Part 16
In the sombre web of Charlotte’s existence there shone one thread of silver, all the brighter and more blessed for the contrast--it was the warm, steady, unfailing friendship of her school-fellow “E.” (Ellen Nussey). “Ma bien aimée, ma précieuse E., mon amie chère et chérie,” she calls her in one of her earlier letters. “If we had but a cottage and a competency of our own, I do think we might live and love on till death, without being dependent on any third person for happiness.” “What am I compared to you?” she exclaims; “I feel my own utter worthlessness when I make the comparison. I am a very coarse, commonplace wretch.” But the affection that overflowed in such loving extravagance was no passing sentiment. As life deepened and grew more and more intense--and fuller of pain--for each, the closer became their attachment, the more constantly Charlotte turned for sympathy and support to her faithful companion. In her, indeed, she found all the greater rest and refreshment because of the difference in their natures. Her individuality colors the Caroline Helstone of ‘Shirley.’
R. W. GILDER, in ‘The Old Cabinet,’ in _Scribner’s Monthly_, now _The Century_, May, 1871.
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[Sidenote: Charlotte’s marriage.]
It was fixed that the marriage was to take place on the 29th of June (1854). Her two friends (Ellen Nussey and Miss Wooler) arrived at Haworth Parsonage the day before; and the long summer afternoon and evening were spent by Charlotte in thoughtful arrangements for the morrow, and for her father’s comfort during her absence from home. When all was finished--the trunk packed, the morning’s breakfast arranged, the wedding-dress laid out--just at bed-time, Mr. Brontë announced his intention of stopping at home while the others went to church. What was to be done? Who was to give the bride away? There were only to be the officiating clergyman, the bride and bridegroom, the bridesmaid, and Miss Wooler present. The prayer-book was referred to; and there it was seen that the rubric enjoins that the minister shall receive “the woman from her father’s or friend’s hands,” and that nothing is specified as to the sex of the “friend.” So Miss Wooler, ever kind in emergency, volunteered to give her old pupil away.... The news of the wedding had slipped abroad before the little party came out of church, and many old humble friends were there, seeing her look “like a snow-drop,” as they say. Her dress was white embroidered muslin, with a lace mantle, and white bonnet trimmed with green leaves, which might suggest the resemblance of the pale wintry flower.
MRS. GASKELL: ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë.’
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[Sidenote: Her brief married life.]
There was not much time for literary labors during these happy months of married life. The wife, new to her duties, was engaged in mastering them with all the patience, self-suppression, and industry which had characterized her throughout her life. Her husband was now her first thought; and he took the time which had formerly been devoted to reading, study, thought, and writing. But occasionally the pressure she was forced to put upon herself was very severe. Mr. Nicholls had never been attracted toward her by her literary fame: with literary effort he had no sympathy, and upon the whole he would rather that his wife should lay aside her pen entirely than that she should gain any fresh triumphs in the world of letters. So she submitted, and with cheerful courage repressed that “gift” which had been her solace in sorrows deep and many. Yet once the spell was too strong to be resisted, and she hastily wrote a few pages of a new story called ‘Emma,’ in which once more she proposed to deal with her favorite theme--the history of a friendless girl. One would fain have seen how she would have treated her subject, now that “the color of her thoughts” had been changed, and that a happy marriage had introduced her to a new phase of that life which she had studied so closely and so constantly. But it was not to be.
T. WEMYSS REID: ‘Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph.’
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[Sidenote: Her death.]
[Charlotte had been ill since January, 1855.] About the third week in March there was a change; a low wandering delirium came on; and in it she begged constantly for food and even for stimulants. She swallowed eagerly now; but it was too late. Wakening for an instant from this stupor of intelligence, she saw her husband’s woe-worn face, and caught the sound of some murmured words of prayer, that God would spare her. “Oh!” she whispered forth, “I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy.”
Early on Saturday morning, March 31st, the solemn tolling of Haworth church-bell spoke forth the fact of her death to the villagers who had known her from a child, and whose hearts shivered within them as they thought of the two sitting desolate and alone in the old grey house.
MRS. GASKELL: ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë.’
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[Sidenote: Charlotte’s and Emily’s work contrasted.]
[Emily] tells us what she saw; and what she saw and what she was incapable of seeing are equally characteristic. All the wildness of that moorland, all the secrets of those lonely farms, all the capabilities of the one tragedy of passion and weakness that touched her solitary life, she divined and appropriated: but not the life of the village at her feet, not the bustle of the mills, the riots, the sudden alternation of wealth and poverty, not the incessant rivalry of church and chapel; and while the West Riding has known the proto-type of nearly every person and nearly every place in ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Shirley,’ not a single character in ‘Wuthering Heights’ ever climbed the hills round Haworth.
