Chapter 4

Like Branwell, Anne had no genius. She shows for ever gentle, and, in spite of an unconquerable courage, conquered. And yet there was more in her than gentleness. There was, in this smallest and least considerable of the Brontës, an immense, a terrifying audacity. Charlotte was bold, and Emily was bolder; but this audacity of Anne's was greater than Charlotte's boldness or than Emily's, because it was willed, it was deliberate, open-eyed; it had none of the superb unconsciousness of genius. Anne took her courage in both hands when she sat down to write _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_. There are scenes, there are situations, in Anne's amazing novel, which for sheer audacity stand alone in mid-Victorian literature, and which would hold their own in the literature of revolt that followed. It cannot be said that these scenes and situations are tackled with a master-hand. But there is a certain grasp in Anne's treatment, and an astonishing lucidity. Her knowledge of the seamy side of life was not exhaustive. But her diagnosis of certain states, her realization of certain motives, suggests Balzac rather than any of the Brontës. Thackeray, with the fear of Mrs. Grundy before his eyes, would have shrunk from recording Mrs. Huntingdon's ultimatum to her husband. The slamming of that bedroom door fairly resounds through the long emptiness of Anne's novel. But that door is the _crux_ of the situation, and if Anne was not a genius she was too much of an artist to sacrifice her _crux_.

And not only was Anne revolutionary in her handling of moral situations, she was an insurgent in religious thought. Not to believe in the dogma of eternal punishment was, in mid-Victorian times and evangelical circles, to be almost an atheist. When, somewhere in the late 'seventies, Dean Farrar published his _Eternal Hope_, that book fell like a bomb into the ranks of the orthodox. But long before Dean Farrar's book Anne Brontë had thrown her bomb. There are two pages in _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_ that anticipate and sum up his now innocent arguments. Anne fairly let herself go here. And though in her "Word to the Elect" (who "may rejoice to think themselves secure") she declares that

None shall sink to everlasting woe Who have not well deserved the wrath of Heaven,

she presently relents, and tacks on a poem in a lighter measure, expressing her hope

That soon the wicked shall at last Be fitted for the skies; And when their dreadful doom is past To light and life arise.

It is said (Charlotte said it) that Anne suffered from religious melancholy of a peculiarly dark and Calvinistic type. I very much suspect that Anne's melancholy, like Branwell's passion, was pathological, and that what her soul suffered from was religious doubt. She could not reach that height where Emily moved serenely; she could not see that

Vain are the thousand creeds That move men's hearts: unutterably vain.

There was a time when her tremulous, clinging faith was broken by contact with Emily's contempt for creeds. When Anne was at Haworth she and Emily were inseparable. They tramped the moors together. With their arms round each other's shoulders, they paced up and down the parlour of the Parsonage. They showed the mysterious attraction and affinity of opposites. Anne must have been fascinated, and at the same time appalled, by the radiant, revealing, annihilating sweep of Emily's thought. She was not indifferent to creeds. But you can see her fearful and reluctant youth yielding at last to Emily's thought, until she caught a glimpse of the "repose" beyond the clash of "conquered good and conquering ill". You can see how the doctrine of eternal punishment went by the board; how Anne, who had gone through agonies of orthodox fear on account of Branwell, must have adjusted things somehow, and arrived at peace. Trust in "the merits of the Redeemer" is, after all, trust in the Immensity beyond Redeemer and redeemed. Of this trust she sang in a voice, like her material voice, fragile, but sweet and true. She sang naïvely of the "Captive Dove" that makes unheard its "joyless moan", of "the heart that Nature formed to love", pining, "neglected and alone". She sang of the "Narrow Way", "Be it," she sings, "thy constant aim

"To labour and to love, To pardon and endure, To lift thy heart to God above, And keep thy conscience pure."

She hears the wind in an alien wood and cries for the Parsonage garden, and for the "barren hills":

Where scarce the scattered, stunted trees Can yield an answering swell, But where a wilderness of heath Returns the sound as well.

