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Title: The Bront Prefaces
Author: Ward, Mrs. Humphry [Mary Augusta] (1851-1920)
Date of first publication: 1899-1900, as part of the Haworth
   Edition of the Bront novels. This ebook marks their
   first separate publication.
Date first posted: 16 August 2009
Date last updated: 16 August 2009
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #372

This ebook was produced by:
Andrew Templeton




                          The Bront Prefaces

                Copyright, 1899 & 1900, by Mary A. Ward.
                          All Rights reserved



Transcriber's note: In 1898 Mary Arnold Ward (Mrs Humphry Ward), author of
'Robert Elsmere', 'Marcella', and 'Helbeck of Bannisdale,' was commissioned
by Smith & Elder to write a series of critical introductions to the novels
of the Bront sisters for the publisher's famed "Haworth Edition," a seven
volume set. The resulting six prefaces -- none was written for Anne's
'Agnes Grey' -- duly appeared in 1899 and 1900 to much critical acclaim.
Of all the prefaces, that written for Emily's 'Wuthering Heights' merits
particular interest; it played a significant role in establishing that
novel's place as one of the great works of English literature.



CONTENTS

Introduction to Jane Eyre
Introduction to Shirley
Introduction to Villette
Introduction to The Professor
Introduction to Wuthering Heights
Introduction to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall




                              Introduction
                                   to
                               Jane Eyre


                                   I


'Jane Eyre' was first published in October 1847. Half a century--since
this tale of the North by an unknown writer stole upon London, and, in
the very midst of the serial publication of 'Vanity Fair,' took the town
by storm, obtaining for its author in the course of a few weeks a
success which, as the creator of Becky Sharp afterwards said to her, a
little sadly and sharply, 'it took me the work of ten years to achieve.'

Half a century, in the view of the Roman Church, is often hardly
sufficient to decide even the first step in the process of canonisation;
it is generally amply sufficient to decide all matters of literary rank
and permanence. How has the verdict gone in the case of Currer Bell?
Have these fifty years 'cut all meaning from the name,' or have they but
filled it with a fuller content, wreathed it with memories and
associations that will for ever keep it luminous and delightful amid the
dim tracts of the past?

Judging by the books that have been written and read in recent years, by
the common verdict as to the Bront sisters, their story, and their
work, which prevails, almost without exception, in the literary
criticism of the present day; by the tone of personal tenderness, even
of passionate homage, in which many writers speak of Charlotte and of
Emily; and by the increasing recognition which their books have obtained
abroad, one may say with some confidence that the name and memory of the
Bronts were never more alive than now, that 'Honour and Fame have got
about their graves' for good and all, and that Charlotte and Emily
Bront are no less secure, at any rate, than Jane Austen or George Eliot
or Mrs. Browning of literary recollection in the time to come.

But if the Bronts live, their books live also. There are some names of
the past--Byron--Voltaire--that are far greater now, more full of magic
and of spell, than the books associated with them--that are, in fact,
separable from the books, and could almost live on without them. But
Charlotte Bront _is_ Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe. You cannot think of her
apart from what she has written, and everything that she wrote has the
challenging quality of personal emotion or of passion, moving in a
narrow range among very concrete things, and intimately fused throughout
with the incidents and feelings of one small, intense experience: so
that, if one finds, as one does find abundantly, that the Bronts are
remembered, it must be that their books are read, that people still sit
up into the night with 'Jane Eyre,' and are still as angry as they were
at the first, that they can get no one to assure them of Paul Emmanuel's
safe return.

So it must be; and so, indeed, the personal experience of most of us can
vouch that it is. Nevertheless, here and there one may hear a protesting
voice. Here and there a reader--and generally a reader of more subtlety
and range than his fellows--struck with the union of certain
extravagances and certain dogmatisms in Charlotte Bront's work, with
the weakness of Anne's and the crudity of Emily's, will dare to say,
'Not at all! The vitality of the Bront fame does not mean primarily the
vitality of the Bront books. It is a vitality which springs from the
English love of the pathetic and the picturesque, and the English
tendency to subordinate matters of art to matters of sentiment. Mrs.
Gaskell, herself an accomplished novelist, wrote an account of these
lonely girls on a Yorkshire moor, struggling with poverty and
consumption, developing genius in the very wrestle with death, taking
the heaven of fame by violence, and perishing in the effort. She showed
them to us oppressed by poverty and by daily contact with a vicious
brother, and yet, through it all, remaining dutiful, loving, and
virtuous, as the good English public likes them to be: she describes the
deaths--the piteous deaths--of two of the sisters in the very moment,
or on the very threshold, of success, and, finally, her narrative
brought us to the death of Charlotte herself--Charlotte snatched from
happiness and from motherhood, after one brief year of married life: and
so skilful is the telling, so touching the story, that the great English
heart goes out to it, and forthwith the Bront books must be books of
genius, because the Bronts are so interesting and their story so
tragic.'

Perhaps this explanation is put forward to account rather for the
continuance of the Bronts' fame than for their original success. Such a
critic would admit that 'Jane Eyre' is at least a vivid and exciting
story; that 'Villette' has at least passages of extraordinary
brilliance: but he will obstinately maintain, none the less, that other
books, now forgotten, have had as much, and that the Bront 'legend' has
unfairly strengthened the claim of the Bront stories upon posterity.

Let us see how such a contention stands in the case of 'Jane Eyre.'
'Jane Eyre'--to run through a summary of the plot--is the story of an
orphan girl, reared at a Charity School amid many hardships, going out
into the world as a governess, and falling in love with her employer,
Mr. Rochester. She yields herself to her own passion and to his
masterful love-making with an eager, an over-eager abandonment. The
wedding-day is fixed; the small marriage party assembles. But in the
very church, and at the moment of the ceremony, it is revealed to Jane
Eyre that Mr. Rochester has a wife living, a frenzied lunatic who has
been confined for months in a corner of the same house where she and
Rochester have had their daily dwelling; that Rochester has deliberately
entrapped her, and that she stands on the edge of an abyss. The marriage
party breaks up in confusion; and Rochester's next endeavour is to
persuade the stunned and miserable Jane to scout law and convention, and
fly with him to love and foreign parts. He shows her the lunatic, in all
the odious horror of her state, and Jane forgives him on the spot,
having never indeed, so far as appears, felt any deep resentment of his
conduct. Nevertheless, she summons up courage to leave him. She steals
away by night, and, after days of wandering and starvation, she finds a
home with the Rivers family, who ultimately turn out to be her cousins.
St. John Rivers, the brother of the family, an Evangelical clergyman
possessed with a fanatical enthusiasm for missionary life, observes the
girl's strong and energetic nature, and makes up his mind to marry her,
not in the least because he loves her, but because he thinks her fitted
to be a missionary's wife. Her will is on the point of yielding to his,
when she hears a mysterious midnight call from Rochester; she hurries
back to her master, to find him blinded and maimed by the fire which has
destroyed his house and his mad wife together; and of course the end is
happiness.

Now certainly there never was a plot, which pretended to be a plot, of
looser texture than that of 'Jane Eyre.' It abounds with absurdities and
inconsistencies. The critics of Charlotte Bront's time had no
difficulty in pointing them out; they lie, indeed, on the surface for
all to see. That such incidents should have happened to Jane Eyre in Mr.
Rochester's house as did happen, without awakening her suspicions; that
the existence of a lunatic should have been commonly known to all the
servants of the house, yet wholly concealed from the governess; that Mr.
Rochester should have been a man of honour and generosity, a man with
whom not only Jane Eyre, but clearly the writer herself, is in love, and
yet capable of deliberately betraying and deceiving a girl of twenty
placed in a singularly helpless position;--these are the fundamental
puzzles of the story. Mrs. Fairfax is a mystery throughout. How, knowing
what she did, did she not inevitably know more?--what was her real
relation to Rochester?--to Jane Eyre? These are questions that no one
can answer--out of the four corners of the book. The country-house party
is a tissue of extravagance throughout; the sarcasms and brutalities of
the beautiful Miss Ingram are no more credible than the manners assumed
by the aristocratic Rochester from the beginning towards his ward's
governess, or the amazing freedom with which he pours into the ears of
the same governess--a virtuous girl of twenty, who has been no more than
a few weeks under his roof--the story of his relations with Adele's
mother.

Turn to the early scenes, for instance, between Jane and Rochester. They
have been 'several days' under the same roof; it is Jane's second
interview with her employer. Mr. Rochester, in Sultan fashion, sends for
her and her pupil after dinner. He sits silent, while Jane's quick eye
takes note of him. Suddenly he turns upon her.


'You examine me, Miss Eyre,' said he; 'do you think me handsome?'


Jane, taken by surprise, delivers a stout negative, whereupon her
employer, in caprice or pique, pursues the subject further:


'--Criticise me: does my forehead not please you?'

He lifted up the sable waves of hair which lay horizontally over his
brow, and showed a solid enough mass of intellectual organs, but an
abrupt deficiency where the suave sign of benevolence should have risen.

'Now, ma'am, am I a fool?'


Poor Jane gets out of the dilemma as best she can, and gradually this
astonishing gentleman thaws, becomes conversational and kind. And this
is how he puts the little governess at her ease:--


'You look very much puzzled. Miss Eyre; and though you are not pretty,
any more than I am handsome, yet a puzzled air becomes you; besides, it
is convenient, for it keeps those searching eyes of yours away from my
physiognomy, and busies them with the worsted flowers of the rug; so
puzzle on. Young lady, I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative
to-night.'


_'Young lady, I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative
to-night!'_ Not even 'Mr. Rawchester' could exceed this. Parody has
nothing to add.

The country-house party is equally far from anything known, either to
realistic or romantic truth, even to the truth as it existed in the days
of 'Jane Eyre's' Quarterly Reviewer and the Cowan Bridge School. Listen
to the badinage of the beautiful and accomplished Miss Ingram. She is
making brutal fun of governesses, in order to be overheard by the shy
and shrinking Jane behind the window-curtain. Miss Ingram, it should be
remarked, has never seen Jane before, has no grievance against her, and
can only be supposed to be displaying the aristocratic temper as such.
It pleases her to describe a love affair that her childhood had
discovered between her own governess and her brother's tutor. She tells
how she and her precious brothers and sisters employed it--the love
affair--'as a sort of lever to hoist our dead-weights from the house.'


' . . . Dear mamma, there, as soon as she got an inkling of the
business, found out that it was of an immoral tendency. Did you not, my
lady-mother?'

'Certainly, my best. And I was quite right, depend on that; there are a
thousand reasons why liaisons between governesses and tutors should
never be tolerated a moment in any well-regulated house; firstly----'

'Oh, gracious, mamma! spare us the enumeration! _Au reste_, we all know
them: danger of bad example to the innocence of childhood--distractions
and consequent neglect of duty--on the part of the attached--mutual
alliance and reliance; confidence thence resulting--insolence
accompanying--mutiny and general blow-up. Am I right, Baroness Ingram,
of Ingram Park?'


_Baroness Ingram, of Ingram Park!_

But Miss Ingram can also show herself as the gay and sprightly trifler
with Rochester's well-bred homage.


'Whenever I marry,' she continued, after a pause which none interrupted,
'I am resolved that my husband shall not be a rival, but a foil. Mr.
Rochester, now sing, and I will play for you.'

'I am all obedience,' was the response.

'Here, then, is a Corsair-song. Know that I doat on Corsairs; and for
that reason sing it "con spirito."'

'Commands from Miss Ingram's lips would put spirit into a mug of milk
and water.'


And so on. The whole scene from beginning to end is a piece of heavy
grotesque, without either the truth or the fun of good satire. It was
these pages, of course, and certain others like them in the book, that
set George Henry Lewes preaching the 'mild eyes,' the 'truth,' and
'finish' of Miss Austen to the new and stormy genius which had produced
'Jane Eyre.' And one may see, perhaps, in Charlotte's soreness, in the
very vehemence that she shows under this particular criticism, that,
secretly, the shaft has gone home. She is, after all, infinitely shrewd,
sensitive, and, in the end, just. She wrote a petulant letter to Mr.
Lewes; but she sent for 'Pride and Prejudice,' which she had never read,
and the probability is that, in spite of a natural antipathy, her quick
eye took note at once of the fineness of stroke that goes to caricature
itself in that immortal book; that she pondered Mr. Collins and Lady
Catharine de Burgh; and that in the comparative ease and urbanity which
marked the painting of manners in 'Shirley,' the influence of her tilt
with Lewes counts for something.

As to the other weaknesses of plot and conception, they are very obvious
and very simple. The 'arrangements' by which Jane Eyre is led to find a
home in the Rivers household, and becomes at once her uncle's heiress,
and the good angel of her newly discovered cousins; the device of the
phantom voice that recalls her to Rochester's side; the fire that
destroys the mad wife, and delivers into Jane's hands a subdued and
helpless Rochester;--all these belong to that more mechanical and
external sort of plot-making, which the modern novelist of feeling and
passion--as distinguished from the novelist of adventure--prides himself
on renouncing. To him the painting of a situation like that, say, in
Benjamin Constant's 'Adolphe'--infinitely true, and wholly
insoluble--where the writer scorns to apply any coercive framework, any
rough-and-ready 'plot' to his material, is the admirable and important
thing. The true subject of 'Jane Eyre' is the courage with which a
friendless and loving girl confronts her own passion, and, in the
interest of some strange social instinct which she knows as 'duty,'
which she cannot explain and can only obey, tramples her love underfoot,
and goes out miserable into the world. Beside this wrestle of the human
will, everything else is trivial or vulgar. The various
expedients--legacies, uncles, fires, and coincidences--by which Jane
Eyre is ultimately brought to happiness, cheapen and degrade the book
without convincing the reader. In fact--to return to our _advocatus
diaboli_--'"Jane Eyre" is on the one side a rather poor novel of
incident, planned on the conventional pattern, and full of clumsy
execution; on another side it is a picture of passion and of ideas, for
which in truth the writer had no sufficient equipment; she moves
imprisoned, to quote Mr. Leslie Stephen, in "a narrow circle of
thoughts;" if you press it, the psychology of the book is really
childish; Rochester is absurd, Jane Eyre, in spite of the stir that she
makes, only half-realised and half-conscious. Still, as a study of
feeling, adapted to some extent to modern realist demands, the novel
came at a happy moment. It is one of the signs, no doubt, that mark the
transition from the old novel to the new, from the old novel of plot and
coincidence to the new novel of psychology and character. But, given the
defects of the book, how is it possible to assign it a high place in the
history of that great modern art which has commanded the knowledge of a
Tolstoy, and the mind of a Turgunieff, which is the subtle interpreter
and not the vulgar stage-manager of nature, which shrinks from the
merely obvious and vigorous, and is ever pressing forward toward that
more delicate, more complex, more elusive expression, satisfying in
proportion to its incompleteness, which is the highest response of human
genius to this unintelligible world?'



                                   II



So far the objector; yet, in spite of it all, 'Jane Eyre' persists, and
Charlotte Bront is with the immortals. What is it that a critic of this
type forgets--what item does he drop out of the reckoning which yet, in
the addition, decides the sum?

Simply, one might say, Charlotte Bront herself. Literature, says
Joubert, has been called the expression of society; and so no doubt it
is, looked at as a whole. In the single writer, however, it appears
rather as the expression of studies, or temper, or personality. 'And
this last is the best. There are books so fine that literature in them
is but the expression of those that write them.' In other words, there
are books where the writer seems to be everything, the material
employed, the environment, almost nothing. The main secret of the charm
that clings to Charlotte Bront's books is, and will always be, the
contact which they give us with her own fresh, indomitable, surprising
personality--surprising, above all. In spite of its conventionalities of
scheme, 'Jane Eyre' has, in detail, in conversation, in the painting of
character, that perpetual magic of the unexpected which overrides a
thousand faults, and keeps the mood of the reader happy and alert. The
expedients of the plot may irritate or chill the artistic sense; the
voice of the story-teller, in its inflections of passion, or feeling or
reverie, charms and holds the ear, almost from first to last. The
general plan may be commonplace, the ideas even of no great profundity;
but the book is original. How often in the early scenes of childhood or
school-life does one instinctively expect the conventional solution, the
conventional softening, the conventional prettiness or quaintness, that
so many other story-tellers, of undoubted talent, could not have
resisted! And it never comes. Hammer-like, the blows of a passionate
realism descend. Jane Eyre, the little helpless child, is "never
comforted; Mrs. Reid, the cruel aunt, is never sorry for her cruelties;
Bessie, the kind nurse, is not _very_ kind, she does not break the
impression, she satisfies no instinct of poetic compensation, she only
just makes the story credible, the reader's assent possible. So, at
Lowood, Helen Burns is not a suffering angel; there is nothing
consciously pretty or touching in the wonderful picture of her; reality,
with its discords, its infinite novelties, lends word and magic to the
passion of Charlotte's memory of her dead sister; all is varied, living,
poignant, full of the inexhaustible savour of truth, and warm with the
fire of the heart. So that at last, when pure pathos comes, when Helen
sleeps herself to death in Jane's arms, when the struggle is over, and
room is made for softness, for pity, the mind of the reader yields
itself wholly, without reserve, to the working of an artist so
masterful, so self-contained, so rightly frugal as to the great words
and great emotions of her art. We are in the presence of the same kind
of power as that which drew the death of Bazarov in 'Fathers and
Sons'--a power which, in the regions covered by the experience of the
mind behind it, 'nothing common does nor mean,' which shrinks from the
borrowed and the imitated and the insincere, as the patriot shrinks from
treason.

Personality then--strong, free, passionate personality--is the sole but
the sufficient spell of these books. Can we analyse some of its
elements?--so far, at least, as their literary expression is concerned?

In the first place, has it ever been sufficiently recognised that
Charlotte Bront is first and foremost an _Irishwoman_ that her genius
is at bottom a Celtic genius? When she first appeared at the Roehead
school in 1831, as a child of fourteen, it was noticed by the
schoolfellow to whom we owe so many early remembrances of her, that she
'spoke with a strong Irish accent.' Her father came from an Irish cabin
in County Down; her mother was of a Cornish family. The main
characteristics indeed of the Celt are all hers--disinterestedness,
melancholy, wildness, a wayward force and passion, for ever wooed by
sounds and sights to which other natures are insensible--by murmurs from
the earth, by colours in the sky, by tones and accents of the soul, that
speak to the Celtic sense as to no other. 'We shall never build the
Parthenon,' said Renan of his own Breton race; 'marble is not for us;
but we know how to grip the heart and the soul; we have an art of
piercing that belongs to us alone; we plunge our hands into the entrails
of man, and, like the witches of "Macbeth," we draw them back full of
the secrets of the infinite. The great marvel of our art is to know how
to make a charm out of the very disease that plagues us. A spring of
eternal madness rises in the heart of our race. The "realm of faery,"
the most beautiful on earth, is our domain.'--Idealism, understood as a
life-long discontent; passion, conceived as an inner thirst and longing
that wears and kills more often than it makes happy; a love of home and
kindred entwined with the very roots of life, so that home-sickness may
easily exhaust and threaten life; an art directed rather to expression
than to form--ragged often and broken, but always poignant, always
suggestive, touched with reverie and emotion; who does not recognize in
these qualities, these essentially Celtic qualities, the qualities of
the Bronts?

Take this passage from Charlotte's letter to Miss Nussey, announcing
Emily's death:


The anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of
death is gone by; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No
need now to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not
feel them. She died in a time of promise. We saw her taken from life in
its prime.


