CHAPTER XIV. THE RECOIL. I.

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The elements that conduce to reaction and recoil are sometimes fatal to the best proposed and ablest evolved schemes of man. Priests and counsellors may gravely devise; knight and maid may devoutly swear; the pious neophyte and the exalted religionist may make solemn pledge, but reaction often brings catastrophe. Thus the Christian Church is rightfully a watchful Body, a militant Force, preaches the weakness of man and cries "Ora continenter!" And herein lies the value of a ponderous state procedure. Irritating in its slow gravity and indifferent to the passionate appeals of emotionalism, such procedure yet withstands the backward wave which comes as answer to courageous but costly proposals.

The unsupported and undisciplined individual, like communities, cannot always safely stand alone, and finally resolves into an automaton at the service of unlicensed and unconsidered impulse when the day of reaction comes. The anthropologist and the pathologist relate how exacting straitness suddenly has broken down with a lamentable demonstration of most morbid prurience; and relentless history has chronicled grievous moral declensions in the lives of men and women whose careers in the greater part were records of generous and unselfish devotion to a noble cause or an honourable work. Until the day of reaction is safely fought through the battle is not won.

Perhaps it was to prevent all possibility of a final and definite reconciliation between M. HÉger and Miss BrontË that M. Sue, aided by his friends, ridiculed their attachment in his feuilleton, Miss Mary. Not that EugÈne Sue would do this necessarily for Virtue's sake, but the position of moral reprehender gave him title to the rÔle he had assumed. M. HÉger was sorely punished to lose Miss BrontË, as M. Sue has shown, and as we have seen Charlotte BrontË herself tells us in a letter; and the intensity of his affection for her is only further accentuated by the light M. Sue throws upon the subject in a conversation which occurs between Alphonsine and the jealous mother, concerning Mdlle. Lagrange in the opening chapters of his feuilleton. As I have stated, evidence compels us to perceive M. Sue often presented by imitation of Charlotte BrontË's Method I., Interchange of the sexes for obfuscation's sake, M. HÉger in Alphonsine: Madame de Morville (Madame HÉger) has just said Mdlle. Lagrange (Miss BrontË) affected a little to speak of her humble origin.

"Elle affecter," replies Alphonsine, "... c'est une erreur. Quand, par hasard, elle parlait de sa famille, c'est que la conversation venait lÀ-dessus. D'ailleurs, Écoute donc, Mademoiselle Lagrange eÛt ÉtÉ fiÈre qu'elle en avait le droit."

"Proud! what of? not of her face, poor girl."

"No, that is true."

Madame de Morville admits that Mdlle. Lagrange was endowed with patience, learning, and fortitude; and says, "Tu le sais, nous avions pour elle les plus grands Égards."

"Without doubt ... and myself, I loved her like a sister."

To which Madame de Morville retorts:

"A ce point que, pendant les premiers jours qui ont suivi son dÉpart je t'ai vue souvent pleurer, et que depuis je te trouve triste."

"Que veux-tu ... se quitter aprÈs plus de trois ans d'intimitÉ, cela vous laisse du chagrin."

"This sensibility does credit to your heart, but after all it seems to me that you and I shall be able by our mutual tenderness to console each other for the loss d'une ÉtrangÈre."

"Une ÉtrangÈre!" says Alphonsine, naÏvely; "dis donc une amie, une soeur.... Ainsi, toi ... tu es pour moi, n'est-ce pas, aussi affectueuse que possible; pourtant tu m'imposes toujours; il y a mille riens, mille folies, mille bÊtises si tu veux, que je n'oserais jamais te dire, et qui nous amusaient et nous faisaient rire aux larmes avec cette pauvre Mademoiselle Lagrange; et puis ces causeries sans fin pendant les rÉcrÉations, nos jeux mÊmes, car elle Était trÈs enfant quand elle s'y mettait[70]; all this made our temps de l'Étude pass like a dream, and that of recreation like a flash."

"Without doubt," replied Madame de Morville, with a forced smile; ... "and I, ... je ne jouissais de la sociÉtÉ de ces demoiselles que lors de notre promenade d'avant dÎner, ou le soir jusqu'À l'heure du thÉ."

The irreparableness of the loss at first to M. HÉger is herein clearly shown. But whether he would confess himself to Miss BrontË afterwards is not certain. The tone of Charlotte BrontË's successive writings suggests he did not, as do many points of evidence and the reference in Villette, Chapter XIX., to that "He was a religious little man, in his way: the self-denying and self-sacrificing part of the Catholic religion commanded the homage of his soul."

