LIBRARY UNIVERSU . CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO CHARLOTTE BRONTE GEORGE ELIOT JANE AUSTEN CHARLOTTE BRONTE GEORGE ELIOT JANE AUSTEN STUDIES IN THEIR WORKS BY HENRY H. IBONNELL LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 91 AND 93 FIFTH AVE., NEW YORK LONDON AND BOMBAY I9O2 Copyright, 1902 BY HENRY H. BONNELL All rights rutrvtd UNIVERSITY PRESS JOHN WILSON AND SON CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. To E. C. B. CONTENTS I. CHARLOTTE BRONTE. PAGE (a) HER REALISM 3 () HER ATTITUDE TOWARDS NATURE 53 (c) HER PASSION 81 II. GEORGE ELIOT. (V) HER RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 131 () HER ART 199 (r) HER SYMPATHY : FURTHER CON- SIDERED 257 III. JANE AUSTEN. (V) HER PLACE . 325 () HER WONDERFUL CHARM . . . 380 CHARLOTTE BRONTE A STUDY OF PASSION CHARLOTTE BRONTE A STUDY OF PASSION A. HER REALISM I "THERE are three principal influences," says the biographer of Renan, " which go to shape human character: that of heredity, that of locality, and that of every-day association." And the character maybe studied with approximations to truth only after all pos- sible evidence relating to such influences is in hand. If time be the corrector and adjuster, any approach to finality in criticism may be despaired of until the image shall have passed into a more or less fixed atmo- sphere, into an atmosphere which has ceased to pulsate with the passions and the prejudices, the friendships and the hatreds of the present hour. As a pathetic illustration of this essential inability to seize with a full sense of ownership the finished idea of a life whose activities have but just ceased, the memorial paper of Mr. Henry James upon Lowell is worthy of note. " It is his [the critic's] function," says Mr. James, " to speak with assurance when once his impression has become final ; and it is in noting this circumstance that I perceive how slenderly prompted I am to deliver myself on such an occa- sion as a critic. It is not that due conviction is ab- 4 Charlotte Bronte sent ; it is only that the function is a cold one. It is not that the final impression is dim ; it is only that it is made on a softer part of the spirit than the critical sense. The process is more mystical, the deposited image is insistently personal, the generalizing principle is that of loyalty." But if the poet had been an offender in the eyes of the critic, and if the critic had lived in a less acutely fair-minded age than the present; if instead of having the latter-day Mr. James as his friendly reviewer, the poet had died far enough back in the century to have fallen under the finger of Gifford, this difficulty of correct judgment would have been all the more urgent. The vast majority of men and women seem to be but the net product of ancestry and environment ; and an original man used to be regarded with peculiar sus- picion as one whose purpose was not explained by his environment, and whose lack of ancestry had to be accounted for by a kind of spontaneous generation or special creation, which, like all biological departures, is a little disquieting. Indeed, this nervous attitude is even yet a common one. We are fond of talking about the Republic of Let- ters, and the capitals have a fine rhetorical look on the printed page. But too many of those immortals who have finally won a free citizenship there would seem to have had their fortunes at first cast among the numbing rigors of an oligarchy, their radicalism grouped for the while into a forlorn third party, such was that questioning challenge of all new modes of thought and action which was esteemed to be a safeguard of our conservation. And yet in course of time the true values come to the surface. If there is enough vital excellence in Her Realism 5 a man's work to buoy up what is not vital in it, that work will be found afloat in after generations. The best books are not the rare books. Every wise writer is, sooner or later, a read writer. However slow the critics may be in differentiating the vitalities from the non-vitalities, the life in them is at last discovered, somehow as tears are discovered in the presence of grief, or a fever in the blood at a tale of wrong. It is not so very surprising, then, that the reception of ' Jane Eyre ' in certain critical quarters was a glar- ingly mistaken one, and that its appreciation was challenged step by step with refusals to accept its message because of the misunderstandings of its spiritual simplicity. Yet in six months' time the novel was in its third edition. 1 Sales are not the finest test, of course, for ' Queechy,' and ' An Original Belle ' are still sold. But it is not only the commonplace which is popular : there is another kind of popularity which is but the acknowledgment that a great chord has been struck true ; and this instinctive recognition of a pure, sane genius lasts in an abiding personal interest unattached to the other class of "popular** writers. How many who read, last year, well, any of the " best-selling books " of that season, can tell even the name of its author? On the other hand, who does not know that Keats lies buried in Rome; and what literary sojourner in the Eternal City does not linger for awhile in that old cemetery near the pyramid of Gaius Cestius? Finally, is there any popular living 1 ' The Life of Charlotte Bronte,' by Mrs. Gaskell, with an Intro- duction and Notes by Clement K. Shorter. New York and London, Harper & Bros., 1900, p. 363, note. All references to Mrs. Gaskell's work in this study are made from this, the latest and most authorita- tive edition of her biography. 6 Charlotte Bronte writer to whose grave, forty years after his death, will flock in one year, as to a shrine, ten thousand pil- grims? That was the number which visited the Bronte Museum at Haworth in I895. 1 II There were popular writers in Miss Bronte's day, too, who are known now only to students of literature. Richardson and Fielding had, each in his own way, marked a path for Realism to follow, but it was not heeded. The love of the marvellous, formerly fostered by the drama, and checked for awhile by Goldsmith, and in a minor way by such books as ' Evelina ' and ' Cecilia ' (for artificial as her style was, and highly improbable as were some of her incidents, Miss Burney's pictures were in general accord with the prin- ciples of realism), found full vent again in the ' Myste- ries of Udolpho,' and in the lucubrations of ' Monk ' Lewis and 'Anastasius' Hope. While Miss Bronte had, in her formative period, only such knowledge of literature as the parsonage afforded, and while beyond certain standard poets and historians it did not afford much ; 2 while her reading was necessarily desultory, 1 'Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle,' by Clement K. Shorter, London : New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1896. p. 23. 2 We know from ' Shirley ' what the Bronte library consisted of in part: " mad Methodist magazines, full of miracles and apparitions, and preternatural warnings, ominous dreams and frenzied fanaticisms ; " all of which came from the maternal forbears in Cornwall. It was not until the pleasant relations with her publishers were established that she was put in command of a full supply of literature ; and the flood that set in then is an index to the previous drouth. In the earlier days there was no such assistance, and no time for extended reading even if the means had been present. Her Realism 7 as the time for it had to be snatched from household drudgery, needlework, and the mistaken art-practis- ing, and the nearest circulating library could be reached only by a stiff four-mile walk over the moors to Keighley (in 1848 we find her complaining that no circulating library is accessible), she had doubtless dipped into the romance writers enough to appreciate their general faults, and to criticise the same in her preface to ' The Professor.' The story-tellers whose fame was noisiest in Miss Bronte's early days might be divided into two classes, the ultra-romantic and the tiresomely didactic. An encyclopedic list of these would be interesting as showing how like a breeze from a new sphere ' Jane Eyre ' and ' Vanity Fair ' scattered their unrealities and impossibilities. They are for the most part for- gotten, and only by forcibly carrying the attention back to them can we rightly understand what the originality of Charlotte Bronte and Thackeray meant in 1847. As good specimens as any of the first class are Jane Porter, whose ' Thaddeus of Warsaw ' gained such honors (but who reads it now?) ; the Lee sis- ters, from one of the ' Canterbury Tales ' of whom Byron "borrowed" his 'Werner,' if, indeed, 'Wer- ner ' was written by Byron, and not by the Duchess of Devonshire, as the Hon. Frederick Levison-Gower now claims ; l Mrs. Radcliffe, of lurid memory ; ' Fatal Revenge ' Maturin ; the gratefully recalled G. P. R. James, with his solitary horseman, his pale moonlight, and his lonely inn ; to say nothing of the much-to- answer-for Ainsworth, with his Jack Sheppards and Dick Turpins. 1 Nineteenth Century, August, 1899. 8 Charlotte Bronte In the second division repose, among others, Mrs. Opie ; Anna Maria Porter, the child friend of Scott ; Hannah More ; Maria Edgeworth, and Miss Landon ; and that Mrs. Sherwood who in the working heyday of her life produced ninety books. 1 It is significant that the typical didacticists are women. They were forced into it, positively, by an honest natural femi- nine desire to save fiction, through morality, from utter pruriency, and negatively, by a lack of inspiration to accomplish the reform along the lines of the highest art. It is easy enough for us to laugh at Miss Edge- worth's ' Moral Tales ; ' we ought to think a little, in her justification, of what she was trying to escape from. 2 Other novelists still famous in Miss Bronte's day who may not be classified so easily were: William Godwin, whose writings she did not know, as she asks to see them in 1849 ; 3 Henry Mackenzie, whose voice comes down to us a mixed echo of Richardson and Sterne ; that sprightly woman, Miss Ferrier; William Carleton and Gerald Griffin, two Irish realists before the days of realism; the excellent Miss Mitford; and the ephem- 1 Mrs. Sherwood is, curiously enough, omitted from such works as the 'Encyclopedia Britannica ' and the ' Library of the World's Best Literature.' If such works of reference are intended to chronicle only those of the past who live in the present, her name would certainly be one of the first to be dropped ; but the author of ' Roxobel ' still, admired by grandmothers and maiden aunts in primitive homes surely deserves mention in any book which professes to be not only a recorder of the living dead, but a mausoleum also to the dead dead. 2 It is just to Miss Edgeworth's memory to say that, but for the didactic interference of her father, the popularity of her works would have remained ; and that, notwithstanding this interference, such novels as ' Castle Rackrent,' ' Belinda,' and ' Patronage,' have a fixed place in literary history, and may still be enjoyed by the judicious. 3 Shorter, p. 195. Her Realism 9 eral but fashionable Mrs. Gore. 1 I was about to put Samuel Warren in the list, but Miss Bronte prob- ably read ' Ten Thousand A Year,' as it came from Blackwood's, the one strictly literary periodical taken in at the parsonage up to 1832, when Eraser's was subscribed to for a short period. In none of these had Charlotte Bronte any lot or share. 2 Surely the remarkable circumstance of her criticism of Miss Austen is, not that it differs from Sir Walter Scott's (and nearly everybody else's, too), but because of its revelation that she had never seen such a book as ' Pride and Prejudice/ which had then been in print thirty-five years. We are fain to overlook in Charlotte Bronte what in others would seem a slight upon that delightful recorder of tittle-tattle and charm- ing precursor of Trollope. The reader of the biog- raphy knows that she was, as a child, uncommonly 1 Among the " curiosities of literature " which I occasionally take down from a dusty top-shelf, I value for the suggestions it invariably awakens a certain sadly faded set of twelvemos, in the doubtful bind- ing of the early '30*3, and bearing the imprint of the Messrs. Harper. They are reprints of the most popular of such of the above as had fallen from the press by that time ; and the accompanying advertise- ment of the publishers, long since turned yellow, mentions these pro- ductions as " fashionable," in contradistinction to the " standard " work noted on the opposite leaf. Fancy the impossibility of such a distinc- tion between fiction and other literature to-day ! Yet for the most part, the distinction was deserved then. Only since then has the novel taken on its more serious side, assuming to itself the characteristics of all the other forms of literature also. 2 She says, in a letter to Mr. Williams : " The plot of 'Jane Eyre ' may be a hackneyed one. Mr. Thackeray remarks that it is familiar to him. But having read comparatively few novels, I never chanced to meet with it, and I thought it original. . . . The Weekly Chronicle seems inclined to identify me with Mrs. Marsh. I never had the pleasure of perusing a line of Mrs. Marsh's in my life." Shorter, p. 404. io Charlotte Bronte studious, and that her schoolmates were wont to look up to her as a prodigy of learning. It is safe to surmise that of the books she recommends to Ellen Nussey in her letter of July 4, 1834,* she had read a goodly number, if not all, herself; and the list is valuable as showing that, however high the omissions, there were still higher inclusions. But that she was not a trained student is evident. Outside of Blackwood's she had but little acquaintance with contemporary writers. The favorite heroes of the youthful ' Magazine ' were, almost without exception, the famous politicians of the day, were not literary heroes. The natural periods or turning-points of literary history were not known to her ; and she was therefore without any thorough understanding of their reciprocal relations and their influence upon subsequent writing. Her reference to Mr. Atkinson's book as " the first exposition of avowed atheism and materialism " she had ever read, 2 shows she had no acquaintance with the free thought of the preceding century; and if any speculative writing had come in her way (which the environment forbids us to suppose), it is clear from the tone of her letters pertaining to this period that it would have been considered unsafe for a young woman's perusal. Whether consciously or unconsciously, and without necessarily affecting his originality, nearly every writer is influenced by some predecessor. Bulwer traces to Godwin, Dumas to Scott. The literary father of Dickens is Goldsmith, and his uncles are Smollett and Sterne ; while Smollett, for his part, is a disciple of Lesage, and Sterne is the English Rabelais. Much as Thackeray differs from Fielding, if it had not been 1 Gaskell, p. 134. 