. In now than he was six months ago. In three days we shall actually have been married that length of time. papa not at all altered since he saw him last will love her child without spoiling it, I think. self. rows deep and many. Yet once "the spell" was too strong to be resisted, and she hastily wrote a few pages of a new story called "Emma," in which once more she proposed to deal with her favorite theme the history of a friendless girl. One would fain have seen how she would have treated her subject, now that "the color of her thoughts" had been changed, and that a happy marriage had introduced her to a new phase of that life which she had studied so closely and so constantly. But it was not to be. On January 19, when she had returned to Haworth, after a short visit to Sir J. K. Shuttleworth's, she wrote to her friend saying that her health had been very good ever since her return from Ireland till about ten days before, when a sudden change had taken place, and continual attacks of faintness and sickness had set in. Those around her were not alarmed at first. They hoped that before long all would be well with her again; they could not believe that the joys of which she had just begun to taste were about to be snatched away. But her weakness grew apace; the sickness knew no abatement; and a deadly fear began to creep into the hearts of husband and father. She was soon so weak that she was compelled to remain in bed, and from that "dreary bed" she wrote two or three faint pencil notes which still exist - the last pathetic chapters in that lifelong correspondence from which we have gathered so many extracts. In one of them, which Mrs. Gaskell has published, she says: "I want to give you an assurance which I know will comfort you-and that is that I find in my husband the tenderest nurse, the kindest support, the best earthly comfort, that ever woman had. His patience never fails, and it is tried by sad days and broken nights." In another, the last, she says: "I cannot talk - even to my dear, patient, constant Arthur I can say but few words at once." One dreary March morning, when frosts still bound the earth and no spring sun had come to gladden the hearts of those who watched for summer, her friend received another letter, written, not in the neat, minute hand of Charlotte Brontë, but in her father's tremulous characters: MY DEAR MADAM, HAWORTH, near KEIGHLEY, We are all in great trouble, and Mr. Nicholls so much so that he is not sufficiently strong and composed to be able to write. I therefore devote a few lines to tell you that my dear daughter is very ill, and apparently on the verge of the grave. If she could speak she would no doubt dictate to us whilst answering your kind letter. But we are left to ourselves to give what answer we can. The doctors have no hope of her case, and fondly as we a long time cherished hope, that hope is now gone, and we have only to look forward to the solemn event with prayer to God that he will give us grace and strength sufficient unto our day. Ever truly and respectfully yours, The following day, March 31st, 1855, the blinds were drawn once again at Haworth parsonage; the last and greatest of the children of the house had passed away; and the brilliant name of Charlotte Brontë had become a name and nothing more! "We are left to ourselves," said Mr. Brontë in the letter I have just quoted - and so it was. Not the glory only, but the light, had fled from the parsonage where the childless father and the widowed husband sat together beside their dead. Of all the drear and desolate spots upon that wild Yorkshire moorland there was none now so dreary and so desolate as the house which had once been the home of Charlotte Brontë. XII. No apology need be offered for any single feature of Charlotte Brontë's life or character. She was what God made her in the furnace of sore afflictions and yet more sore temptations; her life, instinct with its extraordinary individuality, was notwithstanding always subject to exterior influences, for the existence of which she was not responsible, and which more than once threatened to change the whole na ture and purpose of her being; her genius, which brought forth its first-fruits under the cold shade of obscurity and adversity, was developed far more largely by sorrow, loneliness, and pain, than by the success which she gained in so abundant a degree. There are features of her character which we can scarcely comprehend, for the existence of which we are unable to account; and there are features of her genius which jar upon our sympathies and ruffle our conventional ideas; but for neither will one word of apology or excuse be offered by any who really know and love this great woman. The fashion which exalted her to such a pinnacle of fame, like many another fashion, has lost its vitality; and the pres ent generation, wrapped in admiration of another school of fiction, has consigned the works of Currer Bell to a premature sepulchre. But her friends need not despair; for from that dreary tomb of neglect an hour