CHAPTER XV
The Brontes
During the middle of the nineteenth century, English fiction largelydepicted manners and customs of different classes and different parts ofEngland. While Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli, and Mrs. Gaskell werewriting realistic novels, romantic fiction found noble exponents in theBronte sisters.
The quiet life lived by the Brontes in the vicarage on the edge of thevillage of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire seems prosaic to thecasual observer, but it had many weird elements of romanticism. Thepurple moors stretching away behind the grey stone vicarage, the greysky, and the sun always half-frowning, and never sporting with naturehere as it does over the mountains in Westmoreland, make thought earnestand deep, and suggest the mystery which surrounds human life. It is aserious country, that of the Wharf valley; the people are a seriouspeople, silent and observant. The Brontes were a direct outcome of thiscountry and people, only in them their severity and silence were kindledinto life by a Celtic imagination.
What a group of people lived within those grey stone walls! As the vicarand his four motherless children gathered about their simple board,while they engaged in conversation with each other or with the curate,what scenes would have been enacted in that quiet room if the fanciesteeming in each childish brain could have been suddenly endowed withlife! How could even a dull curate, with an undercurrent of addition andsubtraction running in his brain, based upon his meagre salary andeconomical expenditures, have been insensible to the thought with whichthe very atmosphere must have been surcharged? The brother, PatrickBranwell, found his audience in the public house, and delighted it withhis wit and conversation. The sisters, after their household tasks weredone, wrote their stories and often read them to each other.
But fate had chosen her darkest hues in which to weave the warp and woofof their lives. The wild dissipations and wilder talk of their brotherBranwell clouded the imaginations of his sisters, and in a short timedeath was a constant presence in their midst. In September, 1848,Branwell died at the age of thirty; in less than three months, Emilydied at the age of twenty-nine; and in five-months, Anne died at theage of twenty-seven; and Charlotte, the eldest, was left alone with herfather. During the remaining six years of her life, her compensation forher loss of companionship was her writing. Not long after the death ofher sisters, Mr. Nicholls proposed to her; was refused; proposed againand was accepted; then came the separation caused by Mr. Bronte'shostility to the marriage; then the marriage in the church under whosepavement so many members of her family were buried, grim attendants ofher wedding; then the nine short months of married life; then the deathof the last of the Bronte sisters at the age of thirty-nine. Mr. Bronteoutlived her only six years, but he was the last of his family. Sixchildren had been born to Patrick Bronte, not one survived him. Fortyyears had eliminated a family which yet lives through the imaginativepowers of the three daughters who reached years of maturity.
Of the three sisters, the least is known of Emily, and her one novel,_Wuthering Heights_, reveals nothing of herself. Not one of thecharacters thought or felt as did the quiet, retiring author. Yet sogreat was her dramatic power that her brother Branwell was credited withthe book, as it was deemed impossible for a woman to have conceived thecharacter of Heathcliff. And yet this arch-fiend of literature wascreated by the daughter of a country vicar, whose only journeys fromhome had been to schools, either as pupil or governess. Charlotte Brontehas thrown but little light upon her sister's character. She says thatshe loved animals and the moors, but was cold toward people and repelledany attempt to win her confidence. The author of _Jane Eyre_ seemsneither to have understood Emily's nature nor her genius. Yet we aretold that Emily was constantly seen with her arms around the gentleAnne, and that they were inseparable companions. If Anne Bronte couldhave lived longer, she would have thrown much light upon the characterof the author of _Wuthering Heights_. But now, as we read of her brieflife and her one novel, she seems to belong to the great dramatistsrather than to the novelists, to the poets who live apart from the worldand commune only with the people of their own creating.
_Wuthering Heights_ stands alone in the history of prose fiction. Itbelongs to the wild region of romanticism, but it imitates no book, andhas never been copied. No incident, no character, no description, can betraced to the influence of any other book, but the atmosphere is that ofthe West Riding of Yorkshire.
