Could anything be more horrible than that red room? Or take the
descriptions of the school at Lowood where the horror of pestilence
hangs over house and garden. Through all these Gateshead and Lowood
scenes Charlotte is unerring and absolute in her reality.

Her very style, so uncertain in its rendering of human speech, becomes
flawless in such passages as this: "It was three o'clock; the
church-bell tolled as I passed under the belfry: the charm of the hour
lay in its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun.
I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer,
for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral
treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its
utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made
no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle,
and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white,
worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on
each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and the
little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like
single russet leaves about to drop.

"This lane inclined up-hill all the way to Hay.... I then turned
eastward.

"On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon; pale yet as a cloud, but
brightening momently; she looked over Hay which, half lost in trees,
sent up a blue smoke from its few chimneys; it was yet a mile distant,
but in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life.
My ear, too, felt the flow of currents; in what dales and depths I could
not tell: but there were many hills beyond Hay, and doubtless many becks
threading their passes. That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of
the nearest streams, the sough of the most remote.

"A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and whisperings, at once so
far away and so clear: a positive tramp, tramp; a metallic clatter,
which effaced the soft wave-wanderings; as, in a picture, the solid mass
of a crag, or the rough boles of a great oak, drawn in dark and strong
on the foreground, efface the aerial distance of azure hill, sunny
horizon, and blended clouds, where tint melts into tint.

"The din sounded on the causeway...."

Flawless this, too, of the sky after sunset: "Where the sun had gone
down in simple state--pure of the pomp of clouds--spread a solemn
purple, burning with the light of red jewel and furnace flame at one
point, on one hill-peak, and extending high and wide, soft and still
softer, over half heaven."

And this of her own moors: "There are great moors behind and on each
hand of me; there are waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley at
my feet. The population here must be thin, and I see no passengers on
these roads: they stretch out east, west, north and south--white, broad,
lonely; they are all cut in the moor, and the heather grows deep and
wild to their very verge."

She has given the secret of the moor country in a phrase: "I felt the
consecration of its loneliness." In that one line you have the real, the
undying Charlotte Brontë.

It is such immortal things that make the difference between _Jane Eyre_
and _The Professor_. So immeasurable is that difference that it almost
justifies the theorist in assuming an "experience" to account for it, an
experience falling between the dates of _The Professor_ and _Jane Eyre_.
Unfortunately there was none; none in the sense cherished by the
researcher. Charlotte's letters are an unbroken record of those two
years that followed her return from Brussels. Her life is laid bare in
its long and cramped monotony, a life singularly empty of "experience".

And yet an experience did come to her in that brief period. If the
researcher had not followed a false scent across the Channel, if his
_flair_ for tragic passion had not destroyed in him all sense of
proportion, he could not possibly have missed it; for it stared him in
the face, simple, obvious, inevitable. But miss it he certainly did.
Obsessed by his idea, he considered it a negligible circumstance that
Charlotte should have read _Wuthering Heights_ before she wrote _Jane
Eyre_. And yet, I think that, if anything woke Charlotte up, it was
that. Until then, however great her certainty of her own genius, she did
not know how far she could trust it, how far it would be safe to let
imagination go. Appalled by the spectacle of its excesses, she had
divorced imagination from the real. But Emily knew none of these cold
deliberations born of fear. _Wuthering Heights_ was the fruit of a
divine freedom, a divine unconsciousness. It is not possible that
Charlotte, of all people, should have read _Wuthering Heights_ without a
shock of enlightenment; that she should not have compared it with her
own bloodless work; that she should not have felt the wrong done to her
genius by her self-repression. Emily had dared to be herself; _she_ had
not been afraid of her own passion; she had had no method; she had
accomplished a stupendous thing without knowing it, by simply letting
herself go. And Charlotte, I think, said to herself, "That is what I
ought to have done. That is what I will do next time." And next time she
did it. The experience may seem insufficient, but it is of such
experiences that a great writer's life is largely made. And if you
_must_ have an influence to account for _Jane Eyre_, there is no need
to go abroad to look for it. There was influence enough in her own home.
These three Brontës, adoring each other, were intolerant of any other
influence; and the strongest spirit, which was Emily's, prevailed. To be
sure, no remonstrances from Emily or Charlotte could stop Anne in her
obstinate analysis of Walter Huntingdon; but it was some stray spark
from Emily that kindled Anne. As for Charlotte, her genius must have
quickened in her when her nerves thrilled to the shock of _Wuthering
Heights_. This, I know, is only another theory; but it has at least the
merit of its modesty. It is not offered as in the least accounting for,
or explaining, Charlotte's genius. It merely suggests with all possible
humility a likely cause of its release. Anyhow, it is a theory that does
Charlotte's genius no wrong, on which account it seems to me preferable
to any other. It is really no argument against it to say that Charlotte
never acknowledged her sister's influence, that she was indeed unaware
of it; for, in the first place, the stronger the spiritual tie between
them, the less likely was she to have been aware. In the second place,
it is not claimed that _Wuthering Heights_ was such an influence as the
"sojourn in Brussels" is said to have been--that it "made Miss Brontë an
author". It is not claimed that if there had been no _Wuthering Heights_
and no Emily Brontë, there would have been no _Jane Eyre_; for to me
nothing can be more certain that whatever had, or had not happened,
Charlotte's genius would have found its way.

