better; I must act in some way, and act with you. I have taken notice,
Monsieur, that people who are only in each other's company for
amusement, never really like each other so well, or esteem each other so
highly, as those who work together, and perhaps suffer together!'"
To which Crimsworth replies, "You speak God's truth, and you shall have
your own way, for it is the best way."
There is far more common sense than passion in the solid little Frances
and her apathetic lover. It is Frances Henri's situation, not her
character, that recalls so irresistibly Lucy Snowe. Frances has neither
Lucy's temperament, nor Lucy's terrible capacity for suffering. She
suffers through her circumstances, not through her temperament. The
motives handled in _The Professor_ belong to the outer rather than the
inner world; the pressure of circumstance, bereavement, poverty, the
influences of alien and unloved surroundings, these are the springs that
determine the drama of Frances and of Crimsworth. Charlotte is
displaying a deliberate interest in the outer world and the material
event. She does not yet know that it is in the inner world that her
great conquest and dominion is to be. The people in this first novel are
of the same family as the people in _Jane Eyre_, in _Shirley_, in
_Villette_. Crimsworth is almost reproduced in Louis Moore. Yorke
Hunsden is the unmistakable father of Mr. Yorke and Rochester; Frances,
a pale and passionless sister of Jane Eyre, and a first cousin of Lucy.
Yet, in spite of these relationships, _The Professor_ stands alone. In
spite of its striking resemblance to _Villette_ there is no real, no
spiritual affinity. And the great gulf remains fixed between _The
Professor_ and _Jane Eyre_.
This difference lies deeper than technique. It is a difference of
vision, of sensation. The strange greyness of _The Professor_, its
stillness, is not due altogether to Charlotte's deliberate intention. It
is the stillness, the greyness of imperfect hearing, of imperfect
seeing. I know it has one fine piece of word-painting, but not one that
can stand among Charlotte Brontë's masterpieces in this kind.
Here it is. "Already the pavement was drying; a balmy and fresh breeze
stirred the air, purified by lightning; I left the west behind me, where
spread a sky like opal, azure inmingled with crimson; the enlarged sun,
glorious in Tyrian dyes, dipped his brim already; stepping, as I was,
eastward, I faced a vast bank of clouds, but also I had before me the
arch of an even rainbow; a perfect rainbow--high, wide, vivid. I looked
long; my eye drank in the scene, and I suppose my brain must have
absorbed it; for that night, after lying awake in pleasant fever a long
time, watching the silent sheet-lightning, which still played among the
retreating clouds, and flashed silvery over the stars, I at last fell
asleep; and then in a dream was reproduced the setting sun, the bank of
clouds, the mighty rainbow. I stood, methought, on a terrace; I leaned
over a parapeted wall; there was space below me, depth I could not
fathom, but hearing an endless splash of waves, I believed it to be the
sea; sea spread to the horizon; sea of changeful green and intense blue;
all was soft in the distance; all vapour-veiled. A spark of gold
glistened on the line between water and air, floated up, appeared,
enlarged, changed; the object hung midway between heaven and earth,
under the arch of the rainbow; the soft but dark clouds diffused behind.
It hovered as on wings; pearly, fleecy, gleaming air streamed like
raiment round it; light, tinted with carnation, coloured what seemed
face and limbs; a large star shone with still lustre on an angel's
forehead--" But the angel ruins it.
And this is all, and it leaves the dreariness more dreary. In _The
Professor_ you wander through a world where there is no sound, no
colour, no vibration; a world muffled and veiled in the stillness and
the greyness of the hour before dawn. It is the work of a woman who is
not perfectly alive. So far from having had her great awakening,
Charlotte is only half awake. Her intellect is alert enough and avid,
faithful and subservient to the fact. It is her nerves and senses that
are asleep. Her soul is absent from her senses.
