Delphi complete works of.., p.1572
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 1572
“Hetty hung round Dinah, and shuddered again. The silence seemed long before she went on.
“‘I met nobody, for it was very early, and I got into the wood.... I knew the way to the place,... the place against the nut-tree; and I could hear it crying at every step.... I thought it was alive.... I don’t know whether I was frightened or glad.... I don’t know what I felt. I only know I was in the wood and heard the cry. I don’t know what I felt till I saw the baby was gone. And when I’d put it there, I thought I should like somebody to find it, and save it from dying; but when I saw it was gone, I was struck like a stone with fear. I never thought o’ stirring, I felt so weak. I knew I couldn’t run away, and everybody as saw me ‘ud know about the baby. My heart went like a stone; I couldn’t wish or try for anything; it seemed like as if I should stay there forever, and nothing ‘ud ever change. But they came and took me away. ‘Hetty was silent, but she shuddered again, as if there were still something behind; and Dinah waited, for her heart was so full that tears must come before words. At last Hetty burst out, with a sob, ‘Dinah, do you think God will take away that crying and the place in the wood, now I’ve told everything?’ ‘Let us pray, poor sinner; let us fall on our knees again, and pray to the God of all mercy. ‘“
VI
It is a mark of maturing power in an author to deal more with complex and less with simple character. Acquaintance with life brings an increasing sense of the prevalence of mixed motives in the actions of men, and a keener perception of the fact that personality resides rather in the motives than the actions of men. An action is black or white; a motive is commonly the blend of several if not all the colors. This law of life the ripening talent gladly makes the law of its art. But there is another law, rather of the author’s nature than his art, to which his allegiance is involuntary and insensible, and this is the law of recurrence in the types he treats.
“Adam Bede” was George Eliot’s first great novel, and its characters, imposing and important as they were, were almost primitively simple. Then came “ The Mill on the Floss,” where the characters are mainly simple, but where we have in Maggie Tulliver a personality worthy in its complexity of the maturing power of the author. In “ Romola,” a later book, there is a reversion in the heroine to the singly-motived types of the earlier books; and in “Middlemarch,” which came still later, the characters are so subtly studied that, with the exception of Rosamond Vincy’s plain selfishness, the motives of nearly all, good, bad, and indifferent, are found as mixed as they would be in life. In “ Daniel Deronda “ we see not a recurrence to the original simplicity in the motives of the persons represented, but rather the matured power of showing them complex beginning to fall into decay, to weaken and to fail of the supreme effects achieved in “Middlemarch.”
It may almost be said that in “ Romola” George Eliot, as an artist, came to what Tolstoy, in the moral world, calls “the first consciousness.” In Tito Melema she must have rejoiced with full knowledge as the prime figure in English fiction, since Shakspere’s men, to illustrate the play of mixed motives in character. That consummate scoundrel is indeed a glorious achievement; but Romola, generously as she is imagined, is comparatively a failure. She is not an Italian of the Renaissance, she is not an Italian at all; she is a deeply ethicized intellectual English woman of the nineteenth century, with a Protestant conscience and a middle-class tradition, moved by Puritanic principles, which even if we suppose her a Florentine Piagnone and a follower of Savonarola, would not have actuated a Bardi in the time of the declining republic. She is spiritually a reversion to Dinah Morris, though appointed to such different offices in the story; as Tessa, her husband’s ignorant little paramour, is a reversion to Hetty Sorrel. Tessa, of course, has nothing of Hetty’s ignorant ambition, and there is no tragedy of self-deceit in her case; she has given herself to Tito because she has been asked, and not because she has ever dreamt of marrying him; she is as soft as Hetty is hard, and she is not vain. She is a contadina, as Hetty is a country girl, and Tito in her dim world holds the same high place that Donnithorne holds in Hetty’s; but her fate is not so terrible, because in that old Italy, still pagan under the Christian forms, there is no such tragedy for her as for Hetty in a time and a place where the Christian ideal of womanhood had made the fear of shame stronger than even the fear of crime.
GEORGE ELIOTS ROSAMOND VINCY AND DOROTHEA BROOKE
THE cultivated world was long ago brought to profess its open pleasure in character because it is true rather than in character because it is pleasing or edifying; but whether this pleasure is real or not, or whether it is not underlain by a secret preference for a character because he is good or she is pretty, I am not quite sure.
In the theatres frequented by the simple-hearted sort of people, the actor playing the part of a virtuous person is applauded, and the actor playing the part of a villain is hissed, irrespective of their artistic merits; but this rarely happens in any two-dollar house. Still, I am not satisfied that it would not happen if the two-dollar audience were as sincere as the fifty-cent audience, and I have my misgivings in offering to the admiration of the reader a detestable character merely because it is a masterpiece.
