Part 2
There is a charming and gracious dogma of Roman Catholicism which would have us believe that all good deeds and holy prayers make up a spiritual treasury, a public fund, from which are drawn consolation for the church suffering, and strength for the church militant. A similar treasury (be it reverently spoken) holds for us all the stored-up laughter of the world, and from it comes human help in hours of black dejection. Whoever enriches this exchequer should be held a benefactor of his race. Whoever robs it--no matter what heroic motives he may advance in extenuation of the deed--has sinned heavily against his fellow men. For the gayety of life, like the beauty and the moral worth of life, is a saving grace, which to ignore is folly, and to destroy is crime. There is no more than we need,--there is barely enough to go round. If we waste our little share, if we extinguish our little light, the treasury is that much poorer, and our neighbour walks in gloom.
The thinkers of the world should by rights be the guardians of the world’s mirth; but thinking is a sorry business, and a period of critical reflection, following a period of vigorous and engrossing activity, is apt to breed the “plaintive pessimist,” whose self-satisfaction is disproportionate to his worth. Literature, we are assured by its practitioners, “exists to please;” but it has some doubtful methods of imparting pleasure. If, indeed, we sit down to read books on degeneracy and kindred topics, we have no reason to complain of what we find in them. It is not through such gates as these that we seek an escape from mortality. But why should poets and essayists and novelists be so determinedly depressing? Why should “the earnest prophetic souls who tear the veil from our illusory national prosperity”--I quote from a recent review--be so warmly praised for their vandalism? Heaven knows they are always tearing the veil from something, until there is hardly a rag left for decency. Yet there are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth. Granted that our habit of exaggerating the advantages of modern civilization and of modern culture does occasionally provoke and excuse plain speaking, there is no need of a too merciless exposure, a too insulting refutation of these agreeable fallacies. If we think ourselves well off, we _are_ well off. If, dancing in chains, we believe ourselves free, we _are_ free, and he is not our benefactor who weighs our shackles. Reformers have unswervingly and unpityingly decreased the world’s content that they might better the world’s condition. The first part of their task is quickly done. The second halts betimes. Count Tolstoi has, with the noblest intentions, made many a light step heavy, and many a gay heart sad.
As for poets and novelists, their sin is unprovoked and unpardonable. Story-telling is not a painful duty. It is an art which, in its best development, adds immeasurably to the conscious pleasure of life. It is an anodyne in hours of suffering, a rest in hours of weariness, and a stimulus in hours of health and joyous activity. It can be made a vehicle for imparting instruction, for destroying illusions, and for dampening high spirits; but these results, though well thought of in our day, are not essential to success. Want and disease are mighty factors in life; but they have never yet inspired a work of art. The late Professor Boyesen has indeed recorded his unqualified delight at the skill with which Russian novelists describe the most unpleasant maladies. He said enthusiastically that, after reading one of these masterpieces, he felt himself developing some of the very symptoms which had been so accurately portrayed; but to many readers this would be scant recommendation. It is not symptoms we seek in stories. The dullest of us have imagination enough to invent them for ourselves.
“Poverty,” said old Robert Burton, “is a most odious calling,” and it has not grown any more enjoyable in the past three hundred years. Nothing is less worth while than to idealize its discomforts, unless it be to sourly exaggerate them. There is no life so hard as to be without compensations, especially for those who take short views; and the view of poverty seldom goes beyond the needs of the hour and their fulfilment. But there has arisen of late years a school of writers--for the most part English, though we have our representatives--who paint realistically the squalor and wretchedness of penury, without admitting into their pictures one ray of the sunshine that must sometimes gild the dreariest hovel or the meanest street. A notable example of this black art was Mr. George Gissing, whose novels are too powerful to be ignored, and too depressing to be forgotten. The London of the poor is not a cheerful place; it is perhaps the most cheerless place in Christendom; but this is the way it appeared in Mr. Gissing’s eyes when he was compelled to take a suburban train:--
“Over the pest-stricken region of East London, sweltering in sunlight which served only to reveal the intimacies of abomination; across miles of a city of the damned, such as thought never conceived before this age of ours; above streets swarming with a nameless populace, cruelly exposed by the unwonted light of heaven; stopping at stations which it crushes the heart to think should be the destination of any mortal,--the train made its way at length beyond the outmost limits of dread, and entered upon a land of level meadows, of hedges and trees, of crops and cattle.”
