A. Mary F. Robinson: ‘Emily Brontë.’
The turning-point in Charlotte’s career.
It was Charlotte’s visit to Brussels, first as pupil and afterwards as teacher in the school of Madame Héger, which was the turning-point in her life, which changed its currents, and gave to it a new purpose and a new meaning. Up to the moment of that visit she had been the simple, kindly, truthful Yorkshire girl, endowed with strange faculties, carried away at times by burning impulses, moved often by emotions the nature of which she could not fathom, but always hemmed in by her narrow experiences, her limited knowledge of life and the world. Until she went to Belgium, her sorest troubles had been associated with her dislike to the society of strangers, her heaviest burden had been the necessity under which she lay of tasting that “cup of life as it is mixed for governesses,” which she detested so heartily. Under the belief that they could qualify themselves to keep a school of their own if they had once mastered the delicacies of the French and German languages, she and Emily set off for this sojourn in Brussels.
One may be forgiven for speculating as to her future lot had she accepted the offer of marriage she received in her early governess days, and settled down as the faithful wife of a sober English gentleman. In that case ‘Shirley’ perhaps might have been written, but ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Villette’ never. She learned much during her two years’ sojourn in the Belgian capital; but the greatest of all the lessons she mastered while there was that self-knowledge the taste of which is so bitter to the mouth, though so wholesome to the life.
T. Wemyss Reid: ‘Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph.’
The sisters’ life in Brussels.
The flower-market out of doors, with clove-pinks, tall Mary-lilies, and delicate roses d’amour, filling the quaint mediæval square before the beautiful old façade of the Hôtel de Ville; Sainte-Gudule, with its spires and arches; the Montagne de la Cour (almost as steep as Haworth Street), its windows ablaze at night with jewels; the little, lovely park, its great elms just coming into leaf, its statues just bursting from their winter sheaths of straw; the galleries of ancient pictures, their walls a sober glory of colors, blues, deep as a summer night, rich reds, brown-golds, most vivid greens. All this should have made an impression on the two home-keeping girls from Yorkshire; and Charlotte, indeed, perceived something of its beauty and strangeness. But Emily, from a bitter sense of exile, from a natural narrowness of spirit, rebelled against it all as an insult to the memory of her home—she longed, hopelessly, uselessly, for Haworth. The two Brontës were very different to the Belgian school-girls in Madame Héger’s Pensionnat. They were, for one thing, ridiculously old to be at school—twenty-four and twenty-six—and they seemed to feel their position; their speech was strained and odd; all the “sceptical, wicked, immoral French novels, over forty of them, the best substitute for French conversation to be met with,” which the girls had toiled through with so much singleness of spirit, had not cured the broadness of their accent nor the artificial idioms of their Yorkshire French. Monsieur Héger, indeed, considered that they knew no French at all. Their manners, even among English people, were stiff and prim; the hearty, vulgar, genial expansion of their Belgian school-fellows must have made them seem as lifeless as marionettes. Their dress—Haworth had permitted itself to wonder at the uncouthness of those amazing leg-of-mutton sleeves (Emily’s pet whim in and out of fashion), at the ill-cut lankness of those skirts, clumsy enough on round little Charlotte, but a very caricature of mediævalism on Emily’s tall, thin, slender figure. They knew they were not in their element, and kept close together, rarely speaking. Yet, Monsieur Héger, patiently watching, felt the presence of a strange power under those uncouth exteriors. It was with the delight of a botanist discovering a rare plant in his garden, of a politician detecting a future statesman in his nursery, that he perceived the unusual faculty which lifted his two English pupils above their school-fellows.... It was Emily who had the larger share of Monsieur Héger’s admiration.... He gave her credit for logical powers, for a capacity for argument unusual in a man, and rare, indeed, in a woman. She, not Charlotte, was the genius in his eyes, although he complained that her stubborn will rendered her deaf to all reason, when her own determination, or her own sense of right, was concerned.
That time in Brussels was wasted upon Emily. The trivial characters which Charlotte made immortal merely annoyed her. The new impressions which gave another scope to Charlotte’s vision were nothing to her. All that was grand, remarkable, passionate, under the surface of that conventional Pensionnat de Demoiselles, was invisible to Emily. Notwithstanding her genius she was very hard and narrow. Poor girl, she was sick for home.... Charlotte’s engrossment in her new life, her eagerness to please her master, was a contemptible weakness to the imbittered heart. She would laugh when she found her elder sister trying to arrange her homely gowns in the French taste, and stalk silently through the large school-rooms with a fierce satisfaction in her own ugly sleeves, in the Haworth cut of her skirts. She seldom spoke a word to any one; only sometimes she would argue with Monsieur Héger, perhaps secretly glad to have the chance of shocking Charlotte. If they went out to tea, she would sit still on her chair, answering “Yes,” and “No;” inert, miserable, with a heart full of tears. When her work was done she would walk in the Crossbowmen’s ancient garden, under the trees, leaning on her shorter sister’s arm, pale, silent—a tall, stooping figure.... Emily did indeed work hard. She was there to work, and not till she had learned a certain amount would her conscience permit her to return to Haworth. It was for dear liberty that she worked. She began German, a favorite study in after years, and of some purpose, since the style of Hoffman left its impression on the author of ‘Wuthering Heights.’ She worked hard at music; and in half a year the stumbling school-girl became a brilliant and proficient musician. Her playing is said to have been singularly accurate, vivid, and full of fire. French, too, both in grammar and literature, was a constant study.