2 Gaskell, p. 517. Her Realism 1 1 for Fielding, he would have differed more. And Fielding's prototype, on his own confession, was Cervantes. But whence came Charlotte Bronte? Stand on the old gray steps of that Haworth par- sonage, and cry out the question over the moors billowing up from the horizon to your feet. Echo will answer "Whence?" There never was author of highest rank so uninflu- enced by, because there never was one so uncon- scious of, literary models. Even the French trash she read to perfect her knowledge of that tongue a dangerous experiment with less elemental natures was without any effect upon her modes. 1 Her object 1 So high an authority as Mrs. Humphry Ward thinks differently. [' Jane Eyre.' Haworth edition. New York. Harper & Bros., 1899. Introduction, pp. xxvii-xxx.] There is no more proof, however, that the bale of French books which Charlotte acknowledges receiving in 1840 contained Hugo and De Musset (the possibility of which Mrs. Ward hints at) than that it contained the merely ephemeral writers of the day. Why might it not just as well have held the de- lectable fiction of the Countess Dash ? George Sand may have had some influence upon her style. But the point here contended for is the absolute independence of her idea ; and Mrs. Ward admits that the differences between the two are fundamental, and that Charlotte Bronte's stuff is " English, Protestant, law-respecting, conventional even." She had only a qualified regard for the French woman. She writes Lewes, in 1848, that she never saw any of her works which she ad- mired throughout, and thinks that ' Consuelo ' couples " strange extravagance with wondrous excellence." [Gaskell, p. 361 ] ' Jane Eyre ' and ' Shirley ' were published before she had read " some of Balzac's and George Sand's novels," which Lewes "lent her," in 1850, " to take with her into the country," and which she returned with the criticism that George Sand is often a " fantastic, fanatical, unprac- tical enthusiast," "far from truthful " in " many of her views of life," apt to be " misled ... by her feelings." " A hopeful point in all her writings," she concludes, " is the scarcity of false French sentiment, I wish I could say its absence ; but the weed flourishes here and there, even in the ' Lettres.' " [Ibid., pp. 494, 495.] 12 Charlotte Bronte was to learn a vocabulary, not to form a style ; and she did not come in contact with Balzac until late in life, when Lewes called her attention that way. When we hear of Maupassant apprenticing himself to a lit- erary taskmaster for seven years, as Jacob served Laban, before putting pen to paper, the Rachel in view, perfection of style ; and when we remember that Maupassant is but the perfected flower of a plant which had begun to bloom before Miss Bronte's day, we exclaim : Here, then, is a mystery ! if not a soul breathing rather than a mind working, at least a mind drawing its breath of life from the soul, and not from other minds. She was one of the queens of literature, like Mrs. Browning, and yet not a lite- rary woman, like Miss Martineau. Ill Imagination so existed for this Yorkshire girl. Its freedom from literary influence was not only the re- sult of the negations of her surroundings, but was an indication in part of her determination to carve her own way. As we have seen, she knew enough of the romancers to deliberately direct her steps in the op- posite direction ; and that was realism. Realism to her meant simply as it must mean to all of us when we get back to fundamental conceptions truth to nature. By that test she can say, " Read Scott alone ; all novels after his are worthless." 1 She wrote that before Thackeray had startled the world with a new form of realism ; but even after that happy day she would still have defended Scott on the ground that 1 Gaskell, p. 135. t Her Realism i 3 his romantic situations did not interfere with his sane portrayals of character. Though she tells us that, in sketching Miss Ainley, she is not depicting a figment of the imagination [" we seek the originals of such portraits in real life only"], she also makes Caroline Helstone say, in the same volume, in answer to Shir- ley's question who prompted her assertion that cer- tain natures, like Cowper's and Rousseau's, were never loved : " The voice we hear in solitude told me all I know on these subjects." Jane Eyre remarks that the three marvellous water-colors which she has shown to Rochester she saw " with the spiritual eye." The trouble with the latter-day realism is that the outside voices are so loud it cannot hear the voices of solitude; and the spiritual eye has become dim through its constant employment in unspiritual in- vestigations. The story of the life of Miss Bronte admits us to a wonderful picture of simplicity and innocence, the simplicity rising to spiritual propor- tions as the morning light of intellectual aspiration blazes through it, and the innocence, like that softer light of evening, taking on deeper colors as the knowledge comes. Realism was to her a vital con- ception ; but we see it exalted, by this independence, this ideality, this simplicity and innocence. It stood, first and foremost, for truthfulness, and her life not being full of varied experiences, this truthfulness would not allow her to deal imaginatively with situ- ations beyond them. But what sets it apart from other forms of reality is its sublimation, the actual- ities studied filtering through her sweet maidenly heart before taking their final shape. How could the critics suppose for a moment that ' Jane Eyre ' was the work of a man? 14 Charlotte Bronte In the filtration it underwent the change. When the bitterness of physical isolation, the sweetness of purity of spirit, the faculty of great receptiveness, and the habit of dogged obstinacy, born of devout conscientiousness, meet in one person, there is likely to result a certain hardness, touched and fired by a purifying egoism. No competent critic would ever apply Chatfield's witty definition of egoism to Miss Bronte, " suffering the private I to be too much in the public eye ; " and yet no critic, competent or otherwise, could fail to note the intensity of the pre- dominant inborn self-emphasis in everything she has written. Such subjectivity is simply the product of conditions fostered by extreme loneliness of life, quickened by intense loftiness of thought. It was not the forced atmosphere of voluntary seclusion which she breathed, but the clean breeze of native loneliness. Hence the natural wildness of the flavor, and the purity of the bouquet. " It is moorish," says Charlotte, of 'Wuthering Heights,' "and wild and knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise, the author being herself a native and nursling of the moors." And this is true only in less degree of the sister who wrote it. Picture once more the scene : three motherless girls, with restless, searching brains hungered for lack of food ; with a father whose idyllic selfishness left no room in his thoughts for a proper comprehension of their difficulties, and a brother whose presence was a tor- ment; cut off from the busy world, and with a total ignorance of its passwords and divining rods ; wear- ing out body and soul with fruitless plans to remove the load of poverty ; feeling conscious power in their Her Realism 1 5 veins, and seeing the beckoning hand of fate, but dis- cerning not whither it led, and groping in tracts far more desolate than any surrounding moors ; the silence all about broken only by the tumult of rush- ing thought. The result is idealized realism, the ideality not antagonizing the realism, but clarifying it. The ob- jective milieu was her physical isolation; the subject- tive force was her purity of spirit which penetrated it; the result was the glorious landscape of an apocalypse. It is unconscious, artless. Indeed, her lonely inde- pendence is constantly manifesting itself in artlessness of one form or another. That her work has art not- withstanding is because genius inevitably is thus at- tended : the kindly god provides fairy spades to dig withal. Untutored genius involves unlabored art; and when the tongue is touched by fire, the form of the issuing words is of kindling beauty. We have in Charlotte and Emily Bronte the most shining of all examples of pure genius. In George Eliot the genius is alloyed by learning. Gold of the purest texture may not be put to as many uses in the arts as the alloyed metals, but it is harder to supply the purity than the alloy. Because of her narrower horizon, Charlotte Bronte had a more compelling genius than her successor, whose acquaintance with the world's philosophies so overlay her thought that the piled up learning was constantly threatening a blockade of the tap-root of genius, whence flow the living juices which color the whole. The develop- ment of spiritual strength depends upon intensity, rather than comprehensiveness, of thought; and in- tense thinking, narrowed by surroundings, and driven in on itself, must result, if the conditions are other- 1 6 Charlotte Bronte wise favorable, in intense spirituality. Innocence of life of the world energizes and drives down to its deepest springs the search into the life of self. The utter absence of world-knowledge becomes the utter presence of self-penetration. For we must remember that the root idea of genius does not only not involve extraordinary culture, but, on the contrary, conveys a meaning which such culture may succeed in obliterat- ing. So, if Charlotte Bronte could not have drawn Tito Melema, George Eliot could not have drawn Edward Rochester. If the former could not have portrayed with like skill such a subtle analysis of char- acter as is presented in Lydgate, an analysis which gets its power from a wide knowledge of motives and men, still more certainly could George Eliot not have made the voice of Rochester ring through the night, " Jane ! Jane ! Jane ! " to be heard miles and miles away by Jane the wind blowing where it listeth, and no one telling whence it cometh or whither it goeth. And yet it is truth itself; and Miss Bronte once said, " in a low voice, drawing in her breath," " But it is a true thing; it really happened." I am very far from meaning to compare the genius of George Eliot unfavorably with that of one who so wholly differed from her. But I do mean that there is danger of a loss of the purest spirituality in the broadening out of the intellectual sympathies, and, conversely, that the intense light of a pure spirituality throws a shadow over those sympathies. It is one of many indications that Charlotte Bronte did not write novels with a purpose ; for with all their nobility, the specialized interest of George Eliot's later works bears the same relation to Miss Bronte's simple utterance as a hymn which is at the same time a prayer does Her Realism 17 to a hymn of praise. George Eliot's genius shone through talent, Charlotte Bronte's in spite of talent. Each kind has its peculiar dangers, makes its specific mistakes. Only, the errors of genius led astray by talent are more far-reaching than the accidental lapses of genius pure and simple. The character of Lydgate is perfectly drawn ; the most searching analysis fails to find the slightest flaw in the workmanship. There are many incidental errors, on the other hand, in the building up of Rochester. But the book which con- tains Lydgate is a failure, so far as it fails to establish a doctrine which had taken such an insistent hold upon its author as to warp her mind from its proper contemplation. The nervous intelligence of genius prevented such a failure in ' Jane Eyre.' In that one respect, ' Middlemarch ' is a mistake. ' Jane Eyre ' merely contains mistake. She was aware of her dangers. She acknowledges some affinity between 'Jane Eyre ' and ' David Cop- perfield,' but exclaims : " Only, what an advantage has Dickens in his varied knowledge of men and things ! " l See what her conception of realism here stood for. " Details, situations which I do not understand and cannot personally inspect, I would not for the world meddle with, lest I should make a more ridiculous mess of the matter than Mrs. Trollope did in her ' Factory Boy.' Besides," she continues, " not one feeling on any subject, public or private, will I ever affect that I do not really experience. Yet though I must limit my sympathies; though my observation cannot penetrate where the very deepest political and social truths are to be learnt; though many doors of knowledge which are open for you are forever shut for l Shorter, p. 397. 2 1 8 Charlotte Bronte me ; though I must guess and calculate and grope my way in the dark, and come to uncertain conclusions unaided and alone where such writers as Dickens and Thackeray, having access to the shrine and image of Truth, have only to go into the temple, lift the veil a moment, and come out and say what they have seen, yet with every disadvantage, I mean still, in my own contracted way, to do my best." ] This lack of experience which she regrets is the cause of whatever failures we have to reckon against her ; for no matter how deliberate a realism, and how absolute a conscientiousness, it cannot but transpire that a sparse acquaintance with men and women will lead the wayfarer into occasional culs-de-sac through a failure to appreciate the altered values in the whole- ness of a character which the side-lights of motive and circumstance thrust into it. It was the passion of this woman to study the character in its wholeness ; but the absence of the world-knowledge at times ex- aggerated, in her pure vision, faults which such a knowledge would condone, and minimized virtues which it would extol. She saw the world, of neces- sity, too much through the eyes of self. And yet the failures are unimportant; for, we say again, element- ary genius is too intelligent to make fundamental mis- takes, while intellectuality forces such mistakes upon the intelligence. 