by E. F. Benson
She went back from Scotland to Haworth, where she stayed a month; it was like the return home after Anne’s death. ‘There was a reaction,’ she wrote, ‘that sunk me to the earth: the deadly silence, solitude, desolation, were awful; the craving for companionship, the hopelessness of relief, were what I should dread to feel again.’ She was morbidly oppressed with the sense of the shortness of life, and of ‘the sickness, decay, the struggle of spirit and flesh’ that must come before the end of it. Her father was anxious about her health; this caused, she thought, the gloomy thoughts that assailed her, and made a canker in her mind, and she entreated him not to worry about her.
In turn she was anxious about him, and two people worrying about each other, with little or no external diversion, brews a deadly atmosphere. Charlotte’s nerves were frayed, she had no literary project on hand and she dwelt morbidly on the past, and thus grew apprehensive about the future. ‘I think grief,’ she writes, ‘is a two-edged sword, it cuts both ways: the memory of one loss is the anticipation of another.’
Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, robbed of Charlotte’s visit to him in London, now urged her to come and stay with him at a house he had taken near Bowness on Lake Windermere, and again Mr. Brontë, who by no means wanted her always to be with him at Haworth, said that her refusal to go would much annoy him. Her dutifulness was rewarded, for it was now she met Mrs. Gaskell for the first time and a friendship and a correspondence began which, though never intimate, lasted to the end of Charlotte’s life. There was already a mutual predisposition, for Mrs. Gaskell had written to Charlotte in praise of Shirley, and Charlotte had therefore settled she was a great and a good woman. Now these pleasant expectations were realised: Charlotte found her a kind and cheerful companion of high talent. Mrs. Gaskell also was attracted and interested: Charlotte’s shyness and silence struck her first, and the absence of ‘any spark of merriment.’ But her well-meaning host still could not do right, for he took Charlotte for a drive in a carriage to see the beauties of the Lake country. That sounds harmless, but no — she writes to Miss Wooler: ‘Decidedly it does not agree with me to prosecute the search of the picturesque in a carriage; a waggon, a spring-cart, even a post-chaise might do, but the carriage upsets everything.’ But could poor Sir James have foreseen this fatal flaw? Even if he had, and if he had sent Charlotte out in a waggon, she would surely have founded an even graver complaint at being supplied with so unusual a conveyance. It was not really the carriage that worried her; it was the presence of other people and her own self-consciousness. She was afraid of growing in any degree enthusiastic, and thus drawing attention to the ‘lioness, the authoress, the artist.’ Not till her next visit to the Lakes, in the winter, when she stayed with Miss Martineau and fell victim to her robust charm, did she realise Sir James’s kindly intentions. ‘I begin to admit in my own mind,’ she wrote, ‘that he is sincerely benignant to me.’
She went back home at the end of August, and was, as usual, much cheered by an article in the Palladium, by Sidney Dobell, entitled ‘Currer Bell,’ which expressed the warmest admiration not only for Jane Eyre and Shirley, but for Wuthering Heights. It revived, however, the suggestion that Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were also of Currer Bell’s authorship. Mr. Williams had seen this article, and he now wrote to Charlotte proposing to reissue Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey in one volume, with a biographical notice by her which should make known the history of the three pseudonyms. Emily and Anne were dead, and there was no longer any reason why the mystery should not be authoritatively dispelled. He also made some suggestion about reissuing The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Charlotte was opposed to that: she did not think the book should be preserved. Anne had written it under a strange, conscientious, half-ascetic notion of accomplishing a painful penance and a severe duty: it had better drop out of existence. But she warmly favoured the other suggestion, only the book must be republished by Smith, Elder and not by its original publisher, Newby. She also decided to make a selection from her sisters’ manuscript poems, not hitherto published, and issue them in the form of an appendix.
She set to work at once, and before the end of September a rough copy of the ‘Biographical Notice’ was in the hands of her publisher. She described, with a simplicity she rarely attained, Emily’s last illness; none can read that page unmoved, so sincere and heart-broken is the regret and the anguish for those estranged days that inspired it.
Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly, she made haste to leave us. Yet while physically she perished, mentally she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of love and wonder. The awful point was that while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity: the spirit was inexorable to the flesh: from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eye, the same service was exacted as in health. To stand by and witness this and not dare to remonstrate was a pain no words can render....
Truly, if Charlotte was reaping the hardness she had sown, she made expiation in that bitter harvesting.
Then, when the ‘Biographical Notice’ was finished, Charlotte read Wuthering Heights over again, and wrote a Preface regarding it to this new edition. She tells us that she has now got a clear glimpse of its faults, and craves indulgence for them:
Had she (Emily) but lived, her mind would have grown like a strong tree, loftier, straighter, wider-spreading, and its matured fruits would have attained a mellower ripeness and sunnier bloom, but on that mind time and experience alone could work.
But we stare incredulous at such a conclusion. What does it mean? It is as if Charlotte predicted that some dryad of the moor, in whose eyes shone the knowledge of things veiled and primeval, would be tamed by time and experience into losing her elemental quality, and be thereby ripened and mellowed. Surely, had Emily lived, exactly the opposite must have happened. What more would have been revealed to her by the ‘Strange Power’ that inspired her we cannot tell, for the ways of genius are past finding out, and its paths in the dark waters through which it alone can lead us, but any such development as Charlotte predicted must have been to the detriment of that supreme quality. She missed all that Wuthering Heights stands for: she shuddered at its ‘horror of great darkness,’ she wished to cease ‘to breathe lightning,’ not knowing that the darkness and the lightning are It; and, apologising for them, she pointed out ‘those spots where clouded daylight and eclipsed sun still attest their existence.’ Eagerly, defending the book, she calls our attention to ‘the homely benevolence of Nelly Dean,’ to the ‘constancy and tenderness of Edgar Linton’: Emily could render such, and had she lived she would have developed her power further in that regard. But when it came to the true genius of the book, namely the loves of Heathcliff and Catherine, that soaring of fierce eagles out of sight, or to the passionate mystical yearning for the unsheathed beauty of the world, for the wakening and being satisfied with it, she was blind: Emily’s ‘descriptions of natural scenery are what they should be, and all they should be.’ As for the eagles, Heathcliff ‘stands unredeemed ... except for his faint regard for Hareton,’ and his ‘half implied esteem for Nelly Dean’; his love for Catherine ‘is a passion such as might boil and glow in the bad essence of some evil genius!’ All she can say for Catherine is that ‘she is not destitute of a certain strange beauty in her fierceness, or of honesty in the midst of her perverted passion and passionate perversity.’ Such was her estimate of the book when loyally and lovingly she tried to appreciate and understand it.
There is scarcely in the whole history of the family a more heart-rending picture than that which Charlotte paints of herself sitting in the dining-room of the Parsonage, in a loneliness which her occupation accentuated and rendered the more intolerable, and going through her sisters’ papers. She spent hours peering into the minutely written manuscripts, selecting the poems to be published, and writing little lost explana
tory notes: in one she said, ‘the Genius of a solitary region seems to address his wandering and wayward votary’; in another, ‘the same mind is in converse with a like abstraction’; in another, ‘the wakened soul struggles to blend with the storm by which it is swayed....’ As in her portrait of her sister in Shirley, as in her Preface, these notes are mere external observations; Emily is beyond her. She had thought, she wrote to Mr. Williams, that this intellectual exertion would rouse her mind from the sense of despairing loneliness, but it was not so. All turned to memory; memory was ‘both sad and relentless.’
The reading over of papers, the renewal of remembrance brought back the pang of bereavement, and occasioned a depression of spirits well-nigh intolerable. For one or two nights I scarcely knew how to get on till morning; and when morning came I was still haunted with a sense of sickening distress.
