No More Learning

3 Adam Bede, p. 152. Strangely enough, the relation between Adam and Dinah,
which, according to the ordinary laws of fiction could only end in their ultimate union,
was not suggested to George Eliot by Lewes till she had made some progress with the
story. His argument (for which see Life, vol. I, p. 447) does not remove the blot (if it
be one), which was pointed out by Bulwer Lytton as the single thing, besides the dialect,
to be found fault with in Adam Bede (ibid. p. 526).


## p. 392 (#408) ############################################

392
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
>
Although she was fain to acknowledge the truth of Bulwer
Lytton's criticism', that the epic breadth into which she was
beguiled by love of her subject in the first two volumes' caused a
want of fulness in the preparation of the tragedy reached in the
third, yet, the nobility and beauty of Maggie's personality has to
be made fully manifest before we can absolve her for giving way,
even momentarily, to her passion for Stephen ; and a long ending,
such as goes far to mar the effect of certain other of George Eliot's
works, would hardly have enhanced the expiatory solemnity of its
perfect close. Maggie's is the earliest in the sequence of George
Eliot's heroines par excellence—Romola, Dorothea, Gwendolen
being the others. None of them brings home to us with more
intense force than Maggie Tulliver the conflict waged by the
great imaginative aspirations of the soul, which never abandons
them though it cannot command their fulfilment, and the puri-
fying influence of these aspirations. For, with her, as with the
rest, of whom, though with features wholly her own, she is a sort
of prototype, the escape from hopeless battling or prostrating
collapse lies one way only—that to which she is, as it were, acci-
dentally led—the way of self-sacrifice. If she stumbles on the
threshold of her better life, it is that she may fully learn the truth
of Philip's saying that there can be no renunciation without pain,
and she has to pass through a struggle far harder than her early
yearnings and strivings before she conquers. After this, she can
await the end, whatever judgment may be passed upon her by her
brother, who cannot go beyond knowing that he is in the right, or
by all the gossips of St Ogg's, who cannot rise above the certainty
that she is in the wrong. When the end comes, it finds her in the
midst of tempest and destruction as a bringer of reconciliation and
peace, and the novel closes, in perfect harmony with its opening,
as a story of trusting love.
In The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot had already displayed
an amplitude of exposition—both in the delineation of manners
and in the analysis of their significance—which could not but, from
time to time, seem exacting even to the warmest admirers of her
genius. Mr and Mrs Tulliver, in some ways, are a kind of inversion
of the Poysers, and, though of a feebler personal texture, not less
true to nature and nature's humorousness. But Mrs Tulliver's
sisters must be pronounced frequently tedious, and the enquiry
into the motives of ordinary doings by ordinary people is, at times,
trying. Still, in The Mill on the Floss, the background remains a
1 Life, etc. , vol. II, p. 17.
es


## p. 393 (#409) ############################################

xi]
Silas Marner
393
background only, and there is no dissipation of the interest which
never ceases to centre in ‘sister Maggie'-as the whole story was
intended to have been called, till its present name, breathing the
very spirit of English romance, and hinting vaguely at the tragic
course of the homely story, was, in a happy moment, substituted.
After the completion of this novel, which was dedicated to
Lewes, the authoress left England in his company for a few months'
holiday, which she spent mainly in Italy. In Florence, which
aroused in her a stronger interest than even Rome itself, she began
to think of Romola ; nor is it possible that this theme could have
grown in her mind without the aid of the genius loci. But, after
her return, although she continued to carry on an extensive course
of reading for the sake of this book, she did not actually set to
work upon it for nearly a twelvemonth further. Wholly absorbed
as she was, at this time, by her literary work, and holding aloof
from any wider social intercourse, she was able, by 1861, to com-
plete for publication another story, totally different in its associations
from that upon which her mind had already become primarily
intent. Silas Marner, though it can hardly be said to fall under
the category of short stories, extends to no great length, and, in
construction and treatment, shows a perfect sense of proportion on
the part of the writer. Indeed, competent judges have pronounced
it, in form, George Eliot's most finished work, while none of her
larger novels surpasses it in delicacy of pathos. The life of the
solitary linen-weaver, driven out long ago, by a grievous wrong,
from the little religious community to which he belonged, and
doomed, as it seemed, to a remote quietude rendered bearable
only by his satisfaction in his growing pile of gold, is suddenly
changed by the theft of his treasure. The young spendthrift who
has done the deed vanishes ; and the mystery remains unsolved
till it is cleared up with the unravelling of the whole plot of the
story. Nothing could be more powerfully drawn than the blank
despondency of the unhappy man, and nothing more beautifully
imagined than the change wrought by the golden-haired child who
takes the place of the gold by his hearth and in his heart. The
tenderness of fancy which pervades this simple tale, and the bright-
ness of humour which, not so much in the symposiasts of the
Rainbow as in the motherly Dolly Winthrop, relieves the con-
strained simplicity of its course, certainly assure to Silas Marner
a place of its own among George Eliot's works.
'I began Romola,' she writes', 'a young woman—I finished it an
1 Life, etc. , vol. II, p. 88.
>