2 1 Shorter, p. 409. a Could we indulge in impossible speculations as to what Currer and Ellis Bell would have brought forth had their father's lot been cast in a busy city parish, we might easily imagine very different re- sults. Take three examples from Mrs. Gaskell as indicating Char- lotte's sturdy ignorance of the world, and incidentally emphasizing the reflection of the quaint beauty of her isolation upon her thoughts and actions. Is there, for example, in all the tearful history of liter- Her Realism 19 IV Not to affect what she did not really experience did not mean that she must physically experience everything she wrote about, but only that she must ary aspirations, a more touching instance of unacquaintance with ways and means than the record of the travels of the manuscript of the ' Professor ' in search of a publisher ? Having experimented with house after house, it occurred to this brave struggler, as a last resource, to send the, to her precious, but by this time hated, package to Messrs. Smith & Elder, a firm which the sophisticated candidate for fame would have selected among the first of his choice. And the bundle arrives at Cornhill in its original wrapping, with all the other direc- tions and cancelled stamps upon it: so each publisher to whom it had been submitted must have known perforce of all the other publishers who had declined it ! Like her Jane and her Lucy, there it stood in all its disadvantages; she would not strip it of a single one. Let it be accepted on its inside merits or not at all. The second scene is one which stands out in Rembrandt-like colors which leave a deep impress for all time upon the heart. When Mr. Bronte took his daughters to Brussels, their night in London was passed at the famed Chapter Coffee House of Paternoster Row ; and thither, " for very ignorance where else to go," drifted the two shrink- ing girls when they went up to town to break the news of their iden- tity to their publishers. Never before, I conceive, in the history of those walls, which had heard the wordy talk of Johnson and echoed the laughter of Fielding, had such guests been harbored there ; and the one female servant of the place whom I like to fancy a good woman must have taken a motherly interest in the wanderers, whom Mr. Smith found " clinging together on the most remote window- seat," below which came up to them not the "mighty roar of London," but an occasional " footfall on the pavement ... of that unfrequented street." Finally, Miss Bronte's constitutional timidity was so intense that the meeting of strangers was a positive torment. Whenever it was possible, she refused the kind offers of her publishers of introductions to the literary lions of the day, even declining Dickens, whose fame was then growing daily. Yet this painfully diffident woman nerves her almost uncontrollable bashfulness to the point of addressing a Frenchman in an English railway carriage, eager to snatch every opportunity to improve herself in his language ! 2O Charlotte Bronte feel mentally the absolute truth of it. Whatever faults there are lie in the exaggeration her intense fidelity placed upon this conception. Her anxiety not to falsify, her determination to paint people as she sees them, warts and all, results in a rather slim number of agreeable people. Always excepting Shirley for Shirley, be it always remembered, is Emily the only characters in her novels free from sorrowful humors of some sort are the Misses Rivers, Mrs. Fairfax, and Miss Temple, all in her first great fiction ; which, with the addition of little Henry Symp- son from ' Shirley,' and Miss de Bassompierre from ' Villette ' complete the list. I do not include Caro- line Helstone in the category, although she is a lovable girl, because she is in part an idealized por- trait of Charlotte Bronte herself, she coyly placing herself in a romantic atmosphere for once (as if she could not bear to part from Emily after having placed her there first), and attempting to hide from discovery in such an unusual course by speaking in the third person. The rigor of her portrayals, we cannot but feel, is occasionally overdone. Her portrait of Madame Beck, for example, is too severe, although we know the provocations. It is difficult to believe that " not the agony in Gethsemane, not the death on Calvary, could have wrung from her eyes one tear." Lucy had, at least, considerable freedom there, and was apparently allowed to go out evenings, even to the theatre, with Dr. John, when she so desired. She just mentions some of Madame Beck's good points, showing, in spite of her antipathy, and except for its Jesuitry, that the school was a rationally managed one, and that if the pupils were not happy, it was not Her Realism 21 wholly Madame Beck's fault. Because Miss Bronte believed all men and women to be imperfect, her characters reflect this belief, sometimes to an un- pleasant degree of truthfulness. Even Robert Moore, fine fellow as he is, is made to sacrifice to Baal by turning his back on Caroline, and seeking matrimonial alliance with a pecuniary end in view. And on the night of Robert's confession of his meanness, the sturdy Yorke himself tells a " dark truth," namely, that if his old sweetheart had loved him as he once fancied he loved her ; if he " had been secure of her affection, certain of her constancy, been irritated by no doubts, stung by no humiliations . . . the odds were (he let his hand fall heavy on the saddle) that he should have left her ! " No marvel that after this, " they rode side by side in silence." Miss Bronte does not express any scorn of men, as apart from women, here, but holds the glass to human nature. For she who drew Edward Crimsworth and Brockle- hurst also painted Jane Eyre's aunt and Madame Beck, to say nothing of Mrs. Yorke, into whose mouth she puts the spitfire of the Quarterly's very words, thus showing herself capable of bright revenge. But, though we feel the austerity of her treatment, though we see that the arrow aimed at exactness may fall below the heart of the centre because not directed above it, though the truth which she finds is at times a little too harsh for common vision, still such is her general truthfulness her impersona- tions do not cease to interest because ' disagreeable ; ' nay, none of her strongest characters are among the exceptions. And the severity is always keen against herself. Her portraits of the Professor, Jane Eyre, and Lucy 22 Charlotte Bronte Snowe intend to urge the next to impossible like- lihood of their originals to win that affection for which they were perishing because of the natural obstacles their dispositions offered to popular esteem. Who does not remember how their author is con- stantly checking and subduing their dreams of happi- ness? Such dreams are madness, she says again and again ; and she makes her heroines plain and unpre- possessing and prim and outwardly cold, in order to make the chances of happiness fantastic. She was aiming, as we know from the preface to the ' Pro- fessor/ against the fallacious romanticism of the day, the " passionate preference for the wild, wonder- ful, and thrilling." " 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 not get a shilling he had not earned; that no sudden turn should lift him in a moment to wealth and high sta- tion ; that whatever small competency he might gain should be won by the sweat of his brow ; . . . that he should not even marry a beautiful girl or a lady of rank. As Adam's son he should share Adam's doom, and drain throughout life a mixed and mode- rate cup of enjoyment." And so she places Jane and Lucy in adverse cir- cumstances such as she was personally acquainted with, that they may look the hardest facts of life full in the face. When Lucy in whom there is even more of Charlotte Bronte than in Jane is, in her incomparable way, endeavoring to propitiate the future by realizing the present, she soliloquizes: Is there nothing more for me in life no true home nothing to be dearer to me than myself, and by its par- Her Realism 23 amount preciousness to draw from me better things than I care to cultivate for myself only? Nothing at whose feet I can willingly lay down the whole burden of human egotism, and gloriously take up the nobler charge of laboring and living for others ? I suppose, Lucy Snowe, the rule of your life is not to be so rounded ; for you the crescent phase must suffice. Very good ! I see a huge mass of my fellow- creatures in no better circumstances. I see that a great many men, and more women, hold their span of life in con- ditions of denial and privation. I find no reason why I should be of the few favored. I believe in some blending of hope and sunshine sweetening the worse lots. I believe that this life is not all ; neither the beginning nor the end. I believe while I tremble ; I trust while I weep. ... It is right to look our life accounts bravely in the face now and then, and settle them earnestly. And he is a poor self- swindler who lies to himself while he reckons the items, and sets down under the head " happiness " that which is misery. Call anguish anguish, and despair despair ; write both down in strong characters with a resolute pen ; you will the better pay your debt to Doom. Falsify; insert " privilege " where you should have written " pain," and see if your mighty creditor will allow the fraud to pass, or accept the coin with which you would cheat him. Offer to the strongest, if the darkest, angel of God's host water when he has asked blood will he take it ? Not a whole pale sea for one red drop. That she carries it too far in her supreme effort is evidenced by the ending of ' Villette.' Her father, generally wrong, was right in insisting upon a happy conclusion there. The matter of endings is always to be determined by the logical drift of the plot. If without an insult to rational intelligence Jack may have Jill, we poor mortals who love a lover want it 24 Charlotte Bronte brought about ; but if it can be done only by a gym- nastic performance, we would prefer a little heart- ache and great spiritual satisfaction to a reconciled father, a made-up quarrel, and a happy marriage, all accompanied by strong mental depression. But surely, Paul Emmanuel's ship might have come back, and the " pain-pressed pilgrim " ended her days in certain joy, without any shock to the trained percep- tions. I suspect she had been led, somewhat against her conscience, to make ' Jane Eyre ' and ' Shirley ' close happily ; and in her final work, into which the whole strong essence of her suffering was infused, she was determined not to be swayed from her fell tragic purpose. She, who is usually so logical, is forced by this Spartan fixedness not to be led into paths of dalliance to an illogical, and therefore inartistic, conclusion. Her feelings were kept under the surveillance of distrust, owing to her nervous shrinking from outward display. So, while there is a consequent inward ex- pansion, the published result is often a lack of warmth in the portrayal of character. It was as if she dreaded to praise too eagerly through fear of a rejec- tion of the gift from such an insignificant giver : the fancied repulse overcame the actual impulse. For example : I liked her. It is not a declaration I have -often made concerning my acquaintance in the course of this book. The reader will bear with it for once. Intimate intercourse, close inspection, disclosed in Paulina only what was deli- cate, intelligent, and sincere, therefore my regard for her lay deep. An admiration more superficial might have been more demonstrative. Mine, however, was quiet. Her Realism 25 Because of this her minor characters are forgotten, except by her close students, and only her great creations, like Rochester and Emmanuel, are remem- bered, because with them only does the passion burn through the timidity. One feels a primness, a restriction ; but it is not owing, as has been supposed, to an old-maidenish prudery, but to a young-maidenish modesty, the modesty of a maid of her time, which is different from that of the present day ; and which was exag- gerated even for her time by the seclusion of her sur- roundings. But such are the happy recompenses of genius nearly every negation in such an order of mind stands for the corresponding acquisition. The primness results in a fine logical exactness, and fulfils one of the minor definitions of genius, " infi- nite painstaking." It is her logic, in general, that makes her delinea- tions so sharp, her logic leagued with her stout conscientiousness. Nearly every other author would have softened the picture of the death-bed of Mrs. Reed. Not she. It is a splendid, if terrible, picture of death-bed remorse, without any death-bed repent- ance, the pain of a guilty conscience without the change of the spiritual attitude towards her sin which is signified in the more effective word, and without which the remorse is futile and cowardly. The author pities her, and makes Jane forgive her. Miss Bronte's attitude is eminently Christian ; but her clear-eyed genius penetrates the mists of sentimentality raised by those who conjure up final events in accordance with pious hopes as against assured certainties, and perceives that " it was too late for her to make now the effort to change her habitual frame of mind : living, 26 Charlotte Bronte she had ever hated me dying, she must hate me still." Inexorable, you say. Yes, but bravely true ; and though to be contemplated with tears, yet full of a stronger morality than that of the eleventh-hour repentance of average fiction. As she sowed, she reaped. It is stern, just, perfect. But it required courage to set it forth ; and it is perhaps the finest evidence in Miss Bronte's work of her logical mind and conscientious spirit, two characteristics, I believe, more pre-eminently twined in her than in any other author. To such a marriage must we trace her " severity," a legitimate child of honest parents. One might ask, if she did not affect what she did not really experience, how she came to make those social blunders in 'Jane Eyre' which gave the re- viewers such a turn. Miss Bronte doubtless thought she had found the experience in the homes in which she had led the life of a dependant ; and Miss Ingram was doubtless intended to reflect some supercilious miss who had crossed the path of the little governess, wincing at the contrast between careless freedom and careworn slavery, between proud looks and a high stomach and their utter physical and psychical oppo- sites. It is quite possible she exaggerated the contrast, her natural retiring shyness magnifying what seemed to her the reverse of shy into something bolder than it really was. It is simply one of the faults of inten- sity unchecked by experience, one of the marks of a lack of technical training. It does not interfere with her general veracity. Even in such details as per- tained to the fashionable life she was ignorant of, the Her Realism 27 falsity is only in the details. The character of Miss Ingram is clearly enough seen through all the faults of manner in telling it. Veracity was more than a study with Miss Bronte ; it was a passion. The emphasis laid upon it at times had its outcome in an exaggeration which defeated the very purpose of its aim, making the situation un- likely where it was only meant to be intense. It is hard to believe, for example, that the silence following the interruption of the marriage ceremony of Jane Eyre and Rochester lasted for ten minutes. A ten- minutes silence at such a time is a sizable slice. Of the same sort is her description of Graham conferring with Lucy about his impending interview with Mr. Home. His fate hung on the outcome of that inter- view ; and yet so anxious is the author to keep before the reader the idea of the gay, debonair Graham, the picture set forth at the beginning of the story [" a handsome, faithless-looking youth . . . his smile fre- quent, and destitute neither of fascination nor of subtlety "], that, although she makes his hand trem- ble and a " vital