They who are still youthful in the nineties can hardly understand the
thrill which went through us all in the forties upon the appearance of
_Jane Eyre_, on the discovery of a new genius and a new style. The
reputation of most later writers grew by degrees and by repeated
impressions of good work. Trollope, George Eliot, Stevenson, George
Meredith, did not conquer the interest of the larger public until after
many books and by gradual widening of the judgment of experts. But
little Charlotte Brontë, who published but three tales in six years and
who died at the age of thirty-eight, bounded into immediate fame--a
fame that after nearly fifty years we do not even now find to have been
excessive.
And then, there was such personal interest in the writer's self, in her
intense individuality, in her strong character; there was so much
sympathy with her hard and lonely life; there was such pathos in her
family history and the tragedy which threw gloom over her whole life,
and cut it off in youth after a few months of happiness. To have lived
in poverty, in a remote and wild moorland, almost friendless and in
continual struggle against sickness, to have been motherless since the
age of five, to have lost four sisters and a brother before she was
more than thirty-three, to have been sole survivor of a large
household, to have passed a life of continual weakness, toil, and
suffering--and then to be cut off after nine months of marriage,--all
this touched the sympathies of the world as the private life of few
writers touches them. And then the shock of her sudden death came upon
us as a personal sorrow. Such genius, such courage, such perseverance,
such promise--and yet but three books in all, published at intervals of
two and of four years! There was meaning in the somewhat unusual form
in which Mrs. Gaskell opens her _Life of Charlotte Brontë_, setting out
verbatim in her first chapter the seven memorial inscriptions to the
buried family in Haworth Church, and placing on the title-page a
vignette of Haworth churchyard with its white tombstones. Charlotte
Brontë was a kind of prosaic, most demure and orthodox Shelley in the
Victorian literature--with visible genius, an intense personality,
unquenchable fire, an early and tragic death. And all this passion in
a little prim, shy, delicate, proud Puritan girl!
To this sympathy our great writer, whom she herself called "the first
social regenerator of the day," did full justice in that beautiful
little piece which he wrote in the _Cornhill Magazine_ upon her death
and which is the last of the _Roundabout Papers_ in the twenty-second
volume of Thackeray's collected works. It is called _The Last Sketch_:
it is so eloquent, so true, so sympathetic that it deserves to be
remembered, and yet after forty years it is too seldom read.
Of the multitude that have read her books, who has not known and
deplored the tragedy of her family, her own most sad and untimely fate?
Which of her readers has not become her friend? Who that has known her
books has not admired the artist's noble English, the burning love of
truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager
sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honour, so to
speak, of the woman? What a story is that of that family of poets in
their solitude yonder on the gloomy northern moors!
He goes on to deplore that "the heart newly awakened to love and
happiness, and throbbing with maternal hope, had ceased to beat." He
speaks of her "trembling little frame, the little hand, the great
honest eyes." He speaks of his recollections of her in society, of
"the impetuous honesty" which seemed the character of the woman--
I fancied an austere little Joan of Arc marching in upon us, and
rebuking our easy lives, our easy morals. She gave me the impression
of being a very pure, and lofty, and high-minded person. A great and
holy reverence of right and truth seemed to be with her always. Such,
in our brief interview, she appeared to me. As one thinks of that life
so noble, so lonely,--of that passion for truth--of those nights and
nights of eager study, swarming fancies, invention, depression,
elation, prayer; as one reads the necessarily incomplete, though most
touching and admirable history of the heart that throbbed in this one
little frame--of this one amongst the myriads of souls that have lived
and died on this great earth--this great earth?--this little speck in
the infinite universe of God--with what wonder do we think of to-day,
with what awe await to-morrow, when that which is now but darkly seen
shall be clear!
