infallibly degrade their nature…. Lonely as I am, how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career…? How should I be with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where there is not a single educated family? In that case I should have no world at all. As it is, something like a hope and a motive sustains me still. I wish all your daughters–I wish every woman in England, had also a hope and a motive.”
Whatever the views of Charlotte Bronte’s heroines may or may not have been, these were her own views–sober, sincere, and utterly dispassionate. Mrs. Oliphant set them aside, either in criminal carelessness, or with still more criminal deliberation, because they interfered with her theory. They are certainly not the views of a woman given to day-dreaming and window-gazing. Lucy Snowe may have had time for window-gazing, but not Charlotte Bronte, what with her writing and her dusting, sweeping, ironing, bed-making, and taking the eyes out of the potatoes for poor old Tabby, who was too blind to see them. Window-gazing of all things! Mrs. Oliphant could not have fixed upon a habit more absurdly at variance with Charlotte’s character.
For she was pure, utterly and marvellously pure from sentimentalism, which was (and she knew it) the worst vice of the Victorian age. Mr. Leslie Stephen said that, “Miss Bronte’s sense of humour was but feeble.” It was robust enough when it played with sentimentalists. But as for love, for passion, she sees it with a tragic lucidity that is almost a premonition. And her attitude was by no means that of the foredoomed spinster, making necessity her virtue. There was no necessity. She had at least four suitors (quite a fair allowance for a little lady in a lonely parish), and she refused them all. Twice in her life, in her tempestuous youth, and at a crisis of her affairs, she chose “dependence upon coarse employers” before matrimony. She was shrewd, lucid, fastidious, and saw the men she knew without any glamour. To the cold but thoroughly presentable Mr. Henry Nussey she replied thus: “It has always been my habit to study the character of those among whom I chance to be thrown, and I think I know yours and can imagine what description of woman would suit you for a wife. The character should not be too marked, ardent and original, her temper should be mild, her piety undoubted, and her personal attractions sufficient to please your eyes and gratify your just pride. As for me you do not know me….” She was only three-and-twenty when she wrote that, with the prospect of Stonegappe before her. For she had not, and could not have for him, “that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him; and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my husband”. Later, in her worst loneliness she refused that ardent Mr. Taylor, who courted her by the novel means of newspapers sent with violent and unremitting regularity through the post. He represented to some degree the larger life of intellectual interest. But he offended her fastidiousness. She was sorry for the little man with his little newspaper, and that was all. She refused several times the man she ultimately married. He served a long apprenticeship to love, and Charlotte yielded to his distress rather than to her own passion. She describes her engaged state as “very calm, very expectant. What I taste of happiness is of the soberest order. I trust to love my husband. I am grateful for his tender love for me…. Providence offers me this destiny. Doubtless then it is the best for me.”
These are not the words, nor is this the behaviour of Mrs. Oliphant’s Charlotte Bronte, the forlorn and desperate victim of the obsession of matrimony.
I do not say that Charlotte Bronte had not what is called a “temperament”; her genius would not have been what it was without it; she herself would have been incomplete; but there never was a woman of genius who had her temperament in more complete subjection to her character; and it is her character that you have to reckon with at every turn.
The little legends and the little theories have gone far enough. And had they gone no farther they would not have mattered much. They would at least have left Charlotte Bronte’s genius to its own mystery.
But her genius was the thing that irritated, the enigmatic, inexplicable thing. Talent in a woman you can understand, there’s a formula for it–_tout talent de femme est un bonheur manque_. So when a woman’s talent baffles you, your course is plain, _cherchez l’homme_. Charlotte’s critics argued that if you could put your finger on the man you would have the key to the mystery. This, of course, was arguing that her genius was, after all, only a superior kind of talent; but some of them had already begun to ask themselves, Was it, after all, anything more? So they began to look for the man. They were certain by this time that there was one.
The search was difficult; for Charlotte had concealed him well. But they found him at last in M. Constantin Heger, the little Professor of the Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the Rue d’Isabelle. Sir Wemyss Reid had suggested a love-affair in Brussels to account for Charlotte’s depression, which was unfavourable to his theory of the happy life. Mr. Leyland seized upon the idea, for it nourished his theory that Branwell was an innocent lamb who had never caused his sisters a moment’s misery. They _made_ misery for themselves out of his harmless peccadilloes. Mr. Angus Mackay in _The Brontes, Fact and Fiction_, gives us this fiction for a fact. He is pleased with what he calls the “pathetic significance” of his “discovery”. There _was_ somebody, there had to be, and it had to be M. Heger, for there wasn’t anybody else. Mr. Mackay draws back the veil with a gesture and reveals–the love-affair. He is very nice about it, just as nice as ever he can be. “We see her,” he says, “sore wounded in her affections, but unconquerable in her will. The discovery … does not degrade the noble figure we know so well…. The moral of her greatest works–that conscience must reign absolute at whatever cost–acquires a greater force when we realize how she herself came through the furnace of temptation with marks of torture on her, but with no stain on her soul.”
This is all very well, but the question is: _Did_ Charlotte come through a furnace? _Did_ she suffer from a great and tragic passion? It may have been so. For all we know she may have been in fifty furnaces; she may have gone from one fit of tragic passion to another. Only (apart from gossip, and apart from the argument from the novels, which begs the question) we have no evidence to prove it. What we have points all the other way.
Gossip apart, believers in the tragic passion have nourished their theory chiefly on that celebrated passage in a letter of Charlotte’s to Ellen Nussey: “I returned to Brussels after Aunt’s death, prompted by what then seemed an irresistible impulse. I was punished for my selfish folly by a withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of mind.”
Here we have the great disclosure. By “irresistible impulse” and “selfish folly”, Charlotte could only mean indulgence in an illegitimate passion for M. Heger’s society. Peace of mind bears but one interpretation.
Mr. Clement Shorter, to his infinite credit, will have none of this. He maintains very properly that the passage should be left to bear the simple construction that Miss Nussey and Mr. Nicholls put upon it. But I would go farther. I am convinced that not only does that passage bear that construction, but that it will not bear the weight of any other.
In eighteen-forty-two Charlotte’s aunt died, and Charlotte became the head of her father’s household. She left her father’s house in a time of trouble, prompted by “an irresistible impulse” towards what we should now call self-development. Charlotte, more than two years later, in a moment of retrospective morbidity, called it “selfish folly”. In that dark mid-Victorian age it was sin in any woman to leave her home if her home required her. And with her aunt dead, and her brother Branwell drowning his grief for his relative in drink, and her father going blind and beginning in his misery to drink a little too, Charlotte felt that her home did require her. Equally she felt that either Emily or she had got to turn out and make a living, and since it couldn’t possibly be Emily it must be she. The problem would have been quite simple even for Charlotte–but _she wanted to go_. Therefore her tender conscience vacillated. When you remember that Charlotte Bronte’s conscience was, next to her genius, the largest, and at the same time the most delicate part of her, and that her love for her own people was a sacred passion, her words are sufficiently charged with meaning. A passion for M. Heger is, psychologically speaking, superfluous. You can prove anything by detaching words from their context. The letter from which that passage has been torn is an answer to Ellen Nussey’s suggestions of work for Charlotte. Charlotte says “any project which infers the necessity of my leaving home is impracticable to me. If I could leave home I should not be at Haworth now. I know life is passing away, and I am doing nothing, earning nothing–a very bitter knowledge it is at moments–but I see no way out of the mist”; and so on for another line or two, and then: “These ideas sting me keenly sometimes; but whenever I consult my conscience it affirms that I am doing right in staying at home, and bitter are its upbraidings when I yield to an eager desire for release.” And then, the passage quoted _ad nauseam_, to support the legend of M. Heger.
A “total withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of mind”. This letter is dated October 1846–more than two years since her return from Brussels in January, eighteen-forty-four. In those two years her father was threatened with total blindness, and her brother Branwell achieved his destiny. The passage refers unmistakably to events at Haworth. It is further illuminated by another passage from an earlier letter. Ellen Nussey is going through the same crisis–torn between duty to herself and duty to her people. She asks Charlotte’s advice and Charlotte gives judgment: “The right path is that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest.” The sacrifice, observe, not of happiness, not of passion, but of self-interest, the development of self. It was self-development, and not passion, not happiness, that she went to Brussels for.
And Charlotte’s letters from Brussels–from the scene of passion in the year of crisis, eighteen-forty-three–sufficiently reveal the nature of the trouble there. Charlotte was alone in the Pensionnat without Emily. Emily was alone at Haworth. The few friends she had in Brussels left soon after her arrival. She was alone in Brussels, and her homesickness was terrible. You can trace the malady in all its stages. In March she writes: “I ought to consider myself well off, and to be thankful for my good fortune. I hope I am thankful” (clearly she isn’t thankful in the least!), “and if I could always keep up my spirits and never feel lonely or long for companionship or friendship, or whatever they call it, I should do very well.” In the same letter you learn that she is giving English lessons to M. Heger and his brother-in-law, M. Chapelle. “If you could see and hear the efforts I make to teach them to pronounce like Englishmen, and their unavailing attempts to imitate, you would laugh to all eternity.” Charlotte is at first amused at the noises made by M. Heger and his brother-in-law.
In May the noises made by Monsieur fail to amuse. Still, she is “indebted to him for all the pleasure or amusement” that she had, and in spite of her indebtedness, she records a “total want of companionship”. “I lead an easeful, stagnant, silent life, for which … I ought to be very thankful” (but she is not). May I point out that though you may be “silent” in the first workings of a tragic and illegitimate passion, you are not “stagnant”, and certainly not “easeful”.
At the end of May she finds out that Madame Heger does not like her, and Monsieur is “wondrously influenced” by Madame. Monsieur has in a great measure “withdrawn the light of his countenance”, but Charlotte apparently does not care. In August the _vacancies_ are at hand, and everybody but Charlotte is going home. She is consequently “in low spirits; earth and heaven are dreary and empty to me at this moment”…. “I can hardly write, I have such a dreary weight at my heart.” But she will see it through. She will stay some months longer “till I have acquired German”. And at the end: “Everybody is abundantly civil, but homesickness comes creeping over me. I cannot shake it off.” That was in September, in M. Heger’s absence. Later, she tells Emily how she went into the cathedral and made “a real confession _to see what it was like_”. Charlotte’s confession has been used to bolster up the theory of the “temptation”. Unfortunately for the theory it happened in September, when M. Heger and temptation were not there. In October she finds that she no longer trusts Madame Heger. At the same time “solitude oppresses me to an excess”. She gave notice, and M. Heger flew into a passion and commanded her to stay. She stayed very much against, not her conscience, but her will. In the same letter and the same connection she says, “I have much to say–many little odd things, queer and puzzling enough–which I do not like to trust to a letter, but which one day perhaps, or rather one evening–if ever we should find ourselves by the fireside at Haworth or Brookroyd, with our feet on the fender curling our hair–I may communicate to you.”
Charlotte is now aware of a situation; she is interested in it, intellectually, not emotionally.
In November: “Twinges of homesickness cut me to the heart, now and then.” On holidays “the silence and loneliness of all the house weighs down one’s spirits like lead…. Madame Heger, good and kind as I have described her” (_i.e._ for all her goodness and kindness), “never comes near me on these occasions.” … “She is not colder to me than she is to the other teachers, but they are less dependent on her than I am.” But the situation is becoming clearer. Charlotte is interested. “I fancy I begin to perceive the reason of this mighty distance and reserve; it sometimes makes me laugh, and at other times nearly cry. When I am sure of it I will tell you.”
There can be no doubt that before she left Brussels Charlotte was sure; but there is no record of her ever having told.
The evidence from the letters is plain enough. But the first thing that the theorist does is to mutilate letters. He suppresses all those parts of a correspondence which tell against his theory. When these torn and bleeding passages are restored piously to their contexts they are destructive to the legend of tragic passion. They show (as Mr. Clement Shorter has pointed out) that throughout her last year at Brussels Charlotte Bronte saw hardly anything of M. Heger. They also show that before very long Charlotte had a shrewd suspicion that Madame had arranged it so, and that it was not so much the absence of Monsieur that disturbed her as the extraordinary behaviour of Madame. And they show that from first to last she was incurably homesick.
