Chesterton on the importance of the Brontes

I'm typing using someone else's ideas today, because I am overstimulated from the first day of co-op yesterday and will probably spend all of today working it in mentally.  But using someone else's ideas is not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if they're good ideas and they apply somehow to your own life.  

While waiting for Bob to finish David Copperfield, I've picked up a slim volume of Chesterton's called Twelve Types.  They are short essays on the importance of various authors, his reasons not always being the ones people readily suppose.  I started reading in the back, with Tolstoy and Sir Walter Scott, and have now wandered back to the front of the book to the Brontes and William Morris.  

Of course, it's always hard to dive into the middle of a Chesterton paragraph. Somehow he is easier to take either as a whole, or one quotable sentence at a time.  He has a way of writing in stereo, so that your mind has to process disparate elements and, from a distance, see the whole.  And his paragraphs are long.  But it's almost always worth the effort, as this one was for me:

"The great and abiding truth for which the Bronte cycle of fiction stands is a certain most important truth about the enduring spirit of youth, the truth of the near kinship between terror and joy.  The Bronte heroine, dingily dressed, badly educated, hampered by a humiliating inexperience, a kind of ugly innocence, is yet, by the very fact of her solitude and her gaucherie, full of the greatest delight that is possible to a human being, the delight of expectation, the delight of an ardent and flamboyant ignorance.  She serves to show how futile it is of humanity to suppose that pleasure can be attained chiefly by putting on evening dress every evening, and having a box at the theatre every first night.  It is not the man of pleasure who has pleasure; it is not the man of the world who appreciates the world.  The man who has learnt to do all conventional things perfectly has at the same time learnt to do them prosaically.  It is the awkward man, whose evening dress does not fit him, whose gloves will not go on, whose compliments will not come off, who is really full of the ancient ecstasies of youth.  He is frightened enough of society to enjoy his triumphs.  He has that element of fear which is one of the eternal ingredients of joy.  This spirit is the central spirit of the Bronte novel.  It is the epic of the exhilaration of the shy man.  As such it is of incalculable value in our time, of which the curse is that is does not take joy reverently because it does not take it fearfully.  The shabby and inconspicuous governess of Charlotte Bronte, with the small outlook and the small creed, has more commerce with the awful and elemental forces which drive the world than a legion of lawless minor poets.  She approached the universe with real simplicity, and consequently, with real fear and delight.  She was, so to speak, shy before the multitude of the stars, and in this she had possessed herself of the only force which can prevent enjoyment being as black and barren as routine.  The faculty of being shy is the first and most delicate of the power of enjoyment.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of pleasure."

Yesterday I walked down the subway platform to find a young homeschooled friend reading Jane Eyre as her family waited for the train to co-op.  I was happy for her, as I nostalgically remembered being enthralled with Wuthering Heights at about the same age.  I have often wondered since why it was that I was so swept away at twelve by a book that was all about violent, idolatrous people who are never happy for more than brief moments.  I had always told myself that it must have been because Emily Bronte did such a excellent job of describing the misery of passion that I found it satisfying artistically. But I've read many first rate books over the years, and I can still remember enough of what I felt about Wuthering Heights to realize that aesthetic appreciation doesn't quite cover it.  I think that Chesterton has just given me a hint.  

At twelve, I was an awkward and shy child, in the midst of a series of moves, whose parents were going through a difficult time, and who had little or no experience in the world except that found in books. Now I am watching my own child go through the same stage of life, and it brings back some of those Bronte-ish feelings.  We always hope to soften some of the edges of what we experienced for our own children, but even so, we find we are not always omnipotent, or even competent, and that the early teens can be a bit shy and awkward for everyone, whether you have a box at the theater now and then or not.  

It is not entirely true that the Brontes were totally untutored, of course.  They did eventually have contact with some of the writers of their time, and their books were not entirely the product of a isolated and imaginative existence in a windswept and gloomy parsonage.  But surely, the terrors and joys of childhood did have something to do with the powerful stories they wrote as young adults. And surely, if Chesterton found something of value in the Brontes for his own age, we of an age where many five-year-olds are jaded already, and where all experiences preferably come predigested, padded, and psychologized, can learn even more from the terror and joy of the shy Brontes.