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 of windows which
never show anyone 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 see their lives thrown away, and have no power to save
themselves!
"The position," she goes on, "in itself so tragic, is one which can
scarcely be expressed without calling forth 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 Helstone 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." (This is more than can be said of
Mrs. Oliphant's view of the adorable Shirley Keeldar who was Emily
Brontë. It is ludicrous enough, and it may be genuine, but it is
certainly not true.) But Mrs. Oliphant is careful not to go too far.
"Note," she says, "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." Yet she characterizes their "outcry" as "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" (Mrs. Oliphant thinks that she is rendering
Charlotte Brontë's thought), "endeavouring to persuade ourselves!
Charlotte Brontë 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.... Miss Brontë herself said correct things" (observe that
insincerity is insinuated here) "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." (Why, you naturally wonder, should
it have been?) "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." (And very proper of them,
too.) "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 Emanuel, so unlike him, coming into his place."
The obvious answer to all this is that Charlotte Brontë was writing in
the mid-Victorian age, about mid-Victorian women, the women whom she saw
around her; writing, without any "philosophy" or "covert conviction", in
the days before emancipation, when marriage was the only chance of
independence that a woman had. It would have been marvellous, if she had
not had her sister Emily before her, that in such an age she should have
conceived and created Shirley Keeldar. As for poor little Lucy with her
two men, she is not the first heroine who mistook the false dawn for the
true. Besides, Miss Brontë's "philosophy" was exactly the opposite to
that attributed to her, as anybody may see who reads _Shirley_. In
these matters she burned what her age adored, and adored what it burned,
a thorough revolutionary.
But this is not the worst. Mrs. Oliphant professes to feel pity for her
victim. "Poor Charlotte Brontë! She has not been as other women,
protected by the grave from all betrayal of the episodes in her own
life." (You would imagine they were awful, the episodes in Charlotte
Brontë's 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 possibly be a dozen
little Joe Taylors before all was over."
This is atrocious. But the malice and bad taste of it are nothing to the
gross carelessness and ignorance it reveals--ignorance of facts and
identities and names. Charlotte's suitor was Mr. James Taylor and not
Joe. Joe, the brother of her friend, Mary Taylor, was married already to
a lady called Amelia, and it is of Joe and his Amelia that Charlotte
writes. "She must take heart" (Amelia had been singularly unsuccessful),
"there may yet be a round dozen of little Joe Taylors to look after--run
after--to sort and switch and train up in the way they should go."
Of Mr. James Taylor she writes more decorously. Miss Nussey, as usual,
had been thinking unwarrantable things, and had made a most unbecoming
joke about Jupiter and Venus, which outraged Charlotte's "common
sense". "The idea of the little man," says Charlotte, "shocks me less.
He still sends his little newspaper; and the other day there came a
letter of a bulk, volume, pith, judgment and knowledge, fit to have been
the product of a giant. You may laugh as much and as wickedly as you
please, but the fact is, there is a quiet constancy about this, my
diminutive and red-haired friend, which adds a foot to his stature,
turns his sandy locks dark, and altogether dignifies him a good deal in
my estimation." This is all she says by way of appreciation. She says
later, "His manners and his personal appearance scarcely pleased me more
than at the first interview.... I feel that in his way he has a regard
for me; a regard which I cannot bring myself entirely to reciprocate in
kind, and yet its withdrawal leaves a painful blank." Miss Nussey
evidently insists that Charlotte's feelings are engaged this time,
arguing possibly from the "painful blank"; and Charlotte becomes
explicit. She speaks of the disadvantages of the alleged match, and we
gather that Miss Nussey has been urging her to take the little man. "But
there is another thing which forms a barrier more difficult to pass than
any of these. Would Mr. Taylor and I ever suit? Could I ever feel for
him enough love to accept him as a husband? Friendship--gratitude--esteem
I have, but each moment he came near me, and that I could see his eyes
fastened on me, my veins ran ice. Now that he is away, I feel far
more gently to him; it is only close by that I grow rigid--stiffening
with a strange mixture of apprehension and anger--which nothing
softens but his retreat, and a perfect subduing of his manner."