* * * * *
But in _Jane Eyre_, she is not only awakened, but awake as she has never
been awake before, with all her virgin senses exquisitely alive, every
nerve changed to intense vibration. Sometimes she is perniciously awake;
she is doing appalling things, things unjustifiable, preposterous;
things that would have meant perdition to any other writer; she sees
with wild, erroneous eyes; but the point is that she sees, that she
keeps moving, that from the first page to the last she is never once
asleep. To come to _Jane Eyre_ after _The Professor_ is to pass into
another world of feeling and of vision.
It is not the difference between reality and unreality. _The Professor_
is real enough, more real in some minor points--dialogue, for
instance--than _Jane Eyre_. The difference is that _The Professor_ is a
transcript of reality, a very delicate and faithful transcript, and
_Jane Eyre_ is reality itself, pressed on the senses. The pressure is so
direct and so tremendous, that it lasts through those moments when the
writer's grip has failed.
For there are moments, long moments of perfectly awful failure in _Jane
Eyre_. There are phrases that make you writhe, such as "the etymology of
the mansion's designation", and the shocking persistency with which
Charlotte Brontë "indites", "peruses", and "retains". There are whole
scenes that outrage probability. Such are the scenes, or parts of
scenes, between Jane and Rochester during the comedy of his courtship.
The great orchard scene does not ring entirely true. For pages and pages
it falters between passion and melodrama; between rhetoric and the _cri
de coeur_. Jane in the very thick of her emotion can say, "I have
talked, face to face, with what I reverence, with what I delight
in--with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I have known you,
Mr. Rochester, and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I
absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity for
departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death." And the
comedy is worse. Jane elaborates too much in those delicious things she
says to Rochester. Rochester himself provokes the parodist. (Such
manners as Rochester's were unknown in mid-Victorian literature.)
"He continued to send for me punctually the moment the clock struck
seven; though when I appeared before him now, he had no such honeyed
terms as 'love' and 'darling' on his lips: the best words at my disposal
were 'provoking', 'malicious elf,' 'sprite', 'changeling', etc. For
caresses, too, I now got grimaces; for a pressure of the hand, a pinch
on the arm; for a kiss on the cheek, a severe tweak of the ear. It was
all right: at present I decidedly preferred these fierce favours to
anything more tender."
Yet there is comedy, pure comedy in those scenes, though never
sustained, and never wrought to the inevitable dramatic climax. Jane is
delightful when she asks Rochester whether the frown on his forehead
will be his "married look", and when she tells him to make a
dressing-gown for himself out of the pearl-grey silk, "and an infinite
series of waistcoats out of the black satin". _The Quarterly_ was much
too hard on the earlier _cadeau_ scene, with Rochester and Jane and
Adèle, which is admirable in its suggestion of Jane's shyness and
precision.
_"'N'est-ce pas, Monsieur, qu'il y a un cadeau pour Mademoiselle Eyre,
dans votre petit coffre?'"_
"'Who talks of _cadeaux_?' said he gruffly; 'did you expect a present,
Miss Eyre? Are you fond of presents?' and he searched my face with eyes
that I saw were dark, irate, and piercing.
"'I hardly know, sir; I have little experience of them; they are
generally thought pleasant things.'"
Charlotte Brontë was on her own ground there. But you tremble when she
leaves it; you shudder throughout the awful drawing-room comedy of
Blanche Ingram. Blanche says to her mother: "Am I right, Baroness Ingram
of Ingram Park?" And her mother says to Blanche, "My lily-flower, you
are right now, as always." Blanche says to Rochester, "Signor Eduardo,
are you in voice to-night?" and he, "Donna Bianca, if you command it, I
will be." And Blanche says to the footman, "Cease that chatter,
blockhead, and do my bidding."
That, Charlotte's worst lapse, is a very brief one, and the scene
itself is unimportant. But what can be said of the crucial scene of the
novel, the tremendous scene of passion and temptation? There _is_
passion in the scene before it, between Jane and Rochester on the
afternoon of the wedding-day that brought no wedding.