Now if Charlotte had been in any degree, latently, or increasingly, or violently in love with M. Heger, she would have been as miserable as you like in M. Heger’s house, but she would not have been homesick; she would not, I think, have worried quite so much about Madame’s behaviour; and she would have found the clue to it sooner than she did.
To me it is all so simple and self-evident that, if the story were not revived periodically, if it had not been raked up again only the other day,[A] there would be no need to dwell upon anything so pitiful and silly.
[Footnote A: See _The Key to the Bronte Works_, by J. Malham-Dembleby, 1911.]
It rests first and foremost on gossip, silly, pitiful gossip and conjecture. Gossip in England, gossip in Brussels, conjecture all round. Above all, it rests on certain feline hints supplied by Madame Heger and her family. Charlotte’s friends were always playfully suspecting her of love-affairs. They could never put their fingers on the man, and they missed M. Heger. It would never have occurred to their innocent mid-Victorian minds to suspect Charlotte of an attachment to a married man. It would not have occurred to Charlotte to suspect herself of it. But Madame Heger was a Frenchwoman, and she had not a mid-Victorian mind, and she certainly suspected Charlotte of an attachment, a flagrant attachment, to M. Heger. It is well known that Madame made statements to that effect, and it is admitted on all hands that Madame had been jealous. It may fairly be conjectured that it was M. Heger and not Charlotte who gave her cause, slight enough in all conscience, but sufficient for Madame Heger. She did not understand these Platonic relations between English teachers and their French professors. She had never desired Platonic relations with anybody herself, and she saw nothing but annoyance in them for everybody concerned. Madame’s attitude is the clue to the mystery, the clue that Charlotte found. She accused the dead Charlotte of an absurd and futile passion for her husband; she stated that she had had to advise the living Charlotte to moderate the ardour of her admiration for the engaging professor; but the truth, as Charlotte in the end discovered, was that for a certain brief period Madame was preposterously jealous. M. Heger confessed as much when he asked Charlotte to address her letters to him at the Athenee Royale instead of the Pensionnat. The correspondence, he said, was disagreeable to his wife.
Why, in Heaven’s name, disagreeable, if Madame Heger suspected Charlotte of an absurd and futile passion? And why should Madame Heger have been jealous of an absurd and futile woman, a woman who had seen so little of Madame Heger’s husband, and who was then in England? I cannot agree with Mr. Shorter that M. Heger regarded Charlotte with indifference. He was a Frenchman, and he had his vanity, and no doubt the frank admiration of his brilliant pupil appealed to it vividly in moments of conjugal depression. Charlotte herself must have had some attraction for M. Heger. Madame perceived the appeal and the attraction, and she was jealous; therefore her interpretation of appearances could not have been so unflattering to Charlotte as she made out. Madame, in fact, suspected, on her husband’s part, the dawning of an attachment. We know nothing about M. Heger’s attachment, and we haven’t any earthly right to know; but from all that is known of M. Heger it is certain that, if it was not entirely intellectual, not entirely that “_affection presque paternelle_” that he once professed, it was entirely restrained and innocent and honourable. It is Madame Heger with her jealousy who has given the poor gentleman away. Monsieur’s state of mind–extremely temporary–probably accounted for “those many odd little things, queer and puzzling enough”, which Charlotte would not trust to a letter; matter for curl-paper confidences and no more.
Of course there is the argument from the novels, from _The Professor_, from _Jane Eyre_, from _Villette_. I have not forgotten it. But really it begs the question. It moves in an extremely narrow and an extremely vicious circle. Jane Eyre was tried in a furnace of temptation, therefore Charlotte must have been tried. Lucy Snowe and Frances Henri loved and suffered in Brussels. Therefore Charlotte must have loved and suffered there. And if Charlotte loved and suffered and was tried in a furnace of temptation, that would account for Frances and for Lucy and for Jane.
No; the theorists who have insisted on this tragic passion have not reckoned with Charlotte Bronte’s character, and its tremendous power of self-repression. If at Brussels any disastrous tenderness had raised its head it wouldn’t have had a chance to grow an inch. But Charlotte had large and luminous ideas of friendship. She was pure, utterly pure from all the illusions and subtleties and corruptions of the sentimentalist, and she could trust herself in friendship. She brought to it ardours and vehemences that she would never have allowed to love. If she let herself go in her infrequent intercourse with M. Heger, it was because she was so far from feeling in herself the possibility of passion. That was why she could say, “I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what the parting with M. Heger cost me. It grieved me so much to grieve him who has been so true, kind, and disinterested a friend.” That was how she could bring herself to write thus to Monsieur: “_Savez-vous ce que je ferais, Monsieur? J’ecrirais un livre et je le dedierais a mon maitre de litterature, au seul maitre que j’aie jamais eu–a vous Monsieur! Je vous ai dit souvent en francais combien je vous respecte, combien je suis redevable a votre bonte a vos conseils. Je voudrais le dire une fois en anglais … le souvenir de vos bontes ne s’effacera jamais de ma memoire, et tant que ce souvenir durera le respect que vous m’avez inspire durera aussi._” For “_je vous respecte_” we are not entitled to read “_je vous aime_”. Charlotte was so made that kindness shown her moved her to tears of gratitude. When Charlotte said “respect” she meant it. Her feeling for M. Heger was purely what Mr. Matthew Arnold said religion was, an affair of “morality touched with emotion”. All her utterances, where there is any feeling in them, no matter what, have a poignancy, a vibration which is Brontesque and nothing more. And this Brontesque quality is what the theorists have (like Madame Heger, and possibly Monsieur) neither allowed for nor understood.
* * * * *
For this “fiery-hearted Vestal”, this virgin, sharp-tongued and sharper-eyed, this scorner of amorous curates, had a genius for friendship. This genius, like her other genius, was narrow in its range and opportunity, and for that all the more ardent and intense. It fed on what came to its hand. It could even grow, like her other genius, with astounding vitality out of strange and hostile soil. She seems to have had many friends, obscure and great; the obscure, the Dixons, the Wheelrights, the Taylors, the Nusseys, out of all proportion to the great. But properly speaking she had only two friends, Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey, the enchanting, immortal “Nel”.
There _is_ something at first sight strange and hostile about Mary Taylor, the energetic, practical, determined, terribly robust person you see so plainly trying, in the dawn of their acquaintance, to knock the nonsense out of Charlotte. Mary Taylor had no appreciation of the Brontesque. When Charlotte told Mary Taylor that at Cowan Bridge she used to stand in the burn on a stone to watch the water flow by, Mary Taylor told Charlotte that she should have gone fishing. When _Jane Eyre_ appeared she wrote to Charlotte in a strain that is amusing to posterity. There is a touch of condescension in her praise. She is evidently surprised at anything so great coming out of Charlotte. “It seemed to me incredible that you had actually written a book.” “You are very different from me,” she says, “in having no doctrine to preach. It is impossible to squeeze a moral out of your production.” She is thinking of his prototype when she criticizes the character of St. John Rivers. “A missionary either goes into his office for a piece of bread, or he goes for enthusiasm, and that is both too good and too bad a quality for St. John. It’s a bit of your absurd charity to believe in such a man.” As an intellectual woman Mary Taylor realized Charlotte Bronte’s intellect, but it is doubtful if she ever fully realized what, beyond an intellect, she had got hold of in her friend. She was a woman of larger brain than Ellen Nussey, she was loyal and warm-hearted to the last degree, but it was not given to her to see in Charlotte Bronte what Ellen Nussey, little as you would have expected it, had seen. She did not keep her letters. She burnt them “in a fit of caution”, which may have been just as well.
But Mary Taylor is important. She had, among her more tender qualities, an appalling frankness. It was she who told poor little Charlotte that she was very ugly. Charlotte never forgot it. You can feel in her letters, in her novels, in her whole nature, the long reverberation of the shock. She said afterwards: “You did me a great deal of good, Polly,” by which she meant that Polly had done her an infinity of harm.
Her friends all began by trying to do her good. Even Ellen Nussey tried. Charlotte is very kindly cautioned against being “tempted by the fondness of my sisters to consider myself of too much importance”, and in a parenthesis Ellen Nussey begs her not to be offended. “Oh, Ellen,” Charlotte writes, “do you think I could be offended by any good advice you may give me?” She thanks her heartily, and loves her “if possible all the better for it”. Ellen Nussey in her turn asks Charlotte to tell her of her faults and “cease flattering her”. Charlotte very sensibly refuses; and it is not till she has got away from her sisters that her own heart-searchings begin. They are mainly tiresome, but there is a flash of revelation in her reply to “the note you sent me with the umbrella”. “My darling, if I were like you, I should have to face Zionwards, though prejudice and error might occasionally fling a mist over the glorious vision before me, for with all your single-hearted sincerity you have your faults, but _I_ am not like you. If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up, and makes me feel society, as it is, wretchedly insipid, you would pity me, and I dare say despise me.” Miss Nussey writes again, and Charlotte trembles “all over with excitement” after reading her note. “I will no longer shrink from your question,” she replies. “I _do_ wish to be better than I am. I pray fervently sometimes to be made so … this very night I will pray as you wish me.”
But Charlotte is not in the least like Ellen Nussey, and she still refuses to be drawn into any return of this dangerous play with a friend’s conscience and her nerves. “I will not tell you all I think and feel about you, Ellen. I will preserve unbroken that reserve which alone enables me to maintain a decent character for judgment; but for that, I should long ago have been set down by all who knows me as a Frenchified fool. You have been very kind to me of late, and gentle, and you have spared me those little sallies of ridicule, which, owing to my miserable and wretched touchiness of character, used formerly to make me wince, as if I had been touched with hot iron. Things that nobody else cares for enter into my mind and rankle there like venom. I know these feelings are absurd, and therefore I try to hide them, but they only sting the deeper for concealment. I’m an idiot!”
Miss Nussey seems to have preserved her calm through all the excitement and to have never turned a hair. But nothing could have been worse for Charlotte than this sort of thing. It goes on for years. It began in eighteen-thirty-three, the third year of their friendship, when she was seventeen. In ‘thirty-seven it is at its height. Charlotte writes from Dewsbury Moor: “If I could always live with you, if your lips and mine could at the same time drink the same draught at the same pure fountain of mercy, I hope, I trust, I might one day become better, far better than my evil, wandering thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit and warm to the flesh, will now permit me to be. I often plan the pleasant life we might lead, strengthening each other in the power of self-denial, that hallowed and glowing devotion which the past Saints of God often attained to.”
Now a curious and interesting thing is revealed by this correspondence. These religious fervours and depressions come on the moment Charlotte leaves Haworth and disappear as soon as she returns. All those letters were written from Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor, while the Haworth letters of the same period are sane and light-hearted. And when she is fairly settled at Haworth, instead of emulating the Saints of God, she and Miss Nussey are studying human nature and the art of flirtation as exhibited by curates. Charlotte administers to her friend a formidable amount of worldly wisdom, thus avenging herself for the dance Miss Nussey led her round the throne of grace.
For, though that morbid excitement and introspection belonged solely to Charlotte’s days of exile, Miss Nussey was at the bottom of it. Mary Taylor would have been a far robuster influence. But Charlotte’s friendship for Mary Taylor, warm as it was, strikes cold beside her passionate affection for Ellen Nussey. She brought her own fire to that, and her own extraordinary capacity for pain. Her letters show every phase of this friendship, its birth, its unfolding; and then the sudden leaping of the flame, its writhing and its torture. She writes with a lover’s ardour and impatience. “Write to me very soon and dispel my uncertainty, or I shall get impatient, almost irritable.” “I read your letter with dismay. Ellen–what shall I do without you? Why are we to be denied each other’s society? It is an inscrutable fatality…. Why are we to be divided?” (She is at Roe Head, and Roe Head suggests the answer.) “Surely, Ellen, it must be because we are in danger of loving each other too well–of losing sight of the _Creator_ in idolatry of the _creature_.” She prays to be resigned, and records “a sweet, placid sensation like those that I remember used to visit me when I was a little child, and on Sunday evenings in summer stood by the window reading the life of a certain French nobleman who attained a purer and higher degree of sanctity than has been known since the days of the Early Martyrs. I thought of my own Ellen–” “I wish I could see you, my darling; I have lavished the warmest affections of a very hot tenacious heart upon you; if you grow cold, it is over.” She was only twenty-one.
