Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  There was an awkward pause. The lady passengers moved closer to each other; the Washoe husband looked abstractedly at the fire; and the tall man apparently turned his eyes inward for self-support at this emergency. But Miggles’s laugh, which was very infectious, broke the silence. ‘Come,’ she said, briskly, ‘you must be hungry. Who’ll bear a hand to help me get tea?’”

  The literary epoch of Miggles is early traceable in certain little touches. She is of that romanticistic generation which Mr. Harte himself has never outlived, and which we would hardly have him outlive. In her time good criminals abounded, and ladies with pasts were of a present behavior so self-devoted that they could often put their unerring sisters to the blush. They are rarer, now, and even on the stage their histories seem rather more to characterize them; but one likes to believe that there are Miggleses in the world, and life is often so illogical that it is not impossible.

  It is a case which we have to suppose, but we cannot complain of the terms in which Mr. Harte asks us to suppose it. They are amusing and they are touching, and according to the simple ethics of the period, they are even improving. When it comes time for Miggles’s involuntary and unexpected guests to seek such rest as they may find under her roof, she shows the ladies into the one other room, which imaginably their propriety makes too hot for their hostess. At any rate she soon reappears in the midst of an animated debate concerning her history among the men.

  “But not, apparently, the same Miggles who a few hours before had flashed upon us. Her eyes were downcast, and as she hesitated for a moment on the threshold with a blanket on her arm, she seemed to have left behind her the frank fearlessness which had charmed us a moment before. Coming into the room, she drew a low stool beside the paralytic’s chair, sat down, drew the blanket over her shoulders, and saying, ‘If it’s all the same to you, boys, as we’re rather crowded, I’ll stop here to-night,’ took the invalid’s withered hand in her own, and turned her eyes upon the dying fire. An instinctive feeling that this was only premonitory to more confidential relations, and perhaps some shame at our previous curiosity, kept us silent. The rain still beat upon the roof, wandering gusts of wind stirred the embers into momentary brightness, until, in a lull of the elements, Miggles suddenly lifted up her head, and, throwing her hair over her shoulder, turned her face upon the group and asked, ‘Is there any of you that knows me?’ There was no reply. ‘Think again! I lived at Marysville in ‘53. Everybody knew me there, and everybody had the right to know me. I kept the Polka Saloon until I came to live with Jim. That’s six years ago. Perhaps I’ve changed some.’ The absence of recognition may have disconcerted her. She turned her head to the fire again, and it was some seconds before she again spoke, and then more rapidly: ‘Well, you see I thought some of you must have known me. There’s no great harm done, any way. What I was going to say was this: Jim here’ — she took his hand in both of hers as she spoke—’ used to know me, if you didn’t, and spent a heap of money upon me. I reckon he spent all he had. And one day — it’s six years ago this winter — Jim came into my back room, sat down on my sofy, like as you see him in that chair, and never moved again without help. He was struck all of a heap, and never seemed to know what ailed him. The doctors came and said as how it was caused all along of his way of life, — for Jim was mighty free and wild like, — and that he would never get better, and couldn’t last long any way. They advised me to send him to Frisco to the hospital, for he was no good to any one and would be a baby all his life. Perhaps it was something in Jim’s eye, perhaps it was that I never had a baby, but I said “No.” I was rich then, for I was popular with everybody, — gentlemen like yourself, sir, came to see me, — and I sold out my business and bought this yer place, because it was sort of out of the way of travel, you see, and I brought my baby here.’ With a woman’s intuitive tact and poetry, she had, as she spoke, slowly shifted her position so as to bring the mute figure of the ruined man between her and her audience, hiding in the shadow behind it, as if she offered it as a tacit apology for her actions.... Hidden in the darkness, but still holding his hand, she went on: — ... ‘The folks about here are very kind,’ said Miggles, after a pause, coming a tittle into the tight again. ‘The men from the fork used to hang around here, until they found they wasn’t wanted, and the women are kind, — and don’t call....

