TO a man," says an engaging cynic in Mr. Stephen McKenna's "Sonia," "sex is an incident: to a woman it is everything in this world and in the next"; a generalization which a novelist can always illustrate with a heroine who meets his views. We have had many such women in recent fiction, and it takes some discernment to perceive that in them sex seems everything, only because honour and integrity and fair-mindedness are nothing. They are not swept by emotions good or bad; but when all concern for other people's rights and privileges is eliminated, a great deal of room is left for the uneasy development of appetites which may be called by any name we like.
Among the Georgian and early-Victorian novelists, Richardson alone stands as an earnest and pitiless expositor of sex. He slipped as far away from it as he could in "Sir Charles Grandison," but in doing so he slipped away from reality. The grossness of Fielding's men is not intrinsic; it is, as Mr. McKenna would say, incidental. Jane Austen, who never wrote of things with which she was unfamiliar, gave the passions a wide berth. Scott was too robustly masculine, and Dickens too hopelessly and helplessly humorous, to deal with them intelligently. Thackeray dipped deep into the strong tide of life, and was concerned with all its eddying currents. Woman was to him what she was not to Scott, "une grande réalité comme la guerre"; and, like war, she had her complications. He found these complications to be for the most part distasteful; but he never assumed that a single key could open all the chambers of her soul.
When Mrs. Ritchie said of Jane Austen's heroines that they have "a certain gentle self-respect, and humour, and hardness of heart," she must have had Emma in her mind. Humour hardens the heart, at least to the point of sanity; and Emma surveys her little world of Highbury very much as Miss Austen surveyed her little world of Steventon and Chawton, with a less piercing intelligence, but with the same appreciation of foibles, and the same unqualified acceptance of tedium. To a modern reader, the most striking thing about the life depicted in all these novels is its dullness. The men have occupations of some sort, the women have none. They live in the country, or in country towns. Of outdoor sports they know nothing. They walk when the lanes are not too muddy, and some of them ride. They play round games in the evening, and always for a stake. A dinner or a dance is an event in their lives; and as for acting, we know what magnificent proportions it assumes when we are told that even to Henry Crawford, "in all the riot of his gratifications, it was as yet an untasted pleasure."
Emma, during the thirteen months in which we enjoy her acquaintance, finds plenty of mischief for her idle hands to do. Her unwarranted interference in the love affairs of two people whom it is her plain business to let alone is the fruit of ennui. Young, rich, nimble of wit and sound of heart, she lives through days and nights of inconceivable stupidity. She does not ride, and we have Mr. Knightley's word for it that she does not read. She can sketch, but one drawing in thirteen months is the sum of her accomplishment. She may possibly have a regard for the "moral scenery" which Hannah More condescended to admire; but nature is neither law nor impulse to her soul. She knows little or nothing of the country about her own home. It takes the enterprising Mrs. Elton to get her as far as Box Hill, a drive of seven miles, though the view it commands is so fine as to provoke "a burst of admiration" from beholders who have apparently never taken the trouble to look at it before. "We are a very quiet set of people," observes Emma in complacent defence of this apathy, "more disposed to stay at home than engage in schemes of pleasure."
Dr. Johnson's definition of a novel as "a smooth tale, generally of love," fits Miss Austen well. It is not that she assigns to love a heavy rôle; but there is nothing to interfere with its command of the situation. Vague yearnings, tempestuous doubts, combative principles, play no part in her well-ordered world. The poor and the oppressed are discreetly excluded from its precincts. Emma does not teach the orphan boy to read, or the orphan girl to sew. She looks after her father's comfort, and plays backgammon with him in the evenings. Of politics she knows nothing, and the most complicated social problem she is called on to face is the recognition, or the rejection, of her less fashionable neighbours. Are, or are not, the Coles sufficiently genteel to warrant her dining with them? Highbury is her universe, and no restless discontent haunts her with waking dreams of the Tiber and the Nile. Frank Churchill may go to London, sixteen miles off, to get his hair cut; but Emma remains at Hartfield, and holds the centre of the stage. We can count the days, we can almost count the hours in her monotonous life. She is unemotional, even for her setting; and it was after reading her placid history that Charlotte Brontë wrote the memorable depreciation of all Miss Austen's novels.
