common height, and arrived at such a dazzling completeness of
beauty that his eyes might well show surprise and delight at
beholding her. In hers there was a brightness so lustrous and
melting that I have seen a whole assembly follow her as if by an
attraction irresistible; and that night the great Duke was at
the playhouse after Ramillies, every soul turned and looked (she
chanced to enter at the opposite side of the theater at the same
moment) at her, and not at him. She was a brown beauty--that is,
her eyes, hair, and eyebrows and eyelashes were dark; her hair
curling with rich undulations, and waving over her shoulders.
But her complexion was as dazzling white as snow in sunshine;
except her cheeks, which were a bright red, and her lips, which
were of a still deeper crimson. Her mouth and chin, they said,
were too large and full, and so they might be for a goddess in
marble, but not for a woman whose eyes were fire, whose look was
love, whose voice was the sweetest low song, whose shape was
perfect symmetry, health, decision, activity, whose foot, as it
planted itself on the ground, was firm but flexible, and whose
motion, whether rapid or slow, was always perfect grace--agile
as a nymph, lofty as a queen--now melting, now imperious,
now sarcastic--there was no single movement of hers but was
beautiful. As he thinks of her, he who writes feels young again,
and remembers a paragon.”
Esmond falls instantly in love with the dazzling beauty, and the rest
of the book, down to nearly the end of the last chapter, has for its
theme his fruitless devotion to this brilliant, volatile, imperious,
and capricious girl, and her mother’s sympathy with him in his vain
suit!
He again betakes himself to the army to win a rank and a name so
as to lay them at her feet. He takes part in the great campaigns of
Marlborough in Flanders--at Donauwörth, Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde,
Wynendael, Malplaquet. He is wounded at Blenheim, and again (near the
close of the war) at Mons, and he is promoted until he reaches the
rank of colonel. He returns to England from time to time, meets the
brilliant girl (now maid of honor to the Queen) to whom his life is
devoted, only to have his heart torn by her coldness and her caprices.
Once for a moment she relents, but the mood passes and she pursues her
schemes of ambition. First she is betrothed to Lord Ashburnham, then to
the Duke of Hamilton, and when that nobleman falls in a duel with Lord
Mohun, it is Esmond who has to bring her the news of this crushing blow
to her ambition.
And now he will attempt one brilliant feat to win her. Queen Anne
is near her end. Esmond will bring back to England the Pretender,
the exiled King (to whose cause the family are deeply devoted) to
take the vacant throne. Here follow the details of this scheme, and a
description of the king’s dissolute and fickle character. He is brought
to the house of Lady Castlewood, where he shows too plainly his fancy
for Beatrix, who on her part is far too compliant. She is sent away
to Castlewood, and becomes furious at the suspicions of her family.
When the plot of the king’s friends is ripe the Pretender can not be
found. A letter from Beatrix informing him that she is a prisoner
is intercepted, and Esmond and her brother Frank ride all night to
Castlewood, where they find the young king, and although they are in
time to save her honor, yet this crowning infidelity has crushed out
the last spark of Esmond’s love. On their return to London the Queen is
dead and George is proclaimed King.
Let the concluding scenes of the story be told in Esmond’s own words:
“Ever after that day at Castlewood, when we rescued her, she
persisted in holding all her family as her enemies, and left us,
and escaped to France, to what a fate I disdain to tell. Nor was
her son’s house a home for my dear mistress; my poor Frank was
weak, as perhaps all our race hath been, and led by women....
’Twas after a scene of ignoble quarrel on the part of Frank’s
wife and mother (for the poor lad had been made to marry the
whole of that German family with whom he had connected himself)
that I found my mistress one day in tears, and then besought her
to confide herself to the care and devotion of one who by God’s
help would never forsake her. And then the tender matron, as
beautiful in her autumn, and as pure as virgins in their spring,
with blushes of love and eyes of meek surrender yielded to my
respectful importunity, and consented to share my home.”
