by E. F. Benson
Wordsworth appears not to have answered this letter, though he kept it, but eventually there came to Charlotte, long after she had gone back to Miss Wooler’s after the Christmas holidays, a reply from the Laureate. It was a kind, a long and a careful letter, but it was very far from being encouraging. He told her she had the faculty of verse, but reminded her that this was no rare gift: he felt bound when any young aspirant asked him for his advice about adopting literature as a profession, to caution him ‘against taking so perilous a course.’ Then came passages which surely laid an icy finger on her enthusiasm.
The day-dreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind.... Literature cannot be the business for a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.... However ill what has been said may accord with your present views and temper, the longer you live the more reasonable it will appear to you....
This letter was, in fact, quite as discouraging as Wordsworth’s silence to Branwell, and its discouragement was, for the present, effective. Charlotte wrote back saying, ‘I trust I shall never more feel ambitious to see my name in print: if the wish should rise, I’ll look at Southey’s letter and suppress it.’ She put away all literary ambition, and devoted her energies to the task of gaining such experience in teaching for herself and her sisters as should qualify them for the educational career which she had chosen for them all.
Southey lived long enough to see Jane Eyre take the world by storm and to know (if such information ever reached him) that the author of that book and of Shirley was the young lady to whom he had written that literature neither could nor ought to be the business of a woman’s life. But it must be remembered that Charlotte had sent to him (as had Branwell to Wordsworth) a specimen of her poetry, and, from what we know of it, he was as certainly right to discourage her muse as was Wordsworth in finding nothing to say to Branwell, for neither of them had any real gift for poetry at all. But it was perhaps odd that neither he nor Wordsworth perceived of what admirable prose (though that was not submitted to their judgment) their correspondents were capable. Both of them, when they were not being literary, wrote fine and apt English, rhythmical and dignified, with that indefinable verbal inevitability which is the hall-mark of the writer. Here, for instance, is a paragraph from Branwell’s letter to Wordsworth:
Do pardon me, sir, that I have ventured to come before one whose work I have most loved in our literature, and who most has been with me a divinity of the mind, laying before him one of my writings, and asking of him a judgment of its contents. I must come before someone from whose sentence there is no appeal, and such a one is he who has developed the theory of poetry as well as its practice, and both in such a way as to claim a place in the memory of a thousand years to come.
Any boy who at the age of nineteen could write that, had already a good command of his material; equally excellent, though by no means superior, and with a curious resemblance in rhythm and construction is the following from Charlotte’s letter to Southey. Her grip on words was already firm, and, when she was not trying to be literary or to write poetry, she had nothing to learn.
At the first perusal of your letter I felt only shame and regret that I had ever ventured to trouble you with my crude rhapsody: I felt a painful heat rise to my face when I thought of the quires of paper I had covered with what once gave me so much delight, but which now was only a source of confusion; but after I had thought a little and read it again and again the prospect seemed to clear.
But the oracle had spoken, and in obedience to it she entirely dismissed her dreams of Parnassus, and continued at Dewsbury Moor, where Miss Wooler had moved her school from Roe Head. Emily had spent six months as a teacher in Miss Patchett’s school near Halifax, pursuing the same object, but her health had broken down and she had returned to Haworth and its moors and its liberties, away from which she seemed to lose all health and happiness. Anne was still with Charlotte as a pupil at Miss Wooler’s, but just before the Christmas holidays of 1837 she began to suffer from coughs and pains which put Charlotte in mind of the illness of her two elder sisters at Cowan Bridge, and she thought these were symptoms of consumption. All allowance must be made for her, for she was overwrought and hysterical, and in a panic she went to Miss Wooler and, in what must have been a horrid scene, flew, as she confessed, ‘into a regular passion,’ which she considered perfectly justified, and told her that Anne was extremely ill and that Miss Wooler was quite indifferent to the danger. Miss Wooler was very much hurt at this monstrous accusation and wrote to Mr. Brontë, who, though he realised that Charlotte had been unreasonable, settled that they should both leave Dewsbury Moor and come home.
