The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

  Of course he had not: “peculiar intimacy” is one of the easiest ways of destroying the capacity for humorous observation. Trollope’s real strength lay in the fact that he knew—he was one of those men who can acquire instinct at a glance—the life of clergymen without suffering from the hobbling restriction of knowing the clergymen themselves. In consequence he could openly laugh in their faces, which they enjoyed, and not behind their backs, which no one would have liked. If Trollope had really lived in a real Barchester he would have been simply the Cathedral Untouchable. As it is he is the greatest layman of ecclesiastical letters. And so it is that Barchester and Barsetshire, the one really convincing rural Ruritania out of many, came into existence out of the imagination and not out of experience. That Barchester is convincing, is despite rather than because of Trollope’s art as a storyteller. For he would adopt the maddening habit of assuring his readers that they were merely fiddling about with fiction, instead of allowing them the illusion that they were being given some miraculous opportunity for handling life: which is the object of every intelligent novelist.

  There is, for instance, the heart-breaking opening to The Warden:

  The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of—let us call it Barchester. …

  That is very much like bursting the bubble before it is blown. And Trollope’s activities with a pin are some of the most regrettable pieces of destructive work in fiction. Henry James said of them:

  These little slaps at credulity are very discouraging, but they are even more inexplicable, for they are deliberately inartistic, even judged from the point of view of the rather vague consideration of form, which is the only canon we have the right to impose upon Trollope … when Trollope suddenly winks at us and reminds us that he is telling us an arbitrary thing, we are startled and shocked in quite the same way as if Macaulay or Motley were to drop the historic mask and intimate that William of Orange was a myth or the Duke of Alva an invention.

  Trollope had other faults. His plots were like haddock lines with rows of hooks on which to hang things—usually comedy—and nothing more. His mind recognised nothing stranger than a curate with a funny face like Mr. Slope. But as a story-teller Trollope can hold up his head and his reader’s time with any.

  There are other Trollopes than the Puck in the Cathedral Close. In all, Trollope wrote fifty-one novels as well as travel books and biographies. The last years of his life were like those of a smaller and unworried Scott, spent in feverishly paying off debts that did not exist.

  Trollope wrote quickly and often badly. Dr. Wortle’s School is a sudden bright spot of real Trollope amid works that satisfied their purpose the moment they were paid for. Towards the end of his years, Anthony Trollope was merely the vulgarly successful literary merchant taking his revenge out of Life for having kept him short of pocket-money when at school.

  The Independent Brontes

  Haworth Parsonage in 1840 was absurdly overcrowded with female genius. That bleak house set in a barren landscape was the kindling point of one of the celestial burning-glasses of the imagination. Indeed, so intense is the imaginative quality in the work of Emily and Charlotte that Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre might serve better as the theme for a sonnet than as a subject for criticism. Not only did the novels of the Bronte sisters handle those thoughts that poetry can handle better than prose, but their own lives were planned in the pattern of poetic tragedies. And Charlotte, whose life spanned the abrupt, glowing fragments of the lives of Emily and Anne, was both spectator and actor in the play.

  The Brontes mixed life and work so much in one that it is hard to say where the one stops and the other begins. There are few authors for whom the critic has to wait so often and so patiently on the biographer: Mrs. Gaskell is not an incidental luxury but a critical necessity.

  Because the Brontes are so manifestly inexplicable, new explanations of their unique genius succeed each other in rapid succession. One of the most common of these is to explain the Brontes in terms of local geography, and attribute the wildness of their minds to the wildness of their native scenery. It is a good explanation, except that it fails to explain how it is that Brontes are not born in every wild and lonely corner of Great Britain.

  Haworth Parsonage has undergone that distortion in our minds which occurs when we look at anything too long and too hard. We have come to see it only as the cold mortuary where the bodies of the Brontes rested briefly in their quick passage to the churchyard, and not as the home where a family of children enjoyed all the ordinary juvenile freedoms of body and imagination.

  It is true that Fate in that household seems to have been both hard and in a hurry. There was a door—one would almost say the door, for symbolists have set it so large in the foreground of the picture—between the house and the graveyard. And the door opened and shut too often and too soon. In 1821 Mrs. Brontë died and was carried through. In May, 1828, Maria followed her, and a month later her sister, Elizabeth. Then Fate stood off for a space—for twenty years, letting two of this family declare their worth and the third his worthlessness—and then it struck them down, one, two and three.

  First there was Branwell Bronte, drunken and drugged, who yet retained sufficient of that almost fanatical independence of mind which distinguished all the Brontes to carry out his old, defiant resolve of dying standing upright.

  Then, less than three months later, Emily’s body withered into death. Charlotte wrote of her:

  Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. … Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the fading eyes, the same service was exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was a pain no words can render.

