praise her unaware. Her glory is that she did glorify it. Until she
came, passion between man and woman had meant animal passion. Fielding
and Smollett had dealt with it solely on that footing. A woman's gentle,
legalized affection for her husband was one thing, and passion was
another. Thackeray and Dickens, on the whole, followed Fielding. To all
three of them passion is an affair wholly of the senses, temporary,
episodic, and therefore comparatively unimportant. Thackeray intimated
that he could have done more with it but for his fear of Mrs. Grundy.
Anyhow, passion was not a quality that could be given to a good woman;
and so the good women of Dickens and Thackeray are conspicuously
without it. And Jane Austen may be said to have also taken Fielding's
view. Therefore she was obliged to ignore passion. She gave it to one
vulgar woman, Lydia Bennett, and to one bad one, Mrs. Rushworth; and
having given it them, she turned her head away and refused to have
anything more to do with these young women. She was not alone in her
inability to "tackle passion". No respectable mid-Victorian novelist
could, when passion had so bad a name.
And it was this thing, cast down, defiled, dragged in the mud, and
ignored because of its defilement, that Charlotte Brontë took and lifted
up. She washed it clean; she bathed it in the dew of the morning; she
baptized it in tears; she clothed it in light and flame; she showed it
for the divine, the beautiful, the utterly pure and radiant thing it is,
"the very sublime of faith, truth and devotion". She made it, this
spirit of fire and air, incarnate in the body of a woman who had no
sensual charm. Because of it little Jane became the parent of Caterina
and of Maggie Tulliver; and Shirley prepared the way for Meredith's
large-limbed, large-brained, large-hearted women.
It was thus that Charlotte Brontë glorified passion. The passion that
she glorified being of the finest fibre, it was naturally not understood
by people whose fibres were not fine at all.
It was George Henry Lewes (not a person of the finest fibre) who said of
_Jane Eyre_ that "the grand secret of its success ... as of all great
and lasting successes was its reality". In spite of crudities,
absurdities, impossibilities, it remains most singularly and startlingly
alive. In _Jane Eyre_ Charlotte Brontë comes for the first time into her
kingdom of the inner life. She grasps the secret, unseen springs; in her
narrow range she is master of the psychology of passion and of
suffering, whether she is describing the agony of the child Jane shut
up in that terrible red room, or the anguish of the woman on the morning
of that wedding-day that brought no wedding. Or take the scene of Jane's
flight from Thornfield, or that other scene, unsurpassed in its passion
and tenderness, of her return to Rochester at Ferndean.
"To this house I came just ere dark, on an evening marked by the
characteristics of sad sky, cold gale, and continued small, penetrating
rain.... Even within a very short distance of the manor-house you could
see nothing of it; so thick and dark grew the timber of the gloomy wood
about it. Iron gates between granite pillars showed me where to enter,
and passing through them, I found myself at once in the twilight of
close-ranked trees. There was a grass-grown track descending the forest
aisle, between hoar and knotty shafts and under branched arches. I
followed it, expecting soon to reach the dwelling; but it stretched on
and on, it wound far and farther: no sign of habitation or grounds was
visible.... At last my way opened, the trees thinned a little; presently
I beheld a railing, then the house--scarce, by this dim light,
distinguishable from the trees; so dank and green were its decaying
walls. Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch, I stood amidst a
space of enclosed ground, from which the wood swept away in a
semicircle. There were no flowers, no garden-beds; only a broad
gravel-walk girdling a grass-plat, and this set in the heavy frame of
the forest. The house presented two pointed gables in its front; the
windows were latticed and narrow: the front-door was narrow too, one
step led up to it.... It was still as a church on a week-day; the
pattering rain on the forest leaves was the only sound audible....
"I heard a movement--that narrow front-door was unclosing, and some
shape was about to issue from the grange.
"It opened slowly; a figure came out into the twilight and stood on the
step; a man without a hat: he stretched forth his hand as if to feel
whether it rained. Dark as it was I had recognized him....
