has Miss Nussey's brief spiritual ascendency. But the friendship and the
letters never cease. They go on for twenty years, through exile and
suffering, through bereavement, through fame and through marriage,
uninterrupted and, except for one brief period, unabridged. There is
nothing in any biography to compare with those letters to Ellen Nussey.
If Charlotte Brontë had not happened to be a great genius as well as a
great woman, they alone would have furnished forth her complete
biography. There is no important detail of her mere life that is not
given in them. Mrs. Gaskell relied almost entirely on them, and on
information supplied to her by Miss Nussey. And each critic and
biographer who followed her, from Sir Wemyss Reid to Mr. Clement
Shorter, drew from the same source. Miss Nussey was almost the only safe
repository of material relating to Charlotte Brontë. She had possessed
hundreds of her letters and, with that amiable weakness which was the
defect of her charming quality, she was unable to withhold any of them
from the importunate researcher. There seems to have been nothing,
except one thing, that Charlotte did not talk about to Miss Nussey when
they sat with their feet on the fender and their hair in curl-papers.
That one thing was her writing. It is quite possible that in those
curl-paper confidences Miss Nussey learnt the truth about Charlotte's
friend, M. Héger. She never learnt anything about Charlotte's genius. In
everything that concerned her genius Charlotte was silent and secret
with her friend. That was the line, the very sharp and impassable line
she drew between her "dear, _dear_ Ellen", her "dearest Nel", and her
sisters, Anne and Emily. The freemasonry of friendship ended there. You
may search in vain through even her later correspondence with Miss
Nussey for any more than perfunctory and extraneous allusions to her
works. It was as if they had never been. Every detail of her daily life
is there, the outer and the inner things, the sewing and ironing and
potato-peeling, together with matters of the heart and soul, searchings,
experiences, agonies; the figures of her father, her brother, her
sisters, move there, vivid and alive; and old Tabby and the curates; and
the very animals, Keeper and Flossie, and the little black cat, Tom,
that died and made Emily sorry; but of the one thing not a word. The
letters to Ellen Nussey following the publication of _Jane Eyre_ are all
full of gossip about Miss Ringrose and the Robinsons. Presently Ellen
hears a rumour of publication. Charlotte repudiates it and friction
follows.
Charlotte writes: "Dear Ellen,--write another letter and explain that
note of yours distinctly.... Let me know what you heard, and from whom
you heard it. You do wrong to feel pain from any circumstance, or to
suppose yourself slighted...." "Dear Ellen,--All I can say to you about
a certain matter is this: the report ... must have had its origin in
some absurd misunderstanding. I have given _no one_ a right to affirm or
hint in the most distant manner that I am publishing (humbug!). Whoever
has said it--if anyone has, which I doubt--is no friend of mine. Though
twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none. I scout the idea
utterly. Whoever, after I have distinctly rejected the charge, urges it
upon me, will do an unkind and ill-bred thing." If Miss Nussey is asked,
she is authorized by Miss Brontë to say, "that she repels and disowns
every accusation of the kind. You may add, if you please, that if anyone
has her confidence, you believe you have, and she has made no drivelling
confessions to you on that subject." "Dear Ellen,--I shall begin by
telling you that you have no right to be angry at the length of time I
have suffered to slip by since receiving your last, without answering
it; because you have often kept me waiting much longer, and having made
this gracious speech, thereby obviating reproaches, I will add that I
think it a great shame, when you receive a long and thoroughly
interesting letter, full of the sort of details you fully relish, to
read the same with selfish pleasure, and not even have the manners to
thank your correspondent, and express how very much you enjoyed the
narrative. I _did_ enjoy the narrative in your last very keenly....
Which of the Miss Woolers did you see at Mr. Allbutts?"
A beautiful but most unequal friendship. "The sort of details you fully
relish--" How that phrase must have rankled! You can hear the passionate
protest: "Those details are not what I relish in the least. Putting me
off with your Woolers and your Allbutts! If only you had told me about
_Jane Eyre_!" For it turned out that all the time Mary Taylor had been
told. The inference was that Mary Taylor, with her fits of caution,
could be trusted.
This silence of Charlotte's must have been most painful and
incomprehensible to the poor Ellen who was Caroline Helstone. She had
been the first to divine Charlotte's secret; for she kept the letters.
