Part 1 (1/2)

Varied Types

by G K Chesterton

CHARLOTTE BRONTe

Objection is often raised against realistic biography because it reveals so much that is important and even sacred about a man's life The real objection to it will rather be found in the fact that it reveals about a man the precise points which are unimportant It reveals and asserts and insists on exactly those things in a man's life of which the man himself is wholly unconscious; his exact class in society, the circumstances of his ancestry, the place of his present location These are things which do not, properly speaking, ever arise before the human vision They do not occur to a man's mind; it may be said, with almost equal truth, that they do not occur in a man's life A man no more thinks about himself as the inhabitant of the third house in a row of Brixton villas than he thinks about his What a man's name hat his income hom he married, where he lived, these are not sanctities; they are irrelevancies

A very strong case of this is the case of the Brontes The Bronte is in the position of the e; her eccentricities forly lorious gossips of literature, like Mr Augustine Birrell and Mr Andrew Lang, never tire of collecting all the glihts and sticks and strahich will go to make a Bronte museum They are the most personally discussed of all Victorian authors, and the liraphy has left few darkened corners in the dark old Yorkshi+re house And yet the whole of this biographical investigation, though natural and picturesque, is not wholly suitable to the Brontes

For the Bronte genius was above all things deputed to assert the supreme unimportance of externals Up to that point truth had always been conceived as existing more or less in the novel ofthat an infinitely older and more elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in which no person, good or bad, had any reat assertion that the huuise as tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a _bal overness and eternities inside a manufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace spinster, with the dress of nificant to notice that Charlotte Bronte, following consciously or unconsciously the great trend of her genius, was the first to take away froold and diaold and diarace Instinctively she felt that the whole of the exterior ht be liest of centuries, and revealed within them all the hells and heavens of Dante

It itih singularly picturesque in themselves, matter less than the externals of al to knohether Jane Austen had any knowledge of the lives of the officers and women of fashi+on whom she introduced into herto knohether dickens had ever seen a shi+pwreck or been inside a workhouse For in these authors much of the conviction is conveyed, not always by adherence to facts, but always by grasp of the of the work of the Brontes is that thein the whole universe is fact Such a story as ”Jane Eyre” is in itself so ht to be excluded from a book of fairy tales The characters do not do what they ought to do, nor what they would do, nor it ht be said, such is the insanity of the atmosphere, not even what they intend to do The conduct of Rochester is so primevally and superhumanly caddish that Bret Harte in his ad his usual manner, he threw his boots atrese caricature The scene in which Rochester dresses up as an old gipsy has so in it which is really not to be found in any other branch of art, except in the end of the pantomime, where the Ehtnorance of the world, ”Jane Eyre” is perhaps the truest book that was ever written Its essential truth to life sometimes makes one catch one's breath For it is not true to manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are al which is true, eerle straw if a Bronte story were a hundred times more moonstruck and improbable than ”Jane Eyre,” or a hundred tihts” It would not e Read stood on his head, and Mrs Read rode on a dragon, if Fairfax Rochester had four eyes and St John Rivers three legs, the story would still remain the truest story in the world The typical Bronte character is, indeed, a kind ofin his and his feet on his arht place

The great and abiding truth for which the Bronte cycle of fiction stands is a certainspirit of youth, the truth of the near kinshi+p between terror and joy The Bronte heroine, dingily dressed, badly educated, haly innocence, is yet, by the very fact of her solitude and her gaucherie, full of the greatest delight that is possible to a huht of an ardent and flanorance She serves to sho futile it is of humanity to suppose that pleasure can be attained chiefly by putting on evening dress every evening, and having a box at the theatre every first night It is not the man of pleasure who has pleasure; it is not the man of the world who appreciates the world The s perfectly has at the same time learnt to do the dress does not fit hio on, whose compliments will not come off, who is really full of the ancient ecstasies of youth He is frightened enough of society actually to enjoy his triumphs He has that eleredients of joy This spirit is the central spirit of the Bronte novel It is the epic of the exhilaration of the shy man As such it is of incalculable value in our time, of which the curse is that it does not take joy reverently because it does not take it fearfully The shabby and inconspicuous governess of Charlotte Bronte, with the small outlook and the small creed, had more commerce with the awful and eleion of lawless minor poets She approached the universe with real siht She was, so to speak, shy before the multitude of the stars, and in this she had possessed herself of the only force which can prevent enjoy as black and barren as routine The faculty of being shy is the first and the most delicate of the powers of enjoy of pleasure

