experiences. She was born and brought up in a bleak moorland village,
climbing steeply and grimly to the edge of heathery uplands. The bare
parsonage, with its little dark rooms, looks out on a churchyard paved
with graves. Her father was a kindly man, but essentially moody and
solitary. He took all his meals alone, walked alone, sate alone. Her
mother died of cancer, when she was but a child. Then she was sent to
an ill-managed austere school, and here when she was nine years old her
two elder sisters died. She took service two or three times as a
governess, and endured agonies of misunderstanding, suspicious of her
employers, afraid of her pupils, longing for home with an intense
yearning. Then she went out to a school at Brussels, where under the
teaching of M. Heger, a gifted professor, her mind and heart awoke, and
she formed for him a strange affection, half an intellectual devotion,
half an unconscious passion, which deprived her of her peace of mind.
Her sad and wistful letters to him, lately published, were disregarded
by him, partly because his wife was undoubtedly jealous of the
relation, partly because he was disconcerted by the emotion he had
aroused. Her brother, a brilliant, wayward, and in some ways attractive
boy, got into disgrace, and drifted home, where he tried to console
himself with drink and opium. After three years of this horrible life,
he died, and within twelve months her two surviving sisters, Emily and
Anne, developed consumption and died. As Robert Browning says, there
indeed was "trouble enough for one!"
Now it must be borne in mind that her temperament was naturally
hypochondriacal.
Let me quote a passage dealing with the same experience; it is
undoubtedly autobiographical, though it comes from Villette, into which
Charlotte Bronte threw the picture of her own solitary experiences in
Brussels. She is left alone at the pensionnat in the vacation, strained
by work and anxiety, and tortured by exhaustion, restlessness, and
sleeplessness:--
"One day, perceiving this growing illusion, I said, 'I really believe
my nerves are getting overstretched: my mind has suffered somewhat too
much; a malady is growing upon it--what shall I do? How shall I keep
well?'
"Indeed there was no way to keep well under the circumstances. At last
a day and night of peculiarly agonising depression were succeeded by
physical illness; I took perforce to my bed. About this time the Indian
summer closed, and the equinoctial storms began; and for nine dark and
wet days, of which the hours rushed on all turbulent, deaf,
dishevelled--bewildered with sounding hurricane--I lay in a strange
fever of the nerves and blood. Sleep went quite away. I used to rise in
the night, look round for her, beseech her earnestly to return. A
rattle of the window, a cry of the blast only replied--Sleep never came!
"I err. She came once, but in anger. Impatient of my importunity she
brought with her an avenging dream. By the clock of St. Jean Baptiste,
that dream remained scarce fifteen minutes--a brief space, but
sufficing to wring my whole frame with unknown anguish; to confer a
nameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very
tone of a visitation from eternity. Between twelve and one that night a
cup was forced to my lips, black, strong, strange, drawn from no well,
but filled up seething from a bottomless and boundless sea. Suffering,
brewed in temporal or calculable measure, and mixed for mortal lips,
tastes not as this suffering tasted. Having drank [sic] and woke, I
thought all was over: the end come and passed by. Trembling
fearfully--as consciousness returned--ready to cry out on some
fellow-creature to help me, only that I knew no fellow-creature was
near enough to catch the wild summons--Goton in her far distant attic
could not hear--I rose on my knees in bed. Some fearful hours went over
me; indescribably was I torn, racked and oppressed in mind. Amidst the
horrors of that dream I think the worst lay here. Methought the
well-loved dead, who had loved ME well in life, met me elsewhere
alienated; galled was my inmost spirit with an unutterable sense of
despair about the future. Motive there was none why I should try to
recover or wish to live; and yet quite unendurable was the pitiless and
haughty voice in which Death challenged me to engage his unknown
terrors. When I tried to pray I could only utter these words:--
"'From my youth up Thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled mind.'"