She must have felt like some tender and worshipping wife to whom all
doors in the house of the beloved are thrown open, except the door of
the sanctuary, which is persistently slammed in her charming face. There
must have come to her moments of terrible insight when she felt the
danger and the mystery of the flaming spirit she had tried to hold. But
Charlotte's friend can wear her half-pathetic immortality with grace.
She could at least say: "She told me things she never told anyone else.
I have hundreds of her letters. And I had her heart."
* * * * *
Nothing so much as this correspondence reveals the appalling solitude in
which the Brontës lived. Here is their dearest and most intimate friend,
and she is one to whom they can never speak of the thing that interested
them most. No doubt "our best plays mean secret plays"; but Charlotte,
at any rate, suffered from this secrecy. There was nothing to counteract
Miss Nussey's direful influence on her spiritual youth. "Papa" highly
approved of the friendship. He wished it to continue, and it did; and it
was the best that Charlotte had. I know few things more pathetic than
the cry that Charlotte, at twenty-one, sent out of her solitude (with
some verses) to Southey and to Wordsworth. Southey told her that,
"Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not
to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure
will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To
those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be
less eager for celebrity." A sound, respectable, bourgeois opinion so
far, but Southey went farther. "Write poetry for its own sake," he said;
and he could hardly have said better. Charlotte treasured the letter,
and wrote on the cover of it, "Southey's advice, to be kept for ever."
Wordsworth's advice, I am sorry to say, provoked her to flippancy.
And that, out of the solitude, was all. Not the ghost, not the shadow of
an Influence came to the three sisters. There never was genius that owed
so little to influence as theirs.
I know that in Charlotte's case there is said to have been an Influence.
An Influence without which she would have remained for ever in
obscurity, with _Villette_, with _Shirley_, with _Jane Eyre_, with _The
Professor_, unborn, unconceived.
Need I say that the Influence is--M. Héger?
"The sojourn in Brussels," says Mr. Clement Shorter, "made Miss Brontë
an author," and he is only following Sir Wemyss Reid, who was the first
to establish Brussels as the turning-point. Mr. Shorter does not believe
in M. Héger as the inspirer of passion, but he does believe in him as
the inspirer of genius. He thinks it exceedingly probable that had not
circumstances led Charlotte Brontë to spend some time at Brussels not
only would "the world never have heard of her", but it would never have
heard of her sisters. He is quite certain about Charlotte anyhow; she
could not have "arrived" had she not met M. Héger. "She went," he says,
"to Brussels full of the crude ambitions, the semi-literary impulses
that are so common on the fringe of the writing world. She left Brussels
a woman of genuine cultivation, of educated tastes, armed with just the
equipment that was to enable her to write the books of which two
generations of her countrymen have been justly proud."
This is saying that Charlotte Brontë had no means of expression before
she wrote _devoirs_ under M. Héger. True, her genius did not find itself
until after she left Brussels, that is to say, not until she was nearly
thirty. I have not read any of her works as Lord Charles Albert Florian
Wellesley, and I do not imagine they were works of genius. But that only
means that Charlotte Brontë's genius took time. She was one of those
novelists who do not write novels before they are nearly thirty. But she
could write. Certain fragments of her very earliest work show that from
the first she had not only the means, but very considerable mastery of
expression. What is more, they reveal in germ the qualities that marked
her style in its maturity. Her styles rather, for she had several. There
is her absolutely simple style, in which she is perfect; her didactic
style, her fantastic style, which are mere temporary aberrations; and
her inspired style, in which at her worst she is merely flamboyant and
redundant, and at her best no less than perfect. You will find a faint,
embryonic foreshadowing of her perfections in the fragments given by
Mrs. Gaskell. There is THE HISTORY OF THE YEAR 1829, beginning: "Once
Papa lent my sister Maria a book. It was an old geography book; she
wrote on its blank leaf, "Papa lent me this book." This book is a
hundred and twenty years old; it is at this moment lying before me.
