Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 1072
For Love and Friendship, with some similar pages in the accompanying fragments, is really a rattling burlesque; something much better than what the ladies of the time called an agreeable rattle. It is one of those things that can be the more readily read with enjoyment through being written with enjoyment; in other words, it is all the better for being juvenile in the sense of being joyful. She is said to have written these things at the age of seventeen, evidently in much the same spirit in which people conduct a family magazine; for the medallions included in the manuscript were the work of her sister Cassandra. The whole thing is full of the sort of high spirits that are always higher in private than in public; as people laugh louder in the house than in the street. Many of her admirers would not expect, perhaps many of her admirers would not admire, the sort of fun to be found in the letter to the young lady `whose feelings were too strong for her judgment’, and who remarks incidentally `I murdered my father at a very early period in my life, I have since murdered my mother, and I am now going to murder my sister’. Personally, I think it admirable; not the conduct, but the confession. But there is much more than hilarity in the humour, even at this stage of its growth. There is almost everywhere a certain neatness in the nonsense. There is not a little of the true Austen irony. ‘The noble Youth informed us that his name was Lindsay — for particular reasons, however, I shall conceal it under that of Talbot.’ Did anyone really desire that to disappear into the waste-paper basket? `She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her — she was only an object of contempt.’ Is not that something like the first faint line in the figure of Fanny Price? When a loud knocking is heard on the door of the Rustic Cot by the Uske, the heroine’s father enquires the nature of the noise, and by cautious steps of inference they are enabled to define it as somebody outside striking the door. `”Yes” (exclaimed I) “I cannot help thinking it must be somebody who knocks for admittance.” “That is another point” (replied he) “we must not pretend to determine on what motive the person may knock — tho’ that some one does rap at the door I am partly convinced”.’ In the aggravating leisure and lucidity of that reply, is there not the foreshadowing of another and more famous father; and do we not hear for a moment, in the rustic cottage by the Uske, the unmistakable voice of Mr Bennet?
But there is a larger critical reason for taking pleasure in the gaiety of these various travesties and trifles. Mr Austen-Leigh seems to have thought them not sufficiently serious for the reputation of his great relative; but greatness is not made up of serious things, in the sense of solemn things. The reason here, however, is as serious as even he or anyone else could desire; for it concerns the fundamental quality of one of the finest talents in letters.
A very real psychological interest, almost amounting to a psychological mystery, attaches to any early work of Jane Austen. And for that one reason, among others, which has hardly been sufficiently emphasised. Great as she was, nobody was likely to maintain that she was a poet. But she was a marked example of what is said of the poet; she was born, not made. As compared with her, indeed, some of the poets really were made. Many men who had the air of setting the world on fire have left at least a reasonable discussion about what set them on fire. Men like Coleridge or Carlyle had certainly kindled their first torches from the flambeaux of equally fantastic German mystics or Platonic speculators; they had gone through furnaces of culture where even less creative people might have been inflamed to creation. Jane Austen was not inflamed or inspired or even moved to be a genius; she simply was a genius. Her fire, what there was of it, began with herself; like the fire of the first man who rubbed two dry sticks together. Some would say that they were very dry sticks which she rubbed together. It is certain that she by her own artistic talent made interesting what thousands of superficially similar people would have made dull. There was nothing in her circumstances, or even in her materials, that seems obviously meant for the making of such an artist. It might seem a very wild use of the wrong word to say that Jane Austen was elemental. It might even seem even a little wanton to insist that she was original. Yet this objection would come from the critic not really considering what is meant by an element or an origin. Perhaps it might be as well expressed in what is really meant by an individual. Her ability is an absolute; it cannot be analysed into influences. She has been compared to Shakespeare; and in this sense she really does recall the joke about the man who said he could write like Shakespeare if he had the mind. In this case we seem to see a thousand spinsters sitting at a thousand tea-tables; and they could all have written Emma, if they had the mind.
