Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/49

 wherever the place, without shirking or complaining; if there is a cross presented to them, take it on submissive shoulders; receive the burden there is for them to carry; begin the march, and fare on, without rebelling. The author denounced cant; she abhorred tyranny; she gave its own sterling importance to self-respect, and she did this in a manner for which every good woman should thank her. When it became known that "Jane Eyre" was written by a woman, a young woman, and the daughter of a clergyman, the wonder was great how she could have come by the knowledge of such a man as Mr. Rochester, or what could have induced her to select him, and to put into his mouth such language; but for all this, was there ever a reader of any discrimination who was hurt by the book?

If morbidness belonged to Miss Brontë, the one of her characters most fit for its display was Caroline Helstone; but even in her sound sense triumphed in the end, and instead of dying, according to precedent, she rallied and began anew. "Jane Eyre" was written under circumstances by no means favorable to cheerfulness; and what shall we say of "Shirley" and "Villette"? Think of the life of Charlotte—so often told—in that parsonage, approached through the churchyard, where the blackened slabs over the graves lay as thick as paving stones in the streets of London; behind it the wide and solitary moors; the family secluded in their habits; the six little motherless children left to take care of themselves, dying, one after another, till none but herself was left. All of the time while she was writing "Jane Eyre" she lived in constant apprehension of something terrible to befall her brother; she was worried by care, "which never vacated its seat in her breast." Between the publication of "Jane Eyre" and the completion of "Shirley," died Branwell, Emily, and Anne, and Charlotte was left to the dismal house, with memory and imagination for companions; she finished the story under the depressing gloom of that desolated home, from which the three had so lately been carried to join the other three in the narrow house just without the door; but can any one see where, in "Shirley," she laid down the pen, and where, after such interruption, she took it up again?

In "Villette" Charlotte's crushed heart will cry out, but her moral strength, her integrity of purpose does not fail. "Villette" is her greatest work; it has more calm and completeness than the others; it is sounder, healthier, broader in its aims and experiences; it is more finished and harmonious; the characters, though more in number, and more involved, are drawn with greater care and more skilfully analyzed; and in it is the most of herself. The depth of her anguish finds voice in Lucy Snow. The appalling loneliness and stagnation of her life, against which her feelings rose calling for some part in this world's activities, weighed upon her with a pressure which a less elastic nature could not have resisted. To allay that suffering she flung all her energies into "Villette," though pain was gnawing at her vitals, and shadows from those graves were haunting the room where she wrote. Not without cause was the sharp cry, half stifled in utterance, from the white lips of Lucy Snow. Those records of agony from tortured nerves, from heart-hunger, and heartbreak, have a most profound pathos. One of the most sublime spectacles ever seen was her life at that time—a woman of organization so sensitive that she could almost feel it if a shadow crossed the sun, her mortal part wholly disproportioned to the soul it held: "battling with life and death, and grief and fate," sending a shuddering cry along those pages for some human help, some human solace, yet saying amid the thick darkness, "These ills cannot happen without the sanction of God"; "I know that His treasures contain the proof as the promise of His mercy." The conflict in such a