If Esmond had shot himself, or turned monk, or spent his last days
alone, or lived with Lady Castlewood as her son, the artistic harmony
of the book would have been preserved, but to marry one who had been
in the place of a mother to him all these years--Faugh! not even the
genius of Thackeray can make such a match attractive. This dreadful
anticlimax mars what would otherwise be beyond all question (and what
may be still in spite of it) the most beautiful work of fiction ever
written.
Thackeray knows better than any other novelist, except perhaps
Cervantes, how to describe a gentleman. That peculiar aggregation of
qualities so unmistakable, yet so elusive of definition, which go to
make up this character, appear more clearly in his novels than anywhere
else in English fiction. Henry Esmond, Colonel Newcome and Major Dobbin
are almost as perfect examples of this as the Knight of the Sorrowful
Countenance himself. And Thackeray (in another work) thus speaks to us
of gentlemen:
“Perhaps these are rarer personages than some of us think for.
Which of us can point out many such in his circle, men whose aims
are generous, whose truth is constant, and not only constant
in its kind but elevated in its degree; whose want of meanness
makes them simple; who can look the world honestly in the face
with an equal manly sympathy for the great and small? We all know
a hundred whose coats are very well made, and a score who have
excellent manners, and one or two happy beings who are what they
call in the inner circles, and have shot into the very centre and
bull’s eye of the fashion; but of gentlemen how many? Let us take
a little scrap of paper and each make out his list.”
The diction of Thackeray is exquisite beyond all comparison with that
of any other author. There are some repetitions, and many marks of
carelessness, but Thackeray does not suffer because he is careless,
he seems rather to gain by it. Henry Esmond is full of digressions;
for example, the historical accounts of the campaigns in Flanders have
little to do with the main purpose of the story. But where else can we
find history written with such a charm? You seem to be in the midst of
the events it chronicles, beholding its great scenes and listening to
contemporary gossip and criticism. Where else is any such description
of a hero like that of Marlborough:
“Our chief, whom England and all Europe, saving only the
Frenchmen, worshiped almost, had this of the godlike in him, that
he was impassible before victory, before danger, before defeat.
Before the greatest obstacle or the most trivial ceremony;
before a hundred thousand men drawn in battalia, or a peasant
slaughtered at the door of his burning hovel; before a carouse
of drunken German lords, or a monarch’s court, a cottage-table,
where his plans were laid, or an enemy’s battery, vomiting flame
and death, and strewing corpses round about him--he was always
cold, calm, resolute, like fate. He performed a treason or a
court-bow, he told a falsehood as black as Styx, as easily as he
paid a compliment or spoke about the weather. He took a mistress
and left her, he betrayed his benefactor and supported him, or
would have murdered him, with the same calmness always, and
having no more remorse than Clotho when she weaves the thread, or
Lachesis when she cuts it....
“His qualities were pretty well known in the army, where there
were parties of all politics, and of plenty of shrewdness and
wit; but there existed such a perfect confidence in him, as the
first captain in the world, and such a faith and admiration in
his prodigious genius and fortune, that the very men whom he
notoriously cheated of their pay, the chiefs whom he used and
injured (for he used all men, great and small, that came near
him, as his instruments alike), and took something of theirs,
either some quality or some property--the blood of a soldier it
might be, or a jeweled hat, or a hundred thousand crowns from a
king, or a portion out of a starving sentinel’s three farthings;
or (when he was young) a kiss from a woman and the gold chain
off her neck, taking all he could from woman or man, and having,
as I said, this of the godlike in him, that he could see a hero
perish or a sparrow fall with the same amount of sympathy for
either. Not that he had no tears; he could always order up this
reserve at the proper moment to battle; he could draw upon tears
or smiles alike, and whenever need was for using this cheap coin.
He would cringe to a shoe-black, as he would flatter a minister
or a monarch; be haughty, be humble, threaten, repent, weep,
grasp your hand, or stab you, whenever he saw occasion--but yet
those of the army who knew him best, and had suffered most from
him, admired him most of all; and as he rode along the lines of
battle, or galloped up in the nick of time to a battalion reeling
from before the enemy’s charge or shot, the fainting men and
officers got new courage as they saw the splendid calm of his
face and felt that his will made them irresistible.”