Charlotte Bronte thus speaks of it in a letter to a friend:
"_Wuthering Heights_ was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, outof homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitarymoor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head,savage, swart, sinister: a form moulded with at least one element ofgrandeur--power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model butthe vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took humanshape, and there it stands, colossal, dark and frowning, half statue,half rock, in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter,almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland mossclothes it, and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance,grows faithfully close to the giant's foot."
All of this is true, but it gives only the general outlines, nothing ofthe inner meaning.
In all literature, there is not so repulsive a villain as Heathcliff,the offspring of the gipsies. Insensible to kindness, but resentful ofwrong; hard, scheming, indomitable in resolution; quick to put off theavenging of an injury until he can make his revenge serve his purpose;the personification of strength and power; he is yet capable of a lovestronger than his hate. Heathcliff is so repulsive that he does notattract, and drawn with such skill that, as has been said, he has notbeen imitated.
But the strong, dark picture of Heathcliff makes us forget thatCatharine is the centre of the story. The night that Mr. Lockwood spendsat Wuthering Heights he reads her books, and her spirit appears to himcrying for entrance at the window, and complaining that she has wanderedon the moors for twenty years. While living, she represents a human soulbalanced between heaven and hell, loved by both the powers of darknessand of light. But in her earliest years, she had loved Heathcliff; theirthoughts, their affections were intertwined, and they were welded, as itwere, into one soul, not at first by love, but by their common hatred ofHindley Earnshaw. When Catharine meets Edgar Linton, her finer natureasserts itself. She loves him as a being from another world; he givesher the first glimpse of real goodness, kindness, and gentleness. Shecatches through him a gleam of Paradise. But she knows how transientthis is, and says to her old nurse, Nelly Dean:
"I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be inheaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff solow, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marryHeathcliff now; and that, not because he's handsome, no, Nelly, butbecause he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, hisand mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam fromlightning, or frost from fire."
But Catharine is married to Edgar, and for three years her better naturetriumphs. Heathcliff is away; Edgar Linton loves her truly, and theirhome is happy. Catharine alone knows that that house is not her trueplace of abode. She alone knows that Edgar has not touched her innernature. She knows that her real self, the self that must abide throughthe centuries, is indissolubly linked with another's. And whenHeathcliff returns, the intensity of her joy, her almost unearthlydelight, she neither can nor attempts to conceal. Not once is shedeceived as to his true nature. She knows the depth of his depravity,and thus warns the girl who has fallen in love with him:
"He's not a rough diamond--a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic;--he'sa fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I never say to him, let this or thatenemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them,--Isay, let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged: and he'dcrush you, like a sparrow's egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesomecharge."
But Catharine's nature is akin to his, and it is with almost bruta
ldelight that she helps forward this marriage, when she finds the girldoes not trust her word.
Then comes the strife between Edgar and Heathcliff for the soul, so itseems, of Catharine. There is no jealousy on Edgar's part. The booknever stoops to anything so earthly. Edgar loathes Heathcliff and cannotunderstand Catharine's affection for her early playmate. Although shenever for a moment hesitates in her allegiance to Heathcliff, it is thisstrife that causes her death. The strife between good and evil wears herout.
Even after her death, her soul cannot leave this earth. It is stilljoined to Heathcliff's. It resembles here the story of Paola andFrancesca. Catharine is waiting for him and his only delight is in herhaunting presence. Heathcliff cannot be accused of keeping Catharinefrom Paradise. In life she would not let him from her presence, and sheclings to him now. It is the story of _Undine_ reversed. Undine gained asoul through a mortal's love. And we feel toward the close thatCatharine, selfish and passionate as she was, is yet Heathcliff's betterspirit. Catharine while living had prevented Heathcliff from killing herbrother. Although he loved Catharine better than himself, and would havemade any sacrifice at her request, he feels no more tenderness for heroffspring than for his own. But the spirit of Catharine lived in herchild and nephew, and when they looked at him with her eyes, he had nopleasure in his revenge upon the son of Hindley nor on the daughter ofEdgar Linton.
