1917] on The Brontes: A Hundred Years After 149 



Her marriage with Mr. Xicholls need not trouble her biographer. 

 She was only a Avife for a few months. She does not seem to have 

 married that gentleman — we can say it now — for love, the love of 

 which her books and letters are full to dazzling ; but to secure a help 

 to her eccentric old father, and for herself and her cinder of a heart, 

 a man she could respect. Before her marriage she wrote, " I trust 

 the demands of feeling and duty will be in some manner reconciled 

 by the step in contemplation." 



" My destiny," again she writes, " will not be brilliant, certainly, 

 but Mr. Xicholls is conscientious, affectionate, pure in heart and life. 

 He offers a most constant and tried attachment. I am very grateful 

 to him. I mean to try to make him happy, and papa tooy 



What is all this ? The first quotation about " reconciling feeling 

 and duty," and the last, why it reads like the character of a domestic 

 servant who is seeking a place. Still again here is an encomium, 

 " Mr. Nicholls is a kind, considerate fellow, with all his masculine 

 faults ; he enters into my wishes about having the thing done quietly." 

 The thing is the marriage. 



This is very different from the words she, as Lucy Snowe, uses as 

 to Paul Emanuel, " magnificent minded, grand hearted, dear, faulty 

 little man," or again her heart speaks, " L^nknown and unloved, I 

 held him harsh and strange — the low stature, the wiry make, the 

 angles, the darkness, the manner, displeased me. Xow, penetrated 

 with his influence, and living by his affection, having his worth 

 by intellect, and his goodness by heart— I prefer him before all 

 humanity." 



But she could not have said less, poor woman, of Mr. Xicholls. 

 It reads like the description of someone who had paid a morning call, 

 not of the marriage with your heart's desire. 



Even four months after her marriage she writes of her husband, 

 " people don't compliment me as they do Arthur — excuse the name, 

 it has grown natural to use it now." Excuse the name ! AVhy this 

 silly diffidence ? But even later she writes of him, " He is well, 

 thank God, and so am I, and he is ' my dear boy,' certainly — dearer 

 now than he was six months ago. In three days we shall actually 

 have been married that length of time." This gourd of love is of 

 slow growth. 



Mr. Xicholls was doubtless all that Charlotte Bronte — we never 

 think of her as anything else — says of him, but he has really no 

 interest for those who love and believe in the woman he, as if by 

 accident, married. He consoled himself after her death (the last of 

 all the six Brontes) by a marriage with a cousin, and I cannot doubt 

 that it was a more suitable match of mediocrities than his first ven- 

 ture in that reckless direction. Most marriages, if they are made in 

 Heaven, are certainly made in the dark, and a common man who 

 marries a famous woman takes a perilous step. To borrow lustre 

 from her fame, and to have one's private life submitted to the 



