No More Learning

The theme, no doubt, in more respects than one, suited
George Eliot, and inspired her to one of her finest poems.
She afterwards wrote certain other pieces in verse—some of
them lyrics not devoid of charm, and one of them, more especially
The Minor Prophet, in a vein which might be thought not wholly
unlike that of some of the characters in verse by Robert Browning,
but that his power of dramatic condensation is wanting. They
are full of brilliant turns of thought, and the poet had acquired
a mastery of metre which made her delight in putting her ideas
into a form well suited to gnomic utterances. In prose, she
produced nothing further of importance? The Impressions of
Theophrastus Such, of which the publication was postponed to
1879, on account of George Henry Lewes's death, was much read
1 Decameron, x, 7. The plays are Shirley's The Royall Master and Alfred de
Musset's Carmosine.
% They are collected, with those mentioned above, in the volume of Poems forming
vol. XI of the Warwick edition.
3 The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob (both printed with Silas Marner in vol. vi of
the Warwick edition) go back to the years 1859 and 1860 respectively. The former
is a study of clairvoyance as, at once, a gift and a curse, hardly less improbable than
it is painful. Brother Jacob is a rather sordid tale of nemesis.
E. L. XIII. OH. XI.
26


## p. 402 (#418) ############################################

402
The Political and Social Novel [CH. XI
when it came out, and the success of the book, which, in a more
than ordinary sense, was one of esteem, sent a ray of consola-
tion into her retirement. The satire of the modern Theophrastus
directs itself chiefly to the foibles and vanities of the literary
class-a class to which no authors ever more thoroughly belonged,
and took pride in belonging, than George Eliot and the lost guide
and companion of her labours, but as to whose weaknesses her
own single-mindedness of purpose and freedom from all pretence
or affectation supplied her with a safe standard of judgment.
But this series of essays falls short of the collections offered by
the Greek moralist, and by the most successful of his modern
imitators, whether French or English, not only in variety, but,
also, by the absence of what might have been expected from
George Eliot herself, had she still been at the height of her
power-namely, evidence of the plastic or formative gift which
tradition asserted Theophrastus to have carried even to the
extent of mimicry. The work is, explicably enough, devoid of
gaiety-an element which, though not indispensable, can ill be
spared altogether in a book of this sort.
Quite late in her life, a personal happiness for which it is not
presumptuous to say that her heart had yearned, came to the
gifted woman of whose writings we have briefly spoken, in the
form of marriage. In May 1880, she gave her hand to John
Walter Cross, in recognition of a chivalrous devotion measurable
only by those who knew him well. But the dream was a short
one. On their return from a continental tour on which Cross
had fallen ill at Venice, she, in her turn, was prostrated by
sickness, and, before the year was out, on 22 December, she
passed away. Of no greater woman of letters is the name re-
corded in English annals, and of none who had made the form
of composition finally chosen by her as her own so complete a
vehicle of all with which she had charged it. George Eliot's
novels speak to us of her comprehensive wisdom, nurtured by
assiduously acquired learning, of her penetrating and luminous
wit, furnished with its material by a power of observation to
which all the pathetic and all the humorous aspects of human
character lay open and of her profound religious conviction of
the significance of life and its changes as helping to better the
human soul brave and unselfish enough not to sink before them.


## p. 403 (#419) ############################################

CHAPTER XII
THE BRONTËS
WHEN Mrs Gaskell published The Life of Charlotte Brontë,
she was forty-seven, and had already written Mary Barton,
Cranford and Ruth. In six years, there were to follow Sylvia's
Lovers and that story in which is embalmed the charm of all
things fading—Cousin Phillis. The biography was worthy of its
author. Here was presented, not less truthfully than exquisitely,
all that it was essential to know of the sad story of Charlotte
Brontë's life, and, interwoven in its texture, and consummately
in place, the beautiful piece of prose in which Ellen Nussey told
of Anne Brontë's death. It was surprising that this masterpiece,
at its first appearance, should have been marred by indiscretions
of revelation, relating, in part, to the father of the sisters, to
whose paternal care the book paid tribute, and who was still
alive, an octogenarian. The explanation was, partly, that Mrs
Gaskell was a novelist whose first obligation was truth to character,
and who was interested in the subordinate personages of her
narrative mainly in so far as they illustrated the figure of its
heroine; and, also, partly, that the task she had set herself—to
tell soon and fully Charlotte Brontë's life-story-was not one that
could possibly have been executed without giving some temporary
offence. Yet, the main lines of the story were seized and held
with the unerring hand of genius, and, in the amended version, we
now possess a book that, both in its candour and in its restraint,
remains the true record for posterity.
Of the substantial accuracy of its picture of the Brontë
household, there is no longer any question. Some of the original
domestic details now banished from the volume may not have been
correct; but such stories as attached themselves to Patrick Brontë
do not gather round a man of unexacting character. His custom of
dining alone in a house with two sitting-rooms is sufficiently
26-2


## p. 404 (#420) ############################################

404
[ch.
The Brontës
significant. No one,' writes Mary Taylor to Ellen Nussey, a year
after Charlotte's death, 'ever gave up more than she did and
with full consciousness of what she sacrificed. ' Family affection
for his offspring, on the one side, of course, there was, and, on the
other, deep filial piety and that cherishing fondness which springs
from piety; but it is a main element in Charlotte Brontë's later
history that talk in the lonely house must often have been 'but
a tinkling cymbal. '
Patrick Brunty or Brontë, as, at Haworth, he came finally to
write the name, was, so far as we know, a pure Irishman. He
was born in Emdale, county Down, in 1777, and, in 1802, presumably
with the aid of some slender savings, he entered St John's
college, Cambridge. After taking his degree, he held various
curacies, settling down finally, in 1820, in the incumbency of
Haworth. But the troubles of life were not over; for, in less
than two years, his always delicate wife, Maria Branwell, whom he
had married in 1812, had died, leaving him the care of six children,
Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, Emily Jane and
Anne, of whom the eldest was eight and the youngest not yet
two years of age. In this difficulty, his wife's sister Elizabeth
.
Branwell took up her residence with him at Haworth, remaining
there as mistress of his house till her death. Thus was the house-
hold constituted till Charlotte Brontë was twenty-six.
For so large a family, the house in the graveyard was a
confined habitation : it stood at the top of the steep and drab
village, its front windows looking on the church and the
graves,
and its back on the wide-stretching moors over which the tiny
girls loved constantly to ramble. Their father was not a learned
man; but he knew enough to teach infants, and it was a mistake
that, in order to provide them with more systematic instruc-
tion, he should have sent four of them to a clergy daughters'
boarding school. This was an absurdly cheap subsidised insti-
tution, for no other was within his means; and the disastrous
experiment, afterwards forming the basis of the account of Lowood
in Jane Eyre, came to an end within a year. Charlotte Brontë
believed that the precarious health of her two elder sisters had
suffered from the experience. In any case, the first tragedies
of her home were the early deaths of the much-loved Maria and
Elizabeth.
The household, thus reduced in numbers, remained at Haworth
for the next six years, occupied with reading, rambling, household
management and, above all, with literary invention ; and it was


