The Three Brontes Part 4

The simple truth is that Charlotte had nerves, and Branwell was extremely trying. And it is possible that Emily had less to bear, that in her detachment she was protected more than Charlotte from Branwell at his worst.

Meanwhile tales were abroad presenting Charlotte in the queerest lights.

There is that immortal story of how Thackeray gave a party for Currer Bell at his house in Young Street, and how Currer Bell had a headache and lay on a sofa in the back drawing-room, and refused to talk to anybody but the governess; and how Thackeray at last, very late, with a finger on his lip, stole out of the house and took refuge in his club.

No wonder if this quaint and curious Charlotte survived in the memory of Thackeray's daughter. But, even apart from the headache, you can see how it came about, how the sight of the governess evoked Charlotte Bronte's unforgotten agony. She saw in the amazed and cheerful lady her own sad youth, slighted and oppressed, solitary in a scene of gaiety--she could not have seen her otherwise--and her warm heart rushed out to her. She was determined that that governess should have a happy evening if n.o.body else had. Her behaviour was odd, if you like, it was even absurd, but it had the sublimity of vicarious expiation. Has anyone ever considered its significance, the magnitude of her deed? For Charlotte, to be the guest of honour on that brilliant night, in the house of Thackeray, her divinity, was to touch the topmost height of fame. And she turned her back on the brilliance and the fame and the face of her divinity, and offered herself up in flames as a sacrifice for all the governesses that were and had ever been and would be.

And after the fine stories came the little legends--things about Charlotte when she was a governess herself at Mrs. Sidgwick's, and the t.i.ttle-tattle of the parish. One of the three curates whom Charlotte made so shockingly immortal avenged himself for his immortality by stating that the trouble with Charlotte was that she _would_ fight for mastery in the parish. Who can believe him? If there is one thing that seems more certain than another it is Charlotte's utter indifference to parochial matters. But Charlotte was just, and she may have objected to the young man's way with the Dissenters; we know that she did very strongly object to Mr. William Weightman's way. And that, I imagine, was the trouble between Charlotte and the curates.

As for the Sidgwicks, Charlotte's biographers have been rather hard on them. Mr. Leslie Stephen calls them "coa.r.s.e employers". They were certainly not subtle enough to divine the hidden genius in their sad little governess. It was, I imagine, Charlotte's alien, enigmatic face that provoked a little Sidgwick to throw a Bible at her. She said Mrs.

Sidgwick did not know her, and did not "intend to know her". She might have added that if she _had_ intended Mrs. Sidgwick could not possibly have known her. And when the Sidgwicks said (as they did say to their cousin, Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson) that if Miss Bronte "was invited to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about like a slave; if she was not invited she imagined she was being excluded from the family circle", that was simply their robust view of the paralysed att.i.tude of a shy girl among strangers, in an agony of fear lest she should cut in where she was not wanted.

And allowances must be made for Mrs. Sidgwick. She was, no doubt, considerably annoyed at finding that she had engaged a thoroughly incompetent and apparently thoroughly morbid young person who had offered herself as a nursery-governess and didn't know how to keep order in the nursery. Naturally there was trouble at Stonegappe. Then one fine day Mrs. Sidgwick discovered that there was, after all, a use for that incomprehensible and incompetent Miss Bronte. Miss Bronte had a gift.

She could sew. She could sew beautifully. Her st.i.tching, if you would believe it, was a dream. And Mrs. Sidgwick saw that Miss Bronte's one talent was not lodged in her useless. So Charlotte sat alone all evening in the schoolroom at Stonegappe, a small figure hidden in pure white, billowy seas of muslin, and lamented thus: "She cares nothing in the world about me except to contrive how the greatest possible quant.i.ty of labour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end she overwhelms me with oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin night-caps to make, and above all things, dolls to dress." And Mrs. Sidgwick complained that Charlotte did not love the children, and forgot how little she liked it when the children loved Charlotte, and was unaware, poor lady, that it was recorded of her, and would be recorded to all time, that she had said, "Love the _governess_, my dear!" when her little impulsive boy put his hand in Charlotte's at the dinner-table, and cried "I love 'ou, Miss Bronte." It was the same little, impulsive boy who threw the Bible at Charlotte, and also threw a stone which hit her.

No wonder that Miss Bronte's one and only "pleasant afternoon" was when Mr. Sidgwick went out walking in his fields with his children and his Newfoundland dog, and Charlotte (by order) followed and observed him from behind.

