And that, out of the solitude, was all. Not the ghost, not the shadow of
an Influence came to the three sisters. There never was genius that owed
so little to influence as theirs.

I know that in Charlotte's case there is said to have been an Influence.
An Influence without which she would have remained for ever in
obscurity, with _Villette_, with _Shirley_, with _Jane Eyre_, with _The
Professor_, unborn, unconceived.

Need I say that the Influence is--M. Héger?

"The sojourn in Brussels," says Mr. Clement Shorter, "made Miss Brontë
an author," and he is only following Sir Wemyss Reid, who was the first
to establish Brussels as the turning-point. Mr. Shorter does not believe
in M. Héger as the inspirer of passion, but he does believe in him as
the inspirer of genius. He thinks it exceedingly probable that had not
circumstances led Charlotte Brontë to spend some time at Brussels not
only would "the world never have heard of her", but it would never have
heard of her sisters. He is quite certain about Charlotte anyhow; she
could not have "arrived" had she not met M. Héger. "She went," he says,
"to Brussels full of the crude ambitions, the semi-literary impulses
that are so common on the fringe of the writing world. She left Brussels
a woman of genuine cultivation, of educated tastes, armed with just the
equipment that was to enable her to write the books of which two
generations of her countrymen have been justly proud."

This is saying that Charlotte Brontë had no means of expression before
she wrote _devoirs_ under M. Héger. True, her genius did not find itself
until after she left Brussels, that is to say, not until she was nearly
thirty. I have not read any of her works as Lord Charles Albert Florian
Wellesley, and I do not imagine they were works of genius. But that only
means that Charlotte Brontë's genius took time. She was one of those
novelists who do not write novels before they are nearly thirty. But she
could write. Certain fragments of her very earliest work show that from
the first she had not only the means, but very considerable mastery of
expression. What is more, they reveal in germ the qualities that marked
her style in its maturity. Her styles rather, for she had several. There
is her absolutely simple style, in which she is perfect; her didactic
style, her fantastic style, which are mere temporary aberrations; and
her inspired style, in which at her worst she is merely flamboyant and
redundant, and at her best no less than perfect. You will find a faint,
embryonic foreshadowing of her perfections in the fragments given by
Mrs. Gaskell. There is THE HISTORY OF THE YEAR 1829, beginning: "Once
Papa lent my sister Maria a book. It was an old geography book; she
wrote on its blank leaf, "Papa lent me this book." This book is a
hundred and twenty years old; it is at this moment lying before me.
While I write this I am in the kitchen of the Parsonage, Haworth; Tabby,
the servant, is washing up the breakfast things, and Anne, my youngest
sister (Maria was my eldest), is kneeling on a chair, looking at some
cakes, which Tabby has been baking for us." You cannot beat that for
pure simplicity of statement. There is another fragment that might have
come straight out of _Jane Eyre_. "One night, about the time when the
cold sleet and stormy fogs of November are succeeded by the snowstorms
and high piercing night-winds of confirmed winter, we were all sitting
round the warm, blazing kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrel
with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which she
came off victorious, no candle having been produced." And there is a
dream-story that Mr. Clement Shorter gives. She is in the "Mines of
Cracone", under the floor of the sea. "But in the midst of all this
magnificence I felt an indescribable sense of fear and terror, for the
sea raged above us, and by the awful and tumultuous noises of roaring
winds and dashing waves, it seemed as if the storm was violent. And now
the massy pillars groaned beneath the pressure of the ocean, and the
glittering arches seemed about to be overwhelmed. When I heard the
rushing waters and saw a mighty flood rolling towards me I gave a loud
shriek of terror." The dream changes: she is in a desert full of barren
rocks and high mountains, where she sees "by the light of his own fiery
eyes a royal lion rousing himself from his kingly slumbers. His terrible
eye was fixed upon me, and the desert rang, and the rocks echoed with
the tremendous roar of fierce delight which he uttered as he sprang
towards me." And there is her letter to the editor of one of their
_Little Magazines_: "Sir,--It is well known that the Genii have declared
that unless they perform certain arduous duties every year, of a
mysterious nature, all the worlds in the firmament will be burnt up, and
gathered together in one mighty globe, which will roll in solitary
splendour through the vast wilderness of space, inhabited only by the
four high princes of the Genii, till time shall be succeeded by
Eternity; and the impudence of this is only to be paralleled by another
of their assertions, namely, that by their magic might they can reduce
the world to a desert, the purest waters to streams of livid poison, and
the clearest lakes to stagnant water, the pestilential vapours of which
shall slay all living creatures, except the bloodthirsty beast of the
forest, and the ravenous bird of the rock. But that in the midst of this
desolation the palace of the chief Genii shall rise sparkling in the
wilderness, and the horrible howl of their war-cry shall spread over the
land at morning, at noontide, and at night; but that they shall have
their annual feast over the bones of the dead, and shall yearly rejoice
with the joy of victors. I think, sir, that the horrible wickedness of
this needs no remark, and therefore I hasten to subscribe myself, etc."

