Humor and the Heroine

I have of late been mingling afresh with the heroines of our greater English fiction, holding converse with this lady, sitting a while beside that, sending a word or a smile to another and another, renewing old intimacies with many. They are a fair and gallant company, and it is good to be with them. They are wise and sweet, passionate, strong and brave, beautiful almost always, good on the whole, and, without fail, interesting. Yet I felt the lack of one last grace, — a sense of humor. Their families often have it, their servants sometimes, their authors almost always have it, but the ladies themselves, they have it not.

There was Maggie Tulliver: in the heart of a richly humorous society, wherein her own father and mother and aunts were the shining luminaries, she saw none of the humor, she only felt the pain, — for it is the light touch that tickles, the heavy impact hurts or stuns. And so, where another nature might have smiled at the narrowness and the ignorance and the intolerance, her spirit was crushed by it, or driven to desperate rebellion.

And Dorothea! If her grave gray eyes could have been lighted by a gleam of humor, in how different an aspect would the world around her have presented itself to her; she might have regarded Sir James with less impatience and Casaubon with less veneration, she would probably have been saved from being hiswife, and would have missed the wisdom and the pain which that experience brought to her. She would have forfeited the joy of cherishing certain ideals, but would have been spared the pain of seeing them shattered. Possibly, too, she would have lost her power of appealing to some natures, as well as her desire to do so, — for Mr. Cadwallader, it will be remembered, who was richly endowed with the humorous sense, felt no call to reform the world. Surely, even the faintest light of humor on her face would have repelled Rosamond Vincy in a critical moment, and checked her impulse of confidence. But she would have been happier, perhaps saner, and, who knows, she might even have built better houses for the poor.

Thackeray’s ladies are of another sort, yet humor sits not upon their brows. From Beatrix Esmond there dart now and then flashing sword-blades of cynicism, murderous rather than lambent. Becky’s is Mephistophelian wit that blasts, while poor little Amelia has no wit of any sort, barely head enough to carry her through the plainer issues of life, and that not without bungling. Ethel Newcome, indeed, might under better nurture have sent out a light of humor, but it was turned to flashes of sardonic wit aimed at a social order that she scorned yet bowed to.

Scott’s damsels have not even these latent powers. Gay or stately, serene or passionate, they are at one in this. As Chaucer’s nun rides demure and undiscerning in the roadside company whose humorous aspects Chaucer himself so keenly enjoyed, so these ladies move in a world of chivalry and of jollity, touched by emotions of pity and of prudery, of love and of alarm, but never touched by humor.

The Bronté novels are without even moderately cheerful accessories — not an expansive butler, a relaxed monk, or a jesting grave - digger — to mitigate the nightmare depression of their down-trodden though fitfully remonstrant heroines, bullied along by their fierce or sullen heroes.

In contemporary fiction there is no better tale to tell. Mrs. Ward has sent out, one after another, a series of strenuous dames, from the Katharine of Robert Elsmere, with her austere and chilling virtue, to Lady Rose’s daughter, with less virtue and more charm, who, if she had been endowed with humorous insight, could better have endured her servitude to so splendid a mark for the comic spirit as Lady Henry. Miss Wilkins’s young women pass before us, a pathetic company, with faces worn though sweet, and spirits repressed though brave. The brilliant ladies of our myriad “ historical ” romances are content to be brilliant merely in face and robing and in the deeds of their lovers; they are not so much great in themselves as the occasion of greatness in others.

Scanning the fair company of heroines, I have indeed found a few upon whose faces plays a light of real humor, but these exceptions may be counted on one’s fingers. There is Meredith’s Diana, there is his Clara Middleton, perplexed, ensnared, yet with eyes in whose depths lurk the dancing imps that her creator himself invoked to his aid. They helped her to her final escape from the Monster, goading her and jeering at her by turns as she fluttered under his hand, but always, though with flickering lights, exhibiting to her humorous sense the comic aspects of that same Monster. Stevenson, who made few women, made one, Barbara Graham, in whose eyes gleams the delicious mockery that is both wipe and kind. Jane Austen, herself endowed with an exquisite perception of the humor in the society about her, vouchsafed the same gift of vision to the most charming of her heroines, Elizabeth Bennett. With dancing eyes Elizabeth observes them all, — her family, her neighbors, her suitor the unparalleled Mr. Collins, her lover the formidable Mr. Darcy, and his aunt the overpowering Lady de Burgh. She girds at them with her nimble tongue, whose wit, a trifle too sharp-edged at first, is softened by sorrow and failure until its gayety is only kind. Sweet girl! If Maggie Tulliver could but have looked on her world as Elizabeth regarded hers! A few flicks from Elizabeth’s tongue, the sort that proved so beneficial to the high-andmighty Darcy, would have done Tom Tulliver worlds of good. But Maggie’s weapons were of a different fashion, and their shafts always rebounded to wound the sender. Curious, is it not, that with George Eliot’s own strong sense for the humor of life, her heroines — or heroes either, for that matter (consider Daniel Deronda and Felix Holt and Adam Bede!) — should have been so utterly devoid of it One exception there is, in Esther Lyon, the dainty and difficult, who, but for a touch of querulousness, belongs rather in Miss Austen’s circle and might have been a more satisfying friend to Elizabeth Bennett than any she possessed.

Yet if we leave the novelists and turn to the master playwright, we find gayety enough. There is Rosalind, the brave and merry-hearted, taking her life’s misfortunes in both hands and turning them first to jest and then to joy. There is Viola, breathing a delicate fragrance of humer where she passes. There is Portia, with a gleam in her eye as she enters in her legal vestments, the gleam kindling into a humorous justice toward the Jew and a humorous jest toward the Christian. There is Beatrice the royalhearted, with her sound, true; laughter and her sound, true scorn, — a queenly heroine, tragedy draws back before her tread, she masters it in its beginning.

Yes, from Rosalind, from Beatrice tragedy falls away. And is this the reason why our heroines for the most part know not humor ? Is it that its possession gives one a kind of armor against adversity, an immunity from attack, a mastery of the world in place of subjection to it ? Perhaps. There are those who have not this mastery, who are born to be hurt, to be flung down, to be conquered or to conquer only through panting struggle; and these are they the artist seeks, on the watch always for the shock of conflict, the clash of nerves and hearts. The “interesting” temperament is the passionate, the impetuous, not the temperate and controlled. Humor implies a certain remoteness, aloofness, which quenches the ardor of the adventure. It implies balance, sense of proportion, of values, and this brings the poise and control not shared by those who struggle for life in mid-stream. Yet it is the struggle for life that the artist seeks to depict and his public yearns to witness.

Must it be so ? Would there not be something yet more poignant in struggle and suffering, if it were accompanied, illuminated by a humorous sense, turned inward to accent the folly of it all ? Lear’s fool seems to some of us more pathetic than his master by virtue of this very consciousness, and the appeal of Cyrano de Bergerac is accentuated by the lurking smile of the sufferer as he regards himself. But who will create for us such a figure ? From the novelists there is, as we have seen, little to expect. Among the poet-dramatists, whether we accept the leadership of Ibsen or Maeterlinck or D’Annunzio or Sardou or Phillips, there is scarcely a rift in the cloud of conscious and conscientious seriousness. Obviously, we must wait.