It is not, I think, necessary to be dogmatic in comparing the “greatness” of Villette and Jane Eyre. The former is “more elaborated, more mature in execution, but less tragic, less simple and direct.” The influence of personal tragedy (assuming her love for Monsieur Heger) obviously permeates the work; leading to the idealisation of the pedagogue genius (revived in Louis Gerard Moore, Esq.—himself half Flemish), and to unjust hostility against the Continental feminine (partially atoned for in Hortense Moore). On the other hand, it is more in touch with real life; less melodramatic, though still sensational; more acutely varied, and equally vivid, in characterisation.
Finally, in Shirley, if the spirit of Charlotte Brontë is less concentrated, it burns with no less steady flame. Here, for almost the first time in a woman-writer, we find that eager questioning upon the earlier struggles between capital and labour—the risks attendant upon the introduction of machinery, the proper relations between master and men—which afterwards became part of the stock material for fiction. We find, too, much shrewd comment upon her own experience of clerical types—no less in the contrast between Helstone and Hall than in the somewhat heavily satirised curates; and some, probably inherited, injustice towards Dissenters. The characterisation is far more varied and more realistic; since we have at least two pairs of lovers, the numerous Yorke family, and a whole host of “walking ladies and gentlemen,” more or less carefully portrayed. Local colour appears in several passages of enthusiastic analysis of Yorkshire manners; and the philosophy is frequently turned on everyday life. For example:
“In English country ladies there is this point to be remarked. Whether young or old, pretty or plain, dull or sprightly, they all (or almost all) have a certain expression stamped on their features, which seems to say, ‘I know—I do not boast of it—but I know that I am the standard of what is proper; let everyone therefore whom I approach, or who approaches me, keep a sharp look-out, for wherein they differ from me—be the same in dress, manner, opinion, principle, or practice—therein they are wrong.”
Yet the inspiration of Shirley echoes Jane Eyre and Villette. Here, too, as we have seen,—though the heroine is a rich beauty,—Man should be Master; and “indisputably, a great, good, handsome man is the first of created things.” Yet neither Shirley nor her friend Caroline have anything in common with the “average” woman, who, “if her admirers only told her that she was an angel, would let them treat her like an idiot”; or with her parents, who “would have delivered her over to the Rector’s loving-kindness and his tender mercies without one scruple”; or with the second Mrs. Helstone, who “reversing the natural order of insect existence, would have fluttered through the honeymoon, a bright, admired butterfly, and crawled the rest of her days a sordid, trampled worm.”
Jane Eyre, 1847.
Shirley, 1849.
Villette, 1852.
The Professor, 1857.
“JANE EYRE” TO “SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE”
(1847-1858)
Emily Brontë (1818-1848) can scarcely, in character or genius, be accommodated to any ordered consideration of development. Regarded by many enthusiasts as greater than her more famous sister, she stands alone for all time. Her one novel, Wuthering Heights, is unique for the passionate intensity of its emotions and the wild dreariness of its atmosphere. Save for the clumsily introduced stranger, who merely exists to “hear the story,” the entire plot is woven about seven characters, all save one nearly related, and a few servants.
“Mr. Heathcliff,” said the second Catherine, “you have nobody to love you; and, however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery. You are miserable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him? Nobody loves you—nobody will cry for you when you die! I wouldn’t be you!”
Charlotte calls him “child neither of Lascar nor gipsy, but a man’s shape animated by demon life—a Ghoul—an afreet”; and “from the time when ‘the little black-haired swarthy thing, as dark as if it came from the Devil,’ was first unrolled out of the bundle and set on its feet in the farm-house kitchen, to the hour when Nelly Dean found the grim, stalwart corpse laid on its back on the panel-enclosed bed, with wide-gazing eyes that seemed to ‘sneer at her attempt to close them, and parted lips and sharp white teeth that sneered too,’” this human monster dominates every character and event in the whole book. Men and women, Linton or Earnshaw, are but pawns in his remorseless brain; thwarting his will, daring his anger time after time; yet always submitting at last to the will of their “master”: save, indeed, at the fall of the curtain, when he had “lost the faculty of enjoying destruction.” For the passion of Heathcliff’s strange existence is gloomy revenge—against fate and his own associates. Bitterly concentrated on the few human beings—all occupying two adjacent farms—with whom his life is passed, he seems the embodiment of an eternal curse, directed to thwart every natural feeling, every hope of happiness or peace.
Emily Brontë reveals no conception of humanity save this fiendish misanthrope; churlish boors like Hindley and Hareton Earnshaw; weak good people like Edgar, Isabella, and Linton; passionate sprites like the two Catherines. Old Joseph indeed contains some elements of the comic spirit, exhibited in hypocrisy; and Nelly Dean alone has both virtue and strength of character. But in making, or striving to unmake, marriages between these “opposites”; in forcing their society upon each other, and hovering around his helpless victims; the arch-fiend Heathcliff has ample scope for the indulgence of his diabolical whim. The tormenting of others and of himself; the perverse making of misery for its own sake; the ingenious exercise of brutal tyranny, are food and drink to this twisted soul. In ordinary cases we should wonder what might have happened had Catherine married him. We should set about picturing Heathcliff in happy possession of the love for which he craved so mightily: we should have murmured, “What cruel waste.” But the power of Emily Brontë’s conception denies us such idle imaginings. Heathcliff was manifestly incapable of “satisfaction” in anything, and there, as elsewhere, was Catherine his true mate. No circumstances, the most roseate or ideal, could have tamed his savage nature, quieted his stormy discontents, or lulled his passion for hurting all creatures weaker than himself. Such love as his must always have crushed and devoured what it yearned for: he could never have had enough of it: have rested in it, or rested upon it. He was, indeed, possessed by the “eighth devil.”