Produced by Sigal Alon, Robert Tonsing and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
HOURS IN A LIBRARY
VOL. III.
HOURS IN A LIBRARY
BY
LESLIE STEPHEN
_NEW EDITION, WITH ADDITIONS_
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. III.
LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1892
[_All rights reserved_]
CONTENTS
OF
THE THIRD VOLUME
PAGE
CHARLOTTE BRONTË 1
CHARLES KINGSLEY 31
GODWIN AND SHELLEY 64
GRAY AND HIS SCHOOL 101
STERNE 139
COUNTRY BOOKS 175
GEORGE ELIOT 207
AUTOBIOGRAPHY 237
CARLYLE'S ETHICS 271
THE STATE TRIALS 306
COLERIDGE 339
HOURS IN A LIBRARY
_CHARLOTTE BRONTË_
Mr. Swinburne, in his recent essay upon Miss Brontë, has, as usual,
bestowed the most enthusiastic and generous praise with a lavish hand,
and bestowed it upon worthy objects. And, as usual, he seems to be
a little too much impressed with the necessary connection between
illuminating in honour of a hero and breaking the windows or burning
the effigies of the hero's rivals. I do not wish to examine the
justice of his assaults, and still less to limp on halting and prosaic
feet after his eloquent discourse. I propose only to follow an inquiry
suggested by a part of his argument. After all, though criticism
cannot boast of being a science, it ought to aim at something like
a scientific basis, or at least to proceed in a scientific spirit.
The critic, therefore, before abandoning himself to the oratorical
impulse, should endeavour to classify the phenomena with which he
is dealing as calmly as if he were ticketing a fossil in a museum.
The most glowing eulogy, the most bitter denunciation, have their
proper place; but they belong to the art of persuasion, and form no
part of scientific method. Our literary, like our religious, creed
should rest upon a purely rational ground, and be exposed to logical
tests. Our faith in an author must, in the first instance, be the
product of instinctive sympathy, instead of deliberate reason. It may
be propagated by the contagion of enthusiasm, and preached with all
the fervour of proselytism. But when we are seeking to justify our
emotions, we must endeavour to get for the time into the position
of an independent spectator, applying with rigid impartiality such
methods as are best calculated to free us from the influence of
personal bias.
Undoubtedly it is a very difficult task to be alternately witness
and judge; to feel strongly, and yet to analyse coolly; to love
every feature in a familiar face, and yet to decide calmly upon its
intrinsic ugliness or beauty. To be an adequate critic is almost
to be a contradiction in terms; to be susceptible to a force, and
yet free from its influence; to be moving with the stream, and yet
to be standing on the bank. It is especially difficult in the case
of writers like Miss Brontë, and of critics who were in the most
enthusiastic age when her fame was in its early freshness. It is
almost impossible not to have overpowering prejudices in regard to
a character so intense, original, and full of special idiosyncrasy.
If you did not love her you must hate her: or, since hatred for so
noble a sufferer would imply unreasonable brutality, we may say,
feel strongly a hopeless uncongeniality of temperament. The power
of exciting such feelings is, indeed, some testimony to an author's
intrinsic force; and it may explain the assertion of her latest
biographer. If it be true, as he says, that she has been comparatively
neglected of late years, that is what may easily happen in the case
of writers more remarkable for intensity than comprehensive power.
Their real audience must always be the comparatively small number who
are in sympathy with their peculiar moods. But their vigour begins
by impressing and overawing a large number of persons who do not feel
this spontaneous sympathy. They conquer by sheer force minds whom they
do not attract by milder methods. In literature, at any rate, violent
conquests are generally transitory; and after a time, those who have
obeyed the rule against their natural inclination fall away and leave
an audience composed of those alone who have been swayed by a deeper
attraction. Charlotte Brontë, and perhaps her sister Emily in an
even higher degree, must have a certain interest for all intelligent
observers of character. But only a minority will thoroughly and
unreservedly enjoy the writings which embody so peculiar an essence.
Some scenery—rich pasturage and abounding rivers and forest-clad
hills—appeals more or less to everybody. It is only a few who really
love the lonely cairn on a wind-swept moor. An accident may make it
the fashion to affect admiration for such peculiar aspects of nature;
but, like all affectations, it will die away after a time, and the
faithful lovers be reduced to a narrow band.
The comparative eclipse, then—if eclipse there be—of Charlotte
Brontë's fame, does not imply want of power, but want of
comprehensiveness. There is a certain _primâ facie_ presumption
against a writer who appeals only to a few, though it may be amply
rebutted by showing that the few are also fit. The two problems must
go together; why is the charm so powerful, and why is it so limited?
Any intense personality has so far a kind of double-edged influence.
Shakespeare sympathises with everybody, and therefore everyone with
him. Swift scorns and loathes a great part of the world, and therefore
if people in general read Swift, or said honestly what they felt,
many readers would confess to a simple feeling of aversion to his
writings. There is, however, a further distinction. One may dislike
such a man as Swift, but one cannot set him aside. His amazing
intellectual vigour, the power with which he states some of the great
problems of life, and the trenchant decision of his answer, give him
a right to be heard. We may shudder, but we are forced to listen. If
with equal force of character his intellectual power had been less,
we should feel the shock without the mysterious attraction. He would
be an unpleasant phenomenon, and one which might be simply neglected.
