Chapter XXXIV.), may be said to have been in Miss Brontë's mind that

life of religious consecration which in _Villette_ she owns to have been the likely result of her further listening to the advice of the priest, to whom she had given "the ... outline of my experience," as she terms it.

Therefore it is interesting to observe that, as the woman in "Apostasy" suddenly hears the voice of her lover calling and says:--

"He calls--I come--my pulse scarce beats, My heart fails in my breast. Again that voice--how far away, How dreary sounds that tone! And I, methinks, am gone astray In trackless wastes and lone.

"I fain would rest a little while: Where can I find a stay, Till dawn upon the hills shall smile, And show some trodden way?[76] I come! I come! in haste she said, 'Twas Walter's voice I heard!" Then up she sprang--but fell back, dead, His name her latest word.

so in the scene in _Jane Eyre_: St. John ejaculates--

'My prayers are heard!' He pressed his hand firmer on my head, as if he claimed me; he surrounded me with his arm, _almost_ as if he loved me ["That priest had arms which could influence me; he was naturally kind, with a sentimental French kindness, to whose softness I knew myself not wholly impervious. Without respecting some sorts of affection, there was hardly any sort having a fibre of root in reality, which I could rely on my force wholly to withstand."--Charlotte Brontë speaking of her Brussels Fénélon in _Villette_, Chapter XV.], I say _almost_--I knew the difference--for I had felt what it was to be loved; but, like him, I now ... thought only of duty;... I sincerely, ... fervently longed to do what was right.... 'Show me, show me the path!' I entreated of Heaven.... My heart beat fast and thick.... I heard a voice somewhere cry 'Jane! Jane! Jane!' nothing more.... I had heard it--where or whence, for ever impossible to know! And it was ... a known, loved, well-remembered voice--that of Edward Fairfax Rochester.... 'I am coming!' I cried.... 'Wait for me! Oh, I will come!' I broke from St. John, who would have detained me. It was _my_ time to assume ascendency. _My_ powers were in play, and in force. I told him to forbear question or remark.... I mounted to my chamber ... fell on my knees, and prayed in my way--a different way to St. John's, but effective in its own fashion.... I rose from the thanksgiving--took a resolve--and lay down ... eager but for the daylight.

Mrs. Gaskell related that Charlotte Brontë in private conversation in reference to this preternatural crying of a voice, replied with much gravity and without further enlightenment that such an incident really did occur in her experience. Whether it occurred in connection with her Brussels Fénélon and immediately preceded a reconciliation between herself and M. Héger I know not. As, however, Charlotte Brontë's expression of gratitude to this priest and the whole fervent story of thankfulness for the deliverance from dangerous temptation were written subsequently to her return from Brussels, it is clear there was never a reconciliation which cost either her or M. Héger honour. I do not urge this as an advocate; I state it upon the strength of unmistakable evidence.

Miss Brontë believed it better to leave Brussels and avoid the possibilities of the peculiar situation--a situation always fraught with temptation. Hence her sudden resolve to return to England.

Arrived at Haworth the full recoil came. She had won through a great ordeal, and she knew that surrounded by his wife and family,[77] comforted by piety and the knowledge of his happy issue from involution in disastrous complications, M. Héger would resume tranquilly his accustomed course of life. To Charlotte Brontë, who by the showing of all evidence was initially responsible for a morally gratifying outcome of their dangerous attachment, this was a galling picture. Knowing nothing of the ecstatic delights of the pietist in the sacrificial sense of M. Héger, who was a devoted member of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and, as he is made to describe himself in _Villette_, "a sort of lay Jesuit," she became just a woman living in the world of her primal nature and conceiving but that she had lost. Miss Rigby--afterwards Lady Eastlake--who wrote the remarkable article on _Jane Eyre_ in _The Quarterly Review_ of 1849, perceived with a flash of real insight and the instinct of womanhood that Currer Bell's pen had presented ungarbed, vital relations of some man and woman identical in both _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_. The circumstances were full difficult for the reviewer; she was irritated and encompassed. _Wuthering Heights_, which so soon had followed the appearance of _Jane Eyre_, she suddenly recognized as the very storm-centre of this literary tornado of passionate declamation; and she chastised that work in the name of _Jane Eyre_, for she could not know all the cruel truth, and she feared to popularize _Wuthering Heights_. Although Miss Rigby wrote:--"It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength," she added, "but it is the strength of a mere heathenish mind which is a law unto itself." And later, turning upon _Wuthering Heights_ she says with a final vehemency, and most sensationally:--

There can be no interest attached to the writer of _Wuthering Heights_--a novel succeeding _Jane Eyre_ ... and purporting [!] to be written by Ellis Bell--unless it were for the sake of a more individual reprobation. For though there is a decided family likeness between the two [!], yet the aspect of the Jane and Rochester animals in their native state as Catherine and Heathcliffe [!], is abominably pagan.

Miss Rigby thus excused herself a further consideration of _Wuthering Heights_. In the days of the gratification of discovering the one she loved in return loved her,[78] this recognition stood between Charlotte Brontë and "every thought of religion, as an eclipse between man and the broad sun," so in another sense truly did the contemplation of M. Héger's self-pacification intervene in the time of reaction. The doubtings and agonizing emotions of her equivocal season in Brussels were now precipitated. Her poems "Gilbert," "Frances," and "Preference" are testimony to her vengeful and retaliative instinct; as are her portrayals of M. Héger as M. Pelet of _The Professor_ and as Heathcliffe of _Wuthering Heights_. But as I show in the next chapter, Charlotte Brontë afterwards regretted her human weakness and her vituperations of the day of the recoil. She began to set forth the story of her ordeal more sanely and proportionately in _Jane Eyre_. As one who soberly rewrites of fact, she recited therein much that she already had given detachedly; and consistently she presented by aid of the frame-work of "plot" from Montagu's _Gleanings in Craven_ which already had given her elemental suggestions for her _Wuthering Heights_, the history of her life in _Jane Eyre_--a work that stands as testimony to Charlotte Brontë's love of truth as to her heroic battling in the days of fiercest temptation.