Likely enough it is that M. HÉger hailed, as do truly noble men, the day of trial, and elevated by the very agony of great sacrifice the personality which worshipped a conception of duty consonant with Divine law. It seems, though, that then the battle was won; his day of reaction was fought through. At the time of what M. Sue makes M. de Morville call "ce premier entraÎnement" was the greatest danger, and abundant testimony goes to prove he would have gone the length of indiscretion but that Charlotte BrontË, herself innately honourable and influenced by her Christian upbringing, checked the mad rush of impetuous passion. Then the Church of M. HÉger intervened. As Charlotte BrontË tells us in Villette, Chapter XXXVI.: "We were under the surveillance of a sleepless eye: Rome watched jealously her son through that mystic lattice at which I had knelt once, and to which M. Emanuel drew nigh month by month—the sliding panel of the confessional." She was much gratified by M. HÉger's fervent admiration, though she had perforce to remember their circumstances. As M. Sue said of Lagrange so it had been with Miss BrontË:—

The girl had never before known love, save by reading and hearing of its magical influence. All the natural tenderness which lay in her heart she had year after year suppressed.

The references in her poems to a recognition of growing coldness in a lover—see "Frances," "Preference," etc., if we may read them in the biographical sense Mr. Mackay suggests, show there had been a day when she perceived external influences were dictating to M. HÉger a line of moral procedure. Obviously, while she herself had held temptation at bay she was strong; but once she discovered an ally was lessening the necessity of her defence her woman's nature awoke. She doubted the sincerity of the past protestations of passion; she saw in every eye a sinister spy; she found in the Roman Church nothing but a partisan of Madame HÉger (see Madame Beck and the Roman Church in Villette), and M. HÉger became to her a very impersonation of insincerity and treachery. Of the secret tempest which had begun to rage within herself she would disclose nothing to M. HÉger; and she would know that once the storm slept the end might be the worst. But Charlotte BrontË was not yet in the season of the recoil, though alone, wretched, and rapidly losing faith in God and man. As for M. HÉger, he was supported by the knowledge that the ideal of the good and pious is glorified by sacrifice. That "Hell holds no fury like a woman scorned" is a platitude, for a woman scorned in the meaning of the writer is a woman with a shattered life. In her fullest and native sense she ceases to exist thereafter. However, as in many cases Nature provides a remedy for her maimed, woman has given her dissimulation. But to quote Charlotte BrontË's poem, "Frances":—

"Who can for ever crush the heart,
Restrain its throbbing, curb its life?
Dissemble truth with ceaseless art,
With outward calm mask inward strife?"

It is a dangerous day when woman is her very self and thwarted. Then, and only then, can she utter the distressing blasphemies Charlotte BrontË places in the mouth of the speaker in her verses, "Apostasy":—

"Talk not of thy Last Sacrament,
Tell not thy beads for me;
Both rite and prayer are vainly spent,
As dews upon the sea.
Speak not one word of Heaven above
Rave not of Hell's alarms;
Give me but back my Walter's love,
Restore me to his arms!
"Then will the bliss of Heaven be won;
Then will Hell shrink away;
As I have seen night's terrors shun
The conquering steps of day.
'Tis my religion thus to love,
My creed thus fixed to be;
Not Death shall shake, nor Priestcraft break
My rock-like constancy!"

And places in the mouth of Catherine of Wuthering Heights, Chapter IX., in the same connection:—

"If I were in heaven ... I should be extremely miserable.... I dreamt once ... I was there, ... heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out ... on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.[71] ... I cannot express it; but surely you ... have a notion that there is ... an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliffe's miseries ... my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. [See my remarks on Charlotte BrontË's belief in the elective affinities, page 96-7.] My love for Heathcliffe resembles the eternal rocks beneath.... I am Heathcliffe,—he's always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to myself—but as my own being—so don't talk of our separation again."

It is of the barriers which divided the woman of the verses "Apostasy" from her lover that the priest has reminded her. Thus she says:—

"... Did I need that thou shouldst tell
What mighty barriers rise
To part me from that dungeon-cell
Where my loved Walter lies?"

