Heroines Of Fiction. William Dean Howells
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have always been English and American; and they have constantly grown more interesting as they have grown more modem.
I
The best thing in the expression of any sort of modernity is a voluntary naturalness, an instructed simplicity; and there is no writer of the present moment, not Mr. Hardy, not Count Tolstoy himself, who is more modern than Defoe in these essentials, though Defoe wrote two hundred and fifty years ago. But we cannot go back to Defoe in this place any more than we could turn, say, to M. Zola. Defoe is distinctly of the nineteenth century in the voluntary naturalness and instructed simplicity of his art, but he is no more of the English nineteenth-century tradition, or principle or superstition, call it what you will, than M. Zola. He wrote the clearest, purest English, the most lifelike English; and his novels are of a self-evident and most convincing fidelity to life. But he was, frankly, of the day before we began to dwell in decencies, before women began to read novels so much that the novel had to change the subject, or so limit its discussion that it came to the same thing. Defoe was of a vastly nobler morality than Fielding, and his books are less corrupting; they are not corrupting at all, in fact; they are as well intentioned as Richardson's, which sometimes deal with experiences far from edifying in order to edify. He is a greater, a more modern artist than either of the others; but because of his matter, and not because of his manner or motive, his heroines must remain under lock and key, and cannot be so much as named in mixed companies. Defoe's novels cannot be freely read and criticized; only his immortal romance is open to all comers, of every age and sex, and it is a thousand pities that " Robinson Crusoe " has no heroine. We must not begin to study our heroines of nineteenth-century fiction with him, though, aesthetically and ethically, nineteenth-century fiction derives from him in some things that are best in it, especially in that voluntary naturalness and instructed simplicity which are the chiefest marks of modernity.
We cannot begin a hundred years later with the heroines of Samuel Richardson, though one of them at least is as freshly modern as any girl of yesterday or tomorrow. Clarissa Harlowe, in spite of her eighteenth-century costume and keeping, remains a masterpiece in the portraiture of that Ever-Womanly which is of all times and places. The form of the novel in which she appears, the epistolary novel, is of all forms the most averse to the apparent unconsciousness so fascinating in a heroine; yet the cunning of Richardson (it was in some things an unrivalled cunning) triumphs over the form and shows us Clarissa with no more of pose than she would confront herself with in the glass. It is in her own words that she gives herself to our knowledge, but we feel that she gives herself truly, and with only the mental reserves that a girl would actually use: there is always some final fact that a girl must withhold.
She gives not herself alone, but all her environment, vividly, credibly, convincingly, in the letters she writes. She persuades us that she lives and suffers; and though it is preposterous in the novelist to study her love-affair so minutely as he does, it is not preposterous but most simple and natural for her to dwell upon it in every detail. It is all the world, the center of the universe to her experience, and however the author permits her to tire the reader, she cannot be supposed to tire herself or tire her ardent friend and correspondent, Miss Anna Howe, in her unstinted outpourings. Indeed, when the reader has once put himself in sympathy with a heroine who does not always deserve it, he too is eager for the smallest particulars of her pathetic fate.
The situation in "Clarissa Harlowe" is one which the author was apparently much more at home in than in the situations of either " Pamela " or " Sir Charles Grandison." Richardson was not native to the low life of the one or the high life of the other, but to the middle-class life where Clarissa Harlowe belongs. There, at ease in the setting, he had merely to imagine an impulsive, affectionate, right-principled girl, persecuted by her philistine family, who try to force her into a hateful marriage, till they drive her to the protection of the lover who plots her ruin. It is very imaginable that when she cannot save herself from him, she should reject the offer of his hand, and that she should die of her griefs; but these are not the vital facts of the case from an artistic point of view. From such a point of view, the heroine's gentle and lovable nature, the characters of the different personages, and the incidents that arise from them and reveal them, are the main matters, and it is here that Richardson has his greatest success. Clarissa is more lifelike in what she does than in what she says, for she has to say too much, though in her spirited resentment of her wrongs from her detestable family, she brings palpably before us her weak mother and father, her hateful sister and brutal brother, and all the abetting cousins and aunts and uncles. Her waverings, however, her hesitations and withdrawals, her resistances and persistences, it is in these that the author most truly finds her and reveals her. As he finds her and reveals her she is like girls of our widely different circumstance in the measure that many great-grandmotherly miniatures are like the photographs of their great-granddaughters. She is, in her character, of the nineteenth century, but in her environment she is almost as impossible as the heroines of Defoe, from whom she derives in the right realistic line.
II
It remained for a still later, but not much later, novelist to portray in the sister-heroines of "The Vicar of Wakefield," two dear girls who are far more appreciable and acceptable to our nineteenth-century notions. They are as distinctly of the eighteenth-century circumstance as Clarissa Harlowe, but they are somehow so transcendently imagined that they have survived into our time with the effect of being born in it.
It can hardly be claimed that Goldsmith was a greater imagination than Richardson; but he was certainly a greater artist. He had the instinct of reticence, which Richardson had not, and it is not going much too far to say that the nineteenth-century English novel, as we understand it now, with its admirable limitations, was invented by Oliver Goldsmith. The novel that respects the right of innocence to pleasure in a true picture of manners, and honors the claim of inexperience to be amused and edified without being abashed, was his creation. He did not know himself, perhaps, how wonderfully he was prophesying, in "The Vicar of Wakefield," the best modern fiction of England and America.
He does not portray the incidents or characters which Richardson studies with a pious abhorrence, or Fielding with a blackguardly sympathy. His realism stops short of the facts which may appall, or which may defile the fancy. It contents itself with the gentle domestic situation of the story and its change from happiness to misery through chances none the less probable because they are operated by the author so much more obviously than they would be now by an author of infinitely less inspiration. Such an artist would not now accumulate disaster upon Dr. Primrose's head so clearly with his own hand; disaster has become much more accustomed to the affliction of fictitious character and makes its approaches with the indirectness and delays noticeable in the actual world. Neither would such an artist have employed means so little psychological as the good man's sudden loss of fortune and his swift precipitation to misery by the wretch who breaks the heart of his daughter, and spoils the joy of all those harmless lives. Happily for the finer art of our time, the betrayer does not now imaginably find his way into the family of a country clergyman with the intent to dishonor and destroy it; but even in the brutal time when such things were justly imaginable the author spares us the worst with a sort of prophetic sensibility. The fair Olivia is, indeed, eloped with if not quite abducted; things could not be otherwise managed in that day without defiance of the traditions alike of fiction and of fact; but she stoops to folly only through a mock marriage, and this in the end, as is well known, proves a real marriage, thanks to the twofold duplicity of the wicked lover's agent, who, for purposes of his own, has had the ceremony performed by a real clergyman. Her tragic fate gives her a sort of dignity not innate in her; and in her potential relenting towards the ultimate disaster of the scoundrel who has so cruelly misused her, she has the highest charm of the Ever-Womanly—at least to the Ever-Manly witness. But it is at no time pretended that she is a wise person, even by the fond father who tells the story of his family. "Olivia, now about eighteen," he says in such antithetical portraiture of his daughters as the age delighted in, " had that luxuriancy of beauty with which painters generally draw Hebe; open, sprightly and commanding. Sophia's features were not so striking at first, but often did more execution; for they were soft, modest and alluring. Olivia wished for many lovers; Sophia to secure one. Olivia was often affected from too great desire to please; Sophia even repressed excellence from