Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “He had roused her from her sleep, for she raised herself up with a hurried and startled look. ‘Get up!’ said the man. ‘It is you, Bill!’ said the girl, with an expression of pleasure at his return. ‘It is,’ was the reply. ‘Get up.’... ‘Bill,’ said the girl, in the low voice of alarm, ‘why do you look like that at me?’ The robber sat regarding her, for a few seconds, with dilated nostrils and heaving breast; and then, grasping her by the head and throat, dragged her into the middle of the room, and, looking once towards the door, placed his heavy hand upon her mouth. ‘Bill, Bill!’ gasped the girl, wrestling with the strength of mortal fear— ‘I — I won’t scream or cry — not once — hear me — speak to me — tell me what I have done!’ ‘You know, you she-devil!’ returned the robber, suppressing his breath. ‘You were watched to-night; every word you said was heard.’ ‘Then spare my life, for the love of Heaven, as I spared yours,’ rejoined the girl, clinging to him. ‘Bill, dear Bill, you cannot have the heart to kill me. Oh! think of all I have given up, only this one night, for you. You shall have time to think, and save yourself this crime; I will not loose my hold, you cannot throw me off. Bill, Bill, for dear God’s sake, for your own, for mine, stop before you spill my blood! I have been true to you, upon my guilty soul I have!’ The man struggled violently to release his arms; but those of the girl were clasped round his, and tear her as he would he could not tear them away. ‘Bill,’ cried the girl, striving to lay her head upon his breast, ‘the gentleman, and that dear lady, told me to-night of a home in some foreign country where I could end my days in solitude and peace. Let me see them again, and beg them, on my knees, to show the same mercy and goodness to you, and let us both leave this dreadful place, and far apart lead better lives, and forget how we have lived, except in prayers, and never see each other more. It is never too late to repent. They told me so — I feel it now — but we must have time — a little, little time!’ The housebreaker freed one arm and grasped his pistol. The certainty of immediate detection if he fired flashed across his mind even in the midst of his fury; and he beat it twice, with all the force he could summon, upon the upturned face that almost touched his own. She staggered and fell; nearly blinded with the blood that rained down from a deep gash in her forehead; but raising herself, with difficulty, on her knees, drew from her bosom a white handkerchief — Rose Maylie’s own — and holding it up, in her folded hands, as high towards Heaven as her feeble strength would allow, breathed one prayer for mercy to her Maker. It was a ghastly figure to look upon. The murderer, staggering backward to the wall, and shutting out the sight with his hand, seized a heavy club and struck her down.”

  HEROINES OF CHARLES DICKENS’S MIDDLE PERIOD

  I HAVE compunctions (which I am not sure I shall find just, on examination) for having passed over Dickens’s earlier books without mentioning certain of his womenkind who have found a place in our associations with his name, or have achieved a sort of independent existence in proverb. I mean such surcharged travesties as Fanny Squeers and Tilly Price and Miss La Creevy in “Nicholas Nickleby”; such grotesques as Sally Brass in “ Old Curiosity Shop,” and the elderly Miss Wardle in “ Pickwick Papers”; such frantic burlesques as abound in “Oliver Twist.” But even if I were to hold myself to stricter account in cataloguing these than I have found necessary, I should not feel justified in citing them as heroines; and I hope not to have a bad conscience in ignoring now and hereafter the innumerable freaks and monsters with which the author peoples his page and to which he wildly and whirlingly attributes the sex and nature of women.

  I

  In any just sense there is no heroine in “ Barnaby Rudge,” which is a book of more skill and power than any that Dickens had yet written. We may dismiss without self-reproach such a ladylike lay-figure as Emma Haredale, and a goblin effigy like Miss Miggs, and come without delay to Dolly Varden, who, in turn, need hardly delay us longer. She is a cheap little coquette, imagined upon the commonest lines, with abundant assertion as to her good looks and graces, but without evidence of the charm that the silliest flirt has in reality. She is nothing and she does nothing; and she cannot be petted and patted by her inventor, with all his fondness, into any semblance of personality. Dickens, however, had himself such potent charm that what he said went, at least with his own generation; and so Dolly Varden passed for a pretty girl such as in life knows how to snare the hearts of men, and play with them and throw them away. Perhaps the falsest note in her was her supposed capability of deep regret for the love she had trifled with and a final constancy to it; but we were told this was so, and we obediently imagined it.

