Part 5 (2/2)
The evidence fro that the theorist does is to mutilate letters He suppresses all those parts of a correspondence which tell against his theory When these torn and bleeding passages are restored piously to their contexts they are destructive to the legend of tragic passion They show (as Mr Clehout her last year at Brussels Charlotte Bronte saw hardly anything of M Heger They also show that before very long Charlotte had a shrewd suspicion that Madaed it so, and that it was not so much the absence of Monsieur that disturbed her as the extraordinary behaviour of Madame And they show that from first to last she was incurably horee, latently, or increasingly, or violently in love with M Heger, she would have been as er's house, but she would not have been homesick; she would not, I think, have worried quite so much about Madame's behaviour; and she would have found the clue to it sooner than she did
To me it is all so simple and self-evident that, if the story were not revived periodically, if it had not been raked up again only the other day,[A] there would be no need to dwell upon anything so pitiful and silly
[Footnote A: See _The Key to the Bronte Works_, by J Malhaossip, silly, pitiful gossip and conjecture Gossip in England, gossip in Brussels, conjecture all round
Above all, it rests on certain feline hints supplied by Madaer and her fa her of love-affairs They could never put their fingers on the er It would never have occurred to their innocent mid-Victorian minds to suspect Charlotte of an attachment to a married man It would not have occurred to Charlotte to suspect herself of it
But Madaer was a Frenchwoman, and she had not a mid-Victorian mind, and she certainly suspected Charlotte of an attacher It is well known that Madame made statements to that effect, and it is admitted on all hands that Madame had been jealous It er and not Charlotte who gave her cause, slight enough in all conscience, but sufficient for Madaer She did not understand these Platonic relations between English teachers and their French professors She had never desired Platonic relations with anybody herself, and she saw nothing but annoyance in them for everybody concerned Madame's attitude is the clue to the mystery, the clue that Charlotte found She accused the dead Charlotte of an absurd and futile passion for her husband; she stated that she had had to advise the living Charlotte toprofessor; but the truth, as Charlotte in the end discovered, was that for a certain brief period Madaer confessed as much when he asked Charlotte to address her letters to him at the Athenee Royale instead of the Pensionnat The correspondence, he said, was disagreeable to his wife
Why, in Heaven's naer suspected Charlotte of an absurd and futile passion? And why should Madaer have been jealous of an absurd and futile woer's husband, and as then in England? I cannot agree with Mr Shorter that M Heger regarded Charlotte with indifference He was a Frenchman, and he had his vanity, and no doubt the frank admiration of his brilliant pupil appealed to it vividly in al depression Charlotte herself er Madame perceived the appeal and the attraction, and she was jealous; therefore her interpretation of appearances could not have been so unflattering to Charlotte as she made out Mada of an attacher's attachht to know; but froer it is certain that, if it was not entirely intellectual, not entirely that ”_affection presque paternelle_” that he once professed, it was entirely restrained and innocent and honourable It is Madaentleman away Monsieur's state of mind--extremely tes, queer and puzzling enough”, which Charlotte would not trust to a letter; matter for curl-paper confidences and no ument from the novels, from _The Professor_, frootten it But really it begs the question It moves in an extremely narrow and an extremely vicious circle Jane Eyre was tried in a furnace of temptation, therefore Charlotte must have been tried Lucy Snowe and Frances Henri loved and suffered in Brussels Therefore Charlotte must have loved and suffered there And if Charlotte loved and suffered and was tried in a furnace of temptation, that would account for Frances and for Lucy and for Jane
No; the theorists who have insisted on this tragic passion have not reckoned with Charlotte Bronte's character, and its tremendous power of self-repression If at Brussels any disastrous tenderness had raised its head it wouldn't have had a chance to grow an inch But Charlotte had large and luminous ideas of friendshi+p She was pure, utterly pure from all the illusions and subtleties and corruptions of the sentimentalist, and she could trust herself in friendshi+p She brought to it ardours and vehemences that she would never have allowed to love If she let herself go in her infrequent intercourse with M Heger, it was because she was so far fro in herself the possibility of passion That hy she could say, ”I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what