Charles James Lever
(1806-1872).
Charles James Lever came in direct literary descent from neither of these, but from William Hamilton Maxwell (1792-1850), whose Stories from Waterloo turned Lever’s attention to the literary possibilities of the great war. This book begot Harry Lorrequer, begun in the Dublin University Magazine in 1837; and Lorrequer was followed by Charles O’Malley (1840). The former derived its name from the ‘rollicking’ quality generally recognised as characteristic of Lever. Both books have whatever attraction high spirits and plenty of fun and fighting and adventure can give; but in the literary sense they are rough and unpolished to the last degree. Tom Burke of Ours (1844) shows the same qualities slightly chastened and reduced to a more literary shape. The change went on, and Lever paid more and more attention to construction and to literary law and rule. He himself considered Sir Brook Fossbrooke (1866) his best book; but it may be questioned whether the gain in smoothness and regularity is sufficient to compensate for the partial loss of that rush of adventure and copiousness of anecdote which won for Lever his reputation, and still preserves it.
Charlotte Brontë
(1816-1855),
Emily Jane Brontë
(1818-1848),
Anne Brontë
(1820-1849).
It is singular that this typically Irish novelist was by blood more English than Irish. But the debt which Ireland owed to England in Lever was repaid with interest in that family of genius, the Brontës. Their father, himself a minor poet, left behind him, when he left Ireland, the name by which he was known, Brunty, from O’Prunty, and was afterwards known as Brontë. He married a Cornish girl, and settled as a clergyman at Haworth, on the wild moors of the West Riding of Yorkshire. All his children who grew to maturity possessed talent, if not genius. His son, Patrick Branwell Brontë, who was in boyhood considered the most promising of all, squandered his own life and clouded the lives of his sisters by his debauchery. The three sisters, Charlotte, Emily Jane and Anne, all won a place in literature, and two of them a conspicuous one. Their lives were uneventful, but gloomy and sometimes tragic. They were poor, they had a dissipated brother, they were constitutionally liable to consumption, and their story is a record of dauntless efforts frustrated by failing health. Their works bear deep marks of the people and the place amidst which they were conceived, but even more of their own family history. This was in fact inevitable. The sisters had no wide culture; still less were they accustomed to mingle in society and meet many types of men and women. Besides their few books, greedily read until the favourites were so tattered and worn that they had to be hidden away on private shelves, the men dwelling near them, the scenes around them and the tales current in their family were the only food for their imagination.
An outline of Charlotte’s life can be easily traced in her writings. Her first place of education, Cowan Bridge School, for the daughters of clergymen, appears in Jane Eyre; and Helen Burns represents her hapless eldest sister Maria, who died at eleven. A residence in Brussels to improve their French and qualify them for higher teaching, furnished much matter for The Professor and Villette. They meant to receive pupils at the parsonage; but their brother’s intemperance made that impossible, even if pupils had offered themselves, and, until his death in 1848, he was a heavy burden and a bitter grief.
The sisters had long loved to write as well as to read; and Charlotte has told how, in the autumn of 1845, the thought of publication was suggested by a MS. volume of Emily’s poetry. Her criticism of the verses is generous, but by no means extravagant. ‘I thought them,’ she says, ‘condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear they had also a peculiar music, wild, melancholy, and elevating.’ The other sisters had written poems also, and after various difficulties a small volume of Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell was published in 1846. It attracted little attention, and Charlotte says with truth that only the poems of Emily deserved much. Hers display a genuine poetic gift. Had she lived to write much more verse she would certainly have been one of the greatest of English poetesses, and might have been the first of all. Strength, sincerity and directness are the characteristics of her verse; and the individuality of the writer gives it distinction:
‘I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.
‘What have these lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of heaven and hell.’
The volume of verse was followed by several volumes of prose. Each sister had a story ready, and the three were offered simultaneously for publication. Emily’s novel, Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s, Agnes Grey, were accepted, though ‘on terms somewhat impoverishing to the two authors.’ Charlotte’s, The Professor, was rejected by one publisher after another, and ten years passed before it appeared. Meanwhile the dauntless author set to work and wrote Jane Eyre. This was accepted, and was published, like the stories by the other sisters, in 1847. Unlike theirs, it won a rapid and remarkable success and finally fixed the career of Charlotte Brontë.
It will be convenient to take the work of the three sisters in the reverse order. That of Anne Brontë may be speedily dismissed. She was a gentle, delicate creature both in mind and body; and but for her greater sisters her writings would now be forgotten. Her pleasing but commonplace tale of Agnes Grey was followed by The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in which she attempted, without success, to depict a profligate.
In sheer genius Emily Brontë probably surpassed Charlotte, though in art she was certainly the inferior of her elder sister. All that she wrote bears the stamp of her sombre imagination and of the gloomy strength of her character. Despite the Celtic strain in her blood, she, like the rest of her family, had more in common with the austere Yorkshire character than with that of the typical Irishman. She had a perfect comprehension of it. She was, as the northern character is by so many felt to be, personally unattractive. She was almost savagely reserved. Even her sisters, in her last illness, dared not notice ‘the failing step, the laboured breathing, the frequent pauses’ with which she climbed the staircase. But she had also the better qualities of the northern nature. She never shrank from duty or evaded a burden; and her courage was boundless. With her own hand she applied cautery to the bite of a dog she believed to be mad; and she conquered a savage bull-dog by beating it with the bare hands, though she had been warned that if struck it would fly at her throat.