Of course, all these old tales should have gone where Mrs. Sidgwick's old muslin caps went; but they have not, and so it has got about that Charlotte Bronte was not fond of children. Even Mr. Swinburne, at the height of his magnificent eulogy, after putting crown upon crown upon her head, pauses and wonders: had she any love for children? He finds in her "a plentiful lack of inborn baby-wors.h.i.+p"; she is unworthy to compare in this with George Eliot, "the spiritual mother of Totty, of Eppie, and of Lillo". "The fiery-hearted Vestal of Haworth," he says, "had no room reserved in the palace of her pa.s.sionate and high-minded imagination as a nursery for inmates of such divine and delicious quality." There was little Georgette in _Villette_, to say nothing of Polly, and there was Adele in _Jane Eyre_. But Mr. Swinburne had forgotten about little Georgette. Like George Henry Lewes he is "well-nigh moved to think one of the most powerfully and exquisitely written chapters in _s.h.i.+rley_ a chapter which could hardly have been written at all by a woman, or, for that matter, by a man, of however n.o.ble and kindly a nature, in whom the instinct, or nerve, or organ of love for children was even of average natural strength and sensibility"; so difficult was it for him to believe in "the dread and repulsion felt by a forsaken wife and tortured mother for the very beauty and dainty sweetness of her only new-born child, as recalling the cruel, sleek charm of the human tiger that had begotten it". And so he crowns her with all crowns but that of "love for children". He is still tender to her, seeing in her that one monstrous lack; he touches it with sorrow and a certain shame.

Mr. Birrell follows him. "Miss Bronte," he says with confidence, "did not care for children. She had no eye for them. Hence it comes about that her novel-children are not good." He is moved to playful sarcasm when he tells how in August of eighteen-fifty-three "Miss Bronte suffered a keen disappointment". She went to Scotland with some friends who took their baby with them. The parents thought the baby was ill when it wasn't, and insisted on turning back, and Charlotte had to give up her holiday. "All on account of a baby," says Mr. Birrell, and refers you to Charlotte's letter on the subject, implying that it was cold-blooded. The biographer can quote letters for his purpose, and Mr.

Birrell omits to tell us that Charlotte wrote "had any evil consequences followed a prolonged stay, I should never have forgiven myself". You are to imagine that Charlotte could have forgiven herself perfectly well, for Charlotte "did not care for children".

Mrs. Oliphant does not echo that cry. She was a woman and knew better.

For I believe that here we touch the very heart of the mystery that was Charlotte Bronte. We would have no right to touch it, to approach it, were it not that other people have already violated all that was most sacred and most secret in that mystery, and have given the world a defaced and disfigured Charlotte Bronte. I believe that this love of children which even Mr. Swinburne has denied to her, was the key to Charlotte's nature. We are face to face here, not with a want in her, but with an abyss, depth beyond depth of tenderness and longing and frustration, of a pa.s.sion that found no clear voice in her works, because it was one with the elemental nature in her, undefined, unuttered, unutterable.

She was afraid of children; she was awkward with them; because such pa.s.sion has shynesses, distances, and terrors unknown to the average comfortable women who become happy mothers. It has even its perversions, when love hardly knows itself from hate. Such love demands before all things possession. It cries out for children of its own flesh and blood.

I believe that there were moments when it was pain for Charlotte to see the children born and possessed by other women. It must have been agony to have to look after them, especially when the rule was that they were not to "love the governess".

The proofs of this are slender, but they are sufficient. There is little Georgette, the sick child that Lucy nurses in the Pensionnat: "Little Georgette still piped her plaintive wail, appealing to me by her familiar term, 'Minnie, Minnie, me very poorly!' till my heart ached."

... "I affected Georgette; she was a sensitive and loving child; to hold her in my lap, or carry her in my arms, was to me a treat. To-night she would have me lay my head on the pillow of her crib; she even put her little arms round my neck. Her clasp and the nestling action with which she pressed her cheek to mine made me almost cry with a sort of tender pain."

Once during a spring-cleaning at Upperwood House Charlotte was Mrs.

White's nursemaid as well as her governess, and she wrote: "By dint of nursing the fat baby it has got to know me and be fond of me. I suspect myself of growing rather fond of it." Years later she wrote to Mrs.

Gaskell, after staying with her: "Could you manage to convey a small kiss to that dear but dangerous little person, Julia? She surrept.i.tiously possessed herself of a minute fraction of my heart, which has been missing ever since I saw her."

