Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  But in case Mr. Taylor cared to come for the day, she gave the most minute directions how he was to get to Haworth from Leeds, pointing out the mischances that menaced him if he forgot to change at Shipley: in fact, though rather fluttered, she did not discourage the visit at all.

  Mr. Taylor came then, early in September, for the inside of a day, and they met again in London in the winter, when Charlotte went to stay with Mrs. Smith, her publisher’s mother. He certainly made a strong impression on her, though, as was usual with strangers, not wholly agreeable, for he had

  a determined, dreadful nose in the middle of his face (which after all was the usual place) which when poked into my countenance cuts into my soul like iron. Still he is horribly intelligent, quick, searching, sagacious, and with a memory of relentless tenacity. To turn to Williams after him or to Smith himself, is to turn from granite to easy down or warm fur.

  We may infer that he proposed to her then, for two passages in a letter she wrote to Ellen in September 1850, just nine months afterwards, strongly point to this. The first is:

  ‘Doubtless there are men whom if I chose to encourage I might marry, but no matrimonial lot is even remotely offered me which seems to me truly desirable.’

  She then refers to a letter she had received from Mr. Taylor (‘the little man’).

  I was somewhat surprised to receive his letter, having concluded nine months ago that there would be no more correspondence from that quarter.... This little Taylor is deficient neither in spirits nor sense.

  Something had evidently happened nine months ago which made her think that Mr. Taylor would not write again. But he had spirit and the sense to see that there was hope for him. So little Taylor persevered in his suit, causing Charlotte to waver, for à propos of some abstruse badinage on Ellen’s part about marriage (probably referring to George Smith), she wrote to her:

  The idea of the ‘little man’ shocks me less — it would be a more likely match if ‘matches’ were at all in question, which they are not.... 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 looked like yielding, and very likely she would have married him, had he not accepted an appointment to open a branch of Messrs. Smith, Elder in Bombay; this would take him out of England for five years. Charlotte wrote him two very proper letters, hoping that ‘the change of climate would not bring a risk to health,’ and referring to business as ‘a Moloch which demanded personal touch in the mention of his sacrifice, which was endorsed by the moral reflections that followed: such sacrifices.’ There is a faint but unmistakably personal touch in the mention of his sacrifice, which was endorsed by the moral reflections that followed:

  May your decision in the crisis through which you have gone result in the best effect on your happiness and welfare: and indeed, guided as you are by the wish to do right, and a high sense of duty, I trust it cannot be otherwise. The change of climate is all I fear, but Providence will overrule this, too, for the best — in Him you can believe and in Him only. You will want therefore neither solace nor support, though your lot will be cast as a stranger in a strange land.

  He had asked for a farewell interview, and in this same letter she gave him leave to come to Haworth and say good-bye. It would be a pleasure to see him, though that pleasure would be tinged with sadness. He came — and he said good-bye.

  But it is evident that she had expected something different from this last interview, and her letter to Ellen recording it is puzzled and surprised. She magnified this appointment which he had ‘reluctantly accepted’ into something tremendous. It was a ‘post of honour and danger’ (though to open a branch in a publishing house in Bombay does not seem desperately perilous), and duty had compelled him to take it. Anyhow, ‘he has been and is gone, things are just as they were. I feel there is a mystery about the transaction yet.’ The mystery really was that she could not make up her mind whether she had done right in refusing him, and she doubted it.

  And then, curiously and characteristically, in order to persuade herself of her wisdom in refusing him, she now began to see his bad points. ‘He looked much older and thinner. I saw him very near and once through my glass; the resemblance to Branwell struck me forcibly, it is marked.’ The lines in his face showed ‘an inflexibility and, I must add, a hardness of character which do not attract. As he stood near me, as he looked at me in his keen way, it was all I could do to stand my ground tranquilly and steadily, and not to recoil as before, and his manners were jarring.’ But already she found that ‘his absence, and the exclusion of his idea from her mind,’ left a blank she had not expected: at once she felt lonely and despondent. She determined to wean her mind from the subject, but with the very smallest measure of success, for her letters teem with speculations about the little man. Something perhaps had been said at that last interview as to whether, when he returned, she would reconsider her decision, but she doubted whether he could ever ‘be acceptable as a husband,’ and found yet more reasons against it. He had excellent and sterling qualities, but what discoveries of his imperfections!

