora Pallisser, Lady Laura Kennedy, Mrs. Phineas Finn, Madalina Demolines, Miss Dunstable, and the various heroines of “Orley Farm,” “The Bertrams,” “Can You Forgive Her?” “Is He Popenjoy?” “He Knew He Was Right,” and many others to gainsay so bold a claim’. Yet, in spite of them is not Mrs. Proudie, after Lily Dale, the woman character who remains most distinct in the memories of Trollope’s readers?

  I have been wondering all through my writing of him, whether the readers of Trollope are of that commanding class which they once were, and sadly doubting. Once, there is no question but he had the largest number of authoritative readers, but for how long a time, or just when, it would not be easy to say. I suspect his supremacy was brief, and that it could be ascertained only for that bright moment when Thackeray was editing the “Cornhill Magazine,” and Trollope was writing its serial. But his popularity extended all through the eighteen-sixties, and well into the seventies, from the time fixed by his “Cornhill” story; I forget which of his stories it was. Thackeray had then done all his great novels, and though Dickens had still several of his prodigious fantasies before him, it is doubtful if he was to deepen or even widen the impression he had already made. Charles Reade was synchronously coruscating in his most brilliant pin-wheeling and sky-rocketing, but like Dickens he was confirming rather than forming his public. George Eliot’s greatest work came a little later, and in “ Middlemarch” she pushed Trollope from the throne, which she then held until her declining powers made the accession of Mr. Thomas Hardy easy for his unquestionable mastery.

  But during the period covered by our civil war, say, from 1861 till 1865, Trollope reigned; and no one, I think, can say that he was unworthy to reign. Each of the great contemporary English novelists represented an English world, and Thackeray’s English world did not differ more from Dickens’s than from Reade’s or George Eliot’s. But Trollope, without seeking subjects for ironical satire, or surprising transformation, or dazzling discovery, or morbid analysis, represented the English world as it appeared to him in its normal moods of high-and-low mindedness; vicious, virtuous; dull, amusing, respectable and disreputable; vise and foolish; but in all its varieties entirely and for the most part unconsciously English. One need not recur to Carlyle’s saying that Trollope could never lack for characters, so long as there were thirty millions of people in Great Britain, mostly bores; for that is as false and wrong-headed as nearly all Carlyle’s ad captandum criticism; and Hawthorne’s saying that a novel of Trollope’s was like a piece of earth under the microscope, with all the life active upon it, imparts an erring sense of dimensions. If a telescope of prodigious power could be trained from somewhere in space upon the British Isles, so that their people could be seen life-size, that would offer some such effect as we get in Trollope’s fiction. He had not enough, or he had too much, imagination to conceive of representing his fellow-subjects in the mid-years of the Victorian reign, other than as he knew them, and he neither extenuated nor aught set down in malice concerning them.

  If this is true of the men, it is still truer of the women. At a time when Thackeray was caricaturing or sentimentalizing them, when Dickens was translating them into pretty or hideous monsters, when Reade was portraying them as impassioned or perfidious pusses, and when George Eliot was idealizing them in her Romolas or persecuting them in her Gwendolens and Rosamonds, Trollope was doing his period the incalculable service of anticipating instantaneous photography in his likenesses of Victorian maids, wives, and widows in endless variety. His work is all so true and artistic that one cannot trace in it the presence of any favorite type of woman. The women are such women as each scheme necessarily involves: good, bad, and indifferent; fair, plain, and middling; wise and foolish; high and low; the camera treats them all alike fairly; and the spectator is the richer by its impartiality.

  Upon the whole I should be inclined to place Trollope among the very first of those supreme novelists to whom the ever-womanly has revealed itself. He has not shown the subtlest sense of womanhood; his portraits do not impart the last, the most exquisite joy; it is not the very soul of the sex that shows itself in them; but it is the mind, the heart, the conscience, the manner; and this is for one painter enough. Let Jane Austen catch their ultimate charm, and George Eliot their ultimate truth, and Hawthorne their farthermost meanings and intimations; Trollope has shown them as we mostly see them when we meet them in society and as we know them at home; and if it were any longer his to choose, he might well rest content with his work. For my part I wish I might send my readers to the long line of his wise, just, sane novels, which I have been visiting anew for the purposes of these papers, and finding as delightful as ever, and, thanks to extraordinary gifts for forgetting, almost as fresh as ever.

  THE HEROINE OF “THE INITIALS”

  SOME time about the middle of the century which has so lately become the last, there appeared a novel which swept the younger novel-reading world almost with the thoroughness of “Jane Eyre” among maturer readers. Those who were once of that younger world still think “The Initials” one of the most captivating love stories ever written; and they feel something of the old pride in it which they felt when it was a mark of taste and refinement to like it.