big, sentimental, child-loving public is Mrs. Burnett’s Lord Fauntleroy,
who maybe best described as the good little boy with the clothes. It
is quite impossible to separate him in our minds from his wardrobe,
to divest him of his velvet suits and sashes, his “rich Vandyke lace
collar,” his leggings and neat little Oxford ties. He is always and in
all places “a small copy of the fairy prince,” picturesquely grouped
with a dog, or a cat, or a pony, as circumstances direct. We cannot be
coarse enough to imagine him with cropped hair, and muddy boots, and a
torn jacket, and a hole in his stocking, like so many, many real little
boys who daily break their mothers’ hearts by their profound neglect of
appearances. He is so ready in conversation, too, and pays such charming
compliments to pretty young ladies, instead of hustling into corners and
staring owlishly, after the fashion of those awkward little boys I know.
And he is so very, very good! Not consciously and morbidly virtuous like
that baby prig, Little Saint Elizabeth, who comes from the same hands,
but artlessly and inevitably correct. He gives all his money to pay poor
Michael’s rent, and we rejoice rightly in his generosity, with only one
wistful recollection of that vastly different specimen of boyhood, for
whose misdeeds Mr. Aldrich is responsible, and who spends his funds
gloriously in indigestible treats to his friends. It is very charming
in Lord Fauntleroy to offer his eager plea in behalf of the farmer
Higgins, and probably just what any warm-hearted child would have done
in his place; but we cannot but contrast his wonderful unconsciousness
afterward, “not realizing his own importance in the least,” with the
familiar figure of little Paul Dombey strutting up and down the room
at Brighton, full of the new-blown dignity of being a financier, and
lending young Gay the money for his uncle. It would take the sternest
of moralists to object to Paul’s infantile strut; it would take the most
trusting of sentimentalists to believe that Cedric is quite as innocently
unconscious as he seems.
There is a remarkably nice little girl in that pleasant English novel,
published a few years ago, _Sir Charles Danvers_—a little girl who can
be safely recommended to all child-lovers, who will only wish they could
hear a great deal more about her. Molly Danvers is not particularly
precocious; she is not at all supersensitive, and we are not even told
that she is pretty. There is absolutely no inventory given of her
personal charms; and as to her clothes, “a white frock and two slim black
legs” are casually mentioned on her first introduction, and we never hear
another word about them. “A white frock and two slim black legs!” Could
any description be more meagre? Imagine Little Saint Elizabeth, or Sara
Crewe, reduced ruthlessly to a white frock, and not another allusion
to their wardrobes in the whole course of their histories. But Molly
doesn’t care. I have a suspicion that her white frocks don’t stay white
very long, and that her slim black legs are better distinguished for
activity than for grace. She is anything but heroic, and runs fleetly
away from danger, leaving both her cousin and her donkey to their fate;
but she has a loving little heart, nevertheless, and when her terrier
dies, this heart is as nearly broken as a healthy little girl’s can be.
“‘He is _dead_, Uncle Charles. He was quite well, and eating
Albert biscuits with the dolls this morning, and now’—the rest
was too dreadful, and Molly burst into a flood of tears, and
burrowed with her head against the faithful waistcoat of Uncle
Charles—of Uncle Charles, the friend, the consoler of all the
ills that Molly had so far been heir to.
“‘Vic had a very happy life, Molly,’ said Charles, pressing the
little brown head against his cheek, and vaguely wondering what
it would be like to have any one to turn to in time of trouble.
“‘I always kept trouble from him except that time I shut him in
the door,’ gasped Molly. ‘I never took him out in a string, and
he only wore his collar—that collar you gave him that made him
scratch so—on Sundays.’
“‘And he was not ill a long time? He did not suffer any pain?’
“‘No, Uncle Charles, not much. But, though he did not say
anything, his face looked worse than screaming, and he passed
away very stiff in his hind-legs. Oh!’ (with a fresh outburst)
‘when cook told me that her sister that was in a decline had
gone, I never thought’ (sob, sob!) ‘poor Vic would be the
next.’”