While I write this I am in the kitchen of the Parsonage, Haworth; Tabby,
the servant, is washing up the breakfast things, and Anne, my youngest
sister (Maria was my eldest), is kneeling on a chair, looking at some
cakes, which Tabby has been baking for us." You cannot beat that for
pure simplicity of statement. There is another fragment that might have
come straight out of _Jane Eyre_. "One night, about the time when the
cold sleet and stormy fogs of November are succeeded by the snowstorms
and high piercing night-winds of confirmed winter, we were all sitting
round the warm, blazing kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrel
with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which she
came off victorious, no candle having been produced." And there is a
dream-story that Mr. Clement Shorter gives. She is in the "Mines of
Cracone", under the floor of the sea. "But in the midst of all this
magnificence I felt an indescribable sense of fear and terror, for the
sea raged above us, and by the awful and tumultuous noises of roaring
winds and dashing waves, it seemed as if the storm was violent. And now
the massy pillars groaned beneath the pressure of the ocean, and the
glittering arches seemed about to be overwhelmed. When I heard the
rushing waters and saw a mighty flood rolling towards me I gave a loud
shriek of terror." The dream changes: she is in a desert full of barren
rocks and high mountains, where she sees "by the light of his own fiery
eyes a royal lion rousing himself from his kingly slumbers. His terrible
eye was fixed upon me, and the desert rang, and the rocks echoed with
the tremendous roar of fierce delight which he uttered as he sprang
towards me." And there is her letter to the editor of one of their
_Little Magazines_: "Sir,--It is well known that the Genii have declared
that unless they perform certain arduous duties every year, of a
mysterious nature, all the worlds in the firmament will be burnt up, and
gathered together in one mighty globe, which will roll in solitary
splendour through the vast wilderness of space, inhabited only by the
four high princes of the Genii, till time shall be succeeded by
Eternity; and the impudence of this is only to be paralleled by another
of their assertions, namely, that by their magic might they can reduce
the world to a desert, the purest waters to streams of livid poison, and
the clearest lakes to stagnant water, the pestilential vapours of which
shall slay all living creatures, except the bloodthirsty beast of the
forest, and the ravenous bird of the rock. But that in the midst of this
desolation the palace of the chief Genii shall rise sparkling in the
wilderness, and the horrible howl of their war-cry shall spread over the
land at morning, at noontide, and at night; but that they shall have
their annual feast over the bones of the dead, and shall yearly rejoice
with the joy of victors. I think, sir, that the horrible wickedness of
this needs no remark, and therefore I hasten to subscribe myself, etc."
Puerile, if you like, and puerile all the stuff that Charlotte Brontë
wrote before eighteen-forty-six; but her style at thirteen, in its very
rhythms and cadences, is the unmistakable embryo of her style at thirty;
and M. Héger no more cured her of its faults that he could teach her its
splendours. Something that was not Brussels made Miss Brontë a
prodigious author at thirteen. The mere mass of her _Juvenilia_
testifies to a most ungovernable bent. Read the list of works, appalling
in their length, which this child produced in a period of fifteen
months; consider that she produced nothing but melancholy letters during
her "sojourn in Brussels"; and compare M. Héger's academic precepts with
her practice, with the wild sweep and exuberance of her style when she
has shaken him off, and her genius gets possession of her.
I know there is a gulf fixed between Currer Bell and Charles Townsend,
who succeeded Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley and the Marquis of
Douro, about eighteen-thirty-eight; but it is bridged by the later
_Poems_ which show Charlotte's genius struggling through a wrong medium
to the right goal. She does not know--after the sojourn in Brussels she
does not yet know--that her right medium is prose. She knew no more than
she knew in November, eighteen-forty-one, when, on the eve of her flight
from Haworth, she writes: "The plain fact is, I was not, I am not now,
certain of my destiny." It was not until two years after she had
returned to Haworth that she received her certainty. For posterity,
overpowered by the labour of the Brontë specialists, it may seem as if
Charlotte Brontë's genius owed everything to her flight from Haworth. In
reality her flight merely coincided with the inevitable shooting of its
wings; and the specialists have mistaken coincidence for destiny.
Heaven only knows what would have happened to her genius if, blind to
her destiny, she had remained in Brussels. For, once there, its
wing-feathers left off growing. Its way was blocked by every conceivable
hostile and obstructive thing. Madame Héger was hostile, and Monsieur, I
think, purely obstructive. Emily saw through him, and denounced his
method as fatal to all originality. Charlotte, to be sure, called him
"my dear master, the only master that I ever had", but if that was not
her "absurd charity", it was only her Brontësque way. There was no sense
in which he was her master. He taught her French; to the very last the
habit of using "a few French words" was the King Charles's head in her
manuscripts; and the French he taught her did her harm. The restraint he
could and would have taught her she never learnt until her genius had
had, in defiance and in spite of him, its full fling.