In the tenderness that once or twice comes over Heathcliff as he looksat Hareton Earnshaw, there is a ray of promise that he may be redeemed.And in the final outcome of the story, one can but hope that Catharine'srestless spirit, as it watches and waits for Heathcliff, is striving tobring some blessing upon her house. The awakening of a better nature inHareton, through his love for Catharine's daughter, is a pretty, tenderidyl. The book is like a Greek tragedy in this, that at the close theatmosphere has been purged; the sun once more shines through the windowsof Wuthering Heights; hatred is dead, and love reigns supreme.
_Wuthering Heights_ is a novel not of externals, not of character, butof something deeper, more vital. The love of Catharine and Heathcliffhas no physical basis; it is the union of souls evil, but not material.It is the sex of spirit, not of body, that adds its might to theresistless force that unites these two. Notwithstanding the externalpictures are so distinct that a painter could transfer them to hiscanvas, the book is a soul-tragedy.
_Wuthering Heights_ cannot be classed among the so-called popularnovels. It has appealed to the poets rather than to the readers offiction. It has received the warmest praise from the poet Swinburne. In_The Athenaeum_ of June 16, 1883, he thus eulogises it:
"Now in _Wuthering Heights_ this one thing needful ['logical and moralcertitude'] is as perfectly and triumphantly attained as in _King Lear_or _The Duchess of Malfi_, in _The Bride of Lammermoor_ or _Notre-Damede Paris_. From the first we breathe the fresh dark air of tragicpassion and presage; and to the last the changing wind and flyingsunlight are in keeping with the stormy promise of the dawn. There is nomonotony, there is no repetition, but there is no discord. This is thefirst and last necessity, the foundation of all labour and the crown ofall success, for a poem worthy of the name; and this it is thatdistinguishes the hand of Emily from the hand of Charlotte Bronte. Allthe works of the elder sister are rich in poetic spirit, poetic feeling,and poetic detail; but the younger sister's work is essentially anddefinitely a poem in the fullest and most positive sense of the term."
At the close of this essay he writes:
"It may be true that not many will ever take it to their hearts; it iscertain that those who do like it will like nothing very much better inthe whole world of poetry or prose."
All that we know of Emily Bronte's nature is consistent, such as wewould expect of the author of _Wuthering Heights_. The first stanza ofher last poem, written but a short time before her death, reveals herstrength of will and faith:
No coward soul is mine, No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere: I see Heaven's glories shine, And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
These lines evoked the following tribute from Matthew Arnold:
----she (How shall I sing her?) whose soul Knew no fellow for might, Passion, vehemence, grief, Daring, since Byron died, That world-famed son of fire--she, who sank Baffled, unknown, self-consumed; Whose too bold dying song Stirr'd, like a clarion-blast, my soul.
The great books of prose fiction have been for the most part the work ofmature years. The lyric poets burst into rhapsody at the dawn of life;but the powers of the novelist have ripened more slowly. The novelistshave done better work after thirty-five than at an earlier age but fewof them have written a classic at the age of twenty-eight, as did EmilyBronte.
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Anne Bronte's fame has been both augmented and dimmed by the greatergenius of her two sisters. She is remembered principally as one of theBrontes, so that her books have been oftener reprinted and moreextensively read than their actual merit would warrant. In comparisonwith the greater genius of Charlotte and Emily, her writings have beendeclared void of interest, and without any ray of the brilliancy whichdistinguishes their books. This latter statement is not true. AnneBronte did not have their imaginative power, but she reproduced what shehad seen and learned of life with conscientious devotion to truth._Wuthering Heights_ and _Agnes Grey_, Anne Bronte's first book, werepublished together in three volumes so as to meet the popular demandthat novels, like the graces, should appear in threes. It is aphotographic representation of the life of a governess in England duringthe forties. Agnes's courage in determining to augment the family incomeby seeking a position as governess; the high hopes with which she entersupon her first position; her conscientious resolve to do her fullChristian duty to the spoiled children of the Bloomfields; her dismissaland sad return home; her second position in the family of Mr. Murray, acountry squire; the two daughters, one determined to make a fine matchfor herself, the other a perfect hoyden without a thought beyond thehorses and dogs; the disregard of the truth in both; Mr. Hatfield, theminister, who cared only for the county families among hisparishioners; Miss Murray's marriage for position and the unhappinessthat followed it--form a series of photographs, which only a sensitive,responsive nature could have produced. The contrast between the gentle,refined governess, and the coarse natures upon whom she is dependent, iswell shown, although there is no attempt on the part of the author toassert any superiority of one over the other. We have many books inwhich the shrinking governess is described from the point of view of thefamily or one of their guests, but here the governess of an Englishfox-hunting squire has spoken for herself; she has described her trialsand the constant self-sacrifice which is demanded of her withoutbitterness, and in a kindly spirit withal, and for that reason the bookis a valuable addition to the history of the life and manners of thecentury.
