represented as more lovable than the rest. She is the hungry little
epicure, looking on while others feast, and envying every one of them,
even while she snarls at their fare as apples of Gomorrah. She cannot
abide that they should be better off than she, even though she scorns
their satisfaction in what they possess. Her wild and despairing rush
through Brussels when the town is _en fete_, cold, impassioned,
fever-hot with rancour and loneliness, produces the most amazing effect
on the mind. She is the banished spirit for whom there is no place, the
little half-tamed wild beast, wild with desire to tear and rend
everything that is happy. One feels that she has a certain justification
and realises the full force of being left out in the cold, of having no
part or lot in the matter when other people are amused and rejoice. Many
other writers have endeavoured to produce a similar effect with milder
means, but I suppose because of a feeble-minded desire to preserve the
reputation of their forlorn heroine and give the reader an amiable view
of her, no one has succeeded like the author of "Villette," who is in no
way concerned for the amiability of Lucy Snowe.
For the impartiality of this picture is as extraordinary as its power.
Lucy Snowe is her own historian; it is the hot blood of the
autobiographist that rushes through her veins, yet no attempt is made to
recommend her to the reader or gain his sympathy. She is much too real
to think of these outside things, or of how people will judge her, or
how to make her proceedings acceptable to their eyes. We do not know
whether Charlotte Bronte ever darted out of the white still house,
standing dead in the moonlight, and rushed through the streets and, like
a ghost, into the very heart of the gaslights and festivities; but it
would be difficult to persuade any reader that some one had not done so,
imprinting that phantasmagoria of light and darkness upon a living
brain. Whether it was Charlotte Bronte or Lucy Snowe, the effect is the
same. We are not even asked to feel for her or pity her, much less to
approve her. Nothing is demanded from us on her account but merely to
behold the soul in revolt and the strange workings of her despair. It
was chiefly because of the indifference to her of Dr. John that Lucy was
thus driven into a momentary madness; and with the usual regardless
indiscretion of all Charlotte Bronte's amateur biographers, Mr. Shorter
intimates to us who was the living man who was Dr. John and occasioned
all the commotion. The tragedy, however it appears, was unnecessary, for
the victim got over it with no great difficulty, and soon began the much
more engrossing interest which still remained behind.
Nothing up to this point has attracted us in "Villette," except, indeed,
the tremendous vitality and reality of the whole, the sensation of the
actual which is in every line, and which forbids us to believe for a
moment that what we are reading is fiction. But a very different
sentiment comes into being as we become acquainted with the black
bullet-head and vivacious irascible countenance of M. Paul Emmanuel. He
is the one only character in Miss Bronte's little world who has a real
charm, whose entrance upon the stage warms all our feelings and awakens
in us not interest alone, but lively liking, amusement and sympathy. The
quick-witted, quick-tempered Frenchman, with all the foibles of his
vanity displayed, as susceptible to any little slight as a girl, as
easily pleased with a sign of kindness, as far from the English ideal as
it is possible to imagine, dancing with excitement, raging with
displeasure, committing himself by every step he takes, cruel,
delightful, barbarous and kind, is set before us in the fullest light,
intolerable but always enchanting. He is as full of variety as Rosalind,
as devoid of dignity as Pierrot, contradictory, inconsistent, vain, yet
conquering all our prejudices and enchanting us while he performs every
antic that, according to our usual code, a man ought not to be capable
of. How was it that for this once the artist got the better of all her
restrictions and overcame all her misconceptions, and gave us a man to
be heartily loved, laughed at, and taken into our hearts?
I cannot answer that question. I am sorry that he was M. Heger, and the
master of the establishment, and not the clever tutor who had so much of
Madame Beck's confidence. But anyhow, he is the best that Miss Bronte
ever did for us, the most attractive individual, the most perfect
picture. The Rochesters were all more or less fictitious,
notwithstanding the unconscious inalienable force of realism which gives
them, in spite of themselves and us, a kind of overbearing life; but
Miss Bronte never did understand what she did not know. She had to see a
thing before it impressed itself upon her, and when she did see it, with
what force she saw! She knew M. Paul Emmanuel, watching him day by day,
seeing all his littlenesses and childishness, his vanity, his big warm
heart, his clever brain, the manifold nature of the man. He stands out,
as the curates stood out, absolutely real men about whom we could
entertain no doubt, recognisable anywhere. The others were either a
woman's men, like the Moors of Shirley, whose roughness was bluster (she
could not imagine an Englishman who was not rough and rude), and their
strength more or less made up; or an artificial composition like St.
