Emily Brontë
A grey old Parsonage standing among graves, remote from the world on its
wind-beaten hill-top, all round the neighbouring summits wild with
moors; a lonely place among half-dead ash-trees and stunted thorns, the
world cut off on one side by the still ranks of the serried dead, and
distanced on the other by mile-long stretches of heath: such, we know,
was Emily Bronte's home.
An old, blind, disillusioned father, once prone to an extraordinary
violence of temper, but now grown quiet with age, showing his
disappointment with life by a melancholy cynicism that was quite
sincere; two sisters, both beloved, one, fired with genius and quick to
sentiment, hiding her enthusiasm under the cold demeanour of the
ex-governess, unsuccessful, and unrecognised; the other gentler, dearer,
fairer, slowly dying, inch by inch, of the blighting neighbourhood of
vice. One brother, scarce less dear, of set purpose drinking himself to
death out of furious thwarted passion for a mistress that he might not
marry: these were the members of Emily Bronte's household.
Herself we know: inexperienced, courageous, passionate, and full of
pity. Was it wonderful that she summed up life in one bitter line?--
"Conquered good and conquering ill."
Her own circumstances proved the axiom true, and of other lives she had
but little knowledge. Whom should she ask? The gentle Ellen who seemed
of another world, and yet had plentiful troubles of her own? The curates
she despised for their narrow priggishness? The people in the village of
whom she knew nothing save when sickness, wrong, or death summoned her
to their homes to give help and protection? Her life had given only one
view of the world, and she could not realise that there were others
which she had not seen.
"I am bound to avow," says Charlotte, "that she had scarcely more
practical knowledge of the peasantry among whom she lived than a nun has
of the country people that pass her convent gates. My sister's
disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favoured and
fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church, or to take a
walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. Though her
feeling for the people round her was benevolent, intercourse with them
she never sought, nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced; and
yet she knew them, knew their ways, their language, their family
histories; she could hear of them with interest and talk of them with
detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but with them she rarely
exchanged a word. Hence it ensued that what her mind had gathered of the
real concerning them was too exclusively confined to those tragic and
terrible traits of which, in listening to the secret annals of every
rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress.
Her imagination, which was a spirit more sombre than sunny, more
powerful than sportive, found in such traits materials whence it wrought
creations like Heathcliff, like Earnshaw, like Catharine. Having formed
these beings she did not know what she had done. If the auditors of her
work, when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of
natures so relentless and implacable--of spirits so lost and fallen; if
it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful
scenes banished sleep by night and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis
Bell would wonder what was meant and suspect the complainant of
affectation. Had she but lived, her mind would of itself have grown like
a strong tree--loftier and straighter, wider spreading--and its matured
fruits would have attained a mellower ripening and sunnier bloom; but on
that mind time and experience alone could work, to the influence of
other intellects it was not amenable."[26]
Yet no human being is wholly free, none wholly independent, of
surroundings. And Emily Bronte least of all could claim such immunity.
We can with difficulty just imagine her a prosperous heiress, loving and
loved, high-spirited and even hoydenish; but with her cavalier fantasy
informed by a gracious splendour all her own, we can just imagine Emily
Bronte as Shirley Keeldar, but scarcely Shirley Keeldar writing
'Wuthering Heights.' Emily Bronte away from her moors, her loneliness,
her poverty, her discipline, her companionship with genius, violence and
degradation, would have taken another colour, as hydrangeas grow now
red, now blue, according to the nature of the soil. It was not her lack
of knowledge of the world that made the novel she wrote become
'Wuthering Heights,' not her inexperience, but rather her experience,
limited and perverse, indeed, and specialised by a most singular
temperament, yet close and very real. Her imagination was as much
inspired by the circumstances of her life, as was Anne's when she wrote
the 'Tenant of Wildfell Hall,' or Charlotte's in her masterpiece
'Villette;' but, as in each case the imagination was of a different
quality, experience, acting upon it, produced a distinct and dissimilar
result; a result obtained no less by the contrariety than by the harmony
of circumstance. For our surroundings affect us in two ways; subtly and
permanently, tinging us through and through as wine tinges water, or, by
some violent neighbourhood of antipathetic force, sending us off at a
tangent as far as possible from the antagonistic presence that so
detestably environs us. The fact that Charlotte Bronte knew chiefly
clergymen is largely responsible for 'Shirley,' that satirical eulogy of
the Church and apotheosis of Sunday-school teachers. But Emily, living
in this same clerical evangelistic atmosphere, is revolted, forced to
the other extreme; and, while sheltering her true opinions from herself
under the all-embracing term "Broad Church," we find in her writings no
belief so strong as the belief in the present use and glory of life; no
love so great as her love for earth--earth the mother and grave; no
assertion of immortality, but a deep certainty of rest. There is no note
so often struck in all her work, and struck with such variety of
emphasis, as this: that good for goodness' sake is desirable, evil for
evil's sake detestable, and that for the just and the unjust alike there
is rest in the grave.
