outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil, white as
an avalanche, sweeps from her head to her feet, and arabesques of
lightning flame on its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple
like that horizon: through its blush shines the star of evening. Her
steady eyes I cannot picture; they are clear--they are deep as
lakes--they are lifted and full of worship--they tremble with the
softness of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the expanse
of a cloud, and is paler than the early moon, risen long before dark
gathers: she reclines her bosom on the edge of Stilbro' Moor; her mighty
hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face, she speaks with
God.'"
It is the living sister speaking for the dead; for Charlotte herself had
little of Emily's fine Paganism. But for one moment, in this lyric
passage, her soul echoes the very soul of Emily as she gathers round her
all the powers and splendours (and some, alas, of the fatal rhetoric) of
her prose to do her honour.
It is not only in the large figure of the Titan Shirley that Charlotte
Brontë shows her strength. She has learnt to draw her minor masculine
characters with more of insight and of accuracy--Caroline Helstone, the
Yorkes, Robert Moore, Mr. Helstone, Joe Scott, and Barraclough, the
"joined Methody". With a few strokes they stand out living. She has
acquired more of the art of dialogue. She is a past master of dialect,
of the racy, native speech of these men. Not only is Mr. Yorke painted
with unerring power and faithfulness in every detail of his harsh and
vigorous personality, but there is no single lapse from nature when he
is speaking. The curates only excepted, Charlotte never swerves from
this fidelity. But when she is handling her curates, it is a savage and
utterly inartistic humour that inspires her. You feel that she is not
exercising the art of comedy, but relieving her own intolerable boredom
and irritation. No object could well be more innocent, and more
appealing in its innocence, than little Mr. Sweeting, curate of
Nunnerly. Mr. Sweeting at the tea-table, "having a dish of tarts before
him, and marmalade and crumpet upon his plate", should have moved the
Comic Spirit to tears of gentleness.
Curates apart, two-thirds of _Shirley_ are written with an unerring
devotion to the real, to the very actual. They have not, for all that,
the profound reality of _Jane Eyre_. The events are confused, somehow;
the atmosphere is confusing; the northern background is drawn with a
certain hardness and apathy of touch; the large outlines are obscured,
delicate colours sharpened; it is hard and yet blurred, like a bad steel
engraving. Charlotte's senses, so intensely, so supernaturally alive in
_Jane Eyre_, are only passably awake in _Shirley_. It has some of the
dulness of _The Professor_, as it has more than its sober rightness.
But, for three-and-twenty chapters, the sobriety, the rightness triumph.
There are no improbabilities, no flights of imagination, none of the
fine language which was the shame when it was not the glory of _Jane
Eyre_.
Then suddenly there comes a break--a cleavage. It comes with that
Chapter Twenty-four, which is headed "The Valley of the Shadow of
Death". It was written in the first months after Emily Brontë's death.
From that point Charlotte's level strength deserts her. Ever after, she
falls and soars, and soars and falls again. There is a return to the
manner of _Jane Eyre_, the manner of Charlotte when she is deeply moved;
there is at times a relapse to Jane Eyre's worst manner. You get it at
once in "The Valley of the Shadow" chapter, in the scene of Caroline's
love-sick delirium.
"'But he will not know I am ill till I am gone; and he will come when
they have laid me out, and I am senseless, cold and stiff.
"'What can my departed soul feel then? Can it see or know what happens
to the clay? Can spirits, through any medium, communicate with living
flesh? Can the dead at all revisit those they leave? Can they come in
the elements? Will wind, water, fire lend me a path to Moore?
"'Is it for nothing the wind sounds almost articulate sometimes--sings
as I have lately heard it sing at night--or passes the casement sobbing,
as if for sorrow to come? Does nothing then haunt it--nothing inspire
it?'"
The awful improbability of Caroline is more striking because of its
contrast with the inspired rightness of the scene of Cathy's delirium in
_Wuthering Heights_. It is Charlotte feebly echoing Emily, and going
more and more wrong up to her peroration.
Delirious Caroline wonders: "'What is that electricity they speak of,
whose changes make us well or ill; whose lack or excess blasts; whose
even balance revives?...'
