members of your society enjoy in being personally connected with the
scenes and even, perhaps, with the characters associated with the Bronte
family, I cannot begin my little address to you to-day without some
invocation of the genius of the place. We meet at Dewsbury because the
immortal sisters were identified with Dewsbury. Is it then not
imperative that for whatever picture of them I may endeavour to present
before you this afternoon, Dewsbury should form the background?
Unfortunately, however, although in the hands of a skilful painter the
figures of the ladies may glow forth, I fear that in the matter of
taking Dewsbury as the background some vagueness and some darkness are
inevitable. In the biographies of Mrs. Gaskell and of Mr. Clement
Shorter, as well as in the proceedings of your society, I have searched
for evidences of the place Dewsbury took in the lives of the Brontes.
What I find--I expect you to tell me that it is not exhaustive--is this.
Their father, the Rev. Patrick Bronte, was curate here from 1809 to
1811. In 1836, when Charlotte was twenty, Miss Wooler transferred her
school from Roe Head to Heald's House at the top of Dewsbury Moor. In
this school, where Charlotte had been a pupil since 1831, she was now a
governess, and a governess she remained until early in 1838. In April of
that year Miss Wooler was taken ill and Charlotte was for a little while
in charge. Then there was an explosion of temper, of some kind, and
Charlotte went back to Haworth.
That, then, in the main, is the limit of what the scrupulous Muse of
history vouchsafes to tell us about Charlotte Bronte's relation to
Dewsbury. But it also supplies us with one or two phrases which I cannot
bring myself to spare you. In January 1838, Charlotte reviews her
experience at Dewsbury Moor; "I feel," she says, "in nothing better,
nothing humbler nor purer." Again, in 1841, after there had passed time
enough to mellow her exacerbations, she continues to express herself
with vigour. Miss Wooler is making overtures to Charlotte and Emily to
take over the school at Heald's House; perhaps a place might be found
for Anne as well. Miss Wooler, one of the kindest of women, is most
thoughtful, most conciliatory. Charlotte will have none of the idea; she
puts it roughly from her. Of Dewsbury she has nothing to say but that
"it is a poisoned place for me." This is all we know of Charlotte's
relation to Dewsbury, yet nothing, you will tell me, in Froude's phrase,
to what the angels know. Well, I must be frank with you and say that I
am afraid the angels have been inclined to record exceedingly little of
Charlotte Bronte's residence in your inoffensive neighbourhood. I have
to paint a background to my picture, and I find none but the gloomiest
colours. They have to be what the art-critics of the eighteenth century
called "sub-fusc." But it is not the fault of Dewsbury, it is the fault,
or the misfortune, of our remarkable little genius. She was here, in
this wholesome and hospitable vicinity, for several months, during which
time "she felt in nothing better, neither humbler nor purer," and
looking back upon it, she had to admit that it was "a poisoned place"
to her.
I cannot help fancying that you will agree with me, that on such an
occasion as the present, and especially when dealing with a group of
writers about whom so much as has been said as about the Brontes, it is
wise not to cover too wide a ground, but to take, and keep to, one
aspect of the subject. Our little excursion into the history seems to
have given us, under the heading "Dewsbury," a rather grim text, from
which, nevertheless, we may perhaps extract some final consolation. Let
me say at the outset that for the grimness, for the harshness, Dewsbury
is not at all to blame. I fancy that if, in the years from 1836 to 1838,
the Bronte girls had been visitors to Kubla Khan, and had been fed on
honey by his myrmidons at Xanadu, that pleasure-dome would yet have been
"poisoned" to them. It was not poverty, and cold, and the disagreeable
position of a governess, it was not the rough landscape of your moors,
nor its lack of southern amenity which made Charlotte wretched here. It
was not in good Miss Wooler, nor in the pupils, nor in the visitors at
Heald's House that the mischief lay, it was in the closed and patient
crater of Charlotte's own bosom. And I am almost persuaded that, if you
had lived in Dewsbury sixty-five years ago, you would have heard on very
quiet days a faint subterranean sound which you would never have been
able to guess was really the passion, furiously panting, shut up in the
heart of a small, pale governess in Heald's House schoolroom.
