Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  In Grandcourt the imperious girl who had dreamed of ruling him finds a master whose will can break her own or bend it to his when he chooses, and their marriage is a long atrocity which begins almost from this awful moment “One evening, shortly before they came to the Abbey, they were going to dine at Brackenshaw Castle. Gwendolen had said to herself that she would never wear those diamonds: they had horrible words clinging and crawling about them, as from some bad dream, whose images lingered on the perturbed sense. She came down dressed in her white, with only a streak of gold and a pendant of emeralds, which Grandcourt had given her, round her neck, and the little emerald stars in her ears. Grandcourt stood with his back to the fire and looked at her as she entered. ‘Am I altogether as you like?’ she said, speaking rather gayly. She was not without enjoyment in this occasion of going to Brackenshaw Castle with her new dignities upon her, as men whose affairs are sadly involved will enjoy dining out among persons likely to be under a pleasant mistake about them. ‘No,’ said Grandcourt. Gwendolen felt suddenly uncomfortable, wondering what was to come.... ‘Oh mercy!’ she exclaimed, the pause lasting till she could bear it no longer. ‘How am I to alter myself?’ ‘ Put on the diamonds,’ said Grandcourt, looking straight at her with his narrow glance. Gwendolen paused in her turn, afraid of showing any emotion, and feeling that nevertheless there was some change in her eyes as they met his. But she was obliged to answer, and said as indifferently as she could, ‘Oh, please not I don’t think diamonds suit me.’ ‘What you think has nothing to do with it,’ said Grandcourt, his sotto voce imperiousness seeming to have an evening quietude and finish, like his toilet. ‘I wish you to wear the diamonds.’ ‘Pray excuse me; I like these emeralds,’ said Gwendolen, frightened in spite of her preparation. That white hand of his which was touching his whisker was capable, she fancied, of clinging round her neck and threatening to throttle her; for her fear of him, mingled with the vague foreboding of some retributive calamity which hung about her life, had reached a superstitious point. ‘Oblige me by telling me your reason for not wearing the diamonds when I desire it,’ said Grandcourt. His eyes were still fixed upon her, and she felt her own eyes narrowing under them as if to shut out an entering pain. Of what use was the rebellion within her? She could say nothing that would not hurt her worse than submission. Turning slowly and covering herself again, she went to her dressing-room. As she reached out the diamonds it occurred to her that her unwillingness to wear them might have already raised a suspicion in Grandcourt that she had some knowledge about them which he had not given her. She fancied that his eyes showed a delight in torturing her. How could she be defiant? She had nothing to say that would touch him — nothing but what would give him a more painful grasp of her consciousness. ‘He delights in making the dogs and horses quail: that is half his pleasure in calling them his,’ she said to herself, as she opened the jewel-case with a shivering sensation. ‘It will be so with me; and I shall quail. What else is there for me? I will not say to the world, “Pity me.”’ She was about to ring for her maid when she heard the door open behind her. It was Grandcourt who came in. ‘You want some one to fasten them,’ he said, coming toward her. She did not answer, but simply stood still, leaving him to take out the ornaments and fasten them as he would....

  ‘What makes you so cold?’ said Grandcourt, when he had fastened the last ear-ring. ‘Pray put plenty of furs on. I hate to see a woman come into a room looking frozen. If you are to appear as a bride at all, appear decently.’”

  II

  The tragedy can scarcely be said to culminate in the scene of Grandcourt’s death, which Gwendolen herself describes to Deronda, not knowing whether she has really been willing he should drown, and not seeking to defend herself in telling how she leaped to him with a rope at last, too late. But it ends there, and there is perhaps a supreme effect in this uncertainty of hers Which agonizes as much as it consoles. It sets the seal to a record as true to human nature as it is terrible, and testifies to a power in the writer which is nowhere surpassed in the art which her great conscience exalted heaven-high above its wonted office of amusing.

