The Three Brontës

by May Sinclair

To which Crimsworth replies, "You speak God's truth, and you shall have your own way, for it is the best way."

There is far more common sense than passion in the solid little Frances and her apathetic lover. It is Frances Henri's situation, not her character, that recalls so irresistibly Lucy Snowe. Frances has neither Lucy's temperament, nor Lucy's terrible capacity for suffering. She suffers through her circumstances, not through her temperament. The motives handled in The Professor belong to the outer rather than the inner world; the pressure of circumstance, bereavement, poverty, the influences of alien and unloved surroundings, these are the springs that determine the drama of Frances and of Crimsworth. Charlotte is displaying a deliberate interest in the outer world and the material event. She does not yet know that it is in the inner world that her great conquest and dominion is to be. The people in this first novel are of the same family as the people in Jane Eyre, in Shirley, in Villette. Crimsworth is almost reproduced in Louis Moore. Yorke Hunsden is the unmistakable father of Mr. Yorke and Rochester; Frances, a pale and passionless sister of Jane Eyre, and a first cousin of Lucy. Yet, in spite of these relationships, The Professor stands alone. In spite of its striking resemblance to Villette there is no real, no spiritual affinity. And the great gulf remains fixed between The Professor and Jane Eyre.

This difference lies deeper than technique. It is a difference of vision, of sensation. The strange greyness of The Professor, its stillness, is not due altogether to Charlotte's deliberate intention. It is the stillness, the greyness of imperfect hearing, of imperfect seeing. I know it has one fine piece of word-painting, but not one that can stand among Charlotte Brontë's masterpieces in this kind.

Here it is. "Already the pavement was drying; a balmy and fresh breeze stirred the air, purified by lightning; I left the west behind me, where spread a sky like opal, azure inmingled with crimson; the enlarged sun, glorious in Tyrian dyes, dipped his brim already; stepping, as I was, eastward, I faced a vast bank of clouds, but also I had before me the arch of an even rainbow; a perfect rainbow—high, wide, vivid. I looked long; my eye drank in the scene, and I suppose my brain must have absorbed it; for that night, after lying awake in pleasant fever a long time, watching the silent sheet-lightning, which still played among the retreating clouds, and flashed silvery over the stars, I at last fell asleep; and then in a dream was reproduced the setting sun, the bank of clouds, the mighty rainbow. I stood, methought, on a terrace; I leaned over a parapeted wall; there was space below me, depth I could not fathom, but hearing an endless splash of waves, I believed it to be the sea; sea spread to the horizon; sea of changeful green and intense blue; all was soft in the distance; all vapour-veiled. A spark of gold glistened on the line between water and air, floated up, appeared, enlarged, changed; the object hung midway between heaven and earth, under the arch of the rainbow; the soft but dark clouds diffused behind. It hovered as on wings; pearly, fleecy, gleaming air streamed like raiment round it; light, tinted with carnation, coloured what seemed face and limbs; a large star shone with still lustre on an angel's forehead—" But the angel ruins it.

And this is all, and it leaves the dreariness more dreary. In The Professor you wander through a world where there is no sound, no colour, no vibration; a world muffled and veiled in the stillness and the greyness of the hour before dawn. It is the work of a woman who is not perfectly alive. So far from having had her great awakening, Charlotte is only half awake. Her intellect is alert enough and avid, faithful and subservient to the fact. It is her nerves and senses that are asleep. Her soul is absent from her senses.

* * * * *

But in Jane Eyre, she is not only awakened, but awake as she has never been awake before, with all her virgin senses exquisitely alive, every nerve changed to intense vibration. Sometimes she is perniciously awake; she is doing appalling things, things unjustifiable, preposterous; things that would have meant perdition to any other writer; she sees with wild, erroneous eyes; but the point is that she sees, that she keeps moving, that from the first page to the last she is never once asleep. To come to Jane Eyre after The Professor is to pass into another world of feeling and of vision.

It is not the difference between reality and unreality. The Professor is real enough, more real in some minor points—dialogue, for instance—than Jane Eyre. The difference is that The Professor is a transcript of reality, a very delicate and faithful transcript, and Jane Eyre is reality itself, pressed on the senses. The pressure is so direct and so tremendous, that it lasts through those moments when the writer's grip has failed.

For there are moments, long moments of perfectly awful failure in Jane Eyre. There are phrases that make you writhe, such as "the etymology of the mansion's designation", and the shocking persistency with which Charlotte Brontë "indites", "peruses", and "retains". There are whole scenes that outrage probability. Such are the scenes, or parts of scenes, between Jane and Rochester during the comedy of his courtship. The great orchard scene does not ring entirely true. For pages and pages it falters between passion and melodrama; between rhetoric and the cri de coeur. Jane in the very thick of her emotion can say, "I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence, with what I delight in—with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester, and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity for departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death." And the comedy is worse. Jane elaborates too much in those delicious things she says to Rochester. Rochester himself provokes the parodist. (Such manners as Rochester's were unknown in mid-Victorian literature.)

"He continued to send for me punctually the moment the clock struck seven; though when I appeared before him now, he had no such honeyed terms as 'love' and 'darling' on his lips: the best words at my disposal were 'provoking', 'malicious elf,' 'sprite', 'changeling', etc. For caresses, too, I now got grimaces; for a pressure of the hand, a pinch on the arm; for a kiss on the cheek, a severe tweak of the ear. It was all right: at present I decidedly preferred these fierce favours to anything more tender."