II

I realised a little while ago that I was getting sadly belated in the

matter of novel-reading. I had come to decline on a few old favourites

and was breaking no new ground. That is a provincial frame of mind,

just as when a man begins to discard dressing for dinner, and can

endure nothing but an old coat and slippers. It is easy to think of it

as unworldly, peaceable, philosophical; but it is mere laziness. The

really unworldly philosopher is the man who is at ease in all costumes

and at home in all companies.

I did not take up my novel-reading in a light spirit or for mere

diversion. To begin a new novel is for me like staying at a strange

house; I am bewildered and discomposed by the new faces, by the hard

necessity of making the acquaintance of all the new people, and in

determining their merits and their demerits. But I was bent on more

serious things still. I knew that it is the writers of romances, and

not the historians or the moralists, who are the real critics and the

earnest investigators of life and living. There may be at the present

day few subtle psychologists or surpassing idealists at work writing

novels, and still fewer great artists; but for a man to get out of the

way of reading contemporary fiction is not only a disease, it is almost

a piece of moral turpitude--or at best a sign of lassitude, stupidity,

and Toryism; because it means that one's mind is made up and that one

has some dull theory which life and the thoughts of others may confirm

if they will, but must not modify: from which deadly kind of

incrustation may common-sense and human interest deliver us.

It is a matter of endless debate whether a novel should have an ethical

purpose, or whether it should merely be an attempt to present

beautifully any portion of truth clearly perceived, faithfully

observed, delicately grouped, and artistically isolated. In the latter

case, say the realists, whatever the subject, the incident, the details

may be, the novel will possess exactly the same purpose that underlies

things, no more and no less; and the purpose may be trusted to look

after itself.

The other theory is that the novelist should have a definite motive;

that he should have a case which he is trying to prove, a warning he

wishes to enforce, an end which he desires to realise. The fact that

Dickens and Charles Reade had philanthropic motives of social reform,

and wished to improve the condition of schools, workhouses, lunatic

asylums, and gaols, is held to justify from the moral point of view

such novels as _Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, Hard Cash_, and _It is

Never too Late to Mend_. And from the moral point of view these books

are entirely justified, because they did undoubtedly interest a large

number of people in such subjects who would not have been interested by

sermons or blue-books. These books quickened the emotions of ordinary

people on the subject; and public sentiment is of course the pulse of

legislation.

Whether the philanthropic motive injured the books from the artistic

point of view is another question. It undoubtedly injured them exactly

in proportion as the philanthropic motive led the writers to distort or

to exaggerate the truth. It is perfectly justifiable, artistically, to

lay the scene of a novel in a workhouse or a gaol, but if the

humanitarian impulse leads to any embroidery of or divergence from the

truth, the novel is artistically injured, because the selection and

grouping of facts should be guided by artistic and not by philanthropic

motives.

Now the one emotion which plays a prominent part in most romances is

the passion of love, and it is interesting to observe that even this

motive is capable of being treated from the philanthropic as well as

from the artistic point of view. In a book which is now perhaps unduly

neglected, from the fact that it has a markedly early Victorian

flavour, Charles Kingsley's _Yeast_, there is a distinct attempt made

to fuse the two motives. The love of Lancelot for Argemone is depicted

both in the artistic and in the philanthropic light. The passion of the

lover throbs furiously through the odd weltering current of social

problems indicated, as a stream in lonely meadows may be seen and heard

to pulsate at the beat of some neighbouring mill which it serves to

turn. Yet the philanthropic motive is there, in that love is depicted

as a redeeming power, a cure for selfishness, a balm for unrest; and

the artistic impulse finally triumphs in the death of Argemone

unwedded.

In the hands of women-writers, love naturally tends to be depicted from

the humanitarian point of view. It is the one matchless gift which the

woman has to offer, the supreme opportunity of exercising influence,

the main chance of what is clumsily called self-effectuation. The old

proverb says that all women are match-makers; and Mr. Bernard Shaw goes

further and maintains that they act from a kind of predatory instinct,

however much that instinct may be concealed or glorified.

