Her heart beat like the heart of a frightened bird; but this direct opposition helped her. She felt her determination growing stronger. ‘Maggie! Dearest! If you love me, you are mine. Who can have so great a claim on you as I have? My life is bound up in your love. There is nothing in the past that can annul our right to each other; it is the first time we have either of us loved with our whole heart and soul. ‘Maggie was still silent for a little while — looking down. Stephen was in a flutter of new hope; he was going to triumph. But she raised her eyes and met his with a glance that was filled with the anguish of regret — not with yielding. ‘No — not with my whole heart and soul, Stephen,’ she said, with timid resolution. ‘I have never consented to it with my whole mind. There are memories, and affections, and longings after perfect goodness, that have such a strong hold on me; they would never quit me for long; they would come back and be pain to me — repentance. I couldn’t live in peace if I put the shadow of a wilful sin between myself and God. I have caused sorrow already — I know — I feel it; but I have never deliberately consented to it; I have never said, “ They shall suffer, that I may have joy. “ It has never been my will to marry you; if you were to win consent from the momentary triumph of my feeling for you, you would not have my whole soul. If I could wake back again into the time before yesterday, I would choose to be true to my calmer affections, and live without the joy of love,’... Again a deep flush came over Maggie’s face, and she was silent. Stephen thought again that he was beginning to prevail — he had never yet believed that he should not prevail; there are possibilities which our minds shrink from too completely for us to fear them. ‘Dearest,’ he said, in his deepest, tenderest tone, leaning toward her, and putting his arm round her, ‘you are mine now — the world believes it — duty must spring out of that now; in a few hours you will be legally mine, and those who had claims on us will submit — they will see that there was a force which declared against their claims,’ Maggie’s eyes opened wide in one terrified look at the face that was close to hers, and she started up — pale again. ‘Oh, I can’t do it,’ she said, in a voice almost of agony; ‘Stephen — don’t ask me — don’t urge me. I can’t argue any longer — I don’t know what is wise; but my heart will not let me do it. I see — I feel their trouble now; it is as if it were branded on my mind. I have suffered, and had no one to pity me; and now I have made others suffer. It would never leave me; it would embitter your love to me.’... ‘Good God, Maggie!’ said Stephen, rising too and grasping her arm, ‘you rave. How can you go back without marrying me? You don’t know what will be said, dearest. You see nothing as it really is.’ ‘Yes, I do. But they will believe me. I will confess everything. Lucy will believe me — she will forgive you, and — and — oh, some good will come by clinging to the right. Dear, dear Stephen, let me go! — don’t drag me into deeper remorse. My whole soul has never consented — it does not consent now,’ Stephen let go her arm, and sank back on the chair, half stunned by despairing rage. He was silent a few moments, not looking at her; while her eyes were turned toward him yearningly, in alarm at this sudden change. At last he said, still without looking at her— ‘Go, then — leave me — don’t torture me any longer — I can’t bear it.’ Involuntarily she leaned toward him and put out her hand to touch his. But he shrank from it as if it had been burning iron, and said again, ‘Leave me!’”
III
It does not seem to me that the true logic of the tale is Maggie’s death with Tom Tulliver, or Stephen’s marriage with Lucy. It is a forced touch where the husband and wife stand together beside the grave of the brother and sister; but in the novels, the best of the novels, fifty years ago, they forced their touches rather? more than they do now. To kill people or to marry them is to beg the question; but into some corner the novelist is commonly driven who deals with a problem. It is only life that can deal masterfully with problems, and life does not solve them by referring them to another life or by stifling them with happiness. How life would have solved the problem of Maggie Tulliver I am not quite prepared to say; but I have my revolt against George Eliot’s solution. All the more I must own that the evolution of the heroine’s character, from the sort of undisciplined, imaginative, fascinating little girl we see her at first, into the impassioned, bewildered, self-disciplined woman we see her at last, is masterly. Having given my opinion that her supreme expression is in her relation to her lover, I have my doubts, or at least my compunctions in behalf of her relation to her brother. Unquestionably the greatest pathos of the story appeals to us from her relation to her brother. The adoring dependence, the grieving indignation, the devotion, the revolt, the submission, and the reunion which make up her love for him is such a study of sisterly affection as I should not know where to match. The very conditions of her intellectual and emotional superiority involve a moral inferiority to the brute simplicity, the narrow integrity, the heroic truth of the more singlynatured man. Maggie saw life more whole than Tom, but that part of it which he saw he discerned with a clearness denied to her large but cloudy vision. It is a great and beautiful story, which one reads with a helpless wonder that such a book should ever be in any wise superseded, or should not constantly keep the attention at least of those fitted to feel its deep and lasting significance.
