Twelve Types

Twelve Types

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Twelve Types, by G.K. Chesterton
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Title: Twelve Types
Author: G.K. Chesterton
Release Date: June 2, 2004 [EBook #12491]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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TWELVE TYPES
BY G.K. CHESTERTON
LONDON ARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS 1902

NOTE
These papers, with certain alterations and additions, are reprinted with
the kind permission of the Editors of The Daily News and The Speaker.
G.K.C. KENSINGTON.

CONTENTS
CHARLOTTE BRONTË WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS SCHOOL
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
FRANCIS ROSTAND CHARLES II STEVENSON THOMAS
CARLYLE TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF SIMPLICITY
SAVONAROLA THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT

CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Objection is often raised against realistic biography because it reveals
so much that is important and even sacred about a man's life. The real
objection to it will rather be found in the fact that it reveals about a man
the precise points which are unimportant. It reveals and asserts and
insists on exactly those things in a man's life of which the man himself
is wholly unconscious; his exact class in society, the circumstances of
his ancestry, the place of his present location. These are things which
do not, properly speaking, ever arise before the human vision. They do
not occur to a man's mind; it may be said, with almost equal truth, that
they do not occur in a man's life. A man no more thinks about himself
as the inhabitant of the third house in a row of Brixton villas than he
thinks about himself as a strange animal with two legs. What a man's
name was, what his income was, whom he married, where he lived,
these are not sanctities; they are irrelevancies.
A very strong case of this is the case of the Brontës. The Brontë is in
the position of the mad lady in a country village; her eccentricities form
an endless source of innocent conversation to that exceedingly mild and

bucolic circle, the literary world. The truly glorious gossips of literature,
like Mr Augustine Birrell and Mr Andrew Lang, never tire of collecting
all the glimpses and anecdotes and sermons and side-lights and sticks
and straws which will go to make a Brontë museum. They are the most
personally discussed of all Victorian authors, and the limelight of
biography has left few darkened corners in the dark old Yorkshire
house. And yet the whole of this biographical investigation, though
natural and picturesque, is not wholly suitable to the Brontës. For the
Brontë genius was above all things deputed to assert the supreme
unimportance of externals. Up to that point truth had always been
conceived as existing more or less in the novel of manners. Charlotte
Brontë electrified the world by showing that an infinitely older and
more elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in which no person,
good or bad, had any manners at all. Her work represents the first great
assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilisation is a disguise as
tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a 'bal masqué.' She showed that
abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside a
manufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace spinster, with the dress
of merino and the soul of flame. It is significant to notice that Charlotte
Brontë, following consciously or unconsciously the great trend of her
genius, was the first to take away from the heroine not only the
artificial gold and diamonds of wealth and fashion, but even the natural
gold and diamonds of physical beauty and grace. Instinctively she felt
that the whole of the exterior must be made ugly that the whole of the
interior might be made sublime. She chose the ugliest of women in the
ugliest of centuries, and revealed within them all the hells and heavens
of Dante.
It may, therefore, I think, be legitimately said that the externals of the
Brontës' life, though singularly picturesque in themselves, matter less
than the externals of almost any other writers. It is interesting to know
whether Jane Austen had any knowledge of the lives of the officers and
women of fashion whom she introduced into her masterpieces. It is
interesting to know whether Dickens had ever seen a shipwreck or been
inside a workhouse. For in these authors much of the conviction is
conveyed, not always by adherence to facts, but always by grasp of
them. But