"'_Where_ is the other world? In _what_ will another life consist? Why
do I ask? Have I not cause to think that the hour is hasting but too
fast when the veil must be rent for me? Do I not know the Grand Mystery
is likely to break prematurely on me? Great Spirit, in whose goodness I
confide; whom, as my Father, I have petitioned night and morning from
early infancy, help the weak creation of Thy hands! Sustain me through
the ordeal I dread and must undergo! Give me strength! Give me patience!
Give me--oh, _give me_ FAITH!'"
Jane Eyre has done worse than that, so has Rochester; but somehow, when
they were doing their worst with it, they got their passion through.
There is no live passion behind this speech of Caroline's, with its wild
stress of italics and of capitals. What passion there was in Charlotte
when she conceived Caroline was killed by Emily's death.
And Mrs. Pryor, revealing herself to Caroline, is even more terrible.
She has all the worst vices of Charlotte's dramatic style. Mrs. Pryor
calls to the spirit of Caroline's dead father: "'James, slumber
peacefully! See, your terrible debt is cancelled! Look! I wipe out the
long, black account with my own hand! James, your child atones: this
living likeness of you--this thing with your perfect features--this one
good gift you gave me has nestled affectionately to my heart and
tenderly called me "mother". Husband, rest forgiven.'"
Even Robert Moore, otherwise almost a masterpiece, becomes improbable
when, in his great scene, Shirley refuses him. When Mr. Yorke asks him
what has gone wrong he replies: "The machinery of all my nature; the
whole enginery of this human mill; the boiler, which I take to be the
heart, is fit to burst."
Shirley herself is impossible with her "Lucifer, Star of the Morning,
thou art fallen," and her speech to her mercenary uncle: "Sir, your
god, your great Bell, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a
demon."
What is worse than all, Louis Moore--Louis, the hero, Louis, the master
of passion, is a failure. He is Charlotte Brontë's most terrible, most
glaring failure. It is not true that Charlotte could not draw men, or
that she drew them all alike; Robert Moore, the hard-headed man of
business, the man of will and purpose, who never gives up, is not only
almost a masterpiece but a spontaneous masterpiece, one of the first
examples of his kind. But there is no blood in Louis' veins, no virility
in his swarthy body. He is the most unspeakable of schoolmasters. Yet
Charlotte lavished on this puppet half the wealth of her imagination.
She flings phrase after perfect phrase to him to cover himself
with--some of her best things have been given to Louis Moore to utter;
but they do not make him live. Again, she strangles him in his own
rhetoric. The courtship of Louis Moore and Shirley will not compare with
that of Jane and Rochester. There is no nightingale singing in their
wood.
Yet, for all that, _Shirley_ comes very near to being Charlotte Brontë's
masterpiece. It is inspired from first to last with a great intention
and a great idea. It shows a vision of reality wider than her grasp. Its
faults, like the faults of _Jane Eyre_, are all on the surface, only
there is more surface in _Shirley_. If it has not _Jane Eyre's_
commanding passion, it has a vaster sweep. It was literally the first
attempt in literature to give to woman her right place in the world.
From first to last there is not a page or a line in it that justifies
the malignant criticism of Mrs. Oliphant. Caroline Helstone does not
justify it. She is no window-gazing virgin on the look-out, in love
already before the man has come. She is a young girl, very naturally in
love with a man whom she has known for years, who is always on the spot.
As for Shirley, she flung herself with all the vehemence of her
prophetic soul on the hypocritical convention that would make every
woman dependent on some man, and at the same time despises her for the
possession of her natural instincts. And Caroline followed her. "I
observe that to such grievances as society cannot cure, it usually
forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn: this scorn being only a sort of
tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People hate to be reminded of
ills they are unable or unwilling to remedy: such reminder, in forcing
on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of an
obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease and
shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the houseless and
unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the
world: the demand disturbs the happy and rich: it disturbs parents....
Men of England! Look at your poor girls, many of them fading round you,
dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating
to sour old maids--envious, back-biting, wretched, because life is a
desert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce
modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and
consideration by marriage, which to celibacy is denied. Fathers, cannot
you alter these things?... You would wish to be proud of your daughters,
and not to blush for them, then seek for them an interest and an
occupation which shall raise them above the flirt, the manoeuvrer, the
mischief-making talebearer. Keep your girl's minds narrow and
degraded--they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes a disgrace
to you: give them scope and work--they will be your gayest companions in
health; your tenderest nurses in sickness; your most faithful prop in
old age."
