for the sake of my good, and would venture to refer to a change he had
noticed in my dress.'"
* * * * *
"'And if you condemn a bow of ribbon for a lady, monsieur, you would
necessarily disapprove of a thing like this for a gentleman?' holding up
my bright little chainlet of silk and gold. His sole reply was a
groan--I suppose over my levity.
"After sitting some minutes in silence, and watching the progress of the
chain, at which I now wrought more assiduously than ever, he inquired:
"'Whether what he had just said would have the effect of making me
entirely detest him?'
"I hardly remember what answer I made, or how it came about; I don't
think I spoke at all, but I know we managed to bid good night on
friendly terms: and even after M. Paul had reached the door, he turned
back just to explain that he would not be understood to speak in entire
condemnation of the scarlet dress.'...
"'And the flowers under my bonnet, monsieur?' I asked. 'They are very
little ones.'
"'Keep them little, then,' said he. 'Permit them not to become
full-blown.'
"'And the bow, monsieur--the bit of ribbon?'
"'_Va pour le ruban_!' was the propitious answer.
"And so we settled it."
That is good; and when Lucy presents the watchguard it is better still.
"He looked at the box: I saw its clear and warm tint, and bright azure
circlet, pleased his eyes. I told him to open it.
"'My initials!' said he, indicating the letters in the lid. 'Who told
you I was called Carl David?'
"'A little bird, monsieur.'
"'Does it fly from me to you? Then one can tie a message under its wing
when needful.'
"He took out the chain--a trifle indeed as to value, but glossy with
silk and sparkling with beads. He liked that too--admired it artlessly,
like a child.
"'For me?'
"'Yes, for you.'
"'This is the thing you were working at last night?'
"'The same.'
"'You finished it this morning?'
"'I did.'
"'You commenced it with the intention that it should be mine?'
"'Undoubtedly.'
"'And offered on my fête-day?'
"'Yes.'
"'This purpose continued as you wove it?'
"'Again I assented.'
"'Then it is not necessary that I should cut out any portion--saying,
this part is not mine: it was plaited under the idea and for the
adornment of another?'
"'By no means. It is neither necessary, nor would it be just.'
"'This object is _all_ mine?'
"'That object is yours entirely.'
"Straightway monsieur opened his paletot, arranged the guard splendidly
across his chest, displaying as much and suppressing as little as he
could: for he had no notion of concealing what he admired and thought
decorative....
"'_À present c'est un fait accompli_,' said he, readjusting his
paletot...."
To the last gesture of Monsieur it is superb.
I have taken those scenes because they are of crucial importance as
indications of what Charlotte Brontë was doing in _Villette_, and yet
would do. They show not only an enormous advance in technique, but a
sense of the situation, of the _scène à faire_, which is entirely or
almost entirely lacking in her earlier work.
If there be degrees in reality, Lucy and Pauline de Bassompierre are
only less real than M. Paul. And by some miracle their reality is not
diminished by Charlotte Brontë's singular change of intention with
regard to these two. Little Polly, the child of the beginning, the
inscrutable creature of nerves, exquisitely sensitive to pain, fretting
her heart out in love for her father and for Graham Bretton, is hardly
recognizable in Pauline, Countess de Bassompierre. She has preserved
only her fragility, her fastidiousness, her little air of
inaccessibility. Polly is obviously predestined to that profound and
tragic suffering which is Lucy Snowe's.
"I watched Polly rest her small elbow on her small knee, her head on her
hand; I observed her draw a square inch or two of pocket-handkerchief
from the doll-pocket of her doll-skirt, and then I heard her weep. Other
children in grief or pain cry aloud, without shame or restraint, but
this being wept: the tiniest occasional sniff testified to her emotion."
Again (Polly is parted from her father): "When the street-door closed,
she dropped on her knees at a chair with a cry--'Papa!'
"It was low and long; a sort of 'why hast thou forsaken me?' During an
ensuing space of some minutes I perceived she endured agony. She went
through, in that brief interval of her infant life, emotions such as
some never feel; it was in her constitution: she would have more of such
instants if she lived."
