The Accents of Persuasion by Robert Bernard

Author:Robert Bernard [Robert Bernard Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571302109
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

3

SHIRLEY

‘Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you,’ wrote Charlotte Brontë in the opening of Shirley; ‘something unromantic as Monday morning.’ In denying the reader a promise of ‘sentiment, and poetry, and reverie’, ‘passion, and stimulus, and melodrama’, [Chap. 1, I:1–2] she was somewhat disingenuous, although it is true that there is a good deal less ‘poetry’ than readers of Jane Eyre probably expected of her next novel. But of sentiment, reverie, passion, melodrama, and stimulus (whatever she meant by that term) there is more, to be honest, than most readers can stomach. God’s plenty, one might say if Deity were more important in this novel.

As in The Professor, Miss Brontë’s formal allegiance is to a disciplined novel, with both her own emotions and those of her characters kept in firm check; it is no surprise that her absorption with the non-rational aspects of life threatens to wreck the unity of the novel by fighting against the rational impulses that she is avowedly supporting. Again and again, we see her poised on the edge of unleashing the torrent of emotive force of Jane Eyre, then prudently drawing back. A small but illustrative example is her description of Shirley’s house, looking like a Girtin water-colour: ‘If Fieldhead had few other merits as a building, it might at least be termed picturesque: its irregular architecture, and the grey and mossy colouring communicated by time, gave it a just claim to this epithet. The old latticed windows, the stone porch, the walls, the roof, the chimney-stacks, were rich in crayon touches and sepia lights and shades. The trees behind were fine, bold, and spreading; the cedar on the lawn in front was grand, and the granite urns on the garden wall, the fretted arch of the gateway, were, for an artist, as the very desire of the eye.’ [Chap. 11, I:276–7.]

The setting is that of a Gothic novel, but when we are taken inside, we find that instead of developing the air of mystery the narrator treats us to a disquisition on the difficulties of spring-cleaning the panelling in this ‘gothic old barrack’: ‘Whoever, having the bowels of humanity, has seen servants scrubbing at these polished wooden walls with bees-waxed cloths on a warm May day, must allow that they are “[in]tolerable and not to be endured”; and I cannot but secretly applaud the benevolent barbarian who had painted another and larger apartment of Fieldhead–the drawing-room to-wit, formerly also an oak-room–of a delicate pinky white; thereby earning for himself the character of a Hun, but mightily enhancing the cheerfulness of that portion of his abode, and saving future housemaids a world of toil.’ [Chap. 11, I:289.] With a rude wrench, we are back in the literally workaday world. Fieldhead shelters no ghosts, and its inhabitant is a most level-headed, unmysterious person.

Twice Caroline Helstone sees ‘apparitions’ in the moonlight, but, unromantically enough, they turn out to be only her friends walking in the evening air. On another occasion Robert sees her form in his

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