The Brontes
During the middle of the nineteenth century, English fiction largely
depicted manners and customs of different classes and different parts of
England. While Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli, and Mrs. Gaskell were
writing realistic novels, romantic fiction found noble exponents in the
Bronte sisters.
The quiet life lived by the Brontes in the vicarage on the edge of the
village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire seems prosaic to the
casual observer, but it had many weird elements of romanticism. The
purple moors stretching away behind the grey stone vicarage, the grey
sky, and the sun always half-frowning, and never sporting with nature
here as it does over the mountains in Westmoreland, make thought earnest
and deep, and suggest the mystery which surrounds human life. It is a
serious country, that of the Wharf valley; the people are a serious
people, silent and observant. The Brontes were a direct outcome of this
country and people, only in them their severity and silence were kindled
into life by a Celtic imagination.
What a group of people lived within those grey stone walls! As the vicar
and 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 fancies
teeming in each childish brain could have been suddenly endowed with
life! How could even a dull curate, with an undercurrent of addition and
subtraction running in his brain, based upon his meagre salary and
economical expenditures, have been insensible to the thought with which
the very atmosphere must have been surcharged? The brother, Patrick
Branwell, found his audience in the public house, and delighted it with
his wit and conversation. The sisters, after their household tasks were
done, wrote their stories and often read them to each other.
But fate had chosen her darkest hues in which to weave the warp and woof
of their lives. The wild dissipations and wilder talk of their brother
Branwell clouded the imaginations of his sisters, and in a short time
death was a constant presence in their midst. In September, 1848,
Branwell died at the age of thirty; in less than three months, Emily
died at the age of twenty-nine; and in five-months, Anne died at the
age of twenty-seven; and Charlotte, the eldest, was left alone with her
father. During the remaining six years of her life, her compensation for
her loss of companionship was her writing. Not long after the death of
her sisters, Mr. Nicholls proposed to her; was refused; proposed again
and was accepted; then came the separation caused by Mr. Bronte's
hostility to the marriage; then the marriage in the church under whose
pavement so many members of her family were buried, grim attendants of
her wedding; then the nine short months of married life; then the death
of the last of the Bronte sisters at the age of thirty-nine. Mr. Bronte
outlived her only six years, but he was the last of his family. Six
children had been born to Patrick Bronte, not one survived him. Forty
years had eliminated a family which yet lives through the imaginative
powers 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 the
characters thought or felt as did the quiet, retiring author. Yet so
great was her dramatic power that her brother Branwell was credited with
the book, as it was deemed impossible for a woman to have conceived the
character of Heathcliff. And yet this arch-fiend of literature was
created by the daughter of a country vicar, whose only journeys from
home had been to schools, either as pupil or governess. Charlotte Bronte
has thrown but little light upon her sister's character. She says that
she loved animals and the moors, but was cold toward people and repelled
any attempt to win her confidence. The author of _Jane Eyre_ seems
neither to have understood Emily's nature nor her genius. Yet we are
told that Emily was constantly seen with her arms around the gentle
Anne, and that they were inseparable companions. If Anne Bronte could
have lived longer, she would have thrown much light upon the character
of the author of _Wuthering Heights_. But now, as we read of her brief
life and her one novel, she seems to belong to the great dramatists
rather than to the novelists, to the poets who live apart from the world
and commune only with the people of their own creating.
_Wuthering Heights_ stands alone in the history of prose fiction. It
belongs to the wild region of romanticism, but it imitates no book, and
has never been copied. No incident, no character, no description, can be
traced to the influence of any other book, but the atmosphere is that of
the 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, out
of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary
moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head,
savage, swart, sinister: a form moulded with at least one element of
grandeur--power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but
the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human
shape, 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 moss
clothes 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 of
the inner meaning.
In all literature, there is not so repulsive a villain as Heathcliff,
the offspring of the gipsies. Insensible to kindness, but resentful of
wrong; hard, scheming, indomitable in resolution; quick to put off the
avenging of an injury until he can make his revenge serve his purpose;
the personification of strength and power; he is yet capable of a love
stronger than his hate. Heathcliff is so repulsive that he does not
attract, and drawn with such skill that, as has been said, he has not
been imitated.
