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The Three Brontës · Chapter 9Introduction (7)

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For there are moments, long moments of perfectly awful failure in Jane Eyre. There are phrases that make you writhe, such as "the etymology of the mansion's designation", and the shocking persistency with which Charlotte Brontë "indites", "peruses", and "retains". There are whole scenes that outrage probability. Such are the scenes, or parts of scenes, between Jane and Rochester during the comedy of his courtship. The great orchard scene does not ring entirely true. For pages and pages it falters between passion and melodrama; between rhetoric and the cri de coeur. Jane in the very thick of her emotion can say, "I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence, with what I delight in—with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester, and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity for departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death." And the comedy is worse. Jane elaborates too much in those delicious things she says to Rochester. Rochester himself provokes the parodist. (Such manners as Rochester's were unknown in mid-Victorian literature.)

"He continued to send for me punctually the moment the clock struck seven; though when I appeared before him now, he had no such honeyed terms as 'love' and 'darling' on his lips: the best words at my disposal were 'provoking', 'malicious elf,' 'sprite', 'changeling', etc. For caresses, too, I now got grimaces; for a pressure of the hand, a pinch on the arm; for a kiss on the cheek, a severe tweak of the ear. It was all right: at present I decidedly preferred these fierce favours to anything more tender."

Yet there is comedy, pure comedy in those scenes, though never sustained, and never wrought to the inevitable dramatic climax. Jane is delightful when she asks Rochester whether the frown on his forehead will be his "married look", and when she tells him to make a dressing-gown for himself out of the pearl-grey silk, "and an infinite series of waistcoats out of the black satin". The Quarterly was much too hard on the earlier cadeau scene, with Rochester and Jane and Adèle, which is admirable in its suggestion of Jane's shyness and precision.

"'N'est-ce pas, Monsieur, qu'il y a un cadeau pour Mademoiselle Eyre, dans votre petit coffre?'"

"'Who talks of cadeaux?' said he gruffly; 'did you expect a present, Miss Eyre? Are you fond of presents?' and he searched my face with eyes that I saw were dark, irate, and piercing.

"'I hardly know, sir; I have little experience of them; they are generally thought pleasant things.'"

Charlotte Brontë was on her own ground there. But you tremble when she leaves it; you shudder throughout the awful drawing-room comedy of Blanche Ingram. Blanche says to her mother: "Am I right, Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park?" And her mother says to Blanche, "My lily-flower, you are right now, as always." Blanche says to Rochester, "Signor Eduardo, are you in voice to-night?" and he, "Donna Bianca, if you command it, I will be." And Blanche says to the footman, "Cease that chatter, blockhead, and do my bidding."

That, Charlotte's worst lapse, is a very brief one, and the scene itself is unimportant. But what can be said of the crucial scene of the novel, the tremendous scene of passion and temptation? There is passion in the scene before it, between Jane and Rochester on the afternoon of the wedding-day that brought no wedding.

"'Jane, I never meant to wound you thus. If the man who had but one little ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter, that ate of his bread, and drank of his cup, and lay in his bosom, had by some mistake slaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have rued his bloody blunder more than I now rue mine. Will you ever forgive me?'… 'You know I am a scoundrel, Jane?' ere long he inquired wistfully, wondering, I suppose, at my continued silence and tameness; the result of weakness rather than of will.

"'Yes, sir.'

"'Then tell me so roundly and sharply—don't spare me.'

"'I cannot; I am tired and sick. I want some water.'

"He heaved a sort of shuddering sigh, and, taking me in his arms, carried me downstairs."

But there are terrible lapses. After Rochester's cry, "'Jane, my little darling … If you were mad, do you think I should hate you,'" he elaborates his idea and he is impossible: "'Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken it would be my treasure still; if you raved, my arms should confine you and not a strait waistcoat—your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me; if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace at least as fond as it would be restrictive.'"

And in the final scene of temptation there is a most curious mingling of reality and unreality, of the passion which is poetry, and the poetry which is not passion.