## p. 405 (#421) ############################################

XII]
Brussels
405
not till 1831, when Charlotte was nearly fifteen, that she was again
sent to a boarding school, this time to Miss Wooler's at Roe Head,
where she made the acquaintance of Ellen Nussey and Mary
Taylor, who became her lifelong friends. Miss Wooler was nd
and competent, and eighteen fairly happy months of pupilage
resulted, three years later, in Charlotte's returning as an in-
structress, while Emily and Anne also became pupils in the same
school. But Charlotte was not born to be a teacher of young
girls, and, after another interval of three years, she returned to
Haworth, fretted in mind and spirit. Yet, something had to be
done to replenish the family exchequer on which the one, and
thoroughly unsatisfactory, brother was beginning to make a series
of claims. Emily had attempted and failed to live the life of an
assistant schoolmistress under peculiarly exacting conditions, and
there was nothing left for Charlotte and Anne except to become
governesses in private families. But, though the gentle Anne
.
was, apparently, a good governess, retaining one post for four
years, the experiences of neither of the pair met their wishes,
and it occurred to Charlotte and Emily that they should
qualify for the three setting up school by themselves. For this,
,
some knowledge of foreign languages was indispensable, and, in
February 1842, the two sisters, aged, respectively, twenty-five and
twenty-three, had found their way as pupils into a foreign school,
the pensionnat Héger, rue d'Isabelle, Brussels. The short year
spent there was made especially interesting on account of the
lectures of the professor of literature, Constantin Heger, a man
of thirty-three who, obviously, added to some of the usual
Napoleonisms of the professeur des jeunes filles (Napoleonisms to
which Charlotte Brontë was not blind) a genuine force of character,
something of the genius of exposition and a touch of that ironic
or semi-humorous malice which is the salt of personality. But
this brightening episode was not to last, and, in eight months, the
sisters were hurrying home too late to attend the deathbed of
their aunt Branwell.
The home was reorganised, Emily being left to keep house.
Branwell, who had failed in several occupations, found a post as
tutor in the same family where Anne was governess, and Charlotte
Brontë allowed herself to be tempted to return to Brussels, in
January 1843, as instructress in English. She was now verging
on twenty-seven, and at Brussels were the surroundings that had
broken the dull monotony of her life. Hitherto, this monotony
had been endurable; henceforth, it was no longer so. As she taught


## p. 406 (#422) ############################################

406
[CH.
The Brontës
in the school of the Hegers, at times instructing Constantin Héger
and his brother-in-law in English, and hearing from him constantly
of the high things in literature and life, there was set up that
rapport of intelligence, and, more than this, that interplay where
soul responds to soul, of which, hitherto, she had known nothing.
In a year, she was back in the lonely house, herself now twice
lonely ‘for remembering happier things. All had not gone well
in her absence: the brother was hastening down a career that
ended in an early grave; the plan of a school had come to
nothing; the tone of the communications she sent to her adored
professor, too exalté, led to the ending of all communication; and
in the letters she wrote to Brussels in these barren years we can
hear the cry of a stifled heart. In March 1845, she writes to Ellen
Nussey :
I can hardly tell you how time gets on at Haworth. There is no event
whatever to mark its progress. One day resembles another: and all have
heavy lifeless physiognomies. . . . There was a time when Haworth was a very
pleasant place to me: it is not so now. I feel as if we were all buried here.
. . . Write very soon dear Ellen.
There was one way of escape and one only-for 'the imagination
is not a state,' as Blake tells us, 'it is the human existence itself. '
Yet, this relief was not found at once, nor was the unconscious
attempt to supply it at first successful. In the poems which, with
others by her sisters, were published in 1846 and in her first serious
attempt at a novel, The Professor, traces of a recent loss are too
evident, the transcription of emotional experience is too literal. The
substance of the art-work is not yet just a number of things that had
happened, ready for the free handling of the artist. The authoress
is, obviously, trying to solve a riddle in her past, and it was not till
1847, when Jane Eyre was published, that, though still carrying
her burden of experience, she found relief in imagination. The
love-story which Charlotte Brontë tells in Jane Eyre is a more
beautiful one than that which Mrs Gaskell has pictured in Cousin
Phillis. It is finer because it is as innocent and yet it is not
withered. In Jane Eyre, it dances before us dignified with the
joy of living. Here, at last, the artistic problem solved itself,
freely, without effort almost, the tangle of the real and the
ideal, as it were, merely unrolling. In the midst of her care for
her ageing father, now threatened with blindness, with the Poems
fallen dead from the press and the little light she had known a
memory only, the vision came to her, as it came to Thackeray, for
'behold, love is the crown and completion of all earthly good. '


