Heroines Of Fiction. William Dean Howells
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your present language is sufficient to remind her that she speaks with the mortal enemy of her father. ' ' I pray you to be patient, madam. . . . My answer must come from her own lips. Once more. Miss Lucy Ashton, I am that Ravenswood to whom you granted the solemn engagement which you now desire to retract and cancel.' Lucy's bloodless lips could only falter out the words, 'It was my mother.' 'She speaks truly,' said Lady Ashton. 'It teas I, who, authorized alike by the laws of God and man, advised her and concurred with her to set aside an unhappy and precipitate engagement—and to annul it by the authority of Scripture itself. . . . You have asked what questions you thought fit. You see the total incapacity of my daughter to answer you. You desire to know whether Lucy Ashton of her own free will desires to annul the engagement into which she has been trepanned. . . . Here is the contract which she this morning subscribed . . . with Mr. Hastings of Bucklaw.' Ravenswood gazed upon the deed as if petrified. 'This is, indeed, madam, an undeniable piece of evidence. . . . There, madam,' he said, laying down before Lucy the signed paper and the broken piece of gold—'there are the evidences of your first engagement; may you be more faithful to that which you have just formed. I will trouble you to return the corresponding tokens of my ill-placed confidence—I ought rather to say my egregious folly.' Lucy returned the scornful glance of her lover with a gaze from which perception seemed to have been banished; yet she seemed partly to have understood his meaning, for she raised her hands as if to undo a blue ribbon which she wore about her neck. She was unable to accomplish her purpose, but Lady Ashton cut the ribbon asunder, and detached the broken piece of gold, which Miss Ashton had till then worn in her bosom; the written counterpart of the lover's engagement she for some time had had in her own possession. With a haughty courtesy she delivered both to Ravenswood."
In spite of the slovenly construction of these passages, the repetitions, the touches of melodrama, the whole want of artistic delicacy and precision, the spirit of an immensely affecting tragedy is here present. Lucy's part is so greatly and simply imagined that a word more from her, the least expression of protest or imploring would detract from its heart-breaking beauty. Such a scene could not be the work of less than a master, who alone would know how a little later to add, stiffly and formally, indeed, but with skill to extract yet a drop more of pathos from the fact, "Miss Ashton never alluded to what had passed in the state room. It seemed doubtful if she was even conscious of it, for she was often observed to raise her hands to her neck, as if in search of the ribbon that had been taken from it, and to mutter in surprise and discontent, when she could not find it,' It was the link that bound me to life.' "
III
Scott's failures were among his gentilities, his lords and ladies, his princes and princesses, who are always more or less like the poorer sort of stage players. I do not know that he fails more signally with his women than with his men in high life; but Lucy Ashton is the only woman of gentle birth in his romances whom I remember, from my first long-ago reading, for her distinguished qualities, if indeed she has more than one of these. All his women of lower station, however, especially those that come casually and momentarily into the story, are alive, and speak a tongue as different from the literary language of their betters as nature is from artifice. He was essentially a humorist and humanist; he dearly loved and enjoyed such of his fellow-beings as he could come close to through their originality, or eccentricity, or simplicity; and there is no laird's leddy, no bare-legged lassie, no screaming or scolding old-wife, who is not as veritable as any man of her rank, and far more so than any man of higher rank. Such figures abound in his Scotch stories and give them that air of reality which is never quite absent from them. But again when he transcends the sort of character which he knows personally or by familiar hearsay, he fails as dismally in diving low as in soaring high. With such a figure as Meg Merrilies, for instance, he does nothing that convinces you of her verity; she remains as strictly of melodrama as any mouthing champion in "Ivanhoe"; Rowena herself is not more really unreal, not more improbably moved; and she is far less noisy and tiresome; for the maledictions of Meg Merrilies actually bore one; and Meg is mostly maledictions.
In the story which resounds with them, there is one young lady who divides the honors of heroine with the gypsy; and in her, for once, Scott is able to impart the charm of a lively girlishness. Julia Mannering is sinuously true, after the manner of her sex, and light of tongue and heart rather than head. She is a genuine personality; and she carries off an impossible part in the plot with so much vivacity and naturalness that one is almost as much in love with her as with any of the ignorant and amusing housewives and farm-bodies.
"Waverley " offers no such figure as this young lady in "Guy Mannering," to my liking. Rose Bradwardine is a nice girl, and fit to be married by a hero who repents being fool enough to have fought for the Pretender. But the farthest stretch of charity cannot find her a character. She does what a young lady ought because she is bidden; her speech is the effect of that ventriloquism which Scott too obviously practiced in speaking his own words from whatever lips were convenient. She is not the worst instrument of this sort; and Flora Mac Ivor is not the most diaphanous of the author's failures to construct a credible image of historic motive and personality. It is not that the sister of a Highland chieftain, supporting the rebellion of Charles Edward Stuart, might not play the part assigned to Flora Mac Ivor; but that she does not play it in a way to make us feel that she is deeply interested in it. We are told much about her, but we are shown very little; and are made witnesses of but one moment of poignant feeling in a woman who must have had many, if she were really a woman. This climax is fitly reached in that last interview of Waverley's with Flora when he finds her sewing upon the shroud of her brother who is about to be executed for treason. Then she blames herself for her brother's doom as something that her own impassioned loyalty to the Stuarts had urged him forward to. She realizes that the cause was always hopeless, and while she still believes it just and sacred, she agonizes at her part in it for her brother's sake. This point is really fine—the finest in a story whose course is loose and straggling, and whose effects have rarely the compactness that deep passion alone can give.
SCOTT'S JEANIE DEANS AND COOPER'S LACK OF HEROINES
THE nature of Scott's heroines is such that the choice of this one or that, as the most representative, is a question of intellectual preference rather than of passion, and could hardly rouse feeling in any but their duly appointed lovers. Fortunately for Scott, he does not live by them; one cannot quite say that without them he would still be one of the greatest novelists, and chief of the great romancers; but one may very safely say that such general impression as one keeps of his fiction is not strengthened by a vivid sense of these ladies. Only now and then, and here and there, are they essential to the lasting effect; one recalls them vaguely and with an effort; they are not voluntarily constant to the fancy like the women of Thackeray, of George Eliot, of Charles Reade, even of Dickens; and of some other more modern novelists, above all Mr. Hardy. In the imaginary world of Scott's creation, woman remained as subordinate as he found her in the civic world about him. He invented a man's world, and perhaps because women did not come into their rights in it, his man's world has now mostly lapsed to a boy's world, where there is little need of the glamour which women cast upon life.
I
I have already noted one chief exception to the prevailing nullity of Scott's heroines in the sad reality of Lucy Ashton, and I shall hardly contrary any critical reader in suggesting Jeanie Deans as another. No characters could well be more strongly contrasted, and one cannot think of them without feeling that in this direction, as in so many others, Scott's performance was a very imperfect measure of his possibility. If he had not been driven to make quantity, what quality might not he have given us! If he had not had the burden of telling a story upon him, how much more he might have told us of life! If he had not felt bound to portray swashbucklers, with what gracious and touching portraits of womanhood might not he have enriched his page! The man himself was so modest and single of heart that the secret of the ever-womanly would gladly have imparted itself to him if he had not been, as it were, too shy to suffer the confidence. Whenever he caught some hint of it by chance, how clearly he set it down! But for the most part, as I have already said, these chances addressed him from low life; gentlewomen seem rarely to have confided their more complex natures to him. For once,