_By the same Author:_

THE CREATORSTHE DIVINE FIRETWO SIDES OF A QUESTIONTHE HELPMATEKITTY TAILLEURMR. AND MRS. NEVILL TYSONANN SEVERN AND THE FIELDINGSARNOLD WATERLOW: A LIFEUNCANNY STORIESTHE RECTOR OF WYCKTHE ALLINGHAMSA CURE OF SOULSFAR ENDHISTORY OF ANTHONY WARINGTALES TOLD BY SIMPSONETC. 

THE THREE BRONTËS

_by_

MAY SINCLAIR

1912

PREFATORY NOTE

My thanks are due, first and chiefly, to Mr. Clement K. Shorter whoplaced all his copyright material at my disposal; and to Mr. G. M. Williamson and Mr. Robert H. Dodd, of New York, for allowing me to drawso largely from the Poems of Emily Brontë, published by Messrs. Dodd, Mead, and Co. In 1902; also to Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, thepublishers of the Complete Poems of Emily Brontë, edited by Mr. Shorter;and to Mr. Alfred Sutro for permission to use his translation of _Wisdomand Destiny_. Lastly, and somewhat late, to Mr. Arthur Symons for histranslation from St. John of the Cross. If I have borrowed from him morethan I had any right to without his leave, I hope he will forgive me. 

MAY SINCLAIR. 

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE THREE BRONTËS

APPENDIX I

APPENDIX II

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

When six months ago Mr. Thomas Seccombe suggested that I should write ashort essay on "The Three Brontës" I agreed with some misgiving. 

Yet that deed was innocent compared with what I have done now; and, inany case, the series afforded the offender a certain shelter andprotection. But to come out like this, into the open, with _another_Brontë book, seems not only a dangerous, but a futile and a fatuousadventure. All I can say is that I did not mean to do it. I certainlynever meant to write so long a book. 

It grew, insidiously, out of the little one. Things happened. Newcriticisms opened up old questions. When I came to look carefully intoMr. Clement Shorter's collection of the _Complete Poems of EmilyBrontë_, I found a mass of material (its existence I, at any rate, hadnot suspected) that could not be dealt with in the limits of theoriginal essay. 

The book is, and can only be, the slightest of all slight appreciations. None the less it has been hard and terrible for me to write it. Not onlyhad I said nearly all that I had to say already, but I was depressed atthe very start by that conviction of the absurdity of trying to sayanything at all, after all that has been said, about Anne, or Emily, orCharlotte Brontë. 

Anne's case, perhaps, was not so difficult. For obvious reasons, AnneBrontë will always be comparatively virgin soil. But it was impossibleto write of Charlotte after Mrs. Gaskell; impossible to say more ofEmily than Madame Duclaux has said; impossible to add one single littlefact to the vast material, so patiently amassed, so admirably arrangedby Mr. Clement Shorter. And when it came to appreciation there were Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, Mr. Birrell, andMrs. Humphry Ward, lying along the ground. When it came to eulogy, afterMr. Swinburne's _Note on Charlotte Brontë_, neither Charlotte nor Emilyhave any need of praise. 

And on Emily Brontë, M. Maeterlinck has spoken the one essential, theone perfect and final and sufficient word. I have "lifted" itunblushingly; for no other word comes near to rendering the unique, thehaunting, the indestructible impression that she makes. 

So, because all the best things about the Brontës have been saidalready, I have had to fall back on the humble day-labour of clearingaway some of the rubbish that has gathered round them. 

Round Charlotte it has gathered to such an extent that it is difficultto see her plainly through the mass of it. Much has been cleared away;much remains. Mrs. Oliphant's dreadful theories are still on record. Theexcellence of Madame Duclaux's monograph perpetuates her one seriouserror. Mr. Swinburne's _Note_ immortalizes his. M. Héger was dug upagain the other day. 

It may be said that I have been calling up ghosts for the mere fun oflaying them; and there might be something in it, but that really theseghosts still walk. At any rate many people believe in them, even at thistime of day. M. Dimnet believes firmly that poor Mrs. Robinson was inlove with Branwell Brontë. Some of us still think that Charlotte was inlove with M. Héger. They cannot give him up any more than M. Dimnet cangive up Mrs. Robinson. 

Such things would be utterly unimportant but that they tend to obscurethe essential quality and greatness of Charlotte Brontë's genius. Because of them she has passed for a woman of one experience and of onebook. There is still room for a clean sweep of the rubbish that has beenshot here. 

In all this, controversy was unavoidable, much as I dislike itsungracious and ungraceful air. If I have been inclined to undervaluecertain things--"the sojourn in Brussels", for instance--which othershave considered of the first importance, it is because I believe that itis always the inner life that counts, and that with the Brontës itsupremely counted. 

If I have passed over the London period too lightly, it is because Ijudge it extraneous and external. If I have tried, cruelly, to take fromCharlotte the little beige gown that she wore at Mr. Thackeray'sdinner-party, it is because her home-made garments seem to suit herbetter. She is more herself in skirts that have brushed the moors andkept some of the soil of Haworth in their hem. 

I may seem to have exaggerated her homesickness for Haworth. It may besaid that Haworth was by no means Charlotte's home as it was Emily's. Iam aware that there were moments--hours--when she longed to get awayfrom it. I have not forgotten how Mary Taylor found her in such an hour, not long after her return from Brussels, when her very flesh shrank fromthe thought of her youth gone and "nothing done"; nothing before her butlong, empty years in Haworth. The fact remains that she was never happyaway from it, and that in Haworth her genius most certainly found itselfat home. And this particular tone of misery and unrest disappeared fromthe moment when her genius declared itself, so that I am inclined to seein it a little personal dissatisfaction, if you will, but chiefly theunspeakable restlessness and misery of power unrecognized andsuppressed. "Nothing done!" That was her reiterated cry. 

Again, if I have overlooked the complexities of Charlotte's character, it is that the great lines that underlie it may be seen. In my heart Iagree with M. Dimnet that the Brontës were not simple. All the same, Ithink that his admirable portrait of Charlotte is spoiled by hisattitude of pity for "_la pauvre fille_", as he persists in calling her. I think he dwells a shade too much on her small asperities andacidities, and on that "_ton de critique mesquine_", which he puts downto her provincialism. No doubt there were moments of suffering and ofirritation, as well as moments of uncontrollable merriment, whenCharlotte lacked urbanity, but M. Dimnet has almost too keen an eye forthem. 

In making war on theories I cannot hope to escape a countercharge oftheorizing. Exception may be taken to my own suggestion as to the effectof _Wuthering Heights_ on Charlotte Brontë's genius. If anybody likes tofling it on the rubbish heap they may. I may have theorized a little toomuch in laying stress on the supernatural element in _WutheringHeights_. It is because M. Dimnet has insisted too much on itsbrutality. I may have exaggerated Emily Brontë's "mysticism". It isbecause her "paganism" has been too much in evidence. It may be saidthat I have no more authority for my belief that Emily Brontë was inlove with the Absolute than other people have for theirs, thatCharlotte was in love with M. Héger. 

Finally, much that I have said about Emily Brontë's hitherto unpublishedpoems is pure theory. But it is theory, I think, that carefulexamination of the poems will make good. I may have here and there givenas a "Gondal" poem what is not a "Gondal" poem at all. Still, I believe, it will be admitted that it is in the cycle of these poems, and notelsewhere, that we should look for the first germs of _WutheringHeights_. The evidence only demonstrates in detail--what has never beenseriously contested--that the genius of Emily Brontë found its sourcesin itself. 

_10th October, 1911. _

The Three Brontës

It is impossible to write of the three Brontës and forget the place theylived in, the black-grey, naked village, bristling like a rampart on theclean edge of the moor; the street, dark and steep as a gully, climbingthe hill to the Parsonage at the top; the small oblong house, naked andgrey, hemmed in on two sides by the graveyard, its five windows flushwith the wall, staring at the graveyard where the tombstones, grey andnaked, are set so close that the grass hardly grows between. The churchitself is a burying ground; its walls are tombstones, and its floorroofs the forgotten and the unforgotten dead. 

A low wall and a few feet of barren garden divide the Parsonage from thegraveyard, a few feet between the door of the house and the door in thewall where its dead were carried through. But a path leads beyond thegraveyard to "a little and a lone green lane", Emily Brontë's lane thatleads to the open moors. 

It is the genius of the Brontës that made their place immortal; but itis the soul of the place that made their genius what it is. You cannotexaggerate its importance. They drank and were saturated with Haworth. When they left it they hungered and thirsted for it; they sickened tillthe hour of their return. They gave themselves to it with passion, andtheir works ring with the shock and interchange of two immortalities. Haworth is saturated with them. Their souls are henceforth no more to bedisentangled from its soul than their bodies from its earth. All theirpoetry, their passion and their joy is there, in this place of theirtragedy, visible, palpable, narrow as the grave and boundless. 

In the year eighteen-twenty the Reverend Patrick Brontë and his wifeMaria brought their six children, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, PatrickBranwell, Emily, and Anne, from Thornton, where they were born, toHaworth. Mr. Brontë was an Irishman, a village schoolmaster who won, marvellously, a scholarship that admitted him to Cambridge and theChurch of England. Tales have been told of his fathers and hisforefathers, peasants and peasant farmers of Ballynaskeagh in CountyDown. They seem to have been notorious for their energy, eccentricity, imagination, and a certain tendency to turbulence and excess. Tales havebeen told of Mr. Brontë himself, of his temper, his egotism, hisselfishness, his fits of morose or savage temper. The Brontës'biographers, from Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux[A] to Mr. Birrell, have all been hard on this poor and unhappy and innocent old man. It isnot easy to see him very clearly through the multitude of tales theytell: how he cut up his wife's silk gown in a fit of passion; how hefired off pistols in a series of fits of passion; how, in still gloomierand more malignant fits, he used to go for long solitary walks. And whenyou look into the matter you find that the silk gown was, after all, acotton one, and that he only cut the sleeves out, and _then_ walked intoKeighley and brought a silk gown back with him instead; that when hewas a young man at Drumballyroney he practised pistol firing, not as asafety valve for temper but as a manly sport, and that as a manly sporthe kept it up. As for solitary walks, there is really no reason why afather should not take them; and if Mr. Brontë had insisted onaccompanying Charlotte and Emily in their walks, his conduct would havebeen censured just the same, and, I think, with considerably morereason. As it happened, Mr. Brontë, rather more than most fathers, madecompanions of his children when they were little. This is not quite thesame thing as making himself a companion for them, and the result was aterrific outburst of infant precocity; but this hardly justifies Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux. They seem to have thought that they weresomehow appeasing the outraged spirits of Emily and Charlotte byblackening their father and their brother; whereas, if anything couldgive pain to Charlotte and Emily and innocent Anne in heaven, it wouldbe the knowledge of what Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux have done forthem. 

[Footnote A: A. Mary F. Robinson. ]

There was injustice in all that zeal as well as indiscretion, for Mr. Brontë had his good points as fathers go. Think what the fathers of theVictorian era could be, and what its evangelical parsons often were; andremember that Mr. Brontë was an evangelical parson, and the father ofEmily and Charlotte, not of a brood of gentle, immaculate Jane Austens, and that he was confronted suddenly and without a moment's warning withCharlotte's fame. Why, the average evangelical parson would have beenshocked into apoplexy at the idea of any child of his producing_Wuthering Heights_ or _Jane Eyre_. Charlotte's fame would have lookedto him exceedingly like infamy. We know what Charles Kingsley, the leastevangelical of parsons, once thought of Charlotte. And we know what Mr. Brontë thought of her. He was profoundly proud of his daughter's genius;there is no record and no rumour of any criticism on his part, of anyremonstrance or amazement. He was loyal to Charlotte to the last days ofhis life, when he gave her defence into Mrs. Gaskell's hands; for whichconfidence Mrs. Gaskell repaid him shockingly. 

But he was the kind of figure that is irresistible to the caustic orhumorous biographer. There was something impotently fiery in him, as ifthe genius of Charlotte and Emily had flicked him in irony as it passedhim by. He wound himself in yards and yards and yards of white cravat, and he wrote a revolutionary poem called "Vision of Hell". It is easy tomake fun of his poems, but they were no worse, or very little worse, than his son Branwell's, so that he may be pardoned if he thoughthimself more important than his children. Many fathers of the Victorianera did. 

And he _was_ important as a temporary vehicle of the wandering creativeimpulse. It struggled and strove in him and passed from him, choked inyards and yards of white cravat, to struggle and strive again inBranwell and in Anne. As a rule the genius of the race is hostile to thecreative impulse, and the creative impulse is lucky if it can piercethrough to one member of a family. In the Brontës it emerges at fivedifferent levels, rising from abortive struggle to supremeachievement--from Mr. Brontë to his son Branwell, from Branwell to Anne, from Anne to Charlotte, and from Charlotte to Emily. And Maria, whodied, was an infant prodigy. 

And Mr. Brontë is important because he was the tool used by theirdestiny to keep Charlotte and Emily in Haworth. 

The tragedy we are too apt to call their destiny began with theirbabyhood, when the mother and six children were brought to HaworthParsonage and the prospect of the tombstones. They had not been thereeighteen months before the mother sickened and died horribly of cancer. 

She had to be isolated as far as possible. The Parsonage house was notlarge, and it was built with an extreme and straight simplicity; twofront rooms, not large, right and left of the narrow stone-flaggedpassage, a bedroom above each, and between, squeezed into the smallspare space above the passage, a third room, no bigger than a closet andwithout a fireplace. This third room is important in the story of theBrontës, for, when their mother's illness declared itself, it was inthis incredibly small and insufferably unwholesome den that the fivelittle girls were packed, heaven knows how, and it was here that theseeds of tuberculosis were sown in their fragile bodies. After theirmother's death the little fatal room was known as the children's study(you can see, in a dreadful vision, the six pale little faces, pressedtogether, looking out of the window on to the graves below). It was usedagain as a night-nursery, and later still as the sleeping-place sharedby two, if not three, of the sisters, two of whom were tuberculous. 

The mother died and was buried in a vault under the floor of the church, not far from the windows of her house. Her sister, Miss Branwell, cameup from Penzance to look after the children. You can see this small, middle-aged, early Victorian spinster, exiled for ever from the sunshineof the town she loved, dragging out her sad, fastidious life in a coldand comparatively savage country that she unspeakably disliked. She tookpossession of the room her sister died in (it was the most cheerful roomin the house), and lived in it. Her nieces had to sit there with herfor certain hours while she taught them sewing and all the earlyVictorian virtues. Their father made himself responsible for the rest oftheir education, which he conducted with considerable vigour andoriginality. Maria, the eldest, was the child of promise. Long beforeMaria was eleven he "conversed" with her on "the leading topics of theday, with as much pleasure and freedom as with any grown-up person". 

For this man, so gloomy, we are told, and so morose, found pleasure intaking his tiny children out on to the moors, where he entertained themalternately with politics and tales of brutality and horror. At sixyears old each little Brontë had its view of the political situation;and it was not until a plague of measles and whooping-cough found outtheir tender youth that their father realized how very young and smalland delicate they were, and how very little, after all, he understoodabout a nursery. In a sudden frantic distrust of the climate of Haworth, of Miss Branwell, and his own system, he made up his mind to send Mariaand Elizabeth and Charlotte and Emily to school. 

And there was only one school within his means, the Clergy Daughters'School, established at Cowan Bridge in an unwholesome valley. It hasbeen immortalized in _Jane Eyre_, together with its founder and patron, the Reverend Carus Wilson. There can be no doubt that the earlyVictorian virtues, self-repression, humility, and patience underaffliction, were admirably taught at Cowan Bridge. And if the carnalnature of the Clergy Daughters resisted the militant efforts of Mr. Carus Wilson, it was ultimately subdued by low diet and primitivedrainage working together in an unwholesome valley. Mr. Carus Wilson, indeed, was inspired by a sublime antagonism to the claims of theperishable body; but he seems to have pushed his campaign against theflesh a bit too far, and was surprised at his own success when, oneafter another, the extremely perishable bodies of those children werelaid low by typhus. 

The fever did not touch the four little Brontës. They had anotherdestiny. Their seed of dissolution was sown in that small stifling roomat Haworth, and was reaped now at Cowan Bridge. First Maria, thenElizabeth, sickened, and was sent home to die. Charlotte stayed on for awhile with Emily. She ran wild, and hung about the river, watching it, and dabbling her feet and hands in the running water. Their doom waitedfor Charlotte and for Emily. 

There is no record of Elizabeth except that, like Anne Brontë, she was"gentle". But Maria lived in Charlotte's passionate memory, and willlive for ever as Helen Burns, the school-fellow of Jane Eyre. Of thosefive infant prodigies, she was the most prodigious. She was the first ofthe children to go down into the vault under Haworth Church; you see herlooking back on her sad way, a small, reluctant ghost, lovely, infantile, and yet maternal. Under her name on the flat tombstone averse stands, premonitory, prophetic, calling to her kindred: "Be yealso ready. "

Charlotte was nine years old when her sisters died. Tragedy tells atnine years old. It lived all her life in her fine nerves, reinforced byshock after shock of terror and of anguish. 

But for the next seven years, spent at the Parsonage without a break, tragedy was quiescent. Day after day, year after year passed, andnothing happened. And the children of the Parsonage, thrown onthemselves and on each other, were exuberantly happy. They had thefreedom of the moors, and of the worlds, as wild, as gorgeous, aslonely, as immeasurable, which they themselves created. They found outthat they were not obliged to be the children of the Parsonage; theycould be, and they were, anything they chose, from the Duke ofWellington down to citizens of Verdopolis. For a considerable number ofyears they were the "Islanders". "It was in 1827" (Charlotte, atthirteen, records the date with gravity--it was so important) "that ourplays were established: _Young Men_, June 1826; _Our Fellows_, July1827; _The Islanders_, December 1827. These are our three great playsthat are not kept secret. "

But there were secret plays, Emily's and Charlotte's; and these yougather to be the shy and solitary flights of Emily's and Charlotte'sgenius. They seem to have required absolutely no impulsion from without. The difficult thing for these small children was to stop writing. Theirfire consumed them, and left their bodies ashen white, fragile as ashes. And yet they were not, they could not have been, the sedentary, unwholesome little creatures they might seem to be. The girls were kepthard at work with their thin arms, brushing carpets, dusting furniture, and making beds. And for play they tramped the moors with their brother;they breasted the keen and stormy weather; the sun, the moon, the stars, and the winds knew them; and it is of these fierce, radiant, elementalthings that Charlotte and Emily wrote as no women before them had everwritten. Conceive the vitality and energy implied in such a life; andthink, if you can, of these two as puny, myopic victims of the lust ofliterature. It was from the impressions they took in those seven yearsthat their immortality was made. 

And then, for a year and a half, Charlotte went to school again, thatschool of Miss Wooler's at Roe Head, where Ellen Nussey found her, "asilent, weeping, dark little figure in the large bay-window". She wasthen sixteen. 

Two years later she went back to Miss Wooler's school as a teacher. 

In the register of the Clergy Daughters' School there are two immortalentries:

"Charlotte Brontë.... Left school, June 1st, 1825--Governess. "

"Emily Brontë.... Left, June 1st, 1825. Subsequent career--Governess. "

They did not question the arrangement. They were not aware of any otherdestiny. They never doubted that the boy, Branwell, was the child ofpromise, who was to have a glorious career. In order that he should haveit the sisters left Haworth again and again, forcing themselves to theexile that destroyed them, and the work they hated. It was Charlotte andAnne who showed themselves most courageous and determined in theterrible adventure; Emily, who was courage and determination incarnate, failed. Homesickness had become a disease with them, an obsession, almost a madness. They longed with an immitigable longing for theirParsonage-house, their graveyard, and their moors. Emily was consumed byit; Anne languished; Charlotte was torn between it and her passion forknowledge. 

She took Emily back with her to Roe Head as a pupil, and Emily nearlydied of it. She sent Emily home, and little Anne, the last victim, tookEmily's place. She and Charlotte went with the school when it wasremoved to Dewsbury Moor. Then Emily, who had nearly died of Roe Head, shamed by Charlotte's and Anne's example, went to Halifax as a teacherin Miss Patchett's Academy for Young Ladies. She was at Halifax--Halifaxof all places--for six months, and nearly died of Halifax. And afterthat Charlotte and Anne set out on their careers as nursery-governesses. 

It was all that they considered themselves fit for. Anne went to a Mrs. Ingham at Blake Hall, where she was homesick and miserable. Charlottewent to the Sidgwicks at Stonegappe near Skipton, where "one of thepleasantest afternoons I spent--indeed, the only one at allpleasant--was when Mr. Sidgwick walked out with his children, and I hadorders to follow a little way behind". You have an impression of yearsof suffering endured at Stonegappe. As a matter of fact, Charlotte wasthere hardly three months--May, June, July, eighteen-thirty-nine. 

And most of the time their brother Branwell was either at Bradford or atHaworth, dreaming of greatness, and drinking at the "Black Bull". The"Black Bull" stands disastrously near to the Parsonage, at the corner ofthe churchyard, with its parlour windows looking on the graves. Branwellwas the life and soul of every party of commercial travellers thatgathered there. Conviviality took strange forms at Haworth. It had aMasonic Lodge of the Three Graces, with John Brown, the grave-digger, for Worshipful Master. Branwell was at one and the same time secretaryto the Three Graces and to the Haworth Temperance Society. When he wasnot entertaining bagmen, he was either at Bradford painting badportraits, or at Haworth pouring out verses, fearfully long, fatallyfluent verses, and writing hysterical letters to the editor of_Blackwood's Magazine_. 

One formidable letter (the third he sent) is headed in large letters:"Sir, read what I write. " It begins: "And would to Heaven you wouldbelieve in me, for then you would attend to me and act upon it", andends: "You lost an able writer in James Hogg, and God grant you may getone in Patrick Branwell Brontë. " Another followed, headed: "Sir, readnow at last", and ending, "Condemn not unheard". In a final letterBranwell inquires whether Mr. Blackwood thinks his magazine "so perfectthat no addition to its power would be either possible or desirable", and whether it is pride that actuates him, or custom, or prejudice, andconjures him: "Be a man, sir!"

Nothing came of it. Mr. Blackwood refused to be a man. 

Yet Branwell had his chance. He went to London, but nothing came of it. He went to Bradford and had a studio there, but nothing came of it. Helived for a brief period in a small provincial Bohemia. It was his bestand happiest period, but nothing came of it beyond the letters and thereams of verse he sent to Leyland the sculptor. There was somethingbrilliant and fantastic about the boy that fascinated Leyland. But astudio costs money, and Branwell had to give his up and go back toHaworth and the society of John Brown the stone-mason and grave-digger. That John Brown was a decent fellow you gather from the fact that on ajourney to Liverpool he had charge of Branwell, when Branwell was at hisworst. They had affectionate names for each other. Branwell is thePhilosopher, John Brown is the Old Knave of Trumps. The whole troublewith Branwell was that he could not resist the temptation of impressingthe grave-digger. He himself was impressed by the ironic union in theWorshipful Master of conviviality and a sinister occupation. 

A letter of Branwell's (preserved by the grave-digger in a quaintdevotion to his friend's memory) has achieved an immortality denied tohis "Effusions". Nothing having come of the "Effusions", Branwell, tohis infinite credit, followed his sisters' example, and became tutorwith a Mr. Postlethwaite. The irony of his situation pleased him, andhe wrote to the Old Knave of Trumps thus: "I took a half-year's farewellof old friend whisky at Kendal on the night after I left. There was aparty of gentlemen at the Royal Hotel, and I joined them. We ordered insupper and whisky-toddy as hot as hell! They thought I was a physician, and put me in the chair. I gave several toasts that were washed down atthe same time till the room spun round and the candles danced in oureyes.... I found myself in bed next morning with a bottle of porter, aglass, and a corkscrew beside me. Since then I have not tasted anythingstronger than milk-and-water, nor, I hope, shall, till I return atmidsummer; when we will see about it. I am getting as fat as PrinceWilliam at Springhead, and as godly as his friend Parson Winterbotham. My hand shakes no longer. I ride to the banker's at Ulverston with Mr. Postlethwaite, and sit drinking tea, and talking scandal with oldladies. As for the young ones! I have one sitting by me justnow--fair-faced, blue-eyed, dark-haired, sweet eighteen--she littlethinks the devil is so near her!"--and a great deal more in the samesilly, post-Byronic strain. 

In his postscript Branwell says: "Of course you won't show this letter", and of course John Brown showed it all round. It was far too good to bekept to himself; John Brown's brother thought it so excellent that hecommitted it to memory. This was hard on Branwell. The letter is toofantastic to be used against him as evidence of his extreme depravity, but it certainly lends some support to Mrs. Gaskell's statements that hehad begun already, at two-and-twenty, to be an anxiety to his family. Haworth, that schooled his sisters to a high and beautiful austerity, was bad for Branwell. 

He stayed with Mr. Postlethwaite for a month longer than Charlottestayed with the Sidgwicks. 

Then, for a whole year, Charlotte was at Haworth, doing housemaid'swork, and writing poems, and amusing herself at the expense of herfather's curates. She had begun to find out the extent to which shecould amuse herself. She also had had "her chance". She had refused twooffers of marriage, preferring the bondage and the exile that she knew. Nothing more exhilarating than a proposal that you have rejected. Thoseproposals did Charlotte good. But it was not marriage that she wanted. She found it (for a year) happiness enough to be at Haworth, to watchthe long comedy of the curates as it unrolled itself before her. She sawmost things that summer (her twenty-fifth) with the ironic eyes of thecomic spirit, even Branwell. She wrote to Miss Nussey: "A distantrelation of mine, one Patrick Boanerges, has set off to seek his fortunein the wild, wandering, knight-errant-like capacity of clerk on theLeeds and Manchester Railroad. " And she goes on to chaff Miss Nusseyabout Celia Amelia, the curate. "I know Mrs. Ellen is burning witheagerness to hear something about W. Weightman, whom she adores in herheart, and whose image she cannot efface from her memory. "

Some of her critics, including Mrs. Oliphant (far less indulgent thanthe poor curates who forgave her nobly), have grudged Charlotte heramusement. There is nothing, from her fame downwards, that Mrs. Oliphantdid not grudge her. Mr. Birrell sternly disapproves; even Mr. Swinburne, at the height of his panegyric, is put off. Perhaps Charlotte's humourwas not her most attractive quality; but nobody seems to have seen thepathos and the bravery of it. Neither have they seen that Miss Nusseywas at the bottom of its worst development, the "curate-baiting". MissNussey used to go and stay at Haworth for weeks at a time. Haworth wasnot amusing, and Miss Nussey had to be amused. All this school-girlishjesting, the perpetual and rather tiresome banter, was a playing down toMiss Nussey. It was a kind of tender "baiting" of Miss Nussey, who hadtried on several occasions to do Charlotte good. And it was the natural, healthy rebound of the little Irish _gamine_ that lived in CharlotteBrontë, bursting with cleverness and devilry. I, for my part, am glad tothink that for one happy year she gave it full vent. 

She was only twenty-four. Even as late as the mid-Victorian era to betwenty-four and unmarried was to be middle-aged. But (this cannot be toomuch insisted on) Charlotte Brontë was the revolutionist who changed allthat. She changed it not only in her novels but in her person. Hereagain she has been misrepresented. There are no words severe enough forMrs. Oliphant's horrible portrait of her as a plain-faced, lachrymose, middle-aged spinster, dying, visibly, to be married, obsessed for everwith that idea, for ever whining over the frustration of her sex. WhatMrs. Oliphant, "the married woman", resented in Charlotte Brontë, overand above her fame, was Charlotte's unsanctioned knowledge of themysteries, her intrusion into the veiled places, her unbaring of thevirgin heart. That her genius was chiefly concerned in it does not seemto have occurred to Mrs. Oliphant, any more than it occurred to her tonotice the impression that Charlotte Brontë made on her malecontemporaries. It is doubtful if one of them thought of her as Mrs. Oliphant would have us think. They gave her the tender, deferentaffection they would have given to a charming child. Even the verycurates saw in her, to their amazement, the spirit of undying youth. Small as a child, and fragile, with soft hair and flaming eyes, andalways the pathetic, appealing plainness of a plain child, with herchild's audacity and shyness, her sudden, absurd sallies and retreats, she had a charm made the more piquant by her assumption of austerity. George Henry Lewes was gross and flippant, and he could not see it;Branwell's friend, Mr. Grundy, was Branwell's friend, and he missed it. Mrs. Oliphant ranges herself with Mr. Grundy and George Henry Lewes. 

But Charlotte's fun was soon over, and she became a nursery-governessagain at Mrs. White's, of Rawdon. Anne was with Mrs. Robinson, at ThorpGreen. 

Emily was at Haworth, alone. 

That was in eighteen-forty-one. Years after their death a little blackbox was found, containing four tiny scraps of paper, undiscovered byCharlotte when she burnt every line left by Anne and Emily except theirpoems. Two of these four papers were written by Emily, and two by Anne;each sister keeping for the other a record of four years. They begin ineighteen-forty-one. Emily was then twenty-four and Anne a year and ahalf younger. Nothing can be more childlike, more naïve. Emily heads herdiary:

 A PAPER to be opened when Anne is 25 years old, or my next birthday after if all be well. Emily Jane Brontë. July the 30th, 1841. 

She says: "It is Friday evening, near nine o'clock--wild rainy weather. I am seated in the dining-room, having just concluded tidying ourdesk-boxes, writing this document. Papa is in the parlour--Aunt upstairsin her room.... Victoria and Adelaide are ensconced in the peat-house. Keeper is in the kitchen--Hero in his cage. "

Having accounted for Victoria and Adelaide, the tame geese, Keeper, thedog, and Hero, the hawk, she notes the whereabouts of Charlotte, Branwell, and Anne. And then (with gravity):

"A scheme is at present in agitation for setting us up in a school ofour own. "... "This day four years I wonder whether we shall be draggingon in our present condition or established to our hearts' content. "

Then Emily dreams her dream. 

"I guess that on the time appointed for the opening of this paper we, _i. E. _ Charlotte, Anne, and I, shall be all merrily seated in our ownsitting-room in some pleasant and flourishing seminary, having justgathered in for the midsummer holiday. Our debts will be paid off and weshall have cash in hand to a considerable amount. Papa, Aunt, andBranwell, will either have been or be coming to visit us. "

And Anne writes with equal innocence (it is delicious, Anne's diary):"Four years ago I was at school. Since then I have been a governess atBlake Hall, left it, come to Thorp Green, and seen the sea and YorkMinster. "... "We have got Keeper, got a sweet little cat and lost it, and also got a hawk. Got a wild goose which has flown away, and threetame ones, one of which has been killed. "

It is Emily who lets out the dreary secret of the dream--the debts whichcould not be paid; probably Branwell's. 

But the "considerable amount of cash in hand" was to remain a dream. Nothing came of Branwell's knight-errantry. He muddled the accounts ofthe Leeds and Manchester Railroad and was sent home. It was not good forBranwell to be a clerk at a lonely wayside station. His disaster, whichthey much exaggerated, was a shock to the three sisters. They began tohave misgivings, premonitions of Branwell's destiny. 

And from Mrs. White's at Rawdon, Charlotte sends out cry after desolatecry. Again we have an impression of an age of exile, but really theexile did not last long, not much longer than Emily's imprisonment inthe Academy for Young Ladies, nothing like so long as Anne's miserableterm. 

The exile really began in 'forty-two, when Charlotte and Emily leftEngland for Brussels and Madame Héger's Pensionnat de Demoiselles in theRue d'Isabelle. It is supposed to have been the turning-point inCharlotte's career. She was then twenty-six, Emily twenty-four. 

It is absurd and it is pathetic, but Charlotte's supreme ambition atthat time was to keep a school, a school of her own, like her friendMiss Wooler. There was a great innocence and humility in Charlotte. Shewas easily taken in by any of those veiled, inimical spectres of thecross-roads that youth mistakes for destiny. She must have refused tolook too closely at the apparition; it was enough for her that she sawin it the divine thing--liberty. Her genius was already struggling inher. She had begun to feel under her shoulders the painful piercing ofher wings. Her friend, Mary Taylor, had written to her from Brusselstelling her of pictures and cathedrals. Charlotte tells how it woke herup. "I hardly know what swelled in my breast as I read her letter: sucha vehement impatience of restraint and steady work; such a strong wishfor wings--wings such as wealth can furnish; such an urgent desire tosee, to know, to learn; something internal seemed to expand bodily for aminute. I was tantalized by the consciousness of faculties unexercised. "But Charlotte's "wings" were not "such as wealth can furnish". They wereto droop, almost to die, in Brussels. 

Emily was calmer. Whether she mistook it for her destiny or not, sheseems to have acquiesced when Charlotte showed her the veiled figure atthe cross-roads, to have been led blindfold by Charlotte through the"streaming and starless darkness" that took them to Brussels. The restshe endured with a stern and terrible resignation. It is known from herletters what the Pensionnat was to Charlotte. Heaven only knows what itmust have been to Emily. Charlotte, with her undying passion forknowledge and the spectacle of the world, with her psychologicalinterest in M. Héger and his wife, Charlotte hardly came out of it withher soul alive. But Emily was not interested in M. Héger nor in hiswife, nor in his educational system. She thought his system was no goodand told him so. What she thought of his wife is not recorded. 

Then, in their first year of Brussels, their old aunt, Miss Branwell, died. That was destiny, the destiny that was so kind to Emily. It senther and her sister back to Haworth and it kept her there. Poor Anne wasfairly launched on her career; she remained in her "situation", andsomebody had to look after Mr. Brontë and the house. Things were goingbadly and sadly at the Parsonage. Branwell was there, drinking; andCharlotte was even afraid that her father ... Also sometimes ... Perhaps.... 

She left Emily to deal with them and went back to Brussels as a pupilteacher, alone. She went in an agony of self-reproach, desiring more andmore knowledge, a perfect, inalienable, indestructible possession ofthe German language, and wondering whether it were right to satisfy thatindomitable craving. By giving utterance to this self-reproach, sopassionate, so immense, so disproportioned to the crime, the innocentCharlotte laid herself open to an unjust suspicion. Innocent and unawareshe went, and--it is her own word--she was "punished" for it. 

Nothing that she had yet known of homesickness could compare with thatlast year of solitary and unmitigated exile. It is supposed, even by thecharitable, that whatever M. Héger did or did not do for Charlotte, hedid everything for her genius. As a matter of fact, it was at Brusselsthat she suffered the supreme and ultimate abandonment. She no longerfelt the wild unknown thing stirring in her with wings. So little couldM. Héger do for it that it refused to inhabit the same house with him. She records the result of that imprisonment a few weeks after herrelease: "There are times now when it appears to me as if all my ideasand feelings, except a few friendships and affections, are changed fromwhat they used to be; something in me, which used to be enthusiasm, istamed down and broken. "

At Brussels surely enlightenment must have come to her. She must haveseen, as Emily saw, that in going that way, she had mistaken and doneviolence to her destiny. 

She went back to Haworth where it waited for her, where it had turnedeven the tragedy of her family to account. Everything conspired to keepher there. The school was given up. She tells why. "It is on Papa'saccount; he is now, as you know, getting old, and it grieves me to tellyou that he is losing his sight. I have felt for some months that Iought not to be away from him; and I feel now that it would be tooselfish to leave (at least as long as Branwell and Anne are absent) topursue selfish interests of my own. With the help of God I will try todeny myself in this matter, and to wait. "

And with the help of God she waited. 

There are three significant entries in Emily's sealed paper foreighteen-forty-five. "Now I don't desire a school at all, and none of ushave any great longing for it. " "I am quite contented for myself ... Seldom or never troubled with nothing to do and merely desiring thateverybody could be as comfortable as myself and as undesponding, andthen we should have a very tolerable world of it. " "I have plenty ofwork on hand, and writing.... " This, embedded among details of anincomparable innocence: "We have got Flossy; got and lost Tiger; lostthe hawk, Hero, which, with the geese, was given away, and is doubtlessdead. "

And Anne, as naïve as a little nun, writes in _her_ sealed paper: "Emilyis upstairs ironing. I am sitting in the dining-room in therocking-chair before the fire with my feet on the fender. Papa is in theparlour. Tabby and Martha are, I think, in the kitchen. Keeper andFlossy are, I do not know where. Little Dick is hopping in his cage. "And then, "Emily ... Is writing some poetry.... I wonder what it isabout?"

That is the only clue to the secret that is given. These childlikediaries are full of the "Gondal Chronicles", [A] an interminable fantasyin which for years Emily collaborated with Anne. They flourished the"Gondal Chronicles" in each other's faces, with positive bravado, tryingto see which could keep it up the longer. Under it all there was amystery; for, as Charlotte said of their old play, "Best plays weresecret plays, " and the sisters kept their best hidden. And then suddenlythe "Gondal Chronicles" were dropped, the mystery broke down. All threeof them had been writing poems; they had been writing poems for years. Some of Emily's dated from her first exile at Roe Head. Most of Anne'ssad songs were sung in her house of bondage. From Charlotte, in herBrussels period, not a line. 

[Footnote A: See _supra_, pp. 193 to 209. ]

But at Haworth, in the years that followed her return and found herfree, she wrote nearly all her maturer poems (none of them wereexcessively mature): she wrote _The Professor_, and close upon _TheProfessor_, _Jane Eyre_. In the same term that found her also, poorchild, free, and at Haworth, Anne wrote _Agnes Grey_ and _The Tenant ofWildfell Hall_. 

And Emily wrote _Wuthering Heights_. 

They had found their destiny--at Haworth. 

 * * * * *

Every conceivable theory has been offered to account for the novels thatcame so swiftly and incredibly from these three sisters. It has beensaid that they wrote them merely to pay their debts when they found thatpoems did not pay. It would be truer to say that they wrote them becauseit was their destiny to write them, and because their hour had come, andthat they published them with the dimmest hope of a return. 

Before they knew where they were, Charlotte found herself involved inwhat she thought was a businesslike and masculine correspondence withpublishing firms. 

The _Poems_ by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, appeared first, andnothing happened. _The Professor_ travelled among publishers, andnothing happened. Then, towards the end of the fourth year there came_Jane Eyre_, and Charlotte was famous. 

But not Emily. _Wuthering Heights_ appeared also, and nothing happened. It was bound in the same volume with Anne's humble tale. Its lightningshould have scorched and consumed _Agnes Grey_, but nothing happened. Ellis and Acton Bell remained equals in obscurity, recognized only bytheir association with the tremendous Currer. When it came to publishing_The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_, and association became confusion, Charlotte and Anne went up to London to prove their separate identity. Emily stayed at Haworth, superbly indifferent to the proceedings. Shewas unseen, undreamed of, unrealized, and in all her life she made nosign. 

But, in a spirit of reckless adventure, Charlotte and Anne walked theseven miles to Keighley on a Friday evening in a thunderstorm, and tookthe night train up. On the Saturday morning they appeared in the officeat Cornhill to the amazement of Mr. George Smith and Mr. Williams. Withchildlike innocence and secrecy they hid in the Chapter Coffee-house inPaternoster Row, and called themselves the Misses Brown. Whenentertainment was offered them, they expressed a wish to hear Dr. Crolypreach. They did not hear him; they only heard _The Barber of Seville_at Covent Garden. They tried, with a delicious solemnity, to give thewhole thing an air of business, but it was really a breathless, infantile escapade of three days. Three days out of four years. 

 * * * * *

And in those four years poor Branwell's destiny found him also. Aftermany minor falls and penitences and relapses, he seemed at length tohave settled down. He had been tutor for two and a half years with theRobinsons at Thorp Green, in the house where Anne was a governess. Hewas happy at first; an ominous happiness. Then Anne began to be aware ofsomething. 

Mr. Birrell has said rather unkindly that he has no use for this youngman. Nobody had any use for him. Not the editors to whom he used towrite so hysterically. Not the Leeds and Manchester Railroad Company. And certainly not Mrs. Robinson, the lady for whom he conceived thatinsane and unlawful passion which has been made to loom so large in thelives of the Brontës. After all the agony and indignation that hasgathered round this episode, it is clear enough now, down to the lastsordid details. The feverish, degenerate, utterly irresponsible Branwellnot only declared his passion, but persuaded himself, against theevidence of his senses, that it was returned. The lady (whom he musthave frightened horribly) told her husband, who instantly dismissedBranwell. 

Branwell never got over it. 

He was destined to die young, and, no doubt, if there had been no Mrs. Robinson, some other passion would have killed him. Still, it may besaid with very little exaggeration that he died of it. He had nothitherto shown any signs of tuberculosis. It may be questioned whetherwithout this predisposing cause he would have developed it. He had hadhis chance to survive. _He_ had never been packed, like his sisters, first one of five, then one of three, into a closet not big enough forone. But he drank harder after the Robinson affair than he had everdrunk before, and he added opium to drink. Drink and opium gavefrightful intensity to the hallucination of which, in a sense, he died. 

It took him more than three years, from July, eighteen-forty-five, thedate of his dismissal, to September, eighteen-forty-eight, the date ofhis death. 

The Incumbent of Haworth has been much blamed for his son'sshortcomings. He has been charged with first spoiling the boy, and thenneglecting him. In reality his only error (a most unusual one in anearly Victorian father) was that he believed in his son's genius. WhenLondon and the Royal Academy proved beyond him he had him taught atBradford. He gave him a studio there. He had already given him aneducation that at least enabled him to obtain tutorships, if not to keepthem. The Parsonage must have been a terrible place for Branwell, but itwas not in the Vicar's power to make it more attractive than the BullInn. Branwell was not a poet like his sisters, and moors meant nothingto him. To be sure, when he went into Wales and saw Penmaenmawr, hewrote a poem about it. But the poem is not really about Penmaenmawr. Itis all about Branwell; Penmaenmawr _is_ Branwell, a symbol of hiscolossal personality and of his fate. For Branwell was a monstrousegoist. He was not interested in his sisters or in his friends, orreally in Mrs. Robinson. He was interested only in himself. What could apoor vicar do with a son like that? There was nothing solid in Branwellthat you could take hold of and chastise. There was nothing you couldappeal to. His affection for his family was three-fourthssentimentalism. Still, what the Vicar could do he did do. When Branwellwas mad with drink and opium he never left him. There is no story moregrim and at the same time more poignant and pathetic than that whichMrs. Gaskell tells of his devotion to his son in this time of the boy'sruin. Branwell slept in his father's room. He would doze all day, andrage all night, threatening his father's life. In the morning he wouldgo to his sisters and say: "The poor old man and I have had a terriblenight of it. He does his best, the poor old man, but it is all over withme. " He died in his father's arms while Emily and little Anne looked on. 

They say that he struggled to his feet and died standing, to prove thestrength of his will; but some biographer has robbed him of this poorsplendour. It was enough for his sisters--and it should be enough foranybody--that his madness left him with the onset of his illness, andthat he went from them penitent and tender, purified by the mystery andmiracle of death. 

That was on Sunday, the twenty-fourth of September. From that day Emilysickened. She caught cold at Branwell's funeral. On September thethirtieth she was in church listening to his funeral sermon. After that, she never crossed the threshold of the Parsonage till in December herdead body was carried over it, to lie beside her brother under thechurch floor. 

