But it is clear that Carlyle suffered ceaselessly, though never unutterably. He was a matchless artist, with an unequalled gift of putting into vivid words everything he experienced; but his sadness was a disease of the imagination, a fear, not of anything definite—for he never even saw the anxieties that were nearest to him—but a nightmare dream of chaos and whirling forces all about him, a dread of slipping off his own very fairly comfortable perch into oceans of confusion and dismay.
XIII
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
I doubt if the records of intimate biography contain a finer object-lesson against fear and all its obsessions than the life of Charlotte Bronte. She was of a temperament which in many ways was more open to the assaults of fear than any which could well be devised. She was frail and delicate, liable to acute nervous depression, intensely shy and sensitive, and susceptible as well; that is to say that her shyness did not isolate her from her kind; she wanted to be loved, respected, even admired. When she did love, she loved with fire and passion and desperate loyalty.
Her life was from beginning to end full of sharp and tragic experiences. She was born and brought up in a bleak moorland village, climbing steeply and grimly to the edge of heathery uplands. The bare parsonage, with its little dark rooms, looks out on a churchyard paved with graves. Her father was a kindly man, but essentially moody and solitary. He took all his meals alone, walked alone, sate alone. Her mother died of cancer, when she was but a child. Then she was sent to an ill-managed austere school, and here when she was nine years old her two elder sisters died. She took service two or three times as a governess, and endured agonies of misunderstanding, suspicious of her employers, afraid of her pupils, longing for home with an intense yearning. Then she went out to a school at Brussels, where under the teaching of M. Heger, a gifted professor, her mind and heart awoke, and she formed for him a strange affection, half an intellectual devotion, half an unconscious passion, which deprived her of her peace of mind. Her sad and wistful letters to him, lately published, were disregarded by him, partly because his wife was undoubtedly jealous of the relation, partly because he was disconcerted by the emotion he had aroused. Her brother, a brilliant, wayward, and in some ways attractive boy, got into disgrace, and drifted home, where he tried to console himself with drink and opium. After three years of this horrible life, he died, and within twelve months her two surviving sisters, Emily and Anne, developed consumption and died. As Robert Browning says, there indeed was "trouble enough for one!"
Now it must be borne in mind that her temperament was naturally hypochondriacal.
Let me quote a passage dealing with the same experience; it is undoubtedly autobiographical, though it comes from Villette, into which Charlotte Bronte threw the picture of her own solitary experiences in Brussels. She is left alone at the pensionnat in the vacation, strained by work and anxiety, and tortured by exhaustion, restlessness, and sleeplessness:—
"One day, perceiving this growing illusion, I said, 'I really believe my nerves are getting overstretched: my mind has suffered somewhat too much; a malady is growing upon it—what shall I do? How shall I keep well?'
"Indeed there was no way to keep well under the circumstances. At last a day and night of peculiarly agonising depression were succeeded by physical illness; I took perforce to my bed. About this time the Indian summer closed, and the equinoctial storms began; and for nine dark and wet days, of which the hours rushed on all turbulent, deaf, dishevelled—bewildered with sounding hurricane—I lay in a strange fever of the nerves and blood. Sleep went quite away. I used to rise in the night, look round for her, beseech her earnestly to return. A rattle of the window, a cry of the blast only replied—Sleep never came!