4 APRIL 1857, Page 25

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MRS. GASKELL'S LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE.* THE natural life of Charlotte Brontë was as uneventful as that of any young lady whose sole mission upon earth has been to "suckle fools and chronicle small beer." She was born in 1816, the third daughter and child of a clergyman holding a small living on the moors that divide Lancashire from the West Riding of Yorkshire. Her mother died when Charlotte was a child, and her two elder sisters before she was nine years old ; leaving her to be a kind of mother and sister in one to two younger sisters and a brother. With the exception of a short period spent when she was about eight years old at that clerical school which the readers of Jane Eyre are not likely to forget, and a subsequent residence of greater length at the close of her girlhood in a school kept by a Miss Wooler not far from her home, Charlotte grew up with very little direct training or instruction of any kind. But the father would talk to his children about all subjects in which he was interested; the household work trained the girls to industry ; and they seem to have had plenty of excellent books at their command. The father's notions were eccentric ; and he probably injured his children, who seem to have been originally delicate, by a Spartan system of abstinence, with the view of making them hardy. Still, from him, so far as we can judge came both the character acid genius that distinguished di three of his daughters who grew to be women, and Charlotte especially. Certainly, young ladies can seldom have owed less to the general influence of society, of other girls, of intercourse of any sort with human beings out of their own narrow family circle, than these little Brontes seem to have owed. Almost the only event that made apparently a lasting impression on Charlotte's mind during her early years, was the death by rapid consumption of her two elder sisters, who sickened at the clerical school described in Jane .Eyre. Besides this dark experience, Charlotte seems to have had no influences from the world outside the parsonage at Haworth, except what came to her from her father's talk about polities, and what she read with strange eagerness for a girl in the newspapers that came in her way. This was about the time of the Catholic Emancipation, and the Duke of Wellington became her hero ; a childish fancy that she has embalmed in Shirley. But though the little Brontës had no society, and no regular teaching, they were companions for one another ; their time was always employed; and they seem all four of them to have displayed in childhood a remarkable degree of imagination in inventing plays—a remarkable fertility of what Charlotte calls "making out." All children have this perhaps to some extent, but it early Amounted to genius with these four ; and Charlotte at least, before she was sixteen, had written tales and sketches enough to fill a great number of volumes ; of which Mrs. Gaskell gives a short specimen, that is surprisingly free from fault, and vivid in its presentative power for the production of a girl of that age. It was after all this literary activity that Charlotte went to school for the second time in her life ; and her first appearance there is thus described by one of her very few intimate friends.

"I first saw her coming out of a covered cart, in very oldfashioned clothes, and looking very cold and miserable. She was coming to school at Miss Wooler's. When she appeared in the school-room, her dress was changed, but just as old. She looked a little old woman, so short-sighted that she always appeared to be seeking something, and moving her head from side to aide to catch a sight of it. She was very shy and nervous, and spoke with a strong Irish accent. When a book was given her, she dropped her head over it till her nose nearly touched it; and when she was told to hold her head up, up went the book after it, still close to her nose ; so that it was not possible to help laughing."

And after stating that "we thought her very ignorant, for she had not learnt grammar at all, and very little geography," the writer of the letter which contains the description goes on to say: " She would confound us by knowing things that were out of our range altogether. She was acquainted with most of the short pieces of poetry that we had to learn by heart; would tell us the authors, the poems they were taken from, and sometimes repeat a page or two, and tell us the plot. She had a habit of writing in italics, (printing characters,) and said she had learnt it by writing in their magazine. They brought out a ' magazine ' once a month, and wished it to look as like pint as possible. She told us a tale out of it. No one wrote in it, and no one read it, but herself, her brother, and two sisters. She promised to show me some of these magazines, but retracted it afterwards' and would never be persuaded to do so. In our play-hours she sat or stood still, with a book, if possible. Some of us once urged her to be on our side in a game at ball. She said she had never played, and could not play. We made her try, but soon found that she could not see the ball, so we Ind her out. She took all our proceedings with pliable indifference, and always seemed to need a previous resolution to say No ' to anything. She used to go and stand under the trees in the play-ground, and say it was pleasanter. She endeavoured to explain this, pointing out the shadows, the peeps of sky, &c. We understood but • The Life of Charlotte Brontl, Author of "Jane Zyre," Ste. By E. C. Gas ket', Author of "Mary Barton," Om. In two volumes. Published by Smith, Elder, and Co. little of it. She said that at Cowan Bridge she used to stand in the burn, on a stone, to watch the water flow by. I told her she should have gone fishing : she said she never wanted. She always showed physical feebleness in everything. She ate no animal food at school. It was about this time I told her she was very ugly. Some years afterwards, I told her I thought I had been very impertinent. She replied, You did me a great deal of good, Polly ; so don't repent of it.' She used to draw much better, and more quickly, than anything we had seen before, and knew much about celebrated pictures and painters. Whenever an opportunity offered of examining a picture or cut of any kind, she went over it piecemeal, with her eyes close to the paper, looking so long that we used to ask her ' What she saw in it ? ' She could always see plenty, and explained it very well. She made poetry and drawing at least exceedingly interesting to me; and then I got the habit, which I have yet, of referring mentally to her opinion on all matters of that kind."