In October, a week or two after Branwell's death, Charlotte wrote:"Emily has a cold and cough at present. " "Emily's cold and cough arevery obstinate. I fear she has pain in her chest, and I sometimes catcha shortness in her breathing when she has moved at all quickly. " InNovember: "I told you Emily was ill, in my last letter. She has notrallied yet. She is very ill.... I think Emily seems the nearest thingto my heart in all the world. " And in December: "Emily suffers no morefrom pain or weakness now ... There is no Emily in time, or on earthnow.... We are very calm at present. Why should we be otherwise? Theanguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains ofdeath is gone by: the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. Noneed to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does notfeel them. She died in a time of promise.... But it is God's will, andthe place where she has gone is better than that which she has left. "

It could have been hardly daylight on the moors the morning whenCharlotte went out to find that last solitary sprig of heather which shelaid on Emily's pillow for Emily to see when she awoke. Emily's eyeswere so drowsed with death that she could not see it. And yet it couldnot have been many hours later when a fire was lit in her bedroom, andshe rose and dressed herself. Madame Duclaux[A] tells how she sat beforethe fire, combing her long, dark hair, and how the comb dropped from herweak fingers, and fell under the grate. And how she sat there in hermortal apathy; and how, when the servant came to her, she said dreamily:"Martha, my comb's down there; I was too weak to stoop and pick it up. "

[Footnote A: "Emily Brontë": _Eminent Women Series_. ]

She dragged herself down to the sitting-room, and died there, about twoo'clock. She must have had some horror of dying in that room of deathoverhead; for, at noon, when the last pains seized her, she refused tobe taken back to it. Unterrified, indomitable, driven by her immortalpassion for life, she fought terribly. Death took her as she tried torise from the sofa and break from her sisters' arms that would have laidher there. Profoundly, piteously alienated, she must have felt that Anneand Charlotte were in league with death; that they fought with her andbound her down; and that in her escape from them she conquered. 

Another month and Anne sickened. As Emily died of Branwell's death, soEmily's death hastened Anne's. Charlotte wrote in the middle ofJanuary: "I can scarcely say that Anne is worse, nor can I say she isbetter.... The days pass in a slow, dull march: the nights are the test;the sudden wakings from restless sleep, the revived knowledge that onelies in her grave, and another, not at my side, but in a separate andsick bed. " And again in March: "Anne's decline is gradual andfluctuating, but its nature is not doubtful. " And yet again in April:"If there were no hope beyond this world ... Emily's fate, and thatwhich threatens Anne, would be heartbreaking. I cannot forget Emily'sdeath-day; it becomes a more fixed, a darker, a more frequentlyrecurring idea in my mind than ever. It was very terrible. She was torn, conscious, panting, reluctant, though resolute, out of a happy life. "

Mrs. Oliphant has censured Emily Brontë for the manner of her dying. Shemight as well have censured Anne for drawing out the agony. For Anne wasgentle to the end, utterly submissive. She gave death no trouble. Shewent, with a last hope, to Scarborough, and died there at the end ofMay. She was buried at Scarborough, where she lies alone. It is not easyto believe that she had no "preference for place", but there is no doubtthat even to that choice of her last resting-place she would havesubmitted--gently. 

"I got here a little before eight o'clock. All was clean and bright, waiting for me. Papa and the servants were well, and all received mewith an affection that should have consoled. The dogs seemed in strangeecstasy. I am certain that they regarded me as the harbinger of others. The dumb creatures thought that as I was returned, those who had been solong absent were not far behind.... I felt that the house was allsilent, the rooms were all empty. I remembered where the three werelaid--in what narrow, dark dwellings--never more to reappear onearth.... I cannot help thinking of their last days, remembering theirsufferings, and what they said and did, and how they looked in mortalaffliction.... To sit in a lonely room, the clock ticking loud through astill house.... " Charlotte could see nothing else before her. 

It was July. She had come home after a visit to Miss Nussey. 

In that month she wrote that chapter of _Shirley_ which is headed "TheValley of the Shadow". The book (begun more than eighteen months before)fairly quivers with the shock that cut it in two. 

It was finished somewhere in September of that year of Anne's death. Charlotte went up to London. She saw Thackeray. She learned to acceptthe fact of her celebrity. 

Somehow the years passed, the years of Charlotte's continuous celebrity, and of those literary letters that take so disproportionate a part inher correspondence that she seems at last to have forgotten; she seemsto belong to the world rather than to Haworth. And the world seems fullof Charlotte; the world that had no place for Emily. And yet _WutheringHeights_ had followed _Shirley_. It had been republished withCharlotte's introduction, her vindication of Emily. It brought more famefor Charlotte, but none--yet--for Emily. 

Two years later came _Villette_. Charlotte went up to London a secondtime and saw Thackeray again. And there were more letters, the admirablebut slightly self-conscious letters of the literary woman, artificiallyassured. They might deceive you, only the other letters, the letters toEllen Nussey go on; they come palpitating with the life of CharlotteBrontë's soul that had in it nothing of the literary taint. You see inthem how, body and soul, Haworth claims her and holds her, and will notlet her go. 

Nor does she desire now to be let go. Her life at Haworth is part ofEmily's life; it partakes of the immortality of the unforgotten dead. London and Thackeray, the Smiths, Mrs. Gaskell, and Miss Martineau, SirJohn and Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, her celebrity and the little train ofcheerful, unfamiliar circumstances, all these things sink intoinsignificance beside it. They are all extraneous somehow, and out ofkeeping. Nothing that her biographers have done (when they have donetheir worst) can destroy or even diminish the effect her life gives ofunity, of fitness, of profound and tragic harmony. It was Mrs. Gaskell'ssense of this effect that made her work a masterpiece. 

And in her marriage, at Haworth, to her father's curate, ArthurNicholls, the marriage that cut short her life and made an end of hercelebrity, Charlotte Brontë followed before all things her instinct forfitness, for unity, for harmony. It was exquisitely in keeping. It didno violence to her memories, her simplicities and sanctities. It foundher in the apathy of exhaustion, and it was yet one with all that waspassionate in her and undying. She went to it one morning in May, allwhite and drooping, in her modest gown and that poor little bridalbonnet with its wreath of snowdrops, symbolic of all the timidities, thereluctances, the cold austerities of spring roused in the lap of winter, and yet she found in it the secret fire of youth. She went to it afraid;and in her third month of marriage she still gives a cry wrung from thememory of her fear. "Indeed, indeed, Nell, it is a solemn and strangeand perilous thing for a woman to become a wife. "

And yet for all that, after London, after fame and friendships in whichher dead had no share, her marriage was not the great departure; it wasthe great return. It was the outcome of all that had gone before it; thefruit of painful life, which is recognition, acceptance, the final trustin destiny. There were to be no more false starts, no more veiled ghostsof the cross-roads, pointing the disastrous way. 

And in its abrupt and pitiful end her life rang true; it sustained thetragic harmony. It was the fulfilment of secret prophecies, forebodings, premonitions, of her reiterated "It was not to be. " You may say that inthe end life cheated and betrayed her. 

And inevitably; for she had loved life, not as Emily loved it, like anequal, with power over it and pride and an unearthly understanding, virgin and unafraid. There was something slightly subservient, consciously inferior, in Charlotte's attitude to life. She had loved itsecretly, with a sort of shame, with a corroding passion and incredulityand despair. Such natures are not seldom victims of the power they wouldpropitiate. It killed her in her effort to bring forth life. 

When the end came she could not realize it. For the first time she wasincredulous of disaster. She heard, out of her last stupor, her husbandpraying that God would spare her, and she whispered, "Oh, I am not goingto die, am I? He will not separate us; we have been so happy. "

You can see her youth rising up beside that death-bed and answering, "That is why. "

And yet, could even Charlotte's youth have been so sure as to thecheating and betrayal? That happiness of hers was cut short in themoment of its perfection. She was not to suffer any disenchantment ordecline; her love was not to know any cold of fear or her genius anyfever of frustration. She was saved the struggle we can see before her. Arthur Nicholls was passionately fond of Charlotte. But he was hostileto Charlotte's genius and to Charlotte's fame. A plain, practical, robust man, inimical to any dream. He could be adorably kind to a sick, submissive Charlotte. Would he have been so tender to a Charlotte inrevolt? She was spared the torture of the choice between Arthur Nichollsand her genius. We know how she would have chosen. It is well for her, and it is all one to literature, that she died, not "in a time ofpromise", but in the moment of fulfilment. 

 * * * * *

No. Of these tragic Brontës the most tragic, the most pitiful, the mostmercilessly abused by destiny, was Anne. An interminable, monstrousexile is the impression we get of Anne's life in the years of hergirlhood. There is no actual record of them. Nobody kept Anne's letters. We never hear her sad voice raised in self-pity or revolt. It isdoubtful if she ever raised it. She waited in silence and resignation, and then told her own story in _Agnes Grey_. But her figure remains dimin her own story and in the classic "Lives". We only know that she wasthe youngest, and that, unlike her sisters, she was pretty. She hadthick brown curling hair, and violet-blue eyes, and delicate darkeyebrows, and a skin rose and white for her sisters' sallow, that musthave given some ominous hint of fever. This delicate thing was broken onthe wheel of life. They say of Anne perpetually that she was "gentle". In Charlotte's sketch of her she holds her pretty head high, her eyesgaze straight forward, and you wonder whether, before the breakingpoint, she was always as gentle as they say. But you never see her inany moment of revolt. Her simple poems, at their bitterest, express nomore than a frail agony, an innocent dismay. That little raising of thehead in conscious rectitude is all that breaks the long plaint of _AgnesGrey_. 

There is no piety in that plaint. It is purely pagan; the cry of youthcheated of its desire. Life brought her no good gifts beyond the slenderineffectual beauty that left her undesired. Her tremulous, expectantwomanhood was cheated. She never saw so much as the flying veil of joy, or even of such pale, uninspired happiness as she dreamed in _AgnesGrey_. She was cheated of her innocent dream. 

And by an awful irony her religion failed her. She knew its bitterness, its terrors, its exactions. She never knew its ecstasies, its flamingmysteries, nor, even at her very last, its consolations. Her tenderconscience drew an unspeakable torment from the spectacle of herbrother's degradation. 

For it was on Anne, who had no genius to sustain her, that poorBranwell, with the burden of his destiny, weighed most hard. It was Anneat Thorp Green who had the first terrible misgivings, the intolerablepremonitions. 

That wretched story is always cropping up again. The lady whom Mrs. Gaskell, with a murderous selection of adjectives, called "that matureand wicked woman", has been cleared as far as evidence and common sensecould clear her. But the slander is perpetually revived. It has alwaysproved too much for the Brontë biographers. Madame Duclaux published itagain twenty years after, in spite of the evidence and in spite of Mrs. Gaskell's retractation. You would have thought that Branwell might havebeen allowed to rest in the grave he dug for himself so well. But no, they will not let him rest. Branwell drank, and he ate opium; and, as ifdrink and opium and erotic madness were not enough, they must credithim with an open breach of the seventh commandment as well. M. Dimnet, the most able of recent critics of the Brontës, thinks and maintainsagainst all evidence that there was more in it than Branwell's madness. He will not give up the sordid tragedy _à trois_. He thinks he knowswhat Anne thought of Branwell's behaviour, and what awful secret she washinting at, and what she told her sisters when she came back to Haworth. He argues that Anne Brontë saw and heard things, and that her testimonyis not to be set aside. 

What did Anne Brontë see and hear? She saw her brother consumed by anillegitimate passion; a passion utterly hopeless, given the nature ofthe lady. The lady had been kind to Anne, to Branwell she had beenangelically kind. Anne saw that his behaviour was an atrocious returnfor her kindness. Further than that the lady hardly counted in Anne'svision. Her interest was centred on her brother. She saw him takingfirst to drink and then to opium. She saw that he was going mad, and hedid go mad. One of the most familiar symptoms of morphia mania is atendency to erotic hallucinations of the precise kind that Branwellsuffered from. Anne was unable to distinguish between such ahallucination and depravity. But there is not a shadow of evidence thatshe thought what M. Dimnet thinks, or that if she had thought it shemade Charlotte and Emily think it too. Branwell's state was quite enoughin itself to break their hearts. His letters to Leyland, to John Brown, the sexton, to Francis Grundy, record with frightful vividness everyphase of his obsession. 

It is inconceivable that such letters should have been kept, still moreinconceivable that they should have been published. It is inconceivablethat Mrs. Gaskell should have dragged the pitiful and shameful figureinto the light. Nobody can save poor Branwell now from the dreadfulimmortality thrust on him by his enemies and friends with equal zeal. All that is left to us is a merciful understanding of his case. Branwell's case, once for all, was purely pathological. There wasnothing great about him, not even his passion for Mrs. Robinson. Properly speaking, it was not a passion at all, it was a disease. Branwell was a degenerate, as incapable of passion as he was of poetry. His sisters, Anne and Charlotte, talked with an amazing innocence aboutBranwell's vices. Simple and beautiful souls, they never for a momentsuspected that his worst vice was sentimentalism. In the beginning, before it wrecked him, nobody enjoyed his own emotions more thanBranwell. At his worst he wallowed voluptuously in the torments offrustration. At the end, what with drink and what with opium, he wasundoubtedly insane. His letters are priceless pathological documents. They reveal all the workings of his peculiar mania. He thinks everybodyis plotting to keep him from Mrs. Robinson. Faced at every turn with theevidence of this lady's complete indifference, he gives it all a lunatictwist to prove the contrary. He takes the strangest people into hisconfidence, John Brown, the sexton, and the Robinsons' coachman. Queerflames of lucidity dart here and there through this madness: "Theprobability of her becoming free to give me herself and estate ever roseto drive away the prospect of her decline under her present grief. " "Ihad reason to hope that ere very long I should be the husband of a ladywhom I loved best in the world, and with whom, in more than competence, I might live at leisure to try to make myself a name in the world ofposterity, without being pestered by the small but countlessbotherments, which, like mosquitoes, sting us in the world of work-daytoil. That hope and herself are gone--she to wither into patientlypining decline--_it_ to make room for drudgery. " It is all sordid aswell as terrible. We have no right to know these things. Mrs. Oliphantis almost justified in her protest against Charlotte as the first tobetray her brother. 

But did Charlotte betray Branwell? Not in her letters. She neverimagined--how could she?--that those letters would be published. Not inher novels. Her novels give no portrait of Branwell and no hint thatcould be easily understood. It is in her prefaces to her sisters' novelsthat he appears, darkly. Charlotte, outraged by the infamous article inthe _Quarterly_, was determined that what had been said of her shouldnever be said of Anne and Emily. She felt that their works offeredirresistible provocation to the scandalous reviewer. She thought itnecessary to explain how they came by their knowledge of evil. 

This vindication of her sisters is certainly an indictment of herbrother to anybody who knew enough to read between the lines. Charlottemay have innocently supposed that nobody knew or ever would know enough. Unfortunately, Mrs. Gaskell knew; and when it came to vindicatingCharlotte, she considered herself justified in exposing Charlotte'sbrother because Charlotte herself had shown her the way. 

But Charlotte might have spared her pains. Branwell does not account forHeathcliff any more than he accounts for Rochester. He does not evenaccount for Huntingdon in poor Anne's novel. He accounts only forhimself. He is important chiefly in relation to the youngest of theBrontës. Oddly enough, this boy, who was once thought greater than hissister Emily, was curiously akin to the weak and ineffectual Anne. Heshows the weird flickering of the flame that pulsed so feebly andintermittently in her. He had Anne's unhappy way with destiny, her knackof missing things. She had a touch of his morbidity. He was given tosilences which in anybody but Anne would have been called morose. It washer fate to be associated with him in the hour and in the scene of hisdisgrace. And he was offered up unwittingly by Charlotte as a sacrificeto Anne's virtue. 

 * * * * *

Like Branwell, Anne had no genius. She shows for ever gentle, and, inspite of an unconquerable courage, conquered. And yet there was more inher than gentleness. There was, in this smallest and least considerableof the Brontës, an immense, a terrifying audacity. Charlotte was bold, and Emily was bolder; but this audacity of Anne's was greater thanCharlotte's boldness or than Emily's, because it was willed, it wasdeliberate, open-eyed; it had none of the superb unconsciousness ofgenius. Anne took her courage in both hands when she sat down to write_The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_. There are scenes, there are situations, in Anne's amazing novel, which for sheer audacity stand alone inmid-Victorian literature, and which would hold their own in theliterature of revolt that followed. It cannot be said that these scenesand situations are tackled with a master-hand. But there is a certaingrasp in Anne's treatment, and an astonishing lucidity. Her knowledge ofthe seamy side of life was not exhaustive. But her diagnosis of certainstates, her realization of certain motives, suggests Balzac rather thanany of the Brontës. Thackeray, with the fear of Mrs. Grundy before hiseyes, would have shrunk from recording Mrs. Huntingdon's ultimatum toher husband. The slamming of that bedroom door fairly resounds throughthe long emptiness of Anne's novel. But that door is the _crux_ of thesituation, and if Anne was not a genius she was too much of an artist tosacrifice her _crux_. 

And not only was Anne revolutionary in her handling of moral situations, she was an insurgent in religious thought. Not to believe in the dogmaof eternal punishment was, in mid-Victorian times and evangelicalcircles, to be almost an atheist. When, somewhere in the late'seventies, Dean Farrar published his _Eternal Hope_, that book felllike a bomb into the ranks of the orthodox. But long before DeanFarrar's book Anne Brontë had thrown her bomb. There are two pages in_The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_ that anticipate and sum up his nowinnocent arguments. Anne fairly let herself go here. And though in her"Word to the Elect" (who "may rejoice to think themselves secure") shedeclares that

 None shall sink to everlasting woe Who have not well deserved the wrath of Heaven, she presently relents, and tacks on a poem in a lighter measure, expressing her hope

 That soon the wicked shall at last Be fitted for the skies; And when their dreadful doom is past To light and life arise. 

It is said (Charlotte said it) that Anne suffered from religiousmelancholy of a peculiarly dark and Calvinistic type. I very muchsuspect that Anne's melancholy, like Branwell's passion, waspathological, and that what her soul suffered from was religious doubt. She could not reach that height where Emily moved serenely; she couldnot see that

 Vain are the thousand creeds That move men's hearts: unutterably vain. 

There was a time when her tremulous, clinging faith was broken bycontact with Emily's contempt for creeds. When Anne was at Haworth sheand Emily were inseparable. They tramped the moors together. With theirarms round each other's shoulders, they paced up and down the parlour ofthe Parsonage. They showed the mysterious attraction and affinity ofopposites. Anne must have been fascinated, and at the same timeappalled, by the radiant, revealing, annihilating sweep of Emily'sthought. She was not indifferent to creeds. But you can see her fearfuland reluctant youth yielding at last to Emily's thought, until shecaught a glimpse of the "repose" beyond the clash of "conquered good andconquering ill". You can see how the doctrine of eternal punishment wentby the board; how Anne, who had gone through agonies of orthodox fear onaccount of Branwell, must have adjusted things somehow, and arrived atpeace. Trust in "the merits of the Redeemer" is, after all, trust in theImmensity beyond Redeemer and redeemed. Of this trust she sang in avoice, like her material voice, fragile, but sweet and true. She sangnaïvely of the "Captive Dove" that makes unheard its "joyless moan", of"the heart that Nature formed to love", pining, "neglected and alone". She sang of the "Narrow Way", "Be it, " she sings, "thy constant aim

 "To labour and to love, To pardon and endure, To lift thy heart to God above, And keep thy conscience pure. "

She hears the wind in an alien wood and cries for the Parsonage garden, and for the "barren hills":

 Where scarce the scattered, stunted trees Can yield an answering swell, But where a wilderness of heath Returns the sound as well. 

 For yonder garden, fair and wide, With groves of evergreen, Long winding walks, and borders trim And velvet lawns between. 

 Restore to me that little spot, With grey hills compassed round, Where knotted grass neglected lies, And weeds usurp the ground. 

For she, too, loved the moors; and through her love for them she wrotetwo perfect lines when she called on Memory to

 Forever hang thy dreamy spell Round mountain star and heather-bell. 

The critics, the theorists, the tale-mongers, have left Anne quiet inthat grave on the sea-coast, where she lies apart. Her gentleinsignificance served her well. 

 * * * * *

But no woman who ever wrote was more criticized, more spied upon, morelied about, than Charlotte. It was as if the singular purity and povertyof her legend offered irresistible provocation. The blank page calledfor the scribbler. The silence that hung about her was dark withchallenge; it was felt to be ambiguous, enigmatic. Reserve suggests areservation, something hidden and kept back from the insatiable publicwith its "right to know". Mrs. Gaskell with all her indiscretions hadnot given it enough. The great classic _Life of Charlotte Brontë_ was, after all, incomplete. Until something more was known about her, Charlotte herself was incomplete. It was nothing that Mrs. Gaskell'swork was the finest, tenderest portrait of a woman that it was evergiven to a woman to achieve; nothing that she was not only recklesslyand superbly loyal to Charlotte, but that in her very indiscretions shewas, as far as Charlotte was concerned, incorruptibly and profoundlytrue. 

Since Mrs. Gaskell's time, other hands have been at work on Charlotte, improving Mrs. Gaskell's masterpiece. A hundred little touches have beenadded to it. First, it was supposed to be too tragic, too deliberatelyand impossibly sombre (that sad book of which Charlotte's friend, MaryTaylor, said that it was "not so gloomy as the truth"). So first cameSir Wemyss Reid, conscientiously working up the high lights till he gotthe values all wrong. "If the truth must be told, " he says, "the life ofthe author of _Jane Eyre_ was by no means so joyless as the world nowbelieves it to have been. " And he sets out to give us the truth. But allthat he does to lighten the gloom is to tell a pleasant story of how"one bright June morning in 1833, a handsome carriage and pair isstanding opposite the 'Devonshire Arms' at Bolton Bridge". In thehandsome carriage is a young girl, Ellen Nussey, waiting for CharlotteBrontë and her brother and sisters to go with her for a picnic to BoltonAbbey. 

"Presently, " says Sir Wemyss Reid, "on the steep road which stretchesacross the moors to Keighley, the sound of wheels is heard, mingled withthe merry speech and merrier laughter of fresh young voices. Shall we goforward unseen, " he asks, "and study the approaching travellers whilstthey are still upon the road? Their conveyance is no handsome carriage, but a rickety dog-cart, unmistakably betraying its neighbourship to thecarts and ploughs of some rural farmyard. The horse, freshly taken fromthe fields, is driven by a youth who, in spite of his countrified dress, is no mere bumpkin. His shock of red hair hangs down in somewhat raggedlocks behind his ears, for Branwell Brontë esteems himself a genius anda poet, and, following the fashion of the times, has that abhorrence ofthe barber's shears which genius is supposed to affect. But the lad'sface is a handsome and striking one, full of Celtic fire and humour, untouched by the slightest shade of care, hopeful, promising, evenbrilliant. How gaily he jokes with his three sisters; with whatinexhaustible volubility he pours out quotations from his favouritepoets, applying them to the lovely scenes around him; and with what amischievous delight in his superior nerve and mettle, he attempts thefeats of charioteering, which fill the heart of the youngest of theparty with sudden terrors! Beside him, in a dress of marvellousplainness, and ugliness, stamped with the brand "home-made" incharacters which none can mistake, is the eldest of the sisters. Charlotte is talking too; there are bright smiles upon her face; she isenjoying everything around her, the splendid morning, the charms ofleafy trees and budding roses, and the ever musical stream; most of all, perhaps, the charm of her brother's society, and the expectation of thatcoming meeting with her friends, which is so near at hand. Behind sits apretty little girl, with fine complexion and delicate regular features, whom the stranger would pick out as the beauty of the company, and atall, rather angular figure, clad in a dress exactly resemblingCharlotte's. Emily Brontë does not talk so much as the rest of theparty, but her wonderful eyes, brilliant and unfathomable as the pool atthe foot of a waterfall, but radiant also with a wealth of tendernessand warmth, show how her soul is expanding under the influences of thescene; how quick she is to note the least prominent of the beautiesaround her, how intense is her enjoyment of the songs of the birds, thebrilliancy of the sunshine, the rich scent of the flower-bespangledhedgerows. If she does not, like Charlotte and Anne, meet her brother'sceaseless flood of sparkling words with opposing currents of speech, sheutters a strange, deep guttural sound which those who know her bestinterpret as the language of a joy too deep for articulate expression. Gaze at them as they pass you in the quiet road, and acknowledge that, in spite of their rough and even uncouth exteriors, a happier four couldhardly be met with in this favourite haunt of pleasure-seekers during along summer's day. "

And you do gaze at them and are sadder, if anything, than you werebefore. You see them, if anything, more poignantly. You see theircheerful biographer doing all he knows, and the light he shoots acrossthe blackness only makes it blacker. 

 Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi di tempo felice Nella miseria;

and in the end the biographer with all his cheerfulness succumbs to thetradition of misery, and even adds a dark contribution of his own, thesuggestion of an unhappy love-affair of Charlotte's. 

After Sir Wemyss Reid came Mr. Francis Grundy with _his_ littlepictures, _Pictures of the Past_, presenting a dreadfully unattractiveCharlotte. 

Then came Mr. Leyland, following Mr. Grundy, with his glorification ofBranwell and his hint that Charlotte made it very hard at home for thepoor boy. He repeats the story that Branwell told Mr. George SearlePhillips, how he went to see a dying girl in the village, and sat withher half an hour, and read a psalm to her and a hymn, and how he feltlike praying with her too, but he was not "good enough", how he cameaway with a heavy heart and fell into melancholy musings. "Charlotteobserved my depression, " Branwell said, "and asked what ailed me. So Itold her. She looked at me with a look which I shall never forget if Ilive to be a hundred years old--which I never shall. It was not likeher at all. It wounded me as if someone had struck me a blow in themouth. It involved ever so many things in it. It ran over me, questioning and examining, as if I had been a wild beast. It said, 'Didmy ears deceive me, or did I hear aright?' And then came the painful, baffled expression, which was worse than all. It said, 'I wonder ifthat's true?' But, as she left the room, she seemed to accuse herself ofhaving wronged me, and smiled kindly upon me, and said, 'She is mylittle scholar, and I will go and see her. ' I replied not a word. I wastoo much cut up! When she was gone, I came over here to the 'Black Bull'and made a note of it.... "

You see the implication? It was Charlotte who drove him to the "BlackBull". That was Branwell's impression of Charlotte. Just the sort ofimpression that an opium-eater would have of a beloved sister. 

But Branwell's impression was good enough for Madame Duclaux to foundher theory on. Her theory is that Charlotte was inferior to Emily intenderness. It may well be so, and yet Charlotte would remain above mostwomen tender, for Emily's wealth would furnish forth a score of sisters. The simple truth is that Charlotte had nerves, and Branwell wasextremely trying. And it is possible that Emily had less to bear, thatin her detachment she was protected more than Charlotte from Branwell athis worst. 

Meanwhile tales were abroad presenting Charlotte in the queerest lights. There is that immortal story of how Thackeray gave a party for CurrerBell at his house in Young Street, and how Currer Bell had a headacheand lay on a sofa in the back drawing-room, and refused to talk toanybody but the governess; and how Thackeray at last, very late, with afinger on his lip, stole out of the house and took refuge in his club. No wonder if this quaint and curious Charlotte survived in the memoryof Thackeray's daughter. But, even apart from the headache, you can seehow it came about, how the sight of the governess evoked CharlotteBrontë's unforgotten agony. She saw in the amazed and cheerful lady herown sad youth, slighted and oppressed, solitary in a scene ofgaiety--she could not have seen her otherwise--and her warm heart rushedout to her. She was determined that that governess should have a happyevening if nobody else had. Her behaviour was odd, if you like, it waseven absurd, but it had the sublimity of vicarious expiation. Has anyoneever considered its significance, the magnitude of her deed? ForCharlotte, to be the guest of honour on that brilliant night, in thehouse of Thackeray, her divinity, was to touch the topmost height offame. And she turned her back on the brilliance and the fame and theface of her divinity, and offered herself up in flames as a sacrificefor all the governesses that were and had ever been and would be. 

And after the fine stories came the little legends--things aboutCharlotte when she was a governess herself at Mrs. Sidgwick's, and thetittle-tattle of the parish. One of the three curates whom Charlottemade so shockingly immortal avenged himself for his immortality bystating that the trouble with Charlotte was that she _would_ fight formastery in the parish. Who can believe him? If there is one thing thatseems more certain than another it is Charlotte's utter indifference toparochial matters. But Charlotte was just, and she may have objected tothe young man's way with the Dissenters; we know that she did verystrongly object to Mr. William Weightman's way. And that, I imagine, wasthe trouble between Charlotte and the curates. 

As for the Sidgwicks, Charlotte's biographers have been rather hard onthem. Mr. Leslie Stephen calls them "coarse employers". They werecertainly not subtle enough to divine the hidden genius in their sadlittle governess. It was, I imagine, Charlotte's alien, enigmatic facethat provoked a little Sidgwick to throw a Bible at her. She said Mrs. Sidgwick did not know her, and did not "intend to know her". She mighthave added that if she _had_ intended Mrs. Sidgwick could not possiblyhave known her. And when the Sidgwicks said (as they did say to theircousin, Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson) that if Miss Brontë "was invitedto walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered aboutlike a slave; if she was not invited she imagined she was being excludedfrom the family circle", that was simply their robust view of theparalysed attitude of a shy girl among strangers, in an agony of fearlest she should cut in where she was not wanted. 

And allowances must be made for Mrs. Sidgwick. She was, no doubt, considerably annoyed at finding that she had engaged a thoroughlyincompetent and apparently thoroughly morbid young person who hadoffered herself as a nursery-governess and didn't know how to keep orderin the nursery. Naturally there was trouble at Stonegappe. Then one fineday Mrs. Sidgwick discovered that there was, after all, a use for thatincomprehensible and incompetent Miss Brontë. Miss Brontë had a gift. She could sew. She could sew beautifully. Her stitching, if you wouldbelieve it, was a dream. And Mrs. Sidgwick saw that Miss Brontë's onetalent was not lodged in her useless. So Charlotte sat alone all eveningin the schoolroom at Stonegappe, a small figure hidden in pure white, billowy seas of muslin, and lamented thus: "She cares nothing in theworld about me except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity oflabour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end she overwhelms mewith oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin night-capsto make, and above all things, dolls to dress. " And Mrs. Sidgwickcomplained that Charlotte did not love the children, and forgot howlittle she liked it when the children loved Charlotte, and was unaware, poor lady, that it was recorded of her, and would be recorded to alltime, that she had said, "Love the _governess_, my dear!" when herlittle impulsive boy put his hand in Charlotte's at the dinner-table, and cried "I love 'ou, Miss Brontë. " It was the same little, impulsiveboy who threw the Bible at Charlotte, and also threw a stone which hither. 

No wonder that Miss Brontë's one and only "pleasant afternoon" was whenMr. Sidgwick went out walking in his fields with his children and hisNewfoundland dog, and Charlotte (by order) followed and observed himfrom behind. 

Of course, all these old tales should have gone where Mrs. Sidgwick'sold muslin caps went; but they have not, and so it has got about thatCharlotte Brontë was not fond of children. Even Mr. Swinburne, at theheight of his magnificent eulogy, after putting crown upon crown uponher head, pauses and wonders: had she any love for children? He finds inher "a plentiful lack of inborn baby-worship"; she is unworthy tocompare in this with George Eliot, "the spiritual mother of Totty, ofEppie, and of Lillo". "The fiery-hearted Vestal of Haworth, " he says, "had no room reserved in the palace of her passionate and high-mindedimagination as a nursery for inmates of such divine and deliciousquality. " There was little Georgette in _Villette_, to say nothing ofPolly, and there was Adèle in _Jane Eyre_. But Mr. Swinburne hadforgotten about little Georgette. Like George Henry Lewes he is"well-nigh moved to think one of the most powerfully and exquisitelywritten chapters in _Shirley_ a chapter which could hardly have beenwritten at all by a woman, or, for that matter, by a man, of howevernoble and kindly a nature, in whom the instinct, or nerve, or organ oflove for children was even of average natural strength and sensibility";so difficult was it for him to believe in "the dread and repulsion feltby a forsaken wife and tortured mother for the very beauty and daintysweetness of her only new-born child, as recalling the cruel, sleekcharm of the human tiger that had begotten it". And so he crowns herwith all crowns but that of "love for children". He is still tender toher, seeing in her that one monstrous lack; he touches it with sorrowand a certain shame. 

Mr. Birrell follows him. "Miss Brontë, " he says with confidence, "didnot care for children. She had no eye for them. Hence it comes aboutthat her novel-children are not good. " He is moved to playful sarcasmwhen he tells how in August of eighteen-fifty-three "Miss Brontësuffered a keen disappointment". She went to Scotland with some friendswho took their baby with them. The parents thought the baby was ill whenit wasn't, and insisted on turning back, and Charlotte had to give upher holiday. "All on account of a baby, " says Mr. Birrell, and refersyou to Charlotte's letter on the subject, implying that it wascold-blooded. The biographer can quote letters for his purpose, and Mr. Birrell omits to tell us that Charlotte wrote "had any evil consequencesfollowed a prolonged stay, I should never have forgiven myself". You areto imagine that Charlotte could have forgiven herself perfectly well, for Charlotte "did not care for children". 

Mrs. Oliphant does not echo that cry. She was a woman and knew better. 

For I believe that here we touch the very heart of the mystery that wasCharlotte Brontë. We would have no right to touch it, to approach it, were it not that other people have already violated all that was mostsacred and most secret in that mystery, and have given the world adefaced and disfigured Charlotte Brontë. I believe that this love ofchildren which even Mr. Swinburne has denied to her, was the key toCharlotte's nature. We are face to face here, not with a want in her, but with an abyss, depth beyond depth of tenderness and longing andfrustration, of a passion that found no clear voice in her works, because it was one with the elemental nature in her, undefined, unuttered, unutterable. 

She was afraid of children; she was awkward with them; because suchpassion has shynesses, distances, and terrors unknown to the averagecomfortable women who become happy mothers. It has even its perversions, when love hardly knows itself from hate. Such love demands before allthings possession. It cries out for children of its own flesh and blood. I believe that there were moments when it was pain for Charlotte to seethe children born and possessed by other women. It must have been agonyto have to look after them, especially when the rule was that they werenot to "love the governess". 

The proofs of this are slender, but they are sufficient. There is littleGeorgette, the sick child that Lucy nurses in the Pensionnat: "LittleGeorgette still piped her plaintive wail, appealing to me by herfamiliar term, 'Minnie, Minnie, me very poorly!' till my heart ached. "... "I affected Georgette; she was a sensitive and loving child; to holdher in my lap, or carry her in my arms, was to me a treat. To-night shewould have me lay my head on the pillow of her crib; she even put herlittle arms round my neck. Her clasp and the nestling action with whichshe pressed her cheek to mine made me almost cry with a sort of tenderpain. "

Once during a spring-cleaning at Upperwood House Charlotte was Mrs. White's nursemaid as well as her governess, and she wrote: "By dint ofnursing the fat baby it has got to know me and be fond of me. I suspectmyself of growing rather fond of it. " Years later she wrote to Mrs. Gaskell, after staying with her: "Could you manage to convey a smallkiss to that dear but dangerous little person, Julia? Shesurreptitiously possessed herself of a minute fraction of my heart, which has been missing ever since I saw her. "

Mrs. Gaskell tells us that there was "a strong mutual attraction"between Julia, her youngest little girl, and Charlotte Brontë. "Thechild, " she says, "would steal her little hand into Miss Brontë'sscarcely larger one, and each took pleasure in this apparentlyunobserved caress. " May I suggest that children do not steal theirlittle hands into the hands of people who do not care for them? Theirinstinct is infallible. 

Charlotte Brontë tried to give an account of her feeling for children;it was something like the sacred awe of the lover. "Whenever I seeFlorence and Julia again I shall feel like a fond but bashful suitor, who views at a distance the fair personage to whom, in his clownish awe, he dare not risk a near approach. Such is the clearest idea I can giveyou of my feeling towards children I like, but to whom I am astranger--and to what children am I not a stranger?"

Extraordinary that Charlotte's critics have missed the pathos of that_cri de coeur_. It is so clearly an echo from the "house of bondage", where Charlotte was made a stranger to the beloved, where the belovedthrew stones and Bibles at her. You really have to allow for the shockof an experience so blighting. It is all part of the perversity of thefate that dogged her, that her feeling should have met with thatreverse. But it was there, guarded with a certain shy austerity. She"suspected" herself of getting rather fond of the baby. 

She hid her secret even from herself, as women will hide these things. But her dreams betrayed her after the way of dreams. Charlotte's dream(premonitory, she thought, of trouble) was that she carried a littlecrying child, and could not still its cry. "She described herself, " Mrs. Gaskell says, "as having the most painful sense of pity for the littlething, lying _inert_, as sick children do, while she walked about insome gloomy place with it, such as the aisle of Haworth Church. " Thisdream she gives to _Jane Eyre_, unconscious of its profound significanceand fitness. It is a pity that Mr. Swinburne did not pay attention toCharlotte's dream. 

All her life, I think, she suffered because of the perpetual insurgenceof this secret, impassioned, maternal energy. Hence the sting of Lewes'sfamous criticism, beginning: "The grand function of woman, it mustalways be remembered" (as if Charlotte had forgotten it!) "isMaternity"; and, working up from his criticism of that chapter in_Shirley_ to a climax of adjuration: "Currer Bell, if under your hearthad ever stirred a child; if to your bosom a babe had ever beenpressed--that mysterious part of your being, towards which all the restof it was drawn, in which your whole soul was transported andabsorbed--never could you have _imagined_ such a falsehood as that!" Itwas impossible for Charlotte to protest against anything but theabominable bad taste of Lewes's article, otherwise she might have toldhim that she probably knew rather more about those mysteries than hedid. It was she who gave us that supreme image of disastrous love. "Ilooked at my love; it shivered in my heart like a suffering child in acold cradle!"

And this woman died before her child was born. 

 * * * * *

Then there is Mrs. Oliphant again. Though she was not one of those whosaid Charlotte Brontë was not fond of children, though she would havedied rather than have joined Lewes in his unspeakable cry against her, Mrs. Oliphant made certain statements in no better taste than his. Shesuggests that Charlotte, fond or not fond of children, was too fond ofmatrimonial dreams. Her picture (the married woman's picture) is of anundesired and undesirable little spinster pining visibly and shamelesslyin a parsonage. She would have us believe that from morning till night, from night till morning, Charlotte Brontë in the Parsonage thought ofnothing but of getting married, that her dreams pursued, ruthlessly, thecasual visitor. The hopelessness of the dream, the undesirability ofCharlotte, is what makes her so irresistible to her sister novelist. 

There was "one subject", she says, "which Charlotte Brontë had at hercommand, having experienced in her own person, and seen her nearestfriends under the experience, of that solitude and longing of women ofwhich she has made so remarkable an exposition. The long silence of lifewithout an adventure or a change, the forlorn gaze out of windows whichnever show anyone coming who can rouse the slightest interest in themind, the endless years and days which pass and pass, carrying away thebloom, extinguishing the lights of youth, bringing a dreary middle agebefore which the very soul shrinks, while yet the sufferer feels howstrong is the current of life in her own veins, and how capable she isof all the active duties of existence--this was the essence and soul ofthe existence she knew best. Was there no help for it? Must the womenwait and see their lives thrown away, and have no power to savethemselves!

"The position, " she goes on, "in itself so tragic, is one which canscarcely be expressed without calling forth inevitable ridicule, a laughat the best, more often a sneer, at the women whose desire for a husbandis thus betrayed. Shirley and Caroline Helstone both cried out for thathusband with an indignation, a fire and impatience, a sense of wrong andinjury, which stopped the laugh for the moment. It might be ludicrous, but it was horribly genuine and true. " (This is more than can be said ofMrs. Oliphant's view of the adorable Shirley Keeldar who was EmilyBrontë. It is ludicrous enough, and it may be genuine, but it iscertainly not true. ) But Mrs. Oliphant is careful not to go too far. "Note, " she says, "there was nothing sensual about these young women. Itwas life they wanted; they knew nothing of the grosser thoughts whichthe world with its jeers attributes to them: of such thoughts they wereunconscious in a primitive innocence which, perhaps, only womenunderstand. " Yet she characterizes their "outcry" as "indelicate". "Allvery well to talk of women working for their living, finding newchannels for themselves, establishing their independence. How much havewe said of all that" (Mrs. Oliphant thinks that she is renderingCharlotte Brontë's thought), "endeavouring to persuade ourselves!Charlotte Brontë had the courage of her opinions. It was not educationnor a trade that her women wanted. It was not a living, but their sharein life.... Miss Brontë herself said correct things" (observe thatinsincerity is insinuated here) "about the protection which a trade isto a woman, keeping her from a mercenary marriage; but this was not inthe least the way of her heroines. " (Why, you naturally wonder, shouldit have been?) "They wanted to be happy, no doubt, but above all thingsthey wanted their share in life, to have their position by the side ofmen, which alone confers a natural equality, to have their shoulder tothe wheel, their hands on the reins of common life, to build up theworld and link the generations each to each. " (And very proper of them, too. ) "In her philosophy, marriage was the only state which procuredthis, and if she did not recommend a mercenary marriage she was at leastvery tolerant about its conditions, insisting less upon love than was tobe expected" (!) "and with a covert conviction in her mind, that if notone man, then another was better than any complete abandonment of thelarger path. Lucy Snowe for a long time had her heart very much set onDr. John and his placid breadth of Englishism; but when she finallyfound out that to be impossible her tears were soon dried by theprospect of Paul Emanuel, so unlike him, coming into his place. "

The obvious answer to all this is that Charlotte Brontë was writing inthe mid-Victorian age, about mid-Victorian women, the women whom she sawaround her; writing, without any "philosophy" or "covert conviction", inthe days before emancipation, when marriage was the only chance ofindependence that a woman had. It would have been marvellous, if she hadnot had her sister Emily before her, that in such an age she should haveconceived and created Shirley Keeldar. As for poor little Lucy with hertwo men, she is not the first heroine who mistook the false dawn for thetrue. Besides, Miss Brontë's "philosophy" was exactly the opposite tothat attributed to her, as anybody may see who reads _Shirley_. Inthese matters she burned what her age adored, and adored what it burned, a thorough revolutionary. 

