The Three Brontes Part 11

Having lavished such care and love on Polly, Charlotte Bronte could not possibly have meant to debase her and efface her. How then did it happen that Polly was debased and Lucy sublimely exalted?

It happened, I think, partly because for the first time Charlotte Bronte created a real living man. The reality of M. Paul Emanuel was too strong both for Lucy and for Charlotte Bronte. From the moment when he seized her and dragged her to the garret he made Lucy live as Charlotte Bronte had never contemplated her living. He made her live to the utter exclusion and extinction of Pauline de Ba.s.sompierre.

And "the despotic little man" dominates the book to an extent that Charlotte never contemplated either. Until the storm carried him out of her sight, she was, I think, unaware of his dominion. Dr. John was her hero. She told Mr. George Smith, his prototype, that she intended him for the most beautiful character in the book (which must have been very gratifying to Mr. George Smith). He was the type she needed for her purpose. But he does not "come off", if only for the reason that she is consciously preoccupied with him. Dr. John was far more of an obsession to her than this little man, Paul Emanuel, who was good enough for Lucy Snowe. Pauline de Ba.s.sompierre was to be finished and perfected to match the high finish and perfection of Dr. John. Yet neither Pauline nor Dr.

John "came off". Charlotte Bronte cared too much for them. But for Paul Emanuel she did not care. He comes off in a triumph of the detached, divinely free "Creative Impulse".

Charlotte, with all her schemes, is delivered over to her genius from the moment when Lucy settles in Villette. To Charlotte's inexperience Brussels was a perfect hotbed for the germs of the real. That, I think, can be admitted without subscribing to the view that it was anything more. Once in the Pensionnat, Lucy entered an atmosphere of the most intense reality. From that point onward the book is literally inspired by the sense of atmosphere, that sense to which experience brings the stuff to work on. All Charlotte's experience and her suffering is there, changed, intensified, trans.m.u.ted to an experience and a suffering which were not hers.

This matured sense of actuality is shown again in the drawing of the minor characters. There is a certain vindictiveness about the portrait of Ginevra Fanshawe, a touch of that fierce, intolerant temper that caused Blanche Ingram to be strangled by the hands of her creator.

Ginevra is not strangled. She lives splendidly; she flourishes in an opulence of detail.

Experience may have partly accounted for Ginevra. It could hardly have accounted for the little de Hamel, and he is perfect as far as he goes.

It is because of this increasing mastery, this new power in handling unsympathetic types, because, in short, of its all round excellence, that _Villette_ must count as Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece. It is marvellous that within such limits she should have attained such comparative catholicity of vision. It is not the vast vision of _Shirley_, prophetic and inspired, and a little ineffectual. It is the lucid, sober, un.o.bstructed gaze of a more accomplished artist, the artist whose craving for "reality" is satisfied; the artist who is gradually extending the limits of his art. When Charlotte Bronte wrote _Jane Eyre_ she could not appreciate Jane Austen; she wondered why George Henry Lewes liked her so much. She objected to Jane Austen because there was no pa.s.sion in her, and therefore no poetry and no reality. When she wrote _Shirley_ she had seen that pa.s.sion was not everything; there were other things, very high realities, that were not pa.s.sion. By the time she wrote _Villette_ she saw, not only that there are other things, but that pa.s.sion is the rarest thing on earth. It does not enter into the life of ordinary people like Dr. John, and Madame Beck, and Ginevra Fanshawe.

In accordance with this tendency to level up, her style in _Villette_ attains a more even and a more certain excellence. Her flights are few; so are her lapses. Her fearful tendency to rhetoric is almost gone. Gone too are the purple patches; but there is everywhere delicate colour under a vivid light. But there are countless pa.s.sages which show the perfection to which she could bring her old imaginative style. Take the scene where Lucy, under the influence of opium, goes into Villette _en fete_.

"The drug wrought. I know not whether Madame had over-charged or under-charged the dose; its result was not that she intended. Instead of stupor, came excitement. I became alive to new thought--to reverie peculiar in colouring. A gathering call ran among the faculties, their bugles sang, their trumpets rang an untimely summons....

"I took a route well known, and went up towards the palatial and royal Haute-Ville; thence the music I heard certainly floated; it was hushed now, but it might rewaken. I went on: neither band nor bell-music came to meet me; another sound replaced it, a sound like a strong tide, a great flow, deepening as I proceeded. Light broke, movement gathered, chimes pealed--to what was I coming? Entering on the level of a Grande Place, I found myself, with the suddenness of magic, plunged amidst a gay, living, joyous crowd.

"Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the whole world seems abroad; moonlight and heaven are banished: the town by her own flambeaux, beholds her own splendour--gay dresses, grand equipage, fine horses and gallant riders, throng the bright streets. I see even scores of masks. It is a strange scene, stranger than dreams."

This is only beaten by that lyric pa.s.sage that ends _Villette_; that sonorous dirge that rings high above all pathos, which is somehow a song of triumph, inspired by the whole power and splendour and magnificence of storm and death.

"The sun pa.s.ses the equinox; the days shorten, the leaves grow sere; but--he is coming.

"Frosts appear at night; November has sent his fogs in advance; the wind takes its autumn moan; but--he is coming.

"The skies hang full and dark--a rack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms--arches and broad radiations; there rise resplendent mornings--glorious, royal, purple, as monarch in his state; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest--so b.l.o.o.d.y, they shame Victory in her pride. I know some signs of the sky, I have noted them ever since childhood. G.o.d, watch that sail! Oh, guard it!

"The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace, Banshee--'keening' at every window! It will rise--it will swell--it shrieks out long: wander as I may through the house this night, I cannot lull the blast. The advancing hours make it strong; by midnight all sleepless watchers hear and fear a wild south-west storm.

"That storm roared frenzied for seven days. It did not cease till the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks: it did not lull till the deeps had gorged their fill of substance. Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work, would he fold the wings whose waft was thunder--the tremor of whose plumes was storm."

After _Villette_, the _Last Sketch_, the _Fragment of Emma_; that fragment which Charlotte Bronte read to her husband not long before her death. All he said was, "The critics will accuse you of repet.i.tion."

The critics have fulfilled his cautious prophecy. The _Fragment_ pa.s.sed for one of those sad things of which the least said the better. It was settled that Charlotte Bronte had written herself out, that if she had lived she would have become more and more her own plagiarist. There is a middle-aged lady in _Emma_, presumably conceived on the lines of Mrs.

Fairfax and Mrs. Pryor. There is a girls' school, which is only not Lowood because it is so obviously Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor. There is a schoolmistress with sandy hair and thin lips and a cold blue eye, recalling Madame Beck, though there the likeness ceases. And in that school, ill-treated by that schoolmistress, there is a little ugly, suffering, deserted child.

All this looks very much like repet.i.tion. But it does not shake my private belief that _Emma_ is a fragment of what would have been as great a novel as _Villette_. There are indications. There is Mr. Ellin, who proves that Charlotte Bronte could create a live man of the finer sort, an unexploited masculine type with no earthly resemblance to Rochester or to Louis Moore or M. Paul. He is an unfinished sketch rather than a portrait, but a sketch that would not too shamefully have discredited Mr. Henry James. For there is a most modern fineness and subtlety in _Emma_; and, for all its sketchy incompleteness, a peculiar certainty of touch, an infallible sense of the significant action, the revealing gesture. With a splendid economy of means, scenes, pa.s.sages, phrases, apparently slight, are charged with the most intense psychological suggestion. When Mr. Ellin, summoned on urgent business by Miss Wilc.o.x, takes that preposterously long and leisurely round to get to her, you know what is pa.s.sing in the mind of Mr. Ellin as well as if you had been told. In that brief scene between Mr. Ellin and the schoolmistress, you know as well as if you had been told, that Miss Wilc.o.x has lost Mr. Ellin because of her unkindness to a child. When the child, Matilda Fitzgibbon, falls senseless, and Mr. Ellin gives his inarticulate cry and lifts her from the floor, the enigmatic man has revealed his innermost nature.

Now a fragment that can suggest all this with the smallest possible expenditure of phrases, is not a fragment that can be set aside. It is slight; but slightness that accomplishes so much is a sign of progress rather than of falling-off. We shall never know what happened to Matilda when Mr. Ellin took her from Miss Wilc.o.x. We shall never know what happened to Mr. Ellin; but I confess that I am dying to know, and that I find it hard to forgive Mr. Nicholls for having killed them, so certain am I that they would have lived triumphantly if Charlotte Bronte had not married him.

Some of us will be profoundly indifferent to this issue; for Charlotte Bronte has no following in a certain school. She defies a.n.a.lysis. You cannot label her. What she has done is not "Realism", neither is it "Romance". She displeases both by her ambiguity and by her lack of form.