## p. 407 (#423) ############################################

XII)
The Plot of Jane Eyre
407
6
Some concession, doubtless, had to be made to the requirements
of the prevailing art of fiction. As novels were understood in the
middle of the nineteenth century, they were always love-stories
in the common or vulgar sense. You did really fall in love with
someone and want to marry. The love in question was by no
means simply a great and noble affection, an overflow of being,
rather the contrary. There had to be a basis which people could
understand. Esmond had really to marry lady Castlewood, though,
of course, in that instance, the love of which Thackeray wrote was
not a love that dreams of marriage. These things happen in fable-
land, or, at least, they thus happened in the fableland of the mid-
century.
What Charlotte Brontë had to tell was a tale of the heart's
realisation through another, and of the loss of what seemed to
be realised. Because it was a novel she was writing, the loss
had not to be final, but, because it was a story of loss, there
had to be a bar. "The plot of Jane Eyre,' writes Charlotte to
Mr Williams in the autumn of 1847, 'may be a hackneyed one.
Mr Thackeray remarks that it is familiar to him, but having read
comparatively few novels, I never chanced to meet with it, and
I thought it original. Charlotte Brontë's possible forgetfulness,
if she had seen the story, and Thackeray's dim memory are equally
explicable. The tale of actual and intended bigamy which Sheridan
Le Fanu contributed to The Dublin University Magazine in 1839
was just one of those stories eminently adapted for floating in the
back of the mind. In the strange fictions of Le Fanu, the reader's
feelings are sympathetically and deeply moved without his either
seeing the actual occurrences face to face or believing them to be
real. The atmosphere, which is, generally, charged with suggestions
from the supernatural, has something of smoke in it and our memory
of the stories is often but the memory of a dream. But that Le
Fanu's tale suggested the plot of Jane Eyre is decidedly possible? .
If so, Sir Leslie Stephen’s query why the pleasing Rochester
should have embarked on an intended bigamy is sufficiently
answered. The original hint was a story of bigamy, and
Charlotte Brontë altered and softened it to meet her purpose,
like Shakespeare, moulding (but not entirely reversing) her plot,
to make it correspond more nearly with her characters. If, on
the contrary, she had not read Le Fanu's tale, one must admit
that, with no hint to constrain her, she was guilty of one incon-
sistency of invention. There was, perhaps, another reason. Odd
i See appendix to this chapter.
>


## p. 408 (#424) ############################################

408
[CH.
The Brontës
as it may seem, the fact that Rochester had bigamous intentions
took away any impropriety from Jane's reception of unrealisable
advances on his part. Not that it greatly matters; for all this
was merely machinery and was only of value as enabling Charlotte
Brontë to give her outflow of heart a wholly fictional setting.
So novel, indeed, was this outflow that even Mrs Gaskell feels
herself obliged to begin the long chorus of apology for occasional
coarseness in the novel. There was never any need for it. Jane
Eyre was a unique Victorian book because in it, whatever the age
might think it right to say, it was made plain to the most unwillingly
convinced that purity could be passionate and that a woman could
read the heart. The scene in the garden with Rochester, the equally
touching farewell and the joy of final meeting—these are love
passages which truly introduced 'a new vibration into literature. '
Childish and slender creature! It seemed as if a linnet had hopped
on my foot and proposed to bear me on its tiny wing. '
But this was in the domain of the ideal. In Charlotte's home
itself-except for her own book, and even of this there had been
coarse criticism—there was nothing of attainment. Wuthering
Heights and Agnes Grey, the works of her sisters, had passed
without recognition. Anne, in her child's morality, was labouring
at a task unsuited to her talent and fine observation, while
Branwell, her text, was drugging himself to death upstairs. The
opening chapters of Shirley, begun in the first excitement of success,
with their hard and not very legitimate characterisation of neigh-
bouring curates, were lying on Charlotte Brontë's desk. Reality,
with its harsh surroundings, was not, after all, to be escaped from,
and 'Ferndean', with its conquering triumph, had been but a castle
in Spain. It was, therefore, in a mood of disillusionment that, after
the bravura of the first chapters, the new story was continued,
and very soon, coming nearer, though with hesitating steps, to the
past, it is subdued to the mood. A great artist speaks again, and
for the last time exquisitely, in the beautiful story of Caroline
Helstone's unavailing affection. Who, then, was Caroline-Ellen
Nussey or Anne or Charlotte—and who was Robert, as dis-
tinguished from Louis Moore? It does not matter; we are listening
to a tale of feeling.
In September, Branwell died, and, before the end of the year,
when the main story was nearly finished, Emily. By June of the
next year, with the death of Anne, Charlotte was alone.
To understand Charlotte Brontë's masterpieces, it should be
1 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
a


## p. 409 (#425) ############################################

XII]
Shirley and Villette
409
remembered that they were only compulsorily three-volume books.
Jane Eyre was eked out with the St John Rivers addition, and,
when, after Anne's death, Charlotte took up her pen to write the
third volume of Shirley, the interest is shifted. The second plot of
Louis Moore and Shirley was not an afterthought, but it reads
like one. More vivid, doubtless, than the earlier part, it is far less
full of meaning. In short, the recurrent tutor and pupil story,
a story that will insist on being told whether consonant or not, is,
here, but an addition. There are other weaknesses in Shirley.
Caroline's affair ends happily—perhaps a necessity of mid-Victorian
fiction—Mrs Pryor, though useful to the heroine as a confidante
and a fair copy of the life, is amateur's work, beneath the colour
of the other characters, and out of the picture; but Robert and
Hortense in their little parlour and Caroline in the twilight have
a grace d'outre mer.
Unlike Jane Eyre, Shirley is not easy to read. Beautiful as is
Caroline's love-story, it is of another order of art altogether from
that of the easy masterpiece-possibly of an even rarer order.
There is the distinction between what is of great beauty and what
is great.
Varying the next few years with visits to London and to friends,
Charlotte Brontë found recuperation, and her temperament
underwent some steeling. All her loved ones in early graves or
separated by 'surge and blast,' she can now bear to look back,
not absolutely without repining, but with much of the artist's
detached and curious interest at what once was. Another story
was owed to the public, and, perhaps, that one, too suddenly told
in the unpublished Professor, might unroll itself anew. Fresh
observations, too, had been added, and, when Villette opens, it is
the figure of Dr John that catches the eye—the boy John with his
tiny companion Paulina-whether or not a personal reminiscence,
certainly a charming effort of imagination. But the main theme
of Villette is the remembrance of Brussels, and we may suppose
that the effort to resolve past discords was now largely conscious.
In any case, there is no better exercise for the student of art and
its processes than to compare the unembarrassed handling of the
material of experience in Villette, with the treatment of the same
material in The Professor. For all that, the material still counts
for too much, and one feels, as one does not feel in Jane Eyre or
in the case of Caroline Helstone, that the characters, however
changed the circumstances, are, nevertheless, real people, to be
actually found somewhere. One does feel, and to a degree which,