_The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_, her second novel, was a peculiar book tohave shaped itself in the brain of the gentle youngest daughter of theVicar of Haworth. But Anne Bronte had seen phases of life which musthave sorely wounded her pure spirit. She had been governess at ThorpGreen, where her brother Branwell was tutor, and where he formed thatunfortunate attachment for the wife of his employer, which, with thehelp of liquor and opium, deranged his mind. Anne wrote in her diary atthis time, "I have had some very unpleasant and undreamt-of experienceof human nature." As we picture Anne Bronte, with her light brown hair,violet-blue eyes, shaded by pencilled eyebrows, and transparentcomplexion, she seems a spirit of goodness and purity made to beholddaily a depth of evil in the nature of one dear to her, which fills herwith wonderment and horror.
Mr. Huntingdon of Wildfell Hall was drawn from personal observation ofher brother. She wrote with minuteness, because she believed it her dutyto hold up his life as a warning to others. The gradual change in Mr.Huntingdon from the happy confident lover to the ruined debauchee iswell traced; the story of his infatuation for the wife of his friend, soreckless that
he attempted no concealment, is realistic in the extreme.But what a change in the novel! A hundred years before, Huntingdon wouldhave made a fine hero of romance, but here he is disgraced to theposition of chief villain, and the reader feels for him only pity andloathing. Probably a man's pen would have touched his errors morelightly, but Anne Bronte painted him as he appeared to her. The authorattributes such a character as Huntingdon's to false education, andmakes her heroine say:
"As for my son--if I thought he would grow up to be what you call a manof the world,--one that has 'seen life,' and glories in his experience,even though he should so far profit by it as to sober down, at length,into a useful and respected member of society--I would rather that hedied to-morrow--rather a thousand times."
Notwithstanding its defects--and it is full of them judged from thestand-point of art--_Wildfell Hall_ is a book of promise. In thedescriptions of the Hall, the mystery that surrounds its mistress, therumours of her unknown lover, the heathclad hills and the desolatefields, there are romantic elements that remind one of _WutheringHeights_. The book is more faulty than _Agnes Grey_, but the writer hada deeper vision of life with its weaknesses and its depths of humanpassion. If years had mellowed that "undreamt-of experience" of ThorpGreen, Anne Bronte with her truthful observation and sympathetic insightinto character might have written a classic. The material out of which_Wildfell Hall_ was wrought, under a more mature mind, with a bettergrasp of the whole and a better regard for proportion, would have made anovel worthy of a place beside _Jane Eyre_.
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That English fiction has produced sweeter and more varied fruit by beinggrafted with the novels of women no one who gives the matter a seriousthought can for a moment doubt. One distinctive phase of woman's mindmade its way but slowly in the English novel. Women are by natureintrospective. They read character and are quick to grasp the motivesand passions that underlie action. The French women have again and againembodied this view of human nature in their novels, which areessentially of the inner life. _The Princess of Cleves_ by Madame deLafayette, written in 1678, is the first book in which all the conflictsare those of the emotions; here the great triumph is that which a womanwins over her own heart. Madame de Tencin in _Memoires du Comte deComminges_ represents her hero and heroine under the influence of twogreat passions, religion and love. Madame de Souza, Madame Cottin,Madame de Genlis, Madame de Stael, and George Sand wrote novels of theinner life. The Princess of Cleves with noble dignity controls heremotion and at last conquers it. The pages of George Sand thrill withunbridled passion.
