The Silent Isle eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 353 pages of information about The Silent Isle.

The Silent Isle eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 353 pages of information about The Silent Isle.

If love were so omnipotent, so divine a thing, we should have love stories proving the truth and worth of alliances between an Earl and a kitchen-maid, between a Duchess and a day-labourer; but no attempt is made to upset conventional traditions which are tamely regarded as insuperable.  “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment,” said Shakespeare; but who experiments in such ways, who dares to write of them?  We are still hopelessly feudal and fastidious.  “Such unions do not do,” we say; “they land people in such awkward situations.”  Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris is read with disgust, because the girl was a lodging-house servant; but if Hazlitt had abandoned himself to a passion for a girl of noble birth, the story would have been deemed romantic enough.  Thus it would seem that below the transcendentalism of modern love lies a rich vein of snobbishness.  With Charlotte Bronte the triumph over social conditions in Jane Eyre, and even in Shirley, is one of the things that makes the story glow and thrill; but the glow of the peerage has to be cast in Prisoners over the detestable Lossiemouth, that one may feel that after all the heroine has done well for herself from a social point of view.  If social conditions are indeed a barrier, let them be treated with a sort of noble shame, as the love of the keeper Tregarva for the squire’s daughter Honoria is treated in Yeast; let them not be fastidiously ignored over the tea-cups at the Hall.

Love is a mighty thing, a deep secret; but if we dare to write of it, let us face the truth about it; let us confess boldly that it is limited by physical and social conditions, even though that involves a loss of its transcendent might.  But let us not meekly accept these narrowing axioms, and while we dig a neat canal for the emotion with one hand, claim with the other that the peaceful current has all the splendour and volume of the resistless river foaming from rock to rock, and leaping from the sheltered valley to the boundless sea.

III

People often talk as if human beings were crushed by sorrows and misfortunes and tragic events.  It is not so!  We are crushed by temperament.  Just as Dr. Johnson said about writing, that no man was ever written down but by himself, so we are the victims not of circumstances but of disposition.  Those who succumb to tragic events are those who, like Mrs. Gummidge, feel them more than other people.  The characters that break down under brutalising influences, evil surroundings, monotonous toil, are those neurotic temperaments which under favourable circumstances would have been what is called artistic, who depend upon stimulus and excitement, upon sunshine and pleasure.  Of course, a good deal of what, in our ignorance of the working of psychological laws, we are accustomed to call chance or luck, enters into the question.  Ill-health, dull surroundings, loveless lives cause

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Project Gutenberg
The Silent Isle from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.