Chapter 5

Charlotte Brontë tried to give an account of her feeling for children; it was something like the sacred awe of the lover. "Whenever I see Florence and Julia again I shall feel like a fond but bashful suitor, who views at a distance the fair personage to whom, in his clownish awe, he dare not risk a near approach. Such is the clearest idea I can give you of my feeling towards children I like, but to whom I am a stranger--and to what children am I not a stranger?"

Extraordinary that Charlotte's critics have missed the pathos of that _cri de coeur_. It is so clearly an echo from the "house of bondage", where Charlotte was made a stranger to the beloved, where the beloved threw stones and Bibles at her. You really have to allow for the shock of an experience so blighting. It is all part of the perversity of the fate that dogged her, that her feeling should have met with that reverse. But it was there, guarded with a certain shy austerity. She "suspected" herself of getting rather fond of the baby.

She hid her secret even from herself, as women will hide these things. But her dreams betrayed her after the way of dreams. Charlotte's dream (premonitory, she thought, of trouble) was that she carried a little crying child, and could not still its cry. "She described herself," Mrs. Gaskell says, "as having the most painful sense of pity for the little thing, lying _inert_, as sick children do, while she walked about in some gloomy place with it, such as the aisle of Haworth Church." This dream she gives to _Jane Eyre_, unconscious of its profound significance and fitness. It is a pity that Mr. Swinburne did not pay attention to Charlotte's dream.

All her life, I think, she suffered because of the perpetual insurgence of this secret, impassioned, maternal energy. Hence the sting of Lewes's famous criticism, beginning: "The grand function of woman, it must always be remembered" (as if Charlotte had forgotten it!) "is Maternity"; and, working up from his criticism of that chapter in _Shirley_ to a climax of adjuration: "Currer Bell, if under your heart had ever stirred a child; if to your bosom a babe had ever been pressed--that mysterious part of your being, towards which all the rest of it was drawn, in which your whole soul was transported and absorbed--never could you have _imagined_ such a falsehood as that!" It was impossible for Charlotte to protest against anything but the abominable bad taste of Lewes's article, otherwise she might have told him that she probably knew rather more about those mysteries than he did. It was she who gave us that supreme image of disastrous love. "I looked at my love; it shivered in my heart like a suffering child in a cold cradle!"

And this woman died before her child was born.

* * * * *

Then there is Mrs. Oliphant again. Though she was not one of those who said Charlotte Brontë was not fond of children, though she would have died rather than have joined Lewes in his unspeakable cry against her, Mrs. Oliphant made certain statements in no better taste than his. She suggests that Charlotte, fond or not fond of children, was too fond of matrimonial dreams. Her picture (the married woman's picture) is of an undesired and undesirable little spinster pining visibly and shamelessly in a parsonage. She would have us believe that from morning till night, from night till morning, Charlotte Brontë in the Parsonage thought of nothing but of getting married, that her dreams pursued, ruthlessly, the casual visitor. The hopelessness of the dream, the undesirability of Charlotte, is what makes her so irresistible to her sister novelist.

There was "one subject", she says, "which Charlotte Brontë had at her command, having experienced in her own person, and seen her nearest friends under the experience, of that solitude and longing of women of which she has made so remarkable an exposition. The long silence of life without an adventure or a change, the forlorn gaze out of windows which never show anyone coming who can rouse the slightest interest in the mind, the endless years and days which pass and pass, carrying away the bloom, extinguishing the lights of youth, bringing a dreary middle age before which the very soul shrinks, while yet the sufferer feels how strong is the current of life in her own veins, and how capable she is of all the active duties of existence--this was the essence and soul of the existence she knew best. Was there no help for it? Must the women wait and see their lives thrown away, and have no power to save themselves!