The English women, however, are more repressed by nature than theFrench, and the English novel of the inner life advanced but slowly. Theemotions of the long-forgotten Sidney Biddulph are minutely told. _ASimple Story_ by Mrs. Inchbald is a psychological novel. Amelia Opie,Mary Brunton, and Mrs. Shelley wrote novels of the inner life.
But _Jane Eyre_ is the first English novel which in sustained intensityof emotion can compare with the novels of Madame de Stael or GeorgeSand. The style partakes of the high-wrought character of the heroine,and the reader is whirled along in the vortex of feeling until he toopartakes of every varied mood of the characters, and closes the bookfevered and exhausted. It is one of the ironies of fate that CharlotteBronte with her strong pro-Anglican prejudices should belong to theschool of these French women. But there is the same difference betweentheir writings that there is between the French temperament and theEnglish. Even in the wildest moments of Jane Eyre her passion is ratherlike the river Wharf when it has overflowed its banks; while theirs islike the mountain torrent that bears all down before it.
Much of the passion that Charlotte Bronte describes is pure imagination.She wrote freely to her friends about herself and the people whom sheknew. The three rejected suitors caused her only a little amusement. Herlove for Mr. Nicholls, whom she afterwards married, was little warmerthan respect. We could as easily weave a romance out of Jane Austen'sremark that the poet Crabbe was a man whom she could marry as to make alove story out of Charlotte's relations to Monseiur Heger, who figuresas the hero in three of her books. Here she is greater than the Frenchwomen writers: they knew by experience what they wrote; she by innategenius.
Perhaps no novelist ever had more meagre materials out of which to makefour novels than had Charlotte Bronte: her sisters, Monsieur and MadameHeger, the curates, and herself; a small village in Yorkshire, twoboarding schools, two positions as governess, and a short time spent ina school in Brussels. Compare this range with the material that Scott,Dickens, or Thackeray had--then judge how much of the elixir of geniuswas given to each.
The early pages of _Jane Eyre_, the first novel which Charlotte Brontepublished, describe Lowood Institution, a place modelled upon Cowan'sBridge School. The two teachers, the kind Miss Temple and the cruel MissScatcherd, were drawn from two instructors there at the time the Brontesattended it. Helen Burns, so untidy but so meek in spirit, was MariaBronte, the eldest sister, who died at the age of eleven, probably as aresult of the poor food and harsh treatment of the school. With whatcalm she replies to Jane, when she would sympathise with her for anunjust punishment:
"I am, as Miss Scatcherd said, slatternly; I seldom put, and never keep,things in order; I am careless; I forget rules; I read when I shouldlearn my lessons; I have no method; and sometimes I say, like you, Icannot bear to be subjected to systematic arrangements. This is all veryprovoking to Miss Scatcherd, who is naturally neat, punctual, andparticular."
Helen Burns, with her calm submission, and Jane Eyre, with herrebellious spirit, are finely contrasted. Jane's passionate resentmentof the punishments which Miss Scatcherd inflicted on Helen was genuine.Charlotte was nine years old when she left Cowan's Bridge School, buther suppressed anger at the punishments which her sister Maria hadreceived there flashed out years afterwards in _Jane Eyre_.
Charlotte Bronte was writing _Jane Eyre_ at the same time that Emily andAnne were writing _Wuthering Heights_ and _Agnes Grey_. As they readfrom their manuscripts, Charlotte objected to beauty as a requisite of aheroine, and said, "I will show you a heroine as plain and as small asmyself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours." So arose theconception of Jane Eyre. If the slight, shy, Yorkshire governess,without beauty or charm of manner, had appeared before the imaginationof any novelist either male or female, at that time, and asked to beadmitted into the house of fiction, she would have been refused entranceas cruelly as Hannah shut the door in the face of Jane Eyre, when shecame to her dripping with the rain, cold and weak from two nights'exposure on the moor, and asking for charity. But Charlotte Bronte,with a woman's sympathetic eye made doubly penetrating and loving bygenius, chose this outcast from romance as a heroine, a woman withoutbeauty or charm, and boldly proclaimed that moral beauty was superior tophysical beauty, and that the attraction of one soul for another layquite beyond the pale of external form.