This is not the less heartrending for being amusing, and that short
sentence “his face looked worse than screaming” is a master-stroke of
realistic description. On the whole, for ordinary family purposes, Molly
Danvers is one of the nicest little girls I know; and if we seek—as many
people rightly seek—for the poetry, the beauty of childhood, subtly
transferred to paper, let us turn back a few years, and re-read for
the fifth or the fiftieth time, as it chances, those seven delicious
chapters of _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, which describe a single day in the
lives of the three babies, René Jean, Gros Alain, and Georgette. How many
hours must Victor Hugo have watched patiently and gladly the ways of
little children before he could paint them with such minute and charming
truth, and what sheer delight is embodied in every line! They do nothing
remarkable, these tiny French peasants; they say nothing worth noting;
they are clothed in rags; they are alone all day; they are mischievous,
healthy, and natural. They hang enchanted, all three, over a wood-louse,
their curls touching, their breath suspended, their eyes fixed on the
embarrassed insect: and we watch them with a joy and wonder equal to
their own. “It is a she-creature,” announces René Jean, and Georgette
laughs, Georgette who, at twenty months, has not yet acquired the art of
conversation. She utters a single word from time to time, but sentences
lie beyond her scope. She is occupied with grave thoughts, and when she
breathes a soft monosyllable, her brothers pause encouragingly to listen.
A belated bee comes buzzing in the window and departs.
“‘She is going home,’ said René Jean.
“‘It is a beast,’ said Gros Alain. ‘No,’ said René Jean, ‘it is
a fly.’ ‘A f’y,’ said Georgette.”
This is the extent of their conversational powers, and how very limited
it seems. They do not talk, these babies; they act. They lay their
destructive hands on the rare old folio of _Saint Bartholomew_, and
tear out the leaves one by one, solemnly, innocently, conscientiously.
Georgette, who cannot reach the volume, sits on the floor, and tears each
leaf into little pieces with painstaking amiability; and all three are
so happy over their self-appointed task. By the side of their absolute
unconsciousness, the Willie Winkies and Lord Fauntleroys of romance grow
suddenly Utopian and unreal. The chivalry, honor, generosity, loyalty,
picturesqueness, and brilliancy, all the story-book virtues of story-book
children, seem less winning and less dear than the birdlike contentment
of three silent, sleepy little creatures, curled softly together, and
painted by a master’s hand.
THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS
It is a curious fact that three of the most successful and eminent
literary women in England—Miss Austen, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss
Mitford—should have been typical old maids; not merely unmarried through
stress of intervening circumstances—ill health, early disappointment,
or a self-sacrificing devotion to other cares—but women whose lives
were rounded and completed without that element which we are taught to
believe is the main-spring and prime motor of existence. To understand
how thoroughly this was the case, we have but to turn to a later and
very different writer, Charlotte Brontë, who married when she was
thirty-eight, and died one year afterward, and whose whole literary
life was accordingly passed in spinsterhood. Yet if that very grave and
respectable gentleman, the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, had never appeared upon
the scene at all, it would have been impossible to call Miss Brontë a
typical old maid. She had the outward signs of one, indeed, the prim
demeanor, the methodical habits, the sarcastic attitude toward the male
sex; but burning in every fibre of her being, and evident in every page
of her writings, is that fierce unrest, that inarticulate, distressful
longing of a woman who craves love. We can easily imagine Elizabeth
Bennet, and the very sensible Elinor Dashwood, and even Emma Woodhouse,
dearest and brightest of girls, slipping from their lovers’ grasp and
growing into old maids as charming as was Miss Austen herself; but poor
plain Jane Eyre, and that reticent little school-teacher, Lucy Snowe, are
shaken and consumed with the passion of their own desires. Such women
cannot walk from the cradle to the grave, handling their lives with
delicate satisfaction and content; they must find what they need or die.
It is amusing to note how the various critics and biographers of Miss
Austen, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Mitford have debated and fretted
over the painful lack of romance in their careers. Feminine critics,
especially, find it difficult to believe that there is no hidden tale to
tell, no secret and justifiable cause for this otherwise inexplicable
behavior; and much time and patience have been exhausted in dragging
shadowy memories to light. In the case of Miss Mitford, indeed, it
seems quite hopeless to search for even the ghost of a love-story, and,
although she certainly did devote her life with touching unselfishness to
the comfort and support of a very exacting father, it cannot for a moment
be urged that, in so doing, she relinquished any distinct desire or
prospect of matrimony. Perhaps the exasperating qualities of her parent
inclined her unconsciously to remain single; for, with all her unsparing
devotion, she must, in the course of sorely tried years, have grown to
regard men very much as Dolly Winthrop regarded them,—“in the light of
animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome.” Mr.
