Some Diversions Of A Man Of Letters Part 6

"How do you think my audacious husband has spent his time since he has been in town? Why, he must needs send me down what he termed a little Christmas box, which was a huge box from Howel and James's, containing only eight Gros de Naples dresses of different colours not made up, four Gros des Indes, two merino ones, four satin ones, an amber, a black, a white and a blue, eight pocket handkerchiefs that look as if they had been spun out of lilies and air and _brodee_ by the fairies, they are so exquisitely fine and so beautifully worked. Four pieces (16 yards in each) of beautiful white blonde, two broad pieces and two less broad, a beautiful and very large blue real cashmere shawl, a Chantilly veil that would reach from this to Dublin, and six French long pellerines very richly embroidered on the finest India muslin, three dozen pair of white silk stockings, one dozen of black, a most beautiful black satin cloak with very pretty odd sort of capes and trimmed round and up the sides with a very broad band of a new kind of figured plush--I forget what they call it (it came from Paris), and a hat of the same--such a hat as can only be made in the Rue Vivienne.

You would think that this 'little Christmas box' would have been enough to have lasted for some time. However, he thought differently, for on New Year's morning before I was out of bed, there came a parcel by the mail, which on opening proved to be a large red Morocco case containing a bright gold chain, a yard and a half long, with the most beautiful and curious cross to it that I ever saw--the chain is as thick as my dead gold necklace, and you may guess what sort of a thing it is when I tell you that I took it to a jeweller here to have it weighed, and it weighed a pound all but an ounce. The man said it never was made for less than fifty guineas, but that he should think it had cost more."

Rosina, who has only 80 a year of her own, will not be outdone, and cannot "resist ordering" Edward "a gold toilette, which he has long wished for.... Round the rim of the basin and the handle of the ewer I have ordered a wreath of _narcissus_ in dead gold, which, for Mr.

Pelham, you'll own, is not a bad idea."

It would be expected that all this crazy display would lead the young couple rapidly and deeply into debt. That it did not do so is the most curious phase of the story. Bulwer-Lytton immediately, and apparently without the slightest difficulty, developed a literary industry the sober record of which approaches the fabulous. Walter Scott alone may be held to have equalled it. The giants of popular fiction did, indeed, enjoy larger single successes than Bulwer-Lytton did, but none of them, not d.i.c.kens himself, was so uniformly successful. Everything he wrote sold as though it were bread displayed to a hungry crowd. Even his poetry, so laboriously and lifelessly second-hand, always sold. He did not know what failure was; he made money by _Devereux_; even _The New Timon_ went into many editions. To earn what was required, however--and in these early years he seems to have made 3000 his minimum of needful return--to live in the insane style which his wife and he demanded, an enormous nervous strain was required. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's temper had always been warm and eager; it now grew irritable to the highest degree.

His mother continued to exasperate him; his wife suddenly failed to please him; his health waned; and he became the most miserable of men; yet without ceasing for a moment to be the most indefatigable of authors. The reader will follow the evolution of the tragedy, which is of poignant interest, in Lord Lytton's pages. The whole story is one of the most extraordinary in the history of literature.

It has been a feature of Bulwer-Lytton's curious posthumous fortune that he has seemed solitary in his intellectual if not in his political and social action. We think of him as one of those morose and lonely bees that are too busy gathering pollen to join the senate of the hive, and are dwellers in the holes of the rocks. It is quite true that, with a painful craving for affection, he had not the genius of friendship. The general impression given by his biography is one of isolation; in "the sea of life" he was one of those who are most hopelessly "enisled."

Nothing is sadder than this severance of a delicate and sensitive temperament from those who surround it closely and to whom it stretches out its arms in vain. But a careful reading of these interesting volumes leaves us in no doubt of the cause of this loneliness. Bulwer-Lytton, with all his ardour and his generosity, was devoid of the gift of sympathy. In characters of a simpler mould a natural kindliness may take the place of comprehension. But Bulwer-Lytton had a lively and protean fancy which perpetually deceived him. In human relations he was always moving, but always on the wrong track.

