NOTE
These papers, with certain alterations and additions, arereprinted with the kind permission of the Editors of The DailyNews and The Speaker.
G.K.C.
KENSINGTON.
TOLSTOY AND THECULT OF SIMPLICITY
THE POSITION OF SIRWALTER SCOTT
Objection is often raised against realistic biography because itreveals so much that is important and even sacred about a man'slife. The real objection to it will rather be found in the factthat it reveals about a man the precise points which areunimportant. It reveals and asserts and insists on exactly thosethings in a man's life of which the man himself is whollyunconscious; his exact class in society, the circumstances of hisancestry, the place of his present location. These are things whichdo not, properly speaking, ever arise before the human vision. Theydo not occur to a man's mind; it may be said, with almost equaltruth, that they do not occur in a man's life. A man no more thinksabout himself as the inhabitant of the third house in a row ofBrixton villas than he thinks about himself as a strange animalwith two legs. What a man's name was, what his income was, whom hemarried, where he lived, these are not sanctities; they areirrelevancies.
A very strong case of this is the case of the Brontës. TheBrontë is in the position of the mad lady in a countryvillage; her eccentricities form an endless source of innocentconversation to that exceedingly mild and bucolic circle, theliterary world. The truly glorious gossips of literature, like MrAugustine Birrell and Mr Andrew Lang, never tire of collecting allthe glimpses and anecdotes and sermons and side-lights and sticksand straws which will go to make a Brontë museum. They are themost personally discussed of all Victorian authors, and thelimelight of biography has left few darkened corners in the darkold Yorkshire house. And yet the whole of this biographicalinvestigation, though natural and picturesque, is not whollysuitable to the Brontës. For the Brontë genius was aboveall things deputed to assert the supreme unimportance of externals.Up to that point truth had always been conceived as existing moreor less in the novel of manners. Charlotte Brontë electrifiedthe world by showing that an infinitely older and more elementaltruth could be conveyed by a novel in which no person, good or bad