Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle Part 48

'I am glad to hear that Louisa has a chance of a presentation to Queen's College. I hope she will succeed. Do not, my dear sir, be indifferent--be earnest about it. Come what may afterwards, an education secured is an advantage gained--a priceless advantage.

Come what may, it is a step towards independency, and one great curse of a single female life is its dependency. It does credit both to Louisa's heart and head that she herself wishes to get this presentation. Encourage her in the wish. Your daughters--no more than your sons--should be a burden on your hands. Your daughters--as much as your sons--should aim at making their way honourably through life. Do not wish to keep them at home. Believe me, teachers may be hard-worked, ill-paid, and despised, but the girl who stays at home doing nothing is worse off than the hardest-wrought and worst-paid drudge of a school. Whenever I have seen, not merely in humble, but in affluent homes, families of daughters sitting waiting to be married, I have pitied them from my heart. It is doubtless well--very well--if Fate decrees them a happy marriage; but, if otherwise, give their existence some object, their time some occupation, or the peevishness of disappointment and the listlessness of idleness will infallibly degrade their nature.

'Should Louisa eventually go out as a governess, do not be uneasy respecting her lot. The sketch you give of her character leads me to think she has a better chance of happiness than one in a hundred of her sisterhood. Of pleasing exterior (that is always an advantage--children like it), good sense, obliging disposition, cheerful, healthy, possessing a good average capacity, but no prominent master talent to make her miserable by its cravings for exercise, by its mutiny under restraint--Louisa thus endowed will find the post of governess comparatively easy. If she be like her mother--as you say she is--and if, consequently, she is fond of children, and possesses tact for managing them, their care is her natural vocation--she ought to be a governess.

'Your sketch of Braxborne, as it is and as it was, is sadly pleasing.

I remember your first picture of it in a letter written a year ago--only a year ago. I was in this room--where I now am--when I received it. I was not alone then. In those days your letters often served as a text for comment--a theme for talk; now, I read them, return them to their covers and put them away. Johnson, I think, makes mournful mention somewhere of the pleasure that accrues when we are "solitary and cannot impart it." Thoughts, under such circ.u.mstances, cannot grow to words, impulses fail to ripen to actions.

'Lonely as I am, how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career--perseverance to plead through two long, weary years with publishers till they admitted me? How should I be with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where there is not a single educated family? In that case I should have no world at all: the raven, weary of surveying the deluge, and without an ark to return to, would be my type. As it is, something like a hope and motive sustains me still. I wish all your daughters--I wish every woman in England, had also a hope and motive. Alas! there are many old maids who have neither.--Believe me, yours sincerely,

'C. BRONTE.'

TO W. S. WILLIAMS

'_July_ 26_th_, 1849.

'MY DEAR SIR,--I must rouse myself to write a line to you, lest a more protracted silence should seem strange.

'Truly glad was I to hear of your daughter's success. I trust its results may conduce to the permanent advantage both of herself and her parents.

'Of still more importance than your children's education is your wife's health, and therefore it is still more gratifying to learn that your anxiety on that account is likely to be alleviated. For her own sake, no less than for that of others, it is to be hoped that she is now secured from a recurrence of her painful and dangerous attacks. It was pleasing, too, to hear of good qualities being developed in the daughters by the mother's danger. May your girls always so act as to justify their father's kind estimate of their characters; may they never do what might disappoint or grieve him.

'Your suggestion relative to myself is a good one in some respects, but there are two persons whom it would not suit; and not the least incommoded of these would be the young person whom I might request to come and bury herself in the hills of Haworth, to take a church and stony churchyard for her prospect, the dead silence of a village parsonage--in which the tick of the clock is heard all day long--for her atmosphere, and a grave, silent spinster for her companion. I should not like to see youth thus immured. The hush and gloom of our house would be more oppressive to a buoyant than to a subdued spirit.

