Title: The Three Brontës
Author: Sinclair, May, 1863-1946
Language: English
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_By the same Author:_

THE CREATORS
THE DIVINE FIRE
TWO SIDES OF A QUESTION
THE HELPMATE
KITTY TAILLEUR
MR. AND MRS. NEVILL TYSON
ANN SEVERN AND THE FIELDINGS
ARNOLD WATERLOW: A LIFE
UNCANNY STORIES
THE RECTOR OF WYCK
THE ALLINGHAMS
A CURE OF SOULS
FAR END
HISTORY OF ANTHONY WARING
TALES TOLD BY SIMPSON
ETC.



THE THREE BRONTËS


_by_

MAY SINCLAIR


1912



PREFATORY NOTE


My thanks are due, first and chiefly, to Mr. Clement K. Shorter who
placed all his copyright material at my disposal; and to Mr. G.M.
Williamson and Mr. Robert H. Dodd, of New York, for allowing me to draw
so largely from the Poems of Emily Brontë, published by Messrs. Dodd,
Mead, and Co. in 1902; also to Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, the
publishers of the Complete Poems of Emily Brontë, edited by Mr. Shorter;
and to Mr. Alfred Sutro for permission to use his translation of _Wisdom
and Destiny_. Lastly, and somewhat late, to Mr. Arthur Symons for his
translation from St. John of the Cross. If I have borrowed from him more
than I had any right to without his leave, I hope he will forgive me.

MAY SINCLAIR.



CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION

THE THREE BRONTËS

APPENDIX I

APPENDIX II

INDEX



INTRODUCTION


When six months ago Mr. Thomas Seccombe suggested that I should write a
short essay on "The Three Brontës" I agreed with some misgiving.

Yet that deed was innocent compared with what I have done now; and, in
any case, the series afforded the offender a certain shelter and
protection. But to come out like this, into the open, with _another_
Brontë book, seems not only a dangerous, but a futile and a fatuous
adventure. All I can say is that I did not mean to do it. I certainly
never meant to write so long a book.

It grew, insidiously, out of the little one. Things happened. New
criticisms opened up old questions. When I came to look carefully into
Mr. Clement Shorter's collection of the _Complete Poems of Emily
Brontë_, I found a mass of material (its existence I, at any rate, had
not suspected) that could not be dealt with in the limits of the
original essay.

The book is, and can only be, the slightest of all slight appreciations.
None the less it has been hard and terrible for me to write it. Not only
had I said nearly all that I had to say already, but I was depressed at
the very start by that conviction of the absurdity of trying to say
anything at all, after all that has been said, about Anne, or Emily, or
Charlotte Brontë.

Anne's case, perhaps, was not so difficult. For obvious reasons, Anne
Brontë will always be comparatively virgin soil. But it was impossible
to write of Charlotte after Mrs. Gaskell; impossible to say more of
Emily than Madame Duclaux has said; impossible to add one single little
fact to the vast material, so patiently amassed, so admirably arranged
by Mr. Clement Shorter. And when it came to appreciation there were Mr.
Theodore Watts-Dunton, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, Mr. Birrell, and
Mrs. Humphry Ward, lying along the ground. When it came to eulogy, after
Mr. Swinburne's _Note on Charlotte Brontë_, neither Charlotte nor Emily
have any need of praise.

And on Emily Brontë, M. Maeterlinck has spoken the one essential, the
one perfect and final and sufficient word. I have "lifted" it
unblushingly; for no other word comes near to rendering the unique, the
haunting, the indestructible impression that she makes.

So, because all the best things about the Brontës have been said
already, I have had to fall back on the humble day-labour of clearing
away some of the rubbish that has gathered round them.

Round Charlotte it has gathered to such an extent that it is difficult
to see her plainly through the mass of it. Much has been cleared away;
much remains. Mrs. Oliphant's dreadful theories are still on record. The
excellence of Madame Duclaux's monograph perpetuates her one serious
error. Mr. Swinburne's _Note_ immortalizes his. M. Héger was dug up
again the other day.

It may be said that I have been calling up ghosts for the mere fun of
laying them; and there might be something in it, but that really these
ghosts still walk. At any rate many people believe in them, even at this
time of day. M. Dimnet believes firmly that poor Mrs. Robinson was in
love with Branwell Brontë. Some of us still think that Charlotte was in
love with M. Héger. They cannot give him up any more than M. Dimnet can
give up Mrs. Robinson.

Such things would be utterly unimportant but that they tend to obscure
the essential quality and greatness of Charlotte Brontë's genius.
Because of them she has passed for a woman of one experience and of one
book. There is still room for a clean sweep of the rubbish that has been
shot here.

In all this, controversy was unavoidable, much as I dislike its
ungracious and ungraceful air. If I have been inclined to undervalue
certain things--"the sojourn in Brussels", for instance--which others
have considered of the first importance, it is because I believe that it
is always the inner life that counts, and that with the Brontës it
supremely counted.

If I have passed over the London period too lightly, it is because I
judge it extraneous and external. If I have tried, cruelly, to take from
Charlotte the little beige gown that she wore at Mr. Thackeray's
dinner-party, it is because her home-made garments seem to suit her
better. She is more herself in skirts that have brushed the moors and
kept some of the soil of Haworth in their hem.

I may seem to have exaggerated her homesickness for Haworth. It may be
said that Haworth was by no means Charlotte's home as it was Emily's. I
am aware that there were moments--hours--when she longed to get away
from it. I have not forgotten how Mary Taylor found her in such an hour,
not long after her return from Brussels, when her very flesh shrank from
the thought of her youth gone and "nothing done"; nothing before her but
long, empty years in Haworth. The fact remains that she was never happy
away from it, and that in Haworth her genius most certainly found itself
at home. And this particular tone of misery and unrest disappeared from
the moment when her genius declared itself, so that I am inclined to see
in it a little personal dissatisfaction, if you will, but chiefly the
unspeakable restlessness and misery of power unrecognized and
suppressed. "Nothing done!" That was her reiterated cry.

Again, if I have overlooked the complexities of Charlotte's character,
it is that the great lines that underlie it may be seen. In my heart I
agree with M. Dimnet that the Brontës were not simple. All the same, I
think that his admirable portrait of Charlotte is spoiled by his
attitude of pity for "_la pauvre fille_", as he persists in calling her.
I think he dwells a shade too much on her small asperities and
acidities, and on that "_ton de critique mesquine_", which he puts down
to her provincialism. No doubt there were moments of suffering and of
irritation, as well as moments of uncontrollable merriment, when
Charlotte lacked urbanity, but M. Dimnet has almost too keen an eye for
them.

In making war on theories I cannot hope to escape a countercharge of
theorizing. Exception may be taken to my own suggestion as to the effect
of _Wuthering Heights_ on Charlotte Brontë's genius. If anybody likes to
fling it on the rubbish heap they may. I may have theorized a little too
much in laying stress on the supernatural element in _Wuthering
Heights_. It is because M. Dimnet has insisted too much on its
brutality. I may have exaggerated Emily Brontë's "mysticism". It is
because her "paganism" has been too much in evidence. It may be said
that I have no more authority for my belief that Emily Brontë was in
love with the Absolute than other people have for theirs, that
Charlotte was in love with M. Héger.

Finally, much that I have said about Emily Brontë's hitherto unpublished
poems is pure theory. But it is theory, I think, that careful
examination of the poems will make good. I may have here and there given
as a "Gondal" poem what is not a "Gondal" poem at all. Still, I believe,
it will be admitted that it is in the cycle of these poems, and not
elsewhere, that we should look for the first germs of _Wuthering
Heights_. The evidence only demonstrates in detail--what has never been
seriously contested--that the genius of Emily Brontë found its sources
in itself.

_10th October, 1911._



The Three Brontës


It is impossible to write of the three Brontës and forget the place they
lived in, the black-grey, naked village, bristling like a rampart on the
clean edge of the moor; the street, dark and steep as a gully, climbing
the hill to the Parsonage at the top; the small oblong house, naked and
grey, hemmed in on two sides by the graveyard, its five windows flush
with the wall, staring at the graveyard where the tombstones, grey and
naked, are set so close that the grass hardly grows between. The church
itself is a burying ground; its walls are tombstones, and its floor
roofs the forgotten and the unforgotten dead.

A low wall and a few feet of barren garden divide the Parsonage from the
graveyard, a few feet between the door of the house and the door in the
wall where its dead were carried through. But a path leads beyond the
graveyard to "a little and a lone green lane", Emily Brontë's lane that
leads to the open moors.

It is the genius of the Brontës that made their place immortal; but it
is the soul of the place that made their genius what it is. You cannot
exaggerate its importance. They drank and were saturated with Haworth.
When they left it they hungered and thirsted for it; they sickened till
the hour of their return. They gave themselves to it with passion, and
their works ring with the shock and interchange of two immortalities.
Haworth is saturated with them. Their souls are henceforth no more to be
disentangled from its soul than their bodies from its earth. All their
poetry, their passion and their joy is there, in this place of their
tragedy, visible, palpable, narrow as the grave and boundless.

In the year eighteen-twenty the Reverend Patrick Brontë and his wife
Maria brought their six children, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick
Branwell, Emily, and Anne, from Thornton, where they were born, to
Haworth. Mr. Brontë was an Irishman, a village schoolmaster who won,
marvellously, a scholarship that admitted him to Cambridge and the
Church of England. Tales have been told of his fathers and his
forefathers, peasants and peasant farmers of Ballynaskeagh in County
Down. They seem to have been notorious for their energy, eccentricity,
imagination, and a certain tendency to turbulence and excess. Tales have
been told of Mr. Brontë himself, of his temper, his egotism, his
selfishness, his fits of morose or savage temper. The Brontës'
biographers, from Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux[A] to Mr. Birrell,
have all been hard on this poor and unhappy and innocent old man. It is
not easy to see him very clearly through the multitude of tales they
tell: how he cut up his wife's silk gown in a fit of passion; how he
fired off pistols in a series of fits of passion; how, in still gloomier
and more malignant fits, he used to go for long solitary walks. And when
you look into the matter you find that the silk gown was, after all, a
cotton one, and that he only cut the sleeves out, and _then_ walked into
Keighley and brought a silk gown back with him instead; that when he
was a young man at Drumballyroney he practised pistol firing, not as a
safety valve for temper but as a manly sport, and that as a manly sport
he kept it up. As for solitary walks, there is really no reason why a
father should not take them; and if Mr. Brontë had insisted on
accompanying Charlotte and Emily in their walks, his conduct would have
been censured just the same, and, I think, with considerably more
reason. As it happened, Mr. Brontë, rather more than most fathers, made
companions of his children when they were little. This is not quite the
same thing as making himself a companion for them, and the result was a
terrific outburst of infant precocity; but this hardly justifies Mrs.
Gaskell and Madame Duclaux. They seem to have thought that they were
somehow appeasing the outraged spirits of Emily and Charlotte by
blackening their father and their brother; whereas, if anything could
give pain to Charlotte and Emily and innocent Anne in heaven, it would
be the knowledge of what Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux have done for
them.

[Footnote A: A. Mary F. Robinson.]

There was injustice in all that zeal as well as indiscretion, for Mr.
Brontë had his good points as fathers go. Think what the fathers of the
Victorian era could be, and what its evangelical parsons often were; and
remember that Mr. Brontë was an evangelical parson, and the father of
Emily and Charlotte, not of a brood of gentle, immaculate Jane Austens,
and that he was confronted suddenly and without a moment's warning with
Charlotte's fame. Why, the average evangelical parson would have been
shocked into apoplexy at the idea of any child of his producing
_Wuthering Heights_ or _Jane Eyre_. Charlotte's fame would have looked
to him exceedingly like infamy. We know what Charles Kingsley, the least
evangelical of parsons, once thought of Charlotte. And we know what Mr.
Brontë thought of her. He was profoundly proud of his daughter's genius;
there is no record and no rumour of any criticism on his part, of any
remonstrance or amazement. He was loyal to Charlotte to the last days of
his life, when he gave her defence into Mrs. Gaskell's hands; for which
confidence Mrs. Gaskell repaid him shockingly.

But he was the kind of figure that is irresistible to the caustic or
humorous biographer. There was something impotently fiery in him, as if
the genius of Charlotte and Emily had flicked him in irony as it passed
him by. He wound himself in yards and yards and yards of white cravat,
and he wrote a revolutionary poem called "Vision of Hell". It is easy to
make fun of his poems, but they were no worse, or very little worse,
than his son Branwell's, so that he may be pardoned if he thought
himself more important than his children. Many fathers of the Victorian
era did.

And he _was_ important as a temporary vehicle of the wandering creative
impulse. It struggled and strove in him and passed from him, choked in
yards and yards of white cravat, to struggle and strive again in
Branwell and in Anne. As a rule the genius of the race is hostile to the
creative impulse, and the creative impulse is lucky if it can pierce
through to one member of a family. In the Brontës it emerges at five
different levels, rising from abortive struggle to supreme
achievement--from Mr. Brontë to his son Branwell, from Branwell to Anne,
from Anne to Charlotte, and from Charlotte to Emily. And Maria, who
died, was an infant prodigy.

And Mr. Brontë is important because he was the tool used by their
destiny to keep Charlotte and Emily in Haworth.

The tragedy we are too apt to call their destiny began with their
babyhood, when the mother and six children were brought to Haworth
Parsonage and the prospect of the tombstones. They had not been there
eighteen months before the mother sickened and died horribly of cancer.

She had to be isolated as far as possible. The Parsonage house was not
large, and it was built with an extreme and straight simplicity; two
front rooms, not large, right and left of the narrow stone-flagged
passage, a bedroom above each, and between, squeezed into the small
spare space above the passage, a third room, no bigger than a closet and
without a fireplace. This third room is important in the story of the
Brontës, for, when their mother's illness declared itself, it was in
this incredibly small and insufferably unwholesome den that the five
little girls were packed, heaven knows how, and it was here that the
seeds of tuberculosis were sown in their fragile bodies. After their
mother's death the little fatal room was known as the children's study
(you can see, in a dreadful vision, the six pale little faces, pressed
together, looking out of the window on to the graves below). It was used
again as a night-nursery, and later still as the sleeping-place shared
by two, if not three, of the sisters, two of whom were tuberculous.

The mother died and was buried in a vault under the floor of the church,
not far from the windows of her house. Her sister, Miss Branwell, came
up from Penzance to look after the children. You can see this small,
middle-aged, early Victorian spinster, exiled for ever from the sunshine
of the town she loved, dragging out her sad, fastidious life in a cold
and comparatively savage country that she unspeakably disliked. She took
possession of the room her sister died in (it was the most cheerful room
in the house), and lived in it. Her nieces had to sit there with her
for certain hours while she taught them sewing and all the early
Victorian virtues. Their father made himself responsible for the rest of
their education, which he conducted with considerable vigour and
originality. Maria, the eldest, was the child of promise. Long before
Maria was eleven he "conversed" with her on "the leading topics of the
day, with as much pleasure and freedom as with any grown-up person".

For this man, so gloomy, we are told, and so morose, found pleasure in
taking his tiny children out on to the moors, where he entertained them
alternately with politics and tales of brutality and horror. At six
years old each little Brontë had its view of the political situation;
and it was not until a plague of measles and whooping-cough found out
their tender youth that their father realized how very young and small
and delicate they were, and how very little, after all, he understood
about a nursery. In a sudden frantic distrust of the climate of Haworth,
of Miss Branwell, and his own system, he made up his mind to send Maria
and Elizabeth and Charlotte and Emily to school.

And there was only one school within his means, the Clergy Daughters'
School, established at Cowan Bridge in an unwholesome valley. It has
been immortalized in _Jane Eyre_, together with its founder and patron,
the Reverend Carus Wilson. There can be no doubt that the early
Victorian virtues, self-repression, humility, and patience under
affliction, were admirably taught at Cowan Bridge. And if the carnal
nature of the Clergy Daughters resisted the militant efforts of Mr.
Carus Wilson, it was ultimately subdued by low diet and primitive
drainage working together in an unwholesome valley. Mr. Carus Wilson,
indeed, was inspired by a sublime antagonism to the claims of the
perishable body; but he seems to have pushed his campaign against the
flesh a bit too far, and was surprised at his own success when, one
after another, the extremely perishable bodies of those children were
laid low by typhus.

The fever did not touch the four little Brontës. They had another
destiny. Their seed of dissolution was sown in that small stifling room
at Haworth, and was reaped now at Cowan Bridge. First Maria, then
Elizabeth, sickened, and was sent home to die. Charlotte stayed on for a
while with Emily. She ran wild, and hung about the river, watching it,
and dabbling her feet and hands in the running water. Their doom waited
for Charlotte and for Emily.

There is no record of Elizabeth except that, like Anne Brontë, she was
"gentle". But Maria lived in Charlotte's passionate memory, and will
live for ever as Helen Burns, the school-fellow of Jane Eyre. Of those
five infant prodigies, she was the most prodigious. She was the first of
the children to go down into the vault under Haworth Church; you see her
looking back on her sad way, a small, reluctant ghost, lovely,
infantile, and yet maternal. Under her name on the flat tombstone a
verse stands, premonitory, prophetic, calling to her kindred: "Be ye
also ready."

Charlotte was nine years old when her sisters died. Tragedy tells at
nine years old. It lived all her life in her fine nerves, reinforced by
shock after shock of terror and of anguish.

But for the next seven years, spent at the Parsonage without a break,
tragedy was quiescent. Day after day, year after year passed, and
nothing happened. And the children of the Parsonage, thrown on
themselves and on each other, were exuberantly happy. They had the
freedom of the moors, and of the worlds, as wild, as gorgeous, as
lonely, as immeasurable, which they themselves created. They found out
that they were not obliged to be the children of the Parsonage; they
could be, and they were, anything they chose, from the Duke of
Wellington down to citizens of Verdopolis. For a considerable number of
years they were the "Islanders". "It was in 1827" (Charlotte, at
thirteen, records the date with gravity--it was so important) "that our
plays were established: _Young Men_, June 1826; _Our Fellows_, July
1827; _The Islanders_, December 1827. These are our three great plays
that are not kept secret."

But there were secret plays, Emily's and Charlotte's; and these you
gather to be the shy and solitary flights of Emily's and Charlotte's
genius. They seem to have required absolutely no impulsion from without.
The difficult thing for these small children was to stop writing. Their
fire consumed them, and left their bodies ashen white, fragile as ashes.
And yet they were not, they could not have been, the sedentary,
unwholesome little creatures they might seem to be. The girls were kept
hard at work with their thin arms, brushing carpets, dusting furniture,
and making beds. And for play they tramped the moors with their brother;
they breasted the keen and stormy weather; the sun, the moon, the stars,
and the winds knew them; and it is of these fierce, radiant, elemental
things that Charlotte and Emily wrote as no women before them had ever
written. Conceive the vitality and energy implied in such a life; and
think, if you can, of these two as puny, myopic victims of the lust of
literature. It was from the impressions they took in those seven years
that their immortality was made.

And then, for a year and a half, Charlotte went to school again, that
school of Miss Wooler's at Roe Head, where Ellen Nussey found her, "a
silent, weeping, dark little figure in the large bay-window". She was
then sixteen.

Two years later she went back to Miss Wooler's school as a teacher.

In the register of the Clergy Daughters' School there are two immortal
entries:

"Charlotte Brontë.... Left school, June 1st, 1825--Governess."

"Emily Brontë.... Left, June 1st, 1825. Subsequent career--Governess."

They did not question the arrangement. They were not aware of any other
destiny. They never doubted that the boy, Branwell, was the child of
promise, who was to have a glorious career. In order that he should have
it the sisters left Haworth again and again, forcing themselves to the
exile that destroyed them, and the work they hated. It was Charlotte and
Anne who showed themselves most courageous and determined in the
terrible adventure; Emily, who was courage and determination incarnate,
failed. Homesickness had become a disease with them, an obsession,
almost a madness. They longed with an immitigable longing for their
Parsonage-house, their graveyard, and their moors. Emily was consumed by
it; Anne languished; Charlotte was torn between it and her passion for
knowledge.

She took Emily back with her to Roe Head as a pupil, and Emily nearly
died of it. She sent Emily home, and little Anne, the last victim, took
Emily's place. She and Charlotte went with the school when it was
removed to Dewsbury Moor. Then Emily, who had nearly died of Roe Head,
shamed by Charlotte's and Anne's example, went to Halifax as a teacher
in Miss Patchett's Academy for Young Ladies. She was at Halifax--Halifax
of all places--for six months, and nearly died of Halifax. And after
that Charlotte and Anne set out on their careers as nursery-governesses.

It was all that they considered themselves fit for. Anne went to a Mrs.
Ingham at Blake Hall, where she was homesick and miserable. Charlotte
went to the Sidgwicks at Stonegappe near Skipton, where "one of the
pleasantest afternoons I spent--indeed, the only one at all
pleasant--was when Mr. Sidgwick walked out with his children, and I had
orders to follow a little way behind". You have an impression of years
of suffering endured at Stonegappe. As a matter of fact, Charlotte was
there hardly three months--May, June, July, eighteen-thirty-nine.

And most of the time their brother Branwell was either at Bradford or at
Haworth, dreaming of greatness, and drinking at the "Black Bull". The
"Black Bull" stands disastrously near to the Parsonage, at the corner of
the churchyard, with its parlour windows looking on the graves. Branwell
was the life and soul of every party of commercial travellers that
gathered there. Conviviality took strange forms at Haworth. It had a
Masonic Lodge of the Three Graces, with John Brown, the grave-digger,
for Worshipful Master. Branwell was at one and the same time secretary
to the Three Graces and to the Haworth Temperance Society. When he was
not entertaining bagmen, he was either at Bradford painting bad
portraits, or at Haworth pouring out verses, fearfully long, fatally
fluent verses, and writing hysterical letters to the editor of
_Blackwood's Magazine_.

One formidable letter (the third he sent) is headed in large letters:
"Sir, read what I write." It begins: "And would to Heaven you would
believe in me, for then you would attend to me and act upon it", and
ends: "You lost an able writer in James Hogg, and God grant you may get
one in Patrick Branwell Brontë." Another followed, headed: "Sir, read
now at last", and ending, "Condemn not unheard". In a final letter
Branwell inquires whether Mr. Blackwood thinks his magazine "so perfect
that no addition to its power would be either possible or desirable",
and whether it is pride that actuates him, or custom, or prejudice, and
conjures him: "Be a man, sir!"

Nothing came of it. Mr. Blackwood refused to be a man.

Yet Branwell had his chance. He went to London, but nothing came of it.
He went to Bradford and had a studio there, but nothing came of it. He
lived for a brief period in a small provincial Bohemia. It was his best
and happiest period, but nothing came of it beyond the letters and the
reams of verse he sent to Leyland the sculptor. There was something
brilliant and fantastic about the boy that fascinated Leyland. But a
studio costs money, and Branwell had to give his up and go back to
Haworth and the society of John Brown the stone-mason and grave-digger.
That John Brown was a decent fellow you gather from the fact that on a
journey to Liverpool he had charge of Branwell, when Branwell was at his
worst. They had affectionate names for each other. Branwell is the
Philosopher, John Brown is the Old Knave of Trumps. The whole trouble
with Branwell was that he could not resist the temptation of impressing
the grave-digger. He himself was impressed by the ironic union in the
Worshipful Master of conviviality and a sinister occupation.

A letter of Branwell's (preserved by the grave-digger in a quaint
devotion to his friend's memory) has achieved an immortality denied to
his "Effusions". Nothing having come of the "Effusions", Branwell, to
his infinite credit, followed his sisters' example, and became tutor
with a Mr. Postlethwaite. The irony of his situation pleased him, and
he wrote to the Old Knave of Trumps thus: "I took a half-year's farewell
of old friend whisky at Kendal on the night after I left. There was a
party of gentlemen at the Royal Hotel, and I joined them. We ordered in
supper and whisky-toddy as hot as hell! They thought I was a physician,
and put me in the chair. I gave several toasts that were washed down at
the same time till the room spun round and the candles danced in our
eyes.... I found myself in bed next morning with a bottle of porter, a
glass, and a corkscrew beside me. Since then I have not tasted anything
stronger than milk-and-water, nor, I hope, shall, till I return at
midsummer; when we will see about it. I am getting as fat as Prince
William at Springhead, and as godly as his friend Parson Winterbotham.
My hand shakes no longer. I ride to the banker's at Ulverston with Mr.
Postlethwaite, and sit drinking tea, and talking scandal with old
ladies. As for the young ones! I have one sitting by me just
now--fair-faced, blue-eyed, dark-haired, sweet eighteen--she little
thinks the devil is so near her!"--and a great deal more in the same
silly, post-Byronic strain.

In his postscript Branwell says: "Of course you won't show this letter",
and of course John Brown showed it all round. It was far too good to be
kept to himself; John Brown's brother thought it so excellent that he
committed it to memory. This was hard on Branwell. The letter is too
fantastic to be used against him as evidence of his extreme depravity,
but it certainly lends some support to Mrs. Gaskell's statements that he
had begun already, at two-and-twenty, to be an anxiety to his family.
Haworth, that schooled his sisters to a high and beautiful austerity,
was bad for Branwell.

He stayed with Mr. Postlethwaite for a month longer than Charlotte
stayed with the Sidgwicks.

Then, for a whole year, Charlotte was at Haworth, doing housemaid's
work, and writing poems, and amusing herself at the expense of her
father's curates. She had begun to find out the extent to which she
could amuse herself. She also had had "her chance". She had refused two
offers of marriage, preferring the bondage and the exile that she knew.
Nothing more exhilarating than a proposal that you have rejected. Those
proposals did Charlotte good. But it was not marriage that she wanted.
She found it (for a year) happiness enough to be at Haworth, to watch
the long comedy of the curates as it unrolled itself before her. She saw
most things that summer (her twenty-fifth) with the ironic eyes of the
comic spirit, even Branwell. She wrote to Miss Nussey: "A distant
relation of mine, one Patrick Boanerges, has set off to seek his fortune
in the wild, wandering, knight-errant-like capacity of clerk on the
Leeds and Manchester Railroad." And she goes on to chaff Miss Nussey
about Celia Amelia, the curate. "I know Mrs. Ellen is burning with
eagerness to hear something about W. Weightman, whom she adores in her
heart, and whose image she cannot efface from her memory."

Some of her critics, including Mrs. Oliphant (far less indulgent than
the poor curates who forgave her nobly), have grudged Charlotte her
amusement. There is nothing, from her fame downwards, that Mrs. Oliphant
did not grudge her. Mr. Birrell sternly disapproves; even Mr. Swinburne,
at the height of his panegyric, is put off. Perhaps Charlotte's humour
was not her most attractive quality; but nobody seems to have seen the
pathos and the bravery of it. Neither have they seen that Miss Nussey
was at the bottom of its worst development, the "curate-baiting". Miss
Nussey used to go and stay at Haworth for weeks at a time. Haworth was
not amusing, and Miss Nussey had to be amused. All this school-girlish
jesting, the perpetual and rather tiresome banter, was a playing down to
Miss Nussey. It was a kind of tender "baiting" of Miss Nussey, who had
tried on several occasions to do Charlotte good. And it was the natural,
healthy rebound of the little Irish _gamine_ that lived in Charlotte
Brontë, bursting with cleverness and devilry. I, for my part, am glad to
think that for one happy year she gave it full vent.

She was only twenty-four. Even as late as the mid-Victorian era to be
twenty-four and unmarried was to be middle-aged. But (this cannot be too
much insisted on) Charlotte Brontë was the revolutionist who changed all
that. She changed it not only in her novels but in her person. Here
again she has been misrepresented. There are no words severe enough for
Mrs. Oliphant's horrible portrait of her as a plain-faced, lachrymose,
middle-aged spinster, dying, visibly, to be married, obsessed for ever
with that idea, for ever whining over the frustration of her sex. What
Mrs. Oliphant, "the married woman", resented in Charlotte Brontë, over
and above her fame, was Charlotte's unsanctioned knowledge of the
mysteries, her intrusion into the veiled places, her unbaring of the
virgin heart. That her genius was chiefly concerned in it does not seem
to have occurred to Mrs. Oliphant, any more than it occurred to her to
notice the impression that Charlotte Brontë made on her male
contemporaries. It is doubtful if one of them thought of her as Mrs.
Oliphant would have us think. They gave her the tender, deferent
affection they would have given to a charming child. Even the very
curates saw in her, to their amazement, the spirit of undying youth.
Small as a child, and fragile, with soft hair and flaming eyes, and
always the pathetic, appealing plainness of a plain child, with her
child's audacity and shyness, her sudden, absurd sallies and retreats,
she had a charm made the more piquant by her assumption of austerity.
George Henry Lewes was gross and flippant, and he could not see it;
Branwell's friend, Mr. Grundy, was Branwell's friend, and he missed it.
Mrs. Oliphant ranges herself with Mr. Grundy and George Henry Lewes.

But Charlotte's fun was soon over, and she became a nursery-governess
again at Mrs. White's, of Rawdon. Anne was with Mrs. Robinson, at Thorp
Green.

Emily was at Haworth, alone.

That was in eighteen-forty-one. Years after their death a little black
box was found, containing four tiny scraps of paper, undiscovered by
Charlotte when she burnt every line left by Anne and Emily except their
poems. Two of these four papers were written by Emily, and two by Anne;
each sister keeping for the other a record of four years. They begin in
eighteen-forty-one. Emily was then twenty-four and Anne a year and a
half younger. Nothing can be more childlike, more naïve. Emily heads her
diary:

    A PAPER to be opened
        when Anne is
        25 years old,
    or my next birthday after
            if
        all be well.
Emily Jane Brontë. July the 30th, 1841.

She says: "It is Friday evening, near nine o'clock--wild rainy weather.
I am seated in the dining-room, having just concluded tidying our
desk-boxes, writing this document. Papa is in the parlour--Aunt upstairs
in her room.... Victoria and Adelaide are ensconced in the peat-house.
Keeper is in the kitchen--Hero in his cage."

Having accounted for Victoria and Adelaide, the tame geese, Keeper, the
dog, and Hero, the hawk, she notes the whereabouts of Charlotte,
Branwell, and Anne. And then (with gravity):

"A scheme is at present in agitation for setting us up in a school of
our own."... "This day four years I wonder whether we shall be dragging
on in our present condition or established to our hearts' content."

Then Emily dreams her dream.

"I guess that on the time appointed for the opening of this paper we,
_i.e._ Charlotte, Anne, and I, shall be all merrily seated in our own
sitting-room in some pleasant and flourishing seminary, having just
gathered in for the midsummer holiday. Our debts will be paid off and we
shall have cash in hand to a considerable amount. Papa, Aunt, and
Branwell, will either have been or be coming to visit us."

And Anne writes with equal innocence (it is delicious, Anne's diary):
"Four years ago I was at school. Since then I have been a governess at
Blake Hall, left it, come to Thorp Green, and seen the sea and York
Minster."... "We have got Keeper, got a sweet little cat and lost it,
and also got a hawk. Got a wild goose which has flown away, and three
tame ones, one of which has been killed."

It is Emily who lets out the dreary secret of the dream--the debts which
could not be paid; probably Branwell's.

But the "considerable amount of cash in hand" was to remain a dream.
Nothing came of Branwell's knight-errantry. He muddled the accounts of
the Leeds and Manchester Railroad and was sent home. It was not good for
Branwell to be a clerk at a lonely wayside station. His disaster, which
they much exaggerated, was a shock to the three sisters. They began to
have misgivings, premonitions of Branwell's destiny.

And from Mrs. White's at Rawdon, Charlotte sends out cry after desolate
cry. Again we have an impression of an age of exile, but really the
exile did not last long, not much longer than Emily's imprisonment in
the Academy for Young Ladies, nothing like so long as Anne's miserable
term.

The exile really began in 'forty-two, when Charlotte and Emily left
England for Brussels and Madame Héger's Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the
Rue d'Isabelle. It is supposed to have been the turning-point in
Charlotte's career. She was then twenty-six, Emily twenty-four.

It is absurd and it is pathetic, but Charlotte's supreme ambition at
that time was to keep a school, a school of her own, like her friend
Miss Wooler. There was a great innocence and humility in Charlotte. She
was easily taken in by any of those veiled, inimical spectres of the
cross-roads that youth mistakes for destiny. She must have refused to
look too closely at the apparition; it was enough for her that she saw
in it the divine thing--liberty. Her genius was already struggling in
her. She had begun to feel under her shoulders the painful piercing of
her wings. Her friend, Mary Taylor, had written to her from Brussels
telling her of pictures and cathedrals. Charlotte tells how it woke her
up. "I hardly know what swelled in my breast as I read her letter: such
a vehement impatience of restraint and steady work; such a strong wish
for wings--wings such as wealth can furnish; such an urgent desire to
see, to know, to learn; something internal seemed to expand bodily for a
minute. I was tantalized by the consciousness of faculties unexercised."
But Charlotte's "wings" were not "such as wealth can furnish". They were
to droop, almost to die, in Brussels.

Emily was calmer. Whether she mistook it for her destiny or not, she
seems to have acquiesced when Charlotte showed her the veiled figure at
the cross-roads, to have been led blindfold by Charlotte through the
"streaming and starless darkness" that took them to Brussels. The rest
she endured with a stern and terrible resignation. It is known from her
letters what the Pensionnat was to Charlotte. Heaven only knows what it
must have been to Emily. Charlotte, with her undying passion for
knowledge and the spectacle of the world, with her psychological
interest in M. Héger and his wife, Charlotte hardly came out of it with
her soul alive. But Emily was not interested in M. Héger nor in his
wife, nor in his educational system. She thought his system was no good
and told him so. What she thought of his wife is not recorded.

Then, in their first year of Brussels, their old aunt, Miss Branwell,
died. That was destiny, the destiny that was so kind to Emily. It sent
her and her sister back to Haworth and it kept her there. Poor Anne was
fairly launched on her career; she remained in her "situation", and
somebody had to look after Mr. Brontë and the house. Things were going
badly and sadly at the Parsonage. Branwell was there, drinking; and
Charlotte was even afraid that her father ... also sometimes ...
perhaps....

She left Emily to deal with them and went back to Brussels as a pupil
teacher, alone. She went in an agony of self-reproach, desiring more and
more knowledge, a perfect, inalienable, indestructible possession of
the German language, and wondering whether it were right to satisfy that
indomitable craving. By giving utterance to this self-reproach, so
passionate, so immense, so disproportioned to the crime, the innocent
Charlotte laid herself open to an unjust suspicion. Innocent and unaware
she went, and--it is her own word--she was "punished" for it.

Nothing that she had yet known of homesickness could compare with that
last year of solitary and unmitigated exile. It is supposed, even by the
charitable, that whatever M. Héger did or did not do for Charlotte, he
did everything for her genius. As a matter of fact, it was at Brussels
that she suffered the supreme and ultimate abandonment. She no longer
felt the wild unknown thing stirring in her with wings. So little could
M. Héger do for it that it refused to inhabit the same house with him.
She records the result of that imprisonment a few weeks after her
release: "There are times now when it appears to me as if all my ideas
and feelings, except a few friendships and affections, are changed from
what they used to be; something in me, which used to be enthusiasm, is
tamed down and broken."