## p. 410 (#426) ############################################

410
[CH.
The Brontës
artistically, is painful, that, after all, all this is observation or
record. We have an uneasy fear that we are looking into other
people's houses. The result is a novel which is a miracle of
characterisation, and most supreme where it seems most literal,
as in the wonderful “patriotic' scene in the schoolroom, or in
Lucy's tremors over her letter. Yet, even in such places, our
pleasure is alloyed by our consciousness that we are being put
off with mere description. At times, too, when we are out of
the school and where no great interest is taken by the author
in the character observed, it is evident that literalness of tran-
scription has interfered with artistic effort, as in the account of the
actress Rachel. As novel-readers, we do not expect to be reading
a diary. Nor is this weakness in Villette—a weakness due to the
absence of imagining and to its author's contentment in merely
seeing life's pages turn over-redeemed by the merits of the book.
The amazing variety of characters does not remedy it, nor does the
fact that this weakness is counted a chief excellence by those whose
interest is in the biography rather than in its subject, in her life
rather than in her work, in the least degree cure it. Villette is a
brilliant novel; in it, Charlotte Brontë threw off the incubus of the
past, without transforming the past into the ideal; or, in other
words, she built on her experience without making her experience
our experience of the soul. Villette is the work of a great genius;
but it does not bring the solace that comes from great art. It
makes us sad; but it leaves our eyes dry. We watch beings who
suffer, without sharing their suffering ; our identity is not merged
in the human crisis because, speaking of the book as a whole, it is
not poetry. At the end, doubtless, it is, and we put it down,
participating in that distant sorrow. But this is only to say that,
at the end, it achieves what it has not achieved during its progress.
This tour de force was the last of Charlotte Brontë's writings.
Two chapters of a novel, strangely called Emma—a sort of
challenge to fame-remain from her few months of married
life. She had said her say as the poets say it, and was dead
before she was thirty-nine.
Emily Brontë left only one book and some verses. As to her
novel, critical judgment is still in suspense. It is not desirable
to read; to take Wuthering Heights from the shelf is to prepare
for oneself no pleasure. The song of love and of morning that
makes Jane Eyre an imperishable possession is not sung here.
On the contrary, in this strange tale of outland natures on outland
moors all is thunder-clad-darkness, and the light more awful that


## p. 411 (#427) ############################################

411
XII] Wuthering Heights
breaks the storm, passions that, in their tempestuous strength at
once terrify us for human nature and enlarge our conception of its
dignity. It bears the same relation to Jane Eyre that Webster
bears to Shakespeare, if one could imagine Webster greater than
Shakespeare. This, indeed, is its defect, and in seeking to estimate
the proportional value of this defect judgment is at a loss. It is
a tale of diablerie, not of life. What happened in Jane Eyre
might have happened, part of it did actually happen, but all of it,
leaving out of account a little melodrama, here and there, which
is not essential, might have happened. These are beings agitated
by our desires, and we are reading about ourselves. . In Wuthering
Heights, it is not so; we see Heathcliff from the outside, and
observe this triumph of imagination. When we have admitted
that this is not a tale of our own life, the door is closed upon
detraction. In every other respect and of its kind, the work done
here is absolute. In these chapters, echoing with apprehension,
chapters that
Bring the unreal world too strangely near
and in which the disaster that one would often think has culminated
goes on culminating to the close, everything is found in place, and,
though it is a wild consistency, as Dobell was the first to say,
consonant. Perfectly in keeping' with the nature of Heathcliff,
as perfectly as the abduction of Isabella or the forced marriage of
the shivering Linton, are the hanging of the Springer-a demoniac
revelation—and the attack upon the younger Catherine, those
stunning and unceasing slaps on the young girl's face that
madden the reader as if he had been present. Undeviatingly,
almost without thinking, from Lockwood's nightmare at the
beginning to the last scene in Joseph's kitchen, when Heathcliff's
glazing eyes are tense with love's vision, the imagination pursues
its course because the authoress never for a moment dreams of
questioning the imagination.
In reading such a work, we are oppressed by an intensity of
personal feeling.
There is no friendly author between us and
what is seen.
The fury of the events is by no means harmonised
or softened by human comment explanatory or apologetic. The
hideous drama merely comes before us, and is there; and yet we do
not absolutely hate Heathcliff. The scene in the death-chamber
with Catherine entitles him to speak of his affection as an 'immortal
love,' a feeling which ‘shackles accidents and bolts up change,'
and testifies to the infinity of humanity. In those few pages,
where the stormy villain and his dying beloved override time and


## p. 412 (#428) ############################################

412
[CH.
The Brontës
snatch a moment from eternity, we learn, as in Othello, something
of passion's transfiguring power. And this passion is not physical.
No doubt, a writer older and with more experience than Emily
Brontë must, of necessity, have known that the attraction exercised
by such a man, or by any man the least like Heathcliff, could only
be of that kind. She did not know, and in her ignorance she gave
to the transcendent a new setting, a setting far stranger than that
in Jane Eyre, but, also, more arresting. It is the main mark of
the Brontës' books and the inner reason why they are cherished
that, out of the innocence of the heart, the mouth speaketh.
Of Emily Brontë's poems, it may be said that they are on the
edge of greatness. So much cannot be pretended for those of her
sisters. Charlotte's have a strong autobiographical reference,
and, when they are most autobiographical, the truthful tenderness
of her emotion sometimes finds expression; but, in the main, they
are not poetry. Charlotte Brontë, though she did not care for
three volumes, achieves her results, as a prose authoress, by a
series of effects, not by single blows. Such a method is unsuited
to short poems, where poetry loses everything if it loses the quint-
essential. The verse-writing of the gentle Anne, like all her work,
has something winning in its appeal, or, it would be more correct
to say, in its absence of appeal. It compasses more only when it
is religious ; but the religious poems are distinguished rather by a
few rare verses than as complete or satisfying wholes. At their best,
they have more sincerity and less sentimentalism than most hymns.
Since the poems of Emily challenge a much graver attention,
it should be noted at once that, judged from a higher standpoint,
the chief defect of Anne's is, also, very observable here. Except
where the poems are very short-such as The Old Stoic, Remem-
brance, or Stanzas—they seldom hold attention to the end, and the
poetical experience is not coextensive with the poem. It is there
often—at the beginnings or episodically—but it is seldom con-
tinuous. Besides this, even the best of them are too frequently
dependent upon scaffolding. They have a set theme, or they work
through to a set pronouncement. They have, generally, something
definite to say, as prose has. The poetry does not express itself
for its own sake or mould its own setting. Yet, they have been
greatly prized by many fine critics. Their independence of the
ordinary aids to comfort, their habit of resting on an accepted
despondency, predisposes the modern reader in their favour.
Especially their pagan feeling for nature, and their deeply melan-
choly but unrepining sentiment, appeal to minds that have been