  And Jim here,’ said Miggles, with her old laugh again, and coming quite out into the firelight, ‘Jim — why, boys, you would admire to see how much he knows for a man like him. Sometimes I bring him flowers, and he looks at ’em just as natural as if he knew ‘em; and times, when we’re sitting alone, I read him those things on the wall. Why, Lord!’ said Miggles, with her frank laugh, ‘I’ve read him that whole side of the house this winter. There never was such a man for reading as Jim.’ ‘Why,’ asked the Judge, ‘do you not marry this man to whom you have devoted your youthful life?’ ‘Weil, you see,’ said Miggles, ‘it would be playing it rather low down on Jim to take advantage of his being so helpless. And then, too, if we were man and wife, now, we’d both know that I was bound to do what I do now of my own accord.’ ‘But you are young yet and attractive.’ ‘It’s getting late,’ said Miggles, gravely, ‘and you’d better all turn in. Good-night, boys;’ and throwing the blanket over her head, Miggles laid herself down beside Jim’s chair, her head pillowed on the low stool that held his feet, and spoke no more. The fire slowly faded from the hearth; we each sought our blankets in silence; and presently there was no sound in the long room but the pattering of the rain upon the roof, and the heavy breathing of the sleepers.”

  II

  Of course, in a certain way, no heroine has ever been. The whole entrancing race exists only by an agreement between author and reader; and if the personality imagined is pleasing the author may make his own terms with the reader. But he had better not push the reader too far; the reader’s credulity is great, but it is possible to exhaust it, and for that reason, many heroines of the past, who were impossibly or exorbitantly conditioneid, have ceased to be. They were of a fashion, or of a mood of feeling, and the fashion or the mood has changed. Once we accepted such heroines as Miggles because they were the fashion, but now we can accept them no longer because they are not the fashion. The great matter for the author who will have his heroine last in the reader’s fancy is to condition her so that to any mood she shall be easily imaginable, and one has not to recur to some outworn humor in order to imagine her. Then he may tell us what he will of her; he may say not only that she no longer lives, but that she never lived; still, we rehabilitate her and she lives on.

  Mr. T. B. Aldrich went to this length in the case of his Marjorie Daw. She, so far as I know, is the only heroine in the whole range of fiction who perishes under the hand of her creator; yet she does not pass, but continues vividly present in the reader’s consciousness.

  The first effect of the brilliant sketch in which she has her being is that of irreparable loss, but this is not the last effect; one has a personal grief in learning that Marjorie Daw never existed save in the fancy of the fancied narrator; she does not survive in that tacit make-believe of author and reader which is the convention of fiction; she is destroyed, yet she persists, and haunts the memory with an immortal loveliness.

  “Sometimes in the morning, and oftener in the afternoon, when the sun has withdrawn from that part of the mansion a young woman appears on the piazza with some Penelope web of embroidery in her hand, or a book. There is a hammock over there — of pineapple fibre, it looks from here. A hammock is very becoming when one is eighteen, and has golden hair, and dark eyes, and an emerald-colored illusion dress looped up after the fashion of a Dresden china shepherdess, and is chaussée like a belle of the time of Louis Quatorze. All this splendor goes into that hammock and sways there like a pond-lily in the golden afternoon,”

  The girl is invented, it will be remembered, out of the air, to amuse the intolerable leisure of a young fellow laid up with a broken leg, and the friend who invents her
becomes gradually so interested in her characterization and the sick man’s infatuation with her that he constructs a personality quite as appreciable to the reader. She swings in the hammock and reads; she plays croquet; she listens sympathetically to her friend’s accounts of the invalid; she surprises herself in a dawning passion for the sufferer; and then she is locked up by her irascible old father. It is at this point that John Fleming, having impatiently reduced the correspondence with Edward Delaney from letters to telegrams, bursts all restraints, and flies to the supposed habitat of the heroine, to find that there is no such heroine, no such house, and no such hammock, as Edward Delaney’s too creative powers have invented.

  It is a bewitching little romance, almost of the miniature dimensions of a conceit, but it is as filling to the reader as most long novels, and is of an abiding flavor piquant beyond that of any but a very few. In fact, Marjorie Daw, who, by the remorseful confession of her supposed inventor, has never lived, has outlived myriads of heroines whose reality has never been impeached by their authors.