It is quite natural and right that Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, indeed all
who have spoken of the author of _Jane Eyre_, should insist primarily
on the personality of Charlotte Brontë. It is this intense personality
which is the distinctive note of her books. They are not so much tales
as imaginary autobiographies. They are not objective presentations of
men and women in the world. They are subjective sketches of a Brontë
under various conditions, and of the few men and women who occasionally
cross the narrow circle of the Brontë world. Of the three stories she
published, two are autobiographies, and the third is a fancy portrait
of her sister Emily. Charlotte Brontë is herself Jane Eyre and Lucy
Snowe, and Emily Brontë is Shirley Keeldar. So in _The Professor_, her
earliest but posthumous tale, Frances Henri again is simply a little
Swiss Brontë. That story also is told as an autobiography, but, though
the narrator is supposed to be one William Crimsworth, it is a woman
who speaks, sees, and dreams all through the book. The four tales,
which together were the work of eight years, are all variations upon a
Brontë and the two Brontë worlds in Yorkshire and Belgium. It is most
significant (but quite natural) that Mrs. Gaskell in her _Life of
Charlotte Brontë_ devotes more than half her book to the story of the
family before the publication of _Jane Eyre_. The four tales are not
so much romances as artistic and imaginative autobiographies.
To say this is by no means to detract from their rare value. The
romances of adventure, of incident, of intrigue, of character, of
society, or of humour, depend on a great variety of observation and a
multiplicity of contrasts. There is not much of Walter Scott, as a
man, in _Ivanhoe_ or of Alexander Dumas in the _Trois Mousquetaires_;
and Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Bulwer, Miss Edgeworth, Stevenson,
and Meredith--even Miss Austen and George Eliot--seek to paint men and
women whom they conceive and whom we may see and know, and not
themselves and their own home circle. But Charlotte Brontë told us her
own life, her own feelings, sufferings, pride, joy, and ambition. She
bared for us her own inner soul, and all that it had known and desired,
and this she did with a noble, pure, simple, but intense truth. There
was neither egoism, nor monotony, nor commonplace in it. It was all
coloured with native imagination and a sense of true art. There is
ample room in Art for these subjective idealisations of even the
narrowest world. Shelley's lyrics are intensely self-centred, but no
one can find in them either realism or egoism. The field in prose is
far more limited, and the risk of becoming tedious and morbid is
greater. But a true artist can now and then in prose produce most
precious portraits of self and glowing autobiographic fantasies of a
noble kind.
And Charlotte Brontë was a true artist. She was also more than this; a
brave, sincere, high-minded woman, with a soul, as the great moralist
saw, "of impetuous honesty." She was not seduced, or even moved, by
her sudden fame. She put aside the prospect of success, money, and
social distinction as things which revolted her. She was quite right.
With all her genius it was strictly and narrowly limited; she was
ignorant of the world to a degree immeasurably below that of any other
known writer of fiction; her world was incredibly scanty and barren.
She had to spin everything out of her own brain in that cold, still,
gruesome Haworth parsonage. It was impossible for any genius to paint
a world of which it was as ignorant as a child. Hence, in eight years
she only completed four tales for publication. And she did right.
With her strict limits both of brain and of experience she could not go
further. Perhaps, as it was, she did more than was needed. _Shirley_
and _Villette_, with all their fine scenes, are interesting now mainly
because Charlotte Brontë wrote them, and because they throw light upon
her brain and nature. _The Professor_ is entirely so, and has hardly
any other quality. We need not groan that we have no more than we have
from her pen. _Jane Eyre_ would suffice for many reputations and alone
will live.
In considering the gifted Brontë family, it is really Charlotte alone
who finally concerns us. Emily Brontë was a wild, original, and
striking creature, but her one book is a kind of prose _Kubla Khan_--a
nightmare of the superheated imagination. Anne Brontë always seems but
a pale reflection of the family. In any other family she might be
interesting--just as "Barrel Mirabeau" was the good boy and fool of the
Mirabeau family, though in another family he would have been the genius
and the profligate. And so, the poems of the whole three are
interesting as psychologic studies, but have hardly a single stanza
that can be called poetry at all. It is significant, but hardly
paradoxical, that Charlotte's verses are the worst of the three. How
many born writers of musical prose have persisted in manufacturing
verse of a curiously dull and unmelodious quality! The absolute
masters of prose and of verse in equal perfection hardly exceed
Shakespeare and Shelley, Goethe and Hugo. And Charlotte Brontë is an
eminent example of a strong imagination working with freedom in prose,
but which began by using the instrument of verse, and used it in a
manner that never rose for an instant above mediocrity.
