The Three Brontes Part 8

It was thus that Charlotte Bronte glorified pa.s.sion. The pa.s.sion that she glorified being of the finest fibre, it was naturally not understood by people whose fibres were not fine at all.

It was George Henry Lewes (not a person of the finest fibre) who said of _Jane Eyre_ that "the grand secret of its success ... as of all great and lasting successes was its reality". In spite of crudities, absurdities, impossibilities, it remains most singularly and startlingly alive. In _Jane Eyre_ Charlotte Bronte comes for the first time into her kingdom of the inner life. She grasps the secret, unseen springs; in her narrow range she is master of the psychology of pa.s.sion and of suffering, whether she is describing the agony of the child Jane shut up in that terrible red room, or the anguish of the woman on the morning of that wedding-day that brought no wedding. Or take the scene of Jane's flight from Thornfield, or that other scene, unsurpa.s.sed in its pa.s.sion and tenderness, of her return to Rochester at Ferndean.

"To this house I came just ere dark, on an evening marked by the characteristics of sad sky, cold gale, and continued small, penetrating rain.... Even within a very short distance of the manor-house you could see nothing of it; so thick and dark grew the timber of the gloomy wood about it. Iron gates between granite pillars showed me where to enter, and pa.s.sing through them, I found myself at once in the twilight of close-ranked trees. There was a gra.s.s-grown track descending the forest aisle, between h.o.a.r and knotty shafts and under branched arches. I followed it, expecting soon to reach the dwelling; but it stretched on and on, it wound far and farther: no sign of habitation or grounds was visible.... At last my way opened, the trees thinned a little; presently I beheld a railing, then the house--scarce, by this dim light, distinguishable from the trees; so dank and green were its decaying walls. Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch, I stood amidst a s.p.a.ce of enclosed ground, from which the wood swept away in a semicircle. There were no flowers, no garden-beds; only a broad gravel-walk girdling a gra.s.s-plat, and this set in the heavy frame of the forest. The house presented two pointed gables in its front; the windows were latticed and narrow: the front-door was narrow too, one step led up to it.... It was still as a church on a week-day; the pattering rain on the forest leaves was the only sound audible....

"I heard a movement--that narrow front-door was unclosing, and some shape was about to issue from the grange.

"It opened slowly; a figure came out into the twilight and stood on the step; a man without a hat: he stretched forth his hand as if to feel whether it rained. Dark as it was I had recognized him....

"His form was of the same strong and stalwart contour as ever.... But in his countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding--that reminded me of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished, might look as looked that sightless Samson."

Again--Rochester hears Jane's voice in the room where she comes to him.

"'And where is the speaker? Is it only a voice? Oh! I _cannot_ see, but I must feel or my heart will stop and my brain burst.'...

"He groped. I arrested his wandering hand, and prisoned it in both mine.

"'Her very fingers!' he cried; 'her small, slight fingers! If so, there must be more of her.'

"The muscular hand broke from my custody; my arm was seized, my shoulder--neck--wrist--I was entwined and gathered to him....

"I pressed my lips to his once brilliant and now rayless eyes--I swept back his hair from his brow and kissed that too. He suddenly seemed to rouse himself: the conviction of the reality of all this seized him.

"'It is you--is it, Jane? You are come back to me then?'

"'I am.'"

The scene as it stands is far from perfect; but only Charlotte Bronte could sustain so strong an illusion of pa.s.sion through so many lapses.

And all that pa.s.sion counts for no more than half in the astounding effect of reality she produces. Before _Jane Eyre_ there is no novel written by a woman, with the one exception of _Wuthering Heights_, that conveys so poignant an impression of surroundings, of things seen and heard, of the earth and sky; of weather; of the aspects of houses and of rooms. It suggests a positive exaltation of the senses of sound and light, an ecstasy, an enchantment before the visible, tangible world. It is not a matter of mere faithful observation (though few painters have possessed so incorruptibly the innocence of the eye). It is an almost supernatural intentness; sensation raised to the _n_th power. Take the description of the awful red room at Gateshead.