Mrs. Gaskell tells us that there was "a strong mutual attraction"

between Julia, her youngest little girl, and Charlotte Bronte. "The child," she says, "would steal her little hand into Miss Bronte's scarcely larger one, and each took pleasure in this apparently un.o.bserved caress." May I suggest that children do not steal their little hands into the hands of people who do not care for them? Their instinct is infallible.

Charlotte Bronte tried to give an account of her feeling for children; it was something like the sacred awe of the lover. "Whenever I see Florence and Julia again I shall feel like a fond but bashful suitor, who views at a distance the fair personage to whom, in his clownish awe, he dare not risk a near approach. Such is the clearest idea I can give you of my feeling towards children I like, but to whom I am a stranger--and to what children am I not a stranger?"

Extraordinary that Charlotte's critics have missed the pathos of that _cri de coeur_. It is so clearly an echo from the "house of bondage", where Charlotte was made a stranger to the beloved, where the beloved threw stones and Bibles at her. You really have to allow for the shock of an experience so blighting. It is all part of the perversity of the fate that dogged her, that her feeling should have met with that reverse. But it was there, guarded with a certain shy austerity. She "suspected" herself of getting rather fond of the baby.

She hid her secret even from herself, as women will hide these things.

But her dreams betrayed her after the way of dreams. Charlotte's dream (premonitory, she thought, of trouble) was that she carried a little crying child, and could not still its cry. "She described herself," Mrs.

Gaskell says, "as having the most painful sense of pity for the little thing, lying _inert_, as sick children do, while she walked about in some gloomy place with it, such as the aisle of Haworth Church." This dream she gives to _Jane Eyre_, unconscious of its profound significance and fitness. It is a pity that Mr. Swinburne did not pay attention to Charlotte's dream.

All her life, I think, she suffered because of the perpetual insurgence of this secret, impa.s.sioned, maternal energy. Hence the sting of Lewes's famous criticism, beginning: "The grand function of woman, it must always be remembered" (as if Charlotte had forgotten it!) "is Maternity"; and, working up from his criticism of that chapter in _s.h.i.+rley_ to a climax of adjuration: "Currer Bell, if under your heart had ever stirred a child; if to your bosom a babe had ever been pressed--that mysterious part of your being, towards which all the rest of it was drawn, in which your whole soul was transported and absorbed--never could you have _imagined_ such a falsehood as that!" It was impossible for Charlotte to protest against anything but the abominable bad taste of Lewes's article, otherwise she might have told him that she probably knew rather more about those mysteries than he did. It was she who gave us that supreme image of disastrous love. "I looked at my love; it s.h.i.+vered in my heart like a suffering child in a cold cradle!"

And this woman died before her child was born.

Then there is Mrs. Oliphant again. Though she was not one of those who said Charlotte Bronte was not fond of children, though she would have died rather than have joined Lewes in his unspeakable cry against her, Mrs. Oliphant made certain statements in no better taste than his. She suggests that Charlotte, fond or not fond of children, was too fond of matrimonial dreams. Her picture (the married woman's picture) is of an undesired and undesirable little spinster pining visibly and shamelessly in a parsonage. She would have us believe that from morning till night, from night till morning, Charlotte Bronte in the Parsonage thought of nothing but of getting married, that her dreams pursued, ruthlessly, the casual visitor. The hopelessness of the dream, the undesirability of Charlotte, is what makes her so irresistible to her sister novelist.

There was "one subject", she says, "which Charlotte Bronte had at her command, having experienced in her own person, and seen her nearest friends under the experience, of that solitude and longing of women of which she has made so remarkable an exposition. The long silence of life without an adventure or a change, the forlorn gaze out of windows which never show anyone coming who can rouse the slightest interest in the mind, the endless years and days which pa.s.s and pa.s.s, carrying away the bloom, extinguis.h.i.+ng the lights of youth, bringing a dreary middle age before which the very soul shrinks, while yet the sufferer feels how strong is the current of life in her own veins, and how capable she is of all the active duties of existence--this was the essence and soul of the existence she knew best. Was there no help for it? Must the women wait and see their lives thrown away, and have no power to save themselves!