A few more years and the leaping and the writhing and the torture cease, the fire burns to a steady, inextinguishable glow. There is gaiety in Charlotte’s tenderness. She is “infuriated” on finding a jar in her trunk. “At first I hoped it was empty, but when I found it heavy and replete, I could have hurled it all the way back to Birstall. However, the inscription A.B. softened me much. You ought first to be tenderly kissed, and then as tenderly whipped. Emily is just now sitting on the floor of the bedroom where I am writing, looking at her apples. She smiled when I gave them and the collar as your presents, with an expression at once well pleased and slightly surprised.”
The religious fervours and the soul-searchings have ceased long ago, so has Miss Nussey’s brief spiritual ascendency. But the friendship and the letters never cease. They go on for twenty years, through exile and suffering, through bereavement, through fame and through marriage, uninterrupted and, except for one brief period, unabridged. There is nothing in any biography to compare with those letters to Ellen Nussey. If Charlotte Bronte had not happened to be a great genius as well as a great woman, they alone would have furnished forth her complete biography. There is no important detail of her mere life that is not given in them. Mrs. Gaskell relied almost entirely on them, and on information supplied to her by Miss Nussey. And each critic and biographer who followed her, from Sir Wemyss Reid to Mr. Clement Shorter, drew from the same source. Miss Nussey was almost the only safe repository of material relating to Charlotte Bronte. She had possessed hundreds of her letters and, with that amiable weakness which was the defect of her charming quality, she was unable to withhold any of them from the importunate researcher. There seems to have been nothing, except one thing, that Charlotte did not talk about to Miss Nussey when they sat with their feet on the fender and their hair in curl-papers. That one thing was her writing. It is quite possible that in those curl-paper confidences Miss Nussey learnt the truth about Charlotte’s friend, M. Heger. She never learnt anything about Charlotte’s genius. In everything that concerned her genius Charlotte was silent and secret with her friend. That was the line, the very sharp and impassable line she drew between her “dear, _dear_ Ellen”, her “dearest Nel”, and her sisters, Anne and Emily. The freemasonry of friendship ended there. You may search in vain through even her later correspondence with Miss Nussey for any more than perfunctory and extraneous allusions to her works. It was as if they had never been. Every detail of her daily life is there, the outer and the inner things, the sewing and ironing and potato-peeling, together with matters of the heart and soul, searchings, experiences, agonies; the figures of her father, her brother, her sisters, move there, vivid and alive; and old Tabby and the curates; and the very animals, Keeper and Flossie, and the little black cat, Tom, that died and made Emily sorry; but of the one thing not a word. The letters to Ellen Nussey following the publication of _Jane Eyre_ are all full of gossip about Miss Ringrose and the Robinsons. Presently Ellen hears a rumour of publication. Charlotte repudiates it and friction follows.
Charlotte writes: “Dear Ellen,–write another letter and explain that note of yours distinctly…. Let me know what you heard, and from whom you heard it. You do wrong to feel pain from any circumstance, or to suppose yourself slighted….” “Dear Ellen,–All I can say to you about a certain matter is this: the report … must have had its origin in some absurd misunderstanding. I have given _no one_ a right to affirm or hint in the most distant manner that I am publishing (humbug!). Whoever has said it–if anyone has, which I doubt–is no friend of mine. Though twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none. I scout the idea utterly. Whoever, after I have distinctly rejected the charge, urges it upon me, will do an unkind and ill-bred thing.” If Miss Nussey is asked, she is authorized by Miss Bronte to say, “that she repels and disowns every accusation of the kind. You may add, if you please, that if anyone has her confidence, you believe you have, and she has made no drivelling confessions to you on that subject.” “Dear Ellen,–I shall begin by telling you that you have no right to be angry at the length of time I have suffered to slip by since receiving your last, without answering it; because you have often kept me waiting much longer, and having made this gracious speech, thereby obviating reproaches, I will add that I think it a great shame, when you receive a long and thoroughly interesting letter, full of the sort of details you fully relish, to read the same with selfish pleasure, and not even have the manners to thank your correspondent, and express how very much you enjoyed the narrative. I _did_ enjoy the narrative in your last very keenly…. Which of the Miss Woolers did you see at Mr. Allbutts?”
A beautiful but most unequal friendship. “The sort of details you fully relish–” How that phrase must have rankled! You can hear the passionate protest: “Those details are not what I relish in the least. Putting me off with your Woolers and your Allbutts! If only you had told me about _Jane Eyre_!” For it turned out that all the time Mary Taylor had been told. The inference was that Mary Taylor, with her fits of caution, could be trusted.
This silence of Charlotte’s must have been most painful and incomprehensible to the poor Ellen who was Caroline Helstone. She had been the first to divine Charlotte’s secret; for she kept the letters. She must have felt like some tender and worshipping wife to whom all doors in the house of the beloved are thrown open, except the door of the sanctuary, which is persistently slammed in her charming face. There must have come to her moments of terrible insight when she felt the danger and the mystery of the flaming spirit she had tried to hold. But Charlotte’s friend can wear her half-pathetic immortality with grace. She could at least say: “She told me things she never told anyone else. I have hundreds of her letters. And I had her heart.”
* * * * *
Nothing so much as this correspondence reveals the appalling solitude in which the Brontes lived. Here is their dearest and most intimate friend, and she is one to whom they can never speak of the thing that interested them most. No doubt “our best plays mean secret plays”; but Charlotte, at any rate, suffered from this secrecy. There was nothing to counteract Miss Nussey’s direful influence on her spiritual youth. “Papa” highly approved of the friendship. He wished it to continue, and it did; and it was the best that Charlotte had. I know few things more pathetic than the cry that Charlotte, at twenty-one, sent out of her solitude (with some verses) to Southey and to Wordsworth. Southey told her that, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.” A sound, respectable, bourgeois opinion so far, but Southey went farther. “Write poetry for its own sake,” he said; and he could hardly have said better. Charlotte treasured the letter, and wrote on the cover of it, “Southey’s advice, to be kept for ever.” Wordsworth’s advice, I am sorry to say, provoked her to flippancy.
And that, out of the solitude, was all. Not the ghost, not the shadow of an Influence came to the three sisters. There never was genius that owed so little to influence as theirs.
I know that in Charlotte’s case there is said to have been an Influence. An Influence without which she would have remained for ever in obscurity, with _Villette_, with _Shirley_, with _Jane Eyre_, with _The Professor_, unborn, unconceived.
Need I say that the Influence is–M. Heger?
“The sojourn in Brussels,” says Mr. Clement Shorter, “made Miss Bronte an author,” and he is only following Sir Wemyss Reid, who was the first to establish Brussels as the turning-point. Mr. Shorter does not believe in M. Heger as the inspirer of passion, but he does believe in him as the inspirer of genius. He thinks it exceedingly probable that had not circumstances led Charlotte Bronte to spend some time at Brussels not only would “the world never have heard of her”, but it would never have heard of her sisters. He is quite certain about Charlotte anyhow; she could not have “arrived” had she not met M. Heger. “She went,” he says, “to Brussels full of the crude ambitions, the semi-literary impulses that are so common on the fringe of the writing world. She left Brussels a woman of genuine cultivation, of educated tastes, armed with just the equipment that was to enable her to write the books of which two generations of her countrymen have been justly proud.”
This is saying that Charlotte Bronte had no means of expression before she wrote _devoirs_ under M. Heger. True, her genius did not find itself until after she left Brussels, that is to say, not until she was nearly thirty. I have not read any of her works as Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley, and I do not imagine they were works of genius. But that only means that Charlotte Bronte’s genius took time. She was one of those novelists who do not write novels before they are nearly thirty. But she could write. Certain fragments of her very earliest work show that from the first she had not only the means, but very considerable mastery of expression. What is more, they reveal in germ the qualities that marked her style in its maturity. Her styles rather, for she had several. There is her absolutely simple style, in which she is perfect; her didactic style, her fantastic style, which are mere temporary aberrations; and her inspired style, in which at her worst she is merely flamboyant and redundant, and at her best no less than perfect. You will find a faint, embryonic foreshadowing of her perfections in the fragments given by Mrs. Gaskell. There is THE HISTORY OF THE YEAR 1829, beginning: “Once Papa lent my sister Maria a book. It was an old geography book; she wrote on its blank leaf, “Papa lent me this book.” This book is a hundred and twenty years old; it is at this moment lying before me. While I write this I am in the kitchen of the Parsonage, Haworth; Tabby, the servant, is washing up the breakfast things, and Anne, my youngest sister (Maria was my eldest), is kneeling on a chair, looking at some cakes, which Tabby has been baking for us.” You cannot beat that for pure simplicity of statement. There is another fragment that might have come straight out of _Jane Eyre_. “One night, about the time when the cold sleet and stormy fogs of November are succeeded by the snowstorms and high piercing night-winds of confirmed winter, we were all sitting round the warm, blazing kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrel with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which she came off victorious, no candle having been produced.” And there is a dream-story that Mr. Clement Shorter gives. She is in the “Mines of Cracone”, under the floor of the sea. “But in the midst of all this magnificence I felt an indescribable sense of fear and terror, for the sea raged above us, and by the awful and tumultuous noises of roaring winds and dashing waves, it seemed as if the storm was violent. And now the massy pillars groaned beneath the pressure of the ocean, and the glittering arches seemed about to be overwhelmed. When I heard the rushing waters and saw a mighty flood rolling towards me I gave a loud shriek of terror.” The dream changes: she is in a desert full of barren rocks and high mountains, where she sees “by the light of his own fiery eyes a royal lion rousing himself from his kingly slumbers. His terrible eye was fixed upon me, and the desert rang, and the rocks echoed with the tremendous roar of fierce delight which he uttered as he sprang towards me.” And there is her letter to the editor of one of their _Little Magazines_: “Sir,–It is well known that the Genii have declared that unless they perform certain arduous duties every year, of a mysterious nature, all the worlds in the firmament will be burnt up, and gathered together in one mighty globe, which will roll in solitary splendour through the vast wilderness of space, inhabited only by the four high princes of the Genii, till time shall be succeeded by Eternity; and the impudence of this is only to be paralleled by another of their assertions, namely, that by their magic might they can reduce the world to a desert, the purest waters to streams of livid poison, and the clearest lakes to stagnant water, the pestilential vapours of which shall slay all living creatures, except the bloodthirsty beast of the forest, and the ravenous bird of the rock. But that in the midst of this desolation the palace of the chief Genii shall rise sparkling in the wilderness, and the horrible howl of their war-cry shall spread over the land at morning, at noontide, and at night; but that they shall have their annual feast over the bones of the dead, and shall yearly rejoice with the joy of victors. I think, sir, that the horrible wickedness of this needs no remark, and therefore I hasten to subscribe myself, etc.”
Puerile, if you like, and puerile all the stuff that Charlotte Bronte wrote before eighteen-forty-six; but her style at thirteen, in its very rhythms and cadences, is the unmistakable embryo of her style at thirty; and M. Heger no more cured her of its faults that he could teach her its splendours. Something that was not Brussels made Miss Bronte a prodigious author at thirteen. The mere mass of her _Juvenilia_ testifies to a most ungovernable bent. Read the list of works, appalling in their length, which this child produced in a period of fifteen months; consider that she produced nothing but melancholy letters during her “sojourn in Brussels”; and compare M. Heger’s academic precepts with her practice, with the wild sweep and exuberance of her style when she has shaken him off, and her genius gets possession of her.