"'Never,' said he, as he ground his teeth, 'never was anything so frail, and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand!' And he shook me with the force of his hold. 'I could bend her with my finger and thumb; and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage—with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it—the savage, beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit—with will and energy, and virtue and purity—that I want: not alone your brittle frame. Of yourself, you could come with soft flight and nestle against my heart, if you would; seized against your will you will elude the grasp like an essence—you will vanish ere I inhale your fragrance. Oh, come, Jane, come!'"

It is the crucial scene of the book; and with all its power, with all its vehemence and passionate reality it is unconvincing. It stirs you and it leaves you cold.

The truth is that in Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë had not mastered the art of dialogue; and to the very last she was uncertain in her handling of it. In this she is inferior to all the great novelists of her time; inferior to some who were by no means great. She understood more of the spiritual speech of passion than any woman before her, but she ignores its actual expression, its violences, its reticences, its silences. In her great scenes she is inspired one moment, and the next positively handicapped by her passion and her poetry. In the same sentence she rises to the sudden poignant cri du coeur, and sinks to the artifice of metaphor. She knew that passion is poetry, and poetry is passion; you might say it was all she knew, or ever cared to know. But her language of passion is too often the language of written rather than of spoken poetry, of poetry that is not poetry at all. It is as if she had never heard the speech of living men and women. There is more actuality in the half-French chatter of Adèle than in any of the high utterances of Jane and Rochester.

And yet her sense of the emotion behind the utterance is infallible, so infallible that we accept the utterance. By some miracle, which is her secret, the passion gets through. The illusion of reality is so strong that it covers its own lapses. Jane Eyre exists to prove that truth is higher than actuality.

"'Jane suits me: do I suit her?'

"'To the finest fibre of my nature, sir.'"

If no woman alive had ever said that, it would yet be true to Jane's feeling. For it is a matter of the finest fibres, this passion of Jane's, that set people wondering about Currer Bell, that inflamed Mrs. Oliphant, as it inflamed the reviewer in The Quarterly, and made Charles Kingsley think that Currer Bell was coarse. Their state of mind is incredible to us now. For what did poor Jane do, after all? Nobody could possibly have had more respect for the ten commandments. For all Rochester's raging, the ten commandments remain exactly where they were. It was inconceivable to Charlotte Brontë that any decent man or woman could make hay, or wish to make hay, of them. And yet Jane offended. She sinned against the unwritten code that ordains that a woman may lie till she is purple in the face, but she must not, as a piece of gratuitous information, tell a man she loves him; not, that is to say, in as many words. She may declare her passion unmistakably in other ways. She may exhibit every ignominious and sickly sign of it; her eyes may glow like hot coals; she may tremble; she may flush and turn pale; she may do almost anything, provided she does not speak the actual words. In mid-Victorian times an enormous licence was allowed her. She might faint, with perfect propriety, in public; she might become anaemic and send for the doctor, and be ordered iron; she might fall ill, horridly and visibly, and have to be taken away to spas and places to drink the waters. Everybody knew what that meant. If she had shrieked her passion on the housetops she could hardly have published it more violently; but nobody minded. It was part of the mid-Victorian convention.

Jane Eyre did none of these things. As soon as she was aware of her passion for Mr. Rochester she thrust it down into the pocket of her voluminous mid-Victorian skirt and sat on it. Instead of languishing and fainting where Rochester could see her, she held her head rather higher than usual, and practised the spirited arts of retort and repartee. And nobody gave her any credit for it. Then Rochester puts the little thing (poor Jane was only eighteen when it happened) to the torture, and, with the last excruciating turn of the thumbscrew, she confesses. That was the enormity that was never forgiven her.

"'You'll like Ireland, I think,'" says Rochester in his torturing mood; "'they are such kind-hearted people there.'

"'It is a long way off, sir.'

"'No matter, a girl of your sense will not object to the voyage or the distance.'

"'Not the voyage, but the distance: and then the sea is a barrier.'

"'From what, Jane?'

"'From England and from Thornfield, and—'

"'Well?'

"'From you, sir.'"

She had done it. She had said, or almost said the words.

It just happened. There was magic in the orchard at Thornfield; there was youth in her blood; and—"Jane, did you hear the nightingale singing in that wood?"

Still, she had done it.