Surely this is a trifle strained. The “nameless populace” would be not a little surprised to hear itself described with such dark eloquence. I remember once encountering in a third-class English railway carriage a butcher-boy--he confided to me his rank and profession--who waxed boastful over the size and wealth of London. “It’s the biggest city in the world, that’s wot it is; it’s got five millions of people in it, that’s wot it’s got; and I’m a Londoner, that’s wot I am,” he said, glowing with pride that was not without merit in one of mean estate. The “city of the damned” appeared a city of the gods to this young son of poverty.
Such books sin against the gayety of life.
All the earth round, If a man bear to have it so, Things which might vex him shall be found;
and there is no form of sadness more wasteful than that which is bred of a too steadfast consideration of pain. It is not generosity of spirit which feeds this mood. The sorrowful acceptance of life’s tragedies is of value only when it prompts us to guard more jealously, or to impart more freely, life’s manifold benefactions. Mr. Pater has subtly defined the mental attitude which is often mistaken for sympathy, but which is a mere ineffectual yielding to depression over the sunless scenes of earth.
“He”--Carl of Rosenmold--“had fits of the gloom of other people, their dull passage through and exit from the world, the threadbare incidents of their lives, their dismal funerals, which, unless he drove them away immediately by strenuous exercise, settled into a gloom more properly his own. Yet, at such times, outward things would seem to concur unkindly in deepening the mental shadows about him.”
This is precisely the temper which finds expression in much modern verse. Its perpetrators seem wrapped in endless contemplation of other people’s gloom, until, having absorbed all they can hold, they relieve their oppressed souls by unloading it in song. Women are especially prone to mournful measures, and I am not without sympathy for that petulant English critic who declined to read their poetry on the plea that it was “all dirges.” But men can be mourners, too, and--
In all the endless road you tread There’s nothing but the night,
is too often the burden of their verse, the unsolicited assurance with which they cheer us on our way. We do not believe them, of course, except in moments of dejection; but these are just the moments in which we would like to hear something different. When our share of gayety is running pitifully low, and the sparks of joy are dying on life’s hearth, we have no courage to laugh down the voices of those who, “wilfully living in sadness, speak but the truths thereof.”
Hazlitt, who was none too happy, but who strove manfully for happiness, used to say that he felt a deeper obligation to Northcote than to any of his other friends who had done him far greater service, because Northcote’s conversation was invariably gay and agreeable. “I never ate nor drank with him; but I have lived on his words with undiminished relish ever since I can remember; and when I leave him, I come out into the street with feelings lighter and more ethereal than I have at any other time.” Here is a debt of friendship worth recording, and blither hearts than Hazlitt’s have treasured similar benefactions. Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson gladly acknowledged his gratitude to people who set him smiling when they came his way, or who smiled themselves from sheer cheerfulness of heart. They never knew--not posing as philanthropists--how far they helped him on his road; but he knew, and has thanked them in words not easily forgotten:--
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or, when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.... A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of good-will; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted.”
There is little doubt that the somewhat indiscriminate admiration lavished upon Mr. Stevenson himself was due less to his literary than to his personal qualities. People loved him, not because he was an admirable writer, but because he was a cheerful consumptive. There has been far too much said about his ill health, and nothing is so painful to contemplate as the lack of reserve on the part of relatives and executors which thrusts every detail of a man’s life before the public eye. It provokes maudlin sentiment on the one side, and ungracious asperity on the other. But, in Mr. Stevenson’s case, silence is hard to keep. He was a sufferer who for many years increased the gayety of life.
Genius alone can do this on a large scale; but everybody can do it on a little one. Our safest guide is the realization of a hard truth,--that we are not privileged to share our troubles with other people. If we could make up our minds to spare our friends all details of ill health, of money losses, of domestic annoyances, of altercations, of committee work, of grievances, provocations, and anxieties, we should sin less against the world’s good-humour. It may not be given us to add to the treasury of mirth; but there is considerable merit in not robbing it. I have read that “the most objectionable thing in the American manner is excessive cheerfulness,” and I would like to believe that so pardonable a fault is the worst we have to show. It is not our mission to depress, and one recalls with some satisfaction Saint-Simon’s remark anent Madame de Maintenon, whom he certainly did not love. Courtiers less astute wondered at the enduring charm which this middle-aged woman, neither handsome nor witty, had for her royal husband. Saint-Simon held the clue. It was her “decorous gayety” which soothed Louis’s tired heart. “She so governed her humours that, at all times and under all circumstances, she preserved her cheerfulness of demeanour.”
