Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Jane Austen; studies in their works

Contents

I. CHARLOTTE BRONTE. page

(fl) Her Realism 3

(F) Her Attitude towards Nature 53

II

There were popular writers in Miss Bronte's day, too, who are known now only to students of literature. Richardson and Fielding had, each in his own way, marked a path for Realism to follow, but it was not heeded. The love of the marvellous, formerly fostered by the drama, and checked for awhile by Goldsmith, and in a minor way by such books as * Evelina ' and * Cecilia ' (for artificial as her style was, and highly improbable as were some of her incidents. Miss Burney's pictures were in general accord with the principles of realism), found full vent again in the * Mysteries of Udolpho,' and in the lucubrations of ' Monk' Lewis and 'Anastasius' Hope. While Miss Bronte had, in her formative period, only such knowledge of literature as the parsonage afforded, and while beyond certain standard poets and historians it did not afford much ; ^ while her reading was necessarily desultory,

1 'Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle,' by Clement K. Shorter, London : New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1896. p. 23.

2 We know from ' Shirley ' what the Bronte library consisted of in part : " mad Methodist magazines, full of miracles and apparitions, and preternatural warnings, ominous dreams and frenzied fanaticisms ; " all of which came from the maternal forbears in Cornwall. It was not until the pleasant relations with her publishers were established that she was put in command of a full supply of literature ; and the flood that set in then is an index to the previous drouth. In the earlier days there was no such assistance, and no time for extended reading even if the means had been present.

as the time for it had to be snatched from household drudgery, needlework, and the mistaken art-practising, and the nearest circulating library could be reached only by a stiff four-mile walk over the moors to Keighley (in 1848 we find her complaining that no circulating library is accessible), she had doubtless dipped into the romance writers enough to appreciate their general faults, and to criticise the same in her preface to ' The Professor.'

The story-tellers whose fame was noisiest in Miss Bronte's early days might be divided into two classes, the ultra-romantic and the tiresomely didactic. An encyclopedic list of these would be interesting as showing how like a breeze from a new sphere 'Jane Eyre' and 'Vanity Fair' scattered their unrealities and impossibilities. They are for the most part forgotten, and only by forcibly carrying the attention back to them can we rightly understand what the originality of Charlotte Bronte and Thackeray meant in 1847.

As good specimens as any of the first class are Jane Porter, whose ' Thaddeus of Warsaw ' gained such honors (but who reads it now?) ; the Lee sisters, from one of the ' Canterbury Tales ' of whom Byron "borrowed" his 'Werner,' — if, indeed, 'Werner ' was written by Byron, and not by the Duchess of Devonshire, as the Hon. Frederick Levison-Gower now claims ; ^ Mrs. Radcliffe, of lurid memory ; ' Fatal Revenge ' Maturin ; the gratefully recalled G. P. R. James, with his solitary horseman, his pale moonlight, and his lonely inn ; to say nothing of the much-toanswer-for Ainsworth, with his Jack Sheppards and Dick Turpins.

^ Nineteenth Century, August, 1899.

In the second division repose, among others, Mrs. Opie ; Anna Maria Porter, the child friend of Scott; Hannah More; Maria Edgeworth, and Miss Landon ; and that Mrs. Sherwood who in the working heyday of her hfe produced ninety books.^ It is significant that the typical didacticists are women. They were forced into it, positively, by an honest natural feminine desire to save fiction, through morality, from utter pruriency, and negatively, by a lack of inspiration to accomplish the reform along the lines of the highest art. It is easy enough for us to laugh at Miss Edgeworth's ' Moral Tales ; ' we ought to think a little, in her justification, of what she was trying to escape from.^

Other novelists still famous in Miss Bronte's day who may not be classified so easily were : William Godwin, whose writings she did not know, as she asks to see them in 1849; ^ Henry Mackenzie, whose voice comes down to us a mixed echo of Richardson and Sterne ; that sprightly woman, Miss Ferrier; William Carleton and Gerald Griffin, two Irish realists before the days of realism ; the excellent Miss Mitford ; and the ephem-

1 Mrs. Sherwood is, curiously enough, omitted from such works as the 'Encyclopedia Britannica ' and the 'Library of the World's Best Literature.' If such works of reference are intended to chronicle only those of the past who live in the present, her name would certainly be one of the first to be dropped ; but the author of ' Roxobel ' — still, admired by grandmothers and maiden aunts in primitive homes — surely deserves mention in any book which professes to be not only a recorder of the living dead, but a mausoleum also to the dead dead.

