Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  One wonders what the fine creature thought of the silent little lady who drew such deadly conclusions from his small-talk.

  But, it must be again repeated, it was chiefly her shyness that, by making her miserable in the presence of strangers, rendered her ill-disposed to them; it was like some acute physical pain which renders abominable all that is experienced while it is in possession. Not being herself at ease, her own discomfort led her to lay the blame of it on them, even though the meeting had been desired and looked forward to on both sides. This was very markedly so in the case of Thackeray, for whom, before she met him, she had a wild hero-worship comparable with that which, in the days of her childhood, she had cherished for the Duke of Wellington. He was unique, he was a Titan, he was the legitimate high priest of Truth, and ‘a hundred years hence the thoughtful critic, looking down on the deep waters, will see his work shining through them, the pearl of great price. He is alone in his power, alone in his simplicity, alone in his self-control.’ He was a great knight-errant gloriously tilting against and triumphantly overthrowing the pomps and empty pretensions of the world, with his burnished spear of noble-hearted satire.

  Reality based on such glowing expectations was almost bound to prove a disappointment, and the first meeting seems to have been a dreadful fiasco. Thackeray was invited to dine at Mrs. Smith’s to meet her, but Charlotte had been out all morning, she had missed her lunch, and by seven o’clock exhaustion and the excitement of meeting him had made ‘savage work’ of her. It must have been by her own wish that he was not introduced to her before dinner, but he came up and shook hands. Afterwards he talked to her a little, but she could hardly reply to him at all; everything was ‘dreamlike.’ ‘Had I not been obliged to speak,’ she wrote to Mr. Williams, ‘I could have managed well, but it behoved me to answer when addressed and the effort was torture — I spoke stupidly.’ Unfortunately this meeting had been arranged in order that, at her wish, she might get to know Thackeray, so speech could hardly be avoided. But speech being torture, she chiefly listened, and, alas, she found his talk ‘very peculiar, too perverse to be pleasant’; he was ‘cynical, harsh and contradictory.’ The torture of her own shyness, coupled with the self-conscious sense that something ‘brilliant, eccentric and provocative was expected of the author of Jane Eyre’ made her critical of him. Though still an intellectual Titan, he lost something of his moral stature, and the glamour began to fade from his work as well.

  I have come to the conclusion [she wrote to Mr. Williams] that whenever he (Thackeray) writes, Mephistopheles stands on his right hand and Raphael on his left: the great doubter and sneerer usually guides the pen; the Angel noble and gentle, interlines letters of light here and there. Alas, Thackeray, I wish your strong wings would lift you oftener above the smoke of cities into the pure region nearer heaven.

  The preacher, we fear, who was never very far from Charlotte’s right hand, held the pen for her there, and when she next saw Thackeray in London in June 1850, he inspired her tongue. Her shyness had worn off, and, no doubt to his extreme astonishment, she went for the Titan.

  He made a morning call, [she wrote to Ellen] and sat about two hours. Mr. Smith only was in the room, the whole time. He described it afterwards as a ‘queer scene,’ and I suppose it was. The giant sat before me: I was moved to speak to him of some of his shortcomings (literary, of course); one by one the faults came into my mind, and one by one I brought them out, and sought some explanation or defence. He did defend himself like a great Turk and heathen; that is to say the excuses were often worse than the crime itself. The matter ended in decent amity; if all be well I am to dine at his house this evening.

  A queer scene indeed! Only once before had he met her, and then she was too awe-struck with him to utter more than a syllable; now for two hours he was in the dock before this ferocious little lady, who cross-examined him on his literary misdeeds and poured scorn on the pleading which only aggravated his offence. It must have been in some trepidation that he looked forward to that evening, for who could tell whether she might not again arraign him before the distinguished company whom he had honoured with an invitation to come in after dinner and see the great authoress? But there was no real fear of that; the presence of strangers exercised the usual paralysing effect on her. She was more tongue-tied than she had been on the first occasion of their meeting, and there ensued the most ghastly party ever recorded in the melancholy history of social pleasure.

