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Title: The Key to the Bront� Works The Key to Charlotte Bront�'s 'Wuthering Heights,' 'Jane Eyre,' and her other works.
Author: John Malham-Dembleby
Release Date: September 3, 2012 [EBook #40655]
Language: English
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THE KEY TO THE BRONT� WORKS.
THE KEY TO THE BRONT� WORKS
THE KEY TO CHARLOTTE BRONT�'S "WUTHERING HEIGHTS," "JANE EYRE," AND HER OTHER WORKS.
SHOWING THE METHOD OF THEIR CONSTRUCTION AND THEIR RELATION TO THE FACTS AND PEOPLE OF HER LIFE.
BY JOHN MALHAM-DEMBLEBY.
London and Felling-on-Tyne: THE WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING CO., LTD. NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE. 1911.
All Rights Reserved.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. OUTLINE OF CHARLOTTE BRONT�'S LIFE 13
II. ORIGIN OF THE CANDLE-BEARING BEDSIDE VISITANT AND THE UNCOUTH SERVANT IN "WUTHERING HEIGHTS" AND "JANE EYRE" 20
III. ORIGIN OF THE FOUNDLING HEATHCLIFFE AND HIS NAME IN "WUTHERING HEIGHTS"--ORIGIN OF THE INSANE LADY AND THE WHITE VEIL SCENE IN "JANE EYRE" 33
IV. A RAINY DAY IN CHARLOTTE BRONT�'S CHILDHOOD: THE OPENING INCIDENT IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF THE HEROINES OF "WUTHERING HEIGHTS" AND "JANE EYRE" 37
V. CHARLOTTE BRONT�'S FRIEND, TABITHA AYKROYD, THE BRONT�S' SERVANT, AS MRS. DEAN OF "WUTHERING HEIGHTS," AND AS BESSIE AND HANNAH OF "JANE EYRE" 43
VI. CHARLOTTE BRONT�'S CHILD APPARITION IN "THE PROFESSOR," "WUTHERING HEIGHTS," AND "JANE EYRE" 52
VII. THE ORIGINALS OF GIMMERTON, GIMMERDEN, GIMMERTON KIRK AND CHAPEL, PENISTON CRAGS, THE FAIRY CAVE, ETC., IN "WUTHERING HEIGHTS," AND OF THE FAIRY CAVE AND THE FAIRY JANET IN "JANE EYRE" 57
VIII. THE RIVERS OR BRONT� FAMILY IN "JANE EYRE" 69
IX. ORIGIN OF THE YORKSHIRE ELEMENT IN CHARLOTTE BRONT�'S HUNSDEN OF "THE PROFESSOR"; HEATHCLIFFE OF "WUTHERING HEIGHTS"; ROCHESTER OF "JANE EYRE"; AND YORKE OF "SHIRLEY" 83
X. HEATHCLIFFE OF "WUTHERING HEIGHTS" AND ROCHESTER OF "JANE EYRE" ONE AND THE SAME 90
XI. CATHERINE AND HEATHCLIFFE OF "WUTHERING HEIGHTS" AS JANE AND ROCHESTER OF "JANE EYRE" 93
XII. EUG�NE SUE AND CHARLOTTE BRONT�'S BRUSSELS LIFE. I. MDLLE. LAGRANGE AND HER MANUSCRIPT "CATHERINE BELL, THE ORPHAN" 104
XIII. EUG�NE SUE AND CHARLOTTE BRONT�'S BRUSSELS LIFE. II. ACCUSATIONS AND PROTESTATIONS! 120
XIV. THE RECOIL, I. 130
XV. THE RECOIL, II. 143
XVI. THE BRONT� POEMS 156
APPENDIX.
MINOR IDENTIFICATIONS OF PERSONS AND PLACES IN THE BRONT� WORKS 159
THE H�GER PORTRAIT OF CHARLOTTE BRONT� IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY 162
INDEX 169
LIST OF SUBSCRIBERS TO THE FIRST EDITION 179
PREFACE.
The Key to the Bront� Works is the absolutely necessary companion volume to Charlotte Bront�'s Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Shirley, The Professor, and Villette. Without it the reader cannot know the real Currer Bell and her people, or see her works as they were to herself. Great indeed and continuous has been the task of writing this volume: a comprehension of my duty to law and literature, to posterity and to Charlotte Bront�, set aside any other consideration. It could be no compliment to my learned and distinguished subscribers to assume importance would attach to The Key to the Bront� Works were the volume a mere skimming of extant Bront� biography, albeit that has its province of interest. The Key to the Bront� Works, I repeat, is the only book which shows us the life and works of Charlotte Bront� as intimately known to herself. Herein is my task accomplished; herewith is my reward. To quote my words from a private correspondence with Sir Charles Holroyd, Kt., Director of the National Gallery, London:--
"After her return from Brussels in 1844, Charlotte Bront� conceived the idea of perpetuating the drama of her life. Again and again, true artist as she was, she cleared her presentations, till finally the world had those great works which stand as a signal testimony to the high value of the true artist, and as testimony to the divine origin of real inspiration. And now priest, statesman, writer--whatsoever a man may be, he will discover in the works of Charlotte Bront� salutary instruction, and at the same time will perceive with thrilling admiration the greatness of Art when she is at one with Genius. As I pen these lines to you, Sir Charles, I am reminded of the evanescence of the halo of romance round so many historic characters and personages when sober history speaks apart; but Charlotte Bront� we find to be a greater luminary the closer we approach her."
The utmost possible interest attaches to my sensational evidence, now first showing Charlotte Bront� to be the author and heroine of Wuthering Heights, a book many have declared "the finest work of genius written by a woman," and some look upon as "one of the greatest novels in our or any other literature." In view of my evidence it will be impossible hereafter to convince the world that Charlotte Bront� did not write Wuthering Heights. The Key to the Bront� Works in his hands, every reader is an expert upon the subject. By resort to each indexed reference to Charlotte Bront�'s methods I have discovered, and named Methods I. and II., sensational ratification of all I say hereon will be found.
It will presently seem incredible the chief argument hitherto advanced against my assertion that Charlotte Bront� wrote Wuthering Heights was that Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are "totally dissimilar in style, thought, etc.," for my evidence is proof absolute to the opposite. A recent writer on the Bront�s[1] says Wuthering Heights contains nothing whatsoever biographically, or in any way, suggestive of Emily Bront� and her personality, and admits upon the other hand that the characteristic of Charlotte Bront�'s writing is her full and intimate self-revelation of the incidents of her own life. Nothing can recall these words. They are a frank, or an ingenuous, statement of irrefutable fact; and though the writer did not journey to the logical conclusion, it is well he is associated with this fundamental admission. The same significant truth is voiced still more recently by another writer, who says: "Wuthering Heights reveals nothing of Emily Bront�. Not one of the characters thought or felt as did the quiet, retiring" Emily[2].
Much detached yet valuable and interesting evidence I have omitted for the sake of clearness, but it has aided me in regard to the final discoveries I now present, and is ready further to substantiate my conclusions. One of these detached pieces of evidence shows that the younger Catherine and Hareton Earnshaw--the two lovers who at the close of Wuthering Heights become teacher and pupil--latterly were to Charlotte Bront� herself and M. H�ger. Apparently she did not wish to end Wuthering Heights without a picture of reconciled relations between two characters who could present a phase of M. H�ger and herself. The teacher and pupil relations between Miss Bront� and M. H�ger were most dear and gladdening to her memory. We have a glimpse of them in Villette, Shirley, and in The Professor, Chapter XIX., where Crimsworth is reading a book with Francis Evans Henri, whom he is teaching to read and pronounce English. These two characters represent M. H�ger and Charlotte Bront�; and Miss Bront� taught M. H�ger to read and pronounce English out of her own favourite old books, "consecrated to her by other associations," to quote her own words in Wuthering Heights, Chapter XXXI., though often in The Professor she alternates the position of the characters by an interchange of the sexes, a method of Miss Bront� I have discovered and termed her Method I. Let the reader peruse carefully the scene in The Professor in the light of my reference to Eug�ne Sue and Charlotte Bront�'s old copy in English of The Imitation of Christ at Brussels, and in the light of the "reading and pronouncing" scenes in Chapters XXX., XXXI., and XXXII., of Wuthering Heights;
also:--
Charlotte Bront� in a letter:-- Wuthering Heights, Chapter XXXI.:--
"If you could see and hear "I heard him trying to read to the efforts I make to teach himself, and pretty blunders he [M. H�ger] to pronounce ... and makes!... it was extremely funny [his] unavailing attempts to ... still, he has no right to imitate you would laugh to all appropriate what is mine, and eternity."--Mrs. GASKELL'S make it ridiculous to me with Life of Charlotte Bront�. his vile mistakes and mispronunciations! Those books, both prose and verse, are consecrated to me by other associations, and I hate to have them debased and profaned in his mouth."
Note how in The Professor and Wuthering Heights the male lover is unable to devote himself to the reading lesson because of the distraction of the heroine's interesting physiognomy. In this connection we may glance at the following little parallel of the hen-killing figure, with which, like the foregoing, I do not deal in the course of The Key to the Bront� Works. Again we perceive Charlotte Bront�'s Method I.:--
Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre.
Chapter XXX. Chapter XIV.
Hareton contented himself with Mr. Rochester had been looking ... looking at Catherine instead ... at the fire, and I had been of the book. She continued looking at him, when, turning reading. His attention became suddenly, he caught my gaze ... quite centred in the study fastened on his physiognomy. of her ... curls ... and perhaps not quite aware to what he did "You examine me, Miss Eyre," ... he put out his hand and said he; "do you think me stroked one curl as gently as if handsome?" it were a bird. He might have stuck a knife into her neck, she "No sir." started with such a taking.... "And so under the pretence of stroking and soothing me into placidity, you stick a sly penknife under my ear."
Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre were of course M. H�ger and Miss Bront�. It is indeed important and interesting to find at the old farmstead of Wuthering Heights scenes reminiscent of the intimately pedagogic relations that existed between Charlotte Bront� and M. H�ger of the school at Brussels.
Discovering Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are practically as the same book, I have disclosed their relationship in parallel columns--the most satisfactory and conclusive evidence in the world. Herewith we see both volumes agree in scenes and chapters virtually word for word, and from beginning to end. Both works we now find are one in origin, each containing not less than four identical characters portrayed by Charlotte Bront� from her own life, she herself being the original of the heroine in each book, and her friend M. H�ger in the main the original of the hero thereof. Charlotte Bront�'s brother, Branwell Bront�, in agreement with her estimate of him as a wreck of selfishness, is the unhappy fool of both books; while her life-long companion, Tabitha Aykroyd, who was to her as nurse, mother, and friend, is therein the indispensable domestic servant and motherly good woman of the humble class.
I will not occupy my preface with an enumeration of the many important and interesting Bront� discoveries I have been enabled to make and present herewith in The Key to the Bront� Works. I may briefly indicate my chief sensational discoveries:--The discovery of the origin of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre; the discovery that in Jane Eyre Charlotte Bront� immortalized not only herself and M. H�ger, but also her father, the Rev. Patrick Bront�, her brother, four sisters, her aunt and a cousin, and Tabitha Aykroyd, the Bront� servant or housekeeper; the discovery first revealing the history of Charlotte Bront�'s life at Brussels and friendship with M. H�ger, the original of her chief heroes; and the discovery of the most sensational fact that Charlotte Bront� and not Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, and was herself the original of the heroine and M. H�ger that of the hero, as I have mentioned.
My warm thanks are due to Mr. Harold Hodge, who commissioned me to write my article "The Key to Jane Eyre" for The Saturday Review;[3] and to Mr. W. L. Courtney, M.A., LL.D., the editor of The Fortnightly Review, who commissioned me to write my article "The Lifting of the Bront� Veil: A New Study of the Bront� Family."[4] Mr. Courtney's words of encouragement--those of a true gentleman and an eminent literary scholar and author--have made bright to me the accomplishment of this work.
I thank Lady Ritchie--the gifted author-daughter of Thackeray the writer of Vanity Fair to whom Charlotte Bront� in her second edition dedicated Jane Eyre--for her kind permission to use in The Key to the Bront� Works what her ladyship had written me privately in regard to her sitting at dinner beside Charlotte Bront� on June 12th, 1850, with Mr. Thackeray and Mr. George Smith the publisher, when Miss Bront� was wearing a light green dress, an incident that has relation to the green dress in the interesting H�ger portrait of Charlotte Bront� drawn in 1850, now the property of the nation and in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
I desire to express my gratitude to Miss Catherine Galbraith Welch, who introduced an outline of my Bront� discoveries to the readers of The New York Times Saturday Review of Books. I thank The Spectator, The Outlook, and other organs for their open acknowledgment of the fact that I have made a discovery at last throwing light upon Charlotte Bront�'s Brussels experiences and her relations with the H�gers at Brussels. And I wish also to thank the anonymous and scholarly writer who penned the long and careful article in The Dundee Advertiser under the heading "The Original of Jane Eyre," containing an encouraging appreciation of the importance of my discovery I dealt with in my article "The Key to Jane Eyre" in The Saturday Review.
I would like to give a pressure of the hand to my subscribers for the first edition of The Key to the Bront� Works. Your kind letters to me and your active interest in The Key to the Bront� Works will ever dwell among my pleasant memories. One I grieve will never see on earth these pages--the late Most Honourable Marquis of Ripon, K.G., who numbered with my earliest subscribers.
The readers of The Key to the Bront� Works will love Charlotte Bront� more and know her better than ever they have loved or known her in the past. They will see her books are rich with new-found treasures, and will recognize her to be a world's writer--a character of signal eminence, one of the most illustrious of women.
Truth will out, and facts have their appointed day of revelation; thus I cannot help it that more than sixty years of writing on the Bront�s is placed out of date by my discoveries.
JOHN MALHAM-DEMBLEBY.
THE KEY TO THE BRONT� WORKS.
CHAPTER I.
OUTLINE OF CHARLOTTE BRONT�'S LIFE.
St. Michael the Prince of Messengers--to him was dedicated the little church on the hill at Haworth, in the Parish of Bradford, Yorkshire, whose living gave sustenance to the family of the restless, ambitious son of Erin, Patrick Bront�.[5] Is it for nothing that a spiritual banner is raised by man and appeal made for the beneficent influence of a conception of definite personal character? Within this sacred circumscription came to be written the works of Charlotte Bront�, and herefrom the words of a Messenger went out to the uttermost parts of the world.
The mystery of impulse! The servant is not master, nor is the messenger he that sendeth. Behind the lives of the great was ever an influence to do: blind may be the early groping of Genius, stumbling her feet on the rugged road of a darksome journey begun in the veiling mist of life's dawn, but onward and ever onward is she impelled to the journey's end. Ere Night blots out Genius her Message has accomplished. Glancing back to the literary strivings of Charlotte Bront�'s childhood, and upon those quaint little efforts [Greek: peri t�n apist�n], which her young brother and sisters sought to emulate,[6] we see her responsive to some inward prompting that told her she must write.
Born on April 21st, 1816, at Thornton, near Bradford, during her father's curacy of that parish, Charlotte Bront� was one of a family of six, whose mother died in 1821. The story of her literary beginnings shows them to have been of the kind known to many aspirants. There were the rebuffs of editors and of at least one famous author; and, in addition, was the divertisement of her life as teacher and governess. Her correspondence is voluminous. It was ever written down to the intended recipient. As to the somewhat commonplace Ellen Nussey, whose friendship, begun at Roe Head, near Dewsbury, the school of a Miss Margaret Wooler, lasted to the end: she invariably discussed the domestic and social happenings of the acquaintances known by or of interest to them. Thus her letters[7] are commonly circumstantial and seldom soared beyond the capacity, or exceeded the limits of the departmental interests, of those for whom they were written.