There is little profit in asking ourselves or others whether life be a desirable possession. It is thrust upon us, without concurrence on our part. Unless we can abolish compulsory birth, our relish for the situation is not a controlling force. “Every child,” we are told, “is sent to school a hundred years before he is born;” but he can neither profit by his schooling nor refuse his degree. Here we are in a world which holds much pain and many pleasures, oceans of tears and echoes of laughter. Our position is not without dignity, because we can endure; and not without enjoyment, because we can be merry. Gayety, to be sure, requires as much courage as endurance; but without courage the battle of life is lost. “To reckon dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat that runs through all the winning music of the world, to hold back the hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from life because of death,--this is to be afraid of Pan.”
THE POINT OF VIEW
Look contentedly upon the scattered difference of things.--SIR THOMAS BROWNE.
Fiction is the only field in which women started abreast with men, and have not lagged far behind. Their success, though in no wise brilliant, has been sufficiently assured to call forth a vast deal of explanation from male critics, who deem it necessary to offer reasons for what is not out of reason, to elucidate what can never be a mystery. Not very many years ago a contributor to the “Westminster Review” asserted seriously that “the greater affectionateness” of women enabled them to write stories, and that “the domestic experiences, which form the bulk of their knowledge, find an appropriate place in novels. The very nature of fiction calls for that predominance of sentiment which befits the feminine mind.”
It is not easy, however, to account for Miss Austen and Miss Brontë, for George Eliot and George Sand, on the score of “affectionateness” and domesticity. The quality of their work has won for them and for their successors the privilege of being judged by men’s standards, and of being forever exempt from that fatal word, “considering.” All that is left of the half-gallant, half-condescending tone with which critics indulgently praised “Evelina” is a well-defined and clearly expressed sentiment in favour of women’s heroines, and a corresponding reluctance--on the part of men at least--to tolerate their heroes. Mr. Henley voiced the convictions of his sex when he declared his readiness to accept, “with the humility of ignorance, and something of the learner’s gratitude,” all of George Eliot’s women, “from Romola down to Mrs. Pullet” (up to Mrs. Pullet, one would rather say), and his lively mistrust of the “governesses in revolt,” whom it has pleased her to call men. Heroes of the divided skirt, every one of them, was his verdict. Deronda, an incarnation of woman’s rights. Tito, an improper female in breeches. Silas Marner, a good, perplexed old maid. Lydgate alone has “aught of the true male principle about him.”
This is a matter worthy of regard, because the charm of a novel is based largely upon the attraction its hero has for women, and its heroine for men. Incident, dialogue, the development of minor characters,--these things have power to please; but the enduring triumph of a story depends upon the depth of our infatuation for somebody that figures in it, and here, as elsewhere, the instinct of sex reigns supreme. Why is it impossible for a man, who is not an artist or an art-critic, to acknowledge that the great portraits of the world are men’s portraits? Because he has given his heart to Mona Lisa, or to Rembrandt’s Saskia, or to some other beauty, dead and gone. Why do we find in the Roman Catholic Church that it is invariably a man who expounds the glory of Saint Theresa, and a woman who piously supplicates Saint Anthony? The same rule holds good in fiction. Clarissa Harlowe has been loved as ardently as Helen of Troy. Mr. Saintsbury gives charming expression to this truth in his preface to “Pride and Prejudice.”
“In the novels of the last hundred years,” he says, “there are vast numbers of young ladies with whom it might be a pleasure to fall in love; there are at least five with whom, as it seems to me, no man of taste and spirit can help doing so. Their names are, in chronological order, Elizabeth Bennet, Diana Vernon, Argemone Lavington, Beatrix Esmond, and Barbara Grant. I should have been most in love with Beatrix and Argemone; I should, I think, for mere occasional companionship, have preferred Diana and Barbara Grant. But to live with and to marry, I do not know that any one of the four can come into competition with Elizabeth.”
This choice little literary seraglio is by no means the only one selected with infinite care by critics too large-minded for monogamy, while passions more exclusive burn with intenser flame. Of Beatrix Esmond it might be said that Thackeray was the only man who never succumbed to her charms. Women have been less wont to confess their infatuations,--perhaps for lack of opportunity,--but they have cherished in their hearts a long succession of fictitious heroes, most of them eminently unworthy of regard. We know how they puzzled and distressed poor Richardson by their preference for that unpardonable villain, Lovelace, whom honest men loathe. Even in these chill and seemly days they seek some semblance of brutality. The noble, self-abnegating hero has little chance with them. The perplexed hero has even less. It is a significant circumstance that, of all the characters upon whom Mrs. Humphry Ward has lavished her careful art, Helbeck of Bannisdale, who doesn’t know the meaning of perplexity, and who has no weak tolerance for other people’s views, makes the sharpest appeal to feminine taste. But masculine taste rejects him.
