The trees stood massively in all their summer foliage spotted and
grouped upon a meadow which sloped gently down from the big white house.
There were unmistakable signs of the year 1835 both in the trees and in
the sky, for modern trees are not nearly so voluminous as these ones,
and the sky of those days had a kind of pale diffusion in its texture
which was different from the more concentrated tone of the skies we
know.
Mr. George Ormerod stepped from the drawing-room window of Sedbury
House, Gloucestershire, wearing a tall furry hat and white trousers
strapped under his instep; he was closely, though deferentially,
followed by a lady wearing a yellow-spotted dress over a crinoline, and
behind her, singly and arm in arm, came nine children in nankeen jackets
and long white drawers. They were going to see the water let out of a
pond.
The youngest child, Eleanor, a little girl with a pale face, rather
elongated features, and black hair, was left by herself in the
drawing-room, a large sallow apartment with pillars, two chandeliers,
for some reason enclosed in holland bags, and several octagonal tables
some of inlaid wood and others of greenish malachite. At one of these
little Eleanor Ormerod was seated in a high chair.
“Now, Eleanor,” said her mother, as the party assembled for the
expedition to the pond, “here are some pretty beetles. Don’t touch the
glass. Don’t get down from your chair, and when we come back little
George will tell you all about it.”
So saying, Mrs. Ormerod placed a tumbler of water containing about half
a dozen great water grubs in the middle of the malachite table, at a
safe distance from the child, and followed her husband down the slope of
old-fashioned turf towards a cluster of extremely old-fashioned sheep;
opening, directly she stepped on to the terrace, a tiny parasol of
bottle green silk with a bottle green fringe, though the sky was like
nothing so much as a flock bed covered with a counterpane of white
dimity.
The plump pale grubs gyrated slowly round and round in the tumbler. So
simple an entertainment must surely soon have ceased to satisfy. Surely
Eleanor would shake the tumbler, upset the grubs, and scramble down from
her chair. Why, even a grown person can hardly watch those grubs
crawling down the glass wall, then floating to the surface, without a
sense of boredom not untinged with disgust. But the child sat perfectly
still. Was it her custom, then, to be entertained by the gyrations of
grubs? Her eyes were reflective, even critical. But they shone with
increasing excitement. She beat one hand upon the edge of the table.
What was the reason? One of the grubs had ceased to float: he lay at the
bottom; the rest, descending, proceeded to tear him to pieces.
“And how has little Eleanor enjoyed herself?” asked Mr. Ormerod, in
rather a deep voice, stepping into the room and with a slight air of
heat and of fatigue upon his face.
“Papa,” said Eleanor, almost interrupting her father in her eagerness to
impart her observation, “I saw one of the grubs fall down and the rest
came and ate him!”
“Nonsense, Eleanor,” said Mr. Ormerod. “You are not telling the truth.”
He looked severely at the tumbler in which the beetles were still
gyrating as before.
“Papa, it was true!”
“Eleanor, little girls are not allowed to contradict their fathers,”
said Mrs. Ormerod, coming in through the window, and closing her green
parasol with a snap.
“Let this be a lesson,” Mr. Ormerod began, signing to the other children
to approach, when the door opened, and the servant announced,
“Captain Fenton.”
Captain Fenton “was at times thought to be tedious in his recurrence to
the charge of the Scots Greys in which he had served at the battle of
Waterloo.”
But what is this crowd gathered round the door of the George Hotel in
Chepstow? A faint cheer rises from the bottom of the hill. Up comes the
mail coach, horses steaming, panels mud-splashed. “Make way! Make way!”
cries the ostler and the vehicle dashes into the courtyard, pulls up
sharp before the door. Down jumps the coachman, the horses are led off,
and a fine team of spanking greys is harnessed with incredible speed in
their stead. Upon all this—coachman, horses, coach, and passengers—the
crowd looked with gaping admiration every Wednesday evening all through
the year. But to-day, the twelfth of March, 1852, as the coachman
settled his rug, and stretched his hands for the reins, he observed that
instead of being fixed upon him, the eyes of the people of Chepstow
darted this way and that. Heads were jerked. Arms flung out. Here a hat
swooped in a semi-circle. Off drove the coach almost unnoticed. As it
turned the corner all the outside passengers craned their necks, and one
gentleman rose to his feet and shouted, “There! there! there!” before he
was bowled into eternity. It was an insect—a red-winged insect. Out the
people of Chepstow poured into the high road; down the hill they ran;
always the insect flew in front of them; at length by Chepstow Bridge a
young man, throwing his bandanna over the blade of an oar, captured it
alive and presented it to a highly respectable elderly gentleman who now
came puffing upon the scene—Samuel Budge, doctor, of Chepstow. By
Samuel Budge it was presented to Miss Ormerod; by her sent to a
professor at Oxford. And he, declaring it “a fine specimen of the rose
underwinged locust” added the gratifying information that it “was the
first of the kind to be captured so far west.”
And so, at the age of twenty-four Miss Eleanor Ormerod was thought the
proper person to receive the gift of a locust.
When Eleanor Ormerod appeared at archery meetings and croquet
tournaments young men pulled their whiskers and young ladies looked
grave. It was so difficult to make friends with a girl who could talk of
nothing but black beetles and earwigs—“Yes, that’s what she likes,
isn’t it queer?—Why, the other day Ellen, Mama’s maid, heard from Jane,
who’s under-kitchenmaid at Sedbury House, that Eleanor tried to boil a
beetle in the kitchen saucepan and he wouldn’t die, and swam round and
round, and she got into a terrible state and sent the groom all the way
to Gloucester to fetch chloroform—all for an insect, my dear!—and she
gives the cottagers shillings to collect beetles for her—and she spends
hours in her bedroom cutting them up—and she climbs trees like a boy to
find wasps’ nests—oh, you can’t think what they don’t say about her in
the village—for she does look so odd, dressed anyhow, with that great
big nose and those bright little eyes, so like a caterpillar herself, I
always think—but of course she’s wonderfully clever and very good, too,
both of them. Georgiana has a lending library for the cottagers, and
Eleanor never misses a service—but there she is—that short pale girl
in the large bonnet. Do go and talk to her, for I’m sure I’m too stupid,
but you’d find plenty to say—” But neither Fred nor Arthur, Henry nor
William found anything to say—
“. . . probably the lecturer would have been equally well pleased
had none of her own sex put in an appearance.”
This comment upon a lecture delivered in the year 1889 throws some
light, perhaps, upon archery meetings in the ’fifties.
It being nine o’clock on a February night some time about 1862 all the
Ormerods were in the library; Mr. Ormerod making architectural designs
at a table; Mrs. Ormerod lying on a sofa making pencil drawings upon
grey paper; Eleanor making a model of a snake to serve as a paper
weight; Georgiana making a copy of the font in Tidenham Church; some of
the others examining books with beautiful illustrations; while at
intervals someone rose, unlocked the wire book case, took down a volume
for instruction or entertainment, and perused it beneath the chandelier.
Mr. Ormerod required complete silence for his studies. His word was law,
even to the dogs, who, in the absence of their master, instinctively
obeyed the eldest male person in the room. Some whispered colloquy there
might be between Mrs. Ormerod and her daughters—
“The draught under the pew was really worse than ever this morning,
Mama—”
“And we could only unfasten the latch in the chancel because Eleanor
happened to have her ruler with her—”
“—hm—m—m. Dr. Armstrong—Hm—m—m—”
“—Anyhow things aren’t as bad with us as they are at Kinghampton. They
say Mrs. Briscoe’s Newfoundland dog follows her right up to the chancel
rails when she takes the sacrament—”
“And the turkey is still sitting on its eggs in the pulpit.”
—“The period of incubation for a turkey is between three and four
weeks”—said Eleanor, thoughtfully looking up from her cast of the snake
and forgetting, in the interest of her subject, to speak in a whisper.
“Am I to be allowed no peace in my own house?” Mr. Ormerod exclaimed
angrily, rapping with his ruler on the table, upon which Mrs. Ormerod
half shut one eye and squeezed a little blob of Chinese white on to her
high light, and they remained silent until the servants came in, when
everyone, with the exception of Mrs. Ormerod, fell on their knees. For
she, poor lady, suffered from a chronic complaint and left the family
party forever a year or two later, when the green sofa was moved into
the corner, and the drawings given to her nieces in memory of her. But
Mr. Ormerod went on making architectural drawings at nine p.m. every
night (save on Sundays when he read a sermon) until he too lay upon the
green sofa, which had not been used since Mrs. Ormerod lay there, but
still looked much the same. “We deeply felt the happiness of ministering
to his welfare,” Miss Ormerod wrote, “for he would not hear of our
leaving him for even twenty-four hours and he objected to visits from my
brothers excepting occasionally for a short time. They, not being used
to the gentle ways necessary for an aged invalid, worried him . . . the
Thursday following, the 9th October, 1873, he passed gently away at the
mature age of eighty-seven years.” Oh, graves in country
churchyards—respectable burials—mature old gentlemen—D.C.L., LL.D.,
F.R.S., F.S.A.—lots of letters come after your names, but lots of women
are buried with you!
There remained the Hessian Fly and the Bot—mysterious insects! Not, one
would have thought, among God’s most triumphant creations, and yet—if
you see them under a microscope!—the Bot, obese, globular, obscene;
the Hessian, booted, spurred, whiskered, cadaverous. Next slip under the
glass an innocent grain; behold it pock-marked and livid; or take this
strip of hide, and note those odious pullulating lumps—well, what does
the landscape look like then?
The only palatable object for the eye to rest on in acres of England is
a lump of Paris Green. But English people won’t use microscopes; you
can’t make them use Paris Green either—or if they do, they let it
drip. Dr. Ritzema Bos is a great stand-by. For they won’t take a woman’s
word. And indeed, though for the sake of the Ox Warble one must stretch
a point, there are matters, questions of stock infestation, things one
has to go into—things a lady doesn’t even like to see, much less
discuss, in print—“these, I say, I intend to leave entirely to the
Veterinary surgeons. My brother—oh, he’s dead now—a very good man—for
whom I collected wasps’ nests—lived at Brighton and wrote about
wasps—he, I say, wouldn’t let me learn anatomy, never liked me to do
more than take sections of teeth.”
Ah, but Eleanor, the Bot and the Hessian have more power over you than
Mr. Edward Ormerod himself. Under the microscope you clearly perceive
that these insects have organs, orifices, excrement; they do, most
emphatically, copulate. Escorted on the one side by the Bos or Warble,
on the other by the Hessian Fly, Miss Ormerod advanced statelily, if
slowly, into the open. Never did her features show more sublime than
when lit up by the candour of her avowal. “This is excrement; these,
though Ritzema Bos is positive to the contrary, are the generative
organs of the male. I’ve proved it.” Upon her head the hood of Edinburgh
most fitly descended; pioneer of purity even more than of Paris Green.
“If you’re sure I’m not in your way,” said Miss Lipscomb unstrapping her
paint box and planting her tripod firmly in the path, “—I’ll try to get
a picture of those lovely hydrangeas against the sky—What flowers you
have in Penzance!”