  Now that we have lived beyond the glamour of Dickens’s wonderful power, it is incredible what things we were asked and made to believe by him. It was like a kind of game, such as children play together, in which it is pretended that things are so and so, without reference to any inherent probability or possibility; and the power of the master of the revels was so great that when you came under his spell you were glad to be under it, and did not question the means by which he worked his wonders, any more than children do in playing a game.

  It cannot be denied that he refined upon his means, though the trick remained essentially the same, as he wrote more and more. But he was always and inalienably of the theatre, and as one reads his novels now it is with an immense regret that he did not frankly make them plays. His melodrama then might have seemed drama; his stage scenery aspects of nature, so much less would his faults have appeared in plays than they do in novels.

  II

  A certain difference is noticeable in the novels which Dickens began to write after his visit to America, though it cannot be pretended that the change was an effect of his visit. Rather it was an effect of his maturing talent and his growing self-knowledge. He was still so far from maturity that he did not create any feminine character (however misshapen or idealized) till he gave us Mrs. Dombey and her mother, Mrs. Skewton, in “ Dombey and Son.” Even in these he could not tame his superabounding spirits to the work of ascertaining their nature and representing it. They were in a sort characters, but they were without limitations, and they impersonated the frenzied excess of his fancy in the direction of the qualities ascribed to them. Not before “David Copperfield” did any novel of Dickens offer that last proof of ripened powers which only a true heroine attests. In “ Martin Chuzzlewit,’ which followed hard upon his return home from America, and which hastily embodied in fiction the impressions of his sojourn among us, there is no heroine, though there are a multitude of caricatures in women’s clothes and with women’s names, and falsetto suggestions of women’s natures in the minor and meaner qualities assigned to them. Some of these are English and some are American, and the author simple-heartedly expected that the Americans would like the last because the first were quite as monstrous. His error is no part of his condemnation, and in fact he is not to be condemned at all for the abnormal creatures of his fancy: Mrs. Hominy and Mrs. Major Pawkins are certainly no worse than Sairey Gamp and Betsey Prig, and we could once laugh equally at them all, though now the laughing is more difficult than the liking. Our preference must be for the English inventions, with which at least their inventor is more at home, and whose accents he distinguishes more successfully. As always, the light is the light of the footlights and the setting is that of the theatre; the whole affair is operated almost as openly as in the new ventriloquism of the vaudeville stage, where the actor-dramatist stands behind his row of puppets, and with his hand now on this and now on that supplies the dialogue and imparts the appropriate action, which he sometimes renders extraordinarily lifelike at the end by walking off the stage arm in arm with the principal puppet.

  What has become of all the delight that was once in these things? The fun of the printed page is no less obvious; the old materials of laughter are there; but somehow the convention by which we agreed to split our sides at the grotesquery of Sairey Gamp and Betsey Prig is disabled, and in its broken condition Dickens can no more make us
smile than Rabelais himself. There must have been something in the air of that time, gone from this, by which he had power upon us; and in every age some great novelist has like power at which the next generation incredulously wonders.

  III

  It is doubtful if the pathos of Little Paul or Florence Dombey could make us cry, now, though it used to wring tears from all eyes, and we could not find the hysterical emotion of the author in working it up a sob or a sigh too much. We did not, in fact, blame his art in any way, we who were his true lieges, but were glad of all his fustian in portraying the alienation of the proud Edith Dombey from her arrogant husband. We gratefully exulted in her design of wounding Dombey in the tenderest place by eloping with his confidential man Carker, and then in turn mocking the hopes of the traitor and flinging his guilty love in his teeth. We followed with panting eagerness every advance of the plot, and gasped for breath in that high climax where Mrs. Dombey, safe away from her husband in France, suddenly unmasked her hatred to her would-be paramour; even yet we cannot help seeing what a tremendously telling scene it would be on the stage.

