tortured him, is an unearthly thing. Charlotte showed insight when she
said in her preface to _Wuthering Heights_: "Heathcliff betrays one
solitary human feeling, and that is _not_ his love for Catherine; which
is a sentiment fierce and inhuman ... the single link that connects
Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely confessed regard for Hareton
Earnshaw--the young man whom he has ruined; and then his half-implied
esteem for Nelly Dean." But that Heathcliff is wholly inhuman--"a ghoul,
an afreet"--I cannot really see. Emily's psychology here is perforce
half on the unearthly plane; it is above our criticism, lending itself
to no ordinary tests. But for all his unearthliness, Heathcliff is
poignantly human, from his childhood when he implored Nelly Dean to make
him "decent", for he is "going to be good", to his last hour of piteous
dependence on her. You are not allowed for a moment to forget, that,
horrible and vindictive as he is, the child Heathcliff is yet a child.
Take the scene where the boy first conceives his vengeance.
"On my inquiring the subject of his thoughts, he answered gravely:
"'I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don't care how
long I wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before
I do!'
"'For shame, Heathcliff!' said I. 'It is for God to punish wicked
people. We should learn to forgive.'
"'No, God won't have the satisfaction that I shall,' he returned. 'I
only wish I knew the best way! Let me alone, and I'll plan it out: while
I'm thinking of that I don't feel pain.'"
It is very like Heathcliff. It is also pathetically like a child.
In Hareton Earnshaw Emily Brontë is fairly on the earth all the time,
and nothing could be finer than her handling of this half-brutalized,
and wholly undeveloped thing, her showing of the slow dawn of his
feelings and intelligence. Her psychology is never psychologic. The
creature reveals himself at each moment of his unfolding for what he is.
It was difficult; for in his degradation he had a certain likeness in
unlikeness to the degraded Heathcliff. It was Heathcliff's indomitable
will that raised him. Hareton cannot rise without a woman's hand to help
him. The younger Catherine again was difficult, because of her likeness
to her mother. Her temper, her vanity, her headstrong trickiness are
Catherine Earnshaw. But Catherine Linton is a healthy animal, incapable
of superhuman passion, capable only (when properly chastened by
adversity) of quite ordinary pity and devotion. She inspires
bewilderment, but terror and fascination never; and never the glamour,
the magic evoked by the very name of Catherine Earnshaw. Her escapades
and fantasies, recalling Catherine Earnshaw, are all on an attenuated
scale.
Yet Catherine Earnshaw seems now and then a less solid figure. That is
because her strength does not lie in solidity at all. She is a thing of
flame and rushing wind. One half of her is akin to the storms of
Wuthering Heights, the other belongs to her unseen abiding-place. Both
sides of her are immortal.
And they are of that immortality which is the spirit of place--the
spirit that, more than all spirits, inspired Emily Brontë. Two of
Charlotte's books, _The Professor_ and _Villette_, might have been
written away from Haworth; Emily's owes much of its outward character to
the moors, where it was brought forth. Not even Charlotte could paint,
could suggest scenes like Emily Brontë. There is nobody to compare with
her but Thomas Hardy; and even he has to labour more, to put in more
strokes to achieve his effect. In four lines she gives the storm, the
cold and savage foreground, and the distance of the Heights: "One may
guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the
excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a
range of gaunt thorns, all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving
alms of the sun."
See the finish of this landscape, framed in a window: "They sat together
in a window whose lattice lay back against the wall, and displayed,
beyond the garden trees and the wild green park, the valley of
Gimmerton, with a long line of mist winding nearly to its top (for very
soon after you pass the chapel, as you may have noticed, the sough that
runs from the marshes joins a beck which follows the bend of the glen).
Wuthering Heights rose above this silvery vapour; but our old house was
invisible; it rather dips down on the other side."
In six lines she can paint sound, and distance, and scenery, and the
turn of the seasons, and the two magics of two atmospheres. "Gimmerton
chapel bells were still ringing; and the full, mellow flow of the beck
in the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet substitute for
the yet absent murmur of the summer foliage, which drowned that music
about the Grange when the trees were in leaf. At Wuthering Heights it
always sounded on quiet days following a great thaw or a season of
steady rain."