"'Jane, I never meant to wound you thus. If the man who had but one
little ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter, that ate of his
bread, and drank of his cup, and lay in his bosom, had by some mistake
slaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have rued his bloody
blunder more than I now rue mine. Will you ever forgive me?'... 'You
know I am a scoundrel, Jane?' ere long he inquired wistfully, wondering,
I suppose, at my continued silence and tameness; the result of weakness
rather than of will.
"'Yes, sir.'
"'Then tell me so roundly and sharply--don't spare me.'
"'I cannot; I am tired and sick. I want some water.'
"He heaved a sort of shuddering sigh, and, taking me in his arms,
carried me downstairs."
But there are terrible lapses. After Rochester's cry, "'Jane, my little
darling ... If you were mad, do you think I should hate you,'" he
elaborates his idea and he is impossible: "'Your mind is my treasure,
and if it were broken it would be my treasure still; if you raved, my
arms should confine you and not a strait waistcoat--your grasp, even in
fury, would have a charm for me; if you flew at me as wildly as that
woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace at least as
fond as it would be restrictive.'"
And in the final scene of temptation there is a most curious mingling of
reality and unreality, of the passion which is poetry, and the poetry
which is not passion.
"'Never,' said he, as he ground his teeth, 'never was anything so frail,
and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand!' And he shook me
with the force of his hold. 'I could bend her with my finger and thumb;
and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her?
Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out
of it, defying me, with more than courage--with a stern triumph.
Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it--the savage, beautiful
creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only
let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate
would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay
dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue
and purity--that I want: not alone your brittle frame. Of yourself, you
could come with soft flight and nestle against my heart, if you would;
seized against your will you will elude the grasp like an essence--you
will vanish ere I inhale your fragrance. Oh, come, Jane, come!'"
It is the crucial scene of the book; and with all its power, with all
its vehemence and passionate reality it is unconvincing. It stirs you
and it leaves you cold.
The truth is that in _Jane Eyre_ Charlotte Brontë had not mastered the
art of dialogue; and to the very last she was uncertain in her handling
of it. In this she is inferior to all the great novelists of her time;
inferior to some who were by no means great. She understood more of the
spiritual speech of passion than any woman before her, but she ignores
its actual expression, its violences, its reticences, its silences. In
her great scenes she is inspired one moment, and the next positively
handicapped by her passion and her poetry. In the same sentence she
rises to the sudden poignant _cri du coeur_, and sinks to the artifice
of metaphor. She knew that passion is poetry, and poetry is passion;
you might say it was all she knew, or ever cared to know. But her
language of passion is too often the language of written rather than of
spoken poetry, of poetry that is not poetry at all. It is as if she had
never heard the speech of living men and women. There is more actuality
in the half-French chatter of Adèle than in any of the high utterances
of Jane and Rochester.
And yet her sense of the emotion behind the utterance is infallible, so
infallible that we accept the utterance. By some miracle, which is her
secret, the passion gets through. The illusion of reality is so strong
that it covers its own lapses. _Jane Eyre_ exists to prove that truth is
higher than actuality.
"'Jane suits me: do I suit her?'
"'To the finest fibre of my nature, sir.'"
If no woman alive had ever said that, it would yet be true to Jane's
feeling. For it is a matter of the finest fibres, this passion of
Jane's, that set people wondering about Currer Bell, that inflamed Mrs.
Oliphant, as it inflamed the reviewer in _The Quarterly_, and made
Charles Kingsley think that Currer Bell was coarse. Their state of mind
is incredible to us now. For what did poor Jane do, after all? Nobody
could possibly have had more respect for the ten commandments. For all
Rochester's raging, the ten commandments remain exactly where they were.
It was inconceivable to Charlotte Brontë that any decent man or woman
could make hay, or wish to make hay, of them. And yet Jane offended. She
sinned against the unwritten code that ordains that a woman may lie till
she is purple in the face, but she must not, as a piece of gratuitous
information, tell a man she loves him; not, that is to say, in as many
words. She may declare her passion unmistakably in other ways. She may
exhibit every ignominious and sickly sign of it; her eyes may glow like
hot coals; she may tremble; she may flush and turn pale; she may do
almost anything, provided she does not speak the actual words. In
mid-Victorian times an enormous licence was allowed her. She might
faint, with perfect propriety, in public; she might become anaemic and
send for the doctor, and be ordered iron; she might fall ill, horridly
and visibly, and have to be taken away to spas and places to drink the
waters. Everybody knew what that meant. If she had shrieked her passion
on the housetops she could hardly have published it more violently; but
nobody minded. It was part of the mid-Victorian convention.
