Читать книгу Heroines Of Fiction - William Dean Howells - Страница 36

So far as any man may he said to invent anything, Walter Scott invented the historical novel. His fiction drew upon the life of the past for characters and events, which he colored and shaped and posed to serve the ends of a fancied scheme. Historical personages had been used before his time, as in those monstrous and tedious fables classified in the annals of fiction as the heroical romances. Many Asian and African princes, wondrously translated, figure in the illimitable pages of Gomberville, Calprenade, and Scuderi; the rival families of Granada, after valiant service in the supposititious Spanish chronicles, were made to amuse the vast leisure of the ladies and gentlemen of Louis XIV. 's court by the same authors. But these authors took liberties with the originals of their creations such as Scott never allowed himself. He did not mind forcing a civilization in the hot-bed of his fancy, or transposing the peculiarities of one epoch to another; but he kept a fairly good conscience as to personality, and his historical characters realize in reasonable measure the ideal of tradition, if not of veritable record.

His evolution as a historical novelist reveals the simplicity of his nature and the open-hearted directness of his aim so winningly that you love the man more and more, while you respect the artist less and less. It is not that in going from the desultory Scotch stories he began with to the English, Continental, and Oriental motives he ended with, he did not learn something more of form and effect. But what he gained in these, he lost in more vital things. He no longer wrote of what he knew and believed in, but what he studied and made-believe in. His earlier Scotch stories show his wish for truth to life, not only in the facts which he accumulates in prefaces and notes to attest the verity of the incidents, but in those finer things which the heart of the reader best corroborates. This wish was the principle of the realists whom he followed and surpassed in the popular favor, with a frank and generous shame for his triumph; but when he abandoned his native ground in the fear he so single-heartedly owns that his readers must get tired of his Scotch stories if he kept on with them, he did not perhaps abandon this principle, but he abandoned the best means of fulfilling it. He was a great literary force; he had got an immense creative impetus, and he could not help doing things that attracted and interested, but it must be confessed that he weakened more and more in the power of doing things that convinced. The early Scotch stories are those which his grown-up readers have not tired of; while all but boys and girls (and rather young boys and girls) have tired of the romances which he forsook them for. In these the characters degenerate into types, heroic, hollow, that resound with echoing verbiage, and personate one quality and tendency. This seems to me especially true of the women, or the types of women, who are what he makes them, not what he finds them. He clothes them in certain attributes, as he habits them in certain garments, and he appoints them certain ceremonial relations to the facts which are mostly outside of the real drama, or inessential to it. In " Ivanhoe " the action scarcely concerns either Rebecca or Rowena; the lovemaking, so far as there is any, is between Rebecca and Ivanhoe, and yet Ivanhoe placidly marries Rowena, with whom he has, to the reader's knowledge, not made love at all. In fiction women exist in the past, present, or future tenses, the infinitive, indicative, potential, or imperative moods of lovemaking; otherwise they do not exist at all, and no phantom of delight, masquerading in their clothes, suffices. Both Rowena and Rebecca might be left out of ''Ivanhoe," and the story would not be the poorer for their absence. Rowena, in fact, is a large, blond, calm nonentity, not only passionless, but traitless. Rebecca is conventionally filial, conventionally noble and pathetic; but she is without inconsistency, without variation, which are the soul of feminine identity, and she does not persuade us that she has any real business in the scene. Her moment of greatest vitality is that where she is imprisoned in the tower of Front-de-Boeuf's castle, and reports to her fellow-captive, the wounded Ivanhoe, the events of the assault as they pass under her eye around the beleaguered walls. I do not know whether this is accounted a scene of uncommon power by the critics or not, but it seems to me so.

"'And I must lie here like a bedridden monk', exclaimed Ivanhoe, 'while the game that gives me freedom or death is played out by others! Look from the window once again, kind maiden, but beware that you are not marked by the archers beneath. . . . What dost thou see, Rebecca?' 'Nothing but the cloud of arrows that fly so thick as to dazzle mine eyes, and to hide the bowmen who shoot them.' 'That cannot endure,' cried Ivanhoe. ' If they press not right on to carry the castle by pure force of arms, the archery may avail but little against stone walls and bulwarks.' . . . She turned her head from the lattice as if unable longer to endure a sight so terrible. 'Look forth again, Rebecca,' said Ivanhoe, mistaking the cause of her retiring. . . . ' There is now less danger.' Rebecca again looked forth and almost immediately exclaimed, ' Holy prophets of the law! Front-de-Boeuf and the Black Knight fight hand to hand in the breach, amid the roar of their followers, who watch the progress of the strife with the cause of the oppressed and of the captive!' She then uttered a loud shriek, and exclaimed, 'He is down!—he is down!' 'Who is down?' cried Ivanhoe. 'For our dear Lady's sake, tell me which has fallen.' 'The Black Knight,' answered Rebecca faintly; then instantly again shouted with joyful eagerness—'But no!—but no!—the name of the Lord of Hosts be blessed! —he is on foot again, and fights as if there were twenty men's strength in his single arm. His sword is broken he snatches an axe from a yeoman—he presses Front- de-Boeuf with blow on blow—the giant stoops and totters like an oak under the steel of the woodsman— he falls, he falls!' 'Front-de-Boeuf?' exclaimed Ivanhoe. 'Front-de-Boeuf!' answered the Jewess. 'The assailants have won the postern gate, have they not?' asked Ivanhoe. 'They have, they have,' exclaimed Rebecca, 'and they press the besieged hard upon the outer wall; some plant ladders, some swarm like bees, and endeavor to ascend upon the shoulders of each other —down go stones, beams, and trunks of trees. As they bear the wounded to the rear, fresh men supply their places in the assault. . . . The Black Knight approaches the postern with his huge axe—the thundering blows which he deals, you may hear them above all the din and shouts of the battle. Stones and beams are hailed down on the bold champion—he regards them no more than if they were thistle-down or feathers! . . . The postern gate shakes, it crashes, it is splintered by his blows—they rush in—the outwork is gone—Oh, Bod!—they hurl the defenders from the battlements— they throw them into the moat—Oh, men, if ye be men indeed, spare them that can resist no longer! . . Our friends strengthen themselves within the outwork which they have mastered; and it affords them so good a shelter from the foeman's shot, that the garrison only bestow a few bolts on it from interval to interval, as if rather to disquiet, than effectually to injure them.' "