They fought bitter and regular, like man and wife.
Since the days of Richardson and Fielding, English novelists have
devoted themselves with tireless energy to the pleasant task of
match-making. They have held this duty to be of such paramount
importance that much of their work has practically no other _raison
d’être_. They write their stories--so far as we can see--solely
and entirely that they may bring two wavering young people to the
altar; and they leave _us_ stranded at the church doors in lamentable
ignorance of all that is to follow. Thackeray once asked Alexandre
Dumas why he did not take up the real history of other people’s heroes
and heroines, and tell the world what their married lives were like.
It would have been a perilous enterprise, for, notwithstanding two
centuries of practice, novelists are astonishingly bad match-makers.
We know what happened when Thackeray himself undertook to continue
the tale of Ivanhoe and Rowena, whom Scott abandoned to their fate,
with merely a gentle hint of some mental deviations on the bridegroom’s
part. Sir Walter, indeed, always shook hands with his young couples on
their wedding-day, and left them to pull through as best they could.
Their courtships and their marriages interested him less than other
things he wanted to write about,--sieges and tournaments, criminal
trials, and sour Scottish saints. He had lived his own life bravely and
happily without his heart’s desire; he believed that it was the fate of
most men to do the same; and he clung stoutly to Dryden’s axiom:--
Secrets of marriage still are sacred held,
Their sweet and bitter from the world concealed.
In real life this admirable reticence is a thing of the past; but the
novelist, for the most part, holds his peace, leaving his readers a
prey to melancholy doubts and misgivings.
The English-speaking novelist only. In French fiction, as Mr. Lang
points out, “love comes after marriage punctually enough, but it is
always love for another.” The inevitableness of the issue startles
and dismays an English reader, accustomed to yawn gently over the
innocent prenuptial dallyings of Saxon man and maid. The French
story-writer cannot and does not ignore his social code which urbanely
limits courtship. When he describes a girl’s dawning sentiment, he
does so often with exquisite grace and delicacy; but he reserves his
portrayal of the master passion until maturity gives it strength, and
circumstances render it unlawful. His conception of his art imposes no
scruple which can impede analysis. If an English novelist ventures to
treat of illicit love, the impression he gives is of a blind, almost
mechanical force, operating against rather than in unison with natural
laws. Those normal but most repellent aspects of the case, which the
Frenchman treats openly and exhaustively, the Englishman ignores or
rejects. His theory of civilization is built up largely--and wisely--on
suppression.
But why should the sentiment or passion of love be the chosen theme
of story-writers, to the practical exclusion of other interests?
Why should it be the central point around which their tales revolve?
When we look about us in the world we know, we cannot think that love
is taking up much time and attention in people’s lives. It dominates
gloriously for a brief period,--or for brief periods,--and then makes
way for other engrossing influences. Its might and authority are
recognized; but the recognition does not imply constant concern. The
atmosphere of life is not surcharged with emotion, as is the atmosphere
of fiction. Society is not composed of young men and women falling
madly but virtuously in love with one another, nor of married men and
women doing the same thing on less legitimate lines.
To these rational arguments, which have been urged by restless critics
before now, M. Paul Bourget makes answer that novelists deal with love
because, under its white heat, all characteristics become more vividly
alive, and are brought more actively and more luminously into play. Man
is never so self-revealing as when consumed by passion. We see into
his heart, only when it is lit by the flame of desire. Moreover, love
being natural, and in a manner inevitable, there is not in treating of
it that suggestion of artifice which chills our faith in most of the
incidents of fiction.
But is the man whom we see revealed by the light of love the real man?
Can we, after this transient illumination, say safely to ourselves, “We
know him well”? Is it his true and human self, _son naturel_, to use an
admirable old French phrase, which is both quickened and betrayed by
passion? Putting cynicism aside, rejecting Lord Bacon’s dictum, “Love
is a nuisance, and an impediment to important action,” we are still
doubtful as to the value of traits studied under these powerful but
perishable conditions. It is not what a man does when he is in love,
but what he does when he is out of love (Philip drunk to Philip sober)
which counts for characterization. That pleasant old romancer, Maistro
Rusticiano di Pisa, tells us that a courtier once asked Charlemagne
whether he held King Meliadus or his son Tristan to be the better man.
To this question the Emperor made wise reply: “King Meliadus was the
better man, and I will tell you why. As far as I can see, everything
that Tristan did was done for love, and his great feats would never
have been done, save under the constraint of love, which was his spur
and goad. Now this same thing can never be said of King Meliadus. For
what deeds he did, he did them, not by dint of love, but by dint of his
strong right arm. Purely out of his own goodness he did good, and not
by constraint of love.”
It is this element of coercion which gives us pause. Not out of his own
goodness, nor out of his own badness, does the lover act; but goaded
onward by a force too impetuous for resistance. When this force is
spent, then we can test the might of his “strong right arm.” Who that
has read it can forget the matchless paragraph of adjectives in which
the Ettrick Shepherd contrasts the glowing deceits of courtship with
the sober sincerities of married life? “Love,” he sighs, “is a saft,
sweet, bright, balmy, triumphant, and glorious lie, in place of which
nature offers us in mockery during a’ the rest o’ our lives the puir,
paltry, pitiful, faded, fushionless, cauldrified, and chittering
substitute, truth.”
