Delphi complete works of.., p.1580
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 1580
IV
The youthfulness of all this is lovely. These people are really at the beginning of life and are immersed in the intoxicating employ of finding themselves out while remaining ignorant of their power upon each other. Neither is an actor; the fascination of both is in their entire sincerity. A worse than either would not have done what they each did; they are still almost children.
I think it is plain that the author learned part of her trade from those weird sisters who wrote “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights.” Her art is a blend of Charlotte Brontë’s and Emily Brontë’s, with a greater tendency to the greater freedom of Emily’s, and an effect, in the composite result, of a fresh originality. But in her stormiest scenes you have not the sense of outlawry such as you have in those of “Wuthering Heights,” and the casing air is charged with comedy, not tragedy. Oddly enough, these aesthetics do not discord with the metaphysics which the author has learned to indulge from the fiction of Goethe. There are passages in this story of young love which in their psychological, economical, sociological excursiveness might have been studied from “Wilhelm Meister.” The author was in fact operating in a region then so new to the novelist that she had a fair right to divide with the reader the weight of the exegetic duty laid upon her. She had invited him into a world so strange to the English-speaking reader that she must sometimes suspend the lighter pleasures of hospitality in making sure that he understands what is going on. The world is since so much more thoroughly travelled, and thanks to such fiction as hers, the peoples are so much more intimately versed in each other’s peculiarities that the task of the international novelist is now indefinitely lightened.
But fortunately, however well we knew Germany, or Italy, or Spain, or Russia, the Pays du Tendre always remains strange to us, and the highways and byways of the land of love may be mapped out in the closest detail, to the untiring interest of the student. Especially that region of a girl’s heart, explored by so many thousands of travellers who have recorded its surprises in so many hundred thousands of books, continues a perennial mystery, a continent proof against all revelations. We get glimpses of it in the story of such a girl as Hildegarde, but only glimpses, and perhaps if she herself opened it to us, we should be none the wiser in it We cannot be sure that Hamilton will always be happy; at times he will be tempestuously happy; but at least he will never be calmly unhappy. She will be always a surprise and a puzzle to him, and when she is most his own, his sense of possession will be qualified by this inalienable strangeness in her, which will also be her strangeness to herself. She will never be able to reveal her own nature wholly to him; for she will never wholly know it. For other girls the most obvious, though not by any means the most valuable lesson of her experience will be that it is not safe for a girl to box a young man’s ears unless she is willing to marry him. This point seems to be definitely ascertained in “The Initials.”
THE HEROINE OF “KATE BEAUMONT”
IF we put aside the romances of Hawthorne and the romantic novels of Cooper, we can hardly find much fiction of American scope and import before the Civil War, except “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” That was a great novel, marred by defects of art, and fettered to a cause, but still a great novel, and really the earliest American novel. After the war we began to have other novels of material proportions, and first among these were the stories of J. W. De Forest, a brevet major of volunteers, and a veteran of the vast army then fading back, with the weather-beaten blue of its overcoats, into the common color of the popular life. His distinction was thereafter civil and literary, and for the purposes of this paper it will be convenient to call him Mr. De Forest, though there is so much in his books to remind the reader of the big war which the author had passed through, with all his artistic senses alert. The book in which I first made his acquaintance, with a surprise and joy in an American who seemed to write novels with authority, was altogether concerned with the war and its results, and “Miss Ravenel’s Conversion “ was not less valuable to me for the light it cast upon the motives and morals of the recent struggle than for the knowledge of men and women, as such, which it showed. I have not read it since those far-off days, and I have not recurred to his subsequent novels, “Playing the Mischief,”
“The Wetherill Affair,”
“Overland,” and “ Irene the Missionary,” which I have hardly named in the order of their succession; but I have read “Honest John Vane” more than once, with a feeling of its mastery in handling the flabby material of our ordinary political virtue, such as no other American novel has given me. A certain impatience, a certain contempt of his material on the moral side, is what as nearly allies Mr. De Forest’s art, in spite of his Huguenot race, to the New England ethicism so fatal to Action, as anything I have noted in him. It forbids him the artist’s impartial joy in the good, bad, and indifferent motives which his sole affair is to let show themselves what they are, and it leaves him, if not a partisan of the better, a censor of the worse. A certain scornful bluntness in dealing with the disguises in which women natures reveal themselves is perhaps at the root of that dislike which most women have felt for his Action, and which in a nation of women, readers has prevented it from ever winning a merited popularity.