This was primarily the result of Charlotte Bront�'s nervous perception of character and recognition of the want of a truly psychical reciprocity with her friends. She tells us that of all living beings only "Rochester" understood her, and her letters to M. H�ger, of her Brussels school--the original of this character--were not preserved. In the day of high fame, when she corresponded with literary folk, she felt herself as on parade, rushed to make opinions, as say, on Miss Austen, whom she criticized somewhat adversely. Obviously she hated to be at the service of bookish letter-writers. Erratically she responded to their promptings, trying not to be ruffled, but she could not reveal her heart. From these letters, and the epistles of the class I have previously mentioned, Mrs. Gaskell in the main wrote her famous biography. The Charlotte Bront� known of the recipients of this correspondence her biographer presented, backed with the necessary local colour. She had enjoyed in the days of Miss Bront�'s popularity a short acquaintance with her; and when, at the death of Currer Bell, Mr. Bront� requested her to write his daughter's "life," she was eminently fitted to give the world Charlotte Bront� as known by her acquaintances.
But of the intimate Charlotte Bront�, and the origin of the Bront� works, the method of their construction, and their relation to the facts and people of her life, Mrs. Gaskell could tell us virtually nothing. Neither could she, nor any succeeding biographer, throw light upon Miss Bront�'s Brussels life, or upon the subject of her friendship with M. H�ger, who is discovered by internal evidence to be the original of Currer Bell's chief heroes. Charlotte Bront�'s was an intensely reserved nature. She built to herself a universe which she peopled in secret. Her real life she lived out again in her books. Therein appeared the real Charlotte Bront�, and see we her life and its people as known to herself. Whether she thought the secrets of her works would be revealed I cannot tell; but as the traveller who in far distant lands inscribes on some lonely rock the relation of his experience, conscious that a future explorer will read the tale, so does Genius, with the faith which gave her being, leave her message in the hope of an early day of revelation, and in the secure knowledge of the final penetration of truth.
We now, sixty years after, find by aid of the many discoveries I have made and present my readers in the pages of this, The Key to the Bront� Works, that Charlotte Bront�, penning in her connective works the story of her life, gave us the spectacle of a living drama wherein she was herself a leading actor. Herein we see the imperfections and shortcomings of human nature, and Charlotte Bront� herself is shown standing in the slippery places. Before our eyes flits the procession of the people who moved about her, and the air is filled with the atmosphere through which her genius saw the world. In this new light of revelation we perceive her great message is--the Martyrdom of Virtue. A more poignant message I know not! And Charlotte Bront� was martyr in this moving drama--nay, I believe there also was another. Spending two years at a Brussels pensionnat she gained the friendship of Monsieur H�ger, a devout Roman Catholic and a man of intellect who, himself once a teacher at the establishment, as was M. Pelet in The Professor at a similar school, came to marry the mistress. Miss Bront� went twice to Brussels, on the first occasion being accompanied by her sister Emily. Finally, Charlotte Bront� left Brussels abruptly on account, it has been said, of the harsh attitude of Madame H�ger, who even forbade her husband to correspond with Miss Bront�. Concerning this period and the incidents associated therewith, I have been enabled to lift the veil. We have thus, for the first time, external evidence that shows Charlotte Bront�, at Brussels, endured the greatest ordeal through which it is the lot of a woman to pass. We see how she and M. H�ger emerged triumphantly from dangerous temptation, and how they were aided, the one by her Christian upbringing, the other by the influence of his Church.
It was in January 1844 when Charlotte Bront� returned finally from Brussels; and she and her sisters printed a circular in connection with a project of starting a private school at Haworth, but no progress was made. Charlotte Bront�'s life at this period will be better understood by a reference to the chapters on "The Recoil" in this work--it was her darkest time: when the human in her cried out--as it has, alas! in so many at the bitter hour. She rebelled. Not violently; but by reproach. Only her own pen can tell how cruelly she suffered mentally. She had done no wrong and had resisted a great evil, but the recoil found her weak: it was the martyrdom of virtue. She was suffering for the sake of right; and that she cried aloud as in an agony showed her suffering was intense. The storm left the world Wuthering Heights. The tone of ribald caricature in dealing with the Pharisee Joseph; the impatient, vindictive pilloring of her own nervous and physical infirmities as "Catherine"; the ruthless baring of the flesh to show "Heathcliffe's" heart was stone; the wilful plunging into an atmosphere of harsh levity, crude animalism, and repulsive hypochondria, all contributed to a sombre and powerful work of art grand in its perpetration, standing alone in solemn majesty like the black rack that stretches low athwart a clear sky--the rearward of the storm. But it bears the story of a sad Night, and Charlotte Bront�'s subsequent works were written in repentance: for in Heathcliffe and Catherine of Wuthering Heights she had portrayed M. H�ger and herself.
In this dark hour of Charlotte Bront�'s life, Emily Bront�, to whom she afterwards gave Wuthering Heights, was writing, on July 30th, 1845,[8] that she, Emily, was "contented and undesponding," and was engaged upon and intended to continue some puerile compositions called The Gondal Chronicles, which she spoke of as "delighting" her and Anne. She and Anne had been engaged upon this effort three and a half years, and it was yet unfinished.
While making comparison between Emily's and Charlotte's standpoint at this time--and Charlotte obtained for herself the names of Currer Bell from Montagu's book which, as I show, contained the "plot," etc., of Wuthering Heights, for her own use in the Bront� poem publishing project of 1845-46--it is most important to note that but some months after Emily's diary entry Wuthering Heights was offered by Charlotte to Messrs. Aylott and Jones, with The Professor and Agnes Grey--on April 6th, 1846. The literal evidence of The Key to the Bront� Works does not require that we ask by what miracle the "contented" Emily Bront�, who had collaborated three and a half years with Anne on The Gondal Chronicles, and declared an intention at the end of July 1845 to "stick firmly" to their composition, could come, in addition to preparing her poems for the press, to begin and to finish Wuthering Heights by or before April 6th, 1846.[9]
After Charlotte Bront�'s return from Brussels the degeneracy of her only brother, Patrick Branwell Bront�, a young man ambitious, but not successful, as an artist, made him an object of her disgust and antipathy, and we find she portrayed him unflinchingly as Hindley Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights, and again as John Reed of Jane Eyre. Emily, we have been told, liked her brother, though an attempt was made somewhat recently to dissipate the tradition.[10] But Charlotte, after the deaths of her elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, the eldest of the family, obviously was piqued from childhood by the advantage Branwell's sex gave him over her seniority, more especially as he seems to have been brutal to her:--See "A Rainy Day in Charlotte Bront�'s Childhood," in The Key to the Bront� Works.
It may be observed Charlotte Bront� went to three schools, and that each had a remarkable influence upon her life and literature. The first was the Clergy Daughters' School in the Kendal locality, to which her sisters Maria, Elizabeth, and Emily also went upon the death of the ailing Mrs. Bront� at Haworth. The second was Miss Wooler's school already mentioned, and the third the Brussels pensionnat. The fact that Jane Eyre virtually opens with the Clergy Daughters' School incidents--incidents drawn from her child-memory regarding the temporary mismanagement of an establishment which subsequently has proved a most useful foundation--shows she began Jane Eyre with the utmost possible fidelity to truth in so far as regarded herself and her associations. The story of how this famous work was sent in 1847 to a firm of publishers who had just declined her novel The Professor is well known history, as is the relation of the subsequent success of the book and the elevation of Charlotte Bront� to the highest recognition.
Wuthering Heights had been published as Ellis Bell's work, a nom de guerre that also had appeared over Emily Bront�'s poems. It was issued under the condition that the next book by its author went to the same publisher, a Mr. Newby, which, of course, made impossible thereafter Charlotte Bront�'s acknowledging her authorship of this work, as the next book by the author of Wuthering Heights, her Jane Eyre, was published by another house. But there are evidences in Shirley that despite her nervous apprehensions, and her letters show she was very much afraid of this Mr. Newby, who afterwards asserted she wrote Wuthering Heights, she therein carefully placed significations of her authorship of Wuthering Heights.
Villette was published in January 1853, and in the June of 1854 Currer Bell married her father's curate, the Rev. A. B. Nicholls, whom she previously had refused. She married him, it may be, as a final immolation of herself on the altar of Right and Duty. Her married life was but for some few months--it was so short we yet call her Charlotte Bront�. Her father outlived her by six years. The last survivor of the young Bront�s, she died in March 1855, within a month of old Tabitha Aykroyd, her best loved woman friend and companion apart from her own kinsfolk. Charlotte Bront�, with other members of her family, rests in the grey fabric which is the modern representative of that early described as the church of St. Michael the Archangel de Haworth. Her message is yet with us; the tablets of her life she has bequeathed to posterity, and the key to open the way to their repository is now in our hands. Her genius has shown the price of right-doing and the grim and dangerous valley through which Virtue must go ere break of Day.
CHAPTER II.
THE ORIGIN OF THE CANDLE-BEARING BEDSIDE VISITANT AND THE UNCOUTH SERVANT IN "WUTHERING HEIGHTS" AND "JANE EYRE."
My evidence shows that between 1837 and 1847 Charlotte Bront� was perusing very attentively a little volume entitled Gleanings in Craven, or the Tourist's Guide, by one Frederic Montagu of Lincoln's Inn, son of Basil Montagu, second (natural) son of John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, whose ancestor brought Charles II. over from Holland on the Restoration in 1660 and therefor received his earldom.[11] The book, which had never been associated by any person with the name or works of Charlotte Bront� till I wrote my article, "The Key to Jane Eyre," upon it for The Saturday Review, was in the form of "Six letters to a friend in India," addressed as, "My dear Howard ... now at Bombay," and was dedicated by special permission to the Duke of Devonshire, a fact not mentioned save in the early editions. It was printed at Briggate, Leeds, by A. Pickard, and published at Skipton-in-Craven in 1838. Messrs. Simpkin, Marshall & Co. were the London publishers.
Frederick Montagu was a gentleman travelling in Yorkshire for his health's sake it seems, and it occurred to him to relate in epistolary form the story of his adventures. He had read the local writers, but it is most clear Charlotte Bront� was particularly influenced in the construction of her great masterpieces, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, by his purely personal contributions. It was not only as a gleaner of local hearsay that Montagu wrote the long panegyric upon Miss Currer which obviously resulted in Charlotte Bront�'s choosing the name, but as one whose attention had been drawn to her literary eminence. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, who in his Reminiscences of a Literary Life (1836) spoke so good a word for Basil Montagu, Frederic's father,[12] under whom he had studied for the bar, also devoted in those Reminiscences many pages to Miss Currer and Eshton Hall. Thus we read in Montagu's Gleanings in Craven:--
And now as to literature ... Miss Currer is the head of all the female bibliopolists (sic) in Europe, the library of Eshton Hall fully bearing out this truth.... In taking my leave of Eshton Hall, there is a subject upon which I must say a word: it is only the repetition of the echo I have heard about Eshton.... There was one name connected by every person with worth and excellence--one who in the continual performance of charity, like a pure but imbedded stream, silently pursues her kind course, nourishing all within her sweet influence:--I believe it may be truly said no person is more deservedly loved and respected than Miss Currer.
As to "Bell," which like "Currer," came to be chosen by Charlotte Bront� from Montagu's book for her pen-name in the poem publishing project of autumn 1845--only some months before Wuthering Heights was supposed to have been written--Montagu says:--
Kirkby-Lonsdale is a neat, stone-built town, and has a free Grammar School.... It was at this school that the celebrated lawyer, and one of his late Majesty's Counsels, the late John Bell, Esq., received his education.
And three lines before this Montagu has described the views of the Lune, "and the prospect from the churchyard, taking in Casterton Hall."[13] This is the very background of the early chapters of Jane Eyre. Indeed, Casterton Hall was the original of Brocklehurst Hall in Jane Eyre, and here resided the Rev. W. Carus-Wilson, the original of Mr. Brocklehurst, "the black marble clergyman" of the school at Lowood; while Kirkby-Lonsdale was the original of Lowton of Jane Eyre. These facts compel us to perceive that Charlotte Bront� would naturally be led by Montagu's words, to recall she too as regards her education had been associated with the locality mentioned. These references seem to have made Currer Bell relate in Jane Eyre her experiences in that district. Neither Miss Bront� nor Mrs. Gaskell, her biographer, gave any information as to the origin of the "Currer" and "Bell" of Currer Bell, but it is known the "Bell" was not chosen from the name of the Rev. A. Bell Nicholls whom she afterwards married.[14]
A further personal contribution by Montagu, one he based on gossip rather than on tradition, was the story of a foundling who, he says, was discovered by a shepherd on a rocky elevation. This I find Charlotte Bront� evolved into "a cuckoo story." The circumstance that this male child was found on the craggy summit of a hill may have dictated to her the name of the foundling Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights.
I moreover find that, influenced by Montagu's quaint descriptions of the wild and remote neighbourhood, Charlotte Bront� made Malham and the valley of Malham the background of her story, Wuthering Heights. With Malham, Montagu associated the names of Linton and Airton (Hareton); the Fairy Cave, the Crags, glens, mists; a grey old church in the valley, the "Kirk" by Malham, Kirkby Malham Church, which Charlotte Bront� calls in Wuthering Heights Gimmerton Kirk; a rapid stream and a Methodist chapel. And he draws attention to Malham, being at the foot of a range of steep mountains--"the Heights," and having an annual sheep fair, when over one hundred thousand sheep are shown at one time, the which observation was, we now discover, responsible for Charlotte Bront�'s choice of "Gimmerton" and "Gimmerden," from "gimmer," a female sheep, and meaning respectively the village of sheep and the valley of sheep, a characteristic of hers being that she often chose her names on what she termed the lucus a non lucendo principle.[15]
Having in Wuthering Heights made so pointed a reference to the Fairy Cave in the neighbourhood of Gimmerton, and having therein associated with it the names of Airton (Hareton) and Linton, which Montagu connected with Gimmerton or Malham, Charlotte Bront� had not openly mentioned in that work the Fairy Janet referred to by Montagu, though she hinted at "the mysteries of the Fairy Cave." But I find that her "elfish" imagination induced her later, in Jane Eyre, to appropriate for herself the r�le of the Fairy Janet, the Queen of the Malhamdale or Gimmerden elves, who ruled in the neighbourhood of Gimmerton and of Wuthering Heights, the home of Catherine Earnshaw. Thus we see Charlotte Bront� primarily associated both Catherine Earnshaw, the heroine of Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, the heroine of Jane Eyre, with Malham. And discovering the impetuosity of her imaginative nature and its romantic turn, I doubt not she was impatient to begin the tale of the "fairy-born and human-bred" heroine whose surname she took from the River Aire or Ayre, which sprang, as Montagu carefully indicates, from Malham, or Gimmerton, as Charlotte Bront� would say in her Wuthering Heights. From this came the suggestion of the "Rivers" family, with which I deal later, the names employed by Charlotte Bront� being River(s), Burn(s), Aire or Eyre, Severn, Reed, and Keeldar.