John, an ideal bully like Rochester. The ideal was not her forte--she
had few gifts that way: but she saw with overwhelming lucidity and
keenness, and what she saw, without a doubt, without a scruple, she
could put upon the canvas in lines of fire. Seldom, very seldom, did an
object appear within reach of that penetrating light, which could be
drawn lovingly or made to appear as a being to be loved. Was not the
sole model of that species M. Paul? It would seem that in the piteous
poverty of her life, which was so rich in natural power, she had never
met before a human creature in whom she could completely trust, or one
who commended himself to her entirely, with all his foibles and
weaknesses increasing, not diminishing, the charm.
It is, in my opinion, a most impertinent inquiry to endeavour to search
out what were the sentiments of Charlotte Bronte for M. Heger. Any one
whom it would be more impossible to imagine as breaking the very first
rule of English decorum, and letting her thoughts stray towards another
woman's husband, I cannot imagine. Her fancy was wild and her utterance
free, and she liked to think that men were quite untrammelled by those
proprieties which bound herself like bonds of iron in her private
person, and that she might pluck a fearful joy by listening to their
dreadful experiences: but she herself was as prim and Puritan as any
little blameless governess that ever went out of an English parish. But
while believing this I cannot but feel it was an intolerable spite of
fortune that the one man whom she knew in her life, whom her story
could make others love, the only man whom she saw with that real
illumination which does justice to humanity, was not M. Paul Emmanuel
but M. Heger. This was why we were left trembling at the end of Lucy
Snowe's story, not knowing whether he ever came back to her out of the
wilds, fearing almost as keenly that nothing but loss could fitly end
the tale, yet struggling in our imaginations against the doom--as if it
had concerned our own happiness.
Was this new-born power in her, the power of representing a man at his
best, she who by nature saw both men and women from their worst side, a
sign of the development of genius in herself, the softening of that
scorn with which she had hitherto regarded a world chiefly made up of
inferior beings, the mellowing influence of maturity? So we might have
said, had it not been that after this climax of production she never
spake word more in the medium of fiction. Had she told the world
everything she had to say? Could she indeed say nothing but what she had
seen and known in her limited experience--the trials of school and
governessing, the longing of women, the pangs of solitude? That strange
form of imagination which can deal only with fact, and depict nothing
but what is under its eyes, is in its way perhaps the most impressive of
all--especially when inspired by the remorseless lights of that keen
outward vision which is unmitigated by any softening of love for the
race, any embarrassing toleration as to feelings and motives. It is
unfortunately true in human affairs that those who expect a bad ending
to everything, and suspect a motive at least dubious to every action,
prove right in a great number of cases, and that the qualities of truth
and realism have been appropriated to their works by almost universal
consent. Indeed there are some critics who think this the only true form
of art. But it is at the same time a power with many limitations. The
artist who labours, as M. Zola does, searching into every dust-heap, as
if he could find out human nature, the only thing worth depicting, with
all its closely hidden secrets, all its flying indistinguishable tones,
all its infinite gradations of feeling, by that nauseous process, or by
a roaring progress through the winds, upon a railway brake, or the visit
of a superficial month to the most complicated, the most subtle of
cities--must lay up for himself and for his reader many disappointments
and deceptions: but the science of artistic study, as exemplified in
him, had not been invented in Charlotte Bronte's day.
She did not attempt to go and see things with the intention of
representing them; she was therefore limited to the representation of
those things which naturally in the course of life came under her eyes.
She knew, though only as a child, the management and atmosphere of a
great school, and set it forth, branding a great institution with an
insufferable stigma, justly or unjustly, who knows? She went to another
school and turned out every figure in it for our inspection--a community
all jealous, spiteful, suspicious, clandestine: even the chance pupil
with no particular relation to her story or herself, painted with all
her frivolities for the edification of the world did not escape. "She
was Miss So-and-So," say the army of commentators who have followed Miss
Bronte, picking up all the threads, so that the grand-daughter of the
girl who had the misfortune to be in the Brussels Pensionnat along with
that remorseless artist may be able to study the character of her
ancestress. The public we fear loves this kind of art, however,
notwithstanding all its drawbacks.
On the other hand probably no higher inspiration could have set before
us so powerfully the image of M. Paul. Thus we are made acquainted with
the best and the worst which can be effected by this method--the base in
all their baseness, the excellent all the dearer for their
characteristic faults: but the one representation scarcely less
offensive than the other to the victim. Would it be less trying to the
individual to be thus caught, identified, written out large in the light
of love and glowing adoration, than in the more natural light of scorn?
