Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Mr. Hardy loves to keep close to nature in all his novels, but in none do we feel the breath of the earth as in this. The story keeps to the circuit of the lonely heath, with its few farms and hamlets; and much of it befalls by night, as suits the dusky soul of the heroine. A very significant bit, as regards her, and very characteristic as regards the courageous humor of the author, is that passage in which she keeps her bargain with the simple-hearted country boy who lends her his costume for a masquerading adventure on condition that she will let him hold her hand for a quarter of an hour.

  “The next evening Eustacia stood punctually at the fuel-house door, waiting for the dusk which was to bring Charley with the trappings.... He appeared on the dark ridge of heathland.... ‘Here are the things,’ he whispered, placing them upon the threshold. ‘And now, Miss Eustacia—’

  ‘The payment. It is quite ready. I am as good as my word.’ She leaned against the door-post, and gave him her hand. Charley took it in both his own with a tenderness beyond description, unless it was like that of a child holding a captured sparrow.’ Why, there’s a glove on it!’ he said, in a deprecating way. ‘I have been walking,’ she observed. ‘But, miss!’ ‘Well — it is hardly fair,’ She pulled off the glove, and gave him her bare hand. They stood together without further speech, each looking at the blackening scene, and each thinking his and her own thoughts. ‘I think I won’t use it all up to-night,’ said Charley, when six or eight minutes had been passed by them hand-in-hand. ‘May I have the other few minutes another time?’ ‘As you like,’ said she without the least emotion. ‘But it must be over in a week. Now, there is only one thing I want you to do: to wait while I put on the dress, and then to see if I do my part properly. But let me look first indoors,’ She vanished for a minute or two, and went in. Her grandfather was safely asleep in his chair. ‘Now, then,’ she said, on returning, ‘walk down the garden a little way, and when I am ready I’ll call you,’ Charley walked and waited, and presently heard a soft whistle. He returned to the fuel-house door.... She struck the light, revealing herself to be changed in sex, brilliant in colors, and armed from top to toe. Perhaps she quailed a little under Charley’s vigorous gaze, but whether any shyness appeared upon her countenance could not be seen by reason of the strips of ribbon which used to cover the face in mumming costumes, representing the barred visor of the mediaeval helmet. ‘It fits pretty well,’ she said, looking down at the white overalls, ‘except that the tunic, or whatever you call it, is long in the sleeve. The bottom of the overalls I can turn up inside.... Now you may leave me.’

  ‘Yes, miss. But I think I’ll have one minute more of what I am owed, if you don’t mind.’ Eustacia gave him her hand as before. ‘One minute,’ she said, and at about the proper interval counted on till she reached seven or eight. Hand and person she then withdrew to a distance of several feet, and recovered some of her old dignity. The contract completed, she raised between them a barrier impenetrable as a wall ‘There, ’tis all gone; and I didn’t mean quite all,’ he said, with a sigh.”

  A whimsical comedy in the neighboring heath-dwellers plays round the central tragedy, and gilds with its phosphorescent gayety the gloom of the whelming doom. When it has come to Eustacia’s feigning absence from home and letting her husband’s mother toil back to her own house through the mid-day heat that kills her, the end is already in view, for she has not opened her door because Wildeve is within. In the scene with her husband which follows, Eustacia’s peculiar nature is allowed to make itself felt in terms curiously wanting in dramatic intensity, but somehow adequate to the situation. He comes home early in the morning, and goes straight to her room. “ The noise of his arrival must have aroused her, for when he opened the door she was standing before the looking-glass in her nightdress, the ends of her hair gathered into one hand, with which she was coiling the whole mass round her head, previous to beginning toilette operations. She was not a woman given to speaking first at a meeting, and she allowed Clym to walk across in silence, without turning her head. He came behind her, and she saw his face in the glass. It was ashy, haggard, and terrible. Instead of starting towards him in sorrowful surprise, as even Eustacia, undemonstrative wife as she was, would have done in days before she burdened herself with a secret, she remained motionless, looking at him in the glass. And while she looked, the carmine flush with which warmth and sound sleep had suffused her cheeks and neck dissolved from view, and the deathlike pallor in his face flew across into hers. He was close enough to see this, and the sight instigated his tongue. ‘You know what is the matter,’ he said, huskily. ‘I see it in your face.’ Her hand relinquished the rope of hair and dropped to her side, and the pile of tresses, no longer supported, fell from the crown of her head about her shoulders and over the white nightgown in inky streams. She made no reply. ‘Speak to me,’ said Yeobright, peremptorily. The blanching process did not cease in her, and her lips now became as white as her face. One familiar with the stoic philosophy would have fancied that he saw the delicate tissue of her soul extricating itself from her body, and leaving it a simple heap of old clay. She turned to him and said, ‘Yes, Clym, I’ll speak to you. Why do you return so early? Can I do anything for you?’ ‘Yes, you can listen to me. It seems that my wife is not very well.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Your face, my dear; your face. Or perhaps it is the pale morning light which takes your color away? Now I am going to reveal a secret to you. Ha-ha!” Oh, that is ghastly! ‘ ‘What?’ ‘Your laugh.’ ‘There’s reason for ghastliness, Eustacia; you have held my happiness in the hollow of your hand, and like a devil you have dashed it down I ‘She started back from her dressing-table, retreated a few steps from him, and looked him in the face. ‘Ah! you think to frighten me,’ she said, with a slight laugh. ‘Is it worthwhile? I am undefended, and alone.’ ‘How extraordinary!’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘As there is ample time I will tell you, though you know well enough. I mean that it is extraordinary that you should be alone in my absence. Tell me, now, where is he who was with you on the afternoon of the thirty-first of August? Under the bed? Up the chimney?’ A shudder overcame her and shook the light fabric of her night-dress throughout. ‘I do not remember dates so exactly,’ she said. ‘I cannot recollect that anybody was with me besides yourself.’”

