Charlotte had never lost her passion for acquiring knowledge and now, for the first time in ten years, she had a legitimate reason to submerge herself in an entirely selfish pursuit of learning. Describing the Pensionnat Heger to Ellen Nussey as a large school of forty day-pupils and twelve boarders, she drew analogies with Roe Head. Madame Heger reminded her of Catherine Wooler – she had ‘precisely the same cast of mind degree of cultivation & quality of character’ though her ‘severe points’ were softened because she was a married lady. The three teachers, Mesdemoiselles Blanche, Sophie and Marie, she dismissed as an old maid, a potential one and a talented and original lady whose manners were so repulsive and arbitrary that she had alienated all the pupils except the Brontës. Seven masters also came in to teach the seven branches of learning: French, drawing, music, singing, writing, arithmetic and German.4 One person alone had already made an outstanding impression upon Charlotte and that was Monsieur Heger, who taught the girls French literature.
There is one individual of whom I have not yet spoken M Heger the husband of Madame – he is professor of Rhetoric a man of power as to mind but very choleric & irritable in temperament – a little, black, ugly being with a face/ that varies in expression, sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane Tomcat – sometimes those of a delirious Hyena – occasionally – but very seldom he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not above a hundred degrees removed from what you would call mild & gentleman-like he is very angry with me just at present because I have written a translation which he chose to stigmatize as peu correct – not because it was particularly so in reality but because he happened to be in a bad humour when he read it – he did not tell me so – but wrote the accusation on the margin of my book and asked
Emily and he don’t draw well together at all – when he is very ferocious with me I cry – & that sets all things straight. Emily works like a horse and she has had great difficulties to contend with/ – far greater than I have had
If Charlotte quickly recognized extraordinary powers in Monsieur Heger, he was not slow to realize the ability of his new pupils. They had begun their education on the usual system, preparing grammatical and syntactical exercises, taking down dictation and extending their vocabulary by copying and translating words and phrases. Having quietly observed their progress, Monsieur Heger decided that they were capable of something more advanced. He proposed to do what he had sometimes done with other older and abler pupils: read them some of the finest passages from French literature, discuss and analyse them together and then get the sisters to reproduce their own thoughts in a similar style. His suggestion was received less than graciously. Emily gave it short shrift, saying she saw no good to be derived from the plan, which would result only in them losing all originality of thought and expression. Charlotte, less belligerently, also doubted the benefits of the scheme but was prepared to try it out simply because she felt bound to obey her teacher.6 In this unpromising way began the lessons which were to have such a tremendous influence on the Brontës. They subjected Charlotte, in particular, to a new and not unwelcome discipline which was ultimately to transform the whole way she was accustomed to write, releasing her from the verbiage of Angria and setting her firmly on the road to spare and elegant prose.
Frederika Macdonald, who was a pupil at the Pensionnat Heger nineteen years after Charlotte, described Monsieur Heger’s method in greater detail.
He would read aloud some eloquent, pathetic, or amusing passage from a classical French author. He would then analyse this passage, and signalise its beauties or criticise its defects. Afterwards he would either himself suggest, or allow his pupils to select, a subject for composition, attuned to the same key, either grave or gay, of the model of excellence he had given; but of a sufficiently different character to make anything resembling unintelligent imitation impossible … The pupil was supposed to write in her own note-book a rough copy of the composition, leaving a wide margin for corrections. The fair copy of the exercise given Monsieur Héger was also to have a wide margin … when the corrected exercise was returned the pupil was held to verify the remarks made, and to re-write the composition, for her own benefit only, with the improvements suggested.
Frequently the exercises would be discussed and criticized in class, the writer being called upon to defend her opinions or a particular choice of phrase. An exercise which met with Monsieur Heger’s favour would have to be copied out again and presented to him to keep.7
This method of teaching can be seen working in practice in the essays Charlotte and Emily wrote throughout the summer of 1842. Around two dozen have survived, slightly less than half of them by Emily. At least three of Charlotte’s earliest compositions can be traced back to their source pieces, which Charlotte transcribed into one of her notebooks. ‘The Sick Girl’, written on 18 April, was based on Alexandre Soumet’s poem, ‘La Pauvre Fille’, which her essay followed closely, opening with the same observation that sleep is a stranger to the bed of sickness and using the same images of the sun’s rays on the mountain and the child’s exclusion from the play of her friends; at the end, however, she departed from her original source and allowed the girl to recover.8
‘Evening Prayer in a Camp’, written on 26 April, was more adventurous. The stimulus for this piece was the concept of the incongruity of Christian prayers being said on board ship in the middle of a vast ocean which was taken from Chateaubriand’s ‘Priére du Soir â bord d’un vaisseau’. Charlotte transposed the scene to an Egyptian desert, added to the power of the image by turning those at prayer into soldiers on the eve of battle and strengthened the contrast by placing them in the confines of a heathen temple.9
The third essay, ‘Anne Askew’, written on 2 June, was an ‘Imitation’ and therefore the closest of all to its source, ‘Eudore. Moeurs Chrétiennes IV Siècle’, also by Chateaubriand. The story of Eudore told how this early Christian was faced with being thrown to the lions for his faith; on the evening before his death he received a letter saying that his fiancée had been condemned to be the mistress of another man but would be restored to him undefiled if he sacrificed to the gods. Urged by his companions to make the sacrifice, Eudore went to do so but at the last minute dashed down the libations and declared, ‘I am a Christian.’ Charlotte again gave the story a different twist, making the central figure Anne Askew, the English Protestant martyr who was burnt at the stake during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary. Charlotte began in almost exactly the same words as Chateaubriand: ‘In the reign of Mary, Queen of England, a young girl named Anne Askew was about to be put to the rack.’ Like Eudore, Anne receives a letter, in her case from the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, offering her a pardon if she will recant. Half dazed by the torture and tempted to end her sufferings Anne begins to sign the letter but, remembering that only the body can die, she returns voluntarily to the rack, declaring ‘I am a Protestant.’10 One can only wonder what Monsieur Heger, a devout Catholic, thought of his pupil’s choice of subject and her defiant conversion of a
universal Christian martyr into a specifically Protestant one.