Or, again:


I cannot forget Emily's death-day.--It was very terrible. She was torn,
conscious, panting, reluctant, though resolute, out of a happy life.


Or, take the well-known outburst in 'Shirley,' where Charlotte, writing
in the desolate Haworth home after her sisters' deaths, turns from the
description of Jessy Yorke, to think of Martha Taylor, Jessy Yorke's
original, and of Martha's burial-day in Brussels:--


But, Jessy, I will write about you no more. This is an autumn evening,
wet and wild. There is only one cloud in the sky; but it curtains it
from pole to pole. The wind cannot rest; it hurries, sobbing, over hills
of sullen outline, colourless with twilight and mist. Rain has beat all
day on that church tower--


[--one thinks of her, lifting her eyes from her small writing, as she
looks down the bare strip of garden to Haworth Church--];


--it rises dark from the stony enclosure of its graveyard; the nettles,
the long grass, and the tombs all drip with wet. This evening reminds me
too forcibly of another evening some years ago: a howling, rainy, autumn
evening, too,--when certain who had that day performed a pilgrimage to a
grave new-made in a heretic cemetery, sat near a wood fire on the hearth
of a foreign dwelling. They were merry and social, but they each knew
that a gap, never to be filled, had been made in their circle. They knew
they had lost something whose absence could never be quite atoned for,
so long as they lived; and they knew that heavy falling rain was soaking
into the wet earth which covered their lost darling; and that the sad,
sighing gale was mourning above her buried head. The fire warmed them;
Life and Friendship yet blessed them: but Jessy lay cold, coffined,
solitary--only the sod screening her from the storm.


These passages surely have the Celtic quality, if ever writing had.
Rapid, yearning, broken speech!--there is no note more penetrating in
our literature.

Then, as to the Celtic pride, the Celtic shyness, the Celtic
endurance,--Charlotte Bront was rich in them all. Her nature loves to
give--recoils from gifts. She will owe nothing to anyone; she half
enjoys, half dislikes, the kindnesses even of her friendly and
considerate publisher; and in society she will neither be exhibited nor
patronised. Nor will she submit her judgment or taste; she will swear to
no man's words. Nothing is more curious than to mark the resolute, and
even haughty, independence with which the little countrywoman approached
for the first time the literary world and the celebrities of London. She
breaks her shy silence at a dinner-table crowded with Macready
worshippers to denounce Macready's acting; when Thackeray comes to see
her for the first time, she herself says, 'The giant sate before me; I
was moved to speak to him of some of his shortcomings (literary, of
course); one by one the faults came into my head, and one by one I
brought them out and sought some explanation or defence;'--so that Mr.
Smith, sitting by, may well describe it as 'a queer scene.' She will
have nothing to say to Miss Barrett's poetry; and when she returns to
Haworth, she says, with a touch of quiet and confident scorn, that
London people talk a great deal of writers and books who mean nothing in
the country, nothing to England at large. As to the shyness, it was the
torment of both her physical and mental life. The Celtic craving for
solitude, the Celtic shrinking from all active competitive
existence--they were part of Charlotte's inmost nature, although
perpetually crossed and checked, no doubt, by other influences driving
her to utterance, to production, to sustained effort. And for
endurance--did not her short life, divided between labour, fame, and
calamity, make, first and chief upon all who knew it, the impression of
an unshaken and indomitable spirit? The 'chainless soul' was hers no
less than Emily's, though she was far saner and sweeter than Emily.

And all three qualities--pride, shrinking, endurance--are writ large in
her books. With passion added, they _are_ Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe. They
supply the atmosphere, the peculiar note, of all the stories. A contempt
for mean and easy living, for common gains, and common luxuries,
breathes in them, and makes them harsh and bracing as the air of her own
moors.

And one other Celtic quality there is in Charlotte Bront and her books,
which is responsible perhaps for half their defects. It is a quality of
exuberance, of extravagance, of what her contemporaries called 'bad
taste.' Charles Kingsley threw 'Shirley' aside because the opening
seemed to him vulgar. Miss Martineau expressed much the same judgment on
'Villette.' And there can be no doubt that there was in Miss Bront a
curious vein of recklessness, roughness, one might also
say--_hoydenism_--that exists side by side with an exquisite delicacy
and a true dignity, and is none the less Irish and Celtic for that. It
disappears, so far as one can see, with the publication of 'Shirley;'
but, up till then, it has to be reckoned with. It is conspicuous in the
whole episode of 'the curates,' both in real life and in the pages of
'Shirley;' it is visible especially in certain recently published
letters to Miss Nussey, which one could wish had been left imprinted;
and it makes the one shadow of excuse for the inexcusable 'Quarterly'
article. There is one sentence in the first chapter of 'Shirley,' which
may serve both as an illustration of this defect, and as a landmark
pointing to certain radical differences of feeling that separate 1900
from 1850. It occurs in the course of an address to the reader, warning
him to expect neither sentiment, poetry, nor passion from the book
before him. 'Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard.
. . . It is not positively affirmed that you shall not have a taste of
the exciting, perhaps towards the middle and close of the meal, but it
is resolved that the first dish set upon the table shall be one that a
Catholic--_aye, even an Anglo-Catholic--might eat on Good Friday on
Passion Week: it shall be cold lentils and vinegar without oil; it shall
be unleavened bread with bitter herbs, and no roast lamb_.'

These lines that I have thrown into italics were written in 1850, five
years after Newman's secession, in the midst no doubt of a swelling tide
of Liberal reaction, destined, however, as we all know now, to interfere
very little with the spread and power of those deep undercurrents
setting from the Oxford Movement. The hasty arrogance, the failure in
feeling and right instinct, which the passage shows, mark the chief
limitation and weakness in the artist who wrote it. It is a weakness of
taste, a limitation, as Mr. Leslie Stephen would perhaps insist, of
thought and idea. Taken together with the country-house scenes in 'Jane
Eyre,' with some of the curate scenes in 'Shirley,' with various
passages of raw didactic and rather shrill preaching, this utterance,
and some others like it, suggest a lack of social intelligence, of a
wide outlook, of that sense, above all, for measure and urbanity which
belongs to other and more perfect art--like George Sand's--or to a more
exquisitely tempered instinct--like that of Burns. One returns to
Renan's explanation: 'We Celts shall never build a Parthenon; marble is
not for us.' Our art is uncertain and wavering; liable to many lapses
and false notes. But!--'we lay our grip on heart and soul, we bring up
from the depths of the human spirit the secrets of the infinite.'



                                  III



The Irish and Celtic element in Charlotte Bront, however, is not all.
Far from it. Crossing, controlling the wild impetuous temper of the
Irishwoman is an influence from another world, an influence of habit and
long association, breathed from Yorkshire, and the hard, frugal,
persistent North. One has but to climb her Haworth hills to feel it
flowing around one. Let it be in the winter, on some frosty white-rimed
day, when the tops of the moors are lost in the cold mist, while a dim
sun steals along their sides showing the great mills in the hollows, the
ice-fringed streams, the bare half-poisoned woods, the rows of stone
cottages, while the horse's hoofs ring sharp on the paving-stones of
this Haworth Street that mounts stern and steep, without a relenting
slope or zig-zag, heedless of the strained muscles of man or beast, from
the busy factories below to the towered church and the little parsonage
on the hill-top. The small stone houses mount with you on either hand,
low, ugly, solid, without a trace of colour or ornament, the decent yet
unlovely homes of a sturdy industrious race. The chimneys pour out their
smoke, the valley hums with life and toil. You stand at the top of the
hill and look around you. Manchester and the teeming Lancashire world
are behind you. Bradford and Leeds in front of you. You can see nothing
through the sun-lit fog, save the rolling forms of the moors bearing
their dim ever-growing burden of houses; but you know that you stand in
the heart of working England, the England that goes through its labour
and its play, its trade-unionism and its football, its weaving or its
coal-mining, with equal vigour and tenacity, with all the English love
of gain and the English thirst for success--watchful, jealous, thrifty,
absorbed in this very tangible earth, and the struggle to subdue it,
stained with many coarse and brutal things, scornful of the dreamer and
the talker, and yet, by virtue of its very strength of striving life,
its very excesses of rough force and will, holding in its deep breast
powers of passion and of drama unsuspected even by itself.

Amid this rude full-blooded keen-brained world grew up the four
wonderful children who had survived their fragile mother and their two
elder sisters. From the beginning they showed the Celtic qualities--the
Celtic vision that remakes the world, throws it into groups and
pictures, seen with a magical edge and sharpness. Are they gathered on a
winter's night round the kitchen fire with Tabby for a companion?
Charlotte--a mere child--_sees_ the little scene as a whole, as a poet
or a painter would see it, notes the winter storm and wind outside, the
glow within, the quick-witted children, the old servant, throws it all
into a fragment of vivid dialogue and writes it down--realised, on
record, for ever. Or a tramp, talking the language of religious mania,
comes to the door. Again Charlotte marks him, stamps him into words,
makes a permanent representative figure out of him, a figure of the
imagination. Yet all the time there are secret bonds between these four
small creatures--the children of an Irish father and a Cornish
mother--and the stern practical Yorkshire world about them. For they
come not from the typical and Catholic Ireland, but from the Ireland of
the North, on which commerce and Protestantism have set their grasp, the
Ireland which has half yielded itself to England. In the girls, at any
rate, the Bible and Puritanism have mingled with their Celtic blood.
Economy, self-discipline, constancy, self-repression, order,--these
things come easily to them, so far as the outer conduct of life is
concerned. They take their revenge in dreams,--in the whims and passions
of the imagination. But they cook and clean and sew, they learn all the
household arts that their aunt and Tabby can teach them. They are
docile, hard-working, hard-living. They are poor, saving, industrious,
keenly alive to the value of money and of work, like the world about
them.

And it is this mixture of Celtic dreaming with English realism and
self-control which gives value and originality to all they do--to
Emily's 'Wuthering Heights,' to Charlotte's four stories. Lady Caroline
Lamb, an Irishwoman like Charlotte, could tear you a passion to tatters,
in 'Glenarvon,' with a certain wild power. Take a passage at random:--


'Many can deceive,' said Glenarvon, mournfully gazing on Calantha whilst
she wept; 'but is your lover like the common herd? Oh! we have loved, my
gentle mistress, better than they know how; we have dared the utmost:
your mind and mine must not even be compared with theirs. Let the vulgar
dissemble and fear--let them talk idly in the unmeaning jargon they
admire; they never felt what we have felt; they never dared what we have
done: to win, and to betray, is with them an air--a fancy; and fit is
the delight for the beings who can enjoy it.--But if once I show myself
again, the rabble must shrink at last; they dare not stand before
Glenarvon. Heaven or hell, I care not which, have cast a ray so bright
around my brow that not all the perfidy of a heart as lost as mine, of a
heart loaded, as you know too well, with crimes man shudders even to
imagine--not all the envy and malice of those whom my contempt has stung
can lower me to their level. And you, Calantha, do you think you will
ever learn to hate me, even were I to leave and to betray you?--Poor
blighted flower--to thy last wretched hour thou wouldst pine in
unavailing recollection and regret; as Clytie, though bound and fettered
to the earth, still fixes her uplifted eyes upon her own sun, who passes
over regardless in his course, nor deigns to cast a look below!'


This was passion, masterful passion, as a woman, Byron's pupil,
conceived it, in 1816, the year of Charlotte Bront's birth. It is
instructive sometimes to look back at landmarks of this lesser kind.
There is vigour in these sentences, but compare their vague and mouthing
falsity with any conversation in 'Jane Eyre'--above all, with the
touches in the last scene between Jane and Rochester. Dwell on the
moment when Jane, carrying the tray, enters the blind man's presence;
notice how clear and true--with the clearness and truth of poetry--are
all the stages of recognition and of rapture--till Rochester says:


'Hitherto I have hated to be helped--to be led; henceforth, I feel I
shall hate it no more, I did not like to put my hand into a hireling's;
but it is pleasant to feel it circled by Jane's little fingers. I
preferred utter loneliness to the constant attendance of servants; but
Jane's soft ministry will be a perpetual joy. Jane suits me; do I suit
her?'

'To the finest fibre of my nature, sir.' . . . Reverently lifting his
hat from his brow, and bending his sightless eyes to the earth, he stood
in mute devotion. Only the last words of the worship were audible.

'I thank my Maker that in the midst of judgment He has remembered mercy.
I humbly entreat my Redeemer to give me strength to lead henceforth a
purer life than I have done hitherto.'

Then he stretched out his hand to be led. I took that dear hand, held it
a moment to my lips, then let it pass round my shoulder; being so much
lower of stature than he, I served both for his prop and guide. We
entered the wood and wended homeward.


What feeling, and what truth!--a truth all Charlotte's own, not Jane
Austen's nor another's--in which we may, if we will, detect the fusion
of two races, the mingling of two worlds.



                                   IV



As to the outer and material history of 'Jane Eyre,' it is written to
some extent in Mrs. Gaskell's 'Life,' and has employed the pens of many
a critic and local antiquary since. We all know that Lowood is Cowan
Bridge, that Helen Burns stands for Maria Bront, that 'Miss Temple' and
'Miss Scatcherd' were drawn from real people; we are told that
Thornfield Hall was suggested by one old Yorkshire house, and Ferndean
Manor by another; that St. John Rivers had an original: we may take for
granted that Charlotte's own experiences as a governess have passed into
the bitterness with which the rich and 'society' are described; and Mrs.
Gaskell has recorded that, according to Charlotte's own testimony, the
incident of the midnight voice heard by Rochester and Jane was 'true'
and 'really happened.'

Such identifications and researches will always have their interest,
though the artist never sees as the critic sees, and is often filled
with a secret amazement when he or she is led back to the scene or the
person which is supposed to have furnished--which did indeed
furnish--the germ, and the clay. The student will collect these details;
the reader will do well not to pay too much attention to them. The
literary affiliations and connections of the book would be far more
important and significant if one could trace them. But they are not easy
to trace.

If one gathers together the information to be gleaned from Mrs.
Gaskell's 'Life' and elsewhere, as to Charlotte's book education--that
voracious and continuous reading to which we have many references, one
may arrive at a general outline, something of this kind.--There were no
children's books in Haworth Parsonage. The children there were nourished
upon the food of their elders: the Bible, Shakspeare, Addison, Johnson,
Sheridan, Cowper, for the past; Scott, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, 'Blackwood's Magazine,' 'Fraser's Magazine,' and Leigh Hunt
for the moderns; on a constant supply of newspapers, Whig and
Tory--Charlotte once said to a friend that she had taken an interest in
politics since she was five years old--on current biographies, such as
Lockhart's Life of Burns, Moore's Lives of Byron and Sheridan, Southey's
'Nelson,' Wolfe's 'Remains;' and on miscellaneous readings of old
Methodist magazines containing visions and miraculous conversions, Mrs.
Rowe's 'Letters from the Dead to the Living,' the 'British Essayists,'
collected from the 'Rambler,' the 'Mirror,' and elsewhere, and stories
from the 'Lady's Magazine.' They breathed, therefore, as far as books
were concerned a bracing and stimulating air from the beginning. Nothing
was softened or adapted for them. Before little Maria, the eldest girl,
died, at the age of eleven, her father could discuss with her any
current topic in which he himself was interested, as though she were
grown-up and his equal.

The Duke of Wellington was their nursery-hero, and Charlotte, a child of
twelve, recorded at the time the emotions with which the news of
Catholic Emancipation was received at Haworth Parsonage, and spent her
leisure time at school, when she was fifteen, in fighting a Radical
schoolfellow on behalf of the Duke and against Reform.

Thus strongly were the foundations laid, deep in the rich main soil of
English life and letters. The force and freedom with which these lonely
girls wrote and thought from the beginning they owed largely to this
first training. Later on, both in Charlotte and in Emily, certain
foreign influences come in. Just as Emily certainly owed something to
Hofmann's Tales, so Charlotte probably owed much--more, I am inclined to
believe, than has yet been recognised--to the books of French
Romanticism, that great movement starting from Chateaubriand at the
beginning of the century, and already at its height before 'Jane Eyre'
was written. There are one or two pieces of evidence that bear on this
point. In 1840, before the visit to Brussels, Charlotte writes that she
has received 'another bale of French books from G----'--apparently from
the Taylors--'containing upwards of forty volumes. They are like the
rest, clever, wicked, sophistical and immoral. The best of it is, that
they give one a thorough idea of France and Paris.' If these were
contemporary books, as, from the last sentence, one might suppose they
were, it is worth while to inquire what writers were probably among
them. By 1840 Victor Hugo had written 'Marion Delorme,' 'Hernani,' 'Le
Roi s'amuse,' 'Ruy Bias,' six volumes of poems, 'Notre Dame de Paris,'
and much else. Alfred de Musset, who was thirty in 1840, had done all
his work of importance, and sunk into premature exhaustion; 'Premires
Posies,' 'Rolla,' 'Confession d'un Enfant du Sicle,' 'Espoir en
Dieu'--were they in the packet that reached Charlotte in 1840? George
Sand, making her first great success with 'Indiana' in 1832, had
produced 'Valentine,' 'Llia,' 'Jacques,' 'Lone Leoni,' 'Andr,'
'Mauprat,' and some others. Balzac, herald of another age and another
world, had been ten years at work on the 'Comdie Humaine.' We know,
however, from a letter of Charlotte's in 1848, that she never read a
novel of Balzac's till after the publication of 'Jane Eyre.'

But she did read George Sand, as the same letter informs us, and the
influence of that great romantic artist in whom restless imagination
went hand in hand with a fine and chosen realism, was probably of some
true importance in the development of Charlotte Bront's genius. During
her two years in Brussels, under the teaching of M. Hger--who gave her
passages from Victor Hugo to study as models of style, and was himself a
keen reader, critic, and lecturer--there can be little question that she
made wide acquaintance with the French books of the day, and it was the
day of Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset and George Sand. It has not yet, I
think, been pointed out that there is in 'Jacques'--a novel written in
1834--a very curious anticipation of the cry of Rochester to Jane. The
passage occurs in a letter from Sylvia, the sisterly friend, to Jacques,
about to become the husband of Fernande:--


Mon me est habitue  vivre seule, Dieu le veut ainsi; que vient faire
la tienne dans ma solitude? Viens-tu m'avertir de quelque danger, ou
m'annoncer quelque malheur plus pouvantable que tous ceux auxquels a
suffi mon courage? L'autre soir j'tais assise au pied de la montagne;
le ciel tait voil, et le vent gmissait dans les arbres; j'ai entendu
distinctement, au milieu de ces sons d'une triste harmonie, le son de ta
voix. Elle a jet trois ou quatre notes dans l'espace, faibles, mais si
pures et si saisissables que j'ai t voir les buissons d'o elle tait
partie pour m'assurer que tu n'y tais pas. Ces choses-l m'ont rarement
trompe; Jacques, il faut qu'il y ait un orage sur nos ttes.


The suggestion, the romantic suggestion of these sentences may very
possibly have come in Charlotte Bront's way, may have mingled with,
perhaps given birth to, some later fancy or experience, of which she
spoke to Mrs. Gaskell, and so found shape ultimately in the thrilling
scene of 'Jane Eyre.' Of direct imitation of George Sand there is
nowhere any trace; but in certain parts of 'Shirley,' in the 'Marriage
of Genius and Humanity,' for instance, the stimulating influence of
certain famous passages in 'Llia' suggests itself readily; and
throughout 'Villette' there is constantly something in her mode of
approaching her subject, even in the turn of the sentences, especially
in the use of participles, which is French rather than English. All the
books testify to her pride in her French culture. She had won it at
great cost; it had opened fresh worlds to her, and she makes free use of
it in numerous scenes of 'Shirley' and 'Villette,' and in the whole
portraiture of the Moores.

