CHARLOTTE BHONTE, 1816-1916

Evening Star, Issue 16092, 18 April 1916, Page 9

CHARLOTTE BHONTE, 1816-1916

[Contributed by J. R. Sinclair.]

(Continued from Saturday's issue.)

No. 2. ' Jano Eyre,' the intense love story, submitted to Smith and Elder, was accepted, printed, and published in October, 1847. It took London by storm. There had been no preliminary advertising "No 6uch triumph,'! writes Mr Weymss Eeid, "has been achieved in our time by any oiher English author, nor can it bo said, upon tho whole, that many triumphs have been better merited." ' Vanity Fair,' to my mind the greatest book of its kind, ever written, hatl just . been published, but 'Jane Eyre' outbid it for popular favor, leaving Thackeray's great work in the faraway background. So quietly had the work been done—so considerate always for

others—that her' father was among these who were taken aback. The sisters had

kept the knowledge of their literary ventures from their father for fear of his in

creasing his anxiety by disappointment. He was suddenly confronted, without

warning, with his daughter's fame. Professional criticism did little for it, with a

few exceptions, Thackeray among the number. He sent to the unknown author a

copy of his 'Vanity Fair,' inscribed "with the grateful regards of W. M. Thackeray" —an honor not vouchsafed by him to many of even successful authors.

The power of fascination of the tale itself—" its noble thoughts nobly -expressed, its superb vehemence"—captured the public. Tho whole reading world of England was in a ferment to discern the unknown author. Who was Currer Bell? Even the publishers did not know whether a man or a woman had written it. Newspapers were tull of praise of this great unknown genius which had suddenly appeared, tho author, l he while, modestly writing to a critic (G. _ !L Lewes), whom she had much to forgive, for of a passage in one of his criticisms the Right Hon. Mr Birrell says: "It may well make the reader blush for him six and thirty years after the deed was done." She writes: "My stock •of material is not abundant, but very slender, and, besides, my experience, my acquirements, nor my powers are sufficiently \-aried to justify my becoming a frequent writer." There is something touching in the attitude of the sisters when an Ame-

rican publishing-house, probably iri quite j pood faith, advertised that a work by Ac- ! ten Bell (her sister Ann) which had just | been publifhed was by the author of ' Jane. Eyre'—that Acton Bell and Currer Bell were one and the same individual. They were fearful lest they might be associated with a suggestion that was not true. About this time, too, the ' Quarterly Review's' anonymous article appeared, hinting that Thackeray had been satirised as "Rochester" in 'Jane Eyre' by an old associate. The sisters went at once to London—the only occasion on which Ann went far from home, to clear matters up, to show themselves to be two separate beings. The publishers did not know whether the Bells were men or women. This was the first meeting of the firm with the slight figure for whom curiosity had so long been hunting, ' Shirley' followed ' Jano Eyre.' She ried to make it a piece of actual life. While she was writing it, first her only brother, then Emily—the indomitable Emily, whose passion for life set up a terrible fight with death—then Ann passed away, the sisters all victims to consumption. Her anguish was extreme, the outpouring of the afflicted heart. " Heal my

life's life. "Rend not from me what long affection entwines with my whole heart; bend, hear, be clement." None was left to listen to the progress of the tale. The sisters had been used to read to each otheT what they had written. There was criticism, loving help. She was alone, was ill, and had suffered, as had the others. She struggled on bravely, battling against inherited weakness of constitution. "Were I to write much I should become blind." She was fretting at the thought of her youth gone, so little done. Her father, who had always kept to his own room, was ilj, and sho was haunted with the fear that he, the last, might go. It was in these conditions that the book was finished and despatched to the publisher. Shirley Keeldar was, as we know, her •sister'Emily-;-Mr Helstone stood for her father; Caroline HeTstone was her schoolmate and lifelong friend, Miss Ellen Nussey; Rose Yorke was Miss Mary Taylor, also a schoolmato at Roe's Head, who, when the book was published, lived in Wellington, N.Z. Her correspondence with Charlotte Bronte, beginning in 1849, is set out in Mr Clement Shortens book. " All her life," wrote Miss Taylor later, " was but labor and pain, and she never threw down the burden for the sake of present pleasure." Change of scene was sorely needed, but the father was not strong yet, and she would not leave him. Some criticism was hostile. In her extreme modesty, clinging, as always, to the real, she wrote :