"The position," she goes on, "in itself so tragic, is one which can scarcely be expressed without calling forth inevitable ridicule, a laugh at the best, more often a sneer, at the women whose desire for a husband is thus betrayed. Shirley and Caroline Helstone both cried out for that husband with an indignation, a fire and impatience, a sense of wrong and injury, which stopped the laugh for the moment. It might be ludicrous, but it was horribly genuine and true." (This is more than can be said of Mrs. Oliphant's view of the adorable Shirley Keeldar who was Emily Brontë. It is ludicrous enough, and it may be genuine, but it is certainly not true.) But Mrs. Oliphant is careful not to go too far. "Note," she says, "there was nothing sensual about these young women. It was life they wanted; they knew nothing of the grosser thoughts which the world with its jeers attributes to them: of such thoughts they were unconscious in a primitive innocence which, perhaps, only women understand." Yet she characterizes their "outcry" as "indelicate". "All very well to talk of women working for their living, finding new channels for themselves, establishing their independence. How much have we said of all that" (Mrs. Oliphant thinks that she is rendering Charlotte Brontë's thought), "endeavouring to persuade ourselves! Charlotte Brontë had the courage of her opinions. It was not education nor a trade that her women wanted. It was not a living, but their share in life.... Miss Brontë herself said correct things" (observe that insincerity is insinuated here) "about the protection which a trade is to a woman, keeping her from a mercenary marriage; but this was not in the least the way of her heroines." (Why, you naturally wonder, should it have been?) "They wanted to be happy, no doubt, but above all things they wanted their share in life, to have their position by the side of men, which alone confers a natural equality, to have their shoulder to the wheel, their hands on the reins of common life, to build up the world and link the generations each to each." (And very proper of them, too.) "In her philosophy, marriage was the only state which procured this, and if she did not recommend a mercenary marriage she was at least very tolerant about its conditions, insisting less upon love than was to be expected" (!) "and with a covert conviction in her mind, that if not one man, then another was better than any complete abandonment of the larger path. Lucy Snowe for a long time had her heart very much set on Dr. John and his placid breadth of Englishism; but when she finally found out that to be impossible her tears were soon dried by the prospect of Paul Emanuel, so unlike him, coming into his place."

The obvious answer to all this is that Charlotte Brontë was writing in the mid-Victorian age, about mid-Victorian women, the women whom she saw around her; writing, without any "philosophy" or "covert conviction", in the days before emancipation, when marriage was the only chance of independence that a woman had. It would have been marvellous, if she had not had her sister Emily before her, that in such an age she should have conceived and created Shirley Keeldar. As for poor little Lucy with her two men, she is not the first heroine who mistook the false dawn for the true. Besides, Miss Brontë's "philosophy" was exactly the opposite to that attributed to her, as anybody may see who reads _Shirley_. In these matters she burned what her age adored, and adored what it burned, a thorough revolutionary.

But this is not the worst. Mrs. Oliphant professes to feel pity for her victim. "Poor Charlotte Brontë! She has not been as other women, protected by the grave from all betrayal of the episodes in her own life." (You would imagine they were awful, the episodes in Charlotte Brontë's life.) "Everybody has betrayed her, and all she thought about this one, and that, and every name that was ever associated with hers. There was a Mr. Taylor from London, about whom she wrote with great freedom to her friend, Miss Nussey, telling how the little man had come, how he had gone away without any advance in the affairs, how a chill came over her when he appeared and she found him much less attractive than when at a distance, yet how she liked it as little when he went away, and was somewhat excited about his first letter, and even went so far as to imagine with a laugh that there might possibly be a dozen little Joe Taylors before all was over."

This is atrocious. But the malice and bad taste of it are nothing to the gross carelessness and ignorance it reveals--ignorance of facts and identities and names. Charlotte's suitor was Mr. James Taylor and not Joe. Joe, the brother of her friend, Mary Taylor, was married already to a lady called Amelia, and it is of Joe and his Amelia that Charlotte writes. "She must take heart" (Amelia had been singularly unsuccessful), "there may yet be a round dozen of little Joe Taylors to look after--run after--to sort and switch and train up in the way they should go."

Of Mr. James Taylor she writes more decorously. Miss Nussey, as usual, had been thinking unwarrantable things, and had made a most unbecoming joke about Jupiter and Venus, which outraged Charlotte's "common sense". "The idea of the little man," says Charlotte, "shocks me less. He still sends his little newspaper; and the other day there came a letter of a bulk, volume, pith, judgment and knowledge, fit to have been the product of a giant. You may laugh as much and as wickedly as you please, but the fact is, there is a quiet constancy about this, my diminutive and red-haired friend, which adds a foot to his stature, turns his sandy locks dark, and altogether dignifies him a good deal in my estimation." This is all she says by way of appreciation. She says later, "His manners and his personal appearance scarcely pleased me more than at the first interview.... I feel that in his way he has a regard for me; a regard which I cannot bring myself entirely to reciprocate in kind, and yet its withdrawal leaves a painful blank." Miss Nussey evidently insists that Charlotte's feelings are engaged this time, arguing possibly from the "painful blank"; and Charlotte becomes explicit. She speaks of the disadvantages of the alleged match, and we gather that Miss Nussey has been urging her to take the little man. "But there is another thing which forms a barrier more difficult to pass than any of these. Would Mr. Taylor and I ever suit? Could I ever feel for him enough love to accept him as a husband? Friendship--gratitude--esteem I have, but each moment he came near me, and that I could see his eyes fastened on me, my veins ran ice. Now that he is away, I feel far more gently to him; it is only close by that I grow rigid--stiffening with a strange mixture of apprehension and anger--which nothing softens but his retreat, and a perfect subduing of his manner." And again, "my conscience, I can truly say, does not _now_ accuse me of having treated Mr. Taylor with injustice or unkindness ... but with every disposition and with every wish, with every intention even to look on him in the most favourable point of view at his last visit, it was impossible to me in my inward heart to think of him as one that might one day be acceptable as a husband." Could anything be _more_ explicit? There is a good deal more of it. After one very searching criticism of Mr. Taylor: "One does not like to say these things, but one had better be honest." And of her honesty Charlotte's letters on this subject leave no doubt. There is not the smallest ground for supposing that even for a moment had she thought of Mr. James Taylor as "one that one day might be acceptable", much less is there for Mr. Clement Shorter's suggestion that if he had come back from Bombay she would have married him.