"A bed supported on ma.s.sive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a soft fawn colour, with a flush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly-polished old mahogany. Out of these deep surrounding shades rose high and glared white the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Ma.r.s.eilles counterpane. Scarcely less prominent was an ample, cushioned easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne.... Mr. Reed had been dead nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his last; here he lay in state; hence his coffin was borne by the undertaker's men; and since that day a sense of dreary consecration had guarded it from frequent intrusion."

Could anything be more horrible than that red room? Or take the descriptions of the school at Lowood where the horror of pestilence hangs over house and garden. Through all these Gateshead and Lowood scenes Charlotte is unerring and absolute in her reality.

Her very style, so uncertain in its rendering of human speech, becomes flawless in such pa.s.sages as this: "It was three o'clock; the church-bell tolled as I pa.s.sed under the belfry: the charm of the hour lay in its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun.

I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white, worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and the little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like single russet leaves about to drop.

"This lane inclined up-hill all the way to Hay.... I then turned eastward.

"On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon; pale yet as a cloud, but brightening momently; she looked over Hay which, half lost in trees, sent up a blue smoke from its few chimneys; it was yet a mile distant, but in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life.

My ear, too, felt the flow of currents; in what dales and depths I could not tell: but there were many hills beyond Hay, and doubtless many becks threading their pa.s.ses. That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of the nearest streams, the sough of the most remote.

"A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and whisperings, at once so far away and so clear: a positive tramp, tramp; a metallic clatter, which effaced the soft wave-wanderings; as, in a picture, the solid ma.s.s of a crag, or the rough boles of a great oak, drawn in dark and strong on the foreground, efface the aerial distance of azure hill, sunny horizon, and blended clouds, where tint melts into tint.

"The din sounded on the causeway...."

Flawless this, too, of the sky after sunset: "Where the sun had gone down in simple state--pure of the pomp of clouds--spread a solemn purple, burning with the light of red jewel and furnace flame at one point, on one hill-peak, and extending high and wide, soft and still softer, over half heaven."

And this of her own moors: "There are great moors behind and on each hand of me; there are waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley at my feet. The population here must be thin, and I see no pa.s.sengers on these roads: they stretch out east, west, north and south--white, broad, lonely; they are all cut in the moor, and the heather grows deep and wild to their very verge."

She has given the secret of the moor country in a phrase: "I felt the consecration of its loneliness." In that one line you have the real, the undying Charlotte Bronte.

It is such immortal things that make the difference between _Jane Eyre_ and _The Professor_. So immeasurable is that difference that it almost justifies the theorist in a.s.suming an "experience" to account for it, an experience falling between the dates of _The Professor_ and _Jane Eyre_.

Unfortunately there was none; none in the sense cherished by the researcher. Charlotte's letters are an unbroken record of those two years that followed her return from Brussels. Her life is laid bare in its long and cramped monotony, a life singularly empty of "experience".

And yet an experience did come to her in that brief period. If the researcher had not followed a false scent across the Channel, if his _flair_ for tragic pa.s.sion had not destroyed in him all sense of proportion, he could not possibly have missed it; for it stared him in the face, simple, obvious, inevitable. But miss it he certainly did.

Obsessed by his idea, he considered it a negligible circ.u.mstance that Charlotte should have read _Wuthering Heights_ before she wrote _Jane Eyre_. And yet, I think that, if anything woke Charlotte up, it was that. Until then, however great her certainty of her own genius, she did not know how far she could trust it, how far it would be safe to let imagination go. Appalled by the spectacle of its excesses, she had divorced imagination from the real. But Emily knew none of these cold deliberations born of fear. _Wuthering Heights_ was the fruit of a divine freedom, a divine unconsciousness. It is not possible that Charlotte, of all people, should have read _Wuthering Heights_ without a shock of enlightenment; that she should not have compared it with her own bloodless work; that she should not have felt the wrong done to her genius by her self-repression. Emily had dared to be herself; _she_ had not been afraid of her own pa.s.sion; she had had no method; she had accomplished a stupendous thing without knowing it, by simply letting herself go. And Charlotte, I think, said to herself, "That is what I ought to have done. That is what I will do next time." And next time she did it. The experience may seem insufficient, but it is of such experiences that a great writer's life is largely made. And if you _must_ have an influence to account for _Jane Eyre_, there is no need to go abroad to look for it. There was influence enough in her own home.

