Produced by Delphine Lettau, Pat McCoy and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
WOMEN NOVELISTS
_Of_
QUEEN VICTORIA'S REIGN
Women Novelists
_Of_
Queen Victoria's Reign
_A Book of Appreciations_
By
Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Lynn Linton
Mrs. Alexander, Mrs. Macquoid, Mrs. Parr
Mrs. Marshall, Charlotte M. Yonge
Adeline Sergeant & Edna Lyall
London
Hurst & Blackett, Limited
13 Great Marlborough Street
1897
_ALL RIGHTS RESERVED_
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press
CONTENTS
THE SISTERS BRONTE
_By_ MRS. OLIPHANT _Page_ 1
GEORGE ELIOT
_By_ MRS. LYNN LINTON _Page_ 61
MRS. GASKELL
_By_ EDNA LYALL _Page_ 117
MRS. CROWE
MRS. ARCHER CLIVE
MRS. HENRY WOOD
_By_ ADELINE SERGEANT _Page_ 149
LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON
MRS. STRETTON
ANNE MANNING
_By_ CHARLOTTE M. YONGE _Page_ 193
DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
_By_ MRS. PARR _Page_ 217
JULIA KAVANAGH
AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS
_By_ MRS. MACQUOID _Page_ 249
MRS. NORTON
_By_ MRS. ALEXANDER _Page_ 275
"A. L. O. E." (MISS TUCKER)
MRS. EWING
_By_ MRS. MARSHALL _Page_ 291
PUBLISHERS' NOTE
_Having been concerned for many years in the publication of works of
fiction by feminine writers, it has occurred to us to offer, as our
contribution to the celebration of "the longest Reign," a volume having
for its subject leading Women Novelists of the Victorian Era._
_In the case of living lady fictionists, it is too early to assess the
merit or forecast the future of their works. The present book,
therefore, is restricted to Women Novelists deceased._
_It was further necessary to confine the volume within reasonable
limits, and it was decided, consequently, that it should deal only with
Women who did all their work in Fiction after the accession of the
Queen. This decision excludes not only such writers as Lady Morgan, Mrs.
Opie, Miss Ferrier, Miss Mitford, Mrs. Shelley, and Miss Jane Porter,
who, although they died after 1837, published all their most notable
stories early in the century; but also such writers as Mrs. Gore, Mrs.
Bray, Mrs. S. C. Hall, Mrs. Trollope, Lady Blessington, and Mrs. Marsh,
who made their debuts as novelists between 1823 and 1834._
_As regards some of the last-named, it might be urged that the works
they produced have now no interest other than historical, and can be
said to live only so far as they embody more or less accurate
descriptions of Society early in the Reign. The "Deerbrook" and "The
Hour and the Man" of Miss Martineau are still remembered, and, perhaps,
still read; but it is as a political economist and miscellaneous writer,
rather than as a Novelist, that their author ranks in literature; while
of the tales by Miss Pardoe, Miss Geraldine Jewsbury, and others once
equally popular, scarcely the titles are now recollected._
_On the other hand, the eminence and permanence of the Brontes, George
Eliot, and Mrs. Gaskell are universally recognised; the popularity of
Mrs. Craik and Mrs. Henry Wood is still admittedly great; the
personality of Mrs. Norton will always send students to her works; Mrs.
Crowe and Mrs. Clive were pioneers in domestic and "sensational"
fiction; Lady Georgiana Fullerton produced a typical religious novel;
Miss Manning made pleasing and acceptable the autobiographico-historical
narrative; the authors of "The Valley of a Hundred Fires" of "Barbara's
History," and of "Adele" have even now their readers and admirers; while
"A. L. O. E." and Mrs. Ewing were among the most successful caterers for
the young._
_It has seemed to us that value as well as interest would attach to
critical estimates of and biographical notes upon, these representative
Novelists, supplied by living mistresses of the craft; and we are glad
to have been able to secure for the purpose, the services of the
contributors to this volume, all of whom may claim to discourse with
some authority upon the art they cultivate. It is perhaps scarcely
necessary to say that each contributor is responsible only for the essay
to which her name is appended._
THE SISTERS BRONTE
_By_ MRS. OLIPHANT
THE SISTERS BRONTE
The effect produced upon the general mind by the appearance of Charlotte
Bronte in literature, and afterwards by the record of her life when that
was over, is one which it is nowadays somewhat difficult to understand.
Had the age been deficient in the art of fiction, or had it followed any
long level of mediocrity in that art, we could have comprehended this
more easily. But Charlotte Bronte appeared in the full flush of a period
more richly endowed than any other we know of in that special branch of
literature, so richly endowed, indeed, that the novel had taken quite
fictitious importance, and the names of Dickens and Thackeray ranked
almost higher than those of any living writers except perhaps Tennyson,
then young and on his promotion too. Anthony Trollope and Charles Reade
who, though in their day extremely popular, have never had justice from
a public which now seems almost to have forgotten them, formed a
powerful second rank to these two great names. It is a great addition to
the value of the distinction gained by the new comer that it was
acquired in an age so rich in the qualities of the imagination.