But the strong, dark picture of Heathcliff makes us forget that
Catharine is the centre of the story. The night that Mr. Lockwood spends
at Wuthering Heights he reads her books, and her spirit appears to him
crying for entrance at the window, and complaining that she has wandered
on the moors for twenty years. While living, she represents a human soul
balanced between heaven and hell, loved by both the powers of darkness
and of light. But in her earliest years, she had loved Heathcliff; their
thoughts, their affections were intertwined, and they were welded, as it
were, into one soul, not at first by love, but by their common hatred of
Hindley Earnshaw. When Catharine meets Edgar Linton, her finer nature
asserts itself. She loves him as a being from another world; he gives
her the first glimpse of real goodness, kindness, and gentleness. She
catches through him a gleam of Paradise. But she knows how transient
this is, and says to her old nurse, Nelly Dean:
"I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in
heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so
low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry
Heathcliff now; and that, not because he's handsome, no, Nelly, but
because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his
and mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from
lightning, or frost from fire."
But Catharine is married to Edgar, and for three years her better nature
triumphs. Heathcliff is away; Edgar Linton loves her truly, and their
home is happy. Catharine alone knows that that house is not her true
place of abode. She alone knows that Edgar has not touched her inner
nature. She knows that her real self, the self that must abide through
the centuries, is indissolubly linked with another's. And when
Heathcliff returns, the intensity of her joy, her almost unearthly
delight, she neither can nor attempts to conceal. Not once is she
deceived 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's
a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I never say to him, let this or that
enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them,--I
say, let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged: and he'd
crush you, like a sparrow's egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesome
charge."
But Catharine's nature is akin to his, and it is with almost brutal
delight that she helps forward this marriage, when she finds the girl
does not trust her word.
Then comes the strife between Edgar and Heathcliff for the soul, so it
seems, of Catharine. There is no jealousy on Edgar's part. The book
never stoops to anything so earthly. Edgar loathes Heathcliff and cannot
understand Catharine's affection for her early playmate. Although she
never for a moment hesitates in her allegiance to Heathcliff, it is this
strife that causes her death. The strife between good and evil wears her
out.
Even after her death, her soul cannot leave this earth. It is still
joined to Heathcliff's. It resembles here the story of Paola and
Francesca. Catharine is waiting for him and his only delight is in her
haunting presence. Heathcliff cannot be accused of keeping Catharine
from Paradise. In life she would not let him from her presence, and she
clings to him now. It is the story of _Undine_ reversed. Undine gained a
soul through a mortal's love. And we feel toward the close that
Catharine, selfish and passionate as she was, is yet Heathcliff's better
spirit. Catharine while living had prevented Heathcliff from killing her
brother. Although he loved Catharine better than himself, and would have
made any sacrifice at her request, he feels no more tenderness for her
offspring than for his own. But the spirit of Catharine lived in her
child and nephew, and when they looked at him with her eyes, he had no
pleasure in his revenge upon the son of Hindley nor on the daughter of
Edgar Linton.
In the tenderness that once or twice comes over Heathcliff as he looks
at 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's
restless spirit, as it watches and waits for Heathcliff, is striving to
bring some blessing upon her house. The awakening of a better nature in
Hareton, through his love for Catharine's daughter, is a pretty, tender
idyl. The book is like a Greek tragedy in this, that at the close the
atmosphere has been purged; the sun once more shines through the windows
of Wuthering Heights; hatred is dead, and love reigns supreme.
_Wuthering Heights_ is a novel not of externals, not of character, but
of something deeper, more vital. The love of Catharine and Heathcliff
has 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 the
resistless force that unites these two. Notwithstanding the external
pictures are so distinct that a painter could transfer them to his
canvas, the book is a soul-tragedy.
