to the admission of women to various offices, colleges, functions, and
privileges, singularly little attention has been paid, by themselves at
least, to the fact that in one highly important department of human
affairs their cause is already gained--gained in such a way as to
deprive them largely of their ground, formerly so substantial, for
complaining of the intolerance of man. In America, in England, to-day,
it is no longer a question of their admission into the world of
literature: they are there in force; they have been admitted, with all
the honours, on a perfectly equal footing. In America, at least, one
feels tempted at moments to exclaim that they are in themselves the
world of literature. In Germany and in France, in this line of
production, their presence is less to be perceived. To speak only of the
latter country, France has brought forth in the persons of Madame de
Sévigné, Madame de Staël, and Madame Sand, three female writers of the
first rank, without counting a hundred ladies to whom we owe charming
memoirs and volumes of reminiscence; but in the table of contents of the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, that epitome of the literary movement (as
regards everything, at least, but the famous doctrine, in fiction, of
“naturalism”), it is rare to encounter the name of a female contributor.
The covers of American and English periodicals tell a different story;
in these monthly joints of the ladder of fame the ladies stand as thick
as on the staircase at a crowded evening party.
There are, of course, two points of view from which this free possession
of the public ear may be considered--as regards its effect upon the life
of women, and as regards its effect upon literature. I hasten to add
that I do not propose to consider either, and I touch on the general
fact simply because the writer whose name I have placed at the head of
these remarks happens to be a striking illustration of it. The work of
Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson is an excellent example of the way the
door stands open between the personal life of American women and the
immeasurable world of print, and what makes it so is the particular
quality that this work happens to possess. It breathes a spirit
singularly and essentially conservative--the sort of spirit which, but
for a special indication pointing the other way, would in advance seem
most to oppose itself to the introduction into the feminine lot of new
and complicating elements. Miss Woolson evidently thinks that lot
sufficiently complicated, with the sensibilities which even in primitive
ages women were acknowledged to possess; fenced in by the old
disabilities and prejudices, they seem to her to have been by their very
nature only too much exposed, and it would never occur to her to lend
her voice to the plea for further exposure--for a revolution which
should place her sex in the thick of the struggle for power. She sees it
in preference surrounded certainly by plenty of doors and windows (she
has not, I take it, a love of bolts and Oriental shutters), but
distinctly on the private side of that somewhat evasive and exceedingly
shifting line which divides human affairs into the profane and the
sacred. Such is the turn of mind of the author of _Rodman the Keeper_
and _East Angels_, and if it has not prevented her from writing books,
from competing for the literary laurel, this is a proof of the strength
of the current which to-day carries both sexes alike to that mode of
expression.
Miss Woolson’s first productions were two collections of short tales,
published in 1875 and 1880, and entitled respectively _Castle Nowhere_
and _Rodman the Keeper_. I may not profess an acquaintance with the
former of these volumes, but the latter is full of interesting artistic
work. Miss Woolson has done nothing better than the best pages in this
succession of careful, strenuous studies of certain aspects of life,
after the war, in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. As the fruit of a
remarkable minuteness of observation and tenderness of feeling on the
part of one who evidently did not glance and pass, but lingered and
analysed, they have a high value, especially when regarded in the light
of the _voicelessness_ of the conquered and reconstructed South. Miss
Woolson strikes the reader as having a compassionate sense of this
pathetic dumbness--having perceived that no social revolution of equal
magnitude had ever reflected itself so little in literature, remained so
unrecorded, so unpainted and unsung. She has attempted to give an
impression of this circumstance, among others, and a sympathy altogether
feminine has guided her pen. She loves the whole region, and no daughter
of the land could have handled its peculiarities more indulgently, or
communicated to us more of the sense of close observation and intimate
knowledge. Nevertheless it must be confessed that the picture, on the
whole, is a picture of dreariness--of impressions that may have been
gathered in the course of lonely afternoon walks at the end of hot days,
when the sunset was wan, on the edge of rice-fields, dismal swamps, and
other brackish inlets. The author is to be congratulated in so far as
such expeditions may have been the source of her singularly exact
familiarity with the “natural objects” of the region, including the
negro of reality. She knows every plant and flower, every vague odour
and sound, the song and flight of every bird, every tint of the sky and
murmur of the forest, and she has noted scientifically the dialect of
the freedmen. It is not too much to say that the negroes in _Rodman the
Keeper_ and in _East Angels_ are a careful philological study, and that
if Miss Woolson preceded Uncle Remus by a considerable interval, she
may have the credit of the initiative--of having been the first to take
their words straight from their lips.