suspense alternately hold and hurry his breath," she can calmly assure us that in all this trouble " his smile never faded." It is also a tax upon our credulity to accept the cool statement that the knowledge possessed by Helstone and Moore that they stood a good chance of being shot from behind a wall, that drizzling night they went on their danger- ous errand to Stillbro' Moor, made them " elate." I am convinced that Richard Coeur de Lion himself would hardly be elated with the idea of being shot in the dark. But her notion was to lay emphasis on the fact of their "steely nerves and steady-beating hearts." It is merely another example of over-emphasis, almost 28 Charlotte Bronte her only fault in character drawing, and a natural fault of writers who feel their convictions intensely, and whose faithful realism is harassed by ideality. Not to multiply instances, let us say, in conclusion, that delirious persons do not talk just like Caroline Helstone in her wanderings. What causes some of Miss Bronte's conversations to seem unreal is her making her characters say to, what other novelists would make them say of, each other. This is also the fruit of the unusual conditions of her life. She thought, as it were, out loud, as is the habit of persons much accustomed to solitariness. There is a lack of skill, too, in the management of the plot, and for the same reasons. For, given sim- plicity, innocence, love of truth, as the basic character, and intensity as the temperament, and such mechani- cal complexities as the arrangement and joining to- gether of all the parts (which requires a technical gift quite different from that of the pure conceiving of character) will only bewilder and confuse. It is extremely improbable that the presence of the mani- acal wife in Thornfield could have been concealed from Mrs. Fairfax and the servants, and that their suspicions should not have been conveyed to Jane. There is no need for the elaborate portraiture of the king and queen of Belgium in ' Villette.' They have nothing to do with the story, and are of no interest in themselves: with such matter crowded into it, the book ceases to be a story, and becomes a journal. And all that intense picturing of Miss Marchmont's sufferings, at the beginning of the same book, might have been omitted. It was a too careful notice of such seeming care- lessness that moved the criticisms of those reviewers Her Realism 29 who made such a stir in their day, but who are now forgotten, while the object of their attack lives on. They were honest enough, though mistaken and not far-seeing. They could not penetrate the veil of the mystery ; nor could they know what we know of the personal life and aspirations of one who was to them simply a new novelist to earn some daily bread over ; whose name and whose sex was a riddle, and who used a language not before heard, and therefore open to conservative opposition. The famous Quarterly Review article 1 would have been z/zfamous only on 1 The subsequent history of this article is one of the most curious instances in literary records of mistaken application. Its supposed author was Lockhart, and Miss Bronte's defenders have made it hot for his memory. For over forty years he was held up to public beating, Mr. Swinburne [' A Note on Charlotte Bronte.' London : Chatto & Windus, 1877] and Mr. Birrell ['Charlotte Bronte.' London : Walter Scott, 1877] laying on particularly heavy strokes as they passed by. Yet they were not certain of the authorship ; and, of course, it did not cross their minds that the writer might have been a vvoman. " Who wrote the article," says Mr. Birrell, " is not publicly known" [p. 108]. And yet thirty-eight years before that, Charlotte and her publishers knew that Miss Rigby (afterwards Lady Eastlake) was the author [Shorter, p. 347] ; and the Memoirs of Sara Coleridge containing a letter to Quillinan referring to Miss Rigby in this con- nection were published several years .before Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Birrell wrote their monographs. The article was certainly in Lockhart's style, and in keeping with the traditions of the Quarterly. Charlotte said, before she was informed of the authorship, that the writer was " no gentleman " [Shorter, p. 190]. What Miss Rigby felt when she read Swinburne, Birrell, and others may be surmised, for I believe she must have repented of her wounding judgments. And it is still open to suspicion that Lockhart tinctured the article with his venom. There were other reviews that hurt also, one of which was our own North American of October, 1848, which may be here alluded to as an instance of cocksureness now, happily, not so prominent as in the past. The heading of the notice ran thus : "i. Jane Eyre, an Autobiography. Edited by Currer Bell. Boston: Wilkins, Carter & Co., 1848. I2mo. 30 Charlotte Bronte the supposition that the writer was personally ac- quainted with the novelist. As it stood, it was merely brutal through ignorance and spiritual dullsighted- ness. Miss Bronte's description of the house party at Thornfield is a failure, of course. She had no real leaning towards that kind of writing, and not enough experience to do it well; nor had she the gift of many lesser writers to absorb into their descriptions the essential masterly qualities of the descriptions of others. The main point overlooked by her critics was, and is, to see through this crudeness to the vital- ities beyond. The critics took roughness for coarse- ness. She drew coarse characters, but they were not coarsely drawn. We see the picture, and we say 2. Wuthering Heights. By the author of Jane Eyre. New York : Harper & Bros., 1848. 2 vols., I2ino. 3. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Acton Bell, author of Wuther- ing Heights. New York: Harper & Bros., 1848. 2 vols., I2mo." That is, Acton Bell, or Anne Bronte, wrote all three! The writer says, however, that 'Jane Eyre,' bears the mark of more than one mind and one sex. The descriptions of dress, " the minutiae of the sick chamber," and the " various superficial refinements of feeling in regard to the external relations of the sex" are feminine; but the " clear, distinct, decisive style of its representation of character, manners, and scenery . . . continually suggests a male mind." It is taken for granted that Acton is a man, and is the portrayer of that portion of ' Jane Eyre ' which has to do with Rochester. " We are gallant enough to detect the hand of a gentleman in the composition." It is more difficult for us to discover the hand of a gentleman in the review, or to deduce from its tone what constituted the reviewer's right to pass judgment upon what gentlemen do. And certain kinds of gallantry are the worst kinds of insult. Quarterly reviewers have had their little day. That evil trinity, Gif- ford, Lockhart, and Croker, are overthrown Olympians, and the insis- tent fairness of our age prohibits any succession to the office. They were only fit to crush Delia Cruscans and the like ; and their pro- nouncements were not based upon what a later generation demands in the way of judgment. Think of the critical ability of a man who could deliberately put Charlotte Bronte, as a poet, before Emily ! Her Realism 31 it is coarse ; but that is because the coarse object is delineated with truth. One looking for coarseness must go elsewhere. 1 1 Lewes' article in the Edinburgh Review, Jan., 1850, while striving to do her justice, was quite unpardonable in its flippancy, and was far worse, considering the fuller knowledge he possessed of the real facts of her life, than the Quarterly's ; and her letter to him was a deserved rebuke. [Gaskell, p. 449.] Lewes was an acute, not a pro- found man. The only critic of her work during her life who really understood her, and the first to understand Emily (too late, alas 1 for her earthly satisfaction), was Sydney Dobell, in the Palladium (bound volume of 1850). His correspondence with Miss Bronte should be read by every student of her life. See ' Life and Letters of Sydney Dobell,' London, Smith, Elder, & Co., 1878. The Palladium article is reprinted in the first volume. It is interesting to note, in this connection, that if the identity of the Bronte sisters was not known to certain persons in London before the question " Who is Currer Bell ? " passed from lip to lip over England, it argues for much lack of penetration. Charlotte began her correspondence with the firm of Aylott & Jones concerning the production of the Poems by the Bells as early as January, 1846. She wrote from Haworth, and under her own name, as sponsor for Currer Bell. It is very remarkable that this firm contributed nothing to the elucidation of the problem which sprang up upon the publication of 'Jane Eyre,' for they knew at least that Currer Bell was the friend of Charlotte Bronte, and that Charlotte Bronte's home was Haworth. The identity of the initials must also have seemed suspicious. If they knew and kept silence, it is one of the most notable silences on record. Messrs. Smith and Elder must also have had their unpub- lished suspicions, for the same reason. One of the most significant indications of the entire change of view we have undergone in our social attitude towards women may be found in Southey's well-known letter to Miss Bronte. It is quite possible that some old-fashioned gentlemen may still applaud the advice, but the point is that if Southey had to deal with the subject now, he would write differently : it is not now the view of literary men. What gave our author special offence in the criticisms of her work was the folly and crime of blaming her for writing, as a woman, what would have been condoned in a man. She was one of the first to stand for the sexlessness of art. She asked for praise or condem- nation for the work's sake, not because she, a woman, did it; and her struggle had a good deal to do with the final literary emancipation of womanhood. " Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, 32 Charlotte Bronte VI Her artlessness is shown on many sides. For exam- ple, it is everywhere evident in her failing to screen the locality of her story. All the places mentioned in the books are places known on the maps. Whin- bury is Oxenhope. Nunnely is Oakworth. Morton is Hathersage. "Field Head" is Oakwell Hall near Birstall, and all the other ' Shirley ' scenery is equally patent. The Haworth edition of the novels is sprinkled with photographs of the originals of the localities she describes under other names. She has not only been to the Brussels she writes of (unlike Mrs. Radcliffe, whose vivid mise en scdne is wholly fanciful), but one may visit the city, with copies of ' Villette ' and the ' Professor,' in hand and discover the places therein made famous, the Rue d' Isabelle, the Protestant cemetery, the church where the confession was made, the park to which Lucy stole at midnight on the feast of the Martyrs. And because the original of and it ought not to be," wrote Southey, on the ground that the seek- ing in imagination for excitement would be rendered unnecessary by the vicissitudes and anxieties of that other life which, as a woman, she must accept. Of course, he could not foresee the after-fame of this timid seeker for help ; and he would even in his own day have acknowledged, I think, that in cases of real genius, there is no volun- tary, arbitrary "seeking" in imagination, but that the imagination exists involuntarily, a hungry call on nature, demanding vent. Had Charlotte Bronte been less of a genius, this letter of Southey might have done her harm. It is a pity that he did not live, as Wordsworth did, to know the matured woman to whom, as a girl, he gave his asked-for advice. And it should be remembered that it was a specimen of Charlotte's verse that he saw : his answer was appro- priate enough for that special exhibition. But it is his generalizing that we of a later day have corrected. Her Realism 33 Brocklehurst was immediately detected, Brocklebridge church was seen to be no other than Tunstall's, over which that pious gentleman presided. Finally, as all the world knows, Lowood is no fiction, but another name for the all too real Cowan's Bridge. Edward Crimsworth curses his brother as a " grease- horn," a term which is explained to be " purely shire ; " as if the dash would not spell York to all who knew the district. On the other hand, it is only by roundabout methods that one may dis- cover that St. Oggs is Gainsborough. Indeed, George Eliot departs from geographical veracity by giving the Floss (/. e. y the Trent) a tributary, as if to throw a too eager searcher after originals off the track. 1 It is the same with the characters : they are simply the occupiers of the places, all personally or tradition- ally known to the author. The name of Eyre was not invented. Dr. John stood for Mr. George Smith, and his mother was the prototype of Mrs. Bretton. Cyril Hall's original was Canon Heald. The curates im- mediately recognized themselves, much to Miss Bronte's dismay, and made a joke of the matter, which showed them to be as bad as they were painted. Mr. Nicholls was let off easily in the pass- ing reference to Mr. Macarthy. As Morton is recog- nized as Hathersage, it is fair to assume that St. John Rivers is the fictional name of Henry Nussey, who 1 Those wishing to identify scenery in George Eliot should consult, among other papers, Mr. George Morley's article in the Gentleman's Magazine for December, 1890 (reprinted with illustrations in the 1897 volume of the Art Journal) ; ' George Eliot's Country/ in the Century for July, 1885; also articles inMurtsey's, Aug., 1897, and the Bookmci n, vol. ii., p. 376. 