Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “The rapid, unconnected manner in which Lady Delacour spoke, the hurry of her motions, the quick, suspicious, angry gleams of her eye, her laugh, her unintelligible words, all conspired at this moment to give Belinda the idea that her intellects were suddenly disordered.... She went towards her with the intention of soothing her by caresses; but at her approach Lady Delacour pushed the table on which she had been writing from her with violence; started up, flung back the veil which fell over her face as she rose, and darted upon Belinda a look which fixed her to the spot where she stood.... Belinda’s blood ran cold — she had no longer any doubt that this was insanity. She shut the penknife that lay upon the table, and put it in her pocket. ‘Cowardly creature!’ cried Lady Delacour, and her countenance changed to an expression of ineffable contempt. ‘What is it you fear?’ ‘That you should injure yourself. Sit down — for Heaven’s sake listen to your friend, to Belinda.’ ‘My friend! My Belinda!’ cried Lady Delacour.... ‘O, Belinda! You whom I have so loved, so trusted!’ The tears rolled fast down her painted cheeks; she wiped them hastily away, but so roughly that she became a strange and ghastly spectacle. Unconscious of her disordered appearance, she rushed past Belinda, who vainly attempted to stop her, threw up the sash, and, stretching herself far out of the window, gasped for breath. Miss Portman drew her back, and closed the window, saying, ‘The rouge is all off your face, my dear Lady Delacour; you are not fit to be seen.’... ‘Rouge! Not fit to be seen! At such a time as this, to talk to me in this manner! O, niece of Mrs. Stanhope! dupe, dupe, that I am.’”

  Belinda tries to reason with Lady Delacour’s jealousy, which takes the form of ironical meekness, only to burst out again in envenomed accusation. “‘You are goodness itself, and gentleness, and prudence personified. You know perfectly how to manage her whom you fear you have driven to madness. But, tell me, good, gentle, prudent Miss Portman, why need you dread so much that I should go mad?... Nobody would believe me whatever I said.... And would not this be almost as if I were dead and buried? No; your calculations are better than mine: the poor mad wife would... yet stand between you and the fond object of your secret soul — a coronet.... O, Belinda, do not you see that a coronet cannot confer happiness?’ ‘I have seen it long; I pity you from the bottom of my soul,’ said Belinda, bursting into tears.”

  Lady Delacour cannot believe the girl is leaving her house when she leaves the room; she determines to balk the hope of being pressed to stay, which she imagines in Belinda; and when some people call she swiftly repairs her looks and goes to receive them. “Fresh rouged, and beautifully dressed, she was performing her part to a brilliant audience, when Belinda entered the drawing-room.... ‘You dine with Lady Anne, Miss Portman, I understand. Though you talk of running away from me... I am with all due humility so confident of the irresistible attractions of this house, that I defy Oakley Park and all its charms. So, Miss Portman, instead of adieu, I shall only say au revoir!” Adieu, Lady Delacour!’ said Belinda, with a look and tone that struck her ladyship to the heart. All her suspicions, all her pride, all her affected gayety forsook her.... She flew after Miss Portman, stopped her at the head of the stairs and exclaimed, ‘My dearest Belinda, are you gone? My best, my only friend, say you are not gone forever! Say you will return!’ ‘Adieu,’ repeated Belinda,”

  We are told that she broke from Lady Delacour with a heart full of pity for her, but sure of the right and wisdom of her course; and nothing in the whole scene between them is more finely ascertained than the delicate dignity and goodness with which Belinda behaves. In this she is worthy to be the heroine of her own story, and though she must divide the honors with Lady Delacour, in the dramatic moments, she has the heroine’s true supremacy as a subtler study of character, and a newer type. The intensely emotional nature like Lady Delacour, vivid, violent, reckless, has been often done, and it is always fascinating; but it has seldom been so well done as by Miss Edgeworth, who, with a few touches of analysis, has allowed it to express itself. Yet, after all, a nature like Belinda’s, ruled by principles and bound by scruples, the nature of a lady, is far more difficult to do.

