Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

Madame Héger had looked upon Charlotte when she was at Brussels as a highly excitable, nervous girl, whom she did not at all understand. Her farewell words when she left, Je me vengerai, were not pleasant, and perhaps portended trouble; it was as well to bear them in mind. Then her letters began to arrive; her husband (as we have seen) tore them up after reading them, threw them into the waste-paper basket, and dictated his replies to his wife. One (the first of those that survive) he did not tear up, and his wife read it and kept it. Having found out in what terms Charlotte was writing to him, she felt that her general apprehensions as to what a hysterical girl like this might do were justified, and when other letters came and he tore them up, she rescued them from the waste-paper basket whenever she had the opportunity, pieced them together and kept them also. They confirmed what she had always thought, and in case there was trouble with Charlotte, it would be useful to have them. At least one of them, moreover, had been addressed to her husband, not at the pensionnat in the Rue d’Isabelle, but at the Athénée Royal, where he held a Latin class for boys. Then in course of time the letters ceased, for after two years Charlotte wrote no more, and as far as M. Héger then knew, no letter of hers to him was in existence, for he had put them into the waste-paper basket.

  Over twenty years later, when the Brontës had become famous, there was a lecture delivered at Brussels by a literary Frenchman on the subject of ‘The Brontës.’ Mdlle. Louise Héger attended it, and was horrified to hear her father and mother held up to the execration of the audience for their cruelty and barbarity to the two sisters when at Brussels; the lecturer illustrated his remarks by quotations from Villette. She told her mother on her return home what had been said, and in answer Mme. Héger took her to her room, opened her jewel-case, and showed her the four letters of Charlotte to her father which she had pieced together and kept, bidding her read them. The devotion they showed towards him adequately disposed of the idea that he had treated her with barbarity, and shed an entirely new light on the situation. Mdlle. Louise understood, and the letters were then replaced in their cache.

  Madame Héger died in 1889, leaving to Louise her jewel-case and its contents, among which were the letters. She took them to her father, who was engaged in going through and destroying papers of his wife’s. He recognised them, and, astonished and ill-pleased to know that they were still in existence, threw them once more into the waste-paper basket. Louise thought that her father was not in the mood to give careful consideration to the fate of these letters which her mother had been at pains to preserve for so long; they should not be destroyed without due reflection, and presently, when her father had left the room, she did exactly as her mother had done forty-five years before, took them out of the waste-paper basket, and again kept them. Thus though M. Héger, when they were eventually published, was roundly abused (especially by those who had so conclusively proved that Charlotte was never in love with him) for having kept them at all, it turns out that, as far as his intention was concerned, he had twice destroyed them. Mdlle. Louise then consulted a French friend on the wisdom of keeping the letters. He strongly recommended her to do so, since they were now of the highest literary interest. After her father’s death she showed them to her brother, Professor Paul Héger, and eventually a family council was held as to what should be done with them. One member of it maintained that such fervour of expression pointed to guilty intercourse between M. Héger and Charlotte, and it is certainly possible that this construction might be put upon them by those who did not know the circumstances. But neither Professor Héger nor his sister, to whom the letters belonged, wished to destroy them, and in 1913 they brought them to England to consult Mr. Marion Spielmann, whose judgment they trusted, about their fate. On his advice they consented to the publication, and presented the letters themselves to the British Museum.

  Constantin Héger

  Mdlle. Louise Héger’s narrative, as here abridged, is obviously trustworthy; she alone knew the history of the letters, and there is no reason to suspect that it is other than completely reliable, and we can accept it without reservations. But there is one point which may already have struck the reader and which requires examination. It is this.

