This in itself is a great t.i.tle to honour; it is his main work, his n.o.blest t.i.tle. His sphere was wide, but not at all general; it was strictly limited to the range of his own indefatigable observations.
He hardly ever drew a character or painted a scene, even of the most subordinate kind, which he had not studied from the life with minute care, and whenever he did for a moment wander out of his limits, he made an egregious failure. But this task of his, to cast the sunshine of pathos and of genial mirth over the humblest, dullest, and most uninviting of our fellow-creatures, was a great social mission to which his whole genius was devoted. No waif and stray was so repulsive, no drudge was so mean, no criminal was so atrocious, but what Charles d.i.c.kens could feel for him some ray of sympathy, or extract some pathetic mirth out of his abject state. And d.i.c.kens does not look on the mean and the vile as do Balzac and Zola, that is, from without, like the detective or the surgeon. He sees things more or less from their point of view: he feels with the Marchioness: he himself as a child was once a Smike: he cannot help liking the fun of the Artful Dodger: he has been a good friend to Barkis: he likes Traddles: he loves Joe: poor Nancy ends her vile life in heroism: and even his brute of a dog worships Bill Sikes.
Here lies the secret of his power over such countless millions of readers. He not only paints a vast range of ordinary humanity and suffering or wearied humanity, but he speaks for it and lives in it himself, and throws a halo of imagination over it, and brings home to the great ma.s.s of average readers a new sense of sympathy and gaiety.
This humane kinship with the vulgar and the common, this magic which strikes poetry out of the dust of the streets, and discovers traces of beauty and joy in the most monotonous of lives, is, in the true and best sense of the term, Christ-like, with a message and gospel of hope.
Thackeray must have had Charles d.i.c.kens in his mind when he wrote: "The humourous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness--your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture--your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy."
Charles d.i.c.kens, of all writers of our age, a.s.suredly did this in every work of his pen, for thirty-three years of incessant production. It is his great t.i.tle to honour; and a novelist can desire no higher t.i.tle than this.
There is another quality in which Charles d.i.c.kens is supreme--in purity. Here is a writer who is realistic, if ever any writer was, in the sense of having closely observed the lowest strata of city life, who has drawn the most miserable outcasts, the most abandoned men and women in the dregs of society, who has invented many dreadful scenes of pa.s.sion, l.u.s.t, seduction, and debauchery; and yet in forty works and more you will not find a page which a mother need withhold from her grown daughter. As Thackeray wrote of his friend:--"I am grateful for the innocent laughter and the sweet and unsullied page which the author of _David Copperfield_ gives to my children." We need not formulate any dogma or rule on such a topic, nor is it essential that all books should be written _virginibus puerisque_; but it is certain that every word of Charles d.i.c.kens was so written, even when he set himself (as he sometimes did) to describe animal natures and the vilest of their s.e.x.
d.i.c.kens is a realist in that he probes the gloomiest recesses and faces the most disheartening problems of life: he is an idealist in that he never presents us the common or the vile with mere commonplace or repulsiveness, and without some ray of humane and genial charm to which ordinary eyes are blind. d.i.c.kens, then, was above all things a humourist, an inexhaustible humourist, to whom the humblest forms of daily life wore a certain sunny air of genial mirth; but the question remains if he was a humourist of the highest order: was he a poet, a creator of abiding imaginative types? Old Johnson"s definition of humour as "grotesque imagery," and "grotesque" as meaning some distortion in figure, may not be adequate as a description of humour, but it well describes the essential feature of Charles d.i.c.kens. His infallible instrument is caricature--which strictly means an "overload," as Johnson says, "an exaggerated resemblance." Caricature is a likeness having some comical exaggeration or distortion. Now, caricature is a legitimate and potent instrument of humour, which great masters have used with consummate effect. Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Rembrandt, Hogarth, use it; but only at times, and in a subsidiary way. Rabelais, Swift, Fielding, use this weapon not unfrequently; Shakespeare very sparingly; Goldsmith and Scott, I think, almost never. Caricature, the essence of which is exaggeration of some selected feature, distortion of figure, disproportion of some part, is a potent resource, but one to which the greater masters resort rarely and with much moderation.