What a description of the destruction of the French army after
Ramillies:
“At first it was a retreat orderly enough; but presently the
retreat became a rout, and a frightful slaughter of the French
ensued on this panic; so that an army of sixty thousand men was
utterly crushed and destroyed in the course of a couple of hours.
It was as if a hurricane had seized a compact numerous fleet,
flung it all to the winds, shattered, sunk, and annihilated it:
_Afflavit Deus et dissipati sunt._”
The author is not so successful in the introduction of his literary
characters, one of whom, Joseph Addison, not only has no relation to
the story, but adds little to the merit of the work.
A peculiarity of Thackeray is the subtle manner in which the motives
and passions of his various personages sometimes reveal themselves.
For instance, Lady Castlewood’s intense love for Esmond in the early
part of the book is altogether a matter of inference from her strange
conduct, and might very easily be overlooked or misunderstood by
persons who lack insight and keen perception. Indeed, in some places
the indications of the motive as drawn from the words and actions of
his heroines are so delicate and shadowy, that we can not always quite
tell what the author would have us infer, or perhaps we even come to
the conclusion that there is no accounting for a woman. And yet, even
when we are thus at fault, how entirely natural it all seems!
Thackeray never wanders into unknown territory. He writes about
the people he knows and describes the things with which he is in
close contact. In the development of the story there is a blending
of experience and imagination, which mutually aid each other in the
creation of characters that are marvelously ideal and true to nature at
the same time.
Dickens’s men and women are frequently types. You can predict with
great confidence what each will do under given circumstances.
Thackeray’s characters are more uncertain and elusive. But is not this
the way of the world? Those of us who have been mistaken in the conduct
of our friends or enemies (and who has not?) must acknowledge the
essential truthfulness of many a portrait which at first blush appears
inconsistent.
And in this novel, in which Colonel Esmond tells his own story, the
author shows his surpassing power in making us see his principal
characters, especially his dear mistress and her daughter, not so much
as they really were, but as they appeared to the man who loved them.
Thackeray gives to our understanding very good reason to doubt whether
Lady Castlewood had all the perfections he attributes to her, but he
compels our hearts to join in Esmond’s worship, and to feel even toward
the wayward Beatrix a share of the passion of her lover.
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is a novel which was written for a purpose. It was
an attack upon the system of negro slavery and was intended to awaken
the people of the North to a realization of the horrors and essential
wickedness of that institution. So well did it accomplish its purpose
that it became an important feature of the history of the abolition
movement, which led to the organization of the Republican party and
finally to the overthrow of slavery. No other American novel had such
a circulation nor left so deep an impression upon its time. But it has
long outlived its moral purpose, and the persistent demand both for the
book and for the play which is taken from it shows that “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin” has a vitality of its own, which entitles it to a high rank
among works of fiction. What are the elements of its excellence?
It is not in all respects a finished production. The style is uneven
and marred by occasional crudities and weaknesses. The author evidently
lacks a good deal in the matter of literary education. Words are used
unnecessarily which are colloquial, very rare, or perhaps not found in
the dictionary at all. Thus: “The rocking chair of the good Quakeress
Rachel Halliday kept up a subdued creechy-crawchy”; Rachel collects
“needments” for Eliza out of her household stores; St. Clare speaks of
the “cheatery” of his negroes, and other phrases are used which are
equally obsolete or unconventional. Some of the sentences are awkward
in the extreme, and there are involved paragraphs, with inconsistent
similes and metaphors.
Besides this, there is a certain femininity pervading the book, which
appears in minute descriptions of household duties and utensils, and in
a certain religious flavor of the Sunday-school variety, which obtrudes
itself in inappropriate places.
But although the mere literary quality of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is not
high, the work is characterized by great dramatic power, and permeated
with a feeling so intense that the expression of it rises in many
places into eloquence. The great feature of this somber and absorbing
novel is its convincing character. The truth of the dreadful facts
which it recounts are shown, not merely by contemporary records,
but the events are described in such a way as to bring with them
the consciousness that they must have occurred. This overpowering
impression of reality and the tragic pathos of the tale itself contain
the secret of its power.