Another of Montagu's personal contributions which greatly influenced Charlotte Bront� was on the leaf before the mention of John Bell, Esq., and on the same leaf as the mention of Casterton Hall, headed "A Night's Repose." This was the narration of a night's adventure, Montagu telling how he went to a lonely hostelry and found an unwillingness in the hostess to give him bed and shelter. He also discovered a mystery surrounded the hostess and a peculiar, harsh-voiced country-bred man-servant--who came to be the original of Joseph of Wuthering Heights. At night the apparition of the hostess appears at Montagu's bedside, white-faced and lighted candle in hand. It is plain the peculiar man-servant appealed very strongly to Charlotte Bront�, and thus in both her Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre transcriptions of the midnight incident this characteristic is marked and recognizable: in Joseph; and in Grace Poole, by what I have termed Charlotte Bront�'s Method I., interchange of the sexes of characters. In Wuthering Heights, by her same Method I., Montagu's inhospitable hostess became the inhospitable host Heathcliffe; but in each of Charlotte Bront�'s versions--Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre--a central figure of the incidents she based upon Montagu's story of "A Night's Repose" was the uncouth, coarse-voiced country-bred servant.
We also shall see that Montagu's reference to lunacy being an exception to his objection against the separation of husband and wife, and the use he made of a verse in his Malham letter, likening the moon to
"A ... lady lean and pale Who totters forth wrapt in a gauzy veil, Out of her chamber led by the insane And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,"
were responsible for the "plot" of Jane Eyre including an insane lady who wanders out of her chamber at night and dons a vapoury veil.
And evidence of the enthusiasm with which Charlotte Bront� applied herself to Jane Eyre is the fact that she at once took from Montagu's little volume for this her second story based upon the book's suggestions, the names of
Broughton, Poole (from Pooley), Eshton, Georgiana, Lynn (from Linton), Lowood (from Low-wood), Mason, Ingram, Helen,[16] and possibly Millcote (from Weathercote).
Thus far we see Charlotte Bront� drew Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre from the same source; that in a word, Jane Eyre, was Charlotte's second attempt to utilize and amplify the suggestions in Montagu's work which had appealed to her when she began Wuthering Heights, and we see the suggestions she utilized in Jane Eyre always bear unmistakable relationship to those she had utilized in her Wuthering Heights. But the use Charlotte Bront� made of Montagu's book was not in the nature of literary theft; that volume simply afforded suggestions which she enlarged upon.
I shall presently show how I find Jane Eyre is the second attempt of Currer Bell to enlarge upon suggestions that had appealed to her when she first read Montagu. For a commencement I will refer to the early construction of her Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. As simple stories they both are based upon the description Montagu gives of an isolated hostelry with an inhospitable hostess, a midnight apparition, and an air of mystery that surrounds the hostess and a peculiar, uncouth servant, to whom I have already alluded. The stage properties of this narrative, the characters, and the "action" or plot, I will give side by side, as they appear severally, first in Montagu, next in Wuthering Heights, and finally in Jane Eyre. Herewith the reader will have excellent examples of the two chief methods I find Charlotte Bront� employed often when she drew from a character in more than one work or instance, or when she desired to veil the identity of her originals. Charlotte Bront�'s Methods I. and II., being discovered equally in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre show, as conclusively as any other evidence, that she was the author of both works. No consideration whatsoever can alter the iron fact or depreciate from its significance, that it was absolutely my discovery of Charlotte Bront�'s Methods I. and II., which revealed to me the sensational verbal and other parallels between Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre I give in The Key to the Bront� Works:--
Read carefully:--
Charlotte Bront�'s Method I.--The interchange of sexes. Thus the original of A may be a woman, and the original of B a man; but A may be represented as a man, and B as a woman.
Charlotte Bront�'s Method II.--Altering the age of a character portrayed. Thus the original of C may be young, and the original of D old; but C may be represented as old, and D as young.
The literal extracts to which I have referred I print as occurring in the three works:--Montagu the original, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre. I will first give the substance, or subject matter, side by side:--
MONTAGU. Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre.
Montagu goes on Lockwood, of whom Jane (Method I., horseback to a Montagu was palpably interchange of the solitary house at a the original, goes sexes) goes to a distance from any on horseback to a solitary house, habitable dwelling, solitary house at a alone. Comfort is all alone, and seeks a distance from any around, but an air of night's repose. But habitable dwelling, mystery surrounds though comfort is all alone, and seeks a the master's wife and around, he finds an night's repose. But a peculiar air of mystery he finds an air of harsh-voiced female surrounds the mystery surrounds the servant (Method I., inhospitable hostess inhospitable host interchange of the and her deep-voiced, (Charlotte Bront�'s sexes). Yorkshire Method I., dialect-speaking, interchange of the country-bred sexes) and his man-servant. harsh-voiced, Yorkshire dialect-speaking, country-bred man-servant.
Montagu is shown to Lockwood is shown to Jane, in bed one bed up a step-ladder bed, and sleeps only night, sleeps only that leads through a fitfully, dreaming. fitfully, dreaming. trap, and sleeps only He hears noises and She hears noises and fitfully, dreaming. perceives a gleam of perceives a gleam of He hears noises and light. He starts to light. She starts to perceives a gleam of find the white-faced find the apparition light He starts to apparition of his of her master's wife find the white-faced host standing at his standing at her apparition of his bedside, lighted bedside, lighted hostess standing at candle in hand, his candle in hand, her his bedside, lighted features convulsed features convulsed candle in hand, her with diabolical rage. with diabolical rage. features convulsed The harsh-voiced, The harsh-voiced, with diabolical rage. Yorkshire peculiar female The deep-voiced, dialect-speaking servant Jane first Yorkshire man-servant, a sour encountered after dialect-speaking old man (Charlotte having gone to the peculiar man-servant Bront�'s Method II., attics and through a he sees by looking the altering of the trap-door to the down the step-ladder age of a character roof. through the trap. portrayed), comes down a step-ladder that vanished through a trap.
In the literal extracts I now give the reader will perceive that in the description of the bedside, candle-bearing apparition in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bront� followed Montagu almost word for word, and in the whole staging of the midnight episode at the house of the inhospitable host in Wuthering Heights followed him entirely in outlining the story. Both the Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre versions give unequivocal evidence of being refractions from Montagu conveyed through one brain alone, the peculiar idiosyncrasy and elective sensitiveness of which are undeniably recognizable as Charlotte Bront�'s:--
A Night's Repose. A Night's Repose. A Night's Repose.
My servant having Heathcliffe, when he Jane is shown the lamed his steed ... saw my horse's breast bedrooms of the I arrived alone at a fairly pushing the secluded Thornfield small hostelry in a barrier, did put out Hall:-- secluded part of his hand to unchain the country, and it ... calling as we "Do the servants apparently at some entered the court, sleep in these distance from any "Joseph, take Mr. rooms?" habitable dwelling. Lockwood's horse; and Having determined to bring some wine." "No ... no one sleeps rest for the night, here. One would ... I discovered in the Joseph was an say that if there woman who seemed to elderly, nay an old were a ghost at be the hostess an man, very old Thornfield Hall this anxiety to get rid perhaps, though hale would be its haunt." of me; but with the and sinewy. "The Lord usual obstinacy of help us!" he ... I followed ... to curiosity caused soliloquised in an the attics, and by this apparent undertone of peevish thence by a trap-door anxiety, I determined displeasure, while to the roof of the not to be thwarted; relieving me of my hall ... a laugh so, putting up my horse, looking ... in struck my ear ... horse, I entered the my face so sourly "Who is it?" house, and sat down that I charitably to a humble but conjectured he must ... the laugh was as substantial meal, have need of Divine preternatural ... as prepared during aid to digest his any I ever heard.... my absence in the dinner, and his pious stable; and though ejaculation had no The ... door opened, comfort had sway with reference to my and a servant came all around me, yet unexpected advent. out--a woman of there was an evident between thirty and air of profound "Guests are so forty; a set, mystery between my exceedingly rare in square-made figure hostess and her this house that I and ... and with a hard, boy-of-all-work, a my dogs hardly know plain face.... thick-set son of the how to receive them," north, with a deep says Heathcliffe. One day Jane, out for voice and a sturdy a walk, sees a manner; whilst I, Resuming his horseman approaching with all the narrative in Chapter who, in sympathy with malignant pleasure of II., Lockwood tells Montagu's story of counteracting any us he goes again to laming a horse, has mystery, secretly Wuthering Heights and an accident. enjoyed the hope of gains admittance with discovering the difficulty, after "Did the horse fall reason of wishing my muttering, "Wretched in Hay Lane?" Jane absence.... I was not inmates, you deserve asks later of a at all disconcerted, perpetual isolation servant. but philosophically ... for your churlish finished my meal ... inhospitality. I "Yes, it slipped." and at an early hour don't care, I will requested to be shown get in." Thus Jane learns the where I was to rest horseman is the for the night. "As to staying here," master of Thornfield Refusing to listen cries Heathcliffe, "I Hall. She discovers to any excuse, I was don't keep an air of mystery shown up a ladder accommodations for surrounds the master into a small room.... visitors: you must of the house; and a I thanked my guide, share a bed with thick-set woman and ... laid down Joseph [the servant is involved. with the expectation country-bred servant] of sleeping hard, an if you do." expectation which was Chapter XV. not realized, for thoughts obtruded Chapter III. Though I had now themselves upon me, extinguished my wholly preventing Lockwood at last is candle and was laid repose. Midnight had guided to bed by a down in bed, I could scarcely fallen when servant. While not sleep for I heard voices in the leading the way, she thinking of the room below, and by a recommended ... "I [mystery that seemed light which grew should hide the to surround Mr. stronger every moment candle, ... for her Rochester].... I I felt some person master had an odd hardly knew whether I was about to ascend notion about the had slept or not the ladder. chamber ... and never after this musing; at let anybody lodge any rate I started Before Charlotte there willingly."... wide awake on hearing Bront� proceeds I sank back in bed a vague murmur.... I with the dramatic and fell asleep.... wished I had kept my experiences of this Alas! what could it candle burning; the terrible night she be that made me pass night was drearily provides entirely such a terrible dark.... I rose and original matter night? I don't sat up in bed independent of remember another that listening;... I was Montagu, as a I can compare with it chilled with fear.... preface. I will give since I was capable I began to feel the Montagu his space, of suffering. return of slumber. however, for we But it was not fated have here a duet in ... I began to ... I should sleep unison, so to speak, dream.... I had set that night. A dream between Wuthering out on my way home, had scarcely Heights and Jane with Joseph for a approached my ear Eyre. The trio will guide. The snow lay when it fled be resumed in perfect yards deep in our affrighted.... There sequence after road. We came to a was a demonia laugh Montagu has rested a chapel.... Presently ... at my chamber few bars in the the whole chapel door.... I thought introduction. My resounded with the goblin laughter reader will note with rappings and stood at my sensational interest, counter-rappings; ... bedside.... Something I am sure, that in at last, to my ... moaned. "Was that both of Charlotte unspeakable relief, Grace Poole?" [the Bront�'s they awoke me.... thick-set servant] introductions to the What ... had thought I.... There appearance of the suggested the tumult? was a candle burning candle-bearing, ... the branch of a outside. frenzied, bedside fir-tree that touched apparition, the my lattice as the separate narrators blast wailed by.... Chapter XXV. tell us that a gale is blowing; that I dreamt again, if ... After I went to they dreamed most possible still more bed I could not disagreeably twice. disagreeably than sleep--a sense of The first dream being before.... I heard anxious excitement in each instance that the gusty wind, ... I depressed me. The of journeying upon an thought I rose ... to gale still rising unknown road, and the unhasp the casement. seemed to my ear to second dream that of "I must stop [the fir muffle a ... doleful an unknown ice-cold bough's teasing undersound.... During little child (always sound]," I muttered, my first sleep I was referred to in the knocking my hand following the neuter "it"), which through the glass and windings of an "wailed piteously" stretching an arm out unknown road; ... and "clung" to the to seize the ... rain pelted me; I was narrators in branch; instead of burdened with the "terror," intense which my fingers charge of a little horror being closed on the fingers child--a very small accentuated by their of an ice-cold hand! creature, ... which being unable to rid The intense horror of shivered in my cold themselves of the nightmare came over arms and wailed clinging, shivering me: I tried to draw piteously in my ear. small "creature," as back my arm, but the Charlotte Bront� hand clung to it, and I dreamt another calls "it." The a most melancholy dream.... I still "doleful" moaning and voice sobbed.... I carried the unknown the "blast" play discerned ... a little child: I might their part in each child's face looking not lay it down version, and in both through the window. anywhere, however a "branch" is duly Terror made me cruel, tired were my grasped or seized by and finding it arms--however its the dreamer. For the useless to attempt weight impeded my origin of this shaking the creature progress, I must wailing little off, I pulled its retain it.... I creature see my wrist on to the climbed the thin chapter, "Charlotte broken pane, ... wall [of the house] Bront�'s Child rubbing it to and fro with frantic, Apparition." till the blood ran perilous haste, ... down; ... still it the stones rolled Further, the reader wailed ... and from under my feet, will observe that in maintained its the ivy branches I both Wuthering tenacious gripe, grasped gave way, the Heights and Jane almost maddening me child clung round my Eyre Montagu's with fear. neck in terror, and bedside, almost strangled candle-bearing I said, "Let me go!" me.... The blast blew apparition is not a The fingers relaxed, so strong.... I sat dream, but a I snatched mine ... down on the narrow candlelit reality, and stopped my ledge; I hushed the immediately sequent ears.... Yet the scared infant, ... to the dream of the instant I listened the wall crumbled; I tenacious child again, there was the was shaken; the child phantom. doleful cry, rolled from my knee; moaning;... I tried I lost my balance, I will here resume to jump up, but could fell, and awoke. Montagu's narrative: not stir a limb.... ... By a light which grew stronger every Hasty footsteps "Now, Jane, that is moment, I felt some approached my chamber all," put in person was about to door, ... a light Rochester. To which ascend the ladder. At glimmered ... at the Jane Eyre replies, this moment every top of the bed. I sat "All the preface; the murder ... I had shuddering yet, and tale is yet to come." heard of crowded upon wiping the On waking a gleam my brain, and I perspiration from my dazzled my eyes; ... instantly determined forehead. The it was candle to make the best intruder appeared to light.... A form fight I could, ... hesitate.... emerged from the and with my partially closet; it took the closed eyes turned ... Heathcliffe stood light and held it towards the near the entrance, in aloft.... I had risen trap-door. I had only his shirt and up in bed, I bent just time to make my trousers, with a forward, ... then my arrangements when, candle dripping over blood crept cold clad in a white gown, his fingers and his through my veins.... fastened close up to face white.... The It was not even that her neck, with her first creak of the strange woman Grace black hair, matted by oak startled him, ... Poole [the thick-set carelessness, hanging the light leaped from servant].... It over her collar, and his hold.... seemed ... a woman as pale as death, ... with thick and ascended my hostess. "It is only your dark hair hanging Never shall I forget guest, sir," I called long down her back. I her dreadfully out. "I had the know not what dress hideous expression. nightmare." she had on: it was She came up to the white and straight; bedside and looked at "Mr. Lockwood ... who but whether gown, me for a full minute, showed you up to this sheet or shroud I and after passing the room?" grinding his cannot tell. The candle carefully teeth to control the features were fearful before my eyes, left maxillary and ghastly to me; me, and carefully convulsions. ... it was a savage descended the ladder. face. I wish I could "It was your servant, forget ... the Montagu arises, and, Zillah," I replied, lineaments.... Just looking down the flinging myself on to at my bedside the ladder, finds the the floor, and ... figure stopped: the thick-set servant is resuming my fiery eye glared upon also astir with the garments.... "The me--she thrust up her mysterious, hideous place ... is swarming candle close to my visitant. Then with ghosts and face, and Montagu hears his goblins." extinguished it under trap-door replaced; my eyes. and he wakes to learn "What do you mean?" he has had the asked Heathcliffe.... "Now," says nightmare. "Lie down and finish Rochester. "I'll out the night since explain to you all you are here...." about it. It was half dream, half reality: I descended; ... a woman did, I doubt nothing was stirring not, enter your room; ... and then Joseph and that woman [shuffled] down a was--must have wooden ladder that been--Grace Poole vanished through a [the thick-set trap--the ascent to servant]. You call his garret, I her a strange being suppose. yourself."
