But the great Victorian novelists pushed their speculations beyond the elementary problems raised by the victim-villain situation. They had, several of them, personal reasons for reflecting thoughtfully upon the social utility of the stout bulwarks with which the English law attempted to fortify the idea of chastity and the related doctrine of the irretrievable. Dickens is said to have fallen in love with all the Hogarth daughters and to have married the wrong one. Thackeray married at twenty-five a woman who half a dozen years later became insane and who outlived him. Bulwer-Lytton was legally separated at twenty-three from a woman who outlived him. Meredith’s Modern Love discusses an incompatibility of temper from which a death divorced him. And George Eliot, high priestess of Victorian morality, was actually living in a kind of solemn and almost officious virtue with another woman’s husband. These were circumstances arranged to liberate speculation and to set it playing a little skeptically about the one way out—the sole dark exit which Goldsmith had so glibly offered to lovely women who are unfortunate in love.
In a novel of the mid-nineteenth century, which used to be thought very dangerous reading,—Jane Eyre,—Charlotte Brontë considered one of these more difficult cases, and almost presented it. Jane, an eager, self-reliant, self-supporting, and fairly hard-headed young woman, first of our modern heroines, is loved with a grand passion by Rochester, who is enchained by marriage to a hopeless lunatic. Now the novelist permits Jane to fall deeply in love with Rochester, thus perilously illustrating the possibility that a truly great and two-sided passion may come into existence outside legal status. Charlotte Brontë, however, intervened twice to save the situation. She wasn’t fastidious about the chastity of Rochester: chastity is a female virtue. But she was fastidious about the chastity of Jane. And so, of course, she makes Jane ignorant at first of the fact that Rochester is married; and she makes Jane tell him that it is all up, when she learns that he is married. That was the perfectly correct thing for Jane to do.
But it created a dilemma. Charlotte Brontë knew that it created a dilemma—a dilemma with unchastity for one horn and the frustration of a grand passion for the other. (It should perhaps be explained that a grand passion, in those illiberal days, was thought of as an experience that befell a girl but once in a lifetime.) Charlotte Brontë did not quite dare to treat this dilemma. She faced it for a moment. She let her readers face it for a moment. Then she intervened again: she destroyed the dilemma. She made it all come right. She restored both hero and heroine to chastity by pitching the lunatic wife headlong into the flames of the house of Rochester.
A happy thought—so it must have seemed to the author. Yet, as one reflects upon it, this solution appears a little dangerous. To pitch a superfluous wife into the flames—well, it would not quite serve as a Kantian basis for the solution of all such problems. Under the English law, the dilemma reasserted its actuality. Jane Eyre stands there early in the Victorian Age as a challenge, rather evasively presented, to the idea of chastity. In W. B. Maxwell’s Spinster of This Parish, 1923, a modern heroine is placed in almost precisely Jane’s situation, except that her lover does not think it necessary to lie to her about his lunatic wife. Without a moment’s hesitation, she accepts the grand passion. Since she accepts it with all the fortitude and fidelity of an old-fashioned wife, she seems to-day a quite safe, old-fashioned character; and it is hard to conceive of any one’s thinking of her as “unchaste.”
Other Victorians, usually with much circumspection, returned to the dilemma; and they returned to it in such numbers that to challenge the idea of chastity as a legal creation may be regarded as a rather distinctively Victorian contribution. From the question what to do when you are united to an undivorceable insane wife, the Victorians proceeded cautiously to consider the demands of virtue in analogous sets of circumstances. What is the point at which the maintenance of legal chastity involves the loss of ethical integrity? What is right conduct for a young girl whose parents or relatives have united her in a “suitable marriage” to a repellent brute of means and good family? That is a question which interested Thackeray in The Newcomes; and it will be remembered that the wife of Barnes Newcome answers the question in her own case by giving her husband occasion for divorce under the English law. It is not always observed that to Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter right conduct, to the last page of the book, consists in fidelity to her lover, not to her fanatical husband; and Hawthorne, perhaps indecently, places the lovers in adjacent graves of a Boston burying-ground. Isabel Archer, in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, is begged by her lover to desert her husband and come to him, and to disregard the “bottomless idiocy” of what other people will think or say about them. Though, on the last page, Isabel is still clinging to legality, one is left in some doubt whether she will cling indefinitely. Meredith’s Diana is a standing challenge to the doctrine of irretrievable marriage. Hardy’s Tess is a defiance to the idea of chastity entertained by the Angel Clares; and the obscene relation in Jude the Obscure is obviously that between him and his wife, not that between him and Sue, except as it is smirched by his return to his wife and by her return to her husband.
But why multiply instances? Here are enough to show that the good Victorians repeatedly solicited our sympathy and our support for heroines whose ethical integrity was afflicted by their legal chastity. The idea of illicit love as an affair of victim and villain, has been largely jettisoned or given over to melodrama, as of an interest too primitive or too banal for extended consideration. To their successors, the Victorian realists bequeath, as matter of far higher artistic and general human concern, their rather cautious essays upon the evaded dilemma of Jane Eyre.
III
H. G. WELLS, GALSWORTHY, MAY SINCLAIR, J. D. BERESFORD
Let us now enter fearfully upon the burning ground of contemporary fiction. The territory is immense, and unexplorable here in detail. All that one can do is to stand upon the smoky borderland, and comment briefly upon some conspicuous spots in the conflagrant area and upon the general direction of the wind.
One cannot, on every occasion for mentioning him, reread the entire works of Mr. Wells. I retain a strong impression that most of his novels of contemporary life challenge the idea of indissoluble marriage. In this respect Mr. Wells is no innovator. I retain also the impression that one tends to derive from these novels a conviction that everyone’s first marriage is a mistake. This indicates the direction of the wind. Now Mr. Wells is a long way from accepting Goldsmith’s idea that death is the only way out of a bad situation. He has no patience with the doctrine of irretrievability. But as long as unlawful relations furnish the only available alternative way out, his works naturally disquiet Cornelia, and challenge her idea of chastity.
His works disquiet me, because I think the defect which his heroes and heroines find in their first marriage they will find also in their second, and their third, and their fourth; they will find that neither the second nor the third nor the fourth marriage is capable of sustaining indefinitely the sense of ecstasy which the tired business man experiences the first time he notices how pretty his stenographer is. Tedium is three fourths of life. Sensible men settle quietly down to endure it, sustained by their fortitude and their twenty-five per cent of creature comforts and incidentals. The others imagine that by Babbittian adventures they can change the proportions and get something better than tedium. There is nothing that is even “just as good.” Thackeray knew this and admitted it. Mr. Wells hasn’t admitted it. That constitutes one distinction between the author of The Newcomes and the author of The New Machiavelli.