Charlotte's genius indeed was so profoundly akin to Charlotte's nature
that its way, the way of its upward progress, was by violent impetus and
recoil.

In _Shirley_ she revolts from the passion of _Jane Eyre_. She seems to
have written it to prove that there are other things. She had been stung
by _The Quarterly's_ attack, stung by rumour, stung by every adverse
thing that had been said. And yet not for a moment was she "influenced"
by her reviewers. It was more in defiance than in submission that she
answered them with _Shirley_. _Shirley_ was an answer to every criticism
that had yet been made. In _Shirley_ she forsook the one poor play of
hearts insurgent for the vast and varied movement of the world; social
upheavals, the clash of sects and castes, the first grim hand-to-hand
struggle between capital and labour, all are there. The book opens with
a drama, not of hearts but of artisans insurgent; frame-breakers, not
breakers of the marriage law. In sheer defiance she essays to render the
whole real world, the complex, many-threaded, many-coloured world; where
the tragic warp is woven with the bright comedy of curates. It is the
world of the beginnings; the world of the early nineteenth century that
she paints. A world with the immensity, the profundity, the darkness of
the brooding sea; where the spirit of a woman moves, troubling the
waters; for Charlotte Brontë has before her the stupendous vision of the
world as it was, as it yet is, and as it is to be.

That world, as it existed from eighteen-twelve to Charlotte's own time,
eighteen-fifty, was not a place for a woman with a brain and a soul.
There was no career for any woman but marriage. If she missed it she
missed her place in the world, her prestige, and her privileges as a
woman. What was worse, she lost her individuality, and became a mere
piece of furniture, of disused, old-fashioned furniture, in her father's
or her brother's house. If she had a father or a brother there was no
escape for her from dependence on the male; and if she had none, if
there was no male about the house, her case was the more pitiable. And
the traditions of her upbringing were such that the real, vital things,
the things that mattered, were never mentioned in her presence. Religion
was the solitary exception; and religion had the reality and vitality
taken out of it by its dissociation with the rest of life. A woman in
these horrible conditions was only half alive. She had no energies, no
passions, no enthusiasms. Convention drained her of her life-blood. What
was left to her had no outlet; pent up in her, it bred weak, anaemic
substitutes for its natural issue, sentimentalism for passion, and
sensibility for the nerves of vision. This only applies, of course, to
the average woman.

Charlotte Brontë was born with a horror of the world that had produced
this average woman, this creature of minute corruptions and hypocrisies.
She sent out _Jane Eyre_ to purify it with her passion. She sent out
_Shirley_ to destroy and rebuild it with her intellect. Little Jane was
a fiery portent. Shirley was a prophecy. She is modern to her
finger-tips, as modern as Meredith's great women: Diana, or Clara
Middleton, or Carinthia Jane. She was born fifty years before her time.

This is partly owing to her creator's prophetic insight, partly to her
sheer truth to life. For Shirley was to a large extent a portrait of
Emily Brontë who was born before her time.

It is Emily Brontë's spirit that burns in Shirley Keeldar; and it is the
spirit of Shirley Keeldar that gives life to the unwilling mass of this
vast novel. It is almost enough immortality for Shirley that she is the
only living and authentic portrait of Emily Brontë in her time.
Charlotte has given her the "wings that wealth can give", and they do
not matter. She has also given her the wings of Emily's adventurous
soul, the wealth of her inner life.

"A still, deep, inborn delight glows in her young veins;
unmingled--untroubled, not to be reached or ravished by human agency,
because by no human agency bestowed: the pure gift of God to His
creature, the free dower of Nature to her child. This joy gives her
experience of a genii-life. Buoyant, by green steps, by glad hills, all
verdure and light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that whence
angels looked down on the dreamer of Bethel, and her eye seeks, and her
soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it."

"Her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes
it--" That was the secret of Emily's greatness, of her immeasurable
superiority to her sad sisters.

And again: "In Shirley's nature prevailed at times an easy indolence:
there were periods when she took delight in perfect vacancy of hand and
eye--moments when her thoughts, her simple existence, the fact of the
world being around--and heaven above her, seemed to yield her such
fulness of happiness, that she did not need to lift a finger to increase
the joy. Often, after an active morning, she would spend a sunny
afternoon in lying stirless on the turf, at the foot of some tree of
friendly umbrage: no society did she need but that of Caroline, and it
sufficed if she were within call; no spectacle did she ask but that of
the deep blue sky, and such cloudlets as sailed afar and aloft across
its span; no sound but that of the bee's hum, the leaf's whisper."

There are phrases in Louis Moore's diary that bring Emily Brontë
straight before us in her swift and vivid life. Shirley is "Sister of
the spotted, bright, quick-fiery leopard." "Pantheress!--beautiful
forest-born!--wily, tameless, peerless nature! She gnaws her chain. I
see the white teeth working at the steel! She has dreams of her wild
woods, and pinings after virgin freedom." "How evanescent, fugitive,
fitful she looked--slim and swift as a Northern streamer!" "... With
her long hair flowing full and wavy; with her noiseless step, her pale
cheek, her eye full of night and lightning, she looked, I thought,
spirit-like--a thing made of an element--the child of a breeze and a
flame--the daughter of ray and raindrop--a thing never to be overtaken,
arrested, fixed."