But, though beset and environed by dullness, Emma is not dull. On the contrary, she is remarkably engaging; less vivacious than Elizabeth Bennet, but infinitely more agreeable. She puts us into a good humour with ourselves, she "produces delight." The secret of her potency is that she has grasped the essential things of life, and let the non-essentials go. There is distinction in the way she accepts near duties, in her sense of balance, and order, and propriety. She is a normal creature, highly civilized, and sanely artificial. Mr. Saintsbury says that Miss Austen knew two things: humanity and art. "Her men, though limited, are true, and her women are, in the old sense, absolute." Emma is "absolute." The possibility—or impossibility—of being Mr. Knightley's intellectual competitor never occurs to her. She covets no empty honours. She is content to be necessary and unassailable.
Mr. Chesterton has written a whimsical and fault-finding paper entitled "The Evolution of Emma," in which he assumes that this embodiment of domesticity is the prototype of the modern welfare worker who runs birth-control meetings and baby weeks, urges maternity bills upon legislators, prates about segregation, and preaches eugenics and sex hygiene to a world that knows a great deal more about such matters than she does. Emma, says Mr. Chesterton, considers that because she is more genteel than Harriet Smith she is privileged to alienate this humble friend from Robert Martin who wants to marry her, and fling her at the head of Mr. Elton who doesn't. Precisely the same spirit—so he asserts—induces the welfare worker to conceive that her greater gentility (she sometimes calls it intelligence) warrants her gross intrusion into the lives of people who are her social inferiors. It is because they are her social inferiors that she dares to do it. The goodness of her intentions carries no weight. Emma's intentions are of the best, so far as she can separate them from her subconscious love of meddling.
This ingenious comparison is very painful to Emma's friends in the world of English readers. It cannot be that she is the ancestress of a type so vitally opposed to all that she holds correct and becoming. I do not share Mr. Chesterton's violent hostility to reformers, even when they have no standard of taste. There are questions too big and pertinacious for taste to control. I only think it hard that, feeling as he does, he should compare Emma's youthful indiscretions with more radical and disquieting activities. Emma is indiscreet, but she is only twenty-one. At twenty-two she is safely married to Mr. Knightley, and her period of indiscretion is over. At twenty-two she has fulfilled her destiny, has stepped into line, and, as the centre of the social unit, is harmoniously adjusted, not to Highbury alone, but to civilization and the long traditions of the ages. That she should regard her lover, even in her first glowing moments of happiness, as an agreeable companion, and as an assistant in the care of her father, is characteristic. "Self-respect, humour and hardness of heart" are out of hand with romance. So much the better for Mr. Knightley, who will never find his emotions drained, his wisdom questioned, his authority denied, and who will come in time to believe that he, and not his wife, is "absolute."
That we their names and courses know;
And he that on their changes looks
Would think them govern'd by our books."
Miss Austen's views on marriage are familiar to her readers, and need no comment. They must have been drawn from a careful survey of the society which surrounded her, a society composed for the most part of insensitive, unrebellious men and women who had the habit of making the best of things. At times the cynicism is a trifle too pronounced, as when Eleanor Dashwood asks herself why Mr. Palmer is so ill-mannered:
"His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman. But she knew that this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it."
At times simplicity and sincerity transcend the limits of likelihood, as when Elizabeth Watson says to her young sister:
"I should not like marrying a disagreeable man any more than yourself; but I do not think there are many very disagreeable men. I think I could like any good-humoured man with a comfortable income."
At times a delicacy of touch lends distinction to the frankest worldliness, as when Mary Crawford generously applauds her brother Henry's determination to marry Fanny Price:
"I know that a wife you loved would be the happiest of women; and that even when you ceased to love, she would yet find in you the liberality and good breeding of a gentleman."
There is a lamentable lack of sentiment in even this last and happiest exposition of married life; but it expresses the whole duty of husbands, and the whole welfare of wives, as understood in the year 1814.
If Jane Austen and Thackeray wrought their heroines with perfect and painstaking accuracy, Scott's attitude was for the most part one of reprehensible indifference. His world was run by men, and the ringleted sylphs of seventeen (the word "flapper" had not then cast discredit on this popular age) play very simple parts. Ruskin, it may be remembered, ardently admired these young ladies, and held them up as models of "grace, tenderness and intellectual power" to all his female readers. It never occurred to the great moralist, any more than to the great story-teller, that a girl is something more than a set of assorted virtues. "To Scott, as to most men of his age," observes an acute English critic, "woman was not an individual, but an institution—a toast that was drunk some time after Church and King."
