lessons, and their father told them the news. The three sisters, Charlotte, Emily Jane, and Anne, and their brother, Branwell, devoted themselves to writing, and Charlotte composed in a few years some twenty or thirty tales as well as many poems. In 1831 she went again to school at Roe Head, a country house between Leeds and Huddersfield, and made the friendship of Ellen Nussey and Mary and Martha Taylor. On her letters to Miss Nussey our knowledge of her life is mainly based. Mary and Martha Taylor suggested the Rose and Jessy Yorke of Shirley. Returning to her home in 1832, Miss Brontë found that her brother Branwell had contracted vicious habits, and he was to the last a source of increasing misery to the family. She had experiences as a school-teacher, and as a governess at a salary of £20 a year; the discipline of teaching was pronounced equally painful and priceless.' The sisters began to think of starting a school, and in February 1842 Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels in order to improve their knowledge of foreign languages. They entered the school kept by M. Héger and his wife in the Rue d'Isabelle.

There can be no doubt that this was the decisive event in Miss Brontë's life. It was then she began to live and to write out of her heart. She was nearly twenty-six, and had written incessantly but without the smallest success. Though she had received two proposals of marriage, her heart had never been touched. She had never met a man of intellect, culture, and imagination. Yet through all the years she craved for intellectual sympathy, and at last she found it. M. Héger, then twentysix, was a man of accomplishment, enthusiastic, passionate, tender, and religious in his nature. His pupil regarded him with steadily growing affection and admiration. He recognised her gifts and pitied her loneliness. After spending nine months at Brussels, the Brontë girls returned to Haworth Vicarage on the death of their aunt. Emily remained at home to keep house for her father, but Charlotte returned to Brussels. She wrote to Miss Nussey: 'I returned to Brussels after aunt's death against my conscience, prompted by what then seemed an irresistible impulse. I was punished for my selfish folly by a total withdrawal, for more than two years, of happiness and peace of mind.' The attempts to explain away these words make them only more significant. During her second period at Brussels Charlotte Brontë instructed M. Héger and his brother-inlaw in English.

She suffered much from low spirits, and on one occasion paid a visit to the confessional. She says to Emily: 'I actually did confess-a real confession,' a confession doubtless not of sin but of pain. By the advice of her friend Mary Taylor she suddenly returned on 18th January 1844. A month after she wrote: 'I suffered much before I left Brussels. I think however long I live I shall not forget what the parting with M. Héger cost me.' She carried on a corre

spondence with her teacher for eighteen months, but it was sharply ended through the intervention of Madame Héger. There was nothing dishonourable in the episode, and it is obvious that M. Héger never felt for his pupil anything more than friendship. But the result was deep and abiding.

She returned to a very gloomy home. Her brother Branwell, who had become thoroughly vicious-an opium-eater, a drunkard, and a confirmed liar-was dismissed from a situation as tutor, returned to his father's house, and after years of steady deterioration, during which his sisters endured unspeakable agonies, died in September 1848. He was intellectually the weakest of the family; there is little trace of talent in his writings. The enforced contact with shameless vice from which the sisters had to suffer left its mark upon their works.

Miss Brontë's thoughts turned to literature, and the three sisters put together a little volume of verses, published at their expense, in May 1846, by Messrs Aylott & Jones. The sisters adopted the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. These corresponded with their initials. One or two critics recognised the excellence of Ellis Bell's work, but it appears that only two copies of the book were sold. Later on Miss Brontë reissued the volume, with additional poems from the literary remains of Ellis and Acton Bell. Miss Brontë had written a novel, The Professor, based on her Brussels experience, and sent it to various publishers. The manuscript shows that the title originally chosen was The Master. It went to six publishers, and was returned without comment; but Mr W. S. Williams, the reader to Messrs Smith, Elder, & Co., and a critic of rare discernment, saw its value, and Miss Brontë was advised to write a novel of the threevolume size. The Professor made only two regulation volumes; otherwise it would probably have been accepted. The book did not appear till after Miss Brontë's death, and has been unaccountably depreciated by critics; it is, however, an exquisitely fresh and tender love-story, and the heroine, Frances Evans Henri, is perhaps the most charming in Charlotte Brontë's gallery. It gives full proof of the writer's power, and Miss Brontë herself never swerved in her high estimate of its value. It is a story of the love between a master and his pupil, a subject from which Miss Brontë's thoughts never moved far. Messrs Smith and Elder couched their refusal of the tale in such reasonable and courteous terms as were almost an encouragement. Miss Brontë replied that she had a second narrative in three volumes now in progress and nearly completed, to which she had endeavoured to impart a more vivid interest than belonged to The Professor. The pub. lishers desired to see the manuscript, which was despatched to them on 24th August. It was accepted, printed, and published by 16th October, and in a very short time, and without the aid of the critics, attained a great success. One of its

