The controversy here is with those who admire Charlotte Bronte throughout
her career. She altered greatly. She did, in fact, inherit a manner of
English that had been strained beyond restoration, fatigued beyond
recovery, by the "corrupt following" of Gibbon; and there was within her
a sense of propriety that caused her to conform. Straitened and serious
elder daughter of her time, she kept the house of literature. She
practised those verbs, to evince, to reside, to intimate, to peruse. She
wrote "communicating instruction" for teaching; "an extensive and
eligible connexion"; "a small competency"; "an establishment on the
Continent"; "It operated as a barrier to further intercourse"; and of a
child (with a singular unfitness with childhood) "For the toys he
possesses he seems to have contracted a partiality amounting to
affection." I have been already reproached for a word on Gibbon written
by way of parenthesis in the course of an appreciation of some other
author. Let me, therefore, repeat that I am writing of the corrupt
following of that apostle and not of his own style. Gibbon's grammar is
frequently weak, but the corrupt followers have something worse than poor
grammar. Gibbon set the fashion of "the latter" and "the former." Our
literature was for at least half a century strewn with the wreckage of
Gibbon. "After suppressing a competitor who had assumed the purple at
Mentz, he refused to gratify his troops with the plunder of the
rebellious city," writes the great historian. When Mr. Micawber
confesses "gratifying emotions of no common description" he conforms to a
lofty and a distant Gibbon. So does Mr. Pecksniff when he says of the
copper-founder's daughter that she "has shed a vision on my path
refulgent in its nature." And when an author, in a work on "The Divine
Comedy," recently told us that Paolo and Francesca were to receive from
Dante "such alleviation as circumstances would allow," that also is a
shattered, a waste Gibbon, a waif of Gibbon. For Johnson less than
Gibbon inflated the English our fathers inherited; because Johnson did
not habitually or often use imagery, whereas Gibbon did use habitual
imagery, and such use is what deprives a language of elasticity, and
leaves it either rigid or languid, oftener languid. Encumbered by this
drift and refuse of English, Charlotte Bronte yet achieved the miracle of
her vocabulary. It is less wonderful that she should have appeared out
of such a parsonage than that she should have arisen out of such a
language.
A re-reading of her works is always a new amazing of her reader who turns
back to review the harvest of her English. It must have been with
rapture that she claimed her own simplicity. And with what a moderation,
how temperately, and how seldom she used her mastery! To the last she
has an occasional attachment to her bonds; for she was not only fire and
air. In one passage of her life she may remind us of the little
colourless and thrifty hen-bird that Lowell watched nest-building with
her mate, and cutting short the flutterings and billings wherewith he
would joyously interrupt the business; Charlotte's nesting bird was a
clergyman. He came, lately affianced, for a week's visit to her
parsonage, and she wrote to her friend before his arrival: "My little
plans have been disarranged by an intimation that Mr.--is coming on
Monday"; and afterwards, in reference to her sewing, "he hindered me for
a full week."
In alternate pages _Villette_ is a book of spirit and fire, and a novel
of illiberal rancour, of ungenerous, uneducated anger, ungentle, ignoble.
In order to forgive its offences, we have to remember in its author's
favour not her pure style set free, not her splendour in literature, but
rather the immeasurable sorrow of her life. To read of that sorrow again
is to open once more a wound which most men perhaps, certainly most
women, received into their hearts in childhood. For the Life of
Charlotte Bronte is one of the first books of biography put into the
hands of a child, to whom _Jane Eyre_ is allowed only in passages. We
are young when we first hear in what narrow beds "the three are laid"--the
two sisters and the brother--and in what a bed of living insufferable
memories the one left lay alone, reviewing the hours of their death--alone
in the sealed house that was only less narrow than their graves. The
rich may set apart and dedicate a room, the poor change their street, but
Charlotte Bronte, in the close captivity of the fortunes of mediocrity,
rested in the chair that had been her dying sister's, and held her
melancholy bridals in the dining room that had been the scene of terrible
and reluctant death.
But closer than the conscious house was the conscious mind. Locked with
intricate wards within the unrelaxing and unlapsing thoughts of this
lonely sister, dwelt a sorrow inconsolable. It is well for the perpetual
fellowship of mankind that no child should read this life and not take
therefrom a perdurable scar, albeit her heart was somewhat frigid towards
childhood, and she died before her motherhood could be born.