Of the Brontës it is Charlotte only who concerns us, and of Charlotte's
work it is _Jane Eyre_ only that can be called a masterpiece. To call
it a masterpiece, as Thackeray did, is not to deny its manifold and
manifest shortcomings. It is a very small corner of the world that it
gives, and that world is seen by a single acute observer from without.
The plain little governess dominates the whole book and fills every
page. Everything and every one appear, not as we see them and know
them in the world, but as they look to a keen-eyed girl who had hardly
ever left her native village. Had the whole book been cast into the
form of impersonal narration, this limitation, this huge ignorance of
life, this amateur's attempt to construct a romance by the light of
nature instead of observation and study of persons, would have been a
failure. As the autobiography of Jane Eyre--let us say at once of
Charlotte Brontë--it is consummate art. It produces the illusion we
feel in reading _Robinson Crusoe_. In the whole range of modern
fiction there are few characters whom we feel that we know so
intimately as we do Jane Eyre. She is as intensely familiar to us as
Becky Sharp or Parson Adams. Much more than this. Not only do we feel
an intimate knowledge of Jane Eyre, but we see every one by the eyes of
Jane Eyre only. Edward Rochester has not a few touches of the
melodramatic villain; and no man would ever draw a man with such
conventional and Byronic extravagances. If Edward Rochester had been
described in impersonal narrative with all his brutalities, his stage
villain frowns, and his Grand Turk whims, it would have spoiled the
book. But Edward Rochester, the "master" of the little governess, as
seen by the eyes of a passionate, romantic, but utterly unsophisticated
girl, is a powerful character; and all the inconsistencies, the
affectation, the savageries we might detect in him, become the natural
love-dream of a most imaginative and most ignorant young woman.
A consummate master of style has spoken, we have just seen, of the
"noble English" that Charlotte Brontë wrote. It is true that she never
reached the exquisite ease, culture, and raciness of Thackeray's
English. She lapsed now and then into provincial solecisms; she
"named" facts as well as persons; girls talk of a "beautiful man"; nor
did she know anything of the scientific elaboration of George Eliot or
the subtle grace of Stevenson. But the style is of high quality and
conscientious finish--terse, pure, picturesque, and sound. Like
everything she did, it was most scrupulously honest--the result of a
sincere and vivid soul, resolved to utter what it had most at heart in
the clearest tone. Very few writers of romance have ever been masters
of a style so effective, so nervous, so capable of rising into floods
of melody and pathos. There is a fine passage of the kind in one of
her least-known books, the earliest indeed of all, which no publisher
could be found in her lifetime to print. The "Professor" has just
proposed, has been accepted, and goes home to bed half-crazy and
fasting. A sudden reaction falls on his over-wrought nerves.
A horror of great darkness fell upon me; I felt my chamber invaded by
one I had known formerly, but had thought for ever departed. I was
temporarily a prey to hypochondria. She had been my acquaintance, nay,
my guest, once before in boyhood; I had entertained her at bed and
board for a year; for that space of time I had her to myself in secret;
she lay with me, she ate with me, she walked out with me, showing me
nooks in woods, hollows in hills, where we could sit together, and
where she could drop her drear veil over me, and so hide sky and sun,
grass and green tree; taking me entirely to her death-cold bosom, and
holding me with arms of bone. What tales she would tell me at such
hours! What songs she would recite in my ears! How she would
discourse to me of her own country--the grave--and again and again
promise to conduct me there ere long; and drawing me to the very brink
of a black, sullen river, show me, on the other side, shores unequal
with mound, monument, and tablet, standing up in a glimmer more hoary
than moonlight. "Necropolis!" she would whisper, pointing to the pale
piles, and add, "It contains a mansion prepared for you."
Finely imagined--finely said! It has the ring and weird mystery of De
Quincey. There are phrases that Thackeray would not have used, such as
jar on the ear and betray an immature taste. "Necropolis" is a strange
affectation when "City of the Dead" was at hand; and "pointing to the
pale piles" is a hideous alliteration. But in spite of such
immaturities (and the writer never saw the text in type) the passage
shows wonderful power of language and sense of music in prose. How
fine is the sentence, "taking me to her death-cold bosom, and holding
me with arms of bone," and that of the tombstones, "in a glimmer more
hoary than moonlight" Coleridge might have used such a phrase in the
_Ancient Mariner_ or in _Christabel_. Yet these were the thoughts and
the words of a lonely girl of thirty as she watched the dreary
churchyard at Haworth from the windows of its unlovely parsonage.
