Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Won’t you come here again? Do!’ Heathcliff went back to her chair and leant over her, but not so far as to let her see his face, which was livid with emotion. She bent round to look at him: he would not permit it: turning abruptly, he walked to the fireplace, where he stood silent with his back towards us.... In her eagerness she rose, and supported herself on the arm of her chair. At that earnest appeal he turned to her.... An instant they held asunder; and then how they met I hardly knew, but Catharine made a spring and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive.... She put up her hand to clasp his neck, and bring his cheek to her own.... ‘You teach me now how cruel you have been — cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me and cry; and wring out my tears and kisses: they’ll blight you, they’ll damn you. You loved me — then what right had you to leave me? What right — answer me — for the poor fancy you felt for Linton?’... ‘Let me alone. Let me alone,’ sobbed Catharine. ‘If I’ve done wrong, I’m dying for it. It is enough. You left me too, but I won’t upbraid you. I forgive you; forgive me!’ ‘It is hard to forgive, and look at those eyes, and feel these wasted hands,’ he answered. ‘Kiss me again, and don’t let me see your eyes! I can forgive you for what you’ve done to me. I love my murderer — but yours! How can I?’ They were silent — their faces hid against each other, and washed by each other’s tears. ‘Service is over,’ I announced. ‘My master will be here in half an hour.’ Heathcliff groaned a curse, and strained Catharine closer: she never stirred.... ‘Now he is here.’

  I exclaimed. ‘For heaven’s sake hurry down. You’ll not meet any one at the front stairs. “ I must go, Cathy,’ said Heathcliff, seeking to extricate himself from his companion’s arms.... ‘You must not go!’ she answered, holding him as firmly as her strength allowed. ‘You shall not, I tell you.’ He would have risen, and unfixed her fingers by the act; she clung fast, gasping. ‘No!’ she shrieked. ‘Oh, don’t, don’t go! It is the last time! Edgar will not hurt us. Heathcliff, I shall die! I shall die!’ ‘Damn the fool! There he is!’ cried Heathcliff, sinking back into his seat. ‘Hush, my darling! Hush, hush, Catharine! I’ll stay. If he shot me so, I’d expire with a blessing on my lips.’... Edgar sprang to his unbidden guest, blanched with astonishment and rage. What he meant to do I cannot tell; however, the other stopped all demonstrations at once by placing the lifeless form in his arms. ‘Look there!’ he said; ‘unless you be a fiend, help her first — then you shall speak to me.’”

  III

  It might be thought that Catharine Linton was sufficiently involved in her ungoverned impulses; but her daughter Catharine is of a still more labyrinthine lawlessness. She has her father’s violent temperament, as well as his complexion; her malice, if qualities can be assigned a tint, is peculiarly blond, while her mother’s fury was brunette. She lends herself to Heathcliff’s purposes by her disobedience to her father, and first puts herself in his power by a romantic fancy for his weakling son, whom she only despises when Heathcliff has forced their marriage, and her husband willingly and even gladly abandons her to his father’s barbarity. She effectively lives Heathcliff’s prisoner till he dies, but she never yields in spirit to him, though quelled by blows into a literal submission; and from time to time she breaks out into reckless taunts and defiances. It is an exposition of woman’s nature unparalleled in some traits. She has been delicately bred in her father’s house, and educated, if not disciplined; she would be expected to have the instincts of a class; but she seems not to feel the insult of Heathcliff’s blows so much as to dread the mere pain; and you cannot help believing these are the facts of the case. You know it to be also true that he never relents to her out of tenderness for her mother’s memory; and that in the mere wantonness of her power she is quite capable of lacerating the proud, ignorant soul of the only man who could have protected her against his ferocity. Surely that side of a girl’s nature was never so unsparingly studied as in the love-making between Hareton and Catharine, who first rouses all the wild beast in him by laughing at his crude attempts to learn from her teaching, and then tames it to her will by the arts which her growing fancy for him inspires.

  “Earnshaw sat, morose as usual, at the chimney comer, and my little mistress was beguiling an idle hour with drawing pictures on the window-panes, varying her amusement by smothered bursts of songs, and whispered ejaculations, and quick looks of annoyance and impatience in the direction of her cousin, who steadfastly smoked and looked into the grate.... Presently I heard her begin, ‘I’ve found out, Hareton, that I want — that I’m glad — that I should like you to be my cousin now, if you had not grown so cross to me and so rough.’ Hareton returned no answer.... ‘Let me take that pipe,’ she said, cautiously advancing her hand and abstracting it from his mouth. Before he could attempt to recover it, it was broken and behind the fire. He swore at her and seized another. ‘Stop,’ she cried; ‘you must listen to me first, and I can’t speak while those clouds are floating in my face.’ ‘Will you go to the devil!’ he exclaimed, ferociously, ‘and let me be!’ ‘No,’ she persisted, ‘I won’t. Come, you shall take notice of me, Hareton: you are my cousin, and you shall own me.’ ‘I shall have nothing to do with you and your mucky pride, and your damned mocking tricks. Side o’ t’ gate, now, this minute!’ Catharine frowned, and retreated to the window-seat, chewing her lip, and endeavoring, by humming an eccentric tune, to conceal a growing tendency to sob.... ‘You hate me, as much as Mr. Heathcliff does, and more.” You’re a damned liar,’ began Earnshaw. ‘Why have I made him angry, by taking your part, a hundred times? And that when you sneered at me and despised me, and—’

