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.

I do not say that Charlotte Brontë had not what is called a
"temperament"; her genius would not have been what it was without it;
she herself would have been incomplete; but there never was a woman of
genius who had her temperament in more complete subjection to her
character; and it is her character that you have to reckon with at every
turn.

The little legends and the little theories have gone far enough. And had
they gone no farther they would not have mattered much. They would at
least have left Charlotte Brontë's genius to its own mystery.

But her genius was the thing that irritated, the enigmatic, inexplicable
thing. Talent in a woman you can understand, there's a formula for
it--_tout talent de femme est un bonheur manqué_. So when a woman's
talent baffles you, your course is plain, _cherchez l'homme_.
Charlotte's critics argued that if you could put your finger on the man
you would have the key to the mystery. This, of course, was arguing that
her genius was, after all, only a superior kind of talent; but some of
them had already begun to ask themselves, Was it, after all, anything
more? So they began to look for the man. They were certain by this time
that there was one.

The search was difficult; for Charlotte had concealed him well. But they
found him at last in M. Constantin Héger, the little Professor of the
Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the Rue d'Isabelle. Sir Wemyss Reid had
suggested a love-affair in Brussels to account for Charlotte's
depression, which was unfavourable to his theory of the happy life. Mr.
Leyland seized upon the idea, for it nourished his theory that Branwell
was an innocent lamb who had never caused his sisters a moment's misery.
They _made_ misery for themselves out of his harmless peccadilloes. Mr.
Angus Mackay in _The Brontës, Fact and Fiction_, gives us this fiction
for a fact. He is pleased with what he calls the "pathetic significance"
of his "discovery". There _was_ somebody, there had to be, and it had to
be M. Héger, for there wasn't anybody else. Mr. Mackay draws back the
veil with a gesture and reveals--the love-affair. He is very nice about
it, just as nice as ever he can be. "We see her," he says, "sore
wounded in her affections, but unconquerable in her will. The discovery
... does not degrade the noble figure we know so well.... The moral of
her greatest works--that conscience must reign absolute at whatever
cost--acquires a greater force when we realize how she herself came
through the furnace of temptation with marks of torture on her, but with
no stain on her soul."

This is all very well, but the question is: _Did_ Charlotte come through
a furnace? _Did_ she suffer from a great and tragic passion? It may have
been so. For all we know she may have been in fifty furnaces; she may
have gone from one fit of tragic passion to another. Only (apart from
gossip, and apart from the argument from the novels, which begs the
question) we have no evidence to prove it. What we have points all the
other way.

Gossip apart, believers in the tragic passion have nourished their
theory chiefly on that celebrated passage in a letter of Charlotte's to
Ellen Nussey: "I returned to Brussels after Aunt's death, prompted by
what then seemed an irresistible impulse. I was punished for my selfish
folly by a withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of
mind."

Here we have the great disclosure. By "irresistible impulse" and
"selfish folly", Charlotte could only mean indulgence in an illegitimate
passion for M. Héger's society. Peace of mind bears but one
interpretation.

Mr. Clement Shorter, to his infinite credit, will have none of this. He
maintains very properly that the passage should be left to bear the
simple construction that Miss Nussey and Mr. Nicholls put upon it. But I
would go farther. I am convinced that not only does that passage bear
that construction, but that it will not bear the weight of any other.

In eighteen-forty-two Charlotte's aunt died, and Charlotte became the
head of her father's household. She left her father's house in a time of
trouble, prompted by "an irresistible impulse" towards what we should
now call self-development. Charlotte, more than two years later, in a
moment of retrospective morbidity, called it "selfish folly". In that
dark mid-Victorian age it was sin in any woman to leave her home if her
home required her. And with her aunt dead, and her brother Branwell
drowning his grief for his relative in drink, and her father going blind
and beginning in his misery to drink a little too, Charlotte felt that
her home did require her. Equally she felt that either Emily or she had
got to turn out and make a living, and since it couldn't possibly be
Emily it must be she. The problem would have been quite simple even for
Charlotte--but _she wanted to go_. Therefore her tender conscience
vacillated. When you remember that Charlotte Brontë's conscience was,
next to her genius, the largest, and at the same time the most delicate
part of her, and that her love for her own people was a sacred passion,
her words are sufficiently charged with meaning. A passion for M. Héger
is, psychologically speaking, superfluous. You can prove anything by
detaching words from their context. The letter from which that passage
has been torn is an answer to Ellen Nussey's suggestions of work for
Charlotte. Charlotte says "any project which infers the necessity of my
leaving home is impracticable to me. If I could leave home I should not
be at Haworth now. I know life is passing away, and I am doing nothing,
earning nothing--a very bitter knowledge it is at moments--but I see no
way out of the mist"; and so on for another line or two, and then:
"These ideas sting me keenly sometimes; but whenever I consult my
conscience it affirms that I am doing right in staying at home, and
bitter are its upbraidings when I yield to an eager desire for release."
And then, the passage quoted _ad nauseam_, to support the legend of M.
Héger.