2 It is just to Miss Edgeworth's memory to say that, but for the didactic interference of her father, the popularity of her works would have remained ; and that, notwithstanding this interference, such novels as ' Castle Rackrent,' ' Belinda,' and ' Patronage,' have a fixed place in literary history, and may still be enjoyed by the judicious.

eral but fashionable Mrs. Gore.^ I was about to put Samuel Warren in the list, but Miss Bronte probably read ' Ten Thousand A Year,' as it came from Blackwood's, the one strictly literary periodical taken in at the parsonage up to 1832, when Frascr' s was subscribed to for a short period.

In none of these had Charlotte Bronte any lot or share.^ Surely the remarkable circumstance of her criticism of Miss Austen is, not that it differs from Sir Walter Scott's (and nearly everybody else's, too), but because of its revelation that she had never seen such a book as ' Pride and Prejudice,' which had then been in print thirty-five years. We are fain to overlook in Charlotte Bronte what in others would seem a slight upon that delightful recorder of tittle-tattle and charming precursor of Trollope. The reader of the biography knows that she was, as a child, uncommonly

^ Among the " curiosities of literature " which I occasionally take down from a dusty top-shelf, I value for the suggestions it invariably awakens a certain sadly faded set of twelvemos, in the doubtful binding of the early '30's, and bearing the imprint of the Messrs. Harper. They are reprints of the most popular of such of the above as had fallen from the press by that time ; and the accompanying advertisement of the publishers, long since turned yellow, mentions these productions as " fashionable," in contradistinction to the " standard " work noted on the opposite leaf. Fancy the impossibility of such a distinction between fiction and other literature to-day! Yet for the most part, the distinction was deserved then. Only since then has the novel taken on its more serious side, assuming to itself the characteristics of all the other forms of literature also.

^ She says, in a letter to Mr. Williams : " The plot of 'Jane Eyre ' maybe a hackneyed one. Mr. Thackeray remarks that it is familiar to him. But having read comparatively few novels, I never chanced to meet with it, and I thought it original. . . . The Weekly Chronicle seems inclined to identify me with Mrs. Marsh. I never had the pleasure of perusing a line of Mrs. Marsh's in my life." — Shorter, p. 404.

lo Charlotte Bronte

studious, and that her schoolmates were wont to look up to her as a prodigy of learning. It is safe to surmise that of the books she recommends to Ellen Nussey in her letter of July 4, 1834/ she had read a goodly number, if not all, herself; and the list is valuable as showing that, however high the omissions, there were still higher inclusions. But that she was not a trained student is evident. Outside of Blackwood' s she had but little acquaintance with contemporary writers. The favorite heroes of the youthful ' Magazine ' were, almost without exception, the famous politicians of the day, — were not literary heroes. The natural periods or turning-points of literary history were not known to her ; and she was therefore without any thorough understanding of their reciprocal relations and their influence upon subsequent writing. Her reference to Mr. Atkinson's book as " the first exposition of avowed atheism and materialism " she had ever read,^ shows she had no acquaintance with the free thought of the preceding century; and if any speculative writing had come in her way (which the environment forbids us to suppose), it is clear from the tone of her letters pertaining to this period that it would have been considered unsafe for a young woman's perusal. Whether consciously or unconsciously, and without necessarily affecting his originality, nearly every writer is influenced by some predecessor. Bulwer traces to Godwin, Dumas to Scott. The literary father of Dickens is Goldsmith, and his uncles are Smollett and Sterne ; while Smollett, for his part, is a disciple of Lesage, and Sterne is the English Rabelais. Much as Thackeray differs from Fielding, if it had not been

for Fielding, he would have dififered more. And Fielding's prototype, on his own confession, was Cervantes. But whence came Charlotte Bronte? Stand on the old gray steps of that Haworth parsonage, and cry out the question over the moors billowing up from the horizon to your feet. Echo will answer "Whence?"

