The other novels, less perfect as pictures of life, are not inferior in sheer intellect. Vanity Fair and Barry Lyndon are superlative examples of force of mind. The latter is so faithfully written from the scoundrel’s point of view that only the excess of scoundrelism prevents Barry from commanding sympathy. The former contains in Becky Sharp the cleverest and most resourceful of all Thackeray’s characters. It also contains, especially in the chapters on the Waterloo campaign, some of the finest English he ever wrote. Pendennis has its special interest in the thread of autobiography interwoven with it; while The Newcomes has its crowning glory in the old colonel, and in the famous scene in Grey Friars. After The Newcomes the quality of Thackeray’s work, or at least of his novels (for the lectures and the Roundabout Papers stand apart) declined. He did not live long enough to demonstrate whether the decline was permanent or not; but certainly there is no lack of power in the Roundabout Papers; and in spite of his own dictum that no man ought to write a novel after fifty, Thackeray should have been just at his best when he died.
Thackeray was a poet and an artist as well as a novelist; and sometimes in a copy of verses or in a sketch the inner spirit of the man may be seen more compendiously, if not more truly and surely, than in longer and more ambitious works. It is so here. The spirit that pervades Vanity Fair is the same that inspired the Ballad of Bouillabaisse, the concluding stanzas of The Chronicle of the Drum, The End of the Play, Vanitas Vanitatum, and others of his more serious verses. There is a touch of satire in these verses, but there is far more of pity than scorn. Still more vividly this spirit shines through a triplet of sketches labelled respectively Ludovicus, Rex and Ludovicus Rex, the shivering little atom of humanity, the imposing trappings of royalty, and then the poor little mortal clothed in this magnificence. Here we have the quintessence of Thackeray’s sermon through all his books, the difference between the humble reality and the vast pretensions, moral, intellectual and social, too often based on it. There is frequently scorn in the sermon, the more in proportion to the greatness of the pretensions. But there is almost always pity behind the scorn. Ludovicus Rex is, after all, the sport of fate. It is fate that decrees
‘How very weak the very wise,
How very small the very great are!’
It is the neglect of this fact that has led to the common judgment that Thackeray is a cynic. The gulf that divides him from cynicism is seen when we compare him with Swift. There is always in Thackeray a sensitive kindliness not to be found in the older writer. Thackeray’s bitterest satire is on individuals who are worse than their neighbours. There is something amiss with society when Barry Lyndon and Becky Sharp are possible; but we are not led to think that all men are Barry Lyndons, or all women Becky Sharps. Gulliver, on the contrary, is a satire on the human race.
William Carleton
(1794-1869).
A group of Irish novelists, rather older than Thackeray and Dickens, may be noticed together for the sake of certain features they have in common. If fineness of literary quality alone were in question, the first place must be assigned to William Carleton, whose Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry are the most carefully executed of their class. Carleton however had neither the verve nor the copiousness of Lever, who has been fixed upon by popular judgment as the leading Irish novelist of his time. Samuel Lover
(1797-1868).Still less can the versatile Samuel Lover, song-writer, dramatist and painter as well as novelist, compete with Lever; for although the former did many things with a certain dexterity he did nothing really well. His Handy Andy is a formless book, and the fun of it grows tedious.
Charles James Lever
(1806-1872).
Charles James Lever came in direct literary descent from neither of these, but from William Hamilton Maxwell (1792-1850), whose Stories from Waterloo turned Lever’s attention to the literary possibilities of the great war. This book begot Harry Lorrequer, begun in the Dublin University Magazine in 1837; and Lorrequer was followed by Charles O’Malley (1840). The former derived its name from the ‘rollicking’ quality generally recognised as characteristic of Lever. Both books have whatever attraction high spirits and plenty of fun and fighting and adventure can give; but in the literary sense they are rough and unpolished to the last degree. Tom Burke of Ours (1844) shows the same qualities slightly chastened and reduced to a more literary shape. The change went on, and Lever paid more and more attention to construction and to literary law and rule. He himself considered Sir Brook Fossbrooke (1866) his best book; but it may be questioned whether the gain in smoothness and regularity is sufficient to compensate for the partial loss of that rush of adventure and copiousness of anecdote which won for Lever his reputation, and still preserves it.
Charlotte Brontë
(1816-1855),
Emily Jane Brontë
(1818-1848),
Anne Brontë
(1820-1849).
