The sisters now wrote novels, Emily, "Wuthering Heights," Charlotte, "The Professor"; Anne, "Agnes Grey". In August, 1846, Charlotte began "Jane Eyre," which, when finished, came into the hands of Thackeray's publishers, Messrs. Smith & Elder, and filled them with amazement and enthusiasm. The book appeared in autumn, 1847, pleased Lockhart, then editor of "The Quarterly Review," no less than it pleased Mr. Smith, and at once became the "daughter of debate," discussed everywhere, praised and reviled, and, in some unintelligible way, most reviled by "The Quarterly". The critic detected in the author an unregenerate, violent rebel against society, and a woman who was a dishonour to her sex! Certainly—
A wounded human spirit turns
Here on its bed of pain.
The unparalleled vigour and genius of the early scenes, the cruelties which the lonely child supports with unconquered spirit, were things new in fiction, while the repressed passion of the plain yet seductive governess during the wooing of the too Byronic Mr. Rochester, and in a house as terrible as the castle of Mrs. Radcliffe's "Sicilian Romance," excited a lively romantic interest, accompanied by a tendency to smile at an ignorant imagination. Borrowed romance combined with instinctive realism, bitter experience blended with the day-dreams of a life, a frankness long forgotten by early Victorian fiction, made the novel a strange and triumphantly successful combination. That mentor of young novelists, George Lewes, recommended to the author the study of Miss Austen, whose novels Charlotte Brontë was not happy enough (because she never had been happy) to appreciate. That she had no humour we cannot say, but she had none of the kindly humour of her great predecessor.
Meanwhile "Wuthering Heights," that strange and strenuous study of violent characters, was eclipsed by "Jane Eyre," though it has now come to its own, thanks to the appreciations of Mr. Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne. The author did not live to find herself famous; Anne Brontë also died, leaving their sister in deeper solitude. Charlotte's "Shirley" (1849), with its caricatures of the local curates, caused the discovery of her authorship: the curates were forgiving, and the novel was welcomed. Miss Brontë visited London, a shy and tameless lioness, and met Thackeray, whom she had regarded as a Saul among the prophets, and discovered to be something rather different. Her shyness permitted her to rebuke him in good set terms, but blighted his guests. Her last novel, "Villette" (1852), with romantic situations, is a record of her personal experiences at Brussels; unfortunate for her hosts, and a cause of much gossip and personal discussion. The book is not destitute of the hungry bitterness which Matthew Arnold detected and disliked; and we ask how in the nature of things it could be otherwise? Her experience had been narrow, atrocious, and on her experience and from her experience she always drew when she did not borrow from her day-dreams. In life she did not find the love of which she dreamed: in 1854 (she had rejected several other suitors) she married the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, her father's curate, and died in the following year. Her life, her character, and her books were one, and were unique. "This little Jeanne d'Arc," as Thackeray called her, this eager rebel and ardent Tory, broke into the placidity of the contemporary novel, and opened a pathway unto many, who had little or none of her genius.
The best estimate of the Brontës, clear of and contemptuous of trivialities and gossip, is in French, "Les Sœurs Brontë," by the Abbé Dimnet.
Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The end of all that Greeks and Trojans suffered for Helen's sake was "that there might be a song in the ears of men of after times". In the view of the interests of art (and in no other) the end of Puritanism in New England was to inspire the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). He was more certainly the classical author of American fiction than either Thackeray or Dickens is in England. They were prodigal of their genius, giving "as rich men give who care not for their gifts," or, if you please, as poor men when the printer's devil is at the door, even as did Sir Walter, who never thought about "art". But Hawthorne hoarded his inspirations, and when he used them gave them in the best form which was within his means. The inspiration was always moral, and usually bizarre. In his published note-books we see his method; he conceived some strange situations; over some of these he brooded till the characters disengaged themselves and lived before his eyes, and worked out their wyrd under stress of sin and remorse. He thought of the effect of a sudden homicidal act on a character gay, innocent, and faunlike, and we have Donatello in "The Marble Faun" (or "Transformation"). He thought of the amour of a Puritan preacher (like Lockhart in "Adam Blair") and the idea grew into "The Scarlet Letter". He thought of the beautiful poisonous girl (an old legend) and we have "Rappacini's Daughter". The Puritan sense of sin, and the old New England sorrows of the witchcraft trials, and the shadows of the woods, and the fear of the Indians, among whom Meikle John Gibb (a Covenanter who went too far even for the Rev. Mr. Cargill) was a great medicine-man, dwelt in his imagination. He felt acutely, though not a man of religion, the horrors of the Genevan creed, which did not make the people who believed in it more unhappy than their Episcopalian neighbours. They were accustomed to the doctrines which horrified Hawthorne's contemporaries in America, and, like the Black Laird of Ormistoun, hanged for Darnley's murder, and richly deserving to be hanged for his daily misdeeds, they saw their way out of a doom of eternal fire which Hawthorne supposed them always to anticipate. Nervousness had not set in, the climate had not produced its effect on the sturdy Puritans of New England. By Hawthorne's time the climate had produced its effect, and he brooded blackly over what his ancestors should have felt—but did not feel. The Black Laird of Ormistoun had only to convince himself that he was of the Elect, as he did, and death, to him, meant, as he said, that he should sup that night in Paradise. Not understanding this buoyancy of temperament, Hawthorne dwelt on the horrors which he supposed his ancestors to have fed full of, and, in his stories, expressed his emotions in terms of imperishable art. Though he had no theological basis he remained a Puritan. He, to whom beauty was everything, talked of "the squeamish love of beauty". In Europe he is said (like an excellent Pope who had tin aprons made for the