head of her father's household. She left her father's house in a time of
trouble, prompted by "an irresistible impulse" towards what we should
now call self-development. Charlotte, more than two years later, in a
moment of retrospective morbidity, called it "selfish folly". In that
dark mid-Victorian age it was sin in any woman to leave her home if her
home required her. And with her aunt dead, and her brother Branwell
drowning his grief for his relative in drink, and her father going blind
and beginning in his misery to drink a little too, Charlotte felt that
her home did require her. Equally she felt that either Emily or she had
got to turn out and make a living, and since it couldn't possibly be
Emily it must be she. The problem would have been quite simple even for
Charlotte--but _she wanted to go_. Therefore her tender conscience
vacillated. When you remember that Charlotte Brontë's conscience was,
next to her genius, the largest, and at the same time the most delicate
part of her, and that her love for her own people was a sacred passion,
her words are sufficiently charged with meaning. A passion for M. Héger
is, psychologically speaking, superfluous. You can prove anything by
detaching words from their context. The letter from which that passage
has been torn is an answer to Ellen Nussey's suggestions of work for
Charlotte. Charlotte says "any project which infers the necessity of my
leaving home is impracticable to me. If I could leave home I should not
be at Haworth now. I know life is passing away, and I am doing nothing,
earning nothing--a very bitter knowledge it is at moments--but I see no
way out of the mist"; and so on for another line or two, and then:
"These ideas sting me keenly sometimes; but whenever I consult my
conscience it affirms that I am doing right in staying at home, and
bitter are its upbraidings when I yield to an eager desire for release."
And then, the passage quoted _ad nauseam_, to support the legend of M.
Héger.
A "total withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of
mind". This letter is dated October 1846--more than two years since her
return from Brussels in January, eighteen-forty-four. In those two years
her father was threatened with total blindness, and her brother Branwell
achieved his destiny. The passage refers unmistakably to events at
Haworth. It is further illuminated by another passage from an earlier
letter. Ellen Nussey is going through the same crisis--torn between duty
to herself and duty to her people. She asks Charlotte's advice and
Charlotte gives judgment: "The right path is that which necessitates the
greatest sacrifice of self-interest." The sacrifice, observe, not of
happiness, not of passion, but of self-interest, the development of
self. It was self-development, and not passion, not happiness, that she
went to Brussels for.
And Charlotte's letters from Brussels--from the scene of passion in the
year of crisis, eighteen-forty-three--sufficiently reveal the nature of
the trouble there. Charlotte was alone in the Pensionnat without Emily.
Emily was alone at Haworth. The few friends she had in Brussels left
soon after her arrival. She was alone in Brussels, and her homesickness
was terrible. You can trace the malady in all its stages. In March she
writes: "I ought to consider myself well off, and to be thankful for my
good fortune. I hope I am thankful" (clearly she isn't thankful in the
least!), "and if I could always keep up my spirits and never feel lonely
or long for companionship or friendship, or whatever they call it, I
should do very well." In the same letter you learn that she is giving
English lessons to M. Héger and his brother-in-law, M. Chapelle. "If you
could see and hear the efforts I make to teach them to pronounce like
Englishmen, and their unavailing attempts to imitate, you would laugh to
all eternity." Charlotte is at first amused at the noises made by M.
Héger and his brother-in-law.
In May the noises made by Monsieur fail to amuse. Still, she is
"indebted to him for all the pleasure or amusement" that she had, and in
spite of her indebtedness, she records a "total want of companionship".
"I lead an easeful, stagnant, silent life, for which ... I ought to be
very thankful" (but she is not). May I point out that though you may be
"silent" in the first workings of a tragic and illegitimate passion, you
are not "stagnant", and certainly not "easeful".
At the end of May she finds out that Madame Héger does not like her, and
Monsieur is "wondrously influenced" by Madame. Monsieur has in a great
measure "withdrawn the light of his countenance", but Charlotte
apparently does not care. In August the _vacancies_ are at hand, and
everybody but Charlotte is going home. She is consequently "in low
spirits; earth and heaven are dreary and empty to me at this moment"....