But this only increases the wonder of a triumph which had no artificial
means to heighten it, nothing but genius on the part of a writer
possessing little experience or knowledge of the world, and no sort of
social training or adventitious aid. The genius was indeed unmistakable,
and possessed in a very high degree the power of expressing itself in
the most vivid and actual pictures of life. But the life of which it had
command was seldom attractive, often narrow, local, and of a kind which
meant keen personal satire more than any broader view of human
existence. A group of commonplace clergymen, intense against their
little parochial background as only the most real art of portraiture,
intensified by individual scorn and dislike, could have made them: the
circle of limited interests, small emulations, keen little spites and
rancours, filling the atmosphere of a great boarding school, the
Brussels _Pensionnat des filles_--these were the two spheres chiefly
portrayed: but portrayed with an absolute untempered force which knew
neither charity, softness, nor even impartiality, but burned upon the
paper and made everything round dim in the contrast. I imagine it was
this extraordinary naked force which was the great cause of a success,
never perhaps like the numerical successes in literature of the present
day, when edition follows edition, and thousand thousand, of the books
which are the favourites of the public: but one which has lived and
lasted through nearly half a century, and is even now potent enough to
carry on a little literature of its own, book after book following each
other not so much to justify as to reproclaim and echo to all the winds
the fame originally won. No one else of the century, I think, has called
forth this persevering and lasting homage. Not Dickens, though perhaps
more of him than of any one else has been dealt out at intervals to an
admiring public; not Thackeray, of whom still we know but little; not
George Eliot, though her fame has more solid foundations than that of
Miss Bronte. Scarcely Scott has called forth more continual droppings of
elucidation, explanation, remark. Yet the books upon which this
tremendous reputation is founded though vivid, original, and striking in
the highest degree, are not great books. Their philosophy of life is
that of a schoolgirl, their knowledge of the world almost _nil_, their
conclusions confused by the haste and passion of a mind self-centred and
working in the narrowest orbit. It is rather, as we have said, the most
incisive and realistic art of portraiture than any exercise of the
nobler arts of fiction--imagination, combination, construction--or
humorous survey of life or deep apprehension of its problems--upon which
this fame is built.
The curious circumstance that Charlotte Bronte was, if the word may be
so used, doubled by her sisters, the elder, Emily, whose genius has been
taken for granted, carrying the wilder elements of the common
inspiration to extremity in the strange, chaotic and weird romance of
"Wuthering Heights," while Anne diluted such powers of social
observation as were in the family into two mildly disagreeable novels of
a much commoner order, has no doubt also enhanced the central figure of
the group to an amazing degree. They placed her strength in relief by
displaying its separate elements, and thus commending the higher skill
and larger spirit which took in both, understanding the moors and wild
country and rude image of man better than the one, and misunderstanding
the common course of more subdued life less than the other. The three
together are for ever inseparable; they were homely, lowly, somewhat
neglected in their lives, had few opportunities and few charms to the
careless eye: yet no group of women, undistinguished by rank, unendowed
by beauty, and known to but a limited circle of friends as unimportant
as themselves have ever, I think, in the course of history--certainly
never in this century--come to such universal recognition. The effect is
quite unique, unprecedented, and difficult to account for; but there
cannot be the least doubt that it is a matter of absolute fact which
nobody can deny.
* * * * *
These three daughters of a poor country clergyman came into the world
early in the century, the dates of their births being 1816, 1818, 1820,
in the barest of little parsonages in the midst of the moors--a wild but
beautiful country, and a rough but highly characteristic and keen-witted
people. Yorkshire is the very heart of England; its native force, its
keen practical sense, its rough wit, and the unfailing importance in the
nation of the largest of the shires has given it a strong individual
character and position almost like that of an independent province. But
the Brontes, whose name is a softened and decorated edition of a common
Irish name, were not of that forcible race: and perhaps the strong
strain after emotion, and revolt against the monotonies of life, which
were so conspicuous in them were more easily traceable to their Celtic
origin than many other developments attributed to that cause. They were
motherless from an early age, children of a father who, after having
been depicted as a capricious tyrant, seems now to have found a fairer
representation as a man with a high spirit and peculiar temper, yet
neither unkind to his family nor uninterested in their welfare. There
was one son, once supposed to be the hero and victim of a disagreeable
romance, but apparent now as only a specimen, not alas, uncommon, of the
ordinary ne'er-do-well of a family, without force of character or
self-control to keep his place with decency in the world.
