The Three Brontës

by May Sinclair

"I watched Polly rest her small elbow on her small knee, her head on her hand; I observed her draw a square inch or two of pocket-handkerchief from the doll-pocket of her doll-skirt, and then I heard her weep. Other children in grief or pain cry aloud, without shame or restraint, but this being wept: the tiniest occasional sniff testified to her emotion."

Again (Polly is parted from her father): "When the street-door closed, she dropped on her knees at a chair with a cry—'Papa!'

"It was low and long; a sort of 'why hast thou forsaken me?' During an ensuing space of some minutes I perceived she endured agony. She went through, in that brief interval of her infant life, emotions such as some never feel; it was in her constitution: she would have more of such instants if she lived."

Polly is contrasted with the cold and disagreeable Lucy. "I, Lucy Snowe, was calm," Lucy says when she records that agony. The effect she gives, of something creepily insensitive and most unpleasant, is unmistakable in these early chapters. She watches Polly with a cold, analytic eye. "These sudden, dangerous natures—sensitive as they are called—offer many a curious spectacle to those whom a cooler temperament has secured from participation in their vagaries." When Polly, charming Polly, waits on her father at the tea-table, Lucy is impervious to her tiny charm. "Candidly speaking, I thought her a little busy-body." When Graham Bretton repulses Polly, Lucy has some thoughts of "improving the occasion by inculcating some of those maxims of philosophy whereof I had ever a tolerable stock ready for application."

There is no sign in the beginning that this detestable Lucy is to be heroine. But in Chapter Four Polly disappears and Lucy takes her place and plays her part. The child Polly had a suffering and passionate heart, for all her little air of fastidiousness and inaccessibility. It is the suffering and passionate heart of Polly that beats in Lucy of the Pensionnat. There is only enough of the original Lucy left to sit in judgment on Ginevra Fanshawe and "the Parisienne".

The child Polly had an Imagination. "'Miss Snowe,' said she in a whisper, 'this is a wonderful book … it tells about distant countries, a long, long way from England, which no traveller can reach without sailing thousands of miles over the sea…. Here is a picture of thousands gathered in a desolate place—a plain spread with sand…. And here are pictures more stranger than that. There is the wonderful Great Wall of China; here is a Chinese lady with a foot littler than mine. There is a wild horse of Tartary; and here—most strange of all—is a land of ice and snow without green fields, woods, or gardens. In this land they found some mammoth bones; there are no mammoths now. You don't know what it was; but I can tell you, because Graham told me. A mighty goblin creature, as high as this room, and as long as the hall; but not a fierce, flesh-eating thing, Graham thinks. He believes if I met one in a forest, it would not kill me, unless I came quite in its way; when it would trample me down amongst the bushes, as I might tread on a grasshopper in a hay-field without knowing it.'"

It is Polly's Imagination that appears again in Lucy's "Creative Impulse". "I with whom that Impulse was the most intractable, the most capricious, the most maddening of masters … a deity which sometimes, under circumstances apparently propitious, would not speak when questioned, would not hear when appealed to, would not, when sought, be found; but would stand, all cold, all indurated, all granite, a dark Baal with carven lips and blank eyeballs, and breast like the stone face of a tomb; and again, suddenly, at some turn, some sound, some long-trembling sob of the wind, at some rushing past of an unseen stream of electricity, the irrational Demon would awake unsolicited, would stir strangely alive, would rush from its pedestal like a perturbed Dagon, calling to its votary for a sacrifice, whatever the hour—to its victim for some blood or some breath, whatever the circumstances or scene—rousing its priest, treacherously promising vaticination, perhaps filling its temple with a strange hum of oracles, but sure to give half the significance to fateful winds, and grudging to the desperate listener even a miserable remnant—yielding it sordidly, as though each word had been a drop of the deathless ichor of its own dark veins."

That is Lucy. But when Polly reappears fitfully as Pauline de Bassompierre, she is an ordinary, fastidious little lady without a spark of imagination or of passion.

Now in the first three chapters of Villette, Charlotte Brontë concentrated all her strength and all her art on the portrait of little Polly. The portrait of little Polly is drawn with the most delicate care and tender comprehension, and the most vivid and entire reality. I cannot agree with Mr. Swinburne that George Eliot, with her Totty and Eppie and Lillo, showed a closer observation of the ways, or a more perfect understanding of the heart of a child. Only little Maggie Tulliver can stand beside little Polly in Villette. She is an answer to every critic, from Mr. Swinburne downwards, who maintains that Charlotte Brontë could not draw children.

But Lucy at fourteen is drawn with slight and grudging strokes, sufficient for the minor part she is evidently to play. Lucy at Bretton is a mere foil to little Polly. Charlotte Brontë distinctly stated in her letters that she did not care for Miss Snowe. "Lucy must not marry Dr. John; he is far too youthful, handsome, bright-spirited, and sweet-tempered; he is a 'curled darling' of Nature and of fortune, and must draw a prize in life's lottery. His wife must be young, rich, pretty; he must be made very happy indeed. If Lucy marries anybody, it must be the Professor—a man in whom there is much to forgive, much to 'put up with'. But I am not leniently disposed towards Miss Frost: from the beginning I never meant to appoint her lines in pleasant places." "As to the character of Lucy Snowe, my intention from the first was that she should not occupy the pedestal to which Jane Eyre was raised by some injudicious admirers. She is where I meant her to be, and where no charge of self-laudation can touch her."