Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  What was behind the veil?

  In a famous conversation between Catharine Morland and Isabella Thorp in “Northanger Abbey,” Catharine says she has been reading “Udolpho” ever since she woke and is “got to the black veil.”

  “Are you, indeed?” cries Isabella. “Oh, I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are you not wild to know?”

  “Oh yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me; I would not be told on any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton.”

  This conjecture of Catharine’s is so much more effective than the fact that I prefer to leave it; but if any reader is impatient of it, he may satisfy his curiosity by turning to the last chapters of the romance, where all the “Mysteries of Udolpho” are conscientiously explained»

  SCOTT’S REBECCA AND ROWENA, AND LUCY ASHTON

  IT is not only in her conscientious explanation of the “Mysteries of Udolpho” that Mrs. Radcliffe pays tribute to the realistic ideal of her time. Her romances are as chaste in motive and as modest in material as Jane Austen’s novels, and far decenter than most novels of any age. They might be blamed for their blending of sublimity and absurdity, but there is no specious mixture of good and bad in them to confound the conscience by the spectacle of noble rascality or virtuous depravity in any form. One may squander one’s time on them, but one cannot get positive harm from them. They may misrepresent manners, but they do not misrepresent morals; and in their idyllic passages, such as that episode of the pastor La Luc in “The Romance of the Forest,” they are refining, and even edifying. It is hard not to wish a little to be like Mrs. Radcliffe’s good people, and one never wishes to be like her bad people. The love-making between her heroes and heroines is of virginal purity; the heroine is always a Nice Girl, just as a heroine of Jane Austen or Frances Burney is, even if she is not a Real Girl; and it is to be claimed for Anne Radcliffe that she too helped with the other great women authors of her time to characterize Anglo-Saxon fiction with decency. When the magic wand fell from her hold, it passed to the keeping of a man whose ideal was as high and pure as her own.

  I

  So far as any man may be said to invent anything, Walter Scott invented the historical novel. His fiction drew upon the life of the past for characters and events, which he colored and shaped and posed to serve the ends of a fancied scheme. Historical personages had been used before his time, as in those monstrous and tedious fables classified in the annals of fiction as the heroical romances. Many Asian and African princes, wondrously translated, figure in the illimitable pages of Gomberville, Calprenade, and Scuderi; the rival families of Granada, after valiant service in the supposititious Spanish chronicles, were made to amuse the vast leisure of the ladies and gentlemen of Louis XIV.’s court by the same authors. But these authors took liberties with the originals of their creations such as Scott never allowed himself. He did not mind forcing a civilization in the hot-bed of his fancy, or transposing the peculiarities of one epoch to another; but he kept a fairly good conscience as to personality, and his historical characters realize in reasonable measure the ideal of tradition, if not of veritable record.

  His evolution as a historical novelist reveals the simplicity of his nature and the open-hearted directness of his aim so winningly that you love the man more and more, while you respect the artist less and less. It is not that in going from the desultory Scotch stories he began with to the English, Continental, and Oriental motives he ended with, he did not learn something more of form and effect. But what he gained in these, he lost in more vital things. He no longer wrote of what he knew and believed in, but what he studied and made believe in. His earlier Scotch stories show his wish for truth to life, not only in the facts which he accumulates in prefaces and notes to attest the verity of the incidents, but in those finer things which the heart of the reader best corroborates. This wish was the principle of the realists whom he followed and surpassed in the popular favor, with a frank and generous shame for his triumph; but when he abandoned his native ground in the fear he so single-heartedly owns that his readers must get tired of his Scotch stories if he kept on with them, he did not perhaps abandon this principle, but he abandoned the best means of fulfilling it. He was a great literary force; he had got an immense creative impetus, and he could not help doing things that attracted and interested, but it must be confessed that he weakened more and more in the power of doing things that convinced. The early Scotch stories are those which his grown-up readers have not tired of; while all but boys and girls (and rather young boys and girls) have tired of the romances which he forsook them for In these the characters degenerate into types, heroic, hollow, that resound with echoing verbiage, and personate one quality and tendency. This seems to me especially true of the women, or the types of women, who are what he makes them, not what he finds them. He clothes them in certain attributes, as he habits them in certain garments, and he appoints them certain ceremonial relations to the facts which are mostly outside of the real drama, or inessential to it. In “Ivanhoe” the action scarcely concerns either Rebecca or Rowena; the love-making, so far as there is any, is between Rebecca and Ivanhoe, and yet Ivanhoe placidly marries Rowena, with whom he has, to the reader’s knowledge, not made love at all. In fiction women exist in the past, present, or future tenses, the infinitive, indicative, potential, or imperative moods of love-making; otherwise they do not exist at all, and no phantom of delight, masquerading in their clothes, suffices. Both Rowena and Rebecca might be left out of “Ivanhoe,” and the story would not be the poorer for their absence. Rowena, in fact, is a large, blond, calm nonentity, not only passionless, but traitless. Rebecca is conventionally filial, conventionally noble and pathetic; but she is without inconsistency, without variation, which are the soul of feminine identity, and she does not persuade us that she has any real business in the scene. Her moment of greatest vitality is that where she is imprisoned in the tower of Front-de-Boeuf’s castle, and reports to her fellow-captive, the wounded Ivanhoe, the events of the assault as they pass under her eye around the beleaguered walls. I do not know whether this is accounted a scene of uncommon power by the critics or not, but it seems to me so.