Like Emily she is not "caught". "But if I were," she says, "do you know
what soothsayers I would consult?... The little Irish beggar that comes
barefoot to my door; the mouse that steals out of the cranny in the
wainscot; the bird that in frost and snow pecks at my window for a
crumb; the dog that licks my hand and sits beside my knee."

And yet again: "She takes her sewing occasionally: but, by some
fatality, she is doomed never to sit steadily at it for above five
minutes at a time: her thimble is scarcely fitted on, her needle scarce
threaded, when a sudden thought calls her upstairs; perhaps she goes to
seek some just-then-remembered old ivory-backed needle-book, or older
china-topped work-box, quite unneeded, but which seems at the moment
indispensable; perhaps to arrange her hair, or a drawer which she
recollects to have seen that morning in a state of curious confusion;
perhaps only to take a peep from a particular window at a particular
view where Briarfield Church and Rectory are visible, pleasantly bowered
in trees. She has scarcely returned, and again taken up the slip of
cambric, or square of half-wrought canvas, when Tartar's bold scrape and
strangled whistle are heard at the porch door, and she must run to open
it for him; it is a hot day; he comes in panting; she must convoy him to
the kitchen, and see with her own eyes that his water-bowl is
replenished. Through the open kitchen-door the court is visible, all
sunny and gay, and peopled with turkeys and their poults, peahens and
their chicks, pearl-flecked Guinea fowls, and a bright variety of pure
white and purple-necked, and blue and cinnamon-plumed pigeons.
Irresistible spectacle to Shirley! She runs to the pantry for a roll,
and she stands on the doorstep scattering crumbs: around her throng her
eager, plump, happy, feathered vassals.... There are perhaps some little
calves, some little new-yeaned lambs--it may be twins, whose mothers
have rejected them: Miss Keeldar ... must permit herself the treat of
feeding them with her own hand."

Like Emily she is impatient of rituals and creeds. Like Emily she adores
the Earth. Not one of Charlotte's women except Shirley could have
chanted that great prose hymn of adoration in which Earth worships and
is worshipped. "'Nature is now at her evening prayers; she is kneeling
before those red hills. I see her prostrate on the great steps of her
altar, praying for a fair night for mariners at sea, for travellers in
deserts, for lambs on moors, and unfledged birds in woods.... I see her,
and I will tell you what she is like: she is like what Eve was when she
and Adam stood alone on earth.' 'And that is not Milton's Eve, Shirley,'
says Caroline, and Shirley answers: 'No, by the pure Mother of God, she
is not.' Shirley is half a Pagan. She would beg to remind Milton 'that
the first men of the earth were Titans, and that Eve was their mother:
from her sprang Saturn, Hyperion, Oceanus; she bore Prometheus.... I
say, there were giants on the earth in those days, giants that strove to
scale heaven. The first woman's breast that heaved with life on this
world yielded daring which could contend with Omnipotence; the strength
which could bear a thousand years of bondage--the vitality which could
feed that vulture death through uncounted ages--the unexhausted life
and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immortality, which, after
millenniums of crimes, struggles, and woes, could conceive and bring
forth a Messiah. The first woman was heaven-born: vast was the heart
whence gushed the well-spring of the blood of nations; and grand the
undegenerate head where rested the consort-crown of creation.'...

"'You have not yet told me what you saw kneeling on those hills.'

"'I saw--I now see--a woman-Titan; her robe of blue air spreads to the
outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil, white as
an avalanche, sweeps from her head to her feet, and arabesques of
lightning flame on its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple
like that horizon: through its blush shines the star of evening. Her
steady eyes I cannot picture; they are clear--they are deep as
lakes--they are lifted and full of worship--they tremble with the
softness of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the expanse
of a cloud, and is paler than the early moon, risen long before dark
gathers: she reclines her bosom on the edge of Stilbro' Moor; her mighty
hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face, she speaks with
God.'"

It is the living sister speaking for the dead; for Charlotte herself had
little of Emily's fine Paganism. But for one moment, in this lyric
passage, her soul echoes the very soul of Emily as she gathers round her
all the powers and splendours (and some, alas, of the fatal rhetoric) of
her prose to do her honour.

It is not only in the large figure of the Titan Shirley that Charlotte
Brontë shows her strength. She has learnt to draw her minor masculine
characters with more of insight and of accuracy--Caroline Helstone, the
Yorkes, Robert Moore, Mr. Helstone, Joe Scott, and Barraclough, the
"joined Methody". With a few strokes they stand out living. She has
acquired more of the art of dialogue. She is a past master of dialect,
of the racy, native speech of these men. Not only is Mr. Yorke painted
with unerring power and faithfulness in every detail of his harsh and
vigorous personality, but there is no single lapse from nature when he
is speaking. The curates only excepted, Charlotte never swerves from
this fidelity. But when she is handling her curates, it is a savage and
utterly inartistic humour that inspires her. You feel that she is not
exercising the art of comedy, but relieving her own intolerable boredom
and irritation. No object could well be more innocent, and more
appealing in its innocence, than little Mr. Sweeting, curate of
Nunnerly. Mr. Sweeting at the tea-table, "having a dish of tarts before
him, and marmalade and crumpet upon his plate", should have moved the
Comic Spirit to tears of gentleness.

