Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  ‘I must speak out,’ he declared. ‘It is my duty as a father. I know that this young man likes you and wishes to marry you. If your happiness is concerned, I must know that. Then I will see what I can do.’ Kate could endure no longer; she was fairly driven into a burst of tears and sobbing; she clutched her father, and buried her face in his neck, all the while kissing him. It was the same as to say, ‘I am very miserable, but do not be unhappy about it, and do not be vexed with me.’ ‘Oh, my poor child,’ he repeated several times, patting her shoulder in a helpless way, the most discomforted of comforters. At last she recovered her self-possession a little, gradually lifting her head until her lips touched his ear. ‘Papa, I will tell you everything,’ she whispered. ‘I did love him, and oh, I do! If you had let him propose to me I should have taken him. But now it is different. Since I have seen how it must always be between our families, I have decided that I will never marry him, not even if you consent. I will not risk being put in hostility with my own family. And now let me go, quick. Let me run,’ The instant he loosed his embrace she rustled out of the room, and away to her own chamber, shutting the door upon herself with a noise of hurry which he could plainly hear,”

  V

  All this, it must be owned, is very sweet and true; and there is nothing anywhere forced in the note of Kate Beaumont’s character. She is always very naturally and delicately a girl, who suffers into admirable womanhood. But the want of something salient in her appearances unfits her for quotation.

  Perhaps that is the worst that can be said of her. The worst that can be said of her author is that he was apt to leave his work in a certain unfinish, and at last he left it altogether. I think it one of the greatest pities of our literary history that about twenty years ago Mr. De Forest ceased to print if he did not cease to write fiction: I suspect that the only book he has recently published— “A Lover’s Revolt” — is of a much earlier invention. It has the virtues and the defects of all his work. It is strongest in the portrayal of men’s characters, though its women cannot be said to be either weakly or falsely done. Their natures are truly but not kindly rendered, and this is a sort of error in the handling. Again, as always before, the artist’s contempt for their duplicity masters his sense of the goodness, the sincerity indeed, which consists with that duplicity. He is distinctly a man’s novelist, and as men do not need novelists so much apparently as women, his usefulness has been limited. When he was writing the novels which, like “Kate Beaumont,” commanded for him the admiration of those among his countrymen best fitted to know good work, it seemed reasonable that he should be lastingly recognized as one of the masters of American fiction; and I for one shall never be willing to own him less, though I cannot read many pages of his without wishing he had done this or that differently. It is not only the master who chooses to leave things in the rough; it is sometimes the ‘prentice who has not yet learned how to shape them perfectly. Still, in spite of all this I remember and I feel his strenuous imaginative gift working with a sort of disdainful honesty to the effects of art Finer, not stronger workmen succeeded him, and a delicate realism, more responsive to the claims and appeals of the feminine over-soul, replaced his inexorable veracity. In the fate of his fiction, whether final or provisional, it is as if this sensitive spirit had avenged the slight it felt, and, as the habit of women is, over-avenged itself. It had revealed itself to him as it does only to the masters of fiction, and he had seemed not to prize the confidence — had mocked at it, or what was worse, had made it the text for dramatic censures far more cutting and insufferable than sermons. In the lapse of time, however, the woman-soul may revise and even reverse its judgments. It is capricious as well as implacable, and it is possible that in some future moment it may fancy seeing itself as a most truthful man-soul saw it; and then Mr. De Forest’s belated turn will have come.

  MR. JAMES’S DAISY MILLER

  AS I have noted before in these papers, it is the fate of most novelists to be associated in the minds of readers with a certain type of heroine, or with a single heroine. If it is a type that represents the novelist he is not unfairly used; for the type may be varied into distinctive characters; if it is a single character it seems not so just, for every novelist has invented many characters. Mr. Henry James, for instance, has given us more, and more finely, yet strongly, differenced heroines than any novelist of his time, but at the mention of his name a single creation of his will come so prominently to mind that Daisy Miller will for the moment make us forget all her sisters.

  I

  Mr. James’s time is still ours, and while perfect artistry is prized in literature, it is likely to be prolonged indefinitely beyond our time. But he belongs pre-eminently to that period following the Civil War when our authorship felt the rising tide of national life in an impulse to work of the highest refinement, the most essential truth. The tendency was then toward a subtle beauty, which he more than any other American writer has expressed in his form, and toward a keen, humorous, penetrating self-criticism, which seized with joy upon the expanding national life, and made it the material of fiction as truly national as any yet known. Mr. J. W. De Forest was the pioneer in the path which the American novelists were to take; and hard upon him came Mr. Henry James, as unlike him as one talent could well be unlike another, and yet of the same mission in preparing the way, and planting the seeds of an imaginative literature, native to our soil, but taking the four winds of heaven in its boughs. They were as like in their equipment, through study and sojourn abroad, as they have been unlike in their destiny. Mr. De Forest’s books are a part of our literary history; Mr. James’s books are a part of our literature. Mr. De Forest somehow offended “the finer female sense,” in whose favor the prosperity of our fiction resides, and he is no longer read; Mr. James, who flattered it as little, lastingly piqued it, and to read him if for nothing but to condemn him is the high intellectual experience of the daughters of mothers whose indignant girlhood resented while it adored his portraits of American women. To enjoy his work, to feel its rare excellence, both in conception and expression is a brevet of intellectual good form which the women who have it prize at all its worth. This is not a history of American fiction, and I cannot arrange here for giving Mr. James even a provisional predominance in it; but those who know our short and simple annals, in that sort, will no doubt place him where he belongs. Those who do not know them may at least be told that no American writer has been more the envy and ambition of generous youth trying for distinction as well as sincerity in their work.