That is the argument from fathers, and it comes from Caroline Helstone,
not from Shirley. And the fact that Caroline married Robert Moore, and
Shirley fell in love when her hour came (and with Louis Moore, too!)
does not diminish the force or the sincerity or the truth of the tirade.
_Shirley_ may not be a great novel; but it is a great prophetic book.
Shirley's vision of the woman kneeling on the hills serves for more than
Emily Brontë's vision of Hertha and Demeter, of Eve, the Earth-mother,
"the mighty and mystical parent"; it is Charlotte Brontë's vindication
of Eve, her vision of woman as she is to be. She faced the world once
for all with her vision: "I see her," she said, "and I will tell you
what she is like."
Mrs. Oliphant did not see the woman kneeling on the hills. Neither
George Eliot nor Mrs. Gaskell saw her. They could not possibly have told
the world what she was like. It is part of Charlotte Brontë's superior
greatness that she saw.
* * * * *
You do not see that woman in _Villette_. She has passed with the
splendour of Charlotte's vision of the world. The world in _Villette_ is
narrowed to a Pensionnat de Demoiselles, and centred in the heart of one
woman. And never, not even in _Jane Eyre_, and certainly not in
_Shirley_, did Charlotte Brontë achieve such mastery of reality, and
with it such mastery of herself. _Villette_ is the final triumph of her
genius over the elements that warred in her. It shows the movement of
her genius, which was always by impulse and recoil. In _The Professor_
she abjured, in the interests of reality, the "imagination" of her
youth. In _Jane Eyre_ she was urged forward by the released impetus of
the forces she repressed. In _Shirley_ they are still struggling with
her sense of the sober and the sane reality; the book is torn to
fragments in the struggle, and in the end imagination riots.
But in _Villette_ there are none of these battlings and rendings, these
Titanic upheavals and subsidences. Charlotte Brontë's imagination, and
her sense of the real, are in process of fusion. There are few novels in
which an imagination so supreme is wedded to so vivid a vision of
actuality. It may be said that Charlotte Brontë never achieved positive
actuality before. The Pensionnat de Demoiselles is almost as visibly and
palpably actual as the Maison Vauquer in _Père Goriot_. It is a return
to the method of experience with a vengeance. Charlotte's success,
indeed, was so stunning that for all but sixty years _Villette_ has
passed for a _roman à clef_, the novel, not only of experience, but of
personal experience. There was a certain plausibility in that view. The
characters could all be easily recognized. And when Dr. John was
identified with Mr. George Smith, and his mother with Mr. George Smith's
mother, and Madame Beck with Madame Héger, and M. Paul Emanuel with
Madame Héger's husband, the inference was irresistible: Lucy Snowe was,
and could only be, Charlotte Brontë. And as the figure of M. Paul
Emanuel was ten times more vivid and convincing than that of Rochester,
so all that applied to Jane Eyre applied with ten times more force to
Lucy. In _Villette_ Charlotte Brontë was considered to have given
herself hopelessly away.
I have tried to show that this view cannot stand before an unprejudiced
examination of her life and letters. No need to go into all that again.
On the evidence, Charlotte seems at the best of times to have fallen in
love with difficulty; and she most certainly was no more in love with
"the little man", Paul Emanuel, than she was with "the little man", Mr.
Taylor. The really important and interesting point is that, if she had
been, if he had thus obtained the reality with which passion endows its
object, her imagination would have had no use for him; its work would
have been done for it.
To the supreme artist the order of the actual event is one thing, and
the order of creation is another. Their lines may start from the same
point in the actual, they may touch again and again, but they are not
the same, and they cannot run exactly parallel. There must always be
this difference between the actual thing and the thing drawn from it,
however closely, that each is embedded and enmeshed in a different
context. For a character in a novel to be alive it must have grown; and
to have grown it must have followed its own line of evolution,
inevitably and in its own medium; and that, whether or not it has been
"taken", as they say, "from life". The more alive it is the less likely
is it to have been "taken", to have been seized, hauled by the scruff of
its neck out of the dense web of the actual. All that the supreme artist
wants is what Charlotte Brontë called "the germ of the real", by which
she meant the germ of the actual. He does not want the alien, developed
thing, standing in its own medium ready-made. Charlotte Brontë said that
the character of Dr. John was a failure because it lacked the germ of
the real. She should have said that it lacked the germ of many reals; it
is so obviously drawn from incomplete observation of a single instance.