Curates apart, two-thirds of _Shirley_ are written with an unerring
devotion to the real, to the very actual. They have not, for all that,
the profound reality of _Jane Eyre_. The events are confused, somehow;
the atmosphere is confusing; the northern background is drawn with a
certain hardness and apathy of touch; the large outlines are obscured,
delicate colours sharpened; it is hard and yet blurred, like a bad steel
engraving. Charlotte's senses, so intensely, so supernaturally alive in
_Jane Eyre_, are only passably awake in _Shirley_. It has some of the
dulness of _The Professor_, as it has more than its sober rightness.
But, for three-and-twenty chapters, the sobriety, the rightness triumph.
There are no improbabilities, no flights of imagination, none of the
fine language which was the shame when it was not the glory of _Jane
Eyre_.

Then suddenly there comes a break--a cleavage. It comes with that
Chapter Twenty-four, which is headed "The Valley of the Shadow of
Death". It was written in the first months after Emily Brontë's death.

From that point Charlotte's level strength deserts her. Ever after, she
falls and soars, and soars and falls again. There is a return to the
manner of _Jane Eyre_, the manner of Charlotte when she is deeply moved;
there is at times a relapse to Jane Eyre's worst manner. You get it at
once in "The Valley of the Shadow" chapter, in the scene of Caroline's
love-sick delirium.

"'But he will not know I am ill till I am gone; and he will come when
they have laid me out, and I am senseless, cold and stiff.

"'What can my departed soul feel then? Can it see or know what happens
to the clay? Can spirits, through any medium, communicate with living
flesh? Can the dead at all revisit those they leave? Can they come in
the elements? Will wind, water, fire lend me a path to Moore?

"'Is it for nothing the wind sounds almost articulate sometimes--sings
as I have lately heard it sing at night--or passes the casement sobbing,
as if for sorrow to come? Does nothing then haunt it--nothing inspire
it?'"

The awful improbability of Caroline is more striking because of its
contrast with the inspired rightness of the scene of Cathy's delirium in
_Wuthering Heights_. It is Charlotte feebly echoing Emily, and going
more and more wrong up to her peroration.

Delirious Caroline wonders: "'What is that electricity they speak of,
whose changes make us well or ill; whose lack or excess blasts; whose
even balance revives?...'

"'_Where_ is the other world? In _what_ will another life consist? Why
do I ask? Have I not cause to think that the hour is hasting but too
fast when the veil must be rent for me? Do I not know the Grand Mystery
is likely to break prematurely on me? Great Spirit, in whose goodness I
confide; whom, as my Father, I have petitioned night and morning from
early infancy, help the weak creation of Thy hands! Sustain me through
the ordeal I dread and must undergo! Give me strength! Give me patience!
Give me--oh, _give me_ FAITH!'"

Jane Eyre has done worse than that, so has Rochester; but somehow, when
they were doing their worst with it, they got their passion through.
There is no live passion behind this speech of Caroline's, with its wild
stress of italics and of capitals. What passion there was in Charlotte
when she conceived Caroline was killed by Emily's death.

And Mrs. Pryor, revealing herself to Caroline, is even more terrible.
She has all the worst vices of Charlotte's dramatic style. Mrs. Pryor
calls to the spirit of Caroline's dead father: "'James, slumber
peacefully! See, your terrible debt is cancelled! Look! I wipe out the
long, black account with my own hand! James, your child atones: this
living likeness of you--this thing with your perfect features--this one
good gift you gave me has nestled affectionately to my heart and
tenderly called me "mother". Husband, rest forgiven.'"

Even Robert Moore, otherwise almost a masterpiece, becomes improbable
when, in his great scene, Shirley refuses him. When Mr. Yorke asks him
what has gone wrong he replies: "The machinery of all my nature; the
whole enginery of this human mill; the boiler, which I take to be the
heart, is fit to burst."

Shirley herself is impossible with her "Lucifer, Star of the Morning,
thou art fallen," and her speech to her mercenary uncle: "Sir, your
god, your great Bell, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a
demon."

What is worse than all, Louis Moore--Louis, the hero, Louis, the master
of passion, is a failure. He is Charlotte Brontë's most terrible, most
glaring failure. It is not true that Charlotte could not draw men, or
that she drew them all alike; Robert Moore, the hard-headed man of
business, the man of will and purpose, who never gives up, is not only
almost a masterpiece but a spontaneous masterpiece, one of the first
examples of his kind. But there is no blood in Louis' veins, no virility
in his swarthy body. He is the most unspeakable of schoolmasters. Yet
Charlotte lavished on this puppet half the wealth of her imagination.
She flings phrase after perfect phrase to him to cover himself
with--some of her best things have been given to Louis Moore to utter;
but they do not make him live. Again, she strangles him in his own
rhetoric. The courtship of Louis Moore and Shirley will not compare with
that of Jane and Rochester. There is no nightingale singing in their
wood.

Yet, for all that, _Shirley_ comes very near to being Charlotte Brontë's
masterpiece. It is inspired from first to last with a great intention
and a great idea. It shows a vision of reality wider than her grasp. Its
faults, like the faults of _Jane Eyre_, are all on the surface, only
there is more surface in _Shirley_. If it has not _Jane Eyre's_
commanding passion, it has a vaster sweep. It was literally the first
attempt in literature to give to woman her right place in the world.