Now with Charles d.i.c.kens caricature--that comical exaggeration of a particular feature, distortion of some part beyond nature--is not only the essence of his humour, but it is the universal and ever-present source of his mirth. It would not be true to say that, exaggeration is the sole form of humour that he uses, but there is hardly a character of his to which it is not applied, nor a scene of which it is not the pervading "motive." Some feature, some oddity, some temperament is seized, dwelt upon, played with, and turned inside out, with incessant repet.i.tion and unwearied energy. Every character, except the walking gentleman and the walking lady, the insipid lover, or the colourless friend, have some feature thrust out of proportion, magnified beyond nature. Sam Weller never speaks without his anecdote, Uriah is always ""umble," Barkis is always "willin"," Mark Tapley is always "jolly,"
Dombey is always solemn, and Toots is invariably idiotic. It is no doubt natural that Barnaby"s Raven should always want tea, whatever happens, for the poor bird has but a limited vocabulary. But one does not see why articulate and sane persons like Captain Cuttle, Pecksniff, and Micawber should repeat the same phrases under every condition and to all persons. This, no doubt, is the essence of farce: it may be irresistibly droll as farce, but it does not rise beyond farce. And at last even the most enthusiastic Pickwickian wearies of such monotony of iteration.
Now, the keynote of caricature being the distortion of nature, it inevitably follows that humourous exaggeration is unnatural, however droll; and, where it is the main source of the drollery, the picture as a whole ceases to be within the bounds of nature. But the great masters of the human heart invariably remain true to nature: not merely true to a selected feature, but to the natural form as a whole.
Falstaff, in his wildest humour, speaks and acts as such a man really might speak and act. He has no catch-phrase on which he harps, as if he were a talking-machine wound up to emit a dozen sounds. Parson Adams speaks and acts as such a being might do in nature. The comic characters of Goldsmith, Scott, or Thackeray do not outrun and defy nature, nor does their drollery depend on any special and abnormal feature, much less on any stock phrase which they use as a label. The ill.u.s.trations of Cruikshank and Phiz are delightfully droll, and often caricatures of a high order. But being caricatures, they overload and exaggerate nature, and indeed are always, in one sense, impossible in nature. The grins, the grimaces, the contortions, the dwarfs, the idiots, the monstrosities of these wonderful sketches could not be found in human beings constructed on any known anatomy. And d.i.c.kens"s own characters have the same element of unnatural distortion. It is possible that these familiar caricatures have even done harm to his reputation. His creations are of a higher order of art and are more distinctly spontaneous and original. But the grotesque sketches with which he almost uniformly presented his books accentuate the element of caricature on which he relied; and often add an unnatural extravagance beyond that extravagance which was the essence of his own method.
The consequence is that everything in d.i.c.kens is "in the excess," as Aristotle would say, and not "in the mean." Whether it is Tony Weller, or "the Shepherd," or the Fat Boy, Hugh or the Raven, Toots or Traddles, Micawber or Skimpole, Gamp or Mantalini--all are overloaded in the sense that they exceed nature, and are more or less extravagant.
They are wonderful and delightful caricatures, but they are impossible in fact. The similes are hyperbolic; the names are grotesque; the incidents partake of harlequinade, and the speeches of roaring farce.
It is often wildly droll, but it is rather the drollery of the stage than of the book. The characters are never possible in fact; they are not, and are not meant to be, nature; they are always and everywhere comic distortions of nature. Goldsmith"s Dr. Primrose tells us that he chose his wife for the same qualities for which she chose her wedding gown. That is humour, but it is also pure, literal, exact truth to nature. David Copperfield"s little wife is called a lap-dog, acts like a lap-dog, and dies like a lap-dog; the lap-dog simile is so much overdone that we are glad to get rid of her, and instead of weeping with Copperfield, we feel disposed to call him a ninny.
