Mary A. Ward

“ The main characteristics indeed of the Celt are all hers disinter- estedness, melancholy, wildness, a way ward force and passion, for ever wooed by sounds and sights to which other natures are insensible by murmurs from the earth, by colours in the sky, by tones and accents of the soul, that speak to the Celtic sense as to no other. ' We shall never build the Parthenon,' said Renan of his own Breton race ; ' marble is not for us ; but we know how to grip the heart and the soul ; we have an art of piercing that belongs to us alone ”

“ The ' chainless soul ' was hers no less than Emily's, though she was far saner and sweeter than Emily.
And all three qualities pride, shrinking, endurance are writ large in her books. With passion added, they are Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe. They supply the atmosphere, the peculiar note, of all the stories. A contempt for mean and easy living, for common gains, and common luxuries, breathes in them, and makes them harsh and bracing as the air of her own moors.
And one other Celtic quality there is in Charlotte Bronte and her books, which is responsible perhaps for half their defects. ”

“ From the beginning they showed the Celtic qualities the Celtic vision that re- makes the world, throws it into groups and pictures, seen with a magical edge and sharpness. Are they gathered on a winter's night round the kitchen fire with Tabby for a com- panion ? Charlotte -a mere child- sees the little scene as a whole, as a poet or a painter would see it, notes the winter storm and wind outside, the glow within, the quick-witted children, the old servant, throws it all into a fragment of vivid dialogue and writes it down realised, on record, for ever. ”

“ Let it be in the winter, on some frosty white-rimed day, when the tops of the moors are lost in the cold mist, while a dim sun steals along their sides showing the great mills in the hollows, the ice -fringed streams, the bare half -poisoned woods, the rows of stone cottages, while the horse's hoofs ring sharp on the paving- stones of this Haworth Street that mounts stern and steep, without a relenting slope or zig-zag, heedless of the strained muscles of man or beast, from the busy factories below to the towered church and the little parsonage on the hill-top. ”

“ But they cook and clean and sew, they learn all the household arts that their aunt and Tabby can teach them. They are docile, hard-working, hard- living. They are poor, saving, industrious, keenly alive to the value of money and of work, like the world about them.
And it is this mixture of Celtic dreaming with English realism and self-control which gives value and originality to all they do to Emily's 'Wuthering Heights,' to Charlotte's four stories. Lady Caroline Lamb, an Irishwoman like Charlotte, could tear you a passion to tatters, in 'Glenarvon,' with a certain wild power. ”

“ Here and there a reader and generally a reader of more subtlety and range than his fellows struck with the union of certain extravagances and certain dogmatisms in Charlotte Brontë's work, with the weakness of Anne's and the crudity of Emily's, will dare to say, 'Not at all! The vitality of the Bronte fame does not mean primarily the vitality of the Bronte books. It is a vitality which springs from the English love of the pa- thetic and the picturesque, and the English tendency to sub- ordinate matters of art to matters of sentiment. ”

“ Let the vulgar dissemble and fear—let them talk idly in the unmeaning jargon they admire; they never felt what we have felt; they never dared what we have done: to win, and to betray, is with them an air—a fancy; and fit is the delight for the beings who can enjoy it.—But if once I show myself again, the rabble must shrink at last ”

“ The small stone houses mount with you on either hand, low, ugly, solid, without a trace of colour or ornament, the decent yet unlovely homes of a sturdy industrious race. The chim- neys pour out their smoke, the valley hums with life and toil. You stand at the top of the hill and look around you. Man- chester and the teeming Lancashire world are behind you. Bradford and Leeds in front of you. You can see nothing through the sun-lit fog, save the rolling forms of the moors bearing their dim ever-growing burden of houses ”

“ Heaven or hell, I care not which, have cast a ray so bright around my brow that not all the perfidy of a heart as lost as mine, of a heart loaded, as you know too well, with crimes man shudders even to imagine—not all the envy and malice of those whom my contempt has stung can lower me to their level. ”

“ A spring of eternal madness rises in the heart of our race. The "realm of faery," the most beautiful on earth, is our domain.' Idealism, un- derstood as a life-long discontent ; passion, conceived as an inner thirst and longing that wears and kills more often than it makes happy ; a love of home and kindred entwined with the very roots of life, so that home-sickness may easily ex- haust and threaten life ; an art directed rather to expression than to form ragged often and broken, but always poignant, always suggestive, touched with reverie and emotion ”

“ Rochester's house as did happen, without awakening her sus- picions ; that the existence of a lunatic should have been commonly known to all the servants of the house, yet wholly concealed from the governess; that Mr. Rochester should have been a man of honour and generosity, a man with whom not only Jane Eyre, but clearly the writer herself, is in love, and yet capable of deliberately betraying and deceiving a girl of twenty placed in a singularly helpless position ; these are the fundamental puzzles of the story. ”

“ Charlotte Bronte's main stuff "is English, Protestant, law-respecting, conventional even. No judgment was ever more foolish than that which detected a social rebel in the writer of ' Jane Eyre.' She thought the French books, as we have seen, ' clever, wicked, sophistical, and immoral.' But she read them ; and for all her revolt from them, they quickened and fertilised her genius. More than this. The influence which she absorbed from them has given her a special place in our literature of imagination. ”

