Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  In all this Pelagia is certainly not a better woman than Hypatia; but she is a more lovable nature, and she does not make Hypatia’s fatal mistake of trying to transcend her own nature. Hypatia would have married the faithless prefect Orestes in the hope of restoring the old Greek faith, though in her neoplatonism she is as passionless as he is faithless. Her author deals intelligently with her, but somehow he fails to deal impressively, and, as regards the reader’s sympathy or even interest, he fails to deal successfully. It may be that he suffers himself to be too strictly trammelled by history — the historical romance must not, of all things, be historical — and does not give his imagination free play in her character. In any case she remains a woman without warmth of heart, that supreme mode of motion, without heat even of intellect. She cannot, therefore, impart movement to the figures of the drama around her and centring in her. The Alexandria of the fifth century is a great scene, with its wild monks ‘doing the will of the bigoted Cyril, and wreaking their fanaticism now upon the Jews and now upon the pagans; with its Roman prefect seeking to hold the turbulent population in check alternately by tyranny and flattery; with its belated schools of Greek philosophy; with its church already sunk into superstition and corruption; with its swarming masses of every race and color, the prey of every lawless impulse from within and without, effete and hysterical, violent and cruel, kept from famine by public doles of food, and amused by bloody public shows at once pitiless and shameless; and “Hypatia” is Kingsley’s endeavor and his failure to fuse all these warring elements into a dramatic whole. In spite of his admirable conception of the situation, his learning, his poetic insight, they will not respond to his intention. They remain dispersed, as they might not if they had been grouped about a central figure of more cohesive power. But all the different particles seem to crumble away from the repellent nature of the heroine, whose fate the spectator beholds with compassion certainly, but with more horror than compassion. On a far higher plane than Bulwer’s work in “The Last Days of Pompeii,” Kingsley’s work in “Hypatia” falls below it in artistic effect; for Bulwer, cheap as he was, was at least a melodramatist, while Kingsley was no dramatist at all, but an exalted moralist willing to borrow the theatre for the ends of the church. If we realize this we shall understand why his figures seem to have come out of the property-room by way of the vestry. Orestes, the debauched Roman prefect, believing neither in the gods nor the saints, but willing to propitiate the friends of either as they shall serve the turn of his ambition; Miriam, the haggish slave-dealer, who knows the common paternity of Pelagia and Philammon, and is the mother of Orestes’s boon companion, the brilliant Jewish sceptic and cynic Raphael Aben-Ezra, partner of Orestes’s passion for the snow-cold Hypatia, and destined to a true Christian conversion; Theon, the Heavy Father of Hypatia, who consents for his sake as well as her own ambition to listen to the suit of Orestes; the whole tribe of monkish and prelatic fanatics; the forty Gothic barbarians stalking large and blond through the scene, and casually hewing down enough miscreants of every tradition and persuasion to satisfy the bloodthirstiest reader; the hermits and fathers of the desert; and the various soldiers, students, porters, slaves, and singing and dancing women who thickly people the scene, all affect us like old friends from beyond the foot-lights. The conception is not wanting in originality; it is the performance which seems somehow second-hand in most cases. The affair has many dramatic moments; it often promises to be a drama, but it never quite is so. As a representation of antique life closer to our own than either that of “Quo Vadis “ or “The Last Days of Pompeii,” it lacks as much the brute plethora and intensity of the one as the histrionic knack of the other; and yet the message it conveys is more vital than that of either. It realizes to us that human motives and passions are immutably the same in all times and places; that philosophy perishes in spite of its beauty and truth, and that religion survives in spite of its ugliness and falsehood, because it takes account of the things of the soul and philosophy cares only for the things of the mind. It teaches that the Christianity of the nineteenth century as well as the fifth needs to be saved from itself before it can save the world, but that it alone can save the world.

  Kingsley was a poet — I am always saying that — and he passionately loved the artistic presence of the antique world. He was one of those Hellenizing English minds of whom Keats was the first and finest, and he stood in some such relation to the pagan past as one of the earliest Greek Christians might, feeling the beauty of its ideality while abhorring its sensuality. He was very fit indeed to write a much better story of the zealots and sophists of Alexandria than he actually wrote in “Hypatia,” and I still think it was through his heroine that he failed. If I fail to prove this, and any reader recurring to the book after many years, or coming newly to it, shall find it greater than I have found it in my second reading, I shall rejoice, and save myself by making my critic observe that I always said the author was a poet.

  III

  Kingsley himself recognizes a difficulty in rehabilitating to the fancy the period he has chosen, and this difficulty lies in the impossibility of telling all about paganism. He could tell the worst about Christianity, but without a statement of the unnamable iniquities which the old faith suffered if it did not foster there could be no sufficient contrast of the two. In paganism there could be no conviction of sin; there could be offences against the will or the dignity of the gods, but none against the spirit of righteousness, such as quicken the soul of the offender to repentance; and in like manner there could be no such meekness of heart as attributes its virtue to some source of goodness outside itself. Hypatia’s enthusiasm for the pagan philosophy must ignore the foulness of the pagan life; and her stainless personal purity must rejoice in itself as the effect of her own will. She has but two passions, or rather one, for ambition includes jealousy, and she is envious of the witchery which Pelagia has for the hearts of men, and cannot bear that the dancing-woman should enjoy the triumph which she herself disdains. She has her following of those who can adore beauty that lectures and illumines, but she must have all, or at least she cannot suffer that her rival should have any.