  ‘I didn’t know you took my part,’ she answered, drying her eyes, ‘and I was miserable, and bitter at everybody; but now I thank you, and beg you to forgive me: what can I do besides?’ She returned to the hearth and frankly extended her hand. He blackened and scowled like a thunder-cloud, and kept his fists resolutely clinched, and his gaze fixed on the ground. Catharine, by instinct, must have divined that it was obdurate perversity and not dislike that prompted this dogged conduct, for, after remaining an instant undecided, she stooped and impressed on his cheek a gentle kiss.... ‘Say you forgive me, Hareton, do. You can make me so happy by speaking that little word,’ He muttered something inaudible. ‘And you’ll be my friend?’ added Catharine, interrogatively. ‘Nay, you’ll be ashamed of me every day of your life,’ he answered, ‘and the more ashamed the more you know me, THE TWO CATHARINES OF EMILY BRONTÉ and I cannot bide it.’ ‘So you won’t be my friend?’ she said, smiling as sweet as honey and creeping close up.”

  No one can deny the charm of this, the absolute reality, the consummate art, which is still art, however unconscious. Did the dying girl who wrote the strange book, where it is only one of so many scenes of unfaltering truth, know how great it was, with all its defects? In any case criticism must recognize its mastery and rejoice in its courage.

  VOLUME II.

  CHARLES KINGSLEY’S HYPATIA

  THE interest felt in the novels of the Brontë sisters was from the first intensely personal, and it grew more and more personal, as the veil was lifted from their pathetic lives, and the close relation between what they had written and what they had been was seen. In the average unliterary mind the relation between the author and his work is always a thing to be taken for granted. He is identified with this or that person in the fiction, and if the reader of average unliterary mind has the chance of speaking to him about his story, he will say, “There, where the girl comes to you, and you tell her,” or the like Sometimes this is amusing, and sometimes it is dismaying; in any case it is useless for the author to protest; and it is not very good business for him to do so. The average unliterary reader loves him and his work, according as he finds him personally in it, or believes he finds him.

  This passion
was fed full in the case of the Brontës, and they were taken to the hearts of their readers as few authors have been. Their books were in fact very personal to themselves. Charlotte may be easily and probably associated with the nature if not the character and experience of Jane Eyre; she can hardly be dissociated from it; and if in the more detached and dramatic story of “Wuthering Heights,” Emily cannot be so unfailingly identified with this or that person, yet there is an identity in the animate and inanimate environment of her life and that of the people in “ Withering Heights “ which is quite as satisfying to the average unliterary mind. She had not and could not have the world-wide worship of her sister; but her cult was of a more fervent devotion, with the zeal and the spiritual pride of a small sect in it; and doubtless many a bruised and prisoned spirit wreaked its bitterness in the wild turbulence, the lawless violence, of “ Wuthering Heights” which could not find outlet even in the revolt of “Jane Eyre” against the social and religious formalism of the time. But perhaps because personal merit triumphs in that book over all adverse circumstances it was dearer to more hearts, and the author was dearer; for people like to see virtue rewarded. It is at least certain that it was personal to more hearts, and it stands, better than “ Wuthering Heights,” which is a struggle with fate, for the personal insurrection against convention, which in some sort or other is always active.

  The insurrection against society in the larger sense is less pervasive because it is of more alarming implication, but this too is perpetual; and at the same time that “Jane Eyre” was stirring the world’s sympathy for a young girl striving single-handed with unkindness and temptation, there was another book making its powerful appeal for justice in behalf of all those who have not against those who have, for the toilers against the idlers, for famine against surfeit, for mass against class, for manhood against moneyhood.