Mistress of some of the best prose of her century, Charlotte Bronte was
subject to a Lewes, a Chorley, a Miss Martineau: that is, she suffered
what in Italian is called _soggezione_ in their presence. When she had
met six minor contemporary writers--by-products of literature--at dinner,
she had a headache and a sleepless night. She writes to her friend that
these contributors to the quarterly press are greatly feared in literary
London, and there is in her letter a sense of tremor and exhaustion. And
what nights did the heads of the critics undergo after the meeting?
Lewes, whose own romances are all condoned, all forgiven by time and
oblivion, who gave her lessons, who told her to study Jane Austen? The
others, whose reviews doubtless did their proportionate part in still
further hunting and harrying the tired English of their day? And before
Harriet Martineau she bore herself reverently. Harriet Martineau, albeit
a woman of masculine understanding (we may imagine we hear her
contemporaries give her the title), could not thread her way safely in
and out of two or three negatives, but wrote--about this very Charlotte
Bronte: "I did not consider the book a coarse one, though I could not
answer for it that there were no traits which, on a second leisurely
reading, I might not dislike." Mrs. Gaskell quotes the passage with no
consciousness of anything amiss.
As for Lewes's vanished lesson upon the methods of Jane Austen, it served
one only sufficient purpose. Itself is not quoted by anyone alive, but
Charlotte Bronte's rejoinder adds one to our little treasury of her
incomparable pages. If they were twenty, they are twenty-one by the
addition of this, written in a long-neglected letter and saved for us by
Mr. Shorter's research, for I believe his is the only record: "What sees
keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what
throbs fast and full, though hidden, what blood rushes through, what is
the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death--that Miss
Austen ignores."
When the author of _Jane Eyre_ faltered before six authors, more or
less, at dinner in London, was it the writer of her second-class English
who was shy? or was it the author of the passages here to follow?--and
therefore one for whom the national tongue was much the better? There
can be little doubt. The Charlotte Bronte who used the English of a
world long corrupted by "one good custom"--the good custom of Gibbon's
Latinity grown fatally popular--could at any time hold up her head
amongst her reviewers; for her there was no sensitive interior solitude
in that society. She who cowered was the Charlotte who made Rochester
recall "the simple yet sagacious grace" of Jane's first smile; she who
wrote: "I looked at my love; it shivered in my heart like a suffering
child in a cold cradle"; who wrote: "To see what a heavy lid day slowly
lifted, what a wan glance she flung upon the hills, you would have
thought the sun's fire quenched in last night's floods." This new genius
was solitary and afraid, and touched to the quick by the eyes and voice
of judges. In her worse style there was no "quick." Latin-English,
whether scholarly or unscholarly, is the mediate tongue. An unscholarly
Latin-English is proof against the world. The scholarly Latin-English
wherefrom it is disastrously derived is, in its own nobler measure, a
defence against more august assaults than those of criticism. In the
strength of it did Johnson hold parley with his profounder sorrows--hold
parley (by his phrase), make terms (by his definition), give them at last
lodging and entertainment after sentence and treaty.
And the meaner office of protection against reviewers and the world was
doubtless done by the meaner Latinity. The author of the phrase "The
child contracted a partiality for his toys" had no need to fear any
authors she might meet at dinner. Against Charlotte Bronte's sorrows her
worse manner of English never stands for a moment. Those vain phrases
fall from before her face and her bared heart. To the heart, to the
heart she took the shafts of her griefs. She tells them therefore as she
suffered them, vitally and mortally. "A great change approached.
Affliction came in that shape which to anticipate is dread; to look back
on, grief. My sister Emily first declined. Never in all her life had
she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger
now. She made haste to leave us." "I remembered where the three were
laid--in what narrow, dark dwellings." "Do you know this place? No, you
never saw it; but you recognize the nature of these trees, this
foliage--the cypress, the willow, the yew. Stone crosses like these are
not unfamiliar to you, nor are these dim garlands of everlasting flowers.
Here is the place." "Then the watcher approaches the patient's pillow,
and sees a new and strange moulding of the familiar features, feels at
once that the insufferable moment draws nigh." In the same passage comes
another single word of genius, "the sound that so wastes our strength."
And, fine as "wastes," is the "wronged" of another sentence--"some
wronged and fettered wild beast or bird."
It is easy to gather such words, more difficult to separate the best from
such a mingled page as that on "Imagination": "A spirit, softer and
better than human reason, had descended with quiet flight to the waste";
and "My hunger has this good angel appeased with food sweet and strange";
and "This daughter of Heaven remembered me to-night; she saw me weep, and
she came with comfort; 'Sleep,' she said, 'sleep sweetly--I gild thy
dreams.'" "Was this feeling dead? I do not know, but it was buried.