At Brussels surely enlightenment must have come to her. She must have
seen, as Emily saw, that in going that way, she had mistaken and done
violence to her destiny.

She went back to Haworth where it waited for her, where it had turned
even the tragedy of her family to account. Everything conspired to keep
her there. The school was given up. She tells why. "It is on Papa's
account; he is now, as you know, getting old, and it grieves me to tell
you that he is losing his sight. I have felt for some months that I
ought not to be away from him; and I feel now that it would be too
selfish to leave (at least as long as Branwell and Anne are absent) to
pursue selfish interests of my own. With the help of God I will try to
deny myself in this matter, and to wait."

And with the help of God she waited.

There are three significant entries in Emily's sealed paper for
eighteen-forty-five. "Now I don't desire a school at all, and none of us
have any great longing for it." "I am quite contented for myself ...
seldom or never troubled with nothing to do and merely desiring that
everybody could be as comfortable as myself and as undesponding, and
then we should have a very tolerable world of it." "I have plenty of
work on hand, and writing...." This, embedded among details of an
incomparable innocence: "We have got Flossy; got and lost Tiger; lost
the hawk, Hero, which, with the geese, was given away, and is doubtless
dead."

And Anne, as naïve as a little nun, writes in _her_ sealed paper: "Emily
is upstairs ironing. I am sitting in the dining-room in the
rocking-chair before the fire with my feet on the fender. Papa is in the
parlour. Tabby and Martha are, I think, in the kitchen. Keeper and
Flossy are, I do not know where. Little Dick is hopping in his cage."
And then, "Emily ... is writing some poetry.... I wonder what it is
about?"

That is the only clue to the secret that is given. These childlike
diaries are full of the "Gondal Chronicles",[A] an interminable fantasy
in which for years Emily collaborated with Anne. They flourished the
"Gondal Chronicles" in each other's faces, with positive bravado, trying
to see which could keep it up the longer. Under it all there was a
mystery; for, as Charlotte said of their old play, "Best plays were
secret plays," and the sisters kept their best hidden. And then suddenly
the "Gondal Chronicles" were dropped, the mystery broke down. All three
of them had been writing poems; they had been writing poems for years.
Some of Emily's dated from her first exile at Roe Head. Most of Anne's
sad songs were sung in her house of bondage. From Charlotte, in her
Brussels period, not a line.

[Footnote A: See _supra_, pp. 193 to 209.]

But at Haworth, in the years that followed her return and found her
free, she wrote nearly all her maturer poems (none of them were
excessively mature): she wrote _The Professor_, and close upon _The
Professor_, _Jane Eyre_. In the same term that found her also, poor
child, free, and at Haworth, Anne wrote _Agnes Grey_ and _The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall_.

And Emily wrote _Wuthering Heights_.

They had found their destiny--at Haworth.

       *       *       *       *       *

Every conceivable theory has been offered to account for the novels that
came so swiftly and incredibly from these three sisters. It has been
said that they wrote them merely to pay their debts when they found that
poems did not pay. It would be truer to say that they wrote them because
it was their destiny to write them, and because their hour had come, and
that they published them with the dimmest hope of a return.

Before they knew where they were, Charlotte found herself involved in
what she thought was a businesslike and masculine correspondence with
publishing firms.

The _Poems_ by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, appeared first, and
nothing happened. _The Professor_ travelled among publishers, and
nothing happened. Then, towards the end of the fourth year there came
_Jane Eyre_, and Charlotte was famous.

But not Emily. _Wuthering Heights_ appeared also, and nothing happened.
It was bound in the same volume with Anne's humble tale. Its lightning
should have scorched and consumed _Agnes Grey_, but nothing happened.
Ellis and Acton Bell remained equals in obscurity, recognized only by
their association with the tremendous Currer. When it came to publishing
_The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_, and association became confusion,
Charlotte and Anne went up to London to prove their separate identity.
Emily stayed at Haworth, superbly indifferent to the proceedings. She
was unseen, undreamed of, unrealized, and in all her life she made no
sign.

But, in a spirit of reckless adventure, Charlotte and Anne walked the
seven miles to Keighley on a Friday evening in a thunderstorm, and took
the night train up. On the Saturday morning they appeared in the office
at Cornhill to the amazement of Mr. George Smith and Mr. Williams. With
childlike innocence and secrecy they hid in the Chapter Coffee-house in
Paternoster Row, and called themselves the Misses Brown. When
entertainment was offered them, they expressed a wish to hear Dr. Croly
preach. They did not hear him; they only heard _The Barber of Seville_
at Covent Garden. They tried, with a delicious solemnity, to give the
whole thing an air of business, but it was really a breathless,
infantile escapade of three days. Three days out of four years.

       *       *       *       *       *

And in those four years poor Branwell's destiny found him also. After
many minor falls and penitences and relapses, he seemed at length to
have settled down. He had been tutor for two and a half years with the
Robinsons at Thorp Green, in the house where Anne was a governess. He
was happy at first; an ominous happiness. Then Anne began to be aware of
something.

Mr. Birrell has said rather unkindly that he has no use for this young
man. Nobody had any use for him. Not the editors to whom he used to
write so hysterically. Not the Leeds and Manchester Railroad Company.
And certainly not Mrs. Robinson, the lady for whom he conceived that
insane and unlawful passion which has been made to loom so large in the
lives of the Brontës. After all the agony and indignation that has
gathered round this episode, it is clear enough now, down to the last
sordid details. The feverish, degenerate, utterly irresponsible Branwell
not only declared his passion, but persuaded himself, against the
evidence of his senses, that it was returned. The lady (whom he must
have frightened horribly) told her husband, who instantly dismissed
Branwell.

Branwell never got over it.

He was destined to die young, and, no doubt, if there had been no Mrs.
Robinson, some other passion would have killed him. Still, it may be
said with very little exaggeration that he died of it. He had not
hitherto shown any signs of tuberculosis. It may be questioned whether
without this predisposing cause he would have developed it. He had had
his chance to survive. _He_ had never been packed, like his sisters,
first one of five, then one of three, into a closet not big enough for
one. But he drank harder after the Robinson affair than he had ever
drunk before, and he added opium to drink. Drink and opium gave
frightful intensity to the hallucination of which, in a sense, he died.

It took him more than three years, from July, eighteen-forty-five, the
date of his dismissal, to September, eighteen-forty-eight, the date of
his death.

The Incumbent of Haworth has been much blamed for his son's
shortcomings. He has been charged with first spoiling the boy, and then
neglecting him. In reality his only error (a most unusual one in an
early Victorian father) was that he believed in his son's genius. When
London and the Royal Academy proved beyond him he had him taught at
Bradford. He gave him a studio there. He had already given him an
education that at least enabled him to obtain tutorships, if not to keep
them. The Parsonage must have been a terrible place for Branwell, but it
was not in the Vicar's power to make it more attractive than the Bull
Inn. Branwell was not a poet like his sisters, and moors meant nothing
to him. To be sure, when he went into Wales and saw Penmaenmawr, he
wrote a poem about it. But the poem is not really about Penmaenmawr. It
is all about Branwell; Penmaenmawr _is_ Branwell, a symbol of his
colossal personality and of his fate. For Branwell was a monstrous
egoist. He was not interested in his sisters or in his friends, or
really in Mrs. Robinson. He was interested only in himself. What could a
poor vicar do with a son like that? There was nothing solid in Branwell
that you could take hold of and chastise. There was nothing you could
appeal to. His affection for his family was three-fourths
sentimentalism. Still, what the Vicar could do he did do. When Branwell
was mad with drink and opium he never left him. There is no story more
grim and at the same time more poignant and pathetic than that which
Mrs. Gaskell tells of his devotion to his son in this time of the boy's
ruin. Branwell slept in his father's room. He would doze all day, and
rage all night, threatening his father's life. In the morning he would
go to his sisters and say: "The poor old man and I have had a terrible
night of it. He does his best, the poor old man, but it is all over with
me." He died in his father's arms while Emily and little Anne looked on.

They say that he struggled to his feet and died standing, to prove the
strength of his will; but some biographer has robbed him of this poor
splendour. It was enough for his sisters--and it should be enough for
anybody--that his madness left him with the onset of his illness, and
that he went from them penitent and tender, purified by the mystery and
miracle of death.

That was on Sunday, the twenty-fourth of September. From that day Emily
sickened. She caught cold at Branwell's funeral. On September the
thirtieth she was in church listening to his funeral sermon. After that,
she never crossed the threshold of the Parsonage till in December her
dead body was carried over it, to lie beside her brother under the
church floor.

In October, a week or two after Branwell's death, Charlotte wrote:
"Emily has a cold and cough at present." "Emily's cold and cough are
very obstinate. I fear she has pain in her chest, and I sometimes catch
a shortness in her breathing when she has moved at all quickly." In
November: "I told you Emily was ill, in my last letter. She has not
rallied yet. She is very ill.... I think Emily seems the nearest thing
to my heart in all the world." And in December: "Emily suffers no more
from pain or weakness now ... there is no Emily in time, or on earth
now.... We are very calm at present. Why should we be otherwise? The
anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of
death is gone by: the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No
need to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not
feel them. She died in a time of promise.... But it is God's will, and
the place where she has gone is better than that which she has left."

It could have been hardly daylight on the moors the morning when
Charlotte went out to find that last solitary sprig of heather which she
laid on Emily's pillow for Emily to see when she awoke. Emily's eyes
were so drowsed with death that she could not see it. And yet it could
not have been many hours later when a fire was lit in her bedroom, and
she rose and dressed herself. Madame Duclaux[A] tells how she sat before
the fire, combing her long, dark hair, and how the comb dropped from her
weak fingers, and fell under the grate. And how she sat there in her
mortal apathy; and how, when the servant came to her, she said dreamily:
"Martha, my comb's down there; I was too weak to stoop and pick it up."

[Footnote A: "Emily Brontë": _Eminent Women Series_.]

She dragged herself down to the sitting-room, and died there, about two
o'clock. She must have had some horror of dying in that room of death
overhead; for, at noon, when the last pains seized her, she refused to
be taken back to it. Unterrified, indomitable, driven by her immortal
passion for life, she fought terribly. Death took her as she tried to
rise from the sofa and break from her sisters' arms that would have laid
her there. Profoundly, piteously alienated, she must have felt that Anne
and Charlotte were in league with death; that they fought with her and
bound her down; and that in her escape from them she conquered.

Another month and Anne sickened. As Emily died of Branwell's death, so
Emily's death hastened Anne's. Charlotte wrote in the middle of
January: "I can scarcely say that Anne is worse, nor can I say she is
better.... The days pass in a slow, dull march: the nights are the test;
the sudden wakings from restless sleep, the revived knowledge that one
lies in her grave, and another, not at my side, but in a separate and
sick bed." And again in March: "Anne's decline is gradual and
fluctuating, but its nature is not doubtful." And yet again in April:
"If there were no hope beyond this world ... Emily's fate, and that
which threatens Anne, would be heartbreaking. I cannot forget Emily's
death-day; it becomes a more fixed, a darker, a more frequently
recurring idea in my mind than ever. It was very terrible. She was torn,
conscious, panting, reluctant, though resolute, out of a happy life."

Mrs. Oliphant has censured Emily Brontë for the manner of her dying. She
might as well have censured Anne for drawing out the agony. For Anne was
gentle to the end, utterly submissive. She gave death no trouble. She
went, with a last hope, to Scarborough, and died there at the end of
May. She was buried at Scarborough, where she lies alone. It is not easy
to believe that she had no "preference for place", but there is no doubt
that even to that choice of her last resting-place she would have
submitted--gently.

"I got here a little before eight o'clock. All was clean and bright,
waiting for me. Papa and the servants were well, and all received me
with an affection that should have consoled. The dogs seemed in strange
ecstasy. I am certain that they regarded me as the harbinger of others.
The dumb creatures thought that as I was returned, those who had been so
long absent were not far behind.... I felt that the house was all
silent, the rooms were all empty. I remembered where the three were
laid--in what narrow, dark dwellings--never more to reappear on
earth.... I cannot help thinking of their last days, remembering their
sufferings, and what they said and did, and how they looked in mortal
affliction.... To sit in a lonely room, the clock ticking loud through a
still house...." Charlotte could see nothing else before her.

It was July. She had come home after a visit to Miss Nussey.

In that month she wrote that chapter of _Shirley_ which is headed "The
Valley of the Shadow". The book (begun more than eighteen months before)
fairly quivers with the shock that cut it in two.

It was finished somewhere in September of that year of Anne's death.
Charlotte went up to London. She saw Thackeray. She learned to accept
the fact of her celebrity.

Somehow the years passed, the years of Charlotte's continuous celebrity,
and of those literary letters that take so disproportionate a part in
her correspondence that she seems at last to have forgotten; she seems
to belong to the world rather than to Haworth. And the world seems full
of Charlotte; the world that had no place for Emily. And yet _Wuthering
Heights_ had followed _Shirley_. It had been republished with
Charlotte's introduction, her vindication of Emily. It brought more fame
for Charlotte, but none--yet--for Emily.

Two years later came _Villette_. Charlotte went up to London a second
time and saw Thackeray again. And there were more letters, the admirable
but slightly self-conscious letters of the literary woman, artificially
assured. They might deceive you, only the other letters, the letters to
Ellen Nussey go on; they come palpitating with the life of Charlotte
Brontë's soul that had in it nothing of the literary taint. You see in
them how, body and soul, Haworth claims her and holds her, and will not
let her go.

Nor does she desire now to be let go. Her life at Haworth is part of
Emily's life; it partakes of the immortality of the unforgotten dead.
London and Thackeray, the Smiths, Mrs. Gaskell, and Miss Martineau, Sir
John and Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, her celebrity and the little train of
cheerful, unfamiliar circumstances, all these things sink into
insignificance beside it. They are all extraneous somehow, and out of
keeping. Nothing that her biographers have done (when they have done
their worst) can destroy or even diminish the effect her life gives of
unity, of fitness, of profound and tragic harmony. It was Mrs. Gaskell's
sense of this effect that made her work a masterpiece.

And in her marriage, at Haworth, to her father's curate, Arthur
Nicholls, the marriage that cut short her life and made an end of her
celebrity, Charlotte Brontë followed before all things her instinct for
fitness, for unity, for harmony. It was exquisitely in keeping. It did
no violence to her memories, her simplicities and sanctities. It found
her in the apathy of exhaustion, and it was yet one with all that was
passionate in her and undying. She went to it one morning in May, all
white and drooping, in her modest gown and that poor little bridal
bonnet with its wreath of snowdrops, symbolic of all the timidities, the
reluctances, the cold austerities of spring roused in the lap of winter,
and yet she found in it the secret fire of youth. She went to it afraid;
and in her third month of marriage she still gives a cry wrung from the
memory of her fear. "Indeed, indeed, Nell, it is a solemn and strange
and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife."

And yet for all that, after London, after fame and friendships in which
her dead had no share, her marriage was not the great departure; it was
the great return. It was the outcome of all that had gone before it; the
fruit of painful life, which is recognition, acceptance, the final trust
in destiny. There were to be no more false starts, no more veiled ghosts
of the cross-roads, pointing the disastrous way.

And in its abrupt and pitiful end her life rang true; it sustained the
tragic harmony. It was the fulfilment of secret prophecies, forebodings,
premonitions, of her reiterated "It was not to be." You may say that in
the end life cheated and betrayed her.

And inevitably; for she had loved life, not as Emily loved it, like an
equal, with power over it and pride and an unearthly understanding,
virgin and unafraid. There was something slightly subservient,
consciously inferior, in Charlotte's attitude to life. She had loved it
secretly, with a sort of shame, with a corroding passion and incredulity
and despair. Such natures are not seldom victims of the power they would
propitiate. It killed her in her effort to bring forth life.

When the end came she could not realize it. For the first time she was
incredulous of disaster. She heard, out of her last stupor, her husband
praying that God would spare her, and she whispered, "Oh, I am not going
to die, am I? He will not separate us; we have been so happy."

You can see her youth rising up beside that death-bed and answering,
"That is why."

And yet, could even Charlotte's youth have been so sure as to the
cheating and betrayal? That happiness of hers was cut short in the
moment of its perfection. She was not to suffer any disenchantment or
decline; her love was not to know any cold of fear or her genius any
fever of frustration. She was saved the struggle we can see before her.
Arthur Nicholls was passionately fond of Charlotte. But he was hostile
to Charlotte's genius and to Charlotte's fame. A plain, practical,
robust man, inimical to any dream. He could be adorably kind to a sick,
submissive Charlotte. Would he have been so tender to a Charlotte in
revolt? She was spared the torture of the choice between Arthur Nicholls
and her genius. We know how she would have chosen. It is well for her,
and it is all one to literature, that she died, not "in a time of
promise", but in the moment of fulfilment.

       *       *       *       *       *

No. Of these tragic Brontës the most tragic, the most pitiful, the most
mercilessly abused by destiny, was Anne. An interminable, monstrous
exile is the impression we get of Anne's life in the years of her
girlhood. There is no actual record of them. Nobody kept Anne's letters.
We never hear her sad voice raised in self-pity or revolt. It is
doubtful if she ever raised it. She waited in silence and resignation,
and then told her own story in _Agnes Grey_. But her figure remains dim
in her own story and in the classic "Lives". We only know that she was
the youngest, and that, unlike her sisters, she was pretty. She had
thick brown curling hair, and violet-blue eyes, and delicate dark
eyebrows, and a skin rose and white for her sisters' sallow, that must
have given some ominous hint of fever. This delicate thing was broken on
the wheel of life. They say of Anne perpetually that she was "gentle".
In Charlotte's sketch of her she holds her pretty head high, her eyes
gaze straight forward, and you wonder whether, before the breaking
point, she was always as gentle as they say. But you never see her in
any moment of revolt. Her simple poems, at their bitterest, express no
more than a frail agony, an innocent dismay. That little raising of the
head in conscious rectitude is all that breaks the long plaint of _Agnes
Grey_.

There is no piety in that plaint. It is purely pagan; the cry of youth
cheated of its desire. Life brought her no good gifts beyond the slender
ineffectual beauty that left her undesired. Her tremulous, expectant
womanhood was cheated. She never saw so much as the flying veil of joy,
or even of such pale, uninspired happiness as she dreamed in _Agnes
Grey_. She was cheated of her innocent dream.

And by an awful irony her religion failed her. She knew its bitterness,
its terrors, its exactions. She never knew its ecstasies, its flaming
mysteries, nor, even at her very last, its consolations. Her tender
conscience drew an unspeakable torment from the spectacle of her
brother's degradation.

For it was on Anne, who had no genius to sustain her, that poor
Branwell, with the burden of his destiny, weighed most hard. It was Anne
at Thorp Green who had the first terrible misgivings, the intolerable
premonitions.

That wretched story is always cropping up again. The lady whom Mrs.
Gaskell, with a murderous selection of adjectives, called "that mature
and wicked woman", has been cleared as far as evidence and common sense
could clear her. But the slander is perpetually revived. It has always
proved too much for the Brontë biographers. Madame Duclaux published it
again twenty years after, in spite of the evidence and in spite of Mrs.
Gaskell's retractation. You would have thought that Branwell might have
been allowed to rest in the grave he dug for himself so well. But no,
they will not let him rest. Branwell drank, and he ate opium; and, as if
drink and opium and erotic madness were not enough, they must credit
him with an open breach of the seventh commandment as well. M. Dimnet,
the most able of recent critics of the Brontës, thinks and maintains
against all evidence that there was more in it than Branwell's madness.
He will not give up the sordid tragedy _à trois_. He thinks he knows
what Anne thought of Branwell's behaviour, and what awful secret she was
hinting at, and what she told her sisters when she came back to Haworth.
He argues that Anne Brontë saw and heard things, and that her testimony
is not to be set aside.

What did Anne Brontë see and hear? She saw her brother consumed by an
illegitimate passion; a passion utterly hopeless, given the nature of
the lady. The lady had been kind to Anne, to Branwell she had been
angelically kind. Anne saw that his behaviour was an atrocious return
for her kindness. Further than that the lady hardly counted in Anne's
vision. Her interest was centred on her brother. She saw him taking
first to drink and then to opium. She saw that he was going mad, and he
did go mad. One of the most familiar symptoms of morphia mania is a
tendency to erotic hallucinations of the precise kind that Branwell
suffered from. Anne was unable to distinguish between such a
hallucination and depravity. But there is not a shadow of evidence that
she thought what M. Dimnet thinks, or that if she had thought it she
made Charlotte and Emily think it too. Branwell's state was quite enough
in itself to break their hearts. His letters to Leyland, to John Brown,
the sexton, to Francis Grundy, record with frightful vividness every
phase of his obsession.

It is inconceivable that such letters should have been kept, still more
inconceivable that they should have been published. It is inconceivable
that Mrs. Gaskell should have dragged the pitiful and shameful figure
into the light. Nobody can save poor Branwell now from the dreadful
immortality thrust on him by his enemies and friends with equal zeal.
All that is left to us is a merciful understanding of his case.
Branwell's case, once for all, was purely pathological. There was
nothing great about him, not even his passion for Mrs. Robinson.
Properly speaking, it was not a passion at all, it was a disease.
Branwell was a degenerate, as incapable of passion as he was of poetry.
His sisters, Anne and Charlotte, talked with an amazing innocence about
Branwell's vices. Simple and beautiful souls, they never for a moment
suspected that his worst vice was sentimentalism. In the beginning,
before it wrecked him, nobody enjoyed his own emotions more than
Branwell. At his worst he wallowed voluptuously in the torments of
frustration. At the end, what with drink and what with opium, he was
undoubtedly insane. His letters are priceless pathological documents.
They reveal all the workings of his peculiar mania. He thinks everybody
is plotting to keep him from Mrs. Robinson. Faced at every turn with the
evidence of this lady's complete indifference, he gives it all a lunatic
twist to prove the contrary. He takes the strangest people into his
confidence, John Brown, the sexton, and the Robinsons' coachman. Queer
flames of lucidity dart here and there through this madness: "The
probability of her becoming free to give me herself and estate ever rose
to drive away the prospect of her decline under her present grief." "I
had reason to hope that ere very long I should be the husband of a lady
whom I loved best in the world, and with whom, in more than competence,
I might live at leisure to try to make myself a name in the world of
posterity, without being pestered by the small but countless
botherments, which, like mosquitoes, sting us in the world of work-day
toil. That hope and herself are gone--she to wither into patiently
pining decline--_it_ to make room for drudgery." It is all sordid as
well as terrible. We have no right to know these things. Mrs. Oliphant
is almost justified in her protest against Charlotte as the first to
betray her brother.

But did Charlotte betray Branwell? Not in her letters. She never
imagined--how could she?--that those letters would be published. Not in
her novels. Her novels give no portrait of Branwell and no hint that
could be easily understood. It is in her prefaces to her sisters' novels
that he appears, darkly. Charlotte, outraged by the infamous article in
the _Quarterly_, was determined that what had been said of her should
never be said of Anne and Emily. She felt that their works offered
irresistible provocation to the scandalous reviewer. She thought it
necessary to explain how they came by their knowledge of evil.

This vindication of her sisters is certainly an indictment of her
brother to anybody who knew enough to read between the lines. Charlotte
may have innocently supposed that nobody knew or ever would know enough.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Gaskell knew; and when it came to vindicating
Charlotte, she considered herself justified in exposing Charlotte's
brother because Charlotte herself had shown her the way.

But Charlotte might have spared her pains. Branwell does not account for
Heathcliff any more than he accounts for Rochester. He does not even
account for Huntingdon in poor Anne's novel. He accounts only for
himself. He is important chiefly in relation to the youngest of the
Brontës. Oddly enough, this boy, who was once thought greater than his
sister Emily, was curiously akin to the weak and ineffectual Anne. He
shows the weird flickering of the flame that pulsed so feebly and
intermittently in her. He had Anne's unhappy way with destiny, her knack
of missing things. She had a touch of his morbidity. He was given to
silences which in anybody but Anne would have been called morose. It was
her fate to be associated with him in the hour and in the scene of his
disgrace. And he was offered up unwittingly by Charlotte as a sacrifice
to Anne's virtue.

       *       *       *       *       *

Like Branwell, Anne had no genius. She shows for ever gentle, and, in
spite of an unconquerable courage, conquered. And yet there was more in
her than gentleness. There was, in this smallest and least considerable
of the Brontës, an immense, a terrifying audacity. Charlotte was bold,
and Emily was bolder; but this audacity of Anne's was greater than
Charlotte's boldness or than Emily's, because it was willed, it was
deliberate, open-eyed; it had none of the superb unconsciousness of
genius. Anne took her courage in both hands when she sat down to write
_The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_. There are scenes, there are situations,
in Anne's amazing novel, which for sheer audacity stand alone in
mid-Victorian literature, and which would hold their own in the
literature of revolt that followed. It cannot be said that these scenes
and situations are tackled with a master-hand. But there is a certain
grasp in Anne's treatment, and an astonishing lucidity. Her knowledge of
the seamy side of life was not exhaustive. But her diagnosis of certain
states, her realization of certain motives, suggests Balzac rather than
any of the Brontës. Thackeray, with the fear of Mrs. Grundy before his
eyes, would have shrunk from recording Mrs. Huntingdon's ultimatum to
her husband. The slamming of that bedroom door fairly resounds through
the long emptiness of Anne's novel. But that door is the _crux_ of the
situation, and if Anne was not a genius she was too much of an artist to
sacrifice her _crux_.

And not only was Anne revolutionary in her handling of moral situations,
she was an insurgent in religious thought. Not to believe in the dogma
of eternal punishment was, in mid-Victorian times and evangelical
circles, to be almost an atheist. When, somewhere in the late
'seventies, Dean Farrar published his _Eternal Hope_, that book fell
like a bomb into the ranks of the orthodox. But long before Dean
Farrar's book Anne Brontë had thrown her bomb. There are two pages in
_The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_ that anticipate and sum up his now
innocent arguments. Anne fairly let herself go here. And though in her
"Word to the Elect" (who "may rejoice to think themselves secure") she
declares that

  None shall sink to everlasting woe
  Who have not well deserved the wrath of Heaven,

she presently relents, and tacks on a poem in a lighter measure,
expressing her hope

  That soon the wicked shall at last
    Be fitted for the skies;
  And when their dreadful doom is past
    To light and life arise.

It is said (Charlotte said it) that Anne suffered from religious
melancholy of a peculiarly dark and Calvinistic type. I very much
suspect that Anne's melancholy, like Branwell's passion, was
pathological, and that what her soul suffered from was religious doubt.
She could not reach that height where Emily moved serenely; she could
not see that

        Vain are the thousand creeds
 That move men's hearts: unutterably vain.

There was a time when her tremulous, clinging faith was broken by
contact with Emily's contempt for creeds. When Anne was at Haworth she
and Emily were inseparable. They tramped the moors together. With their
arms round each other's shoulders, they paced up and down the parlour of
the Parsonage. They showed the mysterious attraction and affinity of
opposites. Anne must have been fascinated, and at the same time
appalled, by the radiant, revealing, annihilating sweep of Emily's
thought. She was not indifferent to creeds. But you can see her fearful
and reluctant youth yielding at last to Emily's thought, until she
caught a glimpse of the "repose" beyond the clash of "conquered good and
conquering ill". You can see how the doctrine of eternal punishment went
by the board; how Anne, who had gone through agonies of orthodox fear on
account of Branwell, must have adjusted things somehow, and arrived at
peace. Trust in "the merits of the Redeemer" is, after all, trust in the
Immensity beyond Redeemer and redeemed. Of this trust she sang in a
voice, like her material voice, fragile, but sweet and true. She sang
naïvely of the "Captive Dove" that makes unheard its "joyless moan", of
"the heart that Nature formed to love", pining, "neglected and alone".
She sang of the "Narrow Way", "Be it," she sings, "thy constant aim

  "To labour and to love,
    To pardon and endure,
  To lift thy heart to God above,
    And keep thy conscience pure."

She hears the wind in an alien wood and cries for the Parsonage garden,
and for the "barren hills":

  Where scarce the scattered, stunted trees
    Can yield an answering swell,
  But where a wilderness of heath
    Returns the sound as well.

  For yonder garden, fair and wide,
    With groves of evergreen,
  Long winding walks, and borders trim
    And velvet lawns between.

  Restore to me that little spot,
    With grey hills compassed round,
  Where knotted grass neglected lies,
    And weeds usurp the ground.

For she, too, loved the moors; and through her love for them she wrote
two perfect lines when she called on Memory to

  Forever hang thy dreamy spell
  Round mountain star and heather-bell.

The critics, the theorists, the tale-mongers, have left Anne quiet in
that grave on the sea-coast, where she lies apart. Her gentle
insignificance served her well.

       *       *       *       *       *

But no woman who ever wrote was more criticized, more spied upon, more
lied about, than Charlotte. It was as if the singular purity and poverty
of her legend offered irresistible provocation. The blank page called
for the scribbler. The silence that hung about her was dark with
challenge; it was felt to be ambiguous, enigmatic. Reserve suggests a
reservation, something hidden and kept back from the insatiable public
with its "right to know". Mrs. Gaskell with all her indiscretions had
not given it enough. The great classic _Life of Charlotte Brontë_ was,
after all, incomplete. Until something more was known about her,
Charlotte herself was incomplete. It was nothing that Mrs. Gaskell's
work was the finest, tenderest portrait of a woman that it was ever
given to a woman to achieve; nothing that she was not only recklessly
and superbly loyal to Charlotte, but that in her very indiscretions she
was, as far as Charlotte was concerned, incorruptibly and profoundly
true.

Since Mrs. Gaskell's time, other hands have been at work on Charlotte,
improving Mrs. Gaskell's masterpiece. A hundred little touches have been
added to it. First, it was supposed to be too tragic, too deliberately
and impossibly sombre (that sad book of which Charlotte's friend, Mary
Taylor, said that it was "not so gloomy as the truth"). So first came
Sir Wemyss Reid, conscientiously working up the high lights till he got
the values all wrong. "If the truth must be told," he says, "the life of
the author of _Jane Eyre_ was by no means so joyless as the world now
believes it to have been." And he sets out to give us the truth. But all
that he does to lighten the gloom is to tell a pleasant story of how
"one bright June morning in 1833, a handsome carriage and pair is
standing opposite the 'Devonshire Arms' at Bolton Bridge". In the
handsome carriage is a young girl, Ellen Nussey, waiting for Charlotte
Brontë and her brother and sisters to go with her for a picnic to Bolton
Abbey.

"Presently," says Sir Wemyss Reid, "on the steep road which stretches
across the moors to Keighley, the sound of wheels is heard, mingled with
the merry speech and merrier laughter of fresh young voices. Shall we go
forward unseen," he asks, "and study the approaching travellers whilst
they are still upon the road? Their conveyance is no handsome carriage,
but a rickety dog-cart, unmistakably betraying its neighbourship to the
carts and ploughs of some rural farmyard. The horse, freshly taken from
the fields, is driven by a youth who, in spite of his countrified dress,
is no mere bumpkin. His shock of red hair hangs down in somewhat ragged
locks behind his ears, for Branwell Brontë esteems himself a genius and
a poet, and, following the fashion of the times, has that abhorrence of
the barber's shears which genius is supposed to affect. But the lad's
face is a handsome and striking one, full of Celtic fire and humour,
untouched by the slightest shade of care, hopeful, promising, even
brilliant. How gaily he jokes with his three sisters; with what
inexhaustible volubility he pours out quotations from his favourite
poets, applying them to the lovely scenes around him; and with what a
mischievous delight in his superior nerve and mettle, he attempts the
feats of charioteering, which fill the heart of the youngest of the
party with sudden terrors! Beside him, in a dress of marvellous
plainness, and ugliness, stamped with the brand "home-made" in
characters which none can mistake, is the eldest of the sisters.
Charlotte is talking too; there are bright smiles upon her face; she is
enjoying everything around her, the splendid morning, the charms of
leafy trees and budding roses, and the ever musical stream; most of all,
perhaps, the charm of her brother's society, and the expectation of that
coming meeting with her friends, which is so near at hand. Behind sits a
pretty little girl, with fine complexion and delicate regular features,
whom the stranger would pick out as the beauty of the company, and a
tall, rather angular figure, clad in a dress exactly resembling
Charlotte's. Emily Brontë does not talk so much as the rest of the
party, but her wonderful eyes, brilliant and unfathomable as the pool at
the foot of a waterfall, but radiant also with a wealth of tenderness
and warmth, show how her soul is expanding under the influences of the
scene; how quick she is to note the least prominent of the beauties
around her, how intense is her enjoyment of the songs of the birds, the
brilliancy of the sunshine, the rich scent of the flower-bespangled
hedgerows. If she does not, like Charlotte and Anne, meet her brother's
ceaseless flood of sparkling words with opposing currents of speech, she
utters a strange, deep guttural sound which those who know her best
interpret as the language of a joy too deep for articulate expression.
Gaze at them as they pass you in the quiet road, and acknowledge that,
in spite of their rough and even uncouth exteriors, a happier four could
hardly be met with in this favourite haunt of pleasure-seekers during a
long summer's day."

And you do gaze at them and are sadder, if anything, than you were
before. You see them, if anything, more poignantly. You see their
cheerful biographer doing all he knows, and the light he shoots across
the blackness only makes it blacker.

        Nessun maggior dolore
  Che ricordarsi di tempo felice
  Nella miseria;

and in the end the biographer with all his cheerfulness succumbs to the
tradition of misery, and even adds a dark contribution of his own, the
suggestion of an unhappy love-affair of Charlotte's.

After Sir Wemyss Reid came Mr. Francis Grundy with _his_ little
pictures, _Pictures of the Past_, presenting a dreadfully unattractive
Charlotte.

Then came Mr. Leyland, following Mr. Grundy, with his glorification of
Branwell and his hint that Charlotte made it very hard at home for the
poor boy. He repeats the story that Branwell told Mr. George Searle
Phillips, how he went to see a dying girl in the village, and sat with
her half an hour, and read a psalm to her and a hymn, and how he felt
like praying with her too, but he was not "good enough", how he came
away with a heavy heart and fell into melancholy musings. "Charlotte
observed my depression," Branwell said, "and asked what ailed me. So I
told her. She looked at me with a look which I shall never forget if I
live to be a hundred years old--which I never shall. It was not like
her at all. It wounded me as if someone had struck me a blow in the
mouth. It involved ever so many things in it. It ran over me,
questioning and examining, as if I had been a wild beast. It said, 'Did
my ears deceive me, or did I hear aright?' And then came the painful,
baffled expression, which was worse than all. It said, 'I wonder if
that's true?' But, as she left the room, she seemed to accuse herself of
having wronged me, and smiled kindly upon me, and said, 'She is my
little scholar, and I will go and see her.' I replied not a word. I was
too much cut up! When she was gone, I came over here to the 'Black Bull'
and made a note of it...."

