Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  At first Charlotte is evidently the predominant partner: she exhorts, she encourages, she approves, she educates, and the lover has something of the governess about her. She discusses literary topics and assures Ellen that ‘your natural abilities are excellent, and under the direction of a judicious and able friend, you might acquire a decided taste for elegant literature and even poetry.’ Then there was some alarm about Ellen’s health, and Charlotte, in that laboured style that both she and Branwell considered literary, hoped that

  your medical adviser is mistaken in supposing that you have any tendency towards a pulmonary affection. Dear Ellen, that would indeed be a calamity.... Guard against the gloomy impression that such a state of mind naturally produces.

  That alarm passed off, and when Charlotte was eighteen Ellen went on a visit to London, and Charlotte’s letters unconsciously show not only what the friendship was becoming to her, but give us, intimately and inevitably, something of the ripening characteristics of her mind. At first she was afraid that the distractions and gaiety of ‘modern Babylon’ would prove too potent a diversion to Ellen, and take her mind away from her adorer, but she found this was not so. Ellen remained not only her friend, but her ‘true friend.’ Then in this letter follows a passage in which devotion is strangely mingled with the approbation of a governess who is satisfied with her pupil.

  I am really grateful [she writes] for your mindfulness of so obscure a person as myself, and I hope the pleasure is not purely selfish, I trust it is partly derived from the consciousness that my friend’s character is of a higher and more steadfast order than I was once perfectly aware of. Few girls would have done as you have done — would have beheld the glare and glitter and dazzling display of London with dispositions so unchanged, hearts so uncontaminated. I see no affectation in your letter, no trifling, no frivolous contempt of pain, and weak admiration of showy persons and things.... Continue to spare a corner of your warm affectionate heart for your true and grateful friend.

  But Ellen’s mind, her intellectual advancement must still be seen to, and when she wrote to Charlotte asking her for a list of books to read, the instructress and moralist is altogether in the ascendant, and ‘the judicious and able friend’ recommends ‘Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith, Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth and Southey.’

  Now don’t be startled [she writes] at the names of Shakespeare and Byron. Both these were great men, and their works are like them. You know how to choose the good and avoid the evil; the finest passages are always the purest, and the bad are invariably revolting. Omit the comedies of Shakespeare, and the Don Juan, perhaps the Cain of Byron ... read the rest fearlessly: that must indeed be a depraved mind which can gather evil from Henry VIII, Richard III, from Macbeth, and Hamlet, and Julius Caesar. In fiction read Scott alone: all novels after his are worthless. For biography, read Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Southey’s Life of Nelson, etc., etc. For divinity your brother Henry will advise you.

  This list is interesting, as showing how large a province in Charlotte’s mind was occupied by poetry; poetry to her taste, though she was a most indifferent muse when she turned her hand to it herself, was the highest form of literary expression, to an appreciation of which, if judiciously guided, Ellen might attain. The list appears to have been enough to last her friend for her lifetime, for literature is hardly mentioned again in these letters. For a brief space before the Parliamentary election of 1835 Charlotte tried to kindle Ellen’s interest in politics with dithyrambic outbursts.

  The Election! The Election! [she writes] that cry has rung even amongst our lonely hills like the blast of a trumpet. How has it roused the populous neighbourhood of Birstall? Under what banner have your brothers ranged themselves? The Blue or the Yellow? Use your influence with them, entreat them, if it be necessary, on your knees to stand by their country and religion in this day of danger.

  But that passes too, and the personal relation, ripening into passion, dethrones all other topics. So far from the schoolgirl schwärm cooling down into the mere warmth of friendship or the chill of indifference, it begins to flame, reducing the governess and the politician to ashes, and the growing human adoration feeds itself with the fuel of religious aspirations.

  I am at this moment [wrote Charlotte, now in her twenty-first year] trembling all over with excitement after reading your note: it is what I never received before — it is the unrestrained pouring out of a warm, gentle, generous heart, it contains sentiments unrestrained by human motives, prompted by the pure God himself, it expresses a noble sympathy which I do not, cannot describe. Ellen, Religion has indeed elevated your character. I do wish to be better than I am, I pray fervently to be made so. I have stings of conscience — visitings of remorse — glimpses of Holy, inexpressible things, which formerly I used to be a stranger to.... This very night I will pray as you wish me. May the Almighty hear me compassionately! and I humbly trust He will — for you will strengthen my polluted petition with your own pure requests.... If you love me, do, do come on Friday. I shall watch and wait for you, and if you disappoint me, I shall weep....

  Again she writes:

  At such times in such moods as these, Ellen, it is my nature to seek repose in some calm, tranquil idea, and I have now summoned up your image to give me rest. There you sit, upright and still in your black dress and white scarf, your pale marble-like face, looking so serene and kind — just like reality. I wish you would speak to me. It is from religion you derive your chief charm, and may its influence always preserve you as pure, as unassuming, and as benevolent in thought and deed as you are now. What am I compared to you? I feel my own utter worthlessness as I make the comparison. I am a very coarse, commonplace wretch, Ellen.... Give my love to both your sisters. The bonnet is too handsome for me. I dare write no more.

