by E. F. Benson
Mr. Nicholls had now been curate at Haworth for over eight years, and Charlotte had often alluded to him with disparagement and dislike. His narrowness of mind was what chiefly struck her; he was just a ‘highly uninteresting narrow and unattractive specimen of the coarser sex,’ she could not see the germs of goodness which Ellen perceived in him. The parishioners generally shared her view, and they hoped that when he went for his holiday to Ireland he would not trouble to return. But by the time she was writing Shirley she regarded him with a kindlier eye, and in her presentation of him as Mr. Macarthey, which amused him so enormously, she allowed that he was ‘decent, decorous and conscientious.’ Now for some months she had suspected that ‘he cared something for me and wanted me to care for him.’ Her father, she thought, had suspected the same, and alluded to his low spirits and ill-health with ‘much indirect sarcasm.’ Charlotte wondered if Ellen, who was sometimes too quick to observe the earliest symptom of the love-lorn, had noticed this too. Ellen had: she had already been scolded by Charlotte for her prospective match-making.
The Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls
One evening in December Mr. Nicholls came to tea with her and her father in Mr. Brontë’s study.
After tea, [she wrote to Ellen] I withdrew to the dining-room as usual. As usual, Mr. Nicholls sat with papa till between eight and nine o’clock. I then heard him open the parlour door, as if going. I expected the clash of the front door. He stopped in the passage: he tapped: like lightning it flashed on me what was coming. He entered, he stood before me. What his words were you can guess: his manner you can hardly realize, nor can I forget it. Shaking from head to foot, looking deadly pale, speaking low, vehemently yet with difficulty, he made me for the first time feel what it costs a man to declare affection when he doubts response.
Charlotte promised him a reply next day, and when he had gone, she went to her father and told him what had happened. A Bedlamite scene followed.
If I had loved Mr. Nicholls, [she wrote] and had heard such epithets applied to him as were used, it would have transported me past my patience; as it was, my blood boiled with a sense of injustice. But papa worked himself up into a state not to be trifled with: the veins on his temples started up like whipcord and his eyes became suddenly bloodshot. I made haste to promise him that Mr. Nicholls should on the morrow have a distinct refusal.... Attachment to Mr. Nicholls, you are aware, I never entertained, but the poignant pity inspired by his state on Monday evening by the hurried revelation of his sufferings for many months, is something galling and irksome.
This was not a promising beginning of a love affair, for the lady, so she protested, had not the slightest feeling of affection towards her suitor, and her father got blood to the head at the notion of her marrying him. Normally, therefore, one would have thought that, when Mr. Nicholls thereupon resigned his curacy, the affair was finished; as a matter of fact, it had barely begun. Unsoftened by Charlotte’s promise that she would not marry Mr. Nicholls, Mr. Brontë wrote him what Charlotte called a ‘pitiless despatch.’ The poor man was already ‘entirely rejecting his meals,’ and so Charlotte accompanied the pitiless despatch with a note dissociating herself from these violent expressions, and she exhorted him to maintain his courage and spirits. She had already taken sides against her father (whose violence certainly suggests that there was some truth in the stories about him which Mrs. Gaskell had to suppress), for she wished that Ellen could be at Haworth now ‘to see papa in his present mood: you would know something of him.’ She was afraid also that ‘papa thinks a little too much about his want of money: he says that the match would be a degradation, that I should be throwing myself away, that he expects me, if I marry at all, to do very differently.’ Charlotte did not share these worldly views against her marrying Mr. Nicholls, but she had some even more valid ones of her own. ‘My own objections,’ she writes, ‘arise from a sense of incongruity and uncongeniality in feelings, tastes, principles.’ Her ‘dearest wish’ for the immediate future was that ‘papa would resume his tranquillity, and Mr. N. his beef and pudding.’ The writing of the pitiless despatch, however, seemed to have been a safety-valve to Mr. Brontë’s indignation, for Charlotte adds a postscript to this remarkable letter, saying that ‘the incipient inflammation in Papa’s eye is disappearing.’