Mitford, a most genial and handsome old gentleman of the Turveydrop
pattern, managed to keep his daughter’s hands full of work, and her
heart full of love, and left her little chance or disposition for any
wandering fancies. All the exuberant affection of her girlhood, all the
mature attachment of later years, were concentrated upon him alone.
Her youth waned, her freshness faded, her indomitable courage and
cheerfulness quailed a little before the ever-increasing burdens of her
life; but through it all, in joy and sorrow, no shadow of a suitor stands
beckoning by her side. Her serene old age was haunted by no dim voices
crying out of the past for the joy which had slipped from her grasp. She
wrote love-stories by the score, always approaching the subject from the
outside, and treating it with the easy conventionality, the generous yet
imperfect sympathy of a warm-hearted woman not prone to analyze motives.
They are very pleasant stories for the most part, sensible, healthy,
and happy; but they are not convincing. The reader feels that if Polly
did not marry Joe she would be just as well satisfied with William, and
that if Edwin failed to win Angelina he would soon content himself with
Dorothy. This is a comfortable state of affairs, and doubtless true
to life; but it is not precisely the element which makes a successful
love-tale. The fact is, Miss Mitford described things pretty much as she
found them, not seeking to dive below the surface, and always adding a
little sunshine of her own. She was a happy woman, save for some sad
years of overwork, and her life was full of pleasant detail, of cherished
duties, and of felicitous labor; but, from first to last, love had no
part in it, and, fancy free, she never reckoned of her loss.
Miss Edgeworth, too, seems to have been lifted from the sphere of
matrimony by the unusual strength of her family affections. Her devotion
to her father, to her two stepmothers, and to her nineteen brothers and
sisters was of such an absorbing nature as to leave her little leisure or
inclination for mere matters of sentiment. She was so busy too, so full
of pleasant cares, and successful work, and a thousand-and-one delightful
interests; above all, she clung so fondly to her home, and country,
and the familiar faces she had known from baby-hood, that love had no
chance to storm her well-defended walls. When that handsome and earnest
young Swede, he of the “superior understanding and mild manners,” came
to woo, he found, alas! that the lady could not tear her heart away from
Ireland and her beautiful young stepsisters to give it to his keeping.
She acknowledged his merits, both his mildness and his superiority, she
liked and admired him in every way; but marry and go to Sweden!—that she
would not do, either for M. Edelcrantz or any other man. Mrs. Edgeworth,
who was distinctly sentimental, and who would have been delighted to see
her clever stepdaughter happily wedded, says quite touchingly that Maria
was mistaken in the strength of her own feelings; that she really loved
M. Edelcrantz, but refused to marry him because her family could not bear
to part with her, because “she would not have suited his position at the
court of Stockholm,” and because she feared her lack of beauty would one
day lessen his regard. Shadow of shadows! Was there ever a woman who
declined to marry the man she truly loved for such cloud-built reasoning
as this! Maria was doubtless the darling of her own home circle, and
would have been sorely missed had she winged her flight to Sweden; but
there were daughters enough in that overflowing household to admit of
one being spared. As for the other obstacles, it is hardly possible that
they should have been urged seriously by a woman as free from morbid
sentiment as was Miss Edgeworth. There is a sweet humility which is
born of love, and which whispers to most women—and, probably, to some
men—that they are unworthy of the choice which has fallen upon them, of
the jewel which has been flung at their feet. But to push this delicate
emotion so far as to sacrifice happiness at its bidding is not the
impulse of a sound and healthy nature. Miss Edgeworth could never have
been pretty, and had spent most of her life in retirement; but she was by
no means unacquainted with the ways of the world, by no means destitute
of womanly charms, and, above all, by no means without the exhilarating
consciousness of success. In fact, when we read her biography, we are
principally impressed by the amount of adulation she received, by the
extraordinary enthusiasm her pleasant tales aroused. The struggling
novelist is tempted to wish that he also might have lived in those
halcyon days, until he remembers that a far greater writer, Miss Austen,
had no share in this universal and unbounded applause. Miss Edgeworth
was as much the pet of the literary world as of her own household and
friends. She had little need to doubt her powers, or to fear neglect
and indifference. If she really regretted poor M. Edelcrantz—who went
back to Sweden with a sore heart and never married anybody else—she gave
no outward token of repentance, but lived to be eighty-two, the most
cheerful and radiant of old maids, faithful to the last to her family
affections, and happy to die in the midst of those who had made the
sunshine of her life.