Jane Eyre is not, however, Charlotte Bronte, as has been so oftenasserted. She would not have gone back to comfort Mr. Rochester, aftershe had once left the Hall. One suspects that he was drawn from reading,since the author hardly trusted her knowledge of worldly men to draw afitting lover for Jane. Mr. Rochester is very much the same type of manas Mr. B., whom Pamela married, and the independent Jane addresses himas "My Master," an expression constantly on the lips of Pamela. YetRochester leaves a permanent impression on the mind, for he represents astrong man at war with destiny. He conceals his marriage because of hisdetermination to conquer fate. It is pointed out by critics to-day thathe is quite an impossible character, that he is, in fact, a woman'shero. It is well to remember, however, that the author of _Jane Eyre_was believed at first to have been a man, as it was thought impossiblefor a man like Rochester to have been conceived in a woman's brain, andnot until Mrs. Gaskell's life of the Brontes was published wasCharlotte's character as a modest woman established. But men haverepudiated Mr. Rochester, and so we must accept their judgment.
The heroine of her next novel,
_Shirley_, was suggested by Emily Bronte.Only Shirley was not Emily. Shirley could not have conceived even thedim outlines of _Wuthering Heights_, but she had many of the strongqualities of Emily, and these, mingled with the softer stuff of her ownnature, make her contradictory but charming, and Louis Moore, anagreeable tutor whom Emily Bronte would have quite despised, naturallyfalls in love with his wayward pupil, as they pore over books in theschool-room. Shirley is contrasted with Caroline Helstone, of whom Mrs.Humphry Ward says: "For delicacy, poetry, divination, charm, Carolinestands supreme among the women of Miss Bronte's gallery." Even if otheradmirers of Miss Bronte deny her this eminence, she certainly possessesall the qualities, rare among heroines, which Mrs. Ward has attributedto her.
In many of the conversations between Shirley and Caroline, there arereminders of what passed between the Bronte sisters in their own home.The relative excellence of men and women novelists always interestedthem. Shirley evidently expressed Charlotte's own views in thefollowing words:
"If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed;but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion aboutwomen. They do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them,both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll,half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. Then to hear themfall into ecstasies with each other's creations, worshipping the heroineof such a poem--novel--drama, thinking it fine,--divine! Fine and divineit may be, but often quite artificial--false as the rose in my bestbonnet there. If I spoke all I think on this point, if I gave my realopinion of some first-rate female characters in first-rate works, whereshould I be? Dead under a cairn of avenging stones in half-an-hour."
"After all," says Caroline, "authors' heroines are almost as good asauthoresses' heroes."
"Not at all," Shirley replies. "Women read men more truly than men readwomen. I'll prove that in a magazine article some day when I've time;only it will never be inserted; it will be 'declined with thanks,' andleft for me at the publisher's."
The greater part of the men in _Shirley_ were drawn from life, and areas true to their sex as were the heroines of Dickens, Thackeray, orDisraeli, who were then writing. As for the curates, they are perfect.No man's hand could have executed their portraits so skilfully. Theyhave no more real use in the story than they seem to have had in theirrespective parishes. But this daughter of a country vicar, who knewnothing of the London cockney, who was then enlivening the books ofDickens, seized upon the funniest people she knew, the curates, and theyhave been immortalised.
There is often in Charlotte Bronte's novels a separation of plot andcharacter, as if they formed themselves independently in her mind. Thisis especially true of _Shirley_. At that time the attention of Englandwas directed toward the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire.Mrs. Trollope and Harriet Martineau had written upon conditions of lifethere. In _Sybil_ Disraeli considered broadly the underlying causes ofthe misery of the operatives. Mrs. Gaskell wrote _Mary Barton_, a storyof Manchester life, the same year that Charlotte Bronte was writing_Shirley_. The plot of the last named is laid in the early years of thenineteenth century, and turns upon the opposition of the workmen to theintroduction of machinery. But the plot and characters are constantlygetting in each other's way and tripping each other up. Though the bookis full of defects, one cannot judge it harshly. When she began thefunny description of the curates' tea-drinking, her brother and sisterswere with her. Before it was finished, she and her father were leftalone. But at this time the public demanded melodrama. Fires, drownings,and death-beds were popular methods of untying hard knots and of playingupon the emotions of the reader. She, like Mrs. Gaskell, constantlyresorts to outside circumstances to help put things to rights when theyare drifting in the wrong direction, circumstances which Jane Austenwould not have admitted in a book of hers.
