Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  TWO HEROINES OF MARIA EDGEWORTH’S

  FEW figures in literary history appeal to the remembrance so pathetically as the author of “Evelina.” She had many trials which she bore with sweetness and patience; her blessings were mainly from her gift of being content with little, and of overprizing any kindness people did her, as if it were the effect of extraordinary virtue in them. Indeed, Fanny Burney was Evelina. She had not only written herself into the character of that heroine, but she had so thoroughly written herself out in it, that she seemed not to have had the stuff for another heroine left in her nature. Or, if this is going too far, it is certain that neither Cecilia nor Camilla makes herself remembered like Evelina as a real personality.

  I

  “Cecilia” was written while the author of “Evelina” was still Miss Burney, and before she entered the service of the Queen; “Camilla” was written long after she had left that service, and was published after she had become the wife of the émigré noble D’Arblay. In “Cecilia” she was not yet so overweighted by the fear and favor of the great Dr. Johnson that she wished to write her novels as he would have written them, and the language, if not quite the language of life, is often easy, gay, and natural. The mighty lexicographer was not to do his worst with her diction till many years later in “Camilla,” where he prevailed with an effect which the image of a fawn advancing with the gait of a hippopotamus feebly suggests, though in more vital things “Camilla” is far from a mistaken performance. All three of the Burney-D’Arblay novels are on the same ground. They have mainly to do with the London of rank and fashion, and the London of trade and vulgarity; but a good part of the action passes in the country, and another good part in the several English spas whose waters were then the mode, and whose pump-rooms are the scenes of so much love-making in contemporary fiction. But in both “Cecilia” and “Camilla,” the nominal heroines are of a less engaging, a less amusing quality. Cecilia is a girl of much more sense than Evelina; she has wit and she has beauty; and yet somehow she fails to take the heart as Evelina does. She moves in a world much more ascertained in its characteristics, through a much more ingenious intrigue. A cloud of genteel company at a dozen different places is suggested; vivid and amusing figures swarm in the pages of the novel. There are, indeed, only too many of them for remembrance, though probably no one who has met such a type of “agreeable rattle” as Miss Lerolle will have quite forgotten her; or her anti-type of supercilious passivity, Miss Leeson. That Lady Honoria who likes getting her father angry because he makes such funny faces and swears so divertingly when he is in a temper, is perhaps not so justifiably dear to the fancy; but she outlives most of the serious personages in the reader’s remembrance. In the handling of all, a sense of the author’s maturing art grows upon the critic; and in fact the “Cecilia” as a novel is as much superior to the “Evelina” which preceded it as it is to the “Camilla “which followed it.

  II

  It is always possible, of course, that “Evelina” might have eventuated in “Camilla,” even if the author had not spent five or six years, as the Queen’s tire-woman, in the narcotic neighborhood of royalty. The tendency which Richardson had given to the best English fiction, and which is so strongly felt in “The Vicar of Wakefield,’ might have persisted in Fanny Burney’s novels, and overweighted them at last, though she had remained in the world of literature, and looked on uninterruptedly at the world of fashion. Society was then so bad, not in its standards, but in its indifference to them, that all decent writers had it on their consciences to better it to their utmost by the force of imaginary examples. Fiction had not yet conceived of the supreme ethics which consist in portraying life truly and letting the lesson take care of itself. After a hundred years this conception is not yet very clear to many novelists, or, what is worse, to their critics; and the novel, to save itself alive from the contempt and abhorrence in which the most of good people once held it, had to be good in the fashion of the sermon rather than in the fashion of the drama. It felt its way slowly and painfully by heavy sloughs of didacticism and through dreary tracts of moral sentiment to the standing it now has, and we ought to look back at its flounderings, not with wonder that it floundered so long, but that it ever arrived. In fact, it did not flounder so very long, and it arrived at what is still almost an ideal perfection in the art of Jane Austen. But first it had to pass through the school of Maria Edgeworth, who was as severe a disciplinarian as ever the lighter-minded muses came under. They have long since had their revenge, poor things, and she has had to pay for her severity in the popular superstition which still prevails that she was all precept, all principle, all preaching. Nothing could be more mistaken, as any one may prove who will turn to her entertaining novels of English fashionable life, her faithful and sympathetic sketches of Irish character, high and low. It is known that Tourguênief, from his pleasure in her Irish stories, conceived the notion of making like studies of Russian conditions; that to this influence the world owes the “Notes of a Sportsman, “and that the Russian serfs, from the influence of that book with the Czar, finally owed their emancipation.