  It will have been seen that Hypatia, after all, does not escape being a woman; she is, indeed, the more a woman in failing, and it is in the throes of her self-recognized limitations that the heart warms to her a little. Hypatia angered that Pelagia should be the supreme attraction of the spectacle that the prefect is planning, is at least more tolerable than Hypatia refusing to let Pelagia profit by her teaching, even at the prayer of her beloved pupil Philammon, because she will not have her own purity contaminated by Pelagia’s presence. In her former mood she is at the worst sincere, but in the latter mood she is at the best not credible even if she is sincere. It is hard to see what side of Hypatia is accessible to sympathy, but the terrible spectacle of her death must inspire compassion. This acquires reality rather from the passions of her murderers than from any quality of her own; and it is difficult to conceive of her even as a living impersonation of intellectual pride suffering martyrdom. Is not she rather a statue to a belated ideal, thrown down and broken to pieces by the sanguinary zealots of another faith? It is hard even to believe in Philammon, her pupil and lover, who has turned monk again, but who deserts his brethren to warn her of their hate, and to save her from their fury, as she appears after her lecture, in the street where they are lurking.

  “At last a curricle, glittering with silver, rattled round the corner and stopped opposite him.... A slave brought forth an embroidered cushion, and then Hypatia herself came forth, looking more glorious than ever; her lips set in a sad, firm smile; her eyes uplifted, inquiring, eager, and yet gentle, dimmed by some great inward awe, as if her soul were far away aloft, and face to face with God. In a moment he sprang to her, caught her robe convulsively, threw himself on his knees before her. ‘Stop! Stay! You are going to destruction!’ Calmly she looked down upon him. ‘Accomplice of witches! Would you make of Theon’s daughter a traitor lik
e yourself?’ She believed him guilty, then! It was the will of God! The plumes of the horses were waving far down the street before he recovered himself and rushed after her, shouting he knew not what. It was too late. A dark wave of men rushed from the ambuscade, surged round the car — swept forward — she had disappeared; and, as Philammon followed breathless, the horses galloped past him madly homeward with the empty carriage. Whither were they dragging her? To the Cæsareum, to the Church of God himself? Impossible! Why thither, of all places on the earth? Why did the mob, increasing momentarily by hundreds, pour down upon the beach, and return brandishing flints, shells, fragments of pottery? She was upon the church steps before he caught them up, invisible among the crowd, but he could track her by the fragments of her dress....

  He would save her! And he struggled in vain to pierce the dense mass of parobolani and monks, who, mingled with fishwives and dock-workers, leaped and yelled around their victim.... Yes! On into the church itself! Into the cool, dim shadow, with its fretted pillars and lowering domes, and candles and incense, and blazing altar, and great pictures looking from the walls across the gorgeous gloom. And right in front, above the altar, the colossal Christ watching unmoved from off the wall, his right hand raised, to give a blessing or a curse? On, up the nave, fresh shreds of her dress strewing the holy pavement, up the chancel steps themselves, up to the altar, right underneath the great still Christ, and there even these hell-hounds paused. She shook herself free from her tormentors, and, springing back, rose for a moment to her full height, naked, snow-white against the dusky mass around, shame and indignation in those wide, clear eyes, but not a stain of fear. With one hand she clasped her golden locks around her; the other long, white arm was stretched upward toward the great still Christ, appealing — and who dare say in vain? — from man to God. Her lips were open to speak, but the words that would have come from them reached God’s ear alone; for in an instant Peter struck her down, the dark mass closed over her again, and then, wail on wail, long, wild, ear-piercing, rung along the vaulted roof.”

  But enough of this, as the novelist himself would say. Poor Hypatia, framed of such great elements by the hand of a true poet, how is it she fails of the due effect? Perhaps it is because of the double charge which the poet felt laid upon him as also a priest. He must make her at once the beautiful apostle of a creed outworn, and an example of its insufficiency to the needs at least of woman nature, if not of human nature. Hawthorne could have dealt triumphantly with such a figure, and rapt us with the mystical and thrilling charm of its contrasts; but not Kingsley, too earnest as he always was for the long patience of art, and too perfervid in that zeal for his reader’s soul first of all things. The dramatist can preach and he does preach by Hamlet, by Macbeth, by Othello, who are never freed, either of them, to an absolute and single significance, but if the preacher attempts to dramatize, we forget his lesson in our sense of his failure. The moral of “Hypatia” is, Beware of spiritual pride, and do not evil that good may come; but what is the meaning of Hypatia herself?