You see the implication? It was Charlotte who drove him to the "Black
Bull". That was Branwell's impression of Charlotte. Just the sort of
impression that an opium-eater would have of a beloved sister.

But Branwell's impression was good enough for Madame Duclaux to found
her theory on. Her theory is that Charlotte was inferior to Emily in
tenderness. It may well be so, and yet Charlotte would remain above most
women tender, for Emily's wealth would furnish forth a score of sisters.
The simple truth is that Charlotte had nerves, and Branwell was
extremely trying. And it is possible that Emily had less to bear, that
in her detachment she was protected more than Charlotte from Branwell at
his worst.

Meanwhile tales were abroad presenting Charlotte in the queerest lights.
There is that immortal story of how Thackeray gave a party for Currer
Bell at his house in Young Street, and how Currer Bell had a headache
and lay on a sofa in the back drawing-room, and refused to talk to
anybody but the governess; and how Thackeray at last, very late, with a
finger on his lip, stole out of the house and took refuge in his club.
No wonder if this quaint and curious Charlotte survived in the memory
of Thackeray's daughter. But, even apart from the headache, you can see
how it came about, how the sight of the governess evoked Charlotte
Brontë's unforgotten agony. She saw in the amazed and cheerful lady her
own sad youth, slighted and oppressed, solitary in a scene of
gaiety--she could not have seen her otherwise--and her warm heart rushed
out to her. She was determined that that governess should have a happy
evening if nobody else had. Her behaviour was odd, if you like, it was
even absurd, but it had the sublimity of vicarious expiation. Has anyone
ever considered its significance, the magnitude of her deed? For
Charlotte, to be the guest of honour on that brilliant night, in the
house of Thackeray, her divinity, was to touch the topmost height of
fame. And she turned her back on the brilliance and the fame and the
face of her divinity, and offered herself up in flames as a sacrifice
for all the governesses that were and had ever been and would be.

And after the fine stories came the little legends--things about
Charlotte when she was a governess herself at Mrs. Sidgwick's, and the
tittle-tattle of the parish. One of the three curates whom Charlotte
made so shockingly immortal avenged himself for his immortality by
stating that the trouble with Charlotte was that she _would_ fight for
mastery in the parish. Who can believe him? If there is one thing that
seems more certain than another it is Charlotte's utter indifference to
parochial matters. But Charlotte was just, and she may have objected to
the young man's way with the Dissenters; we know that she did very
strongly object to Mr. William Weightman's way. And that, I imagine, was
the trouble between Charlotte and the curates.

As for the Sidgwicks, Charlotte's biographers have been rather hard on
them. Mr. Leslie Stephen calls them "coarse employers". They were
certainly not subtle enough to divine the hidden genius in their sad
little governess. It was, I imagine, Charlotte's alien, enigmatic face
that provoked a little Sidgwick to throw a Bible at her. She said Mrs.
Sidgwick did not know her, and did not "intend to know her". She might
have added that if she _had_ intended Mrs. Sidgwick could not possibly
have known her. And when the Sidgwicks said (as they did say to their
cousin, Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson) that if Miss Brontë "was invited
to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about
like a slave; if she was not invited she imagined she was being excluded
from the family circle", that was simply their robust view of the
paralysed attitude of a shy girl among strangers, in an agony of fear
lest she should cut in where she was not wanted.

And allowances must be made for Mrs. Sidgwick. She was, no doubt,
considerably annoyed at finding that she had engaged a thoroughly
incompetent and apparently thoroughly morbid young person who had
offered herself as a nursery-governess and didn't know how to keep order
in the nursery. Naturally there was trouble at Stonegappe. Then one fine
day Mrs. Sidgwick discovered that there was, after all, a use for that
incomprehensible and incompetent Miss Brontë. Miss Brontë had a gift.
She could sew. She could sew beautifully. Her stitching, if you would
believe it, was a dream. And Mrs. Sidgwick saw that Miss Brontë's one
talent was not lodged in her useless. So Charlotte sat alone all evening
in the schoolroom at Stonegappe, a small figure hidden in pure white,
billowy seas of muslin, and lamented thus: "She cares nothing in the
world about me except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity of
labour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end she overwhelms me
with oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin night-caps
to make, and above all things, dolls to dress." And Mrs. Sidgwick
complained that Charlotte did not love the children, and forgot how
little she liked it when the children loved Charlotte, and was unaware,
poor lady, that it was recorded of her, and would be recorded to all
time, that she had said, "Love the _governess_, my dear!" when her
little impulsive boy put his hand in Charlotte's at the dinner-table,
and cried "I love 'ou, Miss Brontë." It was the same little, impulsive
boy who threw the Bible at Charlotte, and also threw a stone which hit
her.

No wonder that Miss Brontë's one and only "pleasant afternoon" was when
Mr. Sidgwick went out walking in his fields with his children and his
Newfoundland dog, and Charlotte (by order) followed and observed him
from behind.

Of course, all these old tales should have gone where Mrs. Sidgwick's
old muslin caps went; but they have not, and so it has got about that
Charlotte Brontë was not fond of children. Even Mr. Swinburne, at the
height of his magnificent eulogy, after putting crown upon crown upon
her head, pauses and wonders: had she any love for children? He finds in
her "a plentiful lack of inborn baby-worship"; she is unworthy to
compare in this with George Eliot, "the spiritual mother of Totty, of
Eppie, and of Lillo". "The fiery-hearted Vestal of Haworth," he says,
"had no room reserved in the palace of her passionate and high-minded
imagination as a nursery for inmates of such divine and delicious
quality." There was little Georgette in _Villette_, to say nothing of
Polly, and there was Adèle in _Jane Eyre_. But Mr. Swinburne had
forgotten about little Georgette. Like George Henry Lewes he is
"well-nigh moved to think one of the most powerfully and exquisitely
written chapters in _Shirley_ a chapter which could hardly have been
written at all by a woman, or, for that matter, by a man, of however
noble and kindly a nature, in whom the instinct, or nerve, or organ of
love for children was even of average natural strength and sensibility";
so difficult was it for him to believe in "the dread and repulsion felt
by a forsaken wife and tortured mother for the very beauty and dainty
sweetness of her only new-born child, as recalling the cruel, sleek
charm of the human tiger that had begotten it". And so he crowns her
with all crowns but that of "love for children". He is still tender to
her, seeing in her that one monstrous lack; he touches it with sorrow
and a certain shame.

Mr. Birrell follows him. "Miss Brontë," he says with confidence, "did
not care for children. She had no eye for them. Hence it comes about
that her novel-children are not good." He is moved to playful sarcasm
when he tells how in August of eighteen-fifty-three "Miss Brontë
suffered a keen disappointment". She went to Scotland with some friends
who took their baby with them. The parents thought the baby was ill when
it wasn't, and insisted on turning back, and Charlotte had to give up
her holiday. "All on account of a baby," says Mr. Birrell, and refers
you to Charlotte's letter on the subject, implying that it was
cold-blooded. The biographer can quote letters for his purpose, and Mr.
Birrell omits to tell us that Charlotte wrote "had any evil consequences
followed a prolonged stay, I should never have forgiven myself". You are
to imagine that Charlotte could have forgiven herself perfectly well,
for Charlotte "did not care for children".

Mrs. Oliphant does not echo that cry. She was a woman and knew better.

For I believe that here we touch the very heart of the mystery that was
Charlotte Brontë. We would have no right to touch it, to approach it,
were it not that other people have already violated all that was most
sacred and most secret in that mystery, and have given the world a
defaced and disfigured Charlotte Brontë. I believe that this love of
children which even Mr. Swinburne has denied to her, was the key to
Charlotte's nature. We are face to face here, not with a want in her,
but with an abyss, depth beyond depth of tenderness and longing and
frustration, of a passion that found no clear voice in her works,
because it was one with the elemental nature in her, undefined,
unuttered, unutterable.

She was afraid of children; she was awkward with them; because such
passion has shynesses, distances, and terrors unknown to the average
comfortable women who become happy mothers. It has even its perversions,
when love hardly knows itself from hate. Such love demands before all
things possession. It cries out for children of its own flesh and blood.
I believe that there were moments when it was pain for Charlotte to see
the children born and possessed by other women. It must have been agony
to have to look after them, especially when the rule was that they were
not to "love the governess".

The proofs of this are slender, but they are sufficient. There is little
Georgette, the sick child that Lucy nurses in the Pensionnat: "Little
Georgette still piped her plaintive wail, appealing to me by her
familiar term, 'Minnie, Minnie, me very poorly!' till my heart ached."
... "I affected Georgette; she was a sensitive and loving child; to hold
her in my lap, or carry her in my arms, was to me a treat. To-night she
would have me lay my head on the pillow of her crib; she even put her
little arms round my neck. Her clasp and the nestling action with which
she pressed her cheek to mine made me almost cry with a sort of tender
pain."

Once during a spring-cleaning at Upperwood House Charlotte was Mrs.
White's nursemaid as well as her governess, and she wrote: "By dint of
nursing the fat baby it has got to know me and be fond of me. I suspect
myself of growing rather fond of it." Years later she wrote to Mrs.
Gaskell, after staying with her: "Could you manage to convey a small
kiss to that dear but dangerous little person, Julia? She
surreptitiously possessed herself of a minute fraction of my heart,
which has been missing ever since I saw her."

Mrs. Gaskell tells us that there was "a strong mutual attraction"
between Julia, her youngest little girl, and Charlotte Brontë. "The
child," she says, "would steal her little hand into Miss Brontë's
scarcely larger one, and each took pleasure in this apparently
unobserved caress." May I suggest that children do not steal their
little hands into the hands of people who do not care for them? Their
instinct is infallible.

Charlotte Brontë tried to give an account of her feeling for children;
it was something like the sacred awe of the lover. "Whenever I see
Florence and Julia again I shall feel like a fond but bashful suitor,
who views at a distance the fair personage to whom, in his clownish awe,
he dare not risk a near approach. Such is the clearest idea I can give
you of my feeling towards children I like, but to whom I am a
stranger--and to what children am I not a stranger?"

Extraordinary that Charlotte's critics have missed the pathos of that
_cri de coeur_. It is so clearly an echo from the "house of bondage",
where Charlotte was made a stranger to the beloved, where the beloved
threw stones and Bibles at her. You really have to allow for the shock
of an experience so blighting. It is all part of the perversity of the
fate that dogged her, that her feeling should have met with that
reverse. But it was there, guarded with a certain shy austerity. She
"suspected" herself of getting rather fond of the baby.

She hid her secret even from herself, as women will hide these things.
But her dreams betrayed her after the way of dreams. Charlotte's dream
(premonitory, she thought, of trouble) was that she carried a little
crying child, and could not still its cry. "She described herself," Mrs.
Gaskell says, "as having the most painful sense of pity for the little
thing, lying _inert_, as sick children do, while she walked about in
some gloomy place with it, such as the aisle of Haworth Church." This
dream she gives to _Jane Eyre_, unconscious of its profound significance
and fitness. It is a pity that Mr. Swinburne did not pay attention to
Charlotte's dream.

All her life, I think, she suffered because of the perpetual insurgence
of this secret, impassioned, maternal energy. Hence the sting of Lewes's
famous criticism, beginning: "The grand function of woman, it must
always be remembered" (as if Charlotte had forgotten it!) "is
Maternity"; and, working up from his criticism of that chapter in
_Shirley_ to a climax of adjuration: "Currer Bell, if under your heart
had ever stirred a child; if to your bosom a babe had ever been
pressed--that mysterious part of your being, towards which all the rest
of it was drawn, in which your whole soul was transported and
absorbed--never could you have _imagined_ such a falsehood as that!" It
was impossible for Charlotte to protest against anything but the
abominable bad taste of Lewes's article, otherwise she might have told
him that she probably knew rather more about those mysteries than he
did. It was she who gave us that supreme image of disastrous love. "I
looked at my love; it shivered in my heart like a suffering child in a
cold cradle!"

And this woman died before her child was born.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then there is Mrs. Oliphant again. Though she was not one of those who
said Charlotte Brontë was not fond of children, though she would have
died rather than have joined Lewes in his unspeakable cry against her,
Mrs. Oliphant made certain statements in no better taste than his. She
suggests that Charlotte, fond or not fond of children, was too fond of
matrimonial dreams. Her picture (the married woman's picture) is of an
undesired and undesirable little spinster pining visibly and shamelessly
in a parsonage. She would have us believe that from morning till night,
from night till morning, Charlotte Brontë in the Parsonage thought of
nothing but of getting married, that her dreams pursued, ruthlessly, the
casual visitor. The hopelessness of the dream, the undesirability of
Charlotte, is what makes her so irresistible to her sister novelist.

There was "one subject", she says, "which Charlotte Brontë had at her
command, having experienced in her own person, and seen her nearest
friends under the experience, of that solitude and longing of women of
which she has made so remarkable an exposition. The long silence of life
without an adventure or a change, the forlorn gaze out of windows which
never show anyone coming who can rouse the slightest interest in the
mind, the endless years and days which pass and pass, carrying away the
bloom, extinguishing the lights of youth, bringing a dreary middle age
before which the very soul shrinks, while yet the sufferer feels how
strong is the current of life in her own veins, and how capable she is
of all the active duties of existence--this was the essence and soul of
the existence she knew best. Was there no help for it? Must the women
wait and see their lives thrown away, and have no power to save
themselves!

"The position," she goes on, "in itself so tragic, is one which can
scarcely be expressed without calling forth inevitable ridicule, a laugh
at the best, more often a sneer, at the women whose desire for a husband
is thus betrayed. Shirley and Caroline Helstone both cried out for that
husband with an indignation, a fire and impatience, a sense of wrong and
injury, which stopped the laugh for the moment. It might be ludicrous,
but it was horribly genuine and true." (This is more than can be said of
Mrs. Oliphant's view of the adorable Shirley Keeldar who was Emily
Brontë. It is ludicrous enough, and it may be genuine, but it is
certainly not true.) But Mrs. Oliphant is careful not to go too far.
"Note," she says, "there was nothing sensual about these young women. It
was life they wanted; they knew nothing of the grosser thoughts which
the world with its jeers attributes to them: of such thoughts they were
unconscious in a primitive innocence which, perhaps, only women
understand." Yet she characterizes their "outcry" as "indelicate". "All
very well to talk of women working for their living, finding new
channels for themselves, establishing their independence. How much have
we said of all that" (Mrs. Oliphant thinks that she is rendering
Charlotte Brontë's thought), "endeavouring to persuade ourselves!
Charlotte Brontë had the courage of her opinions. It was not education
nor a trade that her women wanted. It was not a living, but their share
in life.... Miss Brontë herself said correct things" (observe that
insincerity is insinuated here) "about the protection which a trade is
to a woman, keeping her from a mercenary marriage; but this was not in
the least the way of her heroines." (Why, you naturally wonder, should
it have been?) "They wanted to be happy, no doubt, but above all things
they wanted their share in life, to have their position by the side of
men, which alone confers a natural equality, to have their shoulder to
the wheel, their hands on the reins of common life, to build up the
world and link the generations each to each." (And very proper of them,
too.) "In her philosophy, marriage was the only state which procured
this, and if she did not recommend a mercenary marriage she was at least
very tolerant about its conditions, insisting less upon love than was to
be expected" (!) "and with a covert conviction in her mind, that if not
one man, then another was better than any complete abandonment of the
larger path. Lucy Snowe for a long time had her heart very much set on
Dr. John and his placid breadth of Englishism; but when she finally
found out that to be impossible her tears were soon dried by the
prospect of Paul Emanuel, so unlike him, coming into his place."

The obvious answer to all this is that Charlotte Brontë was writing in
the mid-Victorian age, about mid-Victorian women, the women whom she saw
around her; writing, without any "philosophy" or "covert conviction", in
the days before emancipation, when marriage was the only chance of
independence that a woman had. It would have been marvellous, if she had
not had her sister Emily before her, that in such an age she should have
conceived and created Shirley Keeldar. As for poor little Lucy with her
two men, she is not the first heroine who mistook the false dawn for the
true. Besides, Miss Brontë's "philosophy" was exactly the opposite to
that attributed to her, as anybody may see who reads _Shirley_. In
these matters she burned what her age adored, and adored what it burned,
a thorough revolutionary.

But this is not the worst. Mrs. Oliphant professes to feel pity for her
victim. "Poor Charlotte Brontë! She has not been as other women,
protected by the grave from all betrayal of the episodes in her own
life." (You would imagine they were awful, the episodes in Charlotte
Brontë's life.) "Everybody has betrayed her, and all she thought about
this one, and that, and every name that was ever associated with hers.
There was a Mr. Taylor from London, about whom she wrote with great
freedom to her friend, Miss Nussey, telling how the little man had come,
how he had gone away without any advance in the affairs, how a chill
came over her when he appeared and she found him much less attractive
than when at a distance, yet how she liked it as little when he went
away, and was somewhat excited about his first letter, and even went so
far as to imagine with a laugh that there might possibly be a dozen
little Joe Taylors before all was over."

This is atrocious. But the malice and bad taste of it are nothing to the
gross carelessness and ignorance it reveals--ignorance of facts and
identities and names. Charlotte's suitor was Mr. James Taylor and not
Joe. Joe, the brother of her friend, Mary Taylor, was married already to
a lady called Amelia, and it is of Joe and his Amelia that Charlotte
writes. "She must take heart" (Amelia had been singularly unsuccessful),
"there may yet be a round dozen of little Joe Taylors to look after--run
after--to sort and switch and train up in the way they should go."

Of Mr. James Taylor she writes more decorously. Miss Nussey, as usual,
had been thinking unwarrantable things, and had made a most unbecoming
joke about Jupiter and Venus, which outraged Charlotte's "common
sense". "The idea of the little man," says Charlotte, "shocks me less.
He still sends his little newspaper; and the other day there came a
letter of a bulk, volume, pith, judgment and knowledge, fit to have been
the product of a giant. You may laugh as much and as wickedly as you
please, but the fact is, there is a quiet constancy about this, my
diminutive and red-haired friend, which adds a foot to his stature,
turns his sandy locks dark, and altogether dignifies him a good deal in
my estimation." This is all she says by way of appreciation. She says
later, "His manners and his personal appearance scarcely pleased me more
than at the first interview.... I feel that in his way he has a regard
for me; a regard which I cannot bring myself entirely to reciprocate in
kind, and yet its withdrawal leaves a painful blank." Miss Nussey
evidently insists that Charlotte's feelings are engaged this time,
arguing possibly from the "painful blank"; and Charlotte becomes
explicit. She speaks of the disadvantages of the alleged match, and we
gather that Miss Nussey has been urging her to take the little man. "But
there is another thing which forms a barrier more difficult to pass than
any of these. Would Mr. Taylor and I ever suit? Could I ever feel for
him enough love to accept him as a husband? Friendship--gratitude--esteem
I have, but each moment he came near me, and that I could see his eyes
fastened on me, my veins ran ice. Now that he is away, I feel far
more gently to him; it is only close by that I grow rigid--stiffening
with a strange mixture of apprehension and anger--which nothing
softens but his retreat, and a perfect subduing of his manner."
And again, "my conscience, I can truly say, does not _now_ accuse
me of having treated Mr. Taylor with injustice or unkindness ...
but with every disposition and with every wish, with every intention
even to look on him in the most favourable point of view at his last
visit, it was impossible to me in my inward heart to think of him as one
that might one day be acceptable as a husband." Could anything be _more_
explicit? There is a good deal more of it. After one very searching
criticism of Mr. Taylor: "One does not like to say these things, but one
had better be honest." And of her honesty Charlotte's letters on this
subject leave no doubt. There is not the smallest ground for supposing
that even for a moment had she thought of Mr. James Taylor as "one that
one day might be acceptable", much less is there for Mr. Clement
Shorter's suggestion that if he had come back from Bombay she would have
married him.

But Joe or James, it is all one to Mrs. Oliphant, with her theory of
Charlotte Brontë. "For her and her class, which did not speak of it,
everything depended upon whether the women married or did not marry.
Their thoughts were thus artificially fixed to one point in the
horizon." The rest is repetition, ending in the astounding verdict: "The
seed she thus sowed has come to many growths that would have appalled
Charlotte Brontë. But while it would be very unjust to blame her for the
vagaries that have followed, and to which nothing could be less
desirable than any building of the house or growth of the race, any
responsibility or service, we must still believe that it was she who
drew the curtain first aside and opened the gates to imps of evil
meaning, polluting and profaning the domestic hearth."

That is Mrs. Oliphant on Charlotte Brontë.

And even Mr. Clement Shorter, who has dealt so admirably with outrageous
legends, goes half the way with the detractor. He has a theory that
Charlotte Brontë was a woman of morbid mood, "to whom the problem of sex
appealed with all its complications", and that she "dwelt continually on
the problem of the ideal mate".

Now Charlotte may have dreamed of getting married (there have been more
criminal dreams); she may have brooded continually over the problem of
the ideal mate, only of all these dreams and broodings there is not one
atom of evidence--not one. Not a hint, not a trace, either in her
character as we know it, or in her very voluminous private
correspondence. The facts of her life disprove it. Her letters to Ellen
Nussey (never meant for publication) reveal the workings of Charlotte's
feminine mind when applied to "the sex problem"; a mind singularly
wholesome and impersonal, and singularly detached. Charlotte is full of
lights upon this awful subject of matrimony, which, by the way, had
considerably more interest for Miss Nussey than it had for her. In fact,
if it had not been for Miss Nussey it would not have appeared so often
as it did in Charlotte's letters. If you pay attention to the context (a
thing that theorists never do) you see, what is indeed obvious, that a
large portion of Charlotte Brontë's time was taken up in advising and
controlling Ellen Nussey, that amiable and impulsive prototype of
Caroline Helstone. She is called upon in all Miss Nussey's hours of
crisis, and there seem to have been a great many of them. "Do not," she
writes, "be over-persuaded to marry a man you can never respect--I do
not say _love_, because I think if you can respect a person before
marriage, moderate love at least will come after; and as to intense
passion, I am convinced that that is no desirable feeling. In the first
place, it seldom or never meets with a requital; and in the second
place, if it did, the feeling would be only temporary; it would last the
honeymoon, and then, perhaps, give place to disgust, or indifference,
worse perhaps than disgust. Certainly this would be the case on the
man's part; and on the woman's--God help her if she is left to love
passionately and alone.

"I am tolerably well convinced that I shall never marry at all."

And again, to Miss Nussey, six months later: "Did you not once say to me
in all childlike simplicity, 'I thought, Charlotte, no young lady should
fall in love till the offer was actually made'? I forgot what answer I
made at the time, but I now reply, after due consideration, Right as a
glove, the maxim is just, and I hope you will always attend to it. I
will even extend and confirm it: no young lady should fall in love till
the offer has been made, accepted, the marriage ceremony performed, and
the first half-year of wedded life has passed away. A woman may then
begin to love, but with great precaution, very coolly, very moderately,
very rationally. If she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a cold
look cuts her to the heart, she is a fool. If she ever loves so much
that her husband's will is her law, and that she has got into a habit of
watching his looks in order that she may anticipate his wishes, she will
soon be a neglected fool. Did I not tell you of an instance...?"

What could be more lucid, more light-hearted, and more sane? And if
Charlotte is suspicious of the dangers of her own temperament, that only
proves her lucidity and sanity the more.

Later, at Brussels, when confronted with "three or four people's" idea
that "the future _époux_ of Miss Brontë is on the Continent", she
defends herself against the "silly imputation". "Not that it is a crime
to marry, or a crime to wish to be married; but it is an imbecility,
which I reject with contempt, for women, who have neither fortune nor
beauty, to make marriage the principal object of their wishes and hopes,
and the aim of all their actions; not to be able to convince themselves
that they are unattractive, and that they had better be quiet, and think
of other things than wedlock." Can anything be clearer?

So much for herself. But she has to deal with Miss Nussey, in
difficulties again, later: "Papa has two or three times expressed a fear
that since Mr. ---- paid you so much attention, he will, perhaps, have
made an impression on your mind which will interfere with your comfort.
I tell him I think not, as I believe you to be mistress of yourself in
those matters. Still, he keeps saying that I am to write to you and
dissuade you from thinking of him. I never saw Papa make himself so
uneasy about a thing of the kind before; he is usually very sarcastic on
such subjects.

"Mr. ---- be hanged! I never thought very well of him, and I am much
disposed to think very ill of him at this blessed minute. I have
discussed the subject fully, for where is the use of being mysterious
and constrained?--it is not worth while."

And yet again it is Ellen Nussey. "Ten years ago I should have laughed
at your account of the blunder you made in mistaking the bachelor doctor
of Bridlington for a married man. I should have certainly thought you
scrupulous over-much, and wondered how you could possibly regret being
civil to a decent individual merely because he happened to be single
instead of double. Now, however, I can perceive that your scruples are
founded on common sense. I know that if women wish to escape the stigma
of husband-seeking, they must act and look like marble or clay--cold,
expressionless, bloodless; for every appearance of feeling, of joy,
sorrow, friendliness, antipathy, admiration, disgust, are alike
construed by the world into the attempt to" (I regret to say that
Charlotte wrote) "to hook a husband."

Later, she has to advise her friend Mr. Williams as to a career for his
daughter Louisa. And here she is miles ahead of her age, the age that
considered marriage the only honourable career for a woman. "Your
daughters--no more than your sons--should be a burden on your hands.
Your daughters--as much as your sons--should aim at making their way
honourably through life. Do you not wish to keep them at home? Believe
me, teachers may be hard-worked, ill-paid and despised, but the girl who
stays at home doing nothing is worse off than the hardest-wrought and
worst-paid drudge of a school. Whenever I have seen, not merely in
humble but in affluent houses, families of daughters sitting waiting to
be married, I have pitied them from my heart. It is doubtless well--very
well--if Fate decrees them a happy marriage; but, if otherwise, give
their existence some object, their time some occupation, or the
peevishness of disappointment, and the listlessness of idleness will
infallibly degrade their nature.... Lonely as I am, how should I be if
Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career...? How should I
be with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where
there is not a single educated family? In that case I should have no
world at all. As it is, something like a hope and a motive sustains me
still. I wish all your daughters--I wish every woman in England, had
also a hope and a motive."

Whatever the views of Charlotte Brontë's heroines may or may not have
been, these were her own views--sober, sincere, and utterly
dispassionate. Mrs. Oliphant set them aside, either in criminal
carelessness, or with still more criminal deliberation, because they
interfered with her theory. They are certainly not the views of a woman
given to day-dreaming and window-gazing. Lucy Snowe may have had time
for window-gazing, but not Charlotte Brontë, what with her writing and
her dusting, sweeping, ironing, bed-making, and taking the eyes out of
the potatoes for poor old Tabby, who was too blind to see them.
Window-gazing of all things! Mrs. Oliphant could not have fixed upon a
habit more absurdly at variance with Charlotte's character.

For she was pure, utterly and marvellously pure from sentimentalism,
which was (and she knew it) the worst vice of the Victorian age. Mr.
Leslie Stephen said that, "Miss Brontë's sense of humour was but
feeble." It was robust enough when it played with sentimentalists. But
as for love, for passion, she sees it with a tragic lucidity that is
almost a premonition. And her attitude was by no means that of the
foredoomed spinster, making necessity her virtue. There was no
necessity. She had at least four suitors (quite a fair allowance for a
little lady in a lonely parish), and she refused them all. Twice in her
life, in her tempestuous youth, and at a crisis of her affairs, she
chose "dependence upon coarse employers" before matrimony. She was
shrewd, lucid, fastidious, and saw the men she knew without any glamour.
To the cold but thoroughly presentable Mr. Henry Nussey she replied
thus: "It has always been my habit to study the character of those among
whom I chance to be thrown, and I think I know yours and can imagine
what description of woman would suit you for a wife. The character
should not be too marked, ardent and original, her temper should be
mild, her piety undoubted, and her personal attractions sufficient to
please your eyes and gratify your just pride. As for me you do not know
me...." She was only three-and-twenty when she wrote that, with the
prospect of Stonegappe before her. For she had not, and could not have
for him, "that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for
him; and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I
will regard my husband". Later, in her worst loneliness she refused that
ardent Mr. Taylor, who courted her by the novel means of newspapers sent
with violent and unremitting regularity through the post. He represented
to some degree the larger life of intellectual interest. But he offended
her fastidiousness. She was sorry for the little man with his little
newspaper, and that was all. She refused several times the man she
ultimately married. He served a long apprenticeship to love, and
Charlotte yielded to his distress rather than to her own passion. She
describes her engaged state as "very calm, very expectant. What I taste
of happiness is of the soberest order. I trust to love my husband. I am
grateful for his tender love for me.... Providence offers me this
destiny. Doubtless then it is the best for me."

These are not the words, nor is this the behaviour of Mrs. Oliphant's
Charlotte Brontë, the forlorn and desperate victim of the obsession of
matrimony.

I do not say that Charlotte Brontë had not what is called a
"temperament"; her genius would not have been what it was without it;
she herself would have been incomplete; but there never was a woman of
genius who had her temperament in more complete subjection to her
character; and it is her character that you have to reckon with at every
turn.

The little legends and the little theories have gone far enough. And had
they gone no farther they would not have mattered much. They would at
least have left Charlotte Brontë's genius to its own mystery.

But her genius was the thing that irritated, the enigmatic, inexplicable
thing. Talent in a woman you can understand, there's a formula for
it--_tout talent de femme est un bonheur manqué_. So when a woman's
talent baffles you, your course is plain, _cherchez l'homme_.
Charlotte's critics argued that if you could put your finger on the man
you would have the key to the mystery. This, of course, was arguing that
her genius was, after all, only a superior kind of talent; but some of
them had already begun to ask themselves, Was it, after all, anything
more? So they began to look for the man. They were certain by this time
that there was one.

The search was difficult; for Charlotte had concealed him well. But they
found him at last in M. Constantin Héger, the little Professor of the
Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the Rue d'Isabelle. Sir Wemyss Reid had
suggested a love-affair in Brussels to account for Charlotte's
depression, which was unfavourable to his theory of the happy life. Mr.
Leyland seized upon the idea, for it nourished his theory that Branwell
was an innocent lamb who had never caused his sisters a moment's misery.
They _made_ misery for themselves out of his harmless peccadilloes. Mr.
Angus Mackay in _The Brontës, Fact and Fiction_, gives us this fiction
for a fact. He is pleased with what he calls the "pathetic significance"
of his "discovery". There _was_ somebody, there had to be, and it had to
be M. Héger, for there wasn't anybody else. Mr. Mackay draws back the
veil with a gesture and reveals--the love-affair. He is very nice about
it, just as nice as ever he can be. "We see her," he says, "sore
wounded in her affections, but unconquerable in her will. The discovery
... does not degrade the noble figure we know so well.... The moral of
her greatest works--that conscience must reign absolute at whatever
cost--acquires a greater force when we realize how she herself came
through the furnace of temptation with marks of torture on her, but with
no stain on her soul."

This is all very well, but the question is: _Did_ Charlotte come through
a furnace? _Did_ she suffer from a great and tragic passion? It may have
been so. For all we know she may have been in fifty furnaces; she may
have gone from one fit of tragic passion to another. Only (apart from
gossip, and apart from the argument from the novels, which begs the
question) we have no evidence to prove it. What we have points all the
other way.

Gossip apart, believers in the tragic passion have nourished their
theory chiefly on that celebrated passage in a letter of Charlotte's to
Ellen Nussey: "I returned to Brussels after Aunt's death, prompted by
what then seemed an irresistible impulse. I was punished for my selfish
folly by a withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of
mind."

Here we have the great disclosure. By "irresistible impulse" and
"selfish folly", Charlotte could only mean indulgence in an illegitimate
passion for M. Héger's society. Peace of mind bears but one
interpretation.

Mr. Clement Shorter, to his infinite credit, will have none of this. He
maintains very properly that the passage should be left to bear the
simple construction that Miss Nussey and Mr. Nicholls put upon it. But I
would go farther. I am convinced that not only does that passage bear
that construction, but that it will not bear the weight of any other.

In eighteen-forty-two Charlotte's aunt died, and Charlotte became the
head of her father's household. She left her father's house in a time of
trouble, prompted by "an irresistible impulse" towards what we should
now call self-development. Charlotte, more than two years later, in a
moment of retrospective morbidity, called it "selfish folly". In that
dark mid-Victorian age it was sin in any woman to leave her home if her
home required her. And with her aunt dead, and her brother Branwell
drowning his grief for his relative in drink, and her father going blind
and beginning in his misery to drink a little too, Charlotte felt that
her home did require her. Equally she felt that either Emily or she had
got to turn out and make a living, and since it couldn't possibly be
Emily it must be she. The problem would have been quite simple even for
Charlotte--but _she wanted to go_. Therefore her tender conscience
vacillated. When you remember that Charlotte Brontë's conscience was,
next to her genius, the largest, and at the same time the most delicate
part of her, and that her love for her own people was a sacred passion,
her words are sufficiently charged with meaning. A passion for M. Héger
is, psychologically speaking, superfluous. You can prove anything by
detaching words from their context. The letter from which that passage
has been torn is an answer to Ellen Nussey's suggestions of work for
Charlotte. Charlotte says "any project which infers the necessity of my
leaving home is impracticable to me. If I could leave home I should not
be at Haworth now. I know life is passing away, and I am doing nothing,
earning nothing--a very bitter knowledge it is at moments--but I see no
way out of the mist"; and so on for another line or two, and then:
"These ideas sting me keenly sometimes; but whenever I consult my
conscience it affirms that I am doing right in staying at home, and
bitter are its upbraidings when I yield to an eager desire for release."
And then, the passage quoted _ad nauseam_, to support the legend of M.
Héger.

A "total withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of
mind". This letter is dated October 1846--more than two years since her
return from Brussels in January, eighteen-forty-four. In those two years
her father was threatened with total blindness, and her brother Branwell
achieved his destiny. The passage refers unmistakably to events at
Haworth. It is further illuminated by another passage from an earlier
letter. Ellen Nussey is going through the same crisis--torn between duty
to herself and duty to her people. She asks Charlotte's advice and
Charlotte gives judgment: "The right path is that which necessitates the
greatest sacrifice of self-interest." The sacrifice, observe, not of
happiness, not of passion, but of self-interest, the development of
self. It was self-development, and not passion, not happiness, that she
went to Brussels for.

And Charlotte's letters from Brussels--from the scene of passion in the
year of crisis, eighteen-forty-three--sufficiently reveal the nature of
the trouble there. Charlotte was alone in the Pensionnat without Emily.
Emily was alone at Haworth. The few friends she had in Brussels left
soon after her arrival. She was alone in Brussels, and her homesickness
was terrible. You can trace the malady in all its stages. In March she
writes: "I ought to consider myself well off, and to be thankful for my
good fortune. I hope I am thankful" (clearly she isn't thankful in the
least!), "and if I could always keep up my spirits and never feel lonely
or long for companionship or friendship, or whatever they call it, I
should do very well." In the same letter you learn that she is giving
English lessons to M. Héger and his brother-in-law, M. Chapelle. "If you
could see and hear the efforts I make to teach them to pronounce like
Englishmen, and their unavailing attempts to imitate, you would laugh to
all eternity." Charlotte is at first amused at the noises made by M.
Héger and his brother-in-law.