Upon the whole, therefore, I think it may justifiably be said that the dark wild youth of the Brontes in their dark wild Yorkshi+re hoerated as a necessary factor in their work and their conception The emotions hich they dealt were universal etide joy and the springtide terror Every one of us as a boy or girl has had soht dream of nameless obstacle and unutterable menace, in which there was, under whatever i Heights” Every one of us has had a day-dream of our own potential destiny not one atom more reasonable than ”Jane Eyre”

And the truth which the Brontes came to tell us is the truth that many waters cannot quench love, and that suburban respectability cannot touch or damp a secret enthusiasm Clapham, like every other earthly city, is built upon a volcano Thousands of people go to and fro in the wilderness of bricks and ion, wearing a mean attire, thousands of women who have never found any expression for their exaltation or their tragedy but to go on working harder and yet harder at dull and auto shi+rts But out of all these silent ones one suddenly became articulate, and spoke a resonant testi around us upon every side to-day like a huge and radiating georeat city There are times e are almost stricken crazy, as eperspectives, the frantic arithht of ours is in truth nothing but a fancy There are no chains of houses; there are no crowds of ram of streets and houses is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder Each of these men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself Each of these houses stands in the centre of the world There is no single house of all those millions which has not sees and the end of travel

WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS SCHOOL

It is proper enough that the unveiling of the bust of William Morris should approximate to a public festival, for while there have been enius in the Victorian era more despotic than he, there have been none so representative He represents not only that rapacious hunger for beauty which has now for the first time become a serious problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that honourable instinct for finding beauty in coer and more bony structure The time has passed when William Morris was conceived to be irrelevant to be described as a designer of wall-papers If Morris had been a hatter instead of a decorator, we should have becoradually and painfully conscious of an improvement in our hats If he had been a tailor, we should have suddenly found our frock-coats trailing on the ground with the grandeur of mediaeval raiment If he had been a shoemaker, we should have found, with no little consternation, our shoes gradually approxi to the antique sandal As a hairdresser, he would have invented so of the hair worthy to be the crown of Venus; as an ironer, his nails would have had some noble pattern, fit to be the nails of the Cross

The limitations of William Morris, whatever they were, were not the limitations of common decoration It is true that all his work, even his literary work, was in soree the qualities of a splendid wall-paper His characters, his stories, his religious and political views, had, in the th and breadth without thickness He seemed really to believe that men could enjoy a perfectly flat felicity He made no account of the unexplored and explosive possibilities of human nature, of the unna as aas he had the inspiring consciousness that the chestnut colour of his hair was relieved against the blue forest a mile behind, he would be serenely happy So he would be, no doubt, if he were really fitted for a decorative existence; if he were a piece of exquisitely coloured card-board

But although Morris took little account of the terrible solidity of huures in the round, it is altogether unfair to represent hireat public necessity and fulfilled it heroically The difficulty hich he grappled was one so immense that we shall have to be separated froe of it It was the probleliness of the most self-conscious of centuries Morris at least saw the absurdity of the thing He felt it was monstrous that thethe strangest and most contradictory beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic and the colossal calm of the hellenic God, should himself, by a farcical bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat

He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist It is indeed difficult to account for the clinging curse of ugliness which blights everything brought forth by the most prosperous of centuries In all created nature there is not, perhaps, anything so co of shapes, its height and thickness just neutralising each other; its colour is the most repulsive of colours--a fat and soulless red, a red without a touch of blood or fire, like the scarlet of dead men's sins Yet there is no reason whatever why such hideousness should possess an object full of civic dignity, the treasure-house of a thousand secrets, the fortress of a thousand souls If the old Greeks had had such an institution, we may be sure that it would have been surure of the God of letter-writing If the mediaeval Christians has possessed it, it would have had a niche filled with the golden aureole of St Rowland of the Postage Stauising one of the most beautiful of ideas under one of the most preposterous of forms It is useless to deny that the miracles of science have not been such an incentive to art and iion Ifhad been driven for leagues underground, and had dragged at its destroying tail loads of laughing hus, and if they had then been told that the people alluded to this pulverising portent chirpily as ”The Twopenny Tube,” they would have called down the fire of Heaven on us as a race of half-witted atheists Probably they would have been quite right