Jane Eyre did none of these things. As soon as she was aware of her
passion for Mr. Rochester she thrust it down into the pocket of her
voluminous mid-Victorian skirt and sat on it. Instead of languishing and
fainting where Rochester could see her, she held her head rather higher
than usual, and practised the spirited arts of retort and repartee. And
nobody gave her any credit for it. Then Rochester puts the little thing
(poor Jane was only eighteen when it happened) to the torture, and, with
the last excruciating turn of the thumbscrew, she confesses. That was
the enormity that was never forgiven her.
"'You'll like Ireland, I think,'" says Rochester in his torturing mood;
"'they are such kind-hearted people there.'
"'It is a long way off, sir.'
"'No matter, a girl of your sense will not object to the voyage or the
distance.'
"'Not the voyage, but the distance: and then the sea is a barrier.'
"'From what, Jane?'
"'From England and from Thornfield, and--'
"'Well?'
"'From _you_, sir.'"
She had done it. She had said, or almost said the words.
It just happened. There was magic in the orchard at Thornfield; there
was youth in her blood; and--"Jane, did you hear the nightingale singing
in that wood?"
Still, she had done it.
And she was the first heroine who had. Adultery, with which we are
fairly familiar, would have seemed a lesser sin. There may be
extenuating circumstances for the adulteress. There were extenuating
circumstances for Rochester. He could plead a wife who went on all
fours. There were no extenuating circumstances for little Jane. No use
for her to say that she was upset by the singing of the nightingale;
that it didn't matter what she said to Mr. Rochester when Mr. Rochester
was going to marry Blanche Ingram, anyway; that she only flung herself
at his head because she knew she couldn't hit it; that her plainness
gave her a certain licence, placing her beyond the code. Not a bit of
it. Jane's plainness was one thing that they had against her. Until her
time no heroine had been permitted to be plain. Jane's seizing of the
position was part of the general insolence of her behaviour.
Jane's insolence was indeed unparalleled. Having done the deed she felt
no shame or sense of sin; she stood straight up and defended herself.
That showed that she was hardened.
It certainly showed--Jane's refusal to be abject--that Jane was far
ahead of her age.
"'I tell you I must go!' I retorted, roused to something like passion.
'Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an
automaton?--a machine without feelings, and can bear to have my morsel
of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from
my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am
soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and
fully as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much
wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now
for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of
custom, conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that
addresses'" ("Addresses"? oh, Jane!) "'your spirit; just as if both had
passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal--as we
are!'"
This, allowing for some slight difference in the phrasing, is twentieth
century. And it was this--Jane's behaviour in the orchard, and not
Rochester's behaviour in the past--that opened the door to the "imps of
evil meaning, polluting and defiling the domestic hearth."
Still, though _The Quarterly_ censured Jane's behaviour, it was
Rochester who caused most of the trouble and the scandal by his
remarkable confessions. In a sense they _were_ remarkable. Seldom,
outside the pages of French fiction, had there been so lavish and public
a display of mistresses. And while it was agreed on all hands that
Rochester was incredible with his easy references to Céline and Giacinta
and Clara, still more incredible was it that a young woman in a country
parsonage should have realized so much as the existence of Clara and
Giacinta and Céline. But, when Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux invoked
Branwell and all his vices to account for Charlotte's experience, they
forgot that Charlotte had read Balzac,[A] and that Balzac is an
experience in himself. She had also read Moore's _Life of Byron_, and
really there is nothing in Rochester's confessions that Byron and a
little Balzac would not account for. So that they might just as well
have left poor Branwell in his grave.
