THE BRONTES: LIFE AND LETTERS.* A STERN critic might argue
that these two great tragic volumes are lengthy, are monotonous, contain among their seven hundred and eleven letters many that were not worth preserving from a literary point of view, or even, in some cases, for any purpose of throwing fresh light on the character or genius, the joys or sufferings, of Charlotte Bronte and her sisters. There would be more than a grain of literal truth in all this. It might also be said that such an immense mass of biographical material, with even the one world-known biography crumbled into the pot, could not easily be con- sumed by any readers who did not add to an enthusiastic admiration for Charlotte Bronte's writings a devouring curiosity as to every yard of ribbon she bought to trim a bonnet or every piece of ham she ordered for supper at Haworth Vicarage.
Yet, in spite of these objections, we doubt whether any really open-minded reader would find it possible to lay these volumes down with a page still unread. Although the outlines of the story were perfectly well known, one follows eagerly the development of Charlotte's noble character through the long valley of shadows, ill-health, misunderstandings—with lights of extraordinary brilliancy, such lights as only emerge where genius is, flashing now and then across the darkness—until her unsuitable marriage caged the wild creature and soon smothered and extinguished the bright spirit.
Mr. Shorter is quite right in his praise of Mr. Nicholls as a worthy man and an excellent husband. Charlotte had known him for some years as a hopelessly disagreeable and miserable lover. Some women are attracted by that kind of thing, and no doubt she was terribly lonely with her pompous and eccentric old father. Still, the marriage wis unsuitable. Charlotte was happy after a fashion, we do not deny. Modest and unselfish as she was, she listened indulgently to her Arthur, even when be tried to insist that Ellen Nussey, the friend of her heart, whom we have to thank for the greater part of these volumes, should solemnly promise • The Brontis : Life and Letters. Being an Attempt to Present a Full and Final Record of the Lives of the Three Sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontg, from the Biographies of Mrs. Gaskell and others, and from numerous hitherto Un- published Manuscripts and Letters. By Clement Shorter. 2 vols. London: Hodder and Stoughton. [21.. net. J
to burn all her letters. This alone seems enough to show that those who "urge" that Mr. Nicholls "was not the ideal husband" have some right on their side. Mr. Shorter's remark that "such criticisms are always impertinences" is not convincing. When every part of a woman's life is laid before the world, as here, for free discussion, it is difficult to draw the exact line where "impertinence" comes in. "If women of intellect always waited for the ideal husband," Mr. Shorter goes on to say, "most of them would die unmarried." Would it matter very much if they did ? And Charlotte was something more than a woman of intellect ; she was a woman of genius as well as of singularly fine character. Why should not the fates have arranged a "marriage of true minds" for her as well as for Elizabeth Barrett Browning ?
These are unavailing regrets, but they show the frame of mind—wrathful melancholy—with which one reader at least has laid down these volumes. And such an unexpected stirring of sympathy justifies Mr. Shorter's method. It is a living being, and an intensely interesting one, that dis- engages itself from all these hundreds of letters linked together here and there by a few lines, not always very convincing, from the editor's pen.
We think that Mr. Shorter is the first person who has succeeded in painting—or rather in setting before the world- s really natural picture of Emily Brontë, a genius as strange as she was great, hardly the morbid savage tradition has made her. There are few more pathetic and striking things in the book than certain manuscripts of Emily and of Anne, for the preservation of which we have to thank Mr. Nicholls, who sent them to Mr. Shorter some thirteen years ago. Scraps of paper, covered with tiny writing, and folded into a little old pin-box, they are a kind of chronicle to be read every four years, and they give glimpses of the life at Haworth Vicarage down to 1845, three years before Emily's death, which show that in their own peculiar way the girls knew bow to be happy, even while their miserable brother was doing his best to drag the whole family downhill. Charlotte, with her foreign and other experiences, was a little outside all this, and her imaginative world had a closer hold on reality ; but "the countless illusions of early youth," to use her own words, still belonged to her sisters. In the intervals of an active and useful daily life, they lived among visions and images, carrying on between themselves the "Chronicles of Gonda- land," which, if written down, are unhappily lost for ever.