Truly Montagu's description of the coarse-voiced, thick-set, country-bred servant, and his implication with the mystery of the lonely house had impressed Charlotte Bront� considerably. Whether she portrayed him as the Joseph of Wuthering Heights or, by her Method I., as the Grace Poole of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bront� respects the original associations of this character as they were figured to her by Frederic Montagu's little fiction of "A Night's Repose." Herewith have we evidence as to mental idiosyncrasy and elective-sensitiveness recognizable as Charlotte Bront�'s--proof that her brain and none other was responsible for both the Wuthering Heights and the Jane Eyre versions of the midnight incident from Montagu.
CHAPTER III.
ORIGIN OF THE FOUNDLING HEATHCLIFFE AND HIS NAME IN "WUTHERING HEIGHTS"--ORIGIN OF THE INSANE LADY AND THE WHITE VEIL SCENE IN "JANE EYRE."
We have now seen that Montagu's book provided Charlotte Bront� with the idea for a lonely house of mystery--a mystery which should surround a host with a peculiar, harsh-voiced, uncouth, north-country servant, and I have shown how that idea was adopted by her for Wuthering Heights and afterwards for Jane Eyre. At one time Charlotte Bront� wrote the Tale of a Foundling, and she certainly read with interest a remarkable story told by Montagu of a foundling who, he tells us in the letter next before the Malham letter, was discovered by a shepherd on the top of a craggy "mountain," a circumstance which perhaps led her in making use of this foundling story to name the child Heathcliffe. I will place the substance of the two stories side by side:--
MONTAGU. Wuthering Heights.
On the top of a craggy height In a wild, hilly country, a male a male infant "was found by a infant was brought home by a shepherd, who took it to his farmer who had found it home, and after feeding and homeless. He brought up the clothing it he had the child child, and the rest of its named Simon; being himself but career is the obvious "cuckoo a poor man he was unable to story": the child ousts the poor maintain the foundling," when farmer's family. It was called was agreed to by his friends Heathcliffe. that the child should be kept "ameng 'em." The child was called Simon Amenghem.
The cuckoo story derived obviously from the history Montagu gives of the foundling became thus the backbone of Wuthering Heights; but it is possible that the cuckoo story requiring the foundling should be painted with all the viciousness and cruelty of character necessary to his part, Charlotte Bront� found herself dissatisfied with the story. And portraying herself in the narrative as Catherine Earnshaw, her hero became M. H�ger. This naturally led to an awkward clashing. Whether the extreme "demonism" of Heathcliffe must be understood as being in the main due to his r�le as the "cuckoo," who was to oust the poor farmer's offspring "like unfledged dunnocks," to quote Mrs. Dean, I will not in this chapter inquire.
Turning again to Montagu's book, Charlotte saw a further suggestion that contained excellent "plot" possibilities. This was the question of lunacy being an exception to the objection against the separation of husband and wife, Montagu's relation being Barry Cornwall (to whom, by the way, Thackeray dedicated Vanity Fair), who was a Metropolitan Commissioner in Lunacy. To Charlotte Bront�, however, the subject came simply as a useful suggestion. She had no views upon it, and she desired only that her heroine would marry Rochester, the hero with an insane wife. At heart Charlotte was indifferent as to the vital point, even nullifying the very theme of the plot by making Rochester aver that if Jane Eyre had been the mad wife, he would still have loved and cherished her.
It would appear that in conjunction with Montagu's remarks on lunacy and the separation of husband and wife, an extract he gives from Shelley is also responsible for a wife's lunacy being the theme of the plot of Jane Eyre. The extract which Montagu quotes in the Malham letter is where the poet speaks of "The Waning Moon" as like--
"A ... lady lean and pale Who totters forth wrapt in a gauzy veil Out of her chamber led by the insane And feeble wanderings of her fading brain."
Thus was evidently suggested to Charlotte Bront� the hanging up in the closet of the "vapoury veil" for the stage purposes of the "insane lady"; and in Jane Eyre Montagu's night-wandering, candle-bearing hostess became a lady who passed, after the manner of the lines he quoted,--
Out of her chamber led by the insane And feeble wanderings of her fading brain--
became Mrs. Rochester. Norton Conyers, a house near Ripon, it is said, is associated with the story that a mad woman was once confined there.[17] If Charlotte Bront� was familiar with this story, and we are told the interior is somewhat similar to the descriptions of Thornfield, we can understand that, perusing Montagu's book at the time when she was utilizing his narrative of the candle-bearing, hideous-faced, white-clad midnight visitant in a house of mystery, she would the more readily appropriate the further suggestions his work contained in regard to a wife's insanity, and the "veil-clad" apparition of a night-roaming insane lady. It is important to note, however, that the evidence of my preceding chapter proves indubitably the "mad woman" was but a secondary suggestion--the primary suggestion responsible for the plot of Jane Eyre being that of Montagu's midnight apparition. And just as the thick-set country-bred servant denotes in the question as to the origin and author of the candle-bearing bedside visitant in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, the "gauzy veil" likewise denotes as to the origin of the mad woman of Jane Eyre. So we read in the beginning of Chapter XXV. of Jane Eyre, that Jane leaves the vapoury veil in the closet:--
To conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour ... gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment. "I will leave you by yourself, white dream," I said.
Then farther on we read that:--
The moon shut herself wholly within her chamber, and drew close her curtain of cloud,
which is simply an antithetical paraphrase of Montagu's quoted verse on "The Waning Moon" which, like
A ... lady ... pale ... totters forth wrapt in a gauzy veil, out of her chamber.
And in the same chapter of Jane Eyre we read finally that the insane lady, who has come out of her chamber,
"... took my veil from its place; she held it up, gazed at it long, and then she threw it over her head, and turned to the mirror ... it removed my veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts, and flinging both on the floor, trampled on them."
CHAPTER IV.
A RAINY DAY IN CHARLOTTE BRONT�'S CHILDHOOD: THE OPENING INCIDENT IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF THE HEROINES OF "WUTHERING HEIGHTS" AND "JANE EYRE."
Seeing Catherine Earnshaw, the heroine of Wuthering Heights, was drawn, as I find, by Charlotte Bront� for her autobiographical self, the real commencement of that work, in so far as personal narrative was concerned, is the diary extract she wrote of herself in her earliest childhood.[18] In Jane Eyre she placed her earliest childhood memories at the beginning of the story. I will give extracts side by side, when it will be seen they agree practically word for word. It is of course undeniable that none but Charlotte Bront� herself would or could have penned these incidents of her own childhood.
Chapter III. Chapter I.
A rainy day in the early A rainy day in the early childhood of Catherine childhood of Jane Eyre, Earnshaw, as told by herself. as told by herself.
-------- --------
... All day had been flooding There was no possibility of with rain; we could not go to taking a walk that day, ... church. the cold winter wind had brought with it a rain so penetrating that further outdoor exercise was out of the question.
Hindley [Branwell Bront�] and Eliza, John [Branwell Bront�], his wife [? Sister Maria] basked and Georgiana were now clustered downstairs before a comfortable round their mamma [Aunt fire. Branwell] in the drawing-room ... by the fireside ... looking perfectly happy.
Heathcliffe [Method I., Me she had dispensed from interchange of the sexes. In joining the group.... A small the childhood of Heathcliffe breakfast-room adjoined the Charlotte often portrays drawing-room; I slipped in herself], myself, and the ... there, ... I possessed myself of ploughboy were commanded to take a volume, ... I mounted into the our prayer-books and mount ... window-seat, ... and having on a sack ... [in the garret. drawn the ... curtain nearly They go downstairs again]. close, I was shrined in ... retirement.... With ... [a book] "You forget you have a master in on my knee I was ... happy; ... me," says the tyrant [Hindley: but interruption ... came too Branwell Bront�]. soon. The ... door opened: "Boh!" cried the voice of John ... We made ourselves ... snug Reed [Branwell Bront�]. ... in the arch of the dresser. I had just fastened our "It is well I drew the curtain," pinafores together and hung them thought I, ... but Eliza ... up for a curtain, when in comes said: "She is in the Joseph.[19]... He tears down my window-seat, ... Jack handiwork [the curtain], boxes [Branwell]." my ears, and ... thrust [a book] upon us.... I took my ... volume ... and hurled it into the dog-kennel, vowing I hated a good book.
Hindley [Branwell Bront�] I came out immediately, for I hurried up from his paradise on trembled at the idea of being the hearth, and seizing ... us dragged forth by the said Jack ... hurled both into the [Branwell Bront�]. back-kitchen. "What were you doing behind the curtain?" he asked. "I'll teach you to rummage my bookshelves, for they are mine; all the house belongs to me, or soon will do.... Go ... by the door."
I did so, ... but ... I saw him lift the book and stand in the act to hurl it.... The volume was flung.... He ran ... at me.... I saw in him a tyrant.... Then Mrs. Reed [Aunt Branwell] subjoined: "Take her to the red-room."...
... How little did I dream that ... All John Reed's [Branwell Hindley [Branwell Bront�] would Bront�'s] violent tyrannies ... ever make me cry so.... My head turned in my disturbed mind.... aches, till I cannot keep it on My head still ached ... no one the pillow; and still I can't reproved John [Branwell].... How give over. all my brain was in tumult.... I could not answer the question why I thus suffered; now at the distance of--I will not say how many years--I see it clearly.
Thus we see the "volume-hurling" incident with which John Reed is associated had its origin in some incident connected with Charlotte Bront�'s childhood and her brother Branwell. As Catherine, Charlotte Bront� calls Hindley "a tyrant" in this connection, and as Jane Eyre she calls John Reed "a tyrant" here. Branwell, as John Reed, is made to tell Jane in connection with this incident that "all this house belongs to me, or will do"; and as Hindley Earnshaw he tells his sister Catherine, "You forget you have a master here." By Charlotte Bront�'s Method II., altering the age of a character portrayed, Branwell is represented in the Wuthering Heights scene as a man in years. Without further appeal it was likely enough that Hindley Earnshaw, Catherine's brother, was drawn for Charlotte Bront�'s brother, seeing Catherine was Charlotte. Herewith we find an explanation for a fact Mr. Francis A. Leyland has strongly emphasized in his work The Bront� Family, that in Wuthering Heights incidents (the carving-knife incident, etc.) and epithets known by his intimates to have been common to Branwell Bront� are associated with Hindley Earnshaw in the days of his moral deterioration. That deterioration is reflected in the portrayal of the latter end of John Reed in Jane Eyre; in Wuthering Heights it is given in detail. As for Emily Bront�, she always liked and commiserated with Branwell Bront�.[20]
I hope the attempt to interfere with this tradition recently has no relation to the fact that I briefly stated in my Fortnightly Review article that John Reed and Hindley Earnshaw were one and the same. It is plain to see that if Emily really liked Branwell, as people stated who gleaned from hearsay, she could not have portrayed him as Hindley Earnshaw. But a wrong estimate of the nature of the evidence I promised to bring has been formed if it were thought I should base my book upon such a point. It is enough that Charlotte Bront�'s private letters regarding Branwell are quite in agreement with her own harsh portrayals of him in her Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.
It is interesting to recall Branwell avowed he, and not Emily, wrote Wuthering Heights. This fact and the association of Branwell Bront� incidents and epithets with the book induced Mr. Leyland to advocate Branwell's authorship. The Key to the Bront� Works shows the absurdness of such a claim. Mr. Leyland suggested Branwell may have collaborated with Emily; and he professed to discover a break in the style. I find, however, that though there were violent psychical fluctuations in the mood of the writer of Wuthering Heights, the book is throughout the work of Charlotte Bront�. This may be proved alone by the Chapter III., with which I now deal: it is the "key" chapter, and is, so to speak, a microcosm of Wuthering Heights, as the reader will perceive by help of my index. Whosoever was the writer of this third chapter wrote the whole of Wuthering Heights, and we see it was Currer Bell.
By Charlotte Bront�'s Method I., interchange of the sexes, the interloper Jane in the early chapters of Jane Eyre and the interloper Heathcliffe in the early chapters of Wuthering Heights become one and the same; and Hindley's tyrannizing over Heathcliffe is John Reed's (Branwell Bront�'s) tyrannizing over Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bront�). Again, by Method I., interchange of the sexes, old Joseph, in Charlotte's Wuthering Heights version of the rainy day incident in her childhood, serves the part of the servant Tabitha Aykroyd, for whom Bessie in the Jane Eyre version of the rainy day incident was drawn. (See "Joseph" and his bit of garden, Wuthering Heights, Chapter XXXIII.; also my footnote on page 47.) Thus Charlotte Bront� as Catherine tells us that when she was banished from the comfortable fire "Joseph" sermonizes, and that she hoped he might give "a short homily for his own sake"; and in the scene in Jane Eyre drawn from the same incident Jane was left to Bessie, who "supplied the hiatus by a homily of an hour's length, in which she proved beyond a doubt that I was the most wicked and abandoned child ever reared under a roof."
Catherine's story of the rainy day in Wuthering Heights was written by her in childhood on "a 'red-hot' Methodist's tract." Hence it is interesting to read Charlotte Bront�'s words in Villette, where as Lucy Snowe she says she had "once read when a child certain Wesleyan Methodist tracts seasoned with ... excitation to fanaticism." As Caroline Helstone[21] in Shirley, Charlotte tells us she had read "some mad Methodist magazines, full of miracles and apparitions, of preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism; ... from these faded flowers Caroline had in her childhood extracted the honey--they were tasteless to her now." Let the reader compare Charlotte Bront�'s reference to Briar Chapel and the shouts, yells, ejaculations, frantic cries of "the assembly" in Chapter IX. of Shirley with the references in Chapter III. of Wuthering Heights to the frantic zeal of "the assembly" of the chapel of Gimmerden Sough. It will be at once recognized that the former is but the extension of the other, amplified by the same hand.
Thus, in the light of the name Branderham ("Brander'em," from "brander," a hot iron over a fire) for the name of the zealous Rev. Jabes Branderham,[22] of the chapel of Gimmerden Sough, of Wuthering Heights, we see a connection with the play Charlotte Bront� makes upon "burning and fire" in the hymn sung at Briar Chapel in Chapter IX. of Shirley:--
"For every fight Is dreadful and loud-- The warrior's delight Is slaughter and blood; His foes overturning Till all shall expire-- And this is with burning And fuel and fire."
In the rainy day incident Charlotte Bront� as Catherine vowed "she hated a good book," and this rebellion against the thrusting upon her of religious "lumber," as she calls it in Wuthering Heights, was a characteristic of her childhood shown also in the "Jane Eyre and Mr. Brocklehurst" incident, where the latter asks--
"And the Psalms? I hope you like them?"
"No, sir," replied Jane.
"No? Oh, shocking!"
At heart, however, Charlotte Bront� was a true Christian, though disliking excessive zealousness in the demonstrations of the members of any church. Read what M. Emanuel says in Chap. XXXVI. of Villette; the last paragraph. Lockwood tells us in the incident connected with Catherine's diary that "a glare of white letters started from the dark as vivid as spectres--the air swarmed with Catherines." This, Charlotte Bront�'s idea of spectral writing running in the air, occurs in Chap. XV. of Jane Eyre, where Rochester speaks of a phantom hag (see Charlotte Bront�'s phantom hag in Chap. XII. of Wuthering Heights), who "wrote in the air a memento which ran in lurid hieroglyphics all along the house-front." Says Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, continuing:--"An immediate interest kindled within me for the unknown Catherine, and I began ... to decipher her hieroglyphics"--the diary.
