GREENHOWE,
SEDBERGH,
Aug. 21, 1904.
MY DEAR HERBERT,--I suppose I am very early Victorian in my tastes; but
I have just been reading Jane Eyre again with intense satisfaction. (I
will tell you presently WHY I have been reading it.) I read it first as
a boy at Eton, and I must have read it twenty times since. I know that
much of it is grotesque, but it seems to me that its grotesqueness is
not absurd, any more than the stiff animals and trees or hills in the
early Italian pictures are absurd; one smiles, not contemptuously, but
tenderly at it all.
Again, there are two ways of treating a work of art. If a portrait, for
instance, is intensely realistic and true to its original, one says,
"How lifelike!" If it is widely unlike the original, one can always
say, "How symbolical!" Of the first kind of portrait one may say that
it brings the man before you; of the latter you may say that the artist
has striven to paint the soul rather than the body. Well, I think it is
fair to call Jane Eyre symbolical. Some of the people depicted are very
true to life. The old, comfortable, good-humoured housekeeper, Mrs.
Fairfax; Bessie the nursemaid; Adele, the little French girl, Mr.
Rochester's ward; the two Rivers sisters--they are admirable portraits.
But Mr. Rochester, the haughty Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park, Miss
Ingram, who says to the footman, "Leave that chatter, blockhead, and do
my bidding," St. John Rivers, the blue-eyed fanatic--these are
caricatures or types, according as you like to view them. To me they
are types: characters finely conceived, and only exaggerated because
Charlotte Bronte had never mixed with people of that species in
ordinary life. But I think that one can see into the souls of these
people in spite of the exaggerations of speech and gesture and
behaviour which disfigure them. Yet it is not primarily for the
character-drawing that I value the book. What attracts me is the
romance, the beauty, the poetry of the whole, and a special union of
intellectual force, with passion at white heat, which breathes through
them. The love scenes have the same strange glow that I always feel in
Tennyson's "Come into the garden, Maud," where the pulse of the lover
thrills under one's hand with the love that beats from the heart of the
world. And then, too, Charlotte Bronte seems to me to have had an
incomparable gift of animating a natural scene with vivid human
emotions. The frost-bound day, when the still earth holds its breath,
when the springs are congealed, and the causeway is black with slippery
ice, in that hour when Jane Eyre first sees Mr. Rochester; and again
the scene in the summer garden, just before the thunderstorm, when Mr.
Rochester calls her to look at the great hawk-moth drinking from the
flower chalice. Such scenes have a vitality that makes them as real to
me as scenes upon which my own eyes have rested.
Again, I know no writer who has caught the poetry of the hearth like
Charlotte Bronte. The evening hours, when the fire leaps in the
chimney, and the lamp is lit, and the homeless wind moans outside, and
the contented mind possesses its dreams--I know nothing like that in
any book.
Indeed, I do not know any books which give me quite the sense of genius
that Charlotte Bronte's bring me. I find it difficult to define where
the genius lies; but the love which she dares to depict seems to me to
have a different quality to any other love; it is the passionate ardour
of a pure soul; it embraces body, mind, and heart alike; it is a love
that pierces through all disguises, and is the worship of spirit for
spirit at the very root of being; such love is not lightly conceived or
easily given; it is not born of chance companionship, of fleshly
desire, of a craving to share the happiness of a buoyant spirit of
sunshine and sweetness; it is rather nurtured in gloom and sadness, it
demands a corresponding depth and intensity, it requires to discern in
its lover a deep passion for the beauty of virtue. It is one of the
triumphs of Jane Eyre that the love she feels for Mr. Rochester pierces
through those very superficial vices which would be most abhorrent to
the pure nature, if it were not for the certainty that such vice was
the disguise and not the essence of the soul. And here lies, I think,
the uplifting hopefulness of Jane Eyre, the Christ-like power of
recognising the ardent spirit of love behind gross faults of both the
animal and the intellectual nature.
I do not know if you ever came across a book--I must send it you if you
have not seen it--which moves me and feeds my spirit more than almost
any book I know--the Letters and Journals of William Cory. He was a
master at Eton, you know, but before our time; and his life was rather
a disappointed one; but he had that remarkable union of qualities which
I think is very rare--hard intellectual force with passionate
tenderness. I suppose that, as far as mental ability went, he was one
of the very foremost men of his day. He had a faultless memory, great
clearness and vigour of thought, and perfect lucidity of expression.
But he valued these gifts very little in comparison with feeling, which
was his real life. It always interests me deeply to find that he had
the same opinion of Charlotte Bronte that I hold; and indeed I have
always thought that, allowing for a difference of nationality, he was
very much the kind of man whom she depicted in Villette as Paul
Emmanuel.
Personality is, after all, the ultimate foundation of art, and I think
that what I value most of all in Charlotte Bronte's books is the
revelation of herself that they afford. The shy, frail, indomitable,
ardent creature, inured to poverty and hardness, without illusions,
without material temptations, but all aglow with the sacred fire--such
is the character that here emerges. Charlotte Bronte as a writer seems
to me like a burning-glass which concentrates on one intense point the
fiercest fire of the soul. I would humbly believe that there is much of
this spirit in the world, but that it seldom co-exists with the
artistic power, the intellectual force, that enables it to express
itself.
And now I will tell you what has made me take up Jane Eyre again at
this time. I was bicycling a day or two ago in a secluded valley under
the purple heights of Ingleboro'. I passed a little village, with a big
building standing by a stream below the road, called Lowood. It came
into my head as a pleasant thought that some place like this might have
been the scene of the schooldays of Jane Eyre; but I thought no more of
it, till a little while after I saw a tablet in the wall of a house by
the wayside. I dismounted, and behold! it was the very place, the very
building where Charlotte Bronte spent her schooldays. It was a low,
humble building, now divided into cottages. But you can still see the
windows of the dormitory, the little kitchen garden, the brawling
stream, the path across the meadows, and, beyond all, the long line of
the moor. In a house just opposite was a portrait of Mr. Brocklehurst
himself (his real name was Carus-Wilson), so sternly, and I expect
unjustly, gibbetted in the book. That was a very sacred hour for me. I
thought of Miss Temple and Helen Burns; I thought of the cold, the
privation, the rigour of that comfortless place. But I felt that it was
good to be there. I drew nearer in that hour to the unquenched spirit
that battled so gloriously with life and with its worst terrors and
sorrows, and that wrote so firmly and truly its pure hopes and immortal
dreams. . . .--Ever yours,