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.
The Preacher at Large
The spirit of Hannah More is abroad in the land. It does not preach
the same code of morals that the good Hannah preached in her lifetime,
but it preaches its altered code with her assurance and with her
continuity. Miss More preached to the poor the duty of an unreasonable
and unmanly content, and to the rich the duty of personal and national
smugness. Her successors are more than likely to urge upon rich and
poor the paramount duty of revolt. The essence of preaching, however,
is not doctrine, but didacticism. Beliefs and behaviour are subject to
geographical and chronological conditions, but human nature lives and
triumphs in the sermon.
Hannah More was not licensed to preach. She would have paled at the
thought of a lady taking orders, or climbing the pulpit steps. She
had no intellectual gifts. Her most intimate critic, the Honourable
Augustine Birrell (the only living man who confesses to the purchase of
her works in nineteen calf-bound volumes, which he subsequently buried
in his garden), pronounced her to be “an encyclopædia of all literary
vices.” Yet for forty years she told her countrymen what they should
do, and what they should leave undone, in return for which censorship
they paid her boundless deference and thirty thousand pounds, a great
deal of money in those days.
Miss More is a connecting link between the eighteenth century,
which moralized, and the nineteenth century, which preached. Both
were didactic, but, as Mr. Austin Dobson observes, “didactic with a
difference.” Addison was characterized in his day as “a parson in a
tie-wig,” an unfriendly, but not altogether inaccurate, description,
the tie-wig symbolizing a certain gentlemanly aloofness from potent and
primitive emotions. Religion is a primitive emotion, and the eighteenth
century (_ce siècle sans âme_) was, in polite life, singularly shy of
religion; reserving it for the pulpit, and handling it there with the
caution due to an explosive. Crabbe, who also lapped over into the
nineteenth century, was reproached by his friends for talking about
Heaven and Hell in his sermons, “as though he had been a Methodist.”
From such indiscretions the tie-wig preserved the eighteenth-century
moralists. Addison meditates for a morning in Westminster Abbey, and
the outcome of his meditation is that the poets have no monuments,
and the monuments no poets. Steele walks the London streets, jostling
against vice and misery, and pauses to tell us that a sturdy beggar
extracted from him the price of a drink by pleading mournfully that
all his family had died of thirst; a jest which took easily with the
crowd, and might be trusted to raise a sympathetic laugh to-day. It is
plain that these gentlemen felt without saying what Henry Adams said
without feeling, that “morality is a private and costly luxury,” and so
forbore to urge it upon a bankrupt world.
The paradox of our own time is that clergymen, whose business it is
to preach, are listened to impatiently, while laymen, whose business
it is to instruct or to amuse, are encouraged to preach. I open two
magazines, and am confronted by prophetic papers on “The Vanishing
Sermon,” and “Will Preaching Become Obsolete?” I exchange them for two
others, and find lengthy articles entitled “Can We Control Our Own
Morals?” and “Spiritual Possibilities of Business Life.” Now, if a
disquisition on “Spiritual Possibilities of Business Life” be not a
sermon, of what elements is a sermon composed? Yet when I endeavour to
ascertain these possibilities, I read that business men often refuse
to listen to professional preaching, because, while their democratic
ideals, their enthusiasm for human values, and their passion for
scientific perfection in their products “leave them not far from the
Kingdom of Heaven,” the Church, unhappily for itself, “has not been big
enough or strong enough to captivate their imagination, and hold their
allegiance.”
This would seem to imply that business men are too good to go
to church--a novel and, I should think, popular point of view.
Congregations hear little like it from the pulpit, the average
clergyman being unable to observe any signs of a commercial Utopia,
and having a tiresome and Jeremiah-like habit of pointing out defects.
As for asking a group of magazine-readers if they can control their
own morals, the query is a vaporous one, not meant to be answered
scientifically, but after a formula settled and approved. Even the
concession to modernism implied in its denial of religion as a
compelling force gets us no nearer to our goal. “The faith we need
is not necessarily faith in any supernatural help; but only in the
demonstrated fact of the possibility of controlling our own minds and
morals by going at it in the right way.” The tendency of a simple
truth, that abstraction which we all admire, to develop into a truism,
is no less noticeable when set forth in the persuasiveness of print
than when delivered with ecclesiastical authority.
Personally, I cannot conceive of a sermonless world. The preacher’s
function is too manifest to be ignored, his message too direct to
be diverted. Joubert said truly that devout men and women listen
with pleasure to dull sermons, because they recognize the legitimate
relation between priest and people, and their minds are attuned to
receptivity. And if a dull sermon can command the attention and awaken
the sympathy of a congregation honest enough to admit that dullness
is the paramount note of human intercourse, and that it is as well
developed in the listeners as in the speaker, think of the power which
individual intelligence derives from collective authority. This is the
combination which so fascinated Henry Adams when he speculated upon
the ecclesiasticism of the thirteenth century; its nobility, lucidity
and weight. “The great theologians were also architects who undertook
to build a Church Intellectual, corresponding, bit by bit, to the
Church Administrative, both expressing--and expressed by--the Church
Architectural.”
With the coming of the printed word, the supreme glory of the spoken
word departed. Reading is the accepted substitute for oratory as for
conversation, a substitute so cheap, so accessible, so accommodating,
that its day will wane only with the waning warmth of the sun, or
the exhaustion and collapse of civilization. Yet even under the new
dispensation, even with the amazing multiplicity of creeds (twenty-four
religions to one sauce, lamented Talleyrand a hundred years ago), even
though ecclesiastical architecture has ceased to express anything but a
love of comfort and an understanding of acoustics, the preacher holds
his own. There are always people interested in the relation of their
souls to God; and when it happens that a man is born into the world
capable of convincing them that the only thing of importance in life is
the relation of their souls to God, he becomes a maker of history.
