Brontës (81 page)

A terrible struggle tore apart his heart – for several minutes he said not a word – he covered his eyes with his hand and leant his brow against the battlemented wall. Soon he rose – his face pale and his lips bloodless – and replied in a firm loud voice, ‘If my children die, God will take them to his breast, I have only a duty to fulfil, which is to remain faithful to my country – Men of Ghent, I am not defeated, take yourselves off.'
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In the event, the men of Ghent refused to commit such an atrocity and the town was relieved. Then, obviously following her original source, Charlotte ended by stating that there was no more noble example from ancient history.

Marcus Curtius, throwing himself into the gaping fissure which had opened in the middle of the Forum was not moved by a courage more sublime than the commander of Oudenarde, sacrificing his feelings as a father to his principles as a patriot.
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Emily's version of the same story takes a much less high-flown view of the events. She gives no prominence to Simon de Lalaing as the inspiration in the city's defence but simply talks of the overwhelming numbers facing the besieged. Interestingly, too, where Charlotte gives the women her customary
passive role by simply saying that they supported their commander and that Madame de Lalaing especially had shown herself worthy to be a soldier's wife, Emily typically gives them a much more active part. ‘Even the women – that class condemned by the laws of society to be a heavy burden in every instance of action or danger, on this occasion put aside their degrading privileges and played a distinguished role in the defence.'
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Though Simon de Lalaing had been a much less important figure in her account, his terrible choice loses none of its dramatic force.

The commander looked at his sons who implored his aid with eyes full of tears, at their side he saw the soldiers, armed with swords, who would put them to death; he hesitated one moment, nature struggling hard against honour – his breast filled with overpowering emotion. But finally the patriot subdued the father and he turned to the men of Ghent saying ‘Take the life of these poor children, I cannot put it in the balance against the liberty of my country and as for their souls I commend them to God. My sentence is delivered'.
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Emily, too, drew the comparison with Marcus Curtius, but gave it a totally different emphasis: ‘there are more men who can leap with Marcus Curtius into a living tomb than can sacrifice, like Lalaing, the tenderest affections of the heart for love of their country'.
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While Charlotte had considered the individuals involved, believing Lalaing's courage to surpass that of Marcus Curtius, Emily had turned the example into a general observation on mankind. Men are more often motivated to self-sacrifice by brute, unthinking courage than by a deliberate denial of the heart's best feelings.

This air of cynicism is not one which runs through all Emily's French exercises; her misanthropy – and her lack of conventional religious faith – have been vastly over-stated by her biographers. On 15 May, for example, she wrote an essay in defence of cats, attributing their commonly acknowledged bad qualities – hypocrisy, cruelty and ingratitude – to their close resemblance to humans. The cat playing with a mouse is no worse than the man who hunts a fox to the verge of death then throws it to the dogs, or the boy who crushes a butterfly in his hand. The cat's hypocrisy is what humans call politeness ‘and anyone who does not employ it to disguise his true feelings would soon be driven out of society'. Even the cat's notorious ingratitude is only another name for its penetration: it sees the motives of those who would bestow favours and judges them for what they are worth. The whole point of the essay, however, as Emily states emphatically at the
beginning, is, ‘I can truthfully say that I like cats.' ‘A cat is an animal who has more human feelings than almost any other being', she tells us, yet their vices do not make her hate people any more than she hates cats. It is worth pointing out, too, that Charlotte also seems to have written an essay on the subject, now lost, which espoused exactly the same sentiments.
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‘Filial Love', another essay, written on 5 August, is also often quoted as an illustration of Emily's jaundiced view of mankind. Only men, she claims, require the threat of the commandment ‘Honour your father and mother if you wish to live' to enforce their obedience.

It is a principle of nature that parents love their children, the doe does not fear the dogs when her little one is in danger, the bird dies on its nest; this instinct is a part of the divine spirit which we share with every animal which exists – and has not God put a similar sentiment in the heart of children? Something of it, certainly, and yet the voice of thunder cries ‘Honour your parents or you will die!'
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However, what the essay goes on to point out is that the vast majority of children do love their parents quite naturally: those who do not are instinctively shunned by the moral majority. Emily's argument is that, while shunning such ‘monsters', we should pity not condemn them.