  “‘And I must lie here like a bedridden monk,’ exclaimed Ivanhoe, ‘while the game that gives me freedom or death is played out by others! Look from the window once again, kind maiden, but beware that you are not marked by the archers beneath.... What dost thou see, Rebecca?’ ‘Nothing but the cloud of arrows that fly so thick as to dazzle mine eyes, and to hide the bowmen who shoot them.’ ‘That cannot endure,’ cried Ivanhoe. ‘If they press not right on to carry the castle by pure force of arms, the archery may avail but little against stone walls and bulwarks,’...

  She turned her head from the lattice as if unable longer to endure a sight so terrible. ‘Look forth again, Rebecca,’ said Ivanhoe, mistaking the cause of her retiring.... ‘ There is now less danger,’ Rebecca again looked forth and almost immediately exclaimed, ‘Holy prophets of the law! Front-de-Boeuf and the Black Knight fight hand to hand in the breach, amid the roar of their followers, who watch the progress of the strife with the cause of the oppressed and of the captive!’ She then uttered a loud shriek, and exclaimed, ‘He is down! — he is down!’ ‘Who is down?’ cried Ivanhoe. ‘For our dear Lady’s sake, tell me which has fallen.’ ‘The Black Knight,’ answered Rebecca faintly; then instantly again shouted with joyful eagerness—’ But no! — but no! — the name of the Lord of Hosts be blessed! — he is on foot again, and fights as if there were twenty men’s strength in his single arm. His sword is broken — he snatches an axe from a yeoman — he presses Front-de-Boeuf with blow on blow — the giant stoops and totters like an oak under the steel of the woodsman — he falls, he falls!’ ‘Front-de-Boeuf?’ exclaimed Ivanhoe. ‘Front-de-Boeuf!’ answered the Jewess. ‘The assailants have won the postern gate, have they not?’ asked Ivanhoe. ‘They have, they have,’ exclaimed Rebecca, ‘and they press the besieg
ed hard upon the outer wall; some plant ladders, some swarm like bees, and endeavor to ascend upon the shoulders of each other — down go stones, beams, and trunks of trees. As they bear the wounded to the rear, fresh men supply their places in the assault.... The Black Knight approaches the postern with his huge axe — the thundering blows which he deals, you may hear them above all the din and shouts of the battle. Stones and beams are hailed down on the bold champion — he regards them no more than if they were thistle-down or feathers!... The postern gate shakes, it crashes, it is splintered by his blows — they rush in — the outwork is gone — Oh, God! — they hurl the defenders from the battlements — they throw them into the moat — Oh, men, if ye be men indeed, spare them that can resist no longer!... Our friends strengthen themselves within the outwork which they have mastered; and it affords them so good a shelter from the foeman’s shot, that the garrison only bestow a few bolts on it from interval to interval, as if rather to disquiet, than effectually to injure them.’”