And what a fling! It is the way of genius to look after itself. In spite
of obstacles, Charlotte Brontë's took hold of every man and woman that
crossed and barred its path, and ultimately it avenged itself on
Monsieur and on Madame Héger. Those two were made for peaceful,
honourable conjugal obscurity, but it was their luck to harbour a
half-fledged and obstructed genius in their Pensionnat, a genius
thirsting for experience; and somehow, between them, they contrived to
make it suffer. That was their tragedy. Monsieur's case is pitiful; for
he was kind and well-meaning, and he was fond of Charlotte; and yet,
because of Charlotte, there is no peace for him in the place where he
has gone. Her genius has done with him, but her ghost, like some malign
and awful destiny, pursues him. No sooner does he sink back quiet in his
grave than somebody unearths him. Why cannot he be allowed to rest, once
for all, in his amiable unimportance? He became, poor man, important
only by the use that Charlotte's genius made of him. It seized him as it
would have seized on any other interesting material that came its way.
Without him we might have had another Rochester, and we should not have
had any Paul Emanuel, which would have been a pity; that is all.
There is hardly any hope that Brontë specialists will accept this view.
For them the sojourn in Brussels will still stand as the turning-point
in Charlotte Brontë's career. Yet for her, long afterwards, Brussels
must have stood as the danger threatening it. She would have said, I
think, that her sojourn in Haworth was the turning-point. It was destiny
that turned Emily back to Haworth from the destruction that waited for
her at Brussels, so that she conceived and brought forth _Wuthering
Heights_; her own destiny that she secretly foreknew, consoling and
beneficent. And, no doubt, it was destiny of a sort, unforeknown,
deceitful, apparently malignant, that sent Charlotte back again to
Brussels after her aunt's death. It wrung from her her greatest book,
_Villette_. But Haworth, I think, would have wrung from her another and
perhaps a greater.
For the first-fruits of the sojourn in Brussels was neither _Villette_
nor _Jane Eyre_, but _The Professor_. And _The Professor_ has none of
the qualities of _Jane Eyre_ or of _Villette_; it has none of the
qualities of Charlotte's later work at all; above all, none of that
master quality which M. Héger is supposed to have specially evoked.
Charlotte, indeed, could not well have written a book more destructive
to the legend of the upheaval, the tragic passion, the furnace of
temptation and the flight. Nothing could be less like a furnace than the
atmosphere of _The Professor_. From the first page to the last there is
not one pulse, not one breath of passion in it. The bloodless thing
comes coldly, slowly tentatively, from the birth. It is almost as frigid
as a _devoir_ written under M. Héger's eye. The theorists, I notice, are
careful not to draw attention to _The Professor_; and they are wise, for
attention drawn to _The Professor_ makes sad work of their theory.
Remember, on the theory, Charlotte Brontë has received her great
awakening, her great enlightenment; she is primed with passion; the
whole wonderful material of _Villette_ is in her hand; she has before
her her unique opportunity. You ought, on the theory, to see her
hastening to it, a passionate woman, pouring out her own one and supreme
experience, and, with the brand of Brussels on her, never afterwards
really doing anything else. Whereas the first thing the impassioned
Charlotte does (after a year of uninspired and ineffectual poetizing) is
to sit down and write _The Professor_; a book, remarkable not by any
means for its emotion, but for its cold and dispassionate observation.
Charlotte eliminates herself, and is Crimsworth in order that she may
observe Frances Henri the more dispassionately. She is inspired solely
by the analytic spirit, and either cannot, or will not, let herself go.
But she does what she meant to do. She had it in mind to write, not a
great work of imagination, but a grey and sober book, and a grey and
sober book is what she writes. A book concerned only with things and
people she has seen and known; a book, therefore, from which passion and
the poetry that passion is must be rigidly excluded, as belonging to
the region of things not, strictly speaking, known. It is as if she had
written _The Professor_ in rivalry with her sister Anne, both of them
austerely determined to put aside all imagination and deal with
experience and experience alone. Thus you obtain sincerity, you obtain
truth. And with nothing but experience before her, she writes a book
that has no passion in it, a book almost as bloodless and as gentle as
her sister Anne's.