At other times, the passages chosen by Monsieur Heger for study would only be allowed to suggest a subject. One such example was Victor Hugo’s account of Mirabeau at the Tribune, in which he pointed out both the faulty ‘exaggeration in conception’ and the successful nuances of expression. Monsieur Heger then left his pupils to choose their own topic because, he said, ‘it is necessary, before sitting down to write on a subject, to have thoughts and feelings about it. I cannot tell on what subject your heart and mind have been excited.’11 On this particular occasion, Charlotte opted for Peter the Hermit, the preacher who had galvanized Europe into taking up the Crusade, while Emily chose King Harold of England on the eve of the Battle of Hastings. Charlotte’s version exalted the spirit of the man, that fire within him which would always compel him to rise above the mundane. Clearly she identified with him herself, returning to the theme of physical beauty which had haunted her since childhood.
Peter the Hermit’s strength was not merely physical strength for Nature, or rather, God, is impartial in the distribution of gifts, giving one grace, beauty, bodily perfection, another spirit and moral greatness. Peter was a little man and not good-looking; but he had that courage, that steadfastness, that enthusiasm, that emotional energy which crushes all opposition and makes the will of one man become the law of a whole nation.12
Emily, on the other hand, set out to prove that a man could rise to the occasion. To do this she contrasted Harold, the king, in peace time and Harold, the hero, in war.
Harold united in himself all the energy, the power, all the hopes of one nation. Now he was no longer a king, he was a hero. The situation had transformed him; in peace undoubtedly he would have been like almost all other princes occupying a peaceful throne: a miserable slave in his palace, wearied with pleasure, deceived by flatterers, knowing, for he was not a complete fool, that he was the least free of all his people … Harold on the field of battle, without his palace, without his ministers, without his courtesans, without his splendour, without his luxury, having only his country’s sky above him and, beneath his feet, that land which his ancestors had held and which he will not abandon except with life; and Harold, surrounded by devoted hearts, who had entrusted him with their safety, their freedom, their existence – what a difference! A divine spirit shines in his eyes, visible to men as well as to his Creator – a multitude of human passions rise in him at the same time exalted, sanctified, nearly deified. His courage has no element of rashness, his pride of arrogance, his indignation of injustice, that assurance of presumption. He is inwardly convinced that no mortal power could defeat him. Death, alone, could snatch victory from his arms – and Harold is ready to submit to her because the touch of her hand is to heroes what the blow striking off his shackles is to the slave.13
Mrs Gaskell rightly considered Emily’s essay superior in both power and imagination to Charlotte’s,14 though her command of French vocabulary and idiom did not yet rival that of her elder sister. Indeed, both girls had had only four months’ tuition at this stage, so their achievement was already remarkable.
In some of the exercises, it is possible to make a direct comparison between Charlotte’s and Emily’s version of the same piece. Both sisters wrote an undated essay, for instance, on the siege of Oudenarde. Charlotte’s, as befitted someone who had worshipped military heroes from childhood, concentrates on Simon de Lalaing, the heroic captain of the besieged town, who inspires courage and endurance in his defenders. When his two sons are captured by the enemy, Simon is forced to choose between seeing them executed before his eyes or handing over the keys of the town.
A terrible struggle tore apart his heart – for several minutes he said not a word – he covered his eyes with his hand and leant his brow against the battlemented wall. Soon he rose – his face pale and his lips bloodless – and replied in a firm loud voice, ‘If my children die, God will take them to his breast, I have only a duty to fulfil, which is to remain faithful to my country – Men of Ghent, I am not defeated, take yourselves off.’15
In the event, the men of Ghent refused to commit such an atrocity and the town was relieved. Then, obviously following her original source, Charlotte ended by stating that there was no more noble example from ancient history.