  Lady Ritchie, Thackeray’s daughter (whose admirable account of it I follow), was present throughout the evening. To her and her sister, then young girls, the occasion was of the most thrilling, for they had surreptitiously dipped into Jane Eyre, which, though chiefly unintelligible, was highly stimulating. Her father went down to the front door to receive his guest, and in she came, escorted by him and Mr. Smith, ‘in mittens, in silence, in seriousness,’ tiny and hardly reaching up to Thackeray’s elbow. She was somewhat grave and stern, thought Lady Ritchie, especially ‘to forward little girls who wished to chatter’; evidently Charlotte remembered, from the governess days, the necessity and the difficulty of repelling the rude familiarities of children. Then, after this family dinner, the brilliant company began to assemble. Mrs. Crowe who wrote The Nightside of Nature was there, and Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Mrs. Proctor and her husband, Barry Cornwall (who, so rumour had once said, were the joint authors of Jane Eyre) and their daughter, Adelaide Anne Proctor, who wrote The Lost Chord and other poems.

  Everyone waited (says Lady Ritchie) for the brilliant conversation which never began at all. Miss Brontë retired to the sofa in the study and murmured a low word now and then to our kind governess, Miss Truelock. The room looked very dark, the lamp began to smoke a little, the conversation grew dimmer and more dim, the ladies sat round still expectant, my father was too much perturbed by the gloom and the silence to be able to cope with it at all. Mrs. Brookfield who was in the doorway by the study near the corner in which Miss Brontë was sitting, leant forward with a little commonplace, since brilliance was not to be the order of the evening. ‘Do you like London, Miss Brontë?’ she said; another silence, a pause, then Miss Brontë answered ‘Yes and no,’ very gravely....

  It is indeed little wonder that, after the lioness had gone, Thackeray quietly let himself out of his house and spent the rest of the evening at his club, quite unable to face his other guests. One is sorry for them for having had so poor an entertainment, one is especially sorry for the host, but most of all for Charlotte. Further acquaintance with Thackeray in later visits to London, even now that she was no longer shy of him, was productive only of ironical comments on his faults. She went to a lecture of his at which the audience was ‘the cream of London society,’ and she was surprised that he noticed her at all, when so many ‘admiring duchesses and countesses were seated in rows before him.’ When he asked her afterwards if she had enjoyed it, she found this harmless inquiry over-eager and naïve. And what a snob!

  He postponed his next lecture at the earnest petition of the duchesses and marchionesses who, on the day on which it should have been delivered, were necessitated to go down with the Queen and Court to Ascot races. I told him I thought he did wrong to put it off an their account — and I think so still....

  Then there was a fancy dress ball given by the Queen, and the

  great lords and ladies have been quite wrapt up in preparation for this momentous event. Their pet and darling, Mr. Thackeray, of course, sympathizes with them. He was here yesterday to dinner and left very early in the evening in order that he might visit respectively the Duchess of Norfolk, the Marchioness of Londonderry, Ladies Chesterfield and Clanricarde, and see them all in their fancy costumes of the reign of Charles II before they set out for the Palace.... Amongst others the Lord Chancellor attended his last lecture, and Mr. Thackeray says he expects a place from him: but in this I think he was joking. Of course Mr. T. is a good deal spoiled by all this, and indeed it cannot be otherwise.

  It was a sad disen
chantment, but indeed she was on the alert for disenchantment, and there underlies her criticism of him an uneasy jealousy of one who could enjoy his success while she could not enjoy her own. Thackeray offered to introduce her to galaxies of great folk who would receive her with open arms, but she thought ‘“society” produced so ill an effect on him that she had better avoid it.’ She can no longer find an agreeable trait in him, and when Mr. Smith sent her an engraving of his portrait by Lawrence, she noticed that ‘the expression of spite, most vividly marked in the original, is here softened.’ And his work also did follow him into the darkness of her disapproval. She went to his lecture on Fielding: it was ‘a painful hour,’ and she had nothing but horror for his lightness over evil and drunken ways. Branwell, of course, was still bitterly and hardly in her mind, but there was more cavilling than criticism in her indignation with the lecturer: anyone would think that Thackeray had made an impassioned address exhorting every young man to take to drink without further delay.

