Chapter 10
That world, as it existed from eighteen-twelve to Charlotte's own time, eighteen-fifty, was not a place for a woman with a brain and a soul. There was no career for any woman but marriage. If she missed it she missed her place in the world, her prestige, and her privileges as a woman. What was worse, she lost her individuality, and became a mere piece of furniture, of disused, old-fashioned furniture, in her father's or her brother's house. If she had a father or a brother there was no escape for her from dependence on the male; and if she had none, if there was no male about the house, her case was the more pitiable. And the traditions of her upbringing were such that the real, vital things, the things that mattered, were never mentioned in her presence. Religion was the solitary exception; and religion had the reality and vitality taken out of it by its dissociation with the rest of life. A woman in these horrible conditions was only half alive. She had no energies, no passions, no enthusiasms. Convention drained her of her life-blood. What was left to her had no outlet; pent up in her, it bred weak, anaemic substitutes for its natural issue, sentimentalism for passion, and sensibility for the nerves of vision. This only applies, of course, to the average woman.
Charlotte Brontë was born with a horror of the world that had produced this average woman, this creature of minute corruptions and hypocrisies. She sent out _Jane Eyre_ to purify it with her passion. She sent out _Shirley_ to destroy and rebuild it with her intellect. Little Jane was a fiery portent. Shirley was a prophecy. She is modern to her finger-tips, as modern as Meredith's great women: Diana, or Clara Middleton, or Carinthia Jane. She was born fifty years before her time.
This is partly owing to her creator's prophetic insight, partly to her sheer truth to life. For Shirley was to a large extent a portrait of Emily Brontë who was born before her time.
It is Emily Brontë's spirit that burns in Shirley Keeldar; and it is the spirit of Shirley Keeldar that gives life to the unwilling mass of this vast novel. It is almost enough immortality for Shirley that she is the only living and authentic portrait of Emily Brontë in her time. Charlotte has given her the "wings that wealth can give", and they do not matter. She has also given her the wings of Emily's adventurous soul, the wealth of her inner life.
"A still, deep, inborn delight glows in her young veins; unmingled--untroubled, not to be reached or ravished by human agency, because by no human agency bestowed: the pure gift of God to His creature, the free dower of Nature to her child. This joy gives her experience of a genii-life. Buoyant, by green steps, by glad hills, all verdure and light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that whence angels looked down on the dreamer of Bethel, and her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it."
"Her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it--" That was the secret of Emily's greatness, of her immeasurable superiority to her sad sisters.
And again: "In Shirley's nature prevailed at times an easy indolence: there were periods when she took delight in perfect vacancy of hand and eye--moments when her thoughts, her simple existence, the fact of the world being around--and heaven above her, seemed to yield her such fulness of happiness, that she did not need to lift a finger to increase the joy. Often, after an active morning, she would spend a sunny afternoon in lying stirless on the turf, at the foot of some tree of friendly umbrage: no society did she need but that of Caroline, and it sufficed if she were within call; no spectacle did she ask but that of the deep blue sky, and such cloudlets as sailed afar and aloft across its span; no sound but that of the bee's hum, the leaf's whisper."
There are phrases in Louis Moore's diary that bring Emily Brontë straight before us in her swift and vivid life. Shirley is "Sister of the spotted, bright, quick-fiery leopard." "Pantheress!--beautiful forest-born!--wily, tameless, peerless nature! She gnaws her chain. I see the white teeth working at the steel! She has dreams of her wild woods, and pinings after virgin freedom." "How evanescent, fugitive, fitful she looked--slim and swift as a Northern streamer!" "... With her long hair flowing full and wavy; with her noiseless step, her pale cheek, her eye full of night and lightning, she looked, I thought, spirit-like--a thing made of an element--the child of a breeze and a flame--the daughter of ray and raindrop--a thing never to be overtaken, arrested, fixed."
Like Emily she is not "caught". "But if I were," she says, "do you know what soothsayers I would consult?... The little Irish beggar that comes barefoot to my door; the mouse that steals out of the cranny in the wainscot; the bird that in frost and snow pecks at my window for a crumb; the dog that licks my hand and sits beside my knee."
