of married life. The wife, new to her duties, was engaged in mastering
them with all the patience, self-suppression, and industry which had
characterized her throughout her life. Her husband was now her first
thought; and he took the time which had formerly been devoted to
reading, study, thought, and writing. But occasionally the pressure she
was forced to put upon herself was very severe. Mr. Nicholls had never
been attracted toward her by her literary fame: with literary effort
he had no sympathy, and upon the whole he would rather that his wife
should lay aside her pen entirely than that she should gain any fresh
triumphs in the world of letters. So she submitted, and with cheerful
courage repressed that “gift” which had been her solace in sorrows deep
and many. Yet once the spell was too strong to be resisted, and she
hastily wrote a few pages of a new story called ‘Emma,’ in which once
more she proposed to deal with her favorite theme--the history of a
friendless girl. One would fain have seen how she would have treated
her subject, now that “the color of her thoughts” had been changed, and
that a happy marriage had introduced her to a new phase of that life
which she had studied so closely and so constantly. But it was not to
be.
T. WEMYSS REID: ‘Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Her death.]
[Charlotte had been ill since January, 1855.] About the third week in
March there was a change; a low wandering delirium came on; and in it
she begged constantly for food and even for stimulants. She swallowed
eagerly now; but it was too late. Wakening for an instant from this
stupor of intelligence, she saw her husband’s woe-worn face, and caught
the sound of some murmured words of prayer, that God would spare her.
“Oh!” she whispered forth, “I am not going to die, am I? He will not
separate us, we have been so happy.”
Early on Saturday morning, March 31st, the solemn tolling of Haworth
church-bell spoke forth the fact of her death to the villagers who had
known her from a child, and whose hearts shivered within them as they
thought of the two sitting desolate and alone in the old grey house.
MRS. GASKELL: ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Charlotte’s and Emily’s work contrasted.]
[Emily] tells us what she saw; and what she saw and what she was
incapable of seeing are equally characteristic. All the wildness
of that moorland, all the secrets of those lonely farms, all the
capabilities of the one tragedy of passion and weakness that touched
her solitary life, she divined and appropriated: but not the life of
the village at her feet, not the bustle of the mills, the riots, the
sudden alternation of wealth and poverty, not the incessant rivalry of
church and chapel; and while the West Riding has known the proto-type
of nearly every person and nearly every place in ‘Jane Eyre’ and
‘Shirley,’ not a single character in ‘Wuthering Heights’ ever climbed
the hills round Haworth.
Say that two foreigners have passed though Staffordshire, leaving us
their reports of what they have seen. The first, going by day, will
tell us of the hideous blackness of the country, but yet more, no
doubt, of that awful, patient struggle of man with fire and darkness,
of the grim courage of those unknown lives; and he would see what they
toil for, women with little children in their arms; and he would notice
the blue sky beyond the smoke, doubly precious for such horrible
environment. But the second traveller has journeyed through the night;
neither squalor nor ugliness, neither sky nor children, has he seen,
only a vast stretch of blackness shot through with flaming fires, or
here and there burned to a dull red by heated furnaces; and before
these, strange toilers, half naked, scarcely human, and red in the
leaping flicker and gleam of the fire. The meaning of their work he
could not see, but a fearful and impressive phantasmagoria of flame
and blackness and fiery energies at work in the encompassing night. So
differently did the black country of this world appear to Charlotte,
clear-seeing and compassionate, and to Emily Brontë, a traveller
through the shadows.
A. M. F. ROBINSON: ‘Emily Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Their opposite methods.]
[Sidenote: Charlotte’s studies from the life.]