No doubt that if in _East Angels_, as well as in the volume of tales,
the sadness of Miss Woolson’s South is more striking than its high
spirits, this is owing somewhat to the author’s taste in the way of
subject and situation, and especially to her predilection for cases of
heroic sacrifice--sacrifice sometimes unsuspected and always
unappreciated. She is fond of irretrievable personal failures, of people
who have had to give up even the memory of happiness, who love and
suffer in silence, and minister in secret to the happiness of those who
look over their heads. She is interested in general in secret histories,
in the “inner life” of the weak, the superfluous, the disappointed, the
bereaved, the unmarried. She believes in personal renunciation, in its
frequency as well as its beauty. It plays a prominent part in each of
her novels, especially in the last two, and the interest of _East
Angels_ at least is largely owing to her success in having made an
extreme case of the virtue in question credible to the reader. Is it
because this element is weaker in _Anne_, which was published in 1882,
that _Anne_ strikes me as the least happily composed of the author’s
works? The early chapters are charming and full of promise, but the
story wanders away from them, and the pledge is not taken up. The reader
has built great hopes upon Tita, but Tita vanishes into the vague, after
putting him out of countenance by an infant marriage--an accident in
regard to which, on the whole, throughout her stories, Miss Woolson
shows perhaps an excessive indulgence. She likes the unmarried, as I
have mentioned, but she likes marriages even better, and also sometimes
hurries them forward in advance of the reader’s exaction. The only
complaint it would occur to me to make of _East Angels_ is that Garda
Thorne, whom we cannot think of as anything but a little girl, discounts
the projects we have formed for her by marrying twice; and somehow the
case is not bettered by the fact that nothing is more natural than that
she should marry twice, unless it be that she should marry three times.
We have perceived her, after all, from the first, to be peculiarly
adapted to a succession of pretty widowhoods.
_For the Major_ has an idea, a little fantastic perhaps, but eminently
definite. This idea is the secret effort of an elderly woman to appear
really as young to her husband as (owing to peculiar circumstances) he
believed her to be when he married her. Nature helps her (she happens to
preserve, late in life, the look of comparative youth), and art helps
nature, and her husband’s illusions, fostered by failing health and a
weakened brain, help them both, so that she is able to keep on the mask
till his death, when she pulls it off with a passionate cry of
relief--ventures at last, gives herself the luxury, to be old. The
sacrifice in this case has been the sacrifice of the maternal instinct,
she having had a son, now a man grown, by a former marriage, who
reappears after unsuccessful wanderings in far lands, and whom she may
not permit herself openly to recognise. The sacrificial attitude is
indeed repeated on the part of her step-daughter, who, being at last
taken into Madam Carroll’s confidence, suffers the young man--a shabby,
compromising, inglorious acquaintance--to pass for her lover, thereby
discrediting herself almost fatally (till the situation is straightened
out), with the Rev. Frederick Owen, who has really been marked out by
Providence for the character, and who cannot explain on any comfortable
hypothesis her relations with the mysterious Bohemian. Miss Woolson’s
women in general are capable of these refinements of devotion and
exaltations of conscience, and she has a singular talent for making our
sympathies go with them. The conception of Madam Carroll is highly
ingenious and original, and the small stippled portrait has a real
fascination. It is the first time that a woman has been represented as
painting her face, dyeing her hair, and “dressing young,” out of
tenderness for another: the effort usually has its source in tenderness
for herself. But Miss Woolson has done nothing of a neater execution
than this fanciful figure of the little ringleted, white-frocked,
falsely juvenile lady, who has the toilet-table of an actress and the
conscience of a Puritan.