But Joe or James, it is all one to Mrs. Oliphant, with her theory of Charlotte Brontë. "For her and her class, which did not speak of it, everything depended upon whether the women married or did not marry. Their thoughts were thus artificially fixed to one point in the horizon." The rest is repetition, ending in the astounding verdict: "The seed she thus sowed has come to many growths that would have appalled Charlotte Brontë. But while it would be very unjust to blame her for the vagaries that have followed, and to which nothing could be less desirable than any building of the house or growth of the race, any responsibility or service, we must still believe that it was she who drew the curtain first aside and opened the gates to imps of evil meaning, polluting and profaning the domestic hearth."

That is Mrs. Oliphant on Charlotte Brontë.

And even Mr. Clement Shorter, who has dealt so admirably with outrageous legends, goes half the way with the detractor. He has a theory that Charlotte Brontë was a woman of morbid mood, "to whom the problem of sex appealed with all its complications", and that she "dwelt continually on the problem of the ideal mate".

Now Charlotte may have dreamed of getting married (there have been more criminal dreams); she may have brooded continually over the problem of the ideal mate, only of all these dreams and broodings there is not one atom of evidence--not one. Not a hint, not a trace, either in her character as we know it, or in her very voluminous private correspondence. The facts of her life disprove it. Her letters to Ellen Nussey (never meant for publication) reveal the workings of Charlotte's feminine mind when applied to "the sex problem"; a mind singularly wholesome and impersonal, and singularly detached. Charlotte is full of lights upon this awful subject of matrimony, which, by the way, had considerably more interest for Miss Nussey than it had for her. In fact, if it had not been for Miss Nussey it would not have appeared so often as it did in Charlotte's letters. If you pay attention to the context (a thing that theorists never do) you see, what is indeed obvious, that a large portion of Charlotte Brontë's time was taken up in advising and controlling Ellen Nussey, that amiable and impulsive prototype of Caroline Helstone. She is called upon in all Miss Nussey's hours of crisis, and there seem to have been a great many of them. "Do not," she writes, "be over-persuaded to marry a man you can never respect--I do not say _love_, because I think if you can respect a person before marriage, moderate love at least will come after; and as to intense passion, I am convinced that that is no desirable feeling. In the first place, it seldom or never meets with a requital; and in the second place, if it did, the feeling would be only temporary; it would last the honeymoon, and then, perhaps, give place to disgust, or indifference, worse perhaps than disgust. Certainly this would be the case on the man's part; and on the woman's--God help her if she is left to love passionately and alone.

"I am tolerably well convinced that I shall never marry at all."

And again, to Miss Nussey, six months later: "Did you not once say to me in all childlike simplicity, 'I thought, Charlotte, no young lady should fall in love till the offer was actually made'? I forgot what answer I made at the time, but I now reply, after due consideration, Right as a glove, the maxim is just, and I hope you will always attend to it. I will even extend and confirm it: no young lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted, the marriage ceremony performed, and the first half-year of wedded life has passed away. A woman may then begin to love, but with great precaution, very coolly, very moderately, very rationally. If she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a cold look cuts her to the heart, she is a fool. If she ever loves so much that her husband's will is her law, and that she has got into a habit of watching his looks in order that she may anticipate his wishes, she will soon be a neglected fool. Did I not tell you of an instance...?"

What could be more lucid, more light-hearted, and more sane? And if Charlotte is suspicious of the dangers of her own temperament, that only proves her lucidity and sanity the more.

Later, at Brussels, when confronted with "three or four people's" idea that "the future _époux_ of Miss Brontë is on the Continent", she defends herself against the "silly imputation". "Not that it is a crime to marry, or a crime to wish to be married; but it is an imbecility, which I reject with contempt, for women, who have neither fortune nor beauty, to make marriage the principal object of their wishes and hopes, and the aim of all their actions; not to be able to convince themselves that they are unattractive, and that they had better be quiet, and think of other things than wedlock." Can anything be clearer?