[Footnote A: I am wrong. Charlotte did not read Balzac till later, when
George Henry Lewes told her to. But there were those twenty "clever,
wicked, sophistical, and immoral French books" that she read in
eighteen-forty. They may have served her purpose better.]
Indeed, it was the manner of Rochester's confession that gave away the
secret of Currer Bell's sex; her handling of it is so inadequate and
perfunctory. Rochester is at his worst and most improbable in the
telling of his tale. The tale in itself is one of Charlotte's clumsiest
contrivances for conveying necessary information. The alternate baldness
and exuberant, decorated, swaggering boldness (for Charlotte's style was
never bolder than when she was essaying the impossible) alone betrayed
the hand of an innocent woman. Curious that these makeshift passages
with their obviously second-hand material, their palpably alien _mise en
scène_, should ever have suggested a personal experience and provoked
_The Quarterly_ to its infamous and immortal utterance: "If we ascribe
the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to
one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of
her own sex."
_The Quarterly_, to do it justice, argued that Currer Bell was a man,
for only a man would have betrayed such ignorance of feminine resources
as to make Jane Eyre, on a night alarm, "hurry on a frock and shawl".
The reasoning passed. Nobody saw that such a man would be as innocent as
any parson's daughter. Nobody pointed out that, as it happened, Currer
Bell had provided her dowagers with "vast white wrappers" on the second
night alarm. And, after all, the sex of _The Quarterly_ reviewer itself
remains a problem. Long ago Mr. Andrew Lang detected the work of two
hands in that famous article. You may say there were at least three.
There was, first, the genial reviewer of _Vanity Fair_, who revels in
the wickedness of Becky Sharpe, and who is going to revel in the
wickedness of Jane. Then suddenly some Mr. Brocklebank steps in, and you
get a "black-marble clergyman" on _Jane Eyre_.
"We have said," says this person, "that this was the picture of a
natural heart. This, to our view, is the great and crying mischief of
the book. Jane Eyre is throughout the personification of an unregenerate
and undisciplined spirit, the more dangerous to exhibit from that
prestige of principle and self-control, which is liable to dazzle the
eyes too much for it to observe the insufficient and unsound foundation
on which it rests. It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral
strength; but it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law
unto itself.... She has inherited the worst sin of our fallen
nature--the sin of pride."
Jane, you see, should have sinned to show her Christian humility. The
style, if not the reasoning, is pure Brocklebank. He does "not hesitate
to say that the tone of mind and thought, which has overthrown authority
and violated every code, human and divine, abroad, and fostered Chartism
and rebellion at home, is the same which has written _Jane Eyre_".
Ellis and Acton (poor Acton!) Bell get it even stronger than that; and
then, suddenly again, you come on a report on the "Condition of
Governesses", palpably drawn up by a third person. For years Miss Rigby,
who was afterwards Lady Eastlake, got the credit for the whole absurd
performance, for she was known to have written the review on _Vanity
Fair_. What happened seems to have been that Miss Rigby set out in all
honesty to praise _Jane Eyre_. Then some infuriated person interfered
and stopped her. The article was torn from the unfortunate Miss Rigby
and given to Brocklebank, who used bits of her here and there.
Brocklebank, in his zeal, overdid his part, so the report on Governesses
was thrown in to give the whole thing an air of seriousness and
respectability. So that it is exceedingly doubtful whether, after all,
it was a woman's hand that dealt the blow.
If Charlotte Brontë did not feel the effect of it to the end of her
life, she certainly suffered severely at the time. It was responsible
for that impassioned defence of Anne and Emily which she would have been
wiser to have left alone.
It must be admitted that _Jane Eyre_ was an easy prey for the truculent
reviewer, for its faults were all on the surface, and its great
qualities lay deep. Deep as they were, they gripped the ordinary
uncritical reader, and they gripped the critic in spite of himself, so
that he bitterly resented being moved by a work so flagrantly and
obviously faulty. What was more, the passion of the book was so intense
that you were hardly aware of anything else, and its author's austere
respect for the ten commandments passed almost unobserved.