The differences, of course, between her and the author of 'Jacques' are
great and fundamental. Charlotte Bront's main _stuff_ is English,
Protestant, law-respecting, conventional even. No judgment was ever more
foolish than that which detected a social rebel in the writer of 'Jane
Eyre.' She thought the French books, as we have seen, 'clever, wicked,
sophistical, and immoral.' But she read them; and for all her revolt
from them, they quickened and fertilised her genius. More than this. The
influence which she absorbed from them has given her a special place in
our literature of imagination. She stands between Jane Austen, the
gentle and witty successor of Miss Barney and Richardson, and George
Eliot, upon whom played influences of quite another kind--German,
critical, scientific--representing the world which succeeded the world
of 'Hernani.' Midway appears the work of Charlotte Bront, linked in
various significant ways with the French romantic movement, which began
with 'Atala' in 1801, and had run its course abroad before 1847, the
year of 'Jane Eyre.' One may almost say of it, indeed, that it belongs
more to the European than to the special English tradition. For all its
strongly marked national and provincial elements, it was very early
understood and praised in France; and it was of a French critic, and a
French critic only, that Charlotte Bront said with gratitude, in the
case of Shirley, 'he follows Currer Bell through every winding, discerns
every point, discriminates every shade, proves himself master of the
subject, and lord of the aim.'



                              Introduction
                                   to
                                Shirley



                                   I



'Shirley' was published in the autumn of 1849, two years after the
appearance of 'Jane Eyre.' No book was ever written under more pathetic,
more torturing conditions. It was begun very soon after the publication
of 'Jane Eyre,' amid the first rushings of the blast of fame; it was
continued all through those miserable and humiliating months of 1848,
when the presence of Branwell at the parsonage was a perpetual shadow on
his sisters' lives, when they never knew what a day might bring forth
and would lie trembling and wakeful at night, listening for sounds from
their father's room where Branwell slept--Branwell who had often
threatened them in the delirium of an opium-eater and a drunkard that
either his father or he would be dead by the morning.

'Wuthering Heights' and 'Agnes Grey' had appeared in December 1847, a
few weeks after 'Jane Eyre.' During 1848 they seem to have been
generally regarded as earlier efforts from the pen of the writer of
'Jane Eyre'; and it was this misconception, in fact, which led to the
first hurried visit of Charlotte and Anne to London in July, when
Charlotte put into the hands of her astonished publisher the letter from
himself, addressed to Currer Bell, which had reached Haworth Parsonage
the day before, and so, nine months after its publication, disclosed the
secret of 'Jane Eyre.'

In these first interviews with her publisher--thenceforward her friend
also--she was able to tell him that 'Shirley,' her second story, was
well advanced. The second volume, indeed, was nearly finished by
September, when Branwell died. The end of the year, or the beginning of
the next, should have seen its publication. The poor sisters may well
have hoped, now that Branwell's vices and sufferings distracted them no
more, to pass into quieter and happier hours, hours of home peace and
fruitful work.

Alas! one needs only to put down the bare dates and facts of the six
months that followed, to realise the havoc that they made at once in
Charlotte's heart, and in the history of English genius. Emily, the
strong, indomitable Emily--who had borne with Branwell throughout more
patiently, more indulgently than the other two--developed tuberculosis,
the family scourge, at the very moment of Branwell's last struggle, and
she left the house only once after his death. The tragic, the unbearable
story of those three months, during which Emily fought with death and
would let no one help her, has been often told. The memory of them
haunts any visitor to the little parsonage to-day. As one mounts the
stone staircase, with one's hand on the old rail, suddenly ghosts are
there. Emily mounts before one, clinging to the rail, dragging her
wasted frame from step to step. The laboured breath sounds once more
through the small, quiet house, and the sisters in the dining-room below
turn to each other in misery as they hear it. For it is Emily's spirit
that still holds the parsonage; amid all the memories of the
house--hers, fierce, passionate, inscrutable--is still pre-eminent. For
she is the mystery. The others 'abide our question.' We can know
Charlotte and understand poor Anne; we shall never either know or
understand Emily.

For three months she battled for her life, in her own cruel way. The
sisters, who saw her perishing, were helpless. She would accept nothing
at their hands, and when the last whisper came--'If you send for a
doctor I will see him now'--it was too late. The suffering of the elder
sister has left many piteous traces in her letters, and in 'Shirley'
itself. 'Moments so dark as these I have never known,'--she writes on
the very morning of Emily's death--'I think Emily seems the nearest
thing to my heart in the world.' And when Emily is gone, and Anne also
has set her feet upon the road that leads to the last shadow,
Charlotte's poor heart is crushed between longing for the dead and fear
for the living. She talks in March 1849--three months after Emily's
death, two months before Anne's--of the 'intense attachment' with which
'our hearts clung to Emily,' and then she adds: 'she was scarce buried
when Anne's health failed--her decline is gradual and fluctuating, but
its nature is not doubtful.' Yet in these spring days, between the two
deaths, she has taken up her pen again. And she is cheered by the praise
given to the early volumes of 'Shirley' by Mr. Smith and Mr. Williams.
'Oh! if Anne were well,' she cries, 'if the void death has left were a
little closed up, if the dreary word _nevermore_ would cease sounding in
my ears, I think I could yet do something.'

But May comes, and Charlotte takes Anne to Scarborough, thinks no more
of her book--hangs day by day, and hour by hour, on the last looks and
words of this gentle creature, this ardent Christian, who yet is of the
indomitable Bront clay like the rest of them, and leaves behind her no
record of soft and pious imaginings, but a warning tale of drunkenness
and profligacy, steadily carried out through all its bitter truth. By
the end of May, Anne is in her grave, and Charlotte stays on a while by
the sea, waiting for the mere passage of the days that may give her
strength to go home and take up her work again.

By the beginning of July, however, she had returned to Haworth. She
writes to her friend in words that paint the very heart of grief:

'All received me with an affection that should have consoled. The dogs
were in strange ecstasy. I am certain they regarded me as the harbinger
of others. The dumb creatures thought that as I was returned, those who
had been so long absent were not far behind.

'I left papa soon, and went into the dining-room: I shut the door--I
tried to be glad that I was come home. . . But . . . I felt that the
house was all silent--the rooms were all empty. I remembered where the
three were laid--in what narrow dark dwellings--never more to reappear
on earth. . . . The agony that _was to be undergone_ and was not to be
avoided, came on. I underwent it, and passed a dreary evening and night,
and a mournful morrow. To-day I am better.'

During the weeks that followed she resolutely set herself to finish
'Shirley,' and some months later she bears passionate testimony to the
supporting, stimulating power of her great gift. 'The faculty of
imagination' she says to Mr. Williams, 'lifted me when I was sinking,
three months ago (_i.e._ immediately after the death of Anne); its
active exercise has kept my head above water since.'

It was at the 24th chapter of her story that she began again; it was
with the description of Caroline's wrestle with death, Caroline's
discovery of her mother, Caroline's rescue from the destroyer at the
hands of Tenderness and Hope, that the poor forsaken sister filled her
first lonely hours, cheating her grief by dreams, by 'making out,' as
she had often consoled the physical and moral trouble of her girlhood,
Mrs. Pryor's agony of nursing and of dread is Charlotte's.


Not always do those who dare such divine conflict prevail. Night after
night the sweat of agony may burst dark on the forehead; the supplicant
may cry for mercy with that soundless voice the soul utters when its
appeal is to the Invisible. 'Spare my beloved,' it may implore. 'Heal my
life's life. Rend not from me what long affection entwines with my whole
nature. God of heaven--bend--hear--be clement!' And after this cry and
strife, the sun may rise and see him worsted. That opening morn which
used to salute him with the whisper of zephyrs, the carol of skylarks,
may breathe as its first accents, from the dear lips which colour and
heat have quitted--'Oh! I have had a suffering night. This morning I am
worse. I have tried to rise. I cannot. Dreams I am unused to have
troubled me.'

Then the watcher approaches the patient's pillow, and sees a new and
strange moulding of the familiar features, feels at once that the
insufferable moment draws nigh, knows that it is God's will his idol
shall be broken, and bends his head, and subdues his soul to the
sentence he cannot avert, and scarce can bear.

Happy Mrs. Pryor! She was still praying, unconscious that the summer sun
hung above the hills, when her child softly woke in her arms. No piteous
unconscious moaning--sound which so wastes our strength that, even if we
have sworn to be firm, a rush of unconquerable fears sweeps away the
oath,--preceded her waking. No space of deaf apathy followed. The first
words spoken were not those of one becoming estranged from this world,
and already permitted to stray at times into realms foreign to the
living. Caroline evidently remembered with clearness what had happened.


Thus did poor Charlotte, dreaming alone, make use of her own pain for
the imagining of joy; thus, sitting in her 'lonely room--the clock
ticking loud in a still house,' did she comfort her own desolation by
this exquisite and tender picture of mother and daughter reunited, made
known to each other, after years of separation and under the shadow of
death. Caroline Helstone shall not be left in darkness and forlorn!
Charlotte will bring her to the light--place her in loving shelter.


Mrs. Pryor held Caroline to her bosom; she cradled her in her arms; she
rocked her softly, as if lulling a young child to sleep.

'My mother! My own mother!' The offspring nestled to the parent: that
parent, feeling the endearment and hearing the appeal, gathered her
closer still. She covered her with noiseless kisses: she murmured love
over her, like a cushat fostering its young.


Then from the ecstasy of mother and child, the 'maker' passed on to the
love-story of Shirley and Louis Moore--Shirley who stood in Charlotte's
mind, as she herself tells us, for Emily. Emily lay under the floor of
the old church, a stone's throw from Charlotte, as she wrote; and
Charlotte, looking up at each passing sound, would be clutched anew,
hour after hour, by the thought of Emily's pain, Emily's death-anguish,
the waste of Emily's genius. But as the small writing covered the
advancing page, Emily lived again--grown rich, beautiful, happy. Her
dog, old Tartar, rambled beside her; the glow of health is on her cheek;
she has a lover, and a wedding-dress; length of days and of joy--both
are secured to her. One may say what one will of these last chapters of
'Shirley.' Louis Moore is no favourite with any reader of the Bronts;
his courting of Shirley has nothing to do with the realities either of
love or of the male human being; his very creation involves a certain
dulling and weakening of Charlotte's faculty--a certain morbidness also.
But those who recall the circumstances of 'Shirley's' composition will
for ever forgive him; they will remember how tired and trembling was the
hand that drew him; how he stood in Charlotte's sad fancy for protecting
strength, and passionate homage, for all that Emily would never know,
and all that the woman in Charlotte, at that desolate moment of her
life, most yearned to know.



                                   II



There can be no question, however, that 'Shirley,' from a literary point
of view, suffered seriously from the tension and distraction of mind
amid which it was composed. It was neither the unity, the agreeable
old-fashioned unity of 'Jane Eyre,' nor, as a whole, the passionate
truth of 'Villette.' In the very centre of the book, the story suddenly
gives way. The love-story of Robert and Caroline has somehow to be
delayed; and one divines that the writer--for whom life has temporarily
made impossible that fiery concentration of soul, in which a year or two
later she wrote 'Villette'--hesitates as to the love-story of Shirley
and Louis. She does not see her way; she gropes a little; and that angel
of imagination, to which she pays so many a glowing tribute in the
course of her work, seems to droop its wing beside her, and move
listlessly through two or three chapters, which do little more than mark
time till the divine breath returns. These are the chapters headed
'Shirley seeks to be saved by works,' 'Whitsuntide,' 'The School Feast.'
They are really scene-shifting chapters while the new act is preparing;
and the interval is long and the machinery a little clumsy. 'Villette'
also passes from one motive to another, from Lucy's first love for
Graham Bretton, to her second love for Paul Emanuel. But in 'Villette'
the transition is made with admirable swiftness. As Graham Bretton
recedes, _parri passu_, Paul Emanuel advances. The two themes are
interwoven; the book never ceases to be an organism; there is no
faltering in the writer, no uncertainty in the touch. Invention full and
warm flows through it in a never slackening tide; there are few or none
of the cold and superfluous passages that disfigure the middle region of
'Shirley.'

Signs of the same momentary failure in the artist's fusing and vivifying
power are numerous also in the style of 'Shirley,' as compared with the
style of 'Villette.' Commonplaces writ large; a tendency to produce
pages of 'copy,' pages that any 'descriptive reporter' could do as well;
an Extravagance which is not power, but rather a kind of womanish
violence; and a humour also that sometimes leaves the scene on which it
is turned colder and more laboured than it found it--these are some of
the faults that attach especially to the central scenes of 'Shirley,' to
the many pages devoted to Shirley's charitable plans, to the
school-treat, to the curates, to the old maids. Take these sentences,
for instance, from the account of Miss Ainley: 'Sincerity is never
ludicrous; it is always respectable. Whether truth--be it religious or
moral truth--speak eloquently and in well-chosen language or not, its
voice should be heard with reverence. Let those who cannot nicely, and
with certainty, discern the difference between those of hypocrisy and
those of sincerity, never presume to laugh at all, lest they should have
the miserable misfortune to laugh in the wrong place and commit impiety
when they think they are achieving wit.'

A great creative artist, an artist capable of writing a 'Villette' does
not drop into surplusage of this kind, unless there is some sterilising
and hostile influence overshadowing her. In her happy hour she will fall
upon sentences like this and sweep them from the page, or rather she
will never conceive them. Humble truth, modest piety, the scorner to be
scorned--no need then to talk or prate about them. She sees them in act
as they live, and move, and walk; and she records the vision--not any
personal opinion about them.



                                  III



Nevertheless, it may be argued, and with truth, that even these slacker
and more diffuse chapters of the story have a real and abiding interest
for the student of English manners--that this clerical, middle-class,
country life was intimately known to Charlotte Bront, and that the
portraits of Mr. Helstone, Cyril Hall, the Curates, and the rest, have
at least an historical interest. And indeed the _matter_, the subject,
is rich enough; it is the matter of Jane Austen, of 'Middlemarch,' and
the 'Scenes from Clerical Life,' of Trollope and Mrs. Gaskell, of half
the eminent and most of the readable novels of English life. Charlotte
Bront presents it with force and knowledge, often with bursts of poetic
or satiric observation, but without either the humour or the charm that
other English hands have been able to give it. This country and clerical
life, though as a human being she was part of it, was not _her_ subject
in literature; let anyone compare the relative failure of 'Shirley' with
the unwavering power and mastery of 'Villette.' It was in the play of
personal passion, set amid the foreign scenes of 'Villette'--scenes that
stirred her curiosity, her wrath, her fancy, as novelty and change must
always stir the poetic, as distinguished from the critical or humorous
genius, that Charlotte at last found her best, her crowning opportunity.

The men, for instance, of 'Shirley,' on their first appearance roused a
protest among readers and reviewers that can only be repeated now. Among
them Mr. Helstone makes, on the whole, the best impression. Miss Bront
drew him from experience, or at least from a germ of reality sufficient
to give life and persuasiveness to the creation that sprang from it. Mr.
Robertson, of Heald's Hall, the indomitable fighting parson of the
thirties, who was the original of Helstone, little knew to whom he was
preaching, when at the consecration of a church near Haworth in 1826 he
numbered among his hearers a child of ten years old, small, sharp-faced,
with bright dreamy eyes. 'I never saw him but that once,' Miss Bront
said later to Mr. Williams. But he was known to her father; his
character and exploits made an impression in her neighbourhood; she
heard much of him, and probably his truculent Tory virtues raised him to
hero-height in the fancy of an infant worshipper of Wellington and hater
of Lord Grey. This was not much foundation, but it was enough. Helstone
has life and truth; his hardness or violence, his courtesies and his
scorns, his rare tendernesses, his unconquerable reserves, his smaller
habits and gestures are finely studied, finely rendered. But he
alone--and Martin Yorke--have any convincing veracious quality among the
men of the book. Mr. Yorke also was studied from life, but the writer
has reproduced only the incongruities and oddities of the character, not
the unity of the man. Robert Moore is ingeniously imagined and often
interesting. But at the critical moment of the book the cloud of sorrow
and bewilderment that descended on the mind of the writer, dulling nerve
and vision, blurs him also, so that he seems to dissolve and break up,
to be no longer a man and an entity.

And Louis Moore! When her friendly critics in Cornhill, Mr. Williams and
Mr. Taylor, sent her during the progress of the book--which they were
allowed to see in manuscript--some 'complaints' of her heroes, Charlotte
answered in much depression, that her critics were probably justified.
'When I write about women I am sure of my ground--in the other case I am
not so sure.' And once or twice, in meeting criticisms on 'Jane Eyre' or
'Shirley,' she says with perfect frankness that it may all be very true.
She has seen too little of society; known too little of men. Yet all the
time she had within her that store of passionate and complete
observation, whence, later on, Paul Emanuel was to rise and have his
being. And she was by no means meek in her general estimate of the power
of women to describe and penetrate men in fiction. There is a passage in
'Shirley' where Miss Keeldar, after pouring scorn on some of the
well-known heroines of men's novels, maintains, with warmth, that in
fiction women read men more truly than men are able to read women: and
one hears through her animated talk the voice of Charlotte herself.

That Charlotte Bront, under adequate stimulus, could draw a living man
with truth, humour and variety, Paul Emanuel is there to testify. No
single atom of true experience was ever lost upon her genius. But her
shyness and silence allowed her too little of this experience, and in
the pure play of imagination she was inferior, in dealing with
character, to her sister Emily. Emily knew less of men personally than
Charlotte. But she had no illusions about them, and Charlotte had many.
Emily is the true creator, using the most limited material in the
puissant, detached impersonal way that belongs only to the highest
gifts--the way of Shakespeare. Charlotte is often parochial, womanish,
and morbid in her imagination of men and their relation to women; Emily
who has known two men only, her father and her brother, and derives all
other knowledge of the sex from books, from Tabby's talk in the kitchen,
from the forms and features she passes in the village street, or on the
moors--Emily can create a Heathcliff, a Hareton Earnshaw, a Joseph, an
Edgar Linton, with equal force, passion, and indifference. All of them
up to a certain point, owing to the fact that she knows nothing of
certain ground-truths of life, are equally false; but beyond that point
all have the same magnificent, careless truth of imagination. She never
bowed before her creatures, in a sort of personal subjection to them, as
Charlotte did.