The market gardener crossed his hands on his hoe, slowly twined a piece
of bass round his finger, looked at the sky, said something about the
sun, also about the prevalence of lady artists, and then, with a nod of
his head, observed sententiously that it was to a lady that he owed
everything he had.
“Ah?” said Miss Lipscomb, flattered, but already much occupied with her
composition.
“A lady with a queer-sounding name,” said Mr. Pascoe, “but that’s the
lady I’ve called my little girl after—I don’t think there’s such
another in Christendom.”
Of course it was Miss Ormerod, equally of course Miss Lipscomb was the
sister of Miss Ormerod’s family doctor; and so she did no sketching that
morning, but left with a handsome bunch of grapes instead—for every
flower had drooped, ruin had stared him in the face—he had written, not
believing one bit what they told him—to the lady with the queer name,
back there came a book “In-ju-ri-ous In-sects,” with the page turned
down, perhaps by her very hand, also a letter which he kept at home
under the clock, but he knew every word by heart, since it was due to
what she said there that he wasn’t a ruined man—and the tears ran down
his face and Miss Lipscomb, clearing a space on the lodging-house table,
wrote the whole story to her brother.
“The prejudice against Paris Green certainly seems to be dying down,”
said Miss Ormerod when she read it.—“But now,” she sighed rather
heavily, being no longer young and much afflicted with the gout, “now
it’s the sparrows.”
One might have thought that _they_ would have left her alone—innocent
dirt-grey birds, taking more than their share of the breakfast crumbs,
otherwise inoffensive. But once you look through a microscope—once you
see the Hessian and the Bot as they really are—there’s no peace for an
elderly lady pacing her terrace on a fine May morning. For example, why,
when there are crumbs enough for all, do only the sparrows get them? Why
not swallows or martins? Why—oh, here come the servants for prayers—
“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against
us. . . . For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory, for
ever and ever. Amen—”
“The Times, ma’am—”
“Thank you, Dixon. . . . The Queen’s birthday! We must drink her
Majesty’s health in the old white port, Dixon. Home Rule—tut—tut—tut.
All that madman Gladstone. My father would have thought the world was
coming to an end, and I’m not at all sure that it isn’t. I must talk to
Dr. Lipscomb—”
Yet all the time in the tail of her eye she saw myriads of sparrows, and
retiring to the study proclaimed in a pamphlet of which 36,000 copies
were gratuitously distributed that the sparrow is a pest.
“When he eats an insect,” she said to her sister Georgians, “which
isn’t often, it’s one of the few insects that one wants to keep—one of
the very few,” she added with a touch of acidity natural to one whose
investigations have all tended to the discredit of the insect race.
“But there’ll be some very unpleasant consequences to face,” she
concluded—“Very unpleasant indeed.”
Happily the port was now brought in, the servants assembled; and Miss
Ormerod, rising to her feet, gave the toast “Her Blessed Majesty.” She
was extremely loyal, and moreover she liked nothing better than a glass
of her father’s old white port. She kept his pigtail, too, in a box.
Such being her disposition it went hard with her to analyse the
sparrow’s crop, for the sparrow she felt, symbolises something of the
homely virtue of English domestic life, and to proclaim it stuffed with
deceit was disloyal to much that she, and her fathers before her, held
dear. Sure enough the clergy—the Rev. J. E. Walker—denounced her for
her brutality; “God Save the Sparrow!” exclaimed the Animal’s Friend;
and Miss Carrington, of the Humanitarian League, replied in a leaflet
described by Miss Ormerod as “spirity, discourteous, and inaccurate.”
“Well,” said Miss Ormerod to her sister, “it did me no harm before to be
threatened to be shot at, also hanged in effigy, and other little
attentions.”
“Still it was very disagreeable, Eleanor—more disagreeable I believe,
to me than to you,” said Georgiana. Soon Georgiana died. She had however
finished the beautiful series of insect diagrams at which she worked
every morning in the dining-room and they were presented to Edinburgh
University. But Eleanor was never the same woman after that.
Dear forest fly—flour moths—weevils—grouse and cheese
flies—beetles—foreign correspondents—eel worms—ladybirds—wheat
midges—resignation from the Royal Agricultural Society—gall
mites—boot beetles—Announcement of honorary degree to be
conferred—feelings of appreciation and anxiety—paper on wasps—last
annual report warnings of serious illness—proposed pension—gradual
loss of strength—Finally Death.
That is life, so they say.
“It does no good to keep people waiting for an answer,” sighed Miss
Ormerod, “though I don’t feel as able as I did since that unlucky
accident at Waterloo. And no one realises what the strain of the work
is—often I’m the only lady in the room, and the gentlemen so learned,
though I’ve always found them most helpful, most generous in every way.
But I’m growing old. Miss Hartwell, that’s what it is. That’s what led
me to be thinking of this difficult matter of flour infestation in the
middle of the road so that I didn’t see the horse until he had poked his
nose into my ear. . . . Then there’s this nonsense about a pension. What
could possess Mr. Barron to think of such a thing? I should feel
inexpressibly lowered if I accepted a pension. Why, I don’t altogether
like writing LL.D. after my name, though Georgie would have liked it.
All I ask is to be let go on in my own quiet way. Now where is Messrs.
Langridge’s sample? We must take that first. ‘Gentlemen, I have examined
your sample and find . . .’”
“If any one deserves a thorough good rest it’s you. Miss Ormerod,” said
Dr. Lipscomb, who had grown a little white over the ears. “I should say
the farmers of England ought to set up a statue to you, bring offerings
of corn and wine—make you a kind of Goddess, eh—what was her name?”
“Not a very shapely figure for a Goddess,” said Miss Ormerod with a
little laugh. “I should enjoy the wine though. You’re not going to cut
me off my one glass of port surely?”
“You must remember,” said Dr. Lipscomb, shaking his head, “how much your
life means to others.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Miss Ormerod, pondering a little.
“To be sure, I’ve chosen my epitaph. ‘She introduced Paris Green into
England,’ and there might be a word or two about the Hessian fly—that,
I do believe, was a good piece of work.”
“No need to think about epitaphs yet,” said Dr. Lipscomb.
“Our lives are in the hands of the Lord,” said Miss Ormerod simply.
Dr. Lipscomb bent his head and looked out of the window. Miss Ormerod
remained silent.
“English entomologists care little or nothing for objects of practical
importance,” she exclaimed suddenly. “Take this question of flour
infestation—I can’t say how many grey hairs that hasn’t grown me.”
“Figuratively speaking. Miss Ormerod,” said Dr. Lipscomb, for her hair
was still raven black.
“Well, I do believe all good work is done in concert,” Miss Ormerod
continued. “It is often a great comfort to me to think that.”
“It’s beginning to rain,” said Dr. Lipscomb. “How will your enemies like
that, Miss Ormerod?”
“Hot or cold, wet or dry, insects always flourish!” cried Miss Ormerod,
energetically sitting up in bed.
“Old Miss Ormerod is dead,” said Mr. Drummond, opening The Times on
Saturday, July 20th, 1901.
“Old Miss Ormerod?” asked Mrs. Drummond.
[Footnote 8: Founded upon the Life of Eleanor Ormerod, by Robert
Wallace Murray. 1904.]
_Jane Austen_
It is probable that if Miss Cassandra Austen had had her way, we should
have had nothing of Jane Austen’s except her novels. To her elder sister
alone did she write freely; to her alone she confided her hopes and, if
rumour is true, the one great disappointment of her life; but when Miss
Cassandra Austen grew old, and the growth of her sister’s fame made her
suspect that a time might come when strangers would pry and scholars
speculate, she burnt, at great cost to herself, every letter that could
gratify their curiosity, and spared only what she judged too trivial to
be of interest.
Hence our knowledge of Jane Austen is derived from a little gossip, a
few letters, and her books. As for the gossip, gossip which has survived
its day is never despicable; with a little rearrangement it suits our
purpose admirably. For example, Jane “is not at all pretty and very
prim, unlike a girl of twelve . . . Jane is whimsical and affected,”
says little Philadelphia Austen of her cousin. Then we have Mrs.
Mitford, who knew the Austens as girls and thought Jane “the prettiest,
silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers”.
Next, there is Miss Mitford’s anonymous friend “who visits her now [and]
says that she has stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise,
taciturn piece of ‘single blessedness’ that ever existed, and that,
until _Pride and Prejudice_ showed what a precious gem was hidden in
that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or
firescreen. . . . The case is very different now,” the good lady goes on;
“she is still a poker—but a poker of whom everybody is afraid. . . .
A wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk is terrific
indeed!” On the other side, of course, there are the Austens, a race
little given to panegyric of themselves, but nevertheless, they say, her
brothers “were very fond and very proud of her. They were attached to
her by her talents, her virtues, and her engaging manners, and each
loved afterwards to fancy a resemblance in some niece or daughter of his
own to the dear sister Jane, whose perfect equal they yet never expected
to see.” Charming but perpendicular, loved at home but feared by
strangers, biting of tongue but tender of heart—these contrasts are by
no means incompatible, and when we turn to the novels we shall find
ourselves stumbling there too over the same complexities in the writer.
To begin with, that prim little girl whom Philadelphia found so unlike a
child of twelve, whimsical and affected, was soon to be the authoress of
an astonishing and unchildish story, _Love and Friendship_,[9] which,
incredible though it appears, was written at the age of fifteen. It was
written, apparently, to amuse the schoolroom; one of the stories in the
same book is dedicated with mock solemnity to her brother; another is
neatly illustrated with water-colour heads by her sister. There are
jokes which, one feels, were family property; thrusts of satire, which
went home because all little Austens made mock in common of fine ladies
who “sighed and fainted on the sofa”.
Brothers and sisters must have laughed when Jane read out loud her last
hit at the vices which they all abhorred. “I die a martyr to my grief
for the loss of Augustius. One fatal swoon has cost me my life. Beware
of Swoons, Dear Laura. . . . Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not
faint. . . .” And on she rushed, as fast as she could write and quicker
than she could spell, to tell the incredible adventures of Laura and
Sophia, of Philander and Gustavus, of the gentleman who drove a coach
between Edinburgh and Stirling every other day, of the theft of the
fortune that was kept in the table drawer, of the starving mothers and
the sons who acted Macbeth. Undoubtedly, the story must have roused the
schoolroom to uproarious laughter. And yet, nothing is more obvious than
that this girl of fifteen, sitting in her private corner of the common
parlour, was writing not to draw a laugh from brother and sisters, and
not for home consumption. She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for
our age, for her own; in other words, even at that early age Jane Austen
was writing. One hears it in the rhythm and shapeliness and severity of
the sentences. “She was nothing more than a mere good tempered, civil,
and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her—she was
only an object of contempt.” Such a sentence is meant to outlast the
Christmas holidays. Spirited, easy, full of fun, verging with freedom
upon sheer nonsense,—_Love and Friendship_ is all that, but what is
this note which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly and
penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The
girl of fifteen is laughing, in her corner, at the world.
