Where No Fear Was, Arthur Christopher Benson [the little red hen read aloud txt] 📗

of mild and muddled tolerance. She had a vein of frank and rather bitter irony when she was indignant, and she could return stroke for stroke.

She knew well that, whatever life was meant to be, it was not intended to be an easy business; but she did not face it stoically or indifferently; she had a fierce desire for knowledge, culture, ideas; she was ambitious; and above everything she desired to be loved; yet she did not think of love in the way in which all English romancers had treated it for over a century, as a condescending hand held out by a superior being, for the glory of which a woman submitted to a more or less contented servitude; but as a glowing equality of passion and worship, in which two hearts clasped each other close, with a sacred concurrence of soul. And thus it was that she and Robert Browning, above all other writers of the century, put the love of man and woman in the true light, as the supreme worth of life; not as a half-sensuous excitement, with lapses and reactions, but as a great and holy mystery of devotion and service and mutual help. She too had her little taste of love. Mr. Nicholls, her father's curate, a man of deep tenderness behind his quiet homely ways, had proposed to her; she had refused him; but his suffering and bewilderment had touched her deeply, and at last she consented, though she went to her wedding in fear and dread; but she was rewarded, and for a few short months tasted a calm and sweet happiness, the joy of being needed and desired, and at the same time guarded and tended well. Her pathetic words, when she knew from his lips that she must die, "God will not part us--we have been so happy," are full of the deepest tragedy.

I say again that I know of no instance among the most intimate records of the human heart, in which life was faced with such splendid courage as it was by Charlotte Bronte. It contained so many things which she desired--art, beauty, thought, peace, deep and tender relations, and the supreme crown of love. But she never dreamed of trying to escape or shirk her lot. After her first great success with Jane Eyre, she might have lived life on her own lines; her writing meant wealth to one of her simple tastes; and as her closest friend said, if she had chosen to set up a house of her own, she would have been gratefully thanked for any kindness she might have shown to her household, instead of being, as she was, ruthlessly employed and even tyrannised over. Consider how a young authoress, with that splendid success to her credit, would nowadays be made much of and tended, begged to consult her own wishes and make, her own arrangements. But Charlotte Bronte hated notoriety, and took her fame with a shrinking and modest amazement. She never gave herself airs, or displayed any affectation, or caught at any flattery. She just went back to her tragic home, and carried the burden of housekeeping on her frail shoulders. The simplicity, the delicacy, the humility of it all is above praise. If ever there was a human being who might have pleaded to be excused from any gallant battling with life because of her bleak, comfortless, unhappy surroundings, and her own sensitive temperament, it was Charlotte Bronte. But instead of that she fought silently with disaster and unhappiness, neither pitying herself for her destiny, nor taking the smallest credit for her tough resistance. It does not necessarily prove that all can wage so equal a fight with fears and sorrows; but it shows at least that an indomitable resolution can make a noble thing out of a life from which every circumstance of romance and dignity seems to be purposely withdrawn.

I do not think that there is in literature a more inspiring and heartening book than Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. The book was written with a fine frankness and a daring indiscretion which cost Mrs. Gaskell very dear. It remains as one of the most matchless and splendid presentments of duty and passion and genius, waging a perfectly undaunted fight with life and temperament, and carrying off the spoils not only of undying fame, but the far more supreme crown of moral force. Charlotte Bronte never doubted that she had been set in the forefront of the battle, and that her first concern was with the issues of life and sorrow and death. She died at thirty-eight, at a time when many men and women have hardly got a firm hold of life at all, or have parted with weak illusions. Yet years before she had said sternly to a friend who was meditating a flight from hard conditions of life: "The right course is that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest." Many people could have said that, but I know no figure who more relentlessly and loyally carried out the principle than Charlotte Bronte, or who waged a more vigorous and tenacious battle with every onset of fear. "My conscience tells me," she once wrote about an anxious decision, "that it would be the act of a moral poltroon to let the fear of suffering stand in the way of improvement. But suffer I shall. No matter!"


XIV


JOHN STERLING

I believe that the most affecting, beautiful, and grave message ever written from a death-bed is John Sterling's last letter to Carlyle. It reflects, perhaps, something of Carlyle's own fine manner, but then Sterling had long been Carlyle's friend and confidant.

Before I give it, let me add a brief account of Sterling. He was some ten years Carlyle's junior, the son of the redoubtable Edward Sterling, the leader-writer of the Times, a man who in his day wielded a mighty influence. Carlyle describes the father's way of life, how he spent the day in going about London, rolling into clubs, volubly questioning and talking; then returned home in the evening, and condensed it all into a leader, "and is found," said Carlyle, "to have hit the essential purport of the world's immeasurable babblement that day with an accuracy above all other men."