This clear and fine perception of what may be called the anaesthetic elereat reforination to see an evil that surrounds us on every side The manner in which Morris carried out his crusadethe circuan to bloo, and our hitherto prosaic stools and sofas sees and ared dignity ca ornaments of copper and iron So delicate and universal has been the revolution in doland has had its taste cunningly and treacherously i-rooe but essential truth that art, or human decoration, has, nine tilier than they were before, froe to the wall-paper of a British reat and beneficent as was the aesthetic revolution of Morris, there was a very definite limit to it It did not lie only in the fact that his revolution was in truth a reaction, though this was a partial explanation of his partial failure When he was denouncing the dresses ofdraped like women,” as he forcibly expressed it, he would hold up for practical ies Further than this retrogressive and io Now, the men of the time of Chaucer had many evil qualities, but there was at least one exhibition of hed at the idea of dressing themselves in thethemselves an aesthetic blue, after the custom of the ancient Britons They would not have called that a movement at all Whatever was beautiful in their dress orhonestly and naturally out of the life they led and preferred to lead And it may surely be maintained that any real advance in the beauty ofhonestly and naturally out of the life we lead and prefer to lead We are not altogether without hints and hopes of such a change, in the growing orthodoxy of rough and athletic costumes But if this cannot be, it will be no substitute or satisfaction to turn life into an interminable historical fancy-dress ball

But the limitation of Morris's work lay deeper than this We est it by a method after his own heart Of all the various works he performed, none, perhaps, was so splendidly and solidly valuable as his great protest for the fables and superstitions ofthat the fairy tales contain the deepest truth of the earth, the real record ofdetails may be inaccurate, Jack may not have cliiant; but it is not such things that s that makes every enuity, self-consciousness, hypocritical impartiality It appears to us that of all the fairy-tales none contains so vital ain many forms, of Beauty and the Beast There is written, with all the authority of a human scripture, the eternal and essential truth that until we love a thing in all its ugliness we cannot make it beautiful This was the weak point in Williaht to refor it Modern London is indeed a beast, big enough and black enough to be the beast in Apocalypse, blazing with awith a million voices But unless the poet can love this fabulous enerous excitement his massive and mysterious _joie-de-vivre_, the vast scale of his iron anato of his thunderous heart, he cannot and will not change the beast into the fairy prince Morris's disadvantage was that he was not honestly a child of the nineteenth century: he could not understand its fascination, and consequently he could not really develop it An abiding testimony to his tremendous personal influence in the aesthetic world is the vitality and recurrence of the Arts and Crafts Exhibitions, which are steeped in his personality like a chapel in that of a saint If we look round at the exhibits in one of these aesthetic shoe shall be struck by the large mass of modern objects that the decorative school leaves untouched There is a noble instinct for giving the right touch of beauty to cos that are so touched are the ancient things, the things that always to some extent commended theates, beautiful fountains, beautiful cups, beautiful chairs, beautiful reading-desks But there are no s made beautiful

There are no beautiful laines, beautiful bicycles The spirit of William Morris has not seized hold of the century and made its humblest necessities beautiful And this was because, with all his healthiness and energy, he had not the supres; Beauty shrank fro

But herein, indeed, lay Morris's deepest claireat reformer: that he left his work incomplete There is, perhaps, no better proof that a man is a mere meteor, merely barren and brilliant, than that his work is done perfectly A man like Morris draws attention to needs he cannot supply In after-years weArts and Crafts Exhibition In it we shall not decorate the armour of the twelfth century, but the ht nobly in twisted iron, fit to hold the sanctity of fire A pillar-box shall be carved with figures emblematical of the secrets of comradeshi+p and the silence and honour of the State

Railway signals, of all earthly things the most poetical, the coloured stars of life and death, shall be lareen and crimson worthy of their terrible and faithful service But if ever this gradual and genuine movement of our time towards beauty--not backwards, but forwards--does truly come about, Morris will be the first prophet of it

Poet of the childhood of nations, craftsman in the new honesties of art, prophet of a merrier and wiser life, his full-blooded enthusiasm will be remembered when human life has once more assurey of the aesthetic twilight in whichlive is, in spite of all the pessireyness of dawn