In May the noises made by Monsieur fail to amuse. Still, she is
"indebted to him for all the pleasure or amusement" that she had, and in
spite of her indebtedness, she records a "total want of companionship".
"I lead an easeful, stagnant, silent life, for which ... I ought to be
very thankful" (but she is not). May I point out that though you may be
"silent" in the first workings of a tragic and illegitimate passion, you
are not "stagnant", and certainly not "easeful".

At the end of May she finds out that Madame Héger does not like her, and
Monsieur is "wondrously influenced" by Madame. Monsieur has in a great
measure "withdrawn the light of his countenance", but Charlotte
apparently does not care. In August the _vacancies_ are at hand, and
everybody but Charlotte is going home. She is consequently "in low
spirits; earth and heaven are dreary and empty to me at this moment"....
"I can hardly write, I have such a dreary weight at my heart." But she
will see it through. She will stay some months longer "till I have
acquired German". And at the end: "Everybody is abundantly civil, but
homesickness comes creeping over me. I cannot shake it off." That was in
September, in M. Héger's absence. Later, she tells Emily how she went
into the cathedral and made "a real confession _to see what it was
like_". Charlotte's confession has been used to bolster up the theory of
the "temptation". Unfortunately for the theory it happened in
September, when M. Héger and temptation were not there. In October she
finds that she no longer trusts Madame Héger. At the same time "solitude
oppresses me to an excess". She gave notice, and M. Héger flew into a
passion and commanded her to stay. She stayed very much against, not her
conscience, but her will. In the same letter and the same connection she
says, "I have much to say--many little odd things, queer and puzzling
enough--which I do not like to trust to a letter, but which one day
perhaps, or rather one evening--if ever we should find ourselves by the
fireside at Haworth or Brookroyd, with our feet on the fender curling
our hair--I may communicate to you."

Charlotte is now aware of a situation; she is interested in it,
intellectually, not emotionally.

In November: "Twinges of homesickness cut me to the heart, now and
then." On holidays "the silence and loneliness of all the house weighs
down one's spirits like lead.... Madame Héger, good and kind as I have
described her" (_i.e._ for all her goodness and kindness), "never comes
near me on these occasions." ... "She is not colder to me than she is to
the other teachers, but they are less dependent on her than I am." But
the situation is becoming clearer. Charlotte is interested. "I fancy I
begin to perceive the reason of this mighty distance and reserve; it
sometimes makes me laugh, and at other times nearly cry. When I am sure
of it I will tell you."

There can be no doubt that before she left Brussels Charlotte was sure;
but there is no record of her ever having told.

The evidence from the letters is plain enough. But the first thing that
the theorist does is to mutilate letters. He suppresses all those parts
of a correspondence which tell against his theory. When these torn and
bleeding passages are restored piously to their contexts they are
destructive to the legend of tragic passion. They show (as Mr. Clement
Shorter has pointed out) that throughout her last year at Brussels
Charlotte Brontë saw hardly anything of M. Héger. They also show that
before very long Charlotte had a shrewd suspicion that Madame had
arranged it so, and that it was not so much the absence of Monsieur that
disturbed her as the extraordinary behaviour of Madame. And they show
that from first to last she was incurably homesick.

Now if Charlotte had been in any degree, latently, or increasingly, or
violently in love with M. Héger, she would have been as miserable as you
like in M. Héger's house, but she would not have been homesick; she
would not, I think, have worried quite so much about Madame's behaviour;
and she would have found the clue to it sooner than she did.

To me it is all so simple and self-evident that, if the story were not
revived periodically, if it had not been raked up again only the other
day,[A] there would be no need to dwell upon anything so pitiful and
silly.

[Footnote A: See _The Key to the Brontë Works_, by J. Malham-Dembleby,
1911.]

It rests first and foremost on gossip, silly, pitiful gossip and
conjecture. Gossip in England, gossip in Brussels, conjecture all round.
Above all, it rests on certain feline hints supplied by Madame Héger and
her family. Charlotte's friends were always playfully suspecting her of
love-affairs. They could never put their fingers on the man, and they
missed M. Héger. It would never have occurred to their innocent
mid-Victorian minds to suspect Charlotte of an attachment to a married
man. It would not have occurred to Charlotte to suspect herself of it.
But Madame Héger was a Frenchwoman, and she had not a mid-Victorian
mind, and she certainly suspected Charlotte of an attachment, a flagrant
attachment, to M. Héger. It is well known that Madame made statements to
that effect, and it is admitted on all hands that Madame had been
jealous. It may fairly be conjectured that it was M. Héger and not
Charlotte who gave her cause, slight enough in all conscience, but
sufficient for Madame Héger. She did not understand these Platonic
relations between English teachers and their French professors. She had
never desired Platonic relations with anybody herself, and she saw
nothing but annoyance in them for everybody concerned. Madame's attitude
is the clue to the mystery, the clue that Charlotte found. She accused
the dead Charlotte of an absurd and futile passion for her husband; she
stated that she had had to advise the living Charlotte to moderate the
ardour of her admiration for the engaging professor; but the truth, as
Charlotte in the end discovered, was that for a certain brief period
Madame was preposterously jealous. M. Héger confessed as much when he
asked Charlotte to address her letters to him at the Athénée Royale
instead of the Pensionnat. The correspondence, he said, was disagreeable
to his wife.

Why, in Heaven's name, disagreeable, if Madame Héger suspected Charlotte
of an absurd and futile passion? And why should Madame Héger have been
jealous of an absurd and futile woman, a woman who had seen so little of
Madame Héger's husband, and who was then in England? I cannot agree with
Mr. Shorter that M. Héger regarded Charlotte with indifference. He was a
Frenchman, and he had his vanity, and no doubt the frank admiration of
his brilliant pupil appealed to it vividly in moments of conjugal
depression. Charlotte herself must have had some attraction for M.
Héger. Madame perceived the appeal and the attraction, and she was
jealous; therefore her interpretation of appearances could not have been
so unflattering to Charlotte as she made out. Madame, in fact,
suspected, on her husband's part, the dawning of an attachment. We know
nothing about M. Héger's attachment, and we haven't any earthly right to
know; but from all that is known of M. Héger it is certain that, if it
was not entirely intellectual, not entirely that "_affection presque
paternelle_" that he once professed, it was entirely restrained and
innocent and honourable. It is Madame Héger with her jealousy who has
given the poor gentleman away. Monsieur's state of mind--extremely
temporary--probably accounted for "those many odd little things, queer
and puzzling enough", which Charlotte would not trust to a letter;
matter for curl-paper confidences and no more.

Of course there is the argument from the novels, from _The Professor_,
from _Jane Eyre_, from _Villette_. I have not forgotten it. But really
it begs the question. It moves in an extremely narrow and an extremely
vicious circle. Jane Eyre was tried in a furnace of temptation,
therefore Charlotte must have been tried. Lucy Snowe and Frances Henri
loved and suffered in Brussels. Therefore Charlotte must have loved and
suffered there. And if Charlotte loved and suffered and was tried in a
furnace of temptation, that would account for Frances and for Lucy and
for Jane.

No; the theorists who have insisted on this tragic passion have not
reckoned with Charlotte Brontë's character, and its tremendous power of
self-repression. If at Brussels any disastrous tenderness had raised its
head it wouldn't have had a chance to grow an inch. But Charlotte had
large and luminous ideas of friendship. She was pure, utterly pure from
all the illusions and subtleties and corruptions of the sentimentalist,
and she could trust herself in friendship. She brought to it ardours and
vehemences that she would never have allowed to love. If she let herself
go in her infrequent intercourse with M. Héger, it was because she was
so far from feeling in herself the possibility of passion. That was why
she could say, "I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what
the parting with M. Héger cost me. It grieved me so much to grieve him
who has been so true, kind, and disinterested a friend." That was how
she could bring herself to write thus to Monsieur: "_Savez-vous ce que je
ferais, Monsieur? J'écrirais un livre et je le dédierais à mon maître de
littérature, au seul maître que j'aie jamais eu--à vous Monsieur! Je
vous ai dit souvent en français combien je vous respecte, combien je
suis redevable à votre bonté à vos conseils. Je voudrais le dire une
fois en anglais ... le souvenir de vos bontés ne s'effacera jamais de ma
mémoire, et tant que ce souvenir durera le respect que vous m'avez
inspiré durera aussi._" For "_je vous respecte_" we are not entitled to
read "_je vous aime_". Charlotte was so made that kindness shown her
moved her to tears of gratitude. When Charlotte said "respect" she meant
it. Her feeling for M. Héger was purely what Mr. Matthew Arnold said
religion was, an affair of "morality touched with emotion". All her
utterances, where there is any feeling in them, no matter what, have a
poignancy, a vibration which is Brontësque and nothing more. And this
Brontësque quality is what the theorists have (like Madame Héger, and
possibly Monsieur) neither allowed for nor understood.

       *       *       *       *       *

For this "fiery-hearted Vestal", this virgin, sharp-tongued and
sharper-eyed, this scorner of amorous curates, had a genius for
friendship. This genius, like her other genius, was narrow in its range
and opportunity, and for that all the more ardent and intense. It fed on
what came to its hand. It could even grow, like her other genius, with
astounding vitality out of strange and hostile soil. She seems to have
had many friends, obscure and great; the obscure, the Dixons, the
Wheelrights, the Taylors, the Nusseys, out of all proportion to the
great. But properly speaking she had only two friends, Mary Taylor and
Ellen Nussey, the enchanting, immortal "Nel".

There _is_ something at first sight strange and hostile about Mary
Taylor, the energetic, practical, determined, terribly robust person you
see so plainly trying, in the dawn of their acquaintance, to knock the
nonsense out of Charlotte. Mary Taylor had no appreciation of the
Brontësque. When Charlotte told Mary Taylor that at Cowan Bridge she
used to stand in the burn on a stone to watch the water flow by, Mary
Taylor told Charlotte that she should have gone fishing. When _Jane
Eyre_ appeared she wrote to Charlotte in a strain that is amusing to
posterity. There is a touch of condescension in her praise. She is
evidently surprised at anything so great coming out of Charlotte. "It
seemed to me incredible that you had actually written a book." "You are
very different from me," she says, "in having no doctrine to preach. It
is impossible to squeeze a moral out of your production." She is
thinking of his prototype when she criticizes the character of St. John
Rivers. "A missionary either goes into his office for a piece of bread,
or he goes for enthusiasm, and that is both too good and too bad a
quality for St. John. It's a bit of your absurd charity to believe in
such a man." As an intellectual woman Mary Taylor realized Charlotte
Brontë's intellect, but it is doubtful if she ever fully realized what,
beyond an intellect, she had got hold of in her friend. She was a woman
of larger brain than Ellen Nussey, she was loyal and warm-hearted to the
last degree, but it was not given to her to see in Charlotte Brontë what
Ellen Nussey, little as you would have expected it, had seen. She did
not keep her letters. She burnt them "in a fit of caution", which may
have been just as well.

But Mary Taylor is important. She had, among her more tender qualities,
an appalling frankness. It was she who told poor little Charlotte that
she was very ugly. Charlotte never forgot it. You can feel in her
letters, in her novels, in her whole nature, the long reverberation of
the shock. She said afterwards: "You did me a great deal of good,
Polly," by which she meant that Polly had done her an infinity of harm.

Her friends all began by trying to do her good. Even Ellen Nussey tried.
Charlotte is very kindly cautioned against being "tempted by the
fondness of my sisters to consider myself of too much importance", and
in a parenthesis Ellen Nussey begs her not to be offended. "Oh, Ellen,"
Charlotte writes, "do you think I could be offended by any good advice
you may give me?" She thanks her heartily, and loves her "if possible
all the better for it". Ellen Nussey in her turn asks Charlotte to tell
her of her faults and "cease flattering her". Charlotte very sensibly
refuses; and it is not till she has got away from her sisters that her
own heart-searchings begin. They are mainly tiresome, but there is a
flash of revelation in her reply to "the note you sent me with the
umbrella". "My darling, if I were like you, I should have to face
Zionwards, though prejudice and error might occasionally fling a mist
over the glorious vision before me, for with all your single-hearted
sincerity you have your faults, but _I_ am not like you. If you knew my
thoughts; the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at
times eats me up, and makes me feel society, as it is, wretchedly
insipid, you would pity me, and I dare say despise me." Miss Nussey
writes again, and Charlotte trembles "all over with excitement" after
reading her note. "I will no longer shrink from your question," she
replies. "I _do_ wish to be better than I am. I pray fervently sometimes
to be made so ... this very night I will pray as you wish me."

But Charlotte is not in the least like Ellen Nussey, and she still
refuses to be drawn into any return of this dangerous play with a
friend's conscience and her nerves. "I will not tell you all I think and
feel about you, Ellen. I will preserve unbroken that reserve which alone
enables me to maintain a decent character for judgment; but for that, I
should long ago have been set down by all who knows me as a Frenchified
fool. You have been very kind to me of late, and gentle, and you have
spared me those little sallies of ridicule, which, owing to my miserable
and wretched touchiness of character, used formerly to make me wince, as
if I had been touched with hot iron. Things that nobody else cares for
enter into my mind and rankle there like venom. I know these feelings
are absurd, and therefore I try to hide them, but they only sting the
deeper for concealment. I'm an idiot!"

Miss Nussey seems to have preserved her calm through all the excitement
and to have never turned a hair. But nothing could have been worse for
Charlotte than this sort of thing. It goes on for years. It began in
eighteen-thirty-three, the third year of their friendship, when she was
seventeen. In 'thirty-seven it is at its height. Charlotte writes from
Dewsbury Moor: "If I could always live with you, if your lips and mine
could at the same time drink the same draught at the same pure fountain
of mercy, I hope, I trust, I might one day become better, far better
than my evil, wandering thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit
and warm to the flesh, will now permit me to be. I often plan the
pleasant life we might lead, strengthening each other in the power of
self-denial, that hallowed and glowing devotion which the past Saints of
God often attained to."

Now a curious and interesting thing is revealed by this correspondence.
These religious fervours and depressions come on the moment Charlotte
leaves Haworth and disappear as soon as she returns. All those letters
were written from Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor, while the Haworth letters
of the same period are sane and light-hearted. And when she is fairly
settled at Haworth, instead of emulating the Saints of God, she and Miss
Nussey are studying human nature and the art of flirtation as exhibited
by curates. Charlotte administers to her friend a formidable amount of
worldly wisdom, thus avenging herself for the dance Miss Nussey led her
round the throne of grace.

For, though that morbid excitement and introspection belonged solely to
Charlotte's days of exile, Miss Nussey was at the bottom of it. Mary
Taylor would have been a far robuster influence. But Charlotte's
friendship for Mary Taylor, warm as it was, strikes cold beside her
passionate affection for Ellen Nussey. She brought her own fire to that,
and her own extraordinary capacity for pain. Her letters show every
phase of this friendship, its birth, its unfolding; and then the sudden
leaping of the flame, its writhing and its torture. She writes with a
lover's ardour and impatience. "Write to me very soon and dispel my
uncertainty, or I shall get impatient, almost irritable." "I read your
letter with dismay. Ellen--what shall I do without you? Why are we to be
denied each other's society? It is an inscrutable fatality.... Why are
we to be divided?" (She is at Roe Head, and Roe Head suggests the
answer.) "Surely, Ellen, it must be because we are in danger of loving
each other too well--of losing sight of the _Creator_ in idolatry of the
_creature_." She prays to be resigned, and records "a sweet, placid
sensation like those that I remember used to visit me when I was a
little child, and on Sunday evenings in summer stood by the window
reading the life of a certain French nobleman who attained a purer and
higher degree of sanctity than has been known since the days of the
Early Martyrs. I thought of my own Ellen--" "I wish I could see you, my
darling; I have lavished the warmest affections of a very hot tenacious
heart upon you; if you grow cold, it is over." She was only twenty-one.

A few more years and the leaping and the writhing and the torture cease,
the fire burns to a steady, inextinguishable glow. There is gaiety in
Charlotte's tenderness. She is "infuriated" on finding a jar in her
trunk. "At first I hoped it was empty, but when I found it heavy and
replete, I could have hurled it all the way back to Birstall. However,
the inscription A.B. softened me much. You ought first to be tenderly
kissed, and then as tenderly whipped. Emily is just now sitting on the
floor of the bedroom where I am writing, looking at her apples. She
smiled when I gave them and the collar as your presents, with an
expression at once well pleased and slightly surprised."

The religious fervours and the soul-searchings have ceased long ago, so
has Miss Nussey's brief spiritual ascendency. But the friendship and the
letters never cease. They go on for twenty years, through exile and
suffering, through bereavement, through fame and through marriage,
uninterrupted and, except for one brief period, unabridged. There is
nothing in any biography to compare with those letters to Ellen Nussey.
If Charlotte Brontë had not happened to be a great genius as well as a
great woman, they alone would have furnished forth her complete
biography. There is no important detail of her mere life that is not
given in them. Mrs. Gaskell relied almost entirely on them, and on
information supplied to her by Miss Nussey. And each critic and
biographer who followed her, from Sir Wemyss Reid to Mr. Clement
Shorter, drew from the same source. Miss Nussey was almost the only safe
repository of material relating to Charlotte Brontë. She had possessed
hundreds of her letters and, with that amiable weakness which was the
defect of her charming quality, she was unable to withhold any of them
from the importunate researcher. There seems to have been nothing,
except one thing, that Charlotte did not talk about to Miss Nussey when
they sat with their feet on the fender and their hair in curl-papers.
That one thing was her writing. It is quite possible that in those
curl-paper confidences Miss Nussey learnt the truth about Charlotte's
friend, M. Héger. She never learnt anything about Charlotte's genius. In
everything that concerned her genius Charlotte was silent and secret
with her friend. That was the line, the very sharp and impassable line
she drew between her "dear, _dear_ Ellen", her "dearest Nel", and her
sisters, Anne and Emily. The freemasonry of friendship ended there. You
may search in vain through even her later correspondence with Miss
Nussey for any more than perfunctory and extraneous allusions to her
works. It was as if they had never been. Every detail of her daily life
is there, the outer and the inner things, the sewing and ironing and
potato-peeling, together with matters of the heart and soul, searchings,
experiences, agonies; the figures of her father, her brother, her
sisters, move there, vivid and alive; and old Tabby and the curates; and
the very animals, Keeper and Flossie, and the little black cat, Tom,
that died and made Emily sorry; but of the one thing not a word. The
letters to Ellen Nussey following the publication of _Jane Eyre_ are all
full of gossip about Miss Ringrose and the Robinsons. Presently Ellen
hears a rumour of publication. Charlotte repudiates it and friction
follows.

Charlotte writes: "Dear Ellen,--write another letter and explain that
note of yours distinctly.... Let me know what you heard, and from whom
you heard it. You do wrong to feel pain from any circumstance, or to
suppose yourself slighted...." "Dear Ellen,--All I can say to you about
a certain matter is this: the report ... must have had its origin in
some absurd misunderstanding. I have given _no one_ a right to affirm or
hint in the most distant manner that I am publishing (humbug!). Whoever
has said it--if anyone has, which I doubt--is no friend of mine. Though
twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none. I scout the idea
utterly. Whoever, after I have distinctly rejected the charge, urges it
upon me, will do an unkind and ill-bred thing." If Miss Nussey is asked,
she is authorized by Miss Brontë to say, "that she repels and disowns
every accusation of the kind. You may add, if you please, that if anyone
has her confidence, you believe you have, and she has made no drivelling
confessions to you on that subject." "Dear Ellen,--I shall begin by
telling you that you have no right to be angry at the length of time I
have suffered to slip by since receiving your last, without answering
it; because you have often kept me waiting much longer, and having made
this gracious speech, thereby obviating reproaches, I will add that I
think it a great shame, when you receive a long and thoroughly
interesting letter, full of the sort of details you fully relish, to
read the same with selfish pleasure, and not even have the manners to
thank your correspondent, and express how very much you enjoyed the
narrative. I _did_ enjoy the narrative in your last very keenly....
Which of the Miss Woolers did you see at Mr. Allbutts?"

A beautiful but most unequal friendship. "The sort of details you fully
relish--" How that phrase must have rankled! You can hear the passionate
protest: "Those details are not what I relish in the least. Putting me
off with your Woolers and your Allbutts! If only you had told me about
_Jane Eyre_!" For it turned out that all the time Mary Taylor had been
told. The inference was that Mary Taylor, with her fits of caution,
could be trusted.

This silence of Charlotte's must have been most painful and
incomprehensible to the poor Ellen who was Caroline Helstone. She had
been the first to divine Charlotte's secret; for she kept the letters.
She must have felt like some tender and worshipping wife to whom all
doors in the house of the beloved are thrown open, except the door of
the sanctuary, which is persistently slammed in her charming face. There
must have come to her moments of terrible insight when she felt the
danger and the mystery of the flaming spirit she had tried to hold. But
Charlotte's friend can wear her half-pathetic immortality with grace.
She could at least say: "She told me things she never told anyone else.
I have hundreds of her letters. And I had her heart."

       *       *       *       *       *

Nothing so much as this correspondence reveals the appalling solitude in
which the Brontës lived. Here is their dearest and most intimate friend,
and she is one to whom they can never speak of the thing that interested
them most. No doubt "our best plays mean secret plays"; but Charlotte,
at any rate, suffered from this secrecy. There was nothing to counteract
Miss Nussey's direful influence on her spiritual youth. "Papa" highly
approved of the friendship. He wished it to continue, and it did; and it
was the best that Charlotte had. I know few things more pathetic than
the cry that Charlotte, at twenty-one, sent out of her solitude (with
some verses) to Southey and to Wordsworth. Southey told her that,
"Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not
to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure
will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To
those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be
less eager for celebrity." A sound, respectable, bourgeois opinion so
far, but Southey went farther. "Write poetry for its own sake," he said;
and he could hardly have said better. Charlotte treasured the letter,
and wrote on the cover of it, "Southey's advice, to be kept for ever."
Wordsworth's advice, I am sorry to say, provoked her to flippancy.

And that, out of the solitude, was all. Not the ghost, not the shadow of
an Influence came to the three sisters. There never was genius that owed
so little to influence as theirs.

I know that in Charlotte's case there is said to have been an Influence.
An Influence without which she would have remained for ever in
obscurity, with _Villette_, with _Shirley_, with _Jane Eyre_, with _The
Professor_, unborn, unconceived.

Need I say that the Influence is--M. Héger?

"The sojourn in Brussels," says Mr. Clement Shorter, "made Miss Brontë
an author," and he is only following Sir Wemyss Reid, who was the first
to establish Brussels as the turning-point. Mr. Shorter does not believe
in M. Héger as the inspirer of passion, but he does believe in him as
the inspirer of genius. He thinks it exceedingly probable that had not
circumstances led Charlotte Brontë to spend some time at Brussels not
only would "the world never have heard of her", but it would never have
heard of her sisters. He is quite certain about Charlotte anyhow; she
could not have "arrived" had she not met M. Héger. "She went," he says,
"to Brussels full of the crude ambitions, the semi-literary impulses
that are so common on the fringe of the writing world. She left Brussels
a woman of genuine cultivation, of educated tastes, armed with just the
equipment that was to enable her to write the books of which two
generations of her countrymen have been justly proud."

This is saying that Charlotte Brontë had no means of expression before
she wrote _devoirs_ under M. Héger. True, her genius did not find itself
until after she left Brussels, that is to say, not until she was nearly
thirty. I have not read any of her works as Lord Charles Albert Florian
Wellesley, and I do not imagine they were works of genius. But that only
means that Charlotte Brontë's genius took time. She was one of those
novelists who do not write novels before they are nearly thirty. But she
could write. Certain fragments of her very earliest work show that from
the first she had not only the means, but very considerable mastery of
expression. What is more, they reveal in germ the qualities that marked
her style in its maturity. Her styles rather, for she had several. There
is her absolutely simple style, in which she is perfect; her didactic
style, her fantastic style, which are mere temporary aberrations; and
her inspired style, in which at her worst she is merely flamboyant and
redundant, and at her best no less than perfect. You will find a faint,
embryonic foreshadowing of her perfections in the fragments given by
Mrs. Gaskell. There is THE HISTORY OF THE YEAR 1829, beginning: "Once
Papa lent my sister Maria a book. It was an old geography book; she
wrote on its blank leaf, "Papa lent me this book." This book is a
hundred and twenty years old; it is at this moment lying before me.
While I write this I am in the kitchen of the Parsonage, Haworth; Tabby,
the servant, is washing up the breakfast things, and Anne, my youngest
sister (Maria was my eldest), is kneeling on a chair, looking at some
cakes, which Tabby has been baking for us." You cannot beat that for
pure simplicity of statement. There is another fragment that might have
come straight out of _Jane Eyre_. "One night, about the time when the
cold sleet and stormy fogs of November are succeeded by the snowstorms
and high piercing night-winds of confirmed winter, we were all sitting
round the warm, blazing kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrel
with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which she
came off victorious, no candle having been produced." And there is a
dream-story that Mr. Clement Shorter gives. She is in the "Mines of
Cracone", under the floor of the sea. "But in the midst of all this
magnificence I felt an indescribable sense of fear and terror, for the
sea raged above us, and by the awful and tumultuous noises of roaring
winds and dashing waves, it seemed as if the storm was violent. And now
the massy pillars groaned beneath the pressure of the ocean, and the
glittering arches seemed about to be overwhelmed. When I heard the
rushing waters and saw a mighty flood rolling towards me I gave a loud
shriek of terror." The dream changes: she is in a desert full of barren
rocks and high mountains, where she sees "by the light of his own fiery
eyes a royal lion rousing himself from his kingly slumbers. His terrible
eye was fixed upon me, and the desert rang, and the rocks echoed with
the tremendous roar of fierce delight which he uttered as he sprang
towards me." And there is her letter to the editor of one of their
_Little Magazines_: "Sir,--It is well known that the Genii have declared
that unless they perform certain arduous duties every year, of a
mysterious nature, all the worlds in the firmament will be burnt up, and
gathered together in one mighty globe, which will roll in solitary
splendour through the vast wilderness of space, inhabited only by the
four high princes of the Genii, till time shall be succeeded by
Eternity; and the impudence of this is only to be paralleled by another
of their assertions, namely, that by their magic might they can reduce
the world to a desert, the purest waters to streams of livid poison, and
the clearest lakes to stagnant water, the pestilential vapours of which
shall slay all living creatures, except the bloodthirsty beast of the
forest, and the ravenous bird of the rock. But that in the midst of this
desolation the palace of the chief Genii shall rise sparkling in the
wilderness, and the horrible howl of their war-cry shall spread over the
land at morning, at noontide, and at night; but that they shall have
their annual feast over the bones of the dead, and shall yearly rejoice
with the joy of victors. I think, sir, that the horrible wickedness of
this needs no remark, and therefore I hasten to subscribe myself, etc."

Puerile, if you like, and puerile all the stuff that Charlotte Brontë
wrote before eighteen-forty-six; but her style at thirteen, in its very
rhythms and cadences, is the unmistakable embryo of her style at thirty;
and M. Héger no more cured her of its faults that he could teach her its
splendours. Something that was not Brussels made Miss Brontë a
prodigious author at thirteen. The mere mass of her _Juvenilia_
testifies to a most ungovernable bent. Read the list of works, appalling
in their length, which this child produced in a period of fifteen
months; consider that she produced nothing but melancholy letters during
her "sojourn in Brussels"; and compare M. Héger's academic precepts with
her practice, with the wild sweep and exuberance of her style when she
has shaken him off, and her genius gets possession of her.

I know there is a gulf fixed between Currer Bell and Charles Townsend,
who succeeded Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley and the Marquis of
Douro, about eighteen-thirty-eight; but it is bridged by the later
_Poems_ which show Charlotte's genius struggling through a wrong medium
to the right goal. She does not know--after the sojourn in Brussels she
does not yet know--that her right medium is prose. She knew no more than
she knew in November, eighteen-forty-one, when, on the eve of her flight
from Haworth, she writes: "The plain fact is, I was not, I am not now,
certain of my destiny." It was not until two years after she had
returned to Haworth that she received her certainty. For posterity,
overpowered by the labour of the Brontë specialists, it may seem as if
Charlotte Brontë's genius owed everything to her flight from Haworth. In
reality her flight merely coincided with the inevitable shooting of its
wings; and the specialists have mistaken coincidence for destiny.

Heaven only knows what would have happened to her genius if, blind to
her destiny, she had remained in Brussels. For, once there, its
wing-feathers left off growing. Its way was blocked by every conceivable
hostile and obstructive thing. Madame Héger was hostile, and Monsieur, I
think, purely obstructive. Emily saw through him, and denounced his
method as fatal to all originality. Charlotte, to be sure, called him
"my dear master, the only master that I ever had", but if that was not
her "absurd charity", it was only her Brontësque way. There was no sense
in which he was her master. He taught her French; to the very last the
habit of using "a few French words" was the King Charles's head in her
manuscripts; and the French he taught her did her harm. The restraint he
could and would have taught her she never learnt until her genius had
had, in defiance and in spite of him, its full fling.

And what a fling! It is the way of genius to look after itself. In spite
of obstacles, Charlotte Brontë's took hold of every man and woman that
crossed and barred its path, and ultimately it avenged itself on
Monsieur and on Madame Héger. Those two were made for peaceful,
honourable conjugal obscurity, but it was their luck to harbour a
half-fledged and obstructed genius in their Pensionnat, a genius
thirsting for experience; and somehow, between them, they contrived to
make it suffer. That was their tragedy. Monsieur's case is pitiful; for
he was kind and well-meaning, and he was fond of Charlotte; and yet,
because of Charlotte, there is no peace for him in the place where he
has gone. Her genius has done with him, but her ghost, like some malign
and awful destiny, pursues him. No sooner does he sink back quiet in his
grave than somebody unearths him. Why cannot he be allowed to rest, once
for all, in his amiable unimportance? He became, poor man, important
only by the use that Charlotte's genius made of him. It seized him as it
would have seized on any other interesting material that came its way.
Without him we might have had another Rochester, and we should not have
had any Paul Emanuel, which would have been a pity; that is all.

There is hardly any hope that Brontë specialists will accept this view.
For them the sojourn in Brussels will still stand as the turning-point
in Charlotte Brontë's career. Yet for her, long afterwards, Brussels
must have stood as the danger threatening it. She would have said, I
think, that her sojourn in Haworth was the turning-point. It was destiny
that turned Emily back to Haworth from the destruction that waited for
her at Brussels, so that she conceived and brought forth _Wuthering
Heights_; her own destiny that she secretly foreknew, consoling and
beneficent. And, no doubt, it was destiny of a sort, unforeknown,
deceitful, apparently malignant, that sent Charlotte back again to
Brussels after her aunt's death. It wrung from her her greatest book,
_Villette_. But Haworth, I think, would have wrung from her another and
perhaps a greater.

For the first-fruits of the sojourn in Brussels was neither _Villette_
nor _Jane Eyre_, but _The Professor_. And _The Professor_ has none of
the qualities of _Jane Eyre_ or of _Villette_; it has none of the
qualities of Charlotte's later work at all; above all, none of that
master quality which M. Héger is supposed to have specially evoked.
Charlotte, indeed, could not well have written a book more destructive
to the legend of the upheaval, the tragic passion, the furnace of
temptation and the flight. Nothing could be less like a furnace than the
atmosphere of _The Professor_. From the first page to the last there is
not one pulse, not one breath of passion in it. The bloodless thing
comes coldly, slowly tentatively, from the birth. It is almost as frigid
as a _devoir_ written under M. Héger's eye. The theorists, I notice, are
careful not to draw attention to _The Professor_; and they are wise, for
attention drawn to _The Professor_ makes sad work of their theory.

Remember, on the theory, Charlotte Brontë has received her great
awakening, her great enlightenment; she is primed with passion; the
whole wonderful material of _Villette_ is in her hand; she has before
her her unique opportunity. You ought, on the theory, to see her
hastening to it, a passionate woman, pouring out her own one and supreme
experience, and, with the brand of Brussels on her, never afterwards
really doing anything else. Whereas the first thing the impassioned
Charlotte does (after a year of uninspired and ineffectual poetizing) is
to sit down and write _The Professor_; a book, remarkable not by any
means for its emotion, but for its cold and dispassionate observation.
Charlotte eliminates herself, and is Crimsworth in order that she may
observe Frances Henri the more dispassionately. She is inspired solely
by the analytic spirit, and either cannot, or will not, let herself go.
But she does what she meant to do. She had it in mind to write, not a
great work of imagination, but a grey and sober book, and a grey and
sober book is what she writes. A book concerned only with things and
people she has seen and known; a book, therefore, from which passion and
the poetry that passion is must be rigidly excluded, as belonging to
the region of things not, strictly speaking, known. It is as if she had
written _The Professor_ in rivalry with her sister Anne, both of them
austerely determined to put aside all imagination and deal with
experience and experience alone. Thus you obtain sincerity, you obtain
truth. And with nothing but experience before her, she writes a book
that has no passion in it, a book almost as bloodless and as gentle as
her sister Anne's.

Let us not disparage _The Professor_. Charlotte herself did not
disparage it. In her Preface she refused to solicit "indulgence for it
on the plea of a first attempt. A first attempt," she says, "it
certainly was not, as the pen which wrote it had been previously worn in
a practice of some years." In that Preface she shows plainly that at the
very outset of her career she had no sterner critic than herself; that
she was aware of her sins and her temptations, and of the dangers that
lurked for her in her imaginative style. "In many a crude effort,
destroyed almost as soon as composed, I had got over any such taste as I
might have had for ornamented and decorated composition, and come to
prefer what was plain and homely." Observe, it is not to the lessons of
the "master", but to the creation and destruction that went on at
Haworth that she attributes this purgation. She is not aware of the
extent to which she can trust her genius, of what will happen when she
has fairly let herself go. She is working on a method that rules her
choice of subject. "I said to myself that my hero should work his way
through life, as I had seen real, living men work theirs--that he should
never get a shilling that he had not earned--that no sudden turns should
lift him in a moment to wealth and high station; that whatever small
competency he might gain should be won by the sweat of his brow; that
before he could find so much as an arbour to sit down in, he should
master at least half the ascent of the Hill Difficulty; that he should
not marry even a beautiful girl or a lady of rank."

There was no fine madness in that method; but its very soundness and
sanity show the admirable spirit in which Charlotte Brontë approached
her art. She was to return to the method of _The Professor_ again and
yet again, when she suspected herself of having given imagination too
loose a rein. The remarkable thing was that she should have begun with
it.

And in some respects _The Professor_ is more finished, better
constructed than any of her later books. There is virtue in its extreme
sobriety. Nothing could be more delicate and firm than the drawing of
Frances Henri; nothing in its grey style more admirable than the scene
where Crimsworth, having found Frances in the cemetery, takes her to her
home in the Rue Notre Dame aux Neiges.