It is singular that this typically Irish novelist was by blood more English than Irish. But the debt which Ireland owed to England in Lever was repaid with interest in that family of genius, the Brontës. Their father, himself a minor poet, left behind him, when he left Ireland, the name by which he was known, Brunty, from O’Prunty, and was afterwards known as Brontë. He married a Cornish girl, and settled as a clergyman at Haworth, on the wild moors of the West Riding of Yorkshire. All his children who grew to maturity possessed talent, if not genius. His son, Patrick Branwell Brontë, who was in boyhood considered the most promising of all, squandered his own life and clouded the lives of his sisters by his debauchery. The three sisters, Charlotte, Emily Jane and Anne, all won a place in literature, and two of them a conspicuous one. Their lives were uneventful, but gloomy and sometimes tragic. They were poor, they had a dissipated brother, they were constitutionally liable to consumption, and their story is a record of dauntless efforts frustrated by failing health. Their works bear deep marks of the people and the place amidst which they were conceived, but even more of their own family history. This was in fact inevitable. The sisters had no wide culture; still less were they accustomed to mingle in society and meet many types of men and women. Besides their few books, greedily read until the favourites were so tattered and worn that they had to be hidden away on private shelves, the men dwelling near them, the scenes around them and the tales current in their family were the only food for their imagination.
An outline of Charlotte’s life can be easily traced in her writings. Her first place of education, Cowan Bridge School, for the daughters of clergymen, appears in Jane Eyre; and Helen Burns represents her hapless eldest sister Maria, who died at eleven. A residence in Brussels to improve their French and qualify them for higher teaching, furnished much matter for The Professor and Villette. They meant to receive pupils at the parsonage; but their brother’s intemperance made that impossible, even if pupils had offered themselves, and, until his death in 1848, he was a heavy burden and a bitter grief.
The sisters had long loved to write as well as to read; and Charlotte has told how, in the autumn of 1845, the thought of publication was suggested by a MS. volume of Emily’s poetry. Her criticism of the verses is generous, but by no means extravagant. ‘I thought them,’ she says, ‘condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear they had also a peculiar music, wild, melancholy, and elevating.’ The other sisters had written poems also, and after various difficulties a small volume of Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell was published in 1846. It attracted little attention, and Charlotte says with truth that only the poems of Emily deserved much. Hers display a genuine poetic gift. Had she lived to write much more verse she would certainly have been one of the greatest of English poetesses, and might have been the first of all. Strength, sincerity and directness are the characteristics of her verse; and the individuality of the writer gives it distinction:
‘I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.
‘What have these lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of heaven and hell.’
The volume of verse was followed by several volumes of prose. Each sister had a story ready, and the three were offered simultaneously for publication. Emily’s novel, Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s, Agnes Grey, were accepted, though ‘on terms somewhat impoverishing to the two authors.’ Charlotte’s, The Professor, was rejected by one publisher after another, and ten years passed before it appeared. Meanwhile the dauntless author set to work and wrote Jane Eyre. This was accepted, and was published, like the stories by the other sisters, in 1847. Unlike theirs, it won a rapid and remarkable success and finally fixed the career of Charlotte Brontë.
It will be convenient to take the work of the three sisters in the reverse order. That of Anne Brontë may be speedily dismissed. She was a gentle, delicate creature both in mind and body; and but for her greater sisters her writings would now be forgotten. Her pleasing but commonplace tale of Agnes Grey was followed by The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in which she attempted, without success, to depict a profligate.
In sheer genius Emily Brontë probably surpassed Charlotte, though in art she was certainly the inferior of her elder sister. All that she wrote bears the stamp of her sombre imagination and of the gloomy strength of her character. Despite the Celtic strain in her blood, she, like the rest of her family, had more in common with the austere Yorkshire character than with that of the typical Irishman. She had a perfect comprehension of it. She was, as the northern character is by so many felt to be, personally unattractive. She was almost savagely reserved. Even her sisters, in her last illness, dared not notice ‘the failing step, the laboured breathing, the frequent pauses’ with which she climbed the staircase. But she had also the better qualities of the northern nature. She never shrank from duty or evaded a burden; and her courage was boundless. With her own hand she applied cautery to the bite of a dog she believed to be mad; and she conquered a savage bull-dog by beating it with the bare hands, though she had been warned that if struck it would fly at her throat.