It is in the case of Miss Austen, however, that truly strenuous efforts
have been made to cultivate a passable romance upon scanty soil. Miss
Austen was pretty, she was gay, she possessed an indefinable attraction
for men, and she was in turn attracted by them, as a healthy-minded,
happy-hearted girl should be. Her letters to Cassandra are full of
amusing confidences on the subject—confidences far too amusing, in fact,
to give any sign or token of genuine feeling beyond. She writes with
buoyant cheerfulness about Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom she “does not care
sixpence,” yet prefers him to all other competitors, who must have ranked
pitiably low in the scale. “I am almost afraid,” she confesses, “to tell
you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything
most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down
together. I _can_ expose myself, however, _only once more_, because he
leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we _are_ to have
a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking,
pleasant young man, I assure you.”
Not without grave faults, though, it would seem, for a little later
we hear of a morning coat which is much too light to please Jane’s
critical eye. She cannot possibly give her maiden affections to a man
who would wear such a coat, and so, after a while, he disappears from
her pages and her life, to go out into the world, and win much legal
renown, and be Chief Justice of Ireland, and always to remember with
great tenderness the gay young girl at Ashe. Then there appears on the
scene that unnamed friend of Mrs. Lefroy’s, whose love is so sudden and
fervent that Miss Austen feels quite sure it will soon decline into
“sensible indifference,” as, no doubt, it does. Then the suitor who has
“the recommendation of good character, and a good position in life, of
everything in fact except the subtle power of touching my heart”—which
seems to have been the real difficulty with them all. Sir Francis Doyle,
indeed, tells a very pretty and pathetic tale of Jane Austen’s engagement
to a naval officer who, after the peace of 1820, accompanied his
_fiancée_ and her family to Switzerland. Here he started off on foot one
fine morning, promising to meet his friends at Chamouni. He never came,
and they waited and waited with fast-growing fears, only to learn, when
all was over, that the young man had been seized with a sudden fever, and
had died, unknown and scantily cared for, in some poor cottage home. It
is a sad story, but happily does not rest upon any shadow of foundation.
Miss Austen never was engaged, and never was in Switzerland; and although
Sir Francis had the tale from a friend, who had it from a member of
the family, it merely goes to prove that even relatives are not wholly
incapable of weaving romances out of thin air, rather than be, like the
knife-grinder, without a tale to tell.
Mrs. Malden, Jane Austen’s enthusiastic biographer, discredits most
unhesitatingly this particular love-legend, while at the same time she
manifests a lively desire to give form and color to another, scarcely
less intangible. The third chapter in her little volume is enticingly
headed “Her Life’s One Romance,” and in it is narrated at some length the
story of an attractive young clergyman whom Jane and Cassandra Austen
met one summer at a seaside resort in Devonshire. He openly admired the
younger girl, and, when they parted, “impressed strongly on the sisters
his intention of meeting them again.” He died, however, shortly after,
and Jane neither gave any outward token of grief, nor indulged in any
confidences on the subject. Nevertheless, Cassandra, whose own youth
was shadowed by the blight of a lost love, was wont to say, after her
sister’s death, that she believed this to have been her one and only
romance; and Miss Thackeray, in her sympathetic sketch of Miss Austen,
alludes very sweetly and very confidently to the tale.
“Here, too,” she says, “is another sorrowful story. The sisters’ fate
(there is a sad coincidence and similarity in it) was to be undivided;
their life, their experience, was the same. Some one without a name takes
leave of Jane one day, promising to come back. He never comes back: long
afterwards they hear of his death. The story seems even sadder than
Cassandra’s in its silence and uncertainty, for silence and uncertainty
are death in life to some people.”