Girls of fifteen are always laughing. They laugh when Mr. Binney helps
himself to salt instead of sugar. They almost die of laughing when old
Mrs. Tomkins sits down upon the cat. But they are crying the moment
after. They have no fixed abode from which they see that there is
something eternally laughable in human nature, some quality in men and
women that for ever excites our satire. They do not know that Lady
Greville who snubs, and poor Maria who is snubbed, are permanent
features of every ball-room. But Jane Austen knew it from her birth
upwards. One of those fairies who perch upon cradles must have taken her
a flight through the world directly she was born. When she was laid in
the cradle again she knew not only what the world looked like, but had
already chosen her kingdom. She had agreed that if she might rule over
that territory, she would covet no other. Thus at fifteen she had few
illusions about other people and none about herself. Whatever she writes
is finished and turned and set in its relation, not to the parsonage,
but to the universe. She is impersonal; she is inscrutable. When the
writer, Jane Austen, wrote down in the most remarkable sketch in the
book a little of Lady Greville’s conversation, there is no trace of
anger at the snub which the clergyman’s daughter, Jane Austen, once
received. Her gaze passes straight to the mark, and we know precisely
where, upon the map of human nature, that mark is. We know because Jane
Austen kept to her compact; she never trespassed beyond her boundaries.
Never, even at the emotional age of fifteen, did she round upon herself
in shame, obliterate a sarcasm in a spasm of compassion, or blur an
outline in a mist of rhapsody. Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to have
said, pointing with her stick, end _there_; and the boundary line is
perfectly distinct. But she does not deny that moons and mountains and
castles exist—on the other side. She has even one romance of her own.
It is for the Queen of Scots. She really admired her very much. “One of
the first characters in the world,” she called her, “a bewitching
Princess whose only friend was then the Duke of Norfolk, and whose only
ones now Mr. Whitaker, Mrs. Lefroy, Mrs. Knight and myself.” With these
words her passion is neatly circumscribed, and rounded with a laugh. It
is amusing to remember in what terms the young Brontës wrote, not very
much later, in their northern parsonage, about the Duke of Wellington.
The prim little girl grew up. She became “the prettiest, silliest, most
affected husband-hunting butterfly” Mrs. Mitford ever remembered, and,
incidentally, the authoress of a novel called _Pride and Prejudice_,
which, written stealthily under cover of a creaking door, lay for many
years unpublished. A little later, it is thought, she began another
story, _The Watsons_, and being for some reason dissatisfied with it,
left it unfinished. Unfinished and unsuccessful, it may throw more light
upon its writer’s genius than the polished masterpiece blazing in
universal fame. Her difficulties are more apparent in it, and the method
she took to overcome them less artfully concealed. To begin with, the
stiffness and the bareness of the first chapters prove that she was one
of those writers who lay their facts out rather baldly in the first
version and then go back and back and back and cover them with flesh and
atmosphere. How it would have been done we cannot say—by what
suppressions and insertions and artful devices. But the miracle would
have been accomplished; the dull history of fourteen years of family
life would have been converted into another of those exquisite and
apparently effortless introductions; and we should never have guessed
what pages of preliminary drudgery Jane Austen forced her pen to go
through. Here we perceive that she was no conjuror after all. Like other
writers, she had to create the atmosphere in which her own peculiar
genius could bear fruit. Here she fumbles; here she keeps us waiting.
Suddenly, she has done it; now things can happen as she likes things to
happen. The Edwards’ are going to the ball. The Tomlinsons’ carriage is
passing; she can tell us that Charles is “being provided with his gloves
and told to keep them on”; Tom Musgrove retreats to a remote corner with
a barrel of oysters and is famously snug. Her genius is freed and
active. At once our senses quicken; we are possessed with the peculiar
intensity which she alone can impart. But of what is it all composed? Of
a ball in a country town; a few couples meeting and taking hands in an
assembly room; a little eating and drinking; and for catastrophe, a boy
being snubbed by one young lady and kindly treated by another. There is
no tragedy and no heroism. Yet for some reason the little scene is
moving out of all proportion to its surface solemnity. We have been made
to see that if Emma acted so in the ball-room, how considerate, how
tender, inspired by what sincerity of feeling she would have shown
herself in those graver crises of life which, as we watch her, come
inevitably before our eyes. Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much
deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to
supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet
is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows
with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial.
Always the stress is laid upon character. How, we are made to wonder,
will Emma behave when Lord Osborne and Tom Musgrove make their call at
five minutes before three, just as Mary is bringing in the tray and the
knife-case? It is an extremely awkward situation. The young men are
accustomed to much greater refinement. Emma may prove herself ill-bred,
vulgar, a nonentity. The turns and twists of the dialogue keep us on the
tenterhooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon the present moment,
half upon the future. And when, in the end, Emma behaves in such a way
as to vindicate our highest hopes of her, we are moved as if we had been
made witnesses of a matter of the highest importance. Here, indeed, in
this unfinished and in the main inferior story are all the elements of
Jane Austen’s greatness. It has the permanent quality of literature.
Think away the surface animation, the likeness to life, and there
remains to provide a deeper pleasure, an exquisite discrimination of
human values. Dismiss this too from the mind and one can dwell with
extreme satisfaction upon the more abstract art which, in the ball-room
scene, so varies the emotions and proportions the parts that it is
possible to enjoy it, as one enjoys poetry, for itself, and not as a
link which carries the story this way and that.
But the gossip says of Jane Austen that she was perpendicular, precise,
and taciturn—“a poker of whom everybody is afraid”. Of this too there
are traces; she could be merciless enough; she is one of the most
consistent satirists in the whole of literature. Those first angular
chapters of _The Watsons_ prove that hers was not a prolific genius; she
had not, like Emily Brontë, merely to open the door to make herself
felt. Humbly and gaily she collected the twigs and straws out of which
the nest was to be made and placed them neatly together. The twigs and
straws were a little dry and a little dusty in themselves. There was the
big house and the little house; a tea party, a dinner party, and an
occasional picnic; life was hedged in by valuable connections and
adequate incomes; by muddy roads, wet feet, and a tendency on the part
of the ladies to get tired; a little money supported it, a little
consequence, and the education commonly enjoyed by upper middle-class
families living in the country. Vice, adventure, passion were left
outside. But of all this prosiness, of all this littleness, she evades
nothing, and nothing is slurred over. Patiently and precisely she tells
us how they “made no stop anywhere till they reached Newbury, where a
comfortable meal, uniting dinner and supper, wound up the enjoyments and
fatigues of the day”. Nor does she pay to conventions merely the tribute
of lip homage; she believes in them besides accepting them. When she is
describing a clergyman, like Edmund Bertram, or a sailor, in particular,
she appears debarred by the sanctity of his office from the free use of
her chief tool, the comic genius, and is apt therefore to lapse into
decorous panegyric or matter-of-fact description. But these are
exceptions; for the most part her attitude recalls the anonymous ladies’
ejaculation—“A wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk is
terrific indeed!” She wishes neither to reform nor to annihilate; she is
silent; and that is terrific indeed. One after another she creates her
fools, her prigs, her worldlings, her Mr. Collins’, her Sir Walter
Elliotts, her Mrs. Bennetts. She encircles them with the lash of a
whip-like phrase which, as it runs round them, cuts out their
silhouettes for ever. But there they remain; no excuse is found for them
and no mercy shown them. Nothing remains of Julia and Maria Bertram when
she has done with them; Lady Bertram is left “sitting and calling to Pug
and trying to keep him from the flower beds” eternally. A divine justice
is meted out; Dr. Grant, who begins by liking his goose tender, ends by
bringing on “apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners
in one week”. Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to
give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off. She is
satisfied; she is content; she would not alter a hair on anybody’s head,
or move one brick or one blade of grass in a world which provides her
with such exquisite delight.
Nor, indeed, would we. For even if the pangs of outraged vanity, or the
heat of moral wrath, urged us to improve away a world so full of spite,
pettiness, and folly, the task is beyond our powers. People are like
that—the girl of fifteen knew it; the mature woman proves it. At this
very moment some Lady Bertram finds it almost too trying to keep Pug
from the flower beds; she sends Chapman to help Miss Fanny, a little
late. The discrimination is so perfect, the satire so just that,
consistent though it is, it almost escapes our notice. No touch of
pettiness, no hint of spite, rouses us from our contemplation. Delight
strangely mingles with our amusement. Beauty illumines these fools.
That elusive quality is indeed often made up of very different parts,
which it needs a peculiar genius to bring together. The wit of Jane
Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste. Her fool is a fool,
her snob is a snob, because he departs from the model of sanity and
sense which she has in mind, and conveys to us unmistakably even while
she makes us laugh. Never did any novelist make more use of an
impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of an unerring
heart, an unfailing good taste, an almost stern morality, that she shows
up those deviations from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are among
the most delightful things in English literature. She depicts a Mary
Crawford in her mixture of good and bad entirely by this means. She lets
her rattle on against the clergy, or in favour of a baronetage and ten
thousand a year with all the ease and spirit possible; but now and again
she strikes one note of her own, very quietly, but in perfect tune, and
at once all Mary Crawford’s chatter, though it continues to amuse, rings
flat. Hence the depth, the beauty, the complexity of her scenes. From
such contrasts there comes a beauty, a solemnity even which are not only
as remarkable as her wit, but an inseparable part of it. In _The
Watsons_ she gives us a foretaste of this power; she makes us wonder why
an ordinary act of kindness, as she describes it, becomes so full of
meaning. In her masterpieces, the same gift is brought to perfection.
Here is nothing out of the way; it is midday in Northamptonshire; a dull
young man is talking to rather a weakly young woman on the stairs as
they go up to dress for dinner, with housemaids passing. But, from
triviality, from commonplace, their words become suddenly full of
meaning, and the moment for both one of the most memorable in their
lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep,
trembling, serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this
drop in which all the happiness of life has collected gently subsides
again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.
What more natural then, with this insight into their profundity, than
that Jane Austen should have chosen to write of the trivialities of day
to day existence, of parties, picnics, and country dances? No
“suggestions to alter her style of writing” from the Prince Regent or
Mr. Clarke could tempt her; no romance, no adventure, no politics or
intrigue could hold a candle to life on a country house staircase as she
saw it. Indeed, the Prince Regent and his librarian had run their heads
against a very formidable obstacle; they were trying to tamper with an
incorruptible conscience, to disturb an infallible discretion. The child
who formed her sentences so finely when she was fifteen never ceased to
form them, and never wrote for the Prince Regent or his Librarian, but
for the world at large. She knew exactly what her powers were, and what
material they were fitted to deal with as material should be dealt with
by a writer, whose standard of finality was high. There were impressions
that lay outside her province; emotions that by no stretch or artifice
could be properly coated and covered by her own resources. For example,
she could not make a girl talk enthusiastically of banners and chapels.
She could not throw herself wholeheartedly into a romantic moment. She
had all sorts of devices for evading scenes of passion. Nature and its
beauties she approached in a sidelong way of her own. She describes a
beautiful night without once mentioning the moon. Nevertheless, as we
read the few formal phrases about “the brilliancy of an unclouded night
and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods” the night is at once as
“solemn, and soothing, and lovely” as she tells us, quite simply, that
it was.
