This technicolour rendering of Emma’s life and background shows her as a woman ‘made for love’, tiresomely unaccountable to herself for the frequent betrayals she suffered at the hands of her lovers; a fashionable trollop who was none the less a simple girl at heart. Whether Emma is shown exhibiting herself, nude, in the Health-and-Beauty pornographic racket where she was employed; whether she is trailing her provocative petticoats around the Royal Palace of Naples; partaking in violent flagellation scenes; or romping with Romney in the studio; Emma is always the seduced, never the seducer.
According to Lozania Prole, the Regency male must surely be the most single-minded in the whole history of society, since one and all who cross Emma’s path are moved by her beauty to a common intent to possess her, by means no matter how foul.
And it was Emma, of course, not Nelson, who saved England from the French.
[1949]
Passionate Humbugs
The time for debunking the Victorians, we now hear from high quarters, is over. Let us take them seriously then. It may be, of course, that these authorities mean only the Eminent in Victorian life; but I propose to take them at their literal word because Thackeray, Tennyson and, say, Gladstone and Florence Nightingale do not add up to something that means ‘the Victorians’.
The Victorians were a large number of people called ‘the poor’; a small but immensely materially powerful number, the middle class; and an even smaller number, influential but impotent, the aristocracy. I make this obvious statement because it should be clear that, when we are asked not to debunk the Victorians, it is not Matthew Arnold who is in question. It is the powerful middle class with whom we have to deal so far as ‘the Victorians’ and their tastes are concerned. It was they who bought up In Memoriam, very wisely, in edition after edition; it was they above whose heads Thackeray would have liked to write but dared not; and it was they who created something unknown in England in previous centuries, called a ‘demand’.
The demand was supplied. But what was its nature? The very fact that it was a ‘demand’ and not merely a ‘wide interest’ (as there had been not long since in Scott, Mrs Radcliffe and even Jane Austen) suggests it was something pretty vigorous. In fact, it was full-blooded and passionate; and I suggest that the Victorian age can only be rivalled for passion by the Elizabethan. The difference is that while Elizabethan passions were still regulated by a cultural and religious unity, Victorian passions were all over the place, like their religion. The Victorian passion was for everything they did – eating, dressing, talking, money-making, writing, worshipping and sex. They indulged these passions unrestrainedly and promiscuously, with the exception of sexual passion which was counteracted by what we know as Victorian morals. These morals derived from many things besides Puritanism, but mostly I think, from the material desire of the middle class to secure its strength and protect its unity by disciplining itself to a rigid code of outward behaviour. What went on in their emotions – in their inward behaviour – was nobody’s business so long as it did not come out and menace the structure of things. And it was this undisciplined emotion that created the demand for a type of popular literature.
Alan Walbank has collected an anthology of excerpts from the work of women novelists between 1850 and 1900. They do not bear considering as art, but they do confirm the type of demand these literary ladies supplied. What was wanted, particularly by women readers, was a violent emotional catharsis. That is nothing new in art. But this catharsis was required to be vitiated – and the art was consequently debased – by the introduction of material sentiments. Virtue has explicitly to be its own reward here on earth. You could vicariously murder your husband, set fire to a house, ‘take’ a lover, but you would receive your reckoning in Vol. III. So that, what I assert to be the intensely erotic instincts of the Victorian reader were left unassuaged by what I find to be the peep-show obscenity of Victorian popular reading. Hence the craving for more and yet more emotion-through-fiction. It is not satisfied yet. What is more, literature is becoming increasingly a matter of a meeting of demands mainly emotional, rather than a stimulus of interest, emotional and otherwise. For which we have to thank the Victorians. Alan Walbank’s selection is useful mainly for easy reference to this aspect of popular Victorian taste. The authors represented include Charlotte Yonge, Mrs Henry Wood, Mrs Oliphant, Marie Corelli, Mrs Humphrey Ward (surely out of place in this company) and Ouida. They differ widely, but all meet on the materialist-moral level.