reviewers thus commenced his article: 'Since the publication of Grantley Manor no novel has created so much sensation as Jane Eyre.' The secret of Miss Brontë's triumph is not at all obscure. She combined passion with power of expression. The glow and energy of the story held its readers captive. Very soon there came fierce protests against its unconventionality. Miss Rigby (see page 387), in the Quarterly Review, went so far as to suggest that the writer might be a woman 'who for some sufficient reason had long forfeited the society of her sex;' and the North British Review followed suit by saying that 'if Jane Eyre be the production of a woman, she

CHARLOTTE BRONTË.

From an Engraving after the Drawing by G. Richmond, R.A., by permission of Messrs Smith, Elder, & Co.

must be a woman unsexed.' Doubtless the book was unusually outspoken. The obsession of Branwell's conduct and conversation at the time she wrote it goes further than anything else to account for this. There is also abundant testimony that her father and one or two men who visited her home talked before her, if not to her, with as little reticence as Rochester talked to Jane Eyre. Her experience of Brussels schoolgirls must also be reckoned. However, the main point to be noted is that the subject in itself was absolutely unconventional. In this, as in all her novels, she describes love not from the man's but from the woman's point of view. She lifts the veil from the love-agonies of her heroines, and expresses the suffering which women are doomed to bear in silence. It has often been said that Charlotte Brontë's books are autobiographical,

and this is true in a very real sense. She drew her characters from life; some of them, she admitted, were merely photographs. But in another sense, equally important, her books do not render the outward part of her own experience. As we know her, Charlotte Brontë was a martyr to her sense of duty. She lived for her family-her father, her sisters, her brother, her servants. She would suffer nothing to shake the supremacy of her home duties, and almost denied herself the solace of friendship. But her heroines have no tie to home or family: they are able to choose and shape their destinies; they enter the world free, and yet with qualities of culture and feeling that bring to them at last the full investiture of life through love. She writes much of love requited; but her main theme is the suffering of love which is in doubt, the pain of unrequited affection. Did she know it? For answer we quote her own words: Details, situations which I do not understand and cannot personally inspect, I would not for the world meddle with. . . . Besides, not one feeling on any subject, public or private, will I ever affect that I do not really experience.' The grounds of the main objections that have been taken to Miss Brontë's novels are their occasional outspokenness and their unsparing revelations of the heart. The second edition of Jane Eyre, with a dedication to Thackeray, appeared in January 1848. Thackeray had already expressed his admiration of the book, though he complained that the plot was familiar to him. Miss Brontë said meekly that she had read few novels, and that she imagined the plot was original. Her intense but strictly critical and qualified admiration of Thackeray seems to have been based entirely on Vanity Fair, the first number of which appeared in January 1847 and the last in July 1848.

There was eager speculation on the authorship Many critics thought the book of Jane Eyre. must have been written by a man. Others believed that a man and a woman had been at work together, and the names of Barry Cornwall and his wife were suggested. But one, the able critic in the Christian Remembrancer, said: 'We, for our part, cannot doubt that the work is written by a female, and, as certain provincialisms indicate, by one from the north of England.' It is impossible to trace the literary connections of Jane Eyre, but it has been suggested that in Charlotte Brontë's conception of love there are distinct traces of Harriet Martineau's forgotten novel, Deerbrook. There are also hints of the influence of Pamela, which, we know, was read by her father, and imitated by him in a little book. The attempts to suggest foreign origins are not plausible.