The habit of direct study from life which has given us, among its
finest and most precious results, these two contrasted figures of
Shirley Keeldar and Lucy Snowe, affords yet another point of contrast
or distinction between the manner and motive of work respectively
perceptible in the design of either sister. Emily Brontë, like William
Blake, would probably have said, or at least would presumably have
felt, that such study after the model was to her impossible--an attempt
but too certain to diminish her imaginative insight and disable her
creative hand; while Charlotte evidently never worked so well as when
painting more or less directly from nature. Almost the only apparent
exception, as far as we--the run of her readers--know, is the wonderful
and incomparable figure of Rochester.... In most cases probably the
design begun by means of the camera was transferred for completion to
the canvas. The likeness of Mr. Helstone to Mr. Brontë, for example,
was thus at once enlarged and subdued, heightened and modified, by the
skilful and noble instinct which kept it always within the gracious and
natural bounds prescribed and maintained by the fine tact of filial
respect.
[Sidenote: The gift of the Brontë sisters.]
The gift of which I would speak is that of a power to make us feel in
every nerve, at every step forward which our imagination is compelled
to take under the guidance of another’s, that thus and not otherwise,
but in all things altogether even as we are told and shown, it was
and it must have been with the human figures set before us in their
action and their suffering; that thus and not otherwise they absolutely
must and would have felt and thought and spoken under the proposed
conditions. It is something for a writer to have achieved if he has
made it worth our fancy’s while to consider by the light of imaginative
reason whether the creatures of his own fancy would in actual fact
and life have done as he has made them do or not; it is something,
and by comparison it is much. But no definite terms of comparison
will suffice to express how much more than this it is to have done
what the youngest of capable readers must feel on first opening ‘Jane
Eyre’ that the writer of its very first pages has shown herself
competent to do.... Even in the best and greatest works of our best
and greatest we do not find this one great good quality so innate, so
immanent as in hers. At most we find the combination of event with
character, the coincidence of action with disposition, the coherence
of consequences with emotions, to be rationally credible and acceptable
to the natural sense of a reasonable faith. We rarely or never feel
that, given the characters, the incidents become inevitable; that
such passion must needs bring forth none other than such action, such
emotions cannot choose but find their only issue in such events. And
certainly we do not feel, what it seems to me the highest triumph of
inspired intelligence and creative instinct to succeed in making us
feel, that the main-spring of all, the central relation of the whole,
“the very pulse of the machine,” has in it this occult inexplicable
force of nature. But when Catherine Earnshaw says to Nelly Dean,
“I _am_ Heathcliff!” and when Jane Eyre answers Edward Rochester’s
question, whether she feels in him the absolute sense of fitness and
correspondence to herself which he feels himself in her, with the words
which close and crown the history of their twin-born spirits--“to the
finest fibre of my nature, sir,”--we feel to the finest fibre of our
own that these are no mere words. On this ground at least it might
for once be not unpardonable to borrow their standing reference or
illustration from the comparative school of critics, ... and say, as
was said on another score of Emily Brontë in particular by Sydney
Dobell, that either sister in this single point “has done no less”
than Shakespeare. As easily might we imagine a change of the mutual
relations between the characters of Shakespeare as a corresponding
revolution or reversal of conditions among theirs.
[Sidenote: Emily a true poet.]
There was a dark unconscious instinct as of primitive nature-worship
in the passionate great genius of Emily Brontë, which found no
corresponding quality in her sister’s.... It is possible that to take
full delight in Emily Brontë’s book one must have something by natural
inheritance of her instinct and something by earliest association of
her love for the same special points of earth--the same lights and
sounds and colors and odors, and sights and shapes of the same fierce
free landscape of tenantless and fenceless moor; but however that may
be, it was assuredly with no less justice of insight and accuracy of
judgment than humility of self-knowledge and fidelity of love that
Charlotte in her day of solitary fame assigned to her dead sister the
crown of poetic honor which she has rightfully disclaimed for herself.
Full of poetic quality as her own work is throughout, that quality
is never condensed or crystallised into the proper and final form of
verse. But the pure note of absolutely right expression for things
inexpressible in full by prose at its highest point of adequacy--the
formal inspiration of sound which at once reveals itself, and which can
fully reveal itself by metrical embodiment alone, in the symphonies and
antiphonies of regular word-music and definite instinctive modulation
of corresponsive tones--this is what Emily had for her birthright as
certainly as Charlotte had it not.... The final expression in verse of
Emily’s passionate and inspired intelligence was to be uttered from
lips already whitened though not yet chilled by the present shadow of
unterrifying death. No last words of poet or hero or sage or saint
were ever worthy of longer or more reverent remembrance than that
appeal which is so far above and beyond a prayer ... at once fiery and
solemn, full alike of resignation and of rapture, as wholly stripped
and cleared and lightened from all burdens and all bandages and all
incrustations of creed as it is utterly pervaded and possessed by the
sublime and irrefutable passion of belief.