  I

  One of the most striking things in Charles Kingsley’s “ Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet” is the modernity of the problems involved, the conditions combated, the terms of the contest, and the very language in which they are stated. The book is on this side palpitantly actual, though the literary attitude is so old-fashioned and outdated. The Chartist agitation of fifty years ago is mirrored in the Socialist aspiration of the present day; its aims are effectively the same, its means the same, its vocabulary the same, and neither the reasons nor the unreasons with which it was then met have since changed. Its quarrel is now less with aristocracy and more with plutocracy; but these were always really convertible if not identical, and now the quarrel is more directly with capital because class without capital is no longer to be feared. The one great matter in which the new industrial rebellion differs from the old is in its attitude towards religion; but this change has taken place less through the hearts of the toilers than through the hearts of the teachers. The church has risen to an ideal of Christianity which was intuitive with the world of work and need; and it was already beginning to imagine its duty in the modem industrial conditions when “Alton Locke” was written. How much that book had to do with clarifying its conception of this duty it would not be easy to say; but we can make sure of the fact that “Alton Locke” has been potent as a twofold protest: first against the cruel exploitation of labor, and second against the misdirected resentment of the sufferers. Its insurrection is on a far broader ground, and with a much wider intention than that of “ Jane Eyre.” It is human and that is personal; but because humanity is still so much weaker than personality, it has probably influenced vastly fewer readers. Then, it has failed of equal influence, undoubtedly, because it is not of equal art. It is a polemic, in which all the characters, of whatever party they apparently are, are always arguing for the author. They stand for this thing or that, but they have not risen of themselves; they are where they are because he put them there. English fiction is for the most part still in the stage of allegory, though there were always masters who could teach it the higher function of drama. Charles Kingsley was not of these masters, at least in “Alton Locke,” and he was too didactic by nature and by culture ever to be simply representative. He is trying to carry a point, to enforce a truth, rather than to show it and let it enforce itself. In “ Alton Locke,” the hero, who speaks for himself in the autobiographical form, is really a character, a person; Kingsley always dealt well with the literary type, its consciousness, its conceit, its self-distrust, its timid selfishness, and its bursts of enthusiasm; but the others are merely frameworks actuated directly from the author, doing the things they are expected to do. This is especially true of the two women who must stand for the heroines. Neither Lillian Winnstay, the shallow-hearted, romantic beauty, who flatters the poor poet by her pleasure in his verse and his picturesque personality, nor Eleanor Staunton, who snubs him for his good, but is really his friend, and the faithful friend of all the poor, is more than an illustration. They have their being, not in a world of law, but a world of special providences (the world of nearly all English fiction), and they do what it happens to them to do, and for the effect upon Alton Locke, whom they are to teach that if the upper classes are sometimes self-absorbed they are also sometimes self-devoted. This was a useful thing enough, and something that not only a burning-hearted orator and agitator like Alton Locke could profitably realize, but that all the struggling and suffering lower classes would do well to understand; yet it was not a thing that could give them dramatic projection, apparently, beyond the will of their creator. Lillian Winnstay was of rather more palpable sub CHARLES KINGSLEY’S HYPATIA stance than Eleanor Staunton, and in her more complex behavior she achieves something like the complexity of a real character. She is at least not exemplary, and so far she is saved from the worst that can befall a type in fiction, or perhaps in life. In a book so largely devoted to making it clear that the church is not the enemy but the true friend if not sole hope of the poor, it is much to have her the daughter of a dean; and it is in the interest of her reality that she is kept from anything worse than an intellectual flirtation with the sweat-shop poet, or from anything but an æsthetical appreciation of his picturesqueness.

  II

  It is a curious fact that a sort of imagination, like that of a poet, and especially such a poet as Kingsley was, can somehow give its creations greater verisimilitude by putting them back in time, where they may be posed in an arbitrary light, with a setting unquestioned by the familiar experiences and associations of the reader. For this reason Hypatia in the novel of her name is more lifelike than Eleanor Staunton, and her foil Pelagia is more lifelike than Eleanor Staunton’s foil, Lillian Winnstay. Hypatia is really a young lady of the early eighteen-fifties, of the time when young ladies of her type were crudely called strong - minded. She was a sort of Alexandrian Margaret Fuller, with more good looks than our transcendental muse could pretend to; but not of a loftier ideal, a purer soul, a more “orphic utterance.” She was a woman - version of Julian the Apostate, and she was born in Athens and lived and lectured at Alexandria not long after that paganizing reactionary failed to persuade the world that there was something in the old mythology or philosophy. She had a large following of cultured and gilded youth, but the mob, led on by the turbulent monks of the city, under the countenance of the patriarch Cyril, rose in tumult against her, and she was tom to pieces by the Christian zealots. So far history, with whose elements our poet (and Kingsley was a very true if not a very great poet) deals as he may and will, and reconstructs in a figure of at least as much recognizable reality as the heroines of his novels of modem life.

  It cannot be said by the unprejudiced reader that his Hypatia is an attractive personality. He has somehow failed to give her charm, though he has given her a beautiful body, perfectly moulded features, with blue eyes and yellow hair, and a glorious intellect. But the truth is his Hypatia remains as cold as the baths of Apollo, and it is not going too far to say that she is rather repellent. Of course she might answer that she did not mean to be otherwise, in her poet’s hands, and that what he had shown her, that s
he was: rather arrogant in mind, holding matrimony in high scorn, and thinking but little better, if any, of maternity. The passion of the ardent young monk Philammon for this snow-cold divinity is not made altogether credible, and his sister, poor, pretty Pelagia, who has lived the life of a wanton and is presently the paramour of the Gothic chief Amal, is more winning in some things that take the heart. She is passionately faithful to her huge, stupid, honest Goth, and she is kind to every one else, with a willingness to see people happy even if they are not virtuous. She is spiritually modest, and at least unconscious in her other immodesty. When she is awakened through the dim memories of childhood to the fact that she and Philammon are sister and brother, long ago carried captive from Athens and sold into slavery, she tries hard to let the monk bring her to a conviction of sin. But though she is good Christian enough to believe in hell, she also believes in God, and thinks He will take into consideration the peculiar circumstances under which she remains constant to Amal, whom the customs of the Goth’s tribe will not suffer to marry her.