Let us not disparage _The Professor_. Charlotte herself did not
disparage it. In her Preface she refused to solicit "indulgence for it
on the plea of a first attempt. A first attempt," she says, "it
certainly was not, as the pen which wrote it had been previously worn in
a practice of some years." In that Preface she shows plainly that at the
very outset of her career she had no sterner critic than herself; that
she was aware of her sins and her temptations, and of the dangers that
lurked for her in her imaginative style. "In many a crude effort,
destroyed almost as soon as composed, I had got over any such taste as I
might have had for ornamented and decorated composition, and come to
prefer what was plain and homely." Observe, it is not to the lessons of
the "master", but to the creation and destruction that went on at
Haworth that she attributes this purgation. She is not aware of the
extent to which she can trust her genius, of what will happen when she
has fairly let herself go. She is working on a method that rules her
choice of subject. "I said to myself that my hero should work his way
through life, as I had seen real, living men work theirs--that he should
never get a shilling that he had not earned--that no sudden turns should
lift him in a moment to wealth and high station; that whatever small
competency he might gain should be won by the sweat of his brow; that
before he could find so much as an arbour to sit down in, he should
master at least half the ascent of the Hill Difficulty; that he should
not marry even a beautiful girl or a lady of rank."
There was no fine madness in that method; but its very soundness and
sanity show the admirable spirit in which Charlotte Brontë approached
her art. She was to return to the method of _The Professor_ again and
yet again, when she suspected herself of having given imagination too
loose a rein. The remarkable thing was that she should have begun with
it.
And in some respects _The Professor_ is more finished, better
constructed than any of her later books. There is virtue in its extreme
sobriety. Nothing could be more delicate and firm than the drawing of
Frances Henri; nothing in its grey style more admirable than the scene
where Crimsworth, having found Frances in the cemetery, takes her to her
home in the Rue Notre Dame aux Neiges.
"Stepping over a little mat of green wool, I found myself in a small
room with a painted floor and a square of green carpet in the middle;
the articles of furniture were few, but all bright and exquisitely
clean--order reigned through its narrow limits--such order as it suited
my punctilious soul to behold.... Poor the place might be; poor truly it
was, but its neatness was better than elegance, and had but a bright
little fire shone on that clean hearth, I should have deemed it more
attractive than a palace. No fire was there, however, and no fuel laid
ready to light; the lace-mender was unable to allow herself that
indulgence.... Frances went into an inner room to take off her bonnet,
and she came out a model of frugal neatness, with her well-fitting black
stuff dress, so accurately defining her elegant bust and taper waist,
with her spotless white collar turned back from a fair and shapely
neck, with her plenteous brown hair arranged in smooth bands on her
temples and in a large Grecian plait behind: ornaments she had
none--neither brooch, ring, nor ribbon; she did well enough without
them--perfection of fit, proportion of form, grace of carriage,
agreeably supplied their place." Frances lights a fire, having fetched
wood and coal in a basket.
"'It is her whole stock, and she will exhaust it out of hospitality,'
thought I.
"'What are you going to do?' I asked: 'not surely to light a fire this
hot evening? I shall be smothered.'
"'Indeed, Monsieur, I feel it very chilly since the rain began; besides,
I must boil the water for my tea, for I take tea on Sundays; you will be
obliged to bear the heat.'"
And Frances makes the tea, and sets the table, and brings out her
pistolets, and offers them to Monsieur, and it is all very simple and
idyllic. So is the scene where Crimsworth, without our knowing exactly
how he does it, declares himself to Frances. The dialogue is half in
French, and does not lend itself to quotation, but it compares very
favourably with the more daring comedy of courtship in _Jane Eyre_.
Frances is delicious in her very solidity, her absence of abandonment.
She refuses flatly to give up her teaching at Crimsworth's desire,
Crimsworth, who will have six thousand francs a year.
"'How rich you are, Monsieur!' And then she stirred uneasily in my arms.
'Three thousand francs!' she murmured, 'while I get only twelve
hundred!' She went on faster. 'However, it must be so for the present;
and, Monsieur, were you not saying something about my giving up my
place? Oh no! I shall hold it fast'; and her little fingers emphatically
tightened on mine.
"'Think of marrying you to be kept by you, Monsieur! I could not do it;
and how dull my days would be! You would be away teaching in close,
noisy schoolrooms, from morning till evening, and I should be lingering
at home, unemployed and solitary. I should get depressed and sullen, and
you would soon tire of me.'
"'Frances, you could yet read and study--two things you like so well.'