I know there is a gulf fixed between Currer Bell and Charles Townsend, who succeeded Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley and the Marquis of Douro, about eighteen-thirty-eight; but it is bridged by the later _Poems_ which show Charlotte’s genius struggling through a wrong medium to the right goal. She does not know–after the sojourn in Brussels she does not yet know–that her right medium is prose. She knew no more than she knew in November, eighteen-forty-one, when, on the eve of her flight from Haworth, she writes: “The plain fact is, I was not, I am not now, certain of my destiny.” It was not until two years after she had returned to Haworth that she received her certainty. For posterity, overpowered by the labour of the Bronte specialists, it may seem as if Charlotte Bronte’s genius owed everything to her flight from Haworth. In reality her flight merely coincided with the inevitable shooting of its wings; and the specialists have mistaken coincidence for destiny.
Heaven only knows what would have happened to her genius if, blind to her destiny, she had remained in Brussels. For, once there, its wing-feathers left off growing. Its way was blocked by every conceivable hostile and obstructive thing. Madame Heger was hostile, and Monsieur, I think, purely obstructive. Emily saw through him, and denounced his method as fatal to all originality. Charlotte, to be sure, called him “my dear master, the only master that I ever had”, but if that was not her “absurd charity”, it was only her Brontesque way. There was no sense in which he was her master. He taught her French; to the very last the habit of using “a few French words” was the King Charles’s head in her manuscripts; and the French he taught her did her harm. The restraint he could and would have taught her she never learnt until her genius had had, in defiance and in spite of him, its full fling.
And what a fling! It is the way of genius to look after itself. In spite of obstacles, Charlotte Bronte’s took hold of every man and woman that crossed and barred its path, and ultimately it avenged itself on Monsieur and on Madame Heger. Those two were made for peaceful, honourable conjugal obscurity, but it was their luck to harbour a half-fledged and obstructed genius in their Pensionnat, a genius thirsting for experience; and somehow, between them, they contrived to make it suffer. That was their tragedy. Monsieur’s case is pitiful; for he was kind and well-meaning, and he was fond of Charlotte; and yet, because of Charlotte, there is no peace for him in the place where he has gone. Her genius has done with him, but her ghost, like some malign and awful destiny, pursues him. No sooner does he sink back quiet in his grave than somebody unearths him. Why cannot he be allowed to rest, once for all, in his amiable unimportance? He became, poor man, important only by the use that Charlotte’s genius made of him. It seized him as it would have seized on any other interesting material that came its way. Without him we might have had another Rochester, and we should not have had any Paul Emanuel, which would have been a pity; that is all.
There is hardly any hope that Bronte specialists will accept this view. For them the sojourn in Brussels will still stand as the turning-point in Charlotte Bronte’s career. Yet for her, long afterwards, Brussels must have stood as the danger threatening it. She would have said, I think, that her sojourn in Haworth was the turning-point. It was destiny that turned Emily back to Haworth from the destruction that waited for her at Brussels, so that she conceived and brought forth _Wuthering Heights_; her own destiny that she secretly foreknew, consoling and beneficent. And, no doubt, it was destiny of a sort, unforeknown, deceitful, apparently malignant, that sent Charlotte back again to Brussels after her aunt’s death. It wrung from her her greatest book, _Villette_. But Haworth, I think, would have wrung from her another and perhaps a greater.
For the first-fruits of the sojourn in Brussels was neither _Villette_ nor _Jane Eyre_, but _The Professor_. And _The Professor_ has none of the qualities of _Jane Eyre_ or of _Villette_; it has none of the qualities of Charlotte’s later work at all; above all, none of that master quality which M. Heger is supposed to have specially evoked. Charlotte, indeed, could not well have written a book more destructive to the legend of the upheaval, the tragic passion, the furnace of temptation and the flight. Nothing could be less like a furnace than the atmosphere of _The Professor_. From the first page to the last there is not one pulse, not one breath of passion in it. The bloodless thing comes coldly, slowly tentatively, from the birth. It is almost as frigid as a _devoir_ written under M. Heger’s eye. The theorists, I notice, are careful not to draw attention to _The Professor_; and they are wise, for attention drawn to _The Professor_ makes sad work of their theory.
Remember, on the theory, Charlotte Bronte has received her great awakening, her great enlightenment; she is primed with passion; the whole wonderful material of _Villette_ is in her hand; she has before her her unique opportunity. You ought, on the theory, to see her hastening to it, a passionate woman, pouring out her own one and supreme experience, and, with the brand of Brussels on her, never afterwards really doing anything else. Whereas the first thing the impassioned Charlotte does (after a year of uninspired and ineffectual poetizing) is to sit down and write _The Professor_; a book, remarkable not by any means for its emotion, but for its cold and dispassionate observation. Charlotte eliminates herself, and is Crimsworth in order that she may observe Frances Henri the more dispassionately. She is inspired solely by the analytic spirit, and either cannot, or will not, let herself go. But she does what she meant to do. She had it in mind to write, not a great work of imagination, but a grey and sober book, and a grey and sober book is what she writes. A book concerned only with things and people she has seen and known; a book, therefore, from which passion and the poetry that passion is must be rigidly excluded, as belonging to the region of things not, strictly speaking, known. It is as if she had written _The Professor_ in rivalry with her sister Anne, both of them austerely determined to put aside all imagination and deal with experience and experience alone. Thus you obtain sincerity, you obtain truth. And with nothing but experience before her, she writes a book that has no passion in it, a book almost as bloodless and as gentle as her sister Anne’s.
Let us not disparage _The Professor_. Charlotte herself did not disparage it. In her Preface she refused to solicit “indulgence for it on the plea of a first attempt. A first attempt,” she says, “it certainly was not, as the pen which wrote it had been previously worn in a practice of some years.” In that Preface she shows plainly that at the very outset of her career she had no sterner critic than herself; that she was aware of her sins and her temptations, and of the dangers that lurked for her in her imaginative style. “In many a crude effort, destroyed almost as soon as composed, I had got over any such taste as I might have had for ornamented and decorated composition, and come to prefer what was plain and homely.” Observe, it is not to the lessons of the “master”, but to the creation and destruction that went on at Haworth that she attributes this purgation. She is not aware of the extent to which she can trust her genius, of what will happen when she has fairly let herself go. She is working on a method that rules her choice of subject. “I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life, as I had seen real, living men work theirs–that he should never get a shilling that he had not earned–that no sudden turns should lift him in a moment to wealth and high station; that whatever small competency he might gain should be won by the sweat of his brow; that before he could find so much as an arbour to sit down in, he should master at least half the ascent of the Hill Difficulty; that he should not marry even a beautiful girl or a lady of rank.”
There was no fine madness in that method; but its very soundness and sanity show the admirable spirit in which Charlotte Bronte approached her art. She was to return to the method of _The Professor_ again and yet again, when she suspected herself of having given imagination too loose a rein. The remarkable thing was that she should have begun with it.
And in some respects _The Professor_ is more finished, better constructed than any of her later books. There is virtue in its extreme sobriety. Nothing could be more delicate and firm than the drawing of Frances Henri; nothing in its grey style more admirable than the scene where Crimsworth, having found Frances in the cemetery, takes her to her home in the Rue Notre Dame aux Neiges.
“Stepping over a little mat of green wool, I found myself in a small room with a painted floor and a square of green carpet in the middle; the articles of furniture were few, but all bright and exquisitely clean–order reigned through its narrow limits–such order as it suited my punctilious soul to behold…. Poor the place might be; poor truly it was, but its neatness was better than elegance, and had but a bright little fire shone on that clean hearth, I should have deemed it more attractive than a palace. No fire was there, however, and no fuel laid ready to light; the lace-mender was unable to allow herself that indulgence…. Frances went into an inner room to take off her bonnet, and she came out a model of frugal neatness, with her well-fitting black stuff dress, so accurately defining her elegant bust and taper waist, with her spotless white collar turned back from a fair and shapely neck, with her plenteous brown hair arranged in smooth bands on her temples and in a large Grecian plait behind: ornaments she had none–neither brooch, ring, nor ribbon; she did well enough without them–perfection of fit, proportion of form, grace of carriage, agreeably supplied their place.” Frances lights a fire, having fetched wood and coal in a basket.
“‘It is her whole stock, and she will exhaust it out of hospitality,’ thought I.
“‘What are you going to do?’ I asked: ‘not surely to light a fire this hot evening? I shall be smothered.’
“‘Indeed, Monsieur, I feel it very chilly since the rain began; besides, I must boil the water for my tea, for I take tea on Sundays; you will be obliged to bear the heat.'”
And Frances makes the tea, and sets the table, and brings out her pistolets, and offers them to Monsieur, and it is all very simple and idyllic. So is the scene where Crimsworth, without our knowing exactly how he does it, declares himself to Frances. The dialogue is half in French, and does not lend itself to quotation, but it compares very favourably with the more daring comedy of courtship in _Jane Eyre_. Frances is delicious in her very solidity, her absence of abandonment. She refuses flatly to give up her teaching at Crimsworth’s desire, Crimsworth, who will have six thousand francs a year.
“‘How rich you are, Monsieur!’ And then she stirred uneasily in my arms. ‘Three thousand francs!’ she murmured, ‘while I get only twelve hundred!’ She went on faster. ‘However, it must be so for the present; and, Monsieur, were you not saying something about my giving up my place? Oh no! I shall hold it fast’; and her little fingers emphatically tightened on mine.
“‘Think of marrying you to be kept by you, Monsieur! I could not do it; and how dull my days would be! You would be away teaching in close, noisy schoolrooms, from morning till evening, and I should be lingering at home, unemployed and solitary. I should get depressed and sullen, and you would soon tire of me.’
“‘Frances, you could yet read and study–two things you like so well.’
“‘Monsieur, I could not; I like contemplative life, but I like an active better; I must act in some way, and act with you. I have taken notice, Monsieur, that people who are only in each other’s company for amusement, never really like each other so well, or esteem each other so highly, as those who work together, and perhaps suffer together!'”
To which Crimsworth replies, “You speak God’s truth, and you shall have your own way, for it is the best way.”
There is far more common sense than passion in the solid little Frances and her apathetic lover. It is Frances Henri’s situation, not her character, that recalls so irresistibly Lucy Snowe. Frances has neither Lucy’s temperament, nor Lucy’s terrible capacity for suffering. She suffers through her circumstances, not through her temperament. The motives handled in _The Professor_ belong to the outer rather than the inner world; the pressure of circumstance, bereavement, poverty, the influences of alien and unloved surroundings, these are the springs that determine the drama of Frances and of Crimsworth. Charlotte is displaying a deliberate interest in the outer world and the material event. She does not yet know that it is in the inner world that her great conquest and dominion is to be. The people in this first novel are of the same family as the people in _Jane Eyre_, in _Shirley_, in _Villette_. Crimsworth is almost reproduced in Louis Moore. Yorke Hunsden is the unmistakable father of Mr. Yorke and Rochester; Frances, a pale and passionless sister of Jane Eyre, and a first cousin of Lucy. Yet, in spite of these relationships, _The Professor_ stands alone. In spite of its striking resemblance to _Villette_ there is no real, no spiritual affinity. And the great gulf remains fixed between _The Professor_ and _Jane Eyre_.
This difference lies deeper than technique. It is a difference of vision, of sensation. The strange greyness of _The Professor_, its stillness, is not due altogether to Charlotte’s deliberate intention. It is the stillness, the greyness of imperfect hearing, of imperfect seeing. I know it has one fine piece of word-painting, but not one that can stand among Charlotte Bronte’s masterpieces in this kind.