I am inclined to think that she did "take" Dr. John. And whenever
Charlotte Brontë "took" a character, as she took the unfortunate curates
and Mr. St. John Rivers, the result was failure.
No supreme work of art was ever "taken". It was begotten and born and
grown, the offspring of faithful love between the soul of the artist and
reality. The artist must bring to his "experience" as much as he takes
from it. The dignity of Nature is all against these violences and
robberies of art. She hides her deepest secret from the marauder, and
yields it to the lover who brings to her the fire of his own soul.
And that fire of her own soul was what Charlotte Brontë brought to her
supreme creations. It was certainly what she brought to Paul Emanuel.
Impossible to believe that M. Héger gave her more than one or two of the
germs of M. Paul. Personally, I can only see the respectable M. Héger as
a man whose very essence was a certain impassivity and phlegm under the
appearance of a temperament. Choleric he was, with the superficial and
temporary choler of the schoolmaster. A schoolmaster gifted with the
most extraordinary, the most marvellous, the most arresting faculty for
making faces, a faculty which in an Englishman would have argued him a
perfect volcano of erratic temperament. But I more than suspect that
when it came to temperament M. Héger took it out in faces; that he was
nothing more than a benevolent, sentimental, passably intellectual
bourgeois; but bourgeois to the core. Whereas, look at M. Paul! No
wonder that with that tame and solid stuff before her it took even
Charlotte Brontë's fiery spirit nine years (torturing the unwilling
dross that checked its flight) before it could create Paul Emanuel.
Because of her long work on him he is at once the most real and the best
imagined of her characters.
I admit that in the drawing of many of her minor characters she seems to
have relied upon very close and intimate observation of the living
model. But in none of her minor characters is she at grips with the
reality that, for her, passion is. Charlotte refused to give heroic rank
to persons she had merely observed; she would not exalt them to the
dignity of passion. Her imagination could not work on them to that
extent. (That is partly why Caroline's delirium is so palpably "faked".)
Even in her portrait of the heroic Shirley, who was frankly "taken" from
her sister Emily, she achieved the likeness mainly by the artifice of
unlikeness, by removing Shirley Keeldar into a life in which Emily
Brontë had never played a part, whereby Shirley became for her a
separate person. (You cannot by any stretch of the imagination see Emily
falling in love with the schoolmaster, Louis Moore.)
Lest there should be any doubt on the subject, Charlotte herself
explained to Mrs. Gaskell how her imagination worked. "I asked her,"
Mrs. Gaskell says, "whether she had ever taken opium, as the description
given of its effects in _Villette_ was so exactly like what I had
experienced--vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, of which the
outlines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, etc. She replied that
she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but
that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to
describe anything that had not fallen within her own experience; she had
thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling
asleep--wondering what it was like, or how it would be--till at length,
sometimes after her story had been arrested at this one point for weeks,
she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had
in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word
for word, as it happened."
To a mind like that the germ of the actual was enough. Charlotte
Brontë's genius, in fact, was ardently impatient of the actual: it cared
only for its own. At the least hint from experience it was off. A
glance, a gesture of M. Héger's was enough to fire it to the conception
of Paul Emanuel. He had only to say a kind word to her, to leave a book
or a box of bon-bons in her desk (if he _did_ leave bon-bons) for
Charlotte's fire to work on him. She had only to say to herself, "This
little man is adorable in friendship; I wonder what he would be like in
love," and she saw that he would be something, though not altogether,
like Paul Emanuel. She had only to feel a pang of half-remorseful,
half-humorous affection for him, and she knew what Lucy felt like in her
love-sick agony. As for Madame Héger, Madame's purely episodic jealousy,
her habits of surveillance, her small inscrutabilities of behaviour,
became the fury, the treachery, the perfidy of Madame Beck. For
treachery and perfidy, and agony and passion, were what Charlotte wanted
for _Villette_.