These children all scribbled from their infancy as soon as the power of
inscribing words upon paper was acquired by them, inventing imaginary
countries and compiling visionary records of them as so many imaginative
children do. The elder girl and boy made one pair, the younger girls
another, connected by the closest links of companionship. It was thought
or hoped that the son was the genius of the family, and at the earliest
possible age he began to send his effusions to editors, and to seek
admission to magazines with the mingled arrogance and humility of a
half-fledged creature. But the world knows now that it was not poor
Branwell who was the genius of the family; and this injury done him in
his cradle, and the evil report of him that everybody gives throughout
his life, awakens a certain pity in the mind for the unfortunate youth
so unable to keep any supremacy among the girls whom he must have
considered his natural inferiors and vassals. We are told by Charlotte
Bronte herself that he never knew of the successes of his sisters, the
fact of their successive publications being concealed from him out of
tenderness for his feelings; but it is scarcely to be credited that when
the parish knew the unfortunate brother did not find out. The unhappy
attempt of Mrs. Gaskell in writing the lives of the sisters to make this
melancholy young man accountable for the almost brutal element in Emily
Bronte's conception of life, and the strange views of Charlotte as to
what men were capable of, has made him far too important in their
history; where, indeed, he had no need to have appeared at all, had the
family pride consisted, as the pride of so many families does, in
veiling rather than exhibiting the faults of its members. So far as can
be made out now, he had as little as possible to do with their
development in any way.
There was nothing unnatural or out of the common in the youthful life of
the family except that strange gift of genius, which though consistent
with every genial quality of being, in such a nature as that of Scott,
seems in other developments of character to turn all the elements into
chaos. Its effect upon the parson's three daughters was, indeed, not of
a very wholesome kind. It awakened in them an uneasy sense of
superiority which gave double force to every one of the little
hardships which a girl in a great school of a charitable kind, and a
governess in a middle-class house, has to support: and made life harder
instead of sweeter to them in many ways, since it was full of the biting
experience of conditions less favourable than those of many persons
round them whom they could not but feel inferior to themselves.
The great school, which it was Charlotte Bronte's first act when she
began her literary career to invest with an almost tragic character of
misery, privation, and wrong, was her first step from home. Yorkshire
schools did not at that period enjoy a very good reputation in the
world, and Nicholas Nickleby was forming his acquaintance with the
squalid cruelty of Dotheboys Hall just about the same time when
Charlotte Bronte's mind was being filled with the privations and
discontents of Lowood. In such a case there is generally some fire where
there is so much smoke, and probably Lowood was under no very heavenly
_regime_: but at the same time its drawbacks were sharply accentuated by
that keen criticism which is suggested by the constant sense of injured
worth and consciousness of a superiority not acknowledged. The same
feeling pursued her into the situations as governess which she occupied
one after another, and in which her indignation at being expected to
feel affection for the children put under her charge, forms a curious
addition to the other grievances with which fate pursues her life. No
doubt there are many temptations in the life of a governess; the
position of a silent observer in a household, looking on at all its
mistakes, and seeing the imperfection of its management with double
force because of the effect they have on herself--especially if she
feels herself competent, had she but the power, to set things
right--must always be a difficult one. It was not continued long enough,
however, to involve very much suffering; though no doubt it helped to
mature the habit of sharp personal criticism and war with the world.
At the same time Charlotte Bronte made some very warm personal
friendships, and wrote a great many letters to the school friends who
pleased her, in which a somewhat stilted tone and demure seriousness is
occasionally invaded by the usual chatter of girlhood, to the great
improvement of the atmosphere if not of the mind. Ellen Nussey, Mary
Taylor, women not manifestly intellectual but sensible and independent
without either exaggeration of sentiment or hint of tragic story,
remained her close friends as long as she lived, and her letters to
them, though always a little demure, give us a gentler idea of her than
anything else she has written. Not that there is much charm either of
style or subject in them: but there is no sort of bitterness or sense
of insufficient appreciation. Nothing can be more usual and commonplace,
indeed, than this portion of her life. As in so many cases, the
artificial lights thrown upon it by theories formed afterwards, clear
away when we examine its actual records, and it is apparent that there
was neither exceptional harshness of circumstance nor internal struggle
in the existence of the girl who, though more or less in arms against
everybody outside--especially when holding a position superior to her
own, more especially still when exercising authority over her in any
way--was yet quite an easy-minded, not unhappy, young woman at home,
with friends to whom she could pour out long pages of what is, on the
whole, quite moderate and temperate criticism of life, not without
cheerful allusion to now and then a chance curate or other young person
of the opposite sex, suspected of "paying attention" to one or other of
the little coterie. These allusions are not more lofty or dignified than
are similar notes of girls of less exalted pretensions, but there is not
a touch in them of the keen pointed pen which afterwards put up the
Haworth curates in all their imperfections before the world.
