At least six publishers refused The Professor before Charlotte Brontë reluctantly shelved it in order to finish Jane Eyre, but she obviously thought well of it none the less, for she subsequently suggested that George Smith reconsider his initial refusal and publish it as a successor to Jane Eyre. After the publication of Shirley she offered her first-born to Smith a third time, but his feeling against it was still so strong that even Miss Brontë’s great reputation seemed inadequate reason to accept the manuscript. Reluctantly, for she had written a preface in 1851 in the expectation of its publication, she agreed to lock The Professor and ‘the monotony of his demure Quaker countenance’ into a cupboard and forget him. But she had no intention of destroying the work, and after her death Sir James Kay-Shuttle worth and Mrs. Gaskell dug out the manuscript and together convinced Mr. Nicholls that he should consent to its publication. This time, knowing that there were to be no more novels from Currer Bell, Smith was glad to take the manuscript for his firm. The virtues that Miss Brontë found in the novel have not always been apparent to her readers, who have frequently felt it be be an undernourished, if not starved, work.

In her preface Miss Brontë wrote that her juvenile attempts before beginning The Professor had cured her of ‘any such taste as I might once have had for ornamented and redundant composition’, and that she had ‘come to prefer what was plain and homely….

‘I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs–that he should never get a shilling he had not earned–that no sudden turns should lift him in a moment to wealth and high station; that whatever small competency he might gain, should be won by the sweat of his brow; that, before he could find so much as an arbour to sit down in, he should master at least half the ascent of “the Hill of Difficulty”; that he should not even marry a beautiful girl or a lady of rank. As Adam’s son he should share Adam’s doom, and drain throughout life a mixed and moderate cup of enjoyment.

‘In the sequel, however, I find that publishers in general scarcely approved of this system, but would have liked something more imaginative and poetical–something more consonant with a highly wrought fancy, with a taste for pathos, with sentiments more tender, elevated, unworldly. Indeed until an author has tried to dispose of a manuscript of this kind, he can never know what stores of romance and sensibility lie hidden in breasts he would not have suspected of casketing such treasures. Men in business are usually thought to prefer the real; on trial the idea will be often found fallacious: a passionate preference for the wild, wonderful, and thrilling–the strange, startling, and harrowing–agitates divers souls that show a calm and sober surface.’ [I:v–vii]

Most readers would agree with the publishers in asking for ‘something more imaginative and poetical’ in the novel, although what they might mean by those notoriously slippery terms would probably be considerably different from the meaning Miss Brontë attached to them in this context. By both terms she seems to have meant that which is contrary to literal fact and probability, a meaning more often given to ‘imaginative’ than to ‘poetical’ in the popular usage of our own day.

Miss Brontë’s preface makes her sound a confirmed rationalist, a term more than a little misleading when applied to the author of Jane Eyre and Villette. It is a cliché to say that her first and third books tried for the look of a transcription of everyday life, while the second and fourth used the trappings of the Gothic and proceeded from a sensibility that attempted to unite the claims of both the rational and non-rational faculties of man. For the truth is that Charlotte Brontë never finally decided on the relative values of the claims of these two parts of man’s mind; in her best works it is the tension that exists between their opposing pulls that gives the novels their vitality, and the resolution of the problem that gives the reader a sense of fulfilment.

In her preface to The Professor she was clearly thinking of the imagination and the poetic faculties as non-rational processes and therefore without any real validity; on occasion, when particularly worried about the harmful effects of relying on the imagination, she equated it with undisciplined wallowing in emotion and sentiment, and consequently thought it something to be feared and avoided. The very fear of what she thought of as the imagination is some measure of the attraction she felt for it, and a recognition of its necessity for her. The Professor is, in part, a repudiation of its preface, for Miss Brontë was unable to avoid showing the necessity of the emotions. In Jane Eyre and Villette she transcends this distrust of the non-rational and, with a more mature attitude to the imagination, makes the theme of both novels the reconciliation of the head and the heart into the kind of superior cognition or imagination that Coleridge meant when he wrote of the ‘secondary Imagination’, which ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; … it struggles to idealize and to unify’.1 What Coleridge meant was the essentially creative power that gives embodiment to the perceptions of man’s mind, that power that makes an artistic unity out of the disparate, discrete aspects of life, and at her greatest, this is what Miss Brontë was able to do with the extraordinary hodge-podge of emotions and experiences that are the raw material of her novels.

Since she failed to keep The Professor as unemotional a tale as she planned, it is not surprising that Miss Brontë’s preface seems disingenuous or, at least, indicative of less than the whole truth of her attitudes. Nor was it only within the framework of her novels that she felt the necessity for something beyond a literal, factual view of the world. The ‘imaginative and poetical’ aspects of the Angrian tales and of her other juvenilia are well-known. When she was only eighteen, she prepared a reading list for her friend Ellen Nussey. The list itself is not exceptional, for the poets she recommends include the names one would expect a well-read young lady of the early part of the century to know, including Shakespeare, of course, with Milton, Wordsworth, and most of the major poets between them. Significantly, however, the only times her enthusiasm is roused are when she is writing of Shakespeare and Byron (‘Both these were great men, and their works are like themselves’) and of ‘Scott’s sweet, wild, romantic poetry.’ ‘For fiction,’ she wrote, ‘read Scott alone; all novels after his are worthless.’ [Gaskell, Chap. 7, I:140.]

Perhaps even more revealing than her early love of these three writers, with all the romantic feeling implied thereby, are her mature views on Jane Austen, a writer whose themes, if not style, one might expect her to admire. In January 1848 she wrote to G. H. Lewes, who had said that he would rather have written Pride and Prejudice or Tom Jones than any of Scott’s Waverley novels: ‘I had not seen “Pride and Prejudice” till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate, daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.’ [Gaskell, Chap. 16, II:54.]

A week later she indignantly answered Lewes, quoting his own dictum: ‘“Miss Austen is not a poetess, has no ‘sentiment’ (you scornfully enclose the word in inverted commas), no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasm of poetry,” and then you add, I must “learn to acknowledge her as one of the greatest artists, of the greatest painters of human character, and one of the writers with the nicest sense of means to an end that ever lived.”’ [Gaskell, Chap. 16, II:55.] It is the very lack of poetry and sentiment that keeps Jane Austen from the greatness of George Sand and Thackeray, she told Lewes: ‘Miss Austen being, as you say, without “sentiment”, without poetry, maybe is sensible, real (more real than true), but she cannot be great.’ [Gaskell, Chap. 16,  II:56.]

Miss Brontë’s misunderstanding of her great predecessor is less interesting for its indication of her failure as a critic than it is for its implications of the type of sensibility she felt in her own writing. Two years later she tried reading Jane Austen once more, but she had to admit to W. S. Williams that she still felt greatly dissatisfied:

‘I have likewise read one of Miss Austen’s works–Emma–read it with interest and with just the degree of admiration which Miss Austen herself would have thought sensible and suitable. Anything like warmth or enthusiasm–anything energetic, poignant, heart-felt is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstration the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outré and extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well. There is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting. She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood. Even to the feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition–too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress. Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands, and feet. What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death–this Miss Austen ignores. She no more, with her mind’s eye, beholds the heart of her race than each man, with bodily vision, sees the heart in his heaving breast. Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman. If this is heresy, I cannot help it. If I said it to some people (Lewes for instance) they would directly accuse me of advocating exaggerated heroics, but I am not afraid of your falling into any such vulgar error.’ [Shorter, II:127–8.]