Say that two foreigners have passed though Staffordshire, leaving us their reports of what they have seen. The first, going by day, will tell us of the hideous blackness of the country, but yet more, no doubt, of that awful, patient struggle of man with fire and darkness, of the grim courage of those unknown lives; and he would see what they toil for, women with little children in their arms; and he would notice the blue sky beyond the smoke, doubly precious for such horrible environment. But the second traveller has journeyed through the night; neither squalor nor ugliness, neither sky nor children, has he seen, only a vast stretch of blackness shot through with flaming fires, or here and there burned to a dull red by heated furnaces; and before these, strange toilers, half naked, scarcely human, and red in the leaping flicker and gleam of the fire. The meaning of their work he could not see, but a fearful and impressive phantasmagoria of flame and blackness and fiery energies at work in the encompassing night. So differently did the black country of this world appear to Charlotte, clear-seeing and compassionate, and to Emily Brontë, a traveller through the shadows.
A. M. F. ROBINSON: ‘Emily Brontë.’
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[Sidenote: Their opposite methods.]
[Sidenote: Charlotte’s studies from the life.]
The habit of direct study from life which has given us, among its finest and most precious results, these two contrasted figures of Shirley Keeldar and Lucy Snowe, affords yet another point of contrast or distinction between the manner and motive of work respectively perceptible in the design of either sister. Emily Brontë, like William Blake, would probably have said, or at least would presumably have felt, that such study after the model was to her impossible--an attempt but too certain to diminish her imaginative insight and disable her creative hand; while Charlotte evidently never worked so well as when painting more or less directly from nature. Almost the only apparent exception, as far as we--the run of her readers--know, is the wonderful and incomparable figure of Rochester.... In most cases probably the design begun by means of the camera was transferred for completion to the canvas. The likeness of Mr. Helstone to Mr. Brontë, for example, was thus at once enlarged and subdued, heightened and modified, by the skilful and noble instinct which kept it always within the gracious and natural bounds prescribed and maintained by the fine tact of filial respect.
[Sidenote: The gift of the Brontë sisters.]
The gift of which I would speak is that of a power to make us feel in every nerve, at every step forward which our imagination is compelled to take under the guidance of another’s, that thus and not otherwise, but in all things altogether even as we are told and shown, it was and it must have been with the human figures set before us in their
## action and their suffering; that thus and not otherwise they absolutely
must and would have felt and thought and spoken under the proposed conditions. It is something for a writer to have achieved if he has made it worth our fancy’s while to consider by the light of imaginative reason whether the creatures of his own fancy would in actual fact and life have done as he has made them do or not; it is something, and by comparison it is much. But no definite terms of comparison will suffice to express how much more than this it is to have done what the youngest of capable readers must feel on first opening ‘Jane Eyre’ that the writer of its very first pages has shown herself competent to do.... Even in the best and greatest works of our best and greatest we do not find this one great good quality so innate, so immanent as in hers. At most we find the combination of event with character, the coincidence of action with disposition, the coherence of consequences with emotions, to be rationally credible and acceptable to the natural sense of a reasonable faith. We rarely or never feel that, given the characters, the incidents become inevitable; that such passion must needs bring forth none other than such action, such emotions cannot choose but find their only issue in such events. And certainly we do not feel, what it seems to me the highest triumph of inspired intelligence and creative instinct to succeed in making us feel, that the main-spring of all, the central relation of the whole, “the very pulse of the machine,” has in it this occult inexplicable force of nature. But when Catherine Earnshaw says to Nelly Dean, “I _am_ Heathcliff!” and when Jane Eyre answers Edward Rochester’s question, whether she feels in him the absolute sense of fitness and correspondence to herself which he feels himself in her, with the words which close and crown the history of their twin-born spirits--“to the finest fibre of my nature, sir,”--we feel to the finest fibre of our own that these are no mere words. On this ground at least it might for once be not unpardonable to borrow their standing reference or illustration from the comparative school of critics, ... and say, as was said on another score of Emily Brontë in particular by Sydney Dobell, that either sister in this single point “has done no less” than Shakespeare. As easily might we imagine a change of the mutual relations between the characters of Shakespeare as a corresponding revolution or reversal of conditions among theirs.
[Sidenote: Emily a true poet.]