Nothing is more wonderful in d.i.c.kens than his exuberance of animal spirits, that inexhaustible fountain of life and gaiety, in which he equals Scott and far surpa.s.ses any other modern. The intensity of the man, his electric activity, his spasmodic nervous power, quite dazzle and stun us. But this restless gaiety too often grows fatiguing, as the rollicking fun begins to pall upon us, as the jokes ring hollow, and the wit gets stale by incessant reiteration. We know how much in real life we get to hate the joker who does not know when to stop, who repeats his jests, and forces the laugh when it does not flow freely.
Something of the kind the most devoted of d.i.c.kens"s readers feel when they take in too much at one time. None but the very greatest can maintain for long one incessant outpour of drollery, much less of extravagance. Aristophanes could do it; Shakespeare could do it; so could Cervantes; and so, too, Rabelais. But then, the wildest extravagance of these men is so rich, so varied, so charged with insight and thought, and, in the case of Rabelais, so resplendent with learning and suggestion, that we never feel satiety and the cruel sense that the painted mask on the stage is grinning at us, whilst the actor behind it is weary and sad. When one who is not amongst the very greatest pours forth the same inextinguishable laughter in the same key, repeating the same tricks, and multiplying kindred oddities, people of cultivation enjoy it heartily once, twice, it may be a dozen times, but at last they make way for the young bloods who can go thirty-seven times to see "Charley"s Aunt."
A good deal has been said about d.i.c.kens"s want of reading; and his enthusiastic biographer very fairly answers that Charles d.i.c.kens"s book was the great book of life, of which he was an indefatigable student.
When other men were at school and at college, he was gathering up a vast experience of the hard world, and when his brother writers were poring over big volumes in their libraries, he was pacing up and down London and its suburbs with inexhaustible energy, drinking in oddities, idiosyncrasies, and wayside incidents at every pore. It is quite true: London is a microcosm, an endless and bottomless Babylon; which, perhaps, no man has ever known so well as did Charles d.i.c.kens. This was his library: here he gathered that vast encyclopaedia of human nature, which some are inclined to call "c.o.c.kney," but if it be, "c.o.c.kayne" must be a very large country indeed. Still, the fact remains, that of book-learning of any kind d.i.c.kens remained, to the end of his days, perhaps more utterly innocent than any other famous English writer since Shakespeare. His biographer labours to prove that he had read Fielding and Smollett, _Don Quixote_ and _Gil Blas_, _The Spectator_, and _Robinson Crusoe_. Perhaps he had, like most men who have learned to read. But, no doubt, this utter severance from books, which we feel in his tales, will ultimately tell against their immortality.
This rigid abstinence from books, which d.i.c.kens practised on system, had another reaction that we notice in his style. Not only do we feel in reading his novels that we have no reason to a.s.sume that he had ever read anything except a few popular romances, but we note that he can hardly be said to have a formed literary style of his own. d.i.c.kens had mannerisms, but hardly a style. In some ways, this is a good thing: much less can he be said to have a bad style. It is simply no style.
He knows nothing of the crisp, modulated, balanced, and reserved mastery of phrase and sentence which marks Thackeray. Nor is it the easy simplicity of _Robinson Crusoe_ and the _Vicar of Wakefield_. The tale spins along, and the incidents rattle on with the volubility of a good story-teller who warms up as he goes, but who never stops to think of his sentences and phrases. He often gets verbose, rings the changes on a point which he sees to have caught his hearers; he plays with a fancy out of measure, and turns his jest inside out and over and over, like a fine comic actor when the house is in a roar. His language is free, perfectly clear, often redundant, sometimes grandiloquent, and usually addressed more to the pit than to the boxes. And he is a little p.r.o.ne to slide, even in his own proper person, into those formal courtesies and obsolete compliments which forty years ago survived amongst the superior orders of bagmen and managing clerks.