For yonder garden, fair and wide, With groves of evergreen, Long winding walks, and borders trim And velvet lawns between.

Restore to me that little spot, With grey hills compassed round, Where knotted grass neglected lies, And weeds usurp the ground.

For she, too, loved the moors; and through her love for them she wrote two perfect lines when she called on Memory to

Forever hang thy dreamy spell Round mountain star and heather-bell.

The critics, the theorists, the tale-mongers, have left Anne quiet in that grave on the sea-coast, where she lies apart. Her gentle insignificance served her well.

* * * * *

But no woman who ever wrote was more criticized, more spied upon, more lied about, than Charlotte. It was as if the singular purity and poverty of her legend offered irresistible provocation. The blank page called for the scribbler. The silence that hung about her was dark with challenge; it was felt to be ambiguous, enigmatic. Reserve suggests a reservation, something hidden and kept back from the insatiable public with its "right to know". Mrs. Gaskell with all her indiscretions had not given it enough. The great classic _Life of Charlotte Brontë_ was, after all, incomplete. Until something more was known about her, Charlotte herself was incomplete. It was nothing that Mrs. Gaskell's work was the finest, tenderest portrait of a woman that it was ever given to a woman to achieve; nothing that she was not only recklessly and superbly loyal to Charlotte, but that in her very indiscretions she was, as far as Charlotte was concerned, incorruptibly and profoundly true.

Since Mrs. Gaskell's time, other hands have been at work on Charlotte, improving Mrs. Gaskell's masterpiece. A hundred little touches have been added to it. First, it was supposed to be too tragic, too deliberately and impossibly sombre (that sad book of which Charlotte's friend, Mary Taylor, said that it was "not so gloomy as the truth"). So first came Sir Wemyss Reid, conscientiously working up the high lights till he got the values all wrong. "If the truth must be told," he says, "the life of the author of _Jane Eyre_ was by no means so joyless as the world now believes it to have been." And he sets out to give us the truth. But all that he does to lighten the gloom is to tell a pleasant story of how "one bright June morning in 1833, a handsome carriage and pair is standing opposite the 'Devonshire Arms' at Bolton Bridge". In the handsome carriage is a young girl, Ellen Nussey, waiting for Charlotte Brontë and her brother and sisters to go with her for a picnic to Bolton Abbey.

"Presently," says Sir Wemyss Reid, "on the steep road which stretches across the moors to Keighley, the sound of wheels is heard, mingled with the merry speech and merrier laughter of fresh young voices. Shall we go forward unseen," he asks, "and study the approaching travellers whilst they are still upon the road? Their conveyance is no handsome carriage, but a rickety dog-cart, unmistakably betraying its neighbourship to the carts and ploughs of some rural farmyard. The horse, freshly taken from the fields, is driven by a youth who, in spite of his countrified dress, is no mere bumpkin. His shock of red hair hangs down in somewhat ragged locks behind his ears, for Branwell Brontë esteems himself a genius and a poet, and, following the fashion of the times, has that abhorrence of the barber's shears which genius is supposed to affect. But the lad's face is a handsome and striking one, full of Celtic fire and humour, untouched by the slightest shade of care, hopeful, promising, even brilliant. How gaily he jokes with his three sisters; with what inexhaustible volubility he pours out quotations from his favourite poets, applying them to the lovely scenes around him; and with what a mischievous delight in his superior nerve and mettle, he attempts the feats of charioteering, which fill the heart of the youngest of the party with sudden terrors! Beside him, in a dress of marvellous plainness, and ugliness, stamped with the brand "home-made" in characters which none can mistake, is the eldest of the sisters. Charlotte is talking too; there are bright smiles upon her face; she is enjoying everything around her, the splendid morning, the charms of leafy trees and budding roses, and the ever musical stream; most of all, perhaps, the charm of her brother's society, and the expectation of that coming meeting with her friends, which is so near at hand. Behind sits a pretty little girl, with fine complexion and delicate regular features, whom the stranger would pick out as the beauty of the company, and a tall, rather angular figure, clad in a dress exactly resembling Charlotte's. Emily Brontë does not talk so much as the rest of the party, but her wonderful eyes, brilliant and unfathomable as the pool at the foot of a waterfall, but radiant also with a wealth of tenderness and warmth, show how her soul is expanding under the influences of the scene; how quick she is to note the least prominent of the beauties around her, how intense is her enjoyment of the songs of the birds, the brilliancy of the sunshine, the rich scent of the flower-bespangled hedgerows. If she does not, like Charlotte and Anne, meet her brother's ceaseless flood of sparkling words with opposing currents of speech, she utters a strange, deep guttural sound which those who know her best interpret as the language of a joy too deep for articulate expression. Gaze at them as they pass you in the quiet road, and acknowledge that, in spite of their rough and even uncouth exteriors, a happier four could hardly be met with in this favourite haunt of pleasure-seekers during a long summer's day."

