This young man is the son of Sir William Blancove, in whose bank Anthony is employed as a clerk. Thus had he met Dahlia, to her cost. He and his cousin Algernon, son of the neighbouring squire at Wrexham, were the youths who stood watching the girls one May Day feast. Algernon is a flippant sinner of the well-known school, generally beset with debts, and not much troubled with morals. Edward, Dahlia’s lover, is of other texture—of a perilous superiority, cold-brained, legal, sharp, and unyouthfully serious. They have a cousin, Mrs. Margaret Lovell, whose part in the story it is difficult to define. She does harm, and sometimes appears to wish to do well. Fabulously fair, brilliant and proud, she plays with both young men, and seems to play the mischief all round. In the first scene between the youths we are dashed from a conviction of Edward’s cynicism by a very human and sincere cry: ‘Virtue, by heaven! I wish I were entitled to preach it to any man on earth.’ And yet this cry and the flush are contradicted by his cold perusal of Dahlia’s heart-broken letter explaining why she sent him away alone. ‘The poor child threatens to eat no dinner if I don’t write,’ he says, and we pity the girl doubly.
After this it is no surprise to find Dahlia abroad, and writing home letters breathing frantic worship of the husband she does not name. Rhoda’s trusting joy in the news is pitiful—more pitiful still her loyal endeavour to shield her beloved sister when the farmer’s wrath explodes over an unsigned announcement of the marriage. In reply to his cry, ‘Dahlia Blank! Who’s her husband? Has he got a name?’ she protests: ‘She was very hurried, father. I have a letter from her, and I have only “Dahlia” written at the end—no other name.’ ‘And you suspect no harm of your sister?’ ‘Father, how can I imagine any harm?’ And then the man in his wretched perplexity appeals to Robert, to whom he had hoped to marry Dahlia: ‘I’m shut in a dark room with the candle blown out. I’ve a sort of fear you have in that dilemma, lest you should lay your finger on edges of sharp knives; and if I think a step, if I go thinking a step, and feel my way, I do cut myself, and I bleed, I do. Robert, does this look like the letter of a married woman? I can’t think for myself. She ties my hands.’ To please Rhoda Robert would have lied, and said it did. ‘Her face was like an eager flower straining for life,’ but all he could reply was, ‘She says she’s married, and we’re bound to accept what she says.’ His answer is remembered wrathfully by Rhoda.
Hearing that Edward is married to Dahlia, Mrs. Lovell exclaims, ‘Impossible! Edward has more heart than brains.’ She resolves not to forsake him in his folly, which means disaster for Dahlia, and ultimately for him. A letter from Dahlia in London brings up Rhoda to her, accompanied by this uncompromising father. Lugubrious portent, Dahlia is not visible to them when they call at her lodgings. Her letter shows that she saw them from the window. The next chapter unfolds the mystery. Dahlia is weeping and miserable, Edward uncomfortable and protesting. Like young men who embark lightly upon such perilous waters, he is irritated by the discovery that women are ‘pieces of machinery that, for want of proper oiling, creak, stick, threaten convulsions, and are tragic and stir us the wrong way.’ By way of medicine he suggests champagne and the theatre. To the same theatre Algernon and Dahlia’s family have gone, and we may imagine the sensation of their recognition of Dahlia in a box where Algernon has joined his cousin to help the fainting girl. Algernon only is seen, and is believed to be Dahlia’s seducer. There is sorrow and the face of stricken and humbled pride in the Kentish farm upon their return. The farmer’s sole aim now is to marry his remaining daughter respectably and forget the sinner. The scene between Rhoda and Robert, in which she still implores him to say that he thinks Dahlia innocent, is unforgettable—sharp, strong, and conflicting. He is sorry for Dahlia, and ready to marry the woman he loves if she will have him. Rhoda heard him not, ‘her brain was beating at the mystery and misery wherein Dahlia lay engulphed.’ She will not marry a man who fancies he has anything to pardon, and when he lamely protests that Dahlia has nothing to do with her, she bursts out: ‘We are one, and will be till we die. I feel my sister’s hand in mine, though she’s away and lost. She’s my darling forever and ever. We’re one.’
