II
The sin is the worse because every one acknowledges the Life of Charlotte Brontë to be—after Boswell’s Life of Johnson, admittedly beyond competition—among the two or three best biographies in our language. Conceive the Brontës—not Charlotte alone, but the whole family—the whole of that terrible family in that terrible parsonage at Haworth—as this staid lady, wife of a Unitarian minister, faithfully depicts them—the wastrel son, Branwell: through long nights tearing his own heart out, with his stern old father’s, in the bedroom they had, for safety, to occupy together: in the end pulling himself up to die standing: the shuddering sisters listening on the stairs; Emily, doomed and fierce, she too in her turn standing up to die. Consider—I will not say Wuthering Heights, or Charlotte’s well-known magnificent description, in Villette, of Rachel and her tortured acting—but consider if only by illustration of contrast this most maddened poem by Emily—and there are others as tragic—
The Prisoner
Still let my tyrants know, I am not doom’d to wear
Year after year in gloom and desolate despair;
A messenger of Hope comes every night to me,
And offers for short life, eternal liberty.
He comes with Western winds, with evening’s wandering airs,
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars:
Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.
Desire for nothing known in my maturer years,
When Joy grew made with awe, at counting future tears:
When, if my spirit’s sky was full of flashes warm,
I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunder-storm.
But first, a hush of peace—a soundless calm descends;
The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends.
Mute music soothes my breast—unutter’d harmony
That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.
Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels;
Its wings are almost free—its home, its harbour found;
Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound.
O dreadful is the check—intense the agony—
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb—the brain to think again—
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.
Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less;
The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless;
And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine,
If it but herald Death, the vision is divine.
Consider, I say, that the authoress of Cranford not only lived with these fierce women and comforted them as their benign friend, with a comfort that no soul can give to another without understanding, but portrayed them (their struggles ended) in a book that combines the English (even the Victorian English) with the Greek, a fidelity to awful fact with a serene judgment, a tender mercy—the two so discovering and covering all, that—whether it be in charity or in justice—its core of truth has never been challenged: that it stands yet among the noblest few of English biographies. I put it to you that, if you but set together those two books—Cranford and the Life of Charlotte Brontë—at once you must recognise the operating hand—the quietly operating hand—of genius. But this, even when Mrs. Gaskell’s longer novels are thrown into the scale, has avoided, I think—because she herself is so equable, so temperate—its right recognition. Yes, her very portrait has a Hellenic look, so beautiful it is, so penetrating its calm gaze.