"The position," she goes on, "in itself so tragic, is one which can scarcely be expressed without calling forth inevitable ridicule, a laugh at the best, more often a sneer, at the women whose desire for a husband is thus betrayed. s.h.i.+rley and Caroline Helstone both cried out for that husband with an indignation, a fire and impatience, a sense of wrong and injury, which stopped the laugh for the moment. It might be ludicrous, but it was horribly genuine and true." (This is more than can be said of Mrs. Oliphant's view of the adorable s.h.i.+rley Keeldar who was Emily Bronte. It is ludicrous enough, and it may be genuine, but it is certainly not true.) But Mrs. Oliphant is careful not to go too far.

"Note," she says, "there was nothing sensual about these young women. It was life they wanted; they knew nothing of the grosser thoughts which the world with its jeers attributes to them: of such thoughts they were unconscious in a primitive innocence which, perhaps, only women understand." Yet she characterizes their "outcry" as "indelicate". "All very well to talk of women working for their living, finding new channels for themselves, establis.h.i.+ng their independence. How much have we said of all that" (Mrs. Oliphant thinks that she is rendering Charlotte Bronte's thought), "endeavouring to persuade ourselves!

Charlotte Bronte had the courage of her opinions. It was not education nor a trade that her women wanted. It was not a living, but their share in life.... Miss Bronte herself said correct things" (observe that insincerity is insinuated here) "about the protection which a trade is to a woman, keeping her from a mercenary marriage; but this was not in the least the way of her heroines." (Why, you naturally wonder, should it have been?) "They wanted to be happy, no doubt, but above all things they wanted their share in life, to have their position by the side of men, which alone confers a natural equality, to have their shoulder to the wheel, their hands on the reins of common life, to build up the world and link the generations each to each." (And very proper of them, too.) "In her philosophy, marriage was the only state which procured this, and if she did not recommend a mercenary marriage she was at least very tolerant about its conditions, insisting less upon love than was to be expected" (!) "and with a covert conviction in her mind, that if not one man, then another was better than any complete abandonment of the larger path. Lucy Snowe for a long time had her heart very much set on Dr. John and his placid breadth of Englis.h.i.+sm; but when she finally found out that to be impossible her tears were soon dried by the prospect of Paul Emanuel, so unlike him, coming into his place."

The obvious answer to all this is that Charlotte Bronte was writing in the mid-Victorian age, about mid-Victorian women, the women whom she saw around her; writing, without any "philosophy" or "covert conviction", in the days before emanc.i.p.ation, when marriage was the only chance of independence that a woman had. It would have been marvellous, if she had not had her sister Emily before her, that in such an age she should have conceived and created s.h.i.+rley Keeldar. As for poor little Lucy with her two men, she is not the first heroine who mistook the false dawn for the true. Besides, Miss Bronte's "philosophy" was exactly the opposite to that attributed to her, as anybody may see who reads _s.h.i.+rley_. In these matters she burned what her age adored, and adored what it burned, a thorough revolutionary.

But this is not the worst. Mrs. Oliphant professes to feel pity for her victim. "Poor Charlotte Bronte! She has not been as other women, protected by the grave from all betrayal of the episodes in her own life." (You would imagine they were awful, the episodes in Charlotte Bronte's life.) "Everybody has betrayed her, and all she thought about this one, and that, and every name that was ever a.s.sociated with hers.

There was a Mr. Taylor from London, about whom she wrote with great freedom to her friend, Miss Nussey, telling how the little man had come, how he had gone away without any advance in the affairs, how a chill came over her when he appeared and she found him much less attractive than when at a distance, yet how she liked it as little when he went away, and was somewhat excited about his first letter, and even went so far as to imagine with a laugh that there might possibly be a dozen little Joe Taylors before all was over."

This is atrocious. But the malice and bad taste of it are nothing to the gross carelessness and ignorance it reveals--ignorance of facts and ident.i.ties and names. Charlotte's suitor was Mr. James Taylor and not Joe. Joe, the brother of her friend, Mary Taylor, was married already to a lady called Amelia, and it is of Joe and his Amelia that Charlotte writes. "She must take heart" (Amelia had been singularly unsuccessful), "there may yet be a round dozen of little Joe Taylors to look after--run after--to sort and switch and train up in the way they should go."

Of Mr. James Taylor she writes more decorously. Miss Nussey, as usual, had been thinking unwarrantable things, and had made a most unbecoming joke about Jupiter and Venus, which outraged Charlotte's "common sense". "The idea of the little man," says Charlotte, "shocks me less.