  “As the sound of Carker’s fastening the door resounded through the intermediate rooms, and seemed to come hushed and stifled into that last one, the sound of the Cathedral clock striking twelve mingled with it, in Edith’s ears. She heard him pause, as if he heard it too and listened; and then come back towards her, laying a long train of footsteps through the silence, and shutting all the doors behind him as he came along. Her hand, for a moment, left the velvet chair to bring a knife within her reach upon the table; then she stood as she had stood before.... ‘I have never,’ resumed Carker, ‘seen you look so handsome as you do to-night,’... He was coming gayly towards her, when, in an instant, she caught the knife up from the table and started one pace back. ‘Stand still!’ she said, ‘or I shall murder you!’ The sudden change in her, the towering fury and intense abhorrence sparkling in her eyes and lighting up her brow, made him stop as if a fire had stopped him. ‘Stand still!’ she said, ‘come no nearer me, upon your life!’ They both stood looking at each other. Rage and astonishment were in his face, but he controlled them, and said lightly, ‘Come, come! Tush! we are alone, and out of everybody’s sight and hearing. Do you think to frighten me with those tricks of virtue?’ ‘Do you think to frighten me,’ she answered, fiercely, ‘from any purpose that I have, and any course I am resolved upon, by reminding me of the solitude of this place and there being no help near? Me, who am here alone, designedly? If I feared you, should I not have avoided you? If I feared you, should I be here, in the dead of night, telling you to your face what I am going to tell?’...

  ‘Do you mistake me for your husband?’ he retorted, with a grin. Disdaining to reply, she stretched her arm out, pointing to the chair. He bit his lip, laughed, and sat down in it, with an impatient air he was unable to conceal; and biting his nail nervously, and looking at her sideways, with bitter discomfiture, even while he feigned to be amused by her caprice. She put the knife down upon the table, and, touching her bosom with her hand, said: ‘I have something lying here that is no love trinket; and sooner than endure your touch once more I would use it on you — and you know it, while I speak — with less reluctance than I would on any other creeping thing that lives.’ He affected to laugh jestingly, and entreated her to act her play out quickly, for the supper was growing cold. But the secret look with which he regarded her was more sullen and lowering, and he struck his foot once upon the floor with a muttered oath. ‘How many times,’ said Edith, bending her darkest glance upon him, ‘has your bold knavery assailed me with outrage and insult? How many times in your smooth manner and mocking words and looks have I been twitted with my courtship and my marriage?... From my marriage day I found myself exposed to such new shame — to such solicitation and pursuit (expressed as clearly as if it had been written in the coarsest words, and thrust into my hand at every turn) from one mean villain, that I felt as if I had never known humiliation till that time. This shame my husband fixed upon me; hemmed me round with, himself; steeped me in, with his own hands, and of his own act, repeated hundreds of times. And thus — forced by the two from every point of rest I had,... driven from each to each, and beset by one when I escaped the other — my anger rose almost to distraction against both. I do not know against which it rose higher — the master or the man I” He watched her closely, as she stood before him in the very triumph of her indignant beauty. She was resolute, he saw; undauntable; with no more fear of him than of a worm. ‘But if I tell you that the lightest touch of your hand makes my blood cold with antipathy; that from the hour when I first saw and hated you, to now, when my instinctive repugnance is enhanced by every minute’s knowledge of you I have since had, you have been a loathsome creature to me which has not its like on earth — how then?... We meet and part to-night,’ she said.

  ‘You have fallen on Sicilian days and sensual rest, too soon.’

  ‘Edith!’ he retorted, menacing her with his hand ‘Sit down! Have done with this! What devil possesses you?’ ‘Their name is Legion,’ she replied, uprearing her proud form as if she would have crushed him; ‘you and your master have raised them in a fruitful house, and they shall tear you both....