John Wesley was such a man. I read recently that, when he was preaching
at Tullamore, a large cat leaped from the rafters upon a woman’s
head, and ran over the heads and shoulders of the closely packed
congregation. “But none of them cried out any more than if it had been
a butterfly.” _There_ was a test of the preacher’s supremacy. What
other influence could have been so absolute and coercive? When I was a
very little girl I was taken to see Edwin Booth play “Hamlet,” in the
old Walnut Street theatre of Philadelphia. That night a cat entered
with the ghost, and paced sedately in his wake across the ramparts of
Elsinore. The audience shouted its amusement, and the poignancy of
a great scene, interpreted by a great actor, was temporarily lost.
“Spellbound” is a word in common use, expressing, as a rule, very
ordinary attention. Booth cast a spell, but it was easily broken.
Wesley cast a spell which defied both fear and laughter. Nothing short
of dynamite could have distracted that Tullamore congregation from the
business it had on hand.
That the sermon was tyrannical in the days of its pride and power is
a truth which cannot be gainsaid. Eloquence in the pulpit has no more
bowels for its victims than has eloquence on the rostrum. History is
full of instances that move our souls to wonder. When Darnley, new
wedded to Mary Stuart, and seeing himself in the rôle of peacemaker,
went to hear Knox preach in Saint Giles’, that uncompromising divine
likened him to Ahab, who incurred the wrath of Jehovah by acquiescing
in the idolatry of Jezebel, his wife. James Melville says that when
Knox preached, “he was like to ding the pulpit to blads, and fly out of
it.” Darnley, furious, or frightened, or both, left the church while
the victorious preacher was still marshalling the hosts of Israel to
combat.
Charles the Second was wont to recall with bitter mirth a certain
Sunday in Edinburgh when he was forced by his loyal Scotch subjects to
hear six sermons, a heavy price to pay even for loyalty. Paris may have
been worth one mass to Henry of Navarre; but all Scotland was not worth
six sermons to Charles Stuart, and the memory of that Sunday sweetened
his return to France and to freedom.
It is a far cry from Knox hurling the curses of his tribal God at alien
tribesmen, from Wesley convicting his narrow world “of sin, and of
justice, and of judgment,” even from that “good, honest and painful
sermon” which Dr. Pepys heard one Sunday morning with inward misgivings
and troubled stirrings of the soul, to the sterilized discourse which
offends against no assortment of beliefs, and no standards of taste.
Frederick Locker gives us in his “Confidences” a grim description of
the funeral services of George Henry Lewes, at Highgate Cemetery.
Twelve gentlemen of rationalistic views had gathered in the mortuary
chapel, and to them a thirteenth gentleman, also of rationalistic
views, but who had taken orders somewhere, delivered an address, “half
apologizing for suggesting the possible immortality of some of our
souls.”
This may indicate the progress of the ages; but does it also indicate
the progress of the ages that the moral essay, which was wont to be
satiric, is now degenerating into the printed sermon, which is sure to
be censorious; that the very men who once charmed us with the lightness
of their touch and the keen edge of their humour are now preaching
thunderously? For years Mr. Chesterton gave us reason to be grateful
that we had learned to read. Who so debonair when he was gay, who so
incisive when he was serious, who so ready with his thrust, who so
understanding in his sympathy? We trusted him never to preach and never
to scold, and he has betrayed our trust by doing both. He calls it
prophesying; but prophesying is preaching, plus scolding, and no one
knows this better than he does.
The earth is a bad little planet, and we hope that other planets are
happier and better behaved. But the vials of Mr. Chesterton’s wrath
are emptied on the heads of people who do not read him, and who have
no idea that they are being anathematized. Swift used to say that most
sermons were aimed at men and women who never went to church, and the
same sort of thing happens to-day. We, Mr. Chesterton’s chosen readers,
are not capitalists, or philanthropists, or prohibitionists, or any of
the things he abhors; and we wish he would leave these gentry alone,
and write for us again with the old shining wit, the old laughter, the
old mockery, which was like a dash of salt on the flavourless porridge
of life.
Twenty-one years ago Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson published an American
edition of the “Letters from a Chinese Official,” a species of sermon,
it is true, but preached delicately and understandingly, in suave and
gleaming sentences, its burden of thought half veiled by the graceful
lightness of its speech. American readers took that book to heart. We
could not make over the United States into a second China. “Some god
this severance rules.” But we accepted in the spirit of reason a series
of criticisms which were reasonably conveyed to our intelligence, and a
great deal of good they did us.
Much has happened in twenty-one years, and few of us are so
light-hearted or so reasonable as of yore. Is it because we have grown
impatient of strictures that Mr. Dickinson’s sermons now seem to us a
trifle heavy, his reproaches more than a trifle harsh? We did not mind
being compared adversely to China, but we do mind being blamed for
Germany’s transgressions. When, as the mouthpiece of suffering Europe,
Mr. Dickinson says, “America is largely responsible for our condition,”
a flat denial seems in order. America did not invade Belgium, she did
not burn French towns, she did not sink merchant ships. It seems to be
Mr. Dickinson’s impression that our entrance, not without provocation,
into the war “prolonged” the struggle, to the grievous injury of
the Allies as well as of the Central Powers. There is a veracious
paragraph in one of Mr. Tarkington’s “Penrod” stories, which describes
the bewilderment of an ordinary American boy who does something he
cannot well help doing, and who is thrashed or rewarded by an irate
or delighted father, according to a point of view which is a veiled
mystery to him. So, too, the ordinary American adult gapes confusedly
when a British pacifist tells him that, by fighting the war to a
finish, he and his nation are to blame for the economic ruin of Europe.