Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  It is the first exposition of avowed Atheism and Materialism [she wrote] that I have ever read: the first unequivocal declaration of disbelief in the existence of a God or a Future Life I have ever seen.... Sincerely — for my own part — do I wish to find and know the truth, but if this be truth, well may she guard herself with mysteries and cover herself with a veil. If this be Truth, Man or Woman who beholds her can but curse the day he or she was born....

  Again she wrote: ‘I deeply regret its publication for the lady’s sake: it gives a death blow to her future usefulness. Who can trust the word or rely on the judgment of an avowed atheist?’ But shocked though she was, she did not let this crucial division on religious questions put an end to the friendship, and she continued to correspond with her. She got into her head, though quite mistakenly, that Miss Martineau’s friends were as shocked as herself and that they had, one and all, refused to have anything more to do with her. So she determined to stick to her and, when questioned by Miss Wooler as to the wisdom of friendship with an atheist, wrote a characteristic homily in reply:

  I do not feel it would be right to give Miss Martineau up entirely. There is in her nature much that is very noble. Hundreds have forsaken her, more I fear in the apprehension that their fair name may suffer if seen in connection with hers than for any pure conviction, such as you suggest, of harm consequent on her fatal tenets. With these fair weather friends I cannot bear to rank. And for her sin, is it not one of those which God and not man must judge?... If you had seen how she secretly suffers from abandonment, you would be the last to give her up: you would separate the sinner from the sin, and feel as if the right lay rather in quietly adhering to her in her strait, while that adherence is unfashionable and unpopular, than in turning your back when the world sets the example.

  These are certainly very creditable sentiments, and evince a much larger charity than Charlotte sometimes showed; but we wonder whether she really meant that nobody ‘could trust the word of an avowed atheist.’ Anyhow, the friendship continued, and she sent Miss Martineau favourable comments which she had received on her book, with the intention of cheering her Coventry. But Miss Martineau, rather disconcertingly, was not in the least in need of being cheered. She referred to Charlotte’s notion that her friends had forsaken her as ‘an unaccountable delusion’: the book which Charlotte had averred had given the ‘death blow to her usefulness’ had only earned for her a new world of sympathy.

  The depression of solitude and silence at Haworth returned. Mr. James Taylor had his final interview, which left the situation as it was, and Charlotte began to reckon up what had happened. He would be absent for five years; ‘a dividing expanse of three oceans’ would come between them; and though it was entirely of her own choice that anything divided them any more at all, she regretted what she had done, in spite of the excellent reasons for refusing him, of which she found more, and Ellen’s ‘soft consolatory accents’ did not console her. Her father was not well, and she felt that having him to think about ‘took her thoughts off other matters, which have become complete bitterness and ashes.’ The ‘seeming foundation of support and prospect of hope’ had completely crumbled away with James Taylor’s departure to India, and there was nothing again to look forward to.

  And then, amazingly and uniquely (though only briefly), a new interest enlivened her: dress. She was soon to pay a month’s visit to Jupiter and Jupiter’s family in London, and she wanted all sorts of things: chemisettes of small size, and a new bonnet, and in particular a lace mantle to ‘go with’ a black satin dress. She had bought a black lace mantle, but it looked ‘brown and rusty’ over the satin, and she exchanged it for a white one, which looked better and was also cheaper, for it cost only £1 14s. She went to Leeds to buy a new bonnet to wear with the black satin, but when she tried it on ‘its pink lining looked infinitely too gay.’ Then she wanted a new dress: there were ‘beautiful silks of pale sweet colours, but they were five shillings a yard,’ so she chose black silk at three shillings. For the moment Charlotte was violently concerned with her frocks.

  These vanities being duly provided, Charlotte went up to London again, at the end of May 1851, to stay with her publisher and his mother and sisters for a solid month. Everyone was disposed to make much of her: she breakfasted at the house of Mr. Rogers the ‘patriarch poet’; she was asked to a big party at Grosvenor House but declined; she attended Thackeray’s lectures, and, though Thackeray did not repeat the experiment of getting together a party to meet her, he pointed her out to ‘his grand friends,’ and Lord Carlisle and Monckton Milnes introduced themselves. When one of these lectures was over, so Mrs. Gaskell tells us, the audience formed up in two lines and she had to pass down an aisle between rows of eager and interested faces. She retailed these social triumphs to her father and Ellen with considerable gusto: one cannot but think that in her heart, especially when they were over, they gave her a good deal of satisfaction, but at the time her shyness and self-consciousness discounted them. She was not well, she suffered from headache and sickness, and she felt inclined to murmur at Fate, ‘which compels me to comparative silence and solitude for eleven months in the year, and in the twelfth, while offering social enjoyment, takes away the vigour and cheerfulness which should turn it to account.’ Her malaise caused her to make some severe remarks about certain of these entertainments. She went to a meeting of a Roman Catholic Society, at which Cardinal Wiseman presided. He had a quadruple chin, a large mouth with oily lips betokening greed. ‘He came swimming into the room, smiling, simpering and bowing like a fat old lady, and sat down very demure in his chair, the picture of a sleek hypocrite.’ Dark-looking, sinister priests surrounded him; he spoke in a smooth, whining voice like a canting Methodist preacher. A horrid spectacle, but she certainly enjoyed telling Ellen about him. She went to see Rachel act:

  a wonderful sight, terrible as if the earth has cracked deep at your feet, and revealed a glimpse of hell. She made me shudder to the marrow of my bones: in her some fiend has certainly taken up its incarnate home. She is not a woman, she is a snake, she is the —— .

