[Sidenote: Charlotte’s weak sight.]
She cannot see well, and does little beside knitting. The way she weakened her eyesight was this: When she was sixteen or seventeen, she wanted much to draw, and she copied nimini-pimini copper-plate engravings out of annuals (“stippling,” don’t the artists call it?); ... till at the end of six months she had produced an exquisitely faithful copy of the engraving. She wanted to learn to express her ideas by drawing. After she had tried to draw stories, and not succeeded, she took the better mode of writing, but in so small a hand that it is almost impossible to decipher what she wrote at this time.
[Sidenote: Habits of order.]
[Sidenote: Emily “a Titan.”]
[Sidenote: A picture by Branwell.]
I soon observed that her habits of order were such that she could not go on with the conversation if a chair was out of its place; everything was arranged with delicate regularity.... I told her of ----’s admiration of ‘Shirley,’ which pleased her, for the character of ‘Shirley’ was meant for her sister Emily, about whom she is never tired of talking, nor I of listening. Emily must have been a remnant of the Titans--great-grand-daughter of the giants who used to inhabit the earth. One day Miss Brontë brought down a rough, common-looking oil painting, done by her brother, of herself--a little, rather prim-looking girl of eighteen--and the two other sisters, girls of sixteen and fourteen, with cropped hair, and sad, dreamy-looking eyes.
MRS. GASKELL: ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Charlotte’s life-long friendship with Ellen Nussey.]
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.
* * * * *
[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.’
* * * * *
[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.’
* * * * *
[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.’
* * * * *
[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.’
* * * * *
[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.