309

THE MISS BRONTËS.*

[July 1857.]

FRIENDS and friendly biographers are apt to ask too much from "the public," and from the critic who expresses an individual atom of public judgment. There is such a thing as being unjust to the judges. It is unjust to require of readers-all of whom more or less form opinions on an author-that the personal qualities of the writer, unblemished purity of life, exalted heroism, or heroic self-denial, should blind them to errors of style or dullness of story. It is constantly urged, more or less directly, that Smith must write sense because he supports an aged mother, and Amelia be true to nature because all her friends love her so much; and when these claims are ignored, there is irritation and outcry. is well," Mrs. Gaskell writes, "that the thoughtless critics, who spoke of the sad and gloomy views of life presented by the Brontës in their tales, should know how such words. were wrung out of them by the living recollection of the

"It

The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Author of "Jane Eyre," (6 Shirley," Villette," &c. By E. C. Gaskell, Author of Mary Barton," Ruth," &c. 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1857.

99.66

Miss Brontë's Novels. London: same Publishers.

Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey. By Ellis and Acton Bell. A new edition, revised; with a Biographical Notice of the Authors, a Selection from their Literary Remains, and a Preface. By Currer Bell. London: same Publishers, 1851. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. By Acton Bell. Hodgson. Poems. By Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. London:

Smith, Elder, and Co., 1846.

long agony they suffered." Why thoughtless critics? They had penetration enough, it seems, to point out a leading feature in the books; and they must have been more than thoughtful to penetrate the secret domestic sorrows of the family and take them into account in characterising their written productions. A living author is known to the world by his works only, or, if not so, it is with his works alone that the public are concerned; and he has no cause of complaint if he is fairly judged by them without any allowance for the private conditions under which they were produced. On the other hand, he has the corresponding right to demand that personal considerations and private information shall not be dragged in as elements of literary judgment, and that his publicity as an artist shall give no pretext for invading the seclusion of his private life. While we disregard the weak and unfounded complaints we so often hear of "unsympathising" criticism, we must all allow that no terms of reprobation are too strong for forced and unwarrantable intrusions into the personal sanctuary. When an author is dead and his biography is written, especially what may be called a private biography as distinguished from a simple record of public actions, some of the restrictions never justly infringed during the lifetime are removed. The sphere which is voluntarily opened to the public measures the range of the critic. By the very act of admitting us to the interior of a life and character we are invited to examine it; and if such a biography is to have any value, opinions on it must be freely formed and freely expressed.

In writing the life of the late Mrs. Nicholls, Mrs. Gaskell had more than ordinary difficulties to contend with. She had to depict an existence whose interest consisted in the singular characteristics of the narrow home in which it passed, in the spectacle of genius contending against circumstance, not on the wide stage of the world, but within the walls of one household, in

energy struggling not against the outward blows of fate, but against the trials of the heart, and still more against isolation and repression. So narrow was the stage, so few the actors, that it was impossible to illuminate one without letting in the light on others who stood closely grouped around the central figure, and without laying bare to the public eye the closest, and by all men most jealously guarded, secrets of domestic life. The biographer who has to deal with such a life must choose between a mode of treatment which reduces his field to the limits of a memoir, and scarcely allows him to do justice to his task, or one which, on the other hand, is sure in its wider scope to do some injury to the rights and susceptibilities of others. Mrs. Gaskell made her choice, and has unflinchingly acted upon it. In the warmth of her admiration for her friend, in her determination to interest the public in her conscientious self-denying character and her joyless life, she has let no considerations interfere with her purpose of presenting her subject in all the detail necessary to its complete appreciation, and with all that force of graphic delineation of which she is so great a

master.

Frankly we will state our conviction, that she was mistaken; that the principles and the practice which in England make it indecorous to withdraw the veil from purely domestic affairs, the joys, the griefs, the shames of the household,-have a true basis in fortitude and delicacy of feeling, and are paramount to the consideration of gratifying public curiosity, or even to that of securing a full appreciation for the private character of a distinguished artist. Don't let us deceive ourselves about the moral lesson in the present case; it is either so exceptional as to have no common application, or it is one which all who wish may gather for themselves within the range of their own family experience. And let us remember too, that, without pressing real domestic events into the service, we have in our modern novels sufficient

scope for supplying that pleasurable excitement of our better feelings, now so common a luxury, and which is in danger with many of us of replacing the effort to find them a field for their actual exercise.

After this protest, we are free to echo the universal opinion as to the skill with which a difficult work has been executed, and an absorbing interest given to the narrative; rather, we should say, to the felicity with which its native elements of interest have been marshalled and arrayed. The writer, indeed, has gently evaded the responsibility of giving us her own conception of the characters she is describing. This, perhaps, is a thing that we have no right to demand of her, but it would have added much to the value of her work to have had a clear view of the impression produced by the whole of Miss Brontë's character on any mind which had had opportunities of studying her intimately. This is the simplest, the most trustworthy, almost the only way in which we can gain any adequate comprehension of a nature which we have not known at first hand. But Mrs. Gaskell neither loves to form a judgment herself, nor is she very willing that others should do so. She admits the right of divergence of opinion, but is almost as sensitive to the exercise of it as Miss Brontë herself. Not to echo her own enthusiasm is an unfailing mark of superficial insight and shallow thought. She has a tendency to hector us all, in a ladylike way, into unqualified admiration; and when very angry, she whips the critics severely with her pockethandkerchief. What she stigmatises as want of sympathy, excites her bitterness. She prefers the Transatlantic school of criticism, and thinks praise cannot be too like Devonshire cream. She approves the American clergyman, whose tribute seems to us more difficult of digestion than any censure, however harsh and undeserved. "We have," writes the reverend gentleman,

"we have in our sacred of sacreds a special shelf, highly adorned, as a place we delight to honour, of novels

which we recognise as having had a good influence on character-our character. Foremost is Jane Eyre."

With all its excellences, and they are many, this book has a trace of the cant of paneulogism. It is of a very different description from that which Charlotte Brontë herself would have written under similar circumstances,very dissimilar from those brief, outspoken, truthful sentences in which she characterises her sisters in the short and eloquent tribute which she has paid to their memory. Charlotte Brontë's character could have borne a thoroughly open and honest picture of what defects it had, and borne it better than it can bear one or two slight and almost friendly hints, such as that of "slight astringencies" of character in the lady-novelist, in sentences written concerning her married life.

These are shortcomings, no doubt, yet the completeness of the work in other respects goes far to compensate us for them; whatever can be derived from sequence of events, external description, and such indications of personal character as letters afford, is furnished in the fullest abundance. The biographer's command of language, and her talent of description, at once powerful and delicate, enable her to depict with wondrous vividness the scenes in which this painful and secluded drama of life was presented, and the conditions under which it was played out to its melancholy close. Sadly and strangely the story reads, from the time when the motherless and little less than fatherless children sit self-companioned in the gloomy candleless kitchen, or return with wet and weary feet to a smell only of dry boots, to that when the last of them, after a life deeply scarred with those sharp struggles of which the heart is the arena, parted at last with a cry of reluctance from a brief spell of happy days. It is not keen and protracted suffering, or great calamities, which give its sorrowful character to this family history,though of these too it embraced its full share; but there. is a sunlessness, a gray shadow over the house, from the