There is therefore, in considering even her crudest early experiments, the interest of looking at a mind and not at a mirror. She may not be conscious of being herself; yet she is not, like so many more cultivated imitators, conscious of being somebody else. The force, at its first and feeblest, is coming from within and not merely from without. This interest, which belongs to her as an individual with a superior instinct for the intelligent criticism of life, is the first of the reasons that justify a study of her juvenile works; it is an interest in the psychology of the artistic vocation. I will not say of the artistic temperament; for nobody ever had less of the tiresome thing commonly so described than Jane Austen. But while this alone would be a reason for finding out how her work began, it becomes yet more relevant when we have found out how it did begin. This is something more than the discovery of a document; it is the discovery of an inspiration. And that inspiration was the inspiration of Gargantua and of Pickwick; it was the gigantic inspiration of laughter.
If it seemed odd to call her elemental, it may seem equally odd to call her exuberant. These pages betray her secret; which is that she was naturally exuberant. And her power came, as all power comes, from the control and direction of exuberance. But there is the presence and pressure of that vitality behind her thousand trivialities; she could have been extravagant if she liked. She was the very reverse of a starched or a starved spinster; she could have been a buffoon like the Wife of Bath if she chose. This is what gives an infallible force to her irony. This is what gives a stunning weight to her understatements. At the back of this artist also, counted as passionless, there was passion; but her original passion was a sort of joyous scorn and a fighting spirit against all that she regarded as morbid and lax and poisonously silly. The weapons she forged were so finely finished that we might never have known this, but for these glimpses of the crude furnace from which they came. Finally there are two additional facts involved which I will leave the modern critics and correspondents in newspapers to ponder and explain at their leisure. One is that this realist, in rebuking the romantics, is very much concerned with rebuking them for the very thing for which revolutionary sentiment has so much admired them; as for their glorification of ingratitude to parents and their easy assumption that the old are always wrong. ‘No!’ says the noble Youth in Love and Friendship, `never shall it be said that I obliged my father.’ And the other is that there is not a shadow of indication anywhere that this independent intellect and laughing spirit was other than contented with a narrow domestic routine, in which she wrote a story as domestic as a diary in the intervals of pies and puddings, without so much as looking out of the window to notice the French Revolution.
The Countrymen of Mary Webb and Thomas Hardy
The work of Mary Webb had an aspect distinct from all the debate about it merely as a case of something first neglected because it was not advertised and then advertised because it was neglected. I am not claiming to be one of the discoverers: nor am I one of those who hastened to discover the thing after it had been discovered. I only read one of the writer’s books, Precious Bane, and that struck me as strangely and very individually beautiful; but I thought it unique in every sense of the word, and never even knew if the writer’s name were known, or if she had written anything else. But the book left a very strong impression on my mind, and especially in one respect. It is very vivid and at the same time indescribable. Perhaps the hint is in the word ‘precious’ in Precious Bane. Not that Mrs Webb was in the least precious in the priggish sense. I mean in the things of price: a richness in things commonly connected with bareness and poverty. Something of what is spoken of as the gorgeous East, rested like the transparent colours of a rainbow, upon a landscape very typical of the West. Perhaps we sometimes forget, when we talk of Orient pearls and gold, that the sunset can be rich as well as the sunrise.