Here it is. “Already the pavement was drying; a balmy and fresh breeze stirred the air, purified by lightning; I left the west behind me, where spread a sky like opal, azure inmingled with crimson; the enlarged sun, glorious in Tyrian dyes, dipped his brim already; stepping, as I was, eastward, I faced a vast bank of clouds, but also I had before me the arch of an even rainbow; a perfect rainbow–high, wide, vivid. I looked long; my eye drank in the scene, and I suppose my brain must have absorbed it; for that night, after lying awake in pleasant fever a long time, watching the silent sheet-lightning, which still played among the retreating clouds, and flashed silvery over the stars, I at last fell asleep; and then in a dream was reproduced the setting sun, the bank of clouds, the mighty rainbow. I stood, methought, on a terrace; I leaned over a parapeted wall; there was space below me, depth I could not fathom, but hearing an endless splash of waves, I believed it to be the sea; sea spread to the horizon; sea of changeful green and intense blue; all was soft in the distance; all vapour-veiled. A spark of gold glistened on the line between water and air, floated up, appeared, enlarged, changed; the object hung midway between heaven and earth, under the arch of the rainbow; the soft but dark clouds diffused behind. It hovered as on wings; pearly, fleecy, gleaming air streamed like raiment round it; light, tinted with carnation, coloured what seemed face and limbs; a large star shone with still lustre on an angel’s forehead–” But the angel ruins it.
And this is all, and it leaves the dreariness more dreary. In _The Professor_ you wander through a world where there is no sound, no colour, no vibration; a world muffled and veiled in the stillness and the greyness of the hour before dawn. It is the work of a woman who is not perfectly alive. So far from having had her great awakening, Charlotte is only half awake. Her intellect is alert enough and avid, faithful and subservient to the fact. It is her nerves and senses that are asleep. Her soul is absent from her senses.
* * * * *
But in _Jane Eyre_, she is not only awakened, but awake as she has never been awake before, with all her virgin senses exquisitely alive, every nerve changed to intense vibration. Sometimes she is perniciously awake; she is doing appalling things, things unjustifiable, preposterous; things that would have meant perdition to any other writer; she sees with wild, erroneous eyes; but the point is that she sees, that she keeps moving, that from the first page to the last she is never once asleep. To come to _Jane Eyre_ after _The Professor_ is to pass into another world of feeling and of vision.
It is not the difference between reality and unreality. _The Professor_ is real enough, more real in some minor points–dialogue, for instance–than _Jane Eyre_. The difference is that _The Professor_ is a transcript of reality, a very delicate and faithful transcript, and _Jane Eyre_ is reality itself, pressed on the senses. The pressure is so direct and so tremendous, that it lasts through those moments when the writer’s grip has failed.
For there are moments, long moments of perfectly awful failure in _Jane Eyre_. There are phrases that make you writhe, such as “the etymology of the mansion’s designation”, and the shocking persistency with which Charlotte Bronte “indites”, “peruses”, and “retains”. There are whole scenes that outrage probability. Such are the scenes, or parts of scenes, between Jane and Rochester during the comedy of his courtship. The great orchard scene does not ring entirely true. For pages and pages it falters between passion and melodrama; between rhetoric and the _cri de coeur_. Jane in the very thick of her emotion can say, “I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence, with what I delight in–with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester, and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity for departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death.” And the comedy is worse. Jane elaborates too much in those delicious things she says to Rochester. Rochester himself provokes the parodist. (Such manners as Rochester’s were unknown in mid-Victorian literature.)
“He continued to send for me punctually the moment the clock struck seven; though when I appeared before him now, he had no such honeyed terms as ‘love’ and ‘darling’ on his lips: the best words at my disposal were ‘provoking’, ‘malicious elf,’ ‘sprite’, ‘changeling’, etc. For caresses, too, I now got grimaces; for a pressure of the hand, a pinch on the arm; for a kiss on the cheek, a severe tweak of the ear. It was all right: at present I decidedly preferred these fierce favours to anything more tender.”
Yet there is comedy, pure comedy in those scenes, though never sustained, and never wrought to the inevitable dramatic climax. Jane is delightful when she asks Rochester whether the frown on his forehead will be his “married look”, and when she tells him to make a dressing-gown for himself out of the pearl-grey silk, “and an infinite series of waistcoats out of the black satin”. _The Quarterly_ was much too hard on the earlier _cadeau_ scene, with Rochester and Jane and Adele, which is admirable in its suggestion of Jane’s shyness and precision.
_”‘N’est-ce pas, Monsieur, qu’il y a un cadeau pour Mademoiselle Eyre, dans votre petit coffre?'”_
“‘Who talks of _cadeaux_?’ said he gruffly; ‘did you expect a present, Miss Eyre? Are you fond of presents?’ and he searched my face with eyes that I saw were dark, irate, and piercing.
“‘I hardly know, sir; I have little experience of them; they are generally thought pleasant things.'”
Charlotte Bronte was on her own ground there. But you tremble when she leaves it; you shudder throughout the awful drawing-room comedy of Blanche Ingram. Blanche says to her mother: “Am I right, Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park?” And her mother says to Blanche, “My lily-flower, you are right now, as always.” Blanche says to Rochester, “Signor Eduardo, are you in voice to-night?” and he, “Donna Bianca, if you command it, I will be.” And Blanche says to the footman, “Cease that chatter, blockhead, and do my bidding.”
That, Charlotte’s worst lapse, is a very brief one, and the scene itself is unimportant. But what can be said of the crucial scene of the novel, the tremendous scene of passion and temptation? There _is_ passion in the scene before it, between Jane and Rochester on the afternoon of the wedding-day that brought no wedding.
“‘Jane, I never meant to wound you thus. If the man who had but one little ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter, that ate of his bread, and drank of his cup, and lay in his bosom, had by some mistake slaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have rued his bloody blunder more than I now rue mine. Will you ever forgive me?’… ‘You know I am a scoundrel, Jane?’ ere long he inquired wistfully, wondering, I suppose, at my continued silence and tameness; the result of weakness rather than of will.
“‘Yes, sir.’
“‘Then tell me so roundly and sharply–don’t spare me.’
“‘I cannot; I am tired and sick. I want some water.’
“He heaved a sort of shuddering sigh, and, taking me in his arms, carried me downstairs.”
But there are terrible lapses. After Rochester’s cry, “‘Jane, my little darling … If you were mad, do you think I should hate you,'” he elaborates his idea and he is impossible: “‘Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken it would be my treasure still; if you raved, my arms should confine you and not a strait waistcoat–your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me; if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace at least as fond as it would be restrictive.'”
And in the final scene of temptation there is a most curious mingling of reality and unreality, of the passion which is poetry, and the poetry which is not passion.
“‘Never,’ said he, as he ground his teeth, ‘never was anything so frail, and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand!’ And he shook me with the force of his hold. ‘I could bend her with my finger and thumb; and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage–with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it–the savage, beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit–with will and energy, and virtue and purity–that I want: not alone your brittle frame. Of yourself, you could come with soft flight and nestle against my heart, if you would; seized against your will you will elude the grasp like an essence–you will vanish ere I inhale your fragrance. Oh, come, Jane, come!'”
It is the crucial scene of the book; and with all its power, with all its vehemence and passionate reality it is unconvincing. It stirs you and it leaves you cold.
The truth is that in _Jane Eyre_ Charlotte Bronte had not mastered the art of dialogue; and to the very last she was uncertain in her handling of it. In this she is inferior to all the great novelists of her time; inferior to some who were by no means great. She understood more of the spiritual speech of passion than any woman before her, but she ignores its actual expression, its violences, its reticences, its silences. In her great scenes she is inspired one moment, and the next positively handicapped by her passion and her poetry. In the same sentence she rises to the sudden poignant _cri du coeur_, and sinks to the artifice of metaphor. She knew that passion is poetry, and poetry is passion; you might say it was all she knew, or ever cared to know. But her language of passion is too often the language of written rather than of spoken poetry, of poetry that is not poetry at all. It is as if she had never heard the speech of living men and women. There is more actuality in the half-French chatter of Adele than in any of the high utterances of Jane and Rochester.
And yet her sense of the emotion behind the utterance is infallible, so infallible that we accept the utterance. By some miracle, which is her secret, the passion gets through. The illusion of reality is so strong that it covers its own lapses. _Jane Eyre_ exists to prove that truth is higher than actuality.
“‘Jane suits me: do I suit her?’
“‘To the finest fibre of my nature, sir.'”
If no woman alive had ever said that, it would yet be true to Jane’s feeling. For it is a matter of the finest fibres, this passion of Jane’s, that set people wondering about Currer Bell, that inflamed Mrs. Oliphant, as it inflamed the reviewer in _The Quarterly_, and made Charles Kingsley think that Currer Bell was coarse. Their state of mind is incredible to us now. For what did poor Jane do, after all? Nobody could possibly have had more respect for the ten commandments. For all Rochester’s raging, the ten commandments remain exactly where they were. It was inconceivable to Charlotte Bronte that any decent man or woman could make hay, or wish to make hay, of them. And yet Jane offended. She sinned against the unwritten code that ordains that a woman may lie till she is purple in the face, but she must not, as a piece of gratuitous information, tell a man she loves him; not, that is to say, in as many words. She may declare her passion unmistakably in other ways. She may exhibit every ignominious and sickly sign of it; her eyes may glow like hot coals; she may tremble; she may flush and turn pale; she may do almost anything, provided she does not speak the actual words. In mid-Victorian times an enormous licence was allowed her. She might faint, with perfect propriety, in public; she might become anaemic and send for the doctor, and be ordered iron; she might fall ill, horridly and visibly, and have to be taken away to spas and places to drink the waters. Everybody knew what that meant. If she had shrieked her passion on the housetops she could hardly have published it more violently; but nobody minded. It was part of the mid-Victorian convention.
Jane Eyre did none of these things. As soon as she was aware of her passion for Mr. Rochester she thrust it down into the pocket of her voluminous mid-Victorian skirt and sat on it. Instead of languishing and fainting where Rochester could see her, she held her head rather higher than usual, and practised the spirited arts of retort and repartee. And nobody gave her any credit for it. Then Rochester puts the little thing (poor Jane was only eighteen when it happened) to the torture, and, with the last excruciating turn of the thumbscrew, she confesses. That was the enormity that was never forgiven her.
“‘You’ll like Ireland, I think,'” says Rochester in his torturing mood; “‘they are such kind-hearted people there.’
“‘It is a long way off, sir.’
“‘No matter, a girl of your sense will not object to the voyage or the distance.’
“‘Not the voyage, but the distance: and then the sea is a barrier.’
“‘From what, Jane?’
“‘From England and from Thornfield, and–‘
“‘Well?’
“‘From _you_, sir.'”
She had done it. She had said, or almost said the words.
It just happened. There was magic in the orchard at Thornfield; there was youth in her blood; and–“Jane, did you hear the nightingale singing in that wood?”
Still, she had done it.
And she was the first heroine who had. Adultery, with which we are fairly familiar, would have seemed a lesser sin. There may be extenuating circumstances for the adulteress. There were extenuating circumstances for Rochester. He could plead a wife who went on all fours. There were no extenuating circumstances for little Jane. No use for her to say that she was upset by the singing of the nightingale; that it didn’t matter what she said to Mr. Rochester when Mr. Rochester was going to marry Blanche Ingram, anyway; that she only flung herself at his head because she knew she couldn’t hit it; that her plainness gave her a certain licence, placing her beyond the code. Not a bit of it. Jane’s plainness was one thing that they had against her. Until her time no heroine had been permitted to be plain. Jane’s seizing of the position was part of the general insolence of her behaviour.
Jane’s insolence was indeed unparalleled. Having done the deed she felt no shame or sense of sin; she stood straight up and defended herself. That showed that she was hardened.
It certainly showed–Jane’s refusal to be abject–that Jane was far ahead of her age.
“‘I tell you I must go!’ I retorted, roused to something like passion. ‘Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?–a machine without feelings, and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and fully as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses'” (“Addresses”? oh, Jane!) “‘your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal–as we are!'”