CHAPTER V.
CHARLOTTE BRONT�'S FRIEND, TABITHA AYKROYD, THE BRONT�S' SERVANT, AS MRS. DEAN OF "WUTHERING HEIGHTS," AND AS BESSIE AND HANNAH OF "JANE EYRE."
It is a remarkable fact that of all the members of Charlotte Bront�'s home circle the one to whom, excepting herself, she gave most prominence in her works was Tabitha Aykroyd, the Bront�s' servant or housekeeper. For I find this good woman was portrayed by Charlotte Bront� as Mrs. Dean of Wuthering Heights, Bessie and Hannah of Jane Eyre, and, on occasion, as Mrs. Pryor of Shirley. Indeed, strange though it may sound to say, my discovery that Tabitha Aykroyd, as she appealed to Currer Bell, was the original of these characters, alone explains the chief mystery of Wuthering Heights, and shows clearly enough Charlotte Bront� was its heroine and its author. In a word, we see by this discovery that Wuthering Heights is book the first of Charlotte Bront�'s life as told by herself from old Tabitha's standpoint, and Jane Eyre book the second, giving her life's story and confession as related by herself entirely from her own point of view.
Never in Wuthering Heights did Nelly Dean really understand Catherine, and "the honest but inflexible servant," as Currer Bell calls Tabitha as Hannah of Jane Eyre, never yielded herself to a surrender of her rough-hearted but genuine nature wherein Charlotte was concerned.
"Tabby," said Mrs. Gaskell, "had a Yorkshire keenness of perception into character, and it was not everybody she liked." That Tabitha Aykroyd would readily appeal to Charlotte Bront� as fitted for the narrator of the histories in Wuthering Heights we may easily perceive by reading Mrs. Gaskell's further words on this Bront� servant:--
"When Charlotte was little more than nine years old ... an elderly woman of the village came to live as servant at the parsonage. She remained there, as a member of the household, thirty years [Hannah was thirty years with the Rivers family in Jane Eyre--an approximate date, of course, when that work was written] and from the length of her faithful service, and the attachment and respect she inspired is deserving of mention. Tabby was a thorough specimen of a Yorkshire woman of her class, in dialect, in character. She abounded in strong, practical sense and shrewdness. Her words were far from flattering, but she would spare no deeds in the cause of those whom she kindly regarded. She ruled the children pretty sharply; and yet never grudged a little extra trouble to provide them with such small treats as came within her power. In return she claimed to be looked upon as a humble friend.... Tabby had lived in Haworth in the days when the pack-horses went through once a week.... What is more, she had known the 'bottom' or valley in those primitive days when the fairies frequented the margin of the 'beck' on moonlight nights, and had known folk who had seen them. [See references to 'Bessie's' fairy tales in Jane Eyre, Chaps. I., II., and IV.].... No doubt she had many a tale to tell of bygone days of the countryside: old ways of living, former inhabitants, decayed gentry, who had melted away, and whose places knew them no more; family tragedies and dark superstitious dooms; and in telling these things, without the least consciousness that there might ever be anything requiring to be softened down, would give at full length the bare and simple details."
Says Mrs. Dean, the Yorkshire servant who narrates the family tragedies of Wuthering Heights just after the manner of Tabitha Aykroyd:--
"But, Mr. Lockwood, I forget these tales cannot divert you, ... I could have told Heathcliffe's history, all that you need hear, in half-a-dozen words."
"Sit still, Mrs. Dean," cried Lockwood, "... you've done just right to tell the story leisurely. That is the method I like.... Excepting a few provincialisms, ... you have no marks of the manners ... peculiar to your class; ... you have been compelled to cultivate your reflective faculties for want of occasions for frittering your life away in silly trifles."
Mrs. Dean laughed. "I certainly esteem myself a steady, reasonable kind of body," she said; "not exactly from living among the hills and seeing one set of faces, and one series of actions, from year's end to year's end; but I have undergone sharp discipline which has taught me wisdom."
"Jane" says of Mrs. Dean as "Bessie" of Jane Eyre, Chap. IV., Method II., altering the age of characters portrayed:--
When gentle, Bessie seemed to me the ... kindest being in the world;... I wished ... intensely ... she would always be so pleasant and amiable, and never push about or scold, or task me unreasonably, as she was ... wont to do. Bessie Lee[23] must, I think, have been a girl of good natural capacity, for she was smart in all she did, and had a remarkable knack of narrative; so, at least, I judge from the impression made upon me by her nursery tales.... But she had a capricious and hasty temper and indifferent ideas of principle or justice ["Hannah" would have driven off the destitute Jane Eyre], still, such as she was, I preferred her to any one else at Gateshead Hall.
"Mrs. Dean"[24] in her turn says of "Catherine"--Charlotte Bront�:--
"She was never so happy as when we were all scolding her at once and she defying us.... I vexed her frequently by trying to bring down her arrogance; she never took an aversion to me though."
In Chap. IV. of Jane Eyre Bessie says to Jane Eyre, after the latter has asked her not to scold:--
"Well, I will, but mind you are a very good girl, and don't be afraid of me. Don't start when I chance to speak sharply."
"I don't think I shall ever be afraid of you again, Bessie, because I have got used to you."
Jane suggests Bessie dislikes her, to which is replied:--
"I don't dislike you.... I believe I am fonder of you than of all the others."
"You don't show it."
"You sharp little thing!... What makes you so venturesome and hardy?"
The idiosyncratic appeal Tabitha Aykroyd made to Charlotte is related identically wherever she is portrayed. That Charlotte Bront� had been initially entranced by her fairy tales, and the old songs she sang, is shown more especially in the phases she gives of Tabitha as Bessie and as Ellen Dean. Thus we read in Jane Eyre, Chap. IV., in the close of the scene just given:--
"That afternoon lapsed in peace and harmony; ... in the evening Bessie told me some of her most enchaining stories, and sang me some of her sweetest songs. Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine." And in Wuthering Heights, Chap. XXII., Ellen Dean says of Miss Catherine Linton (see my reference to this character as a phase of Charlotte Bront�, in my preface):--"From dinner to tea she would lie doing nothing except singing old songs--my nursery lore--to herself, ... half thinking, half dreaming, happier than words can express." So in the same work, Chap. XXIV., the same Catherine says:--"He was charmed with two or three pretty songs [I sang]--your songs, Ellen." The italics are Charlotte Bront�'s.
Jane Eyre, Chap. III., says:--
Bessie had now finished ... tidying the room ... she sang:--
"In the days we went agipsying A long time ago."
I had often heard the song before, and always with lively delight; for Bessie had a sweet voice--at least I thought so. But now, though her voice was still sweet, I found in its melody an indescribable sadness. Sometimes, preoccupied with her work, she sang the refrain very low, very lingeringly: "a long time ago," came like the saddest cadence of a funeral hymn. She passed into another ballad.
Tabby Aykroyd going to the Parsonage when the motherless Charlotte Bront� was but nine, Charlotte seems to have been drawn to look upon her as a new-found friend, and afterwards she idealized those memories associated with her. It is noticeable she had been impressed in childhood by her singing and the sympathetic sweetness of her voice. There is a world of meaning--a gracious waiving aside of qualifying fact in the sentence, "Bessie had a sweet voice--at least I thought so." Charlotte was fond of Scottish ballads, and in Villette, Chapter XXV., she identifies herself in her phase as Paulina (see my further reference to this phase of Charlotte Bront�) with a a love for a Scottish song. With Tabitha Aykroyd she loved to associate the singing of her favourite ballads, as we have seen in her reference to the songs of Tabitha in her phases as Bessie of Jane Eyre and Mrs. Dean of Wuthering Heights. And so it is we find Mrs. Dean telling us in Chapter IX. of Wuthering Heights, 'I was rocking Hareton on my knee, and humming a song that began:--
"It was far in the night and the bairnies grat, The mither beneath the mools heard that."'
Whether traits of Nancy Garrs or her sister, or Martha Brown, the other Bront� servants, contributed to Charlotte's portrayal is doubtful. I think they did not. We see in this chapter the original of Bessie of Jane Eyre was certainly the original of Mrs. Dean of Wuthering Heights--Tabitha Aykroyd; and as Charlotte Bront� portrayed Mrs. Dean as an elderly woman servant, before she began Jane Eyre, we must decide the question of the real age of the original of Bessie by that fact. Confirming is the portrayal of the same character by Charlotte as the elderly Hannah in Jane Eyre. See my chapter on "The Rivers or Bront� Family."[25]
Of "Dean" or Tabitha Aykroyd in the r�le of Hannah of the family "Jane" says:--"I had a feeling that she did not understand me, ... that she was prejudiced against me." Nevertheless she says to her: "You ... have been an honest and faithful servant, I will say so much for you."
Much stress is placed by Tabitha Aykroyd, as Nelly Dean, and Bessie, on Charlotte Bront�'s passionateness. Says Mrs. Dean of Catherine in Wuthering Heights:
"The doctor had said that she would not bear crossing much, she ought to have her own way; and it was nothing less than murder in his eyes, for any one to presume to stand up and contradict her, ... serious threats of a fit ... often attended her rages."
Thus I find there is a connection between Catherine's "fit of frenzy" and delirium in Wuthering Heights, Chapters XI. and XII., and the scenes attendant upon Jane's fit of frenzy in Jane Eyre, Chapters I., II., III. The one is told by Charlotte as from Tabitha Aykroyd's (Bessie's) standpoint, the other from Catherine's (Charlotte Bront�'s), an inversion of attitude which proves Charlotte Bront� to be the author and heroine of Wuthering Heights.
Charlotte Bront� in the locked Charlotte Bront� in the locked chamber, and Tabitha Aykroyd, chamber, and Tabitha Aykroyd, the Bront� servant, told by the Bront� servant, told by Tabitha, as it were. Charlotte.
She [Catherine--Charlotte I [Jane--Charlotte Bront�] sat Bront�] rang the bell till it looking at the white bed, ... broke.... I [Tabitha--Nelly occasionally turning a Dean] entered leisurely. It was fascinated eye towards the ... enough to try the temper of a mirror ... I hushed my sobs, saint, such senseless, wicked fearful lest ... signs of grief rages! There she lay dashing her might waken a preternatural head against the ... sofa and voice ... or elicit from the grinding her teeth.... I brought gloom some haloed face.... This a glass of water; and as she ... I felt would be terrible.... would not drink, I sprinkled it At this moment a light gleamed on her face. In a few seconds on the wall; ... shaken as my she stretched herself out stiff, nerves were by agitation, I and ... assumed the aspect of thought the swift-darting beam death. was a herald of some coming vision from another world. My Linton [? Mr. Bront�] looked heart beat thick, my head grew terrified. "There is nothing the hot; a sound filled my ears matter," ... and I which I deemed the rushing of [Tabitha--Mrs. Dean] told him wings: something seemed near me; how she had resolved ... on I was oppressed, suffocated; exhibiting a fit of frenzy. I endurance broke down; I rushed incautiously gave the account to the door and shook the lock aloud, ... she [Charlotte in desperate effort. Steps came Bront�] started up ... and then running along the ... passage, rushed from the room. The master ... Bessie and Abbot entered. directed me to follow; I did to her chamber door; she ... "Miss Eyre, are you ill?" said secured it against me.... On the Bessie [Tabitha Aykroyd]. third day Catherine [Charlotte Bront�] un-barred her door, ... "What a dreadful noise! It went desired a basin of gruel, for through me!" exclaimed Abbot. she believed she was dying. "Take me out!" was my cry. "These ... awful nights; I've never closed my lids--and oh!... "... Are you hurt? Have you seen I've been ... haunted, Nelly! something?" demanded Bessie [Tabitha]. But I begin to fancy [Tabitha]. you don't like me.... They have all turned to enemies; ... "Oh! I ... thought a ghost would they have, the people here." come."
Tossing about, she increased her "She has screamed on purpose," feverish bewilderment of declared Abbot [?].... "And what madness.... "Don't you see that a scream! If she had been in face?" she inquired, gazing pain one would have excused it, nervously at the mirror.... "Oh! but she only wanted to bring us Nelly [Tabitha], the room is all here: I know her naughty haunted! I'm afraid of being tricks." left alone...." ... Mrs. Reed [Aunt Branwell] I [Nelly Dean--Tabitha] came.... "Silence!" she attempted to steal to the door exclaimed; "this scene is ... but I was summoned back by a repulsive." I was a precocious piercing scream. actor in her eyes. She sincerely looked upon me [Charlotte] as a ... "As soon as ever I barred compound of virulent passions, the door," proceeded Catherine mean spirit, and dangerous [Charlotte Bront�], "utter duplicity.... I suppose I had a darkness overwhelmed me, and I species of fit: unconsciousness fell on the floor. I couldn't closed the scene.... The next explain ... how certain I felt thing I remembered is waking ... of having a fit, or going mad." with a feeling as if I had had a frightful nightmare ... "A sound sleep would do you agitation, uncertainty, and a good," said Nelly Dean--Tabitha predominant sense of terror Aykroyd. confused my faculties.... Bessie [Tabby] stood at the bed-foot with a basin in her hand.
"Do you feel as if you could sleep, Miss?" asked Bessie [Tabitha Aykroyd] rather softly.
For me [Charlotte] the watches of that long night passed in ghostly watchfulness; ear, eye, and mind were alike strained by dread, such dread as children only can feel.
By her Method II.: altering the age of a character portrayed, Charlotte Bront� gives us Tabitha Aykroyd as a young woman in Bessie; and by the same Method II, in the scene just read from Wuthering Heights, we have an instance of her presenting, as an incident in womanhood, an incident which the testimony of Jane Eyre and other evidences show occurred really in Charlotte's own childhood. As she relates in Jane Eyre, her dread was "such dread as children only can feel"; and she goes on to say "this incident [of the locked room] gave my nerves a shock of which I feel the reverberation to this day." Thus in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre Charlotte paints an excellent picture of the matter-of-fact but good-hearted Tabitha Aykroyd going to the room in response to her, Charlotte Bront�'s, frantic appeal, sceptical and certainly unsympathetic.
The part played by the wild summoning of Tabitha to the room, the references to "a fit," the ghost and haunted chamber, the dread of the mirror, the suggestion that the frenzy of fear was wilfully assumed, the piercing scream, Tabitha Aykroyd with her basin and her final suggestion of sleep, are in themselves ample evidence that Charlotte Bront� in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre drew this scene from an experience of the kind in her own childhood. In each work stress is laid by her upon her own hypersensitiveness, and we learn how the Bront� household misunderstood her excessive passionateness and misread it as wicked acting[26].
We see Tabitha best in Mrs. Dean of Wuthering Heights, as Hannah of the Rivers family of Jane Eyre, and by Currer Bell's Method II., alteration of age of the character portrayed, as Bessie of that work. Tabitha Aykroyd lives and breathes her life through the pages of Charlotte Bront�'s Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre to-day, and ever will she remain in literature, a real Yorkshire woman amazingly translated from the wide Yorkshire hearth with its great, wind-whitened fire and smell of hot cakes, to the pages of two of the finest examples of the English novel. Her portrayal I declare to be one of the most admirable achievements in the works of Charlotte Bront�.
CHAPTER VI.
CHARLOTTE BRONT�'S CHILD APPARITION IN "THE PROFESSOR," "WUTHERING HEIGHTS," AND "JANE EYRE."