This quiet clergyman's daughter, always hearing evil of Dissenters, has
therefore from pure courage and revolted justice become a dissenter
herself. A dissenter in more ways than one. Never was a nature more
sensitive to the stupidities and narrowness of conventional opinion, a
nature more likely to be found in the ranks of the opposition; and with
such a nature indignation is the force that most often looses the gate
of speech. The impulse to reveal wrongs and sufferings as they really
are, is overwhelmingly strong; although the revelation itself be
imperfect. What, then, would this inexperienced Yorkshire parson's
daughter reveal? The unlikeness of life to the authorised pictures of
life; the force of evil, only conquerable by the slow-revolving process
of nature which admits not the eternal duration of the perverse; the
grim and fearful lessons of heredity; the sufficiency of the finite to
the finite, of life to life, with no other reward than the conduct of
life fulfils to him that lives; the all-penetrating kinship of living
things, heather-sprig, singing lark, confident child, relentless tyrant;
and, not least, not least to her already in its shadow, the sure and
universal peace of death.
A strange evangel from such a preacher; but a faith evermore emphasised
and deeper rooted in Emily's mind by her incapacity to acquiesce in the
stiff, pragmatic teaching, the narrow prejudice, of the Calvinists of
Haworth. Yet this very Calvinism influenced her ideas, this doctrine she
so passionately rejected, calling herself a disciple of the tolerant and
thoughtful Frederick Maurice, and writing, in defiance of its flames and
shriekings, the most soothing consolations to mortality that I remember
in our tongue.
Nevertheless, so dual-natured is the force of environment, this
antagonistic faith, repelling her to the extreme rebound of belief, did
not send her out from it before she had assimilated some of its sternest
tenets. From this doctrine of reward and punishment she learned that for
every unchecked evil tendency there is a fearful expiation; though she
placed it not indeed in the flames of hell, but in the perverted
instincts of our own children. Terrible theories of doomed incurable sin
and predestined loss warned her that an evil stock will only beget
contamination: the children of the mad must be liable to madness; the
children of the depraved, bent towards depravity; the seed of the
poison-plant springs up to blast and ruin, only to be overcome by
uprooting and sterilisation, or by the judicious grafting, the patient
training of many years.
Thus prejudiced and evangelical Haworth had prepared the woman who
rejected its Hebraic dogma, to find out for herself the underlying
truths. She accepted them in their full significance. It has been laid
as a blame to her that she nowhere shows any proper abhorrence of the
fiendish and vindictive Heathcliff. She who reveals him remembers the
dubious parentage of that forsaken seaport baby, "Lascar or Gipsy;" she
remembers the Ishmaelitish childhood, too much loved and hated, of the
little interloper whose hand was against every man's hand. Remembering
this, she submits as patiently to his swarthy soul and savage instincts
as to his swarthy skin and "gibberish that nobody could understand."
From thistles you gather no grapes.
No use, she seems to be saying, in waiting for the children of evil
parents to grow, of their own will and unassisted, straight and noble.
The very quality of their will is as inherited as their eyes and hair.
Heathcliff is no fiend or goblin; the untrained doomed child of some
half-savage sailor's holiday, violent and treacherous. And how far shall
we hold the sinner responsible for a nature which is itself the
punishment of some forefather's crime. Even for such there must be rest.
No possibility in the just and reverent mind of Emily Bronte that the
God whom she believed to be the very fount and soul of life could
condemn to everlasting fire the victims of morbid tendencies not chosen
by themselves. No purgatory, and no everlasting flame, is needed to
purify the sins of Heathcliff; his grave on the hillside will grow as
green as any other spot of grass, moor-sheep will find the grass as
sweet, heath and harebells will grow of the same colour on it as over a
baby's grave. For life and sin and punishment end with death to the
dying man; he slips his burden then on to other shoulders, and no
visions mar his rest.
"I wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the
sleepers in that quiet earth." So ends the last page of 'Wuthering
Heights.'
So much for the theories of life and evil that the clash of circumstance
and character struck out from Emily Bronte. It happened, as we know,
that she had occasion to test these theories; and but for that she could
never have written 'Wuthering Heights.' Not that the story, the
conception, would have failed. After all there is nothing more appalling
in the violent history of that upland farm than many a midland manor set
thick in elms, many a wild country-house of Wales or Cornwall could
unfold. Stories more socially painful than the mere brute violence of
the Earnshaws; of madness and treachery, stories of girls entrapped
unwillingly into a lunatic marriage that the estate might have an heir;
legends of fearful violence, of outcast children, dishonoured wives,
horrible and persistent evil. Who, in the secret places of his memory,
stores not up such haunting gossip? And Emily, familiar with all the