This, allowing for some slight difference in the phrasing, is twentieth century. And it was this–Jane’s behaviour in the orchard, and not Rochester’s behaviour in the past–that opened the door to the “imps of evil meaning, polluting and defiling the domestic hearth.”
Still, though _The Quarterly_ censured Jane’s behaviour, it was Rochester who caused most of the trouble and the scandal by his remarkable confessions. In a sense they _were_ remarkable. Seldom, outside the pages of French fiction, had there been so lavish and public a display of mistresses. And while it was agreed on all hands that Rochester was incredible with his easy references to Celine and Giacinta and Clara, still more incredible was it that a young woman in a country parsonage should have realized so much as the existence of Clara and Giacinta and Celine. But, when Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux invoked Branwell and all his vices to account for Charlotte’s experience, they forgot that Charlotte had read Balzac,[A] and that Balzac is an experience in himself. She had also read Moore’s _Life of Byron_, and really there is nothing in Rochester’s confessions that Byron and a little Balzac would not account for. So that they might just as well have left poor Branwell in his grave.
[Footnote A: I am wrong. Charlotte did not read Balzac till later, when George Henry Lewes told her to. But there were those twenty “clever, wicked, sophistical, and immoral French books” that she read in eighteen-forty. They may have served her purpose better.]
Indeed, it was the manner of Rochester’s confession that gave away the secret of Currer Bell’s sex; her handling of it is so inadequate and perfunctory. Rochester is at his worst and most improbable in the telling of his tale. The tale in itself is one of Charlotte’s clumsiest contrivances for conveying necessary information. The alternate baldness and exuberant, decorated, swaggering boldness (for Charlotte’s style was never bolder than when she was essaying the impossible) alone betrayed the hand of an innocent woman. Curious that these makeshift passages with their obviously second-hand material, their palpably alien _mise en scene_, should ever have suggested a personal experience and provoked _The Quarterly_ to its infamous and immortal utterance: “If we ascribe the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex.”
_The Quarterly_, to do it justice, argued that Currer Bell was a man, for only a man would have betrayed such ignorance of feminine resources as to make Jane Eyre, on a night alarm, “hurry on a frock and shawl”. The reasoning passed. Nobody saw that such a man would be as innocent as any parson’s daughter. Nobody pointed out that, as it happened, Currer Bell had provided her dowagers with “vast white wrappers” on the second night alarm. And, after all, the sex of _The Quarterly_ reviewer itself remains a problem. Long ago Mr. Andrew Lang detected the work of two hands in that famous article. You may say there were at least three. There was, first, the genial reviewer of _Vanity Fair_, who revels in the wickedness of Becky Sharpe, and who is going to revel in the wickedness of Jane. Then suddenly some Mr. Brocklebank steps in, and you get a “black-marble clergyman” on _Jane Eyre_.
“We have said,” says this person, “that this was the picture of a natural heart. This, to our view, is the great and crying mischief of the book. Jane Eyre is throughout the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit, the more dangerous to exhibit from that prestige of principle and self-control, which is liable to dazzle the eyes too much for it to observe the insufficient and unsound foundation on which it rests. It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength; but it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself…. She has inherited the worst sin of our fallen nature–the sin of pride.”
Jane, you see, should have sinned to show her Christian humility. The style, if not the reasoning, is pure Brocklebank. He does “not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought, which has overthrown authority and violated every code, human and divine, abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has written _Jane Eyre_”.
Ellis and Acton (poor Acton!) Bell get it even stronger than that; and then, suddenly again, you come on a report on the “Condition of Governesses”, palpably drawn up by a third person. For years Miss Rigby, who was afterwards Lady Eastlake, got the credit for the whole absurd performance, for she was known to have written the review on _Vanity Fair_. What happened seems to have been that Miss Rigby set out in all honesty to praise _Jane Eyre_. Then some infuriated person interfered and stopped her. The article was torn from the unfortunate Miss Rigby and given to Brocklebank, who used bits of her here and there. Brocklebank, in his zeal, overdid his part, so the report on Governesses was thrown in to give the whole thing an air of seriousness and respectability. So that it is exceedingly doubtful whether, after all, it was a woman’s hand that dealt the blow.
If Charlotte Bronte did not feel the effect of it to the end of her life, she certainly suffered severely at the time. It was responsible for that impassioned defence of Anne and Emily which she would have been wiser to have left alone.
It must be admitted that _Jane Eyre_ was an easy prey for the truculent reviewer, for its faults were all on the surface, and its great qualities lay deep. Deep as they were, they gripped the ordinary uncritical reader, and they gripped the critic in spite of himself, so that he bitterly resented being moved by a work so flagrantly and obviously faulty. What was more, the passion of the book was so intense that you were hardly aware of anything else, and its author’s austere respect for the ten commandments passed almost unobserved.
But when her enemies accuse Charlotte Bronte of glorifying passion they praise her unaware. Her glory is that she did glorify it. Until she came, passion between man and woman had meant animal passion. Fielding and Smollett had dealt with it solely on that footing. A woman’s gentle, legalized affection for her husband was one thing, and passion was another. Thackeray and Dickens, on the whole, followed Fielding. To all three of them passion is an affair wholly of the senses, temporary, episodic, and therefore comparatively unimportant. Thackeray intimated that he could have done more with it but for his fear of Mrs. Grundy. Anyhow, passion was not a quality that could be given to a good woman; and so the good women of Dickens and Thackeray are conspicuously without it. And Jane Austen may be said to have also taken Fielding’s view. Therefore she was obliged to ignore passion. She gave it to one vulgar woman, Lydia Bennett, and to one bad one, Mrs. Rushworth; and having given it them, she turned her head away and refused to have anything more to do with these young women. She was not alone in her inability to “tackle passion”. No respectable mid-Victorian novelist could, when passion had so bad a name.
And it was this thing, cast down, defiled, dragged in the mud, and ignored because of its defilement, that Charlotte Bronte took and lifted up. She washed it clean; she bathed it in the dew of the morning; she baptized it in tears; she clothed it in light and flame; she showed it for the divine, the beautiful, the utterly pure and radiant thing it is, “the very sublime of faith, truth and devotion”. She made it, this spirit of fire and air, incarnate in the body of a woman who had no sensual charm. Because of it little Jane became the parent of Caterina and of Maggie Tulliver; and Shirley prepared the way for Meredith’s large-limbed, large-brained, large-hearted women.
It was thus that Charlotte Bronte glorified passion. The passion that she glorified being of the finest fibre, it was naturally not understood by people whose fibres were not fine at all.
It was George Henry Lewes (not a person of the finest fibre) who said of _Jane Eyre_ that “the grand secret of its success … as of all great and lasting successes was its reality”. In spite of crudities, absurdities, impossibilities, it remains most singularly and startlingly alive. In _Jane Eyre_ Charlotte Bronte comes for the first time into her kingdom of the inner life. She grasps the secret, unseen springs; in her narrow range she is master of the psychology of passion and of suffering, whether she is describing the agony of the child Jane shut up in that terrible red room, or the anguish of the woman on the morning of that wedding-day that brought no wedding. Or take the scene of Jane’s flight from Thornfield, or that other scene, unsurpassed in its passion and tenderness, of her return to Rochester at Ferndean.
“To this house I came just ere dark, on an evening marked by the characteristics of sad sky, cold gale, and continued small, penetrating rain…. Even within a very short distance of the manor-house you could see nothing of it; so thick and dark grew the timber of the gloomy wood about it. Iron gates between granite pillars showed me where to enter, and passing through them, I found myself at once in the twilight of close-ranked trees. There was a grass-grown track descending the forest aisle, between hoar and knotty shafts and under branched arches. I followed it, expecting soon to reach the dwelling; but it stretched on and on, it wound far and farther: no sign of habitation or grounds was visible…. At last my way opened, the trees thinned a little; presently I beheld a railing, then the house–scarce, by this dim light, distinguishable from the trees; so dank and green were its decaying walls. Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch, I stood amidst a space of enclosed ground, from which the wood swept away in a semicircle. There were no flowers, no garden-beds; only a broad gravel-walk girdling a grass-plat, and this set in the heavy frame of the forest. The house presented two pointed gables in its front; the windows were latticed and narrow: the front-door was narrow too, one step led up to it…. It was still as a church on a week-day; the pattering rain on the forest leaves was the only sound audible….
“I heard a movement–that narrow front-door was unclosing, and some shape was about to issue from the grange.
“It opened slowly; a figure came out into the twilight and stood on the step; a man without a hat: he stretched forth his hand as if to feel whether it rained. Dark as it was I had recognized him….
“His form was of the same strong and stalwart contour as ever…. But in his countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding–that reminded me of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished, might look as looked that sightless Samson.”
Again–Rochester hears Jane’s voice in the room where she comes to him.
“‘And where is the speaker? Is it only a voice? Oh! I _cannot_ see, but I must feel or my heart will stop and my brain burst.’…
“He groped. I arrested his wandering hand, and prisoned it in both mine.
“‘Her very fingers!’ he cried; ‘her small, slight fingers! If so, there must be more of her.’
“The muscular hand broke from my custody; my arm was seized, my shoulder–neck–wrist–I was entwined and gathered to him….
“I pressed my lips to his once brilliant and now rayless eyes–I swept back his hair from his brow and kissed that too. He suddenly seemed to rouse himself: the conviction of the reality of all this seized him.
“‘It is you–is it, Jane? You are come back to me then?’
“‘I am.'”
The scene as it stands is far from perfect; but only Charlotte Bronte could sustain so strong an illusion of passion through so many lapses. And all that passion counts for no more than half in the astounding effect of reality she produces. Before _Jane Eyre_ there is no novel written by a woman, with the one exception of _Wuthering Heights_, that conveys so poignant an impression of surroundings, of things seen and heard, of the earth and sky; of weather; of the aspects of houses and of rooms. It suggests a positive exaltation of the senses of sound and light, an ecstasy, an enchantment before the visible, tangible world. It is not a matter of mere faithful observation (though few painters have possessed so incorruptibly the innocence of the eye). It is an almost supernatural intentness; sensation raised to the _n_th power. Take the description of the awful red room at Gateshead.
“A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a soft fawn colour, with a flush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly-polished old mahogany. Out of these deep surrounding shades rose high and glared white the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles counterpane. Scarcely less prominent was an ample, cushioned easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne…. Mr. Reed had been dead nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his last; here he lay in state; hence his coffin was borne by the undertaker’s men; and since that day a sense of dreary consecration had guarded it from frequent intrusion.”
Could anything be more horrible than that red room? Or take the descriptions of the school at Lowood where the horror of pestilence hangs over house and garden. Through all these Gateshead and Lowood scenes Charlotte is unerring and absolute in her reality.
Her very style, so uncertain in its rendering of human speech, becomes flawless in such passages as this: “It was three o’clock; the church-bell tolled as I passed under the belfry: the charm of the hour lay in its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun. I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white, worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and the little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like single russet leaves about to drop.
“This lane inclined up-hill all the way to Hay…. I then turned eastward.
“On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon; pale yet as a cloud, but brightening momently; she looked over Hay which, half lost in trees, sent up a blue smoke from its few chimneys; it was yet a mile distant, but in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life. My ear, too, felt the flow of currents; in what dales and depths I could not tell: but there were many hills beyond Hay, and doubtless many becks threading their passes. That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of the nearest streams, the sough of the most remote.
“A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and whisperings, at once so far away and so clear: a positive tramp, tramp; a metallic clatter, which effaced the soft wave-wanderings; as, in a picture, the solid mass of a crag, or the rough boles of a great oak, drawn in dark and strong on the foreground, efface the aerial distance of azure hill, sunny horizon, and blended clouds, where tint melts into tint.
“The din sounded on the causeway….”
Flawless this, too, of the sky after sunset: “Where the sun had gone down in simple state–pure of the pomp of clouds–spread a solemn purple, burning with the light of red jewel and furnace flame at one point, on one hill-peak, and extending high and wide, soft and still softer, over half heaven.”