  MR. G. W. CABLE’S AURORA AND CLOTILDE NANCANOU

  THE heroines of Mr. Cable’s admirable novel, “ The Grandissimes,” could be proved, at least to the satisfaction of their present elderly adorer, easily first among the imaginary ladies with whose sweetness novelists have enriched and enlarged our acquaintance. But I should feel that I had neglected a prior claim if, before speaking of them, I did not pay my duty to the type of heroine who illumines with her pale, wild-rose beauty the sylvan scenes of Miss Murfree’s mountain stories, and who was fully developed while the pseudonym of Charles Egbert Craddock still veiled the identity of the author. It is a type varied according to circumstance, into this character and that, but primarily a type and not a character, and so no doubt more responsive to the social and personal facts from which it was evolved; a sad, shy, almost elusive presence in the savage rudeness of the environment. Sometimes a daughter, sometimes a young wife, sometimes a sweetheart, this heroine is always the same temperamentally, with a sort of martyr-grace and angelic innocence that touch the heart to pity rather than passion, and keep the memory constant to an ideal of womanhood as true and beautiful as any conceived in fiction. Whatever the fortune of the author’s work shall be, no critic can hereafter recur to the art of her time and not feel the importance of her contribution to it in this type, if in nothing else. After the conditions shall have long passed away it will remain to testify of the conditions, for it could have been possible only in them, and could have evolved its wistful loveliness only among their contrasts.

  I

  I am not going to urge the right of Mr. Cable to lead the Southern writers who have done such notable work in fiction since the Civil War. There may very well be two opinions as to that, and it is quite sufficient for my purpose here that the reader should agree with me concerning the positive excellence of “The Grandissimes,” That seems to me one of the few American fictions which one can think of without feeling the need of forbearance; or without wishing, in the interest of common honesty, strongly to qualify one’s praises of it. Ample, yet shapely, picturesque in time and place, but essentially faithful to the facts of both, romantic in character but realistic in characterization, it abounds in varieties and contrasts of life mellowed but not blurred in the past to which they are attributed. Without accusing the author of slighting any of the rich possibilities of such an historic moment as that of the cession of Louisiana to the United States by France, and the union of the old province with the new nation against the prejudices of nearly all the native population, one may note that the political situation is subordinated to the social and personal interests, and the dark presence of slavery itself is perceptible not in any studied attitude, but in the casual effects of character among the Creole masters and the Creole slaves.

  It is well known that the author’s presentation of this character dissatisfied (to use a word of negative import for the expression of a positive resentment) the descendants of the Creole masters at least, who fancied their race caricatured in the picture. But the fact only testified to the outside spectator of the extreme difficulty, the impossibility, indeed, of satisfying any people with any portraiture by an alien hand. To such a spectator Mr. Cable’s studies of Creole character in his New Orleans of the early nineteenth century seem affectionately, almost fondly, appreciative, and they convince of their justice by that internal evidence which it is as hard to corroborate as to overthrow. No dearer or delightfuller figures have been presented by the observer of an alien race and religion than Mr. Cable has offered in Aurora and Clotilde Nancanou, and in none does the artist seem to have penetrated more sympathetically the civilization, so unlike his own, which animated them with a witchery so diverse yet so equal. Without blaming his Creole critics, one wonders what would have satisfied them if they are not content with the vivid and lawless caprice of Aurora, the demure, conscientious, protesting fascination of Clotilde.

  In this mother and daughter the parental and filial relations are inverted with courageous fidelity to life, where we as often see a judicious daughter holding an impulsive mother in check as the reverse. Clotilde is always shocked and troubled by her mother’s wilful rashness, and Aurora, who is not so very much her senior, is always breaking bounds with a girlish impetuosity, which is only aggravated by the attempt to restrain it. These lovely ladies, who are in their way ladies to their finger-tips, and are as gentle in breeding as they are simple in circumstance, shine to each other’s advantage in the situations which contrast them; and it is in such situations that they are mostly seen. One such situation fixed itself in my mind at a first reading, and has remained there unfaded during the twenty years that have since elapsed, though I will not deny that I have several times refreshed my original sense of it. The reader who knows the book will not have forgotten the passage descriptive of Sieur Frowenfeld’s call upon the ladies in their little house, when Clotilde and he try to ignore their unspoken love for each other in a sober discussion of the Creole’s peculiarities, and Aurora, from whom their passion is of course less hidden than from themselves, dashes irrelevantly into the conversation from time to time, and turns the train of Frowenfeld’s ideas topsy-turvy. It is all done with a delicacy, a gracious tenderness, enhanced by the author’s sensitive rendering of the Creole ladies’ accents in the English which they employ with the English-speaking young German pharmacist; but one despairs in quoting it, knowing that the quaint beauty of the characterization can be only suggested in such a fragment.