She breakfasted with her father, she worked alone, and alone she walked on the moors on days of autumn sunshine ‘with solitude and memory for companions, and Heathcliff haunted every glen and hollow.’ She sat down to her solitary dinner, for Mr. Brontë dined by himself, and soon after the early closing in of the shortening days began to darken. Now she must put her work aside, for her eyes would not stand the strain of deciphering these scripts by candle-light; also she dared not work in the evening for fear of the sleepless nights that followed. Rainstorms swept over the garden and glimmering tombstones of the graveyard, and she drew the curtains across the panes, but still the voice of the wind called from without, as of Cathy wailing ‘Let me in!’ and fingers tapped at the pane.
Memory; everything was memory, and all memories were bitter. The silent house was astir with ghosts, and these lonely evening hours were the worst of all, for they were those in which once there had been excitement and eager talk over plans, over literary ambitions, over projects for keeping a school. The horror grew, and perhaps she would take her knitting into the kitchen and talk with Tabby for an hour; then, still alone, she supped and fed Anne’s or Emily’s dogs, whose mistresses had not yet returned, unless it was their voices in the wind from the moors. Mr. Brontë went early to bed, winding, as he passed, the clock on the stairs, whose ticking could be heard throughout the house; but Charlotte sat up till midnight, for where was the use of lying lonely in the dark? As one of those rare visitors to Haworth wrote to Mrs. Gaskell, it seemed ‘that joy can never have entered that house since it was first built.’
Such was the autumn of 1850.
CHAPTER XVII
As soon as this new edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey was out of her hands, Charlotte went to pay a long-promised visit to Miss Martineau. She lived at Ambleside, but had been away when Charlotte was staying with Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth in the summer, and they had not met since she had been introduced a year ago as ‘Miss Brogden.’ Instantly she succumbed to the breezy, efficient, rather masculine charm of her new friend, who had the most vivifying effect on her after the desolate, memory-haunted autumn. ‘She is a great and a good woman,’ she wrote to Ellen, ‘of course not without peculiarities, but I have seen none as yet that annoy me.... Miss Martineau I relish inexpressibly.’ It was her tremendous vitality that was so bracing and admirable, and not less her mental vigour. She was up at five in the morning, and after a cold bath took a walk by starlight, and had finished breakfast and got to work by seven. The morning was spent in solitude; they walked and talked till dinner; and after Miss Martineau conversed ‘fluently and abundantly,’ and sat up for a couple of hours after Charlotte had gone to bed at ten, writing letters. Charlotte wrote to her father with the same rare unqualified enthusiasm:
As to Miss Martineau I admire her and wonder at her more than I can say. Her powers of labour, of exercise, and social cheerfulness are beyond my comprehension. In spite of the unceasing activity of her colossal intellect, she enjoys robust health. She is very kind to me, though she must think I am a very insignificant person compared to herself.
To Mr. Williams she wrote:
Her animal spirits are as unflagging as her mental powers. It gave me no pain to feel insignificant, mentally and corporeally, in comparison with her.
To another friend she wrote:
She is certainly a woman of wonderful endowments, both intellectual and physical, and though I share few of her opinions, and regard her as fallible on certain points of judgment, I must still accord her my highest esteem. The manner in which she combines the highest mental culture with the nicest discharge of feminine duties filled me with admiration, while her affectionate kindness earned my gratitude.
To Mr. Taylor she wrote:
I find a worth and greatness in herself, and a constancy, benevolence, perseverance in her practices, such as wins the sincerest esteem and affection. She is not a person to be judged by her writings alone, but rather by her own deeds and life, than which nothing can be more exemplary and nobler. Faults she has, but to me they appear very trivial weighed in the balance against her excellences.
There is scarcely a qualifying phrase in these enthusiasms: Charlotte let herself go in almost undiluted appreciation. She had never admired any woman so unreservedly since the days of her adolescent passion for Ellen, and it was almost as if the sunshine of the morning, long obscured and eclipsed, had returned to her and warmed her into uncritical enjoyment. Moreover, Charlotte could render her an intellectual homage such as she had never been able to accord to Ellen, and this homage was at present reciprocated, for Miss Martineau greatly admired Jane Eyre and Shirley, ‘and,’ wrote Charlotte, ‘while she testifies affectionate approbation, I feel the sting taken away from another class of critics.’