And she was the first heroine who had. Adultery, with which we are fairly familiar, would have seemed a lesser sin. There may be extenuating circumstances for the adulteress. There were extenuating circumstances for Rochester. He could plead a wife who went on all fours. There were no extenuating circumstances for little Jane. No use for her to say that she was upset by the singing of the nightingale; that it didn't matter what she said to Mr. Rochester when Mr. Rochester was going to marry Blanche Ingram, anyway; that she only flung herself at his head because she knew she couldn't hit it; that her plainness gave her a certain licence, placing her beyond the code. Not a bit of it. Jane's plainness was one thing that they had against her. Until her time no heroine had been permitted to be plain. Jane's seizing of the position was part of the general insolence of her behaviour.

Jane's insolence was indeed unparalleled. Having done the deed she felt no shame or sense of sin; she stood straight up and defended herself. That showed that she was hardened.

It certainly showed—Jane's refusal to be abject—that Jane was far ahead of her age.

"'I tell you I must go!' I retorted, roused to something like passion. 'Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings, and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and fully as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses'" ("Addresses"? oh, Jane!) "'your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal—as we are!'"

This, allowing for some slight difference in the phrasing, is twentieth century. And it was this—Jane's behaviour in the orchard, and not Rochester's behaviour in the past—that opened the door to the "imps of evil meaning, polluting and defiling the domestic hearth."

Still, though The Quarterly censured Jane's behaviour, it was Rochester who caused most of the trouble and the scandal by his remarkable confessions. In a sense they were remarkable. Seldom, outside the pages of French fiction, had there been so lavish and public a display of mistresses. And while it was agreed on all hands that Rochester was incredible with his easy references to Céline and Giacinta and Clara, still more incredible was it that a young woman in a country parsonage should have realized so much as the existence of Clara and Giacinta and Céline. But, when Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux invoked Branwell and all his vices to account for Charlotte's experience, they forgot that Charlotte had read Balzac,[A] and that Balzac is an experience in himself. She had also read Moore's Life of Byron, and really there is nothing in Rochester's confessions that Byron and a little Balzac would not account for. So that they might just as well have left poor Branwell in his grave.

[Footnote A: I am wrong. Charlotte did not read Balzac till later, when George Henry Lewes told her to. But there were those twenty "clever, wicked, sophistical, and immoral French books" that she read in eighteen-forty. They may have served her purpose better.]

Indeed, it was the manner of Rochester's confession that gave away the secret of Currer Bell's sex; her handling of it is so inadequate and perfunctory. Rochester is at his worst and most improbable in the telling of his tale. The tale in itself is one of Charlotte's clumsiest contrivances for conveying necessary information. The alternate baldness and exuberant, decorated, swaggering boldness (for Charlotte's style was never bolder than when she was essaying the impossible) alone betrayed the hand of an innocent woman. Curious that these makeshift passages with their obviously second-hand material, their palpably alien mise en scène, should ever have suggested a personal experience and provoked The Quarterly to its infamous and immortal utterance: "If we ascribe the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex."

The Quarterly, to do it justice, argued that Currer Bell was a man, for only a man would have betrayed such ignorance of feminine resources as to make Jane Eyre, on a night alarm, "hurry on a frock and shawl". The reasoning passed. Nobody saw that such a man would be as innocent as any parson's daughter. Nobody pointed out that, as it happened, Currer Bell had provided her dowagers with "vast white wrappers" on the second night alarm. And, after all, the sex of The Quarterly reviewer itself remains a problem. Long ago Mr. Andrew Lang detected the work of two hands in that famous article. You may say there were at least three. There was, first, the genial reviewer of Vanity Fair, who revels in the wickedness of Becky Sharpe, and who is going to revel in the wickedness of Jane. Then suddenly some Mr. Brocklebank steps in, and you get a "black-marble clergyman" on Jane Eyre.

"We have said," says this person, "that this was the picture of a natural heart. This, to our view, is the great and crying mischief of the book. Jane Eyre is throughout the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit, the more dangerous to exhibit from that prestige of principle and self-control, which is liable to dazzle the eyes too much for it to observe the insufficient and unsound foundation on which it rests. It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength; but it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself…. She has inherited the worst sin of our fallen nature—the sin of pride."