Miss Brontë, who had kept her secret even from her publishers, went up to London in July 1846 with her sister Anne and revealed herself. After a short visit, they returned to a sorely tried home. Branwell Brontë died, as we have said, in September

1848, Emily in December, and Anne Brontë in May 1849. During this painful time Miss Brontë was writing Shirley, which is the brightest of her stories. She had partially escaped from sweet and bitter memories. Nearly every character in the book was a Yorkshire friend. It was impossible any longer to hide the secret of the authorship. The Yorke family in particular were almost daguerreotypes' of the Taylors. Shirley Keeldar, the heroine, represents traces of her sister Emily; Louis Moore, the tutor, is the inevitable M. Héger; Mr Helstone is a Mr Roberson, a fighting Tory parson of the thirties. The love-story of Robert and Caroline is even more beautiful than that of Louis and Shirley. In both cases the man is dominant. Shirley expressed Charlotte Brontë in her happiest mood, and will always be the favourite novel of many readers, though Jane Eyre has been more esteemed by the public and Villette by the critics.

Miss Brontë's genius had by this time brought her into a circle of friendly admirers, and among others she came to know Thackeray, G. H. Lewes, Mrs Gaskell, and Miss Martineau. With none of these, however, was she on terms of real intimacy. She was shy and shrinking, melancholy and selfconscious, and her feeble, nervous, suffering body was always sinking to its fall. There could be no greater contrast than that between her fiery soul and her extreme reserve and timidity. Outwardly her life was one of decorous, uneventful simplicity, but as a writer she plunged boldly into the whirl of passion, and never hesitated to lay bare the inner sanctuary of feeling. Yet her friendships and her fame gave her pleasure. 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 the raven, weary of surveying the deluge and without an ark to return to, would be my type. As it is, something like a hope and motive sustains me still.'

Villette, her last completed story, and artistically the most perfect of all, is a reproduction of her life in Brussels, with touches from more recent experience. It appeared in the beginning of 1853Her publisher, Mr George Smith, and his mother are among the characters, and it contains a description of Rachel's acting which Miss Brontë had seen in London. The book was received with a burst of acclamation. Harriet Martineau protested against the place it gave to love, and Anglican journals against its attacks on, sacerdotalism. But its picture of love, its romance, its poetry, its sarcasm, and occasional playfulness captivated the world. Villette is an autobiography in the fullest sense of the word. Charlotte herself is Lucy Snowe, and M. Héger is Paul Emanuel. Her father urged that the story should end happily with the marriage of the professor and his pupil. Miss Brontë, however, was inflexible. The lovers are left unwedded. Amidst all the praise the writer's heart was sinking. Her courage was

failing; the oppressive quietness of her home-life, and, above all, the haunting memories of Brussels, crushed her spirits. Solitude fearfully aggravated other evils. She sat day by day in her chair, with saddest memories for her only company, late into the night, conversing with the spirits of the dead. A gleam of happiness came before the end. Her father's curate, Mr A. B. Nicholls, had long loved her. Though Miss Brontë esteemed him, she thought him narrow and uncongenial in feelings and tastes. Her father furiously opposed the match; he thought that his famous daughter would be throwing herself away on a curate with £100 a year. Miss Brontë was touched at last by the steadfast devotion of Mr Nicholls, her father yielded, and she was married on 19th June 1854. After a visit with her husband to his Irish relations, she returned to Haworth. Her married life was very happy, but her health became precarious; she sank steadily, and died on 31st March 1855 of an illness incidental to childbirth. Her last words. were: ‘Oh, I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy.' So ended a deeply shadowed life. Her early friend, Mary Taylor, declared that Mrs Gaskell's biography was 'not so gloomy as the truth,' that Miss Brontë had lived all her days in a walking nightmare of poverty and self-suppression. For her three great books she received only £1500; practically all this sum was saved and bequeathed to her husband. It was her lot to be unfortunate in almost all things; but her fortitude remained unshaken. She was rigidly faithful to her views of duty, and though often wounded she was never stained. It has been well said that no apology need be offered for any single feature of Charlotte. Brontë's life and character.' The vitality of her works is undiminished, and to-day they are as widely read as ever.