If you accuse me of fatalism, I am helpless in your hands, for I confess
I do not see how it could be otherwise, and do scarcely wish that it
could have been. Let us not be too sentimental in this matter. Figures
in literature are notable and valuable to us for what they give us. The
more personal and intense and definite that is, the greater the gift,
the more strenuous the toil and the more severe the initiation which
lead to its expression. The Brontes had a certain thing to learn to
give; what that was we shall presently try to note. But whatever we find
it to be, we start with allowing that it was extremely and boldly
original. It was not to be mastered by lying upon padded sofas and
toying with a little Berlin wool-work. It involved pain, resistance, a
stern revision of things hitherto taken for granted. The secrets which
they designed to wring from nature and from life were not likely to be
revealed to the self-indulgent and the dilettante. The sisters had a
message from the sphere of indignation and revolt. In order that they
should learn it as well as teach it, it was necessary that they should
arrive on the scene at an evil hour for their own happiness. _Jane Eyre_
and _Shirley_ and _Villette_ could not have been written unless, for
long years, the world had been "a poisoned place" for Charlotte Bronte.
It has been excellently said by Mrs. Humphry Ward that in many respects,
and to the very last, the Brontes challenge no less than they attract
us. This is an aspect which, in the midst of rapturous modern
heroine-worship, we are apt to forget. Thackeray, who respected the
genius of the family, and was immensely kind to the author of _Jane
Eyre_, never really felt comfortable in her company. We know how he
stole out of his own front-door, and slipped away into the night to
escape her. "A very austere little person," he called her, and we may
put what emphasis on the austerity we will. I feel sure that any
maladroit "white-washing of Charlotte" will tend, sooner or later,
good-natured though it may be, in a failure to comprehend what she
really was, in what her merit consisted, what the element in her was
that, for instance, calls us here together nearly half a century after
she completed her work and passed away. Young persons of genius very
commonly write depressing books; since, the more vivid an unripe
creature's impression of life is, the more acute is its distress. It is
only extremely stupid Sunday-school children who shout in chorus, "We
are so happy, happy, happy!" Genius thrown naked, with exposed nerves,
on a hard indifferent world, is never "happy" at first. Earth is a
"poisoned place" to it, until it has won its way and woven its garments
and discovered its food.
But in the case of Charlotte Bronte, unhappiness was more than juvenile
fretfulness. All her career was a revolt against conventionality,
against isolation, against irresistible natural forces, such as climate
and ill-health and physical insignificance. Would this insubmissive
spirit have passed out of her writings, as it passed, for instance, out
of those of George Sand? I am not sure, for we see it as strongly,
though more gracefully and skilfully expressed, in _Villette_ as in the
early letters which her biographers have printed. Her hatred of what was
commonplace and narrow and obvious flung her against a wall of
prejudice, which she could not break down. She could only point to it by
her exhausting efforts; she could only invite the generation which
succeeded her to bring their pickaxes to bear upon it. Hence, to the
very last, she seems, more than any other figure in our literature, to
be forever ruffled in temper, for ever angry and wounded and indignant,
rejecting consolation, crouched like a sick animal in the cavern of her
own quenchless pride. This is not an amiable attitude, nor is it
historically true that this was Charlotte Bronte's constant aspect. But
I will venture to say that her amiabilities, her yielding moods, are
really the unessential parts of her disposition, and that a certain
admirable ferocity is the notable feature of her intellectual character.
Her great heart was always bleeding. Here at Dewsbury, in the years we
are contemplating, the hemorrhage was of the most doleful kind, for it
was concealed, suppressed, it was an inward flow. When once she became
an author the pain of her soul was relieved. She said, in 1850, looking
back on the publication of the hapless first volume of poems, "The mere
effort to succeed gave a wonderful zest to existence." Then, a little
later, when no one had paid the slightest attention to the slender trio
of maiden voices, "Something like the chill of despair began to invade
their hearts." With a less powerful inspiration, they must have ceased
to make the effort; they must have succumbed in a melancholy oblivion.