I
I am certain that it would be difficult to find a more detestable character, or a truer, than Rosamond Vincy, who equally with Dorothea Brooke is the heroine of “Middlemarch.” She is a very beautiful girl, and Lydgate who marries her loves her with a tenderness worthy the soul that is not in her. The soul that is in her is small and meanly selfish, but neither she nor he knows how small or meanly selfish at first. Rosamond, indeed, has a very high ideal of herself, which eventuates in an inexorable conceit after marriage, when the early tumult of the emotions subsides, and she has time to take full thought of her merits in contrast to her husband’s demerits. She is of that intensely personal nature which receives whatever happens as of direct intention toward itself; and feels injured or favored by the course of human events as if they were primarily concerned with it. As the course of events is not agreeable to Rosamond after her marriage with Lydgate, she naturally holds him responsible for them, and he falls in her esteem and her affection when he finds that they have been living extravagantly and wishes her to help him retrench. She never could have duly appreciated either his brilliant mind or his tender heart, and she sets herself to thwart and baffle him with a success which the greatness of both his mind and heart render easy for a dull, narrow, pretty egotist.
There can be nothing more tragical than the story of their unhappy married life, in which she harasses him with her paltry ambitions and resentments, and wears him out at last. Such women literally kill men, and the more generous the men the more easily they fall the prey of such women. It is nothing to Rosamond and can be nothing that her husband is recognized as a man of great scientific importance, and has the making of the highest professional fame in him. There is no sort of opinion, public or private, which could convince her that he had not wronged her by falling into money difficulties after he married her, or in failing to make her life as luxurious for her as she had expected. She breaks his heart and then she breaks his spirit, and when he dies she inherits the money that at last comes to her from his life-insurance with a sense of desert which has never once forsaken her.
We all know women like Rosamond Vincy; the type is eternal and ineffaceable, but a woman of her sort will complacently sit before Rosamond’s portrait, and never dream that there is anything like herself in it. The successive scenes in which her unconscious, abominable selfishness is developed can scarcely be said to culminate, but they each deepen and widen a little the sense of her deadly and deadening egotism, and of the hopelessness with which a generous spirit like Lydgate’s must struggle in the clinging and stifling hold of a polyp-nature like hers. In a novel of later date, where the dramatic method is more used, the whole situation would be imparted at once; but it must be seen that the partial suggestions of George Eliot follow one upon another with a deepening impression, till the reader’s pity for Lydgate’s doom in the wretched creature he loves would have excused his surrender to almost any temptation. Lydgate suffers a certain moral decay in his endeavor to please his wife, and even falls under suspicion of complicity with another’s crime; but at the worst he has done no wrong beyond lowering his aspirations, and has only sinned against himself.
Any one of the passages in which the author securely if slowly feels her way to the eventuality would serve to exhibit Rosamond as she always is, and I cannot say that I choose the first scene in which Lydgate tries to make her understand the situation as stronger than the others.
“‘Dear Rosy, lay down your work and come to sit by me,’ he said, gently, pushing away the table, and stretching out his arm to draw a chair near his own. Rosamond obeyed. As she came toward him in her drapery of transparent, faintly tinted muslin, her slim yet round figure never looked more graceful; as she sat down by him and laid one hand on the elbow of his chair, at last looking at him and meeting his eyes, her delicate neck and cheek and purely cut lips never had more of that untarnished beauty which touches us in spring-time and infancy and all sweet freshness. It touched Lydgate now, and mingled the early memories of his love for her with all the other memories which were stirred in this crisis of deep trouble. He laid his ample hand softly on hers, saying: ‘Dear!’ with the lingering utterance which affection gives to the word. Rosamond, too, was still under the power of that same past, and her husband was still in part the Lydgate whose approval had stirred delight She put his hair lightly away from his forehead, then laid her other hand on his, and was conscious of forgiving him. ‘I am obliged to tell you what will hurt you, Rosy. But there are things which husband and wife must think of together. I dare say it has occurred to you already that I am short of money.’ Lydgate paused; but Rosamond turned her neck and looked at a vase on the mantel-piece. ‘I was not able to pay for all the things we had to get before we were married, and there have been expenses since which I have been obliged to meet. I took pains to keep it from you while you were not well; now we must think about it together, and you must help me.’ ‘What can I do, Tertius?’ said Rosamond, turning her eyes on him again. That little speech of four words, like so many others in all languages, is capable by varied vocal inflections of expressing all states of mind from helpless dimness to exhaustive argumentative perception, from the completest, self-devoting fellowship to the most neutral aloofness. Rosamond’s thin utterance threw into the words ‘What can I do?’ as much neutrality as they could hold. They fell like a mortal chill on Lydgate’s roused tenderness. He did not storm in indignation — he felt too sad a sinking of the heart. And when he spoke again it was more in the tone of a man who forces himself to fulfil a task. ‘It is necessary for you to know, because I have to give security for a time, and a man must come to make an inventory of the furniture.’ Rosamond colored deeply. ‘Have you not asked papa for money?’ she said, as soon as she could speak.... ‘No, Rosy,’ said Lydgate, decisively. ‘It is too late to do that.... I insist upon it that your father shall not know, unless I choose to tell him,’ added Lydgate, with a more peremptory emphasis. This certainly was unkind, but Rosamond had thrown him back on evil expectation as to what she would do in the way of quiet, steady disobedience. The unkindness seemed unpardonable to her: she was not given to weeping, and disliked it, but now her chin and lips began to tremble and the tears welled up....