But this is not the worst. Mrs. Oliphant professes to feel pity for hervictim. "Poor Charlotte Brontë! She has not been as other women, protected by the grave from all betrayal of the episodes in her ownlife. " (You would imagine they were awful, the episodes in CharlotteBrontë's life. ) "Everybody has betrayed her, and all she thought aboutthis one, and that, and every name that was ever associated with hers. There was a Mr. Taylor from London, about whom she wrote with greatfreedom to her friend, Miss Nussey, telling how the little man had come, how he had gone away without any advance in the affairs, how a chillcame over her when he appeared and she found him much less attractivethan when at a distance, yet how she liked it as little when he wentaway, and was somewhat excited about his first letter, and even went sofar as to imagine with a laugh that there might possibly be a dozenlittle Joe Taylors before all was over. "

This is atrocious. But the malice and bad taste of it are nothing to thegross carelessness and ignorance it reveals--ignorance of facts andidentities and names. Charlotte's suitor was Mr. James Taylor and notJoe. Joe, the brother of her friend, Mary Taylor, was married already toa lady called Amelia, and it is of Joe and his Amelia that Charlottewrites. "She must take heart" (Amelia had been singularly unsuccessful), "there may yet be a round dozen of little Joe Taylors to look after--runafter--to sort and switch and train up in the way they should go. "

Of Mr. James Taylor she writes more decorously. Miss Nussey, as usual, had been thinking unwarrantable things, and had made a most unbecomingjoke about Jupiter and Venus, which outraged Charlotte's "commonsense". "The idea of the little man, " says Charlotte, "shocks me less. He still sends his little newspaper; and the other day there came aletter of a bulk, volume, pith, judgment and knowledge, fit to have beenthe product of a giant. You may laugh as much and as wickedly as youplease, but the fact is, there is a quiet constancy about this, mydiminutive and red-haired friend, which adds a foot to his stature, turns his sandy locks dark, and altogether dignifies him a good deal inmy estimation. " This is all she says by way of appreciation. She sayslater, "His manners and his personal appearance scarcely pleased me morethan at the first interview.... I feel that in his way he has a regardfor me; a regard which I cannot bring myself entirely to reciprocate inkind, and yet its withdrawal leaves a painful blank. " Miss Nusseyevidently insists that Charlotte's feelings are engaged this time, arguing possibly from the "painful blank"; and Charlotte becomesexplicit. She speaks of the disadvantages of the alleged match, and wegather that Miss Nussey has been urging her to take the little man. "Butthere is another thing which forms a barrier more difficult to pass thanany of these. Would Mr. Taylor and I ever suit? Could I ever feel forhim enough love to accept him as a husband? Friendship--gratitude--esteemI have, but each moment he came near me, and that I could see his eyesfastened on me, my veins ran ice. Now that he is away, I feel farmore gently to him; it is only close by that I grow rigid--stiffeningwith a strange mixture of apprehension and anger--which nothingsoftens but his retreat, and a perfect subduing of his manner. "And again, "my conscience, I can truly say, does not _now_ accuseme of having treated Mr. Taylor with injustice or unkindness ... But with every disposition and with every wish, with every intentioneven to look on him in the most favourable point of view at his lastvisit, it was impossible to me in my inward heart to think of him as onethat might one day be acceptable as a husband. " Could anything be _more_explicit? There is a good deal more of it. After one very searchingcriticism of Mr. Taylor: "One does not like to say these things, but onehad better be honest. " And of her honesty Charlotte's letters on thissubject leave no doubt. There is not the smallest ground for supposingthat even for a moment had she thought of Mr. James Taylor as "one thatone day might be acceptable", much less is there for Mr. ClementShorter's suggestion that if he had come back from Bombay she would havemarried him. 

But Joe or James, it is all one to Mrs. Oliphant, with her theory ofCharlotte Brontë. "For her and her class, which did not speak of it, everything depended upon whether the women married or did not marry. Their thoughts were thus artificially fixed to one point in thehorizon. " The rest is repetition, ending in the astounding verdict: "Theseed she thus sowed has come to many growths that would have appalledCharlotte Brontë. But while it would be very unjust to blame her for thevagaries that have followed, and to which nothing could be lessdesirable than any building of the house or growth of the race, anyresponsibility or service, we must still believe that it was she whodrew the curtain first aside and opened the gates to imps of evilmeaning, polluting and profaning the domestic hearth. "

That is Mrs. Oliphant on Charlotte Brontë. 

And even Mr. Clement Shorter, who has dealt so admirably with outrageouslegends, goes half the way with the detractor. He has a theory thatCharlotte Brontë was a woman of morbid mood, "to whom the problem of sexappealed with all its complications", and that she "dwelt continually onthe problem of the ideal mate". 

Now Charlotte may have dreamed of getting married (there have been morecriminal dreams); she may have brooded continually over the problem ofthe ideal mate, only of all these dreams and broodings there is not oneatom of evidence--not one. Not a hint, not a trace, either in hercharacter as we know it, or in her very voluminous privatecorrespondence. The facts of her life disprove it. Her letters to EllenNussey (never meant for publication) reveal the workings of Charlotte'sfeminine mind when applied to "the sex problem"; a mind singularlywholesome and impersonal, and singularly detached. Charlotte is full oflights upon this awful subject of matrimony, which, by the way, hadconsiderably more interest for Miss Nussey than it had for her. In fact, if it had not been for Miss Nussey it would not have appeared so oftenas it did in Charlotte's letters. If you pay attention to the context (athing that theorists never do) you see, what is indeed obvious, that alarge portion of Charlotte Brontë's time was taken up in advising andcontrolling Ellen Nussey, that amiable and impulsive prototype ofCaroline Helstone. She is called upon in all Miss Nussey's hours ofcrisis, and there seem to have been a great many of them. "Do not, " shewrites, "be over-persuaded to marry a man you can never respect--I donot say _love_, because I think if you can respect a person beforemarriage, moderate love at least will come after; and as to intensepassion, I am convinced that that is no desirable feeling. In the firstplace, it seldom or never meets with a requital; and in the secondplace, if it did, the feeling would be only temporary; it would last thehoneymoon, and then, perhaps, give place to disgust, or indifference, worse perhaps than disgust. Certainly this would be the case on theman's part; and on the woman's--God help her if she is left to lovepassionately and alone. 

"I am tolerably well convinced that I shall never marry at all. "

And again, to Miss Nussey, six months later: "Did you not once say to mein all childlike simplicity, 'I thought, Charlotte, no young lady shouldfall in love till the offer was actually made'? I forgot what answer Imade at the time, but I now reply, after due consideration, Right as aglove, the maxim is just, and I hope you will always attend to it. Iwill even extend and confirm it: no young lady should fall in love tillthe offer has been made, accepted, the marriage ceremony performed, andthe first half-year of wedded life has passed away. A woman may thenbegin to love, but with great precaution, very coolly, very moderately, very rationally. If she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a coldlook cuts her to the heart, she is a fool. If she ever loves so muchthat her husband's will is her law, and that she has got into a habit ofwatching his looks in order that she may anticipate his wishes, she willsoon be a neglected fool. Did I not tell you of an instance... ?"

What could be more lucid, more light-hearted, and more sane? And ifCharlotte is suspicious of the dangers of her own temperament, that onlyproves her lucidity and sanity the more. 

Later, at Brussels, when confronted with "three or four people's" ideathat "the future _époux_ of Miss Brontë is on the Continent", shedefends herself against the "silly imputation". "Not that it is a crimeto marry, or a crime to wish to be married; but it is an imbecility, which I reject with contempt, for women, who have neither fortune norbeauty, to make marriage the principal object of their wishes and hopes, and the aim of all their actions; not to be able to convince themselvesthat they are unattractive, and that they had better be quiet, and thinkof other things than wedlock. " Can anything be clearer?

So much for herself. But she has to deal with Miss Nussey, indifficulties again, later: "Papa has two or three times expressed a fearthat since Mr. ---- paid you so much attention, he will, perhaps, havemade an impression on your mind which will interfere with your comfort. I tell him I think not, as I believe you to be mistress of yourself inthose matters. Still, he keeps saying that I am to write to you anddissuade you from thinking of him. I never saw Papa make himself souneasy about a thing of the kind before; he is usually very sarcastic onsuch subjects. 

"Mr. ---- be hanged! I never thought very well of him, and I am muchdisposed to think very ill of him at this blessed minute. I havediscussed the subject fully, for where is the use of being mysteriousand constrained?--it is not worth while. "

And yet again it is Ellen Nussey. "Ten years ago I should have laughedat your account of the blunder you made in mistaking the bachelor doctorof Bridlington for a married man. I should have certainly thought youscrupulous over-much, and wondered how you could possibly regret beingcivil to a decent individual merely because he happened to be singleinstead of double. Now, however, I can perceive that your scruples arefounded on common sense. I know that if women wish to escape the stigmaof husband-seeking, they must act and look like marble or clay--cold, expressionless, bloodless; for every appearance of feeling, of joy, sorrow, friendliness, antipathy, admiration, disgust, are alikeconstrued by the world into the attempt to" (I regret to say thatCharlotte wrote) "to hook a husband. "

Later, she has to advise her friend Mr. Williams as to a career for hisdaughter Louisa. And here she is miles ahead of her age, the age thatconsidered marriage the only honourable career for a woman. "Yourdaughters--no more than your sons--should be a burden on your hands. Your daughters--as much as your sons--should aim at making their wayhonourably through life. Do you not wish to keep them at home? Believeme, teachers may be hard-worked, ill-paid and despised, but the girl whostays at home doing nothing is worse off than the hardest-wrought andworst-paid drudge of a school. Whenever I have seen, not merely inhumble but in affluent houses, families of daughters sitting waiting tobe married, I have pitied them from my heart. It is doubtless well--verywell--if Fate decrees them a happy marriage; but, if otherwise, givetheir existence some object, their time some occupation, or thepeevishness of disappointment, and the listlessness of idleness willinfallibly degrade their nature.... Lonely as I am, how should I be ifProvidence had never given me courage to adopt a career... ? How should Ibe with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish wherethere is not a single educated family? In that case I should have noworld at all. As it is, something like a hope and a motive sustains mestill. I wish all your daughters--I wish every woman in England, hadalso a hope and a motive. "

Whatever the views of Charlotte Brontë's heroines may or may not havebeen, these were her own views--sober, sincere, and utterlydispassionate. Mrs. Oliphant set them aside, either in criminalcarelessness, or with still more criminal deliberation, because theyinterfered with her theory. They are certainly not the views of a womangiven to day-dreaming and window-gazing. Lucy Snowe may have had timefor window-gazing, but not Charlotte Brontë, what with her writing andher dusting, sweeping, ironing, bed-making, and taking the eyes out ofthe potatoes for poor old Tabby, who was too blind to see them. Window-gazing of all things! Mrs. Oliphant could not have fixed upon ahabit more absurdly at variance with Charlotte's character. 

For she was pure, utterly and marvellously pure from sentimentalism, which was (and she knew it) the worst vice of the Victorian age. Mr. Leslie Stephen said that, "Miss Brontë's sense of humour was butfeeble. " It was robust enough when it played with sentimentalists. Butas for love, for passion, she sees it with a tragic lucidity that isalmost a premonition. And her attitude was by no means that of theforedoomed spinster, making necessity her virtue. There was nonecessity. She had at least four suitors (quite a fair allowance for alittle lady in a lonely parish), and she refused them all. Twice in herlife, in her tempestuous youth, and at a crisis of her affairs, shechose "dependence upon coarse employers" before matrimony. She wasshrewd, lucid, fastidious, and saw the men she knew without any glamour. To the cold but thoroughly presentable Mr. Henry Nussey she repliedthus: "It has always been my habit to study the character of those amongwhom I chance to be thrown, and I think I know yours and can imaginewhat description of woman would suit you for a wife. The charactershould not be too marked, ardent and original, her temper should bemild, her piety undoubted, and her personal attractions sufficient toplease your eyes and gratify your just pride. As for me you do not knowme.... " She was only three-and-twenty when she wrote that, with theprospect of Stonegappe before her. For she had not, and could not havefor him, "that intense attachment which would make me willing to die forhim; and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that Iwill regard my husband". Later, in her worst loneliness she refused thatardent Mr. Taylor, who courted her by the novel means of newspapers sentwith violent and unremitting regularity through the post. He representedto some degree the larger life of intellectual interest. But he offendedher fastidiousness. She was sorry for the little man with his littlenewspaper, and that was all. She refused several times the man sheultimately married. He served a long apprenticeship to love, andCharlotte yielded to his distress rather than to her own passion. Shedescribes her engaged state as "very calm, very expectant. What I tasteof happiness is of the soberest order. I trust to love my husband. I amgrateful for his tender love for me.... Providence offers me thisdestiny. Doubtless then it is the best for me. "

These are not the words, nor is this the behaviour of Mrs. Oliphant'sCharlotte Brontë, the forlorn and desperate victim of the obsession ofmatrimony. 

I do not say that Charlotte Brontë had not what is called a"temperament"; her genius would not have been what it was without it;she herself would have been incomplete; but there never was a woman ofgenius who had her temperament in more complete subjection to hercharacter; and it is her character that you have to reckon with at everyturn. 

The little legends and the little theories have gone far enough. And hadthey gone no farther they would not have mattered much. They would atleast have left Charlotte Brontë's genius to its own mystery. 

But her genius was the thing that irritated, the enigmatic, inexplicablething. Talent in a woman you can understand, there's a formula forit--_tout talent de femme est un bonheur manqué_. So when a woman'stalent baffles you, your course is plain, _cherchez l'homme_. Charlotte's critics argued that if you could put your finger on the manyou would have the key to the mystery. This, of course, was arguing thather genius was, after all, only a superior kind of talent; but some ofthem had already begun to ask themselves, Was it, after all, anythingmore? So they began to look for the man. They were certain by this timethat there was one. 

The search was difficult; for Charlotte had concealed him well. But theyfound him at last in M. Constantin Héger, the little Professor of thePensionnat de Demoiselles in the Rue d'Isabelle. Sir Wemyss Reid hadsuggested a love-affair in Brussels to account for Charlotte'sdepression, which was unfavourable to his theory of the happy life. Mr. Leyland seized upon the idea, for it nourished his theory that Branwellwas an innocent lamb who had never caused his sisters a moment's misery. They _made_ misery for themselves out of his harmless peccadilloes. Mr. Angus Mackay in _The Brontës, Fact and Fiction_, gives us this fictionfor a fact. He is pleased with what he calls the "pathetic significance"of his "discovery". There _was_ somebody, there had to be, and it had tobe M. Héger, for there wasn't anybody else. Mr. Mackay draws back theveil with a gesture and reveals--the love-affair. He is very nice aboutit, just as nice as ever he can be. "We see her, " he says, "sorewounded in her affections, but unconquerable in her will. The discovery... Does not degrade the noble figure we know so well.... The moral ofher greatest works--that conscience must reign absolute at whatevercost--acquires a greater force when we realize how she herself camethrough the furnace of temptation with marks of torture on her, but withno stain on her soul. "

This is all very well, but the question is: _Did_ Charlotte come througha furnace? _Did_ she suffer from a great and tragic passion? It may havebeen so. For all we know she may have been in fifty furnaces; she mayhave gone from one fit of tragic passion to another. Only (apart fromgossip, and apart from the argument from the novels, which begs thequestion) we have no evidence to prove it. What we have points all theother way. 

Gossip apart, believers in the tragic passion have nourished theirtheory chiefly on that celebrated passage in a letter of Charlotte's toEllen Nussey: "I returned to Brussels after Aunt's death, prompted bywhat then seemed an irresistible impulse. I was punished for my selfishfolly by a withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace ofmind. "

Here we have the great disclosure. By "irresistible impulse" and"selfish folly", Charlotte could only mean indulgence in an illegitimatepassion for M. Héger's society. Peace of mind bears but oneinterpretation. 

Mr. Clement Shorter, to his infinite credit, will have none of this. Hemaintains very properly that the passage should be left to bear thesimple construction that Miss Nussey and Mr. Nicholls put upon it. But Iwould go farther. I am convinced that not only does that passage bearthat construction, but that it will not bear the weight of any other. 

In eighteen-forty-two Charlotte's aunt died, and Charlotte became thehead of her father's household. She left her father's house in a time oftrouble, prompted by "an irresistible impulse" towards what we shouldnow call self-development. Charlotte, more than two years later, in amoment of retrospective morbidity, called it "selfish folly". In thatdark mid-Victorian age it was sin in any woman to leave her home if herhome required her. And with her aunt dead, and her brother Branwelldrowning his grief for his relative in drink, and her father going blindand beginning in his misery to drink a little too, Charlotte felt thather home did require her. Equally she felt that either Emily or she hadgot to turn out and make a living, and since it couldn't possibly beEmily it must be she. The problem would have been quite simple even forCharlotte--but _she wanted to go_. Therefore her tender consciencevacillated. When you remember that Charlotte Brontë's conscience was, next to her genius, the largest, and at the same time the most delicatepart of her, and that her love for her own people was a sacred passion, her words are sufficiently charged with meaning. A passion for M. Hégeris, psychologically speaking, superfluous. You can prove anything bydetaching words from their context. The letter from which that passagehas been torn is an answer to Ellen Nussey's suggestions of work forCharlotte. Charlotte says "any project which infers the necessity of myleaving home is impracticable to me. If I could leave home I should notbe at Haworth now. I know life is passing away, and I am doing nothing, earning nothing--a very bitter knowledge it is at moments--but I see noway out of the mist"; and so on for another line or two, and then:"These ideas sting me keenly sometimes; but whenever I consult myconscience it affirms that I am doing right in staying at home, andbitter are its upbraidings when I yield to an eager desire for release. "And then, the passage quoted _ad nauseam_, to support the legend of M. Héger. 

A "total withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace ofmind". This letter is dated October 1846--more than two years since herreturn from Brussels in January, eighteen-forty-four. In those two yearsher father was threatened with total blindness, and her brother Branwellachieved his destiny. The passage refers unmistakably to events atHaworth. It is further illuminated by another passage from an earlierletter. Ellen Nussey is going through the same crisis--torn between dutyto herself and duty to her people. She asks Charlotte's advice andCharlotte gives judgment: "The right path is that which necessitates thegreatest sacrifice of self-interest. " The sacrifice, observe, not ofhappiness, not of passion, but of self-interest, the development ofself. It was self-development, and not passion, not happiness, that shewent to Brussels for. 

And Charlotte's letters from Brussels--from the scene of passion in theyear of crisis, eighteen-forty-three--sufficiently reveal the nature ofthe trouble there. Charlotte was alone in the Pensionnat without Emily. Emily was alone at Haworth. The few friends she had in Brussels leftsoon after her arrival. She was alone in Brussels, and her homesicknesswas terrible. You can trace the malady in all its stages. In March shewrites: "I ought to consider myself well off, and to be thankful for mygood fortune. I hope I am thankful" (clearly she isn't thankful in theleast!), "and if I could always keep up my spirits and never feel lonelyor long for companionship or friendship, or whatever they call it, Ishould do very well. " In the same letter you learn that she is givingEnglish lessons to M. Héger and his brother-in-law, M. Chapelle. "If youcould see and hear the efforts I make to teach them to pronounce likeEnglishmen, and their unavailing attempts to imitate, you would laugh toall eternity. " Charlotte is at first amused at the noises made by M. Héger and his brother-in-law. 

In May the noises made by Monsieur fail to amuse. Still, she is"indebted to him for all the pleasure or amusement" that she had, and inspite of her indebtedness, she records a "total want of companionship". "I lead an easeful, stagnant, silent life, for which ... I ought to bevery thankful" (but she is not). May I point out that though you may be"silent" in the first workings of a tragic and illegitimate passion, youare not "stagnant", and certainly not "easeful". 

At the end of May she finds out that Madame Héger does not like her, andMonsieur is "wondrously influenced" by Madame. Monsieur has in a greatmeasure "withdrawn the light of his countenance", but Charlotteapparently does not care. In August the _vacancies_ are at hand, andeverybody but Charlotte is going home. She is consequently "in lowspirits; earth and heaven are dreary and empty to me at this moment".... "I can hardly write, I have such a dreary weight at my heart. " But shewill see it through. She will stay some months longer "till I haveacquired German". And at the end: "Everybody is abundantly civil, buthomesickness comes creeping over me. I cannot shake it off. " That was inSeptember, in M. Héger's absence. Later, she tells Emily how she wentinto the cathedral and made "a real confession _to see what it waslike_". Charlotte's confession has been used to bolster up the theory ofthe "temptation". Unfortunately for the theory it happened inSeptember, when M. Héger and temptation were not there. In October shefinds that she no longer trusts Madame Héger. At the same time "solitudeoppresses me to an excess". She gave notice, and M. Héger flew into apassion and commanded her to stay. She stayed very much against, not herconscience, but her will. In the same letter and the same connection shesays, "I have much to say--many little odd things, queer and puzzlingenough--which I do not like to trust to a letter, but which one dayperhaps, or rather one evening--if ever we should find ourselves by thefireside at Haworth or Brookroyd, with our feet on the fender curlingour hair--I may communicate to you. "

Charlotte is now aware of a situation; she is interested in it, intellectually, not emotionally. 

In November: "Twinges of homesickness cut me to the heart, now andthen. " On holidays "the silence and loneliness of all the house weighsdown one's spirits like lead.... Madame Héger, good and kind as I havedescribed her" (_i. E. _ for all her goodness and kindness), "never comesnear me on these occasions. " ... "She is not colder to me than she is tothe other teachers, but they are less dependent on her than I am. " Butthe situation is becoming clearer. Charlotte is interested. "I fancy Ibegin to perceive the reason of this mighty distance and reserve; itsometimes makes me laugh, and at other times nearly cry. When I am sureof it I will tell you. "

There can be no doubt that before she left Brussels Charlotte was sure;but there is no record of her ever having told. 

The evidence from the letters is plain enough. But the first thing thatthe theorist does is to mutilate letters. He suppresses all those partsof a correspondence which tell against his theory. When these torn andbleeding passages are restored piously to their contexts they aredestructive to the legend of tragic passion. They show (as Mr. ClementShorter has pointed out) that throughout her last year at BrusselsCharlotte Brontë saw hardly anything of M. Héger. They also show thatbefore very long Charlotte had a shrewd suspicion that Madame hadarranged it so, and that it was not so much the absence of Monsieur thatdisturbed her as the extraordinary behaviour of Madame. And they showthat from first to last she was incurably homesick. 

Now if Charlotte had been in any degree, latently, or increasingly, orviolently in love with M. Héger, she would have been as miserable as youlike in M. Héger's house, but she would not have been homesick; shewould not, I think, have worried quite so much about Madame's behaviour;and she would have found the clue to it sooner than she did. 

To me it is all so simple and self-evident that, if the story were notrevived periodically, if it had not been raked up again only the otherday, [A] there would be no need to dwell upon anything so pitiful andsilly. 

[Footnote A: See _The Key to the Brontë Works_, by J. Malham-Dembleby, 1911. ]

It rests first and foremost on gossip, silly, pitiful gossip andconjecture. Gossip in England, gossip in Brussels, conjecture all round. Above all, it rests on certain feline hints supplied by Madame Héger andher family. Charlotte's friends were always playfully suspecting her oflove-affairs. They could never put their fingers on the man, and theymissed M. Héger. It would never have occurred to their innocentmid-Victorian minds to suspect Charlotte of an attachment to a marriedman. It would not have occurred to Charlotte to suspect herself of it. But Madame Héger was a Frenchwoman, and she had not a mid-Victorianmind, and she certainly suspected Charlotte of an attachment, a flagrantattachment, to M. Héger. It is well known that Madame made statements tothat effect, and it is admitted on all hands that Madame had beenjealous. It may fairly be conjectured that it was M. Héger and notCharlotte who gave her cause, slight enough in all conscience, butsufficient for Madame Héger. She did not understand these Platonicrelations between English teachers and their French professors. She hadnever desired Platonic relations with anybody herself, and she sawnothing but annoyance in them for everybody concerned. Madame's attitudeis the clue to the mystery, the clue that Charlotte found. She accusedthe dead Charlotte of an absurd and futile passion for her husband; shestated that she had had to advise the living Charlotte to moderate theardour of her admiration for the engaging professor; but the truth, asCharlotte in the end discovered, was that for a certain brief periodMadame was preposterously jealous. M. Héger confessed as much when heasked Charlotte to address her letters to him at the Athénée Royaleinstead of the Pensionnat. The correspondence, he said, was disagreeableto his wife. 

Why, in Heaven's name, disagreeable, if Madame Héger suspected Charlotteof an absurd and futile passion? And why should Madame Héger have beenjealous of an absurd and futile woman, a woman who had seen so little ofMadame Héger's husband, and who was then in England? I cannot agree withMr. Shorter that M. Héger regarded Charlotte with indifference. He was aFrenchman, and he had his vanity, and no doubt the frank admiration ofhis brilliant pupil appealed to it vividly in moments of conjugaldepression. Charlotte herself must have had some attraction for M. Héger. Madame perceived the appeal and the attraction, and she wasjealous; therefore her interpretation of appearances could not have beenso unflattering to Charlotte as she made out. Madame, in fact, suspected, on her husband's part, the dawning of an attachment. We knownothing about M. Héger's attachment, and we haven't any earthly right toknow; but from all that is known of M. Héger it is certain that, if itwas not entirely intellectual, not entirely that "_affection presquepaternelle_" that he once professed, it was entirely restrained andinnocent and honourable. It is Madame Héger with her jealousy who hasgiven the poor gentleman away. Monsieur's state of mind--extremelytemporary--probably accounted for "those many odd little things, queerand puzzling enough", which Charlotte would not trust to a letter;matter for curl-paper confidences and no more. 

Of course there is the argument from the novels, from _The Professor_, from _Jane Eyre_, from _Villette_. I have not forgotten it. But reallyit begs the question. It moves in an extremely narrow and an extremelyvicious circle. Jane Eyre was tried in a furnace of temptation, therefore Charlotte must have been tried. Lucy Snowe and Frances Henriloved and suffered in Brussels. Therefore Charlotte must have loved andsuffered there. And if Charlotte loved and suffered and was tried in afurnace of temptation, that would account for Frances and for Lucy andfor Jane. 

No; the theorists who have insisted on this tragic passion have notreckoned with Charlotte Brontë's character, and its tremendous power ofself-repression. If at Brussels any disastrous tenderness had raised itshead it wouldn't have had a chance to grow an inch. But Charlotte hadlarge and luminous ideas of friendship. She was pure, utterly pure fromall the illusions and subtleties and corruptions of the sentimentalist, and she could trust herself in friendship. She brought to it ardours andvehemences that she would never have allowed to love. If she let herselfgo in her infrequent intercourse with M. Héger, it was because she wasso far from feeling in herself the possibility of passion. That was whyshe could say, "I think, however long I live, I shall not forget whatthe parting with M. Héger cost me. It grieved me so much to grieve himwho has been so true, kind, and disinterested a friend. " That was howshe could bring herself to write thus to Monsieur: "_Savez-vous ce que jeferais, Monsieur? J'écrirais un livre et je le dédierais à mon maître delittérature, au seul maître que j'aie jamais eu--à vous Monsieur! Jevous ai dit souvent en français combien je vous respecte, combien jesuis redevable à votre bonté à vos conseils. Je voudrais le dire unefois en anglais ... Le souvenir de vos bontés ne s'effacera jamais de mamémoire, et tant que ce souvenir durera le respect que vous m'avezinspiré durera aussi. _" For "_je vous respecte_" we are not entitled toread "_je vous aime_". Charlotte was so made that kindness shown hermoved her to tears of gratitude. When Charlotte said "respect" she meantit. Her feeling for M. Héger was purely what Mr. Matthew Arnold saidreligion was, an affair of "morality touched with emotion". All herutterances, where there is any feeling in them, no matter what, have apoignancy, a vibration which is Brontësque and nothing more. And thisBrontësque quality is what the theorists have (like Madame Héger, andpossibly Monsieur) neither allowed for nor understood. 

 * * * * *

For this "fiery-hearted Vestal", this virgin, sharp-tongued andsharper-eyed, this scorner of amorous curates, had a genius forfriendship. This genius, like her other genius, was narrow in its rangeand opportunity, and for that all the more ardent and intense. It fed onwhat came to its hand. It could even grow, like her other genius, withastounding vitality out of strange and hostile soil. She seems to havehad many friends, obscure and great; the obscure, the Dixons, theWheelrights, the Taylors, the Nusseys, out of all proportion to thegreat. But properly speaking she had only two friends, Mary Taylor andEllen Nussey, the enchanting, immortal "Nel". 

There _is_ something at first sight strange and hostile about MaryTaylor, the energetic, practical, determined, terribly robust person yousee so plainly trying, in the dawn of their acquaintance, to knock thenonsense out of Charlotte. Mary Taylor had no appreciation of theBrontësque. When Charlotte told Mary Taylor that at Cowan Bridge sheused to stand in the burn on a stone to watch the water flow by, MaryTaylor told Charlotte that she should have gone fishing. When _JaneEyre_ appeared she wrote to Charlotte in a strain that is amusing toposterity. There is a touch of condescension in her praise. She isevidently surprised at anything so great coming out of Charlotte. "Itseemed to me incredible that you had actually written a book. " "You arevery different from me, " she says, "in having no doctrine to preach. Itis impossible to squeeze a moral out of your production. " She isthinking of his prototype when she criticizes the character of St. JohnRivers. "A missionary either goes into his office for a piece of bread, or he goes for enthusiasm, and that is both too good and too bad aquality for St. John. It's a bit of your absurd charity to believe insuch a man. " As an intellectual woman Mary Taylor realized CharlotteBrontë's intellect, but it is doubtful if she ever fully realized what, beyond an intellect, she had got hold of in her friend. She was a womanof larger brain than Ellen Nussey, she was loyal and warm-hearted to thelast degree, but it was not given to her to see in Charlotte Brontë whatEllen Nussey, little as you would have expected it, had seen. She didnot keep her letters. She burnt them "in a fit of caution", which mayhave been just as well. 

But Mary Taylor is important. She had, among her more tender qualities, an appalling frankness. It was she who told poor little Charlotte thatshe was very ugly. Charlotte never forgot it. You can feel in herletters, in her novels, in her whole nature, the long reverberation ofthe shock. She said afterwards: "You did me a great deal of good, Polly, " by which she meant that Polly had done her an infinity of harm. 

Her friends all began by trying to do her good. Even Ellen Nussey tried. Charlotte is very kindly cautioned against being "tempted by thefondness of my sisters to consider myself of too much importance", andin a parenthesis Ellen Nussey begs her not to be offended. "Oh, Ellen, "Charlotte writes, "do you think I could be offended by any good adviceyou may give me?" She thanks her heartily, and loves her "if possibleall the better for it". Ellen Nussey in her turn asks Charlotte to tellher of her faults and "cease flattering her". Charlotte very sensiblyrefuses; and it is not till she has got away from her sisters that herown heart-searchings begin. They are mainly tiresome, but there is aflash of revelation in her reply to "the note you sent me with theumbrella". "My darling, if I were like you, I should have to faceZionwards, though prejudice and error might occasionally fling a mistover the glorious vision before me, for with all your single-heartedsincerity you have your faults, but _I_ am not like you. If you knew mythoughts; the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that attimes eats me up, and makes me feel society, as it is, wretchedlyinsipid, you would pity me, and I dare say despise me. " Miss Nusseywrites again, and Charlotte trembles "all over with excitement" afterreading her note. "I will no longer shrink from your question, " shereplies. "I _do_ wish to be better than I am. I pray fervently sometimesto be made so ... This very night I will pray as you wish me. "

But Charlotte is not in the least like Ellen Nussey, and she stillrefuses to be drawn into any return of this dangerous play with afriend's conscience and her nerves. "I will not tell you all I think andfeel about you, Ellen. I will preserve unbroken that reserve which aloneenables me to maintain a decent character for judgment; but for that, Ishould long ago have been set down by all who knows me as a Frenchifiedfool. You have been very kind to me of late, and gentle, and you havespared me those little sallies of ridicule, which, owing to my miserableand wretched touchiness of character, used formerly to make me wince, asif I had been touched with hot iron. Things that nobody else cares forenter into my mind and rankle there like venom. I know these feelingsare absurd, and therefore I try to hide them, but they only sting thedeeper for concealment. I'm an idiot!"

Miss Nussey seems to have preserved her calm through all the excitementand to have never turned a hair. But nothing could have been worse forCharlotte than this sort of thing. It goes on for years. It began ineighteen-thirty-three, the third year of their friendship, when she wasseventeen. In 'thirty-seven it is at its height. Charlotte writes fromDewsbury Moor: "If I could always live with you, if your lips and minecould at the same time drink the same draught at the same pure fountainof mercy, I hope, I trust, I might one day become better, far betterthan my evil, wandering thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spiritand warm to the flesh, will now permit me to be. I often plan thepleasant life we might lead, strengthening each other in the power ofself-denial, that hallowed and glowing devotion which the past Saints ofGod often attained to. "

Now a curious and interesting thing is revealed by this correspondence. These religious fervours and depressions come on the moment Charlotteleaves Haworth and disappear as soon as she returns. All those letterswere written from Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor, while the Haworth lettersof the same period are sane and light-hearted. And when she is fairlysettled at Haworth, instead of emulating the Saints of God, she and MissNussey are studying human nature and the art of flirtation as exhibitedby curates. Charlotte administers to her friend a formidable amount ofworldly wisdom, thus avenging herself for the dance Miss Nussey led herround the throne of grace. 

For, though that morbid excitement and introspection belonged solely toCharlotte's days of exile, Miss Nussey was at the bottom of it. MaryTaylor would have been a far robuster influence. But Charlotte'sfriendship for Mary Taylor, warm as it was, strikes cold beside herpassionate affection for Ellen Nussey. She brought her own fire to that, and her own extraordinary capacity for pain. Her letters show everyphase of this friendship, its birth, its unfolding; and then the suddenleaping of the flame, its writhing and its torture. She writes with alover's ardour and impatience. "Write to me very soon and dispel myuncertainty, or I shall get impatient, almost irritable. " "I read yourletter with dismay. Ellen--what shall I do without you? Why are we to bedenied each other's society? It is an inscrutable fatality.... Why arewe to be divided?" (She is at Roe Head, and Roe Head suggests theanswer. ) "Surely, Ellen, it must be because we are in danger of lovingeach other too well--of losing sight of the _Creator_ in idolatry of the_creature_. " She prays to be resigned, and records "a sweet, placidsensation like those that I remember used to visit me when I was alittle child, and on Sunday evenings in summer stood by the windowreading the life of a certain French nobleman who attained a purer andhigher degree of sanctity than has been known since the days of theEarly Martyrs. I thought of my own Ellen--" "I wish I could see you, mydarling; I have lavished the warmest affections of a very hot tenaciousheart upon you; if you grow cold, it is over. " She was only twenty-one. 

A few more years and the leaping and the writhing and the torture cease, the fire burns to a steady, inextinguishable glow. There is gaiety inCharlotte's tenderness. She is "infuriated" on finding a jar in hertrunk. "At first I hoped it was empty, but when I found it heavy andreplete, I could have hurled it all the way back to Birstall. However, the inscription A. B. Softened me much. You ought first to be tenderlykissed, and then as tenderly whipped. Emily is just now sitting on thefloor of the bedroom where I am writing, looking at her apples. Shesmiled when I gave them and the collar as your presents, with anexpression at once well pleased and slightly surprised. "

The religious fervours and the soul-searchings have ceased long ago, sohas Miss Nussey's brief spiritual ascendency. But the friendship and theletters never cease. They go on for twenty years, through exile andsuffering, through bereavement, through fame and through marriage, uninterrupted and, except for one brief period, unabridged. There isnothing in any biography to compare with those letters to Ellen Nussey. If Charlotte Brontë had not happened to be a great genius as well as agreat woman, they alone would have furnished forth her completebiography. There is no important detail of her mere life that is notgiven in them. Mrs. Gaskell relied almost entirely on them, and oninformation supplied to her by Miss Nussey. And each critic andbiographer who followed her, from Sir Wemyss Reid to Mr. ClementShorter, drew from the same source. Miss Nussey was almost the only saferepository of material relating to Charlotte Brontë. She had possessedhundreds of her letters and, with that amiable weakness which was thedefect of her charming quality, she was unable to withhold any of themfrom the importunate researcher. There seems to have been nothing, except one thing, that Charlotte did not talk about to Miss Nussey whenthey sat with their feet on the fender and their hair in curl-papers. That one thing was her writing. It is quite possible that in thosecurl-paper confidences Miss Nussey learnt the truth about Charlotte'sfriend, M. Héger. She never learnt anything about Charlotte's genius. Ineverything that concerned her genius Charlotte was silent and secretwith her friend. That was the line, the very sharp and impassable lineshe drew between her "dear, _dear_ Ellen", her "dearest Nel", and hersisters, Anne and Emily. The freemasonry of friendship ended there. Youmay search in vain through even her later correspondence with MissNussey for any more than perfunctory and extraneous allusions to herworks. It was as if they had never been. Every detail of her daily lifeis there, the outer and the inner things, the sewing and ironing andpotato-peeling, together with matters of the heart and soul, searchings, experiences, agonies; the figures of her father, her brother, hersisters, move there, vivid and alive; and old Tabby and the curates; andthe very animals, Keeper and Flossie, and the little black cat, Tom, that died and made Emily sorry; but of the one thing not a word. Theletters to Ellen Nussey following the publication of _Jane Eyre_ are allfull of gossip about Miss Ringrose and the Robinsons. Presently Ellenhears a rumour of publication. Charlotte repudiates it and frictionfollows. 

Charlotte writes: "Dear Ellen, --write another letter and explain thatnote of yours distinctly.... Let me know what you heard, and from whomyou heard it. You do wrong to feel pain from any circumstance, or tosuppose yourself slighted.... " "Dear Ellen, --All I can say to you abouta certain matter is this: the report ... Must have had its origin insome absurd misunderstanding. I have given _no one_ a right to affirm orhint in the most distant manner that I am publishing (humbug!). Whoeverhas said it--if anyone has, which I doubt--is no friend of mine. Thoughtwenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none. I scout the ideautterly. Whoever, after I have distinctly rejected the charge, urges itupon me, will do an unkind and ill-bred thing. " If Miss Nussey is asked, she is authorized by Miss Brontë to say, "that she repels and disownsevery accusation of the kind. You may add, if you please, that if anyonehas her confidence, you believe you have, and she has made no drivellingconfessions to you on that subject. " "Dear Ellen, --I shall begin bytelling you that you have no right to be angry at the length of time Ihave suffered to slip by since receiving your last, without answeringit; because you have often kept me waiting much longer, and having madethis gracious speech, thereby obviating reproaches, I will add that Ithink it a great shame, when you receive a long and thoroughlyinteresting letter, full of the sort of details you fully relish, toread the same with selfish pleasure, and not even have the manners tothank your correspondent, and express how very much you enjoyed thenarrative. I _did_ enjoy the narrative in your last very keenly.... Which of the Miss Woolers did you see at Mr. Allbutts?"

A beautiful but most unequal friendship. "The sort of details you fullyrelish--" How that phrase must have rankled! You can hear the passionateprotest: "Those details are not what I relish in the least. Putting meoff with your Woolers and your Allbutts! If only you had told me about_Jane Eyre_!" For it turned out that all the time Mary Taylor had beentold. The inference was that Mary Taylor, with her fits of caution, could be trusted. 

This silence of Charlotte's must have been most painful andincomprehensible to the poor Ellen who was Caroline Helstone. She hadbeen the first to divine Charlotte's secret; for she kept the letters. She must have felt like some tender and worshipping wife to whom alldoors in the house of the beloved are thrown open, except the door ofthe sanctuary, which is persistently slammed in her charming face. Theremust have come to her moments of terrible insight when she felt thedanger and the mystery of the flaming spirit she had tried to hold. ButCharlotte's friend can wear her half-pathetic immortality with grace. She could at least say: "She told me things she never told anyone else. I have hundreds of her letters. And I had her heart. "

 * * * * *

Nothing so much as this correspondence reveals the appalling solitude inwhich the Brontës lived. Here is their dearest and most intimate friend, and she is one to whom they can never speak of the thing that interestedthem most. No doubt "our best plays mean secret plays"; but Charlotte, at any rate, suffered from this secrecy. There was nothing to counteractMiss Nussey's direful influence on her spiritual youth. "Papa" highlyapproved of the friendship. He wished it to continue, and it did; and itwas the best that Charlotte had. I know few things more pathetic thanthe cry that Charlotte, at twenty-one, sent out of her solitude (withsome verses) to Southey and to Wordsworth. Southey told her that, "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought notto be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisurewill she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. Tothose duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will beless eager for celebrity. " A sound, respectable, bourgeois opinion sofar, but Southey went farther. "Write poetry for its own sake, " he said;and he could hardly have said better. Charlotte treasured the letter, and wrote on the cover of it, "Southey's advice, to be kept for ever. "Wordsworth's advice, I am sorry to say, provoked her to flippancy. 

And that, out of the solitude, was all. Not the ghost, not the shadow ofan Influence came to the three sisters. There never was genius that owedso little to influence as theirs. 

I know that in Charlotte's case there is said to have been an Influence. An Influence without which she would have remained for ever inobscurity, with _Villette_, with _Shirley_, with _Jane Eyre_, with _TheProfessor_, unborn, unconceived. 

Need I say that the Influence is--M. Héger?

"The sojourn in Brussels, " says Mr. Clement Shorter, "made Miss Brontëan author, " and he is only following Sir Wemyss Reid, who was the firstto establish Brussels as the turning-point. Mr. Shorter does not believein M. Héger as the inspirer of passion, but he does believe in him asthe inspirer of genius. He thinks it exceedingly probable that had notcircumstances led Charlotte Brontë to spend some time at Brussels notonly would "the world never have heard of her", but it would never haveheard of her sisters. He is quite certain about Charlotte anyhow; shecould not have "arrived" had she not met M. Héger. "She went, " he says, "to Brussels full of the crude ambitions, the semi-literary impulsesthat are so common on the fringe of the writing world. She left Brusselsa woman of genuine cultivation, of educated tastes, armed with just theequipment that was to enable her to write the books of which twogenerations of her countrymen have been justly proud. "

This is saying that Charlotte Brontë had no means of expression beforeshe wrote _devoirs_ under M. Héger. True, her genius did not find itselfuntil after she left Brussels, that is to say, not until she was nearlythirty. I have not read any of her works as Lord Charles Albert FlorianWellesley, and I do not imagine they were works of genius. But that onlymeans that Charlotte Brontë's genius took time. She was one of thosenovelists who do not write novels before they are nearly thirty. But shecould write. Certain fragments of her very earliest work show that fromthe first she had not only the means, but very considerable mastery ofexpression. What is more, they reveal in germ the qualities that markedher style in its maturity. Her styles rather, for she had several. Thereis her absolutely simple style, in which she is perfect; her didacticstyle, her fantastic style, which are mere temporary aberrations; andher inspired style, in which at her worst she is merely flamboyant andredundant, and at her best no less than perfect. You will find a faint, embryonic foreshadowing of her perfections in the fragments given byMrs. Gaskell. There is THE HISTORY OF THE YEAR 1829, beginning: "OncePapa lent my sister Maria a book. It was an old geography book; shewrote on its blank leaf, "Papa lent me this book. " This book is ahundred and twenty years old; it is at this moment lying before me. While I write this I am in the kitchen of the Parsonage, Haworth; Tabby, the servant, is washing up the breakfast things, and Anne, my youngestsister (Maria was my eldest), is kneeling on a chair, looking at somecakes, which Tabby has been baking for us. " You cannot beat that forpure simplicity of statement. There is another fragment that might havecome straight out of _Jane Eyre_. "One night, about the time when thecold sleet and stormy fogs of November are succeeded by the snowstormsand high piercing night-winds of confirmed winter, we were all sittinground the warm, blazing kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrelwith Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which shecame off victorious, no candle having been produced. " And there is adream-story that Mr. Clement Shorter gives. She is in the "Mines ofCracone", under the floor of the sea. "But in the midst of all thismagnificence I felt an indescribable sense of fear and terror, for thesea raged above us, and by the awful and tumultuous noises of roaringwinds and dashing waves, it seemed as if the storm was violent. And nowthe massy pillars groaned beneath the pressure of the ocean, and theglittering arches seemed about to be overwhelmed. When I heard therushing waters and saw a mighty flood rolling towards me I gave a loudshriek of terror. " The dream changes: she is in a desert full of barrenrocks and high mountains, where she sees "by the light of his own fieryeyes a royal lion rousing himself from his kingly slumbers. His terribleeye was fixed upon me, and the desert rang, and the rocks echoed withthe tremendous roar of fierce delight which he uttered as he sprangtowards me. " And there is her letter to the editor of one of their_Little Magazines_: "Sir, --It is well known that the Genii have declaredthat unless they perform certain arduous duties every year, of amysterious nature, all the worlds in the firmament will be burnt up, andgathered together in one mighty globe, which will roll in solitarysplendour through the vast wilderness of space, inhabited only by thefour high princes of the Genii, till time shall be succeeded byEternity; and the impudence of this is only to be paralleled by anotherof their assertions, namely, that by their magic might they can reducethe world to a desert, the purest waters to streams of livid poison, andthe clearest lakes to stagnant water, the pestilential vapours of whichshall slay all living creatures, except the bloodthirsty beast of theforest, and the ravenous bird of the rock. But that in the midst of thisdesolation the palace of the chief Genii shall rise sparkling in thewilderness, and the horrible howl of their war-cry shall spread over theland at morning, at noontide, and at night; but that they shall havetheir annual feast over the bones of the dead, and shall yearly rejoicewith the joy of victors. I think, sir, that the horrible wickedness ofthis needs no remark, and therefore I hasten to subscribe myself, etc. "

Puerile, if you like, and puerile all the stuff that Charlotte Brontëwrote before eighteen-forty-six; but her style at thirteen, in its veryrhythms and cadences, is the unmistakable embryo of her style at thirty;and M. Héger no more cured her of its faults that he could teach her itssplendours. Something that was not Brussels made Miss Brontë aprodigious author at thirteen. The mere mass of her _Juvenilia_testifies to a most ungovernable bent. Read the list of works, appallingin their length, which this child produced in a period of fifteenmonths; consider that she produced nothing but melancholy letters duringher "sojourn in Brussels"; and compare M. Héger's academic precepts withher practice, with the wild sweep and exuberance of her style when shehas shaken him off, and her genius gets possession of her. 