And this of her own moors: “There are great moors behind and on each hand of me; there are waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley at my feet. The population here must be thin, and I see no passengers on these roads: they stretch out east, west, north and south–white, broad, lonely; they are all cut in the moor, and the heather grows deep and wild to their very verge.”
She has given the secret of the moor country in a phrase: “I felt the consecration of its loneliness.” In that one line you have the real, the undying Charlotte Bronte.
It is such immortal things that make the difference between _Jane Eyre_ and _The Professor_. So immeasurable is that difference that it almost justifies the theorist in assuming an “experience” to account for it, an experience falling between the dates of _The Professor_ and _Jane Eyre_. Unfortunately there was none; none in the sense cherished by the researcher. Charlotte’s letters are an unbroken record of those two years that followed her return from Brussels. Her life is laid bare in its long and cramped monotony, a life singularly empty of “experience”.
And yet an experience did come to her in that brief period. If the researcher had not followed a false scent across the Channel, if his _flair_ for tragic passion had not destroyed in him all sense of proportion, he could not possibly have missed it; for it stared him in the face, simple, obvious, inevitable. But miss it he certainly did. Obsessed by his idea, he considered it a negligible circumstance that Charlotte should have read _Wuthering Heights_ before she wrote _Jane Eyre_. And yet, I think that, if anything woke Charlotte up, it was that. Until then, however great her certainty of her own genius, she did not know how far she could trust it, how far it would be safe to let imagination go. Appalled by the spectacle of its excesses, she had divorced imagination from the real. But Emily knew none of these cold deliberations born of fear. _Wuthering Heights_ was the fruit of a divine freedom, a divine unconsciousness. It is not possible that Charlotte, of all people, should have read _Wuthering Heights_ without a shock of enlightenment; that she should not have compared it with her own bloodless work; that she should not have felt the wrong done to her genius by her self-repression. Emily had dared to be herself; _she_ had not been afraid of her own passion; she had had no method; she had accomplished a stupendous thing without knowing it, by simply letting herself go. And Charlotte, I think, said to herself, “That is what I ought to have done. That is what I will do next time.” And next time she did it. The experience may seem insufficient, but it is of such experiences that a great writer’s life is largely made. And if you _must_ have an influence to account for _Jane Eyre_, there is no need to go abroad to look for it. There was influence enough in her own home. These three Brontes, adoring each other, were intolerant of any other influence; and the strongest spirit, which was Emily’s, prevailed. To be sure, no remonstrances from Emily or Charlotte could stop Anne in her obstinate analysis of Walter Huntingdon; but it was some stray spark from Emily that kindled Anne. As for Charlotte, her genius must have quickened in her when her nerves thrilled to the shock of _Wuthering Heights_. This, I know, is only another theory; but it has at least the merit of its modesty. It is not offered as in the least accounting for, or explaining, Charlotte’s genius. It merely suggests with all possible humility a likely cause of its release. Anyhow, it is a theory that does Charlotte’s genius no wrong, on which account it seems to me preferable to any other. It is really no argument against it to say that Charlotte never acknowledged her sister’s influence, that she was indeed unaware of it; for, in the first place, the stronger the spiritual tie between them, the less likely was she to have been aware. In the second place, it is not claimed that _Wuthering Heights_ was such an influence as the “sojourn in Brussels” is said to have been–that it “made Miss Bronte an author”. It is not claimed that if there had been no _Wuthering Heights_ and no Emily Bronte, there would have been no _Jane Eyre_; for to me nothing can be more certain that whatever had, or had not happened, Charlotte’s genius would have found its way.
Charlotte’s genius indeed was so profoundly akin to Charlotte’s nature that its way, the way of its upward progress, was by violent impetus and recoil.
In _Shirley_ she revolts from the passion of _Jane Eyre_. She seems to have written it to prove that there are other things. She had been stung by _The Quarterly’s_ attack, stung by rumour, stung by every adverse thing that had been said. And yet not for a moment was she “influenced” by her reviewers. It was more in defiance than in submission that she answered them with _Shirley_. _Shirley_ was an answer to every criticism that had yet been made. In _Shirley_ she forsook the one poor play of hearts insurgent for the vast and varied movement of the world; social upheavals, the clash of sects and castes, the first grim hand-to-hand struggle between capital and labour, all are there. The book opens with a drama, not of hearts but of artisans insurgent; frame-breakers, not breakers of the marriage law. In sheer defiance she essays to render the whole real world, the complex, many-threaded, many-coloured world; where the tragic warp is woven with the bright comedy of curates. It is the world of the beginnings; the world of the early nineteenth century that she paints. A world with the immensity, the profundity, the darkness of the brooding sea; where the spirit of a woman moves, troubling the waters; for Charlotte Bronte has before her the stupendous vision of the world as it was, as it yet is, and as it is to be.
That world, as it existed from eighteen-twelve to Charlotte’s own time, eighteen-fifty, was not a place for a woman with a brain and a soul. There was no career for any woman but marriage. If she missed it she missed her place in the world, her prestige, and her privileges as a woman. What was worse, she lost her individuality, and became a mere piece of furniture, of disused, old-fashioned furniture, in her father’s or her brother’s house. If she had a father or a brother there was no escape for her from dependence on the male; and if she had none, if there was no male about the house, her case was the more pitiable. And the traditions of her upbringing were such that the real, vital things, the things that mattered, were never mentioned in her presence. Religion was the solitary exception; and religion had the reality and vitality taken out of it by its dissociation with the rest of life. A woman in these horrible conditions was only half alive. She had no energies, no passions, no enthusiasms. Convention drained her of her life-blood. What was left to her had no outlet; pent up in her, it bred weak, anaemic substitutes for its natural issue, sentimentalism for passion, and sensibility for the nerves of vision. This only applies, of course, to the average woman.
Charlotte Bronte was born with a horror of the world that had produced this average woman, this creature of minute corruptions and hypocrisies. She sent out _Jane Eyre_ to purify it with her passion. She sent out _Shirley_ to destroy and rebuild it with her intellect. Little Jane was a fiery portent. Shirley was a prophecy. She is modern to her finger-tips, as modern as Meredith’s great women: Diana, or Clara Middleton, or Carinthia Jane. She was born fifty years before her time.
This is partly owing to her creator’s prophetic insight, partly to her sheer truth to life. For Shirley was to a large extent a portrait of Emily Bronte who was born before her time.
It is Emily Bronte’s spirit that burns in Shirley Keeldar; and it is the spirit of Shirley Keeldar that gives life to the unwilling mass of this vast novel. It is almost enough immortality for Shirley that she is the only living and authentic portrait of Emily Bronte in her time. Charlotte has given her the “wings that wealth can give”, and they do not matter. She has also given her the wings of Emily’s adventurous soul, the wealth of her inner life.
“A still, deep, inborn delight glows in her young veins; unmingled–untroubled, not to be reached or ravished by human agency, because by no human agency bestowed: the pure gift of God to His creature, the free dower of Nature to her child. This joy gives her experience of a genii-life. Buoyant, by green steps, by glad hills, all verdure and light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that whence angels looked down on the dreamer of Bethel, and her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it.”
“Her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it–” That was the secret of Emily’s greatness, of her immeasurable superiority to her sad sisters.
And again: “In Shirley’s nature prevailed at times an easy indolence: there were periods when she took delight in perfect vacancy of hand and eye–moments when her thoughts, her simple existence, the fact of the world being around–and heaven above her, seemed to yield her such fulness of happiness, that she did not need to lift a finger to increase the joy. Often, after an active morning, she would spend a sunny afternoon in lying stirless on the turf, at the foot of some tree of friendly umbrage: no society did she need but that of Caroline, and it sufficed if she were within call; no spectacle did she ask but that of the deep blue sky, and such cloudlets as sailed afar and aloft across its span; no sound but that of the bee’s hum, the leaf’s whisper.”
There are phrases in Louis Moore’s diary that bring Emily Bronte straight before us in her swift and vivid life. Shirley is “Sister of the spotted, bright, quick-fiery leopard.” “Pantheress!–beautiful forest-born!–wily, tameless, peerless nature! She gnaws her chain. I see the white teeth working at the steel! She has dreams of her wild woods, and pinings after virgin freedom.” “How evanescent, fugitive, fitful she looked–slim and swift as a Northern streamer!” “… With her long hair flowing full and wavy; with her noiseless step, her pale cheek, her eye full of night and lightning, she looked, I thought, spirit-like–a thing made of an element–the child of a breeze and a flame–the daughter of ray and raindrop–a thing never to be overtaken, arrested, fixed.”
Like Emily she is not “caught”. “But if I were,” she says, “do you know what soothsayers I would consult?… The little Irish beggar that comes barefoot to my door; the mouse that steals out of the cranny in the wainscot; the bird that in frost and snow pecks at my window for a crumb; the dog that licks my hand and sits beside my knee.”
And yet again: “She takes her sewing occasionally: but, by some fatality, she is doomed never to sit steadily at it for above five minutes at a time: her thimble is scarcely fitted on, her needle scarce threaded, when a sudden thought calls her upstairs; perhaps she goes to seek some just-then-remembered old ivory-backed needle-book, or older china-topped work-box, quite unneeded, but which seems at the moment indispensable; perhaps to arrange her hair, or a drawer which she recollects to have seen that morning in a state of curious confusion; perhaps only to take a peep from a particular window at a particular view where Briarfield Church and Rectory are visible, pleasantly bowered in trees. She has scarcely returned, and again taken up the slip of cambric, or square of half-wrought canvas, when Tartar’s bold scrape and strangled whistle are heard at the porch door, and she must run to open it for him; it is a hot day; he comes in panting; she must convoy him to the kitchen, and see with her own eyes that his water-bowl is replenished. Through the open kitchen-door the court is visible, all sunny and gay, and peopled with turkeys and their poults, peahens and their chicks, pearl-flecked Guinea fowls, and a bright variety of pure white and purple-necked, and blue and cinnamon-plumed pigeons. Irresistible spectacle to Shirley! She runs to the pantry for a roll, and she stands on the doorstep scattering crumbs: around her throng her eager, plump, happy, feathered vassals…. There are perhaps some little calves, some little new-yeaned lambs–it may be twins, whose mothers have rejected them: Miss Keeldar … must permit herself the treat of feeding them with her own hand.”
Like Emily she is impatient of rituals and creeds. Like Emily she adores the Earth. Not one of Charlotte’s women except Shirley could have chanted that great prose hymn of adoration in which Earth worships and is worshipped. “‘Nature is now at her evening prayers; she is kneeling before those red hills. I see her prostrate on the great steps of her altar, praying for a fair night for mariners at sea, for travellers in deserts, for lambs on moors, and unfledged birds in woods…. I see her, and I will tell you what she is like: she is like what Eve was when she and Adam stood alone on earth.’ ‘And that is not Milton’s Eve, Shirley,’ says Caroline, and Shirley answers: ‘No, by the pure Mother of God, she is not.’ Shirley is half a Pagan. She would beg to remind Milton ‘that the first men of the earth were Titans, and that Eve was their mother: from her sprang Saturn, Hyperion, Oceanus; she bore Prometheus…. I say, there were giants on the earth in those days, giants that strove to scale heaven. The first woman’s breast that heaved with life on this world yielded daring which could contend with Omnipotence; the strength which could bear a thousand years of bondage–the vitality which could feed that vulture death through uncounted ages–the unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immortality, which, after millenniums of crimes, struggles, and woes, could conceive and bring forth a Messiah. The first woman was heaven-born: vast was the heart whence gushed the well-spring of the blood of nations; and grand the undegenerate head where rested the consort-crown of creation.’…
“‘You have not yet told me what you saw kneeling on those hills.’
“‘I saw–I now see–a woman-Titan; her robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil, white as an avalanche, sweeps from her head to her feet, and arabesques of lightning flame on its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple like that horizon: through its blush shines the star of evening. Her steady eyes I cannot picture; they are clear–they are deep as lakes–they are lifted and full of worship–they tremble with the softness of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the expanse of a cloud, and is paler than the early moon, risen long before dark gathers: she reclines her bosom on the edge of Stilbro’ Moor; her mighty hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face, she speaks with God.'”