There never was author of highest rank so uninfluenced by, because there never was one so unconscious of, literary models. Even the French trash she read to perfect her knowledge of that tongue — a dangerous experiment with less elemental natures — was without any effect upon her modes.-^ Her object

1 So high an authority as Mrs. Humphry Ward thinks differently. [' Jane Eyre.' Haworth edition. New York. Harper & Bros., 1S99. Introduction, pp. xxvii-xxx.] There is no more proof, however, that the bale of French books whicli Cliarlotte acknowledges receiving in 1840 contained Hugo and De Musset (the possibility of which Mrs. Ward hints at) than that it contained the merely ephemeral writers of the day. Why might it not just as well have held the delectable fiction of the Countess Dash ? George Sand may have had some influence upon her style. But the point here contended for is the absolute independence of her jc/m ; and Mrs. Ward admits that the differences between the two are fundamental, and that Charlotte Bronte's stuj^ is " English, Protestant, law-respecting, conventional even."

She had only a qualified regard for the French woman. She writes Lewes, in 1S48, that she never saw any of her works which she admired throughout, and thinks that ' Consuelo ' couples " strange extravagance with wondrous excellence." [Gaskell, p. 361 ] ' Jane Eyre ' and ' Shirley ' were published before she had read " some of Balzac's and George Sand's novels," which Lewes " lent her," in 1850, " to take with her into the country," and which she returned with the criticism that George Sand is often a "fantastic, fanatical, unpractical enthusiast," "far from truthful " in " many of her views of life," apt to be " misled ... by her feelings." " A hopeful point in all her writings," she concludes, " is the scarcity of false French sentiment, I wish I could say its absence ; but the weed flourishes here and there, even in the ' Lettres.' " [Ibid., pp. 494, 495.]

was to learn a vocabulary, not to form a style ; and she did not come in contact with Balzac until late in life, when Lewes called her attention that way. When we hear of Maupassant apprenticing himself to a hterary taskmaster for seven years, as Jacob served Laban, before putting pen to paper, — the Rachel in view, perfection of style ; and when we remember that Maupassant is but the perfected flower of a plant which had begun to bloom before Miss Bronte's day, we exclaim : Here, then, is a mystery ! if not a soul breathing rather than a mind working, at least a mind drawing its breath of life from the soul, and not from other minds. She was one of the queens of literature, like Mrs. Browning, and yet not a hterary woman, like Miss Martineau.

Ill

Imagination so existed for this Yorkshire girl. Its freedom from literary influence was not only the result of the negations of her surroundings, but was an indication in part of her determination to carve her own way. As we have seen, she knew enough of the romancers to deliberately direct her steps in the opposite direction ; and that was realism. Realism to her meant simply — as it must mean to all of us when we get back to fundamental conceptions — truth to nature. By that test she can say, " Read Scott alone ; all novels after his are worthless." ^ She wrote that before Thackeray had startled the world with a new form of realism ; but even after that happy day she would still have defended Scott on the ground that

i Gaskell, p. 135. _ his romantic situations did not interfere with his sane portrayals of character. Though she tells us that, in sketching Miss Ainlcy, she is not depicting a figment of the imagination [" we seek the originals of such portraits in real life only"], she also makes Caroline Helstone say, in the same volume, in answer to Shirley's question who prompted her assertion that certain natures, like Cowper's and Rousseau's, were never loved : " The voice we hear in solitude told me all I know on these subjects." Jane Eyre remarks that the three marvellous water-colors which she has shown to Rochester she saw " with the spiritual eye."