Mrs. Gaskell, the Bront� biographer, relates that a friend of Charlotte Bront� said Charlotte had told her "a misfortune was often preceded by the dream which she gives to Jane Eyre of carrying a wailing child. She, Charlotte Bront�, described herself as having the most painful sense of pity for the little thing.... The misfortunes she mentioned were not always to herself. She thought such sensitiveness to omens was ... present to susceptible people...." This in the main explains the origin of the child-apparition as an omen of disaster in Charlotte Bront�'s works.
It would seem by Charlotte's statement in Jane Eyre that Tabitha Aykroyd, as "Bessie," was responsible for the origin of this little superstition; and it is instructive to find the child-apparition as an ill-omen in connection with Tabitha Aykroyd as Mrs. Dean in Wuthering Heights. I have shown John Reed and Hindley Earnshaw represent Branwell Bront�; we may notice, therefore, that the child-apparition is given equally in Wuthering Heights and in Jane Eyre as coming before disaster or disgrace to Branwell Bront�.
Chapter XI. Chapter XXI.
Tabitha Aykroyd's child-apparition Tabitha Aykroyd's child-apparition as a token of calamity to Branwell as a token of calamity to Branwell Bront�. Bront�.
Says Mrs. Dean [Tabitha]: "I Presentiments are strange came to a stone which serves as things! ... and so are signs.... a guide-post to ... the Heights Sympathies I believe exist (for and the village.... Hindley instance, between far-distant [Branwell Bront�] and I held it ... wholly estranged relatives). a favourite spot twenty years When I was a ... girl I heard before, ... and ... it appeared Bessie [Tabitha Aykroyd] say that I beheld my ... playmate that to dream of children was a seated on the ... turf, ... his sure sign of trouble.... During little hand scooping out the the last week scarcely a night earth."[27] had gone ... that had not brought ... the dream of an "Poor Hindley!" [Branwell infant which I ... watched Bront�] I exclaimed playing with daisies on a lawn involuntarily. I started--my or ... dabbling its hands in bodily eye was cheated in the running water.[27] It was a belief that the child lifted its wailing child this night, ... a face and stared straight into laughing one the next, ... but mine! It vanished in a whatever mood the apparition twinkling; but immediately I evinced ... it failed not ... to felt an irresistible yearning to meet me.... I grew nervous.... be at the Heights. Superstition It was from companionship with urged me to comply with this this baby-phantom I had been impulse--"Suppose he were dead! roused ... when I heard the cry: ... supposing it were a sign of and on the ... day following ... death!" I found a man [Bessie's husband] waiting for me; ... he was ... in deep mourning, and the hat in his hand was surrounded with a crape band.
"I hope no one is dead," I said. And the man replies that John Reed [Branwell Bront�] had got into great trouble and was dead.
Branwell Bront� was not dead when Charlotte Bront� wrote those two versions, but it seems certain that an apparition of a child in some period of Charlotte's life preceded a further debasement of Branwell, the original of Hindley Earnshaw and John Reed. We may note Charlotte Bront�'s Method II., in regard to Hindley.
In Charlotte Bront�'s The Professor we find reference to her child-phantom wailing outside, and to the eerie, premonitory signal made against a lattice, as in her Wuthering Heights:--
Wuthering Heights. The Professor.
Chapter III. Chapter XVI.
Scene: An isolated homestead on Scene: An isolated homestead on a winter's night, snow-wind a winter's night, snow-wind blowing, storm threatening. blowing, storm threatening.
While leading me upstairs she Take care, young man [Zillah, the stout housewife] [recommended "the herdsman's recommended that I should hide wife"], that you fasten the door the candle and not make a noise, well, ... whatever sound you ... they had so many queer hear stir not and look not out. goings-on. The night will soon fall, ... strange noises are often heard He sleeps and is awakened by-- ... you might chance to hear, as it were, a child cry, and on The branch of a fir that touched opening the door to give it my lattice.... I listened succour ... a shadowy goblin dog doubtingly, ... I heard the might rush over the threshold; gusty wind and the driving of or more awful still, if the snow;... I heard also the something flapped, as with firbough repeat its teasing wings, against the lattice, and sound.... I ... endeavoured to then a raven or a white dove unhasp the casement, ... flew in and settled on the knocking my knuckles through the hearth, such a visitor would be glass, and stretching an arm out a sure sign of misfortune. to seize the ... branch; instead of which my fingers closed on The stranger, left alone, the fingers of a little ice-cold listens awhile to the muffled hand.[28]... I tried to draw snow-wind. back my arm, but the hand clung to it and a melancholy voice sobbed--"Let me in--let me in!"
... As it spoke, I discerned obscurely a child's face looking through the window.... Still it wailed "Let me in!" and it maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear.
"How can I?" I said.... "Let me go, if you want me to let you in." I stopped my ears to exclude the lamentable prayer, ... yet the instant I listened again, there was the doleful cry moaning on!
"Begone!" I shouted; "I'll never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years."
In Wuthering Heights Charlotte Bront� has worked the child-phantom into the story proper, setting it for the spirit of the departed Catherine, who as a child again (Method II., altering age of the character portrayed) seeks Heathcliffe. The building of the child-phantom in the plot of Wuthering Heights created a peculiar state of affairs; but as we have seen by Charlotte Bront�'s reference to it in the extract from The Professor, she was impressed by its possibilities of giving a weird spiritual atmosphere, and she did not extend the idea in The Professor. The substance of Charlotte Bront�'s two versions of the child-phantom wailing outside a house for admittance is identical:--
The Professor. Wuthering Heights.
Scene: An isolated homestead on a Scene: An isolated homestead on a winter's night, snow-wind blowing, winter's night, snow-wind blowing, storm threatening. Young stranger storm threatening. Young stranger admonished by the good housewife admonished by the good housewife that there are queer goings-on that there are queer goings-on thereabouts. thereabouts.
Subjunctive Mood. Indicative Mood.
Something might brush against Something brushes against the the lattice, and a phantom-child lattice, and a phantom-child might wail outside for succour. wails outside for succour. On opening to admit it an awful, On opening to admit it an awful, supernatural incident might occur. supernatural incident occurs.
Thus we perceive the famous child-phantom incident in Chapter III. of Wuthering Heights had its origin (1) in Montagu's lonely-house incident; (2) in Charlotte Bront�'s awe of a child-apparition; (3) in Charlotte Bront�'s Method II., alteration of age of character portrayed, by which Catherine the woman becomes a child again; and (4) in Charlotte Bront�'s notion, as evidenced in Shirley, Chapter XXIV., that a loved dead one can "revisit those they leave"; can "come in the elements"; that "wind" could give "a path to Moor(e)"--Heath(cliffe), "passing the casement sobbing"; that the loved dead one could "haunt" the wind. These, then, we see were the notions in Charlotte Bront�'s head responsible for Catherine's returning so sensationally to the abode of her lover as a child-spectre. For Catherine's love for Wuthering Heights was not simply because of the place and its moors, as so many writers have wrongly contended, but because it was associated with Heathcliffe.[29] Let my reader peruse again the "wailing child" passages I quote from Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in Chapter II. of The Key to the Bront� Works.
Truly the testimony of Charlotte Bront�'s child-phantom were alone the sign-manual that she and none other wrote Wuthering Heights.
CHAPTER VII.
THE ORIGINALS OF GIMMERTON, GIMMERDEN, GIMMERTON KIRK AND CHAPEL, PENISTON CRAGS, THE FAIRY CAVE, ETC., IN "WUTHERING HEIGHTS," AND OF THE FAIRY CAVE AND THE FAIRY JANET IN "JANE EYRE."
The uncommon stress Charlotte Bront� has laid upon the outlandishness of the Wuthering Heights country and its solitudes assuredly would have been absent from that work had she drawn her background from the comparatively characterless Haworth moors on the skirts of manufacturing towns, and not from impressions created in her mind by Montagu's description in his Gleanings in Craven of the wildest and weirdest scenery in Yorkshire. There has been a noticeable tendency on the part of town-bred, and also of romantic, biographers to be awed by the ordinary moorland surroundings of Haworth, and to associate with them all the wildness of the Craven or Scottish Highlands, though Miss Mary Robinson, whose work entitled Emily Bront� is in effect an "appreciation" of Wuthering Heights, says frankly regarding the house standing beyond the street on the summit of Haworth Hill, shown as the original of Wuthering Heights, that to her thinking "this fine old farm of the Sowdens is far too near the mills of Haworth to represent the God-forsaken, lonely house." But of course an author can place a given abode against any background. Wuthering Heights has been connected by some people with a locality called Withins--how wrongly a reference to the origin of Gimmerton and Gimmerden alone shows. The primary origin of the name and title of "Wuthering Heights" I reveal in the final chapter on "The Recoil."
The following passage from Wuthering Heights tells that Charlotte Bront�'s imagination was enjoying the latitude of a half-realized, suggested background. It reads just like the traveller Montagu with his horse, attendant servant on horseback, roadside inns, hostlers, and description of country. But the connection of Montagu with Lockwood of Wuthering Heights we have already seen in the early chapters of The Key to the Bront� Works:--
1802--This September I was invited to devastate the moors of a friend in the North, and on my journey ... I unexpectedly came within fifteen miles of Gimmerton. The hostler at a roadside public-house was holding a pail of water to refresh my horses when a cart of very green oats ... passed by, and he remarked--
"Yon's frough Gimmerton, nah! They're allus three wick after other folk wi' ther harvest."
"Gimmerton?" I repeated; my residence in that locality had already grown dim and dreamy. "Ah, I know. How far is it from this?"
"Happen fourteen mile o'er th' hills; and a rough road." A sudden impulse seized me to visit Thrushcross Grange. It was scarcely noon, and I conceived that I might as well pass the night under my own roof as in an inn.... Having rested a while, I directed my servant to inquire the way to the village; and, with great fatigue to our beasts, we managed the distance in some three hours. I left him there, and proceeded ... down the valley alone. The grey church looked greyer, and the churchyard lonelier. I distinguished a moor sheep cropping the short turf on the graves.... The heat did not hinder me from enjoying the delightful scenery above and below; had I seen it nearer August, I'm sure it would have tempted me to waste a month among its solitudes. [Be it observed he would rather have done so than have gone to "the moors" of his friend.] In winter nothing more dreary than those glens shut in by hills,[30] and those bluff, bold swells of heath.
So we too would imagine, judging by Montagu's description of the district in his little work.
Throughout Wuthering Heights we hear mention of Gimmerton, but it is apparent the village was "dim and dreamy" to Charlotte Bront�--somewhere about the little valley we should imagine, to conclude by general observations. However, clear it is that Gimmerton and Gimmerden were drawn by Charlotte Bront� merely from impressions created in her mind by other than a personal acquaintance with the district. Where then, and in what peculiar circumstances, did Charlotte receive these suggestions--suggestions that must have appealed to her at a time immediately coincident with her commencing this foundling story with the house of mystery, the inhospitable host, the uncouth man-servant, and the candle-bearing bedside visitant--all from Montagu's book? My evidence declares these suggestions also came from Montagu's little work, and that the originals of Gimmerton in Wuthering Heights, and Gimmerden, or the valley of Gimmerton, were Malham and Malhamdale, or the valley of Malham. This district Montagu describes as being "most interesting ... in its own variety of wildness."
I believe Kilnsey Crags, which Montagu describes on the last page of the letter next to that written from Malham, figured in Charlotte Bront�'s mind as the originals of Peniston Crags ("Peniston" may have been suggested by Montagu's mention of Pennigent). Montagu's description of Kilnsey Crags I will place side by side with the reference to Peniston Crags in Wuthering Heights:--
MONTAGU. Wuthering Heights. Chapter XVIII.
KILNSEY CRAGS. PENISTON CRAGS.
A lofty range of limestone rocks The abrupt descent of Peniston ... stretching nearly half a Crags particularly attracted her mile along the valley, and notice; especially when the rendered perhaps, more striking setting sun shone on it and the by contrasting with the vale topmost heights, and the whole immediately at its base. extent of the landscape, besides [by contrasting] lay in shadow.
Clearly Joseph's "leading of lime" from Peniston Crags in Wuthering Heights was suggested to Charlotte Bront� by the "Kiln" of Kilnsea Crags, and Montagu's reference to the crags being limestone. Dean describes them to Cathy, and her words are simply Montagu's description--treated antithetically--of Gordale Scar in the Malham letter:--
In the clefts in the rocks' They were bare masses of stone, sides, or wherever a lodgement with hardly enough earth in of earth appears [is] the ... their clefts to nourish ... a yew. tree.... One of the maids mentioning the Fairy Cave, quite turned her head....
In his Malham letter Montagu describes a Fairy Cave, and of course Gimmerton has the Fairy Cave in its neighbourhood. It is placed under the Crags, but we have no description in Wuthering Heights:--
Montagu has a boy-guide "adapted Says Catherine Linton to the boy to show the prominent features Hareton:--"I want ... to hear to strangers." He takes Montagu about the fairishes, as you on to Malham, where Montagu sees call them.".... Hareton opened the Fairy Cave. This boy-guide the mysteries of the Fairy Cave was called Robert Airton, and he and twenty other queer places. was aged twelve.[31] But ... I was not favoured with a description of the interesting objects she saw. I could gather, however, that her guide had been a favourite.
The name of Linton appears in Montagu in the letter next that in which he describes the Fairy Cave. We may understand that Charlotte Bront�'s romantic imagination was entranced, as she says Catherine Linton's was, with the mention of the Fairy Cave; and Jane Eyre is testimony that after writing Wuthering Heights she turned again to consider its possibilities of suggestion.
In fact, I find that Charlotte Bront� when she chose the name of Janet Eyre for herself was also calling herself the Fairy Janet. And where, then, read Charlotte Bront� of the fairy Janet Eyre? The evidence of Montagu's work proves that when she wrote the name Eyre, she was implying by this Derbyshire variant the name Aire or Ayre, meaning the river Ayre. Where acquired Charlotte Bront� so intimate an acquaintance with the history of the Fairy Janet of the Aire as to take upon herself poetically, the r�le of that Craven elf and her name?
Mr. Harry Speight recently, in The Craven Highlands, told us "the Fairy Jennet or Janet was queen of the Malhamdale elves" who frequented the enchanted ground round the source of the Aire. But prior to Montagu's dealing with Janet's Cave, the home of the Malhamdale fays, the queen-elf had been referred to as Gennet. Montagu spelt the name Jannet, and later writers having referred to him, the fairy cave now bears the name Janet's Cave. A Malham writer prior to Montagu referred only briefly to the Fairy Cave, and quite prosily. In his Malham letter Montagu says:--
"Leaving a farmhouse at the entrance of the vale to the left, we [he and his boy-guide] proceeded over two fields, then ascended about twenty yards, suddenly turned an acute angle, and penetrating some bushes we stood at the entrance of a deep and narrow glen, before a perpendicular fall of water. At the foot of this cascade is
JANNET'S CAVE.