A "total withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of
mind". This letter is dated October 1846--more than two years since her
return from Brussels in January, eighteen-forty-four. In those two years
her father was threatened with total blindness, and her brother Branwell
achieved his destiny. The passage refers unmistakably to events at
Haworth. It is further illuminated by another passage from an earlier
letter. Ellen Nussey is going through the same crisis--torn between duty
to herself and duty to her people. She asks Charlotte's advice and
Charlotte gives judgment: "The right path is that which necessitates the
greatest sacrifice of self-interest." The sacrifice, observe, not of
happiness, not of passion, but of self-interest, the development of
self. It was self-development, and not passion, not happiness, that she
went to Brussels for.

And Charlotte's letters from Brussels--from the scene of passion in the
year of crisis, eighteen-forty-three--sufficiently reveal the nature of
the trouble there. Charlotte was alone in the Pensionnat without Emily.
Emily was alone at Haworth. The few friends she had in Brussels left
soon after her arrival. She was alone in Brussels, and her homesickness
was terrible. You can trace the malady in all its stages. In March she
writes: "I ought to consider myself well off, and to be thankful for my
good fortune. I hope I am thankful" (clearly she isn't thankful in the
least!), "and if I could always keep up my spirits and never feel lonely
or long for companionship or friendship, or whatever they call it, I
should do very well." In the same letter you learn that she is giving
English lessons to M. Héger and his brother-in-law, M. Chapelle. "If you
could see and hear the efforts I make to teach them to pronounce like
Englishmen, and their unavailing attempts to imitate, you would laugh to
all eternity." Charlotte is at first amused at the noises made by M.
Héger and his brother-in-law.

In May the noises made by Monsieur fail to amuse. Still, she is
"indebted to him for all the pleasure or amusement" that she had, and in
spite of her indebtedness, she records a "total want of companionship".
"I lead an easeful, stagnant, silent life, for which ... I ought to be
very thankful" (but she is not). May I point out that though you may be
"silent" in the first workings of a tragic and illegitimate passion, you
are not "stagnant", and certainly not "easeful".

At the end of May she finds out that Madame Héger does not like her, and
Monsieur is "wondrously influenced" by Madame. Monsieur has in a great
measure "withdrawn the light of his countenance", but Charlotte
apparently does not care. In August the _vacancies_ are at hand, and
everybody but Charlotte is going home. She is consequently "in low
spirits; earth and heaven are dreary and empty to me at this moment"....
"I can hardly write, I have such a dreary weight at my heart." But she
will see it through. She will stay some months longer "till I have
acquired German". And at the end: "Everybody is abundantly civil, but
homesickness comes creeping over me. I cannot shake it off." That was in
September, in M. Héger's absence. Later, she tells Emily how she went
into the cathedral and made "a real confession _to see what it was
like_". Charlotte's confession has been used to bolster up the theory of
the "temptation". Unfortunately for the theory it happened in
September, when M. Héger and temptation were not there. In October she
finds that she no longer trusts Madame Héger. At the same time "solitude
oppresses me to an excess". She gave notice, and M. Héger flew into a
passion and commanded her to stay. She stayed very much against, not her
conscience, but her will. In the same letter and the same connection she
says, "I have much to say--many little odd things, queer and puzzling
enough--which I do not like to trust to a letter, but which one day
perhaps, or rather one evening--if ever we should find ourselves by the
fireside at Haworth or Brookroyd, with our feet on the fender curling
our hair--I may communicate to you."

