The Female Portrait Gallery/Rebecca
IVANHOE.
No. 15.— REBECCA.
The character of Rebecca stands pre-eminent amid Scott's finest conceptions. Its nobility was at once acknowledged. If there be one thing which redeems our fallen nature, which attests that its origin was from heaven and its early home in paradise, it is the generous sympathy that, even in the most hardened and worldly, warms in the presence of the good and of the beautiful. There must have been, even in those whose course has darkened into crime, an innocent and hopeful time, and the light of that hour, however perverted and shadowed, is never quite extinguished. Enough remains to kindle, if but for a moment, the electric admiration whose flash, like the lightning, is from above. Fiction is but moulding together the materials collected by every day, in real as well as imagined life; the highest order of excellence carries the impulse along with it. Nature and fortune have this earth for their place of contention, and the victory is too often with the latter. We are tempted and we fall— we lack resolution to act upon the promptings of our better and inward self; the iron enters into the soul, the wings of our nobler aspirations melt in the heat of exertion, the dust of the highway choaks our finer breathing, and if at any time we are fain to pause and commune with ourselves, alas! what do we find ourselves to be? low, weak, selfish, and old—how different from what we once hoped to be. But nature is never quite subdued to what she works in; the divine essence will at times re-assert its divinity, and hence the homage that is of love rises to that which is above us—to Beauty and to Truth.
The characteristic of Rebecca is high-mindedness, born of self reliance. From a very infant she must have been "a being drawing thoughtful breath;" As is the case with all Scott's favourite delineations, she is the only child of a widower, and the death of her mother must have flung an early shadow over her path; from her infancy she must have learnt to be alone—solitude which enervates the weak, feeds and invigorates the strong mind. Her studies, too, were well calculated to develop her powers; skilled in the art of healing she knew the delight of usefulness, and she learnt to pity because familiar with suffering. No one, not even the most careless, can stand beside the bed of sickness and of death without learning their sad and solemn lessons. Within her home she was surrounded by luxury and that refinement which is the poetry of riches; but she knew that Danger stood at the threshold, and that Fear was the unbidden guest who peered through their silken hangings. The timid temper lives in perpetual terror, the nobler one braces itself to endure whenever the appointed time shall come. History offers no picture more extraordinary than the condition of the Jews during the middle ages. Their torture and their destruction was deemed an acceptable sacrifice to that Saviour who was born of their race, and whose sermon on the Mount taught no lessons save those of peace and love. When Madame Roland went to execution, she turned towards the statue of that power, then adored with such false worship, and exclaimed, "Oh, liberty! what crimes are wrought in thy name!" The christian might say the same of his faith; but different in deed is the religion which is of God, and that which is of man.
In that criticism, now so often the staple of conversation, I have often heard it objected, that Rebecca could not have fallen in love with Ivanhoe—that her high-toned mind would have been attracted towards the Templar. This is a curious proof of the want of interest in Scott's heroes—we feel as if their good fortune were a moral injustice. The fact is, that respect for good old rules was an inherent part of Scott's mind; whatever was "gray with age," to him "became religion." His rich and fertile mind poured the materials of a new world into literature—but he insisted that it should take a conventional shape, and be bound by given rules. It had long been a rule that vice was to be punished and virtue rewarded in fiction, whatever it might be in real life. It is one of the many mysteries of our moral nature, that there is something in high and striking qualities that seems as it were a temptation of fate. The ancients knew this well. Moreover there are faults which almost wear virtue's seeming, and to our weakness there is a wild attraction in these very faults—but as, according to Scott's code, such faults must be duly visited in the concluding chapters, he could not invest his hero with them. The said hero is usually a brave, handsome and well conducted young man, who gives his parents and readers as little anxiety as possible. Still the circumstances under which Rebecca sees Ivanhoe are managed with Scott's utmost skill—she knows him first as the benefactor of her father—she sees him first as the victor of the tournament, and she first comes in contact with him under the tenderest relations of kindness and service. But the "why did she love him?" may in a woman's case always be answered by Byron's vindication of "Kaled's" attachment to his own gloomy hero— "Curious fool, be still,
Is human love the growth of human will?"
A woman's lover is always the idol of her imagination; he is far more indebted to her for good qualities than his vanity would like to acknowledge. Rochefoucauld says, "L'amour cessé des qu'on voit l’objet comme il est." But if the illusion has its own sorrow, the cure is bitterer still, "as charm by charm unwinds." I believe that more women are disappointed in marriage than men; a woman gives the whole of her heart—the man only gives the remains of his, and very often there is only a little left. Besides his idol is rarely so much the work of his own hands as her's; at the end of the first year she may ask, where are the picturesque and ennobling qualities with which she invested her lover? in nine cases out of ten echo will indeed answer "where." Why an unhappy passion is often so lasting is that it never encounters that "Ithuriel of the common-place," Reality. I like to think of Rebecca amid the olive groves of Granada. Care for her father's old age, kindliness to the poor and the suffering, and the workings of a mind strong in endurance, would bring tranquillity if not happiness, till the hand might be pressed to the subdued heart without crying "peace, peace, where is no peace!"