Charlotte Bronte

“Power above powers, O heavenly Eloquence,
That with the strong rein of commanding words
Dost manage, guide, and master the eminence
Of men’s affections, more than all their swords;
Shan we not offer to thy excellence
The richest treasure that our wit affords?”
–Samuel Daniel

Charlotte Bronte! What can ever be said about Charlotte Bronte that shall do the completest justice to her? Mere words are not adequate to describe her dazzling genius: no, not even words that carry a comparable emotional voltage to those that she habitually used. Charlotte Bronte is as much beyond our highest praise as any mortal can well be who has his (or her) day and then ceases to be. To me the hours I spent in her company are “a consecration and a dream.” I had read many masters of English prose before I came to her; with the result that I should never have expected her to be capable, not only of challenging comparison with them, but also of beating them on their own ground, as it were, with but the solitary exception of the hermit of Winterslow. As R. L. Stevenson long ago clinched the matter, “We are mighty fine fellows, but none of us can write like William Hazlitt.” Hazlitt, indeed, is on an eminence apart. It is always best to leave him alone when we are discussing what Dryden has, with commendable felicity, called “that other harmony.” Moreover, Hazlitt was not a story-teller; and since I am, just now, proposing to dissertate on a novelist, it is doubly desirable to have no truck with him.

Supreme

This proviso accepted. it becomes easier to deal with Charlotte Bronte. Among the gentry whose profession, at one time or another, has been the spinning or yarns, this eldest of the Bronte sisters is supreme – and, especially, amongst the female section of that gentry. I may say, with Keats (in a different context), that before tackling her,
“Much had I travelled in the realms of gold
And many a goodly state and kingdom seen;
Round many a Western island had I been
which bards in fealty to Apollo hold!”

but that, as again with Keats,
“Yet dig I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard (Charlotte) speak out loud and bold.”

And, to finish as I began:

“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise­
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte

I really wonder whether, among English novelists (not omitting Thackeray) grander prose has ever been written than by Charlott Bronte. Like Kipling, I also am a “Jane-ite,” and am ready to take up the cudgels in her behalf as against anyone else–­always excepting Charlotte. We are told that Charlotte Bronte did not admire greatly the genius of Jane Austen. Knowing as I do, something of Charlotte, I am hardly surprised that she did not: the distance of the poles separated them. Jane Austen’s whole stock-in-trade – apart from an extremely elegant style – was an almost unlimited capacity to specialize in what I may designate as storms in tea-cups. There never, perhaps, was a writer that revelled more in the delineation of the minutaeof life: give her, in social matters, an inch and she would take an ell. It may be said of her that a yellow primrose by a river’s brim was, to her, but a yellow primrose by a river’s brim – and naught else.

Not so with “Currer Bell. Her genius was less circum­scribed. It required, for its, satisfactory operation, real storms; storms the size of life itself. Her own spirit was a terrific hurricane, and as such could be at home only in a similarly bizarre emotional atmosphere. She might have justified herself in the celebrated phrase of Charles Lamb’s: “ I am made up of queer points and I want so many answering needles. “Where Jane Austen was supremely content with the mere surface, Charlotte knew no peace until she could delve beneath the surface to whatever lay below. It was a case of “depths” with her.

As Miss May Sinclair puts it in her introduction to Jane Epre (Bveryman’s Series).

“For Charlotte Bronte the best part of life is the passion that exalts and transfigures it. Passion is poetry: poetry is passion. It is the truth of men and women. Some people have none of this truth in them, such are Jane Austen’s ladies and gentlemen. To Charlotte they are not real people.”

Exactly where, in all of Jane Austen’s novels, is there a Rochester or a lane Eyre, a Paul Emanuel or a Lucy Snowe, a Lous Moore or a Shirely Keeldar, or even a William Crims­worth (“The Professor”) and Frances Henri? Reading Jane Austen after Charlotte Bronte is like entering a flat landscape after sojourning through a lush and eye-enchanting scenery, like Shakespeare’s:

“A bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows:
Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine,
With sweet musk roses and with eglantine.”

No Comparison between Emily and Charlotte Bronte

I note with deep regret that it has become quite the fashion in English literary criticism to bring in Emily Bronte whenever there is a discussion of Charlotte, and to bring her in with the set purpose of disparaging Charlotte. Now, if the truth is to be told for once, I must say that, for pure assininity, this is hard to beat. It is being told in Gath and bruited about in the streets of Askalon that Wuthering Heights, by itself, is immeasurably superior to Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, and The Professor, combined as well as separately. This is such a shocking absurdity that, if I were a Victorian lady, I should faint outright at the mere suggestion of it. How there can, in any rational scheme of things, be a comparison between the first and the other four passes my comprehension. In the first place, Wuthering Heights, is not all Emily’s: her brother, the thrice-unfortunate Branwell Bronte, had also a hand in it, and it may well be that the better portions of that hideous book were written by him and not by her. In the second place, a paragraph of Jane Eyre or Villette, and some portions of Shirley, can be shown to be far superior to he whole of Wuthering Heights.