  That passage is as memorable a monument to Charlotte as it is to Emily. And in that single brave, bright phrase, Biblical in its brevity, broad in its comprehension, “stronger than a man, simpler than a child,” there is a hint of the difficulty that has beset the commentators of Charlotte Bronte. For Charlotte Bronte not only lived life in its largest terms but had also the natural eloquence to describe such existence. The company of those who have written about her has not yet produced one with the swift sweep of language of the original. And all reports of the emotional intensity of the alpine moments of her novels, as for instance, of that lonely drifting cry of Rochester in Jane Eyre, come down flat and stale, like text-book versions of the passions of Sappho.

  Mr. Chesterton once rolled up his sleeves and wrote that Wuthering Heights was “written by an eagle.” And some phrase of like idiotic and courageous emphasis will have to be found to describe the mystery of Charlotte’s writing. “Thou hadst all Passion’s splendour,” recorded Robert Bridges of Emily, “Thou hadst abounding store of Heaven’s eternal jewels,” and the description might be appropriated and be shared with her sister.

  The only Bronte not carried through that door from the Parsonage to the churchyard was Anne. She died in that absolute placidity of heart which was Emily’s and Charlotte’s too, extracting the truth that she had only four hours to live from the doctor, and saying as her last words: “Take courage, Charlotte; take courage.” It was the death of Anne Bronte, the brilliant baby, the author of Agnes Gray, yet almost the duffer of the family, that broke down the battered defences of heroism with which Charlotte’s nature was surrounded. When she returned home she wrote:

  I shut the door—I tried to be glad that I was come home. I have always been glad before—except once—even then I was cheered. But this time joy was not to b
e the sensation. I felt that the house was all silent—the rooms were all empty. I remembered where the three were laid—in what narrow dark dwellings—never more to reappear on earth. So the sense of desolation and bitterness took possession of me. The agony that was to be undergone, and was not to be avoided, came on.

  Whether the deaths of the Brontë sisters would have remained set out so clearly as scenes on the stage of our imagination, if they had not been recorded by Charlotte, is improbable. It is as improbable, in fact, as whether Charlotte would have become one of the lifelong heroines of romance without Mrs. Gaskell. In each instance it is as though Destiny had been aware of the responsibilities of the occasion, and had sent first Charlotte and then Mrs. Gaskell as recorders, as Boswell and Lockhart were sent to record Johnson and Scott.

  There never was a family that spent so much of its time in making records of itself as the Brontës. From the cradle to the early grave each member scribbled unforgettable words about itself, and then handed the pencil over to the one that was left, to carry on. The whole history of the Brontës is like a relay race run against Death.

  To have gone into Haworth Parsonage in the year 1830 would have been like stepping into a world where children had miraculously grown as articulate as their elders, and where genius was announcing itself on odd scraps of paper, on old book covers: anywhere and everywhere that presented itself to a family of children without any of the ordinary indolences of youth. Any attempt at explaining the Bronte’s books in the light of the Brontes themselves is ridiculously incomplete unless the explanation makes clear that the Brontes were children who drifted tragically through life without growing up and without ever having been really young.

  The Rev. Patrick Bronte describes how he put questions to his children and how their answers confounded him:

  I began with Anne, and asked what a child like her most wanted; she answered, “Age and experience.” I asked the next, Emily, what I had best do with her brother Branwell, who was sometimes a naughty boy; she answered, “Reason with him, and when he won’t listen to reason, whip him.” I asked Branwell what was the best way of knowing the difference between the intellects of men and women; he answered, “By considering the difference between them as to their bodies.” I then asked Charlotte what was the best book in the world; she answered, “The Bible.” And what was the next best; she answered, “The Book of Nature” I then asked her next what was the best mode of education for a woman; she answered, “That which would make her rule her house well.” Lastly I asked the oldest what was the best mode of spending time; she answered, “By laying it out in preparation for a happy eternity.”

  It might be argued that the real comedian of that scene was the Rev. Patrick Bronte putting such questions to his babies. But there is also the rather awe-inspiring comedy of premature sagacity on the part of the children. For at the time Anne was four and Charlotte ten. And in that nursery of prodigies, invention was a continuous industry.

  There is a library of Brontë manuscripts, ranging from The Young Men’s Magazine, in six numbers, dated 1829, and Characters of Great Men of the Present Age, to romances, fairy tales and poems, to the number of thirty—that much from Charlotte; of Emily’s work there has been preserved three manuscript collections of poems together with two compositions in French; Anne has left us seven manuscript volumes of poems; and the idle Branwell, twenty-five manuscripts, from The Battle of Washington, written when he was ten, to Lord Nelson and other Poems, written when he was twenty-seven.

  There never was a schoolroom of children to whom composition was so easy and natural; children whose juvenilia were less juvenile. The only child whose mentality is comparable was Walter Scott; so that if young Charlotte had met young Walter and conquered her shyness, the two infants would have had a large portion of literature and whole continents of adult life to discuss together.

  “We had very early cherished the dream of one day becoming authors,” wrote Charlotte Bronte of their dream when it had become reality. “This dream, never relinquished even when distance divided and absorbing tasks occupied us, now suddenly acquired strength and consistency: and took the character of a resolve.”

