Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Before the end of the day, her mother has evasively appeared and been unwillingly made acquainted with her daughter’s unknown friend, whom the girl has already easily made invite her to go with him to see the castle of Chillon. The mother is not surprised, that evening, in the same garden, when Daisy tells him she wishes he would take her a row on the lake. Mrs. Miller sees no social objection, but suggests, “I should think you had better find out what time it is.” The courier, however, who has arrived to announce that Randolph has gone to bed, ventures to interpose. “‘I suppose you don’t think it’s proper!’ Daisy exclaimed.... ‘Oh, I hoped you would make a fuss. I don’t care to go, now.’ ‘I myself shall make a fuss if you don’t go,’ said Winterbourne. ‘That’s all I want — a fuss,’ and the young girl began to laugh again.... Daisy turned away from Winter bourne, looking at him, smiling, and fanning herself. ‘Good-night,’ she said, ‘I hope you are disappointed, or disgusted, or something!’ He looked at her, taking the hand she offered. ‘I am puzzled,’ he answered. ‘Well, I hope it won’t keep you awake.’”

  I should not know where else to find the witless purposelessness — beyond the moment’s excitement and the pleasure of bewildering a young man — in much of a girl’s behavior more sufficiently yet more sparingly suggestive than in these admirable passages. The girl is a little fool, of course, but while her youth lasts she is an angelic, a divine fool, with caprices that have the quality of inspirations. She behaves at Vevey with Winterbourne, “a real American,” as she would have done with a “gentleman friend” at Schenectady, but when he sees her next at Rome he finds her behaving with Italians as if they, too, were “gentlemen friends” at Schenectady. He meets her at the house of a Europeanized American lady who would fain Europeanize Daisy enough at least to save her from scandal. “Daisy was exchanging greetings very prettily with her hostess; but when she heard Winterbourne’s voice she quickly turned her head. ‘Well, I declare!’ she said. ‘I told you I should come,’ Winterbourne rejoined smiling. ‘Well, I didn’t believe it,’ said Miss Daisy.... ‘You might have come to see me!’ ‘I arrived only yesterday.’ ‘I don’t believe that,’ the young girl declared.... ‘Why, you were awfully mean at Vevey. You wouldn’t do anything. You wouldn’t stay there when I asked you.’ ‘My dearest young lady,’ cried Winterbourne with eloquence, ‘have I come all the way to Rome to encounter your reproaches?’ ‘Just hear him say that!’ said Daisy, giving a twist to a bow on Mrs. Walker’s dress. ‘Did you ever hear anything so quaint?’ ‘So quaint, my dear?’ murmured Mrs. Walker, in the tone of a partisan of Winterbourne. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Daisy, fingering Mrs. Walker’s ribbons. ‘Mrs. Walker, I want to tell you something!... You know I’m coming to your party.... But I want your permission to bring a friend.... It’s an intimate friend of mine — Mr. Giovanelli,’ said Daisy, without a tremor in her clear little voice, or a shadow on her brilliant little face.... ‘He’s an Italian;... he’s the handsomest man in the world except Mr. Winterbourne!... He thinks ever so much of Americans. He’s tremendously clever. He’s perfectly lovely! ‘“

  The afternoon before the party Mrs. Walker and Winterbourne find Daisy walking on the Pincio, at the supreme hour of the promenade, with Giovanelli, quite as she would have been with a “gentleman friend” at home. Mrs. Walker wants her to leave him and get into her carriage, but Daisy thinks it would disappoint and wound him, and she will not do that. In the evening she comes to the party long after her mother has appeared, and comes alone with Giovanelli, as she might with a “gentleman friend” in Schenectady. When she goes up to take leave of her hostess, Mrs. Walker turns her back on her. It is the beginning of the end, in which all society turns its back on Daisy.

  Winterbourne sees her for the last time in the Colosseum at midnight, alone with Giovanelli. “‘How long have you been here?’ he asked almost brutally. Daisy, lovely in the flattering moonlight, looked at him a moment Then, ‘All the evening,’ she answered, gently. ‘I never saw anything so pretty,’ ‘I am afraid that you will not think Roman fever very pretty. This is the way people catch it,’... ‘I never was sick,’ the girl declared. ‘I don’t look like much, but I’m healthy! I was bound to see the Colosseum by moonlight; I shouldn’t have wanted to go home without that; and we’ve had the most beautiful time, haven’t we, Mr. Giovanelli?’... ‘I should advise you,’ said Winterbourne, ‘to drive home as fast as possible.’ ‘What you say is very wise,’ Giovanelli rejoined. ‘I will go and make sure that the carriage is at hand.’...