He still sends his little newspaper; and the other day there came a letter of a bulk, volume, pith, judgment and knowledge, fit to have been the product of a giant. You may laugh as much and as wickedly as you please, but the fact is, there is a quiet constancy about this, my diminutive and red-haired friend, which adds a foot to his stature, turns his sandy locks dark, and altogether dignifies him a good deal in my estimation." This is all she says by way of appreciation. She says later, "His manners and his personal appearance scarcely pleased me more than at the first interview.... I feel that in his way he has a regard for me; a regard which I cannot bring myself entirely to reciprocate in kind, and yet its withdrawal leaves a painful blank." Miss Nussey evidently insists that Charlotte's feelings are engaged this time, arguing possibly from the "painful blank"; and Charlotte becomes explicit. She speaks of the disadvantages of the alleged match, and we gather that Miss Nussey has been urging her to take the little man. "But there is another thing which forms a barrier more difficult to pa.s.s than any of these. Would Mr. Taylor and I ever suit? Could I ever feel for him enough love to accept him as a husband? Friends.h.i.+p--grat.i.tude--esteem I have, but each moment he came near me, and that I could see his eyes fastened on me, my veins ran ice. Now that he is away, I feel far more gently to him; it is only close by that I grow rigid--stiffening with a strange mixture of apprehension and anger--which nothing softens but his retreat, and a perfect subduing of his manner."

And again, "my conscience, I can truly say, does not _now_ accuse me of having treated Mr. Taylor with injustice or unkindness ...

but with every disposition and with every wish, with every intention even to look on him in the most favourable point of view at his last visit, it was impossible to me in my inward heart to think of him as one that might one day be acceptable as a husband." Could anything be _more_ explicit? There is a good deal more of it. After one very searching criticism of Mr. Taylor: "One does not like to say these things, but one had better be honest." And of her honesty Charlotte's letters on this subject leave no doubt. There is not the smallest ground for supposing that even for a moment had she thought of Mr. James Taylor as "one that one day might be acceptable", much less is there for Mr. Clement Shorter's suggestion that if he had come back from Bombay she would have married him.

But Joe or James, it is all one to Mrs. Oliphant, with her theory of Charlotte Bronte. "For her and her cla.s.s, which did not speak of it, everything depended upon whether the women married or did not marry.

Their thoughts were thus artificially fixed to one point in the horizon." The rest is repet.i.tion, ending in the astounding verdict: "The seed she thus sowed has come to many growths that would have appalled Charlotte Bronte. But while it would be very unjust to blame her for the vagaries that have followed, and to which nothing could be less desirable than any building of the house or growth of the race, any responsibility or service, we must still believe that it was she who drew the curtain first aside and opened the gates to imps of evil meaning, polluting and profaning the domestic hearth."

That is Mrs. Oliphant on Charlotte Bronte.

And even Mr. Clement Shorter, who has dealt so admirably with outrageous legends, goes half the way with the detractor. He has a theory that Charlotte Bronte was a woman of morbid mood, "to whom the problem of s.e.x appealed with all its complications", and that she "dwelt continually on the problem of the ideal mate".

Now Charlotte may have dreamed of getting married (there have been more criminal dreams); she may have brooded continually over the problem of the ideal mate, only of all these dreams and broodings there is not one atom of evidence--not one. Not a hint, not a trace, either in her character as we know it, or in her very voluminous private correspondence. The facts of her life disprove it. Her letters to Ellen Nussey (never meant for publication) reveal the workings of Charlotte's feminine mind when applied to "the s.e.x problem"; a mind singularly wholesome and impersonal, and singularly detached. Charlotte is full of lights upon this awful subject of matrimony, which, by the way, had considerably more interest for Miss Nussey than it had for her. In fact, if it had not been for Miss Nussey it would not have appeared so often as it did in Charlotte's letters. If you pay attention to the context (a thing that theorists never do) you see, what is indeed obvious, that a large portion of Charlotte Bronte's time was taken up in advising and controlling Ellen Nussey, that amiable and impulsive prototype of Caroline Helstone. She is called upon in all Miss Nussey's hours of crisis, and there seem to have been a great many of them. "Do not," she writes, "be over-persuaded to marry a man you can never respect--I do not say _love_, because I think if you can respect a person before marriage, moderate love at least will come after; and as to intense pa.s.sion, I am convinced that that is no desirable feeling. In the first place, it seldom or never meets with a requital; and in the second place, if it did, the feeling would be only temporary; it would last the honeymoon, and then, perhaps, give place to disgust, or indifference, worse perhaps than disgust. Certainly this would be the case on the man's part; and on the woman's--G.o.d help her if she is left to love pa.s.sionately and alone.