"Stepping over a little mat of green wool, I found myself in a small
room with a painted floor and a square of green carpet in the middle;
the articles of furniture were few, but all bright and exquisitely
clean--order reigned through its narrow limits--such order as it suited
my punctilious soul to behold.... Poor the place might be; poor truly it
was, but its neatness was better than elegance, and had but a bright
little fire shone on that clean hearth, I should have deemed it more
attractive than a palace. No fire was there, however, and no fuel laid
ready to light; the lace-mender was unable to allow herself that
indulgence.... Frances went into an inner room to take off her bonnet,
and she came out a model of frugal neatness, with her well-fitting black
stuff dress, so accurately defining her elegant bust and taper waist,
with her spotless white collar turned back from a fair and shapely
neck, with her plenteous brown hair arranged in smooth bands on her
temples and in a large Grecian plait behind: ornaments she had
none--neither brooch, ring, nor ribbon; she did well enough without
them--perfection of fit, proportion of form, grace of carriage,
agreeably supplied their place." Frances lights a fire, having fetched
wood and coal in a basket.

"'It is her whole stock, and she will exhaust it out of hospitality,'
thought I.

"'What are you going to do?' I asked: 'not surely to light a fire this
hot evening? I shall be smothered.'

"'Indeed, Monsieur, I feel it very chilly since the rain began; besides,
I must boil the water for my tea, for I take tea on Sundays; you will be
obliged to bear the heat.'"

And Frances makes the tea, and sets the table, and brings out her
pistolets, and offers them to Monsieur, and it is all very simple and
idyllic. So is the scene where Crimsworth, without our knowing exactly
how he does it, declares himself to Frances. The dialogue is half in
French, and does not lend itself to quotation, but it compares very
favourably with the more daring comedy of courtship in _Jane Eyre_.
Frances is delicious in her very solidity, her absence of abandonment.
She refuses flatly to give up her teaching at Crimsworth's desire,
Crimsworth, who will have six thousand francs a year.

"'How rich you are, Monsieur!' And then she stirred uneasily in my arms.
'Three thousand francs!' she murmured, 'while I get only twelve
hundred!' She went on faster. 'However, it must be so for the present;
and, Monsieur, were you not saying something about my giving up my
place? Oh no! I shall hold it fast'; and her little fingers emphatically
tightened on mine.

"'Think of marrying you to be kept by you, Monsieur! I could not do it;
and how dull my days would be! You would be away teaching in close,
noisy schoolrooms, from morning till evening, and I should be lingering
at home, unemployed and solitary. I should get depressed and sullen, and
you would soon tire of me.'

"'Frances, you could yet read and study--two things you like so well.'

"'Monsieur, I could not; I like contemplative life, but I like an active
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.

But when her enemies accuse Charlotte Brontë of glorifying passion they
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.'

"'I saw--I now see--a woman-Titan; her robe of blue air spreads to the
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.

"'While he, M. Paul, was on these painful topics, he would dare my anger
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.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of Charlotte Brontë's _Poems_ there is not much to say. They are better
poems than Branwell's or Anne's, but that does not make them very good.
Still, they are interesting, and they are important, because they are
the bridge by which Charlotte Brontë passed into her own dominion. She
took Wordsworth with his Poems and Ballads for her guide, and he misled
her and delayed her on her way, and kept her a long time standing on her
bridge. For in her novels, and her novels only, Charlotte was a poet. In
her poems she is a novelist, striving and struggling for expression in a
cramped form, an imperfect and improper medium. But most indubitably a
novelist. Nearly all her poems which are not artificial are impersonal.
They deal with "situations", with "psychological problems", that cry
aloud for prose. There is the "Wife" who seems to have lived a long,
adventurous life with "William" through many poems; there is the
deserted wife and mother in "Mementos"; there is "Frances", the deserted
maiden; there is "Gilbert" with his guilty secret and his suicide, a
triple domestic tragedy in the three acts of a three-part ballad; there
is the lady in "Preference", who prefers her husband to her passionate
and profoundly deluded lover; there is the woman in "Apostasy", wrecked
in the conflict between love and priestcraft; and there is little else
beside. These poems are straws, showing the way of the wind that bloweth
where it listeth.

       *       *       *       *       *

Too much has been written about Charlotte Brontë, and far too much has
been read. You come away from it with an enormous mass of printed stuff
wrecked in your memory, letters, simply hundreds of letters, legends and
theories huddled together in a heap, with all values and proportions
lost; and your impression is of tumult and of suffering, and of a
multitude of confused and incongruous happenings; funerals and
flirtations, or something very like flirtations, to the sound of the
passing bell and sexton's chisel; upheavals of soul, flights to and from
Brussels, interminable years of exile, and of lurid, tragic passion;
years, interminable, monotonous years of potato-peeling and all manner
of household piety; scenes of debauchery, horrors of opium and of drink;
celebrity, cataclysmal celebrity, rushings up to town in storm and
darkness, dim coffee-houses in Paternoster Row, dinner-parties; deaths,
funerals, melancholia; and still celebrity; years, interminable,
monotonous years of blazing celebrity, sounds of the literary workshop
overpowering the sexton's chisel; then marriage, sudden and swift; then
death. And in the midst of it all, one small and rather absurd and
obscure figure, tossed to and fro, said to be Charlotte Brontë.

What an existence!

This is the impression created by the bibliographical total. But sweep
four-fifths of it away, all the legends and half the letters, and sort
and set out what remains, observing values and proportions, and you get
an outer life where no great and moving event ever came, saving only
death (Charlotte's marriage hardly counts beside it); an outer life of a
strange and almost oppressive simplicity and silence; and an inner life,
tumultuous and profound in suffering, a life to all appearances
frustrate, where all nourishment of the emotions was reduced to the
barest allowance a woman's heart can depend on and yet live; and none
the less a life that out of that starvation diet raised enough of rich
and vivid and superb emotion to decorate a hundred women's lives; an
inner life which her genius fed and was fed from, for which no reality,
no experience, could touch its own intensity of realization. And, genius
apart, in the region of actual and ostensible emotion, no one of us can
measure the depth of her adoration of duty, or the depth, the force and
volume of her passion for her own people, and for the earth trodden by
their feet, the earth that covered them. Beside it every other feeling
was temporary and insignificant. In the light of it you see Charlotte
Brontë's figure for ever simple and beautiful and great; behind her for
ever the black-grey setting of her village and the purple of her moors.
That greatness and beauty and simplicity is destroyed by any effort to
detach her from her background. She may seem susceptible to the alien
influences of exile; but it is as an exile that she suffers; and her
most inspired moments are her moments of return, when she wrote prose
like this: "The moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale; as glad as if
she gave herself to his fierce caress with love. No Endymion will watch
for his goddess to-night: there are no flocks on the mountains."

       *       *       *       *       *

Around the figure of Emily Brontë there is none of that clamour and
confusion. She stands apart in an enduring silence, and guards for ever
her secret and her mystery. By the mercy of heaven the swarm of gossips
and of theorists has passed her by. She has no legend or hardly any. So
completely has she been passed over that when Madame Duclaux came to
write the Life of Emily Brontë she found little to add to Mrs. Gaskell's
meagre record beyond that story, which she tells with an incomparable
simplicity and reticence, of Emily in her mortal illness, sitting by the
hearth, combing her long hair till the comb slips from her fingers.

That is worth all the reams, the terrible reams that have been written
about Charlotte.

There can be no doubt that Emily Brontë found her shelter behind
Charlotte's fame; but she was protected most of all by the
unapproachable, the unique and baffling quality of her temperament and
of her genius. Her own people seem to have felt it; Charlotte herself in
that preface to _Wuthering Heights_, which stands as her last
vindication and eulogy of her dead sister, even Charlotte betrays a
curious reservation and reluctance. You feel that Emily's genius
inspired her with a kind of sacred terror.

Charlotte destroyed all records of her sister except her poems. Between
six and seven hundred of her own letters have been published; there are
two of Emily's. They tell little or nothing. And there was that diary
she kept for Anne, where she notes with extreme brevity the things that
are happening in her family. There never was a diary wherein the soul of
the diarist was so well concealed.

And yet, because of this silence, this absence of legend and conjecture,
we see Emily Brontë more clearly than we can ever hope to see Charlotte
now. Though hardly anything is known of her, what _is_ known is
authentic; it comes straight from those who knew and loved her: from
Charlotte, from Ellen Nussey, from the servants at the Parsonage. Even
of her outward and visible presence we have a clearer image. The lines
are fewer, but they are more vivid. You see her tall and slender, in her
rough clothes, tramping the moors with the form and the step of a virile
adolescent. Shirley, the "_bête fauve_", is Emily civilized. You see her
head carried high and crowned with its long, dark hair, coiled simply,
caught up with a comb. You see her face, honey-pale, her slightly high,
slightly aquiline nose; her beautiful eyes, dark-grey, luminous; the
"kind, kindling, liquid eyes" that Ellen Nussey saw; and their look, one
moment alert, intent, and the next, inaccessibly remote.

I have seen such kind and kindling eyes in the face of a visionary, born
with a profound, incurable indifference to the material event; for whom
the Real is the incredible, unapparent harmony that flows above,
beneath, and within the gross flux of appearances. To him it is the sole
thing real. That kind and kindling look I know to be simply a light
reflected from the surface of the dream. It is anything but cold; it has
indeed a certain tender flame; but you would be profoundly mistaken if
you argued from it more than the faintest polite interest in you and
your affairs. The kindling of Emily Brontë's eyes I take to have had at
times something of the same unearthly quality. Strangers received from
her an impression as of a creature utterly removed from them; a
remoteness scarcely human, hard to reconcile with her known tenderness
for every living thing. She seems to have had a passionate repugnance to
alien and external contacts, and to have felt no more than an almost
reluctant liking for the lovable and charming Ellen Nussey. Indeed, she
regarded Charlotte's friend with the large and virile tolerance that
refuses to be charmed.

And yet in the depths of her virginal nature there was something
fiercely tender and maternal. There can be no doubt that she cared for
Charlotte, who called her "Mine own bonnie love"; but she would seem to
have cared far more for Anne who was young and helpless, and for
Branwell who was helpless and most weak.

Thus there is absolutely nothing known of Emily that destroys or
disturbs the image that Haworth holds of her; nothing that detaches her
for a moment from her own people, and from her own place. Her days of
exile count not at all in her thirty years of home. No separation ever
broke, for one hour that counted, the bonds that bound her to her moors,
or frustrated the divine passion of her communion with their earth and
sky. Better still, no tale of passion such as they tell of Charlotte was
ever told of Emily.

It may be told yet, for no secret thing belonging to this disastrous
family is sacred. There may be somewhere some awful worshipper of Emily
Brontë, impatient of her silence and unsatisfied with her strange, her
virgin and inaccessible beauty, who will some day make up a story of
some love-affair, some passion kindred to Catherine Earnshaw's passion
for Heathcliff, of which her moors have kept the secret; and he will
tell his tale. But we shall at least know that he had made it up. And
even so, it will have been better for that man if he had never been
born. He will have done his best to destroy or to deface the loveliness
of a figure unique in literature. And he will have ignored the one
perfect, the one essentially true picture of Emily Brontë, which is to
be found in Maurice Maeterlinck's _Wisdom and Destiny_.

To M. Maeterlinck she is the supreme instance of the self-sufficing
soul, independent and regardless of the material event. She shows the
emptiness, the impotence, the insignificance of all that we call
"experience," beside the spirit that endures. "Not a single event ever
paused as it passed by her threshold; yet did every event she could
claim take place in her heart, with incomparable force and beauty, with
matchless precision and detail. We say that nothing ever happened; but
did not all things really happen to her much more directly and tangibly
than with most of us, seeing that everything that took place about her,
everything that she saw or heard was transformed within her into
thoughts and feelings, into indulgent love, admiration, adoration of
life...?

"Of her happiness none can doubt. Not in the soul of the best of all
those whose happiness has lasted longest, been the most active,
diversified, perfect, could more imperishable harvest be found, than in
the soul Emily Brontë lays bare. If to her there came nothing of all
that passes in love, sorrow, passion or anguish, still did she possess
all that abides when emotion has faded away."[A]

[Footnote A: _Wisdom and Destiny_, translated by Alfred Sutro.]

What was true of Charlotte, that her inner life was luminous with
intense realization, was a hundred times more true of Emily. It was so
true that beside it nothing else that can be said is altogether true. It
is not necessary for a man to be convinced of the illusory nature of
time and of material happenings in order to appreciate Charlotte's
genius; but his comprehension of Emily's will be adequate or otherwise,
according to the passion and sincerity with which he embraces that idea.
And he must have, further, a sense of the reality behind the illusion.
It is through her undying sense of it that Emily Brontë is great. She
had none of the proud appearances of the metaphysical mind; she did not,
so far as we know, devour, like George Eliot, whole systems of
philosophy in her early youth. Her passionate pantheism was not derived;
it was established in her own soul. She was a mystic, not by religious
vocation, but by temperament and by ultimate vision. She offers the
apparent anomaly of extreme detachment and of an unconquerable love of
life.

It was the highest and the purest passion that you can well conceive.
For life gave her nothing in return. It treated her worse than it
treated Charlotte. She had none of the things that, after all, Charlotte
had; neither praise nor fame in her lifetime; nor friendship, nor love,
nor vision of love. All these things "passed her by with averted head";
and she stood in her inviolable serenity and watched them go, without
putting out her hand to one of them. You cannot surprise her in any
piteous gesture of desire or regret. And, unlike Charlotte, she made it
impossible for you to pity her.

It is this superb attitude to life, this independence of the material
event, this detachment from the stream of circumstance, that marks her
from her sister; for Charlotte is at moments pitifully immersed in the
stream of circumstance, pitifully dependent on the material event. It
is true that she kept her head above the stream, and that the failure of
the material event did not frustrate or hinder her ultimate achievement.
But Charlotte's was not by any means "a chainless soul". It struggled
and hankered after the unattainable. What she attained and realized she
realized and attained in her imagination only. She knew nothing of the
soul's more secret and intimate possession. And even her imagination
waited to some extent upon experience. When Charlotte wrote of passion,
of its tragic suffering, or of its ultimate appeasing, she, after all,
wrote of things that might have happened to her. But when Emily wrote of
passion, she wrote of a thing that, so far as she personally was
concerned, not only was not and had not been, but never could be. It was
true enough of Charlotte that she created. But of Emily it was
absolutely and supremely true.

Hers is not the language of frustration, but of complete and satisfying
possession. It may seem marvellous in the mouth of a woman destitute of
all emotional experience, in the restricted sense; but the real wonder
would have been a _Wuthering Heights_ born of any personal emotion; so
certain is it that it was through her personal destitution that her
genius was so virile and so rich. At its hour it found her virgin, not
only to passion but to the bare idea of passion, to the inner and
immaterial event.

And her genius was great, not only through her stupendous imagination,
but because it fed on the still more withdrawn and secret sources of her
soul. If she had had no genius she would yet be great because of what
took place within her, the fusion of her soul with the transcendent and
enduring life.

It was there that, possessing nothing, she possessed all things; and her
secret escapes you if you are aware only of her splendid paganism. She
never speaks the language of religious resignation like Anne and
Charlotte. It is most unlikely that she relied, openly or in secret, on
"the merits of the Redeemer", or on any of the familiar consolations of
religion. As she bowed to no disaster and no grief, consolation would
have been the last thing in any religion that she looked for. But, for
height and depth of supernatural attainment, there is no comparison
between Emily's grip of divine reality and poor Anne's spasmodic and
despairing clutch; and none between Charlotte's piety, her "God
willing"; "I suppose I ought to be thankful", and Emily's acceptance and
endurance of the event.

I am reminded that one event she neither accepted nor endured. She
fought death. Her spirit lifted the pathetic, febrile struggle of
weakness with corruption, and turned it to a splendid, Titanic, and
unearthly combat.

And yet it was in her life rather than her death that she was splendid.
There is something shocking and repellent in her last defiance. It
shrieks discord with the endurance and acceptance, braver than all
revolt, finer than all resignation, that was the secret of her genius
and of her life.

There is no need to reconcile this supreme detachment with the storm and
agony that rages through _Wuthering Heights_, or with the passion for
life and adoration of the earth that burns there, an imperishable flame;
or with Catherine Earnshaw's dream of heaven: "heaven did not seem to be
my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and
the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the
heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy".
Catherine Earnshaw's dream has been cited innumerable times to prove
that Emily Brontë was a splendid pagan. I do not know what it does
prove, if it is not the absolute and immeasurable greatness of her
genius, that, dwelling as she undoubtedly did dwell, in the secret and
invisible world, she could yet conceive and bring forth Catherine
Earnshaw.

It is not possible to diminish the force or to take away one word of Mr.
Swinburne's magnificent eulogy. There _was_ in the "passionate great
genius of Emily Brontë", "a dark, unconscious instinct as of primitive
nature-worship". That was where she was so poised and so complete; that
she touches earth and heaven, and is at once intoxicated with the
splendour of the passion of living, and holds her spirit in security and
her heart in peace. She plunged with Catherine Earnshaw into the thick
of the tumult, and her detachment is not more wonderful than her
immersion.

It is our own imperfect vision that is bewildered by the union in her of
these antagonistic attitudes. It is not only entirely possible and
compatible, but, if your soul be comprehensive, it is inevitable that
you should adore the forms of life, and yet be aware of their
impermanence; that you should affirm with equal fervour their illusion
and the radiance of the reality that manifests itself in them. Emily
Brontë was nothing if not comprehensive. There was no distance, no abyss
too vast, no antagonism, no contradiction too violent and appalling for
her embracing soul. Without a hint, so far as we know, from any
philosophy, by a sheer flash of genius she pierced to the secret of the
world and crystallized it in two lines:

  The earth that wakes _one_ human heart to feeling
  Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

It is doubtful if she ever read a line of Blake; yet it is Blake that
her poems perpetually recall, and it is Blake's vision that she has
reached there. She too knew what it was

  To see a world in a grain of sand,
    And a Heaven in a wild flower,
  To hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
    And Eternity in an hour.

She sees by a flash what he saw continuously; but it is by the same
light she sees it and wins her place among the mystics.

Her mind was not always poised. It swung between its vision of
transparent unity and its love of earth for earth's sake. There are at
least four poems of hers that show this entirely natural oscillation.

In one, a nameless poem, the Genius of Earth calls to the visionary
soul:

  Shall earth no more inspire thee,
    Thou lonely dreamer now?
  Since passion may not fire thee,
    Shall nature cease to bow?

  Thy mind is ever moving
    In regions dark to thee;
  Recall its useless roving,
    Come back, and dwell with me.

       *       *       *       *       *

  Few hearts to mortals given
    On earth so wildly pine;
  Yet few would ask a heaven
    More like this earth than thine.

"The Night-Wind" sings the same song, lures with the same enchantment;
and the human voice answers, resisting:

  Play with the scented flower,
    The young tree's supple bough,
  And leave my human feelings
    In their own course to flow.

But the other voice is stronger:

  The wanderer would not heed me;
    Its kiss grew warmer still.
  "Oh, come," it sighed so sweetly;
    "I'll win thee 'gainst thy will.

  "Were we not friends from childhood?
    Have I not loved thee long?
  As long as thou, the solemn night,
    Whose silence wakes my song.

  "And when thy heart is resting
    Beneath the church-aisle stone,
  _I_ shall have time for mourning,
    And _thou_ for being alone."

There are nine verses of "The Night-Wind", and the first eight are
negligible; but, as for the last and ninth, I do not know any poem in
any language that renders, in four short lines, and with such
incomparable magic and poignancy, the haunting and pursuing of the human
by the inhuman, that passion of the homeless and eternal wind.

And this woman, destitute, so far as can be known, of all metaphysical
knowledge or training, reared in the narrowest and least metaphysical of
creeds, did yet contrive to express in one poem of four irregular verses
all the hunger and thirst after the "Absolute" that ever moved a human
soul, all the bewilderment and agony inflicted by the unintelligible
spectacle of existence, the intolerable triumph of evil over good, and
did conceive an image and a vision of the transcendent reality that
holds, as in crystal, all the philosophies that were ever worthy of the
name.

Here it is. There are once more two voices: one of the Man, the other of
the Seer:

THE PHILOSOPHER

  Oh, for the time when I shall sleep
    Without identity.
  And never care how rain may steep,
    Or snow may cover me!
  No promised heaven, these wild desires
    Could all, or half fulfil;
  No threatened hell, with quenchless fires,
    Subdue this restless will.

  So said I, and still say the same;
    Still, to my death, will say--
  Three gods, within this little frame,
    Are warring night and day;
  Heaven could not hold them all, and yet
    They all are held in me;
  And must be mine till I forget
    My present entity!
  Oh, for the time, when in my breast
    Their struggles will be o'er!
  Oh, for the day, when I shall rest,
    And never suffer more!

  I saw a spirit, standing, man,
    Where thou dost stand--an hour ago,
  And round his feet three rivers ran,
    Of equal depth, and equal flow--
  A golden stream--and one like blood,
    And one like sapphire seemed to be;
  But where they joined their triple flood
    It tumbled in an inky sea.
  The spirit sent his dazzling gaze
    Down through that ocean's gloomy night;
  Then, kindling all, with sudden blaze,--
    The glad deep sparkled wide and bright--
  White as the sun, far, far more fair
    Than its divided sources were!

  And even for that spirit, seer,
    I've watched and sought my lifetime long;
  Sought him in heaven, hell, earth and air,
    An endless search and always wrong.
  Had I but seen his glorious eye
    _Once_ light the clouds that 'wilder me,
  I ne'er had raised this coward cry
    To cease to think, and cease to be;
  I ne'er had called oblivion blest,
    Nor, stretching eager hands to death,
  Implored to change for senseless rest
    This sentient soul, this living breath--
  Oh, let me die--that power and will
    Their cruel strife may close,
  And conquered good and conquering ill
    Be lost in one repose!

That vision of the transcendent spirit, with the mingled triple flood of
life about his feet, is one that Blake might have seen and sung and
painted.

The fourth poem, "The Prisoner", is a fragment, and an obscure fragment,
which may belong to a very different cycle. But whatever its place, it
has the same visionary quality. The vision is of the woman captive,
"confined in triple walls", the "guest darkly lodged", the "chainless
soul", that defies its conqueror, its gaoler, and the spectator of its
agony. It has, this prisoner, its own unspeakable consolation, the
"Messenger":

  He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs,
  With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars.
  Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
  And visions rise and change that kill me with desire.

       *       *       *       *       *

  But, first, a hush of peace--a soundless calm descends;
  The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends;
  Mute music soothes my breast--unuttered harmony,
  That I could never dream, till earth was lost to me.

  Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
  My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels:
  Its wings are almost free--its home, its harbour found,
  Measuring the gulf, it stoops and dares the final bound.

That is the language of a mystic, of a mystic who has passed beyond
contemplation; who has known or imagined ecstasy. The joy is
unmistakable; unmistakable, too, is the horror of the return:

  Oh! dreadful is the check--intense the agony--
  When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
  When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
  The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

There is no doubt about those three verses; that they are the expression
of the rarest and the most tremendous experience that is given to
humanity to know.

If "The Visionary" does not touch that supernal place, it belongs
indubitably to the borderland:

  Silent is the house; all are laid asleep:
  One alone looks out o'er the snow-wreaths deep,
  Watching every cloud, dreading every breeze
  That whirls the wildering drift and bends the groaning trees.

  Cheerful is the hearth, soft the matted floor;
  Not one shivering gust creeps through pane or door;
  The little lamp burns straight, the rays shoot strong and far
  I trim it well to be the wanderer's guiding-star.

  Frown, my haughty sire! chide, my angry dame!
  Set your slaves to spy; threaten me with shame;
  But neither sire nor dame, nor prying serf shall know,
  What angel nightly tracks that waste of frozen snow.

  What I love shall come like visitant of air,
  Safe in secret power from lurking human snare;
  What loves me no word of mine shall e'er betray,
  Though for faith unstained my life must forfeit pay.

  Burn then, little lamp; glimmer straight and clear--
  Hush! a rustling wing stirs, methinks, the air;
  He for whom I wait, thus ever comes to me:
  Strange Power! I trust thy might; trust thou my constancy.

Those who can see nothing in this poem but the idealization of an
earthly passion must be strangely and perversely mistaken in their Emily
Brontë. I confess I can never read it without thinking of one of the
most marvellous of all poems of Divine Love: "En una Noche Escura".

EN UNA NOCHE ESCURA[A]

    Upon an obscure night
    Fevered with Love's anxiety
    (O hapless, happy plight!)
    I went, none seeing me,
  Forth from my house, where all things quiet be.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Blest night of wandering
    In secret, when by none might I be spied,
    Nor I see anything;
    Without a light to guide
  Save that which in my heart burnt in my side.

    That light did lead me on
    More surely than the shining of noontide,
    Where well I knew that One
    Did for my coming bide;
  Where he abode might none but he abide.

    O night that didst lead thus;
    O night more lovely than the dawn of light;
    O night that broughtest us
    Lover to lover's sight,
  Lover to loved, in marriage of delight!

[Footnote A: "St. John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul."
Translated by Arthur Symons in vol. ii. of his _Collected Poems_.]

       *       *       *       *       *

We know what love is celebrated there, and we do not know so clearly
what manner of supernal passion is symbolized in Emily Brontë's
angel-lover. There is a long way there between Emily Brontë and St.
John of the Cross, between her lamp-lit window and his "Dark Night of
the Soul", and yet her opening lines have something of the premonitory
thrill, the haunting power of tremendous suggestion, the intense,
mysterious expectancy of his. The spiritual experience is somewhat
different, but it belongs to the same realm of the super-physical; and
it is very far from Paganism.

She wrote of these supreme ardours and mysteries; and she wrote that
most inspired and vehement song of passionate human love, "Remembrance":

  Cold in the earth--and the deep snow piled above thee,
  Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
  Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee....

But "Remembrance" is too well known for quotation here. So is "The Old
Stoic".

These are perfect and unforgettable things. But there is hardly one of
the least admirable of her poems that has not in it some unforgettable
and perfect verse or line:

  And oh, how slow that keen-eyed star
    Has tracked the chilly grey!
  What, watching yet? how very far
    The morning lies away.

That is how some watcher on Wuthering Heights might measure the long
passage of the night.

"The Lady to her Guitar", that recalls the dead and forgotten player,
sings:

  It is as if the glassy brook
    Should image still its willows fair,
  _Though years ago the woodman's stroke
    Laid low in dust their Dryad-hair_.

She has her "dim moon struggling in the sky", to match Charlotte's "the
moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale, glad as if she gave herself to
his fierce caress with love". At sixteen, in the schoolroom,[A] she
wrote verses of an incomparable simplicity and poignancy:

  A little while, a little while,
    The weary task is put away,
  And I can sing and I can smile,
    Alike, while I have holiday.

  Where wilt thou go, my harassed heart--
    What thought, what scene invites thee now?
  What spot, or near or far apart,
    Has rest for thee, my weary brow?

       *       *       *       *       *

  The house is old, the trees are bare,
    Moonless above bends twilight's dome;
  But what on earth is half so dear--
    So longed for--as the hearth of home?

  The mute bird sitting on the stone,
    The dank moss dripping from the wall,
  The thorn-trees gaunt, the walks o'ergrown,
    I love them--how I love them all!

  Still, as I mused, the naked room,
    The alien firelight died away,
  And, from the midst of cheerless gloom,
    I passed to bright, unclouded day.

  A little and a lone green lane
    That opened on a common wide;
  A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain
    Of mountains circling every side.

  A heaven so clear, an earth so calm.
    So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air;
  And, deepening still the dream-like charm,
    Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere.

[Footnote A: Madame Duclaux assigns to these verses a much later
date--the year of Emily Brontë's exile in Brussels. Sir William
Robertson Nicoll also considers that "the 'alien firelight' suits
Brussels better than the Yorkshire hearth of 'good, kind' Miss Wooler".
To me the schoolroom of the Pensionnat suggests an "alien" stove, and
not the light of any fire at all.]

       *       *       *       *       *

There was no nostalgia that she did not know. And there was no funeral
note she did not sound; from the hopeless gloom of

  In the earth--the earth--thou shalt be laid,
    A grey stone standing over thee;
  Black mould beneath thee spread,
    And black mould to cover thee.

  Well--there is rest there,
    So fast come thy prophecy;
  The time when my sunny hair
    Shall with grass-roots entwined be.

  But cold--cold is that resting-place
    Shut out from joy and liberty,
  And all who loved thy living face
    Will shrink from it shudderingly.

From that to the melancholy grace of the moorland dirge:

  The linnet in the rocky dells,
    The moor-lark in the air,
  The bee among the heather-bells
    That hide my lady fair:

  The wild deer browse above her breast;
    The wild birds raise their brood;
  And they, her smiles of love caressed,
    Have left her solitude.

       *       *       *       *       *

  Well, let them fight for honour's breath,
    Or pleasure's shade pursue--
  The dweller in the land of death
    Is changed and careless too.

  And if their eyes should watch and weep
    Till sorrow's source were dry,
  She would not, in her tranquil sleep,
    Return a single sigh.

  Blow, west wind, by the lowly mound,
    And murmur, summer-streams--
  There is no need of other sound
    To soothe my lady's dreams.

There is, finally, that nameless poem--her last--where Emily Brontë's
creed finds utterance. It also is well known, but I give it here by way
of justification, lest I should seem to have exaggerated the mystic
detachment of this lover of the earth:

    No coward soul is mine,
  No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
    I see Heaven's glories shine,
  And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

    O God within my breast,
  Almighty, ever-present Deity!
    Life--that in me has rest,
  As I--undying Life--have power in thee!

    Vain are the thousand creeds
  That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
    Worthless as withered weeds,
  Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.

    To waken doubt in one
  Holding so fast by thine infinity;
    So surely anchored on
  The steadfast rock of immortality.

    With wide-embracing love
  Thy spirit animates eternal years,
    Pervades and broods above,
  Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

    Though earth and man were gone,
  And suns and universes ceased to be,
    And Thou wert left alone,
  Every existence would exist in Thee.

    There is not room for Death,
  Nor atom that his might could render void:
    Thou--THOU art Being and Breath,
  And what THOU art may never be destroyed.

It is not a perfect work. I do not think it is by any means the finest
poem that Emily Brontë ever wrote. It has least of her matchless,
incommunicable quality. There is one verse, the fifth, that recalls
almost painfully the frigid poets of Deism of the eighteenth century.
But even that association cannot destroy or contaminate its superb
sincerity and dignity. If it recalls the poets of Deism, it recalls no
less one of the most ancient of all metaphysical poems, the poem of
Parmenides on Being:

  [Greek: pos d' an epeit apoloito pelon, pos d' an ke genoito;
  ei ge genoit, ouk est', oud ei pote mellei esesthai.

         *       *       *       *       *

  tos, genesis men apesbestai kai apiotos olethros.
  oude diaireton estin, epei pan estin homoion
  oude ti pae keneon....
                         ....eon gar eonti pelazei.]

Parmenides had not, I imagine, "penetrated" to Haworth; yet the last
verse of Emily Brontë's poem might have come straight out of his [Greek:
ta pros halaetheiaen]. Truly, an astonishing poem to have come from a
girl in a country parsonage in the 'forties.

But the most astonishing thing about it is its inversion of a yet more
consecrated form: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are
restless till they rest in Thee". Emily Brontë does not follow St.
Augustine. She has an absolutely inspired and independent insight:

    Life--that in me has rest,
  As I--undying Life--have power in Thee!

For there was but little humility or resignation about Emily Brontë.
Nothing could be prouder than her rejection of the view that must have
been offered to her every Sunday from her father's pulpit. She could not
accept the Christian idea of separation and the Mediator. She knew too
well the secret. She saw too clearly the heavenly side of the eternal
quest. She heard, across the worlds, the downward and the upward rush of
the Two immortally desirous; when her soul cried she heard the answering
cry of the divine pursuer: "My heart is restless till it rests in Thee."
It is in keeping with her vision of the descent of the Invisible, who
comes

  With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars,

her vision of the lamp-lit window, and the secret, unearthly
consummation.

There is no doubt about it. And there is no doubt about the Paganism
either. It seems at times the most apparent thing about Emily Brontë.

The truth is that she revealed her innermost and unapparent nature only
in her poems. That was probably why she was so annoyed when Charlotte
discovered them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Until less than ten years ago it was commonly supposed that Charlotte
had discovered all there were. Then sixty-seven hitherto unpublished
poems appeared in America. And the world went on unaware of what had
happened.

And now Mr. Clement Shorter, in his indefatigable researches, has
unearthed seventy-one more, and published them with the sixty-seven and
with Charlotte's thirty-nine.[A]

[Footnote A: _Complete Works of Emily Brontë._ Vol. I.--Poetry. (Messrs.
Hodder and Stoughton, 1910.)]

And the world continues more or less unaware.

I do not know how many new poets Vigo Street can turn out in a week. But
I do know that somehow the world is made sufficiently aware of some of
them. But this event, in which Vigo Street has had no hand, the
publication, after more than sixty years, of the Complete Poems of Emily
Brontë, has not, so far as I know, provoked any furious tumult of
acclaim.

And yet there could hardly well have been an event of more importance in
its way. If the best poems in Mr. Shorter's collection cannot stand
beside the best in Charlotte's editions of 1846 and 1850, many of them
reveal an aspect of Emily Brontë's genius hitherto unknown and undreamed
of; one or two even reveal a little more of the soul of Emily Brontë
than has yet been known.

There are no doubt many reasons for the world's indifference. The few
people in it who read poetry at all do not read Emily Brontë much; it is
as much as they can do to keep pace with the perpetual, swift procession
of young poets out of Vigo Street. There is a certain austerity about
Emily Brontë, a superb refusal of all extravagance, pomp, and
decoration, which makes her verses look naked to eyes accustomed to
young lyrics loaded with "jewels five-words long". About Emily Brontë
there is no emerald and beryl and chrysoprase; there are no vine-leaves
in her hair, and on her white Oread's feet there is no stain of purple
vintage. She knows nothing of the Dionysiac rapture and the sensuous
side of mysticism. She can give nothing to the young soul that thirsts
and hungers for these things.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the world should be callous to
Emily Brontë. What you are not prepared for is the appearance of
indifference in her editors. They are pledged by their office to a
peculiar devotion. And the circumstances of Emily Brontë's case made it
imperative that whoever undertook this belated introduction should show
rather more than a perfunctory enthusiasm. Her alien and lonely state
should have moved Mr. Clement Shorter to a passionate chivalry. It has
not even moved him to revise his proofs with perfect piety. Perfect
piety would have saved him from the oversight, innocent but deplorable,
of attributing to Emily Brontë four poems which Emily Brontë could not
possibly have written, which were in fact written by Anne:
"Despondency", "In Memory of a Happy Day in February", "A Prayer", and
"Confidence."[A] No doubt Mr. Shorter found them in Emily's handwriting;
but how could he, how _could_ he mistake Anne's voice for Emily's?

