CHARLOTTE BRONTE.*
Jr will surprise most people to read that Mr. Shorter was assisted in the preparation of this book by Charlotte Bronte's husband, Mr. Nicholls, who is still living. One cannot think of her work without a sense of remoteness ; an interval separ- ates us from it, not to be measured in years. Jane Eyre was introduced to London almost at the same time as Becky Sharp, and no gulf divides us from Becky, who probably im- presses the world to-day very much as she did at her first appearance. The same cannot be said of Mr. Rochester's little governess, who outraged society so deeply. It is amazing to remember that Mrs. Gaskell only forty years ago con- cluded her memoir of the authoress with a passage of almost deprecatory excuses. Society, as usual, had a sound instinct and knew when it was being hard hit. The objects of Thackeray's satire were very much what Miss Brontë, in her way, was attacking; pride of purse, insolence to dependants, and narrow conventional respectability. But Thackeray's attitude had nothing militant about it ; the bent of his mind, essentially sceptical, recoiled from any clear distinctions between the good and the bad. Pride of purse is vulgar,' he would say, but, after all, if you and I were rich, my friend, might not our point of view alter ? ' Miss Bronte-, when she attacked, made a positive, passionate onslaught ; the characters with whom she sides are incapable, at least, of meanness. She left no one in doubt as to her con- victions, and convictions have seldom had a more effective advocate. If she seems far off from us now, it is be- cause in relation to women the whole code of society has altered, and in working that alteration no influence has been more potent than hers. That, no doubt, ac- counts in part for the extraordinary interest which has been shown concerning her life ; neither Thackeray nor George Eliot have been the subject of half so much biographi- cal writing; about Charles Reade as a person scarcely a word is spoken. People have seen, and seen rightly, in Carver Bell something more than a considerable artist,—a real leader of opinion in a very momentous though gradual revolution. Partly also the very narrowness of her range has produced a kind et local cult with its Brontë Museum at Haworth,—Yorkshire folk regard the wonderful family as their particular glory and their enthusiasm radiates. But chiefly the bulk of this Bronte literature is due to the intrinsic fascination of the subject. So strange a group has never been shown to the world as that which Mrs. Gaskell's biography displayed ; it caught the popular imagination, and by the angry corre- spondence which followed with Mr. Carus Wilson and others
• Charlotte Bronti and her Circle. By Cleratnt Shorter. London : Ilcdeler and Stoughton.
who found themselves named publicly as the originals of no flattering portraits, popular curiosity also was inflamed. Mr. Shorter's book should close the series. It satisfies all possible curiosities and publishes all possible letters ; shatters the myth which had grown up concerning Branwell Brontë ; and adds to the account of Charlotte Bronte's life some in- teresting details relating to her marriage. But it tells us nothing new of the two younger sisters, Emily and Anne, whose papers Charlotte destroyed ; and the portrait of Char- lotte herself needed no finishing touches. Mrs. Gaskell's description of her outward appearance is not likely to be improved on at this time of day; the best of the letters were selected by her at once with a delicate tact; and for the inner nature of the woman the novels are in themselves a very sufficient revelation.
The beet single phrase to characterise the whole group belongs to Miss Mary Taylor—Rose Yorke of Shirley—who compared them to potatoes growing in a cellar. The metaphor is country-bred and may need explanation. When potatoes are stored in a rambling outhouse the doors may be shut, but light often makes its way in through chinks under- neath them ; and you will find roots in the furthest corner with great green shoots thirty or forty feet long straggling out towards this glimpse of free nature. There is something like that in the Bronte genius ; something morbid, an abnormal development in one direction. Charlotte's power of observation and desire of experience set her passionately longing for travel ; shut up in that moorland house with a father resentful of any visitor, her mind was driven in on itself, and the result was that unnatural introspectiveness which she renders so energetically in Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe. The experience of life which Branwell brought to her was such an experience as hospital nurses cannot avoid ; but in those days ladies were not hospital nurses, and it seemed shocking that any lady should possess it. But such as it was, it was knowledge, and she, pining for knowledge, seized upon it, till her experience grew, like the potato, to unhealthy proportions in a single direction. Again, it is im- possible to read her books without seeing the woman's passionate craving for love ; and love was denied her. Emily Bronte's affection was rather a comradeship ; Shirley will tell you how this motherless girl dreamed of a mother's caresses. Nothing in that vehement nature became atrophied for lack of food ; love and caresses were denied, but the forces of her being sent out cravings for them that seemed almost irrational, like a starving man's hunger to the well-fed. The effect of the life upon Emily Brontë it is not so easy to judge of. Her book is perfectly impersonal ; her main actors are creatures of sheer imagination, evolved out of a nature that inherited her father's love for solitude. Wuthering Heights is inspired by the spirit of wild and lonely moors, and it is probable that this plant at least would have grown only in the dark.