_Wuthering Heights_ cannot be classed among the so-called popular
novels. It has appealed to the poets rather than to the readers of
fiction. 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 moral
certitude'] is as perfectly and triumphantly attained as in _King Lear_
or _The Duchess of Malfi_, in _The Bride of Lammermoor_ or _Notre-Dame
de Paris_. From the first we breathe the fresh dark air of tragic
passion and presage; and to the last the changing wind and flying
sunlight are in keeping with the stormy promise of the dawn. There is no
monotony, there is no repetition, but there is no discord. This is the
first and last necessity, the foundation of all labour and the crown of
all success, for a poem worthy of the name; and this it is that
distinguishes the hand of Emily from the hand of Charlotte Bronte. All
the works of the elder sister are rich in poetic spirit, poetic feeling,
and poetic detail; but the younger sister's work is essentially and
definitely 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 is
certain that those who do like it will like nothing very much better in
the whole world of poetry or prose."
All that we know of Emily Bronte's nature is consistent, such as we
would expect of the author of _Wuthering Heights_. The first stanza of
her last poem, written but a short time before her death, reveals her
strength 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 of
mature years. The lyric poets burst into rhapsody at the dawn of life;
but the powers of the novelist have ripened more slowly. The novelists
have done better work after thirty-five than at an earlier age but few
of them have written a classic at the age of twenty-eight, as did Emily
Bronte.
* * * * *
Anne Bronte's fame has been both augmented and dimmed by the greater
genius of her two sisters. She is remembered principally as one of the
Brontes, so that her books have been oftener reprinted and more
extensively read than their actual merit would warrant. In comparison
with the greater genius of Charlotte and Emily, her writings have been
declared void of interest, and without any ray of the brilliancy which
distinguishes their books. This latter statement is not true. Anne
Bronte did not have their imaginative power, but she reproduced what she
had seen and learned of life with conscientious devotion to truth.
_Wuthering Heights_ and _Agnes Grey_, Anne Bronte's first book, were
published together in three volumes so as to meet the popular demand
that novels, like the graces, should appear in threes. It is a
photographic representation of the life of a governess in England during
the forties. Agnes's courage in determining to augment the family income
by seeking a position as governess; the high hopes with which she enters
upon her first position; her conscientious resolve to do her full
Christian duty to the spoiled children of the Bloomfields; her dismissal
and sad return home; her second position in the family of Mr. Murray, a
country squire; the two daughters, one determined to make a fine match
for herself, the other a perfect hoyden without a thought beyond the
horses and dogs; the disregard of the truth in both; Mr. Hatfield, the
minister, who cared only for the county families among his
parishioners; Miss Murray's marriage for position and the unhappiness
that 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, is
well shown, although there is no attempt on the part of the author to
assert any superiority of one over the other. We have many books in
which the shrinking governess is described from the point of view of the
family or one of their guests, but here the governess of an English
fox-hunting squire has spoken for herself; she has described her trials
and the constant self-sacrifice which is demanded of her without
bitterness, and in a kindly spirit withal, and for that reason the book
is a valuable addition to the history of the life and manners of the
century.
_The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_, her second novel, was a peculiar book to
have shaped itself in the brain of the gentle youngest daughter of the
Vicar of Haworth. But Anne Bronte had seen phases of life which must
have sorely wounded her pure spirit. She had been governess at Thorp
Green, where her brother Branwell was tutor, and where he formed that
unfortunate attachment for the wife of his employer, which, with the
help of liquor and opium, deranged his mind. Anne wrote in her diary at
this time, "I have had some very unpleasant and undreamt-of experience
of human nature." As we picture Anne Bronte, with her light brown hair,
violet-blue eyes, shaded by pencilled eyebrows, and transparent
complexion, she seems a spirit of goodness and purity made to behold
daily a depth of evil in the nature of one dear to her, which fills her
with wonderment and horror.
Mr. Huntingdon of Wildfell Hall was drawn from personal observation of
her brother. She wrote with minuteness, because she believed it her duty
to hold up his life as a warning to others. The gradual change in Mr.
Huntingdon from the happy confident lover to the ruined debauchee is
well traced; the story of his infatuation for the wife of his friend, so
reckless that he attempted no concealment, is realistic in the extreme.
But what a change in the novel! A hundred years before, Huntingdon would
have made a fine hero of romance, but here he is disgraced to the
position of chief villain, and the reader feels for him only pity and
loathing. Probably a man's pen would have touched his errors more
lightly, but Anne Bronte painted him as he appeared to her. The author
attributes such a character as Huntingdon's to false education, and
makes her heroine say:
"As for my son--if I thought he would grow up to be what you call a man
of 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 he
died to-morrow--rather a thousand times."
