The Three Brontes Part 7

"'I hardly know, sir; I have little experience of them; they are generally thought pleasant things.'"

Charlotte Bronte was on her own ground there. But you tremble when she leaves it; you shudder throughout the awful drawing-room comedy of Blanche Ingram. Blanche says to her mother: "Am I right, Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park?" And her mother says to Blanche, "My lily-flower, you are right now, as always." Blanche says to Rochester, "Signor Eduardo, are you in voice to-night?" and he, "Donna Bianca, if you command it, I will be." And Blanche says to the footman, "Cease that chatter, blockhead, and do my bidding."

That, Charlotte's worst lapse, is a very brief one, and the scene itself is unimportant. But what can be said of the crucial scene of the novel, the tremendous scene of pa.s.sion and temptation? There _is_ pa.s.sion in the scene before it, between Jane and Rochester on the afternoon of the wedding-day that brought no wedding.

"'Jane, I never meant to wound you thus. If the man who had but one little ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter, that ate of his bread, and drank of his cup, and lay in his bosom, had by some mistake slaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have rued his b.l.o.o.d.y blunder more than I now rue mine. Will you ever forgive me?'... 'You know I am a scoundrel, Jane?' ere long he inquired wistfully, wondering, I suppose, at my continued silence and tameness; the result of weakness rather than of will.

"'Yes, sir.'

"'Then tell me so roundly and sharply--don't spare me.'

"'I cannot; I am tired and sick. I want some water.'

"He heaved a sort of shuddering sigh, and, taking me in his arms, carried me downstairs."

But there are terrible lapses. After Rochester's cry, "'Jane, my little darling ... If you were mad, do you think I should hate you,'" he elaborates his idea and he is impossible: "'Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken it would be my treasure still; if you raved, my arms should confine you and not a strait waistcoat--your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me; if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace at least as fond as it would be restrictive.'"

And in the final scene of temptation there is a most curious mingling of reality and unreality, of the pa.s.sion which is poetry, and the poetry which is not pa.s.sion.

"'Never,' said he, as he ground his teeth, 'never was anything so frail, and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand!' And he shook me with the force of his hold. 'I could bend her with my finger and thumb; and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her?

Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage--with a stern triumph.

Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it--the savage, beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want: not alone your brittle frame. Of yourself, you could come with soft flight and nestle against my heart, if you would; seized against your will you will elude the grasp like an essence--you will vanish ere I inhale your fragrance. Oh, come, Jane, come!'"

It is the crucial scene of the book; and with all its power, with all its vehemence and pa.s.sionate reality it is unconvincing. It stirs you and it leaves you cold.

The truth is that in _Jane Eyre_ Charlotte Bronte had not mastered the art of dialogue; and to the very last she was uncertain in her handling of it. In this she is inferior to all the great novelists of her time; inferior to some who were by no means great. She understood more of the spiritual speech of pa.s.sion than any woman before her, but she ignores its actual expression, its violences, its reticences, its silences. In her great scenes she is inspired one moment, and the next positively handicapped by her pa.s.sion and her poetry. In the same sentence she rises to the sudden poignant _cri du coeur_, and sinks to the artifice of metaphor. She knew that pa.s.sion is poetry, and poetry is pa.s.sion; you might say it was all she knew, or ever cared to know. But her language of pa.s.sion is too often the language of written rather than of spoken poetry, of poetry that is not poetry at all. It is as if she had never heard the speech of living men and women. There is more actuality in the half-French chatter of Adele than in any of the high utterances of Jane and Rochester.

And yet her sense of the emotion behind the utterance is infallible, so infallible that we accept the utterance. By some miracle, which is her secret, the pa.s.sion gets through. The illusion of reality is so strong that it covers its own lapses. _Jane Eyre_ exists to prove that truth is higher than actuality.

"'Jane suits me: do I suit her?'

"'To the finest fibre of my nature, sir.'"

If no woman alive had ever said that, it would yet be true to Jane's feeling. For it is a matter of the finest fibres, this pa.s.sion of Jane's, that set people wondering about Currer Bell, that inflamed Mrs.

Oliphant, as it inflamed the reviewer in _The Quarterly_, and made Charles Kingsley think that Currer Bell was coa.r.s.e. Their state of mind is incredible to us now. For what did poor Jane do, after all? n.o.body could possibly have had more respect for the ten commandments. For all Rochester's raging, the ten commandments remain exactly where they were.