Mme. Rachel.

...

The theatre was full-crammed to its roof: royal and noble were there: palace and hotel had emptied their inmates into those tiers so thronged and so hushed. . . . I wondered if she would justify her renown: with strange curiosity, with feelings severe and austere, yet of riveted interest, I waited. She was a study of such nature as had not encountered my eyes yet: a great and new planet she was but in what shape? I waited her rising.

She rose at nine that December night: above the horizon I saw her come. She could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star verged already on its judgment day. Seen near, it was a chaoshollow, half-consumed; an orb perished or perishinghalf lava, half glow. . . .

What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen, fair as the day once, turned pale now like twilight, and wasted like wax in flame. . . . I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man in each of her eyes sat a devil. These evil forces bore her through the tragedy, kept up her feeble strength-for she was but a frail creature; and as the actions rose and the stir deepened, how wildly they shook her with their passions of the pit! They wrote HELL on her straight,.

haughty brow. They tuned her voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate she stood.

It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation.
It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral.

Swordsmen thrust through, and dying in their blood on the arena sand; bulls goring, horses disembowelled, made a meeker vision for the public-a milder condiment for a people's palate-than Vashti torn by seven devils: devils which cried sore and rent the tenement they haunted, but still refused to be exorcised.

Suffering had struck that stage empress; and she stood before her audience, neither yielding to, nor enduring, nor, in finite measure, resenting it: she stood locked in struggle, rigid in resistance. She stood, not dressed, but draped in pale antique folds, long and regular like sculpture. A background and entourage and flooring of deepest crimson threw her out, white like alabaster-like silver: rather, be it said like Death.

Where was the artist of the Cleopatra? Let him come and sit down and study the different visions. Let him seek here the mighty brawn, the muscle, the abounding blood, the full-fed flesh he worshipped: let all materialists draw nigh and look on.

I have said that she does not resent her grief. No, the weakness of that word would make it a lie. To her, what hurts becomes immediately embodied: she looks on it as a thing that can be attacked, worried down, torn in shreds. Scarcely a substance herself, she grapples to conflict with abstractions. Before calamity she is a tigress; she rends her woes, shivers them in convulsed abhorrence. Pain, for her, has no result in good tears water no harvest of wisdom: on sickness, on death itself, she looks with the eye of a rebel. Wicked, perhaps, she is, but also she is strong; and her strength has conquered Beauty, has overcome Grace, and bound both at her side, captives peerlessly fair and docile as fair. Even in the uttermost frenzy of energy is each mænad movement royally, imperially, incedingly upborne. Her hair, flying loose in revel or war, is still an angel's hair, and glorious under a halo. Fallen, insurgent, banished, she remembers the heaven where she rebelled. Heaven's light, following her exile, pierces its confines and discloses their forlorn remoteness.

(From Villette, Chap. XXIII.)

Rain.

This is

This

But Jessie, I will write about you no more. an autumn evening wet and wild. There is only one cloud in the sky, but it curtains it from pole to pole. The wind cannot rest: it hurries sobbing over hills of sullen outline, colourless with twilight and mist. Rain has beat all day on that church tower: it rises dark from the stony enclosure of its graveyard: the nettles, the long grass, and the tombs all drip with wet. evening reminds me too forcibly of another evening some years ago: a howling, rainy autumn evening too-when certain who had that day performed a pilgrimage to a grave new-made in a heretic cemetery, sat near a woodfire on the hearth of a foreign dwelling. They were merry and social, but they each knew that a gap never to be filled had been made in their circle. They knew they had lost something whose absence could never be quite atoned for so long as they lived; and they knew that heavy falling rain was soaking into the wet earth

which covered their lost darling, and that the sad sighing gale was mourning above her buried head. The fire warmed them; Life and Friendship yet blessed them; but Jessie lay cold, coffined, solitary-only the sod screening her from the storm.

(From Shirley, Chap. XXIII.) Hope Dead.