I know not indeed which would be the worst ordeal to go through, to be
drawn like Madame Beck, suspicious, stealthy, with watchful eyes
appearing out of every corner, surprising every incautious word, than to
be put upon the scene in the other manner, with all your peccadilloes
exposed in the light of admiration and fondness, and yourself put to
play the part of hero and lover. The point of view of the public is one
thing, that of the victim quite another. We are told that Miss Bronte,
perhaps with a momentary compunction for what she had done, believed
herself to have prevented all injurious effects by securing that
"Villette" should not be published in Brussels, or translated into the
French tongue, both of them of course perfectly futile hopes since the
very desire to hinder its appearance was a proof that this appearance
would be of unusual interest. The fury of the lady exposed in all her
stealthy ways could scarcely have been less than the confusion of her
spouse when he found himself held up to the admiration of his town as
Lucy Snowe's captivating lover. To be sure it may be said the public has
nothing to do with this. These individuals are dead and gone, and no
exposure can hurt them any longer, whereas the gentle reader lives for
ever, and goes on through the generations, handing on to posterity his
delight in M. Paul. But all the same it is a cruel and in reality an
immoral art; and it has this great disadvantage, that its area is
extremely circumscribed, especially when the artist lives most of her
life in a Yorkshire parsonage amid the moors, where so few notable
persons come in her way.
* * * * *
There was however one subject of less absolute realism which Charlotte
Bronte had at her command, having experienced in her own person and seen
her nearest friends under the experience, of that solitude and longing
of women, of which she has made so remarkable an exposition. The long
silence of life without an adventure or a change, the forlorn gaze out
at windows which never show any one coming who can rouse the slightest
interest in the mind, the endless years and days which pass and pass,
carrying away the bloom, extinguishing the lights of youth, bringing a
dreary middle age before which the very soul shrinks, while yet the
sufferer feels how strong is the current of life in her own veins, and
how capable she is of all the active duties of existence--this was the
essence and soul of the existence she knew best. Was there no help for
it? Must the women wait and long and see their lives thrown away, and
have no power to save themselves?
The position in itself so tragic is one which can scarcely be expressed
without calling forth an inevitable ridicule, a laugh at the best, more
often a sneer at the women whose desire for a husband is thus betrayed.
Shirley and Caroline Helston both cried out for that husband with an
indignation, a fire and impatience, a sense of wrong and injury, which
stopped the laugh for the moment. It might be ludicrous but it was
horribly genuine and true. Note there was nothing sensual about these
young women. It was life they wanted; they knew nothing of the grosser
thoughts which the world with its jeers attributes to them: of such
thoughts they were unconscious in a primitive innocence which perhaps
only women understand. They wanted their life, their place in the world,
the rightful share of women in the scheme of nature. Why did not it come
to them? The old patience in which women have lived for all the
centuries fails now and again in a keen moment of energy when some one
arises who sees no reason why she should endure this forced inaction, or
why she should invent for herself inferior ways of working and give up
her birthright, which is to carry on the world.
The reader was horrified with these sentiments from the lips of young
women. The women were half ashamed, yet more than half stirred and
excited by the outcry, which was true enough if indelicate. All very
well to talk of women working for their living, finding new channels for
themselves, establishing their independence. How much have we said of
all that, endeavouring to persuade ourselves! Charlotte Bronte had the
courage of her opinions. It was not education nor a trade that her women
wanted. It was not a living but their share in life, a much more
legitimate object had that been the way to secure it, or had there been
any way to secure it in England. Miss Bronte herself said correct things
about the protection which a trade is to a woman, keeping her from a
mercenary marriage; but this was not in the least the way of her
heroines. They wanted to be happy, no doubt, but above all things they
wanted their share in life--to have their position by the side of men,
which alone confers a natural equality, to have their shoulder to the
wheel, their hands on the reins of common life, to build up the world,
and link the generations each to each. In her philosophy marriage was
the only state which procured this, and if she did not recommend a
mercenary marriage she was at least very tolerant about its conditions,
insisting less upon love than was to be expected and with a covert
conviction in her mind that if not one man then another was better than
any complete abandonment of the larger path. Lucy Snowe for a long time
had her heart very much set on Dr. John and his placid breadth of
Englishism: but when she finally found out that to be impossible her
tears were soon dried by the prospect of Paul Emmanuel, so unlike him,
coming into his place.
Poor Charlotte Bronte! She has not been as other women, protected by the
grave from all betrayal of the episodes in her own life. Everybody has
betrayed her, and all she thought about this one and that, and every
name that was ever associated with hers. There was a Mr. Taylor from
London about whom she wrote with great freedom to her friend Miss
Nussey, telling how the little man had come, how he had gone away
without any advance in the affairs, how a chill came over her when he
appeared and she found him much less attractive than when at a distance,
yet how she liked it as little when he went away and was somewhat
excited about his first letter, and even went so far as to imagine with
a laugh that there might be possibly a dozen little Joe Taylors before
all was over. She was hard upon Miss Austen for having no comprehension
of passion, but no one could have been cooler and less impassioned than
she as she considered the question of Mr. Taylor, reluctant to come to
any decision yet disappointed when it came to nothing. There was no
longing in her mind for Mr. Taylor, but there was for life and action
and the larger paths and the little Joes.
