CHARLOTTE BRONTE’S PLACE IN FICTION

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1681, 18 May 1904, Page 23

CHARLOTTE BRONTE’S PLACE IN FICTION

'■The Place of Charlotte Bronte in 19tli Century Fiction” was the subject of a lecture- by Dr. Garnett, who passed in review the great novelists of the early and middle Victorian era who, in Iris words, “constitute the constellation of which we maintain Charlotte Bronte to have been the bright particular star.” O’f Dickens and Thackeray, whose styles he contrasted, he said that neither -of them touches Charlotte Bronte anywhere; they leave the field entirely open for her peculiar gift, and notwithstanding her enthusiastic admiration for

Thackeray she would have written as she has written if he had not existed. “It is impossible/’ he went on, “to pass over the strong affinity between Charlotte Bronte’s work and a portion of George Eliot’s. At first Bight this is not so apparent, owing to the great dissimilarity of atmosphere and environment. Nevertheless there is one fibre almost identical, or if distinction there be it is/ that in Charlotte Bronte’s case the fibre is the whole woman, while'in George Eliot’s it is but one string of a most, ample harp—l mean the fibre of passion. Passion is the dominant note of Charlotte Bronte’s; nay, more, it is the music. Take away this ardent, impetuous feeling and there is nothing left.” A point which Dr. Garnett enforced was that there is no trace of any direct influence of Charlotte Bronte upon George Eliot. Both drew from the book of nature, and in truth to nature there is nothing to choose- between them. With regard to Anthony Trollope it is evident that v e can have little in common with Charlotte Bronte, and that they are far from encroaching on each other’s spheres. Charles Kingsley’s earliest novels are written to recommend ideals of Christian socialism. All approach perilously near the region of the tract, but all are marked by the writer’s energy and marvellous gift of picturesque description as well as by the fine moral tone and the translation of the ideas of Carlyle into ordinary speech. They have this in common, with Charlotte Bronte’s novels, that they are works of intense passion, but hers is the passion of the individual and bis the enthusiasm of humanity. Disraeli, a novelist of equal genius, but who appears at first sight at the opposite pole from Kingsley, resembles him in the extent to which he writes with a..direct purpose. George Borrow presents a curious combination of objective and subjective tendencies; in both tbe«e characteristics he differs from Charlotte Bronte, upon whom he could have exerted no influence. The concluding literary portraits presented were those of Bnlwer and Mrs Gaskell, neither of whom, he contended, could be paralleled with an authoress so thoroughly selfconsistent as Charlotte Bronte.