"I can hardly write, I have such a dreary weight at my heart." But she
will see it through. She will stay some months longer "till I have
acquired German". And at the end: "Everybody is abundantly civil, but
homesickness comes creeping over me. I cannot shake it off." That was in
September, in M. Héger's absence. Later, she tells Emily how she went
into the cathedral and made "a real confession _to see what it was
like_". Charlotte's confession has been used to bolster up the theory of
the "temptation". Unfortunately for the theory it happened in
September, when M. Héger and temptation were not there. In October she
finds that she no longer trusts Madame Héger. At the same time "solitude
oppresses me to an excess". She gave notice, and M. Héger flew into a
passion and commanded her to stay. She stayed very much against, not her
conscience, but her will. In the same letter and the same connection she
says, "I have much to say--many little odd things, queer and puzzling
enough--which I do not like to trust to a letter, but which one day
perhaps, or rather one evening--if ever we should find ourselves by the
fireside at Haworth or Brookroyd, with our feet on the fender curling
our hair--I may communicate to you."
Charlotte is now aware of a situation; she is interested in it,
intellectually, not emotionally.
In November: "Twinges of homesickness cut me to the heart, now and
then." On holidays "the silence and loneliness of all the house weighs
down one's spirits like lead.... Madame Héger, good and kind as I have
described her" (_i.e._ for all her goodness and kindness), "never comes
near me on these occasions." ... "She is not colder to me than she is to
the other teachers, but they are less dependent on her than I am." But
the situation is becoming clearer. Charlotte is interested. "I fancy I
begin to perceive the reason of this mighty distance and reserve; it
sometimes makes me laugh, and at other times nearly cry. When I am sure
of it I will tell you."
There can be no doubt that before she left Brussels Charlotte was sure;
but there is no record of her ever having told.
The evidence from the letters is plain enough. But the first thing that
the theorist does is to mutilate letters. He suppresses all those parts
of a correspondence which tell against his theory. When these torn and
bleeding passages are restored piously to their contexts they are
destructive to the legend of tragic passion. They show (as Mr. Clement
Shorter has pointed out) that throughout her last year at Brussels
Charlotte Brontë saw hardly anything of M. Héger. They also show that
before very long Charlotte had a shrewd suspicion that Madame had
arranged it so, and that it was not so much the absence of Monsieur that
disturbed her as the extraordinary behaviour of Madame. And they show
that from first to last she was incurably homesick.
Now if Charlotte had been in any degree, latently, or increasingly, or
violently in love with M. Héger, she would have been as miserable as you
like in M. Héger's house, but she would not have been homesick; she
would not, I think, have worried quite so much about Madame's behaviour;
and she would have found the clue to it sooner than she did.
To me it is all so simple and self-evident that, if the story were not
revived periodically, if it had not been raked up again only the other
day,[A] there would be no need to dwell upon anything so pitiful and
silly.
[Footnote A: See _The Key to the Brontë Works_, by J. Malham-Dembleby,
1911.]
It rests first and foremost on gossip, silly, pitiful gossip and
conjecture. Gossip in England, gossip in Brussels, conjecture all round.
Above all, it rests on certain feline hints supplied by Madame Héger and
her family. Charlotte's friends were always playfully suspecting her of
love-affairs. They could never put their fingers on the man, and they
missed M. Héger. It would never have occurred to their innocent
mid-Victorian minds to suspect Charlotte of an attachment to a married
man. It would not have occurred to Charlotte to suspect herself of it.