Miss Wooler, who had always shown the most motherly kindness and consideration to Charlotte, had a tearful scene of reconciliation with her before they went. Charlotte wrote to Ellen pouring scorn on the poor lady’s tears, but allowing that ‘in spite of her cold repulsive manners she had a considerable regard for me.’ She seems not to have realised that before. She went back after the Christmas holidays for another term at Miss Wooler’s, Anne and Emily and Branwell all remaining at home; but now she had a nervous breakdown, and returned in the early summer of 1838 to Haworth, where the whole family remained for a year. All her plans and ambitions for herself and her sisters had come to nothing as yet. Emily first, then Anne, and finally she herself had been obliged, for reasons of health, to give up the education and the experience in teaching which she had arranged with a view to their career: the oracles had been dumb or deeply discouraging when consulted about her poems and Branwell’s, and there was nothing whatever ahead. Never throughout her life was she optimistic; she expected little, as she told Mrs. Gaskell in after years, and was always prepared for disappointment, but no amount of disappointment, however embittering, caused her to relax her efforts in securing anything on which she had set her heart and which she believed was within attainment.
In the spring of 1839 Branwell, in pursuance of Art, left Haworth and the conviviality of the ‘Lodge of the Three Graces’ and took a studio at Bradford. His departure is perhaps commemorated in Emily’s poem Absence, dated April 19, 1839.
One is absent, and for one Cheerless, chill is our hearthstone; One is absent, and for him Cheeks are pale and eyes are dim.
It is usually stated that this refers to Anne, who had just gone out as governess to Mrs. Ingham: the gender of the pronoun, however, is hard to explain. At Bradford he painted a few portraits, but seems to have spent most of his time in the society of local artists and at the bars of hotels, and after a few months his father stopped supplies, and recalled him to Haworth. Much has been made of this incident: vivid embroideries have been stitched over it, and we learn from the Brontë-Saga that ‘he disappeared from Bradford heavily in debt and was lost to sight until, unnerved, a drunkard and an opium eater, he came back home.’ This lurid picture, however, has no shadow of foundation in fact. He never disappeared at all, except for those hours in which he was travelling back from Bradford to Haworth, nor is there any reason for supposing that he was in debt or that he had yet taken to opium.
In March of the same spring Henry Nussey, as we have already seen, proposed to Charlotte. He was now a curate at Donnington in Sussex, and wrote her a very businesslike letter, saying that after Easter he intended to take pupils into his house, and intimated (as Charlotte told his sister)
that in due time he should want a wife to take care of his pupils, and frankly me to be that wife. Altogether the letter is written without cant or flattery, and in a common-sense style which does credit to his judgment.
Charlotte refused this proposal, though the prospect of having Ellen to live with her was a strong temptation to accept it, on the very sensible grounds that she did not love him, and her letter to him, giving ‘a decided negative,’ was equally free from cant and flattery and might have been written not by the girl
he wanted to marry but by a sententious aunt.
In forming this decision [she told him] I trust I have listened to the dictates of conscience more than those of inclination. I have no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you, but I feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you. 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, her spirits even and cheerful, and her personal attractions sufficient to please your eyes and gratify your just pride.
This letter irresistibly reminds us of Jane Austen at her very best, and it is indeed no wonder that Charlotte in later years was so entirely incapable of appreciating her art, when we find her writing in all seriousness passages that could be cited as admirable examples of Jane Austen’s humour. Henry Nussey, we may guess, was no more in love with Charlotte than she with him, for little more than six months elapsed before he wrote to tell her that he had secured another young lady to look after the pupils at Donnington, and again she replied with just such edifying sentiments as Jane Austen gives to Mr. Collins when he retails the counsels of Lady Catherine de Bourgh on the subject of matrimony. In her letter of congratulation she said:
The step no doubt will by many of your friends be considered scarcely as a prudent one, since fortune is not amongst the number of the young lady’s advantages. For my own part I must confess that I esteem you the more for not hunting after wealth, if there be strength of mind, firmness of principle and sweetness of temper to compensate for the absence of that usually all powerful attraction.... The bread earned by honourable toil is sweeter than the bread of idleness, and mutual love and domestic calm are treasures far preferable to the possessions rust can corrupt and moths consume away.