There is an old topic of discussion whether d.i.c.kens could invent an organic and powerful plot, and carry out an elaborate scheme with perfect skill. It is certain that he has never done so, and it can hardly be said that he has ever essayed it. The serial form in parts, wherein almost all his stories were cast, requiring each number of three chapters to be "a.s.sorted," like sugar-plums, with grave and gay, so as to tell just enough but not too much, made a highly-wrought scheme almost impossible. It is plain that Charles d.i.c.kens had nothing of that epical gift which gave us _Tom Jones_ and _Ivanhoe_. Perhaps the persistent use of the serial form shows that he felt no interest in that supreme art of an immense drama duly unfolded to a prepared end.
In _Pickwick_ there neither was, nor could there be, any organic plot.
In _Oliver Twist_, in _Barnaby Rudge_, in _Dombey_, in _Bleak House_, in the _Tale of Two Cities_, there are indications of his possessing this power, and in certain parts of these tales we seem to be in the presence of a great master of epical narration. But the power is not sustained; and it must be confessed that in none of these tales is there a complete and equal scheme. In most of the other books, especially in those after _Bleak House_, the plot is so artless, so _decousu_, so confused, that even practised readers of d.i.c.kens fail to keep it clear in their mind. The serial form, where a leading character wanders about to various places, and meets a succession of quaint parties, seems to be that which suited his genius and which he himself most entirely enjoyed.
In contrast with the Pickwickian method of comic rambles in search of human "curios," d.i.c.kens introduced some darker effects and persons of a more or less sensational kind. Some of these are as powerful as anything in modern fiction; and f.a.gin and Bill Sikes, Smike and Poor Jo, the Gordon riots and the storms at sea, may stand beside some tableaux of Victor Hugo for lurid power and intense realism. But it was only at times and during the first half of his career that d.i.c.kens could keep clear of melodrama and somewhat stagey blue fire. And at times his blue fire was of a very cheap kind. Rosa Dartle and Carker, Steerforth and Blandois, Quilp and Uriah Heep, have a melancholy glitter of the footlights over them. We cannot see what the villains want, except to look villainous, and we fail to make out where is the danger to the innocent victims. We find the villain of the piece frantically struggling to get some paper, or to get hold of some boy or girl. But as the scene is in London in the nineteenth century, and not in Naples in the fifteenth century, we cannot see who is in real danger, or why, or of what. And with all this, d.i.c.kens was not incapable of bathos, or tragedy suddenly exploding in farce. The end of Krook by spontaneous combustion is such a case; but a worse case is the death of Dora, Copperfield"s baby wife, along with that of the lap-dog, Jip. This is one of those unforgotten, unpardonable, egregious blunders in art, in feeling, even in decency, which must finally exclude Charles d.i.c.kens from the rank of the true immortals.
But his books will long be read for his wonderful successes, and his weaker pieces will entirely be laid aside as are the failures of so many great men, the rubbish of Fielding, of Goldsmith, of Defoe; which do nothing now to dim the glory of _Tom Jones_, _The Vicar of Wakefield_, and _Robinson Crusoe_. The glory of Charles d.i.c.kens will always be in his _Pickwick_, his first, his best, his inimitable triumph. It is true that it is a novel without a plot, without beginning, middle, or end, with much more of caricature than of character, with some extravagant tom-foolery, and plenty of vulgarity.