  Daisy followed with Winterbourne. He kept looking at her; she seemed not the least embarrassed....

  Then noticing his silence, she asked him why he did not speak.... He only began to laugh. They passed under one of the dark archways; Giovanelli was in front with the carriage. Here Daisy stopped a moment, looking at the young American. ‘you believe, the other day, I was engaged?’... ‘I believe it makes very little difference whether you are engaged or not!’ He felt the young girl’s pretty eyes fixed upon him through the thick gloom of the archway.... ‘I don’t care,’ said Daisy, in a little strange tone, ‘whether I have the Roman fever or not. ‘“ In her delirium she entreats her mother to tell Winterbourne that she never was engaged to Giovanelli. After her death he finds himself alone with the Italian by her grave. “He seemed to wish to say something. At last he said, ‘She was the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable,’ and then he added, ‘and she was the most innocent. ‘“

  VI

  The perfection of the workmanship in this little book could not be represented without an apparent exaggeration which would wrong its scrupulous but most sufficient expression. If no word could be spared without in some degree spoiling it, none could be added without cumbering its beauty with a vain decoration. To quote from it at all is to wish to quote it all; and one resigns one’s self the more easily to the impossibility of giving a notion of the perfection of the performance in view of the impossibility of imparting a due sense, at second hand, of the loveliness and truth of the conception.

  The reader must go to the book for both, and when he has read it I think he will agree with me that never was any civilization offered a more precious tribute than that which a great artist paid ours in the character of Daisy Miller. But our civilization could not imagine the sincerity in which the tribute was offered. It could not realize that Daisy Miller was presented in her divine innocence, her inextinguishable trust in herself and others, as the supreme effect of the American attitude toward womanhood. The American man might have suffered her — perhaps more than suffered her; pitied her; adored her even — but the American woman would none of her. She fancied in the poor girl a libel of her nationality, almost a libel of her sex, and failed to seize her wilding charm, her flowerlike purity. The American woman would none of Daisy Miller, not because the American woman was ungracious or ungrateful, but because she was too jealous of her own perfection to allow that innocence might be reckless, and angels in their ignorance of evil might not behave as discreetly as worse people.

  MR. THOMAS HARDY’S HEROINES

  IF I restrict myself somewhat in the space given to Mr.

  Hardy’s heroines and seem scantly to treat of them in a paper or two, it is not because I value them less than the heroines of some novelists with whom I have allowed myself a wider range. But I am sensible that with all their witchery they are of a sisterhood, or at the most a cousinhood, which may be more typically represented, and that with their strong individual characters there is a strong family likeness among them all which may be suggested in the figures and actions of a few.

  I

  I recall distinctly the order of my acquaintance with these lovely, if somewhat elusive, somewhat illusive ladies. It began with Elfride Swancourt in “A Pair of Blue Eyes,” who revealed to me a fresh conception of the ever-womanly, and in whose fate passion and caprice, comedy and tragedy were so strangely mingled that one remembers her with a sigh that is half a smile and an adoration that
rather slights its idol. She remained somehow exterior both to what she suffered and to what she did; it happened to her, or from her, but she did not seem responsible for it. Fancy Dare in “Under the Greenwood Tree “ was morally more trammelled both in the cause and consequence. Yet she, too, was warped along by the toils of fate rather than moved by her own will; and in fact most of the women of Mr. Hardy could urge that they had to do the things they did, even when they wished to do them. This was not quite so much the case with Bathsheba Everdene, in “ Far from the Madding Crowd,” as with some others. She, for a Hardy heroine, had a degree of control over her destiny which might almost be called freewill; at least she was not so much the prey of determinism as most of the others. It is true that she yields to a sort of fascination in Sargeant Troy, but only as all women in love do; she no more keeps her head than she keeps her heart in the mistaken marriage she makes. She has a powerful will, which does not avail her so much in the great as in the little things, and she has a sturdy common-sense of pretty much the same effect. Yet she is, upon the whole, the least wrought upon by her environment, and the most absolute of her sisterhood. The larger part of these are self-willed rather than strong-willed, as is eminently the case with Paula Power, in “The Laodicean.” That is not nearly so great a novel as “Far from the Madding Crowd,” but it is of a peculiar charm because it is the full expression of the sort of feminine personality which will bewitch men as long as the shifty graces of a weather-vane more take their fancy in women than the steadfast virtues of the sky-pointing steeple. Each worshipper hopes that somehow the vane when it turns in his favor will stand still there, and in fact this is what commonly happens first or last. Paula Power veered with most winds that blew, but while her purposes shifted her fancy was fixed in the young architect who had caught it, and who kept it, in spite of all her turning.

