Heroines Of Fiction. William Dean Howells
in an apparently inexhaustible knowledge of the London world.
What this world was, how dissipated, unprincipled, brutal, reckless, steeped in debt and drink, has never been more frankly shown. The moral is always present in the picture, and it is too often applied with inartistic directness, but it is not always so applied. There are abundant moments of pure drama, when the character is expressed in the action; and though much of the motive that ought to be seen is stated, still enough of it is seen to constitute the story a work of art. The author proves herself in all her books an aesthetic force; she was perverted in her artistic instincts by false ideals of duty; but she knew human nature, and when she would allow herself to do so she could represent life with masterly power. She does not get Belinda fully before the reader without many needless devices to deepen the intrigue, and many tiresome lectures to enforce the lesson, but she does give at last the full sense of a beautiful girl who gains rather than loses in delightfulness by growing wiser and better. Discreet Belinda has always been, but at first, she is discreet for herself only; and at last she is wise for others as well. A fair half of the book might be thrown away with the effect of twice enriching what was left; perhaps two-thirds might be parted with to advantage; certainly all that does not relate to Belinda's friendship with Lady Delacour and her love for Clarence Harvey would not be missed by the reader who likes art better than artifice, and prefers to make his own applications of the facts. The friendship between Belinda and Lady Delacour is more important than the love between Belinda and Clarence; but if the story were reduced to the truly wonderful study of Lady Delacour's passionate and distorted nature, she and not Belinda would be the heroine of " Belinda.'' As it is, it is she who has the greater fascination for the experienced witness, and for any student of womanhood the dramatic portrayal of her jealousy must appeal as a masterpiece almost unique in that sort.
IV
The domestic situation in Lady Delacour's household is promptly developed through the mysterious contradictions that cloud her conduct: the wild gayety, the listless melancholy, the moody despair. "For some days after Belinda's arrival in town she heard nothing of Lord Delacour; his lady never mentioned his name except once accidentally, as she was showing Miss Portman the house. . . . The first time Belinda ever saw his Lordship, he was dead drunk in the arms of two footmen who were carrying him up-stairs to his bedroom; his lady, who was just returned from Ranelagh, passed him by on the landing-place with a look of sovereign contempt. 'What is the matter? Who is this?' said Belinda. 'Only the body of Lord Delacour,' said her ladyship. . . . 'Don't look so shocked and amazed, Belinda; don't look so new, child; this funeral of my lord's intellects is to me a nightly, or,' added her ladyship, looking at her watch and yawning, ' I believe I should say, a daily ceremony—six o'clock, I protest!' The next morning . . . after a very late breakfast. Lord Delacour entered the room. ' Lord Delacour, sober, my dear,' said her ladyship to Miss Portman, by way of introducing him."
The cat-and-dog life which this couple lead is very unreservedly portrayed, and Belinda is so far deceived as not to suppose that they can be in love with each other, in spite of all. My lord's days and nights are given to debauchery, his lady's to the wildest dissipation at balls and routs (one faintly imagines what a rout was!) and gay parties at those public resorts which were once so much the fashion in London, or at least in London novels, where from Vauxhall to Ranelagh, from Ranelagh to the Pantheon, from the Pantheon to Almack's, there is a perpetual glitter of their misleading lights.