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394
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
old woman' In whatever sense this saying is to be accepted, it
shows how she had consciously and consistently contemplated this
work as a labour of years, and how she had been led to the writing
of it by something besides a vast variety of study in political
and ecclesiastical history, in theology, in political philosophy, in
humanistic and artistic lore and in illustrative literature of all
kinds. Yet, it is a supreme prerogative of genius to be able to
master its material by becoming part of what it has transformed ;
and George Eliot was never more herself, and never displayed her
most distinctive intellectual qualities and moral purposes with
more powerful directness than in this, the most elaborate, as well
as erudite, of all her literary productions. Romola is one of the
most real and lifelike of her prose fictions, and, from this point of
view, too, shows itself altogether superior to a novel which it is
difficult not to bring into comparison with it, Charles Kingsley's
Hypatia, published about ten years earlier. Both works exhibit
the movement of actual life, as well as of deep feeling ; but
Romola is not less distinguished from the older work by its
greater variety and vividness of illustrative detail, than it is by
the profounder depth of the human emotions, belonging to no
age or scene in particular, which it calls up. For, although
Romola may fairly be called a historical novel, it is something
at once different from, and more than, this. The book has a
right to be so described by virtue of the exhaustive view which
it offers of the Florence of its period, of the men who helped to
make or mar the fortunes of the republic, of the traditions, usages
and notions of the city, of the humours of its festivals and the
charms of its gardens, of the types of signoria, mercato, the world
of learning and letters and the cloisters of San Marco. The actual
historical personages introduced-Machiavelli, king Charles VIII
and the rest-are not mere lay figures, but careful studies; and
Savonarola himself towers before us, with the wellknown facial
features in which a likeness, not without reason, has been dis-
covered to George Eliot's own, while his eloquence is reproduced
from his own written discourses. The lesser figures with which
the canvas is crowded—the talkers in the barber's shop and the
rest-are, to say the least, as concrete and as lifelike as are any of
George Eliot's English townsfolk or villagers ; indeed, she says
herself that her desire to give as full a view of the medium in
which a character moves as of the character itself actuated her in
Romola just as strongly as it did in The Mill on the Floss and
i See her letter in reply to R. H. Hutton's criticism, Life, etc. , vol. 11, pp. 96—7.
9


## p. 395 (#411) ############################################

XI]
Romola
395
in her other books ; but that the excess of this was, naturally,
more perceptible in the former instance. The wonderfully fine
proem almost leads us to suppose that it is the opening to a his-
torical novel, of which Florence itself will prove to be the main
theme. Yet, the whole of these surroundings, to use George
Eliot's word, form only the 'medium,' or milieu, of the action-
of Savonarola himself as well as of his beloved Florence; and the
action itself is, once more, the struggle through which fate, cir-
cumstance, place, time and the individualities—her father, her
husband and the rest—brought into contact with her own in-
dividuality compel a noble-natured woman to pass before she can
reconcile herself to her lot in the consciousness of having striven
for what is great and good. The evolution thus accomplished is a
process of which the human interest pervades, but at the same time
transcends, all its rich political, religious and literary envelopment.
The piety of Romola, her maiden devotion to the service of her
father and the studies which he loves, cannot, we know, circum-
scribe the life of one created, like herself, for the performance of
the highest duties of womanhood. And so she falls in love with
Tito—beautiful and clever and gifted with the adaptability which
belongs to the lower scholarship, as it does to the lower statesman-
ship, of life, and which, if combined with an unflinching and
unyielding 'improbity' of purpose, often comes near to brilliant
There may be points and passages—beginning with his
mock marriage to Tessa-in which the cruelty of Tito's selfishness
is beyond bearing ; but the hardening of his heart is told with
fidelity to nature. It may be added that, although the construc-
tion of the story is not open to the charge of artificiality (and the
Baldassare by-plot is quite in accordance with historical proba-
bility), fateful meetings and lucky escapes from meetings are too
liberally distributed over the surface of the action. But, as the
novel runs along what, apart from mere details, may be truly
described as its majestic course, Romola herself rises to the height
of the problems which she is called upon to confront-problems of
public and private duty, which her spiritual guide, Savonarola,
refused to allow her to treat as distinct from one another. The
hopes and fears of her fellow-citizens may shrink from the friar,
when his position, gradually undermined, begins to give way; when
the plague takes the heart out of the people; and when the church
drives him out of her communion; but neither plague nor papal
thunder has terrors for her free and exalted soul, and she has not
ceased to trust in the prophet because he has become rebel. In her
success.


