The Three Brontes Part 9

Curates apart, two-thirds of _Shirley_ are written with an unerring devotion to the real, to the very actual. They have not, for all that, the profound reality of _Jane Eyre_. The events are confused, somehow; the atmosphere is confusing; the northern background is drawn with a certain hardness and apathy of touch; the large outlines are obscured, delicate colours sharpened; it is hard and yet blurred, like a bad steel engraving. Charlotte's senses, so intensely, so supernaturally alive in _Jane Eyre_, are only pa.s.sably awake in _Shirley_. It has some of the dulness of _The Professor_, as it has more than its sober rightness.

But, for three-and-twenty chapters, the sobriety, the rightness triumph.

There are no improbabilities, no flights of imagination, none of the fine language which was the shame when it was not the glory of _Jane Eyre_.

Then suddenly there comes a break--a cleavage. It comes with that Chapter Twenty-four, which is headed "The Valley of the Shadow of Death". It was written in the first months after Emily Bronte's death.

From that point Charlotte's level strength deserts her. Ever after, she falls and soars, and soars and falls again. There is a return to the manner of _Jane Eyre_, the manner of Charlotte when she is deeply moved; there is at times a relapse to Jane Eyre's worst manner. You get it at once in "The Valley of the Shadow" chapter, in the scene of Caroline's love-sick delirium.

"'But he will not know I am ill till I am gone; and he will come when they have laid me out, and I am senseless, cold and stiff.

"'What can my departed soul feel then? Can it see or know what happens to the clay? Can spirits, through any medium, communicate with living flesh? Can the dead at all revisit those they leave? Can they come in the elements? Will wind, water, fire lend me a path to Moore?

"'Is it for nothing the wind sounds almost articulate sometimes--sings as I have lately heard it sing at night--or pa.s.ses the cas.e.m.e.nt sobbing, as if for sorrow to come? Does nothing then haunt it--nothing inspire it?'"

The awful improbability of Caroline is more striking because of its contrast with the inspired rightness of the scene of Cathy's delirium in _Wuthering Heights_. It is Charlotte feebly echoing Emily, and going more and more wrong up to her peroration.

Delirious Caroline wonders: "'What is that electricity they speak of, whose changes make us well or ill; whose lack or excess blasts; whose even balance revives?...'

"'_Where_ is the other world? In _what_ will another life consist? Why do I ask? Have I not cause to think that the hour is hasting but too fast when the veil must be rent for me? Do I not know the Grand Mystery is likely to break prematurely on me? Great Spirit, in whose goodness I confide; whom, as my Father, I have pet.i.tioned night and morning from early infancy, help the weak creation of Thy hands! Sustain me through the ordeal I dread and must undergo! Give me strength! Give me patience!

Give me--oh, _give me_ FAITH!'"

Jane Eyre has done worse than that, so has Rochester; but somehow, when they were doing their worst with it, they got their pa.s.sion through.

There is no live pa.s.sion behind this speech of Caroline's, with its wild stress of italics and of capitals. What pa.s.sion there was in Charlotte when she conceived Caroline was killed by Emily's death.

And Mrs. Pryor, revealing herself to Caroline, is even more terrible.

She has all the worst vices of Charlotte's dramatic style. Mrs. Pryor calls to the spirit of Caroline's dead father: "'James, slumber peacefully! See, your terrible debt is cancelled! Look! I wipe out the long, black account with my own hand! James, your child atones: this living likeness of you--this thing with your perfect features--this one good gift you gave me has nestled affectionately to my heart and tenderly called me "mother". Husband, rest forgiven.'"

Even Robert Moore, otherwise almost a masterpiece, becomes improbable when, in his great scene, Shirley refuses him. When Mr. Yorke asks him what has gone wrong he replies: "The machinery of all my nature; the whole enginery of this human mill; the boiler, which I take to be the heart, is fit to burst."

Shirley herself is impossible with her "Lucifer, Star of the Morning, thou art fallen," and her speech to her mercenary uncle: "Sir, your G.o.d, your great Bell, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon."

What is worse than all, Louis Moore--Louis, the hero, Louis, the master of pa.s.sion, is a failure. He is Charlotte Bronte's most terrible, most glaring failure. It is not true that Charlotte could not draw men, or that she drew them all alike; Robert Moore, the hard-headed man of business, the man of will and purpose, who never gives up, is not only almost a masterpiece but a spontaneous masterpiece, one of the first examples of his kind. But there is no blood in Louis' veins, no virility in his swarthy body. He is the most unspeakable of schoolmasters. Yet Charlotte lavished on this puppet half the wealth of her imagination.

She flings phrase after perfect phrase to him to cover himself with--some of her best things have been given to Louis Moore to utter; but they do not make him live. Again, she strangles him in his own rhetoric. The courtship of Louis Moore and Shirley will not compare with that of Jane and Rochester. There is no nightingale singing in their wood.

