Charlotte Bronte

E F Benson

• Publisher: Librorium Editions
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783966108966
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies

It was precisely and carefully written, stating the facts and pulling apart the saintly whitewash Mrs. Gaskell and other previous biographers had done to Charlotte's life. He does a thorough job of getting at the real Charlotte behind all the myth.I'm not even sure the author liked Charlotte very much, but that didn't stop him depicting her honestly, with the facts that he had before him.The book ends very abruptly with Charlotte's death. The last few chapters seem a bit hurried, but on the whole it was a good effort.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË
BY
E. F. BENSON

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
LONDON ♦ NEW YORK ♦ TORONTO
1932

[Pg iv]

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. LTD.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C.4
6 OLD COURT HOUSE STREET, CALCUTTA
53 NICOL ROAD, BOMBAY
36A MOUNT ROAD, MADRAS

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
55 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
221 EAST 20TH STREET, CHICAGO
88 TREMONT STREET, BOSTON
128-132 UNIVERSITY AVENUE, TORONTO

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[Pg v]

INTRODUCTION

‘And what was he like when he wasn’t writing books?’ asked the small boy to whom I had just been reading a chapter out of Treasure Island. ‘He wasn’t really grown up, was he?’

Such were the two questions which came from those unsophisticated lips, and surely it was a very laudable curiosity that inspired them. This chapter of Treasure Island had been entrancing: it was proper to want to know something about the man who held so thrilling a pen. I sympathise with that desire and uphold it, in spite of those austere purists who tell us that a book must be judged on its merits and on them alone. The reading of it has kindled in us an excitement or has awakened a perception of beauty: for these (the purists say) the book alone is responsible, and the emotions which the reading of it has aroused are concerned only with what lies between its covers. The merchant of pearls (they argue) does not want to ascertain the conditions under which this valuable bivalve lived: it is enough for him that a thing of beauty and of great price lies in his hand. So why, if we read a book or look at a picture that kindles our imagination, should we want to know about the circumstances which helped or handicapped the author or the artist who produced it? They are irrelevant.

The answer is that the book has kindled our imagination, and this very fact makes us demand to know the[Pg vi] intimate and personal history of it. We want to see it not on the flat page only, but in the round, and to be curious about the author and the circumstances in which he wrote it is by no means an irrelevant inquisitiveness. We legitimately wish to know how and why he wrote like that: we find it humanly impossible not to desire to learn about him as well as to enjoy his work.

For a fine flower of literature is not a sundered phenomenon, as is a pearl in Bond Street. It grew from a soil, and not only do its colour and its fragrance, its manner of growth and of foliage concern us, but the nature of the soil which nourished it. Was it a natural product of that soil, or was there in it so fiery and individual a particle that it grew there in spite of its soil? So far from such an inquiry being irrelevant there is nothing more justly interesting, for, indeed, until we know about the author we cannot really judge of his work. Some elements in it, even though it is a masterpiece, may seem to us false or crude or biased, but an understanding of the author’s life may show us that he could not have looked at the world of which he treats from any other angle. It is our business, if we want to understand a book which is worth our study and our admiration, to look at it through our author’s eyes before making conclusions on the evidence of our own. For an ultimate, if not for an elementary appreciation of the finest work, a knowledge of its genesis is essential. To know that Shelley’s Adonais was a lament for the death of Keats expands our just appreciation of it, and we are the poorer because we do not know the genesis of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

There is another reason as well that redeems from the charge of idle inquisitiveness our desire to know all we can about the private lives of certain individuals. A man may have been eminent in action or distinguished in the arts, but it is not to enhance our appreciation of[Pg vii] his achievements that we study his private life. We do not, for instance, read the most entrancing biography in the world in order to enlarge our appreciation of Rasselas: in fact, the more we enjoy Boswell’s Life the more we regret that so entrancing a companion as Johnson ever spent in writing the precious hours he might have devoted to conversation. We want to know more and yet more about the man and his ways and his robust oddities and squalor and nobility, for the sake of acquaintance with him himself, and for no other reason whatever. I do not know how many people nowadays read Rasselas, but they cannot amount to one per cent. of those who read Boswell, and even of that one per cent. a large fraction must have embarked on their task because they already knew the biography. Johnson in fact no longer connotes to us the classical author of his day, but the subject of Boswell’s book, and we want to learn about him not for what he wrote but for what he was.