From first to last there is not a page or a line in it that justifies
the malignant criticism of Mrs. Oliphant. Caroline Helstone does not
justify it. She is no window-gazing virgin on the look-out, in love
already before the man has come. She is a young girl, very naturally in
love with a man whom she has known for years, who is always on the spot.
As for Shirley, she flung herself with all the vehemence of her
prophetic soul on the hypocritical convention that would make every
woman dependent on some man, and at the same time despises her for the
possession of her natural instincts. And Caroline followed her. "I
observe that to such grievances as society cannot cure, it usually
forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn: this scorn being only a sort of
tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People hate to be reminded of
ills they are unable or unwilling to remedy: such reminder, in forcing
on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of an
obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease and
shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the houseless and
unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the
world: the demand disturbs the happy and rich: it disturbs parents....
Men of England! Look at your poor girls, many of them fading round you,
dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating
to sour old maids--envious, back-biting, wretched, because life is a
desert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce
modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and
consideration by marriage, which to celibacy is denied. Fathers, cannot
you alter these things?... You would wish to be proud of your daughters,
and not to blush for them, then seek for them an interest and an
occupation which shall raise them above the flirt, the manoeuvrer, the
mischief-making talebearer. Keep your girl's minds narrow and
degraded--they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes a disgrace
to you: give them scope and work--they will be your gayest companions in
health; your tenderest nurses in sickness; your most faithful prop in
old age."

That is the argument from fathers, and it comes from Caroline Helstone,
not from Shirley. And the fact that Caroline married Robert Moore, and
Shirley fell in love when her hour came (and with Louis Moore, too!)
does not diminish the force or the sincerity or the truth of the tirade.

_Shirley_ may not be a great novel; but it is a great prophetic book.
Shirley's vision of the woman kneeling on the hills serves for more than
Emily Brontë's vision of Hertha and Demeter, of Eve, the Earth-mother,
"the mighty and mystical parent"; it is Charlotte Brontë's vindication
of Eve, her vision of woman as she is to be. She faced the world once
for all with her vision: "I see her," she said, "and I will tell you
what she is like."

Mrs. Oliphant did not see the woman kneeling on the hills. Neither
George Eliot nor Mrs. Gaskell saw her. They could not possibly have told
the world what she was like. It is part of Charlotte Brontë's superior
greatness that she saw.

       *       *       *       *       *

You do not see that woman in _Villette_. She has passed with the
splendour of Charlotte's vision of the world. The world in _Villette_ is
narrowed to a Pensionnat de Demoiselles, and centred in the heart of one
woman. And never, not even in _Jane Eyre_, and certainly not in
_Shirley_, did Charlotte Brontë achieve such mastery of reality, and
with it such mastery of herself. _Villette_ is the final triumph of her
genius over the elements that warred in her. It shows the movement of
her genius, which was always by impulse and recoil. In _The Professor_
she abjured, in the interests of reality, the "imagination" of her
youth. In _Jane Eyre_ she was urged forward by the released impetus of
the forces she repressed. In _Shirley_ they are still struggling with
her sense of the sober and the sane reality; the book is torn to
fragments in the struggle, and in the end imagination riots.

But in _Villette_ there are none of these battlings and rendings, these
Titanic upheavals and subsidences. Charlotte Brontë's imagination, and
her sense of the real, are in process of fusion. There are few novels in
which an imagination so supreme is wedded to so vivid a vision of
actuality. It may be said that Charlotte Brontë never achieved positive
actuality before. The Pensionnat de Demoiselles is almost as visibly and
palpably actual as the Maison Vauquer in _Père Goriot_. It is a return
to the method of experience with a vengeance. Charlotte's success,
indeed, was so stunning that for all but sixty years _Villette_ has
passed for a _roman à clef_, the novel, not only of experience, but of
personal experience. There was a certain plausibility in that view. The
characters could all be easily recognized. And when Dr. John was
identified with Mr. George Smith, and his mother with Mr. George Smith's
mother, and Madame Beck with Madame Héger, and M. Paul Emanuel with
Madame Héger's husband, the inference was irresistible: Lucy Snowe was,
and could only be, Charlotte Brontë. And as the figure of M. Paul
Emanuel was ten times more vivid and convincing than that of Rochester,
so all that applied to Jane Eyre applied with ten times more force to
Lucy. In _Villette_ Charlotte Brontë was considered to have given
herself hopelessly away.

I have tried to show that this view cannot stand before an unprejudiced
examination of her life and letters. No need to go into all that again.
On the evidence, Charlotte seems at the best of times to have fallen in
love with difficulty; and she most certainly was no more in love with
"the little man", Paul Emanuel, than she was with "the little man", Mr.
Taylor. The really important and interesting point is that, if she had
been, if he had thus obtained the reality with which passion endows its
object, her imagination would have had no use for him; its work would
have been done for it.