Jane, you see, should have sinned to show her Christian humility. The style, if not the reasoning, is pure Brocklebank. He does "not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought, which has overthrown authority and violated every code, human and divine, abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has written Jane Eyre".

Ellis and Acton (poor Acton!) Bell get it even stronger than that; and then, suddenly again, you come on a report on the "Condition of Governesses", palpably drawn up by a third person. For years Miss Rigby, who was afterwards Lady Eastlake, got the credit for the whole absurd performance, for she was known to have written the review on Vanity Fair. What happened seems to have been that Miss Rigby set out in all honesty to praise Jane Eyre. Then some infuriated person interfered and stopped her. The article was torn from the unfortunate Miss Rigby and given to Brocklebank, who used bits of her here and there. Brocklebank, in his zeal, overdid his part, so the report on Governesses was thrown in to give the whole thing an air of seriousness and respectability. So that it is exceedingly doubtful whether, after all, it was a woman's hand that dealt the blow.

If Charlotte Brontë did not feel the effect of it to the end of her life, she certainly suffered severely at the time. It was responsible for that impassioned defence of Anne and Emily which she would have been wiser to have left alone.

It must be admitted that Jane Eyre was an easy prey for the truculent reviewer, for its faults were all on the surface, and its great qualities lay deep. Deep as they were, they gripped the ordinary uncritical reader, and they gripped the critic in spite of himself, so that he bitterly resented being moved by a work so flagrantly and obviously faulty. What was more, the passion of the book was so intense that you were hardly aware of anything else, and its author's austere respect for the ten commandments passed almost unobserved.

But when her enemies accuse Charlotte Brontë of glorifying passion they praise her unaware. Her glory is that she did glorify it. Until she came, passion between man and woman had meant animal passion. Fielding and Smollett had dealt with it solely on that footing. A woman's gentle, legalized affection for her husband was one thing, and passion was another. Thackeray and Dickens, on the whole, followed Fielding. To all three of them passion is an affair wholly of the senses, temporary, episodic, and therefore comparatively unimportant. Thackeray intimated that he could have done more with it but for his fear of Mrs. Grundy. Anyhow, passion was not a quality that could be given to a good woman; and so the good women of Dickens and Thackeray are conspicuously without it. And Jane Austen may be said to have also taken Fielding's view. Therefore she was obliged to ignore passion. She gave it to one vulgar woman, Lydia Bennett, and to one bad one, Mrs. Rushworth; and having given it them, she turned her head away and refused to have anything more to do with these young women. She was not alone in her inability to "tackle passion". No respectable mid-Victorian novelist could, when passion had so bad a name.

And it was this thing, cast down, defiled, dragged in the mud, and ignored because of its defilement, that Charlotte Brontë took and lifted up. She washed it clean; she bathed it in the dew of the morning; she baptized it in tears; she clothed it in light and flame; she showed it for the divine, the beautiful, the utterly pure and radiant thing it is, "the very sublime of faith, truth and devotion". She made it, this spirit of fire and air, incarnate in the body of a woman who had no sensual charm. Because of it little Jane became the parent of Caterina and of Maggie Tulliver; and Shirley prepared the way for Meredith's large-limbed, large-brained, large-hearted women.

It was thus that Charlotte Brontë glorified passion. The passion that she glorified being of the finest fibre, it was naturally not understood by people whose fibres were not fine at all.

It was George Henry Lewes (not a person of the finest fibre) who said of Jane Eyre that "the grand secret of its success … as of all great and lasting successes was its reality". In spite of crudities, absurdities, impossibilities, it remains most singularly and startlingly alive. In Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë comes for the first time into her kingdom of the inner life. She grasps the secret, unseen springs; in her narrow range she is master of the psychology of passion and of suffering, whether she is describing the agony of the child Jane shut up in that terrible red room, or the anguish of the woman on the morning of that wedding-day that brought no wedding. Or take the scene of Jane's flight from Thornfield, or that other scene, unsurpassed in its passion and tenderness, of her return to Rochester at Ferndean.