Jane Eyre-who had been an ardent, expectant woman-almost a bride-was a cold solitary girl again: her life was pale; her prospects were desolate. A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and corn-field lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow, and the woods which twelve hours since waved leafy and fragrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pineforests in wintry Norway. My hopes were all deadstruck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive. I looked at my love; that feeling which was my master's-which he had created; it shivered in my heart, like a suffering child in a cold cradle; sickness and anguish had seized it; it could not seek Mr Rochester's arms-it could not derive warmth from his breast. Oh, never more could it turn to him, for faith was blightedconfidence destroyed! . . . One idea only still throbbed life-like within me-a remembrance of God: it begot an unuttered prayer: these words went wandering up and down in my rayless mind, as something that should be whispered; but no energy was found to express them— 'Be not far from me, for trouble is near: there is none to help.'

It was near; and as I had lifted no petition to Heaven to avert it as I had neither joined my hands, nor bent my knees, nor moved my lips-it came in full heavy swing the torrent poured over me.

(From Jane Eyre, Chap. XXVI.)

Villette by Moonlight.

Hush! The clock strikes. Ghostly deep as is the stillness of this house, it is only eleven. While my ear follows to silence the hum of the last stroke, I catch faintly from the built-art capital a sound like bells, or like a band a sound where sweetness, where victory, where mourning blend. Oh to approach this music nearer, to listen to it alone by the rushy basin! Let me go-oh let me go! What hinders, what does not aid freedom? . . . Quiet Rue Fossette! I find on this pavement that wanderer-wooing summer night of which I mused; I see its moon over me; I feel its dew in the air. But here I cannot stay; I am still too near old haunts; so close under the dungeon, I can hear the prisoner's moan. This solemn peace is not what I seek, it is not what I can bear: to me the face of that sky bears the aspect of a world's death. The park also will be calm-I know, a mortal serenity prevails everywhere —yet let me seek the park. . . . Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the whole world seems abroad; moonlight and heaven are banished: the town, by her own flambeaux, beholds her own splendour-gay dresses, grand equipages, fine horses, and gallant riders throng the bright streets. I see even scores of masks. It is a

strange scene, stranger than dreams. . . . That festal night would have been safe for a very child. Half the peasantry had come in from the outlying environs of Villette, and the decent burghers were all abroad and around, dressed in their best. My straw hat passed amidst cap and jacket, short petticoat, and long calico mantle, without, perhaps, attracting a glance; I only took the precaution to bend down the broad leaf gipsywise, with a supplementary ribbon-and then I felt safe as if masked.

Safe I passed down the avenues-safe I mixed with the crowd where it was deepest. To be still was not in my power, nor quietly to observe. I drank the elastic night air-the swell of sound, the dubious light, now flashing, now fading. (From Villette, Chap. XXXVIII.)

Prayer.

Not always do those who dare such divine conflict prevail. Night after night the sweat of agony may burst dark on the forehead; the supplicant may cry for mercy with that soundless voice the soul utters when its appeal is to the Invisible. 'Spare my beloved,' it may implore. Heal my life's life. Rend not from me what long affection entwines with my whole nature. God of heaven-bend-hear-be clement!' And after this cry of strife, the sun may rise to see him worsted. That opening morn which used to salute him with the whisper of zephyrs, the carol of skylarks, may breathe as its first accents, from the dear lips which colour and heat have quitted-Oh, I have had a suffering night. ing I am worse. I have tried to rise. Dreams I am unused to have troubled me.'

This mornI cannot.

Then the watcher approaches the patient's pillow and sees a new and strange moulding of the familiar features, feels at once that the insufferable moment draws nigh, knows it is God's will his idol shall be broken, and bends his head, and subdues his soul to the sentence he cannot avert, and scarce can bear.

Happy Mrs Pryor! She was still praying, unconscious that the summer sun hung above the hills, when her child softly woke in her arms. No piteous unconscious moaning-sound which so wastes our strength that, even if we have sworn to be firm, a rush of unconquerable fears sweeps away the oath-preceded her waking. No space of deaf apathy followed. The first words spoken were not those of one becoming estranged from this world, and already permitted to stray at times into realms foreign to the living. Caroline evidently remembered with clearness what had happened. (From Shirley, Chap. XXV.)