  To revert from her character and its development, to that of Janet Dempster in “Scenes of Clerical Life,” is a curious and valuable experience for the student of George Eliot’s work. We go from an ethicism in Gwendolen Harleth’s case as rootless and flowerless as that of the stoics back to an ideal of conduct sprung from a sense of the power not ourselves that makes for righteousness, and to a faith in the fatherly love of the Judge of all the earth, which promises itself compensation hereafter for whatever is wrong here. In “Daniel Deronda,” George Eliot had reached that moment of her agnosticism when it seemed enough to “join the choir invisible” of those whose personality has indeed perished forever, but whose character remains to help and comfort us who are still wandering through this twilight toward the eternal night. It involved a sublime self-abnegation which we cannot contemplate without a glow of pride in the humanity so self-sufficing, and a thrill of reverent admiration. It was magnificent, and I will not withhold my sense that if it was sincere it transcended the rapture of martyrdom. All the more I feel bound to recognize the meek beauty of the faith which was the spring and inspiration of the author’s art in “Janet’s Repentance.” There right conduct was not self-derived, but was an effect of the universal law of love which remembers and considers every minutest atom of life, and guards the finite human consciousness through its affinity to the infinite and the divine. It is not pertinent to pronounce upon the moral quality of the two creative moods of the author but only to note their difference.

  There is socially almost as wide a difference between Gwendolen Harleth and Janet Dempster, who are alike in their unhappiness and its common source in a cruel marriage. But Gwendolen has sought her misery through her ambition, and Janet’s has come to her through her love, and it has had power to drag her down through the refuge she takes from it, but never to spoil her noble nature. Her husband, a shrewd and able lawyer in a provincial town, is himself a drunkard, and when he is in drink, he is of a brutal cruelty to his wife which has at last driven her to try his vice as a means of deadening her misery from it. We have seen how Grandcourt could torture his bride; now let us see how, on another level of life, Dempster could devote a yet more helpless victim to a less guilty rage, when he comes home imbruted by his cups.

  “There was a large heavy knocker on the green door, and though Mr. Dempster carried a latch-key, he sometimes chose to use the knocker. He chose to do so now. The thunder resounded through Orchard Street, and, after a single minute, there was a second clap, louder than the first. Another minute, and still the door was not opened; whereupon Mr. Dempster, muttering, took out his latch-key, and, with less difficulty than might have been expected, thrust it into the door. When he opened the door the passage was dark. ‘Janet!’ in the loudest rasping tone, was the next sound that rang through the house. ‘Janet! ‘again — before a slow step was heard on the stairs, and a distant light began to flicker on the wall of the passage. ‘Curse you! you creeping idiot! Come faster, can’t you?’ Yet a few seconds, and the figure of a tall woman, holding aslant a heavy-plated drawing-room candlestick, appeared at the turning of the passage that led to the broader entrance. She had on a light dress which sat loosely about her figure, but did not disguise its liberal, graceful outline. A heavy mass of straight jet-black hair had escaped from its fastening, and hung over her shoulders. Her grandly cut features, pale with the natural paleness of a brunette, had premature lines about them, telling that the years had been lengthened by sorrow, and the delicately curved nostril, which seemed made to quiver with the proud consciousness of power and beauty, must have quivered to the heart-piercing griefs which had given that worn look to the comers of her mouth. Her wide-open black eyes had a strangely fixed, sightless gaze, as she paused at the turning and stood silent before her husband. ‘I’ll teach you to keep me waiting in the dark, you pale staring fool!’ he said, advancing with his slow d
runken step. ‘What, you’ve been drinking again, have you? I’ll beat you into your senses.’ He laid his hand with a firm grip on her shoulder, turned her round, and pushed her slowly before him along the passage and through the dining-room door, which stood wide open on their left hand.

