contact with Emily's contempt for creeds. When Anne was at Haworth she
and Emily were inseparable. They tramped the moors together. With their
arms round each other's shoulders, they paced up and down the parlour of
the Parsonage. They showed the mysterious attraction and affinity of
opposites. Anne must have been fascinated, and at the same time
appalled, by the radiant, revealing, annihilating sweep of Emily's
thought. She was not indifferent to creeds. But you can see her fearful
and reluctant youth yielding at last to Emily's thought, until she
caught a glimpse of the "repose" beyond the clash of "conquered good and
conquering ill". You can see how the doctrine of eternal punishment went
by the board; how Anne, who had gone through agonies of orthodox fear on
account of Branwell, must have adjusted things somehow, and arrived at
peace. Trust in "the merits of the Redeemer" is, after all, trust in the
Immensity beyond Redeemer and redeemed. Of this trust she sang in a
voice, like her material voice, fragile, but sweet and true. She sang
naïvely of the "Captive Dove" that makes unheard its "joyless moan", of
"the heart that Nature formed to love", pining, "neglected and alone".
She sang of the "Narrow Way", "Be it," she sings, "thy constant aim
"To labour and to love,
To pardon and endure,
To lift thy heart to God above,
And keep thy conscience pure."
She hears the wind in an alien wood and cries for the Parsonage garden,
and for the "barren hills":
Where scarce the scattered, stunted trees
Can yield an answering swell,
But where a wilderness of heath
Returns the sound as well.
For yonder garden, fair and wide,
With groves of evergreen,
Long winding walks, and borders trim
And velvet lawns between.
Restore to me that little spot,
With grey hills compassed round,
Where knotted grass neglected lies,
And weeds usurp the ground.
For she, too, loved the moors; and through her love for them she wrote
two perfect lines when she called on Memory to
Forever hang thy dreamy spell
Round mountain star and heather-bell.
The critics, the theorists, the tale-mongers, have left Anne quiet in
that grave on the sea-coast, where she lies apart. Her gentle
insignificance served her well.
* * * * *
But no woman who ever wrote was more criticized, more spied upon, more
lied about, than Charlotte. It was as if the singular purity and poverty
of her legend offered irresistible provocation. The blank page called
for the scribbler. The silence that hung about her was dark with
challenge; it was felt to be ambiguous, enigmatic. Reserve suggests a
reservation, something hidden and kept back from the insatiable public
with its "right to know". Mrs. Gaskell with all her indiscretions had
not given it enough. The great classic _Life of Charlotte Brontë_ was,
after all, incomplete. Until something more was known about her,
Charlotte herself was incomplete. It was nothing that Mrs. Gaskell's
work was the finest, tenderest portrait of a woman that it was ever
given to a woman to achieve; nothing that she was not only recklessly
and superbly loyal to Charlotte, but that in her very indiscretions she
was, as far as Charlotte was concerned, incorruptibly and profoundly
true.
Since Mrs. Gaskell's time, other hands have been at work on Charlotte,
improving Mrs. Gaskell's masterpiece. A hundred little touches have been
added to it. First, it was supposed to be too tragic, too deliberately
and impossibly sombre (that sad book of which Charlotte's friend, Mary
Taylor, said that it was "not so gloomy as the truth"). So first came
Sir Wemyss Reid, conscientiously working up the high lights till he got
the values all wrong. "If the truth must be told," he says, "the life of
the author of _Jane Eyre_ was by no means so joyless as the world now
believes it to have been." And he sets out to give us the truth. But all
that he does to lighten the gloom is to tell a pleasant story of how
"one bright June morning in 1833, a handsome carriage and pair is
standing opposite the 'Devonshire Arms' at Bolton Bridge". In the
handsome carriage is a young girl, Ellen Nussey, waiting for Charlotte
Brontë and her brother and sisters to go with her for a picnic to Bolton
Abbey.