The author likes a glamour, and by minute touches and gentle,
conciliatory arts, she usually succeeds in producing a valid one. If I
had more space I should like to count over these cumulative strokes, in
which a delicate manipulation of the real is mingled with an
occasionally frank appeal to the romantic muse. But I can only mention
two of the most obvious: one the frequency of her reference to the
episcopal church as an institution giving a tone to American life (the
sort of tone which it is usually assumed that we must seek in
civilisations more permeated with ecclesiasticism); the other her
fondness for family histories--for the idea of perpetuation of race,
especially in the backward direction. I hasten to add that there is
nothing of the crudity of sectarianism in the former of these
manifestations, or of the dreariness of the purely genealogical passion
in the latter; but none the less is it clear that Miss Woolson likes
little country churches that are dedicated to saints not vulgarised by
too much notoriety, that are dressed with greenery (and would be with
holly if there were any), at Christmas and Easter; that have “rectors,”
well connected, who are properly garmented, and organists, slightly
deformed if possible, and addicted to playing Gregorian chants in the
twilight, who are adequately artistic; likes also generations that have
a pleasant consciousness of a few warm generations behind them,
screening them in from too bleak a past, from vulgar draughts in the
rear. I know not whether for the most part we are either so Anglican or
so long-descended as in Miss Woolson’s pages we strike ourselves as
being, but it is certain that as we read we protest but little against
the soft impeachment. She represents us at least as we should like to
be, and she does so with such discretion and taste that we have no fear
of incurring ridicule by assent. She has a high sense of the
picturesque; she cannot get on without a social atmosphere. Once, I
think, she has looked for these things in the wrong place--at the
country boarding-house denominated Caryl’s, in _Anne_, where there must
have been flies and grease in the dining-room, and the ladies must have
been overdressed; but as a general thing her quest is remarkably happy.
She stays at home, and yet gives us a sense of being “abroad”; she has a
remarkable faculty of making the new world seem ancient. She succeeds in
representing Far Edgerly, the mountain village in _For the Major_, as
bathed in the precious medium I speak of. Where is it meant to be, and
where was the place that gave her the pattern of it? We gather vaguely,
though there are no negroes, that it is in the south; but this, after
all, is a tolerably indefinite part of the United States. It is
somewhere in the midst of forests, and yet it has as many idiosyncrasies
as Mrs. Gaskell’s _Cranford_, with added possibilities of the pathetic
and the tragic. What new town is so composite? What composite town is so
new? Miss Woolson anticipates these questions; that is she prevents us
from asking them: we swallow Far Edgerly whole, or say at most, with a
sigh, that if it couldn’t have been like that it certainly ought to have
been.
