Chapter 9

It certainly showed--Jane's refusal to be abject--that Jane was far ahead of her age.

"'I tell you I must go!' I retorted, roused to something like passion. 'Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?--a machine without feelings, and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and fully as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses'" ("Addresses"? oh, Jane!) "'your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal--as we are!'"

This, allowing for some slight difference in the phrasing, is twentieth century. And it was this--Jane's behaviour in the orchard, and not Rochester's behaviour in the past--that opened the door to the "imps of evil meaning, polluting and defiling the domestic hearth."

Still, though _The Quarterly_ censured Jane's behaviour, it was Rochester who caused most of the trouble and the scandal by his remarkable confessions. In a sense they _were_ remarkable. Seldom, outside the pages of French fiction, had there been so lavish and public a display of mistresses. And while it was agreed on all hands that Rochester was incredible with his easy references to Céline and Giacinta and Clara, still more incredible was it that a young woman in a country parsonage should have realized so much as the existence of Clara and Giacinta and Céline. But, when Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux invoked Branwell and all his vices to account for Charlotte's experience, they forgot that Charlotte had read Balzac,[A] and that Balzac is an experience in himself. She had also read Moore's _Life of Byron_, and really there is nothing in Rochester's confessions that Byron and a little Balzac would not account for. So that they might just as well have left poor Branwell in his grave.

[Footnote A: I am wrong. Charlotte did not read Balzac till later, when George Henry Lewes told her to. But there were those twenty "clever, wicked, sophistical, and immoral French books" that she read in eighteen-forty. They may have served her purpose better.]

Indeed, it was the manner of Rochester's confession that gave away the secret of Currer Bell's sex; her handling of it is so inadequate and perfunctory. Rochester is at his worst and most improbable in the telling of his tale. The tale in itself is one of Charlotte's clumsiest contrivances for conveying necessary information. The alternate baldness and exuberant, decorated, swaggering boldness (for Charlotte's style was never bolder than when she was essaying the impossible) alone betrayed the hand of an innocent woman. Curious that these makeshift passages with their obviously second-hand material, their palpably alien _mise en scène_, should ever have suggested a personal experience and provoked _The Quarterly_ to its infamous and immortal utterance: "If we ascribe the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex."

_The Quarterly_, to do it justice, argued that Currer Bell was a man, for only a man would have betrayed such ignorance of feminine resources as to make Jane Eyre, on a night alarm, "hurry on a frock and shawl". The reasoning passed. Nobody saw that such a man would be as innocent as any parson's daughter. Nobody pointed out that, as it happened, Currer Bell had provided her dowagers with "vast white wrappers" on the second night alarm. And, after all, the sex of _The Quarterly_ reviewer itself remains a problem. Long ago Mr. Andrew Lang detected the work of two hands in that famous article. You may say there were at least three. There was, first, the genial reviewer of _Vanity Fair_, who revels in the wickedness of Becky Sharpe, and who is going to revel in the wickedness of Jane. Then suddenly some Mr. Brocklebank steps in, and you get a "black-marble clergyman" on _Jane Eyre_.

"We have said," says this person, "that this was the picture of a natural heart. This, to our view, is the great and crying mischief of the book. Jane Eyre is throughout the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit, the more dangerous to exhibit from that prestige of principle and self-control, which is liable to dazzle the eyes too much for it to observe the insufficient and unsound foundation on which it rests. It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength; but it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself.... She has inherited the worst sin of our fallen nature--the sin of pride."

Jane, you see, should have sinned to show her Christian humility. The style, if not the reasoning, is pure Brocklebank. He does "not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought, which has overthrown authority and violated every code, human and divine, abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has written _Jane Eyre_".

Ellis and Acton (poor Acton!) Bell get it even stronger than that; and then, suddenly again, you come on a report on the "Condition of Governesses", palpably drawn up by a third person. For years Miss Rigby, who was afterwards Lady Eastlake, got the credit for the whole absurd performance, for she was known to have written the review on _Vanity Fair_. What happened seems to have been that Miss Rigby set out in all honesty to praise _Jane Eyre_. Then some infuriated person interfered and stopped her. The article was torn from the unfortunate Miss Rigby and given to Brocklebank, who used bits of her here and there. Brocklebank, in his zeal, overdid his part, so the report on Governesses was thrown in to give the whole thing an air of seriousness and respectability. So that it is exceedingly doubtful whether, after all, it was a woman's hand that dealt the blow.