He could not speak again immediately; but Rosamond did not go on sobbing; she tried to conquer her agitation and wiped away her tears, continuing to look before her at the mantel-piece.... ‘Your friends would not wish you to be without money. And surely these odious tradesmen might be made to understand that and to wait, if you would make proper representations to them,’ ‘This is idle, Rosamond,’ said Lydgate, angrily. ‘You must learn to take my judgment on questions you don’t understand. I have made necessary arrangements, and they must be carried out.’... Rosamond quietly went out of the room, leaving Lydgate helpless and wondering. Was she not coming back? It seemed that she had no more identified herself with him than if they had been creatures of different species and opposing interests.... ‘This is all the jewelry you ever gave me. You can return what you like of it, and of the plate also. You will not, of course, expect me to stay at home to-morrow. I shall go to papa’s,’ To many women the look Lydgate cast at her would have been more terrible than one of anger: it had in it a despairing acceptance of the distance she was placing between them.... ‘I shall not touch these jewels, Rosy. Take them away again. But I will write out a list of plate that we may return, and that can be packed up and sent at once,’... Rosamond went to reach the inkstand, and after setting it on the table was going to turn away, when Lydgate, who was standing close by, put his arm around her and drew her toward him, saying: ‘Come, darling, let us make the best of things. It will only be for a time, I hope, that we shall have to be stingy and particular. Kiss me.’ His native warm-heartedness took a great deal of quenching, and it is a part of manliness for a husband to feel keenly the fact that an inexperienced girl has got into trouble by marrying him. She received his kiss and returned it faintly, and in this way an appearance of accord was recovered for the time.”
II
It may be said that we know Rosamond Vincy from the beginning, and that her character does not reveal itself more fully in the different scenes that follow this. But so do we know the character of Hamlet from the beginning, and it is new light rather than more light that events throw upon it, as the drama proceeds. There is no surprise, but a very great interest and instruction, in Rosamond’s meddling conceit when she interferes with Lydgate’s brave endeavors to get out of debt, and brings shame upon him by her secret appeals to his family; and in the absolute immorality of her willingness to have him so bound by a money favor to Bulstrode that he is helpless to declare his suspicions of Bulstrode’s guilt in an affair very like murder. When the shadow of this affair falls upon Lydgate, too, Rosamond feels herself chiefly aggrieved, and blames her husband for her suffering through him. It is by no means out of keeping with what else we know of her that she should have meantime supposed herself to be loved by Lydgate’s friend Ladislaw, and that she should have suffered his passion, without returning it, as a just tribute to her meritorious beauty.
There is of course the question, which I hope will occur to the reader of these papers, whether in portraying a nature so altogether odious as Rosamond’s the author has not been guilty of leze-complexity. Is not such a character too simply, too singly detestable, to be a true copy? I confess that it comes perilously near incurring some such censure; but perhaps the defence may be that we have not taken due account of mitigating circumstances in Rosamond’s case. If Lydgate had smoothly and splendidly succeeded, as she expected, from the beginning, and there had been no hint of debts or troubles, her conceit would have concerned itself with little, insignificant things; she would have been content chiefly to talk incessantly about herself, and safely flirt well within a devoted admiration of her husband; she would have been a pretty bore, without the power of considerable mischief, as she was certainly always without the wish for it, or the cognizance of it. There is fairly enough the implication of all this in the representation of her character, as we must own when we most suspect the author of having come to hate Rosamond so much that she is just to her with difficulty.
Novelists ought not to have their favorites among their creations, as parents ought not to have their favorites among their children; but no doubt they have them. If the novelists are women, they wish their readers to share their preferences, and it might be true to say the same thing of the novelists even if they are men. At any rate, George Eliot has her preferences most distinctly, and she pursues some of her women with a rancor as perceptible as her fondness for others. I will not deny that I think this a defect of her art; it is so; and I am not going to defend it any more in the case of Dorothea Brooke, whom she loves, than in the case of Rosamond Vincy, whom she hates with a hatred passing her hatred of Hetty Sorrel and Gwendolen Harleth, and all the other anti-heroines of her books. She succeeds in commending these to our dislike rather than she succeeds in commending to our liking her Romolas and Mary Garths and Mirahs, perhaps because in fiction as in life a woman does not know how to praise her friends sparingly enough. But in Dorothea Brooke she has known how to hold her hand, or rather has she known how so to temper Dorothea’s strength with weakness, her wisdom with folly, her good with evil, as to render her entirely credible and entirely lovable.
III
Since I wrote the foregoing paragraph I have been reviewing the whole career, or rather the whole character, of Dorothea in “Middlemarch,” and I think I can now go still farther in praise of her, and keep well within the limits of reason. She is of a most noble make, not merely because she is of a high mind and an eager conscience, but because she has a will to be generously of use to those who need her, and because she is above all pettiness in the cruel disappointment which life brings when it teaches her that sometimes those who need her help most cannot receive it ungrudgingly, or even at all. She once says it herself in talk with Will Ladislaw, ‘“I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me.’ ‘What is that?’ said Will, rather jealous of the belief. ‘That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirt of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.... Please not to call it by any name,’ said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly. ‘You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it.’”