What I am quite seriously getting at is that I don’t see that we can do other than debunk ‘the Victorians’, even admitting it would be nice to prove our grandfathers misjudged our great-grandfathers. I think, in fact, they did misjudge them, for they denounced the Victorians for the wrong reasons. They failed to realise that the Victorians had the advantage of being far more passionate in every way, and I repeat, more promiscuous in non-sexual matters, than their descendants who made such a fuss about emancipation. But the Victorians were humbugs, and they bequeathed us a more vicious sort of humbug – emotional chaos.
If we are looking for a typical example of this emotional excess in the powerful element of Victorian society, we can do no better than read Walbank’s extracts from Ouida and Eileen Bigland’s biography of that author. As Eileen Bigland says, Ouida gave the middle class a sensational though inaccurate account of high society. But an accurate account would never have satisfied this insatiate public. Ouida only offered what they craved. That frightful female’s activities, as Eileen Bigland capably displays them, and her literary output, are all of a parcel with her times.
[1951]
Pensée: Biography
The sort of biographical writing that adheres relentlessly to fact, faithfully recounting all that undoubtedly happened and nothing that perhaps happened, can give a terribly distorted picture of the subject and times in question, because facts strung together present the truth only where simple people and events are involved; and the only people and events worth reading about are complex. There is another biographical approach in which the author’s imagination rampages across history, mercilessly getting up our ancestors in all sorts of fancy dress and imbuing them with our latest notions of love, psychology and hygiene.
[…]
[1950]
Fuzzy Young Person
Bettina Brentano is one of the most fascinating ecstatics and line-shooters that one could hope to meet in the annals of the Romantic Movement. She was born at Frankfurt in 1785; her father was a prosperous Italian merchant and her mother, Maxe de la Roche, with whom Goethe had an amorous affair, a cultivated German.
Everything about Bettina, all that happened to her, is piled on, like an historical film. She was for ever finding herself in Gothic situations: she rescues and conceals a fugitive soldier, licks his wounds clean, no less; she finds herself abandoned by the coachman in a dark forest in the middle of the night; as a schoolgirl, she roams the convent grounds when all are asleep, is caught in a thunderstorm, clings to a tree, is wonderfully terrified. Or so she claimed in her delightful letters. These letters are intelligently arranged and linked by the authors’ explanatory text.
Bettina lost no time in seeking out her mother’s lover, Goethe, whom, one gathers, she began by enchanting and ended by boring. She was observed, dry-eyed, by the visiting Crabb Robinson; she cultivated Beethoven, Schelling (of whom she said, ‘There is something about him I do not like, and that is his wife’), Schiller (who said of her that when she had left he felt as if he had recovered from a severe illness), and in fact everyone in politics and art. Her husband, Achim von Arnim, thought twice and thrice before marrying her, and hesitated to introduce her to his family lest she should lie down upon the table. ‘Who is this fuzzy young person?’ said Napoleon. She published, without embellishments, her correspondence with Goethe. He was undoubtedly the presiding genius of her imagination, and the authors are wisely uncertain whether she consciously modelled herself on Mignon, the child character in ‘Wilhelm Meister’,
or whether Bettina was simply born to fit the part. She kept up the frisky young attitude till quite late in life. An unfriendly friend of Bettina’s enquires, ‘What is the use of an elf in a commercial age? Who wants her trick dances, her tree-top games…? … dances are unsuited to the greying locks.’
This is a splendid biography, one of whose many incidental qualities is the light it casts on the Germany of the period.
[1957]
The Brontës as Teachers
The general feeling about the incursion into teaching of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë is that it was little short of martyrdom. The letters of Charlotte, the diaries of Anne, the novels of both, abound with evidence that the experience of being teachers was an agony to all four. Nothing, we are given to understand, could be worse than to be a private governess, a tutor or a school teacher to such pupils as came the Brontës’ way; nothing worse than to be employed by such people as engaged the Brontës.
