The Key to the Bronte Works Part 14

Leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life.

Charlotte Bronte and M. Constantin Gilles Romain Heger loved each other as those who are worshippers of two high ideals, when one of these ideals is love, the other honour. And this was tragedy. To the agonizing nature of unrequitable affection endured for honour's sake do we owe Charlotte Bronte's _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE RECOIL.

I.

The elements that conduce to reaction and recoil are sometimes fatal to the best proposed and ablest evolved schemes of man. Priests and counsellors may gravely devise; knight and maid may devoutly swear; the pious neophyte and the exalted religionist may make solemn pledge, but reaction often brings catastrophe. Thus the Christian Church is rightfully a watchful Body, a militant Force, preaches the weakness of man and cries "Ora continenter!" And herein lies the value of a ponderous state procedure. Irritating in its slow gravity and indifferent to the pa.s.sionate appeals of emotionalism, such procedure yet withstands the backward wave which comes as answer to courageous but costly proposals.

The unsupported and undisciplined individual, like communities, cannot always safely stand alone, and finally resolves into an automaton at the service of unlicensed and unconsidered impulse when the day of reaction comes. The anthropologist and the pathologist relate how exacting straitness suddenly has broken down with a lamentable demonstration of most morbid prurience; and relentless history has chronicled grievous moral declensions in the lives of men and women whose careers in the greater part were records of generous and unselfish devotion to a n.o.ble cause or an honourable work. Until the day of reaction is safely fought through the battle is not won.

Perhaps it was to prevent all possibility of a final and definite reconciliation between M. Heger and Miss Bronte that M. Sue, aided by his friends, ridiculed their attachment in his _feuilleton, Miss Mary_.

Not that Eugene Sue would do this necessarily for Virtue's sake, but the position of moral reprehender gave him t.i.tle to the role he had a.s.sumed.

M. Heger was sorely punished to lose Miss Bronte, as M. Sue has shown, and as we have seen Charlotte Bronte herself tells us in a letter; and the intensity of his affection for her is only further accentuated by the light M. Sue throws upon the subject in a conversation which occurs between Alphonsine and the jealous mother, concerning Mdlle. Lagrange in the opening chapters of his _feuilleton_. As I have stated, evidence compels us to perceive M. Sue often presented by imitation of Charlotte Bronte's Method I., Interchange of the s.e.xes for obfuscation's sake, M.

Heger in Alphonsine: Madame de Morville (Madame Heger) has just said Mdlle. Lagrange (Miss Bronte) affected a little to speak of her humble origin.

"Elle affecter," replies Alphonsine, "... c'est une erreur. Quand, par hasard, elle parlait de sa famille, c'est que la conversation venait la-dessus. D'ailleurs, ecoute donc, Mademoiselle Lagrange et ete fiere qu'elle en avait le droit."

"Proud! what of? not of her face, poor girl."

"No, that is true."

Madame de Morville admits that Mdlle. Lagrange was endowed with patience, learning, and fort.i.tude; and says, "Tu le sais, nous avions pour elle les plus grands egards."

"Without doubt ... and myself, I loved her like a sister."

To which Madame de Morville retorts:

"A ce point que, pendant les premiers jours qui ont suivi son depart je t'ai vue souvent pleurer, et que depuis je te trouve triste."

"Que veux-tu ... se quitter apres plus de trois ans d'intimite, cela vous laisse du chagrin."

"This sensibility does credit to your heart, but after all it seems to me that you and I shall be able by our mutual tenderness to console each other for the loss d'une etrangere."

"Une etrangere!" says Alphonsine, navely; "dis donc une amie, une soeur.... Ainsi, toi ... tu es pour moi, n'est-ce pas, aussi affectueuse que possible; pourtant tu m'imposes toujours; il y a mille riens, mille folies, mille betises si tu veux, que je n'oserais jamais te dire, et qui nous amusaient et nous faisaient rire aux larmes avec cette pauvre Mademoiselle Lagrange; et puis ces causeries sans fin pendant les recreations, nos jeux memes, car elle etait tres enfant quand elle s'y mettait[70]; all this made our temps de l'etude pa.s.s like a dream, and that of recreation like a flash."

"Without doubt," replied Madame de Morville, with a forced smile; ... "and I, ... je ne jouissais de la societe de ces demoiselles que lors de notre promenade d'avant diner, ou le soir jusqu'a l'heure du the."

The irreparableness of the loss at first to M. Heger is herein clearly shown. But whether he would confess himself to Miss Bronte afterwards is not certain. The tone of Charlotte Bronte's successive writings suggests he did not, as do many points of evidence and the reference in _Villette_, Chapter XIX., to that "He was a religious little man, in his way: the self-denying and self-sacrificing part of the Catholic religion commanded the homage of his soul."