Wuthering Heights is of diseased imagination all compact. As a story it is a dismal failure; and as for character-drawing and the rest, it is nowhere in comparison with Charlotte’s quartette of novels. I shall not go into the morals of Wuthering Heights just now – because it may be argued that morals have nothing to do with the question and that literature is one thing and morality another. But it is high time that the morals of Wuthering Heights were discussed threadbare: because such an eminent critic as Miss May Sinclair, after admitting that
“Unlike Charlotte, Emily has no use for symbols and abstractions; with her all signs of passion are concrete and have impact,”

has the audacity to remark:

“Yet, how clean that passion is. Even Catherine Earnshaw’s hysteria of frustration is less of the flesh than of the spirit, a fiery, unearthly hysteria!” (Introduction to Wuthering Heights. “Everyman’s Series”)
The point of Wuthering Heights is just the opposite: the exalta­tion naked and unashamed, of whatever is the antithesis of “clean” passion – as, for instance, that between the said Catherine and Heathcliff. And as for Emily’s style – well, it is decidedly not in the same street as Charlotte’s – no, not by a long chalk.

An Innovation is Novel-writing

I posited the question, a little earlier, whether, among English novelists, grander prose has ever been written than Charlotte Bronte’s. Even Thackeray’s, I am bound to confess, is inferior to it. Her prose has a distinction that is absent from that of the others. There is not an insipid passage anywhere in her works, and the number of positively brilliant passages is legion. Villetteand Jane Eyre and Shirley abound in them; and even The Professor, the least of these four. The last-named was her first novel, though not the first to have been published; the first to have been published was Jane Eyre. All the same, there is that in it that would have brought fame, enough and to spare, to a lesser novelist. The Professor is the shortest as well as the neatest of Charlotte’s novels. It is notable also for its rare economy of expression. As she herself admitted in her preface to it:

“I had not indeed published anything before I commenced The Professor, but 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 came to prefer what was plain and homely.”

In it we see the beginnings of the principal innovation in novel-writing that we associate with Charlotte Bronte. Perhaps for the first time in English literature we get, for the heroine, not a dazzling beauty, not a Helen’s face,

“...that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium;”

not a lady of Cleopatra’s attractions, to “cool” whose “gipsy’s lust” Antony “is become the bellows and the fan,”

“The triple-pillar of the world, transform’d
Into a strumpet’s fool.”

No, none of those fairies, but a plain unsophisticated lass, whose adornment is not of the body but of the spirit, but who can yet prove that her life’s story can be as much charged with human interest and pathos as that of any of her more enchanting sisters, with “Juno’s eyes or Cytherea’s breath.” Frances Henri leads the procession of Charlotte’s heroines. She is the prototype of those to come later on–Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe and Caroline Helstone. In Charlotte’s words:

“I can pronounce no encomiums on her beauty, for she was not beautiful; nor offer condolence on her plainness, for neither was she plain; a careworn character of forehead, and a corresponding moulding of the mouth, struck me with a sentiment resembling surprise, but these traits would probably have passed unnoticed by any less crotchety observer.” (Of Frances Henri in The Professor. P. 107. Everyman’s Series.)

“Jane Eyre” and “Villette”

This is carried to its highest pitch in-Lucy Snowy in Villete. Villette is Charlotte Bronte’s masterpiece; she never excelled in portraiture her Lucy Snowe and her M. Paul Emanuel. As Miss May Sinclair says: “He (M. Paul Emanuel) is the unique glory of Villette, from his first invasion of the scene, in paletot, and bonnet grec, to his final disappearance in the storm.” (Intro­duction to Villette. Everyman’s Series.)

I am aware that many hold that Jane Eyre, and not Villetteis Charlotte’s most memorable book. I beg to differ from this view. Without the least intention of minimizing the stupendous beauty of that novel I should yet like to suggest that, in the matter of the first place as regards technique, characterization, and style, Villetteis as far above Jane Eyre as Jane Eyre is above Shirelyand The Professor. If Charlotte had written nothing else but Villetteher niche in the temple of fame would have been secure. I can devote an entire article to Lucy Snowe and M. Paul Emanuel. Lucy Snowe is Jane Eyre “writ large,” and M. Paul Emanuel is a leviathan of imaginative creation compared with Rochester–big as Rochester undoubtedly is; and he (Rochester) is hundred times a more forceful personality than the hero of Shirley – Louis Moore: as Louis Moore is himself head and shoulders above William Crimsworth of The Professor. Dr. John Graham Bretton, in Villette, is an ineffective rival in our affections to M. Paul Emanuel, even as Mr. St. John (a perfect prig) pales into complete insignificance before Rochester in Jane Eyre, and Robert Moore, of “Hallow’s Mill”, before his brother, louis, in Shirley.