Rejects him, not more sharply, perhaps, than it is wont to reject any type of manhood put forward urgently by a woman. There was a time when Rochester was much in vogue, and girls young enough to cherish illusions wove them radiantly around that masterful lover who wooed in the fashion of the Conqueror. But men looked ever askance upon his volcanic energies and emotions. They failed to see any charm in his rudeness, and they resented his lack of _retenue_. Robust candour is a quality which civilization--working in the interests of both sexes--has wisely thought fit to discard. Even Mr. Birrell, who is disposed to leniency where Charlotte Brontë’s art is concerned, admits that while Rochester is undeniably masculine, and not a governess in revolt, he is yet “man described by woman,” studied from the outside by one who could only surmise. And of the fierce and adorable little professor, the “sallow tiger” who is the crowning achievement of “Villette,” he has still more serious doubts. “Some good critics there are who stick to it that in his heart of hearts Paul Emanuel was a woman.”
Does this mean that femininity, backed by genius, cannot grasp the impalpable something which is the soul and essence of masculinity? Because then it follows that masculinity, backed by genius, cannot grasp the impalpable something which is the soul and essence of femininity. Such a limitation has never yet been recognized and deplored. On the contrary, there are novelists, like Mr. Hardy, and Mr. George Meredith, and Mr. Henry James, who are considered to know a great deal more about women than women know about themselves, and to be able to give the sex some valuable points for its own enlightenment. Just as Luini and Leonardo da Vinci are believed to have grasped the subtleties hidden deep in the female heart, and to have betrayed them upon their imperishable canvases in a lurking smile or a gleam from half-shut eyes, so Mr. Meredith and Mr. James are believed to have betrayed these feminine secrets in the ruthless pages of their novels. Mr. Boyesen, for example, did not hesitate to say that no woman could have drawn a character like Diana of the Crossways, and endowed her with “that nameless charm,” because “the sentiment that feels and perceives it is wholly masculine.” Why should not this rule work both ways, and a nameless charm be given to some complex and veracious hero, because the sentiment that feels and perceives it is wholly feminine? Mrs. Humphry Ward strove for just such a triumph in her portrait of Edward Manisty, but she strove in vain. Yet if the attraction of one sex for the other be mutual, why should it enlighten the man and confuse the woman? Or is this enlightenment less penetrating than it appears? Perhaps a rare perfection in recognizing and reproducing detail may be mistaken for a firm grasp upon the whole.
Certain it is that if men have looked with skepticism at the types of manhood presented with so much ardour by female novelists,--if they have voted Rochester a brute, and Mr. Knightley a prig, and Robert Elsmere a bore, and Deronda “an intolerable kind of Grandison,”--women in their turn have evinced resentment, or at least impatience, at the attitude of heroines so sweetly glorified by men. Lady Castlewood is a notable example. How kindly Thackeray--who is not always kind--treats this “tender matron,” this “fair mistress” of the admirable Esmond! What pleasant adjectives, “gentlest,” “truest,” “loveliest,” he has ever ready at her service! How frankly he forgives faults more endearing than virtues to the masculine mind! “It takes a man,” we are told, “to forgive Lady Castlewood.” She is the finest and most reverent incarnation of what men conceive to be purely feminine traits. In a world that belongs to its masters, she is an exquisite appurtenance, a possession justly prized. In a world shared--albeit somewhat unevenly--by men and women, she seems less good and gracious. “I always said I was alone,” cries Beatrix sternly. “You were jealous of me from the time I sat on my father’s knee.” And the child’s eyes saw the truth.
It has been claimed, and perhaps with justice, that the irritation provoked by Thackeray’s virtuous heroines is born of wounded vanity. Mr. Lang observes that women easily pardon Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory, but never Amelia Sedley nor Laura Pendennis. For the matter of that, men easily pardon Mr. Collins and Mr. Elton. They do more than pardon, they delight in these incomparable clerics, and they adore Miss Austen for having created them. Mr. Saintsbury vows that Mr. Collins is worthy of Fielding or Swift. But their sentiments towards the excellent Edmund Bertram, who is all that a parson should be, are not wholly unlike the sentiments of women towards Amelia Sedley, who is all that a wife and a mother should be; nor are they ready to admit that Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley are worthy of Elizabeth and Emma. Lord Brabourne has recorded a distinct prejudice against Mr. Knightley, on the ground that he interferes too much; yet it is plain that Miss Austen considered this interference as a masculine prerogative, exercised with judgment and discretion. He is what women call “a thorough man,” just as Amelia is what men call “a thorough woman.” Mr. Lang bravely confesses his affection for her on this very score: “She is such a thorough woman.” It evidently does not occur to him to doubt Thackeray’s knowledge, or his own knowledge, of the sex.