## p. 396 (#412) ############################################

396
The Political and Social Novel [CH.
6
personal experiences, she passes through a not dissimilar evolution.
The tragic sorrow of her utter isolation seems, at last, to have de-
scended upon her hopelessly, and, through the blue waters, she drifts
away from all that was near and dear to her. But, like her boat,
her lofty soul finds its way into harbour. To the villagers among
whom she landed she left behind her the legend of the beneficent
Madonna's visit ; to herself, there remained the resolve to hold
herself on the highest level of self-sacrifice possible to her, tending
the children of her twice faithless husband, and leaving all else in
the hands of God. Thus, while Tito had fallen, because, of the
earth earthy, he could not, with all his beauty and learning and
wit, rise above himself, Romola stands erect, though with bowed
head. The variegated brilliancy of the setting which dazzles us in
this wonderful novel thus melts, at its close, into a soft diffusion
of the purest light.
Not long after the completion of Romola, George Eliot and
George Henry Lewes had established themselves at The Priory,
Regent's park. But, though the effort had been extraordinary-
she had, as she wrote some ten years later, written the book
with her best blood, such as it is, and with the most ardent
care for veracity of which her nature was capable? '—she had
no intention of resting on her laurels. 'The last quarter,' she
writes in January 1865, ‘has made an epoch for me, by the
fact that, for the first time in my serious authorship, I have
written verse. ' The earliest mention in her correspondence of
The Spanish Gypsy, early in September 1864, characteristically
records that, while already engaged upon the play, she was
' reading about Spain’; but, before, in the beginning of 1867,
she took a journey to that country, she had been persuaded to
give herself a respite, producing, in the interval, the one volume
novel Felix Holt, the Radical (1866). In some respects, this
book holds an isolated position among her works, and, practically,
alone warrants her being placed among eminent English writers
of fiction who, in their novels, have treated political, as well as
social, topics. Her consciousness of this direct purpose is shown
by her having, after some hesitation, consented to follow up the
publication of the novel by that of an Address to Working-
Men issued in the name of its hero? As was her wont, she
Life, etc. , vol. II, pp. 438—9.
2 This address, printed in Blackwood's Magazine for 1866, able as it undoubtedly is,
must, from the point of view of its probable effect on the audience or public con-
templated, be confessed to be, in the first instance, too long; in the second, too full of
figures and illustrations borrowed from popular science, general history and other, in
6
1


## p. 397 (#413) ############################################

XI]
Felix Holt
397
had prepared herself for her political novel by a solid course of
reading, which included, besides the worthy Samuel Bamford's
Passages from the Life of a Radical, such guidance as Mill's
Political Economy and Harriet Martineau's version of Comte's
Système de Politique Positive. On an examination, however, of
her story itself, it will not be found to convey any political teaching
of further purport than that which, a decade and a half earlier,
Charles Kingsley and his friends had sought to bring home to
the British working man. The secret of true reform is not to be
found in any particular measure or programme of measures,
whether it call itself Reform bill", people's charter or any other
name of high sound; but it lies in the resolve of the mass of the
people—in other words, of the working classes—to learn to think
and act for themselves. This kind of radicalism, though far from
being either vague or visionary, is that of an idealist; and, as
such, the principles of Felix Holt are presented in this story,
in contrast with the toryism of the Debarrys and the colonially
clearsighted opportunism of Harold Transome. For the rest, the
political philosophy of Felix Holt has not very much to do with
the story, except as part and parcel of the manliness of character
by which he secures his place in the heart of the heroine. The
plot by which the contrasts in her fortunes and in those of the
other personages of the story are developed is more melodramatic
in its course than is usual with George Eliot; and, whether its
legal machinery be perfect or otherwise, the general impression
left on the reader is not one in which excellences of detail
combine into a satisfactory total effect. Thus, and because of
the lack of a female character comparable in interest to those
standing forth in her other books, Felix Holt cannot be held
entitled to rank with the finest of them.
The Spanish Gypsy, not completed and published till 1868,
fills no such place in the sum of George Eliot's literary work as
it does in her literary life as regarded by herself. The poem, of
which the subject was first, more or less vaguely, suggested by an
Annunciation of Tintoretto at Venice, is, in form, a combination
of narrative and drama, with a considerable admixture of lyric;
but, though thus suggesting a certain spontaneity of composition,
it is artificial in the result, and, to put it bluntly, 'smells of the
lamp. The reader becomes oppressed, not only by the lore
themselves, suitable sources; and, finally, too obviously wanting in the balance of
earnest encouragement which no popular oratory of the kind can afford to spare.
1 Cf. the passage on the Reform bill, Life, vol. II, p. 152.