I am in sympathy with the view that their enforced choice of careers was a pity (except that it provided marvellous material for fiction) and rejoice with everyone else that at least three of them discovered their true vocation in time to write their unique, unconformable books. But were the Brontës mere lambs among wolves when they set forth to teach? I suggest that if anything could equal the misfortune of their lot as teachers it was the lot of the respective pupils and employers of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne.
Charlotte was the first to teach. Having practised for a while on her sisters she left Haworth Parsonage in 1835 to become a resident mistress at Roe Head school where previously she had been a pupil. Her formal education had covered little more than two years’ schooling supplemented by home tuition from her maiden aunt. When, just turned nineteen, she became a mistress at Roe Head, her main qualification as an instructor of the young was a protected upbringing; this was, after all, judged to be the highest qualification a girl could produce. The headmistress (that Miss Wooler who remained a life-long friend to Charlotte) began by treating her as a friend. Charlotte stayed with Miss Wooler for over two years, but according to her letters and diaries she was miserable most of the time, as she well might be. Here is one of her diary entries:
All this day I have been in a dream, half miserable, half ecstatic… I had been toiling for nearly an hour with Miss Lister, Miss Marriot, and Ellen Cook, striving to teach them the distinction between an article and a substantive. The parsing lesson was completed; a dead silence had succeeded it in the schoolroom, and I sat sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came to me: Am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy, and the hyperbolical and most asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs, and of compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair, prisoned within these four bare walls, while these glorious summer suns are burning in heaven and the year is revolving in its richest glow? Stung to the heart with this reflection I started up and mechanically walked to the window. A sweet August morning was smiling without… I felt as if I could have written gloriously… If I had had time to indulge it I felt that the vague suggestion of that moment would have settled down into some narrative better at least than anything I ever produced before. But just then a dolt came up with a lesson.
Now, all this did violence to Charlotte, who wanted to write, not teach. But what we are concerned with here is the effect of her frustration on the Misses Lister, Marriot and Cook, not to mention the unfortunate ‘dolt’ who interrupted Charlotte’s reverie. Were they all so unlike normal children, were they all such ‘fat-headed oafs’ that they failed to sense Miss Brontë’s contempt and fury? One cannot help feeling that they gained less from Charlotte’s instruction than she expended upon it by way of ‘suppressing my rage’.
But poor Charlotte was to fare worse. She presented herself in 1839 as governess to the children of a Mrs Sidgwick who, poor soul, did not dream she was about to harbour an eminent Victorian. Charlotte immediately transferred her dislike of the job to Mrs Sidgwick and her children, though she was not averse to Mr Sidgwick. Charlotte’s complaints were many and bitter: Mrs Sidgwick never left her a free moment to enjoy the spacious grounds and neighbouring countryside; Mrs Sidgwick would not allow the children, ‘riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs’, to be corrected (a charge which Charlotte was to bring against her next employer and Anne against hers, somewhat contrary to notions of middle-class rearing of children in the nineteenth century); Mrs Sidgwick took Charlotte to task for sulking, whereupon Charlotte wept; Mrs Sidgwick expected Charlotte to love the children; and, final indignity, Mrs Sidgwick ‘overwhelms me with oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin nightcaps to make, and, above all things, dolls to dress’.
It sounds quite drastic. Certainly the patent misery of the new governess must have seemed so to Mrs Sidgwick who, from other accounts, is said to have been an amiable woman. No doubt she loaded on the needlework with a view to keeping Charlotte from brooding, to give her something to occupy her mind, for it is remarkable how often in those days melancholy was equated with vacancy of purpose and cheerfulness with a full life. Still, we cannot blame Mrs Sidgwick for being an average mediocre nonentity; she never claimed to be other. If anything was to blame it was the system which included needlework among other semi-domestic tasks in the normal duties of a governess. Unless we look upon Charlotte as a famous author, which we are not doing at the moment, the sewing was no real outrage. And whether it was any more degrading, any greater a bore, than is the supervision of conducted tours and school lunches to the present-day teaching profession, is a question.