The letters to his mother, to his wife, to his son, exemplify this unfortunate tendency. They are eloquent, they are even too eloquent, for Bulwer-Lytton intoxicated himself with his own verbosity; they are meant to be kind, they are meant to be just, they are meant to be wise and dignified and tender; but we see, in Lord Lytton's impartial narrative, that they scarcely ever failed to exasperate the receiver. His dealings with his son, of whom he was exquisitely proud and sensitively fond, are of the saddest character, because of the father's want of comprehension, haste of speech and intolerance of temper. The very fact that a son, a wife, or a mother could with impunity be addressed in terms of exaggerated sensibility, because there could be no appeal, was a snare to the too-ready pen of Bulwer-Lytton, which, poured out its oceans of ink without reflection and without apprehension. If violent offence were given, the post went out again later in the day, and equally violent self-humiliation would restore the emotional balance. But what could not be restored was the sense of confidence and domestic security.

In his contact with other literary men of his own age more restraint was necessary, and we learn from Lord Lytton's pages of valuable and prolonged acquaintanceships which were sometimes almost friendships. His company was much sought after, and occasionally by very odd persons.

Lord Lytton prints a series of most diverting letters from the notorious Harriette Wilson, who, in spite of the terror into which her "Memoirs"

had thrown society, desired to add the author of _Pelham_ to the aviary of her conquests. But the snare was set in vain before the eyes of so shrewd a bird as Bulwer-Lytton; he declined to see the lady, but he kept her amazing letters. This was in 1829, when the novelist seems to have had no literary or political a.s.sociates. But by 1831, we find him editing the _New Monthly Magazine_, and attaching himself to Lord Melbourne and Lord Durham on the one hand and to Disraeli and d.i.c.kens on the other. When to these we have added Lady Blessington and Let.i.tia Landon, we have mentioned all those public persons with whom Bulwer-Lytton seems to have been on terms of intimacy during his early manhood. All through these years he was an incessant diner-out and party-goer, and the object of marvellous adulation, but he pa.s.sed through all this social parade as though it had been a necessary portion of the exterior etiquette of life. Why he fatigued himself by these formal exercises, in which he seems to have found no pleasure, it is impossible to conceive, but a sense of the necessity of parade was strangely native to him.

He had, however, one close and constant friend. John Forster was by far the most intimate of all his a.s.sociates throughout his career.

Bulwer-Lytton seems to have met him first about 1834, when he was twenty-eight and Forster only twenty-two. In spite of this disparity in age, the younger man almost at once took a tone of authority such as the elder seldom permitted in an acquaintance. Forster had all the gifts which make a friend valuable. He was rich in sympathy and resource, his temper was reasonable, he comprehended a situation, he knew how to hold his own in argument and yet yield with grace. Lord Lytton prints a very interesting character-sketch of Forster, which he has found among his grandfather's MSS. It is a tribute which does equal credit to him who makes it and to him of whom it is made:--

"John Forster.... A most sterling man, with an intellect at once ma.s.sive and delicate. Few, indeed, have his strong practical sense and sound judgment; fewer still unite with such qualities his exquisite appreciation of latent beauties in literary art. Hence, in ordinary life, there is no safer adviser about literary work, especially poetry; no more refined critic. A large heart naturally accompanies so masculine an understanding. He has the rare capacity for affection which embraces many friendships without loss of depth or warmth in one. Most of my literary contemporaries are his intimate companions, and their jealousies of each other do not diminish their trust in him. More than any living critic, he has served to establish reputations. Tennyson and Browning owed him much in their literary career. Me, I think, he served in that way less than any of his other friends. But, indeed, I know of no critic to whom I have been much indebted for any position I hold in literature. In more private matters I am greatly indebted to his counsels. His reading is extensive. What faults he has lie on the surface. He is sometimes bluff to rudeness. But all such faults of manner (and they are his only ones) are but trifling inequalities in a nature solid and valuable as a block of gold."

This was written with full experience, as the names of Tennyson and Browning will remind us, for Bulwer-Lytton was slow to admit the value of these younger talents. His relations with Tennyson have always been known to be unfortunate; as they are revealed in Lord Lytton's biography they approach the incredible. He met Browning at Covent Garden Theatre during the Macready "revival" of the poetic stage, but it was not until after the publication of _Men and Women_ that he became conscious of Browning's claim, which he then very grudgingly admitted. He was grateful to Browning for his kindness to Robert Lytton in Italy, but he never understood his genius or his character.