  I looked for something of the gentleman — something I mean of the natural gentleman ... I could not find one gleam, I could not see one passing glimpse of true good-breeding; it is hard to say, but it is true. In mind too, though clever, he is second-rate, thoroughly second-rate. One does not like to say these things, but one had better be honest. Were I to marry him my heart would bleed in pain and humiliation. I could not, could not look up to him. No — if Mr. Taylor be the only husband Fate offers to me, single I must always remain. But yet at times I grieve for him and perhaps it is superfluous, for I cannot think he will suffer much; a hard nature, occupation and change of scene will befriend him....

  Again she found from friends in London that his temper left much to be desired; that was a point in favour of her decision, but against that must be set the fact that Mr. Brontë much liked him, and was extremely kind when he said good-bye to him,

  exhorting him to be true to himself, his country and his God, and wishing him all good wishes.... Whenever he has alluded to him since it has been with significant eulogy. When I alluded that he was no gentleman he seemed out of patience with me for the objection.... I believe he thinks a prospective union deferred for five years with such a decorous reliable personage would be a very proper and advisable affair.

  Perhaps Mr. Brontë even expected an immediate engagement, for he said that if she married now he would give up the Parsonage and live in lodgings. Altogether Charlotte found it a very puzzling business: she had refused Mr. Taylor and found a peck of admirable reasons for so doing, but she wondered if she had been wise, and thought it better to refer the responsibility of what she had done elsewhere. She had assured him of the protection of Providence in Bombay, and Providence had directed her also. ‘Most true it is,’ she wrote to Ellen after she saw him for the last time, ‘that we are overruled by one above us — that in His hands our very will is as clay in the hands of the potter.’

  So Mr. Taylor— ‘stern and abrupt little man’ — went out to Bombay. He wrote to Charlotte a rather realistic description of the processes of a Turkish bath, which he had gone to see though not to indulge in. He might have omitted, she thought, some of the details, but she found his description amusing, and it tallied with what Thackeray had said about the same pleasurable institution in Grand Cairo. But she could not refrain from moral reflections in her answer:

  The usage seems to me a little rough, and I cannot help thinking that equal benefit might be obtained through less violent means, but I suppose without the previous fatigue the after-sensation would not be so enjoyable and no doubt it is that indolent after-sensation which the self-indulgent Mahomedans chiefly cultivate. I think you did right to disdain it.

  She lamented, for his sake, ‘the deficiency
in all intellectual attractions’ at Bombay. She had not weaned him even yet from her mind, for she wrote to Mr. Williams asking him for an ‘impartial judgment’ on his character, and he spoke highly of him. But after that Mr. Taylor seems to have written no more to her, and that made her uneasy; she wondered whether the affair had come to an end. Once more, though less poignantly than when she waited to see whether the post brought her a letter from M. Héger, she was on the alert for the arrival of Indian mails, but still there was nothing for her, and she confessed she was disappointed. Several times Ellen asked if she had not heard, and eventually Charlotte begged her not to refer to the subject again: ‘All is silent as the grave.’ She never saw him again, for when at the end of his five years in Bombay he returned to England, she was dead.

  CHAPTER XV

  To return to Shirley. In that trying interval, before its appearance, of proof correcting and waiting for publication, Charlotte was in a high state of nervous tension. The story had been read by three members of the Smith, Elder firm (all of whom, of course, knew her identity, but were bound to secrecy), and Mr. Williams had criticised the whole presentation of the curates as being an irrelevant piece of caricature. She replied that they were positive photographs, they were as real as the Bible, they were True, and Truth was better than Art. She refused to give them up, but her real reason for retaining them (and she must have known it) was that she could not forgo the satisfaction of scarifying Messrs. Grant, Smith and Bradley under disguises that would deceive nobody, especially them. Once more she was extremely anxious that her sex as author should not be suspected by reviewers or by the public. She thought that a book by a woman was judged with ‘pitiful contempt,’ and hoped that Shirley would be considered so indubitably male in style and treatment that any doubts (of which there were already many) about the sex of the author of Jane Eyre would be finally set at rest.