Miss Martineau told Mrs. Gaskell two little anecdotes about this visit which, though she relates them as independent, may have had a connection. She had mesmeric powers (or as we should say now, hypnotic powers), and Charlotte constantly urged her to mesmerise her. This she refused to do, thinking that Charlotte was in a low nervous condition and that harm might come. She made excuse, saying again and again that she was tired. But there came a day when she could not plead fatigue, and Charlotte ‘fell under the influence.’ In other words, she began to go into a light trance, and Miss Martineau stopped. Soon after Miss Martineau had to give a lecture: Charlotte sitting sideways to her never took her eyes off her, and when the lecture was over came and stood by her, and in Miss Martineau’s ‘very voice’ repeated the words from Shakespeare which she had quoted, ‘Is my son dead?’ They went home in silence, and again Charlotte staring at her said, ‘Is my son dead?’ The two stories seem connected; it looks as if some hypnotic influence had been established which renewed itself when Charlotte fixed her eyes on Miss Martineau.
She returned to Haworth, having spent Christmas with this tonic and marvellous friend, vastly restored, rather severe on herself for having been so feeble as to need a change, and full of critical impressions. She had been to see Mrs. Arnold, widow of Dr. Arnold, and her family at Fox How, and had surveyed them with a magisterial eye. Mrs. Arnold was good and amiable, but intellect was not her strong point, and her manner at first lacked genuineness and simplicity. The daughters were like her both in their qualities and their defects; ‘their opinions on literary subjects were rather imitative than original, rather sentimental than sound.’ Matthew Arnold’s manner was ‘displeasing from its seeming foppery,’ and Charlotte regarded him at first with ‘regretful surprise: the shade of Dr. Arnold seemed to me to frown on his young representative.’ Also his theological opinions were very vague and unsettled, but he like the rest of the family improved upon acquaintance: the unfavourable first impression had only been the effect which strangers always had on her. Then Amelia Wooler came in for some rough handling. She had written Charlotte a letter full of ‘claptrap sentiment and humbugging attempts at fine writing.’ Also she had asked for Wordsworth’s, Southey’s, Miss Martineau’s, and Charlotte’s autographs: this showed that the ‘old trading spirit’ was still alive.
Then there were matrimonial subjects to be discusse
d with Ellen: Mr. James Taylor at this time, in spite of discouragement, was prosecuting his suit, and Charlotte at present felt well-disposed to him. There are also allusions to a younger man, not named, but certainly to be identified with her young publisher, George Smith, with whom she had made that daring expedition to Scotland. Ellen’s badinage (there is no other word for it) on this subject was frightfully arch, for she alluded to him and Charlotte as Jupiter and Venus, and Charlotte, evidently highly delighted, bade her have done with this ‘heathen trash.’ Towards him she was more than well-disposed, perhaps she was a little in love with him, for Jupiter, encouraged by the success of the Scottish visit, had proposed to Venus that she should make a trip up the Rhine with him, and she wrote to Ellen: ‘I am not made of stone, and what is mere excitement to him is fever to me.... I cannot conceive either his mother or his sisters relishing it, and all London would gabble like a countless host of geese.’ Her common sense told her that it would never do to marry him, even if he proposed to her. There was a great difference of fortune between them, and it was part of her creed that there should be approximate equality of means between husband and wife; also he was considerably younger than she, and ‘personal regard and natural liking do not compensate for that.’ She writes with admirable wisdom: ‘I am content to have him as a friend, and pray God to continue to me the common sense to look on one so young, so rising, so hopeful in no other light.’ But there the matter stayed, and there is no kind of reason to suppose that George Smith ever did propose to her.
Very soon a trial tested that high adoration for Miss Martineau, but it stood firm. She, in collaboration with Mr. Atkinson, published early in February 1851 a book called Letters on the Nature and Development of Man. Though it is impossible to suppose that Charlotte, after all those long intimate talks with her, had no inkling of what Miss Martineau’s theological opinions were, the publication of them shocked her a good deal. Making allowance for the fact that she often worked herself up, when pen in hand, to exaggerated statements of her feelings, it is evident that she was much upset.