Polly is contrasted with the cold and disagreeable Lucy. "I, Lucy Snowe,
was calm," Lucy says when she records that agony. The effect she gives,
of something creepily insensitive and most unpleasant, is unmistakable
in these early chapters. She watches Polly with a cold, analytic eye.
"These sudden, dangerous natures--sensitive as they are called--offer
many a curious spectacle to those whom a cooler temperament has secured
from participation in their vagaries." When Polly, charming Polly, waits
on her father at the tea-table, Lucy is impervious to her tiny charm.
"Candidly speaking, I thought her a little busy-body." When Graham
Bretton repulses Polly, Lucy has some thoughts of "improving the
occasion by inculcating some of those maxims of philosophy whereof I had
ever a tolerable stock ready for application."
There is no sign in the beginning that this detestable Lucy is to be
heroine. But in Chapter Four Polly disappears and Lucy takes her place
and plays her part. The child Polly had a suffering and passionate
heart, for all her little air of fastidiousness and inaccessibility. It
is the suffering and passionate heart of Polly that beats in Lucy of the
Pensionnat. There is only enough of the original Lucy left to sit in
judgment on Ginevra Fanshawe and "the Parisienne".
The child Polly had an Imagination. "'Miss Snowe,' said she in a
whisper, 'this is a wonderful book ... it tells about distant countries,
a long, long way from England, which no traveller can reach without
sailing thousands of miles over the sea.... Here is a picture of
thousands gathered in a desolate place--a plain spread with sand.... And
here are pictures more stranger than that. There is the wonderful Great
Wall of China; here is a Chinese lady with a foot littler than mine.
There is a wild horse of Tartary; and here--most strange of all--is a
land of ice and snow without green fields, woods, or gardens. In this
land they found some mammoth bones; there are no mammoths now. You don't
know what it was; but I can tell you, because Graham told me. A mighty
goblin creature, as high as this room, and as long as the hall; but not
a fierce, flesh-eating thing, Graham thinks. He believes if I met one in
a forest, it would not kill me, unless I came quite in its way; when it
would trample me down amongst the bushes, as I might tread on a
grasshopper in a hay-field without knowing it.'"
It is Polly's Imagination that appears again in Lucy's "Creative
Impulse". "I with whom that Impulse was the most intractable, the most
capricious, the most maddening of masters ... a deity which sometimes,
under circumstances apparently propitious, would not speak when
questioned, would not hear when appealed to, would not, when sought, be
found; but would stand, all cold, all indurated, all granite, a dark
Baal with carven lips and blank eyeballs, and breast like the stone face
of a tomb; and again, suddenly, at some turn, some sound, some
long-trembling sob of the wind, at some rushing past of an unseen stream
of electricity, the irrational Demon would awake unsolicited, would stir
strangely alive, would rush from its pedestal like a perturbed Dagon,
calling to its votary for a sacrifice, whatever the hour--to its victim
for some blood or some breath, whatever the circumstances or
scene--rousing its priest, treacherously promising vaticination,
perhaps filling its temple with a strange hum of oracles, but sure to
give half the significance to fateful winds, and grudging to the
desperate listener even a miserable remnant--yielding it sordidly, as
though each word had been a drop of the deathless ichor of its own dark
veins."
That is Lucy. But when Polly reappears fitfully as Pauline de
Bassompierre, she is an ordinary, fastidious little lady without a spark
of imagination or of passion.
Now in the first three chapters of _Villette_, Charlotte Brontë
concentrated all her strength and all her art on the portrait of little
Polly. The portrait of little Polly is drawn with the most delicate care
and tender comprehension, and the most vivid and entire reality. I
cannot agree with Mr. Swinburne that George Eliot, with her Totty and
Eppie and Lillo, showed a closer observation of the ways, or a more
perfect understanding of the heart of a child. Only little Maggie
Tulliver can stand beside little Polly in _Villette_. She is an answer
to every critic, from Mr. Swinburne downwards, who maintains that
Charlotte Brontë could not draw children.