of resurrection must come, and the woman who has given us three of the most masterful books of the century, will again assert her true position in the literature of her country. We hear nothing now of the "immorality "" of her writings. Younger people if they turn from the sparkling or didactic pages of the most popular of recent stories to "Jane Eyre," or "Villette," in the hope of find ing there some stimulant which may have power to tickle their jaded palates, will search in vain for anything that even bor ders upon impropriety - as we understand the word in these enlightened days-and they will form a queer conception of the of the whole as a faithful portrait is congeneration of critics which denounced sidered. Charlotte Brontë was not natCurrer Bell as the writer of immoral works urally a morbid person; in youth she was of fiction. But it is said that there is happy and high-spirited; and up to the coarseness in her stories "otherwise so last moment of her life she had à serene entirely noble." Even Mrs. Gaskell has strength and cheerfulness which seldom assented to the charge'; and it is generally deserted her, except when acute physical believed that Charlotte Brontë, as a writer, suffering was added to her mental pangs. though not immoral in tone, was rude in If her mind could have been freed from language and coarse in thought. The the depressing influences exerted on it by truth, however, is, that this so-called her frail and suffering body, it would have coarseness is nothing more than the sim-been one of the healthiest and most equaplicity and purity, the straightforwardness ble minds of our age. As it was, it showed and unconsciousness which an unspotted itself able to meet the rude buffetings of heart naturally displays in dealing with fate without shrinking and without brathose great problems of life which, alas! vado; and the woman who is to this day none who have drunk deep of the wa- regarded by the world at large as a marters of good and evil can ever handle vel of self-conscious genius and of unwith entire freedom from embarrassment. checked morbidness, was able to her dying An American writer has spoken of Char- hour to take the keenest, liveliest interlotte Brontë as "the great pre-Raphaelite est in the welfare of her friends, to pour among women, who was not ashamed or out all her sympathy wherever she believed afraid to utter what God had shown her, that it was needed and deserved, and to and was too single-hearted of aim to lighten the grim parsonage at Haworth by swerve one hairbreadth in duplicating a presence which, in the sacred recesses nature's outlines." She was more than of her home, was bright and cheerful, as this, however. She was bold enough to well as steadfast and calm. set up a standard of right of her own; and when still the unknown daughter of the humble Yorkshire parson, she could stir the hearts of readers throughout the world with the trumpet-note of such a declaration as this: "Conventionality is not morality; self-righteousness is not religion; to pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns." Let it be remembered that these words were written nearly thirty years ago, when conventionalism was still a potent influence in checking the free utterance of our inmost opinions; and let us be thankful that in that heroic band to whom we owe the emancipation of English thought, a woman holds an honorable place. Writing of her life just after it had closed, her friend Miss Martineau said of her, "In her vocation she had, in addition to the deep intuitions of a gifted woman, the strength of a man, the patience of a hero, and the conscientiousness of a saint." Those who know her best will apply to her personal character the epithets which Miss Martineau reserved for her career as an author. It has been my object in these pages to supplement the picture painted in Mrs. Gaskell's admirable biography by the addition of one or two features, slight in themselves, perhaps, and yet not unimportant when the effect • Harper's New Monthly Magazine, February, 1866. "Do not underrate her oddity," said a gifted friend who knew her during her heyday of fame, while these pages were being written. Her oddity, it must be owned, was extreme so far as the world could judge. But I have striven to show how much this eccentricity was outward and superficial only, due in part to the peculiar conditions of her early life, but chiefly to the excessive shyness in the presence of strangers which she shared with her sisters. At heart, as some of these letters will show, she was one of the truest women who ever breathed; and her own heart-history was by no means so exceptional, so far removed from the hearthistory of most women, as the public believes. The key to her character was simple and unflinching devotion to duty. Once she failed, or, rather, once she allowed inclination to blind her as to the true direction of the path of duty, and that single failure colored the whole of her subsequent life. But her own condemnation of herself was more sharp and