## p. 398 (#414) ############################################

398
[ch.
The Political and Social Novel
poured into the dramatic mould, but by the great amount of
guidance bestowed upon him--the characterisation of characters,
and the like-and is left cold by the solution of the problem
whether racial duty has claims to high allegiance, higher than
our love ? ' Some of the descriptive passages, above all the popular
festival in which the acrobat-conjuror figures with his monkey
Annibal, before the lady Fedalma is herself moved to join in the
dance, have the brilliant picturesqueness of scenes in Romola ;
nor, of course, are we left without the sententious comments of
a highly intelligent chorus.
George Eliot, now at the height of her literary reputation,
was still to produce two of her most important prose fictions,
and was able to suit her methods and forms of composition to
her own preferences. The great length, and the production, in
large instalments, of Middlemarch, a Study of Provincial Life
(1871—2), and of its successor Daniel Deronda, were not unaccept-
able to a generation which, compared with its successors, 'lived
when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by
our needs). . . . We later historians,' she adds, speaking of Fielding,
'must not linger after his example, and if we did so, it is probable
that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a
camp-stool in a parrot-house. ' This she says by way of humorously
excusing herself for abstaining from those digressions which were
not really very congenial to her; but, at the same time, she was
conscious that the fullness with which she treated her proper themes
might, at times, seem exacting. Yet, whatever may be thought
of this increasing amplitude of treatment in her latest novels,
accompanied, as it was, by a certain falling-off in the freshness and
variety of accumulated detail, her incomparable power of exhibiting
the development of character is here found at its height. This
development, in which time, contact and purpose alike have their
share, may show itself, as she writes in the preface to Middle-
march, in the epic life of a St Teresa ; but it also shows itself
in many a latterday life ; and, if it is worth studying, analysing,
following on to its results at all, must be best worth the effort
if this is made with relative completeness. At the same time,
Middlemarch—the same cannot, with equal confidence, be asserted
of Daniel Deronda—is an admirable example of constructive art,
and, in this respect, may challenge comparison with the consummate
workmanship of Romola. The story flows on without constraint;
but Dorothea never sinks out of her primary place in our interest;
as her ideals never abandon her, so, her consistent shaping of her
>


## p. 399 (#415) ############################################

xi] Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda
399
conduct in accordance with them never ceases to command our
sympathy. Her great original blunder in allowing herself to be
wooed and won by Mr Casaubon, whose ultra-academical pedantry
and ‘archangelical method of exposition’ she mistakes for marks
of real superiority, was all but unavoidable by one to whom, as
to herself, an ordinary marriage was impossible (ordinary men
may be consoled by the fact that Sir James Chettam is one of
the best drawn gentlemen in George Eliot's gallery of characters).
But, although her mistake is cruelly revenged upon her, after her
very submissiveness to duty has deepened her husband's delusion
as to his own value, it fails to debase her. As she gradually
comes to love Ladislaw, she is protected by the lofty purity of
her mind from acknowledging her feeling to herself too soon or
from giving way to it after she has confessed to herself both her
passion and its hopelessness. She is made happy in the end; but
;
she has been true to herself from first to last. Side by side with
Dorothea's experiences of life and its trials we have those of
Lydgate, who has matched himself unequally with smiling common-
place and has to descend from his own level? . The whole story,
with its double plot, is an admirable social picture as well as a pro-
found study of human character; the episode of the political reform
struggle, with the inconsequent Mr Brooke as its central figure,
is more satirical in treatment than is that of Lydgate's efforts for
medical reform; and, though ample in its framework and even
finding room for a purely humorous character in the person of
Mrs Cadwallader, the novel is far less diffuse than some of its
predecessors.
Daniel Deronda (1876), the last of George Eliot's works of
prose fiction, though, as is not to be denied, it brought some dis-
appointment to the ever-widening congregation of her admirers,
both in matter and style, maintains the high standard of Middle-
march; and, in the character of Gwendolen, offers one more
variety of the high-spirited and high-souled woman whom the
experience of life trains to resignation—a resignation of little
worth if it comes without pain. She passes, imperiously self-
centred, through childhood and girlhood; nor is it till after she
has quickly shaken off the honest proffer of a boyish heart that
she steadies herself to meet the first real trial-the imminent
marriage proposal of Grandcourt, great by his calm acceptance
1 The experiences of Lydgate were, probably, in part, suggested by those of the young
doctor in Harriet Martineau's Deerbrook, to which Kingsley's Two Years Ago may, also,
have been indebted.