Yet, for all that, _Shirley_ comes very near to being Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece. It is inspired from first to last with a great intention and a great idea. It shows a vision of reality wider than her grasp. Its faults, like the faults of _Jane Eyre_, are all on the surface, only there is more surface in _Shirley_. If it has not _Jane Eyre's_ commanding pa.s.sion, it has a vaster sweep. It was literally the first attempt in literature to give to woman her right place in the world.

From first to last there is not a page or a line in it that justifies the malignant criticism of Mrs. Oliphant. Caroline Helstone does not justify it. She is no window-gazing virgin on the look-out, in love already before the man has come. She is a young girl, very naturally in love with a man whom she has known for years, who is always on the spot.

As for Shirley, she flung herself with all the vehemence of her prophetic soul on the hypocritical convention that would make every woman dependent on some man, and at the same time despises her for the possession of her natural instincts. And Caroline followed her. "I observe that to such grievances as society cannot cure, it usually forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn: this scorn being only a sort of tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People hate to be reminded of ills they are unable or unwilling to remedy: such reminder, in forcing on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of an obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease and shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and rich: it disturbs parents....

Men of England! Look at your poor girls, many of them fading round you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating to sour old maids--envious, back-biting, wretched, because life is a desert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage, which to celibacy is denied. Fathers, cannot you alter these things?... You would wish to be proud of your daughters, and not to blush for them, then seek for them an interest and an occupation which shall raise them above the flirt, the manoeuvrer, the mischief-making talebearer. Keep your girl's minds narrow and degraded--they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes a disgrace to you: give them scope and work--they will be your gayest companions in health; your tenderest nurses in sickness; your most faithful prop in old age."

That is the argument from fathers, and it comes from Caroline Helstone, not from Shirley. And the fact that Caroline married Robert Moore, and Shirley fell in love when her hour came (and with Louis Moore, too!) does not diminish the force or the sincerity or the truth of the tirade.

_Shirley_ may not be a great novel; but it is a great prophetic book.

Shirley's vision of the woman kneeling on the hills serves for more than Emily Bronte's vision of Hertha and Demeter, of Eve, the Earth-mother, "the mighty and mystical parent"; it is Charlotte Bronte's vindication of Eve, her vision of woman as she is to be. She faced the world once for all with her vision: "I see her," she said, "and I will tell you what she is like."

Mrs. Oliphant did not see the woman kneeling on the hills. Neither George Eliot nor Mrs. Gaskell saw her. They could not possibly have told the world what she was like. It is part of Charlotte Bronte's superior greatness that she saw.

You do not see that woman in _Villette_. She has pa.s.sed with the splendour of Charlotte's vision of the world. The world in _Villette_ is narrowed to a Pensionnat de Demoiselles, and centred in the heart of one woman. And never, not even in _Jane Eyre_, and certainly not in _Shirley_, did Charlotte Bronte achieve such mastery of reality, and with it such mastery of herself. _Villette_ is the final triumph of her genius over the elements that warred in her. It shows the movement of her genius, which was always by impulse and recoil. In _The Professor_ she abjured, in the interests of reality, the "imagination" of her youth. In _Jane Eyre_ she was urged forward by the released impetus of the forces she repressed. In _Shirley_ they are still struggling with her sense of the sober and the sane reality; the book is torn to fragments in the struggle, and in the end imagination riots.

But in _Villette_ there are none of these battlings and rendings, these t.i.tanic upheavals and subsidences. Charlotte Bronte's imagination, and her sense of the real, are in process of fusion. There are few novels in which an imagination so supreme is wedded to so vivid a vision of actuality. It may be said that Charlotte Bronte never achieved positive actuality before. The Pensionnat de Demoiselles is almost as visibly and palpably actual as the Maison Vauquer in _Pere Goriot_. It is a return to the method of experience with a vengeance. Charlotte's success, indeed, was so stunning that for all but sixty years _Villette_ has pa.s.sed for a _roman a clef_, the novel, not only of experience, but of personal experience. There was a certain plausibility in that view. The characters could all be easily recognized. And when Dr. John was identified with Mr. George Smith, and his mother with Mr. George Smith's mother, and Madame Beck with Madame Heger, and M. Paul Emanuel with Madame Heger's husband, the inference was irresistible: Lucy Snowe was, and could only be, Charlotte Bronte. And as the figure of M. Paul Emanuel was ten times more vivid and convincing than that of Rochester, so all that applied to Jane Eyre applied with ten times more force to Lucy. In _Villette_ Charlotte Bronte was considered to have given herself hopelessly away.