Elements of comedy began to enter into this extremely serious situation. Mr. Nicholls, having received Charlotte’s letter of exhortation, quitted Haworth, leaving Mr. Brontë to look after the parish alone. A week afterwards he was back again, and wrote to Mr. Brontë withdrawing his resignation, clearly because of the contents of Charlotte’s letter. Mr. Brontë allowed him to stop on, but only on condition of his giving a promise in writing that he would never mention the word marriage again either to him or Charlotte. Mr. Nicholls took no notice of that, but remained. Ever since the first frightful disclosure which caused Mr. Brontë a return of his apoplectic symptoms, parson and curate had not spoken to each other at all, nor met even in church, for Mr. Nicholls got somebody to take his duty for him, and Charlotte wrote to Ellen that ‘she feels persuaded the termination will be his departure for Australia.’ Meantime feeling at Haworth ran high against him. ‘Martha,’ Charlotte gravely records, ‘is bitter against him; John Brown (the sexton) says “he should like to shoot him.”’ Her own state of mind indeed defies unravelment, and she certainly could not unravel it herself. She assembles public opinion about his presumption in proposing to her, and yet writes to assure him of her sympathy in such terms that he recanted his resignation.
The tenseness of the situation was temporarily relieved by Charlotte’s departure on the last visit she ever made to London, in order to see Villette through the press. She told her father that he must not write her abusive letters about Mr. Nicholls, and he promised not to. But he could not always cork up his virulence, and so he wrote her one letter as from Flossie, Anne’s dog; and Flossie, of course, could say what she liked. This instance of humour at Haworth must be cherished: it was not common in that tense atmosphere. On this visit, which Charlotte spent as usual with Mr. George Smith and his mother and sisters, and which lasted nearly a month, there was no lionising now nor any attempt to make her mix with what she called ‘the decorative side of life.’ Social gaieties were agony to her: it was no use trying to enjoy them. London, again, on its side, had learned that she was not a satisfactory lioness, and made no effort to induce her to roar. She had promised to let the importunate baronet Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth know when she was in town, but she evaded his hospitalities by not telling him till towards the end of her stay, and thus was not vexed with ‘his excited fuss.’ She was allowed her own choice in the way of engagements and sight-seeings, and selected ‘the real side of life,’ visiting two prisons, Newgate and Pentonville, the Bank, the Exchange, the Foundling Hospital, and the lunatic asylum at Bethlehem Hospital. Then there was work to be done on the proof sheets of Villette: it must have been odd to correct them in the house of George Smith, for he and his mother confessedly appeared in the book as Dr. John and his mother. They were both perfectly aware of this, and though the presentation of them was wholly appreciative they did not entirely relish it. His comment on Lucy Snowe had been that she was ‘an odd fascinating little puss,’ and that he was not in love with her.
Charlotte most considerately postponed the appearance of Villette till the end of January 1853, in order that it should not clash with the publication of Mrs. Gaskell’s Ruth. A week before it was issued she wrote to Miss Martineau, her friendship with whom had survived the shock of the latter’s atheistical views, asking her for her frank criticism on the forthcoming novel.
I know [she said] that you will give me your thoughts upon my book as frankly as if you spoke to some near relative whose good you preferred to her gratification. I wince under the pain of condemnation like any other weak structure of flesh and blood; but I love, I honour, I kneel to truth. Let her smite me on the one cheek — good! the tears may spring to the eyes; but courage! there is the ot
her side, hit again, right sharply.
No more forcible though rather rhetorical request for candour can be imagined. Charlotte had also previously begged Miss Martineau to tell her if she detected anything coarse in her work, as certain reviewers of Jane Eyre had done. It is, then, little wonder that Miss Martineau, thus solemnly adjured, dealt frankly with her friend about Villette. She wrote:
As for the other side of the question, which you desire to know, I have but one thing to say, but it is not a small one. I do not like the love, either the kind or the degree of it; and its prevalence in the book, and effect on the action of it, help to explain the passages in the reviews which you consulted me about, and seem to afford some foundation for the criticisms they offered.
The rest of the letter was suppressed by Mrs. Gaskell, but it must have been laudatory, for Charlotte answered that it was fair, right, and worthy of her, but against this passage she violently protested; it struck her dumb. She did not turn the other cheek at all, but the tears sprang to her eyes and an undying resentment to her heart. She replied:
I know what love is as I understand it; and if man or woman should be ashamed of feeling such love, then there is nothing right, noble, faithful, truthful, unselfish on this earth, as I comprehend rectitude, nobleness, fidelity, truth and disinterestedness.... To differ from you gives me keen pain.