The deep interest of this experience is that it was endured by one who
was not only intellectually endowed beyond most women of her time, but
whose sanity, reasonableness, and moral force were conspicuously
strong. Charlotte Bronte was not one of those impulsive and imaginative
women who are the prey of every fancy. Throughout the whole of her
career, she was for ever compelling her frail and sensitive
temperament, with indomitable purpose, to perform whatever she had
undertaken to do. There never was anyone who lived so sternly by
principle and reason, or who so maintained her self-control in the face
of sorrow, disaster, unhappiness, and bereavement. She never gave way
to feeble or morbid self-accusation, and therefore the fact that she
could thus have suffered is a sign that this unnamed terror can coexist
with a dauntless courage and an essential self-command.
Here again is the cry of a desolate heart! She had been going through
her sisters' papers not long after their death, and wrote to her great
friend:
"I am both angry and surprised at myself for not being in better
spirits; for not growing accustomed, or at least resigned, to the
solitude and isolation of my lot. But my late occupation left a result,
for some days and indeed still, very painful. The reading over of
papers, the renewal of remembrances, brought back the pangs of
bereavement and occasioned a depression of spirits well-nigh
intolerable. For one or two nights I hardly knew how to get on till
morning; and when morning came I was still haunted by a sense of
sickening distress. I tell you these things because it is absolutely
necessary to me to have SOME relief. You will forgive me and not
trouble yourself, or imagine that I am one whit worse than I say. It is
quite a mental ailment, and I believe and hope is better now. I think
so, because I can speak about it, which I never can when grief is at
its worst. I thought to find occupation and interest in writing when
alone at home, but hitherto my efforts have been in vain: the
deficiency of every stimulus is so complete. You will recommend me, I
dare say, to go from home; but that does no good, even could I again
leave papa with an easy mind. . . . I cannot describe what a time of it
I had after my return from London and Scotland. There was a reaction
that sank me to the earth, the deadly silence, solitude, depression,
desolation were awful; the craving for companionship, the hopelessness
of relief were what I should dread to feel again."
Or again, in a somewhat calmer mood, she writes:
"I feel to my deep sorrow, to my humiliation, that it is not in my
power to bear the canker of constant solitude. I had calculated that
when shut out from every enjoyment, from every stimulus but what could
be desired from intellectual exertion, my mind would rouse itself
perforce. It is not so. Even intellect, even imagination will not
dispense with the ray of domestic cheerfulness, with the gentle spur of
family discussions. Late in the evening and all through the nights, I
fall into a condition of mind which turns entirely to the past--to
memory, and memory is both sad and relentless. This will never do, and
will produce no good. I tell you this that you may check false
anticipations. You cannot help me, and must not trouble yourself in any
shape to sympathise with me. It is my cup, and I must drink it as
others do theirs."
It would be difficult to create a picture of more poignant suffering;
yet she was at this time a famous writer. She had published Jane Eyre
and Shirley, and on her visits to London, to her hospitable publisher,
had found herself welcomed, honoured, feted. The great lions of the
literary world had flocked eagerly to meet her. Even these simple
festivities were accompanied by a deadly sense of strain, anxiety, and
exhaustion. Mrs. Gaskell describes how a little later she met Charlotte
Bronte at a quiet country-house, and how Charlotte was reduced from
tolerable health to a bad nervous headache by the announcement that
they were going to drive over in the afternoon to have tea at a
neighbour's house--the prospect of meeting strangers was so alarming to
her.
But in spite of this agonising susceptibility and vulnerability, there
is never the least touch either of sentimentality or self-pity about
Charlotte Bronte. She stuck to her duty and faced life with an infinity
of patient courage. One of her friends said of her that no one she had
ever known had sacrificed more to others, or done it with a fuller
consciousness of what she was sacrificing. If duty and affection bade
her act, no sense of weakness or of inclination had any power over her.
She was afraid of life, but she stood up to it; she was never crushed
or broken. Consider the circumstances under which she began to write
Jane Eyre. She had written her novel The Professor, and it was returned
to her nine several times, by publisher after publisher. Her father was
threatened with blindness. She had taken him to Manchester for an
operation, installed him in lodgings, and settled down alone to nurse
him. The ill-fated Professor came back to her once more with a polite
refusal. That very day she wrote the first lines of Jane Eyre. Later on
too, with her brother dying of opium and drink, she had begun Shirley,
and she finished it after the deaths of her sisters. She was perfectly
merciless to herself, saw no reason why she should be spared any sorrow
or suffering or ill-health, but looked upon it all as a stern but not
unjust discipline. She had one of the most passionately affectionate
natures both in friendship and home relations--"my hot tenacious
heart," she once says! But there was no touch of softness or
sentimentality about her; she never feebly condoned weaknesses; her
observation of people was minute, her judgment of them severe and even
satirical. Her letters abound in pungent humour and acute perception;
and her idea of charity was not that of mild and muddled tolerance. She
had a vein of frank and rather bitter irony when she was indignant, and
she could return stroke for stroke.