I
I suppose his shapeliest novel is “Kate Beaumont,” which might better have been called “A Family Feud,” so largely is it the history of the hostilities between the Beaumonts and McAlisters in a South Carolina village before the war. Within the framework of this tragedy, which has the comic reliefs visible to so true a humorist as Mr. De Forest, plays the love story of Kate Beaumont and Frank McAlister. They have met on the steamer bringing them home from a long sojourn in Europe, and he has fallen in love with her before she has fallen into the sea and been saved from death by her hereditary enemy. He has the greatest loathing for the hereditary enmity, which he considers a relic of barbarism, and his rescue of Kate Beaumont forms a pretty basis for the reconciliation of their families, when the young people get home. The reconciliation is always just about to effect itself, but is always turning into provisional hostilities, and it does not actually take place till the close of the book, when the lovers are duly married. I confess that it was not with the expectation of finding Kate Beaumont a heroine to my hand that I turned again to the book; and I there found her what I remembered her, a sweet girl, gentle and generous, with a ready-made passion for her lover, and otherwise a prevailing passivity. It was in her sister Nellie, the wife of the drunken Randolph Armitage, that I looked forward to meeting a second time a personality which greatly pleased me the first. Nellie Armitage is a great little creature, quite true to herself and her circumstance: absolute woman, and yet with rather more humor than is vouchsafed to most of her family. She had married Armitage for love of his beauty, and as his vice grew upon him, the proud girl had lived to suffer from him every ignominy, of which blows were almost the least pari When she ceases to love him she cannot leave him because of the public scandal which a woman of the Beaumont race must not expose herself to; and because she cannot do so without confessing to the other Beaumonts things which will make it their duty and pleasure to kill her husband.
All the men in the book have an extraordinary vitality, and Nellie Beaumont has her full share of it, though the other women are rather scanted in behalf of the men. She is pathetically, heroically, whimsically alive from the first moment, and is never more so than when she falls in love with Frank McAlister for her sister’s sake, and putting aside the historic Beaumont hatred, resolves that he shall be Kate’s husband. She comes the more naturally to this pass when she at last abandons her own husband, and takes refuge with her father; for by this time life has taught her that the love of a good man is the best thing in the world, and Frank McAlister is good. With the help of the heavenly powers she has fairly got the feud under her feet, when her husband comes to claim her, and in his drunken jealousy of Frank — not on hers but on Kate’s account — tries to kill the young fellow whom he finds on a mission of peace in Peyton Beaumont’s house. His wild shooting brings down Beaumont’s saintly old father-in-law, Colonel Kershaw; Frank’s brothers, lurking about, imagine that the Beaumonts have attacked him, and open fire upon the Beaumonts, who come running, pistol in hand; and the old feud flames out again in more infernal fury than ever. But Kershaw’s death proves a real peace-offering; Armitage is promptly turned out, and when his initial is found on the fatal bullet, and not the McAlisters’, the way is open to the Beaumonts for that forgiveness of their enemies which the old man has urged upon them from his death-bed. The families are reconciled, and Kate and Frank are married.