bitter than any which could have been passed upon her by the world, and from that one venial error she drew lessons which enabled her henceforward to live with a steady, constant power of self-sacrifice at her command such as distinguishes saints and heroes rather than ordinary men and women. Hot, impulsive, and tenacious in her affections, she suffered those whom she loved the most dearly to be torn from her without losing faith in herself or in God; tenderly sensitive as to the treatment which her friends received, she repaid the cruelty and injustice of her father towards the man whose heart she had won, by a depth of devotion and self-sacrifice which can only be fully estimated by those who know under what bitter conditions it was lavished upon an unworthy parent; bound, as all the children of genius are, by the spell of her own imagination, she was yet able during the closing months of her life to lay aside her pen, and give herself up wholly, at the desire of her husband, to those parish duties which had such slight attractions for her. Those who, knowing these facts, still venture to assert that the virtues which distinguished Currer Bell the author were lacking in Charlotte Brontë the woman, must have minds warped by deep-rooted and unworthy prejudices. I have expressed my conviction that the comparative neglect from which "Jane Eyre" and its sister works now suffer is only temporary. It is true that in some respects these books are not attractive. Though they are written with a terse vigor which must make them grateful to all whose palates are cloyed by the pretty writing of the present generation, they undoubtedly err on the side of a lack of literary polish. And though the portraits presented to us in their pages are wonderful as works of art, unsurpassed as studies of character, the range of the artist is a limited one, and for the most part the subjects chosen are not the most pleasing that could have been conceived. Yet one great and striking merit belongs to this masterly painter of men and women, which is lacking in some who, treading to a certain extent in her footsteps, have achieved even a wider and more brilliant reputation. There is no taint of the dissecting-room about her books; we are never invited to admire the supreme cleverness of the operator who with unsparing knife lays bare before us the whole cunning mechanism of the soul which is stretched under the scalpel; nor are we bidden to pause and listen to those didatic moralizings which belong rather to the preacher or the lecturer than the novelist. It is the artist, not the anatomist who is instructing us; and after all we may derive a more accurate knowledge of men and women as they are from the cartoons of a Raphael than from the most elaborate diagrams or sections of the most eminent of physiologists. Perhaps no merit is more conspicuous in Charlotte Brontë's writings than their unswerving honesty. Writing always "under the spell," at the dictation as it were of an invisible and superior spirit, she would never write save when "the fit was upon her" and she had something to say. "I have been silent lately because I have accumulated nothing since I wrote last," is a phrase which fell from her on one occasion. Save when she believed that she had accumulated something, some truth which she was bound to convey to the world, she would not touch her pen. She had every temptation to write fast and freely. Money was needed at home, and money was to be had by the mere production of novels which, whether good, bad, or indifferent, were certain to sell. But she withstood the temptation bravely, withstood it even when it came strengthened by the supplications of her friends, and from first to last she gave the world nothing but her best. This honesty rare enough unfortunately among those whose painful lot it is to coin their brains into money- was carried far beyond these limits. When in writing she found that any character had escaped from her hands and every writer of fiction knows how easily this may happen- she made no attempt to finish the portrait according to the canons of literary art. She waited patiently for fresh light; studying deeply in her waking hours, dreaming constantly of her task during her uneasy slumbers, until perchance the light she needed came and she could go on. But if it came not she never pretended to supply the place of this inspiration of genius by any clever trick of literary workmanship. The picture was left unfinished-perfect so far as it went, but broken off at the point at which the author's keen intuitions had failed or fled from her. Nor when her work was done would she consent to alter or amend at the bidding of others; for the sake of no applause, of no success, would she change the fate of any of her characters as they had been fixed in the crucible of her genius. Even when her father exerted all his authority to secure another ending to the tale of "Villette," he could only, as we have seen, persuade his daughter to veil the catastrophe. The hero was doomed; and