The main plot of the novel flows on in a very natural manner. Uncle
Tom, a faithful, conscientious negro, is the property of a Kentucky
master who is compelled by necessity to tear him away from his family
and sell him “down the river.” First he becomes the property of St.
Clare, an excellent man, upon whose death he is purchased by one
Legree, an incarnate fiend, by whom he is whipped to death for refusing
to become the instrument of his master’s cruelty. Other incidents, like
the escape of Eliza and her husband, who finally obtain their liberty
in Canada, are subsidiary to the main design.
Many of the characters are so natural that they must have been taken
from living models. The cultured, cynical, yet sensitive and kindly
St. Clare, and his querulous wife Marie; Eva, their affectionate,
spiritual, fairy-like child; the grotesque Topsy; the prim and precise
Miss Ophelia, with strong New England instincts and prejudices; Haley
the slave-trader, the “man of humanity,”--seem especially lifelike.
Legree’s brutality is almost inconceivable, and its only justification
is found in the fact that such men, abnormal as they were, actually
existed and controlled the destinies of great numbers of human beings.
Some of the episodes are quite as effective as the main current of
the narrative; for example, the stealing of Lucy’s baby by the slave
trader on the way down the Ohio, followed by the suicide of the
mother. We know that children were sold in just that fashion, and the
simple narrative tells us exactly what it meant. There is a terrible
power, too, in the whispered story about poor Prue: “She’s got drunk
again and they put her down cellar, and they left her all day, and I
hearn them saying that the flies had got to her, and she’s dead.” No
detailed account of the actual barbarities inflicted upon the wretched
creature could give a stronger impression of the hideous reality than
the whispers of the other slaves who knew of it and yet were afraid to
speak.
To make a fine work of art, the subject ought to be worthy and the
treatment artistic. Mrs. Stowe fails a little in the latter point, but
there was never a novelist with a more impressive theme. It is that
theme, after all, which has given to her work the chief part of its
permanent value.
CRANFORD
MRS. GASKELL
“Cranford” is a novel of somewhat the same character as “Pride and
Prejudice.” There are few pictures more true to life than Mrs.
Gaskell’s description of the small town and the little ladies who
inhabit it. It was a town from which men were mostly absent, and where
it was felt that they would be quite useless even if they were there.
The little women were filled with great love for gentility and a
distrust of mankind so great that they almost persuaded themselves that
to be a man was to be vulgar. They practiced “elegant economies”--for
money-spending was “low and ostentatious.” They never admitted their
poverty, and were greatly shocked when Captain Brown came to town and
openly confessed his own. They were so refined that they had to retire
to the privacy of their own rooms to suck an orange, and were filled
with dismay when at the house of Mr. Holbrook peas were placed upon the
table to be eaten with a two-pronged fork.
We have delicious bits of rambling and inconsequent talk, delicate
descriptions of the various strata of respectability in Cranford, and
of the autocratic social dominion exercised by one Mrs. Jameson, who,
although a great tyrant over her neighbors, lived in abject fear of her
own butler. The author portrays graphically the superstitions of the
ladies in this little community, their belief in a “murderous gang”
which was always upon the point of committing some desperate robbery,
their terror of footpads who never appeared, their various opinions
upon the subject of ghosts, and the ingenious scheme of rolling a ball
under the bed so as to find whether a robber was hidden there, without
stooping down to look. The author describes vividly the character of
the small economies in which each person is said to have some specialty
of his own; while one preserves bits of paper, another saves up all the
strings; with a good housekeeper it is butter or cream, while with Miss
Mattie Jenkyns, the heroine of the story, if the story can be said to
have a heroine, it was in the matter of candles. This Miss Mattie is a
lovable character, very self-depreciating and always submissive to her
older sister Deborah. Miss Mattie had had a lover in her youth, one
Mr. Holbrook, an old-fashioned country farmer who was found lacking in
gentility by the rest of the family, therefore her days ebbed away in
single blessedness.