I know there is a gulf fixed between Currer Bell and Charles Townsend, who succeeded Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley and the Marquis ofDouro, about eighteen-thirty-eight; but it is bridged by the later_Poems_ which show Charlotte's genius struggling through a wrong mediumto the right goal. She does not know--after the sojourn in Brussels shedoes not yet know--that her right medium is prose. She knew no more thanshe knew in November, eighteen-forty-one, when, on the eve of her flightfrom Haworth, she writes: "The plain fact is, I was not, I am not now, certain of my destiny. " It was not until two years after she hadreturned to Haworth that she received her certainty. For posterity, overpowered by the labour of the Brontë specialists, it may seem as ifCharlotte Brontë's genius owed everything to her flight from Haworth. Inreality her flight merely coincided with the inevitable shooting of itswings; and the specialists have mistaken coincidence for destiny. 

Heaven only knows what would have happened to her genius if, blind toher destiny, she had remained in Brussels. For, once there, itswing-feathers left off growing. Its way was blocked by every conceivablehostile and obstructive thing. Madame Héger was hostile, and Monsieur, Ithink, purely obstructive. Emily saw through him, and denounced hismethod as fatal to all originality. Charlotte, to be sure, called him"my dear master, the only master that I ever had", but if that was nother "absurd charity", it was only her Brontësque way. There was no sensein which he was her master. He taught her French; to the very last thehabit of using "a few French words" was the King Charles's head in hermanuscripts; and the French he taught her did her harm. The restraint hecould and would have taught her she never learnt until her genius hadhad, in defiance and in spite of him, its full fling. 

And what a fling! It is the way of genius to look after itself. In spiteof obstacles, Charlotte Brontë's took hold of every man and woman thatcrossed and barred its path, and ultimately it avenged itself onMonsieur and on Madame Héger. Those two were made for peaceful, honourable conjugal obscurity, but it was their luck to harbour ahalf-fledged and obstructed genius in their Pensionnat, a geniusthirsting for experience; and somehow, between them, they contrived tomake it suffer. That was their tragedy. Monsieur's case is pitiful; forhe was kind and well-meaning, and he was fond of Charlotte; and yet, because of Charlotte, there is no peace for him in the place where hehas gone. Her genius has done with him, but her ghost, like some malignand awful destiny, pursues him. No sooner does he sink back quiet in hisgrave than somebody unearths him. Why cannot he be allowed to rest, oncefor all, in his amiable unimportance? He became, poor man, importantonly by the use that Charlotte's genius made of him. It seized him as itwould have seized on any other interesting material that came its way. Without him we might have had another Rochester, and we should not havehad any Paul Emanuel, which would have been a pity; that is all. 

There is hardly any hope that Brontë specialists will accept this view. For them the sojourn in Brussels will still stand as the turning-pointin Charlotte Brontë's career. Yet for her, long afterwards, Brusselsmust have stood as the danger threatening it. She would have said, Ithink, that her sojourn in Haworth was the turning-point. It was destinythat turned Emily back to Haworth from the destruction that waited forher at Brussels, so that she conceived and brought forth _WutheringHeights_; her own destiny that she secretly foreknew, consoling andbeneficent. And, no doubt, it was destiny of a sort, unforeknown, deceitful, apparently malignant, that sent Charlotte back again toBrussels after her aunt's death. It wrung from her her greatest book, _Villette_. But Haworth, I think, would have wrung from her another andperhaps a greater. 

For the first-fruits of the sojourn in Brussels was neither _Villette_nor _Jane Eyre_, but _The Professor_. And _The Professor_ has none ofthe qualities of _Jane Eyre_ or of _Villette_; it has none of thequalities of Charlotte's later work at all; above all, none of thatmaster quality which M. Héger is supposed to have specially evoked. Charlotte, indeed, could not well have written a book more destructiveto the legend of the upheaval, the tragic passion, the furnace oftemptation and the flight. Nothing could be less like a furnace than theatmosphere of _The Professor_. From the first page to the last there isnot one pulse, not one breath of passion in it. The bloodless thingcomes coldly, slowly tentatively, from the birth. It is almost as frigidas a _devoir_ written under M. Héger's eye. The theorists, I notice, arecareful not to draw attention to _The Professor_; and they are wise, forattention drawn to _The Professor_ makes sad work of their theory. 

Remember, on the theory, Charlotte Brontë has received her greatawakening, her great enlightenment; she is primed with passion; thewhole wonderful material of _Villette_ is in her hand; she has beforeher her unique opportunity. You ought, on the theory, to see herhastening to it, a passionate woman, pouring out her own one and supremeexperience, and, with the brand of Brussels on her, never afterwardsreally doing anything else. Whereas the first thing the impassionedCharlotte does (after a year of uninspired and ineffectual poetizing) isto sit down and write _The Professor_; a book, remarkable not by anymeans for its emotion, but for its cold and dispassionate observation. Charlotte eliminates herself, and is Crimsworth in order that she mayobserve Frances Henri the more dispassionately. She is inspired solelyby the analytic spirit, and either cannot, or will not, let herself go. But she does what she meant to do. She had it in mind to write, not agreat work of imagination, but a grey and sober book, and a grey andsober book is what she writes. A book concerned only with things andpeople she has seen and known; a book, therefore, from which passion andthe poetry that passion is must be rigidly excluded, as belonging tothe region of things not, strictly speaking, known. It is as if she hadwritten _The Professor_ in rivalry with her sister Anne, both of themausterely determined to put aside all imagination and deal withexperience and experience alone. Thus you obtain sincerity, you obtaintruth. And with nothing but experience before her, she writes a bookthat has no passion in it, a book almost as bloodless and as gentle asher sister Anne's. 

Let us not disparage _The Professor_. Charlotte herself did notdisparage it. In her Preface she refused to solicit "indulgence for iton the plea of a first attempt. A first attempt, " she says, "itcertainly was not, as the pen which wrote it had been previously worn ina practice of some years. " In that Preface she shows plainly that at thevery outset of her career she had no sterner critic than herself; thatshe was aware of her sins and her temptations, and of the dangers thatlurked for her in her imaginative style. "In many a crude effort, destroyed almost as soon as composed, I had got over any such taste as Imight have had for ornamented and decorated composition, and come toprefer what was plain and homely. " Observe, it is not to the lessons ofthe "master", but to the creation and destruction that went on atHaworth that she attributes this purgation. She is not aware of theextent to which she can trust her genius, of what will happen when shehas fairly let herself go. She is working on a method that rules herchoice of subject. "I said to myself that my hero should work his waythrough life, as I had seen real, living men work theirs--that he shouldnever get a shilling that he had not earned--that no sudden turns shouldlift him in a moment to wealth and high station; that whatever smallcompetency he might gain should be won by the sweat of his brow; thatbefore he could find so much as an arbour to sit down in, he shouldmaster at least half the ascent of the Hill Difficulty; that he shouldnot marry even a beautiful girl or a lady of rank. "

There was no fine madness in that method; but its very soundness andsanity show the admirable spirit in which Charlotte Brontë approachedher art. She was to return to the method of _The Professor_ again andyet again, when she suspected herself of having given imagination tooloose a rein. The remarkable thing was that she should have begun withit. 

And in some respects _The Professor_ is more finished, betterconstructed than any of her later books. There is virtue in its extremesobriety. Nothing could be more delicate and firm than the drawing ofFrances Henri; nothing in its grey style more admirable than the scenewhere Crimsworth, having found Frances in the cemetery, takes her to herhome in the Rue Notre Dame aux Neiges. 

"Stepping over a little mat of green wool, I found myself in a smallroom with a painted floor and a square of green carpet in the middle;the articles of furniture were few, but all bright and exquisitelyclean--order reigned through its narrow limits--such order as it suitedmy punctilious soul to behold.... Poor the place might be; poor truly itwas, but its neatness was better than elegance, and had but a brightlittle fire shone on that clean hearth, I should have deemed it moreattractive than a palace. No fire was there, however, and no fuel laidready to light; the lace-mender was unable to allow herself thatindulgence.... Frances went into an inner room to take off her bonnet, and she came out a model of frugal neatness, with her well-fitting blackstuff dress, so accurately defining her elegant bust and taper waist, with her spotless white collar turned back from a fair and shapelyneck, with her plenteous brown hair arranged in smooth bands on hertemples and in a large Grecian plait behind: ornaments she hadnone--neither brooch, ring, nor ribbon; she did well enough withoutthem--perfection of fit, proportion of form, grace of carriage, agreeably supplied their place. " Frances lights a fire, having fetchedwood and coal in a basket. 

"'It is her whole stock, and she will exhaust it out of hospitality, 'thought I. 

"'What are you going to do?' I asked: 'not surely to light a fire thishot evening? I shall be smothered. '

"'Indeed, Monsieur, I feel it very chilly since the rain began; besides, I must boil the water for my tea, for I take tea on Sundays; you will beobliged to bear the heat. '"

And Frances makes the tea, and sets the table, and brings out herpistolets, and offers them to Monsieur, and it is all very simple andidyllic. So is the scene where Crimsworth, without our knowing exactlyhow he does it, declares himself to Frances. The dialogue is half inFrench, and does not lend itself to quotation, but it compares veryfavourably with the more daring comedy of courtship in _Jane Eyre_. Frances is delicious in her very solidity, her absence of abandonment. She refuses flatly to give up her teaching at Crimsworth's desire, Crimsworth, who will have six thousand francs a year. 

"'How rich you are, Monsieur!' And then she stirred uneasily in my arms. 'Three thousand francs!' she murmured, 'while I get only twelvehundred!' She went on faster. 'However, it must be so for the present;and, Monsieur, were you not saying something about my giving up myplace? Oh no! I shall hold it fast'; and her little fingers emphaticallytightened on mine. 

"'Think of marrying you to be kept by you, Monsieur! I could not do it;and how dull my days would be! You would be away teaching in close, noisy schoolrooms, from morning till evening, and I should be lingeringat home, unemployed and solitary. I should get depressed and sullen, andyou would soon tire of me. '

"'Frances, you could yet read and study--two things you like so well. '

"'Monsieur, I could not; I like contemplative life, but I like an activebetter; I must act in some way, and act with you. I have taken notice, Monsieur, that people who are only in each other's company foramusement, never really like each other so well, or esteem each other sohighly, as those who work together, and perhaps suffer together!'"

To which Crimsworth replies, "You speak God's truth, and you shall haveyour own way, for it is the best way. "

There is far more common sense than passion in the solid little Francesand her apathetic lover. It is Frances Henri's situation, not hercharacter, that recalls so irresistibly Lucy Snowe. Frances has neitherLucy's temperament, nor Lucy's terrible capacity for suffering. Shesuffers through her circumstances, not through her temperament. Themotives handled in _The Professor_ belong to the outer rather than theinner world; the pressure of circumstance, bereavement, poverty, theinfluences of alien and unloved surroundings, these are the springs thatdetermine the drama of Frances and of Crimsworth. Charlotte isdisplaying a deliberate interest in the outer world and the materialevent. She does not yet know that it is in the inner world that hergreat conquest and dominion is to be. The people in this first novel areof the same family as the people in _Jane Eyre_, in _Shirley_, in_Villette_. Crimsworth is almost reproduced in Louis Moore. YorkeHunsden is the unmistakable father of Mr. Yorke and Rochester; Frances, a pale and passionless sister of Jane Eyre, and a first cousin of Lucy. Yet, in spite of these relationships, _The Professor_ stands alone. Inspite of its striking resemblance to _Villette_ there is no real, nospiritual affinity. And the great gulf remains fixed between _TheProfessor_ and _Jane Eyre_. 

This difference lies deeper than technique. It is a difference ofvision, of sensation. The strange greyness of _The Professor_, itsstillness, is not due altogether to Charlotte's deliberate intention. Itis the stillness, the greyness of imperfect hearing, of imperfectseeing. I know it has one fine piece of word-painting, but not one thatcan stand among Charlotte Brontë's masterpieces in this kind. 

Here it is. "Already the pavement was drying; a balmy and fresh breezestirred the air, purified by lightning; I left the west behind me, wherespread a sky like opal, azure inmingled with crimson; the enlarged sun, glorious in Tyrian dyes, dipped his brim already; stepping, as I was, eastward, I faced a vast bank of clouds, but also I had before me thearch of an even rainbow; a perfect rainbow--high, wide, vivid. I lookedlong; my eye drank in the scene, and I suppose my brain must haveabsorbed it; for that night, after lying awake in pleasant fever a longtime, watching the silent sheet-lightning, which still played among theretreating clouds, and flashed silvery over the stars, I at last fellasleep; and then in a dream was reproduced the setting sun, the bank ofclouds, the mighty rainbow. I stood, methought, on a terrace; I leanedover a parapeted wall; there was space below me, depth I could notfathom, but hearing an endless splash of waves, I believed it to be thesea; sea spread to the horizon; sea of changeful green and intense blue;all was soft in the distance; all vapour-veiled. A spark of goldglistened on the line between water and air, floated up, appeared, enlarged, changed; the object hung midway between heaven and earth, under the arch of the rainbow; the soft but dark clouds diffused behind. It hovered as on wings; pearly, fleecy, gleaming air streamed likeraiment round it; light, tinted with carnation, coloured what seemedface and limbs; a large star shone with still lustre on an angel'sforehead--" But the angel ruins it. 

And this is all, and it leaves the dreariness more dreary. In _TheProfessor_ you wander through a world where there is no sound, nocolour, no vibration; a world muffled and veiled in the stillness andthe greyness of the hour before dawn. It is the work of a woman who isnot perfectly alive. So far from having had her great awakening, Charlotte is only half awake. Her intellect is alert enough and avid, faithful and subservient to the fact. It is her nerves and senses thatare asleep. Her soul is absent from her senses. 

 * * * * *

But in _Jane Eyre_, she is not only awakened, but awake as she has neverbeen awake before, with all her virgin senses exquisitely alive, everynerve changed to intense vibration. Sometimes she is perniciously awake;she is doing appalling things, things unjustifiable, preposterous;things that would have meant perdition to any other writer; she seeswith wild, erroneous eyes; but the point is that she sees, that shekeeps moving, that from the first page to the last she is never onceasleep. To come to _Jane Eyre_ after _The Professor_ is to pass intoanother world of feeling and of vision. 

It is not the difference between reality and unreality. _The Professor_is real enough, more real in some minor points--dialogue, forinstance--than _Jane Eyre_. The difference is that _The Professor_ is atranscript of reality, a very delicate and faithful transcript, and_Jane Eyre_ is reality itself, pressed on the senses. The pressure is sodirect and so tremendous, that it lasts through those moments when thewriter's grip has failed. 

For there are moments, long moments of perfectly awful failure in _JaneEyre_. There are phrases that make you writhe, such as "the etymology ofthe mansion's designation", and the shocking persistency with whichCharlotte Brontë "indites", "peruses", and "retains". There are wholescenes that outrage probability. Such are the scenes, or parts ofscenes, between Jane and Rochester during the comedy of his courtship. The great orchard scene does not ring entirely true. For pages and pagesit falters between passion and melodrama; between rhetoric and the _cride coeur_. Jane in the very thick of her emotion can say, "I havetalked, face to face, with what I reverence, with what I delightin--with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester, and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel Iabsolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity fordeparture; and it is like looking on the necessity of death. " And thecomedy is worse. Jane elaborates too much in those delicious things shesays to Rochester. Rochester himself provokes the parodist. (Suchmanners as Rochester's were unknown in mid-Victorian literature. )

"He continued to send for me punctually the moment the clock struckseven; though when I appeared before him now, he had no such honeyedterms as 'love' and 'darling' on his lips: the best words at my disposalwere 'provoking', 'malicious elf, ' 'sprite', 'changeling', etc. Forcaresses, too, I now got grimaces; for a pressure of the hand, a pinchon the arm; for a kiss on the cheek, a severe tweak of the ear. It wasall right: at present I decidedly preferred these fierce favours toanything more tender. "

Yet there is comedy, pure comedy in those scenes, though neversustained, and never wrought to the inevitable dramatic climax. Jane isdelightful when she asks Rochester whether the frown on his foreheadwill be his "married look", and when she tells him to make adressing-gown for himself out of the pearl-grey silk, "and an infiniteseries of waistcoats out of the black satin". _The Quarterly_ was muchtoo hard on the earlier _cadeau_ scene, with Rochester and Jane andAdèle, which is admirable in its suggestion of Jane's shyness andprecision. 

_"'N'est-ce pas, Monsieur, qu'il y a un cadeau pour Mademoiselle Eyre, dans votre petit coffre?'"_

"'Who talks of _cadeaux_?' said he gruffly; 'did you expect a present, Miss Eyre? Are you fond of presents?' and he searched my face with eyesthat I saw were dark, irate, and piercing. 

"'I hardly know, sir; I have little experience of them; they aregenerally thought pleasant things. '"

Charlotte Brontë was on her own ground there. But you tremble when sheleaves it; you shudder throughout the awful drawing-room comedy ofBlanche Ingram. Blanche says to her mother: "Am I right, Baroness Ingramof Ingram Park?" And her mother says to Blanche, "My lily-flower, youare right now, as always. " Blanche says to Rochester, "Signor Eduardo, are you in voice to-night?" and he, "Donna Bianca, if you command it, Iwill be. " And Blanche says to the footman, "Cease that chatter, blockhead, and do my bidding. "

That, Charlotte's worst lapse, is a very brief one, and the sceneitself is unimportant. But what can be said of the crucial scene of thenovel, the tremendous scene of passion and temptation? There _is_passion in the scene before it, between Jane and Rochester on theafternoon of the wedding-day that brought no wedding. 

"'Jane, I never meant to wound you thus. If the man who had but onelittle ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter, that ate of hisbread, and drank of his cup, and lay in his bosom, had by some mistakeslaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have rued his bloodyblunder more than I now rue mine. Will you ever forgive me?'... 'Youknow I am a scoundrel, Jane?' ere long he inquired wistfully, wondering, I suppose, at my continued silence and tameness; the result of weaknessrather than of will. 

"'Yes, sir. '

"'Then tell me so roundly and sharply--don't spare me. '

"'I cannot; I am tired and sick. I want some water. '

"He heaved a sort of shuddering sigh, and, taking me in his arms, carried me downstairs. "

But there are terrible lapses. After Rochester's cry, "'Jane, my littledarling ... If you were mad, do you think I should hate you, '" heelaborates his idea and he is impossible: "'Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken it would be my treasure still; if you raved, myarms should confine you and not a strait waistcoat--your grasp, even infury, would have a charm for me; if you flew at me as wildly as thatwoman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace at least asfond as it would be restrictive. '"

And in the final scene of temptation there is a most curious mingling ofreality and unreality, of the passion which is poetry, and the poetrywhich is not passion. 

"'Never, ' said he, as he ground his teeth, 'never was anything so frail, and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand!' And he shook mewith the force of his hold. 'I could bend her with my finger and thumb;and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her?Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking outof it, defying me, with more than courage--with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it--the savage, beautifulcreature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will onlylet the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmatewould escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its claydwelling-place. And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtueand purity--that I want: not alone your brittle frame. Of yourself, youcould come with soft flight and nestle against my heart, if you would;seized against your will you will elude the grasp like an essence--youwill vanish ere I inhale your fragrance. Oh, come, Jane, come!'"

It is the crucial scene of the book; and with all its power, with allits vehemence and passionate reality it is unconvincing. It stirs youand it leaves you cold. 

The truth is that in _Jane Eyre_ Charlotte Brontë had not mastered theart of dialogue; and to the very last she was uncertain in her handlingof it. In this she is inferior to all the great novelists of her time;inferior to some who were by no means great. She understood more of thespiritual speech of passion than any woman before her, but she ignoresits actual expression, its violences, its reticences, its silences. Inher great scenes she is inspired one moment, and the next positivelyhandicapped by her passion and her poetry. In the same sentence sherises to the sudden poignant _cri du coeur_, and sinks to the artificeof metaphor. She knew that passion is poetry, and poetry is passion;you might say it was all she knew, or ever cared to know. But herlanguage of passion is too often the language of written rather than ofspoken poetry, of poetry that is not poetry at all. It is as if she hadnever heard the speech of living men and women. There is more actualityin the half-French chatter of Adèle than in any of the high utterancesof Jane and Rochester. 

And yet her sense of the emotion behind the utterance is infallible, soinfallible that we accept the utterance. By some miracle, which is hersecret, the passion gets through. The illusion of reality is so strongthat it covers its own lapses. _Jane Eyre_ exists to prove that truth ishigher than actuality. 

"'Jane suits me: do I suit her?'

"'To the finest fibre of my nature, sir. '"

If no woman alive had ever said that, it would yet be true to Jane'sfeeling. For it is a matter of the finest fibres, this passion ofJane's, that set people wondering about Currer Bell, that inflamed Mrs. Oliphant, as it inflamed the reviewer in _The Quarterly_, and madeCharles Kingsley think that Currer Bell was coarse. Their state of mindis incredible to us now. For what did poor Jane do, after all? Nobodycould possibly have had more respect for the ten commandments. For allRochester's raging, the ten commandments remain exactly where they were. It was inconceivable to Charlotte Brontë that any decent man or womancould make hay, or wish to make hay, of them. And yet Jane offended. Shesinned against the unwritten code that ordains that a woman may lie tillshe is purple in the face, but she must not, as a piece of gratuitousinformation, tell a man she loves him; not, that is to say, in as manywords. She may declare her passion unmistakably in other ways. She mayexhibit every ignominious and sickly sign of it; her eyes may glow likehot coals; she may tremble; she may flush and turn pale; she may doalmost anything, provided she does not speak the actual words. Inmid-Victorian times an enormous licence was allowed her. She mightfaint, with perfect propriety, in public; she might become anaemic andsend for the doctor, and be ordered iron; she might fall ill, horridlyand visibly, and have to be taken away to spas and places to drink thewaters. Everybody knew what that meant. If she had shrieked her passionon the housetops she could hardly have published it more violently; butnobody minded. It was part of the mid-Victorian convention. 

Jane Eyre did none of these things. As soon as she was aware of herpassion for Mr. Rochester she thrust it down into the pocket of hervoluminous mid-Victorian skirt and sat on it. Instead of languishing andfainting where Rochester could see her, she held her head rather higherthan usual, and practised the spirited arts of retort and repartee. Andnobody gave her any credit for it. Then Rochester puts the little thing(poor Jane was only eighteen when it happened) to the torture, and, withthe last excruciating turn of the thumbscrew, she confesses. That wasthe enormity that was never forgiven her. 

"'You'll like Ireland, I think, '" says Rochester in his torturing mood;"'they are such kind-hearted people there. '

"'It is a long way off, sir. '

"'No matter, a girl of your sense will not object to the voyage or thedistance. '

"'Not the voyage, but the distance: and then the sea is a barrier. '

"'From what, Jane?'

"'From England and from Thornfield, and--'

"'Well?'

"'From _you_, sir. '"

She had done it. She had said, or almost said the words. 

It just happened. There was magic in the orchard at Thornfield; therewas youth in her blood; and--"Jane, did you hear the nightingale singingin that wood?"

Still, she had done it. 

And she was the first heroine who had. Adultery, with which we arefairly familiar, would have seemed a lesser sin. There may beextenuating circumstances for the adulteress. There were extenuatingcircumstances for Rochester. He could plead a wife who went on allfours. There were no extenuating circumstances for little Jane. No usefor her to say that she was upset by the singing of the nightingale;that it didn't matter what she said to Mr. Rochester when Mr. Rochesterwas going to marry Blanche Ingram, anyway; that she only flung herselfat his head because she knew she couldn't hit it; that her plainnessgave her a certain licence, placing her beyond the code. Not a bit ofit. Jane's plainness was one thing that they had against her. Until hertime no heroine had been permitted to be plain. Jane's seizing of theposition was part of the general insolence of her behaviour. 

Jane's insolence was indeed unparalleled. Having done the deed she feltno shame or sense of sin; she stood straight up and defended herself. That showed that she was hardened. 

It certainly showed--Jane's refusal to be abject--that Jane was farahead of her age. 

"'I tell you I must go!' I retorted, roused to something like passion. 'Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am anautomaton?--a machine without feelings, and can bear to have my morselof bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed frommy cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I amsoulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, andfully as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and muchwealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is nowfor me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium ofcustom, conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit thataddresses'" ("Addresses"? oh, Jane!) "'your spirit; just as if both hadpassed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal--as weare!'"

This, allowing for some slight difference in the phrasing, is twentiethcentury. And it was this--Jane's behaviour in the orchard, and notRochester's behaviour in the past--that opened the door to the "imps ofevil meaning, polluting and defiling the domestic hearth. "

Still, though _The Quarterly_ censured Jane's behaviour, it wasRochester who caused most of the trouble and the scandal by hisremarkable confessions. In a sense they _were_ remarkable. Seldom, outside the pages of French fiction, had there been so lavish and publica display of mistresses. And while it was agreed on all hands thatRochester was incredible with his easy references to Céline and Giacintaand Clara, still more incredible was it that a young woman in a countryparsonage should have realized so much as the existence of Clara andGiacinta and Céline. But, when Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux invokedBranwell and all his vices to account for Charlotte's experience, theyforgot that Charlotte had read Balzac, [A] and that Balzac is anexperience in himself. She had also read Moore's _Life of Byron_, andreally there is nothing in Rochester's confessions that Byron and alittle Balzac would not account for. So that they might just as wellhave left poor Branwell in his grave. 

[Footnote A: I am wrong. Charlotte did not read Balzac till later, whenGeorge Henry Lewes told her to. But there were those twenty "clever, wicked, sophistical, and immoral French books" that she read ineighteen-forty. They may have served her purpose better. ]

Indeed, it was the manner of Rochester's confession that gave away thesecret of Currer Bell's sex; her handling of it is so inadequate andperfunctory. Rochester is at his worst and most improbable in thetelling of his tale. The tale in itself is one of Charlotte's clumsiestcontrivances for conveying necessary information. The alternate baldnessand exuberant, decorated, swaggering boldness (for Charlotte's style wasnever bolder than when she was essaying the impossible) alone betrayedthe hand of an innocent woman. Curious that these makeshift passageswith their obviously second-hand material, their palpably alien _mise enscène_, should ever have suggested a personal experience and provoked_The Quarterly_ to its infamous and immortal utterance: "If we ascribethe book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it toone who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society ofher own sex. "

_The Quarterly_, to do it justice, argued that Currer Bell was a man, for only a man would have betrayed such ignorance of feminine resourcesas to make Jane Eyre, on a night alarm, "hurry on a frock and shawl". The reasoning passed. Nobody saw that such a man would be as innocent asany parson's daughter. Nobody pointed out that, as it happened, CurrerBell had provided her dowagers with "vast white wrappers" on the secondnight alarm. And, after all, the sex of _The Quarterly_ reviewer itselfremains a problem. Long ago Mr. Andrew Lang detected the work of twohands in that famous article. You may say there were at least three. There was, first, the genial reviewer of _Vanity Fair_, who revels inthe wickedness of Becky Sharpe, and who is going to revel in thewickedness of Jane. Then suddenly some Mr. Brocklebank steps in, and youget a "black-marble clergyman" on _Jane Eyre_. 

"We have said, " says this person, "that this was the picture of anatural heart. This, to our view, is the great and crying mischief ofthe book. Jane Eyre is throughout the personification of an unregenerateand undisciplined spirit, the more dangerous to exhibit from thatprestige of principle and self-control, which is liable to dazzle theeyes too much for it to observe the insufficient and unsound foundationon which it rests. It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moralstrength; but it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a lawunto itself.... She has inherited the worst sin of our fallennature--the sin of pride. "

Jane, you see, should have sinned to show her Christian humility. Thestyle, if not the reasoning, is pure Brocklebank. He does "not hesitateto say that the tone of mind and thought, which has overthrown authorityand violated every code, human and divine, abroad, and fostered Chartismand rebellion at home, is the same which has written _Jane Eyre_". 

Ellis and Acton (poor Acton!) Bell get it even stronger than that; andthen, suddenly again, you come on a report on the "Condition ofGovernesses", palpably drawn up by a third person. For years Miss Rigby, who was afterwards Lady Eastlake, got the credit for the whole absurdperformance, for she was known to have written the review on _VanityFair_. What happened seems to have been that Miss Rigby set out in allhonesty to praise _Jane Eyre_. Then some infuriated person interferedand stopped her. The article was torn from the unfortunate Miss Rigbyand given to Brocklebank, who used bits of her here and there. Brocklebank, in his zeal, overdid his part, so the report on Governesseswas thrown in to give the whole thing an air of seriousness andrespectability. So that it is exceedingly doubtful whether, after all, it was a woman's hand that dealt the blow. 

If Charlotte Brontë did not feel the effect of it to the end of herlife, she certainly suffered severely at the time. It was responsiblefor that impassioned defence of Anne and Emily which she would have beenwiser to have left alone. 

It must be admitted that _Jane Eyre_ was an easy prey for the truculentreviewer, for its faults were all on the surface, and its greatqualities lay deep. Deep as they were, they gripped the ordinaryuncritical reader, and they gripped the critic in spite of himself, sothat he bitterly resented being moved by a work so flagrantly andobviously faulty. What was more, the passion of the book was so intensethat you were hardly aware of anything else, and its author's austererespect for the ten commandments passed almost unobserved. 

But when her enemies accuse Charlotte Brontë of glorifying passion theypraise her unaware. Her glory is that she did glorify it. Until shecame, passion between man and woman had meant animal passion. Fieldingand Smollett had dealt with it solely on that footing. A woman's gentle, legalized affection for her husband was one thing, and passion wasanother. Thackeray and Dickens, on the whole, followed Fielding. To allthree of them passion is an affair wholly of the senses, temporary, episodic, and therefore comparatively unimportant. Thackeray intimatedthat he could have done more with it but for his fear of Mrs. Grundy. Anyhow, passion was not a quality that could be given to a good woman;and so the good women of Dickens and Thackeray are conspicuouslywithout it. And Jane Austen may be said to have also taken Fielding'sview. Therefore she was obliged to ignore passion. She gave it to onevulgar woman, Lydia Bennett, and to one bad one, Mrs. Rushworth; andhaving given it them, she turned her head away and refused to haveanything more to do with these young women. She was not alone in herinability to "tackle passion". No respectable mid-Victorian novelistcould, when passion had so bad a name. 

And it was this thing, cast down, defiled, dragged in the mud, andignored because of its defilement, that Charlotte Brontë took and liftedup. She washed it clean; she bathed it in the dew of the morning; shebaptized it in tears; she clothed it in light and flame; she showed itfor the divine, the beautiful, the utterly pure and radiant thing it is, "the very sublime of faith, truth and devotion". She made it, thisspirit of fire and air, incarnate in the body of a woman who had nosensual charm. Because of it little Jane became the parent of Caterinaand of Maggie Tulliver; and Shirley prepared the way for Meredith'slarge-limbed, large-brained, large-hearted women. 

It was thus that Charlotte Brontë glorified passion. The passion thatshe glorified being of the finest fibre, it was naturally not understoodby 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 greatand lasting successes was its reality". In spite of crudities, absurdities, impossibilities, it remains most singularly and startlinglyalive. In _Jane Eyre_ Charlotte Brontë comes for the first time into herkingdom of the inner life. She grasps the secret, unseen springs; in hernarrow range she is master of the psychology of passion and ofsuffering, whether she is describing the agony of the child Jane shutup in that terrible red room, or the anguish of the woman on the morningof that wedding-day that brought no wedding. Or take the scene of Jane'sflight from Thornfield, or that other scene, unsurpassed in its passionand tenderness, of her return to Rochester at Ferndean. 

"To this house I came just ere dark, on an evening marked by thecharacteristics of sad sky, cold gale, and continued small, penetratingrain.... Even within a very short distance of the manor-house you couldsee nothing of it; so thick and dark grew the timber of the gloomy woodabout it. Iron gates between granite pillars showed me where to enter, and passing through them, I found myself at once in the twilight ofclose-ranked trees. There was a grass-grown track descending the forestaisle, between hoar and knotty shafts and under branched arches. Ifollowed it, expecting soon to reach the dwelling; but it stretched onand on, it wound far and farther: no sign of habitation or grounds wasvisible.... At last my way opened, the trees thinned a little; presentlyI beheld a railing, then the house--scarce, by this dim light, distinguishable from the trees; so dank and green were its decayingwalls. Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch, I stood amidst aspace of enclosed ground, from which the wood swept away in asemicircle. There were no flowers, no garden-beds; only a broadgravel-walk girdling a grass-plat, and this set in the heavy frame ofthe forest. The house presented two pointed gables in its front; thewindows were latticed and narrow: the front-door was narrow too, onestep led up to it.... It was still as a church on a week-day; thepattering rain on the forest leaves was the only sound audible.... 

"I heard a movement--that narrow front-door was unclosing, and someshape was about to issue from the grange. 

"It opened slowly; a figure came out into the twilight and stood on thestep; a man without a hat: he stretched forth his hand as if to feelwhether it rained. Dark as it was I had recognized him.... 

"His form was of the same strong and stalwart contour as ever.... But inhis countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding--thatreminded me of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerousto approach in his sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyescruelty 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, butI 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, theremust be more of her. '

"The muscular hand broke from my custody; my arm was seized, myshoulder--neck--wrist--I was entwined and gathered to him.... 

"I pressed my lips to his once brilliant and now rayless eyes--I sweptback his hair from his brow and kissed that too. He suddenly seemed torouse 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 Brontëcould sustain so strong an illusion of passion through so many lapses. And all that passion counts for no more than half in the astoundingeffect of reality she produces. Before _Jane Eyre_ there is no novelwritten by a woman, with the one exception of _Wuthering Heights_, thatconveys so poignant an impression of surroundings, of things seen andheard, of the earth and sky; of weather; of the aspects of houses and ofrooms. It suggests a positive exaltation of the senses of sound andlight, an ecstasy, an enchantment before the visible, tangible world. Itis not a matter of mere faithful observation (though few painters havepossessed so incorruptibly the innocence of the eye). It is an almostsupernatural intentness; sensation raised to the _n_th power. Take thedescription of the awful red room at Gateshead. 

"A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains ofdeep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the twolarge windows with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded infestoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table atthe foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were asoft fawn colour, with a flush of pink in it; the wardrobe, thetoilet-table, the chairs were of darkly-polished old mahogany. Out ofthese deep surrounding shades rose high and glared white the piled-upmattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseillescounterpane. Scarcely less prominent was an ample, cushioned easy-chairnear the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; andlooking, as I thought, like a pale throne.... Mr. Reed had been deadnine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his last; here he lay instate; hence his coffin was borne by the undertaker's men; and sincethat day a sense of dreary consecration had guarded it from frequentintrusion. "

Could anything be more horrible than that red room? Or take thedescriptions of the school at Lowood where the horror of pestilencehangs over house and garden. Through all these Gateshead and Lowoodscenes Charlotte is unerring and absolute in her reality. 

Her very style, so uncertain in its rendering of human speech, becomesflawless in such passages as this: "It was three o'clock; thechurch-bell tolled as I passed under the belfry: the charm of the hourlay 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 coraltreasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in itsutter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it madeno 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, oneach side, there were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and thelittle brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked likesingle russet leaves about to drop. 

"This lane inclined up-hill all the way to Hay.... I then turnedeastward. 

"On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon; pale yet as a cloud, butbrightening 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 couldnot tell: but there were many hills beyond Hay, and doubtless many becksthreading their passes. That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle ofthe nearest streams, the sough of the most remote. 

"A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and whisperings, at once sofar away and so clear: a positive tramp, tramp; a metallic clatter, which effaced the soft wave-wanderings; as, in a picture, the solid massof a crag, or the rough boles of a great oak, drawn in dark and strongon the foreground, efface the aerial distance of azure hill, sunnyhorizon, 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 gonedown in simple state--pure of the pomp of clouds--spread a solemnpurple, burning with the light of red jewel and furnace flame at onepoint, on one hill-peak, and extending high and wide, soft and stillsofter, over half heaven. "

And this of her own moors: "There are great moors behind and on eachhand of me; there are waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley atmy feet. The population here must be thin, and I see no passengers onthese roads: they stretch out east, west, north and south--white, broad, lonely; they are all cut in the moor, and the heather grows deep andwild to their very verge. "

She has given the secret of the moor country in a phrase: "I felt theconsecration of its loneliness. " In that one line you have the real, theundying Charlotte Brontë. 

It is such immortal things that make the difference between _Jane Eyre_and _The Professor_. So immeasurable is that difference that it almostjustifies the theorist in assuming an "experience" to account for it, anexperience falling between the dates of _The Professor_ and _Jane Eyre_. Unfortunately there was none; none in the sense cherished by theresearcher. Charlotte's letters are an unbroken record of those twoyears that followed her return from Brussels. Her life is laid bare inits long and cramped monotony, a life singularly empty of "experience". 

And yet an experience did come to her in that brief period. If theresearcher had not followed a false scent across the Channel, if his_flair_ for tragic passion had not destroyed in him all sense ofproportion, he could not possibly have missed it; for it stared him inthe face, simple, obvious, inevitable. But miss it he certainly did. Obsessed by his idea, he considered it a negligible circumstance thatCharlotte should have read _Wuthering Heights_ before she wrote _JaneEyre_. And yet, I think that, if anything woke Charlotte up, it wasthat. Until then, however great her certainty of her own genius, she didnot know how far she could trust it, how far it would be safe to letimagination go. Appalled by the spectacle of its excesses, she haddivorced imagination from the real. But Emily knew none of these colddeliberations born of fear. _Wuthering Heights_ was the fruit of adivine freedom, a divine unconsciousness. It is not possible thatCharlotte, of all people, should have read _Wuthering Heights_ without ashock of enlightenment; that she should not have compared it with herown bloodless work; that she should not have felt the wrong done to hergenius by her self-repression. Emily had dared to be herself; _she_ hadnot been afraid of her own passion; she had had no method; she hadaccomplished a stupendous thing without knowing it, by simply lettingherself go. And Charlotte, I think, said to herself, "That is what Iought to have done. That is what I will do next time. " And next time shedid it. The experience may seem insufficient, but it is of suchexperiences that a great writer's life is largely made. And if you_must_ have an influence to account for _Jane Eyre_, there is no needto go abroad to look for it. There was influence enough in her own home. These three Brontës, adoring each other, were intolerant of any otherinfluence; and the strongest spirit, which was Emily's, prevailed. To besure, no remonstrances from Emily or Charlotte could stop Anne in herobstinate analysis of Walter Huntingdon; but it was some stray sparkfrom Emily that kindled Anne. As for Charlotte, her genius must havequickened in her when her nerves thrilled to the shock of _WutheringHeights_. This, I know, is only another theory; but it has at least themerit of its modesty. It is not offered as in the least accounting for, or explaining, Charlotte's genius. It merely suggests with all possiblehumility a likely cause of its release. Anyhow, it is a theory that doesCharlotte's genius no wrong, on which account it seems to me preferableto any other. It is really no argument against it to say that Charlottenever acknowledged her sister's influence, that she was indeed unawareof it; for, in the first place, the stronger the spiritual tie betweenthem, 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 Brontë anauthor". It is not claimed that if there had been no _Wuthering Heights_and no Emily Brontë, there would have been no _Jane Eyre_; for to menothing 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 naturethat its way, the way of its upward progress, was by violent impetus andrecoil. 

In _Shirley_ she revolts from the passion of _Jane Eyre_. She seems tohave written it to prove that there are other things. She had been stungby _The Quarterly's_ attack, stung by rumour, stung by every adversething 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 sheanswered them with _Shirley_. _Shirley_ was an answer to every criticismthat had yet been made. In _Shirley_ she forsook the one poor play ofhearts insurgent for the vast and varied movement of the world; socialupheavals, the clash of sects and castes, the first grim hand-to-handstruggle between capital and labour, all are there. The book opens witha drama, not of hearts but of artisans insurgent; frame-breakers, notbreakers of the marriage law. In sheer defiance she essays to render thewhole real world, the complex, many-threaded, many-coloured world; wherethe tragic warp is woven with the bright comedy of curates. It is theworld of the beginnings; the world of the early nineteenth century thatshe paints. A world with the immensity, the profundity, the darkness ofthe brooding sea; where the spirit of a woman moves, troubling thewaters; for Charlotte Brontë has before her the stupendous vision of theworld 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 shemissed her place in the world, her prestige, and her privileges as awoman. What was worse, she lost her individuality, and became a merepiece of furniture, of disused, old-fashioned furniture, in her father'sor her brother's house. If she had a father or a brother there was noescape for her from dependence on the male; and if she had none, ifthere was no male about the house, her case was the more pitiable. Andthe traditions of her upbringing were such that the real, vital things, the things that mattered, were never mentioned in her presence. Religionwas the solitary exception; and religion had the reality and vitalitytaken out of it by its dissociation with the rest of life. A woman inthese horrible conditions was only half alive. She had no energies, nopassions, no enthusiasms. Convention drained her of her life-blood. Whatwas left to her had no outlet; pent up in her, it bred weak, anaemicsubstitutes for its natural issue, sentimentalism for passion, andsensibility for the nerves of vision. This only applies, of course, tothe average woman. 

Charlotte Brontë was born with a horror of the world that had producedthis average woman, this creature of minute corruptions and hypocrisies. She sent out _Jane Eyre_ to purify it with her passion. She sent out_Shirley_ to destroy and rebuild it with her intellect. Little Jane wasa fiery portent. Shirley was a prophecy. She is modern to herfinger-tips, as modern as Meredith's great women: Diana, or ClaraMiddleton, or Carinthia Jane. She was born fifty years before her time. 

This is partly owing to her creator's prophetic insight, partly to hersheer truth to life. For Shirley was to a large extent a portrait ofEmily Brontë who was born before her time. 