The other sisters at this time in the background, two figures always
clinging together, looking almost like one, have no great share in this
softer part of Charlotte's life. They were, though so different in
character, completely devoted to each other, apparently forming no other
friendships, each content with the one other partaker of her every
thought. A little literature seems to have been created between them,
little chapters of recollection and commentary upon their life, sealed
up and put away for three years in each case, to be opened on Emily's or
on Anne's birthday alternately, as a pathetic sign of their close unity,
though the little papers were in themselves simple in the extreme. Anne
too became a governess with something of the same experience as
Charlotte, and uttering very hard judgments of unconscious people who
were not the least unkind to her. But Emily had no such trials. She
remained at home perhaps because she was too uncompromising to be
allowed to make the experiment of putting up with other people, perhaps
because one daughter at home was indispensable. The family seems to have
had kind and trusted old servants, so that the cares of housekeeping did
not weigh heavily upon the daughter in charge, and there is no evidence
of exceptional hardness or roughness in their circumstances in any way.
In 1842, Charlotte and Emily, aged respectively twenty-six and
twenty-four, went to Brussels. Their design was "to acquire a thorough
familiarity with French," also some insight into other languages, with
the view of setting up a school on their own account. The means were
supplied by the aunt, who had lived in their house and taken more or
less care of them since their mother's death. The two sisters were
nearly a year in the Pensionnat Heger, now so perfectly known in every
detail of its existence to all who have read "Villette." They were
recalled by the death of the kind aunt who had procured them this
advantage, and afterwards Charlotte, no one quite knows why, went back
to Brussels for a second year, in which all her impressions were
probably strengthened and intensified. Certainly a more clear and
lifelike picture, scathing in its cold yet fierce light, was never made
than that of the white tall Brussels house, its class rooms, its
gardens, its hum of unamiable girls, its sharp display of rancorous and
shrill teachers, its one inimitable professor. It startles the reader to
find--a fact which we had forgotten--that M. Paul Emmanuel was M. Heger,
the husband of Madame Heger and legitimate head of the house: and that
this daring and extraordinary girl did not hesitate to encounter gossip
or slander by making him so completely the hero of her romance. Slander
in its commonplace form had nothing to do with such a fiery spirit as
that of Charlotte Bronte: but it shows her perfect independence of mind
and scorn of comment that she should have done this. In the end of '43
she returned home, and the episode was over. It was really the only
episode of possible practical significance in her life until we come to
the records of her brief literary career and her marriage, both towards
its end.
* * * * *
The prospect of the school which the three sisters were to set up
together was abandoned; there was no more talk of governessing. We are
not told if it was the small inheritance of the aunt--only, Mr. Clement
Shorter informs us, L1500--which enabled the sisters henceforward to
remain at home without thought of further effort: but certainly this was
what happened. And the lives of the two younger were drawing so near the
end that it is a comfort to think that they enjoyed this moment of
comparative grace together. Their life was extremely silent, secluded,
and apart. There was the melancholy figure of Branwell to distract the
house with the spectacle of heavy idleness, drink, and disorder; but
this can scarcely have been so great an affliction as if he had been a
more beloved brother. He was not, however, veiled by any tender attempt
to cover his follies or wickedness, but openly complained of to all
their friends, which mitigates the affliction: and they seem to have
kept very separate from him, living in a world of their own.
In 1846 a volume of poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, was
published at their own cost. It had not the faintest success; they were
informed by the publisher that two copies only had been sold, and the
only satisfaction that remained to them was to send a few copies to some
of the owners of those great names which the enthusiastic young women
had worshipped from afar as stars in the firmament. These poems were
re-published after Charlotte Bronte had attained her first triumph, and
people had begun to cry out and wonder over "Wuthering Heights." The
history of "Jane Eyre," on the other hand, is that of most works which
have been the beginning of a career. It fell into the hands of the right
man, the "reader" of Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co., Mr. Williams, a man
of great intelligence and literary insight. The first story written by
Charlotte Bronte, which was called "The Professor," and was the original
of "Villette," written at a time when her mind was very full of the
emotions raised by that singular portion of her life, had been rejected
by a number of publishers, and was also rejected by Mr. Williams, who
found it at once too crude and too _short_ for the risks of
publication, three volumes at that period being your only possible form
for fiction. But he saw the power in it, and begged the author to try
again at greater length. She did so; not on the basis of the "Professor"
as might have seemed natural--probably the materials were still too much
at fever-heat in her mind to be returned to at that moment--but by the
story of "Jane Eyre," which at once placed Charlotte Bronte amid the
most popular and powerful writers of her time.
I remember well the extraordinary thrill of interest which in the midst
of all the Mrs. Gores, Mrs. Marshs, &c.--the latter name is mentioned
along with those of Thackeray and Dickens even by Mr. Williams--came
upon the reader who, in the calm of ignorance, took up the first volume
of "Jane Eyre." The period of the heroine in white muslin, the
immaculate creature who was of sweetness and goodness all compact, had
lasted in the common lines of fiction up to that time. Miss Austen
indeed might well have put an end to that abstract and empty fiction,
yet it continued, as it always does continue more or less, the primitive
ideal. But "Jane Eyre" gave her, for the moment, the _coup de grace_.