the parting with M Heger cost rieve him who has been so true, kind, and disinterested a friend” That was how she could bring herself to write thus to Monsieur: ”_Savez-vous ce que je ferais, Monsieur? J'ecrirais un livre et je le dedierais a mon maitre de litterature, au seul maitre que j'aie jamais eu--a vous Monsieur! Je vous ai dit souvent en francais combien je vous respecte, combien je suis redevable a votre bonte a vos conseils Je voudrais le dire une fois en anglaisle souvenir de vos bontes ne s'effacera jamais de ma memoire, et tant que ce souvenir durera le respect que vous m'avez inspire durera aussi_” For ”_je vous respecte_” we are not entitled to read ”_je vous aime_” Charlotte was so ratitude When Charlotte said ”respect” she er was purely what Mr Matthew Arnold said religion was, an affair of ”morality touched with e in thenancy, a vibration which is Brontesque and nothing more And this Brontesque quality is what the theorists have (like Madaer, and possibly Monsieur) neither allowed for nor understood
For this ”fiery-hearted Vestal”, this virgin, sharp-tongued and sharper-eyed, this scorner of aenius, like her other genius, was narrow in its range and opportunity, and for that all the more ardent and intense It fed on what caenius, with astounding vitality out of strange and hostile soil She seereat; the obscure, the Dixons, the Wheelrights, the Taylors, the Nusseys, out of all proportion to the great But properly speaking she had only two friends, Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey, the enchanting, iht strange and hostile about Mary Taylor, the energetic, practical, deter, in the dawn of their acquaintance, to knock the nonsense out of Charlotte Mary Taylor had no appreciation of the Brontesque When Charlotte told Mary Taylor that at Cowan Bridge she used to stand in the burn on a stone to watch the water flow by, Mary Taylor told Charlotte that she should have gone fishi+ng When _Jane Eyre_ appeared she wrote to Charlotte in a strain that is a to posterity There is a touch of condescension in her praise She is evidently surprised at anything so great co out of Charlotte ”It seemed to me incredible that you had actually written a book” ”You are very different fro no doctrine to preach It is impossible to squeeze aof his prototype when she criticizes the character of St John Rivers ”A oes into his office for a piece of bread, or he goes for enthusiasood and too bad a quality for St John It's a bit of your absurd charity to believe in such a man” As an intellectual woman Mary Taylor realized Charlotte Bronte's intellect, but it is doubtful if she ever fully realized what, beyond an intellect, she had got hold of in her friend She was a woer brain than Ellen Nussey, she was loyal and wariven to her to see in Charlotte Bronte what Ellen Nussey, little as you would have expected it, had seen She did not keep her letters She burnt them ”in a fit of caution”, which may have been just as well
But Mary Taylor is i herfrankness It was she who told poor little Charlotte that she was very ugly Charlotte never forgot it You can feel in her letters, in her novels, in her whole nature, the long reverberation of the shock She said afterwards: ”You did ood, Polly,” by which she meant that Polly had done her an infinity of harood Even Ellen Nussey tried
Charlotte is very kindly cautioned against being ”tempted by the fondness of my sisters to consider myself of too s her not to be offended ”Oh, Ellen,”
Charlotte writes, ”do you think I could be offended by any good advice you ive me?” She thanks her heartily, and loves her ”if possible all the better for it” Ellen Nussey in her turn asks Charlotte to tell her of her faults and ”cease flattering her” Charlotte very sensibly refuses; and it is not till she has got away froin They are mainly tiresome, but there is a flash of revelation in her reply to ”the note you sent , if I were like you, I should have to face Zionwards, though prejudice and error lorious vision before le-hearted sincerity you have your faults, but _I_ ahts; the dreaination that at times eats me up, and makes me feel society, as it is, wretchedly insipid, you would pity ain, and Charlotte tre her note ”I will no longer shrink from your question,” she replies ”I _do_ wish to be better than I aht I will pray as you wish me”
But Charlotte is not in the least like Ellen Nussey, and she still refuses to be drawn into any return of this dangerous play with a friend's conscience and her nerves ”I will not tell you all I think and feel about you, Ellen I will preserve unbroken that reserve which alone enables o have been set down by all who knows me as a Frenchified fool You have been very kind to entle, and you have sparedto my miserable and wretched touchiness of character, used formerly to s that nobody else cares for enter into s are absurd, and therefore I try to hide the the deeper for concealment I'm an idiot!”
