The Common Reader
desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently. This very
ardour, rejecting half shades and other minor impediments, wings its way
past the daily conduct of ordinary people and allies itself with their
more inarticulate passions. It makes them poets, or, if they choose to
write in prose, intolerant of its restrictions. Hence it is that both
Emily and Charlotte are always invoking the help of nature. They both
feel the need of some more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering
passions in human nature than words or actions can convey. It is with a
description of a storm that Charlotte ends her finest novel _Villette_.
“The skies hang full and dark—a wrack sails from the west; the clouds
cast themselves into strange forms.” So she calls in nature to describe
a state of mind which could not otherwise be expressed. But neither of
the sisters observed nature accurately as Dorothy Wordsworth observed
it, or painted it minutely as Tennyson painted it. They seized those
aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt
or imputed to their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their
lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a
dull page or display the writer’s powers of observation—they carry on
the emotion and light up the meaning of the book.
The meaning of a book, which lies so often apart from what happens and
what is said and consists rather in some connection which things in
themselves different have had for the writer, is necessarily hard to
grasp. Especially this is so when, like the Brontës, the writer is
poetic, and his meaning inseparable from his language, and itself rather
a mood than a particular observation. _Wuthering Heights_ is a more
difficult book to understand than _Jane Eyre_, because Emily was a
greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with
eloquence and splendour and passion “I love”, “I hate”, “I suffer”. Her
experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there
is no “I” in _Wuthering Heights_. There are no governesses. There are no
employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily
was inspired by some more general conception. The impulse which urged
her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked
out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the
power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt
throughout the novel—a struggle, half thwarted but of superb
conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which
is not merely “I love” or “I hate”, but “we, the whole human race” and
“you, the eternal powers . . .” the sentence remains unfinished. It is
not strange that it should be so; rather it is astonishing that she can
make us feel what she had it in her to say at all. It surges up in the
half-articulate words of Catherine Earnshaw, “If all else perished and
_he_ remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained and
he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I
should not seem part of it”. It breaks out again in the presence of the
dead. “I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel
an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter—the eternity they
have entered—where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its
sympathy and joy in its fulness.” It is this suggestion of power
underlying the apparitions of human nature, and lifting them up into the
presence of greatness that gives the book its huge stature among other
novels. But it was not enough for Emily Brontë to write a few lyrics,
to utter a cry, to express a creed. In her poems she did this once and
for all, and her poems will perhaps outlast her novel. But she was
novelist as well as poet. She must take upon herself a more laborious
and a more ungrateful task. She must face the fact of other existences,
grapple with the mechanism of external things, build up, in recognisable
shape, farms and houses and report the speeches of men and women who
existed independently of herself. And so we reach these summits of
emotion not by rant or rhapsody but by hearing a girl sing old songs to
herself as she rocks in the branches of a tree; by watching the moor
sheep crop the turf; by listening to the soft wind breathing through the
grass. The life at the farm with all its absurdities and its
improbability is laid open to us. We are given every opportunity of
comparing _Wuthering Heights_ with a real farm and Heathcliff with a
real man. How, we are allowed to ask, can there be truth or insight or
the finer shades of emotion in men and women who so little resemble what
we have seen ourselves? But even as we ask it we see in Heathcliff the
brother that a sister of genius might have seen; he is impossible we
say, but nevertheless no boy in literature has so vivid an existence as
his. So it is with the two Catherines; never could women feel as they do
or act in their manner, we say. All the same, they are the most lovable
women in English fiction. It is as if she could tear up all that we know
human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparences with such a
gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of
all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts; with a few
touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by
speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.
[Footnote 11: Written in 1916.]
[Footnote 12: Charlotte and Emily Brontë had much the same sense of
colour. “. . . we saw—ah! it was beautiful—a splendid place carpeted
with crimson, and crimson-covered chairs and tables, and a pure white
ceiling bordered by gold, a shower of glass drops hanging in silver
chains from the centre, and shimmering with little soft tapers”
(_Wuthering Heights_). Yet it was merely a very pretty drawing-room, and
within it a boudoir, both spread with white carpets, on which seemed
laid brilliant garlands of flowers; both ceiled with snowy mouldings of
white grapes and vine leaves, beneath which glowed in rich contrast
crimson couches and ottomans; while the ornaments on the pale Parian
mantelpiece were of sparkling Bohemia glass, ruby red; and between the
windows large mirrors repeated the general blending of snow and fire.]