  Their quarrel ends in her leaving the house, and at last the reader’s heart almost turns to her in her self-pity, cruel and false as she has been.

  “‘Oh, oh, oh!’ she cried, breaking down at last; and, shaking with sobs which choked her, she sank upon her knees. ‘Oh, will you have done! Oh, you are too relentless — there’s a limit to the cruelty of savages! I have held out long — but you crush me down. I beg for mercy — I cannot bear this any longer — it is inhuman to go farther with this! If I had — killed your — mother with my own hand — I should not deserve such a scourging to the bone as this. Oh, oh! God have mercy upon a miserable woman!... You have beaten me in this game — I beg you to stay your hand in pity!... I am going from this house. We cannot both stay here.’ She hastily dressed herself, Yeobright moodily walking up and down the room the whole of the time. At last all her things were on. Her poor little hands quivered so violently as she held them to her chin to fasten her bonnet that she could not tie the strings, and after a few moments she relinquished the attempt. Seeing this, he moved forward and said, ‘Let me tie them.’ She assented in silence, and lifted her chin. For once at least in her life she was totally oblivious of the charm of her attitude. But he was not, and he turned his eyes aside, that he might not be tempted to softness.”

  III

  Elfride Swancourt, as compared with such an earthspirit as Eustacia Vye, is an air-spirit, but she is quite as strictly of this world. One has a greater tenderness for her, and realizes that in her love affairs, so swiftly successive as to be almost simultaneous, she is quite unselfish, or at least she seeks her happiness only in that of the man she loves. She suffers cruel rejection and punishment through Henry Knight, on whom her heart is truly set, because he th
inks her a flirt, and is retroactively jealous of the young architect Stephen Smith, and cannot understand how she might have had a fancy for another before she was fixed in her passion for himself. But she recovers from the blow sufficiently to marry Lord Luxellian, and the final pathos of her story is not for her heart-break, but for her early death. The pang of this is such that it is difficult to get back of the fact to that earlier consciousness of her, in which one could laugh when an older woman said of her that Elfride would talk like a philosopher but would behave like a robin in a greenhouse.

  This, indeed, was true of her mainly in minor matters of conduct; she was equal to the more heroic demands of life. There is a lovely honesty in her which mainly characterizes her in spite of much folly and heedless risk and downright defection. That is, she gives her fancy to Stephen Smith, and then she gives her heart to Henry Knight, without losing the reader’s respect; for people change, and one preference pushes out another without sin, though not without suffering. It is the hard lot of women that, though they cannot always inspire men with constancy, they so embody men’s highest ideal of it that they cannot change without violence to that ideal. They are therefore obliged to use finesse, when perhaps they would rather not, and try to seem unchanging even while they change.

  It was Elfride’s difficult problem to make Knight feel that she had never loved any one but him, while confronted in her own consciousness by the fact that in a different, if somewhat more ignorant way, she had at least very much liked being loved by Stephen Smith, if she had not loved him. She was really engaged to Smith when she met Knight, and she had somehow to get rid of the old love before reconciling herself to happiness in the new. The affair was possible in its subjective implications, but objectively it countered with the devoted and exacting passion of Knight, and ended badly.

  Nothing more prettily suggests this charming girl’s complexity of emotion and simplicity of action than a scene which will have remained in every reader’s memory; one of Mr. Hardy’s peculiarly audacious and intimate scenes. With Knight she has got over the face of a lofty seaward cliff, and when he finds it impossible to return to her he helps her to get back and remains clinging to a face of rock where his hold must give way in a few minutes. There is no time to run for help, and there is none at hand except in her own wit. “On a sudden,” we are told, “she vanished over the bank from his sight.” She was gone for what seemed to him an eternity, but when she reappeared he noticed, as he looked up at her, “ that in her arms she bore a bundle of white linen, and that her form was singularly attenuated. So preternaturally thin and flexible was Elfride at this moment that she appeared to bend under the light blows of the rain-shafts, as they struck into her sides and bosom, and splintered into spray on her face.... She sat down and hurriedly began rending the linen into strips. Those she knotted end to end, and afterwards twisted them like the strands of a cord. In a short space of time she had formed a perfect rope by this means, six or seven yards long. ‘Can you wait while I bind it?’ she said, anxiously extending her gaze down to him. Yes, if not very long. Hope has given me a wonderful instalment of strength.’ Elfride wound the lengthy string she had thus formed round and round the linen rope, which... was now firm in every part. ‘When you have let it down,’ said Knight, already resuming his position of ruling power, ‘go back from the edge of the slope, and over the bank as far as the rope will allow you. Then lean down, and hold the end with both hands,’...