Puerile, if you like, and puerile all the stuff that Charlotte Brontë
wrote before eighteen-forty-six; but her style at thirteen, in its very
rhythms and cadences, is the unmistakable embryo of her style at thirty;
and M. Héger no more cured her of its faults that he could teach her its
splendours. Something that was not Brussels made Miss Brontë a
prodigious author at thirteen. The mere mass of her _Juvenilia_
testifies to a most ungovernable bent. Read the list of works, appalling
in their length, which this child produced in a period of fifteen
months; consider that she produced nothing but melancholy letters during
her "sojourn in Brussels"; and compare M. Héger's academic precepts with
her practice, with the wild sweep and exuberance of her style when she
has shaken him off, and her genius gets possession of her.

I know there is a gulf fixed between Currer Bell and Charles Townsend,
who succeeded Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley and the Marquis of
Douro, about eighteen-thirty-eight; but it is bridged by the later
_Poems_ which show Charlotte's genius struggling through a wrong medium
to the right goal. She does not know--after the sojourn in Brussels she
does not yet know--that her right medium is prose. She knew no more than
she knew in November, eighteen-forty-one, when, on the eve of her flight
from Haworth, she writes: "The plain fact is, I was not, I am not now,
certain of my destiny." It was not until two years after she had
returned to Haworth that she received her certainty. For posterity,
overpowered by the labour of the Brontë specialists, it may seem as if
Charlotte Brontë's genius owed everything to her flight from Haworth. In
reality her flight merely coincided with the inevitable shooting of its
wings; and the specialists have mistaken coincidence for destiny.

Heaven only knows what would have happened to her genius if, blind to
her destiny, she had remained in Brussels. For, once there, its
wing-feathers left off growing. Its way was blocked by every conceivable
hostile and obstructive thing. Madame Héger was hostile, and Monsieur, I
think, purely obstructive. Emily saw through him, and denounced his
method as fatal to all originality. Charlotte, to be sure, called him
"my dear master, the only master that I ever had", but if that was not
her "absurd charity", it was only her Brontësque way. There was no sense
in which he was her master. He taught her French; to the very last the
habit of using "a few French words" was the King Charles's head in her
manuscripts; and the French he taught her did her harm. The restraint he
could and would have taught her she never learnt until her genius had
had, in defiance and in spite of him, its full fling.

And what a fling! It is the way of genius to look after itself. In spite
of obstacles, Charlotte Brontë's took hold of every man and woman that
crossed and barred its path, and ultimately it avenged itself on
Monsieur and on Madame Héger. Those two were made for peaceful,
honourable conjugal obscurity, but it was their luck to harbour a
half-fledged and obstructed genius in their Pensionnat, a genius
thirsting for experience; and somehow, between them, they contrived to
make it suffer. That was their tragedy. Monsieur's case is pitiful; for
he was kind and well-meaning, and he was fond of Charlotte; and yet,
because of Charlotte, there is no peace for him in the place where he
has gone. Her genius has done with him, but her ghost, like some malign
and awful destiny, pursues him. No sooner does he sink back quiet in his
grave than somebody unearths him. Why cannot he be allowed to rest, once
for all, in his amiable unimportance? He became, poor man, important
only by the use that Charlotte's genius made of him. It seized him as it
would have seized on any other interesting material that came its way.
Without him we might have had another Rochester, and we should not have
had any Paul Emanuel, which would have been a pity; that is all.