But they were saved by the instinct of a mission. It was not their
private grief which primarily stirred them. What urged them on was the
dim consciousness that they gave voice to a dumb sense of the suffering
of all the world. They had to go on working; they had to pursue their
course, though it might seem sinister or fatal; their business was to
move mankind, not to indulge or please it. They "must be honest; they
must not varnish, soften, or conceal."
What Charlotte Bronte was learning to do in her grim and, let us admit
it, her unlovely probation on Dewsbury Moor, was to introduce a fresh
aspect of the relations of literature to life. Every great writer has a
new note; hers was--defiance. All the aspects in which life presented
itself to her were distressing, not so much in themselves as in herself.
She rebelled against the outrages of poverty, and she drank to its dregs
the cup of straitened circumstances. She was proud, as proud as Lucifer,
and she was forced into positions which suppleness and cheerfulness
might have made tolerable, if not agreeable. She wrung from these
positions their last drop of bitterness. A very remarkable instance of
this may be found in her relation to the Sidgwick family, who, by
universal report, were generous, genial, and unassuming. To Charlotte
Bronte these kindly, if somewhat commonplace folk, grew to seem what a
Turkish pasha seems to the inhabitants of a Macedonian village. It was
not merely the surroundings of her life--it was life itself, in its
general mundane arrangements, which was intolerable to her. She fretted
in it, she beat her wings against its bars, and she would have done the
same if those bars had been of gold, and if the fruits of paradise had
been pushed to her between them. This, I think, is why the expression of
her anger seems too often disproportionate, and why her irony is so apt
to be preposterous. She was born to resist being caged in any form. Her
defiance was universal, and often it was almost indiscriminate.
Do not let us presume to blame this insubmission. Still less let us
commit the folly of minimising it. A good cheerful little Charlotte
Bronte, who thought the best of everybody, who gaily took her place
without a grudging sigh, whose first aim was to make those about her
happy and to minister to their illusions, would have been a much more
welcome inmate of Miss Wooler's household than the cantankerous
governess whom nobody could please, whose susceptibilities were always
on edge, whose lonely arrogance made her feared by all but one or two
who timidly persisted in loving her. But such a paragon of the obvious
virtues would have passed as the birds pass and as the flowers. She
would have left no mark behind. She would never have enriched the
literature of England by one of its master-evidences of the force of
human will. She would never have stirred hundreds of thousands of
consciences to a wholesome questioning of fate and their own souls.
Let us endeavour to pursue the inquiry a few steps further. It is
impossible to separate the ethical conditions of an author's mind from
the work that he produces. The flower requires the soil; it betrays in
its colour and its perfume the environment of its root. The moral
constitution of the writer is reflected in the influence of the written
page. This is the incessant contention; on one hand the independence of
art asserts itself; on the other, it is impossible to escape from the
implicit influence of conduct upon art. There have been few writers of
any age in whom this battle raged more fiercely than it did in Charlotte
Bronte. Her books, and those of her sisters, seem anodyne enough to-day;
to readers of a sensitive species they seemed, when they were published,
as dangerous as _Werther_ had been, as seductive as the _Nouvelle
Heloise_. The reason of this was, in the main, the spirit of revolt
which inspired them. There was something harsh and glaring in their
landscape; there was that touch of Salvator Rosa which one of their
earliest critics observed in them. But more essential was the
stubbornness, the unflinching determination to revise all accepted
formulas of conduct, to do this or that, not because it was usual to do
it, but because it was rational, and in harmony with human nature.
Into an age which had become almost exclusively utilitarian, and in
which the exercise of the imagination, in its real forms, was sedulously
discountenanced, Charlotte Bronte introduced passion in the sphere of
prose fiction, as Byron had introduced it in the sphere of verse thirty
years earlier. It was an inestimable gift; it had to come to us, from
Charlotte Bronte or another, to save our literature from a decline into
triviality and pretension. But she suffered, as Byron had suffered, in
the direct ratio of her originality. If a writer employs passion in an
age which has ceased to recognise it as one of the necessities of
literary vitality he is safe to be accused of perverting his readers.
