The Brontës
During the middle of the nineteenth century, English fiction largely depicted manners and customs of different classes and different parts of England. While Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli, and Mrs. Gaskell were writing realistic novels, romantic fiction found noble exponents in the Brontë sisters.
The quiet life lived by the Brontës in the vicarage on the edge of the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire seems prosaic to the casual observer, but it had many weird elements of romanticism. The purple moors stretching away behind the grey stone vicarage, the grey sky, and the sun always half-frowning, and never sporting with nature here as it does over the mountains in Westmoreland, make thought earnest and deep, and suggest the mystery which surrounds human life. It is a serious country, that of the Wharf valley; the people are a serious people, silent and observant. The Brontës were a direct outcome of this country and people, only in them their severity and silence were kindled into life by a Celtic imagination.
What a group of people lived within those grey stone walls! As the vicar and his four motherless children gathered about their simple board, while they engaged in conversation with each other or with the curate, what scenes would have been enacted in that quiet room if the fancies teeming in each childish brain could have been suddenly endowed with life! How could even a dull curate, with an undercurrent of addition and subtraction running in his brain, based upon his meagre salary and economical expenditures, have been insensible to the thought with which the very atmosphere must have been surcharged? The brother, Patrick Branwell, found his audience in the public house, and delighted it with his wit and conversation. The sisters, after their household tasks were done, wrote their stories and often read them to each other.
But fate had chosen her darkest hues in which to weave the warp and woof of their lives. The wild dissipations and wilder talk of their brother Branwell clouded the imaginations of his sisters, and in a short time death was a constant presence in their midst. In September, 1848, Branwell died at the age of thirty; in less than three months, Emily died at the age of twenty-nine; and in five-months, Anne died at the age of twenty-seven; and Charlotte, the eldest, was left alone with her father. During the remaining six years of her life, her compensation for her loss of companionship was her writing. Not long after the death of her sisters, Mr. Nicholls proposed to her; was refused; proposed again and was accepted; then came the separation caused by Mr. Brontë's hostility to the marriage; then the marriage in the church under whose pavement so many members of her family were buried, grim attendants of her wedding; then the nine short months of married life; then the death of the last of the Brontë sisters at the age of thirty-nine. Mr. Brontë outlived her only six years, but he was the last of his family. Six children had been born to Patrick Brontë, not one survived him. Forty years had eliminated a family which yet lives through the imaginative powers of the three daughters who reached years of maturity.
Of the three sisters, the least is known of Emily, and her one novel, Wuthering Heights, reveals nothing of herself. Not one of the characters thought or felt as did the quiet, retiring author. Yet so great was her dramatic power that her brother Branwell was credited with the book, as it was deemed impossible for a woman to have conceived the character of Heathcliff. And yet this arch-fiend of literature was created by the daughter of a country vicar, whose only journeys from home had been to schools, either as pupil or governess. Charlotte Brontë has thrown but little light upon her sister's character. She says that she loved animals and the moors, but was cold toward people and repelled any attempt to win her confidence. The author of Jane Eyre seems neither to have understood Emily's nature nor her genius. Yet we are told that Emily was constantly seen with her arms around the gentle Anne, and that they were inseparable companions. If Anne Brontë could have lived longer, she would have thrown much light upon the character of the author of Wuthering Heights. But now, as we read of her brief life and her one novel, she seems to belong to the great dramatists rather than to the novelists, to the poets who live apart from the world and commune only with the people of their own creating.
Wuthering Heights stands alone in the history of prose fiction. It belongs to the wild region of romanticism, but it imitates no book, and has never been copied. No incident, no character, no description, can be traced to the influence of any other book, but the atmosphere is that of the West Riding of Yorkshire.
Charlotte Brontë thus speaks of it in a letter to a friend:
"Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister: a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur—power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape, and there it stands, colossal, dark and frowning, half statue, half rock, in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it, and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant's foot."
All of this is true, but it gives only the general outlines, nothing of the inner meaning.
In all literature, there is not so repulsive a villain as Heathcliff, the offspring of the gipsies. Insensible to kindness, but resentful of wrong; hard, scheming, indomitable in resolution; quick to put off the avenging of an injury until he can make his revenge serve his purpose; the personification of strength and power; he is yet capable of a love stronger than his hate. Heathcliff is so repulsive that he does not attract, and drawn with such skill that, as has been said, he has not been imitated.