  ‘I have tied it round my waist,’ she cried; ‘and I will lean directly upon the bank, holding with my hands as well,’ It was the arrangement he had thought of, but would not suggest. ‘I will raise and drop it three times when I am behind the bank,’ she continued, ‘to signify that I am ready. Take care, oh, take the greatest care, I beg of you!’... She dropped the rope over him to learn how much of its length it would be necessary to expend on that side of the bank, went back, and disappeared as she had done before. The rope was trailing by Knight’s shoulders. In a few moments it moved three times. He waited yet a second or two, then laid hold.... Half a dozen extensions of the arms, alternating with half a dozen seizures of the rope with his feet, brought him up to the level of the soil. He was saved, and sprang over the bank. At sight of him she leapt to her feet with almost a shriek of joy. Knight’s eyes met hers, and with supreme eloquence the glance of each told a long-concealed tale of emotion in that short half-moment. Moved by an impulse neither could resist, they ran together and into each other’s arms.... An overwhelming rush of exultation at having delivered the man she revered from one of the most terrible forms of death shook the gentle girl to the centre of her soul. It merged in a defiance of duty to Stephen, and a total recklessness as to plighted faith. Every nerve of her will was now in entire subjection to her feeling — volition as a guiding power had forsaken her. To remain passive, as she remained now, encircled by his arms, was a sufficiently complete result — a glorious crown to all the years of her life.... Elfride recovered herself, and gently struggled to be free. He reluctantly relinquished her, and then surveyed her from crown to toe. She seemed as small as an infant He perceived whence she had obtained the rope. ‘Elfride, my Elfride!’ he exclaimed in gratified amazement. ‘I must leave you now,’ she said, her face doubling its red, with an expression between gladness and shame. ‘You follow me, but at some distance,’... Behind the bank, while Knight reclined upon the dizzy slope waiting for death, she had taken off her whole clothing, and replaced only her outer robe and skirt Every thread of the remainder lay upon the ground in the form of a woollen and cotton rope.... She then ran off from him through the pelting rain like a hare; or more like a pheasant when, scampering away with a lowered tail, it has a mind to fly, but does not.”

  MR. THOMAS HARDY’S BATHSHEBA EVERDENE AND PAULA POWER

  EACH great novelist arrives at, rather than with, his own way of looking at life. When he begins to make himself known to us, he is not himself alone, but the masters also who have gone before him, and who gradually leave him to himself as he shows more and more his ultimate power. All this, which is true of all novelists, is less true of Mr. Hardy than almost any other. He seemed to come from nowhere in literature, to be without preoccupations or affinities: the effect perhaps of his training in an art which is one of the most objective, and the farthest in its immemorial simplicities from the manifold consciousnesses of the literary art. Before he was a novelist, he was an architect, and what clung to him from tradition or association was not some other man’s literary method or manner, but the habit of thinking, as it were in plastic terms, and of using words structurally. To be sure, when he first attracted criticism, people thought him like George Eliot, but it seems to me that this was a mistaken impression from their both dealing so largely with rustic life. The spirit of their respective dealing with it was not at all the same, and I do not think that Mr. Hardy’s way of looking at life of any level is like the way of any novelist before him. As nearly as I can put it to myself it is the vision of humanity, as little as possibly affected by those influences from without — religious and moral — which we anxiously enough mistake for impulses; it is the sense of das ding an sich, which we so rarely have had that we might say we never had it before. This is the first impression we have of life as Mr. Hardy shows it, but then we begin to perceive very gradually, but at last fully, how this primitive material is affected by experience, when the experience is vital, as most experience is not, and how it loses its original simplicity through experience and becomes a living soul. A vast number of the men and women in his novels never reach this development, but remain a part of mere nature like the cattle and poultry, the trees, the soil. They are delightful company just as these animate and inanimate things are. They are souls, and doubtless will live hereafter, but they are not living souls here and now; they are like

  — “sheep and goats

  That nourish a blind life within the brain,”

  Sometimes Mr. Hardy’s people pass through tremendous experiences, and se
em very little the more alive for them. A beautiful, perhaps a supreme, effort of his art is that his characters are in the last extreme of discovery impalpably veiled from your knowledge as people are whom you know best in the waking and working world. Something is still kept back — possibly for the final intimacies of another state of being.

  I

  Do we ever come thoroughly to know Bathsheba Everdene in “Far from the Madding Crowd”? No more, I fancy, than if we were of her most familiar acquaintance. We understand the workings of her mind, and feel their charm, but that ultimate reason of her being, for which imagination aches in vain, is the secret which is kept from the author himself. He is the greater power because of the reservation; if he could and would tell all, he would not be the master he is. And perhaps if he could explain her as exhaustively as we wish she would not be a woman. Our mystification, which continues to the end, begins with the first glimpses of Bathsheba which we share with her lover, Gabriel Oak.