Chapter IV: Part 4

One more circumstance deserves to be noted as both familiar and consolatory. Napoleon’s most formidable purpose was to empty England’s purse by waging a commercial war. When he forbade her exports to the countries he fancied he controlled, he was promised implicit obedience. In March, 1801, Lord Minto wrote serenely to Lord Grenville: “The trade of England and the necessities of the Continent will find each other out in defiance of prohibitions. Not one of the confederates will be true to the gang, and I have little doubt of our trade penetrating into France itself, and thriving in Paris.”--Which it did.

The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times. The despairing tone of contemporary writers would seem to indicate that the allied nations that fought and won the Great War have fallen from some high pinnacle they never reached to an abysmal depth they have never sounded. When Dean Inge recorded in “The Contemporary Review” his personal conviction that the war had been “a ghastly and unnecessary blunder, which need not have happened, and ought not to have happened,” this casual statement was taken up and repeated on both sides of the Atlantic, after the exasperating fashion in which a Greek chorus takes up and repeats in strophe and antistrophe the most depressing sentiment of the play. And to what purpose? Did any sane man ever doubt that Austria’s brutal ultimatum to Serbia was a ghastly and unnecessary blunder? Did any sane man ever doubt that Germany’s invasion of Belgium was a ghastly and unnecessary blunder? But if Dean Inge or his sympathizers knew of any argument, save that of arms, by which the Central Powers could have been convinced that they were blundering, and persuaded to retrieve their blunder, so that what ought not to have happened need not have happened, it is a pity that this enlightenment was not vouchsafed to an imperilled world.

It is possible for two boys to build up a friendship on the basis of a clean fight. It is possible for two nations to build up a good understanding on the basis of a clean fight. The relations between Great Britain and South Africa constitute a case in point. Germany’s fighting was unclean from start to finish. Therefore, while there are many to feel commiseration for her, there are none to do her honour. The duration of the war has little to do with this strong sentiment of disesteem. Had it lasted four months instead of four years, the deeds done in Belgium and in France would have sterilized the seeds of friendship in the minds of all who remembered them. To an abnormal sense of superiority, Germany added an abnormal lack of humour, which made her regard all resistance as an unjustifiable and unpardonable affront. Her resentment that Belgians should have presumed to defend their country was like the resentment of that famous marauder, the Earl of Cassillis, when Allan Stewart refused to be tortured into signing away his patrimony. “You are the most obstinate man I ever saw to oblige me to use you thus,” said the justly indignant Earl. “I never thought to have treated any one as your stubbornness has made me treat you.”

The emotional ebb-tide which followed the signing of the armistice was too natural to be deplored, save that it gave to obstructionists their chance to decry the matchless heroisms of the war. No people can be heroic over the problem of paying debts out of an empty treasury. Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness. Bargaining is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process. If it were given to debtors to love their creditors, there would have been no persecution of the Jews. If it were given to creditors to love their debtors, there would be no poverty on earth. That all the nations, now presumably on friendly terms, should be following their own interests would seem to most of us the normal thing it is, if they did not so persistently affect to be amazed and grieved at one another’s behaviour, and if the mischief-makers of every land were not actively engaged in widening breaches into chasms.

It is inevitable and logical that the men who were pacifists when the word had a sinister meaning should heartily detest their countries’ allies who helped them win the war. The English “Nation and Athenæum” wrote of France in 1922 as it might have written--but did not--of Germany in 1914. Poincaré it likened to Shylock, France to a butcher eager for the shambles. “French militarism at work in the Rhineland is a lash to every evil passion.” “Europe is kept in social and political disorder by the sheer selfishness of France.” “There _was_ a France of the mind. Victory killed it, and a long slow renovation of the soul must precede its resurrection.”

Like the ingenuous Mr. Pepys, the “Nation” does “just naturally hate the French,” and takes it hard that the world should persistently regard them as a valuable asset to civilization. The concentrated nationalism which held Verdun now expresses itself in a steely resolution to hold France, and to recover for her out of the wreckage of Europe the material aid of which she stands in need. Coöperation is a good word and a good thing. To a Frenchman it means primarily the interest of his own country. What else does it mean to any of us? Britain’s policy of conciliation, our policy of aloofness, Germany’s bargaining, and Russia’s giant bluff, all have the same significance. “Be not deceived! Nothing is so dear to any creature as his profit,” said Epictetus, who, having stript his own soul bare of desires, was correspondingly ready to forgive the acquisitive instincts of others.

Mr. Edward Martin, writing very lucidly and very sympathetically of the French, admits that their conception of their duty to the world “is to defend France, keep her functioning, and make her powerful and prosperous.” It sounds narrow, and practical, and arrogant. It also sounds familiar. France feels herself to be intellectually and artistically a thing of value. The best service she can render to the world is her own preservation. How does America feel? The very week that Mr. Martin offered his interpretation of Gallic nationalism, a writer in the “Review of Reviews” (New York), after asserting with indescribable smugness that Americans “have been trained to an attitude of philanthropy hardly known in other countries,” proceeded to illustrate this attitude by defending high tariffs, restricted immigration, and other comforting pieces of legislation. “Our best service to the world,” he explained, “lies in maintaining our national life and character.”