That music is the prelude to Heathcliff's return, and to the passionate
scene that ends in Catherine's death.
And nothing could be more vivid, more concrete, than Emily Brontë's
method. Time is marked as a shepherd on the moors might mark it, by the
movement of the sun, the moon, and the stars; by weather, and the
passage of the seasons. Passions, emotions, are always presented in
bodily symbols, by means of the bodily acts and violences they inspire.
The passing of the invisible is made known in the same manner. And the
visible world moves and shines and darkens with an absolute illusion of
reality. Here is a road seen between sunset and moonrise: "... all that
remained of day was a beamless amber light along the west: but I could
see every pebble on the path, and every blade of grass, by the light of
that splendid moon".
The book has faults, many and glaring faults. You have to read it many
times before you can realize in the mass its amazing qualities. For it
is probably the worst-constructed tale that ever was written, this story
of two houses and of three generations that the man Lockwood is supposed
to tell. Not only has Lockwood to tell of things he could not possibly
have heard and seen, but sometimes you get scene within vivid scene,
dialogue within dialogue, and tale within tale, four deep. Sometimes you
are carried back in a time and sometimes forward. You have to think hard
before you know for certain whose wife Catherine Heathcliff really is.
You cannot get over Lockwood's original mistake. And this poor device of
narrative at second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand, is used to convey
things incredible, inconceivable; all the secret, invisible drama of the
souls of Catherine and Heathcliff, as well as whole acts of the most
visible, the most tangible, the most direct and vivid and tumultuous
drama; drama so tumultuous, so vivid, and so direct, that by no
possibility could it have been conveyed by any medium. It simply
happens.
And that is how Emily Brontë's genius triumphs over all her faults. It
is not only that you forgive her faults and forget them, you are not--in
the third reading anyhow--aware of them. They disappear, they are
destroyed, they are burnt up in her flame, and you wonder how you ever
saw them. All her clumsy contrivances cannot stay her course, or obscure
her light, or quench her fire. Things happen before your eyes, and it
does not matter whether Lockwood, or Nelly Dean, or Heathcliff, or
Catherine, tells you of their happening.
And yet, though Lockwood and Nelly Dean are the thinnest, the most
transparent of pure mediums, they preserve their personalities
throughout. Nelly especially. The tale only begins to move when Lockwood
drops out and Nelly takes it up. At that point Emily Brontë's style
becomes assured in its directness and simplicity, and thenceforward it
never falters or changes its essential character.
And it is there, first of all, in that unfaltering, unchanging quality
of style that she stands so far above her sister. She has no purple
patches, no decorative effects. No dubiously shining rhetoric is hers.
She does not deal in metaphors or in those ponderous abstractions, those
dreadful second-hand symbolic figures--Hope, Imagination, Memory, and
the rest of them, that move with every appearance of solidity in
Charlotte's pages. There are no angels in her rainbows. Her "grand
style" goes unclothed, perfect in its naked strength, its naked beauty.
It is not possible to praise Charlotte's style without reservations; it
is not always possible to give passages that illustrate her qualities
without suppressing her defects. What was a pernicious habit with
Charlotte, her use of words like "peruse", "indite", "retain", with
Emily is a mere slip of the pen. There are only, I think, three of such
slips in _Wuthering Heights_. Charlotte was capable of mixing her worst
things with her best. She mixed them most in her dialogue, where sins of
style are sinfullest. It is not always possible to give a scene, word
for word, from Charlotte's novels; the dramatic illusion, the illusion
of reality, is best preserved by formidable cutting.
But not only was Emily's style sinless; it is on the whole purest, most
natural, and most inevitable in her dialogue; and that, although the
passions she conceived were so tremendous, so unearthly, that she might
have been pardoned if she found no human speech to render them.