  A more forlorn hope can scarcely be imagined, for though, in Jane Eyre, Edward Rochester might be thought to be the creation of a man, no male character in Shirley could possibly be thought to be other than the creation of a woman; no sign of a ‘peard’ can be detected beneath their mufflers. But this longing to be considered male was indeed an obsession with her, and she thought that everyone was leagued together to unmask her. Mr. Williams, for instance, in sending her a packet of proofs for correction had not sealed the cover securely, and it had been resealed at the General Post Office in London, and then forwarded to Haworth. Charlotte suspected in that a dark design against her secret, and, forgetting that the packet had been resealed in London, was convinced that it had been opened at the Post Office in Keighley. This she was sure was the work of ‘prying curiosity.... The gossiping inquisitiveness of small towns is rife at Keighley. Those packets passing backwards and forwards by the post have doubtless aggravated their curiosity.’ But how she could have thought that on the publication of Shirley her incognito, not only of sex but of individuality, would not instantly be given away, passes understanding, for the book practically consisted of sketches, portraits and caricatures of her immediate circle. She allowed that she had seen and slightly knew the ‘original’ of Cyril Hall, but averred that he would no more suspect her of having ‘put’ him into a novel, or indeed of having written a novel at all, than he would have suspected that his dog had done so. But no sooner did the Rev. W. M. Heald read Shirley than he correctly recognised himself and half a dozen characters as well, and applied to Ellen, as an intimate friend of the ‘unknown Currer Bell’ (sending his respects also to Mr. Brontë so that there could be no mistake about his meaning), for a key to the others. Again, Charlotte had sent to one of the brothers of her friend Mary Taylor, before publication, those chapters of the book which related to the ‘Yorkes,’ in which every single member of his family, father, daughters (dead and alive) and sons were daguerrotyped: his comment was that she had not drawn them strong enough. Then there was Shirley herself, confessedly a portrait of Emily Brontë; there were the photographed curates; there was Mr. Nicholls in the unmistakable guise of Mr. Macarthey; Hortense Moore was equally photographic of Mlle. Haussé of the pensionnat at Brussels. Yet even when the book was out, Charlotte wrote, as Currer Bell, to G. H. Lewes, who was to review it in the Edinburgh Review, saying ‘I wish you did not think I was a woman.’

  But it was no use wishing anything of the sort. Charlotte, with an optimism she recognised to be ostrich-like, had fondly hoped that if she hid her head in the Parsonage she would be invisible, but her identity leaked out in London, and poured out in spate at Haworth. It could not possibly be otherwise: too many pointers were directed there; besides, she had made too many her confidants. Mr. Nicholls had his lodgings at the house of John Brown the sexton, and, when he read about himself, Mrs. Brown ‘seriously thought he had gone wrong in his head, as she heard him giving vent to roars of laughter, clapping his hands and stamping on the floor ... He would read all the scenes about the curates aloud to papa, and triumphed in his own character.’

  Then there were the curates themselves; they had often annoyed her, and to serve them out she had dipped in her unkindest ink, and lavished on them all her powers of contempt and ridicule. There was the master of the Haworth Grammar School, once temporary curate to Mr. Brontë, and him, under the unmistakable lineaments of Mr. Donne, she had described as of ‘a coldly phlegmatic immoveably complacent densely self-satisfied nature’; he was ‘a frontless, arrogant, decorous slip of the commonplace, conceited, inane, insipid.’ She libellously stated that he and the others met together for drunken orgies: as a matter of fact the evenings that they spent together were passed in reading the Greek Fathers.

  But her whips and her scorpions were wasted.