It was inconceivable to Charlotte Bronte that any decent man or woman could make hay, or wish to make hay, of them. And yet Jane offended. She sinned against the unwritten code that ordains that a woman may lie till she is purple in the face, but she must not, as a piece of gratuitous information, tell a man she loves him; not, that is to say, in as many words. She may declare her pa.s.sion unmistakably in other ways. She may exhibit every ignominious and sickly sign of it; her eyes may glow like hot coals; she may tremble; she may flush and turn pale; she may do almost anything, provided she does not speak the actual words. In mid-Victorian times an enormous licence was allowed her. She might faint, with perfect propriety, in public; she might become anaemic and send for the doctor, and be ordered iron; she might fall ill, horridly and visibly, and have to be taken away to spas and places to drink the waters. Everybody knew what that meant. If she had shrieked her pa.s.sion on the housetops she could hardly have published it more violently; but n.o.body minded. It was part of the mid-Victorian convention.

Jane Eyre did none of these things. As soon as she was aware of her pa.s.sion for Mr. Rochester she thrust it down into the pocket of her voluminous mid-Victorian skirt and sat on it. Instead of languis.h.i.+ng and fainting where Rochester could see her, she held her head rather higher than usual, and practised the spirited arts of retort and repartee. And n.o.body gave her any credit for it. Then Rochester puts the little thing (poor Jane was only eighteen when it happened) to the torture, and, with the last excruciating turn of the thumbscrew, she confesses. That was the enormity that was never forgiven her.

"'You'll like Ireland, I think,'" says Rochester in his torturing mood; "'they are such kind-hearted people there.'

"'It is a long way off, sir.'

"'No matter, a girl of your sense will not object to the voyage or the distance.'

"'Not the voyage, but the distance: and then the sea is a barrier.'

"'From what, Jane?'

"'From England and from Thornfield, and--'

"'Well?'

"'From _you_, sir.'"

She had done it. She had said, or almost said the words.

It just happened. There was magic in the orchard at Thornfield; there was youth in her blood; and--"Jane, did you hear the nightingale singing in that wood?"

Still, she had done it.

And she was the first heroine who had. Adultery, with which we are fairly familiar, would have seemed a lesser sin. There may be extenuating circ.u.mstances for the adulteress. There were extenuating circ.u.mstances for Rochester. He could plead a wife who went on all fours. There were no extenuating circ.u.mstances for little Jane. No use for her to say that she was upset by the singing of the nightingale; that it didn't matter what she said to Mr. Rochester when Mr. Rochester was going to marry Blanche Ingram, anyway; that she only flung herself at his head because she knew she couldn't hit it; that her plainness gave her a certain licence, placing her beyond the code. Not a bit of it. Jane's plainness was one thing that they had against her. Until her time no heroine had been permitted to be plain. Jane's seizing of the position was part of the general insolence of her behaviour.

Jane's insolence was indeed unparalleled. Having done the deed she felt no shame or sense of sin; she stood straight up and defended herself.

That showed that she was hardened.

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 pa.s.sion.

'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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed through the grave, and we stood at G.o.d'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 Celine 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 Celine. 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 s.e.x; 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 makes.h.i.+ft pa.s.sages with their obviously second-hand material, their palpably alien _mise en scene_, 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 s.e.x."

_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 pa.s.sed. n.o.body saw that such a man would be as innocent as any parson's daughter. n.o.body 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 s.e.x 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 Bronte 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 impa.s.sioned 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 pa.s.sion of the book was so intense that you were hardly aware of anything else, and its author's austere respect for the ten commandments pa.s.sed almost un.o.bserved.

But when her enemies accuse Charlotte Bronte of glorifying pa.s.sion they praise her unaware. Her glory is that she did glorify it. Until she came, pa.s.sion between man and woman had meant animal pa.s.sion. Fielding and Smollett had dealt with it solely on that footing. A woman's gentle, legalized affection for her husband was one thing, and pa.s.sion was another. Thackeray and d.i.c.kens, on the whole, followed Fielding. To all three of them pa.s.sion 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, pa.s.sion was not a quality that could be given to a good woman; and so the good women of d.i.c.kens 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 pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sion". No respectable mid-Victorian novelist could, when pa.s.sion 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 Bronte 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 s.h.i.+rley prepared the way for Meredith's large-limbed, large-brained, large-hearted women.