The three following years pass over. One of the deepest interests of her life centres round the 29th of June, 1854. On that day many old and humble friends saw her come out of Haworth church, leaning on the arm of “one of the best gentlemen in the county,” and looking “like a snowdrop.” We almost smile as we think of the merciless derider of weak and insipid suitors finding a lord and a master—of the hand which drew the three solemn ecclesiastics, Malone, Donne, and Sweeting, locked at the altar in that of her father’s curate, and learning from experience,—
“That marriage, rightly understood,
Gives to the tender and the good
A paradise below.”
Mr. Nicholls loved Miss Brontë as his own soul, and she loved him, and every day her love grew stronger. In the last letter she ever wrote, we find the following sentence: “No kinder, better husband than mine, it seems to me, there can be in the world.” Home joys are only dependent, in a small degree, on external circumstances.
Nine months followed of calm happiness—months of respite and rest. During the next winter she was confined to a sick bed, from which she never rose. The doctor assured her that all would soon be right. Martha tenderly waited on her mistress, and from time to time had tried to cheer her with the thoughts of the baby that was coming. But she died on the 31st March, 1855, in the thirty-ninth year of her age, after a long and weary illness, bravely as she had lived, and left her widowed husband and childless father sitting desolate and alone in the old grey parsonage.
One member out of most of the families of the parish was bidden to the funeral, and those who were excluded from the formal train of mourners thronged the church and churchyard. Two mourners deserve special notice. The one was a village girl that had been betrayed, seduced, and cast away. In Mrs. Nicholls she had found a holy sister, who ministered to her needs in her time of trial. Bitter was the grief of this young woman, and sincere her mourning. The other was a blind girl living some four miles from Haworth, who loved the deceased so dearly that she implored those about her to lead her along the roads, and over the moors, that she might listen to the solemn words, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
MERITS AS A NOVELIST.
In the real distinguished from the ideal school of fiction, Mrs. Nicholls, known to the literary world as Currer Bell, attained immediate and lasting popularity. We purpose to notice a few of her leading characteristics, and to define briefly but articulately, the worth of her teaching. An eminent and genial critic justly remarks: “Currer Bell professed to be no idle entertainer. She did not, indeed, tag on a moral to the end of her book—else it had been little worth; or even blazon it on its surface. But she professed to write truly, to show living men and women meeting the exigencies, grappling with the problems, of real existence; to point out how the battle goes, in the circles of English middle life, between pretension and reality, between falsehood and truth. If we were content to listen to her as a historian, she relinquished with a smile the laurel of the romancer.” Her plots possess the merit of rare interest; her characters, however eccentric, stand out as unmistakable realities. True, the plot in the “Professor,” her first prose work, which met with so many refusals, and was not published till after her death, is of no great interest. Although she has never surpassed two or three portraits there sketched, it will not bear comparison with her other works.
The style of Currer Bell is one which will reward study for its own sake. Its tone may be somewhat too uniform, its balance and cadence too unvaried. Perhaps, also, there is too much of the abruptness of passion. It is certainly inferior to many styles, so far as the crimson and gold of literature are concerned. But there is no writer with whom we are acquainted, more deserving of praise for clearness, pointedness, and force. Would that any word of ours could recall the numerous admirers of morbid magnificence and barbarous dissonance, affected jargon and fantastic verbiage, laboured antithesis and false brilliance, and induce them to read night and day the novels of Currer Bell, for the sake of their style. In “Jane Eyre,” her most powerful work, published in October, 1847, it must be admitted that female delicacy is somewhat outraged; but its specimens of picturesque, resolute, straightforward writing, enable this tale to take a high place in the field of romantic literature.