These three Brontes, adoring each other, were intolerant of any other influence; and the strongest spirit, which was Emily's, prevailed. To be sure, no remonstrances from Emily or Charlotte could stop Anne in her obstinate a.n.a.lysis of Walter Huntingdon; but it was some stray spark from Emily that kindled Anne. As for Charlotte, her genius must have quickened in her when her nerves thrilled to the shock of _Wuthering Heights_. This, I know, is only another theory; but it has at least the merit of its modesty. It is not offered as in the least accounting for, or explaining, Charlotte's genius. It merely suggests with all possible humility a likely cause of its release. Anyhow, it is a theory that does Charlotte's genius no wrong, on which account it seems to me preferable to any other. It is really no argument against it to say that Charlotte never acknowledged her sister's influence, that she was indeed unaware of it; for, in the first place, the stronger the spiritual tie between them, the less likely was she to have been aware. In the second place, it is not claimed that _Wuthering Heights_ was such an influence as the "sojourn in Brussels" is said to have been--that it "made Miss Bronte an author". It is not claimed that if there had been no _Wuthering Heights_ and no Emily Bronte, there would have been no _Jane Eyre_; for to me nothing can be more certain that whatever had, or had not happened, Charlotte's genius would have found its way.

Charlotte's genius indeed was so profoundly akin to Charlotte's nature that its way, the way of its upward progress, was by violent impetus and recoil.

In _Shirley_ she revolts from the pa.s.sion of _Jane Eyre_. She seems to have written it to prove that there are other things. She had been stung by _The Quarterly's_ attack, stung by rumour, stung by every adverse thing that had been said. And yet not for a moment was she "influenced"

by her reviewers. It was more in defiance than in submission that she answered them with _Shirley_. _Shirley_ was an answer to every criticism that had yet been made. In _Shirley_ she forsook the one poor play of hearts insurgent for the vast and varied movement of the world; social upheavals, the clash of sects and castes, the first grim hand-to-hand struggle between capital and labour, all are there. The book opens with a drama, not of hearts but of artisans insurgent; frame-breakers, not breakers of the marriage law. In sheer defiance she essays to render the whole real world, the complex, many-threaded, many-coloured world; where the tragic warp is woven with the bright comedy of curates. It is the world of the beginnings; the world of the early nineteenth century that she paints. A world with the immensity, the profundity, the darkness of the brooding sea; where the spirit of a woman moves, troubling the waters; for Charlotte Bronte has before her the stupendous vision of the world as it was, as it yet is, and as it is to be.

That world, as it existed from eighteen-twelve to Charlotte's own time, eighteen-fifty, was not a place for a woman with a brain and a soul.

There was no career for any woman but marriage. If she missed it she missed her place in the world, her prestige, and her privileges as a woman. What was worse, she lost her individuality, and became a mere piece of furniture, of disused, old-fashioned furniture, in her father's or her brother's house. If she had a father or a brother there was no escape for her from dependence on the male; and if she had none, if there was no male about the house, her case was the more pitiable. And the traditions of her upbringing were such that the real, vital things, the things that mattered, were never mentioned in her presence. Religion was the solitary exception; and religion had the reality and vitality taken out of it by its dissociation with the rest of life. A woman in these horrible conditions was only half alive. She had no energies, no pa.s.sions, no enthusiasms. Convention drained her of her life-blood. What was left to her had no outlet; pent up in her, it bred weak, anaemic subst.i.tutes for its natural issue, sentimentalism for pa.s.sion, and sensibility for the nerves of vision. This only applies, of course, to the average woman.