But if there is one thing more than another to be avoided and ruthlessly
condemned, it is this quiet assumption that a woman has parted with her
heart, when she herself has breathed no word to warrant it. The cheerful
serenity of Jane Austen’s daily life showed no ripple of storm, her lips
told no tale; and why are we to assume that a young man whom she met
for a few idle weeks and never saw again had broken down the barriers
of that self-possessed nature, had overcome the gay indifference which
showed no signs of hurt? As for the popular theory that Anne Elliot’s
gentle enduring love and poor Fanny Price’s hours of bravely borne pain
were imaged from the depth of their author’s experience, we have but to
remember that the same hand gave us Harriet Smith, with her fluctuating,
lightly won affections, and Charlotte Collins, sensible and happy,
enjoying her pleasant home, and enduring—or avoiding—her solemn, pompous,
servile, stupid husband. As well connect one type as another with the
genius that revealed them all.
“Of Jane herself I know no definite love-tale to relate,” says her nephew
and biographer, Mr. Austen Leigh; and this seems about the conclusion of
the matter. “No _man’s_ life could be more entirely free from sentiment,”
admits, very reluctantly, one of her cleverest critics. “If love be a
woman’s chief business, here is a very sweet woman who had no share in
it. It is a want, but we have no right to complain, seeing that she did
not shape her course to please us.”
This is a generous reflection on the critic’s part; but is the want so
painfully apparent as he thinks, or may we not be well content with Jane
Austen as we have her, the central figure of a little loving family
group, the dearest of daughters and sisters, the gayest and brightest of
aunts, the most charming and incomparable of old maids?
THE CHARM OF THE FAMILIAR
Those persons are happiest in this restless and mutable world who are in
love with change, who delight in what is new simply because it differs
from what is old; who rejoice in every innovation, and find a strange
alert pleasure in all that is, and that has never been before. With
little things as with big ones, this sentiment is the sentiment of our
day. “Unrest,” says Schopenhauer, “is the mark of existence,” and the
many trifling details of ordinary life evince on every side the same
keen relish for novelty, the same careless disregard of the familiar.
Especially is this the case with women, who feel less wistfully than men
the subtle charm of association, and who have less sympathy than men for
the dear, faulty, unlovely, well-loved things of their youth. No woman
could have written those pathetic lines of Mr. Lang’s on St. Andrews:
“A little city, worn and gray,”
the memory of whose rainwashed, desolate streets blots out from his mind
all the beauty and the splendor of Oxford. And—to descend from serious to
frivolous subjects—no woman can wholly appreciate that pleasant sketch of
Mr. Barrie’s, called “My Tobacco Pouch,” which reveals a mental condition
absolutely inexplicable to the most astute feminine apprehension. It
is the instinctive desire of our sex for modernism that keeps rolling
the great ball of trade. Manufacturers and shopkeepers would starve in
common if they catered only to men, who not infrequently have a marked
preference for the archaic. But women, to use the words of Sir Thomas
Browne, are “complexionally propense to innovation.” With wonderful
pliancy and adaptability they fit easily into new surroundings, make
homes out of new houses, fill their rooms with new objects, and grasp
a fair share of happiness in the enjoyment of novelty in every form,
whether of fashion, art, literature, religion or philanthropy.
But what of the unfortunate few who, through some strange moral twist,
are “complexionally propense” to sameness; who feel a passionate regret
for what has been lost, and a passionate reluctance to part with what is
fast slipping away; and who, as the great world rolls relentlessly on its
appointed course, find themselves “forever broken on the wheel of time”?
The journal of that stout old Tory, Sir Francis Doyle, betrays a strong
dislike, not only for political upheavals, which are very uncomfortable
and disturbing things, but for innovations of any kind. “Nothing can
be so good as what is old,” says Mr. Lang; and Mr. Peacock tranquilly
declares that all the really valuable opinions have been uttered a
thousand years ago. Amid the noisy blare with which the trumpets of
progress herald every move, comes thrilling now and then a note of
protest from some malcontent who does not part so easily with the past,
and for whom familiarity lends to every detail of life a merit and beauty
of its own. It almost seems as if two-thirds of mankind were hard at work
improving away the happiness of the remaining third, and bidding them at
intervals to stop grumbling and appreciate the change.