"I am tolerably well convinced that I shall never marry at all."

And again, to Miss Nussey, six months later: "Did you not once say to me in all childlike simplicity, 'I thought, Charlotte, no young lady should fall in love till the offer was actually made'? I forgot what answer I made at the time, but I now reply, after due consideration, Right as a glove, the maxim is just, and I hope you will always attend to it. I will even extend and confirm it: no young lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted, the marriage ceremony performed, and the first half-year of wedded life has pa.s.sed away. A woman may then begin to love, but with great precaution, very coolly, very moderately, very rationally. If she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a cold look cuts her to the heart, she is a fool. If she ever loves so much that her husband's will is her law, and that she has got into a habit of watching his looks in order that she may antic.i.p.ate his wishes, she will soon be a neglected fool. Did I not tell you of an instance...?"

What could be more lucid, more light-hearted, and more sane? And if Charlotte is suspicious of the dangers of her own temperament, that only proves her lucidity and sanity the more.

Later, at Brussels, when confronted with "three or four people's" idea that "the future _epoux_ of Miss Bronte is on the Continent", she defends herself against the "silly imputation". "Not that it is a crime to marry, or a crime to wish to be married; but it is an imbecility, which I reject with contempt, for women, who have neither fortune nor beauty, to make marriage the princ.i.p.al object of their wishes and hopes, and the aim of all their actions; not to be able to convince themselves that they are unattractive, and that they had better be quiet, and think of other things than wedlock." Can anything be clearer?

So much for herself. But she has to deal with Miss Nussey, in difficulties again, later: "Papa has two or three times expressed a fear that since Mr. ---- paid you so much attention, he will, perhaps, have made an impression on your mind which will interfere with your comfort.

I tell him I think not, as I believe you to be mistress of yourself in those matters. Still, he keeps saying that I am to write to you and dissuade you from thinking of him. I never saw Papa make himself so uneasy about a thing of the kind before; he is usually very sarcastic on such subjects.

"Mr. ---- be hanged! I never thought very well of him, and I am much disposed to think very ill of him at this blessed minute. I have discussed the subject fully, for where is the use of being mysterious and constrained?--it is not worth while."

And yet again it is Ellen Nussey. "Ten years ago I should have laughed at your account of the blunder you made in mistaking the bachelor doctor of Bridlington for a married man. I should have certainly thought you scrupulous over-much, and wondered how you could possibly regret being civil to a decent individual merely because he happened to be single instead of double. Now, however, I can perceive that your scruples are founded on common sense. I know that if women wish to escape the stigma of husband-seeking, they must act and look like marble or clay--cold, expressionless, bloodless; for every appearance of feeling, of joy, sorrow, friendliness, antipathy, admiration, disgust, are alike construed by the world into the attempt to" (I regret to say that Charlotte wrote) "to hook a husband."

Later, she has to advise her friend Mr. Williams as to a career for his daughter Louisa. And here she is miles ahead of her age, the age that considered marriage the only honourable career for a woman. "Your daughters--no more than your sons--should be a burden on your hands.

Your daughters--as much as your sons--should aim at making their way honourably through life. Do you not wish to keep them at home? Believe me, teachers may be hard-worked, ill-paid and despised, but the girl who stays at home doing nothing is worse off than the hardest-wrought and worst-paid drudge of a school. Whenever I have seen, not merely in humble but in affluent houses, families of daughters sitting waiting to be married, I have pitied them from my heart. It is doubtless well--very well--if Fate decrees them a happy marriage; but, if otherwise, give their existence some object, their time some occupation, or the peevishness of disappointment, and the listlessness of idleness will infallibly degrade their nature.... Lonely as I am, how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career...? How should I be with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where there is not a single educated family? In that case I should have no world at all. As it is, something like a hope and a motive sustains me still. I wish all your daughters--I wish every woman in England, had also a hope and a motive."

Whatever the views of Charlotte Bronte's heroines may or may not have been, these were her own views--sober, sincere, and utterly dispa.s.sionate. Mrs. Oliphant set them aside, either in criminal carelessness, or with still more criminal deliberation, because they interfered with her theory. They are certainly not the views of a woman given to day-dreaming and window-gazing. Lucy Snowe may have had time for window-gazing, but not Charlotte Bronte, what with her writing and her dusting, sweeping, ironing, bed-making, and taking the eyes out of the potatoes for poor old Tabby, who was too blind to see them.