Likely enough it is that M. Heger hailed, as do truly n.o.ble men, the day of trial, and elevated by the very agony of great sacrifice the personality which worshipped a conception of duty consonant with Divine law. It seems, though, that then the battle was won; his day of reaction was fought through. At the time of what M. Sue makes M. de Morville call "ce premier entrainement" was the greatest danger, and abundant testimony goes to prove he would have gone the length of indiscretion but that Charlotte Bronte, herself innately honourable and influenced by her Christian upbringing, checked the mad rush of impetuous pa.s.sion.

Then the Church of M. Heger intervened. As Charlotte Bronte tells us in _Villette_, Chapter x.x.xVI.: "We were under the surveillance of a sleepless eye: Rome watched jealously her son through that mystic lattice at which I had knelt once, and to which M. Emanuel drew nigh month by month--the sliding panel of the confessional." She was much gratified by M. Heger's fervent admiration, though she had perforce to remember their circ.u.mstances. As M. Sue said of Lagrange so it had been with Miss Bronte:--

The girl had never before known love, save by reading and hearing of its magical influence. All the natural tenderness which lay in her heart she had year after year suppressed.

The references in her poems to a recognition of growing coldness in a lover--see "Frances," "Preference," etc., if we may read them in the biographical sense Mr. Mackay suggests, show there had been a day when she perceived external influences were dictating to M. Heger a line of moral procedure. Obviously, while she herself had held temptation at bay she was strong; but once she discovered an ally was lessening the necessity of her defence her woman's nature awoke. She doubted the sincerity of the past protestations of pa.s.sion; she saw in every eye a sinister spy; she found in the Roman Church nothing but a partisan of Madame Heger (see Madame Beck and the Roman Church in _Villette_), and M. Heger became to her a very impersonation of insincerity and treachery. Of the secret tempest which had begun to rage within herself she would disclose nothing to M. Heger; and she would know that once the storm slept the end might be the worst. But Charlotte Bronte was not yet in the season of the recoil, though alone, wretched, and rapidly losing faith in G.o.d and man. As for M. Heger, he was supported by the knowledge that the ideal of the good and pious is glorified by sacrifice. That "h.e.l.l holds no fury like a woman scorned" is a plat.i.tude, for a woman scorned in the meaning of the writer is a woman with a shattered life.

In her fullest and native sense she ceases to exist thereafter. However, as in many cases Nature provides a remedy for her maimed, woman has given her dissimulation. But to quote Charlotte Bronte's poem, "Frances":--

"Who can for ever crush the heart, Restrain its throbbing, curb its life?

Dissemble truth with ceaseless art, With outward calm mask inward strife?"

It is a dangerous day when woman is her very self and thwarted. Then, and only then, can she utter the distressing blasphemies Charlotte Bronte places in the mouth of the speaker in her verses, "Apostasy":--

"Talk not of thy Last Sacrament, Tell not thy beads for me; Both rite and prayer are vainly spent, As dews upon the sea.

Speak not one word of Heaven above Rave not of h.e.l.l's alarms; Give me but back my Walter's love, Restore me to his arms!

"Then will the bliss of Heaven be won; Then will h.e.l.l shrink away; As I have seen night's terrors shun The conquering steps of day.

'Tis my religion thus to love, My creed thus fixed to be; Not Death shall shake, nor Priestcraft break My rock-like constancy!"

And places in the mouth of Catherine of _Wuthering Heights_, Chapter IX., in the same connection:--

"If I were in heaven ... I should be extremely miserable.... I dreamt once ... 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 ... on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.[71] ... I cannot express it; but surely you ... have a notion that there is ... an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliffe's miseries ... my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and _he_ remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. [See my remarks on Charlotte Bronte's belief in the elective affinities, page 96-7.] My love for Heathcliffe resembles the eternal rocks beneath.... I _am_ Heathcliffe,--he's always, always in my mind--not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to myself--but as my own being--so don't talk of our separation again."

It is of the barriers which divided the woman of the verses "Apostasy"

from her lover that the priest has reminded her. Thus she says:--

"... Did I need that thou shouldst tell What mighty barriers rise To part me from that dungeon-cell Where my loved Walter lies?"

The whole history of Charlotte Bronte's Brussels life before us, the fact that an insurmountable barrier--his marriage--separated her from M.