What, however, we read with no less pleasure than surprise are the evidences of Bulwer-Lytton's interest in certain authors of a later generation, of whom the general public has never suspected him to have been aware. Something almost like friendship sprang up as lately as 1867 between him and a man whom n.o.body would suppose him to admire, Matthew Arnold. It sometimes happens that a sensitive and petulant artist finds it more easy to acknowledge the merits of his successors than to endure those of his immediate contemporaries. The _Essays in Criticism_ and _The Study of Celtic Literature_ called forth from the author of _My Novel_ and _The Caxtons_ such eulogy as had never been spared for the writings of Thackeray or Carlyle. Matthew Arnold appeared to Bulwer-Lytton to have "brought together all that is most modern in sentiment, with all that is most scholastic in thought and language."

Arnold was a guest at Knebworth, and brought the Duke of Genoa with him.

He liked Bulwer-Lytton, and their relations became very cordial and lasted for some years; Arnold has given an amusing, but very sympathetic, account of the dignified hospitalities of Knebworth.

No revelation in Lord Lytton's volumes is, however, more pleasing or more unexpected than his grandfather's correspondence with Swinburne. It is thought that he heard of him through Monckton Milnes; at all events, he was an early reader of _Atalanta in Calydon_. When, in 1866, all the furies of the Press fell shrieking on _Poems and Ballads_, Bulwer-Lytton took a very generous step. He wrote to Swinburne, expressing his sympathy and begging him to be calm. The young poet was extremely touched, and took occasion to beg the elder writer for his advice, the publisher having, without consulting him, withdrawn his volume from sale. Bulwer-Lytton's reply was a most cordial invitation to stay with him at Knebworth and talk the matter over. Swinburne gratefully accepted, and John Forster was asked to meet him. It was Bulwer-Lytton, it appears, who found another publisher for the outraged volume, and helped Swinburne out of the sc.r.a.pe. He was always kindness itself if an appeal was made to his protection, and to his sense of justice. However, pleasant as the visit to Knebworth was, there is no evidence that it was repeated. Bulwer-Lytton considered Swinburne's opinions preposterous, and indeed if he told Swinburne, as in 1869 he told his son Robert, that Victor Hugo was "but an epileptic dwarf in a state of galvanism," there must have been wigs on the green at Knebworth.

The student of the biography, if he is already familiar with the more characteristic works of Bulwer-Lytton, will find himself for the first time provided with a key to much that has puzzled him in the nature of that author. The story itself, apart from the tragic matrimonial trouble which runs through it like a blood-red cord, is of unusual interest. It is a story of strife, without repose, without enjoyment, but with a good deal of splendour and satisfaction. Almost to the end Bulwer-Lytton was engaged in struggle. As an ambitious social being he was fighting the world; as an author he was battling with his critics; as a statesman he was always in the wild storm of party politics. As a private individual he was all the time keeping his head up against the tide of social scandal which attacked him when he least expected it, and often threatened to drown him altogether. This turmoil contrasts with the calm of the evening years, after the peerage had been won, the ambition satisfied, the literary reputation secured.

Few writers have encountered, in their own time and after their death, so much adverse criticism, and yet have partly survived it. It is hardly realised, even perhaps by Lord Lytton, how unwilling the reviewers were to give credit to his grandfather. He never found favour in their eyes, and it was a matter of constant resentment with him that they did him, as he thought, injustice. The evidence of his wounded feelings is constant in his letters. The Quarterly Review never mentioned him without contempt until 1865, when the publication of his works, in forty-three volumes, forced it to consider this indefatigable and popular writer with a measure of respect. Sir Walter Scott, with his universal geniality, read _Pelham_ in 1828 and "found it very interesting: the light is easy and gentlemanlike, the dark very grand and sombrous." He asked who was the author, and he tried to interest his son-in-law in the novel. But Lockhart was implacable: "_Pelham_," he replied, "is writ by a Mr. Bulwer, a Norfolk squire, and horrid puppy. I have not read the book, from disliking the author." Lockhart, however, did read _Devereux_, and three years afterwards, when reviewing some other novel, he said of the historical characters in that romance: "It seems hard to disquiet so many bright spirits for the sole purpose of showing that they _could_ be dull." That was the att.i.tude of the higher criticism to Bulwer-Lytton from, let us say, 1830 to 1860; he was "a horrid puppy" and he was also "dull."

