Читать книгу Heroines Of Fiction - William Dean Howells - Страница 13

The scene in the ballroom, where Evelina becomes the prey of the tease whom she has not meant to deceive harmfully, is one of many in which Sir Clement Willoughby pursues and torments her. He begins by teasing her, and ends by loving her, but he never imagines marrying her. That is reserved for Lord Orville, who thought her rather a poor thing at first, but comes more and more to feel her charm and realize her worth. She has not an instant's misgiving as to him. From the earliest moment she finds his "conversation really delightful. His manners are so elegant and so gentle, so unassuming that they engage esteem and diffuse complacence," quite as they would with Dr. Johnson, in whose diction Miss Burney upon this occasion speaks for her heroine. But in fact Lord Orville is a gentleman and not a prig, at a time when the choice between being a prig and being a blackguard was difficult for a young man in good society. It has been rather the custom of criticism to decry this hero, but he never shows himself unequal to his great office of appreciating Evelina. No matter what box she is m he divines that she got there for some reason that was honorable to her heart if not to her head.

It is with a fine courage that Miss Burney shows her heroine in her silliness as well as her sense, but she can do this without that suspicion of satirizing her sex which would attach to a writer of the other sex. In fact, one great charm of the story is that it is not satire at all. It is mostly light comedy; it is sometimes low comedy; it is at other times serious melodrama; but the lesson from it is never barbed, and the author's attitude towards her characters has never that sarcastic knowingness which has been the most odious vice of English novelists.