But, on the other hand, if “every person and a large proportion of the incidents were copied from life,” the emotional power of her work is entirely imaginative. As pictures of life, her stories are inadequate and unsatisfying, partly because there is so much in human nature and in life which does not interest her: so much of which she knew nothing; and she is only at home in the heart of her subject. Here again she is in no way realistic—as was Jane Austen in manners or George Eliot in emotion—but entirely romantic, however original her conception of romance. Her heroes and heroines are as far from everyday humanity, and as ideal and visionary, as Mrs. Radcliffe’s, though she does not, of course, follow the “rules” of romance: rather creating out of her own brain a new heaven and a new earth, inhabited by a people that know not God or man.
Apart from the rude awakening at Brussels, again, she exhibited in private correspondence by turns the strange contrasts between common sense and emotionalism which mark her work.
She defines the “right path” as “that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest”: she thinks, “if you can respect a person before marriage, moderate love at least will come after; and as to intense passion, I am convinced that that is no desirable feeling.”
She advises her best friend that
“no young lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted, the marriage ceremony performed, and the first half-year of wedded life has passed away. A woman may then begin to love, but with great precaution, very coolly, very moderately, very rationally. If she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a cold look cuts her to the heart, she is a fool. If she ever loves so much that her husband’s will is her law, and that she has got into the habit of watching his looks in order that she may anticipate his wishes, she will soon be a neglected fool.”
On the other hand, “if you knew my thoughts, the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up, and makes me feel society, as it is, insipid, you would pity me and I daresay despise me.”
Her emotion on first seeing the sea is absolutely overpowering; and surely we know the woman who insisted on visiting a maidservant “attacked by a violent fever,” fearlessly entered her room in spite of every remonstrance, “threw herself on the bed beside her, and repeatedly kissed her burning brow.”
Experience with her, in fact, had never been confined to the external happenings, which can be accumulated, with more or less sympathy, by the biographer; and her own declaration of how she worked up episodes outside her own experience may be applied, without much modification, to her manipulation of that experience itself. Asked whether the description of taking opium in Villette was based on knowledge,
“She replied, that she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to describe anything which had not fallen within her own experience; she had thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling to sleep—wondering what it was like or how it would be—till at length, sometimes after the progress of her story had been arrested at this one point for weeks, she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it word for word as it had happened.”
It is obvious that, if no less feminine than her predecessors, the nature and methods of Charlotte Brontë would produce very different work from theirs. In narrative and description she remains domestic and middle-class. She does not adopt the “high” notions of aristocracy, she does not plunge into the mysteries of crime. Her plots are laid “at home,” so to speak, and among the professional classes or small gentry with whom she was personally familiar. The only material which may be noticed as a new departure is derived from her particular experiences in schools in England and abroad, combined with her intimate knowledge of the governess and the tutor. In Shirley, again, she is one of the earliest women to devote any serious attention to the progress of trade and the introduction of machinery, with its effect on the social problems of the working classes.