"His form was of the same strong and stalwart contour as ever.... But in
his countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding--that
reminded me of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous
to approach in his sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes
cruelty has extinguished, might look as looked that sightless Samson."
Again--Rochester hears Jane's voice in the room where she comes to him.
"'And where is the speaker? Is it only a voice? Oh! I _cannot_ see, but
I must feel or my heart will stop and my brain burst.'...
"He groped. I arrested his wandering hand, and prisoned it in both mine.
"'Her very fingers!' he cried; 'her small, slight fingers! If so, there
must be more of her.'
"The muscular hand broke from my custody; my arm was seized, my
shoulder--neck--wrist--I was entwined and gathered to him....
"I pressed my lips to his once brilliant and now rayless eyes--I swept
back his hair from his brow and kissed that too. He suddenly seemed to
rouse himself: the conviction of the reality of all this seized him.
"'It is you--is it, Jane? You are come back to me then?'
"'I am.'"
The scene as it stands is far from perfect; but only Charlotte Brontë
could sustain so strong an illusion of passion through so many lapses.
And all that passion counts for no more than half in the astounding
effect of reality she produces. Before _Jane Eyre_ there is no novel
written by a woman, with the one exception of _Wuthering Heights_, that
conveys so poignant an impression of surroundings, of things seen and
heard, of the earth and sky; of weather; of the aspects of houses and of
rooms. It suggests a positive exaltation of the senses of sound and
light, an ecstasy, an enchantment before the visible, tangible world. It
is not a matter of mere faithful observation (though few painters have
possessed so incorruptibly the innocence of the eye). It is an almost
supernatural intentness; sensation raised to the _n_th power. Take the
description of the awful red room at Gateshead.
"A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of
deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two
large windows with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in
festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at
the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a
soft fawn colour, with a flush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the
toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly-polished old mahogany. Out of
these deep surrounding shades rose high and glared white the piled-up
mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles
counterpane. Scarcely less prominent was an ample, cushioned easy-chair
near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and
looking, as I thought, like a pale throne.... Mr. Reed had been dead
nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his last; here he lay in
state; hence his coffin was borne by the undertaker's men; and since
that day a sense of dreary consecration had guarded it from frequent
intrusion."
Could anything be more horrible than that red room? Or take the
descriptions of the school at Lowood where the horror of pestilence
hangs over house and garden. Through all these Gateshead and Lowood
scenes Charlotte is unerring and absolute in her reality.
Her very style, so uncertain in its rendering of human speech, becomes
flawless in such passages as this: "It was three o'clock; the
church-bell tolled as I passed under the belfry: the charm of the hour
lay in its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun.
I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer,
for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral
treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its
utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made
no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle,
and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white,
worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on
each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and the
little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like
single russet leaves about to drop.
"This lane inclined up-hill all the way to Hay.... I then turned
eastward.
"On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon; pale yet as a cloud, but
brightening momently; she looked over Hay which, half lost in trees,
sent up a blue smoke from its few chimneys; it was yet a mile distant,
but in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life.
My ear, too, felt the flow of currents; in what dales and depths I could
not tell: but there were many hills beyond Hay, and doubtless many becks
threading their passes. That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of
the nearest streams, the sough of the most remote.
"A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and whisperings, at once so
far away and so clear: a positive tramp, tramp; a metallic clatter,
which effaced the soft wave-wanderings; as, in a picture, the solid mass
of a crag, or the rough boles of a great oak, drawn in dark and strong
on the foreground, efface the aerial distance of azure hill, sunny
horizon, and blended clouds, where tint melts into tint.
"The din sounded on the causeway...."
Flawless this, too, of the sky after sunset: "Where the sun had gone
down in simple state--pure of the pomp of clouds--spread a solemn
purple, burning with the light of red jewel and furnace flame at one
point, on one hill-peak, and extending high and wide, soft and still
softer, over half heaven."
And this of her own moors: "There are great moors behind and on each
hand of me; there are waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley at
my feet. The population here must be thin, and I see no passengers on
these roads: they stretch out east, west, north and south--white, broad,
lonely; they are all cut in the moor, and the heather grows deep and
wild to their very verge."