The whole history of Charlotte BrontË's Brussels life before us, the fact that an insurmountable barrier—his marriage—separated her from M. HÉger, and the fact that she herself consulted[72] a Roman Catholic priest whom I designate as her "FÉnÉlon," advising, like the Mentor of TÉlÉmaque,[73] the tempted one to "flee temptation," identify these "barriers" as a covert reference to the circumstances unhappily existing which made intimacy between Miss BrontË and M. HÉger dangerous. To quote my words in The Fortnightly Review:—"We see why Miss BrontË, herself a Protestant, went to the confessional at Brussels.... We know this was no freak, as also that it was impossible for Charlotte to mention the subject to her sister without attributing it to a freak. More, we perceive now the nature of her confession, and, the "Flee temptation!" note of FÉnÉlon's Les Aventures de TÉlÉmaque fresh in our minds, we see why she wrote of her father-confessor in Villette, Chapter XV.:—

There was something of FÉnelon about that benign old priest; and whatever ... I may think of his Church and creed, ... of himself I must ever retain a grateful recollection. He was kind when I needed kindness; he did me good. May heaven bless him!

I mention that by her composite method of presenting characters, which Charlotte BrontË admitted to have employed, Dr. John Bretton, while often in the beginning representing Mr. Smith the publisher, becomes finally a representation of the Rev. Mr. Nicholls who married Miss BrontË.[74] So in Jane Eyre, St. John Rivers while in the main representing the Rev. Patrick BrontË, becomes associated temporarily with that priest I have called Charlotte BrontË's Brussels FÉnÉlon. She tells us in Villette that she broke off the seduction of visiting this priest and says:—"The probabilities are that had I visited ... at the ... day appointed, I might just now ... have been counting my beads in the cell of a ... convent...." Miss BrontË admits he had had great influence with her, and this fact and the testimony of her poem "Apostasy" just quoted show this priest and his admonitions were in her mind when she wrote the final scene between herself and St. John Rivers in Jane Eyre (Chapter XXXV.). Therein, as in that poem and in Wuthering Heights, "Religion" and "Angels"[75] are set as being less to her than the vicinage of her lover. Indeed the India and the missionary life of Jane Eyre, and the marriage with St. John (see Chapter XXXIV.), may be said to have been in Miss BrontË's mind that life of religious consecration which in Villette she owns to have been the likely result of her further listening to the advice of the priest, to whom she had given "the ... outline of my experience," as she terms it.

Therefore it is interesting to observe that, as the woman in "Apostasy" suddenly hears the voice of her lover calling and says:—

"He calls—I come—my pulse scarce beats,
My heart fails in my breast.
Again that voice—how far away,
How dreary sounds that tone!
And I, methinks, am gone astray
In trackless wastes and lone.
"I fain would rest a little while:
Where can I find a stay,
Till dawn upon the hills shall smile,
And show some trodden way?[76]
I come! I come! in haste she said,
'Twas Walter's voice I heard!"
Then up she sprang—but fell back, dead,
His name her latest word.

so in the scene in Jane Eyre: St. John ejaculates—

'My prayers are heard!' He pressed his hand firmer on my head, as if he claimed me; he surrounded me with his arm, almost as if he loved me ["That priest had arms which could influence me; he was naturally kind, with a sentimental French kindness, to whose softness I knew myself not wholly impervious. Without respecting some sorts of affection, there was hardly any sort having a fibre of root in reality, which I could rely on my force wholly to withstand."—Charlotte BrontË speaking of her Brussels FÉnÉlon in Villette, Chapter XV.], I say almost—I knew the difference—for I had felt what it was to be loved; but, like him, I now ... thought only of duty;... I sincerely, ... fervently longed to do what was right.... 'Show me, show me the path!' I entreated of Heaven.... My heart beat fast and thick.... I heard a voice somewhere cry 'Jane! Jane! Jane!' nothing more.... I had heard it—where or whence, for ever impossible to know! And it was ... a known, loved, well-remembered voice—that of Edward Fairfax Rochester.... 'I am coming!' I cried.... 'Wait for me! Oh, I will come!' I broke from St. John, who would have detained me. It was my time to assume ascendency. My powers were in play, and in force. I told him to forbear question or remark.... I mounted to my chamber ... fell on my knees, and prayed in my way—a different way to St. John's, but effective in its own fashion.... I rose from the thanksgiving—took a resolve—and lay down ... eager but for the daylight.