Realistic pictures are given of the difficulties of the little ladies
with servants and their “followers,” who were always forbidden by the
strict rules prevailing in Cranford, but who never could be kept out.
There are episodes filled with very real and tender pathos--the
sacrifices made by Miss Jessie Brown for her invalid sister, the sad
picture of the suffering of the mother whose boy, after a public
flogging by his father, ran off to sea. This same boy, later in life,
reappeared in Cranford, ever true to his character as a practical
joker, and astonished the ladies by his accounts of the hunting of
cherubim among the heights of the Himalayas, a kind of sport which
seemed to them little better than sacrilege.
The whole book is a delicious epitome of the narrow life of a
small town, and is an ample refutation of the curious dogma, lately
announced, that women are deficient in the sense of humor!
BARFÜSSELE
BERTHOLD AUERBACH
I hardly know whether Auerbach will always be regarded as one of the
great masters of fiction, but to me his simple village stories take a
higher rank than many works that are far more pretentious. They are
filled with infinite tenderness, and are true to the essential traits
of human nature. Auerbach has an intimate knowledge of the village life
in the Black Forest, of which he writes, and he is able to combine
universal characteristics with local peculiarities in such a way that
the picture becomes vivid and convincing.
“Barfüssele” is the story of a little orphan girl, a wise child,
clear-headed and reflective, who develops under the solemn training of
poverty and sorrow into a character of great sweetness, self reliance,
and heroism.
In the opening chapter we see her with her younger brother walking
to the house where they have always lived, knocking at the door and
calling for their father and mother. The children do not understand
the meaning of the funeral they have attended, nor why they have been
separated and given to the care of others, and they are looking for
their parents to come home again. But there is no answer to their
calling, so they go off to the pond and amuse themselves by throwing
stones and making them skip across the water. Here Amrei, the girl,
pretends to be more awkward than she really is, in order to give Dami,
her little brother, the pleasure of showing his greater skill.
Many charming incidents of childhood follow--accounts of the riddles
that she gives and guesses, descriptions of her quaint childish
philosophy regarding the birds, the dogs, the trees, and the deep
problem of human sorrow.
After a while she begins to earn her living by tending a flock of
geese, and when the Rodelbauer, her guardian, wants her to give up such
work because it is a reproach to her, she answers steadfastly, “I must
carry out what I have begun.”
It is a sad life she leads with the Black Marann, a widow, who through
long years has been waiting for the return of an only son, from whom
she hears nothing. The boy has in fact been killed in Algiers, yet
no one in the village dares to tell her, though they tell Amrei, and
the child has to bear the burden of this secret. But amid all this
gloom, the heart of the orphan girl is strengthened by the precepts of
her melancholy companion, who tells her how much better it is to be
sufficient to one’s self than to depend upon another for happiness. And
when at the wedding at the Rodelbauer’s no one will dance with “Little
Barefoot” (for so the girl is called), she dances by herself and dances
well, and says “It is better to dance alone, for then I do not need to
wait for a partner.”
But the main purpose of her life is to cheer and stimulate her younger
brother, a boy who is weak-spirited, complaining and unsteady, whose
character is indeed a sharp contrast to her own. Into his mind she
tries to instil her own spirit of independence. He finds service in a
neighboring village, and she will not weep at parting with him until
after he is gone, and then the world seems very empty to her. Dami
is unjustly turned away from his situation and loses all his little
belongings in a fire. He works for a while with a charcoal-burner,
and then resolves to go to America. His sister secretly rejoices at
his bold purpose, but reproves him severely when he wants to revenge
himself upon the master who has discharged him. It is largely through
her efforts that his passage money is raised. She gives him his
father’s ax and sack, and tells him that these two things mean that he
must work and gather and save the results of his labor, and that they
must be the inspiration of his life.
Meanwhile she has been taken into service at the Rodelbauer’s, and her
goodness and skill have made her indispensable, though she suffers much
from the taunts and scolding of Rosel, the daughter of the household.
Her clothing is poor, but always very neat, for, says the author,
“Neatness is the ornament of poverty, costing nothing, but not to be
purchased.”