It is because he brings his peculiar views to bear upon problems of
universal interest that we cannot afford simply to drop him out of
mind. The power of grasping general truths is necessary to give a
broad base to a writer's fame, though his capacity for tender and deep
emotion is that which makes us love or hate him.
Mr. Swinburne takes Miss Brontë to illustrate the distinction between
'genius' and 'intellect.' Genius, he says, as the most potent faculty,
can most safely dispense with its ally. If genius be taken to mean
the poetic as distinguished from the scientific type of mind—that
which sees intuitively, prefers synthesis to analysis, and embodies
ideas in concrete symbols instead of proceeding by rule and measure,
and constructing diagrams in preference to drawing pictures—the
truth is undeniable and important. The reasoner gives us mechanism
and constructs automata where the seer creates living and feeling
beings. The contrast used to be illustrated by the cases of Jonson
and Shakespeare—by the difference between the imaginative vigour of
'Antony and Cleopatra,' and the elaborate construction of 'Sejanus.'
We must add, however, that the two qualities of mind are not mutually
exclusive. The most analytic mind has some spark of creative
power, and the great creators are capable of deliberate dissection.
Shakespeare could reflect; and Jonson could see. The ideally perfect
mind would be capable of applying each method with equal facility in
its proper place.
Genius, therefore, manifested in any high degree, must be taken to
include intellect, if the words are to be used in this sense. Genius
begins where intellect ends; or takes by storm where intellect has
to make elaborate approaches according to the rules of scientific
strategy. One sees where the other demonstrates, but the same
principles are common to both. To say that a writer shows more genius
than intellect may mean simply that, as an artist, he proceeds by
the true artistic method, and does not put us off with scientific
formulæ galvanised into an internal semblance of life. But it may
mean that his reflective powers are weak, that he has not assimilated
the seminal ideas of his time, and is at a loss in the higher regions
of philosophic thought. If so, you are setting limits to the sphere
of his influence, and showing that he is incapable of uttering the
loftiest aspirations and the deepest emotions of his fellows. A great
religious teacher may prefer a parable to a theory, but the parable
is impressive because it gives the most vivid embodiment of a truly
philosophical theory.
Miss Brontë, as her warmest admirers would grant, was not and did
not in the least affect to be a philosophical thinker. And because a
great writer, to whom she has been gratuitously compared, is strong
just where she is weak, her friends have an injudicious desire to make
out that the matter is of no importance, and that her comparative
poverty of thought is no injury to her work. There is no difficulty
in following them so far as to admit that her work is none the worse
for containing no theological or philosophical disquisitions, or for
showing no familiarity with the technicalities of modern science and
metaphysics. But the admission by no means follows that her work does
not suffer very materially by the comparative narrowness of the circle
of ideas in which her mind habitually revolved. Perhaps if she had
been familiar with Hegel or Sir W. Hamilton, she would have intruded
undigested lumps of metaphysics, and introduced vexatious allusions
to the philosophy of identity or to the principle of the excluded
middle. But it is possible, also, that her conceptions of life and
the world would have been enriched and harmonised, and that, without
giving us more scientific dogmas, her characters would have embodied
more fully the dominating ideas of the time. There is no province of
inquiry—historical, scientific, or philosophical—from which the artist
may not derive useful material; the sole question is whether it has
been properly assimilated and transformed by the action of the poetic
imagination. By attempting to define how far Miss Brontë's powers
were in fact thus bounded, we shall approximately decide her place
in the great hierarchy of imaginative authors. That it was a very
high one, I take to be undeniable. Putting aside living writers, the
only female novelist whom one can put distinctly above her is George
Sand; for Miss Austen, whom most critics place upon a still higher
level, differs so widely in every way that 'comparison' is absurd. It
is almost silly to draw a parallel between writers when every great
quality in one is 'conspicuous by its absence' in the other.
The most obvious of all remarks about Miss Brontë is the close
connection between her life and her writings. In no books is the
author more completely incarnated. She is the heroine of her two
most powerful novels; for Lucy Snowe is avowedly her own likeness,
and Lucy Snowe differs only by accidents from Jane Eyre; whilst her
sister is the heroine of the third novel. All the minor characters,
with scarcely an exception, are simply portraits, and the more
successful in proportion to their fidelity. The scenery and even the
incidents are, for the most part, equally direct transcripts from
reality. And, as this is almost too palpable a peculiarity to be
expressly mentioned, it seems to be an identical proposition that
the study of her life is the study of her novels. More or less true
of all imaginative writers, this must be pre-eminently true of Miss
Brontë. Her experience, we might say, has been scarcely transformed in
passing through her mind. She has written down not only her feelings,
but the more superficial accidents of her life. She has simply given
fictitious names and dates, with a more or less imaginary thread of
narrative, to her own experience at school, as a governess, at home,
and in Brussels. 'Shirley' contains a continuous series of photographs
of Haworth and its neighbourhood; as 'Villette' does of Brussels: and
if 'Jane Eyre' is not so literal, except in the opening account of
the school-life, much of it is almost as strictly autobiographical.