Again, nothing is more curious than to compare Charlotte Bront's
conceptions of Rochester and the two Moores, her painting of the
relations between these heroes and the women of the piece, with the
ideas and conceptions of George Sand in almost all her earlier stories.
To Jane Eyre, Rochester is 'my master' from first to last; Louis Moore
is the tutor and the tyrant even in love-making; Paul Emanuel, for all
his foibles and tempers that make him so welcome and so real, is still
in relation to the woman he loves, the captor, the teacher, the
breaker-in. And there is plenty of evidence in Miss Bront's letters,
and in what is known of her married life, to show that this, in fact,
was her own personal ideal. She had battled with the world, and she
dreamed of rest; she had been forced to exercise her own will with so
strong and unceasing an effort, that the thought of dropping the tension
for ever, of handing all judgment, all choice, over to another's will,
became delight; and, last and most important, what she did not know she
glorified. But George Sand, alas! knew too much, and knew too well. No
schoolroom imaginations are possible to her. The men she creates are
handled with a large indulgence, half maternal, half poetic, that may
turn to irony or to reproach, never to the mere woman's self-surrender.
In general, as M. Faguet says, 'elle aime les types de femmes nergiques
et d'hommes faibles,' and this preference is the unconscious reflection
of her own personal history. In her various love affairs she had always
found herself in the end the better man; she had shaken herself free
from fettering claims because the artist in her was much stronger than
the woman, and the man of the present, seen in his actuality, had come
to seem to her but a poor creature. She dreamed of a man of the future,
and a marriage of the future. Meanwhile, the men she imagines and
describes in so large a number of her novels, the relations she draws
between them and the women they love, betray her own secret
consciousness of power and ascendency. Hence Llia and Stenio, Edm and
Mauprat, Andr, Simon, and many more.

The personal contrast, indeed, between the two writers, the two women,
can hardly be conceived too sharply. We shall realise it a little,
perhaps, if we try to imagine George Sand, after her early successes,
and in the first glow of fame, marrying a country curate, without a
tinge of letters, who encouraged his wife to give up the practice of
novel-writing, and in return 'often found a little work for her to do'
in his study or the parish; if we endeavour to think of her as
submitting without a murmur, and finding in the quiet happiness of the
simplest domestic life reward enough for the suppression of her gift and
the taming of her soul.



                                   IV



On the other hand--in compensation--could George Sand have imagined or
drawn a Caroline Helstone? In all her work, did she ever penetrate as
close to the 'very pulse of the machine' as Charlotte Bront has done in
this picture of Caroline? I think not. For delicacy, poetry, divination,
charm, Caroline stands supreme among the women of Miss Bront's gallery.
She is as true as Lucy Snowe, but infinitely more delightful; she has
the same flower-like purity and fragrance as Frances in the 'Professor,'
but she is more tangible, more varied; she can love with the same
intensity as 'Jane Eyre,' but to intensity she adds an therial and
tender grace that Jane must do without. The exquisite quality in her she
shares indeed with Paulina in 'Villette'; but Paulina is a mere sketch
compared to her. From the moment when in her 'soft bloom' she first
enters the Moores' sitting-room, to the final scene when Robert
graciously rewards her faith and affection with a heart far below her
deserts, she is all woman and all love. It is conceivable that _she_,
being what she is, should have felt no jealousy of Shirley; that she
should have drooped without complaining; that she should have preferred
rather to die than hate; to slip out of the struggle rather than make a
selfish claim. Yet she is no mere bundle of virtues; hers is no insipid
or eclectic goodness like that of Thackeray's Lauras and Amelias. What
fortitude and courage even in her despair--what tenderness in her
relation to her new-found mother--what daring in the dove, when the
heart and its rights are to be upheld!


'Love a crime! No, Shirley: love is a divine virtue--obtrusiveness is a
crime; forwardness is a crime; and both disgust: but love!--no purest
angel need blush to love! And when I see or hear either man or woman
couple shame with love, I know their minds are coarse, their
associations debased. . . .'

'You sacrifice three-fourths of the world, Caroline.'

'They are cold--they are cowardly--they are stupid, on the subject,
Shirley! They never loved--they never were loved!'

'Thou art right, Lina! And in their dense ignorance they blaspheme
living fire, seraph-brought from a divine altar.'

'They confound it with sparks mounting from Tophet!'


Shirley Keeldar, too, is full of charm, though, as a conception, she has
hardly the roundness, the full and delicate truth of Caroline. But the
two complete each other, and Charlotte Bront has expressed in the
picture of Shirley that wilder and more romantic element of her own
being, which found a little later far richer and stronger utterance in
'Villette.' Caroline, Shirley, Mrs. Pryor--delicacy, wildness, family
affection--these indeed are the three aspects of Charlotte's
personality, Charlotte's genius. So that they are children of her own
heart's blood, spirits born of her own essence, and warm with her own
life.



                                   V



Thus again we return once more to the central claim, the redeeming spell
of all Charlotte Bront's work--which lies, not so much in the thing
written, to speak in paradoxes, as in the temper and heart of the
writer. If 'Shirley,' wherever the women of the story are chiefly
concerned, is richer even than 'Jane Eyre' in poetry and unexpectedness,
in a sort of fresh and sparkling charm like that of a moor in sunshine,
it is because Charlotte Bront herself has grown and mellowed in the
interval; because she has thought more, felt more, trembled still more
deeply under the pain and beauty of the world. Untoward circumstance
indeed makes 'Shirley' less than a masterpiece, distracts the thinking
brain and patient hand, is the parent here and there of blurs and
inequalities. But this is, so to speak, an accident. Grief and weariness
of spirit dim the clear eyes, or mar the utterance of the story-teller
from time to time. But the steady growth of genius is there all the
same. 'Shirley' is not so good a story, not so remarkable an achievement
as 'Jane Eyre,' but it contains none the less the promise and potency of
higher things than 'Jane Eyre'--of the brilliant, the imperishable
'Villette.'



                              Introduction
                                   to
                                Villette



                                   I



During the year which followed the publication of 'Shirley,' Charlotte
Bront seems to have been content to rest from literary labour--save for
the touching and remarkable Preface that she contributed in the autumn
of the year to the reprint of 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Agnes
Grey,'--which had been happily rescued from Mr. Newby and were safe in
Mr. Smith's hands. We hear nothing of any new projects. After the great
success of 'Shirley' and 'Jane Eyre,' indeed, she turned back to think
of the still unprinted manuscript of 'The Professor,' and to plans of
how work already done might be turned to account, now that the public
knew her and the way was smoothed. Towards the end of 1850, or in the
first days of 1851, she wrote a fresh preface to 'The Professor,' and
suggested to her publishers that they should at last venture upon its
publication. They did not apparently refuse; but they advised her
against the project; and as Mr. Nicholls says in a note which he added
to his wife's Preface, on the publication of the 'Professor' after her
death, she then 'made use of the materials in a subsequent
work--"Villette."' There is an interesting and, for the most part,
unpublished letter to Mr. George Smith, still in existence, which throws
light upon this disappointment of hers--a disappointment which to us is
pure gain, since it produced 'Villette.' In spite of her gaiety of tone,
it is evident that she is sensitive in the matter, and a little
wounded--


Mr. Williams will have told you (she writes to Mr. Smith) that I have
yielded with ignoble facility in the matter of 'The Professor.' Still it
may be proper to make some attempt towards dignifying that act of
submission by averring that it was done 'under protest.'

'The Professor' has now had the honour of being rejected nine times by
the 'Tr--de.' (Three rejections go to your own share; you may affirm
that you accepted it this last time, but that cannot be admitted; if it
were only for the sake of symmetry and effect, I must regard this
martyrized MS. as repulsed or at any rate withdrawn for the ninth time!)
Few--I flatter myself--have earned an equal distinction, and of course
my feelings towards it can only be paralleled by those of a doting
parent towards an idiot child. Its merits--I plainly perceive--will
never be owned by anybody but Mr. Williams and me; very particular and
unique must be our penetration, and I think highly of us both
accordingly. You may allege that merit is not visible to the naked eye.
Granted; but the smaller the commodity--the more inestimable its value.

You kindly propose to take 'The Professor' into custody. Ah--no! His
modest merit shrinks at the thought of going alone and unbefriended to a
spirited publisher. Perhaps with slips of him you might light an
occasional cigar--or you might remember to lose him some day--and a
Cornhill functionary would gather him up and consign him to the
repositories of waste paper, and thus he would prematurely find his way
to the 'butterman' and trunkmakers. No--I have put him by and locked him
up--not indeed in my desk, where I could not tolerate the monotony of
his demure quaker countenance, but in a cupboard by himself.


In the same letter, she goes on to say--the passage has been already
quoted by Mrs. Gaskell--that she must accept no tempting invitations to
London, till she has 'written a book.' She deserves no treat, having
done no work.

Early in 1851 then, having 'locked up' 'The Professor' as finally done
with and set aside, Miss Bront fell back once more on the _material_ of
the earlier book, holding herself free to use it again in a different
and a better way. With all the quickened and enriched faculty which
these five years of labour and of fame had brought her, she returned to
the scenes of her Brussels experience, and drew 'Villette' from them as
she had once drawn 'The Professor.' By the summer she had probably
written the earlier chapters, and early in June she at last allowed
herself the change and amusement of a visit to Mr. George Smith and his
mother, who were then living in Gloucester Place. This visit contributed
much to the growing book. In the first place the character of Graham
Bretton,--'Dr. John'--owed many characteristic features and details to
Miss Bront's impressions, now renewed and completed, of her kind host
and publisher, Mr. George Smith. Mrs. Smith, Mr. George Smith's mother,
was even more closely drawn--sometimes to words and phrases which are
still remembered--in the Mrs. Bretton of the book. And further, two
incidents at least of this London visit may be recognised in 'Villette;'
one connected with Thackeray's second lecture on 'The English
Humourists,' to which Miss Bront was taken by her hosts,--the other a
night at the theatre, when she saw Rachel act for the first time. As to
the lecture, after it was over, the great man himself came down from the
platform, and making his way to the small, shy lady sitting beside Mrs.
Smith, eagerly asked her 'how she had liked it.' How many women would
have felt the charm, the honour even, of the tribute implied! But the
'very austere little person,' as Thackeray afterwards described her,
thus approached, was more repelled than pleased. Paul Emanuel does the
like after his lecture at the Athne, and his chronicler has some sharp
words for the 'restlessness,' the lack of 'desirable self-control,' that
the act seemed to her to show. One can only remember that Miss Bront
would have judged herself as she judges another. She too must be allowed
her idiosyncrasies. One must no more blame her shrinking than
Thackeray's effusion.

With regard to the acting of the great, the 'possessed' Rachel, it made
as deep an impression on Charlotte Bront, as it produced much about the
same time on Matthew Arnold.


On Saturday (she writes) I went to see Rachel; a wonderful
sight--terrible as if the earth had cracked deep at your feet, and
revealed a glimpse of hell. I shall never forget it. She made me shudder
to the marrow of my bones; in her some fiend has certainly taken up an
incarnate home. She is not a woman; she is a snake; she is the----!


And again--


Rachel's acting transfixed me with wonder, enchained me with interest,
and thrilled me with horror . . . it is scarcely human nature that she
shows you; it is something wilder and worse; the feelings and fury of a
fiend.


One has only to turn from these letters to the picture of the 'great
actress' in 'Villette,' who holds the theatre breathless on the night
when Dr. John and his mother take Lucy Snowe to the play, to see that
the passage in the book, with all its marvellous though unequal power,
its mingling of high poetry with extravagance and occasional falsity of
note, is a mere amplification of the letters. It shows how profoundly
the fiery dmonic element in Miss Bront had answered to the like gift
in Rachel; and it bears testimony once more to the close affinity
between her genius and those more passionate and stormy influences let
loose in French culture by the romantic movement. Rachel acted the
classical masterpieces; but she acted them as a romantic of the
generation of 'Hernani;' and it was as a romantic that she laid a fiery
hand on Charlotte Bront.

After the various visits and excitements of the summer Charlotte tried
to make progress with the new story, during the loneliness of the autumn
at Haworth. But Haworth in those days seems to have been a poisoned
place. A kind of low fever,--influenza--feverish cold--were the constant
plagues of the parsonage and its inmates. The poor story-teller
struggled in vain against illness and melancholy. She writes to Mrs.
Gaskell of 'deep dejection of spirits,' and to Mr. Williams that it is
no use grumbling over hindered powers or retarded work, 'for no words
can make a change.' It is a matter between Currer Bell 'and his
position, his faculties, and his fate.' Was it during these months of
physical weakness,--haunted, too, by the longing for her sisters and the
memory of their deaths--that she wrote the wonderful chapters describing
Lucy Snowe's delirium of fever and misery during her lonely holidays at
the _pensionnat?_ The imagination is at least the fruit of the
experience; for the poet weaves with all that comes to his hand. But
there are degrees of delicacy and nobility in the weaving. Edmond de
Goncourt noted, as an artist--for the public--every detail of his
brother's death, and his own sensations. Charlotte conceived the sacred
things of kinship more finely. Those veiled and agonised passages of
'Shirley' are all that she will tell the world of woes that are not
wholly her own. But of her personal suffering, physical and mental, she
is mistress, and she has turned it to poignant and lasting profit in the
misery of Lucy Snowe. A misery, of which the true measure lies not in
the story of Lucy's fevered solitude in the Rue Fossette, of her wild
flight through Brussels, her confession to Pre Silas, her fainting in
the stormy street, but rather in the profound and touching passage which
describes how Lucy, rescued by the Brettons, comforted by their
friendship and at rest, yet dares not let herself claim too much from
that friendship, lest, like all other claims she has ever made, it
should only land her in sick disappointment and rebuff at last.


'Do not let me think of them too often, too much, too fondly,' I
implored: 'let me be content with a temperate draught of the living
stream: let me not run athirst, and apply passionately to its welcome
waters: let me not imagine in them a sweeter taste than earth's
fountains know. Oh! would to God I may be enabled to feel enough
sustained by an occasional, amicable intercourse, rare, brief,
unengrossing and tranquil: quite tranquil!'

Still repeating this word, I turned to my pillow; and still repeating
it, I steeped that pillow with tears.


Words so desolately, bitterly true were never penned till the spirit
that conceived them had itself drunk to the lees the cup of lonely pain.

But the spring of the following year brought renewing of life and
faculty. She wrote diligently, refusing to visit or be visited, till
again, in June, resolution and strength gave way. Her father, too, was
ill; and in July she wrote despondently to Mr. Williams as to the
progress of the book. In September, though quite unfit for concentrated
effort, she was stern with herself, would not let her friend, Ellen
Nussey, come,--vowed, cost what it might, 'to finish.' In vain. She was
forced to give herself the pleasure of her friend's company 'for one
reviving week.' Then she resolutely sent the kind Ellen Nussey away, and
resumed her writing. Always the same pathetic 'craving for support and
companionship,' as she herself described it!--and always the same
steadfast will, forcing both the soul to patience, and the body to its
work. No dear comrades now beside her!--with whom to share the ardours
or the glooms of composition. She writes once to Mr. Williams of her
depression 'and almost despair, because there is no one to read a line,
or of whom to ask a counsel. "Jane Eyre" was not written under such
circumstances, nor were two-thirds of "Shirley."' During her worst time
of weakness, as she confessed to Mrs. Gaskell, 'I sat in my chair day
after day, the saddest memories my only company. It was a time I shall
never forget. But God sent it, and it must have been for the
best.'--Language that might have come from one of the pious old maids of
'Shirley.' How strangely its gentle Puritan note mates with the
exuberant, audacious power the speaker was at that moment throwing into
'Villette'! But both are equally characteristic, equally true. And it is
perhaps in the union of this self-governing English piety, submissive,
practical, a little stern, with her astonishing range and daring as an
artist, that one of Charlotte Bront's chief spells over the English
mind may be said to lie.

One more patient effort, however, in this autumn of 1852, and the book
at last was done. She sent the later portion of it, trembling, to her
publishers. Mr. Smith had already given her warm praise for the first
half of the story; and though both he and Mr. Williams made some natural
and inevitable criticisms when the whole was in their hands, yet she had
good reason to feel that substantially Cornhill was satisfied, and she
herself could rest, and take pleasure--and for the writer there is none
greater--in the thing done, the task fulfilled. In January 1853 she was
in London correcting proofs, and on the 24th of that month the book
appeared.



                                   II



'"Villette,"' says Mrs. Gaskell, 'was received with one burst of
acclamation.' There was no question then among 'the judicious,' and
there can be still less question now, that it is the writer's
masterpiece. It has never been so widely read as 'Jane Eyre;' and
probably the majority of English readers prefer 'Shirley.' The
narrowness of the stage on which the action passes, the foreign setting,
the very fulness of poetry, of visualising force, that runs through it,
like a fiery stream bathing and kindling all it touches down to the
smallest detail, are repellent or tiring to the mind that has no energy
of its own responsive to the energy of the writer. But not seldom the
qualities which give a book immortality are the qualities that for a
time guard it from the crowd--till its bloom of fame has grown to a safe
maturity, beyond injury or doubt.

'I think it much quieter than "Shirley,"' said Charlotte, writing to
Mrs. Gaskell just before the book's appearance. 'It will not be
considered pretentious'--she says, in the letter that announces the
completion of the manuscript. Strange!--as though it were her chief
hope that the public would receive it as the more modest offering of a
tamed muse. Did she really understand so little of what she had done?
For of all criticisms that can be applied to it, none has so little
relation to 'Villette' as a criticism that goes by negatives. It is the
most assertive, the most challenging of books. From beginning to end it
seems to be written in flame; one can only return to the metaphor, for
there is no other that renders the main, the predominant impression. The
story is, as it were, upborne by something lambent and rushing. Whether
it be the childhood of Paulina, or the first arrival of the desolate
Lucy in 'Villette,' or those anguished weeks of fever and nightmare
which culminated in the confession to the Pre Silas, or the yearning
for Dr. John's letters, or the growth, so natural, so true, of the love
between Lucy and Paul Emanuel on the very ruins and ashes of Lucy's
first passion, or the inimitable scene, where Lucy, led by the 'spirit
in her feet,' spirit of longing, spirit of passion, flits ghost-like
through the festival-city, or the last pages of dear domestic sweetness,
under the shadow of parting--there is nothing in the book but shares in
this all-pervading quality of swiftness, fusion, vital warmth. And the
detail is as a rule much more assured and masterly than in the two
earlier books. Here and there are still a few absurdities that recall
the drawing-room scenes of 'Jane Eyre'--a few unfortunate or irrelevant
digressions like the chapter 'Cleopatra,'--little failures in eye and
tact that scores of inferior writers could have avoided without an
effort. But they are very few; they spoil no pleasure. And as a rule the
book has not only imagination and romance, it has knowledge of life, and
accuracy of social vision, in addition to all the native shrewdness, the
incisive force of the early chapters of 'Jane Eyre.'

Of all the characters, Dr. John no doubt is the least tangible, the
least alive. Here the writer was drawing enough from reality to spoil
the freedom of imagination that worked so happily in the creation of
Paulina, and not enough to give to her work that astonishing and complex
truth which marks the portrait of Paul Emanuel. Dr. John occasionally
reminds us of the Moores; and it is not just that he should do so; there
is inconsistency and contradiction in the portrait--not much, perhaps,
but enough to deprive it of the 'passionate perfection,' the vivid
rightness that belong to all the rest. Yet the whole picture of his
second love--the subduing of the strong successful man to modesty and
tremor by the sudden rise of true passion, by the gentle, all-conquering
approach of the innocent and delicate Paulina--is most subtly felt, and
rendered with the strokes, light and sweet and laughing, that belong to
the subject. As to Paul Emanuel, we need not resay all that Mr.
Swinburne has said; but we need not try to question, either, his place
among the immortals. 'Magnificent-minded, grand-hearted, dear faulty
little man!' It may be true as Mr. Leslie Stephen contends, that--in
spite of his relation to the veritable M. Hger--there are in him
elements of femininity, that he is not all male. But he is none the less
man and living, for that; the same may be said of many of his real
brethren. And what variety, what invention, what truth, have been
lavished upon him! and what a triumph to have evolved from such
materials,--a schoolroom, a garden, a professor, a few lessons,
conversations, walks,--so rich and sparkling a whole!