But its originality, its irrepressible drolleries, its substantial human nature, and its intense vitality, place it quite in a cla.s.s by itself. We can no more group it, or test it by any canon of criticism, than we could group or define _Pantagruel_ or _Faust_. There are some works of genius which seem to transcend all criticism, of which the very extravagances and incoherences increase the charm. And _Pickwick_ ought to live with _Gil Blas_ and _Tristram Shandy_. In a deeper vein, the tragic scenes in _Oliver Twist_ and in _Barnaby Rudge_ must long hold their ground, for they can be read and re-read in youth, in manhood, in old age. The story of Dotheboys Hall, the Yarmouth memories of Copperfield, Little Nell, Mrs. Gamp, Micawber, Toots, Captain Cuttle, Pecksniff, and many more will long continue to delight the youth of the English-speaking races. But few writers are remembered so keenly by certain characters, certain scenes, incidental whimsies, and so little for entire novels treated strictly as works of art. There is no reason whatever for pretending that all these scores of tales are at all to be compared with the best of them, or that the invention of some inimitable scenes and characters is enough to make a supreme and faultless artist. The young and the uncritical make too much of Charles d.i.c.kens, when they fail to distinguish between his best and his worst. Their fastidious seniors make too little of him, when they note his many shortcomings and fail to see that in certain elements of humour he has no equal and no rival. If we mean Charles d.i.c.kens to live we must fix our eye on these supreme gifts alone.
VII
CHARLOTTE BRONTe
They who are still youthful in the nineties can hardly understand the thrill which went through us all in the forties upon the appearance of _Jane Eyre_, on the discovery of a new genius and a new style. The reputation of most later writers grew by degrees and by repeated impressions of good work. Trollope, George Eliot, Stevenson, George Meredith, did not conquer the interest of the larger public until after many books and by gradual widening of the judgment of experts. But little Charlotte Bronte, who published but three tales in six years and who died at the age of thirty-eight, bounded into immediate fame--a fame that after nearly fifty years we do not even now find to have been excessive.
And then, there was such personal interest in the writer"s self, in her intense individuality, in her strong character; there was so much sympathy with her hard and lonely life; there was such pathos in her family history and the tragedy which threw gloom over her whole life, and cut it off in youth after a few months of happiness. To have lived in poverty, in a remote and wild moorland, almost friendless and in continual struggle against sickness, to have been motherless since the age of five, to have lost four sisters and a brother before she was more than thirty-three, to have been sole survivor of a large household, to have pa.s.sed a life of continual weakness, toil, and suffering--and then to be cut off after nine months of marriage,--all this touched the sympathies of the world as the private life of few writers touches them. And then the shock of her sudden death came upon us as a personal sorrow. Such genius, such courage, such perseverance, such promise--and yet but three books in all, published at intervals of two and of four years! There was meaning in the somewhat unusual form in which Mrs. Gaskell opens her _Life of Charlotte Bronte_, setting out verbatim in her first chapter the seven memorial inscriptions to the buried family in Haworth Church, and placing on the t.i.tle-page a vignette of Haworth churchyard with its white tombstones. Charlotte Bronte was a kind of prosaic, most demure and orthodox Sh.e.l.ley in the Victorian literature--with visible genius, an intense personality, unquenchable fire, an early and tragic death. And all this pa.s.sion in a little prim, shy, delicate, proud Puritan girl!
To this sympathy our great writer, whom she herself called "the first social regenerator of the day," did full justice in that beautiful little piece which he wrote in the _Cornhill Magazine_ upon her death and which is the last of the _Roundabout Papers_ in the twenty-second volume of Thackeray"s collected works. It is called _The Last Sketch_: it is so eloquent, so true, so sympathetic that it deserves to be remembered, and yet after forty years it is too seldom read.
Of the mult.i.tude that have read her books, who has not known and deplored the tragedy of her family, her own most sad and untimely fate?
Which of her readers has not become her friend? Who that has known her books has not admired the artist"s n.o.ble English, the burning love of truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the pa.s.sionate honour, so to speak, of the woman? What a story is that of that family of poets in their solitude yonder on the gloomy northern moors!