On leaving the masquerade where Belinda has overheard that killing talk about herself among the young men of her circle, she repeats it in an anguish of shame to her friend, as they drive away from Lady Singleton's to the Pantheon, in their respective disguises of the tragic and the comic muse. '"And is this all?' cried Lady Delacour. ' Lord, my dear, you must either give up living in the world or expect to hear yourself, and your aunts, and your cousins, and your friends, from generation to generation, abused every hour in the day by their friends and your friends; 'tis the common course of things. Now you know what a multitude of obedient servants, dear creatures, and very sincere and most affectionate friends I have. ... Do you think I'm fool enough to imagine that they would care the hundredth part of a straw if I were this minute thrown into the Red or the Black Sea?' . . . The carriage stopped at the Pantheon. ... To Belinda the night appeared long and dull; the commonplace wit of chimneysweepers and gypsies; the antics of harlequins; the graces of flower-girls and Cleopatras had not power to amuse her; for her thoughts still recurred to that conversation which had given her so much pain. . . . 'How happy you are, Lady Delacour,' said she, when they got into the carriage to go home, . . . 'to have such an amazing flow of spirits!' 'Amazing you might well say, if you knew all,' said Lady Delacour, and she heaved a deep sigh, threw herself back in the carriage, let fall her mask, and was silent. It was broad daylight, and Belinda had a full view of her countenance, which was a picture of despair. . . . Her ladyship started up and exclaimed, 'If I had served myself with half the zeal I have served the world I should not now be thus forsaken. . . . But it is all over now. I am dying.' . . . Belinda . . . gazed at Lady Delacour, and repeated the word, ' Dying!' ' I tell you I am dying,' said her ladyship."
At home she bade Belinda " follow her to her dressing room. . . . Come in; what is it you are afraid of?' said she. Belinda went in, and Lady Delacour shut and locked the door. There was no light except what came from the candle which Lady Delacour held in her hand. . . . Belinda, as she looked around, saw nothing but a confusion of linen rags; vials, some empty, some full, and she perceived there was a strong smell of medicines. Lady Delacour . . . looked from side to side of the room without seeming to know what she was in search of. She then, in a species of fury, wiped the paint from her face, and returning to Belinda, held the candle so as to throw the light full on her livid features . . . which formed a horrid contrast with her gay, fantastic dress. 'You are shocked, Belinda,' said she, ' but as yet you have seen nothing— look here'—baring half her bosom. . . . Belinda sunk back into a chair; Lady Delacour flung herself on her knees before her. ' Am I humbled, am I wretched enough?"'
The story of Belinda's friendship for the miserable woman from this moment on is imagined with a knowledge of human nature and a divination of its nobler possibilities worthy of Tolstoy, though it is wrought with an art indefinitely more fallible. Miss Edgeworth was not only in herself very inconstantly an artist, but, as is well known, she subordinated her judgment to that of her honored father, whom she allowed to meddle with her work, and mar it in the cause of good morals as much as he would. It is but fair to lay to the charge of her well-willing, ill-witting parent at least half of the crude and clumsy didacticism with which Belinda's fine nature is unfolded in her efforts to serve and to save Lady Delacour; but perhaps the crude and clumsy mechanism of the affair is all Miss Edgeworth's own. We may easily grant this, and still in the dramatic moments find enough evidence of her power to prove her a great artist.
Lady Delacour, of course, believes that she has a cancer, and she has put herself in the hands of a quack who preys upon her fears. Her secret is known only to her waiting-woman, till she herself betrays it to Belinda, whom she binds to her by the most solemn vows of silence. But the girl can find no peace till she has got Lady Delacour's leave to speak of it to a physician (who is, of course, Edgeworthianly over-wise and over-good); and as Belinda has not lived for several weeks under the roof of Lord Delacour without surprising in him some traits of kindness for his wife, she wins Lady Delacour's consent to let him know that some great calamity is threatening her. Belinda sets herself with all her innate discreetness to make them friends, but she does not, discreet as she is, manage this without rousing the jealousy of Lady Delacour, which finds food in her returning love for her husband. Seeing Belinda and Lord Delacour on such increasingly good terms in her interest, she can only believe that they wish to be on better in their own as soon as she is out of the way. As the story was always to end well, however, the cancer proves no cancer, and is cured with very slight scientific attention; Lady Delacour is reconciled to her husband without losing her friend, and Belinda is duly married to Clarence Harvey, whom she has been in love with from the beginning.
Such a meagre résumé of merely one order of its events does no justice to the many-sided interest of the novel, and its rich abundance of characterization, which sometimes accuses itself of caricature, but which probably embodies a presentation of fashionable life at the beginning of our century faithfuller than it can now appear. Still, the jealousy