And again, "my conscience, I can truly say, does not _now_ accuse
me of having treated Mr. Taylor with injustice or unkindness ...
but with every disposition and with every wish, with every intention
even to look on him in the most favourable point of view at his last
visit, it was impossible to me in my inward heart to think of him as one
that might one day be acceptable as a husband." Could anything be _more_
explicit? There is a good deal more of it. After one very searching
criticism of Mr. Taylor: "One does not like to say these things, but one
had better be honest." And of her honesty Charlotte's letters on this
subject leave no doubt. There is not the smallest ground for supposing
that even for a moment had she thought of Mr. James Taylor as "one that
one day might be acceptable", much less is there for Mr. Clement
Shorter's suggestion that if he had come back from Bombay she would have
married him.
But Joe or James, it is all one to Mrs. Oliphant, with her theory of
Charlotte Brontë. "For her and her class, which did not speak of it,
everything depended upon whether the women married or did not marry.
Their thoughts were thus artificially fixed to one point in the
horizon." The rest is repetition, ending in the astounding verdict: "The
seed she thus sowed has come to many growths that would have appalled
Charlotte Brontë. 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."
That is Mrs. Oliphant on Charlotte Brontë.
And even Mr. Clement Shorter, who has dealt so admirably with outrageous
legends, goes half the way with the detractor. He has a theory that
Charlotte Brontë was a woman of morbid mood, "to whom the problem of sex
appealed with all its complications", and that she "dwelt continually on
the problem of the ideal mate".
Now Charlotte may have dreamed of getting married (there have been more
criminal dreams); she may have brooded continually over the problem of
the ideal mate, only of all these dreams and broodings there is not one
atom of evidence--not one. Not a hint, not a trace, either in her
character as we know it, or in her very voluminous private
correspondence. The facts of her life disprove it. Her letters to Ellen
Nussey (never meant for publication) reveal the workings of Charlotte's
feminine mind when applied to "the sex problem"; a mind singularly
wholesome and impersonal, and singularly detached. Charlotte is full of
lights upon this awful subject of matrimony, which, by the way, had
considerably more interest for Miss Nussey than it had for her. In fact,
if it had not been for Miss Nussey it would not have appeared so often
as it did in Charlotte's letters. If you pay attention to the context (a
thing that theorists never do) you see, what is indeed obvious, that a
large portion of Charlotte Brontë's time was taken up in advising and
controlling Ellen Nussey, that amiable and impulsive prototype of
Caroline Helstone. She is called upon in all Miss Nussey's hours of
crisis, and there seem to have been a great many of them. "Do not," she
writes, "be over-persuaded to marry a man you can never respect--I do
not say _love_, because I think if you can respect a person before
marriage, moderate love at least will come after; and as to intense
passion, I am convinced that that is no desirable feeling. In the first
place, it seldom or never meets with a requital; and in the second
place, if it did, the feeling would be only temporary; it would last the
honeymoon, and then, perhaps, give place to disgust, or indifference,
worse perhaps than disgust. Certainly this would be the case on the
man's part; and on the woman's--God help her if she is left to love
passionately and alone.
"I am tolerably well convinced that I shall never marry at all."
And again, to Miss Nussey, six months later: "Did you not once say to me
in all childlike simplicity, 'I thought, Charlotte, no young lady should
fall in love till the offer was actually made'? I forgot what answer I
made at the time, but I now reply, after due consideration, Right as a
glove, the maxim is just, and I hope you will always attend to it. I
will even extend and confirm it: no young lady should fall in love till
the offer has been made, accepted, the marriage ceremony performed, and
the first half-year of wedded life has passed away. A woman may then
begin to love, but with great precaution, very coolly, very moderately,
very rationally. If she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a cold
look cuts her to the heart, she is a fool. If she ever loves so much
that her husband's will is her law, and that she has got into a habit of
watching his looks in order that she may anticipate his wishes, she will
soon be a neglected fool. Did I not tell you of an instance...?"
What could be more lucid, more light-hearted, and more sane? And if
Charlotte is suspicious of the dangers of her own temperament, that only
proves her lucidity and sanity the more.
Later, at Brussels, when confronted with "three or four people's" idea
that "the future _époux_ of Miss Brontë is on the Continent", she
defends herself against the "silly imputation". "Not that it is a crime
to marry, or a crime to wish to be married; but it is an imbecility,
which I reject with contempt, for women, who have neither fortune nor
beauty, to make marriage the principal object of their wishes and hopes,
and the aim of all their actions; not to be able to convince themselves
that they are unattractive, and that they had better be quiet, and think
of other things than wedlock." Can anything be clearer?