3 34 Charlotte Bronte was vicar there, especially as the characters fit. We have seen that her discoverer has acknowledged that Miss Ainley was drawn from life. The other old maid in the story was also known, and afterwards married. Mr. Cartwright's works at Liversedge were attacked, as were Robert Moore's at Hollow's-mill. Everybody knows who Paul Emmanuel was in real life. It is evident that the Vashti she describes in ' Villette ' was the Rachel she saw in London. There was " absolute resemblance " in Hortense Moore to Mile. Hausse; and the originals of the other teachers in ' Villette ' are mentioned in the letters from Brussels. A Miss Miller sat for the portrait labelled Ginevra Fan- shawe. Miss Nussey says 1 Charlotte had met the original of Helstone, although she blended his char- acteristics with those of her father. Mr. Brocklehurst, if you will pardon me for mentioning it again, is the Rev. Carus Wilson. Miss Nussey herself is commemo- rated in Caroline Helstone. Miss Wooler's memory is preserved in the picture of Miss Temple, and Miss Scratcherd was equally well known in the flesh. Helen Burns was Maria Bronte. The demoniacal wife in ' Jane Eyre ' was not an invention, nor, as we have seen, was that voice in the night. Mme. Beck and her previous study in the ' Professor ' were recog- nized at once. Compare the reference to the time wasted in art-practising I have in my day wasted a certain quantity of Bristol board and drawing paper, crayons and cakes of color, but when I examine the contents of my portfolio now, it seems as if during the years it had been lying closed some fairy had changed what I once thought sterling coin into dry 1 Scribner's, May, 1871. Her Realism 35 leaves, and I feel much inclined to consign the whole col- lection of drawings to the fire ; I see they have no value. with what Lucy Snowe says of the same thing : I sat bending over my desk drawing that is, copying an elaborate line engraving, tediously working up my copy to the finish of the original, for that was my practical notion of art ; and strange to say, I took extreme pleasure in the labor, and could even produce curiously finical Chinese fac-similes of steel or mezzotint plates things about as valuable as so many achievements in worsted-work, but I thought pretty well of them in those days. Because Lucy Snowe is Charlotte Bronte, as is Jane Eyre, and as is the Professor. " Mrs. Pryor was well known to many, who loved the original dearly." The very animals of the novels were the pets of the par- sonage. This faithfulness of reproduction extends in one case to the name of the character, her most typical Yorkshireman being Mr. Yorke himself; for, says Mrs. Gaskell of the original, " No other country but York- shire could have produced such a man." 1 Mary Taylor recognized the Yorke group away off in New Zealand where she read the novel, and acknowledged its truthfulness. There is, indeed, a veritable triumph for Miss Bronte's art in Miss Taylor's statement that she and the others were made to talk very much as they would have talked if they had talked at all. 2 That shows both the faithfulness of her realism and her logical power in building an imaginative structure upon a well-ascertained base. The realism was not mere phonography. The conversations were created to suit the known characters. Imagination had full sway; but, recklessly unmodifiable to every recog- 1 Gaskell, p. 158. 2 Shorter, p. 251. 36 Charlotte Bronte nized norm as the talk of the Yorke children seems, it is welcomed by the most intelligent of them as finely true. 1 No such list as this can be made of any other writer, and it is of the highest interest as illustrating the veracity of Miss Bronte's method. She describes what she knows. She had not had much acquaintance with sea scenery, so there is hardly any mention of the sea in her books. In making Hortense Moore foreign in dress, she makes the foreignness Belgian. VII Her range of vision being narrow, and her truthful- ness not permitting her to extend it beyond the limits of experience, we find not only known characters, but a similarity of type and situation. There are not many men of many minds in her novels. Hunsden's pecu- liarities are an early study of Yorke's. Dr. John talks to Lucy somewhat as Rochester talks to Jane. There is a recurrence of the master-and-pupil situa- tion of the ' Professor ' in ' Shirley ' and ' Villette.' Paul Emmanuel is a moral Rochester, in a Roman Catholic environment. Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe are twin sisters, which, knowing as we do their one original, is a dazzling evidence of their beautiful truth. Even in the incidental situations of the stories is this similarity to be found. Louis Moore's trifling with Shirley's desk is a counterpart of Paul Emmanuel's with Lucy's. Indeed, this fondness for meddling with other persons' affairs is quite an alarming symptom in her heroes. 1 Regarding Emily's work, one walking from Keighley to Haworth may see the name Earnshaw on a sign before an inn. Her Realism 37 And that the artistic imagination did not run away with the verisimilitude which she made a matter of course, is sufficiently proved by the outcome of the Lowood controversy. To revert to George Eliot once more, the comparison is inevitable, if the latter writer had had to speak of a past experience at a school which, but for some care, would have been immediately recognized as Cowan's Bridge, she would have so cloaked the identity that such a recognition would have been impossible, or would have cleverly intimated that the story was of the long ago and that the abuses had for a century or so been eradicated. Charlotte Bronte erred in these fine distinctions, be- cause of an absorption in her theme which allowed no time for other than setting it forth downright. She maintained that every word of the Lowood matter was in accordance with fact, and Mrs. Gaskell sub- stantiated it from personal investigation. 1 It is not surprising that there was a hubbub about it. But Charlotte did not expect its original would be dis- covered. She was not a reformer, like Dickens. ' Jane Eyre ' was not a novel with a purpose. Lo- wood was not intended as a companion picture to Dotheboys Hall. Dickens thundered against evils which he believed to be present. There were no evils at Cowan's Bridge when Charlotte Bronte wrote, for the school had been removed to Casterton, and its objectionable features were a thing of the past. 2 Indeed, she tells us as much in the story. Its bitter- ness had so pierced her memory, however, that her on-rushing thought did not take the prudent steps 1 Gaskell, pp. 65 seq. 2 See her letter to Miss Wooler, Shorter, p. 262. 38 Charlotte Bronte which a more deliberative judgment would have dictated. 1 And I take it that this delineation of known per- sons and places is a very different thing from the " local color " of the more modern novelists. With them it is the celebration of the district, the town, the street. Miss Bronte had no such artistic pho- tography in mind. Her scenery was not intended to be recognized ; she fancied she had concealed it be- hind fictitious names. She had an inherent terror of publicity, and wished the identity between Currer Bell and" Charlotte Bronte to remain unknown. The things she had experienced came to her as the natural things to be described ; and in the bright innocence of her heart, and the quaint self-deception of her se- clusion, she wove her magic web around the people 1 Local tradition, according to Mr. Candy [Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 267, p. 415 : Some Reminiscences of the author of ' Jane Eyre '] supports Charlotte's statement that " some died at the school and were buried quietly and quickly," notwithstanding Mrs. Gaskell's statement to the contrary. " In Leek churchyard, a short distance from Cowan's Bridge, are two gravestones, the inscriptions on which record the deaths of pupils at the school (one of the names is Becker) at the time of the epidemic described in the novel. If the date of the year which is somewhat illegible from age is correctly deciphered, the pathetic record in 'Jane Eyre ' is literally true." This writer also vouches, from personal investigation, for the general unsanitary situa- tion of the place, and the unsuitability of the building for the purpose to which it was put. In this connection, it should be insisted that she is, distinctly, not a " governess novelist." Anne might fairly be called that, but not Charlotte. She did not have the idea before her of righting any particular wrongs ; the absolute freedom of her genius saved her from that. Her direct progression towards truth, taking the steady road of Realism, compelled her to write of the heart- depressing and brain-wearying trials of the one dependent life which she knew with a personal knowledge which inflamed her soul. She was not moved by the philanthropic impulse of Dickens ; only thus could her mind flame out its painful message. Her Realism 39 she knew, and made them move in the only paths which occurred to her, the paths her own feet had trod. As a matter of fact, we learn but little of the cus- toms and manners of the localities of which she writes. The subjective crowds the objective. We hear a little, it is true, of the peripatetic " missionary basket " of parochial fame ; there is some mention of the Whitsuntide festivities of the neighborhood ; and it may be discovered that in those days Mrs. Sweeney dispensed the soothing syrup which Mrs. Winslow has since made her own. But were Miss Bronte attempt- ing " local color," surely we should find some descrip- tion of the funeral arvils which the Nonconformist Yorkshire conscience reconciled itself to as a substi- tute for the Popish wake, and which had a tendency, it would seem from Mrs. Gaskell's description, to change griefs of the heart to pains in the head. She is silent, too, concerning that other Yorkshire custom referred to by her biographer, which would have fur- nished Mr. Bunner, let us say, with delicious morsels, had he been born in Thornton, that wedding an- them sung in chapel, upon the first appearance of a newly married couple, by a band of choristers who, with the earnings of the occasion, invariably spent the following night carousing in honor of Hymen, to the great scandal of the neighborhood. Another au- thor Hardy or Blackmore, for example would have made much more out of the Gytrash than Miss Bronte does in ' Jane Eyre.' Her first consideration was the portrayal of the radical elements of charac- ter, not the painting of scenery; and all the vivid beauty of her descriptive powers, and all the rare marvel of her rich poetic prose when engaged in the 40 Charlotte Bronte depiction of woods and moors and weather, she would have held as secondary and accidental. In truth, she who in her own field is the most purely imaginative of all writers except Emily, is not an imaginative writer at all either in the portrayal of incidents or in the fashioning of character with other than her native clay. Yorkshire and Belgium are her only hall-marks. Her apocalyptic visions have other sources, which is, perhaps, why they are apoca- lyptic. Her stories are thin, and have little outward excitement, the maniacal adventures in ' Jane Eyre ' being the only really stirring exception. She could not romance for the mere pleasure of it. Only once did she break loose, when her affection lured her into the dream of Emily happily in love. But it may be that she was a better judge of her limitations than others, for ' Shirley ' ranks below her two greatest works. Hence the curates. Unlike George Eliot, she could not draw a really fine clergyman, never having met one. Mr. Hall's picture is kindly painted, but the talk of him is too didactically pious for our unre- generate taste. The purely priestly in Rivers is ex- cellently, if sternly, emphasized, but the asceticism drowns the humanity. The others seem to us mere caricatures. Caricatures they are not; they are of the type that came under her vision. VIII I would not say that Miss Bronte had the old- maid's attitude towards children, for that would put an unjust classification in view, my observation be- ing that among the best friends of children must be Her Realism 41 reckoned their maiden aunts. Actual motherhood is not necessary to awaken the mother-love lying dor- mant in virgin breasts. But she was enveloped with the peculiar shyness which is as a repelling atmos- phere to the approach of child-confidence. In re- gard to the little ones, we do not find in Currer Bell any of those sweet springs of understanding which are fed from the rills of a joyous instinctive uncritical affection. Not that she does not observe ; she ob- serves keenly, but too aloofly. She is too individual : her truthfulness to the special portrait stands in the way of a general truthfulness. Knowing as we do some of the characteristics of Maria Bronte, we should hesitate to say that Helen Burns, her fictional representative, is an impossible child. On the contrary, this portrait is not a proof that Charlotte did not understand children, but is a proof that she did understand Helen Burns. But she is so individual that she is not typical, and we do not recognize any of childhood's qualities in the charac- ter. It is not that her talk is big ; but when a pre- cocious infant uses large words, what gives charm and humor to the situation is the incongruousness of the childish mind grappling with thoughts as yet im- perfectly conceived, the developing fancy trying to take root in an undeveloped intellect. His words share the fate of his building-blocks ; they are apt to come tumbling about his head before they reach the upper stories. There is the undivorcible child-atmos- phere even in the clever talk of unusual children ; and what makes the conversation of an extraordina- rily developed child quaint is the language in the atmosphere. But there is no such atmosphere about Helen Burns. She talks like an eighteenth-century 42 Charlotte Bronte essayist. Her mind is not even a palimpsest, through the later writing of which you may discern the earlier. It is a grown-up mind of sixty years, without a trace of childhood. 