The Silent Isle, Arthur Christopher Benson [best book reader txt] 📗

these beautiful, stainless hearts are preoccupied with what they receive rather than with what they give. In that crude, ingenuous book The Professor, the hero, who is a good instance of how Charlotte Bronte confused rigidity of nature with manliness, surprised by an outbreak of passionate emotion on the part of his quiet and self-contained wife, and still more surprised by its sudden quiescence, asks her what has become of her emotion and where it is gone. "I do not know where it is gone," says the girl, "but I know that whenever it is wanted it will come back." That is a noble touch. It may be true that Paul Emmanuel and Robert Moore cling too closely to the idea of rewarding their humble mistresses, after testing them harshly and even brutally, with the gift of their love--though even this humility has a touching quality of beauty; but the supreme lover, Mr. Rochester, who, in spite of his ridiculous affectations, his grotesque hauteurs, his impossible theatricality, is a figure of flesh and blood, is absorbed in his passion in a way that shows the fire leaping on the innermost altar. The irresistible appeal of the book to the heart is due to the fact that Jane Eyre never seems conscious of what she is giving, but only of what she is receiving; and it is this that makes her gift so regal, so splendid a thing.

Side by side with this book I would set a recent work, Miss Cholmondeley's Prisoners. Fine and noble as the book is in many ways, it is yet vitiated by the sense of the value of the gift of love from the woman's point of view. Love is there depicted as the one redeeming and transforming power in the world. But in order to prove the thesis, the two chief characters among the men of the book, Wentworth and Lord Lossiemouth, are not, like Mr. Rochester, strong men disfigured by violent faults, but essentially worthless persons, one the slave of an oldmaidish egotism and the other of a frank animalism. The result in both cases is an experimentum in corpore vili. The authoress, instead of presiding over her creations like a little Deity, is a strong partisan; and the purpose seems to be to bring out more clearly the priceless nature of the gift which comes near their hand. No one would dispute the position that love is a purifying and transforming power; but love, conscious of its worth, loses the humility and the unselfishness in which half its power lies. Even Magdalen, the finest character in the book, is not free from a quality of condescension. In the great love-scene where she accepts Lord Lossiemouth, she comforts him by saying, "You have not only come back to me. You have come back to yourself." That is a false touch, because it has a flavour of superiority about it. It reminds one of the lover in The Princess lecturing the hapless Ida from his bed-pulpit, and saying, "Blame not thyself too much," and "Dearer thou for faults lived over." One cannot imagine Jane Eyre saying to Mr. Rochester that he had come back to himself through loving her. It just detracts at the supreme moment from the generosity of the scene; it has the accent of the priestess, not of the true lover; and thus at the moment when one longs to be in the very white-heat of emotion, one is subtly aware of an improving hand that casts water upon the flame.

The love that lives in art is the love of Penelope and Antigone, of Cordelia and Desdemona and Imogen, of Enid, of Mrs. Browning, among women; and among men, the love of Dante, of Keats, of the lover of Maud, of Pere Goriot, of Robert Browning.

It is the unreasoning, unquestioning love of a man for a woman or a woman for a man, just as they are, for themselves only; "because it was you and me," as Montaigne says. Not a respect for good qualities, a mere admiration for beauty, a perception of strength or delicacy, but a sort of predestined unity of spirit and body, an inner and instinctive congeniality, a sense of supreme need and nearness, which has no consciousness of raising or helping or forgiving about it, but is rather an imperative desire for surrender, for sharing, for serving. Thus, in love, faults and weaknesses are not things to be mended or overlooked, but opportunities of lavish generosity. Sacrifice is not only not a pain, but the deepest and acutest pleasure possible. Love of this kind has nothing of the tolerance of friendship about it, the process of addition and subtraction, the weighing of net results, though that can provide a sensible and happy partnership enough. And thus when an author has grace and power to perceive such a situation, no further motive or purpose is needed; indeed the addition of any such motive merely defames and tarnishes the quality of the divine gift.

It is not to be pretended that all human beings have the gift of loving so. To love perfectly is a matter of genius; it may be worth while to depict other sorts of love, for it has infinite gradations and nuances. One of the grievous mistakes that the prophets and prophetesses of love make is that they tend to speak as if only some coldness and hardness of nature, which could be dispensed with at will or by effort, holds men and women back from the innermost relationship. It is the same mistake as that made by many preachers who speak as if the moral sense was equally developed in all, or required only a little effort of the will. But a man or a woman may be quite able to perceive the nobility, the solemn splendour of a perfect love, and yet be incapable of either feeling or inspiring it. The possession of such a gift is a thing to thank God for; the absence of it is not a thing to be shrewishly condemned. The power is not often to be found in combination with high intellectual or artistic gifts. There is a law of compensation in human nature, but there is also a law of limitations; and this it is both foolish and cowardly to ignore.

