The privation that Mr. Brontë experienced after his vicar's departure--a privation that Miss Brontë's temperament must have made him feel more sensibly--was such that he recalled the suitor, and the marriage took place. It was a dreary ceremony: no relations, no friends, so that the bride positively had no one to lead her to the altar; for her father had refused to be present at the marriage for fear of feeling agitated, faithful to the end to the dry and egotistical line of conduct he had marked out for himself.
The wife devoted herself bravely to seconding her husband in the duties of his ministry. She visited the poor, had a Sunday-school, improvised prayers and knew the Bible by heart. She was happy--but her happiness was of short duration, for physical and moral sufferings had exhausted her, and she died just as life had become harmonized according to her wishes.
A celebrated author, a strong and courageous woman, aspiring after a Christian life, she gave all that a heart can give which is not possessed of the true light; and M. Selden is right in saying at the close: "Charlotte is better than her heroines." There are few authors of whom one could say as much.
III.
From England with its maintien compassé, and cold religious tenets, M. Camille Selden takes us to Germany, the land of sentiment and intellectual research, and introduces us to a Jewess in Berlin, that we may see what a German salon was at the end of the eighteenth century.
Rahel Levin was only twenty years old when she lost her father, a wealthy Israelite, gloomy and violent in his bearing at home, but amiable and attractive in society.
The young Rahel, endowed with great intelligence and unerring tact, united to a truly kind heart, was valued and sought by every one as soon as she appeared in society. She was exceedingly amiable, full of an obliging good temper that made her anticipate wishes, divine annoyances in order to relieve them, and forget herself in seeking to make others happy. Rare too was her loyalty; not only was her soul incapable of falsehood, but of any want of sincerity. Her husband who had the good taste not to be jealous of his wife's superiority and success, said of her "that she did not think to lose by showing herself as God had made her, or gain by hiding anything." "Natural candor, absolute purity of soul, and sincerity of heart are the only things worthy of respect--the rest is only external regularity and conventionality," she often said to those who lavished upon her expressions of respect and admiration.
Unhappily for Mlle. Levin, circumstances concurred in alienating her from her family. Her mother and brothers, notwithstanding their ample fortune, showed a rapacity worthy of their race, and most unlike Rahel's broad and generous ideas; and her position would have been pitiable, but for the illustrious friends who frequented her mother's house. Among them the young girl forgot the petty meanness of her home life; and inexhaustible in ideas, perceptive faculty, and wit, she handled the gravest subjects with delicate skill, and almost as if she were playing with them. Full of unfailing good temper, she could discuss the most varied, the most opposite subjects, without dogmatism or eccentricity.
But this want of union with her family, which had deprived her of the domestic happiness so indispensable to every affectionate woman had rendered her paradoxical and even a little sceptical. See, for example, what she wrote to her youngest sister, who had consulted her about a proposal of marriage: "The want of durability in everything, and the inevitable separation between an object and its [{842}] motive, afford, you see, the final explanation of all that is human. You do not wish to belong to humanity; very well, destroy yourself. I feel quite differently: only transitory things, only what is human can tranquillize and console me." How at variance is this bitterness with the ardent hopefulness of the spiritual Eugénie de Guérin! and how excellent a proof, if we needed any new one, that true happiness is unattainable without that deep religious feeling which raises us above all passing things! Charlotte Brontë had at least that Protestant severity which stifles all tender quailing of the heart and soul, like a miser trembling lest he should lose a farthing of the merits of his sacrifice; but poor Rahel possessed only the intellectual resources of the mind, and they can do little for us.
Goethe, whose countrywoman she was so proud of being; Goethe, little inclined to exaggerate the value of a woman's mind, took pleasure in calling her a generous girl. "She has powerful emotions and a careless way of expressing them," he said: "the better you know her, the more you feel yourself attracted and gently enthralled."