This longing which she expressed with so much vehemence and some poetic
fervour as the burden of the lives of Shirley and her friends has been
the keynote of a great deal that has followed--the revolts and
rebellions, the wild notions about marriage, the "Sex Problem," and a
great deal more. From that first point to the prevailing discussion of
all the questions involved is a long way; but it is a matter of logical
progression, and when once the primary matter is opened, every
enlargement of the subject may be taken as a thing to be expected.
Charlotte Bronte was in herself the embodiment of all old-fashioned
restrictions. She was proper, she was prim, her life was hedged in by
all the little rules which bind the primitive woman. But when she left
her little recluse behind and rushed into the world of imagination her
exposure of the bondage in which she sat with all her sisters was far
more daring than if she had been a woman of many experiences and knew
what she was speaking of. She did know the longing, the discontent, the
universal contradiction and contrariety which is involved in that
condition of unfulfilment to which so many grey and undeveloped lives
are condemned. For her and her class, which did not speak of it,
everything depended upon whether the woman married or did not marry.
Their thoughts were thus artificially fixed to one point in the horizon,
but their ambition was neither ignoble nor unclean. It was bold, indeed,
in proportion to its almost ridiculous innocence, and want of perception
of any grosser side. Their share in life, their part in the mutual
building of the house, was what they sought. But the seed she thus sowed
has come to many growths which would have appalled Charlotte Bronte.
Those who took their first inspiration from this cry of hers, have quite
forgotten what it was she wanted, which was not emancipation but an
extended duty. But while it would be very unjust to blame her for the
vagaries that have followed and to which nothing could be less desirable
than any building of the house or growth of the race, any responsibility
or service--we must still believe that it was she who drew the curtain
first aside and opened the gates to imps of evil meaning, polluting and
profaning the domestic hearth.
The marriage which--after all these wild embodiments of the longing and
solitary heart which could not consent to abandon its share in life,
after Shirley and Lucy Snowe, and that complex unity of three female
souls all unfulfilled, which had now been broken by death--she accepted
in the end of her life, is the strangest commentary upon all that went
before, or rather, upon all the literary and spiritual part of her
history, though it was a quite appropriate ending to Mr. Bronte's
daughter, and even to the writer of those sober letters which discussed
Mr. Taylor, whether he should or should not be encouraged, and how it
was a little disappointing after all to see him go away. Her final
suitor was one of the class which she had criticised so scathingly, one
who, it might have been thought, would scarcely have ventured to enter
the presence or brave the glance of so penetrating an eye, but who would
seem to have brought all the urgency of a _grand passion_ to the sombre
parlour of the parsonage, to the afternoon stillness of the lonely woman
who would not seem to have suspected anything of the kind till it was
poured out before her without warning. She was startled and confused by
his declaration and appeal, never apparently having contemplated the
possibility of any such occurrence; and in the interval which followed
the father raged and resisted, and the lover did not conceal his
heartbroken condition but suffered without complaining while the lady
looked on wistful, touched and attracted by the unlooked-for love, and
gradually melting towards that, though indifferent to the man who
offered it. Mr. Bronte evidently thought that if this now distinguished
daughter who had been worshipped among the great people in London, and
talked of in all the newspapers, married at all in her mature age, it
should be some one distinguished like herself, and not the mere curate
who was the natural fate of every clergyman's daughter, the simplest and
least known.
Charlotte meanwhile said no word, but saw the curate enact various
tragic follies of love for her sake with a sort of awe and wonder,
astonished to find herself thus possessed still of the charm which none
are so sure as women that only youth and beauty can be expected to
possess. And she had never had any beauty, and, though she was not old,
was no longer young. It is a conventional fiction that a woman still in
the thirties is beyond the exercise of that power. Indeed, it would be
hard to fix the age at which the spell departs. Certainly the demeanour
of Mr. Nicholls gave her full reason to believe that it had not departed
from her. He faltered in the midst of the service, grew pale, almost
lost his self-possession when he suddenly saw her among the kneeling
figures round the altar; and no doubt this rather shocking and startling
exhibition of his feelings was more pardonable to the object of so much
emotion than it was likely to have been to any other spectator. The
romance is a little strange, but yet it is a romance in its quaint
ecclesiastical way. And soon Charlotte was drawn still more upon her
lover's side by the violence of her father. It was decided that the
curate was to go, and that this late gleam of love-making was to be
extinguished and the old dim atmosphere to settle down again for ever.
Finally, however, the mere love of love, which had always been more to
her than any personal inclination, and the horror of that permanent
return to the twilight of dreamy living against which she had struggled
all her life, overcame her, and gave her courage; but she married
characteristically, not as women marry who are carried to a new home and
make a new beginning in life, but retaining all the circumstances of the
old and receiving her husband into her father's house where she had
already passed through so many fluctuations and dreamed so many dreams,
and which was full to overflowing with the associations of the past.