Charlotte and Emily
THOUGH many years have passed since Andrew Lang, in his History of English Literature, said that "the -best book on the Brontes is in French, Les Soeurs Bronte, by Ernest Dimnet," I am hot aware that we have had a translation of it until to-day: It is a typical example of that light-handed but penetrating analysis of personality which is so characteristic of French critics, saturated as they are in a civilization famed for its psychological finesse. If they are a little too proud of their tradition, they tend to patronize their victims, especially if the latter have some spiritual tendency, as for instance, Shelley had. We find, however, no superiority in M. Dinmet. Some might even accuse him of heroine-worship, an uncommon quality in a Frenchman when he is dealing with a foreigner. His method is a straightforward one, with none of the modern ironic and pathetic complications which Mr. Lytton Strachey has since introduced into the technique of biography. M. Dimnet relateS the facts, events, and achievements into an orderly brief, with a running commentary which is Modest and convincing.
The story of the Brontë family, a tale of the inconsequential birth of genius and its- sparse sustenance, is like a fiction by Miss May Sinclair. But indeed no fictions could so closely resemble_ it as do Charlotte's own .novels. The world who has read Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette has also lived in the Haworth parsonage, stifling in those uncultured hills. It feels that it has ministered to the purblind old Irish scholar and submitted to the irritable tyranny of his disappointed spirit. It has helped the "human wreck," brother Branwell, up to his father's bedroom, where he also slept, Muttering and moaning in drink over an insane passion for his employer's wife.
Charlotte Bront6 did not have time to emerge from the initial stages in her development as an artist. , She wrote with her sympathies "rather than with her imagination ; drawing, like George Sand, from an abnormally powerful nervous system what should have come from the remoter region of the brain. It is all very well to absolve a poet or novelist from the weakness of conscious theft from the material of his own life. One can say "But there is no obvious character in his book who can be recognized ; he has transmuted all his material." There is, however, more than one way of robbing Peter to pay Paul. A novelist who deliberately exploits his min temperament, and slavishly reflects in his fiction the general hues of his own reaction to life, is equally guilty of incompleteness in his craft. Whether or nOt Charlotte recog- nize: d her danger it is difficult to say ; for Villette, her last book, is a work of the period of transition from fervid youth to the mbre sober phase of aitistic maturity. It is therefore weaker, but fuller and more knowledgeable, than the inspired Jane Eyre. Trying tO tear her art away from her own miserable and eirculitscribed --aelf, she perversely played with fire, and warked her own day-dream .of love and hate into the story. The result is a crude parody of her feelings towards Monsieur and Madame Heger, in which she 'did kiStice neither to them nor to herself. She was not really so wilfid and malicious as she there allowed herself to be. Had she lived to write more calmly, drawing upon her. almost untouched intellectual resources, we should probably have had work as artistically acceptable as that of George Eliot, and still more enjoyable because of the greater originality of character of its author. But the way of the ecstatic, subjective writer is hard, for what is more difficult to master than the habit of self-exploita- tibia ? Herein lies the- death-trap of go much lyric genius.
We ee. our own—generation how cruelly Mr. D. II,
Lawrence's locks have been sheared by this treacherous Delilah, and how he battles to expel the traitor.
Charlotte Bronte's letters suggest that she too was nerving herself for the effort; and that she recognized how imperative it was for her to lift her art above the fever and the fret of her personal existence. Perhaps her severe strictures of Jane Austen were a sort of jealous recognition that here was an artist from whom she could learn much on this matter. She had no need, however, to be envious of that incisive miniaturist. We have proof of her vigilant watch over her own moods and sensory reactions, and the following extract from a letter shows the courage with which she endeavoured to school herself to a more reliable and objective method of creativeness : "Now and then the silence of the house, the solitude of the room, has pressed on me with a weight I found it difficult to bear, and recollection has not failed to be as alert, poignant, obtrusive, as other feelings were languid. I attribute this state of things partly to the weather, and I have sre this been warned of approaching disturbance in the atmosphere by a sense of bodily weakness, and deep, heavy, mental sadness, such as some would call presentiment. I cannot help feeling something of the excitement of expectation till the post hour comes, and when, day after day, it brings nothing, I get low. This is a stupid, disgraceful, unmeaning state of things. I feel bitterly vexed at my own dependence and folly, but it is so bad for the mind to be quite alone, and to have none with whom to talk over little crosses and disappointments, and to laugh them away."
The fact that she was so powerful a personality, however, made the task superhumanly difficult. As M. Dimnet points out,
"literary pursuits helped her but little. This great artist had none of the lesser resources of the usual literary women. This was one of her characteristics : the woman in her overwhelmed every- thing else. She never thought of her books but with a sensation of fatigue, and a fear of never doing equally well again. Others would have found satisfaction in the recollection of the sensational success of Jane Eyre, of the name of Currer Bell (her nom de plume) becoming famous almost overnight in English-speaking countries, of Thackeray's admiration, of the deference paid her by a powerful publisher like Smith. She had none of these ideas.
There is one figure, however, who stands outside Charlotte's world of parasitic emotionalism. It was her sister Emily. Charlotte, in spite of a devotion to her younger sister,-and a passionate defence of her inscrutable character, had not the , strength fully to embrace that hermetic personality. The • effort to portray it in the figure of Shirley is a failure. One feels that Shirley is only a handful of leaves plucked from a forest oak. While Charlotte could ease her mind of its ambitious pains by savaging the local clergymen, Emily could find no such domestic remedy. Indeed, she needed none ; for this wild Leucadian spirit harboured no more resentment than does the naked flame. She was out, abroad among the hills, a prophetess of the Pennines, impervious to the proprieties of the valley below. She had the masculine fierceness of the poet about her, for her moorland voice is the same that we hear in the deepest music of Wordsworth, when he is agonized by some startling conjunction of reverie and observation. Charlotte would propitiate her own conscience ; but Emily's battle was with a more impersonal force, a power that would not be defined_by a discipline of letter-writing, or by any other application of logic. It called her out of doors, into high and stony places, where she laboured alone like a northern Elijah, battling against the knowledge of eternity.
Charlotte, in spite of the improprieties which contemporary taste found in Jane Eyre, could not share this emancipation ; and it was only with trembling admiration that she could reply to Emfly's brave cry :
"And am I wrong to worship where Faith cannot doubt, nor hope despair,
Since my own soul can grant my prayer ? "
RICHARD CHURCH. -
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