This is just what France thinks, only her most zealous sons forbear to define prudence as philanthropy. They believe that the world is the better for what they have to give; but they know that it is not for the world’s sake that they so keenly desire to be in a position to give it. They are profoundly sentimental, but their sentiment is all for _la patrie_. Internationally they are practical to the point of hardness, and they see no reason why they should be otherwise. There is for them no pressing necessity to assume that they love their neighbours as themselves.

It is different with Americans in whom idealism and materialism dispute every inch of the ground. A Texan professor, sent by the American Peace Commission to investigate conditions in Germany, published in “The North American Review,” May, 1922, a paper on “American Ideals and Traditions,” which was widely quoted as embodying a clear and fervid spirit of hopefulness, much needed in these disillusioned days. The writer took the high ground that Americans were the first people in the world “to make the spirit of disinterested human service the measure of a nation as well as of a man. What is now termed American humanitarianism is but the American spirit of philanthropy at home, translated into international relations.” This “simple historical fact” is the key to all our actions. “The entrance of America into the Great War was not a species of interruption in the normal flow of its idealism; but was the irresistible on-pressing of the great current of our ‘will to human service.’”

One wonders if this particular idealist remembers what happened in Europe, in the United States, and on the high seas, between July, 1914, and April, 1917? Does he recall those thirty-two months, close-packed with incidents of such an order that their cumulative weight broke down our hardy resistance to “service,” and drove us slowly but splendidly into action? Great deeds are based on great emotions; but the conflicting emotions of that period are not accurately described as “irresistible.” The best of them were too long and too successfully resisted. We gain no clear impression of events by thinking in ornamental terms. Headlines are one thing, and history is another. “In judging others,” says Thomas à Kempis, “a man usually toileth in vain. For the most part he is mistaken, and he easily sinneth. But in judging and scrutinizing himself, he always laboureth with profit.”

The continued use of the word “entangling” is to be regretted. It arouses an excess of uneasiness in cautious souls. All alliances from marriage up--or down--must necessarily entangle. The anchorites of Thebais are the only examples we have of complete emancipation from human bonds. That simple and beautiful thing, minding our own affairs and leaving our neighbours to mind theirs, is unhappily not possible for allies. Neither is a keen and common desire for peace a sufficient basis for agreement. Peace must have terms, and terms require a basis of their own--justice, reason, and the limited gains which are based on mutual concessions. “Whether we are peaceful depends upon whether others are provocative.” Mr. W. H. Mallock tells us a pleasant story of an old Devonshire woman who was bidden by the parson to be “conciliating” to her husband. “I labour for peace, sir,” was the spirited reply. “But when I speak to he thereof, he directly makes hisself ready for battle.”

There are students of history who would have us believe that certain nations are natural allies, fitted by character and temperament to agree, and to add to one another’s pleasure and profit. Germany and Russia have been cited more than once as countries instinctively well disposed towards each other, because each supplements the other’s talents. Bismarck ranked the Germans as among the male, and the Slavs as among the female nations of the world. The driving power he rightfully assigned to Germany. “The soft Slav nature,” says a writer in “The New Republic,” “emotional, sensitive, but undisciplined, has derived most of such progress as it has made in material civilization from German sources.”

Both countries have proved unsound allies, and Russia has the feminine quality of changeableness. “Dangerous to her foes, disastrous to her friends.” Both make the same kind of currency, and stand in need of business partners who make a different sort. America, with the gold of Europe locked up in her treasury, is the most desirable, but least accessible, partner in Christendom. As the great creditor of the civilized world, she has been impelled to assert that no participation on her part in any international conference implies a surrender of her claims to payment. France, as the great sufferer by a world’s war, has made it equally clear that no participation on _her_ part implies a surrender of her claims to reparation. The anger and shame with which the Allies first saw the injuries inflicted on her have been softened by time; and that strange twist in human nature which makes men more concerned for the welfare of a criminal than for the welfare of his victim has disposed us to think kindly of an unrepentant Germany. But France cannot well forget the wounds from which she bleeds. Less proud than Britain, which prefers beggary to debt, she is infinitely more logical; and it is the unassailable strength of her position which has irritated the sentimentalists of the world, whose hearts are in the right place, but whose heads are commonly elsewhere.

The French press has waxed sorrowful and bitter over France’s sense of isolation. Her cherished belief in the “unshakable American friendship” has been cruelly shattered, and she has asked of Heaven and earth where is the (proverbially absent) gratitude of republics. That there is no such thing as an unshakable national friendship is as well known to the clear-headed and well-informed French as to the rest of us. They were our very good friends in 1777, and our love for them flamed high. They were our very bad friends in 1797, and by the time they had taken or sunk three hundred and forty American ships, our affection had grown cool. It revived in 1914 under the impetus of their great wrongs and greater valour. Some good feeling remains, and bids fair to remain, if the press and the politicians of both lands will kindly let it alone; but popular enthusiasm, a fire of straw, burned itself quickly out. After all, we ourselves are no longer the idol of our whilom friends. A fairy god-mother is popular only when she is changing pumpkins into coaches, and mice into prancing bays. When she gives nothing but good advice, her words are no more golden than her neighbour’s. In the realm of the practical, a friendship which does not help, and an enmity which does not hurt, can never be controlling factors.