What is more, her dramatic instinct never fails her as it fails
Charlotte over and over again. Charlotte had not always the mastery and
self-mastery that, having worked a situation up to its dramatic climax,
leaves it there. A certain obscure feeling for rightness guides her in
the large, striding movement of the drama; it is in the handling of the
scenes that she collapses. She wanders from climax to climax; she goes
back on her own trail; she ruins her best effects by repetition. She has
no continuous dramatic instinct; no sense whatever of dramatic form.
These are present somehow in _Wuthering Heights_, in spite of its
monstrous formlessness. Emily may have had no more sense of form for
form's sake than Charlotte; she may have had no more dramatic instinct;
but she had an instinct for the ways of human passion. She knew that
passion runs its course, from its excitement to its climax and
exhaustion. It has a natural beginning and a natural end. And so her
scenes of passion follow nature. She never goes back on her effect,
never urges passion past its climax, or stirs it in its exhaustion. In
this she is a greater "realist" than Charlotte.
* * * * *
It is incredible that _Wuthering Heights_, or any line of it, any line
that Emily Brontë ever wrote, should have passed for Charlotte's. She
did things that Charlotte could never have done if she tried a thousand
years, things not only incomparably greater, but unique.
Yet in her lifetime she was unrecognized. What is true of her prose is
true also of her poems. They, indeed, did bring her a little praise,
obscure and momentary. No less she was unrecognized to such an extent
that _Wuthering Heights_ was said and believed to be an immature work of
Charlotte's. Even after her death, her eulogist, Sydney Dobell, was so
far from recognizing her, that he seems to have had a lingering doubt as
to Ellis Bell's identity until Charlotte convinced him of his error.
And only the other day a bold attempt was made to tear from Emily Brontë
the glory that she has won at last from time. The very latest theory,[A]
offered to the world as a marvellous discovery, the fruit of passionate
enthusiasm and research, is the old, old theory that Charlotte, and not
Emily, wrote _Wuthering Heights_. And Sydney Dobell, with his little
error, is made to serve as a witness. In order to make out a case for
Charlotte, the enthusiast and researcher is obliged to disparage every
other work of Emily's. He leans rashly enough on the assumption that her
"Gondal Chronicles" were, in their puerility, beneath contempt, still
more rashly on his own opinion that she was no poet.
[Footnote A: _The Key to the Brontë Works_, by J. Malham-Dembleby. See
Appendix I.]
If this were the only line he took, this amusing theorist might be left
alone. The publication of the _Complete Poems_ settles him. The value,
the really priceless value, of his undertaking is in the long array of
parallel passages from the prose of Charlotte and of Emily with which he
endeavours to support it. For, so far from supporting it, these columns
are the most convincing, the most direct and palpable refutation of his
theory. If any uncritical reader should desire to see for himself
wherein Charlotte and Emily Brontë differed; in what manner, with what
incompatible qualities and to what an immeasurable degree the younger
sister was pre-eminent, he cannot do better than study those parallel
passages. If ever there was a voice, a quality, an air absolutely apart
and distinct, not to be approached by, or confounded with any other, it
is Emily Brontë's.
It was the glare of Charlotte's fame that caused in her lifetime that
blindness and confusion. And Emily, between pride and a superb
indifference, suffered it. She withdrew, with what seemed an obstinate
perversity, into her own magnificent obscurity. She never raised a hand
to help herself. She left no record, not a note or a word to prove her
authorship of _Wuthering Heights_. Until the appearance in 1910 of her
_Complete Poems_ the world had no proof of it but Charlotte's statement.
It was considered enough, in Charlotte's lifetime. The world accepted
her disclaimer.
But the trouble began again after Charlotte's death. Emily herself had
no legend; but her genius was perpetually the prey of rumours that left
her personality untouched. Among the many provoked by Mrs. Gaskell's
_Life_, there was one attributing _Wuthering Heights_ to her brother
Branwell.[A] Mr. Francis Grundy said that Branwell told him he had
written _Wuthering Heights_. Mr. Leyland believed Mr. Grundy. He
believed that Branwell was a great poet and a great novelist, and he
wrote two solid volumes of his own in support of his belief.
[Footnote A: The curious will find a note on this point in Appendix II.]