She has given the secret of the moor country in a phrase: "I felt the
consecration of its loneliness." In that one line you have the real, the
undying Charlotte Brontë.
It is such immortal things that make the difference between _Jane Eyre_
and _The Professor_. So immeasurable is that difference that it almost
justifies the theorist in assuming an "experience" to account for it, an
experience falling between the dates of _The Professor_ and _Jane Eyre_.
Unfortunately there was none; none in the sense cherished by the
researcher. Charlotte's letters are an unbroken record of those two
years that followed her return from Brussels. Her life is laid bare in
its long and cramped monotony, a life singularly empty of "experience".
And yet an experience did come to her in that brief period. If the
researcher had not followed a false scent across the Channel, if his
_flair_ for tragic passion had not destroyed in him all sense of
proportion, he could not possibly have missed it; for it stared him in
the face, simple, obvious, inevitable. But miss it he certainly did.
Obsessed by his idea, he considered it a negligible circumstance that
Charlotte should have read _Wuthering Heights_ before she wrote _Jane
Eyre_. And yet, I think that, if anything woke Charlotte up, it was
that. Until then, however great her certainty of her own genius, she did
not know how far she could trust it, how far it would be safe to let
imagination go. Appalled by the spectacle of its excesses, she had
divorced imagination from the real. But Emily knew none of these cold
deliberations born of fear. _Wuthering Heights_ was the fruit of a
divine freedom, a divine unconsciousness. It is not possible that
Charlotte, of all people, should have read _Wuthering Heights_ without a
shock of enlightenment; that she should not have compared it with her
own bloodless work; that she should not have felt the wrong done to her
genius by her self-repression. Emily had dared to be herself; _she_ had
not been afraid of her own passion; she had had no method; she had
accomplished a stupendous thing without knowing it, by simply letting
herself go. And Charlotte, I think, said to herself, "That is what I
ought to have done. That is what I will do next time." And next time she
did it. The experience may seem insufficient, but it is of such
experiences that a great writer's life is largely made. And if you
_must_ have an influence to account for _Jane Eyre_, there is no need
to go abroad to look for it. There was influence enough in her own home.
These three Brontës, adoring each other, were intolerant of any other
influence; and the strongest spirit, which was Emily's, prevailed. To be
sure, no remonstrances from Emily or Charlotte could stop Anne in her
obstinate analysis of Walter Huntingdon; but it was some stray spark
from Emily that kindled Anne. As for Charlotte, her genius must have
quickened in her when her nerves thrilled to the shock of _Wuthering
Heights_. This, I know, is only another theory; but it has at least the
merit of its modesty. It is not offered as in the least accounting for,
or explaining, Charlotte's genius. It merely suggests with all possible
humility a likely cause of its release. Anyhow, it is a theory that does
Charlotte's genius no wrong, on which account it seems to me preferable
to any other. It is really no argument against it to say that Charlotte
never acknowledged her sister's influence, that she was indeed unaware
of it; for, in the first place, the stronger the spiritual tie between
them, the less likely was she to have been aware. In the second place,
it is not claimed that _Wuthering Heights_ was such an influence as the
"sojourn in Brussels" is said to have been--that it "made Miss Brontë an
author". It is not claimed that if there had been no _Wuthering Heights_
and no Emily Brontë, there would have been no _Jane Eyre_; for to me
nothing can be more certain that whatever had, or had not happened,
Charlotte's genius would have found its way.
Charlotte's genius indeed was so profoundly akin to Charlotte's nature
that its way, the way of its upward progress, was by violent impetus and
recoil.