  II

  One easily perceives that it is the author, and not a young mediaeval Jewess who is describing the scene in these literary terms; and it is no great wonder that Ivanhoe, finding himself in company with an elderly novelist instead of a beautiful girl, drops off to sleep upon the assurance of victory for his side, after a brief argument upholding the ideal of chivalry against that of humanity, which the supposed Jewess maintains. The passage must often have been praised, and the situation is so well imagined that the unreality of the heroine cannot spoil it quite. It may be said that she is as real as the hero, and she is certainly as well fitted to take the fancy of those boys of all ages to whom the romance of “Ivanhoe” has now almost wholly fallen. Rebecca is not much more probable or palpable in the scenes where she repels the wicked love of the Templar, or meets his accusation before the judges who condemn her to death, or even in that climax where Ivanhoe rises from a sick-bed to do battle for her against her enemy and his. But she is always so much more alive than Rowena, that she exists at least by contrast.

  The story in which she has her being seems to have been the first which Scott wrote when he began to be afraid his Scotch stories were wearying his public. The romance which immediately preceded “Ivanhoe” was “The Bride of Lammennoor,” not perhaps the best of the Scotch stories, but a tale which has most deeply appealed to the hearts of gentle readers. Of all Scott’s heroines Lucy Ashton is, after Jeanie Deans, perhaps the most persuasive of her reality. She is almost purely tragical. From the very beginning you can see her dark fate following the yielding and tender creature on “that way madness lies,” and it avails little that the Master of Ravenswood saves her from a mad bull in the opening chapters, or that they plight their troth and have their brief hour of happiness in the shadow of her doom. When you see her at last, gibbering and gloating over the bleeding body of the husband whom she had stabbed on her wedding-night, it is as if you had foreseen it all from the first. She has fewer words in her tragedy than even Ophelia in hers; but she remains in the memory with the like clinging hold upon the pity of the witness. The book is much better in construction than most of Scott’s novels; it has far more form than he commonly knew how to give them, and, basing itself so largely as it does upon facts known to him, it has a truth that the others seldom had. This truth, strangely enough, is concentrated in the passive girl who scarcely speaks; who is blown about like a lily in the stormy events and the violent passions that surge around her, and suffers everything, but does nothing. She hardly utters a word in that last scene between Ravenswood and herself, when he returns to the house from which he has been driven with atrocious insult by her mother, to question the hapless creature of her own part in her betrothal to Bucklaw; yet she is the very soul of the tremendous incident.

  “He planted himself full in the middle of the apartment, opposite to the table at which Lucy was seated, on whom, as if she had been alone in the chamber, he bent his eyes with a mingled expression of deep grief and deliberate indignation. His dark-colored riding cloak, displaced from one shoulder, hung around one side of his person in the ample folds of the Spanish mantle. His slouched hat, which he had not removed at entrance, gave an additional gloom to his dark features, which, wasted by sorrow and marked by the ghastly look communicated by long illness, added to a countenance naturally somewhat stem and wild, a fierce and even savage expression.... He said not a single word, and there was a deep silence in the company for more than two minutes. It was broken by Lady Ashton, who in that space partly recovered her natural audacity. She demanded to know the cause of this unauthorized intrusion. ‘That is a question, madam,’ said her son, ‘which I have the best right to ask,’... Bucklaw interposed, saying, ‘No man on earth should usurp his previous right in demanding an explanation from the Master,’... The passions of the two young men thus counteracting each other, gave Ravenswood leisure to exclaim, in a stem and steady voice, ‘Silence! — let him who really seeks danger, lake the fitting time when it may be found; my mission here will shortly be accomplished. Is that your handwriting, madam?’ he added, in a softer tone, extending towards Miss Ashton her last letter. A faltering ‘Yes,’ seemed rather to escape from her lips than to be uttered as a voluntary answer. ‘And is this your handwriting?’ extending towards her their mutual engagement. Lucy remained silent. Terror and a yet stronger and more confused feeling so utterly disturbed her understanding that she probably scarcely comprehended the question that was put to her.... ‘Sir William Ashton,’ said Ravenswood... ‘if this young lady of her own free will desires the restoration of this contract, as her letter would seem to imply, there is not a withered leaf which this autumn wind strews on the heath, that is more valueless in my eyes. But I must and will hear the truth from her own mouth.. . alone, and without witnesses. Lady Ashton is welcome to remain, but let all others depart,’ Ravenswood, when the men had left the room, bolted the door, and returned, raised his hat from his forehead, and gazing upon Lucy with eyes HEROINES OF FICTION in which an expression of sorrow overcame their late fierceness... said, ‘Do you know me, Miss Ashton? I am still Edgar Ravenswood. ‘She was silent, and he went on with increasing vehemence, ‘I am still that Edgar Ravenswood, who... for your sake forgave, nay clasped hands with the oppressor and pillager of his house — the traducer and murderer of his father,” My daughter,’ answered Lady Ashton, ‘has no occasion to dispute the identity of your person; the venom of your present language is sufficient to remind her that she speaks with the mortal enemy of her father. “ I pray you to be patient, madam.... My answer must come from her own lips. Once more, Miss Lucy Ashton, I am that Ravenswood to whom you granted the solemn engagement which you now desire to retract and cancel,’ Lucy’s bloodless lips could only falter out the words, ‘It was my mother.’ ‘She speaks truly,’ said Lady Ashton. ‘It was I, who, authorized alike by the laws of God and man, advised her and concurred with her to set aside an unhappy and precipitate engagement — and to annul it by the authority of Scripture itself....