Notwithstanding its defects--and it is full of them judged from the
stand-point of art--_Wildfell Hall_ is a book of promise. In the
descriptions of the Hall, the mystery that surrounds its mistress, the
rumours of her unknown lover, the heathclad hills and the desolate
fields, there are romantic elements that remind one of _Wuthering
Heights_. The book is more faulty than _Agnes Grey_, but the writer had
a deeper vision of life with its weaknesses and its depths of human
passion. If years had mellowed that "undreamt-of experience" of Thorp
Green, Anne Bronte with her truthful observation and sympathetic insight
into character might have written a classic. The material out of which
_Wildfell Hall_ was wrought, under a more mature mind, with a better
grasp of the whole and a better regard for proportion, would have made a
novel worthy of a place beside _Jane Eyre_.
* * * * *
That English fiction has produced sweeter and more varied fruit by being
grafted with the novels of women no one who gives the matter a serious
thought can for a moment doubt. One distinctive phase of woman's mind
made its way but slowly in the English novel. Women are by nature
introspective. They read character and are quick to grasp the motives
and passions that underlie action. The French women have again and again
embodied this view of human nature in their novels, which are
essentially of the inner life. _The Princess of Cleves_ by Madame de
Lafayette, written in 1678, is the first book in which all the conflicts
are those of the emotions; here the great triumph is that which a woman
wins over her own heart. Madame de Tencin in _Memoires du Comte de
Comminges_ represents her hero and heroine under the influence of two
great passions, religion and love. Madame de Souza, Madame Cottin,
Madame de Genlis, Madame de Stael, and George Sand wrote novels of the
inner life. The Princess of Cleves with noble dignity controls her
emotion and at last conquers it. The pages of George Sand thrill with
unbridled passion.
The English women, however, are more repressed by nature than the
French, and the English novel of the inner life advanced but slowly. The
emotions of the long-forgotten Sidney Biddulph are minutely told. _A
Simple 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 intensity
of emotion can compare with the novels of Madame de Stael or George
Sand. The style partakes of the high-wrought character of the heroine,
and the reader is whirled along in the vortex of feeling until he too
partakes of every varied mood of the characters, and closes the book
fevered and exhausted. It is one of the ironies of fate that Charlotte
Bronte with her strong pro-Anglican prejudices should belong to the
school of these French women. But there is the same difference between
their writings that there is between the French temperament and the
English. Even in the wildest moments of Jane Eyre her passion is rather
like the river Wharf when it has overflowed its banks; while theirs is
like 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 she
knew. The three rejected suitors caused her only a little amusement. Her
love for Mr. Nicholls, whom she afterwards married, was little warmer
than respect. We could as easily weave a romance out of Jane Austen's
remark that the poet Crabbe was a man whom she could marry as to make a
love story out of Charlotte's relations to Monseiur Heger, who figures
as the hero in three of her books. Here she is greater than the French
women writers: they knew by experience what they wrote; she by innate
genius.
Perhaps no novelist ever had more meagre materials out of which to make
four novels than had Charlotte Bronte: her sisters, Monsieur and Madame
Heger, the curates, and herself; a small village in Yorkshire, two
boarding schools, two positions as governess, and a short time spent in
a school in Brussels. Compare this range with the material that Scott,
Dickens, or Thackeray had--then judge how much of the elixir of genius
was given to each.
The early pages of _Jane Eyre_, the first novel which Charlotte Bronte
published, describe Lowood Institution, a place modelled upon Cowan's
Bridge School. The two teachers, the kind Miss Temple and the cruel Miss
Scatcherd, were drawn from two instructors there at the time the Brontes
attended it. Helen Burns, so untidy but so meek in spirit, was Maria
Bronte, the eldest sister, who died at the age of eleven, probably as a
result of the poor food and harsh treatment of the school. With what
calm she replies to Jane, when she would sympathise with her for an
unjust 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 should
learn my lessons; I have no method; and sometimes I say, like you, I
cannot bear to be subjected to systematic arrangements. This is all very
provoking to Miss Scatcherd, who is naturally neat, punctual, and
particular."