Nobody believes in Mr. Grundy, or in Mr. Leyland and his belief in
Branwell now. All that can be said of Branwell, in understanding and
extenuation, is that he would have been a great poet and a greater
novelist if he could have had his own way.
This having of your own way, unconsciously, undeliberately, would seem
to be the supreme test of genius. Having your own way in the teeth of
circumstances, of fathers and of brothers, and of aunts, of
school-mistresses,[A] and of French professors, of the parish, of
poverty, of public opinion and hereditary disease; in the teeth of the
most disastrous of all hindrances, duty, not neglected, but fulfilled.
By this test the genius of Emily Brontë fairly flames; Charlotte's
stands beside it with a face hidden at times behind bruised and darkened
wings. By this test even Anne's pale talent shows here and there a
flicker as of fire. In all three the having of their own way was, after
all, the great submission, the ultimate obedience to destiny.
[Footnote A: It was Miss Wooler who taught Charlotte to "peruse".]
For genius like theirs _is_ destiny. And that brings us back to the
eternal question of the Sources. "Experience" will not account for what
was greatest in Charlotte. It will hardly account for what was least in
Emily. With her only the secret, the innermost experience counted. If
the sources of _Wuthering Heights_ are in the "Gondal Poems", the
sources of the poems are in _that_ experience, in the long life of her
adventurous spirit. Her genius, like Henry Angora and Rosina and the
rest of them, flew from the "Palaces of Instruction". As she _was_ Henry
Angora, so she _was_ Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.
It is a case of "The Horse I rode at the battle of Zamorna", that is
all.
There has been too much talk about experience. What the critic, the
impressionist, of the Brontës needs is to recover, before all things,
the innocence of the eye. No doubt we all of us had it once, and can
remember more or less what it was like. To those who have lost it I
would say: Go back and read again Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte
Brontë_.
Years and years ago, when I was a child, hunting forlornly in my
father's bookshelves, I came upon a small, shabby volume, bound in
yellow linen. The title-page was adorned with one bad wood-cut that
showed a grim, plain house standing obliquely to a churchyard packed
with tombstones--tombstones upright and flat, and slanting at all
angles. In the foreground was a haycock, where the grave grass had been
mown. I do not know how the artist, whose resources were of the
slenderest, contrived to get his overwhelming but fascinating effect of
moorland solitude, of black-grey nakedness and abiding gloom. But he
certainly got it and gave it. There was one other picture, representing
a memorial tablet.
Tombstones always fascinated me in those days, because I was mortally
afraid of them; and I opened that book and read it through.
I could not, in fact, put it down. For the first time I was in the grip
of a reality more poignant than any that I had yet known, of a tragedy
that I could hardly bear. I suppose I have read that book a score of
times since then. There are pages in it that I shrink from approaching
even now, because of the agony of realization they revive. The passing
bell tolled continually in the prelude; it sounded at intervals
throughout; it tolled again at the close. The refrain of "Here lie the
Remains" haunted me like a dolorous song. It seemed to me a decorous and
stately accompaniment to such a tale, and that wood-cut on the
title-page a fitting ornament. I knew every corner of that house. I have
an impression (it is probably a wrong one) of a flagged path going right
down from the Parsonage door through another door and plunging among the
tombs. I saw six little white and wistful faces looking out of an upper
window; I saw six little children going up and up a lane, and I wondered
how the tiny feet of babies ever got so far. I saw six little Brontë
babies lost in the spaces of the illimitable moors. They went over
rough stones and walls and mountain torrents; their absurd petticoats
were blown upwards by the wind, and their feet were tangled in the
heather. They struggled and struggled, and yet were in an ecstasy that I
could well understand.
I remember I lingered somewhat long over the schooldays at Cowan Bridge
and that I found the Brussels period dull; M. Héger struck me as a
tiresome pedant, and I wondered how Charlotte could ever have put up
with him. There was a great deal about Branwell that I could not
understand at all, and so forgot. And I skipped all the London part, and
Charlotte's literary letters. I had a very vague idea of Charlotte apart
from Haworth and the moors, from the Parsonage and the tombstones, from
Tabby and Martha and the little black cat that died, from the garden
where she picked the currants, and the quiet rooms where she wrote her
wonderful, wonderful books.