  She was more nearly a society person than Mr. Hardy commonly paints, and had less of primitive earthiness than almost any of his heroines. In that terrible “Group of Noble Dames” with whom he makes us acquainted in a series of wonderful histories the tellular quality of their natures is so much more appreciable than even the mundane, that they seem beings emancipated by their potent caprices and propensities from all the social obligations, and are not so much grandes dames as predatory creatures set by their caste above the moral law.

  Mr. Hardy’s heroines are good or they are bad, or they are now good and now bad, according to some inner impulse from some agency deeper or more primal than conscience. When they feel the pull of the moral law, they yield it a partial and provisional allegiance, as Fancy Dare does in “Under the Greenwood Tree,” when she finds herself so differently in love with the vicar and with Dick the tranter that she is unable to reconcile the conflicting passions and acquires what merit she can by frankly owning the fact to the vicar and renouncing him; or as the pretty widow in “The Distracted Young Preacher,” who acknowledges the error of smuggling, but sees some excuse for herself and her neighbors in the fact they “ only do it in the winter.” Perhaps we may best define the sort of woman this novelist places before us so livingly that we cannot doubt their reality by a process of exclusion in which we need not go farther than to say that they are wholly unlike American women. They are of the same stock racially, but ours are of a graft upon the parent stem so different that the two varieties of fruit are as little related as plums and apricots. In the Hardy lower-class heroines we see the primitive Englishwoman before she was touched by Puritanism, and in his middle and upper class heroines the same woman as she has grown into modem civilization unaffected by the tremendous force which has permeated and moulded the nature of the American great-great-grandnieces of that original Englishwoman. I have often wondered what character untouched by Puritanism was like, and I have fancied that in the Hardy heroines I have seen; and if I cannot altogether approve of it, I can own its charm, as I can willingly acknowledge the ugliness and error and soul-sickness which Puritanism produced in building up our intensely personalized American conscience. If we take the case even of such a character as Sue Brodhead in “Jude,” with her hysterically exaggerated impulses toward what her conscience bids her do, we have the nervous impressibility of the Puritanized woman, but we are made finely aware that it is the like effect of wholly different causes. It is the ecclesiasticized conscience which works in this English girl, not the personalized conscience which would drive a like American girl to the same frenetic extremes.

  Oddly enough, as the reader will perhaps think, I am inclined to regard Ethelberta in “The Hand of Ethelberta” as one of the highest-minded of Mr. Hardy’s women. At least she is one of those least swayed by passion, and of a mind the least darkened by exhalations from those dregs of pagan earthiness which lie at the base of his woman’s natures. She is quite unselfish, and her ambition is for her family and the advancement of its modest fortunes. When the employment of her unique gift as a public story-teller makes it advisable for her to establish herself in London, and she takes a house there, with her brother for a page, one sister for cook and the other for housemaid, and her mother for a sort of upper servant, they all understand that it is for their good and not for her glory, and they acquiesce with the affection for her which she feels for them, and which she never fails to show on proper occasion. Dinner in a nobleman’s house where her father the butler waits behind her chair while she figures as the celebrity of the hour is not a proper occasion, and she reserves the display of her filial love for the meetings with her father behind her own doors. Even in the case of her young lover, whom she gives up for the bad-natured but good-humored old lord whom she marries, she has never been so much in love with him but she was willing to get him for her sister Picotee; and when she finds out how very wicked her amiable old lord is she does her best to escape from him; being prevented, she remains and reforms him.

