Marcella and Pembroke
THERE could scarcely be a greater contrast in the material for contemporary fiction than is shown in the English novel Marcella1 and the New England one Pembroke.2 In Marcella, the scene is laid in London and English country seats; the people are nobility, gentry, labor reformers, and peasants ; the talk is of the readjustment of society. In Pembroke, the scene is laid in an obscure country village, among people who know no social distinctions, and have no interests beyond marrying and giving in marriage, though political antagonism furnishes the apple of discord. The one superficial likeness between the two books lies in the fact that in each case the hero and heroine, after plighting their troth, fly apart, and the labor of the novelist is to bring them together again on the last page of the story.
The contrast of art is even greater. The author of Marcella is an Englishwoman, born into an intellectual household, trained in scholarship and polite society, conversant with literature in many phases, and actively concerned in the solution of mighty problems of religion, politics, and industrial life. Her great interest is in character, but in character as it is moulded by the influences issuing from the turmoil of a changing England, and most of all, as disclosed by this novel, in the character of woman. Not to generalize too far, we may content ourselves with saying that she has aimed to portray a character in its gradual unfolding from a crude, unformed nature, eager in its emotional life which is expended upon social disorders, and craving an independent expression of power, into such a womanhood as knows its limitations, and also the satisfaction which comes to it through its subjection to a law of love. Mrs. Ward writes so at the centre of English life that, whether consciously or unconsciously, she represents a sort of intellectual and social Woman’s Bench, and Marcella may fairly be regarded as an opinion handed down upon the great case of woman’s rights and duties in contemporary society.
As such it has a peculiar interest. It cannot be said that Marcella Boyce is a merely notional woman. She tries experiments ; by turns Lady Bountiful, practical Socialist, and nurse, she comes as closely as is possible to the lives of the men and women from whom her rank and breeding have seemed to separate her. But her great experiment is upon herself, in the test of her own womanly nature, how far she is able to acquire an independence of home, father, mother, and lover, and to lead a self-centred life, none the less self-centred that it is ostensibly one of self-sacrifice. At every turn Marcella meets herself; and if we read the moral aright, it is only when she fairly recognizes the incompleteness of the woman in her that she comes to her senses and marries, substituting thus a normal life for a factitious one. If this be thought a commonplace rendering of an elaborate fiction, it must be remembered that when a thoughtful woman undertakes, in the space of nearly a thousand pages, to work out the destinies of two or three people, she must, if she will escape the snare of subtlety, get down to elemental foundations ; and the virtue of this novel is that Mrs. Ward is genuinely desirous of penetrating the complexity of the life she is transcribing, so as to reach the clear and simple meaning of it all.
This is very noticeable when one considers the substance of the interests which concern the men and women of the book. Again and again, in incident, in conversation about the incident, and in all the speculation which arises over the problems of the social order, Mrs. Ward appears to be hunting for some solvent. She is too wise to think to find a formula which shall express the result of all the ferment which her story reflects, but she comes very near a final statement when she makes Marcella say, in a conversation with Anthony Craven, when he charges her with being recreant to Socialism : —
“ No! so far as Socialism means a political system, — the trampling out of private enterprise and competition, and all the rest of it, — I find myself slipping away from it more and more. No! as I go about among these wage-earners, the emphasis — do what I will — comes to lie less and less on possession, more and more on character.”
In so far as Marcella is a tract for the times it is a failure as a novel, and we can anticipate the languor of an intelligent reader of the book a generation hence. It is saved from being a mere tract for the times by the effurt of the novelist to concentrate interest on the girl whose development forms the theme of the book. It is Marcella Boyce caught in the social maelstrom, and struggling to escape being swallowed up in it, who enlists the reader’s sympathy; and both novelist and reader, in spite of their common interest in social problems, really strike hands most emphatically in their desire to get her happily married in the end to Aldous Raeburn. What attracts our attention, as students of contemporary fiction, is the enormous expenditure of intellectual energy by Mrs. Ward in evoking her figures out of this seeming chaos of opinionative disorder. It is as if she perceived clearly that fiction is not a vehicle for opinions, and yet could not care for any persons whom she might create unless they were elaborately representative of opinions, and all actors in the drama of reform. She is a critic engaged in creation, with a theoretic perception of sound canons of art, but with so strong a practical tendency toward the negation of those canons that one comes at last to a confused admiration of a will which has forced a tolerably consistent work of fiction out of most unpromising materials. The whole novel is a piece of strenuous workmanship, with thought and feeling pressed into service, but with scarcely a passage which conveys the notion of spontaneity, of sudden inspiration, or even, we may say, of thorough enjoyment of her art by the artist.