It is one of the oddest cases of an author's self-delusion that
Miss Brontë should have imagined that she could remain anonymous
after the publication of 'Shirley,' and the introduction of such
whole-length portraits from the life as the Yorke family. She does
not appear to have been herself conscious of the closeness of her
adherence to facts. 'You are not to suppose,' she says in a letter
given by Mrs. Gaskell, 'any of the characters in "Shirley" intended
as real portraits. It would not suit the rules of art, nor of my
own feelings, to write in that style. We only suffer reality to
_suggest_ never to _dictate_.' She seems to be thinking chiefly of
her 'heroes and heroines,' and would perhaps have admitted that the
minor personages were less idealised. But we must suppose also that
she failed to appreciate fully the singularity of characters which,
in her seclusion, she had taken for average specimens of the world
at large. If I take my village for the world, I cannot distinguish
the particular from the universal; and must assume that the most
distinctive peculiarities are unnoticeably commonplace. The amazing
vividness of her portrait-painting is the quality which more than
any other makes her work unique amongst modern fiction. Her realism
is something peculiar to herself; and only the crudest of critics
could depreciate its merits on the ground of its fidelity to facts.
The hardest of all feats is to see what is before our eyes. What is
called the creative power of genius is much more the power of insight
into commonplace things and characters. The realism of the De Foe
variety produces an illusion, by describing the most obvious aspects
of everyday life, and introducing the irrelevant and accidental. A
finer kind of realism is that which, like Miss Austen's, combines
exquisite powers of minute perception with a skill which can light
up the most delicate miniatures with an unfailing play of humour.
A more impressive kind is that of Balzac, where the most detailed
reproduction of realities is used to give additional force to the
social tragedies which are being enacted at our doors. The specific
peculiarity of Miss Brontë seems to be the power of revealing to us
the potentiality of intense passions lurking behind the scenery of
everyday life. Except in the most melodramatic—which is also the
weakest—part of 'Jane Eyre,' we have lives almost as uneventful as
those of Miss Austen, and yet charged to the utmost with latent power.
A parson at the head of a school-feast somehow shows himself as a
'Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood;' a professor lecturing
a governess on composition is revealed as a potential Napoleon; a
mischievous schoolboy is obviously capable of developing into a
Columbus or a Nelson; even the most commonplace natural objects,
such as a row of beds in a dormitory, are associated, and naturally
associated, with the most intense emotions. Miss Austen makes you feel
that a tea-party in a country parsonage may be as amusing as the most
brilliant meeting of cosmopolitan celebrities; and Miss Brontë that
it may display characters capable of shaking empires and discovering
new worlds. The whole machinery is in a state of the highest electric
tension, though there is no display of thunder and lightning to amaze
us.
The power of producing this effect without stepping one hand's-breadth
beyond the most literal and unmistakable fidelity to ordinary facts is
explicable, one would say, so far as genius is explicable at all, only
in one way. A mind of extraordinary activity within a narrow sphere
has been brooding constantly upon a small stock of materials, and a
sensitive nature has been exposed to an unusual pressure from the hard
facts of life. The surroundings must surely have been exceptional, and
the receptive faculties impressible even to morbidness, to produce so
startling a result; and the key seemed to be given by Mrs. Gaskell's
touching biography, which, with certain minor faults, is still one
of the most pathetic records of a melancholy life in our literature.
Charlotte Brontë and her sister, according to this account, resembled
the sensitive plant exposed to the cutting breezes of the West Riding
moors. Their writings were the cry of pain and of only half-triumphant
faith, produced by a life-long martyrdom, tempered by mutual sympathy,
but embittered by family sorrows and the trials of a dependent life.
They afforded one more exemplification of the common theory, that
great art is produced by taking an exceptionally delicate nature and
mangling it slowly under the grinding wheels of the world.
A recent biographer has given us to understand that this is in great
part a misconception, and, whilst paying high compliments to Mrs.
Gaskell, he virtually accuses her of unintentionally substituting a
fiction for a biography. Mr. Wemyss Reid's intention is excellent; and
one can well believe that Mrs. Gaskell did in fact err by carrying
into the earlier period the gloom of later years. Most certainly one
would gladly believe this to be the case. Only when Mr. Reid seems to
think that Charlotte Brontë was a gay and high-spirited girl, and that
the people of Haworth were thoroughly commonplace, we begin to fear
that we are in the presence of one of those well-meant attempts at
whitewashing which 'do justice' to a marked character by obliterating
all its most prominent features. If Boswell had written in such a
spirit, Johnson would have been a Chesterfield, and Goldsmith never
have blundered in his talk. When we look at them fairly, Mr. Reid's
proofs seem to be distinctly inadequate for his conclusions, though
calculated to correct some very important misconceptions. He quotes,
for example, a couple of letters, in one of which Miss Brontë ends
a little outburst of Tory politics by saying, 'Now, Ellen, laugh
heartily at all that rhodomontade!' This sentence, omitted by Mrs.