  JANE AUSTEN’S ELIZABETH BENNET

  THE fashion of Maria Edgeworth’s world has long passed away, but human nature is still here, and the fiction which was so true to it in the first years of the century is true to it in the last. “The Absentee,” “Vivian,” “Ennui,” “Helen,” “Patronage,” show their kindred with “Belinda,” and by their frank and fresh treatment of character, their knowledge of society, and their employment of the major rather than the minor means of moving and amending the reader, they all declare themselves of the same lineage. In their primitive ethicism they own “Pamela,” and “Sir Charles Grandison” for their ancestors; but they are much more dramatic than Richardson’s novels; they are almost theatrical in their haste for a direct moral effect. In this they are like the Burney-D’Arblay novels, which also deal with fashionable life, with dissipated lords and ladies, with gay parties at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, with debts and duns, with balls and routs in splendid houses, whose doors are haunted by sheriff’s officers, with bankruptcies and arrests, or flights and suicides. But the drama of the Edgeworth fiction tends mostly to tragedy, and that of the Burney-D’Arblay fiction to comedy; though there are cases in the first where the wrong-doer is saved alive, and cases in the last where he is lost in his sins. The author of “Evelina “ was a good but light spirit, the author of “Belinda” was a good but very serious soul and was amusing with many misgivings. Maria Edgeworth was a humorist in spite of herself; Frances Burney was often not as funny as she meant, and was, as it were, forced into tragical effects by the pressure of circumstances. You feel that she would much rather have got on without them; just as you feel that Miss Edgeworth rejoices in them, and is not sure that her jokes will be equally blessed to you.

  I

  It remained for the greatest of the gifted women, who beyond any or all other novelists have fixed the character and behavior of Anglo-Saxon fiction, to assemble in her delightful talent all that was best in that of her sisters. Jane Austen was indeed so fine an artist, that we are still only beginning to realize how fine she was; to perceive, after a hundred years, that in the form of imagined fact, in the expression of personality, in conduct of the narrative, and the subordination of t to character, she is still unapproached in the English branch of Anglo-Saxon fiction. In American fiction Hawthorne is to be named with her for perfection of form; the best American novels are built upon more symmetrical fines than the best English novels, and have unconsciously shaped themselves upon the ideal which she instinctively and instantly realized.

  Of course it was not merely in externals that Jane Austen so promptly achieved her supremacy. The wonder of any beautiful thing is that it is beautiful in so many ways; and her fiction is as admirable for its lovely humor, its delicate satire, its good sense, its kindness, its truth to nature, as for its form. There is nothing hurried or huddled in it, nothing confused or obscured; nothing excessive or inordinate. The marvel of it is none the less because it is evident that she wrote from familiar acquaintance with the fiction that had gone before her. In her letters there are hints of her intimacy with the novels of Goldsmith, of Richardson, of Frances Burney, and of Maria Edgeworth; but in her stories there are scarcely more traces of their influence than of Mrs. Radcliffe’s, or any of the romantic writers whom she delighted to mock. She is obviously of her generation, but in all literature she is one of the most original and independent spirits. Her deeply domesticated life was passed in the country scenes, the county society, which her books portray, far from literary men and events; and writing as she used, amidst the cheerful chatter of her home, she produced literature of still unrivalled excellence in its way, apparently without literary ambition, and merely for the pleasure of getting the life she knew before her outward vision. With the instinct and love of doing it, and not with the sense of doing anything uncommon, she achieved that masterpiece, “Pride and Prejudice,” whic
h is quite as remarkable for being one of several masterpieces as for its absolute excellence. There have been authors enough who have written one extraordinary book; but all Jane Austen’s books are extraordinary, and “Persuasion,” Northanger Abbey,”

  “Emma,”

  “Mansfield Park,” land “Sense and Sensibility,” are each a masterpiece, (inferior only to “Pride and Prejudice,” which was written first. After the young girl of twenty had written it, she kept it half as many years longer before she printed it. In mere order of chronology it belongs to the eighteenth century, but in spirit it is distinctly of the nineteenth century, as we feel that cycle to have been when we feel proudest of it. In manners as much as in methods it is such a vast advance upon the work of her sister novelists that you wonder whether some change had not already taken place in English society which she notes, and which they fail to note.