But the strong, dark picture of Heathcliff makes us forget that Catharine is the centre of the story. The night that Mr. Lockwood spends at Wuthering Heights he reads her books, and her spirit appears to him crying for entrance at the window, and complaining that she has wandered on the moors for twenty years. While living, she represents a human soul balanced between heaven and hell, loved by both the powers of darkness and of light. But in her earliest years, she had loved Heathcliff; their thoughts, their affections were intertwined, and they were welded, as it were, into one soul, not at first by love, but by their common hatred of Hindley Earnshaw. When Catharine meets Edgar Linton, her finer nature asserts itself. She loves him as a being from another world; he gives her the first glimpse of real goodness, kindness, and gentleness. She catches through him a gleam of Paradise. But she knows how transient this is, and says to her old nurse, Nelly Dean:
"I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; and that, not because he's handsome, no, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire."
But Catharine is married to Edgar, and for three years her better nature triumphs. Heathcliff is away; Edgar Linton loves her truly, and their home is happy. Catharine alone knows that that house is not her true place of abode. She alone knows that Edgar has not touched her inner nature. She knows that her real self, the self that must abide through the centuries, is indissolubly linked with another's. And when Heathcliff returns, the intensity of her joy, her almost unearthly delight, she neither can nor attempts to conceal. Not once is she deceived as to his true nature. She knows the depth of his depravity, and thus warns the girl who has fallen in love with him:
"He's not a rough diamond—a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic;—he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I never say to him, let this or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them,—I say, let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged: and he'd crush you, like a sparrow's egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesome charge."
But Catharine's nature is akin to his, and it is with almost brutal delight that she helps forward this marriage, when she finds the girl does not trust her word.
Then comes the strife between Edgar and Heathcliff for the soul, so it seems, of Catharine. There is no jealousy on Edgar's part. The book never stoops to anything so earthly. Edgar loathes Heathcliff and cannot understand Catharine's affection for her early playmate. Although she never for a moment hesitates in her allegiance to Heathcliff, it is this strife that causes her death. The strife between good and evil wears her out.
Even after her death, her soul cannot leave this earth. It is still joined to Heathcliff's. It resembles here the story of Paola and Francesca. Catharine is waiting for him and his only delight is in her haunting presence. Heathcliff cannot be accused of keeping Catharine from Paradise. In life she would not let him from her presence, and she clings to him now. It is the story of Undine reversed. Undine gained a soul through a mortal's love. And we feel toward the close that Catharine, selfish and passionate as she was, is yet Heathcliff's better spirit. Catharine while living had prevented Heathcliff from killing her brother. Although he loved Catharine better than himself, and would have made any sacrifice at her request, he feels no more tenderness for her offspring than for his own. But the spirit of Catharine lived in her child and nephew, and when they looked at him with her eyes, he had no pleasure in his revenge upon the son of Hindley nor on the daughter of Edgar Linton.
In the tenderness that once or twice comes over Heathcliff as he looks at Hareton Earnshaw, there is a ray of promise that he may be redeemed. And in the final outcome of the story, one can but hope that Catharine's restless spirit, as it watches and waits for Heathcliff, is striving to bring some blessing upon her house. The awakening of a better nature in Hareton, through his love for Catharine's daughter, is a pretty, tender idyl. The book is like a Greek tragedy in this, that at the close the atmosphere has been purged; the sun once more shines through the windows of Wuthering Heights; hatred is dead, and love reigns supreme.
Wuthering Heights is a novel not of externals, not of character, but of something deeper, more vital. The love of Catharine and Heathcliff has no physical basis; it is the union of souls evil, but not material. It is the sex of spirit, not of body, that adds its might to the resistless force that unites these two. Notwithstanding the external pictures are so distinct that a painter could transfer them to his canvas, the book is a soul-tragedy.
Wuthering Heights cannot be classed among the so-called popular novels. It has appealed to the poets rather than to the readers of fiction. It has received the warmest praise from the poet Swinburne. In The Athenæum of June 16, 1883, he thus eulogises it:
"Now in Wuthering Heights this one thing needful ['logical and moral certitude'] is as perfectly and triumphantly attained as in King Lear or The Duchess of Malfi, in The Bride of Lammermoor or Notre-Dame de Paris. From the first we breathe the fresh dark air of tragic passion and presage; and to the last the changing wind and flying sunlight are in keeping with the stormy promise of the dawn. There is no monotony, there is no repetition, but there is no discord. This is the first and last necessity, the foundation of all labour and the crown of all success, for a poem worthy of the name; and this it is that distinguishes the hand of Emily from the hand of Charlotte Brontë. All the works of the elder sister are rich in poetic spirit, poetic feeling, and poetic detail; but the younger sister's work is essentially and definitely a poem in the fullest and most positive sense of the term."
