Charlotte’s pen-portrait of herself.
Those who would understand Charlotte, even more than those who would understand Emily, should study the difference of tenderness between the touch that drew Shirley Keeldar and the touch that drew Lucy Snowe. This latter figure, as Mr. Wemyss Reid has observed with indisputable accuracy of insight, was, doubtless, if never meant to win liking or made to find favor in the general reader’s eyes, yet none the less evidently on that account the faithful likeness of Charlotte Brontë, studied from the life, and painted by her own hand with the sharp austere precision of a photograph rather than a portrait. But it is herself with the consolation and support of her genius withdrawn, with the strength of her spiritual arm immeasurably shortened, the cunning of her right hand comparatively cancelled; and this it is that makes the main undertone and ultimate result of the book somewhat mournfuller even than the literal record of her mournful and glorious life.
A. C. Swinburne: ‘A Note on Charlotte Brontë.’ London: Chatto & Windus, 1877.
A chat with Mrs. Gaskell.
The parlor at Haworth in Charlotte’s last days.
We talked over the clear, bright fire; it is a cold country, and the fires were a pretty warm dancing light all over the house. The parlor has been evidently refurnished within the last few years, since Miss Brontë’s success has enabled her to have a little more money to spend. Everything fits into, and is in harmony with, the idea of a country parsonage, possessed by people of very moderate means. The prevailing color of the room is crimson, to make a warm setting for the cold, gray landscape without. There is her likeness by Richmond,and an engraving from Laurence’s picture of Thackeray; and two recesses on each side of the high, narrow, old-fashioned mantel-piece, filled with books—books given to her, books she has bought, and which tell of her individual pursuits and tastes; not standard books.
Charlotte’s weak sight.
She cannot see well, and does little beside knitting. The way she weakened her eyesight was this: When she was sixteen or seventeen, she wanted much to draw, and she copied nimini-pimini copper-plate engravings out of annuals (“stippling,” don’t the artists call it?); ... till at the end of six months she had produced an exquisitely faithful copy of the engraving. She wanted to learn to express her ideas by drawing. After she had tried to draw stories, and not succeeded, she took the better mode of writing, but in so small a hand that it is almost impossible to decipher what she wrote at this time.
Habits of order.
Emily “a Titan.”
A picture by Branwell.
I soon observed that her habits of order were such that she could not go on with the conversation if a chair was out of its place; everything was arranged with delicate regularity.... I told her of ——’s admiration of ‘Shirley,’ which pleased her, for the character of ‘Shirley’ was meant for her sister Emily, about whom she is never tired of talking, nor I of listening. Emily must have been a remnant of the Titans—great-grand-daughter of the giants who used to inhabit the earth. One day Miss Brontë brought down a rough, common-looking oil painting, done by her brother, of herself—a little, rather prim-looking girl of eighteen—andthe two other sisters, girls of sixteen and fourteen, with cropped hair, and sad, dreamy-looking eyes.
Mrs. Gaskell: ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë.’
Charlotte’s life-long friendship with Ellen Nussey.
In the sombre web of Charlotte’s existence there shone one thread of silver, all the brighter and more blessed for the contrast—it was the warm, steady, unfailing friendship of her school-fellow “E.” (Ellen Nussey). “Ma bien aimée, ma précieuse E., mon amie chère et chérie,” she calls her in one of her earlier letters. “If we had but a cottage and a competency of our own, I do think we might live and love on till death, without being dependent on any third person for happiness.” “What am I compared to you?” she exclaims; “I feel my own utter worthlessness when I make the comparison. I am a very coarse, commonplace wretch.” But the affection that overflowed in such loving extravagance was no passing sentiment. As life deepened and grew more and more intense—and fuller of pain—for each, the closer became their attachment, the more constantly Charlotte turned for sympathy and support to her faithful companion. In her, indeed, she found all the greater rest and refreshment because of the difference in their natures. Her individuality colors the Caroline Helstone of ‘Shirley.’
R. W. Gilder, in ‘The Old Cabinet,’ inScribner’s Monthly, nowThe Century, May, 1871.
Charlotte’s marriage.
It was fixed that the marriage was to take place on the 29th of June (1854). Her two friends (Ellen Nussey and Miss Wooler) arrived at Haworth Parsonagethe day before; and the long summer afternoon and evening were spent by Charlotte in thoughtful arrangements for the morrow, and for her father’s comfort during her absence from home. When all was finished—the trunk packed, the morning’s breakfast arranged, the wedding-dress laid out—just at bed-time, Mr. Brontë announced his intention of stopping at home while the others went to church. What was to be done? Who was to give the bride away? There were only to be the officiating clergyman, the bride and bridegroom, the bridesmaid, and Miss Wooler present. The prayer-book was referred to; and there it was seen that the rubric enjoins that the minister shall receive “the woman from her father’s or friend’s hands,” and that nothing is specified as to the sex of the “friend.” So Miss Wooler, ever kind in emergency, volunteered to give her old pupil away.... The news of the wedding had slipped abroad before the little party came out of church, and many old humble friends were there, seeing her look “like a snow-drop,” as they say. Her dress was white embroidered muslin, with a lace mantle, and white bonnet trimmed with green leaves, which might suggest the resemblance of the pale wintry flower.