It is Emily Brontë's spirit that burns in Shirley Keeldar; and it is thespirit of Shirley Keeldar that gives life to the unwilling mass of thisvast novel. It is almost enough immortality for Shirley that she is theonly living and authentic portrait of Emily Brontë in her time. Charlotte has given her the "wings that wealth can give", and they donot matter. She has also given her the wings of Emily's adventuroussoul, 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 God to Hiscreature, the free dower of Nature to her child. This joy gives herexperience of a genii-life. Buoyant, by green steps, by glad hills, allverdure and light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that whenceangels looked down on the dreamer of Bethel, and her eye seeks, and hersoul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it. "

"Her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishesit--" That was the secret of Emily's greatness, of her immeasurablesuperiority 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 andeye--moments when her thoughts, her simple existence, the fact of theworld being around--and heaven above her, seemed to yield her suchfulness of happiness, that she did not need to lift a finger to increasethe joy. Often, after an active morning, she would spend a sunnyafternoon in lying stirless on the turf, at the foot of some tree offriendly umbrage: no society did she need but that of Caroline, and itsufficed if she were within call; no spectacle did she ask but that ofthe deep blue sky, and such cloudlets as sailed afar and aloft acrossits 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 Brontëstraight before us in her swift and vivid life. Shirley is "Sister ofthe spotted, bright, quick-fiery leopard. " "Pantheress!--beautifulforest-born!--wily, tameless, peerless nature! She gnaws her chain. Isee the white teeth working at the steel! She has dreams of her wildwoods, and pinings after virgin freedom. " "How evanescent, fugitive, fitful she looked--slim and swift as a Northern streamer!" "... Withher long hair flowing full and wavy; with her noiseless step, her palecheek, 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 aflame--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 knowwhat soothsayers I would consult?... The little Irish beggar that comesbarefoot to my door; the mouse that steals out of the cranny in thewainscot; the bird that in frost and snow pecks at my window for acrumb; the dog that licks my hand and sits beside my knee. "

And yet again: "She takes her sewing occasionally: but, by somefatality, she is doomed never to sit steadily at it for above fiveminutes at a time: her thimble is scarcely fitted on, her needle scarcethreaded, when a sudden thought calls her upstairs; perhaps she goes toseek some just-then-remembered old ivory-backed needle-book, or olderchina-topped work-box, quite unneeded, but which seems at the momentindispensable; perhaps to arrange her hair, or a drawer which sherecollects to have seen that morning in a state of curious confusion;perhaps only to take a peep from a particular window at a particularview where Briarfield Church and Rectory are visible, pleasantly boweredin trees. She has scarcely returned, and again taken up the slip ofcambric, or square of half-wrought canvas, when Tartar's bold scrape andstrangled whistle are heard at the porch door, and she must run to openit for him; it is a hot day; he comes in panting; she must convoy him tothe kitchen, and see with her own eyes that his water-bowl isreplenished. Through the open kitchen-door the court is visible, allsunny and gay, and peopled with turkeys and their poults, peahens andtheir chicks, pearl-flecked Guinea fowls, and a bright variety of purewhite 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 hereager, plump, happy, feathered vassals.... There are perhaps some littlecalves, some little new-yeaned lambs--it may be twins, whose mothershave rejected them: Miss Keeldar ... Must permit herself the treat offeeding them with her own hand. "

Like Emily she is impatient of rituals and creeds. Like Emily she adoresthe Earth. Not one of Charlotte's women except Shirley could havechanted that great prose hymn of adoration in which Earth worships andis worshipped. "'Nature is now at her evening prayers; she is kneelingbefore those red hills. I see her prostrate on the great steps of heraltar, praying for a fair night for mariners at sea, for travellers indeserts, 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 sheand Adam stood alone on earth. ' 'And that is not Milton's Eve, Shirley, 'says Caroline, and Shirley answers: 'No, by the pure Mother of God, sheis not. ' Shirley is half a Pagan. She would beg to remind Milton 'thatthe first men of the earth were Titans, and that Eve was their mother:from her sprang Saturn, Hyperion, Oceanus; she bore Prometheus.... Isay, there were giants on the earth in those days, giants that strove toscale heaven. The first woman's breast that heaved with life on thisworld yielded daring which could contend with Omnipotence; the strengthwhich could bear a thousand years of bondage--the vitality which couldfeed that vulture death through uncounted ages--the unexhausted lifeand uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immortality, which, aftermillenniums of crimes, struggles, and woes, could conceive and bringforth a Messiah. The first woman was heaven-born: vast was the heartwhence gushed the well-spring of the blood of nations; and grand theundegenerate 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-Titan; her robe of blue air spreads to theoutskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil, white asan avalanche, sweeps from her head to her feet, and arabesques oflightning flame on its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purplelike that horizon: through its blush shines the star of evening. Hersteady eyes I cannot picture; they are clear--they are deep aslakes--they are lifted and full of worship--they tremble with thesoftness of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the expanseof a cloud, and is paler than the early moon, risen long before darkgathers: she reclines her bosom on the edge of Stilbro' Moor; her mightyhands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face, she speaks withGod. '"

It is the living sister speaking for the dead; for Charlotte herself hadlittle of Emily's fine Paganism. But for one moment, in this lyricpassage, her soul echoes the very soul of Emily as she gathers round herall the powers and splendours (and some, alas, of the fatal rhetoric) ofher prose to do her honour. 

It is not only in the large figure of the Titan Shirley that CharlotteBrontë shows her strength. She has learnt to draw her minor masculinecharacters with more of insight and of accuracy--Caroline Helstone, theYorkes, Robert Moore, Mr. Helstone, Joe Scott, and Barraclough, the"joined Methody". With a few strokes they stand out living. She hasacquired 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 paintedwith unerring power and faithfulness in every detail of his harsh andvigorous personality, but there is no single lapse from nature when heis speaking. The curates only excepted, Charlotte never swerves fromthis fidelity. But when she is handling her curates, it is a savage andutterly inartistic humour that inspires her. You feel that she is notexercising the art of comedy, but relieving her own intolerable boredomand irritation. No object could well be more innocent, and moreappealing in its innocence, than little Mr. Sweeting, curate ofNunnerly. Mr. Sweeting at the tea-table, "having a dish of tarts beforehim, and marmalade and crumpet upon his plate", should have moved theComic Spirit to tears of gentleness. 

Curates apart, two-thirds of _Shirley_ are written with an unerringdevotion 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 acertain hardness and apathy of touch; the large outlines are obscured, delicate colours sharpened; it is hard and yet blurred, like a bad steelengraving. Charlotte's senses, so intensely, so supernaturally alive in_Jane Eyre_, are only passably awake in _Shirley_. It has some of thedulness 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 thefine language which was the shame when it was not the glory of _JaneEyre_. 

Then suddenly there comes a break--a cleavage. It comes with thatChapter Twenty-four, which is headed "The Valley of the Shadow ofDeath". It was written in the first months after Emily Brontë's death. 

From that point Charlotte's level strength deserts her. Ever after, shefalls and soars, and soars and falls again. There is a return to themanner 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 atonce in "The Valley of the Shadow" chapter, in the scene of Caroline'slove-sick delirium. 

"'But he will not know I am ill till I am gone; and he will come whenthey have laid me out, and I am senseless, cold and stiff. 

"'What can my departed soul feel then? Can it see or know what happensto the clay? Can spirits, through any medium, communicate with livingflesh? Can the dead at all revisit those they leave? Can they come inthe elements? Will wind, water, fire lend me a path to Moore?

"'Is it for nothing the wind sounds almost articulate sometimes--singsas I have lately heard it sing at night--or passes the casement sobbing, as if for sorrow to come? Does nothing then haunt it--nothing inspireit?'"

The awful improbability of Caroline is more striking because of itscontrast with the inspired rightness of the scene of Cathy's delirium in_Wuthering Heights_. It is Charlotte feebly echoing Emily, and goingmore 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; whoseeven balance revives?... '

"'_Where_ is the other world? In _what_ will another life consist? Whydo I ask? Have I not cause to think that the hour is hasting but toofast when the veil must be rent for me? Do I not know the Grand Mysteryis likely to break prematurely on me? Great Spirit, in whose goodness Iconfide; whom, as my Father, I have petitioned night and morning fromearly infancy, help the weak creation of Thy hands! Sustain me throughthe 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, whenthey were doing their worst with it, they got their passion through. There is no live passion behind this speech of Caroline's, with its wildstress of italics and of capitals. What passion there was in Charlottewhen 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. Pryorcalls to the spirit of Caroline's dead father: "'James, slumberpeacefully! See, your terrible debt is cancelled! Look! I wipe out thelong, black account with my own hand! James, your child atones: thisliving likeness of you--this thing with your perfect features--this onegood gift you gave me has nestled affectionately to my heart andtenderly called me "mother". Husband, rest forgiven. '"

Even Robert Moore, otherwise almost a masterpiece, becomes improbablewhen, in his great scene, Shirley refuses him. When Mr. Yorke asks himwhat has gone wrong he replies: "The machinery of all my nature; thewhole enginery of this human mill; the boiler, which I take to be theheart, 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, yourgod, your great Bell, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as ademon. "

What is worse than all, Louis Moore--Louis, the hero, Louis, the masterof passion, is a failure. He is Charlotte Brontë's most terrible, mostglaring failure. It is not true that Charlotte could not draw men, orthat she drew them all alike; Robert Moore, the hard-headed man ofbusiness, the man of will and purpose, who never gives up, is not onlyalmost a masterpiece but a spontaneous masterpiece, one of the firstexamples of his kind. But there is no blood in Louis' veins, no virilityin his swarthy body. He is the most unspeakable of schoolmasters. YetCharlotte lavished on this puppet half the wealth of her imagination. She flings phrase after perfect phrase to him to cover himselfwith--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 ownrhetoric. The courtship of Louis Moore and Shirley will not compare withthat of Jane and Rochester. There is no nightingale singing in theirwood. 

Yet, for all that, _Shirley_ comes very near to being Charlotte Brontë'smasterpiece. It is inspired from first to last with a great intentionand a great idea. It shows a vision of reality wider than her grasp. Itsfaults, like the faults of _Jane Eyre_, are all on the surface, onlythere is more surface in _Shirley_. If it has not _Jane Eyre's_commanding passion, it has a vaster sweep. It was literally the firstattempt 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 justifiesthe malignant criticism of Mrs. Oliphant. Caroline Helstone does notjustify it. She is no window-gazing virgin on the look-out, in lovealready before the man has come. She is a young girl, very naturally inlove 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 herprophetic soul on the hypocritical convention that would make everywoman dependent on some man, and at the same time despises her for thepossession of her natural instincts. And Caroline followed her. "Iobserve that to such grievances as society cannot cure, it usuallyforbids utterance, on pain of its scorn: this scorn being only a sort oftinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People hate to be reminded ofills they are unable or unwilling to remedy: such reminder, in forcingon them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of anobligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease andshakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the houseless andunemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in theworld: 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, degeneratingto sour old maids--envious, back-biting, wretched, because life is adesert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarcemodest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position andconsideration by marriage, which to celibacy is denied. Fathers, cannotyou 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 anoccupation which shall raise them above the flirt, the manoeuvrer, themischief-making talebearer. Keep your girl's minds narrow anddegraded--they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes a disgraceto you: give them scope and work--they will be your gayest companions inhealth; your tenderest nurses in sickness; your most faithful prop inold age. "

That is the argument from fathers, and it comes from Caroline Helstone, not from Shirley. And the fact that Caroline married Robert Moore, andShirley 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 thanEmily Brontë's vision of Hertha and Demeter, of Eve, the Earth-mother, "the mighty and mystical parent"; it is Charlotte Brontë's vindicationof Eve, her vision of woman as she is to be. She faced the world oncefor all with her vision: "I see her, " she said, "and I will tell youwhat she is like. "

Mrs. Oliphant did not see the woman kneeling on the hills. NeitherGeorge Eliot nor Mrs. Gaskell saw her. They could not possibly have toldthe world what she was like. It is part of Charlotte Brontë's superiorgreatness that she saw. 

 * * * * *

You do not see that woman in _Villette_. She has passed with thesplendour of Charlotte's vision of the world. The world in _Villette_ isnarrowed to a Pensionnat de Demoiselles, and centred in the heart of onewoman. And never, not even in _Jane Eyre_, and certainly not in_Shirley_, did Charlotte Brontë achieve such mastery of reality, andwith it such mastery of herself. _Villette_ is the final triumph of hergenius over the elements that warred in her. It shows the movement ofher genius, which was always by impulse and recoil. In _The Professor_she abjured, in the interests of reality, the "imagination" of heryouth. In _Jane Eyre_ she was urged forward by the released impetus ofthe forces she repressed. In _Shirley_ they are still struggling withher sense of the sober and the sane reality; the book is torn tofragments in the struggle, and in the end imagination riots. 

But in _Villette_ there are none of these battlings and rendings, theseTitanic upheavals and subsidences. Charlotte Brontë's imagination, andher sense of the real, are in process of fusion. There are few novels inwhich an imagination so supreme is wedded to so vivid a vision ofactuality. It may be said that Charlotte Brontë never achieved positiveactuality before. The Pensionnat de Demoiselles is almost as visibly andpalpably actual as the Maison Vauquer in _Père Goriot_. It is a returnto the method of experience with a vengeance. Charlotte's success, indeed, was so stunning that for all but sixty years _Villette_ haspassed for a _roman à clef_, the novel, not only of experience, but ofpersonal experience. There was a certain plausibility in that view. Thecharacters could all be easily recognized. And when Dr. John wasidentified with Mr. George Smith, and his mother with Mr. George Smith'smother, and Madame Beck with Madame Héger, and M. Paul Emanuel withMadame Héger's husband, the inference was irresistible: Lucy Snowe was, and could only be, Charlotte Brontë. And as the figure of M. PaulEmanuel was ten times more vivid and convincing than that of Rochester, so all that applied to Jane Eyre applied with ten times more force toLucy. In _Villette_ Charlotte Brontë was considered to have givenherself hopelessly away. 

I have tried to show that this view cannot stand before an unprejudicedexamination 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 inlove 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 hadbeen, if he had thus obtained the reality with which passion endows itsobject, her imagination would have had no use for him; its work wouldhave been done for it. 

To the supreme artist the order of the actual event is one thing, andthe order of creation is another. Their lines may start from the samepoint in the actual, they may touch again and again, but they are notthe same, and they cannot run exactly parallel. There must always bethis difference between the actual thing and the thing drawn from it, however closely, that each is embedded and enmeshed in a differentcontext. For a character in a novel to be alive it must have grown; andto 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 likelyis it to have been "taken", to have been seized, hauled by the scruff ofits neck out of the dense web of the actual. All that the supreme artistwants is what Charlotte Brontë called "the germ of the real", by whichshe meant the germ of the actual. He does not want the alien, developedthing, standing in its own medium ready-made. Charlotte Brontë said thatthe character of Dr. John was a failure because it lacked the germ ofthe real. She should have said that it lacked the germ of many reals; itis so obviously drawn from incomplete observation of a single instance. I am inclined to think that she did "take" Dr. John. And wheneverCharlotte Brontë "took" a character, as she took the unfortunate curatesand Mr. St. John Rivers, the result was failure. 

No supreme work of art was ever "taken". It was begotten and born andgrown, the offspring of faithful love between the soul of the artist andreality. The artist must bring to his "experience" as much as he takesfrom it. The dignity of Nature is all against these violences androbberies of art. She hides her deepest secret from the marauder, andyields it to the lover who brings to her the fire of his own soul. 

And that fire of her own soul was what Charlotte Brontë brought to hersupreme creations. It was certainly what she brought to Paul Emanuel. Impossible to believe that M. Héger gave her more than one or two of thegerms of M. Paul. Personally, I can only see the respectable M. Héger asa man whose very essence was a certain impassivity and phlegm under theappearance of a temperament. Choleric he was, with the superficial andtemporary choler of the schoolmaster. A schoolmaster gifted with themost extraordinary, the most marvellous, the most arresting faculty formaking faces, a faculty which in an Englishman would have argued him aperfect volcano of erratic temperament. But I more than suspect thatwhen it came to temperament M. Héger took it out in faces; that he wasnothing more than a benevolent, sentimental, passably intellectualbourgeois; but bourgeois to the core. Whereas, look at M. Paul! Nowonder that with that tame and solid stuff before her it took evenCharlotte Brontë's fiery spirit nine years (torturing the unwillingdross 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 bestimagined of her characters. 

I admit that in the drawing of many of her minor characters she seems tohave relied upon very close and intimate observation of the livingmodel. But in none of her minor characters is she at grips with thereality that, for her, passion is. Charlotte refused to give heroic rankto persons she had merely observed; she would not exalt them to thedignity of passion. Her imagination could not work on them to thatextent. (That is partly why Caroline's delirium is so palpably "faked". )Even in her portrait of the heroic Shirley, who was frankly "taken" fromher sister Emily, she achieved the likeness mainly by the artifice ofunlikeness, by removing Shirley Keeldar into a life in which EmilyBrontë had never played a part, whereby Shirley became for her aseparate person. (You cannot by any stretch of the imagination see Emilyfalling in love with the schoolmaster, Louis Moore. )

Lest there should be any doubt on the subject, Charlotte herselfexplained to Mrs. Gaskell how her imagination worked. "I asked her, "Mrs. Gaskell says, "whether she had ever taken opium, as the descriptiongiven of its effects in _Villette_ was so exactly like what I hadexperienced--vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, of which theoutlines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, etc. She replied thatshe had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, butthat she had followed the process she always adopted when she had todescribe anything that had not fallen within her own experience; she hadthought intently on it for many and many a night before fallingasleep--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 hadin reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, wordfor word, as it happened. "

To a mind like that the germ of the actual was enough. CharlotteBrontë's genius, in fact, was ardently impatient of the actual: it caredonly for its own. At the least hint from experience it was off. Aglance, a gesture of M. Héger's was enough to fire it to the conceptionof Paul Emanuel. He had only to say a kind word to her, to leave a bookor a box of bon-bons in her desk (if he _did_ leave bon-bons) forCharlotte's fire to work on him. She had only to say to herself, "Thislittle man is adorable in friendship; I wonder what he would be like inlove, " 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 herlove-sick agony. As for Madame Héger, Madame's purely episodic jealousy, her habits of surveillance, her small inscrutabilities of behaviour, became the fury, the treachery, the perfidy of Madame Beck. Fortreachery and perfidy, and agony and passion, were what Charlotte wantedfor _Villette_. 

And yet it is true that _Villette_ is a novel of experience, owing itsconspicuous qualities very much to observation. After all, acontemporary novel cannot be made altogether out of the fire of thegreat writer's soul. It is because Charlotte Brontë relied too much onthe fire of her own soul that in _Jane Eyre_ and parts of _Shirley_ shemissed 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 ofthe speech characteristic of an individual and a type, for the rightaccent and pitch, for all the vanishing shades and aspects of thetemporary and the particular, the greatest and the fieriest writer is atthe mercy of observation and experience. It was her final mastery ofthese things that made it possible to praise Charlotte Brontë's powersof observation at the expense of her genius; and this mainly because ofM. 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 ofstairs to the solitary and lofty attic and locks her in, to that othermoment when he brings her to the little house that he has prepared forher. Whenever he appears there is pure radiant comedy, and pathos aspure. It is in this utter purity, this transparent simplicity, that_Villette_ is great. There is not one jarring note in any of thedelicious dialogues between Lucy and M. Paul, not one of those passageswhich must be erased if quotation is not to fail of its effect. Take thescene where Lucy breaks M. Paul's spectacles. 

"A score of times ere now I had seen them fall and receive nodamage--this time, as Lucy Snowe's hapless luck would have it, they sofell that each clear pebble became a shivered and shapeless star. 

"Now, indeed, dismay seized me--dismay and regret. I knew the value ofthese _lunettes_: M. Paul's sight was peculiar, not easily fitted, andthese glasses suited him. I had heard him call them his treasures: as Ipicked them up, cracked and worthless, my hand trembled. Frightenedthrough all my nerves I was to see the mischief I had done, but I thinkI was even more sorry than afraid. For some seconds I dared not look thebereaved Professor in the face; he was the first to speak. 

"'_Là_!' he said: '_me voilà veuf de mes lunettes_! I think thatMademoiselle Lucy will now confess that the cord and gallows are amplyearned; she trembles in anticipation of her doom. Ah, traitress, traitress! You are resolved to have me quite blind and helpless in yourhands!'

"I lifted my eyes: his face, instead of being irate, lowering andfurrowed, was overflowing with the smile, coloured with the bloom I hadseen brightening it that evening at the Hotel Crécy. He was notangry--not even grieved. For the real injury he showed himself full ofclemency; 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 Isaid 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 passion, and accuses Lucy of behaving tohim, "'With what pungent vivacities--what an impetus of mutiny--what a_fougue_ of injustice. '... '_Chut! à l'instant!_ There! there Iwent--_vive comme la poudre_. ' He was sorry--he was very sorry: for mysake he grieved over the hopeless peculiarity. This _emportement_, this_chaleur_--generous, perhaps, but excessive--would yet, he feared, do mea mischief. It was a pity. I was not--he believed, in his soul--whollywithout good qualities; and would I but hear reason, and be more sedate, more sober, less _en l'air_, less _coquette_, less taken by show, lessprone to set an undue value on outside excellence--to make much of theattentions of people remarkable chiefly for so many feet of stature, _des couleurs de poupée, un nez plus ou moins bien fait_, and anenormous amount of fatuity--I might yet prove a useful, perhaps anexemplary character. But, as it was----And here the little man's voicewas for a moment choked. 

"I would have looked up at him, or held out my hand, or said a soothingword; but I was afraid, if I stirred, I should either laugh or cry; soodd, 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 onat his ease. 

"'While he, M. Paul, was on these painful topics, he would dare my angerfor the sake of my good, and would venture to refer to a change he hadnoticed in my dress. '"

 * * * * *

"'And if you condemn a bow of ribbon for a lady, monsieur, you wouldnecessarily disapprove of a thing like this for a gentleman?' holding upmy bright little chainlet of silk and gold. His sole reply was agroan--I suppose over my levity. 

"After sitting some minutes in silence, and watching the progress of thechain, at which I now wrought more assiduously than ever, he inquired:

"'Whether what he had just said would have the effect of making meentirely detest him?'

"I hardly remember what answer I made, or how it came about; I don'tthink I spoke at all, but I know we managed to bid good night onfriendly terms: and even after M. Paul had reached the door, he turnedback just to explain that he would not be understood to speak in entirecondemnation of the scarlet dress. '... 

"'And the flowers under my bonnet, monsieur?' I asked. 'They are verylittle ones. '

"'Keep them little, then, ' said he. 'Permit them not to becomefull-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 azurecirclet, pleased his eyes. I told him to open it. 

"'My initials!' said he, indicating the letters in the lid. 'Who toldyou I was called Carl David?'

"'A little bird, monsieur. '

"'Does it fly from me to you? Then one can tie a message under its wingwhen needful. '

"He took out the chain--a trifle indeed as to value, but glossy withsilk 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 fête-day?'

"'Yes. '

"'This purpose continued as you wove it?'

"'Again I assented. '

"'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 theadornment 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 splendidlyacross his chest, displaying as much and suppressing as little as hecould: for he had no notion of concealing what he admired and thoughtdecorative.... 

"'_À present c'est un fait accompli_, ' said he, readjusting hispaletot.... "

To the last gesture of Monsieur it is superb. 

I have taken those scenes because they are of crucial importance asindications of what Charlotte Brontë was doing in _Villette_, and yetwould do. They show not only an enormous advance in technique, but asense of the situation, of the _scène à faire_, which is entirely oralmost entirely lacking in her earlier work. 

If there be degrees in reality, Lucy and Pauline de Bassompierre areonly less real than M. Paul. And by some miracle their reality is notdiminished by Charlotte Brontë's singular change of intention withregard to these two. Little Polly, the child of the beginning, theinscrutable creature of nerves, exquisitely sensitive to pain, frettingher heart out in love for her father and for Graham Bretton, is hardlyrecognizable in Pauline, Countess de Bassompierre. She has preservedonly her fragility, her fastidiousness, her little air ofinaccessibility. Polly is obviously predestined to that profound andtragic suffering which is Lucy Snowe's. 

"I watched Polly rest her small elbow on her small knee, her head on herhand; I observed her draw a square inch or two of pocket-handkerchieffrom the doll-pocket of her doll-skirt, and then I heard her weep. Otherchildren in grief or pain cry aloud, without shame or restraint, butthis 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 anensuing space of some minutes I perceived she endured agony. She wentthrough, in that brief interval of her infant life, emotions such assome never feel; it was in her constitution: she would have more of suchinstants 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 unmistakablein these early chapters. She watches Polly with a cold, analytic eye. "These sudden, dangerous natures--sensitive as they are called--offermany a curious spectacle to those whom a cooler temperament has securedfrom participation in their vagaries. " When Polly, charming Polly, waitson her father at the tea-table, Lucy is impervious to her tiny charm. "Candidly speaking, I thought her a little busy-body. " When GrahamBretton repulses Polly, Lucy has some thoughts of "improving theoccasion by inculcating some of those maxims of philosophy whereof I hadever a tolerable stock ready for application. "

There is no sign in the beginning that this detestable Lucy is to beheroine. But in Chapter Four Polly disappears and Lucy takes her placeand plays her part. The child Polly had a suffering and passionateheart, for all her little air of fastidiousness and inaccessibility. Itis the suffering and passionate heart of Polly that beats in Lucy of thePensionnat. There is only enough of the original Lucy left to sit injudgment on Ginevra Fanshawe and "the Parisienne". 

The child Polly had an Imagination. "'Miss Snowe, ' said she in awhisper, 'this is a wonderful book ... It tells about distant countries, a long, long way from England, which no traveller can reach withoutsailing thousands of miles over the sea.... Here is a picture ofthousands gathered in a desolate place--a plain spread with sand.... Andhere are pictures more stranger than that. There is the wonderful GreatWall 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 aland of ice and snow without green fields, woods, or gardens. In thisland they found some mammoth bones; there are no mammoths now. You don'tknow what it was; but I can tell you, because Graham told me. A mightygoblin creature, as high as this room, and as long as the hall; but nota fierce, flesh-eating thing, Graham thinks. He believes if I met one ina forest, it would not kill me, unless I came quite in its way; when itwould trample me down amongst the bushes, as I might tread on agrasshopper in a hay-field without knowing it. '"

It is Polly's Imagination that appears again in Lucy's "CreativeImpulse". "I with whom that Impulse was the most intractable, the mostcapricious, the most maddening of masters ... A deity which sometimes, under circumstances apparently propitious, would not speak whenquestioned, would not hear when appealed to, would not, when sought, befound; but would stand, all cold, all indurated, all granite, a darkBaal with carven lips and blank eyeballs, and breast like the stone faceof a tomb; and again, suddenly, at some turn, some sound, somelong-trembling sob of the wind, at some rushing past of an unseen streamof electricity, the irrational Demon would awake unsolicited, would stirstrangely alive, would rush from its pedestal like a perturbed Dagon, calling to its votary for a sacrifice, whatever the hour--to its victimfor some blood or some breath, whatever the circumstances orscene--rousing its priest, treacherously promising vaticination, perhaps filling its temple with a strange hum of oracles, but sure togive half the significance to fateful winds, and grudging to thedesperate listener even a miserable remnant--yielding it sordidly, asthough each word had been a drop of the deathless ichor of its own darkveins. "

That is Lucy. But when Polly reappears fitfully as Pauline deBassompierre, she is an ordinary, fastidious little lady without a sparkof imagination or of passion. 

Now in the first three chapters of _Villette_, Charlotte Brontëconcentrated all her strength and all her art on the portrait of littlePolly. The portrait of little Polly is drawn with the most delicate careand tender comprehension, and the most vivid and entire reality. Icannot agree with Mr. Swinburne that George Eliot, with her Totty andEppie and Lillo, showed a closer observation of the ways, or a moreperfect understanding of the heart of a child. Only little MaggieTulliver can stand beside little Polly in _Villette_. She is an answerto every critic, from Mr. Swinburne downwards, who maintains thatCharlotte Brontë 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 Brettonis a mere foil to little Polly. Charlotte Brontë distinctly stated inher letters that she did not care for Miss Snowe. "Lucy must not marryDr. John; he is far too youthful, handsome, bright-spirited, andsweet-tempered; he is a 'curled darling' of Nature and of fortune, andmust 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, itmust 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: fromthe beginning I never meant to appoint her lines in pleasant places. ""As to the character of Lucy Snowe, my intention from the first was thatshe should not occupy the pedestal to which Jane Eyre was raised by someinjudicious admirers. She is where I meant her to be, and where nocharge of self-laudation can touch her. "

But Lucy is _not_ altogether where she was meant to be. When shereappears at the Pensionnat it is with "flame in her soul and lightningin her eyes". She reminds M. Paul "of a young she wild creature, newcaught, untamed, viewing with a mixture of fire and fear the firstentrance of the breaker-in". 

"'You look, ' said he, 'like one who would snatch at a draught of sweetpoison, and spurn wholesome bitters with disgust. '"

There is no inconsistency in this. Women before now have hidden a soullike a furnace under coldness and unpleasantness, and smotheredshrieking nerves under an appearance of apathy. Lucy Snowe is one ofthem. As far as she goes, Lucy at Bretton is profoundly consistent withLucy in _Villette_. It is not Lucy's volcanic outbreaks in thePensionnat that do violence to her creator's original intention. It isthe debasement of Polly and the exaltation of Lucy to her tragic rôle, the endowment of Lucy with Polly's rarest qualities, to the utterimpoverishment of Pauline de Bassompierre. Polly in _Villette_ is a merefoil to Lucy. 

Having lavished such care and love on Polly, Charlotte Brontë could notpossibly have meant to debase her and efface her. How then did it happenthat Polly was debased and Lucy sublimely exalted?

It happened, I think, partly because for the first time Charlotte Brontëcreated a real living man. The reality of M. Paul Emanuel was toostrong both for Lucy and for Charlotte Brontë. From the moment when heseized her and dragged her to the garret he made Lucy live as CharlotteBrontë had never contemplated her living. He made her live to the utterexclusion and extinction of Pauline de Bassompierre. 

And "the despotic little man" dominates the book to an extent thatCharlotte never contemplated either. Until the storm carried him out ofher sight, she was, I think, unaware of his dominion. Dr. John was herhero. She told Mr. George Smith, his prototype, that she intended himfor the most beautiful character in the book (which must have been verygratifying to Mr. George Smith). He was the type she needed for herpurpose. But he does not "come off", if only for the reason that she isconsciously preoccupied with him. Dr. John was far more of an obsessionto her than this little man, Paul Emanuel, who was good enough for LucySnowe. Pauline de Bassompierre was to be finished and perfected to matchthe high finish and perfection of Dr. John. Yet neither Pauline nor Dr. John "came off". Charlotte Brontë cared too much for them. But for PaulEmanuel 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 fromthe moment when Lucy settles in Villette. To Charlotte's inexperienceBrussels was a perfect hotbed for the germs of the real. That, I think, can be admitted without subscribing to the view that it was anythingmore. Once in the Pensionnat, Lucy entered an atmosphere of the mostintense reality. From that point onward the book is literally inspiredby the sense of atmosphere, that sense to which experience brings thestuff to work on. All Charlotte's experience and her suffering is there, changed, intensified, transmuted to an experience and a suffering whichwere not hers. 

This matured sense of actuality is shown again in the drawing of theminor characters. There is a certain vindictiveness about the portraitof Ginevra Fanshawe, a touch of that fierce, intolerant temper thatcaused Blanche Ingram to be strangled by the hands of her creator. Ginevra is not strangled. She lives splendidly; she flourishes in anopulence of detail. 

Experience may have partly accounted for Ginevra. It could hardly haveaccounted 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 handlingunsympathetic types, because, in short, of its all round excellence, that _Villette_ must count as Charlotte Brontë's masterpiece. It ismarvellous that within such limits she should have attained suchcomparative catholicity of vision. It is not the vast vision of_Shirley_, prophetic and inspired, and a little ineffectual. It is thelucid, sober, unobstructed gaze of a more accomplished artist, theartist whose craving for "reality" is satisfied; the artist who isgradually extending the limits of his art. When Charlotte Brontë wrote_Jane Eyre_ she could not appreciate Jane Austen; she wondered whyGeorge Henry Lewes liked her so much. She objected to Jane Austenbecause there was no passion in her, and therefore no poetry and noreality. When she wrote _Shirley_ she had seen that passion was noteverything; there were other things, very high realities, that were notpassion. By the time she wrote _Villette_ she saw, not only that thereare other things, but that passion is the rarest thing on earth. It doesnot enter into the life of ordinary people like Dr. John, and MadameBeck, 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. Gonetoo are the purple patches; but there is everywhere delicate colourunder a vivid light. But there are countless passages which show theperfection to which she could bring her old imaginative style. Take thescene where Lucy, under the influence of opium, goes into Villette _enfête_. 

"The drug wrought. I know not whether Madame had over-charged orunder-charged the dose; its result was not that she intended. Instead ofstupor, came excitement. I became alive to new thought--to reveriepeculiar in colouring. A gathering call ran among the faculties, theirbugles sang, their trumpets rang an untimely summons.... 

"I took a route well known, and went up towards the palatial and royalHaute-Ville; thence the music I heard certainly floated; it was hushednow, but it might rewaken. I went on: neither band nor bell-music cameto meet me; another sound replaced it, a sound like a strong tide, agreat flow, deepening as I proceeded. Light broke, movement gathered, chimes pealed--to what was I coming? Entering on the level of a GrandePlace, I found myself, with the suddenness of magic, plunged amidst agay, living, joyous crowd. 

"Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the whole world seemsabroad; moonlight and heaven are banished: the town by her ownflambeaux, beholds her own splendour--gay dresses, grand equipage, finehorses and gallant riders, throng the bright streets. I see even scoresof masks. It is a strange scene, stranger than dreams. "

This is only beaten by that lyric passage that ends _Villette_; thatsonorous dirge that rings high above all pathos, which is somehow a songof triumph, inspired by the whole power and splendour and magnificenceof storm and death. 

"The sun passes 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 windtakes its autumn moan; but--he is coming. 

"The skies hang full and dark--a rack sails from the west; the cloudscast themselves into strange forms--arches and broad radiations; thererise resplendent mornings--glorious, royal, purple, as monarch in hisstate; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle atits thickest--so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. I know somesigns of the sky, I have noted them ever since childhood. God, watchthat sail! Oh, guard it!

"The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace, Banshee--'keening' at everywindow! It will rise--it will swell--it shrieks out long: wander as Imay through the house this night, I cannot lull the blast. The advancinghours make it strong; by midnight all sleepless watchers hear and fear awild south-west storm. 

"That storm roared frenzied for seven days. It did not cease till theAtlantic was strewn with wrecks: it did not lull till the deeps hadgorged their fill of substance. Not till the destroying angel of tempesthad achieved his perfect work, would he fold the wings whose waft wasthunder--the tremor of whose plumes was storm. "

 * * * * *

After _Villette_, the _Last Sketch_, the _Fragment of Emma_; thatfragment which Charlotte Brontë read to her husband not long before herdeath. All he said was, "The critics will accuse you of repetition. "

The critics have fulfilled his cautious prophecy. The _Fragment_ passedfor one of those sad things of which the least said the better. It wassettled that Charlotte Brontë had written herself out, that if she hadlived she would have become more and more her own plagiarist. There is amiddle-aged lady in _Emma_, presumably conceived on the lines of Mrs. Fairfax and Mrs. Pryor. There is a girls' school, which is only notLowood because it is so obviously Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor. There is aschoolmistress with sandy hair and thin lips and a cold blue eye, recalling Madame Beck, though there the likeness ceases. And in thatschool, ill-treated by that schoolmistress, there is a little ugly, suffering, deserted child. 

All this looks very much like repetition. But it does not shake myprivate belief that _Emma_ is a fragment of what would have been asgreat a novel as _Villette_. There are indications. There is Mr. Ellin, who proves that Charlotte Brontë could create a live man of the finersort, an unexploited masculine type with no earthly resemblance toRochester or to Louis Moore or M. Paul. He is an unfinished sketchrather than a portrait, but a sketch that would not too shamefully havediscredited Mr. Henry James. For there is a most modern fineness andsubtlety in _Emma_; and, for all its sketchy incompleteness, a peculiarcertainty of touch, an infallible sense of the significant action, therevealing gesture. With a splendid economy of means, scenes, passages, phrases, apparently slight, are charged with the most intensepsychological suggestion. When Mr. Ellin, summoned on urgent business byMiss Wilcox, takes that preposterously long and leisurely round to getto her, you know what is passing in the mind of Mr. Ellin as well as ifyou had been told. In that brief scene between Mr. Ellin and theschoolmistress, you know as well as if you had been told, that MissWilcox has lost Mr. Ellin because of her unkindness to a child. When thechild, Matilda Fitzgibbon, falls senseless, and Mr. Ellin gives hisinarticulate cry and lifts her from the floor, the enigmatic man hasrevealed his innermost nature. 

Now a fragment that can suggest all this with the smallest possibleexpenditure of phrases, is not a fragment that can be set aside. It isslight; but slightness that accomplishes so much is a sign of progressrather than of falling-off. We shall never know what happened to Matildawhen Mr. Ellin took her from Miss Wilcox. We shall never know whathappened to Mr. Ellin; but I confess that I am dying to know, and that Ifind it hard to forgive Mr. Nicholls for having killed them, so certainam I that they would have lived triumphantly if Charlotte Brontë had notmarried him. 

Some of us will be profoundly indifferent to this issue; for CharlotteBrontë has no following in a certain school. She defies analysis. Youcannot 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_ shepreserves some of her clumsiness, her crudity, her improbability. Theprogress of "the Novel" in our day is towards a perfection of form and areality she never knew. 

But "reality" is a large term; and, as for form, _who_ cared about it inthe fifties? As for improbability--as M. Dimnet says--she is not moreimprobable than Balzac. 

And all these things, the ambiguity, the formlessness and the rest, shewas gradually correcting as she advanced. It is impossible to exaggeratethe importance and significance of her attainment in _Villette_; therehas been so much confused thinking in the consecrated judgment of thatnovel. _Villette_ owes its high place largely to its superiorconstruction and technique; largely and primarily to Charlotte Brontë'sprogress towards the light, towards the world, towards the greatundecorated reality. It is odd criticism that ignores the inevitablegrowth, the increasing vision and grasp, the whole indomitable advanceof a great writer, and credits "experience" with the final masterpiece. As a result of this confusion _Villette_ has been judged "final" inanother sense. Yes, final--this novel that shows every sign and token oflong maturing, long-enduring power. If Charlotte Brontë's critics hadnot hypnotized themselves by the perpetual reiteration of that word"experience", it would have been impossible for them, with the evidenceof her work before them, to have believed that in _Villette_ she hadwritten herself out. 

She was only just beginning. 

 * * * * *

Of Charlotte Brontë's _Poems_ there is not much to say. They are betterpoems than Branwell's or Anne's, but that does not make them very good. Still, they are interesting, and they are important, because they arethe bridge by which Charlotte Brontë passed into her own dominion. Shetook Wordsworth with his Poems and Ballads for her guide, and he misledher and delayed her on her way, and kept her a long time standing on herbridge. For in her novels, and her novels only, Charlotte was a poet. Inher poems she is a novelist, striving and struggling for expression in acramped form, an imperfect and improper medium. But most indubitably anovelist. Nearly all her poems which are not artificial are impersonal. They deal with "situations", with "psychological problems", that cryaloud for prose. There is the "Wife" who seems to have lived a long, adventurous life with "William" through many poems; there is thedeserted wife and mother in "Mementos"; there is "Frances", the desertedmaiden; there is "Gilbert" with his guilty secret and his suicide, atriple domestic tragedy in the three acts of a three-part ballad; thereis the lady in "Preference", who prefers her husband to her passionateand profoundly deluded lover; there is the woman in "Apostasy", wreckedin the conflict between love and priestcraft; and there is little elsebeside. These poems are straws, showing the way of the wind that blowethwhere it listeth. 

 * * * * *

Too much has been written about Charlotte Brontë, and far too much hasbeen read. You come away from it with an enormous mass of printed stuffwrecked in your memory, letters, simply hundreds of letters, legends andtheories huddled together in a heap, with all values and proportionslost; and your impression is of tumult and of suffering, and of amultitude of confused and incongruous happenings; funerals andflirtations, or something very like flirtations, to the sound of thepassing bell and sexton's chisel; upheavals of soul, flights to and fromBrussels, interminable years of exile, and of lurid, tragic passion;years, interminable, monotonous years of potato-peeling and all mannerof household piety; scenes of debauchery, horrors of opium and of drink;celebrity, cataclysmal celebrity, rushings up to town in storm anddarkness, 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 workshopoverpowering the sexton's chisel; then marriage, sudden and swift; thendeath. And in the midst of it all, one small and rather absurd andobscure figure, tossed to and fro, said to be Charlotte Brontë. 

What an existence!

This is the impression created by the bibliographical total. But sweepfour-fifths of it away, all the legends and half the letters, and sortand set out what remains, observing values and proportions, and you getan outer life where no great and moving event ever came, saving onlydeath (Charlotte's marriage hardly counts beside it); an outer life of astrange and almost oppressive simplicity and silence; and an inner life, tumultuous and profound in suffering, a life to all appearancesfrustrate, where all nourishment of the emotions was reduced to thebarest allowance a woman's heart can depend on and yet live; and nonethe less a life that out of that starvation diet raised enough of richand vivid and superb emotion to decorate a hundred women's lives; aninner life which her genius fed and was fed from, for which no reality, no experience, could touch its own intensity of realization. And, geniusapart, in the region of actual and ostensible emotion, no one of us canmeasure the depth of her adoration of duty, or the depth, the force andvolume of her passion for her own people, and for the earth trodden bytheir feet, the earth that covered them. Beside it every other feelingwas temporary and insignificant. In the light of it you see CharlotteBrontë's figure for ever simple and beautiful and great; behind her forever the black-grey setting of her village and the purple of her moors. That greatness and beauty and simplicity is destroyed by any effort todetach her from her background. She may seem susceptible to the alieninfluences of exile; but it is as an exile that she suffers; and hermost inspired moments are her moments of return, when she wrote proselike this: "The moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale; as glad as ifshe gave herself to his fierce caress with love. No Endymion will watchfor his goddess to-night: there are no flocks on the mountains. "

 * * * * *

Around the figure of Emily Brontë there is none of that clamour andconfusion. She stands apart in an enduring silence, and guards for everher secret and her mystery. By the mercy of heaven the swarm of gossipsand of theorists has passed her by. She has no legend or hardly any. Socompletely has she been passed over that when Madame Duclaux came towrite the Life of Emily Brontë she found little to add to Mrs. Gaskell'smeagre record beyond that story, which she tells with an incomparablesimplicity and reticence, of Emily in her mortal illness, sitting by thehearth, combing her long hair till the comb slips from her fingers. 

That is worth all the reams, the terrible reams that have been writtenabout Charlotte. 

There can be no doubt that Emily Brontë found her shelter behindCharlotte's fame; but she was protected most of all by theunapproachable, the unique and baffling quality of her temperament andof her genius. Her own people seem to have felt it; Charlotte herself inthat preface to _Wuthering Heights_, which stands as her lastvindication and eulogy of her dead sister, even Charlotte betrays acurious reservation and reluctance. You feel that Emily's geniusinspired her with a kind of sacred terror. 

Charlotte destroyed all records of her sister except her poems. Betweensix and seven hundred of her own letters have been published; there aretwo of Emily's. They tell little or nothing. And there was that diaryshe kept for Anne, where she notes with extreme brevity the things thatare happening in her family. There never was a diary wherein the soul ofthe diarist was so well concealed. 

And yet, because of this silence, this absence of legend and conjecture, we see Emily Brontë more clearly than we can ever hope to see Charlottenow. Though hardly anything is known of her, what _is_ known isauthentic; it comes straight from those who knew and loved her: fromCharlotte, from Ellen Nussey, from the servants at the Parsonage. Evenof her outward and visible presence we have a clearer image. The linesare fewer, but they are more vivid. You see her tall and slender, in herrough clothes, tramping the moors with the form and the step of a virileadolescent. Shirley, the "_bête fauve_", is Emily civilized. You see herhead 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, onemoment alert, intent, and the next, inaccessibly remote. 