The romance described rustics in an age when they were even ruder than they were in the tales of Hardy or the poems of Housman. Nor was there the smallest attempt to idealise the life in the sense of suiting it to the rather low ideal of modern sentiment and comfort. The country was not turned into an Arcadia even of the really natural grace of Virgil or Theocritus; still less are the peasants turned into stage peasants or the shepherdess to a china shepherdess. The thing I mean by riches is something more subtle even than happiness. These peasants live a hard life; they probably on occasion live a hungry life; they are quite capable in some circumstances of living a gross or ferocious life. But they do, in a very deep sense, live a full life. And that is where the very atmosphere of the book differs from that of Hardy or of many striking and valuable books upon the same theme; books that have, indeed, found grandeur and even beauty in such a primitive existence, but have found only the beauty of bare rocks or the grandeur of the desert. The atmosphere of such books is that of stoicism, if not pessimism. The atmosphere of this book is that of mysticism; and we feel that the rustics themselves are not only the mysteries but also the mystics. It is inadequate to say, by one of those critical phrases which become only too quickly cant phrases, that the story is full of colour. The stories of Thomas Hardy, for instance, are undoubtedly full of colour. Men have used the metaphors of cloud and darkness in talking, whether justly or unjustly, of his metaphysical and moral ideas. But whatever may be true of his ideas, this is certainly not true of his imagery. The pictures that remain in my own memory, and I imagine in most other memories, of a first reading of the Wessex Tales, are rather specially picked out in strong sunlight. Nothing could be clearer than the outlines or brighter than the hues of some of those bright and cruel comedies of love and hate, along the white roads or on the great green hills. If his characters were indeed only puppets of destiny, they were often very gaily dressed puppets. There is no lack of light, if it be sometimes as deadly as lightning; and though he insisted too much that there is no rose without a thorn, he never failed to give very rich tints to the roses.
But there is in Hardy’s work, as in all work really belonging to a pagan world, this character: that all the light is shining on things and not through them. It is all the difference between the gaiety of an old pagan painting or mosaic and the burning clarity of a medieval window. And we do sometimes feel, in mere poverty, as in medieval austerity, that things may be bright by being transparent and transparent by being thin. If Hardy made a tragedy out of a tree and a well and a thunderstorm, he wanted to turn the strong sunlight on the scene almost like a theatrical limelight. He wanted the daylight to explore the well, we might almost say that he wanted the daylight to shine on and show up the darkness. But he did not mean, at any rate, not as the mystics can mean, that there was a mystery within the tree, making it truly a tree of life; or a special providence even in a falling thunderbolt. And if he thought that truth lay at the bottom of the well, I think it was commonly in the form of a corpse. At any rate, it was not in the form of a goddess or a nymph of the spring. He did not specially feel that a positive life, still less that a joyful life, was irradiating outwards through these things. He did not think that they meant something; he only thought that he meant something in saying that they meant nothing. The whole irony of his meaning is in that unmeaning world.
Now, Mary Webb and her peasants live in a very meaning world. Life, quite apart from the proportions of its sadness or gladness, is stuffed with significance. There is the silent pressure of a second sense in things; and a sort of halo round every object, whether of horror or tenderness. Thunderstorms are more than thunderstorms, and trees are more than trees, and the well is deeper than any man has known. This is expressed, merely externally, in a tangle of associations and traditions about all sorts of things; so that candles or cabbages or common objects of the kitchen may have dark properties. But it is the expression of a sense of fullness, as in the rain-cloud or even the thundercloud; and richness not only in the soul, but in the dark subsoil of existence. And I think this atmosphere is true, touching simple people, and all those who are near to the earth. Stupid people, hopelessly, hideously stupid people, generally call it superstition.
I mean that the more grimly realistic school is not wrong in being realistic, certainly not wrong in being tragic, but it is wrong, touching humanity of this type, in not being mystic. Common country folk like Tess or Jude the Obscure might well have been hurt as much as they were hurt, and cried out when they were hurt in a human fashion, and died when they were hurt too much, in the manner of all tragedy. But they would not have seen themselves in such hard and naked outline as the pessimistic novelist sees them. The whole thing would have been at once enriched and confused by the mystical traditions of mankind; by the remains of religion, by the hints of superstition, by the mystery of death which cuts both ways, like the two-edged sword of the angel. They would have felt desperate, but they would not have felt insignificant; they would have felt significant. That is the quality that clings to my memory out of that remarkable story, which I read so long ago — the story called Precious Bane. And it is connected with another quality in it, a quality very rare in recent literature; something which I can only call the note of nobility. Here again, there is something even in the title that suggests the truth. A precious thing does not merely mean a sumptuous thing, in the sense of something connected with gross luxury and wealth. A precious thing means something that is bought with a price; and in this case there is present the whole of that idea of the ancient price of sacrifice. That a bane can be precious is not a fashionable doctrine just now. Nor do I propose to debate its moral implications in this passing literary note. But it is certain that, wherever that conception is present in literature, there is made possible a poetic height and the breathing of a spiritual air that are never known where it is neglected; that even in the world of what is purely artistic, that degree of dignity is only attainable through something moral; and that, if there be art critics who care only for art, they would do well to keep martyrdom in the world, if only by making other people the martyrs.