At the close of this essay he writes:
"It may be true that not many will ever take it to their hearts; it is certain that those who do like it will like nothing very much better in the whole world of poetry or prose."
All that we know of Emily Brontë's nature is consistent, such as we would expect of the author of Wuthering Heights. The first stanza of her last poem, written but a short time before her death, reveals her strength of will and faith:
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
These lines evoked the following tribute from Matthew Arnold:
——she
(How shall I sing her?) whose soul
Knew no fellow for might,
Passion, vehemence, grief,
Daring, since Byron died,
That world-famed son of fire—she, who sank
Baffled, unknown, self-consumed;
Whose too bold dying song
Stirr'd, like a clarion-blast, my soul.
The great books of prose fiction have been for the most part the work of mature years. The lyric poets burst into rhapsody at the dawn of life; but the powers of the novelist have ripened more slowly. The novelists have done better work after thirty-five than at an earlier age but few of them have written a classic at the age of twenty-eight, as did Emily Brontë.
Anne Brontë's fame has been both augmented and dimmed by the greater genius of her two sisters. She is remembered principally as one of the Brontës, so that her books have been oftener reprinted and more extensively read than their actual merit would warrant. In comparison with the greater genius of Charlotte and Emily, her writings have been declared void of interest, and without any ray of the brilliancy which distinguishes their books. This latter statement is not true. Anne Brontë did not have their imaginative power, but she reproduced what she had seen and learned of life with conscientious devotion to truth. Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, Anne Brontë's first book, were published together in three volumes so as to meet the popular demand that novels, like the graces, should appear in threes. It is a photographic representation of the life of a governess in England during the forties. Agnes's courage in determining to augment the family income by seeking a position as governess; the high hopes with which she enters upon her first position; her conscientious resolve to do her full Christian duty to the spoiled children of the Bloomfields; her dismissal and sad return home; her second position in the family of Mr. Murray, a country squire; the two daughters, one determined to make a fine match for herself, the other a perfect hoyden without a thought beyond the horses and dogs; the disregard of the truth in both; Mr. Hatfield, the minister, who cared only for the county families among his parishioners; Miss Murray's marriage for position and the unhappiness that followed it—form a series of photographs, which only a sensitive, responsive nature could have produced. The contrast between the gentle, refined governess, and the coarse natures upon whom she is dependent, is well shown, although there is no attempt on the part of the author to assert any superiority of one over the other. We have many books in which the shrinking governess is described from the point of view of the family or one of their guests, but here the governess of an English fox-hunting squire has spoken for herself; she has described her trials and the constant self-sacrifice which is demanded of her without bitterness, and in a kindly spirit withal, and for that reason the book is a valuable addition to the history of the life and manners of the century.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, her second novel, was a peculiar book to have shaped itself in the brain of the gentle youngest daughter of the Vicar of Haworth. But Anne Brontë had seen phases of life which must have sorely wounded her pure spirit. She had been governess at Thorp Green, where her brother Branwell was tutor, and where he formed that unfortunate attachment for the wife of his employer, which, with the help of liquor and opium, deranged his mind. Anne wrote in her diary at this time, "I have had some very unpleasant and undreamt-of experience of human nature." As we picture Anne Brontë, with her light brown hair, violet-blue eyes, shaded by pencilled eyebrows, and transparent complexion, she seems a spirit of goodness and purity made to behold daily a depth of evil in the nature of one dear to her, which fills her with wonderment and horror.
Mr. Huntingdon of Wildfell Hall was drawn from personal observation of her brother. She wrote with minuteness, because she believed it her duty to hold up his life as a warning to others. The gradual change in Mr. Huntingdon from the happy confident lover to the ruined debauchee is well traced; the story of his infatuation for the wife of his friend, so reckless that he attempted no concealment, is realistic in the extreme. But what a change in the novel! A hundred years before, Huntingdon would have made a fine hero of romance, but here he is disgraced to the position of chief villain, and the reader feels for him only pity and loathing. Probably a man's pen would have touched his errors more lightly, but Anne Brontë painted him as he appeared to her. The author attributes such a character as Huntingdon's to false education, and makes her heroine say:
"As for my son—if I thought he would grow up to be what you call a man of the world,—one that has 'seen life,' and glories in his experience, even though he should so far profit by it as to sober down, at length, into a useful and respected member of society—I would rather that he died to-morrow—rather a thousand times."