But Madame Héger was a Frenchwoman, and she had not a mid-Victorian
mind, and she certainly suspected Charlotte of an attachment, a flagrant
attachment, to M. Héger. It is well known that Madame made statements to
that effect, and it is admitted on all hands that Madame had been
jealous. It may fairly be conjectured that it was M. Héger and not
Charlotte who gave her cause, slight enough in all conscience, but
sufficient for Madame Héger. She did not understand these Platonic
relations between English teachers and their French professors. She had
never desired Platonic relations with anybody herself, and she saw
nothing but annoyance in them for everybody concerned. Madame's attitude
is the clue to the mystery, the clue that Charlotte found. She accused
the dead Charlotte of an absurd and futile passion for her husband; she
stated that she had had to advise the living Charlotte to moderate the
ardour of her admiration for the engaging professor; but the truth, as
Charlotte in the end discovered, was that for a certain brief period
Madame was preposterously jealous. M. Héger confessed as much when he
asked Charlotte to address her letters to him at the Athénée Royale
instead of the Pensionnat. The correspondence, he said, was disagreeable
to his wife.
Why, in Heaven's name, disagreeable, if Madame Héger suspected Charlotte
of an absurd and futile passion? And why should Madame Héger have been
jealous of an absurd and futile woman, a woman who had seen so little of
Madame Héger's husband, and who was then in England? I cannot agree with
Mr. Shorter that M. Héger regarded Charlotte with indifference. He was a
Frenchman, and he had his vanity, and no doubt the frank admiration of
his brilliant pupil appealed to it vividly in moments of conjugal
depression. Charlotte herself must have had some attraction for M.
Héger. Madame perceived the appeal and the attraction, and she was
jealous; therefore her interpretation of appearances could not have been
so unflattering to Charlotte as she made out. Madame, in fact,
suspected, on her husband's part, the dawning of an attachment. We know
nothing about M. Héger's attachment, and we haven't any earthly right to
know; but from all that is known of M. Héger it is certain that, if it
was not entirely intellectual, not entirely that "_affection presque
paternelle_" that he once professed, it was entirely restrained and
innocent and honourable. It is Madame Héger with her jealousy who has
given the poor gentleman away. Monsieur's state of mind--extremely
temporary--probably accounted for "those many odd little things, queer
and puzzling enough", which Charlotte would not trust to a letter;
matter for curl-paper confidences and no more.
Of course there is the argument from the novels, from _The Professor_,
from _Jane Eyre_, from _Villette_. I have not forgotten it. But really
it begs the question. It moves in an extremely narrow and an extremely
vicious circle. Jane Eyre was tried in a furnace of temptation,
therefore Charlotte must have been tried. Lucy Snowe and Frances Henri
loved and suffered in Brussels. Therefore Charlotte must have loved and
suffered there. And if Charlotte loved and suffered and was tried in a
furnace of temptation, that would account for Frances and for Lucy and
for Jane.
No; the theorists who have insisted on this tragic passion have not
reckoned with Charlotte Brontë's character, and its tremendous power of
self-repression. If at Brussels any disastrous tenderness had raised its
head it wouldn't have had a chance to grow an inch. But Charlotte had
large and luminous ideas of friendship. She was pure, utterly pure from
all the illusions and subtleties and corruptions of the sentimentalist,
and she could trust herself in friendship. She brought to it ardours and
vehemences that she would never have allowed to love. If she let herself
go in her infrequent intercourse with M. Héger, it was because she was
so far from feeling in herself the possibility of passion. That was why
she could say, "I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what
the parting with M. Héger cost me. It grieved me so much to grieve him
who has been so true, kind, and disinterested a friend." That was how
she could bring herself to write thus to Monsieur: "_Savez-vous ce que je
ferais, Monsieur? J'écrirais un livre et je le dédierais à mon maître de
littérature, au seul maître que j'aie jamais eu--à vous Monsieur! Je
vous ai dit souvent en français combien je vous respecte, combien je
suis redevable à votre bonté à vos conseils. Je voudrais le dire une
fois en anglais ... le souvenir de vos bontés ne s'effacera jamais de ma
mémoire, et tant que ce souvenir durera le respect que vous m'avez
inspiré durera aussi._" For "_je vous respecte_" we are not entitled to
read "_je vous aime_". Charlotte was so made that kindness shown her
moved her to tears of gratitude. When Charlotte said "respect" she meant
it. Her feeling for M. Héger was purely what Mr. Matthew Arnold said
religion was, an affair of "morality touched with emotion". All her
utterances, where there is any feeling in them, no matter what, have a
poignancy, a vibration which is Brontësque and nothing more. And this
Brontësque quality is what the theorists have (like Madame Héger, and
possibly Monsieur) neither allowed for nor understood.