I have seen such kind and kindling eyes in the face of a visionary, bornwith a profound, incurable indifference to the material event; for whomthe Real is the incredible, unapparent harmony that flows above, beneath, and within the gross flux of appearances. To him it is the solething real. That kind and kindling look I know to be simply a lightreflected from the surface of the dream. It is anything but cold; it hasindeed a certain tender flame; but you would be profoundly mistaken ifyou argued from it more than the faintest polite interest in you andyour affairs. The kindling of Emily Brontë's eyes I take to have had attimes something of the same unearthly quality. Strangers received fromher an impression as of a creature utterly removed from them; aremoteness scarcely human, hard to reconcile with her known tendernessfor every living thing. She seems to have had a passionate repugnance toalien and external contacts, and to have felt no more than an almostreluctant liking for the lovable and charming Ellen Nussey. Indeed, sheregarded Charlotte's friend with the large and virile tolerance thatrefuses to be charmed. 

And yet in the depths of her virginal nature there was somethingfiercely tender and maternal. There can be no doubt that she cared forCharlotte, who called her "Mine own bonnie love"; but she would seem tohave cared far more for Anne who was young and helpless, and forBranwell who was helpless and most weak. 

Thus there is absolutely nothing known of Emily that destroys ordisturbs the image that Haworth holds of her; nothing that detaches herfor a moment from her own people, and from her own place. Her days ofexile count not at all in her thirty years of home. No separation everbroke, for one hour that counted, the bonds that bound her to her moors, or frustrated the divine passion of her communion with their earth andsky. Better still, no tale of passion such as they tell of Charlotte wasever told of Emily. 

It may be told yet, for no secret thing belonging to this disastrousfamily is sacred. There may be somewhere some awful worshipper of EmilyBrontë, impatient of her silence and unsatisfied with her strange, hervirgin and inaccessible beauty, who will some day make up a story ofsome love-affair, some passion kindred to Catherine Earnshaw's passionfor Heathcliff, of which her moors have kept the secret; and he willtell his tale. But we shall at least know that he had made it up. Andeven so, it will have been better for that man if he had never beenborn. He will have done his best to destroy or to deface the lovelinessof a figure unique in literature. And he will have ignored the oneperfect, the one essentially true picture of Emily Brontë, which is tobe found in Maurice Maeterlinck's _Wisdom and Destiny_. 

To M. Maeterlinck she is the supreme instance of the self-sufficingsoul, independent and regardless of the material event. She shows theemptiness, the impotence, the insignificance of all that we call"experience, " beside the spirit that endures. "Not a single event everpaused as it passed by her threshold; yet did every event she couldclaim take place in her heart, with incomparable force and beauty, withmatchless precision and detail. We say that nothing ever happened; butdid not all things really happen to her much more directly and tangiblythan with most of us, seeing that everything that took place about her, everything that she saw or heard was transformed within her intothoughts and feelings, into indulgent love, admiration, adoration oflife... ?

"Of her happiness none can doubt. Not in the soul of the best of allthose whose happiness has lasted longest, been the most active, diversified, perfect, could more imperishable harvest be found, than inthe soul Emily Brontë lays bare. If to her there came nothing of allthat passes in love, sorrow, passion or anguish, still did she possessall 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 withintense realization, was a hundred times more true of Emily. It was sotrue that beside it nothing else that can be said is altogether true. Itis not necessary for a man to be convinced of the illusory nature oftime and of material happenings in order to appreciate Charlotte'sgenius; but his comprehension of Emily's will be adequate or otherwise, according to the passion and sincerity with which he embraces that idea. And he must have, further, a sense of the reality behind the illusion. It is through her undying sense of it that Emily Brontë is great. Shehad none of the proud appearances of the metaphysical mind; she did not, so far as we know, devour, like George Eliot, whole systems ofphilosophy in her early youth. Her passionate pantheism was not derived;it was established in her own soul. She was a mystic, not by religiousvocation, but by temperament and by ultimate vision. She offers theapparent anomaly of extreme detachment and of an unconquerable love oflife. 

It was the highest and the purest passion that you can well conceive. For life gave her nothing in return. It treated her worse than ittreated Charlotte. She had none of the things that, after all, Charlottehad; neither praise nor fame in her lifetime; nor friendship, nor love, nor vision of love. All these things "passed her by with averted head";and she stood in her inviolable serenity and watched them go, withoutputting out her hand to one of them. You cannot surprise her in anypiteous gesture of desire or regret. And, unlike Charlotte, she made itimpossible for you to pity her. 

It is this superb attitude to life, this independence of the materialevent, this detachment from the stream of circumstance, that marks herfrom her sister; for Charlotte is at moments pitifully immersed in thestream of circumstance, pitifully dependent on the material event. Itis true that she kept her head above the stream, and that the failure ofthe material event did not frustrate or hinder her ultimate achievement. But Charlotte's was not by any means "a chainless soul". It struggledand hankered after the unattainable. What she attained and realized sherealized and attained in her imagination only. She knew nothing of thesoul's more secret and intimate possession. And even her imaginationwaited to some extent upon experience. When Charlotte wrote of passion, of its tragic suffering, or of its ultimate appeasing, she, after all, wrote of things that might have happened to her. But when Emily wrote ofpassion, she wrote of a thing that, so far as she personally wasconcerned, not only was not and had not been, but never could be. It wastrue enough of Charlotte that she created. But of Emily it wasabsolutely and supremely true. 

Hers is not the language of frustration, but of complete and satisfyingpossession. It may seem marvellous in the mouth of a woman destitute ofall emotional experience, in the restricted sense; but the real wonderwould have been a _Wuthering Heights_ born of any personal emotion; socertain is it that it was through her personal destitution that hergenius was so virile and so rich. At its hour it found her virgin, notonly to passion but to the bare idea of passion, to the inner andimmaterial event. 

And her genius was great, not only through her stupendous imagination, but because it fed on the still more withdrawn and secret sources of hersoul. If she had had no genius she would yet be great because of whattook place within her, the fusion of her soul with the transcendent andenduring life. 

It was there that, possessing nothing, she possessed all things; and hersecret escapes you if you are aware only of her splendid paganism. Shenever speaks the language of religious resignation like Anne andCharlotte. It is most unlikely that she relied, openly or in secret, on"the merits of the Redeemer", or on any of the familiar consolations ofreligion. As she bowed to no disaster and no grief, consolation wouldhave been the last thing in any religion that she looked for. But, forheight and depth of supernatural attainment, there is no comparisonbetween Emily's grip of divine reality and poor Anne's spasmodic anddespairing clutch; and none between Charlotte's piety, her "Godwilling"; "I suppose I ought to be thankful", and Emily's acceptance andendurance of the event. 

I am reminded that one event she neither accepted nor endured. Shefought death. Her spirit lifted the pathetic, febrile struggle ofweakness with corruption, and turned it to a splendid, Titanic, andunearthly combat. 

And yet it was in her life rather than her death that she was splendid. There is something shocking and repellent in her last defiance. Itshrieks discord with the endurance and acceptance, braver than allrevolt, finer than all resignation, that was the secret of her geniusand of her life. 

There is no need to reconcile this supreme detachment with the storm andagony that rages through _Wuthering Heights_, or with the passion forlife and adoration of the earth that burns there, an imperishable flame;or with Catherine Earnshaw's dream of heaven: "heaven did not seem to bemy home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; andthe angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of theheath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy". Catherine Earnshaw's dream has been cited innumerable times to provethat Emily Brontë was a splendid pagan. I do not know what it doesprove, if it is not the absolute and immeasurable greatness of hergenius, that, dwelling as she undoubtedly did dwell, in the secret andinvisible world, she could yet conceive and bring forth CatherineEarnshaw. 

It is not possible to diminish the force or to take away one word of Mr. Swinburne's magnificent eulogy. There _was_ in the "passionate greatgenius of Emily Brontë", "a dark, unconscious instinct as of primitivenature-worship". That was where she was so poised and so complete; thatshe touches earth and heaven, and is at once intoxicated with thesplendour of the passion of living, and holds her spirit in security andher heart in peace. She plunged with Catherine Earnshaw into the thickof the tumult, and her detachment is not more wonderful than herimmersion. 

It is our own imperfect vision that is bewildered by the union in her ofthese antagonistic attitudes. It is not only entirely possible andcompatible, but, if your soul be comprehensive, it is inevitable thatyou should adore the forms of life, and yet be aware of theirimpermanence; that you should affirm with equal fervour their illusionand the radiance of the reality that manifests itself in them. EmilyBrontë was nothing if not comprehensive. There was no distance, no abysstoo vast, no antagonism, no contradiction too violent and appalling forher embracing soul. Without a hint, so far as we know, from anyphilosophy, by a sheer flash of genius she pierced to the secret of theworld and crystallized it in two lines:

 The earth that wakes _one_ human heart to feeling Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell. 

It is doubtful if she ever read a line of Blake; yet it is Blake thather poems perpetually recall, and it is Blake's vision that she hasreached there. She too knew what it was

 To see a world in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, To hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour. 

She sees by a flash what he saw continuously; but it is by the samelight she sees it and wins her place among the mystics. 

Her mind was not always poised. It swung between its vision oftransparent unity and its love of earth for earth's sake. There are atleast four poems of hers that show this entirely natural oscillation. 

In one, a nameless poem, the Genius of Earth calls to the visionarysoul:

 Shall earth no more inspire thee, Thou lonely dreamer now? Since passion may not fire thee, Shall nature cease to bow?

 Thy mind is ever moving In regions dark to thee; Recall its useless roving, Come back, and dwell with me. 

 * * * * *

 Few hearts to mortals given On earth so wildly pine; Yet few would ask a heaven More like this earth than thine. 

"The Night-Wind" sings the same song, lures with the same enchantment;and the human voice answers, resisting:

 Play with the scented flower, The young tree's supple bough, And leave my human feelings In their own course to flow. 

But the other voice is stronger:

 The wanderer would not heed me; Its kiss grew warmer still. "Oh, come, " it sighed so sweetly; "I'll win thee 'gainst thy will. 

 "Were we not friends from childhood? Have I not loved thee long? As long as thou, the solemn night, Whose silence wakes my song. 

 "And when thy heart is resting Beneath the church-aisle stone, _I_ shall have time for mourning, And _thou_ for being alone. "

There are nine verses of "The Night-Wind", and the first eight arenegligible; but, as for the last and ninth, I do not know any poem inany language that renders, in four short lines, and with suchincomparable magic and poignancy, the haunting and pursuing of the humanby the inhuman, that passion of the homeless and eternal wind. 

And this woman, destitute, so far as can be known, of all metaphysicalknowledge or training, reared in the narrowest and least metaphysical ofcreeds, did yet contrive to express in one poem of four irregular versesall the hunger and thirst after the "Absolute" that ever moved a humansoul, all the bewilderment and agony inflicted by the unintelligiblespectacle of existence, the intolerable triumph of evil over good, anddid conceive an image and a vision of the transcendent reality thatholds, as in crystal, all the philosophies that were ever worthy of thename. 

Here it is. There are once more two voices: one of the Man, the other ofthe Seer:

THE PHILOSOPHER

 Oh, for the time when I shall sleep Without identity. And never care how rain may steep, Or snow may cover me! No promised heaven, these wild desires Could all, or half fulfil; No threatened hell, with quenchless fires, Subdue this restless will. 

 So said I, and still say the same; Still, to my death, will say-- Three gods, within this little frame, Are warring night and day; Heaven could not hold them all, and yet They all are held in me; And must be mine till I forget My present entity! Oh, for the time, when in my breast Their struggles will be o'er! Oh, for the day, when I shall rest, And never suffer more!

 I saw a spirit, standing, man, Where thou dost stand--an hour ago, And round his feet three rivers ran, Of equal depth, and equal flow-- A golden stream--and one like blood, And one like sapphire seemed to be; But where they joined their triple flood It tumbled in an inky sea. The spirit sent his dazzling gaze Down through that ocean's gloomy night; Then, kindling all, with sudden blaze, -- The glad deep sparkled wide and bright-- White as the sun, far, far more fair Than its divided sources were!

 And even for that spirit, seer, I've watched and sought my lifetime long; Sought him in heaven, hell, earth and air, An endless search and always wrong. Had I but seen his glorious eye _Once_ light the clouds that 'wilder me, I ne'er had raised this coward cry To cease to think, and cease to be; I ne'er had called oblivion blest, Nor, stretching eager hands to death, Implored to change for senseless rest This sentient soul, this living breath-- Oh, let me die--that power and will Their cruel strife may close, And conquered good and conquering ill Be lost in one repose!

That vision of the transcendent spirit, with the mingled triple flood oflife about his feet, is one that Blake might have seen and sung andpainted. 

The fourth poem, "The Prisoner", is a fragment, and an obscure fragment, which may belong to a very different cycle. But whatever its place, ithas the same visionary quality. The vision is of the woman captive, "confined in triple walls", the "guest darkly lodged", the "chainlesssoul", that defies its conqueror, its gaoler, and the spectator of itsagony. It has, this prisoner, its own unspeakable consolation, the"Messenger":

 He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs, With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars. Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire, And visions rise and change that kill me with desire. 

 * * * * *

 But, first, a hush of peace--a soundless calm descends; The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends; Mute music soothes my breast--unuttered harmony, That I could never dream, till earth was lost to me. 

 Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals; My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels: Its wings are almost free--its home, its harbour found, Measuring the gulf, it stoops and dares the final bound. 

That is the language of a mystic, of a mystic who has passed beyondcontemplation; who has known or imagined ecstasy. The joy isunmistakable; unmistakable, too, is the horror of the return:

 Oh! dreadful is the check--intense the agony-- When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again; The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain. 

There is no doubt about those three verses; that they are the expressionof the rarest and the most tremendous experience that is given tohumanity to know. 

If "The Visionary" does not touch that supernal place, it belongsindubitably to the borderland:

 Silent is the house; all are laid asleep: One alone looks out o'er the snow-wreaths deep, Watching every cloud, dreading every breeze That whirls the wildering drift and bends the groaning trees. 

 Cheerful is the hearth, soft the matted floor; Not one shivering gust creeps through pane or door; The little lamp burns straight, the rays shoot strong and far I trim it well to be the wanderer's guiding-star. 

 Frown, my haughty sire! chide, my angry dame! Set your slaves to spy; threaten me with shame; But neither sire nor dame, nor prying serf shall know, What angel nightly tracks that waste of frozen snow. 

 What I love shall come like visitant of air, Safe in secret power from lurking human snare; What loves me no word of mine shall e'er betray, Though for faith unstained my life must forfeit pay. 

 Burn then, little lamp; glimmer straight and clear-- Hush! a rustling wing stirs, methinks, the air; He for whom I wait, thus ever comes to me: Strange Power! I trust thy might; trust thou my constancy. 

Those who can see nothing in this poem but the idealization of anearthly passion must be strangely and perversely mistaken in their EmilyBrontë. I confess I can never read it without thinking of one of themost marvellous of all poems of Divine Love: "En una Noche Escura". 

EN UNA NOCHE ESCURA[A]

 Upon an obscure night Fevered with Love's anxiety (O hapless, happy plight!) I went, none seeing me, Forth from my house, where all things quiet be. 

 * * * * *

 Blest night of wandering In secret, when by none might I be spied, Nor I see anything; Without a light to guide Save that which in my heart burnt in my side. 

 That light did lead me on More surely than the shining of noontide, Where well I knew that One Did for my coming bide; Where he abode might none but he abide. 

 O night that didst lead thus; O night more lovely than the dawn of light; O night that broughtest us Lover to lover's sight, Lover to loved, in marriage of delight!

[Footnote A: "St. John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul. "Translated by Arthur Symons in vol. Ii. Of his _Collected Poems_. ]

 * * * * *

We know what love is celebrated there, and we do not know so clearlywhat manner of supernal passion is symbolized in Emily Brontë'sangel-lover. There is a long way there between Emily Brontë and St. John of the Cross, between her lamp-lit window and his "Dark Night ofthe Soul", and yet her opening lines have something of the premonitorythrill, the haunting power of tremendous suggestion, the intense, mysterious expectancy of his. The spiritual experience is somewhatdifferent, but it belongs to the same realm of the super-physical; andit is very far from Paganism. 

She wrote of these supreme ardours and mysteries; and she wrote thatmost inspired and vehement song of passionate human love, "Remembrance":

 Cold in the earth--and the deep snow piled above thee, Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave! Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee.... 

But "Remembrance" is too well known for quotation here. So is "The OldStoic". 

These are perfect and unforgettable things. But there is hardly one ofthe least admirable of her poems that has not in it some unforgettableand perfect verse or line:

 And oh, how slow that keen-eyed star Has tracked the chilly grey! What, watching yet? how very far The morning lies away. 

That is how some watcher on Wuthering Heights might measure the longpassage of the night. 

"The Lady to her Guitar", that recalls the dead and forgotten player, sings:

 It is as if the glassy brook Should image still its willows fair, _Though years ago the woodman's stroke Laid low in dust their Dryad-hair_. 

She has her "dim moon struggling in the sky", to match Charlotte's "themoon reigns glorious, glad of the gale, glad as if she gave herself tohis fierce caress with love". At sixteen, in the schoolroom, [A] shewrote verses of an incomparable simplicity and poignancy:

 A little while, a little while, The weary task is put away, And I can sing and I can smile, Alike, while I have holiday. 

 Where wilt thou go, my harassed heart-- What thought, what scene invites thee now? What spot, or near or far apart, Has rest for thee, my weary brow?

 * * * * *

 The house is old, the trees are bare, Moonless above bends twilight's dome; But what on earth is half so dear-- So longed for--as the hearth of home?

 The mute bird sitting on the stone, The dank moss dripping from the wall, The thorn-trees gaunt, the walks o'ergrown, I love them--how I love them all!

 Still, as I mused, the naked room, The alien firelight died away, And, from the midst of cheerless gloom, I passed to bright, unclouded day. 

 A little and a lone green lane That opened on a common wide; A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain Of mountains circling every side. 

 A heaven so clear, an earth so calm. So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air; And, deepening still the dream-like charm, Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere. 

[Footnote A: Madame Duclaux assigns to these verses a much laterdate--the year of Emily Brontë's exile in Brussels. Sir WilliamRobertson Nicoll also considers that "the 'alien firelight' suitsBrussels better than the Yorkshire hearth of 'good, kind' Miss Wooler". To me the schoolroom of the Pensionnat suggests an "alien" stove, andnot the light of any fire at all. ]

 * * * * *

There was no nostalgia that she did not know. And there was no funeralnote she did not sound; from the hopeless gloom of

 In the earth--the earth--thou shalt be laid, A grey stone standing over thee; Black mould beneath thee spread, And black mould to cover thee. 

 Well--there is rest there, So fast come thy prophecy; The time when my sunny hair Shall with grass-roots entwined be. 

 But cold--cold is that resting-place Shut out from joy and liberty, And all who loved thy living face Will shrink from it shudderingly. 

From that to the melancholy grace of the moorland dirge:

 The linnet in the rocky dells, The moor-lark in the air, The bee among the heather-bells That hide my lady fair:

 The wild deer browse above her breast; The wild birds raise their brood; And they, her smiles of love caressed, Have left her solitude. 

 * * * * *

 Well, let them fight for honour's breath, Or pleasure's shade pursue-- The dweller in the land of death Is changed and careless too. 

 And if their eyes should watch and weep Till sorrow's source were dry, She would not, in her tranquil sleep, Return a single sigh. 

 Blow, west wind, by the lowly mound, And murmur, summer-streams-- There is no need of other sound To soothe my lady's dreams. 

There is, finally, that nameless poem--her last--where Emily Brontë'screed finds utterance. It also is well known, but I give it here by wayof justification, lest I should seem to have exaggerated the mysticdetachment of this lover of the earth:

 No coward soul is mine, No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere: I see Heaven's glories shine, And faith shines equal, arming me from fear. 

 O God within my breast, Almighty, ever-present Deity! Life--that in me has rest, As I--undying Life--have power in thee!

 Vain are the thousand creeds That move men's hearts: unutterably vain; Worthless as withered weeds, Or idlest froth amid the boundless main. 

 To waken doubt in one Holding so fast by thine infinity; So surely anchored on The steadfast rock of immortality. 

 With wide-embracing love Thy spirit animates eternal years, Pervades and broods above, Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears. 

 Though earth and man were gone, And suns and universes ceased to be, And Thou wert left alone, Every existence would exist in Thee. 

 There is not room for Death, Nor atom that his might could render void: Thou--THOU art Being and Breath, And what THOU art may never be destroyed. 

It is not a perfect work. I do not think it is by any means the finestpoem that Emily Brontë ever wrote. It has least of her matchless, incommunicable quality. There is one verse, the fifth, that recallsalmost painfully the frigid poets of Deism of the eighteenth century. But even that association cannot destroy or contaminate its superbsincerity and dignity. If it recalls the poets of Deism, it recalls noless one of the most ancient of all metaphysical poems, the poem ofParmenides on Being:

 [Greek: pos d' an epeit apoloito pelon, pos d' an ke genoito; ei ge genoit, ouk est', oud ei pote mellei esesthai. 

 * * * * *

 tos, genesis men apesbestai kai apiotos olethros. Oude diaireton estin, epei pan estin homoion oude ti pae keneon.... .... Eon gar eonti pelazei. ]

Parmenides had not, I imagine, "penetrated" to Haworth; yet the lastverse of Emily Brontë's poem might have come straight out of his [Greek:ta pros halaetheiaen]. Truly, an astonishing poem to have come from agirl in a country parsonage in the 'forties. 

But the most astonishing thing about it is its inversion of a yet moreconsecrated form: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts arerestless till they rest in Thee". Emily Brontë does not follow St. Augustine. She has an absolutely inspired and independent insight:

 Life--that in me has rest, As I--undying Life--have power in Thee!

For there was but little humility or resignation about Emily Brontë. Nothing could be prouder than her rejection of the view that must havebeen offered to her every Sunday from her father's pulpit. She could notaccept the Christian idea of separation and the Mediator. She knew toowell the secret. She saw too clearly the heavenly side of the eternalquest. She heard, across the worlds, the downward and the upward rush ofthe Two immortally desirous; when her soul cried she heard the answeringcry of the divine pursuer: "My heart is restless till it rests in Thee. "It is in keeping with her vision of the descent of the Invisible, whocomes

 With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars, her vision of the lamp-lit window, and the secret, unearthlyconsummation. 

There is no doubt about it. And there is no doubt about the Paganismeither. It seems at times the most apparent thing about Emily Brontë. 

The truth is that she revealed her innermost and unapparent nature onlyin her poems. That was probably why she was so annoyed when Charlottediscovered them. 

 * * * * *

Until less than ten years ago it was commonly supposed that Charlottehad discovered all there were. Then sixty-seven hitherto unpublishedpoems appeared in America. And the world went on unaware of what hadhappened. 

And now Mr. Clement Shorter, in his indefatigable researches, hasunearthed seventy-one more, and published them with the sixty-seven andwith Charlotte's thirty-nine. [A]

[Footnote A: _Complete Works of Emily Brontë. _ Vol. I. --Poetry. (Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, 1910. )]

And the world continues more or less unaware. 

I do not know how many new poets Vigo Street can turn out in a week. ButI do know that somehow the world is made sufficiently aware of some ofthem. But this event, in which Vigo Street has had no hand, thepublication, after more than sixty years, of the Complete Poems of EmilyBrontë, has not, so far as I know, provoked any furious tumult ofacclaim. 

And yet there could hardly well have been an event of more importance inits way. If the best poems in Mr. Shorter's collection cannot standbeside the best in Charlotte's editions of 1846 and 1850, many of themreveal an aspect of Emily Brontë's genius hitherto unknown and undreamedof; one or two even reveal a little more of the soul of Emily Brontëthan has yet been known. 

There are no doubt many reasons for the world's indifference. The fewpeople in it who read poetry at all do not read Emily Brontë much; it isas much as they can do to keep pace with the perpetual, swift processionof young poets out of Vigo Street. There is a certain austerity aboutEmily Brontë, a superb refusal of all extravagance, pomp, anddecoration, which makes her verses look naked to eyes accustomed toyoung lyrics loaded with "jewels five-words long". About Emily Brontëthere is no emerald and beryl and chrysoprase; there are no vine-leavesin her hair, and on her white Oread's feet there is no stain of purplevintage. She knows nothing of the Dionysiac rapture and the sensuousside of mysticism. She can give nothing to the young soul that thirstsand hungers for these things. 

It is not surprising, therefore, that the world should be callous toEmily Brontë. What you are not prepared for is the appearance ofindifference in her editors. They are pledged by their office to apeculiar devotion. And the circumstances of Emily Brontë's case made itimperative that whoever undertook this belated introduction should showrather more than a perfunctory enthusiasm. Her alien and lonely stateshould have moved Mr. Clement Shorter to a passionate chivalry. It hasnot even moved him to revise his proofs with perfect piety. Perfectpiety would have saved him from the oversight, innocent but deplorable, of attributing to Emily Brontë four poems which Emily Brontë could notpossibly have written, which were in fact written by Anne:"Despondency", "In Memory of a Happy Day in February", "A Prayer", and"Confidence. "[A] No doubt Mr. Shorter found them in Emily's handwriting;but how could he, how _could_ he mistake Anne's voice for Emily's?

[Footnote A: Published among Charlotte Brontë's posthumous "Selections"in 1850. ]

 My God (oh let me call Thee mine, Weak, wretched sinner though I be), My trembling soul would fain be Thine; My feeble faith still clings to Thee. 

It is Anne's voice at her feeblest and most depressed. 

It is, perhaps, a little ungrateful and ungracious to say these things, when but for Mr. Shorter we should not have had Emily's complete poemsat all. And to accuse Mr. Shorter of present indifference (in the faceof his previous achievements) would be iniquitous if it were not absurd;it would be biting the hand that feeds you. The pity is that, owing to amere momentary lapse in him of the religious spirit, Mr. Shorter hasmissed his own opportunity. He does not seem to have quite realized thesplendour of his "find". Nor has Sir William Robertson Nicoll seen fitto help him here. Sir William Robertson Nicoll deprecates anyover-valuation of Mr. Clement Shorter's collection. "It is not claimed, "he says, "for a moment that the intrinsic merits of the verses are of aspecial kind. " And Mr. Clement Shorter is not much bolder in profferinghis treasures. "No one can deny to them, " he says, "a certainbibliographical interest. "

Mr. Shorter is too modest. His collection includes one of theprofoundest and most beautiful poems Emily Brontë ever wrote, [A] and atleast one splendid ballad, "Douglas Ride". [B] Here is the ballad, orenough of it to show how live it is with sound and vision and speed. Itwas written by a girl of twenty:

 What rider up Gobeloin's glen Has spurred his straining steed, And fast and far from living men Has passed with maddening speed?

 I saw his hoof-prints mark the rock, When swift he left the plain; I heard deep down the echoing shock Re-echo back again. 

 * * * * *

 With streaming hair, and forehead bare, And mantle waving wide, His master rides; the eagle there Soars up on every side. 

 The goats fly by with timid cry, Their realm rashly won; They pause--he still ascends on high-- They gaze, but he is gone. 

 O gallant horse, hold on thy course; The road is tracked behind. Spur, rider, spur, or vain thy force-- Death comes on every wind. 

 * * * * *

 Hark! through the pass with threatening crash Comes on the increasing roar! But what shall brave the deep, deep wave, The deadly pass before?

 Their feet are dyed in a darker tide, Who dare those dangers drear. Their breasts have burst through the battle's worst, And why should they tremble here?

 * * * * *

 "Now, my brave men, this one pass more, This narrow chasm of stone, And Douglas for our sovereign's gore Shall yield us back his own. "

 I hear their ever-rising tread Sound through the granite glen; There is a tall pine overhead Held by the mountain men. 

 That dizzy bridge which no horse could track Has checked the outlaw's way; There like a wild beast turns he back, And grimly stands at bay. 

 Why smiles he so, when far below He spies the toiling chase? The pond'rous tree swings heavily, And totters from its place. 

 They raise their eyes, for the sunny skies Are lost in sudden shade: But Douglas neither shrinks nor flies, He need not fear the dead. 

[Footnote A: See pp. 207, 208. ]

[Footnote B: I have removed the title from the preceding fragment to theballad to which it obviously belongs. ]

That is sufficiently unlike the Emily Brontë whom Charlotte edited. Andthere is one other poem that stands alone among her poems with a strangeexotic beauty, a music, a rhythm and a magic utterly unlike any of theforms we recognize as hers:

 Gods of the old mythology Arise in gloom and storm; Adramalec, bow down thy head, Reveal, dark fiend, thy form. The giant sons of Anakim Bowed lowest at thy shrine, And thy temple rose in Argola, With its hallowed groves of vine; And there was eastern incense burnt, And there were garments spread, With the fine gold decked and broidered, And tinged with radiant red, With the radiant red of furnace flames That through the shadows shone As the full moon when on Sinai's top Her rising light is thrown. 

It is undated and unsigned, and so unlike Emily Brontë that I should notbe surprised if somebody were to rise up and prove that it is Coleridgeor somebody. Heaven forbid that this blow should fall on Mr. ClementShorter, and Sir William Robertson Nicoll, and on me. There is at leastone reassuring line. "Reveal, dark fiend, thy form", has a decided ringof the Brontësque. 

And here again, on many an otherwise negligible poem she has set herseal, she has scattered her fine things; thus:

 No; though the soil be wet with tears, How fair so'er it grew, The vital sap once perished Will never flow again; _And surer than that dwelling dread, The narrow dungeon of the dead, Time parts the hearts of men. _

And again, she gives a vivid picture of war in four lines:

 In plundered churches piled with dead The heavy charger neighed for food, The wounded soldier laid his head 'Neath roofless chambers splashed with blood. 

Again, she has a vision:

 In all the hours of gloom My soul was rapt away. I stood by a marble tomb Where royal corpses lay. 

A frightful thing appears to her, "a shadowy thing, most dim":

 And still it bent above, Its features still in view; _It seemed close by; and yet more far Than this world from the farthest star That tracks the boundless blue. _

 Indeed 'twas not the space Of earth or time between, But the sea of deep eternity, The gulf o'er which mortality Has never, never been. 

The date is June 1837, a year earlier than the ballad. And here is thefirst sketch or germ of "The Old Stoic":

 Give we the hills our equal prayer, Earth's breezy hills and heaven's blue sea, _I ask for nothing further here Than my own heart and liberty. _

And here is another poem, of a sterner and a sadder stoicism:

 There was a time when my cheek burned To give such scornful words the lie, Ungoverned nature madly spurned The law that bade it not defy. Oh, in the days of ardent youth I would have given my life for truth. 

 For truth, for right, for liberty, I would have gladly, freely died; And now I calmly bear and see The vain man smile, the fool deride, Though not because my heart is tame, Though not for fear, though not for shame. 

 My soul still chokes at every tone Of selfish and self-clouded error; My breast still braves the world alone, Steeled as it ever was to terror. Only I know, howe'er I frown, The same world will go rolling on. 

October 1839. It is the worldly wisdom of twenty-one!

 * * * * *

If this, the ballad and the rest, were all, the world would still bericher, by a wholly new conception of Emily Brontë, of her resources andher range. 

But it is by no means all. And here we come to the opportunity which, owing to that temporary decline of fervour, Mr. Shorter has sounfortunately missed. 

He might have picked out of the mass wherein they lie scattered, all butlost, sometimes barely recognizable, the fragments of a Titanic epic. Hemight have done something to build up again the fabric of thatmarvellous romance, that continuous dream, that stupendous and gorgeousfantasy in which Emily Brontë, for at least eleven years, lived andmoved and had her being. 

Until the publication of the unknown poems, it was possible to ignorethe "Gondal Chronicles". They are not included in Mr. Clement Shorter'sexhaustive list of early and unpublished manuscripts. Nobody knewanything about them except that they were part of a mysterious game ofmake-believe which Emily and the ever-innocent Anne played together, long after the age when most of us have given up make-believing. Thereare several references to the Chronicles in the diaries of Emily andAnne. Emily writes in 1841: "The Gondaland are at present in athreatening state, but there is no open rupture as yet. All the princesand princesses of the Royalty are at the Palace of Instruction. " Annewonders "whether the Gondaland will still be flourishing" in 1845. In1845 Emily and Anne go for their first long journey together. "Andduring our excursion we were Ronald Macalgin, Henry Angora, JulietAngusteena, Rosabella Esmaldan, Ella and Julian Egremont, CatharineNavarre, and Cordelia Fitzaphnold, escaping from the palaces ofinstruction to join the Royalists, who are hard pressed at present bythe victorious Republicans. "The Gondals, " Emily says, "still flourishbright as ever. " Anne is not so sure. "We have not yet finished our'Gondal Chronicles' that we began three years and a half ago. When willthey be done? The Gondals are at present in a sad state. The Republicansare uppermost, but the Royalists are not quite overcome. The youngsovereigns, with their brothers and sisters, are still at the Palace ofInstruction. The Unique Society, about half a year ago, were wrecked ona desert island as they were returning from Gaul. They are still there, but we have not played at them much yet. "

But there are no recognizable references to the Gondal poems. It is notcertain whether Charlotte Brontë knew of their existence, not absolutelycertain that Anne, who collaborated on the Gondals, knew. 

"Brontë specialists" are agreed in dismissing the Chronicles as puerile. But the poems cannot be so dismissed. Written in lyric or ballad form, fluent at their worst and loose, but never feeble; powerful, vehement, and overflowing at their best, their cycle contains some of EmilyBrontë's very finest verse. They are obscure, incoherent sometimes, because they are fragmentary; even poems apparently complete inthemselves are fragments, scenes torn out of the vast and complicatedepic drama. We have no clue to the history of the Gondals, whereby wecan arrange these scenes in their right order. But dark and broken asthey are, they yet trail an epic splendour, they bear the wholephantasmagoria of ancestral and of racial memories, of "old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago". These songs and ballads, strungon no discernible thread, are the voice of an enchanted spirit, recalling the long roll of its secular existences; in whom nothing livesbut that mysterious, resurgent memory. 

The forms that move through these battles are obscure. You can pick outmany of the Gondal poems by the recurring names of heroes and of lands. But where there are no names of heroes and of lands to guide you it isnot easy to say exactly which poems are Gondal poems and which are not. But after careful examination and comparison you can make out at leasteighty-three of them that are unmistakable, and ten doubtful. 

All the battle-pieces and songs of battle, the songs of mourning andcaptivity and exile, the songs of heroism, martyrdom, defiance, songs, or fragments of songs, of magic and divination, and many of the lovesongs, belong to this cycle. What is more, many of the poems ofeighteen-forty-six and of eighteen-fifty are Gondal poems. 

For in the Gondal legend the idea of the Doomed Child, an idea thathaunted Emily Brontë, recurs perpetually, and suggests that the Gondallegend is the proper place of "The Two Children", and "The Wanderer fromthe Fold", which appear in the posthumous Selections of eighteen-fifty. It certainly includes three at the very least of the poems ofeighteen-forty-six: "The Outcast Mother", "A Death-Scene", and "Honour'sMartyr". 

It does not look, I own, as if this hunt for Gondal literature couldinterest a single human being; which is why nobody, so far as I know, has pursued it. And the placing of those four poems in the obscureGondal legend would have nothing but "a bibliographical interest" wereit not that, when placed there, they show at once the main track of thelegend. And the main track of the legend brings you straight to thecourses of _Wuthering Heights_ and of the love poems. 

The sources of _Wuthering Heights_ have been the dream and the despairof the explorer, long before Mrs. Humphry Ward tried to find them in the_Tales of Hoffmann_. And "Remembrance", one of the most passionate lovepoems in the language, stood alone and apart from every other thing thatEmily Brontë had written. It was awful and mysterious in its loneliness. 

But I believe that "Remembrance" also may be placed in the Gondal legendwithout any violence to its mystery. 

For supreme in the Gondal legend is the idea of a mighty and disastrouspassion, a woman's passion for the defeated, the dishonoured, and theoutlawed lover; a creature superb in evil, like Heathcliff, and likeHeathcliff tragic and unspeakably mournful in his doom. He or some herolike him is "Honour's Martyr". 

 To-morrow, Scorn will blight my name, And Hate will trample me, Will load me with a coward's shame-- A traitor's perjury. 

 False friends will launch their covert sneers True friends will wish me dead; And I shall cause the bitterest tears That you have ever shed. 

Like Heathcliff, he is the "unblessed, unfriended child"; the child ofthe Outcast Mother, abandoned on the moor. 

 Forests of heather, dark and long, Wave their brown branching arms above; And they must soothe thee with their song, And they must shield my child of love. 

 * * * * *

 Wakes up the storm more madly wild, The mountain drifts are tossed on high; Farewell, unblessed, unfriended child, I cannot bear to watch thee die. 

In an unmistakable Gondal song Geraldine's lover calls her to the tryston the moor. In the Gondal poem "Geraldine", she has her child with herin a woodland cavern, and she prays over it wildly:

 "Bless it! My Gracious God!" I cried, "Preserve Thy mortal shrine, For Thine own sake, be Thou its guide, And keep it still divine--

 "Say, sin shall never blanch that cheek, Nor suffering change that brow. Speak, in Thy mercy, Maker, speak, And seal it safe from woe. "

 * * * * *

 The revellers in the city slept, My lady in her woodland bed; I watching o'er her slumber wept, As one who mourns the dead. 

Geraldine therefore is the Outcast Mother. In "The Two Children" thedoom gathers round the child. 

 Heavy hangs the raindrop From the burdened spray; Heavy broods the damp mist On uplands far away. 

 Heavy looms the dull sky, Heavy rolls the sea; And heavy throbs the young heart Beneath that lonely tree. 

 Never has a blue streak Cleft the clouds since morn Never has his grim fate Smiled since he was born. 

 Frowning on the infant, Shadowing childhood's joy. Guardian-angel knows not That melancholy boy. 

 * * * * *

 Blossom--that the west wind Has never wooed to blow, Scentless are thy petals, Thy dew is cold as snow!

 Soul--where kindred kindness No early promise woke, Barren is thy beauty, As weed upon a rock. 

 Wither--soul and blossom! You both were vainly given: Earth reserves no blessing For the unblest of Heaven. 

The doomed child of the outcast mother is the doomed man, and, by thedoom, himself an outcast. The other child, the "Child of delight, withsun-bright hair", has vowed herself to be his guardian angel. Theirdrama is obscure; but you make out that it is the doomed child, and notBranwell Brontë, who is "The Wanderer from the Fold". 

 How few, of all the hearts that loved, Are grieving for thee now; And why should mine to-night be moved With such a sense of woe?

 Too often thus, when left alone, Where none my thoughts can see, Comes back a word, a passing tone From thy strange history. 

 * * * * *

 An anxious gazer from the shore-- I marked the whitening wave, And wept above thy fate the more Because--I could not save. 

 It recks not now, when all is over; But yet my heart will be A mourner still, though friend and lover Have both forgotten thee. 

Compare with this that stern elegy in Mr. Shorter's collection, "Shed notears o'er that tomb. " A recent critic has referred this poem ofreprobation also to Branwell Brontë--as if Emily could possibly havewritten like this of Branwell:

 Shed no tears o'er that tomb, For there are angels weeping; Mourn not him whose doom Heaven itself is mourning. 

 * * * * *

 ... He who slumbers there His bark will strive no more Across the waters of despair To reach that glorious shore. 

 The time of grace is past, And mercy, scorned and tried, Forsakes to utter wrath at last The soul so steeled by pride. 

 That wrath will never spare, Will never pity know; Will mock its victim's maddened prayer, With triumph in his woe. 

 Shut from his Maker's smile The accursed man shall be; For mercy reigns a little while, But hate eternally. 

This is obviously related to "The Two Children", and that again to "TheWanderer from the Fold". Obviously, too, the woman's lament in "TheWanderer from the Fold" recalls the Gondal woman's lament for herdishonoured lover. For there are two voices that speak and answer eachother, the voice of reprobation, and the voice of passion and pity. Thisis the "Gondal Woman's Lament":

 Far, far is mirth withdrawn: 'Tis three long hours before the morn, And I watch lonely, drearily; So come, thou shade, commune with me. 

 Deserted one! thy corpse lies cold, And mingled with a foreign mould. Year after year the grass grows green Above the dust where thou hast been. 

 I will not name thy blighted name, Tarnished by unforgotten shame, Though not because my bosom torn Joins the mad world in all its scorn. 

 Thy phantom face is dark with woe, Tears have left ghastly traces there, Those ceaseless tears! I wish their flow Could quench thy wild despair. 

 They deluge my heart like the rain On cursed Zamorna's howling plain. Yet when I hear thy foes deride, I must cling closely to thy side. 

 Our mutual foes! They will not rest From trampling on thy buried breast. Glutting their hatred with the doom They picture thine beyond the tomb. 

(Which is what they did in the song of reprobation. But passion and pityknow better. They know that)

 ... God is not like human kind, Man cannot read the Almighty mind; Vengeance will never torture thee, Nor hurt thy soul eternally. 

 * * * * *

 What have I dreamt? He lies asleep, With whom my heart would vainly weep; _He_ rests, and _I_ endure the woe That left his spirit long ago. 

This poem is not quoted for its beauty or its technique, but for itsimportant place in the story. You can track the great Gondal hero downby that one fantastic name, "Zamorna". You have thus four poems, obviously related; and a fifth that links them, obviously, with theGondal legend. 

It is difficult to pick out from the confusion of these unsortedfragments all the heroes of Emily Brontë's saga. There is Gleneden, whokills a tyrant and is put in prison for it. There is Julius Angora, who"lifts his impious eye" in the cathedral where the monarchs of Gondalare gathered; who leads the patriots of Gondal to the battle ofAlmedore, and was defeated there, and fell with his mortal enemy. He isbeloved of Rosina, a crude prototype of Catherine Earnshaw. "King Juliusleft the south country" and remained in danger in the northern landbecause a passion for Rosina kept him there. There is also Douglas ofthe "Ride". He appears again in the saga of the Queen Augusta, the womanof the "brown mountain side". But who he was, and what he was doing, andwhether he killed Augusta or somebody else killed her, I cannot for thelife of me make out. Queen Augusta, like Catherine Earnshaw, is acreature of passion and jealousy, and her lover had been faithless. Shesings that savage song of defiance and hatred and lamentation: "Light upthy halls!"

 Oh! could I see thy lids weighed down in cheerless woe; Too full to hide their tears, too stern to overflow; Oh! could I know thy soul with equal grief was torn, This fate might be endured--this anguish might be borne. 

 How gloomy grows the night! 'Tis Gondal's wind that blows; I shall not tread again the deep glens where it rose, I feel it on my face----Where, wild blast! dost thou roam? What do we, wanderer! here, so far away from home?

 I do not need thy breath to cool my death-cold brow; But go to that far land where she is shining now; Tell her my latest wish, tell her my dreary doom; Say that my pangs are past, but _hers_ are yet to come. 

And there is Fernando, who stole his love from Zamorna. He is a sort ofshadowy forerunner of Edgar Linton. 

There is the yeoman Percy, the father of Mary whom Zamorna loved. Andthere is Zamorna. 

A large group of poems in the legend refer, obviously, I think, to thesame person. Zamorna is the supreme hero, the Achilles of this northernIliad. He is the man of sin, the "son of war and love", the child"unblessed of heaven", abandoned by its mother, cradled in the heatherand rocked by the winter storm, the doomed child, grown to its doom, like Heathcliff. His story is obscure and broken, but when all theZamorna poems are sorted from the rest, you make out that, likeHeathcliff, he ravished from her home the daughter of his mortal enemy(with the difference that Zamorna loves Mary); and that like Heathcliffhe was robbed of the woman that he loved. The passions of Zamorna arethe passions of Heathcliff. He dominates a world of savage loves andmortal enmities like the world of _Wuthering Heights_. There arepassages in this saga that reveal the very aspect of the soul ofHeathcliff. Here are some of them. 