She knew well that, whatever life was meant to be, it was not intended
to be an easy business; but she did not face it stoically or
indifferently; she had a fierce desire for knowledge, culture, ideas;
she was ambitious; and above everything she desired to be loved; yet
she did not think of love in the way in which all English romancers had
treated it for over a century, as a condescending hand held out by a
superior being, for the glory of which a woman submitted to a more or
less contented servitude; but as a glowing equality of passion and
worship, in which two hearts clasped each other close, with a sacred
concurrence of soul. And thus it was that she and Robert Browning,
above all other writers of the century, put the love of man and woman
in the true light, as the supreme worth of life; not as a half-sensuous
excitement, with lapses and reactions, but as a great and holy mystery
of devotion and service and mutual help. She too had her little taste
of love. Mr. Nicholls, her father's curate, a man of deep tenderness
behind his quiet homely ways, had proposed to her; she had refused him;
but his suffering and bewilderment had touched her deeply, and at last
she consented, though she went to her wedding in fear and dread; but
she was rewarded, and for a few short months tasted a calm and sweet
happiness, the joy of being needed and desired, and at the same time
guarded and tended well. Her pathetic words, when she knew from his
lips that she must die, "God will not part us--we have been so happy,"
are full of the deepest tragedy.
I say again that I know of no instance among the most intimate records
of the human heart, in which life was faced with such splendid courage
as it was by Charlotte Bronte. It contained so many things which she
desired--art, beauty, thought, peace, deep and tender relations, and
the supreme crown of love. But she never dreamed of trying to escape or
shirk her lot. After her first great success with Jane Eyre, she might
have lived life on her own lines; her writing meant wealth to one of
her simple tastes; and as her closest friend said, if she had chosen to
set up a house of her own, she would have been gratefully thanked for
any kindness she might have shown to her household, instead of being,
as she was, ruthlessly employed and even tyrannised over. Consider how
a young authoress, with that splendid success to her credit, would
nowadays be made much of and tended, begged to consult her own wishes
and make, her own arrangements. But Charlotte Bronte hated notoriety,
and took her fame with a shrinking and modest amazement. She never gave
herself airs, or displayed any affectation, or caught at any flattery.
She just went back to her tragic home, and carried the burden of
housekeeping on her frail shoulders. The simplicity, the delicacy, the
humility of it all is above praise. If ever there was a human being who
might have pleaded to be excused from any gallant battling with life
because of her bleak, comfortless, unhappy surroundings, and her own
sensitive temperament, it was Charlotte Bronte. But instead of that she
fought silently with disaster and unhappiness, neither pitying herself
for her destiny, nor taking the smallest credit for her tough
resistance. It does not necessarily prove that all can wage so equal a
fight with fears and sorrows; but it shows at least that an indomitable
resolution can make a noble thing out of a life from which every
circumstance of romance and dignity seems to be purposely withdrawn.
I do not think that there is in literature a more inspiring and
heartening book than Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. The book
was written with a fine frankness and a daring indiscretion which cost
Mrs. Gaskell very dear. It remains as one of the most matchless and
splendid presentments of duty and passion and genius, waging a
perfectly undaunted fight with life and temperament, and carrying off
the spoils not only of undying fame, but the far more supreme crown of
moral force. Charlotte Bronte never doubted that she had been set in
the forefront of the battle, and that her first concern was with the
issues of life and sorrow and death. She died at thirty-eight, at a
time when many men and women have hardly got a firm hold of life at
all, or have parted with weak illusions. Yet years before she had said
sternly to a friend who was meditating a flight from hard conditions of
life: "The right course is that which necessitates the greatest
sacrifice of self-interest." Many people could have said that, but I
know no figure who more relentlessly and loyally carried out the
principle than Charlotte Bronte, or who waged a more vigorous and
tenacious battle with every onset of fear. "My conscience tells me,"
she once wrote about an anxious decision, "that it would be the act of
a moral poltroon to let the fear of suffering stand in the way of
improvement. But suffer I shall. No matter!"