Diana Vernon exists to be toasted. She has the
And Mrs. Crewe"
quality associated in our minds with clinking glasses, and loud-spoken loyalty to Stuart or to Hanoverian. She has always caught the fancy of men, and has been likened in her day to Shakespeare's Beatrice, Rosalind and Portia, ladies of wit and distinction, who aspire to play adventurous rôles in the mad medley of life. She is as well fitted to provoke general admiration as Julia Mannering is to awaken personal regard. She is one of the five heroines of English fiction with whom Mr. Saintsbury avows no man of taste and spirit can fail to fall in love. He does not aspire, even in fancy, to marry her. His choice of a wife is Elizabeth Bennet. But for "occasional companionship" he gives Diana the prize.
Occasional companionship is all that we get of her in "Rob Roy." She enlivens the opening chapters very prettily, but is eliminated from the best and most vigorous episodes. My own impression is that Scott forgot all about Miss Vernon while he was happily engaged with MacGregor, and the Bailie, and Andrew Fairservice; and that whenever he remembered her, he produced her on the stage as mysteriously and as irrelevantly as a conjurer lifts white rabbits out of his hat. Wrapped in a horseman's cloak, she comes riding under a frosty moon, gives Frank Osbaldistone a packet of valuable papers, bids him one of half-a-dozen solemn and final farewells, and disappears until the next trick is called. It was a good arrangement for Scott, who liked to have the decks cleared for action; but it makes Diana unduly fantastic and unreal.
So, too, does the weight of learning with which Rashleigh Osbaldistone has loaded her. Greek and Latin, history, science and philosophy, "as well as most of the languages of modern Europe," seem a large order for a girl of eighteen. Diana can also saddle and bridle a horse, clear a five-barred gate, and fire a gun without winking. Yet she has a "tiny foot"—so at least Scott says—and she rides to hounds with her hair bound only by the traditional ribbon, so that her long tresses "stream on the breeze." The absurd and complicated plot in which she is involved is never disentangled. Dedicated in infancy to the cloister, which was at least unusual, she has been released by Rome from vows she has never taken, only on condition that she marries a cousin who is within the forbidden degree of kindred. Her numerous allusions to this circumstance—"The fatal veil was wrapped round me in my cradle," "I am by solemn contract the bride of Heaven, betrothed to the convent from the cradle"—distress and mystify poor Frank, who is not clever at best, and who accepts all her verdicts as irrevocable. Every time she bids him farewell, he believes it to be the end; and he loses the last flicker of hope when she sends him a ring by—of all people under Heaven—Helen MacGregor, who delivers it with these cheerful words: "Young man, this comes from one whom you will never see more. If it is a joyless token, it is well fitted to pass through the hands of one to whom joy can never be known. Her last words were 'Let him forget me forever.'"
After which the astute reader is prepared to hear that Frank and Diana were soon happily married, without any consideration for cradle or for cloister, and without the smallest intervention from Rome.
Miss Vernon is one of Scott's characters for whom an original has been found. This in itself is a proof of vitality. Nobody would dream of finding the original of Lucy Bertram, or Isabella Wardour, or Edith Bellenden. As a matter of fact, the same prototype would do for all three, and half-a-dozen more. But Captain Basil Hall expended much time and ingenuity in showing that Scott drew Diana after the likeness of Miss Jane Anne Cranstoun, a young lady of Edinburgh who married an Austrian nobleman, and left Scotland before the first of the Waverley Novels was written.
Miss Cranstoun was older than Scott, well born, well looking, a fearless horse-woman, a frank talker, a warm friend, and had some reputation as a wit. It was through her that the young man made his first acquaintance with Bürger's ballad, "Lenore," which so powerfully affected his imagination that he sat up all night, translating it into English verse. When it was finished, he repaired to Miss Cranstoun's house to show her the fruits of his labour. It was then half-past six, an hour which to that vigorous generation seemed seasonable for a morning call. Clarissa Harlowe grants Lovelace his interviews at five.