## p. 413 (#429) ############################################

XII]
Emily Brontë's Poems
413
already influenced by Meredith. Moreover, Emily's verse has-
what is scarcely to be traced at all in that of her sisters—metrical
music :
For if your former words were true
How useless would such sorrow be;
As wise, to mourn the seed which grew
Unnoticed on its parent tree,
and, sometimes, a very original feeling in the metre :
Silent is the house, all are laid asleep,
where the hesitancy of the verse, together with the stumbling treat-
ment of the allegory, expresses perfectly the quiver of the girl as
she withdraws into the world of dream. Occasionally, there is a
tenderness for which one would hardly have looked in the author
of Wuthering Heights—the real Emily that lived, one would think,
and to whom that vision came :
To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear.
In one farewell verse only, the great wind blows:
Though earth and man were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee;
for, in poetry, what was elemental in her was not to find expression.
The graves and the moors are in these poems as they are in
Wuthering Heights, and it is the same Emily who is walking by
them, but how differently-without the delirium of strength.
Here, we are in contact with the actual human being, and find
ourselves listening to the low tones natural to the girl who, all
her life, and except when she was writing Wuthering Heights,
controlled the utterances of the heart :
So I knew that he was dying,
Stooped and raised his languid head,
Felt no breath and heard no sighing,
So I knew that he was dead.
The feeling beneath those poems, perhaps just because it is a
controlled feeling, does not always find full expression. One likes
them the better on rereading, one has to come again and taste,
for the atmosphere of the poet's thought is not quite com-
municated : they are not poems that compel one to feel with the
poet. To be complimentary, it might be said that they 'speak in
silences. ' They do speak, but to an attentive ear, with something
of soundlessness, something estranged, at least something very


## p. 414 (#430) ############################################

414
The Brontës
[ch.
far away from the sounding sureness of the prose. The lyric
medium did not supply her with sufficient imaginative material,
and this, perhaps, may suffice to explain why there is not more
to praise ; for, in her verse, though she communes freely with
her spirit of imagination, that spirit is not freely exercised.
Perhaps it also explains why their constant readers love these
poems ; for, in them, in the absence of her strange imaginings,
what is chiefly disclosed is her individualism, the author of
Wuthering Heights in her loneliness.
A word may be added as to the novels of Anne Brontë.
Agnes Grey has interest, a record of her governess experiences,
treated, so far as one can judge, not very freely, and, for this
reason, affording, in its mild way, something of the pleasure of
discovery. The eager interest in everything connected with the
biography of the Brontës aroused by Mrs Gaskell's Life has given
to those faint pages an attraction beyond their own. Yet, what
her sister once wrote to Mr Williams, in reply to a letter full of
family references, is not without appositeness : 'I think details of
character always have a charm, even when they relate to people
we have never seen, nor expect to see. ' The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall is as interesting a novel as was ever written without any
element of greatness. It is pleasant to read of all sorts of intrigue
and bad doings just as if they were a fairy tale and altogether
outside the atmosphere of badness. There is one drawback—the
tale is told by a man meant by the authoress to be quite 'nice,'
but, in fact, less likeable than Crimsworth in The Professor. The
Brontës had observed men not unclosely; but they were not able
to see things through the eyes of men.
.
APPENDIX
A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family being a tenth extract
from the Legacy of the Late Francis Purcell P. P. of Drumcoolagh,
appeared in The Dublin University Magazine for October 1839, pp. 398-
415, and was reprinted in The Purcell Papers, 1880, and in The Watcher
and other Weird Stories, 1894, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu.
While nothing could be more probable than that the author of The Irish
Sketch Book and Barry Lyndon had read this story, it is clear that
Charlotte Brontë could have had access to it. Her father, when at Cam-
bridge, sent money to his Irish relatives; in his will, he remembered them,
and there is an absurd legend that, after the publication of Jane Eyre, one of
them crossed the Irish sea to deal summary justice to Miss Bigby of The