Helen Burns, with her calm submission, and Jane Eyre, with her
rebellious spirit, are finely contrasted. Jane's passionate resentment
of the punishments which Miss Scatcherd inflicted on Helen was genuine.
Charlotte was nine years old when she left Cowan's Bridge School, but
her suppressed anger at the punishments which her sister Maria had
received there flashed out years afterwards in _Jane Eyre_.
Charlotte Bronte was writing _Jane Eyre_ at the same time that Emily and
Anne were writing _Wuthering Heights_ and _Agnes Grey_. As they read
from their manuscripts, Charlotte objected to beauty as a requisite of a
heroine, and said, "I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as
myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours." So arose the
conception of Jane Eyre. If the slight, shy, Yorkshire governess,
without beauty or charm of manner, had appeared before the imagination
of any novelist either male or female, at that time, and asked to be
admitted into the house of fiction, she would have been refused entrance
as cruelly as Hannah shut the door in the face of Jane Eyre, when she
came 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 by
genius, chose this outcast from romance as a heroine, a woman without
beauty or charm, and boldly proclaimed that moral beauty was superior to
physical beauty, and that the attraction of one soul for another lay
quite beyond the pale of external form.
Jane Eyre is not, however, Charlotte Bronte, as has been so often
asserted. She would not have gone back to comfort Mr. Rochester, after
she 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 a
fitting lover for Jane. Mr. Rochester is very much the same type of man
as Mr. B., whom Pamela married, and the independent Jane addresses him
as "My Master," an expression constantly on the lips of Pamela. Yet
Rochester leaves a permanent impression on the mind, for he represents a
strong man at war with destiny. He conceals his marriage because of his
determination to conquer fate. It is pointed out by critics to-day that
he is quite an impossible character, that he is, in fact, a woman's
hero. 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 impossible
for a man like Rochester to have been conceived in a woman's brain, and
not until Mrs. Gaskell's life of the Brontes was published was
Charlotte's character as a modest woman established. But men have
repudiated 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 the
dim outlines of _Wuthering Heights_, but she had many of the strong
qualities of Emily, and these, mingled with the softer stuff of her own
nature, make her contradictory but charming, and Louis Moore, an
agreeable tutor whom Emily Bronte would have quite despised, naturally
falls in love with his wayward pupil, as they pore over books in the
school-room. Shirley is contrasted with Caroline Helstone, of whom Mrs.
Humphry Ward says: "For delicacy, poetry, divination, charm, Caroline
stands supreme among the women of Miss Bronte's gallery." Even if other
admirers of Miss Bronte deny her this eminence, she certainly possesses
all the qualities, rare among heroines, which Mrs. Ward has attributed
to her.
In many of the conversations between Shirley and Caroline, there are
reminders of what passed between the Bronte sisters in their own home.
The relative excellence of men and women novelists always interested
them. Shirley evidently expressed Charlotte's own views in the
following 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 about
women. 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 them
fall into ecstasies with each other's creations, worshipping the heroine
of such a poem--novel--drama, thinking it fine,--divine! Fine and divine
it may be, but often quite artificial--false as the rose in my best
bonnet there. If I spoke all I think on this point, if I gave my real
opinion of some first-rate female characters in first-rate works, where
should I be? Dead under a cairn of avenging stones in half-an-hour."
"After all," says Caroline, "authors' heroines are almost as good as
authoresses' heroes."
"Not at all," Shirley replies. "Women read men more truly than men read
women. 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,' and
left for me at the publisher's."
The greater part of the men in _Shirley_ were drawn from life, and are
as true to their sex as were the heroines of Dickens, Thackeray, or
Disraeli, who were then writing. As for the curates, they are perfect.
No man's hand could have executed their portraits so skilfully. They
have no more real use in the story than they seem to have had in their
respective parishes. But this daughter of a country vicar, who knew
nothing of the London cockney, who was then enlivening the books of
Dickens, seized upon the funniest people she knew, the curates, and they
have been immortalised.
There is often in Charlotte Bronte's novels a separation of plot and
character, as if they formed themselves independently in her mind. This
is especially true of _Shirley_. At that time the attention of England
was directed toward the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire.