  Fame could have brought Maria Edgeworth’s noble spirit no sweeter consolation than such an event; she would have counted such an indirect effect of her work infinitely beyond the inspiration of such a consummate artist as Tourguénief, but her long life ended just before our century had reached its fiftieth year, and thirty years before the serfs were freed. She began author Well back in the eighteenth century, but she began novelist distinctly within the nineteenth. As her “Castle Rackrent “ appeared in 1801, there can be no dispute concerning this fact; and no one who will read that capital story, or almost any other novel of hers, can question her right to stand with the foremost in nineteenth-century fiction by virtue of many things besides her priority in time. Such a reader will feel it his privilege, his highest pleasure, to help reverse the sentence which relegates this artist to the sad society of the mere sermoners. She did preach, there is no denying that, but she also pictured life so faithfully that Scott could wish for nothing greater than “Miss Edgeworth’s wonderful power of vivifying all her persons, and making them live as beings in your mind.”

  She knew her Ireland closely, lovingly, humorously, down to the last whimsicality of the tatterdemalion peasantry and the last eccentricity of the reckless, jovial gentry; but she knew her England, too, and the scenes of London fashion in her books are as graphic as Fanny Burney’s. Indeed, it cannot be said that those London stories which have Ireland for a background are better than those which deal solely with English interests and characters. “The Absentee” and its kind are of inferior aesthetic quality, for in these the author has a moral to enforce, a social principle to preach; and in the others she has only character to paint, and personal conduct to portray. For this reason such a novel as “Belinda” is a better test of her powers than “The Absentee,” After all, there is no situation so universally appealing to the sympathy and the fancy as that which Miss Burney chose in “Evelina” and “Cecilia,” and which Miss Edgeworth again chose in “Belinda.” A young girl gently bred, and coming up for the first time from the country to view the world of London society with innocent, astonished eyes — what could be sweeter, more suggestive, more abundant in exciting chance than this?

  III

  Belinda Portman is no such ingenue as Evelina; she is of a far more sophisticated good sense even than Cecilia, whose more reasoned and tempered innocence she rather partakes. She has a very worldly-minded Mrs. Selina Stanhope for her aunt, who at Bath arranges her invitation for a London season from Lady Delacour, and supplies her with a store of mundane maxims, such as Mrs. Stanhope had found effectual in managing the matrimonial campaigns of five other nieces. The first interesting quality in Belinda is that she has not the wish to profit by this dark wisdom of Mrs. Stanhope’s; but early in her London career a mortifying accident acquaints her with the fact that she is supposed to be there to further these matchmaking schemes of her aunt. She
is already in love with one of the young men she hears talking her over, and with the hurt to her girlish dignity and delicacy, she begins to think and to reflect. From that hour her evolution into a woman of good sense and good-will, of magnanimous impulses and generous actions is probably and entertainingly accomplished by the author, with unfailing confidence in an apparently inexhaustible knowledge of the London world.

  What this world was, how dissipated, unprincipled, brutal, reckless, steeped in debt and drink, has never been more frankly shown. The moral is always present in the picture, and it is too often applied with inartistic directness, but it is not always so applied. There are abundant moments of pure drama, when the character is expressed in the action; and though much of the motive that ought to be seen is stated, still enough of it is seen to constitute the story a work of art. The author proves herself in all her books an aesthetic force; she was perverted in her artistic instincts by false! ideals of duty; but she knew human nature, and when she would allow herself to do so she could represent life; with masterly power. She does not get Belinda fully before the reader without many needless devices to deepen the intrigue, and many tiresome lectures to enforce the lesson, but she does give at last the full sense of a beautiful girl who gains rather than loses in delightfulness by growing wiser and better. Discreet Belinda has always been, but at first she is discreet for herself only; and at last she is wise for others as well.

