Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Soon after Shirley appeared, Charlotte again turned her mind to The Professor, which had lain on her shelf since her publishers had dissuaded her from expanding it into three-volumed form. But now she contemplated bringing it out as it stood, and wrote a preface to it. Not a word of her intentions, so far as we can find in her letters, did she communicate to anyone; nor is there the slightest allusion to the subject when she discusses plans with her publishers. But after her death her husband, Mr. Nicholls, consented to the publication of The Professor, and it appeared in 1856 with the preface that Charlotte had written for it, and an explanatory note in which he stated these facts, adding: ‘Being dissuaded from her intention, the authoress made some use of the material in a subsequent work Villette.’ It is possible that the ‘dissuasion’ of which Mr. Nicholls speaks should refer to the occasion when, after the publication of Jane Eyre, she contemplated expanding The Professor into three volumes, and that now she wrote the preface and abandoned her intention again, for Mrs. Gaskell does not mention it in her Life of Charlotte Brontë, nor can we find any allusion to this second intention elsewhere.

  With regard to the book Shirley itself, its faults are many and patent, and it cannot be put in the same class as Jane Eyre or Villette. Jane Eyre had its faults too, but in the white-hot furnace of its sincerity and passion, they were utterly consumed, appearing momentarily like specks of black in the glow of it, and then perishing. But there is no such incandescent quality in Shirley: Shirley was observed rather than felt, and Charlotte never got into the living heart of her work as she did with Jane Eyre and Villette.

  She took immense trouble with it; she strained and agonised and doubted over it. But she wrote it from the outside, not the inside, and, paradoxical though it sounds, this very industry and this painstaking copying of her models are the cause of the lower level on which the book moves; study takes the place of inspiration, and observation is not fused and made molten in the furnace of imagination. Again, she wanted to inculcate certain truths, such imprimis, as the supreme splendour of equal love between man and woman; but whereas in Jane Eyre she took the live coal in the tongs from off the altar of its burning, in Shirley, donning the fatal vestments of the preacher, she ascended the pulpit and discoursed, with anathemas, on the world’s sordid view of love. She declaimed her gospel, instead of presenting without comment, as in Jane Eyre, the evangelists of love. Never was there so hieratic a homily as Caroline Helstone’s pronouncement and her colloquy with Shirley. Says Caroline:

  ‘Obtrusiveness is a crime; forwardness is a crime, and both disgust: but love! — no purest angel need blush to love! And when I hear or see either man or woman couple shame with love I know their minds are coarse, their associations debased. Many who think themselves refined ladies and gentlemen, and on whose lips the word “vulgarity” is for ever hovering, cannot mention “love” without betraying their own innate and imbecile degradation: it is a low feeling in their estimation, connected only with low ideas for them.’

  ‘You describe three-quarters of the world, Caroline.’

  ‘They are cold, — they are cowardly — they are stupid on the subject, Shirley! They never loved — they never were loved.’

  ‘Thou art right, Lina! And in their dense ignorance they blaspheme living fire, seraph-brought from a divine altar.’

  ‘They confound it with sparks mounting from Tophet.’

  All very true no doubt. But did two girls ever talk so unnaturally and so gratuitously, for nothing has occurred to warrant these diatribes? Charlotte was in the pulpit, preaching not creating, and, incidentally, punishing those who found coarseness in Jane Eyre, and putting into the mouth of her characters the precise phrases with which she had scolded them in her letters. She was lecturing on love, justifying her view of it. The same spirit of irrelevant propaganda, again in defence of Jane Eyre, inspires her indignation against the unfair treatment which she thought that women novelists received.

  Their (men’s) good woman [cries Shirley] is a queer thing, half-doll, half-angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. Then to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other’s creations, worshipping the heroine of such a poem-novel-drama, thinking it fine — divine! If I spoke all I think on this point; if I gave my real opinion of some first-rate female character, in first-rate works, where should I be? Dead, under a cairn of avenging stones in half an hour. Women read men more truly than men read women. I’ll prove that in a magazine paper some day when I have time....

  Charlotte, through the mouthpiece of Shirley, is merely venting her views on the literary arena.

  It is this same personal motive which, with similar punishment in view, turns her presentation of the curates into sheer caricature. They had annoyed her, and her intention was to give them ‘what for,’ taking in her hand not the rapier of satire but the bludgeon of abuse. These were grotesque puppets which she set up, in order to knock them down, and her observation of them was falsified by personal antipathy. These outbursts of propaganda and vituperation are pieces of rubbish which might have perished in the consuming heat of Jane Eyre, but in Shirley there is no such reverberating furnace. Louis Moore, Shirley’s preordained mate, personifying man’s ideal love for woman, is so falsetto a troubadour that, frankly, romance withers. The love-scenes are largely conveyed by means of his highly rhetorical diary instead of by direct narrative; Charlotte invites the reader to stoop over her shoulder and read what he scribbles: ‘Since Shirley has appealed to my strength,’ he writes, ‘I abhor solitude. Cold abstraction — fleshless skeleton — daughter — mother and mate of Death!...’ Shirley was shy, ‘but to my perception a delicate splendour robed her.... I looked like a stupid block, I dare say: I was alive with a life of Paradise, as she turned her glance from my glance, and softly averted her head to hide the suffusion of her cheek.’ Louis Moore retails page after page of dialogue between his mistress and himself, and it is all tinsel and froth compared with the gleams of those deep waters of passion that move us so profoundly when Jane Eyre and Rochester are together. For their simplicity we get eloquence: Louis calls her ‘Sister of the spotted, bright, quick-fiery leopard,’ and after great fireworks, with the sun ‘a dizzying scarlet blaze’ and the sky ‘a violet vortex,’ there is a dismal descent of the rocket stick, and Shirley having accepted him, says (quite in the Jane Austen style):