Gaskell, is taken to prove that Charlotte's interest in politics was
'not unmingled with the happy levity of youth.' Surely, it is just a
phrase from the school-girl's 'Complete Letter-Writer.' It would be
as sensible to quote from an orator the phrase, 'but I fear that I
am wearying the House,' to prove that he was conscious of being an
intolerable bore. The next letter is said to illustrate the 'infinite
variety of moods' of her true character, and its rapid transitions
from grave to gay, because, whilst expressing very strongly some
morbid feelings, she admits that they would be contemptible to
common-sense, and says that she had been 'in one of her sentimental
humours.' Did anybody ever express a morbid feeling without some such
qualification? And is not 'infinite,' even in the least mathematical
sense, rather a strong expression for two? A sentimental mood and a
reaction are mentioned in one letter. That scarcely proves much gaiety
of heart or variety of mood. If, indeed, Charlotte had always been at
her worst, she would have been mad: and we need not doubt that she too
had some taste of the gladness as of the sorrows of childhood. The
plain truth is, that Miss Brontë's letters, read without reference
to the disputes of rival biographers, are disappointing. The most
striking thing about them is that they are young-ladyish. Here and
there a passage revealing the writer's literary power shines through
the more commonplace matter, but, as a whole, they give a curious
impression of immaturity. The explanation seems to be, in the first
place, that Miss Brontë, with all her genius, was still a young
lady. Her mind, with its exceptional powers in certain directions,
never broke the fetters by which the parson's daughter of the last
generation was restricted. Trifling indications of this are common
in her novels. The idealised portrait of Emily, the daring and
unconventional Shirley, shows her utmost courage by hinting a slight
reluctance to repeat certain clauses in the Athanasian Creed; and the
energy with which the unlucky curates are satirised shows the state
of mind in which even the youngest clergyman is still invested with
more or less superhuman attributes. The warmth is generated by the
previous assumption that a young gentleman who dons a white neckcloth
must, in the normal state of things, put off the schoolboy and
develop a hidden pair of wings. The wrath excited by their failure to
fulfil this expectation strikes one as oddly disproportionate. And, in
the next place, it seems that, even in writing to her best friends,
Miss Brontë habitually dreaded any vivid expression of feeling, and
perhaps observed that her sentiments when spread upon letter-paper
had a morbid appearance. There are many people who can confide in
the public more freely than in the most intimate friends. The mask
of anonymous authorship and fictitious personages has a delusive
appearance of security. The most sacred emotions are for ourselves or
for the invisible public rather than for the intermediate sphere of
concrete spectators. The letters may dissipate some of Mrs. Gaskell's
romantic gloom, but they do not persuade us that the Brontës were ever
like their neighbours. The doctrine that the people of Haworth were
really commonplace mortals may be accepted with a similar reserve.
Undoubtedly every Scotch peasant is not a Davie Deans, nor every
Irishman a Captain Costigan. There are natives of the mining districts
who do not throw half-bricks at every stranger they see; there are
Yankees who do not chew tobacco, and Englishmen who do not eat raw
beef-steaks. And so one may well believe that many inhabitants of
Haworth would have passed muster at Charing Cross; and one may hope
and believe that a man like Heathcliff was an exaggeration even of
the most extravagant of the squires in Craven. If there were many such
people in any corner of this world, it would be greatly in want of
a thorough clearing out. And, therefore, one may understand why the
good people of Haworth should be amazed when Mrs. Gaskell set forth
as common types the gentleman who fired small-shot from his parlour
window at anyone who came within convenient range, and the man who
chuckled over his luck in dying just after insuring his life.
But, for all this, it would be permissible also to suppose that there
was a strongly-marked provincial character in that region, even if
Miss Brontë's life-like portraits were not their own sufficient
evidence. All people seem to be commonplace to the commonplace
observer. Genius reveals the difference; it does not invent it.
In one sense, doubtless, the people were commonplace enough, and
in that fact lay part of their offensiveness. Many of the upper
classes, one may guess, were hard, crabbed men of business, with
even less than the average of English toleration for sentiment or
æsthetic fancies; and their inferiors were sturdy workmen, capable
of taking a pride in their own brutality, which would have shocked
gentler races. But the precise degree in which these characteristics
were manifested must be left to the decision of local observers. We
cannot affect to know accurately in what proportion the charge of
originality is to be shared between the Brontës and their neighbours;
how far the surroundings were unusually harsh and the surrounded
abnormally tender. In any case, one may assume that Miss Brontë and
her sisters were at once even morbidly sensitive and exposed to the
contact of persons emphatically intolerant of morbid sentiment.