Zamorna, in prison, cries out to his "false friend and treacherousguide":

 "If I have sinned; long, long ago That sin was purified by woe. I have suffered on through night and day, I've trod a dark and frightful way. "

It is what Heathcliff says to Catherine Earnshaw: "I've fought through abitter life since I last heard your voice. "

And again:

 If grief for grief can touch thee, If answering woe for woe, If any ruth can melt thee, Come to me now. 

It is the very voice of Heathcliff calling to Cathy. 

Again, he is calling to "Percy", the father of Mary, his bride, the rosethat he plucked from its parent stem, that died from the plucking. 

 Bitterly, deeply I've drunk of thy woe; When thy stream was troubled, did mine calmly flow? And yet I repent not; I'd crush thee again If our vessels sailed adverse on life's stormy main. But listen! The earth is our campaign of war, * * * * *

 Is there not havoc and carnage for thee Unless thou couchest thy lance at me?

He proposes to unite their arms. 

 Then might thy Mary bloom blissfully still This hand should ne'er work her sorrow or ill. 

 * * * * *

 What! shall Zamorna go down to the dead With blood on his hands that he wept to have shed?

The alliance is refused. Percy is crushed. Mary is dying, the rose iswithering. 

 Its faded buds already lie To deck my coffin when I die. Bring them here--'twill not be long, 'Tis the last word of the woeful song; And the final and dying words are sung To the discord of lute strings all unstrung. 

 * * * * *

 Have I crushed you, Percy? I'd raise once more The beacon-light on the rocky shore. Percy, my love is so true and deep, That though kingdoms should wail and worlds should weep, I'd fling the brand in the hissing sea, The brand that must burn unquenchably. Your rose is mine; when the sweet leaves fade, They must be the chaplet to wreathe my head The blossoms to deck my home with the dead. 

Zamorna is tenderer than Heathcliff. He laments for his rose. 

 On its bending stalk a bonny flower In a yeoman's home close grew; It had gathered beauty from sunshine and shower, From moonlight and silent dew. 

 * * * * *

 Keenly his flower the yeoman guarded, He watched it grow both day and night; From the frost, from the wind, from the storm he warded That flush of roseate light. And ever it glistened bonnilie Under the shade of the old yew-tree. 

 * * * * *

 The rose is blasted, withered, blighted Its root has felt a worm, And like a heart beloved and slighted, Failed, faded, shrunk its form. Bud of beauty, bonny flower, I stole thee from thy natal bower. 

 I was the worm that withered thee.... 

And he sings of Mary, on her death-bed in her delirium. He will notbelieve that she is dying. 

 Oh! say not that her vivid dreams Are but the shattered glass Which but because more broken, gleams More brightly in the grass. Her spirit is the unfathomed lake Whose face the sudden tempests break To one tormented roar; But as the wild winds sink in peace All those disturbed waves decrease Till each far-down reflection is As life-like as before. 

Her death is not the worst. 

 I cannot weep as once I wept Over my western beauty's grave. 

 * * * * *

 I am speaking of a later stroke, A death the dream of yesterday, Still thinking of my latest shock, A noble friendship torn away. I feel and say that I am cast From hope, and peace, and power, and pride

 * * * * *

 Without a voice to speak to you Save that deep gong which tolled my doom, And made my dread iniquity Look darker than my deepest gloom. 

But the crucial passage (for the sources) is the scene in the yeoman'shall where Zamorna comes to Percy. He comes stealthily. 

 That step he might have used before When stealing on to lady's bower, Forth at the same still twilight hour, For the moon now bending mild above Showed him a son of war and love. His eye was full of that sinful fire Which oft unhallowed passions light. It spoke of quickly kindled ire, Of love too warm, and wild, and bright. Bright, but yet sullied, love that could never Bring good in rising, leave peace in decline, Woe to the gifted, crime to the giver.... 

 * * * * *

 Now from his curled and shining hair, Circling the brow of marble fair, His dark, keen eyes on Percy gaze With stern and yet repenting rays. 

 * * * * *

He loves Percy whose rose was his, and he hates him, as Heathcliff mighthave loved and hated, but with less brutality. 

 Young savage! how he bends above The object of his wrath and love, How tenderly his fingers press The hand that shrinks from their caress. 

The yeoman turns on "the man of sin". 

 What brought you here? I called you not

 * * * * *

 Are you a hawk to follow the prey, When mangled it flutters feebly away? A sleuth-hound to track the deer by his blood, When wounded he wins to the darkest wood, There, if he can, to die alone?

It might have been Heathcliff and a Linton. 

So much for Zamorna. 

Finally, there are two poems in Mr. Shorter's collection that, verse forprose, might have come straight out of _Wuthering Heights_. One(inspired by Byron) certainly belongs to the Zamorna legend of theGondal cycle. 

 And now the house-dog stretched once more His limbs upon the glowing floor; The children half resume their play, Though from the warm hearth scared away; The good-wife left her spinning-wheel And spread with smiles the evening meal; The shepherd placed a seat and pressed To their poor fare the unknown guest, And he unclasped his mantle now, And raised the covering from his brow, Said, voyagers by land and sea Were seldom feasted daintily, And cheered his host by adding stern He'd no refinement to unlearn. 

Which is what Heathcliff would have said sternly. Observe the effect ofhim. 

 A silence settled on the room, The cheerful welcome sank to gloom; But not those words, though cold or high, So froze their hospitable joy. No--there was something in his face, Some nameless thing which hid not grace, And something in his voice's tone Which turned their blood as chill as stone. The ringlets of his long black hair Fell o'er a cheek most ghastly fair. Youthful he seemed--but worn as they Who spend too soon their youthful day. When his glance dropped, 'twas hard to quell Unbidden feelings' hidden swell; And Pity scarce her tears could hide, So sweet that brow with all its pride. But when upraised his eye would dart An icy shudder through the heart, Compassion changed to horror then, And fear to meet that gaze again. 

 It was not hatred's tiger-glare, Nor the wild anguish of despair; It was not either misery Which quickens friendship's sympathy; No--lightning all unearthly shone Deep in that dark eye's circling zone, Such withering lightning as we deem None but a spirit's look may beam; And glad were all when he turned away And wrapt him in his mantle grey, And hid his head upon his arm, And veiled from view his basilisk charm. 

That, I take it, is Zamorna, that Byronic hero, again; but it is alsouncommonly like Heathcliff, with "his basilisk eyes". And it is datedJuly 1839, seven years before _Wuthering Heights_ was written. 

The other crucial instance is a nameless poem to the Earth. 

 I see around me piteous tombstones grey Stretching their shadows far away. Beneath the turf my footsteps tread Lie low and lone the silent dead; Beneath the turf, beneath the mould, For ever dark, for ever cold. And my eyes cannot hold the tears That memory hoards from vanished years. For Time and Death and mortal pain Give wounds that will not heal again. Let me remember half the woe I've seen and heard and felt below, And heaven itself, so pure and blest, Could never give my spirit rest. Sweet land of light! Thy children fair Know nought akin to our despair; Nor have they felt, nor can they tell What tenants haunt each mortal cell, What gloomy guests we hold within, Torments and madness, fear and sin! Well, may they live in ecstasy Their long eternity of joy; At least we would not bring them down With us to weep, with us to groan. No, Earth would wish no other sphere To taste her cup of suffering drear; She turns from heaven a tearless eye And only mourns that _we_ must die! Ah mother! what shall comfort thee In all this boundless misery? To cheer our eager eyes awhile, We see thee smile, how fondly smile! But who reads not through the tender glow Thy deep, unutterable woe? Indeed no darling hand above Can cheat thee of thy children's love. We all, in life's departing shine, Our last dear longings blend with thine, And struggle still, and strive to trace With clouded gaze thy darling face. We would not leave our nature home For _any_ world beyond the tomb. No, mother, on thy kindly breast Let us be laid in lasting rest, Or waken but to share with thee A mutual immortality. 

There is the whole spirit of _Wuthering Heights_; the spirit ofCatherine Earnshaw's dream; the spirit that in the last page broods overthe moorland graveyard. It is instinct with a more than pagan adorationof the tragic earth, adored because of her tragedy. 

It would be dangerous to assert positively that "Remembrance" belongs tothe same song-cycle; but it undoubtedly belongs to the same cycle, orrather cyclone, of passion; the cyclone that rages in the hearts ofHeathcliff and of Catherine. The genius of Emily Brontë was so fardramatic that, if you could divide her poems into the personal andimpersonal, the impersonal would be found in a mass out of allproportion to the other. But, with very few exceptions, you cannot sodivide them; for in her continuous and sustaining dream, the vision thatlasted for at least eleven years of her life, from eighteen-thirty-four, the earliest date of any known Gondal poem, to eighteen-forty-five, thelast appearance of the legend, she _was_ these people; she lived, indistinguishably and interchangeably, their tumultuous and passionatelife. Sometimes she is the lonely spirit that looks on in immortalirony, raised above good and evil. More often she is a happy god, immanent in his restless and manifold creations, rejoicing in thismultiplication of himself. It is she who fights and rides, who loves andhates, and suffers and defies. She heads one poem naïvely: "To the HorseBlack Eagle that I rode at the Battle of Zamorna. " The horse _I_ rode!If it were not glorious, it would be (when you think what her life wasin that Parsonage) most mortally pathetic. 

But it is all in keeping. For, as she could dare the heavenly, divineadventure, so there was no wild and ardent adventure of the earth shedid not claim. 

 * * * * *

Love of life and passionate adoration of the earth, adoration andpassion fiercer than any pagan knew, burns in _Wuthering Heights_. Andif that were all, it would be impossible to say whether her mysticism orher paganism most revealed the soul of Emily Brontë. 

In _Wuthering Heights_ we are plunged apparently into a world of mostunspiritual lusts and hates and cruelties; into the very darkness andthickness of elemental matter; a world that would be chaos, but for theiron Necessity that brings its own terrible order, its own implacablelaw of lust upon lust begotten, hate upon hate, and cruelty uponcruelty, through the generations of Heathcliffs and of Earnshaws. 

Hindley Earnshaw is brutal to the foundling, Heathcliff, and degradeshim. Heathcliff, when his hour comes, pays back his wrong with theinterest due. He is brutal beyond brutality to Hindley Earnshaw, and hedegrades Hareton, Hindley's son, as he himself was degraded; but he isnot brutal to him. The frustrated passion of Catherine Earnshaw forHeathcliff, and of Heathcliff for Catherine, hardly knows itself fromhate; they pay each other back torture for torture, and pang forhopeless pang. When Catherine marries Edgar Linton, Heathcliff marriesIsabella, Edgar's sister, in order that he may torture to perfectionCatherine and Edgar and Isabella. His justice is more than poetic. Thelove of Catherine Earnshaw was all that he possessed. He knows that hehas lost it through the degradation that he owes to Hindley Earnshaw. Itis because an Earnshaw and a Linton between them have robbed him of allthat he possessed, that, when his hour comes, he pays himself back byrobbing the Lintons and the Earnshaws of all that _they_ possess, theirThrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. He loathes above all loathelycreatures, Linton, his own son by Isabella. The white-blooded thing isso sickly that he can hardly keep it alive. But with an unearthlycruelty he cherishes, he nourishes this spawn till he can marry it onits death-bed to the younger Catherine, the child of Catherine Earnshawand of Edgar Linton. This supreme deed accomplished, he lets thecreature die, so that Thrushcross Grange may fall into his hands. Judgedby his bare deeds, Heathcliff seems a monster of evil, a devil withoutany fiery infernal splendour, a mean and sordid devil. 

But--and this is what makes Emily Brontë's work stupendous--not for amoment can you judge Heathcliff by his bare deeds. Properly speaking, there are no bare deeds to judge him by. Each deed comes wrapt in itsown infernal glamour, trailing a cloud of supernatural splendour. Thewhole drama moves on a plane of reality superior to any deed. The spiritof it, like Emily Brontë's spirit, is superbly regardless of thematerial event. As far as material action goes Heathcliff is singularlyinert. He never seems to raise a hand to help his vengeance. He letsthings take their course. He lets Catherine marry Edgar Linton andremain married to him. He lets Isabella's passion satisfy itself. Helets Hindley Earnshaw drink himself to death. He lets Hareton sink tothe level of a boor. He lets Linton die. His most overt and violentaction is the capture of the younger Catherine. And even there he takesadvantage of the accident that brings her to the door of WutheringHeights. He watches and bides his time with the intentness of a broodingspirit that in all material happenings seeks its own. He makes them hisinstruments of vengeance. And Heathcliff's vengeance, like his passionfor Catherine, is an immortal and immaterial thing. He shows how littlehe thinks of sordid, tangible possession; for, when his vengeance iscomplete, when Edgar Linton and Linton Heathcliff are dead and theirlands and houses are his, he becomes utterly indifferent. He falls intoa melancholy. He neither eats nor drinks. He shuts himself up in Cathy'slittle room and is found dead there, lying on Cathy's bed. 

If there never was anything less heavenly, less Christian, than thisdrama, there never was anything less earthly, less pagan. There is noname for it. It is above all our consecrated labels and distinctions. Ithas been called a Greek tragedy, with the Aeschylean motto, [Greek: todrasanti pathein]. But it is not Greek any more than it is Christian;and if it has a moral, its moral is far more [Greek: to pathontipathein]. It is the drama of suffering born of suffering, and confinedstrictly within the boundaries of the soul. 

Madame Duclaux (whose criticism of _Wuthering Heights_ is not to besurpassed or otherwise gainsaid) finds in it a tragedy of inheritedevil. She thinks that Emily Brontë was greatly swayed by the doctrine ofheredity. "'No use, ' she seems to be saying, 'in waiting for thechildren of evil parents to grow, of their own will and unassisted, straight and noble. The very quality of their will is as inherited astheir eyes and hair. Heathcliff is no fiend or goblin; the untrained, doomed child of some half-savage sailor's holiday, violent andtreacherous. And how far shall we hold the sinner responsible for anature which is itself the punishment of some forefather's crime?'"

All this, I cannot help thinking, is alien to the spirit of _WutheringHeights_, and to its greatness. It is not really any problem of hereditythat we have here. Heredity is, in fact, ignored. Heathcliff's race andparentage are unknown. There is no resemblance between the good oldEarnshaws, who adopted him, and their son Hindley. Hareton does notinherit Hindley's drunkenness or his cruelty. It is not through anyphysical consequence of his father's vices that Hareton suffers. Lintonis in no physical sense the son of Heathcliff. If Catherine Lintoninherits something of Catherine Earnshaw's charm and temper, it isbecause the younger Catherine belongs to another world; she is aninferior and more physical creature. She has nothing in her of CatherineEarnshaw's mutinous passion, the immortal and unearthly passion whichmade that Catherine alive and killed her. Catherine Linton's "littleromance" is altogether another affair. 

The world of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a world of spiritualaffinities, of spiritual contacts and recoils where love begets andbears love, and hate is begotten of hate and born of shame. Even LintonHeathcliff, that "whey-faced, whining wretch", that physical degenerate, demonstrates the higher law. His weakness is begotten by his father'sloathing on his mother's terror. 

Never was a book written with a more sublime ignoring of the physical. You only get a taste of it once in Isabella's unwholesome love forHeathcliff; that is not passion, it is sentiment, and it is thoroughlyimpure. And you get a far-off vision of it again in Isabella's fear ofHeathcliff. Heathcliff understood her. He says of her, "'No brutalitydisgusted her.... I've sometimes relented, from pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what she could endure and still creep shamefullyback. '" This civilized creature is nearer to the animals, there is moreof the earth in her than in Catherine or in Heathcliff. They areelemental beings, if you like, but their element is fire. They areclean, as all fiery, elemental things are clean. 

True, their love found violent physical expression; so that M. Maeterlinck can say of them and their creator: "We feel that one musthave lived for thirty years under chains of burning kisses to learn whatshe has learned; to dare so confidently set forth, with such minuteness, such unerring certainty, the delirium of those two lovers of _WutheringHeights_; to mark the self-conflicting movements of the tenderness thatwould make suffer, and the cruelty that would make glad, the felicitythat prayed for death, and the despair that clung to life, the repulsionthat desired, the desire drunk with repulsion--love surcharged withhatred, hatred staggering beneath its load of love. "[A]

[Footnote A: _Wisdom and Destiny_, translated by Alfred Sutro. ]

True; but the passion that consumes Catherine and Heathcliff, that burnstheir bodies and destroys them, is nine-tenths a passion of the soul. Ittaught them nothing of the sad secrets of the body. Thus Catherine'streachery to Heathcliff is an unconscious treachery. It is her innocencethat makes it possible. She goes to Edgar Linton's arms with blindeyes, in utter, childlike ignorance, not knowing what she does till itis done and she is punished for it. She is punished for the sin of sins, the sundering of the body from the soul. All her life after she sees hersin. She has taken her body, torn it apart and given it to Edgar Linton, and Heathcliff has her soul. 

"'You love Edgar Linton, ' Nelly Dean says, 'and Edgar loves you ... Where is the obstacle?'

"_'Here!_ and _here_!' replied Catherine, striking one hand on herforehead, and the other on her breast: 'in whichever place the soullives. In my soul and in my heart, I'm convinced I'm wrong. '... 'I've nomore business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and ifthe wicked man in there hadn't brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn'thave thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so heshall never know how I love him, and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls aremade of, his and mine are the same. '"

Not only are they made of the same stuff, but Heathcliff _is_ her soul. 

"'I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion thatthere is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were theuse of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseriesin this world have been Heathcliff's miseries ... My great thought inliving is himself.... Nelly! I _am_ Heathcliff! He's always, always inmy mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to myself, butas my own being. '"

That is her "secret". 

Of course, there is Cathy's other secret--her dream, which passes forEmily Brontë's "pretty piece of Paganism". But it is only one side ofEmily Brontë. And it is only one side of Catherine Earnshaw. WhenHeathcliff turns from her for a moment in that last scene of passion, she says: "'Oh, you see, Nelly, he would not relent a moment to keep meout of the grave. _That_ is how I'm loved! Well, never mind. That is not_my_ Heathcliff. I shall love mine yet; and take him with me: he's in mysoul. And, ' she added musingly, 'the thing that irks me most is thisshattered prison, after all. I'm tired of being enclosed here. I'mwearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: notseeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls ofan aching heart; but really with it and in it. Nelly, you think you arebetter and more fortunate than I; in full health and strength; you aresorry for me--very soon that will be altered. I shall be sorry for_you_. I shall be incomparably above and beyond you all. '"

True, adoration of Earth, the All-Mother, runs like a choric hymnthrough all the tragedy. Earth is the mother and the nurse of thesechildren. They are brought to her for their last bed, and she gives themthe final consolation. 

Yet, after all, the end of this wild northern tragedy is far enough fromEarth, the All-Mother. The tumult of _Wuthering Heights_ ceases whenHeathcliff sickens. It sinks suddenly into the peace and silence ofexhaustion. And the drama closes, not in hopeless gloom, the agony ofdamned souls, but in redemption, reconciliation. 

Catherine, the child of Catherine and of Edgar Linton, loves Hareton, the child of Hindley Earnshaw. The evil spirit that possessed these twodies with the death of Heathcliff. The younger Catherine is a mixedcreature, half-spiritualized by much suffering. Hareton is a splendidanimal, unspiritualized and unredeemed. Catherine redeems him; and yougather that by that act of redemption, somehow, the souls of Catherineand Heathcliff are appeased. 

The whole tremendous art of the book is in this wringing of strange andterrible harmony out of raging discord. It ends on a sliding cadence, soft as a sigh of peace only just conscious after pain. 

"I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope nextthe moor: the middle one grey and half-buried in heath; Edgar Linton'sonly harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff'sstill bare. 

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the mothsfluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft windbreathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagineunquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. "

 * * * * *

But that is not the real end, any more than Lockwood's arrival atWuthering Heights is the beginning. It is only Lockwood recoveringhimself; the natural man's drawing breath after the passing of thesupernatural. 

For it was not conceivable that the more than human love of Heathcliffand Catherine should cease with the dissolution of their bodies. It wasnot conceivable that Catherine, by merely dying in the fifteenthchapter, should pass out of the tale. As a matter of fact, she neverdoes pass out of it. She is more in it than ever. 

For the greater action of the tragedy is entirely on the invisible andimmaterial plane; it is the pursuing, the hunting to death of an earthlycreature by an unearthly passion. You are made aware of it at the verybeginning when the ghost of the child Catherine is heard and felt byLockwood; though it is Heathcliff that she haunts. It begins in thehour after Catherine's death, upon Heathcliff's passionate invocation:"'Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest so long as I am living! You saidI killed you--haunt me, then! The murdered _do_ haunt their murderers, Ibelieve. I know that ghosts _have_ wandered on earth. Be with mealways--take any form--drive me mad! Only _do_ not leave me in thisabyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unbearable! I _cannot_live without my life! I _cannot_ live without my soul!'"

It begins and is continued through eighteen years. He cannot see her, but he is aware of her. He is first aware on the evening of the day sheis buried. He goes to the graveyard and breaks open the new-made grave, saying to himself, "'I'll have her in my arms again! If she be cold, I'll think it is the north wind that chills _me_; and if she bemotionless, it is sleep. '" A sighing, twice repeated, stops him. "'Iappeared to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind. I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by; but as certainly asyou perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, thoughit cannot be discerned, so certainly I felt Cathy was there; not underme, but on the earth.... Her presence was with me; it remained while Irefilled the grave, and led me home. '"

But she cannot get through to him completely, because of the fleshlybody that he wears. 

He goes up to his room, his room and hers. "'I looked roundimpatiently--I felt her by me--I could _almost_ see her, and yet I_could not_!... She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil tome! And since then, sometimes more and sometimes less, I've been thesport of that intolerable torture!... When I sat in the house withHareton, it seemed that on going out I should meet her; when I walked onthe moors I should meet her coming in. When I went from home, Ihastened to return; she _must_ be somewhere at the Heights, I wascertain! And when I slept in her chamber--I was beaten out of that. Icouldn't lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was eitheroutside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, oreven resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when achild; and I must open my lids to see. And so I opened and closed them ahundred times a night--to be always disappointed! It racked me!... Itwas a strange way of killing: not by inches, but by fractions ofhair-breadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eighteenyears!'"

In all Catherine's appearances you feel the impulse towards satisfactionof a soul frustrated of its passion, avenging itself on the body thatbetrayed it. It has killed Catherine's body. It will kill Heathcliff's;for it _must_ get through to him. And he knows it. 

Heathcliff's brutalities, his cruelties, the long-drawn accomplishmentof his revenge, are subordinate to this supreme inner drama, thiswearing down of the flesh by the lust of a remorseless spirit. 

Here are the last scenes of the final act. Heathcliff is failing. "'Nelly, ' he says, 'there's a strange change approaching: I'm in itsshadow at present. I take so little interest in my daily life, that Ihardly remember to eat or drink. Those two who have left the room'"(Catherine Linton and Hareton) "'are the only objects which retain adistinct material appearance to me.... Five minutes ago, Hareton seemeda personification of my youth, not a human being: I felt to him in sucha variety of ways that it would have been impossible to have accostedhim rationally. In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherineconnected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may supposethe most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least: forwhat is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? Icannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in theflags? In every cloud, in every tree--filling the air at night, andcaught by glimpses in every object by day--I am devoured with her image!The most ordinary faces of men and women--my own features--mock me witha resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memorandathat she did exist, and that I have lost her. '... 

"'But what do you mean by a _change_, Mr. Heathcliff?' I said, alarmedat his manner.... 

"'I shall not know till it comes, ' he said, 'I'm only half conscious ofit now. '"

A few days pass. He grows more and more abstracted and detached. Onemorning Nelly Dean finds him downstairs, risen late. 

"I put a basin of coffee before him. He drew it nearer, and then restedhis arms on the table, and looked at the opposite wall, as I supposed, surveying one particular portion, up and down, with glittering, restlesseyes, and with such eager interest that he stopped breathing during halfa minute together.... 

"'Mr. Heathcliff! master!' I cried, 'don't, for God's sake stare as ifyou saw an unearthly vision. '

"'Don't, for God's sake, shout so loud, ' he replied. 'Turn round, andtell me, are we by ourselves?'

"'Of course, ' was my answer, 'of course we are. '

"Still, I involuntarily obeyed him, as if I were not quite sure. With asweep of his hand he cleared a space in front of the breakfast-things, and leant forward more at his ease. 

"Now I perceived that he was not looking at the wall; for, when Iregarded him alone, it seemed exactly that he gazed at something withintwo yards' distance. And, whatever it was, it communicated, apparently, both pleasure and pain in exquisite extremes: at least the anguished, yet raptured, expression of his countenance suggested that idea. Thefancied object was not fixed: either his eyes pursued it with unwearieddiligence, and, even in speaking to me, were never weaned away. I vainlyreminded him of his protracted abstinence from food: if he stirred totouch anything in compliance with my entreaties, if he stretched hishand out to get a piece of bread, his fingers clenched before theyreached it, and remained on the table, forgetful of their aim. "

He cannot sleep; and at dawn of the next day he comes to the door of hisroom--Cathy's room--and calls Nelly to him. She remonstrates with himfor his neglect of his body's health, and of his soul's. 

"'Your cheeks are hollow, and your eyes bloodshot, like a personstarving with hunger, and going blind with loss of sleep. '

"'It is not my fault that I cannot eat or rest, ' he said.... 'I'll doboth as soon as I possibly can ... As to repenting of my injustices, I've done no injustice, and I repent of nothing. I am too happy; and yetI'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but does notsatisfy itself. '" ... "In the afternoon, while Joseph and Hareton wereat their work, he came into the kitchen again, and, with a wild look, bid me come and sit in the house: he wanted somebody with him. Ideclined; telling him plainly that his strange talk and mannerfrightened me, and I had neither the nerve nor the will to be hiscompanion alone. 

"'I believe you think me a fiend, ' he said, with his dismal laugh:'something too horrible to live under a decent roof. ' Then, turning toCatherine, who was there, and who drew behind me at his approach, headded, half sneeringly: 'Will _you_ come, chuck? I'll not hurt you. No!to you I've made myself worse than the devil. Well, there is _one_ whowon't shrink from my company! By God! she's relentless. Oh, damn it!It's unutterably too much for flesh and blood to bear--even mine. '"

It is Heathcliff's susceptibility to this immaterial passion, the furywith which he at once sustains and is consumed by it, that makes himsplendid. 

Peace under green grass could never be the end of Heathcliff or of sucha tragedy as _Wuthering Heights_. Its real end is the tale told by theshepherd whom Lockwood meets on the moor. 

"'I was going to the Grange one evening--a dark evening, threateningthunder--and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a littleboy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and Isupposed the lambs were skittish and would not be guided. 

"'What is the matter, my little man?' I asked. 

"'There's Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under t' Nab, ' he blubbered, 'un' I darnut pass 'em. '"

It is there, the end, in one line, charged with the vibration of thesupernatural. One line that carries the suggestion of I know not whatghostly and immaterial passion and its unearthly satisfaction. 

 * * * * *

And this book stands alone, absolutely self-begotten and self-born. Itbelongs to no school; it follows no tendency. You cannot put it into anycategory. It is not "Realism", it is not "Romance", any more than _JaneEyre_: and if any other master's method, De Maupassant's or Turgeniev's, is to be the test, it will not stand it. There is nothing in it you canseize and name. You will not find in it support for any creed or theory. The redemption of Catherine Linton and Hareton is thrown in by the wayin sheer opulence of imagination. It is not insisted on. Redemption isnot the keynote of _Wuthering Heights_. The moral problem never enteredinto Emily Brontë's head. You may call her what you will--Pagan, pantheist, transcendentalist mystic and worshipper of earth, she slipsfrom all your formulas. She reveals a point of view above good and evil. Hers is an attitude of tolerance that is only not tenderness because heracceptance of life and of all that lives is unqualified and unstinting. It is too lucid and too high for pity. 

Heathcliff and Catherine exist. They justify their existence by theirpassion. But if you ask what is to be said for such a creature as LintonHeathcliff, you will be told that he does not justify his existence; hisexistence justifies him. 

 Do I despise the timid deer, Because his limbs are fleet with fear? Or, would I mock the wolf's death-howl, Because his form is gaunt and foul? Or, hear with joy the lev'ret's cry, Because it cannot bravely die? No! Then above his memory Let Pity's heart as tender be. 

After all it _is_ pity; it is tenderness. 

And if Emily Brontë stands alone and is at her greatest in the thingsthat none but she can do, she is great also in some that she may be saidto share with other novelists; the drawing of minor characters, forinstance. Lockwood may be a little indistinct, but he is properly so, for he is not a character, he is a mere impersonal looker-on. But NellyDean, the chief teller of the story, preserves her rich individualitythrough all the tortuous windings of the tale. Joseph, the oldfarm-servant, the bitter, ranting Calvinist, is a masterpiece. Andmasterly was that inspiration that made Joseph chorus to a drama thatmoves above good and evil. "'Thank Hivin for all!'" says Joseph. "'Allwarks togither for gooid, to them as is chozzen and piked out fro' therubbidge. Yah knaw whet t' Scripture sez. '" "'It's a blazing shame, thatI cannot oppen t' blessed Book, but yah set up them glories to Sattan, and all t' flaysome wickednesses that iver were born into the warld. '"

Charlotte Brontë said of her sister: "Though her feeling for the peopleround her was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced ... She could hear of themwith interest and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, andaccurate; but _with_ them she rarely exchanged a word. " And yet youmight have said she had been listening to Joseph all her life, such isher command of his copious utterance: "'Ech! ech!' exclaimed Joseph. 'Weel done, Miss Cathy! weel done, Miss Cathy! Howsiver, t' maister salljust tum'le o'er them brocken pots; un' then we's hear summut; we's hearhow it's to be. Gooid-for-naught madling! ye desarve pining fro' this toChurstmas, flinging t' precious gifts o' God under fooit i' yer flaysomerages! But I'm mista'en if ye shew yer sperrit lang. Will Hathecliffbide sich bonny ways, think ye? I nobbut wish he may catch ye i' thatplisky. I nobbut wish he may. '"

Edgar Linton is weak in drawing and in colour; but it was well-nighimpossible to make him more alive beside Catherine and Heathcliff. IfEmily's hand fails in Edgar Linton it gains strength again in Isabella. These two are the types of the civilized, the over-refined, the delicatewearers of silk and velvet, dwellers in drawing-rooms with pure whiteceilings bordered with gold, "with showers of glass-drops hanging insilver chains from the centre". They, as surely as the tainted Hindley, are bound to perish in any struggle with strong, fierce, primeval fleshand blood. The fatal moment in the tale is where the two half-savagechildren, Catherine and Heathcliff, come to Thrushcross Grange. Thrushcross Grange, with all its sickly brood, is doomed to go downbefore Wuthering Heights. But Thrushcross Grange is fatal to Catherinetoo. She has gone far from reality when she is dazzled by the glitteringglass-drops and the illusion of Thrushcross Grange. She has divorced herbody from her soul for a little finer living, for a polished, ascrupulously clean, perfectly presentable husband. 

Emily Brontë shows an unerring psychology in her handling of therelations between Isabella and Catherine. It is Isabella's morbidpassion for Heathcliff that wakes the devil in Catherine. Isabella is asentimentalist, and she is convinced that Heathcliff would love her ifCatherine would "let him". She refuses to believe that Heathcliff iswhat he is. But Catherine, who _is_ Heathcliff, can afford to accusehim. "'Nelly, '" she says, "'help me to convince her of her madness. Tellher what Heathcliff is.... He's not a rough diamond--a pearl-containingoyster of a rustic; he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. '" But Isabellawill not believe it. "'Mr. Heathcliff is not a fiend, '" she says; "'hehas an honourable soul, and a true one, or how could he remember her?'"It is the same insight that made George Meredith represent Juliana, thesentimental passionist, as declaring her belief in Evan Harrington'sinnocence while Rose Jocelyn, whose love is more spiritual and thereforemore profoundly loyal, doubts. Emily Brontë, like George Meredith, saw asensualist in every sentimentalist; and Isabella Linton was a littleanimal under her silken skin. She is ready to go to her end _quandmême_, whatever Heathcliff is, but she tricks herself into believingthat he is what he is not, that her sensualism may justify itself to herrefinement. That is partly why Heathcliff, who is no sensualist, hatesand loathes Isabella and her body. 

But there are moments when he also hates the body of Catherine thatbetrayed her. Emily Brontë is unswerving in her drawing of Heathcliff. It is of a piece with his strangeness, his unexpectedness, that he doesnot hate Edgar Linton with anything like the same intensity of hatredthat he has for Isabella. And it is of a piece with his absolute fierycleanness that never for a moment does he think of taking the lover'sobvious revenge. For it is not, I imagine, that Emily Brontëdeliberately shirked the issue, or deliberately rejected it; it is thatthat issue never entered her head. Nor do I see here, in his abandonmentof the obvious, any proof of the childlikeness and innocence of Emily, however childlike and innocent she may have been. I see only atremendous artistic uprightness, the rejection, conscious orunconscious, of an unfitting because extraneous element. Anne, who wasten times more childlike and innocent than Emily, tackles this peculiarobviousness unashamed, because she needed it. And because she did notneed it, Emily let it go. 

The evil wrought by Heathcliff, like the passion that inspired andtortured him, is an unearthly thing. Charlotte showed insight when shesaid in her preface to _Wuthering Heights_: "Heathcliff betrays onesolitary human feeling, and that is _not_ his love for Catherine; whichis a sentiment fierce and inhuman ... The single link that connectsHeathcliff with humanity is his rudely confessed regard for HaretonEarnshaw--the young man whom he has ruined; and then his half-impliedesteem for Nelly Dean. " But that Heathcliff is wholly inhuman--"a ghoul, an afreet"--I cannot really see. Emily's psychology here is perforcehalf on the unearthly plane; it is above our criticism, lending itselfto no ordinary tests. But for all his unearthliness, Heathcliff ispoignantly human, from his childhood when he implored Nelly Dean to makehim "decent", for he is "going to be good", to his last hour of piteousdependence on her. You are not allowed for a moment to forget, that, horrible and vindictive as he is, the child Heathcliff is yet a child. Take the scene where the boy first conceives his vengeance. 

"On my inquiring the subject of his thoughts, he answered gravely:

"'I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don't care howlong I wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die beforeI do!'

"'For shame, Heathcliff!' said I. 'It is for God to punish wickedpeople. We should learn to forgive. '

"'No, God won't have the satisfaction that I shall, ' he returned. 'Ionly wish I knew the best way! Let me alone, and I'll plan it out: whileI'm thinking of that I don't feel pain. '"

It is very like Heathcliff. It is also pathetically like a child. 

In Hareton Earnshaw Emily Brontë is fairly on the earth all the time, and nothing could be finer than her handling of this half-brutalized, and wholly undeveloped thing, her showing of the slow dawn of hisfeelings and intelligence. Her psychology is never psychologic. Thecreature reveals himself at each moment of his unfolding for what he is. It was difficult; for in his degradation he had a certain likeness inunlikeness to the degraded Heathcliff. It was Heathcliff's indomitablewill that raised him. Hareton cannot rise without a woman's hand to helphim. The younger Catherine again was difficult, because of her likenessto her mother. Her temper, her vanity, her headstrong trickiness areCatherine Earnshaw. But Catherine Linton is a healthy animal, incapableof superhuman passion, capable only (when properly chastened byadversity) of quite ordinary pity and devotion. She inspiresbewilderment, but terror and fascination never; and never the glamour, the magic evoked by the very name of Catherine Earnshaw. Her escapadesand fantasies, recalling Catherine Earnshaw, are all on an attenuatedscale. 

Yet Catherine Earnshaw seems now and then a less solid figure. That isbecause her strength does not lie in solidity at all. She is a thing offlame and rushing wind. One half of her is akin to the storms ofWuthering Heights, the other belongs to her unseen abiding-place. Bothsides of her are immortal. 

And they are of that immortality which is the spirit of place--thespirit that, more than all spirits, inspired Emily Brontë. Two ofCharlotte's books, _The Professor_ and _Villette_, might have beenwritten away from Haworth; Emily's owes much of its outward character tothe moors, where it was brought forth. Not even Charlotte could paint, could suggest scenes like Emily Brontë. There is nobody to compare withher but Thomas Hardy; and even he has to labour more, to put in morestrokes to achieve his effect. In four lines she gives the storm, thecold and savage foreground, and the distance of the Heights: "One mayguess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by theexcessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by arange of gaunt thorns, all stretching their limbs one way, as if cravingalms of the sun. "

See the finish of this landscape, framed in a window: "They sat togetherin a window whose lattice lay back against the wall, and displayed, beyond the garden trees and the wild green park, the valley ofGimmerton, with a long line of mist winding nearly to its top (for verysoon after you pass the chapel, as you may have noticed, the sough thatruns from the marshes joins a beck which follows the bend of the glen). Wuthering Heights rose above this silvery vapour; but our old house wasinvisible; it rather dips down on the other side. "

In six lines she can paint sound, and distance, and scenery, and theturn of the seasons, and the two magics of two atmospheres. "Gimmertonchapel bells were still ringing; and the full, mellow flow of the beckin the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet substitute forthe yet absent murmur of the summer foliage, which drowned that musicabout the Grange when the trees were in leaf. At Wuthering Heights italways sounded on quiet days following a great thaw or a season ofsteady rain. "

That music is the prelude to Heathcliff's return, and to the passionatescene that ends in Catherine's death. 

And nothing could be more vivid, more concrete, than Emily Brontë'smethod. Time is marked as a shepherd on the moors might mark it, by themovement of the sun, the moon, and the stars; by weather, and thepassage of the seasons. Passions, emotions, are always presented inbodily symbols, by means of the bodily acts and violences they inspire. The passing of the invisible is made known in the same manner. And thevisible world moves and shines and darkens with an absolute illusion ofreality. Here is a road seen between sunset and moonrise: "... All thatremained of day was a beamless amber light along the west: but I couldsee every pebble on the path, and every blade of grass, by the light ofthat splendid moon". 

The book has faults, many and glaring faults. You have to read it manytimes before you can realize in the mass its amazing qualities. For itis probably the worst-constructed tale that ever was written, this storyof two houses and of three generations that the man Lockwood is supposedto tell. Not only has Lockwood to tell of things he could not possiblyhave heard and seen, but sometimes you get scene within vivid scene, dialogue within dialogue, and tale within tale, four deep. Sometimes youare carried back in a time and sometimes forward. You have to think hardbefore you know for certain whose wife Catherine Heathcliff really is. You cannot get over Lockwood's original mistake. And this poor device ofnarrative at second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand, is used to conveythings incredible, inconceivable; all the secret, invisible drama of thesouls of Catherine and Heathcliff, as well as whole acts of the mostvisible, the most tangible, the most direct and vivid and tumultuousdrama; drama so tumultuous, so vivid, and so direct, that by nopossibility could it have been conveyed by any medium. It simplyhappens. 

And that is how Emily Brontë's genius triumphs over all her faults. Itis not only that you forgive her faults and forget them, you are not--inthe third reading anyhow--aware of them. They disappear, they aredestroyed, they are burnt up in her flame, and you wonder how you eversaw them. All her clumsy contrivances cannot stay her course, or obscureher light, or quench her fire. Things happen before your eyes, and itdoes not matter whether Lockwood, or Nelly Dean, or Heathcliff, orCatherine, tells you of their happening. 

And yet, though Lockwood and Nelly Dean are the thinnest, the mosttransparent of pure mediums, they preserve their personalitiesthroughout. Nelly especially. The tale only begins to move when Lockwooddrops out and Nelly takes it up. At that point Emily Brontë's stylebecomes assured in its directness and simplicity, and thenceforward itnever falters or changes its essential character. 

And it is there, first of all, in that unfaltering, unchanging qualityof style that she stands so far above her sister. She has no purplepatches, no decorative effects. No dubiously shining rhetoric is hers. She does not deal in metaphors or in those ponderous abstractions, thosedreadful second-hand symbolic figures--Hope, Imagination, Memory, andthe rest of them, that move with every appearance of solidity inCharlotte's pages. There are no angels in her rainbows. Her "grandstyle" goes unclothed, perfect in its naked strength, its naked beauty. It is not possible to praise Charlotte's style without reservations; itis not always possible to give passages that illustrate her qualitieswithout suppressing her defects. What was a pernicious habit withCharlotte, her use of words like "peruse", "indite", "retain", withEmily is a mere slip of the pen. There are only, I think, three of suchslips in _Wuthering Heights_. Charlotte was capable of mixing her worstthings with her best. She mixed them most in her dialogue, where sins ofstyle are sinfullest. It is not always possible to give a scene, wordfor word, from Charlotte's novels; the dramatic illusion, the illusionof reality, is best preserved by formidable cutting. 

But not only was Emily's style sinless; it is on the whole purest, mostnatural, and most inevitable in her dialogue; and that, although thepassions she conceived were so tremendous, so unearthly, that she mighthave been pardoned if she found no human speech to render them. 

What is more, her dramatic instinct never fails her as it failsCharlotte over and over again. Charlotte had not always the mastery andself-mastery that, having worked a situation up to its dramatic climax, leaves it there. A certain obscure feeling for rightness guides her inthe large, striding movement of the drama; it is in the handling of thescenes that she collapses. She wanders from climax to climax; she goesback on her own trail; she ruins her best effects by repetition. She hasno continuous dramatic instinct; no sense whatever of dramatic form. 

These are present somehow in _Wuthering Heights_, in spite of itsmonstrous formlessness. Emily may have had no more sense of form forform's sake than Charlotte; she may have had no more dramatic instinct;but she had an instinct for the ways of human passion. She knew thatpassion runs its course, from its excitement to its climax andexhaustion. It has a natural beginning and a natural end. And so herscenes of passion follow nature. She never goes back on her effect, never urges passion past its climax, or stirs it in its exhaustion. Inthis she is a greater "realist" than Charlotte. 

 * * * * *

It is incredible that _Wuthering Heights_, or any line of it, any linethat Emily Brontë ever wrote, should have passed for Charlotte's. Shedid things that Charlotte could never have done if she tried a thousandyears, things not only incomparably greater, but unique. 

Yet in her lifetime she was unrecognized. What is true of her prose istrue also of her poems. They, indeed, did bring her a little praise, obscure and momentary. No less she was unrecognized to such an extentthat _Wuthering Heights_ was said and believed to be an immature work ofCharlotte's. Even after her death, her eulogist, Sydney Dobell, was sofar from recognizing her, that he seems to have had a lingering doubt asto Ellis Bell's identity until Charlotte convinced him of his error. 

And only the other day a bold attempt was made to tear from Emily Brontëthe glory that she has won at last from time. The very latest theory, [A]offered to the world as a marvellous discovery, the fruit of passionateenthusiasm and research, is the old, old theory that Charlotte, and notEmily, wrote _Wuthering Heights_. And Sydney Dobell, with his littleerror, is made to serve as a witness. In order to make out a case forCharlotte, the enthusiast and researcher is obliged to disparage everyother work of Emily's. He leans rashly enough on the assumption that her"Gondal Chronicles" were, in their puerility, beneath contempt, stillmore rashly on his own opinion that she was no poet. 

