Studies in Early Victorian Literature

by Frederic Harrison

It is quite natural and right that Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, indeed all who have spoken of the author of Jane Eyre, should insist primarily on the personality of Charlotte Brontë. It is this intense personality which is the distinctive note of her books. They are not so much tales as imaginary autobiographies. They are not objective presentations of men and women in the world. They are subjective sketches of a Brontë under various conditions, and of the few men and women who occasionally cross the narrow circle of the Brontë world. Of the three stories she published, two are autobiographies, and the third is a fancy portrait of her sister Emily. Charlotte Brontë is herself Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, and Emily Brontë is Shirley Keeldar. So in The Professor, her earliest but posthumous tale, Frances Henri again is simply a little Swiss Brontë. That story also is told as an autobiography, but, though the narrator is supposed to be one William Crimsworth, it is a woman who speaks, sees, and dreams all through the book. The four tales, which together were the work of eight years, are all variations upon a Brontë and the two Brontë worlds in Yorkshire and Belgium. It is most significant (but quite natural) that Mrs. Gaskell in her Life of Charlotte Brontë devotes more than half her book to the story of the family before the publication of Jane Eyre. The four tales are not so much romances as artistic and imaginative autobiographies.

To say this is by no means to detract from their rare value. The romances of adventure, of incident, of intrigue, of character, of society, or of humour, depend on a great variety of observation and a multiplicity of contrasts. There is not much of Walter Scott, as a man, in Ivanhoe or of Alexander Dumas in the Trois Mousquetaires; and Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Bulwer, Miss Edgeworth, Stevenson, and Meredith—even Miss Austen and George Eliot—seek to paint men and women whom they conceive and whom we may see and know, and not themselves and their own home circle. But Charlotte Brontë told us her own life, her own feelings, sufferings, pride, joy, and ambition. She bared for us her own inner soul, and all that it had known and desired, and this she did with a noble, pure, simple, but intense truth. There was neither egoism, nor monotony, nor commonplace in it. It was all coloured with native imagination and a sense of true art. There is ample room in Art for these subjective idealisations of even the narrowest world. Shelley's lyrics are intensely self-centred, but no one can find in them either realism or egoism. The field in prose is far more limited, and the risk of becoming tedious and morbid is greater. But a true artist can now and then in prose produce most precious portraits of self and glowing autobiographic fantasies of a noble kind.

And Charlotte Brontë was a true artist. She was also more than this; a brave, sincere, high-minded woman, with a soul, as the great moralist saw, "of impetuous honesty." She was not seduced, or even moved, by her sudden fame. She put aside the prospect of success, money, and social distinction as things which revolted her. She was quite right. With all her genius it was strictly and narrowly limited; she was ignorant of the world to a degree immeasurably below that of any other known writer of fiction; her world was incredibly scanty and barren. She had to spin everything out of her own brain in that cold, still, gruesome Haworth parsonage. It was impossible for any genius to paint a world of which it was as ignorant as a child. Hence, in eight years she only completed four tales for publication. And she did right. With her strict limits both of brain and of experience she could not go further. Perhaps, as it was, she did more than was needed. Shirley and Villette, with all their fine scenes, are interesting now mainly because Charlotte Brontë wrote them, and because they throw light upon her brain and nature. The Professor is entirely so, and has hardly any other quality. We need not groan that we have no more than we have from her pen. Jane Eyre would suffice for many reputations and alone will live.

In considering the gifted Brontë family, it is really Charlotte alone who finally concerns us. Emily Brontë was a wild, original, and striking creature, but her one book is a kind of prose Kubla Khan—a nightmare of the superheated imagination. Anne Brontë always seems but a pale reflection of the family. In any other family she might be interesting—just as "Barrel Mirabeau" was the good boy and fool of the Mirabeau family, though in another family he would have been the genius and the profligate. And so, the poems of the whole three are interesting as psychologic studies, but have hardly a single stanza that can be called poetry at all. It is significant, but hardly paradoxical, that Charlotte's verses are the worst of the three. How many born writers of musical prose have persisted in manufacturing verse of a curiously dull and unmelodious quality! The absolute masters of prose and of verse in equal perfection hardly exceed Shakespeare and Shelley, Goethe and Hugo. And Charlotte Brontë is an eminent example of a strong imagination working with freedom in prose, but which began by using the instrument of verse, and used it in a manner that never rose for an instant above mediocrity.