Now there was one great woman-writer, Charlotte Brontë, to whom it was

given to treat of love from the artistic side. She has been accused of

making her heroines, Jane Eyre, Caroline Helstone, Lucy Snowe, too

submissive, too grateful for the gift of a man's love. They forgive

deceit, rebuffs, severity, coldness, with a surpassing meekness. But it

is here that the artistic quality really emerges; these beautiful,

stainless hearts are preoccupied with what they receive rather than

with what they give. In that crude, ingenuous book _The Professor_, the

hero, who is a good instance of how Charlotte Brontë confused rigidity

of nature with manliness, surprised by an outbreak of passionate

emotion on the part of his quiet and self-contained wife, and still

more surprised by its sudden quiescence, asks her what has become of

her emotion and where it is gone. "I do not know where it is gone,"

says the girl, "but I know that whenever it is wanted it will come

back." That is a noble touch. It may be true that Paul Emmanuel and

Robert Moore cling too closely to the idea of rewarding their humble

mistresses, after testing them harshly and even brutally, with the gift

of their love--though even this humility has a touching quality of

beauty; but the supreme lover, Mr. Rochester, who, in spite of his

ridiculous affectations, his grotesque _hauteurs_, his impossible

theatricality, is a figure of flesh and blood, is absorbed in his

passion in a way that shows the fire leaping on the innermost altar.

The irresistible appeal of the book to the heart is due to the fact

that Jane Eyre never seems conscious of what she is giving, but only of

what she is receiving; and it is this that makes her gift so regal, so

splendid a thing.

Side by side with this book I would set a recent work, Miss

Cholmondeley's _Prisoners_. Fine and noble as the book is in many ways,

it is yet vitiated by the sense of the value of the gift of love from

the woman's point of view. Love is there depicted as the one redeeming

and transforming power in the world. But in order to prove the thesis,

the two chief characters among the men of the book, Wentworth and Lord

Lossiemouth, are not, like Mr. Rochester, strong men disfigured by

violent faults, but essentially worthless persons, one the slave of an

oldmaidish egotism and the other of a frank animalism. The result in

both cases is an _experimentum in corpore vili_. The authoress, instead

of presiding over her creations like a little Deity, is a strong

partisan; and the purpose seems to be to bring out more clearly the

priceless nature of the gift which comes near their hand. No one would

dispute the position that love is a purifying and transforming power;

but love, conscious of its worth, loses the humility and the

unselfishness in which half its power lies. Even Magdalen, the finest

character in the book, is not free from a quality of condescension. In

the great love-scene where she accepts Lord Lossiemouth, she comforts

him by saying, "You have not only come back to me. You have come back

to yourself." That is a false touch, because it has a flavour of

superiority about it. It reminds one of the lover in _The Princess_

lecturing the hapless Ida from his bed-pulpit, and saying, "Blame not

thyself too much," and "Dearer thou for faults lived over." One cannot

imagine Jane Eyre saying to Mr. Rochester that he had come back to

himself through loving her. It just detracts at the supreme moment from

the generosity of the scene; it has the accent of the priestess, not of

the true lover; and thus at the moment when one longs to be in the very

white-heat of emotion, one is subtly aware of an improving hand that

casts water upon the flame.

The love that lives in art is the love of Penelope and Antigone, of

Cordelia and Desdemona and Imogen, of Enid, of Mrs. Browning, among

women; and among men, the love of Dante, of Keats, of the lover of

Maud, of Père Goriot, of Robert Browning.

It is the unreasoning, unquestioning love of a man for a woman or a

woman for a man, just as they are, for themselves only; "because it was

you and me," as Montaigne says. Not a respect for good qualities, a

mere admiration for beauty, a perception of strength or delicacy, but a

sort of predestined unity of spirit and body, an inner and instinctive

congeniality, a sense of supreme need and nearness, which has no

consciousness of raising or helping or forgiving about it, but is

rather an imperative desire for surrender, for sharing, for serving.

Thus, in love, faults and weaknesses are not things to be mended or

overlooked, but opportunities of lavish generosity. Sacrifice is not

only not a pain, but the deepest and acutest pleasure possible. Love of

this kind has nothing of the tolerance of friendship about it, the

process of addition and subtraction, the weighing of net results,

though that can provide a sensible and happy partnership enough. And

thus when an author has grace and power to perceive such a situation,

no further motive or purpose is needed; indeed the addition of any such

motive merely defames and tarnishes the quality of the divine gift.