It seems, then, in spite of her preface that Miss Brontë was violating her own most deeply held convictions when in writing The Professor she ‘restrained imagination, eschewed romance, repressed excitement,’ avoided ‘over-bright colouring’, and ‘sought to produce something which should be soft, grave, and true’. [Gaskell, Chap. 16, II:42.] What is most important about this transgression against her own instincts is that it indicates a good part of the reason the novel lacks the artistic unity of the later works. When Miss Brontë eschewed imagination in her sense of the word, with its connotations of excess, exaggeration, and improbability, she failed to fulfil the claims of the Imagination, as Coleridge used the term. The true unity of a work of art eluded her at the very time she sought to find it by emphasis on a single aspect of perception. Paradoxically, it was when she was most eclectic in her choice of material that her work was most unified in effect, and the more literally improbable those materials the greater the sense of reality she achieved. As Lord David Cecil has written, ‘Out of her improbabilities and absurdities, she constructed an original vision of life; from the scattered, distorted fragments of experience which managed to penetrate her huge self-absorption, she created a world.’2

The world of Charlotte Brontë’s novels is, to be sure, a circumscribed one when compared to the worlds of Shakespeare or Chaucer or Milton or even that of her admired master, Thackeray, but the breadth of the world the artist dreams has little relationship to our sense of fulfilment in it. Completeness is all. The horizons may be narrow, but one must have a sense of the artist’s having explored them. In spite of Shirley, one does not go to Charlotte Brontë for an understanding of Victorian history or politics; the wise man repairs to her novels for an exploration of her own confined world, and it is only when one feels that she has attempted to close a curtain over half that world, as in The Professor, that one feels its cramping limits.

The plot of The Professor is a simple one, organized in linear, chronological fashion with three settings, the central section in Brussels sandwiched between two English sections. Crimsworth quarrels with the brother who employs him, goes to Brussels as a schoolmaster, is attracted by Mlle. Reuter, falls in love with Frances, marries her and eventually takes her back to England. Once Crimsworth has seen through the wiles of Mlle. Reuter, he embarks upon his courtship of Frances, which is carried through without hitch or complication. It is improbable that the story has often held children from play or old men from the chimney corner.

It has been customary to say of the novel, taking the lead from Miss Brontë’s husband’s postscript to her preface, that it is a kind of preliminary sketch for Villette. True, the two novels are set in Brussels, there is a professor-student relationship that develops into love, and the inhabitants of the Pension Héger have been reworked into fictional being in both novels; but these are mere surface resemblances, and in reality the first novel has less likeness to Villette than has Jane Eyre. What is most interesting about it as a first novel is the introduction of themes that characterize the rest of the novels. All too often, however, the techniques were not yet developed for giving life to these themes.

Since Miss Brontë spent so much of her life in either preparation for or the practice of teaching, it is hardly surprising that all four of her novels are concerned with pedagogues and pupils, with master-disciple relationships, with learning to know oneself and the world. It may reasonably be objected that most novels share in a concern so generally stated as this last, but Miss Brontë’s novels are, strictly speaking, novels of development, in which the learning process develops an inexperienced or unfinished character into a mature person. In The Professor and Villette, the central pair of characters are both teachers; in Jane Eyre the eponymous character is teacher, then governess; in Shirley Louis Moore is a tutor. However, the relationship between master and pupil is not always a neat parallel for the learning process of life. Jane Eyre, for instance, is technically the teacher, but in the initial stages of their relationship, it is Rochester who educates her. Then the roles are reversed, and he becomes the pupil as she becomes the dominant member of the pair. Lucy Snowe is both school-mistress and pupil, but M. Paul learns from her as much as he is able to teach her.

At its core The Professor has a triangle of teaching and learning. Hunsden acts as worldly monitor to Crimsworth, who in turn educates Frances in English and in life and love. But it is Frances who acts as arbiter and teacher to Hunsden in the ways of the heart.

Hunsden’s method of instructing Crimsworth is rough, almost insulting in the fashion that characterizes the relationship of men in Miss Brontë’s novels. (After this first attempt she wisely followed the example of Jane Austen in avoiding scenes in which only men appear.) In the early scenes in X——, Hunsden is set in marked contrast to Edward Crimsworth; where Hunsden is brusque in his machinations to aid William Crimsworth, Edward Crimsworth is brutal in his treatment of his brother. Like two contrasting parts of his personality, Hunsden and Edward struggle to dominate William Crimsworth. At the beginning of the book William is put in the position of having to choose to be like either his aristocratic mother or his plebeian father. His brother has settled for vulgar tradesman’s ideals combined with the haughtiness of the would-be aristocrat: the worst of two worlds. Hunsden has the ascetic habits and the Olympian contempt of vulgarity that accords with his ancient lineage, but he combines them with an innate modesty that prompts him to profess being only a tradesman and a hater of the upper classes. As passion dominates Edward Crimsworth, so a slightly vinegarish, somewhat spinsterish, dispassionate rationality animates Hunsden. Edward hates his brother because he recognizes in him an innate aristocracy that he lacks himself, Hunsden berates William Crimsworth for the same sort of oversensitivity that he perceives in the aristocratic face of the portrait of his mother. Edward Crimsworth tries to crush the humanity in his brother, Hunsden liberates that humanity by freeing it of pretension.

In the later part of the book Edward Crimsworth’s passionate anger and arrogance is replaced as a menace to William by the sexual licence of Pelet, who tries to make the Englishman his disciple. In this part of the book the ascetic Hunsden is set in contrast to Pelet. Like most of the sensualists in Miss Brontë’s novels, Pelet is guileful, shifty, untrustworthy. Mlle. Zoraïde is the feminine equivalent of Pelet, and their marriage is the matching of like characters. Miss Brontë was not so unsubtle as to suggest that either passion or reason existed without dilution in persons, but she so feared the deleterious effect of passion that she believed it could negate reason or even pervert it into craftiness. Crimsworth says of Zoraïde: ‘“To read of female character as depicted in Poetry, and Fiction, one would think it was made up of sentiment, either for good or bad–here is a specimen, and a most sensible and respectable specimen, too, whose staple ingredient is abstract reason. No Talleyrand was ever more passionless than Zoraïde Reuter!” So I thought then; I found afterwards that blunt susceptibilities are very consistent with strong propensities.’ [Chap. 10, I:175–6.]