That the book should be the story of a governess was perhaps necessary
to the circumstances of the writer: and the governess was already a
favourite figure in fiction. But generally she was of the beautiful,
universally fascinating, all-enduring kind, the amiable blameless
creature whose secret merits were never so hidden but that they might be
perceived by a keen sighted hero. I am not sure, indeed, that anybody
believed Miss Bronte when she said her heroine was plain. It is very
clear from the story that Jane was never unnoticed, never failed to
please, except among the women, whom it is the instinctive art of the
novelist to rouse in arms against the central figure, thus demonstrating
the jealousy, spite, and rancour native to their minds in respect to the
women who please men. No male cynic was ever stronger on that subject
than this typical woman. She cannot have believed it, I presume, since
her closest friends were women, and she seems to have had perfect faith
in their kindness: but this is a matter of conventional belief which has
nothing to do with individual experience. It is one of the doctrines
unassailable of the art of fiction; a thirty-ninth article in which
every writer of novels is bound to believe.
Miss Bronte did not know fine ladies, and therefore, in spite of herself
and a mind the reverse of vulgar, she made the competitors for Mr.
Rochester's favour rather brutal and essentially vulgar persons, an
error, curiously enough, which seems to have been followed by George
Eliot in the corresponding scenes in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story," where
Captain Wybrow's _fiancee_ treats poor Tiny very much as the beauty in
Mr. Rochester's house treats Jane Eyre. Both were imaginary pictures,
which perhaps more or less excuses their untruthfulness in writers both
so sincere and lifelike in treating things they knew. It is amusing to
remember that Jane Eyre's ignorance of dress gave a clinching argument
to Miss Rigby in the _Quarterly_ to decide that the writer was not and
could not possibly be a woman. The much larger and more significant fact
that no man (until in quite recent days when there have been instances
of such effeminate art) ever made a woman so entirely the subject and
inspiration of his book, the only interest in it, was entirely
overlooked in what was, notwithstanding, the very shrewd and telling
argument about the dress.
The chief thing, however, that distressed the candid and as yet
unaccustomed reader in "Jane Eyre," and made him hope that it might be a
man who had written it, was the character of Rochester's confidences to
the girl whom he loved--not the character of Rochester, which was
completely a woman's view, but that he should have talked to a girl so
evidently innocent of his amours and his mistresses. This, however, I
think, though, as we should have thought, a subject so abhorrent to a
young woman such as Charlotte Bronte was, was also emphatically a
woman's view. A man might have credited another man of Rochester's kind
with impulses practically more heinous and designs of the worst kind:
but he would not have made him err in that way.
In this was a point of honour which the woman did not understand. It
marks a curious and subtle difference between the sexes. The woman less
enlightened in practical evil considers less the risks of actual vice;
but her imagination is free in other ways, and she innocently permits
her hero to do and say things so completely against the code which is
binding on gentlemen whether vicious or otherwise that her want of
perception becomes conspicuous. The fact that the writer of the review
in the _Quarterly_ was herself a woman accounts for her mistake in
supposing that the book was written if not by a man, by "a woman
unsexed;" "a woman who had forfeited the society of her sex." And
afterwards, when Mrs. Gaskell made her disastrous statements about
Branwell Bronte and other associates of Charlotte's youth, it was with
the hope of proving that the speech and manners of the men to whom she
had been accustomed were of a nature to justify her in any such
misapprehension of the usual manners of gentlemen. It was on the
contrary, as I think, only the bold and unfettered imagination of a
woman quite ignorant on all such subjects which could have suggested
this special error. The mind of such a woman, casting about for
something to make her wicked but delightful hero do by way of
demonstrating his wickedness, yet preserving the fascination which she
meant him to retain, probably hit upon this as the very wickedest thing
she could think of, yet still attractive: for is there not a thrill of
curiosity in searching out what such a strange being might think or say,
which is of itself a strong sensation? Miss Bronte was, I think, the
first to give utterance to that curiosity of the woman in respect to the
man, and fascination of interest in him--not the ideal man, not Sir
Kenneth, too reverent for anything but silent worship--which has since
risen to such heights of speculation, and imprints now a tone upon
modern fiction at which probably she would have been horrified.
* * * * *
There were numberless stories in those days of guilty love and betrayal,
of how "lovely woman stoops to folly," and all the varieties of that
endless subject; but it was, except in the comic vein, or with grotesque
treatment, the pursuit of the woman by the man, the desire of the lover
for the beloved which was the aim of fiction. A true lady of romance
walked superior: she accepted (or not) the devotion: she stooped from
her white height to reward her adorer: but that she herself should
condescend to seek him (except under the circumstances of fashionable
life, where everybody is in quest of a coronet), or call out for him to
heaven and earth when he tarried in his coming, was unknown to the
situations of romantic art. When the second of Charlotte Bronte's books
appeared, there was accordingly quite a new sensation in store for the
public. The young women in "Shirley" were all wild for this lover who,
though promised by all the laws of nature and romance, did not appear.