It is not to be pretended that all human beings have the gift of loving

so. To love perfectly is a matter of genius; it may be worth while to

depict other sorts of love, for it has infinite gradations and

_nuances_. One of the grievous mistakes that the prophets and

prophetesses of love make is that they tend to speak as if only some

coldness and hardness of nature, which could be dispensed with at will

or by effort, holds men and women back from the innermost relationship.

It is the same mistake as that made by many preachers who speak as if

the moral sense was equally developed in all, or required only a little

effort of the will. But a man or a woman may be quite able to perceive

the nobility, the solemn splendour of a perfect love, and yet be

incapable of either feeling or inspiring it. The possession of such a

gift is a thing to thank God for; the absence of it is not a thing to

be shrewishly condemned. The power is not often to be found in

combination with high intellectual or artistic gifts. There is a law of

compensation in human nature, but there is also a law of limitations;

and this it is both foolish and cowardly to ignore.

When one comes to form such a list as I have tried to do of great

lovers in literature and life, it is surprising and rather distressing

to find, after all, how difficult it is to make such a list at all. It

is easier to make a list of women who have loved perfectly than a list

of men. Two rather painful considerations arise. Is it because, after

all, it is so rare, so almost abnormal an experience for one to love

purely, passionately, and permanently, that the difficulty of making

such a list arises? There are plenty of books, both imaginative and

biographical, to choose from, and yet the perfect companionship seems

very rare. Or is it that we nowadays exaggerate the whole matter? That

would be a conclusion to which I would not willingly come; but it is

quite clear that we have transcendentalised the power of love very much

of late. Is this due to the immense flood of romances that have

overwhelmed our literature? Does love really play so large a part in

people's lives as romances would have us think? Or do the immense

number of romances rather show that love does really play a greater

part than anything else in our lives? The transcendental conception of

love has found a high and passionate expression in the sonnets of

Rossetti, yet all that we know of Rossetti would seem to prove that in

his case it was actual rather than transcendental; and he is to be

classed in the matter of love rather among its voluptuaries and slaves

than among its true and harmonious exponents. I am disposed to think

that with men, at all events, or at least with Englishmen of the

present day, love is rather a bewildering episode than a guiding

principle; and that some of the happiest alliances have been those in

which passion has tranquilly transformed itself into a true and gentle

companionship. This would seem to prove that love was as a rule a

physical rather than a spiritual passion, cutting across life rather

than flowing in its channels.

And then, too, the further consideration intervenes: Can any one, in

reflecting upon the instances of great and loving relationships that

have come within the range of his experience, name a single case in

which a deep passion has ever been conceived and consummated, without

the existence of physical charm of some kind in the woman who has been

the object of the passion? I do not, of course, limit charm to regular

and conventional beauty. But I cannot myself recall a single instance

of such a passion being evoked by a woman destitute of physical

attractiveness. The charm may be that of voice, of glance, of bearing,

of gesture, but the desirable element is always there in some form or

other.

I have known women of wit, of intellect, of sympathy, of delicate

perception, of loyalty, of passionate affectionateness, who yet have

missed the joy of wedded love from the absence of physical charm.

Indeed, to make love beautiful, one has to conceive of it as exhibited

in creatures of youth and grace like Romeo and Juliet; and to connect

the pretty endearments of love with awkward, ugly, ungainly persons has

something grotesque and even profane about it. But if love were the

transcendental thing that it is supposed to be, if it were within reach

of every hand, physical characteristics would hardly affect the

question. I wish that some of the passionate interpreters of love would

make a work of imagination that should render with verisimilitude the

love-affair of two absolutely grotesque and misshapen persons, without

any sense of incongruity or absurdity. I should be loth to say that

love depends upon physical characteristics; but I think it must be

confessed that impassioned love does so depend. A woman without

physical attractiveness, but with tenderness, loyalty, and devotion,

may arrive at plenty of happy relationships; she may be trusted,

confided in, adored by young and old; but of the redeeming and

regenerating love that comes with marriage she may have no chance at

all. It is a terrible question to ask, but what chance has love against

eczema? And yet eczema may co-exist with every mental and spiritual

grace in the world. In this case it is evident that the modern

transcendental theory of love crumbles away altogether, if it is at the

mercy of a physical condition.