He goes on to deplore that "the heart newly awakened to love and happiness, and throbbing with maternal hope, had ceased to beat." He speaks of her "trembling little frame, the little hand, the great honest eyes." He speaks of his recollections of her in society, of "the impetuous honesty" which seemed the character of the woman--
I fancied an austere little Joan of Arc marching in upon us, and rebuking our easy lives, our easy morals. She gave me the impression of being a very pure, and lofty, and high-minded person. A great and holy reverence of right and truth seemed to be with her always. Such, in our brief interview, she appeared to me. As one thinks of that life so n.o.ble, so lonely,--of that pa.s.sion for truth--of those nights and nights of eager study, swarming fancies, invention, depression, elation, prayer; as one reads the necessarily incomplete, though most touching and admirable history of the heart that throbbed in this one little frame--of this one amongst the myriads of souls that have lived and died on this great earth--this great earth?--this little speck in the infinite universe of G.o.d--with what wonder do we think of to-day, with what awe await to-morrow, when that which is now but darkly seen shall be clear!
It is quite natural and right that Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, indeed all who have spoken of the author of _Jane Eyre_, should insist primarily on the personality of Charlotte Bronte. It is this intense personality which is the distinctive note of her books. They are not so much tales as imaginary autobiographies. They are not objective presentations of men and women in the world. They are subjective sketches of a Bronte under various conditions, and of the few men and women who occasionally cross the narrow circle of the Bronte world. Of the three stories she published, two are autobiographies, and the third is a fancy portrait of her sister Emily. Charlotte Bronte is herself Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, and Emily Bronte is Shirley Keeldar. So in _The Professor_, her earliest but posthumous tale, Frances Henri again is simply a little Swiss Bronte. That story also is told as an autobiography, but, though the narrator is supposed to be one William Crimsworth, it is a woman who speaks, sees, and dreams all through the book. The four tales, which together were the work of eight years, are all variations upon a Bronte and the two Bronte worlds in Yorkshire and Belgium. It is most significant (but quite natural) that Mrs. Gaskell in her _Life of Charlotte Bronte_ devotes more than half her book to the story of the family before the publication of _Jane Eyre_. The four tales are not so much romances as artistic and imaginative autobiographies.
To say this is by no means to detract from their rare value. The romances of adventure, of incident, of intrigue, of character, of society, or of humour, depend on a great variety of observation and a multiplicity of contrasts. There is not much of Walter Scott, as a man, in _Ivanhoe_ or of Alexander Dumas in the _Trois Mousquetaires_; and d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, Trollope, Bulwer, Miss Edgeworth, Stevenson, and Meredith--even Miss Austen and George Eliot--seek to paint men and women whom they conceive and whom we may see and know, and not themselves and their own home circle. But Charlotte Bronte told us her own life, her own feelings, sufferings, pride, joy, and ambition. She bared for us her own inner soul, and all that it had known and desired, and this she did with a n.o.ble, pure, simple, but intense truth. There was neither egoism, nor monotony, nor commonplace in it. It was all coloured with native imagination and a sense of true art. There is ample room in Art for these subjective idealisations of even the narrowest world. Sh.e.l.ley"s lyrics are intensely self-centred, but no one can find in them either realism or egoism. The field in prose is far more limited, and the risk of becoming tedious and morbid is greater. But a true artist can now and then in prose produce most precious portraits of self and glowing autobiographic fantasies of a n.o.ble kind.
And Charlotte Bronte was a true artist. She was also more than this; a brave, sincere, high-minded woman, with a soul, as the great moralist saw, "of impetuous honesty." She was not seduced, or even moved, by her sudden fame. She put aside the prospect of success, money, and social distinction as things which revolted her. She was quite right.
With all her genius it was strictly and narrowly limited; she was ignorant of the world to a degree immeasurably below that of any other known writer of fiction; her world was incredibly scanty and barren.
She had to spin everything out of her own brain in that cold, still, gruesome Haworth parsonage. It was impossible for any genius to paint a world of which it was as ignorant as a child. Hence, in eight years she only completed four tales for publication. And she did right.