But Lucy at fourteen is drawn with slight and grudging strokes,
sufficient for the minor part she is evidently to play. Lucy at Bretton
is a mere foil to little Polly. Charlotte Brontë distinctly stated in
her letters that she did not care for Miss Snowe. "Lucy must not marry
Dr. John; he is far too youthful, handsome, bright-spirited, and
sweet-tempered; he is a 'curled darling' of Nature and of fortune, and
must draw a prize in life's lottery. His wife must be young, rich,
pretty; he must be made very happy indeed. If Lucy marries anybody, it
must be the Professor--a man in whom there is much to forgive, much to
'put up with'. But I am not leniently disposed towards Miss Frost: from
the beginning I never meant to appoint her lines in pleasant places."
"As to the character of Lucy Snowe, my intention from the first was that
she should not occupy the pedestal to which Jane Eyre was raised by some
injudicious admirers. She is where I meant her to be, and where no
charge of self-laudation can touch her."
But Lucy is _not_ altogether where she was meant to be. When she
reappears at the Pensionnat it is with "flame in her soul and lightning
in her eyes". She reminds M. Paul "of a young she wild creature, new
caught, untamed, viewing with a mixture of fire and fear the first
entrance of the breaker-in".
"'You look,' said he, 'like one who would snatch at a draught of sweet
poison, and spurn wholesome bitters with disgust.'"
There is no inconsistency in this. Women before now have hidden a soul
like a furnace under coldness and unpleasantness, and smothered
shrieking nerves under an appearance of apathy. Lucy Snowe is one of
them. As far as she goes, Lucy at Bretton is profoundly consistent with
Lucy in _Villette_. It is not Lucy's volcanic outbreaks in the
Pensionnat that do violence to her creator's original intention. It is
the debasement of Polly and the exaltation of Lucy to her tragic rôle,
the endowment of Lucy with Polly's rarest qualities, to the utter
impoverishment of Pauline de Bassompierre. Polly in _Villette_ is a mere
foil to Lucy.
Having lavished such care and love on Polly, Charlotte Brontë could not
possibly have meant to debase her and efface her. How then did it happen
that Polly was debased and Lucy sublimely exalted?
It happened, I think, partly because for the first time Charlotte Brontë
created a real living man. The reality of M. Paul Emanuel was too
strong both for Lucy and for Charlotte Brontë. From the moment when he
seized her and dragged her to the garret he made Lucy live as Charlotte
Brontë had never contemplated her living. He made her live to the utter
exclusion and extinction of Pauline de Bassompierre.
And "the despotic little man" dominates the book to an extent that
Charlotte never contemplated either. Until the storm carried him out of
her sight, she was, I think, unaware of his dominion. Dr. John was her
hero. She told Mr. George Smith, his prototype, that she intended him
for the most beautiful character in the book (which must have been very
gratifying to Mr. George Smith). He was the type she needed for her
purpose. But he does not "come off", if only for the reason that she is
consciously preoccupied with him. Dr. John was far more of an obsession
to her than this little man, Paul Emanuel, who was good enough for Lucy
Snowe. Pauline de Bassompierre was to be finished and perfected to match
the high finish and perfection of Dr. John. Yet neither Pauline nor Dr.
John "came off". Charlotte Brontë cared too much for them. But for Paul
Emanuel she did not care. He comes off in a triumph of the detached,
divinely free "Creative Impulse".
Charlotte, with all her schemes, is delivered over to her genius from
the moment when Lucy settles in Villette. To Charlotte's inexperience
Brussels was a perfect hotbed for the germs of the real. That, I think,
can be admitted without subscribing to the view that it was anything
more. Once in the Pensionnat, Lucy entered an atmosphere of the most
intense reality. From that point onward the book is literally inspired
by the sense of atmosphere, that sense to which experience brings the
stuff to work on. All Charlotte's experience and her suffering is there,
changed, intensified, transmuted to an experience and a suffering which
were not hers.
This matured sense of actuality is shown again in the drawing of the
minor characters. There is a certain vindictiveness about the portrait
of Ginevra Fanshawe, a touch of that fierce, intolerant temper that
caused Blanche Ingram to be strangled by the hands of her creator.