So much for herself. But she has to deal with Miss Nussey, in
difficulties again, later: "Papa has two or three times expressed a fear
that since Mr. ---- paid you so much attention, he will, perhaps, have
made an impression on your mind which will interfere with your comfort.
I tell him I think not, as I believe you to be mistress of yourself in
those matters. Still, he keeps saying that I am to write to you and
dissuade you from thinking of him. I never saw Papa make himself so
uneasy about a thing of the kind before; he is usually very sarcastic on
such subjects.
"Mr. ---- be hanged! I never thought very well of him, and I am much
disposed to think very ill of him at this blessed minute. I have
discussed the subject fully, for where is the use of being mysterious
and constrained?--it is not worth while."
And yet again it is Ellen Nussey. "Ten years ago I should have laughed
at your account of the blunder you made in mistaking the bachelor doctor
of Bridlington for a married man. I should have certainly thought you
scrupulous over-much, and wondered how you could possibly regret being
civil to a decent individual merely because he happened to be single
instead of double. Now, however, I can perceive that your scruples are
founded on common sense. I know that if women wish to escape the stigma
of husband-seeking, they must act and look like marble or clay--cold,
expressionless, bloodless; for every appearance of feeling, of joy,
sorrow, friendliness, antipathy, admiration, disgust, are alike
construed by the world into the attempt to" (I regret to say that
Charlotte wrote) "to hook a husband."
Later, she has to advise her friend Mr. Williams as to a career for his
daughter Louisa. And here she is miles ahead of her age, the age that
considered marriage the only honourable career for a woman. "Your
daughters--no more than your sons--should be a burden on your hands.
Your daughters--as much as your sons--should aim at making their way
honourably through life. Do you not wish to keep them at home? Believe
me, teachers may be hard-worked, ill-paid and despised, but the girl who
stays at home doing nothing is worse off than the hardest-wrought and
worst-paid drudge of a school. Whenever I have seen, not merely in
humble but in affluent houses, families of daughters sitting waiting to
be married, I have pitied them from my heart. It is doubtless well--very
well--if Fate decrees them a happy marriage; but, if otherwise, give
their existence some object, their time some occupation, or the
peevishness of disappointment, and the listlessness of idleness will
infallibly degrade their nature.... Lonely as I am, how should I be if
Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career...? How should I
be with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where
there is not a single educated family? In that case I should have no
world at all. As it is, something like a hope and a motive sustains me
still. I wish all your daughters--I wish every woman in England, had
also a hope and a motive."
Whatever the views of Charlotte Brontë's heroines may or may not have
been, these were her own views--sober, sincere, and utterly
dispassionate. Mrs. Oliphant set them aside, either in criminal
carelessness, or with still more criminal deliberation, because they
interfered with her theory. They are certainly not the views of a woman
given to day-dreaming and window-gazing. Lucy Snowe may have had time
for window-gazing, but not Charlotte Brontë, what with her writing and
her dusting, sweeping, ironing, bed-making, and taking the eyes out of
the potatoes for poor old Tabby, who was too blind to see them.
Window-gazing of all things! Mrs. Oliphant could not have fixed upon a
habit more absurdly at variance with Charlotte's character.
For she was pure, utterly and marvellously pure from sentimentalism,
which was (and she knew it) the worst vice of the Victorian age. Mr.
Leslie Stephen said that, "Miss Brontë's sense of humour was but
feeble." It was robust enough when it played with sentimentalists. But
as for love, for passion, she sees it with a tragic lucidity that is
almost a premonition. And her attitude was by no means that of the
foredoomed spinster, making necessity her virtue. There was no
necessity. She had at least four suitors (quite a fair allowance for a
little lady in a lonely parish), and she refused them all. Twice in her
life, in her tempestuous youth, and at a crisis of her affairs, she
chose "dependence upon coarse employers" before matrimony. She was
shrewd, lucid, fastidious, and saw the men she knew without any glamour.