But, for all that skipping and forgetting, there stood out a vivid and
ineffaceable idea of Emily; Emily who was tall and strong and
unconquerable; Emily who loved animals, and loved the moors; Emily and
Keeper, that marvellous dog; Emily kneading bread with her book propped
before her; Emily who was Ellis Bell, listening contemptuously to the
reviews of _Wuthering Heights_; Emily stitching at the long seam with
dying fingers; and Emily dead, carried down the long, flagged path, with
Keeper following in the mourners' train.
And, all through, an invisible, intangible presence, something
mysterious, but omnipotently alive; something that excited these three
sisters; something that atoned, that not only consoled for suffering and
solitude and bereavement, but that drew its strength from these things;
something that moved in this book like the soul of it; something that
they called "genius".
Now that, as truly as I can set it down, is the impression conveyed to a
child's mind by Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte Brontë_. And making
some deductions for a child's morbid attraction to tombstones, and a
child's natural interest in children, it seems to me even now that this
innocent impression is the true one. It eliminates the inessential and
preserves the proportions; above all, it preserves the figure of Emily
Brontë, solitary and unique.
Anyhow, I have never been able to get away from it.
_September_ 1911.
APPENDIX I
THE KEY TO THE BRONTË WORKS
More than once Mr. Malham-Dembleby has approached us with his mysterious
"Key". There was his "Key to _Jane Eyre_", published in the _Saturday
Review_ in 1902; there was his "Lifting of the Brontë Veil", published
in the _Fortnightly Review_ in 1907; and there was the correspondence
that followed. Now he has gathered all his evidence together into one
formidable book, and we are faced with what he calls his "miraculous and
sensational" discovery that it was Charlotte and not Emily Brontë who
wrote _Wuthering Heights_, and that in _Wuthering Heights_ she
immortalized the great tragic passion of her life, inspired by M. Héger,
who, if you please, is Heathcliff.
This is Mr. Malham-Dembleby's most important contribution to the
subject. M. Héger, Mr. Malham-Dembleby declares, was Heathcliff before
he was M. Pelet, or Rochester, or M. Paul. And as it was Charlotte and
not Emily who experienced passion, Charlotte alone was able to
immortalize it.
So much Mr. Malham-Dembleby assumes in the interests of psychology. But
it is not from crude psychological arguments that he forges his
tremendous Key. It is from the internal evidence of the works, supported
by much "sensational" matter from the outside.
By way of internal evidence then, we have first the sensational
discovery of a work, _Gleanings in Craven, or The Tourists' Guide_, by
"one Frederic Montagu", published at Skipton-in-Craven in 1838, which
work the author of _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_ must have read
and drawn upon for many things, names (including her own pseudonym of
Currer Bell), descriptions of scenery, local legends, as of that fairy
Jannet, Queen of the Malhamdale Elves, who haunted the sources of the
Aire and suggested Rochester's Queen of Elves, his fairy, Janet Eyre.
Parallel passages are given showing a certain correspondence between
Montagu's traveller's tale and the opening scene of _Wuthering Heights_.
Montagu goes on horseback to a solitary house, like Lockwood, and, like
Lockwood, is shown to bed, dreams, and is awakened by a white-faced
apparition (his hostess, not his host), who holds a lighted candle, like
Heathcliff, and whose features, like Heathcliff's, are convulsed with
diabolical rage, and so on. Mr. Malham-Dembleby, in a third parallel
column, uses the same phrases to describe Jane Eyre's arrival at
Rochester's house, her dreams, and the appearance of Rochester's mad
wife at her bedside; his contention being that the two scenes are
written by the same hand.
All this is very curious and interesting; so far, however, Mr.
Malham-Dembleby's sensational evidence does no more for us than suggest
that Charlotte and Emily may very likely have read Montagu's book.
But the plot thickens. Mr. Malham-Dembleby first prints parallel
passages from Montagu's book and _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_,
then, extensively, scene after scene from _Jane Eyre_ and _Wuthering
Heights_.