In _Shirley_ she revolts from the passion of _Jane Eyre_. She seems to
have written it to prove that there are other things. She had been stung
by _The Quarterly's_ attack, stung by rumour, stung by every adverse
thing that had been said. And yet not for a moment was she "influenced"
by her reviewers. It was more in defiance than in submission that she
answered them with _Shirley_. _Shirley_ was an answer to every criticism
that had yet been made. In _Shirley_ she forsook the one poor play of
hearts insurgent for the vast and varied movement of the world; social
upheavals, the clash of sects and castes, the first grim hand-to-hand
struggle between capital and labour, all are there. The book opens with
a drama, not of hearts but of artisans insurgent; frame-breakers, not
breakers of the marriage law. In sheer defiance she essays to render the
whole real world, the complex, many-threaded, many-coloured world; where
the tragic warp is woven with the bright comedy of curates. It is the
world of the beginnings; the world of the early nineteenth century that
she paints. A world with the immensity, the profundity, the darkness of
the brooding sea; where the spirit of a woman moves, troubling the
waters; for Charlotte Brontë has before her the stupendous vision of the
world as it was, as it yet is, and as it is to be.
That world, as it existed from eighteen-twelve to Charlotte's own time,
eighteen-fifty, was not a place for a woman with a brain and a soul.
There was no career for any woman but marriage. If she missed it she
missed her place in the world, her prestige, and her privileges as a
woman. What was worse, she lost her individuality, and became a mere
piece of furniture, of disused, old-fashioned furniture, in her father's
or her brother's house. If she had a father or a brother there was no
escape for her from dependence on the male; and if she had none, if
there was no male about the house, her case was the more pitiable. And
the traditions of her upbringing were such that the real, vital things,
the things that mattered, were never mentioned in her presence. Religion
was the solitary exception; and religion had the reality and vitality
taken out of it by its dissociation with the rest of life. A woman in
these horrible conditions was only half alive. She had no energies, no
passions, no enthusiasms. Convention drained her of her life-blood. What
was left to her had no outlet; pent up in her, it bred weak, anaemic
substitutes for its natural issue, sentimentalism for passion, and
sensibility for the nerves of vision. This only applies, of course, to
the average woman.
Charlotte Brontë was born with a horror of the world that had produced
this average woman, this creature of minute corruptions and hypocrisies.
She sent out _Jane Eyre_ to purify it with her passion. She sent out
_Shirley_ to destroy and rebuild it with her intellect. Little Jane was
a fiery portent. Shirley was a prophecy. She is modern to her
finger-tips, as modern as Meredith's great women: Diana, or Clara
Middleton, or Carinthia Jane. She was born fifty years before her time.
This is partly owing to her creator's prophetic insight, partly to her
sheer truth to life. For Shirley was to a large extent a portrait of
Emily Brontë who was born before her time.
It is Emily Brontë's spirit that burns in Shirley Keeldar; and it is the
spirit of Shirley Keeldar that gives life to the unwilling mass of this
vast novel. It is almost enough immortality for Shirley that she is the
only living and authentic portrait of Emily Brontë in her time.
Charlotte has given her the "wings that wealth can give", and they do
not matter. She has also given her the wings of Emily's adventurous
soul, the wealth of her inner life.
"A still, deep, inborn delight glows in her young veins;
unmingled--untroubled, not to be reached or ravished by human agency,
because by no human agency bestowed: the pure gift of God to His
creature, the free dower of Nature to her child. This joy gives her
experience of a genii-life. Buoyant, by green steps, by glad hills, all
verdure and light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that whence
angels looked down on the dreamer of Bethel, and her eye seeks, and her
soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it."
"Her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes
it--" That was the secret of Emily's greatness, of her immeasurable
superiority to her sad sisters.
And again: "In Shirley's nature prevailed at times an easy indolence:
there were periods when she took delight in perfect vacancy of hand and
eye--moments when her thoughts, her simple existence, the fact of the
world being around--and heaven above her, seemed to yield her such
fulness of happiness, that she did not need to lift a finger to increase
the joy. Often, after an active morning, she would spend a sunny
afternoon in lying stirless on the turf, at the foot of some tree of
friendly umbrage: no society did she need but that of Caroline, and it
sufficed if she were within call; no spectacle did she ask but that of
the deep blue sky, and such cloudlets as sailed afar and aloft across
its span; no sound but that of the bee's hum, the leaf's whisper."