XIV
JOHN STERLING
I believe that the most affecting, beautiful, and grave message ever
written from a death-bed is John Sterling's last letter to Carlyle. It
reflects, perhaps, something of Carlyle's own fine manner, but then
Sterling had long been Carlyle's friend and confidant.
Before I give it, let me add a brief account of Sterling. He was some
ten years Carlyle's junior, the son of the redoubtable Edward Sterling,
the leader-writer of the Times, a man who in his day wielded a mighty
influence. Carlyle describes the father's way of life, how he spent the
day in going about London, rolling into clubs, volubly questioning and
talking; then returned home in the evening, and condensed it all into a
leader, "and is found," said Carlyle, "to have hit the essential
purport of the world's immeasurable babblement that day with an
accuracy above all other men."
The younger Sterling, Carlyle's friend, was at Cambridge for a time,
but never took his degree; he became a journalist, wrote a novel,
tales, plays, endless poems--all of thin and vapid quality. His brief
life, for he died at thirty-eight, was a much disquieted one; he
travelled about in search of health, for he was early threatened with
consumption; for a short time he was a curate in the English Church,
but drifted away from that. He lived for a time at Falmouth, and
afterwards at Ventnor. He must have been a man of extraordinary charm,
and with quite unequalled powers of conversation. Even Carlyle seems to
have heard him gladly, and that is no ordinary compliment, considering
Carlyle's own volubility, and the agonies, occasionally suppressed but
generally trenchantly expressed, with which Carlyle listened to other
well-known talkers like Coleridge and Macaulay.
Carlyle certainly had a very deep affection and admiration for
Sterling; he rains down praises upon him, in that wonderful little
biography, which is probably the finest piece of work that Carlyle ever
did.
He speaks of Sterling as "brilliant, beautiful, cheerful with an
ever-flowing wealth of ideas, fancies, imaginations . . . with frank
affections, inexhaustible hopes, audacities, activities, and general
radiant vivacity of heart and intelligence, which made the presence of
him an illumination and inspiration wherever he went."
But all Carlyle's love and admiration for his friend did not induce him
to praise Sterling's writings; he looked upon him as a poet, but
without the gift of expression. He says that all Sterling's work was
spoilt by over-haste, and "a lack of due inertia." The fact is that
Sterling was a sort of improvisatore, and what was beautiful and
natural enough when poured out in talk, and with the stimulus of
congenial company, grew pale and indistinct when he wrote it down; he
had, in fact, no instinct for art or for design, and he failed whenever
he tried to mould ideas into form.
The shadow of illness darkened about him, and he spent long periods in
prostrate seclusion, tended by his wife and children, unable to write
or talk or receive his friends. Then a terrible calamity befell him.
His mother, to whom he was devotedly attached, died after a long
illness, Sterling not being allowed to go to her, or to leave his own
sick-room. He received the news one morning by letter, that all was
over, went in to tell his wife, who was ill; while they were talking,
his wife became faint, and died two hours later. So that within a few
hours he lost the two human beings whom he most devotedly loved, and on
whom he most depended for sympathy and help.
But in all Sterling's sorrows and illnesses, he never seems to have
lost his interest in life and thought, in ideas, questions, and
problems. Again and again he came back to the surface, with an
irrepressible zest and freshness, and even gaiety, until at last all
hope of life was extinguished. He lay dying for many weeks, and it was
then that he wrote his last letter to Carlyle, which must be given in
full:--
HILLSIDE, VENTNOR,
10th August 1844.
MY DEAR CARLYLE,--For the first time for many months it seems possible
to send you a few words; merely, however, for Remembrance and Farewell.
On higher matters there is nothing to say. I tread the common road into
the great darkness, without any thought of fear, and with very much of
hope. Certainty indeed I have none. With regard to you and me I cannot
begin to write; having nothing for it but to keep shut the lid of those
secrets with all the iron weights that are in my power. Towards me it
is still more true than towards England that no man has been and done
like you. Heaven bless you! If I can lend a hand when THERE, that will
not be wanting. It is all very strange, but not one hundredth part so
sad as it seems to the standers-by.