It is so called from the queen or governess of a numerous tribe of faeries, which tradition assures us anciently held their court here; and as there may be some of my readers who may like at the moonlit hour to be entertained at one of Jannet's banquets, I will give an idea as to the mode of obtaining admission into such society.... On the evening when I first learned the mystic lore, the golden sun had kissed every flower, even unto the retiring lily, and was gliding westward when, from the heart's couch of a moss rose, there came the eldest daughter of faeryland, probably the self-same Jannet's daughter, saying:--
'I have come from whence Peace with white sceptre wafting to and fro, Smooths the wide bosom of the Elysian world,'
and who, upon being informed that I was desirous of swearing allegiance to her sweet mother, said that she would bring intelligence whether I might be admitted to her pretty vassalage; she then bade her attendants bring her car, which was a leaf of a favourite hyacinth, drawn by two lady-birds who were guided by reins of gossamer; the mellow horn of the herald bee summoned her attendants, who, to the number of twenty, obeyed the call; and taking the coronets from off their brows, made low obeisance to their young princess, which she pleasingly acknowledged. Then they each captured a sphere of thistle-down, and seating themselves thereon, followed their princess; who, attended by her guards, each armed with a maiden's eye-lash, journeyed onwards towards the realms of enchanted ground. I should think that not many minutes elapsed when the cavalcade returned, and the charter written upon the leaf of a 'forget-me-not,' with the gold from a butterfly's wing, was placed into my hand by 'a fay,' with injunctions not to divulge the secrets of the order. I would have promised but awoke from this pleasant dream."
We will now read Montagu's description of the Fairy Janet, and a fairy coming to him at sundown when adapted by Charlotte Bront� in Jane Eyre.
Ad�le asks Rochester whether she is to go to school without her governess, Jane Eyre:--
"Yes," he replied; ... "for I am to take mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcano tops, and mademoiselle shall live with me there, and only me."
"... But you can't get her there...."
"Ad�le ... late one evening ... I sat down to rest me on a stile ... when something came up the path.... Our speechless colloquy was to this effect--
"It was a fairy, and come from Elf-land, it said.... It told me of the alabaster cave and silver vale.... I said I should like to go.... 'Oh,' returned the fairy.... 'Here is a talisman which will remove all difficulties' and she held out a pretty gold ring...."
"But what has mademoiselle [Jane Eyre] to do with it? I don't care for the fairy...."
"Mademoiselle [Jane Eyre] is a fairy," he said, whispering mysteriously.
But Ad�le assures him she made no account of his "contes de f�e."
For the present it is enough to know that in the main and ostensibly the Fairy Janet Eyre was Charlotte Bront�'s adaptation of Montagu's Fairy Janet, the queen-elf of the Malhamdale fairies, said to frequent the enchanted land round the source of the Aire.
The fairy idea, Charlotte discovered, served well to give a certain gallantry to Rochester's bestowing of epithets. These the reader may have interest in finding in Jane Eyre. For instance, when Jane, returning from her visit to a dead relative, informs Rochester, he says:--
"A true Janian reply! [italics mine]. Good angels be my guard! She comes from the other world--from the abode of people who are dead, and tells me so when she meets me alone here in the gloaming! If I dared, I'd touch you, to see if you are substance or shadow, you elf!--but I'd as soon offer to take hold of a blue ignis-fatuus light in the marsh."
A few lines lower Rochester asks:--
"Tell me, now, fairy as you are--can't you give a charm?"
And then farther down:
"Pass, Janet: go up home and stay your weary little wandering feet at a friend's threshold."
When Rochester's bed is in flames, and he awakes to find Janet has thrown water upon it, he demands:--
"In the name of all the elves in Christendom, is that Jane Eyre?"
And so I might continue. It is observable Charlotte Bront� never allows Rochester to call Jane Eyre "Janet" and "fairy" in the same breath. She permits the use of Janet, however, when the fairy notion is concealed, as when Rochester says:
"Just put your hand in mine, Janet, that I may have the evidence of touch as well as sight, to prove you are near me."
Certain it is that in Charlotte Bront�'s inmost heart her autobiographical self was called Janet Aire.[32]
Charlotte Bront�'s conceptions, when she let her imagination have play and forgot the world of readers were, like Jane Eyre's thoughts, "elfish." See the fairy tale, The Adventures of Ernest Alembert (attributed by Charlotte Bront� to her pen in her fifteenth year). It has been remarked this story is not in the handwriting Charlotte Bront� affected at this period, and that the manuscript has not Charlotte's customary title-page.[33] In view of the evidence of The Key to the Bront� Works, it is of interest to make a comparison between Alembert and Montagu's Gleanings in Craven, published eight years later than the date Charlotte Bront� ascribed to its completion. The association of the family of Lambert with hypothetical high treason and with being extinct; with the Malham country as described by Montagu--the references, so frequent in his pages, to the awe inspired by the wildness of the scenery, to the underground torrent, the contrasting range of crags, the lake, the fairy cave, the fairy and the admittance into faerydom; to "the mellow hum of the bee," etc., are interesting in the extreme, seeing by aid of Montagu that Malham as presented by him became Gimmerton of Wuthering Heights. Whether "coincidence" has to do with this matter of Alembert and Montagu, or Charlotte Bront� has for some reason ante-dated Alembert, I leave to the reader to decide.
MONTAGU. The Adventures of Ernest Alembert.
Montagu, speaking of the church Charlotte Bront� begins by of Kirkby-Malham, "in the ... relating that there once lived vale of Malham," says:--"Some of an Ernest Alembert. One of the the Lamberts are buried Alemberts having been "beheaded" here--here is a monument to ... for "high treason,"[34] "the John Lambert, who aided Cromwell family had decayed" until the in his murder of Charles the only survivor was Ernest First (as all did who were Alembert. We are told that he implicated in Cromwell's beside a valley; and the river rebellion)[34]--after the became a lake. A stranger Restoration lived he died putting him under a spell, banished and forgotten at [A]lembert accepts him for a Guernsey. The family is now guide, and they wend their way extinct." up the valley.
In the chapter on Malham, [A]lembert finds himself at a Montagu accepts a guide who place where the torrent goes takes him up the vale of Malham. underground. He mentions Malham Lake, or Tarn, and says of the River Aire in the connection that the water "delves into the mountain, and does not appear again until it reaches the village of Airton, below Malham."
We have descriptions of wild We have descriptions of wild moor, "tremendous" precipices, moors and precipices, and and "grand and terrific foaming cataracts. When they cataracts":--"At last we stopped to rest after a climb attained the summit of the "the scene was grand and awful mountain, when, looking down in in the extreme.... The mellow the chasm beneath, horror and hum of the bee was no longer immensity were defined with heard.... Above rose tremendous thrilling truth." precipices, whose vast shadows blackened all that portion of the moor [see "Peniston Crags," page 59], and deepened the frown on the face of unpropitious nature."
Montagu and his guide go to a [A]lembert and his guide go to a cave--the cave of the Fairy cave. Farther on the guide Janet. Montagu falling asleep as vanishes, but [A]lembert wakes it were, a fairy comes to his to find him by his side as a side and tells him he is in the fairy [Charlotte Bront�, Method realm of fairies. She promises I., interchange of the sexes], to induct him into the wonders who addresses [A]lembert as of faeryland, and "the mellow follows:-- horn of the herald bee" summoned her attendants. And so on. See "I am a fairy. You have been, Charlotte Bront�'s mention in and still are, in the land of Alembert of "the mellow hum of fairies. Some wonders you have the bee." seen; many more you shall see if you choose to follow me." And so on in extension.
I have often wondered why no one has ever observed before that the hand which wrote The Adventures of Ernest Alembert must assuredly have written every line of Wuthering Heights. We may well understand why Charlotte Bront� in Wuthering Heights wrote of Catherine Linton that "the mentioning the Fairy Cave quite turned her head" with interest. And that the original of the Fairy Cave in Wuthering Heights was the Fairy Cave of Malhamdale Montagu mentions at such length in his Malham letter, the use of the names Linton and Airton in the connection irrefutably proves without other appeal: Hareton--that variant of Aire, cannot be associated with Derbyshire like "Eyre"; and despite the use of "Eyre," Aire was the name in Charlotte Bront�'s mind, just as "Airton" was when she wrote "Hareton."
Both the "boy-guide" and "Gimmerton's mist" were obviously suggested to Charlotte Bront� for Wuthering Heights by Montagu, the original, as I have shown, of Lockwood:--
I ... took leave of my host and Says Heathcliffe:--"People followed the youthful steps of familiar with these moors often my guide whose services I had miss their road on such an accepted.... Upon the summit of evening." the mountain is Kilnsea Moor, over which it is impossible to "Perhaps I can get a guide among find a route to Malham Water your lads, ... could you spare without a guide, more one?" asks Lockwood of his host. particularly as a mist creates a difficulty, even to a person well acquainted with the locality.
Montagu's frequent references to the mountainous character of the Malham country were doubtless responsible for Charlotte Bront�'s choice of the word "heights" used in her title. Why the name of Gimmer, from "gimmer" a female sheep, and signifying with "ton" the place of sheep, was chosen by her for Gimmerton, is clear when we read the etymology Montagu gives of Skipton. He mentions Skibden and Skipton, proceeding to explain that "Skipton, or Sceptown (from the Saxon word 'scep,' a sheep)" meant "the town of sheep"; and Montagu tells us a native spoke of the village as "the town of Malham." Hence we perceive why Charlotte Bront� coined "Gimmerton," the village of sheep, and "Gimmerden," the valley of sheep, for Malham and Malhamdale with the source of the Aire, the Fairy Cave, the Sough, the adjacent crags, the heights, the glens, the rising mists, the Methodist chapel and kirk in the lonely vale, when in the light of all the foregoing we read in Montagu's work that:--
"Here [at Malham] there is an annual fair held on the 15th of October, appropriated entirely for the sale of sheep.[35] I am within the limit of fact when I say that upwards of one hundred thousand [sheep] have been shown at one time. [Joseph takes cattle to "Gimmerton Fair," of course not in October.] The houses are mostly built of limestone, and covered with grit slates, and irregularly situated at the base of a range of steep mountains"--"the Heights."
Malham he describes as "a small township, divided into east and west portions by a rapid stream"--"the beck down Gimmerton." "There is a Methodist chapel at Malham," he states, and says that the old church of Kirkby-Malham "is in the very bosom of the vale of Malham." Thus Gimmerton Kirk, in the lonely valley of Gimmerton,[36] was Charlotte Bront�'s name in Wuthering Heights for the kirk by Malham, in the lonely vale of Malham. This insight into the origin of the name of "kirk" for a Yorkshire church excuses what, without it, would have been an anachronistic misnomer. As for the Nonconformists' place of worship, Dean is made to remark:--"They call the Methodists' or Baptists' place--I can't say which it is at Gimmerton--a chapel."
In the light of the foregoing evidence it is impossible to ignore the reference Montagu makes to "the sinks," where the water from Malham Tarn sinks underground for a considerable distance. Whether Charlotte Bront� thought this would produce a quag in the neighbourhood I cannot tell; but if she has used the word "sough" (pronounced suff) in its ordinary acceptance in Yorkshire, she originally meant "a subterranean passage or tunnel, draining water as from a sink," if I may quote a definition in Dr. Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary. There is every sign in her writings of a loose, composite adaptation of Montagu's topography, etc., yet Charlotte Bront� was ever jealous of associations, and under a guise or not she frequently preserved carefully recognizable characteristics necessary to locality and to personality; and we see Montagu had associated a sough with Malham. We have mention of Gimmerton Sough in Chapter III. of Wuthering Heights, and in Chapter X.:--"... the valley of Gimmerton, with a long list of mist winding nearly to its top (for very soon after you pass the chapel ... the sough that runs from the marshes joins a beck which follows the bend of the glen). Wuthering Heights rose above this silvery vapour." And we have read what Montagu says about the mists of Malham.
The influence of Montagu's descriptions of this wild locality is likewise observable in the scenery and the background of Jane Eyre,[37] as I mentioned in the article "The Key to Jane Eyre" I wrote in The Saturday Review. The yews and evergreens, mentioned by Montagu in connection with Malham, and introduced by Charlotte Bront�, with other trees of the fir-tribe, in descriptions of Morton in Jane Eyre, Chap. XXX., etc., and in Wuthering Heights, are not common to Haworth.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE RIVERS OR BRONT� FAMILY IN "JANE EYRE."
Charlotte Bront�, while she often portrayed the main characters of her stories from people in her own life, was quite at home with them in whatsoever condition or surroundings she placed them.[38] She loved the memory of Tabitha Aykroyd--that faithful servant, companion, and friend; hated the vices of her brother Branwell Bront�, and was obsessed by thoughts of M. H�ger, her Brussels friend. So she placed the good old housekeeper of the parsonage--under an ecclesiastical cognomen truly--as Mrs. Dean at Wuthering Heights; set up her brother Branwell on the same premises as Hindley Earnshaw, and put her Brussels friend in the position of master of that abode.
In Jane Eyre Tabitha Aykroyd is Bessie of Mrs. Reed's household, and Hannah of the Rivers family; Branwell is among better surroundings as John Reed, and M. H�ger is portrayed more proportionately as the master of Thornfield; while in the same work Charlotte Bront� portrays her own sister Maria Bront�, and makes her say she is a native of Northumberland and describe the scenery round her birthplace there!
In Shirley Charlotte admits to having placed Emily Bront� as "Shirley Keeldar," surrounded by the environment of a wealthy woman--a landed proprietress in the Dewsbury neighbourhood; and she gives us phases of M. H�ger as a resident of Yorkshire, in the two Moores.
Villette contains in Dr. John, towards the close, a portrait of the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, who became her husband, as a resident of the foreign town Villette--for I find the character Dr. John was a portrait not wholly drawn, as is supposed, from Mr. Smith of Messrs. Smith & Elder, the Bront� publishers; and glimpses of Mr. Thackeray as a Villette lecturer appear in a flitting usurpation of M. H�ger's rights as the original of M. Paul.
Charlotte Bront�'s thus placing given characters against any background is doubtless responsible for the fact that when I wrote the Fortnightly Review article, "The Lifting of the Bront� Veil: A New Study of the Bront� Family," in March, 1907, nigh on sixty years of readers of the Bront� works had failed to recognize Charlotte Bront� had portrayed in Jane Eyre not only herself and her sister, Maria Bront�, as was commonly known, but also her brother, Branwell Bront�; her Aunt Branwell; her cousin, Eliza Branwell; her sister, Elizabeth Bront�; her sister, Emily Bront�; her sister, Anne Bront�; her father, the Rev. Patrick Bront�; and also Tabitha Aykroyd, the Bront� servant. Perhaps it was because readers believed Morton was Hathersage, Derbyshire, that a suspicion of the Rivers family being the Bront� family at Haworth never had been entertained.
I found, however, that all the above-mentioned members of the Bront� family were placed in Jane Eyre under a "Rivers" surname; and proceeding into the inquiry as to their identity, I perceived this discovery of the Bront� family in Jane Eyre numbered with the more important of my Bront� discoveries, and that despite her purposed and reasonable cross-scents--the spired church, the mention of knife-grinders, and the hinting at the proximity of Sheffield, all so necessary in her day to permit the portrayal of phases of the life at Haworth Parsonage--Morton to Charlotte Bront� was in the main Haworth. What importance would attach to a discovery of an unknown portrait group of his family deliberately painted from life by an old master! Such is the importance of this discovery of the Bront� family drawn by the pen of Charlotte Bront� herself in Jane Eyre. Currer Bell portrayed with unvarying truth; and with cunning artistry she brought forward in her literary legacy to the English novel the sure characteristics--the very soul, the shallowness, the pretty affectionateness, the cooing "dove-like voice," the "blue steel glance," of those she had watched and loved and feared.
