The Silent Isle. Benson Arthur Christopher

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СКАЧАТЬ realised a little while ago that I was getting sadly belated in the matter of novel-reading. I had come to decline on a few old favourites and was breaking no new ground. That is a provincial frame of mind, just as when a man begins to discard dressing for dinner, and can endure nothing but an old coat and slippers. It is easy to think of it as unworldly, peaceable, philosophical; but it is mere laziness. The really unworldly philosopher is the man who is at ease in all costumes and at home in all companies.

      I did not take up my novel-reading in a light spirit or for mere diversion. To begin a new novel is for me like staying at a strange house; I am bewildered and discomposed by the new faces, by the hard necessity of making the acquaintance of all the new people, and in determining their merits and their demerits. But I was bent on more serious things still. I knew that it is the writers of romances, and not the historians or the moralists, who are the real critics and the earnest investigators of life and living. There may be at the present day few subtle psychologists or surpassing idealists at work writing novels, and still fewer great artists; but for a man to get out of the way of reading contemporary fiction is not only a disease, it is almost a piece of moral turpitude—or at best a sign of lassitude, stupidity, and Toryism; because it means that one's mind is made up and that one has some dull theory which life and the thoughts of others may confirm if they will, but must not modify: from which deadly kind of incrustation may common-sense and human interest deliver us.

      It is a matter of endless debate whether a novel should have an ethical purpose, or whether it should merely be an attempt to present beautifully any portion of truth clearly perceived, faithfully observed, delicately grouped, and artistically isolated. In the latter case, say the realists, whatever the subject, the incident, the details may be, the novel will possess exactly the same purpose that underlies things, no more and no less; and the purpose may be trusted to look after itself.

      The other theory is that the novelist should have a definite motive; that he should have a case which he is trying to prove, a warning he wishes to enforce, an end which he desires to realise. The fact that Dickens and Charles Reade had philanthropic motives of social reform, and wished to improve the condition of schools, workhouses, lunatic asylums, and gaols, is held to justify from the moral point of view such novels as Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, Hard Cash, and It is Never too Late to Mend. And from the moral point of view these books are entirely justified, because they did undoubtedly interest a large number of people in such subjects who would not have been interested by sermons or blue-books. These books quickened the emotions of ordinary people on the subject; and public sentiment is of course the pulse of legislation.

      Whether the philanthropic motive injured the books from the artistic point of view is another question. It undoubtedly injured them exactly in proportion as the philanthropic motive led the writers to distort or to exaggerate the truth. It is perfectly justifiable, artistically, to lay the scene of a novel in a workhouse or a gaol, but if the humanitarian impulse leads to any embroidery of or divergence from the truth, the novel is artistically injured, because the selection and grouping of facts should be guided by artistic and not by philanthropic motives.

      Now the one emotion which plays a prominent part in most romances is the passion of love, and it is interesting to observe that even this motive is capable of being treated from the philanthropic as well as from the artistic point of view. In a book which is now perhaps unduly neglected, from the fact that it has a markedly early Victorian flavour, Charles Kingsley's Yeast, there is a distinct attempt made to fuse the two motives. The love of Lancelot for Argemone is depicted both in the artistic and in the philanthropic light. The passion of the lover throbs furiously through the odd weltering current of social problems indicated, as a stream in lonely meadows may be seen and heard to pulsate at the beat of some neighbouring mill which it serves to turn. Yet the philanthropic motive is there, in that love is depicted as a redeeming power, a cure for selfishness, a balm for unrest; and the artistic impulse finally triumphs in the death of Argemone unwedded.

      In the hands of women-writers, love naturally tends to be depicted from the humanitarian point of view. It is the one matchless gift which the woman has to offer, the supreme opportunity of exercising influence, the main chance of what is clumsily called self-effectuation. The old proverb says that all women are match-makers; and Mr. Bernard Shaw goes further and maintains that they act from a kind of predatory instinct, however much that instinct may be concealed or glorified.

      Now there was one great woman-writer, Charlotte Brontë, to whom it was given to treat of love from the artistic side. She has been accused of making her heroines, Jane Eyre, Caroline Helstone, Lucy Snowe, too submissive, too grateful for the gift of a man's love. They forgive deceit, rebuffs, severity, coldness, with a surpassing meekness. But it is here that the artistic quality really emerges; these beautiful, stainless hearts are preoccupied with what they receive rather than with what they give. In that crude, ingenuous book The Professor, the hero, who is a good instance of how Charlotte Brontë confused rigidity of nature with manliness, surprised by an outbreak of passionate emotion on the part of his quiet and self-contained wife, and still more surprised by its sudden quiescence, asks her what has become of her emotion and where it is gone. "I do not know where it is gone," says the girl, "but I know that whenever it is wanted it will come back." That is a noble touch. It may be true that Paul Emmanuel and Robert Moore cling too closely to the idea of rewarding their humble mistresses, after testing them harshly and even brutally, with the gift of their love—though even this humility has a touching quality of beauty; but the supreme lover, Mr. Rochester, who, in spite of his ridiculous affectations, his grotesque hauteurs, his impossible theatricality, is a figure of flesh and blood, is absorbed in his passion in a way that shows the fire leaping on the innermost altar. The irresistible appeal of the book to the heart is due to the fact that Jane Eyre never seems conscious of what she is giving, but only of what she is receiving; and it is this that makes her gift so regal, so splendid a thing.

      Side by side with this book I would set a recent work, Miss Cholmondeley's Prisoners. Fine and noble as the book is in many ways, it is yet vitiated by the sense of the value of the gift of love from the woman's point of view. Love is there depicted as the one redeeming and transforming power in the world. But in order to prove the thesis, the two chief characters among the men of the book, Wentworth and Lord Lossiemouth, are not, like Mr. Rochester, strong men disfigured by violent faults, but essentially worthless persons, one the slave of an oldmaidish egotism and the other of a frank animalism. The result in both cases is an experimentum in corpore vili. The authoress, instead of presiding over her creations like a little Deity, is a strong partisan; and the purpose seems to be to bring out more clearly the priceless nature of the gift which comes near their hand. No one would dispute the position that love is a purifying and transforming power; but love, conscious of its worth, loses the humility and the unselfishness in which half its power lies. Even Magdalen, the finest character in the book, is not free from a quality of condescension. In the great love-scene where she accepts Lord Lossiemouth, she comforts him by saying, "You have not only come back to me. You have come back to yourself." That is a false touch, because it has a flavour of superiority about it. It reminds one of the lover in The Princess lecturing the hapless Ida from his bed-pulpit, and saying, "Blame not thyself too much," and "Dearer thou for faults lived over." One cannot imagine Jane Eyre saying to Mr. Rochester that he had come back to himself through loving her. It just detracts at the supreme moment from the generosity of the scene; it has the accent of the priestess, not of the true lover; and thus at the moment when one longs to be in the very white-heat of emotion, one is subtly aware of an improving hand that casts water upon the flame.

      The love that lives in art is the love of Penelope and Antigone, of Cordelia and Desdemona and Imogen, of Enid, of Mrs. Browning, among women; and among men, the love of Dante, of Keats, of the lover of Maud, of Père Goriot, of Robert Browning.

      It is the unreasoning, unquestioning love of a man for a woman or a woman for a man, just as they are, for themselves only; "because it was you and me," as Montaigne says. Not a respect for good qualities, a mere admiration for beauty, a perception of strength or delicacy, but СКАЧАТЬ