  “The ladies were at home. Aurora herself opened the door, and Clotilde came forward from the bright fire-place with a cordiality never before so unqualified. There was something about these ladies — in their simple but noble grace, in their half-Gallic, half-classic beauty, in a jocund buoyancy mated to an amiable dignity — that made them appear to the scholar as though they had just bounded into life from the garlanded procession of some old fresco. The resemblance was not a little helped on by the costume of the late Revolution (most acceptably chastened and belated by the distance from Paris). Their black hair, somewhat heavier on Clotilde’s head, where it rippled once or twice, was knotted Grecque, and adorned only with the spoils of a nosegay given to Clotilde by a chivalric small boy in the home of her music scholar. ‘We was expectin’ you since several days,’ said Clotilde, as the three sat down before the fire, Frowenfeld in a cushioned chair whose moth-holes had been carefully darned.... And, a few moments later, the apothecary and both ladies (the one as fond of the abstract as the other two were ignorant of the concrete) were engaged in an animated, running discussion on art, society, climate, education.... Frowenfeld had never before spent such an hour. At its expiration he had so well held his own against both the others that the three had settled down to this sort of entertainment: Aurora would make an assertion, or Clotilde would ask a question; and Frowenfeld would present his opinions without the thought of a reservation either in himself or his hearers. On their part, they would sit in deep atte
ntion, shielding their faces from the fire, and responding to enunciations directly contrary to their convictions with an occasional ‘yes-seh,’ or ‘ceddenly,’ or ‘of coze,’ or — prettier affirmation still — a solemn drooping of the eyelids, a slight compression of the lips, and a low, slow declination of the head. ‘The bane of all Creole art-effort’ — (we take up the apothecary’s words at a point where Clotilde was leaning forward and slightly frowning in an honest attempt to comprehend his condensed English)— ‘the bane of all Creole art-effort, so far as I have seen it, is amateurism.’ ‘ Amateu—’ murmured Clotilde, a little beclouded on the main word and distracted by a French difference of meaning, but planting an elbow on one knee in the genuineness of her attention, and responding with a bow.... ‘That is to say,’ said Frowenfeld, apologizing for the homeliness of his further explanation by a smile, ‘a kind of ambitious indolence that lays very large eggs, but can neither see the necessity for building a nest beforehand, nor command the patience to hatch the eggs afterward.’ ‘Of coze,’ said Aurora. ‘It is a great pity,’ said the sermonizer, looking at the face of Clotilde, elongated in the brass andiron, and, after a pause: ‘Nothing on earth can take the place of hard and patient labor. But that, in this community, is not esteemed; most sorts of it are contemned; the humbler sorts are despised, and the higher are regarded with mingled patronage and commiseration,’... ‘Doze Creole’ is lezzy,’ said Aurora. ‘That is a hard word to apply to those who do not consciously deserve it,’ said Frowenfeld; ‘but if they could only wake up to the fact — find it out themselves—’ ‘Ceddenly,’ said Clotilde. “Sieur Frowenfel’,’ said Aurora, leaning her hand on her side, ‘some pipple thing it is doze climade; ‘ow you lag doze climade?’ ‘I do not suppose,’ replied the visitor, ‘there is a more delightful climate in the world.’ ‘ Ah-h-h! ‘ — both ladies at once, in a low, gracious tone of acknowledgment. ‘I thing Louisiana is a paradize — me l’ said Aurora. ‘W’ere you gain’ fin’ sudge a h-air?’ She respired a sample of it. ‘W’ere you goin’ fin’ sudge a so ridge groun’? De weed’ in my bag yard is twenny-five feet ‘igh!’ ‘Ah! maman!’ ‘Twenty-six!’said Aurora, correcting herself.... ‘Yes,’ he said, breaking a contemplative pause, ‘the climate is too comfortable and the soil too rich, — though I do not think it is entirely on their account that the people who enjoy them are so sadly in arrears to the civilized world.’ He blushed with the fear that his talk was bookish, and felt grateful to Clotilde for seeming to understand his speech. ‘W’ad you fin’ de rizzon is, ‘Sieur Frowenfel’?’ she asked. ‘I do not wish to philosophize,’ he answered. ‘Mais, go hon.’ ‘Mais, go ahade,’ said both ladies, settling themselves. ‘It is largely owing,’ exclaimed Frowenfeld, with sudden fervor, ‘to a defective organization of society, which keeps this community, and will continue to keep it for an indefinite time to come, entirely unprepared and disinclined to follow the course of modern thought’ ‘Of coze,’ murmured Aurora, who had lost her bearings almost at the first word.”