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THE BRONTE SISTERS.*

The true criticism of the work of the sisters Brontë ought to present to our imaginations, on a general view, an aspect at once large and simple. It ought to be no more complex than the sight from any vantage point of the famous moors above Haworth parsonage, or, we might add, the picture which memory would bear away even after many hours' wanderings in those almost classic haunts. The journeyings would reveal, of course, many grim or appealing details unapparent in the general prospect, but imagination, after we had come south or gone north, would but see a great picture, synthetic and simple, and would have wrought its own sense of the color and "spirit" of the heath-lands. The deeper essence of the place would still be a secret of nature, that knows the meaning of matter and spirit and all their manifestations in the universe. So the general features in thorough-going Brontë criticism will be sheer, simple, outstanding, the details deftly set in subsidiary proportion. For Charlotte and Emily Brontë were strange and intense souls, and in their books it is the soul-fact that matters. True, there are a hundred less-inspired things; let them be quietly touched and passed. The great poetic, passionate, creative stages are elemental and bold, easily seen by those that can see; and having duly marked them and told their quality, criticism has done its broad work. It cannot sound their mystery, wring out the secret of their inspiration, any more than the traveller on the heath can penetrate to the secret below the color and the lonely beauty of nature.

Mrs. Humphry Ward is sometimes

*The Life and Works of Charlotte Bronte and her Sisters. With Introduction to the Works y Mrs. Humphry Ward. 6 vols. 1900.

thoughtful in her Brontë studies, but she also dwells unduly on none too relevant details. We could wish, on the other hand, that she had boldly considered a vital matter that must be settled before the absolute worth of the sisters' work in literature, or the evolution of literature, is satisfactorily determined. In her introduction to "Jane Eyre" she writes with pardonable gratification of the unquestioned spell exercised to-day by Charlotte Brontë's novels on the imagination of England. But this suggests the important and here unconsidered question whether the reading world, on the whole, realizes what great fiction ought to be, whether its general ideal is such that its enthusiasm in the case of Miss Brontë can be said to be a really critical tribute. It is to be feared, as a matter of fact, that England and the Continent have paid more attention to the body than to the spirit in fiction; and despite Mrs. Ward's high opinion of latter-day developments of the novel, it is by no means yet certain that it can become a supreme medium of literature. A worthy instrument it has been, in some instances a noble We have even seen achievements that have suggested the supreme, the novelist, in such rare cases, showing great soul in action, giving embodiment to, as we might say, spiritual romance, indicating in characters and destinies something of the Soul above souls, vision of the Power that "ever accompanies the march of man." The general desire, however, is that he should walk "rationally" upon earth, and paint the body and circumstance of his age or another. Much-too much-is expected of him as a delineator of daily manners till often he becomes but the photograper of individuals, the Autol

one.

ycus of data that have no more than a transient importance. It might almost seem that the great novelist must be a master of two arts-that of revealing spiritual forces, permanent passions, like a great poet or dramatist, and that of imparting imaginative significance to more ordinary actualities. The two powers-the interaction of the two worlds-make the true novel. To be thus a seer and a convincing delineator of actuality, so far as actuality is essential a keen problem-necessitates vision, intuition, opportunity and experience on such a scale that we must needs be modest in our expectations on the score of permanent fiction. The vision and the intuition are of the greater importance; on their possession and cultivation depends the fact whether fiction can be absolute literature rather than excellent description or analysis, or the work, as it were, of a syndicate of reporters in the service of a "time spirit," which may not be by any means a true daughter of the eternal.

If the vision of the sisters Brontë sometimes failed them, it was uncommon at its best. And even as regards their experience or their knowledge of life, Mrs. Ward, like many critics, seems to entertain a too narrow idea. The sources of knowledge are subtle as well as obvious. Knowing the Celtic inheritance of the sisters (of which more anon), their contact with a world of great Northern tradition, the keen ordeals to which their sensitive spirits were subjected at home and abroad, which stirred unimagined forces in their natures, and made them critics of life in a higher sense than, perhaps, is commonly realized-understanding all this, and more, and remembering the subtle ways in which nature and life speak to the chosen mind, we may well be chary of complaint as to lack of knowledge in their case. It is the soul that matters, not the number of

of

miles travelled, the number cities seen in the actual world. Charlotte Brontë has told, as she was eminently fitted to tell, the ordeals of souls that live alone, in more senses than one-the never finished tragedies of deep natures in plain frames. Her unhappy governesses and teachers are more than governesses and teachers; they are types, old and new as the passion for sympathy, the lack of consideration in any woman's sphere. And crises and partings, journeys and reunions in her pages sometimes seem to tell of people in more mysterious lands and on more mysterious seas than ours. They speak of souls rather than bodies.