Balzac says, "When nothing else can be charged against an author, the
reproach of immorality is thrown at his head." When we study the record
of the grim life of the sisters at Haworth, like that of three young
soldiers round a camp-fire with the unseen enemy prowling in the
darkness just out of their sight--when we think of the strenuous vigil,
the intractable and indomitable persistence, the splendour of the
artistic result--we may console ourselves in our anger at the insults
they endured, by reflecting how little they cared. And their noble
indifference to opinion further endears them to us. We may repeat of
them all what Charlotte in a letter once said of Emily, "A certain
harshness in her powerful and peculiar character only makes me cling to
her more."
This insubmissiveness, which was the unconscious armour given to protect
her against the inevitable attacks of fortune, while, on the other hand,
it was the very sign-manual of Charlotte's genius, was, on the other, a
drawback from which she did not live long enough to emancipate her
nature. It is responsible for her lack of interest in what is delicate
and complex; it excused to herself a narrowness of vision which we are
sometimes tempted to find quite distressing. It is probably the cause of
a fault that never quits her for long, a tendency to make her characters
express themselves with a lyrical extravagance which sometimes comes
close to the confines of rodomontade. Charlotte Bronte never arrives at
that mastery of her material which permits the writer to stand apart
from his work, and sway the reader with successive tides of emotion
while remaining perfectly calm himself. Nor is she one of those whose
visible emotion is nevertheless fugitive, like an odour, and evaporates,
leaving behind it works of art which betray no personal agitation. On
the contrary, her revolt, her passion, all the violence of her
sensibility, are present on her written page, and we cannot read it with
serenity or with a merely captious curiosity, because her own eager
spirit, immortal in its active force, seems to throb beside it.
The aspect of Charlotte Bronte which I have tried to indicate to you
to-day, and which I have sketched thus hastily and slightly against the
background of her almost voiceless residence in Dewsbury, is far from
being a complete or unique one. I offer it to you only as a single facet
of her wonderful temperament, of the rich spectacle of her talent. I
have ventured to propose it, because, in the multiplication of honours
and attentions, the tendency to deify the human, to remove those
phenomena of irregularity which are the evidence of mortal strength,
grows irresistible, and we find ourselves, unconsciously, substituting a
waxen bust, with azure eyes and golden hair, for the homely features
which (if we could but admit it) so infinitely better match the honest
stories. Let us not busy ourselves to make excuse for our austere little
genius of the moors. Let us be content to take her exactly as she was,
with her rebellion and her narrowness, her angers and her urgencies,
perceiving that she had to be this sorrowful offspring of a poisoned
world in order to clear the wells of feeling for others, and to win from
emancipated generations of free souls the gratitude which is due to a
precursor.
[Footnote 7: Address delivered before the Bronte Society in the Town
Hall of Dewsbury, March 28th, 1903.]
THE NOVELS OF BENJAMIN DISRAELI
It is not easy for a man whose sovereign ambition is seen to be leading
him with great success in a particular direction to obtain due credit
for what he accomplishes with less manifest success in another. There is
no doubt that Disraeli as an author has, at all events until very
lately, suffered from the splendour of his fame as a politician. But he
was an author long before he became a statesman, and it certainly is a
little curious that even in his youth, although he was always
commercially successful with his books, they were never, as we say,
"taken seriously" by the critics. His earliest novels were largely
bought, and produced a wide sensation, but they were barely accepted as
contributions to literature. If we look back to the current criticism of
those times, we find such a book as _Dacre_, a romance by the Countess
of Morley, which is now absolutely forgotten, treated with a dignity and
a consideration never accorded to _The Young Duke_ or to _Henrietta
Temple_. Even Disraeli's satiric squibs, in the manner of Lucian and
Swift, which seem to us among the most durable ornaments of light
literature in the days of William IV., were read and were laughed at,
but were not critically appraised.