  Rachel made a deep and horrible impression on her; months afterwards, writing to Mr. Taylor in Bombay, she compared her acting to ‘the poisoned stimulants to popular ferocity’ of gladiatorial shows. ‘It is scarcely human nature that she shows you: it is something wilder and worse: the feelings and fury of a fiend. The great gift of genius she undoubtedly has: but, I fear she rather abuses it than turns it to good account.’

  Then there were visits to the Crystal Palace, no less than five of them. It impressed her immensely; it was like a bazaar created by Eastern genii, and arranged by supernatural hands. But it palled: it soon became a bustling and fatiguing place, and she did not want to go so often but was forced to. Her last days in London were spoiled because Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, from whom she had hitherto concealed her presence, discovered her, and it was hard to ward off his eager hospitalities.

  The chronicle of these pleasures reads but drearily. She had made valiant efforts to overcome that deplorable killjoy shyness which turned normal social intercourse into torture, but they seemed unavailing, and her health could not stand the cheerful stir and bustle which is in itself so enjoyable to others, but which, getting on her nerves, caused her to look with a jaundiced eye on what others found entertaining. We must not therefore imagine, as certain of her biographers state, that except for the sense of duty and filial piety which kept her at Haworth she would have led a brilliant life in London, the centre of some high literary circle. She disliked London, and she affirmed that if she had to live there she would studiously avoid literary circles. London life was impossible for her; a few weeks of it was as much as she could stand, and after that, according to her own rueful picture of herself, she returned home meagre and old and hollow-eyed. Besides, it was at Haworth only she was able to write, and writing was to her the sole panacea for the weary fret of life, and for the morbid melancholy that so often beset her. Once only again did
she spend a holiday in London, and then she avoided what she had learned, by repeated experience, gave her more discomfort than pleasure.

  On her way home she spent two days at Plymouth Grove, Manchester, the house of Mr. and Mrs. Gaskell, and there suddenly a new trait of tenderness towards children manifested itself. In her governess days, perhaps because she could not manage them, perhaps because they formed part of a milieu she detested, she had certainly not cared for them, and shrank from their tokens of affection. But now, as if surprised at and distrustful of her own unwonted feelings, she wrote to Mrs. Gaskell after her visit, asking her to manage ‘to convey a small kiss to that dear but dangerous little person Julia. She surreptitiously possessed herself of a minute fraction of my heart, which has been missing ever since I saw her.’ It was a diffident, humble access; she ‘felt like a fond but bashful suitor who views at a distance the fair personage to whom in his slavish awe he dare not risk a near approach.’ She felt a stranger to children.

  Charlotte got home by the beginning of July, and set to work on her new book. As may be remembered, she had thought of following up Jane Eyre with an expanded version of The Professor, and had also thought, after the publication of Shirley, of bringing it out as it stood, and even wrote a preface for it, but nothing came of it. But she had never personally abandoned the idea of using much of the material in a future book, and she now did so in the writing of Villette. Instantly, as always before, she found healing for her despondence and depression in the exercise of her imagination; her letters to her friends much diminish in volume and in vividness, for all her energy was being poured into her work. It went well, for she was handling the molten stuff of her experiences in Brussels which was still live fire; she got on quickly, and hoped to have the book ready for publication in the spring of the next year, 1852. She refused to leave Haworth in spite of invitations from Miss Martineau, Mrs. Gaskell and Ellen Nussey, for while the wind of imagination blew she must sail before it. None of the usual causes for dissatisfaction prevailed against her. Tabby got influenza and Martha quinsy, and she nursed them both; her father got a cold; Keeper, Emily’s dog, died; but all burdens were light when her work prospered.

  Then in the winter her health broke down, and she had many weeks of illness and enforced idleness; headaches and bilious attacks continually prostrated her; her letters are a catalogue of miserable symptoms and ineffectual remedies. The spring brought improvement, but when she tried to get to work again, the happy inspiration of the autumn would not return, and, as she wrote to Mr. Williams, ‘When the mood leaves me (it has left me now, without vouchsafing so much as a word of a message when it will return) I put by the MS. and wait till it comes back again.’ For more than four months this barrenness persisted; she slept ill at night, and sat idle all day, longing to work but unable, and afraid sometimes that the pain she suffered was a symptom of the disease of which her four sisters and her brother had died. Then at last the blessed mood returned, and before the end of March she was at work again.