This vivid power of painting in words is specially called forth by the
look of nature and the scenes she describes. Charlotte Brontë had, in
the highest degree, that which Ruskin has called the "pathetic
fallacy," the eye which beholds nature coloured by the light of the
inner soul. In this quality she really reaches the level of fine
poetry. Her intense sympathy with her native moors and glens is akin
to that of Wordsworth. She almost never attempts to describe any
scenery with which she is not deeply familiar. But how wonderfully she
catches the tone of her own moorland, skies, storm-winds, secluded hall
or cottage!
The charm of the hour lay in its approaching dimness, in the
low-gliding and pale-beaming sun. I was a mile from Thornfield, in a
lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in
autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws,
but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless
repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there
was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn
and hazel bushes were as still as the white worn stones which
causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on each side, there
were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and the little brown
birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like single
russet leaves that had forgotten to drop. . . . From my seat I could
look down on Thornfield: the gray and battlemented hall was the
principal object in the vale below me; its woods and dark rookery rose
against the west. I lingered till the sun went down amongst the trees,
and sank crimson and clear behind them.
How admirable is this icy hush of nature in breathless expectation of
the first coming of the master of Thornfield--of the master of Jane
herself. And yet, how simple in phrase, how pure, how Wordsworthian in
its sympathy with earth even in her most bare and sober hues! And then
that storm which ushers in the story of the Vampyre woman tearing
Jane's wedding veil at her bedside, when "the clouds drifted from pole
to pole, fast following, mass on mass." And as Jane watches the
shivered chestnut-tree, "black and riven, the trunk, split down the
centre, gasped ghastly"--a strange but powerful alliteration. "The
moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled the
fissure; her disk was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw
on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly
in the deep drift of cloud." An admirable overture to that terrific
scene of the mad wife's visit to the rival's bed.
Charlotte Brontë is great in clouds, like a prose Shelley. We all
recall that mysterious storm in which _Villette_ darkly closes, and
with it the expected bridegroom of Lucy Snowe--
The wind takes its autumn moan; but--he is coming. The skies hang full
and dark--a rack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into
strange forms--arches and broad radiations; there rise resplendent
mornings--glorious, royal, purple as monarch in his state; the heavens
are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest--so
bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. . . . When the sun returned
his light was night to some!
And into that night Lucy's master, lover, husband has for ever passed.
This sympathy with nature, and this power to invest it with feeling for
the human drama of which it is the scene, lifts little Charlotte Brontë
into the company of the poets. No one, however, can enter into all the
art of her landscapes unless he knows those Yorkshire moors, the
straggling upland villages, bare, cold, gray, uncanny, with low,
unlovely stone buildings, and stern church towers and graveyards,
varied with brawling brooks and wooded glens, and here and there a grim
manor-house that had seen war. It is so often that the dwellers in the
least picturesque and smiling countries are found to love their native
country best and to invest it with the most enduring art. And the
pilgrims to Haworth Parsonage have in times past been as ardent as
those who flock to Grasmere or to Abbotsford.
_Jane Eyre_ is full of this "pathetic fallacy," or aspect of nature
dyed in the human emotions of which it is the mute witness. The storm
in the garden at night when Rochester first offers marriage to his
little governess, and they return to the house drenched in rain and
melted with joy, is a fine example of this power. From first to last,
the correspondence between the local scene and the human drama is a
distinctive mark in _Jane Eyre_.