"Presently," says Sir Wemyss Reid, "on the steep road which stretches
across the moors to Keighley, the sound of wheels is heard, mingled with
the merry speech and merrier laughter of fresh young voices. Shall we go
forward unseen," he asks, "and study the approaching travellers whilst
they are still upon the road? Their conveyance is no handsome carriage,
but a rickety dog-cart, unmistakably betraying its neighbourship to the
carts and ploughs of some rural farmyard. The horse, freshly taken from
the fields, is driven by a youth who, in spite of his countrified dress,
is no mere bumpkin. His shock of red hair hangs down in somewhat ragged
locks behind his ears, for Branwell Brontë esteems himself a genius and
a poet, and, following the fashion of the times, has that abhorrence of
the barber's shears which genius is supposed to affect. But the lad's
face is a handsome and striking one, full of Celtic fire and humour,
untouched by the slightest shade of care, hopeful, promising, even
brilliant. How gaily he jokes with his three sisters; with what
inexhaustible volubility he pours out quotations from his favourite
poets, applying them to the lovely scenes around him; and with what a
mischievous delight in his superior nerve and mettle, he attempts the
feats of charioteering, which fill the heart of the youngest of the
party with sudden terrors! Beside him, in a dress of marvellous
plainness, and ugliness, stamped with the brand "home-made" in
characters which none can mistake, is the eldest of the sisters.
Charlotte is talking too; there are bright smiles upon her face; she is
enjoying everything around her, the splendid morning, the charms of
leafy trees and budding roses, and the ever musical stream; most of all,
perhaps, the charm of her brother's society, and the expectation of that
coming meeting with her friends, which is so near at hand. Behind sits a
pretty little girl, with fine complexion and delicate regular features,
whom the stranger would pick out as the beauty of the company, and a
tall, rather angular figure, clad in a dress exactly resembling
Charlotte's. Emily Brontë does not talk so much as the rest of the
party, but her wonderful eyes, brilliant and unfathomable as the pool at
the foot of a waterfall, but radiant also with a wealth of tenderness
and warmth, show how her soul is expanding under the influences of the
scene; how quick she is to note the least prominent of the beauties
around her, how intense is her enjoyment of the songs of the birds, the
brilliancy of the sunshine, the rich scent of the flower-bespangled
hedgerows. If she does not, like Charlotte and Anne, meet her brother's
ceaseless flood of sparkling words with opposing currents of speech, she
utters a strange, deep guttural sound which those who know her best
interpret as the language of a joy too deep for articulate expression.
Gaze at them as they pass you in the quiet road, and acknowledge that,
in spite of their rough and even uncouth exteriors, a happier four could
hardly be met with in this favourite haunt of pleasure-seekers during a
long summer's day."
And you do gaze at them and are sadder, if anything, than you were
before. You see them, if anything, more poignantly. You see their
cheerful biographer doing all he knows, and the light he shoots across
the blackness only makes it blacker.
Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi di tempo felice
Nella miseria;
and in the end the biographer with all his cheerfulness succumbs to the
tradition of misery, and even adds a dark contribution of his own, the
suggestion of an unhappy love-affair of Charlotte's.
After Sir Wemyss Reid came Mr. Francis Grundy with _his_ little
pictures, _Pictures of the Past_, presenting a dreadfully unattractive
Charlotte.
Then came Mr. Leyland, following Mr. Grundy, with his glorification of
Branwell and his hint that Charlotte made it very hard at home for the
poor boy. He repeats the story that Branwell told Mr. George Searle
Phillips, how he went to see a dying girl in the village, and sat with
her half an hour, and read a psalm to her and a hymn, and how he felt
like praying with her too, but he was not "good enough", how he came
away with a heavy heart and fell into melancholy musings. "Charlotte
observed my depression," Branwell said, "and asked what ailed me. So I
told her. She looked at me with a look which I shall never forget if I
live to be a hundred years old--which I never shall. It was not like
her at all. It wounded me as if someone had struck me a blow in the
mouth. It involved ever so many things in it. It ran over me,
questioning and examining, as if I had been a wild beast. It said, 'Did
my ears deceive me, or did I hear aright?' And then came the painful,
baffled expression, which was worse than all. It said, 'I wonder if
that's true?' But, as she left the room, she seemed to accuse herself of
having wronged me, and smiled kindly upon me, and said, 'She is my
little scholar, and I will go and see her.' I replied not a word. I was
too much cut up! When she was gone, I came over here to the 'Black Bull'
and made a note of it...."
You see the implication? It was Charlotte who drove him to the "Black
Bull". That was Branwell's impression of Charlotte. Just the sort of
impression that an opium-eater would have of a beloved sister.