1 Currer Bell's children are portraits, but portraits only of extremely rare species, as if a natural historian should confine his observation to the grotesque in nature. The subject suggests an interesting topic. Know- ing a little of the originals of some of her extraordi- nary characters Helen Burns, among others is not this result of her labors an argument against a too keenly followed realism? Surely, the passion to set down all the accidents* of each particular person is a mistaken attitude towards truth. For while there is no substance without accidents, actual specific obser- vation should be toned into a conformity with general laws before it is set forth to view, unless it be of that kind which is of itself the cause of new law. Hence Romance, which supplies accidents as well as realism, and which supplies them when the resources of realism fail. Miss Bronte's strongest characteristics are her truth- fulness and her intensity. She is, indeed, intense in her truthfulness, which, when combined with a too insistent realism, irritates the attention. If the child Helen Burns, if the child Polly, if the Yorke children, are the outcomes of this truthfulness to particular details, are we not justified in asking for a little less concentration on the specific, and a little more evolu- tion from the general? This fault of particularization differs, however, from the fault which at first sight seems akin to it, the fault 1 Remembering what the father said about Maria, what might have been ours if she and that other had lived 1 Her Realism 43 of the school which has arisen since her day, and which also aims at reality. Realism, pressed ruthlessly to all its minor logical outcomes, passes to its wintry death ; and indeed, in our latter-day work, art has been so exclusively employed in developing all the nice shades of not character so much as every mus- cle which controls every motive which prompts every desire which works the piston of every will, that the vital juices run thin and dry as they sluggishly return to the heart of the structure. When several para- graphs are devoted, in the finest play of the subtlest of current English-writing realists, to an analysis, of as intricate a delicacy as the workmanship of a Da- mascus blade, of the dainty set of ideas started in the brain of a Boston lady by the discovery of the brightly polished condition of her door-knob, we feel that in the passing of that other James, there is somehow gone a glory from the earth. Miss Bronte would have had as little sympathy with such an outcome as she had with the romanticists; for any system which involves in its last analysis the absence of large imaginations it would be impossible to connect with the name of one in whom realism was baptized in imagination, and whose style was fired by passion. She was too true to herself to be other than herself in her writings. The mechanical mysteries of her art had no charm for Currer Bell. In very truth, she would have denied fellowship with any craft which would narrow art into the grooves of a cunningly learned trade. A more extended acquaintance with these mysteries would have saved her from the obvious lapses of her straightforward method ; but as the peculiar charm and unique power of this writer are wrapped up in 44 Charlotte Bronte her faults, as the lapses we speak of are the neces- sary accidents of that method, it would be worse than folly to speak of them except gratefully. They could not be safely followed by imitators ; it would be impossible to form a school upon them, because that would imply a dependence upon faults which, separated from the independence of Charlotte Bronte, would glare balefully. The art which conceals the art of the narrator in the impersonal third person, for example, is the only safe art for the majority ; and to Currer Bell's personal note, a reflection of which is seen in the form of all her stories (for even in ' Shir- ley,' Caroline Helstone, while intended as a portrait of Miss Nussey, is instinctively felt to be in a much larger way a picture of Charlotte Bronte also), are due most of her shortcomings. Yet what would have become of Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe if their stories had been told by a manifest outsider? The passion of a personal spiritual experience could only be wrought into them by this particular writer making them stand for her particular self. The first person comes naturally with such a complete emptying of the absolute into the fictional self. Maybe if Miss Bronte's brilliant powers could have been more stead- ily controlled by the acquired skill of managing de- tails, her realism would have been guided into the narrow streams over which the later school floats so passively. But we are profoundly thankful it was not so, for we should then have had to look elsewhere for the pre-eminent prose-poet of feeling. There is in ' Villette ' as little plot as in any pro- duction of the modern realists; but the mark of diver- gence between the two lies in the importance which incidents occupy in the latter, with whom Dryden's Her Realism 45 dictum is law : " No person, no incident . . . but must be of use to carry on the main design." Miss Bronte was so captivated by the study of character that what may be called the circumstances of her story are fre- quently quite accidental and apart from the principal motive. Her accidents do not control ; and excellent as her logic is, in life logic does not always control, and accidents often do, which are generally illogical. In our progression towards the end of the age, we have reached the days of composite photography in art. The present realist bases his work upon types. Miss Bronte took the individual individually ; we now take the mass representatively. Who would call Ed- ward Rochester a typical man ? or Jane Eyre a repre- sentative woman ? On the other hand, in Silas Lapham do we not recognize, not one man but fifty of our acquaintance ? This is the glory of Charlotte Bronte, this is her fame. The romanticists who preceded her made their heroes impossible by making them do impossible things, from the standpoint of supposable experience. The histories of Rochester and Paul Emmanuel are the reverse of impossible ; Emman- uel's is even humdrum in its commonplaceness. Yet the characters themselves are two of the most ex- traordinary in fiction. Rochester is preposterous, not because he is called upon to do things contrary to nature, but because he acts strictly in accordance with his nature. And if the natural man within us grows weary of the extravagances of these gentlemen, the artistic man is bound to acknowledge that there is reason in their madness, and that their words and deeds are in the finest accord with the laws of their being. " Was ever woman in this humor wooed? " will be asked of Jane Eyre only by those whose ex- 46 Charlotte Bronte perience is bounded by the four walls of a conven- tional home. IX Purified realism is a rare enough thing to be thankful for. That is the sun, and the defects we have noticed are mere specks on its surface. The sunspots do not hinder the sunshine. We are told in ' Shirley ' that all her characters will be found imperfect; yet she is also determined not " to handle degraded or utterly infamous ones. Child-torturers, slave masters and drivers, I consign to the hands of jailers ; the novelist may be excused from sullying his page with the record of their deeds." Even as we find but few agreeable persons in her books, so also do we find no debasing realisms. There are a few jackasses, clerical and lay, one sanc- timonious hypocrite, a spoiled beauty or two, some hard continental characters, a family of tyrannical children, and Mrs. Reed, strictly speaking, no vil- lains. She is a pure realist in one sense, although she placed her characters in situations which a pure realist of another sense would delight in making that sense all too evident. She has been blamed for those situations, and ' Jane Eyre ' is still considered by some honest per- sons a dangerous book. But without temptation what is virtue ? The glory of Charlotte Bronte is her spotless purity, her making virtue to shine through the temptation and by means of it. She is really a severe moralist. She condemns the ' Life of Mira- beau ' because it could not be put in the hands of the young without danger of impressing the grandeur of vice on a colossal scale, "whereas in vice there is Her Realism 47 no grandeur, . . . only a foul, sordid, and degraded thing." 1 This seems like a commonplace, yet she wrote bitterly, for Miss Bronte's critics ventured to charge her with such portrayals. If the weak only were considered in the writing of books, no books worth the writing would ever be written. To the pure all things are pure is a hard doctrine, for so few are pure. Her realism never shied at ugliness, but it flew unharmed past sin ; nor did she commit crimes against art in the name of art. She holds Burns above Bulwer. Truth is better than art is her creed, just as a man is better than his clothes. But she re- fuses to dwell on such aspects of the truth as are instinctively known, and which could only do harm in the telling, the finer the art, the worse the harm, and which would thus militate against the ideal truth. We live in an age when advice from high quarters if the dove-like innocence of such advice were not made unlikely by the hardly acquired wisdom of the editorial serpent not to read a certain book be- cause of alleged immoralities would be hailed with delight by the wicked publisher, before the bulging eyes of whose fancy would dance, in the best tricks of type, the magic words, " twentieth edition ! " How such a warning could have been passed upon the possible readers of ' Jane Eyre ' has been deemed one of the problems of literature. The reason, per- haps, lay in the mixed conventionality and pruriency of the age, this novel being the first to shock the first, in the falsely safe folds of which it was wont to seek the second. It was an age too dull to recog- nize bright innocence, all the brighter because in- nocently near darkness; and too materialistic to 1 Shorter, p. 385. 48 Charlotte Bronte undertake the analysis of a situation which is obvi- ously (to those who know Miss Bronte) free from all intention of evil, because the situation is objectively one for evil to select. In the intention lies the harm, and the critics could not see it. Let us cherish the pious hope that somebody kicked the gaping puppy who compared his book with hers, in that each was " naughty." It was the author of ' Jane Eyre ' who said : A lover masculine so disappointed can speak and urge explanation ; a lover feminine can say nothing ; if she did the result would be shame and anguish, inward remorse for self-treachery. Nature would brand such demonstration as a rebellion against her instincts, and would vindictively re- pay it afterward by the thunderbolt of self-contempt smit- ing suddenly in secret. Take the matter as you find it : ask no questions, utter no remonstrances. and On my reason had been inscribed the conviction that unlawful pleasure, trenching on another's rights, is delusive and envenomed pleasure ; its hollowness disappoints at the time ; its poison cruelly tortures afterwards ; its effects de- prave forever. and I hate boldness, that boldness which is of the brassy brow and insensate nerves ; but I love the courage of the strong heart, the fervor of the generous blood. And this is the key-note of all her work, which she sounds in a more professional way in the preface to the second edition of 'Jane Eyre ': Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. Her Realism 49 To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns. This is why she admires Thackeray so profoundly ; and yet she takes even him to task for his Fielding lecture, and cries out in her splendid innocence, " I trust God will take from me whatever power of in- vention or expression I may have before he lets me become blind to the sense of what is fitting or unfit- ting to be said ! " 1 There are strong points of similiarity between her male heroes : there is in all of them the eagle quality, the note of dominance. That was her ideal of a man : she could not look up to any other kind. She found this also in Thackeray, and, I venture to suggest, there is a hint of him in Paul Emmanuel. Shirley acknowl- edges the estimable qualities of Sir Philip Nunnely, but she cannot accept him because he is not her master (the italicized word is Miss Bronte's). " I could not trust myself with his happiness; I would not undertake the keeping of it for thousands ; I will accept no hand which cannot hold me in check." " Improving a husband ! " exclaims Shirley, scorn- fully. " No. I shall insist upon my husband im- proving me, or else we part." Charlotte Bronte had no fear of the word " obey " in the marriage service, and would have had no sym- pathy with the women who jest about it; for she would have known that such women have not had their noblest natures touched, or suffer from an in- 1 What a subject for an Imaginary Conversation would be her two-hour talk with the great, lovable, faulty giant, in which she gravely reproved him for his shortcomings, and to which he as gravely listened ; defending himself, however, "like a great Turk and heathen ; that is to say, the excuses were often worse than the crime itself I " 4 50 Charlotte Bronte capacity of full affection. Obedience is involved in love. She took the Scriptural view that man is stronger than woman in judgment, and that obedience is therefore due him. There is no fear in that love, for it is of the perfect kind which casteth it out, the love of complete confidence. Such is her ideal man, and she tries to build her heroes along those lines. Rochester is a trifle too grand, gloomy, and peculiar for the taste of the average woman of this present day, although I understand he created great havoc among the sentimental ladies of the late '40*3. Louis Moore is our old friend the Professor over again (and the Professor is a dreadful prig, with his besides, " guiding by smile and gesture," and, as if that was not enough, also "smiling inwardly" and "bestowing" "proud and contented kisses"). In our unsanctified moments, we have even called him a solemn donkey. His talk with Shirley about his " friendless young orphan girl " is as outrageous as Rochester's ram- blings with Jane. Yet that is a love scene of great strength, notwithstanding; and Shirley yields to the man who can master her Tartar better than she can herself. The genius of this girl was equal to her drawbacks ; and through the immaturity one might almost say because of the immaturity we see it conquering. Immaturity, so far from being wholly a fault, is, nega- tively, in given cases, an indication of genius. That is, the genius is so demonstrable that the immaturity cannot hide it ; the immaturity is seen at once as the thin gossamer through which the sunlight shines. The temporal qualities of immaturity are, by their very poverty, contrasted with the lasting powers of genius, just as the sun shining through a window may Her Realism 51 show hitherto unsuspected defects in the glass. Miss Bronte knew too well, from the home experience, the lapses of men from her high standard, which, I repeat, is the Scriptural standard. The quotation recently made from her works concerning unlawful pleasure had its direct source in Bramwell's life, as may hardly be doubted when the full context is seen: I had once had the opportunity of contemplating, near at hand, an example of the results produced by a course of interesting and romantic domestic treachery. No golden halo of fiction was about this example. I saw it bare and real, and it was very loathsome. I saw a mind degraded by the practice of mean subterfuge, by the habit of perfidious deception, and a body depraved by the infectious influence of the vice-polluted soul. I had suffered much from the forced and prolonged view of this spectacle. Read also the first paragraph of Chapter XIX. of this same book, the ' Professor,' to see how this example had weighed upon her soul. Now, just as faith is strong only in the midst of faithlessness, so does she not deny her ideal because of her acquaintance with the actual. The actual was only too real to her, but the ideal was more real. Jane Eyre is not blinded to the moral transgressions and spiritual sins of Rochester. Both morally and spiritually she is stronger than he. Where conscience existed and it existed everywhere in Charlotte Bronte's vision not even love had sway, the point that her critics missed ; and it was not until conscience had reconciled the love to its absolute demands that the sway was accepted. But then it was accepted. Rochester is a brute, you say. Yet 52 Charlotte Bronte the brute in him was conquered before Jane marries him. It is Una and the lion. There is a mighty strength in her heroes, especially Rochester, which shines back of and out of their weaknesses the original strength of man as he stood in his Creator's plan. Her women, through love for the strength, subdue the weakness by accepting the strength