The Facts of Fiction (21 page)

Poor St. John, the missionary, too, is one of those
characters that rush into the brain from the side that is remote from life. This habit of creating a new world from within herself naturally made her unpopular with a great deal of the old world that was already outside.

One of the unpopularities that soon reached the giant size of hatred came over Charlotte's religious unorthodoxy. Charlotte was of those intensely exasperating and impossible people, who have a true mystic's vision that does not by any means coincide with the religious vision of the time. Whenever convention went one way Charlotte went the other. And whenever convention called on Religion, Charlotte called twice as loud on True Religion. And Charlotte, the tame governess turned rebel, had a very emphatic and dogmatic way with her.

There is that famous preface to the second edition of
Jane Eyre
, in which she wrote: “Having thus acknowledged what I owe those that have aided and approved me, I turn to another class; a small one, so far as I know, but not therefore to be overlooked, I mean the timorous or carping few who doubt the tendency of such books as
Jane Eyre
: in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each insult against bigotry—that parent of crime—an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth. I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions: I would remind them of certain simple truths. Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the smirk from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.”

A woman who talks like that is clearly impossible! Charlotte was as sure that she was right as St. Joan. And she was nearly as provocative in her manner of saying so. For the real trouble lies in the fact that conventionality
is
morality, so far as the world is concerned. And Charlotte, in making it possible for people to live better by throwing over convention was making it in the eyes of the world probable that they would live worse; at least that was how her contemporaries saw it.

That catch-phrase, “Conventionality is not morality,” savours not only of the Red Prophet, but of the red herring. Certainly since Charlotte's time it has been used, not by those who care nothing for the first and a great deal for the second, but by those who care nothing for either. The whole sentence has degenerated into one of those blunt, vulgar weapons of controversy that deflect a charge without defeating it. But Charlotte had a natural manner that both challenged contradiction and punished it. She remained a governess long after she ascended Parnassus.

Emily is the only one of the trinity who was free from the habit of going after the public's knuckles as well as going after its heart or head. Anne, indeed, remained a governess without ever ascending Parnassus. But Emily sat in the high places of the mind all her life. She would have been a poor enough hand at drawing diagrams on a schoolroom blackboard, but she could paint patterns in lightning across the night sky of the imagination so bright that they bewilder when they do not blind.

Wuthering Heights
is all imagination; which is what Charlotte meant when she said that it was the product of “Fate or Inspiration.”

Literary discipline makes as little show in
Wuthering Heights
as a cavalry formation among Exmoor ponies. As a piece of construction, it is one of the worst novels in the language. The tale leaps about from narrative to narrative like a frog, and flashes across the generations like a dragon fly. Beside it
Tristram Shandy
seems to
advance as regularly as a multiplication table.
Wuthering Heights
succeeds, as perhaps no other novel is successful, by force of those things that are left when everything that usually goes to the making of a good novel has been taken away.

That is not to say that its success could not be greater—or, at least, that it could not be successful for more readers—if some of the more common qualities of fiction were there as well. Again and again we feel the old conviction that we are reading the work, not of a mature mind but of a marvellous child. Imagination steps forth in a naked glory that is positively indecent outside poetry. And often it remains as naked as when it was born: which is contrary to the whole idea of art. For instance:

… I heard distinctly the gusty winds, and the driving of the snow; I heard, also, the fir-bough repeat its teasing sound, and ascribed it to the right cause; but it annoyed me so much, that I resolved to silence it, if possible; and, I thought, I resolved to endeavour to unhasp the casement. The hook was soldered into the staple: a circumstance observed by me when awake, but forgotten. “I must stop it nevertheless! ” I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch; instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand! The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, “Let me in—let me in! ” … Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes: still it wailed …

Except as an imaginative canter, the sort of canter that we take on the back of the nightmare, the notion of a child's having its wrist sawn through on a broken window pane is intolerable. And even then it remains essentially the nightmare terror of a child.

Indeed, the childishness of the Brontë imagination is nowhere seen so clearly as in
Wuthering Heights,
in which bad men can do nothing but growl, disgruntled princesses nursing their beauty in a lonely tower can only complain, the dogs would be accounted savage even among wolves, and the weather glass is set permanently stormy. Everyone in
Wuthering Heights
appears to have raw nerves and too many of them. There is a bleakness about their souls which is terrifying; even the house is like a Greenland meteorological station.

The question has often been asked: How did these sisters in a parsonage learn so much about the sort of life that never comes near a parsonage? And the answer probably is that it was Branwell who played Apollo, and went down into the world to mix with mortals and bring back news of them.

That he went down too far for recovery is Branwell's part of the tragedy. So far as the sisters were concerned, they were receiving in each burst of their brother's intoxicated loquacity glimpses of a life that had all the fascination of strangeness. What came through the dirty filter of Branwell's brain, they boiled to purity in the heat of their minds. Nothing that got past Charlotte or Emily on to paper had even a minute smear of impurity.

When Miss Martineau archly said, “You know you and I, Miss Brontë, have both written naughty books,” Charlotte writhed in disgust and at once began writing letters to see if it were she or Miss Martineau who was mistaken.

For Charlotte was a woman of that hopeless purity of mind that could never see through the grimy eyes of other people. When she set out to display weakness or vice she distorted it because she did not know it, and gave the world her Blanches and Mr. Reeds and Elizas and Georgianas.