But this was far from being the opinion of the reading public. We have seen that he never failed, and sometimes he soared into the very empyrean of popularity. In 1834, when he published _The Last Days of Pompeii_, again in 1837 when he published _Ernest Maltravers_, the ecstasy of his adorers discovered their favourite in a moment under the mask of anonymity which he chose to a.s.sume. This was just before the outburst of the great school of Victorian novelists; Bulwer had as yet practically no one but Disraeli to compete with. These two, the author of _Pelham_ and the author of _Vivian Grey_, raced neck and neck at the head of the vast horde of "fashionable" novel-writers; now all but them forgotten. In Bulwer-Lytton's romances the reader moved among exalted personages, alternately flippant and sinister; a "mournful enthusiasm"

was claimed for the writer by the readers of his day. It was the latest and most powerful development of that Byronic spirit which had been so shortlived in verse, but which was to survive in prose until Bulwer-Lytton adopted his _Caxtons_ manner in the middle of the century.

As always in Byronic periods, the portrait of the author himself was searched for among his most fatal conceptions. To the young library subscriber the stoical, solitary figure of Mordaunt, in _The Disowned_, was exactly what was wanted as a representation of the mysterious novelist himself. Pelham was the apotheosis of the man of fashion, and it is amusing to read how, when the Bulwer-Lyttons travelled, they were gazed at in reverence as the Pelham and the Pelhamess.

It would be difficult to improve upon the language used so early as 1832 by one of the very few critics who attempted to do justice to Bulwer-Lytton's merits. The _Edinburgh Review_ found in him "a style vigorous and pliable, sometimes strangely incorrect, but often rising into a touching eloquence." Ten years later such was the private opinion of D.G. Rossetti, who was "inspired by reading _Rienzi_ and _Ernest Maltravers_, which is indeed a splendid work." Now that we look back at Bulwer-Lytton's prodigious compositions, we are able to perceive more justly than did the critics of his own day what his merits were. For one thing, he was extraordinarily versatile. If we examine his books, we must be astonished at their variety. He painted the social life of his own day, he dived into spectral romance, he revived the beautiful ceremonies of antiquity, he evoked the great shades of English and of Continental history, he made realistic and humorous studies of middle-cla.s.s life, he engaged in vehement controversy on topics of the hour, he prophesied of the order of the future, he wrote comedies and tragedies, epics and epistles, satires and lyrics. His canva.s.ses were myriad and he crowded every one of them with figures. At his most Byronic moment he flung his dark cloak aside, and danced in motley through _Paul Clifford_, with its outrageous caricature of George IV.

and his Ministers as a gang of Hounslow highwaymen. Perhaps his best claim to regard is the insatiability of his human curiosity, evinced in the almost infinite variety of his compositions.

The singular being who wrote so large a library of works and whose actual features have so carefully been concealed from the public, will be known at last. The piety of his grandson has presented him to us with no reservations and no false lights. Here he stands, this half-fabulous being, not sheathed in sham armour and padding the stage in buskins, but a real personality at length, "with all his weaknesses and faults, his prejudices, affectations, vanities, susceptibilities, and eccentricities, and also with all his great qualities of industry, courage, kindness of heart; sound judgment, patience, and perseverance."

Lord Lytton has carried through to the close a biographical enterprise of unusual difficulty, and he deserves the thanks of all students of English literature.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE BRONTeS[7]

Although I possess in no degree the advantage which so many of the members of your society enjoy in being personally connected with the scenes and even, perhaps, with the characters a.s.sociated with the Bronte family, I cannot begin my little address to you to-day without some invocation of the genius of the place. We meet at Dewsbury because the immortal sisters were identified with Dewsbury. Is it then not imperative that for whatever picture of them I may endeavour to present before you this afternoon, Dewsbury should form the background?