Love.

'Love a crime! No, Shirley: love is a divine virtue -obtrusiveness is a crime; forwardness is a crime; and both disgust: but love!-no purest angel need blush to love. And when I see or hear either man or woman couple shame with love, I know their minds are coarse, their associations debased.' . . .

'You sacrifice three-fourths of the world, Caroline.' 'They are cold-they are cowardly-they are stupid, on the subject, Shirley! They never loved-they never were loved!'

'Thou art right, Lina! And in their dense ignorance they blaspheme living fire, seraphs-brought from a divine altar.'

'They confound it with sparks mounting from Tophet!' (From Shirley, Chap. XVII.)

The Brontë literature is considerable, but practically all the facts are contained in Mrs Gaskell's biography, edited by Clement Shorter, and in Mr Shorter's Charlotte Bronte and her Circle (1896). The latter work contains many letters to Miss Nussey, W. S. Williams, and others. Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph, by T. Wemyss Reid (1877), is based on Miss Nussey's letters. Some information may be obtained from Pictures of the Past, by F. H. Grundy (1879), and F. A. Leyland's The Brontě Family (1886), but neither book is quite trustworthy. Dr Wright's work, The Brontës in Ireland (1893), is legendary. A very convenient reprint of Miss Brontë's letters, in chronological order, was issued by Mr J. Horsfall Turner for private circulation, but very few copies are extant. Mr Augus tine Birrell's little book in the 'Great Writers' series is marked by its sense and humanity. Almost all the existing material is now in print, the letters to M. Héger having probably been destroyed. A complete edition of her Works, with Introductions by Mrs Humphry Ward, was issued in 7 vols. in 1899-1900; a complete edition, with some new matter, and Introductions by the present writer, was published in 1903. Criticisms are very numerous; the most important is A Note on Charlotte Brontë, by Mr Swinburne (1877). A work full of judicious comment is The Brontës: Fact and Fiction, by Angus M. Mackay (1897). The Transactions of the Brontë Society include some valuable papers and an excellent bibliography. Of the numerous critical essays among the most important are two articles on Jane Eyre and Shirley in the Revue des Deux Mondes, by Eugene Forçade (1848 and 1849); these were considered by Charlotte Brontë the best interpretations of her novels. The Christian Remembrancer in 1848, 1853, and 1857 published acute criticisms, to one of which Miss Brontë replied (see Christian Remembrancer, vol. xxxv.). We may note also the essays by W. C. Roscoe in the National Review, reprinted in his Essays (1860); Sir Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library (3rd series, 1879), and his article in the Dictionary of National Biography; Sir John Skelton in Essays in History and Biography (1883).

W. ROBERTSON NICOLL.

Emily Jane Brontë was born at Thornton in 1818, and died at Haworth on 19th December 1848, leaving behind her one imperishable novel, Wuthering Heights, and some poems which cannot be forgotten. She was an enigma in life; she remains an enigma in death. She went in infancy to the school at Cowan Bridge, and was for some time in 1836 a teacher in a school at Halifax, where she worked from six in the morning till eleven at night. Later on, she was with Charlotte during her first period at Brussels. For the rest, she remained at Haworth, and is said to have been an excellent housekeeper. She had no intimacies except with her sister Anne, and their correspondence has been destroyed. Her two sisters, her father, her brother, her dog, and the old servant in the house were necessary to her, but she never studied their comfort nor returned their confidence. It was said of her that she never showed a regard for any human creature, that all her love was reserved for animals. This is an exaggeration; but her reserve was extreme. She could not live away from the moors, and whenever she was absent she suffered from vehement home-sickness. Miss Nussey tells us that on the top of a moor or in a deep glen she was a child in spirit for glee and enjoyment, that few people had the gift of looking and smiling as she could look and smile. The only man for whom she showed any friendship was a curate, Mr Weightman. She had an exceptional gift for music. Her poems showed remarkable force and vigour, as well as deep feeling. Her creed was never put into explicit form, but it is manifest that she was far