A. C. SWINBURNE: ‘A Note on Charlotte Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: George Eliot on ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Villette.’]
I have read ‘Jane Eyre,’ and shall be glad to know what you admire
in it. All self-sacrifice is good, but one would like it to be in a
somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a
man soul and body to a putrefying carcass. However, the book _is_
interesting; only I wish the characters would talk a little less like
the heroes and heroines of police reports.
GEORGE ELIOT: _Letter_ to Charles Bray, 1848.
* * * * *
I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I
have been reading ‘Villette,’ a still more wonderful book than ‘Jane
Eyre.’ There is something almost preternatural in its power.
GEORGE ELIOT: _Letter_ to Mrs. Bray, in ‘George Eliot’s Life,’ 1853.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Thackeray on Charlotte Brontë’s works and life.]
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 honor, 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!... 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 among 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!
WM. M. THACKERAY: ‘Roundabout Papers.’
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Haworth Churchyard.
[9] A name playfully applied to Emily by her sisters.
MARIAN EVANS (LEWES) (CROSS).
(GEORGE ELIOT.)
1819-1880.
MARIAN EVANS (LEWES) (CROSS).
(GEORGE ELIOT.)
Mary Ann Evans was born at Arbury Farm, in the parish of Chilvers
Coton, on the 22nd of November, 1819. She was the third and youngest
child of Robert Evans and his second wife Christiana Pearson. In
1820 the family removed to Griff House, on the Arbury estate, where
Mary Ann’s happy childhood was passed. At five years of age she was
sent with her sister to Miss Lathom’s boarding-school at Attleboro;
in her eighth or ninth year, to Miss Wallington’s at Nuneaton, where
Miss Lewis, the principal governess, and “an ardent Evangelical
Churchwoman,” became her intimate friend, exercising great influence
over her. In her thirteenth year she was transferred to the school of
the Miss Franklins at Coventry. In the summer of 1836 Mrs. Evans died;
in the following spring the elder sister, Christiana, was married;
and thenceforward Mary Ann took entire charge of the Griff household,
engaging in various studies and active charities at the same time.
In March, 1841, Mr. Robert Evans and his daughter removed to a house
on the Foleshill road, near Coventry; Griff being given up to Isaac,
the brother, who had recently married. In this new neighborhood Miss
Evans formed the friendship of several congenial people--notably Mr.
and Mrs. Charles Bray, and Miss Sara Hennell, a sister of the latter.
The impressible young woman, who had till now held her eager nature
“buckramed in formalities,” adopted the tone of her friends’ thought
the more rapidly and easily because of the inevitable reaction from
artificial restraints. She became an agnostic--though neither this nor
any other single word fully explains her position.
In the spring of 1844 she took up the translation of Strauss’s ‘Life
of Jesus,’ which had already been begun by Mrs. Charles Hennell. Miss
Evans did not complete the work until April, 1846.
On the 31st of May, 1849, Mr. Robert Evans died, after a long illness.
The Brays persuaded his daughter, who was worn out by anxiety and
hard work, to accompany them in a trip to the Continent. At Geneva,
where they arrived in July, she decided to remain a while, living at
a _pension_, and carrying on various studies. In October she left the
_pension_ to board in the family of M. d’Albert Durade, an artist. He
and his wife became her fast friends; M. Durade painted her portrait,
and subsequently translated some of her works into French.
Miss Evans returned to England in March, 1850, and, after visiting her
brother and sister, made her home at Rosehill with the Brays for more
than a year, with occasional visits to London. At the end of September,
1851, she accepted the position of assistant editor of The Westminster
Review, and went to board with the family of the publisher, Mr.