There was a dark unconscious instinct as of primitive nature-worship in the passionate great genius of Emily Brontë, which found no corresponding quality in her sister’s.... It is possible that to take full delight in Emily Brontë’s book one must have something by natural inheritance of her instinct and something by earliest association of her love for the same special points of earth--the same lights and sounds and colors and odors, and sights and shapes of the same fierce free landscape of tenantless and fenceless moor; but however that may be, it was assuredly with no less justice of insight and accuracy of judgment than humility of self-knowledge and fidelity of love that Charlotte in her day of solitary fame assigned to her dead sister the crown of poetic honor which she has rightfully disclaimed for herself. Full of poetic quality as her own work is throughout, that quality is never condensed or crystallised into the proper and final form of verse. But the pure note of absolutely right expression for things inexpressible in full by prose at its highest point of adequacy--the formal inspiration of sound which at once reveals itself, and which can fully reveal itself by metrical embodiment alone, in the symphonies and antiphonies of regular word-music and definite instinctive modulation of corresponsive tones--this is what Emily had for her birthright as certainly as Charlotte had it not.... The final expression in verse of Emily’s passionate and inspired intelligence was to be uttered from lips already whitened though not yet chilled by the present shadow of unterrifying death. No last words of poet or hero or sage or saint were ever worthy of longer or more reverent remembrance than that appeal which is so far above and beyond a prayer ... at once fiery and solemn, full alike of resignation and of rapture, as wholly stripped and cleared and lightened from all burdens and all bandages and all incrustations of creed as it is utterly pervaded and possessed by the sublime and irrefutable passion of belief.
A. C. SWINBURNE: ‘A Note on Charlotte Brontë.’
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[Sidenote: George Eliot on ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Villette.’]
I have read ‘Jane Eyre,’ and shall be glad to know what you admire in it. All self-sacrifice is good, but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man soul and body to a putrefying carcass. However, the book _is_ interesting; only I wish the characters would talk a little less like the heroes and heroines of police reports.
GEORGE ELIOT: _Letter_ to Charles Bray, 1848.
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I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading ‘Villette,’ a still more wonderful book than ‘Jane Eyre.’ There is something almost preternatural in its power.
GEORGE ELIOT: _Letter_ to Mrs. Bray, in ‘George Eliot’s Life,’ 1853.
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[Sidenote: Thackeray on Charlotte Brontë’s works and life.]
Which of her readers has not become her friend? Who that has known her books has not admired the artist’s noble English, the burning love of truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honor, so to speak, of the woman? What a story is that of that family of poets in their solitude yonder on the gloomy northern moors!... As one thinks of that life so noble, so lonely--of that passion for truth--of those nights and nights of eager study, swarming fancies, invention, depression, elation, prayer; as one reads the necessarily incomplete, though most touching and admirable, history of the heart that throbbed in this one little frame--of this one among the myriads of souls that have lived and died on this great earth--this great earth?--this little speck in the infinite universe of God--with what wonder do we think of to-day, with what awe await to-morrow, when that which is now but darkly seen shall be clear!
WM. M. THACKERAY: ‘Roundabout Papers.’
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Haworth Churchyard.
[9] A name playfully applied to Emily by her sisters.
MARIAN EVANS (LEWES) (CROSS).
(GEORGE ELIOT.)
1819-1880.
MARIAN EVANS (LEWES) (CROSS).
(GEORGE ELIOT.)
Mary Ann Evans was born at Arbury Farm, in the parish of Chilvers Coton, on the 22nd of November, 1819. She was the third and youngest child of Robert Evans and his second wife Christiana Pearson. In 1820 the family removed to Griff House, on the Arbury estate, where Mary Ann’s happy childhood was passed. At five years of age she was sent with her sister to Miss Lathom’s boarding-school at Attleboro; in her eighth or ninth year, to Miss Wallington’s at Nuneaton, where Miss Lewis, the principal governess, and “an ardent Evangelical Churchwoman,” became her intimate friend, exercising great influence over her. In her thirteenth year she was transferred to the school of the Miss Franklins at Coventry. In the summer of 1836 Mrs. Evans died; in the following spring the elder sister, Christiana, was married; and thenceforward Mary Ann took entire charge of the Griff household, engaging in various studies and active charities at the same time. In March, 1841, Mr. Robert Evans and his daughter removed to a house on the Foleshill road, near Coventry; Griff being given up to Isaac, the brother, who had recently married. In this new neighborhood Miss Evans formed the friendship of several congenial people--notably Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bray, and Miss Sara Hennell, a sister of the latter. The impressible young woman, who had till now held her eager nature “buckramed in formalities,” adopted the tone of her friends’ thought the more rapidly and easily because of the inevitable reaction from artificial restraints. She became an agnostic--though neither this nor any other single word fully explains her position.