  A fair half of the book might be thrown away with the effect of twice enriching what was left; perhaps two-thirds might be parted with to advantage; certainly all that does not relate to Belinda’s friendship with Lady Delacour and her love for Clarence Harvey would not be missed by the reader who likes art better than artifice, and prefers to make his own applications of the facts. The friendship between Belinda and Lady Delacour is more important than the love between Belinda and Clarence; but if the story were reduced to the truly wonderful study of Lady Delacour’s passionate and distorted nature, she and not Belinda would be the heroine of “Belinda,’ As it is, it is she who has the greater fascination for the experienced witness, and for any student of womanhood the dramatic portrayal of her jealousy must appeal as a masterpiece almost unique in that sort.

  IV

  The domestic situation in Lady Delacour’s household is promptly developed through the mysterious contradictions that cloud her conduct: the wild gayety, the listless melancholy, the moody despair. “For some days after Belinda’s arrival in town she heard nothing of Lord Delacour; his lady never mentioned his name except once accidentally, as she was showing Miss Portman the house..., The first time Belinda ever saw His Lordship, he was dead drunk in the arms of two footmen who were carrying him up-stairs to his bedroom; his lady, who was just returned from Ranelagh, passed him by on the landing-place with a look of sovereign contempt. ‘What is the matter? Who is this?’ said Belinda. ‘Only the body of Lord Delacour,’ said her ladyship.... ‘Don’t look so shocked and amazed, Belinda; don’t look so child; this funeral of my lord’s intellects is to me a nightly, or,’ added her ladyship, looking at her watch and yawning, ‘I believe I should say, a daily ceremony — six o’clock, I protest!’ The next morning... after a very late breakfast, Lord Delacour entered the room. ‘Lord Delacour, sober, my dear,’ said her ladyship to Miss Portman, by way of introducing him.”

  The cat-and-dog life which this couple lead is very unreservedly portrayed, and Belinda is so far deceived as not to suppose that they can be in love with each other, in spite of all. My lord’s days and nights are given to debauchery, his lady’s to the wildest dissipation at balls and routs (one faintly imagines what a was!) and gay parties at those public resorts which were once so much the fashion in London, or at least in London novels, Where from Vauxhall to Ranelagh, from Ranelagh to the Pantheon, from the Pantheon to Almack’s, there is a perpetual glitter of their misleading lights.

  On leaving the masquerade where Belinda has overheard that killing talk about herself among the young men of her circle, she repeats it in an anguish of shame to her friend, as they drive away from Lady Singleton’s to the Pantheon in their respective disguises of the tragic and the comic muse. ‘And is this all?’ cried Lady Delacour. ‘Lord, my dear, you must either give tip living in the world or expect to hear yourself, and your aunts, and your cousins, and your friends, from generation to generation, abused every hour in the day by their friends and your friends; ’tis the common course of things. Now you know what a multitude of obedient servants, dear creatures, and very sincere and most affectionate friends I have.... Do you think I’m fool enough to imagine that they would care the hundredth part of a straw if I were this minute thrown into the Red or the Black Sea?’... The carriage stopped at the Pantheon.... To Belinda the night appeared long and dull; the commonplace wit of chimney-sweepers and gypsies; the antics of harlequins; the graces of flower-girls and Cleopatras had not power to amuse her; for her thoughts still recurred to that conversation which had given her so much pain.. — .. ‘How happy you are, Lady Delacour,’ said she, when they got into the carriage to go home,... ‘to have such an amazing flow of spirits!’ ‘Amazing you might Well say, if you knew all,’ said Lady Delacour, and she heaved a deep sigh, threw herself back in the carriage, let fall her mask, and was silent. It was broad daylight, and Belinda had a full view of her countenance, which was a picture of despair.... Her ladyship started up and exclaimed, ‘If I had served myself with half the zeal I have served the world I should not now be thus forsaken.... But it is all over now. I am dying.’... Belinda... gazed at Lady Delacour, and repeated the word, ‘Dying!’ ‘I tell you I am dying,’ said her ladyship.’

