Brontës (132 page)

On Sunday, 9 June, George Smith took her to the Chapel Royal, where he could be fairly sure that she would catch sight of her hero, the Duke of Wellington. As luck would have it, he was there and Charlotte was able to see in the flesh the man whose exploits had inspired her childhood writings and, indirectly, been the cause of her presence in London as an author. Somewhat tamely, all she had to say of him was that ‘he is a real grand old man', even though her escort had indulged her to the extent of following the duke out of the chapel and so arranging their walk that she met him twice on his way back to Apsley House. Another Sunday was spent less successfully at a Friends' Meeting House where, displaying that intolerance and
sense of the absurd which had marked her perception of Dissenting worship since childhood, she was afforded more amusement than edification. Her host apparently had the good grace to be embarrassed.
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Charlotte was also reintroduced to literary society. G.H. Lewes was invited to lunch one day, having missed the dinner on Charlotte's previous visit. This was the first occasion when George Smith witnessed ‘the fire concealed beneath her mildness'. Lewes, displaying that complete lack of understanding which had characterized his review of
Shirley
, had the indiscretion to say across the table, ‘There ought to be a bond of sympathy between us, Miss Brontë; for we have both written naughty books!' ‘This fired the train with a vengeance, and an explosion followed', George Smith remembered many years later. ‘I listened with mingled admiration and alarm to the indignant eloquence with which that impertinent remark was answered.' When they parted at the end of the evening, they shook hands and Charlotte remarked, ‘We are friends now, are we not?' alluding for the first time to Lewes' shameful review of
Shirley
. ‘Were we not always, then?' Lewes asked, still impervious to her feelings on that subject; ‘No! not always', Charlotte replied significantly and without elaboration.
⁴⁰

To Ellen, Charlotte was more forthcoming, describing Lewes as ‘a man with both weaknesses and sins; but unless I err greatly the foundation of his nature is not bad'. Curiously – one might even say incomprehensibly – it was his appearance which told in his favour: ‘the aspect of Lewes' face almost moves me to tears –', she told Ellen, ‘it is so wonderfully like Emily – her eyes, her features – the very nose, the somewhat prominent mouth, the forehead – even at moments the expression'.
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Lewes' own cruelly dismissive description of Charlotte was worthy of the man who had been unable to see beyond the fact that the author of
Shirley
was a woman: ‘a little, plain, provincial, sickly-looking old maid'.
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Another author whom Charlotte met on this visit was Julia Kavanagh, the twenty-five-year-old protegée of Williams, who supported herself and her mother by her writings. One cannot help wondering whether Charlotte herself perceived the strange reversal of roles that was now thrust upon her: whereas she had been the tiny trembling stranger looking up, physically and mentally, to Thackeray and Martineau, here she was, the grand literary lady, meeting the ‘little, almost dwarfish figure to which even I had to look down – not deformed – that is – not hunchbacked but long-armed and with a large head and (at first sight) a strange face. She met me half-frankly, half tremblingly.' As they sat and talked in Julia Kavanagh's ‘poor but clean
and neat little lodging', Charlotte was once again struck by a resemblance to the dead: ‘it was Martha Taylor in every lineament'.
⁴³

Williams, who had made the introduction at Miss Kavanagh's request, saw a lot more of Charlotte during this visit than he had during her last. He attended a ball given by Mrs Smith at Gloucester Terrace with one of his sons and three of his daughters, the five of them creating something of a sensation with their good looks and graceful manners.
⁴⁴
But the highlight of the visit was, once again, a meeting with Thackeray. This time he made a private morning call at Gloucester Terrace and stayed above two hours alone with Charlotte and George Smith, who was an amused and perceptive witness of the ‘queer scene' that occurred. ‘I was moved to speak to him of some of his short-comings (literary of course) one by one the faults came into my mind and one by one I brought them out and sought some explanation or defence – He did defend himself like a great Turk and heathen – that is to say, the excuses were often worse than the crime itself.' ‘She was angry with her favourites if their conduct or conversation fell below her ideal', Thackeray acknowledged ruefully, while refusing to treat the subject with the seriousness Charlotte thought it deserved. ‘The truth is,' George Smith declared,