II
Now that the prejudices of the war time and the ante-war time have effectively died away, we may rejoice in the virtues which Mr. De Forest shows consistent with so many vices in the Beaumonts. Each of the men of that family is studied with an accuracy which brings him tangibly before us: the father, Peyton Beaumont, a quivering mass of affection for his own flesh and blood, an impersonation of the noblest and stupidest caste and family pride, his hot blood on fire with constant cocktails, and his life always in his hand for the resentment of insult, an impassioned parent and an impenitent homicide; Vincent, the cynical, scientific product of the Paris medical schools, returned to the full acceptance of the South Carolina conditions; his younger brother Poinsett, bred to the law, but practically no more a lawyer than Vincent is a doctor, serenely philosophical, and amiable from premature fat, but as devoted to the feud as the youngest brother, Tom, with whom it is a religion. The Beaumonts are of Huguenot race, and by so much are more picturesque than the Scotch-blooded McAlisters; but these are scarcely less delicately differentiated, though they are not touched with the same artistic affection. The old Judge McAlister, as canny, suave, and slippery as Peyton Beaumont is dense, frank, and truthful, is an admirable portrait, and so is the kind, consumptive, mechanically homicidal eldest son, Bruce. Frank, emancipated from all local tradition by his seven years’ study in Europe, and holding the feud in utter abhorrence, is worthily the lover of Kate Beaumont. But the women of his family are shown in the abeyance of the Southern women in the slave-holding times. It is only some woman liberated by unhappiness to a sort of family leadership who can have the importance of Nellie Beaumont.
But even she, as a character, is less livingly presented than even such a subordinate man as Bentley Armitage. Among the group of powerful men figures, that of the old Colonel Kershaw, who has outlived the sins of his youth and the errors of his civilization, must profoundly interest the student. His patriarchal paramountcy not only with the passionate Beaumont, but all his impassioned descendants is, however, an effect of native goodness which is now become saintly without having degenerated into weakness.
III
Have I been tacitly owning that even my chosen heroine in “Kate Beaumont” is not of the dominant quality which the other heroines of this series may justly claim? She is of scarcely more force, indeed, than the heroines of Dickens, though of indefinitely more vitality. It is not Dickens, however, who in any way characterizes Mr. De Forest, but there are hints and traces of another influence in his novel, which is all the more curious because Charles Reade never minimized woman’s part in fiction. The hints and traces, to be sure, are in the manner, but there is a deeper affinity between the two writers in their divination of women’s nature. Reade turned his seership to flattering account, and so won the favor of a sex which he was apt to symbolize in the innocence of serpents and the wisdom of doves; but it is the defect of Mr. De Forest’s temperament that he could not flatter the foibles of womanhood, or even its faults. I remember in “ Miss Ravend’s Conversion” a very lurid Mrs. Leroy, of whom I cannot think without shuddering. The wife of Honest John Vane is pitilessly ascertained, and there is a widow in “Playing the Mischief” who is not a mirror for widows, to say the least. In “Kate Beaumont,” the old flirt, Mrs. Chester, and the young flirt, Jenny Devine, are treated with a contempt equally open and unsparing. All the more to the honor of such a brave and essentially good woman as Nellie Armitage, who has married to her hurt and kept it hidden, is the praise of an author so chary of flattery for woman.
She has kept her hurt so well hidden that none of the Beaumonts who would have bathed it in blood have ever suspected it; and when she takes Kate home with her for a visit, the girl is simply fascinated with her handsome brother-in-law, and thinks her sister the happiest of wives. The day after her coming to his house Armitage is brought home from a debauch, and with her sister she comes upon him lying senseless.
“‘Oh!’ she exclaimed.... ‘Is he — dying?’ ‘He is dead — dead drunk,’ replied the wife. ‘To think how I have loved him!’ Nellie went on. ‘That man has had all the good, all the best, that was in my heart He has had it and trampled on it, and wasted it till it is gone. I can hate, now, and I hate him.... I have seen the time when I could kneel and kiss the figures of the carpet which his feet had rested upon.... And now see how I hate him and despise him.