It is, however, in _East Angels_ that she has been most successful in
this feat of evoking a local tone, and this is a part of the general
superiority of that very interesting work, which to my mind represents
a long stride of her talent, and has more than the value of all else she
has done. In _East Angels_ the attempt to create an atmosphere has had,
to a considerable degree, the benefit of the actual quality of things in
the warm, rank peninsula which she has studied so exhaustively and loves
so well. Miss Woolson found a tone in the air of Florida, but it is not
too much to say that she has left it still more agreeably
rich--converted it into a fine golden haze. Wonderful is the tact with
which she has pressed it into the service of her story, draped the bare
spots of the scene with it, and hung it there half as a curtain and half
as a background. _East Angels_ is a performance which does Miss Woolson
the highest honour, and if her talent is capable, in another novel, of
making an advance equal to that represented by this work in relation to
its predecessors, she will have made a substantial contribution to our
new literature of fiction. Long, comprehensive, copious, still more
elaborate than her other elaborations, _East Angels_ presents the
interest of a large and well-founded scheme. The result is not flawless
at every point, but the undertaking is of a fine, high kind, and, for
the most part, the effect produced is thoroughly worthy of it. The
author has, in other words, proposed to give us the complete natural
history, as it were, of a group of persons collected, in a complicated
relationship, in a little winter-city on a southern shore, and she has
expended on her subject stores of just observation and an infinite deal
of the true historical spirit. How much of this spirit and of artistic
feeling there is in the book, only an attentive perusal will reveal. The
central situation is a very interesting one, and is triumphantly
treated, but I confess that what is most substantial to me in the book
is the writer’s general conception of her task, her general attitude of
watching life, waiting upon it and trying to catch it in the fact. I
know not what theories she may hold in relation to all this business, to
what camp or league she may belong; my impression indeed would be that
she is perfectly free--that she considers that though camps and leagues
may be useful organisations for looking for the truth, it is not in
their own bosom that it is usually to be found. However this may be, it
is striking that, artistically, she has had a fruitful instinct in
seeing the novel as a picture of the actual, of the characteristic--a
study of human types and passions, of the evolution of personal
relations. In _East Angels_ she has gone much farther in this direction
than in either of her other novels.
The book has, to my sense, two defects, which I may as well mention at
once--two which are perhaps, however, but different faces of the same.
One is that the group on which she has bent her lens strikes us as too
detached, too isolated, too much on a desert island. Its different
members go to and fro a good deal, to New York and to Europe, but they
have a certain shipwrecked air, as of extreme dependence on each other,
though surrounded with every convenience. The other fault is that the
famous “tender sentiment” usurps among them a place even greater perhaps
than that which it holds in life, great as the latter very admittedly
is. I spoke just now of their complicated relationships, but the
complications are almost exclusively the complications of love. Our
impression is of sky and sand--the sky of azure, the sand of silver--and
between them, conspicuous, immense, against the low horizon, the
question of engagement and marriage. I must add that I do not mean to
imply that this question is not, in the very nature of things, at any
time and in any place, immense, or that in a novel it should be expected
to lose its magnitude. I take it indeed that on such a simple shore as
Miss Woolson has described, love (with the passions that flow from it),
is almost inevitably the subject, and that the perspective is not really
false. It is not that the people are represented as hanging together by
that cord to an abnormal degree, but that, there being few accessories
and circumstances, there is no tangle and overgrowth to disguise the
effect. It is a question of effect, but it is characteristic of the
feminine, as distinguished from the masculine hand, that in any portrait
of a corner of human affairs the particular effect produced in _East
Angels_, that of what we used to call the love-story, will be the
dominant one. The love-story is a composition in which the elements are
distributed in a particular proportion, and every tale which contains a
great deal of love has not necessarily a title to the name. That title
depends not upon how much love there may be, but upon how little of
other things. In novels by men other things are there to a greater or
less degree, and I therefore doubt whether a man may be said ever to
have produced a work exactly belonging to the class in question. In
men’s novels, even of the simplest strain, there are still other
references and other explanations; in women’s, when they are of the
category to which I allude, there are none but that one. And there is
certainly much to be said for it.
In _East Angels_ the sacrifice, as all Miss Woolson’s readers know, is
the great sacrifice of Margaret Harold, who immolates herself--there is
no other word--deliberately, completely, and repeatedly, to a husband
whose behaviour may as distinctly be held to have absolved her. The
problem was a very interesting one, and worthy to challenge a superior
talent--that of making real and natural a transcendent, exceptional act,
representing a case in which the sense of duty is raised to exaltation.