Notwithstanding its defects—and it is full of them judged from the stand-point of art—Wildfell Hall is a book of promise. In the descriptions of the Hall, the mystery that surrounds its mistress, the rumours of her unknown lover, the heathclad hills and the desolate fields, there are romantic elements that remind one of Wuthering Heights. The book is more faulty than Agnes Grey, but the writer had a deeper vision of life with its weaknesses and its depths of human passion. If years had mellowed that "undreamt-of experience" of Thorp Green, Anne Brontë with her truthful observation and sympathetic insight into character might have written a classic. The material out of which Wildfell Hall was wrought, under a more mature mind, with a better grasp of the whole and a better regard for proportion, would have made a novel worthy of a place beside Jane Eyre.
That English fiction has produced sweeter and more varied fruit by being grafted with the novels of women no one who gives the matter a serious thought can for a moment doubt. One distinctive phase of woman's mind made its way but slowly in the English novel. Women are by nature introspective. They read character and are quick to grasp the motives and passions that underlie action. The French women have again and again embodied this view of human nature in their novels, which are essentially of the inner life. The Princess of Clèves by Madame de Lafayette, written in 1678, is the first book in which all the conflicts are those of the emotions; here the great triumph is that which a woman wins over her own heart. Madame de Tencin in Mémoires du Comte de Comminges represents her hero and heroine under the influence of two great passions, religion and love. Madame de Souza, Madame Cottin, Madame de Genlis, Madame de Staël, and George Sand wrote novels of the inner life. The Princess of Clèves with noble dignity controls her emotion and at last conquers it. The pages of George Sand thrill with unbridled passion.
The English women, however, are more repressed by nature than the French, and the English novel of the inner life advanced but slowly. The emotions of the long-forgotten Sidney Biddulph are minutely told. A Simple Story by Mrs. Inchbald is a psychological novel. Amelia Opie, Mary Brunton, and Mrs. Shelley wrote novels of the inner life.
But Jane Eyre is the first English novel which in sustained intensity of emotion can compare with the novels of Madame de Staël or George Sand. The style partakes of the high-wrought character of the heroine, and the reader is whirled along in the vortex of feeling until he too partakes of every varied mood of the characters, and closes the book fevered and exhausted. It is one of the ironies of fate that Charlotte Brontë with her strong pro-Anglican prejudices should belong to the school of these French women. But there is the same difference between their writings that there is between the French temperament and the English. Even in the wildest moments of Jane Eyre her passion is rather like the river Wharf when it has overflowed its banks; while theirs is like the mountain torrent that bears all down before it.
Much of the passion that Charlotte Brontë describes is pure imagination. She wrote freely to her friends about herself and the people whom she knew. The three rejected suitors caused her only a little amusement. Her love for Mr. Nicholls, whom she afterwards married, was little warmer than respect. We could as easily weave a romance out of Jane Austen's remark that the poet Crabbe was a man whom she could marry as to make a love story out of Charlotte's relations to Monseiur Héger, who figures as the hero in three of her books. Here she is greater than the French women writers: they knew by experience what they wrote; she by innate genius.
Perhaps no novelist ever had more meagre materials out of which to make four novels than had Charlotte Brontë: her sisters, Monsieur and Madame Héger, the curates, and herself; a small village in Yorkshire, two boarding schools, two positions as governess, and a short time spent in a school in Brussels. Compare this range with the material that Scott, Dickens, or Thackeray had—then judge how much of the elixir of genius was given to each.
The early pages of Jane Eyre, the first novel which Charlotte Brontë published, describe Lowood Institution, a place modelled upon Cowan's Bridge School. The two teachers, the kind Miss Temple and the cruel Miss Scatcherd, were drawn from two instructors there at the time the Brontës attended it. Helen Burns, so untidy but so meek in spirit, was Maria Brontë, the eldest sister, who died at the age of eleven, probably as a result of the poor food and harsh treatment of the school. With what calm she replies to Jane, when she would sympathise with her for an unjust punishment:
"I am, as Miss Scatcherd said, slatternly; I seldom put, and never keep, things in order; I am careless; I forget rules; I read when I should learn my lessons; I have no method; and sometimes I say, like you, I cannot bear to be subjected to systematic arrangements. This is all very provoking to Miss Scatcherd, who is naturally neat, punctual, and particular."