Such a character explains all that Emily Brontë is in literature. Wuthering Heights is her only novel, for she died the year after its publication. It remains therefore uncertain whether she would have mastered her errors, or whether, as in her sister’s case, her first work was to be her greatest. The probability is that she would have improved. She was only thirty; and the defects of Wuthering Heights are artistic,—faulty construction, want of proportion, absence of restraint. These are defects which experience might be expected to overcome; especially as Emily Brontë’s verse showed that she was by no means without taste. There are flaws in the substance too; and it is less likely that these would have disappeared. Even Mrs. Gaskell could not deny that there is some foundation for the charge of coarseness brought against Charlotte; and there is more in the case of Emily. It is not merely that her characters are harsh and repulsive: there are not a few such characters in life, and there were many of them within the experience of the Brontë family. But besides, Emily Brontë appears to sympathise with, and sometimes to admire, the harsher and less lovable features of the characters she draws. Heathcliff is spoilt for most readers by the seemingly loving minuteness with which the author elaborates the worst characteristics of his nature, characteristics familiar to her from family legend.
For several reasons Charlotte Brontë holds a higher place in literature than her sister. She has not to be judged by one work only. Jane Eyre was followed by Shirley (1849), by Villette (1853), by The Professor (1857), published posthumously, and by the fragment, Emma (1860). In none of these did she equal her first novel, but she exhibited different sides and aspects of her genius, she multiplied her creations, and she proved, as long as life was given her, that she had what in the language of sport is called ‘staying power.’ Moreover, Charlotte was decidedly more of the artist than Emily. She understood better the importance of relief. Her imagination too was prevailingly sombre; yet though Jane Eyre is sufficiently gloomy, it is less uniformly so than Wuthering Heights. The shadow is flecked here and there with light. Again, Charlotte is more versatile in her imagination and much more pictorial than Emily. All the members of the Brontë family had a love and apparently some talent for art; but it is in the works of Charlotte that this talent leaves the clearest traces. There are few things in Jane Eyre more impressive than her description in words of the picture her imagination, if not her brush, drew. More ample scope, greater variety, a more humane tone,—these then are the points in which Charlotte surpasses Emily.
Notwithstanding the wonderful force and vividness of their imagination, the Brontës were in several respects singularly limited, largely because their experience was so limited. It was only genius that saved them from the narrowest provinciality. Even genius did not enable them to reach beyond a few well-marked types of character, nor did it save them from errors in the drawing of these. Both Rochester and Heathcliff would have been more endurable, as members of society, if their creators had themselves known more of society. They are brutal because the Brontës had seen and heard about much brutality, and had not learned that polish is by no means synonymous with weakness, and that gentleness is quite consistent with manliness and strength of will.
Partly however the narrowness was in the Brontës themselves. They show little power of invention. Not only are their types few, but the individual characters are nearly all reproductions from life. Probably no English writer of equal rank has transcribed so much from experience as Charlotte Brontë. Many of her characters were so like the originals as to be immediately recognised by themselves or by their neighbours. Shirley Keeldar was her sister Emily, Mr. Helstone was her father, the three curates were real men, and some of Charlotte’s school friends were depicted, it is said, with the accuracy of daguerreotypes. This minute fidelity to fact occasionally brought Miss Brontë into trouble; for she was not particularly sagacious in estimating the effect of what she wrote. We may argue from it, moreover, that if she had lived she would soon have exhausted her material.
Charlotte Brontë was likewise deficient in humour. This might be safely inferred from her works, where there are hardly any humorous characters or situations; and the inference would be confirmed by her life. Her letters, often excellent for their common sense and their high standard of duty, and sometimes for their dignity, are almost destitute of playfulness. Neither does she seem to have readily recognised humour in others. She admired Thackeray above almost all men of her time, but she was completely puzzled by him when they met. She lectured him on his faults, and quaintly adds that his excuses made them worse. The humourist was playing with the too serious mind. Had Miss Brontë been as Irish in nature as she was by blood she would not have made this mistake.
In the case of the Brontës it would be peculiarly ungenerous to insist on defects. All life long they fought against odds. With inadequate means and imperfect training, without friends and without advice, they won by their own force and genius alone a position in literature which is higher now than it was forty years ago. Charlotte is one of the half-dozen or so of great English novelists of the present century; and in all probability it is only her early death that has made Emily’s place somewhat lower.