Ginevra is not strangled. She lives splendidly; she flourishes in an
opulence of detail.
Experience may have partly accounted for Ginevra. It could hardly have
accounted for the little de Hamel, and he is perfect as far as he goes.
It is because of this increasing mastery, this new power in handling
unsympathetic types, because, in short, of its all round excellence,
that _Villette_ must count as Charlotte Brontë's masterpiece. It is
marvellous that within such limits she should have attained such
comparative catholicity of vision. It is not the vast vision of
_Shirley_, prophetic and inspired, and a little ineffectual. It is the
lucid, sober, unobstructed gaze of a more accomplished artist, the
artist whose craving for "reality" is satisfied; the artist who is
gradually extending the limits of his art. When Charlotte Brontë wrote
_Jane Eyre_ she could not appreciate Jane Austen; she wondered why
George Henry Lewes liked her so much. She objected to Jane Austen
because there was no passion in her, and therefore no poetry and no
reality. When she wrote _Shirley_ she had seen that passion was not
everything; there were other things, very high realities, that were not
passion. By the time she wrote _Villette_ she saw, not only that there
are other things, but that passion is the rarest thing on earth. It does
not enter into the life of ordinary people like Dr. John, and Madame
Beck, and Ginevra Fanshawe.
In accordance with this tendency to level up, her style in _Villette_
attains a more even and a more certain excellence. Her flights are few;
so are her lapses. Her fearful tendency to rhetoric is almost gone. Gone
too are the purple patches; but there is everywhere delicate colour
under a vivid light. But there are countless passages which show the
perfection to which she could bring her old imaginative style. Take the
scene where Lucy, under the influence of opium, goes into Villette _en
fête_.
"The drug wrought. I know not whether Madame had over-charged or
under-charged the dose; its result was not that she intended. Instead of
stupor, came excitement. I became alive to new thought--to reverie
peculiar in colouring. A gathering call ran among the faculties, their
bugles sang, their trumpets rang an untimely summons....
"I took a route well known, and went up towards the palatial and royal
Haute-Ville; thence the music I heard certainly floated; it was hushed
now, but it might rewaken. I went on: neither band nor bell-music came
to meet me; another sound replaced it, a sound like a strong tide, a
great flow, deepening as I proceeded. Light broke, movement gathered,
chimes pealed--to what was I coming? Entering on the level of a Grande
Place, I found myself, with the suddenness of magic, plunged amidst a
gay, living, joyous crowd.
"Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the whole world seems
abroad; moonlight and heaven are banished: the town by her own
flambeaux, beholds her own splendour--gay dresses, grand equipage, fine
horses and gallant riders, throng the bright streets. I see even scores
of masks. It is a strange scene, stranger than dreams."
This is only beaten by that lyric passage that ends _Villette_; that
sonorous dirge that rings high above all pathos, which is somehow a song
of triumph, inspired by the whole power and splendour and magnificence
of storm and death.
"The sun passes the equinox; the days shorten, the leaves grow sere;
but--he is coming.
"Frosts appear at night; November has sent his fogs in advance; the wind
takes its autumn moan; but--he is coming.
"The skies hang full and dark--a rack sails from the west; the clouds
cast themselves into strange forms--arches and broad radiations; there
rise resplendent mornings--glorious, royal, purple, as monarch in his
state; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at
its thickest--so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. I know some
signs of the sky, I have noted them ever since childhood. God, watch
that sail! Oh, guard it!
"The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace, Banshee--'keening' at every
window! It will rise--it will swell--it shrieks out long: wander as I
may through the house this night, I cannot lull the blast. The advancing
hours make it strong; by midnight all sleepless watchers hear and fear a
wild south-west storm.
"That storm roared frenzied for seven days. It did not cease till the
Atlantic was strewn with wrecks: it did not lull till the deeps had
gorged their fill of substance. Not till the destroying angel of tempest
had achieved his perfect work, would he fold the wings whose waft was
thunder--the tremor of whose plumes was storm."
* * * * *
After _Villette_, the _Last Sketch_, the _Fragment of Emma_; that
fragment which Charlotte Brontë read to her husband not long before her
death. All he said was, "The critics will accuse you of repetition."