To the supreme artist the order of the actual event is one thing, and
the order of creation is another. Their lines may start from the same
point in the actual, they may touch again and again, but they are not
the same, and they cannot run exactly parallel. There must always be
this difference between the actual thing and the thing drawn from it,
however closely, that each is embedded and enmeshed in a different
context. For a character in a novel to be alive it must have grown; and
to have grown it must have followed its own line of evolution,
inevitably and in its own medium; and that, whether or not it has been
"taken", as they say, "from life". The more alive it is the less likely
is it to have been "taken", to have been seized, hauled by the scruff of
its neck out of the dense web of the actual. All that the supreme artist
wants is what Charlotte Brontë called "the germ of the real", by which
she meant the germ of the actual. He does not want the alien, developed
thing, standing in its own medium ready-made. Charlotte Brontë said that
the character of Dr. John was a failure because it lacked the germ of
the real. She should have said that it lacked the germ of many reals; it
is so obviously drawn from incomplete observation of a single instance.
I am inclined to think that she did "take" Dr. John. And whenever
Charlotte Brontë "took" a character, as she took the unfortunate curates
and Mr. St. John Rivers, the result was failure.

No supreme work of art was ever "taken". It was begotten and born and
grown, the offspring of faithful love between the soul of the artist and
reality. The artist must bring to his "experience" as much as he takes
from it. The dignity of Nature is all against these violences and
robberies of art. She hides her deepest secret from the marauder, and
yields it to the lover who brings to her the fire of his own soul.

And that fire of her own soul was what Charlotte Brontë brought to her
supreme creations. It was certainly what she brought to Paul Emanuel.
Impossible to believe that M. Héger gave her more than one or two of the
germs of M. Paul. Personally, I can only see the respectable M. Héger as
a man whose very essence was a certain impassivity and phlegm under the
appearance of a temperament. Choleric he was, with the superficial and
temporary choler of the schoolmaster. A schoolmaster gifted with the
most extraordinary, the most marvellous, the most arresting faculty for
making faces, a faculty which in an Englishman would have argued him a
perfect volcano of erratic temperament. But I more than suspect that
when it came to temperament M. Héger took it out in faces; that he was
nothing more than a benevolent, sentimental, passably intellectual
bourgeois; but bourgeois to the core. Whereas, look at M. Paul! No
wonder that with that tame and solid stuff before her it took even
Charlotte Brontë's fiery spirit nine years (torturing the unwilling
dross that checked its flight) before it could create Paul Emanuel.
Because of her long work on him he is at once the most real and the best
imagined of her characters.

I admit that in the drawing of many of her minor characters she seems to
have relied upon very close and intimate observation of the living
model. But in none of her minor characters is she at grips with the
reality that, for her, passion is. Charlotte refused to give heroic rank
to persons she had merely observed; she would not exalt them to the
dignity of passion. Her imagination could not work on them to that
extent. (That is partly why Caroline's delirium is so palpably "faked".)
Even in her portrait of the heroic Shirley, who was frankly "taken" from
her sister Emily, she achieved the likeness mainly by the artifice of
unlikeness, by removing Shirley Keeldar into a life in which Emily
Brontë had never played a part, whereby Shirley became for her a
separate person. (You cannot by any stretch of the imagination see Emily
falling in love with the schoolmaster, Louis Moore.)

Lest there should be any doubt on the subject, Charlotte herself
explained to Mrs. Gaskell how her imagination worked. "I asked her,"
Mrs. Gaskell says, "whether she had ever taken opium, as the description
given of its effects in _Villette_ was so exactly like what I had
experienced--vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, of which the
outlines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, etc. She replied that
she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but
that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to
describe anything that had not fallen within her own experience; she had
thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling
asleep--wondering what it was like, or how it would be--till at length,
sometimes after her story had been arrested at this one point for weeks,
she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had
in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word
for word, as it happened."

To a mind like that the germ of the actual was enough. Charlotte
Brontë's genius, in fact, was ardently impatient of the actual: it cared
only for its own. At the least hint from experience it was off. A
glance, a gesture of M. Héger's was enough to fire it to the conception
of Paul Emanuel. He had only to say a kind word to her, to leave a book
or a box of bon-bons in her desk (if he _did_ leave bon-bons) for
Charlotte's fire to work on him. She had only to say to herself, "This
little man is adorable in friendship; I wonder what he would be like in
love," and she saw that he would be something, though not altogether,
like Paul Emanuel. She had only to feel a pang of half-remorseful,
half-humorous affection for him, and she knew what Lucy felt like in her
love-sick agony. As for Madame Héger, Madame's purely episodic jealousy,
her habits of surveillance, her small inscrutabilities of behaviour,
became the fury, the treachery, the perfidy of Madame Beck. For
treachery and perfidy, and agony and passion, were what Charlotte wanted
for _Villette_.

And yet it is true that _Villette_ is a novel of experience, owing its
conspicuous qualities very much to observation. After all, a
contemporary novel cannot be made altogether out of the fire of the
great writer's soul. It is because Charlotte Brontë relied too much on
the fire of her own soul that in _Jane Eyre_ and parts of _Shirley_ she
missed that unique expression of actuality which, over and over again,
she accomplished in _Villette_. For the expression of a social _milieu_,
for manners, for the dialogue of ordinary use, for the whole detail of
the speech characteristic of an individual and a type, for the right
accent and pitch, for all the vanishing shades and aspects of the
temporary and the particular, the greatest and the fieriest writer is at
the mercy of observation and experience. It was her final mastery of
these things that made it possible to praise Charlotte Brontë's powers
of observation at the expense of her genius; and this mainly because of
M. Paul.