  The flame of this furnace compounded of human passion and the religious ecstasies and questionings which it kindled, mounts higher and licks the skies. She writes:

  My Darling, if I were like you, I should have to face Zionward, though prejudice and error might occasionally fling a mist over the glorious vision before me ... but I am not like you. If you knew my thoughts, the dreams that absorb me, the fiery imagination that at times eats me up, and makes me feel society as it is, wretchedly insipid, you would pity and I daresay despise me. But I know the treasures of the Bible, and love and adore them. I can see the Well of Life in all its clearness and brightness, but when I stoop down to drink of the pure waters they fly from my lips as if I were Tantalus....

  Again she writes:

  Ellen, I wish I could live with you always. I begin to cling to you more fondly than ever I did. If we had but a cottage and a competency of our own, I do think we might live and love on till Death without being dependent on any third person for happiness....

  Then there was a fear of Ellen leaving the neighbourhood of the school where Charlotte was now a teacher, and, crying out against this inscrutable fatality, she asks:

  Why are we to be divided? 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. At first I could not say ‘Thy Will be done.’ I felt rebellious, but I knew it was wrong to feel so. Being left a moment alone this morning, I prayed fervently to be enabled to resign myself to every decree of God’s Will, though it should be dealt forth with a far severer hand than the present disappointment.

  This love of the creature obscuring the Creator is in Charlotte’s novels her strongest expression of human love. Jane Eyre, for instance, speaks of Rochester in precisely these terms: ‘I could not in these days see God for his creature of whom I had made an idol.’ In Villete, Lucy Snowe speaks of her love for Dr. John in the same way. Then this temporary obstacle passes, there is a plan of Ellen’s coming to stay at Haworth, and Charlotte writes:

  If I could always live with you, if your lips and mine could at the same time drink the same draught at the same 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.

  Her heart was a ‘hot-bed for sinful thoughts,’ but Ellen’s notes were ‘meat and drink’ to her. But she was not good enough for Ellen. Ellen must be kept ‘from the contamination of too intimate society.’

  Now much comment has been expended on this fervency of religious emotionalism, which has been represented as a morbid but temporary hysterical affection: biographers, Mrs. Gaskell among them, slightly bewildered at it, have preferred largely to suppress it as being a disturbing and inharmonious feature in their preconceived portrait of Charlotte. Certainly nothing can be more unlike any subsequent aspect of her religious views than this Maenad mood; glaring, indeed, is the contrast between this fervour of religion and the piety, almost prim and proper (though heart-felt and sincere) and void of all spark of excitement, which is so abundantly in evidence in her other letters, while here she is dancing like David before the Ark in girded ecstasy, instead of worshipping God in a Sunday bonnet. But it does not seem impossible to find a reconcilement between the two, and the key to it, I think, is this. Never again did she give her heart to anyone, man or woman, in joy and exaltation, and it was her human adoration for Ellen that kindled in her this religious emotionalism. Ellen was at the bottom of it. It was her desire to make herself worthy of her friend that caused Charlotte to lament her own deficiencies in a manner otherwise alien to her, and pray that they should pass away from her; it was human love that inspired those spiritual aspirations, and lit them with its own passion for the perfect. They were in no sense whatever trumped-up or insincere, they flowed out as spontaneously as did the water when Moses struck the rock; but the source of them and their inspiration was Ellen. Charlotte is even consciously aware of this, for in a later letter she practically admits it, and puts her two passions in their relatively correct places:

  In writing at this moment, [she says] I feel an intense disgust at the idea of using a single phrase that sounds like religious cant. I abhor myself, I despise myself, if the doctrine of Calvin be true, I am already an outcast. You cannot imagine how hard, rebellious and intractable all my feelings are. When I begin to study on the subject, I almost grow blasphemous and atheistical in my sentiments. Don’t desert me, don’t be horrified at me, you know what I am. I wish I could see you, my darling; I have lavished the very warmest affection of a very hot tenacious heart upon you — if you grow cold, it is over.

  In the light of such passages as these, it is impossible to doubt the source of her outbreaks of religious fervour. It was not primarily the Throne of Grace before which she made her adoration but before Ellen — Ellen was her Rock of Ages. Never again did she attain to such soaring in her relations with any human being, for the strong and most unhappy attachment to M. Héger, as we shall see, so far from giving her that expansion of wing, rendered her merely abject, and she besought him of his clemency just to write her a few words, crumbs from his table on which she could feed. Nor was there such emotional fervour in her marriage, happy though its briefness was, bringing her the content which she had missed all her life, and drying up that well-spring of bitterness in her temperament which had long caused her to be incapable of enjoyment. Sexless though this passion for Ellen was, it was inspired by the authentic ecstasy of love.