  Mdlle. Louise was not the only person who read these letters during their incarceration in her mother’s jewel-case. Mrs. Gaskell read them also, for in her Life of Charlotte Brontë she quotes verbatim from three of them, piecing together paragraphs of two of them, and giving a few sentences from a third. Nothing that she quotes gives the faintest hint of their essential contents, there is not a word that a girl might not with the utmost propriety have written to her master; Charlotte thanks him for his kindness to her, she sends messages to Madame and the children. But Mrs. Gaskell certainly read the letters, and since they had remained in Brussels from the time when they were written and posted at Haworth till they were brought to England in 1913, she must therefore have seen them when she went to Brussels in 1856 to collect materials and mise en scène concerning Charlotte’s life at the pensionnat. But they were then, according to Mdlle. Louise’s account, reposing in her mother’s jewel-case, having been rescued by her from the waste-paper basket where M. Héger had thrown them, and pieced together. Who, then, showed them to Mrs. Gaskell? Not Madame Héger, for, knowing that she was a friend of Charlotte’s, she refused to see her. It has always been supposed that it was the delineation of herself in Villette that led to this refusal, but the French translation of the book (Mme. Héger knew no English) had only just appeared, and it is a pure assumption to suppose that Mme. Héger had read it. But she had read Charlotte’s letters to her husband, and she had no need to seek further for a reason for not consenting to see Mrs. Gaskell. In any case she did not, and, since she is ruled out, the only person who could have shown Mrs. Gaskell the letters was M. Héger himself. She had an interview with him; she liked and respected him, and they talked about his correspondence with Charlotte, for M. Héger begged her to read his letters to her; he felt sure she would have kept them, and they contained ‘advice about her character, studies, mode of life.’ M. Héger in fact, it becomes plain, showed Mrs. Gaskell Charlotte’s letters (from which she made judicious extracts) and was anxious that she should see how properly he answered them. I therefore venture to suggest — it is a theory only, but one that solves our difficulty — that Mme. Héger’s reason for not seeing Mrs. Gaskell was Charlotte’s letters, and that she said, in effect, to her husband: ‘Show them to Mrs. Gaskell and she will understand why I won’t see her.’ Out came the letters from the jewel-case, and, Mrs. Gaskell having read them they were returned there again.... This conjecture does not, however, invalidate the general credibility of Mdlle. Louise’s narrative to Mr. Spielmann. M. Héger knew that in 1856 his wife was still keeping the letters, but it is no wonder that on her death thirty-three years later it was a matter of surprise to him that they were still in existence. Probably he had forgotten all about them.

  It remains to consider Mrs. Gaskell’s decision to omit from her Life of Charlotte Brontë the whole story of her having fallen in love with M. Héger, of her having written those letters which so indubitably prove it, and to exclude from her book any incident, any hint that might, in her opinion, have given rise to conjecture. It was an important decision, for she was the official biographer, and she must have thought that her book, a model of apparently exhaustive research, would probably remain for all time the final work on the family in general, and on Charlotte in particular, for so ample a Life would surely be definitive. But she must also have known that she was omitting not only the most profound emotional experience of her heroine herself, but one out of which sprang her best and noblest work, for there can be no doubt that without it Villette would never have been written. Nothing more important psychically or mentally ever happened to her, and Mrs. Gaskell, knowing all, decided to say nothing about it, and remove all traces of it. Nothing in her book suggests the possibility of such an entanglement; she even invents a reason for Mme. Héger’s coldness to Charlotte.
Some biographers, no doubt, if this decision had been presented to them, would have abandoned their work altogether, sooner than falsify its essential truth by such an omission; Mrs. Gaskell thought otherwise, and having formed her loyal and admiring conception of the figure she wished to present, scrapped (with or without compunction) what she knew was of first-rate importance for a faithful portrait.

  But there is another side to the question. The disclosure which M. Héger made to her of Charlotte’s letters not only must have been a great shock to her (so great that she could not biographically deal with it at all), but would be equally or more shocking to Charlotte’s father and to her widower, at whose instance she had undertaken the work. They knew nothing, so far as we know, of the whole Héger episode, or, at the most, they had read the extremely proper answers which M. Héger had returned, in the handwriting of his wife, to the letters which Mrs. Gaskell alone had seen. She was full of enthusiasm for her task; she knew, rightly, that it was in her power to make a charming picture of the woman whose work she so admired, and for whom she had so genuine an affection. Though she did publish gossipy stories about Mr. Brontë which, owing to his justifiable indignation she was obliged to withdraw, it was quite another thing to publish far more serious matter which she was perfectly able to substantiate. It was better to say nothing at all about it, to delete anything that might point to it, to invent reasons why Mme. Héger disliked and distrusted Charlotte, to account for her unhappiness at Brussels by the supposition that Branwell was causing grave anxiety — to do anything and everything in order to conceal what she imagined would never be disclosed. The odds in her favour were enormous, but the hundred-to-one chance went against her, and to us to-day Charlotte Brontë is a vastly more human and interesting figure than she ever could have been if it had not.