The fact is, my work is my best companion; hereafter I look for no great earthly comfort except what congenial occupation can give. For society, long seclusion has in a great measure unfitted me, I doubt whether I should enjoy it if I might have it. Sometimes I think I should, and I thirst for it; but at other times I doubt my capability of pleasing or deriving pleasure. The prisoner in solitary confinement, the toad in the block of marble, all in time shape themselves to their lot.--Yours sincerely,

'C. BRONTE.'

TO W. S. WILLIAMS

'_September_ 13_th_, 1849.

'MY DEAR SIR,--I want to know your opinion of the subject of this proof-sheet. Mr. Taylor censured it; he considers as defective all that portion which relates to Shirley's nervousness--the bite of the dog, etc. How did it strike you on reading it?

'I ask this though I well know it cannot now be altered. I can work indefatigably at the correction of a work before it leaves my hands, but when once I have looked on it as completed and submitted to the inspection of others, it becomes next to impossible to alter or amend. With the heavy suspicion on my mind that all may not be right, I yet feel forced to put up with the inevitably wrong.

'Reading has, of late, been my great solace and recreation. I have read J. C. Hare's _Guesses at Truth_, a book containing things that in depth and far-sought wisdom sometimes recall the _Thoughts_ of Pascal, only it is as the light of the moon recalls that of the sun.

'I have read with pleasure a little book on _English Social Life_ by the wife of Archbishop Whately. Good and intelligent women write well on such subjects. This lady speaks of governesses. I was struck by the contrast offered in her manner of treating the topic to that of Miss Rigby in the _Quarterly_. How much finer the feeling--how much truer the feeling--how much more delicate the mind here revealed!

'I have read _David Copperfield_; it seems to me very good--admirable in some parts. You said it had affinity to _Jane Eyre_. It has, now and then--only what an advantage has d.i.c.kens in his varied knowledge of men and things! I am beginning to read Eckermann's _Goethe_--it promises to be a most interesting work. Honest, simple, single-minded Eckermann! Great, powerful, giant-souled, but also profoundly egotistical, old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe! He _was_ a mighty egotist--I see he was: he thought no more of swallowing up poor Eckermann's existence in his own than the whale thought of swallowing Jonah.

'The worst of reading graphic accounts of such men, of seeing graphic pictures of the scenes, the society, in which they moved, is that it excites a too tormenting longing to look on the reality. But does such reality now exist? Amidst all the troubled waters of European society does such a vast, strong, selfish, old Leviathan now roll ponderous! I suppose not.--Believe me, yours sincerely,

'C. BRONTE.'

TO W. S. WILLIAMS

'_March_ 19_th_, 1850.

'MY DEAR SIR,--The books came yesterday evening just as I was wishing for them very much. There is much interest for me in opening the Cornhill parcel. I wish there was not pain too--but so it is. As I untie the cords and take out the volumes, I am reminded of those who once on similar occasions looked on eagerly; I miss familiar voices commenting mirthfully and pleasantly; the room seems very still, very empty; but yet there is consolation in remembering that papa will take pleasure in some of the books. Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness--it has no taste.

'I hope Mrs. Williams continues well, and that she is beginning to regain composure after the shock of her recent bereavement. She has indeed sustained a loss for which there is no subst.i.tute. But rich as she still is in objects for her best affections, I trust the void will not be long or severely felt. She must think, not of what she has lost, but of what she possesses. With eight fine children, how can she ever be poor or solitary!--Believe me, dear sir, yours sincerely,

'C. BRONTE.'

TO W. S. WILLIAMS

'_April_ 12_th_, 1850.

'MY DEAR SIR,--I own I was glad to receive your a.s.surance that the Calcutta paper's surmise was unfounded. {398} It is said that when we _wish_ a thing to be true, we are p.r.o.ne to believe it true; but I think (judging from myself) we adopt with a still prompter credulity the rumour which shocks.

'It is very kind in Dr. Forbes to give me his book. I hope Mr. Smith will have the goodness to convey my thanks for the present. You can keep it to send with the next parcel, or perhaps I may be in London myself before May is over. That invitation I mentioned in a previous letter is still urged upon me, and well as I know what penance its acceptance would entail in some points, I also know the advantage it would bring in others. My conscience tells me it would be the act of a moral poltroon to let the fear of suffering stand in the way of improvement. But suffer I shall. No matter.