Charlotte is now aware of a situation; she is interested in it,
intellectually, not emotionally.

In November: "Twinges of homesickness cut me to the heart, now and
then." On holidays "the silence and loneliness of all the house weighs
down one's spirits like lead.... Madame Héger, good and kind as I have
described her" (_i.e._ for all her goodness and kindness), "never comes
near me on these occasions." ... "She is not colder to me than she is to
the other teachers, but they are less dependent on her than I am." But
the situation is becoming clearer. Charlotte is interested. "I fancy I
begin to perceive the reason of this mighty distance and reserve; it
sometimes makes me laugh, and at other times nearly cry. When I am sure
of it I will tell you."

There can be no doubt that before she left Brussels Charlotte was sure;
but there is no record of her ever having told.

The evidence from the letters is plain enough. But the first thing that
the theorist does is to mutilate letters. He suppresses all those parts
of a correspondence which tell against his theory. When these torn and
bleeding passages are restored piously to their contexts they are
destructive to the legend of tragic passion. They show (as Mr. Clement
Shorter has pointed out) that throughout her last year at Brussels
Charlotte Brontë saw hardly anything of M. Héger. They also show that
before very long Charlotte had a shrewd suspicion that Madame had
arranged it so, and that it was not so much the absence of Monsieur that
disturbed her as the extraordinary behaviour of Madame. And they show
that from first to last she was incurably homesick.

Now if Charlotte had been in any degree, latently, or increasingly, or
violently in love with M. Héger, she would have been as miserable as you
like in M. Héger's house, but she would not have been homesick; she
would not, I think, have worried quite so much about Madame's behaviour;
and she would have found the clue to it sooner than she did.

To me it is all so simple and self-evident that, if the story were not
revived periodically, if it had not been raked up again only the other
day,[A] there would be no need to dwell upon anything so pitiful and
silly.

[Footnote A: See _The Key to the Brontë Works_, by J. Malham-Dembleby,
1911.]

It rests first and foremost on gossip, silly, pitiful gossip and
conjecture. Gossip in England, gossip in Brussels, conjecture all round.
Above all, it rests on certain feline hints supplied by Madame Héger and
her family. Charlotte's friends were always playfully suspecting her of
love-affairs. They could never put their fingers on the man, and they
missed M. Héger. It would never have occurred to their innocent
mid-Victorian minds to suspect Charlotte of an attachment to a married
man. It would not have occurred to Charlotte to suspect herself of it.
But Madame Héger was a Frenchwoman, and she had not a mid-Victorian
mind, and she certainly suspected Charlotte of an attachment, a flagrant
attachment, to M. Héger. It is well known that Madame made statements to
that effect, and it is admitted on all hands that Madame had been
jealous. It may fairly be conjectured that it was M. Héger and not
Charlotte who gave her cause, slight enough in all conscience, but
sufficient for Madame Héger. She did not understand these Platonic
relations between English teachers and their French professors. She had
never desired Platonic relations with anybody herself, and she saw
nothing but annoyance in them for everybody concerned. Madame's attitude
is the clue to the mystery, the clue that Charlotte found. She accused
the dead Charlotte of an absurd and futile passion for her husband; she
stated that she had had to advise the living Charlotte to moderate the
ardour of her admiration for the engaging professor; but the truth, as
Charlotte in the end discovered, was that for a certain brief period
Madame was preposterously jealous. M. Héger confessed as much when he
asked Charlotte to address her letters to him at the Athénée Royale
instead of the Pensionnat. The correspondence, he said, was disagreeable
to his wife.