The Words of Strong Poetry
The writing of Free Verse is currently compared to talking, as in the accepted French phrase about a causerie. And indeed any one who has conducted it so continuously and so long is apt to forget that anything he says may be taken down and used in evidence against him. I have always done my best to remember that I am rather in the dock than in the pulpit, and that I have very little to say, though I have said a good deal, to show why sentence of death should not be passed on me. When Science has really completed all these comforts which it promises mankind, and when all conversations are automatically taken down on a dictaphone or repeated on a phonograph, I rather doubt whether many people will want to put on the records. But, just as many a man has said that he hardly knew his own voice when it came back to him out of a gramophone, so I often wonder, when I chance to come in contact with some of the cracked and dreary records, how I failed to make my voice properly heard or my meaning sufficiently clear. Sometimes it arises from unavoidable hurry or pressure of work; sometimes from neglecting to explain things in their proper order and to put first things first. Sometimes I find I have taken things for granted, used words that have six or seven meanings, left out important steps of the argument, jumped to conclusions, and acted in short as if I were a Professor of Universal Science expounding an Outline of Universal History for Neglected Aunts and Uncles.
Many of these things are merely the inevitable disadvantages of the causerie; but there is one very real advantage in a causerie, even in the literal sense of a talk. Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed it excellently when he said that writing to a man was like firing at him with a gun, while talking to him was like playing on him with a garden-hose. In the first case it is hit and miss; in the second a man can correct his mistakes and correct his line of fire, or rather of water. In such a case, this kind of causerie has really some of the advantages of conversation. I will, therefore, have a shot at the free versifier; or rather (being too humane to shoot him, and very likely to miss him) I will continue to play on him benevolently with the hose, till he is soaked and dripping with the refreshing waters of Helicon, the true fount of free verse, with which I have the joy of sprinkling or asperging him.
I think the first truth about traditional metres is that there is a sort of speech that is stronger than speech. Not merely smoother or sweeter or more melodious or even more beautiful; but stronger. Words are jointed together like bones; they are mortared together like bricks; they are close and compact and resistant; whereas, in all common conversational speech, every sentence is falling to pieces. Perhaps we recognise this latter fact when we talk about letting fall a remark or dropping a hint or throwing out an observation. All conversational speech or writing is under the curse of the Fall; it is under the law of gravitation; it is perpetually falling down, like the universe of Lucretius. But great poets do not drop hints or let observations fall; they lift them and hold them aloft, as the keystone of a strong arch thrusts up the stones, defying the law of gravity and the devil and all his angels. The words of strong poetry are packed as tight and solid as the stones of the arch. The lines of a good sonnet are like bridges of sound across abysses of silence. The boast of the bridges is that you could march armies across them; that a man can rest his weight on every word. The awful cry out of the last tragic trance of Othello, when he realises that death is as real as love, finds words worthy of itself; megalithic words; words not only of weight but weight-bearing; words strong enough to support him above the abyss. `If I quench thee, thou flaming minister . . .’ The address to the candle might almost be called obscure, but it is not doubtful; it is not hesitant or wavering in words or the sound of words; it is rather as if a man were granted a greater thing than speech. And the effect is gained by this firmness in the words and the weight that can rest on them. `I know not where is that Promethean heat.’ You could stand an elephant on that line. It is true, first of all, as a mere fact of acoustics, that there is not one weak syllable in the line. At the same time, there is also that strength of style that is like the strength of gesture. `I know not where’ is the essential elemental cry of man, eternally ignorant of the beginning of life, or of how it may truly be renewed. And it is a plain and simple fact, whether we like it or not, that the words `I know not where’ do sound like some such ancestral city; while the words, `I don’t know where’ certainly do not.