IV
Through the immeasurably greater importance of its heroine, “The Mill on the Floss” is a greater book than “ Adam Bede,” if we are to take Hetty Sorrel for the heroine of “Adam Bede,” as I suppose we must, and not Dinah Morris. I have no doubt but the author gave her best work to the portrayal of Dinah’s nature, and not in any merely voluntary or mechanical way, but from the highest artistic perception and intention. She has revealed in her character one of the highest types of womanhood and of sainthood; and yet it is poor, shallow, weak, sinful Hetty, with the mind of a child scarcely maturing through the will if not the guilt of a murderess, that takes our interest from this great woman and saint, and holds us heart-wrung and gasping in the presence of that squalid experience. Soul for soul, even the light man who betrays Hetty has through, the anguish of his repentance really a higher claim upon our pity. But it is a law which must be divine, though we find it embodied in human justice nowhere out of fiction, that the weak and slight nature has a paramount right to our sympathy when it suffers. Its suffering moves us like that of some hapless little animal agonizing before our eyes in throes for which we can imagine no compensation elsewhere. For the soul that suffers there is the possibility of an eternity of happiness, but for the thing that has no soul, or to which we attribute none, there is no reparation; its anguish affects the spectator like an injustice, a wrong not less atrocious because indefinable. It does not matter that Hetty Sorrel is a vain, thin, hard little nature, snared through nothing better perhaps than her vulgar fancy, her ignorant and selfish ambition. All the same she is snared, she is deceived, she is blotted out of hope as effectually as if she were, in the scope of the story, blotted out of life.
The author’s hold upon her nature — it can hardly be called her character — is shown in nothing more than in the artistic conscience with which she keeps her from becoming more or other than her moral potentialities imply. There are two great passages in her history, almost as far apart as its beginning and its ending, which give the whole range of her spiritual experience; and one of these will occur to the reader as the passage in which the poor creature triumphs in her beauty with her first definite hopes of Arthur Donnithorne’s love.
It occurs in the chapter called “The Two Bed-Chambers,” where Dinah and Hetty sleep in the farm-house, and while Dinah is dedicating herself in thoughts that are cares and prayers, Hetty is peacocking up and down her little room in worship of her own pretty looks.