It is the living sister speaking for the dead; for Charlotte herself had little of Emily’s fine Paganism. But for one moment, in this lyric passage, her soul echoes the very soul of Emily as she gathers round her all the powers and splendours (and some, alas, of the fatal rhetoric) of her prose to do her honour.
It is not only in the large figure of the Titan Shirley that Charlotte Bronte shows her strength. She has learnt to draw her minor masculine characters with more of insight and of accuracy–Caroline Helstone, the Yorkes, Robert Moore, Mr. Helstone, Joe Scott, and Barraclough, the “joined Methody”. With a few strokes they stand out living. She has acquired more of the art of dialogue. She is a past master of dialect, of the racy, native speech of these men. Not only is Mr. Yorke painted with unerring power and faithfulness in every detail of his harsh and vigorous personality, but there is no single lapse from nature when he is speaking. The curates only excepted, Charlotte never swerves from this fidelity. But when she is handling her curates, it is a savage and utterly inartistic humour that inspires her. You feel that she is not exercising the art of comedy, but relieving her own intolerable boredom and irritation. No object could well be more innocent, and more appealing in its innocence, than little Mr. Sweeting, curate of Nunnerly. Mr. Sweeting at the tea-table, “having a dish of tarts before him, and marmalade and crumpet upon his plate”, should have moved the Comic Spirit to tears of gentleness.
Curates apart, two-thirds of _Shirley_ are written with an unerring devotion to the real, to the very actual. They have not, for all that, the profound reality of _Jane Eyre_. The events are confused, somehow; the atmosphere is confusing; the northern background is drawn with a certain hardness and apathy of touch; the large outlines are obscured, delicate colours sharpened; it is hard and yet blurred, like a bad steel engraving. Charlotte’s senses, so intensely, so supernaturally alive in _Jane Eyre_, are only passably awake in _Shirley_. It has some of the dulness of _The Professor_, as it has more than its sober rightness. But, for three-and-twenty chapters, the sobriety, the rightness triumph. There are no improbabilities, no flights of imagination, none of the fine language which was the shame when it was not the glory of _Jane Eyre_.
Then suddenly there comes a break–a cleavage. It comes with that Chapter Twenty-four, which is headed “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”. It was written in the first months after Emily Bronte’s death.
From that point Charlotte’s level strength deserts her. Ever after, she falls and soars, and soars and falls again. There is a return to the manner of _Jane Eyre_, the manner of Charlotte when she is deeply moved; there is at times a relapse to Jane Eyre’s worst manner. You get it at once in “The Valley of the Shadow” chapter, in the scene of Caroline’s love-sick delirium.
“‘But he will not know I am ill till I am gone; and he will come when they have laid me out, and I am senseless, cold and stiff.
“‘What can my departed soul feel then? Can it see or know what happens to the clay? Can spirits, through any medium, communicate with living flesh? Can the dead at all revisit those they leave? Can they come in the elements? Will wind, water, fire lend me a path to Moore?
“‘Is it for nothing the wind sounds almost articulate sometimes–sings as I have lately heard it sing at night–or passes the casement sobbing, as if for sorrow to come? Does nothing then haunt it–nothing inspire it?'”
The awful improbability of Caroline is more striking because of its contrast with the inspired rightness of the scene of Cathy’s delirium in _Wuthering Heights_. It is Charlotte feebly echoing Emily, and going more and more wrong up to her peroration.
Delirious Caroline wonders: “‘What is that electricity they speak of, whose changes make us well or ill; whose lack or excess blasts; whose even balance revives?…’
“‘_Where_ is the other world? In _what_ will another life consist? Why do I ask? Have I not cause to think that the hour is hasting but too fast when the veil must be rent for me? Do I not know the Grand Mystery is likely to break prematurely on me? Great Spirit, in whose goodness I confide; whom, as my Father, I have petitioned night and morning from early infancy, help the weak creation of Thy hands! Sustain me through the ordeal I dread and must undergo! Give me strength! Give me patience! Give me–oh, _give me_ FAITH!'”
Jane Eyre has done worse than that, so has Rochester; but somehow, when they were doing their worst with it, they got their passion through. There is no live passion behind this speech of Caroline’s, with its wild stress of italics and of capitals. What passion there was in Charlotte when she conceived Caroline was killed by Emily’s death.
And Mrs. Pryor, revealing herself to Caroline, is even more terrible. She has all the worst vices of Charlotte’s dramatic style. Mrs. Pryor calls to the spirit of Caroline’s dead father: “‘James, slumber peacefully! See, your terrible debt is cancelled! Look! I wipe out the long, black account with my own hand! James, your child atones: this living likeness of you–this thing with your perfect features–this one good gift you gave me has nestled affectionately to my heart and tenderly called me “mother”. Husband, rest forgiven.'”
Even Robert Moore, otherwise almost a masterpiece, becomes improbable when, in his great scene, Shirley refuses him. When Mr. Yorke asks him what has gone wrong he replies: “The machinery of all my nature; the whole enginery of this human mill; the boiler, which I take to be the heart, is fit to burst.”
Shirley herself is impossible with her “Lucifer, Star of the Morning, thou art fallen,” and her speech to her mercenary uncle: “Sir, your god, your great Bell, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon.”
What is worse than all, Louis Moore–Louis, the hero, Louis, the master of passion, is a failure. He is Charlotte Bronte’s most terrible, most glaring failure. It is not true that Charlotte could not draw men, or that she drew them all alike; Robert Moore, the hard-headed man of business, the man of will and purpose, who never gives up, is not only almost a masterpiece but a spontaneous masterpiece, one of the first examples of his kind. But there is no blood in Louis’ veins, no virility in his swarthy body. He is the most unspeakable of schoolmasters. Yet Charlotte lavished on this puppet half the wealth of her imagination. She flings phrase after perfect phrase to him to cover himself with–some of her best things have been given to Louis Moore to utter; but they do not make him live. Again, she strangles him in his own rhetoric. The courtship of Louis Moore and Shirley will not compare with that of Jane and Rochester. There is no nightingale singing in their wood.
Yet, for all that, _Shirley_ comes very near to being Charlotte Bronte’s masterpiece. It is inspired from first to last with a great intention and a great idea. It shows a vision of reality wider than her grasp. Its faults, like the faults of _Jane Eyre_, are all on the surface, only there is more surface in _Shirley_. If it has not _Jane Eyre’s_ commanding passion, it has a vaster sweep. It was literally the first attempt in literature to give to woman her right place in the world.
From first to last there is not a page or a line in it that justifies the malignant criticism of Mrs. Oliphant. Caroline Helstone does not justify it. She is no window-gazing virgin on the look-out, in love already before the man has come. She is a young girl, very naturally in love with a man whom she has known for years, who is always on the spot. As for Shirley, she flung herself with all the vehemence of her prophetic soul on the hypocritical convention that would make every woman dependent on some man, and at the same time despises her for the possession of her natural instincts. And Caroline followed her. “I observe that to such grievances as society cannot cure, it usually forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn: this scorn being only a sort of tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People hate to be reminded of ills they are unable or unwilling to remedy: such reminder, in forcing on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of an obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease and shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and rich: it disturbs parents…. Men of England! Look at your poor girls, many of them fading round you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating to sour old maids–envious, back-biting, wretched, because life is a desert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage, which to celibacy is denied. Fathers, cannot you alter these things?… You would wish to be proud of your daughters, and not to blush for them, then seek for them an interest and an occupation which shall raise them above the flirt, the manoeuvrer, the mischief-making talebearer. Keep your girl’s minds narrow and degraded–they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes a disgrace to you: give them scope and work–they will be your gayest companions in health; your tenderest nurses in sickness; your most faithful prop in old age.”
That is the argument from fathers, and it comes from Caroline Helstone, not from Shirley. And the fact that Caroline married Robert Moore, and Shirley fell in love when her hour came (and with Louis Moore, too!) does not diminish the force or the sincerity or the truth of the tirade.
_Shirley_ may not be a great novel; but it is a great prophetic book. Shirley’s vision of the woman kneeling on the hills serves for more than Emily Bronte’s vision of Hertha and Demeter, of Eve, the Earth-mother, “the mighty and mystical parent”; it is Charlotte Bronte’s vindication of Eve, her vision of woman as she is to be. She faced the world once for all with her vision: “I see her,” she said, “and I will tell you what she is like.”
Mrs. Oliphant did not see the woman kneeling on the hills. Neither George Eliot nor Mrs. Gaskell saw her. They could not possibly have told the world what she was like. It is part of Charlotte Bronte’s superior greatness that she saw.
* * * * *
You do not see that woman in _Villette_. She has passed with the splendour of Charlotte’s vision of the world. The world in _Villette_ is narrowed to a Pensionnat de Demoiselles, and centred in the heart of one woman. And never, not even in _Jane Eyre_, and certainly not in _Shirley_, did Charlotte Bronte achieve such mastery of reality, and with it such mastery of herself. _Villette_ is the final triumph of her genius over the elements that warred in her. It shows the movement of her genius, which was always by impulse and recoil. In _The Professor_ she abjured, in the interests of reality, the “imagination” of her youth. In _Jane Eyre_ she was urged forward by the released impetus of the forces she repressed. In _Shirley_ they are still struggling with her sense of the sober and the sane reality; the book is torn to fragments in the struggle, and in the end imagination riots.
But in _Villette_ there are none of these battlings and rendings, these Titanic upheavals and subsidences. Charlotte Bronte’s imagination, and her sense of the real, are in process of fusion. There are few novels in which an imagination so supreme is wedded to so vivid a vision of actuality. It may be said that Charlotte Bronte never achieved positive actuality before. The Pensionnat de Demoiselles is almost as visibly and palpably actual as the Maison Vauquer in _Pere Goriot_. It is a return to the method of experience with a vengeance. Charlotte’s success, indeed, was so stunning that for all but sixty years _Villette_ has passed for a _roman a clef_, the novel, not only of experience, but of personal experience. There was a certain plausibility in that view. The characters could all be easily recognized. And when Dr. John was identified with Mr. George Smith, and his mother with Mr. George Smith’s mother, and Madame Beck with Madame Heger, and M. Paul Emanuel with Madame Heger’s husband, the inference was irresistible: Lucy Snowe was, and could only be, Charlotte Bronte. And as the figure of M. Paul Emanuel was ten times more vivid and convincing than that of Rochester, so all that applied to Jane Eyre applied with ten times more force to Lucy. In _Villette_ Charlotte Bronte was considered to have given herself hopelessly away.
I have tried to show that this view cannot stand before an unprejudiced examination of her life and letters. No need to go into all that again. On the evidence, Charlotte seems at the best of times to have fallen in love with difficulty; and she most certainly was no more in love with “the little man”, Paul Emanuel, than she was with “the little man”, Mr. Taylor. The really important and interesting point is that, if she had been, if he had thus obtained the reality with which passion endows its object, her imagination would have had no use for him; its work would have been done for it.
To the supreme artist the order of the actual event is one thing, and the order of creation is another. Their lines may start from the same point in the actual, they may touch again and again, but they are not the same, and they cannot run exactly parallel. There must always be this difference between the actual thing and the thing drawn from it, however closely, that each is embedded and enmeshed in a different context. For a character in a novel to be alive it must have grown; and to have grown it must have followed its own line of evolution, inevitably and in its own medium; and that, whether or not it has been “taken”, as they say, “from life”. The more alive it is the less likely is it to have been “taken”, to have been seized, hauled by the scruff of its neck out of the dense web of the actual. All that the supreme artist wants is what Charlotte Bronte called “the germ of the real”, by which she meant the germ of the actual. He does not want the alien, developed thing, standing in its own medium ready-made. Charlotte Bronte said that the character of Dr. John was a failure because it lacked the germ of