The trouble with the latter-day realism is that the outside voices are so loud it cannot hear the voices of solitude; and the spiritual eye has become dim through its constant employment in unspiritual investigations. The story of the life of Miss Bronte admits us to a wonderful picture of simplicity and innocence, — the simplicity rising to spiritual proportions as the morning light of intellectual aspiration blazes through it, and the innocence, like that softer light of evening, taking on deeper colors as the knowledge comes. Realism was to her a vital conception ; but we see it exalted by this independence, this ideality, this simplicity and innocence. It stood, first and foremost, for truthfulness, and her life not being full of varied experiences, this truthfulness would not allow her to deal imaginatively with situations beyond them. But what sets it apart from other forms of reality is its sublimation, the actualities studied filtering through her sweet maidenly heart before taking their final shape. How could the critics suppose for a moment that ' Jane Eyre ' was the work of a man?

In the filtration it underwent the change. When the bitterness of physical isolation, the sweetness of purity of spirit, the faculty of great receptiveness, and the habit of dogged obstinacy, born of devout conscientiousness, meet in one person, there is likely to result a certain hardness, touched and fired by a purifying egoism. No competent critic would ever apply Chatfield's witty definition of egoism to Miss Bronte, — " suffering the private I to be too much in the public eye ; " and yet no critic, competent or otherwise, could fail to note the intensity of the predominant inborn self-emphasis in everything she has written. Such subjectivity is simply the product of conditions fostered by extreme loneliness of life, quickened by intense loftiness of thought. It was not the forced atmosphere of voluntary seclusion which she breathed, but the clean breeze of native loneliness. Hence the natural wildness of the flavor, and the purity of the bouquet. " It is moorish," says Charlotte, of ' Wuthering Heights,' "and wild and knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise, — the author being herself a native and nursling of the moors." And this is true only in less degree of the sister who wrote it. Picture once more the scene : three motherless girls, with restless, searching brains hungered for lack of food ; with a father whose idyllic selfishness left no room in his thoughts for a proper comprehension of their difficulties, and a brother whose presence was a torment; cut off from the busy world, and with a total ignorance of its passwords and divining rods; wearing out body and soul with fruitless plans to remove the load of poverty ; feeling conscious power in their veins, and seeing the beckoning hand of fate, but discerning not whither it led, and groping in tracts far more desolate than any surrounding moors ; the silence all about broken only by the tumult of rushing thought.

The result is idealized realism, the ideality not antagonizing the realism, but clarifying it. The objective inilieii, was her physical isolation; the subjecttive force was her purity of spirit which penetrated it; the result was the glorious landscape of an apocalypse. It is unconscious, artless. Indeed, her lonely independence is constantly manifesting itself in artlessness of one form or another. That her work has art notwithstanding is because genius inevitably is thus attended : the kindly god provides fairy spades to dig withal. Untutored genius involves unlabored art; and when the tongue is touched by fire, the form of the issuing words is of kindling beauty.

We have in Charlotte and Emily Bronte the most shining of all examples of pure genius. In George EHot the genius is alloyed by learning. Gold of the purest texture may not be put to as many uses in the arts as the alloyed metals, but it is harder to supply the purity than the alloy. Because of her narrower horizon, Charlotte Bronte had a more compelling genius than her successor, whose acquaintance with the world's philosophies so overlay her thought that the piled up learning was constantly threatening a blockade of the tap-root of genius, whence flow the living juices which color the whole. The development of spiritual strength depends upon intensity, rather than comprehensiveness, of thought ; and intense thinking, narrowed by surroundings, and driven in on itself, must result, if the conditions are otherwise favorable, in intense spirituality. Innocence of life of the world energizes and drives down to its deepest springs the search into the life of self The utter absence of world-knowledge becomes the utter presence of self-penetration. For we must remember that the root idea of genius does not only not involve extraordinary culture, but, on the contrary, conveys a meaning which such culture may succeed in obliterating. So, if Charlotte Bronte could not have drawn Tito Melema, George Eliot could not have drawn Edward Rochester. If the former could not have portrayed with like skill such a subtle analysis of character as is presented in Lydgate, — an analysis which gets its power from a wide knowledge of motives and men, — still more certainly could George Eliot not have made the voice of Rochester ring through the night, " Jane ! Jane ! Jane ! " to be heard miles and miles away by Jane — the wind blowing where it listeth, and no one telling whence it cometh or whither it goeth. And yet it is truth itself; and Miss Bronte once said, " in a low voice, drawing in her breath," " But it is a true thing; it really happened."