Miss Cranstoun listened to the ballad with more attention than Diana vouchsafed to her lover's translation from Ariosto (it was certainly better worth hearing), gave Scott his meed of praise and encouragement, and remained his friend, confidant and critic until her marriage separated them forever. There are certain points of resemblance between this clever woman and the high-spirited girl whom Justice Inglewood calls the "heath-bell of Cheviot," and MacGregor "a daft hempsie but a mettle quean." It may be that Diana owes her vitality to Scott's faithful remembrance of Miss Cranstoun, just as Jeanie Deans owes her rare and perfect naturalness to his clear conception of her noble prototype, Helen Walker. "A novel is history without documents, nothing to prove it," said Mr. John Richard Green; but unproved verities, as unassailable as unheard melodies, have a knack of surviving the rack and ruin of time.
When Thackeray courageously gave to the world "a novel without a hero," he atoned for his oversight by enriching it with two heroines, so carefully portrayed, so admirably contrasted, that each strengthens and perfects the other. Just as Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart are etched together on the pages of history with a vivid intensity which singly they might have missed, so Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp (place à la vertu) are etched together on the pages of fiction with a distinctness derived in part from the force of comparison. And just as readers of history have been divided for more than three hundred years into adherents of the rival queens, so readers of novels have been divided for more than seventy years into admirers of the rival heroines. "I have been Emmy's faithful knight since I was ten years old, and read 'Vanity Fair' somewhat stealthily," confessed Andrew Lang; and by way of proving his allegiance, he laid at his lady's feet the stupidest repudiation of Rebecca ever voiced by a man of letters. To class her with Barnes Newcome and Mrs. Macknezie is an unpardonable affront. A man may be a perfect Sir Galahad without surrendering all sense of values and proportion.
When "Vanity Fair" was published, the popular verdict was against Becky. She so disedified the devout that reviewers, with the awful image of the British Matron before their eyes, dealt with her in a spirit of serious condemnation. It will be remembered that Taine, caring much for art and little for matrons, protested keenly against Thackeray's treatment of his own heroine, against the snubs and sneers and censures with which the English novelist thought fit to convince his English readers that he did not sympathize with misconduct. These readers hastened in turn to explain that Becky was rightfully "odious" in her author's eyes, and that she was "created to be exposed," which sounds a little like the stern creed which held that men were created to be damned. Trollope, oppressed by her dissimilarity to Grace Crawley and to Lily Dale, openly mourned her shortcomings; and a writer in "Frazier's Magazine" assured the rank and file of the respectable that in real life they would shrink from her as from an infection. One voice only, that of an unknown critic in a little-read review, was raised in her defence. This brave man admitted without flinching her many sins, but added that he loved her.
The more lenient standards of our day have lifted Rebecca's reputation into the realm of disputable things. So distinguished a moralist as Mr. William Dean Howells praised her tepidly; being disposed in her favour by a distaste, not for Amelia, but for Beatrix Esmond, whom he pronounced a "doll" and an "eighteenth-century marionette," and compared with whom he found Becky refreshingly real. As for Thackeray's harshness, Mr. Howells condoned it on the score of incomprehension. "His morality is the old conventional morality which we are now a little ashamed of; but in his time and place he could scarcely have had any other. After all, he was a simple soul, and strictly of his period."
This is an interesting point of view. To most of us "Vanity Fair" seems about as simple as "Ecclesiastes," the author of which was also "strictly of his period." Sir Sidney Low, the most trenchant critic whom the fates have raised to champion the incomparable Becky, is by way of thinking that in so far as Thackeray was a moralist, he was unfair to her; but that in so far as he was a much greater artist than a moralist, she emerges triumphant from his hands. "She is the first embodiment in English fiction of the woman whose emotions are dominated by her intellect. She is a fighter against fate, and she wages war with unfailing energy, passing lightly, as great warriors do, over the bodies of the killed and wounded."
She does more. She snatches a partial victory out of the jaws of a crushing defeat. The stanchest fighter expects some backing from fate, some good cards to lay on the table. But Becky's fortunes are in Thackeray's hands, and he rules against her at every turn. Life and death are her inexorable opponents. Miss Crawley recovers (which she has no business to do) from a surfeit of lobster, when by dying she would have enriched Rawdon, already in love with Rebecca. Lady Crawley lives just long enough to spoil Becky's chance of marrying Sir Pitt. It is all very hard and very wrong. The little governess had richly earned Miss Crawley's money by her patient care of that ungrateful invalid. She would have been kind and good-tempered to Sir Pitt, whereas his virtuous son and daughter-in-law (the lady Jane whom Thackeray never ceases to praise) leave the poor old paralytic to the care of a coarse, untrained and cruel servant. Becky is not the only sufferer by the bad luck which makes her from start to finish, "a fighter against fate."
