Heroines Of Fiction - William Dean Howells

Скачать книгу

Lady Delacour, though but one interest of the story, becomes in its finer artistic treatment the chief interest; and the scene in which it betrays itself becomes the greatest moment of the drama. The episode is almost altogether admirable, but its climax sufficiently suggests the whole encounter between the unsuspecting Belinda and Lady Delacour, when her passion is fired by the girl's suppression of certain passages in a letter from her aunt Stanhope, giving some worldly advice which her ladyship ironically congratulates Belinda upon not needing.

      "The rapid, unconnected manner in which Lady Delacour spoke, the hurry of her motions, the quick, suspicious, angry gleams of her eye, her laugh, her unintelligible words, all conspired at this moment to give Belinda the idea that her intellects were suddenly disordered. . . . She went towards her with the intention of soothing her by caresses; but at her approach Lady Delacour pushed the table on which she had been writing from her with violence; started up, flung back the veil which fell over her face as she rose, and darted upon Belinda a look which fixed her to the spot where she stood. . . . Belinda's blood ran cold—she had no longer any doubt that this was insanity. She shut the penknife that lay upon the table, and put it in her pocket. 'Cowardly creature!' cried Lady Delacour, and her countenance changed to an expression of ineffable contempt. 'What is it you fear?' 'That you should injure yourself. Sit down—for Heaven's sake listen to your friend, to Belinda.' 'My friend! My Belinda!' cried Lady Delacour. ... 'O, Belinda! You whom I have so loved, so trusted!' The tears rolled fast down her painted cheeks; she wiped them hastily away, but so roughly that she became a strange and ghastly spectacle. Unconscious of her disordered appearance, she rushed past Belinda, who vainly attempted to stop her, threw up the sash, and, stretching herself far out of the window, gasped for breath. Miss Portman drew her back, and closed the window, saying, ' The rouge is all off your face, my dear Lady Delacour; you are not fit to be seen. ' . . . ' Rouge! Not fit to be seen! At such a time as this, to talk to me in this manner! O, niece of Mrs. Stanhope! dupe, dupe, that I am.'"

      Belinda tries to reason with Lady Delacour's jealousy, which takes the form of ironical meekness, only to burst out again in envenomed accusation. "'You are goodness itself, and gentleness, and prudence personified. You know perfectly how to manage her whom you fear you have driven to madness. But, tell me, good, gentle, prudent Miss Portman, why need you dread so much that I should go mad? . . . Nobody would believe me whatever I said. . . . And would not this be almost as if I were dead and buried? No; your calculations are better than mine: the poor mad wife would . . . yet stand between you and the fond object of your secret soul—a coronet. ... O, Belinda, do not you see that a coronet cannot confer happiness?' 'I have seen it long; I pity you from the bottom of my soul,' said Belinda, bursting into tears."

      Lady Delacour cannot believe the girl is leaving her house when she leaves the room; she determines to balk the hope of being pressed to stay, which she imagines in Belinda; and when some people call, she swiftly repairs her looks and goes to receive them. "Fresh rouged, and beautifully dressed, she was performing her part to a brilliant audience, when Belinda entered the drawing-room. . . . 'You dine with Lady Anne, Miss Portman, I understand. Though you talk of running away from me ... I am with all due humility so confident of the irresistible attractions of this house, that I defy Oakley Park and all its charms. So, Miss Portman, instead of adieu, I shall only say au revoir!' ' Adieu, Lady Delacour! ' said Belinda, with a look and tone that struck her ladyship to the heart. All her suspicions, all her pride, all her affected gayety forsook her. . . . She flew after Miss Portman, stopped her at the head of the stairs and exclaimed,' My dearest Belinda, are you gone? My best, my only friend, say you are not gone forever! Say you will return!' 'Adieu,' repeated Belinda."