So much for herself. But she has to deal with Miss Nussey, in difficulties again, later: "Papa has two or three times expressed a fear that since Mr. ---- paid you so much attention, he will, perhaps, have made an impression on your mind which will interfere with your comfort. I tell him I think not, as I believe you to be mistress of yourself in those matters. Still, he keeps saying that I am to write to you and dissuade you from thinking of him. I never saw Papa make himself so uneasy about a thing of the kind before; he is usually very sarcastic on such subjects.

"Mr. ---- be hanged! I never thought very well of him, and I am much disposed to think very ill of him at this blessed minute. I have discussed the subject fully, for where is the use of being mysterious and constrained?--it is not worth while."

And yet again it is Ellen Nussey. "Ten years ago I should have laughed at your account of the blunder you made in mistaking the bachelor doctor of Bridlington for a married man. I should have certainly thought you scrupulous over-much, and wondered how you could possibly regret being civil to a decent individual merely because he happened to be single instead of double. Now, however, I can perceive that your scruples are founded on common sense. I know that if women wish to escape the stigma of husband-seeking, they must act and look like marble or clay--cold, expressionless, bloodless; for every appearance of feeling, of joy, sorrow, friendliness, antipathy, admiration, disgust, are alike construed by the world into the attempt to" (I regret to say that Charlotte wrote) "to hook a husband."

Later, she has to advise her friend Mr. Williams as to a career for his daughter Louisa. And here she is miles ahead of her age, the age that considered marriage the only honourable career for a woman. "Your daughters--no more than your sons--should be a burden on your hands. Your daughters--as much as your sons--should aim at making their way honourably through life. Do you not wish to keep them at home? Believe me, teachers may be hard-worked, ill-paid and despised, but the girl who stays at home doing nothing is worse off than the hardest-wrought and worst-paid drudge of a school. Whenever I have seen, not merely in humble but in affluent houses, families of daughters sitting waiting to be married, I have pitied them from my heart. It is doubtless well--very well--if Fate decrees them a happy marriage; but, if otherwise, give their existence some object, their time some occupation, or the peevishness of disappointment, and the listlessness of idleness will infallibly degrade their nature.... Lonely as I am, how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career...? How should I be with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where there is not a single educated family? In that case I should have no world at all. As it is, something like a hope and a motive sustains me still. I wish all your daughters--I wish every woman in England, had also a hope and a motive."

Whatever the views of Charlotte Brontë's heroines may or may not have been, these were her own views--sober, sincere, and utterly dispassionate. Mrs. Oliphant set them aside, either in criminal carelessness, or with still more criminal deliberation, because they interfered with her theory. They are certainly not the views of a woman given to day-dreaming and window-gazing. Lucy Snowe may have had time for window-gazing, but not Charlotte Brontë, what with her writing and her dusting, sweeping, ironing, bed-making, and taking the eyes out of the potatoes for poor old Tabby, who was too blind to see them. Window-gazing of all things! Mrs. Oliphant could not have fixed upon a habit more absurdly at variance with Charlotte's character.

For she was pure, utterly and marvellously pure from sentimentalism, which was (and she knew it) the worst vice of the Victorian age. Mr. Leslie Stephen said that, "Miss Brontë's sense of humour was but feeble." It was robust enough when it played with sentimentalists. But as for love, for passion, she sees it with a tragic lucidity that is almost a premonition. And her attitude was by no means that of the foredoomed spinster, making necessity her virtue. There was no necessity. She had at least four suitors (quite a fair allowance for a little lady in a lonely parish), and she refused them all. Twice in her life, in her tempestuous youth, and at a crisis of her affairs, she chose "dependence upon coarse employers" before matrimony. She was shrewd, lucid, fastidious, and saw the men she knew without any glamour. To the cold but thoroughly presentable Mr. Henry Nussey she replied thus: "It has always been my habit to study the character of those among whom I chance to be thrown, and I think I know yours and can imagine what description of woman would suit you for a wife. The character should not be too marked, ardent and original, her temper should be mild, her piety undoubted, and her personal attractions sufficient to please your eyes and gratify your just pride. As for me you do not know me...." She was only three-and-twenty when she wrote that, with the prospect of Stonegappe before her. For she had not, and could not have for him, "that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him; and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my husband". Later, in her worst loneliness she refused that ardent Mr. Taylor, who courted her by the novel means of newspapers sent with violent and unremitting regularity through the post. He represented to some degree the larger life of intellectual interest. But he offended her fastidiousness. She was sorry for the little man with his little newspaper, and that was all. She refused several times the man she ultimately married. He served a long apprenticeship to love, and Charlotte yielded to his distress rather than to her own passion. She describes her engaged state as "very calm, very expectant. What I taste of happiness is of the soberest order. I trust to love my husband. I am grateful for his tender love for me.... Providence offers me this destiny. Doubtless then it is the best for me."

These are not the words, nor is this the behaviour of Mrs. Oliphant's Charlotte Brontë, the forlorn and desperate victim of the obsession of matrimony.