However necessary reason may be to curb passion, the man deficient in the proper passion was a poor man to Charlotte Brontë. Nor did she attempt to put a Victorian disguise on the fact that a controlled sexual passion is the normal manifestation of the well-adjusted personality. Hunsden, in spite of the coolness with which he can diagnose Crimsworth’s failures in self-analysis, fails himself to understand half of life. Overt sensuality he can comprehend intellectually, but the sexuality that shares a happy tenancy of man’s body, mind, and emotions with the intellect, he cannot understand. His influence over Crimsworth lessens as the tutor falls in love with Frances. Crimsworth knows that his friend cannot understand his animal nature or his love for the young teacher: ‘Keen-sighted as he was, [he could not] penetrate into my heart, search my brain, and read my peculiar sympathies and antipathies; he had not known me long enough, or well enough, to perceive how low my feelings would ebb under some influences, powerful over most minds; how high, how fast they would flow under other influences, that perhaps acted with the more intense force on me, because they acted on me alone. Neither could he suspect for an instant the history of my communications with Mdlle. Reuter; secret to him and to all others was the tale of her strange infatuation: her blandishments, her wiles … had changed me, for they had proved that I could impress. A sweeter secret nestled deeper in my heart; one full of tenderness and as full of strength….’ [Chap. 22, II:129.]

Like St. John Rivers in Jane Eyre, Hunsden is left at the end of the novel with nothing but the portrait of the woman he loves, dependent upon other relationships for affection, cut off from the proper fulfilment of his life. As an example to Crimsworth, he has stood for the necessity of reason and for the insufficiency of that faculty as a complete guide to life.

Crimsworth’s relationship with Frances is deliberately opposed to those with his pupils and with Mlle. Reuter. As his best pupil, Frances is contrasted to the other students, whose superior she is in both intellectual and emotional capacity. The coarseness and vulgarity of the majority of the pupils are exemplified in the occupants of the first bench, Eulalie, Hortense, and Caroline, and in the other three fledgling sensualists, Aurelia, Adèle, and Juanna. To their mean spirits are contrasted the Protestant intelligence, good manners, and modesty of Frances. The opposite extreme in his pupils is the embryo nun, Sylvie, ‘gentle in manners, intelligent in mind’. Nationality and religion bring out the innate sensuality of the others, but in Sylvie they have stifled the normal growth: ‘her physical organization was defective; weak health stunted her growth and chilled her spirits…. She permitted herself no original opinion, no preference of companion or employment; in everything she was guided by another. With a pale, passive, automaton air, she went about all day long doing what she was bid; never what she liked, or what, from innate conviction, she thought it right to do. The poor little future religieuse had been early taught to make the dictates of her own reason and conscience quite subordinate to the will of her spiritual director. She was the model pupil of Mdlle. Reuter’s establishment; pale, blighted image, where life lingered feebly, but whence the soul had been conjured by Romish wizard-craft!’ [Chap. 12, I:202–3.]

Sylvie and Frances are drawn as the only pupils capable of intellectual achievement, but the compositions of Sylvie are coldly and unimaginatively correct whereas those of Frances are lit by an inquiring spirit and warmed by emotion, since she unites reason and a healthy passion. ‘I knew how quietly and how deeply the well bubbled in her heart,’ writes Crimsworth; ‘I knew how the more dangerous flame burned safely under the eye of reason; I had seen when the fire shot up a moment high and vivid, when the accelerated heat troubled life’s current in its channels; I had seen reason reduce the rebel, and humble its blaze to embers. I had confidence in Frances Evans; I had respect for her, and as I drew her arm through mine, and led her out of the cemetery, I felt I had another sentiment, as strong as confidence, as firm as respect, more fervid than either–that of love.’ [Chap. 19, II:50–51.] Unlike Sylvie, who remains wan and pinched, Frances gradually develops physically as she comes under the influence of Crimsworth, her figure ripens into a ‘plumpness almost embonpoint [sic]’‚ her eyes quicken, and he notices ‘the exquisite turning of waist, wrist, hand, foot and ankle’. [Chap. 18, II:5.] When Crimsworth first realizes that he is falling in love with her, he notes coolly that she is ‘for a sensualist charmless’, [Chap. 19, II:50] but when he confesses that love for the first time, he remarks the change that love has made in both of them: ‘I derived a pleasure, purely material, from contemplating the clearness of her brown eyes, the fairness of her fine skin, the purity of her well-set teeth, the proportion of her delicate form; and that pleasure I could ill have dispensed with. It appeared, then, that I too was a sensualist, in my temperate and fastidious way.’ [Chap. 23, II:174.]

It has frequently been noted that one of the peculiarities of the structure of the novel is that Frances Henri does not make her unobtrusive and nameless entry into the story until almost half-way through the book, but what is usually overlooked is that her entrance is strategically placed. Released from the surveillance of Hunsden in Brussels, Crimsworth has begun to fall under the spell of the enigmatic Mlle. Reuter, and the early part of his stay in the city is primarily concerned with his learning the potence of her physical attraction. With a frankness unusual in the period, Miss Brontë shows the strongly sexual nature of a wholly decent young man. That he has gone too far in his dreams of possessing Zoraïde is made clear by his overhearing the conversation in the garden as she and her lover, Pelet, take a midnight stroll. He recovers from his infatuation that night, and the next morning he meets Frances for the first time. The rest of the novel is taken up with the development of love between a couple who, in Miss Brontë’s favourite word, ‘suit’ each other.

The superficial likenesses between Frances and Zoraïde are almost as obvious as their basic differences, even to the point of Frances’ growing to resemble the older woman in her ‘embonpoint’. Ultimately, both marry pedagogues and both successfully run their own schools; the natures of the two women are, however, totally different. Initially, in her infatuation with Crimsworth, Mlle. Reuter is imperious, clearly set upon being the dominant member of the pair. When she recognizes his disdain, she becomes even more infatuated, but she changes from mistress to slave, a metamorphosis that almost converts Crimsworth into a tyrant: ‘I had ever hated a tyrant; and, behold, the possession of a slave, self-given, went near to transform me into what I abhorred! There was at once a sort of low gratification in receiving this luscious incense from an attractive and still young worshipper; and an irritating sense of degradation in the very experience of the pleasure. When she stole about me with the soft step of a slave, I felt at once barbarous and sensual as a pasha.’ [Chap. 20, II:83.]

To Miss Brontë love and marriage had meaning only when they were the union of equals in independence. Unlike Zoraïde, Frances becomes more, not less, independent as she falls in love. Far from being a sultan’s favourite (a description that Jane Eyre later is to apply contemptuously to her position if she were to live unmarried with Rochester), Frances brings to her marriage to Crimsworth fortune and worldly accomplishments comparable to his own, for, like Jane and perhaps Lucy Snowe, she can marry only when she is an independent woman. The subservience of woman Miss Brontë rejected, but not always her intellectual inferiority. The novels indicate a highly traditional view of the relative intellectual abilities of man and woman, for man is clearly intended to guide the destinies of his mate, so long as he is morally equipped to do so. Because Zoraïde dominates Pelet, their marriage will probably be, within three months’ time, ‘a practical modern French novel’. [Chap. 20, II:90.]