He for God only ; she for God in him. This is the woman's point of view, and not even the new woman can find fault with it as portrayed in Charlotte Bronte; for she makes the men to whom her heroines give such love acknowledge, once it is gained, not their superiority, but the equality of giver and receiver. " This is my equal," says Rochester of Jane. Shirley is Moore's "leopardess," hardly an animal to be fondled. No reader of Charlotte Bronte can ever forget the magnificent repudiation of Milton's Eve, in ' Shirley,' yet the quotation from Milton stands, nevertheless. For she bows to the godlike in the man, and the man acknowledges the divinity in her. None but those who are entitled to queenhood may marry kings. We have seen her attempts at minute delineations are, unlike Miss Austen's, occasionally burdensome, because uncorrected by the application of general principles. It is only when her thought is freed from the petty harassments of her realism that she becomes the great writer that we know, the greatest writer of passion in the English tongue. Then she rises into her pure native empyrean above these levels, and takes her rank along the high places of the immortals. B. HER ATTITUDE TOWARDS NATURE IT may be stated without much fear of contradic- tion that the majority of her readers will always pre-eminently cherish Miss Bronte as a painter of scenery. Atmosphere possessed her. She was en- veloped in the storm, the sunset was a personal glory, moonshine was the footstool of deity. She had both the " golden dreams " of Turner and the golden real- ities of Constable. She could picture the seraphim in ethereal splendor, and she could paint wind. Let us not take low views of this marvellous gift. It is not merely as scenery that we should view it. There is no mechanical contrivance cunningly in- tended to give the picture title and rank as a char- acter study through the medium of the surrounding weather conditions ; the scenery is imbedded in her imagination, and is not arbitrarily selected for the purposes of interpretation. It is like the music which is more than a running commentary upon the text, nay, at times like the music which itself forms the text ; and the text is ever the passion of the human heart. One might relate the fluctuations in the history of Jane Eyre by a series of canvases picturing the atmospheric descriptions accompanying them ; or might transform into the sister art these descriptions 54 Charlotte Bronte in a symphonic manner which would tease the ear with the rapt enthusiasm which the eye feels at the pictures of the words. For, as in that highest form of musical composition, so in this scenic power of our author, the rhythms are contrasted and the keys are related. Follow this history for a space, and feel the effect. The book opens in a depressed atmosphere, corre- sponding to that surrounding the little heroine's life. In the very first paragraph there is a " cold winter wind," bringing with it " sombre clouds." " Raw and chill was the winter morning" she left Gateshead. The afternoon of that long day's drive " came on wet and somewhat misty; " and, arrived at Lowood," rain, wind, and darkness filled the air," like the spiritual demons which were about to encompass her in that abode. In the night she wakes to " hear the wind rave in furious gusts and the rain fall in torrents ; " and when she was compelled to rise, in the grim dawn, " it was bitter cold." She goes out into the garden : " all was wintry blight and brown decay." In the evening, during the play-hour, she " lifted a blind and looked out. It snowed fast, a drift was already forming against the lower panes ; putting my ear close to the window, I could distinguish from the gleeful tumult within the disconsolate moan of the wind outside." And mark that this is not intended merely to emphasize the wintry desolation of her young life, but to drive deep into the spirit her sym- pathy with the storm, and the storm's sympathy with her, the two loveless outcasts when others were in- doors and loved. " Reckless and feverish, I wished the wind to howl more wildly, the gloom to deepen to darkness, and the confusion to rise to clamor." Her Attitude towards Nature 55 There is always throughout the history the same correspondence between outside nature and inside life. But one does not think of this " pathetic fal- lacy" in following Jane Eyre's experience, with such beautiful unconsciousness does she enclose nature in the framework of her thought. It was to be expected, then, that the Sunday afternoon walk back from Mr. Brocklehurst's ministrations (remembering the physi- ological condition of the pupils after a day of starva- tion spent in a paralyzingly cold church) would be set forth in the usual weather strain. " At the close of the afternoon service we returned by an exposed and hilly road, where the bitter wind, blowing over a range of snowy summits to the north, almost flayed the skins from our faces." The raging wind carries on its wings the raging spirit. And as the first note of peace is touched when Helen Burns calms little Jane with her quaint and patient piety, so then for the first time we see an unclouded night in the sky. " Resting my head on Helen's shoulder, I put my arms round her waist; she drew me to her, and we reposed in silence. . . . Some heavy clouds, swept from the sky by a rising wind, had left the moon bare ; and her light, stream- ing in through a window near, shone full." After the gloom and decay of Lowood, she sees before her a reawakened life at Thornfield-Hall, as she views the grounds from the battlements : " the horizon bounded by a propitious sky, azure, marbled with pearly white." The tameness of the governess- lot soon tells on her, however, and on the evening of her return from that walk to Hay made memorable by her first meeting with Rochester at the scene of his accident, the excitement of that episode thrills 56 Charlotte Bronte all the more vehemently because of the returning stagnation. She had caught a glimpse of the out- side world, and there is a momentary rebellion against slipping on again " the viewless fetters of an uniformed and too still existence." I lingered at the gates ; I lingered on the lawn ; I paced backward and forwards on the pavement : the shutters of the glass door were closed ; I could not see into the inte- rior ; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn from the gloomy house from the gray hollow filled with rayless cells, as it appeared to me to that sky expanded before me, a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud ; the moon ascending it in solemn march ; her orb seemed to look up as she left the hill tops, from behind which she had come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, mid- night-dark in its fathomless depth and measureless distance : and for those trembling stars that followed her course, they made my heart tremble, my veins glow when I viewed them. Little things recall us to earth : the clock struck in the hail ; that sufficed ; I turned from moon and stars, opened a side-door, and went in. The house was her life, filled with " rayless cells ; " and in that spotless night was symbolized that ideal life beyond the range of her piteously feeble grasp. The day on which she formally makes Rochester's acquaintance is fittingly " wild and stormy." At the second meeting, the winter rain beats against the panes; and he unloads his Parisian memories upon her in " a freezing and sunless air." The night the maniac wife paid her terrifying visit to the second story was "drearily dark;" and later on, as the tragedy advances, and just before she confronts that grisly terror again, from peaceful sleep Jane opens Her Attitude towards Nature 57 her eyes on the full moon, " silver white and crystal- clear. It was beautiful but too solemn." Her fate was approaching her, " beautiful " because she car- ried duty in her closed hand, but "too solemn" because that duty was so grievous to be borne. It is as descriptive as the music of ' Parsival.' The sympathy of and with nature is, as it were, sacramen- tally complete. Hope was shining high for Jane. Rochester was, in anticipation, hers. A splendid Midsummer shone over England : skies so pure, suns so radiant as were then seen in long succession, seldom favor, even singly, our wave-girt land. It was as if a band of Italian days had come from the South, like a flock of glorious passenger birds, and lighted on the cliffs of Albion. The hay was all got in ; the fields round Thorn- field were green and shorn ; the roads white and baked ; the trees were in their dark prime : hedge and wood, full- leaved and deeply tinted, contrasted well with the sunny hue of the cleared meadows between. Then the catastrophe draws very near. A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurel-walk,, and trembled through the boughs of the chestnut : it wandered away away to an indefinite distance it died. The nightingale's song was then the only voice of the hour : in listening to it I again wept. You hear the far-away echo-like sobbing of a Fate that would be kind, but must be harsh ; and it blends with the voice of the nightingale which makes her weep. And at the moment of his proposal, and while he is madly justifying to himself that crime, the night changes. 58 Charlotte Bronte But what had befallen the night ? The moon was not yet set and we were all in shadow : I could scarcely see my master's face, near as I was. And what ailed the chestnut tree? it writhed and groaned; while wind roared in the laurel-walk, and came sweeping over us . . .a livid vivid spark leapt out of a cloud at which I was looking, and there was a crack, a crash, and a close rattling peal ; and I thought only of hiding my dazzled eyes against Mr. Rochester' s shoulder. . . . Before I left my bed in the morning, little Adele came running in to tell me that the great horsechestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been struck by lightning . . . and half of it split away. There was the Lord speaking out of Sinai, the Lord who had been defied. The nearest approach to it in music that I can think of is the awakening of the trombones in the last act of 'Don Giovanni." The third appearance of the foul nightly visitant immediately precedes the wedding ceremony. " But, Sir, as it grew dark, the wind rose : it blew yester- day evening not as it blows now wild and high but with a sullen moaning sound, far more eerie. I wished you were at home. I came into this room, and the sight of the empty chair and fireless hearth chilled me. For some reason, after I went to bed, I could not sleep a sense of anxious excitement distressed me. The gale still rising seemed to my ear to muffle a mournful undersound : whether in the house or abroad I could not at first tell, but it recurred, doubtful yet doleful, at every lull : at last I made out it must be some dog howling at a distance. . . . On sleeping I continued in dreams the idea of a dark and stormy night. I continued also the wish to be with you, and experienced a strange, regretful consciousness of some barrier dividing us. During all my first sleep I was follow- ing the windings of an unknown road ; total obscurity Her Attitude towards Nature 59 environed me ; rain pelted me ; I was burdened with the charge of a little child ; a very small creature too young and feeble to walk , and which shivered in my cold arms, and wailed piteously in my ear. I thought, Sir, that you were on the road a long way before me ; and I strained every nerve to overtake you, and made effort on effort to utter your name and entreat you to stop but my movements were fettered ; and my voice still died away inarticulate ; while you, I felt, withdrew farther and farther every moment. . . . I dreamt another dream, Sir ; that Thornfield-Hall was a- dreary ruin, the retreat of bats and owls. I thought that of all the stately front nothing remained but a shell-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking. I wandered on a moon- light night through the grass-grown enclosure within : here I stumbled over a marble hearth, and there over a fallen fragment of cornice. Wrapped up in a shawl, I still carried the unknown little child ; I might not lay it down anywhere, however tired were my arms. ... I heard the gallop of a horse at a distance ... I was sure it was you ; and you were departing for many years, and for a distant country. I climbed the thin wall with frantic, perilous haste, eager to catch one glimpse of you from the top : the stones rolled from under my feet, the ivy branches I grasped gave way, the child clung round my neck in terror, and almost strangled me : at last I gained the summit. I saw you like a speck on a white track, lessening every moment. The blast blew so strong I could not stand. I sat down on the narrow edge ; I hushed the scared infant in my lap : you turned an angle of the road ; I bent forward to take a last look ; the wall crumbled ; I was shaken ; the child rolled from my knee ; I lost my balance, fell, and woke." " Now, Jane, that is all." "All the preface, Sir; the tale is yet to come. On waking, a gleam dazzled my eyes : I thought oh, it is daylight ! But I was mistaken : it was only candlelight. Sophie, I supposed, had come in. There was a light on 60 Charlotte Bronte the dressing table, and the door of the closet where, before going to bed, I had hung my wedding dress and veil, stood open : I heard a rustling there. I asked, ' Sophie, what are you doing?' No one answered, but a form emerged from the closet : it took the light, held it aloft and surveyed the garments pendent from the portmanteau. ' Sophie ! Sophie ! ' I again cried ; and still it was silent. I had risen up in bed, I bent forward : first surprise, then bewilderment came over me ; and then my blood crept cold through my veins. Mr. Rochester, this was not Sophie, it was not Leah, it was not Mrs. Fairfax : it was not no, I was sure of it, and am still it was not even that strange woman, Grace Poole." While awaiting Rochester's return, and feverish to tell him this story I sought the orchard, driven to its shelter by the wind, which all day had blown strong and full from the south ; without, however, bringing a speck of rain. Instead of subsiding as night drew on, it seemed to augment its rush and deepen its roar : the trees blew steadfastly one way, never writhing round, and scarcely tossing back their boughs once in an hour ; so continuous was the strain bending their branchy heads northward the clouds drifted from pole to pole, fast following, mass on mass : no glimpse of blue sky had been visible that July day. It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless air-torrent thundering through space. Descending the laurel- walk, I faced the wreck of the chestnut tree ; it stood up black and riven : the trunk, split down the centre, gasped ghastly. The cloven halves were not broken from each other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsun- dered below ; though community