  CHAPTER X

  For a year and a half after Charlotte’s final return from Brussels, she and Emily were alone with their father at the Parsonage, Branwell and Anne coming there only for their holidays from Thorp Green. Her letters during this period are few, and they all betoken the deep disquiet and depression and the bitterness of heart that were growing on her. Indeed, the lights were turned very low: her literary ambitions for the time were dead (or, as she wrote to M. Héger, her failing eyesight made it impossible for her to write), not a line of a poem nor a page of prose seems to have been written by her during this period; her friend Mary Taylor, despairing of occupation for an energetic young woman in England, went out to New Zealand; Branwell, though still giving satisfaction in his situation, was making trouble at home, and though Charlotte says nothing definite we may assume that he was drinking. ‘He has been more than ordinarily tiresome and annoying of late; he leads Papa a wretched life,’ is one of her comments on the conduct of him with whom she had once been the most intimate ally. She had come home from Brussels admirably equipped, a competent scholar in French and German, but no pupil sought to learn of her; she had obtained a certificate with the seal of the Athénée Royal at Brussels, bearing witness to her efficiency as a teacher, and Constantin Héger had signed it, but his name there served only to sharpen her heart’s hunger. She had begged for the crumbs that fell from his table to assuage it, but all she got was letters in the handwriting of his wife, advising her about her studies and her mode of life. Activity, some scheme, some ambition, over which she could employ the self-poisoned energies of her soul, was what she longed for; but the scheme that had occupied her for years was derelict, her ambitions were dead, and her heart emptily aching. There was only bitterness to look back on, and a blank to look forward to.

  It is true that she had Emily with her, but in spite of the oft-reiterated statement that there was a bond of passionate devotion between the two sisters, we search in vain for any expression of it during Emily’s lifetime. Once, when Charlotte was governess at Mrs. Sidgwick’s, she wrote a letter to her sister beginning, ‘Mine bonnie love,’ but otherwise, until Emily’s short and final illness, we can find no token in Charlotte’s letters of the affection, nor yet of the love that involuntarily betrays itself. As Emily’s and Anne’s quadrennial papers show, it was they who were the united couple, and before now estranging circumstances had occurred between the other two. Emily who, as Charlotte knew, was wretched away from Haworth, had been taken to Brussels, where had it not been for Miss Branwell’s death she would have remained for six months more; she had been desperately unhappy there, and the only allusions Charlotte had made to her was that she and M. Héger did not ‘draw well together,’ and that subsequently the Hégers began to recognise ‘her good points below her singularities.’ Then Charlotte had gone back to Brussels alone, and hearing of the burden of household work that lay on Emily’s shoulders, had hoped that her father would soon get another servant. Emily was lonely, and she was glad that old Tabby had returned to the Parsonage — she would be a companion for her sister; but it did not occur to her to go back herself. Nor, on Emily’s side, is there the slightest expression of affection for Charlotte: she hoped that Ellen might manage to go out to Brussels, otherwise Charlotte might stop on there all the days of Methuselah sooner than face the crossing. Emily, no doubt, was intensely reserved, and not even to Anne did she show her secret life, but to Charlotte she showed nothing at all. If she ever had any deep affection for her, it was so completely concealed that not even when the shadow of death was on her did she reach out a hand to her. At present, and indeed up to the end, before which further cause for estrangement had occurred, Emily’s attitude towards Charlotte was one of resentful indifference. Such are the only conclusions we can draw from their meagre references to each other.