Your Wife knows my mind towards her, and will believe it without
asseverations.--Yours to the last, JOHN STERLING.
That letter may speak for itself. In its dignity, its nobleness, its
fearlessness, it is one of the finest human documents I know. But let
it be remembered that it is not the letter of a mournful and
heart-broken man, turning his back on life in an ecstasy of despair;
but the letter of one who had taken a boundless delight in life, had
known upon equal terms most of the finest intellects of the day, and
had been frankly recognised by them as a chosen spirit. All Sterling's
designs for life and work had been slowly and surely thwarted by the
pressure of hopeless illness; yet he had never complained or fretted or
brooded, or indulged in any bitter recriminations against his destiny.
That seems to me a very heroic attitude; while the letter itself, in
its perfect frankness and courage, without a touch of solemnity or
affectation, or any trace of craven shrinking from his doom, makes it
in its noble simplicity one of the finest "last words" that I have ever
read, and finer, I verily believe, than any flight of poetical
imagination.
A few days later he sent Carlyle some stanzas of verse, "written," says
Carlyle, "as if in star-fire and immortal tears; which are among my
sacred possessions, to be kept for myself alone."
A few weeks before he wrote his last letter to Carlyle, Sterling had
written a letter to his son, who was then a boy at school in London. In
that he says:
"When I fancy how you are walking in the same streets, and moving along
the same river, that I used to watch so intently, as if in a dream,
when younger than you are--I could gladly burst into tears, not of
grief, but with a feeling that there is no name for. Everything is so
wonderful, great and holy, so sad and yet not bitter, so full of Death
and so bordering on Heaven. Can you understand anything of this? If you
can, you will begin to know what a serious matter our Life is; how
unworthy and stupid it is to trifle it away without heed; what a
wretched, insignificant, worthless creature anyone comes to be, who
does not as soon as possible bend his whole strength, as in stringing a
stiff bow, to doing whatever task lies first before him."
That again is a noble letter; but over it I think there lies a little
shadow of regret, a sense that he had himself wasted some of the force
of life in vague trifling; but even that mood had passed away in the
nearness of the great impending change, leaving him upborne upon the
greatness of God, in deep wonder and hope, knowing nothing more, in his
weariness and his suffering, but the calmness of the Eternal Will.
XV
INSTINCTIVE FEAR
The fears then from which men suffer, and even the greatest men not
least, seem to be strangely complicated by the fact that nature does
not seem to work as fast in the physical world as in the mental world.
The mosquitoes of South American swamps are all fitted with a perfect
tool-box of implements for piercing the hides of warm-blooded animals
and drawing blood, although warm-blooded animals have long ceased to
exist in those localities. But as the mosquito is one of the few
creatures which can propagate its kind without ever partaking of food,
the mosquito has therefore not died out; and though for many
generations billions upon billions of mosquitoes have never had a
chance of doing what they seem born to do, they have not discarded
their apparatus. If mosquitoes could reason and philosophise, the
prospect of such a meal might remain as a far-off and inspiring ideal
of life and conduct, a thing which heroes in the past had achieved, and
which might be possible again if they remained true to their highest
instincts. So it is with humanity. Many of our fears do not correspond
to any real danger; they are part of a panoply which we inherit, and
have to do with the instinct of self-preservation. We are exposed to
dangers still, dangers of infection for instance, but we have developed
no instinctive fear which helps us to recognise the presence of
infection. We take rational precautions against it when we recognise
it, but the vast prevalence and mortality of consumption a generation
or two ago was due to the fact that men did not recognise consumption
as infectious; and many fine lives--Keats and Emily Bronte, to name but
two--were sacrificed to careless proximity as well as to devoted
tendance; but here nature, with all her instinct of self-preservation,
did not hang out any danger signal, or provide human beings with any
instinctive fear to protect them. Our instinctive fears, such as our
fear of darkness and solitude, and our suspicion of strangers, seem to
date from a time when such conditions were really dangerous, though
they are so no longer.