Since Frances is not passion’s slave, she can afford to meet Crimsworth in circumstances that must have seemed daring to Victorian readers. With no apparent sense of transgressing the normal social code, Frances entertains Crimsworth alone in her apartments. Actually, it is not easy to be sure whether Miss Brontë was completely ignorant of contemporary conventions (which seems unlikely), or whether she deliberately intended these interviews to contrast with the interviews of Crimsworth and Zoraïde, which degenerate into flirtation and, one supposes, would turn into seductions if Crimsworth were not so firmly virtuous and Zoraïde not so intent on capitalizing on all her advantages.

Frances, who has been in some ways the unconscious teacher of her own master, speaks out boldly in arguing with Hunsden after she has attained emotional and intellectual maturity. When he tells her that there is no logic in her, she retorts: ‘Better to be without logic than without feeling…. I suppose you are always interfering with your own feelings, and those of other people, and dogmatizing about the irrationality of this, that, and the other sentiment, and then ordering it to be suppressed because you imagine it to be inconsistent with logic’ [Chap. 24, II:198–9.] Earlier in the novel Zoraïde’s dominance of passion warps her intellect; at the conclusion Hunsden demonstrates that his neglect of the softer side of man’s nature may lead to a perversion of the emotions. His treatment of the Crimsworths’ son, Victor, tends in effect to foster the sparks of his ‘temper–a kind of electrical ardour and power … Hunsden calls it his spirit, and says it should not be curbed.’ [Chap. 25, II:254.] As we leave the novel, the last words belong to Victor, who is about to undergo the same process that his father has passed through, that of learning self-discipline and a nice adjustment of reason and passion, the education, as Miss Brontë saw it, of the sons and daughters of Adam.

The obvious crudities of The Professor are many, both stylistic and structural. For example, the book is riddled with the insecurity of syntax that always bedevilled Miss Brontë, and with her misguided insertions of schoolgirl French. Occasionally, she is so misled by her enthusiasm for her second language that she translates expressions she has already given in English, as when she writes of the closing of ‘the school-year (I’année scolaire).’ [Chap. 20, II:74.] Since she never completely mastered colloquial conversation, it is not surprising that in this first book there are many speeches as stilted as Crimsworth’s description of Frances as ‘my little wild strawberry, Hunsden, whose sweetness made me careless of your hot-house grapes.’ [Chap. 24, II:183.]

The linear movement of the plot saves Miss Brontë from gross errors of construction, although one can hardly avoid irritation at such awkward devices as the letter that opens the book, outlining the necessary background material to a correspondent known only as ‘Charles’, who is never again mentioned. There are other maladroit touches in Miss Brontë’s descriptions when she appears unable to decide whether to speak in the voice of Crimsworth recounting a simple history or with the detached, reflective tones of the novelist consciously considering the craft of fiction while exploiting a position of uninvolvement with the action. There have been notable novels (most often with novelists as protagonists) in which the problem of turning experience into fiction becomes part of the novel itself, but they have a considerably more complex viewpoint than Miss Brontë is attempting in this novel. Rather, she occasionally slides awkwardly from first person narrator into the part of omniscient narrator, with no consequent gain in effect. When Crimsworth first becomes aware of Frances, he describes her at length; then, without warning, the voice of the tutor is confused with that of the novelist: ‘Now, reader, though I have spent a page and a half in describing Mdlle. Henri, I know well enough that I have left on your mind’s eye no distinct picture of her; I have not painted her complexion, nor her eyes, nor her hair, nor even drawn the outline of her shape. You cannot tell whether her nose was aquiline or retroussé, whether her chin was long or short, her face square or oval; nor could I the first day, and it is not my intention to communicate to you at once a knowledge I myself gained by little and little.’ [Chap. 14, I:245–6.] In Jane Eyre and Villette Miss Brontë is more subtle in her exposition, and is content to let the reader share the discoveries of her narrator without calling attention to the fact that direct information is being given.

When Crimsworth goes to Belgium, it is the occasion for a setpiece of description introduced without any attempt at disguise. ‘Reader, perhaps you were never in Belgium? Haply you don’t know the physiognomy of the country? You have not its lineaments defined upon your memory as I have them on mine?’ Crimsworth tells us that four pictures line the wall of his memory: the first three are Eton, X——, and Belgium: ‘As to the fourth, a curtain covers it, which I may hereafter withdraw, or may not, as suits my convenience and capacity. At any rate, for the present it must hang undisturbed.’ [Chap. 7, I:102–3.] Presumably convenience and capacity were lacking, for of the fourth picture we are never told, although one assumes it to be the Crimsworth house in England at the end of the book. The author’s red herrings succeed only in calling unproductive attention to herself and in distracting the reader from his involvement in the novel.

In both these excerpts Miss Brontë addresses ‘Reader’, with a consequent lowering of emotional temperature. In Jane Eyre she learned to use this form of direct address cunningly, by keeping it within the framework of the narrator’s personality, making it part of the spontaneous feminine outburst of a woman so overcome by the remembered emotion of her girlhood that she cannot help speaking simply and directly, with total disregard for the conventions of fiction. The effect in Jane Eyre is precisely the reverse of that in The Professor, for it serves to involve the reader in shared experience. By reserving direct address for emotional climaxes, she is able to achieve such immediacy as that of her most famous line, ‘Reader, I married him.’ In her first book she has not yet mastered the technique.

The choice of Crimsworth as narrator is a serious handicap to the book, for Miss Brontë was unable to impart a believable virility to her masculine mouthpiece, while the point of view of the novel denies her the opportunity of entering the mind of the chief feminine character to carry out the detailed investigation of the feminine psyche at which she was to excel. It is true that Rochester, the brothers Moore, and even M. Paul are in part quite as unbelievable as Crimsworth, but they do not fail as characters, since they are men as seen through a woman’s eyes; in the three last novels it is the credibility of the feminine central consciousness (even in Shirley, ostensibly told in the third person) that matters, not that of the men it perceives. When the credibility of the central consciousness is open to question, as it is with Crimsworth, the reader is unable to accept the validity of his perceptions. At the same time it is clear that Miss Brontë does not intend the awareness of the narrator to be different from that of herself or of the reader.

*

Were it to serve a point, the list of flaws in the novel might be greatly extended, for it is so full of minor faults that it is doubtful that it would attract many modern readers if it were not the first published work of a great writer. Perhaps even greater flaws, however, are some of the very aspects that make the novel fascinating to lovers of the later books: the subjects that so absorbed Charlotte Brontë that she was unable to leave them out, in spite of not yet knowing how to integrate them into the plot and the themes of the novel. Awkward, intrusive, they are unassimilated diversions that impede the course of the central narrative but show clearly and naïvely the preoccupations that she was subsequently to handle with assurance.

The extended description in Chapter 23 of the hypochondria that overcomes Crimsworth is an example of the intrusive concern that is introduced into the novel without any apparent relevance. In the later books Miss Brontë introduces hypochondria, too, but she is careful to make it a symbolic physical manifestation of the ill-health of the psyche too dominated by passion; here Crimsworth’s psychic health has never been better, and the reader is left puzzled.