Charlotte Brontës heroics roused Thackeray's antagonism. He declined to pose on a pedestal for her admiration, and with characteristic contrariety of nature he seemed to be tempted to say the very things that set Charlotte Brontës teeth, so to speak, on edge, and affronted all her ideals. He insisted on discussing his books very much as a clerk in a bank would discuss the ledgers he had to keep for a salary. But all this was, on Thackeray's part, an affectation: an affectation into which he was provoked by what he considered Charlotte Brontës high falutin'. Miss Brontë wanted to persuade him that he was a great man with a ‘mission;' and Thackeray, with many wicked jests, declined to recognise the ‘mission.'
⁴⁵

The confrontation ended in ‘decent amity' and on 12 June, Charlotte was invited to dinner at Thackeray's house in Young Street. The momentousness of the occasion was felt by everyone present, from Thackeray himself, anxiously pacing the floor before Charlotte's arrival, to his young daughters in a frenzy of excitement at the thought of meeting ‘Jane Eyre' herself. Thackeray had invited a brood of women novelists to meet the literary lioness: Mrs Crowe, who specialized in writing on the supernatural, Mrs
Proctor, wife of the poet ‘Barry Cornwall' and mother of the poetess Adelaide Proctor, who was also present.
⁴⁶

Anne Thackeray, then only a girl, described how they watched the carriage arrive, Thackeray himself go out into the hall to welcome his guests, the door opening wide, his re-entrance with George Smith and, between them, ‘a tiny, delicate, serious, little lady, pale, with fair straight hair, and steady eyes. She may be a little over thirty; she is dressed in a little
barège
dress, with a pattern of faint green moss. She enters in mittens, in silence, in seriousness.'
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Mrs Brookfield, a society hostess of less romantic inclinations, noted that Charlotte, ‘a timid little woman with a firm mouth, did not possess a large enough quantity of hair to enable her to form a plait, so therefore wore a very obvious crown of brown silk'. The hairpiece was a new one which Charlotte had commissioned Ellen Nussey to buy in April in preparation for the London trip: though it might have seemed a good idea at the time, it did not create the desired effect.
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The hairpiece was but one source of amusement for the gathering at Thackeray's. After the solemnity and breathless excitement of Charlotte's entrance, the announcement of dinner came as a relief: ‘we all smile as my father stoops to offer his arm', Anne Thackeray reported, ‘for, genius though she may be, Miss Brontë can barely reach his elbow'. As they walked out together, Thackeray unwisely addressed her as ‘Currer Bell'. Charlotte's response was typically prickly. ‘She tossed her head and said “She believed there were books being published by a person named Currer Bell … but the person he was talking to was Miss Brontë – and she saw no connection between the two”'.
⁴⁹

Throughout the dinner Charlotte sat gazing at Thackeray ‘with kindling eyes of interest; lighting up with a sort of illumination every now and then as she answered him'. Afterwards, the ladies left the gentlemen to their port and returned to the drawing room, where everyone waited for the brilliant conversation that never began at all. Charlotte herself, without George Smith or Thackeray himself to guard her, retreated into a corner of the study and sat on the sofa exchanging a low word now and then with the only person with whom she felt comfortable, Miss Truelock, the governess. Eventually, realizing that brilliance was not to be forthcoming, Mrs Brookfield leant forward with a little commonplace and asked, ‘Do you like London, Miss Brontë?' There was a short silence while Charlotte considered the question, then, ‘very gravely', she replied, ‘Yes and No.'