Their ordinary relation to the outside world seems to be indicated
by one peculiarity of Miss Brontë's writing. When young Mark Yorke
sees that Moore has been flattered by hearing a lady describe him
as 'not sentimental,' that offensive lad gets down a dictionary and
endeavours to dash Moore's pleasure by proving that 'not sentimental'
must mean destitute of ideas. The trait is very probably from life,
and is at any rate life-like. There are many amiable people who take a
keen pleasure in dashing cold water upon any little manifestation of
self-complacency in their neighbours. To find out a man's tenderest
corn, and then to bring your heel down upon it with a good rasping
scrunch, is somehow gratifying to corrupt human nature. A kindly wit
contrives to convey a compliment in affected satire. But the whole
aim of a humourist of this variety is to convey the most mortifying
truths in the most brutal plain-speaking. Now speeches modelled upon
this plan are curiously frequent in Miss Brontë's conversations.
Hunsden, the first sketch of the Yorke type in the 'Professor,'
composes his whole talk of a string of brutal home-truths. The worst
characters, like Miss Fanshawe in 'Villette,' thoroughly enjoy telling
a friendless governess that she is poor, plain, and sickly. And
even her favourites, Rochester and Shirley and Paul Emanuel, have
just a leaning to the same trick of speech, though with them it is
an occasional bitter to heighten the flavour of their substantial
kindness. Miss Brontë has as little sense of humour as Milton or
Wordsworth; but her nearest approach to it is in some of those shrewd,
bitter sayings which are rather more of a gibe than a compliment. When
one remembers that the originals of the Yorkes were amongst her most
cherished and cultivated friends, and that they are admittedly painted
to the life, one may fancy that she had received a good many of those
left-handed compliments which seem to have done duty for pleasant
jests in the district.
The soliloquies in which her heroines indulge proceed upon the same
plan. Jane Eyre sits in judgment upon herself, and listens to the
evidence of Memory and Reason, accusing her of rejecting the real and
'rabidly devouring the ideal.' And she decides in accordance with
her witnesses. 'Listen, Jane Eyre, to your sentence; to-morrow place
the glass before you and draw in chalk your own picture, faithfully,
without softening one defect; omit no harsh line; smooth away no
displeasing irregularity: write under it, "Portrait of a governess,
disconnected, poor, and plain!"'
Similar passages occur in 'Shirley' and 'Villette,' and obviously
represent a familiar mood. The original of this portrait was
frequently engaged, it would seem, in forcing herself to hear such
unpalatable truths. When other people snubbed her, after the fashion
of the Yorkes, she might be vexed by their harshness, but her own
thoughts echoed their opinion. Lucy Snowe is rather gratified than
otherwise when Miss Fanshawe treats her to one of these pleasing fits
of frank thinking aloud. She pardons the want of feeling for the sake
of the honesty.
Sensitive natures brought into contact with those of coarser grain may
relieve themselves in various ways. Some might have been driven into
revolt against the proprieties which found so harsh an expression.
The scamp Branwell Brontë took the unluckily commonplace path of
escape from a too frigid code of external morality which leads to
the public-house. His sisters followed the more characteristically
feminine method. They learnt to be proud of the fetters by which they
were bound. Instead of fretting against the stern law of repression,
they identified it with the eternal code of duty, and rejoiced in
trampling on their own weakness. The current thus restrained ran all
the more powerfully in its narrow channel. What might have been bright
and genial sentiment was transformed and chastened into a kind of
austere enthusiasm. They became recluses in spirit, sternly enforcing
a self-imposed rule, though, in their case, the convent walls were
invisible and the objects of their devotion not those which dominate
the ascetic imagination.
Theorists who trace the inheritance of race characteristics might
be interested in the curious development thus effected. The father
of the family was an Irishman, and the mother a Cornish woman; the
aunt, who succeeded her in the management of the household, had a
persistent dislike for the character of her northern neighbours;
even Charlotte herself, we are told, spake in her childhood with a
strong Irish accent. And yet, as we find her saying in reference to
the troubles of 1848, she has 'no sympathy' with French or Irish. She
had been spiritually annexed by the people with whom she lived. She
was obtrusively and emphatically a Yorkshire woman, though only by
adoption; she is never tired of proclaiming or implying her hearty
preference of rough Yorkshire people to cockneys, sentimentalists, and
that large part of the human race which we describe contemptuously
as 'foreigners.' She is a typical example of the 'patriotism of the
steeple.' She loved with her whole heart the narrowest insular type.
She idolised the Duke of Wellington, with his grand contempt for
humbug and ideas, terms synonymous—perhaps rightly synonymous—with
many people. When she came in contact with fine foreigners and
Papists, it only increased her hearty contempt for forms of character
and religion which, one might have fancied _à priori_, would have had
many attractions for her. If at times she felt the æsthetic charm of
parts of the Catholic system, she was but the more convinced that it
was a poison, dangerous in proportion to its sweetness. The habit of
trampling on some of her own impulses had become a religion for her.
She had learnt to make a shield of reserve and self-repression, and
could not be tempted to lay it aside when gentle persuasion took the
place of rougher intimidation. Much is said by her biographers of the
heroic force of will of her sister Emily, who presents the same type
in an intensified form. Undoubtedly both sisters had powerful wills;
but their natures had not less been moulded, and their characters,
so to speak, turned inward by the early influence of surrounding
circumstances. The force was not of that kind which resists the
pressure from without, but of the kind which accepts and intensifies
it, and makes a rigid inward law for itself of the law embodied in
external conditions.