Madame Beck and Ginevra Fanshawe are in their way equally admirable.
They are conceived in the tone of satire; they represent the same sharp
and mordant instinct that found so much play in 'Shirley.' But the
mingled _finesse_ and power with which they are developed is far
superior to anything in 'Shirley;' the curates are rude, rough work
beside them.

And Lucy Snowe? Well--Lucy Snowe is Jane Eyre again, the friendless
girl, fighting the world as best she may, her only weapon a strong and
chainless will, her constant hindrances, the passionate nature that
makes her the slave of sympathy, of the first kind look or word, and the
wild poetic imagination that forbids her all reconciliation with her own
lot, the lot of the unbeautiful and obscure. But though she is Jane Eyre
over again there are differences, and all, it seems to me, to Lucy's
advantage. She is far more intelligible--truer to life and feeling.
Morbid she is often; but Lucy Snows so placed, and so gifted, must have
been morbid. There are some touches that displease, indeed, because it
is impossible to believe in them. Lucy Snowe could never have broken
down, never have appealed for mercy, never have cried 'My heart will
break!' before her treacherous rival, Madame Beck, in Paul Emanuel's
presence. A reader, by virtue of the very force of the effect produced
upon him by the whole creation, has a right to protest 'incredible!' No
woman, least of all Lucy Snowe, could have so understood her own cause,
could have so fought her own battle. But in the main nothing can be more
true or masterly than the whole study of Lucy's hungering nature, with
its alternate discords and harmonies, its bitter-sweetness, its infinite
possibilities for good and evil, dependent simply on whether the heart
is left starved or satisfied, whether love is given or withheld. She
enters the book pale and small and self-repressed, trained in a hard
school, to stern and humble ways, like Jane Eyre--like Charlotte Bront
herself. But Charlotte has given to her more of her own rich inner life,
more of her own poetry and fiery distinction, than to Jane Eyre. She is
weak, but except perhaps in that one failure before Madame Beck, she is
always touching, human, never to be despised. She is in love with loving
when she first appears; and she loves Dr. John because he is kind and
strong, and the only man she has yet seen familiarly. What can be more
natural?--or more exquisitely observed than the inevitable shipwreck of
this first romance, and the inevitable anguish, so little known or
understood by any one about her, that it brings with it? It passes away,
like a warm day in winter, not the true spring, only its herald. And
then slowly, almost unconsciously, there grows up the real affinity, the
love 'venturing diffidently into life after long acquaintance,
furnace-tried by pain, stamped by constancy.' The whole experience is
life itself, as a woman's heart can feel and make it.

Miss Martineau's criticism of 'Villette'--and it is one which hurt the
writer sorely--shows a singular, yet not surprising blindness. Even more
sharply than in her 'Daily News' review, she expresses it in a private
letter to Miss Bront:--

'I do not like the love,'--she says--'either the kind or the degree of
it,'--and she maintains that 'its prevalence in the book, and effect on
the action of it,' go some way to explain and even to justify the charge
of 'coarseness' which had been brought against the writer's treatment of
love in 'Jane Eyre.' The remark is curious, as pointing to the gulf
between Miss Martineau's type of culture--which alike in its strength
and its weakness is that of English provincial Puritanism--and that more
European and cosmopolitan type, to which, for all her strong English and
Yorkshire qualities, and for all her inferiority to her critic in
positive knowledge, Charlotte Bront, as an artist, really belonged. The
truth is, of course, that it is precisely in and through her treatment
of passion,--mainly, no doubt, as it affects the woman's heart and
life--that she has earned and still maintains her fame. And that brings
us to the larger question with which Charlotte Bront's triumph as an
artist is very closely connected. What may be said to be the main
secret, the central cause not only of her success, but, generally, of
the success of women in fiction, during the present century? In other
fields of art they are still either relatively amateurs, or their
performance, however good, awakens a kindly surprise. Their position is
hardly assured; they are still on sufferance. Whereas in fiction the
great names of the past, within their own sphere, are the equals of all
the world, accepted, discussed, analysed, by the masculine critic, with
precisely the same keenness and under the same canons as he applies to
Thackeray or Stevenson, to Balzac or Loti.

The reason perhaps lies first in the fact that, whereas in all other
arts they are comparatively novices and strangers, having still to find
out the best way in which to appropriate traditions and methods not
created by women, in the art of speech, elegant, fitting, familiar
speech, women are and have long been at home. They have practised it for
generations, they have contributed largely to its development. The arts
of society and of letter-writing pass naturally into the art of the
novel. Madame de Svign and Madame du Deffand are the precursors of
George Sand; they lay her foundations, and make her work possible. In
the case of poetry, one might imagine, a similar process is going on,
but it is not so far advanced. In proportion, however, as women's life
and culture widen, as the points of contact between them and the
manifold world multiply and develop, will Parnassus open before them. At
present those delicate and noble women who have entered there look a
little strange to us. Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, Emily Bront,
Marcelline Desbordes-Valmore--it is as though they had wrested something
that did not belong to them, by a kind of splendid violence. As a rule,
so far, women have been poets in and through the novel-Cowper-like poets
of the common life like Miss Austen, or Mrs. Gaskell, or Mrs. Oliphant;
Lucretian or Virgilian observers of the many-coloured web like George
Eliot, or, in some phases, George Sand; romantic or lyrical artists like
George Sand again, or like Charlotte and Emily Bront. Here no one
questions their citizenship; no one is astonished by the place they
hold; they are here among the recognised 'masters of those who know.'

Why?--For, after all, women's range of material, even in the novel, is
necessarily limited. There are a hundred subjects and experiences from
which their mere sex debars them. Which is all very true, but not to the
point. For the one subject which they have eternally at command, which
is interesting to all the world, and whereof large tracts are naturally
and wholly their own, is the subject of love--love of many kinds indeed,
but pre-eminently the love between man and woman. And being already free
of the art and tradition of words, their position in the novel is a
strong one, and their future probably very great.

But it is love as the woman understands it. And here again is their
second strength. Their peculiar vision, their omissions quite as much as
their assertions, make them welcome. Balzac, Flaubert, Anatole France,
Paul Bourget, dissect a complex reality, half physical, half moral; they
are students, psychologists, men of science first, poets afterwards.
They veil their eyes before no contributory fact, they carry scientific
curiosity and veracity to the work; they must see all and they must tell
all. A kind of honour seems to be involved in it--at least for the
Frenchman, as also for the modern Italian and Spaniard. On the other
hand, English novels by men--with the great exceptions of Richardson in
the last century, and George Meredith in this,--from Fielding and Scott
onwards, are not, as a rule, studies of love. They are rather studies of
manners, politics, adventure.

Is it the development of the Hebraist and Puritan element in the English
mind--so real, for all its attendant hypocrisies--that has debarred the
modern Englishman from the foreign treatment of love, so that, with his
realistic masculine instinct, he has largely turned to other things?
But, after all, love still rules 'the camp, the court, the grove!' There
is as much innocent, unhappy, guilty, entrancing love in the world as
there ever was. And treated as the poets treat it, as George Meredith
has treated it in 'Richard Feverel,' or in 'Emilia in England,' or with
that fine and subtle romance which Mr. Henry James threw into 'Roderick
Hudson,' it can still, even in its most tragic forms, give us joy--as no
Flaubert, no Zola, will ever give us joy. The modern mind craves for
knowledge, and the modern novel reflects the craving--which after all it
can never satisfy. But the craving for feeling is at least as strong,
and above all for that feeling which expresses the heart's defiance of
the facts which crush it, which dives, as Renan says, into the innermost
recesses of man, and brings up, or seems to bring up, the secrets of the
infinite. Tenderness, faith, treason, loneliness, parting, yearning, the
fusion of heart with heart and soul with soul, the ineffable
illumination that love can give to common things and humble
lives,--these, after all, are the perennially interesting things in
life; and here the women-novelists are at no disadvantage. Their
knowledge is of the centre; it is adequate, and it is their own. Broadly
speaking, they have thrown themselves on feeling, on Poetry. And by so
doing they have won the welcome of all the world, men and women,
realists and idealists alike. For She--'warm Recluse'--has her
hiding-place deep in the common heart, where 'fresh and green--she lives
of us unseen'; and whoever can evoke her, has never yet lost his reward.



                                  III



It is as poets then, in the larger sense, and as poets of passion,
properly so-called--that is, of exalted and transfiguring feeling--that
writers like George Meredith, and George Sand, and Charlotte Bront
affect the world, and live in its memory. Never was Charlotte Bront
better served by this great gift of poetic vision than in
'Villette'--never indeed so well. The style of the book throughout has
felt the kindling and transforming influence. There are few or no cold
lapses, no raw fillings in. What was extravagance and effort in
'Shirley' has become here a true 'grand style,' an exaltation, a poetic
ambition which justifies itself. One illustration is enough. Let us take
it from the famous scene of the midnight fte, when Lucy, racked with
jealousy and longing, escapes from the _pensionnat_ by night, hungering
for the silence and the fountains of the park, and wanders into the
festal streets, knowing nothing of what is happening there.


Hush! the clock strikes. Ghostly deep as is the stillness of this house,
it is only eleven. While my ear follows to silence the hum of the last
stroke, I catch faintly from the built-out capital, a sound like bells,
or like a band--a sound where sweetness, where victory, where mourning
blend. Oh, to approach this music nearer, to listen to it alone by the
rushy basin! Let me go--oh, let me go! What hinders, what does not aid
freedom?

           .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Quiet Rue Fossette! I find on this pavement that wanderer-wooing summer
night of which I mused; I see its moon over me; I feel its dew in the
air. But here I cannot stay; I am still too near old haunts: so close
under the dungeon, I can hear the prisoners moan. This solemn peace is
not what I seek, it is not what I can bear: to me the face of that sky
bears the aspect of a world's death. The park also will be calm--I know,
a mortal serenity prevails everywhere--yet let me seek the park.

           .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

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

           .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

That festal night would have been safe for a very child. Half the
peasantry had come in from the outlying environs of Villette, and the
decent burghers were all abroad and around, dressed in their best. My
straw hat passed amidst cap and jacket, short petticoat, and long calico
mantle, without, perhaps, attracting a glance; I only took the
precaution to bind down the broad leaf gipsy-wise, with a supplementary
ribbon--and then I felt safe as if masked.

Safe I passed down the avenues--safe I mixed with the crowd where it was
deepest. To be still was not in my power, nor quietly to observe. I
drank the elastic night air--the swell of sound, the dubious light, now
flashing, now fading.


Then follow the two or three little scenes, so brilliant, and yet so
flickering and dream-like, of which Lucy--closely concerned in them
all--is the ghostly and unseen spectator; the sight of the Brettons in
their carriage; the pursuit of the music swelling through the park, like
'a sea breaking into song with all its waves'; the Bretton group beside
the band; the figures and the talk that surround Madame Beck, and then,
climax of the whole, the entry of M. Paul, under the eyes of Lucy--Lucy
who watches him from a few yards distance,--secret, ardent, unknown. The
story grows fast with every page--magical and romantic, as the park
itself with its lights and masks and song; one seems to be watching the
incidents in a sparkling play, set in a passionate music; yet all, as it
were, through a shining mist, wavering and phantasmal.

But at last it is over, and Lucy, the spectre, the spy, must go home
with the rest.


I turned from the group of trees and the 'merrie companie' in its shade.
Midnight was long past; the concert was over, the crowds were thinning.
I followed the ebb. Leaving the radiant park and well-lit Haute-Ville,
. . . I sought the dim lower quarter.

Dim I should not say, for the beauty of moonlight--forgotten in the
park--here once more flowed in upon perception. High she rode, and calm
and stainlessly she shone. The music and the mirth of the _fte_, the
fire and bright hues of those lamps had outdone and outshone her for an
hour, but now, again, her glory and her silence triumphed. The rival
lamps were dying: she held her course like a white fate. Drum, trumpet,
bugle, had uttered their clangour, and were forgotten; with pencil-ray
she wrote on heaven and on earth records for archives everlasting.


This surely is romance, is poetry. It is not what has been called the
_lactea ubertas_ of George Sand. It does not flow so much as flash. It
is more animated than 'Jeanne'; more human and plastic than 'Llia.'
'Consuelo' comes nearest to it; but even 'Consuelo' is cold beside it.

And then, turn from such a rush of passionate feeling and description to
the scenes of character and incident, to the play of satiric invention
in the portraits of Madame Beck, the Belgian schoolgirls, Ginevra
Fanshawe, M. Paul. What a vivid, homely, poignant truth in it all!--like
the sharp and pleasant scent of bruised herbs. No novel, moreover, that
escapes obscurity and ugliness was ever freer from stereotyped forms and
phrases. The writer's fresh inventive sense is perpetually brushing them
away as with a kind of impatience. The phrases come out new minted,
shining; each a venture, and, as a rule, a happy one; yet with no effect
of labour or research; rather of a careless freedom and wealth.

Once again we may notice the influence of French books, of the French
romantic tradition, which had evidently flowed in full tide through the
teaching of that Brussels class-room, whence literally 'Villette' took
its being. 'Villette' itself, in portions that are clearly
autobiographical, bears curious testimony to the French reading, which
stirred and liberated Charlotte's genius, as Hofmann's tales gave spur
and impetus to Emily. It was a fortunate chance that thus brought to
bear upon her at a critical moment a force so strong and kindred, a
force starting from a Celt like herself, from the Breton Chateaubriand.
She owes to it much of her distinction, her European note. French men of
letters have always instinctively admired and understood her. They
divine that there are certain things in the books of their Romantics
that she might very well have written,--the description, for instance,
of Chateaubriand's youth, of his strange sister, of his father and
mother, and the old Chteau of Combourg, in the 'Mmoires d'Outre
Tombe.' Those pages have precisely her mixture of broad imagination with
sharpness of detail; they breathe her yearning and her restlessness. And
no doubt, like 'Atala' and 'Ren,' they have a final mellowness and
mastery, to which the English writer hardly attained.

But to what might she not have attained had she lived, had she gone on
working? Alas! the delicate heart and life had been too deeply wounded;
and in the quiet marriage which followed immediately on 'Villette' the
effort to be simply, personally happy proved too much for one who had
known so well how to suffer. The sickness and loneliness through which
'Villette' was written had no power, apparently, to harm the book. Above
the encroachments of personal weakness she was able for a time to carry
her gift, like a torch above a swelling stream, unhurt. In the writing
of 'Shirley' it was the spectacle of her sisters' anguish that had
distracted and unnerved her. Above her own physical and moral pain, the
triumph of 'Villette' is complete and extraordinary. But it is clear
that she felt a deep exhaustion afterwards. The fragment of 'Emma,'
indeed, seems to show that she might at some later time have resumed the
old task. But for the moment there was clear disinclination for an
effort of which she had too sharply measured the cost. In another
unpublished letter to Mr. Smith, written in 1854, two months before her
own marriage, and shortly after Mr. Smith's, she says--


                                                         April 25, 1854.

My dear Sir,--Thank you for your congratulations and good wishes; if
these last are realised but in part--I shall be very thankful. It gave
me also sincere pleasure to be assured of your own happiness, though of
that I never doubted. I have faith also in its permanent character,
provided Mrs. George Smith is, what it pleases me to fancy her to be.
You never told me any particulars about her--though I should have liked
them much--but did not like to ask questions, knowing how much your mind
and time would be engaged. What _I_ have to say is soon told.

The step in contemplation is no hasty one; on the gentleman's side at
least, it has been meditated for many years, and I hope that in at last
acceding to it, I am acting right; it is what I earnestly wish to do. My
future husband is a clergyman. He was for eight years my father's
curate. He left because the idea of this marriage was not entertained as
he wished. His departure was regarded by the parish as a calamity, for
he had devoted himself to his duties with no ordinary diligence. Various
circumstances have led my father to consent to his return, nor can I
deny that my own feelings have been much impressed and changed by the
nature and strength of the qualities brought out in the course of his
long attachment. I fear I must accuse myself of having formerly done him
less than justice. However, he is to come back now. He has foregone many
chances of preferment to return to the obscure village of Haworth. I
believe I do right in marrying him. I mean to try to make him a good
wife. There has been heavy anxiety, but I begin to hope all will end for
the best. My expectations, however, are very subdued--very different, I
dare say, to what _yours_ were before you were married. Care and Fear
stand so close to Hope, I sometimes scarcely can see her for the shadow
they cast. And yet I am thankful too, and the doubtful future must be
left with Providence.

On one feature in the marriage I can dwell with unmingled satisfaction,
with a _certainty_ of being right. It takes nothing from the attention I
owe to my Father; I am not to leave him--my future husband consents to
come here--thus Papa secures by the step a devoted and reliable
assistant in his old age. There can, of course, be no reason for
withholding the intelligence from your Mother and sisters; remember me
kindly to them whenever you write.

I hardly know in what form of greeting to include your wife's name, as I
have never seen her--say to her whatever may seem to you most
appropriate and most expressive of good will. I sometimes wonder how Mr.
Williams is, and hope he is well. In the course of the year that is gone
Cornhill and London have receded a long way from me; the links of
communication have waxed very frail and few. It must be so in this
world. All things considered, I don't wish it otherwise.

                                                         Yours sincerely,
                                                         C. Bront.

George Smith, Esq.


_'In the course of the year that is gone Cornhill and London have
receded a long way from me; the links of communication have waxed very
frail and few. It must be so in this world. All things considered, I
don't wish it otherwise.'_

Sad and gentle words!--written under a grey sky. They imply a quiet,
perhaps a final renunciation, above all a deep need of rest. And little
more than a year from the date of that letter she had passed through
marriage, through the first hope of motherhood,--through death.

Alas!--To stand in the bare room where she died, looking out on the
church where she and her sister lie, is to be flooded at once with
passionate regrets, and with a tender and inextinguishable reverence.
She, too, like Emily, was 'taken from life in its prime. She died in a
time of promise.' But how much had the steady eager will wrung already
from the fragile body! And she has her reward. For she is of those who
are not forgotten, 'exceeded by the height of happier men;' whose
griefs, rather, by the alchemy of poetry, have become the joys of those
who follow after; whose quick delights and clear perceptions are not
lost in the general store, but remain visibly marked and preserved to
us, in forms that have the time-resisting power, through long years, to
reawaken similar delights and perceptions in minds attune and sensitive.
This it is to live as an artist; and of no less than this is Charlotte
Bront now assured.



                              Introduction
                                   to
                             The Professor



It is in April 1846 that we discover a first mention of 'The Professor'
in a letter from Charlotte Bront to Messrs. Aylott & Jones, the
publishers of the little volume of 'Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell' which made its modest appearance in that year. Miss Bront
consults Messrs. Aylott & Co. 'on behalf of C., E. and A. Bell' as to
how they can best publish three tales already written by them--whether
in three connected volumes or separately. The advice given was no doubt
prudent and friendly,--but it did not help 'The Professor.' The story
went fruitlessly to many publishers. It returned to Charlotte, from one
of its later quests, on the very morning of the day on which Mr. Bront
underwent an operation for cataract at Manchester--August 25, 1846. That
evening, as we have seen, she began 'Jane Eyre.'