## p. 415 (#431) ############################################

XII]
Appendix
415
a
Quarterly, whom he took to be a man. There was, therefore, some measure
of correspondence. ' Charlotte Brontë herself, in requesting Messrs Aylott and
Jones to send out review copies of the Poems, mentions, alone among Irish
papers, The Dublin University Magazine. A favourable notice appeared;
and, in writing to the editor to thank him for it, 6 October 1846, she signs
herself 'your constant and grateful reader. Later, 9 October 1847, she
makes a special request that Messrs Smith and Elder should send Jane Eyre
to the same review. It is not improbable that a forgotten remembrance of
Le Fanu's story, read years before, supplied what was never a fertile in-
ventiveness with the machinery it wanted.
In the story, which is about a twelfth of the length of Jane Eyre, lord Glen-
fallen, who is neither old nor ugly, neither young nor handsome, marries, or
pretends to marry, the young Irish girl who is the narrator, Fanny Richardson.
The couple then set off for his country house, Cahergillagh court, a large
rambling building, where they are welcomed by an old housekeeper who
is used as the storyteller's confidante. The day after, lord Glenfallen,
beginning in a jocular manner by saying he is to be her Bluebeard, counsels
the heroine to visit only that part of the Castle which can be reached from
the front entrance, leaving the back entrance and the part of the building
commanded immediately by it to the menials. He gives no reason for this
extraordinary request, further than a mysterious warning of danger; the
actual reason being that in that part of the castle there lived his blind wife,
who had arrived either from another of his houses or from abroad-one need
not understand everything in the story-on the very day of his own arrival.
A month later, coming up to her bedroom, the heroine is startled by finding
a blind lady seated in a chair. Some sudden talk follows, and, on Fanny's
saying that her name is lady Glenfallen, an outbreak of rage on the
part of her visitant. "The violence of her action, and the fury which con-
vulsed her face, effectually terrified me, and disengaging myself from her
grasp
I screamed as loud as I could for help. The blind woman continued
to pour out a torrent of abuse upon me, foaming at the mouth with rage,
and impotently shaking her clenched fist towards me. I heard Lord Glen-
fallen's step upon the stairs, and I instantly ran out: as I passed him I
perceived that he was deadly pale and just caught the words: “I hope that
demon has not hurt you. ” I made some answer, I forget what, and he
entered the chamber, the door of which he locked upon the inside. What
passed within I know not, but I heard the voices of two speakers raised in
loud and angry altercation. ' When lord Glenfallen returns after two
hours, he is pale and agitated; "that unfortunate woman,' said he,‘is out of
her mind. I daresay she treated you to some of her ravings: but you need
not dread any further interruption from her: I have brought her so far to
reason. The heroine can elicit nothing further. Lord Glenfallen becomes
silent and distracted, and one morning proposes they should go abroad.
That night, however, Fanny is again visited in her bedroom by the blind
woman, who tells her that she and not Fanny is the true lady Glenfallen,
commands her to leave her pretended husband the next day and threatens
her, if she refuses, that she will reap the bitter fruits of her sin. Com-
menting upon this adventure, Fanny continues – There was something
in her face, though her features had evidently been handsome, and were not,
at first sight, unpleasing, which, upon a nearer inspection, seemed to indicate
the habitual prevalence and indulgence of evil passions, and a power of
expressing mere animal rage with an intenseness that I have seldom seen
equalled, and to which an almost unearthly effect was given by the convulsive
quivering of the sightless eyes. She tells her husband, but he meets her
6
6


## p. 416 (#432) ############################################

416
[CH. XII
The Brontës
8
6
6
8
with his former defence: “the person in question, however, has one excuse,
her mind is, as I told you before, unsettled. You should have remembered
that, and hesitated to receive as unexceptionable evidence against the honour
of your husband, the ravings of a lunatic'; and, afterwards, Fanny is told
by old Martha that she hears her master had ill-used the poor blind Dutch-
woman. 'How do you know that she is a Dutchwoman? ' asks Fanny,
“Why, my lady,' answered Martha, the master often calls her the Dutch
hag, and other names you would not like to hear, and I am sure she is
neither English nor Irish; for, whenever they talk together, they speak
some queer foreign lingo. ' Her maiden name, it appears later, had been
Flora van Kemp.
The next incident occurs when Fanny is sitting in the parlour late one
evening. 'I heard, or thought I heard, uttered within a few yards of me, in
an odd, half-sneering tone, the words—“There is blood upon your ladyship's
throat. ” . . . I looked around the room for the speaker, but in vain. I went
then to the room-door, which I opened, and peered into the passage, nearly
faint with horror lest some leering, shapeless thing should greet me upon
the threshold. ' That same night, in her bedroom, the incident is repeated.
• After lying for about an hour awake, I at length fell into a kind of doze;
but my imagination was very busy, for I was startled from this unrefreshing
sleep by fancying that I heard a voice close to my face exclaim as before-
“There is blood upon your ladyship's throat. ” The words were instantly
followed by a loud burst of laughter. Sleep forsakes the terrified girl, and,
sometime in the small hours, she sees the long wall-mirror fixed opposite the
foot of the bed slowly shifting its position. In reality, the mirror was hung
on a concealed door now swinging open to admit a figure. 'It stepped
cautiously into the chamber, and with so little noise, that had I not actually
seen it, I do not think I should have been aware of its presence. It was
arrayed in a kind of woollen night-dress, and a white handkerchief or cloth
was bound tightly about the head. I had no difficulty, spite of the strangeness
of the attire, in recognising the blind woman whom I so much dreaded.
She stooped down, bringing her head nearly to the ground, and in that
attitude she remained motionless for some moments, no doubt in order to
ascertain if any suspicious sounds were stirring. Then comes the account
of the attempted murder, the murderess groping about the room till she
finds a razor and then swiftly sliding towards the heroine, who is paralysed
by fear. 'A slight inaccuracy saved me from instant death; the blow fell
short, the point of the razor grazing my throat. In a moment, I know not
how, I found myself at the other side of the bed, uttering shriek after shriek. '
Lord Glenfallen rushes in and fells the intruder, and the entrance of a crowd
of domestics prevents further danger.
At the trial, Flora van Kemp accuses him of having instigated the
attempted murder of the pretended wife and, on its failure, of having turned
upon herself. But she does not intend to perish singly, all your own handy-
work, my gentle husband. ' This was followed by a low, insolent, and sneering
laugh, which from one in her situation was sufficiently horrible. ' Neverthe-
less, justice is baulked of its prey and sentence is passed upon her alone.
'Before, however, the mandate was executed, she threw her arms wildly into
the air, and uttered one piercing shriek so full of preternatural rage and
despair, that it might fitly have ushered a soul into those realms where hope
can come no more. The sound still rang in my ears, months after the voice
that had uttered it was for ever silent. The husband becomes a prey to
maniacal delusions, hears voices and cuts his throat under circumstances of
peculiar horror; while the innocent Fanny seeks the refuge of a convent.