The balance of her gifts was singularly perfect. Among her finished
novels there are no failures, and among her many chapters few that sink
markedly below the level of the others. But, after all, she died at the
age of forty-two. She died at the height of her powers. She was still
subject to those changes which often make the final period of a writer’s
career the most interesting of all. Vivacious, irrepressible, gifted
with an invention of great vitality, there can be no doubt that she
would have written more, had she lived, and it is tempting to consider
whether she would not have written differently. The boundaries were
marked; moons, mountains, and castles lay on the other side. But was she
not sometimes tempted to trespass for a minute? Was she not beginning,
in her own gay and brilliant manner, to contemplate a little voyage of
discovery?
Let us take _Persuasion_, the last completed novel, and look by its
light at the books she might have written had she lived. There is a
peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in _Persuasion_. The dullness is
that which so often marks the transition stage between two different
periods. The writer is a little bored. She has grown too familiar with
the ways of her world; she no longer notes them freshly. There is an
asperity in her comedy which suggests that she has almost ceased to be
amused by the vanities of a Sir Walter or the snobbery of a Miss
Elliott. The satire is harsh, and the comedy crude. She is no longer so
freshly aware of the amusements of daily life. Her mind is not
altogether on her object. But, while we feel that Jane Austen has done
this before, and done it better, we also feel that she is trying to do
something which she has never yet attempted. There is a new element in
_Persuasion_, the quality, perhaps, that made Dr. Whewell fire up and
insist that it was “the most beautiful of her works”. She is beginning
to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic
than she had supposed. We feel it to be true of herself when she says of
Anne: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned
romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural
beginning”. She dwells frequently upon the beauty and the melancholy of
nature, upon the autumn where she had been wont to dwell upon the
spring. She talks of the “influence so sweet and so sad of autumnal
months in the country”. She marks “the tawny leaves and withered
hedges”. “One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in
it”, she observes. But it is not only in a new sensibility to nature
that we detect the change. Her attitude to life itself is altered. She
is seeing it, for the greater part of the book, through the eyes of a
woman who, unhappy herself, has a special sympathy for the happiness and
unhappiness of others, which, until the very end, she is forced to
comment upon in silence. Therefore the observation is less of facts and
more of feelings than is usual. There is an expressed emotion in the
scene at the concert and in the famous talk about woman’s constancy
which proves not merely the biographical fact that Jane Austen had
loved, but the æsthetic fact that she was no longer afraid to say so.
Experience, when it was of a serious kind, had to sink very deep, and to
be thoroughly disinfected by the passage of time, before she allowed
herself to deal with it in fiction. But now, in 1817, she was ready.
Outwardly, too, in her circumstances, a change was imminent. Her fame
had grown very slowly. “I doubt”, wrote Mr. Austen Leigh, “whether it
would be possible to mention any other author of note whose personal
obscurity was so complete.” Had she lived a few more years only, all
that would have been altered. She would have stayed in London, dined
out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, travelled,
and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to
feast upon at leisure.
And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that Jane
Austen did not write? She would not have written of crime, of passion,
or of adventure. She would not have been rushed by the importunity of
publishers or the flattery of friends into slovenliness or insincerity.
But she would have known more. Her sense of security would have been
shaken. Her comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted less
(this is already perceptible in _Persuasion_) to dialogue and more to
reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters. Those marvellous
little speeches which sum up, in a few minutes’ chatter, all that we
need in order to know an Admiral Croft or a Mrs. Musgrove for ever, that
shorthand, hit-or-miss method which contains chapters of analysis and
psychology, would have become too crude to hold all that she now
perceived of the complexity of human nature. She would have devised a
method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for
conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only
what they are, but what life is. She would have stood farther away from
her characters, and seen them more as a group, less as individuals. Her
satire, while it played less incessantly, would have been more stringent
and severe. She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of
Proust—but enough. Vain are these speculations: the most perfect artist
among women, the writer whose books are immortal, died “just as she was
beginning to feel confidence in her own success”.
[Footnote 9: _Love and Friendship_, Chatto and Windus.]
_Modern Fiction_
In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction it
is difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the
art is somehow an improvement upon the old. With their simple tools and
primitive materials, it might be said, Fielding did well and Jane Austen
even better, but compare their opportunities with ours! Their
masterpieces certainly have a strange air of simplicity. And yet the
analogy between literature and the process, to choose an example, of
making motor cars scarcely holds good beyond the first glance. It is
doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt
much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making
literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to
do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but
with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed
from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we
make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On
the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to
those happier warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear
so serene an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from
whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. It is
for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now
beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose
fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that
certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem
to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert; and of this
perhaps it may be worth while to attempt some account.
Our quarrel, then, is not with the classics, and if we speak of
quarrelling with Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy it is partly
that by the mere fact of their existence in the flesh their work has a
living, breathing, every day imperfection which bids us take what
liberties with it we choose. But it is also true that, while we thank
them for a thousand gifts, we reserve our unconditional gratitude for
Mr. Hardy, for Mr. Conrad, and in a much lesser degree for the Mr.
Hudson, of _The Purple Land, Green Mansions_, and _Far Away and Long
Ago_. Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy have excited so many
hopes and disappointed them so persistently that our gratitude largely
takes the form of thanking them for having shown us what they might have
done but have not done; what we certainly could not do, but as
certainly, perhaps, do not wish to do. No single phrase will sum up the
charge or grievance which we have to bring against a mass of work so
large in its volume and embodying so many qualities, both admirable and
the reverse. If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word we should
say that these three writers are materialists. It is because they are
concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have
disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English
fiction turns its back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if
only into the desert, the better for its soul. Naturally, no single word
reaches the centre of three separate targets. In the case of Mr. Wells
it falls notably wide of the mark. And yet even with him it indicates to
our thinking the fatal alloy in his genius, the great clod of clay that
has got itself mixed up with the purity of his inspiration. But Mr.
Bennett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three, inasmuch as he is by
far the best workman. He can make a book so well constructed and solid
in its craftsmanship that it is difficult for the most exacting of
critics to see through what chink or crevice decay can creep in. There
is not so much as a draught between the frames of the windows, or a
crack in the boards. And yet—if life should refuse to live there? That
is a risk which the creator of _The Old Wives’ Tale_, George Cannon,
Edwin Clayhanger, and hosts of other figures, may well claim to have
surmounted. His characters live abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it
remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for? More and
more they seem to us, deserting even the well-built villa in the Five
Towns, to spend their time in some softly padded first-class railway
carriage, pressing bells and buttons innumerable; and the destiny to
which they travel so luxuriously becomes more and more unquestionably an
eternity of bliss spent in the very best hotel in Brighton. It can
scarcely be said of Mr. Wells that he is a materialist in the sense that
he takes too much delight in the solidity of his fabric. His mind is too
generous in its sympathies to allow him to spend much time in making
things shipshape and substantial. He is a materialist from sheer
goodness of heart, taking upon his shoulders the work that ought to have
been discharged by Government officials, and in the plethora of his
ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realise, or forgetting to
think important, the crudity and coarseness of his human beings. Yet
what more damaging criticism can there be both of his earth and of his
Heaven than that they are to be inhabited here and hereafter by his
Joans and his Peters? Does not the inferiority of their natures tarnish
whatever institutions and ideals may be provided for them by the
generosity of their creator? Nor, profoundly though we respect the
integrity and humanity of Mr. Galsworthy, shall we find what we seek in
his pages.
If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on which is one word
materialists, we mean by it that they write of unimportant things; that
they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the
transitory appear the true and the enduring.
We have to admit that we are exacting, and, further, that we find it
difficult to justify our discontent by explaining what it is that we
exact. We frame our question differently at different times. But it
reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the crest
of a sigh—Is it worth while? What is the point of it all? Can it be
that owing to one of those little deviations which the human spirit
seems to make from time to time Mr. Bennett has come down with his
magnificent apparatus for catching life just an inch or two on the wrong
side? Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth
while. It is a confession of vagueness to have to make use of such a
figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by speaking, as
critics are prone to do, of reality. Admitting the vagueness which
afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us
at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than
secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or
reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to
be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide.
Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our
two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to
resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of
proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely
labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and
blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained,
not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant
who has him in thrall to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy,
love, interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so
impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find
themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion
of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But
sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary
doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the
customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”.
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind
receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or
engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape
themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but
there; so that if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could
write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon
his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no
comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted
style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street
tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding
us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of
the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed
spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little
mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading
merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper
stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.
It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that we seek to define
the quality which distinguishes the work of several young writers, among
whom Mr. James Joyce is the most notable, from that of their
predecessors. They attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more
sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so
they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by
the novelist. Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the
order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected
and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon
the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more
fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought
small. Any one who has read _The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_
or, what promises to be a far more interesting work, _Ulysses_,[10] now
appearing in the _Little Review_, will have hazarded some theory of this
nature as to Mr. Joyce’s intention. On our part, with such a fragment
before us, it is hazarded rather than affirmed; but whatever the
intention of the whole there can be no question but that it is of the
utmost sincerity and that the result, difficult or unpleasant as we may
judge it, is undeniably important. In contrast with those whom we have
called materialists Mr. Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs
to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its
messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards
with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be
probability, or coherence or any other of these signposts which for
generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when
called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see. The scene in
the cemetery, for instance, with its brilliancy, its sordidity, its
incoherence, its sudden lightning flashes of significance, does
undoubtedly come so close to the quick of the mind that, on a first
reading at any rate, it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece. If we
want life itself here, surely we have it. Indeed, we find ourselves
fumbling rather awkwardly if we try to say what else we wish, and for
what reason a work of such originality yet fails to compare, for we must
take high examples, with _Youth_ or _The Mayor of Casterbridge_. It
fails because of the comparative poverty of the writer’s mind, we might
say simply and have done with it. But it is possible to press a little
further and wonder whether we may not refer our sense of being in a
bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and
set free, to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the
mind. Is it the method that inhibits the creative power? Is it due to
the method that we feel neither jovial nor magnanimous, but centred in a
self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or
creates what is outside itself and beyond? Does the emphasis laid,
perhaps didactically, upon indecency, contribute to the effect of
something angular and isolated? Or is it merely that in any effort of
such originality it is much easier, for contemporaries especially, to
feel what it lacks than to name what it gives? In any case it is a
mistake to stand outside examining “methods”. Any method is right, every
method is right, that expresses what we wish to express, if we are
writers; that brings us closer to the novelist’s intention if we are
readers. This method has the merit of bringing us closer to what we were
prepared to call life itself; did not the reading of _Ulysses_ suggest
how much of life is excluded or ignored, and did it not come with a
shock to open _Tristram Shandy_ or even _Pendennis_ and be by them
convinced that there are not only other aspects of life, but more
important ones into the bargain.