They leaned out of their windows, they stretched forth their hands,
calling for him--appealing to heaven and earth. Why were they left to
wear out their bloom, to lose their freshness, to spend their days in
sewing and dreaming, when he, it was certain, was about somewhere, and
by sheer perversity of fate could not find the way to them? Nothing was
thought of the extra half-million of women in those days; perhaps it had
not begun to exist; but that "nobody was coming to marry us, nobody
coming to woo" was apparent.
Young ladies like Miss Charlotte Bronte and Miss Ellen Nussey her
friend, would have died rather than give vent to such sentiments; but
when the one of them to whom that gift was given found that her pen had
become a powerful instrument in her hand, the current of the restrained
feeling burst all boundaries, and she poured forth the cry which nobody
had suspected before. It had been a thing to be denied, to be
indignantly contradicted as impossible, if ever a lovesick girl put
herself forth to the shame of her fellows and the laugh of the world.
When such a phenomenon appeared, she was condemned as either bad or
foolish by every law: and the idea that she was capable of "running
after" a man was the most dreadful accusation that could be brought
against a woman. Miss Bronte's heroines, however, did not precisely do
this. Shirley and Caroline Helstone were not in love so much as longing
for love, clamouring for it, feeling it to be their right of which they
were somehow defrauded. There is a good deal to be said for such a view.
If it is the most virtuous thing in the world for a man to desire to
marry, to found a family, to be the father of children, it should be no
shameful thing for a woman to own the same desire. But it is somehow
against the instinct of primitive humanity, which has decided that the
woman should be no more than responsive, maintaining a reserve in
respect to her feelings, subduing the expression, unless in the "once,
and only once, and to One only" of the poet.
Charlotte Bronte was the first to overthrow this superstition.
Personally I am disposed to stand for the superstition, and dislike all
transgression of it. But that was not the view of the most reticent and
self-controlled of maidens, the little governess, clad in all the strict
proprieties of the period, the parson's daughter despising curates, and
unacquainted with other men. In her secret heart, she demanded of fate
night and day why she, so full of life and capability, should be left
there to dry up and wither; and why Providence refused her the
completion of her being. Her heart was not set on a special love; still
less was there anything fleshly or sensual in her imagination. It is a
shame to use such words in speaking of her, even though to cast them
forth as wholly inapplicable. The woman's grievance--that she should be
left there unwooed, unloved, out of reach of the natural openings of
life: without hope of motherhood: with the great instinct of her being
unfulfilled--was almost a philosophical, and entirely an abstract,
grievance, felt by her for her kind: for every woman dropped out of
sight and unable to attain the manner of existence for which she was
created. And I think it was the first time this cry had been heard out
of the mouth of a perfectly modest and pure-minded woman, nay, out of
the mouth of any woman; for it had nothing to do with the shriek of the
Sapphos for love. It was more startling, more confusing to the general
mind, than the wail of the lovelorn. The gentle victim of "a
disappointment," or even the soured and angered victim, was a thing
quite understood and familiar: but not the woman calling upon heaven and
earth to witness that all the fates were conspiring against her to cheat
her of her natural career.
So far as I can see this was the great point which gave force to
Charlotte Bronte's genius and conferred upon her the curious
pre-eminence she possesses among the romancers of her time. In this view
"Shirley," though I suppose the least popular, is the most
characteristic of her works. It is dominated throughout with this
complaint. Curates? Yes, there they are, a group of them. Is that the
thing you expect us women to marry? Yet it is our right to bear
children, to guide the house. And we are half of the world, and where is
the provision for us?
This cry disturbed the critic, the reader, the general public in the
most curious way; they did not know what to make of it. Was it a
shameless woman who was so crying out? It is always the easiest way, and
one which avoids all complications, to say so, and thus crush every
question. But it was scarcely easy to believe this in face of other
circumstances. Mrs. Gaskell, as much puzzled as any one, when Charlotte
Bronte's short life was over, tried hard to account for it by
"environment" as the superior persons say, that is by the wicked folly
of her brother, and the coarseness of all the Yorkshiremen round; and
thus originated in her bewilderment, let us hope without other
intention, a new kind of biography, as the subject of it inaugurated an
entirely new kind of social revolution. The cry of the women indeed
almost distressed as well as puzzled the world. The vivid genius still
held it, but the ideas were alarming, distracting beyond measure. The
_Times_ blew a trumpet of dismay; the book was revolution as well as
revelation. It was an outrage upon good taste, it was a betrayal of
sentiments too widespread to be comfortable. It was indelicate if not
immodest. We have outgrown now the very use of this word, but it was a
potent one at that period. And it was quite a just reproach. That cry
shattered indeed altogether the "delicacy" which was supposed to be the
most exquisite characteristic of womankind. The softening veil is blown
away, when such exhibitions of feeling are given to the world.