If I were asked to choose that scene in the whole tale which impresses
itself most on my memory, I should turn to the thirty-sixth chapter
when Jane comes back to have a look at Thornfield Hall, peeps on the
battlemented mansion which she had loved so well, and is struck dumb to
find it burnt out to a mere skeleton--"I looked with timorous joy
toward a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin." The suddenness of
this shock, its unexpected and yet natural catastrophe, its mysterious
imagery of the loves of Edward Rochester and Jane Eyre, and the intense
sympathy which earth, wood, rookery, and ruin seem to feel for the
girl's eagerness, amazement, and horror, have always seemed to me to
reach the highest note of art in romance. It is now forty-seven years
since I first read that piece; and in all these years I have found no
single scene in later fiction which is so vividly and indelibly burnt
into the memory as is this. The whole of this chapter, and what
follows it, is intensely real and true. And the very dénoûment of the
tale itself--that inevitable bathos into which the romance so often
dribbles out its last inglorious breath--has a manliness and sincerity
of its own: "the sky is no longer a blank to him--the earth no longer a
void."
The famous scene in the twenty-sixth chapter with the interrupted
marriage, when Rochester drags the whole bridal party into the den of
his maniacal wife, the wild struggle with the mad woman, the despair of
Jane--all this is as powerful as anything whatever in English fiction.
It is even a masterpiece of ingenious construction and dramatic action.
It is difficult to form a cool estimate of a piece so intense, so
vivid, and so artful in its mechanism. The whole incident is conceived
with the most perfect reality; the plot is original, startling, and yet
not wholly extravagant. But it must be confessed that the plot is not
worked out in details in a faultless way. It is undoubtedly in
substance "sensational," and has been called the parent of modern
sensationalism. Edward Rochester acts as a Rochester might; but he too
often talks like the "wicked baronet" of low melodrama. The execution
is not always quite equal to the conception. The affiance of Jane and
Edward Rochester, their attempted marriage, the wild temptation of
Jane, her fierce rebuff of the tempter, his despair and remorse, her
agony and flight--all are consummate in conception, marred here and
there as they are in details by the blue fire and conventional
imprecations of the stage.
The concluding chapters of the book, when Jane finally rejects St. John
Rivers and goes back to Thornfield and to her "master," are all indeed
excellent. St. John is not successful as a character; but he serves to
produce the crisis and to be foil to Rochester. St. John, it is true,
is not a real being: like Rochester, he is a type of man as he affects
the brain and heart of a highly sensitive and imaginative girl.
Objectively speaking, as men living and acting in a practical world,
St. John and Rochester are both in some degree caricatures of men; and,
if the narrative were a cold story calmly composed by a certain Miss
Brontë to amuse us, we could not avoid the sense of unreality in the
men. But the intensity of the vision, the realism of every scene, the
fierce yet self-governed passion of Jane herself, pouring out, as in a
secret diary, her agonies of love, of scorn, of pride, of
abandonment,--all this produces an illusion on us: we are no longer
reading a novel of society, but we are admitted to the wild musings of
a girl's soul; and, though she makes out her first lover to be a
generous brute and her second lover to be a devout machine, we feel it
quite natural that Jane, with her pride and her heart of fire and her
romantic brain, should so in her diary describe them.
St. John Rivers, if we take him coolly outside of Jane's portrait
gallery, is little more than a puppet. We never seem to get nearer to
his own mind and heart, and his conduct and language are hardly
compatible with the noble attributes with which he is said to be
adorned. A man of such refined culture, of such high intelligence, of
such social distinction and experience, of such angelic character, does
not treat women with studied insolence and diabolical cynicism. That a
girl, half maddened by disappointed love, should romantically come to
erect his image into that of a sort of diabolic angel, is natural
enough, and her conduct when she leaves Moor House is right and true,
though we cannot say as much for Rivers' words. But the impression of
the whole scene is right.