The anti-Victorians have always pointed to the novelists-with-a-purpose, Charles Kingsley and Reade and the virtuous, vociferous others in that age, as ample evidence of the corruption of Victorian society. The pro-Victorians have always pointed to them as equally ample evidence of the birth of a national conscience. Probably the trouble lies in a misconception as to the real nature of the purpose, and hence as to the real nature of the novel.

It was a remarkable feature of Victorian authorship that so many writers were also rich, respectable men of the world. As men of the world they needed an excuse for writing. And one of the excuses for writing was that they were as serious, not to say as solemn, in their intentions as the politicans or bishops.

Once the excuse was accepted, they could write twenty-four hours a day without sacrificing their status as gentlemen. And the true purpose of many novels-with-a-purpose was nothing more, indeed, than the novel itself.

Novels of this kind inevitably recede farther and farther from the normal world of fiction, and approach continually nearer to a world of exaggerated fact, in which the novelist is half social-historian and half church-missionary. The novelist deliberately renounces the freedom that is the first child of fancy, and has to strike a bargain with a strict and inartistic discipline that is the uncompromising heir to fact. He has to collect his material like a Kelly's Directory clerk and test it with the patience of a chemist.
For, once a single detail is proved false, the fattest novelfounded-on-fact subsides like a concertina, in a dying wail.

Of all the Victorian novelists-with-a-purpose Charles Reade is the most formidable. He is the fiercest and the best-documented. He looms over the fiction of his day like a gigantic, angry barrister, crying out to the heavens for justice, and holding every shred of evidence up his sleeve.

There was a great deal of the catfish in his nature. Wherever he was there was trouble. Despite his sales, publishers grew to dread him. To extract profit from Charles Reade by publishing him was like trying to extract a gold tooth from a lion's jaws. The profit was there. But so were the jaws.

The trouble was that Reade in his youth at Oxford, too impatient with form and formula to become a priest, and too squeamish to become a doctor, had taken up the study of the law. And from that moment he was on the look-out for abuses.

When I say that he found them, I am not referring only to his legal action with his publishers to restrain them from publishing a cheap edition of
It's Never Too Late to Mend,
or to his injunction against the theatre-manager for pirating one of Reade's adaptations from the French, or to this or to that bitter personal episode. That much was natural. To tell Reade to live peacefully would have been like telling a baby to live without breathing. Reade took his policeman's lantern and his policeman's baton and went out exposing evil and hitting at it and making notes on it.

I am not, however, comparing Charles Reade's novels with the stumbling reports written by thick fingers in a police notebook. For Reade was a novelist of urgent and
impetuous power. True, he never acquired any grace but that of competence. But supremely competent he was, and never dull.

Yet it is not for such excellent novels as
Peg Woffington
or
Christie Johnstone
that Reade is remembered. It is for those novels, intended foremost if not exclusively for their own time, and successful then within the measure of their intention, that he is read and remembered.

With our prisons now humanely conducted (up to a point), and our lunatic asylums as gently disciplined as a children's nursery (presumably), we can still rouse ourselves to a fierce and frantic anger over the wickedness revealed in
It's Never Too Late to Mend
and
Hard Cash.

For, once Reade was emotionally affected—which was for about twelve hours in every day—he grew to twice his normal stature. He was a reformer who swelled like a cobra before striking. And a born reformer he was. Anyone who doubts it has only to turn to his magnificent historical novel that Sir Walter Besant thought “the greatest historical novel in the language,”
The Cloister and the Hearth,
to see him bravely and busily reforming something that could now never be reformed—the law of celibacy for priests, as laid down and practised in the mediæval Church.

Reade prepared his novels with the thoroughness of a prosecuting counsel. Thus he records:

In the year 1835 I began to make notes with a view to writing fiction, but, fixing my mind on its masterpieces in all languages and all recorded letters, I thought so highly of that great and difficult art, that for fourteen years I never ventured to offer my crude sketches to the public.

His notebooks accumulated, until even the indexes of the notebooks themselves had to be indexed in a “fat folio ledger entitled ‘ Index and Indices.' ”

Before Reade wrote
The Cloister and the Hearth
he searched and researched in ecclesiastical history as assiduously as though he were preparing a standard work on the subject, and not a novel. This unique capacity for taking himself seriously was what carried him to success. He shut himself up to fight the Devil, formulated the doctrine of infallibility, pronounced a commination of God's anger against any sinner who disagreed with him, and issued encyclical after encyclical.

Reade always wrote in terms of melodrama. He had to do so. His intention was to conduct democratic commissions into a half-a-dozen abuses and publish the reports in such a fashion that the most unlettered would want to read them. But melodrama is a solvent of good judgment, and occasionally he made a scene intellectually feeble by making it melodramatically emphatic. Thus in
Hard Cash
the reformer in him wanted to show how a sane man could be confined, with the full concurrence of an iniquitous system, in a madhouse. That was all. What actually happened according to the book, was this:

At eight, four keepers came into his room, undressed him, compelled him to make his toilette, etc., before them, which put him to shame—being a gentleman—almost as much as it would a woman; then they hobbled him, and fastened his ankles to the bed, and put his hands into muffles, but did not confine his body; because they had lost a lucrative lodger only a month ago, throttled at night in a strait-waistcoat.

Alfred lay in this plight, and compared with anguish
unspeakable his joyful anticipations of this night with the strange and cruel reality. “
My wedding night! My wedding night!” he cried aloud, and burst into a passion of grief
.

That melodramatic flourish at the end of the passage (I have punished it by putting it into italics) simply destroys the chapter: it degrades the whole affair from the level of the general—the affair of all mankind—to the particular—the affair of young Alf.