Small wonder that novelists content themselves with making matches, and
refrain from examining too closely the result of their handiwork. They
would have more conscience about it, if it were not so easy for them
to withdraw. They are almost as irresponsible as poets, who delight in
yoking unequal mates, as proof of the power of love. Poetry weds King
Cophetua to the beggar maid, and smilingly retires from any further
contemplation of the catastrophe. Shakespeare gives Celia--Celia, with
her sweet brown beauty, her true heart, her nimble wit, her grace of
exquisite companionship--to that unnatural sinner, Oliver; and the
only excuse he offers is that Oliver says he is sorry for his sins. So
I suppose Helen of Troy said she regretted her indiscretion, and this
facile repentance reinstated her in happy domesticity. But the novelist
is not at play in the Forest of Arden. He is presumably grappling with
the dismal realities of earth. Nothing could be less like a fairy
playground than the village of Thrums (“If the Auld-Licht parishioners
ever get to heaven,” said Dr. Chalmers, “they will live on the north
side of it”); yet it is in Thrums that Mr. Barrie marries Babbie to the
Little Minister,--marries her with a smile and a blessing, as though he
had solved, rather than complicated, the mysterious problem of life.
The occasional and deliberate effort of the novelist to arrange an
unhappy union in order to emphasize contrasts of character is an
advance toward realism; but the temporary nature of such tragedies
(which is well understood) robs the situation of its power. In the
typical instance of Dorothea Brooke and Mr. Casaubon, George Eliot
deemed it necessary to offer careful explanation of her conduct,--or
of Dorothea’s,--and she rather ungenerously threw the blame upon
Middlemarch society, which was guiltless before high Heaven, and upon
the then prevalent “modes of education, which made a woman’s knowledge
another name for motley ignorance.” In reality, Dorothea was alone
responsible; and it is hard not to sympathize with Mr. Casaubon,
who was digging contentedly enough in his little dry mythological
dust-heaps when she dazzled him into matrimony. It is hard for the
unregenerate heart not to sympathize occasionally with Rosamond Vincy
and with Tito Melema, whom George Eliot married to Lydgate and to
Romola, in order that she might with more efficacy heap shame and
scorn upon their heads. The moral in all these cases is pointed as
unwaveringly as the compass needle points to the North Star. This is
what happens when noble and ignoble natures are linked together. This
is what happens when the sons of God wed with the daughters of men. We
are not to suppose that it was poor Mr. Casaubon’s failure to write
his “Key to all Mythologies,” nor even his ignorance of German, which
alienated his wife’s affection; but rather his selfish determination to
sacrifice her youth and strength on the altar of his vanity,--a vanity
to which her early homage, be it remembered, had given fresh impetus
and life.
The pointing of morals is not, however, the particular function of
married life. The problem it presents is a purely natural one, and its
ethical value is not so easily ascertained. For the most part the sons
of men wed with the daughters of men. They do not offer the contrast
of processional virtues and of deep debasement; but the far wider
contrast of manhood and of womanhood, of human creatures whose minds
and hearts and tastes and instincts are radically unlike; who differ
in all essentials from the very foundations of their being. “Our idea
of honour is not their idea of honour,” says Mr. Lang, speaking for
men, and of women; “our notions of justice and of humour are not their
notions of justice and of humour; nor can we at all discover a common
calculus of the relative importance of things.”
This is precisely why we wish that novelists would not neglect
their opportunities, and shirk their responsibilities, by escaping
at the church door. What did really happen when Babbie married the
little Minister, and added to the ordinary difficulties of wedlock
the extraordinary complications of birth and training, habits and
character, irreconcilably at variance with the traditions of the
Auld-Licht rectory? We know how the mother of John Wesley,--and
incidentally of eighteen other children,--a dour, stern, pious parson’s
wife, refused to say amen to her husband’s prayer for King William,
and dwelt apart from her reverend spouse and master for twelve long
months, rather than relinquish a sentiment of loyalty for the rightful
sovereign of the land. Such incidents stand in our way when we are told
musically that--
Love will still be lord of all.
Mrs. Wesley loved her husband, and she did not love the banished and
papistical James; yet it was only King William’s death (a happy and
unforeseen solution of the difficulty) which brought her back to
submission and conjugal joys.
