The Common Reader
shock to open _Tristram Shandy_ or even _Pendennis_ and be by them
convinced that there are not only other aspects of life, but more
important ones into the bargain.
However this may be, the problem before the novelist at present, as we
suppose it to have been in the past, is to contrive means of being free
to set down what he chooses. He has to have the courage to say that what
interests him is no longer “this” but “that”: out of “that” alone must
he construct his work. For the moderns “that”, the point of interest,
lies very likely in the dark places of psychology. At once, therefore,
the accent falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon something
hitherto ignored; at once a different outline of form becomes necessary,
difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predecessors. No one
but a modern, perhaps no one but a Russian, would have felt the interest
of the situation which Tchekov has made into the short story which he
calls “Gusev”. Some Russian soldiers lie ill on board a ship which is
taking them back to Russia. We are given a few scraps of their talk and
some of their thoughts; then one of them dies and is carried away; the
talk goes on among the others for a time, until Gusev himself dies, and
looking “like a carrot or a radish” is thrown overboard. The emphasis is
laid upon such unexpected places that at first it seems as if there were
no emphasis at all; and then, as the eyes accustom themselves to
twilight and discern the shapes of things in a room we see how complete
the story is, how profound, and how truly in obedience to his vision
Tchekov has chosen this, that, and the other, and placed them together
to compose something new. But it is impossible to say “this is comic”,
or “that is tragic”, nor are we certain, since short stories, we have
been taught, should be brief and conclusive, whether this, which is
vague and inconclusive, should be called a short story at all.
The most elementary remarks upon modern English fiction can hardly avoid
some mention of the Russian influence, and if the Russians are mentioned
one runs the risk of feeling that to write of any fiction save theirs is
waste of time. If we want understanding of the soul and heart where else
shall we find it of comparable profundity? If we are sick of our own
materialism the least considerable of their novelists has by right of
birth a natural reverence for the human spirit. “Learn to make yourself
akin to people. . . . But let this sympathy be not with the mind—for it
is easy with the mind—but with the heart, with love towards them.” In
every great Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint,
if sympathy for the sufferings of others, love towards them, endeavour
to reach some goal worthy of the most exacting demands of the spirit
constitute saintliness. It is the saint in them which confounds us with
a feeling of our own irreligious triviality, and turns so many of our
famous novels to tinsel and trickery. The conclusions of the Russian
mind, thus comprehensive and compassionate, are inevitably, perhaps, of
the utmost sadness. More accurately indeed we might speak of the
inconclusiveness of the Russian mind. It is the sense that there is no
answer, that if honestly examined life presents question after question
which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in
hopeless interrogation that fills us with a deep, and finally it may be
with a resentful, despair. They are right perhaps; unquestionably they
see further than we do and without our gross impediments of vision. But
perhaps we see something that escapes them, or why should this voice of
protest mix itself with our gloom? The voice of protest is the voice of
another and an ancient civilisation which seems to have bred in us the
instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand.
English fiction from Sterne to Meredith bears witness to our natural
delight in humour and comedy, in the beauty of earth, in the activities
of the intellect, and in the splendour of the body. But any deductions
that we may draw from the comparison of two fictions so immeasurably far
apart are futile save indeed as they flood us with a view of the
infinite possibilities of the art and remind us that there is no limit
to the horizon, and that nothing—no “method”, no experiment, even of
the wildest—is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence. “The proper
stuff of fiction” does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of
fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit
is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art
of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly
bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so
her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
[Footnote 10: Written April 1919.]
_Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights_[11]
Of the hundred years that have passed since Charlotte Brontë was born,
she, the centre now of so much legend, devotion, and literature, lived
but thirty-nine. It is strange to reflect how different those legends
might have been had her life reached the ordinary human span. She might
have become, like some of her famous contemporaries, a figure familiarly
met with in London and elsewhere, the subject of pictures and anecdotes
innumerable, the writer of many novels, of memoirs possibly, removed
from us well within the memory of the middle-aged in all the splendour
of established fame. She might have been wealthy, she might have been
prosperous. But it is not so. When we think of her we have to imagine
some one who had no lot in our modern world; we have to cast our minds
back to the ’fifties of the last century, to a remote parsonage upon the
wild Yorkshire moors. In that parsonage, and on those moors, unhappy and
lonely, in her poverty and her exaltation, she remains for ever.