Then Miss Martineau wrote an anonymous review of Villette in the Daily News, in which she made public the same sort of criticism as had privately given Charlotte such deep offence, pointing out, as is indeed true, that Lucy Snowe’s love for Dr. John is superseded without recorded transition by her love for Paul Emmanuel; she also accused her of attacking Popery with virulence. That was enough, and more than enough. Charlotte ascertained that the review was by her, and instantly determined to have nothing more to do with her.
She has shown with reference to the work [she wrote to Miss Wooler] a spirit so strangely and unexpectedly acrimonious, that I have gathered courage to tell her that the gulf of mutual difference between her and me is so wide and deep, the bridge of union so slight and uncertain that I have come to the conclusion that frequent intercourse would be most perilous and unadvisable and have begged to adjourn sine die my long projected visit to her. Of course she is now very angry, and I know her bitterness will not be short-lived — but it cannot be helped.
That was the end: Charlotte never saw Miss Martineau again, nor sent her a notification of her marriage.
The reception of Villette in spite of some severe reviews was sufficiently favourable to please the author, and she returned to Haworth to take up again the situation concerning Mr. Nicholls, which had been left suspended in her absence. A great social event was impending, namely, the visit of Dr. Longley, Bishop of Ripon, and subsequently Archbishop of Canterbury, who spent a night at the Parsonage. He was ‘a charming little bishop, the most benignant little gentleman that ever put on lawn sleeves,’ and all passed off very well except for Mr. Nicholls’s conduct. He came to tea and supper, but made no effort to be cheerful, rather he called attention to his dejection, and showed temper in speaking to Mr. Brontë. He dogged Charlotte up the path to the vicarage after evening service, and when Charlotte went upstairs, he cast after her some ‘flaysome looks,’ which ‘filled Martha’s soul with horror,’ for Martha, standing by the kitchen door, had her eye on him, and reported these sinister glances. He got up a ‘pertinacious dispute’ with the Inspector of Schools, which revived all Charlotte’s unfavourable impressions of him; ‘if he was a good man at bottom, it is a sad thing that nature has not given him the faculty to put goodness into a more attractive form.’ He grew so gloomy and reserved that the rest of his clerical brethren shunned his company. ‘Papa has a perfect antipathy to him, and he, I fear, to papa. Martha’ (we are reminded for the third time) ‘hates him. I think he might almost be dying and they would not speak a friendly word to or of him.’ Charlotte even managed to doubt the genuineness of his love towards her.
He was never agreeable or amiable, [she wrote] and is less so now than ever, and, alas! I do not know him well enough to be sure there is truth and true affection, or only rancour and corroding disappointment at the bottom of the chagrin. In this state of things I must be, and I am, entirely passive.
In fact, in this letter to Ellen in the spring of 1853 Charlotte collects, as for a criminal trial, every atom of evidence she could find, including her cook’s opinion of him, to demonstrate what a thoroughly undesirable fellow Mr. Nicholls was.
But she was not trying to convince Ellen of that; she was trying to convince herself, and without full success. She began to doubt her own conclusions, and in the very letter in which she set forth this formidable dossier against him she completely betrayed herself. ‘I may be losing the purest gem, and to me far the most precious life can give — genuine attachment — or I may be escaping the yoke of a morose temper.’ So, pending her own decision on the matter, she laid the responsibility on her father. ‘In this doubt,’ she wrote, ‘conscience will not suffer me to take one step in opposition to papa’s will, blended as that will is with the most bitter and unreasonable prejudice.’ But all the time she knew that papa’s will was not a determining factor at all; she would see about papa’s will when she had made up her mind about her own, and she was looking out for some convincing opportunity to tear up her dossier altogether.
Was ever woman in this humour wooed? Was ever woman in this humour won?