  If only once [she wrote] the prospect of a promising life blasted at the outset by wild ways had passed close under his eyes, he never could have spoken with such levity of what led to its piteous destruction. Had I a brother yet living, I should tremble to let him read Thackeray’s lecture on Fielding. I should hide it away from him. If in spite of precautions it fell into his hands, I should earnestly pray him not to be misled by the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely.

  Then Mr. Smith sent her an early copy of the first volume of Esmond, and though, when she had finished the whole, she was generous in praise, her first instinct was to find fault with Thackeray’s motives.

  But what bitter satire, [she writes] what relentless dissection of diseased subjects! Well, and this too is right, or would be right, if the savage surgeon did not seem so fiercely pleased with his work. Thackeray likes to dissect an ulcer or an aneurism, he has pleasure in putting his cruel knife or probe into quivering, living flesh. Thackeray would not like all the world to be good; no great satirist would like society to be perfect.

  It was indeed seldom in this new world of London, which so cordially opened its arms to her in welcome and admiration, that she registered agreeable first impressions of anybody: she was unchanged in that respect from the days when she had first seen in M. Héger an insane tom-cat and a delirious hyena. But Miss Harriet Martineau was an exception. Charlotte was predisposed in her favour, for she had enjoyed Deerbrook and, writing to her before her first visit to London in the name of Currer Bell, expressed the ‘pleasure and profit he has derived from her works,’ and sent her a copy of Shirley. This erasure of the pronoun of sex was evidently intentional, for Charlotte meant to disclose herself, and Miss Martineau, firmly grasping the idea, wittily addressed her envelope of reply to ‘Currer Bell, Esq.,’ but began her letter ‘Dear Madam.’ Then the spirit of social comedy took this promising situation in hand. Currer Bell, on going up to London for that first visit in which Thackeray stocks went down, wrote to Miss Martineau that ‘he’ was in town and would like to see her. There was a small party, all eager to see Currer Bell, but, before he-she arrived, a male guest six feet high was announced, and the party thought this was Currer Bell. Then Currer Bell arrived, and, disclosing herself indistinctly to the footman, she was announced not as ‘Miss Brontë,’ but as ‘Miss Brogden,’ and there entered, so Miss Martineau wrote, ‘the smallest creature I had ever seen except at a fair.’ There for the present the budding friendship stayed, to burst out into amazing bloom a year afterwards.

  Meantime, before Charlotte met Miss Martineau again, other friendships had been forming; that with Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, an eminent doctor now retired and rewarded with a baronetcy, had features peculiarly characteristic of Charlotte’s almost comical inability to let herself go, easily and naturally. He was certainly a lion-hunter, and his persistent stalking must have been tiresome, but his amiability was undefeated. He and his wife appear first on the stage among those who ‘came boring to Haworth on the wise errand of seeing the scenery described in Jane Eyre and Shirley’ They insisted that she should spend a few days with them at Gawthorpe, their place on the borders of East Lancashire, and, since Mr. Brontë would not hear of her refusing, she was left ‘without plea or defence.’ The baronet was a fine-looking man and quite ‘unpretending,’ but, with her habitual prejudice against strangers which, in spite of her resolutions, remained as robust as ever, Charlotte had fears that he might not be what he seemed. ‘I wish he may be as sincere as he is polished,’ she wrote. ‘He shows his white teeth with too frequent a smile, but I will not prejudge him.’ So to Gawthorpe with some misgiving she went. The embarrassment of being obliged to talk, which wrecked her first meeting with Thackeray, was spared her, since ‘the dialogues (perhaps I should say monologues, for I listened far more than I talked) by the fireside in his antique oak-panelled drawing-room, while they suited him, did not too much oppress and exhaust me.’ He was not at all well, his nerves were very sensitive and the state of his health ‘exaggerated sensitiveness into irritability.’ Still he was gracious and dignified, and his ‘tastes and feelings were capable of elevation.’ Then there was Lady Shuttleworth, rather handsome, without any pretensions to ‘aristocratic airs,’ frank, good-humoured and active, but ‘truth obliges me to say that, as it seems to me, grace, dignity, fine feeling were not in the inventory of her qualities.’ Charlotte liked the German governess better than anyone in the house, and had heart-to-heart talks with her. She was well treated ‘for a governess,’ but said she was homesick, ‘and wore the usual pale, despondent look of her class.’