And you do gaze at them and are sadder, if anything, than you were before. You see them, if anything, more poignantly. You see their cheerful biographer doing all he knows, and the light he shoots across the blackness only makes it blacker.

Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi di tempo felice Nella miseria;

and in the end the biographer with all his cheerfulness succumbs to the tradition of misery, and even adds a dark contribution of his own, the suggestion of an unhappy love-affair of Charlotte's.

After Sir Wemyss Reid came Mr. Francis Grundy with _his_ little pictures, _Pictures of the Past_, presenting a dreadfully unattractive Charlotte.

Then came Mr. Leyland, following Mr. Grundy, with his glorification of Branwell and his hint that Charlotte made it very hard at home for the poor boy. He repeats the story that Branwell told Mr. George Searle Phillips, how he went to see a dying girl in the village, and sat with her half an hour, and read a psalm to her and a hymn, and how he felt like praying with her too, but he was not "good enough", how he came away with a heavy heart and fell into melancholy musings. "Charlotte observed my depression," Branwell said, "and asked what ailed me. So I told her. She looked at me with a look which I shall never forget if I live to be a hundred years old--which I never shall. It was not like her at all. It wounded me as if someone had struck me a blow in the mouth. It involved ever so many things in it. It ran over me, questioning and examining, as if I had been a wild beast. It said, 'Did my ears deceive me, or did I hear aright?' And then came the painful, baffled expression, which was worse than all. It said, 'I wonder if that's true?' But, as she left the room, she seemed to accuse herself of having wronged me, and smiled kindly upon me, and said, 'She is my little scholar, and I will go and see her.' I replied not a word. I was too much cut up! When she was gone, I came over here to the 'Black Bull' and made a note of it...."

You see the implication? It was Charlotte who drove him to the "Black Bull". That was Branwell's impression of Charlotte. Just the sort of impression that an opium-eater would have of a beloved sister.

But Branwell's impression was good enough for Madame Duclaux to found her theory on. Her theory is that Charlotte was inferior to Emily in tenderness. It may well be so, and yet Charlotte would remain above most women tender, for Emily's wealth would furnish forth a score of sisters. The simple truth is that Charlotte had nerves, and Branwell was extremely trying. And it is possible that Emily had less to bear, that in her detachment she was protected more than Charlotte from Branwell at his worst.

Meanwhile tales were abroad presenting Charlotte in the queerest lights. There is that immortal story of how Thackeray gave a party for Currer Bell at his house in Young Street, and how Currer Bell had a headache and lay on a sofa in the back drawing-room, and refused to talk to anybody but the governess; and how Thackeray at last, very late, with a finger on his lip, stole out of the house and took refuge in his club. No wonder if this quaint and curious Charlotte survived in the memory of Thackeray's daughter. But, even apart from the headache, you can see how it came about, how the sight of the governess evoked Charlotte Brontë's unforgotten agony. She saw in the amazed and cheerful lady her own sad youth, slighted and oppressed, solitary in a scene of gaiety--she could not have seen her otherwise--and her warm heart rushed out to her. She was determined that that governess should have a happy evening if nobody else had. Her behaviour was odd, if you like, it was even absurd, but it had the sublimity of vicarious expiation. Has anyone ever considered its significance, the magnitude of her deed? For Charlotte, to be the guest of honour on that brilliant night, in the house of Thackeray, her divinity, was to touch the topmost height of fame. And she turned her back on the brilliance and the fame and the face of her divinity, and offered herself up in flames as a sacrifice for all the governesses that were and had ever been and would be.