However this may be, the problem before the novelist at present, as we
suppose it to have been in the past, is to contrive means of being free
to set down what he chooses. He has to have the courage to say that what
interests him is no longer “this” but “that”: out of “that” alone must
he construct his work. For the moderns “that”, the point of interest,
lies very likely in the dark places of psychology. At once, therefore,
the accent falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon something
hitherto ignored; at once a different outline of form becomes necessary,
difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predecessors. No one
but a modern, perhaps no one but a Russian, would have felt the interest
of the situation which Tchekov has made into the short story which he
calls “Gusev”. Some Russian soldiers lie ill on board a ship which is
taking them back to Russia. We are given a few scraps of their talk and
some of their thoughts; then one of them dies and is carried away; the
talk goes on among the others for a time, until Gusev himself dies, and
looking “like a carrot or a radish” is thrown overboard. The emphasis is
laid upon such unexpected places that at first it seems as if there were
no emphasis at all; and then, as the eyes accustom themselves to
twilight and discern the shapes of things in a room we see how complete
the story is, how profound, and how truly in obedience to his vision
Tchekov has chosen this, that, and the other, and placed them together
to compose something new. But it is impossible to say “this is comic”,
or “that is tragic”, nor are we certain, since short stories, we have
been taught, should be brief and conclusive, whether this, which is
vague and inconclusive, should be called a short story at all.
The most elementary remarks upon modern English fiction can hardly avoid
some mention of the Russian influence, and if the Russians are mentioned
one runs the risk of feeling that to write of any fiction save theirs is
waste of time. If we want understanding of the soul and heart where else
shall we find it of comparable profundity? If we are sick of our own
materialism the least considerable of their novelists has by right of
birth a natural reverence for the human spirit. “Learn to make yourself
akin to people. . . . But let this sympathy be not with the mind—for it
is easy with the mind—but with the heart, with love towards them.” In
every great Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint,
if sympathy for the sufferings of others, love towards them, endeavour
to reach some goal worthy of the most exacting demands of the spirit
constitute saintliness. It is the saint in them which confounds us with
a feeling of our own irreligious triviality, and turns so many of our
famous novels to tinsel and trickery. The conclusions of the Russian
mind, thus comprehensive and compassionate, are inevitably, perhaps, of
the utmost sadness. More accurately indeed we might speak of the
inconclusiveness of the Russian mind. It is the sense that there is no
answer, that if honestly examined life presents question after question
which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in
hopeless interrogation that fills us with a deep, and finally it may be
with a resentful, despair. They are right perhaps; unquestionably they
see further than we do and without our gross impediments of vision. But
perhaps we see something that escapes them, or why should this voice of
protest mix itself with our gloom? The voice of protest is the voice of
another and an ancient civilisation which seems to have bred in us the
instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand.
English fiction from Sterne to Meredith bears witness to our natural
delight in humour and comedy, in the beauty of earth, in the activities
of the intellect, and in the splendour of the body. But any deductions
that we may draw from the comparison of two fictions so immeasurably far
apart are futile save indeed as they flood us with a view of the
infinite possibilities of the art and remind us that there is no limit
to the horizon, and that nothing—no “method”, no experiment, even of
the wildest—is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence. “The proper
stuff of fiction” does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of
fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit
is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art
of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly
bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so
her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
[Footnote 10: Written April 1919.]
_Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights_[11]
Of the hundred years that have passed since Charlotte Brontë was born,
she, the centre now of so much legend, devotion, and literature, lived
but thirty-nine. It is strange to reflect how different those legends
might have been had her life reached the ordinary human span. She might
have become, like some of her famous contemporaries, a figure familiarly
met with in London and elsewhere, the subject of pictures and anecdotes
innumerable, the writer of many novels, of memoirs possibly, removed
from us well within the memory of the middle-aged in all the splendour
of established fame. She might have been wealthy, she might have been
prosperous. But it is not so. When we think of her we have to imagine
some one who had no lot in our modern world; we have to cast our minds
back to the ’fifties of the last century, to a remote parsonage upon the
wild Yorkshire moors. In that parsonage, and on those moors, unhappy and
lonely, in her poverty and her exaltation, she remains for ever.
These circumstances, as they affected her character, may have left their
traces on her work. A novelist, we reflect, is bound to build up his
structure with much very perishable material which begins by lending it
reality and ends by cumbering it with rubbish. As we open _Jane Eyre_
once more we cannot stifle the suspicion that we shall find her world of
imagination as antiquated, mid-Victorian, and out of date as the
parsonage on the moor, a place only to be visited by the curious, only
preserved by the pious. So we open _Jane Eyre_; and in two pages every
doubt is swept clean from our minds.
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left
were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from
the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of
my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered
a pale blank of mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat
shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and
lamentable blast.
There is nothing there more perishable than the moor itself, or more
subject to the sway of fashion than the “long and lamentable blast”. Nor
is this exhilaration short-lived. It rushes us through the entire
volume, without giving us time to think, without letting us lift our
eyes from the page. So intense is our absorption that if some one moves
in the room the movement seems to take place not there but up in
Yorkshire. The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road,
makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to
forget her.[12] At the end we are steeped through and through with the
genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Brontë. Remarkable
faces, figures of strong outline and gnarled feature have flashed upon
us in passing; but it is through her eyes that we have seen them. Once
she is gone, we seek for them in vain. Think of Rochester and we have to
think of Jane Eyre. Think of the moor, and again, there is Jane Eyre.
Think of the drawing-room, even, those “white carpets on which seemed
laid brilliant garlands of flowers”, that “pale Parian mantelpiece” with
its Bohemia glass of “ruby red” and the “general blending of snow and
fire”—what is all that except Jane Eyre?
The drawbacks of being Jane Eyre are not far to seek. Always to be a
governess and always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world
which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the other.
The characters of a Jane Austen or of a Tolstoi have a million facets
compared with these. They live and are complex by means of their effect
upon many different people who serve to mirror them in the round. They
move hither and thither whether their creators watch them or not, and
the world in which they live seems to us an independent world which we
can visit, now that they have created it, by ourselves. Thomas Hardy is
more akin to Charlotte Brontë in the power of his personality and the
narrowness of his vision. But the differences are vast. As we read _Jude
the Obscure_ we are not rushed to a finish; we brood and ponder and
drift away from the text in plethoric trains of thought which build up
round the characters an atmosphere of question and suggestion of which
they are themselves, as often as not, unconscious. Simple peasants as
they are, we are forced to confront them with destinies and questionings
of the hugest import, so that often it seems as if the most important
characters in a Hardy novel are those which have no names. Of this
power, of this speculative curiosity, Charlotte Brontë has no trace.
She does not attempt to solve the problems of human life; she is even
unaware that such problems exist; all her force, and it is the more
tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, “I love”, “I
hate”, “I suffer”.
For the self-centred and self-limited writers have a power denied the
more catholic and broad-minded. Their impressions are close packed and
strongly stamped between their narrow walls. Nothing issues from their
minds which has not been marked with their own impress. They learn
little from other writers, and what they adopt they cannot assimilate.
Both Hardy and Charlotte Brontë appear to have founded their styles
upon a stiff and decorous journalism. The staple of their prose is
awkward and unyielding. But both with labour and the most obstinate
integrity by thinking every thought until it has subdued words to
itself, have forged for themselves a prose which takes the mould of
their minds entire; which has, into the bargain, a beauty, a power, a
swiftness of its own. Charlotte Brontë, at least, owed nothing to the
reading of many books. She never learnt the smoothness of the
professional writer, or acquired his ability to stuff and sway his
language as he chooses. “I could never rest in communication with
strong, discreet, and refined minds, whether male or female,” she
writes, as any leader-writer in a provincial journal might have written;
but gathering fire and speed goes on in her own authentic voice “till I
had passed the outworks of conventional reserve and crossed the
threshold of confidence, and won a place by their hearts’ very
hearthstone”. It is there that she takes her seat; it is the red and
fitful glow of the heart’s fire which illumines her page. In other
words, we read Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of
character—her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for
comedy—hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life—hers
is that of a country parson’s daughter; but for her poetry. Probably
that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering
personality, who, as we should say in real life, have only to open the
door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity
perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them
desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently. This very
ardour, rejecting half shades and other minor impediments, wings its way
past the daily conduct of ordinary people and allies itself with their
more inarticulate passions. It makes them poets, or, if they choose to
write in prose, intolerant of its restrictions. Hence it is that both
Emily and Charlotte are always invoking the help of nature. They both
feel the need of some more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering
passions in human nature than words or actions can convey. It is with a
description of a storm that Charlotte ends her finest novel _Villette_.
“The skies hang full and dark—a wrack sails from the west; the clouds
cast themselves into strange forms.” So she calls in nature to describe
a state of mind which could not otherwise be expressed. But neither of
the sisters observed nature accurately as Dorothy Wordsworth observed
it, or painted it minutely as Tennyson painted it. They seized those
aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt
or imputed to their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their
lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a
dull page or display the writer’s powers of observation—they carry on
the emotion and light up the meaning of the book.
The meaning of a book, which lies so often apart from what happens and
what is said and consists rather in some connection which things in
themselves different have had for the writer, is necessarily hard to
grasp. Especially this is so when, like the Brontës, the writer is
poetic, and his meaning inseparable from his language, and itself rather
a mood than a particular observation. _Wuthering Heights_ is a more
difficult book to understand than _Jane Eyre_, because Emily was a
greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with
eloquence and splendour and passion “I love”, “I hate”, “I suffer”. Her
experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there
is no “I” in _Wuthering Heights_. There are no governesses. There are no
employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily
was inspired by some more general conception. The impulse which urged
her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked
out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the
power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt
throughout the novel—a struggle, half thwarted but of superb
conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which
is not merely “I love” or “I hate”, but “we, the whole human race” and
“you, the eternal powers . . .” the sentence remains unfinished. It is
not strange that it should be so; rather it is astonishing that she can
make us feel what she had it in her to say at all. It surges up in the
half-articulate words of Catherine Earnshaw, “If all else perished and
_he_ remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained and
he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I
should not seem part of it”. It breaks out again in the presence of the
dead. “I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel
an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter—the eternity they
have entered—where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its
sympathy and joy in its fulness.” It is this suggestion of power
underlying the apparitions of human nature, and lifting them up into the
presence of greatness that gives the book its huge stature among other
novels. But it was not enough for Emily Brontë to write a few lyrics,
to utter a cry, to express a creed. In her poems she did this once and
for all, and her poems will perhaps outlast her novel. But she was
novelist as well as poet. She must take upon herself a more laborious
and a more ungrateful task. She must face the fact of other existences,
grapple with the mechanism of external things, build up, in recognisable
shape, farms and houses and report the speeches of men and women who
existed independently of herself. And so we reach these summits of
emotion not by rant or rhapsody but by hearing a girl sing old songs to
herself as she rocks in the branches of a tree; by watching the moor
sheep crop the turf; by listening to the soft wind breathing through the
grass. The life at the farm with all its absurdities and its
improbability is laid open to us. We are given every opportunity of
comparing _Wuthering Heights_ with a real farm and Heathcliff with a
real man. How, we are allowed to ask, can there be truth or insight or
the finer shades of emotion in men and women who so little resemble what
we have seen ourselves? But even as we ask it we see in Heathcliff the
brother that a sister of genius might have seen; he is impossible we
say, but nevertheless no boy in literature has so vivid an existence as
his. So it is with the two Catherines; never could women feel as they do
or act in their manner, we say. All the same, they are the most lovable
women in English fiction. It is as if she could tear up all that we know
human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparences with such a
gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of
all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts; with a few
touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by
speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.
