[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.’
* * * * *
[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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
[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.