Mrs. Gaskell related that Charlotte BrontË in private conversation in reference to this preternatural crying of a voice, replied with much gravity and without further enlightenment that such an incident really did occur in her experience. Whether it occurred in connection with her Brussels FÉnÉlon and immediately preceded a reconciliation between herself and M. HÉger I know not. As, however, Charlotte BrontË's expression of gratitude to this priest and the whole fervent story of thankfulness for the deliverance from dangerous temptation were written subsequently to her return from Brussels, it is clear there was never a reconciliation which cost either her or M. HÉger honour. I do not urge this as an advocate; I state it upon the strength of unmistakable evidence.

Miss BrontË believed it better to leave Brussels and avoid the possibilities of the peculiar situation—a situation always fraught with temptation. Hence her sudden resolve to return to England.

Arrived at Haworth the full recoil came. She had won through a great ordeal, and she knew that surrounded by his wife and family,[77] comforted by piety and the knowledge of his happy issue from involution in disastrous complications, M. HÉger would resume tranquilly his accustomed course of life. To Charlotte BrontË, who by the showing of all evidence was initially responsible for a morally gratifying outcome of their dangerous attachment, this was a galling picture. Knowing nothing of the ecstatic delights of the pietist in the sacrificial sense of M. HÉger, who was a devoted member of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and, as he is made to describe himself in Villette, "a sort of lay Jesuit," she became just a woman living in the world of her primal nature and conceiving but that she had lost. Miss Rigby—afterwards Lady Eastlake—who wrote the remarkable article on Jane Eyre in The Quarterly Review of 1849, perceived with a flash of real insight and the instinct of womanhood that Currer Bell's pen had presented ungarbed, vital relations of some man and woman identical in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. The circumstances were full difficult for the reviewer; she was irritated and encompassed. Wuthering Heights, which so soon had followed the appearance of Jane Eyre, she suddenly recognized as the very storm-centre of this literary tornado of passionate declamation; and she chastised that work in the name of Jane Eyre, for she could not know all the cruel truth, and she feared to popularize Wuthering Heights. Although Miss Rigby wrote:—"It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength," she added, "but it is the strength of a mere heathenish mind which is a law unto itself." And later, turning upon Wuthering Heights she says with a final vehemency, and most sensationally:—

There can be no interest attached to the writer of Wuthering Heights—a novel succeeding Jane Eyre ... and purporting [!] to be written by Ellis Bell—unless it were for the sake of a more individual reprobation. For though there is a decided family likeness between the two [!], yet the aspect of the Jane and Rochester animals in their native state as Catherine and Heathcliffe [!], is abominably pagan.

Miss Rigby thus excused herself a further consideration of Wuthering Heights. In the days of the gratification of discovering the one she loved in return loved her,[78] this recognition stood between Charlotte BrontË and "every thought of religion, as an eclipse between man and the broad sun," so in another sense truly did the contemplation of M. HÉger's self-pacification intervene in the time of reaction. The doubtings and agonizing emotions of her equivocal season in Brussels were now precipitated. Her poems "Gilbert," "Frances," and "Preference" are testimony to her vengeful and retaliative instinct; as are her portrayals of M. HÉger as M. Pelet of The Professor and as Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights. But as I show in the next chapter, Charlotte BrontË afterwards regretted her human weakness and her vituperations of the day of the recoil. She began to set forth the story of her ordeal more sanely and proportionately in Jane Eyre. As one who soberly rewrites of fact, she recited therein much that she already had given detachedly; and consistently she presented by aid of the frame-work of "plot" from Montagu's Gleanings in Craven which already had given her elemental suggestions for her Wuthering Heights, the history of her life in Jane Eyre—a work that stands as testimony to Charlotte BrontË's love of truth as to her heroic battling in the days of fiercest temptation.