In the spring of 1844 she took up the translation of Strauss’s ‘Life of Jesus,’ which had already been begun by Mrs. Charles Hennell. Miss Evans did not complete the work until April, 1846.
On the 31st of May, 1849, Mr. Robert Evans died, after a long illness. The Brays persuaded his daughter, who was worn out by anxiety and hard work, to accompany them in a trip to the Continent. At Geneva, where they arrived in July, she decided to remain a while, living at a _pension_, and carrying on various studies. In October she left the _pension_ to board in the family of M. d’Albert Durade, an artist. He and his wife became her fast friends; M. Durade painted her portrait, and subsequently translated some of her works into French.
Miss Evans returned to England in March, 1850, and, after visiting her brother and sister, made her home at Rosehill with the Brays for more than a year, with occasional visits to London. At the end of September, 1851, she accepted the position of assistant editor of The Westminster Review, and went to board with the family of the publisher, Mr. Chapman, in the Strand. She now became acquainted with Herbert Spencer, George Henry Lewes, and other leading thinkers and writers. In 1854 was published her translation of Feuerbach’s ‘Essence of Christianity,’ with her name (now written _Marian_ Evans), on the title-page; this, Mr. Cross informs us, was the only time her real name ever appeared in connection with her work.
In July, 1854, Marian Evans consented to become the wife of George Henry Lewes, though a formal and legal marriage was impossible. They at once went abroad, where they remained until March, 1855; spending the greater part of the time at Weimar and Berlin. After their return to England they lived for over three years in lodgings at Richmond, both working hard, though the health of neither was good. Mrs. Lewes contributed at this time to The Leader and The Westminster Review. She also finished a translation of Spinoza’s ‘Ethics,’ which she had commenced abroad.
In September, 1856, she began, as an experiment, to write fiction. In November _The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton_ was forwarded to the Blackwoods by Mr. Lewes as the work of a friend of his. It was published in Blackwood’s Magazine early in 1857, and fifty guineas paid for it. An arrangement was made by which “George Eliot” was to supply further _Scenes from Clerical Life_. _Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story_ came next, followed by _Janet’s Repentance_. In December these stories were issued in a volume by the Blackwoods, and the author received £120 for the first edition.
ADAM BEDE, her first novel, was published in 1859. She received £800 for the copyright during four years. The book was received with enthusiasm. It was followed by THE MILL ON THE FLOSS (1860), SILAS MARNER (1861), ROMOLA (1863), FELIX HOLT (1866), _The Spanish Gypsy_, a drama (1868), MIDDLEMARCH (1871-2), _Poems_, collected “1874,” DANIEL DERONDA (1876), and _The Impressions of Theophrastus Such_ (1879). The short story called _The Lifted Veil_ was published in Blackwood’s, July, 1859; _Brother Jacob_ appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, July, 1864. ROMOLA also made its appearance in The Cornhill, the publishers paying for it the sum of £7,000. £5,000 was received from the Blackwoods for FELIX HOLT; and the profits of MIDDLEMARCH and DANIEL DERONDA were still greater.
In February, 1859, Mr. and Mrs. Lewes removed to Holly Lodge, Wandsworth; in December, 1860, to 16 Blandford Square; and in November, 1863, to their permanent home, “The Priory,” 21 North Bank, Regent’s Park. They purchased in 1876 a country-house at Witley, near Godalming, Surrey. They were both fond of travelling, and the record of their many continental journeys is full of interest. It was their custom to leave town at once as soon as George Eliot had finished a book.
In November, 1878, occurred the death of Mr. Lewes. For some time George Eliot remained in seclusion, broken down by grief. She edited Mr. Lewes’ MSS., and established as a memorial the George Henry Lewes studentship at Cambridge.
In May, 1880, she was married to Mr. John Walter Cross, who had long been the dear friend of herself and Mr. Lewes. Her marriage created general surprise. It may best be understood by those who have become acquainted, through Mr. Cross’s delicate and conscientious work, ‘George Eliot’s Life,’ with the needs of her singularly sensitive nature.
Mr. and Mrs. Cross immediately left England for the Continent, returning in July to Witley. Mrs. Cross had a long illness in the autumn, which left her much weakened. On the 22d of December, 1880, she died at No. 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, having been confined to the house only four days.
Her husband concludes her biography with the words: “Her spirit joined
‘---- that choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.’”
Nor can any other words be so fit as these of her own--words wherein “the precious life-blood of a master spirit” is “embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
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[Sidenote: Early home.]
[Sidenote: An anecdote of her childhood.]