Chapter III: Part 3

But this is not the worst. Mrs. Oliphant professes to feel pity for her victim. "Poor Charlotte Brontë! She has not been as other women, protected by the grave from all betrayal of the episodes in her own life." (You would imagine they were awful, the episodes in Charlotte Brontë's life.) "Everybody has betrayed her, and all she thought about this one, and that, and every name that was ever associated with hers. There was a Mr. Taylor from London, about whom she wrote with great freedom to her friend, Miss Nussey, telling how the little man had come, how he had gone away without any advance in the affairs, how a chill came over her when he appeared and she found him much less attractive than when at a distance, yet how she liked it as little when he went away, and was somewhat excited about his first letter, and even went so far as to imagine with a laugh that there might possibly be a dozen little Joe Taylors before all was over."

This is atrocious. But the malice and bad taste of it are nothing to the gross carelessness and ignorance it reveals--ignorance of facts and identities and names. Charlotte's suitor was Mr. James Taylor and not Joe. Joe, the brother of her friend, Mary Taylor, was married already to a lady called Amelia, and it is of Joe and his Amelia that Charlotte writes. "She must take heart" (Amelia had been singularly unsuccessful), "there may yet be a round dozen of little Joe Taylors to look after--run after--to sort and switch and train up in the way they should go."

Of Mr. James Taylor she writes more decorously. Miss Nussey, as usual, had been thinking unwarrantable things, and had made a most unbecoming joke about Jupiter and Venus, which outraged Charlotte's "common sense". "The idea of the little man," says Charlotte, "shocks me less. He still sends his little newspaper; and the other day there came a letter of a bulk, volume, pith, judgment and knowledge, fit to have been the product of a giant. You may laugh as much and as wickedly as you please, but the fact is, there is a quiet constancy about this, my diminutive and red-haired friend, which adds a foot to his stature, turns his sandy locks dark, and altogether dignifies him a good deal in my estimation." This is all she says by way of appreciation. She says later, "His manners and his personal appearance scarcely pleased me more than at the first interview.... I feel that in his way he has a regard for me; a regard which I cannot bring myself entirely to reciprocate in kind, and yet its withdrawal leaves a painful blank." Miss Nussey evidently insists that Charlotte's feelings are engaged this time, arguing possibly from the "painful blank"; and Charlotte becomes explicit. She speaks of the disadvantages of the alleged match, and we gather that Miss Nussey has been urging her to take the little man. "But there is another thing which forms a barrier more difficult to pass than any of these. Would Mr. Taylor and I ever suit? Could I ever feel for him enough love to accept him as a husband? Friendship--gratitude--esteem I have, but each moment he came near me, and that I could see his eyes fastened on me, my veins ran ice. Now that he is away, I feel far more gently to him; it is only close by that I grow rigid--stiffening with a strange mixture of apprehension and anger--which nothing softens but his retreat, and a perfect subduing of his manner." And again, "my conscience, I can truly say, does not _now_ accuse me of having treated Mr. Taylor with injustice or unkindness ... but with every disposition and with every wish, with every intention even to look on him in the most favourable point of view at his last visit, it was impossible to me in my inward heart to think of him as one that might one day be acceptable as a husband." Could anything be _more_ explicit? There is a good deal more of it. After one very searching criticism of Mr. Taylor: "One does not like to say these things, but one had better be honest." And of her honesty Charlotte's letters on this subject leave no doubt. There is not the smallest ground for supposing that even for a moment had she thought of Mr. James Taylor as "one that one day might be acceptable", much less is there for Mr. Clement Shorter's suggestion that if he had come back from Bombay she would have married him.

But Joe or James, it is all one to Mrs. Oliphant, with her theory of Charlotte Brontë. "For her and her class, which did not speak of it, everything depended upon whether the women married or did not marry. Their thoughts were thus artificially fixed to one point in the horizon." The rest is repetition, ending in the astounding verdict: "The seed she thus sowed has come to many growths that would have appalled Charlotte Brontë. But while it would be very unjust to blame her for the vagaries that have followed, and to which nothing could be less desirable than any building of the house or growth of the race, any responsibility or service, we must still believe that it was she who drew the curtain first aside and opened the gates to imps of evil meaning, polluting and profaning the domestic hearth."