  The topics of the best fiction of any time will probably be those which decent men and women talk of together in the best company; and such topics vary greatly from time to time. There is no reason to think that Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth were less pureminded than Jane Austen, but they dealt with phases of human experience which she did not deal with, because their friends and acquaintances did so, without being essentially worse than hers. A tendency towards a more scrupulous tone seems to have been the effect of the general revival in religion at the close of the last century, which persisted down to that time in our own century when the rise of scientific agnosticism loosed the bonds of expression. Now again of late years men and women in the best company talk together of things which would not have been discussed during the second and third quarters of the century. One must hedge one’s position on such a point with many perhapses; nothing can be affirmed with certainty; the most that can be said is that the tone if not the temper, the manners if not the morals, which have lately been called fin de siècle, are noticeably more akin to what was fin de siècle a hundred years ago, than they are to what was thought fit in polite society fifty years ago. Possibly another revival of religion will bring another change, such as the purity of Jane Austen’s fiction may have forecast rather than reported. But we do not know this, and possibly again her books are what they are in matter and manner because the little world of county society which she observed was wholesomer and decenter than the great world of London society which Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth studied.

  An author is as great for what he leaves out as for what he puts in; and Jane Austen shows her mastery in nothing more than in her avoidance of moving accidents for her most moving effects. She seems to have known intuitively that character resides in habit, and that for the novelist to seek its expression in violent events would be as stupid as for the painter to expect an alarm of fire or burglary to startle his sitter into a valuable revelation of his qualities. She puts from her, therefore, all the tremendous contrivances of her predecessors, and takes her place quietly on the ground to which they were, the best of them, falteringly and uncertainly feeling their way. After De Foe and Goldsmith she was the first to write a thoroughly artistic novel in English, and she surpassed Goldsmith as far in method as she refined upon De Foe in material. Among her contemporaries she was as easily first as Shakspere among the Elizabethan dramatists; and in the high excellencies of symmetrical form, force of characterization, clearness of conception, simplicity and temperance of means, she is still supreme: that girl who began at twenty with such a masterpiece as “Pride and Prejudice,” and ended with such a masterpiece as “Persuasion” at forty-two!

  II

  The story of “Pride and Prejudice” has of late years become known to a constantly, almost rapidly, increasing cult, as it must be called, for the readers of Jane Austen are hardly ever less than her adorers: she is a passion and a creed, if not quite a religion. A beautiful, clever, and cultivated girl is already piqued and interested if not in love with a handsome, high-principled, excessively proud man, when she becomes bitterly prejudiced against him by the slanders of a worthless beneficiary of his family. The girl is Elizabeth Bennet, the young man is Fitzwilliam Darcy, and they first meet at a ball, where he behaves with ungracious indifference to her, and afterwards at the dinners and parties of a small country neighborhood where persons theoretically beyond the pale of gentility are admitted at least on sufferance; the stately manners of the day are relaxed by youth and high spirits; and no doubt the academic elevation of the language lapses oftener on the lips of the pretty girls and the lively young men than an author still in her nonage, and zealous for the dignity of her style, will allow to appear in the conversation of her hero and heroine.

  From the beginning it seems to Darcy that Elizabeth shines in talk beyond all the other women, though sometimes she shines to Iris cost. But banter from a pretty girl goes farther than flattery with a generous man; and from the first Darcy is attracted by Elizabeth Bennet’s wit, as much as he is repelled by her family. In fact, he cannot get on with her family, for though the Bennets have a sufficiently good standing, in virtue of the father’s quality as a gentleman, it is in spite the mother’s folly and vulgarity, and the folly and vulgarity of all her sisters but one. Mrs. Bennet is probably the most entire and perfect simpleton ever drawn in fiction, and her husband renders life with her supportable by amusing himself with her absurdities. He buries himself in his books and leaves her the management of his daughters in society, getting what comfort he can out of the humor and intellectual sympathy of Elizabeth and the charming goodness of her elder sister Jane. The rest of his family are almost as impossible to him as they are to Darcy, to whom Mr. Bennet himself is rather impossible, and who resolves not only to crush out his own passion for Elizabeth, but to break off his friend Bingley’s love for her sister Jane. His success in doing the one is not so great but he duly comes to offer himself to Elizabeth, and he owns in the humiliation of rejection that he believes he has failed in the other.