She continued to encourage and advise him, and wrote again to her ex-suitor shortly before his marriage:
From what you say of your future partner I doubt not she will be one who will help you to get cheerfully through the difficulties of this world and to obtain a permanent rest in the next; at least I hope such may be the case. You do right to conduct the matter with due deliberation, for on the step you are about to take depends the happiness of your whole lifetime.
Charlotte, when she thus refused matrimony as her destiny, had been three-quarters of a year at Haworth, and during this period she seems to have written nothing whatever: Southey’s discouragement was evidently potent with her. But Emily all the time was at work, secretly and constantly, on her poems, and Charlotte knew nothing of them. Many of them were concerned with the Gondals, and possibly therefore Anne, but Anne alone, was privy to them. But Emily did not confide them to her elder sister, for when, six years later, Charlotte ‘discovered them,’ as she tells us in her memoir of her two sisters after their death, she says that she was aware, but no more, that Emily did write poetry, but up to that time she had seen none of it. Earlier, as she tells us, they used to talk to each other about what they were writing, but that habit must already have ceased, since the discovery of Emily’s poems gave her her first sight of them. This is rather important, for it goes against the assertion, constantly made by Mrs. Gaskell, that there existed between Emily and Charlotte a deep and intense intimacy. There is no evidence for this. The evidence, in fact, which becomes cumulative, goes to show that Emily and Charlotte were never intimate in any real sense, and the first glimpse we get of that is that during this year at Haworth, while the sisters were together and Emily wrote a considerable number of poems, Charlotte knew nothing of them.
Anne meantime had regained such measure of strength as was ever hers, and in April 1839 she went forth from Haworth again, and for five out of the next six years was a governess. She went first to the family of Mrs. Ingham at Blake Hall where, as Charlotte wrote to Ellen, she was very kindly treated; she added, humorously no doubt, but rather acidly, that owing to Anne’s habit of silence she ‘seriously apprehends that Mrs. Ingham will sometime conclude that she has a natural impediment of speech.’ A month or so later Charlotte obtained a similar situation herself and went as governess to the children of Mrs. John Benson Sidgwick at Stonegappe, a few miles out of Skipton.
Less fortunate than Anne, she appears from her letters to have fallen among fiends. The place, she wrote to Emily, was beautiful, and she tried hard to be happy, but her life was an intolerable slavery. The children were ‘the most riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs ever born,’ and she refers to them as ‘little devils incarnate.’ Mrs. Sidgwick did not know her, and did not want to know her. Her manners were
fussily affable, she talks a great deal but little to the purpose.... She cares nothing in the world about me except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity of labour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end she overwhelms me with oceans of needlework.... I see now more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil.
Mr. Sidgwick was not such a brute as his wife, ‘he has less bustling condescension but a far kinder heart.... He never asks me to wipe the children’s smutty noses or tie their shoes or fetch their pinafores or get them a chair.’ The only pleasant afternoon that she spent at Stonegappe was when he walked with his children and his dog, and Charlotte had orders to ‘follow a little behind.’ She tells Emily not to show this depiction of hell to her aunt or her father, or they would think ‘I am never satisfied wherever I am.’ This caution is significant.
After a few weeks the whole family went to stay at Swarcliffe, near Harrogate, a country house belonging to Mrs. Sidgwick’s father, and, she writes to Ellen, life was more miserable than ever. Mr. Greenwood had filled his house with guests, who were gay and enjoyed themselves; there was a large family party, ‘proud as peacocks and wealthy as jews,’ and all the time, as Charlotte bitterly complains, she had a set of ‘pampered, spoilt, and turbulent children’ to look after. She was in agonies of shyness and in the depth of depression, and to crown all, Mrs. Sidgwick took her to task for her glum demeanour, and she broke down and cried. Then she pulled herself together and reflected that ‘Adversity is a good school — the Poor are born to labour, and the Dependent to endure.’ She recollected the fable of the Willow and the Oak, and bent to the storm. Mrs. Sidgwick, she allowed, was generally considered an agreeable woman, ‘But, oh, Ellen, does this compensate for the absence of every fine feeling, of every gentle and delicate sentiment?’