Chapman, in the Strand. She now became acquainted with Herbert Spencer,
George Henry Lewes, and other leading thinkers and writers. In 1854 was
published her translation of Feuerbach’s ‘Essence of Christianity,’
with her name (now written _Marian_ Evans), on the title-page; this,
Mr. Cross informs us, was the only time her real name ever appeared in
connection with her work.
In July, 1854, Marian Evans consented to become the wife of George
Henry Lewes, though a formal and legal marriage was impossible. They
at once went abroad, where they remained until March, 1855; spending
the greater part of the time at Weimar and Berlin. After their return
to England they lived for over three years in lodgings at Richmond,
both working hard, though the health of neither was good. Mrs. Lewes
contributed at this time to The Leader and The Westminster Review.
She also finished a translation of Spinoza’s ‘Ethics,’ which she had
commenced abroad.
In September, 1856, she began, as an experiment, to write fiction. In
November _The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton_ was forwarded
to the Blackwoods by Mr. Lewes as the work of a friend of his. It was
published in Blackwood’s Magazine early in 1857, and fifty guineas paid
for it. An arrangement was made by which “George Eliot” was to supply
further _Scenes from Clerical Life_. _Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story_ came
next, followed by _Janet’s Repentance_. In December these stories were
issued in a volume by the Blackwoods, and the author received £120 for
the first edition.
ADAM BEDE, her first novel, was published in 1859. She received £800
for the copyright during four years. The book was received with
enthusiasm. It was followed by THE MILL ON THE FLOSS (1860), SILAS
MARNER (1861), ROMOLA (1863), FELIX HOLT (1866), _The Spanish Gypsy_,
a drama (1868), MIDDLEMARCH (1871-2), _Poems_, collected “1874,” DANIEL
DERONDA (1876), and _The Impressions of Theophrastus Such_ (1879). The
short story called _The Lifted Veil_ was published in Blackwood’s,
July, 1859; _Brother Jacob_ appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, July,
1864. ROMOLA also made its appearance in The Cornhill, the publishers
paying for it the sum of £7,000. £5,000 was received from the
Blackwoods for FELIX HOLT; and the profits of MIDDLEMARCH and DANIEL
DERONDA were still greater.
In February, 1859, Mr. and Mrs. Lewes removed to Holly Lodge,
Wandsworth; in December, 1860, to 16 Blandford Square; and in November,
1863, to their permanent home, “The Priory,” 21 North Bank, Regent’s
Park. They purchased in 1876 a country-house at Witley, near Godalming,
Surrey. They were both fond of travelling, and the record of their many
continental journeys is full of interest. It was their custom to leave
town at once as soon as George Eliot had finished a book.
In November, 1878, occurred the death of Mr. Lewes. For some time
George Eliot remained in seclusion, broken down by grief. She edited
Mr. Lewes’ MSS., and established as a memorial the George Henry Lewes
studentship at Cambridge.
In May, 1880, she was married to Mr. John Walter Cross, who had long
been the dear friend of herself and Mr. Lewes. Her marriage created
general surprise. It may best be understood by those who have become
acquainted, through Mr. Cross’s delicate and conscientious work,
‘George Eliot’s Life,’ with the needs of her singularly sensitive
nature.
Mr. and Mrs. Cross immediately left England for the Continent,
returning in July to Witley. Mrs. Cross had a long illness in the
autumn, which left her much weakened. On the 22d of December, 1880, she
died at No. 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, having been confined to the house
only four days.
Her husband concludes her biography with the words: “Her spirit joined
‘---- that choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.’”
Nor can any other words be so fit as these of her own--words wherein
“the precious life-blood of a master spirit” is “embalmed and treasured
up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Early home.]
[Sidenote: An anecdote of her childhood.]