That put the seal on the evening. The disappointed ladies grew bored
and restless. Thackeray himself, oppressed by the gloom and silence, could scarcely contain his discomfort and, as Charlotte left, he quietly crept out of the room, out of the house and retired to the masculine comforts of his club. As George Smith later commented, the failure of the evening was a singular illustration of Charlotte's want of social gifts and Thackeray's impatience of social discomfort.
⁵⁰
Though the ladies who had spent ‘one of the dullest evenings of their lives' made much capital out of relating the anecdote for years afterwards at Charlotte's expense, it has to be said that Thackeray's choice of guests showed a remarkable insensitivity to Charlotte's character and feelings. Having read her books and met her several times, he knew her to be hypersensitive about her appearance, her lack of social graces and her provincialism. He also knew that she was painfully shy in company and was only moved to speak on intellectual subjects or on her own high-flown ideas about the writer's calling. Nevertheless, he exposed her to a group of society women, mere dabblers in the world of literature, whose interests and lives had nothing in common with her own. The failure of the dinner party was therefore as much his fault as Charlotte's.

On the way home from Thackeray's, Charlotte proved that she had kept her eyes open even if she had not said much, by suddenly leaning forward, placing her hands on George Smith's knees and saying, ‘She would make you a very nice wife.' ‘Whom do you mean?' asked George Smith. ‘Oh! you know whom I mean', Charlotte replied. She had noticed that he had been very taken with the charms of Adelaide Proctor and she knew her companion well enough to know that he was merely bluffing when he pretended not to know what she meant.
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The day after Thackeray's dinner party, Charlotte had to undergo another ordeal. George Smith had persuaded her that she ought to have her portrait painted and had undertaken to pay for sittings with George Richmond, the celebrated society artist. A former pupil of Henry Fuseli, whose pictures Charlotte had copied with such care and detail as a girl, Richmond enjoyed a busy practice, taking four sitters a day, many of them the leading literary figures of the time. His style was pre-eminently suited to Charlotte, as his standard portraits were simple, quiet and subtly flattering likenesses in a mix of coloured chalks, chiefly black, white and red.
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It is a measure of George Smith's persuasive charm and Charlotte's liking for him that she allowed him to overcome her initial reluctance towards having a portrait made of what, she was all too well aware, were neither beautiful nor attractive features. When she arrived at the studio, she was in
a state of heightened nerves and great anxiety. It needed little to push her over the brink and that little was the wretched hairpiece. George Richmond was puzzled when she removed her hat to see what he took to be a pad of brown merino on her head and, unable to imagine what its purpose was, asked her to remove it. Not surprisingly, Charlotte burst into tears of mortification.
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Richmond took this to be a symptom of his famous sitter's overwrought state, and Charlotte was prohibited from seeing the portrait until it was complete. When she was finally allowed to see the finished work, she again burst into tears, exclaiming that it was so like her sister Anne.
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For once, there was some justice in this remark. Since living in Belgium, Charlotte had abandoned her fussy, ringleted hairstyle, which had not suited the plainness of her features. Now she wore her hair parted down the centre and swept back simply over her ears into a chignon at the back, the effect being to slim down the broadness of her face and forehead; the artist himself supplied the fullness which she lacked in reality and which the hairpiece had so signally failed to redress. Richmond captured the beauty of her large hazel eyes, her one redeeming feature, and played down the size of her prominent nose and mouth. With subtle shadowing, too, and by turning her face slightly to one side, he reduced the squareness of her lower jaw. The resulting portrait was like and not like, a faithful reproduction of the separate features but a more harmonious rendering of the whole. As Mary Taylor was later to comment on seeing the portrait reproduced in Mrs Gaskell's
Life of Charlotte Brontë
, ‘It must upset most people's notions of beauty to be told that the portrait at the beginning is that of an ugly woman. I do not altogether like the idea of publishing a flattered likeness. I had rather the mouth and eyes had been nearer together, and shown the veritable square face and large disproportionate nose.'
⁵⁵

However nerve-racking for Charlotte the sessions with George Richmond had been, at least they pre-empted further demands for her portrait. She was able to turn down an offer from John Everett Millais, for instance, on the grounds that she was engaged to Richmond. Her attraction for Millais, apart from her remarkably fine eyes, was that she fulfilled his idea of what a woman of genius should look like: she ‘looked tired with her own brains' he commented, memorably.
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Though it was undoubtedly a relief to Charlotte not to have to undergo the intense personal scrutiny of a portrait painter again, one cannot help wondering what the Pre-Raphaelite painter of romantic beauties would have made of Charlotte Brontë.