My expectations are very low, and my anticipations somewhat sad and bitter. _ Come what will, I cannot when I write think always of myself, and of what is elegant and charming in femininity. It is not on these terms, or with such ideas, I ever took pen in hand, and if it is only on such terms my writing will be tolerated I shall pass away from the pubic and trouble it no more. How like Carlyle in less patient mood ! But ' Shirley ' made its way. "My own conscience I satisfy first. If I can delight a Thackeray my ambition has had its ration; it is fed. My faculties have wrought a day's work and earned a day's wages." When the author was asked to meet Harriet Martineau a man was looked for. "Miss Bronte" was announoed---a younglooking lady, almost childlike in stature, . in a deep mourning dress, v/ith her beautiful hair smooth and brown, her fine eves blazing with meaning. The identity" of . Currer Bell was, to her intimates, no longer matter for speculation. "Please, ma'am,'' broke in her old and faithful servant, much excited, "you've been and written two books—the grandest books ihat ever were seen." Her father had heard it at Halifax. Her place in the literary world was won. In salons and lecture rooms, as well as at kindred gatherings, she was of those whom her craft delighted to honor. Many glasses were put up in order to look at the author }f 'Jane Eyre.' ' Vilette,' her last book, to which a special interest attaches, was begun, but jn:reasing indisposition prevented her going Hi with it, Her publishers were crying jut for a. new book from her' pen. " I shall get on with it as fast as is consistent with its being done,if not well, yet as well its I can do. it." She would give, like Carlyle. nothing short of her best, " the best I had in me." Books were regularly >ent to her by her publisher. Her critiiisms on works, as Ehey appeared, on the inlitical characters of the she took ;he keenest interest in political questions— Uifjii en? of the feature of Mrs Gaskell's boo!;. She had an inveterate-habit of 1 tr-lhug the truth 5 later she astounded a dinner pfil'ty by saying honestly that shaj did not like Macready ir. 'Othello.' When! shg met Thackeray for the first time, with ' teat courage which timid people often 'V- Ve ' ~s ' i e "" as nioved to " sprak to theGiant" on aqme of hia shortcomings. I have not time, however, to dwell on her bright and frhrewd utterances, which so well repay eareftil etaidy- VHette->-re-csived with on e burst of ae.elama.tion, ■whose pages cno by one hail been written slowly, was Swished—produced, ms we Jiava seen, in gufferins, if not, in torture. She had, tq her owa pergonal griefa, whatever they nwy have been, the added labor 0? • reaping her father ima the weakness for 'mm tflafe during her absence, he had grown to jrtdulg* in. The book depicted seeno alter scene in her own life. If eha caiTJsd. with her the torture of a hopeless love,-which I witl refer to later, its ever? , line would wring from hsr unspeakable anguish, She wrote to her life-Jong friend. Miss? Nussey, about that time : Bom<> painful worry I have gone through this a-ntumui but, there is no use dwelling on that, , . . life is a struggle. Sho nearly broke down in, health—had {e giva up writing for a. time, in spite of ♦*-«««& .twwure frorn her jp;s>liaher*™wa&t

on the moors with her friend for " on© \ little week." She desired ©bill to maintain anonymity. Her characteristic modesty and her consideration for others are prominent ir. her letter to her publishers.: If tho withholding of tho author's name should tend materially to injure the publisher's interest—to interfere with booksellers' orders, etc., I world

not press the point—but if no such detriment is contingent, I should be meet thankful for tho sheltering shadow of an

incognito.

To a criticism by her publishers on the proofs she wrote: The hero should have been an idol, and not a- mute, unresponding idol either, but this would have been unlike real life—inconsistent with truth, at variance with probability.

She would deal with the real, at all ccst, carefully avoiding tho " flowery and inviting course of romance, writing in silent obedience- to the stern dictates of inspiration." Thoeo are the words of a biographer, Mr Wemyss Reid. I eaid my prayers when I had done it; whether it is well or ill done, I don't know. It will not be considerod pretentious, nor is it of a character to excite hostility. Modest and unpretending to the end. She had written her last book.