Great Britain sets scant store by any ally save the sea. She has journeyed far, changing friends on the road as a traveller by post changed horses. She has fought her way, and is singularly devoid of rancour towards her enemies. The time has indeed gone by when, after battle, the English and French knights--or what was left of them--would thank each other for a good fight. Those were days of lamentable darkness, when the last thing a gentleman craved was the privilege of dying in his bed by some slow and agonizing process, the gift of nature, and gratefully designated as “natural.” The headsman for the noble, the hangman for the churl, and the fortunes of war for everybody, made death so easy to come by, and so inexpensive, that there was a great deal of money left for the pleasures of living. That stout-hearted Earl of Northumberland who thanked God that for two hundred years no head of his house had died in bed, knew what his progenitors had been spared. Even in the soberly civilized eighteenth century there lingered a doubt as to the relative value of battle-field, gallows and sick-chamber.

“Men may escape from rope and gun,
_Some_ have outlived the doctor’s pill;”

sang Captain Macheath to the fashionable world which thronged to hear the verities of “The Beggar’s Opera.”

Fighting and making up, alternate friends and foes, the nations of Europe have come in a thousand years to know one another fairly well. There was a short time when Napoleon’s threatened invasion awakened in England’s breast a hearty and healthy abhorrence of France. There was a long time when the phrase, “virgin of English,” applied to a few perilously placed French seaports (Saint-Malo, for example), revealed, as only such proud and burning words can ever reveal, the national hatred of England. Over and over again history taught the same lesson; that the will of a people is stout to repel the invader, and that a foreign alliance offers no stable foundation for policy. But a great deal is learned from contact, whether it be friendly or inimical; and the close call of the Great War has left behind it a legacy of percipience. It was an Englishman who discovered during those years that the French officers snored “with a certain politeness.” It was a great American who said that France had “saved the soul of the world.” It was a Frenchman who wrote comprehensively: “To disregard danger, to stand under fire, is not for an Englishman an act of courage; it is part of a good education.” When gratitude is forgotten, as all things which clamour for remembrance should be, and sentimentalism has dissolved under the pitiless rays of reality, there remains, and will remain, a good understanding which is the basis of good will.

At present the nations that were drawn together by a common peril are a little tired of one another’s company, and more than a little irritated by one another’s grievances. The natural result of this weariness and irritation is an increase of sympathy for Germany, who now finds herself detested by her former allies, and smiled upon by at least some of her former foes. All that she says, and she has a great deal to say, is listened to urbanely. General Ludendorff has assured the American public that Prussia was innocent of even a desire to injure England. What she sought was peace “on conditions acceptable and inoffensive to both parties.” The Crown Prince’s memoirs, which have been appreciatively reviewed, set forth in eloquent language the Arthurian blamelessness of the Hohenzollerns. “The results of the excessive Viennese demand upon Serbia involved us in the war against our will.”

The breathless competition for the memoirs of the exiled Kaiser was a notable event in the publishing world. The history of literature can show nothing to resemble it. In 1918 we gravely discussed the propriety of trying this gentleman for his life. In 1922 we contended with far more heat for the privilege of presenting to a gratified public his imperial views upon his imperial policy. Americans exulted over the acquisition of these copyrights as they exulted over the acquisition of the Blue Boy. It is a grand thing to be able to outbid one’s neighbour, and pay a “record-smashing” price for any article in the market. Certain inflexible and unhumorous souls took umbrage at this catering to a principle we professed to reject, at the elevation of Wilhelm the Second to the rank of the world’s most favoured author. They thought it implied a denial of all we reverenced, of all we fought for, of all we knew to be good. It really implied nothing but curiosity; and curiosity is not to be confounded with homage. Saint Michael is honoured of men and angels; but if he and Lucifer gave their memoirs to the world, which would be better paid for, or more read?

They Had Their Day

“To a man,” says an engaging cynic in Mr. Stephen McKenna’s “Sonia,” “sex is an incident: to a woman it is everything in this world and in the next”; a generalization which a novelist can always illustrate with a heroine who meets his views. We have had many such women in recent fiction, and it takes some discernment to perceive that in them sex seems everything, only because honour and integrity and fair-mindedness are nothing. They are not swept by emotions good or bad; but when all concern for other people’s rights and privileges is eliminated, a great deal of room is left for the uneasy development of appetites which may be called by any name we like.

Among the Georgian and early-Victorian novelists, Richardson alone stands as an earnest and pitiless expositor of sex. He slipped as far away from it as he could in “Sir Charles Grandison,” but in doing so he slipped away from reality. The grossness of Fielding’s men is not intrinsic; it is, as Mr. McKenna would say, incidental. Jane Austen, who never wrote of things with which she was unfamiliar, gave the passions a wide berth. Scott was too robustly masculine, and Dickens too hopelessly and helplessly humorous, to deal with them intelligently. Thackeray dipped deep into the strong tide of life, and was concerned with all its eddying currents. Woman was to him what she was not to Scott, “une grande réalité comme la guerre”; and, like war, she had her complications. He found these complications to be for the most part distasteful; but he never assumed that a single key could open all the chambers of her soul.

