Emily Brontë
wild stories of Haworth for a century back, and nursed on grisly Irish
horrors, tales of 1798, tales of oppression and misery, Emily, with all
this eerie lore at her finger-ends, would have the less difficulty in
combining and working the separate motives into a consistent whole, that
she did not know the real people whose histories she knew by heart. No
memory of individual manner, dominance or preference for an individual
type, caught and disarranged her theories, her conception being the
completer from her ignorance. This much her strong reason and her
creative power enabled her to effect. But this is not all.
This is the plot; but to make a character speak, act, rave, love, live,
die, through a whole lifetime of events, even as the readers feel
convinced he must have acted, must have lived and died, this demands at
least so much experience of a somewhat similar nature as may serve for a
base to one's imagination, a reserve of certainty and reassurance on
which to draw in times of perplexity and doubt. Branwell, who sat to
Anne sorrily enough for the portrait of Henry Huntingdon, served his
sister Emily, not indeed as a model, a thing to copy, but as a chart of
proportions by which to measure, and to which to refer, for correct
investiture, the inspired idea. Mr. Wemyss Reid (whose great knowledge
of the Bronte history and still greater kindness in admitting me to his
advantages as much as might be, I cannot sufficiently acknowledge)--this
capable critic perceives a _bona fide_ resemblance between the character
of Heathcliff and the character of Branwell Bronte as he appeared to his
sister Emily. So much, bearing in mind the verse concerning the leveret,
I own I cannot see. Branwell seems to me more nearly akin to
Heathcliff's miserable son than to Heathcliff. But that, in depicting
Heathcliff's outrageous thwarted love for Catharine, Emily did draw upon
her experience of her brother's suffering, this extract from an
unpublished lecture of Mr. Reid's will sufficiently reveal[27]:--
"It was in the enforced companionship of this lost and
degraded man that Emily received, I am sure, many of the
impressions which were subsequently conveyed to the pages
of her book. Has it not been said over and over again by
critics of every kind that 'Wuthering Heights' reads like
the dream of an opium-eater? And here we find that during
the whole time of the writing of the book an habitual and
avowed opium-eater was at Emily's elbow. I said that perhaps
the most striking part of 'Wuthering Heights' was that which
deals with the relations of Heathcliff and Catharine after
she had become the wife of another. Whole pages of the story
are filled with the ravings and ragings of the villain
against the man whose life stands between him and the woman
he loves. Similar ravings are to be found in all the letters
of Branwell Bronte written at this period of his career; and
we may be sure that similar ravings were always on his lips
as, moody and more than half mad, he wandered about the
rooms of the parsonage at Haworth. Nay, I have found some
striking verbal coincidences between Branwell's own language
and passages in 'Wuthering Heights.' In one of his own
letters there are these words in reference to the object of
his passion: 'My own life without her will be hell. What can
the so-called love of her wretched sickly husband be to her
compared with mine?' Now, turn to 'Wuthering Heights' and
you will read these words: 'Two words would comprehend my
future--death and hell; existence after losing her would be
hell. Yet I was a fool to fancy for a moment that she valued
Edgar Linton's attachment more than mine. If he loved with
all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love in eighty
years as much as I could in a day.'"
So much share in 'Wuthering Heights' Branwell certainly had. He was a
page of the book in which his sister studied; he served, as to an
artist's temperament all things unconsciously serve, for the rough block
of granite out of which the work is hewn, and, even while with
difficulty enduring his vices, Emily undoubtedly learned from them those
darker secrets of humanity necessary to her tragic incantation. They
served her, those dreaded, passionate outbreaks of her brother's, even
as the moors she loved, the fancy she courted, served her. Strange
divining wand of genius, that conjures gold out of the miriest earth of
common life; strange and terrible faculty laying up its stores and
half-mechanically drawing its own profit out of our slightest or most
miserable experiences, noting the gesture with which the mother hears of
her son's ruin, catching the faint varying shadow that the white
wind-shaken window-blind sends over the dead face by which we watch,
drawing its life from a thousand deaths, humiliations, losses, with a
hand in our sharpest joys and bitterest sorrows; this faculty was Emily
Bronte's, and drew its profit from her brother's shame.
Here ended Branwell's share in producing 'Wuthering Heights.' But it is
not well to ignore his claim to its entire authorship; for in the
contemptuous silence of those who know their falsity, such slanders live
and thrive like unclean insects under fallen stones. The vain boast of
an unprincipled dreamer, half-mad with opium, half-drunk with gin,
meaning nothing but the desire to be admired at any cost, has been given
too much prominence by those lovers of sensation who prefer any
startling lie to an old truth. Their ranks have been increased by the
number of those who, ignorant of the true circumstances of Emily's life,
found it impossible that an inexperienced girl could portray so much
violence and such morbid passion. On the contrary, given these
circumstances, none but a personally inexperienced girl could have
treated the subject with the absolute and sexless purity which we find
in 'Wuthering Heights.' How _infecte_, commonplace, and ignominious
would Branwell, relying on his own recollections, have made the thwarted
passion of a violent adventurer for a woman whose sickly husband both
despise! That purity as of polished steel, as cold and harder than ice,
that freedom in dealing with love and hate, as audacious as an infant's
love for the bright flame of fire, could only belong to one whose
intensity of genius was rivalled by the narrowness of her experience--an
experience limited not only by circumstances, but by a nature impervious
to any fierier sentiment than the natural love of home and her own
people, beginning before remembrance and as unconscious as breathing.