  “There was a portrait of Janet’s mother, a grayhaired, dark-eyed old woman, in a neatly fluted cap, hanging over the mantel-piece. Surely the aged eyes take on a look of anguish as they see Janet — not trembling, no! it would be better if she trembled — standing stupidly unmoved in her great beauty, while the heavy arm is lifted to strike her. The blow falls — another — and another. Surely the mother hears that cry— ‘O Robert! pity! pity!’ Poor gray-haired woman! Was it for this you suffered a mother’s pangs in your lone widowhood five-and-thirty years ago? Was it for this you kept the little worn morocco shoes Janet had first run in, and kissed them day by day when she was away from you, a tall girl at school? Was it for this you looked so proudly at her when she came back to you in her rich pale beauty, like a tall white arum that had just unfolded its grand pure curves to the sun?”

  The author’s recurrence in her latest heroine to the pale-dark beauty of her earliest is an interesting evidence of the persistence of an ideal, and the mind’s unconscious obedience to it; but Janet is of far simpler-stuff than Gwendolen in every way, and one is made to feel her weaker and tenderer through her very largeness of physique. She is indeed of a loving and forgiving sort, and there is something most womanly and most pitiful in her eagerness to forget her husband’s brutality as soon as the moment of it is past. There could be nothing more pathetic than her willingness to lend herself to his wish of burlesquing the young curate who is devotedly preaching and living Christianity in the town, but who has fallen under the drunken lawyer’s condemnation as a hypocrite. She gives all her cleverness to this miserable work with no thought but of pleasing the husband who beats her, and for the time he is pleased. But another time comes when she meets his fury with rebellion and then the end comes.

  “About eleven the party dispersed, with the exception of Mr. Budd, who had joined them after dinner, and appeared disposed to stay drinking a little longer. Janet began to hope that he would stay long enough for Dempster to become heavy and stupid, and so fall asleep downstairs, which was a rare but occasional ending of his nights. She told the servants to sit up no longer, and she herself undressed and went to bed, trying to cheat her imagination into the belief that the day was ended for her. But when she lay down, she became more intensely awake than ever. Everything she had taken this evening seemed only to stimulate her senses and her apprehensions to new vividness. Her heart beat violently, and she heard every sound in the house. At last, when it was twelve, she heard Mr. Budd go out; she heard the door slam. Dempster had not moved. Was he asleep? Would he forget? The minutes seemed long, while, with a quickening pulse, she was on the stretch to catch every sound. ‘Janet!’ The loud jarring voice seemed to strike her like a hurled weapon. ‘Janet!’ he called again, moving out of the dining-room to the foot of the stairs. There was a pause of a moment. ‘If you don’t come, I’ll kill you.’ Another pause, and she heard him turn back into the dining-room. Perhaps he would kill her. Let him. Life was as hideous as death. For years she had been rushing on to some unknown but certain horror; and now she was close upon it. She was almost glad. She was in a state of flushed feverish defiance that neutralized her woman’s terrors. She heard his heavy step on the stairs; she saw the slowly advancing light. Then she saw the tall, massive figure and the heavy face, now fierce with drunken rage. He had nothing but the candle in his hand. He set it down on the table and advanced close to the bed. ‘So you think you’ll defy me, do you? We’ll see how long that will last. Get up, madam; out of bed this instant! ‘In the close presence of the dreadful man — of this huge, crushing force, armed with savage will — poor Janet’s desperate defiance all forsook her, and her terrors came back. Trembling she got up, and stood helpless in her night-dress before her husband. He seized her with his heavy grasp by the shoulder and pushed her before him. ‘I’ll cool your hot spirit for you! I’ll teach you to brave me!’ Slowly he pushed her along before him, down stairs and through the passage, where a small oil-lamp was still flickering. What was he going to do to her? She thought every moment he was going to dash her before him on the ground. But she gave no scream — she only trembled. He pushed her on to the entrance, and held her firmly in his grasp while he lifted the latch of the door. Then he opened the door a little way, thrust her out through it and slammed it behind her. For a short space it seemed like a deliverance to Janet. The harsh northeast wind, that blew through her thin night-dress and sent her long, heavy black hair streaming, seemed like the breath of pity after the grasp of that threatening monster. But soon the sense of release from an overpowering terror gave away before the sense of the fate that had really come upon her. This, then, was what she had been travelling toward through her long years of misery! Not yet death. Oh! if she had been brave enough for it, death would have been better.”