Unfortunately, however, although in the hands of a skilful painter the figures of the ladies may glow forth, I fear that in the matter of taking Dewsbury as the background some vagueness and some darkness are inevitable. In the biographies of Mrs. Gaskell and of Mr. Clement Shorter, as well as in the proceedings of your society, I have searched for evidences of the place Dewsbury took in the lives of the Brontes.

What I find--I expect you to tell me that it is not exhaustive--is this.

Their father, the Rev. Patrick Bronte, was curate here from 1809 to 1811. In 1836, when Charlotte was twenty, Miss Wooler transferred her school from Roe Head to Heald's House at the top of Dewsbury Moor. In this school, where Charlotte had been a pupil since 1831, she was now a governess, and a governess she remained until early in 1838. In April of that year Miss Wooler was taken ill and Charlotte was for a little while in charge. Then there was an explosion of temper, of some kind, and Charlotte went back to Haworth.

That, then, in the main, is the limit of what the scrupulous Muse of history vouchsafes to tell us about Charlotte Bronte's relation to Dewsbury. But it also supplies us with one or two phrases which I cannot bring myself to spare you. In January 1838, Charlotte reviews her experience at Dewsbury Moor; "I feel," she says, "in nothing better, nothing humbler nor purer." Again, in 1841, after there had pa.s.sed time enough to mellow her exacerbations, she continues to express herself with vigour. Miss Wooler is making overtures to Charlotte and Emily to take over the school at Heald's House; perhaps a place might be found for Anne as well. Miss Wooler, one of the kindest of women, is most thoughtful, most conciliatory. Charlotte will have none of the idea; she puts it roughly from her. Of Dewsbury she has nothing to say but that "it is a poisoned place for me." This is all we know of Charlotte's relation to Dewsbury, yet nothing, you will tell me, in Froude's phrase, to what the angels know. Well, I must be frank with you and say that I am afraid the angels have been inclined to record exceedingly little of Charlotte Bronte's residence in your inoffensive neighbourhood. I have to paint a background to my picture, and I find none but the gloomiest colours. They have to be what the art-critics of the eighteenth century called "sub-fusc." But it is not the fault of Dewsbury, it is the fault, or the misfortune, of our remarkable little genius. She was here, in this wholesome and hospitable vicinity, for several months, during which time "she felt in nothing better, neither humbler nor purer," and looking back upon it, she had to admit that it was "a poisoned place"

to her.

I cannot help fancying that you will agree with me, that on such an occasion as the present, and especially when dealing with a group of writers about whom so much as has been said as about the Brontes, it is wise not to cover too wide a ground, but to take, and keep to, one aspect of the subject. Our little excursion into the history seems to have given us, under the heading "Dewsbury," a rather grim text, from which, nevertheless, we may perhaps extract some final consolation. Let me say at the outset that for the grimness, for the harshness, Dewsbury is not at all to blame. I fancy that if, in the years from 1836 to 1838, the Bronte girls had been visitors to Kubla Khan, and had been fed on honey by his myrmidons at Xanadu, that pleasure-dome would yet have been "poisoned" to them. It was not poverty, and cold, and the disagreeable position of a governess, it was not the rough landscape of your moors, nor its lack of southern amenity which made Charlotte wretched here. It was not in good Miss Wooler, nor in the pupils, nor in the visitors at Heald's House that the mischief lay, it was in the closed and patient crater of Charlotte's own bosom. And I am almost persuaded that, if you had lived in Dewsbury sixty-five years ago, you would have heard on very quiet days a faint subterranean sound which you would never have been able to guess was really the pa.s.sion, furiously panting, shut up in the heart of a small, pale governess in Heald's House schoolroom.