The importance of the sexual relationship in The Professor scarcely needs underlining; what has already been said about the courtship and marriage of Crimsworth and Frances is sufficient indication of Miss Brontë’s concern with it. The major theme of all the novels is the study of the adjustment between the reason and the passions, and the plot embodying that theme is always a love story, resulting in the marriage of the main characters in three of the novels; in Villette there is no wedding, but the stage is set for it, the characters prepared, the conflicts resolved, and all that remains is for the fates to be propitious. It is this insistence on a love match (but one far removed from those in the novels of her contemporaries) that makes the works of Miss Brontë seem so feminine that today it is difficult to see how any of her original readers could have thought Currer Bell a man. For her love was indeed woman’s whole existence.

Miss Brontë’s intimate correspondence is full of the dread of being a spinster, both because of the personal incompleteness it entailed and because of the scorn in which spinsters were held by their society. The old maids in Shirley are evidence of her lively compassion for such women, figures of fun, laughed at for wanting a husband, ridiculed for failing to find him. It would be unjust to suggest that her personal concern made her exaggerate the plight of spinsters, for they crowd the fiction of the period, either comic like Dickens’s Miss Wardle or pathetic like Mrs. Gaskell’s Miss Mattie. Even Crimsworth, sympathetic as he is in general (since he normally voices Miss Brontë’s own opinions), reflects society’s attitude in part: ‘Look at the rigid and formal race of old maids–the race whom all despise; they have fed themselves, from youth upwards, on maxims of resignation and endurance. Many of them get ossified with the dry diet; self-control is so continually their thought, so perpetually their object, that at last it absorbs the softer and more agreeable qualities of their nature; and they die mere models of austerity, fashioned out of a little parchment and much bone. Anatomists will tell you that there is a heart in the withered old maid’s carcass–the same as in that of any cherished wife or proud mother in the land. Can this be so? I really don’t know; but feel inclined to doubt it.’ [Chap. 23, II:154.)

Because marriage meant so much to her, Miss Brontë’s standards for it were almost impossibly high. Few of the marriages in her novels are happy ones save those of the central characters. Perhaps it is not irrelevant to her feeling that marriage is not an automatically happy institution, to note that she turned down at least three proposals herself before accepting Mr. Nicholls. Passion there must be in marriage, but it was no more self-sufficient there than in any other relationship. Rochester pays cruelly for thinking that it is enough, and Crimsworth, in contemplating marriage, thinks to himself: ‘I know that a pretty doll, a fair fool, might do well enough for the honeymoon; but when passion cooled, how dreadful to find a lump of wax and wood laid in my bosom, a half idiot clasped in my arms, and to remember that I had made of this my equal–nay, my idol–to know that I must pass the rest of my dreary life with a creature incapable of understanding what I said, of appreciating what I thought, or of sympathising with what I felt!’ [Chap. 12, I:215.]

As Crimsworth’s equal and idol, Frances is still submissive to him as master of her mind and heart. Miss Brontë was occasionally impatient with Milton’s view of the order of the sexes, but in her heart she was in agreement with him, for all her heroines look to their lovers for domination in one form or another. Probably the best statement of her attitude is not her own but her mother’s, in one of the delightful love-letters she wrote to Patrick Brontë before their marriage: ‘It is pleasant to be subject to those we love, especially when they never exert their authority but for the good of the subject.’ [Shorter, I:38.] Charlotte Brontë herself wrote that ‘It is natural to me to submit, and very unnatural to command.’ [Gaskell, Chap. 11, I:255–6.] When she finally decided to accept Nicholls, somewhat to the dismay of her friends, the real reason for her acceptance was that suggested by Mrs. Gaskell, who told John Forster that Miss Brontë could never have been happy were she not ‘well ruled and ordered’ by an ‘exacting, rigid, law-giving, passionate’ husband. [SHB, IV:118.]

Miss Brontë’s counter for virility in the novels is usually the rather brutal brusqueness of the men to the women they love. Crimsworth is as harsh to Frances at moments as Rochester is to Jane, M. Paul to Lucy, and the Moore brothers to Shirley and Caroline. When Crimsworth praises the work of his pupil, he deliberately does so in ‘dry and stinted phrase’, [Chap. 18, II:2] but in the autobiographical poem that Frances writes, she indicates that she sees beyond his manner:

Just as the heroines of the novels learn that superficial good looks are not necessary in the men they love, so they must learn that softness is not necessarily the best indication of love. Crimsworth says of his own brusqueness: ‘I like unexaggerated intercourse; it is not my way to overpower with amorous epithets, any more than to worry with selfishly importunate caresses,’ [Chap. 23, II:168] and even in his initial declaration of love, he interrupts the perplexed Frances, whenever she lapses into her native French, with the command, ‘English!’ Obviously, the half-playful reproof is meant affectionately, but even after marriage he insists on his own language: ‘Talk French to me she would, and many a punishment she has had for her wilfulness. I fear the choice of chastisement must have been injudicious, for instead of correcting the fault, it seemed to encourage its renewal.’ [Chap. 25, II:225.] To the last he is as much pedagogue as lover.

Cruelty is, of course, far different from the virile brusqueness of Miss Brontë’s male characters. ‘I was amused,’ she wrote of a friend, ‘by what she says respecting her wish that, when she marries, her husband will, at least, have a will of his own, even should he be a tyrant. Tell her, when she forms that aspiration again, she must make it conditional: if her husband has a strong will, he must also have strong sense, a kind heart, and a thoroughly correct notion of justice; because a man with a weak brain and a strong will, is merely an intractable brute; you can have no hold of him; you can never lead him right. A tyrant under any circumstances is a curse.’ [Gaskell, Chap 16, II:21–22.]

Man’s heavy-handed treatment of his woman in the novels is frequently reminiscent of the rough love-making of Shakespeare’s Hotspur, and the spirit of the ladies sometimes reminds one, too, of the pertness with which Lady Hotspur responds to her husband in the assurance of his love. In explaining why she was unable to accept the proposal of Henry Nussey, Miss Brontë outlined her views of the way a woman should be able to behave in a happy marriage: ‘I had a kindly leaning towards him, because he is an amiable and well-disposed man. Yet I had not, and could not have, that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him; and if ever I marry, it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my husband. Ten to one I shall never have the chance again; but n’importe. Moreover, I was aware that he knew so little of me he could hardly be conscious to whom he was writing. Why! it would startle him to see me in my natural home character; he would think I was a wild, romantic enthusiast indeed. I could not sit all day long making a grave face before my husband. I would laugh, and satirize, and say whatever came into my head first. And if he were a clever man, and loved me, the whole world, weighed in the balance against his smallest wish, should be light as air.’ [Gaskell, Chap. 8, I:186.]

In the other novels the hard-edged jesting serves as a two-sided exploration by the lovers in passing through acquaintance and friendship to love; Jane Eyre’s pertness, for example, is indication that she is not wounded by Rochester’s abruptness. In The Professor the reader frequently winces at the brusqueries of Crimsworth because Frances remains such a passive character. Although the reader knows that Crimsworth does not intend to wound Frances, her behaviour is not sufficient indication that she has not been hurt, and her consciousness remains closed to the reader because of the first-person narration of Crimsworth.