There is hardly any hope that Brontë specialists will accept this view.
For them the sojourn in Brussels will still stand as the turning-point
in Charlotte Brontë's career. Yet for her, long afterwards, Brussels
must have stood as the danger threatening it. She would have said, I
think, that her sojourn in Haworth was the turning-point. It was destiny
that turned Emily back to Haworth from the destruction that waited for
her at Brussels, so that she conceived and brought forth _Wuthering
Heights_; her own destiny that she secretly foreknew, consoling and
beneficent. And, no doubt, it was destiny of a sort, unforeknown,
deceitful, apparently malignant, that sent Charlotte back again to
Brussels after her aunt's death. It wrung from her her greatest book,
_Villette_. But Haworth, I think, would have wrung from her another and
perhaps a greater.

For the first-fruits of the sojourn in Brussels was neither _Villette_
nor _Jane Eyre_, but _The Professor_. And _The Professor_ has none of
the qualities of _Jane Eyre_ or of _Villette_; it has none of the
qualities of Charlotte's later work at all; above all, none of that
master quality which M. Héger is supposed to have specially evoked.
Charlotte, indeed, could not well have written a book more destructive
to the legend of the upheaval, the tragic passion, the furnace of
temptation and the flight. Nothing could be less like a furnace than the
atmosphere of _The Professor_. From the first page to the last there is
not one pulse, not one breath of passion in it. The bloodless thing
comes coldly, slowly tentatively, from the birth. It is almost as frigid
as a _devoir_ written under M. Héger's eye. The theorists, I notice, are
careful not to draw attention to _The Professor_; and they are wise, for
attention drawn to _The Professor_ makes sad work of their theory.

Remember, on the theory, Charlotte Brontë has received her great
awakening, her great enlightenment; she is primed with passion; the
whole wonderful material of _Villette_ is in her hand; she has before
her her unique opportunity. You ought, on the theory, to see her
hastening to it, a passionate woman, pouring out her own one and supreme
experience, and, with the brand of Brussels on her, never afterwards
really doing anything else. Whereas the first thing the impassioned
Charlotte does (after a year of uninspired and ineffectual poetizing) is
to sit down and write _The Professor_; a book, remarkable not by any
means for its emotion, but for its cold and dispassionate observation.
Charlotte eliminates herself, and is Crimsworth in order that she may
observe Frances Henri the more dispassionately. She is inspired solely
by the analytic spirit, and either cannot, or will not, let herself go.
But she does what she meant to do. She had it in mind to write, not a
great work of imagination, but a grey and sober book, and a grey and
sober book is what she writes. A book concerned only with things and
people she has seen and known; a book, therefore, from which passion and
the poetry that passion is must be rigidly excluded, as belonging to
the region of things not, strictly speaking, known. It is as if she had
written _The Professor_ in rivalry with her sister Anne, both of them
austerely determined to put aside all imagination and deal with
experience and experience alone. Thus you obtain sincerity, you obtain
truth. And with nothing but experience before her, she writes a book
that has no passion in it, a book almost as bloodless and as gentle as
her sister Anne's.

Let us not disparage _The Professor_. Charlotte herself did not
disparage it. In her Preface she refused to solicit "indulgence for it
on the plea of a first attempt. A first attempt," she says, "it
certainly was not, as the pen which wrote it had been previously worn in
a practice of some years." In that Preface she shows plainly that at the
very outset of her career she had no sterner critic than herself; that
she was aware of her sins and her temptations, and of the dangers that
lurked for her in her imaginative style. "In many a crude effort,
destroyed almost as soon as composed, I had got over any such taste as I
might have had for ornamented and decorated composition, and come to
prefer what was plain and homely." Observe, it is not to the lessons of
the "master", but to the creation and destruction that went on at
Haworth that she attributes this purgation. She is not aware of the
extent to which she can trust her genius, of what will happen when she
has fairly let herself go. She is working on a method that rules her
choice of subject. "I said to myself that my hero should work his way
through life, as I had seen real, living men work theirs--that he should
never get a shilling that he had not earned--that no sudden turns should
lift him in a moment to wealth and high station; that whatever small
competency he might gain should be won by the sweat of his brow; that
before he could find so much as an arbour to sit down in, he should
master at least half the ascent of the Hill Difficulty; that he should
not marry even a beautiful girl or a lady of rank."