What makes Margaret Harold’s behaviour exceptional and transcendent is
that, in order to render the barrier between herself and the man who
loves her, and whom she loves, absolutely insurmountable, she does her
best to bring about his marriage, endeavours to put another woman into
the frame of mind to respond to him in the event (possible, as she is a
woman whom he has once appeared to love) of his attempting to console
himself for a bitter failure. The care, the ingenuity, the precautions
the author has exhibited, to make us accept Mrs. Harold in her
integrity, are perceptible on every page, and they leave us finally no
alternative but to accept her; she remains exalted, but she remains at
the same time thoroughly sound. For it is not a simple question of
cleverness of detail, but a question of the larger sort of imagination,
and Margaret Harold would have halted considerably if her creator had
not taken the supreme precaution of all, and conceived her from the germ
as capable of a certain heroism--of clinging at the cost of a grave
personal loss to an idea which she believes to be a high one, and taking
such a fancy to it that she endeavours to paint it, by a refinement of
magnanimity, with still richer hues. She is a picture, not of a woman
indulging in a great spasmodic flight or moral _tour de force_, but of a
nature bent upon looking at life from a high point of view, an attitude
in which there is nothing abnormal, and which the author illustrates, as
it were, by a test case. She has drawn Margaret with so close and firm
and living a line that she seems to put us in the quandary, if we
repudiate her, of denying that a woman _may_ look at life from a high
point of view. She seems to say to us: “Are there distinguished natures,
or are there not? Very well, if there are, that’s what they can do--they
can try and provide for the happiness of others (when they adore them)
even to their own injury.” And we feel that we wish to be the first to
agree that there _are_ distinguished natures.
Garda Thorne is the next best thing in the book to Margaret, and she is
indeed equally good in this, that she is conceived with an equal
clearness. But Margaret produces her impression upon us by moving before
us and doing certain things, whereas Garda is more explained, or rather
she explains herself more, tells us more about herself. She says
somewhere, or some one says of her, that she doesn’t narrate, but in
fact she does narrate a good deal, for the purpose of making the reader
understand her. This the reader does, very constantly, and Garda is a
brilliant success. I must not, however, touch upon the different parts
of _East Angels_, because in a work of so much patience and conscience a
single example carries us too far. I will only add that in three places
in especial the author has been so well inspired as to give a definite
pledge of high accomplishment in the future. One of these salient
passages is the description of the closing days of Mrs. Thorne, the
little starved yet ardent daughter of the Puritans, who has been
condemned to spend her life in the land of the relaxed, and who, before
she dies, pours out her accumulations of bitterness--relieves herself in
a passionate confession of everything she has suffered and missed, of
how she has hated the very skies and fragrances of Florida, even when,
as a consistent Christian, thankful for every mercy, she has pretended
most to appreciate them. Mrs. Thorne is the pathetic, tragic form of the
type of which Mrs. Stowe’s Miss Ophelia was the comic. In almost all of
Miss Woolson’s stories the New England woman is represented as
regretting the wholesome austerities of the region of her birth. She
reverts to them, in solemn hours, even when, like Mrs. Thorne, she may
appear for a time to have been converted to mild winters. Remarkably
fine is the account of the expedition undertaken by Margaret Harold and
Evert Winthrop to look for Lanse in the forest, when they believe him,
or his wife thinks there may be reason to believe him, to have been lost
and overtaken by a storm. The picture of their paddling the boat by
torchlight into the reaches of the river, more or less smothered in the
pestilent jungle, with the personal drama, in the unnatural place,
reaching an acute stage between them--this whole episode is in a high
degree vivid, strange, and powerful. Lastly, Miss Woolson has risen
altogether to the occasion in the scene in which Margaret “has it out,”
as it were, with Evert Winthrop, parts from him and, leaving him baffled
and unsurpassably sore, gives him the measure of her determination to
accept the necessity of her fate. These three episodes are not alike,
yet they have, in the high finish of Miss Woolson’s treatment of them, a
family resemblance. Moreover, they all have the stamp which I spoke of
at first--the stamp of the author’s conservative feeling, the
implication that for her the life of a woman is essentially an affair of
private relations.
1887.
VII
ALPHONSE DAUDET
I