The Three Brontes Part 10

"After sitting some minutes in silence, and watching the progress of the chain, at which I now wrought more a.s.siduously than ever, he inquired:

"'Whether what he had just said would have the effect of making me entirely detest him?'

"I hardly remember what answer I made, or how it came about; I don't think I spoke at all, but I know we managed to bid good night on friendly terms: and even after M. Paul had reached the door, he turned back just to explain that he would not be understood to speak in entire condemnation of the scarlet dress.'...

"'And the flowers under my bonnet, monsieur?' I asked. 'They are very little ones.'

"'Keep them little, then,' said he. 'Permit them not to become full-blown.'

"'And the bow, monsieur--the bit of ribbon?'

"'_Va pour le ruban_!' was the propitious answer.

"And so we settled it."

That is good; and when Lucy presents the watchguard it is better still.

"He looked at the box: I saw its clear and warm tint, and bright azure circlet, pleased his eyes. I told him to open it.

"'My initials!' said he, indicating the letters in the lid. 'Who told you I was called Carl David?'

"'A little bird, monsieur.'

"'Does it fly from me to you? Then one can tie a message under its wing when needful.'

"He took out the chain--a trifle indeed as to value, but glossy with silk and sparkling with beads. He liked that too--admired it artlessly, like a child.

"'For me?'

"'Yes, for you.'

"'This is the thing you were working at last night?'

"'The same.'

"'You finished it this morning?'

"'I did.'

"'You commenced it with the intention that it should be mine?'

"'Undoubtedly.'

"'And offered on my fete-day?'

"'Yes.'

"'This purpose continued as you wove it?'

"'Again I a.s.sented.'

"'Then it is not necessary that I should cut out any portion--saying, this part is not mine: it was plaited under the idea and for the adornment of another?'

"'By no means. It is neither necessary, nor would it be just.'

"'This object is _all_ mine?'

"'That object is yours entirely.'

"Straightway monsieur opened his paletot, arranged the guard splendidly across his chest, displaying as much and suppressing as little as he could: for he had no notion of concealing what he admired and thought decorative....

"'_a present c'est un fait accompli_,' said he, readjusting his paletot...."

To the last gesture of Monsieur it is superb.

I have taken those scenes because they are of crucial importance as indications of what Charlotte Bronte was doing in _Villette_, and yet would do. They show not only an enormous advance in technique, but a sense of the situation, of the _scene a faire_, which is entirely or almost entirely lacking in her earlier work.

If there be degrees in reality, Lucy and Pauline de Ba.s.sompierre are only less real than M. Paul. And by some miracle their reality is not diminished by Charlotte Bronte's singular change of intention with regard to these two. Little Polly, the child of the beginning, the inscrutable creature of nerves, exquisitely sensitive to pain, fretting her heart out in love for her father and for Graham Bretton, is hardly recognizable in Pauline, Countess de Ba.s.sompierre. She has preserved only her fragility, her fastidiousness, her little air of inaccessibility. Polly is obviously predestined to that profound and tragic suffering which is Lucy Snowe's.

"I watched Polly rest her small elbow on her small knee, her head on her hand; I observed her draw a square inch or two of pocket-handkerchief from the doll-pocket of her doll-skirt, and then I heard her weep. Other children in grief or pain cry aloud, without shame or restraint, but this being wept: the tiniest occasional sniff testified to her emotion."

Again (Polly is parted from her father): "When the street-door closed, she dropped on her knees at a chair with a cry--'Papa!'

"It was low and long; a sort of 'why hast thou forsaken me?' During an ensuing s.p.a.ce of some minutes I perceived she endured agony. She went through, in that brief interval of her infant life, emotions such as some never feel; it was in her const.i.tution: she would have more of such instants if she lived."

Polly is contrasted with the cold and disagreeable Lucy. "I, Lucy Snowe, was calm," Lucy says when she records that agony. The effect she gives, of something creepily insensitive and most unpleasant, is unmistakable in these early chapters. She watches Polly with a cold, a.n.a.lytic eye.

"These sudden, dangerous natures--sensitive as they are called--offer many a curious spectacle to those whom a cooler temperament has secured from partic.i.p.ation in their vagaries." When Polly, charming Polly, waits on her father at the tea-table, Lucy is impervious to her tiny charm.

"Candidly speaking, I thought her a little busy-body." When Graham Bretton repulses Polly, Lucy has some thoughts of "improving the occasion by inculcating some of those maxims of philosophy whereof I had ever a tolerable stock ready for application."

There is no sign in the beginning that this detestable Lucy is to be heroine. But in Chapter Four Polly disappears and Lucy takes her place and plays her part. The child Polly had a suffering and pa.s.sionate heart, for all her little air of fastidiousness and inaccessibility. It is the suffering and pa.s.sionate heart of Polly that beats in Lucy of the Pensionnat. There is only enough of the original Lucy left to sit in judgment on Ginevra Fanshawe and "the Parisienne".