Helen Burns, with her calm submission, and Jane Eyre, with her rebellious spirit, are finely contrasted. Jane's passionate resentment of the punishments which Miss Scatcherd inflicted on Helen was genuine. Charlotte was nine years old when she left Cowan's Bridge School, but her suppressed anger at the punishments which her sister Maria had received there flashed out years afterwards in Jane Eyre.
Charlotte Brontë was writing Jane Eyre at the same time that Emily and Anne were writing Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. As they read from their manuscripts, Charlotte objected to beauty as a requisite of a heroine, and said, "I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours." So arose the conception of Jane Eyre. If the slight, shy, Yorkshire governess, without beauty or charm of manner, had appeared before the imagination of any novelist either male or female, at that time, and asked to be admitted into the house of fiction, she would have been refused entrance as cruelly as Hannah shut the door in the face of Jane Eyre, when she came to her dripping with the rain, cold and weak from two nights' exposure on the moor, and asking for charity. But Charlotte Brontë, with a woman's sympathetic eye made doubly penetrating and loving by genius, chose this outcast from romance as a heroine, a woman without beauty or charm, and boldly proclaimed that moral beauty was superior to physical beauty, and that the attraction of one soul for another lay quite beyond the pale of external form.
Jane Eyre is not, however, Charlotte Brontë, as has been so often asserted. She would not have gone back to comfort Mr. Rochester, after she had once left the Hall. One suspects that he was drawn from reading, since the author hardly trusted her knowledge of worldly men to draw a fitting lover for Jane. Mr. Rochester is very much the same type of man as Mr. B., whom Pamela married, and the independent Jane addresses him as "My Master," an expression constantly on the lips of Pamela. Yet Rochester leaves a permanent impression on the mind, for he represents a strong man at war with destiny. He conceals his marriage because of his determination to conquer fate. It is pointed out by critics to-day that he is quite an impossible character, that he is, in fact, a woman's hero. It is well to remember, however, that the author of Jane Eyre was believed at first to have been a man, as it was thought impossible for a man like Rochester to have been conceived in a woman's brain, and not until Mrs. Gaskell's life of the Brontës was published was Charlotte's character as a modest woman established. But men have repudiated Mr. Rochester, and so we must accept their judgment.
The heroine of her next novel, Shirley, was suggested by Emily Brontë. Only Shirley was not Emily. Shirley could not have conceived even the dim outlines of Wuthering Heights, but she had many of the strong qualities of Emily, and these, mingled with the softer stuff of her own nature, make her contradictory but charming, and Louis Moore, an agreeable tutor whom Emily Brontë would have quite despised, naturally falls in love with his wayward pupil, as they pore over books in the school-room. Shirley is contrasted with Caroline Helstone, of whom Mrs. Humphry Ward says: "For delicacy, poetry, divination, charm, Caroline stands supreme among the women of Miss Brontë's gallery." Even if other admirers of Miss Brontë deny her this eminence, she certainly possesses all the qualities, rare among heroines, which Mrs. Ward has attributed to her.
In many of the conversations between Shirley and Caroline, there are reminders of what passed between the Brontë sisters in their own home. The relative excellence of men and women novelists always interested them. Shirley evidently expressed Charlotte's own views in the following words:
"If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women. They do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. Then to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other's creations, worshipping the heroine of such a poem—novel—drama, thinking it fine,—divine! Fine and divine it may be, but often quite artificial—false as the rose in my best bonnet there. If I spoke all I think on this point, if I gave my real opinion of some first-rate female characters in first-rate works, where should I be? Dead under a cairn of avenging stones in half-an-hour."
"After all," says Caroline, "authors' heroines are almost as good as authoresses' heroes."
"Not at all," Shirley replies. "Women read men more truly than men read women. I'll prove that in a magazine article some day when I've time; only it will never be inserted; it will be 'declined with thanks,' and left for me at the publisher's."
The greater part of the men in Shirley were drawn from life, and are as true to their sex as were the heroines of Dickens, Thackeray, or Disraeli, who were then writing. As for the curates, they are perfect. No man's hand could have executed their portraits so skilfully. They have no more real use in the story than they seem to have had in their respective parishes. But this daughter of a country vicar, who knew nothing of the London cockney, who was then enlivening the books of Dickens, seized upon the funniest people she knew, the curates, and they have been immortalised.