## p. 417 (#433) ############################################

CHAPTER XIII
LESSER NOVELISTS
a
EDWARD GEORGE EARLE LYTTON BULWER was born on 25 May
1803; on the death of his mother, in 1843, he succeeded to the
Knebworth estate and, in the following year, assumed the name of
Lytton; he was created baron Lytton of Knebworth in 1866.
Ismael and other Poems was published in 1820; his first novel,
Falkland, in 1827; and he continued, in the midst of social,
editorial and political concerns and disastrous matrimonial rela-
tions, to produce fiction, verse and drama until his death on
18 January 1873. His versatility is not more remarkable than his
anticipatory intuition for changes of public taste. In a first phase,
he wrote novels dealing with Wertherism, dandyism and crime;
in a second, he evolved a variant of the historical romance; in a
third, in The Pilgrims of the Rhine (1834), he brought together
English fairy lore and Teutonic legend; in a fourth, he imported
into fiction pseudo-philosophic occultism; in a fifth, he turned to
'varieties of English life,' comparatively staid and quiet; later
still, in The Coming Race (1871), he outlined a new scientific
Utopia; and, finally, in Kenelm Chillingly and The Parisians
(1873), he portrayed character and society transformed by the
vulgarisation of wealth.
Lytton's second and best novel Pelham, or The Adventures
of a Gentleman (1828), is a blend of sentiment, observation and
blague. Rousseau, Goethe, Byron and some ultra-sentimental
experiences of Lytton's own youth are drawn upon for the figure
of Sir Reginald Glanville. Pelham, on the other hand, is drawn
from life, not from books; he is a more credible character in
a more credible world than the almost contemporary Vivian Grey.
Pelham is a dandy, coxcomb, wit, scholar and lover, and, in many
ways, offensive and exasperating; but he is also a staunch friend
and an ambitious and studious politician, in these respects differing
from the corresponding figure in the preliminary sketch Mortimer.
27
E. L. XIII.
CH. XIII.


## p. 418 (#434) ############################################

418
[CH.
Lesser Novelists
What distinguishes Pelham from its author's later writings is its
concentration of creative and expressive effort; Henry Pelham
is the most vivid of all Lytton's characters; and the earlier
chapters have an incisive humorous cynicism which is all too
quickly dissipated into mere discursiveness by an influence every-
where apparent in the book, that of the encyclopaedists. Pelham
was issued at a time when a publisher's recipe for popular fiction?
was 'a little elegant chit-chat or so. ' The effect was galvanic;
Pelhamism superseded Byronism, established a new fashion in
dress and made Lytton famous eight years before Pickwick began
to appear.
In the second quarter of the century, the writings of Pierce
Egan, Ainsworth, Whitehead and Moncrieff give evidence of a new
lease of interest in criminal biography and low life; Lytton was
quick to seize the opportunity. The character Thornton, in
Pelham, is drawn from the actual murderer Thurtell; in The
Disowned (1829), Crauford is a representation of the fraudulent
banker Fauntleroy; Lucretia, or The Children of the Night
(1846), is based on the career of the forger Wainewright. The
point of view is different in Paul Clifford (1830), and Eugene
Aram (1832), which fall into line with The Robbers (1782), Caleb
Williams (1794), The Monk (1795), The Borderers written
1795-6, Melmoth (1820) and other books? concerned with the
criminal's justificatio of himself and demand for sympathy and
understanding. Paul Clifford won the benediction of Godwin,
who thought parts of it 'divinely written,' and of Ebenezer Elliott ;
in its melodramatic way, it furthered the efforts of Mackintosh,
Romilly and others for the reform of prison discipline and penal
law; it provided, also, an example, not lost upon Dickens, of the
novel of humanitarian purpose. The introduction of picaresque
figures, among them the rogue Tomlinson, who stands for "all the
Whigs,' and who becomes a professor of ethics—and, still more,
the quips and personal caricatures in the book-rouse suspicions
as to the depth of the writer's sincerity. Paul Clifford, the
chivalrous highwayman, has his counterpart in the philosophising
murderer Eugene Aram; the obscuring of the plain issue of crime
by sentimental, or, as in the case of Ainsworth, by romantic
sophistry, nauseated Thackeray; in George de Barnwell, Thackeray
described these heroes as 'virtuous and eloquent beyond belief,'
and, in his unvarnished Newgate chronicle Catherine (1839–40),
1 Cf. The Disowned (1829), chap. XXIX.
? Cf. Legouis, E. , The Early Life of Wordsworth, p. 271.
1


## p. 419 (#435) ############################################

XIII]
Bulwer Lytton
419
he put the whole matter in its naked and repulsive truth. The
melodramatic law-court scenes of Paul Clifford and Eugene
Aram are earlier evidences of the theatrical skill with which
Lytton composed his dramas, chief among them Richelieu (1838),
The Lady of Lyons (1838) and the comedy Money (1840). In the
characterisation of Claude Melnotte, hero of The Lady of Lyons,
again, the criminal fact is obscured by the veneer of sentiment.
Lytton next turned his attention to the historical novel; his
Devereux (1829) uses up more of the material (some had already
been put into Pelham) gathered in his study of the politician
Bolingbroke. The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) differs from
Lytton's chief historical romances in taking for its main interest
a natural, instead of a social, convulsion, and in introducing, by the
nature of the case, characters entirely invented. It established in
public favour the romance of classical days, which Lockhart had
attempted in Valerius (1821); at the close of his life, Lytton
returned to the type in his Pausanias the Spartan, published in
1876. In Rienzi (1835), The Last of the Barons (1843) and
Harold (1848), he works upon a consistent theory; abandoning
the practice of Scott, he elects as his central figure a person
of the highest historical importance ; his aims are, first, to give
a just delineation in action and motive of this character; secondly,
to build up, with all the records at hand, a picture of the age
in its major and minor concerns; thirdly, to bring to light the
deeper-lying causes-personal, social, political—of the events of
the period, a period in which the closing stages of an old, and the
opening stages of a new, civilisation are in conflict. His skill in
divining the forces at work in complex phases of society, and
in concocting illustrative scenes, almost nullified by the intolerable
diction of Rienzi and the facile imaginativeness of Harold, is
best seen in The Last of the Barons; though, even in this last
case, the comparison with Quentin Durward or Notre Dame is
fatal. His distinction between Scott's picturesque' and his own
“intellectual' procedure has in it a dangerous note of presumption.
Lytton's keen and credulous interest in all forms of the occult
first finds expression in the short Glenallan and in Godolphin
(1833). The diabolic aspects of rosicrucianism had been put to
use in Godwin's St Leon, and in Melmoth; spectral figures of
more beneficent origin loom in the semi-allegorical Zanoni (1842),
developed from Zicci (1841). The rosicrucian initiate, Zanoni,
yields up all he has won of youth and power for the sake of a
forbidden human passion ; in consequence, he falls a victim to
27—2