  So the visit passed off not amiss, but, writes Charlotte,

  the worst of it is, that there is now some menace hanging over my head of an invitation to go to them in London during the season.... This was his (Sir James’s) theme when I was at Gawthorpe. I then gave notice that I would not be lionised.... I shall probably go. I know what the effect and what the pain will be, how wretched I shall often feel, how thin and haggard I shall get, but he who shuns suffering will never win victory. If I mean to improve, I must strive and endure. The visit will, however, be short, as short as I can possibly make it; would to God it was well over! I have one safeguard. Sir James has been a physician, and looks at me with a physician’s eye: he saw at once that I could not stand much fatigue nor bear the presence of many strangers. Papa is restless and eager for me to go, the idea of a refusal quite hurts him.

  There is something truly pathetic about this letter. It shows us what real torture she suffered from her morbid shyness and self-consciousness, and how she strove to get the better of them. But if there had been a serious operation hanging over her head, instead of a short visit to London, and it was doubtful if she could stand the shock, she could not have spoken more apprehensively of it. It becomes easy to understand how her first impressions of strangers were always disagreeable, for they were, so to speak, the surgeons and nurses who conducted the operation; only the anæsthetist was lacking. But, in spite of the prospective pain, she meant to face it, and there was true courage, for that which to others would be a pleasant experience was to her a real agony. At other times the flesh was weak, and in order to justify on moral grounds her profound hatred of sojourning among strangers, she says that ‘indiscriminate visiting leads only to a waste of time and a vulgarising of character ... besides’ (as an afterthought) ‘it would be wrong to leave papa often.’ But papa on this occasion was ‘quite hurt’ at the thought of her refusing.

  Further menaces were brewing. The persevering baronet now proposed that she should go up with him and his wife to London by road, and stay at several of his relations’ houses on the way. Providence thwarted that more formidable plan; Mr. Brontë was ill, Charlotte did not like to leave him, and with solemn thankfulness she records her relief. ‘I cannot say that I regret having missed this ordeal: I would as lief have walked among red-hot ploughshares.’ Eventually she got out of staying with them at all, and when she went to London in June 1850, she sto
pped at the more familiar house of her publisher instead. But Sir James called with agonising proposals. ‘To my great horror he talks of my going with them to Hampton Court, Windsor, etc. God knows how I shall get on, I perfectly dread it.’ But she escaped from that snare of the fowler.

  It was on this visit to London that Charlotte, as we have seen, arraigned and dined with Thackeray; she also saw the idol of her childhood, the Duke of Wellington; she sat to George Richmond the artist for the crayon portrait of her which Mr. George Smith commissioned and gave to her father, and which was bequeathed to the nation by her husband and now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. She also met G. H. Lewes for the first time, whom she had taken to task for his review of Shirley. She confessed that she felt ‘half sadly, half tenderly’ towards him, his face almost moved her to tears, so wonderfully it resembled Emily’s; ‘in consequence, whatever Lewes does or says, I believe I cannot hate him.’ There was less of social entertainment on this visit, and less lionising, and in consequence she enjoyed it more than her first. But what she called ‘a trying termination’ of it remained, which she looked forward to with apprehension, but enjoyed enormously. This was an expedition to Edinburgh with her young publisher, George Smith, who was six or seven years younger than she, and it showed a daring disregard of the Victorian conventions of 1850, for she went there alone with him and his sister without any middle-aged chaperon at all, feeling that ‘my seniority and lack of all pretensions to beauty, etc., are a perfect safeguard.’ The expedition was a glorious success; she found music and magic at Melrose and Abbotsford, and London ‘compared to Dun-Edin, “mine own romantic town,” is prose compared to poetry or as a great rumbling, rambling heavy epic compared to a lyric, brief, bright, clear, and vital as a flash of lightning.’ The Scotch, too, had grand characters and that gave Scotland its charm and greatness.