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NOTE ON MR. J H HENSHALL'S "ADAM BEDE" |
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WRITERS PICTURES PEOPLE |
Mr. Henshall has taken for his subject one of the most interesting and pathetic scenes in modern English fiction. It is from George Eliot’s novel "Adam Bede." Hetty sorrel is condemned to die for the murder of her child. On the eve of the execution Dinah Morris, the Methodist female preacher, comes to the cell where, in the dim evening light, she sees the convict "sitting on a straw pallet, with her face buried in her knees." She watches with her through the dark and silent hours; the meanwhile, by kind and yet solemn words, softening her heart till she makes confession of the crime. In the early morning, Adam, in happier times ~~ ere the young squire came as tempter ~~ betrothed to Hetty, goes from his lodging to the prison, where he lingers in the court-yard, scarce able to face the ordeal of her presence. "The cart is to set off at half-past seven," he hears. And now he must go forward. The door of the cell grates open, and he is with the two women. Bright summer morning though it be, the thick window-bars hinder the clear light, and not till his eyes are tempered to the gloom and his agitation a little fallen, that he sees Hetty’s marble face, the sweet lips pallid and half open, and her eyes "looking at him with that mournful gaze as if she had come back to him from the dead to tell him of her misery." She is on her knees close to Dinah, whose touch alone gives her strength, "for the pity and love that shone out from Diana’s face looked like a visible pledge of the invisible mercy." And then comes the passage which one must write under the picture ~~ "and the sad eyes met ~~ when Hetty and Adam looked at each other, she felt the change in him too, and it seemed to strike her with fresh fear, . , . she trembled more as she looked at him." They solemnly kiss one another as a sign of forgiveness and farewell. And so Adam departs as the last preparations are beginning. Need we tell how, at the very moment of execution, the reprieve arrives, and Hetty is carried back to await another destiny? For the reader of some thirty years ago these details were superfluous, but George Eliot is for the moment scarce in vogue, and certain critics would condemn the pathetic scene as "bleat." From another hand, they might call it "rant" or "pious twaddle," but for the fact that George Eliot was not of the Faith, so that her portrait of Dinah Morris is but the artistic presentment of a form of belief and certain phases of human life and character. Maybe, her work was once lauded beyond its desert. She had a trick of half-wise and but half-true reflection that seems shallow enough now, and it maybe that here as elsewhere, the idol was worshipped rather for its clay than for its gold. But her thorough understanding of English provincial life, her power to make an ordinary character interesting, her large-hearted humanity, her insight into the pathos and tragic interest hid in the most common life, and her gift of vivid description ~~ are these so common in current literature? Much of her work may be rubbish, but much of it is classic and enduring, and among her best passages must be ranked the one which the artist has wisely chosen. We will only add that the original is a large water-colour, and very powerfully painted in that medium. F.W. |