In the case of the Brontës our interest in their private lives is justified by both these reasons: they were in themselves of most strange and unusual individuality, and two of them, Charlotte and Emily, produced books that profoundly stir our interest and our imagination: it is no desire to pry into private life that makes us want to see these books in the round. A noble flower of literature sprang from a soil which we should have thought was of so arid a nature that the budding and blossoming of such, miraculous in itself by reason of its power or its beauty, is doubly miraculous, by reason of the very unlikelihood, on a priori grounds, of its having blossomed there at all. And when we find that, in the living-room of a grim and meagre parsonage, girt about by moors and graveyard and charged with an atmosphere of hatred and heroism, of thwarted ambitions and acclaimed achievement, there worked two[Pg viii] sisters who, vastly differing in talent and temperament, have for ever enriched English literature, the one by a romance of supreme genius and by a few lyrics whose authentic magic ranks them with Kubla Khan and Keats’s Ode to the Nightingale, the other by two novels which, easily outlasting ephemeral foibles, will always hold their place among classical masterpieces, it is inevitable that we should want to learn all we can not only about the books themselves, but about the strange solitary girls who wrote them. Anything in their lives that throws real light on their books, anything in their books which can be shown to throw real light on their lives, is our legitimate concern.

The earliest of the books about the Brontës, and the only one whose author knew any of them personally, is the admirable Life of Charlotte Brontë, which, at her father’s request, was written by Mrs. Gaskell and published, two years after Charlotte’s death, in 1857. Though she did not come in contact with Charlotte till within five years of her death and never saw her sisters or her brother, she at once became an esteemed though never an intimate friend. Her task was a labour of love. ‘I weighed every line,’ she said, ‘with my whole power and heart, so that every line should go to its great purpose of making her known and valued.’ That surely is a very proper spirit for the biographer, and Mrs. Gaskell produced an admirable book which will always rank high for its technical excellence. But it is possible to have too much of the proper spirit, if the biographer’s object is to produce a human and a faithful portrait. He has no right to suppress or soften harsh features and characteristic traits in his hero because they would interfere with the impression, founded on his own admiration, which he desires to produce. We do not ask that failings should be exaggerated, and limitations too hardly defined, but[Pg ix] we are right to demand from the biographer such presentation of them as is necessary to a true picture. We know from Charlotte’s own letters that there was a vast deal of hardness and intolerance in her nature, and Mrs. Gaskell’s image of her, as entirely tender and loving and patient under cruel trials and disappointments, robs her, with the best motives, of her actual individuality. These suppressions, which render her so much less real, were deliberate: we find that Mrs. Gaskell, with the evidence of Charlotte’s letters in front of her, leaves out important passages which clearly convey what she was at pains to suppress.

Sometimes these omissions are simply puerile. Charlotte, for instance, writing to Ellen Nussey when her authorship of Shirley, which she vainly hoped to conceal, became known at Haworth, exclaimed ‘God help, keep and deliver me!’: Mrs. Gaskell, though transcribing from the letter in front of her, emends: ‘Heaven help, keep and deliver me.’ Such small though numerous alterations are of no consequence, but when it comes to Mrs. Gaskell quoting from Charlotte’s letters to M. Héger and deliberately suppressing all that showed that she was writing love-letters to him, the omission becomes serious, because it leaves out crucial and essential experiences. This point is more fully dealt with in its place. Moreover, though she brought to her task those excellent gifts which had already placed her high in the ranks of English novelists, her skilled instincts as a novelist were often a snare to her. The late Sir Edmund Gosse, one of our finest critics, once said to me, ‘Nobody but a novelist should be allowed to write a biography, but he must remember that he is not now writing a novel,’ and it must be confessed that Mrs. Gaskell was terribly forgetful of that. In her admirable zeal to make her friend known and valued she sometimes fobs us off[Pg x] with fiction, forgetting that, though a novelist’s business is to create characters, it is the business of a biographer to render them, and that the tact of omission, when too unscrupulous, becomes a falsification.

The first edition of Mrs. Gaskell’s book appeared in two volumes, and she soon found herself the centre of a swarm of hornets. Forgetful that she ought to have been dealing with facts, she had taken very insufficient pains about establishing them, and not only was she threatened with two libel actions, but Mr. Brontë, at whose request she had undertaken the work, was furious, as we shall presently see, with what she had said about him. She had to issue a public apology in The Times to avert one of these threatened actions, and when her book was reissued make important omissions: references to these will be made in their due place. She had been inconceivably careless in accepting as true unsifted gossip, always with the intention of blackening the shadows round her central figure and thereby increasing the lustre of its shining, and now she retracted and omitted and, in fact, did all she possibly could to minimise the pain her carelessness had given others, and incidentally to save herself from serious consequences. But subsequent authors of Brontë-Saga have not scrupled to repeat as accredited facts what Mrs. Gaskell was obliged to withdraw because they were not, and many of these have taken their place in what we may call the Canon: it is for this reason alone that I have called attention to the passages which Mrs. Gaskell herself withdrew. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these writers were aware of what they were doing: such passages only appear in the earliest edition...

Table of contents

• CHARLOTTE BRONTË BY E. F. BENSON