In the same way, Edward Rochester, if we take him simply as a cultured
and travelled country gentleman, who was a magnate and great _parti_ in
his county, is barely within the range of possibility. As St. John
Rivers is a walking contradictory of a diabolic saint, so Edward
Rochester is a violent specimen of the heroic ruffian. In Emily
Brontë's gruesome phantasmagoria of _Wuthering Heights_ there is a
ruffian named Heathcliff; and, whatever be his brutalities and
imprecations, we always feel in reading it that _Wuthering Heights_ is
merely a grisly dream, not a novel at all. Edward Rochester has
something of the Heathcliff too. But Rochester is a man of the best
English society, courted by wealth and rank, a man of cultivated
tastes, of wide experience and refined habits, and lastly of most
generous and heroic impulses--and yet such a man swears at his people
like a horse-dealer, teases and bullies his little governess, treats
his adopted child like a dog, almost kicks his brother-in-law in his
rages, plays shocking tricks with his governess at night, offers her
marriage, and attempts to commit bigamy in his own parish with his
living wife still under the same roof! That a man of Rochester's
resource, experience, and forethought, should keep his maniac wife in
his own ancestral home where he is entertaining the county families and
courting a neighbouring peer's sister, and that, after the maniac had
often attempted murder and arson--all this is beyond the range of
probabilities. And yet the story could not go on without it. And so,
Edward Rochester, man of the world as he is, risks his life, his home,
and everything and every one dear to him in order that his little
governess, Jane Eyre, should have the materials for inditing a
thrilling autobiography. It cannot be denied that this is the very
essence of "sensationalism," which means a succession of thrilling
surprises constructed out of situations that are practically impossible.
Nor, alas! can we deny that there are ugly bits of real coarseness in
_Jane Eyre_. It is true that most of them are the effects of that
portentous ignorance of the world and of civilised society which the
solitary dreamer of Haworth Parsonage had no means of removing. The
fine ladies, the lords and soldiers in the drawing-room at Thornfield
are described with inimitable life, but they are described as they
appeared to the lady's-maids, not to each other or to the world.
Charlotte Brontë perhaps did not know that an elegant girl of rank does
not in a friend's house address her host's footman before his guests in
these words--"Cease that chatter, blockhead! and do my bidding." Nor
does a gentleman speak to his governess of the same lady whom he is
thought to be about to marry in these terms--"She is a rare one, is she
not, Jane? A strapper--a real strapper, Jane: big, brown, and buxom."
But all these things are rather the result of pure ignorance.
Charlotte Brontë, when she wrote her first book, had hardly ever seen
any Englishmen but a few curates, the villagers, and her degraded
brother, with rare glimpses of lower middle-class homes. But Jane
Eyre's own doings and sayings are hardly the effect of mere ignorance.
Her nocturnal adventures with her "master" are given with delightful
_naïveté_; her consenting to hear out her "master's" story of his
foreign amours is not pleasant. Her two avowals to Edward
Rochester--one before he had declared his love for her, and the other
on her return to him--are certainly somewhat frank. Jane Eyre in truth
does all but propose marriage twice to Edward Rochester; and she is the
first to avow her love, even when she believed he was about to marry
another woman. It is indeed wrung from her; it is human nature; it is
a splendid encounter of passion; and if it be bold in the little woman,
it is redeemed by her noble defiance of his tainted suit, and her
desperate flight from her married lover.
But Jane Eyre's ignorances and simplicities, the improbabilities of her
men, the violence of the plot, the weird romance about her own life,
are all made acceptable to us by being shown to us only through the
secret visions of a passionate and romantic girl. As the autobiography
of a brave and original woman, who bares to us her whole heart without
reserve and without fear, _Jane Eyre_ stands forth as a great book of
the nineteenth century. It stands just in the middle of the century,
when men were still under the spell of Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, and
Wordsworth, and yet it is not wholly alien to the methods of our latest
realists.
It is true that a purely subjective work in prose romance, an
autobiographic revelation of a sensitive heart, is not the highest and
certainly not the widest art. Scott and Thackeray--even Jane Austen
and Maria Edgeworth--paint the world, or part of the world, as it is,
crowded with men and women of various characters. Charlotte Brontë
painted not the world, hardly a corner of the world, but the very soul
of one proud and loving girl. That is enough: we need ask no more. It
was done with consummate power. We feel that we know her life, from
ill-used childhood to her proud matronhood; we know her home, her
school, her professional duties, her loves and hates, her agonies and
her joys, with that intense familiarity and certainty of vision with
which our own personal memories are graven on our brain. With all its
faults, its narrowness of range, its occasional extravagances, _Jane
Eyre_ will long be remembered as one of the most creative influences of
the Victorian literature, one of the most poetic pieces of English
romance, and among the most vivid masterpieces in the rare order of
literary "Confessions."