  At home she bade Belinda “follow her to her dressing-room.... ‘Come in; what is it you are afraid of?’ said she. Belinda went in, and Lady Delacour shut and locked the door. There was no light except what came from the candle which Lady Delacour held in her hand.... Belinda, as she looked around, saw nothing but a confusion of linen rags; vials, some empty, some full, and she perceived there was a strong smell of medicines. Lady Delacour... looked from side to side of the room without seeming to know what she was in search of. She then, in a species of fury, wiped the paint from her face, and returning to Belinda, held the candle so as to throw the light full on her livid features... which formed a horrid contrast with her gay, fantastic dress. ‘You are shocked, Belinda,’ said she, ‘but as yet you have seen nothing — look here’ — baring half her bosom.... Belinda sunk back into a chair; Lady Delacour flung herself on her knees before her. ‘Am I humbled, am I wretched enough?”’

  The story of Belinda’s friendship for the miserable woman from this moment on is imagined with a knowledge of human nature and a divination of its nobler possibilities worthy of Tolstoy, though it is wrought with an art indefinitely more fallible. Miss Edgeworth was not only in herself very inconstantly an artist, but, as is well known, she subordinated her judgment to that of her honored father, whom she allowed to meddle with her work, and mar it in the cause of good morals as much as he would. It is but fair to lay to the charge of her well-willing, ill-witting parent at least half of the crude and clumsy didacticism with which Belinda’s fine nature is unfolded in her efforts to serve and to save Lady Delacour; but perhaps the crude and clumsy mechanism of the affair is all Miss Edgeworth’s own. We may easily grant this, and still in the dramatic moments find enough evidence of her power to prove her a great artist.

  Lady Delacour, of course, believes that she has a cancer, and she has put herself in the hands of a quack who preys upon her fears. Her secret is known only to her waiting-woman, till she herself betrays it to Belinda, whom she binds to her by the most solemn vows of silence. But the girl can find no peace till she has got Lady Delacour’s leave to speak of it to a physician (who is, of course, Edgeworthianly over-wise and over-good); and as Belinda has not lived for several weeks under the roof of Lord Delacour without surprising in him some traits of kindness for his wife, she wins Lady Delacour’s consent to let him know that some g
reat calamity is threatening her. Belinda sets herself with all her innate discreetness to make them friends, but she does not, discreet as she is, manage this without rousing the jealousy of Lady Delacour, which finds food in her returning love for her husband. Seeing Belinda and Lord Delacour on such increasingly good terms in her interest, she can only believe that they wish to be on better in their own as soon as she is out of the way. As the story was always to end well, however, the cancer proves no cancer, and is cured with very slight scientific attention; Lady Delacour is reconciled to her husband without losing her friend, and Belinda is duly married to Clarence Harvey, whom she has been in love with from the beginning.

  Such a meagre résumé of merely one order of its events does no justice to the many-sided interest of the novel, and its rich abundance of characterization, which sometimes accuses itself of caricature, but which probably embodies a presentation of fashionable life at the beginning of our century faithfuller than it can now appear. Still, the jealousy of Lady Delacour, though but one interest of the story, becomes in its finer artistic treatment the chief interest; and the scene in which it betrays itself becomes the greatest moment of the drama. The episode is almost altogether admirable, but its climax sufficiently suggests the whole encounter between the unsuspecting Belinda and Lady Delacour, when her passion is fired by the girl’s suppression of certain passages in a letter from her aunt Stanhope, giving some worldly advice which her ladyship ironically congratulates Belinda upon not needing.