Heroines Of Fiction - William Dean Howells

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goes back to Mansfield Park with almost as little notice from her family as when she came to Portsmouth; but she has done them good, and is the better and stronger for her unrequited self-devotion. It is not pretended that she takes any active part in supporting the family at Mansfield Park under the disgrace which has befallen them through the elopement of one daughter to be divorced and of another to be married. Her function is best suggested by the exclamation with which her aunt Bertram falls upon her neck, "Dear Fanny, now I shall be comfortable." To be a comfort, that has always been Fanny Price's rare privilege, and she imparts to the reader something of the consolation she brings to all the people in the story who need the help of her sympathy. Possibly there was never a heroine, except Anne Eliot, who was so passive, without being spectacularly passive, if it is permitted so to phrase the rather intangible fact; and yet who so endeared herself to the fancy.

      One is not passionately in love with Fanny Price, as one is with some heroines; one is quite willing Edward Bertram should have her in the end; but she is one of the sweetest and dearest girls in the world, though these words, too, rather oversay her. She is another proof of Jane Austen's constant courage, which was also her constant wisdom, in being true to life. It is not only wit like Elizabeth Bennet's, sensibility like Marianne Dashwood's, complexity like Emma Woodhouse's, or utter innocence like Catharine Morland's that is charming. Goodness is charming, patience, usefulness, forbearance, meekness, are charming, as Jane Austen divined in such contrasting types as Fanny Price and Anne Eliot. If any young lady has a mind to be like them, she can learn how in two of the most interesting books in the world.

      Some of the old English novels were amazing successes even when compared with the most worthless novels of recent days. "Pamela," and "Clarissa," and "Sir Charles Grandison" were read all over the Continent. The "Vicar of Wakefield" was the gospel of a new art to Germany, where Goethe said that it permanently influenced his character. "Evelina" and "Cecilia" were the passions of people of taste everywhere, and when their trembling author was presented to Louis XVIII. in Paris, he complimented her upon her novels, which were known also to the first Napoleon. No such glories attended Jane Austen in her lifetime. She found with difficulty a publisher for her greatest book, and a public quite as slow and reluctant. But her publishers and her public have been increasing ever since, and they were never so numerous as now. Whether they will ever be fewer, it would be useless to ask; what we know without asking, from the evidence of her work, is that in the real qualities of greatness she is still the most actual of all her contemporaries, of nearly all her successors.

      HEROINES OF MISS FERRIER, MRS. OPIE, AND MRS. RADCLIFFE

      DEFOE, Richardson, Goldsmith, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen: this is the lineage of the English fiction whose ideal is reality, whose prototype is nature. To this illustrious company there are others worthy to be added, especially that Miss Susan Edmondstone Ferrier, who wrote ''Marriage", "Inheritance," and "Destiny," and whom Scott praised with his habitual generosity, and grouped with Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, as having "given portraits of real society far superior to anything " men had attempted. The more voluminous Mrs. Amelia Opie may be named with the others for the effect of nature which she secondarily achieved in her characters when primarily seeking the improvement of her readers. She was extolled by the highest criticism in the first quarter of the century for qualities that do not now appeal from her novels, but many of her tales can still be read with amusement, and with a sense of the helpless allegiance to life which her hyper-ethicized art could not withhold.

      I

      I do not know what measure of favor the recent London and Boston editions of Miss Ferrier's novels have met with; but I think the reader can find an uncommon pleasure in them if he will first thoroughly advise himself that they are no such works of art as Jane Austen's stories. Miss Ferrier was one who caricatured and satirized and moralized; and yet her fiction is largely true, with delightful instances in which it is altogether true. In fact, any author who aims at truth to his own knowledge of what is just and right, can hardly fail of truth in portraying life. His conscience governs him in his art, his conscience becomes his art; and the two work together to an issue at once ethical and aesthetic.

      Nearly every character in "Marriage," which we may agree upon for the time as Miss Ferrier's best story, has some touch of the amusing eccentricity, the lawless originality, which afterwards in much eviler times developed into the excesses of Dickensosity. But her people are not merely eccentrics or originals; and one remembers them for their qualities as well as for their singularities. Lady Juliana Courtland, who makes a runaway match with Henry Douglas, and who, when cast off by her father, goes with her lapdogs and parrots to find a home with her husband's family in the Scotch Highlands, is only a super-accentuated expression of the weak, shallow, persistent selfishness of which the best society in all times and countries offers abundant examples. But she is skillfully differenced from other examples of the kind, and she passes through the story quite visibly and tangibly. The three old-maid sisters of the laird of Glenfern are eccentrics, without the inconsistency which distinguishes characters; they are as infallibly themselves as so many lunatics. Their devoutly admired Lady MacLaughlin, with her medicines and all her maxims, is also a type, inflexibly consistent, but capable of variation from her rude prepotency, in favor of the supercilious triviality of the English earl's daughter, who promptly tramples the obsequious pride of the poor ladies of Glenfern under her silk-shod feet. She is a true aristocrat in the unfailing assertion of her superiority, and they are true aristocrats in their acknowledgment of it. When her captivity in the abhorred Highlands comes to an end through the good offices of that old friend of her husband's who manages Douglas's recall to his regiment, and makes him an allowance, she gladly leaves one of her twin daughters behind her with the sister-in-law who adopts it; and with insolent exultation before her husband's family, she goes back to the spendthrift life in London from which her mistaken love-marriage had exiled her. She is studied in bold "black and white; and there is little shading used or needed in the portrayal of her growth from a selfish young woman of fashion into a selfish old woman of fashion.

      One of the prime virtues with which an aristocracy supplies itself at the expense of the lower classes is frankness; and the frankness with which Lady Juliana and all her noble family discover their good and bad traits is shown with perhaps more mastery than anything else in the story. Her niece, Lady Emily, is rather a pleasing accident of the kindly patrician willfulness, such as Thackeray was fond of imagining; but neither she nor Lady Juliana's spoiled daughter Adelaide, nor her neglected daughter Mary, is the heroine of "Marriage." That is always Lady Juliana herself, who grudges letting Mary come to her for a few months, when the girl's health is failing in Scotland, as shamelessly as she refuses following her husband to India when his regiment is ordered away. She has never in her whole selfish life had a doubt of her right to the things she enjoys wasting, and has never had a regret except for a pleasure she has missed. She grows older very naturally; her caprice becomes obstinacy, her willfulness severity, her levity foolishness; she screeches, she scolds, she makes herself a bore and a nuisance. She is truly the incarnation of the meretricious spirit, and her instinct is to spoil and devour, to crave and to grudge.

      II

      Lady Juliana is as amusingly a warning as Emma Castlemain in Mrs. Opie's "Temper'' is intolerably an example. Few young women in fiction have been so offensively good, have had so few moments of passive virtue in which the reader could cease longing for their extirpation. It would be almost as hard to match her for the complications of her origin and destiny. She advances through the story, with a cloud upon the question of her mother's marriage which is lifted just in season to prevent her own marriage with her half- brother; and all this in no obscure lands or times, but in England and France, at such a recent date that she narrowly misses seeing the First Consul review his troops before the Tuileries. A foreign sojourn and an atmosphere of contemporaneous history seem to be necessary, in the author's view, to the development of a heroine who might have shown herself a prig, alternately sentimental and sarcastic, in far less formidable circumstances; but it cannot be honestly said that the political actualities are entertainingly employed in the story of Emma's love-affairs. As far as this story is an illustration of the social spirit of the first decade of the

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