Heroines Of Fiction. William Dean Howells
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De la Motte Fouqué. To a certain extent among the English the romantic impulse resulted in a yet more psychological type, of which Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein" is a superlative example. But in that thin air woman, who is far more of " this sensible warm motion " than man, gasped for breath; and scarcely a palpable heroine remains to us from all that generation of romancers. Such diaphanous embodiments as they could give her traits, waned more and more into symbols; the art of presenting her with her vital charm, distinct, individual, actual as the early realists had known her, seemed lost; and when a realescent talent like Balzac arrived, and began to cast about him in every-day life for the bizarre contrasts and eccentricities, the surprising accidents and tremendous catastrophes which the romancers had sought afar in remote times and under strange skies, he did little to give woman her old importance in fiction. The pathetic and beautiful vision of his Eugenie Grandet rises to reproach me for saying this, and I hasten to acknowledge in her a heroine worthy of the best age of fiction. But still I think that what I say holds true, and that again, as with Hawthorne, the exception proves the rule.
As for the nautical romance which Cooper popularized, and which Captain Marryat carried forward upon the impulse Cooper had given him, it was, still less than the historical or psychological romance, the habitat of the true heroine. In my time I read every one of Marryat's novels, but no gleam of a woman's eye, or drift of a woman's drapery haunts my remembrance of them. Cooper could occasionally find use for a " female " as a captive among his Indians; and no doubt there were figures which passed for heroines in Marryat's land-going stories. Until Mr. Clark Russell's time, however, the marine novel was unfavorable to the heroine. He alone seems to have had the secret of divining lovely girls on water-logged wrecks, or of having his heroes marooned with them on palmy islands of the Spanish Main; though it is due to the many-sidedness of Charles Reade to recall that in "Foul Play," which is so largely a sea story, there is a heroine of such charm, so sweetly and truly a woman, that any man would be willing to be cast away with her on a desert coast, and very loath to be rescued, except in her company.
II
We may explain the absence of genuine women in romantic fiction less charitably than I have already explained it, and suppose that it was a revulsion from their extreme prevalence in the early realistic fiction. Or, we may allow that in all the more active adventures and more tremendous exigencies, a heroine was so difficult to manage that she had to be left out as much as the hero's functional requirement of someone to love would permit. In a representation of every-day life she could always very credibly give a good account of herself, but in what may be called every-other-day life she apparently did not know what to do. Her simple and single device of a "falling lifeless',' as in the case of "females" of "sensibility," was soon exhausted, and, even when in a dead faint, she was apt to be a burden on the action; the hero had to lug her off, either in his arms or on his saddle-bow, or else leave her to the villain, who could seldom be trusted with the care of a lady.
The possibilities of the swoon, indeed, had been pretty well exhausted, when the novel began slowly to return to the study of human nature under the ordinary social conditions. Heroines were confronted with situations to which they were more equal as women, and they fainted less as time went on, until now a lady "falls lifeless " in fiction almost as rarely as in life. The effect in these matters is largely reciprocal, and no doubt the evanescence of the swoon in life is due in turn to its disappearance in fiction. At any rate, fainting is as obsolete as " bursting a blood-vessel," which used to be so common in novels; and the habit of carrying salts which every lady had who wished to pass for a "delicate female," and which continued till the middle of the century, would seem something too funny to her golfing granddaughters, who talk of each other as "women" and share the hardy sports of "men." The novelists themselves began to find hysterics funny, and some employed them to move the mirth of their readers, while the heroines of others were still swooning seriously. To this day they still "burst into tears," and "choke with sobs "; but so do women in life, and so did men once. In the novels of Richardson men weep quite as copiously as women, and upon as little provocation; and possibly one of the few good effects of the novel of adventure was to steel the nerves of the hero, at least, against the melting mood. It may be supposed that in the stress of saving his own life or taking the life of someone else, he could not find the moment for bursting into tears, or choking with sobs; and that he behaved something more like a man from mere pressure of business.
One may go further than this, and imagine that the two schools profited by 7 each other both in the way of warning and the way of example. Certainly the realescents, like Balzac and Hugo, and like Bulwer and Dickens, who followed the romancers, copied some of their virtues as well as their faults; and if they did not copy all the virtues of the early realists, they eschewed most of their faults.
Bulwer and Dickens both brought fiction back to the study of life upon terms as novel as their respective points of view were different. Bulwer was some ten years before Dickens in imparting the surprise they each had for his contemporaries; and the surprise that Bulwer operated in "Pelham" must have been much greater than we can imagine now when we look back and find the story so vulgarly and viciously commonplace under the glare of its worldly splendor. He called it "The Adventures of a Gentleman," and so it might have been, as gentlemen went in those days; but now it would rather be called "The Adventures of a Blackguard," so much have gentlemen or blackguards since improved. In abandoning the fanciful realm of the romancers, and returning to the world of actualities, Bulwer did not return to the unsparing ideal of the first realists, and seek the good of his reader by pointing the moral of his tale; still less did he conceive of the principle which has vitalized the later realists, and leave a faithful study of life, in cause and effect, to enforce its own lesson. In his early fiction we move in a region where the moral law is apparently suspended, as it often seems to be in this unhappy world of ours, and where good does not follow from good or evil from evil, as it finally does to our experience. Cynical conventions, and not the mysterious statutes written in all hearts, govern the world in which Henry Pelham adventures; and in this malarial, this mephitic air, the womanly gasps and perishes.
The literary technique is so much better than Scott's; the story is so much shapelier, the style so much clearer and quicker, the diction so much more accurate, that one at first feels a certain joy in escaping to it. But this soon fades, and you find yourself longing for the foolishest page of romance, for the worst of Scott, of Cooper, of Brockden Brown, of Mrs. Radcliffe, as something truer and better, after all; for these authors, at their worst, were untrue only to the manifestations of human nature, and Bulwer, at his best, misrepresents the surface of life, and he is untrue to its essence.
In the long stretch of his novels, from "Pelham," which was not the first, to "My Novel," which was not the last, but which respectively mark the extremes of his ill-doing and well-doing, there is an apparent effort to retrieve the primal error, the original sin of "Pelham." But one does not feel that Bulwer ever quite works out his redemption. Womanhood, at least, does not forgive him; or it does not countenance his work by its presence so far as to suffer him any memorable heroine. I read all his books at that most impressionable time of life when but to name a woman's name is to conjure up a phantom of delight in the young fancy; but nothing remains to me now from the multitude of his inventions in the figure of women but the vague image of the blind girl Nydia in "The Last Days of Pompeii." I think this sort of general remembrance or oblivion no bad test in such matters, and I feel pretty sure that if Bulwer had imagined any other heroine of equal authenticity. I should find some trace of her charm in my memory. But I find none from the books of an author whom once thought so brilliant and profound, and whom I now think so solemnly empty, so imposingly unimportant. He was a clever artificer, and he is to be credited with doing much to stay the decadence of British prose in fiction, and to rebuild the British novel upon shapely lines. But in all he has written there is an air of meditated purpose, a lack of impulse, an absence of spontaneity. He meant extremely well by literature; he had ideals so tall that he enjoyed something like a moral elevation from them; he respected the novelist so highly that he wished to call him the Poet, and did call him so in his prefaces; he was a man of polite learning, or at least, of scholarly reading; he wished always to do better than he did; in the lack of artistic instincts he had artistic principles, which if mistaken were sincere; and with all he was thoroughly mediocre. He did not grow as an artist, and his "Last Days of Pompeii," winch