This record of Charlotte’s brief sojourn with the Sidgwicks would be incomplete without the testimony of one of the Sidgwick pupils in later years, after Charlotte’s distaste for his family had been made public by Mrs Gaskell. He declared that ‘if Miss Brontë was desired to accompany them to Church – “Oh, Miss Brontë, do run up and put on your things, we want to start” – she was plunged in dudgeon because she was being treated like a hireling. If, in consequence, she was not invited to accompany them, she was infinitely depressed because she was treated as an outcast and a friendless dependant’. Since most of the Brontë victims were inarticulate, locked forever in the pillories of the Brontë letters and novels, I find this brief protest rather touching, coming from the otherwise mute and admittedly inglorious Sidgwick child.
As this was a temporary post Charlotte only had to endure it for less than three months. Before she left, one of the little Sidgwicks threw a Bible at her. He later became a clergyman.
Next comes Mrs White. Charlotte soon discovered that ‘she does not scruple to give way to anger in a very coarse, unladylike manner’. Charlotte preferred Mr White, in spite of her conviction that ‘his extraction is very low’. Meanwhile, she said, she was trying hard to like Mrs White. This effort was fruitful, notwithstanding Mrs White’s bad grammar of which Charlotte is critical, and the fact that Charlotte feared her to be an exciseman’s daughter. In the end, Mrs White won over the parson’s daughter, who came to admit that she was intrigued by the ‘fat baby’, and called her pupils ‘well-disposed’ though of course, ‘indulged’.
Behold now Charlotte in her last teaching post. The Pensionnat Héger in Brussels is the scene, and Charlotte, having gone there to study French and German, has now become an English mistress in this school for young ladies. Her employer, Mme Héger, has grown rather suspicious of the English teacher and spies upon her; Charlotte apparently cannot think why. She prefers M. Héger. The schoolgirls are ‘selfish, animal and inferior’. And we are further delightfully informed that ‘their principles are rotten to the core’. Charlotte’s colleagues hate each other, and she them. So her letters go on. One of her fellow mistresses, worse than the rest, acts as a spy for Mme Héger, is false, is contemptible, is Catholic. In fact they are all Catholic, and in fact, as Charlotte write
s to Branwell, ‘the people here are no go whatsoever’.
As the months proceed, Charlotte is giving English lessons to M. Héger, who seems well satisfied with her work and gives her presents of books occasionally. Charlotte declares that his goodness towards her compensates for the ‘deprivations and humiliations’ which are her lot, but on which she is not explicit.
But presently M. Héger takes to avoiding Charlotte, having first lectured her on the subject of ‘universal Bienveillance’. She, however, is no universalist; her bienveillance is focused on the object of her master whom she observes is ‘wonderfully influenced’ by his wife. With curious logic Charlotte now finds she can ‘no longer trust’ Mme Héger, and driven back to Haworth by that lady’s suspicions, proceeds to confirm them by writing a series of impassioned letters to M. Héger until he implores her to stop.
Let us now look at the teaching career of Branwell Brontë. At the age of twenty he joined the staff of a local school from which he retreated within six months. The small boys made fun of his red hair. After fortifying his dignity with a long interval of writing, painting, hard drinking and opium eating, he became tutor, in 1840, to the children of a Mr and Mrs Postlethwaite. Branwell’s view of his job can best be savoured from his own account of it written to one of his former drinking cronies:
If you saw me now you would not know me, and you would laugh to hear the character the people give me… Well, what am I? That is, what do they think I am? – a most sober, abstemious, patient, mild-hearted, virtuous, gentlemanly philosopher, the picture of good works, the treasure-house of righteous thought. Cards are shuffled under the tablecloth, glasses are thrust into the cupboard, if I enter the room. I take neither spirit, wine, nor malt liquors. I dress in black, and smile like a saint or martyr. Every lady says, ‘What a good young gentleman is the Postlethwaites’ tutor.’ This is a fact, as I am a living soul, and right comfortably do I laugh at them; but in this humour do I mean them to continue.