Some influence may have come upon the BrontE girls from the rugged uncivilized character of the majority of the people in their father's parish ; a plainness of speech and a fearlessness of thought which startled the readers of their novels. That Charlotte Bronte carefully treasured up the realities of character and incident that were around her, or of which she heard, and made abundant use of them in constructing her fictions, will appear plain to every reader of her life. But on the whole the negative rather than the positive influence of their circumstances must be looked to. The sisters became what they. did because circumstances had not been able to neutralize their strong characters; they were not made by circumstances something different from their own natures. The life that we have indicated could only leave character to grow as it would ; there was no cheek, no force upon the natural development up to the time when Charlotte Bronte left school finally, a singularly plain and apparently not at all an accomplished person, as that phrase is generally understood.

Her life continued to the last as devoid of outward excitement and adventure as her girlhood. She became a governess, not from absolute necessity, but from a desire to save her father's resources, which were not large, and to enable him to devote the more to the starting of his son on some career. Visions of the three sisters keeping school together for some time flattered their hopes; and it was with the object of thoroughly preparing for this enterprise that Charlotte resided for some time in a school at Brussels, and gained that experience which she has expended on Valetta. Literature, too, was always looked forward to by the three sisters. But the school visions could not be realized ; and it was not till 1846 that a small volume of poems was published by the three, but at their own expense, which of course was never covered by the sale. Some little time after, Charlotte Drente offered a novel called "The Professor" for publication, without success ; but in October 1847 Messrs. Smith and Elder had accepted the manuscript of Jane Lyre; and within two months the whole country made a household word of the name of " Currer Bell," the pseudonyme under which Charlotte had. previously veiled her personality, along with the two sisters who wrote as "Ellis and Acton Bell." In 1854 Charlotte Brenta was married to her father's curate, Mr. Nicholls ; and she died in the following March. In the years intervening between the publication of Jane Eyre and her death she published two other novels, Shirley and Melte. Besides the actual poverty of incident that characterizes this life, the materials for largely illustrating it, such as it was, even in its later period, and still more in its growing time, are wanting. Very little correspondence can have petaled between the Misses Bronte and other people and of that little less has been preserved. Their father, who ;ins survived them, is very old and infirm, and little more than vague general recollections seem to have been obtained from him. Charlotte does not appear to have been communicative about herself and her proceedings while she lived, and she lived in such retirement and isolation that no one now seems able to describe minutely what she left unrecorded. Yet in spite of these disadvantages, it is impossible to read through Mrs. Gaskell's two volumes without a strong conviction that Charlotte Brontk was a woman as extraordinary by her character as by her genius. She possessed in a remarkable degree, not only the poetical imagination shown in her works, but an unconquerable will, and a sense of duty to which everything in her life was subordinated. It is impossible for us to convey by one or two extracts the impression made upon us by this record. We can only express it by saying, that from the close of her girlhood to her death her existence seems to have been a martyrdom. Before she was nineteen, her constitution, always delicate, find early undermined by hard discipline, had given way. With perfect repose and easy circumstances, with people to look after her and watch her, she might probably have passed through existence without more pain than falls to the lot of many women. But she had, or fancied she had, a great duty to discharge; and she chose to go out as a governess, for which she was utterly unfitted by training and temperament. One way and another, she gave mind and

body no rest ; spent herself lavishly for others—lavishly and even wastefully. The result was a confirmed state of suffering and ill health, terribly aggravated by certain domestic circumstances,

over which Mrs. Gaskell throws no veil, ruthlesslyexposing them in her anxiety for the character of her heroine. Finally, just as

her triumphs as authoress seemed to promise wealth and genial activity, she was bowed to the earth by the loss, one after the other, of her two beloved sisters ; and she seems never after this to have enjoyed a day's real health. The profound pathos, the tragic interest of this book, lies in the exhibition of the terrible struggle that life was to a woman endowed with Charlotte Bronte's conscientiousness, affection for her family, and literary ambitions, and continually curbed and thrown back by physical wretchedness. Its moral is, the unconquerable strength of genius and goodness. Many are the touching passages in literary biogra phy, but perhaps few chapters of history are more pathetic than those which record faithfully the struggles of genius for recognition and for bread. Among them Miss Bronte's Life will hence forth take a first place, were it only to be regarded as the history of the training and development of the authoress of Jane Eyre and

Fillette. But we are not in the least e rating our own impressions when we say that the career exaggerating authoress becomes subordinate in interest to that of the woman ; and this though a career more devoid of adventure or of social excitement can hardly be imagined. The fact is, that, as Mrs. Gaskell tells the story, even her triumphs as a novelist interest us principally as at once the highest exhibition and a long-wished for reward of her heroic patience and energy ; and the passion, eloquence, force, genius, that live in the imaginary scenes of Jane Eyre, are