There was no fine madness in that method; but its very soundness and
sanity show the admirable spirit in which Charlotte Brontë approached
her art. She was to return to the method of _The Professor_ again and
yet again, when she suspected herself of having given imagination too
loose a rein. The remarkable thing was that she should have begun with
it.

And in some respects _The Professor_ is more finished, better
constructed than any of her later books. There is virtue in its extreme
sobriety. Nothing could be more delicate and firm than the drawing of
Frances Henri; nothing in its grey style more admirable than the scene
where Crimsworth, having found Frances in the cemetery, takes her to her
home in the Rue Notre Dame aux Neiges.

"Stepping over a little mat of green wool, I found myself in a small
room with a painted floor and a square of green carpet in the middle;
the articles of furniture were few, but all bright and exquisitely
clean--order reigned through its narrow limits--such order as it suited
my punctilious soul to behold.... Poor the place might be; poor truly it
was, but its neatness was better than elegance, and had but a bright
little fire shone on that clean hearth, I should have deemed it more
attractive than a palace. No fire was there, however, and no fuel laid
ready to light; the lace-mender was unable to allow herself that
indulgence.... Frances went into an inner room to take off her bonnet,
and she came out a model of frugal neatness, with her well-fitting black
stuff dress, so accurately defining her elegant bust and taper waist,
with her spotless white collar turned back from a fair and shapely
neck, with her plenteous brown hair arranged in smooth bands on her
temples and in a large Grecian plait behind: ornaments she had
none--neither brooch, ring, nor ribbon; she did well enough without
them--perfection of fit, proportion of form, grace of carriage,
agreeably supplied their place." Frances lights a fire, having fetched
wood and coal in a basket.

"'It is her whole stock, and she will exhaust it out of hospitality,'
thought I.

"'What are you going to do?' I asked: 'not surely to light a fire this
hot evening? I shall be smothered.'

"'Indeed, Monsieur, I feel it very chilly since the rain began; besides,
I must boil the water for my tea, for I take tea on Sundays; you will be
obliged to bear the heat.'"

And Frances makes the tea, and sets the table, and brings out her
pistolets, and offers them to Monsieur, and it is all very simple and
idyllic. So is the scene where Crimsworth, without our knowing exactly
how he does it, declares himself to Frances. The dialogue is half in
French, and does not lend itself to quotation, but it compares very
favourably with the more daring comedy of courtship in _Jane Eyre_.
Frances is delicious in her very solidity, her absence of abandonment.
She refuses flatly to give up her teaching at Crimsworth's desire,
Crimsworth, who will have six thousand francs a year.

"'How rich you are, Monsieur!' And then she stirred uneasily in my arms.
'Three thousand francs!' she murmured, 'while I get only twelve
hundred!' She went on faster. 'However, it must be so for the present;
and, Monsieur, were you not saying something about my giving up my
place? Oh no! I shall hold it fast'; and her little fingers emphatically
tightened on mine.

"'Think of marrying you to be kept by you, Monsieur! I could not do it;
and how dull my days would be! You would be away teaching in close,
noisy schoolrooms, from morning till evening, and I should be lingering
at home, unemployed and solitary. I should get depressed and sullen, and
you would soon tire of me.'

"'Frances, you could yet read and study--two things you like so well.'

"'Monsieur, I could not; I like contemplative life, but I like an active
better; I must act in some way, and act with you. I have taken notice,
Monsieur, that people who are only in each other's company for
amusement, never really like each other so well, or esteem each other so
highly, as those who work together, and perhaps suffer together!'"