There are phrases in Louis Moore's diary that bring Emily Brontë
straight before us in her swift and vivid life. Shirley is "Sister of
the spotted, bright, quick-fiery leopard." "Pantheress!--beautiful
forest-born!--wily, tameless, peerless nature! She gnaws her chain. I
see the white teeth working at the steel! She has dreams of her wild
woods, and pinings after virgin freedom." "How evanescent, fugitive,
fitful she looked--slim and swift as a Northern streamer!" "... With
her long hair flowing full and wavy; with her noiseless step, her pale
cheek, her eye full of night and lightning, she looked, I thought,
spirit-like--a thing made of an element--the child of a breeze and a
flame--the daughter of ray and raindrop--a thing never to be overtaken,
arrested, fixed."
Like Emily she is not "caught". "But if I were," she says, "do you know
what soothsayers I would consult?... The little Irish beggar that comes
barefoot to my door; the mouse that steals out of the cranny in the
wainscot; the bird that in frost and snow pecks at my window for a
crumb; the dog that licks my hand and sits beside my knee."
And yet again: "She takes her sewing occasionally: but, by some
fatality, she is doomed never to sit steadily at it for above five
minutes at a time: her thimble is scarcely fitted on, her needle scarce
threaded, when a sudden thought calls her upstairs; perhaps she goes to
seek some just-then-remembered old ivory-backed needle-book, or older
china-topped work-box, quite unneeded, but which seems at the moment
indispensable; perhaps to arrange her hair, or a drawer which she
recollects to have seen that morning in a state of curious confusion;
perhaps only to take a peep from a particular window at a particular
view where Briarfield Church and Rectory are visible, pleasantly bowered
in trees. She has scarcely returned, and again taken up the slip of
cambric, or square of half-wrought canvas, when Tartar's bold scrape and
strangled whistle are heard at the porch door, and she must run to open
it for him; it is a hot day; he comes in panting; she must convoy him to
the kitchen, and see with her own eyes that his water-bowl is
replenished. Through the open kitchen-door the court is visible, all
sunny and gay, and peopled with turkeys and their poults, peahens and
their chicks, pearl-flecked Guinea fowls, and a bright variety of pure
white and purple-necked, and blue and cinnamon-plumed pigeons.
Irresistible spectacle to Shirley! She runs to the pantry for a roll,
and she stands on the doorstep scattering crumbs: around her throng her
eager, plump, happy, feathered vassals.... There are perhaps some little
calves, some little new-yeaned lambs--it may be twins, whose mothers
have rejected them: Miss Keeldar ... must permit herself the treat of
feeding them with her own hand."
Like Emily she is impatient of rituals and creeds. Like Emily she adores
the Earth. Not one of Charlotte's women except Shirley could have
chanted that great prose hymn of adoration in which Earth worships and
is worshipped. "'Nature is now at her evening prayers; she is kneeling
before those red hills. I see her prostrate on the great steps of her
altar, praying for a fair night for mariners at sea, for travellers in
deserts, for lambs on moors, and unfledged birds in woods.... I see her,
and I will tell you what she is like: she is like what Eve was when she
and Adam stood alone on earth.' 'And that is not Milton's Eve, Shirley,'
says Caroline, and Shirley answers: 'No, by the pure Mother of God, she
is not.' Shirley is half a Pagan. She would beg to remind Milton 'that
the first men of the earth were Titans, and that Eve was their mother:
from her sprang Saturn, Hyperion, Oceanus; she bore Prometheus.... I
say, there were giants on the earth in those days, giants that strove to
scale heaven. The first woman's breast that heaved with life on this
world yielded daring which could contend with Omnipotence; the strength
which could bear a thousand years of bondage--the vitality which could
feed that vulture death through uncounted ages--the unexhausted life
and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immortality, which, after
millenniums of crimes, struggles, and woes, could conceive and bring
forth a Messiah. The first woman was heaven-born: vast was the heart
whence gushed the well-spring of the blood of nations; and grand the
undegenerate head where rested the consort-crown of creation.'...
"'You have not yet told me what you saw kneeling on those hills.'