Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (617 page)

The following elaborate criticism of one of Mr. Lewes’s now forgotten novels is almost pathetic; it may give a modern critic pause in his serious treatment of the abundant literary ephemera of which we hear so much from day to day.

TO W. S. WILLIAMS

‘
May
1
st
, 1848.

‘My dear Sir, — I am glad you sent me your letter just as you had written it — without revisal, without retrenching or softening touch, because I cannot doubt that I am a gainer by the omission.

‘It would be useless to attempt opposition to your opinions, since, in fact, to read them was to recognise, almost point for point, a clear definition of objections I had already felt, but had found neither the power nor the will to express.  Not the power, because I find it very difficult to analyse closely, or to criticise in appropriate words; and not the will, because I was afraid of
 
doing Mr. Lewes injustice.  I preferred overrating to underrating the merits of his work.

‘Mr. Lewes’s sincerity, energy, and talent assuredly command the reader’s respect, but on what points he depends to win his attachment I know not.  I do not think he cares to excite the pleasant feelings which incline the taught to the teacher as much in friendship as in reverence.  The display of his acquirements, to which almost every page bears testimony — citations from Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, and German authors covering as with embroidery the texture of his English — awes and astonishes the plain reader; but if, in addition, you permit yourself to require the refining charm of delicacy, the elevating one of imagination — if you permit yourself to be as fastidious and exacting in these matters as, by your own confession, it appears
you
are, then Mr. Lewes must necessarily inform you that he does not deal in the article; probably he will add that
therefore
it must be non-essential.  I should fear he might even stigmatise imagination as a figment, and delicacy as an affectation.

‘An honest rough heartiness Mr. Lewes will give you; yet in case you have the misfortune to remark that the heartiness might be quite as honest if it were less rough, would you not run the risk of being termed a sentimentalist or a dreamer?

‘Were I privileged to address Mr. Lewes, and were it wise or becoming to say to him exactly what one thinks, I should utter words to this effect —

‘“You have a sound, clear judgment as far as it goes, but I conceive it to be limited; your standard of talent is high, but I cannot acknowledge it to be the highest; you are deserving of all attention when you lay down the law on principles, but you are to be resisted when you dogmatise on feelings.

‘“To a certain point, Mr. Lewes, you can go, but no farther.  Be as sceptical as you please on whatever lies beyond a certain intellectual limit; the mystery will never be cleared up to you, for that limit you will never overpass.  Not all your learning, not all your reading, not all your sagacity, not all your
 
perseverance can help you over one viewless line — one boundary as impassable as it is invisible.  To enter that sphere a man must be born within it; and untaught peasants have there drawn their first breath, while learned philosophers have striven hard till old age to reach it, and have never succeeded.”  I should not dare, nor would it be right, to say this to Mr. Lewes, but I cannot help thinking it both of him and many others who have a great name in the world.

‘Hester Mason’s character, career, and fate appeared to me so strange, grovelling, and miserable, that I never for a moment doubted the whole dreary picture was from the life.  I thought in describing the “rustic poetess,” in giving the details of her vulgar provincial and disreputable metropolitan notoriety, and especially in touching on the ghastly catastrophe of her fate, he was faithfully recording facts — thus, however repulsively, yet conscientiously “pointing a moral,” if not “adorning a tale”; but if Hester be the daughter of Lewes’s imagination, and if her experience and her doom be inventions of his fancy, I wish him better, and higher, and truer taste next time he writes a novel.

‘Julius’s exploit with the side of bacon is not defensible; he might certainly, for the fee of a shilling or sixpence, have got a boy to carry it for him.

‘Captain Heath, too, must have cut a deplorable figure behind the post-chaise.

‘Mrs. Vyner strikes one as a portrait from the life; and it equally strikes one that the artist hated his original model with a personal hatred.  She is made so bad that one cannot in the least degree sympathise with any of those who love her; one can only despise them.  She is a fiend, and therefore not like Mr. Thackeray’s Rebecca, where neither vanity, heartlessness, nor falsehood have been spared by the vigorous and skilful hand which portrays them, but where the human being has been preserved nevertheless, and where, consequently, the lesson given is infinitely more impressive.  We can learn little from the strange fantasies of demons — we are not of their kind; but the vices of the deceitful, selfish man or woman humble and
 
warn us.  In your remarks on the good girls I concur to the letter; and I must add that I think Blanche, amiable as she is represented, could never have loved her husband after she had discovered that he was utterly despicable.  Love is stronger than Cruelty, stronger than Death, but perishes under Meanness; Pity may take its place, but Pity is not Love.

‘So far, then, I not only agree with you, but I marvel at the nice perception with which you have discriminated, and at the accuracy with which you have marked each coarse, cold, improbable, unseemly defect.  But now I am going to take another side: I am going to differ from you, and it is about Cecil Chamberlayne.

‘You say that no man who had intellect enough to paint a picture, or write a comic opera, could act as he did; you say that men of genius and talent may have egregious faults, but they cannot descend to brutality or meanness.  Would that the case were so!  Would that intellect could preserve from low vice!  But, alas! it cannot.  No, the whole character of Cecil is painted with but too faithful a hand; it is very masterly, because it is very true.  Lewes is nobly right when he says that intellect is
not
the highest faculty of man, though it may be the most brilliant; when he declares that the
moral
nature of his kind is more sacred than the
intellectual
nature; when he prefers “goodness, lovingness, and quiet self-sacrifice to all the talents in the world.”