When Mrs. Ritchie said of Jane Austen’s heroines that they have “a certain gentle self-respect, and humour, and hardness of heart,” she must have had Emma in her mind. Humour hardens the heart, at least to the point of sanity; and Emma surveys her little world of Highbury very much as Miss Austen surveyed her little world of Steventon and Chawton, with a less piercing intelligence, but with the same appreciation of foibles, and the same unqualified acceptance of tedium. To a modern reader, the most striking thing about the life depicted in all these novels is its dullness. The men have occupations of some sort, the women have none. They live in the country, or in country towns. Of outdoor sports they know nothing. They walk when the lanes are not too muddy, and some of them ride. They play round games in the evening, and always for a stake. A dinner or a dance is an event in their lives; and as for acting, we know what magnificent proportions _it_ assumes when we are told that even to Henry Crawford, “in all the riot of his gratifications, it was as yet an untasted pleasure.”

Emma, during the thirteen months in which we enjoy her acquaintance, finds plenty of mischief for her idle hands to do. Her unwarranted interference in the love affairs of two people whom it is her plain business to let alone is the fruit of ennui. Young, rich, nimble of wit and sound of heart, she lives through days and nights of inconceivable stupidity. She does not ride, and we have Mr. Knightley’s word for it that she does not read. She can sketch, but one drawing in thirteen months is the sum of her accomplishment. She may possibly have a regard for the “moral scenery” which Hannah More condescended to admire; but nature is neither law nor impulse to her soul. She knows little or nothing of the country about her own home. It takes the enterprising Mrs. Elton to get her as far as Box Hill, a drive of seven miles, though the view it commands is so fine as to provoke “a burst of admiration” from beholders who have apparently never taken the trouble to look at it before. “We are a very quiet set of people,” observes Emma in complacent defence of this apathy, “more disposed to stay at home than engage in schemes of pleasure.”

Dr. Johnson’s definition of a novel as “a smooth tale, generally of love,” fits Miss Austen well. It is not that she assigns to love a heavy rôle; but there is nothing to interfere with its command of the situation. Vague yearnings, tempestuous doubts, combative principles, play no part in her well-ordered world. The poor and the oppressed are discreetly excluded from its precincts. Emma does not teach the orphan boy to read, or the orphan girl to sew. She looks after her father’s comfort, and plays backgammon with him in the evenings. Of politics she knows nothing, and the most complicated social problem she is called on to face is the recognition, or the rejection, of her less fashionable neighbours. Are, or are not, the Coles sufficiently genteel to warrant her dining with them? Highbury is her universe, and no restless discontent haunts her with waking dreams of the Tiber and the Nile. Frank Churchill may go to London, sixteen miles off, to get his hair cut; but Emma remains at Hartfield, and holds the centre of the stage. We can count the days, we can almost count the hours in her monotonous life. She is unemotional, even for her setting; and it was after reading her placid history that Charlotte Brontë wrote the memorable depreciation of all Miss Austen’s novels.

But, though beset and environed by dullness, Emma is not dull. On the contrary, she is remarkably engaging; less vivacious than Elizabeth Bennet, but infinitely more agreeable. She puts us into a good humour with ourselves, she “produces delight.” The secret of her potency is that she has grasped the essential things of life, and let the non-essentials go. There is distinction in the way she accepts near duties, in her sense of balance, and order, and propriety. She is a normal creature, highly civilized, and sanely artificial. Mr. Saintsbury says that Miss Austen knew two things: humanity and art. “Her men, though limited, are true, and her women are, in the old sense, absolute.” Emma is “absolute.” The possibility--or impossibility--of being Mr. Knightley’s intellectual competitor never occurs to her. She covets no empty honours. She is content to be necessary and unassailable.

Mr. Chesterton has written a whimsical and fault-finding paper entitled “The Evolution of Emma,” in which he assumes that this embodiment of domesticity is the prototype of the modern welfare worker who runs birth-control meetings and baby weeks, urges maternity bills upon legislators, prates about segregation, and preaches eugenics and sex hygiene to a world that knows a great deal more about such matters than she does. Emma, says Mr. Chesterton, considers that because she is more genteel than Harriet Smith she is privileged to alienate this humble friend from Robert Martin who wants to marry her, and fling her at the head of Mr. Elton who doesn’t. Precisely the same spirit--so he asserts--induces the welfare worker to conceive that her greater gentility (she sometimes calls it intelligence) warrants her gross intrusion into the lives of people who are her social inferiors. It is because they _are_ her social inferiors that she dares to do it. The goodness of her intentions carries no weight. Emma’s intentions are of the best, so far as she can separate them from her subconscious love of meddling.

This ingenious comparison is very painful to Emma’s friends in the world of English readers. It cannot be that she is the ancestress of a type so vitally opposed to all that she holds correct and becoming. I do not share Mr. Chesterton’s violent hostility to reformers, even when they have no standard of taste. There are questions too big and pertinacious for taste to control. I only think it hard that, feeling as he does, he should compare Emma’s youthful indiscretions with more radical and disquieting activities. Emma is indiscreet, but she is only twenty-one. At twenty-two she is safely married to Mr. Knightley, and her period of indiscretion is over. At twenty-two she has fulfilled her destiny, has stepped into line, and, as the centre of the social unit, is harmoniously adjusted, not to Highbury alone, but to civilization and the long traditions of the ages. That she should regard her lover, even in her first glowing moments of happiness, as an agreeable companion, and as an assistant in the care of her father, is characteristic. “Self-respect, humour and hardness of heart” are out of hand with romance. So much the better for Mr. Knightley, who will never find his emotions drained, his wisdom questioned, his authority denied, and who will come in time to believe that he, and not his wife, is “absolute.”