'The perusal of _Southey's Life_ has lately afforded me much pleasure. The autobiography with which it commences is deeply interesting, and the letters which follow are scarcely less so, disclosing as they do a character most estimable in its integrity and a nature most amiable in its benevolence, as well as a mind admirable in its talent. Some people a.s.sert that genius is inconsistent with domestic happiness, and yet Southey was happy at home and made his home happy; he not only loved his wife and children _though_ he was a poet, but he loved them the better _because_ he was a poet. He seems to have been without taint of worldliness. London with its pomps and vanities, learned coteries with their dry pedantry, rather scared than attracted him. He found his prime glory in his genius, and his chief felicity in home affections. I like Southey.

'I have likewise read one of Miss Austen's works--_Emma_--read it with interest and with just the degree of admiration which Miss Austen herself would have thought sensible and suitable. Anything like warmth or enthusiasm--anything energetic, poignant, heart-felt is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstration the auth.o.r.ess would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as _outre_ and extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well. There is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting. She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound. The pa.s.sions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood. Even to the feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition--too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress. Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands, and feet. What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death--this Miss Austen ignores. She no more, with her mind's eye, beholds the heart of her race than each man, with bodily vision, sees the heart in his heaving breast. Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (_not senseless_) woman.

If this is heresy, I cannot help it. If I said it to some people (Lewes for instance) they would directly accuse me of advocating exaggerated heroics, but I am not afraid of your falling into any such vulgar error.--Believe me, yours sincerely,

'C. BRONTE.'

TO W. S. WILLIAMS

'_November_ 9_th_, 1850.

'MY DEAR SIR,--I have read Lord John Russell's letter with very great zest and relish, and think him a spirited sensible little man for writing it. He makes no old-womanish outcry of alarm and expresses no exaggerated wrath. One of the best paragraphs is that which refers to the Bishop of London and the Puseyites. Oh! I wish Dr.

Arnold were yet living, or that a second Dr. Arnold could be found!

Were there but ten such men amongst the hierarchs of the Church of England she might bid defiance to all the scarlet hats and stockings in the Pope's gift. Her sanctuaries would be purified, her rites reformed, her withered veins would swell again with vital sap; but it is not so.

'It is well that _truth_ is _indestructible_--that ruin cannot crush nor fire annihilate her divine essence. While forms change and inst.i.tutions perish, "_truth_ is great and shall prevail."

'I am truly glad to hear that Miss Kavanagh's health is improved.

You can send her book whenever it is most convenient. I received from Cornhill the other day a periodical containing a portrait of Jenny Lind--a sweet, natural, innocent peasant-girl face, curiously contrasted with an artificial fine-lady dress. I _do_ like and esteem Jenny's character. Yet not long since I heard her torn to pieces by the tongue of detraction--scarcely a virtue left--twenty odious defects imputed.

'There was likewise a most faithful portrait of R. H. Home, with his imaginative forehead and somewhat foolish-looking mouth and chin, indicating that mixed character which I should think he owns. Mr.

Home writes well. That tragedy on the _Death of Marlowe_ reminds me of some of the best of Dumas' dramatic pieces.--Yours very sincerely,

'C. BRONTE.'

TO MISS ELLEN NUSSEY

'_January_, 1851.

'DEAR ELLEN,--I sent yesterday the _Leader_ newspaper, which you must always send to Hunsworth as soon as you have done with it. I will continue to forward it as long as I get it.

'I am trying a little Hydropathic treatment; I like it, and I think it has done me good. Inclosed is a letter received a few days since.

I wish you to read it because it gives a very fair notion both of the disposition and mind; read, return, and tell me what you think of it.

'Thackeray has given dreadful trouble by his want of punctuality.

Mr. Williams says if he had not been helped out with the vigour, energy, and method of Mr. Smith, he must have sunk under the day and night labour of the last few weeks.