A constant yearning to fine a presentation from untruthfulness is the God-given attribute of the artist, and this was responsible for much that is called harsh in Charlotte BrontË's character as a writer: she would not even spare her own physical and nervous imperfections in her self-portrayals. Emily BrontË would have presented Branwell BrontË as viewed through couleur de rose, yet Charlotte BrontË immortalized him as Hindley Earnshaw and John Reed—as she saw him: weak, tyrannical, a moral wreck. So she presented M. HÉger. She knew his faults—and they were many; but she loved him though she hated them. Her sense of truth and justice, albeit she had lost the rancour of the time of the reaction, determined her in Jane Eyre, it is obvious, to show the occultation of her life's happiness by the incidents of her Brussels life. She would show there had been a day when the barriers between them would have been rashly ignored by him. Thus Rochester is made to sing in Jane Eyre, Chap. XXIV.:—

"I dreamed it would be nameless bliss,
As I loved, loved to be;
And to this object did I press
As blind as eagerly.
But wide as pathless[79] was the space
That lay, our lives, between,
And dangerous as the foamy race
Of ocean-surges green.
And haunted as a robber-path
Through wilderness or wood;
For Might and Right, and Woe and Wrath,
Between our spirits stood.[80]
I dangers dared; I hindrance scorned;
I omens did defy:
Whatever menaced, harassed, warned,[81]
I passed impetuous by.
On sped my rainbow, fast as light;
I flew as in a dream;
For glorious rose upon my sight
That child of Shower and Gleam.
Still bright on clouds of suffering dim
Shines that soft, solemn joy;
Nor care I now, how dense and grim
Disasters gather nigh;
I care not in this moment sweet,
Though all I have rushed o'er
Should come on pinion, strong and fleet,
Proclaiming vengeance sore."

It is clear the impediment of M. HÉger's marriage is suggested in these verses. But undeniable evidence as to Charlotte BrontË's having escaped by flight what she considered a most dangerous temptation, is the fact that we find she was influenced to pen these lines, wherein M. HÉger (Rochester) is likened to a wild pursuer of a "shower and gleam" nymph who sped before him "fast as light" and "glorious rose upon his sight," by Montagu's reference, in Gleanings in Craven, to the story of a Craven nymph a satyr pursued yet lost by her being changed into a spring. Says Frederic Montagu:—

"In the Polyolbion, published in 1612, is the following passage:—

In all my spacious tract let them (so wise) survey
Thy Ribble's rising banks, their worst and let them say;
At Giggleswick, where I a fountain can you show,
That eight times in a day is said to ebb and flow!
Who sometime was a Nymph, and in the mountains high
Of Craven, whose blue heads, for caps put on the sky,
Among the Oreads there, and Sylvans, made abode
(It was ere human foot upon these hills had trod),
Of all the mountain kind, and since she was most fair;
It was a Satyr's chance to see her silver hair
Flow loosely at her back, as up a cliff she clame,
Her beauties noting well, her features and her frame,
And after her he goes; which when she did espy,
Before him like the wind, the nimble Nymph did fly:
They hurry down the rocks, o'er hill and dale they drive,
To take her he doth strain, t' outstrip him she doth strive,
Like one his kind that knew, and greatly feared....
And to the Topic Gods by praying to escape,
They turned her to a Spring, which as she then did pant,
When, wearied with her course, her breath grew wond'rous scant,
Even as the fearful Nymph, then thick and short did blow,
Now made by them a Spring, so doth she ebb and flow."

This is not all. We know now the truth regarding Charlotte BrontË's Brussels life, and seeing she discovered a pertinence in the state of the Craven Nymph to her own—for it is undeniable Rochester's song was modelled upon the lines Montagu quotes—it is likely that what I term the "river" suggestion and the Craven Elf suggestion which resulted in Charlotte BrontË's portraying herself in the rÔle of the stream-named Craven elf, Janet Aire or Eyre, had to do with Montagu's mention of this nymph of Craven who escaped a dangerous persecution by becoming a spring. It seems, indeed, that if she did not at first utilize the parallel of this narrative in verse with her own experience, she yet in Wuthering Heights was influenced by it, in the days which I call the period of the recoil, to represent her hero Heathcliffe as a ruin-creating, semi-human being. Whether the lines—

"It was a Satyr's chance to see her silver hair
Flow loosely at her back as up a cliff she clame,"

had in the connection to do with the "cliffe" in "that ghoul Heathcliffe's" name a reference to Charlotte BrontË's Preface to Wuthering Heights, and her words on the creation of Heathcliffe, in my next chapter, may declare.

It is now impossible not to understand the origin of the Satyr and Nymph passage and its implication in the chapter of Jane Eyre containing Rochester's song, when he says to Jane in the very same chapter:—

"You shall sojourn at Paris, Rome, and Naples: at Florence, Venice, and Vienna: all the ground I've wandered over shall be retrodden by you: wherever I stamped my hoof, your sylph's foot shall step also."


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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