“The formal stars do travel so,
That we their names and courses know;
And he that on their changes looks
Would think them govern’d by our books.”

Miss Austen’s views on marriage are familiar to her readers, and need no comment. They must have been drawn from a careful survey of the society which surrounded her, a society composed for the most part of insensitive, unrebellious men and women who had the habit of making the best of things. At times the cynicism is a trifle too pronounced, as when Eleanor Dashwood asks herself why Mr. Palmer is so ill-mannered:

“His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman. But she knew that this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it.”

At times simplicity and sincerity transcend the limits of likelihood, as when Elizabeth Watson says to her young sister:

“I should not like marrying a disagreeable man any more than yourself; but I do not think there are many very disagreeable men. I think I could like any good-humoured man with a comfortable income.”

At times a delicacy of touch lends distinction to the frankest worldliness, as when Mary Crawford generously applauds her brother Henry’s determination to marry Fanny Price:

“I know that a wife you loved would be the happiest of women; and that even when you ceased to love, she would yet find in you the liberality and good breeding of a gentleman.”

There is a lamentable lack of sentiment in even this last and happiest exposition of married life; but it expresses the whole duty of husbands, and the whole welfare of wives, as understood in the year 1814.

If Jane Austen and Thackeray wrought their heroines with perfect and painstaking accuracy, Scott’s attitude was for the most part one of reprehensible indifference. His world was run by men, and the ringleted sylphs of seventeen (the word “flapper” had not then cast discredit on this popular age) play very simple parts. Ruskin, it may be remembered, ardently admired these young ladies, and held them up as models of “grace, tenderness and intellectual power” to all his female readers. It never occurred to the great moralist, any more than to the great story-teller, that a girl is something more than a set of assorted virtues. “To Scott, as to most men of his age,” observes an acute English critic, “woman was not an individual, but an institution--a toast that was drunk some time after Church and King.”

Diana Vernon exists to be toasted. She has the

“True blue
And Mrs. Crewe”

quality associated in our minds with clinking glasses, and loud-spoken loyalty to Stuart or to Hanoverian. She has always caught the fancy of men, and has been likened in her day to Shakespeare’s Beatrice, Rosalind and Portia, ladies of wit and distinction, who aspire to play adventurous rôles in the mad medley of life. She is as well fitted to provoke general admiration as Julia Mannering is to awaken personal regard. She is one of the five heroines of English fiction with whom Mr. Saintsbury avows no man of taste and spirit can fail to fall in love. He does not aspire, even in fancy, to marry her. His choice of a wife is Elizabeth Bennet. But for “occasional companionship” he gives Diana the prize.

Occasional companionship is all that we get of her in “Rob Roy.” She enlivens the opening chapters very prettily, but is eliminated from the best and most vigorous episodes. My own impression is that Scott forgot all about Miss Vernon while he was happily engaged with MacGregor, and the Bailie, and Andrew Fairservice; and that whenever he remembered her, he produced her on the stage as mysteriously and as irrelevantly as a conjurer lifts white rabbits out of his hat. Wrapped in a horseman’s cloak, she comes riding under a frosty moon, gives Frank Osbaldistone a packet of valuable papers, bids him one of half-a-dozen solemn and final farewells, and disappears until the next trick is called. It was a good arrangement for Scott, who liked to have the decks cleared for action; but it makes Diana unduly fantastic and unreal.

So, too, does the weight of learning with which Rashleigh Osbaldistone has loaded her. Greek and Latin, history, science and philosophy, “as well as most of the languages of modern Europe,” seem a large order for a girl of eighteen. Diana can also saddle and bridle a horse, clear a five-barred gate, and fire a gun without winking. Yet she has a “tiny foot”--so at least Scott says--and she rides to hounds with her hair bound only by the traditional ribbon, so that her long tresses “stream on the breeze.” The absurd and complicated plot in which she is involved is never disentangled. Dedicated in infancy to the cloister, which was at least unusual, she has been released by Rome from vows she has never taken, only on condition that she marries a cousin who is within the forbidden degree of kindred. Her numerous allusions to this circumstance--“The fatal veil was wrapped round me in my cradle,” “I am by solemn contract the bride of Heaven, betrothed to the convent from the cradle”--distress and mystify poor Frank, who is not clever at best, and who accepts all her verdicts as irrevocable. Every time she bids him farewell, he believes it to be the end; and he loses the last flicker of hope when she sends him a ring by--of all people under Heaven--Helen MacGregor, who delivers it with these cheerful words: “Young man, this comes from one whom you will never see more. If it is a joyless token, it is well fitted to pass through the hands of one to whom joy can never be known. Her last words were ‘Let him forget me forever.’”

After which the astute reader is prepared to hear that Frank and Diana were soon happily married, without any consideration for cradle or for cloister, and without the smallest intervention from Rome.

Miss Vernon is one of Scott’s characters for whom an original has been found. This in itself is a proof of vitality. Nobody would dream of finding the original of Lucy Bertram, or Isabella Wardour, or Edith Bellenden. As a matter of fact, the same prototype would do for all three, and half-a-dozen more. But Captain Basil Hall expended much time and ingenuity in showing that Scott drew Diana after the likeness of Miss Jane Anne Cranstoun, a young lady of Edinburgh who married an Austrian nobleman, and left Scotland before the first of the Waverley Novels was written.