Miss Nussey seeh all the excite could have been worse for Charlotte than this sort of thing It goes on for years It began in eighteen-thirty-three, the third year of their friendshi+p, when she was seventeen In 'thirty-seven it is at its height Charlotte writes from Dewsbury Moor: ”If I could always live with you, if your lips and ht at the saht one day becohts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit and warm to the flesh, will now perht lead, strengthening each other in the power of self-denial, that hallowed and glowing devotion which the past Saints of God often attained to”
Now a curious and interesting thing is revealed by this correspondence
These religious fervours and depressions come on the moment Charlotte leaves Haworth and disappear as soon as she returns All those letters ritten from Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor, while the Haworth letters of the saht-hearted And when she is fairly settled at Haworth, instead of e human nature and the art of flirtation as exhibited by curates Charlotte administers to her friend a for herself for the dance Miss Nussey led her round the throne of grace
For, though that ed solely to Charlotte's days of exile, Miss Nussey was at the bottom of it Mary Taylor would have been a far robuster influence But Charlotte's friendshi+p for Mary Taylor, warm as it was, strikes cold beside her passionate affection for Ellen Nussey She brought her own fire to that, and her own extraordinary capacity for pain Her letters show every phase of this friendshi+p, its birth, its unfolding; and then the sudden leaping of the fla and its torture She writes with a lover's ardour and impatience ”Write to et impatient, almost irritable” ”I read your letter with dismay Ellen--what shall I do without you? Why are we to be denied each other's society? It is an inscrutable fatality Why are we to be divided?” (She is at Roe Head, and Roe Head suggests the answer) ”Surely, Ellen, iteach other too well--of losing sight of the _Creator_ in idolatry of the _creature_” She prays to be resigned, and records ”a sweet, placid sensation like those that I remember used to visit s in su the life of a certain French nobleree of sanctity than has been known since the days of the Early Martyrs I thought of ; I have lavished the warmest affections of a very hot tenacious heart upon you; if you grow cold, it is over” She was only twenty-one
A fewand the torture cease, the fire burns to a steady, inextinguishable glow There is gaiety in Charlotte's tenderness She is ”infuriated” on finding a jar in her trunk ”At first I hoped it was empty, but when I found it heavy and replete, I could have hurled it all the way back to Birstall However, the inscription AB softened ht first to be tenderly kissed, and then as tenderly whipped E on the floor of the bedroo at her apples She save them and the collar as your presents, with an expression at once well pleased and slightly surprised”
The religious fervours and the soul-searchings have ceased long ago, so has Miss Nussey's brief spiritual ascendency But the friendshi+p and the letters never cease They go on for twenty years, through exile and suffering, through bereavee, uninterrupted and, except for one brief period, unabridged There is nothing in any biography to compare with those letters to Ellen Nussey
If Charlotte Bronte had not happened to be a great genius as well as a great woraphy There is no iiven in them Mrs Gaskell relied almost entirely on them, and on information supplied to her by Miss Nussey And each critic and biographer who followed her, from Sir Wemyss Reid to Mr Clement Shorter, drew from the same source Miss Nussey was al to Charlotte Bronte She had possessed hundreds of her letters and, with that a quality, she was unable to withhold any of them fro, except one thing, that Charlotte did not talk about to Miss Nussey when they sat with their feet on the fender and their hair in curl-papers
That one thing was her writing It is quite possible that in those curl-paper confidences Miss Nussey learnt the truth about Charlotte's friend, M Heger She never learnt anything about Charlotte's genius In everything that concerned her genius Charlotte was silent and secret with her friend That was the line, the very sharp and impassable line she dreeen her ”dear, _dear_ Ellen”, her ”dearest Nel”, and her sisters, Anne and Emily The freemasonry of friendshi+p ended there You h even her later correspondence with Miss Nussey for any more than perfunctory and extraneous allusions to her works It was as if they had never been Every detail of her daily life is there, the outer and the inner things, the sewing and ironing and potato-peeling, together with onies; the figures of her father, her brother, her sisters, move there, vivid and alive; and old Tabby and the curates; and the very animals, Keeper and Flossie, and the little black cat, To not a word The letters to Ellen Nussey following the publication of _Jane Eyre_ are all full of gossip about Miss Ringrose and the Robinsons Presently Ellen hears a rumour of publication Charlotte repudiates it and friction follows
Charlotte writes: ”Dear Ellen,--write another letter and explain that note of yours distinctly Let me knohat you heard, and fro to feel pain frohted” ”Dear Ellen,--All I can say to you about a certain in in soht to affir (hu!) Whoever has said it--if anyone has, which I doubt--is no friend of h twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none I scout the idea utterly Whoever, after I have distinctly rejected the charge, urges it upon ” If Miss Nussey is asked, she is authorized by Miss Bronte to say, ”that she repels and disowns every accusation of the kind You may add, if you please, that if anyone has her confidence, you believe you have, and she hasconfessions to you on that subject” ”Dear Ellen,--I shall begin by telling you that you have no right to be angry at the length of ti your last, without answering it; because you have often kept racious speech, thereby obviating reproaches, I will add that I think it a great sha letter, full of the sort of details you fully relish, to read the same with selfish pleasure, and not even have the manners to thank your correspondent, and express how very much you enjoyed the narrative I _did_ enjoy the narrative in your last very keenly
Which of the Miss Woolers did you see at Mr Allbutts?”