No offspring of genius was ever more alive, more rich in individuality,
than M. Paul. He is alive and he is adorable, in his _paletot_ and
_bonnet grec_, from the moment when he drags Lucy up three pairs of
stairs to the solitary and lofty attic and locks her in, to that other
moment when he brings her to the little house that he has prepared for
her. Whenever he appears there is pure radiant comedy, and pathos as
pure. It is in this utter purity, this transparent simplicity, that
_Villette_ is great. There is not one jarring note in any of the
delicious dialogues between Lucy and M. Paul, not one of those passages
which must be erased if quotation is not to fail of its effect. Take the
scene where Lucy breaks M. Paul's spectacles.

"A score of times ere now I had seen them fall and receive no
damage--this time, as Lucy Snowe's hapless luck would have it, they so
fell that each clear pebble became a shivered and shapeless star.

"Now, indeed, dismay seized me--dismay and regret. I knew the value of
these _lunettes_: M. Paul's sight was peculiar, not easily fitted, and
these glasses suited him. I had heard him call them his treasures: as I
picked them up, cracked and worthless, my hand trembled. Frightened
through all my nerves I was to see the mischief I had done, but I think
I was even more sorry than afraid. For some seconds I dared not look the
bereaved Professor in the face; he was the first to speak.

"'_Là_!' he said: '_me voilà veuf de mes lunettes_! I think that
Mademoiselle Lucy will now confess that the cord and gallows are amply
earned; she trembles in anticipation of her doom. Ah, traitress,
traitress! You are resolved to have me quite blind and helpless in your
hands!'

"I lifted my eyes: his face, instead of being irate, lowering and
furrowed, was overflowing with the smile, coloured with the bloom I had
seen brightening it that evening at the Hotel Crécy. He was not
angry--not even grieved. For the real injury he showed himself full of
clemency; under the real provocation, patient as a saint."

Take the "Watchguard" scene.

"M. Paul came and stood behind me. He asked at what I was working; and I
said I was making a watchguard. He asked, 'For whom?' And I answered,
'For a gentleman--one of my friends.'"

Whereupon M. Paul flies into a passion, and accuses Lucy of behaving to
him, "'With what pungent vivacities--what an impetus of mutiny--what a
_fougue_ of injustice.'... '_Chut! à l'instant!_ There! there I
went--_vive comme la poudre_.' He was sorry--he was very sorry: for my
sake he grieved over the hopeless peculiarity. This _emportement_, this
_chaleur_--generous, perhaps, but excessive--would yet, he feared, do me
a mischief. It was a pity. I was not--he believed, in his soul--wholly
without good qualities; and would I but hear reason, and be more sedate,
more sober, less _en l'air_, less _coquette_, less taken by show, less
prone to set an undue value on outside excellence--to make much of the
attentions of people remarkable chiefly for so many feet of stature,
_des couleurs de poupée, un nez plus ou moins bien fait_, and an
enormous amount of fatuity--I might yet prove a useful, perhaps an
exemplary character. But, as it was----And here the little man's voice
was for a moment choked.

"I would have looked up at him, or held out my hand, or said a soothing
word; but I was afraid, if I stirred, I should either laugh or cry; so
odd, in all this, was the mixture of the touching and the absurd.

"I thought he had nearly done: but no, he sat down that he might go on
at his ease.

"'While he, M. Paul, was on these painful topics, he would dare my anger
for the sake of my good, and would venture to refer to a change he had
noticed in my dress.'"

       *       *       *       *       *

"'And if you condemn a bow of ribbon for a lady, monsieur, you would
necessarily disapprove of a thing like this for a gentleman?' holding up
my bright little chainlet of silk and gold. His sole reply was a
groan--I suppose over my levity.

"After sitting some minutes in silence, and watching the progress of the
chain, at which I now wrought more assiduously than ever, he inquired:

"'Whether what he had just said would have the effect of making me
entirely detest him?'

"I hardly remember what answer I made, or how it came about; I don't
think I spoke at all, but I know we managed to bid good night on
friendly terms: and even after M. Paul had reached the door, he turned
back just to explain that he would not be understood to speak in entire
condemnation of the scarlet dress.'...

"'And the flowers under my bonnet, monsieur?' I asked. 'They are very
little ones.'

"'Keep them little, then,' said he. 'Permit them not to become
full-blown.'

"'And the bow, monsieur--the bit of ribbon?'

"'_Va pour le ruban_!' was the propitious answer.

"And so we settled it."

That is good; and when Lucy presents the watchguard it is better still.

"He looked at the box: I saw its clear and warm tint, and bright azure
circlet, pleased his eyes. I told him to open it.

"'My initials!' said he, indicating the letters in the lid. 'Who told
you I was called Carl David?'

"'A little bird, monsieur.'

"'Does it fly from me to you? Then one can tie a message under its wing
when needful.'

"He took out the chain--a trifle indeed as to value, but glossy with
silk and sparkling with beads. He liked that too--admired it artlessly,
like a child.

"'For me?'

"'Yes, for you.'

"'This is the thing you were working at last night?'

"'The same.'

"'You finished it this morning?'

"'I did.'

"'You commenced it with the intention that it should be mine?'

"'Undoubtedly.'

"'And offered on my fête-day?'

"'Yes.'

"'This purpose continued as you wove it?'

"'Again I assented.'

"'Then it is not necessary that I should cut out any portion--saying,
this part is not mine: it was plaited under the idea and for the
adornment of another?'

"'By no means. It is neither necessary, nor would it be just.'