And yet again: "She takes her sewing occasionally: but, by some fatality, she is doomed never to sit steadily at it for above five minutes at a time: her thimble is scarcely fitted on, her needle scarce threaded, when a sudden thought calls her upstairs; perhaps she goes to seek some just-then-remembered old ivory-backed needle-book, or older china-topped work-box, quite unneeded, but which seems at the moment indispensable; perhaps to arrange her hair, or a drawer which she recollects to have seen that morning in a state of curious confusion; perhaps only to take a peep from a particular window at a particular view where Briarfield Church and Rectory are visible, pleasantly bowered in trees. She has scarcely returned, and again taken up the slip of cambric, or square of half-wrought canvas, when Tartar's bold scrape and strangled whistle are heard at the porch door, and she must run to open it for him; it is a hot day; he comes in panting; she must convoy him to the kitchen, and see with her own eyes that his water-bowl is replenished. Through the open kitchen-door the court is visible, all sunny and gay, and peopled with turkeys and their poults, peahens and their chicks, pearl-flecked Guinea fowls, and a bright variety of pure white and purple-necked, and blue and cinnamon-plumed pigeons. Irresistible spectacle to Shirley! She runs to the pantry for a roll, and she stands on the doorstep scattering crumbs: around her throng her eager, plump, happy, feathered vassals.... There are perhaps some little calves, some little new-yeaned lambs--it may be twins, whose mothers have rejected them: Miss Keeldar ... must permit herself the treat of feeding them with her own hand."
Like Emily she is impatient of rituals and creeds. Like Emily she adores the Earth. Not one of Charlotte's women except Shirley could have chanted that great prose hymn of adoration in which Earth worships and is worshipped. "'Nature is now at her evening prayers; she is kneeling before those red hills. I see her prostrate on the great steps of her altar, praying for a fair night for mariners at sea, for travellers in deserts, for lambs on moors, and unfledged birds in woods.... I see her, and I will tell you what she is like: she is like what Eve was when she and Adam stood alone on earth.' 'And that is not Milton's Eve, Shirley,' says Caroline, and Shirley answers: 'No, by the pure Mother of God, she is not.' Shirley is half a Pagan. She would beg to remind Milton 'that the first men of the earth were Titans, and that Eve was their mother: from her sprang Saturn, Hyperion, Oceanus; she bore Prometheus.... I say, there were giants on the earth in those days, giants that strove to scale heaven. The first woman's breast that heaved with life on this world yielded daring which could contend with Omnipotence; the strength which could bear a thousand years of bondage--the vitality which could feed that vulture death through uncounted ages--the unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immortality, which, after millenniums of crimes, struggles, and woes, could conceive and bring forth a Messiah. The first woman was heaven-born: vast was the heart whence gushed the well-spring of the blood of nations; and grand the undegenerate head where rested the consort-crown of creation.'...
"'You have not yet told me what you saw kneeling on those hills.'
"'I saw--I now see--a woman-Titan; her robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil, white as an avalanche, sweeps from her head to her feet, and arabesques of lightning flame on its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple like that horizon: through its blush shines the star of evening. Her steady eyes I cannot picture; they are clear--they are deep as lakes--they are lifted and full of worship--they tremble with the softness of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the expanse of a cloud, and is paler than the early moon, risen long before dark gathers: she reclines her bosom on the edge of Stilbro' Moor; her mighty hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face, she speaks with God.'"
It is the living sister speaking for the dead; for Charlotte herself had little of Emily's fine Paganism. But for one moment, in this lyric passage, her soul echoes the very soul of Emily as she gathers round her all the powers and splendours (and some, alas, of the fatal rhetoric) of her prose to do her honour.
It is not only in the large figure of the Titan Shirley that Charlotte Brontë shows her strength. She has learnt to draw her minor masculine characters with more of insight and of accuracy--Caroline Helstone, the Yorkes, Robert Moore, Mr. Helstone, Joe Scott, and Barraclough, the "joined Methody". With a few strokes they stand out living. She has acquired more of the art of dialogue. She is a past master of dialect, of the racy, native speech of these men. Not only is Mr. Yorke painted with unerring power and faithfulness in every detail of his harsh and vigorous personality, but there is no single lapse from nature when he is speaking. The curates only excepted, Charlotte never swerves from this fidelity. But when she is handling her curates, it is a savage and utterly inartistic humour that inspires her. You feel that she is not exercising the art of comedy, but relieving her own intolerable boredom and irritation. No object could well be more innocent, and more appealing in its innocence, than little Mr. Sweeting, curate of Nunnerly. Mr. Sweeting at the tea-table, "having a dish of tarts before him, and marmalade and crumpet upon his plate", should have moved the Comic Spirit to tears of gentleness.
Curates apart, two-thirds of _Shirley_ are written with an unerring devotion to the real, to the very actual. They have not, for all that, the profound reality of _Jane Eyre_. The events are confused, somehow; the atmosphere is confusing; the northern background is drawn with a certain hardness and apathy of touch; the large outlines are obscured, delicate colours sharpened; it is hard and yet blurred, like a bad steel engraving. Charlotte's senses, so intensely, so supernaturally alive in _Jane Eyre_, are only passably awake in _Shirley_. It has some of the dulness of _The Professor_, as it has more than its sober rightness. But, for three-and-twenty chapters, the sobriety, the rightness triumph. There are no improbabilities, no flights of imagination, none of the fine language which was the shame when it was not the glory of _Jane Eyre_.