These circumstances, as they affected her character, may have left their
traces on her work. A novelist, we reflect, is bound to build up his
structure with much very perishable material which begins by lending it
reality and ends by cumbering it with rubbish. As we open _Jane Eyre_
once more we cannot stifle the suspicion that we shall find her world of
imagination as antiquated, mid-Victorian, and out of date as the
parsonage on the moor, a place only to be visited by the curious, only
preserved by the pious. So we open _Jane Eyre_; and in two pages every
doubt is swept clean from our minds.
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left
were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from
the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of
my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered
a pale blank of mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat
shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and
lamentable blast.
There is nothing there more perishable than the moor itself, or more
subject to the sway of fashion than the “long and lamentable blast”. Nor
is this exhilaration short-lived. It rushes us through the entire
volume, without giving us time to think, without letting us lift our
eyes from the page. So intense is our absorption that if some one moves
in the room the movement seems to take place not there but up in
Yorkshire. The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road,
makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to
forget her.[12] At the end we are steeped through and through with the
genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Brontë. Remarkable
faces, figures of strong outline and gnarled feature have flashed upon
us in passing; but it is through her eyes that we have seen them. Once
she is gone, we seek for them in vain. Think of Rochester and we have to
think of Jane Eyre. Think of the moor, and again, there is Jane Eyre.
Think of the drawing-room, even, those “white carpets on which seemed
laid brilliant garlands of flowers”, that “pale Parian mantelpiece” with
its Bohemia glass of “ruby red” and the “general blending of snow and
fire”—what is all that except Jane Eyre?
The drawbacks of being Jane Eyre are not far to seek. Always to be a
governess and always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world
which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the other.
The characters of a Jane Austen or of a Tolstoi have a million facets
compared with these. They live and are complex by means of their effect
upon many different people who serve to mirror them in the round. They
move hither and thither whether their creators watch them or not, and
the world in which they live seems to us an independent world which we
can visit, now that they have created it, by ourselves. Thomas Hardy is
more akin to Charlotte Brontë in the power of his personality and the
narrowness of his vision. But the differences are vast. As we read _Jude
the Obscure_ we are not rushed to a finish; we brood and ponder and
drift away from the text in plethoric trains of thought which build up
round the characters an atmosphere of question and suggestion of which
they are themselves, as often as not, unconscious. Simple peasants as
they are, we are forced to confront them with destinies and questionings
of the hugest import, so that often it seems as if the most important
characters in a Hardy novel are those which have no names. Of this
power, of this speculative curiosity, Charlotte Brontë has no trace.
She does not attempt to solve the problems of human life; she is even
unaware that such problems exist; all her force, and it is the more
tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, “I love”, “I
hate”, “I suffer”.
For the self-centred and self-limited writers have a power denied the
more catholic and broad-minded. Their impressions are close packed and
strongly stamped between their narrow walls. Nothing issues from their
minds which has not been marked with their own impress. They learn
little from other writers, and what they adopt they cannot assimilate.
Both Hardy and Charlotte Brontë appear to have founded their styles
upon a stiff and decorous journalism. The staple of their prose is
awkward and unyielding. But both with labour and the most obstinate
integrity by thinking every thought until it has subdued words to
itself, have forged for themselves a prose which takes the mould of
their minds entire; which has, into the bargain, a beauty, a power, a
swiftness of its own. Charlotte Brontë, at least, owed nothing to the
reading of many books. She never learnt the smoothness of the
professional writer, or acquired his ability to stuff and sway his
language as he chooses. “I could never rest in communication with
strong, discreet, and refined minds, whether male or female,” she
writes, as any leader-writer in a provincial journal might have written;
but gathering fire and speed goes on in her own authentic voice “till I
had passed the outworks of conventional reserve and crossed the
threshold of confidence, and won a place by their hearts’ very
hearthstone”. It is there that she takes her seat; it is the red and
fitful glow of the heart’s fire which illumines her page. In other
words, we read Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of
character—her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for
comedy—hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life—hers
is that of a country parson’s daughter; but for her poetry. Probably
that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering
personality, who, as we should say in real life, have only to open the
door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity
perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them