## p. 400 (#416) ############################################

400
[ch.
The Political and Social Novel
of his great position in the world. His character, however, is
better conceived than executed; for, while we have to take his
high-breeding on assurance, his brutality thrusts itself pitilessly
upon us.
A secret which makes Gwendolen pause on the brink
of acceptance causes her to go abroad to escape Grandcourt
(who follows her very slowly) and to be brought face to face
with Daniel Deronda. Gradually, he becomes a kind of higher
admonition-for he is too detached to fill the office of good angel
-in her life. His own, from his early days onwards, has been
enveloped in a mystery to the solution of which the reader looks
forward with tempered interest. It proves, in the end, to be a
racial problem—though a less violent one than that of The
Spanish Gypsy-with which we are invited to deal; and the haze
of Disraelian dreams hangs round this part of the story, till, at
the close, it leaves us face to face with the familiar project of
the restoration of a national centre to the Jewish race. The
attempt to constitute this Semitic mystery an organic part of
the story of Gwendolen and her experiences, which culminate
in her unhappy marriage with Grandcourt and his tragic death,
cannot be deemed successful. After she has grown accustomed
to rely absolutely on nothing but Deronda and his 'Bouddha-like'
altruism, she finds herself, at last, as her woman's nature cries out
in a moment of despair, ‘forsaken’ by him, so that he may fulfil
his destiny, which includes his marriage with Mirah. But the
candid though severe critic', who goes rather far in his suggestion
that this ending may “raise a smile which the author did not
intend to excite,' is within the mark when he adds that 'no words
of praise can be too warm for the insight displayed by the book
into the complex feelings of modern character' or 'for its delicacy
and depth of delineation of sentiment. ' Among the subsidiary
personages of the story, one is wholly new and original-the
musician of genius, whose single-minded devotion to an art which,
for George Eliot, always had a unique fascination, rises superior
to his personal grotesqueness. Thus, almost in spite of itself,
Daniel Deronda remains one of the great achievements of its
author's genius.
Between the inception of Middlemarch and the completion,
some seven years later, of Daniel Deronda, George Eliot wrote
some pieces of verse which must not be passed by without
mention. How Lisa loved the King (1869) is a very charming
treatment of a subject taken from Boccaccio, and previously-
i See Letters of C. Eliot Norton (1913), vol. 11, p. 64.
6


## p. 401 (#417) ############################################

xi]
George Eliot's Poems
401
so susceptible is a truly pathetic theme of repeated successful
adaptation dealt with very happily in at least two plays of
note? George Eliot's poem is specially interesting by virtue
.
of its graceful form-rimed couplets which suit themselves to the
delicately fanciful argument as if they had come from the pen
of Leigh Hunt. If this delightful little effort has in it just a
trace of artificiality, it is not on that account the less suited to
the conscious refinement of the renascence age.
Of about the same date, and conceived in no very different
mood, is Agatha (1869), a pretty picture of still-life and genial
old age, further softened by religious influence. Slightly later
(1870) is Armgart, which consists of three dramatic scenes, telling
story of artistic triumph, followed by bitter disappointment and
renunciation. Here, may possibly be found the germ of some of
the Klesmer speeches in Daniel Deronda. To the same year, also,
belongs The Legend of Jubal, a more considerable poetical effort,
which treats with great breadth what are really two distinct motifs.
One of these is a tribute to the power of music in the form of
an account of its origin and first spread; the other is the old story
of the return of the inventor of the art after a long absence to the
scenes of its beginnings, where he has been forgotten and is treated
with ignominy, but consoled by the honour in which his art is
held. 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.