* * * * *
For this "fiery-hearted Vestal", this virgin, sharp-tongued and
sharper-eyed, this scorner of amorous curates, had a genius for
friendship. This genius, like her other genius, was narrow in its range
and opportunity, and for that all the more ardent and intense. It fed on
what came to its hand. It could even grow, like her other genius, with
astounding vitality out of strange and hostile soil. She seems to have
had many friends, obscure and great; the obscure, the Dixons, the
Wheelrights, the Taylors, the Nusseys, out of all proportion to the
great. But properly speaking she had only two friends, Mary Taylor and
Ellen Nussey, the enchanting, immortal "Nel".
There _is_ something at first sight strange and hostile about Mary
Taylor, the energetic, practical, determined, terribly robust person you
see so plainly trying, in the dawn of their acquaintance, to knock the
nonsense out of Charlotte. Mary Taylor had no appreciation of the
Brontësque. When Charlotte told Mary Taylor that at Cowan Bridge she
used to stand in the burn on a stone to watch the water flow by, Mary
Taylor told Charlotte that she should have gone fishing. When _Jane
Eyre_ appeared she wrote to Charlotte in a strain that is amusing to
posterity. There is a touch of condescension in her praise. She is
evidently surprised at anything so great coming out of Charlotte. "It
seemed to me incredible that you had actually written a book." "You are
very different from me," she says, "in having no doctrine to preach. It
is impossible to squeeze a moral out of your production." She is
thinking of his prototype when she criticizes the character of St. John
Rivers. "A missionary either goes into his office for a piece of bread,
or he goes for enthusiasm, and that is both too good and too bad a
quality for St. John. It's a bit of your absurd charity to believe in
such a man." As an intellectual woman Mary Taylor realized Charlotte
Brontë's intellect, but it is doubtful if she ever fully realized what,
beyond an intellect, she had got hold of in her friend. She was a woman
of larger brain than Ellen Nussey, she was loyal and warm-hearted to the
last degree, but it was not given to her to see in Charlotte Brontë what
Ellen Nussey, little as you would have expected it, had seen. She did
not keep her letters. She burnt them "in a fit of caution", which may
have been just as well.
But Mary Taylor is important. She had, among her more tender qualities,
an appalling frankness. It was she who told poor little Charlotte that
she was very ugly. Charlotte never forgot it. You can feel in her
letters, in her novels, in her whole nature, the long reverberation of
the shock. She said afterwards: "You did me a great deal of good,
Polly," by which she meant that Polly had done her an infinity of harm.
Her friends all began by trying to do her good. Even Ellen Nussey tried.
Charlotte is very kindly cautioned against being "tempted by the
fondness of my sisters to consider myself of too much importance", and
in a parenthesis Ellen Nussey begs her not to be offended. "Oh, Ellen,"
Charlotte writes, "do you think I could be offended by any good advice
you may give me?" She thanks her heartily, and loves her "if possible
all the better for it". Ellen Nussey in her turn asks Charlotte to tell
her of her faults and "cease flattering her". Charlotte very sensibly
refuses; and it is not till she has got away from her sisters that her
own heart-searchings begin. They are mainly tiresome, but there is a
flash of revelation in her reply to "the note you sent me with the
umbrella". "My darling, if I were like you, I should have to face
Zionwards, though prejudice and error might occasionally fling a mist
over the glorious vision before me, for with all your single-hearted
sincerity you have your faults, but _I_ am not like you. If you knew my
thoughts; the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at
times eats me up, and makes me feel society, as it is, wretchedly
insipid, you would pity me, and I dare say despise me." Miss Nussey
writes again, and Charlotte trembles "all over with excitement" after
reading her note. "I will no longer shrink from your question," she
replies. "I _do_ wish to be better than I am. I pray fervently sometimes
to be made so ... this very night I will pray as you wish me."