_George Eliot_
To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one knows
about her. It is also to become aware of the credulity, not very
creditable to one’s insight, with which, half consciously and partly
maliciously, one had accepted the late Victorian version of a deluded
woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more deluded than
herself. At what moment, and by what means her spell was broken it is
difficult to ascertain. Some people attribute it to the publication of
her _Life_. Perhaps George Meredith, with his phrase about the
“mercurial little showman” and the “errant woman” on the daïs, gave
point and poison to the arrows of thousands incapable of aiming them so
accurately, but delighted to let fly. She became one of the butts for
youth to laugh at, the convenient symbol of a group of serious people
who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the
same scorn. Lord Acton had said that she was greater than Dante; Herbert
Spencer exempted her novels, as if they were not novels, when he banned
all fiction from the London Library. She was the pride and paragon of
her sex. Moreover, her private record was not more alluring than her
public. Asked to describe an afternoon at the Priory, the story-teller
always intimated that the memory of those serious Sunday afternoons had
come to tickle his sense of humour. He had been so much alarmed by the
grave lady in her low chair; he had been so anxious to say the
intelligent thing. Certainly, the talk had been very serious, as a note
in the fine clear hand of the great novelist bore witness. It was dated
on the Monday morning, and she accused herself of having spoken without
due forethought of Marivaux when she meant another; but no doubt, she
said, her listener had already supplied the correction. Still, the
memory of talking about Marivaux to George Eliot on a Sunday afternoon
was not a romantic memory. It had faded with the passage of the years.
It had not become picturesque.
Indeed, one cannot escape the conviction that the long, heavy face with
its expression of serious and sullen and almost equine power has stamped
itself depressingly upon the minds of people who remember George Eliot,
so that it looks out upon them from her pages. Mr. Gosse has lately
described her as he saw her driving through London in a victoria—
a large, thick-set sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose massive features,
somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously bordered by a
hat, always in the height of Paris fashion, which in those days commonly
included an immense ostrich feather.
Lady Ritchie, with equal skill, has left a more intimate indoor
portrait:
She sat by the fire in a beautiful black satin gown, with a green shaded
lamp on the table beside her, where I saw German books lying and
pamphlets and ivory paper-cutters. She was very quiet and noble, with
two steady little eyes and a sweet voice. As I looked I felt her to be a
friend, not exactly a personal friend, but a good and benevolent
impulse.
A scrap of her talk is preserved. “We ought to respect our influence,”
she said. “We know by our own experience how very much others affect our
lives, and we must remember that we in turn must have the same effect
upon others.” Jealously treasured, committed to memory, one can imagine
recalling the scene, repeating the words, thirty years later and
suddenly, for the first time, bursting into laughter.
In all these records one feels that the recorder, even when he was in
the actual presence, kept his distance and kept his head, and never read
the novels in later years with the light of a vivid, or puzzling, or
beautiful personality dazzling in his eyes. In fiction, where so much of
personality is revealed, the absence of charm is a great lack; and her
critics, who have been, of course, mostly of the opposite sex, have
resented, half consciously perhaps, her deficiency in a quality which is
held to be supremely desirable in women. George Eliot was not charming;
she was not strongly feminine; she had none of those eccentricities and
inequalities of temper which give to so many artists the endearing
simplicity of children. One feels that to most people, as to Lady
Ritchie, she was “not exactly a personal friend, but a good and
benevolent impulse”. But if we consider these portraits more closely we
shall find that they are all the portraits of an elderly celebrated
woman, dressed in black satin, driving in her victoria, a woman who has
been through her struggle and issued from it with a profound desire to
be of use to others, but with no wish for intimacy, save with the little
circle who had known her in the days of her youth. We know very little
about the days of her youth; but we do know that the culture, the
philosophy, the fame, and the influence were all built upon a very
humble foundation—she was the grand-daughter of a carpenter.
The first volume of her life is a singularly depressing record. In it we
see her raising herself with groans and struggles from the intolerable
boredom of petty provincial society (her father had risen in the world
and become more middle class, but less picturesque) to be the assistant
editor of a highly intellectual London review, and the esteemed
companion of Herbert Spencer. The stages are painful as she reveals them
in the sad soliloquy in which Mr. Cross condemned her to tell the story