Few young writers are without experiences of the kind, but they seldom last till twenty-seven or later. Emily writes on her twenty-seventh birthday, July 30th, 1845 :—
" Anne and I went our first long journey by ourselves together, leaving home on the 30th of June, Monday, sleeping at York, returning to Reighley Tuesday evening, sleeping there and walking home on Wednesday morning. Though the weather was broken we enjoyed ourselves very much And during our excursion we were, Ronald Macalgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Angusteena, Rosabella Esmaldan, Ella and Julian Egremont, Catherine Navarre, and Cordell& Fitzaphnold, escaping from the palaces of instruction to join the Royalists who are hard driven at present by the victorious Republicans. The Gondals still flourish bright as ever. I am at present writing a work on the First War. Anne has been writing some articles on this, and a book by Henry Sophona. We intend sticking firm to the rascals as long as they delight us, which I am glad to say they do at present We are all in decent health, only that Papa has a. complaint in his eyes, and with the exception of B., who, I hope, will be better and do better hereafter. I am quits con- tented for myself : not as idle as formerly, altogether as hearty, and having learnt to make the most of the present and long for the future with the fidgetiness that I cannot do all I wish: seldom or ever troubled with nothing to do, and merely desiring that everybody could be as comfortable as myself and as undesponding,
and then we should have a very tolerable world of it Anne and I should have picked the black currants if it had been fine and sunshiny. I must hurry off now to my turning and ironing. I have plenty of work on hands, and writing, and am altogether full of business."
These chronicles, written two years before the publication of Wathering Heights, show a very different aide of Emily Bronte from the gloomy reserve and fierce independence with which we are familiar. The hard and terrible agony of her last days, those extraordinary dog stories, which could be matched, after all, in the history of many a passionate lover of animals, have thrown a kind of lurid shadow over the life of a woman who, with more than her share of the whole family's nervous strangeness, could yet find joy in the every- day occupations of house and garden, as well as in her own and her sister's inner world of imaginary romance.
Emily Bronte, of course, knew less of the outside world than any of her family, and was protected by her inaccessible character from intercourse she never wished for. Charlotte, on the contrary, was dragged both ways. Her bright intelligence valued the society of which she had her first experience in London, introduced by her friendly publisher to Thackeray, Lewes, and others of their kind, and which she afterwards enjoyed through her acquaintance with Miss Martineau and Mrs. Ga.skell. It is impossible to read Charlotte's letters without realising that this meeting of mind with mind, this atmosphere of literary culture and of original ideas, was the very breath of life to her. And yet that cruel strain of morbidness, from which none of the family was free, the heaviest burden, perhaps, that can be laid on human character, turned what should have been pure joy into suffering and dread. To " Currer Bell," at the height of her fa me and popularity, the intellectual excitement of meeting her equals and admirers meant paralysing sick head- aches. From the first dining out was "hideous" to her ; she was hardly ever in society without "acute mental pain." The prospect of a tea-party at Fox How made her ill with "apprehension." All this throws new light on Lady Ritchie's amusing reminiscence of that party at her father's house, when Mr. George Smith brought in "a tiny, delicate, serious little lady, pale, with fair straight hair and steady eyes. She may be a little over thirty; she is dressed in a little barege dress, with a pattern of faint green moss. She enters in mittens, in silence, in seriousness; our hearts are beating with wild excitement." And at the same time the fingers of "the great Jane Eyre" vele trembling under her mittens, and the quiet brow was throbbing with nervous terror as Thackeray stooped to give her his arm. And "every one waited for the brilliant conversation which never began at all."
Charlotte BrontZ's entertainers were not always, of course, so unfortunate. She could talk brilliantly enough when her nervous shyness was conquered, and there were those who understood her better than Thackeray, with all his kindness, did, and who succeeded in making the genius shine out under the veiL Sometimes, too, one has a striking glimpse of the little lady's proud self-respect underlying all her terrors ; as when seven gentlemen, including five formidable critics, dined at Mr. Smith's to meet the author of the day. "I innot say they overawed me much," she writes to Mr. Williams, though she confesses to a friend that a sleepless night followed that dinner-party.
It must have been a very difficult task to arrange all these letters in their proper sequence. Considering the probability of another edition, to include those additional letters which Mr. Shorter has placed in the appendix, it is worth while to point out two that are evidently in the wrong place. Letter 459, among those of 1850, which has no date of its own, but mentions the death of Ellen Taylor, should be found two years later, in 1852. Letter 510, dated 1849, has somehow slipped into 1851. It was of course in the former year that Charlotte Bronte first became acquainted with Thackeray.
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