Pushed by admiration and love, Robert unmasks himself. Some of his phrases have a Shakesperean ring. He half conquers the fierce, proud girl by a promise to help Dahlia. He shows himself still stronger in his interview with Squire Blancove, when the farmer calls to accuse Algernon and beg to have his daughter found; and still more startlingly when he returns to his birth-place, and dodges the young men, flinging written and public insolences at them. Edward, returned to his natural element, shows a mixture of cynicism and lingering conscience that he only loses in the fiery ordeal awaiting him, when to his and our surprise he finds himself in possession of a passionately-stirred heart. In Robert’s native village, where Edward is staying, we meet one slimy wretch called Sedgett, who is destined to be the hero of a horrid conspiracy against Dahlia. Everyone seems to be more or less mixed up in it—Robert, Rhoda, and Farmer Fleming with a sense of duty, Algernon in idle villainy, Mrs. Lovett through intrigue, and Edward as a door of escape from his own responsibilities. Was ever one poor unhappy girl so beset by friends and foes and cruel circumstances to drive her to madness? On the part of her family, strength and stern tenderness resolve for her greater misery; on that of Edward, vanity and cowardice. Abandoned, she falls ill, goes to a hospital, and comes out a broken flower, permanently bent by the storm. What refuge in the eyes of those who unkindly desire her good is there for her but marriage—with any man whose name she may bear? As for Edward, in his profound remorse and repentance, all Kentish faces are turned ruthlessly against him, against his offer of atonement, and poor Dahlia’s cry for his tenderness. Rhoda is his fiercest and most pitiless enemy. Dahlia’s letters to him have been suppressed by Algernon, who himself has pleasurable visions of marriage with the victim’s sister, and the wild ramping life of the colonies. The general decision is that Dahlia shall marry the loathsome yokel Sedgett, without any thought of the barbarous sacrifice, worse than death for her. And the ruffian is to get a thousand pounds for taking this tarnished jewel—such is the morality of the majority. Pass a woman straight from illegal arms into those of a husband, and you wash her white. The legal repetition transforms the position into virtue.
Edward himself, though desirous of the conclusion, is wounded and astonished by it. Dahlia’s silence startles him, and he continually asks for her letters. He cannot help thinking of her while seeking the distractions of Paris to forget her. Never for one moment does he alienate our sympathies completely, and we understand from the beginning that he is neither a vulgar sinner nor cynic. Indeed, it is with a sense of personal satisfaction that we greet his return to England, resolved upon a courageous and manly atonement—a changed man, unable to get the thought of his unfortunate victim out of his head. In that fine interview with his father we are proud that he has surpassed our predictions of him, and we wish he would be left to warm the poor heart he has chilled to stone.
But Rhoda is there to shield her sister from what she regards as perfidious tenderness. Nothing will induce her to believe in the sincerity of Edward’s repentance, nor accept his atonement. The unhappy girl, between all these ill-advised friends and protectors, is forced to an abhorred ceremony, where at the church door she is submitted to the indignity of being flung off by the ruffian who has married her for money. Is this human retribution? for it is worse even than God’s! When later Sedgett comes down to Kent to claim his scorned wife, Dahlia, to escape him, drinks poison, and when Edward comes, showing upon his pallid face the touch of wasting grief for all the wringing sorrows brought about by his own temporary baseness, and Rhoda, melted to him, calls her sister down to happiness, Dahlia is found by the side of the bed, ‘inanimate and pale as a sister of death.’ She is brought back to life, but not to happiness. Wasted and weak, passion in her was extinguished, and neither the touch of her lover’s hand nor his voice could ever again thrill her. Robert and Rhoda marry, but neither Edward nor Dahlia marry. Her heart was among the ashes, and her last words to Robert are, ‘Help poor girls!’
CHAPTER IV.
‘EVAN HARRINGTON,’ ‘THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND,’ ‘SANDRA BELLONI,’ AND ‘BEAUCHAMP’S CAREER.’