From that period to this is a long step. We have travelled through many
years and many gradations of sentiment: and we have now arrived at a
standard of opinion by which the "sex-problem" has become the most
interesting of questions, the chief occupation of fiction, to be
discussed by men and women alike with growing warmth and openness, the
immodest and the indelicate being equally and scornfully dismissed as
barriers with which Art has nothing to do. My impression is that
Charlotte Bronte was the pioneer and founder of this school of romance,
though it would probably have shocked and distressed her as much as any
other woman of her age.
* * * * *
The novels of Emily and Anne Bronte were published shortly after "Jane
Eyre," in three volumes, of which "Wuthering Heights" occupied the first
two. I am obliged to confess that I have never shared the common
sentiment of enthusiasm for that, to me, unlovely book. The absence of
almost every element of sympathy in it, the brutality and misery,
tempered only by an occasional gleam of the heather, the freshness of an
occasional blast over the moors, have prevented me from appreciating a
force which I do not deny but cannot admire. The figure of Heathcliffe,
which perhaps has called forth more praise than any other single figure
in the literature of the time, does not touch me. I can understand how
in the jumble which the reader unconsciously makes, explaining him more
or less by Rochester and other of Charlotte Bronte's heroes, he may take
his place in a sort of system, and thus have humanities read into him,
so to speak, which he does not himself possess. But though the horror
and isolation of the house is powerful I have never been able to
reconcile myself either to the story or treatment, or to the estimate of
Emily Bronte's genius held so strongly by so many people. There is
perhaps the less harm in refraining from much comment on this singular
book, of which I gladly admit the unique character, since it has been
the occasion of so many and such enthusiastic comments. To me Emily
Bronte is chiefly interesting as the double of her sister, exaggerating
at once and softening her character and genius as showing those limits
of superior sense and judgment which restrained her, and the softer
lights which a better developed humanity threw over the landscape common
to them both. We perceive better the tempering sense of possibility by
which Charlotte made her rude and almost brutal hero still attractive,
even in his masterful ferocity, when we see Emily's incapacity to
express anything in _her_ hero except perhaps a touch of that tragic
pathos, prompting to fiercer harshness still, which is in the soul of a
man who never more, whatever he does, can set himself right. This is the
one strain of poetry to my mind in the wild conception. There was no
measure in the younger sister's thoughts, nor temperance in her methods.
The youngest of all, the gentle Anne, would have no right to be
considered at all as a writer but for her association with these
imperative spirits. An ordinary little novelette and a moral story,
working out the disastrous knowledge gained by acquaintance with the
unfortunate Branwell's ruinous habits, were her sole productions. She
was the element wanting in Emily's rugged work and nature. Instead of
being two sisters constantly entwined with each other, never separate
when they could help it, had Anne been by some fantastic power swamped
altogether and amalgamated with her best beloved, we may believe that
Emily might then have shown herself the foremost of the three. But the
group as it stands is more interesting than any single individual could
be. And had Charlotte Bronte lived a long and triumphant life, a
fanciful writer might have imagined that the throwing off of those other
threads of being so closely attached to her own had poured greater force
and charity into her veins. But we are baffled in all our suggestions
for the amendment of the ways of Providence.
* * * * *
The melancholy and tragic year, or rather six months, which swept from
Haworth Parsonage three of its inmates, and left Charlotte and her
father alone to face life as they might, was now approaching; and it
seems so completely an episode in the story of the elder sister's
genius as well as her life, that its history is like that of an
unwritten tragedy, hers as much as her actual work. Branwell was the
first to die, unwept yet not without leaving a pathetic note in the
record. Then came the extraordinary passion and agony of Emily, which
has affected the imagination so much, and which, had it been for any
noble purpose, would have been a true martyrdom. But to die the death of
a Stoic, in fierce resistance yet subjection to Nature, regardless of
the feelings of all around, for the sake of pride and self-will alone,
is not an act to be looked upon with the reverential sympathy which,
however, it has secured from many. The strange creature with her shoes
on her feet and her staff in her hand, refusing till the last to
acknowledge herself to be ill or to receive any help in her weakness,
gives thus a kind of climax to her strange and painful work. Her death
took place in December of the same year (1848) in which Branwell died.
Anne, already delicate, would never seem to have held up her head after
her sister's death, and in May 1849 she followed, but in all sweetness
and calmness, to her early grave. She was twenty-eight; Emily
twenty-nine. So soon had the fever of life worn itself out and peace
come. Charlotte was left alone. There had not been to her in either of
them the close companion which they had found in each other. But yet
life ebbed away from her with their deaths, which occurred in such a
startling and quick succession as always makes bereavement more
terrible.