“Having taken off her gown and white ‘kerchief, she drew a key from the large pocket that hung outside her petticoat, and, unlocking one of the lower drawers in the chest, reached from it two short bits of wax-candle — secretly bought at Treddleston — and stuck them in the
two brass sockets. Then she drew forth a bundle of matches, and lighted the candles; and, last of all, a small red-framed shilling looking-glass, without blotches. It was into this small glass that she chose to look first after seating herself. She looked into it, smiling, and turning her head on one side for a minute, then laid it down and took out her brush and comb from an upper drawer. She was going to let down her hair and make herself look like that picture of a lady in Miss Lydia Donnithorne’s dressing-room. It was soon done, and the dark hyacinthine curves fell on her neck. It was not heavy, massive, merely rippling hair, but soft and silken, running at every opportunity into delicate rings. But she pushed it all backward, to look like the picture, and form a dark curtain, throwing into relief her round, white neck. Then she put down her brush and comb, and looked at herself, folding her arms before her, still like the picture.... Oh, yes! she was very pretty; Captain Donnithorne thought so. Prettier than anybody about Hayslope — prettier than any of the ladies she had ever seen visiting at the Chase — indeed, it seemed fine ladies were rather old and ugly — and prettier than Miss Bacon, the miller’s daughter, who was called the beauty of Treddleston. And Hetty looked at herself to-night with quite a different sensation from what she had ever felt before; there was an invisible spectator whose eye rested on her like morning on the flowers. His soft voice was saying over and over again those pretty things she had heard in the wood; his arm was round her, and the delicate rose-scent of his hair was with her still. The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her own beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return. But Hetty seemed to have made up her mind that something was wanting, for she got up and reached an old black lace scarf out of the linen-press, and a pair of large ear-rings out of the sacred drawer from which she had taken her candles. It was an old, old scarf, full of rents, but it would make a becoming border round her shoulders, and set off the whiteness of her upper arm. And she would take out the little ear-rings she had in her ears — oh, how her aunt had scolded her for having her ears bored! — and put in those large ones; they were but colored glass and gilding; but, if you didn’t know what they were made of, they looked just as well as what the ladies wore. And so she sat down again, with the large ear-rings in her ears, and the black lace scarf adjusted round her shoulders. She looked down at her arms; no arms could be prettier down to a little way below the elbow — they were white and plump, and dimpled to match her cheeks; but towards the wrist she thought with vexation that they were coarsened by butter-making and other work that ladies never did. Captain Donnithorne wouldn’t like her to go on doing work; he would like to see her in nice clothes, and thin shoes and white stockings, perhaps with silk clocks to them; for he must love her very much — no one else had ever put his arm around her and kissed her in that way. He would want to marry her and make a lady of her — she could hardly dare to shape the thought — yet how else could it be?... And nothing could be as it had been again; perhaps some day she should be a grand lady and ride in her coach, and dress for dinner in a brocaded silk, with feathers in her hair and her dress sweeping the ground, like Miss Lydia and Lady Dacey, when she saw them going into the dining-room one evening, as she peeped through the little round window in the lobby; only she should not be old and ugly like Miss Lydia, or all the same thickness like Lady Dacey, but very pretty, with her hair done in a great many different ways, and sometimes in a pink dress, and sometimes in a white one — she didn’t know which she liked best; and Mary Burge and everybody would perhaps see her going out in her carriage — or rather, they would hear of it; it was impossible to imagine these things happening at Hayslope in sight of her aunt. At the thought of all this splendor, Hetty got up from her chair, and in doing so caught the little red-framed glass with the edge of her scarf, so that it fell with a bang on the floor; but she was too eagerly occupied with her vision to care about picking it up, and, after a momentary start, began to pace with a pigeon-like stateliness backward and forward along her room, in her colored stays and colored skirt, and the old black lace scarf round her shoulders, and the great glass ear-rings in her ears.... No eyelashes could be more beautiful than Hetty’s; and now, while she walks with her pigeon-like stateliness along the room, and looks down on her shoulders bordered by the old black lace, the dark fringe shows to perfection on her pink cheek. They are but dim, ill-defined pictures that her narrow bit of an imagination can make of the future; but of every picture she is the central figure, in fine clothes. Captain Donnithorne is very close to her, putting his arm round her, perhaps kissing her, and everybody else is admiring and envying her, especially Mary Burge, whose new print dress looks very contemptible by the side of Hetty’s resplendent toilet. Does any sweet or sad memory mingle with this dream of the future — any loving thought of her second parents — of the children she had helped to tend — of any youthful companion, any pet animal, any relic of her own childhood even? Not one. There are some plants that have hardly any roots; you may tear them from their native nook of rock or wall, and just lay them over your ornamental flower-pot, and they blossom none the worse.”