I can take a mean and cowardly revenge on him!’ She suddenly advanced upon the senseless man, and slapped his face with her open hand. ‘Oh, you woman, what are you doing?’ exclaimed Kate, seizing her and drawing her away. ‘Nellie, I won’t love you!’ ‘Yes, I am hateful,’ replied Nellie. ‘Do you know why? I can’t tell you half the reasons I have for being hateful. Look at that scar,’ pointing to a mark on her forehead.... ‘He did it. He struck me with his doubled fist, and that gash was cut by the ring which I gave him.’ Kate sat down, covered her face with her hands, and sobbed violently.... ‘He had struck me before, and he has struck me since. And there have been other insults.... Oh, if my father and brothers knew!’... ‘They would kill him, Nellie,’ whispered Kate, looking up piteously, as if pleading for the man’s life. ‘I know it. But that is not all. I have become so savage that it seems to me I would not mind that What I care for is the exposure. If they should shoot him, people would learn why. It would be known that Nellie Beaumont could not live with her husband... that she had failed as a wife and a woman.... I shall stay and fight it out here till I can fight no longer. But I wanted some one’s sympathy. I wanted at least to tell my sister how miserable I am.’ She stopped, fell on her knees, laid her head in the girl’s lap, and broke out in violent crying. After a minute she rose, lifted Kate to her feet, embraced her passionately, and said in a voice which had suddenly become calm, ‘This is my first cry in two years. My heart feels a little less like breaking. Let us go.’ ‘Do you suppose he has heard?’ asked the young woman, glancing at Armitage. ‘Heard?’ answered Nellie, with a hard laugh. ‘He couldn’t hear the last trump, if it should be blown in this room. Isn’t he horrible — and handsome?’”
IV
After a first moment of prejudice, Mrs. Armitage had taken a sudden liking to Frank McAlister. When at last she realized that she must leave her husband, she was not sorry to find Frank on the train that took her and her sister back to their father’s house. He behaved with such discreetness, and in regard to Kate with such slavish submission to Mrs. Armitage’s will, that “‘I am his sworn ally,’ she said to her sister, as they drove home from the Hartland station. ‘If he proposes, do you accept him. Then I will go to papa with the whole story, and if he is naughty, I will appeal to your grandpapa.’”
She lost no time in making her approaches to their father’s heart through the story of her sufferings.
‘“I have had to leave my husband, and I am excusable for telling why.’ ‘Had to leave your husband! ‘echoed the father, his bushy eyebrows bristling and his eyes turning bloodshot ‘The infamous scoundrel! ‘He was so much of a Beaumont that he... asked for no more than the fact that his daughter had felt herself compelled to leave her husband. On that he judged the case at once and forever.... ‘Be perfectly easy. He won’t live the month out’ ‘Have a care what you do,’ replied Nellie. ‘I don’t want the whole world to know what I’ve suffered.’ ‘Who is going to know it?’ interrupted the old fire-eater. ‘By heavens, I will shoot the man that dares to know it I’... ‘You can’t shoot the women,’ said Nellie.”
The skill with which she plays upon the tenderness of her father in behalf of her sister, have their effect in his consenting that if the feud can once be extinguished Kate shall marry Frank McAlister. ‘“But I can’t discuss it, now,’ he protests. ‘Do let me alone. Do you want to break my heart?’ ‘No, nor Kate’s, either,’ said Nellie,” and presently there is a scene between Kate and her father, who sees her unhappy, and must know why.
“‘Is it more than a Beaumont can endure?’ he repeated, gently, though with an appeal to the family pride. ‘No, it is not more,’ answered Kate.... The father was not satisfied, for he did not want his daughter to suffer at all.... ‘I did not seek this new quarrel,’ he said. ‘I can truly declare that Judge McAlister forced it upon me. I could live with the man decently, if he would let me.’ ‘Oh, father, I have nothing to say about these matters. Why do you explain them to me?’ ‘Because I don’t want you to blame me. I can’t bear it. I say I could live with those people. As for the young man, — I mean Mr. Frank McAlister, — I respect him and like him.’ Kate, in spite of her virginal modesty, gave him a glance of gratitude that stung him. He started, and then resigned himself; the girl did love that man....