I have tried to show that this view cannot stand before an unprejudiced examination of her life and letters. No need to go into all that again.

On the evidence, Charlotte seems at the best of times to have fallen in love with difficulty; and she most certainly was no more in love with "the little man", Paul Emanuel, than she was with "the little man", Mr.

Taylor. The really important and interesting point is that, if she had been, if he had thus obtained the reality with which pa.s.sion endows its object, her imagination would have had no use for him; its work would have been done for it.

To the supreme artist the order of the actual event is one thing, and the order of creation is another. Their lines may start from the same point in the actual, they may touch again and again, but they are not the same, and they cannot run exactly parallel. There must always be this difference between the actual thing and the thing drawn from it, however closely, that each is embedded and enmeshed in a different context. For a character in a novel to be alive it must have grown; and to have grown it must have followed its own line of evolution, inevitably and in its own medium; and that, whether or not it has been "taken", as they say, "from life". The more alive it is the less likely is it to have been "taken", to have been seized, hauled by the scruff of its neck out of the dense web of the actual. All that the supreme artist wants is what Charlotte Bronte called "the germ of the real", by which she meant the germ of the actual. He does not want the alien, developed thing, standing in its own medium ready-made. Charlotte Bronte said that the character of Dr. John was a failure because it lacked the germ of the real. She should have said that it lacked the germ of many reals; it is so obviously drawn from incomplete observation of a single instance.

I am inclined to think that she did "take" Dr. John. And whenever Charlotte Bronte "took" a character, as she took the unfortunate curates and Mr. St. John Rivers, the result was failure.

No supreme work of art was ever "taken". It was begotten and born and grown, the offspring of faithful love between the soul of the artist and reality. The artist must bring to his "experience" as much as he takes from it. The dignity of Nature is all against these violences and robberies of art. She hides her deepest secret from the marauder, and yields it to the lover who brings to her the fire of his own soul.

And that fire of her own soul was what Charlotte Bronte brought to her supreme creations. It was certainly what she brought to Paul Emanuel.

Impossible to believe that M. Heger gave her more than one or two of the germs of M. Paul. Personally, I can only see the respectable M. Heger as a man whose very essence was a certain impa.s.sivity and phlegm under the appearance of a temperament. Choleric he was, with the superficial and temporary choler of the schoolmaster. A schoolmaster gifted with the most extraordinary, the most marvellous, the most arresting faculty for making faces, a faculty which in an Englishman would have argued him a perfect volcano of erratic temperament. But I more than suspect that when it came to temperament M. Heger took it out in faces; that he was nothing more than a benevolent, sentimental, pa.s.sably intellectual bourgeois; but bourgeois to the core. Whereas, look at M. Paul! No wonder that with that tame and solid stuff before her it took even Charlotte Bronte's fiery spirit nine years (torturing the unwilling dross that checked its flight) before it could create Paul Emanuel.

Because of her long work on him he is at once the most real and the best imagined of her characters.

I admit that in the drawing of many of her minor characters she seems to have relied upon very close and intimate observation of the living model. But in none of her minor characters is she at grips with the reality that, for her, pa.s.sion is. Charlotte refused to give heroic rank to persons she had merely observed; she would not exalt them to the dignity of pa.s.sion. Her imagination could not work on them to that extent. (That is partly why Caroline's delirium is so palpably "faked".) Even in her portrait of the heroic Shirley, who was frankly "taken" from her sister Emily, she achieved the likeness mainly by the artifice of unlikeness, by removing Shirley Keeldar into a life in which Emily Bronte had never played a part, whereby Shirley became for her a separate person. (You cannot by any stretch of the imagination see Emily falling in love with the schoolmaster, Louis Moore.)

Lest there should be any doubt on the subject, Charlotte herself explained to Mrs. Gaskell how her imagination worked. "I asked her,"

Mrs. Gaskell says, "whether she had ever taken opium, as the description given of its effects in _Villette_ was so exactly like what I had experienced--vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, of which the outlines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, etc. She replied that she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to describe anything that had not fallen within her own experience; she had thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling asleep--wondering what it was like, or how it would be--till at length, sometimes after her story had been arrested at this one point for weeks, she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word for word, as it happened."

To a mind like that the germ of the actual was enough. Charlotte Bronte's genius, in fact, was ardently impatient of the actual: it cared only for its own. At the least hint from experience it was off. A glance, a gesture of M. Heger's was enough to fire it to the conception of Paul Emanuel. He had only to say a kind word to her, to leave a book or a box of bon-bons in her desk (if he _did_ leave bon-bons) for Charlotte's fire to work on him. She had only to say to herself, "This little man is adorable in friendship; I wonder what he would be like in love," and she saw that he would be something, though not altogether, like Paul Emanuel. She had only to feel a pang of half-remorseful, half-humorous affection for him, and she knew what Lucy felt like in her love-sick agony. As for Madame Heger, Madame's purely episodic jealousy, her habits of surveillance, her small inscrutabilities of behaviour, became the fury, the treachery, the perfidy of Madame Beck. For treachery and perfidy, and agony and pa.s.sion, were what Charlotte wanted for _Villette_.