For one of the most ill-assorted marriages in fiction Miss Austen
must be held to blame. It was this lady’s firm conviction (founded on
Heaven knows what careful and continued observation) that clever men
are wont for the most part to marry foolish or stupid women. We see in
nearly all her books the net results of such seemingly inexplicable
alliances. In what moment of madness did Mr. Bennet ask Mrs. Bennet
to be his wife? Nothing can explain such an enigma; but Miss Austen’s
philosophy, and her knowledge of that commonplace middle-class English
life, which the eighteenth century had stripped bare of all superfluous
emotions, enabled her to prove--to her own satisfaction at least--that
Mr. Bennet was tolerably content with the situation. It is not too much
to say that he enjoys his wife’s absurdities. Only in his few earnest
words to Elizabeth, when Darcy has asked for her hand: “My child, let
me not have the grief of seeing _you_ unable to respect your partner in
life,” do we catch a glimpse of the Valley of Humiliation which he has
trodden for twenty-four years. A still more emphatic illustration of
Miss Austen’s point of view is afforded us in “Sense and Sensibility,”
when Eleanor Dashwood decides that Mrs. Palmer’s surpassing foolishness
cannot sufficiently account for Mr. Palmer’s rudeness and discontent.
“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.”
Fortified by such philosophy, convinced that the natural order of
things, though mysterious and unpleasant, does not entail unhappiness,
Miss Austen deliberately marries Henry Tilney to Catherine Morland;
marries them after an engagement long enough to have opened the
bridegroom’s eyes, were it not for the seventy merciful miles which
lie between Northanger Abbey and the rectory of Fullerton. With an
acute and delicate cynicism, so gently spoken that we hardly feel its
sting, she proves to us, in a succession of conversations, that “a
good-looking girl with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind
cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are
particularly untoward.” When Catherine delivers her priceless views
upon the unprofitable labour of historians, we know that Mr. Tilney’s
fate is sealed.
“You are fond of history!--and so are Mr. Allen and my father; and I
have two brothers who do not dislike it. So many instances within my
small circle of friends is remarkable. At this rate, I shall not pity
the writers of history any longer. If people like to read their books,
it is all very well; but to be at so much trouble in filling great
volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look
into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls,
always struck me as a hard fate. And though I know it is all very right
and necessary, I have often wondered at the person’s courage that could
sit down on purpose to do it.”
To be told that history is made admirable because you read it, is
flattering indeed. Mr. Tilney is satisfied that Catherine has “a great
deal of natural taste,”--an impression which her artless admiration for
his talents deepens into agreeable certainty. When he asks her hand in
marriage, Miss Austen reminds us with dispassionate candour that his
attachment originated in gratitude. “A persuasion of her partiality for
him had been the only cause of his giving her a serious thought.” There
is a final jest about beginning “perfect happiness” at the respective
ages of twenty-six and eighteen, and the curtain is rung down upon a
lifetime of irrational ennui.
The world of the novelist is full of such strange mishaps, and our
sense of inquietude corresponds with our conviction of their reality.
Mrs. Ward probably does not expect us to believe that Jacob Delafield
and Julie Le Breton lived happily and harmoniously together. There
is something as radically inharmonious in their marriage as in the
union of conflicting elements. It is not a question of taking chances
of happiness, as Sophia Western takes them with Tom Jones (very good
chances, to my way of thinking); it is a question of unalterable laws
by which the gods limit our human joy. But there is no sharp sense
of disappointment awakened in our hearts when we read “Lady Rose’s
Daughter,” as when more powerful currents of emotion turn awry. That
Henry Esmond should have married Lady Castlewood, or rather, that he
should not have married Beatrix, I count one of the permanent sorrows
of life.
In an exceedingly clever and ruthlessly disagreeable novel by Mr.
Bernard Shaw, “Cashel Byron’s Profession,” there is a brief, clear
exposition of that precise phase of life which novelists, as a rule,
decline to elucidate. Cashel Byron is a prize-fighter, a champion
light-weight, well-born (though he does not know it) and of cleanly
life; but nevertheless a prize-fighter, with the instincts, habits, and
vocabulary of his class. A young woman, rich, refined, bookish, brought
up in a rarefied intellectual atmosphere which has starved her healthy
sentiment to danger point, falls helplessly in love with his beauty and
his strength, and marries him, in mute desperate defiance of social
laws. The story closes at this point, but the author adds a brief
commentary, designed to explain the limited possibilities of happiness
that exist for the ex-pugilist and his wife.
“Cashel’s admiration for Lydia survived the ardour of his first love
for her, and she employed all her forethought not to disappoint
his reliance on her judgment. She led a busy life, and wrote some
learned monographs, as well as a work in which she denounced
education as practised in the universities and public schools. Her
children inherited her acuteness and refinement, with their father’s
robustness and aversion to study. They were precocious and impudent,
had no respect for Cashel, and showed any they had for their mother
principally by running to her when they were in difficulties.... The
care of this troublesome family had one advantage for her. It left her
little time to think about herself, or about the fact that, when the
illusion of her love passed away, Cashel fell in her estimation. But
the children were a success, and she soon came to regard him as one of
them. When she had leisure to consider the matter at all, which seldom
occurred, it seemed to her that, on the whole, she had chosen wisely.”
Here are conditions which, if presented at length and with sufficient
skill, might hold us spellbound. Here is an opportunity to force
conviction, were the novelist disposed to grapple with his real work.
As it is, Mr. Shaw contents himself with adding one more to the marital
failures of fiction. Dr. Johnson said that most marriages would turn
out as well if the Lord Chancellor made them. The Lord Chancellor would
assuredly make them better than that blundering expert, the novelist.