  The very curates, poor fellows! [she dejectedly wrote to Mr. Williams] show no resentment, each characteristically finds solace for his own wounds in crowing over his brethren. Mr. Donne was at first a little disturbed; for a week or two he was in disquietude, but he is now soothed down: only yesterday I had the pleasure of making him a comfortable cup of tea and seeing him sip it with revived complacency. It is a curious fact that since he read Shirley he has come to the house oftener than ever, and been remarkably meek and assiduous to please. Some people’s natures are veritable enigmas: I quite expected to have had one good scene with him, but as yet nothing of the sort has occurred.

  The gilt was off the gingerbread. Charlotte had meant and hoped and desired that these truly Christian gentlemen should be hurt and indignant at her savage attack on them, and she was truly chagrined at their good humour; all she could make of it was that each was so delighted with the venom she expended on his friends that he forgave her for himself. They were enigmas; it was puzzling and disappointing to find them so indulgent. She wanted to hurt them. That she ever knew that her friend Mary Taylor wrote to Ellen from New Zealand saying that it was rumoured that Charlotte Brontë had been jilted by the three curates one after the other is improbable. Charlotte would not have been amused.

  But though these insensitive creatures had treated her attack on them with such good humour, it was otherwise with her and the unfavourable reviews of Shirley, of which there were a good many that made her writhe, as she had hoped the curates would do. She was furious with their malice and their lies. She pronounced the critic of the Daily News to be to the last degree ‘incompetent, ignorant and flippant.’ His review was unutterably false: it was revolting to be judged by such a creature. The Observer was equally trying; such praise as it bestowed was more mortifying than its blame. The ‘thundering Times’ attacked her fiercely, and it made her cry. The notice in the Edinburgh Review was ‘brutal and savage.’ G. H. Lewes had, as she knew, written this, and he had committed the unpardonable crime of talking about her sex. So she sent him a brief note: ‘I can be on my guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends.’ On the other hand, critical praise gave her the same quality of childish rapture as critical blame gave her of childish resentment. Just as her detractors were liars and revolting dunces, so
the admirers of Shirley were splendid in ability and discernment. Harriet Martineau and Mrs. Gaskell, neither of whom she had at present met, were among these by reason of their appreciation, and she considered them ‘far her superiors in attainment and experience.’ For Miss Martineau she had ‘a lively admiration, a deep esteem,’ while Mrs. Gaskell’s praise, conveyed in a letter ‘brought tears to my eyes. She is a good, she is a great woman. Proud am I that I can touch a chord of sympathy in souls so noble.’ Then there was Eugène Forçade, who had already spoken highly of Jane Eyre: he wrote a review of Shirley in the Revue des deux Mondes, and it was refreshing to turn from the mouthings of the entirely ignorant and incompetent to one ‘whose heart feels, whose power grasps the matter he undertakes to handle.’ He praised Shirley warmly, and therefore he was ‘a subtle-thoughted, keen-eyed, quick-feeling Frenchman, who knew the true nature of things.’

  He follows Currer Bell [she wrote to Ellen, to whom she sent this review] through every winding, discerns every point, discriminates every shade, proves himself master of the subject, and lord of the aim. With that man I would shake hands, if I saw him. I would say, ‘You know me, Monsieur, I shall deem it an honour to know you.’ I could not say so much to the mass of English critics.

  Forçade, she reiterated to Mr. Williams, found no coarseness in Shirley; that was the discovery reserved for smaller minds. Or an anonymous correspondent wrote in a strain of wild enthusiasm about Shirley: ‘there is power in that letter — talent, it is at times eloquently expressed.’ The press she was sure, when she thought of the unfavourable reviews, was a venal concern; only praise was sincere and heartfelt. Those who saw faults in her work were not only mistaken but moral reprobates, abounding in malice and falsehood; those who appreciated it were not only discerning persons but good and great. All this enthusiasm for the enthusiastic, this spitting on the scornful is indicative of just that essentially youthful fire which Charlotte, like Swinburne, always possessed. Her intolerance, her blacks and whites, her rare but unqualified raptures, her censoriousness, were all typical of adolescence. As Sir Edmund Gosse acutely remarked (rather shocking the Brontë Society), she never grew up, nor acquired the kindly indulgence of the mature mind, off which the jagged egoistic edges have been smoothed by the wholesome wear and tear of the world.