  There was no visit to London this summer; in June she went to Filey, close to Scarborough, partly for the sake of sea-air, partly in order to see to the re-lettering of the stone over Anne’s grave. She must have heard that there were some errors on it (and indeed found five), for she referred to this as a duty that had long lain heavy. For some reason she felt that she had to be alone for this task of piety; why, it is impossible to say. Ellen had been with her at Scarborough when Anne died, and she doubtless would have accompanied her now, but Charlotte did not even let her know that she contemplated going, writing her when she had got there a mysterious and rather melodramatic letter, beginning:

  I am at Filey utterly alone. Do not be angry, the step is right. I considered it and resolved on it with due deliberation. I walk on the sands a good deal, and try not to feel desolate and melancholy. How sorely my heart longs for you, I need not say.

  But she only had to tell Ellen she wanted her, and Ellen would have come; clearly she just did not want anybody’s company, and having discharged her duty to the tombstone stayed there for three weeks in great tranquillity and content. She bathed and it seemed to brace her; she walked along the sands for three or four hours every day, as she had been told that this was good for a torpid liver, and became as sunburnt as a bathing-woman. She watched a rough sea with awe and admiration, she saw a dog battling with the waves, she set out to go to Filey Bridge but was frightened back by two cows, she went to church at some small and shabby tabernacle, and could hardly help laughing at the ludicrous seating arrangements, for the singers in the gallery turned their backs on the congregation, and the congregation on the parson. She wished Mr. Nicholls had been there to see it; he would certainly have laughed out, and she sent him her kind regards. Her letters in her utter loneliness were full of good spirits and cheerfulness, and this first kindly mention of Mr. Nicholls is significant.

  She was back at Haworth in July, and had a serious fright about her father, who was threatened with a stroke of apoplexy. He was dangerously ill for a while, but made a steady though slow recovery, and once more Charlotte got to work on Villette, resolved not to quit her labours, but not to hurry them, till the book was finished. There were fits of depression when her work went ill, in which she confessed that she was lonely and likely to remain lonely, but denied, still wondering whether she had been right to refuse Mr. Taylor, that the thought of continuing ‘single’ was the cause of them. She felt she would neither ‘know nor taste pleasure’ until the book was finished, and worked steadily on, refusing for some weeks to let Ellen come to Haworth or to interrupt herself by going to her. Before the end of October she had sent two of the three volumes to her publishers, asking for criticisms. She admitted, when she received them, that there was something in them, and then refused to alter a single word. She could not write otherwise, as she had told Mr. Williams before, and she must write in her own way or not at all. But she was in an agony of nervous apprehension about the whole; she even wanted the book to be published anonymously. Then by the end of November the long task was finished, and she said her prayers.

  She was still all to bits with the strain of her accomplished work and, not less, with the reaction that followed, for receiving from her publishers her cheque of £500 payable on delivery of the complete manuscript without a line of comment on the third volume, she instantly made up her mind to rush up to London and see whether this silence betokened disapproval. The letter came next morning, and Charlotte scolded George Smith soundly for not having sent it with the cheque, reminding him that ‘Inexplicable delays should be avoided when possible, for they are apt to urge those subjected to their harassment to sudden and impulsive steps.’ As for his criticisms on the third volume, she pronounced them just, and took no further notice of them.

  Charlotte was right in not attempting to alter the book; she could no more have done that than she could have added a cubit to her stature, for Villette, to a far higher degree than anything she had ever written, was herself, and it was composed of her own experience, her character and her soul. The book, once written, was as real and as inevitable as the past on which it was founded. Technically, Villette has grave faults; it lacks unity; the interest is shifted from one set of characters to another, Lucy Snowe falls in love with Dr. John, and when she discovers that he regards her with absolute indifference, she falls in love with Paul Emmanuel, who, though this affair is the clou of the book, hardly appears till we are half-way through. All this had been pointed out to Charlotte, but the book was written indelibly with her heart’s blood and it could not be otherwise. For into it she had put, and now was done with, the bitterness of that second year at Brussels, which had robbed her of all peace of mind for two years. Now she externalised these miseries, and by the alchemy of her art transmuted her pangs into pictures, and even as once she in her own person had sought relief from them in the chapel of St. Gudule’s under the seal of confession, so now under the seal of fiction she told the world what she had told a pri
est, and was rid of the perilous stuff. With minute detail and with photographic fidelity she reproduced the pensionnat in the Rue d’Isabelle, and made eternally substantial the phantoms which for her haunted its corridors. Her imagination fused and made molten the actual, and the third volume of Villette, enacted by Lucy Snowe, Paul Emmanuel, and Madame Beck, could never have been written had it not been for the adventure of Charlotte Brontë, Constantin Héger, and Madame. Whether or no she actually muttered Je me vengerai to that lady when she left Brussels for the last time, she had kept these things in her heart, even as she had nursed there the miseries of Cowan Bridge, speaking of them to no living soul; and now releasing them she took her revenge, and wrote immortally of them. Long as she had waited, Madame Héger had to wait longer yet for the justification of her spyings and suspicions as set forth in Villette; and it was not till sixty years later, when all those immediately concerned had long been dead, that there were published the four letters of Charlotte’s to Madame Héger’s husband, which she had picked out of the waste-paper basket and pieced together. They were quits.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  It was in December 1852, when Villette was going through the press, that the final act in the drama of Charlotte’s life began. It started in storm and trouble, it ended with a spell of such tranquil happiness as she had never known.