That is Mrs. Oliphant on Charlotte Brontë.

And even Mr. Clement Shorter, who has dealt so admirably with outrageous legends, goes half the way with the detractor. He has a theory that Charlotte Brontë was a woman of morbid mood, "to whom the problem of sex appealed with all its complications", and that she "dwelt continually on the problem of the ideal mate".

Now Charlotte may have dreamed of getting married (there have been more criminal dreams); she may have brooded continually over the problem of the ideal mate, only of all these dreams and broodings there is not one atom of evidence--not one. Not a hint, not a trace, either in her character as we know it, or in her very voluminous private correspondence. The facts of her life disprove it. Her letters to Ellen Nussey (never meant for publication) reveal the workings of Charlotte's feminine mind when applied to "the sex problem"; a mind singularly wholesome and impersonal, and singularly detached. Charlotte is full of lights upon this awful subject of matrimony, which, by the way, had considerably more interest for Miss Nussey than it had for her. In fact, if it had not been for Miss Nussey it would not have appeared so often as it did in Charlotte's letters. If you pay attention to the context (a thing that theorists never do) you see, what is indeed obvious, that a large portion of Charlotte Brontë's time was taken up in advising and controlling Ellen Nussey, that amiable and impulsive prototype of Caroline Helstone. She is called upon in all Miss Nussey's hours of crisis, and there seem to have been a great many of them. "Do not," she writes, "be over-persuaded to marry a man you can never respect--I do not say _love_, because I think if you can respect a person before marriage, moderate love at least will come after; and as to intense passion, I am convinced that that is no desirable feeling. In the first place, it seldom or never meets with a requital; and in the second place, if it did, the feeling would be only temporary; it would last the honeymoon, and then, perhaps, give place to disgust, or indifference, worse perhaps than disgust. Certainly this would be the case on the man's part; and on the woman's--God help her if she is left to love passionately and alone.

"I am tolerably well convinced that I shall never marry at all."

And again, to Miss Nussey, six months later: "Did you not once say to me in all childlike simplicity, 'I thought, Charlotte, no young lady should fall in love till the offer was actually made'? I forgot what answer I made at the time, but I now reply, after due consideration, Right as a glove, the maxim is just, and I hope you will always attend to it. I will even extend and confirm it: no young lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted, the marriage ceremony performed, and the first half-year of wedded life has passed away. A woman may then begin to love, but with great precaution, very coolly, very moderately, very rationally. If she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a cold look cuts her to the heart, she is a fool. If she ever loves so much that her husband's will is her law, and that she has got into a habit of watching his looks in order that she may anticipate his wishes, she will soon be a neglected fool. Did I not tell you of an instance...?"

What could be more lucid, more light-hearted, and more sane? And if Charlotte is suspicious of the dangers of her own temperament, that only proves her lucidity and sanity the more.

Later, at Brussels, when confronted with "three or four people's" idea that "the future _époux_ of Miss Brontë is on the Continent", she defends herself against the "silly imputation". "Not that it is a crime to marry, or a crime to wish to be married; but it is an imbecility, which I reject with contempt, for women, who have neither fortune nor beauty, to make marriage the principal object of their wishes and hopes, and the aim of all their actions; not to be able to convince themselves that they are unattractive, and that they had better be quiet, and think of other things than wedlock." Can anything be clearer?

So much for herself. But she has to deal with Miss Nussey, in difficulties again, later: "Papa has two or three times expressed a fear that since Mr. ---- paid you so much attention, he will, perhaps, have made an impression on your mind which will interfere with your comfort. I tell him I think not, as I believe you to be mistress of yourself in those matters. Still, he keeps saying that I am to write to you and dissuade you from thinking of him. I never saw Papa make himself so uneasy about a thing of the kind before; he is usually very sarcastic on such subjects.

"Mr. ---- be hanged! I never thought very well of him, and I am much disposed to think very ill of him at this blessed minute. I have discussed the subject fully, for where is the use of being mysterious and constrained?--it is not worth while."