If you accuse me of fatalism, I am helpless in your hands, for I confess I do not see how it could be otherwise, and do scarcely wish that it could have been. Let us not be too sentimental in this matter. Figures in literature are notable and valuable to us for what they give us. The more personal and intense and definite that is, the greater the gift, the more strenuous the toil and the more severe the initiation which lead to its expression. The Brontes had a certain thing to learn to give; what that was we shall presently try to note. But whatever we find it to be, we start with allowing that it was extremely and boldly original. It was not to be mastered by lying upon padded sofas and toying with a little Berlin wool-work. It involved pain, resistance, a stern revision of things. .h.i.therto taken for granted. The secrets which they designed to wring from nature and from life were not likely to be revealed to the self-indulgent and the dilettante. The sisters had a message from the sphere of indignation and revolt. In order that they should learn it as well as teach it, it was necessary that they should arrive on the scene at an evil hour for their own happiness. _Jane Eyre_ and _Shirley_ and _Villette_ could not have been written unless, for long years, the world had been "a poisoned place" for Charlotte Bronte.

It has been excellently said by Mrs. Humphry Ward that in many respects, and to the very last, the Brontes challenge no less than they attract us. This is an aspect which, in the midst of rapturous modern heroine-worship, we are apt to forget. Thackeray, who respected the genius of the family, and was immensely kind to the author of _Jane Eyre_, never really felt comfortable in her company. We know how he stole out of his own front-door, and slipped away into the night to escape her. "A very austere little person," he called her, and we may put what emphasis on the austerity we will. I feel sure that any maladroit "white-washing of Charlotte" will tend, sooner or later, good-natured though it may be, in a failure to comprehend what she really was, in what her merit consisted, what the element in her was that, for instance, calls us here together nearly half a century after she completed her work and pa.s.sed away. Young persons of genius very commonly write depressing books; since, the more vivid an unripe creature's impression of life is, the more acute is its distress. It is only extremely stupid Sunday-school children who shout in chorus, "We are so happy, happy, happy!" Genius thrown naked, with exposed nerves, on a hard indifferent world, is never "happy" at first. Earth is a "poisoned place" to it, until it has won its way and woven its garments and discovered its food.

But in the case of Charlotte Bronte, unhappiness was more than juvenile fretfulness. All her career was a revolt against conventionality, against isolation, against irresistible natural forces, such as climate and ill-health and physical insignificance. Would this insubmissive spirit have pa.s.sed out of her writings, as it pa.s.sed, for instance, out of those of George Sand? I am not sure, for we see it as strongly, though more gracefully and skilfully expressed, in _Villette_ as in the early letters which her biographers have printed. Her hatred of what was commonplace and narrow and obvious flung her against a wall of prejudice, which she could not break down. She could only point to it by her exhausting efforts; she could only invite the generation which succeeded her to bring their pickaxes to bear upon it. Hence, to the very last, she seems, more than any other figure in our literature, to be forever ruffled in temper, for ever angry and wounded and indignant, rejecting consolation, crouched like a sick animal in the cavern of her own quenchless pride. This is not an amiable att.i.tude, nor is it historically true that this was Charlotte Bronte's constant aspect. But I will venture to say that her amiabilities, her yielding moods, are really the unessential parts of her disposition, and that a certain admirable ferocity is the notable feature of her intellectual character.

Her great heart was always bleeding. Here at Dewsbury, in the years we are contemplating, the hemorrhage was of the most doleful kind, for it was concealed, suppressed, it was an inward flow. When once she became an author the pain of her soul was relieved. She said, in 1850, looking back on the publication of the hapless first volume of poems, "The mere effort to succeed gave a wonderful zest to existence." Then, a little later, when no one had paid the slightest attention to the slender trio of maiden voices, "Something like the chill of despair began to invade their hearts." With a less powerful inspiration, they must have ceased to make the effort; they must have succ.u.mbed in a melancholy oblivion.

But they were saved by the instinct of a mission. It was not their private grief which primarily stirred them. What urged them on was the dim consciousness that they gave voice to a dumb sense of the suffering of all the world. They had to go on working; they had to pursue their course, though it might seem sinister or fatal; their business was to move mankind, not to indulge or please it. They "must be honest; they must not varnish, soften, or conceal."

What Charlotte Bronte was learning to do in her grim and, let us admit it, her unlovely probation on Dewsbury Moor, was to introduce a fresh aspect of the relations of literature to life. Every great writer has a new note; hers was--defiance. All the aspects in which life presented itself to her were distressing, not so much in themselves as in herself.