When one comes to form such a list as I have tried to do of great lovers in literature and life, it is surprising and rather distressing to find, after all, how difficult it is to make such a list at all. It is easier to make a list of women who have loved perfectly than a list of men. Two rather painful considerations arise. Is it because, after all, it is so rare, so almost abnormal an experience for one to love purely, passionately, and permanently, that the difficulty of making such a list arises? There are plenty of books, both imaginative and biographical, to choose from, and yet the perfect companionship seems very rare. Or is it that we nowadays exaggerate the whole matter? That would be a conclusion to which I would not willingly come; but it is quite clear that we have transcendentalised the power of love very much of late. Is this due to the immense flood of romances that have overwhelmed our literature? Does love really play so large a part in people's lives as romances would have us think? Or do the immense number of romances rather show that love does really play a greater part than anything else in our lives? The transcendental conception of love has found a high and passionate expression in the sonnets of Rossetti, yet all that we know of Rossetti would seem to prove that in his case it was actual rather than transcendental; and he is to be classed in the matter of love rather among its voluptuaries and slaves than among its true and harmonious exponents. I am disposed to think that with men, at all events, or at least with Englishmen of the present day, love is rather a bewildering episode than a guiding principle; and that some of the happiest alliances have been those in which passion has tranquilly transformed itself into a true and gentle companionship. This would seem to prove that love was as a rule a physical rather than a spiritual passion, cutting across life rather than flowing in its channels.

And then, too, the further consideration intervenes: Can any one, in reflecting upon the instances of great and loving relationships that have come within the range of his experience, name a single case in which a deep passion has ever been conceived and consummated, without the existence of physical charm of some kind in the woman who has been the object of the passion? I do not, of course, limit charm to regular and conventional beauty. But I cannot myself recall a single instance of such a passion being evoked by a woman destitute of physical attractiveness. The charm may be that of voice, of glance, of bearing, of gesture, but the desirable element is always there in some form or other.

I have known women of wit, of intellect, of sympathy, of delicate perception, of loyalty, of passionate affectionateness, who yet have missed the joy of wedded love from the absence of physical charm. Indeed, to make love beautiful, one has to conceive of it as exhibited in creatures of youth and grace like Romeo and Juliet; and to connect the pretty endearments of love with awkward, ugly, ungainly persons has something grotesque and even profane about it. But if love were the transcendental thing that it is supposed to be, if it were within reach of every hand, physical characteristics would hardly affect the question. I wish that some of the passionate interpreters of love would make a work of imagination that should render with verisimilitude the love-affair of two absolutely grotesque and misshapen persons, without any sense of incongruity or absurdity. I should be loth to say that love depends upon physical characteristics; but I think it must be confessed that impassioned love does so depend. A woman without physical attractiveness, but with tenderness, loyalty, and devotion, may arrive at plenty of happy relationships; she may be trusted, confided in, adored by young and old; but of the redeeming and regenerating love that comes with marriage she may have no chance at all. It is a terrible question to ask, but what chance has love against eczema? And yet eczema may co-exist with every mental and spiritual grace in the world. In this case it is evident that the modern transcendental theory of love crumbles away altogether, if it is at the mercy of a physical condition.

The truth is that, like all the joys of humanity, love is unequally distributed, and that it is a thing which no amount of desire or admiration or hope can bring about, unless it is bestowed. Even in the case of the faint-hearted lover, so mercilessly lashed in Prisoners, who will pay a call to see the beloved, but will not take a railway journey for the same object, is it not the physical vitality that is deficient? I do not quarrel with the transcendental treatment of love; I only say that if this is accompanied with a burning scorn and contempt for those who cannot pursue it, it becomes at once a pharisaical and bitter thing. No religion was ever propagated by scolding backsliders or contemning the weak; no chivalry was ever worth the name that did not stand for a desire to do battle only with the strong.

The genius of Charlotte Bronte consists in the fact that she makes love so splendid and glorifying a thing, and that she does not waste her powder and shot upon the poor in spirit. The loveless man or woman, after reading her