[Footnote A: _The Key to the Brontë Works_, by J. Malham-Dembleby. SeeAppendix I. ]

If this were the only line he took, this amusing theorist might be leftalone. The publication of the _Complete Poems_ settles him. The value, the really priceless value, of his undertaking is in the long array ofparallel passages from the prose of Charlotte and of Emily with which heendeavours to support it. For, so far from supporting it, these columnsare the most convincing, the most direct and palpable refutation of histheory. If any uncritical reader should desire to see for himselfwherein Charlotte and Emily Brontë differed; in what manner, with whatincompatible qualities and to what an immeasurable degree the youngersister was pre-eminent, he cannot do better than study those parallelpassages. If ever there was a voice, a quality, an air absolutely apartand distinct, not to be approached by, or confounded with any other, itis Emily Brontë's. 

It was the glare of Charlotte's fame that caused in her lifetime thatblindness and confusion. And Emily, between pride and a superbindifference, suffered it. She withdrew, with what seemed an obstinateperversity, into her own magnificent obscurity. She never raised a handto help herself. She left no record, not a note or a word to prove herauthorship of _Wuthering Heights_. Until the appearance in 1910 of her_Complete Poems_ the world had no proof of it but Charlotte's statement. It was considered enough, in Charlotte's lifetime. The world acceptedher disclaimer. 

But the trouble began again after Charlotte's death. Emily herself hadno legend; but her genius was perpetually the prey of rumours that lefther personality untouched. Among the many provoked by Mrs. Gaskell's_Life_, there was one attributing _Wuthering Heights_ to her brotherBranwell. [A] Mr. Francis Grundy said that Branwell told him he hadwritten _Wuthering Heights_. Mr. Leyland believed Mr. Grundy. Hebelieved that Branwell was a great poet and a great novelist, and hewrote two solid volumes of his own in support of his belief. 

[Footnote A: The curious will find a note on this point in Appendix II. ]

Nobody believes in Mr. Grundy, or in Mr. Leyland and his belief inBranwell now. All that can be said of Branwell, in understanding andextenuation, is that he would have been a great poet and a greaternovelist if he could have had his own way. 

This having of your own way, unconsciously, undeliberately, would seemto be the supreme test of genius. Having your own way in the teeth ofcircumstances, of fathers and of brothers, and of aunts, ofschool-mistresses, [A] and of French professors, of the parish, ofpoverty, of public opinion and hereditary disease; in the teeth of themost disastrous of all hindrances, duty, not neglected, but fulfilled. By this test the genius of Emily Brontë fairly flames; Charlotte'sstands beside it with a face hidden at times behind bruised and darkenedwings. By this test even Anne's pale talent shows here and there aflicker as of fire. In all three the having of their own way was, afterall, the great submission, the ultimate obedience to destiny. 

[Footnote A: It was Miss Wooler who taught Charlotte to "peruse". ]

For genius like theirs _is_ destiny. And that brings us back to theeternal question of the Sources. "Experience" will not account for whatwas greatest in Charlotte. It will hardly account for what was least inEmily. With her only the secret, the innermost experience counted. Ifthe sources of _Wuthering Heights_ are in the "Gondal Poems", thesources of the poems are in _that_ experience, in the long life of heradventurous spirit. Her genius, like Henry Angora and Rosina and therest of them, flew from the "Palaces of Instruction". As she _was_ HenryAngora, so she _was_ Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. 

It is a case of "The Horse I rode at the battle of Zamorna", that isall. 

There has been too much talk about experience. What the critic, theimpressionist, of the Brontës needs is to recover, before all things, the innocence of the eye. No doubt we all of us had it once, and canremember more or less what it was like. To those who have lost it Iwould say: Go back and read again Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of CharlotteBrontë_. 

Years and years ago, when I was a child, hunting forlornly in myfather's bookshelves, I came upon a small, shabby volume, bound inyellow linen. The title-page was adorned with one bad wood-cut thatshowed a grim, plain house standing obliquely to a churchyard packedwith tombstones--tombstones upright and flat, and slanting at allangles. In the foreground was a haycock, where the grave grass had beenmown. I do not know how the artist, whose resources were of theslenderest, contrived to get his overwhelming but fascinating effect ofmoorland solitude, of black-grey nakedness and abiding gloom. But hecertainly got it and gave it. There was one other picture, representinga memorial tablet. 

Tombstones always fascinated me in those days, because I was mortallyafraid of them; and I opened that book and read it through. 

I could not, in fact, put it down. For the first time I was in the gripof a reality more poignant than any that I had yet known, of a tragedythat I could hardly bear. I suppose I have read that book a score oftimes since then. There are pages in it that I shrink from approachingeven now, because of the agony of realization they revive. The passingbell tolled continually in the prelude; it sounded at intervalsthroughout; it tolled again at the close. The refrain of "Here lie theRemains" haunted me like a dolorous song. It seemed to me a decorous andstately accompaniment to such a tale, and that wood-cut on thetitle-page a fitting ornament. I knew every corner of that house. I havean impression (it is probably a wrong one) of a flagged path going rightdown from the Parsonage door through another door and plunging among thetombs. I saw six little white and wistful faces looking out of an upperwindow; I saw six little children going up and up a lane, and I wonderedhow the tiny feet of babies ever got so far. I saw six little Brontëbabies lost in the spaces of the illimitable moors. They went overrough stones and walls and mountain torrents; their absurd petticoatswere blown upwards by the wind, and their feet were tangled in theheather. They struggled and struggled, and yet were in an ecstasy that Icould well understand. 

I remember I lingered somewhat long over the schooldays at Cowan Bridgeand that I found the Brussels period dull; M. Héger struck me as atiresome pedant, and I wondered how Charlotte could ever have put upwith him. There was a great deal about Branwell that I could notunderstand at all, and so forgot. And I skipped all the London part, andCharlotte's literary letters. I had a very vague idea of Charlotte apartfrom Haworth and the moors, from the Parsonage and the tombstones, fromTabby and Martha and the little black cat that died, from the gardenwhere she picked the currants, and the quiet rooms where she wrote herwonderful, wonderful books. 

But, for all that skipping and forgetting, there stood out a vivid andineffaceable idea of Emily; Emily who was tall and strong andunconquerable; Emily who loved animals, and loved the moors; Emily andKeeper, that marvellous dog; Emily kneading bread with her book proppedbefore her; Emily who was Ellis Bell, listening contemptuously to thereviews of _Wuthering Heights_; Emily stitching at the long seam withdying fingers; and Emily dead, carried down the long, flagged path, withKeeper following in the mourners' train. 

And, all through, an invisible, intangible presence, somethingmysterious, but omnipotently alive; something that excited these threesisters; something that atoned, that not only consoled for suffering andsolitude and bereavement, but that drew its strength from these things;something that moved in this book like the soul of it; something thatthey called "genius". 

Now that, as truly as I can set it down, is the impression conveyed to achild's mind by Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte Brontë_. And makingsome deductions for a child's morbid attraction to tombstones, and achild's natural interest in children, it seems to me even now that thisinnocent impression is the true one. It eliminates the inessential andpreserves the proportions; above all, it preserves the figure of EmilyBrontë, solitary and unique. 

Anyhow, I have never been able to get away from it. 

_September_ 1911. 

APPENDIX I

THE KEY TO THE BRONTË WORKS

More than once Mr. Malham-Dembleby has approached us with his mysterious"Key". There was his "Key to _Jane Eyre_", published in the _SaturdayReview_ in 1902; there was his "Lifting of the Brontë Veil", publishedin the _Fortnightly Review_ in 1907; and there was the correspondencethat followed. Now he has gathered all his evidence together into oneformidable book, and we are faced with what he calls his "miraculous andsensational" discovery that it was Charlotte and not Emily Brontë whowrote _Wuthering Heights_, and that in _Wuthering Heights_ sheimmortalized the great tragic passion of her life, inspired by M. Héger, who, if you please, is Heathcliff. 

This is Mr. Malham-Dembleby's most important contribution to thesubject. M. Héger, Mr. Malham-Dembleby declares, was Heathcliff beforehe was M. Pelet, or Rochester, or M. Paul. And as it was Charlotte andnot Emily who experienced passion, Charlotte alone was able toimmortalize it. 

So much Mr. Malham-Dembleby assumes in the interests of psychology. Butit is not from crude psychological arguments that he forges histremendous Key. It is from the internal evidence of the works, supportedby much "sensational" matter from the outside. 

By way of internal evidence then, we have first the sensationaldiscovery of a work, _Gleanings in Craven, or The Tourists' Guide_, by"one Frederic Montagu", published at Skipton-in-Craven in 1838, whichwork the author of _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_ must have readand drawn upon for many things, names (including her own pseudonym ofCurrer Bell), descriptions of scenery, local legends, as of that fairyJannet, Queen of the Malhamdale Elves, who haunted the sources of theAire and suggested Rochester's Queen of Elves, his fairy, Janet Eyre. Parallel passages are given showing a certain correspondence betweenMontagu's traveller's tale and the opening scene of _Wuthering Heights_. Montagu goes on horseback to a solitary house, like Lockwood, and, likeLockwood, is shown to bed, dreams, and is awakened by a white-facedapparition (his hostess, not his host), who holds a lighted candle, likeHeathcliff, and whose features, like Heathcliff's, are convulsed withdiabolical rage, and so on. Mr. Malham-Dembleby, in a third parallelcolumn, uses the same phrases to describe Jane Eyre's arrival atRochester's house, her dreams, and the appearance of Rochester's madwife at her bedside; his contention being that the two scenes arewritten by the same hand. 

All this is very curious and interesting; so far, however, Mr. Malham-Dembleby's sensational evidence does no more for us than suggestthat Charlotte and Emily may very likely have read Montagu's book. 

But the plot thickens. Mr. Malham-Dembleby first prints parallelpassages from Montagu's book and _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_, then, extensively, scene after scene from _Jane Eyre_ and _WutheringHeights_. 

Some of these coincidences seem on the first blush of it remarkable, forinstance, the child-phantom which appears both to Jane Eyre and to NellyDean in _Wuthering Heights_; or the rainy day and the fireside scene, which occur in the third chapter of _Wuthering Heights_ and the openingchapter of _Jane Eyre_. Others again, such as the parallel between thereturn of Heathcliff to Catherine and that of Jane to Rochester, willnot bear examination for a moment. Of this and most of Mr. Malham-Dembleby's parallels it may be said that they only maintain theirstartling character by the process of tearing words from theirsentences, sentences from their contexts, contexts from their scenes, and scenes from the living body of each book. Apparently to Mr. Malham-Dembleby, a book, at any rate a Brontë book, is not a livingbody; each is a box of German bricks, and he takes all the boxes andtumbles them out on the floor together and rearranges them so as to showthat, after all, there was only one box of bricks in the family, andthat was Charlotte's. Much of his argument and the force of his parallelpassages depends on the identification of the characters in the Brontëworks, not only with their assumed originals, but with each other. ForMr. Malham-Dembleby's purposes poor M. Héger, a model alreadyremorselessly overworked by Charlotte, has to sit, not only for M. Pelet, for Rochester and Yorke Hunsden, for Robert and for Louis Moore, but for Heathcliff, and, if you would believe it, for Hareton Earnshaw;because (parallel passage!) the younger Catherine and Hareton Earnshawwere teacher and pupil, and so (when she taught him English) wereCharlotte and M. Héger. 

Mr. Malham-Dembleby's work of identification is made easier for him byhis subsidiary discovery of Charlotte's two methods, Method I, interchange of the sex; Method II, alteration of the age of hercharacters. With this licence almost any character may be any other. Thus Hareton Earnshaw looking at Catherine is Jane Eyre looking at Mr. Rochester. When he touches her Nelly Dean says, "He might have stuck aknife into her, she started in such a taking"; and Rochester says toJane, "You stick a sly penknife under my ear" (parallel passage!). Lockwood at Wuthering Heights is Jane Eyre at Thornton Hall; Heathcliffappearing at Lockwood's bedside, besides being M. Héger and Rochester, is Rochester's mad wife. Heathcliff returning to Catherine is Janereturning to Rochester, and so on. But however varied, howeverapparently discriminated the characters, M. Héger is in all the men, andCharlotte is in all the women, in the two Catherines, in Jane Eyre andFrances Henri; in Caroline Helstone, in Pauline Bassompierre, and LucySnowe. 

Now there is a certain plausibility in this. With all their vividnessand individuality Charlotte Brontë's characters have a way of shadingoff into each other. Jane has much in common with Frances and with Lucy, and Lucy with Pauline. Her men incline rather to one type, that of themasterful, arbitrary, instructive male; that is the type she likes bestto draw. Yorke Hunsden in _The Professor_ splits up into Rochester andRobert Moore and Mr. Yorke; and there is a certain amount of PaulEmanuel in all of them. But life gives us our types very much that way, and there is a bit of somebody else in everybody. It is easy to suggestidentity by exaggerating small points of resemblance and suppressinglarge and essential differences (which is what Mr. Malham-Dembleby doesall the time). But take each whole living man and woman as they havebeen created for us, I don't care if Catherine Earnshaw and Jane Eyre_did_ each have a fit of passion in a locked room, and if a servantwaited upon each with gruel; there is no earthly likeness between thesoul of Catherine and the soul of Jane. I don't care if there was"hell-light" in Rochester's eyes and Heathcliff's too, if they bothswore by the "Deuce", and had both swarthy complexions like PaulEmanuel; for there is a whole universe between Heathcliff and Rochester, between Rochester and M. Paul. Beside Heathcliff, that Titan raging on amountain-top, M. Paul is merely a little man gesticulating on an_estrade_. 

So much for the identifications. Mr. Malham-Dembleby has been tempted toforce them thus, because they support his theory of M. Héger and of thegreat tragic passion, as his theory, by a vicious circle, supports hisidentifications. His procedure is to quote all the emotional passages hecan lay his hands on, from the _Poems_, from _Wuthering Heights_, from_Jane Eyre_, from _Villette_ and _The Professor_, "... All her life'shope was torn by the roots out of her own riven and outraged heart... "(_Villette_) "... Faith was blighted, confidence destroyed... " (_JaneEyre_) ... "Mr. Rochester" (M. Héger, we are informed in confidentialbrackets) was not "what she had thought him". Assuring us thatCharlotte was here describing her own emotions, he builds his argument. "Evidence" (the evidence of these passages) "shows it was in her darkseason when Charlotte Brontë wrote _Wuthering Heights_, and that sheportrayed M. Héger therein with all the vindictiveness of a woman with'a riven, outraged heart', the wounds in which yet rankled sorely. " Sothat, key in hand, for "that ghoul Heathcliff!" we must read "that ghoulHéger". We must believe that _Wuthering Heights_ was written in purevindictiveness, and that Charlotte Brontë repudiated its authorship forthree reasons: because it contained "too humiliating a story" of her"heart-thrall"; because of her subsequent remorse (proof, the modifiedanimus of her portrait of M. Héger as Rochester and as M. Paul), and forcertain sound business considerations. So much for internal evidence. 

Not that Mr. Malham-Dembleby relies on it altogether. He draws largelyupon legend and conjecture, and on more "sensational discoveries" of hisown. He certainly succeeds in proving that legend and conjecture inBrussels began at a very early date. Naturally enough it fairly flaredafter the publication of _Jane Eyre_. So far there is nothing new in hisdiscoveries. But he does provide a thrill when he unearths Eugène Sue'sextinct novel of _Miss Mary, ou l'Institutrice_, and gives us parallelpassages from that. For in _Miss Mary_, published in 1850-51[A] we have, not only character for character and scene for scene, "lifted" bodilyfrom _Jane Eyre_, but the situation in _The Professor_ and _Villette_ islargely anticipated. We are told that Eugène Sue was in Brussels in1844, the year in which Charlotte left the Pensionnat. This isinteresting. But what does it prove? Not, I think, what Mr. Malham-Dembleby maintains--that M. Héger made indiscreet revelations toEugène Sue, but that Eugène Sue was an unscrupulous plagiarist who tookhis own where he found it, either in the pages of _Jane Eyre_ or in thetittle-tattle of a Brussels salon. However indiscreet M. Héger may havebeen, he was a man of proved gravity and honour. He would, at any rate, have drawn the line at frivolous treachery. Nobody, however, can answerfor what Madame Héger and her friends may not have said. Which disposesof Eugène Sue. 

[Footnote A: Serially in the _London Journal_ in 1850; in volume form inParis, 1851. It is possible, but not likely, that Eugène Sue may haveseen the manuscript of _The Professor_ when it was "going the round". ]

Then there is that other "sensational discovery" of the Héger portrait, that little drawing (now in the National Portrait Gallery) of CharlotteBrontë in curls, wearing a green gown, and reading _Shirley_. It issigned Paul Héger, 1850, the year of _Shirley's_ publication, and theyear in which Charlotte sat to Richmond for her portrait. There are twoinscriptions on the back: "The Wearin' of the Green; First since Emily'sdeath"; and below: "This drawing is by P. Héger, done from life in1850. " The handwriting gives no clue. 

Mr. Malham-Dembleby attaches immense importance to this green gown, which he "identifies" with the pink one worn by Lucy in _Villette_. Hesays that Lady Ritchie told him that Charlotte wore a green gown at thedinner-party Thackeray gave for her in June, 1850; and when the greengown turns out after all to be a white one with a green pattern on it, it is all one to Mr. Malham-Dembleby. So much for the green gown. Still, gown or no gown, the portrait _may_ be genuine. Mr. Malham-Dembleby saysthat it is drawn on the same paper as that used in Mr. George Smith'shouse, where Charlotte was staying in June 1850, and he argues thatCharlotte and M. Héger met in London that year, and that he then drewthis portrait of her from the life. True, the portrait is a verycreditable performance for an amateur; true, M. Héger's childrenmaintained that their father did not draw, and there is no earthlyevidence that he did; true, we have nothing but one person's report ofanother person's (a collector's) statement that he had obtained theportrait from the Héger family, a statement at variance with theevidence of the Héger family itself. But granted that the children of M. Héger were mistaken as to their father's gift, and that he did draw thisportrait of Charlotte Brontë from Charlotte herself in London in 1850, I cannot see that it matters a straw or helps us to the assumption ofthe great tragic passion which is the main support of Mr. Malham-Dembleby's amazing fabrication. 

APPENDIX II

Leyland's theory is that Branwell Brontë wrote the first seventeenchapters of _Wuthering Heights_. It has very little beyond Leyland'spassionate conviction to support it. There is a passage in a letter ofBranwell's to Leyland, the sculptor, written in 1845, where he says heis writing a three-volume novel of which the first volume is completed. He compares it with "Hamlet" and with "Lear". There is also Branwell'salleged statement to Mr. Grundy. And there is an obscure legend ofmanuscripts produced from Branwell's hat, before the eyes of Mr. Grundy, in an inn-parlour. Leyland argues freely from the antecedent probabilitysuggested by Branwell's letters and his verse, which he published by wayof vindication. He could hardly have done Branwell a worse service. Branwell's letters give us a vivid idea of the sort of manuscripts thatwould be produced, in inn-parlours, from his hat. As for his verse--thatformless, fluent gush of sentimentalism--it might have passed as anerror of his youth, but for poor Leyland's comments on its majesty andbeauty. There are corpses in it and tombstones, and girls dying oftuberculosis, obscured beyond recognition in a mush of verbiage. Thereis not a live line in it. One sonnet only, out of Branwell's manysonnets, is fitted to survive. It has a certain melancholy, sentimentalgrace. But it is not a good sonnet, and it shows Branwell at his best. At his worst he sinks far below Charlotte at her worst, and, comparedwith Emily or with Charlotte at her best, Branwell is nowhere. Even Annebeats him. Her sad, virginal restraint gives a certain form and valueto her colourless and slender gift. 

There is a psychology of such things, as there is a psychology of worksof genius. Emily Brontë's work, with all its faults of construction, shows one and indivisible, fused in one fire from first to last. Onecannot take the first seventeen chapters of _Wuthering Heights_ andseparate them from the rest. There is no faltering anywhere and no breakin the power and the passion of this stupendous tale. And where passionis, sentimentalism is not. And there is not anywhere in _WutheringHeights_ a trace of that corruption which for the life of him Branwellcould not have kept out of the manuscripts he produced from his hat. 

INDEX

Absolute, the, 16, 176. _Agnes Grey_, 39, 40, 49. Augustine, St. , 185. 

Ballynaskeagh, 20. Balzac, 54, 120, 121, 163. Bassompierre, Pauline de, in Villette, 153-157. Being, 184. -- Parmenides on, 185. Birrell, Mr. , 14, 20, 31, 41, 65. Blake, William, 175, 178. Branwell, Miss, at Haworth, 23, 24. -- -- death of, 36. -- Maria, marries Rev. Patrick Brontë, 20. -- -- illness of, 23. -- -- death of, 23. Brontë-- Anne, 49-57. -- 27, 28. -- at Thornton, 20. -- at Haworth, 20, 27, 33, 39. -- at Thorp Green, 33, 36, 38, 50. -- in London, 40. -- character of 49-51, 55, 56. -- death of, 45. -- diary of, 34, 168, 194. -- Poems of, 54-57, 188, 246. -- novels of, 39, 49-54. -- and Branwell Brontë compared, 54, 246. Charlotte, 57-167. Charlotte at Thornton, 20. -- at Haworth, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 31, 37, 39, 46, 47, 69, 83, 94, 103, 105, 165, 235, 236. -- at Cowan Bridge, 24, 25, 27, 236. -- at Roe Head, 26, 27, 94, 95. -- at Dewsbury Moor, 27, 94. -- at Stonegappe, 28, 62-64. -- at Rawdon, 33, 35, 67. -- in Brussels, 15, 35-37, 81-90, 158, 241, 246. -- in London, 15, 40, 46, 47, 244. -- character of, 16, 66 et seq. , 80, 82, 83-86, 167. -- death of, 48, 49. -- early writings of, 101-104. -- genius of, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 35, 80, 91, 103, 104, 130, 131, 171, 233. -- marriage of, 47-49. -- novels of, 105-165. -- Poems of, 39, 103, 164, 169, 170, 246. -- her love of children, 64-67, 156. -- and Emily Brontë compared, 48, 167-169, 229-231, 233. -- Mr. Swinburne on, 14, 31, 64, 65, 66, 68. Emily Jane, 167-234. -- at Haworth, 19, 20-22, 25, 26, 27, 39. -- at Cowan Bridge, 24, 25. -- at Roe Head, 27, 39. -- at Halifax, 27. -- in Brussels, 35, 36, 37. -- death of, 43, 44, 139, 140, 173. -- character of, 27, 167-173. -- diary of, 33, 38, 194. -- genius of, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 171, 172, 185-186, 187, 208, 209, 229, 233, 234, 236. -- Poems of, 17, 39, 174-185, 231, 232. -- mysticism of, 16, 168, 171, 173-181, 186. -- novel of, 39. -- paganism of, 16, 135, 136, 174, 186, 208, 214. -- and Charlotte Brontë compared, 48, 167-169, 229-231, 233. -- M. Maeterlinck on, 14, 170, 213. -- Mr. Swinburne on, 14, 174. Maria, 20, 22. -- at Cowan Bridge, 24, 25. -- character of, 24, 25. -- death of, 25. Patrick Branwell, 15, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 54, 55, 58, 59, 61, 199, 236. -- at Thornton, 20. -- at Haworth, 20, 25, 28-30, 34, 42. -- at Bradford, 28, 29. -- at Luddenden Foot, 34. -- at Thorp Green, 40, 41. -- in London, 29. -- character of, 40-43, 50-54. -- death of, 43. -- authorship of _Wuthering Heights_ ascribed to, 233, 246, 247. Patrick Branwell and Emily Brontë compared, 246, 247. -- and Anne Brontë compared, 54, 233. -- and Mrs. Robinson, 40, 41, 50-52. -- Poems of, 28, 29, 42, 164, 233, 246. Patrick, Rev. , 20-22, 24, 25, 36, 37, 42, 43, 83. -- at Thornton, 20. -- at Haworth, 20. -- in Ireland, 20, 21. -- character of, 20, 21, 22, 24. -- works of, 22. _Brontës, The Fact and Fiction_, by Angus Mackay, 81. Brown, John, 28, 29, 30, 51. Brussels, Charlotte Brontë in, 15, 35-37, 81-90, 158, 241, 246. -- Emily Brontë in, 35, 36, 37. -- influence of, 15, 81-90, 158. Byron, 121, 206, 207. 

Children, love of, 64-67, 156. -- in Charlotte Brontë's novels, 64, 65, 66, 156. -- in George Eliot's novels, 64, 156. Cowan Bridge School, 24, 25, 27, 91, 236. Creative Impulse, the, 23, 155, 157. Criticism of Charlotte Brontë, 15, 31-33, 64-75, 78-81, 117, 120, 122. -- of _Jane Eyre_, 114, 117, 120-124, 128-142. -- of _Shirley_, 65, 68, 131, 132, 137, 138, 143. -- of _Villette_, 143-149, 153-160, 162, 163. -- of _Emma_, 161, 162. -- of Charlotte Brontë's _Poems_, 164, 165. -- of Emily Brontë's _Poems_, 174-209. Criticism of _Wuthering Heights_, 209-234. -- of _Agnes Grey_, 49, 50. -- of _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_, 54, 55. -- of Anne Brontë's _Poems_, 54-57, 188, 246. 

Dean, Nelly, in _Wuthering Heights_, 222, 224, 225, 229. Destiny, 35, 36, 37, 39, 48, 103, 105, 234. _Destiny, Wisdom and_, quoted, 170. Dewsbury, Charlotte Brontë at, 27, 94. Dialogue, 116, 117, 139, 140, 149, 230. Diary, Emily Brontë's, 33, 38, 194. -- Anne Brontë's, 34, 168, 194. Dimnet, M. , 15, 16, 51, 163. -- -- his criticism of Charlotte Brontë, 16. -- -- his criticism of _Wuthering Heights_, 17. Dobell, Sydney, on Emily Brontë, 232. Dramatic instinct of Charlotte Brontë, 163, 231, 232. -- -- of Emily Brontë, 231, 232. Duclaux, Madame, 14, 20, 21, 44, 50, 61, 120. -- -- her Emily Brontë, 14, 21, 44, 50, 120, 167, 182. -- -- on _Wuthering Heights_ 211, 212. Dunton, Mr. Theodore Watts-, 14, 15. 

Earnshaw, Catherine, 169, 173, 208-229. -- -- character of, 212-216, 227. -- Hareton, 209-212. -- -- character of, 215-218, 226. Earth, the, 127, 136, 143, 173, 207, 208, 224. -- Emily Brontë's love of, 136, 174, 175, 208, 222. -- Genius of, 175. -- Poem to, 207, 208. Ecstasy, 179. Eliot, George, 64, 143, 156, 171. Emanuel, Paul, 105, 144-146, 148-153, 157, 242, 243. _Emma, Fragment of_, 161, 162. Experience, 144 et seq. , 170, 172, 173, 234. -- novel of, 106, 107, 143-146, 148, 164. -- how far important, 144, 145, 148, 234. -- of Charlotte Brontë, 129, 130, 172, 234. Eyre, name whence derived, 239. 

Fanshawe, Ginevra, character of, 154, 159. Farrar, Dean, 55. Fielding, 123. _Fragment of Emma_, 161, 162. 

Gaskell, Mrs. , 20, 21, 22, 30, 42, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 96, 101, 120, 143, 147, 167. Gaskell's, Mrs. , _Life of Charlotte Brontë_, 47, 57, 58, 67, 68, 234-237. Genius, -- of Charlotte Brontë, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 35, 80, 91, 103, 104, 130, 131, 171, 233. -- of Emily Brontë, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 171, 172, 185, 186, 187, 208, 209, 229, 233, 234, 236. -- the, of Place, 19, 20, 227, 228. -- the, of Earth, 174, 175. -- test of, 233, 234. "Gondal Chronicles", 38, 39, 193, 194, 232. "Gondal Poems", 17, 193-208, 234. Grundy, Francis, 33, 51, 60, 203, 246. 

Haworth, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 29, 37, 42-44, 168. -- influence of, 24, 25, 30, 47, 94, 103, 105, 165, 166, 227, 228, 235, 236. Heathcliff, 53, 170, 197, 209-221, 222, 224, 225, 239-242. -- character of, 209, 210, 211, 226. -- and Zamorna, 202-207. Héger, M. Constantin, 14, 35, 36, 81-90. -- -- character of, 88, 89, 146, 147. -- -- influence of, 36, 100, 103-105. Héger's, M. Constantin, relations with Charlotte Brontë, 14, 15, 81-90, 96, 100, 104, 105, 130, 239-247. -- -- original of Paul Emanuel, 105, 144-150, 239-247. -- Madame, 14, 15, 35, 36, 85-89, 104, 148. -- -- original of Madame Beck, 144, 148, 149. Helstone, Caroline, 98, 137, 139, 141, 142, 143. -- -- and Miss Ellen Nussey, 75, 98. Henri, Frances, 89, 108-110. Heredity, 211, 212. 

Imagination and the real, 130, 144. 

_Jane Eyre_, 21, 24, 39, 40, 64, 68, 89, 91, 101, 103, 109, 110, 112-131, 133, 143, 148, 159, 239-247. -- -- criticisms of, 112, 116-124. -- -- dialogue in, 113, 114, 117, 118, 119. -- -- passion in, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117. -- -- reality of, 112, 113, 124. -- -- style in, 128, 129. -- -- and _The Professor_ compared, 105, 109, 110, 112, 113, 129, 138. -- -- and _Shirley_ compared, 131, 138, 141. -- -- and _Villette_ compared, 105, 144, 159. -- -- quoted, 113-115, 117-119, 125-129. John of the Cross, St. , 180, 181. 

Letters of Charlotte Brontë, 46, 53, 75, 76, 165, 166. -- -- to Miss Ellen Nussey, 46, 72, 75-78, 82-92. -- -- from Brussels, 84-87. -- -- to M. Héger, 90. -- -- to Southey, 99. -- -- to Wordsworth, 99. Leyland, Francis A. , 60, 61. -- -- on Branwell Brontë, 81, 233, 246. -- the sculptor, 29, 51, 246. Lewes, George Henry, 33, 64, 68, 124. -- -- on _Shirley_, 68. _Life of Charlotte Brontë_, Mrs. Gaskell's, 47, 57, 58, 67, 68, 234-237. Linton, Catherine, 212, 221, 222, 227. London, Charlotte Brontë in, 15, 40, 46, 47, 244. 

Mackay, Mr. Angus, 81. Maeterlinck, M. , on Emily Brontë, 14, 170, 213. Malham-Dembleby, Mr. J. , 87, 232, 239-245. Marriage of Charlotte Brontë, 47-49. -- Charlotte Brontë on, 69-80, 141, 142. Meredith, George, 133, 224. Moore, Louis, 134, 141, 143. -- Robert, 137, 140. Motherhood, 65-68. Mysticism, 16, 168, 169, 173-181, 186. 

Nature in _Shirley_, 136, 137. -- in _Wuthering Heights_, 173. -- in Emily Brontë's Poems, 207, 208. Nicholls, Rev. Arthur Bell, 47-49, 82. Nicoll, Sir William Robertson, 14, 182, 189, 190. _Note on Charlotte Brontë_, by Algernon Charles Swinburne, 14, 64. Novel, the, 163. Novels of Charlotte Brontë, 105-165. -- of Anne Brontë, 39, 49-54. -- of Emily Brontë, 39, 209-234. Nussey, Miss Ellen, 26, 46, 58, 72, 73, 75-78, 84, 168, 169. -- -- Charlotte Brontë's friendship with, 91-99. -- -- Charlotte Brontë's letters to, 31, 46, 72, 75-78, 86, 91-99. -- -- Charlotte Brontë's advice to, 75-78, 84. -- -- influence of, 91-93. -- Rev. Henry, 79, 80. -- -- original of St. John Rivers, 91, 141, 145. 

Oliphant, Mrs. , on Charlotte Brontë, 31, 32, 33, 69-74, 79, 80, 117, 141. -- -- on _Shirley_, 70, 71, 72, 141, 142. 

Paganism, Emily Brontë's, 16, 135, 136, 174, 186, 208, 214. -- in _Wuthering Heights_, 209, 211, 214, 222. Pantheism, Emily Brontë's, 171, 184. Parmenides, Poem on _Nature_, 185. Passion, Charlotte Brontë's treatment of, 106, 116, 123, 124, 176. -- Emily Brontë's treatment of, 172, 213, 214. -- Dickens' Treatment of, 123. -- Fielding's treatment of, 123. -- Jane Austen's treatment of, 124. -- Smollett's treatment of, 123. -- Thackeray's treatment of, 123. -- in _Jane Eyre_, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117. -- in _Shirley_, 131, 141. -- in _Villette_, 159. -- in _Wuthering Heights_, 210, 211, 212, 213, 218, 221, 222, 224, 228, 231. -- in Emily Brontë's Poems, 179, 180, 182, 196, 199, 200, 205, 208. -- in Emily Brontë's soul, 170-172, 174, 209. -- test in reality, 159. "Philosopher, The", 177. Philosophy, Emily Brontë's, 169, 175, 176, 177. _Pictures of the Past_, by Francis Grundy, 60. Poems of Anne Brontë, 54-57, 164, 188, 246. -- of Branwell Brontë, 28, 29, 42, 164, 233, 246. -- of Charlotte Brontë, 39, 103, 164, 169, 170, 246. -- of Emily Brontë, 17, 39, 174-185, 231, 232. -- _The Complete_, of Emily Brontë, "Poems, Gondal", 17, 193-208, 234. _Professor, The_, 39, 89, 105, 106, 107-112, 138. _Professor, The_ and _Jane Eyre_ compared, 105, 109, 110, 112, 113, 129, 138. -- -- and _Villette_ compared, 111. -- -- quoted, 107, 108, 109, 111. Pryor, Mrs. , 140. 

_Quarterly Review, The_, 53, 114, 117, 120, 121, 131. 

Real, the, -- Imagination and the, 130, 134. -- germ of the, 138, 145, 158. Realism, 163, 221, 231. Reality, 113, 124, 138, 141, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 158, 159, 163, 171, 173, 174, 176, 228, 230, 231. Reid, Sir T. Wemyss, 58, 96. -- -- on Charlotte Brontë, 58, 81, 100. -- -- quoted, 58-60. Rigby, Miss (Lady Eastlake), 122. Rivers, St. John, 91, 145. Robinson, Miss A. Mary F. _See_ Duclaux, Madame. -- Mrs. , 15, 33. -- -- and Branwell Brontë, 15, 41, 42, 52. -- -- vindicated, 41, 50. Rochester, character of, 113, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 125, 140, 141. Roe Head, 26, 27, 95, 162. 

Sidgwick, Mr. , 28, 64. -- Mrs. , 28, 62-64. _Shirley_, 46, 65, 68, 72, 100, 131-143. -- portrait of Emily Brontë in, 70, 71, 133, 137, 147. -- dialogue in, 139-141. -- criticism of, 64, 65, 68, 137, 138. -- style in, 139, 140, 141. -- Woman in, 70, 71, 132, 133, 137, 141, 143. _Shirley_ and _Jane Eyre_ compared, 131, 138, 141. -- and _Villette_ compared, 111, 141, 148, 159. -- and _Wuthering Heights_ compared, 139. -- quoted, 133-137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142. Shorter, Mr. Clement K. , 13, 14, 74, 82, 84, 87, 88, 96, 100, 101, 186-190, 191, 193. _See also_ Prefatory Note. Smith, Mr. George, 40, 144, 158. Smollett, 123. Snowe, Lucy, 71, 79, 89. -- -- and Pauline de Bassompierre, 153-157. Sources of _Wuthering Heights_, 16, 196-209, 231. Southey, Robert, Charlotte Brontë's letter to, 99. Southey's, Robert, advice to Charlotte Brontë, 99. Stephen, Mr. Leslie, 62, 63, 79. Style, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 128, 160, 161, 162, 230, 231. Sue, Eugène, 243, 244. Supernatural, the, in _Wuthering Heights_, 16, 207-221. Swinburne, Mr. , on Charlotte Brontë, 14, 31, 64-65, 66, 68. -- -- on Emily Brontë, 14, 174. 

Taylor, Miss Mary, 15, 35, 58, 91, 92, 94, 98. -- Mr. Joe, 72. -- Mr. James, 72, 73, 74, 145. Temperament, Charlotte Brontë's, 73, 81. _Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The_, 39, 40, 54, 55. -- -- audacity of, 54. -- -- realism of, 54. -- -- and Farrar's _Eternal Hope_, 55. Thackeray, 15, 47, 61, 123. Theories, 16, 17, 57-90, 100, 106, 231-332, 237, 238-247. Thornton, 20. 

_Villette_, 46, 89, 100, 105, 140-161. -- Lucy Snowe in, 71, 79, 89. -- M. Paul in. _See_ Emanuel Paul. -- dialogue in, 149. -- germ of the real in, 145, 158. -- reality of, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 158, 159, 163. -- realism of, 163, 164. -- style in, 160, 161. -- and _The Professor_ compared, 98, 99, 111, 112. -- and _Jane Eyre_ compared, 105, 144, 159. -- and _Shirley_ compared, 111, 141, 148, 159. -- quoted, 149-153, 154, 155, 157. 

Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 14, 196. Williams, Mr. W. S. , 40. -- -- Charlotte Brontë's letter to, 78. Wilson, Rev. Carus, 24, 25. _Wisdom and Destiny_ quoted, 170, 213. Woman, 69, 70, 117, 118, 132, 133, 140, 142, 143. Woman, mid-Victorian, 71, 118, 132. -- modern, 133. Woman's place in the world, 78, 142. Women, Charlotte Brontë's, 69, 70, 132, 133. Wooler, Miss, 26, 27, 35, 98. Wordsworth, letters to, 99. _Wuthering Heights_, 16, 17, 21, 39, 40, 46, 105, 127, 128, 130, 131, 139, 172, 173, 208-234. -- -- criticism of, 209-233. -- -- dialogue in, 218, 219, 220-221, 223, 224. -- -- mysticism in, 173. -- -- paganism in, 209, 211, 214, 222. -- -- passion in, 210, 211, 212, 213, 218, 221, 222, 224, 228, 231. -- -- realism in, 221, 224, 228. -- -- style in, 228, 230. -- -- the supernatural in, 17, 196-209, 216. -- -- sources of, 232, 233, 234. 

Zamorna. -- _See_ Heathcliff. -- _See_ "Gondal Poems". 

2/- Hutchinson's 2/-NET NET

BOOKLOVER'S LIBRARY

The Booklover's Library is now accepted as one of the most successfulventures of recent years. Beautifully produced and covering a wide rangeof subjects, the books have been eagerly sought by a discriminatingpublic. 

Published in the first instance at a price from 30/- and below, eachtitle selected for this library is generally admitted to be a littlemasterpiece in its own particular sphere. 

Here are the eighteen titles which are now available:

First titles in the

BOOKLOVER'S LIBRARY

No. 1. 

HAWORTH PARSONAGE

by Isabel C. Clarke

_Sphere. _--"This biography of that tragical family whose private livesfar transcended the gloom of the magnificent work they produced, is amatter of interest to all who have read and loved _Jane Eyre_ and_Wuthering Heights_. "

No. 2. 

ROMANCE OF EMPIRE by Sir Philip Gibbs

Sir Philip Gibbs unfolds in his graphic, picturesque way the amazingrecord of vision, courage and sacrifice on the part of the pioneers inthe great adventure of Empire. 

No. 3. 

THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS

by W. P. Pycraft

The aim of this book is to bring together a most astounding collectionof facts in regard to the Courtship of Animals of all kinds, from Apesto Ants. 

No. 4. 

THE GHOST BOOK by Cynthia Asquith

Weird, uncanny stories of the supernatural by May Sinclair; AlgernonBlackwood; Mrs. Belloc Lowndes; L. P. Hartley; Denis Mackail; ClemenceDane; C. Ray; Hugh Walpole; Desmond MacCarthy; Walter de la Mare; ArthurMachen; D. H. Lawrence; Oliver Onions; Mary Webb; Charles Whibley; EnidBagnold. 

No. 5. 

PASSION MURDER & MYSTERY

by Bruce Graeme

_Sunday Times. _--"Mr. Graeme has the true knack of the story-teller, andlovers of the gruesome will find all they want in this collection oftales, as they are tragic. "

No. 6. 

TAHITI--ISLE OF DREAMS

by Robert Keable

_Illustrated London News. _--"This is a book of charm and personalphilosophy which will not be forgotten by those who read it. "

No. 7. 

THE THREE BRONTËS by May Sinclair

Mr. Clement K. Shorter in the _Sphere. _--"Assuredly she has produced abook in which there is not a dull line, upon what is acknowledged to beone of the most fascinating subjects in the whole range of literature. "

No. 8. 

LESS THAN THE DUST: The Autobiography of a Tramp by Joseph Stamper

Compton McKenzie in the _Daily Mail. _--"... There are pages with thequality of Maxim Gorki ... Absorbed me sufficiently to make me readevery page, starting at three o'clock in the morning after having readseveral other books--and I cannot say more for a book than that. "

No. 9. 

THE JUTLAND SCANDAL

by Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon

_Daily News. _--"... A concise exposition of the tactics at Jutland and astinging rebuke to those who accuse of having missed a gloriousopportunity through over-caution and lack of fighting spirit. "

No. 10. 

HENRY VIII & HIS WIVES

by Walter Jerrold

In this volume Mr. Jerrold has set out to relate the personal history, so far as it is ascertainable, of the much-married Henry and the sixwomen whom he successfully wedded. 

_Observer. _--"... A rich mine of controversy.... "

No. 11

BEYOND KHYBER PASS

by Lowell Thomas

_Spectator. _--"Unchanged in the last thousand years, the people ofCentral Asia stroll through Mr. Thomas's pages, shrouded girls, swashbuckling youths, peasants, princes ... It is an amazing pageantthat he presents to us. "

No. 12. 

LIFE AND LAUGHTER 'MIDST THE CANNIBALS by Clifford Collinson

_Yorkshire Herald. _--"This is a fascinating narrative of life in theSouth Seas, and emphasizes that fact proves more interesting thanfiction.... "

No. 13. 

LIKE SHADOWS ON THE WALL

by W. B. Maxwell

_Spectator. _--"Mr. Maxwell sketches in a character, a scene, or anincident with remarkable rapidity and vividness ... His book is saltedwith a humour all his own. "

No. 14. 

SPOOK STORIES by E. F. Benson

_Times. _--"Mr. Benson is well-versed in the gentle art of sending coldshivers racing down other people's spines. "

_Spectator. _"These spook stories could not be beaten; every chaptermakes one's flesh creep. "

No. 15. 

ROAMIN' IN THE GLOAMIN'

by Sir Harry Lauder

_Daily Chronicle. _--"It is so vivid that it gives the impression of notbeing written at all, but spoken in that vivid, pawky, homely way whichmakes him 'get over' the footlights as no other artist can do. "

No. 16. 

WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA

by Lowell Thomas

_Daily Mail. _--"Recounts the extraordinary and almost legendary careerof Colonel Lawrence. His experiences indeed read like an 'Arabian Night'of the twentieth century. He played his part marvellously. "

No. 17. 

THE KASÎDAH of Hâjî Abdû El Yezdi

by Sir Richard F. Burton, K. C. M. G. 

A Lay of the Higher Law

The Kasîdah has been described by some of Sir Richard Burton's admirersas his masterpiece, and this edition brings it within the reach of amuch greater public than has been possible before. 

No. 18. 

THE SOUL OF THE WAR

by Philip Gibbs

_The Author. _--"If there is any purpose in what I have written beyondmere record it is to reveal the soul of war so nakedly that it cannot beglossed over by the glamour of false sentiment and false heroics. "