      We are told that she broke from Lady Delacour with a heart full of pity for her, but sure of the right and wisdom of her course; and nothing in the whole scene between them is more finely ascertained than the delicate dignity and goodness with which Belinda behaves. In this she is worthy to be the heroine of her own story, and though she must divide the honors with Lady Delacour, in the dramatic moments, she has the heroine's true supremacy as a subtler study of character, and a newer type. The intensely emotional nature like Lady Delacour, vivid, violent, reckless, has been often done, and it is always fascinating; but it has seldom been so well done as by Miss Edgeworth, who, with a few touches of analysis, has allowed it to express itself. Yet, after all, a nature like Belinda's, ruled by principles and bound by scruples, the nature of a lady, is far more difficult to do.

      JANE AUSTEN'S ELIZABETH BENNET

      THE fashion of Maria Edgeworth's world has long passed away, but human nature is still here, and the fiction which was so true to it in the first years of the century is true to it in the last. " The Absentee,' "Vivian," "Ennui," "Helen," "Patronage," show their kindred with "Belinda," and by their frank and fresh treatment of character, their knowledge of society, and their employment of the major rather than the minor means of moving and amending the reader, they all declare themselves of the same lineage. In their primitive ethicism they own "Pamela," and "Sir Charles Grandison " for their ancestors; but they are much more dramatic than Richardson's novels; they are almost theatrical in their haste for a direct moral effect. In this they are like the Burney-D'Arblay novels, which also deal with fashionable life, with dissipated lords and ladies, with gay parties at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, with debts and duns, with balls and routs in splendid houses, whose doors are haunted by sheriff's officers, with bankruptcies and arrests, or flights and suicides. But the drama of the Edgeworth fiction tends mostly to tragedy, and that of the Burney-D'Arblay fiction to comedy; though there are cases in the first where the wrong-doer is saved alive, and cases in the last where he is lost in his sins. The author of " Evelina " was a good but light spirit, the author of " Belinda " was a good but very serious soul and was amusing with many misgivings. Maria Edgeworth was a humorist in spite of herself; Frances Burney was often not as funny as she meant, and was, as it were, forced into tragical effects by the pressure of circumstances. You feel that she would much rather have got on without them; just as you feel that Miss Edgeworth rejoices in them, and is not sure that her jokes will be equally blessed to you.

      I

      It remained for the greatest of the gifted women, who beyond any or all other novelists have fixed the character and behavior of Anglo-Saxon fiction, to assemble in her delightful talent all that was best in that of her sisters. Jane Austen was indeed so fine an artist, that we are still only beginning to realize how fine she was; to perceive, after a hundred years, that in the form of the imagined fact, in the expression of personality, in the conduct of the narrative, and the subordination of incident to character, she is still unapproached in the English branch of Anglo-Saxon fiction. In American fiction Hawthorne is to be named with her for perfection of form; the best American novels are built upon more symmetrical lines than the best English novels, and have unconsciously shaped themselves upon the ideal which she instinctively and instantly realized.

      Of course it was not merely in externals that Jane Austen so promptly achieved her supremacy. The wonder of any beautiful thing is that it is beautiful in so many ways; and her fiction is as admirable for its lovely humor, its delicate satire, its good sense, its kindness, its truth to nature, as for its form. There is nothing hurried or huddled in it, nothing confused or obscure, nothing excessive or inordinate. The marvel of it is none the less because it is evident that she wrote from familiar acquaintance with the fiction that had gone before her. In her letters there are hints of her intimacy with the novels of Goldsmith, of Richardson, of Frances Burney, and of Maria Edgeworth; but in her stories there are scarcely more traces of their influence than of Mrs. Radcliffe's, or any of the romantic writers whom she delighted to mock. She is obviously of her generation, but in all literature, she is one of the most original and independent spirits. Her deeply domesticated life was passed in the country scenes, the county society, which her books portray, far from literary men and events; and writing as she used, amidst the cheerful chatter of her home, she produced literature of still unrivalled excellence in its way, apparently without literary ambition, and merely for the pleasure of getting the life she knew before her outward vision. With the instinct and love of doing it, and not with the sense of doing anything uncommon, she achieved that masterpiece, "Pride and Prejudice", which is quite as remarkable for being one of several masterpieces as

Скачать книгу