To which Crimsworth replies, "You speak God's truth, and you shall have
your own way, for it is the best way."

There is far more common sense than passion in the solid little Frances
and her apathetic lover. It is Frances Henri's situation, not her
character, that recalls so irresistibly Lucy Snowe. Frances has neither
Lucy's temperament, nor Lucy's terrible capacity for suffering. She
suffers through her circumstances, not through her temperament. The
motives handled in _The Professor_ belong to the outer rather than the
inner world; the pressure of circumstance, bereavement, poverty, the
influences of alien and unloved surroundings, these are the springs that
determine the drama of Frances and of Crimsworth. Charlotte is
displaying a deliberate interest in the outer world and the material
event. She does not yet know that it is in the inner world that her
great conquest and dominion is to be. The people in this first novel are
of the same family as the people in _Jane Eyre_, in _Shirley_, in
_Villette_. Crimsworth is almost reproduced in Louis Moore. Yorke
Hunsden is the unmistakable father of Mr. Yorke and Rochester; Frances,
a pale and passionless sister of Jane Eyre, and a first cousin of Lucy.
Yet, in spite of these relationships, _The Professor_ stands alone. In
spite of its striking resemblance to _Villette_ there is no real, no
spiritual affinity. And the great gulf remains fixed between _The
Professor_ and _Jane Eyre_.

This difference lies deeper than technique. It is a difference of
vision, of sensation. The strange greyness of _The Professor_, its
stillness, is not due altogether to Charlotte's deliberate intention. It
is the stillness, the greyness of imperfect hearing, of imperfect
seeing. I know it has one fine piece of word-painting, but not one that
can stand among Charlotte Brontë's masterpieces in this kind.

Here it is. "Already the pavement was drying; a balmy and fresh breeze
stirred the air, purified by lightning; I left the west behind me, where
spread a sky like opal, azure inmingled with crimson; the enlarged sun,
glorious in Tyrian dyes, dipped his brim already; stepping, as I was,
eastward, I faced a vast bank of clouds, but also I had before me the
arch of an even rainbow; a perfect rainbow--high, wide, vivid. I looked
long; my eye drank in the scene, and I suppose my brain must have
absorbed it; for that night, after lying awake in pleasant fever a long
time, watching the silent sheet-lightning, which still played among the
retreating clouds, and flashed silvery over the stars, I at last fell
asleep; and then in a dream was reproduced the setting sun, the bank of
clouds, the mighty rainbow. I stood, methought, on a terrace; I leaned
over a parapeted wall; there was space below me, depth I could not
fathom, but hearing an endless splash of waves, I believed it to be the
sea; sea spread to the horizon; sea of changeful green and intense blue;
all was soft in the distance; all vapour-veiled. A spark of gold
glistened on the line between water and air, floated up, appeared,
enlarged, changed; the object hung midway between heaven and earth,
under the arch of the rainbow; the soft but dark clouds diffused behind.
It hovered as on wings; pearly, fleecy, gleaming air streamed like
raiment round it; light, tinted with carnation, coloured what seemed
face and limbs; a large star shone with still lustre on an angel's
forehead--" But the angel ruins it.

And this is all, and it leaves the dreariness more dreary. In _The
Professor_ you wander through a world where there is no sound, no
colour, no vibration; a world muffled and veiled in the stillness and
the greyness of the hour before dawn. It is the work of a woman who is
not perfectly alive. So far from having had her great awakening,
Charlotte is only half awake. Her intellect is alert enough and avid,
faithful and subservient to the fact. It is her nerves and senses that
are asleep. Her soul is absent from her senses.

       *       *       *       *       *

But in _Jane Eyre_, she is not only awakened, but awake as she has never
been awake before, with all her virgin senses exquisitely alive, every
nerve changed to intense vibration. Sometimes she is perniciously awake;
she is doing appalling things, things unjustifiable, preposterous;
things that would have meant perdition to any other writer; she sees
with wild, erroneous eyes; but the point is that she sees, that she
keeps moving, that from the first page to the last she is never once
asleep. To come to _Jane Eyre_ after _The Professor_ is to pass into
another world of feeling and of vision.