"'This object is _all_ mine?'

"'That object is yours entirely.'

"Straightway monsieur opened his paletot, arranged the guard splendidly
across his chest, displaying as much and suppressing as little as he
could: for he had no notion of concealing what he admired and thought
decorative....

"'_À present c'est un fait accompli_,' said he, readjusting his
paletot...."

To the last gesture of Monsieur it is superb.

I have taken those scenes because they are of crucial importance as
indications of what Charlotte Brontë was doing in _Villette_, and yet
would do. They show not only an enormous advance in technique, but a
sense of the situation, of the _scène à faire_, which is entirely or
almost entirely lacking in her earlier work.

If there be degrees in reality, Lucy and Pauline de Bassompierre are
only less real than M. Paul. And by some miracle their reality is not
diminished by Charlotte Brontë's singular change of intention with
regard to these two. Little Polly, the child of the beginning, the
inscrutable creature of nerves, exquisitely sensitive to pain, fretting
her heart out in love for her father and for Graham Bretton, is hardly
recognizable in Pauline, Countess de Bassompierre. She has preserved
only her fragility, her fastidiousness, her little air of
inaccessibility. Polly is obviously predestined to that profound and
tragic suffering which is Lucy Snowe's.

"I watched Polly rest her small elbow on her small knee, her head on her
hand; I observed her draw a square inch or two of pocket-handkerchief
from the doll-pocket of her doll-skirt, and then I heard her weep. Other
children in grief or pain cry aloud, without shame or restraint, but
this being wept: the tiniest occasional sniff testified to her emotion."

Again (Polly is parted from her father): "When the street-door closed,
she dropped on her knees at a chair with a cry--'Papa!'

"It was low and long; a sort of 'why hast thou forsaken me?' During an
ensuing space of some minutes I perceived she endured agony. She went
through, in that brief interval of her infant life, emotions such as
some never feel; it was in her constitution: she would have more of such
instants if she lived."

Polly is contrasted with the cold and disagreeable Lucy. "I, Lucy Snowe,
was calm," Lucy says when she records that agony. The effect she gives,
of something creepily insensitive and most unpleasant, is unmistakable
in these early chapters. She watches Polly with a cold, analytic eye.
"These sudden, dangerous natures--sensitive as they are called--offer
many a curious spectacle to those whom a cooler temperament has secured
from participation in their vagaries." When Polly, charming Polly, waits
on her father at the tea-table, Lucy is impervious to her tiny charm.
"Candidly speaking, I thought her a little busy-body." When Graham
Bretton repulses Polly, Lucy has some thoughts of "improving the
occasion by inculcating some of those maxims of philosophy whereof I had
ever a tolerable stock ready for application."

There is no sign in the beginning that this detestable Lucy is to be
heroine. But in Chapter Four Polly disappears and Lucy takes her place
and plays her part. The child Polly had a suffering and passionate
heart, for all her little air of fastidiousness and inaccessibility. It
is the suffering and passionate heart of Polly that beats in Lucy of the
Pensionnat. There is only enough of the original Lucy left to sit in
judgment on Ginevra Fanshawe and "the Parisienne".

The child Polly had an Imagination. "'Miss Snowe,' said she in a
whisper, 'this is a wonderful book ... it tells about distant countries,
a long, long way from England, which no traveller can reach without
sailing thousands of miles over the sea.... Here is a picture of
thousands gathered in a desolate place--a plain spread with sand.... And
here are pictures more stranger than that. There is the wonderful Great
Wall of China; here is a Chinese lady with a foot littler than mine.
There is a wild horse of Tartary; and here--most strange of all--is a
land of ice and snow without green fields, woods, or gardens. In this
land they found some mammoth bones; there are no mammoths now. You don't
know what it was; but I can tell you, because Graham told me. A mighty
goblin creature, as high as this room, and as long as the hall; but not
a fierce, flesh-eating thing, Graham thinks. He believes if I met one in
a forest, it would not kill me, unless I came quite in its way; when it
would trample me down amongst the bushes, as I might tread on a
grasshopper in a hay-field without knowing it.'"

It is Polly's Imagination that appears again in Lucy's "Creative
Impulse". "I with whom that Impulse was the most intractable, the most
capricious, the most maddening of masters ... a deity which sometimes,
under circumstances apparently propitious, would not speak when
questioned, would not hear when appealed to, would not, when sought, be
found; but would stand, all cold, all indurated, all granite, a dark
Baal with carven lips and blank eyeballs, and breast like the stone face
of a tomb; and again, suddenly, at some turn, some sound, some
long-trembling sob of the wind, at some rushing past of an unseen stream
of electricity, the irrational Demon would awake unsolicited, would stir
strangely alive, would rush from its pedestal like a perturbed Dagon,
calling to its votary for a sacrifice, whatever the hour--to its victim
for some blood or some breath, whatever the circumstances or
scene--rousing its priest, treacherously promising vaticination,
perhaps filling its temple with a strange hum of oracles, but sure to
give half the significance to fateful winds, and grudging to the
desperate listener even a miserable remnant--yielding it sordidly, as
though each word had been a drop of the deathless ichor of its own dark
veins."

That is Lucy. But when Polly reappears fitfully as Pauline de
Bassompierre, she is an ordinary, fastidious little lady without a spark
of imagination or of passion.