Why, in Heaven's name, disagreeable, if Madame Héger suspected Charlotte
of an absurd and futile passion? And why should Madame Héger have been
jealous of an absurd and futile woman, a woman who had seen so little of
Madame Héger's husband, and who was then in England? I cannot agree with
Mr. Shorter that M. Héger regarded Charlotte with indifference. He was a
Frenchman, and he had his vanity, and no doubt the frank admiration of
his brilliant pupil appealed to it vividly in moments of conjugal
depression. Charlotte herself must have had some attraction for M.
Héger. Madame perceived the appeal and the attraction, and she was
jealous; therefore her interpretation of appearances could not have been
so unflattering to Charlotte as she made out. Madame, in fact,
suspected, on her husband's part, the dawning of an attachment. We know
nothing about M. Héger's attachment, and we haven't any earthly right to
know; but from all that is known of M. Héger it is certain that, if it
was not entirely intellectual, not entirely that "_affection presque
paternelle_" that he once professed, it was entirely restrained and
innocent and honourable. It is Madame Héger with her jealousy who has
given the poor gentleman away. Monsieur's state of mind--extremely
temporary--probably accounted for "those many odd little things, queer
and puzzling enough", which Charlotte would not trust to a letter;
matter for curl-paper confidences and no more.

Of course there is the argument from the novels, from _The Professor_,
from _Jane Eyre_, from _Villette_. I have not forgotten it. But really
it begs the question. It moves in an extremely narrow and an extremely
vicious circle. Jane Eyre was tried in a furnace of temptation,
therefore Charlotte must have been tried. Lucy Snowe and Frances Henri
loved and suffered in Brussels. Therefore Charlotte must have loved and
suffered there. And if Charlotte loved and suffered and was tried in a
furnace of temptation, that would account for Frances and for Lucy and
for Jane.

No; the theorists who have insisted on this tragic passion have not
reckoned with Charlotte Brontë's character, and its tremendous power of
self-repression. If at Brussels any disastrous tenderness had raised its
head it wouldn't have had a chance to grow an inch. But Charlotte had
large and luminous ideas of friendship. She was pure, utterly pure from
all the illusions and subtleties and corruptions of the sentimentalist,
and she could trust herself in friendship. She brought to it ardours and
vehemences that she would never have allowed to love. If she let herself
go in her infrequent intercourse with M. Héger, it was because she was
so far from feeling in herself the possibility of passion. That was why
she could say, "I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what
the parting with M. Héger cost me. It grieved me so much to grieve him
who has been so true, kind, and disinterested a friend." That was how
she could bring herself to write thus to Monsieur: "_Savez-vous ce que je
ferais, Monsieur? J'écrirais un livre et je le dédierais à mon maître de
littérature, au seul maître que j'aie jamais eu--à vous Monsieur! Je
vous ai dit souvent en français combien je vous respecte, combien je
suis redevable à votre bonté à vos conseils. Je voudrais le dire une
fois en anglais ... le souvenir de vos bontés ne s'effacera jamais de ma
mémoire, et tant que ce souvenir durera le respect que vous m'avez
inspiré durera aussi._" For "_je vous respecte_" we are not entitled to
read "_je vous aime_". Charlotte was so made that kindness shown her
moved her to tears of gratitude. When Charlotte said "respect" she meant
it. Her feeling for M. Héger was purely what Mr. Matthew Arnold said
religion was, an affair of "morality touched with emotion". All her
utterances, where there is any feeling in them, no matter what, have a
poignancy, a vibration which is Brontësque and nothing more. And this
Brontësque quality is what the theorists have (like Madame Héger, and
possibly Monsieur) neither allowed for nor understood.

       *       *       *       *       *

For this "fiery-hearted Vestal", this virgin, sharp-tongued and
sharper-eyed, this scorner of amorous curates, had a genius for
friendship. This genius, like her other genius, was narrow in its range
and opportunity, and for that all the more ardent and intense. It fed on
what came to its hand. It could even grow, like her other genius, with
astounding vitality out of strange and hostile soil. She seems to have
had many friends, obscure and great; the obscure, the Dixons, the
Wheelrights, the Taylors, the Nusseys, out of all proportion to the
great. But properly speaking she had only two friends, Mary Taylor and
Ellen Nussey, the enchanting, immortal "Nel".

