Virginia Woolf - Genius and Ink

The hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë will strike, we believe, with peculiar force upon the minds of a very large number of people. Of those hundred years she lived but thirty-nine, and it is strange to reflect what a different image we might have of her if her life had been a long one. She might have become, like other writers who were her contemporaries, a figure familiarly met with in London and elsewhere, the subject of anecdotes and pictures innumerable, removed from us well within the memory of the middle-aged, in all the splendour of established fame. But it is not so. When we think of her we have to imagine some one who had no lot in our modern world; we have to cast our minds back to the fifties of the last century, to a remote parsonage upon the wild Yorkshire moors. Very few now are those who saw her and spoke to her; and her posthumous reputation has not been prolonged by any circle of friends whose memories so often keep alive for a new generation the most vivid and most perishable characteristics of a dead man.

Nevertheless, when her name is mentioned, there starts up before our eyes a picture of Charlotte Brontë, which is as definite as that of a living person, and one may venture to say that to place her name at the head of a page will cause a more genuine interest than almost any other inscription that might be placed there. What new thing, one may well ask, is to be said of so strange and famous a being? How can we add anything about her life or her work which is not already part of the consciousness of the educated man and woman of today? We have seen Haworth, either in fact or in picture; long ago Mrs. Gaskell stamped our minds with an ineffaceable impression; and the devotion of later students has swept together every trifle that may render back the echoes of that short and circumscribed life.

But there is one peculiarity which real works of art possess in common. At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season. To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know. In their degree, the novels of Charlotte Brontë must be placed within the same class of living and changing creations, which so far as we can guess, will serve a generation yet unborn with a glass in which to measure its varying stature. In their turn they will say how she has changed to them, and what she has given them. If we collect a few of our impressions today, it is not with any hope of assigning her to her final position, or of drawing her portrait afresh; we offer merely our little hoard of observations, which other readers may like to set, for a moment, beside their own.

So many novels once held great have gone out of fashion, or are pronounced unreadable, that we may justly feel a little anxiety when the time comes to make trial of Jane Eyre and the rest. We have suggested that a book, in order to live, must have the power of changing as we change, and we have to ask ourselves whether it is possible that Charlotte Brontë can have kept pace with us. Shall we not go back to her world of the fifties and find that it is a place only to be visited by the learned, only to be preserved for the curious? A novelist, we reflect, is bound to build up his structure with much very perishable material, which begins by lending it reality, and ends by cumbering its form. The mid-Victorian world, moreover, is the last that we of the present moment wish to see resuscitated. One opens Jane Eyre with all these half-conscious premonitions and excuses, and in ten minutes one finds the whole of them dispersed and the light shining and the wind blowing upon a wild and bracing prospect.

Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating, me from the drear November day. At intervals while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspects of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.

As a room full of people makes one who enters suddenly conscious of heightened existence, so the opening passages of this book make us glow and shiver as though we stood out in the storm and saw the rain drive across the moor. There is nothing here that seems more perishable than the moor itself, or more subject to the sway of fashion than the ‘long and lamentable blast’. Nor is this exhilaration short-lived; it rushes us through the entire volume and scarcely gives us time to ask what is happening to us, nor in the end are we able to make out a very clear account of our adventures. We may reflect that this is exactly the opposite of our experience with certain other books justly numbered among the great. When we have finished The Idiot or Jude the Obscure , and even in the course of reading them, the plethoric state of mind which they induce is to be traced in a head resting on the hands, and oblivious eyes fixed upon the fire. We brood and ponder and drift away from the text in trains of thought which build up round the characters an atmosphere of question and suggestion in which they move, but of which they are unconscious. But it is not possible, when you are reading Charlotte Brontë, to lift your eyes from the page. She has you by the hand and forces you along her road, seeing the things she sees and as she sees them. She is never absent for a moment, nor does she attempt to conceal herself or to disguise her voice. At the conclusion of Jane Eyre we do not feel so much that we have read a book, as that we have parted from a most singular and eloquent woman, met by chance upon a Yorkshire hillside, who has gone with us for a time and told us the whole of her life history. So strong is the impression that if we are disturbed while we are reading the disturbance seems to take place in the novel and not in the room.

There are two reasons for this astonishing closeness and sense of personality – that she is herself the heroine of her own novels, and (if we may divide people into those who think and those who feel) that she is primarily the recorder of feelings and not of thoughts. Her characters are linked together by their passions as by a train of gunpowder. One of these small, pale, volcanic women, be she Jane Eyre or Lucy Snowe, has but to come upon the scene, and wherever she looks there start up round her characters of extreme individuality and intensity who are branded for ever with the features she discerns in them. There are novelists, like Tolstoy and Jane Austen, who persuade us that their characters live and are complex by means of their effect upon many different people, who mirror them in the round. They move hither and thither whether their creator watches them or not. But we cannot imagine Rochester when he is apart from Jane Eyre, or rather we can only see him in different situations as she would have seen him in them, and to be always in love and always a governess is to go through the world with blinkers on one’s eyes.

These are serious limitations, perhaps, and it may be true that they give her work a look of crudeness and violence beside that of more impersonal and more experienced artists. At the same time it is by reason of this marvellous gift of vision that she takes her place with the greatest novelists we have. No writer, that is to say, surpasses her in the power of making what she describes immediately visible to us. She seems to sit down to write from compulsion. The scenes in her mind are painted so boldly and in such strong colours that her hand (so we feel) drives rapidly across the paper, and trembles with the intensity of her thought. It is not surprising to hear that she did not enjoy writing her books, and yet that writing was the only occupation that could lift her up when the burden of sorrow and shame which life laid on her, weighted her to the ground. Every one of her books seems to be a superb gesture of defiance, bidding her torturers depart and leave her Queen of a splendid island of imagination. Like some hard-pressed captain, she summoned her powers together and proudly annihilated the enemy.