If Marcella is a reproduction of modern life by a writer always on her guard against offending the laws of art, Pembroke makes no appeal to interest in any movement for reform or the bettering of conditions. The world which it reproduces is singularly narrow, and is spinning in a groove cut deep by generations of hard-headed men and women. One gets a glimpse, in Marcella, of what centuries of life close to the soil have made out of plain men and women. In Pembroke, one sees a community fixed in its little agricultural ways, also pretty near a rocky soil, but inheriting elements of character which once knew the stress of conflict with the powers of darkness, whether those powers lurked in the forms of dusky men or in the scarcely less palpable shapes of spiritual enemies. The New England which is concentrated in Miss Wilkins’s landscape is provincial enough, but there is a subtle quality about it, under her treatment, which leads one to use the familiar agricultural phrase that it has run to seed. The sturdy self-respect has degenerated into pig-headedness ; the frugality has lapsed into meanness; the stern discipline has passed over into cruel tyranny. Above all, the pride which resides in the hero of the tale has stiffened into an ugliness which makes him most desperately “sot.” As one runs over in his mind the several characters in this unlovely yet impressive tale, he sees that, with scarcely an exception, they all represent some abnormal twist; their special virtues have devoured the rest of their nature, so that they stand for individualities distorted, strained, and incapable of the ordinary duties and pleasures of life. Yet it is not through exaggeration that Miss Wilkins makes them vivid ; it is through the power of an imagination quick, firm, and extraordinarily sententious. Not a figure in this little book but betrays itself naturally and through very simple means : the pathetic ones do not know how pathetic they are; the wrong-headed ones are as blind as bats; but the author knows them through and through, and the ease with which she makes them known to the reader is the ease of genius working confidently in material with which it is entirely familiar. It is a genius, too, which is by no means fascinated merely by the abnormal. It is true that the queer warpings of nature afford Miss Wilkins opportunity for some of her keenest strokes, as witness the inimitable scenes in which the addled philosopher Cephas Barnard appears; but she is equally alive to sudden efflorescences of nature, and shows her capacity for perceiving the effect of lovely glints of sunshine. When one considers the material out of which it is made, one stands with admiration before that remarkable passage in which she sends Ephraim Thayer out of the house, on a winter night, to take the one stolen delight of his life ; and with how few touches she manages to sketch the idyllic scene of the cherry party ! For the most part, Miss Wilkins does not decorate her story; each scene is set with a precision of language which is not barren, but felicitously fit and sufficient; yet now and then one comes across a phrase which leads the interested reader to speculate what would happen if this artist once let her feeling for the beautiful have free play, as, for example, in such phrase as this : —
“ The wind began to rise, and at the same time the full moon, impelled softly upward by force as unseen as thought. Charlotte’s fair head gleamed out abruptly in the moonlight like a pale flower, but the folds of her mottled purple skirt were as vaguely dark as the foliage on the lilac bush beside her. All at once the flowering branches on a wide-spreading apple-tree cut the gloom like great silvery wings of a brooding bird. The grass in the yard was like a shaggy silvery fleece. Charlotte paid no more attention to it all than to her own breath or a clock-tick which she would have to withdraw from herself to hear.”
One is tempted to say that nothing save the charm of genius could save this story from ridicule, so daringly unreasonable is the situation which forms the central motive of the book ; but in the real culmination, when Barney gets a glimpse of his moral deformity in the actual curvature of Royal Bennet’s spine, the author seems to justify her logic in pushing this unhappy temper of her hero to the extreme verge of improbability.
An imperfect sympathy will doubtless stand in tlie way of a widespread interest in this book, just as a current enthusiasm will lead a great many persons through the long alleys of Marcella. Yet a judgment which looks mainly to the exercise of art can scarcely hesitate in pronouncing Marcella a tour de force, held up for the time being by a humane temper, and Pembroke a genuine artistic achievement, in spite of the crumbling materials out of which it is built.