classic nude figures of Graeco-Roman sculpture) to have been horrified by the innocent nudities of ancient art. They had never seen anything so improper at Salem, Massachusetts, a decaying seaport where he was born, and lived for fourteen years after taking his degree at Bowdoin in 1825. Here he wrote short tales with little acceptance; and he did not till 1849-1854, publish his best known novels, "The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," and (a result of a stay at a peaceful and purely amateur socialist settlement, Brook Farm) "The Blithedale Romance". His "Tanglewood Tales," from Greek myths (in which Hermes is called "Quicksilver") at first repel, for obvious reasons, but, in fact and on reflection, have much charm, and with Kingsley's "The Heroes" ought not to be neglected by parents and guardians, but rather "placed in the hands" of children. Though some amateurs may prefer "The House of the Seven Gables," haunted as it is by the blood which chokes the Justice, and a little enlivened by the dusty humour of Hepzibah, a decayed gentlewoman, and pervaded by the pretty charm of Phoebe, "The Scarlet Letter" is probably Hawthorne's masterpiece. It may be, and has been, denied by specialists that the hectic and craven Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale could possibly have been the father of the elf-like child Pearl, but these are "oppositions of science, falsely so called". Hester's avenging husband may be, in conception, Dickenslike, but the treatment is far from suggesting Dickens, while the passion of Hester is a masterpiece of poetical fiction. Knots may be sought and found in any reed of fictitious narrative, but "The Scarlet Letter" remains, in its human characters and its dim lights, in its purposeful limitations, and hints at something unrevealed, a masterpiece of romance written under classical conditions. "The Marble Faun" (the plot and mystery were suggested by the murder, by a French duke, of his wife; Miriam is the British governess in that unholy affair) has noble moments and passages, and unconsciously reveals what his Note Books publicly avow, that Hawthorne was terribly ill at ease in Europe, and among monuments of classic and mediaeval art. He had some scruple about enjoying them—they were not at all American, and he was rather bitterly patriotic, one might almost say parochial, in certain moods. But he had lived for most of his life in Salem, Massachusetts; he had, for several years, been American consul at Liverpool; he was a genius of the most exquisite nature, and no more is needed to explain some acerbities and some misappreciations, while we can all sympathize with his criticisms of the adiposity of some British matrons.
Oliver Wendell Holmes.
What has been said about Longfellow may be whispered about Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was at once poet, essayist, and novelist. Both authors should be read first while the reader is young, and can enjoy their books with the freshness of an unsophisticated taste. This is not true of the very great things in literature, in these with advancing experience we ever find new merits, while in studying some early favourites we can scarcely recapture our original delight.
Holmes was born in the same year as Edgar Allan Poe (1809) at Cambridge in New England, where his father was "Orthodox minister of the First Church". This appears to mean that he was a Calvinist, while Harvard, where the son was educated, was devoted to the Unitarian creed, of which the Articles are, to the writer, unknown. Holmes accepted them. Medicine was his profession, he held for some time a Chair of Anatomy; in Boston, where he lived for the greater part of his life, he practised for some time, but his productions in verse and prose gradually caused him to occupy himself mainly with letters. In 1831 he first produced part of his "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," monologues with rare interruptions from the fellow guests of a pension. In 1857 he returned to this pleasant form of discursive essays, the other guests breaking in occasionally according to their ages and characters. Hitherto Holmes had been best known for "occasional verses," especially verses written for the Phi Beta Kappa Society of his University, and for college anniversaries. The "One Hoss Shay" is, in England, with "The Nautilus," the best known of these social feats. In his discursive essays he frequently breaks a lance with his old enemy, Calvinistic theology. This is not very exhilarating; at least to readers who never learned, or if they learned never attached any meaning to the Shorter Catechism. Holmes, who, to be sure, had a minister as his tutor, and Hawthorne, appear to have understood the doctrines, which were useful to Holmes as a butt, and to Hawthorne as a background in his novels, gloomy and alarming,—"The ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir". Naturally Holmes found the sciences to which he was bred very useful in supplying anecdotes and illustrations to his essays and romances. In "Elsie Venner," the heroine, on good Calvinistic principles, is of the seed of the Serpent, and inherits its nature, owing to some mishap of her mother with a rattlesnake. Whether this be scientifically conceivable or not, Elsie is, by inheritance, a perfectly original young woman in an ordinary environment of New England. We do not expect to meet Melusine so far from Lusignan. In "The Guardian Angel" the heroine has several complex personalities, derived from different ancestors, one of them a Red Indian. These devices are in Hawthorne's manner of fantastic invention, without Hawthorne's grasp and power, but the heroines are surrounded by characters more humorous and natural than Hawthorne's people, and the stories are extremely good reading, as are the discursive essays. There is abundance of knowledge of the world, of wit, of humour, and of kind good-humour. There is plenty of strange lore from old books of mystic medicine, and Holmes confessed to being "a little superstitious". Near the house of his boyhood there were "Devil's Footsteps" in a field, and a house from which a portion of the wall had been carried away "from within outward". The marks were associated with a story of a diabolical apparition at a Hell Fire Club, just as at Brasenose College, Oxford. The terrors of his childhood left their mark on his books. There was the faintest touch of Cotton Mather in this foe of Cotton's creed, which, out of fashion or not, was the nurse of many virtues inherited by its tireless opponent. His enduring fame rests on his "Autocrat" and other essays. "No man in England," said Thackeray in 1858, "can write with his charming mixture of wit, pathos, and imagination."