  II

  Mr. James is not quite the inventor of the international novel, as I intimated in my notices of “ The Initials,” but he is the inventor, beyond question, of the international American girl. He recognized and portrayed the innocently adventuring, unconsciously periculant American maiden, who hastened to efface herself almost as soon as she saw herself in that still flattering if a little mocking mirror, so that between two sojourns in Europe, a decade apart, she had time to fade from the vision of the friendly spectator. In 1860 — 70, you saw her and heard her everywhere on the European continent; in 1870-80, you sought her in vain amidst the monuments of art, or on the misty mountain-tops, or at the tables d’hôte. Her passing might have been the effect of a more instructed civilization, or it might have been a spontaneous and voluntary disappearance. In any case she was gone, and it seemed a pity, for she was sweet, and harmless, with a charm derived from our earth and sky, a flavor of new-world conditions imparting its wilding fragrance to that strange environment as freely as to its native air. I could well fancy her discoverer feeling a pang of desolation to find no longer in the living world this lovely creature, who perished as it were of her own impossibility, and whose faded ghost has no habitat but in his faithful page.

  It was perhaps in some such divine despair that he left the field of international fiction, which he had made his own, and had kept for so many years, and turned to English life, with only a thin American presence flitting now and then a
cross the scene. He has done better work, because maturer work, in the treatment of this alien material than he did in the earlier fiction before he possessed himself of the international field. His English people have the convincing effect of having been more truly seen than others except Trollope’s, but they are not those absolute contributions to polite learning which his internationals are. No one else could do them; certainly no living Englishman; and yet one resents the author’s late preoccupation with them, and demands his return to the types of that Atlantis, psychologically midway between Europe and America, where his art ripened and perfected itself in the study of character which confided its existence to him earliest if not onlyest. One demands this of him with a strong disposition to implore him, if the demand fails, to comply in the interest of history, which must, without his help, fail of some of the most curious and interesting, not to say significant, phases of modem civilization.

  Since he began to note Americo-European manners, we have gone increasingly abroad, and his field has indefinitely broadened, and filled itself with an increasing variety of figures. If these have lost the refreshing sharpness of outline which first tempted his eye, they have gained in a fine differentiation which ought still more sympathetically to invite his subtle fancy. A whole new generation has grown up in the international field, and since he abandoned it, no one else has held it in any such force as to be able to dispute his sovereignty if he should come back to it.

  III

  It is a curious and interesting fact of Mr. James’s literary fortunes that in his short stories — one is obliged to call them stories for want of a more closely fitting word — rather than his more extended fictions are the heroes and the heroines we know him best by. He has the art of so environing the slightest presentment of female motive that it shows life-size in the narrow space of a sketch or study; and you remember such a picture with a fullness of detail and a particularity wanting to many colossal figures. You seem in the retrospect to have lived a long time with the pictures, looks, attitudes; phrases remain with you; and when you revert to the book you do not lose this sense of rich amplitude. It would be futile to catalogue the personalities which are so real in the recollection of stories so numerous but not half numerous enough; and it is only for the pleasure of naming them over that I mention at random Mrs. Hedway in “ The Siege of London,” the terrible Georgina in “ Georgina’s Reasons,” Madame Mauve in the story called after her, Pandora in “ Pandora,” Lady Barbarina in “Lady Barbarina Lemon,” that pathetic presence in “The Altar of the Dead,” the two wives of the master in “The Lesson of the Master,” both the girls in “The Spoils of Poynton,” the heroine, and Mrs. Dallow, the sub-heroine, in “ The Tragic Muse,” the daughter in “Marriages,” the poor, shabbily defrauded girl in “Paste,” the two “old things,” the old maids, in “ The Third Person,” Lily in “Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie.” The list is inexhaustible, and it is not only futile but dangerous to deal with it, for your forgetfulness of any figure accuses your taste in all the rest, and if you leave out a general favorite you are in peril of falling a prey to the furious resentment of those who adore just that neglected heroine.

  No other novelist has approached Mr. James in his appreciation of women, and in his ability to suggest the charm which is never wholly absent from women, whether they are good, bad or indifferent in looks or behavior. Take all the other men that have written novels in English and match their women with his, and they seem not to have written of women at all. A few women may vie with him in the portrayal of a few figures; Jane Austen may, and Fanny Burney, and Miss Edgeworth, and George Eliot, and the Brontës, and Mrs. Humphry Ward; but their heroines are as much outnumbered by his as the novelists are in every other way surpassed. The fact is not affected by the want of general recognition; it is not yet known to the ignorant masses of educated people that Mr. James is one of the greatest masters of fiction who has ever lived. It is because he has worked in a fashion of his own, in regions of inquiry not traversed by the herd of adventurers, and dealt with material not exploited before that he is still to the critical Jews a stumbling-block and to the critical Greeks foolishness. But time will inevitably care for this unrivalled artist, or this unique psychologist who deals artist-wise with his knowledge of human nature; and he will yet take that eminent place for which he has no rival.