Faults and crudities of construction in "Jane Eyre" and its successors— matters with which Mrs. Ward deals at length-are sufficiently obvious. Had Charlotte Brontë been careful enough or courageous enough to free herself boldly from old theories of plot-making and other prepossessions, her story of the struggle of duty against affinity would have led to truer ordering, perhaps almost to real fusion, of material. But some of her critic's strictures on details are scarcely tenable. We may not always regard Mr. Rochester so gravely as his creator-he does not justify himself to the imagination in the way of Paul Emmanuel; but his early talk with Jane Eyre is scarcely the delectable food for comedy which Mrs. Ward imagines. The judgment on the country-house party, also, is much too sweeping. Without taking sides on the interesting question of governess versus provincial society, one may gently urge that a governess of genius, in her merciless way, would be likely to detect and record an ugly side of things possessing more or less glamor for the polite. It is not really a case of an ignorant governess passing judgment on "high life;" it is injured and incisive genius casting critical eyes on humanity socially more favored, but spiritu

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of overcoming

ally inferior. Convention may seek to
put her out of court with scorn, but the
spirit of critical judgment, especially
after some of Miss Brontë's own stories,
recorded by Mrs. Gaskell, will not be
convinced that there may not be a great
deal to be urged on the other side. It
were better, no doubt, to invoke the
comic spirit in the treatment of such
issues, but Haworth was not meet,
alas! for her airy presence. Certainly
Charlotte Brontë had not always the
ordinary
happiness
prejudices in the gleam of larger vision,
nor had she the unfailing power of
shaping ordinary material to artistic
ends, as we see in the often delightful
and sometimes poetical "Shirley." The
novelist, as we have suggested, is, on
.occasions, hard set to be an artistic in-
terpreter of permanent passion and
minute and mobile actuality. But it is
possible to slip on points of detail, to
fail, now and then, in kindling imagina-
tive life in ordinary material, and yet
to be true again and again, in the high
hours, to what the imagination recog-
nizes as soul-fact. Because Charlotte
Brontë so vividly interpreted soul-fact,
not occasionally, but often, we know
that, however fallible at other times,
she was an eminent novelist.

Mrs. Ward maintains the interesting,
but, of course, by no means novel, the-
ory, that the genius of Charlotte Brontë
was fundamentally Celtic. The racial
spirit, or rather the deep human one,
as affected in the light and shadow,
the momentum, the environment of a
race of changeful fortunes, no doubt
lives long and works subtly in uncon-
sidered regions, and is an attractive, if
rather tentative study, though put to
strange uses by extremists too bent on
dividing humanity into compartments.
But leaving temperaments and worka-
day selves, and looking into the souls
that live deeply, the souls that create
permanent literature, we feel that they
geo-
are of no race, they know not

graphical boundaries. As to Charlotte
Brontë and Ireland, she seemed unable
to create an Irish character-the curate
Malone in "Shirley" and the drunken
Mrs. Sweeny in "Villette" are beneath
notice in this regard-but it is ob-
viously true that certain qualities well
marked in Celtic nature and personal-
ity are apparent in her work. It is to
be feared, however, that Mrs. Ward
has too conventional an idea of Celtic
Her remarks are a
characteristics.

little too suggestive of Matthew Ar-
nold's lectures on the "Study of Celtic
Literature"-lectures fruitful in their
day and still useful, but not founded on

a

or

comprehensive acquaintance with even translated Gaelic literature and Irish or general Celtic personality. "Celtic melancholy" is but a half-truth. Joyousness is the dominant quality of much Gaelic literature-joyousness and a fierce zest of life. The theory of the Celt's love of loneliness seems strange when we know that the idea of contenthan loneliness" tion being "better passed into a proverb with one order of Celts. For the theory of "Celtic shrinking from all active competitive existence" it would be difficult to find any general justification, ancient modern. Nor is Mrs. Ward convincing when she tries to explain Brontë Celticism as a growth of the Ireland of the North, "on which commerce and Protestantism have set their grasp." This, although perhaps a popular notion, is but another half-truth; the Catholic and Celtic traditions and elements of Ulster are, in their way, outstanding. (In any case, did not the Rev. Patrick Brontë come of a south of Ireland family?) Mrs. Ward's consideration of the Celtic basis of the Brontë genius might have been much more interesting had she understood the manysidedness of the real Celticism, and that the Brontë sisters' practicality and order were no more alien to it on the whole than their share of the "vision that remakes the

world." Were Gaelic literature accessible as a whole, it would clear away many misconceptions caused by taking it in snatches that concern widely severed years and varying circumstances, and give a disconnected and somewhat shadowy idea of the race or races. Its modern successor, Anglo-Irish literature, does not really display a true grip of later Irish realities, and political controversy has, unfortunately, obscured certain verities. The Celt has dreamed dreams, idealized his moors and hills, seen visions of hells and heavens that show a Dantesque feeling, without, of course, a Dantesque art; he has realized the tears of things, and known at stages the melancholy that, for sensitive souls, accompanies the fateful trends of life. But he framed the elaborate Brehon laws and a still more elaborate bardic system, pursued philosophic and scholastic ideals with a strange passion, and in modern days in more lands than one he has proved his genius as an empire-builder. Far from being an elusive creature, half within, half without existence, he has shown at his highest a remarkable grip of both worlds. Mrs. Ward, did she really know the various aspects of Celticism, might have profitably considered that phase of it which would appear to have lived a tenacious if halfinscrutable life in Emily Brontë rather than Charlotte. Yet the critic, conscious of the highest reaches of English genius, would claim much of hers as peculiar to his own race. There is truth on both sides. How much of the spiritual, the poetic, the divine even, lies below either racial consciousness, seldom coming into being or concrete embodiment? This deeper human subconsciousness, so to say, came to consciousness in the Brontë sisters on their great moors in their Yorkshire world of distinctive tradition, in the crises of their struggling years. It mixed with moods and found outlet in

forms in which Celt and Teuton and all men find much of their passionate selves. So, when all is said, the origins are of nature's underlying store; the result speaks for and to humanity.