With her strict limits both of brain and of experience she could not go further. Perhaps, as it was, she did more than was needed. _Shirley_ and _Villette_, with all their fine scenes, are interesting now mainly because Charlotte Bronte wrote them, and because they throw light upon her brain and nature. _The Professor_ is entirely so, and has hardly any other quality. We need not groan that we have no more than we have from her pen. _Jane Eyre_ would suffice for many reputations and alone will live.
In considering the gifted Bronte family, it is really Charlotte alone who finally concerns us. Emily Bronte was a wild, original, and striking creature, but her one book is a kind of prose _Kubla Khan_--a nightmare of the superheated imagination. Anne Bronte always seems but a pale reflection of the family. In any other family she might be interesting--just as "Barrel Mirabeau" was the good boy and fool of the Mirabeau family, though in another family he would have been the genius and the profligate. And so, the poems of the whole three are interesting as psychologic studies, but have hardly a single stanza that can be called poetry at all. It is significant, but hardly paradoxical, that Charlotte"s verses are the worst of the three. How many born writers of musical prose have persisted in manufacturing verse of a curiously dull and unmelodious quality! The absolute masters of prose and of verse in equal perfection hardly exceed Shakespeare and Sh.e.l.ley, Goethe and Hugo. And Charlotte Bronte is an eminent example of a strong imagination working with freedom in prose, but which began by using the instrument of verse, and used it in a manner that never rose for an instant above mediocrity.
Of the Brontes it is Charlotte only who concerns us, and of Charlotte"s work it is _Jane Eyre_ only that can be called a masterpiece. To call it a masterpiece, as Thackeray did, is not to deny its manifold and manifest shortcomings. It is a very small corner of the world that it gives, and that world is seen by a single acute observer from without.
The plain little governess dominates the whole book and fills every page. Everything and every one appear, not as we see them and know them in the world, but as they look to a keen-eyed girl who had hardly ever left her native village. Had the whole book been cast into the form of impersonal narration, this limitation, this huge ignorance of life, this amateur"s attempt to construct a romance by the light of nature instead of observation and study of persons, would have been a failure. As the autobiography of Jane Eyre--let us say at once of Charlotte Bronte--it is consummate art. It produces the illusion we feel in reading _Robinson Crusoe_. In the whole range of modern fiction there are few characters whom we feel that we know so intimately as we do Jane Eyre. She is as intensely familiar to us as Becky Sharp or Parson Adams. Much more than this. Not only do we feel an intimate knowledge of Jane Eyre, but we see every one by the eyes of Jane Eyre only. Edward Rochester has not a few touches of the melodramatic villain; and no man would ever draw a man with such conventional and Byronic extravagances. If Edward Rochester had been described in impersonal narrative with all his brutalities, his stage villain frowns, and his Grand Turk whims, it would have spoiled the book. But Edward Rochester, the "master" of the little governess, as seen by the eyes of a pa.s.sionate, romantic, but utterly unsophisticated girl, is a powerful character; and all the inconsistencies, the affectation, the savageries we might detect in him, become the natural love-dream of a most imaginative and most ignorant young woman.
A consummate master of style has spoken, we have just seen, of the "n.o.ble English" that Charlotte Bronte wrote. It is true that she never reached the exquisite ease, culture, and raciness of Thackeray"s English. She lapsed now and then into provincial solecisms; she "named" facts as well as persons; girls talk of a "beautiful man"; nor did she know anything of the scientific elaboration of George Eliot or the subtle grace of Stevenson. But the style is of high quality and conscientious finish--terse, pure, picturesque, and sound. Like everything she did, it was most scrupulously honest--the result of a sincere and vivid soul, resolved to utter what it had most at heart in the clearest tone. Very few writers of romance have ever been masters of a style so effective, so nervous, so capable of rising into floods of melody and pathos. There is a fine pa.s.sage of the kind in one of her least-known books, the earliest indeed of all, which no publisher could be found in her lifetime to print. The "Professor" has just proposed, has been accepted, and goes home to bed half-crazy and fasting. A sudden reaction falls on his over-wrought nerves.