To the cold but thoroughly presentable Mr. Henry Nussey she replied
thus: "It has always been my habit to study the character of those among
whom I chance to be thrown, and I think I know yours and can imagine
what description of woman would suit you for a wife. The character
should not be too marked, ardent and original, her temper should be
mild, her piety undoubted, and her personal attractions sufficient to
please your eyes and gratify your just pride. As for me you do not know
me...." She was only three-and-twenty when she wrote that, with the
prospect of Stonegappe before her. For she had not, and could not have
for him, "that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for
him; and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I
will regard my husband". Later, in her worst loneliness she refused that
ardent Mr. Taylor, who courted her by the novel means of newspapers sent
with violent and unremitting regularity through the post. He represented
to some degree the larger life of intellectual interest. But he offended
her fastidiousness. She was sorry for the little man with his little
newspaper, and that was all. She refused several times the man she
ultimately married. He served a long apprenticeship to love, and
Charlotte yielded to his distress rather than to her own passion. She
describes her engaged state as "very calm, very expectant. What I taste
of happiness is of the soberest order. I trust to love my husband. I am
grateful for his tender love for me.... Providence offers me this
destiny. Doubtless then it is the best for me."
These are not the words, nor is this the behaviour of Mrs. Oliphant's
Charlotte Brontë, the forlorn and desperate victim of the obsession of
matrimony.
I do not say that Charlotte Brontë had not what is called a
"temperament"; her genius would not have been what it was without it;
she herself would have been incomplete; but there never was a woman of
genius who had her temperament in more complete subjection to her
character; and it is her character that you have to reckon with at every
turn.
The little legends and the little theories have gone far enough. And had
they gone no farther they would not have mattered much. They would at
least have left Charlotte Brontë's genius to its own mystery.
But her genius was the thing that irritated, the enigmatic, inexplicable
thing. Talent in a woman you can understand, there's a formula for
it--_tout talent de femme est un bonheur manqué_. So when a woman's
talent baffles you, your course is plain, _cherchez l'homme_.
Charlotte's critics argued that if you could put your finger on the man
you would have the key to the mystery. This, of course, was arguing that
her genius was, after all, only a superior kind of talent; but some of
them had already begun to ask themselves, Was it, after all, anything
more? So they began to look for the man. They were certain by this time
that there was one.
The search was difficult; for Charlotte had concealed him well. But they
found him at last in M. Constantin Héger, the little Professor of the
Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the Rue d'Isabelle. Sir Wemyss Reid had
suggested a love-affair in Brussels to account for Charlotte's
depression, which was unfavourable to his theory of the happy life. Mr.
Leyland seized upon the idea, for it nourished his theory that Branwell
was an innocent lamb who had never caused his sisters a moment's misery.
They _made_ misery for themselves out of his harmless peccadilloes. Mr.
Angus Mackay in _The Brontës, Fact and Fiction_, gives us this fiction
for a fact. He is pleased with what he calls the "pathetic significance"
of his "discovery". There _was_ somebody, there had to be, and it had to
be M. Héger, for there wasn't anybody else. Mr. Mackay draws back the
veil with a gesture and reveals--the love-affair. He is very nice about
it, just as nice as ever he can be. "We see her," he says, "sore
wounded in her affections, but unconquerable in her will. The discovery
... does not degrade the noble figure we know so well.... The moral of
her greatest works--that conscience must reign absolute at whatever
cost--acquires a greater force when we realize how she herself came
through the furnace of temptation with marks of torture on her, but with
no stain on her soul."
This is all very well, but the question is: _Did_ Charlotte come through
a furnace? _Did_ she suffer from a great and tragic passion? It may have
been so. For all we know she may have been in fifty furnaces; she may
have gone from one fit of tragic passion to another. Only (apart from
gossip, and apart from the argument from the novels, which begs the
question) we have no evidence to prove it. What we have points all the
other way.
Gossip apart, believers in the tragic passion have nourished their
theory chiefly on that celebrated passage in a letter of Charlotte's to
Ellen Nussey: "I returned to Brussels after Aunt's death, prompted by
what then seemed an irresistible impulse. I was punished for my selfish
folly by a withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of
mind."
Here we have the great disclosure. By "irresistible impulse" and
"selfish folly", Charlotte could only mean indulgence in an illegitimate
passion for M. Héger's society. Peace of mind bears but one
interpretation.
Mr. Clement Shorter, to his infinite credit, will have none of this. He
maintains very properly that the passage should be left to bear the
simple construction that Miss Nussey and Mr. Nicholls put upon it. But I
would go farther. I am convinced that not only does that passage bear
that construction, but that it will not bear the weight of any other.