Heroines Of Fiction - William Dean Howells

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she now replied, ' Alack, alack! she never breathed a word to me about it.' A deep groan passed through the court. It was echoed by one deeper and more agonized from the unfortunate father . . . and the venerable old man fell forward senseless . . . with his head at the foot of his terrified daughter. . . . The unfortunate prisoner . . . strove with the guards. . . . 'Let me gang to my father! I will gang to him! He is dead—he is killed —I hae killed him!' Even in this moment of agony Jeanie did not lose that superiority which a deep and firm mind assures to its possessor. . . . 'He is my father—he is our father,' she mildly repeated to those who endeavored to separate them, as she stooped, shaded aside his gray hairs and began assiduously to chafe his temples."

      III

      The loose, inaccurate and ineffectual languaging of this scene is partially concealed by the condensation of the foregoing passages. I know that to many it will seem irreverence little short of sacrilege to speak of Scott's work in these terms; but truth is more precious than sentiment, and no harm but much help can come from recognizing the facts. In verse, Scott was a master of diction, compact, clear, simple; in prose, at least the prose of his novels, he was shapeless, tautological, heavy, infirm, wandering, melodramatic and over-literary. The incident, however, is here so nobly imagined that the reader is held above the course of its feeble and inadequate realization, and shares with the author in the greatness of his concept. It is quite useless to pretend otherwise, and one has only to think how Tolstoy, for instance, or Turgenev would have presented the scene, in order to feel the vast imperfection, the deficiency in surplus, of Scott's treatment. But the world has done him justice, in such things, and where his idea is great, it has measured him by the affluence of his concept, and not by the poverty of his product.

      He was of an age which was over-literary, and which the influence of his error was making more and more so. His error was not wholly his; it was largely the effect of precedent conditions; but it was not the necessary effect. He fell into it, because it was easy, and offered itself to his hurry and his careless hand, as a ready means of satisfying a public ignorant of truth and indifferent to beauty. Artifice can hide the lack of art, melodrama can conceal the absence of drama; and the time for which Scott wrote really preferred artifice and melodrama. In an admirable essay on the romances of Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist to give us standing in the world of fiction. Colonel T. W. Higginson justly notes in defense of Brown's turgidity that " the general style of the period . . . was itself melodramatic. . . . One has only to read over the private letters of any educated family of that period to see that people did not then express themselves as they now do; that they were far more ornate in utterance, more involved in statement, more impassioned in speech." All this is very true, but it is also true that, in spite of the common tendency, there was a strong, lucid undercurrent back to nature in the writings of authors whose excellence Scott himself generously recognized. He praised these as his superiors, and it is hard in the face of his fine modesty to blame him for not emulating their sanity and verity. But he must be blamed for doing what he knew better than to do; and the student of his work will always be to blame if he fails to declare that with all his moral virtues Scott in fiction was of a low aesthetic ideal. He consciously preferred, with his great poetic soul, the folly and the falsity of the romantic to the beauty of the natural, and he wittingly, however unwillingly, extended the realm of Anne Radcliffe rather than the realm of Jane Austen. It was easier to do this, far easier; for the true, the only beautiful, is exigent of patience and of pains that Scott would not or could not give. Whether he could not or would not, he made it harder for his contemporaries and successors to be of a higher ideal than that by which he won his immense success. I believe the badness of Scott's prose in fiction is owing to the lowness of his ideal rather than to the general style of his own period. Sometimes the greatness of a concept can show through the hollow and pompous forms of the product; but this happens rarely. What happens often is that the artificiality of the product is a fair expression of the concept.

      This is true of the work of Scott's greatest follower and disciple, James Fenimore Cooper. It would be pleasant to believe that he was of his own initiative, but it would not be true; and though Cooper was so far original through his patriotism as to prefer American scenes and themes in his fiction, he most distinctly was because Scott had been. His literature was both better and worse than Scott's. It was more compact and more dramatic, no doubt from his more strenuous temperament; but it lacked that depth of humanity which one always feels under Scott's turbid surfaces, and it is wholly without the sweet play of his humor, the sudden flashes of his inspiration. So far as I know it, his romance has never the grace that Scott wins now and again for his from the presence of a genuine heroine. But on this point I was willing to own myself not very well fitted to judge, since my knowledge of Cooper was at best vague and of remote date; and in my misgiving I turned to a literary friend who had made rather a special study of him, and entreated him to help me out with a heroine from him. He answered in effect that the heroines of Cooper did not exist even in the imagination of his readers; there were certain figures in his pages, always introduced as "females," and of such an extremely conventional and ladylike deportment in all circumstances that you wished to kill them. But he added, in a magnanimous despair, that if I would I might read "The Last of the Mohicans," and possibly come away with a heroine. I have just finished the book, with a true regret that I was not a boy of fourteen, or else a man in the second quarter of the century, when I read it; but I have not come away with a heroine. This is not because I have killed either Cora Munro or her sister Alice; but since I am guiltless of their death I am glad they are dead.

      Long ago I read several romances of Charles Brockden Brown, but of those dreams nothing more remains to me now than of some that I dreamed myself about the year 1875. Certainly, no shadow of a heroine remains from them, and I am sure that if there had been the shadow of a heroine in them she would have remained. In fact, the heroine of a romantic novel seldom does, or can, remain with the reader, for the plain reason that she seldom exists. Apparently the ever-womanly refuses herself to the novelist who proposes anything but truth to nature; apparently she cannot trust him. She may not always be so very sincere herself, but she requires sincerity in the artist who would take her likeness, and it is only in the fiction of one who faithfully reports his knowledge of things seen that she will deign to show her face, to let her divine presence be felt. That is the highest and best fiction, and her presence is the supreme evidence of its truth to the whole of life.

      A HEROINE OF BULWER'S

      MANY proofs of the fact that a novel is great or not, as its women are important or unimportant, might be alleged. There are exceptions to the rule, but they are among novels of ages and countries different from ours. As we approach our own time, women in fiction become more and more interesting, and are of greater consequence than the men in fiction, and the skill with which they are portrayed is more and more a test of mastery. By this test the romantic novel shows its inferiority, if by no other; we have only to compare the work of Richardson, Goldsmith, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. George Moore, Mr. Henry James, Harold Frederic, Mr. George W. Cable, Miss Mary E. Wilkins, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and the other realistic or realescent novelists with that of the romanticists, in order to see how vast this inferiority is. If we go outside of our own language, we must note the supremacy of women in the fiction of Goethe, Manzoni, Balzac, Turgenev, Zola, Maupassant, Bjornsen, Valdes, Galdos, Verga, and Sudermann. These masters have presented women livingly, winningly, convincingly as no master of romance has. The greatest exception that occurs to me is, of course, Hawthorne; but even he created his most lifelike woman character, Zenobia, in his most realistic story, "The Blithedale Romance." Women, above all others, should love the fiction which is faithful to life, for no other fiction has paid the homage and done the justice due to women, or recognized their paramount interest.

      I

      Mrs. Radcliffe inspired our Charles Brockden Brown, just as Scott inspired our James Fenimore Cooper. Scott, of course, influenced all Europe, as Richardson and Goldsmith had done in their time; and until the rise of Balzac a whole generation wrote little else but historical novels, though in Germany the romantic movement eventuated in something that was more purely romance, like the "Undine" of

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