This occurred at the height of her mental activity. "Shirley" had been
published, and had been received with the divided feeling we have
referred to; and when she was thus left alone she found, no doubt, the
solace which of all mortal things work gives best, by resuming her
natural occupation in the now more than ever sombre seclusion of the
Parsonage, to which, however, her favourite friend, Ellen Nussey, came
from time to time. One or two visits to London occurred after the two
first publications in which, a demure little person, silent and shy, yet
capable of expressing herself very distinctly by times, and by no means
unconscious of the claim she now had upon other people's respect and
admiration, Charlotte Bronte made a little sensation in the society
which was opened to her, not always of a very successful kind. Everybody
will remember the delightfully entertaining chapter in literary history
in which Mrs. Ritchie, with charming humour and truth, recounts the
visit of this odd little lion to her father's house, and Thackeray's
abrupt and clandestine flight to his club when it was found that nothing
more was to be made of her than an absorbed conversation with the
governess in the back drawing-room, a situation like one in a novel, and
so very like the act of modest greatness, singling out the least
important person as the object of her attentions.
She is described by all her friends as plain, even ugly--a small woman
with a big nose, and no other notable feature, not even the bright eyes
which are generally attributed to genius--which was probably, however,
better than the lackadaisical portrait prefixed to her biography, after
a picture by Richmond, which is the typical portrait of a governess of
the old style, a gentle creature deprecating and wistful. Her letters
are very good letters, well expressed in something of the old-fashioned
way, but without any of the charm of a born letter-writer. Indeed, charm
does not seem to have been hers in any way. But she had a few very
staunch friends who held fast by her all her life, notwithstanding the
uncomfortable experience of being "put in a book," which few people
like. It is a gift by itself to put other living people in books. The
novelist does not always possess it; to many the realms of imagination
are far more easy than the arid realms of fact, and to frame an image of
a man much more natural than to take his portrait. I am not sure that it
is not a mark of greater strength to be able to put a living and
recognisable person on the canvas than it is to invent one. Anyhow, Miss
Bronte possessed it in great perfection. Impossible to doubt that the
characters of "Shirley" were real men; still more impossible to doubt
for a moment the existence of M. Paul Emmanuel. The pursuit of such a
system requires other faculties than those of the mere romancist. It
demands a very clear-cut opinion, a keen judgment not disturbed by any
strong sense of the complexities of nature, nor troubled by any
possibility of doing injustice to its victim.
* * * * *
One thing strikes us very strongly in the description of the school,
Lowood, which was her very first step in literature, and in which there
can now be no doubt, from her own remarks on the manner in which it was
received, she had a vindictive purpose. I scarcely know why, for, of
course, the dates are all there to prove the difference--but my own
conclusion had always been that she was a girl of fourteen or fifteen,
old enough to form an opinion when she left the school. I find, with
much consternation, that she was only nine; and that so far as such a
strenuous opinion was her own at all, it must have been formed at that
early and not very judicious age. That the picture should be so vivid
with only a little girl's recollection to go upon is wonderful; but it
is not particularly valuable as a verdict against a great institution,
its founder and all its ways. Nevertheless, it had its scathing and
wounding effect as much as if the little observer, whose small judgment
worked so precociously, had been capable of understanding the things
which she condemned. It would be rash to trust nineteen in such a
report, but nine!
It was at a different age and in other circumstances that Charlotte
Bronte made her deep and extraordinary study of the Brussels Pensionnat.
She was twenty-seven; she had already gone through a number of those
years of self-repression during which, by dint of keeping silence, the
heart burns. She was, if we may accept the freedom of her utterances in
fiction as more descriptive of her mind than the measured sentences of
her letters, angry with fate and the world which denied her a brighter
career, and bound her to the cold tasks of dependence and the company of
despised and almost hated inferiors during the best of her life. Her
tremendous gift of sight--not second sight or any visionary way of
regarding the object before her, but that vivid and immediate vision
which took in every detail, and was decisive on every act as if it had
been the vision of the gods--was now fully matured. She saw all that was
about her with this extraordinary clearness without any shadow upon the
object or possibility of doubt as to her power of seeing it all round
and through and through. She makes us also see and know the big white
house, with every room distinct: the garden, with its great trees and
alleys: the class-rooms, each with its tribune: the girls, fat and round
and phlegmatic in characteristic foreignism, and herself as spectator,
looking on with contemptuous indifference, not caring to discriminate
between them. The few English figures, which concern her more, are drawn
keen upon the canvas, though with as little friendliness; the teachers
sharply accentuated, Mdlle. Sophie, for instance, who, when she is in a
rage, has no lips, and all the sharp contentions and false civilities of
those banded Free Lances, enemies to everybody and to each other; the
image of watchful suspicion in the head of the house--all these are set
forth in glittering lines of steel. There is not a morsel of compunction
in the picture. Everybody is bad, worthless, a hater of the whole race.
The mistress of the establishment moves about stealthily, watching, her
eyes showing through a mist in every corner, going and coming without a
sound. What a picture it is! There is not a good meaning in the whole
place--not even that beneficent absence of meaning which softens the
view. They are all bent on their own aims, on gaining an advantage great
or small over their neighbours; nobody is spared, nobody is worth a
revision of judgment--except one.