arouses an excess of uneasiness in cautious souls. All alliances
from marriage up--or down--must necessarily entangle. The anchorites
of Thebais are the only examples we have of complete emancipation
from human bonds. That simple and beautiful thing, minding our own
affairs and leaving our neighbours to mind theirs, is unhappily not
possible for allies. Neither is a keen and common desire for peace
a sufficient basis for agreement. Peace must have terms, and terms
require a basis of their own--justice, reason, and the limited gains
which are based on mutual concessions. “Whether we are peaceful depends
upon whether others are provocative.” Mr. W. H. Mallock tells us a
pleasant story of an old Devonshire woman who was bidden by the parson
to be “conciliating” to her husband. “I labour for peace, sir,” was
the spirited reply. “But when I speak to he thereof, he directly makes
hisself ready for battle.”
There are students of history who would have us believe that certain
nations are natural allies, fitted by character and temperament to
agree, and to add to one another’s pleasure and profit. Germany and
Russia have been cited more than once as countries instinctively well
disposed towards each other, because each supplements the other’s
talents. Bismarck ranked the Germans as among the male, and the
Slavs as among the female nations of the world. The driving power he
rightfully assigned to Germany. “The soft Slav nature,” says a writer
in “The New Republic,” “emotional, sensitive, but undisciplined, has
derived most of such progress as it has made in material civilization
from German sources.”
Both countries have proved unsound allies, and Russia has the feminine
quality of changeableness. “Dangerous to her foes, disastrous to her
friends.” Both make the same kind of currency, and stand in need of
business partners who make a different sort. America, with the gold of
Europe locked up in her treasury, is the most desirable, but least
accessible, partner in Christendom. As the great creditor of the
civilized world, she has been impelled to assert that no participation
on her part in any international conference implies a surrender of her
claims to payment. France, as the great sufferer by a world’s war, has
made it equally clear that no participation on _her_ part implies a
surrender of her claims to reparation. The anger and shame with which
the Allies first saw the injuries inflicted on her have been softened
by time; and that strange twist in human nature which makes men more
concerned for the welfare of a criminal than for the welfare of his
victim has disposed us to think kindly of an unrepentant Germany. But
France cannot well forget the wounds from which she bleeds. Less proud
than Britain, which prefers beggary to debt, she is infinitely more
logical; and it is the unassailable strength of her position which has
irritated the sentimentalists of the world, whose hearts are in the
right place, but whose heads are commonly elsewhere.
The French press has waxed sorrowful and bitter over France’s sense of
isolation. Her cherished belief in the “unshakable American friendship”
has been cruelly shattered, and she has asked of Heaven and earth where
is the (proverbially absent) gratitude of republics. That there is no
such thing as an unshakable national friendship is as well known to the
clear-headed and well-informed French as to the rest of us. They were
our very good friends in 1777, and our love for them flamed high. They
were our very bad friends in 1797, and by the time they had taken or
sunk three hundred and forty American ships, our affection had grown
cool. It revived in 1914 under the impetus of their great wrongs and
greater valour. Some good feeling remains, and bids fair to remain, if
the press and the politicians of both lands will kindly let it alone;
but popular enthusiasm, a fire of straw, burned itself quickly out.
After all, we ourselves are no longer the idol of our whilom friends.
A fairy god-mother is popular only when she is changing pumpkins into
coaches, and mice into prancing bays. When she gives nothing but good
advice, her words are no more golden than her neighbour’s. In the realm
of the practical, a friendship which does not help, and an enmity which
does not hurt, can never be controlling factors.
Great Britain sets scant store by any ally save the sea. She has
journeyed far, changing friends on the road as a traveller by post
changed horses. She has fought her way, and is singularly devoid
of rancour towards her enemies. The time has indeed gone by when,
after battle, the English and French knights--or what was left of
them--would thank each other for a good fight. Those were days of
lamentable darkness, when the last thing a gentleman craved was the
privilege of dying in his bed by some slow and agonizing process, the
gift of nature, and gratefully designated as “natural.” The headsman
for the noble, the hangman for the churl, and the fortunes of war for
everybody, made death so easy to come by, and so inexpensive, that
there was a great deal of money left for the pleasures of living.
That stout-hearted Earl of Northumberland who thanked God that for
two hundred years no head of his house had died in bed, knew what
his progenitors had been spared. Even in the soberly civilized
eighteenth century there lingered a doubt as to the relative value of
battle-field, gallows and sick-chamber.
“Men may escape from rope and gun,
_Some_ have outlived the doctor’s pill;”
sang Captain Macheath to the fashionable world which thronged to hear
the verities of “The Beggar’s Opera.”
Fighting and making up, alternate friends and foes, the nations of
Europe have come in a thousand years to know one another fairly well.
There was a short time when Napoleon’s threatened invasion awakened
in England’s breast a hearty and healthy abhorrence of France. There
was a long time when the phrase, “virgin of English,” applied to a few
perilously placed French seaports (Saint-Malo, for example), revealed,
as only such proud and burning words can ever reveal, the national
hatred of England. Over and over again history taught the same lesson;
that the will of a people is stout to repel the invader, and that a
foreign alliance offers no stable foundation for policy. But a great
deal is learned from contact, whether it be friendly or inimical;
and the close call of the Great War has left behind it a legacy of
percipience. It was an Englishman who discovered during those years
that the French officers snored “with a certain politeness.” It was a
great American who said that France had “saved the soul of the world.”
It was a Frenchman who wrote comprehensively: “To disregard danger,
to stand under fire, is not for an Englishman an act of courage; it
is part of a good education.” When gratitude is forgotten, as all
things which clamour for remembrance should be, and sentimentalism has
dissolved under the pitiless rays of reality, there remains, and will
remain, a good understanding which is the basis of good will.
At present the nations that were drawn together by a common peril are a
little tired of one another’s company, and more than a little irritated
by one another’s grievances. The natural result of this weariness and
irritation is an increase of sympathy for Germany, who now finds
herself detested by her former allies, and smiled upon by at least some
of her former foes. All that she says, and she has a great deal to say,
is listened to urbanely. General Ludendorff has assured the American
public that Prussia was innocent of even a desire to injure England.
What she sought was peace “on conditions acceptable and inoffensive
to both parties.” The Crown Prince’s memoirs, which have been
appreciatively reviewed, set forth in eloquent language the Arthurian
blamelessness of the Hohenzollerns. “The results of the excessive
Viennese demand upon Serbia involved us in the war against our will.”
The breathless competition for the memoirs of the exiled Kaiser was a
notable event in the publishing world. The history of literature can
show nothing to resemble it. In 1918 we gravely discussed the propriety
of trying this gentleman for his life. In 1922 we contended with far
more heat for the privilege of presenting to a gratified public his
imperial views upon his imperial policy. Americans exulted over the
acquisition of these copyrights as they exulted over the acquisition of
the Blue Boy. It is a grand thing to be able to outbid one’s neighbour,
and pay a “record-smashing” price for any article in the market.
Certain inflexible and unhumorous souls took umbrage at this catering
to a principle we professed to reject, at the elevation of Wilhelm the
Second to the rank of the world’s most favoured author. They thought it
implied a denial of all we reverenced, of all we fought for, of all we
knew to be good. It really implied nothing but curiosity; and curiosity
is not to be confounded with homage. Saint Michael is honoured of men
and angels; but if he and Lucifer gave their memoirs to the world,
which would be better paid for, or more read?
They Had Their Day
“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.”
“The formal stars do travel so,
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
“True blue
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.