Charlotte, whatever might be her own inclination, could not save him from his fate. Books so true, so honest, so simple, so thorough, as these, depend for their ultimate fate upon no transitions of fashion, no caprices of the public taste. They will hold their own as the slow-born fruits of a great genius, long after the pro- | where that once visited region really lies, ductions of a score of facile pens now able or by what magic power it was suddenly to secure the world's attention have been created for his fleeting vision. In truth, utterly forgotten. The daring and passion the very name of dream suggests someof "Jane Eyre," the broad human sympa- thing remote and mysterious, and when thies, sparkling humor, and graphic por- we want to characterize some impression traiture of "Shirley," and the steady, pa- or scene which by its passing strangeness tient, unsurpassed concentration of power filled us with wonder, we naturally call it which distinguishes "Villette," can hardly dreamlike. cease to command admiration whilst the literature of this century is remembered and studied. But when we turn from the author to the woman, from the written pages to the writer, and when, forgetting the features and fortunes of those who appear in the romances of Currer Bell, we recall that touching story which will forever be associated with Haworth parsonage and with the great family of the Brontës, we see that the artist is greater than her works, that the woman is nobler and purer than the writer, and that by her life, even more than by her labors, the author of Jane Eyre" must always teach us those lessons of courage, self-sacrifice, and patient endurance of which our poor humanity stands in such pressing and constant need. T. WEMYSS REID. 66 From The Cornhill Magazine. THE LAWS OF DREAM-FANCY. THE phenomena of dreams may well seem at first sight to form a world of their own, having no discoverable links of connection with the other facts of human experience. First of all there is the mystery of sleep, which quietly shuts all the avenues of sense and so isolates the mind from contact with the world outside. To gaze at the motionless face of a sleeper temporarily rapt, so to speak, from the life of sight, sound, and movement, which, being common to all, binds us together in mutual recognition and social action, has always something awe-inspiring. How unlike that external inaction, that torpor of sense and muscle, to the familiar waking life with its quick responsiveness and its overflowing energy! And then if we look at dreams from the inside, so to speak, we seem to find but the obverse face of the mystery. How inexpressibly strange does the late night-dream seem to one on waking. He feels he has been sojourning in an unfamiliar world, with an order of sights and a sequence of events quite unlike those of waking experience, and he asks himself in his perplexity The earliest theories respecting dreams illustrate very clearly this perception of the remoteness of dream-life from waking experience. The view held in common by the ancient world, according to Artemidorus, was that dreams were dim previsions of coming events. This great authority on dream-interpretation (oneirocritics) actually defines a dream as a motion or fiction of the soul in a diverse form signifying either good or evil to come; and even a logician like Porphyry ascribed dreams to the influence of a good demon, who.thereby warns us of the evils which another and bad demon is preparing for us.* The same mode of viewing dreams is quite common to-day, and many who pride themselves on a certain intellectual culture, and who imagine themselves to be free from the weakness of superstition, are apt to talk of dreams as of something uncanny, if not distinctly ominous. Nor is it surprising that phenomena which at first sight look so wild and unconditioned should still pass for miraculous interruptions of the natural order of events. Yet in spite of this obvious and impressive element of the mysterious in dreamlife, the scientific impulse to illuminate the less known by the better known has long since begun to play on this obscure subject. Even in the ancient world a writer might here and there be found, like Democritus or Aristotle, who was bold enough to put forward a natural and physical explanation of dreams. But it has been the work of modern science to provide something like an approximate solution of the problem. The careful study of mental life in its intimate union with bodily operations, and the comparison of dream-combinations with other products of the imagination, normal as well as morbid, have gradually helped to dissolve a good part of the mystery which once hung like an opaque mist about the subject. In this way our dream-operations have been found to have a much closer connection with our waking experiences than could be supposed on a superficial view. The quaint dream-theories may be found in Mr. Frank Seafield's * A good deal of interesting information respecting work, "The Literature and Curiosities of Dreams." |