Mrs. Gaskell: ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë.’
Her brief married life.
There was not much time for literary labors during these happy months of married life. The wife, new to her duties, was engaged in mastering them with all the patience, self-suppression, and industry which had characterized her throughout her life. Her husband was nowher first thought; and he took the time which had formerly been devoted to reading, study, thought, and writing. But occasionally the pressure she was forced to put upon herself was very severe. Mr. Nicholls had never been attracted toward her by her literary fame: with literary effort he had no sympathy, and upon the whole he would rather that his wife should lay aside her pen entirely than that she should gain any fresh triumphs in the world of letters. So she submitted, and with cheerful courage repressed that “gift” which had been her solace in sorrows deep and many. Yet once the spell was too strong to be resisted, and she hastily wrote a few pages of a new story called ‘Emma,’ in which once more she proposed to deal with her favorite theme—the history of a friendless girl. One would fain have seen how she would have treated her subject, now that “the color of her thoughts” had been changed, and that a happy marriage had introduced her to a new phase of that life which she had studied so closely and so constantly. But it was not to be.
T. Wemyss Reid: ‘Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph.’
Her death.
[Charlotte had been ill since January, 1855.] About the third week in March there was a change; a low wandering delirium came on; and in it she begged constantly for food and even for stimulants. She swallowed eagerly now; but it was too late. Wakening for an instant from this stupor of intelligence, she saw her husband’s woe-worn face, and caught the sound of some murmured words of prayer, that God would spare her. “Oh!” she whisperedforth, “I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy.”
Early on Saturday morning, March 31st, the solemn tolling of Haworth church-bell spoke forth the fact of her death to the villagers who had known her from a child, and whose hearts shivered within them as they thought of the two sitting desolate and alone in the old grey house.
Mrs. Gaskell: ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë.’
Charlotte’s and Emily’s work contrasted.
[Emily] tells us what she saw; and what she saw and what she was incapable of seeing are equally characteristic. All the wildness of that moorland, all the secrets of those lonely farms, all the capabilities of the one tragedy of passion and weakness that touched her solitary life, she divined and appropriated: but not the life of the village at her feet, not the bustle of the mills, the riots, the sudden alternation of wealth and poverty, not the incessant rivalry of church and chapel; and while the West Riding has known the proto-type of nearly every person and nearly every place in ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Shirley,’ not a single character in ‘Wuthering Heights’ ever climbed the hills round Haworth.
Say that two foreigners have passed though Staffordshire, leaving us their reports of what they have seen. The first, going by day, will tell us of the hideous blackness of the country, but yet more, no doubt, of that awful, patient struggle of man with fire and darkness, of the grim courage of those unknown lives; and he would see what they toil for, women with little children in their arms; and he would notice theblue sky beyond the smoke, doubly precious for such horrible environment. But the second traveller has journeyed through the night; neither squalor nor ugliness, neither sky nor children, has he seen, only a vast stretch of blackness shot through with flaming fires, or here and there burned to a dull red by heated furnaces; and before these, strange toilers, half naked, scarcely human, and red in the leaping flicker and gleam of the fire. The meaning of their work he could not see, but a fearful and impressive phantasmagoria of flame and blackness and fiery energies at work in the encompassing night. So differently did the black country of this world appear to Charlotte, clear-seeing and compassionate, and to Emily Brontë, a traveller through the shadows.
A. M. F. Robinson: ‘Emily Brontë.’
Their opposite methods.
Charlotte’s studies from the life.
The habit of direct study from life which has given us, among its finest and most precious results, these two contrasted figures of Shirley Keeldar and Lucy Snowe, affords yet another point of contrast or distinction between the manner and motive of work respectively perceptible in the design of either sister. Emily Brontë, like William Blake, would probably have said, or at least would presumably have felt, that such study after the model was to her impossible—an attempt but too certain to diminish her imaginative insight and disable her creative hand; while Charlotte evidently never worked so well as when painting more or less directly from nature. Almost the only apparent exception, as far as we—the run of her readers—know, is the wonderful and incomparable figure of Rochester.... In most cases probably thedesign begun by means of the camera was transferred for completion to the canvas. The likeness of Mr. Helstone to Mr. Brontë, for example, was thus at once enlarged and subdued, heightened and modified, by the skilful and noble instinct which kept it always within the gracious and natural bounds prescribed and maintained by the fine tact of filial respect.
The gift of the Brontë sisters.