“ Jane Eyre, the little helpless child, is never comforted ; Mrs. Reid, the cruel aunt, is never sorry for her cruelties ; Bessie, the kind nurse, is not very kind, she does not break the impression, she satisfies no instinct of poetic compensation, she only just makes the story credi- ble, the reader's assent possible. So, at Lowood, Helen Burns is not a suffering angel ; there is nothing consciously pretty or touching in the wonderful picture of her ; reality, with its discords, its infinite novelties, lends word and magic to the passion of Charlotte's memory of her dead sister ”

“ To him the painting of a situation like that, say, in Benjamin Constant's ' Adolphe ' infinitely true, and wholly insoluble where the writer scorns to apply any coercive framework, any rough-and-ready 'plot' to his material, is the admirable and important thing. The true subject of ' Jane Eyre ' is the courage with which a friendless and loving girl confronts her own passion, and, in the interest of some strange social in- stinct which she knows as ' duty,' which she cannot explain and can only obey, tramples her love underfoot, and goes out miserable into the world. ”

“ The whole scene from beginning to end is a piece of heavy grotesque, without either the truth or the fun of good satire. It was these pages, of course, and certain others like them in the book, that set George Henry Lewes preaching the 'mild eyes,' the 'truth,' and 'finish' of Miss Austen to the new and stormy genius which had produced ' Jane Eyre.' And one may see, perhaps, in Charlotte's sore- ness, in the very vehemence that she shows under this particu- lar criticism, that, secretly, the shaft has gone home. She is, after all, infinitely shrewd, sensitive, and, in the end, just. ”

“ In fact to return to our advocatus diaboli - '"Jane Eyre" is on the one side a rather poor novel of incident, planned on the conventional pattern, and full of clumsy execution ; on an- other side it is a picture of passion and of ideas, for which in truth the writer had no sufficient equipment ; she moves im- prisoned, to quote Mr. Leslie Stephen, in " a narrow circle of thoughts ;" if you press it, the psychology of the book is really childish ; Rochester is absurd, Jane Eyre, in spite of the stir that she makes, only half-realised and half-conscious. ”

“ Gaskell, and so found shape ultimately in the thrilling scene of 'Jane Eyre.' Of direct imitation of George Sand there is nowhere any trace ; but in certain parts of ' Shirley,' in the ' Marriage of Genius and Humanity,' for instance, the stimulating influence of certain famous passages in ' L^lia ' suggests itself readily ; and throughout 'Villette' there is constantly something in her mode of approaching her subject, even in the turn of the sentences, especially in the use of participles, which is French rather than English. All the books testify to her pride in her French culture. ”

“ John Rivers, the brother of the fam- ily, an Evangelical clergyman possessed with a fanatical en- thusiasm for missionary life, observes the girl's strong and energetic nature, and makes up his mind to marry her, not in the least because he loves her, but because he thinks her fitted to be a missionary's wife. ”

“ How often in the early scenes of childhood or school-life does one instinctively expect the conventional solution, the conventional softening, the con- ventional prettiness or quaintness, that so many other story- tellers, of undoubted talent, could not have resisted ! ”

“ The country - house party is equally far from anything known, either to realistic or romantic truth, even to the truth as it existed in the days of 'Jane Eyre's' Quarterly Re- viewer and the Cowan Bridge School. ”

“ But ! ' we lay our grip on heart and soul, we bring up from the depths of the human spirit the secrets of the infinite.' == III == The Irish and Celtic element in Charlotte Bronte, how- ever, is not all. Far from it. Crossing, controlling the wild impetuous temper of the Irishwoman is an influence from another world, an influence of habit and long associa- tion, breathed from Yorkshire, and the hard, frugal, persist- ent North. One has but to climb her Haworth hills to feel it flowing around one. ”

“ Let us see how such a contention stands in the case of ' Jane Eyre.' ' Jane Eyre ' to run through a summary of the plot is the story of an orphan girl, reared at a Charity School amid many hardships, going out into the world as a governess, and falling in love with her employer, Mr. Roch- ester. She yields herself to her own passion and to his masterful love-making with an eager, an over-eager abandon- ment. ”

“ Smith, sitting by, may well describe it as ' a queer scene.' She will have nothing to say to Miss Barrett's poetry ; and when she returns to Haworth, she says, with a touch of quiet and confident scorn, that London people talk a great deal of writers and books who mean nothing in the country, nothing to England at large. ”

“ Economy, self-disci- pline, constancy, self-repression, order, these things come easily to them, so far as the outer conduct of life is concern- ed. They take their revenge in dreams, in the whims and passions of the imagination. ”

“ II So far the objector; yet, in spite of it all, 'Jane Eyre' per- sists, and Charlotte Bronte is with the immortals. What is it that a critic of this type forgets what item does he drop out of the reckoning which yet, in the addition, decides the sum ? Simply, one might say, Charlotte Bronte herself. Litera- ture, says Joubert, has been called the expression of society ; and so no doubt it is, looked at as a whole. In the single writer, however, it appears rather as the expression of stud- ies, or temper, or personality. ”

“ Perhaps this explanation is put forward to account rather for the continuance of the Brontes' fame than for their original success. Such a critic would admit that 'Jane Eyre' is at least a vivid and exciting story ”