The Upton Letters

by Arthur Christopher Benson

But I must not end thus. I came home; I told my tale; I found my friend returned. He nodded gravely and wonderingly, and I think he half understood. But his wife was full of curiosity. She made me tell and retell the incident. "Was there no one you could ask?" she said; "I would not have rested till I had solved it." She even bade me tell her the name of the place, but I refused. "Do you mean to say you don't WANT to know?" she said. "No," I said; "I had rather not know." To which, rather petulantly, she said, "Oh, you MEN!" That evening a neighbouring parson, his wife, and daughter, came to dine. I was bidden to tell my story again, and the same scene was re-enacted. "Was there no one you could find to ask?" said the girl. I laughed and said, "I daresay I could have found some one, but I did not want to know. I had rather have my little mystery," I added; and then we men interchanged a nod, while the women looked sharply at each other. "Is it not quite incredible?" my friend's wife said. And the daughter added, "I, for one, will not rest till I have discovered."

That, I suppose, is the difference between the masculine and the feminine mind. You will understand me; but read the story to your wife and daughters, and they will say, "Was there no one he could have asked?" and "I would not rest till I had discovered." Meanwhile I only hope that my maiden's efforts will prove unavailing.—Ever yours,

T. B.

GREENHOWE,
SEDBERGH,
Aug. 21, 1904.

MY DEAR HERBERT,—I suppose I am very early Victorian in my tastes; but I have just been reading Jane Eyre again with intense satisfaction. (I will tell you presently WHY I have been reading it.) I read it first as a boy at Eton, and I must have read it twenty times since. I know that much of it is grotesque, but it seems to me that its grotesqueness is not absurd, any more than the stiff animals and trees or hills in the early Italian pictures are absurd; one smiles, not contemptuously, but tenderly at it all.

Again, there are two ways of treating a work of art. If a portrait, for instance, is intensely realistic and true to its original, one says, "How lifelike!" If it is widely unlike the original, one can always say, "How symbolical!" Of the first kind of portrait one may say that it brings the man before you; of the latter you may say that the artist has striven to paint the soul rather than the body. Well, I think it is fair to call Jane Eyre symbolical. Some of the people depicted are very true to life. The old, comfortable, good-humoured housekeeper, Mrs. Fairfax; Bessie the nursemaid; Adele, the little French girl, Mr. Rochester's ward; the two Rivers sisters—they are admirable portraits. But Mr. Rochester, the haughty Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park, Miss Ingram, who says to the footman, "Leave that chatter, blockhead, and do my bidding," St. John Rivers, the blue-eyed fanatic—these are caricatures or types, according as you like to view them. To me they are types: characters finely conceived, and only exaggerated because Charlotte Bronte had never mixed with people of that species in ordinary life. But I think that one can see into the souls of these people in spite of the exaggerations of speech and gesture and behaviour which disfigure them. Yet it is not primarily for the character-drawing that I value the book. What attracts me is the romance, the beauty, the poetry of the whole, and a special union of intellectual force, with passion at white heat, which breathes through them. The love scenes have the same strange glow that I always feel in Tennyson's "Come into the garden, Maud," where the pulse of the lover thrills under one's hand with the love that beats from the heart of the world. And then, too, Charlotte Bronte seems to me to have had an incomparable gift of animating a natural scene with vivid human emotions. The frost-bound day, when the still earth holds its breath, when the springs are congealed, and the causeway is black with slippery ice, in that hour when Jane Eyre first sees Mr. Rochester; and again the scene in the summer garden, just before the thunderstorm, when Mr. Rochester calls her to look at the great hawk-moth drinking from the flower chalice. Such scenes have a vitality that makes them as real to me as scenes upon which my own eyes have rested.

Again, I know no writer who has caught the poetry of the hearth like Charlotte Bronte. The evening hours, when the fire leaps in the chimney, and the lamp is lit, and the homeless wind moans outside, and the contented mind possesses its dreams—I know nothing like that in any book.

Indeed, I do not know any books which give me quite the sense of genius that Charlotte Bronte's bring me. I find it difficult to define where the genius lies; but the love which she dares to depict seems to me to have a different quality to any other love; it is the passionate ardour of a pure soul; it embraces body, mind, and heart alike; it is a love that pierces through all disguises, and is the worship of spirit for spirit at the very root of being; such love is not lightly conceived or easily given; it is not born of chance companionship, of fleshly desire, of a craving to share the happiness of a buoyant spirit of sunshine and sweetness; it is rather nurtured in gloom and sadness, it demands a corresponding depth and intensity, it requires to discern in its lover a deep passion for the beauty of virtue. It is one of the triumphs of Jane Eyre that the love she feels for Mr. Rochester pierces through those very superficial vices which would be most abhorrent to the pure nature, if it were not for the certainty that such vice was the disguise and not the essence of the soul. And here lies, I think, the uplifting hopefulness of Jane Eyre, the Christ-like power of recognising the ardent spirit of love behind gross faults of both the animal and the intellectual nature.

I do not know if you ever came across a book—I must send it you if you have not seen it—which moves me and feeds my spirit more than almost any book I know—the Letters and Journals of William Cory. He was a master at Eton, you know, but before our time; and his life was rather a disappointed one; but he had that remarkable union of qualities which I think is very rare—hard intellectual force with passionate tenderness. I suppose that, as far as mental ability went, he was one of the very foremost men of his day. He had a faultless memory, great clearness and vigour of thought, and perfect lucidity of expression. But he valued these gifts very little in comparison with feeling, which was his real life. It always interests me deeply to find that he had the same opinion of Charlotte Bronte that I hold; and indeed I have always thought that, allowing for a difference of nationality, he was very much the kind of man whom she depicted in Villette as Paul Emmanuel.

Personality is, after all, the ultimate foundation of art, and I think that what I value most of all in Charlotte Bronte's books is the revelation of herself that they afford. The shy, frail, indomitable, ardent creature, inured to poverty and hardness, without illusions, without material temptations, but all aglow with the sacred fire—such is the character that here emerges. Charlotte Bronte as a writer seems to me like a burning-glass which concentrates on one intense point the fiercest fire of the soul. I would humbly believe that there is much of this spirit in the world, but that it seldom co-exists with the artistic power, the intellectual force, that enables it to express itself.