The gift of which I would speak is that of a power to make us feel in every nerve, at every step forward which our imagination is compelled to take under the guidance of another’s, that thus and not otherwise, but in all things altogether even as we are told and shown, it was and it must have been with the human figures set before us in their action and their suffering; that thus and not otherwise they absolutely must and would have felt and thought and spoken under the proposed conditions. It is something for a writer to have achieved if he has made it worth our fancy’s while to consider by the light of imaginative reason whether the creatures of his own fancy would in actual fact and life have done as he has made them do or not; it is something, and by comparison it is much. But no definite terms of comparison will suffice to express how much more than this it is to have done what the youngest of capable readers must feel on first opening ‘Jane Eyre’ that the writer of its very first pages has shown herself competent to do.... Even in the best and greatest works of our best and greatest we do not find this one great good quality so innate, so immanent as in hers. At most we find the combination of event with character, the coincidence ofaction with disposition, the coherence of consequences with emotions, to be rationally credible and acceptable to the natural sense of a reasonable faith. We rarely or never feel that, given the characters, the incidents become inevitable; that such passion must needs bring forth none other than such action, such emotions cannot choose but find their only issue in such events. And certainly we do not feel, what it seems to me the highest triumph of inspired intelligence and creative instinct to succeed in making us feel, that the main-spring of all, the central relation of the whole, “the very pulse of the machine,” has in it this occult inexplicable force of nature. But when Catherine Earnshaw says to Nelly Dean, “IamHeathcliff!” and when Jane Eyre answers Edward Rochester’s question, whether she feels in him the absolute sense of fitness and correspondence to herself which he feels himself in her, with the words which close and crown the history of their twin-born spirits—“to the finest fibre of my nature, sir,”—we feel to the finest fibre of our own that these are no mere words. On this ground at least it might for once be not unpardonable to borrow their standing reference or illustration from the comparative school of critics, ... and say, as was said on another score of Emily Brontë in particular by Sydney Dobell, that either sister in this single point “has done no less” than Shakespeare. As easily might we imagine a change of the mutual relations between the characters of Shakespeare as a corresponding revolution or reversal of conditions among theirs.
Emily a true poet.
There was a dark unconscious instinct as of primitive nature-worship in the passionate great genius ofEmily Brontë, which found no corresponding quality in her sister’s.... It is possible that to take full delight in Emily Brontë’s book one must have something by natural inheritance of her instinct and something by earliest association of her love for the same special points of earth—the same lights and sounds and colors and odors, and sights and shapes of the same fierce free landscape of tenantless and fenceless moor; but however that may be, it was assuredly with no less justice of insight and accuracy of judgment than humility of self-knowledge and fidelity of love that Charlotte in her day of solitary fame assigned to her dead sister the crown of poetic honor which she has rightfully disclaimed for herself. Full of poetic quality as her own work is throughout, that quality is never condensed or crystallised into the proper and final form of verse. But the pure note of absolutely right expression for things inexpressible in full by prose at its highest point of adequacy—the formal inspiration of sound which at once reveals itself, and which can fully reveal itself by metrical embodiment alone, in the symphonies and antiphonies of regular word-music and definite instinctive modulation of corresponsive tones—this is what Emily had for her birthright as certainly as Charlotte had it not.... The final expression in verse of Emily’s passionate and inspired intelligence was to be uttered from lips already whitened though not yet chilled by the present shadow of unterrifying death. No last words of poet or hero or sage or saint were ever worthy of longer or more reverent remembrance than that appeal which is so far above and beyond a prayer ... at once fieryand solemn, full alike of resignation and of rapture, as wholly stripped and cleared and lightened from all burdens and all bandages and all incrustations of creed as it is utterly pervaded and possessed by the sublime and irrefutable passion of belief.
A. C. Swinburne: ‘A Note on Charlotte Brontë.’
George Eliot on ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Villette.’
I have read ‘Jane Eyre,’ and shall be glad to know what you admire in it. All self-sacrifice is good, but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man soul and body to a putrefying carcass. However, the bookisinteresting; only I wish the characters would talk a little less like the heroes and heroines of police reports.
George Eliot:Letterto Charles Bray, 1848.
I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading ‘Villette,’ a still more wonderful book than ‘Jane Eyre.’ There is something almost preternatural in its power.
George Eliot:Letterto Mrs. Bray, in ‘George Eliot’s Life,’ 1853.
Thackeray on Charlotte Brontë’s works and life.
Which of her readers has not become her friend? Who that has known her books has not admired the artist’s noble English, the burning love of truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honor, so to speak, of the woman? What a story is that of that family of poets in their solitude yonderon the gloomy northern moors!... As one thinks of that life so noble, so lonely—of that passion for truth—of those nights and nights of eager study, swarming fancies, invention, depression, elation, prayer; as one reads the necessarily incomplete, though most touching and admirable, history of the heart that throbbed in this one little frame—of this one among the myriads of souls that have lived and died on this great earth—this great earth?—this little speck in the infinite universe of God—with what wonder do we think of to-day, with what awe await to-morrow, when that which is now but darkly seen shall be clear!
Wm. M. Thackeray: ‘Roundabout Papers.’
FOOTNOTES:[8]Haworth Churchyard.[9]A name playfully applied to Emily by her sisters.
[8]Haworth Churchyard.
[8]Haworth Churchyard.
[9]A name playfully applied to Emily by her sisters.
[9]A name playfully applied to Emily by her sisters.