Miss Cranstoun was older than Scott, well born, well looking, a fearless horse-woman, a frank talker, a warm friend, and had some reputation as a wit. It was through her that the young man made his first acquaintance with Bürger’s ballad, “Lenore,” which so powerfully affected his imagination that he sat up all night, translating it into English verse. When it was finished, he repaired to Miss Cranstoun’s house to show her the fruits of his labour. It was then half-past six, an hour which to that vigorous generation seemed seasonable for a morning call. Clarissa Harlowe grants Lovelace his interviews at five.

Miss Cranstoun listened to the ballad with more attention than Diana vouchsafed to her lover’s translation from Ariosto (it was certainly better worth hearing), gave Scott his meed of praise and encouragement, and remained his friend, confidant and critic until her marriage separated them forever. There are certain points of resemblance between this clever woman and the high-spirited girl whom Justice Inglewood calls the “heath-bell of Cheviot,” and MacGregor “a daft hempsie but a mettle quean.” It may be that Diana owes her vitality to Scott’s faithful remembrance of Miss Cranstoun, just as Jeanie Deans owes her rare and perfect naturalness to his clear conception of her noble prototype, Helen Walker. “A novel is history without documents, nothing to prove it,” said Mr. John Richard Green; but unproved verities, as unassailable as unheard melodies, have a knack of surviving the rack and ruin of time.

When Thackeray courageously gave to the world “a novel without a hero,” he atoned for his oversight by enriching it with two heroines, so carefully portrayed, so admirably contrasted, that each strengthens and perfects the other. Just as Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart are etched together on the pages of history with a vivid intensity which singly they might have missed, so Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp (_place à la vertu_) are etched together on the pages of fiction with a distinctness derived in part from the force of comparison. And just as readers of history have been divided for more than three hundred years into adherents of the rival queens, so readers of novels have been divided for more than seventy years into admirers of the rival heroines. “I have been Emmy’s faithful knight since I was ten years old, and read ‘Vanity Fair’ somewhat stealthily,” confessed Andrew Lang; and by way of proving his allegiance, he laid at his lady’s feet the stupidest repudiation of Rebecca ever voiced by a man of letters. To class her with Barnes Newcome and Mrs. Macknezie is an unpardonable affront. A man may be a perfect Sir Galahad without surrendering all sense of values and proportion.

When “Vanity Fair” was published, the popular verdict was against Becky. She so disedified the devout that reviewers, with the awful image of the British Matron before their eyes, dealt with her in a spirit of serious condemnation. It will be remembered that Taine, caring much for art and little for matrons, protested keenly against Thackeray’s treatment of his own heroine, against the snubs and sneers and censures with which the English novelist thought fit to convince his English readers that he did not sympathize with misconduct. These readers hastened in turn to explain that Becky was rightfully “odious” in her author’s eyes, and that she was “created to be exposed,” which sounds a little like the stern creed which held that men were created to be damned. Trollope, oppressed by her dissimilarity to Grace Crawley and to Lily Dale, openly mourned her shortcomings; and a writer in “Frazier’s Magazine” assured the rank and file of the respectable that in real life they would shrink from her as from an infection. One voice only, that of an unknown critic in a little-read review, was raised in her defence. This brave man admitted without flinching her many sins, but added that he loved her.

The more lenient standards of our day have lifted Rebecca’s reputation into the realm of disputable things. So distinguished a moralist as Mr. William Dean Howells praised her tepidly; being disposed in her favour by a distaste, not for Amelia, but for Beatrix Esmond, whom he pronounced a “doll” and an “eighteenth-century marionette,” and compared with whom he found Becky refreshingly real. As for Thackeray’s harshness, Mr. Howells condoned it on the score of incomprehension. “His morality is the old conventional morality which we are now a little ashamed of; but in his time and place he could scarcely have had any other. After all, he was a simple soul, and strictly of his period.”

This is an interesting point of view. To most of us “Vanity Fair” seems about as simple as “Ecclesiastes,” the author of which was also “strictly of his period.” Sir Sidney Low, the most trenchant critic whom the fates have raised to champion the incomparable Becky, is by way of thinking that in so far as Thackeray was a moralist, he was unfair to her; but that in so far as he was a much greater artist than a moralist, she emerges triumphant from his hands. “She is the first embodiment in English fiction of the woman whose emotions are dominated by her intellect. She is a fighter against fate, and she wages war with unfailing energy, passing lightly, as great warriors do, over the bodies of the killed and wounded.”

She does more. She snatches a partial victory out of the jaws of a crushing defeat. The stanchest fighter expects some backing from fate, some good cards to lay on the table. But Becky’s fortunes are in Thackeray’s hands, and he rules against her at every turn. Life and death are her inexorable opponents. Miss Crawley recovers (which she has no business to do) from a surfeit of lobster, when by dying she would have enriched Rawdon, already in love with Rebecca. Lady Crawley lives just long enough to spoil Becky’s chance of marrying Sir Pitt. It is all very hard and very wrong. The little governess had richly earned Miss Crawley’s money by her patient care of that ungrateful invalid. She would have been kind and good-tempered to Sir Pitt, whereas his virtuous son and daughter-in-law (the lady Jane whom Thackeray never ceases to praise) leave the poor old paralytic to the care of a coarse, untrained and cruel servant. Becky is not the only sufferer by the bad luck which makes her from start to finish, “a fighter against fate.”