Sometimes I thought the tomb unquiet."
Perhaps the most "eloquent" pages are unluckily those wherein we miss the
friction--friction of water to the oar, friction of air to the
pinion--friction that sensibly proves the use, the buoyancy, the act of
language. Sometimes an easy eloquence resembles the easy labours of the
daughters of Danaus. To draw water in a sieve is an easy art, rapid and
relaxed.
But no laxity is ever, I think, to be found in her brief passages of
landscape. "The keen, still cold of the morning was succeeded, later in
the day, by a sharp breathing from the Russian wastes; the cold zone
sighed over the temperate zone and froze it fast." "Not till the
destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work would he fold
the wings whose waft was thunder, the tremor of whose plumes was storm."
"The night is not calm: the equinox still struggles in its storms. The
wild rains of the day are abated: the great single cloud disappears and
rolls away from Heaven, not passing and leaving a sea all sapphire, but
tossed buoyant before a continued, long-sounding, high-rushing moonlight
tempest. . . No Endymion will watch for his goddess to-night: there are
no flocks on the mountains." See, too, this ocean: "The sway of the
whole Great Deep above a herd of whales rushing through the livid and
liquid thunder down from the frozen zone." And this promise of the
visionary Shirley: "I am to be walking by myself on deck, rather late of
an August evening, watching and being watched by a full harvest moon:
something is to rise white on the surface of the sea, over which that
moon mounts silent, and hangs glorious. . . I think I hear it cry with an
articulate voice. . . I show you an image fair as alabaster emerging from
the dim wave."
Charlotte Bronte knew well the experience of dreams. She seems to have
undergone the inevitable dream of mourners--the human dream of the
Labyrinth, shall I call it? the uncertain spiritual journey in search of
the waiting and sequestered dead, which is the obscure subject of the
"Eurydice" of Coventry Patmore's Odes. There is the lately dead, in
exile, remote, betrayed, foreign, indifferent, sad, forsaken by some
vague malice or neglect, sought by troubled love astray.
In Charlotte Bronte's page there is an autumnal and tempestuous dream. "A
nameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very tone
of a visitation from eternity. . . Suffering brewed in temporal or
calculable measure tastes not as this suffering tasted." Finally, is
there any need to cite the passage of _Jane Eyre_ that contains the
avowal, the vigil in the garden? Those are not words to be forgotten.
Some tell you that a fine style will give you the memory of a scene and
not of the recording words that are the author's means. And others again
would have the phrase to be remembered foremost. Here, then, in _Jane_
_Eyre_, are both memories equal. The night is perceived, the phrase is
an experience; both have their place in the reader's irrevocable past.
"Custom intervened between me and what I naturally and inevitably loved."
"Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing in the wood?" "A waft of
wind came sweeping down the laurel walk, and trembled through the boughs
of the chestnut; it wandered away to an infinite distance. . . The
nightingale's voice was then the only voice of the hour; in listening I
again wept."
* * * * *
Whereas Charlotte Bronte walked, with exultation and enterprise, upon the
road of symbols, under the guidance of her own visiting genius, Emily
seldom went out upon those far avenues. She was one who practised
imagery sparingly. Her style had the key of an inner prose which seems
to leave imagery behind in the way of approaches--the apparelled and
arrayed approaches and ritual of literature--and so to go further and to
be admitted among simple realities and antitypes.
Charlotte Bronte also knew that simple goal, but she loved her imagery.
In the passage of _Jane Eyre_ that tells of the return to Thornfield
Hall, in ruins by fire, she bespeaks her reader's romantic attention to
an image which in truth is not all golden. She has moments, on the other
hand, of pure narrative, whereof each word is such a key as I spoke of
but now, and unlocks an inner and an inner plain door of spiritual
realities. There is, perhaps, no author who, simply telling what
happened, tells it with so great a significance: "Jane, did you hear that
nightingale singing in the wood?" and "She made haste to leave us." But
her characteristic calling is to images, those avenues and temples
oracular, and to the vision of symbols.
You may hear the poet of great imagery praised as a great mystic.
Nevertheless, although a great mystical poet makes images, he does not do
so in his greatest moments. He is a great mystic, because he has a full
vision of the mystery of realities, not because he has a clear invention
of similitudes.
Of many thousand kisses the poor last,
and