If Charlotte Brontë did not feel the effect of it to the end of her life, she certainly suffered severely at the time. It was responsible for that impassioned defence of Anne and Emily which she would have been wiser to have left alone.

It must be admitted that _Jane Eyre_ was an easy prey for the truculent reviewer, for its faults were all on the surface, and its great qualities lay deep. Deep as they were, they gripped the ordinary uncritical reader, and they gripped the critic in spite of himself, so that he bitterly resented being moved by a work so flagrantly and obviously faulty. What was more, the passion of the book was so intense that you were hardly aware of anything else, and its author's austere respect for the ten commandments passed almost unobserved.

But when her enemies accuse Charlotte Brontë of glorifying passion they praise her unaware. Her glory is that she did glorify it. Until she came, passion between man and woman had meant animal passion. Fielding and Smollett had dealt with it solely on that footing. A woman's gentle, legalized affection for her husband was one thing, and passion was another. Thackeray and Dickens, on the whole, followed Fielding. To all three of them passion is an affair wholly of the senses, temporary, episodic, and therefore comparatively unimportant. Thackeray intimated that he could have done more with it but for his fear of Mrs. Grundy. Anyhow, passion was not a quality that could be given to a good woman; and so the good women of Dickens and Thackeray are conspicuously without it. And Jane Austen may be said to have also taken Fielding's view. Therefore she was obliged to ignore passion. She gave it to one vulgar woman, Lydia Bennett, and to one bad one, Mrs. Rushworth; and having given it them, she turned her head away and refused to have anything more to do with these young women. She was not alone in her inability to "tackle passion". No respectable mid-Victorian novelist could, when passion had so bad a name.

And it was this thing, cast down, defiled, dragged in the mud, and ignored because of its defilement, that Charlotte Brontë took and lifted up. She washed it clean; she bathed it in the dew of the morning; she baptized it in tears; she clothed it in light and flame; she showed it for the divine, the beautiful, the utterly pure and radiant thing it is, "the very sublime of faith, truth and devotion". She made it, this spirit of fire and air, incarnate in the body of a woman who had no sensual charm. Because of it little Jane became the parent of Caterina and of Maggie Tulliver; and Shirley prepared the way for Meredith's large-limbed, large-brained, large-hearted women.

It was thus that Charlotte Brontë glorified passion. The passion that she glorified being of the finest fibre, it was naturally not understood by people whose fibres were not fine at all.

It was George Henry Lewes (not a person of the finest fibre) who said of _Jane Eyre_ that "the grand secret of its success ... as of all great and lasting successes was its reality". In spite of crudities, absurdities, impossibilities, it remains most singularly and startlingly alive. In _Jane Eyre_ Charlotte Brontë comes for the first time into her kingdom of the inner life. She grasps the secret, unseen springs; in her narrow range she is master of the psychology of passion and of suffering, whether she is describing the agony of the child Jane shut up in that terrible red room, or the anguish of the woman on the morning of that wedding-day that brought no wedding. Or take the scene of Jane's flight from Thornfield, or that other scene, unsurpassed in its passion and tenderness, of her return to Rochester at Ferndean.

"To this house I came just ere dark, on an evening marked by the characteristics of sad sky, cold gale, and continued small, penetrating rain.... Even within a very short distance of the manor-house you could see nothing of it; so thick and dark grew the timber of the gloomy wood about it. Iron gates between granite pillars showed me where to enter, and passing through them, I found myself at once in the twilight of close-ranked trees. There was a grass-grown track descending the forest aisle, between hoar and knotty shafts and under branched arches. I followed it, expecting soon to reach the dwelling; but it stretched on and on, it wound far and farther: no sign of habitation or grounds was visible.... At last my way opened, the trees thinned a little; presently I beheld a railing, then the house--scarce, by this dim light, distinguishable from the trees; so dank and green were its decaying walls. Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch, I stood amidst a space of enclosed ground, from which the wood swept away in a semicircle. There were no flowers, no garden-beds; only a broad gravel-walk girdling a grass-plat, and this set in the heavy frame of the forest. The house presented two pointed gables in its front; the windows were latticed and narrow: the front-door was narrow too, one step led up to it.... It was still as a church on a week-day; the pattering rain on the forest leaves was the only sound audible....