I am very far from meaning to compare the genius of George Eliot unfavorably with that of one who so wholly differed from her. But I do mean that there is danger of a loss of the purest spirituality in the broadening out of the intellectual sympathies, and, conversely, that the intense light of a pure spirituality throws a shadow over those sympathies. It is one of many indications that Charlotte Bronte did not write novels with a purpose ; for with all their nobility, the specialized interest of George Eliot's later works bears the same relation to Miss Bronte's simple utterance as a hymn which is at the same time a prayer does to a hymn of praise. George Eliot's genius shone through talent, Charlotte Bronte's in spite of talent. Each kind has its peculiar dangers, makes its specific mistakes. Only, the errors of genius led astray by talent are more far-reaching than the accidental lapses of genius pure and simple. The character of Lydgate is perfectly drawn ; the most searching analysis fails to find the slightest flaw in the workmanship. There | are many incidental errors, on the other hand, in the building up of Rochester. But the book which contains Lydgate is a failure, so far as it fails to establish a doctrine which had taken such an insistent hold upon its author as to warp her mind from its proper contemplation. The nervous intelligence of genius prevented such a failure in ' Jane Eyre.' In that one respect, ' Middlemarch ' is a mistake. ' Jane Eyre ' merely contains mistake.

She was aware of her dangers. She acknowledges some affinity between 'Jane Eyre ' and ' David Copperfield,' but exclaims : " Only, what an advantage has Dickens in his varied knowledge of men and things ! " ^ See what her conception of realism here stood for. " Details, situations which I do not understand and cannot personally inspect, I would not for the world meddle with, lest I should make a more ridiculous mess of the matter than Mrs. TroUope did in her ' Factory Boy.' Besides," she continues, " not one feeling on any subject, public or private, will I ever affect that I do not really experience. Yet though I must limit my sympathies ; though my observation cannot penetrate where the very deepest political and social truths are to be learnt ; though many doors of knowledge which are open for you are forever shut for me ; though I must guess and calculate and grope my way in the dark, and come to uncertain conclusions unaided and alone where such writers as Dickens and Thackeray, having access to the shrine and image of Truth, have only to go into the temple, lift the veil a moment, and come out and say what they have seen, — yet with every disadvantage, I mean still, in my own contracted way, to do my best." ^

This lack of experience which she regrets is the cause of whatever failures we have to reckon against her; for no matter how deliberate a realism, and how absolute a conscientiousness, it cannot but transpire that a sparse acquaintance with men and women will lead the wayfarer into occasional culs-de-sac through a failure to appreciate the altered values in the wholeness of a character which the side-lights of motive and circumstance thrust into it. It was the passion of this woman to study the character in its wholeness ; but the absence of the world-knowledge at times exaggerated, in her pure vision, faults which such a knowledge would condone, and minimized virtues which it would extol. She saw the world, of necessity, too much through the eyes of self. And yet the failures are unimportant; for, we say again, elementary genius is too intelligent to make fundamental mistakes, while intellectuality forces such mistakes upon the intelligence.^

2 Could we indulge in impossible speculations as to what Currer and Ellis Bell would have brought forth had their father's lot been cast in a busy city parish, we might easily imagine very different results. Take three examples from Mrs. Gaskell as indicating Charlotte's sturdy ignorance of the world, and incidentally emphasizing the reflection of the quaint beauty of her isolation upon her thoughts and actions. Is there, for example, in all the tearful history of liter-

IV

Not to affect what she did not really experience did not mean that she must physically experience everything she wrote about, but only that she must

ary aspirations, a more touching instance of unacquaintance with ways and means than the record of the travels of the manuscript of the ' Professor ' in search of a publisher ? Having experimented with house after house, it occurred to this brave struggler, as a last resource, to send the, to her precious, but by this time hated, package to Messrs. Smith & Elder, a firm which the sophisticated candidate for fame would have selected among the first of his choice. And the bundle arrives at Cornhill in its original wrapping, with all the other directions and cancelled stamps upon it : so each publisher to whom it had been submitted must have known perforce of all the other publishers who had declined it ! Like her Jane and her Lucy, there it stood in all its disadvantages; she would not strip it of a single one. Let it be accepted on its inside merits or not at all.