  For four years this intense attachment continued to blaze, but in 1838, when Charlotte was twenty-two, there comes just a hint of covert reproach, usual with the more domineering and more dominant lover who finds the adorable one too little responsive; for Ellen, though devoted to Charlotte, kept her head, was calm and sensible, and did not indulge in rhapsodies. Charlotte at that time had gone back to Miss Wooler’s school, pupil no longer but a mistress. She became thoroughly unhappy, left rather suddenly, and wrote from Haworth to tell her friend why:

  I stayed as long as I was able, and at length I neither could nor dared stay any longer. My health and spirits had utterly failed me, and the medical man whom I consulted enjoined me, if I valued my life, to go home.... A calm and even mind like yours, Ellen, cannot conceive the feelings of the shattered wretch who is now writing to you, when after weeks of mental and bodily anguish, not to be described, something like rest and tranquillity began to dawn again.... I fear from what you say that I cannot rationally entertain hopes of seeing you before winter. For your own sake I am glad of it.

  Next year, when Charlotte was close on twenty-three, a surprising development occurred, and one quite unforeshadowed in her correspondence. Henry Nussey, Ellen’s brother, an amiable and blameless young clergyman, wrote her a letter proposing marriage. She refused him, and wrote to tell Ellen, who was certainly privy to her brother’s intention, what she had done. ‘There were,’ she said, ‘in this proposal some things which might have proved a strong temptation. I thought if I were to marry Henry Nussey, his sister could live with me, and how happy I should be.’ Propinquity to a sister-in-law seems rather an unusual consideration in favour of matrimony, and has probably never before, or since, been so frankly acknowledged.

  For more than seven years this eager devotion to her friend, though expressed in less exuberant language, continued without abatement, and Charlotte was unable to see any speck in her perfection, except that of her comparative irresponsiveness. Then, coincident with and possibly in consequence of her wretched experience at Brussels, where she fell in love with M. Héger, the flame of it expired, and though to the end of her life the friendship remained deep and stable, there was no more excitement, religious or otherwise, in it, and she wrote to Ellen, ‘In the name of Common Sense, no more lovers’ quarrels!’ She began to see flaws in the peerless crystal; the governess rose ascendant over the lover, and Charlotte warned her of the ‘danger of continued prosperity, which might develop too much a certain germ of ambition latent in your character. I saw this little germ putting out green shoots when I was staying with you at Hathersage.’ She warned her also against vanity and the perishable nature of personal attractiveness, when Ellen was pleased with a new white dress which set off her comeliness. Then Miss Ringrose became a fellow-worshipper at Ellen’s shrine, and wrote to Charlotte with enthusiastic admiration of their mutual friend. Upon which Charlotte again felt it laid upon her to be good for Ellen, and in her most emphatic governess style told her that Miss Ringrose’s feelings for her were ‘half truth, half illusion. No human being could altogether be what she supposes you to be.’ She also said that the notion of her being jealous of the new friend was altogether too ludicrous.

  The splendours had faded, no longer did the bugle blow a royal salute, she could dissect with a calm hand what had dazzled her. ‘Ellen,’ she wrote, ‘is a calm, steady girl, not brilliant, but good and true. She suits me and has always suited me well.’ But now her defects had hardened into qualities, and there was no longer the slightest chance of Ellen’s acquiring a taste for poetry, ‘for she is without romance. If she attempts to read poetry or poetic prose aloud, I am irritated and deprive her of the book. If she talks of it, I stop my ears: but she is good, she is true, she is faithful, and I love her.’

  The long-continued ardour of this attachment which, when it cooled down, subsided into a firm and deep friendship, is of great importance in arriving at any true view of Charlotte’s inner nature, especially when we consider her often-expressed dislike of men as a sex. She thought them coarse, selfish, and conceited. Charles Lamb’s devotion to his sister, for example, she pronounced to be ‘an instance of abnegation of self, scarcely, I think, to be paralleled in the annals of the coarser sex.’ Women, she believed, were infinitely finer, and it was a woman’s portion to be married ‘to a mate who generically is inferior to herself in their [sic] aim in making themselves agreeable.’ She warned Ellen against falling in love, and counselled her thus about marriage:

  After that ceremony is over and after you have had some months to settle down and to get accustomed to the creature you h
ave taken for your worse half, you will probably make a most affectionate and happy wife.

  She was all for a woman leading her own life, violently protesting against the idea that she was always on the look out for a husband.

  I know [she wrote] that if women wish to escape the stigma of husband-seeking, they must act and look like marble or clay — cold, expressionless, bloodless, for every appearance of feeling, of joy, sorrow, friendliness, antipathy, admiration, disgust are all alike construed by the world into the attempt to hook a husband. Never mind! Well-meaning women have their own conscience to comfort them after all. Do not therefore be too much afraid of showing yourself as you are, affectionate, and good-hearted: do not too harshly repress sentiment and feelings excellent in themselves, because you fear that some puppy may fancy that you are letting them come out to fascinate him: do not condemn yourself to live only by halves, because if you showed too much animation some pragmatical thing in breeches might take it into his pate to imagine that you designed to dedicate your life to his inanity.