(CHARLOTTE BRONTË, 1816-1855)
The genius of Charlotte Brontë presents several characteristics
which do not belong to the more or less orderly development of the
earlier women’s work. In the first place she is primarily a romancist,
depending far more on emotional analysis than on the exact portraiture
of everyday life. Though her materials, like theirs, are gained
entirely from personal experience, she clothes them with a passionate
imagination very foreign to anything in Miss Burney or Jane Austen. She
writes, in other words, because her emotions are forced into speech by
that very intensity; not at all from amused observation of life. It
would be difficult, indeed, to find outside her few remarkable stories
so powerful an expression of passion as felt by women--who do not, as
a rule, admit the power of such stormy emotions. Her work is further
remarkable for being mainly inspired by memory; while the recognition
of responsiveness in women leads her to paint _mutual_ passion as it
has been seldom revealed elsewhere.
Much has been written of late years concerning the life of Charlotte
Brontë, and we have been told that the mystery is solved at last. For
despite the almost startling frankness of Mrs. Gaskell’s famous _Life_;
despite the intimate character of many of her published letters; it has
always been recognised that the Charlotte Brontë of the biographers
was _not_ the Charlotte Brontë of _Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_. Now
that we have the letters to Monsieur Heger, however, it seems to be
a prevailing conclusion that reconciliation, and understanding, are
possible. If Charlotte Brontë, like her own Lucy Snowe, was in love
with “her master”; if he was perfectly happy in his married life and,
however responsive to enthusiastic admiration, found warmer feelings
both embarrassing and vexatious; we have discovered the tragedy which
fired her imagination, the utter loneliness which taught her to dwell
so bitterly on the aching void of unreturned affection, to idealise so
romantically the rapture of marriage. Personally we are disposed to
accept these interpretations, but not to rely on them for everything.
To begin with, it is always dangerous to dwell upon any “explanation”
of genius; and, in the second place, it was not Charlotte Brontë’s
experiences (which others have suffered), but the nature awakened by
them, which determined their artistic expression.
Part of the difficulty arises from the two almost contradictory methods
in which she “worked up” her stories. She had remarkable powers of
observation and borrowed from real life as recklessly as Shakespeare
borrowed plots, with very similar indifference to possible criticism.
In this matter, indeed, she cannot be altogether acquitted of malice or
spite; and we do not learn with unmixed pleasure how many “originals”
actually existed for her dramatis personæ.
But, on the other hand, if “every person and a large proportion of the
incidents were copied from life,” the emotional power of her work is
entirely imaginative. As pictures of life, her stories are inadequate
and unsatisfying, partly because there is so much in human nature and
in life which does not interest her: so much of which she knew nothing;
and she is only at home in the heart of her subject. Here again she is
in no way realistic--as was Jane Austen in manners or George Eliot
in emotion--but entirely romantic, however original her conception of
romance. Her heroes and heroines are as far from everyday humanity, and
as ideal and visionary, as Mrs. Radcliffe’s, though she does not, of
course, follow the “rules” of romance: rather creating out of her own
brain a new heaven and a new earth, inhabited by a people that know not
God or man.
Apart from the rude awakening at Brussels, again, she exhibited in
private correspondence by turns the strange contrasts between common
sense and emotionalism which mark her work.
She defines the “right path” as “that which necessitates the greatest
sacrifice of self-interest”: she thinks, “if you can respect a person
before marriage, moderate love at least will come after; and as to
intense passion, I am convinced that that is no desirable feeling.”