As for Lucy Snowe, I agree wholeheartedly with Miss May Sinclair when she avers: “As for Lucy, it, too, is a masterpiece, the most perfect, the most finished, the most psychologically unerring, that Charlotte Bronte ever achieved.” Who can read without tears the passage where Lucy confesses (partly against the grain, because she had once loved that alleged Adonis, Dr. John):

“The love born of beauty was not mine; I had nothing in common with it; I could not dare to meddle with it, but another love, venturing diffidently into life after long acquaintance, furnace-tried by pain, stamped by constancy, consolidated by affection’s pure and durable alloy, submitted by intellect to intellect’s own tests, and finally wrought up, by his own process, to his unflawed completeness, this Love that laughed at Passion, his fast frenzies and his hot and humid extinction, in this Love I had a vested interest; and for whatever tended either to its culture or its destruction I could not view impassably.” (Villette, p. 427. Everyman’s Series.)

And to think that even this love was but partially attained by her and at such an “expense of spirit” is truly bewildering? Her love for Dr. John was completely unrequired: her (later) love for M. Paul Emanuel wasrequited, it is true, but only at the fag end of the book, and then it led to nothing, as, shortly after, just when it was to have been consummated, the incomparable Paul was drowned in a storm while returning to Villette (Brussels) from “Basseterre in Guadaloupe,” whither he had gone to manage a large estate. Poor Lucy! Perhaps the most pathetic figure in the whole of English literature!

The Brussels ground

There is no doubt that Charlotte Bronte was at her best when dealing with the Brussels (Villette) ground. Whenever she has to describe a Pemionnat de Demoiselles she is in her element; and Madame Beck in Villetteand Madame Reuter in The Professor are unforgettable creations – and so, too, to a lesser degree, is M. Pelet. We have her own testimony to her affection for Belgium. In The Professor she apostrophises as follows:

“Belgium! Name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can produce. Belgium! I repeat the word, now as I sit along near midnight. It stirs my world of the past like a summons to resurrection; the graves unclose, the dead are raised...” – The Professor, p. 45. Everyman’s Series.

Among the minor characters In Villette, Ginerva Fanshawe is to be forever remembered. It is a splendid sketch of a born flirt, though there is no question but that a good deal of malice has gone to the painting of her. I like also Pere Silas, the old priest in the church of the Beguinage.

Her Second Best Novel

Jane Eyre is Charlotte Bronte’s second best novel. There arc scenes in it that have only to be read to be believed. The love­making of Jane and Rochester is quite unique in English fiction. The chapter where Rochester asks Jane to be his mistress ­they were on the point of being married, but the existence of Rochester’s first wife was discovered in the nick of time, and the fat was immediately tipped into the fire – is exquisite: exquisite in that Jane comes out through the ordeal with her reputation not only unsullied but actually enhanced. It is, therefore, all the more surprising how, as Charlotte wrote in her preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre, there was a class of critics who doubted its tendency. Had Jane acquiesced in Rochester’s proposal the ten commandments would have been broken and those critics would have been justified in doubting the book’s tendency.

As a matter of fact, Jane suffers terribly for conquering the temptation that was placed in her path. Her flight from Thornfield and the heart-rending miseries that she encounters on the way till she finally finds a safe haven in Moor House are unforgettable in their poignancy. Then the concatenation of circumstances whereby she ultimately gets to Rochester at Ferndean and (the mad wife obliging by dying meanwhile) becomes Mrs. Rochester, are equally memorable. By that time Rochester is blind and crippled, but their second love-making, far from losing all interest, turns out to be even more engrossing than their first. The 37th Chapter merits reading over and over again: it beats to a frazzle the famous scene in George Meredith’s Ordeal of Richard Feverel, where Richard and Lucy cleanse their bosoms of the perilous stuff that had been accumulating there for sometime previously.

But the whole point about Jane Eyre is the innovation that Charlotte Bronte made in respect of her heroine. As Miss May Sinclair puts it beautifully, in her introduction to it in the Everyman’s Series:

“It is not the ten commandments that are broken: It Is the unwritten laws of literature. It was one of these laws that a governess should know her place and that a plain woman should know hers and be kept in it. Then Jane Eyre came and made waste-paper of that convention. She puts ideas into the heads of governesses and plain women. In the novel ofthe past no woman with a face and a figure like Jane’s could hope for more than a mere walking -on­-part, at best for the role of a very minor character. Jane appears as leading lady, and sustains the part with triumphant success. Blanche Ingram, the tall, stately, early Victorian heroine, is a mere temporary foil to little Jane.”

That, indeed, is Jane Eyre in a nutshell.

Her Prose

Shirley need not detain us long, because it is not a patch on Jane Eyre or Villette. It has a topical interest, in that it depicts some scenes of industrial strife in England at the time of the Napoleonic wars. The book is unequal in interest, the later half being decidedly more interesting than the earlier. The heroine is introduced quite late in the story. The only two memorable characters are Shirely Keeldar and Louis Moore. It is to be regretted that our authoress wastes too much precious space on Robert Moore, whom I hated at first sight, as it were. His cousin, Caroline Helstone is also not a great success. Altogether, Shirley is disappointing after Jane Eyre and Villette; though, of course, it is more than equal to a thousand Wuthering Heights put together.

The Secret

What is the secret ofCharlotte Bronte’s style? It is her uncommon knowledge of the Old Testament. She filled her pitcher at the well-spring of its translators. She might have done worse! O, Charlotte! Here is my meed of praise to thee! Take it, however poor its quality; for thou wert a lass unparalleled.