Sir Sidney is by no means content with the somewhat murky twilight in which we take leave of this great little adventuress, with the atmosphere of charity lists, bazaars and works of piety which depressingly surrounds her. He is sure she made a most charming and witty old lady, and that she eventually won over Colonel Dobbin (in spite of Amelia’s misgivings) by judicious praise of the “History of the Punjaub.” And I am equally sure that she never suffered herself to lose so valuable an asset as young Rawdon. Becky’s indifference to her son is the strongest card that Thackeray plays. By throwing into high relief the father’s proud affection for the boy (who is an uncommonly nice little lad), he deepens and darkens the mother’s unconcern. Becky is impervious to the charm of childhood, and she is not affectionate. Once in a while she is moved by a generous impulse; but the crowded cares and sordid scheming of her life leave no room for sensibility.

Nevertheless, if the Reverend Bute Crawley and his household look upon little Rawdon with deep respect as the possible heir of Queen’s Crawley, “between whom and the title there was only the sickly pale child, Pitt Binkie,” it is unlikely that Rebecca the farseeing would ignore the potential greatness of her son. She cannot afford to lose any chance, or any combination of chances, in the hazardous game she plays. There is nothing like the spectacle of this game in English letters. To watch Becky manipulate her brother-in-law, Sir Pitt, is a never-ending delight. He is dull, pompous, vain, ungenerous. He has inherited the fortune which should have been her husband’s. Yet there is no hatred in her heart, nor any serious malice. Hatred, like love, is an emotional extravagance, and Becky’s accounts are very strictly kept.

Therefore, when she persuades the Baronet to spend a week in the little house on Curzon Street, even Thackeray admits that she is sincerely happy to have him there. She comes bustling and blushing into his room with a scuttle of coals; she cooks excellent dishes for his dinner; she gives him Lord Steyne’s White Hermitage to warm his frozen blood, telling him it is a cheap wine which Rawdon has picked up in France; she sits by his side in the firelight, stitching a shirt for her little son; she plays every detail of her part with the careful and conscientious art of a Dutch painter composing a domestic scene; and she asks no unreasonable return for her labours. Rawdon, who does nothing, is disgusted because his brother gives them no money; but Rebecca, who does everything, is content with credit. Sir Pitt, as the head of the family, is the corner-stone upon which she rears the fabric of her social life.

The exact degree of Becky’s innocence and guilt is a matter of slight importance. There is no goodness in her to be spoiled or saved. To try to soften our judgment by pleading one or two acts of contemptuous kindness is absurd. Her qualities are great qualities: valour, and wit, and audacity, and patience, and an ungrumbling acceptance of fate. No one recognizes these qualities except Lord Steyne, who has a greatness of his own. It will be remembered that on one occasion he gives Rebecca eleven hundred pounds to discharge her indebtedness to Miss Briggs; and subsequently discovers that the amount due the “sheep-dog” is six hundred pounds, and that Rebecca has been far too thrifty to pay any of it out of the sum bestowed on her for that purpose. He is not angry at being outwitted, as a small and stupid man would have been. He is charmed.

“His lordship’s admiration for Becky rose immeasurably at this proof of her cleverness. Getting the money was nothing--but getting double the sum she wanted, and paying nobody--it was a magnificent stroke. ‘What an accomplished little devil it is!’ he thought. ‘She beats all the women I have ever seen in the course of my well-spent life. They are babies compared to her. I am a green-horn myself, and a fool in her hands--an old fool. She is unsurpassable in lies.’”

With which testimony, candid, fervent, and generous withal, Becky’s case can be considered closed. Discredited, humiliated, and punished in the irrepressible interests of morality, she is left stranded amid life’s minor respectabilities which must have irked her sorely; but which Thackeray plainly considered to be far beyond her merits. I hope it comforts her in that shadowy land where dwell the immortals of fiction to know that her shameless little figure, flitting dauntlessly from venture to venture, from hazard to hazard, has never been without appreciative observers. I had almost said appreciative and pitying observers; but Becky’s is the last ghost in Christendom whom I should dare to affront with pity.

The Preacher at Large

The spirit of Hannah More is abroad in the land. It does not preach the same code of morals that the good Hannah preached in her lifetime, but it preaches its altered code with her assurance and with her continuity. Miss More preached to the poor the duty of an unreasonable and unmanly content, and to the rich the duty of personal and national smugness. Her successors are more than likely to urge upon rich and poor the paramount duty of revolt. The essence of preaching, however, is not doctrine, but didacticism. Beliefs and behaviour are subject to geographical and chronological conditions, but human nature lives and triumphs in the sermon.

Hannah More was not licensed to preach. She would have paled at the thought of a lady taking orders, or climbing the pulpit steps. She had no intellectual gifts. Her most intimate critic, the Honourable Augustine Birrell (the only living man who confesses to the purchase of her works in nineteen calf-bound volumes, which he subsequently buried in his garden), pronounced her to be “an encyclopædia of all literary vices.” Yet for forty years she told her countrymen what they should do, and what they should leave undone, in return for which censorship they paid her boundless deference and thirty thousand pounds, a great deal of money in those days.

