Certain it is that if men have looked with skepticism at the types of manhood presented with so much ardour by female novelists,—if they have voted Rochester a brute, and Mr. Knightley a prig, and Robert Elsmere a bore, and Deronda “an intolerable kind of Grandison,”—women in their turn have evinced resentment, or at least impatience, at the attitude of heroines so sweetly glorified by men. Lady Castlewood is a notable example. How kindly Thackeray—who is not always kind—treats this “tender matron,” this “fair mistress” of the admirable Esmond! What pleasant adjectives, “gentlest,” “truest,” “loveliest,” he has ever ready at her service! How frankly he forgives faults more endearing than virtues to the masculine mind! “It takes a man,” we are told, “to forgive Lady Castlewood.” She is the finest and most reverent incarnation of what men conceive to be purely feminine traits. In a world that belongs to its masters, she is an exquisite appurtenance, a possession justly prized. In a world shared—albeit somewhat unevenly—by men and women, she seems less good and gracious. “I always said I was alone,” cries Beatrix sternly. “You were jealous of me from the time I sat on my father’s knee.” And the child’s eyes saw the truth.
It has been claimed, and perhaps with justice, that the irritation provoked by Thackeray’s virtuous heroines is born of wounded vanity. Mr. Lang observes that women easily pardon Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory, but never Amelia Sedley nor Laura Pendennis. For the matter of that, men easily pardon Mr. Collins and Mr. Elton. They do more than pardon, they delight in these incomparable clerics, and they adore Miss Austen for having created them. Mr. Saintsbury vows that Mr. Collins is worthy of Fielding or Swift. But their sentiments towards the excellent Edmund Bertram, who is all that a parson should be, are not wholly unlike the sentiments of women towards Amelia Sedley, who is all that a wife and a mother should be; nor are they ready to admit that Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley are worthy of Elizabeth and Emma. Lord Brabourne has recorded a distinct prejudice against Mr. Knightley, on the ground that he interferes too much; yet it is plain that Miss Austen considered this interference as a masculine prerogative, exercised with judgment and discretion. He is what women call “a thorough man,” just as Amelia is what men call “a thorough woman.” Mr. Lang bravely confesses his affection for her on this very score: “She is such a thorough woman.” It evidently does not occur to him to doubt Thackeray’s knowledge, or his own knowledge, of the sex.
Around Fielding’s heroines the battle has raged for years. These kind-hearted, sweet-tempered creatures have been very charming in men’s eyes. Scott loved Sophia Western as if she had been his own daughter,—he would have treated her differently,—and took especial pleasure in her music, in the way she soothed her father to sleep after dinner with “Saint George, he is for England.” Sir Walter and Squire Western had a stirring taste in songs. Dr. Johnson gave his allegiance without reserve to Fielding’s Amelia. He read the inordinately long novel which bears her name at a single sitting, and he always honoured her as the best and loveliest of her sex,—this, too, at a time when Clarissa held the hearts of Christendom in her keeping. Amelia Booth, like Amelia Sedley, is a “thorough woman;” that is, she embodies all the characteristics which the straightforward vice of the eighteenth century conceived to be virtues in her sex, and which provoke the envious admiration of our own less candid age. “Fair, and kind, and good,” so runs the verdict. “What more can be desired?” And the impatient retort of the feminine reader, “No more, but possibly a little less,” offends the critic’s ear. “Where can you find among the genteel writers of this age,” asks Mr. Lang hotly, “a figure more beautiful, tender, devoted, and, in all good ways, womanly, than Sophia Western?” “The adorable Sophia,” Mr. Austin Dobson calls her,—“pure and womanly, in spite of her unfavourable surroundings.” Womanliness is the one trait about which they are all cock-sure. It is the question at issue, and cannot be lightly begged. But Sophia’s strongest plea is the love Sir Walter gave her.