And yet it is true that _Villette_ is a novel of experience, owing its conspicuous qualities very much to observation. After all, a contemporary novel cannot be made altogether out of the fire of the great writer's soul. It is because Charlotte Bronte relied too much on the fire of her own soul that in _Jane Eyre_ and parts of _Shirley_ she missed that unique expression of actuality which, over and over again, she accomplished in _Villette_. For the expression of a social _milieu_, for manners, for the dialogue of ordinary use, for the whole detail of the speech characteristic of an individual and a type, for the right accent and pitch, for all the vanishing shades and aspects of the temporary and the particular, the greatest and the fieriest writer is at the mercy of observation and experience. It was her final mastery of these things that made it possible to praise Charlotte Bronte's powers of observation at the expense of her genius; and this mainly because of M. Paul.

No offspring of genius was ever more alive, more rich in individuality, than M. Paul. He is alive and he is adorable, in his _paletot_ and _bonnet grec_, from the moment when he drags Lucy up three pairs of stairs to the solitary and lofty attic and locks her in, to that other moment when he brings her to the little house that he has prepared for her. Whenever he appears there is pure radiant comedy, and pathos as pure. It is in this utter purity, this transparent simplicity, that _Villette_ is great. There is not one jarring note in any of the delicious dialogues between Lucy and M. Paul, not one of those pa.s.sages which must be erased if quotation is not to fail of its effect. Take the scene where Lucy breaks M. Paul's spectacles.

"A score of times ere now I had seen them fall and receive no damage--this time, as Lucy Snowe's hapless luck would have it, they so fell that each clear pebble became a shivered and shapeless star.

"Now, indeed, dismay seized me--dismay and regret. I knew the value of these _lunettes_: M. Paul's sight was peculiar, not easily fitted, and these gla.s.ses suited him. I had heard him call them his treasures: as I picked them up, cracked and worthless, my hand trembled. Frightened through all my nerves I was to see the mischief I had done, but I think I was even more sorry than afraid. For some seconds I dared not look the bereaved Professor in the face; he was the first to speak.

"'_La_!' he said: '_me voila veuf de mes lunettes_! I think that Mademoiselle Lucy will now confess that the cord and gallows are amply earned; she trembles in antic.i.p.ation of her doom. Ah, traitress, traitress! You are resolved to have me quite blind and helpless in your hands!'

"I lifted my eyes: his face, instead of being irate, lowering and furrowed, was overflowing with the smile, coloured with the bloom I had seen brightening it that evening at the Hotel Crecy. He was not angry--not even grieved. For the real injury he showed himself full of clemency; under the real provocation, patient as a saint."

Take the "Watchguard" scene.

"M. Paul came and stood behind me. He asked at what I was working; and I said I was making a watchguard. He asked, 'For whom?' And I answered, 'For a gentleman--one of my friends.'"

Whereupon M. Paul flies into a pa.s.sion, and accuses Lucy of behaving to him, "'With what pungent vivacities--what an impetus of mutiny--what a _fougue_ of injustice.'... '_Chut! a l'instant!_ There! there I went--_vive comme la poudre_.' He was sorry--he was very sorry: for my sake he grieved over the hopeless peculiarity. This _emportement_, this _chaleur_--generous, perhaps, but excessive--would yet, he feared, do me a mischief. It was a pity. I was not--he believed, in his soul--wholly without good qualities; and would I but hear reason, and be more sedate, more sober, less _en l'air_, less _coquette_, less taken by show, less p.r.o.ne to set an undue value on outside excellence--to make much of the attentions of people remarkable chiefly for so many feet of stature, _des couleurs de poupee, un nez plus ou moins bien fait_, and an enormous amount of fatuity--I might yet prove a useful, perhaps an exemplary character. But, as it was----And here the little man's voice was for a moment choked.

"I would have looked up at him, or held out my hand, or said a soothing word; but I was afraid, if I stirred, I should either laugh or cry; so odd, in all this, was the mixture of the touching and the absurd.

"I thought he had nearly done: but no, he sat down that he might go on at his ease.

"'While he, M. Paul, was on these painful topics, he would dare my anger for the sake of my good, and would venture to refer to a change he had noticed in my dress.'"

"'And if you condemn a bow of ribbon for a lady, monsieur, you would necessarily disapprove of a thing like this for a gentleman?' holding up my bright little chainlet of silk and gold. His sole reply was a groan--I suppose over my levity.