The critics have fulfilled his cautious prophecy. The _Fragment_ passed
for one of those sad things of which the least said the better. It was
settled that Charlotte Brontë had written herself out, that if she had
lived she would have become more and more her own plagiarist. There is a
middle-aged lady in _Emma_, presumably conceived on the lines of Mrs.
Fairfax and Mrs. Pryor. There is a girls' school, which is only not
Lowood because it is so obviously Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor. There is a
schoolmistress with sandy hair and thin lips and a cold blue eye,
recalling Madame Beck, though there the likeness ceases. And in that
school, ill-treated by that schoolmistress, there is a little ugly,
suffering, deserted child.
All this looks very much like repetition. But it does not shake my
private belief that _Emma_ is a fragment of what would have been as
great a novel as _Villette_. There are indications. There is Mr. Ellin,
who proves that Charlotte Brontë could create a live man of the finer
sort, an unexploited masculine type with no earthly resemblance to
Rochester or to Louis Moore or M. Paul. He is an unfinished sketch
rather than a portrait, but a sketch that would not too shamefully have
discredited Mr. Henry James. For there is a most modern fineness and
subtlety in _Emma_; and, for all its sketchy incompleteness, a peculiar
certainty of touch, an infallible sense of the significant action, the
revealing gesture. With a splendid economy of means, scenes, passages,
phrases, apparently slight, are charged with the most intense
psychological suggestion. When Mr. Ellin, summoned on urgent business by
Miss Wilcox, takes that preposterously long and leisurely round to get
to her, you know what is passing in the mind of Mr. Ellin as well as if
you had been told. In that brief scene between Mr. Ellin and the
schoolmistress, you know as well as if you had been told, that Miss
Wilcox has lost Mr. Ellin because of her unkindness to a child. When the
child, Matilda Fitzgibbon, falls senseless, and Mr. Ellin gives his
inarticulate cry and lifts her from the floor, the enigmatic man has
revealed his innermost nature.
Now a fragment that can suggest all this with the smallest possible
expenditure of phrases, is not a fragment that can be set aside. It is
slight; but slightness that accomplishes so much is a sign of progress
rather than of falling-off. We shall never know what happened to Matilda
when Mr. Ellin took her from Miss Wilcox. We shall never know what
happened to Mr. Ellin; but I confess that I am dying to know, and that I
find it hard to forgive Mr. Nicholls for having killed them, so certain
am I that they would have lived triumphantly if Charlotte Brontë had not
married him.
Some of us will be profoundly indifferent to this issue; for Charlotte
Brontë has no following in a certain school. She defies analysis. You
cannot label her. What she has done is not "Realism", neither is it
"Romance". She displeases both by her ambiguity and by her lack of form.
She has no infallible dramatic instinct. Even in _Villette_ she
preserves some of her clumsiness, her crudity, her improbability. The
progress of "the Novel" in our day is towards a perfection of form and a
reality she never knew.
But "reality" is a large term; and, as for form, _who_ cared about it in
the fifties? As for improbability--as M. Dimnet says--she is not more
improbable than Balzac.
And all these things, the ambiguity, the formlessness and the rest, she
was gradually correcting as she advanced. It is impossible to exaggerate
the importance and significance of her attainment in _Villette_; there
has been so much confused thinking in the consecrated judgment of that
novel. _Villette_ owes its high place largely to its superior
construction and technique; largely and primarily to Charlotte Brontë's
progress towards the light, towards the world, towards the great
undecorated reality. It is odd criticism that ignores the inevitable
growth, the increasing vision and grasp, the whole indomitable advance
of a great writer, and credits "experience" with the final masterpiece.
As a result of this confusion _Villette_ has been judged "final" in
another sense. Yes, final--this novel that shows every sign and token of
long maturing, long-enduring power. If Charlotte Brontë's critics had
not hypnotized themselves by the perpetual reiteration of that word
"experience", it would have been impossible for them, with the evidence
of her work before them, to have believed that in _Villette_ she had
written herself out.
She was only just beginning.
* * * * *