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lost n the stern self-control and amazing vitality that could bid them blossom out of the hard realities of the life of Charlotte Brontë. And even this gives by no means a complete view of the character presented to us in these volumes. For Charlotte Bronte was not only an authoress struggling with unusual difficulties by the help of unusual genius and force of character ; she was the daughter of an aged and often helpless father, the sister of a sickly and unfortunate family, and the characteristic that would most surprise those who have only half-studied her fictitieus characters was her devotion to the duties imposed by these relations. Her affections, indeed, as they seem to have been nearly, concentrated on her own family, were proportionately deep and strong ; and throughout these volumes we have the daily life of a woman who by her genius would be thought allied to George Sand, performing with a Cinderella-like assiduity all those humble domestic duties which the perfectly stupid daughters of most middle-class families, and certainly of most country parsons, would think themselves terribly disgraced by being called on to discharge. And in this respect, as in most other points, her two sisters resemble her, though with sufficiently' marked characteristics of their own. -Those who can be powerfully interested by character developing itself without striking outward incident--who can follow the drama of the inner life in a lonely parsonage, where three eccentric girls, and an eccentric father, with an equally eccentric old Yorkshire servant, for the most part load an existence of which one day is precisely in its outward aspect like every other—will find in Mrs. G-askell's account of Charlotte Bronte and her family one of the profoundest tragedies of modern life1 if tragedy be, as we believe it to be_, the contest of humanity with inexorable fats—the anguish and the strife through which the spirit nerves itself for a grander sphere—the martyr's pang, and the saint's victory.

To show of what mettle one of the sisters was, as well as to quote an anecdote striking enough in itself, and interesting for its bearing on one of Charlotte Bronte's works, we select the following passage.

" The feeling, which in Charlotte partook of something of the nature of an affection, VMS with Emily more of a passion. Some one speaking of her to me, in a careless kind of strength of expression, said, 'She never showed regard to any human creature ; all her love was reserved for animals.' The helplessness of an animal was its passport to Charlotte's heart ; the fierce, wild intractability of its nature, was what often recommended it to Emily. Speaking of her dead sister, the former told me that from her many traits in Shirley's character were taken : her way of sitting on the rug reading, with her arm round her rough bulldog's neck ; her calling to a strange dog, running past, with hanging head and lolling tongue, to give it a merciful draught of water, its maddened snap at her, her nobly stern presence of mind, going right into the kitchen, and taking up one of Tabby's red-hot , Italian irons to sear the bitten place, and telling no one till the danger was well nigh over, for fear of the terrors that might beset their weaker minds. All this, looked upon as a well-invented fiction in Shirley,' was written down by Charlotte with streaming eyes ; it was the literal true account of what Emily had done. The same tawny bulldog, (with his 'strangled whistle,') called Tartar in 'Shirley,' was Keeper in Haworth parsonagea gift to Emily. With the gift came a warning. Keeper was faithful to the depths of his nature as long as he was with Mends; but he who struck him with a stick or whip roused the relentless nature of the brute, who flew at his throat forthwith, and held him there till one or the other was at the point of death. Now Keeper's household fauli was this. He loved to steal up-stairs and stretch his square tawny limbo on the comfortable beds, covered over with delicate white counterpanes. But the cleanliness of the parsonage arrangements was perfect ; and this habit of Keeper's was so objectionable, that Emily, in reply to Tabby's remonstrances, declared that, if he was found again transgressing, she herself, in defiance of warning and his well-known ferocity of nature, would beat him so severely that he would never offend again. In the gathering dusk of an autumn evening., Tabby came half tritunphantiv, half tremblingly, but in great wrath, to tell Emily that Keeper was lying on the best bed, in drowsy voluptuousness. Charlotte saw Emily's whitening face and set mouth, but dared not speak to interfere ; no one dared when Emily's eyes glowed in that manner out of the paleness of her face, and when her lip were so compressed into stone. She went up-stairs, and Tabby and Charlotte stood in the gloomy passage below, full of the dark shadows of coining night. Down stairs came Kmily, drag ging after her the unwilling Keeper, his hind-legs set in a heavy attitude of resistance, held by the ' scuft of his neck,' but growling low and savagely all the time. The watchers would fain have spoken, but durst not, for fear of taking off Emily's attention, and causing her to avert her head for a moment from the enraged brute. She let him go, planted in a dark corner at the bottom of the stairs; no time was there to fetch stick or rod, for fear of the strangling clutch at her throat—her bare clenched fist struck against his red fierce eyes before he had time to make his spring, and, in the language of the turf, she 'punished him ' till his eyes were swelled up, and the half-blind stupified beast was led to his accustomed lair, to have his swelled head fomented and cared for by the very Emily herself. The generous dog owed her no grudge ; he loved her dearly ever after : he walked first among the mourners to her funeral; he slept moaning for nights at the door of her empty room, and never, so to speak, rejoiced, dog fashion, after her death."