The truth is that, like all the joys of humanity, love is unequally

distributed, and that it is a thing which no amount of desire or

admiration or hope can bring about, unless it is bestowed. Even in the

case of the faint-hearted lover, so mercilessly lashed in _Prisoners_,

who will pay a call to see the beloved, but will not take a railway

journey for the same object, is it not the physical vitality that is

deficient? I do not quarrel with the transcendental treatment of love;

I only say that if this is accompanied with a burning scorn and

contempt for those who cannot pursue it, it becomes at once a

pharisaical and bitter thing. No religion was ever propagated by

scolding backsliders or contemning the weak; no chivalry was ever worth

the name that did not stand for a desire to do battle only with the

strong.

The genius of Charlotte Brontë consists in the fact that she makes love

so splendid and glorifying a thing, and that she does not waste her

powder and shot upon the poor in spirit. The loveless man or woman,

after reading her book, may say, "What is this great thing that I have

somehow missed? Is it possible that it may be waiting somewhere even

for me?" And then such as these may grow to scan the faces of their

fellow-travellers in hope and wonder. In such a mood as this does love

grow, not under a brisk battery of slaps for being what, after all, God

seems to have meant us to be. There are many men and women nowadays who

must face the fact that they are not likely to be brought into contact

with transcendental passion. It is for them to decide whether they will

or can accept some lower form of love, some congenial companionship,

some sort of easy commercial union. If they cannot, the last thing that

they should do is to repine; they ought rather to organise their lives

upon the best basis possible. All is not lost if love be missed. They

may prepare themselves to be worthy if the great experience comes; but

the one thing in the world that cannot be done from a sense of duty is

to fall in love; and if love be so mighty and transcendent a thing it

cannot be captured like an insect with a butterfly-net. The more

transcendental it is held to be, the greater should be the compassion

of its interpreters for those who have not seen it. It is not those who

fail to gain it that should be scorned, but only the strong man who

deliberately, for prudence and comfort's sake, refuses it and puts it

aside. It is our great moral failure nowadays that legislation,

education, religion, social reform are all occupied in eradicating the

faults of the weak rather than in attacking the faults of the strong;

and the modern interpreters of love are following in the same poor

groove.

If love were so omnipotent, so divine a thing, we should have love

stories proving the truth and worth of alliances between an Earl and a

kitchen-maid, between a Duchess and a day-labourer; but no attempt is

made to upset conventional traditions which are tamely regarded as

insuperable. "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit

impediment," said Shakespeare; but who experiments in such ways, who

dares to write of them? We are still hopelessly feudal and fastidious.

"Such unions do not do," we say; "they land people in such awkward

situations." Hazlitt's _Liber Amoris_ is read with disgust, because the

girl was a lodging-house servant; but if Hazlitt had abandoned himself

to a passion for a girl of noble birth, the story would have been

deemed romantic enough. Thus it would seem that below the

transcendentalism of modern love lies a rich vein of snobbishness. With

Charlotte Brontë the triumph over social conditions in _Jane Eyre_, and

even in _Shirley_, is one of the things that makes the story glow and

thrill; but the glow of the peerage has to be cast in _Prisoners_ over

the detestable Lossiemouth, that one may feel that after all the

heroine has done well for herself from a social point of view. If

social conditions are indeed a barrier, let them be treated with a sort

of noble shame, as the love of the keeper Tregarva for the squire's

daughter Honoria is treated in _Yeast_; let them not be fastidiously

ignored over the tea-cups at the Hall.

Love is a mighty thing, a deep secret; but if we dare to write of it,

let us face the truth about it; let us confess boldly that it is

limited by physical and social conditions, even though that involves a

loss of its transcendent might. But let us not meekly accept these

narrowing axioms, and while we dig a neat canal for the emotion with

one hand, claim with the other that the peaceful current has all the

splendour and volume of the resistless river foaming from rock to rock,

and leaping from the sheltered valley to the boundless sea.