Then suddenly there comes a break--a cleavage. It comes with that Chapter Twenty-four, which is headed "The Valley of the Shadow of Death". It was written in the first months after Emily Brontë's death.
From that point Charlotte's level strength deserts her. Ever after, she falls and soars, and soars and falls again. There is a return to the manner of _Jane Eyre_, the manner of Charlotte when she is deeply moved; there is at times a relapse to Jane Eyre's worst manner. You get it at once in "The Valley of the Shadow" chapter, in the scene of Caroline's love-sick delirium.
"'But he will not know I am ill till I am gone; and he will come when they have laid me out, and I am senseless, cold and stiff.
"'What can my departed soul feel then? Can it see or know what happens to the clay? Can spirits, through any medium, communicate with living flesh? Can the dead at all revisit those they leave? Can they come in the elements? Will wind, water, fire lend me a path to Moore?
"'Is it for nothing the wind sounds almost articulate sometimes--sings as I have lately heard it sing at night--or passes the casement sobbing, as if for sorrow to come? Does nothing then haunt it--nothing inspire it?'"
The awful improbability of Caroline is more striking because of its contrast with the inspired rightness of the scene of Cathy's delirium in _Wuthering Heights_. It is Charlotte feebly echoing Emily, and going more and more wrong up to her peroration.
Delirious Caroline wonders: "'What is that electricity they speak of, whose changes make us well or ill; whose lack or excess blasts; whose even balance revives?...'
"'_Where_ is the other world? In _what_ will another life consist? Why do I ask? Have I not cause to think that the hour is hasting but too fast when the veil must be rent for me? Do I not know the Grand Mystery is likely to break prematurely on me? Great Spirit, in whose goodness I confide; whom, as my Father, I have petitioned night and morning from early infancy, help the weak creation of Thy hands! Sustain me through the ordeal I dread and must undergo! Give me strength! Give me patience! Give me--oh, _give me_ FAITH!'"
Jane Eyre has done worse than that, so has Rochester; but somehow, when they were doing their worst with it, they got their passion through. There is no live passion behind this speech of Caroline's, with its wild stress of italics and of capitals. What passion there was in Charlotte when she conceived Caroline was killed by Emily's death.
And Mrs. Pryor, revealing herself to Caroline, is even more terrible. She has all the worst vices of Charlotte's dramatic style. Mrs. Pryor calls to the spirit of Caroline's dead father: "'James, slumber peacefully! See, your terrible debt is cancelled! Look! I wipe out the long, black account with my own hand! James, your child atones: this living likeness of you--this thing with your perfect features--this one good gift you gave me has nestled affectionately to my heart and tenderly called me "mother". Husband, rest forgiven.'"
Even Robert Moore, otherwise almost a masterpiece, becomes improbable when, in his great scene, Shirley refuses him. When Mr. Yorke asks him what has gone wrong he replies: "The machinery of all my nature; the whole enginery of this human mill; the boiler, which I take to be the heart, is fit to burst."
Shirley herself is impossible with her "Lucifer, Star of the Morning, thou art fallen," and her speech to her mercenary uncle: "Sir, your god, your great Bell, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon."
What is worse than all, Louis Moore--Louis, the hero, Louis, the master of passion, is a failure. He is Charlotte Brontë's most terrible, most glaring failure. It is not true that Charlotte could not draw men, or that she drew them all alike; Robert Moore, the hard-headed man of business, the man of will and purpose, who never gives up, is not only almost a masterpiece but a spontaneous masterpiece, one of the first examples of his kind. But there is no blood in Louis' veins, no virility in his swarthy body. He is the most unspeakable of schoolmasters. Yet Charlotte lavished on this puppet half the wealth of her imagination. She flings phrase after perfect phrase to him to cover himself with--some of her best things have been given to Louis Moore to utter; but they do not make him live. Again, she strangles him in his own rhetoric. The courtship of Louis Moore and Shirley will not compare with that of Jane and Rochester. There is no nightingale singing in their wood.
Yet, for all that, _Shirley_ comes very near to being Charlotte Brontë's masterpiece. It is inspired from first to last with a great intention and a great idea. It shows a vision of reality wider than her grasp. Its faults, like the faults of _Jane Eyre_, are all on the surface, only there is more surface in _Shirley_. If it has not _Jane Eyre's_ commanding passion, it has a vaster sweep. It was literally the first attempt in literature to give to woman her right place in the world.