[Footnote A: Published among Charlotte Brontë's posthumous "Selections"
in 1850.]

  My God (oh let me call Thee mine,
    Weak, wretched sinner though I be),
  My trembling soul would fain be Thine;
    My feeble faith still clings to Thee.

It is Anne's voice at her feeblest and most depressed.

It is, perhaps, a little ungrateful and ungracious to say these things,
when but for Mr. Shorter we should not have had Emily's complete poems
at all. And to accuse Mr. Shorter of present indifference (in the face
of his previous achievements) would be iniquitous if it were not absurd;
it would be biting the hand that feeds you. The pity is that, owing to a
mere momentary lapse in him of the religious spirit, Mr. Shorter has
missed his own opportunity. He does not seem to have quite realized the
splendour of his "find". Nor has Sir William Robertson Nicoll seen fit
to help him here. Sir William Robertson Nicoll deprecates any
over-valuation of Mr. Clement Shorter's collection. "It is not claimed,"
he says, "for a moment that the intrinsic merits of the verses are of a
special kind." And Mr. Clement Shorter is not much bolder in proffering
his treasures. "No one can deny to them," he says, "a certain
bibliographical interest."

Mr. Shorter is too modest. His collection includes one of the
profoundest and most beautiful poems Emily Brontë ever wrote,[A] and at
least one splendid ballad, "Douglas Ride".[B] Here is the ballad, or
enough of it to show how live it is with sound and vision and speed. It
was written by a girl of twenty:

  What rider up Gobeloin's glen
    Has spurred his straining steed,
  And fast and far from living men
    Has passed with maddening speed?

  I saw his hoof-prints mark the rock,
    When swift he left the plain;
  I heard deep down the echoing shock
    Re-echo back again.

       *       *       *       *       *

  With streaming hair, and forehead bare,
    And mantle waving wide,
  His master rides; the eagle there
    Soars up on every side.

  The goats fly by with timid cry,
    Their realm rashly won;
  They pause--he still ascends on high--
    They gaze, but he is gone.

  O gallant horse, hold on thy course;
    The road is tracked behind.
  Spur, rider, spur, or vain thy force--
    Death comes on every wind.

       *       *       *       *       *

  Hark! through the pass with threatening crash
    Comes on the increasing roar!
  But what shall brave the deep, deep wave,
    The deadly pass before?

  Their feet are dyed in a darker tide,
    Who dare those dangers drear.
  Their breasts have burst through the battle's worst,
    And why should they tremble here?

       *       *       *       *       *

  "Now, my brave men, this one pass more,
    This narrow chasm of stone,
  And Douglas for our sovereign's gore
    Shall yield us back his own."

  I hear their ever-rising tread
    Sound through the granite glen;
  There is a tall pine overhead
    Held by the mountain men.

  That dizzy bridge which no horse could track
    Has checked the outlaw's way;
  There like a wild beast turns he back,
    And grimly stands at bay.

  Why smiles he so, when far below
    He spies the toiling chase?
  The pond'rous tree swings heavily,
    And totters from its place.

  They raise their eyes, for the sunny skies
    Are lost in sudden shade:
  But Douglas neither shrinks nor flies,
    He need not fear the dead.

[Footnote A: See pp. 207, 208.]

[Footnote B: I have removed the title from the preceding fragment to the
ballad to which it obviously belongs.]

That is sufficiently unlike the Emily Brontë whom Charlotte edited. And
there is one other poem that stands alone among her poems with a strange
exotic beauty, a music, a rhythm and a magic utterly unlike any of the
forms we recognize as hers:

  Gods of the old mythology
    Arise in gloom and storm;
  Adramalec, bow down thy head,
    Reveal, dark fiend, thy form.
  The giant sons of Anakim
    Bowed lowest at thy shrine,
  And thy temple rose in Argola,
    With its hallowed groves of vine;
  And there was eastern incense burnt,
    And there were garments spread,
  With the fine gold decked and broidered,
    And tinged with radiant red,
  With the radiant red of furnace flames
    That through the shadows shone
  As the full moon when on Sinai's top
    Her rising light is thrown.

It is undated and unsigned, and so unlike Emily Brontë that I should not
be surprised if somebody were to rise up and prove that it is Coleridge
or somebody. Heaven forbid that this blow should fall on Mr. Clement
Shorter, and Sir William Robertson Nicoll, and on me. There is at least
one reassuring line. "Reveal, dark fiend, thy form", has a decided ring
of the Brontësque.

And here again, on many an otherwise negligible poem she has set her
seal, she has scattered her fine things; thus:

  No; though the soil be wet with tears,
    How fair so'er it grew,
  The vital sap once perished
    Will never flow again;
  _And surer than that dwelling dread,
  The narrow dungeon of the dead,
    Time parts the hearts of men._

And again, she gives a vivid picture of war in four lines:

  In plundered churches piled with dead
    The heavy charger neighed for food,
  The wounded soldier laid his head
    'Neath roofless chambers splashed with blood.

Again, she has a vision:

  In all the hours of gloom
    My soul was rapt away.
  I stood by a marble tomb
    Where royal corpses lay.

A frightful thing appears to her, "a shadowy thing, most dim":

  And still it bent above,
  Its features still in view;
  _It seemed close by; and yet more far
  Than this world from the farthest star
  That tracks the boundless blue._

  Indeed 'twas not the space
  Of earth or time between,
  But the sea of deep eternity,
  The gulf o'er which mortality
  Has never, never been.

The date is June 1837, a year earlier than the ballad. And here is the
first sketch or germ of "The Old Stoic":

  Give we the hills our equal prayer,
    Earth's breezy hills and heaven's blue sea,
  _I ask for nothing further here
    Than my own heart and liberty._

And here is another poem, of a sterner and a sadder stoicism:

  There was a time when my cheek burned
    To give such scornful words the lie,
  Ungoverned nature madly spurned
    The law that bade it not defy.
  Oh, in the days of ardent youth
  I would have given my life for truth.

  For truth, for right, for liberty,
    I would have gladly, freely died;
  And now I calmly bear and see
    The vain man smile, the fool deride,
  Though not because my heart is tame,
  Though not for fear, though not for shame.

  My soul still chokes at every tone
    Of selfish and self-clouded error;
  My breast still braves the world alone,
    Steeled as it ever was to terror.
  Only I know, howe'er I frown,
  The same world will go rolling on.

October 1839. It is the worldly wisdom of twenty-one!

       *       *       *       *       *

If this, the ballad and the rest, were all, the world would still be
richer, by a wholly new conception of Emily Brontë, of her resources and
her range.

But it is by no means all. And here we come to the opportunity which,
owing to that temporary decline of fervour, Mr. Shorter has so
unfortunately missed.

He might have picked out of the mass wherein they lie scattered, all but
lost, sometimes barely recognizable, the fragments of a Titanic epic. He
might have done something to build up again the fabric of that
marvellous romance, that continuous dream, that stupendous and gorgeous
fantasy in which Emily Brontë, for at least eleven years, lived and
moved and had her being.

Until the publication of the unknown poems, it was possible to ignore
the "Gondal Chronicles". They are not included in Mr. Clement Shorter's
exhaustive list of early and unpublished manuscripts. Nobody knew
anything about them except that they were part of a mysterious game of
make-believe which Emily and the ever-innocent Anne played together,
long after the age when most of us have given up make-believing. There
are several references to the Chronicles in the diaries of Emily and
Anne. Emily writes in 1841: "The Gondaland are at present in a
threatening state, but there is no open rupture as yet. All the princes
and princesses of the Royalty are at the Palace of Instruction." Anne
wonders "whether the Gondaland will still be flourishing" in 1845. In
1845 Emily and Anne go for their first long journey together. "And
during our excursion we were Ronald Macalgin, Henry Angora, Juliet
Angusteena, Rosabella Esmaldan, Ella and Julian Egremont, Catharine
Navarre, and Cordelia Fitzaphnold, escaping from the palaces of
instruction to join the Royalists, who are hard pressed at present by
the victorious Republicans. "The Gondals," Emily says, "still flourish
bright as ever." Anne is not so sure. "We have not yet finished our
'Gondal Chronicles' that we began three years and a half ago. When will
they be done? The Gondals are at present in a sad state. The Republicans
are uppermost, but the Royalists are not quite overcome. The young
sovereigns, with their brothers and sisters, are still at the Palace of
Instruction. The Unique Society, about half a year ago, were wrecked on
a desert island as they were returning from Gaul. They are still there,
but we have not played at them much yet."

But there are no recognizable references to the Gondal poems. It is not
certain whether Charlotte Brontë knew of their existence, not absolutely
certain that Anne, who collaborated on the Gondals, knew.

"Brontë specialists" are agreed in dismissing the Chronicles as puerile.
But the poems cannot be so dismissed. Written in lyric or ballad form,
fluent at their worst and loose, but never feeble; powerful, vehement,
and overflowing at their best, their cycle contains some of Emily
Brontë's very finest verse. They are obscure, incoherent sometimes,
because they are fragmentary; even poems apparently complete in
themselves are fragments, scenes torn out of the vast and complicated
epic drama. We have no clue to the history of the Gondals, whereby we
can arrange these scenes in their right order. But dark and broken as
they are, they yet trail an epic splendour, they bear the whole
phantasmagoria of ancestral and of racial memories, of "old, unhappy,
far-off things, and battles long ago". These songs and ballads, strung
on no discernible thread, are the voice of an enchanted spirit,
recalling the long roll of its secular existences; in whom nothing lives
but that mysterious, resurgent memory.

The forms that move through these battles are obscure. You can pick out
many of the Gondal poems by the recurring names of heroes and of lands.
But where there are no names of heroes and of lands to guide you it is
not easy to say exactly which poems are Gondal poems and which are not.
But after careful examination and comparison you can make out at least
eighty-three of them that are unmistakable, and ten doubtful.

All the battle-pieces and songs of battle, the songs of mourning and
captivity and exile, the songs of heroism, martyrdom, defiance, songs,
or fragments of songs, of magic and divination, and many of the love
songs, belong to this cycle. What is more, many of the poems of
eighteen-forty-six and of eighteen-fifty are Gondal poems.

For in the Gondal legend the idea of the Doomed Child, an idea that
haunted Emily Brontë, recurs perpetually, and suggests that the Gondal
legend is the proper place of "The Two Children", and "The Wanderer from
the Fold", which appear in the posthumous Selections of eighteen-fifty.
It certainly includes three at the very least of the poems of
eighteen-forty-six: "The Outcast Mother", "A Death-Scene", and "Honour's
Martyr".

It does not look, I own, as if this hunt for Gondal literature could
interest a single human being; which is why nobody, so far as I know,
has pursued it. And the placing of those four poems in the obscure
Gondal legend would have nothing but "a bibliographical interest" were
it not that, when placed there, they show at once the main track of the
legend. And the main track of the legend brings you straight to the
courses of _Wuthering Heights_ and of the love poems.

The sources of _Wuthering Heights_ have been the dream and the despair
of the explorer, long before Mrs. Humphry Ward tried to find them in the
_Tales of Hoffmann_. And "Remembrance", one of the most passionate love
poems in the language, stood alone and apart from every other thing that
Emily Brontë had written. It was awful and mysterious in its loneliness.

But I believe that "Remembrance" also may be placed in the Gondal legend
without any violence to its mystery.

For supreme in the Gondal legend is the idea of a mighty and disastrous
passion, a woman's passion for the defeated, the dishonoured, and the
outlawed lover; a creature superb in evil, like Heathcliff, and like
Heathcliff tragic and unspeakably mournful in his doom. He or some hero
like him is "Honour's Martyr".

  To-morrow, Scorn will blight my name,
    And Hate will trample me,
  Will load me with a coward's shame--
    A traitor's perjury.

  False friends will launch their covert sneers
    True friends will wish me dead;
  And I shall cause the bitterest tears
    That you have ever shed.

Like Heathcliff, he is the "unblessed, unfriended child"; the child of
the Outcast Mother, abandoned on the moor.

  Forests of heather, dark and long,
    Wave their brown branching arms above;
  And they must soothe thee with their song,
    And they must shield my child of love.

       *       *       *       *       *

  Wakes up the storm more madly wild,
    The mountain drifts are tossed on high;
  Farewell, unblessed, unfriended child,
    I cannot bear to watch thee die.

In an unmistakable Gondal song Geraldine's lover calls her to the tryst
on the moor. In the Gondal poem "Geraldine", she has her child with her
in a woodland cavern, and she prays over it wildly:

  "Bless it! My Gracious God!" I cried,
    "Preserve Thy mortal shrine,
  For Thine own sake, be Thou its guide,
    And keep it still divine--

  "Say, sin shall never blanch that cheek,
    Nor suffering change that brow.
  Speak, in Thy mercy, Maker, speak,
    And seal it safe from woe."

       *       *       *       *       *

  The revellers in the city slept,
    My lady in her woodland bed;
  I watching o'er her slumber wept,
    As one who mourns the dead.

Geraldine therefore is the Outcast Mother. In "The Two Children" the
doom gathers round the child.

  Heavy hangs the raindrop
    From the burdened spray;
  Heavy broods the damp mist
    On uplands far away.

  Heavy looms the dull sky,
    Heavy rolls the sea;
  And heavy throbs the young heart
    Beneath that lonely tree.

  Never has a blue streak
    Cleft the clouds since morn
  Never has his grim fate
    Smiled since he was born.

  Frowning on the infant,
    Shadowing childhood's joy.
  Guardian-angel knows not
    That melancholy boy.

       *       *       *       *       *

  Blossom--that the west wind
    Has never wooed to blow,
  Scentless are thy petals,
    Thy dew is cold as snow!

  Soul--where kindred kindness
    No early promise woke,
  Barren is thy beauty,
    As weed upon a rock.

  Wither--soul and blossom!
    You both were vainly given:
  Earth reserves no blessing
    For the unblest of Heaven.

The doomed child of the outcast mother is the doomed man, and, by the
doom, himself an outcast. The other child, the "Child of delight, with
sun-bright hair", has vowed herself to be his guardian angel. Their
drama is obscure; but you make out that it is the doomed child, and not
Branwell Brontë, who is "The Wanderer from the Fold".

  How few, of all the hearts that loved,
    Are grieving for thee now;
  And why should mine to-night be moved
    With such a sense of woe?

  Too often thus, when left alone,
    Where none my thoughts can see,
  Comes back a word, a passing tone
    From thy strange history.

       *       *       *       *       *

  An anxious gazer from the shore--
    I marked the whitening wave,
  And wept above thy fate the more
    Because--I could not save.

  It recks not now, when all is over;
    But yet my heart will be
  A mourner still, though friend and lover
    Have both forgotten thee.

Compare with this that stern elegy in Mr. Shorter's collection, "Shed no
tears o'er that tomb." A recent critic has referred this poem of
reprobation also to Branwell Brontë--as if Emily could possibly have
written like this of Branwell:

  Shed no tears o'er that tomb,
    For there are angels weeping;
  Mourn not him whose doom
    Heaven itself is mourning.

       *       *       *       *       *

  ... he who slumbers there
    His bark will strive no more
  Across the waters of despair
    To reach that glorious shore.

  The time of grace is past,
    And mercy, scorned and tried,
  Forsakes to utter wrath at last
    The soul so steeled by pride.

  That wrath will never spare,
    Will never pity know;
  Will mock its victim's maddened prayer,
    With triumph in his woe.

  Shut from his Maker's smile
    The accursed man shall be;
  For mercy reigns a little while,
    But hate eternally.

This is obviously related to "The Two Children", and that again to "The
Wanderer from the Fold". Obviously, too, the woman's lament in "The
Wanderer from the Fold" recalls the Gondal woman's lament for her
dishonoured lover. For there are two voices that speak and answer each
other, the voice of reprobation, and the voice of passion and pity. This
is the "Gondal Woman's Lament":

  Far, far is mirth withdrawn:
  'Tis three long hours before the morn,
  And I watch lonely, drearily;
  So come, thou shade, commune with me.

  Deserted one! thy corpse lies cold,
  And mingled with a foreign mould.
  Year after year the grass grows green
  Above the dust where thou hast been.

  I will not name thy blighted name,
  Tarnished by unforgotten shame,
  Though not because my bosom torn
  Joins the mad world in all its scorn.

  Thy phantom face is dark with woe,
  Tears have left ghastly traces there,
  Those ceaseless tears! I wish their flow
  Could quench thy wild despair.

  They deluge my heart like the rain
  On cursed Zamorna's howling plain.
  Yet when I hear thy foes deride,
  I must cling closely to thy side.

  Our mutual foes! They will not rest
  From trampling on thy buried breast.
  Glutting their hatred with the doom
  They picture thine beyond the tomb.

(Which is what they did in the song of reprobation. But passion and pity
know better. They know that)

  ... God is not like human kind,
  Man cannot read the Almighty mind;
  Vengeance will never torture thee,
  Nor hurt thy soul eternally.

       *       *       *       *       *

  What have I dreamt? He lies asleep,
  With whom my heart would vainly weep;
  _He_ rests, and _I_ endure the woe
  That left his spirit long ago.

This poem is not quoted for its beauty or its technique, but for its
important place in the story. You can track the great Gondal hero down
by that one fantastic name, "Zamorna". You have thus four poems,
obviously related; and a fifth that links them, obviously, with the
Gondal legend.

It is difficult to pick out from the confusion of these unsorted
fragments all the heroes of Emily Brontë's saga. There is Gleneden, who
kills a tyrant and is put in prison for it. There is Julius Angora, who
"lifts his impious eye" in the cathedral where the monarchs of Gondal
are gathered; who leads the patriots of Gondal to the battle of
Almedore, and was defeated there, and fell with his mortal enemy. He is
beloved of Rosina, a crude prototype of Catherine Earnshaw. "King Julius
left the south country" and remained in danger in the northern land
because a passion for Rosina kept him there. There is also Douglas of
the "Ride". He appears again in the saga of the Queen Augusta, the woman
of the "brown mountain side". But who he was, and what he was doing, and
whether he killed Augusta or somebody else killed her, I cannot for the
life of me make out. Queen Augusta, like Catherine Earnshaw, is a
creature of passion and jealousy, and her lover had been faithless. She
sings that savage song of defiance and hatred and lamentation: "Light up
thy halls!"

  Oh! could I see thy lids weighed down in cheerless woe;
  Too full to hide their tears, too stern to overflow;
  Oh! could I know thy soul with equal grief was torn,
  This fate might be endured--this anguish might be borne.

  How gloomy grows the night! 'Tis Gondal's wind that blows;
  I shall not tread again the deep glens where it rose,
  I feel it on my face----Where, wild blast! dost thou roam?
  What do we, wanderer! here, so far away from home?

  I do not need thy breath to cool my death-cold brow;
  But go to that far land where she is shining now;
  Tell her my latest wish, tell her my dreary doom;
  Say that my pangs are past, but _hers_ are yet to come.

And there is Fernando, who stole his love from Zamorna. He is a sort of
shadowy forerunner of Edgar Linton.

There is the yeoman Percy, the father of Mary whom Zamorna loved. And
there is Zamorna.

A large group of poems in the legend refer, obviously, I think, to the
same person. Zamorna is the supreme hero, the Achilles of this northern
Iliad. He is the man of sin, the "son of war and love", the child
"unblessed of heaven", abandoned by its mother, cradled in the heather
and rocked by the winter storm, the doomed child, grown to its doom,
like Heathcliff. His story is obscure and broken, but when all the
Zamorna poems are sorted from the rest, you make out that, like
Heathcliff, he ravished from her home the daughter of his mortal enemy
(with the difference that Zamorna loves Mary); and that like Heathcliff
he was robbed of the woman that he loved. The passions of Zamorna are
the passions of Heathcliff. He dominates a world of savage loves and
mortal enmities like the world of _Wuthering Heights_. There are
passages in this saga that reveal the very aspect of the soul of
Heathcliff. Here are some of them.

Zamorna, in prison, cries out to his "false friend and treacherous
guide":

  "If I have sinned; long, long ago
  That sin was purified by woe.
  I have suffered on through night and day,
  I've trod a dark and frightful way."

It is what Heathcliff says to Catherine Earnshaw: "I've fought through a
bitter life since I last heard your voice."

And again:

  If grief for grief can touch thee,
    If answering woe for woe,
  If any ruth can melt thee,
    Come to me now.

It is the very voice of Heathcliff calling to Cathy.

Again, he is calling to "Percy", the father of Mary, his bride, the rose
that he plucked from its parent stem, that died from the plucking.

  Bitterly, deeply I've drunk of thy woe;
  When thy stream was troubled, did mine calmly flow?
  And yet I repent not; I'd crush thee again
  If our vessels sailed adverse on life's stormy main.
  But listen! The earth is our campaign of war,

       *       *       *       *       *

  Is there not havoc and carnage for thee
  Unless thou couchest thy lance at me?

He proposes to unite their arms.

  Then might thy Mary bloom blissfully still
  This hand should ne'er work her sorrow or ill.

       *       *       *       *       *

  What! shall Zamorna go down to the dead
  With blood on his hands that he wept to have shed?

The alliance is refused. Percy is crushed. Mary is dying, the rose is
withering.

  Its faded buds already lie
  To deck my coffin when I die.
  Bring them here--'twill not be long,
  'Tis the last word of the woeful song;
  And the final and dying words are sung
  To the discord of lute strings all unstrung.

       *       *       *       *       *

  Have I crushed you, Percy? I'd raise once more
  The beacon-light on the rocky shore.
  Percy, my love is so true and deep,
  That though kingdoms should wail and worlds should weep,
  I'd fling the brand in the hissing sea,
  The brand that must burn unquenchably.
  Your rose is mine; when the sweet leaves fade,
  They must be the chaplet to wreathe my head
  The blossoms to deck my home with the dead.

Zamorna is tenderer than Heathcliff. He laments for his rose.

  On its bending stalk a bonny flower
    In a yeoman's home close grew;
  It had gathered beauty from sunshine and shower,
    From moonlight and silent dew.

       *       *       *       *       *

  Keenly his flower the yeoman guarded,
    He watched it grow both day and night;
  From the frost, from the wind, from the storm he warded
    That flush of roseate light.
  And ever it glistened bonnilie
  Under the shade of the old yew-tree.

       *       *       *       *       *

  The rose is blasted, withered, blighted
    Its root has felt a worm,
  And like a heart beloved and slighted,
    Failed, faded, shrunk its form.
  Bud of beauty, bonny flower,
    I stole thee from thy natal bower.

  I was the worm that withered thee....

And he sings of Mary, on her death-bed in her delirium. He will not
believe that she is dying.

  Oh! say not that her vivid dreams
    Are but the shattered glass
  Which but because more broken, gleams
    More brightly in the grass.
  Her spirit is the unfathomed lake
  Whose face the sudden tempests break
    To one tormented roar;
  But as the wild winds sink in peace
  All those disturbed waves decrease
  Till each far-down reflection is
    As life-like as before.

Her death is not the worst.

  I cannot weep as once I wept
    Over my western beauty's grave.

       *       *       *       *       *

  I am speaking of a later stroke,
    A death the dream of yesterday,
  Still thinking of my latest shock,
    A noble friendship torn away.
  I feel and say that I am cast
    From hope, and peace, and power, and pride

       *       *       *       *       *

  Without a voice to speak to you
    Save that deep gong which tolled my doom,
  And made my dread iniquity
    Look darker than my deepest gloom.

But the crucial passage (for the sources) is the scene in the yeoman's
hall where Zamorna comes to Percy. He comes stealthily.

  That step he might have used before
  When stealing on to lady's bower,
  Forth at the same still twilight hour,
  For the moon now bending mild above
  Showed him a son of war and love.
  His eye was full of that sinful fire
  Which oft unhallowed passions light.
  It spoke of quickly kindled ire,
  Of love too warm, and wild, and bright.
  Bright, but yet sullied, love that could never
  Bring good in rising, leave peace in decline,
  Woe to the gifted, crime to the giver....

       *       *       *       *       *

  Now from his curled and shining hair,
  Circling the brow of marble fair,
  His dark, keen eyes on Percy gaze
  With stern and yet repenting rays.

     *       *       *       *       *

He loves Percy whose rose was his, and he hates him, as Heathcliff might
have loved and hated, but with less brutality.

  Young savage! how he bends above
  The object of his wrath and love,
  How tenderly his fingers press
  The hand that shrinks from their caress.

The yeoman turns on "the man of sin".

  What brought you here? I called you not

       *       *       *       *       *

  Are you a hawk to follow the prey,
  When mangled it flutters feebly away?
  A sleuth-hound to track the deer by his blood,
  When wounded he wins to the darkest wood,
  There, if he can, to die alone?

It might have been Heathcliff and a Linton.

So much for Zamorna.

Finally, there are two poems in Mr. Shorter's collection that, verse for
prose, might have come straight out of _Wuthering Heights_. One
(inspired by Byron) certainly belongs to the Zamorna legend of the
Gondal cycle.

  And now the house-dog stretched once more
  His limbs upon the glowing floor;
  The children half resume their play,
  Though from the warm hearth scared away;
  The good-wife left her spinning-wheel
  And spread with smiles the evening meal;
  The shepherd placed a seat and pressed
  To their poor fare the unknown guest,
  And he unclasped his mantle now,
  And raised the covering from his brow,
  Said, voyagers by land and sea
  Were seldom feasted daintily,
  And cheered his host by adding stern
  He'd no refinement to unlearn.

Which is what Heathcliff would have said sternly. Observe the effect of
him.

  A silence settled on the room,
  The cheerful welcome sank to gloom;
  But not those words, though cold or high,
  So froze their hospitable joy.
  No--there was something in his face,
  Some nameless thing which hid not grace,
  And something in his voice's tone
  Which turned their blood as chill as stone.
  The ringlets of his long black hair
  Fell o'er a cheek most ghastly fair.
  Youthful he seemed--but worn as they
  Who spend too soon their youthful day.
  When his glance dropped, 'twas hard to quell
  Unbidden feelings' hidden swell;
  And Pity scarce her tears could hide,
  So sweet that brow with all its pride.
  But when upraised his eye would dart
  An icy shudder through the heart,
  Compassion changed to horror then,
  And fear to meet that gaze again.

  It was not hatred's tiger-glare,
  Nor the wild anguish of despair;
  It was not either misery
  Which quickens friendship's sympathy;
  No--lightning all unearthly shone
  Deep in that dark eye's circling zone,
  Such withering lightning as we deem
  None but a spirit's look may beam;
  And glad were all when he turned away
  And wrapt him in his mantle grey,
  And hid his head upon his arm,
  And veiled from view his basilisk charm.

That, I take it, is Zamorna, that Byronic hero, again; but it is also
uncommonly like Heathcliff, with "his basilisk eyes". And it is dated
July 1839, seven years before _Wuthering Heights_ was written.

The other crucial instance is a nameless poem to the Earth.

  I see around me piteous tombstones grey
  Stretching their shadows far away.
  Beneath the turf my footsteps tread
  Lie low and lone the silent dead;
  Beneath the turf, beneath the mould,
  For ever dark, for ever cold.
  And my eyes cannot hold the tears
  That memory hoards from vanished years.
  For Time and Death and mortal pain
  Give wounds that will not heal again.
  Let me remember half the woe
  I've seen and heard and felt below,
  And heaven itself, so pure and blest,
  Could never give my spirit rest.
  Sweet land of light! Thy children fair
  Know nought akin to our despair;
  Nor have they felt, nor can they tell
  What tenants haunt each mortal cell,
  What gloomy guests we hold within,
  Torments and madness, fear and sin!
  Well, may they live in ecstasy
  Their long eternity of joy;
  At least we would not bring them down
  With us to weep, with us to groan.
  No, Earth would wish no other sphere
  To taste her cup of suffering drear;
  She turns from heaven a tearless eye
  And only mourns that _we_ must die!
  Ah mother! what shall comfort thee
  In all this boundless misery?
  To cheer our eager eyes awhile,
  We see thee smile, how fondly smile!
  But who reads not through the tender glow
  Thy deep, unutterable woe?
  Indeed no darling hand above
  Can cheat thee of thy children's love.
  We all, in life's departing shine,
  Our last dear longings blend with thine,
  And struggle still, and strive to trace
  With clouded gaze thy darling face.
  We would not leave our nature home
  For _any_ world beyond the tomb.
  No, mother, on thy kindly breast
  Let us be laid in lasting rest,
  Or waken but to share with thee
  A mutual immortality.

There is the whole spirit of _Wuthering Heights_; the spirit of
Catherine Earnshaw's dream; the spirit that in the last page broods over
the moorland graveyard. It is instinct with a more than pagan adoration
of the tragic earth, adored because of her tragedy.

It would be dangerous to assert positively that "Remembrance" belongs to
the same song-cycle; but it undoubtedly belongs to the same cycle, or
rather cyclone, of passion; the cyclone that rages in the hearts of
Heathcliff and of Catherine. The genius of Emily Brontë was so far
dramatic that, if you could divide her poems into the personal and
impersonal, the impersonal would be found in a mass out of all
proportion to the other. But, with very few exceptions, you cannot so
divide them; for in her continuous and sustaining dream, the vision that
lasted for at least eleven years of her life, from eighteen-thirty-four,
the earliest date of any known Gondal poem, to eighteen-forty-five, the
last appearance of the legend, she _was_ these people; she lived,
indistinguishably and interchangeably, their tumultuous and passionate
life. Sometimes she is the lonely spirit that looks on in immortal
irony, raised above good and evil. More often she is a happy god,
immanent in his restless and manifold creations, rejoicing in this
multiplication of himself. It is she who fights and rides, who loves and
hates, and suffers and defies. She heads one poem naïvely: "To the Horse
Black Eagle that I rode at the Battle of Zamorna." The horse _I_ rode!
If it were not glorious, it would be (when you think what her life was
in that Parsonage) most mortally pathetic.

But it is all in keeping. For, as she could dare the heavenly, divine
adventure, so there was no wild and ardent adventure of the earth she
did not claim.

       *       *       *       *       *

Love of life and passionate adoration of the earth, adoration and
passion fiercer than any pagan knew, burns in _Wuthering Heights_. And
if that were all, it would be impossible to say whether her mysticism or
her paganism most revealed the soul of Emily Brontë.

In _Wuthering Heights_ we are plunged apparently into a world of most
unspiritual lusts and hates and cruelties; into the very darkness and
thickness of elemental matter; a world that would be chaos, but for the
iron Necessity that brings its own terrible order, its own implacable
law of lust upon lust begotten, hate upon hate, and cruelty upon
cruelty, through the generations of Heathcliffs and of Earnshaws.

Hindley Earnshaw is brutal to the foundling, Heathcliff, and degrades
him. Heathcliff, when his hour comes, pays back his wrong with the
interest due. He is brutal beyond brutality to Hindley Earnshaw, and he
degrades Hareton, Hindley's son, as he himself was degraded; but he is
not brutal to him. The frustrated passion of Catherine Earnshaw for
Heathcliff, and of Heathcliff for Catherine, hardly knows itself from
hate; they pay each other back torture for torture, and pang for
hopeless pang. When Catherine marries Edgar Linton, Heathcliff marries
Isabella, Edgar's sister, in order that he may torture to perfection
Catherine and Edgar and Isabella. His justice is more than poetic. The
love of Catherine Earnshaw was all that he possessed. He knows that he
has lost it through the degradation that he owes to Hindley Earnshaw. It
is because an Earnshaw and a Linton between them have robbed him of all
that he possessed, that, when his hour comes, he pays himself back by
robbing the Lintons and the Earnshaws of all that _they_ possess, their
Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. He loathes above all loathely
creatures, Linton, his own son by Isabella. The white-blooded thing is
so sickly that he can hardly keep it alive. But with an unearthly
cruelty he cherishes, he nourishes this spawn till he can marry it on
its death-bed to the younger Catherine, the child of Catherine Earnshaw
and of Edgar Linton. This supreme deed accomplished, he lets the
creature die, so that Thrushcross Grange may fall into his hands. Judged
by his bare deeds, Heathcliff seems a monster of evil, a devil without
any fiery infernal splendour, a mean and sordid devil.

But--and this is what makes Emily Brontë's work stupendous--not for a
moment can you judge Heathcliff by his bare deeds. Properly speaking,
there are no bare deeds to judge him by. Each deed comes wrapt in its
own infernal glamour, trailing a cloud of supernatural splendour. The
whole drama moves on a plane of reality superior to any deed. The spirit
of it, like Emily Brontë's spirit, is superbly regardless of the
material event. As far as material action goes Heathcliff is singularly
inert. He never seems to raise a hand to help his vengeance. He lets
things take their course. He lets Catherine marry Edgar Linton and
remain married to him. He lets Isabella's passion satisfy itself. He
lets Hindley Earnshaw drink himself to death. He lets Hareton sink to
the level of a boor. He lets Linton die. His most overt and violent
action is the capture of the younger Catherine. And even there he takes
advantage of the accident that brings her to the door of Wuthering
Heights. He watches and bides his time with the intentness of a brooding
spirit that in all material happenings seeks its own. He makes them his
instruments of vengeance. And Heathcliff's vengeance, like his passion
for Catherine, is an immortal and immaterial thing. He shows how little
he thinks of sordid, tangible possession; for, when his vengeance is
complete, when Edgar Linton and Linton Heathcliff are dead and their
lands and houses are his, he becomes utterly indifferent. He falls into
a melancholy. He neither eats nor drinks. He shuts himself up in Cathy's
little room and is found dead there, lying on Cathy's bed.

If there never was anything less heavenly, less Christian, than this
drama, there never was anything less earthly, less pagan. There is no
name for it. It is above all our consecrated labels and distinctions. It
has been called a Greek tragedy, with the Aeschylean motto, [Greek: to
drasanti pathein]. But it is not Greek any more than it is Christian;
and if it has a moral, its moral is far more [Greek: to pathonti
pathein]. It is the drama of suffering born of suffering, and confined
strictly within the boundaries of the soul.

Madame Duclaux (whose criticism of _Wuthering Heights_ is not to be
surpassed or otherwise gainsaid) finds in it a tragedy of inherited
evil. She thinks that Emily Brontë was greatly swayed by the doctrine of
heredity. "'No use,' she seems to be saying, 'in waiting for the
children of evil parents to grow, of their own will and unassisted,
straight and noble. The very quality of their will is as inherited as
their eyes and hair. Heathcliff is no fiend or goblin; the untrained,
doomed child of some half-savage sailor's holiday, violent and
treacherous. And how far shall we hold the sinner responsible for a
nature which is itself the punishment of some forefather's crime?'"

All this, I cannot help thinking, is alien to the spirit of _Wuthering
Heights_, and to its greatness. It is not really any problem of heredity
that we have here. Heredity is, in fact, ignored. Heathcliff's race and
parentage are unknown. There is no resemblance between the good old
Earnshaws, who adopted him, and their son Hindley. Hareton does not
inherit Hindley's drunkenness or his cruelty. It is not through any
physical consequence of his father's vices that Hareton suffers. Linton
is in no physical sense the son of Heathcliff. If Catherine Linton
inherits something of Catherine Earnshaw's charm and temper, it is
because the younger Catherine belongs to another world; she is an
inferior and more physical creature. She has nothing in her of Catherine
Earnshaw's mutinous passion, the immortal and unearthly passion which
made that Catherine alive and killed her. Catherine Linton's "little
romance" is altogether another affair.