A horror of great darkness fell upon me; I felt my chamber invaded by one I had known formerly, but had thought for ever departed. I was temporarily a prey to hypochondria. She had been my acquaintance, nay, my guest, once before in boyhood; I had entertained her at bed and board for a year; for that s.p.a.ce of time I had her to myself in secret; she lay with me, she ate with me, she walked out with me, showing me nooks in woods, hollows in hills, where we could sit together, and where she could drop her drear veil over me, and so hide sky and sun, gra.s.s and green tree; taking me entirely to her death-cold bosom, and holding me with arms of bone. What tales she would tell me at such hours! What songs she would recite in my ears! How she would discourse to me of her own country--the grave--and again and again promise to conduct me there ere long; and drawing me to the very brink of a black, sullen river, show me, on the other side, sh.o.r.es unequal with mound, monument, and tablet, standing up in a glimmer more h.o.a.ry than moonlight. "Necropolis!" she would whisper, pointing to the pale piles, and add, "It contains a mansion prepared for you."
Finely imagined--finely said! It has the ring and weird mystery of De Quincey. There are phrases that Thackeray would not have used, such as jar on the ear and betray an immature taste. "Necropolis" is a strange affectation when "City of the Dead" was at hand; and "pointing to the pale piles" is a hideous alliteration. But in spite of such immaturities (and the writer never saw the text in type) the pa.s.sage shows wonderful power of language and sense of music in prose. How fine is the sentence, "taking me to her death-cold bosom, and holding me with arms of bone," and that of the tombstones, "in a glimmer more h.o.a.ry than moonlight" Coleridge might have used such a phrase in the _Ancient Mariner_ or in _Christabel_. Yet these were the thoughts and the words of a lonely girl of thirty as she watched the dreary churchyard at Haworth from the windows of its unlovely parsonage.
This vivid power of painting in words is specially called forth by the look of nature and the scenes she describes. Charlotte Bronte had, in the highest degree, that which Ruskin has called the "pathetic fallacy," the eye which beholds nature coloured by the light of the inner soul. In this quality she really reaches the level of fine poetry. Her intense sympathy with her native moors and glens is akin to that of Wordsworth. She almost never attempts to describe any scenery with which she is not deeply familiar. But how wonderfully she catches the tone of her own moorland, skies, storm-winds, secluded hall or cottage!
The charm of the hour lay in its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun. I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and the little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like single russet leaves that had forgotten to drop. . . . From my seat I could look down on Thornfield: the gray and battlemented hall was the princ.i.p.al object in the vale below me; its woods and dark rookery rose against the west. I lingered till the sun went down amongst the trees, and sank crimson and clear behind them.
How admirable is this icy hush of nature in breathless expectation of the first coming of the master of Thornfield--of the master of Jane herself. And yet, how simple in phrase, how pure, how Wordsworthian in its sympathy with earth even in her most bare and sober hues! And then that storm which ushers in the story of the Vampyre woman tearing Jane"s wedding veil at her bedside, when "the clouds drifted from pole to pole, fast following, ma.s.s on ma.s.s." And as Jane watches the shivered chestnut-tree, "black and riven, the trunk, split down the centre, gasped ghastly"--a strange but powerful alliteration. "The moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled the fissure; her disk was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud." An admirable overture to that terrific scene of the mad wife"s visit to the rival"s bed.
Charlotte Bronte is great in clouds, like a prose Sh.e.l.ley. We all recall that mysterious storm in which _Villette_ darkly closes, and with it the expected bridegroom of Lucy Snowe--
The wind takes its autumn moan; but--he is coming. The skies hang full and dark--a rack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms--arches and broad radiations; there rise resplendent mornings--glorious, royal, purple as monarch in his state; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest--so b.l.o.o.d.y, they shame Victory in her pride. . . . When the sun returned his light was night to some!
And into that night Lucy"s master, lover, husband has for ever pa.s.sed.