The curious passivity with which Frances accepts the brusqueries and finally the love of Crimsworth is far less interesting than the gusts of headlong adoration, displays of temper, and prudent second thoughts through which the feminine characters in the other novels pass on their way to love and marriage, but it is at least an accurate representation of one aspect of Miss Brontë’s attitude towards love, the ‘rational’ aspect. In discounting the ‘imaginative and poetical’ in the novel she endowed her heroine with the caution that she advised Ellen Nussey to acquire before marriage, advising her not to wait for ‘une grande passion’, which is only another name for ‘une grande folie’:

‘Did you not once say to me in all childlike simplicity, “I thought, Charlotte, no young lady should fall in love till the offer was actually made?” I forget what answer I made at the time, but I now reply, after due consideration, Right as a glove, the maxim is just, and I hope you will always attend to it. I will even extend and confirm it: No young lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted, the marriage ceremony performed, and the first half-year of wedded life has passed away. A woman may then begin to love, but with great precaution, very coolly, very moderately, very rationally. If she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a cold look cuts her to the heart she is a fool. If she ever loves so much that her husband’s will is her law, and that she has got into a habit of watching his looks in order that she may anticipate his wishes, she will soon be a neglected fool.’ [Shorter, I:197] Fortunately for us all, Miss Brontë did not extend her own cautious viewpoint to her heroines in the three later novels.

An almost Puritan contempt for physical beauty, whether feminine or masculine, permeates the novels. Only in Shirley do the central characters possess striking good looks. Frances, Jane, and Lucy all improve considerably under the influence of love but are essentially plain; Rochester and M. Paul are ugly men; the Moores are handsome only to those who love them; Crimsworth, for all his aristocratic expression, is thin, short, and irregular of feature. Only the infatuated Zoraïde finds him ‘beau comme Apollon quand il sourit de son air hautain’. [Chap. 20, II:83.] Even his son ‘Victor is as little of a pretty child as I am of a handsome man, or his mother of a fine woman; he is pale and spare, with large eyes, as dark as those of Frances, and as deeply set as mine.’ [Chap. 25, II:247.]

At least two critics have pointed out that Miss Brontë used phrenology as a kind of instant character analysis, depending upon the popular pseudo-science as a short cut to characterization.3 Writing of one of his pupils, Crimsworth confirms her viciousness by phrenological reference: ‘I wonder that any one, looking at that girl’s head and countenance, would have received her under their roof. She had precisely the same shape of skull as Pope Alexander the Sixth; her organs of benevolence, veneration, conscientiousness, adhesiveness, were singularly small, those of self-esteem, firmness, destructiveness, combativeness, preposterously large.’ [Chap. 12, I:198.]

Rather more interestingly, Miss Brontë used particular kinds of beauty as shorthand to character description, in the same way that she used phrenology. In The Professor she first introduced the three major categories of feminine beauty that she was to use to such effect in the later novels. When Crimsworth makes his entrance into the classroom at Mile. Reuter’s school, he encounters Eulalie, the prototype of such later figures as Georgiana Reed, Ginevra Fanshawe, and perhaps Dora Sykes. ‘Eulalie was tall, and very finely shaped: she was fair, and her features were those of a Low-country Madonna; many a “figure de vierge” have I seen in Dutch pictures, exactly resembling hers; there were no angles in her shape or in her face, all was curve and roundness–neither thought, sentiment, nor passion, disturbed by line or flush the equality of her pale, clear skin; her noble bust heaved with her regular breathing, her eyes moved a little-by these evidences of life alone could I have distinguished her from some large handsome figure, moulded in wax.’ [Chap. 10, I:164–5.] The overstuffed young ladies of this physical type Miss Brontë portrays as vain, silly, vacuous, and affected, but not vicious; occasionally, they are even affectionate after their own blowzy fashion.

The natural complement to these large, blonde women of wax are the sensual, Oriental temptresses of the books: Crimsworth’s pupil Caroline, Hunsden’s mysterious Lucia, Blanche Ingram, the young Bertha Mason Rochester, and aspects of both Vashti and the painting of the ‘gipsy-queen’, Cleopatra.

Even among the pupils of Miss Brontë’s schools, Caroline is outstanding. She has a pale olive complexion, black hair, and regular features. ‘How, with the tintless pallor of her skin and the classic straightness of her lineaments, she managed to look sensual, I don’t know. I think her lips and eyes contrived the affair between them, and the result left no uncertainty on the beholder’s mind. She was sensual now, and in ten years’ time she would be coarse–promise plain was written in her face of much future folly….

‘Caroline shook her loose ringlets of abundant but somewhat coarse hair over her rolling black eyes; parting her lips, as full as those of a hot-blooded Maroon, she showed her well-set teeth sparkling between them, and treated me at the same time to a smile “de sa façon”. Beautiful as Pauline Borghese, she looked at the moment scarcely purer than Lucrèce de Borgia. Caroline was of noble family. I heard her lady-mother’s character afterwards, and then I ceased to wonder at the precocious accomplishments of the daughter.’ [Chap. 10, I:165–7.]

Naturally, Pelet claims to be taken by the charms of Caroline: ‘Ah there is beauty! beauty in perfection. What a cloud of sable curls about the face of a houri! What fascinating lips! What glorious black eyes! Your Byron would have worshipped her, and you-you cold frigid islander!–you played the austere, the insensible in the presence of an Aphrodite so exquisite?’ [Chap. 11, I:187.] Her very excess of sensuality, however, is Crimsworth’s protection against her charms.

Bertha Mason Rochester is the perfection of Caroline’s type: attractive when young, coarse a few years later, insane by middle age, so passionate as to lose all contact with reason and control, so sensual as to become nothing but an animal.

The third major group of beautiful women, with all the attendant defects of loveliness, is by far the most interesting of the lot, since they are the most credible, but they are also the most difficult to classify. Probably the epitome of the type is Pauline Home de Bassompierre. She is tiny, graceful, perfectly formed on an almost infantile scale, well bred, and with a charming, regular face; she is not unintelligent, and she is affectionate, but her lisp and the tininess of her figure are indicative of the immaturity of her mind and the shallowness of her emotions. Other examples of the type are Rosamond Oliver, Adèle, and, to a limited extent, Caroline Helstone. In The Professor the type has not yet completely emerged, but there are hints of it in Mrs. Edward Crimsworth, who is described as ‘young, tall, and well shaped’, with ‘good animal spirits’, ‘a good complexion and features sufficiently marked but agreeable.’ [Chap 1, I:15–16.] Her insipidity is indicated by her voice: ‘She spoke with a kind of lisp, not disagreeable, but childish. I soon saw also that there was a more than girlish–a somewhat infantine expression in her by no means small features; this lisp and expression were, I have no doubt, a charm in Edward’s eyes, and would be so to those of most men, but they were not to mine. I sought her eye, desirous to read there the intelligence which I could not discern in her face or hear in her conversation; it was merry, rather small; by turns I saw vivacity, vanity, coquetry, look out through its irid, but I watched in vain for a glimpse of soul.’ [Chap. 1, I:16–17.] Mrs. Crimsworth is larger and less attractive than her sister-beauties, but the patent vacuity of her personality is not far removed from the basic frivolity of theirs.