From first to last there is not a page or a line in it that justifies the malignant criticism of Mrs. Oliphant. Caroline Helstone does not justify it. She is no window-gazing virgin on the look-out, in love already before the man has come. She is a young girl, very naturally in love with a man whom she has known for years, who is always on the spot. As for Shirley, she flung herself with all the vehemence of her prophetic soul on the hypocritical convention that would make every woman dependent on some man, and at the same time despises her for the possession of her natural instincts. And Caroline followed her. "I observe that to such grievances as society cannot cure, it usually forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn: this scorn being only a sort of tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People hate to be reminded of ills they are unable or unwilling to remedy: such reminder, in forcing on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of an obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease and shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and rich: it disturbs parents.... Men of England! Look at your poor girls, many of them fading round you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating to sour old maids--envious, back-biting, wretched, because life is a desert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage, which to celibacy is denied. Fathers, cannot you alter these things?... You would wish to be proud of your daughters, and not to blush for them, then seek for them an interest and an occupation which shall raise them above the flirt, the manoeuvrer, the mischief-making talebearer. Keep your girl's minds narrow and degraded--they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes a disgrace to you: give them scope and work--they will be your gayest companions in health; your tenderest nurses in sickness; your most faithful prop in old age."
That is the argument from fathers, and it comes from Caroline Helstone, not from Shirley. And the fact that Caroline married Robert Moore, and Shirley fell in love when her hour came (and with Louis Moore, too!) does not diminish the force or the sincerity or the truth of the tirade.
_Shirley_ may not be a great novel; but it is a great prophetic book. Shirley's vision of the woman kneeling on the hills serves for more than Emily Brontë's vision of Hertha and Demeter, of Eve, the Earth-mother, "the mighty and mystical parent"; it is Charlotte Brontë's vindication of Eve, her vision of woman as she is to be. She faced the world once for all with her vision: "I see her," she said, "and I will tell you what she is like."
Mrs. Oliphant did not see the woman kneeling on the hills. Neither George Eliot nor Mrs. Gaskell saw her. They could not possibly have told the world what she was like. It is part of Charlotte Brontë's superior greatness that she saw.
* * * * *
You do not see that woman in _Villette_. She has passed with the splendour of Charlotte's vision of the world. The world in _Villette_ is narrowed to a Pensionnat de Demoiselles, and centred in the heart of one woman. And never, not even in _Jane Eyre_, and certainly not in _Shirley_, did Charlotte Brontë achieve such mastery of reality, and with it such mastery of herself. _Villette_ is the final triumph of her genius over the elements that warred in her. It shows the movement of her genius, which was always by impulse and recoil. In _The Professor_ she abjured, in the interests of reality, the "imagination" of her youth. In _Jane Eyre_ she was urged forward by the released impetus of the forces she repressed. In _Shirley_ they are still struggling with her sense of the sober and the sane reality; the book is torn to fragments in the struggle, and in the end imagination riots.
But in _Villette_ there are none of these battlings and rendings, these Titanic upheavals and subsidences. Charlotte Brontë's imagination, and her sense of the real, are in process of fusion. There are few novels in which an imagination so supreme is wedded to so vivid a vision of actuality. It may be said that Charlotte Brontë never achieved positive actuality before. The Pensionnat de Demoiselles is almost as visibly and palpably actual as the Maison Vauquer in _Père Goriot_. It is a return to the method of experience with a vengeance. Charlotte's success, indeed, was so stunning that for all but sixty years _Villette_ has passed for a _roman à clef_, the novel, not only of experience, but of personal experience. There was a certain plausibility in that view. The characters could all be easily recognized. And when Dr. John was identified with Mr. George Smith, and his mother with Mr. George Smith's mother, and Madame Beck with Madame Héger, and M. Paul Emanuel with Madame Héger's husband, the inference was irresistible: Lucy Snowe was, and could only be, Charlotte Brontë. And as the figure of M. Paul Emanuel was ten times more vivid and convincing than that of Rochester, so all that applied to Jane Eyre applied with ten times more force to Lucy. In _Villette_ Charlotte Brontë was considered to have given herself hopelessly away.
I have tried to show that this view cannot stand before an unprejudiced examination of her life and letters. No need to go into all that again. On the evidence, Charlotte seems at the best of times to have fallen in love with difficulty; and she most certainly was no more in love with "the little man", Paul Emanuel, than she was with "the little man", Mr. Taylor. The really important and interesting point is that, if she had been, if he had thus obtained the reality with which passion endows its object, her imagination would have had no use for him; its work would have been done for it.