of vitality was destroyed the sap could flow no more : their great boughs on each Her Attitude towards Nature 61 side were dead, and next winter's tempests would be sure to fell one or both to earth : as yet, however, they might be said to form one tree a ruin, but an entire ruin. "You did right to hold fast to each other," I said: as if the monster splinters were living things, and could hear me. " I think, scathed as you look, and charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet ; rising out of that adhesion at the faithful honest roots : you will never have green leaves more never more see birds making nests and singing idyls in your boughs ; the time of pleasure and love is over with you ; but you are not desolate : each of you has a comrade to sympathize with him in his decay." As I looked up at them, the moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled their fissure ; her disk was blood-red and half overcast ; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud. The wind fell for a second, round Thornfield ; but far away over wood and water, poured a wild melancholy wail. " The sap could flow no more ! " But love, deeper than death, stronger than strength, righter than right, not even God's lightning can destroy. Rochester stills her fears by explaining that it was Grace Poole she saw, and bids her think of the mor- row. " Look here " (he lifted up the curtain) " it is a lovely night." It was. Half heaven was pure and stainless : the clouds, now trooping before the wind, which had shifted to the west, were filing off eastward in long, silvered columns. The moon shone peacefully. That mirage passes, and the secret is at last divulged. A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the 62 Charlotte Bronte ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses ; on hay-field and corn-field lay a frozen shroud ; lanes which last night blushed full of flowers to-day were pathless with untrodden snow ; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and fragrant as groves between the tropics, now spread waste, wild, and white as pine forests in wintry Norway. My hopes were all dead-struck with a subtle doom, such as in one night fell on all the firstborn in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing ; they lay stark, still, livid corpses that could never revive. Thus is the ardent expectancy of bridehood turned for Jane Eyre into the bitter-cold desolation of disap- pointment ; and how subtle the elemental feeling by which wintry nature is transmuted, through wither- ing descending scales, into the conditions of her life! It is not a mere likeness between the blight of winter and the death of hope : what chills her to the marrow is that her faith and confidence in her lover are de- stroyed, that "the attitude of stainless truth was gone from his idea," the rich full flower of his manhood had perished fruitless. " Signs," she says, " for aught we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with man." II The true nature-lover is the true nature-sympathizer. There is complete reciprocity between what Nature gives to him and what he to her. There is not neces- sarily a complete comprehension, but there is that highest form of faith, a complete acceptance even of the incomprehensible. Such faith partakes too largely of reverence to allow fear to enter its despoil- Her Attitude towards Nature 63 ing wedge; for this attitude towards nature under- stands spiritually what it cannot comprehend by reason, and the product is awe. The " most natural " natures have it ; and wherever there is any spiritual possession of a man, there may it be found, though the mind be also possessed of shifting quirks. Charlotte Bronte had no love for the Jesuits, but she is candid enough to include the " good father " who had her in spiritual tow with herself in her freedom from fright at the awful storm which overtook them in the house of Mme. Walravens. He had some grandeur in him; he had a simple faith in an elementary God back of his theological complexities, and that simplicity saved him from vulgar fear. In that presence, the socially timid Miss Bronte had none, either. For Lucy says: " I, too, was awe-struck. Being, however, under no pressure of slavish terror, my thoughts and observa- tions were free." Of course. That is a part of her spiritual glory, and which she shares with others of lesser fame, but of similar attitudes. Only, she goes farther into nature than others : she goes farther into it, without consciously pursuing it. She is not striving for effect by a ceremoniously evident attachment ; and she would, without doubt, if living now, disclaim alliance with the class of present writers which takes objective delight in the delineating of scenery. I have said that atmosphere possessed her, and I have tried to demonstrate how it entered into her work. It was of the fibres of her brain, which, of necessity, wrapped the brain's concept with its texture. Her use of nature is more than natural ; it is inevita- ble. In dealing with Charlotte Bronte, we are dealing with spirit as opposed to flesh. She does not divorce 64 Charlotte Bronte the two in the old scholastic way ; there is no theo- logical enmity between them; she suffered, on the contrary, from their close alliance. But she was touched, almost exclusively, on the spiritual side. Pure imagination ruled her. More than any other author, I believe, she exemplifies the idea of the met- aphysicians in their term " productive imagination, " " that faculty by which the parts of the intuitions of space and time are combined into continua." It is untutored, untamed, pure. The three sketches which Jane Eyre produces from her portfolio at Rochester's request are, I submit, the three finest examples in any one book of this spiritual power. The first represented clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea : all the distance was in eclipse ; so, too, was the foreground ; or rather, the nearest billows, for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-sub- merged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam ; its beak held a gold bracelet, set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart. Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the green water ; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed and torn. The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a hill, with grass and some leaves slanting as if by a breeze. Beyond and above spread an expanse of sky, dark blue as at twilight : rising into the sky was a woman's shape to the bust, portrayed in tints as dusk and soft as I could combine. The dim forehead was crowned with a star : the lineaments below were seen as through the suffusion of vapour ; the eyes shone dark and wild ; the hair streamed shadowy, like a beamless cloud torn by storm or by electric Her Attitude towards Nature 65 travail. On the neck lay a pale reflection like moonlight ; the same faint lustre touched the train of thin clouds from which rose and bowed the vision of the Evening Star. The third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter sky : a muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close serried, along the horizon. Throwing these into distance, rose, in the foreground, a head, a colossal head, inclined towards the iceberg, and resting against it. Two thin hands, joined under the forehead, and supporting it, drew up before the lower features a sable veil ; a brow quite bloodless, white as bone, and an eye hollow and fixed, blank of meaning but for the glassiness of despair, alone were visible. Above the temples, amidst wreathed turban folds of black drapery, vague in its character and con- sistency as cloud, gleamed a ring of white flame, gemmed with sparkles of a more lurid tinge. This pale crescent was " the likeness of a Kingly Crown ; " what it diademed was " the shape which shape had none." On that magnificent night of the fete, when Mme. Beck endeavored, through the operation of a sedative, to hold her English teacher in subjection, the drug merely excited her. Instead of stupor came excitement. I became alive to new thought to reverie peculiar in coloring. A gathering call ran among the faculties, their bugles sang, their trumpets rang an untimely summons. Imagination was roused from her rest, and she came forth impetuous and venturous. With scorn she looked on Matter, her mate. " Rise ! " she said. " Sluggard ! this night I will have my will ; nor shalt thou prevail." " Look forth and view the night ! " was her cry, and when I lifted the heavy blind from the casement close at hand with her own royal gesture, she showed me a moon supreme, in an element deep and splendid. 5 66 Charlotte Bronte To my gasping senses she made the glimmering gloom, the narrow limits, the oppressive heat of the dormitory, intoler- able. She lured me to leave this den and follow her forth into dew, coolness, and glory. She recalls having seen a gap in the paling of the park fence. She determines that she will try thus to steal into this deserted park, where she will be abso- lutely alone at such an hour. " The whole park would be mine, the moonlight, midnight park ! " She does not find it deserted, as we know ; but after all the fever and the glamour of the fte had passed, as Lucy seeks again the " dim lower quarter," she finds the moon of her search. Dim I should not say, for the beauty of moonlight, for- gotten in the park, here once more flowed in upon percep- tion. High she rode, and calm and stainlessly she shone. The music and the mirth of the fete, the fire and bright hues of those lamps had outdone and outshone her for an hour, but now, again, her glory and her silence triumphed. The rival lamps were dying : she held her course like a white fate. Drum, trumpet, bugle, had uttered their clangor and were forgotten : with pencil-ray she wrote on heaven and earth records for archives everlasting. She and those stars seemed to me at once the types and witnesses of truth all regnant. The night-sky lit her reign : like its slow- wheeling progress, advanced her victory, that onward movement which has been, and is, and will be from eter- nity to eternity. Paul Emmanuel, lingering in the garden, looks " at the moon, at the gray cathedral over the re- moter spires and house roofs fading into a blue sea of night-mist. He tasted the sweet breath of dusk, and noted the folded bloom of the garden." Who Her Attitude towards Nature 67 else has so delicately expressed that exquisite sense of perfumed eventide, that unnamable sacred-human presence of the haunting vesper spirit? Pier finest similes are based on nature. Saint Pierre's power over her unruly pupils held " them in check as a breezeless frost-air might still a brawling stream." The fair visitors at Thornfield-Hall descend the stair- case " almost as noiselessly as a bright mist rolls down a hill." These fine ladies " all had a sweeping amplitude of array that seemed to magnify their per- sons as a mist magnifies the moon." It is not every day that one may read in one book two such similes based on the effects of mist. When the Orders in Council were repealed, " Liverpool started and snorted like a river-horse roused amongst his reeds by thunder." So, too, the adjectives which come at her nod have the fine fitness which nature demands, the fitness which makes one cry out, " None other would have done at all ! " The rain falls " heavy, prone, and broad." The beck sends a " raving" sound through the air. She has twice put into living words the swelling emotions all travellers open to its influ- ence must feel who stand below the great dome of St. Paul's in the solemn night time: It, too, is dear to my soul ; for there, as I lay in quiet and darkness, I first heard the great bell of St. Paul's tell- ing London it was midnight ; and well do I recall the deep deliberate tones, so full charged with colossal phlegm and force. I had just extinguished my candle and lain down, when a deep, low, mighty tone swung through the night. At first I knew it not ; but it was uttered twelve times, and at the twelfth colossal hum and trembling knell, I said, " I lie in 68 Charlotte Bronte the shadow of St. Paul's." . . . Above my head, above the house-tops, co-elevate almost with the clouds, I saw a sol- emn orbed mass, dark-blue and dim THE DOME. While I looked my inner self moved ; my spirit shook its always fettered wings half loose ; I had a sudden feeling as if I, who had never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life ; in that morning my soul grew as fast as Jonah's gourd. This grave bass glides into softest treble when she writes, with equal insight, of " sweet, soft, exalted " sounds. Oh, carillons of Bruges ! Ill In discussing Charlotte, one must speak of Emily also, that untamed virgin of the moors, to whom they were as the call of the sea to the mariner, and as strong drink to the drunkard. Younger in years and in grace, she was yet the elder sister in her atti- tude towards nature, as paganism is older than Chris- tianity. With her, nature was the thing worshipped, not the milieu through which worship was done. It is expressed in Catherine's dream : " If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable." " Because you are not fit to go there," I answered. " All sinners would be miserable in heaven." " But it is not for that. I dreamt once that I was there ; . . . 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." Her Attitude towards Nature 69 I shall have to show, in the next section, how she was like Charlotte, and yet greater than Charlotte, in her conception of love ; but let me here point out, in passing, her place, along with her less terrible sis- ter, among the great nature portrayers. Emily Bronte has been called the Sphinx of litera- ture. We have only ' Wuthering Heights ' to tell us, in a mystery, what she was, that and a handful of poems, Charlotte's loving testimony, and this from ' Shirley ' : 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 ver- dure and light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that whence angels looked down on the dreamer of Beth-el, and her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it. No, not as she wishes it : she has not time to wish : the swift glory spreads out, sweeping and kindling, and multiplies its splendors faster than Thought can effect his combinations, faster than Aspiration can utter her longings. . . . If Shirley were not an indolent, a reckless, an ignorant being, she would take a pen at such moments ; or at least while the recollection of such moments was yet fresh on her spirit : she would seize, she would fix the apparition, tell the vision revealed. Had she a little more of the organ of acquisitiveness in her head, a little more of the love of property in her nature, she would take a good-sized sheet of paper and write plainly out, in her own queer but clear and legible hand, the story that has been narrated, the song that has been sung to her, and thus possess what she was 7