She has no infallible dramatic instinct. Even in _Villette_ she preserves some of her clumsiness, her crudity, her improbability. The progress of "the Novel" in our day is towards a perfection of form and a reality she never knew.

But "reality" is a large term; and, as for form, _who_ cared about it in the fifties? As for improbability--as M. Dimnet says--she is not more improbable than Balzac.

And all these things, the ambiguity, the formlessness and the rest, she was gradually correcting as she advanced. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance and significance of her attainment in _Villette_; there has been so much confused thinking in the consecrated judgment of that novel. _Villette_ owes its high place largely to its superior construction and technique; largely and primarily to Charlotte Bronte's progress towards the light, towards the world, towards the great undecorated reality. It is odd criticism that ignores the inevitable growth, the increasing vision and grasp, the whole indomitable advance of a great writer, and credits "experience" with the final masterpiece.

As a result of this confusion _Villette_ has been judged "final" in another sense. Yes, final--this novel that shows every sign and token of long maturing, long-enduring power. If Charlotte Bronte's critics had not hypnotized themselves by the perpetual reiteration of that word "experience", it would have been impossible for them, with the evidence of her work before them, to have believed that in _Villette_ she had written herself out.

She was only just beginning.

Of Charlotte Bronte's _Poems_ there is not much to say. They are better poems than Branwell's or Anne's, but that does not make them very good.

Still, they are interesting, and they are important, because they are the bridge by which Charlotte Bronte pa.s.sed into her own dominion. She took Wordsworth with his Poems and Ballads for her guide, and he misled her and delayed her on her way, and kept her a long time standing on her bridge. For in her novels, and her novels only, Charlotte was a poet. In her poems she is a novelist, striving and struggling for expression in a cramped form, an imperfect and improper medium. But most indubitably a novelist. Nearly all her poems which are not artificial are impersonal.

They deal with "situations", with "psychological problems", that cry aloud for prose. There is the "Wife" who seems to have lived a long, adventurous life with "William" through many poems; there is the deserted wife and mother in "Mementos"; there is "Frances", the deserted maiden; there is "Gilbert" with his guilty secret and his suicide, a triple domestic tragedy in the three acts of a three-part ballad; there is the lady in "Preference", who prefers her husband to her pa.s.sionate and profoundly deluded lover; there is the woman in "Apostasy", wrecked in the conflict between love and priestcraft; and there is little else beside. These poems are straws, showing the way of the wind that bloweth where it listeth.

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

What an existence!

This is the impression created by the bibliographical total. But sweep four-fifths of it away, all the legends and half the letters, and sort and set out what remains, observing values and proportions, and you get an outer life where no great and moving event ever came, saving only death (Charlotte's marriage hardly counts beside it); an outer life of a strange and almost oppressive simplicity and silence; and an inner life, tumultuous and profound in suffering, a life to all appearances frustrate, where all nourishment of the emotions was reduced to the barest allowance a woman's heart can depend on and yet live; and none the less a life that out of that starvation diet raised enough of rich and vivid and superb emotion to decorate a hundred women's lives; an inner life which her genius fed and was fed from, for which no reality, no experience, could touch its own intensity of realization. And, genius apart, in the region of actual and ostensible emotion, no one of us can measure the depth of her adoration of duty, or the depth, the force and volume of her pa.s.sion for her own people, and for the earth trodden by their feet, the earth that covered them. Beside it every other feeling was temporary and insignificant. In the light of it you see Charlotte Bronte's figure for ever simple and beautiful and great; behind her for ever the black-grey setting of her village and the purple of her moors.

That greatness and beauty and simplicity is destroyed by any effort to detach her from her background. She may seem susceptible to the alien influences of exile; but it is as an exile that she suffers; and her most inspired moments are her moments of return, when she wrote prose like this: "The moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale; as glad as if she gave herself to his fierce caress with love. No Endymion will watch for his G.o.ddess to-night: there are no flocks on the mountains."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was true of Charlotte, that her inner life was luminous with intense realization, was a hundred times more true of Emily. It was so true that beside it nothing else that can be said is altogether true. It is not necessary for a man to be convinced of the illusory nature of time and of material happenings in order to appreciate Charlotte's genius; but his comprehension of Emily's will be adequate or otherwise, according to the pa.s.sion and sincerity with which he embraces that idea.