The hour will come when conscience will awake, then there will be a terrible retribution; what mediator will then plead for the criminal? It is God who accuses him, What power can save the miserable man? It is God who condemns him. He has rejected happiness in his mortal life only to ensure torment in the eternal life. Let angels and men weep for his fate – he was their brother.
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A few days after this exercise, both sisters wrote on the subject of the caterpillar. For Charlotte it was an opportunity to compare God's greatest creation, mankind, with his lowliest, a worm: the caterpillar ‘lives a crude, materialistic life: it eats and crawls today; it ate and crawled yesterday; it will eat and crawl tomorrow'. It is a symbol of Man's grosser, earthly appetites and just as it apparently dies as a chrysalis only to be reborn as a butterfly, so the human dies in the body to achieve a purified rebirth in the resurrection.
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Emily took a much more imaginative approach in her essay. Walking through a forest, she questions why everything in the natural world tends to destruction:

Nature is an inexplicable problem; it exists on a principle of destruction; everything must be a tireless instrument of death to others or else cease to live itself, and in the meantime we celebrate the day of our birth and praise God for having entered into such a world.
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As if to justify this view she pauses to admire a beautiful flower, only to find that its heart has been eaten out by a caterpillar, which, in disgust, she crushes beneath her foot. A moment later a brilliant butterfly flutters past and realization dawns.

The created should not judge his Creator, here is a symbol of the world to come. Just as the ugly caterpillar is the origin of the splendid butterfly, so this world is the embryo of a new heaven and a new earth whose poorest beauty will infinitely exceed your mortal imagination; and when you see the magnificent outcome of what seems so humble to you now, you will despise your blind presumption in accusing Omniscience for not destroying nature in its infancy.
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This could hardly be a more eloquent statement of Christian belief; Emily's optimism is reflected in the fact that she chose to call her essay ‘The Butterfly', while Charlotte called hers ‘The Caterpillar'.

Two months later, in October, Emily and her sister each wrote an essay entitled ‘The Palace of Death'. Both followed their original source quite closely, describing a scene where Death, tired of the golden time when men died only of old age, chooses a new minister. Rejecting the claims of Ambition and War (or, in Emily's case, Fanaticism), with their attendant trains of Rage and Vengeance, Envy and Treason, Famine, Pestilence, Sloth and Avarice, Death chooses Intemperance. In Charlotte's case the choice is made because ‘War and Ambition are only your children; all the demons that destroy mankind are born of you.'
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Emily, also compelled to choose Intemperance by her source, gave her a stirring speech to justify her candidature of Death:

I have a friend before whom all this assembly will be forced to give way; she is called Civilisation: in a few years' time she will come to inhabit this earth with us and every age will augment her power and in the end she will turn Ambition out of your service, she will harness Anger with the law; she will snatch the weapons from the hands of Fanaticism; she will chase Famine out among the savages; I alone will grow and flourish under her reign.
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Death, recognizing the truth of this statement, makes Intemperance her Vice-Roy. An apparent belief in the power of civilization to tame the savageries of mankind, which was not uncommon in the nineteenth century, is thus given a cynical twist: Intemperance becomes the vice particularly associated with civilization, flourishing outside the state of nature, and it alone will continue to kill.

If Emily's Brussels essays give us a unique insight into her beliefs, Charlotte's are equally revealing. Their most obvious feature, as Mrs Gaskell observed, was their faith – something which contemporaries believed to be sadly lacking in her letters and her published novels.
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The emphasis on faith may have owed something to the air of religion which pervaded the Pensionnat Heger. The prospectus had nailed its colours to the mast: ‘The course of instruction', it declared, was ‘based on Religion.' Monsieur Heger, in particular, was held to be ‘profoundly and openly religious', expressing the zeal of his piety in his membership of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, through which he devoted his leisure hours to teaching the poor and the sick.
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Charlotte was not, however, simply trying to please her master. Monsieur Heger himself recognized that she ‘was brought up on the Bible'
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and there was nothing sycophantic in her defiantly Protestant stance in a Catholic school. Many of her essays were overtly on religious topics; ‘Anne Askew', ‘Evening prayer in a camp', ‘The death of Moses', ‘Portrait of Peter the Hermit' and ‘The Caterpillar', all written in 1842, fall into this class.