And after the fine stories came the little legends--things about Charlotte when she was a governess herself at Mrs. Sidgwick's, and the tittle-tattle of the parish. One of the three curates whom Charlotte made so shockingly immortal avenged himself for his immortality by stating that the trouble with Charlotte was that she _would_ fight for mastery in the parish. Who can believe him? If there is one thing that seems more certain than another it is Charlotte's utter indifference to parochial matters. But Charlotte was just, and she may have objected to the young man's way with the Dissenters; we know that she did very strongly object to Mr. William Weightman's way. And that, I imagine, was the trouble between Charlotte and the curates.

As for the Sidgwicks, Charlotte's biographers have been rather hard on them. Mr. Leslie Stephen calls them "coarse employers". They were certainly not subtle enough to divine the hidden genius in their sad little governess. It was, I imagine, Charlotte's alien, enigmatic face that provoked a little Sidgwick to throw a Bible at her. She said Mrs. Sidgwick did not know her, and did not "intend to know her". She might have added that if she _had_ intended Mrs. Sidgwick could not possibly have known her. And when the Sidgwicks said (as they did say to their cousin, Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson) that if Miss Brontë "was invited to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about like a slave; if she was not invited she imagined she was being excluded from the family circle", that was simply their robust view of the paralysed attitude of a shy girl among strangers, in an agony of fear lest she should cut in where she was not wanted.

And allowances must be made for Mrs. Sidgwick. She was, no doubt, considerably annoyed at finding that she had engaged a thoroughly incompetent and apparently thoroughly morbid young person who had offered herself as a nursery-governess and didn't know how to keep order in the nursery. Naturally there was trouble at Stonegappe. Then one fine day Mrs. Sidgwick discovered that there was, after all, a use for that incomprehensible and incompetent Miss Brontë. Miss Brontë had a gift. She could sew. She could sew beautifully. Her stitching, if you would believe it, was a dream. And Mrs. Sidgwick saw that Miss Brontë's one talent was not lodged in her useless. So Charlotte sat alone all evening in the schoolroom at Stonegappe, a small figure hidden in pure white, billowy seas of muslin, and lamented thus: "She cares nothing in the world about me except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity of labour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end she overwhelms me with oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin night-caps to make, and above all things, dolls to dress." And Mrs. Sidgwick complained that Charlotte did not love the children, and forgot how little she liked it when the children loved Charlotte, and was unaware, poor lady, that it was recorded of her, and would be recorded to all time, that she had said, "Love the _governess_, my dear!" when her little impulsive boy put his hand in Charlotte's at the dinner-table, and cried "I love 'ou, Miss Brontë." It was the same little, impulsive boy who threw the Bible at Charlotte, and also threw a stone which hit her.

No wonder that Miss Brontë's one and only "pleasant afternoon" was when Mr. Sidgwick went out walking in his fields with his children and his Newfoundland dog, and Charlotte (by order) followed and observed him from behind.