[Footnote 11: Written in 1916.]
[Footnote 12: Charlotte and Emily Brontë had much the same sense of
colour. “. . . we saw—ah! it was beautiful—a splendid place carpeted
with crimson, and crimson-covered chairs and tables, and a pure white
ceiling bordered by gold, a shower of glass drops hanging in silver
chains from the centre, and shimmering with little soft tapers”
(_Wuthering Heights_). Yet it was merely a very pretty drawing-room, and
within it a boudoir, both spread with white carpets, on which seemed
laid brilliant garlands of flowers; both ceiled with snowy mouldings of
white grapes and vine leaves, beneath which glowed in rich contrast
crimson couches and ottomans; while the ornaments on the pale Parian
mantelpiece were of sparkling Bohemia glass, ruby red; and between the
windows large mirrors repeated the general blending of snow and fire.]
_George Eliot_
To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one knows
about her. It is also to become aware of the credulity, not very
creditable to one’s insight, with which, half consciously and partly
maliciously, one had accepted the late Victorian version of a deluded
woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more deluded than
herself. At what moment, and by what means her spell was broken it is
difficult to ascertain. Some people attribute it to the publication of
her _Life_. Perhaps George Meredith, with his phrase about the
“mercurial little showman” and the “errant woman” on the daïs, gave
point and poison to the arrows of thousands incapable of aiming them so
accurately, but delighted to let fly. She became one of the butts for
youth to laugh at, the convenient symbol of a group of serious people
who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the
same scorn. Lord Acton had said that she was greater than Dante; Herbert
Spencer exempted her novels, as if they were not novels, when he banned
all fiction from the London Library. She was the pride and paragon of
her sex. Moreover, her private record was not more alluring than her
public. Asked to describe an afternoon at the Priory, the story-teller
always intimated that the memory of those serious Sunday afternoons had
come to tickle his sense of humour. He had been so much alarmed by the
grave lady in her low chair; he had been so anxious to say the
intelligent thing. Certainly, the talk had been very serious, as a note
in the fine clear hand of the great novelist bore witness. It was dated
on the Monday morning, and she accused herself of having spoken without
due forethought of Marivaux when she meant another; but no doubt, she
said, her listener had already supplied the correction. Still, the
memory of talking about Marivaux to George Eliot on a Sunday afternoon
was not a romantic memory. It had faded with the passage of the years.
It had not become picturesque.
Indeed, one cannot escape the conviction that the long, heavy face with
its expression of serious and sullen and almost equine power has stamped
itself depressingly upon the minds of people who remember George Eliot,
so that it looks out upon them from her pages. Mr. Gosse has lately
described her as he saw her driving through London in a victoria—
a large, thick-set sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose massive features,
somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously bordered by a
hat, always in the height of Paris fashion, which in those days commonly
included an immense ostrich feather.
Lady Ritchie, with equal skill, has left a more intimate indoor
portrait:
She sat by the fire in a beautiful black satin gown, with a green shaded
lamp on the table beside her, where I saw German books lying and
pamphlets and ivory paper-cutters. She was very quiet and noble, with
two steady little eyes and a sweet voice. As I looked I felt her to be a
friend, not exactly a personal friend, but a good and benevolent
impulse.
A scrap of her talk is preserved. “We ought to respect our influence,”
she said. “We know by our own experience how very much others affect our
lives, and we must remember that we in turn must have the same effect
upon others.” Jealously treasured, committed to memory, one can imagine
recalling the scene, repeating the words, thirty years later and
suddenly, for the first time, bursting into laughter.
In all these records one feels that the recorder, even when he was in
the actual presence, kept his distance and kept his head, and never read
the novels in later years with the light of a vivid, or puzzling, or
beautiful personality dazzling in his eyes. In fiction, where so much of
personality is revealed, the absence of charm is a great lack; and her
critics, who have been, of course, mostly of the opposite sex, have
resented, half consciously perhaps, her deficiency in a quality which is
held to be supremely desirable in women. George Eliot was not charming;
she was not strongly feminine; she had none of those eccentricities and
inequalities of temper which give to so many artists the endearing
simplicity of children. One feels that to most people, as to Lady
Ritchie, she was “not exactly a personal friend, but a good and
benevolent impulse”. But if we consider these portraits more closely we
shall find that they are all the portraits of an elderly celebrated
woman, dressed in black satin, driving in her victoria, a woman who has
been through her struggle and issued from it with a profound desire to
be of use to others, but with no wish for intimacy, save with the little
circle who had known her in the days of her youth. We know very little
about the days of her youth; but we do know that the culture, the
philosophy, the fame, and the influence were all built upon a very
humble foundation—she was the grand-daughter of a carpenter.
The first volume of her life is a singularly depressing record. In it we
see her raising herself with groans and struggles from the intolerable
boredom of petty provincial society (her father had risen in the world
and become more middle class, but less picturesque) to be the assistant
editor of a highly intellectual London review, and the esteemed
companion of Herbert Spencer. The stages are painful as she reveals them
in the sad soliloquy in which Mr. Cross condemned her to tell the story
of her life. Marked in early youth as one “sure to get something up very
soon in the way of a clothing club”, she proceeded to raise funds for
restoring a church by making a chart of ecclesiastical history; and that
was followed by a loss of faith which so disturbed her father that he
refused to live with her. Next came the struggle with the translation of
Strauss, which, dismal and “soul-stupefying” in itself, can scarcely
have been made less so by the usual feminine tasks of ordering a
household and nursing a dying father, and the distressing conviction, to
one so dependent upon affection, that by becoming a blue-stocking she
was forfeiting her brother’s respect. “I used to go about like an owl,”
she said, “to the great disgust of my brother.” “Poor thing,” wrote a
friend who saw her toiling through Strauss with a statue of the risen
Christ in front of her, “I do pity her sometimes, with her pale sickly
face and dreadful headaches, and anxiety, too, about her father.” Yet,
though we cannot read the story without a strong desire that the stages
of her pilgrimage might have been made, if not more easy, at least more
beautiful, there is a dogged determination in her advance upon the
citadel of culture which raises it above our pity. Her development was
very slow and very awkward, but it had the irresistible impetus behind
it of a deep-seated and noble ambition. Every obstacle at length was
thrust from her path. She knew every one. She read everything. Her
astonishing intellectual vitality had triumphed. Youth was over, but
youth had been full of suffering. Then, at the age of thirty-five, at
the height of her powers, and in the fullness of her freedom, she made
the decision which was of such profound moment to her and still matters
even to us, and went to Weimar, alone with George Henry Lewes.
The books which followed so soon after her union testify in the fullest
manner to the great liberation which had come to her with personal
happiness. In themselves they provide us with a plentiful feast. Yet at
the threshold of her literary career one may find in some of the
circumstances of her life influences that turned her mind to the past,
to the country village, to the quiet and beauty and simplicity of
childish memories and away from herself and the present. We understand
how it was that her first book was _Scenes of Clerical Life_, and not
_Middlemarch_. Her union with Lewes had surrounded her with affection,
but in view of the circumstances and of the conventions it had also
isolated her. “I wish it to be understood,” she wrote in 1857, “that I
should never invite any one to come and see me who did not ask for the
invitation.” She had been “cut off from what is called the world”, she
said later, but she did not regret it. By becoming thus marked, first by
circumstances and later, inevitably, by her fame, she lost the power to
move on equal terms unnoted among her kind; and the loss for a novelist
was serious. Still, basking in the light and sunshine of _Scenes of
Clerical Life_, feeling the large mature mind spreading itself with a
luxurious sense of freedom in the world of her “remotest past”, to speak
of loss seems inappropriate. Everything to such a mind was gain. All
experience filtered down through layer after layer of perception and
reflection, enriching and nourishing. The utmost we can say, in
qualifying her attitude towards fiction by what little we know of her
life, is that she had taken to heart certain lessons not usually learnt
early, if learnt at all, among which, perhaps, the most branded upon her
was the melancholy virtue of tolerance; her sympathies are with the
everyday lot, and play most happily in dwelling upon the homespun of
ordinary joys and sorrows. She has none of that romantic intensity which
is connected with a sense of one’s own individuality, unsated and
unsubdued, cutting its shape sharply upon the background of the world.
What were the loves and sorrows of a snuffy old clergyman, dreaming over
his whisky, to the fiery egotism of Jane Eyre? The beauty of those first
books, _Scenes of Clerical Life_, _Adam Bede_, _The Mill on the Floss_, is
very great. It is impossible to estimate the merit of the Poysers, the
Dodsons, the Gilfils, the Bartons, and the rest with all their
surroundings and dependencies, because they have put on flesh and blood
and we move among them, now bored, now sympathetic, but always with that
unquestioning acceptance of all that they say and do, which we accord to
the great originals only. The flood of memory and humour which she pours
so spontaneously into one figure, one scene after another, until the
whole fabric of ancient rural England is revived, has so much in common
with a natural process that it leaves us with little consciousness that
there is anything to criticise. We accept; we feel the delicious warmth
and release of spirit which the great creative writers alone procure for
us. As one comes back to the books after years of absence they pour out,
even against our expectation, the same store of energy and heat, so that
we want more than anything to idle in the warmth as in the sun beating
down from the red orchard wall. If there is an element of unthinking
abandonment in thus submitting to the humours of Midland farmers and
their wives, that, too, is right in the circumstances. We scarcely wish
to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human. And when we
consider how distant in time the world of Shepperton and Hayslope is,
and how remote the minds of farmer and agricultural labourers from those
of most of George Eliot’s readers, we can only attribute the ease and
pleasure with which we ramble from house to smithy, from cottage parlour
to rectory garden, to the fact that George Eliot makes us share their
lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit
of sympathy. She is no satirist. The movement of her mind was too slow
and cumbersome to lend itself to comedy. But she gathers in her large
grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them
loosely together with a tolerant and wholesome understanding which, as
one finds upon re-reading, has not only kept her figures fresh and free,
but has given them an unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears. There
is the famous Mrs. Poyser. It would have been easy to work her
idiosyncrasies to death, and, as it is, perhaps, George Eliot gets her
laugh in the same place a little too often. But memory, after the book
is shut, brings out, as sometimes in real life, the details and
subtleties which some more salient characteristic has prevented us from
noticing at the time. We recollect that her health was not good. There
were occasions upon which she said nothing at all. She was patience
itself with a sick child. She doted upon Totty. Thus one can muse and
speculate about the greater number of George Eliot’s characters and
find, even in the least important, a roominess and margin where those
qualities lurk which she has no call to bring from their obscurity.
But in the midst of all this tolerance and sympathy there are, even in
the early books, moments of greater stress. Her humour has shown itself
broad enough to cover a wide range of fools and failures, mothers and
children, dogs and flourishing midland fields, farmers, sagacious or
fuddled over their ale, horse-dealers, inn-keepers, curates, and
carpenters. Over them all broods a certain romance, the only romance
that George Eliot allowed herself—the romance of the past. The books
are astonishingly readable and have no trace of pomposity or pretence.
But to the reader who holds a large stretch of her early work in view it
will become obvious that the mist of recollection gradually withdraws.