In a somewhat more expected manner, great masculine beauty fares ill in Miss Brontë’s works. The only two really handsome male characters of any importance are St. John Rivers and Dr. John. Rivers, with the beauty of classical Greece in his profile, is a narrow religious bigot, and Dr. John conceals commonplace emotions and a conventional mind behind his smiling, Celtic good looks.

Hunsden charges Crimsworth with finding the grapes of feminine beauty sour because he cannot reach them, but Crimsworth’s repudiation of mere external attraction might stand directly for the attitude of the author: ‘He could not be aware that … youth and loveliness had been to me everyday objects; that I had studied them at leisure and closely, and had seen the plain texture of truth under the embroidery of appearance.’ [Chap. 22, II:128–9.]

Miss Brontë’s first novel is probably her least overtly religious, but there is a strong feeling of the self-reliant Protestant ethic that so dominated her thinking. The preface to the book, with its renunciation of ‘sudden turns’ of fortune as a plot-agent, and with its insistence that the characters earn whatever happens to them, is consistent with the way in which Crimsworth as ‘Adam’s son’ must learn the meaning of life before he can ‘find so much as an arbour to sit down in’. The doctrine of self-reliance is given further statement within the novel in Frances’ devoir about King Alfred. ‘She had appreciated Alfred’s courage under calamity, she had remembered his Christian education, and had shown him, with the rooted confidence of those primitive days, relying on the scriptural Jehovah for aid against the mythological Destiny.’ [Chap. 16, I:269–70.] On Christmas Eve Alfred defies the power of Fate: ‘Pagan demon, I credit not thine omnipotence, and so cannot succumb to thy power. My God, whose Son, as on this night, took on Him the form of man, and for man vouchsafed to suffer and bleed, controls thy hand, and without His behest thou canst not strike a stroke. My God is sinless, eternal, all-wise–in Him is my trust; and though stripped and crushed by thee–though naked, desolate, void of resource–I do not despair, I cannot despair: were the lance of Guthrum now wet with my blood, I should not despair. I watch, I toil, I hope, I pray; Jehovah, in his own time, will aid.’ [Chap. 16, I:268–9.] It is worth stressing here the denial of the power of Fate because an understanding of Miss Brontë’s position is important in seeing that the otherwise incredible coincidences of such a book as Jane Eyre are neither violations of spiritual probability nor the workings of blind Fate, but the material manifestations of a world order run by Divine will co-operating with man’s own will. To put the matter more simply, the man who accepts Providential guidance, and so helps to shape his own world, will find that events and circumstances do not run counter to his own nature.

The roots of Charlotte Brontë’s religious faith are not far to seek, of course, since she was the daughter of a clergyman and lived most of her life under his roof, next the parish church. Unlike Emily, whose religion seems to have had pantheistic beliefs added to Christian doctrine, Charlotte Brontë seldom varied far from the conventional Evangelical position of her father, who had been educated at Cambridge when that University was the stronghold of Evangelicalism. Mrs. Brontë had been brought up as a Methodist, but she settled comfortably into being the wife of an Anglican priest, and Haworth Parsonage, although friendly to Non-Conformists, seems never to have been infected with the enthusiasm that was the chief distinguishing mark of Methodism at the time.

Mr. Brontë, in looking for a curate, once wrote to describe his own theological position that set the tone for Haworth Parsonage: ‘As far as I know myself, I think I may venture to say that I am no Bigot. Yet I could not feel comfortable with a coadjutor who would deem it his duty to preach the appalling doctrines of personal Election and Reprobation. As I should consider these decidedly derogatory to the Attributes of God, so also I should be fearful of evil consequence to the hearers from the enforcement of final perseverance as an essential article of belief.’ [Shorter, II:422.] Mr. Brontë was as hostile to extreme High Church practices and Roman Catholicism as he was to extreme Calvinistic doctrines. On one occasion he spoke of a liturgical Anglican service as ‘idle and ostentatious pageantry got up in the church, where the Gospel was once faithfully preached.’ [Shorter, II:405.] He was opposed to Roman Catholic emancipation and probably as bigoted about Roman Catholicism as his daughter Charlotte, if we can judge from the tone of the letters that passed between them when she was in Brussels.

‘Whatever such critics as he of the Mirror may say‚’ Miss Brontë wrote to W. S. Williams in 1847, ‘I love the Church of England. Her ministers, indeed, I do not regard as infallible personages. I have seen too much of them for that, but to the Establishment, with all her faults–the profane Athanasian creed excluded–I am sincerely attached.’ [Shorter, I:377.]

The assurance of the general rightness of the Establishment and the sense of fellowship within its fold were never enough for Miss Brontë, nor was the austere relationship of man with his Maker of much comfort, for she constantly felt the terrible need of closer intimacy with another human being, so that her daily life could be some reflection of her faith. In a moving letter in 1837 she had written to Ellen Nussey, wishing that they might live together in Christian fellowship. That her real need was for a husband, a need that she faces directly in the lives of her heroines, if not in her own, only makes the letter the more touching. ‘If I could always live with you, and daily read the Bible with you–if your lips and mine could at the same time drink the same draught, from the same pure fountain of mercy–I hope, I trust, I might one day become better, far better than my evil, wandering thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit and warm to the flesh, will now permit me to be. I often plan the pleasant life which we might lead together, strengthening each other in that power of self-denial, that hallowed and glowing devotion, which the first saints of God often attained to. My eyes fill with tears when I contrast the bliss of such a state, brightened by hopes of the future, with the melancholy state I now live in, uncertain that I ever felt true contrition, wandering in thought and deed, longing for holiness, which I shall never, never obtain, smitten at times to the heart with the conviction that ghastly Calvinistic doctrines are true–darkened, in short, by the very shadows of spiritual death. If Christian perfection be necessary to salvation, I shall never be saved; my heart is a very hot-bed for sinful thoughts, and when I decide on an action I scarcely remember to look to my Redeemer for direction. I know not how to pray; I cannot bend my life to the grand end of doing good; I go on constantly seeking my own pleasure, pursuing the gratification of my own desires, I forget God, and will not God forget me? And, meantime, I know the greatness of Jehovah; I acknowledge the perfection of His word; I adore the purity of the Christian faith; my theory is right, my practice horribly wrong.’ [Gaskell, Chap. 8, I:177–8.]