Charlotte Bronte was born with a horror of the world that had produced this average woman, this creature of minute corruptions and hypocrisies.

She sent out _Jane Eyre_ to purify it with her pa.s.sion. She sent out _Shirley_ to destroy and rebuild it with her intellect. Little Jane was a fiery portent. Shirley was a prophecy. She is modern to her finger-tips, as modern as Meredith's great women: Diana, or Clara Middleton, or Carinthia Jane. She was born fifty years before her time.

This is partly owing to her creator's prophetic insight, partly to her sheer truth to life. For Shirley was to a large extent a portrait of Emily Bronte who was born before her time.

It is Emily Bronte's spirit that burns in Shirley Keeldar; and it is the spirit of Shirley Keeldar that gives life to the unwilling ma.s.s of this vast novel. It is almost enough immortality for Shirley that she is the only living and authentic portrait of Emily Bronte in her time.

Charlotte has given her the "wings that wealth can give", and they do not matter. She has also given her the wings of Emily's adventurous soul, the wealth of her inner life.

"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 G.o.d 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 verdure and light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that whence angels looked down on the dreamer of Bethel, and her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it."

"Her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it--" That was the secret of Emily's greatness, of her immeasurable superiority to her sad sisters.

And again: "In Shirley's nature prevailed at times an easy indolence: there were periods when she took delight in perfect vacancy of hand and eye--moments when her thoughts, her simple existence, the fact of the world being around--and heaven above her, seemed to yield her such fulness of happiness, that she did not need to lift a finger to increase the joy. Often, after an active morning, she would spend a sunny afternoon in lying stirless on the turf, at the foot of some tree of friendly umbrage: no society did she need but that of Caroline, and it sufficed if she were within call; no spectacle did she ask but that of the deep blue sky, and such cloudlets as sailed afar and aloft across its span; no sound but that of the bee's hum, the leaf's whisper."

There are phrases in Louis Moore's diary that bring Emily Bronte straight before us in her swift and vivid life. Shirley is "Sister of the spotted, bright, quick-fiery leopard." "Pantheress!--beautiful forest-born!--wily, tameless, peerless nature! She gnaws her chain. I see the white teeth working at the steel! She has dreams of her wild woods, and pinings after virgin freedom." "How evanescent, fugitive, fitful she looked--slim and swift as a Northern streamer!" "... With her long hair flowing full and wavy; with her noiseless step, her pale cheek, her eye full of night and lightning, she looked, I thought, spirit-like--a thing made of an element--the child of a breeze and a flame--the daughter of ray and raindrop--a thing never to be overtaken, arrested, fixed."

Like Emily she is not "caught". "But if I were," she says, "do you know what soothsayers I would consult?... The little Irish beggar that comes barefoot to my door; the mouse that steals out of the cranny in the wainscot; the bird that in frost and snow pecks at my window for a crumb; the dog that licks my hand and sits beside my knee."

And yet again: "She takes her sewing occasionally: but, by some fatality, she is doomed never to sit steadily at it for above five minutes at a time: her thimble is scarcely fitted on, her needle scarce threaded, when a sudden thought calls her upstairs; perhaps she goes to seek some just-then-remembered old ivory-backed needle-book, or older china-topped work-box, quite unneeded, but which seems at the moment indispensable; perhaps to arrange her hair, or a drawer which she recollects to have seen that morning in a state of curious confusion; perhaps only to take a peep from a particular window at a particular view where Briarfield Church and Rectory are visible, pleasantly bowered in trees. She has scarcely returned, and again taken up the slip of cambric, or square of half-wrought canvas, when Tartar's bold sc.r.a.pe and strangled whistle are heard at the porch door, and she must run to open it for him; it is a hot day; he comes in panting; she must convoy him to the kitchen, and see with her own eyes that his water-bowl is replenished. Through the open kitchen-door the court is visible, all sunny and gay, and peopled with turkeys and their poults, peahens and their chicks, pearl-flecked Guinea fowls, and a bright variety of pure white and purple-necked, and blue and cinnamon-plumed pigeons.