‘There is something divine in the thought that genius preserves from degradation, were it but true; but Savage tells us it was not true for him; Sheridan confirms the avowal, and Byron seals it with terrible proof.

‘You never probably knew a Cecil Chamberlayne.  If you had known such a one you would feel that Lewes has rather subdued the picture than overcharged it; you would know that mental gifts without moral firmness, without a clear sense of right and wrong, without the honourable principle which makes a man rather proud than ashamed of honest labour, are no guarantee from even deepest baseness.

‘I have received the
Dublin University Magazine
.  The notice
 
is more favourable than I had anticipated; indeed, I had for a long time ceased to anticipate any from that quarter; but the critic does not strike one as too bright.  Poor Mr. James is severely handled;
you
, likewise, are hard upon him.  He always strikes me as a miracle of productiveness.

‘I must conclude by thanking you for your last letter, which both pleased and instructed me.  You are quite right in thinking it exhibits the writer’s character.  Yes, it exhibits it
unmistakeably
(as Lewes would say).  And whenever it shall be my lot to submit another MS. to your inspection, I shall crave the full benefit of certain points in that character: I shall ever entreat my
first critic
to be as impartial as he is friendly; what he feels to be out of taste in my writings, I hope he will unsparingly condemn.  In the excitement of composition, one is apt to fall into errors that one regrets afterwards, and we never feel our own faults so keenly as when we see them exaggerated in others.

‘I conclude in haste, for I have written too long a letter; but it is because there was much to answer in yours.  It interested me.  I could not help wishing to tell you how nearly I agreed with you. — Believe me, yours sincerely,

‘C. Bell.’

TO W. S. WILLIAMS

‘
April
5
th
, 1849.

‘My dear Sir, — Your note was very welcome.  I purposely impose on myself the restraint of writing to you seldom now, because I know but too well my letters cannot be cheering.  Yet I confess I am glad when the post brings me a letter: it reminds me that if the sun of action and life does not shine on us, it yet beams full on other parts of the world — and I like the recollection.

‘I am not going to complain.  Anne has indeed suffered much at intervals since I last wrote to you — frost and east wind have had their effect.  She has passed nights of sleeplessness and pain, and days of depression and languor which nothing could cheer — but still, with the return of genial weather she revives.  I cannot perceive that she is feebler
 
now than she was a month ago, though that is not saying much.  It proves, however, that no rapid process of destruction is going on in her frame, and keeps alive a hope that with the renovating aid of summer she may yet be spared a long time.

‘What you tell me of Mr. Lewes seems to me highly characteristic.  How sanguine, versatile, and self-confident must that man be who can with ease exchange the quiet sphere of the author for the bustling one of the actor!  I heartily wish him success; and, in happier times, there are few things I should have relished more than an opportunity of seeing him in his new character.

‘The Cornhill books are still our welcome and congenial resource when Anne is well enough to enjoy reading.  Carlyle’s
Miscellanies
interest me greatly.  We have read
The Emigrant Family
.  The characters in the work are good, full of quiet truth and nature, and the local colouring is excellent; yet I can hardly call it a good novel.  Reflective, truth-loving, and even elevated as is Alexander Harris’s mind, I should say he scarcely possesses the creative faculty in sufficient vigour to excel as a writer of fiction.  He
creates
nothing — he only copies.  His characters are portraits — servilely accurate; whatever is at all ideal is not original. 
The Testimony to the Truth
is a better book than any tale he can write will ever be.  Am I too dogmatical in saying this?

‘Anne thanks you sincerely for the kind interest you take in her welfare, and both she and I beg to express our sense of Mrs. Williams’s good wishes, which you mentioned in a former letter.  We are grateful, too, to Mr. Smith and to all who offer us the sympathy of friendship.

‘Whenever you can write with pleasure to yourself, remember Currer Bell is glad to hear from you, and he will make his letters as little dreary as he can in reply. — Yours sincerely,

‘C. Brontë.’

It was always a great trouble to Miss Wheelwright, whose friendship, it will be remembered, she had made in Brussels, that Charlotte was monopolised by the Smiths on her
 
rare visits to London, but she frequently came to call at Lower Phillimore Place.

TO MISS LÆTITIA WHEELWRIGHT

‘Haworth, Keighley,
December
17
th
, 1849.

‘My dear Lætitia, — I have just time to save the post by writing a brief note.  I reached home safely on Saturday afternoon, and, I am thankful to say, found papa quite well.

‘The evening after I left you passed better than I expected.  Thanks to my substantial lunch and cheering cup of coffee, I was able to wait the eight o’clock dinner with complete resignation, and to endure its length quite courageously, nor was I too much exhausted to converse; and of this I was glad, for otherwise I know my kind host and hostess would have been much disappointed.  There were only seven gentlemen at dinner besides Mr. Smith, but of these, five were critics — a formidable band, including the literary Rhadamanthi of the
Times
, the
Athenæum
, the
Examiner
, the
Spectator
, and the
Atlas
: men more dreaded in the world of letters than you can conceive.  I did not know how much their presence and conversation had excited me till they were gone, and then reaction commenced.  When I had retired for the night I wished to sleep; the effort to do so was vain — I could not close my eyes.  Night passed, morning came, and I rose without having known a moment’s slumber.  So utterly worn out was I when I got to Derby, that I was obliged to stay there all night.