The Three Brontes by May Sinclair

 

bronte/stories/society/gazette

Unknown woman, formerly known as Charlotte Brontë (Mrs A.B. Nicholls)
by Unknown artist
watercolour, 1850
urchased, 1906

Then there is that other "sensational discovery" of the Heger portrait, that little drawing (now in the National Portrait Gallery) of Charlotte Bronte in curls, wearing a green gown, and reading Shirley. It is signed Paul Heger, 1850, the year of Shirley's publication, and the year in which Charlotte sat to Richmond for her portrait. There are two inscriptions on the back: "The Wearin' of the Green; First since Emily's death"; and below: "This drawing is by P. Heger, done from life in 1850." The handwriting gives no clue. Mr. Malham-Dembleby attaches immense importance to this green gown, which he "identifies" with the pink one worn by Lucy in Villette. He says that Lady Ritchie told him that Charlotte wore a green gown at the dinner-party Thackeray gave for her in June, 1850; and when the green gown turns out after all to be a white one with a green pattern on it, it is all one to Mr. Malham-Dembleby. So much for the green gown. Still, gown or no gown, the portrait  may  be genuine. Mr. Malham-Dembleby says that it is drawn on the same paper as that used in Mr. George Smith's house, where Charlotte was staying in June 1850, and he argues that Charlotte and M. Heger met in London that year, and that he then drew this portrait of her from the life. True, the portrait is a very creditable performance for an amateur; true, M. Heger's children maintained that their father did not draw, and there is no earthly evidence that he did; true, we have nothing but one person's report of another person's (a collector's) statement that he had obtained the portrait from the Heger family, a statement at variance with the evidence of the Heger family itself. But granted that the children of M. Heger were mistaken as to their father's gift, and that he did draw this portrait of Charlotte Bronte from Charlotte herself in London in 1850, I cannot see that it matters a straw or helps us to the assumption of the great tragic passion which is the main support of Mr. Malham-Dembleby's amazing fabrication. The-Three-Brontes

BOOKS REVIEWED
 

Since Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte and Maeterlinck's eloquent tribute to Emily in Wisdom and Destiny, which last Miss Sinclair writes she has " unblushingly ' lifted,'" no one has more clearly and adequately dealt with the great trio of sisters. Not once does Miss Sinclair's right instinct fail her in this beautiful appreciation. She understands and sets forth Charlotte's method and inspiration as could one only who shared the same inspiration and practised the same art; she feels Emily's power as one who has felt in the same kind; and it is important to add that she lays her finger on the very heart of Emily's mysticism as could This latter fact recalls to memory certain acknowledgments made to Miss Sinclair in Evelyn IJnderhill's fine volume on Mysticism. As to Charlotte, Miss Sinclair's great service is the clearing away of rubbish and gossip, the tracing to its true source, her finer inspiration and her splendid vindication of Charlotte's women, her prophetic vision of the submerging of the futile and vain mid-Victorian type and the survival of a braver and nobler woman. ' In setting aside the idle gossip of a love-affair which wakened Charlotte Bronte's powers, Miss Sinclair says the great thing to realize is that " it is always the inner life that counts, and with, the Brontes it 

supremely counted."  It counted and accounted indeed for almost everything. Because Charlotte Bronte wrote a novel about a little French professor in love, the critics must necessarily try to build up a gossiping romance about her relations to M. Heger. " It may be," says Miss Sinclair with fine irony,  " t h a t I have no more authority for my belief that Emily Bronte was in love with the Absolute than the other people have for theirs that Charlotte was in love with M. Heger." Miss Sinclair quotes from a letter of Charlotte's written in Brussels at the time when her passion was supposed to be at high-water mark. She writes, " I lead an easeful, stagnant, silent life."  " M ay I point out," asks the unerring psychologist in Miss Sinclair, " that you may be ' silent' in the first workings of a tragic and illegitimate passion, you are not ' stagnant' and certainly not ' easeful.' " Not M. Heger in the French Pensionnai and a futile passion taught Charlotte Bronte to turn her genius free upon the reproduction of life. Charlotte could be inspired, but she was not easily taught. Her schoolmistresses, indeed, taught her to " indite," " peruse," and " retain " where she had much better have "written," "read," and "kept," and doubtless M. Heger corrected her French syntax, but her genius was awakened by reading her untrammeled sister's Wuthering Heights. This discovery is Miss Sinclair's most valuable and entirely original contribution to Bronte biography. Miss Sinclair, who knows so well that the great event is in the inner life, knows also what a high adventure is the reading of a great and vitalizing book. After the " strange grayness " of the Professor, the 

" stillness and grayness of imperfect hearing, imperfect seeing," Charlotte Bronte suddenly awakens and produces a book pulsing with vitality. Through whatever flaws of method and of style, the life, sincerity, reality, of the book breaks. The critics, amazed, search the biographical data for an event to account for the sudden blossoming. Miss Sinclair shows conclusively that the event was spiritual.  It was not a French professor who awakened the genius's soul; it was a book.  It was Emily, who knew none of the " cold deliberations born of fear " ; whose own book was the fruit of a divine freedom, a divine unconsciousness," who lifted her sister to the plane where she too could freely use her powers. " The experience may seem insufficient," says Miss Sinclair, and adds, authoritatively, " it is of such experiences that a great writer's life is largely made." For this insight, this fact so self-evident, once it is pointed out, all readers of Charlotte Bronte owe Miss Sinclair a debt of deep gratitude, as well as for her discriminating, fine-seeing analysis of Charlotte's development of style, method, and spirit. The eulogy of Emily Bronte surpasses any that has yet been accorded that great, unacclaimed writer. If Swinburne has praised her exuberantly and Maeterlinck exquisitely, May Sinclair has sung her truly, proving her praise as she sings. She has paused at the very passages, the lines, the attitudes which give the " unapproachable, the unique and baffling quality of her temperament and of her genius." " Born with a profound, incurable indifference to the material event," chary of alien and external contacts, self-sufficing and heroic, there came to her " nothing of all that passes in love, sorrow, passion, or anguish; still did she possess all that abides when emotion has faded away." Emily Bronte was of those souls born complete who do not realize their being 

through contact with external reality. She was. She lived and thought and produced splendidly aloof from the stream of circumstance. If we would, as critic, desire to find flaws in a book so remarkable as this, we should say that Miss Sinclair was perhaps somewhat too scornful of Anne's gentle and submissive spirit. And it might be pointed out that the method of repetition used especially in the first half of the book, the continual refrain of " their destiny," " their happiness," belongs rather to the method of poetry than of prose. Still no critic need fear to say of Miss Sinclair's book that it is one of the most vital and splendid achievements of literary appreciation and analysis of our times. NorthAmericanRev-