  You have asked what questions you thought fit. You see the total incapacity of my daughter to answer you. You desire to know whether Lucy Ashton of her own free will desires to annul the engagement into which she has been trepanned.... Here is the contract which she this morning subscribed... with Mr.

  Hastings of Bucklaw,’ Ravenswood gazed upon the deed as if petrified, “this is indeed, madam, an undeniable piece of evidence.... There, madam,’ he ,’ said, laying down before Lucy the signed paper and the broken piece of gold—’ there are the evidences of your first engagement; may you be more faithful to that which you have just formed. I will trouble you to return the corresponding tokens of my ill-placed confidence — I ought rather to say my egregious folly,’ Lucy returned the scornful glance of her lover with a gaze from which perception seemed to have been banished; yet she seemed partly to have understood his meaning, for she raised her hands as if to undo a blue ribbon which she wore about her neck. She was unable to accomplish her purpose, but Lady Ashton
cut the ribbon asunder, and detached the broken piece of gold, which Miss Ashton had till then worn in her bosom; the written counterpart of the lover’s engagement she for some time had had in her own possession. With a haughty courtesy she delivered both to Ravenswood.”

  In spite of the slovenly construction of these passages, the repetitions, the touches of melodrama, the whole want of artistic delicacy and precision, the spirit of an immensely affecting tragedy is here present. Lucy’s part is so greatly and simply imagined that a word more from her, the least expression of protest or imploring would detract from its heart-breaking beauty. Such a scene could not be the work of less than a master, who alone would know how a little later to add, stiffly and formally, indeed, but with skill to extract yet a drop more of pathos from the fact, “Miss Ashton never alluded to what had passed in the state room. It seemed doubtful if she was even conscious of it, for she was often observed to raise her hands to her neck, as if in search of the ribbon that had been taken from it, and to mutter in surprise and discontent, when she could not find it, ‘It was the link that bound me to life.’”

  III

  Scott’s failures were among his gentilities, his lords and ladies, his princes and princesses, who are always more or less like the poorer sort of stage players. I do not know that he fails more signally with his women than with his men in high life; but Lucy Ashton is the only woman of gentle birth in his romances whom I remember, from my first long-ago reading, for her distinguished qualities, if indeed she has more than one of these. All his women of lower station, however, especially those that come casually and momentarily into the story, are alive, and speak a tongue as different from the literary language of their betters as nature is from artifice. He was essentially a humorist and humanist; he dearly loved and enjoyed such of his fellow-beings as he could come close to through their originality, or eccentricity, or simplicity; and there is no laird’s leddy, no bare-legged lassie, no screaming or scolding old-wife, who is not as veritable as any man of her rank, and far more so than any man of higher rank. Such figures abound in his Scotch stories and give them that air of reality which is never quite absent from them. But again when he transcends the sort of character which he knows personally or by familiar hearsay, he fails as dismally in diving low as in soaring high With such a figure as Meg Merrilies, for instance, he does nothing that convinces you of her verity; she remains as strictly of melodrama as any mouthing champion in “Ivanhoe “; Rowena herself is not more really unreal, not more improbably moved; and she is far less noisy and tiresome; for the maledictions of Meg Merrilies actually bore one; and Meg is mostly maledictions.