  I cannot, in thinking of him and his somewhat baffling failure of immediate acceptance, promise myself that his right will be acknowledged soon; his own generation, in its superior refinement, was better fitted to appreciate him than the present period coarsened and vulgarized by the prevalence of puerile romance; and yet if his earliest masterpiece had been offered to this thicker-witted time, I doubt if it would have suffered the same injustice which it met from a more enlightened tribunal, or at least the same kind of injustice. It is pathetic to remember how “ Daisy Miller “ was received, or rather rejected, as an attack on American girlhood, and yet it is perfectly intelligible that it should have been taken so by Americans who had still a country to be so inclusively proud of that they could not bear the shadow of question to fall upon any phase of it. Our political descent to the European level has not only thickened our skins but it has in a manner so broadened, though it has imbruted our minds, that if she could have come again we should see Daisy Miller’s innocent freedom in the face of immemorial convention with the liberal and tolerant pleasure which the English at once felt in it. We should not be blinded to her charm, or to the subtle patriotism which divined and portrayed it, by a patriotism which, if fervent and generous, was not so subtle as the author’s. But as I have said, Daisy Miller cannot come again. The very conditions that would render us patient of her now have rendered her impossibility impossible. It is a melancholy paradox, but we need not be inconsolable, for though she has perished forever from the world, we have her spiritual reflex still vivid in the sensitive mirror which caught with such accuracy her girlish personality while it still walked the earth in the dusty ways of European travel.

  IV

  The story of Daisy Miller is as slight as Mr. James delights to make the frame of his picture, which depends so very little for its quality upon the frame. She is first seen at Vevey in Switzerland, with her young but terribly mature little brother and their mother, a little, lonely American group in the rather impertinent custody of a courier whom they make their domestic if not social equal; and she is seen last at Rome (where indeed she dies of the fever) the wonder of the international and the opprobrium of the com patriotic society. Such drama as arises from the simple circumstances precipitates itself in a few spare incidents which, in the retrospect, dwindle to nothing before the superior interest of the psychology. A girl of the later eighteen-seventies, sent with such a mother as hers to Europe by a father who remains making money in Schenectady, after no more experience of the world than she had got in her native town, and at a number of New York dinners among people of like tradition; uncultivated but not rude, reckless but not bold, inexpugnably ignorant of the conventionally right, and spiritedly resentful of control by criterions that offend her own sense of things, she goes about Europe doing exactly what she would do at home, from an innocence as guileless as that which shaped her conduct in her native town. She knows no harm and she means none; she loves life, and talking, and singing, and dancing, and “attentions,” but she is no flirt, and she is essentially and infinitely far from worse. Her whole career, as the reader is acquainted with it, is seen through the privity of the young Europeanized American who meets her at Vevey and follows her to Rome in a fascination which they have for each other, but which is never explicitly a passion. This side of the affair is of course managed with the fine adroitness of Mr. James’s mastery; from the first moment the sense of their potential love is a delicate pleasure for the reader, till at the last it is a delicate pang, when the girl has run her wild gantlet and is dead not only of the Roman fever but of the blows dealt her in her course. There is a curious sort of fatality in it all. She is de
stined by innate and acquired indiscipline to do the things she does; and she is not the less doomed to suffer the things she suffers. In proportion to the offence she gives by her lawless innocence the things she does are slight things, but their consequences break her heart, and leave the reader’s aching, as Winterbourne’s must have ached life-long.

  V

  The young man is sitting in the garden of the Trois Couronnes, at Vevey, talking with her terrible little brother, when Daisy Miller comes down the walk toward them. “She was dressed in white muslin, with a hundred frills and flounces, and knots of pale-colored ribbon. She was bareheaded, but she balanced in her hand a large parasol, with a deep border of embroidery, and she was strikingly, admirably pretty.... He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to perceive that she was not the least embarrassed herself.

  ... She gradually gave him more of the benefit of her glance; and then he saw that this glance was perfectly direct and unshrinking. It was not, however, what would have been called an immodest glance, for the young girl’s eyes were singularly honest and fresh. They were wonderfully pretty eyes; and, indeed, Winterbourne had not seen for a long time anything prettier than his fair countrywoman’s various features — her complexion, her nose, her ears, her teeth....

  As regards this young lady’s face he made several observations. It was not at all insipid, but it was not exactly expressive; and though it was eminently delicate, Winterbourne mentally accused it — very forgivingly — of a want of finish. He thought it very possible that Master Randoph’s sister was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was no mockery, no irony. “ Before long it became obvious that she was much disposed to conversation — having first assured herself that he was “a real American.”

  “Her lips and her eyes were constantly moving. She had a soft, slender, agreeable voice,... with all her prettiness in her lively eyes, and in her light, slightly monotonous smile.”