"JANE EYRE" AND "VILLETTE" ARE TOUCHED WITH GENIUS--TRAGEDY OF
A WOMAN'S LIFE THAT RESULTED IN TWO STORIES OF PASSIONATE
REVOLT AGAINST FATE.
Charlotte Brontë is always linked in my memory with Thackeray because
of her visit to the author of _Vanity Fair_ and its humorous and
pathetic features. She went to London from her lonely Yorkshire home,
and the great world, with its many selfish and unlovely features, made
a painful impression on her. Even Thackeray, her idol, was found to
have feet of clay. But this "little Puritan," as the great man called
her, was endowed with the divine genius which was forced to seek
expression in fiction, and nowhere in all literature will one find an
author who shows more completely the compelling force of a powerful
creative imagination than this little, frail, self-educated woman,
who had none of the advantages of her fellow writers, but who
surpassed them all in a certain fierce, Celtic spirit which forces the
reader to follow its bidding.
[Illustration: CHARLOTTE BRONTË FROM THE EXQUISITELY SYMPATHETIC
CRAYON PORTRAIT BY GEORGE RICHMOND, R.A. NOW IN THE NATIONAL
PORTRAIT GALLERY OF LONDON]
He who would get a full realization of the importance of this Celtic
element in English literature cannot afford to neglect _Jane Eyre_ and
_Villette_, the best of Charlotte Brontë's works. Old-fashioned these
romances are in many ways, oversentimental, in parts poorly
constructed, but in all English fiction there is nothing to surpass
the opening chapters of _Jane Eyre_ for vividness and pathos, and few
things to equal the greater part of _Villette_, the tragedy of an
English woman's life in a Brussels boarding school.
Who can explain the mystery of the flowering of a great literary style
among the bleak and desolate moors of Yorkshire? Who can tell why
among three daughters of an Irish curate of mediocre ability but
tremendously passionate nature one should have developed an abnormal
imagination that in _Wuthering Heights_ is as powerful as Poe's at his
best, and another should have matured into the ablest woman novelist
of her day and her generation? These are freaks of heredity which
science utterly fails to explain.
Charlotte Brontë was born in 1816 and died in 1855. She was one of six
children who led a curiously forlorn life in the old Haworth parsonage
in the midst of the desolate Yorkshire moors. The outlook on one side
was upon a gloomy churchyard; on the other three sides the eye ranged
to the horizon over rolling, dreary moorland that looked like a
heaving ocean under a leaden sky. One brother these five sisters had,
a brilliant but superficial boy, with no stable character, who became
a drunkard and died after lingering on for years, a source of intense
shame to his family. The girls were left motherless at an early age.
Four were sent to a boarding school for clergymen's daughters, but two
died from exposure and lack of nutritious food, and the others,
starved mentally and physically, returned to their home. This was the
school that Charlotte held up to infamy in _Jane Eyre_.
The three sisters who were left, in the order of their ages, were
Emily, Charlotte and Anne. They, with their brother, lived in a kind
of dream world. Charlotte was the natural story-teller, and she wove
endless romances in which figured the great men of history who were
her heroes. She also told over and over many weird Yorkshire legends.
These children devoured every bit of printed matter that came to the
parsonage, and they were as thoroughly informed on all political
questions as the average member of Parliament.
At an age when normal girls were playing with their dolls these
precocious children were writing poems and stories. Their father
developed the ways of a recluse and never took his meals with his
children. Living in this dream world of their own, these children
could not understand normal girls. They were terribly unhappy at
school and came near to death of homesickness. Finally Emily and
Charlotte found a congenial school and in a few years they both made
great strides in education. Charlotte tried teaching and also the work
of governess, but finally both decided to open a girls' school of
their own. To prepare themselves in French, Emily and Charlotte went
to a boarding school in Brussels.
This was the turning point in Charlotte's life. Intensely ambitious,
she worked like a galley slave and soon mastered French so that she
wrote it with ease and vigor. There is no question that she had a
girlish love for her teacher, as passionate as it was brief, and that
her whole outlook was broadened by this experience of a world so
unlike the only one that she had known.
The story of Charlotte's life is told beautifully by Mrs. Gaskell, the
well-known author of _Cranford_. It is one of the finest biographies
in the language, and also one of the most stimulating. The reader who
follows Charlotte's stormy youth is made ashamed of his own lack of
application when he reads of the girl's tireless work in self-culture
in the face of much bodily weakness and great unhappiness.
Read of her experiences in Brussels and you will get some idea of the
tremendous vitality of this frail girl with the luminous eyes and the
fiery spirit that no labor could tire. Mrs. Gaskell has drawn largely
upon Charlotte's letters, which are as vivid and full of character as
any of her fiction. Genius flashes from them; one feels drawn very
close to this woman who raged against her physical infirmities, but
overcame them bravely. When the spirit moved her she poured out her
soul to her friend in words that grip the heart after all these
years.