The sisters, indeed, differed widely, though with a strong
resemblance. The iron had not entered so deeply into Charlotte's
nature. Emily's naturally subjective mode of thought—to use the
unpleasant technical phrase—found its most appropriate utterance in
lyrical poetry. She represents, that is, the mood of pure passion, and
is rather encumbered than otherwise by the necessity of using the more
indirect method of concrete symbols. She feels, rather than observes;
whereas Charlotte feels in observing. Charlotte had not that strange
self-concentration which made the external world unreal to her sister.
Her powers of observation, though restricted by circumstances and
narrowed by limitations of her intellect, showed amazing penetration
within her proper province. The greatest of all her triumphs in
this direction is the character of Paul Emanuel, which has tasked
Mr. Swinburne's powers of expressing admiration, and which one feels
to be, in its way, inimitable. A more charming hero was never drawn,
or one whose reality is more vivid and unmistakable. We know him
as we know a familiar friend, or rather as we should know a friend
whose character had been explained for us by a common acquaintance of
unusual acuteness and opportunity of observation. Perhaps we might
venture to add, that it is hardly explicable, except as a portrait
drawn by a skilful hand guided by love, and by love intensified by the
consciousness of some impassable barrier.
Mr. Swinburne compares this masterpiece of Miss Brontë's art with
the famous heroes of fiction, Don Quixote, Uncle Toby, and Colonel
Newcome. Don Quixote admittedly stands apart as one of the greatest
creations of poetic imagination. Of Colonel Newcome I will not speak;
but the comparison with Uncle Toby is enough to suggest what is the
great secret both of Miss Brontë's success and its limitations.
In one sense Paul Emanuel is superior even to such characters as
these. He is more real: he is so real that we feel at once that he
must have been drawn from a living model, though we may leave some
indefinable margin of idealisation. If the merit of fiction were
simply its approach to producing illusion, we might infer that Paul
Emanuel was one of the first characters in the world of fiction. But
such a test admittedly implies an erroneous theory of art; and, in
fact, the intense individuality of Paul Emanuel is, in a different
sense, the most serious objection to him. He is a real human being
who gave lectures at a particular date in a _pension_ at Brussels. We
are as much convinced of that fact as we are of the reality of Miss
Brontë herself; but the fact is also a presumption that he is not
one of those great typical characters, the creation of which is the
highest triumph of the dramatist or novelist. There is too much of the
temporary and accidental—too little of the permanent and essential.
We all know and love Uncle Toby, but we feel quite sure that no such
man ever existed except in Sterne's brain. There may have been some
real being who vaguely suggested him; but he is, we assume, the
creation of Sterne, and the projection into concrete form of certain
ideas which had affected Sterne's imagination. He is not, indeed,
nor is any fictitious character, a creation out of nothing. Partly,
no doubt, he is Sterne himself, or Sterne in a particular mood; but
Uncle Toby's soul, that which makes him live and excite our sympathy
and love, is something which might be expressed by the philosopher
as a theory, and which has been expressed in an outward symbol by an
artist of extraordinary skill. Don Quixote is of perennial interest,
because he is the most powerful type ever set forth of the contrast
between the ideal and the commonplace, and his figure comes before us
whenever we are forced to meditate upon some of the most vital and
most melancholy truths about human life. Uncle Toby, in a less degree,
is a great creation, because he is the embodiment of one answer to
a profound and enduring problem. He represents, it has been said,
the wisdom of love, as Mr. Shandy exemplifies the love of wisdom.
More precisely, he is an incarnation of the sentimentalism of the
eighteenth century. It is a phenomenon which has its bad and its good
side, and which may be analysed and explained by historians of the
time. Sterne, in describing Uncle Toby, gave a concrete symbol for
one of the most important currents of thought of the time, which took
religious, moral, and political, as well as artistic shapes. In many
ways the sentiment has lost much of its interest for us; but though
an utterance of an imperfect doctrine, we may infer that Uncle Toby's
soul will transmigrate into new shapes, and perhaps develop into
higher forms.
When we measure M. Paul Emanuel by this test, we feel instinctively
that there is something wanting. The most obvious contrast is that M.
Emanuel is no humourist himself, nor even a product of humour. The
imperfections, the lovable absurdities, of Uncle Toby are embedded in
the structure of his character. His whims and oddities always leave
us in the appropriate mood of blended smiles and tears. Many people,
especially 'earnest' young ladies, will prefer M. Paul Emanuel, who,
like his creator, is always in deadly earnest. At bottom he is always
(like all ladies' heroes) a true woman, simple, pure, heroic and
loving—a real Joan of Arc, as Mr. Thackeray said of his creator, in
the beard and blouse of a French professor. He attaches extravagant
importance to trifles, indeed, for his irascible and impetuous
temperament is always converting him into an Æolus of the duck-pond.