Of course, all these old tales should have gone where Mrs. Sidgwick's old muslin caps went; but they have not, and so it has got about that Charlotte Brontë was not fond of children. Even Mr. Swinburne, at the height of his magnificent eulogy, after putting crown upon crown upon her head, pauses and wonders: had she any love for children? He finds in her "a plentiful lack of inborn baby-worship"; she is unworthy to compare in this with George Eliot, "the spiritual mother of Totty, of Eppie, and of Lillo". "The fiery-hearted Vestal of Haworth," he says, "had no room reserved in the palace of her passionate and high-minded imagination as a nursery for inmates of such divine and delicious quality." There was little Georgette in _Villette_, to say nothing of Polly, and there was Adèle in _Jane Eyre_. But Mr. Swinburne had forgotten about little Georgette. Like George Henry Lewes he is "well-nigh moved to think one of the most powerfully and exquisitely written chapters in _Shirley_ a chapter which could hardly have been written at all by a woman, or, for that matter, by a man, of however noble and kindly a nature, in whom the instinct, or nerve, or organ of love for children was even of average natural strength and sensibility"; so difficult was it for him to believe in "the dread and repulsion felt by a forsaken wife and tortured mother for the very beauty and dainty sweetness of her only new-born child, as recalling the cruel, sleek charm of the human tiger that had begotten it". And so he crowns her with all crowns but that of "love for children". He is still tender to her, seeing in her that one monstrous lack; he touches it with sorrow and a certain shame.

Mr. Birrell follows him. "Miss Brontë," he says with confidence, "did not care for children. She had no eye for them. Hence it comes about that her novel-children are not good." He is moved to playful sarcasm when he tells how in August of eighteen-fifty-three "Miss Brontë suffered a keen disappointment". She went to Scotland with some friends who took their baby with them. The parents thought the baby was ill when it wasn't, and insisted on turning back, and Charlotte had to give up her holiday. "All on account of a baby," says Mr. Birrell, and refers you to Charlotte's letter on the subject, implying that it was cold-blooded. The biographer can quote letters for his purpose, and Mr. Birrell omits to tell us that Charlotte wrote "had any evil consequences followed a prolonged stay, I should never have forgiven myself". You are to imagine that Charlotte could have forgiven herself perfectly well, for Charlotte "did not care for children".

Mrs. Oliphant does not echo that cry. She was a woman and knew better.

For I believe that here we touch the very heart of the mystery that was Charlotte Brontë. We would have no right to touch it, to approach it, were it not that other people have already violated all that was most sacred and most secret in that mystery, and have given the world a defaced and disfigured Charlotte Brontë. I believe that this love of children which even Mr. Swinburne has denied to her, was the key to Charlotte's nature. We are face to face here, not with a want in her, but with an abyss, depth beyond depth of tenderness and longing and frustration, of a passion that found no clear voice in her works, because it was one with the elemental nature in her, undefined, unuttered, unutterable.

She was afraid of children; she was awkward with them; because such passion has shynesses, distances, and terrors unknown to the average comfortable women who become happy mothers. It has even its perversions, when love hardly knows itself from hate. Such love demands before all things possession. It cries out for children of its own flesh and blood. I believe that there were moments when it was pain for Charlotte to see the children born and possessed by other women. It must have been agony to have to look after them, especially when the rule was that they were not to "love the governess".

The proofs of this are slender, but they are sufficient. There is little Georgette, the sick child that Lucy nurses in the Pensionnat: "Little Georgette still piped her plaintive wail, appealing to me by her familiar term, 'Minnie, Minnie, me very poorly!' till my heart ached." ... "I affected Georgette; she was a sensitive and loving child; to hold her in my lap, or carry her in my arms, was to me a treat. To-night she would have me lay my head on the pillow of her crib; she even put her little arms round my neck. Her clasp and the nestling action with which she pressed her cheek to mine made me almost cry with a sort of tender pain."

Once during a spring-cleaning at Upperwood House Charlotte was Mrs. White's nursemaid as well as her governess, and she wrote: "By dint of nursing the fat baby it has got to know me and be fond of me. I suspect myself of growing rather fond of it." Years later she wrote to Mrs. Gaskell, after staying with her: "Could you manage to convey a small kiss to that dear but dangerous little person, Julia? She surreptitiously possessed herself of a minute fraction of my heart, which has been missing ever since I saw her."

Mrs. Gaskell tells us that there was "a strong mutual attraction" between Julia, her youngest little girl, and Charlotte Brontë. "The child," she says, "would steal her little hand into Miss Brontë's scarcely larger one, and each took pleasure in this apparently unobserved caress." May I suggest that children do not steal their little hands into the hands of people who do not care for them? Their instinct is infallible.