But Branwell's impression was good enough for Madame Duclaux to found
her theory on. Her theory is that Charlotte was inferior to Emily in
tenderness. It may well be so, and yet Charlotte would remain above most
women tender, for Emily's wealth would furnish forth a score of sisters.
The simple truth is that Charlotte had nerves, and Branwell was
extremely trying. And it is possible that Emily had less to bear, that
in her detachment she was protected more than Charlotte from Branwell at
his worst.
Meanwhile tales were abroad presenting Charlotte in the queerest lights.
There is that immortal story of how Thackeray gave a party for Currer
Bell at his house in Young Street, and how Currer Bell had a headache
and lay on a sofa in the back drawing-room, and refused to talk to
anybody but the governess; and how Thackeray at last, very late, with a
finger on his lip, stole out of the house and took refuge in his club.
No wonder if this quaint and curious Charlotte survived in the memory
of Thackeray's daughter. But, even apart from the headache, you can see
how it came about, how the sight of the governess evoked Charlotte
Brontë's unforgotten agony. She saw in the amazed and cheerful lady her
own sad youth, slighted and oppressed, solitary in a scene of
gaiety--she could not have seen her otherwise--and her warm heart rushed
out to her. She was determined that that governess should have a happy
evening if nobody else had. Her behaviour was odd, if you like, it was
even absurd, but it had the sublimity of vicarious expiation. Has anyone
ever considered its significance, the magnitude of her deed? For
Charlotte, to be the guest of honour on that brilliant night, in the
house of Thackeray, her divinity, was to touch the topmost height of
fame. And she turned her back on the brilliance and the fame and the
face of her divinity, and offered herself up in flames as a sacrifice
for all the governesses that were and had ever been and would be.
And after the fine stories came the little legends--things about
Charlotte when she was a governess herself at Mrs. Sidgwick's, and the
tittle-tattle of the parish. One of the three curates whom Charlotte
made so shockingly immortal avenged himself for his immortality by
stating that the trouble with Charlotte was that she _would_ fight for
mastery in the parish. Who can believe him? If there is one thing that
seems more certain than another it is Charlotte's utter indifference to
parochial matters. But Charlotte was just, and she may have objected to
the young man's way with the Dissenters; we know that she did very
strongly object to Mr. William Weightman's way. And that, I imagine, was
the trouble between Charlotte and the curates.
As for the Sidgwicks, Charlotte's biographers have been rather hard on
them. Mr. Leslie Stephen calls them "coarse employers". They were
certainly not subtle enough to divine the hidden genius in their sad
little governess. It was, I imagine, Charlotte's alien, enigmatic face
that provoked a little Sidgwick to throw a Bible at her. She said Mrs.
Sidgwick did not know her, and did not "intend to know her". She might
have added that if she _had_ intended Mrs. Sidgwick could not possibly
have known her. And when the Sidgwicks said (as they did say to their
cousin, Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson) that if Miss Brontë "was invited
to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about
like a slave; if she was not invited she imagined she was being excluded
from the family circle", that was simply their robust view of the
paralysed attitude of a shy girl among strangers, in an agony of fear
lest she should cut in where she was not wanted.
And allowances must be made for Mrs. Sidgwick. She was, no doubt,
considerably annoyed at finding that she had engaged a thoroughly
incompetent and apparently thoroughly morbid young person who had
offered herself as a nursery-governess and didn't know how to keep order
in the nursery. Naturally there was trouble at Stonegappe. Then one fine
day Mrs. Sidgwick discovered that there was, after all, a use for that
incomprehensible and incompetent Miss Brontë. Miss Brontë had a gift.
She could sew. She could sew beautifully. Her stitching, if you would
believe it, was a dream. And Mrs. Sidgwick saw that Miss Brontë's one
talent was not lodged in her useless. So Charlotte sat alone all evening
in the schoolroom at Stonegappe, a small figure hidden in pure white,
billowy seas of muslin, and lamented thus: "She cares nothing in the
world about me except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity of
labour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end she overwhelms me
with oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin night-caps
to make, and above all things, dolls to dress." And Mrs. Sidgwick
complained that Charlotte did not love the children, and forgot how
little she liked it when the children loved Charlotte, and was unaware,
poor lady, that it was recorded of her, and would be recorded to all
time, that she had said, "Love the _governess_, my dear!" when her
little impulsive boy put his hand in Charlotte's at the dinner-table,
and cried "I love 'ou, Miss Brontë." It was the same little, impulsive
boy who threw the Bible at Charlotte, and also threw a stone which hit
her.