"I heard a movement--that narrow front-door was unclosing, and some shape was about to issue from the grange.

"It opened slowly; a figure came out into the twilight and stood on the step; a man without a hat: he stretched forth his hand as if to feel whether it rained. Dark as it was I had recognized him....

"His form was of the same strong and stalwart contour as ever.... But in his countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding--that reminded me of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished, might look as looked that sightless Samson."

Again--Rochester hears Jane's voice in the room where she comes to him.

"'And where is the speaker? Is it only a voice? Oh! I _cannot_ see, but I must feel or my heart will stop and my brain burst.'...

"He groped. I arrested his wandering hand, and prisoned it in both mine.

"'Her very fingers!' he cried; 'her small, slight fingers! If so, there must be more of her.'

"The muscular hand broke from my custody; my arm was seized, my shoulder--neck--wrist--I was entwined and gathered to him....

"I pressed my lips to his once brilliant and now rayless eyes--I swept back his hair from his brow and kissed that too. He suddenly seemed to rouse himself: the conviction of the reality of all this seized him.

"'It is you--is it, Jane? You are come back to me then?'

"'I am.'"

The scene as it stands is far from perfect; but only Charlotte Brontë could sustain so strong an illusion of passion through so many lapses. And all that passion counts for no more than half in the astounding effect of reality she produces. Before _Jane Eyre_ there is no novel written by a woman, with the one exception of _Wuthering Heights_, that conveys so poignant an impression of surroundings, of things seen and heard, of the earth and sky; of weather; of the aspects of houses and of rooms. It suggests a positive exaltation of the senses of sound and light, an ecstasy, an enchantment before the visible, tangible world. It is not a matter of mere faithful observation (though few painters have possessed so incorruptibly the innocence of the eye). It is an almost supernatural intentness; sensation raised to the _n_th power. Take the description of the awful red room at Gateshead.

"A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a soft fawn colour, with a flush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly-polished old mahogany. Out of these deep surrounding shades rose high and glared white the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles counterpane. Scarcely less prominent was an ample, cushioned easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne.... Mr. Reed had been dead nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his last; here he lay in state; hence his coffin was borne by the undertaker's men; and since that day a sense of dreary consecration had guarded it from frequent intrusion."

Could anything be more horrible than that red room? Or take the descriptions of the school at Lowood where the horror of pestilence hangs over house and garden. Through all these Gateshead and Lowood scenes Charlotte is unerring and absolute in her reality.

Her very style, so uncertain in its rendering of human speech, becomes flawless in such passages as this: "It was three o'clock; the church-bell tolled as I passed under the belfry: the charm of the hour lay in its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun. I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white, worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and the little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like single russet leaves about to drop.

"This lane inclined up-hill all the way to Hay.... I then turned eastward.

"On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon; pale yet as a cloud, but brightening momently; she looked over Hay which, half lost in trees, sent up a blue smoke from its few chimneys; it was yet a mile distant, but in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life. My ear, too, felt the flow of currents; in what dales and depths I could not tell: but there were many hills beyond Hay, and doubtless many becks threading their passes. That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of the nearest streams, the sough of the most remote.

"A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and whisperings, at once so far away and so clear: a positive tramp, tramp; a metallic clatter, which effaced the soft wave-wanderings; as, in a picture, the solid mass of a crag, or the rough boles of a great oak, drawn in dark and strong on the foreground, efface the aerial distance of azure hill, sunny horizon, and blended clouds, where tint melts into tint.

"The din sounded on the causeway...."

Flawless this, too, of the sky after sunset: "Where the sun had gone down in simple state--pure of the pomp of clouds--spread a solemn purple, burning with the light of red jewel and furnace flame at one point, on one hill-peak, and extending high and wide, soft and still softer, over half heaven."

And this of her own moors: "There are great moors behind and on each hand of me; there are waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley at my feet. The population here must be thin, and I see no passengers on these roads: they stretch out east, west, north and south--white, broad, lonely; they are all cut in the moor, and the heather grows deep and wild to their very verge."

She has given the secret of the moor country in a phrase: "I felt the consecration of its loneliness." In that one line you have the real, the undying Charlotte Brontë.