The closing chapter of tho life ot" this faithful, gifted, and unspoiled personality, whoso soft invincibility accomplished so much, is a brief one. Sho was wooed, and after a long wait wedded to one of her father's curates, the Rev. Arthur Bell Xiehol's—the wait brought about by her father's disapproval of the marriage. Thoughtfully, for her father—sacrificing herself —she promised to say No, which resulted in Mr Nicholls's resignation of-his position, tasting again as she had so oftendone of the bitter things that had helped to make her books gray in tone—for sho had, as one writer puts it, gone through a terrible life " with brave and faithful heart." "Taken as a .whole,", says Mr Clement Shorter, "the life of Charlotte Bronte was among tho saddest in literature." Later the father's views changed. The curacy was resumed, and tho marriage tcck place: the bride—"like, a snowdrop—dress of white embroidered muslin, with a lace mantle, and white bonnet I trimmed with green leaves*—her friend Miss Ellen Nus-sey, the solitary brides maid. Happiness had come at. l'st, but it all too swiftly iled. A chill—.a, few months' in weakness*—" Oh I am not going to die, am I? God will not separate us—we have been so happy." And there passed the young wife, the expectant mother, "touching the sympathies of the world as a personal sorrow." The I glory and the light of the old parsonage had gone : the worker, " faithful unto this last," had finished her labor. Genius, recognition of the sacrednoss of work, tlioughtfulness for others, self-denial, patience in differing, modesty, indomitable courage, passion for truth" combined to casket in that slight frame a pern "beauj tiful beyond compare." H«r life was a ! tragedy ; and yet it was beautiful. " Noj thing is beautiful," Boileau tells us, " but ! what is true." So believed Charlotte j Bronte, and so believed Thomas Carlyle. " Truth, fact," writes Carlyle, " is the 'life of all things ; falsity, fiction, or whatever it may call itself, is certain to be- the I death."

Until Jane Eyre's time no heroine had been permitted to be plain. Charlotte Bronte chose the plain and homely ; she would give no encouragement "to tho insolence of more beauty." " The test of the secret of ' Jane Eyre's' success," George Henry Lewes wrote, "as of all great and lasting successes, was its reality." " She had passed," -writes that gifted authoress, -Miss May Sinclair, " into a vs-orld of feeling and vision." Tho scenes between Rochester and Jane Eyre no reader can forget. They bum in. The freedom of touch leaves the reader spellbound. Rochester is, as Swinburne puts it, not a construction, but " the greatest creation of wholly truthful workmanship and vitally heroic mould ever carved and colored by a woman's hand." Rochester is designedly drawn coarse to keep sympathies at a distance. Mr Ju3tin M'Carthy says : " No one who has read ' Jane Eyre' was exactly tho same that he had been before he opened its weird and wonderful pages." This shy English girl had dared to write in burning words of a grandeur in passionate human emotion for which some critics judged the unknown author coarse; " but the passion," as a. writer I have quoted eloquently puts it, "she had glorified was of the finest fibre. She washed it clean, showed it for the divine, the beautiful, the utterly pure and radiant thing it is; the very sublime of faith, truth, and devotion." In an age when plaiiu speaking hmd terrors for many, Charlotte Bronte, the little Puritan daughter of the Yorkshire parson, fearlessly declared that " conventionality is not morality, self-righteousness is not religion, to pluck the mask from the face of the pharisee is not to lift an <-mioua hand to the Crown of Thorns." Thus writes Mr Reid in 1877 : Let it be rem.:*-. ■ t these words were written lie:',:. ;• irs ago, when conventionalism wr..< .-til a potent influence in checking th-j free utterance of our inmost- opinion, and let us be thankful that in that heroic band to whom we owe the emancipation of English thought a woman holds an honorable place The Rev. Charles Kingsloy wrote to Mrs Gaskell when her life of Charlotte Bronte appeared :' I confess that the book has made me ashamed, of myself. It will shame literary people into some strong belief that a simple, virtuous, practical home life is consistent with imaginative genius, and it will shame, too, the pruderv of a not over cleanly (though carefully white washed) age into believing that purity is now (as in all ages till now) quite compatible with the knowledge of evil. I shall now carefully and lovingly read every word she has written. The criticism alluded to would not be possible to-day, but 60 years ago the author who touched its subject did so at his peril, even when that author " was one of the truest and purest of women, a woman who from her birth had led a life of selfsacrifice and patient endurance—a .woman whose affections dwelt only in the sacred shelter of her home." ' Jane Eyre' is her best-known work. "It will long be remembered." Frederick Harrison writes, "as one of the most creative influences of tho Victorian literature ; one of the most poetic pieces of English romance, and among the most vivid masterpieces in the rare order of literary confessions." "No other hand in the reign of Qu-sen Victoria," writes W. Justin M'Carthy, "has dealt with human emotion so powerfully and so truthfully." Charlotte Bronte is herself in large measure Jane Eyre, and in describing the passion of her own heart "she is groat, immutable, and unsurpassable" (tlie Right Hon. Mr Birrell's words). "The book is autobiography," as another puts it, "uf a bravo original woman who bares, her whole heart without reserve and without fear." She could have no oilier world than "a very small corner seen by a keen-eyed girl from within." She loved that which is the real; the Yorkshire moors, though bare and gray to others, had for her perennial freshness. She was "of the poets in her sympathy with elemental things." Her descriptions at will I flood country side and moorland with sun [ shine or Cast them in shade. With one charming passage from ' Jane Eyre '-—a j picture from nature, finished with her | skilled touch—l pasg on to ' Shirley.' The charm of tire hour lay in its ap. preaching the low-glidiug and pale-beaming sup. I was a mile from ThQTnfj3ld.' iri a kim noted for wild rpses i\\ summer, for siuts 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, ifSiado no sound here, for there was not a holly, not fl.n evergreen, to rustle; and tho stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white, worn stones, which causawayed the middle of the path. Far and wide on each side there were only fields, where- no cattle new browsed; and the littlo brown birds which stirred occasionally il» tho hedge looked like single Tti??et learea that had forgotten to drop. . . . From my seat I could look down on Tharnfield. The grey,