No wonder that Miss Brontë's one and only "pleasant afternoon" was when
Mr. Sidgwick went out walking in his fields with his children and his
Newfoundland dog, and Charlotte (by order) followed and observed him
from behind.
Of course, all these old tales should have gone where Mrs. Sidgwick's
old muslin caps went; but they have not, and so it has got about that
Charlotte Brontë was not fond of children. Even Mr. Swinburne, at the
height of his magnificent eulogy, after putting crown upon crown upon
her head, pauses and wonders: had she any love for children? He finds in
her "a plentiful lack of inborn baby-worship"; she is unworthy to
compare in this with George Eliot, "the spiritual mother of Totty, of
Eppie, and of Lillo". "The fiery-hearted Vestal of Haworth," he says,
"had no room reserved in the palace of her passionate and high-minded
imagination as a nursery for inmates of such divine and delicious
quality." There was little Georgette in _Villette_, to say nothing of
Polly, and there was Adèle in _Jane Eyre_. But Mr. Swinburne had
forgotten about little Georgette. Like George Henry Lewes he is
"well-nigh moved to think one of the most powerfully and exquisitely
written chapters in _Shirley_ a chapter which could hardly have been
written at all by a woman, or, for that matter, by a man, of however
noble and kindly a nature, in whom the instinct, or nerve, or organ of
love for children was even of average natural strength and sensibility";
so difficult was it for him to believe in "the dread and repulsion felt
by a forsaken wife and tortured mother for the very beauty and dainty
sweetness of her only new-born child, as recalling the cruel, sleek
charm of the human tiger that had begotten it". And so he crowns her
with all crowns but that of "love for children". He is still tender to
her, seeing in her that one monstrous lack; he touches it with sorrow
and a certain shame.
Mr. Birrell follows him. "Miss Brontë," he says with confidence, "did
not care for children. She had no eye for them. Hence it comes about
that her novel-children are not good." He is moved to playful sarcasm
when he tells how in August of eighteen-fifty-three "Miss Brontë
suffered a keen disappointment". She went to Scotland with some friends
who took their baby with them. The parents thought the baby was ill when
it wasn't, and insisted on turning back, and Charlotte had to give up
her holiday. "All on account of a baby," says Mr. Birrell, and refers
you to Charlotte's letter on the subject, implying that it was
cold-blooded. The biographer can quote letters for his purpose, and Mr.
Birrell omits to tell us that Charlotte wrote "had any evil consequences
followed a prolonged stay, I should never have forgiven myself". You are
to imagine that Charlotte could have forgiven herself perfectly well,
for Charlotte "did not care for children".
Mrs. Oliphant does not echo that cry. She was a woman and knew better.
For I believe that here we touch the very heart of the mystery that was
Charlotte Brontë. We would have no right to touch it, to approach it,
were it not that other people have already violated all that was most
sacred and most secret in that mystery, and have given the world a
defaced and disfigured Charlotte Brontë. I believe that this love of
children which even Mr. Swinburne has denied to her, was the key to
Charlotte's nature. We are face to face here, not with a want in her,
but with an abyss, depth beyond depth of tenderness and longing and
frustration, of a passion that found no clear voice in her works,
because it was one with the elemental nature in her, undefined,
unuttered, unutterable.
She was afraid of children; she was awkward with them; because such
passion has shynesses, distances, and terrors unknown to the average
comfortable women who become happy mothers. It has even its perversions,
when love hardly knows itself from hate. Such love demands before all
things possession. It cries out for children of its own flesh and blood.
I believe that there were moments when it was pain for Charlotte to see
the children born and possessed by other women. It must have been agony
to have to look after them, especially when the rule was that they were
not to "love the governess".
The proofs of this are slender, but they are sufficient. There is little
Georgette, the sick child that Lucy nurses in the Pensionnat: "Little
Georgette still piped her plaintive wail, appealing to me by her
familiar term, 'Minnie, Minnie, me very poorly!' till my heart ached."