The boarding-school project fell through, and for some years the three
sisters lived at home and devoted themselves to literary work. The
first fruits of their pen was a small volume of poems by Currer, Ellis
and Acton Bell, the pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. This book
fell practically stillborn from the press, but the sisters were
undaunted and each began a novel. Without experience of life it is not
strange that these stories lacked merit.
Charlotte drew her novel from her Brussels experience and called it
_The Professor_. Though it was far the best, it was rejected, but
Emily's _Wuthering Heights_ and Anne's _Agnes Gray_ were published.
Emily's novel revealed a powerful but ill-regulated imagination, with
scenes of splendid imaginative force, yet morbid and unreal as an
opium dream. It received some good notices, but Anne's was mediocre
and fell flat. Nothing daunted by the refusal of the publishers to
bring out her first book, Charlotte began _Jane Eyre_, largely
autobiographical in the early chapters, and this book was promptly
accepted and published in August, 1847.
_Jane Eyre_ was a great success from the day it came from the press.
It was an epoch-making novel because it dragged into the fierce light
of publicity many questions which the English public of that day had
decided to leave out of print. To us of today it contains nothing
unusual, for modern women writers have gone far beyond Charlotte
Brontë in their demands for freedom from many strict social
conventions. What makes the book valuable is the glimpse which it
gives of the wild revolt of a passionate nature against the coldness,
the hypocrisy and the many shams of the social life of England in the
middle of the last century.
This novel is also noteworthy for its intense picture of the
sufferings of a lonely, unappreciated girl, who felt in herself the
stirrings of genius and who hungered and thirsted for appreciation.
The terrible pictures of Lowood, the fiction name of the Cowan's
Bridge School, where her two sisters contracted their fatal illness,
are stamped upon the brain of every reader, as are those of the
humiliations of the governess. The style of this book was a revelation
in that period of formal writing. Like Stevenson, Charlotte Brontë
wrought with words as a great artist works with his colors, and many
of her descriptions in _Jane Eyre_ have never been surpassed. Hers was
that brooding Celtic imagination which, when given full play, takes
the reader by the hand and shows him the heights and depths of human
love and suffering.
[Illustration: MRS. GASKELL FROM THE PORTRAIT BY GEORGE RICHMOND,
R.A. MRS. GASKELL'S "LIFE OF BRONTË" IS ONE OF THE FINEST
BIOGRAPHIES IN THE LANGUAGE]
The success of _Jane Eyre_ opened wide the doors of London to the
unknown author. For a time her identity was hidden, but when it was
revealed she was induced to go up to London and see the great world.
Thackeray was especially kind to her, but his efforts to entertain
this Yorkshire recluse were dismal failures. Nothing is more amusing
than his daughter's story of the great novelist, slipping out of the
house one night, when he had asked several celebrities to meet
Charlotte Brontë. The party was a terrible fiasco, and so he escaped,
putting his finger to his lips as he opened the front door to warn his
daughter that she must not reveal his flight. Charlotte's
correspondence with her publisher is also full of pathos. It shows how
keenly she felt her aloofness from the world, which she could not
overcome.
The story of _Villette_ is the real story of Charlotte's experiences
in a Brussels boarding school, where she first tasted the delights of
literary study and her genius first found adequate expression. The
original draft of this novel was called _The Professor_. Charlotte
knew that it contained good material. So, after the death of her
sisters, she took up the subject, and with all her mature power
produced _Villette_--one of those novels struck off at a white heat,
like George Sand's _Indiana_ or Balzac's _Seraphita_. The story is
largely autobiographical, but the episodes of Charlotte's life are
touched with romance when they appear as the experiences of Lucy Snow,
the forlorn English girl in the Continental school, among people of
alien natures and strange speech.
In _Shirley_, Charlotte Brontë revealed much genuine humor in the
malicious portraits of the three curates, who were drawn from real
life. In fact, throughout her books one will find most of the
characters sketched from real people. Hence, if one reads the story of
her life he can trace her from her return from her Continental life
down through the cruel years almost to the end. Back she came to her
gloomy home from Brussels only to watch in succession the lingering
death of her brother and her two sisters. Think of these three
sisters, two marked for sure and early death, laboring at literary
work every day with the passion and intensity that come to few men.
Think of Emily, the eldest, with fierce pride refusing help to climb
the steep stairway of the parsonage home when her strength was almost
spent and her racking cough struck cold on the hearts of her sisters.
And think of Charlotte in her terrible grief turning to fiction as the
only resource from unbearable woe and loneliness. It is one of the
great tragedies of literature, but out of it came the flowering of a
brilliant genius.