Of the Brontës it is Charlotte only who concerns us, and of Charlotte's work it is Jane Eyre only that can be called a masterpiece. To call it a masterpiece, as Thackeray did, is not to deny its manifold and manifest shortcomings. It is a very small corner of the world that it gives, and that world is seen by a single acute observer from without. The plain little governess dominates the whole book and fills every page. Everything and every one appear, not as we see them and know them in the world, but as they look to a keen-eyed girl who had hardly ever left her native village. Had the whole book been cast into the form of impersonal narration, this limitation, this huge ignorance of life, this amateur's attempt to construct a romance by the light of nature instead of observation and study of persons, would have been a failure. As the autobiography of Jane Eyre—let us say at once of Charlotte Brontë—it is consummate art. It produces the illusion we feel in reading Robinson Crusoe. In the whole range of modern fiction there are few characters whom we feel that we know so intimately as we do Jane Eyre. She is as intensely familiar to us as Becky Sharp or Parson Adams. Much more than this. Not only do we feel an intimate knowledge of Jane Eyre, but we see every one by the eyes of Jane Eyre only. Edward Rochester has not a few touches of the melodramatic villain; and no man would ever draw a man with such conventional and Byronic extravagances. If Edward Rochester had been described in impersonal narrative with all his brutalities, his stage villain frowns, and his Grand Turk whims, it would have spoiled the book. But Edward Rochester, the "master" of the little governess, as seen by the eyes of a passionate, romantic, but utterly unsophisticated girl, is a powerful character; and all the inconsistencies, the affectation, the savageries we might detect in him, become the natural love-dream of a most imaginative and most ignorant young woman.

A consummate master of style has spoken, we have just seen, of the "noble English" that Charlotte Brontë wrote. It is true that she never reached the exquisite ease, culture, and raciness of Thackeray's English. She lapsed now and then into provincial solecisms; she "named" facts as well as persons; girls talk of a "beautiful man"; nor did she know anything of the scientific elaboration of George Eliot or the subtle grace of Stevenson. But the style is of high quality and conscientious finish—terse, pure, picturesque, and sound. Like everything she did, it was most scrupulously honest—the result of a sincere and vivid soul, resolved to utter what it had most at heart in the clearest tone. Very few writers of romance have ever been masters of a style so effective, so nervous, so capable of rising into floods of melody and pathos. There is a fine passage of the kind in one of her least-known books, the earliest indeed of all, which no publisher could be found in her lifetime to print. The "Professor" has just proposed, has been accepted, and goes home to bed half-crazy and fasting. A sudden reaction falls on his over-wrought nerves.

A horror of great darkness fell upon me; I felt my chamber invaded by one I had known formerly, but had thought for ever departed. I was temporarily a prey to hypochondria. She had been my acquaintance, nay, my guest, once before in boyhood; I had entertained her at bed and board for a year; for that space of time I had her to myself in secret; she lay with me, she ate with me, she walked out with me, showing me nooks in woods, hollows in hills, where we could sit together, and where she could drop her drear veil over me, and so hide sky and sun, grass and green tree; taking me entirely to her death-cold bosom, and holding me with arms of bone. What tales she would tell me at such hours! What songs she would recite in my ears! How she would discourse to me of her own country—the grave—and again and again promise to conduct me there ere long; and drawing me to the very brink of a black, sullen river, show me, on the other side, shores unequal with mound, monument, and tablet, standing up in a glimmer more hoary than moonlight. "Necropolis!" she would whisper, pointing to the pale piles, and add, "It contains a mansion prepared for you."

Finely imagined—finely said! It has the ring and weird mystery of De Quincey. There are phrases that Thackeray would not have used, such as jar on the ear and betray an immature taste. "Necropolis" is a strange affectation when "City of the Dead" was at hand; and "pointing to the pale piles" is a hideous alliteration. But in spite of such immaturities (and the writer never saw the text in type) the passage shows wonderful power of language and sense of music in prose. How fine is the sentence, "taking me to her death-cold bosom, and holding me with arms of bone," and that of the tombstones, "in a glimmer more hoary than moonlight" Coleridge might have used such a phrase in the Ancient Mariner or in Christabel. Yet these were the thoughts and the words of a lonely girl of thirty as she watched the dreary churchyard at Haworth from the windows of its unlovely parsonage.

This vivid power of painting in words is specially called forth by the look of nature and the scenes she describes. Charlotte Brontë had, in the highest degree, that which Ruskin has called the "pathetic fallacy," the eye which beholds nature coloured by the light of the inner soul. In this quality she really reaches the level of fine poetry. Her intense sympathy with her native moors and glens is akin to that of Wordsworth. She almost never attempts to describe any scenery with which she is not deeply familiar. But how wonderfully she catches the tone of her own moorland, skies, storm-winds, secluded hall or cottage!

The charm of the hour lay in its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun. I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and the little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like single russet leaves that had forgotten to drop. . . . From my seat I could look down on Thornfield: the gray and battlemented hall was the principal object in the vale below me; its woods and dark rookery rose against the west. I lingered till the sun went down amongst the trees, and sank crimson and clear behind them.