Miss More is a connecting link between the eighteenth century, which moralized, and the nineteenth century, which preached. Both were didactic, but, as Mr. Austin Dobson observes, “didactic with a difference.” Addison was characterized in his day as “a parson in a tie-wig,” an unfriendly, but not altogether inaccurate, description, the tie-wig symbolizing a certain gentlemanly aloofness from potent and primitive emotions. Religion is a primitive emotion, and the eighteenth century (_ce siècle sans âme_) was, in polite life, singularly shy of religion; reserving it for the pulpit, and handling it there with the caution due to an explosive. Crabbe, who also lapped over into the nineteenth century, was reproached by his friends for talking about Heaven and Hell in his sermons, “as though he had been a Methodist.”

From such indiscretions the tie-wig preserved the eighteenth-century moralists. Addison meditates for a morning in Westminster Abbey, and the outcome of his meditation is that the poets have no monuments, and the monuments no poets. Steele walks the London streets, jostling against vice and misery, and pauses to tell us that a sturdy beggar extracted from him the price of a drink by pleading mournfully that all his family had died of thirst; a jest which took easily with the crowd, and might be trusted to raise a sympathetic laugh to-day. It is plain that these gentlemen felt without saying what Henry Adams said without feeling, that “morality is a private and costly luxury,” and so forbore to urge it upon a bankrupt world.

The paradox of our own time is that clergymen, whose business it is to preach, are listened to impatiently, while laymen, whose business it is to instruct or to amuse, are encouraged to preach. I open two magazines, and am confronted by prophetic papers on “The Vanishing Sermon,” and “Will Preaching Become Obsolete?” I exchange them for two others, and find lengthy articles entitled “Can We Control Our Own Morals?” and “Spiritual Possibilities of Business Life.” Now, if a disquisition on “Spiritual Possibilities of Business Life” be not a sermon, of what elements is a sermon composed? Yet when I endeavour to ascertain these possibilities, I read that business men often refuse to listen to professional preaching, because, while their democratic ideals, their enthusiasm for human values, and their passion for scientific perfection in their products “leave them not far from the Kingdom of Heaven,” the Church, unhappily for itself, “has not been big enough or strong enough to captivate their imagination, and hold their allegiance.”

This would seem to imply that business men are too good to go to church--a novel and, I should think, popular point of view. Congregations hear little like it from the pulpit, the average clergyman being unable to observe any signs of a commercial Utopia, and having a tiresome and Jeremiah-like habit of pointing out defects. As for asking a group of magazine-readers if they can control their own morals, the query is a vaporous one, not meant to be answered scientifically, but after a formula settled and approved. Even the concession to modernism implied in its denial of religion as a compelling force gets us no nearer to our goal. “The faith we need is not necessarily faith in any supernatural help; but only in the demonstrated fact of the possibility of controlling our own minds and morals by going at it in the right way.” The tendency of a simple truth, that abstraction which we all admire, to develop into a truism, is no less noticeable when set forth in the persuasiveness of print than when delivered with ecclesiastical authority.

Personally, I cannot conceive of a sermonless world. The preacher’s function is too manifest to be ignored, his message too direct to be diverted. Joubert said truly that devout men and women listen with pleasure to dull sermons, because they recognize the legitimate relation between priest and people, and their minds are attuned to receptivity. And if a dull sermon can command the attention and awaken the sympathy of a congregation honest enough to admit that dullness is the paramount note of human intercourse, and that it is as well developed in the listeners as in the speaker, think of the power which individual intelligence derives from collective authority. This is the combination which so fascinated Henry Adams when he speculated upon the ecclesiasticism of the thirteenth century; its nobility, lucidity and weight. “The great theologians were also architects who undertook to build a Church Intellectual, corresponding, bit by bit, to the Church Administrative, both expressing--and expressed by--the Church Architectural.”

With the coming of the printed word, the supreme glory of the spoken word departed. Reading is the accepted substitute for oratory as for conversation, a substitute so cheap, so accessible, so accommodating, that its day will wane only with the waning warmth of the sun, or the exhaustion and collapse of civilization. Yet even under the new dispensation, even with the amazing multiplicity of creeds (twenty-four religions to one sauce, lamented Talleyrand a hundred years ago), even though ecclesiastical architecture has ceased to express anything but a love of comfort and an understanding of acoustics, the preacher holds his own. There are always people interested in the relation of their souls to God; and when it happens that a man is born into the world capable of convincing them that the only thing of importance in life is the relation of their souls to God, he becomes a maker of history.

John Wesley was such a man. I read recently that, when he was preaching at Tullamore, a large cat leaped from the rafters upon a woman’s head, and ran over the heads and shoulders of the closely packed congregation. “But none of them cried out any more than if it had been a butterfly.” _There_ was a test of the preacher’s supremacy. What other influence could have been so absolute and coercive? When I was a very little girl I was taken to see Edwin Booth play “Hamlet,” in the old Walnut Street theatre of Philadelphia. That night a cat entered with the ghost, and paced sedately in his wake across the ramparts of Elsinore. The audience shouted its amusement, and the poignancy of a great scene, interpreted by a great actor, was temporarily lost. “Spellbound” is a word in common use, expressing, as a rule, very ordinary attention. Booth cast a spell, but it was easily broken. Wesley cast a spell which defied both fear and laughter. Nothing short of dynamite could have distracted that Tullamore congregation from the business it had on hand.