So, too, at the middle period of Disraeli's literary life, such books as
_Coningsby_ and _Tancred_ were looked upon as amusing commentaries on
the progress of a strenuous politician, not by any means, or by any
responsible person, as possible minor classics of our language. And at
his third period, the ruling criticism of the hour was aghast at faults
which now entertain us, and was blind to sterling merits which we are
now ready to acknowledge. Shortly after his death, perhaps his most
brilliant apologist was fain to admit that if Disraeli had been
undistinguished as a speaker, his novels would have been "as the flowers
of the field, charming for the day which was passing over them, and then
forgotten." It is only since the beginning of the present century that a
conviction has been gaining ground that some of these books were in
themselves durable, not because they were the work of a man who became
Prime Minister of England and made his sovereign Empress of India, but
as much or as little as if they had been composed by a recluse in a
hermitage. This impression has now become so general with enlightened
critics that the danger seems to be that we should underrate certain
excesses of rhetoric and the Corinthian mode the errors of which used to
be over-emphasised, but should not, in a comparative survey of Victorian
literature, be neglected as serious drawbacks to our perfect enjoyment
of the high-spirited, eloquent, and ardent writings of Benjamin
Disraeli. It is in this spirit of moderation that I now attempt a rapid
sketch of his value as an English author.
I
There is, perhaps, no second example of a writer whose work is divided,
as is that of Disraeli, into three totally distinct periods. Other
authors, as for example, the poet Crabbe, and in a less marked degree
Rogers, have abandoned the practice of writing for a considerable number
of years, and then have resumed it. But the case of Disraeli seems to be
unique as that of a man who pursued the writing, of books with great
ardour during three brief and independent spaces of time. We have his
first and pre-Parliamentarian period, which began with _Vivian Grey_
(1826) and closed with _Venetia_ (1837). We have a second epoch, opening
with _Coningsby_ (1844) and ending with _Tancred_ (1847), during which
time he was working out his political destiny; and we have the novels
which he wrote after he had won the highest distinction in the State.
Certain general characteristics are met with in all these three classes,
but they have also differences which require to be noted and accounted
for. It will, therefore, be convenient to treat them successively.
As oblivion scatters its poppy over the prose fiction of the reigns of
George IV. and William IV., it becomes in creasingly dangerous that
criticism should take the early "fashionable" novels of Disraeli as
solitary representations of literary satire or observation. It is true
that to readers of to-day this class of romance is exclusively
suggestive of _Vivian Grey_ and its fellows, with perhaps the _Pelham_
of Bulwer. But this was not the impression of the original readers of
these novels, who were amused by them, but found nothing revolutionary
in their treatment of society. In the course of _The Young Duke_,
written in 1829, Disraeli suggests an amiable rivalry with the romances
"written by my friends Mr. Ward and Mr. Bulwer." The latter name had
only just risen above the horizon, but that of Plumer Ward, forgotten as
it now is, was one to conjure by. Ward was the author of _Tremaine_
(1825) and _De Vere_ (1827), two novels of the life of a modern English
gentleman, which seems to a reader to-day to be insipid and dull enough.
But they contained "portraits" of public persons, they undertook to hold
the mirror up to the political and fashionable world of London, and they
lashed that fastidiousness which was considered to be the foible of the
age.
The books of Plumer Ward, who was an accomplished personage in advancing
years, were treated with marked distinction in the press, and were
welcomed by critics who deigned to take little notice of even such books
as _Granby_ and _Dacre_. But the stories of the youthful Disraeli
belonged to a class held in still less esteem than those just mentioned.
They had to hold their own as best they might in rivalry with a huge
flight of novels of fashionable life, all of them curiously similar in
general treatment. Above these the romances of Plumer Ward rose in a
sort of recognised dignity, as two peaks around which were crowded
innumerable hillocks. It is necessary to recall readers of to-day, who
think of _Vivian Grey_ as a work of amazing novelty, to the fact that
the _genre_ it represents to us was one which had been lifted into high
credit the year before by the consecrated success of _Tremaine_, and was
at that moment cultivated by a multitude of minor novelists.