Irresistible spectacle to Shirley! She runs to the pantry for a roll, and she stands on the doorstep scattering crumbs: around her throng her eager, plump, happy, feathered va.s.sals.... There are perhaps some little calves, some little new-yeaned lambs--it may be twins, whose mothers have rejected them: Miss Keeldar ... must permit herself the treat of feeding them with her own hand."

Like Emily she is impatient of rituals and creeds. Like Emily she adores the Earth. Not one of Charlotte's women except Shirley could have chanted that great prose hymn of adoration in which Earth worships and is worshipped. "'Nature is now at her evening prayers; she is kneeling before those red hills. I see her prostrate on the great steps of her altar, praying for a fair night for mariners at sea, for travellers in deserts, for lambs on moors, and unfledged birds in woods.... I see her, and I will tell you what she is like: she is like what Eve was when she and Adam stood alone on earth.' 'And that is not Milton's Eve, Shirley,'

says Caroline, and Shirley answers: 'No, by the pure Mother of G.o.d, she is not.' Shirley is half a Pagan. She would beg to remind Milton 'that the first men of the earth were t.i.tans, and that Eve was their mother: from her sprang Saturn, Hyperion, Ocea.n.u.s; she bore Prometheus.... I say, there were giants on the earth in those days, giants that strove to scale heaven. The first woman's breast that heaved with life on this world yielded daring which could contend with Omnipotence; the strength which could bear a thousand years of bondage--the vitality which could feed that vulture death through uncounted ages--the unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immortality, which, after millenniums of crimes, struggles, and woes, could conceive and bring forth a Messiah. The first woman was heaven-born: vast was the heart whence gushed the well-spring of the blood of nations; and grand the undegenerate head where rested the consort-crown of creation.'...

"'You have not yet told me what you saw kneeling on those hills.'

"'I saw--I now see--a woman-t.i.tan; her robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil, white as an avalanche, sweeps from her head to her feet, and arabesques of lightning flame on its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple like that horizon: through its blush shines the star of evening. Her steady eyes I cannot picture; they are clear--they are deep as lakes--they are lifted and full of worship--they tremble with the softness of love and the l.u.s.tre of prayer. Her forehead has the expanse of a cloud, and is paler than the early moon, risen long before dark gathers: she reclines her bosom on the edge of Stilbro' Moor; her mighty hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face, she speaks with G.o.d.'"

It is the living sister speaking for the dead; for Charlotte herself had little of Emily's fine Paganism. But for one moment, in this lyric pa.s.sage, her soul echoes the very soul of Emily as she gathers round her all the powers and splendours (and some, alas, of the fatal rhetoric) of her prose to do her honour.

It is not only in the large figure of the t.i.tan Shirley that Charlotte Bronte shows her strength. She has learnt to draw her minor masculine characters with more of insight and of accuracy--Caroline Helstone, the Yorkes, Robert Moore, Mr. Helstone, Joe Scott, and Barraclough, the "joined Methody". With a few strokes they stand out living. She has acquired more of the art of dialogue. She is a past master of dialect, of the racy, native speech of these men. Not only is Mr. Yorke painted with unerring power and faithfulness in every detail of his harsh and vigorous personality, but there is no single lapse from nature when he is speaking. The curates only excepted, Charlotte never swerves from this fidelity. But when she is handling her curates, it is a savage and utterly inartistic humour that inspires her. You feel that she is not exercising the art of comedy, but relieving her own intolerable boredom and irritation. No object could well be more innocent, and more appealing in its innocence, than little Mr. Sweeting, curate of Nunnerly. Mr. Sweeting at the tea-table, "having a dish of tarts before him, and marmalade and crumpet upon his plate", should have moved the Comic Spirit to tears of gentleness.