There _is_ something at first sight strange and hostile about Mary
Taylor, the energetic, practical, determined, terribly robust person you
see so plainly trying, in the dawn of their acquaintance, to knock the
nonsense out of Charlotte. Mary Taylor had no appreciation of the
Brontësque. When Charlotte told Mary Taylor that at Cowan Bridge she
used to stand in the burn on a stone to watch the water flow by, Mary
Taylor told Charlotte that she should have gone fishing. When _Jane
Eyre_ appeared she wrote to Charlotte in a strain that is amusing to
posterity. There is a touch of condescension in her praise. She is
evidently surprised at anything so great coming out of Charlotte. "It
seemed to me incredible that you had actually written a book." "You are
very different from me," she says, "in having no doctrine to preach. It
is impossible to squeeze a moral out of your production." She is
thinking of his prototype when she criticizes the character of St. John
Rivers. "A missionary either goes into his office for a piece of bread,
or he goes for enthusiasm, and that is both too good and too bad a
quality for St. John. It's a bit of your absurd charity to believe in
such a man." As an intellectual woman Mary Taylor realized Charlotte
Brontë's intellect, but it is doubtful if she ever fully realized what,
beyond an intellect, she had got hold of in her friend. She was a woman
of larger brain than Ellen Nussey, she was loyal and warm-hearted to the
last degree, but it was not given to her to see in Charlotte Brontë what
Ellen Nussey, little as you would have expected it, had seen. She did
not keep her letters. She burnt them "in a fit of caution", which may
have been just as well.

But Mary Taylor is important. She had, among her more tender qualities,
an appalling frankness. It was she who told poor little Charlotte that
she was very ugly. Charlotte never forgot it. You can feel in her
letters, in her novels, in her whole nature, the long reverberation of
the shock. She said afterwards: "You did me a great deal of good,
Polly," by which she meant that Polly had done her an infinity of harm.

Her friends all began by trying to do her good. Even Ellen Nussey tried.
Charlotte is very kindly cautioned against being "tempted by the
fondness of my sisters to consider myself of too much importance", and
in a parenthesis Ellen Nussey begs her not to be offended. "Oh, Ellen,"
Charlotte writes, "do you think I could be offended by any good advice
you may give me?" She thanks her heartily, and loves her "if possible
all the better for it". Ellen Nussey in her turn asks Charlotte to tell
her of her faults and "cease flattering her". Charlotte very sensibly
refuses; and it is not till she has got away from her sisters that her
own heart-searchings begin. They are mainly tiresome, but there is a
flash of revelation in her reply to "the note you sent me with the
umbrella". "My darling, if I were like you, I should have to face
Zionwards, though prejudice and error might occasionally fling a mist
over the glorious vision before me, for with all your single-hearted
sincerity you have your faults, but _I_ am not like you. If you knew my
thoughts; the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at
times eats me up, and makes me feel society, as it is, wretchedly
insipid, you would pity me, and I dare say despise me." Miss Nussey
writes again, and Charlotte trembles "all over with excitement" after
reading her note. "I will no longer shrink from your question," she
replies. "I _do_ wish to be better than I am. I pray fervently sometimes
to be made so ... this very night I will pray as you wish me."

But Charlotte is not in the least like Ellen Nussey, and she still
refuses to be drawn into any return of this dangerous play with a
friend's conscience and her nerves. "I will not tell you all I think and
feel about you, Ellen. I will preserve unbroken that reserve which alone
enables me to maintain a decent character for judgment; but for that, I
should long ago have been set down by all who knows me as a Frenchified
fool. You have been very kind to me of late, and gentle, and you have
spared me those little sallies of ridicule, which, owing to my miserable
and wretched touchiness of character, used formerly to make me wince, as
if I had been touched with hot iron. Things that nobody else cares for
enter into my mind and rankle there like venom. I know these feelings
are absurd, and therefore I try to hide them, but they only sting the
deeper for concealment. I'm an idiot!"

Miss Nussey seems to have preserved her calm through all the excitement
and to have never turned a hair. But nothing could have been worse for
Charlotte than this sort of thing. It goes on for years. It began in
eighteen-thirty-three, the third year of their friendship, when she was
seventeen. In 'thirty-seven it is at its height. Charlotte writes from
Dewsbury Moor: "If I could always live with you, if your lips and mine
could at the same time drink the same draught at the same pure fountain
of mercy, I hope, I trust, I might one day become better, far better
than my evil, wandering thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit
and warm to the flesh, will now permit me to be. I often plan the
pleasant life we might lead, strengthening each other in the power of
self-denial, that hallowed and glowing devotion which the past Saints of
God often attained to."