V
The whole dark, fateful drama, the drama predestined of the contact of such natures as Hetty Sorrel’s and Arthur Donnithorne’s, passes between this typical scene and the other of which I wish to remind the reader. That has happened which must happen with a spirit so selfish and shallow as hers, and a spirit so selfish and soft as his; and though his guilt is greater because his knowledge is greater, she is guilty to the limit of her lesser knowledge. When the man who loves her with the love of the husband he had hoped to be compels her paramour to break with her, but too late, and when Hetty can no longer hide her shame, she seeks to hide herself from all who know her. She runs away from home, and when her time comes, and her child is born, she is tempted to kill it. It is found dead, though she has not killed it, and its death is traced to her, and she is condemned to die for the deed she has thought to do but has not done. The night before she is appointed to suffer she is in her cell, with Dinah Morris watching and praying beside her.
“‘Dinah,’ Hetty sobbed out, throwing her arms round Dinah’s neck, ‘I will speak... I will tell...
I won’t hide it any more. ‘But the tears and sobs were too violent Dinah raised her gently from her knees, and seated her on the pallet again, sitting down by her side. It was a long time before the convulsed throat was quiet, and even then they sat some time in stillness and darkness, holding each other’s hands. At last Hetty whispered, ‘I didn’t do it, Dinah.... I buried it in the wood,... and it cried.... I heard it cry,... ever such a way off,... all night,... and I went back because it cried,’...
She paused, and then spoke hurriedly in a louder, pleading tone. ‘But I thought perhaps it wouldn’t die — there might somebody find it I didn’t kill it — I didn’t kill it myself. I put it down there and covered it up, and when I came back it was gone.... It was because I was so very miserable, Dinah.... I didn’t know where to go,... and I tried to kill myself before, and I couldn’t. Oh, I tried so to drown myself in the pool, and I couldn’t. I went to Windsor — I ran away — did you know? I went to find him, as he might take care of me; and he was gone; and then I didn’t know what to do. I dared not go back home again — I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t have borne to look at anybody, for they’d have scorned me. I thought o’ you sometimes, and thought I’d come to you, for I didn’t think you’d be cross with me, and cry shame on me; I thought I could tell you.... And I came to a haystack, where I thought I could lie down and keep myself warm all night. There was a place cut into it, where I could make me a bed; and I lay comfortable, and the baby was warm against me; and I must have gone to sleep for a good while, for when I woke it was morning, but not very light, and the baby was crying. And I saw a wood a little way off.... I thought there’d perhaps be a ditch or a pond there,... and it was so early I thought I could hide the child there, and get a long way off before the folks was up. And then I thought I’d g
o home — I’d get rides in carts and go home, and tell ’em I’d been to try and see for a place, and couldn’t get one. I longed so for it, Dinah — I longed so to be safe at home. I don’t know how I felt about the baby. I seemed to hate it — it was like a heavy weight hanging round my neck; and yet its crying went through me, and I dared not look at its little hands and face. But I went on to the wood, and I walked about, but there was no water.’... Hetty shuddered.
She was silent for some moments, and when she began again it was in a whisper. ‘I came to a place where there were lots of chips and turf, and I sat down on the trunk of a tree to think what I should do. And all of a sudden I saw a hole under the nut-tree, like a little grave. And it darted into me like lightning — I’d lay the baby there, and cover it with the grass and the chips. I couldn’t kill it any other way. And I’d done it in a minute; and, oh, it cried so, Dinah — I couldn’t cover it quite up — I thought, perhaps, somebody ‘ud come and take care of it, and then it wouldn’t die. And I made haste out of the wood, but I could hear it crying all the while; and when I got out into the fields, it was as if I was held fast — I couldn’t go away, for all I wanted so to go.... But it was morning, for it kept getting lighter; and I turned back the way I’d come. I couldn’t help it, Dinah; it was the baby’s crying made me go; and yet I was frightened to death.... I saw nothing but that place in the wood where I’d buried the baby.... I see it now. Oh, Dinah! shall I always see it?’
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1571