Those Brontë sisters
Not too long ago, I wrote about my
friend Gaspar Stephens’ crabbed relationship with the church. (See here.) To
summarize: Gaspar’s main difficulty is that he loves the sinner but hates the
righteous.
Having spent my evenings the last three weeks with the Brontë sisters, I
can see why.
There are gaping holes in my
sentimental education. Until this month,
I had not read any of the sisters. But now I’ve read all three: the fast-paced
if purple Tenant of Wildfell Hall;
the dark, psychologically constipated Wuthering
Heights; and the patchworked Jane
Eyre.
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| No. 39 |
St. John’s great ambition is to become
one of God’s great servants. He presses Jane to join him in that ambition. In
the beginning, before she knows what role he has written for her, she accedes
to learning “Hindostanee” – because he asks her to and he is “not a man to be
lightly refused,” who takes nothing lightly.
“You felt that every impression made on him, either for pain or pleasure, was
deep-graved and permanent,” she tells the reader.
As her language “master,” Jane finds St. John patient; but even more he
is exacting. And what he exacts finally is “a certain influence” over his pupil
“that took away my liberty of mind,” so that Jane can “no longer talk or laugh
freely when he [is] by,” because that is not what he expects of her. To please
him, she finds, she will be required to “disown half my nature, wrest my tastes
from their original bent, [and] force myself to the adoption of pursuits for which
I had no natural vocation.”
There has been throughout the novel a
conflict between custom and nature; in this case it is between St. John’s
religion and Jane’s human desires. It is a conflict that Jane has often reflected
on; it is one in which St. John has no interest whatever.
Here is what he is interested
in – and all he is interested in, his
going to India to serve his “infallible Master; I am not going out under human
guidance,” he tells Jane, “subject to the defective laws and erring control of
my feeble fellow-worms; my king, my lawgiver, my captain is the All-perfect.”
St. John presses Jane to say she will
come with him; but she will not say it. He asks her what her heart says,
believing, whatever her tongue will not express, it must approve his plan; she
answers that her heart, too, is “mute.” Then, he counters, he must speak for it – her
heart; it says she must come.
Jane continues to resist: she is “no apostle,” she says. And she asks
for mercy, but he cannot grant it. Instead, St. John heaps up arguments why
Jane should do what it is clear to him she will do. (His clarity is the clarity
of the wholly unimaginative. He cannot begin to put himself in her place.) He
grants that she is no apostle: She is right to be humble; but that is no excuse
not to join in his work. Does she wish to fall into the sin of Demas, who
forsook the Apostle, because he loved too much “this present world”?
Perhaps Jane does love the world to much – or she loves life too much,
because she knows that going with St. John will kill her. (She rightly
describes his “persuasion” – advancing “with slow, sure step” – as an “iron
shroud,” contracting round her.)
Still, he requires her, a helpmeet “fitted to my purpose . . . fitted to
my vocation.”
Be clear: St. John doesn’t love Jane;
he doesn’t desire her. He has a purpose for her, his vocation. Listen: and you can hear in my purpose, my vocation a
clear echo of my king, my law-giver, my captain. All belong to St. John. At least, he has no sense that
his will for Jane can differ from God’s will for her.
He is going to Cambridge the next day to say good-bye to friends; he’ll
be gone two weeks. She must “take that space of time to [continue to] consider
my offer,” not forgetting that “if you reject it, it is not me you deny, but
God.” And “Here we are,” my marginal note reads: “Here we are, ever and again,
among those men that are certain their wills are God’s will.”
Jane feels, when her cousin is done preaching at – and threatening her, “an
iron silence,” and in that silence she feels as well “the disappointment of an austere
and despotic nature, which has met resistance where it expected submission; the
disapprobation of a cool, inflexible judgment, which has detected in another
feelings and views in which it has no power to sympathize.” And is this how God
wills, austerely, despotically, coolly, inflexibly – relentlessly, without
mercy. And “resolved on a conquest”?
The
silence cannot continue. That same night at “the [family] prayer following
chapter” – Jane is living at this time with St. John’s sisters - St. John
summons all his energy and “stern zeal,” and in deep earnest he wrestles aloud,
“resolved,” it is clear to her, on a conquest.” The clear reference to Jacob’s
nighttime wrestling with the Angel suggests that St. John is also wrestling
with God. But it is not God St. John needs to wrestle with.
These
great men of the faith, they don’t. They do
not need to say, “Not my will but thy will,” for how could God’s will differ
from theirs. If they wrestle with God in prayer (for we have heard them do so),
it is only rhetorically, for practically they have already defeated him. He has
been brought onto their side long since; he can be on no others’. These great
men of faith have left to conquer only those of us, hell-bent stragglers that
love the world too much that don’t understand that the battle with God has
already been won.
04.30.16
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