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
(1810-1865).
Senior in years to the Brontës was the biographer of Charlotte, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. Mrs. Gaskell’s fame was won chiefly as a novelist, but, both for its intrinsic merits and as a memorial of a most interesting literary friendship, her Life of Charlotte Brontë deserves mention. If not equal to the best biographies in the language, it is worthy of a place in the class nearest to that small group. It gives a delightful impression both of the subject of the memoir and of her biographer. There was sufficient difference between the two to make Mrs. Gaskell’s generous appreciation peculiarly creditable to her. Two contemporaries of the same sex, reared amidst men closely akin in character, and confronted, as Mary Barton and Shirley prove, by similar social problems, could hardly present a greater contrast than there is between Charlotte Brontë and Mrs. Gaskell; the former austere, intense, prone to exaggeration and deficient in humour; the latter genial, balanced, and among the most successful of female humourists. The contrast extended to the personal appearance of the two women. Charlotte Brontë was plain and diminutive, while in her youth Mrs. Gaskell was strikingly beautiful.
The events of Mrs. Gaskell’s life were almost wholly literary. Her first novel, Mary Barton, published in 1848, remains to this day probably her best known, though not her most perfect book. It deals with the industrial state of Lancashire during the crisis of 1842, and it won, by its vivid and touching picture of the life of the poor, the admiration of some of the most distinguished literary men of the time. The subject was gradually drawing more attention. The evils which begot the socialism of Robert Owen and drew the protests of Carlyle and of Ebenezer Elliott had been brought into prominence by the Luddite riots and by Chartism. Most of the novelists were awakening to a sense of them. Disraeli had anticipated Mrs. Gaskell; and Kingsley as well as Charlotte Brontë followed her. The treatment varies greatly. Mrs. Gaskell, like Kingsley, has much more sympathy with socialism than Charlotte Brontë has. The social aspects of Mary Barton caused it to be admired and praised on the one hand, and to be censured on the other, for reasons outside the domain of art; but on the whole they certainly increased its popularity.
The success of Mary Barton won for Mrs. Gaskell an invitation from Dickens to contribute to Household Words, and some of her best work, including Cranford (1851-1853) and North and South (1854-1855), first appeared there. She was also a contributor to the Cornhill, where her last story, Wives and Daughters, was running when she died, with startling suddenness, in 1865.
‘George Sand, only a few months before Mrs. Gaskell’s death, observed to Lord Houghton: “Mrs. Gaskell has done what neither I nor other female writers in France can accomplish; she has written novels which excite the deepest interest in men of the world, and yet which every girl will be the better for reading.”’ This is high praise; and it is deserved. It must not indeed be pressed to mean that Mrs. Gaskell is the equal in genius, far less the superior, of writers like George Sand or George Eliot. Neither is she the equal of her friend, Charlotte Brontë. There is a sweep of imagination and a touch of poetry in Jane Eyre quite beyond the reach of Mrs. Gaskell. But her work is at once free from weakness and wholly innocent. She is of all the more remarkable female novelists of this period the most feminine. The traits of sex are numerous in her books, but they never appear unpleasantly. Her women are generally better than her men; yet her men are not such monsters as the Brontës loved to depict. On the contrary, she is fond of painting men of quiet worth, such as the country doctor whose ‘virtues walk their narrow round,’ who lives unknown, but who is sadly missed when he dies. Her best stories are quiet tales of the life of villages and small towns, and they show the shrewd, kindly, genial observation with which all her life she regarded those around her. She was happy in her own domestic life, and she believed that life in general, though chequered, was happy too. In her picture of human nature the virtues on the whole prevail over the vices.
Mrs. Gaskell saw everything in the light of a sympathetic humour. It is this quality that has served hitherto as salt to her books and has preserved their flavour while that of a great deal of more ambitious literature has been lost. If her humour is not equal to the best specimens of that of George Eliot, it is more diffused; if less powerful, it is gentler and quite as subtle. In style she is easy and flowing; and her later books show more freedom than her first attempt. At the same time, her writing rarely rises to eloquence. She had more talent than genius. She has created many good, but no great characters; and she stands midway between Thackeray and Dickens, who are emphatically men of genius, and writers like Trollope who, with abundant talent and exhaustless industry, have no genius whatever.