“A school, not a seminary, or an establishment, or anything which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality, upon new principles and new systems—and where young ladies, for enormous pay, might be screwed out of health and into vanity—but a real, honest, old-fashioned boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.”
It needed, perhaps, some such unromantic, unruffled, and unvaried existence, with a mind perfectly composed, to produce those six flawless works of art which remain for us the most complete expression of good sense, the most complete triumph over the fanciful exaggerations of romance. Genius alone could adjust the balance with such nicety and leave us content. She forces us, by sheer wit and sympathy, to love and admire the very persons of all time and place who have in themselves least to interest or attract.
The character of Charlotte Brontë, like her work, brings us at once into a new atmosphere. All here is emotionally strenuous, if not melodramatic. The bleak parsonage, the stern widowed father, the vicious son, the three wonderful sisters: around and about them the mysteries of Wuthering Heights. The picture of those lonely girls, all the world to each other and nothing to the world, dreaming and scribbling in the cold, without sympathy and without guidance, is stamped for ever on our imagination. We know something, moreover, from Jane Eyre, about their cruel experience of schooldays, something, from Agnes Grey, about their noble efforts at independence. Finally, we have studied and talked over “the Secret”—supposed to reconcile work and life. As to the main outlines of temperament, at any rate, there can be no question.
Charlotte Brontë’s experience of life was strictly limited: she had little interest about the trivialities of the tea-table. But she observed keenly, had a tenacious memory, and felt with intensity. Without hardness or conceit, she was entirely self-centred: there is no aloofness about her work: it centres passionately around the heroine, reflecting her own emotional outlook. She took life seriously, like her heroines: acutely sensitive to words and looks; caring nothing for what did not personally affect her. No doubt there is something Irish, something too of the grim moorlands, in that mysterious instinct which fired Charlotte, and her sisters, to their perpetual questionings of Providence, their burning protests against the harshness and hypocrisy of the world. Circumstances stifle them and they must speak. Speaking, they must strike.
Charlotte Brontë, indeed, lived almost as much aside from the world as Jane Austen. But Haworth was not Stevenage: the Rev. Patrick was certainly not a “handsome proctor,” and Bramwell could never have risen in “the Service.” It was in nature, however, that the contrast is most marked. The author of Jane Eyre, however shy and unsociable, was not content to stand aloof and look on. With little enough experience of actualities, she was for ever making life for herself, sending that plain, visionary, eager, and sensitive ego of hers out into the world; and uttering with fiery eloquence her comments on what she imagined herself to have done and seen. Until recently, indeed, we have supposed that even the heart of her work, that passionate devotion which she was the first of women to reveal, was entirely imaginative, an invention created without guidance from personal experience. Now evidence has been published which scarcely permits doubt; that whereas, obviously, her pupil-teacherdom at Brussels widened her social outlook, it also awoke her heart. Charlotte Brontë, evidently, fell in love with the “Professor” at the Pensionnat Heger; and thus gained the memory of passion. But it may be reasonably questioned, after all, whether the experience did much for her art. Since Monsieur Heger, no less certainly, did not return her love, and seldom even answered her letters, he could not have taught her the mysteries; and as, like her heroines, she was fatally addicted to exaggeration—in love or hate—it is not probable that her heroes—or ideal men—bear any very real likeness to him in character. After all, she practically “invented” him, as independent witnesses have established; and the accident of her idealisations centring about a living man is not particularly significant. Her attitude, and that of her heroines, towards mankind in general, and towards “the man” in particular, is really woven out of a strong imagination: and the essence of her being remains a dreamer’s. Jane Eyre and Villette are, transparently, the work of one who created her own world for herself only; and we need not modify this impression from any letters of hers ever printed or written. Emotionally she was nourished on her own thoughts; and, in her case, we may read them fearlessly in her work. It was not her nature to suppress, or conceal, anything. She has put herself on record. Here lies the essential difference between her work and Miss Burney’s or Jane Austen’s. While they reflected, with almost unruffled enjoyment, the surface of life, she tore off the wrappings and revealed a Soul. That, too, was of her very self. She had missed everything that mattered. It was at once her consolation and her revenge to project herself into the heart of life, and tell the tale.
The character and experience of George Eliot is far more complex, like her achievement, than that of those who preceded her. Like them, bred in retirement, though among more strenuous surroundings, her youth gave her also much insight into what life means to “small” people. But there was a strong religious atmosphere around her, accident gave her the early control of affairs, and her education—of a later date—was more thorough. Then came the stirring of doubt, from associations with sceptics; the professional training from practical journalism; and the “problem” evoked by her friendship with George Henry Lewes. Life was training her for modern work.
The intense seriousness, the active conscience of primitive faith, remained always with her, influencing characterisation. But it was the wider teachings of philosophy, the later experiences, and the conscious desire after advance that made her didactic. Her letters reveal an unexpected sentimentalism and an intense craving for personal affection; her teachings are all interpreted by what she has read, or inspired by men she has met; but they are in touch with real life and directed by real thought. It was her personal experience and character which enabled George Eliot to combine the “manners” comedy of Fanny Burney and Jane Austen with Miss Brontë’s moral campaign; to weld the message of woman into modernity.
She was, however, before all things, a professional student of humanity. Though she actually commenced novelist at a comparatively advanced age, the previous years, and every item of character, had been a training for this work. She observed with accuracy, remembered without effort, and studiously cultivated her natural literary powers. Emotionally and intellectually she got the most out of life; never, perhaps, quite letting herself go, but keenly alive to every impression, on the alert for experience and information. It was not in her ever to let things alone.
Such a temperament, of course, does not produce either spontaneous fun, sleepless humour, or unbridled self-torment; but it acquires the power of responding to all human difficulties, understanding the “problem” of life, and sympathising in its beauty and joy. George Eliot was always pondering about truth, considering the remedies for evil, looking forward towards progress. Her own experience was utilised freely, with an instinct for dramatic effect, but it is not the whole body of her work. That was a deliberately composed art, put out as an instrument for a given purpose, studied and ornamented. But while thus nurtured and apart, it is also the expression of herself, the sum of her being. Therein, like an actress, she plays many parts, putting on the mood of each new story and living in it.
She is, in fact, a typical woman of letters, as we now understand the term, with all the excellences and all the limitations of even the greatest among us.