... "I affected Georgette; she was a sensitive and loving child; to hold
her in my lap, or carry her in my arms, was to me a treat. To-night she
would have me lay my head on the pillow of her crib; she even put her
little arms round my neck. Her clasp and the nestling action with which
she pressed her cheek to mine made me almost cry with a sort of tender
pain."
Once during a spring-cleaning at Upperwood House Charlotte was Mrs.
White's nursemaid as well as her governess, and she wrote: "By dint of
nursing the fat baby it has got to know me and be fond of me. I suspect
myself of growing rather fond of it." Years later she wrote to Mrs.
Gaskell, after staying with her: "Could you manage to convey a small
kiss to that dear but dangerous little person, Julia? She
surreptitiously possessed herself of a minute fraction of my heart,
which has been missing ever since I saw her."
Mrs. Gaskell tells us that there was "a strong mutual attraction"
between Julia, her youngest little girl, and Charlotte Brontë. "The
child," she says, "would steal her little hand into Miss Brontë's
scarcely larger one, and each took pleasure in this apparently
unobserved caress." May I suggest that children do not steal their
little hands into the hands of people who do not care for them? Their
instinct is infallible.
Charlotte Brontë tried to give an account of her feeling for children;
it was something like the sacred awe of the lover. "Whenever I see
Florence and Julia again I shall feel like a fond but bashful suitor,
who views at a distance the fair personage to whom, in his clownish awe,
he dare not risk a near approach. Such is the clearest idea I can give
you of my feeling towards children I like, but to whom I am a
stranger--and to what children am I not a stranger?"
Extraordinary that Charlotte's critics have missed the pathos of that
_cri de coeur_. It is so clearly an echo from the "house of bondage",
where Charlotte was made a stranger to the beloved, where the beloved
threw stones and Bibles at her. You really have to allow for the shock
of an experience so blighting. It is all part of the perversity of the
fate that dogged her, that her feeling should have met with that
reverse. But it was there, guarded with a certain shy austerity. She
"suspected" herself of getting rather fond of the baby.
She hid her secret even from herself, as women will hide these things.
But her dreams betrayed her after the way of dreams. Charlotte's dream
(premonitory, she thought, of trouble) was that she carried a little
crying child, and could not still its cry. "She described herself," Mrs.
Gaskell says, "as having the most painful sense of pity for the little
thing, lying _inert_, as sick children do, while she walked about in
some gloomy place with it, such as the aisle of Haworth Church." This
dream she gives to _Jane Eyre_, unconscious of its profound significance
and fitness. It is a pity that Mr. Swinburne did not pay attention to
Charlotte's dream.
All her life, I think, she suffered because of the perpetual insurgence
of this secret, impassioned, maternal energy. Hence the sting of Lewes's
famous criticism, beginning: "The grand function of woman, it must
always be remembered" (as if Charlotte had forgotten it!) "is
Maternity"; and, working up from his criticism of that chapter in
_Shirley_ to a climax of adjuration: "Currer Bell, if under your heart
had ever stirred a child; if to your bosom a babe had ever been
pressed--that mysterious part of your being, towards which all the rest
of it was drawn, in which your whole soul was transported and
absorbed--never could you have _imagined_ such a falsehood as that!" It
was impossible for Charlotte to protest against anything but the
abominable bad taste of Lewes's article, otherwise she might have told
him that she probably knew rather more about those mysteries than he
did. It was she who gave us that supreme image of disastrous love. "I
looked at my love; it shivered in my heart like a suffering child in a
cold cradle!"
And this woman died before her child was born.
* * * * *
Then there is Mrs. Oliphant again. Though she was not one of those who
said Charlotte Brontë was not fond of children, though she would have
died rather than have joined Lewes in his unspeakable cry against her,
Mrs. Oliphant made certain statements in no better taste than his. She
suggests that Charlotte, fond or not fond of children, was too fond of
matrimonial dreams. Her picture (the married woman's picture) is of an
undesired and undesirable little spinster pining visibly and shamelessly
in a parsonage. She would have us believe that from morning till night,
from night till morning, Charlotte Brontë in the Parsonage thought of
nothing but of getting married, that her dreams pursued, ruthlessly, the
casual visitor. The hopelessness of the dream, the undesirability of
Charlotte, is what makes her so irresistible to her sister novelist.