Mrs. Trollope and Harriet Martineau had written upon conditions of life
there. In _Sybil_ Disraeli considered broadly the underlying causes of
the misery of the operatives. Mrs. Gaskell wrote _Mary Barton_, a story
of Manchester life, the same year that Charlotte Bronte was writing
_Shirley_. The plot of the last named is laid in the early years of the
nineteenth century, and turns upon the opposition of the workmen to the
introduction of machinery. But the plot and characters are constantly
getting in each other's way and tripping each other up. Though the book
is full of defects, one cannot judge it harshly. When she began the
funny description of the curates' tea-drinking, her brother and sisters
were with her. Before it was finished, she and her father were left
alone. But at this time the public demanded melodrama. Fires, drownings,
and death-beds were popular methods of untying hard knots and of playing
upon the emotions of the reader. She, like Mrs. Gaskell, constantly
resorts to outside circumstances to help put things to rights when they
are drifting in the wrong direction, circumstances which Jane Austen
would 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 was
rejected by all. Finally she herself lost faith in it, and transformed
it into the beautiful story of _Villette_, where the school of Madame
and Monseiur Heger in Brussels is made immortal. In the plot of
_Villette_, as in the plot of _Jane Eyre_ and of _Shirley_, many
extraneous events happen which are either unexpected or unnecessary.
Like _Jane Eyre_, _Villette_ is steeped in the romantic spirit, but the
hard light of reason again dispels the illusion. In the management of
the supernatural Charlotte is far inferior to Emily. The explanation of
the 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 that
which is manifest to our everyday senses. Be it the fourth dimension, or
what 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, that
there is something beyond. Then, with hard common-sense, they deny their
own message, and, so doing, deny to us the world of mystery, and leave
us only the material world in which to believe. Not so Emily Bronte. Not
so Scott or Shakespeare. We may believe in Hamlet's ghost or not; we may
believe or not in the White Lady of Avenel; we may believe or not that
Catharine's soul hovered near Heathcliff. But we are still left with a
belief in the life after death, and still believe in something beyond
experience, and still grope to find those things in heaven and earth of
which 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 clever
as Cardinal Wolsey or Cardinal Richelieu; but she uses all her
diplomatic skill in the management of a lady's school, which, under her
ever watchful eye, with the aid of duplicate keys to the trunks and
drawers of the teachers and pupils, runs without friction of any kind.
Lucy Snowe, the English teacher in _Villette_, is far more pleasing than
Jane Eyre; she is not so passionate, but her view of life is deeper and
broader, and consequently kinder. And there is Paul Emanuel. Who would
have believed the rejected professor would have grown into that scholar
of middle age? He is so distinctly the foreigner in showing every
emotion under which he is labouring. How pathetic and how lovable he is
on the day of his fete when he thinks that the English governess has
forgotten him, and has not brought even a flower to make the day happier
for him! So fretful in little things, so heroic in large things, with so
many faults which every pupil can see, but with so many virtues, frank
even about his little deceptions, he is a lovable man. But many of Miss
Bronte's readers do not find Paul Emanuel as delightful as Paulina, the
womanly little girl who grows into the childlike woman. She is as
sensitive as the mimosa plant to the people about her. Every event of
her childhood, all the people she cared for then, remained indelibly
imprinted on her mind, so that, with her, friendship and love are strong
and abiding.
Notwithstanding their many defects, Charlotte Bronte's novels have left
a permanent impression upon English fiction and have won an acknowledged
place among English classics. She first made a minute analysis of the
varying emotions of men and women, and noted the strange, unaccountable
attractions and repulsions which everybody has experienced. Paulina, a
girl of six, is happy at the feet of Graham, a boy of sixteen, although
he is unconscious of her presence. And so instance after instance can be
given of affinities and antipathies which lie beyond human reason. She,
like her sister Emily, though with less clear vision, was searching for
the 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; I
like seeking the goddess in her temple, and handling the veil, and
daring the dread glance."
Her truthfulness in painting emotion, which to her own generation seemed
most daring, even coarse, has given an abiding quality to her work. And
besides she created Paulina and Paul Emanuel.