In her introduction to "Wuthering Heights" Mrs. Ward propounds a theory of an appreciable German influence, a somewhat liberal infusion of Hoffmann and even Tieck, in Emily Brontë's work. It must be said at once that Mrs. Ward, unfortunately, does not seem to realize the spirit and the stages of the "German romantic movement." Some of her views suggest the wild and peculiar conceptions of this German literature against which Carlyle protested in a critical essay comparatively early in the century. "Tieck and Hoffmann," says Mrs. Ward, "are full of raving and lunatic beings, who sob, shout, tear out their hair by the roots, and live in a perpetual state of personal violence both towards themselves and their neighbors." This, to speak mildly, is not fair criticism even of Hoffmann; but how must it be regarded by the student who has a comprehensive knowledge of Tieck? The whole trend of Mrs. Ward's critique is unjust to the German "Romantics" at their best; to their beauty there is only a casual allusion; there is no suggestion of those qualities, both grave and humorous, in which they are seen to differ decisively-even to the merely casual eye-from the author of "Wuthering Heights.” It would appear that Mrs. Ward's imagination has dwelt overmuch upon the earlier Tieck; and, on the other hand, it is more than doubtful that a mind like Emily Brontë's I could ever have been so much impressed, as she thinks, by the horrors of Hoffmann, or, indeed, of his English contemporaries of the school that would "make Parnassus a churchyard." fact, critics are too apt to exaggerate the "haunting" effect of the "bowl and dagger" bookmen on the early century;

In

we may be sure there was an esoteric English self unimpressed by their terrors. "Monk" Lewis, it is suggestive to remember, had no appreciable effect upon the House of Commons. And the Haworth sisters, let it never be forgotten, had a critical and creative faculty.

Mrs. Ward's theory, however, will be interesting to the curious who seek for the source and development of genius (as distinguished from casual shades and external dyes-some of which, in Emily Brontë's case, were, no doubt, Germanic, as some in Charlotte's were French) anywhere but in the mysterious store and order of nature. We know from Charlotte Brontë's words, and without them should realize the truth, that Emily Brontë the creator, the Emily Brontë who means much to the imagination, owed little, if anything, to literature. It lit or shadowed her mind, of course, as sun or darkness lit or shadowed her moors and heath; it did not permeate her spirit or become a second nature with her. Her distinctive work and that widespread literature which may be regarded as an outcome, so to say, of the British Museum Reading-room, seem ages asunder in point of date and method. All that places her apart owes no more to book-lore than the stories woven and rewoven by vigorous brooding minds in the lonely Icelandic life to which we are indebted for the procession of the sagas: work to which remoteness from common actuality, and profound, aloof winters, gave so often a novel sense and depth of mood. By the way, there was, of course, a Norse element in Yorkshire tradition, and one finds it interesting to trace in Emily Brontë a certain kinship with the sagamen, though fancy might easily carry the kinship too far.

A critic in the Athenæum once suggested a decisive relation in Emily Brontë's genius to something far greater than that of German romance

-which, of course, at its best, had some sense of greatness, or, at least, was deeper than a cult, more than a mere fashion in fiction-to no less than the genius of Dante himself. This is a highly interesting question, which, unfortunately-at least so far as the present writer knows-the acute critic has not considered in detail. In this connection, and in view of Emily Brontë's Celtic ancestry, it were profitable to study that Celtic visionary spirit which made many Infernos before and during Dante's day, even though they found no comprehensive and powerful artist to shape them into concreteness and permanency. There was a potential Dante in the racial soul, and, in truth, some sense of it lingers to this day with the Celts. As to other aspects of the kinship, it is not merely fanciful to apprehend a certain Dantesque significance in the chief lovers in "Wuthering Heights," abandoned to passion in such a degree that it becomes as a great doom. Catherine, in the passionate scene where her cry is that she is Heathcliff, is no faint reminder of Francesca; but a Dante would not allow a Heathcliff or a Catherine, in hate or love, to protest so much. The tears and cries doubtless set Mrs. Ward thinking of the minor features of German romance. The passion, as the fore-mentioned critic recognized, runs too much to rhetoric. But the concentration, not only of speech but of passion, which might-nay, would surely-have come, is indicated in a few of Emily Brontë's best poems. Unfortunately enough, in treating of her virtues or defects, Mrs. Ward-who holds the theory that "we passionately accept her or we are untouched by her”

does not always employ felicitous fig ures of speech. "Charlotte Brontë touches the shield of the reader, . . . she attacks him, and complete as his ultimate surrender may be, he yields fighting; . . . it is still more SO with

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