So far there is, we may admit, a kind of pseudo-humorous element in
his composition; but the humour, such as it is, lies entirely on the
surface. He is perfectly sane and sensible, though a trifle choleric.
Give him a larger sphere of action, and his impetuosity will be
imposing instead of absurd. It is the mere accident of situation which
gives, even for a moment, a ludicrous tinge to his proceedings.
Uncle Toby, on the contrary, would be even more of a humourist
as a general on the battle-field than in his mimic sieges on
the bowling-green. The humour is in his very marrow, not in his
surroundings; and the reason is that Sterne feels what every genuine
humourist feels, and what, indeed, it is his main function to
express—a strong sense of the irony of fate, of the queer mixture
of good and bad, of the heroic and the ludicrous, of this world of
ours, and of what we may call the perversity of things in general.
Whether such a treatment is altogether right and healthy is another
question; and most certainly Sterne's view of life is in many respects
not only unworthy, but positively base. But it remains true that the
deep humourist is finding a voice for one of the most pervading and
profound of the sentiments raised in a philosophical observer who
is struck by the discords of the universe. Sensitiveness to such
discords is one of the marks of a truly reflective intellect, though a
humourist suggests one mode of escape from the pain which they cause,
whilst a philosophic and religious mind may find another and perhaps a
more profound solution.
Now M. Paul Emanuel, admirable and amiable as he is, never carries us
into the higher regions of thought. We are told, even ostentatiously,
of the narrow prejudices which he shares, though they do not make
him harsh and uncharitable. The prejudices were obvious in this case
to the creator, because her own happened to be of a different kind.
The 'Tory and clergyman's daughter' was rather puzzled by finding
that a bigoted Papist with a Jesuit education might still be a good
man, and points out conscientiously the defects which she ascribes to
his early training. But the mere fact of the narrowness, the want of
familiarity with a wider sphere of thought, the acceptance of a narrow
code of belief and morality, does not strike her as in itself having
either a comic or a melancholy side. M. Paul has the wrong set of
prejudices, but is not as wrong as prejudiced; and therefore we feel
that a Sterne, or, say, a George Sand, whilst doing equal justice to
M. Emanuel's excellent qualities, would have had a feeling (which in
her was altogether wanting) of his limitation and his incongruity
with the great system of the world. Seen from an intellectual point
of view, placed in his due relation to the great currents of thought
and feeling of the time, we should have been made to feel the pathetic
and humorous aspects of M. Emanuel's character, and he might have been
equally a living individual and yet a type of some more general idea.
The philosopher might ask, for example, what is the exact value of
unselfish heroism guided by narrow theories or employed on unworthy
tasks; and the philosophic humourist or artist might embody the answer
in a portrait of M. Emanuel considered from a cosmic or a cosmopolitan
point of view. From the lower standpoint accessible to Miss Brontë he
is still most attractive; but we see only his relations to the little
scholastic circle, and have no such perception as the greatest writers
would give us of his relations to the universe, or, as the next order
would give, of his relations to the great world without.
Although the secret of Miss Brontë's power lies, to a great extent, in
the singular force with which she can reproduce acute observations of
character from without, her most esoteric teaching, the most accurate
reflex from her familiar idiosyncrasy, is of course to be found in
the characters painted from within. We may infer her personality
more or less accurately from the mode in which she contemplates her
neighbours, but it is directly manifested in various avatars of her
own spirit. Among the characters who are more or less mouthpieces
of her peculiar sentiment we may reckon not only Lucy Snowe and
Jane Eyre, but, to some extent, Shirley, and, even more decidedly,
Rochester. When they speak we are really listening to her own voice,
though it is more or less disguised in conformity to dramatic
necessity. There are great differences between them; but they are
such differences as would exist between members of the same family,
or might be explained by change of health or internal circumstances.
Jane Eyre has not had such bitter experience as Lucy Snowe; Shirley is
generally Jane Eyre in high spirits, and freed from harassing anxiety;
and Rochester is really a spirited sister of Shirley's, though he does
his very best to be a man, and even an unusually masculine specimen of
his sex.
Mr. Rochester, indeed, has imposed upon a good many people; and he
is probably responsible in part for some of the muscular heroes who
have appeared since his time in the world of fiction. I must, however,
admit that, in spite of some opposing authority, he does not appear to
me to be a real character at all, except as a reflection of a certain
side of his creator. He is in reality the personification of a true
woman's longing (may one say it now?) for a strong master. But the
knowledge is wanting. He is a very bold but necessarily unsuccessful
attempt at an impossibility. The parson's daughter did not really
know anything about the class of which he is supposed to be a type,
and he remains vague and inconsistent in spite of all his vigour. He
is intended to be a person who has surfeited from the fruit of the
tree of knowledge, and addresses the inexperienced governess from the
height—or depth—of his worldly wisdom. And he really knows just as
little of the world as she does. He has to impose upon her by giving
an account of his adventures taken from the first novel at hand of
the early Bulwer school, or a diluted recollection of Byron. There
is not a trace of real cynicism—of the strong nature turned sour by
experience—in his whole conversation. He is supposed to be specially
simple and masculine, and yet he is as self-conscious as a young lady
on her first appearance in society, and can do nothing but discourse
about his feelings, and his looks, and his phrenological symptoms, to
his admiring hearer. Set him beside any man's character of a man and
one feels at once that he has no real solidity or vitality in him.
