My lords and ladies, men and women, the Ten Commandments, by the side of these sighs of gentleness, are the Police Court and the Criminal Code, which are intended to pay cruelty off in punishment. These Four are the tears with which sympathy soothes the wounds of suffering. Blessed interpolator of St. John!
There are three marvelous novels in the Bible—not Novels in the sense of fiction, but in the sense of vivid, living narratives of human emotions and of events. A million Novels rest on those nine verses in John, and the nine verses are better than the million books. The story of David and Uriah's wife is in a similar catalogue as regards quality and usefulness; the story of Esther is a pearl of great beauty.
But to return to heroines, let us make a volte face. There is an old story of the lady who wrote rather irritably to Thackeray, asking, curtly, why all the good women he created were fools and the bright women all bad. “The same complaint,” he answered, “has been made, Madame, of God and Shakespeare, and as neither has given explanation I can not presume to attempt one.” It was curt and severe, and, of course, Thackeray did not write it as it would appear, even though he may have said as much jestingly to some intimate who understood the epigram; but was not the question rather impudently intrusive? Thackeray, you remember, was the “seared cynic” who created Caroline Gann, the gentle, beautiful, glorious “Little Sister,” the staunch, pure-hearted woman whose character not even the perfect scoundrelism of Dr. George Brand Firmin could tarnish or disturb. If there are heroines, surely she has her place high amid the noble group!
There are plenty of intelligent persons sacramentally wedded to mere conventions of good and bad. You could never persuade them that Rebecca Sharp—that most perfect daughter of Thackeray's mind—was a heroine. But of course she was. In that world wherein she was cast to live she was indubitably, incomparably, the very best of all the inhabitants to whom you are intimately introduced. Capt. Dobbin? Oh, no, I am not forgetting good Old Dob. Of all the social door mats that ever I wiped my feet upon Old Dob is certainly the cleanest, most patient, serviceable and unrevolutionary. But, just a door mat, with the virtues and attractions of that useful article of furniture—the sublime, immortal prig of all the ages, or you can take the head of any novel-reader under thirty for a football. You may have known many women, from Bernadettes of Massavielle to Borgias of scant neighborhoods, but you know you never knew one who would marry Old Dob, except as that emotional dishrag, Amelia, married him—as the Last Chance on the stretching high-road of uncertain years. No girl ever willingly marries door mats. She just wipes her feet on them and passes on into the drawing room looking for the Prince. It seems to me one of the triumphant proofs of Becky as a heroine that she did not marry Captain Dobbin. She might have done it any day by crooking her little finger at him—but she didn't.
Madame Becky, that smart daughter of an alcoholic gentleman artist and of his lady of the French ballet, inherited the perfect non-moral morality of the artist blood that sang mercurially through her veins. How could she, therefore, how could she, being non-moral, be immoral? It is clear nonsense. But she did possess the instinctive artist morality of unerring taste for selection in choice. Examine the facts meticulously—meticulously—and observe how carefully she selected that best in all that worst she moved among.
In the will I shall some day leave behind me there will be devised, in primogenitural trust forever, the priceless treasure of conviction that Becky was innocent of Lord Steyne. I leave it to any gentleman who has had the great opportunity to look in familiarly upon the outer and upper fringes of the world of unclassed and predatory women and the noble lords that abound thereamong. Let him read over again that famous scene where Becky writes her scorn upon Steyne's forehead in the noble blood of that aristocratic wolf. Then let him give his decision, as an honest juryman upon his oath, whether he is convinced that the most noble Marquis was raging because he was losing a woman, or from the discovery that he was one of two dupes facing each other, and that he was the fool who had paid for both and had had “no run for his money!” Marquises of Steyne do not resent sentimental losses—they can be hurt only in their sportsmanship.
You may begin with the Misses Pinkerton (in whose select school Becky absorbed the intricate hypocrisies and saturated snobbery of the highest English society) and follow her through all the little and big turmoils of her life, meeting on the way of it all the elaborated differentials of the country-gentleman and lady tribe of Crawley, the line officers and bemedalled generals of the army (except honest O'Dowd and his lady), the most noble Marquis and his shadowy and resigned Marchioness, the R—y—l P—rs—n—ge himself—even down to the tuft-hunters Punter and Loder—and if Becky is not superior to every man and woman of them in every personal trait and grace that calls for admiration—then, why, by George! do you take such an interest, such an undying interest, in her? You invariably take the greatest interest in the best character in a story—unless it's too good and gets “sweety” and “sticky” and so sours on your philosophical stomach. You can't possibly take any interest in Dobbin—you just naturally, emphatically, and in the most unreflecting way in the world, say “Oh, d—n Dobbin!” and go right ahead after somebody else. I don't say Becky was all that a perfect Sunday School teacher should have been, but in the group in which she was born to move she smells cleaner than the whole raft of them—to me.
Thackeray was, next to Shakespeare, the writer most wonderfully combined of instinct and reason that English literature of grace has produced. He has been compared with the Frenchman, Balzac. Since I have no desire to provoke squabbles about favorite authors, let us merely definitely agree that such a comparison is absurd and pass on. Because you must have noticed that Balzac was often feeble in his reason and couldn't make it keep step with his instinct, while in Thackeray they both step together like the Siamese twins. It is a very striking fact, indeed, that during all Becky's intense early experiences with the great world, Thackeray does not make her guilty. All the circumstances of that world were guilty and she is placed amidst the circumstances; but that is all.