  From this point the affair, already so daringly imagined, is one of the most daring in fiction; and less courage, less art, less truth than the author brings to its management would not have availed. It is a great stroke of originality to have Darcy write the letter he does after his rejection, not only confessing, but defending his course; and it is from the subtle but perfectly honest sense of character in her heroine that the author has Elizabeth do justice to him in what she so bitterly resents. When she has once acknowledged the reason of much that he says of her family (and she has to acknowledge that even about her adored father he is measurably right), it is a question merely of friendly chances as to the event. These are overwhelmingly supplied, to Elizabeth’s confusion, by Darcy’s behavior in helping save her sister Lydia from the shame and min of her elopement with the worthless Wickham. Lydia, who is only less entirely and delightfully a fool than Mrs. Bennet herself, is thus the means of Elizabeth’s coming to such a good mind in regard to Darcy that her only misgiving is lest it may be too late. But Darcy has been enlightened as well as she: he does everything a man can to repair his wrongs and blunders, and with a very little leading from Elizabeth, he is brought to offer himself again, and is accepted with what maybe called demure transport, and certainly with alacrity.

  There is nothing more deliciously lover-like than the talks in which they go over all the past events when they are sure of each other; and Elizabeth, who is apt to seem at other times a little too sarcastic, a little too ironical, is here sweetly and dearly and wisely herself. The latest of these talks was that in which she “wanted Mr. Darcy to account for his ever having fallen in love with her. ‘How could you begin? I can comprehend your going on charmingly, when you had once made a beginning; but what could have set you off in the first place?” I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look which first laid the foundation.... I was in the middle of it before I knew I had begun.’ ‘My beauty you had early withstood, and as to my manners — my behavior to you was at least always bordering on the uncivil, and I never spoke to you without rather wishing to give you p
ain than not. Now, be sincere; did you admire me for my impertinence?’ ‘For the liveliness of your mind, I did.’ ‘You may as well call it impertinence at once. It was very little less. The fact is, you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking, and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone. I roused and interested you because I was so unlike them. Had you not been really amiable you would have hated me for it, but in spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself, your feelings were always noble and just.... There, I have saved you the trouble of accounting for it, and, all things considered, I begin to think it perfectly reasonable. To be sure, you knew no actual good of me, but nobody thinks of that when they fall in love.... What made you so shy of me when you first called, and afterwards dined here?... You might have talked to me more.’ ‘A man who felt less might.’ ‘How unlucky you should have a reasonable answer to give, and I should be so reasonable as to admit it! But I wonder how long you would have gone on if you had been left to yourself?’ ‘Lady Catharine’s unjustifiable endeavors to separate us were the means of removing all my doubts.... My aunt’s intelligence had given me hope, and I was determined at once to know everything.’”

  The aunt whom Darcy means is Lady Catharine de Burgh, as great a fool as Mrs. Bennet or Lydia, and much more offensive. She has all Darcy’s arrogance, without a ray of the good sense and heart which enlighten and control it and when she hears a rumor of his engagement to Elizabeth, she comes to question the girl. Their encounter is perhaps the supreme moment of objective drama in the book, and is a bit of very amusing comedy, which is the more interesting to the modem spectator because it expresses the beginning of that revolt against aristocratic pretension characteristic of the best English fiction of our century. Its spirit seems to have worked in the clear intelligence of the young girl to more than one effect of laughing satire, and one feels that Elizabeth Bennet is speaking Jane Austen’s mind, and perhaps avenging her for patronage and impertinence otherwise suffered in silence, when she gives Lady de Burgh her famous setting-down.