Sir Sidney is by no means content with the somewhat murky twilight in which we take leave of this great little adventuress, with the atmosphere of charity lists, bazaars and works of piety which depressingly surrounds her. He is sure she made a most charming and witty old lady, and that she eventually won over Colonel Dobbin (in spite of Amelia's misgivings) by judicious praise of the "History of the Punjaub." And I am equally sure that she never suffered herself to lose so valuable an asset as young Rawdon. Becky's indifference to her son is the strongest card that Thackeray plays. By throwing into high relief the father's proud affection for the boy (who is an uncommonly nice little lad), he deepens and darkens the mother's unconcern. Becky is impervious to the charm of childhood, and she is not affectionate. Once in a while she is moved by a generous impulse; but the crowded cares and sordid scheming of her life leave no room for sensibility.
Nevertheless, if the Reverend Bute Crawley and his household look upon little Rawdon with deep respect as the possible heir of Queen's Crawley, "between whom and the title there was only the sickly pale child, Pitt Binkie," it is unlikely that Rebecca the farseeing would ignore the potential greatness of her son. She cannot afford to lose any chance, or any combination of chances, in the hazardous game she plays. There is nothing like the spectacle of this game in English letters. To watch Becky manipulate her brother-in-law, Sir Pitt, is a never-ending delight. He is dull, pompous, vain, ungenerous. He has inherited the fortune which should have been her husband's. Yet there is no hatred in her heart, nor any serious malice. Hatred, like love, is an emotional extravagance, and Becky's accounts are very strictly kept.
Therefore, when she persuades the Baronet to spend a week in the little house on Curzon Street, even Thackeray admits that she is sincerely happy to have him there. She comes bustling and blushing into his room with a scuttle of coals; she cooks excellent dishes for his dinner; she gives him Lord Steyne's White Hermitage to warm his frozen blood, telling him it is a cheap wine which Rawdon has picked up in France; she sits by his side in the firelight, stitching a shirt for her little son; she plays every detail of her part with the careful and conscientious art of a Dutch painter composing a domestic scene; and she asks no unreasonable return for her labours. Rawdon, who does nothing, is disgusted because his brother gives them no money; but Rebecca, who does everything, is content with credit. Sir Pitt, as the head of the family, is the corner-stone upon which she rears the fabric of her social life.
The exact degree of Becky's innocence and guilt is a matter of slight importance. There is no goodness in her to be spoiled or saved. To try to soften our judgment by pleading one or two acts of contemptuous kindness is absurd. Her qualities are great qualities: valour, and wit, and audacity, and patience, and an ungrumbling acceptance of fate. No one recognizes these qualities except Lord Steyne, who has a greatness of his own. It will be remembered that on one occasion he gives Rebecca eleven hundred pounds to discharge her indebtedness to Miss Briggs; and subsequently discovers that the amount due the "sheep-dog" is six hundred pounds, and that Rebecca has been far too thrifty to pay any of it out of the sum bestowed on her for that purpose. He is not angry at being outwitted, as a small and stupid man would have been. He is charmed.
"His lordship's admiration for Becky rose immeasurably at this proof of her cleverness. Getting the money was nothing—but getting double the sum she wanted, and paying nobody—it was a magnificent stroke. 'What an accomplished little devil it is!' he thought. 'She beats all the women I have ever seen in the course of my well-spent life. They are babies compared to her. I am a green-horn myself, and a fool in her hands—an old fool. She is unsurpassable in lies.'"
With which testimony, candid, fervent, and generous withal, Becky's case can be considered closed. Discredited, humiliated, and punished in the irrepressible interests of morality, she is left stranded amid life's minor respectabilities which must have irked her sorely; but which Thackeray plainly considered to be far beyond her merits. I hope it comforts her in that shadowy land where dwell the immortals of fiction to know that her shameless little figure, flitting dauntlessly from venture to venture, from hazard to hazard, has never been without appreciative observers. I had almost said appreciative and pitying observers; but Becky's is the last ghost in Christendom whom I should dare to affront with pity.