battlemented hall was the principal object in the vale below me. Its woods and dark rookery rose against the west. 5 I "lingered till the sun went down among tho trees, and. sank crimson and clear behind them.

' Shirley ' breaks different ground—social upheaval; the struggle Capital and Labor; the world of tn-e early nineteenth century; social conditions examined by Disraeli in ' Sybil,' not so long ago measured by years, yet a time when industrial might was industrial right. The world 1 of 1812-15 is not the world of to-day. Robert Gerard Moore, tho owner of Hoi- j lows Mill, typical "ot' the romance-of industry in its first advance," stands, too, for a class. He was a hard man, though a just one. Machinery there had to beto replace men, unless industry was to become bankrupt. But, like so many of Iris day, ho did not sufficiently care when new inventions threw tho old workpeople out of employ. He never asked where those to whom he ceased, to pay a weekly wage found their daily broad. "Aml my | brothers keeper?' He could steel himself i to the appeal of the reai worker, so touchi ingly voiced, with whom everyone is today", and Charlotte Bronte was then, in close sympathy with. Moses Barraclough, the Methodist'preacher, we remember, had addressed Moore. Then,

At length one of the men approached, j This man looked very different from either of the two who had previously spoken. He was the real worker. " I've not much faith i' Moses Barraclough," said he, "and I would speak a word to ycu myseln, Mr Moore. It's out o' no 111-will" that I am here, for my part. It's just to male' a effort to see things straightened, for they're sorely a-crooked. Ye see, we're, ill off ; vo.rry ill off. Wer families }R poor and pined. Wore thrown out o' work wi' 'these frames. We can get. nought to do; we can earn nought. What is to be done? Mun we say whist, and lie us down find dee? Nay. I've no grand words at my _ tongue's end, Mr Moore, but I feel that it would be a low principle for a reasonable man to starve to death like a dumb creatur'. I will n't do'fc. I'm not for shedding blood ; I'd neither kill a man nor hurt a man : and I'm not for pulling down mills and breaking machines, for, as ye say, that wav o' going on : 11 never s ; :op invention : but I'll talk—l'll mak' as big a din as ever I can. Invention may be all right, but I know it isn't right for poor folks to starve. Them that governs mun find ■ a way to help us. They mun make fresh oiderations. Yc'll say that's hard to do. So much louder mun wc shout out. then, for so much slacker will t' Parliament men be to set on to a tough job." "Worry the Parliament men as much as ycu please,'' said Moore; "but. to •worry the mill owners is absurd, and I, for one-, won't stand it." "Ye're a raight hard 'un." returned the workman. '"Will n't ye consent to mak' your changes rather more slowly?" Moore was right in his stand —machinery there had to be—but was unsympathetic in enforcing it. The worker was right in ascribing his miseries to the new conditions. Of sympathy there was-none. Alan's inhumanity to man Makes countless "thousands mourn. (To ho continued.)