The world of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a world of spiritual
affinities, of spiritual contacts and recoils where love begets and
bears love, and hate is begotten of hate and born of shame. Even Linton
Heathcliff, that "whey-faced, whining wretch", that physical degenerate,
demonstrates the higher law. His weakness is begotten by his father's
loathing on his mother's terror.

Never was a book written with a more sublime ignoring of the physical.
You only get a taste of it once in Isabella's unwholesome love for
Heathcliff; that is not passion, it is sentiment, and it is thoroughly
impure. And you get a far-off vision of it again in Isabella's fear of
Heathcliff. Heathcliff understood her. He says of her, "'No brutality
disgusted her.... I've sometimes relented, from pure lack of invention,
in my experiments on what she could endure and still creep shamefully
back.'" This civilized creature is nearer to the animals, there is more
of the earth in her than in Catherine or in Heathcliff. They are
elemental beings, if you like, but their element is fire. They are
clean, as all fiery, elemental things are clean.

True, their love found violent physical expression; so that M.
Maeterlinck can say of them and their creator: "We feel that one must
have lived for thirty years under chains of burning kisses to learn what
she has learned; to dare so confidently set forth, with such minuteness,
such unerring certainty, the delirium of those two lovers of _Wuthering
Heights_; to mark the self-conflicting movements of the tenderness that
would make suffer, and the cruelty that would make glad, the felicity
that prayed for death, and the despair that clung to life, the repulsion
that desired, the desire drunk with repulsion--love surcharged with
hatred, hatred staggering beneath its load of love."[A]

[Footnote A: _Wisdom and Destiny_, translated by Alfred Sutro.]

True; but the passion that consumes Catherine and Heathcliff, that burns
their bodies and destroys them, is nine-tenths a passion of the soul. It
taught them nothing of the sad secrets of the body. Thus Catherine's
treachery to Heathcliff is an unconscious treachery. It is her innocence
that makes it possible. She goes to Edgar Linton's arms with blind
eyes, in utter, childlike ignorance, not knowing what she does till it
is done and she is punished for it. She is punished for the sin of sins,
the sundering of the body from the soul. All her life after she sees her
sin. She has taken her body, torn it apart and given it to Edgar Linton,
and Heathcliff has her soul.

"'You love Edgar Linton,' Nelly Dean says, 'and Edgar loves you ...
where is the obstacle?'

"_'Here!_ and _here_!' replied Catherine, striking one hand on her
forehead, and the other on her breast: 'in whichever place the soul
lives. In my soul and in my heart, I'm convinced I'm wrong.'... 'I've no
more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if
the wicked man in there hadn't brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't
have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he
shall never know how I love him, and that, not because he's handsome,
Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are
made of, his and mine are the same.'"

Not only are they made of the same stuff, but Heathcliff _is_ her soul.

"'I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that
there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the
use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries
in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries ... my great thought in
living is himself.... Nelly! I _am_ Heathcliff! He's always, always in
my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to myself, but
as my own being.'"

That is her "secret".

Of course, there is Cathy's other secret--her dream, which passes for
Emily Brontë's "pretty piece of Paganism". But it is only one side of
Emily Brontë. And it is only one side of Catherine Earnshaw. When
Heathcliff turns from her for a moment in that last scene of passion,
she says: "'Oh, you see, Nelly, he would not relent a moment to keep me
out of the grave. _That_ is how I'm loved! Well, never mind. That is not
_my_ Heathcliff. I shall love mine yet; and take him with me: he's in my
soul. And,' she added musingly, 'the thing that irks me most is this
shattered prison, after all. I'm tired of being enclosed here. I'm
wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not
seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of
an aching heart; but really with it and in it. Nelly, you think you are
better and more fortunate than I; in full health and strength; you are
sorry for me--very soon that will be altered. I shall be sorry for
_you_. I shall be incomparably above and beyond you all.'"

True, adoration of Earth, the All-Mother, runs like a choric hymn
through all the tragedy. Earth is the mother and the nurse of these
children. They are brought to her for their last bed, and she gives them
the final consolation.

Yet, after all, the end of this wild northern tragedy is far enough from
Earth, the All-Mother. The tumult of _Wuthering Heights_ ceases when
Heathcliff sickens. It sinks suddenly into the peace and silence of
exhaustion. And the drama closes, not in hopeless gloom, the agony of
damned souls, but in redemption, reconciliation.

Catherine, the child of Catherine and of Edgar Linton, loves Hareton,
the child of Hindley Earnshaw. The evil spirit that possessed these two
dies with the death of Heathcliff. The younger Catherine is a mixed
creature, half-spiritualized by much suffering. Hareton is a splendid
animal, unspiritualized and unredeemed. Catherine redeems him; and you
gather that by that act of redemption, somehow, the souls of Catherine
and Heathcliff are appeased.

The whole tremendous art of the book is in this wringing of strange and
terrible harmony out of raging discord. It ends on a sliding cadence,
soft as a sigh of peace only just conscious after pain.

"I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next
the moor: the middle one grey and half-buried in heath; Edgar Linton's
only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff's
still bare.

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths
fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind
breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine
unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

       *       *       *       *       *

But that is not the real end, any more than Lockwood's arrival at
Wuthering Heights is the beginning. It is only Lockwood recovering
himself; the natural man's drawing breath after the passing of the
supernatural.

For it was not conceivable that the more than human love of Heathcliff
and Catherine should cease with the dissolution of their bodies. It was
not conceivable that Catherine, by merely dying in the fifteenth
chapter, should pass out of the tale. As a matter of fact, she never
does pass out of it. She is more in it than ever.

For the greater action of the tragedy is entirely on the invisible and
immaterial plane; it is the pursuing, the hunting to death of an earthly
creature by an unearthly passion. You are made aware of it at the very
beginning when the ghost of the child Catherine is heard and felt by
Lockwood; though it is Heathcliff that she haunts. It begins in the
hour after Catherine's death, upon Heathcliff's passionate invocation:
"'Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest so long as I am living! You said
I killed you--haunt me, then! The murdered _do_ haunt their murderers, I
believe. I know that ghosts _have_ wandered on earth. Be with me
always--take any form--drive me mad! Only _do_ not leave me in this
abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unbearable! I _cannot_
live without my life! I _cannot_ live without my soul!'"

It begins and is continued through eighteen years. He cannot see her,
but he is aware of her. He is first aware on the evening of the day she
is buried. He goes to the graveyard and breaks open the new-made grave,
saying to himself, "'I'll have her in my arms again! If she be cold,
I'll think it is the north wind that chills _me_; and if she be
motionless, it is sleep.'" A sighing, twice repeated, stops him. "'I
appeared to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind.
I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by; but as certainly as
you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, though
it cannot be discerned, so certainly I felt Cathy was there; not under
me, but on the earth.... Her presence was with me; it remained while I
refilled the grave, and led me home.'"

But she cannot get through to him completely, because of the fleshly
body that he wears.

He goes up to his room, his room and hers. "'I looked round
impatiently--I felt her by me--I could _almost_ see her, and yet I
_could not_!... She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to
me! And since then, sometimes more and sometimes less, I've been the
sport of that intolerable torture!... When I sat in the house with
Hareton, it seemed that on going out I should meet her; when I walked on
the moors I should meet her coming in. When I went from home, I
hastened to return; she _must_ be somewhere at the Heights, I was
certain! And when I slept in her chamber--I was beaten out of that. I
couldn't lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was either
outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or
even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a
child; and I must open my lids to see. And so I opened and closed them a
hundred times a night--to be always disappointed! It racked me!... It
was a strange way of killing: not by inches, but by fractions of
hair-breadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eighteen
years!'"

In all Catherine's appearances you feel the impulse towards satisfaction
of a soul frustrated of its passion, avenging itself on the body that
betrayed it. It has killed Catherine's body. It will kill Heathcliff's;
for it _must_ get through to him. And he knows it.

Heathcliff's brutalities, his cruelties, the long-drawn accomplishment
of his revenge, are subordinate to this supreme inner drama, this
wearing down of the flesh by the lust of a remorseless spirit.

Here are the last scenes of the final act. Heathcliff is failing.
"'Nelly,' he says, 'there's a strange change approaching: I'm in its
shadow at present. I take so little interest in my daily life, that I
hardly remember to eat or drink. Those two who have left the room'"
(Catherine Linton and Hareton) "'are the only objects which retain a
distinct material appearance to me.... Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed
a personification of my youth, not a human being: I felt to him in such
a variety of ways that it would have been impossible to have accosted
him rationally. In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine
connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose
the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least: for
what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I
cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the
flags? In every cloud, in every tree--filling the air at night, and
caught by glimpses in every object by day--I am devoured with her image!
The most ordinary faces of men and women--my own features--mock me with
a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda
that she did exist, and that I have lost her.'...

"'But what do you mean by a _change_, Mr. Heathcliff?' I said, alarmed
at his manner....

"'I shall not know till it comes,' he said, 'I'm only half conscious of
it now.'"

A few days pass. He grows more and more abstracted and detached. One
morning Nelly Dean finds him downstairs, risen late.

"I put a basin of coffee before him. He drew it nearer, and then rested
his arms on the table, and looked at the opposite wall, as I supposed,
surveying one particular portion, up and down, with glittering, restless
eyes, and with such eager interest that he stopped breathing during half
a minute together....

"'Mr. Heathcliff! master!' I cried, 'don't, for God's sake stare as if
you saw an unearthly vision.'

"'Don't, for God's sake, shout so loud,' he replied. 'Turn round, and
tell me, are we by ourselves?'

"'Of course,' was my answer, 'of course we are.'

"Still, I involuntarily obeyed him, as if I were not quite sure. With a
sweep of his hand he cleared a space in front of the breakfast-things,
and leant forward more at his ease.

"Now I perceived that he was not looking at the wall; for, when I
regarded him alone, it seemed exactly that he gazed at something within
two yards' distance. And, whatever it was, it communicated, apparently,
both pleasure and pain in exquisite extremes: at least the anguished,
yet raptured, expression of his countenance suggested that idea. The
fancied object was not fixed: either his eyes pursued it with unwearied
diligence, and, even in speaking to me, were never weaned away. I vainly
reminded him of his protracted abstinence from food: if he stirred to
touch anything in compliance with my entreaties, if he stretched his
hand out to get a piece of bread, his fingers clenched before they
reached it, and remained on the table, forgetful of their aim."

He cannot sleep; and at dawn of the next day he comes to the door of his
room--Cathy's room--and calls Nelly to him. She remonstrates with him
for his neglect of his body's health, and of his soul's.

"'Your cheeks are hollow, and your eyes bloodshot, like a person
starving with hunger, and going blind with loss of sleep.'

"'It is not my fault that I cannot eat or rest,' he said.... 'I'll do
both as soon as I possibly can ... as to repenting of my injustices,
I've done no injustice, and I repent of nothing. I am too happy; and yet
I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but does not
satisfy itself.'" ... "In the afternoon, while Joseph and Hareton were
at their work, he came into the kitchen again, and, with a wild look,
bid me come and sit in the house: he wanted somebody with him. I
declined; telling him plainly that his strange talk and manner
frightened me, and I had neither the nerve nor the will to be his
companion alone.

"'I believe you think me a fiend,' he said, with his dismal laugh:
'something too horrible to live under a decent roof.' Then, turning to
Catherine, who was there, and who drew behind me at his approach, he
added, half sneeringly: 'Will _you_ come, chuck? I'll not hurt you. No!
to you I've made myself worse than the devil. Well, there is _one_ who
won't shrink from my company! By God! she's relentless. Oh, damn it!
It's unutterably too much for flesh and blood to bear--even mine.'"

It is Heathcliff's susceptibility to this immaterial passion, the fury
with which he at once sustains and is consumed by it, that makes him
splendid.

Peace under green grass could never be the end of Heathcliff or of such
a tragedy as _Wuthering Heights_. Its real end is the tale told by the
shepherd whom Lockwood meets on the moor.

"'I was going to the Grange one evening--a dark evening, threatening
thunder--and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little
boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and I
supposed the lambs were skittish and would not be guided.

"'What is the matter, my little man?' I asked.

"'There's Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under t' Nab,' he blubbered,
'un' I darnut pass 'em.'"

It is there, the end, in one line, charged with the vibration of the
supernatural. One line that carries the suggestion of I know not what
ghostly and immaterial passion and its unearthly satisfaction.

       *       *       *       *       *

And this book stands alone, absolutely self-begotten and self-born. It
belongs to no school; it follows no tendency. You cannot put it into any
category. It is not "Realism", it is not "Romance", any more than _Jane
Eyre_: and if any other master's method, De Maupassant's or Turgeniev's,
is to be the test, it will not stand it. There is nothing in it you can
seize and name. You will not find in it support for any creed or theory.
The redemption of Catherine Linton and Hareton is thrown in by the way
in sheer opulence of imagination. It is not insisted on. Redemption is
not the keynote of _Wuthering Heights_. The moral problem never entered
into Emily Brontë's head. You may call her what you will--Pagan,
pantheist, transcendentalist mystic and worshipper of earth, she slips
from all your formulas. She reveals a point of view above good and evil.
Hers is an attitude of tolerance that is only not tenderness because her
acceptance of life and of all that lives is unqualified and unstinting.
It is too lucid and too high for pity.

Heathcliff and Catherine exist. They justify their existence by their
passion. But if you ask what is to be said for such a creature as Linton
Heathcliff, you will be told that he does not justify his existence; his
existence justifies him.

  Do I despise the timid deer,
  Because his limbs are fleet with fear?
  Or, would I mock the wolf's death-howl,
  Because his form is gaunt and foul?
  Or, hear with joy the lev'ret's cry,
  Because it cannot bravely die?
  No! Then above his memory
  Let Pity's heart as tender be.

After all it _is_ pity; it is tenderness.

And if Emily Brontë stands alone and is at her greatest in the things
that none but she can do, she is great also in some that she may be said
to share with other novelists; the drawing of minor characters, for
instance. Lockwood may be a little indistinct, but he is properly so,
for he is not a character, he is a mere impersonal looker-on. But Nelly
Dean, the chief teller of the story, preserves her rich individuality
through all the tortuous windings of the tale. Joseph, the old
farm-servant, the bitter, ranting Calvinist, is a masterpiece. And
masterly was that inspiration that made Joseph chorus to a drama that
moves above good and evil. "'Thank Hivin for all!'" says Joseph. "'All
warks togither for gooid, to them as is chozzen and piked out fro' the
rubbidge. Yah knaw whet t' Scripture sez.'" "'It's a blazing shame, that
I cannot oppen t' blessed Book, but yah set up them glories to Sattan,
and all t' flaysome wickednesses that iver were born into the warld.'"

Charlotte Brontë said of her sister: "Though her feeling for the people
round her was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor,
with very few exceptions, ever experienced ... she could hear of them
with interest and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and
accurate; but _with_ them she rarely exchanged a word." And yet you
might have said she had been listening to Joseph all her life, such is
her command of his copious utterance: "'Ech! ech!' exclaimed Joseph.
'Weel done, Miss Cathy! weel done, Miss Cathy! Howsiver, t' maister sall
just tum'le o'er them brocken pots; un' then we's hear summut; we's hear
how it's to be. Gooid-for-naught madling! ye desarve pining fro' this to
Churstmas, flinging t' precious gifts o' God under fooit i' yer flaysome
rages! But I'm mista'en if ye shew yer sperrit lang. Will Hathecliff
bide sich bonny ways, think ye? I nobbut wish he may catch ye i' that
plisky. I nobbut wish he may.'"

Edgar Linton is weak in drawing and in colour; but it was well-nigh
impossible to make him more alive beside Catherine and Heathcliff. If
Emily's hand fails in Edgar Linton it gains strength again in Isabella.
These two are the types of the civilized, the over-refined, the delicate
wearers of silk and velvet, dwellers in drawing-rooms with pure white
ceilings bordered with gold, "with showers of glass-drops hanging in
silver chains from the centre". They, as surely as the tainted Hindley,
are bound to perish in any struggle with strong, fierce, primeval flesh
and blood. The fatal moment in the tale is where the two half-savage
children, Catherine and Heathcliff, come to Thrushcross Grange.
Thrushcross Grange, with all its sickly brood, is doomed to go down
before Wuthering Heights. But Thrushcross Grange is fatal to Catherine
too. She has gone far from reality when she is dazzled by the glittering
glass-drops and the illusion of Thrushcross Grange. She has divorced her
body from her soul for a little finer living, for a polished, a
scrupulously clean, perfectly presentable husband.

Emily Brontë shows an unerring psychology in her handling of the
relations between Isabella and Catherine. It is Isabella's morbid
passion for Heathcliff that wakes the devil in Catherine. Isabella is a
sentimentalist, and she is convinced that Heathcliff would love her if
Catherine would "let him". She refuses to believe that Heathcliff is
what he is. But Catherine, who _is_ Heathcliff, can afford to accuse
him. "'Nelly,'" she says, "'help me to convince her of her madness. Tell
her what Heathcliff is.... He's not a rough diamond--a pearl-containing
oyster of a rustic; he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.'" But Isabella
will not believe it. "'Mr. Heathcliff is not a fiend,'" she says; "'he
has an honourable soul, and a true one, or how could he remember her?'"
It is the same insight that made George Meredith represent Juliana, the
sentimental passionist, as declaring her belief in Evan Harrington's
innocence while Rose Jocelyn, whose love is more spiritual and therefore
more profoundly loyal, doubts. Emily Brontë, like George Meredith, saw a
sensualist in every sentimentalist; and Isabella Linton was a little
animal under her silken skin. She is ready to go to her end _quand
même_, whatever Heathcliff is, but she tricks herself into believing
that he is what he is not, that her sensualism may justify itself to her
refinement. That is partly why Heathcliff, who is no sensualist, hates
and loathes Isabella and her body.

But there are moments when he also hates the body of Catherine that
betrayed her. Emily Brontë is unswerving in her drawing of Heathcliff.
It is of a piece with his strangeness, his unexpectedness, that he does
not hate Edgar Linton with anything like the same intensity of hatred
that he has for Isabella. And it is of a piece with his absolute fiery
cleanness that never for a moment does he think of taking the lover's
obvious revenge. For it is not, I imagine, that Emily Brontë
deliberately shirked the issue, or deliberately rejected it; it is that
that issue never entered her head. Nor do I see here, in his abandonment
of the obvious, any proof of the childlikeness and innocence of Emily,
however childlike and innocent she may have been. I see only a
tremendous artistic uprightness, the rejection, conscious or
unconscious, of an unfitting because extraneous element. Anne, who was
ten times more childlike and innocent than Emily, tackles this peculiar
obviousness unashamed, because she needed it. And because she did not
need it, Emily let it go.

The evil wrought by Heathcliff, like the passion that inspired and
tortured him, is an unearthly thing. Charlotte showed insight when she
said in her preface to _Wuthering Heights_: "Heathcliff betrays one
solitary human feeling, and that is _not_ his love for Catherine; which
is a sentiment fierce and inhuman ... the single link that connects
Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely confessed regard for Hareton
Earnshaw--the young man whom he has ruined; and then his half-implied
esteem for Nelly Dean." But that Heathcliff is wholly inhuman--"a ghoul,
an afreet"--I cannot really see. Emily's psychology here is perforce
half on the unearthly plane; it is above our criticism, lending itself
to no ordinary tests. But for all his unearthliness, Heathcliff is
poignantly human, from his childhood when he implored Nelly Dean to make
him "decent", for he is "going to be good", to his last hour of piteous
dependence on her. You are not allowed for a moment to forget, that,
horrible and vindictive as he is, the child Heathcliff is yet a child.
Take the scene where the boy first conceives his vengeance.

"On my inquiring the subject of his thoughts, he answered gravely:

"'I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don't care how
long I wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before
I do!'

"'For shame, Heathcliff!' said I. 'It is for God to punish wicked
people. We should learn to forgive.'

"'No, God won't have the satisfaction that I shall,' he returned. 'I
only wish I knew the best way! Let me alone, and I'll plan it out: while
I'm thinking of that I don't feel pain.'"

It is very like Heathcliff. It is also pathetically like a child.

In Hareton Earnshaw Emily Brontë is fairly on the earth all the time,
and nothing could be finer than her handling of this half-brutalized,
and wholly undeveloped thing, her showing of the slow dawn of his
feelings and intelligence. Her psychology is never psychologic. The
creature reveals himself at each moment of his unfolding for what he is.
It was difficult; for in his degradation he had a certain likeness in
unlikeness to the degraded Heathcliff. It was Heathcliff's indomitable
will that raised him. Hareton cannot rise without a woman's hand to help
him. The younger Catherine again was difficult, because of her likeness
to her mother. Her temper, her vanity, her headstrong trickiness are
Catherine Earnshaw. But Catherine Linton is a healthy animal, incapable
of superhuman passion, capable only (when properly chastened by
adversity) of quite ordinary pity and devotion. She inspires
bewilderment, but terror and fascination never; and never the glamour,
the magic evoked by the very name of Catherine Earnshaw. Her escapades
and fantasies, recalling Catherine Earnshaw, are all on an attenuated
scale.

Yet Catherine Earnshaw seems now and then a less solid figure. That is
because her strength does not lie in solidity at all. She is a thing of
flame and rushing wind. One half of her is akin to the storms of
Wuthering Heights, the other belongs to her unseen abiding-place. Both
sides of her are immortal.

And they are of that immortality which is the spirit of place--the
spirit that, more than all spirits, inspired Emily Brontë. Two of
Charlotte's books, _The Professor_ and _Villette_, might have been
written away from Haworth; Emily's owes much of its outward character to
the moors, where it was brought forth. Not even Charlotte could paint,
could suggest scenes like Emily Brontë. There is nobody to compare with
her but Thomas Hardy; and even he has to labour more, to put in more
strokes to achieve his effect. In four lines she gives the storm, the
cold and savage foreground, and the distance of the Heights: "One may
guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the
excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a
range of gaunt thorns, all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving
alms of the sun."

See the finish of this landscape, framed in a window: "They sat together
in a window whose lattice lay back against the wall, and displayed,
beyond the garden trees and the wild green park, the valley of
Gimmerton, with a long line of mist winding nearly to its top (for very
soon after you pass the chapel, as you may have noticed, the sough that
runs from the marshes joins a beck which follows the bend of the glen).
Wuthering Heights rose above this silvery vapour; but our old house was
invisible; it rather dips down on the other side."

In six lines she can paint sound, and distance, and scenery, and the
turn of the seasons, and the two magics of two atmospheres. "Gimmerton
chapel bells were still ringing; and the full, mellow flow of the beck
in the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet substitute for
the yet absent murmur of the summer foliage, which drowned that music
about the Grange when the trees were in leaf. At Wuthering Heights it
always sounded on quiet days following a great thaw or a season of
steady rain."

That music is the prelude to Heathcliff's return, and to the passionate
scene that ends in Catherine's death.

And nothing could be more vivid, more concrete, than Emily Brontë's
method. Time is marked as a shepherd on the moors might mark it, by the
movement of the sun, the moon, and the stars; by weather, and the
passage of the seasons. Passions, emotions, are always presented in
bodily symbols, by means of the bodily acts and violences they inspire.
The passing of the invisible is made known in the same manner. And the
visible world moves and shines and darkens with an absolute illusion of
reality. Here is a road seen between sunset and moonrise: "... all that
remained of day was a beamless amber light along the west: but I could
see every pebble on the path, and every blade of grass, by the light of
that splendid moon".

The book has faults, many and glaring faults. You have to read it many
times before you can realize in the mass its amazing qualities. For it
is probably the worst-constructed tale that ever was written, this story
of two houses and of three generations that the man Lockwood is supposed
to tell. Not only has Lockwood to tell of things he could not possibly
have heard and seen, but sometimes you get scene within vivid scene,
dialogue within dialogue, and tale within tale, four deep. Sometimes you
are carried back in a time and sometimes forward. You have to think hard
before you know for certain whose wife Catherine Heathcliff really is.
You cannot get over Lockwood's original mistake. And this poor device of
narrative at second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand, is used to convey
things incredible, inconceivable; all the secret, invisible drama of the
souls of Catherine and Heathcliff, as well as whole acts of the most
visible, the most tangible, the most direct and vivid and tumultuous
drama; drama so tumultuous, so vivid, and so direct, that by no
possibility could it have been conveyed by any medium. It simply
happens.

And that is how Emily Brontë's genius triumphs over all her faults. It
is not only that you forgive her faults and forget them, you are not--in
the third reading anyhow--aware of them. They disappear, they are
destroyed, they are burnt up in her flame, and you wonder how you ever
saw them. All her clumsy contrivances cannot stay her course, or obscure
her light, or quench her fire. Things happen before your eyes, and it
does not matter whether Lockwood, or Nelly Dean, or Heathcliff, or
Catherine, tells you of their happening.

And yet, though Lockwood and Nelly Dean are the thinnest, the most
transparent of pure mediums, they preserve their personalities
throughout. Nelly especially. The tale only begins to move when Lockwood
drops out and Nelly takes it up. At that point Emily Brontë's style
becomes assured in its directness and simplicity, and thenceforward it
never falters or changes its essential character.

And it is there, first of all, in that unfaltering, unchanging quality
of style that she stands so far above her sister. She has no purple
patches, no decorative effects. No dubiously shining rhetoric is hers.
She does not deal in metaphors or in those ponderous abstractions, those
dreadful second-hand symbolic figures--Hope, Imagination, Memory, and
the rest of them, that move with every appearance of solidity in
Charlotte's pages. There are no angels in her rainbows. Her "grand
style" goes unclothed, perfect in its naked strength, its naked beauty.
It is not possible to praise Charlotte's style without reservations; it
is not always possible to give passages that illustrate her qualities
without suppressing her defects. What was a pernicious habit with
Charlotte, her use of words like "peruse", "indite", "retain", with
Emily is a mere slip of the pen. There are only, I think, three of such
slips in _Wuthering Heights_. Charlotte was capable of mixing her worst
things with her best. She mixed them most in her dialogue, where sins of
style are sinfullest. It is not always possible to give a scene, word
for word, from Charlotte's novels; the dramatic illusion, the illusion
of reality, is best preserved by formidable cutting.

But not only was Emily's style sinless; it is on the whole purest, most
natural, and most inevitable in her dialogue; and that, although the
passions she conceived were so tremendous, so unearthly, that she might
have been pardoned if she found no human speech to render them.

What is more, her dramatic instinct never fails her as it fails
Charlotte over and over again. Charlotte had not always the mastery and
self-mastery that, having worked a situation up to its dramatic climax,
leaves it there. A certain obscure feeling for rightness guides her in
the large, striding movement of the drama; it is in the handling of the
scenes that she collapses. She wanders from climax to climax; she goes
back on her own trail; she ruins her best effects by repetition. She has
no continuous dramatic instinct; no sense whatever of dramatic form.

These are present somehow in _Wuthering Heights_, in spite of its
monstrous formlessness. Emily may have had no more sense of form for
form's sake than Charlotte; she may have had no more dramatic instinct;
but she had an instinct for the ways of human passion. She knew that
passion runs its course, from its excitement to its climax and
exhaustion. It has a natural beginning and a natural end. And so her
scenes of passion follow nature. She never goes back on her effect,
never urges passion past its climax, or stirs it in its exhaustion. In
this she is a greater "realist" than Charlotte.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is incredible that _Wuthering Heights_, or any line of it, any line
that Emily Brontë ever wrote, should have passed for Charlotte's. She
did things that Charlotte could never have done if she tried a thousand
years, things not only incomparably greater, but unique.

Yet in her lifetime she was unrecognized. What is true of her prose is
true also of her poems. They, indeed, did bring her a little praise,
obscure and momentary. No less she was unrecognized to such an extent
that _Wuthering Heights_ was said and believed to be an immature work of
Charlotte's. Even after her death, her eulogist, Sydney Dobell, was so
far from recognizing her, that he seems to have had a lingering doubt as
to Ellis Bell's identity until Charlotte convinced him of his error.

And only the other day a bold attempt was made to tear from Emily Brontë
the glory that she has won at last from time. The very latest theory,[A]
offered to the world as a marvellous discovery, the fruit of passionate
enthusiasm and research, is the old, old theory that Charlotte, and not
Emily, wrote _Wuthering Heights_. And Sydney Dobell, with his little
error, is made to serve as a witness. In order to make out a case for
Charlotte, the enthusiast and researcher is obliged to disparage every
other work of Emily's. He leans rashly enough on the assumption that her
"Gondal Chronicles" were, in their puerility, beneath contempt, still
more rashly on his own opinion that she was no poet.

[Footnote A: _The Key to the Brontë Works_, by J. Malham-Dembleby. See
Appendix I.]

If this were the only line he took, this amusing theorist might be left
alone. The publication of the _Complete Poems_ settles him. The value,
the really priceless value, of his undertaking is in the long array of
parallel passages from the prose of Charlotte and of Emily with which he
endeavours to support it. For, so far from supporting it, these columns
are the most convincing, the most direct and palpable refutation of his
theory. If any uncritical reader should desire to see for himself
wherein Charlotte and Emily Brontë differed; in what manner, with what
incompatible qualities and to what an immeasurable degree the younger
sister was pre-eminent, he cannot do better than study those parallel
passages. If ever there was a voice, a quality, an air absolutely apart
and distinct, not to be approached by, or confounded with any other, it
is Emily Brontë's.

It was the glare of Charlotte's fame that caused in her lifetime that
blindness and confusion. And Emily, between pride and a superb
indifference, suffered it. She withdrew, with what seemed an obstinate
perversity, into her own magnificent obscurity. She never raised a hand
to help herself. She left no record, not a note or a word to prove her
authorship of _Wuthering Heights_. Until the appearance in 1910 of her
_Complete Poems_ the world had no proof of it but Charlotte's statement.
It was considered enough, in Charlotte's lifetime. The world accepted
her disclaimer.

But the trouble began again after Charlotte's death. Emily herself had
no legend; but her genius was perpetually the prey of rumours that left
her personality untouched. Among the many provoked by Mrs. Gaskell's
_Life_, there was one attributing _Wuthering Heights_ to her brother
Branwell.[A] Mr. Francis Grundy said that Branwell told him he had
written _Wuthering Heights_. Mr. Leyland believed Mr. Grundy. He
believed that Branwell was a great poet and a great novelist, and he
wrote two solid volumes of his own in support of his belief.

[Footnote A: The curious will find a note on this point in Appendix II.]

Nobody believes in Mr. Grundy, or in Mr. Leyland and his belief in
Branwell now. All that can be said of Branwell, in understanding and
extenuation, is that he would have been a great poet and a greater
novelist if he could have had his own way.

This having of your own way, unconsciously, undeliberately, would seem
to be the supreme test of genius. Having your own way in the teeth of
circumstances, of fathers and of brothers, and of aunts, of
school-mistresses,[A] and of French professors, of the parish, of
poverty, of public opinion and hereditary disease; in the teeth of the
most disastrous of all hindrances, duty, not neglected, but fulfilled.
By this test the genius of Emily Brontë fairly flames; Charlotte's
stands beside it with a face hidden at times behind bruised and darkened
wings. By this test even Anne's pale talent shows here and there a
flicker as of fire. In all three the having of their own way was, after
all, the great submission, the ultimate obedience to destiny.

[Footnote A: It was Miss Wooler who taught Charlotte to "peruse".]

For genius like theirs _is_ destiny. And that brings us back to the
eternal question of the Sources. "Experience" will not account for what
was greatest in Charlotte. It will hardly account for what was least in
Emily. With her only the secret, the innermost experience counted. If
the sources of _Wuthering Heights_ are in the "Gondal Poems", the
sources of the poems are in _that_ experience, in the long life of her
adventurous spirit. Her genius, like Henry Angora and Rosina and the
rest of them, flew from the "Palaces of Instruction". As she _was_ Henry
Angora, so she _was_ Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.

It is a case of "The Horse I rode at the battle of Zamorna", that is
all.

There has been too much talk about experience. What the critic, the
impressionist, of the Brontës needs is to recover, before all things,
the innocence of the eye. No doubt we all of us had it once, and can
remember more or less what it was like. To those who have lost it I
would say: Go back and read again Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte
Brontë_.

Years and years ago, when I was a child, hunting forlornly in my
father's bookshelves, I came upon a small, shabby volume, bound in
yellow linen. The title-page was adorned with one bad wood-cut that
showed a grim, plain house standing obliquely to a churchyard packed
with tombstones--tombstones upright and flat, and slanting at all
angles. In the foreground was a haycock, where the grave grass had been
mown. I do not know how the artist, whose resources were of the
slenderest, contrived to get his overwhelming but fascinating effect of
moorland solitude, of black-grey nakedness and abiding gloom. But he
certainly got it and gave it. There was one other picture, representing
a memorial tablet.

Tombstones always fascinated me in those days, because I was mortally
afraid of them; and I opened that book and read it through.

I could not, in fact, put it down. For the first time I was in the grip
of a reality more poignant than any that I had yet known, of a tragedy
that I could hardly bear. I suppose I have read that book a score of
times since then. There are pages in it that I shrink from approaching
even now, because of the agony of realization they revive. The passing
bell tolled continually in the prelude; it sounded at intervals
throughout; it tolled again at the close. The refrain of "Here lie the
Remains" haunted me like a dolorous song. It seemed to me a decorous and
stately accompaniment to such a tale, and that wood-cut on the
title-page a fitting ornament. I knew every corner of that house. I have
an impression (it is probably a wrong one) of a flagged path going right
down from the Parsonage door through another door and plunging among the
tombs. I saw six little white and wistful faces looking out of an upper
window; I saw six little children going up and up a lane, and I wondered
how the tiny feet of babies ever got so far. I saw six little Brontë
babies lost in the spaces of the illimitable moors. They went over
rough stones and walls and mountain torrents; their absurd petticoats
were blown upwards by the wind, and their feet were tangled in the
heather. They struggled and struggled, and yet were in an ecstasy that I
could well understand.

I remember I lingered somewhat long over the schooldays at Cowan Bridge
and that I found the Brussels period dull; M. Héger struck me as a
tiresome pedant, and I wondered how Charlotte could ever have put up
with him. There was a great deal about Branwell that I could not
understand at all, and so forgot. And I skipped all the London part, and
Charlotte's literary letters. I had a very vague idea of Charlotte apart
from Haworth and the moors, from the Parsonage and the tombstones, from
Tabby and Martha and the little black cat that died, from the garden
where she picked the currants, and the quiet rooms where she wrote her
wonderful, wonderful books.