  The scheme is the most fantastic of Mr. Hardy’s plots; but it must be owned it is delightful, and Ethelberta is one of the most delightful as well as one of the most respectable of his heroines. She is not quite candid, but, as I said, she is very unselfish, and I do not know that she has her moral superior in his fiction except Anne Garland, in “ The Trumpet Major,” or a pensive figure like Grace Melbury, in “The Woodlanders.” Anne is the sweetest and freshest of his girls, and is of that level of life on which his muse seems to find herself most at home; she is above the lowest, but not so high as to tempt the author aside from her character to the complications of her social environment, which is, indeed, very simple. She is quite, though rather passively, constant to a lover who is rather actively inconstant but finally true to the young fancy they have had for each other; and she is (I hazard the notion) innately perhaps the most ladylike of Mr. Hardy’s creations.

  One heart-breaking presence among these I could not ignore without accusing myself of insensibility, and yet I cannot name Tess, in “ Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” without a feeling of imperfection in the handling of her character which I might not be able to make apparent I do not know that I wish to make it apparent, and I will only say that, profoundly pathetic as she is, Tess seems to me wanting in unity. She seems the effect of two successive impulses of the author’s imagination. In the first part of the story she is one Tess, whom the other Tess in the last part does not so much grow out of as seem, joined to. They are halves of two figurines found in the same soil, and compact of the same clay, not belonging originally together, but joined by voluntary and conscious skill. I have owned that it would be difficult to prove this, and I shall not be hurt if the reader does not agree with me, or throws things at me in defence of one of the most pathetic heroines of fiction.

  Yet I am inclined to hold to my opinion, and I will ask any irate differer to compare her evolution with that of Eustacia Vye, for instance, in “The Return of the Native.” Poor Eustacia, with her sordid ambition and her selfish dreams of happiness, her selfish ideals of love, and her essential cold-heartedness in spite of her warm-bloodedness, is one to command th
e least respect among a generation of ladies who all command one’s amused liking rather than one’s respect — unless, indeed, it be that heroine of “ The Mayor of Casterbridge “ whom I shadowily remember as possibly shadier still, but whom I cannot recall by name.

  II

  Eustacia Vye is one of those natures whose social evolution interests you so little that you do not care how vaguely it is suggested. We first find her in her grandfather’s house on Egdon Heath, of which she is very fit to be the tutelary spirit, though she alone among the characters is not native to it, and has an ideal of life wholly alien to the wild and simple and solemn place. She longs for excitement, and for worldly triumphs and artificial splendors, and at Egdon she has only a lover whom she cannot marry, and another whom, having married, she wearies of, though he is good and fine, and above her in everything but ambition. It is seldom that an author presents a heroine so palpably as Eustacia is shown in these richly descriptive passages.

  “Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess — that is, those which make not quite a model woman.... She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow. It closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow. Her nerves extended into those tresses, and her temper could always be softened by stroking them down. When her hair was brushed she would instantly sink into stillness and look like the Sphinx. She had pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries. Their light, as it came and went, and came again, was partially hampered by their oppressive lids and lashes; and of these the under lid was much fuller than it usually is with English women. This enabled her to indulge in reverie without seeming to do so; she might have been believed capable of sleeping without closing them up.... The mouth seemed formed less to speak than to quiver, less to quiver than to kiss. Some might have added, less to kiss than to curl.... One had fancied that such lip-curves were mostly lurking underground in the South as fragments of forgotten marbles. So fine were the lines of her lips that, though full, each corner of her mouth was as clearly cut as the point of a spear. This keenness of corner was only blunted when she was given over to sudden fits of gloom, one of the phases of the night-side of sentiment which she knew too well for her years.” In this portrait the whole passionately selfish drama of the woman is suggested. Wildeve, a strange, lawless earth-spirit of like generation, trifles with her love, and her fancy wanders from him to Clym Yeobright, who returns from Paris, and settles down on the Heath, after his eyesight is threatened, as a furze-cutter. She does not mean to let him stay there, but to make him take her to Paris, or out into the world somewhere; and from time to time she sees Wildeve, after her marriage to Clym Yeobright, and at last elopes with him, and they are drowned together in the weir.