  Mr. Moore, your judgment is well balanced; your heart is kind; your principles are sound. I know you are wise; I feel you are benevolent; I believe you are conscientious. Be my companion through life; be my guide where I am ignorant, be my master where I am faulty; be my friend always.

  The same fault, that of mere external observation, marks and mars Charlotte’s presentation of Shirley herself. She confessedly meant Shirley in this volume of ‘sketches from the life’ to be the full-length portrait of her sister Emily. She noted and reproduced traits that were characteristic of Emily, such as her long abstracted musings on the moor as she gazed into some pool. She gave Shirley the fierce and devoted Tartar who would not stand a blow, in reproduction of Emily’s Keeper; Shirley’s refusals to admit she was ill were a trait of Emily’s, as Charlotte was bitterly aware (‘She say she is ill! I believe, sir, if she were dying, she would smile and aver “Nothing ails me”’); the story of Shirley being bitten by a dog, and cauterising the wound with a hot iron is also traditionally ascribed to Emily, but all these traits and incidents are observed only, and when it comes to that fusion of observation and penetration through which is produced a portrait not a photograph, we find that Charlotte has not penetrated; she has never got to the heart of Emily, to the genius that made her what she was, and not one glimpse of that mysterious soul is really revealed to us. In nothing is this more plain than in Charlotte’s attempt to render, through Shirley’s mouth, Emily’s attitude towards Nature, that pagan pan-theistic mysticism, that sense of the immanent and unifying Divinity in man and beast and moor, which glows and throbs in her poems. Charlotte could discover the poems themselves, but secret
for ever from her was the inspiration of them, and her attempt to reproduce it was less photograph than parody. In Shirley’s famous rhapsody Charlotte definitely set herself to unveil Emily’s soul.

  Nature is now at her evening prayers: she is kneeling before those red hills. I see her prostrate on the great steps of her altar, praying for a fair night for mariners at sea, for travellers in deserts, for lambs on moors, and unfledged birds in woods. Caroline, I see her! and I will tell you what she is like: she is like what Eve was when she and Adam stood alone on earth.... I saw — I now see — a woman Titan: her robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing: a veil white as an avalanche sweeps from her head to her feet, and arabesques of lightning flame in its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple like that horizon; through its blush shines the star of evening. Her steady eyes I cannot picture: they are clear, they are deep as lakes — they are lifted and full of worship — they tremble with the softness of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the expanse of a cloud and is paler than the early moon, risen long before dark gathers; she reclines her bosom on the ridge of Stilbro’ Moor; her mighty hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face she speaks with God. That Eve is Jehovah’s daughter, as Adam was his son.

  Now we may differ about the beauty and the force of this passage; some may find it a piece of exquisite English, others a patch of rather shrill purple, but all must agree that, as a rendering of Emily’s mysticism, it is a failure. Nor could it have been otherwise, for Charlotte had no touch of the mystic in her religious perceptions; and the very strength and sincerity of them made it impossible for her to comprehend a rapture to which her soul was alien. When she attempted to express it, her speech betrayed her.

  But hear Emily:

  He comes with western winds, with evening’s wandering airs, With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars, Winds take a pensive tone and stars a tender fire, And visions rise and change, that kill me with desire.

  But first a hush of peace — a soundless calm descends, The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends: Mute music soothes my breast — unuttered harmony, That I could never dream till Faith was lost to me.

  Then dawns the Invisible: the Unseen its truth reveals, My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels. Its wings are almost free — its home, its harbour found, Nearing the gulf it stops — and dares the final bound.

  Oh! dreadful is the check — intense the agony — When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see, When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again: The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

  There is the true voice; the expression may fail because the singer tells of things ineffable, but behind is the experience of the mystic’s sacramental communings, of his almost losing his identity because he is so nearly made one with God immanent, of his racked return to himself as to a prison, when the splendour fades. None but a mystic could have written that, and all Charlotte’s talent could not enable her to reproduce, with any wealth of poetical imagery, the faintest semblance of it. In this attempt to reveal Emily she only reveals her own incomprehension of her.