Marcus Curtius, throwing himself into the gaping fissure which had opened in the middle of the Forum was not moved by a courage more sublime than the commander of Oudenarde, sacrificing his feelings as a father to his principles as a patriot.16
Emily’s version of the same story takes a much less high-flown view of the events. She gives no prominence to Simon de Lalaing as the inspiration in the city’s defence but simply talks of the overwhelming numbers facing the besieged. Interestingly, too, where Charlotte gives the women her customary passive role by simply saying that they supported their commander and that Madame de Lalaing especially had shown herself worthy to be a soldier’s wife, Emily typically gives them a much more active part. ‘Even the women – that class condemned by the laws of society to be a heavy burden in every instance of action or danger, on this occasion put aside their degrading privileges and played a distinguished role in the defence.’17 Though Simon de Lalaing had been a much less important figure in her account, his terrible choice loses none of its dramatic force.
The commander looked at his sons who implored his aid with eyes full of tears, at their side he saw the soldiers, armed with swords, who would put them to death; he hesitated one moment, nature struggling hard against honour – his breast filled with overpowering emotion. But finally the patriot subdued the father and he turned to the men of Ghent saying ‘Take the life of these poor children, I cannot put it in the balance against the liberty of my country and as for their souls I commend them to God. My sentence is delivered’.18
Emily, too, drew the comparison with Marcus Curtius, but gave it a totally different emphasis: ‘there are more men who can leap with Marcus Curtius into a living tomb than can sacrifice, like Lalaing, the tenderest affections of the heart for love of their country’.19 While Charlotte had considered the individuals involved, believing Lalaing’s courage to surpass that of Marcus Curtius, Emily had turned the example into a general observation on mankind. Men are more often motivated to self-sacrifice by brute, unthinking courage than by a deliberate denial of the heart’s best feelings.
This air of cynicism is not one which runs through all Emily’s French exercises; her misanthropy – and her lack of conventional religious faith – have been vastly over-stated by her biographers. On 15 May, for example, she wrote an essay in defence of cats, attributing their commonly acknowledged bad qualities – hypocrisy, cruelty and ingratitude – to their close resemblance to humans. The cat playing with a mouse is no worse than the man who hunts a fox to the verge of death then throws it to the dogs, or the boy who crushes a butterfly in his hand. The cat’s hypocrisy is what humans call politeness ‘and anyone who does not employ it to disguise his true feelings would soon be driven out of society’. Even the cat’s notorious ingratitude is only another name for its penetration: it sees the motives of those who would bestow favours and judges them for what they are worth. The whole point of the essay, however, as Emily states emphatically at the beginning, is, ‘I can truthfully say that I like cats.’ ‘A cat is an animal who has more human feelings than almost any other being’, she tells us, yet their vices do not make her hate people any more than she hates cats. It is worth pointing out, too, that Charlotte also seems to have written an essay on the subject, now lost, which espoused exactly the same sentiments.20
‘Filial Love’, another essay, written on 5 August, is also often quoted as an illustration of Emily’s jaundiced view of mankind. Only men, she claims, require the threat of the commandment ‘Honour your father and mother if you wish to live’ to enforce their obedience.
It is a principle of nature that parents love their children, the doe does not fear the dogs when her little one is in danger, th
e bird dies on its nest; this instinct is a part of the divine spirit which we share with every animal which exists – and has not God put a similar sentiment in the heart of children? Something of it, certainly, and yet the voice of thunder cries ‘Honour your parents or you will die!’21
However, what the essay goes on to point out is that the vast majority of children do love their parents quite naturally: those who do not are instinctively shunned by the moral majority. Emily’s argument is that, while shunning such ‘monsters’, we should pity not condemn them.
The hour will come when conscience will awake, then there will be a terrible retribution; what mediator will then plead for the criminal? It is God who accuses him, What power can save the miserable man? It is God who condemns him. He has rejected happiness in his mortal life only to ensure torment in the eternal life. Let angels and men weep for his fate – he was their brother.22
A few days after this exercise, both sisters wrote on the subject of the caterpillar. For Charlotte it was an opportunity to compare God’s greatest creation, mankind, with his lowliest, a worm: the caterpillar ‘lives a crude, materialistic life: it eats and crawls today; it ate and crawled yesterday; it will eat and crawl tomorrow’. It is a symbol of Man’s grosser, earthly appetites and just as it apparently dies as a chrysalis only to be reborn as a butterfly, so the human dies in the body to achieve a purified rebirth in the resurrection.23 Emily took a much more imaginative approach in her essay. Walking through a forest, she questions why everything in the natural world tends to destruction:
Nature is an inexplicable problem; it exists on a principle of destruction; everything must be a tireless instrument of death to others or else cease to live itself, and in the meantime we celebrate the day of our birth and praise God for having entered into such a world.24
Brontës Page 59