The younger Sterling, Carlyle's friend, was at Cambridge for a time, but never took his degree; he became a journalist, wrote a novel, tales, plays, endless poems--all of thin and vapid quality. His brief life, for he died at thirty-eight, was a much disquieted one; he travelled about in search of health, for he was early threatened with consumption; for a short time he was a curate in the English Church, but drifted away from that. He lived for a time at Falmouth, and afterwards at Ventnor. He must have been a man of extraordinary charm, and with quite unequalled powers of conversation. Even Carlyle seems to have heard him gladly, and that is no ordinary compliment, considering Carlyle's own volubility, and the agonies, occasionally suppressed but generally trenchantly expressed, with which Carlyle listened to other well-known talkers like Coleridge and Macaulay.

Carlyle certainly had a very deep affection and admiration for Sterling; he rains down praises upon him, in that wonderful little biography, which is probably the finest piece of work that Carlyle ever did.

He speaks of Sterling as "brilliant, beautiful, cheerful with an ever-flowing wealth of ideas, fancies, imaginations . . . with frank affections, inexhaustible hopes, audacities, activities, and general radiant vivacity of heart and intelligence, which made the presence of him an illumination and inspiration wherever he went."

But all Carlyle's love and admiration for his friend did not induce him to praise Sterling's writings; he looked upon him as a poet, but without the gift of expression. He says that all Sterling's work was spoilt by over-haste, and "a lack of due inertia." The fact is that Sterling was a sort of improvisatore, and what was beautiful and natural enough when poured out in talk, and with the stimulus of congenial company, grew pale and indistinct when he wrote it down; he had, in fact, no instinct for art or for design, and he failed whenever he tried to mould ideas into form.

The shadow of illness darkened about him, and he spent long periods in prostrate seclusion, tended by his wife and children, unable to write or talk or receive his friends. Then a terrible calamity befell him. His mother, to whom he was devotedly attached, died after a long illness, Sterling not being allowed to go to her, or to leave his own sick-room. He received the news one morning by letter, that all was over, went in to tell his wife, who was ill; while they were talking, his wife became faint, and died two hours later. So that within a few hours he lost the two human beings whom he most devotedly loved, and on whom he most depended for sympathy and help.

But in all Sterling's sorrows and illnesses, he never seems to have lost his interest in life and thought, in ideas, questions, and problems. Again and again he came back to the surface, with an irrepressible zest and freshness, and even gaiety, until at last all hope of life was extinguished. He lay dying for many weeks, and it was then that he wrote his last letter to Carlyle, which must be given in full:--

HILLSIDE, VENTNOR, 10th August 1844.

MY DEAR CARLYLE,--For the first time for many months it seems possible to send you a few words; merely, however, for Remembrance and Farewell. On higher matters there is nothing to say. I tread the common road into the great darkness, without any thought of fear, and with very much of hope. Certainty indeed I have none. With regard to you and me I cannot begin to write; having nothing for it but to keep shut the lid of those secrets with all the iron weights that are in my power. Towards me it is still more true than towards England that no man has been and done like you. Heaven bless you! If I can lend a hand when THERE, that will not be wanting. It is all very strange, but not one hundredth part so sad as it seems to the standers-by.

Your Wife knows my mind towards her, and will believe it without asseverations.--Yours to the last, JOHN STERLING.

That letter may speak for itself. In its dignity, its nobleness, its fearlessness, it is one of the finest human documents I know. But let it be remembered that it is not the letter of a mournful and heart-broken man, turning his back on life in an ecstasy of despair; but the letter of one who had taken a boundless delight in life, had known upon equal terms most of the finest intellects of the day, and had been frankly recognised by them as a chosen spirit. All Sterling's designs for life and work had been slowly and surely thwarted by the pressure of hopeless illness; yet he had never complained or fretted or brooded, or indulged in any bitter recriminations against his destiny. That seems to me a very heroic attitude; while the letter itself, in its perfect frankness and courage, without a touch of solemnity or affectation, or any trace of craven shrinking from his doom, makes it in its noble simplicity one of the finest "last words" that I have ever read, and finer, I verily believe, than any flight of poetical imagination.

A few days later he sent Carlyle some stanzas of verse, "written," says Carlyle, "as if in star-fire and immortal tears; which are among my sacred possessions, to be kept for myself alone."

A few weeks before he wrote his last letter to Carlyle,