After the great success of the first two books, she would have liked to
publish 'The Professor.' But Mr. Smith and Mr. Williams dissuaded her;
and to their dissuasion we owe 'Villette'; for if 'The Professor' had
appeared in 1851, Miss Bront could have made no such further use of her
Brussels materials as she did actually put them to in 'Villette.' The
story was finally published after the writer's death, and when the
strong interest excited by Mrs. Gaskell's Memoir led naturally to a
demand for all that could yet be given to the public from the hand of
Currer Bell.

There is little to add to the writer's own animated preface. As she
herself points out, the book is by no means the book of a novice. It was
written in the author's thirtieth year, after a long apprenticeship to
the art of writing. Those innumerable tales, poems, and essays, composed
in childhood and youth, of which Mrs. Gaskell and Mr. Shorter between
them give accounts so suggestive and remarkable, were the natural and
right foundation for all that followed. 'The Professor' shows already a
method of composition almost mature, a pronounced manner, and the same
power of analysis, within narrower limits, as the other books. What it
lacks is colour and movement. Crimsworth as the lonely and struggling
teacher, is inevitably less interesting--described, at any rate, by a
woman--than Lucy Snowe under the same conditions, and in the same
surroundings. His _rle_ is not particularly manly; and he does not
appeal to our pity. The intimate autobiographical note, which makes the
spell of 'Villette,' is absent; we miss the passionate moods and
caprices, all the perennial charm of variable woman, which belongs to
the later story. There are besides no vicissitudes in the plot.
Crimsworth suffers nothing to speak of; he wins his Frances too easily;
and the reader's emotions are left unstirred.

Mademoiselle Renter is Madame Beck over again, but at once less credible
and less complex. Pelet is an extremely clever sketch. And Hunsworth?

Hunsworth is really the critical element in the story. If he were other
than he is, 'The Professor' would have stood higher in the scale. For
the conception of him is both ambitious and original. But it breaks
down. He puzzles us; and yet he is not mysterious. For that he is not
human enough. In the end we find him merely brutal and repellent, and
the letter to Crimsworth, which accompanies the gift of the picture, is
one of those extravagances which destroy a reader's sense of illusion.
Great pains have been taken with him; and when he enters he promises
much; but he is never truly living for a single page, and half way
through the book he has already become a mere bundle of incredibilities.
Let the reader put him beside Mr. Helstone of 'Shirley,' beside even
Rochester, not to speak of Dr. John or Monsieur Paul, and so realise the
difference between imagination working at ease, in happy and vitalising
strength, and the same faculty toiling unprofitably and half-heartedly
with material which it can neither fuse nor master. There is pungency
and power in much of Hunsworth's talk; but it is not a pungency or power
that can save him as a creation.

On the other hand Frances Henri, the little lace-mender, is a figure
touched at every point with grace, feeling and truth. She is an
exquisite sketch--a drawing in pale, pure colour, all delicate animation
and soft life. She is only inferior to Caroline Helstone because the
range of emotion and incident that her story requires is so much
narrower than that which Caroline passes through. One feels her thrown
away on 'The Professor.' An ampler stage and a warmer air should have
been reserved for her; adventures more subtly invented; and a lover less
easily victorious. But the scene in which she makes tea for
Crimsworth--so at least one thinks as one reads it--could hardly be
surpassed for fresh and tender charm; although when the same material is
used again for the last scenes of 'Villette,' it is not hard to see how
the flame and impetus of a great book may still heighten and deepen what
was already excellent before.

'The Professor' indeed is grey and featureless compared with any of
Charlotte Bront's other work. The final impression is that she was
working under restraint when writing it, and that her proper gifts were
consciously denied full play in it. In the preface of 1851, she says, as
an explanation of the sobriety of the story--'In many a crude effort
destroyed almost as soon as composed, I had got over any such taste as I
might once have had for ornamented and redundant composition, and come
to prefer what was plain and homely.' In other words, she was putting
herself under discipline in 'The Professor'; trying to subdue the
poetical impulse; to work as a realist and an observer only.

According to her own account of it, the publishers interfered with this
process. They would not have 'The Professor'; and they welcomed 'Jane
Eyre' with alacrity. She was therefore thrown back, so to speak, upon
her faults; obliged to work in ways more 'ornamented' and 'redundant';
and thus the promise of realism in her was destroyed. The explanation is
one of those which the artist will always supply himself with on
occasion. In truth, the method of 'The Professor' represents a mere
temporary reaction,--an experiment--in Charlotte Bront's literary
development. When she returned to that exuberance of imagination and
expression which was her natural utterance, she was not merely writing
to please her publishers and the public. Rather it was like Emily's
passionate return to the moorland--


           I'll walk where my own nature would be leading,
           It vexes me to choose another guide:


The strong native bent reasserted itself, and with the happiest effects.

But because of what came after, and because the mental history of a
great and delightful artist will always appeal to the affectionate
curiosity of later generations, 'The Professor' will continue to be read
both by those who love Charlotte Bront, and by those who find pleasure
in tracking the processes of literature. It needs no apology as a
separate entity; but from its relation to 'Villette' it gains an
interest and importance the world would not otherwise have granted it.
It is the first revelation of a genius which from each added throb of
happiness or sorrow, from each short after-year of strenuous
living,--_per damna, per cdes_--was to gain fresh wealth and steadily
advancing power.



                              Introduction
                                   to
                           Wuthering Heights



                                   I



In these critical [1] introductions to the books of the Bront sisters I
have so far endeavoured, and must still endeavour, to speak, not the
language of mere panegyric, but that natural to a reader whose critical
sense, no less than his sense of enjoyment, shares in the general
stimulus which is derived from the power and vitality of the books
themselves. The Bronts are searching personalities. They challenge no
less than they attract. Their vigorous effect upon the reader's
sympathies and judgment has been always part of their ascendency, and
one great secret of their enduring fame. To handle their work in a
spirit of flat eulogy and recommendation would be an offence to it and
to them. Its technical faultiness, moreover, is an element of its charm.
The romantic inequalities, the romantic alternations of power and
weakness which these books show, appeal to those deep and mingled
instincts of the English mind which have produced our rich, violent,
faulty, incomparable English literature. When we are under the spell of
the Bront stories we admire and we protest with almost equal warmth; we
lavish upon them the same varieties of feeling as the poet, who brings
to his love no cold, monotonous homage, but--'praise, blame, kisses,
tears and smiles.' For inevitably the critic's manner catches the
freedom of the author's. He will not hesitate dislike; such a mental
attitude cannot maintain itself in the Bronts' neighbourhood. He will
strike when he is hurt, and raise the pans of praise when he is
pleased, with the frankness which such combatants deserve. In each of
her novels, as it were, Charlotte Bront touches the shield of the
reader; she does not woo or persuade him; she attacks him, and, complete
as his ultimate surrender may be, he yields fighting. He 'will still be
talking,' and there is no help for it.

And if this is the case with Charlotte Bront, it is still more so with
Emily. Emily's genius was the greater of the two, yet of a similar
quality and fibre. It provokes even more vivid reactions of feeling in
the reader; and yet, in those who have felt her spell, she wins an
ultimate sympathy and compels an ultimate admiration so strong that no
one wishes to examine the stages of his own conquest. We passionately
accept her, or we are untouched by her. And if we passionately accept
her, we are apt to forget our own critical wrestles by the way; we are
impatient of demurs, of half-words, and all mere ingenuities of opinion
concerning her and that work which is her direct and personal voice.

Nevertheless, criticism has still a real work to do with this strange
novel and these few passionate poems of Emily Bront's. In the first
place, the novel has not even yet taken the place which rightly belongs
to it. In Mr. Saintsbury's belief, for instance, Emily Bront's work,
though he grants its originality, has been 'extravagantly praised,' and
is 'too small in bulk and too limited in character to be put really
high.' (It may be remarked in passing that it is, indeed, smaller in
bulk than Mr. Saintsbury imagines, since he attributes to Emily the book
of her sister Anne, 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.')[2] And even for Mr.
Leslie Stephen's generous and catholic taste, Emily Bront in 'Wuthering
Heights' 'feels rather than observes;' so that 'her feeble grasp upon
external facts makes her book a kind of baseless nightmare, which we
read with wonder and with distressing curiosity, but with even more pain
than pleasure or profit.' Matthew Arnold, indeed, in the well-known
lines--

                                     whose soul
                      Knew no fellow for might,
                      Passion, vehemence, grief.
                      Daring, since Byron died--

--has paid the natural tribute of one true poet to another. But it may
be doubted whether in writing it he thought of 'Wuthering Heights,' and
not rather of those four or five poems of the first order which Emily
Bront has added to our literature. While for an earlier generation of
critics, 'Wuthering Heights' was, as a rule, matter for denunciation
rather than praise; and it was again a poet--Sydney Dobell in the
'Palladium'--who, almost alone, had the courage to understand. The
pathetic letter written by Charlotte to Mr. Williams, little more than
three weeks before Emily's death, which describes the reading by the
sisters of an article on their books in the 'North American Review,'
shows that Emily lived long enough to know that her novel had outraged
the common literary opinion of her day; while before the criticism in
the 'Palladium' appeared she had been more than a year in her grave. [3]
'What a bad set the Bells must be!' says Charlotte, mocking at their
critic. 'What appalling books they write! To-day, as Emily appeared a
little easier, I thought the "Review" would amuse her, so I read it
aloud to her and Anne. As I sat between them at our quiet but now
somewhat melancholy fireside, I studied the two ferocious authors.
Ellis, the "man of uncommon talents, but dogged, brutal, and morose,"
sat leaning back in his easy-chair, drawing his impeded breath as he
best could, and looking, alas! piteously pale and wasted; it is not his
wont to laugh, but he smiled, half amused and half in scorn, as he
listened. Acton was sewing; no emotion ever stirs him to loquacity; so
he only smiled too, dropping at the same time a single word of calm
amazement to hear his character so darkly portrayed. I wonder what the
reviewer would have thought of his own sagacity, could he have beheld
the pair as I did.' [4]

Nevertheless, the 'North American Review' was only swimming with the
stream, anticipating by a few months the violence of the 'Quarterly' and
expressing the verdict of an overwhelming majority of the public.
Moreover, those among us of a later generation who have now reached
middle age can well remember that while Charlotte Bront was a name of
magic to our youth, and Mrs. Gaskell's wonderful biography had stamped
the stories and personalities of her two sisters upon the inmost fibres
of memory and pity, 'Wuthering Heights,' if we read it at all, was read
in haste, and with a prior sense of repulsion, which dropped a veil
between book and reader, and was in truth only the result of an all but
universal tenor of opinion amongst our elders.

Indeed, Charlotte Bront herself, in the touching and eloquent preface
which she wrote for a new edition of 'Wuthering Heights' in 1850, adopts
a tone towards her sister's work which contains more than a shade of
apology. She 'scarcely thinks' that it is 'right or advisable to create
beings like Heathcliff.' She admits that the chisel which hewed him was
rude and untaught. But she pleads that the book contains 'at least one
element of grandeur--power;' that there are 'some glimpses of grace and
gaiety' in the portrait of the younger Catherine, and some touches of 'a
certain strange beauty' in the fierceness of her mother, of a redeeming
honesty amid her perversity and passion. She points out the wilfulness
of the creative gift, and the incalculable dominance that it acquires
over the artist. She vindicates her sister from the charge of any
personal association with the brutalities she describes. 'She had
scarcely more practical knowledge of the people round her than a nun has
of the country folk who sometimes pass her convent gates.' For
Heathcliff she had no model but the 'vision of her own meditations.' And
yet, as Charlotte persists, she knew the North, and the moors, and the
dwellers upon them, with the sufficient knowledge of the artist; and
only those will find her wholly unintelligible or repulsive 'to whom the
inhabitants, the customs, the natural characteristics of the outlying
hills and hamlets in the West Riding of Yorkshire are things alien and
unfamiliar.'

Mrs. Gaskell's comments upon 'Wuthering Heights' betray a similar note
of timidity. 'They might be mistaken,' she says, speaking of Emily and
Anne Bront; 'they might err in writing at all,' seeing that they could
not write otherwise; but all their work, she pleads, was done in
obedience to stern dictates of conscience, and under the pressure of
'hard and cruel facts;' by which are meant, of course, the facts
connected with Branwell Bront. 'All I say is, that never, I believe,
did women possessed of such wonderful gifts exercise them with a fuller
feeling of responsibility for their use. As to mistakes, they stand
now--as authors as well as women--before the judgment-seat of God.'

One hears in these sentences, with their note of protesting emotion, no
less than in Charlotte's tender and dignified defence, the echo of an
angry public opinion, indignant in the typical English way that any
young woman, and especially any clergyman's daughter, should write of
such unbecoming scenes and persons as those which form the subject of
'Wuthering Heights,' and determined if it could to punish the offender.

But for us, fifty years later, how irrelevant are both the attack and
the defence! One might as well plead that Marlowe meant no harm by
creating Tamburlaine, or Victor Hugo in imagining Quasimodo or the fight
with the _pieuvre_ or the central incident of 'Le Roi s'amuse.'
'Wuthering Heights' lives as great imagination, of which we must take
the consequences, the bad with the good; and will continue to live,
whether it pleases us personally or no. Moreover, the book has much more
than a mere local or personal significance. It belongs to a particular
European moment, and like Charlotte's work, though not in the same way,
it holds a typical and representative place in the English literature of
the century. If we look back upon the circumstances of its composition,
the main facts seem to be these.




                                   II




Emily Bront, like her sister, inherited Celtic blood, together with a
stern and stoical tradition of daily life. She was a wayward,
imaginative girl, physically delicate, brought up in loneliness and
poverty, amid a harsh yet noble landscape of hill, moor and stream.
Owing to the fact that her father had some literary cultivation, and an
Irish quickness of intelligence beyond that of his brother-clergy, this
child of genius had from the beginning a certain access to good books,
and through books and newspapers to the central world of thought and of
affairs. In 1827, when Emily was nine, she and her sisters used to amuse
themselves in the wintry firelight by choosing imaginary islands to
govern, and peopling them with famous men. Emily chose the Isle of
Arran, and for inhabitants Sir Walter Scott and the Lockharts; while
Charlotte chose the Duke of Wellington and Christopher North. In 1829,
Charlotte, in a fragment of journal, describes the newspapers taken by
the family in those troubled days of Catholic emancipation and reform,
and lets us know that a neighbour lent them 'Blackwood's Magazine,' 'the
most able periodical there is.' It was, indeed, by the reading of
'Blackwood' in its days of most influence and vigour, and, later, of
'Fraser' (from 1832 apparently), that the Bront household was mainly
kept in touch with the current literature, the criticism, poetry, and
fiction of their day. During their eager, enthusiastic youth the Bront
sisters, then, were readers of Christopher North, Hogg, De Quincey, and
Maginn in 'Blackwood,' of Carlyle's early essays and translations in
'Fraser,' of Scott and Lockhart, no less than of Wordsworth, Southey,
and Coleridge. Charlotte asked Southey for an opinion on her poems;
Branwell did the same with Hartley Coleridge; and no careful reader of
Emily Bront's verse can fail to see in it the fiery and decisive
influence of S. T. C.

So much for the influences of youth. There can be no question that they
were 'romantic' influences, and it can be easily shown that among them
were many kindling sparks from that 'unextinguished hearth' of German
poetry and fiction which played so large a part in English imagination
during the first half of the century. In 1800, Hannah More, protesting
against the Germanising invasion, and scandalised by the news that
Schiller's 'Ruber' 'is now acting in England by persons of quality,'
sees, 'with indignation and astonishment, the Huns and Vandals once more
overpowering the Greeks and Romans,' and English minds 'hurried back to
the reign of Chaos and old Night by distorted and unprincipled
compositions, which, in spite of strong flashes of genius, unite the
taste of the Goths' with the morals of the 'road.' In 1830, Carlyle,
quoting the passage, and measuring the progress of English knowledge and
opinion, reports triumphantly 'a rapidly growing favour for German
literature.' 'There is no one of our younger, more vigorous
periodicals,' he says, 'but has its German craftsman gleaning what he
can'; and for twenty years or more he himself did more than any other
single writer to bring the German and English worlds together. During
the time that he was writing and translating for the 'Edinburgh,' the
'Foreign Review' and 'Fraser,'--in 'Blackwood' also, through the years
when Charlotte and Emily Bront, then at the most plastic stage of
thought and imagination, were delighting in it, one may find a constant
series of translations from the German, of articles on German memoirs
and German poets, and of literary reflections and estimates, which
testify abundantly to the vogue of all things Teutonic, both with men of
letters and the public. In 1840, 'Maga,' in the inflated phrase of the
time, says, indeed, that the Germans are aspiring 'to wield the literary
sceptre, with as lordly a sway as ever graced the dynasty of Voltaire.
No one who is even superficially acquainted with the floating literature
of the day can fail to have observed how flauntingly long-despised
Germanism spreads its phylacteries on every side.' In the year before,
(1839) 'Blackwood' published a translation of Tieck's 'Pietro d'Abano,'
a wild robber-and-magician story, of the type which spread the love of
monster and vampire, witch and werewolf, through a Europe tired for the
moment of eighteenth-century common-sense; and, more important still, a
long section, excellently rendered, from Goethe's 'Dichtung und
Wahrheit.' In that year Emily Bront was alone with her father and aunt
at Haworth, while her two sisters were teaching as governesses.
'Blackwood' came as usual, and one may surely imagine the long, thin
girl bending in the firelight over these pages from Goethe, receiving
the impress of their lucidity, their charm, their sentiment and 'natural
magic,' nourishing from them the vivid and masterly intelligence which
eight years later produced 'Wuthering Heights.'

But she was to make a nearer acquaintance with German thought and fancy
than could be got from the pages of 'Blackwood' and 'Fraser.' In 1842
she and Charlotte journeyed to Brussels, and there a certain divergence
seems to have declared itself between the literary tastes and affinities
of the two sisters. While Charlotte, who had already become an eager
reader of French books, and was at all times more ready to take the
colour of an environment than Emily, was carried, by the teaching of M.
Hger acting upon her special qualities and capacities, into that
profounder appreciation of the French Romantic spirit and method which
shows itself thenceforward in all her books, Emily set herself against
Brussels, against M. Hger, and against the French models that he was
constantly proposing to the sisters. She was homesick and miserable; her
attitude of mind was partly obstinacy, partly, perhaps, a matter of
instinctive and passionate preference. She learnt German diligently, and
it has always been assumed, though I hardly know on what first
authority, that she read a good deal of German fiction, and especially
Hoffmann's tales, at Brussels. Certainly, we hear of her in the
following year, when she was once more at Haworth, and Charlotte was
still at Brussels, as doing her household work 'with a German book open
beside her,' though we are not told what the books were; and, as I learn
from Mr. Shorter, there are indications that the small library Emily
left behind her contained much German literature.