He has, of course, strong nerves and muscles, but those are articles
which can be supplied in unlimited quantities with little expense to
the imagination. Nor can one deny that his conduct to Miss Eyre is
abominable. If he had proposed to her to ignore the existence of the
mad Mrs. Rochester, he would have acted like a rake, but not like a
sneak. But the attempt to entrap Jane into a bigamous connection by
concealing the wife's existence, is a piece of treachery for which
it is hard to forgive him. When he challenges the lawyer and the
clergyman to condemn him after putting themselves in his place, their
answer is surely obvious. One may take a lenient view of a man who
chooses by his own will to annul his marriage to a filthy lunatic;
but he was a knave for trying to entrap a defenceless girl by a mock
ceremony. He puts himself in a position in which the contemptible Mr.
Mason has a moral advantage.
This is by far the worst blot in Miss Brontë's work, and may partly
explain, though it cannot justify, the harsh criticisms made at the
time. It is easy now to win a cheap reputation for generosity by
trampling upon the dead bodies of the luckless critics who blundered
so hopelessly. The time for anger is past; and mere oblivion is the
fittest doom for such offenders. Inexperience, and consequently
inadequate appreciation of the demands of the situation, was Miss
Brontë's chief fault in this matter, and most certainly not any
want of true purity and moral elevation. But the fact that she,
in whom an instinctive nobility of spirit is, perhaps, the most
marked characteristic, should have given scandal to the respectable,
is suggestive of another inference. What, in fact, is the true
significance of this singular strain of thought and feeling, which
puts on various and yet closely-allied forms in the three remarkable
novels we have been considering? It displays itself at one moment
in some vivid description, or—for 'description' seems too faint a
word—some forcible presentation to our mind's eye of a fragment of
moorland scenery; at another, it appears as an ardently sympathetic
portrayal of some trait of character at once vigorous and tender;
then it utters itself in a passionate soliloquy, which establishes
the fact that its author possessed the proverbial claim to knowledge
of the heavenly powers; or again, it produces one of those singular
little prose-poems—such as Shirley's description of Eve—which, with
all their force, have just enough flavour of the 'devoirs' at M.
Heger's establishment to suggest that they are the work of an inspired
school-girl. To gather up into a single formula the meaning of such
a character as Lucy Snowe, or, in other words, of Charlotte Brontë,
is, of course, impossible. But at least such utterances always give
us the impression of a fiery soul imprisoned in too narrow and too
frail a tenement. The fire is pure and intense. It is kindled in a
nature intensely emotional, and yet aided by a heroic sense of duty.
The imprisonment is not merely that of a feeble body in uncongenial
regions, but that of a narrow circle of thought, and consequently
of a mind which has never worked itself clear by reflection, or
developed a harmonious and consistent view of life. There is a certain
feverish disquiet which is marked by the peculiar mannerism of the
style. At its best, we have admirable flashes of vivid expression,
where the material of language is the incarnation of keen intuitive
thought. At its worst, it is strangely contorted, crowded by rather
awkward personifications, and degenerates towards a rather unpleasant
Ossianesque. More severity of taste would increase the power by
restraining the abuse. We feel an aspiration after more than can be
accomplished, an unsatisfied yearning for potent excitement, which is
sometimes more fretful than forcible.
The symptoms are significant of the pervading flaw in otherwise most
effective workmanship. They imply what, in a scientific sense, would
be an inconsistent theory, and, in an æsthetic sense, an inharmonious
representation of life. One great aim of the writing, explained in the
preface to the second edition of 'Jane Eyre,' is a protest against
conventionality. But the protest is combined with a most unflinching
adherence to the proper conventions of society; and we are left in
great doubt as to where the line ought to be drawn. Where does the
unlawful pressure of society upon the individual begin, and what are
the demands which it may rightfully make upon our respect? At one
moment in 'Jane Eyre' we seem to be drifting towards the solution that
strong passion is the one really good thing in the world, and that
all human conventions which oppose it should be disregarded. This was
the tendency which shocked the respectable reviewers of the time. Of
course they should have seen that the strongest sympathy of the author
goes with the heroic self-conquest of the heroine under temptation.
She triumphs at the cost of a determined self-sacrifice, and
undoubtedly we are meant to sympathise with the martyr. Yet it is also
true that we are left with the sense of an unsolved discord. Sheer
stoical regard for duty is represented as something repulsive, however
imposing, in the figure of St. John Rivers, and virtue is rewarded by
the arbitrary removal of the obstacles which made it unpleasant. What
would Jane Eyre have done, and what would our sympathies have been,
had she found that Mrs. Rochester had not been burnt in the fire at
Thornfield? That is rather an awkward question. Duty is supreme, seems
to be the moral of the story; but duty sometimes involves a strain
almost too hard for mortal faculties.