It is not that her power diminishes, for, to our thinking, it is at its
highest in the mature _Middlemarch_, the magnificent book which with all
its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up
people. But the world of fields and farms no longer contents her. In
real life she had sought her fortunes elsewhere; and though to look back
into the past was calming and consoling, there are, even in the early
works, traces of that troubled spirit, that exacting and questioning and
baffled presence who was George Eliot herself. In _Adam Bede_ there is a
hint of her in Dinah. She shows herself far more openly and completely
in Maggie in _The Mill on the Floss_. She is Janet in _Janet’s
Repentance_, and Romola, and Dorothea seeking wisdom and finding one
scarcely knows what in marriage with Ladislaw. Those who fall foul of
George Eliot do so, we incline to think, on account of her heroines; and
with good reason; for there is no doubt that they bring out the worst of
her, lead her into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic,
and occasionally vulgar. Yet if you could delete the whole sisterhood
you would leave a much smaller and a much inferior world, albeit a world
of greater artistic perfection and far superior jollity and comfort. In
accounting for her failure, in so far as it was a failure, one
recollects that she never wrote a story until she was thirty-seven, and
that by the time she was thirty-seven she had come to think of herself
with a mixture of pain and something like resentment. For long she
preferred not to think of herself at all. Then, when the first flush of
creative energy was exhausted and self-confidence had come to her, she
wrote more and more from the personal standpoint, but she did so without
the unhesitating abandonment of the young. Her self-consciousness is
always marked when her heroines say what she herself would have said.
She disguised them in every possible way. She granted them beauty and
wealth into the bargain; she invented, more improbably, a taste for
brandy. But the disconcerting and stimulating fact remained that she was
compelled by the very power of her genius to step forth in person upon
the quiet bucolic scene.
The noble and beautiful girl who insisted upon being born into the Mill
on the Floss is the most obvious example of the ruin which a heroine can
strew about her. Humour controls her and keeps her lovable so long as
she is small and can be satisfied by eloping with the gipsies or
hammering nails into her doll; but she develops; and before George Eliot
knows what has happened she has a full-grown woman on her hands
demanding what neither gipsies nor dolls, nor St. Ogg’s itself is
capable of giving her. First Philip Wakem is produced, and later Stephen
Guest. The weakness of the one and the coarseness of the other have
often been pointed out; but both, in their weakness and coarseness,
illustrate not so much George Eliot’s inability to draw the portrait of
a man, as the uncertainty, the infirmity, and the fumbling which shook
her hand when she had to conceive a fit mate for a heroine. She is in
the first place driven beyond the home world she knew and loved, and
forced to set foot in middle-class drawing-rooms where young men sing
all the summer morning and young women sit embroidering smoking-caps for
bazaars. She feels herself out of her element, as her clumsy satire of
what she calls “good society” proves.
Good society has its claret and its velvet carpets, its dinner
engagements six weeks deep, its opera, and its faery ball rooms . . .
gets its science done by Faraday and its religion by the superior clergy
who are to be met in the best houses; how should it have need of belief
and emphasis?
There is no trace of humour or insight there, but only the
vindictiveness of a grudge which we feel to be personal in its origin.
But terrible as the complexity of our social system is in its demands
upon the sympathy and discernment of a novelist straying across the
boundaries, Maggie Tulliver did worse than drag George Eliot from her
natural surroundings. She insisted upon the introduction of the great
emotional scene. She must love; she must despair; she must be drowned
clasping her brother in her arms. The more one examines the great
emotional scenes the more nervously one anticipates the brewing and
gathering and thickening of the cloud which will burst upon our heads at
the moment of crisis in a shower of disillusionment and verbosity. It is
partly that her hold upon dialogue, when it is not dialect, is slack;
and partly that she seems to shrink with an elderly dread of fatigue
from the effort of emotional concentration. She allows her heroines to
talk too much. She has little verbal felicity. She lacks the unerring
taste which chooses one sentence and compresses the heart of the scene
within that. “Whom are you going to dance with?” asked Mr. Knightley, at
the Westons’ ball. “With you, if you will ask me,” said Emma; and she
has said enough. Mrs. Casaubon would have talked for an hour and we
should have looked out of the window.
Yet, dismiss the heroines without sympathy, confine George Eliot to the
agricultural world of her “remotest past”, and you not only diminish her
greatness but lose her true flavour. That greatness is here we can have
no doubt. The width of the prospect, the large strong outlines of the
principal features, the ruddy light of the early books, the searching
power and reflective richness of the later tempt us to linger and
expatiate beyond our limits. But it is upon the heroines that we would
cast a final glance. “I have always been finding out my religion since I
was a little girl,” says Dorothea Casaubon. “I used to pray so much—now
I hardly ever pray. I try not to have desires merely for myself. . . .”
She is speaking for them all. That is their problem. They cannot live
without religion, and they start out on the search for one when they are
little girls. Each has the deep feminine passion for goodness, which
makes the place where she stands in aspiration and agony the heart of
the book—still and cloistered like a place of worship, but that she no
longer knows to whom to pray. In learning they seek their goal; in the
ordinary tasks of womanhood; in the wider service of their kind. They do
not find what they seek, and we cannot wonder. The ancient consciousness
of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages
dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a demand
for something—they scarcely know what—for something that is perhaps
incompatible with the facts of human existence. George Eliot had far too
strong an intelligence to tamper with those facts, and too broad a
humour to mitigate the truth because it was a stern one. Save for the
supreme courage of their endeavour, the struggle ends, for her heroines,
in tragedy, or in a compromise that is even more melancholy. But their
story is the incomplete version of the story of George Eliot herself.
For her, too, the burden and the complexity of womanhood were not
enough; she must reach beyond the sanctuary and pluck for herself the
strange bright fruits of art and knowledge. Clasping them as few women
have ever clasped them, she would not renounce her own inheritance—the
difference of view, the difference of standard—nor accept an
inappropriate reward. Thus we behold her, a memorable figure,
inordinately praised and shrinking from her fame, despondent, reserved,
shuddering back into the arms of love as if there alone were
satisfaction and, it might be, justification, at the same time reaching
out with “a fastidious yet hungry ambition” for all that life could
offer the free and inquiring mind and confronting her feminine
aspirations with the real world of men. Triumphant was the issue for
her, whatever it may have been for her creations, and as we recollect
all that she dared and achieved, how with every obstacle against
her—sex and health and convention—she sought more knowledge and more
freedom till the body, weighted with its double burden, sank worn out,
we must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of
laurel and rose.
_The Russian Point of View_
Doubtful as we frequently are whether either the French or the
Americans, who have so much in common with us, can yet understand
English literature, we must admit graver doubts whether, for all their
enthusiasm, the English can understand Russian literature. Debate might
protract itself indefinitely as to what we mean by “understand”.
Instances will occur to everybody of American writers in particular who
have written with the highest discrimination of our literature and of
ourselves; who have lived a lifetime among us, and finally have taken
legal steps to become subjects of King George. For all that, have they
understood us, have they not remained to the end of their days
foreigners? Could any one believe that the novels of Henry James were
written by a man who had grown-up in the society which he describes, or
that his criticism of English writers was written by a man who had read
Shakespeare without any sense of the Atlantic Ocean and two or three
hundred years on the far side of it separating his civilisation
from ours? A special acuteness and detachment, a sharp angle of
vision the foreigner will often achieve; but not that absence of
self-consciousness, that ease and fellowship and sense of common values
which make for intimacy, and sanity, and the quick give and take of
familiar intercourse.
Not only have we all this to separate us from Russian literature, but a
much more serious barrier—the difference of language. Of all those who
feasted upon Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekov during the past twenty
years, not more than one or two perhaps have been able to read them in
Russian. Our estimate of their qualities has been formed by critics who
have never read a word of Russian, or seen Russia, or even heard the
language spoken by natives; who have had to depend, blindly and
implicitly, upon the work of translators.
What we are saying amounts to this, then, that we have judged a whole
literature stripped of its style. When you have changed every word in a
sentence from Russian to English, have thereby altered the sense a
little, the sound, weight, and accent of the words in relation to each
other completely, nothing remains except a crude and coarsened version
of the sense. Thus treated, the great Russian writers are like men
deprived by an earthquake or a railway accident not only of all their
clothes, but also of something subtler and more important—their
manners, the idiosyncrasies of their characters. What remains is, as the
English have proved by the fanaticism of their admiration, something
very powerful and very impressive, but it is difficult to feel sure, in
view of these mutilations, how far we can trust ourselves not to impute,
to distort, to read into them an emphasis which is false.
They have lost their clothes, we say, in some terrible catastrophe, for
some such figure as that describes the simplicity, the humanity,
startled out of all effort to hide and disguise its instincts, which
Russian literature, whether it is due to translation, or to some more
profound cause, makes upon us. We find these qualities steeping it
through, as obvious in the lesser writers as in the greater. “Learn to
make yourselves akin to people. I would even like to add: make yourself
indispensable to them. But let this sympathy be not with the mind—for
it is easy with the mind—but with the heart, with love towards them.”
“From the Russian,” one would say instantly, wherever one chanced on
that quotation. The simplicity, the absence of effort, the assumption
that in a world bursting with misery the chief call upon us is to
understand our fellow-sufferers, “and not with the mind—for it is easy
with the mind—but with the heart”—this is the cloud which broods above
the whole of Russian literature, which lures us from our own parched
brilliancy and scorched thoroughfares to expand in its shade—and of
course with disastrous results. We become awkward and self-conscious;
denying our own qualities, we write with an affectation of goodness and
simplicity which is nauseating in the extreme. We cannot say “Brother”
with simple conviction. There is a story by Mr. Galsworthy in which one
of the characters so addresses another (they are both in the depths of
misfortune). Immediately everything becomes strained and affected. The
English equivalent for “Brother” is “Mate”—a very different word, with
something sardonic in it, an indefinable suggestion of humour. Met
though they are in the depths of misfortune the two Englishmen who thus
accost each other will, we are sure, find a job, make their fortunes,
spend the last years of their lives in luxury, and leave a sum of money
to prevent poor devils from calling each other “Brother” on the
Embankment. But it is common suffering, rather than common happiness,
effort, or desire that produces the sense of brotherhood. It is the
“deep sadness” which Dr. Hagberg Wright finds typical of the Russian
people that creates their literature.
A generalisation of this kind will, of course, even if it has some
degree of truth when applied to the body of literature, be changed
profoundly when a writer of genius sets to work on it. At once other
questions arise. It is seen that an “attitude” is not simple; it is
highly complex. Men reft of their coats and their manners, stunned by a
railway accident, say hard things, harsh things, unpleasant things,
difficult things, even if they say them with the abandonment and
simplicity which catastrophe has bred in them. Our first impressions of
Tchekov are not of simplicity but of bewilderment. What is the point of
it, and why does he make a story out of this? we ask as we read story
after story. A man falls in love with a married woman, and they part and
meet, and in the end are left talking about their position and by what
means they can be free from “this intolerable bondage”.