On the other hand, many of the essays apparently on unrelated subjects were coloured by Charlotte's obvious Christian faith. Her description of the ritual immolation of a Hindustani widow is an excuse to attack every aspect of a barbaric practice: the widow, going voluntarily to her death, is upheld as much by pride as religion; the funeral procession is a savage, noisy and pagan display; all the wealth of the Hindustanis, she declares, is not worth a single ray from that star of Bethlehem which the Magi once saw in the East. A sick girl recovers her health in response to fervent prayer and even the sight of a normally timid bird defending its eggs on its nest is a symbol of God's presence in his works.
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Monsieur Heger was a ruthless critic, attacking not only technical mistakes, such as incorrect sentence structure and clumsy translations, but also trying to stamp upon his pupils the importance of adopting a style. He was a man with an eye for detail: a single infelicitous word or phrase merited vicious underlining and he was pitiless in his paring away of unnecessary verbiage. This was something that Charlotte, especially, needed greatly;
though the Angrian obsession had implanted a love of writing in her blood, she had not yet learnt to control her runaway imagination or to impose discipline on her pen. Monsieur Heger was the first person to offer her objective criticism of her style and suggest ways of improving it. At the end of an early essay, ‘The Nest', written on 30 April, he appended a piece of advice:

What importance should be given to details, in developing a subject? You must sacrifice,
without pity
, everything that does not contribute to clarity, verisimilitude and effect. Accentuate everything which sets off the main thought, so that the impression you give is highly coloured, graphic; It is sufficient if the rest remain
in
its place but in the background
. This is what gives to prose style, as to painting, unity, perspective, and
effect
.
Read
Harmonie XIV of Lamartine:
The Infinite:
We will analyse it together
from the point of view of its details
.

May 4 C Heger
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Most of the time, Monsieur Heger confined his advice to stringently critical remarks. A good example occurs in Charlotte's exercise on ‘Peter the Hermit', written on 31 July. Woolly phrases are tightened up: men ‘destined to be' instruments of great change become ‘predestined'; an irrelevant phrase incurs a marginal note ‘why this expression?'; when she refers to ‘Picardy in France', he writes ‘unnecessary when you are writing in French'; an adjectival phrase about an illusion ‘which he could never attain' is cut with the words ‘unnecessary when you say illusion'; an elaborate metaphor about the nature of certain men who, like Samson, can break the cords that bind them even when sleeping, is also cut, this time with the forceful comment ‘you have begun to talk about Peter, you are into the subject, go straight to the end'.
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Under such rigorous criticism of her every word and phrase, Charlotte soon learnt the importance of craft and began to appreciate that mere flow of words – her worst fault since childhood – was not enough.

It is difficult to tell what effect Monsieur Heger's criticism had on Emily's writing since there now exists so little of her prose from either before or after Brussels to compare. Most of his annotations on her essays were confined to picking her up on her grammar and underlining or scoring through her literal translation of English words and phrases. There are remarkably few comments on her style. This may suggest that Emily had not yet advanced beyond the point at which her faults in language became less important than her argument, but it is more likely that it actually indicated she had
fewer problems in this area. Her essays, like her surviving poems,
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were more concise and direct in their approach than Charlotte's and, whatever her faults of translation, Monsieur Heger found much to admire in her power of reasoning and expression. He later confided to Mrs Gaskell that he rated Emily's genius as ‘something even higher' than Charlotte's. She had, he said, ‘a head for logic, and a capability of argument, unusual in a man, and rare indeed in a woman'. The force of this gift, however, he believed to be much impaired by her ‘stubborn tenacity of will which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned.' His assessment of her character was both penetrating and revealing.