There is often in Charlotte Brontë's novels a separation of plot and character, as if they formed themselves independently in her mind. This is especially true of Shirley. At that time the attention of England was directed toward the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Mrs. Trollope and Harriet Martineau had written upon conditions of life there. In Sybil Disraeli considered broadly the underlying causes of the misery of the operatives. Mrs. Gaskell wrote Mary Barton, a story of Manchester life, the same year that Charlotte Brontë was writing Shirley. The plot of the last named is laid in the early years of the nineteenth century, and turns upon the opposition of the workmen to the introduction of machinery. But the plot and characters are constantly getting in each other's way and tripping each other up. Though the book is full of defects, one cannot judge it harshly. When she began the funny description of the curates' tea-drinking, her brother and sisters were with her. Before it was finished, she and her father were left alone. But at this time the public demanded melodrama. Fires, drownings, and death-beds were popular methods of untying hard knots and of playing upon the emotions of the reader. She, like Mrs. Gaskell, constantly resorts to outside circumstances to help put things to rights when they are drifting in the wrong direction, circumstances which Jane Austen would not have admitted in a book of hers.
Before Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre or Shirley, she had finished The Professor, and offered it to different publishers, but it was rejected by all. Finally she herself lost faith in it, and transformed it into the beautiful story of Villette, where the school of Madame and Monseiur Héger in Brussels is made immortal. In the plot of Villette, as in the plot of Jane Eyre and of Shirley, many extraneous events happen which are either unexpected or unnecessary. Like Jane Eyre, Villette is steeped in the romantic spirit, but the hard light of reason again dispels the illusion. In the management of the supernatural Charlotte is far inferior to Emily. The explanation of the nun in Villette is even childish. It is the mistake made by Mrs. Radcliffe, by nearly all writers of the age of reason. They give a ray, as it were, a whisper from the mysterious world which surrounds that which is manifest to our everyday senses. Be it the fourth dimension, or what not, we catch for a moment a message from this other world, which, even indistinct, still tells us that this visible world is not all, that there is something beyond. Then, with hard common-sense, they deny their own message, and, so doing, deny to us the world of mystery, and leave us only the material world in which to believe. Not so Emily Brontë. Not so Scott or Shakespeare. We may believe in Hamlet's ghost or not; we may believe or not in the White Lady of Avenel; we may believe or not that Catharine's soul hovered near Heathcliff. But we are still left with a belief in the life after death, and still believe in something beyond experience, and still grope to find those things in heaven and earth of which philosophy does not dream.
But the characters, not the plot, remain in the mind, after reading Villette. Madame Beck, whose prototype was Madame Héger, is as clever as Cardinal Wolsey or Cardinal Richelieu; but she uses all her diplomatic skill in the management of a lady's school, which, under her ever watchful eye, with the aid of duplicate keys to the trunks and drawers of the teachers and pupils, runs without friction of any kind. Lucy Snowe, the English teacher in Villette, is far more pleasing than Jane Eyre; she is not so passionate, but her view of life is deeper and broader, and consequently kinder. And there is Paul Emanuel. Who would have believed the rejected professor would have grown into that scholar of middle age? He is so distinctly the foreigner in showing every emotion under which he is labouring. How pathetic and how lovable he is on the day of his fête when he thinks that the English governess has forgotten him, and has not brought even a flower to make the day happier for him! So fretful in little things, so heroic in large things, with so many faults which every pupil can see, but with so many virtues, frank even about his little deceptions, he is a lovable man. But many of Miss Brontë's readers do not find Paul Emanuel as delightful as Paulina, the womanly little girl who grows into the childlike woman. She is as sensitive as the mimosa plant to the people about her. Every event of her childhood, all the people she cared for then, remained indelibly imprinted on her mind, so that, with her, friendship and love are strong and abiding.
Notwithstanding their many defects, Charlotte Brontë's novels have left a permanent impression upon English fiction and have won an acknowledged place among English classics. She first made a minute analysis of the varying emotions of men and women, and noted the strange, unaccountable attractions and repulsions which everybody has experienced. Paulina, a girl of six, is happy at the feet of Graham, a boy of sixteen, although he is unconscious of her presence. And so instance after instance can be given of affinities and antipathies which lie beyond human reason. She, like her sister Emily, though with less clear vision, was searching for the hidden sources of human feeling and human action.
Charlotte Brontë wrote to a friend:
"I always through my whole life liked to penetrate to the real truth; I like seeking the goddess in her temple, and handling the veil, and daring the dread glance."
Her truthfulness in painting emotion, which to her own generation seemed most daring, even coarse, has given an abiding quality to her work. And besides she created Paulina and Paul Emanuel.