Before Charlotte Bronte wrote _Jane Eyre_ or _Shirley_, she had finished_The Professor_, and offered it to different publishers, but it wasrejected by all. Finally she herself lost faith in it, and transformedit into the beautiful story of _Villette_, where the school of Madameand Monseiur Heger in Brussels is made immortal. In the plot of_Villette_, as in the plot of _Jane Eyre_ and of _Shirley_, manyextraneous events happen which are either unexpected or unnecessary.Like _Jane Eyre_, _Villette_ is steeped in the romantic spirit, but thehard light of reason again dispels the illusion. In the management ofthe supernatural Charlotte is far inferior to Emily. The explanation ofthe nun in _Villette_ is even childish. It is the mistake made by Mrs.Radcliffe, by nearly all writers of the age of reason. They give a ray,as it were, a whisper from the mysterious world which surrounds thatwhich is manifest to our everyday senses. Be it the fourth dimension, orwhat not, we catch for a moment a message from this other world, which,even indistinct, still tells us that this visible world is not all, thatthere is something beyond. Then, with hard common-sense, they deny theirown message, and, so doing, deny to us the world of mystery, and leaveus only the material world in which to believe. Not so Emily Bronte. Notso Scott or Shakespeare. We may believe in Hamlet's ghost or not; we maybelieve or not in the White Lady of Avenel; we may believe or not thatCatharine's soul hovered near Heathcliff. But we are still left with abelief in the life after death, and still believe in something beyondexperience, and still grope to find those things in heaven and earth ofwhich philosophy does not dream.
But the characters, not the plot, remain in the mind, after reading_Villette_. Madame Beck, whose prototype was Madame Heger, is as cleveras Cardinal Wolsey or Cardinal Richelieu; but she uses all herdiplomatic skill in the management of a lady's school, which, under herever watchful eye, with the aid of duplicate keys to the trunks anddrawers of the teachers and pupils, runs without friction of any kind.Lucy Snowe, the English teacher in _Villette_, is far more pleasing thanJane Eyre; she is not so passionate, but her view of life is deeper andbroader, and consequently kinder. And there is Paul Emanuel. Who wouldhave believed the rejected professor would have grown into that scholarof middle age? He is so distinctly the foreigner in showing everyemotion under which he is labouring. How pathetic and how lovable he ison the day of his fete when he thinks that the English governess hasforgotten him, and has not brought even a flower to make the day happierfor him! So fretful in little things, so heroic in large things, with somany faults which every pupil can see, but with so many virtues, frankeven about his little deceptions, he is a lovable man. But many of MissBronte's readers do not find Paul Emanuel as delightful as Paulina, thewomanly little girl who grows into the childlike woman. She is assensitive as the mimosa plant to the people about her. Every event ofher childhood, all the people she cared for then, remained indeliblyimprinted on her mind, so that, with her, friendship and love are strongand abiding.
Notwithstanding their many defects, Charlotte Bronte's novels have lefta permanent impression upon English fiction and have won an acknowledgedplace among English classics. She first made a minute analysis of thevarying emotions of men and women, and noted the strange, unaccountableattractions and repulsions which everybody has experienced. Paulina, agirl of six, is happy at the feet of Graham, a boy of sixteen, althoughhe is unconscious of her presence. And so instance after instance can begiven of affinities and antipathies which lie beyond human reason. She,like her sister Emily, though with less clear vision, was searching forthe hidden sources of human feeling and human action.
Charlotte Bronte wrote to a friend:
"I always through my whole life liked to penetrate to the real truth; Ilike seeking the goddess in her temple, and handling the veil, anddaring the dread glance."
Her truthfulness in painting emotion, which to her own generation seemedmost daring, even coarse, has given an abiding quality to her work. Andbesides she created Paulina and Paul Emanuel.
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