But, for all that skipping and forgetting, there stood out a vivid and
ineffaceable idea of Emily; Emily who was tall and strong and
unconquerable; Emily who loved animals, and loved the moors; Emily and
Keeper, that marvellous dog; Emily kneading bread with her book propped
before her; Emily who was Ellis Bell, listening contemptuously to the
reviews of _Wuthering Heights_; Emily stitching at the long seam with
dying fingers; and Emily dead, carried down the long, flagged path, with
Keeper following in the mourners' train.

And, all through, an invisible, intangible presence, something
mysterious, but omnipotently alive; something that excited these three
sisters; something that atoned, that not only consoled for suffering and
solitude and bereavement, but that drew its strength from these things;
something that moved in this book like the soul of it; something that
they called "genius".

Now that, as truly as I can set it down, is the impression conveyed to a
child's mind by Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte Brontë_. And making
some deductions for a child's morbid attraction to tombstones, and a
child's natural interest in children, it seems to me even now that this
innocent impression is the true one. It eliminates the inessential and
preserves the proportions; above all, it preserves the figure of Emily
Brontë, solitary and unique.

Anyhow, I have never been able to get away from it.

_September_ 1911.



APPENDIX I

THE KEY TO THE BRONTË WORKS


More than once Mr. Malham-Dembleby has approached us with his mysterious
"Key". There was his "Key to _Jane Eyre_", published in the _Saturday
Review_ in 1902; there was his "Lifting of the Brontë Veil", published
in the _Fortnightly Review_ in 1907; and there was the correspondence
that followed. Now he has gathered all his evidence together into one
formidable book, and we are faced with what he calls his "miraculous and
sensational" discovery that it was Charlotte and not Emily Brontë who
wrote _Wuthering Heights_, and that in _Wuthering Heights_ she
immortalized the great tragic passion of her life, inspired by M. Héger,
who, if you please, is Heathcliff.

This is Mr. Malham-Dembleby's most important contribution to the
subject. M. Héger, Mr. Malham-Dembleby declares, was Heathcliff before
he was M. Pelet, or Rochester, or M. Paul. And as it was Charlotte and
not Emily who experienced passion, Charlotte alone was able to
immortalize it.

So much Mr. Malham-Dembleby assumes in the interests of psychology. But
it is not from crude psychological arguments that he forges his
tremendous Key. It is from the internal evidence of the works, supported
by much "sensational" matter from the outside.

By way of internal evidence then, we have first the sensational
discovery of a work, _Gleanings in Craven, or The Tourists' Guide_, by
"one Frederic Montagu", published at Skipton-in-Craven in 1838, which
work the author of _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_ must have read
and drawn upon for many things, names (including her own pseudonym of
Currer Bell), descriptions of scenery, local legends, as of that fairy
Jannet, Queen of the Malhamdale Elves, who haunted the sources of the
Aire and suggested Rochester's Queen of Elves, his fairy, Janet Eyre.
Parallel passages are given showing a certain correspondence between
Montagu's traveller's tale and the opening scene of _Wuthering Heights_.
Montagu goes on horseback to a solitary house, like Lockwood, and, like
Lockwood, is shown to bed, dreams, and is awakened by a white-faced
apparition (his hostess, not his host), who holds a lighted candle, like
Heathcliff, and whose features, like Heathcliff's, are convulsed with
diabolical rage, and so on. Mr. Malham-Dembleby, in a third parallel
column, uses the same phrases to describe Jane Eyre's arrival at
Rochester's house, her dreams, and the appearance of Rochester's mad
wife at her bedside; his contention being that the two scenes are
written by the same hand.

All this is very curious and interesting; so far, however, Mr.
Malham-Dembleby's sensational evidence does no more for us than suggest
that Charlotte and Emily may very likely have read Montagu's book.

But the plot thickens. Mr. Malham-Dembleby first prints parallel
passages from Montagu's book and _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_,
then, extensively, scene after scene from _Jane Eyre_ and _Wuthering
Heights_.

Some of these coincidences seem on the first blush of it remarkable, for
instance, the child-phantom which appears both to Jane Eyre and to Nelly
Dean in _Wuthering Heights_; or the rainy day and the fireside scene,
which occur in the third chapter of _Wuthering Heights_ and the opening
chapter of _Jane Eyre_. Others again, such as the parallel between the
return of Heathcliff to Catherine and that of Jane to Rochester, will
not bear examination for a moment. Of this and most of Mr.
Malham-Dembleby's parallels it may be said that they only maintain their
startling character by the process of tearing words from their
sentences, sentences from their contexts, contexts from their scenes,
and scenes from the living body of each book. Apparently to Mr.
Malham-Dembleby, a book, at any rate a Brontë book, is not a living
body; each is a box of German bricks, and he takes all the boxes and
tumbles them out on the floor together and rearranges them so as to show
that, after all, there was only one box of bricks in the family, and
that was Charlotte's. Much of his argument and the force of his parallel
passages depends on the identification of the characters in the Brontë
works, not only with their assumed originals, but with each other. For
Mr. Malham-Dembleby's purposes poor M. Héger, a model already
remorselessly overworked by Charlotte, has to sit, not only for M.
Pelet, for Rochester and Yorke Hunsden, for Robert and for Louis Moore,
but for Heathcliff, and, if you would believe it, for Hareton Earnshaw;
because (parallel passage!) the younger Catherine and Hareton Earnshaw
were teacher and pupil, and so (when she taught him English) were
Charlotte and M. Héger.

Mr. Malham-Dembleby's work of identification is made easier for him by
his subsidiary discovery of Charlotte's two methods, Method I,
interchange of the sex; Method II, alteration of the age of her
characters. With this licence almost any character may be any other.
Thus Hareton Earnshaw looking at Catherine is Jane Eyre looking at Mr.
Rochester. When he touches her Nelly Dean says, "He might have stuck a
knife into her, she started in such a taking"; and Rochester says to
Jane, "You stick a sly penknife under my ear" (parallel passage!).
Lockwood at Wuthering Heights is Jane Eyre at Thornton Hall; Heathcliff
appearing at Lockwood's bedside, besides being M. Héger and Rochester,
is Rochester's mad wife. Heathcliff returning to Catherine is Jane
returning to Rochester, and so on. But however varied, however
apparently discriminated the characters, M. Héger is in all the men, and
Charlotte is in all the women, in the two Catherines, in Jane Eyre and
Frances Henri; in Caroline Helstone, in Pauline Bassompierre, and Lucy
Snowe.

Now there is a certain plausibility in this. With all their vividness
and individuality Charlotte Brontë's characters have a way of shading
off into each other. Jane has much in common with Frances and with Lucy,
and Lucy with Pauline. Her men incline rather to one type, that of the
masterful, arbitrary, instructive male; that is the type she likes best
to draw. Yorke Hunsden in _The Professor_ splits up into Rochester and
Robert Moore and Mr. Yorke; and there is a certain amount of Paul
Emanuel in all of them. But life gives us our types very much that way,
and there is a bit of somebody else in everybody. It is easy to suggest
identity by exaggerating small points of resemblance and suppressing
large and essential differences (which is what Mr. Malham-Dembleby does
all the time). But take each whole living man and woman as they have
been created for us, I don't care if Catherine Earnshaw and Jane Eyre
_did_ each have a fit of passion in a locked room, and if a servant
waited upon each with gruel; there is no earthly likeness between the
soul of Catherine and the soul of Jane. I don't care if there was
"hell-light" in Rochester's eyes and Heathcliff's too, if they both
swore by the "Deuce", and had both swarthy complexions like Paul
Emanuel; for there is a whole universe between Heathcliff and Rochester,
between Rochester and M. Paul. Beside Heathcliff, that Titan raging on a
mountain-top, M. Paul is merely a little man gesticulating on an
_estrade_.

So much for the identifications. Mr. Malham-Dembleby has been tempted to
force them thus, because they support his theory of M. Héger and of the
great tragic passion, as his theory, by a vicious circle, supports his
identifications. His procedure is to quote all the emotional passages he
can lay his hands on, from the _Poems_, from _Wuthering Heights_, from
_Jane Eyre_, from _Villette_ and _The Professor_, "... all her life's
hope was torn by the roots out of her own riven and outraged heart..."
(_Villette_) "... faith was blighted, confidence destroyed..." (_Jane
Eyre_) ... "Mr. Rochester" (M. Héger, we are informed in confidential
brackets) was not "what she had thought him". Assuring us that
Charlotte was here describing her own emotions, he builds his argument.
"Evidence" (the evidence of these passages) "shows it was in her dark
season when Charlotte Brontë wrote _Wuthering Heights_, and that she
portrayed M. Héger therein with all the vindictiveness of a woman with
'a riven, outraged heart', the wounds in which yet rankled sorely." So
that, key in hand, for "that ghoul Heathcliff!" we must read "that ghoul
Héger". We must believe that _Wuthering Heights_ was written in pure
vindictiveness, and that Charlotte Brontë repudiated its authorship for
three reasons: because it contained "too humiliating a story" of her
"heart-thrall"; because of her subsequent remorse (proof, the modified
animus of her portrait of M. Héger as Rochester and as M. Paul), and for
certain sound business considerations. So much for internal evidence.

Not that Mr. Malham-Dembleby relies on it altogether. He draws largely
upon legend and conjecture, and on more "sensational discoveries" of his
own. He certainly succeeds in proving that legend and conjecture in
Brussels began at a very early date. Naturally enough it fairly flared
after the publication of _Jane Eyre_. So far there is nothing new in his
discoveries. But he does provide a thrill when he unearths Eugène Sue's
extinct novel of _Miss Mary, ou l'Institutrice_, and gives us parallel
passages from that. For in _Miss Mary_, published in 1850-51[A] we have,
not only character for character and scene for scene, "lifted" bodily
from _Jane Eyre_, but the situation in _The Professor_ and _Villette_ is
largely anticipated. We are told that Eugène Sue was in Brussels in
1844, the year in which Charlotte left the Pensionnat. This is
interesting. But what does it prove? Not, I think, what Mr.
Malham-Dembleby maintains--that M. Héger made indiscreet revelations to
Eugène Sue, but that Eugène Sue was an unscrupulous plagiarist who took
his own where he found it, either in the pages of _Jane Eyre_ or in the
tittle-tattle of a Brussels salon. However indiscreet M. Héger may have
been, he was a man of proved gravity and honour. He would, at any rate,
have drawn the line at frivolous treachery. Nobody, however, can answer
for what Madame Héger and her friends may not have said. Which disposes
of Eugène Sue.

[Footnote A: Serially in the _London Journal_ in 1850; in volume form in
Paris, 1851. It is possible, but not likely, that Eugène Sue may have
seen the manuscript of _The Professor_ when it was "going the round".]

Then there is that other "sensational discovery" of the Héger portrait,
that little drawing (now in the National Portrait Gallery) of Charlotte
Brontë in curls, wearing a green gown, and reading _Shirley_. It is
signed Paul Héger, 1850, the year of _Shirley's_ publication, and the
year in which Charlotte sat to Richmond for her portrait. There are two
inscriptions on the back: "The Wearin' of the Green; First since Emily's
death"; and below: "This drawing is by P. Héger, done from life in
1850." The handwriting gives no clue.

Mr. Malham-Dembleby attaches immense importance to this green gown,
which he "identifies" with the pink one worn by Lucy in _Villette_. He
says that Lady Ritchie told him that Charlotte wore a green gown at the
dinner-party Thackeray gave for her in June, 1850; and when the green
gown turns out after all to be a white one with a green pattern on it,
it is all one to Mr. Malham-Dembleby. So much for the green gown. Still,
gown or no gown, the portrait _may_ be genuine. Mr. Malham-Dembleby says
that it is drawn on the same paper as that used in Mr. George Smith's
house, where Charlotte was staying in June 1850, and he argues that
Charlotte and M. Héger met in London that year, and that he then drew
this portrait of her from the life. True, the portrait is a very
creditable performance for an amateur; true, M. Héger's children
maintained that their father did not draw, and there is no earthly
evidence that he did; true, we have nothing but one person's report of
another person's (a collector's) statement that he had obtained the
portrait from the Héger family, a statement at variance with the
evidence of the Héger family itself. But granted that the children of M.
Héger were mistaken as to their father's gift, and that he did draw this
portrait of Charlotte Brontë from Charlotte herself in London in 1850,
I cannot see that it matters a straw or helps us to the assumption of
the great tragic passion which is the main support of Mr.
Malham-Dembleby's amazing fabrication.



APPENDIX II


Leyland's theory is that Branwell Brontë wrote the first seventeen
chapters of _Wuthering Heights_. It has very little beyond Leyland's
passionate conviction to support it. There is a passage in a letter of
Branwell's to Leyland, the sculptor, written in 1845, where he says he
is writing a three-volume novel of which the first volume is completed.
He compares it with "Hamlet" and with "Lear". There is also Branwell's
alleged statement to Mr. Grundy. And there is an obscure legend of
manuscripts produced from Branwell's hat, before the eyes of Mr. Grundy,
in an inn-parlour. Leyland argues freely from the antecedent probability
suggested by Branwell's letters and his verse, which he published by way
of vindication. He could hardly have done Branwell a worse service.
Branwell's letters give us a vivid idea of the sort of manuscripts that
would be produced, in inn-parlours, from his hat. As for his verse--that
formless, fluent gush of sentimentalism--it might have passed as an
error of his youth, but for poor Leyland's comments on its majesty and
beauty. There are corpses in it and tombstones, and girls dying of
tuberculosis, obscured beyond recognition in a mush of verbiage. There
is not a live line in it. One sonnet only, out of Branwell's many
sonnets, is fitted to survive. It has a certain melancholy, sentimental
grace. But it is not a good sonnet, and it shows Branwell at his best.
At his worst he sinks far below Charlotte at her worst, and, compared
with Emily or with Charlotte at her best, Branwell is nowhere. Even Anne
beats him. Her sad, virginal restraint gives a certain form and value
to her colourless and slender gift.

There is a psychology of such things, as there is a psychology of works
of genius. Emily Brontë's work, with all its faults of construction,
shows one and indivisible, fused in one fire from first to last. One
cannot take the first seventeen chapters of _Wuthering Heights_ and
separate them from the rest. There is no faltering anywhere and no break
in the power and the passion of this stupendous tale. And where passion
is, sentimentalism is not. And there is not anywhere in _Wuthering
Heights_ a trace of that corruption which for the life of him Branwell
could not have kept out of the manuscripts he produced from his hat.



INDEX


Absolute, the, 16, 176.
_Agnes Grey_, 39, 40, 49.
Augustine, St., 185.

Ballynaskeagh, 20.
Balzac, 54, 120, 121, 163.
Bassompierre, Pauline de, in
   Villette, 153-157.
Being, 184.
  -- Parmenides on, 185.
Birrell, Mr., 14, 20, 31, 41, 65.
Blake, William, 175, 178.
Branwell, Miss, at Haworth, 23,
   24.
  -- -- death of, 36.
  -- Maria, marries Rev. Patrick
   Brontë, 20.
  -- -- illness of, 23.
  -- -- death of, 23.
Brontë--
  Anne, 49-57.
    -- 27, 28.
    -- at Thornton, 20.
    -- at Haworth, 20, 27, 33,
     39.
    -- at Thorp Green, 33, 36,
     38, 50.
    -- in London, 40.
    -- character of 49-51, 55,
     56.
    -- death of, 45.
    -- diary of, 34, 168, 194.
    -- Poems of, 54-57, 188,
     246.
    -- novels of, 39, 49-54.
    -- and Branwell Brontë
     compared, 54, 246.
  Charlotte, 57-167.
  Charlotte at Thornton, 20.
    -- at Haworth, 15, 16, 19,
     20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 31,
     37, 39, 46, 47, 69, 83, 94,
     103, 105, 165, 235, 236.
    -- at Cowan Bridge, 24, 25,
     27, 236.
    -- at Roe Head, 26, 27, 94,
     95.
    -- at Dewsbury Moor, 27,
     94.
    -- at Stonegappe, 28, 62-64.
    -- at Rawdon, 33, 35, 67.
    -- in Brussels, 15, 35-37,
     81-90, 158, 241, 246.
    -- in London, 15, 40, 46,
     47, 244.
    -- character of, 16, 66 et
     seq., 80, 82, 83-86, 167.
    -- death of, 48, 49.
    -- early writings of, 101-104.
    -- genius of, 13, 14, 19, 20,
     21, 22, 25, 26, 35, 80, 91,
     103, 104, 130, 131, 171,
     233.
    -- marriage of, 47-49.
    -- novels of, 105-165.
    -- Poems of, 39, 103, 164,
     169, 170, 246.
    -- her love of children,
     64-67, 156.
    -- and Emily Brontë compared,
     48, 167-169, 229-231,
     233.
    -- Mr. Swinburne on, 14,
     31, 64, 65, 66, 68.
  Emily Jane, 167-234.
    -- at Haworth, 19, 20-22,
     25, 26, 27, 39.
    -- at Cowan Bridge, 24, 25.
    -- at Roe Head, 27, 39.
    -- at Halifax, 27.
    -- in Brussels, 35, 36, 37.
    -- death of, 43, 44, 139,
     140, 173.
    -- character of, 27, 167-173.
    -- diary of, 33, 38, 194.
    -- genius of, 14, 15, 16, 17,
     22, 171, 172, 185-186, 187,
     208, 209, 229, 233, 234, 236.
    -- Poems of, 17, 39, 174-185,
     231, 232.
    -- mysticism of, 16, 168,
     171, 173-181, 186.
    -- novel of, 39.
    -- paganism of, 16, 135,
     136, 174, 186, 208, 214.
    -- and Charlotte Brontë
     compared, 48, 167-169, 229-231,
     233.
    -- M. Maeterlinck on, 14,
     170, 213.
    -- Mr. Swinburne on, 14,
     174.
  Maria, 20, 22.
    -- at Cowan Bridge, 24, 25.
    -- character of, 24, 25.
    -- death of, 25.
  Patrick Branwell, 15, 22, 27,
     28, 29, 30, 34, 54, 55, 58,
     59, 61, 199, 236.
    -- at Thornton, 20.
    -- at Haworth, 20, 25,
     28-30, 34, 42.
    -- at Bradford, 28, 29.
    -- at Luddenden Foot, 34.
    -- at Thorp Green, 40, 41.
    -- in London, 29.
    -- character of, 40-43, 50-54.
    -- death of, 43.
    -- authorship of _Wuthering
     Heights_ ascribed to, 233, 246,
     247.
  Patrick Branwell and Emily
     Brontë compared, 246, 247.
    -- and Anne Brontë compared,
     54, 233.
    -- and Mrs. Robinson, 40,
     41, 50-52.
    -- Poems of, 28, 29, 42,
     164, 233, 246.
  Patrick, Rev., 20-22, 24, 25,
     36, 37, 42, 43, 83.
    -- at Thornton, 20.
    -- at Haworth, 20.
    -- in Ireland, 20, 21.
    -- character of, 20, 21, 22,
     24.
    -- works of, 22.
_Brontës, The Fact and Fiction_, by
   Angus Mackay, 81.
Brown, John, 28, 29, 30, 51.
Brussels, Charlotte Brontë in, 15,
   35-37, 81-90, 158, 241, 246.
  -- Emily Brontë in, 35, 36, 37.
  -- influence of, 15, 81-90, 158.
Byron, 121, 206, 207.

Children, love of, 64-67, 156.
  -- in Charlotte Brontë's
   novels, 64, 65, 66, 156.
  -- in George Eliot's novels,
   64, 156.
Cowan Bridge School, 24, 25, 27,
   91, 236.
Creative Impulse, the, 23, 155,
   157.
Criticism of Charlotte Brontë,
   15, 31-33, 64-75, 78-81, 117,
   120, 122.
  -- of _Jane Eyre_, 114, 117,
   120-124, 128-142.
  -- of _Shirley_, 65, 68, 131, 132,
   137, 138, 143.
  -- of _Villette_, 143-149, 153-160,
   162, 163.
  -- of _Emma_, 161, 162.
  -- of Charlotte Brontë's
   _Poems_, 164, 165.
  -- of Emily Brontë's _Poems_,
   174-209.
Criticism of _Wuthering Heights_,
   209-234.
  -- of _Agnes Grey_, 49, 50.
  -- of _The Tenant of Wildfell
   Hall_, 54, 55.
  -- of Anne Brontë's _Poems_,
   54-57, 188, 246.

Dean, Nelly, in _Wuthering
   Heights_, 222, 224, 225, 229.
Destiny, 35, 36, 37, 39, 48, 103,
   105, 234.
_Destiny, Wisdom and_, quoted, 170.
Dewsbury, Charlotte Brontë at,
   27, 94.
Dialogue, 116, 117, 139, 140, 149,
   230.
Diary, Emily Brontë's, 33, 38,
   194.
  -- Anne Brontë's, 34, 168,
   194.
Dimnet, M., 15, 16, 51, 163.
  -- -- his criticism of Charlotte
   Brontë, 16.
  -- -- his criticism of
   _Wuthering Heights_, 17.
Dobell, Sydney, on Emily
   Brontë, 232.
Dramatic instinct of Charlotte
   Brontë, 163, 231, 232.
  -- -- of Emily Brontë, 231,
   232.
Duclaux, Madame, 14, 20, 21, 44,
   50, 61, 120.
  -- -- her Emily Brontë,
   14, 21, 44, 50, 120, 167, 182.
  -- -- on _Wuthering Heights_
   211, 212.
Dunton, Mr. Theodore Watts-,
   14, 15.

Earnshaw, Catherine, 169,
   173, 208-229.
  -- -- character of, 212-216,
   227.
  -- Hareton, 209-212.
  -- -- character of, 215-218,
   226.
Earth, the, 127, 136, 143, 173,
   207, 208, 224.
  -- Emily Brontë's love of,
   136, 174, 175, 208, 222.
  -- Genius of, 175.
  -- Poem to, 207, 208.
Ecstasy, 179.
Eliot, George, 64, 143, 156, 171.
Emanuel, Paul, 105, 144-146,
   148-153, 157, 242, 243.
_Emma, Fragment of_, 161, 162.
Experience, 144 et seq., 170, 172,
   173, 234.
  -- novel of, 106, 107, 143-146,
   148, 164.
  -- how far important, 144,
   145, 148, 234.
  -- of Charlotte Brontë, 129,
   130, 172, 234.
Eyre, name whence derived, 239.

Fanshawe, Ginevra, character
   of, 154, 159.
Farrar, Dean, 55.
Fielding, 123.
_Fragment of Emma_, 161, 162.

Gaskell, Mrs., 20, 21, 22, 30,
   42, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 96, 101,
   120, 143, 147, 167.
Gaskell's, Mrs., _Life of Charlotte
   Brontë_, 47, 57, 58, 67, 68, 234-237.
Genius,
  -- of Charlotte Brontë, 13, 14,
   19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 35, 80,
   91, 103, 104, 130, 131, 171, 233.
  -- of Emily Brontë, 14, 15,
   16, 17, 22, 171, 172, 185, 186,
   187, 208, 209, 229, 233, 234,
   236.
  -- the, of Place, 19, 20, 227,
   228.
  -- the, of Earth, 174, 175.
  -- test of, 233, 234.
"Gondal Chronicles", 38, 39,
   193, 194, 232.
"Gondal Poems", 17, 193-208,
   234.
Grundy, Francis, 33, 51, 60, 203,
   246.

Haworth, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27,
   29, 37, 42-44, 168.
  -- influence of, 24, 25, 30, 47,
   94, 103, 105, 165, 166, 227,
   228, 235, 236.
Heathcliff, 53, 170, 197, 209-221,
   222, 224, 225, 239-242.
  -- character of, 209, 210, 211,
   226.
  -- and Zamorna, 202-207.
Héger, M. Constantin, 14, 35, 36,
   81-90.
  -- -- character of, 88, 89,
   146, 147.
  -- -- influence of, 36, 100,
   103-105.
Héger's, M. Constantin, relations
   with Charlotte Brontë,
   14, 15, 81-90, 96, 100, 104, 105,
   130, 239-247.
  -- -- original of Paul
   Emanuel, 105, 144-150, 239-247.
  -- Madame, 14, 15, 35, 36,
   85-89, 104, 148.
  -- -- original of Madame
   Beck, 144, 148, 149.
Helstone, Caroline, 98, 137, 139,
   141, 142, 143.
  -- -- and Miss Ellen
   Nussey, 75, 98.
Henri, Frances, 89, 108-110.
Heredity, 211, 212.

Imagination and the real, 130,
   144.

_Jane Eyre_, 21, 24, 39, 40, 64, 68,
   89, 91, 101, 103, 109, 110,
   112-131, 133, 143, 148, 159,
   239-247.
  -- -- criticisms of, 112,
   116-124.
  -- -- dialogue in, 113, 114,
   117, 118, 119.
  -- -- passion in, 113, 114,
   115, 116, 117.
  -- -- reality of, 112, 113,
   124.
  -- -- style in, 128, 129.
  -- -- and _The Professor_
   compared, 105, 109, 110, 112,
   113, 129, 138.
  -- -- and _Shirley_ compared,
   131, 138, 141.
  -- -- and _Villette_ compared,
   105, 144, 159.
  -- -- quoted, 113-115,
   117-119, 125-129.
John of the Cross, St., 180, 181.

Letters of Charlotte Brontë,
   46, 53, 75, 76, 165, 166.
  -- -- to Miss Ellen Nussey,
   46, 72, 75-78, 82-92.
  -- -- from Brussels, 84-87.
  -- -- to M. Héger, 90.
  -- -- to Southey, 99.
  -- -- to Wordsworth, 99.
Leyland, Francis A., 60, 61.
  -- -- on Branwell Brontë,
   81, 233, 246.
  -- the sculptor, 29, 51, 246.
Lewes, George Henry, 33, 64, 68,
   124.
  -- -- on _Shirley_, 68.
_Life of Charlotte Brontë_, Mrs.
   Gaskell's, 47, 57, 58, 67, 68,
   234-237.
Linton, Catherine, 212, 221, 222,
   227.
London, Charlotte Brontë in, 15,
   40, 46, 47, 244.

Mackay, Mr. Angus, 81.
Maeterlinck, M., on Emily
   Brontë, 14, 170, 213.
Malham-Dembleby, Mr. J., 87,
   232, 239-245.
Marriage of Charlotte Brontë,
   47-49.
  -- Charlotte Brontë on, 69-80,
   141, 142.
Meredith, George, 133, 224.
Moore, Louis, 134, 141, 143.
  -- Robert, 137, 140.
Motherhood, 65-68.
Mysticism, 16, 168, 169, 173-181,
   186.

Nature in _Shirley_, 136, 137.
  -- in _Wuthering Heights_, 173.
  -- in Emily Brontë's Poems,
   207, 208.
Nicholls, Rev. Arthur Bell,
   47-49, 82.
Nicoll, Sir William Robertson,
   14, 182, 189, 190.
_Note on Charlotte Brontë_, by
   Algernon Charles Swinburne,
   14, 64.
Novel, the, 163.
Novels of Charlotte Brontë,
   105-165.
  -- of Anne Brontë, 39, 49-54.
  -- of Emily Brontë, 39, 209-234.
Nussey, Miss Ellen, 26, 46, 58,
   72, 73, 75-78, 84, 168, 169.
  -- -- Charlotte Brontë's
   friendship with, 91-99.
  -- -- Charlotte Brontë's
   letters to, 31, 46, 72, 75-78,
   86, 91-99.
  -- -- Charlotte Brontë's
   advice to, 75-78, 84.
  -- -- influence of, 91-93.
  -- Rev. Henry, 79, 80.
  -- -- original of St. John
   Rivers, 91, 141, 145.

Oliphant, Mrs., on Charlotte
   Brontë, 31, 32, 33, 69-74, 79,
   80, 117, 141.
  -- -- on _Shirley_, 70, 71,
   72, 141, 142.

Paganism, Emily Brontë's, 16,
   135, 136, 174, 186, 208, 214.
  -- in _Wuthering Heights_, 209,
   211, 214, 222.
Pantheism, Emily Brontë's, 171,
   184.
Parmenides, Poem on _Nature_,
   185.
Passion, Charlotte Brontë's treatment
   of, 106, 116, 123, 124,
   176.
  -- Emily Brontë's treatment
   of, 172, 213, 214.
  -- Dickens' Treatment of,
   123.
  -- Fielding's treatment of,
   123.
  -- Jane Austen's treatment
   of, 124.
  -- Smollett's treatment of,
   123.
  -- Thackeray's treatment of,
   123.
  -- in _Jane Eyre_, 113, 114, 115,
   116, 117.
  -- in _Shirley_, 131, 141.
  -- in _Villette_, 159.
  -- in _Wuthering Heights_, 210,
   211, 212, 213, 218, 221, 222,
   224, 228, 231.
  -- in Emily Brontë's Poems,
   179, 180, 182, 196, 199, 200,
   205, 208.
  -- in Emily Brontë's soul,
   170-172, 174, 209.
  -- test in reality, 159.
"Philosopher, The", 177.
Philosophy, Emily Brontë's, 169,
   175, 176, 177.
_Pictures of the Past_, by Francis
   Grundy, 60.
Poems of Anne Brontë, 54-57,
   164, 188, 246.
  -- of Branwell Brontë, 28,
   29, 42, 164, 233, 246.
  -- of Charlotte Brontë, 39,
   103, 164, 169, 170, 246.
  -- of Emily Brontë, 17, 39,
   174-185, 231, 232.
  -- _The Complete_, of Emily
   Brontë,
"Poems, Gondal", 17, 193-208,
   234.
_Professor, The_, 39, 89, 105, 106,
   107-112, 138.
_Professor, The_ and _Jane Eyre_ compared,
   105, 109, 110, 112, 113,
   129, 138.
  -- -- and _Villette_ compared,
   111.
  -- -- quoted, 107, 108,
   109, 111.
Pryor, Mrs., 140.

_Quarterly Review, The_, 53, 114,
   117, 120, 121, 131.

Real, the,
  -- Imagination and the, 130,
   134.
  -- germ of the, 138, 145, 158.
Realism, 163, 221, 231.
Reality, 113, 124, 138, 141, 143,
   145, 146, 147, 148, 158, 159,
   163, 171, 173, 174, 176, 228,
   230, 231.
Reid, Sir T. Wemyss, 58, 96.
  -- -- on Charlotte Brontë,
   58, 81, 100.
  -- -- quoted, 58-60.
Rigby, Miss (Lady Eastlake), 122.
Rivers, St. John, 91, 145.
Robinson, Miss A. Mary F.
   _See_ Duclaux, Madame.
  -- Mrs., 15, 33.
  -- -- and Branwell Brontë,
   15, 41, 42, 52.
  -- -- vindicated, 41, 50.
Rochester, character of, 113, 117,
   118, 119, 120, 121, 125, 140, 141.
Roe Head, 26, 27, 95, 162.

Sidgwick, Mr., 28, 64.
  -- Mrs., 28, 62-64.
_Shirley_, 46, 65, 68, 72, 100,
   131-143.
  -- portrait of Emily Brontë
   in, 70, 71, 133, 137, 147.
  -- dialogue in, 139-141.
  -- criticism of, 64, 65, 68,
   137, 138.
  -- style in, 139, 140, 141.
  -- Woman in, 70, 71, 132,
   133, 137, 141, 143.
_Shirley_ and _Jane Eyre_ compared,
   131, 138, 141.
  -- and _Villette_ compared, 111,
   141, 148, 159.
  -- and _Wuthering Heights_ compared,
   139.
  -- quoted, 133-137, 138, 139,
   140, 141, 142.
Shorter, Mr. Clement K., 13,
   14, 74, 82, 84, 87, 88, 96, 100,
   101, 186-190, 191, 193. _See
   also_ Prefatory Note.
Smith, Mr. George, 40, 144, 158.
Smollett, 123.
Snowe, Lucy, 71, 79, 89.
  -- -- and Pauline de
   Bassompierre, 153-157.
Sources of _Wuthering Heights_, 16,
   196-209, 231.
Southey, Robert, Charlotte
   Brontë's letter to, 99.
Southey's, Robert, advice to
   Charlotte Brontë, 99.
Stephen, Mr. Leslie, 62, 63, 79.
Style, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106,
   128, 160, 161, 162, 230, 231.
Sue, Eugène, 243, 244.
Supernatural, the, in _Wuthering
   Heights_, 16, 207-221.
Swinburne, Mr., on Charlotte
   Brontë, 14, 31, 64-65, 66, 68.
  -- -- on Emily Brontë, 14, 174.

Taylor, Miss Mary, 15, 35, 58,
   91, 92, 94, 98.
  -- Mr. Joe, 72.
  -- Mr. James, 72, 73, 74, 145.
Temperament, Charlotte Brontë's,
   73, 81.
_Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The_, 39,
   40, 54, 55.
  -- -- audacity of, 54.
  -- -- realism of, 54.
  -- -- and Farrar's _Eternal
   Hope_, 55.
Thackeray, 15, 47, 61, 123.
Theories, 16, 17, 57-90, 100, 106,
   231-332, 237, 238-247.
Thornton, 20.

_Villette_, 46, 89, 100, 105, 140-161.
  -- Lucy Snowe in, 71, 79, 89.
  -- M. Paul in. _See_ Emanuel
   Paul.
  -- dialogue in, 149.
  -- germ of the real in, 145,
   158.
  -- reality of, 144, 145, 146,
   147, 148, 158, 159, 163.
  -- realism of, 163, 164.
  -- style in, 160, 161.
  -- and _The Professor_ compared,
   98, 99, 111, 112.
  -- and _Jane Eyre_ compared,
   105, 144, 159.
  -- and _Shirley_ compared, 111,
   141, 148, 159.
  -- quoted, 149-153, 154, 155,
   157.

Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 14, 196.
Williams, Mr. W.S., 40.
  -- -- Charlotte Brontë's
   letter to, 78.
Wilson, Rev. Carus, 24, 25.
_Wisdom and Destiny_ quoted, 170,
   213.
Woman, 69, 70, 117, 118, 132,
   133, 140, 142, 143.
Woman, mid-Victorian, 71, 118,
   132.
  -- modern, 133.
Woman's place in the world, 78,
   142.
Women, Charlotte Brontë's, 69,
   70, 132, 133.
Wooler, Miss, 26, 27, 35, 98.
Wordsworth, letters to, 99.
_Wuthering Heights_, 16, 17, 21, 39,
   40, 46, 105, 127, 128, 130, 131,
   139, 172, 173, 208-234.
  -- -- criticism of, 209-233.
  -- -- dialogue in, 218, 219,
   220-221, 223, 224.
  -- -- mysticism in, 173.
  -- -- paganism in, 209,
   211, 214, 222.
  -- -- passion in, 210, 211,
   212, 213, 218, 221, 222, 224,
   228, 231.
  -- -- realism in, 221, 224,
   228.
  -- -- style in, 228, 230.
  -- -- the supernatural in,
   17, 196-209, 216.
  -- -- sources of, 232, 233,
   234.

Zamorna.
  -- _See_ Heathcliff.
  -- _See_ "Gondal Poems".



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TAHITI--ISLE OF DREAMS

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THE THREE BRONTËS by May Sinclair

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