“‘How? How?’ he asked, clutching his head. . . . And it seemed as though
in a little while the solution would be found and then a new and
splendid life would begin.” That is the end. A postman drives a student
to the station and all the way the student tries to make the postman
talk, but he remains silent. Suddenly the postman says unexpectedly,
“It’s against the regulations to take any one with the post.” And he
walks up and down the platform with a look of anger on his face. “With
whom was he angry? Was it with people, with poverty, with the autumn
nights?” Again, that story ends.
But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have
overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without the
expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and
proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories
ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing we raise the
question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and
the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues
exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong,
but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or
merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov,
we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the
tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.
Probably we have to read a great many stories before we feel, and the
feeling is essential to our satisfaction, that we hold the parts
together, and that Tchekov was not merely rambling disconnectedly, but
struck now this note, now that with intention, in order to complete his
meaning.
We have to cast about in order to discover where the emphasis in these
strange stories rightly comes. Tchekov’s own words give us a lead in the
right direction. “. . . such a conversation as this between us”, he
says, “would have been unthinkable for our parents. At night they did
not talk, but slept sound; we, our generation, sleep badly, are
restless, but talk a great deal, and are always trying to settle whether
we are right or not.” Our literature of social satire and psychological
finesse both sprang from that restless sleep, that incessant talking;
but after all, there is an enormous difference between Tchekov and Henry
James, between Tchekov and Bernard Shaw. Obviously—but where does it
arise? Tchekov, too, is aware of the evils and injustices of the social
state; the condition of the peasants appals him, but the reformer’s zeal
is not his—that is not the signal for us to stop. The mind interests
him enormously; he is a most subtle and delicate analyst of human
relations. But again, no; the end is not there. Is it that he is
primarily interested not in the soul’s relation with other souls, but
with the soul’s relation to health—with the soul’s relation to
goodness? These stories are always showing us some affectation, pose,
insincerity. Some woman has got into a false relation; some man has been
perverted by the inhumanity of his circumstances. The soul is ill; the
soul is cured; the soul is not cured. Those are the emphatic points in
his stories.
Once the eye is used to these shades, half the “conclusions” of fiction
fade into thin air; they show like transparences with a light behind
them—gaudy, glaring, superficial. The general tidying up of the last
chapter, the marriage, the death, the statement of values so sonorously
trumpeted forth, so heavily underlined, become of the most rudimentary
kind. Nothing is solved, we feel; nothing is rightly held together. On
the other hand, the method which at first seemed so casual,
inconclusive, and occupied with trifles, now appears the result of an
exquisitely original and fastidious taste, choosing boldly, arranging
infallibly, and controlled by an honesty for which we can find no match
save among the Russians themselves. There may be no answer to these
questions, but at the same time let us never manipulate the evidence so
as to produce something fitting, decorous, agreeable to our vanity. This
may not be the way to catch the ear of the public; after all, they are
used to louder music, fiercer measures; but as the tune sounded, so he
has written it. In consequence, as we read these little stories about
nothing at all, the horizon widens; the soul gains an astonishing sense
of freedom.
In reading Tchekov we find ourselves repeating the word “soul” again and
again. It sprinkles his pages. Old drunkards use it freely; “. . . you
are high up in the service, beyond all reach, but haven’t real soul, my
dear boy . . . there’s no strength in it.” Indeed, it is the soul that
is the chief character in Russian fiction. Delicate and subtle in
Tchekov, subject to an infinite number of humours and distempers, it is
of greater depth and volume in Dostoevsky, liable to violent diseases
and raging fevers, but still the predominant concern. Perhaps that is
why it needs so great an effort on the part of an English reader to read
_The Brothers Karamazov_ or _The Possessed_ a second time. The “soul” is
alien to him. It is even antipathetic. It has little sense of humour and
no sense of comedy. It is formless. It has slight connection with the
intellect. It is confused, diffuse, tumultuous, incapable, it seems, of
submitting to the control of logic or the discipline of poetry. The
novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms,
waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely
and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in,
whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a
giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading. We
open the door and find ourselves in a room full of Russian generals, the
tutors of Russian generals, their step-daughters and cousins and crowds
of miscellaneous people who are all talking at the tops of their voices
about their most private affairs. But where are we? Surely it is the
part of a novelist to inform us whether we are in an hotel, a flat, or
hired lodging. Nobody thinks of explaining. We are souls, tortured,
unhappy souls, whose only business it is to talk, to reveal, to confess,
to draw up at whatever rending of flesh and nerve those crabbed sins
which crawl on the sand at the bottom of us. But, as we listen, our
confusion slowly settles. A rope is flung to us; we catch hold of a
soliloquy; holding on by the skin of our teeth, we are rushed through
the water; feverishly, wildly, we rush on and on, now submerged, now in
a moment of vision understanding more than we have ever understood
before, and receiving such revelations as we are wont to get only from
the press of life at its fullest. As we fly we pick it all up—the names
of the people, their relationships, that they are staying in an hotel at
Roulettenburg, that Polina is involved in an intrigue with the Marquis
de Grieux—but what unimportant matters these are compared with the
soul! It is the soul that matters, its passion, its tumult, its
astonishing medley of beauty and vileness. And if our voices suddenly
rise into shrieks of laughter, or if we are shaken by the most violent
sobbing, what more natural?—it hardly calls for remark. The pace at
which we are living is so tremendous that sparks must rush off our
wheels as we fly. Moreover, when the speed is thus increased and the
elements of the soul are seen, not separately in scenes of humour or
scenes of passion as our slower English minds conceive them, but
streaked, involved, inextricably confused, a new panorama of the human
mind is revealed. The old divisions melt into each other. Men are at the
same time villains and saints; their acts are at once beautiful and
despicable. We love and we hate at the same time. There is none: of that
precise division between good and bad to which we are used. Often those
for whom we feel most affection are the greatest criminals, and the most
abject sinners move us to the strongest admiration as well as love.
Dashed to the crest of the waves, bumped and battered on the stones at
the bottom, it is difficult for an English reader to feel at ease. The
process to which he is accustomed in his own literature is reversed. If
we wished to tell the story of a General’s love affair (and we should
find it very difficult in the first place not to laugh at a General), we
should begin with his house; we should solidify his surroundings. Only
when all was ready should we attempt to deal with the General himself.
Moreover, it is not the samovar but the teapot that rules in England;
time is limited; space crowded; the influence of other points of view,
of other books, even of other ages, makes itself felt. Society is sorted
out into lower, middle, and upper classes, each with its own traditions,
its own manners, and, to some extent, its own language. Whether he
wishes it or not, there is a constant pressure upon an English novelist
to recognise these barriers, and, in consequence, order is imposed on
him and some kind of form; he is inclined to satire rather than to
compassion, to scrutiny of society rather than understanding of
individuals themselves.
No such restraints were laid on Dostoevsky. It is all the same to him
whether you are noble or simple, a tramp or a great lady. Whoever you
are, you are the vessel of this perplexed liquid, this cloudy, yeasty,
precious stuff, the soul. The soul is not restrained by barriers. It
overflows, it floods, it mingles with the souls of others. The simple
story of a bank clerk who could not pay for a bottle of wine spreads,
before we know what is happening, into the lives of his father-in-law
and the five mistresses whom his father-in-law treated abominably, and
the postman’s life, and the charwoman’s, and the Princesses’ who lodged
in the same block of flats; for nothing is outside Dostoevsky’s
province; and when he is tired, he does not stop, he goes on. He cannot
restrain himself. Out it tumbles upon us, hot, scalding, mixed,
marvellous, terrible, oppressive—the human soul.
There remains the greatest of all novelists—for what else can we call
the author of _War and Peace_? Shall we find Tolstoi, too, alien,
difficult, a foreigner? Is there some oddity in his angle of vision
which, at any rate until we have become disciples and so lost our
bearings, keeps us at arm’s length in suspicion and bewilderment? From
his first words we can be sure of one thing at any rate—here is a man
who sees what we see, who proceeds, too, as we are accustomed to
proceed, not from the inside outwards, but from the outside inwards.
Here is a world in which the postman’s knock is heard at eight o’clock,
and people go to bed between ten and eleven. Here is a man, too, who is
no savage, no child of nature; he is educated; he has had every sort of
experience. He is one of those born aristocrats who have used their
privileges to the full. He is metropolitan, not suburban. His senses,
his intellect, are acute, powerful, and well nourished. There is
something proud and superb in the attack of such a mind and such a body
upon life. Nothing seems to escape him. Nothing glances off him
unrecorded. Nobody, therefore, can so convey the excitement of sport,
the beauty of horses, and all the fierce desirability of the world to
the senses of a strong young man. Every twig, every feather sticks to
his magnet. He notices the blue or red of a child’s frock; the way a
horse shifts its tail; the sound of a cough; the action of a man trying
to put his hands into pockets that have been sewn up. And what his
infallible eye reports of a cough or a trick of the hands his infallible
brain refers to something hidden in the character so that we know his
people, not only by the way they love and their views on politics and
the immortality of the soul, but also by the way they sneeze and choke.
Even in a translation we feel that we have been set on a mountain-top
and had a telescope put into our hands. Everything is astonishingly
clear and absolutely sharp. Then, suddenly, just as we are exulting,
breathing deep, feeling at once braced and purified, some
detail—perhaps the head of a man—comes at us out of the picture in an
alarming way, as if extruded by the very intensity of its life.
“Suddenly a strange thing happened to me: first I ceased to see what was
around me; then his face seemed to vanish till only the eyes were left,
shining over against mine; next the eyes seemed to be in my own head,
and then all became confused—I could see nothing and was forced to shut
my eyes, in order to break loose from the feeling of pleasure and fear
which his gaze was producing in me. . . .” Again and again we share
Masha’s feelings in _Family Happiness_. One shuts one’s eyes to escape
the feeling of pleasure and fear. Often it is pleasure that is
uppermost. In this very story there are two descriptions, one of a girl
walking in a garden at night with her lover, one of a newly married
couple prancing down their drawing-room, which so convey the feeling of
intense happiness that we shut the book to feel it better. But always
there is an element of fear which makes us, like Masha, wish to escape
from the gaze which Tolstoi fixes on us. Does it arise from the sense,
which in real life might harass us, that such happiness as he describes
is too intense to last, that we are on the edge of disaster? Or is it
not that the very intensity of our pleasure is somehow questionable and
forces us to ask, with Pozdnyshev in the Kreutzer Sonata, “But why
live?” Life dominates Tolstoi as the soul dominates Dostoevsky. There is
always at the centre of all the brilliant and flashing petals of the
flower this scorpion, “Why live?” There is always at the centre of the
book some Olenin, or Pierre, or Levin who gathers into himself all
experience, turns the world round between his fingers, and never ceases
to ask even as he enjoys it, what is the meaning of it, and what should
be our aims. It is not the priest who shatters our desires most
effectively; it is the man who has known them, and loved them himself.
When he derides them, the world indeed turns to dust and ashes beneath
our feet. Thus fear mingles with our pleasure, and of the three great
Russian writers, it is Tolstoi who most enthralls us and most repels.
But the mind takes its bias from the place of its birth, and no doubt,
when it strikes upon a literature so alien as the Russian, flies off at
a tangent far from the truth.
_Outlines_
I