It is not the difference between reality and unreality. _The Professor_
is real enough, more real in some minor points--dialogue, for
instance--than _Jane Eyre_. The difference is that _The Professor_ is a
transcript of reality, a very delicate and faithful transcript, and
_Jane Eyre_ is reality itself, pressed on the senses. The pressure is so
direct and so tremendous, that it lasts through those moments when the
writer's grip has failed.

For there are moments, long moments of perfectly awful failure in _Jane
Eyre_. There are phrases that make you writhe, such as "the etymology of
the mansion's designation", and the shocking persistency with which
Charlotte Brontë "indites", "peruses", and "retains". There are whole
scenes that outrage probability. Such are the scenes, or parts of
scenes, between Jane and Rochester during the comedy of his courtship.
The great orchard scene does not ring entirely true. For pages and pages
it falters between passion and melodrama; between rhetoric and the _cri
de coeur_. Jane in the very thick of her emotion can say, "I have
talked, face to face, with what I reverence, with what I delight
in--with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I have known you,
Mr. Rochester, and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I
absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity for
departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death." And the
comedy is worse. Jane elaborates too much in those delicious things she
says to Rochester. Rochester himself provokes the parodist. (Such
manners as Rochester's were unknown in mid-Victorian literature.)

"He continued to send for me punctually the moment the clock struck
seven; though when I appeared before him now, he had no such honeyed
terms as 'love' and 'darling' on his lips: the best words at my disposal
were 'provoking', 'malicious elf,' 'sprite', 'changeling', etc. For
caresses, too, I now got grimaces; for a pressure of the hand, a pinch
on the arm; for a kiss on the cheek, a severe tweak of the ear. It was
all right: at present I decidedly preferred these fierce favours to
anything more tender."

Yet there is comedy, pure comedy in those scenes, though never
sustained, and never wrought to the inevitable dramatic climax. Jane is
delightful when she asks Rochester whether the frown on his forehead
will be his "married look", and when she tells him to make a
dressing-gown for himself out of the pearl-grey silk, "and an infinite
series of waistcoats out of the black satin". _The Quarterly_ was much
too hard on the earlier _cadeau_ scene, with Rochester and Jane and
Adèle, which is admirable in its suggestion of Jane's shyness and
precision.

_"'N'est-ce pas, Monsieur, qu'il y a un cadeau pour Mademoiselle Eyre,
dans votre petit coffre?'"_

"'Who talks of _cadeaux_?' said he gruffly; 'did you expect a present,
Miss Eyre? Are you fond of presents?' and he searched my face with eyes
that I saw were dark, irate, and piercing.

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

Charlotte Brontë 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 passion and temptation? There _is_
passion 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 bloody
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 passion which is poetry, and the poetry
which is not passion.

"'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 passionate reality it is unconvincing. It stirs you
and it leaves you cold.

The truth is that in _Jane Eyre_ Charlotte Brontë 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 passion 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 passion 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 passion is poetry, and poetry is passion;
you might say it was all she knew, or ever cared to know. But her
language of passion 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 Adèle 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 passion 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 passion 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 coarse. Their state of mind
is incredible to us now. For what did poor Jane do, after all? Nobody
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 Brontë 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 passion 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 passion
on the housetops she could hardly have published it more violently; but
nobody minded. It was part of the mid-Victorian convention.

Jane Eyre did none of these things. As soon as she was aware of her
passion for Mr. Rochester she thrust it down into the pocket of her
voluminous mid-Victorian skirt and sat on it. Instead of languishing 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
nobody 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 circumstances for the adulteress. There were extenuating
circumstances for Rochester. He could plead a wife who went on all
fours. There were no extenuating circumstances 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 passion.
'Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an
automaton?--a machine without feelings, and can bear to have my morsel
of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from
my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am
soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and
fully as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much
wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now
for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of
custom, conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that
addresses'" ("Addresses"? oh, Jane!) "'your spirit; just as if both had
passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal--as we
are!'"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"'I am.'"

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

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