## p. 420 (#436) ############################################

420
[CH.
Lesser Novelists
the Terror; the book suddenly ceases to be vague and becomes
dramatic when dealing with the fates of Robespierre and Henriot.
Lytton's treatment of the Terror falls in date between that of
Carlyle and that of Dickens. Two works nearer to the date and
manner of Wilkie Collins also make use of the supernatural ; in
A Strange Story (1862), a murder mystery is darkened and com-
plicated by the power which one character possesses of suspending
natural law; the short story The Haunted and the Haunters
(1859) contains Lytton's most impressive use of the occult; the
machinery is explained, at the end, in the manner of Mrs Radcliffe-
by persistent will-power, a curse is preserved in a magical vessel,
generations after a crime has been committed. But the effect of
the tale is due less to this than to the half-impalpable loathsome-
ness which menaces the invader of the haunted house ; here, the
story may challenge comparison with the Monçada episode in
Melmoth. For the finer chords of mystery and terror struck by
Coleridge and Keats, Lytton had no ear.
Lytton had early premonition of the change in taste which
occurred about 1848, and sought to fall in with the new realistic
trend in The Caxtons (1849), My Novel (1853) and What will he
do with it? (1858). The result is illuminating. The hero of The
Caxtons is neither dandiacal,' overwrought nor perverted; and,
while in Lucretia the effects of evil home life and upbringing are
traced, in The Caxtons the conditions are reversed and nearer to
common experience. To this degree, Lytton becomes a realist.
But he could not bring himself to face life squarely; a great
part of The Caxtons is devoted to the Byronic youth Vivian ; the
simple annals of the family are narrated in the manner of Sterne ;
an elderly impracticable scholar, a lame duck, a street organ-
grinder feeding his mice provide some of the occasions for
emotional indulgence. If anyone should seek in My Novel for
varieties of English life, he will be disappointed: only one point of
view is possible for the writer, that of our territorial aristocracy';
the varieties may be found in Kingsley's Yeast (1848).
In the fantastic Asmodeus at Large (1836), Lytton had fore-
shadowed the idea of The Coming Race, which antedates by a
year Butler's Erewhon. Lytton's book gives an original turn to
an often-used convention; in this case, the ideal republic is domi-
nated by an irresistible destructive force Vril, and, therefore, is at
peace. The inhabitants look down upon civilisations barbarous
and unfixed in principle. By its implied criticism of contempo-
rary society, the book is connected with Kenelm Chillingly and


## p. 421 (#437) ############################################

XIII]
Anthony Trollope
421
The Parisians, which was left unfinished in the same year. These
books picture England and the Paris of the second empire, sterile in
large ideas and feverishly experimenting with new and untried
expedients; vast financial depredations, communism, political
shiftiness, muscular religion, realism in art—these are some of the
innovations which are contrasted with the older aristocratic pride
and conservatism.
Even in an age of voluminousness, Lytton is an outstanding
example; to his novels must be added a great mass of epic,
satirical and translated verse, much essay-writing, pamphleteering
and a number of successful plays. His wide range of accomplish-
ment, his untiring industry, his talent in construction, his practice
of dealing with imposing subjects, his popularity with the bulk of
readers, give him an air of importance in the Victorian epoch.
But he was rooted too deeply in the age of emotionalism and
rhetoric. Richardson, Sterne and the weaker part of Byron, on
the one hand, and the encyclopaedists on the other, encouraged
in him the sentimentalism which, incidentally, ruined Great
Expectations, and the didactic and abstract habit of thought
and expression with which Thackeray made high-spirited play.
The novel, in Lytton's view, was a study of the effect of something
upon something else; so, after Pelham, he rarely ever escaped
from the discursive to the idiomatic style, or created character by
dramatic sympathy. Finally, his early success confirmed him in
the adoption of the pose, hotly resented by Thackeray and
Tennyson, of the grand seigneur, dispensing the light of reason,
knowledge and humanity.
Anthony Trollope, after a wretched boyhood and youth, of
which he gives some glimpses in his Autobiography and in The
Three Clerks (1858), entered upon a doubly prosperous career as
a civil servant in the post office and as a man of letters. He had
behind him, in the work of his mother, Frances Trollope, an
incentive to literary fertility; from her, he inherited some preju-
dices, but little of his art. The two Irish stories The Macdermots
of Ballycloran (1847) and The Kellys and the O'Kellys (1848), and
La Vendée (1850), were out of accord with his natural aptitudes,
which fitted him rather for the treatment of material like that of
Jane Austen or Thackeray, for both of whom his admiration was
unbounded. The monograph on Thackeray falls below the level
of its subject; but the resemblances in essential points between
Trollope's best work and Thackeray's show that he understood


## p. 422 (#438) ############################################

422
[Ch.
Lesser Novelists
scenes.
more as an artist than he could express as a critic. In The
Warden (1855), a scene from clerical life which precedes by two
years those of George Eliot, the individual quality of Trollope's
genius first comes to light. Echoes of Titmarsh are heard in the
passages satirising Dickens and Carlyle; the characterisation and
the creation of a locality show complete originality. In both
respects, the novel is the nucleus of the Barsetshire series on
which the fame of Trollope most securely rests. Round about
Hiram's hospital, the scene of The Warden, is built up in
Barchester Towers (1857), the cathedral city with all its clerical
hierarchy. Beyond the city, in successive tales-Dr Thorne
(1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), The Small House at Allington
(1864) and The Last Chronicles of Barset (1867) come into view
the episcopal see with its outlying parishes rich and poor, its
houses of middle class folk and gentry, and, looming large and
remote, the castle of the duke of Omnium—a country of the
imagination which gives the illusion of actual life by the com-
pleteness of its visualisation. Clearly as he knows its topography,
he has few pages of description, except in his lively hunting
His foremost concern is with people; and the people in
his books come to our notice in the natural fashion of acquaint-
anceship; with the passage of time, characters are hardened or
mellowed; Trollope rivals Thackeray and Balzac in the skill with
which he suggests changes due to lapsing years.