The second scene is one which stands out in Rembrandt-like colors which leave a deep impress for all time upon the heart. When Mr. Bronte took his daughters to Brussels, their night in London was passed at the famed Chapter Coffee House of Paternoster Row ; and thither, " for very ignorance where else to go," drifted the two shrinking girls when they went up to town to break the news of their identity to their publishers. Never before, I conceive, in the history of those walls, which had heard the wordy talk of Johnson and echoed the laughter of Fielding, had such guests been harbored there; and the one female servant of the place — whom I like to fancy a good woman — must have taken a motherly interest in the wanderers, whom Mr. Smith found " clinging together on the most remote windowseat," below which came up to them — not the "mighty roar of London," but an occasional "footfall on the pavement ... of that unfrequented street."

Finally, Miss Bronte's constitutional timidity was so intense that the meeting of strangers was a positive torment. Whenever it was possible, she refused the kind offers of her publishers of introductions to the literary lions of the day, even declining Dickens, whose fame was then growing daily. Yet this painfully diffident woman nerves her almost uncontrollable bashfulness to the point of addressing a Frenchman in an English railway carriage, — eager to snatch every opportunity to improve herself in his language !

feel mentally the absolute truth of it. Whatever faults there are lie in the exaggeration her intense fidelity placed upon this conception. Her anxiety not to falsify, her determination to paint people as she sees them, warts and all, results in a rather slim number of agreeable people. Always excepting Shirley — for Shirley, be it always remembered, is Emily — the only characters in her novels free from sorrowful humors of some sort are the Misses Rivers, Mrs. Fairfax, and Miss Temple, — all in her first great fiction ; which, with the addition of little Henry Sympson from ' Shirley,' and Miss de Bassompierre from ' Villette ' complete the list. I do not include Caroline Helstone in the category, although she is a lovable girl, because she is in part an idealized portrait of Charlotte Bronte herself, — she coyly placing herself in a romantic atmosphere for once (as if she could not bear to part from Emily after having placed her there first), and attempting to hide from discovery in such an unusual course by speaking in the third person.

The rigor of her portrayals, we cannot but feel, is occasionally overdone. Her portrait of Madame Beck, for example, is too severe, although we know the provocations. It is difficult to believe that " not the agony in Gethsemane, not the death on Calvary, could have wrung from her eyes one tear." Lucy had, at least, considerable freedom there, and was apparently allowed to go out evenings, even to the theatre, with Dr. John, when she so desired. She just mentions some of Madame Beck's good points, showing, in spite of her antipathy, and except for its Jesuitry, that the school was a rationally managed one, and that if the pupils were not happy, it was not

Her Realism 2i

wholly Madame Beck's fault. Because Miss Bronte believed all men and women to be imperfect, her characters reflect this belief, — sometimes to an unpleasant degree of truthfulness. Even Robert Moore, fine fellow as he is, is made to sacrifice to Baal byturning his back on Caroline, and seeking matrimonial alliance with a pecuniary end in view. And on the night of Robert's confession of his meanness, the sturdy Yorke himself tells a " dark truth," namely, that if his old sweetheart had loved him as he once fancied he loved her; if he " had been secure of her affection, certain of her constancy, been irritated by no doubts, stung by no humiliations . . . the odds were (he let his hand fall heavy on the saddle) that he should have left her ! " No marvel that after this, " they rode side by side in silence." Miss Bronte does not express any scorn of men, as apart from women, here, but holds the glass to human nature. For she who drew Edward Crimsworth and Brocklehurst also painted Jane Eyre's aunt and Madame Beck, — to say nothing of Mrs. Yorke, into whose mouth she puts the spitfire of the Quarterly s very words, thus showing herself capable of bright revenge.