She rebelled against the outrages of poverty, and she drank to its dregs the cup of straitened circ.u.mstances. She was proud, as proud as Lucifer, and she was forced into positions which suppleness and cheerfulness might have made tolerable, if not agreeable. She wrung from these positions their last drop of bitterness. A very remarkable instance of this may be found in her relation to the Sidgwick family, who, by universal report, were generous, genial, and una.s.suming. To Charlotte Bronte these kindly, if somewhat commonplace folk, grew to seem what a Turkish pasha seems to the inhabitants of a Macedonian village. It was not merely the surroundings of her life--it was life itself, in its general mundane arrangements, which was intolerable to her. She fretted in it, she beat her wings against its bars, and she would have done the same if those bars had been of gold, and if the fruits of paradise had been pushed to her between them. This, I think, is why the expression of her anger seems too often disproportionate, and why her irony is so apt to be preposterous. She was born to resist being caged in any form. Her defiance was universal, and often it was almost indiscriminate.

Do not let us presume to blame this insubmission. Still less let us commit the folly of minimising it. A good cheerful little Charlotte Bronte, who thought the best of everybody, who gaily took her place without a grudging sigh, whose first aim was to make those about her happy and to minister to their illusions, would have been a much more welcome inmate of Miss Wooler's household than the cantankerous governess whom n.o.body could please, whose susceptibilities were always on edge, whose lonely arrogance made her feared by all but one or two who timidly persisted in loving her. But such a paragon of the obvious virtues would have pa.s.sed as the birds pa.s.s and as the flowers. She would have left no mark behind. She would never have enriched the literature of England by one of its master-evidences of the force of human will. She would never have stirred hundreds of thousands of consciences to a wholesome questioning of fate and their own souls.

Let us endeavour to pursue the inquiry a few steps further. It is impossible to separate the ethical conditions of an author's mind from the work that he produces. The flower requires the soil; it betrays in its colour and its perfume the environment of its root. The moral const.i.tution of the writer is reflected in the influence of the written page. This is the incessant contention; on one hand the independence of art a.s.serts itself; on the other, it is impossible to escape from the implicit influence of conduct upon art. There have been few writers of any age in whom this battle raged more fiercely than it did in Charlotte Bronte. Her books, and those of her sisters, seem anodyne enough to-day; to readers of a sensitive species they seemed, when they were published, as dangerous as _Werther_ had been, as seductive as the _Nouvelle Helose_. The reason of this was, in the main, the spirit of revolt which inspired them. There was something harsh and glaring in their landscape; there was that touch of Salvator Rosa which one of their earliest critics observed in them. But more essential was the stubbornness, the unflinching determination to revise all accepted formulas of conduct, to do this or that, not because it was usual to do it, but because it was rational, and in harmony with human nature.

Into an age which had become almost exclusively utilitarian, and in which the exercise of the imagination, in its real forms, was sedulously discountenanced, Charlotte Bronte introduced pa.s.sion in the sphere of prose fiction, as Byron had introduced it in the sphere of verse thirty years earlier. It was an inestimable gift; it had to come to us, from Charlotte Bronte or another, to save our literature from a decline into triviality and pretension. But she suffered, as Byron had suffered, in the direct ratio of her originality. If a writer employs pa.s.sion in an age which has ceased to recognise it as one of the necessities of literary vitality he is safe to be accused of perverting his readers.

Balzac says, "When nothing else can be charged against an author, the reproach of immorality is thrown at his head." When we study the record of the grim life of the sisters at Haworth, like that of three young soldiers round a camp-fire with the unseen enemy prowling in the darkness just out of their sight--when we think of the strenuous vigil, the intractable and indomitable persistence, the splendour of the artistic result--we may console ourselves in our anger at the insults they endured, by reflecting how little they cared. And their n.o.ble indifference to opinion further endears them to us. We may repeat of them all what Charlotte in a letter once said of Emily, "A certain harshness in her powerful and peculiar character only makes me cling to her more."