A fader in Charlotte's development which neither Mrs. Gaskell nor Mr. Shorter has fully appreciated is the effect of teaching upon a literary temperament. Daudet has written his bitter experiences of it in Le Petit Chose, and it is a voca- tion which scarcely any one has contrived to exercise and pro- duce literature at the same time. The mere strain of keeping reluctant minds at work is one of the heaviest, and tells severely on any nervous organisation. A governess has the trial in its worst form, for she has no adequate means of enforcing authority. Such at least seems to have been Charlotte Bronte's experience both in England and after- wards at Brussels ; and her high-strung nature, with its sensitive pride, must have suffered terribly in the continual effort merely to maintain order. If she was intolerant of stupidity—as undoubtedly she was to an uncharitable degree —that was because she had wrestled day after day with it, and been vanquished by its mere brute force of resistance. "You may bring a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink, and this is true is fortiori of an ass. Charlotte Brontë must have been an admirable teacher; her books are full of luminous suggestions on the subject, and by her own account in Villette—nothing is likely to be more trust- worthy—she succeeded in enforcing discipline. But the wear and tear upon her nervous system must have been ten times what was necessary. A placid, equable person with a low intellectual standard would have produced much the same results at a tenth of the cost. Imagine Charlotte Brontë endeavouring to expound a play of Shakespeare to the original of Miss Ginevra Fanshawe. That is an extreme case, because in it the inferior mind, carapaced like a tortoise in its insensibility, would have just wit enough to understand the intellectual torture it in- flicted upon the teacher to hear flippant stupidities uttered about masterpieces, felt "to the finest fibre" of her own being. Certainly the picture of young womanhood given in Metter does not err on the side of leniency ; and the book appears to have given a good deal of pain and caused no slight un- pleasantness. But Charlotte Brontë had a remarkable power of suffering, and it is hard not to rejoice that ultimately a weapon was put into her hand, too late, indeed, for defence, but in time for vengeance. Yet she would herself have been the first to condemn this kind of post- humous extension given to it by Mr. Shorter. Why should the curates in Shirley have names tacked on to them, for instance ? Besides, it interferes with the enjoyment of the novels to have one's memory continually on the stretch trying to remember who is who. The book WAR perhaps inevitable, but was it necessary P It tells one nothing new of Charlotte Brontë, either as artist or as preacher, —the two capacities in which we have a right to know all there is to be known. No light is thrown on the steady evolution of her art from the arbitrary and mechanical plot of Jane Eyre, to the more excellent way of Shirley and Villette, where the events proceed from the characters in collision. Nowhere is formulated her code in morals, though there is an interesting criticism on it in one of Miss Taylor's admirable letters from New Zealand. But nothing of the sort is needed. In all the novels the main interest is always Miss Brontë, whether she is on the stage herself or not,—the fiery little woman, so meek outwardly, with her passionate assertion of woman's right to possess her own soul ; to be emancipated at a stroke from everything that is conventional, in order that she may be more imperatively bound than ever by the moral law of which she is to be for herself the most severe and inflexible arbitress. Woman is emancipated now without question. It is impossible not to wonder what Charlotte Bronte would say to the result.
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