Heger, and the fact that she herself consulted[72] a Roman Catholic priest whom I designate as her "Fenelon," advising, like the Mentor of Telemaque,[73] the tempted one to "flee temptation," identify these "barriers" as a covert reference to the circ.u.mstances unhappily existing which made intimacy between Miss Bronte and M. Heger dangerous. To quote my words in _The Fortnightly Review_:--"We see why Miss Bronte, herself a Protestant, went to the confessional at Brussels.... We know this was no freak, as also that it was impossible for Charlotte to mention the subject to her sister without attributing it to a freak. More, we perceive now the nature of her confession, and, the "Flee temptation!"

note of Fenelon's _Les Aventures de Telemaque_ fresh in our minds, we see why she wrote of her father-confessor in _Villette_, Chapter XV.:--

There was something of Fenelon about that benign old priest; and whatever ... I may think of his Church and creed, ... of himself I must ever retain a grateful recollection. He was kind when I needed kindness; he did me good. May heaven bless him!

I mention that by her composite method of presenting characters, which Charlotte Bronte admitted to have employed, Dr. John Bretton, while often in the beginning representing Mr. Smith the publisher, becomes finally a representation of the Rev. Mr. Nicholls who married Miss Bronte.[74] So in _Jane Eyre_, St. John Rivers while in the main representing the Rev. Patrick Bronte, becomes a.s.sociated temporarily with that priest I have called Charlotte Bronte's Brussels Fenelon. She tells us in _Villette_ that she broke off the seduction of visiting this priest and says:--"The probabilities are that had I visited ... at the ... day appointed, I might just now ... have been counting my beads in the cell of a ... convent...." Miss Bronte admits he had had great influence with her, and this fact and the testimony of her poem "Apostasy" just quoted show this priest and his admonitions were in her mind when she wrote the final scene between herself and St. John Rivers in _Jane Eyre_ (Chapter x.x.xV.). Therein, as in that poem and in _Wuthering Heights_, "Religion" and "Angels"[75] are set as being less to her than the vicinage of her lover. Indeed the India and the missionary life of _Jane Eyre_, and the marriage with St. John (see Chapter x.x.xIV.), may be said to have been in Miss Bronte's mind that life of religious consecration which in _Villette_ she owns to have been the likely result of her further listening to the advice of the priest, to whom she had given "the ... outline of my experience," as she terms it.

Therefore it is interesting to observe that, as the woman in "Apostasy"

suddenly hears the voice of her lover calling and says:--

"He calls--I come--my pulse scarce beats, My heart fails in my breast.

Again that voice--how far away, How dreary sounds that tone!

And I, methinks, am gone astray In trackless wastes and lone.

"I fain would rest a little while: Where can I find a stay, Till dawn upon the hills shall smile, And show some trodden way?[76]

I come! I come! in haste she said, 'Twas Walter's voice I heard!"

Then up she sprang--but fell back, dead, His name her latest word.

so in the scene in _Jane Eyre_: St. John e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es--

'My prayers are heard!' He pressed his hand firmer on my head, as if he claimed me; he surrounded me with his arm, _almost_ as if he loved me ["That priest had arms which could influence me; he was naturally kind, with a sentimental French kindness, to whose softness I knew myself not wholly impervious. Without respecting some sorts of affection, there was hardly any sort having a fibre of root in reality, which I could rely on my force wholly to withstand."--Charlotte Bronte speaking of her Brussels Fenelon in _Villette_, Chapter XV.], I say _almost_--I knew the difference--for I had felt what it was to be loved; but, like him, I now ... thought only of duty;... I sincerely, ... fervently longed to do what was right.... 'Show me, show me the path!' I entreated of Heaven.... My heart beat fast and thick.... I heard a voice somewhere cry 'Jane! Jane! Jane!' nothing more.... I had heard it--where or whence, for ever impossible to know! And it was ... a known, loved, well-remembered voice--that of Edward Fairfax Rochester.... 'I am coming!' I cried.... 'Wait for me! Oh, I will come!' I broke from St. John, who would have detained me. It was _my_ time to a.s.sume ascendency. _My_ powers were in play, and in force. I told him to forbear question or remark.... I mounted to my chamber ... fell on my knees, and prayed in my way--a different way to St. John's, but effective in its own fashion.... I rose from the thanksgiving--took a resolve--and lay down ... eager but for the daylight.

Mrs. Gaskell related that Charlotte Bronte in private conversation in reference to this preternatural crying of a voice, replied with much gravity and without further enlightenment that such an incident really did occur in her experience. Whether it occurred in connection with her Brussels Fenelon and immediately preceded a reconciliation between herself and M. Heger I know not. As, however, Charlotte Bronte's expression of grat.i.tude to this priest and the whole fervent story of thankfulness for the deliverance from dangerous temptation were written subsequently to her return from Brussels, it is clear there was never a reconciliation which cost either her or M. Heger honour. I do not urge this as an advocate; I state it upon the strength of unmistakable evidence.