With two notable exceptions, Miss Brontë was probably as tolerant of other forms of Christianity as most of her contemporaries were. Her treatment of the two exceptions is one of the least attractive aspects of her writing, both because it reveals a stubborn intolerance and because the strength of that intolerance flashes out in The Professor to help ruin the unity of the novel. The light that ‘falls on earth from Heaven’, she wrote, the rays of truth that ‘pierce the darkness of this life and world’ are so ‘few, faint, and scattered’, that one ought to ask who ‘without presumption can assert that he has found the only true path upwards?’ [Shorter, I:443–4.] Who, that is, except the most ‘enthusiastic’ of Dissenters, and Roman Catholics?

Dissent she distrusted because it allowed the reason to be perverted by undisciplined emotionalism, so that the revelling in emotion became an end in itself. Some evidence of the detached curiosity Miss Brontë felt about the emotional excesses of her fellow-Christians is indicated by her letter to Ellen Nussey, hoping to go to a ‘Ranters’ meeting-house’ at Easton to see ‘What they were up to.’ [SHB, I:190.] Among the works to which Caroline Helstone has access are ‘some mad Methodist Magazines, full of miracles and apparitions, of preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism.’ [Shirley, Chap. 22, II:269.] The malice and hatred displayed by the Dissenters in Shirley indicate how little Miss Brontë thought that their religion could improve their morals. In The Professor Edward Crimsworth, baffled by his brother’s quiet religious belief, sends as his spy ‘“a joined Methodist”, which did not (be it understood) prevent him from being at the same time an engrained rascal’. [Chap. 3, I:37.] In general, as one would expect from the daughter of a Methodist, Miss Brontë tried to be as tolerant as possible of Dissenters who were sincere in their beliefs; the three curates in Shirley, so conscious of their own superiority as members of the Established Church, are a direct transcription of the curates near Haworth whom she so surprisingly rebuked sharply for ‘glorifying themselves and abusing Dissenters’. [Shorter, I:301.] As a good Evangelical, she liked neither Dissenters nor High Churchmen, but even more she disliked their reviling of each other.

On the subject of Roman Catholicism, Miss Brontë was quite as unfair as the curates were on Dissent. To account completely for her aversion to that church would be to rewrite the history of nineteenth-century England, as well as to investigate every disappointment she felt in Brussels. The main reason, however, that she acknowledged (perhaps quite a different thing from the real reason) for this hatred was the old Protestant canard that the Roman Catholic by submitting his sins to confession and forgiveness is giving up his own responsibility and conscience into the hands of another, and that he therefore has no control–and, indeed, need have no control–over his own actions.

In one of her heavily ironic letters to George Smith, Miss Brontë wrote that Wiseman’s having become Archbishop of Westminster led her to think that all Cornhill must become Catholic: ‘What if that presumptuous self-reliance, that audacious championship of Reason and Common Sense which ought to have been crushed out of you all in your cradles, or at least during your school days, and which, perhaps, on the contrary, were encouraged and developed, what if those things should induce you madly to oppose the returning supremacy and advancing victory of the Holy Catholic Church?’ [SHB, III:176.]

One of the most threatening aspects of Roman Catholicism is that it is inculcated so early. Zoraïde Reuter is, of course, far past the age when she might be rescued, and even the girls in her establishment have already been hardened in their immodesty and impropriety: ‘I know nothing of the arcana of the Roman Catholic religion, and I am not a bigot in matters of theology, but I suspect the root of this precocious impurity, so obvious, so general in Popish countries [Miss Brontë had seen but one], is to be found in the discipline, if not the doctrines of the Church of Rome. I record what I have seen: these girls belonged to what are called the respectable ranks of society; they had all been carefully brought up, yet was the mass of them mentally depraved.’ [Chap. 12, I:193.]

Miss Brontë’s hatred of Roman Catholicism existed side-by-side with a partial attraction towards it. In Brussels she attended Roman Catholic services, and on one occasion even attempted to go to confession, an incident she used with great effect in Villette. In 1851 she wrote from London to tell of the two great theatrical experiences she had had, the performance of Rachel and the equally dramatic confirmation at which Cardinal Wiseman officiated. One wonders if their conjunction in the same paragraph of the letter does not indicate that she felt for both of them a mixed attraction and repulsion. ‘On Sunday I went to the Spanish Ambassador’s Chapel, where Cardinal Wiseman, in his archiepiscopal robes and mitre, held a confirmation. The whole scene was impiously theatrical.’ [Gaskell, Chap. 23, II:216–17.] In her letter to her father describing the same event, she significantly associated her disapproval of Wiseman with her dislike of Methodist excesses; she noted his ‘quadruple chin … a very large mouth with oily lips’. He spoke ‘in a smooth whining manner, just like a canting Methodist preacher’. [Shorter, II:219–20.]

Concisely she indicated in a letter from Brussels her feelings about Rome: ‘People talk of the danger which Protestants expose themselves to, in going to reside in Catholic countries, and thereby running the chance of changing their faith. My advice to all Protestants who are tempted to do anything so besotted as turn Catholics is, to walk over the sea on to the Continent; to attend mass sedulously for a time; to note well the mummeries thereof; also the idiotic, mercenary aspect of all the priests; and then, if they are still disposed to consider Papistry in any other light than a most feeble, childish piece of humbug, let them turn Papists at once–that’s all. I consider Methodism, Quakerism, and the extremes of High and Low Churchism foolish, but Roman Catholicism beats them all. At the same time, allow me to tell you, that there are some Catholics who are as good as any Christians can be to whom the Bible is a sealed book, and much better than many Protestants.’ [Gaskell, Chap. 11, I:268.]

In The Professor all Miss Brontë’s spleen against Roman Catholics is plain, but it remains unintegrated into the themes of the book, except as it equates Crimsworth’s sensual attraction to Zoraïde with her moral inadequacies caused by her religion, and it shows the enfeeblement of the reason and the will in the pallid little Sylvie. In Villette the whole background of the corrupting influence of the Church is made part of the fabric of the story; in the first novel it remains an unattractive excrescence.

Charlotte Brontë was not unaware of her own failings, and of the reasons for them, but the strength of her convictions sometimes blinded her into feeling that art and truth were in necessary opposition. ‘The first duty of an author is, I conceive, a faithful allegiance to Truth and Nature,’ she wrote to Williams in 1848; ‘his second, such a conscientious study of Art as shall enable him to interpret eloquently and effectively the oracles delivered by those two great deities. The Bells are very sincere in their worship of Truth, and they hope to apply themselves to the consideration of Art, so as to attain one day the power of speaking the language of conviction in the accents of persuasion; though they rather apprehend that whatever pains they take to modify and soften, an abrupt word or vehement tone will now and then occur to startle ears polite, whenever the subject shall chance to be such as moves their spirits within them.’ [Shorter, I:445.] In her second novel Charlotte Brontë managed to combine the stern dictates of what she thought of as Truth and the persuasive subtleties of Art into one of the masterpieces of the English novel.

1 Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1907), i:202.

2 Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation (Constable and Co., London, 1934), p. 125.

3 Joe Lee Davis, intr. to Jane Eyre (Rinehart and Co., New York, 1950), pp. xv–xvi; and Wilfred M. Senseman, ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Use of Physiognomy and Phrenology,’ Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, XXXVIII, 1953, pp. 475–86.