For Scott, though most of his young heroines are drawn in a perfunctory and indifferent fashion—mere incentives to enterprise or rewards of valour—knew something of the quicksands beyond. He made little boast of this knowledge, frankly preferring the ways of men, about whom there was plenty to be told, and whose motives never needed a too assiduous analysis. Mr. Ruskin, it is true, pronounced all the women of the Waverley Novels to be finer than the men; but he was arguing on purely ethical grounds. He liked the women better because they were better, not because their goodness was truer to life. He was incapable of judging any work, literary or artistic, by purely critical standards. He had praise for Rose Bradwardine, and Catherine Seyton, and Alice Lee, because they are such well-behaved young ladies; he excluded from his list of heroines Lucy Ashton, who stands forever as a proof of her author’s power to probe a woman’s soul. Scott did not care to do this thing. The experiment was too painful for his hands. But critics who talk about the subtleties of modern novelists, as compared with Sir Walter’s “frank simplicity,”—patronizing phrase!—have forgotten “The Bride of Lammermoor.” There is nothing more artistic within the whole range of fiction than our introduction to Lucy Ashton, when the doomed girl—as yet unseen—is heard singing those curious and haunting lines which reveal to us at once the struggle that awaits her, and her helplessness to meet and conquer fate.
There are fashions in novel-writing, as in all things else, and a determined effort to be analytic is imposing enough to mislead. We usually detect this effort when men are writing of women, and when women are writing of men. The former seek to be subtle; the latter seek to be strong. Both are determined to reveal something which is not always a recognizable revelation. In the earlier “novels of character” there is none of this delicate surgery. Fielding took his material as he found it, and so did Miss Austen. She painted her portraits with absolute truthfulness, but she never struggled for insight; above all she never struggled for insight into masculinity. She knew her men as well as any author needs to know them; but her moments of illumination, of absolute intimacy, were for women. It is in such a moment that Emma Woodhouse realizes, “with the speed of an arrow,” that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself.
There is nothing “subtle” in this; nothing that at all resembles Mr. Hardy’s careful explorations into the intricacies of a character like Eustacia Vye, in “The Return of the Native.” There is nothing of Mr. James’s artfulness, nothing of Mr. Meredith’s daring. These two eminent novelists are past masters of their craft. They present their heroines as interesting puzzles to which they alone hold the key. They keep us in a state of suspense from chapter to chapter, and they too often baffle our curiosity in the end. The treatment of Miriam Rooth, in “The Tragic Muse,” is a triumph of ingenuity. “What do you think of her?” “What can you make out of her?” “What is she now, and what is she going to be?” are the unasked, and certainly unanswerable, questions suggested by every phase of this young woman’s development. The bewildered reader, unable to formulate a theory, unable to make even a feeble conjecture, is much impressed by the problem laid before him, and by the acuteness of the author who deciphers it. If to evolve a sphinx and to answer her riddle is to interpret femininity, then there are modern novelists who have entered upon their kingdom. But one remembers Rochefoucauld’s wise words: “The greatest mistake of penetration is, not to have fallen short, but to have gone too far.”
MARRIAGE IN FICTION
They fought bitter and regular, like man and wife.
Since the days of Richardson and Fielding, English novelists have devoted themselves with tireless energy to the pleasant task of match-making. They have held this duty to be of such paramount importance that much of their work has practically no other raison d’être. They write their stories—so far as we can see—solely and entirely that they may bring two wavering young people to the altar; and they leave us stranded at the church doors in lamentable ignorance of all that is to follow. Thackeray once asked Alexandre Dumas why he did not take up the real history of other people’s heroes and heroines, and tell the world what their married lives were like.
It would have been a perilous enterprise, for, notwithstanding two centuries of practice, novelists are astonishingly bad match-makers. We know what happened when Thackeray himself undertook to continue the tale of Ivanhoe and Rowena, whom Scott abandoned to their fate, with merely a gentle hint of some mental deviations on the bridegroom’s part. Sir Walter, indeed, always shook hands with his young couples on their wedding-day, and left them to pull through as best they could. Their courtships and their marriages interested him less than other things he wanted to write about,—sieges and tournaments, criminal trials, and sour Scottish saints. He had lived his own life bravely and happily without his heart’s desire; he believed that it was the fate of most men to do the same; and he clung stoutly to Dryden’s axiom:—