Now a curious and interesting thing is revealed by this correspondence.
These religious fervours and depressions come on the moment Charlotte
leaves Haworth and disappear as soon as she returns. All those letters
were written from Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor, while the Haworth letters
of the same period are sane and light-hearted. And when she is fairly
settled at Haworth, instead of emulating the Saints of God, she and Miss
Nussey are studying human nature and the art of flirtation as exhibited
by curates. Charlotte administers to her friend a formidable amount of
worldly wisdom, thus avenging herself for the dance Miss Nussey led her
round the throne of grace.

For, though that morbid excitement and introspection belonged solely to
Charlotte's days of exile, Miss Nussey was at the bottom of it. Mary
Taylor would have been a far robuster influence. But Charlotte's
friendship for Mary Taylor, warm as it was, strikes cold beside her
passionate affection for Ellen Nussey. She brought her own fire to that,
and her own extraordinary capacity for pain. Her letters show every
phase of this friendship, its birth, its unfolding; and then the sudden
leaping of the flame, its writhing and its torture. She writes with a
lover's ardour and impatience. "Write to me very soon and dispel my
uncertainty, or I shall get impatient, almost irritable." "I read your
letter with dismay. Ellen--what shall I do without you? Why are we to be
denied each other's society? It is an inscrutable fatality.... Why are
we to be divided?" (She is at Roe Head, and Roe Head suggests the
answer.) "Surely, Ellen, it must be because we are in danger of loving
each other too well--of losing sight of the _Creator_ in idolatry of the
_creature_." She prays to be resigned, and records "a sweet, placid
sensation like those that I remember used to visit me when I was a
little child, and on Sunday evenings in summer stood by the window
reading the life of a certain French nobleman who attained a purer and
higher degree of sanctity than has been known since the days of the
Early Martyrs. I thought of my own Ellen--" "I wish I could see you, my
darling; I have lavished the warmest affections of a very hot tenacious
heart upon you; if you grow cold, it is over." She was only twenty-one.

A few more years and the leaping and the writhing and the torture cease,
the fire burns to a steady, inextinguishable glow. There is gaiety in
Charlotte's tenderness. She is "infuriated" on finding a jar in her
trunk. "At first I hoped it was empty, but when I found it heavy and
replete, I could have hurled it all the way back to Birstall. However,
the inscription A.B. softened me much. You ought first to be tenderly
kissed, and then as tenderly whipped. Emily is just now sitting on the
floor of the bedroom where I am writing, looking at her apples. She
smiled when I gave them and the collar as your presents, with an
expression at once well pleased and slightly surprised."

The religious fervours and the soul-searchings have ceased long ago, so
has Miss Nussey's brief spiritual ascendency. But the friendship and the
letters never cease. They go on for twenty years, through exile and
suffering, through bereavement, through fame and through marriage,
uninterrupted and, except for one brief period, unabridged. There is
nothing in any biography to compare with those letters to Ellen Nussey.
If Charlotte Brontë had not happened to be a great genius as well as a
great woman, they alone would have furnished forth her complete
biography. There is no important detail of her mere life that is not
given in them. Mrs. Gaskell relied almost entirely on them, and on
information supplied to her by Miss Nussey. And each critic and
biographer who followed her, from Sir Wemyss Reid to Mr. Clement
Shorter, drew from the same source. Miss Nussey was almost the only safe
repository of material relating to Charlotte Brontë. She had possessed
hundreds of her letters and, with that amiable weakness which was the
defect of her charming quality, she was unable to withhold any of them
from the importunate researcher. There seems to have been nothing,
except one thing, that Charlotte did not talk about to Miss Nussey when
they sat with their feet on the fender and their hair in curl-papers.
That one thing was her writing. It is quite possible that in those
curl-paper confidences Miss Nussey learnt the truth about Charlotte's
friend, M. Héger. She never learnt anything about Charlotte's genius. In
everything that concerned her genius Charlotte was silent and secret
with her friend. That was the line, the very sharp and impassable line
she drew between her "dear, _dear_ Ellen", her "dearest Nel", and her
sisters, Anne and Emily. The freemasonry of friendship ended there. You
may search in vain through even her later correspondence with Miss
Nussey for any more than perfunctory and extraneous allusions to her
works. It was as if they had never been. Every detail of her daily life
is there, the outer and the inner things, the sewing and ironing and
potato-peeling, together with matters of the heart and soul, searchings,
experiences, agonies; the figures of her father, her brother, her
sisters, move there, vivid and alive; and old Tabby and the curates; and
the very animals, Keeper and Flossie, and the little black cat, Tom,
that died and made Emily sorry; but of the one thing not a word. The
letters to Ellen Nussey following the publication of _Jane Eyre_ are all
full of gossip about Miss Ringrose and the Robinsons. Presently Ellen
hears a rumour of publication. Charlotte repudiates it and friction
follows.