This insubmissiveness, which was the unconscious armour given to protect her against the inevitable attacks of fortune, while, on the other hand, it was the very sign-manual of Charlotte's genius, was, on the other, a drawback from which she did not live long enough to emanc.i.p.ate her nature. It is responsible for her lack of interest in what is delicate and complex; it excused to herself a narrowness of vision which we are sometimes tempted to find quite distressing. It is probably the cause of a fault that never quits her for long, a tendency to make her characters express themselves with a lyrical extravagance which sometimes comes close to the confines of rodomontade. Charlotte Bronte never arrives at that mastery of her material which permits the writer to stand apart from his work, and sway the reader with successive tides of emotion while remaining perfectly calm himself. Nor is she one of those whose visible emotion is nevertheless fugitive, like an odour, and evaporates, leaving behind it works of art which betray no personal agitation. On the contrary, her revolt, her pa.s.sion, all the violence of her sensibility, are present on her written page, and we cannot read it with serenity or with a merely captious curiosity, because her own eager spirit, immortal in its active force, seems to throb beside it.

The aspect of Charlotte Bronte which I have tried to indicate to you to-day, and which I have sketched thus hastily and slightly against the background of her almost voiceless residence in Dewsbury, is far from being a complete or unique one. I offer it to you only as a single facet of her wonderful temperament, of the rich spectacle of her talent. I have ventured to propose it, because, in the multiplication of honours and attentions, the tendency to deify the human, to remove those phenomena of irregularity which are the evidence of mortal strength, grows irresistible, and we find ourselves, unconsciously, subst.i.tuting a waxen bust, with azure eyes and golden hair, for the homely features which (if we could but admit it) so infinitely better match the honest stories. Let us not busy ourselves to make excuse for our austere little genius of the moors. Let us be content to take her exactly as she was, with her rebellion and her narrowness, her angers and her urgencies, perceiving that she had to be this sorrowful offspring of a poisoned world in order to clear the wells of feeling for others, and to win from emanc.i.p.ated generations of free souls the grat.i.tude which is due to a precursor.

[Footnote 7: Address delivered before the Bronte Society in the Town Hall of Dewsbury, March 28th, 1903.]

THE NOVELS OF BENJAMIN DISRAELI

It is not easy for a man whose sovereign ambition is seen to be leading him with great success in a particular direction to obtain due credit for what he accomplishes with less manifest success in another. There is no doubt that Disraeli as an author has, at all events until very lately, suffered from the splendour of his fame as a politician. But he was an author long before he became a statesman, and it certainly is a little curious that even in his youth, although he was always commercially successful with his books, they were never, as we say, "taken seriously" by the critics. His earliest novels were largely bought, and produced a wide sensation, but they were barely accepted as contributions to literature. If we look back to the current criticism of those times, we find such a book as _Dacre_, a romance by the Countess of Morley, which is now absolutely forgotten, treated with a dignity and a consideration never accorded to _The Young Duke_ or to _Henrietta Temple_. Even Disraeli's satiric squibs, in the manner of Lucian and Swift, which seem to us among the most durable ornaments of light literature in the days of William IV., were read and were laughed at, but were not critically appraised.

So, too, at the middle period of Disraeli's literary life, such books as _Coningsby_ and _Tancred_ were looked upon as amusing commentaries on the progress of a strenuous politician, not by any means, or by any responsible person, as possible minor cla.s.sics of our language. And at his third period, the ruling criticism of the hour was aghast at faults which now entertain us, and was blind to sterling merits which we are now ready to acknowledge. Shortly after his death, perhaps his most brilliant apologist was fain to admit that if Disraeli had been undistinguished as a speaker, his novels would have been "as the flowers of the field, charming for the day which was pa.s.sing over them, and then forgotten." It is only since the beginning of the present century that a conviction has been gaining ground that some of these books were in themselves durable, not because they were the work of a man who became Prime Minister of England and made his sovereign Empress of India, but as much or as little as if they had been composed by a recluse in a hermitage. This impression has now become so general with enlightened critics that the danger seems to be that we should underrate certain excesses of rhetoric and the Corinthian mode the errors of which used to be over-emphasised, but should not, in a comparative survey of Victorian literature, be neglected as serious drawbacks to our perfect enjoyment of the high-spirited, eloquent, and ardent writings of Benjamin Disraeli. It is in this spirit of moderation that I now attempt a rapid sketch of his value as an English author.

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