But Charlotte is not in the least like Ellen Nussey, and she still
refuses to be drawn into any return of this dangerous play with a
friend's conscience and her nerves. "I will not tell you all I think and
feel about you, Ellen. I will preserve unbroken that reserve which alone
enables me to maintain a decent character for judgment; but for that, I
should long ago have been set down by all who knows me as a Frenchified
fool. You have been very kind to me of late, and gentle, and you have
spared me those little sallies of ridicule, which, owing to my miserable
and wretched touchiness of character, used formerly to make me wince, as
if I had been touched with hot iron. Things that nobody else cares for
enter into my mind and rankle there like venom. I know these feelings
are absurd, and therefore I try to hide them, but they only sting the
deeper for concealment. I'm an idiot!"
Miss Nussey seems to have preserved her calm through all the excitement
and to have never turned a hair. But nothing could have been worse for
Charlotte than this sort of thing. It goes on for years. It began in
eighteen-thirty-three, the third year of their friendship, when she was
seventeen. In 'thirty-seven it is at its height. Charlotte writes from
Dewsbury Moor: "If I could always live with you, if your lips and mine
could at the same time drink the same draught at the same pure fountain
of mercy, I hope, I trust, I might one day become better, far better
than my evil, wandering thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit
and warm to the flesh, will now permit me to be. I often plan the
pleasant life we might lead, strengthening each other in the power of
self-denial, that hallowed and glowing devotion which the past Saints of
God often attained to."
Now a curious and interesting thing is revealed by this correspondence.
These religious fervours and depressions come on the moment Charlotte
leaves Haworth and disappear as soon as she returns. All those letters
were written from Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor, while the Haworth letters
of the same period are sane and light-hearted. And when she is fairly
settled at Haworth, instead of emulating the Saints of God, she and Miss
Nussey are studying human nature and the art of flirtation as exhibited
by curates. Charlotte administers to her friend a formidable amount of
worldly wisdom, thus avenging herself for the dance Miss Nussey led her
round the throne of grace.
For, though that morbid excitement and introspection belonged solely to
Charlotte's days of exile, Miss Nussey was at the bottom of it. Mary
Taylor would have been a far robuster influence. But Charlotte's
friendship for Mary Taylor, warm as it was, strikes cold beside her
passionate affection for Ellen Nussey. She brought her own fire to that,
and her own extraordinary capacity for pain. Her letters show every
phase of this friendship, its birth, its unfolding; and then the sudden
leaping of the flame, its writhing and its torture. She writes with a
lover's ardour and impatience. "Write to me very soon and dispel my
uncertainty, or I shall get impatient, almost irritable." "I read your
letter with dismay. Ellen--what shall I do without you? Why are we to be
denied each other's society? It is an inscrutable fatality.... Why are
we to be divided?" (She is at Roe Head, and Roe Head suggests the
answer.) "Surely, Ellen, it must be because we are in danger of loving
each other too well--of losing sight of the _Creator_ in idolatry of the
_creature_." She prays to be resigned, and records "a sweet, placid
sensation like those that I remember used to visit me when I was a
little child, and on Sunday evenings in summer stood by the window
reading the life of a certain French nobleman who attained a purer and
higher degree of sanctity than has been known since the days of the
Early Martyrs. I thought of my own Ellen--" "I wish I could see you, my
darling; I have lavished the warmest affections of a very hot tenacious
heart upon you; if you grow cold, it is over." She was only twenty-one.
A few more years and the leaping and the writhing and the torture cease,
the fire burns to a steady, inextinguishable glow. There is gaiety in
Charlotte's tenderness. She is "infuriated" on finding a jar in her
trunk. "At first I hoped it was empty, but when I found it heavy and
replete, I could have hurled it all the way back to Birstall. However,
the inscription A.B. softened me much. You ought first to be tenderly
kissed, and then as tenderly whipped. Emily is just now sitting on the
floor of the bedroom where I am writing, looking at her apples. She
smiled when I gave them and the collar as your presents, with an
expression at once well pleased and slightly surprised."