The road ascends through a deep cutting overhung by trees which cling
to the rocky bank wherever they can find roothold, while festoons of
ivy catch every ray of sunlight on their glossy leaves. Past the wood,
green fields stretch away on the right of the road; and beyond them,
through the branches of fir, elm, oak and birch-trees, a glint of
red brick tells us we have reached our goal, for there stands Griff
House.... It is a pleasant, substantial house, built of warm red brick,
with old-fashioned, small-paned casement windows. The walls are almost
hidden by creepers, a glorious old pear-tree, roses and jessamine,
and over one end a tangle of luxuriant ivy. Across the smooth green
lawn and its flower-beds an old stone vase covered with golden lichen
made a point of color beneath the silver stems of a great birch-tree.
Outside the light iron fence a group of sheep were bleating below a
gnarled and twisted oak. Behind them rose the rich purple-brown wood we
had come through, and beyond the wood we caught glimpses of far-away
blue distance, swelling uplands and wide-stretching valleys, with
here and there a huge chimney sending up a column of black smoke or
white puff of steam. On the house-roof pigeons were cooing forth their
satisfaction at the sunshine. From the yew-tree close by, a concert of
small chirping voices told that Spring was coming.... Within, the house
is much in the same state as in the days of Mary Ann Evans’s girlhood.
She went for a short time to school at Nuneaton, coming home from
Saturday till Monday; but one week, in spite of her love of learning,
the little maiden’s heart failed her, and when the time came to start
for school she had disappeared. After hours of search, she was at last
discovered hiding under the great four-post mahogany bed, which was
shown us in its original place in the spare room.
ROSE G. KINGSLEY: ‘George Eliot’s County,’ in _The Century_, July, 1885.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Her father.]
The father was a remarkable man, and many of the leading traits in his
character are to be found in Adam Bede and in Caleb Garth--although, of
course, neither of these is a portrait.
[Sidenote: Her mother.]
[Sidenote: Not a precocious child.]
[Sidenote: “A large slow-growing nature”: Mr. Cross’s important
characterization.]
His second wife was a woman with an unusual amount of natural force;
a shrewd, practical person, with a considerable dash of the Mrs.
Poyser vein in her. Hers was an affectionate, warm-hearted nature,
and her children, on whom she cast “the benediction of her gaze,” were
thoroughly attached to her. She came of a race of yeomen, and her
social position was, therefore, rather better than her husband’s at the
time of their marriage. Her family are, no doubt, prototypes of the
Dodsons in the “Mill on the Floss.” The little girl very early became
possessed with the idea that she was going to be a personage in the
world; and Mr. Charles Lewes has told me an anecdote which George Eliot
related of herself as characteristic of this period of her childhood.
When she was only four years old she recollected playing on the piano,
of which she did not know one note, in order to impress the servant
with a proper notion of her acquirements and generally distinguished
position. This was the time when the love for her brother grew into the
child’s affections. She used always to be at his heels, insisting on
doing everything he did. She was not, in these baby-days, in the least
precocious in learning. In fact, her half-sister, Mrs. Houghton, who
was some fourteen years her senior, told me that the child learned to
read with some difficulty; but Mr. Isaac Evans says that this was not
from any slowness in apprehension, but because she liked playing so
much better. Mere sharpness, however, was not a characteristic of her
mind. Hers was a large, slow-growing nature; and I think it is, at any
rate, certain that there was nothing of the infant phenomenon about
her. In her moral development she showed, from the earliest years,
the trait that was most marked in her all through life, namely, the
absolute need of some one person who should be all in all to her, and
to whom she should be all in all. Very jealous in her affections, and
easily moved to smiles or tears, she was of a nature capable of the
keenest enjoyment or the keenest suffering, knowing “all the wealth
and all the woe” of a pre-eminently exclusive disposition. She was
affectionate, proud, and sensitive in the highest degree.
The sort of happiness that belongs to this budding-time of life, from
the age of three to five, is apt to impress itself very strongly on the
memory; and it is this period which is referred to in the Brother and
Sister Sonnet, “But were another childhood’s world my share, I would be
born a little sister there.”
J. W. CROSS: ‘George Eliot’s Life, as related in her Letters and
Journals.’ New York: Harper & Bros., 1885.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: At the Miss Franklin’s school.]