Mrs. Ward had always had a peculiarly vivid feeling for the genius and tragedy of the Brontë sisters, so that when Mr. George Smith asked her in 1898 to undertake these Prefaces she felt it impossible to resist a task not only attractive in itself, but presented to her in persuasive phrase by “Dr. John.” For it is by this time a commonplace of Brontë lore that Lucy Snowe’s first friend in the wilderness of Villette is no other than the young publisher who had first recognized Charlotte’s greatness, though the situation between Lucy and Dr. John bears no resemblance to the actual friendship that arose between Mr. George Smith and his client. Still, the letters which Mr. Smith placed at Mrs. Ward’s disposal for this task were sufficiently interesting to arouse her curiosity (one of them even described how Charlotte and he had gone together to the celebrated phrenologist, Dr. Brown, to have their heads examined!), and, taking her courage in both hands, she boldly asked him whether he had ever been in love with Charlotte Brontë? His reply is delightful as ever:
August 18, 1898.
My dear Mrs. Humphry Ward,—
...I was amused at your questions. No, I never was in the least bit in love with Charlotte Brontë. I am afraid that the confession will not raise me in your opinion, but the truth is, I never could have loved any woman who had not some charm or grace of person, and Charlotte Brontë had none. I liked her and was interested by her, and I admired her—especially when she was in Yorkshire and I was in London. I never was coxcomb enough to suppose that she was in love with me. But I believe that my mother was at one time rather alarmed.
So with much toil and in the intervals of her other work, Mrs. Ward accomplished the four admirable Prefaces to Charlotte’s novels, enjoying this return to her old critical work of the eighties and becoming more and more deeply possessed by the strange power of the Haworth sisters. Then in the winter she took up Wuthering Heights and Wildfell Hall, writing her introduction to the former under a stress of feeling so profound as to produce in her, for the first and last time since childhood, the desire to express herself in verse. Early one January morning she reached out for pencil and paper and wrote down this sonnet, sending it afterwards to George Smith to deal with as he would. He printed it in the Cornhill Magazine of February, 1900.
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTË.
Pale sisters! reared amid the purple sea
Of windy moorland, where, remote, ye plied
All household arts, meek, passion-taught, and free,
Kinship your joy, and Fantasy your guide!—
Ah! who again ’mid English heaths shall see
Such strength in frailest weakness, or so fierce
Behest on tender women laid, to pierce
The world’s dull ear with burning poetry?—
Whence was your spell?—and at what magic spring,
Under what guardian Muse, drank ye so deep
That still ye call, and we are listening;
That still ye plain to us, and we must weep?—
Ask of the winds that haunt the moors, what breath
Blows in their storms, outlasting life and death!
Her introductions duly appeared in the bulky volumes of the Haworth Edition, and there, unfortunately, they lie buried. The edition was doomed by its unwieldy format, and since the copyright had already disappeared, these “library volumes” were soon displaced by the lighter and handier productions of less stately publishing firms. But the Prefaces had made their mark. The literary world was delighted to welcome Mrs. Ward again among the critics, with whom she had earned her earliest successes, and passages such as the following, which gives her view of the ultimate position of women novelists and women poets, were much quoted and discussed:
‘What may be said to be the main secret, the central cause, not only of Charlotte’s success, but, generally, of the success of women in fiction, during the present century? In other fields of art they are still either relatively amateurs, or their performance, however good, awakens a kindly surprise. Their position is hardly assured; they are still on sufferance. Whereas in fiction the great names of the past, within their own sphere, are the equals of all the world, accepted, discussed, analysed, by the masculine critic, with precisely the same keenness and under the same canons as he applies to Thackeray or Stevenson, to Balzac or Loti.
‘The reason, perhaps, lies first in the fact that, whereas in all other arts they are comparatively novices and strangers, having still to find out the best way in which to appropriate traditions and methods not created by women, in the art of speech, elegant, fitting, familiar speech, women are and have long been at home. They have practised it for generations, they have contributed largely to its development. The arts of society and of letter-writing pass naturally into the art of the novel. Madame de Sévigné and Madame du Deffand are the precursors of George Sand; they lay her foundations, and make her work possible. In the case of poetry, one might imagine, a similar process is going on, but it is not so far advanced. In proportion, however, as women’s life and culture widen, as the points of contact between them and the manifold world multiply and develop, will Parnassus open before them. At present those delicate and noble women who have entered there look still a little strange to us. Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, Emily Brontë, Marcelline Desbordes-Valmore—it is as though they had wrested something that did not belong to them, by a kind of splendid violence. As a rule, so far, women have been poets in and through the novel—Cowper-like poets of the common life like Miss Austen, or Mrs. Gaskell, or Mrs. Oliphant; Lucretian or Virgilian observers of the many-coloured web like George Eliot, or, in some phases, George Sand; romantic or lyrical artists like George Sand again, or like Charlotte and Emily Brontë. Here no one questions their citizenship; no one is astonished by the place they hold; they are here among the recognized masters of those who know.