  Shirley is often spoken of as Charlotte’s memorial to Emily. That is not quite the case, for nearly two-thirds of the book, down to the chapter entitled ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death,’ were written before her death. She began it after hesitations as to whether to recast The Professor in three-volume form, as soon as Jane Eyre was off her hands; thus, while Anne was using Branwell as a model in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte was using Emily in Shirley. Then her work was interrupted by Emily’s rapid decline in the autumn of 1848 and not taken up again till after Anne’s death in May 1849. Charlotte found this break exceedingly difficult to bridge over, and it is permissible to wonder whether there was not a change of plan at this point in the book. Louis Moore, though the story was two-thirds done, had only made his first appearance a couple of pages before; it looks as if his wooing and winning of Shirley was possibly an afterthought. Already the book had faltered; for several chapters before the break no development takes place at all; Caroline Helstone’s love story hung fire, a school-feast, a guying of the curates were obvious padding; it is as if Charlotte was feeling her way, uncertain of her direction. Then after the break she made up her mind, and the book moves swiftly to its appointed end.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Charlotte went up to London in December of the year 1849 to stay with her young publisher George Smith and his widowed mother. Mrs. Smith, she tells Ellen, appeared to have received strict orders to pay her the greatest attention; morning and evening there was a fire in her bedroom and wax candles, and she felt she inspired respect and alarm in her hosts. It was not till this wore off that she perceived that real friendliness was at the bottom of these sybaritic arrangements, and she ‘began to like’ Mrs. Smith; her son also impressed her more favourably than he had done at first sight, and she acknowledged that she saw no reason to regret her decision to make her principal stay with them instead of going, after a day or two, to the house of Laetitia Wheelwright, who had been a school friend at Brussels. By now she was known to be Currer Bell and no more concealment or vain hopes that her books would be taken as products of a male brain were possible.

  From this time onwards she ceased to be a hermit at Haworth, for in the few years that were to elapse before her marriage, she paid four visits to London, she went twice to Scotland, though once only for a single night, and she stayed with new-found friends in the Lakes, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth and Miss Harriet Martineau (to whom she formed a violent attachment, and as violently brought it to a sudden close). She also formed a warm and cordial though never an intimate friendship with Mrs. Gaskell, and stayed with her at Plymouth Grove, Manchester.

  Moreover, high fame was personally hers; pilgrims came to Haworth to follow the topography of her books and get a word from the author. More especially in London the literary world was intensely curious about her, eager to be friendly with her and to make her the lioness at home in circles whose appreciation she most coveted. But fame had come too late for her enjoyment; she had been through bitter waters and the salt still clung to her, or perhaps she had always lacked the ease which springs from geniality. She could not let herself go; her shyness and her self-consciousness were by now an inveterate disease. To be brought up against an unfamiliar face, even if it shone with kindliness, was always discomforting; she distrusted strangers and was always apt to notice their defects before their qualities, and a further misery-making quality in her temperament lay in the habit of thought which suggested that others saw the worst in her. She noticed, for instance (or thought she noticed), that if any man got a good look at her, he would take pains, after that, to avert his eyes from the quarter of the room in which she sat. The natural reaction followed those uncomfortable fancies; she never credited the casually encountered stranger with goodwill towards her. Nowadays we should call this instinct an inferiority complex dating from her schooldays, when it had been impressed on her that she was ugly and insignificant. Indeed, she designedly and auto-biographically made these physical disabilities a feature in Jane Eyre. This morbid self-consciousness, this lack of geniality, and a complete absence of any social effervescence made for her one of the most unfortunate equipments for general intercourse, in the rôle of lioness, that it is possible to conceive.

  There was a certain underlying ungraciousness also that unfitted her for the part; at times she was silent and miserable, at times she roared in a manner socially devastating. Twice during this visit she was taken to see Macready act and subsequently wrote:

  I astonished a dinner-party by honestly saying I did not like him. It is the fashion to rave about his splendid acting — anything more false and artificial, less genuinely impressive than his whole style I could scarcely have imagined; the fact is, the stage system altogether is hollow nonsense, they act farce well enough, the actors comprehend their parts
and do them justice. They comprehend nothing about tragedy or Shakespeare, and it is a failure. I said so, and by so saying produced a blank silence, a mute consternation. I was, indeed, obliged to dissent on many occasions, and to offend by dissenting. It seems now very much the custom to admire a certain wordy, intricate, obscure style of poetry, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes. Some pieces were referred to about which Currer Bell was expected to be very rapturous, and failing in this he disappointed.... I think I should scarcely like to live in London, and were I obliged to live there, I should certainly go little into company, especially I should eschew the literary coteries.

  Again, Mr. Smith brought together a dinner-party of critics, five of them, representing leading papers, in her honour. She ‘enjoyed the spectacle of them greatly,’ but fixed a deadly eye on Mr. Chorley.

  He is a peculiar specimen — one whom you could set yourself to examine, uncertain whether, when you had probed all the small reserves of his character the result would be utter contempt and aversion, or whether for the sake of latent good you would forgive obvious evil. One could well pardon his unpleasant features, his strange voice, even his very foppery and grimace, if one found these disadvantages connected with living talent and any spark of genuine goodness. If there is nothing more than acquirement, smartness, and the affectation of philanthropy, Chorley is a fine creature.