Charlotte writes: "Dear Ellen,--write another letter and explain that
note of yours distinctly.... Let me know what you heard, and from whom
you heard it. You do wrong to feel pain from any circumstance, or to
suppose yourself slighted...." "Dear Ellen,--All I can say to you about
a certain matter is this: the report ... must have had its origin in
some absurd misunderstanding. I have given _no one_ a right to affirm or
hint in the most distant manner that I am publishing (humbug!). Whoever
has said it--if anyone has, which I doubt--is no friend of mine. Though
twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none. I scout the idea
utterly. Whoever, after I have distinctly rejected the charge, urges it
upon me, will do an unkind and ill-bred thing." If Miss Nussey is asked,
she is authorized by Miss Brontë to say, "that she repels and disowns
every accusation of the kind. You may add, if you please, that if anyone
has her confidence, you believe you have, and she has made no drivelling
confessions to you on that subject." "Dear Ellen,--I shall begin by
telling you that you have no right to be angry at the length of time I
have suffered to slip by since receiving your last, without answering
it; because you have often kept me waiting much longer, and having made
this gracious speech, thereby obviating reproaches, I will add that I
think it a great shame, when you receive a long and thoroughly
interesting letter, full of the sort of details you fully relish, to
read the same with selfish pleasure, and not even have the manners to
thank your correspondent, and express how very much you enjoyed the
narrative. I _did_ enjoy the narrative in your last very keenly....
Which of the Miss Woolers did you see at Mr. Allbutts?"

A beautiful but most unequal friendship. "The sort of details you fully
relish--" How that phrase must have rankled! You can hear the passionate
protest: "Those details are not what I relish in the least. Putting me
off with your Woolers and your Allbutts! If only you had told me about
_Jane Eyre_!" For it turned out that all the time Mary Taylor had been
told. The inference was that Mary Taylor, with her fits of caution,
could be trusted.

This silence of Charlotte's must have been most painful and
incomprehensible to the poor Ellen who was Caroline Helstone. She had
been the first to divine Charlotte's secret; for she kept the letters.
She must have felt like some tender and worshipping wife to whom all
doors in the house of the beloved are thrown open, except the door of
the sanctuary, which is persistently slammed in her charming face. There
must have come to her moments of terrible insight when she felt the
danger and the mystery of the flaming spirit she had tried to hold. But
Charlotte's friend can wear her half-pathetic immortality with grace.
She could at least say: "She told me things she never told anyone else.
I have hundreds of her letters. And I had her heart."

       *       *       *       *       *

Nothing so much as this correspondence reveals the appalling solitude in
which the Brontës lived. Here is their dearest and most intimate friend,
and she is one to whom they can never speak of the thing that interested
them most. No doubt "our best plays mean secret plays"; but Charlotte,
at any rate, suffered from this secrecy. There was nothing to counteract
Miss Nussey's direful influence on her spiritual youth. "Papa" highly
approved of the friendship. He wished it to continue, and it did; and it
was the best that Charlotte had. I know few things more pathetic than
the cry that Charlotte, at twenty-one, sent out of her solitude (with
some verses) to Southey and to Wordsworth. Southey told her that,
"Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not
to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure
will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To
those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be
less eager for celebrity." A sound, respectable, bourgeois opinion so
far, but Southey went farther. "Write poetry for its own sake," he said;
and he could hardly have said better. Charlotte treasured the letter,
and wrote on the cover of it, "Southey's advice, to be kept for ever."
Wordsworth's advice, I am sorry to say, provoked her to flippancy.