  In every vaunt you make, I have my triumph. I single out in you the meanest man I know, the parasite and tool of the proud tyrant, that his wound may go the deeper and may rankle more. Boast, and revenge me on him! You know how you came here to-night; you know how you stand cowering there; you see yourself in colors quite as despicable, if not as odious, as those in which I see you. Boast then, and revenge me on yourself,’ The foam was on his lips; the wet stood on his forehead. If she would have faltered once, for only one half-moment, he would have pinioned her; but she was as firm as rock, and her searching eyes never left him. ‘We don’t part so,’ he said. ‘Do you think I am drivelling, to let you go in your mad temper?” Do you think,’ she answered, ‘that I am to be stayed?’ ‘I’ll try, my dear,’ he said, with a ferocious gesture of his head. ‘God’s mercy on you, if you try by coming near me!’ she replied.... ‘Come!’ and his teeth fairly shone again. ‘We must make a treaty of this, or I may take some unexpected course. Sit down, sit down!’... He did not venture to advance towards her; but the door by which he had entered was behind him, and he stepped back to lock it. ‘Lastly, take my warning! look to yourself!’ she said, and smiled again. ‘You have been betrayed, as all betrayers are. It has been made known that you are in this place, or were to be, or have been. If I live, I saw my husband in a carriage in the street to-night!’ ‘Strumpet, it’s false!’ cried Carker. At the moment, the bell rang loudly in the hall. He turned white, as she held her hand up like an enchantress, at whose invocation the sound had come. ‘Hark! do you hear it?’”

  IV

  This would be a great scene on the stage, I say, but it is in no wise the language or the attitude of life. It is not necessary to say that the whole thing is impossible, almost from beginning to end. As impossibilities go, however, it is not a bad one; is not wholly a piece of effectism. The woman’s hatred of her husband is imaginable enough, and she might well wish to make the means of her humiliation the means of his shame; but only in the theatre could the chances of worse be so successfully and triumphantly safeguarded.

  Edith Dombey is the first of that deadly-haughty line of heroines which Dickens afterwards prolonged through many of his novels; and in much of the other characterizations in “Dombey and Son” he achieved novelty and increasing verity. There are no longer such mere monstrosities in the personifications. Each, of course, is furnished with a trick by which you know him or her, and by this trick each is worked more or less, but still the figures have greater reality and initiative; they have mostly a genuine function, and they contribute to the evolution of the plot by fulfilling their function; they are not merely there to amuse themselves or the reader.

  It is in the tragedy and the pathos that the author oftenest falls down, as we now perceive, though the
time was when Macaulay, the historian and critic, cried over Florence Dombey, as he has himself recorded, in inconsolable heart-break. This is the more wonderful because Macaulay, more than any other, had felt the incomparable fineness of Jane Austen’s art. It must be that the critical fibre of the British public, never too sensitive, had been coarsened by a whole generation of romanticistic fiction, until the bearing on and rubbing in of Dickens was not only not an affliction, but a positive delight. He could not help bearing on and rubbing in, even in the case so delicately imagined as that of the little girl neglected and ignored by her father; he must make her a good monster as he makes the father a bad monster; and as he makes monsters, in their several kinds, of Susan Nipper and Miss Blimber and “ good “ Mrs. Brown and her daughter Alice and Mrs. Chick and Mrs. MacStinger and Mrs. Pipchin and Mrs. Toodle and Miss Tox and the other pieces in the game. They are each reduced to a single quality and propensity, and then intensified out of all nature; and yet in their conception they are genuine and probable enough. This is especially true of Mrs. Dombey, who is for a while not overworked in her specialty of haughty revolt against her husband’s hauteur. She is a sincere nature, and abhors the hollow, husband-hunting life which the hideous old coquette, her mother, has led her; and there are hints of noble tragedy in her love and pity for her husband’s neglected daughter Florence. But the tender beauty of this reality is sacrificed to the gross ends of melodrama, and Edith’s characterization ends in blue fire and muted violins, as we have seen. Still, she was the first semblance of a heroine that Dickens had contrived.