The child Polly had an Imagination. "'Miss Snowe,' said she in a whisper, 'this is a wonderful book ... it tells about distant countries, a long, long way from England, which no traveller can reach without sailing thousands of miles over the sea.... Here is a picture of thousands gathered in a desolate place--a plain spread with sand.... And here are pictures more stranger than that. There is the wonderful Great Wall of China; here is a Chinese lady with a foot littler than mine.

There is a wild horse of Tartary; and here--most strange of all--is a land of ice and snow without green fields, woods, or gardens. In this land they found some mammoth bones; there are no mammoths now. You don't know what it was; but I can tell you, because Graham told me. A mighty goblin creature, as high as this room, and as long as the hall; but not a fierce, flesh-eating thing, Graham thinks. He believes if I met one in a forest, it would not kill me, unless I came quite in its way; when it would trample me down amongst the bushes, as I might tread on a gra.s.shopper in a hay-field without knowing it.'"

It is Polly's Imagination that appears again in Lucy's "Creative Impulse". "I with whom that Impulse was the most intractable, the most capricious, the most maddening of masters ... a deity which sometimes, under circ.u.mstances apparently propitious, would not speak when questioned, would not hear when appealed to, would not, when sought, be found; but would stand, all cold, all indurated, all granite, a dark Baal with carven lips and blank eyeb.a.l.l.s, and breast like the stone face of a tomb; and again, suddenly, at some turn, some sound, some long-trembling sob of the wind, at some rushing past of an unseen stream of electricity, the irrational Demon would awake unsolicited, would stir strangely alive, would rush from its pedestal like a perturbed Dagon, calling to its votary for a sacrifice, whatever the hour--to its victim for some blood or some breath, whatever the circ.u.mstances or scene--rousing its priest, treacherously promising vaticination, perhaps filling its temple with a strange hum of oracles, but sure to give half the significance to fateful winds, and grudging to the desperate listener even a miserable remnant--yielding it sordidly, as though each word had been a drop of the deathless ichor of its own dark veins."

That is Lucy. But when Polly reappears fitfully as Pauline de Ba.s.sompierre, she is an ordinary, fastidious little lady without a spark of imagination or of pa.s.sion.

Now in the first three chapters of _Villette_, Charlotte Bronte concentrated all her strength and all her art on the portrait of little Polly. The portrait of little Polly is drawn with the most delicate care and tender comprehension, and the most vivid and entire reality. I cannot agree with Mr. Swinburne that George Eliot, with her Totty and Eppie and Lillo, showed a closer observation of the ways, or a more perfect understanding of the heart of a child. Only little Maggie Tulliver can stand beside little Polly in _Villette_. She is an answer to every critic, from Mr. Swinburne downwards, who maintains that Charlotte Bronte could not draw children.

But Lucy at fourteen is drawn with slight and grudging strokes, sufficient for the minor part she is evidently to play. Lucy at Bretton is a mere foil to little Polly. Charlotte Bronte distinctly stated in her letters that she did not care for Miss Snowe. "Lucy must not marry Dr. John; he is far too youthful, handsome, bright-spirited, and sweet-tempered; he is a 'curled darling' of Nature and of fortune, and must draw a prize in life's lottery. His wife must be young, rich, pretty; he must be made very happy indeed. If Lucy marries anybody, it must be the Professor--a man in whom there is much to forgive, much to 'put up with'. But I am not leniently disposed towards Miss Frost: from the beginning I never meant to appoint her lines in pleasant places."

"As to the character of Lucy Snowe, my intention from the first was that she should not occupy the pedestal to which Jane Eyre was raised by some injudicious admirers. She is where I meant her to be, and where no charge of self-laudation can touch her."

But Lucy is _not_ altogether where she was meant to be. When she reappears at the Pensionnat it is with "flame in her soul and lightning in her eyes". She reminds M. Paul "of a young she wild creature, new caught, untamed, viewing with a mixture of fire and fear the first entrance of the breaker-in".

"'You look,' said he, 'like one who would s.n.a.t.c.h at a draught of sweet poison, and spurn wholesome bitters with disgust.'"

There is no inconsistency in this. Women before now have hidden a soul like a furnace under coldness and unpleasantness, and smothered shrieking nerves under an appearance of apathy. Lucy Snowe is one of them. As far as she goes, Lucy at Bretton is profoundly consistent with Lucy in _Villette_. It is not Lucy's volcanic outbreaks in the Pensionnat that do violence to her creator's original intention. It is the debas.e.m.e.nt of Polly and the exaltation of Lucy to her tragic role, the endowment of Lucy with Polly's rarest qualities, to the utter impoverishment of Pauline de Ba.s.sompierre. Polly in _Villette_ is a mere foil to Lucy.