Her opportunity came. Mr. Nicholls found the situation intolerable; he again resigned his curacy and was to leave Haworth at the end of May. Whit-Sunday came, and next day Charlotte wrote to Ellen an account of what had happened the day before at church:
It seems as if I were to be punished for my doubts about the nature and truth of poor Mr. Nicholls’s regard. Having ventured on Whit Sunday to stop to the sacrament, I got a lesson not to be repeated. He struggled, faltered, then lost command over himself, stood before my eyes and in the sight of all the communicants, white, shaking, voiceless. He made a great effort, but could only with difficulty whisper and falter through the service. I suppose he thought this would be the last time, he goes either this week or the next. I heard the women sobbing round, and I could not quite check my own tears. What had happened was reported to Papa either by Joseph Redman or John Brown; it excited only anger, and such expressions as ‘unmanly driveller.’ Compassion or relenting is no more to be looked for than sap from firewood.
It may be taken that from this moment Charlotte made up her mind to marry him. She had surrendered, and, though his departure was imminent and there were many difficulties in the way yet, she was convinced of the sincerity of his devotion, and knew in her heart that he was her man. There was a school feast at which Mr. Brontë spoke to him ‘with constrained civility but still with civility.’ He did not reply civilly, he cut short further words. Considering that his vicar had not spoken to him for months, this was hardly to be wondered at, and Charlotte was justly afraid that they were both unchristian in their mutual feelings. Then, in spite of Mr. Nicholls’s apparently extreme unpopularity in the parish, his flock got up a handsome testimonial for him in the shape of a gold watch. Mr. Brontë, not being very well, absented himself from the presentation.
Mr. Nicholls came to the Parsonage to deliver up deeds and account-books and to say good-bye to his future father-in-law. Charlotte would not see him in her father’s presence, and he left the house. But now she had really chosen him as he had chosen her, and she could not let him go like that.
Perceiving that he stayed long before going out at the gate, and remembering his long grief, I took courage and went out trembling and miserable. I found him leaning against the garden door in a paroxysm of anguish, sobbing as women never sob. Of course I went straight to him. Very few words were interchanged, those few barely articulate. But he wanted such hope and encouragement as I could not give him.
He went, and Charlotte instantly perceived that it was not he only, but she personally who was
suffering. ‘In all this,’ she complains to Ellen, ‘it is not I who am to be pitied at all, and, of course, nobody pities me. They all think in Haworth that I have disdainfully refused him.’ That she had certainly done, assigning any amount of excellent reasons for her decision, and endorsing it with the approval of Martha and John Brown. But now she intended to marry him, and, though she could not at parting give him any promise until her father’s objections were overcome, she set to work quietly and secretly, making no mention of what she was doing in her letters at the time, and embarked on an amazing and entrancing intrigue.
She had for secret ally and fellow-conspirator the Rev. Joseph Brett Grant, master of Haworth Grammar School. She had pilloried him in Shirley as Mr. Donne, but he had borne her no grudge (rather disconcertingly) for that, and now he proved his active good-will. For in July, only two months after Mr. Nicholls had left Haworth, apparently for good, he was staying perdu with this admirable Mr. Grant at the Grammar School, and there were meetings between Charlotte and him. He had not therefore to wait long for the encouragement she had been unable to give him when they parted at the gate of the Parsonage, and instead of being ‘entirely passive’ she was taking some very romantic measures ‘in opposition to papa’s will.’ This manœuvre, as yet unnoticed by the devout biographer but proved by the indisputable evidence of her own letters, when the course of love ran smooth, is almost too ‘wildly dear,’ and we figure her, as demure and mouse-like and determined as Jane Eyre herself, stealing from the Parsonage, when Mr. Brontë was safely occupied over his sermon, to keep her assignation with her lover at the house of one of the Shirley curates. Did Martha know, we wonder? Did John Brown know? Then she kept in touch with him as well by correspondence; but the correspondence weighed on her mind, and she told her father that she was writing to him. That probably was a well-calculated confession, for the new curate, Mr. de Renzi, Charlotte perceived, did not suit her father nearly as well as Mr. Nicholls had done, and the hint that Mr. Nicholls was not yet entirely severed from Haworth would not be amiss. But Mr. Brontë was told nothing about his clandestine visit to the Grammar School, and his daughter’s meetings with him.