  THE NATURE OF CHARLES READE’S HEROINES

  EACH great novelist invents or discovers a certain type of feminine nature which is his predominant if not his favorite type, although it is by no means his only type. He may wholly depart from it, and easily paint its opposite, or he may vary it, and disguise it, without really departing from it; but this type in its most distinctive form will characterize him in the reader’s general impression. We have only to think of the dominant types of Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the rest, in order to realize the fact; and they need not be alleged in proof, either themselves or their analogues or their opposites. We know what they are, and still better we know what the predominant type of such a minor novelist — he was very nearly a major novelist — as Charles Reade is: it is with an effort that I refrain from writing he and his works seem so quite of the past. I have lately been rereading them nearly all, with a keen sense of his extraordinary knowledge, and a regret for his knowingness in the region of woman’s nature which I could not so readily qualify. It was the fatal defect of his faculty that he valued himself most upon his knowingness, and that he flourished it in the face of his readers instead of using his knowledge to instruct and delight them. He liked better to release a spring, and let his heroine jump at you out of a box than to have her grow softly upon you through the mystery of womanhood, a tangible and adorable personality.

  I

  Charles Readers peculiar invention is a species of coquette manquée. All coquettes are coquettes manquées in so far as the flirt is always self-defeated in her triumph, and loses more than she gains by any conquest. But the sort of coquette manquée that Reade invented is the flirt in whom the impulse of mere flirtation is arrested or interrupted by a throe of conscience, or a thrill of passion, and who for peace’ sake or love’s sake is willing to forego the pleasure of winning a heart to no other end than feeling it hers. She has the nature of a coquette, but the heart of a woman, and is capable of sudden and supreme self-sacrifice. She is as sinuous as a serpent in arriving finally at the effects of the dove. Reade perceived that there is something feline in every woman, but he also divined that in many and perhaps in most cases she wishes to use the arts of the cat for no worse purpose than getting a soft place in a man’s soul and sweetly purring there. This discovery appeared to him so extraordinary that he not only embodied its results in nearly all his heroines, but continually shouted over it, and flaunted it as the great discovery of the age, or of every age. It was indeed a very pretty find, and was not spoiled by the temperamental excesses of the discoverer, who was not without the qualities of his defects, and amidst his violences to art and taste, his ground and lofty tumbling, and his antics of all sorts, had the gift of denoting the traits of his peculiar heroines with unerring skill. He fired from the hip as well as the shoulder; he fired lying down and standing on his head; he fired with his back to the target, looking into a mirror; he fired on the quick run; but he rarely failed to strike the centre of the mark, and when he rang the bell one could (at least in one’s youth) forgive him if he leaped into the air and clicked his heels together with a whoop of triumph.

  II

  He was as apt to give a whoop of triumph upon a small occasion as a great; and he made no unusual noise over so admirable a creature as Lucy Fountain in “Love Me Little, Love Me Long.” He was perhaps rather more boisterous about Mrs. Bazalgette, who is the ultimatum of all Lucy’s worst feminine tendencies. We see in this full-blown flirt what Lucy might have been if she had not resolutely remained a bud, and kept her wiles and lures firmly folded within the green leaves of the calyx out of which they were suffered merely to peep. But this delightful girl is shown us with reticence almost as discreet as her own; and an artist who had a ‘prentice boyishness to the last — his boyishness grew upon him, in fact — shows in her likeness more of the quiet of a master than in any other portraiture. She is most charmingly and originally imagined throughout. Many ladies have loved below them in fiction as well as out, but Lucy is the first girl of her kind to do so; for she is not romantic or passionate, and is of a fancy well guarded by the knowledge and the wisdom of the world. She cannot help seeing that David Dodd is a hero in his unconscious way, but she is perfectly aware that the mate of a merchantman is no mate for a young lady of her wealth and station, to say nothing of her birth and breeding. She is captivated by his career and character, but almost in an aesthetic way at first, and not in any fond fashion of loving him for the dangers he has passed. He surprises her, and then he interests her, and, as it were, convinces her. Her heart slips away from her, while she is in full possession of her reason, and while she can still be shocked at his awkwardness and ashamed of him, even, at times. All the successive and synchronous facts of her consciousness are clearly and subtly, if not delicately, studied; her beauty is vividly painted, and her little tricks and traits — the things in which personality most shows itself, if not resides — are bewitchingl
y caught. Her serviceable subservience to her Aunt Bazalgette, which always ends at some point where Lucy has made up her mind to have her own way, is of the same texture as her complaisance with her Uncle Fountain, who believes that she is going to marry the man of his choice while she is sweetly meaning to marry the man of her own, or rather to let him marry the woman of his, for that is more exactly the relation of the strenuous David Dodd to the event. Her good sense and sagacity are equal to the demands upon them, even after marriage, when they so often fail with ladies who marry for love; and having let the mate of a merchantman choose her, she chooses his lot in life and forsakes her own. She abdicates her place in society, and accepts her new condition with the grace that distinguishes her in all things, great and small.