Now it wrings the heart to picture the woe and the wretchedness of this extremely sensitive, self-conscious girl, whose shyness was such an obsession to her that throughout her life the presence of a stranger would plunge her into gulfs of silent misery, and it warms the heart to think of her indomitable courage in going forth not once only but again and again to take situations which necessarily threw her among strangers, for the sake of contributing to the family finances, and advancing the ambitions which she had determined to accomplish for herself and her sisters. This iron willpower scorned the miseries which were incidental to the working out of its purpose, and though she bitterly complained, and increasingly formed the most censorious conclusions about those who unwittingly incurred them, she never allowed her unhappiness to deter her. Further instances of these characteristic traits in her character, admirable and regrettable, emerge later. But together with her memories of Stonegappe and Swarcliffe she brought away some valuable material for the ruthless caricaturing in Jane Eyre of the guests, whose callous gaiety was etching itself in the mind of the silent little governess, and was to be reproduced with ridicule that was indeed ridiculous, in the figures of the smart party, ‘Baroness Ingram of Ingram Hall’ and the rest, who swept about Mr. Rochester’s house, and told the footman ‘to cease thy chatter, blockhead,’ and took no notice of Jane Eyre.
> This wretched experience lasted but for three months, and once more, exhausted and nerve-racked, she returned in July 1839 to Haworth. Here she recovered her spirits and her speech: she was not shy at home, she talked with ease among familiar faces, and within a week or two of her return she received her second proposal of marriage, again from a clerical admirer. There came to spend the day a former curate of Mr. Brontë’s, now a vicar. With him Mr. Hodgson brought his own curate, Mr. Bryce, who had lately left Dublin University. Mr. Bryce, Charlotte wrote to Ellen, was a witty, lively young man, lacking in discretion and dignity, but though she saw his faults, she was amused at his originality, and laughed at his jests. Before the evening was over his ‘Hibernian flattery’ caused her to cool towards him, and off the visitors went having left a pleasant though no permanent impression. A few days afterwards, Charlotte, to her amazement and amusement, received a proposal of marriage from young Mr. Bryce, ardently professing his attachment. Another decided refusal followed. Six months later Mr. Bryce died suddenly, and Charlotte confesses that when she heard of it she felt both shocked and saddened; ‘it was no shame to feel so, was it?’
Charlotte remained at Haworth, after leaving Mrs. Sidgwick’s house of bondage, for nearly two years before she took another situation as governess, and her letters of the period, sometimes pungent and censorious, sometimes elderly and hortatory, sometimes childlike and brimming with eager enthusiasm and sly ironies, paint her own portrait with a vividness and a fidelity that no biographer can hope to rival, and one is tempted to believe that had she never written anything whatever except letters, she would have won through them a niche in English literature at least as permanent as Horace Walpole’s. She infuses her subject, whatever it is, with the intense interest which it had for her, and at the same time enthralls us with a study of herself. We read, for instance, how she and Ellen had made a plan to go together to the seaside. Miss Branwell and Mr. Brontë had given ‘a reluctant assent,’ and Charlotte’s box was packed. Then there was a difficulty about her conveyance, for Haworth’s only gig was at Harrogate, and likely to remain there. Mr. Brontë objected to Charlotte’s going by coach, and Miss Branwell changed her reluctant assent to the whole scheme for ‘decided disapproval,’ and the visit was abandoned. But then Ellen descended on Haworth with a carriage lent her for the occasion, and like Perseus, rescued Andromeda. Charlotte wept with emotion when, now for the first time, she saw the sea, and they had a marvellous holiday together. She left her spectacles behind, and on her return to Haworth could neither read, write, nor draw with any comfort, but hoped that the landlady of their lodgings would not refuse to give them up. Another pair of spectacles, apparently, was not to be thought of. Trivial as all this is, the intensity of the experience to her renders it enthralling, and it is because it is about a young lady of twenty-three who lived in a remote parsonage, and tells us with inimitable vividness about herself, and not in the least because that young lady a few years afterwards wrote Jane Eyre, that we are absorbed in what she has to say. Almost next day she wrote to Henry Nussey, in a letter already quoted, as if she was his guardian aunt, commending him for not seeking a wealthy wife; but we find these edifications, which show the serious side of her character, hardly more informative than the news that Tabby had become so lame that she left the Parsonage and had gone to live with her sister.