The atmosphere of ‘Evan Harrington’ is neither that of sombre passion nor poignant pain. It has none of the lyrical outbursts that thrill us in ‘Richard Feverel,’ and we are spared in it any violent shaking of the soul. We are allowed to view life more temperately, and follow the fortunes of the characters with an undisturbed exercise of philosophic calm and judgment. A delicious humour colours it throughout, and we are back upon the old sea of metaphors that the writer had nearly drifted from in the simple, undecorated strength of ‘Rhoda Fleming.’ We are tossed about upon its topmost sprays, that sometimes drench us and leave us in wonder whether the author will suddenly get serious and, to use one of his own figures, announce that the curtain has fallen upon this particular part of his performance, and expect us to cry, ‘What an exciting game it has been!’ Could anything be more boisterous than the description of the great Mel, the tailor of Lymport? There is a Homeric exaggeration about him that fascinates while it bewilders. Was ever such a man drawn since the days of mythological heroes? Great ladies loved him; he dressed himself up as a footman, and thought nothing of setting a house on fire for the privilege of carrying in his arms a titled beauty. He was the guest and boon fellow of lords, and he measured them; he was a tailor, and he kept horses; he had gallant adventures, was preposterously handsome and big and glorious; he shook hands with his customers, and was never known to have sent in a bill. The writer remarks: ‘Such a personage comes but once in a generation, and when he goes, men miss the man as well as their money.’
We do not make the acquaintance of the great Mel, but his spirit haunts the scenes of his turbulent career, and we learn of him through fabulous reports and a family of handsome and distinguished daughters, and one son, Evan. All inherit their father’s physical and natural superiority. They pass, as to the manner born, into the upper sphere, and comport themselves in that select circle with dignity and ease. Behind them in the town of Lymport the tailor’s shop, with the name of Harrington upon the door, exists, carried on by the great man’s widow as a means of liquidating his debts. It is the successes and disturbances, the intrigues and exposure of this superior family—born for greatness but not to it—that the book records; and never was genius more untiringly and extravagantly used than in the combined efforts of these three lovely ladies and their brother to conceal the family origin and pass for people of blood. The partial success that crowns their efforts is but an inadequate return for such an expenditure of brain in well-conceived and audacious contrivances. People born with a soul above buttons cannot be blamed for every laudable effort to find their way into their natural element! Imagine a single rose-bush bearing flowers of exceptional beauty in a cabbage-garden, and you will have the incongruous effect of the tailor’s daughter, the Countess de Saldar, in a middle-class drawing-room. Grand manners and aristocratic habits were hers, not by right of breeding or blood, but simply by right of nature. So we sympathize with her in all her graceful and unapproachable intriguing to maintain herself in a society to which she had won entrance by her own unaided genius.
Contrast the genial spirit in which the writer records the adventures and difficulties of this splendid charlatan with the spirit in which Thackeray has painted us his wonderful Becky Sharpe—the broad, half-smiling approval of the more modern satirist, with the ferocity of hate of his great predecessor. Not only does Mr. Meredith admire the woman’s genius for intrigue, but he brings sympathy and affection to the task of making her intelligible to us. So far from seeking to make her odious to us, as Thackeray deliberately does in the portrayal of Rebecca, he leaves it impossible for us to judge her more harshly than he himself does. Wherever she is, we know that we cannot be dull, and we are amused and captivated enough to be willing to dispense with the chill atmosphere of perfect morality and candour. He does not pursue her with a relentless exposure of her inmost vices. He preaches no moral after the fashion of the English novelist, and he takes his intriguing heroine as he finds her—an excellent study in which he delights. She is no vulgar hypocrite, like Becky, under the mask of a fine lady. Born in the sphere to which she feels she justly belongs, she would simply have been a great lady with uncommon diplomatic abilities and with a genius in the shading and splitting of social niceties. Forced to play the part of adventuress, she plays it grandly, and never shabbily. All her marvellous capacities are directed to the concealment of the family shame and to the maintaining of her sisters and brother in the eminence to which they have risen. She is a generous schemer, for her family are included in her enormous ambition. It is not for herself individually, but for the family of the Harringtons, for their united glory and stable position that she so unweariedly plots and intrigues and lies. The three daughters of the great tailor have respectively married a major, a wealthy brewer, and a Portuguese count. Caroline, the beauty, is unhappy as the major’s wife, and finally reaches the climax in exaltation by making the conquest of a duke. Evan now becomes the hope of the family, and it is on his fortunes, his efforts to appear a gentleman, seconded by his sister’s (the countess’s) efforts to penetrate into English aristocratic society, and secure an heiress for her brother, that the story runs.