A constant yearning to fine a presentation from untruthfulness is the God-given attribute of the artist, and this was responsible for much that is called harsh in Charlotte Brontë's character as a writer: she would not even spare her own physical and nervous imperfections in her self-portrayals. Emily Brontë would have presented Branwell Brontë as viewed through _couleur de rose_, yet Charlotte Brontë immortalized him as Hindley Earnshaw and John Reed--as she saw him: weak, tyrannical, a moral wreck. So she presented M. Héger. She knew his faults--and they were many; but she loved him though she hated them. Her sense of truth and justice, albeit she had lost the rancour of the time of the reaction, determined her in _Jane Eyre_, it is obvious, to show the occultation of her life's happiness by the incidents of her Brussels life. She would show there had been a day when the barriers between them would have been rashly ignored by him. Thus Rochester is made to sing in _Jane Eyre_, Chap. XXIV.:--

"I dreamed it would be nameless bliss, As I loved, loved to be; And to this object did I press As blind as eagerly.

But wide as pathless[79] was the space That lay, our lives, between, And dangerous as the foamy race Of ocean-surges green.

And haunted as a robber-path Through wilderness or wood; For Might and Right, and Woe and Wrath, Between our spirits stood.[80]

I dangers dared; I hindrance scorned; I omens did defy: Whatever menaced, harassed, warned,[81] I passed impetuous by.

On sped my rainbow, fast as light; I flew as in a dream; For glorious rose upon my sight That child of Shower and Gleam.

Still bright on clouds of suffering dim Shines that soft, solemn joy; Nor care I now, how dense and grim Disasters gather nigh;

I care not in this moment sweet, Though all I have rushed o'er Should come on pinion, strong and fleet, Proclaiming vengeance sore."

It is clear the impediment of M. Héger's marriage is suggested in these verses. But undeniable evidence as to Charlotte Brontë's having escaped by flight what she considered a most dangerous temptation, is the fact that we find she was influenced to pen these lines, wherein M. Héger (Rochester) is likened to a wild pursuer of a "shower and gleam" nymph who sped before him "fast as light" and "glorious rose upon his sight," by Montagu's reference, in _Gleanings in Craven_, to the story of a Craven nymph a satyr pursued yet lost by her being changed into a spring. Says Frederic Montagu:--

"In the _Polyolbion_, published in 1612, is the following passage:--

In all my spacious tract let them (so wise) survey Thy Ribble's rising banks, their worst and let them say; At Giggleswick, where I a fountain can you show, That eight times in a day is said to ebb and flow! Who sometime was a Nymph, and in the mountains high Of Craven, whose blue heads, for caps put on the sky, Among the Oreads there, and Sylvans, made abode (It was ere human foot upon these hills had trod), Of all the mountain kind, and since she was most fair; It was a Satyr's chance to see her silver hair Flow loosely at her back, as up a cliff she clame, Her beauties noting well, her features and her frame, And after her he goes; which when she did espy, Before him like the wind, the nimble Nymph did fly: They hurry down the rocks, o'er hill and dale they drive, To take her he doth strain, t' outstrip him she doth strive, Like one his kind that knew, and greatly feared.... And to the Topic Gods by praying to escape, They turned her to a Spring, which as she then did pant, When, wearied with her course, her breath grew wond'rous scant, Even as the fearful Nymph, then thick and short did blow, Now made by them a Spring, so doth she ebb and flow."

This is not all. We know now the truth regarding Charlotte Brontë's Brussels life, and seeing she discovered a pertinence in the state of the Craven Nymph to her own--for it is undeniable Rochester's song was modelled upon the lines Montagu quotes--it is likely that what I term the "river" suggestion and the Craven Elf suggestion which resulted in Charlotte Brontë's portraying herself in the rôle of the stream-named Craven elf, Janet Aire or Eyre, had to do with Montagu's mention of this nymph of Craven who escaped a dangerous persecution by becoming a spring. It seems, indeed, that if she did not at first utilize the parallel of this narrative in verse with her own experience, she yet in _Wuthering Heights_ was influenced by it, in the days which I call the period of the recoil, to represent her hero Heathcliffe as a ruin-creating, semi-human being. Whether the lines--

"It was a Satyr's chance to see her silver hair Flow loosely at her back as up a cliff she clame,"

had in the connection to do with the "cliffe" in "that ghoul Heathcliffe's" name a reference to Charlotte Brontë's Preface to _Wuthering Heights_, and her words on the creation of Heathcliffe, in my next chapter, may declare.

It is now impossible not to understand the origin of the Satyr and Nymph passage and its implication in the chapter of _Jane Eyre_ containing Rochester's song, when he says to Jane in the very same chapter:--

"You shall sojourn at Paris, Rome, and Naples: at Florence, Venice, and Vienna: all the ground I've wandered over shall be retrodden by you: wherever I stamped my hoof, your sylph's foot shall step also."