  Throughout this year and a half there is no sign that Emily’s companionship was any consolation for the deadness of Charlotte’s whole life. They walked on the moors together, they sewed shirts, the little cat died and Emily was sorry. But otherwise, as Charlotte wrote to her friend towards the end of this period:

  I can hardly tell you how time gets on at Haworth. There is no event whatever to mark its progress. One day resembles another, and all have heavy, lifeless physiognomies. Sunday, baking day, and Saturday, are the only ones that have any distinctive mark. Meantime life wears away. I shall soon be thirty, and I have done nothing yet. Sometimes I get melancholy at the prospect before and behind me. Yet it is wrong and foolish to repine. Undoubtedly my duty directs me to stay at home for the present. There was a time when Haworth was a very pleasant place to me; it is not so now. I feel as if we are all buried here. I long to travel, to work, to lead a life of action.

  It was now that Charlotte began to take notice, for future use in Shirley, of the famous curates. Including Mr. A. B. Nicholls, of whom she eventually became the devoted wife, there were four of them, though only two were Mr. Brontë’s curates, and she viewed them all with the most unfavourable eye, very different from that with which she had observed that arch-flirt William Weightman, whose susceptibility had supplied such thrilling interest to her and Ellen. He had died while Charlotte was spending her first year with Emily at Brussels, and his successor was James William Smith, who appears in Shirley as Peter Augustus Malone. She at first suspected him, as she had suspected Mr. Weightman, of having matrimonial designs on Ellen, and she alludes to him as the Rev. Lothario Smith. He had said in reference to Ellen: ‘Yes, she is a nice girl — rather quiet; I suppose she has money.’ Charlotte thought these words spoke volumes— ‘they do not prejudice me in favour of Mr. Smith.’ Mr. Brontë shared these misgivings: they both thought ‘that Mr. Smith is a very fickle man, that if he marries he will soon get tired of his wife, and consider her as a burden, also that money will be a principal consideration with him in marrying.’ He went for a six weeks’ holiday to Ireland: ‘Nobody regrets him, because nobody could attach themselves to one who could attach himself to nobody.... Yet the man is not without points that will be most useful to him in getting through life. His good qualities, however, are all of the selfish order.’ While he was gone Joseph Brett Grant (Mr. Donne of
Shirley), master of the Haworth Grammar School, took his duty for the time, and ‘filled his shoes decently enough — but one cares naught about these sort of individuals, so drop them.’ Then Mr. Smith left Haworth, took a curacy at Keighley, four miles off, and was succeeded by A. B. Nicholls (Mr. Macarthey of Shirley). A respectable young man: Charlotte hoped he would give satisfaction. But those hopes were disappointed, for six months afterwards she wrote to Ellen, saying: ‘I cannot for my life see those interesting germs of goodness in him you discovered, his narrowness of mind strikes me chiefly. I fear he is indebted to your imagination for the hidden treasure.’ Nor did he rise at all in her esteem, for in 1846, in answer to some sort of badinage on Ellen’s part with regard to a rumour that Charlotte might be going to marry him, she told her that there was nothing but a ‘cold, far away sort of civility between them,’ and that he and ‘all the other curates are highly uninteresting, narrow and unattractive members of the coarser sex.’ As for his parochial efficiency, we learn that when he went to Ireland on a holiday ‘many of the parishioners express a desire that he should not trouble himself to recross the Channel. This is not the feeling that ought to exist between shepherd and flock.’

  The fourth, James Chesterton Bradley (figuring in Shirley as David Sweeting), was curate at Oakworth, a hamlet not more than a mile from Haworth. Three of them thus lived close to the Parsonage, and, so Charlotte writes to Ellen, ‘God knows there is not one to mend another’: curates seemed to her ‘a self-seeking, vain, empty race.’ Indeed, they were a sore trial.

  The other day [we read] they all three accompanied by Mr. Smidt (of whom by the way I have grievous things to tell you) dropped or rather rushed in unexpectedly to tea. It was Monday (baking day) and I was hot and tired, still, if they had behaved quietly and decently I would have served them out their tea in peace, but they began glorifying themselves and abusing Dissenters in such a manner that my temper lost its balance, and I pronounced a few sentences sharply and rapidly, which struck them all dumb. Papa was greatly horrified also. I don’t regret it....