  But before the dream had grown in strength, Charlotte, Emily and Anne had been scattered about the countryside first as schoolgirls and then as governesses. The year 1845 was a late and misleading date for the publication of their volume of poems. Everyone now knows that it appeared as the work of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The reason, Charlotte tells us, was that: “We did not like to declare ourselves women, because—without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘ feminine’—we had a vague impression that authoresses were liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for this reason, a flattery, which is not true praise.”

  That sentence about authoresses being looked on with prejudice has for modern ears the hollow boom of antiquity. It fixes the date of its composition as definitely as if it had been written on the page of a calendar.

  Charlotte Bronte was a womanly anarchist. And she moved in a society in which the extreme of feminine independence was to be a governess. When one remembers the straining forces that were at work within her, Charlotte’s placid life takes on the new and deeper beauty of restraint.

  How far she was really revolutionary and dangerous may be seen from Jane Eyre. Again, it was by Currer Bell; only this time Currer Bell pushed a blazing bundle of propaganda beneath the noses of the reviewers. It seems incredible to us that anyone could ever have imagined Jane Eyre to be the work of other than a woman. It is valiantly, even violently, an epistle sent forth by Eve to all mankind. It was Jane Eyre that for the first time established one of the great Rights of Women, the Right of Passionate Love, even though it was in Villette that she crowned it. Charlotte Bronte almost made passion respectable: she certainly made it respected. The freedom of women, as reflected in fiction has shown some revealing changes, none more revealing than those seen in Jane Eyre.

  Independence had hitherto been obtained at the cost of all those things for which it is worth being independent. Freedom was in the hands of the Molls and the Miss Williamses. Orthodox heroines, from Pamela Andrews to Sophia Weston, were about as free as a parrot chained by one leg; they could look pretty and flutter and squawk, but the chain was always there; and so was Mr. B. or Tom Jones, or whoever was the unheavenly husband, looming in the background. There were also the wifely heroines, the red-eyed, red-elbowed creatures, the Amelias, Mrs. Primroses and Mrs. Micawbers, born to suffer for the follies of their husbands. No freedom there. And no freedom either in the fainting, flopping heroines of romance. Jane Austen’s characters suffered from too many colds in the head to be really independent women, though a certain snappish spinsterishness gave them some of the appearance of the dignity of separate existence. It was left for Charlotte Bronte to establish the first Independent Woman in fiction.

  It was, I believe, no sudden overflow of charity that made Charlotte give Jane Eyre a surprise legacy of £20,000. It was not so much a sentimental liking for wives as a most unsentimental dislike of husbands that prompted her to do this thing. That cry of Jane’s, “I am an independent woman now,” has set up a whole orchestra of echoes.

  Charlotte Bronte was not, of course, the first to draw a heroine happy and proud of having a dowry as large as her husband’s fortune. She was merely the first to draw a heroine conscious of the significance of it. She established the new line of wives who were partners and not wealthy dependents. When Jane Eyre said to Rochester, “If you won’t let me live with you, I can build a house of my own close up to your door, and you may come and sit in my parlour when you want company of an evening,” Charlotte Bronte was quietly and humorously announcing a piece of feminism that even to-day is startling in its implications.

  There is something in Charlotte’s propaganda for her sex that recalls that exquisite modern artist, Mrs.
Virginia Woolf, who has seen the connection as clearly as Charlotte saw it, between independent means and an independent mind. In point of fact, this underwriting of female genius is one of the heresies of literature. The very women who most wanted liberty and seclusion did their best work without it. And perhaps it is better not to contribute freely to the doctrine of the locked room and the separate cheque-book, so much as to observe that a century of progress in the liberation of woman has left them in one particular exactly where they were.

  But, at the time, people did not see that the dangerous character was Jane Eyre. They concentrated on the unspeakable Mr. Rochester. “Bigamy!” they cried. “This is bigamy!” Even to-day the reader cannot feel the rush of affection for Rochester that Jane Eyre and Charlotte felt. And that is due to the fact that all the virtues in the Bronte novels are the virtues, not of life but of the imagination. They are so much the products of the burning brain that at times it seems as if the eyes of the author are casting out living beams like searchlights and not merely receiving sights like normal eyes. Search for reality, for strict fidelity to fact, and you will never find it in the novels of the Brontes.

  What you will find in its place is imaginative reality; something that stuns you by being bigger and brighter than the thing for which it is a substitute.

  Thus, Charlotte saw the flaming Rochester as a man dragging himself painfully and slowly out of the flames of Hell. Jane, cool and helpful, was needed to pull him over the brink and extinguish the fire. And—because it was all a purely imaginative conception—the thought of bigamy did not deter Charlotte for one moment, for that was an irrelevant interruption from the unimaginative world of fact.’

  There is something often a little disconcerting about the imagination of the Brontes. For, though their juvenilia were often astonishingly unjuvenile, works of their maturity have thick streaks of what for want of a better name we will call childishness, running through them.