And yet again it is Ellen Nussey. "Ten years ago I should have laughed at your account of the blunder you made in mistaking the bachelor doctor of Bridlington for a married man. I should have certainly thought you scrupulous over-much, and wondered how you could possibly regret being civil to a decent individual merely because he happened to be single instead of double. Now, however, I can perceive that your scruples are founded on common sense. I know that if women wish to escape the stigma of husband-seeking, they must act and look like marble or clay--cold, expressionless, bloodless; for every appearance of feeling, of joy, sorrow, friendliness, antipathy, admiration, disgust, are alike construed by the world into the attempt to" (I regret to say that Charlotte wrote) "to hook a husband."

Later, she has to advise her friend Mr. Williams as to a career for his daughter Louisa. And here she is miles ahead of her age, the age that considered marriage the only honourable career for a woman. "Your daughters--no more than your sons--should be a burden on your hands. Your daughters--as much as your sons--should aim at making their way honourably through life. Do you not wish to keep them at home? Believe me, teachers may be hard-worked, ill-paid and despised, but the girl who stays at home doing nothing is worse off than the hardest-wrought and worst-paid drudge of a school. Whenever I have seen, not merely in humble but in affluent houses, families of daughters sitting waiting to be married, I have pitied them from my heart. It is doubtless well--very well--if Fate decrees them a happy marriage; but, if otherwise, give their existence some object, their time some occupation, or the peevishness of disappointment, and the listlessness of idleness will infallibly degrade their nature.... Lonely as I am, how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career...? How should I be with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where there is not a single educated family? In that case I should have no world at all. As it is, something like a hope and a motive sustains me still. I wish all your daughters--I wish every woman in England, had also a hope and a motive."

Whatever the views of Charlotte Brontë's heroines may or may not have been, these were her own views--sober, sincere, and utterly dispassionate. Mrs. Oliphant set them aside, either in criminal carelessness, or with still more criminal deliberation, because they interfered with her theory. They are certainly not the views of a woman given to day-dreaming and window-gazing. Lucy Snowe may have had time for window-gazing, but not Charlotte Brontë, what with her writing and her dusting, sweeping, ironing, bed-making, and taking the eyes out of the potatoes for poor old Tabby, who was too blind to see them. Window-gazing of all things! Mrs. Oliphant could not have fixed upon a habit more absurdly at variance with Charlotte's character.

For she was pure, utterly and marvellously pure from sentimentalism, which was (and she knew it) the worst vice of the Victorian age. Mr. Leslie Stephen said that, "Miss Brontë's sense of humour was but feeble." It was robust enough when it played with sentimentalists. But as for love, for passion, she sees it with a tragic lucidity that is almost a premonition. And her attitude was by no means that of the foredoomed spinster, making necessity her virtue. There was no necessity. She had at least four suitors (quite a fair allowance for a little lady in a lonely parish), and she refused them all. Twice in her life, in her tempestuous youth, and at a crisis of her affairs, she chose "dependence upon coarse employers" before matrimony. She was shrewd, lucid, fastidious, and saw the men she knew without any glamour. To the cold but thoroughly presentable Mr. Henry Nussey she replied thus: "It has always been my habit to study the character of those among whom I chance to be thrown, and I think I know yours and can imagine what description of woman would suit you for a wife. The character should not be too marked, ardent and original, her temper should be mild, her piety undoubted, and her personal attractions sufficient to please your eyes and gratify your just pride. As for me you do not know me...." She was only three-and-twenty when she wrote that, with the prospect of Stonegappe before her. For she had not, and could not have for him, "that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him; and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my husband". Later, in her worst loneliness she refused that ardent Mr. Taylor, who courted her by the novel means of newspapers sent with violent and unremitting regularity through the post. He represented to some degree the larger life of intellectual interest. But he offended her fastidiousness. She was sorry for the little man with his little newspaper, and that was all. She refused several times the man she ultimately married. He served a long apprenticeship to love, and Charlotte yielded to his distress rather than to her own passion. She describes her engaged state as "very calm, very expectant. What I taste of happiness is of the soberest order. I trust to love my husband. I am grateful for his tender love for me.... Providence offers me this destiny. Doubtless then it is the best for me."

These are not the words, nor is this the behaviour of Mrs. Oliphant's Charlotte Brontë, the forlorn and desperate victim of the obsession of matrimony.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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."