Some time afterwards the narrator, in passing through Cordova, learns that Navarro has been condemned to death, and upon a visit to the prison the day before his execution, the bandit tells him the strange story of his liaison with this wild and cruel, yet fascinating girl.
At the great cigar factory at Seville she has a bloody altercation with one of her fellow operatives. Navarro, a rough, green soldier stationed in that city, is ordered to conduct her to prison. She talks to him in his own Basque tongue, pretending to be his fellow countryman, and pleads with him to release her. Inflamed with a sudden passion, he suffers her to escape, and is himself degraded and imprisoned. She secretly sends to him in his cell the means of securing his freedom, and after his release she gives him the liveliest proofs of her gratitude and affection. But she is capricious and fickle to the last degree. Urged by jealousy, Navarro kills an officer and is compelled to desert the army, and at her instigation he takes up the life, first of a smuggler, and then of a bandit. She is the controlling spirit of a little band of outlaws, whose diabolical crimes are described in a manner so natural that they cease to appear extraordinary. Navarro slays the husband of Carmen, a one-eyed miscreant, and takes his place as her lawful lord. But she soon falls in love with a picador, and although this passion is as ephemeral as the rest, Navarro is seized with fury. He strives to persuade her to go with him to some distant region where they can begin life anew. He will forgive the past; he asks only her companionship and love. But she spurns him; he may kill her if he likes, but she will not live with him. She scorns even to flee or to defend herself. At his command she rides with him to a lonely place, where he stabs her, while her eyes flash defiance. He buries her in the wood and delivers himself to justice.
In spite of her crimes and infidelities, there is a touch of heroism and magnanimity in this wild creature which commands our admiration, and explains the passion she awakens in the heart of Navarro.
“Carmen” is a short story, meagre both in incidents and characters, but its few touches are those of the master. It is a work of consummate art.
DAVID COPPERFIELD
CHARLES DICKENS
“David Copperfield” and “Henry Esmond” are perhaps the best illustrations extant of the advantages of the autobiographical method in fiction, which, whatever may be its drawbacks, is better fitted than any other to subjective description. It is said that the true function of the painter is to reproduce things on the canvas, not as they are, but as they appear to the person observing them. In like manner it is often the function of the novelist’s art to describe the world, not as it is, but as it appears to some particular person; and there is no better way to do this than by an autobiography. The artistic truth of the picture will appear, when the reader says to himself, “How often that thing looked just so to me!” Of course the estimate of the truth of this sort of a picture will vary with the personal temperament of the reader, but I think most young readers will find an instant bond of sympathy between David Copperfield and themselves.
At the time I first read it, as a college student, I think no work of fiction had ever attracted me so greatly. There seemed to be much in it which corresponded with my own feelings and experiences, and I still think that those parts of the book that deal with childhood, youth, and early manhood are very true to nature. David’s description of the home at Blunderstone where he was born, of the church, of the fowls in the yard and the fears that they occasioned, of his joy in the house that was made out of a boat on the sand, of his resentment at the tyranny of his stepfather, of his school-boy fancies, of his hero-worship of the brilliant Steerforth,—in short, his general way of looking at the world is so exactly like that of the ordinary healthy boy under similar circumstances that these parts of the book are, in the highest and best sense of the word, very realistic.
But as a whole the work has no such convincing power over me to-day as it had when I first read it. Some of the characters, indeed, like little Miss Mowcher, Barkis, and Mr. Creakle, seem more like puppets and less like real persons than they did. Many of them seem to carry about with them a sort of trade-mark, to certify to their genuineness,—Heep’s “humility,” for instance, Murdstone’s “firmness,” or Littimer’s “respectability”; or perhaps the test of identity is a formula, like “thinking of the old ’un” of Mrs. Gummidge, or “waiting for something to turn up” of Micawber. In many cases the picture is a caricature rather than a real portrait, and yet it has the advantage of the caricature, that it sets forth in bold relief the leading feature and fixes itself forever in the memory.
There is little to say about the story, for it is known to all. Practically three or four stories are woven into one. There is the story of David himself, a boy who, after a comfortable childhood with his young widowed mother and her old house servant Peggotty, falls under the tyranny of a stepfather and his sister, and is sent to be beaten and abused at Creakle’s school, and when his mother dies is put out to a miserable and hopeless existence at the dismal counting-house of Murdstone and Grinby. He runs away, and in absolute destitution betakes himself to the home of Betsey Trotwood, an aunt whom he has never seen, but with whom he finds a refuge. Then follows the description (one of the best chapters in the book) of his school days at Canterbury; his devotion to Miss Shepherd; his romantic adoration of Miss Larkins, who marries an elderly hopgrower; his disastrous fight with a butcher. He is then articled to Mr. Spenlow, of Doctor’s Commons, to become a proctor, and falls in love with Dora, Spenlow’s daughter, an affectionate, foolish little creature, whom he marries. He wins a reputation as an author, and after the death of his “child-wife,” and a period of travel, finally weds Agnes Wickfield, who has always loved him, and who, ever since his school days at Canterbury, has been the guardian spirit of his life.
Intertwined with this story is that of the family of Mr. Peggotty, the brother of David’s old nurse, who lives in the boat on the sand at Yarmouth, with his nephew Ham, and Em’ly, his adopted child, a beautiful creature, who is betrayed by David’s friend Steerforth, with whom she elopes on the eve of her marriage to Ham, and who afterwards abandons her. An affecting picture is given of the honest Mr. Peggotty seeking his poor child through the world; of her final return, and of the great storm and shipwreck, in which Steerforth goes down, and Ham loses his life in a vain attempt at rescue.