Two years later, Charlotte, in 1845, discovered the poems which, at
least since 1834, Emily had been writing. 'It took hours,' says the
elder sister, 'to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to
persuade her that such poems merited publication.' But Charlotte
prevailed, and in 1846 Messrs. Aylott & Jones published the little
volume of 'Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.' It obtained no
success; but 'the mere effort to succeed,' says Charlotte, 'had given a
wonderful zest to existence; it must be pursued. We each set to work on
a prose tale: Ellis Bell produced "Wuthering Heights," Acton Bell "Agnes
Grey," and Currer Bell also wrote a narrative in one volume'--'The
Professor.' For a year and a half 'Wuthering Heights,' in common with
'Agnes Grey' and 'The Professor,' travelled wearily from publisher to
publisher. At last Messrs. Newby accepted the first two. But they
lingered in the press for months, and 'Wuthering Heights' appeared at
last, after the publication of 'Jane Eyre,' and amid the full noise of
its fame, only to be received as an earlier and cruder work of Currer
Bell's, for which even those who admired 'Jane Eyre' could find little
praise and small excuse. Emily seems to have shown not a touch of
jealousy or discouragement. She is not known, however, to have written
anything more than a few verses--amongst them, indeed, the immortal
'Last Lines'--later than 'Wuthering Heights,' and during the last year
of her life she seems to have given herself--true heart, and tameless
soul!--now to supporting her wretched brother through the final stages
of his physical and moral decay, and now to consultation with and
sympathy for Charlotte in the writing of 'Shirley.' Branwell died in
September, and Emily was already ill on the day of his funeral. By the
middle of December, at the age of thirty, she was dead; the struggle of
her iron will and passionate vitality with hampering circumstances was
over. The story of that marvellous dying has been often told, by
Charlotte first of all, then by Mrs. Gaskell, and again by Madame
Darmesteter, in the vivid study of Emily Bront, which represents the
homage of a new poetic generation. Let us recall Charlotte's poignant
sentences--


Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before
her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to
leave us. Yet while physically she perished, mentally she grew stronger
than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she
met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of wonder and love. I
have seen nothing like it; but indeed I have never seen her parallel in
anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood
alone. The awful point was, that while full of ruth for others, on
herself she had no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from
the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service
was exacted as in health. . . . She died December 19, 1848.


'Stronger than a man, simpler than a child:'--these words are Emily
Bront's true epitaph, both as an artist and as a human being. Her
strength of will and imagination struck those who knew her and those who
read her as often inhuman or terrible; and with this was combined a
simplicity partly of genius partly of a strange innocence and
spirituality, which gives her a place apart in English letters. It is
important to realise that of the three books written simultaneously by
the three sisters, Emily's alone shows genius already matured and master
of its tools. Charlotte had a steady development before her, especially
in matters of method and style; the comparative dulness of 'The
Professor,' and the crudities of 'Jane Eyre' made way for the
accomplished variety and brilliance of 'Villette.' But though Emily, had
she lived, might have chosen many happier subjects, treated with a more
flowing unity than she achieved in 'Wuthering Heights,' the full
competence of genius is already present in her book. The common, hasty,
didactic note that Charlotte often strikes is never heard in 'Wuthering
Heights.' The artist remains hidden and self-contained; the work,
however morbid and violent may be the scenes and creatures it presents,
has always that distinction which belongs to high talent working solely
for its own joy and satisfaction, with no thought of a spectator, or any
aim but that of an ideal and imaginative whole. Charlotte stops to think
of objectors, to teach and argue, to avenge her own personal grievances,
or cheat her own personal longings. For pages together, she often is
little more than the clever clergyman's daughter, with a sharp tongue, a
dislike to Ritualism and Romanism, a shrewd memory for persecutions and
affronts, and a weakness for that masterful lover of whom most young
women dream. But Emily is pure mind and passion; no one, from the pages
of 'Wuthering Heights' can guess at the small likes and dislikes, the
religious or critical antipathies, the personal weaknesses of the artist
who wrote it. She has that highest power--which was typically
Shakespeare's power, and which in our day is typically the power of such
an artist as Turgueniev--the power which gives life, intensest life, to
the creatures of imagination, and, in doing so, endows them with an
independence behind which the maker is forgotten. The puppet show is
everything; and, till it is over, the manager--nothing. And it is his
delight and triumph to have it so.

Yet, at the same time, 'Wuthering Heights' is a book of the later
Romantic movement, betraying the influences of German Romantic
imagination, as Charlotte's work betrays the influences of Victor Hugo
and George Sand. The Romantic tendency to invent and delight in
monsters, the _exaltation du moi_, which has been said to be the secret
of the whole Romantic revolt against classical models and restraints;
the love of violence in speech and action, the preference for the
hideous in character and the abnormal in situation--of all these there
are abundant examples in 'Wuthering Heights.' The dream of Mr. Lockwood
in Catherine's box bed, when in the terror of nightmare he pulled the
wrist of the little wailing ghost outside on to the broken glass of the
window, 'and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the
bed-clothes'--one of the most gruesome fancies of literature!--Heathcliff's
long and fiendish revenge on Hindley Earnshaw; the ghastly quarrel between
Linton and Heathcliff in Catherine's presence after Heathcliff's return;
Catherine's three days' fast, and her delirium when she 'tore the pillow
with her teeth;' Heathcliff dashing his head against the trees of her
garden, leaving his blood upon their bark, and 'howling, not like a man,
but like a savage beast being goaded to death with knives and spears;' the
fight between Heathcliff and Earnshaw after Heathcliff's marriage to
Isabella; the kidnapping of the younger Catherine, and the horror rather
suggested than described of Heathcliff's brutality towards his sickly
son:--all these things would not have been written precisely as they were
written, but for the 'Germanism' of the thirties and forties, but for the
translations of 'Blackwood' and 'Fraser,' and but for those German tales,
whether of Hoffmann or others, which there is evidence that Emily Bront
read both at Brussels and after her return.

As to the 'exaltation of the Self,' its claims, sensibilities and
passions, in defiance of all social law and duty, there is no more vivid
expression of it throughout Romantic literature than is contained in the
conversation between the elder Catherine and Nelly Dean before Catherine
marries Edgar Linton. And the violent, clashing egotisms of Heathcliff
and Catherine in the last scene of passion before Catherine's death, are
as it were an epitome of a whole _genre_ in literature, and a whole
phase of European feeling.

Nevertheless, horror and extravagance are not really the characteristic
mark and quality of 'Wuthering Heights.' If they were, it would have no
more claim upon us than a hundred other forgotten books--Lady Caroline
Lamb's 'Glenarvon' amongst them--which represent the dregs and refuse of
a great literary movement. As in the case of Charlotte Bront, the
peculiar force of Emily's work lies in the fact that it represents the
grafting of a European tradition upon a mind already richly stored with
English and local reality, possessing at command a style at once strong
and simple, capable both of homeliness and magnificence. The form of
Romantic imagination which influenced Emily was not the same as that
which influenced Charlotte; whether from a secret stubbornness and
desire of difference, or no, there is not a mention of the French
language, or of French books, in Emily's work, while Charlotte's abounds
in a kind of display of French affinities, and French scholarship. The
dithyrambs of 'Shirley' and 'Villette,' the 'Vision of Eve' of
'Shirley,' and the description of Rachel in 'Villette,' would have been
impossible to Emily; they come to a great extent from the reading of
Victor Hugo and George Sand. But in both sisters there is a similar
_fonds_ of stern and simple realism; a similar faculty of observation at
once shrewd, and passionate; and it is by these that they produce their
ultimate literary effect. The difference between them is almost wholly
in Emily's favour. The uneven, amateurish manner of so many pages in
'Jane Eyre' and 'Shirley;' the lack of literary reticence which is
responsible for Charlotte's frequent intrusion of her own personality,
and for her occasional temptations to scream and preach, which are not
wholly resisted even in her masterpiece 'Villette;' the ugly tawdry
sentences which disfigure some of her noblest passages, and make
quotation from her so difficult:--you will find none of these things in
'Wuthering Heights.' Emily is never flurried, never self-conscious; she
is master of herself at the most rushing moments of feeling or
narrative; her style is simple, sensuous, adequate and varied from first
to last; she has fewer purple patches than Charlotte, but at its best,
her insight no less than her power of phrase, is of a diviner and more
exquisite quality.




                                  III



'Wuthering Heights' then is the product of romantic imagination, working
probably under influences from German literature, and marvellously fused
with local knowledge and a realistic power which, within its own range,
has seldom been surpassed. Its few great faults are soon enumerated. The
tendency to extravagance and monstrosity may, as we have seen, be taken
to some extent as belonging more to a literary fashion than to the
artist. Tieck and Hoffmann are full of raving and lunatic beings who
sob, shout, tear out their hair by the roots, and live in a perpetual
state of personal violence both towards themselves and their neighbours.
Emily Bront probably received from them an additional impulse towards a
certain wildness of manner and conception which was already natural to
her Irish blood, to a woman brought up amid the solitudes of the moors
and the ruggedness of Yorkshire life fifty years ago, and natural also,
alas! to the sister of the opium-eater and drunkard Branwell Bront.

To this let us add a certain awkwardness and confusion of structure; a
strain of ruthless exaggeration in the character of Heathcliff; and some
absurdities and contradictions in the character of Nelly Dean. The
latter criticism indeed is bound up with the first. Nelly Dean is
presented as the faithful and affectionate nurse, the only good angel
both of the elder and the younger Catherine. But Nelly Dean does the
most treacherous, cruel, and indefensible things, simply that the story
may move. She becomes the go-between for Catherine and Heathcliff; she
knowingly allows her charge Catherine, on the eve of her confinement, to
fast in solitude and delirium for three days and nights, without saying
a word to Edgar Linton, Catherine's affectionate husband, and her
master, who was in the house all the time. It is her breach of trust
which brings about Catherine's dying scene with Heathcliff, just as it
is her disobedience and unfaith which really betray Catherine's child
into the hands of her enemies. Without these lapses and indiscretions
indeed the story could not maintain itself; but the clumsiness or
carelessness of them is hardly to be denied. In the case of Heathcliff,
the blemish lies rather in a certain deliberate and passionate defiance
of the reader's sense of humanity and possibility; partly also in the
innocence of the writer, who, in a world of sex and passion, has
invented a situation charged with the full forces of both, without any
true realisation of what she has done. Heathcliff's murderous language
to Catherine about the husband whom she loves with an affection only
second to that which she cherishes for his hateful self; his sordid and
incredible courtship of Isabella under Catherine's eyes; the long horror
of his pursuit and capture of the younger Catherine, his dead love's
child; the total incompatibility between his passion for the mother and
his mean ruffianism towards the daughter; the utter absence of any touch
of kindness even in his love for Catherine, whom he scolds and rates on
the very threshold of death; the mingling in him of high passion with
the vilest arts of the sharper and the thief:--these things o'erleap
themselves, so that again and again the sense of tragedy is lost in mere
violence and excess, and what might have been a man becomes a monster.
There are speeches and actions of Catherine's, moreover, contained in
these central pages which have no relation to any life of men and women
that the true world knows. It may be said indeed that the writer's very
ignorance of certain facts and relations of life, combined with the
force of imaginative passion which she throws into her conceptions,
produces a special poetic effect--a strange and bodiless tragedy--unique
in literature. And there is much truth in this; but not enough to
vindicate these scenes of the book, from radical weakness and falsity,
nor to preserve in the reader that illusion, that inner consent, which
is the final test of all imaginative effort.



                                   IV



Nevertheless there are whole sections of the story during which the
character of Heathcliff is presented to us with a marvellous and
essential truth. The scenes of childhood and youth; the up-growing of
the two desolate children, drawn to each other by some strange primal
sympathy, Heathcliff 'the little black thing, harboured by a good man to
his bane,' Catherine who 'was never so happy as when we were all
scolding her at once, and she defying us with her bold saucy look, and
her ready words;' the gradual development of the natural distance
between them, he the ill-mannered ruffianly no-man's-child, she the
young lady of the house; his pride and jealous pain; her young fondness
for Edgar Linton, as inevitable as a girl's yearning for pretty finery,
and a new frock with the spring; Heathcliff's boyish vow of vengeance on
the brutal Hindley and his race; Cathy's passionate discrimination, in
the scene with Nelly Dean which ends as it were the first act of the
play, between her affection for Linton and her identity with
Heathcliff's life and being:--for the mingling of daring poetry with the
easiest and most masterly command of local truth, for sharpness and
felicity of phrase, for exuberance of creative force, for invention and
freshness of detail, there are few things in English fiction to match
it. One might almost say that the first volume of 'Adam Bede' is false
and mannered beside it,--the first volumes of 'Waverley' or 'Guy
Mannering' flat and diffuse. Certainly, the first volume of 'Jane Eyre,'
admirable as it is, can hardly be set on the same level with the
careless ease and effortless power of these first nine chapters. There
is almost nothing in them but shares in the force and the effect of all
true 'vision'--Joseph, 'the wearisomest self-righteous Pharisee that
ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself, and fling the
curses to his neighbours;' old Earnshaw himself, stupid, obstinate and
kindly; the bullying Hindley with his lackadaisical consumptive wife;
the delicate nurture and superior wealth of the Lintons; the very
animals of the farm, the very rain- and snow-storms of the moors,--all
live, all grow together, like the tangled heather itself, harsh and
gnarled and ugly in one aspect, in another beautiful by its mere
unfettered life and freedom, capable too of wild moments of colour and
blossoming.

And as far as the lesser elements of style, the mere technique of
writing are concerned, one may notice the short elastic vigour of the
sentences, the rightness of epithet and detail, the absence of any care
for effect, and the flashes of beauty which suddenly emerge like the
cistus upon the rock.


'Nelly, do you never dream queer dreams?' said Catherine suddenly, after
some minutes' reflection.

'Yes, now and then,' I answered.

'And so do I. I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me
ever after and changed my ideas: they've gone through and through me
like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind. And this
one; I'm going to tell it--but take care not to smile at any part of
it.'


Nelly Dean tries to avoid the dream, but Catherine persists:--


'I dreamt once that I was in heaven.'

'I tell you I won't hearken to your dreams, Miss Catherine! I'll go to
bed,' I interrupted again.

She laughed, and held me down; for I made a motion to leave my chair.

'This is nothing,' cried she: 'I was only going to say that heaven did
not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back
to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the
middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke
sobbing for joy! That will do to explain my secret, as well as the
other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in
heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so
low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry
Heathcliff now; so he shall 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 are made of, his find mine are the same; and Linton's
is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.'


'The angels flung me out into the middle of the heath--where I woke
sobbing for joy'--the wild words have in them the very essence and
life-blood not only of Catherine but of her creator!

The inferior central scenes of the book, after Catherine's marriage, for
all their teasing faults, have passages of extraordinary poetry. Take
the detail of Catherine's fevered dream after she shuts herself into her
room, at the close of the frightful scene between her husband and
Heathcliff, or the weird realism of her half-delirious talk with Nelly
Dean. In her 'feverish bewilderment' she tears her pillow, and then
finds


childish diversion in pulling the feathers from the rents she had just
made, and ranging them on the sheet according to their different
species: her mind had strayed to other associations.

'That's a turkey's,' she murmured to herself; 'and this is a wild
duck's; and this is a pigeon's. Ah, they put pigeons' feathers in the
pillows--no wonder I couldn't die! Let me take care to throw it on the
floor when I lie down. And here is a moor-cock's; and this--I should
know it among a thousand--it's a lapwing's. Bonny bird; wheeling over
our heads in the middle of the moor. It wanted to get to its nest, for
the clouds had touched the swells, and it felt rain coming. This feather
was picked up from the heath, the bird was not shot: we saw its nest in
the winter, full of little skeletons. Heathcliff set a trap over it, and
the old ones dared not come. I made him promise he'd never shoot a
lapwing after that, and he didn't. Yes, here are more! Did he shoot my
lapwings, Nelly? Are they red, any of them? Let me look.'

'Give over with that baby-work!' I interrupted, dragging the pillow
away, and turning the holes towards the mattress, for she was removing
its contents by handfuls. 'Lie down, and shut your eyes: you're
wandering. There's a mess! The down is flying about like snow.'

I went here and there collecting it.

'I see in you, Nelly,' she continued, dreamily, 'an aged woman: you have
grey hair and bent shoulders. This bed is the fairy cave under Penistone
Crags, and you are gathering elf-bolts to hurt our heifers; pretending,
while I am near, that they are only locks of wool. That's what you'll
come to fifty years hence: I know you are not so now. I'm not wandering:
you're mistaken, or else I should believe you really _were_ that
withered hag, and I should think I _was_ under Penistone Crags; and I'm
conscious it's night, and there are two candles on the table making the
black press shine like jet.'


To these may be added the charming and tender passage describing
Catherine's early convalescence, and her yearnings--so true to such a
child of nature and feeling--for the first flowers and first mild
breathings of the spring; and the later picture of her, the wrecked and
doomed Catherine, sitting in 'dreamy and melancholy softness' by the
open window, listening for the sounds of the moorland, before the
approach of Heathcliff and death:--


Gimmerton chapel bells were still ringing; and the full mellow flow of
the beck in the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet
substitute for the yet absent murmur of the summer foliage, which
drowned that music about the Grange when the trees were in leaf. At
Wuthering Heights it always sounded on quiet days following a great thaw
or a season of steady rain.


Lines which, for their 'sharp and eager observation,' may surely be
matched with these of Coleridge, her master in poetic magic, her
inferior in all that concerns the passionate and dramatic sense of
life:--


                                     All is still,
          A balmy night! and though the stars be dim,
          Yet let us think upon the vernal showers
          That gladden the green earth, and we shall find
          A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.



                                   V



Of what we may call the third and last act of 'Wuthering Heights,' which
extends from the childhood of the younger Catherine to the death of
Heathcliff, much might be said. It is no less masterly than the first
section of the book and much more complex in plan. The key to it lies in
two earlier passages--in Heathcliff's boyish vow of vengence on Hindley
Earnshaw, and in his fierce appeal to his lost love to haunt him, rather
than leave him 'in this abyss where I cannot find her.' The conduct of
the whole 'act' is intricate and difficult; the initial awkwardness
implied in Nelly Dean's function as narrator is felt now and then; but
as a whole, the strength of the intention is no less clear than the
deliberate and triumphant power with which the artist achieves it. These
chapters are not always easy to read, but they repay the closest
attention. Not an incident, not a fragment of conversation is thrown
away, and in the end the effect is complete. It is gained by that fusion
of terror and beauty, of ugliness and a flying magic--'settling
unawares'--which is the characteristic note of the Bronts, and of all
that is best in Romantic literature. Never for a moment do you lose hold
upon the Yorkshire landscape and the Yorkshire folk--look at the picture
of Isabella's wasteful porridge-making and of Joseph's grumbling rage,
amid her gruesome experience as a bride; never are you allowed to forget
a single sordid element in Heathcliff's ruffianism; and yet through it
all the inevitable end developes, the double end which only a master
could have conceived. Life and love rebel and reassert themselves in the
wild slight love-story of Hareton and Cathy, which break the final
darkness like a gleam of dawn upon the moors; and death tames and
silences for ever all that remains of Heathcliff's futile cruelties and
wasted fury.

But what a death! Heathcliff has tormented and oppressed Catherine's
daughter; and it is Catherine's shadow that lures him to his doom,
through every stage and degree of haunting feverish ecstasy, of reunion
promised and delayed, of joy for ever offered and for ever withdrawn.
And yet how simple the method, how true the 'vision' to the end! Around
Heathcliff's last hours the farm-life flows on as usual. There is no
hurry in the sentences; no blurring of the scene. Catherine's haunting
presence closes upon the man who murdered her happiness and youth,
interposes between him and all bodily needs, deprives him of food and
drink and sleep, till the madman is dead of his 'strange happiness,'
straining after the phantom that slays him, dying of the love whereby
alone he remains human, through which fate strikes at last--and strikes
home.

