Читать книгу Heroines Of Fiction - William Dean Howells - Страница 30

In an earlier age of fiction, if not of society, the folly of Marianne would have meant her ruin; but in the wiser and milder aesthetics of Jane Austen it meant merely her present heartbreak, with her final happiness through a worthier love. Hers is a very simple nature, studied with a simpler art than such an intricate character as Emma's. She has only at all times to be herself, responsive to her mainspring of emotionality; and a girl like Emma has apparently to be different people at different times, in obedience to inconsistent and unexpected impulses. She is therefore perhaps the greatest of Jane Austen's creations, and certainly the most modern; yet even so slight and elemental a character as Marianne is handled with the security and mastery, which were sometimes greater and sometimes less in the author's work.

"Persuasion," which was the latest of her novels, is in places the poorest, and "Sense and Sensibility," which is, on the whole, the poorest, has moments of being the greatest. There is no such meanness portrayed in all fiction as John Dashwood's, and yet you are made to feel that he would like not to be mean if only he could once rise above himself. In Marianne and her mother, who are such a pair of emotional simpletons, there are traits of generosity that almost redeem their folly, and their limitations in the direction of silliness are as distinctly shown as their excesses. Willoughby himself, who lives to realize that he has never loved anyone but Marianne, and has been given to understand by the relation who leaves her money away from him, "that if he had behaved with honor towards Marianne, he might at once have been happy and rich',' even he is not committed wholesale to unavailing regret. "That his repentance of misconduct, which thus brought its own punishment, was sincere, need not be doubted. . . . But that he was forever inconsolable—that he fled from society, or contracted a habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart—must not be depended upon, for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humor, nor his house always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity."

It was not Jane Austen's way to do anything wholesale; she was far too well acquainted with life, and of too sensitive an artistic conscience for that; and especially in "Mansfield Park" is one aware of the hand that is held from overdoing. As in "Sense and Sensibility," and in fact all her other novels, the subordinate characters are of delightful verity and vitality. Mrs. Norris is of a meanness which in its sort may almost match with John Dashwood's, and Lady Bertram's indolent affections and principles form a personality of almost unique charm. These sisters of Mrs. Price who made an unhappy love marriage beneath her, are of the same quality as she, and their differentiation by environment is one of the subtle triumphs of the author's art.

It is by the same skill that a character so prevalently passive as that of sweet Fanny Price is made insensibly to take and gently to keep the hold of a heroine upon the reader. It would have been so easy in so many ways to overdo her. But she is never once overdone, either when as a child she meets with the cold welcome of charity in her uncle's family, where she afterwards makes herself indispensable, or in her return to her childhood home, which has forgotten her in her long absence. It is not pretended that she is treated by her cousins and her aunts with active unkindness, and she suffers none of the crueler snubbing which cheaply wins a heroine the heart of the witness. When she goes back to Portsmouth on that famous visit, after nine years at Mansfield Park, it is not concealed that she is ashamed of her home, of her weak and slattern mother, of her drinky, smoky, and sweary father, of her rude little brothers and sisters, of the whole shabby and vulgar household. None of the younger children remember her; her father and mother, from moment to moment, in their preoccupation with her brother, who comes with her to get his ship at Portsmouth (we are again among naval people), fail to remember her. All the circumstances are conducive to disgust and resentment in a girl who might reasonably have expected to be a distinguished guest for a while at least. But once more that delicately discriminating hand of Jane Austen does its work; it presently appears that the Price household is not so altogether impossible, and that a girl who wishes to be of use to others is not condemned to lasting misery and disgrace in any circumstances. Always the humorous sense of limitations comes in, but the human sense of good-will is there; the recognition of the effect of good-will is distinct but not elaborate. There is more philosophizing and satirizing than would be present in a more recent novel of equal mastery; but the characterization is as net as in the highest art of any time.

Sweet Fanny Price goes back to Mansfield Park with almost as little notice from her family as when she came to Portsmouth; but she has done them good, and is the better and stronger for her unrequited self-devotion. It is not pretended that she takes any active part in supporting the family at Mansfield Park under the disgrace which has befallen them through the elopement of one daughter to be divorced and of another to be married. Her function is best suggested by the exclamation with which her aunt Bertram falls upon her neck, "Dear Fanny, now I shall be comfortable." To be a comfort, that has always been Fanny Price's rare privilege, and she imparts to the reader something of the consolation she brings to all the people in the story who need the help of her sympathy. Possibly there was never a heroine, except Anne Eliot, who was so passive, without being spectacularly passive, if it is permitted so to phrase the rather intangible fact; and yet who so endeared herself to the fancy.

One is not passionately in love with Fanny Price, as one is with some heroines; one is quite willing Edward Bertram should have her in the end; but she is one of the sweetest and dearest girls in the world, though these words, too, rather oversay her. She is another proof of Jane Austen's constant courage, which was also her constant wisdom, in being true to life. It is not only wit like Elizabeth Bennet's, sensibility like Marianne Dashwood's, complexity like Emma Woodhouse's, or utter innocence like Catharine Morland's that is charming. Goodness is charming, patience, usefulness, forbearance, meekness, are charming, as Jane Austen divined in such contrasting types as Fanny Price and Anne Eliot. If any young lady has a mind to be like them, she can learn how in two of the most interesting books in the world.

Some of the old English novels were amazing successes even when compared with the most worthless novels of recent days. "Pamela," and "Clarissa," and "Sir Charles Grandison" were read all over the Continent. The "Vicar of Wakefield" was the gospel of a new art to Germany, where Goethe said that it permanently influenced his character. "Evelina" and "Cecilia" were the passions of people of taste everywhere, and when their trembling author was presented to Louis XVIII. in Paris, he complimented her upon her novels, which were known also to the first Napoleon. No such glories attended Jane Austen in her lifetime. She found with difficulty a publisher for her greatest book, and a public quite as slow and reluctant. But her publishers and her public have been increasing ever since, and they were never so numerous as now. Whether they will ever be fewer, it would be useless to ask; what we know without asking, from the evidence of her work, is that in the real qualities of greatness she is still the most actual of all her contemporaries, of nearly all her successors.