  III

  These are dreadful things, and so squalid that they must shock the refined reader; but who that knows life can deny that they happen? They happen far oftener than is ever known, and if the veil could be lifted from many marriages that show a fair outside, what hideous things should not we see! It is not ill, but it is very well to be confronted with the ugly realities, the surviving savageries, that the smug hypocrisy of civilization denies; for till we recognize them we shall not abate them, or even try to do so. In such a scene as this we have no outlaw beating down the suppliant figure of his paramour, as in the burglar’s butchery of Nancy Sikes, but a man of education and of a certain position, wreaking his frenzy of drink and hate upon a woman not guiltless of his own vice, but utterly devoted to him at her worst. Who can doubt as to the relative value of the pictures? As to the art in them respectively, we almost lose sight of the superiority of George Eliot’s in sense of her superior morality.

  This had not yet become the pure ethicism of her final evolution. It was not yet divorced from her strong religious tradition, but was still more vitally related to it; and when she imagined Janet Dempster redeemed and purified, it was through confession and submission to the poor man whom she has helped her wicked husband to deride, and who comes to her help first owning his own frailty and imperfection. There might be something, there might be much, to criticise in the conduct of the story after Janet’s repentance begins. It is difficult to keep the true pathos of the situation free from sentimentality; but it is wrought out mainly with a sincerity both ethical and æsthetical, and where it fails in either effect it is not through the author’s want of faith in her ideal or her method. No one can be held to stricter account than this. It is for others to surpass George Eliot in motive or handling, if they can, in dealing with such a situation, and to bring greater right and clearer reason to it. I will own that I do not see how this could be done.

  ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S LILY DALE

  THERE are no two English novelists of the period we call Victorian who are more unlike and yet more characteristically English than George Eliot and Anthony Trollope. It is strange that in their far greater truth to English life, they should not be named together, like Dickens and Thackeray, as the representative English novelists of their time; but they are not, and it is doubtful if time will repair the injustice which long ago became inveterate. They are both far greater artists, far greater intellectual and moral forces, than the masters whose names stand for Victorian fiction. They paint English manners with a fidelity simply inconceivable of Dickens and Thackeray, and the problems they deal with are of an importance and interest surpassingly greater. On the psychological side, George Eliot’s transcendent power has been fully recognized, but the greatness of her “world,” and its wide inclusiveness, has not been as duly certified by criticism; just as in Anthony Trollope’s case, his immense (acquaintance with society in all its ranks and orders has taken the mind of his
critics from his profound and even subtle proficiency in the region of motive. No one fails to note the attention given to questions of conscience in George Eliot’s novels; they are seen always present or imminent; but few readers seem to have been aware how very largely these questions enter into the texture and color of Anthony Trollope’s fiction. The difference appears to be that she concerns herself with what we may call the puritanic conscience, and he with what we may call the episcopal conscience. Their characters are equally far from the unmoral region in which, say, Mr. Hardy’s quasi-pagans dwell.

  I

  In all fiction I doubt if there is a lovelier or sweeter conscience-story than that of “The Warden.” Unhappily for the purpose of these papers, we are barred from that study of “The Warden” which we might make in proof of Trollope’s psychological power by the fact that it is so wholly the story of a gentle and conscientious old man as scarcely to have a heroine. Eleanor Harding, the daughter of the Warden, must stand for the heroine; and though she is his worthy daughter, and is most dramatically circumstanced in her relation to her lover, whose conscience obliges him to make the wardenship untenable to a man of her father’s conscience, she is not of such structural value in the story that one strongly feels or remembers her part in it. The situation is in itself so affecting, so charming, that it might constitute Eleanor Harding a heroine of the first order; but something that may be called want of charm in the girl herself — perhaps a reflex effect from her history as it is prolonged into her second marriage with Dean Arabin, after poor John Bold has sacrificed his conscience to his love of her — may be at fault; but at any rate, the mind after grappling with her idea, relaxes its hold, and turns away to cling to that of Lily Dale in the divers and sundry books where she appears and reappears.