'Is he a ghoul or vampire?' I mused. 'I had read of such hideous
incarnate demons.' So says Nelly Dean just before Heathcliff's death.
The remark is not hers in truth, but Emily Bront's, and where it stands
it is of great significance. It points to the world of German horror and
romance, to which we know that she had access. That world was congenial
to her, as it was congenial to Southey, Scott, and Coleridge; and it has
left some ugly and disfiguring traces upon the detail of 'Wuthering
Heights.' But _essentially_ her imagination escaped from it and mastered
it. As the haunting of Heathcliff is to the coarser horrors of Tieck and
Hoffmann, so is her place to theirs. For all her crudity and
inexperience, she is in the end with Goethe, rather than with Hoffmann,
[5] and thereby with all that is sane, strong, and living in literature.
'A great work requires many-sidedness, and on this rock the young author
splits,' said Goethe to Eckermann, praising at the same time the art
which starts from the simplest realities and the subject nearest at
hand, to reach at last by a natural expansion the loftiest heights of
poetry. But this was the art of Emily Bront. It started from her own
heart and life; it was nourished by the sights and sounds of a lonely
yet sheltering nature; it was responsive to the art of others, yet
always independent; and in the rich and tangled truth of 'Wuthering
Heights' it showed promise at least of a many-sidedness to which only
the greatest attain.



                                   VI



But death came, swift and unforeseen. The artist sank--

                 Baffled, unknown, self-consumed,--

and her place has but slowly defined itself among us. To its final
determination we have to bring of course not only 'Wuthering Heights,'
but the poems which were printed in the volume of 1846, as well as those
which Charlotte selected and published after Emily's death. In the
volume of 1846 there are twenty-two poems by Ellis Bell, and in the
later selections seventeen. Of these it is now recognised that at least
six or seven belong--in spite of some technical blemishes--to what is
noblest and most vital in English verse. Like Coleridge, she wrote much
that is of no account; and if nothing that she did can claim a place
beside the 'Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel,' she strikes at her
highest a note of concentrated passion of which Coleridge was not
capable. The poem written in her sixteenth year in the school-room at
Roehead has already the _mastery_ which distinguishes her verse from her
sister's, which marks out 'Wuthering Heights' from the 'Professor,' and
remains with any discriminating reader as the dominant impression of her
work:--


              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.


Is there a word to add, or a word to take away? For any lover and child
of the North in particular, is not every verse steeped in suggestion,
which produces that 'frisson jusqu' la moelle des os,' which, as M.
Scherer tells us, a Frenchman gets from the mere _sound_ of Racine?

The tender, unequal lines called 'A Wanderer from the Fold' are less
well known, but no one who is acquainted with the history of Branwell
Bront and of Emily's sorrow for him can read them without emotion, so
true they are to one of the commonest and deepest griefs of the human
spirit. There is an echo of Byron in them--the Byron of the poems to
Thyrza: but it is their personal truth, their root in reality, what
Goethe would call their 'occasional' quality, that preserves them. In
the two noble poems 'Remembrance' and 'Death,' we have her gift at its
greatest--impassioned feeling speaking through adequate and impassioned
form; while in 'The Visionary' one might almost dream that one had
Emily's last word to that guardian power of poetry, to which she and her
sisters owed all the joy of their frail lives.


       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!


Yet not the last word of her hidden, her profoundest self! That is
contained in the wonderful poem--


                          Whose too bold dying song
             Shook, like a clarion-blast, my soul--


in the verses now called 'Last Lines,' which Charlotte discovered in the
writer's desk after her death. Emily's religious faith was a mystery in
life, but in dying she gave it voice, and it is the voice of her
century--a cry in which is summed up, as it were, the sound of many
waters, and the last but sufficient consolation of innumerable souls.



                              Introduction
                                   to
                      The Tenant of Wildfell Hall



Anne Bront serves a twofold purpose in the study of what the Bronts
wrote and were. In the first place, her gentle and delicate presence,
her sad, short story, her hard life and early death, enter deeply into
the poetry and tragedy that have always been entwined with the memory of
the Bronts, as women and as writers; in the second, the books and poems
that she wrote serve as matter of comparison by which to test the
greatness of her two sisters. She is the measure of their genius--like
them, yet not with them.

Many years after Anne's death her brother-in-law protested against a
supposed portrait of her, as giving a totally wrong impression of the
'dear, gentle, Anne Bront.' 'Dear' and 'gentle' indeed she seems to
have been through life, the youngest and prettiest of the sisters, with
a delicate complexion, a slender neck, and small, pleasant features.
Notwithstanding, she possessed in full the Bront seriousness, the
Bront strength of will. When her father asked her at four years old
what a little child like her wanted most, the tiny creature replied--if
it were not a Bront it would be incredible!--'Age and experience.' When
the three children started their 'Island Plays' together in 1827, Anne,
who was then eight, chose Guernsey for her imaginary island, and peopled
it with 'Michael Sadler, Lord Bentinck, and Sir Henry Halford.' She and
Emily were constant companions, and there is evidence that they shared a
common world of fancy from very early days to mature womanhood. 'The
Gondal Chronicles' seem to have amused them for many years, and to have
branched out into innumerable books, written in the 'tiny writing' of
which Mr. Clement Shorter has given us facsimiles. 'I am now engaged in
writing the fourth volume of Solala Vernon's Life,' says Anne at
twenty-one. And four years later Emily says, 'The Gondals still flourish
bright as ever. I am at present writing a work on the First War. Anne
has been writing some articles on this and a book by Henry Sophona. We
intend sticking firm by the rascals as long as they delight us, which I
am glad to say they do at present.'

That the author of 'Wildfell Hall' should ever have delighted in the
Gondals, should ever have written the story of Solala Vernon or Henry
Sophona, is pleasant to know. Then, for her too, as for her sisters
there was a moment when the power of 'making out' could turn loneliness
and disappointment into riches and content. For a time at least, and
before a hard and degrading experience had broken the spring of her
youth, and replaced the disinterested and spontaneous pleasure that is
to be got from the life and play of imagination, by a sad sense of duty,
and an inexorable consciousness of moral and religious mission, Anne
Bront wrote stories for her own amusement, and loved the 'rascals' she
created.

But already in 1841, when we first hear of the Gondals and Solala
Vernon, the material for quite other books was in poor Anne's mind. She
was then teaching in the family at Thorpe Green, where Branwell joined
her as tutor in 1843, and where, owing to events that are still a
mystery, she seems to have passed through an ordeal that left her
shattered in health and nerve, with nothing gained but those melancholy
and repulsive memories that she was afterwards to embody in 'Wildfell
Hall.' She seems, indeed, to have been partly the victim of Branwell's
morbid imagination, the imagination of an opium-eater and a drunkard.
That he was neither the conqueror nor the villain that he made his
sisters believe, all the evidence that has been gathered since Mrs.
Gaskell wrote goes to show. But poor Anne believed his account of
himself, and no doubt saw enough evidence of vicious character in
Branwell's daily life to make the worst enormities credible. She seems
to have passed the last months of her stay at Thorpe Green under a cloud
of dread and miserable suspicion, and was thankful to escape from her
situation in the summer of 1845. At the same moment Branwell was
summarily dismissed from his tutorship, his employer, Mr. Bobinson,
writing a stern letter of complaint to Branwell's father, concerned no
doubt with the young man's disorderly and intemperate habits. Mrs.
Gaskell says: 'The premature deaths of two at least of the sisters--all
the great possibilities of their earthly lives snapped short--may be
dated from Midsummer 1845.' The facts as we now know them hardly bear
out so strong a judgment. There is nothing to show that Branwell's
conduct was responsible in any way for Emily's illness and death, and
Anne, in the contemporary fragment recovered by Mr. Shorter, gives a
less tragic account of the matter. 'During my stay (at Thorpe Green),'
she writes on July 31, 1845, 'I have had some very unpleasant and
undreamt-of experience of human nature. . . . Branwell has . . . been a
tutor at Thorpe Green, and had much tribulation and ill-health. . . . We
hope he will be better and do better in future.' And at the end of the
paper she says, sadly, forecasting the coming years, 'I for my part
cannot well be flatter or older in mind than I am now.' This is the
language of disappointment and anxiety; but it hardly fits the tragic
story that Mrs. Gaskell believed.

That story was, no doubt, the elaboration of Branwell's diseased fancy
during the three years which elapsed between his dismissal from Thorpe
Green and his death. He imagined a guilty romance with himself and his
employer's wife for characters, and he imposed the horrid story upon his
sisters. Opium and drink are the sufficient explanations; and no time
need now be wasted upon unravelling the sordid mystery. But the vices of
the brother, real or imaginary, have a certain importance in literature,
because of the effect they produced upon his sisters. There can be no
question that Branwell's opium madness, his bouts of drunkenness at the
Black Bull, his violence at home, his free and coarse talk, and his
perpetual boast of guilty secrets, influenced the imagination of his
wholly pure and inexperienced sisters. Much of 'Wuthering Heights,' and
all of 'Wildfell Hall,' show Branwell's mark, and there are many
passages in Charlotte's books also, where those who know the history of
the parsonage can hear the voice of those sharp moral repulsions, those
dismal moral questionings, to which Branwell's misconduct and ruin gave
rise. Their brother's fate was an element in the genius of Emily and
Charlotte which they were strong enough to assimilate, which may have
done them some harm, and weakened in them certain delicate or sane
perceptions, but was ultimately, by the strange alchemy of talent, far
more profitable than hurtful, inasmuch as it troubled the waters of the
soul, and brought them near to the more desperate realities of our
'frail, fall'n humankind.'

But Anne was not strong enough, her gift was not vigorous enough, to
enable her thus to transmute experience and grief. The probability is
that when she left Thorpe Green in 1845 she was already suffering from
that religious melancholy of which Charlotte discovered such piteous
evidence among her papers after death. It did not much affect the
writing of 'Agnes Grey,' which was completed in 1846, and reflected the
minor pains and discomforts of her teaching experience, but it combined
with the spectacle of Branwell's increasing moral and physical decay to
produce that bitter mandate of conscience under which she wrote 'The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall.'

Hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature. She hated
her work, but would pursue it. It was written as a warning,'--so said
Charlotte when, in the pathetic Preface of 1850, she was endeavouring to
explain to the public how a creature so gentle and so good as Acton Bell
should have written such a book as 'Wildfell Hall.' And in the second
edition of 'Wildfell Hall' which appeared in 1848 Anne Bront herself
justified her novel in a Preface which is reprinted in this volume for
the first time. The little preface is a curious document. It has the
same determined didactic tone which pervades the book itself, the same
narrowness of view, and inflation of expression, an inflation which is
really due not to any personal egotism in the writer, but rather to that
very gentleness and inexperience which must yet nerve itself under the
stimulus of religion to its disagreeable and repulsive task. 'I knew
that such characters'--as Huntingdon and his companions--'do exist, and
if I have warned one rash youth from following in their steps the book
has not been written in vain.' If the story has given more pain than
pleasure to 'any honest reader,' the writer 'craves his pardon, for
such was far from my intention.' But at the same time she cannot promise
to limit her ambition to the giving of innocent pleasure, or to the
production of 'a perfect work of art.' 'Time and talent so spent I
should consider wasted and misapplied.' God has given her unpalatable
truths to speak and she must speak them.

The measure of misconstruction and abuse therefore which her book
brought upon her she bore, says her sister, 'as it was her custom to
bear whatever was unpleasant, with mild, steady patience. She was a very
sincere and practical Christian, but the tinge of religious melancholy
communicated a sad shade to her brief, blameless life.'

In spite of misconstruction and abuse, however, 'Wildfell Hall' seems
to have attained more immediate success than anything else written by
the sisters before 1848, except 'Jane Eyre.' It went into a second
edition within a very short time of its publication, and Messrs. Kewby
informed the American publishers with whom they were negotiating that it
was the work of the same hand which had produced 'Jane Eyre,' and
superior to either 'Jane Eyre' or 'Wuthering Heights'! It was, indeed,
the sharp practice connected with this astonishing judgment which led to
the sisters' hurried journey to London in 1848--the famous journey when
the two little ladies in black revealed themselves to Mr. Smith, and
proved to him that they were not one Currer Bell, but two Miss Bronts.
It was Anne's sole journey to London--her only contact with a world that
was not Haworth, except that supplied by her school-life at Roehead and
her two teaching engagements.

And there was and is a considerable narrative ability, a sheer moral
energy in 'Wildfell Hall,' which would not be enough, indeed, to keep it
alive if it were not the work of a Bront, but still betray its kinship
and source. The scenes of Huntingdon's wickedness are less interesting
but less improbable than the country-house scenes of 'Jane Eyre'; the
story of his death has many true and touching passages; the last
love-scene is well, even in parts admirably written. But the book's
truth, so far as it is true, is scarcely the truth of imagination; it is
rather the truth of a tract or a report. There can be little doubt that
many of the pages are close transcripts from Branwell's conduct and
language,--so far as Anne's slighter personality enabled her to render
her brother's temperament, which was more akin to Emily's than to her
own. The same material might have been used by Emily or Charlotte;
Emily, as we know, did make use of it in 'Wuthering Heights;' but only
after it had passed through that ineffable transformation, that
mysterious, incommunicable heightening which makes and gives rank in
literature. Some subtle, innate correspondence between eye and brain,
between brain and hand, was present in Emily and Charlotte, and absent
in Anne. There is no other account to be given of this or any other case
of difference between serviceable talent and the high gifts of 'Delos'
and Patara's own 'Apollo.'

The same world of difference appears between her poems and those of her
playfellow and comrade Emily. If ever our descendants should establish
the schools for writers which are even now threatened or attempted, they
will hardly know perhaps any better than we what genius is, nor how it
can be produced. But if they try to teach by example, then Anne and
Emily Bront are ready to their hand. Take the verses written by Emily
at Roehead which contain the lovely lines which I have already quoted in
an earlier 'Introduction.' [6] Just before those lines there are two or
three verses which it is worth while to compare with a poem of Anne's
called 'Home.' Emily was sixteen at the time of writing; Anne about
twenty-one or twenty-two. Both sisters take for their motive the exile's
longing thought of home. Emily's lines are full of faults, but they have
the indefinable quality--here, no doubt, only in the bud, only as a
matter of promise--which Anne's are entirely without. From the twilight
schoolroom at Roehead, Emily turns in thought to tho distant upland of
Haworth and the little stone-built house upon its crest:--


               'There is a spot, 'mid barren hills,
                 Where winter howls, and driving rain;
               But, if the dreary tempest chills.
                 There is a light that warms again.

               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!


Anne's verses, written from one of the houses where she was a governess,
expresses precisely the same feeling, and movement of mind. But notice
the instinctive rightness and swiftness of Emily's, the blurred weakness
of Anne's!--


               '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 gray walls compassed round.
               Where knotted grass neglected lies.
                 And weeds usurp the ground.

               Though all around this mansion high
                 Invites the foot to roam.
               And though its halls are fair within--
                 Oh, give me back my Home!'


A similar parallel lies between Anne's lines 'Domestic Peace,'--a sad
and true reflection of the terrible times with Branwell in 1846, and
Emily's 'Wanderer from the Fold'; while in Emily's 'Last Lines,' the
daring spirit of the sister to whom the magic gift was granted separates
itself for ever from the gentle and accustomed piety of the sister to
whom it was denied. Yet Anne's 'Last Lines'--'I hoped that with the
brave and strong'--have sweetness and sincerity; they have gained and
kept a place in English religious verse, and they must always appeal to
those who love the Bronts because, in the language of Christian faith
and submission, they record the death of Emily and the passionate
affection which her sisters bore her.

And so we are brought back to the point from which we started. It is not
as the writer of 'Wildfell Hall,' but as the sister of Charlotte and
Emily Bront that Anne Bront escapes oblivion--s the frail 'little
one,' upon whom the other two lavished a tender and protecting care, who
was a witness of Emily's death, and herself, within a few minutes of her
own farewell to life, bade Charlotte 'take courage.'

'When my thoughts turn to Anne,' said Charlotte many years earlier,
'they always see her as a patient, persecuted stranger,--more lonely,
less gifted with the power of making friends even than I am.' Later on,
however, this power of making friends seems to have belonged to Anne in
greater measure than to the others. Her gentleness conquered; she was
not set apart, as they were, by the lonely and self-sufficing activities
of great powers; her Christianity, though sad and timid, was of a kind
which those around her could understand; she made no grim fight with
suffering and death as did Emily. Emily was 'torn' from life 'conscious,
panting, reluctant,' to use Charlotte's own words; Anne's 'sufferings
were mild,' her mind 'generally serene,' and at the last 'she thanked
God that death was come, and come so gently.' When Charlotte returned to
the desolate house at Haworth, Emily's large house-dog and Anne's little
spaniel welcomed her in 'a strange, heart-touching way,' she writes to
Mr. Williams. She alone was left, heir to all the memories and tragedies
of the house. She took up again the task of life and labour. She cared
for her father; she returned to the writing of 'Shirley'; and when she
herself passed away, four years later, she had so turned those years to
account that not only all she did but all she loved had passed silently
into the keeping of fame. Mrs. Gaskell's touching and delightful task
was ready for her, and Anne, no less than Charlotte and Emily, was sure
of England's remembrance.


                                                          MARY A. WARD.


                               Footnotes


[1] The last issue of this new edition will consist of Mrs. Gaskell's
_Life of Charlotte Bront_, edited and brought up to date by Mr. Clement
Shorter, with the help of all that store of fresh biographical material,
concerning not only Charlotte Bront but Emily and Anne also, which he
has been some years patiently accumulating. To that book we all look
forward. Meanwhile the aim of these Introductions is only biographical
so far as the suggestions of biography are necessary to literary
understanding.


[2] _Nineteenth Century Literature_, p. 319.


[3] Sydney Dobell's brilliant and sympathetic paper (which has been
republished in his _Life and Works_) is marred by the obstinacy with
which, in spite of the disclaimer in the preface to _Shirley_, he
persists in attributing both _Wuthering Heights_ and _Wildfell Hall_ to
Currer Bell. But apart from this fundamental mistake, which betrays
surely a curious insensibility to the determining facts of style, the
paper is full of clear insight expressed in sharp and subtle phrase. It
is the language of a new criticism, while Miss Rigby's article in the
_Quarterly_, which preceded it by a few weeks, represents the narrow
vigour and violence of a declining school, the school of Croker and
Lockhart.


[4] First printed by Mr. Shorter in _Charlotte Bront and her Circle_,
p. 169 The whole series of these Williams letters form an invaluable
addition to our knowledge of the Bronts.


[5] For any one who has waded through Hoffmann's
_Serapion-brder_--which has become for our generation all but
unreadable,--in spite of the partial explanation which the _physical
violence_ of these tales may perhaps offer of some of the minor detail
of _Wuthering Heights_, there is only one passage which memory will in
the end connect with Emily Bront. The leading idea of the stories which
make up the Serapion collection--if they can be said to have a leading
idea--is that all which the imagination really _sees_--man or goblin,
monster or reality--it may lawfully report. 'Let each of us try and
examine himself well, as whether he has really _seen_ what he is going
to describe, before he sets to work to put it in words.' The vividness
of the Romantics,--as compared with the measure of the Classicalists;
there is here a typical expression of it, and it is one which may well
have lingered in Emily Bront's mind.


[6] Introduction to _Wuthering Heights_, p. xxxix. * Still, as I mused,
the naked room,' &c.




[End of _The Bront Prefaces_
by Mrs. Humphry Ward]