The critic, having Emily's poems and the few remaining verses and
letters of Branwell, cannot doubt the incapacity of that unnerved and
garrulous prodigal to produce a work of art so sustained, passionate,
and remote. For in no respect does the terse, fiery, imaginative style
of Emily resemble the weak, disconnected, now vulgar, now pretty
mannerisms of Branwell. There is, indeed, scant evidence that the writer
of Emily's poems could produce 'Wuthering Heights;' but there is, at any
rate, the impossibility that her work could be void of fire,
concentration, and wild fancy. As great an impossibility as that
vulgarity and tawdriness should not obtrude their ugly heads here and
there from under Branwell's finest phrases. And since there is no single
vulgar, trite, or Micawber-like effusion throughout 'Wuthering Heights;'
and since Heathcliff's passion is never once treated in the despicable
would-be worldly fashion in which Branwell describes his own sensations,
and since at the time that 'Wuthering Heights' was written he was
manifestly, and by his own confession, too physically prostrate for any
literary effort, we may conclude that Branwell did not write the book.
On the other side we have not only the literary evidence of the similar
qualities in 'Wuthering Heights' and in the poems of Ellis Bell, but the
express and reiterated assurance of Charlotte Bronte, who never even
dreamed, it would seem, that it could be supposed her brother wrote the
book; the testimony of the publishers who made their treaty with Ellis
Bell; of the servant Martha who saw her mistress writing it; and--most
convincing of all to those who have appreciated the character of Emily
Bronte--the impossibility that a spirit so upright and so careless of
fame should commit a miserable fraud to obtain it.
Indeed, so baseless is this despicable rumour that to attack it seems
absurd, only sometimes it is wise to risk an absurdity. Puny insects,
left too long unhurt, may turn out dangerous enemies irretrievably
damaging the fertile vine on which they fastened in the security of
their minuteness.
To the three favouring circumstances of Emily's masterpiece, which we
have already mentioned--the neighbourhood of her home, the character of
her disposition, the quality of her experience--a fourth must be added,
inferior in degree, and yet not absolutely unimportant. This is her
acquaintance with German literature, and especially with Hoffmann's
tales. In Emily Bronte's day, Romance and Germany had one significance;
it is true that in London and in prose the German influence was dying
out, but in distant Haworth, and in the writings of such poets as Emily
would read, in Scott, in Southey, most of all in Coleridge, with whose
poems her own have so distinct an affinity, it is still predominant. Of
the materialistic influence of Italy, of atheist Shelley, Byron with
his audacity and realism, sensuous Keats, she would have little
experience in her remote parsonage. And, had she known them, they would
probably have made no impression on a nature only susceptible to kindred
influences. Thackeray, her sister's hero, might have never lived for all
the trace of him we find in Emily's writings; never is there any single
allusion in her work to the most eventful period of her life, that sight
of the lusher fields and taller elms of middle England; that glimpse of
hurrying vast London; that night on the river, the sun slipping behind
the masts, doubly large through the mist and smoke in which the houses,
bridges, ships are all spectral and dim. No hint of this, nor of the
sea, nor of Belgium, with its quaint foreign life; nor yet of that
French style and method so carefully impressed upon her by Monsieur
Heger, and which so decidedly moulded her elder sister's art. But in the
midst of her business at Haworth we catch a glimpse of her reading her
German book at night, as she sits on the hearthrug with her arm round
Keeper's neck; glancing at it in the kitchen, where she is making bread,
with the volume of her choice propped up before her; and by the style of
the novel jotted down in the rough, almost simultaneously with her
reading, we know that to her the study of German was not--like French
and music--the mere necessary acquirement of a governess, but an
influence that entered her mind and helped to shape the fashion of her
thoughts.
So much preface is necessary to explain, not the genius of Emily Bronte,
but the conditions of that genius--there is no use saying more. The aim
of my writing has been missed if the circumstances of her career are not
present in the mind of my reader. It is too late at this point to do
more than enumerate them, and briefly point to their significance. Such
criticism, in face of the living work, is all too much like glancing in
a green and beautiful country at a map, from which one may, indeed,
ascertain the roads that lead to it and away, and the size of the place
in relation to surrounding districts, but which can give no recognisable
likeness of the scene which lies all round us, with its fresh life