"To this house I came just ere dark, on an evening marked by the characteristics of sad sky, cold gale, and continued small, penetrating rain…. Even within a very short distance of the manor-house you could see nothing of it; so thick and dark grew the timber of the gloomy wood about it. Iron gates between granite pillars showed me where to enter, and passing through them, I found myself at once in the twilight of close-ranked trees. There was a grass-grown track descending the forest aisle, between hoar and knotty shafts and under branched arches. I followed it, expecting soon to reach the dwelling; but it stretched on and on, it wound far and farther: no sign of habitation or grounds was visible…. At last my way opened, the trees thinned a little; presently I beheld a railing, then the house—scarce, by this dim light, distinguishable from the trees; so dank and green were its decaying walls. Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch, I stood amidst a space of enclosed ground, from which the wood swept away in a semicircle. There were no flowers, no garden-beds; only a broad gravel-walk girdling a grass-plat, and this set in the heavy frame of the forest. The house presented two pointed gables in its front; the windows were latticed and narrow: the front-door was narrow too, one step led up to it…. It was still as a church on a week-day; the pattering rain on the forest leaves was the only sound audible….

"I heard a movement—that narrow front-door was unclosing, and some shape was about to issue from the grange.

"It opened slowly; a figure came out into the twilight and stood on the step; a man without a hat: he stretched forth his hand as if to feel whether it rained. Dark as it was I had recognized him….

"His form was of the same strong and stalwart contour as ever…. But in his countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding—that reminded me of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished, might look as looked that sightless Samson."

Again—Rochester hears Jane's voice in the room where she comes to him.

"'And where is the speaker? Is it only a voice? Oh! I cannot see, but I must feel or my heart will stop and my brain burst.'…

"He groped. I arrested his wandering hand, and prisoned it in both mine.

"'Her very fingers!' he cried; 'her small, slight fingers! If so, there must be more of her.'

"The muscular hand broke from my custody; my arm was seized, my shoulder—neck—wrist—I was entwined and gathered to him….

"I pressed my lips to his once brilliant and now rayless eyes—I swept back his hair from his brow and kissed that too. He suddenly seemed to rouse himself: the conviction of the reality of all this seized him.

"'It is you—is it, Jane? You are come back to me then?'

"'I am.'"

The scene as it stands is far from perfect; but only Charlotte Brontë could sustain so strong an illusion of passion through so many lapses. And all that passion counts for no more than half in the astounding effect of reality she produces. Before Jane Eyre there is no novel written by a woman, with the one exception of Wuthering Heights, that conveys so poignant an impression of surroundings, of things seen and heard, of the earth and sky; of weather; of the aspects of houses and of rooms. It suggests a positive exaltation of the senses of sound and light, an ecstasy, an enchantment before the visible, tangible world. It is not a matter of mere faithful observation (though few painters have possessed so incorruptibly the innocence of the eye). It is an almost supernatural intentness; sensation raised to the _n_th power. Take the description of the awful red room at Gateshead.

"A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a soft fawn colour, with a flush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly-polished old mahogany. Out of these deep surrounding shades rose high and glared white the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles counterpane. Scarcely less prominent was an ample, cushioned easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne…. Mr. Reed had been dead nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his last; here he lay in state; hence his coffin was borne by the undertaker's men; and since that day a sense of dreary consecration had guarded it from frequent intrusion."

Could anything be more horrible than that red room? Or take the descriptions of the school at Lowood where the horror of pestilence hangs over house and garden. Through all these Gateshead and Lowood scenes Charlotte is unerring and absolute in her reality.

Her very style, so uncertain in its rendering of human speech, becomes flawless in such passages as this: "It was three o'clock; the church-bell tolled as I passed under the belfry: the charm of the hour lay in its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun. I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white, worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and the little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like single russet leaves about to drop.

"This lane inclined up-hill all the way to Hay…. I then turned eastward.

"On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon; pale yet as a cloud, but brightening momently; she looked over Hay which, half lost in trees, sent up a blue smoke from its few chimneys; it was yet a mile distant, but in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life. My ear, too, felt the flow of currents; in what dales and depths I could not tell: but there were many hills beyond Hay, and doubtless many becks threading their passes. That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of the nearest streams, the sough of the most remote.