And yet it is true that _Villette_ is a novel of experience, owing its
conspicuous qualities very much to observation. After all, a
contemporary novel cannot be made altogether out of the fire of the
great writer's soul. It is because Charlotte Brontë relied too much on
the fire of her own soul that in _Jane Eyre_ and parts of _Shirley_ she
missed that unique expression of actuality which, over and over again,
she accomplished in _Villette_. For the expression of a social _milieu_,
for manners, for the dialogue of ordinary use, for the whole detail of
the speech characteristic of an individual and a type, for the right
accent and pitch, for all the vanishing shades and aspects of the
temporary and the particular, the greatest and the fieriest writer is at
the mercy of observation and experience. It was her final mastery of
these things that made it possible to praise Charlotte Brontë's powers
of observation at the expense of her genius; and this mainly because of
M. Paul.
No offspring of genius was ever more alive, more rich in individuality,
than M. Paul. He is alive and he is adorable, in his _paletot_ and
_bonnet grec_, from the moment when he drags Lucy up three pairs of
stairs to the solitary and lofty attic and locks her in, to that other
moment when he brings her to the little house that he has prepared for
her. Whenever he appears there is pure radiant comedy, and pathos as
pure. It is in this utter purity, this transparent simplicity, that
_Villette_ is great. There is not one jarring note in any of the
delicious dialogues between Lucy and M. Paul, not one of those passages
which must be erased if quotation is not to fail of its effect. Take the
scene where Lucy breaks M. Paul's spectacles.
"A score of times ere now I had seen them fall and receive no
damage--this time, as Lucy Snowe's hapless luck would have it, they so
fell that each clear pebble became a shivered and shapeless star.
"Now, indeed, dismay seized me--dismay and regret. I knew the value of
these _lunettes_: M. Paul's sight was peculiar, not easily fitted, and
these glasses suited him. I had heard him call them his treasures: as I
picked them up, cracked and worthless, my hand trembled. Frightened
through all my nerves I was to see the mischief I had done, but I think
I was even more sorry than afraid. For some seconds I dared not look the
bereaved Professor in the face; he was the first to speak.
"'_Là_!' he said: '_me voilà veuf de mes lunettes_! I think that
Mademoiselle Lucy will now confess that the cord and gallows are amply
earned; she trembles in anticipation of her doom. Ah, traitress,
traitress! You are resolved to have me quite blind and helpless in your
hands!'
"I lifted my eyes: his face, instead of being irate, lowering and
furrowed, was overflowing with the smile, coloured with the bloom I had
seen brightening it that evening at the Hotel Crécy. He was not
angry--not even grieved. For the real injury he showed himself full of
clemency; under the real provocation, patient as a saint."
Take the "Watchguard" scene.
"M. Paul came and stood behind me. He asked at what I was working; and I
said I was making a watchguard. He asked, 'For whom?' And I answered,
'For a gentleman--one of my friends.'"
Whereupon M. Paul flies into a passion, and accuses Lucy of behaving to
him, "'With what pungent vivacities--what an impetus of mutiny--what a
_fougue_ of injustice.'... '_Chut! à l'instant!_ There! there I
went--_vive comme la poudre_.' He was sorry--he was very sorry: for my
sake he grieved over the hopeless peculiarity. This _emportement_, this
_chaleur_--generous, perhaps, but excessive--would yet, he feared, do me
a mischief. It was a pity. I was not--he believed, in his soul--wholly
without good qualities; and would I but hear reason, and be more sedate,
more sober, less _en l'air_, less _coquette_, less taken by show, less
prone to set an undue value on outside excellence--to make much of the
attentions of people remarkable chiefly for so many feet of stature,
_des couleurs de poupée, un nez plus ou moins bien fait_, and an
enormous amount of fatuity--I might yet prove a useful, perhaps an
exemplary character. But, as it was----And here the little man's voice
was for a moment choked.
"I would have looked up at him, or held out my hand, or said a soothing
word; but I was afraid, if I stirred, I should either laugh or cry; so
odd, in all this, was the mixture of the touching and the absurd.
"I thought he had nearly done: but no, he sat down that he might go on
at his ease.