It is such immortal things that make the difference between _Jane Eyre_ and _The Professor_. So immeasurable is that difference that it almost justifies the theorist in assuming an "experience" to account for it, an experience falling between the dates of _The Professor_ and _Jane Eyre_. Unfortunately there was none; none in the sense cherished by the researcher. Charlotte's letters are an unbroken record of those two years that followed her return from Brussels. Her life is laid bare in its long and cramped monotony, a life singularly empty of "experience".

And yet an experience did come to her in that brief period. If the researcher had not followed a false scent across the Channel, if his _flair_ for tragic passion had not destroyed in him all sense of proportion, he could not possibly have missed it; for it stared him in the face, simple, obvious, inevitable. But miss it he certainly did. Obsessed by his idea, he considered it a negligible circumstance that Charlotte should have read _Wuthering Heights_ before she wrote _Jane Eyre_. And yet, I think that, if anything woke Charlotte up, it was that. Until then, however great her certainty of her own genius, she did not know how far she could trust it, how far it would be safe to let imagination go. Appalled by the spectacle of its excesses, she had divorced imagination from the real. But Emily knew none of these cold deliberations born of fear. _Wuthering Heights_ was the fruit of a divine freedom, a divine unconsciousness. It is not possible that Charlotte, of all people, should have read _Wuthering Heights_ without a shock of enlightenment; that she should not have compared it with her own bloodless work; that she should not have felt the wrong done to her genius by her self-repression. Emily had dared to be herself; _she_ had not been afraid of her own passion; she had had no method; she had accomplished a stupendous thing without knowing it, by simply letting herself go. And Charlotte, I think, said to herself, "That is what I ought to have done. That is what I will do next time." And next time she did it. The experience may seem insufficient, but it is of such experiences that a great writer's life is largely made. And if you _must_ have an influence to account for _Jane Eyre_, there is no need to go abroad to look for it. There was influence enough in her own home. These three Brontës, adoring each other, were intolerant of any other influence; and the strongest spirit, which was Emily's, prevailed. To be sure, no remonstrances from Emily or Charlotte could stop Anne in her obstinate analysis of Walter Huntingdon; but it was some stray spark from Emily that kindled Anne. As for Charlotte, her genius must have quickened in her when her nerves thrilled to the shock of _Wuthering Heights_. This, I know, is only another theory; but it has at least the merit of its modesty. It is not offered as in the least accounting for, or explaining, Charlotte's genius. It merely suggests with all possible humility a likely cause of its release. Anyhow, it is a theory that does Charlotte's genius no wrong, on which account it seems to me preferable to any other. It is really no argument against it to say that Charlotte never acknowledged her sister's influence, that she was indeed unaware of it; for, in the first place, the stronger the spiritual tie between them, the less likely was she to have been aware. In the second place, it is not claimed that _Wuthering Heights_ was such an influence as the "sojourn in Brussels" is said to have been--that it "made Miss Brontë an author". It is not claimed that if there had been no _Wuthering Heights_ and no Emily Brontë, there would have been no _Jane Eyre_; for to me nothing can be more certain that whatever had, or had not happened, Charlotte's genius would have found its way.

Charlotte's genius indeed was so profoundly akin to Charlotte's nature that its way, the way of its upward progress, was by violent impetus and recoil.

In _Shirley_ she revolts from the passion of _Jane Eyre_. She seems to have written it to prove that there are other things. She had been stung by _The Quarterly's_ attack, stung by rumour, stung by every adverse thing that had been said. And yet not for a moment was she "influenced" by her reviewers. It was more in defiance than in submission that she answered them with _Shirley_. _Shirley_ was an answer to every criticism that had yet been made. In _Shirley_ she forsook the one poor play of hearts insurgent for the vast and varied movement of the world; social upheavals, the clash of sects and castes, the first grim hand-to-hand struggle between capital and labour, all are there. The book opens with a drama, not of hearts but of artisans insurgent; frame-breakers, not breakers of the marriage law. In sheer defiance she essays to render the whole real world, the complex, many-threaded, many-coloured world; where the tragic warp is woven with the bright comedy of curates. It is the world of the beginnings; the world of the early nineteenth century that she paints. A world with the immensity, the profundity, the darkness of the brooding sea; where the spirit of a woman moves, troubling the waters; for Charlotte Brontë has before her the stupendous vision of the world as it was, as it yet is, and as it is to be.