Now, in the selection of a Christian name for the heroine Jane Eyre, in whom she had portrayed herself, there was every reason why Charlotte Bront� would be unlikely to adopt the second name of her sister, Emily Jane. We have seen, however, that Charlotte Bront� had been led by Montagu's mention of the Fairy Jannet, or Janet, poetically to make her heroine a Fairy Janet. This evidence shows, therefore, that "Jane" was really only secondary. The Fairy Cave which this fairy was supposed to frequent is near Malham or Gimmerton, and, as I have said, the Fairy Janet is termed "the queen of the Malhamdale elves that frequent the enchanted land round the source of the Aire." Montagu mentions the fact that the river Ayre takes its rise at Malham--at Malham Tarn, and hence Charlotte Bront� seems to have named her heroine originally Janet Aire. Obvious it is she would be led, naturally, to use later some variant of Aire or Ayre; and the fact that she visited in the summer of 1845 (evidence shows she had read Montagu at the time)[39] her friend Miss Nussey, then at Hathersage in Derbyshire, where Eyre is a common name, would suggest she was led to adopt this variant through her visit there. We already have seen Charlotte Bront� used the variant of "Hare" for "Air" in Wuthering Heights for the boy Hareton from Montagu's boy-guide, Robert Airton. And that she wished in Jane Eyre to break through the confines of the variant she had chosen for Aire, and give open expression to her original and poetic idea, is seen plainly enough where Ad�le asks:--
"And Mademoiselle--what is your name?"
"Eyre--Jane Eyre."
"Aire? bah, I cannot say it."
Having made this interesting discovery, I further found that, not satisfied with appropriating for herself the "stream" surname, she placed such a surname upon those who were related to her and whom she had portrayed in Jane Eyre. So she used Burns from "burn," a stream spelt with an "s," for Maria Bront�; Rivers, from a river also spelt with an "s," for Emily Bront�, Anne Bront�, and the Rev. Patrick Bront�, with Tabitha Aykroyd in attendance as Hannah; Reed, from the river of that name for Charlotte's Aunt Branwell, her cousin Eliza Branwell, and her brother, Branwell Bront�; Severn, from the river of that name for her sister Elizabeth Bront�--just as she used Aire from the river of that name for herself, as Janet Aire.
A reference to Mrs. Gaskell's Bront� Life were sufficient to establish the identifications, when I say that by Charlotte Bront�'s Method II. (the alteration of the age of a character portrayed) the Rev. Patrick Bront� is represented as a young man in the Rev. St. John Eyre Rivers--certainly a very necessary obfuscation, for it is to be seen the home at Morton gives a most enlightening insight into the life at the Haworth Parsonage. A death is supposed to have occurred in the Rivers family; and when it is remembered Thornfield to Charlotte Bront� represented the H�gers' establishment at Brussels, and that she left Brussels the first time on account of the death of her aunt, Miss Elizabeth Branwell who, after being the female head of the parsonage some years, died there in the close of 1842, we may know for whom the Rivers family were really in mourning. Charlotte Bront� tells us that, looking through the window of Moor House--Haworth Parsonage:--
I could see ... an elderly woman [Tabitha Aykroyd--the Mrs. Dean of Wuthering Heights], somewhat rough-looking, but scrupulously clean, like all about her, ... knitting a stocking.... Two young, graceful women [Emily and Anne Bront�]--ladies in every point--sat, one in a low rocking-chair, the other on a lower stool; both wore deep mourning, ... which sombre garb singularly set off very fair necks and faces: a large old ... dog [Emily had a favourite dog] rested his massive head on the knee of one girl--in the lap of the other was cushioned a black cat. A strange place was this humble kitchen for such occupants [but they were ever fond of it]. Who were they? They could not be the daughters of the elderly person at the table [Tabitha]; for she looked like a rustic, and they were all delicacy and cultivation. I had nowhere seen such faces as theirs; and yet, as I gazed on them I seemed intimate with every lineament. I cannot call them handsome--they were too pale and grave for the word: as they each bent over a book they looked thoughtful almost to severity. A stand between them supported a second candle and two great volumes to which they frequently referred; comparing them ... with the smaller books they held in their hands like people consulting a dictionary to aid ... in the task of translation. This scene was as silent as if all the figures had been shadows and the fire-lit apartment a picture.
"Listen, Diana [Emily Bront�]", said one of the absorbed students, ... and in a low voice she read ... in German.... The other girl, who had lifted her head to listen to her sister, repeated, while she gazed at the fire, a line.... "Good!" ... she exclaimed, while her dark and deep eyes sparkled, ... "I like it!"
"Is there ony country where they talk i' that way?" asked the old woman [Tabitha, using her Haworth Yorkshire dialect], and being told there is:--"Well, for sure case, I knawn't how they can understand t'one t'other: and if either o' ye went there, ye could tell what they said, I guess?"
"... Not all--for we are not as clever as you think us, Hannah. We don't speak German...."
"And what good does it do you?"
"We mean to teach it some time--or at least the elements, as they say; and then we shall get more money than we do now."
"Varry like; but give ower studying: ye've done enough for to-night."
"I think we have.... I wonder when St. John [the Rev. Patrick Bront�] will come home."
"Surely he will not be long now: it is just ten" (looking at a little gold watch she drew from her girdle). "It rains fast. Hannah, will you have the goodness to look at the fire in the parlour?"
Charlotte seems to have portrayed particularly those happy months at home in 1842, when, after the death of their aunt, all three sisters were together and their brother Branwell was away. It is Anne Bront� who, as Mary Rivers, consults her watch. For the circumstances in which she acquired this gold watch see the will of Miss Elizabeth Branwell, her aunt.[40]
The woman [Tabitha] rose: she opened a door, ... soon I heard her stir the fire in an inner room. She presently came back: "Ah childer!" said she, "it fair troubles me to go into yond room now: it looks so lonesome wi' the chair empty and set back in a corner."
The Bront� sisters were "always children in the eyes of Tabitha." Continuing her description of her sisters, Charlotte as Jane says:--
Both were fair complexioned and slenderly made; both possessed faces full of distinction and intelligence. One [Emily Bront�] to be sure had hair a shade darker than the other, and there was a difference in their style of wearing it: Mary's [Anne Bront�'s] pale brown locks were parted and braided smooth; Diana's [Emily Bront�'s] duskier tresses covered her neck with thick curls.... [She] had a voice toned to my ear, like the cooing of a dove. She possessed eyes whose gaze I delighted to encounter. Her whole face seemed to me full of charm, Mary's [Anne Bront�'s] countenance was equally intelligent--her features equally pretty; but her expression was more reserved; and her manner, though gentle, more distant. Diana looked and spoke with a certain authority [it was Emily Bront�'s manner]: she had a will.... It was my nature to feel pleasure in yielding to an authority supported like hers; and to bend, where my conscience and self-respect permitted, to an active will.
The following is the portrait of Charlotte Bront�'s father (Method II., the altering the age of the character portrayed) as her imagination pictured him to have been in his young days. St. John's was the Rev. Patrick Bront�'s college at Cambridge:--
Mr. St. John ... had he been a statue instead of a man ... could not have been easier. He was ... tall, slender; his face riveted the eye; it was like a Greek face, very pure in outline; quite a straight classic nose, quite an Athenian mouth and chin. It is seldom indeed an English face comes so near the antique models as did his.... His eyes were large and blue, ... his high forehead, colourless as ivory, was partially streaked over by careless locks of fair hair.... He ... scarcely impressed one with the idea of a gentle ... or even of a placid nature; ... there was something about his nostril, his mouth, his brow, which ... indicated elements within either restless, or hard or eager.
Charlotte Bront�'s references herewith, and in other instances, to the passionate nature of her father are interesting reading, especially in view of the fact that this point has been the subject of controversy. To return to Jane Eyre:--
Mr. Rivers [Mr. Bront�] now closed his book, approached the table, and, as he took a seat, fixed his pictorial-looking eyes full upon me. There was an unceremonious directness, a searching, decided steadfastness in his gaze now which told that intention ... had hitherto kept it averted ... St. John's eyes, though clear enough in a literal sense, in a figurative one were difficult to fathom. He seemed to use them rather as instruments to search other people's thoughts, than as agents to reveal his own: the which combination of keenness and reserve was considerably more calculated to embarrass than to encourage.
Mrs. Gaskell states that even in his old age Mr. Bront�[41] was a tall and a striking-looking man, with a nobly shaped head and erect carriage, and that in youth he must have been unusually handsome. And to use the words of Hannah, "Mr. St. John when he grew up would go to college and be a parson." Continuing, Mrs. Gaskell further says:--
The course of his life shows a powerful and remarkable character, originating and pursuing a purpose in a resolute and independent manner--separating himself from his family. There was no trace of his Irish origin in his speech; he never could have shown his Celtic origin in the straight Greek lines and long oval of his face.
Another writer accentuating this says Mr. Bront� was "proud of his Greek profile," and we have now seen that Charlotte Bront� herself says his (St. John's) face was "like a Greek face, pure in outline." Mr. Bront� had also "fine blue eyes," like Mr. St. John. "His (Mr. Bront�'s) passionate nature was compressed down with stoicism, but it was there, notwithstanding all his philosophic calm and dignity of demeanour, though he did not speak when displeased. He was an active walker, stretching away over the moors for many miles. He dined alone, and did not require companionship."
Which is, of course, all consonant with what we read of St. John Eyre Rivers. Charlotte Bront� continues:--
As to Mr. St. John, the intimacy which had arisen so naturally ... between me and ... [my] sisters did not extend to him. One reason of the distance ... observed between us was, that he was comparatively seldom at home: a large proportion of his time appeared devoted to visiting the sick and poor among the scattered population of his parish. No weather seemed to hinder him in these pastoral excursions: rain or fair, he would, when his hours of morning study were over, take his hat and ... go out on his mission of love and duty.... But, besides his frequent absences, there was another barrier to friendship with him: he seemed of a reserved, an abstracted, and even a brooding nature. Zealous in his ministerial labours, blameless in his life and habits, he yet did not appear to enjoy that mental serenity, that inward content which should be the reward of every sincere Christian and practical philanthropist. Often of an evening, when he sat at the window, his desk and papers before him, he would cease reading or writing, rest his chin on his hand, and deliver himself up to I know not what course of thought; but that it was perturbed and exciting might be seen in the frequent dilation of his eye.
I think, moreover, that Nature was not to him that treasury of delight it was to his [my] sisters. He once expressed, and but once in my hearing, a strong sense of the rugged charm of the hills, and an inborn affection for the dark roof and hoary walls he called his home; but there was more of gloom than pleasure in the tone and words in which the sentiment was manifested; and never did he roam the moors for the sake of their soothing silence--never to seek out or dwell upon the thousand peaceful delights they could yield.
Incommunicative as he was, some time elapsed before I had an opportunity of gauging his mind. I first got an idea of its calibre when I heard him preach in his own church.... I wish I could describe that sermon; but it is past my power. I cannot even render faithfully the effect it produced on me.
It began calm, and indeed, as far as delivery and pitch of voice went, it was calm to the end: an earnestly felt, yet strictly restrained zeal breathed soon in the distinct accents, and prompted the nervous language. This grew to force--compressed, condensed, controlled.... Throughout there was a strange bitterness; an absence of consolatory gentleness; stern allusions to Calvinistic doctrines--election, predestination, reprobation--were frequent.... It seemed to me ... that the eloquence to which I had been listening had sprung from a depth where lay turbid dregs of disappointment--where moved troubling impulses of insatiable yearnings and disquieting aspirations. I was sure St. John Rivers, pure-lived, conscientious, zealous as he was--had not yet found that peace of God which passeth all understanding: he had no more found it ... than had I: with my concealed and racking regrets for my broken idol and lost elysium.
"Charlotte Bront�," says Miss Laura C. Holloway, "early exhibited antagonistic feelings towards the Calvinistic views of her father." And so I might continue at great length. Excluding the love passages necessary to "story" and the missionary suggestions for which it seems that Brussels priest whom I may call Charlotte Bront�'s F�nelon was originally responsible, the portrayal of the Rev. Patrick Bront�, like that of Charlotte's sisters, is absolutely true to prototype and fact.[42] We discover that at heart Charlotte Bront� loved her father, hence she honoured him--the head of the "Rivers" family--by giving him the final word in her autobiography, speaking of him as he appeared to her: an old man whose days were drawing to a close. Jane relates of Morton:--
Near the churchyard, and in the middle of the garden, stood a well-built though small house, which I had no doubt was the parsonage.
In Charlotte Bront�'s mind this was Haworth Parsonage; but it is clear that, despite the church "spire" and other efforts at obfuscation, she did not dare to portray her sisters and father in the parsonage. Thus she placed the family in another house. And now we will have another glimpse of Tabitha Aykroyd, this time as "Hannah," speaking her Haworth Yorkshire dialect:--
"Have you been with the family long?"
"I've lived here thirty year. I nursed them all three.... I thowt more o' th' childer nor of mysel'.... They've like nobody to tak' care on 'em but me ... I'm like to look sharpish."
Hannah was evidently fond of talking [see my chapter on Tabitha Aykroyd]. While I picked the fruit and she made the paste for the pies, she proceeded to give me sundry details about ... her deceased ... mistress, and "the childer," as she called the young people.... There was nothing like them in these parts, nor ever had been; they had liked learning, all three, almost from the time they could speak; and they had always been "of a mak" of their own [had individual character]. They had lived very little at home for a long while, and were only come now to stay a few weeks on account of their father's [aunt's] death: but they did so like Marsh End and Morton [Haworth] and all these moors and hills about. They had been in ... many grand towns, but they always said there was no place like home; and then they were so agreeable with each other--never fell out nor "threaped" [asserted beyond the argumentative point]. She did not know where there was such a family for being united.
Emily Bront� as Diana says it is "a privilege we exercise in our home to prepare our own meals when ... so inclined, or when Hannah [Tabby] is baking, brewing, washing or ironing," which of course was true at Haworth Parsonage. To give yet another description:--
The Rivers [Bront�s] clung to the purple moors behind and around their dwelling with a perfect enthusiasm of attachment. I could comprehend the feeling, and share both its strength and truth. I saw the fascination of the locality, ... my eye feasted on the outline of swell and sweep.... The strong blast and the soft breeze; the rough and the halcyon day; the hours of sunrise and sunset ... developed for me ... the same attraction as for them--wound round my faculties the same spell that entranced theirs.
Then follow pictures of the life at Haworth Parsonage, which tell us how Charlotte Bront� adored her sisters; and with the modesty of true genius she places herself at their feet, as it were. We have a sketch of Tabitha Aykroyd ironing Aunt Branwell's lace frills and crimping her nightcap borders in Jane Eyre, Chapter I., wherein both figure as Bessie and Aunt Reed. Years ago it came to be thought the original of Jane Eyre's Aunt Reed was Miss Branwell, the aunt of the Bront� children, though one writer identified her with a certain Mrs. Sidgwick whose son threw a book at Miss Bront� in her governess days, because "the son of Mrs. Reed" threw a Bible at Jane Eyre. The fact the rainy-day narrations in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre establish, that Charlotte Bront� associated a "volume-hurling" incident with her childhood and Branwell Bront�'s "tyranny," disposed finally of the Sidgwick identifications. John Reed we have now seen was, like Hindley Earnshaw, Catherine's brother, drawn by Charlotte Bront� from her brother Branwell Bront�. Always she wrote of him vindictively, and with a retributive justice, her strong characteristic. At about the period when Currer Bell was penning Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre Branwell was a source of considerable distress to her. He was disgraced; his habits were the reverse of temperate, and it was daily feared that in a fit of delirium he might make an attempt upon his own life. Indeed Charlotte Bront� palpably writes of Branwell Bront� and those miserable associations which brought trouble upon Mrs. Gaskell's first edition of the Bront� Life, in The Professor, Chapter XX., where she says:--
Limited as had yet been my experience of life, I had once had the opportunity of contemplating, near at hand, an example of the results produced by a course of ... domestic treachery.... I saw it bare and real, and it was very loathsome. I saw a mind degraded ... by the habit of perfidious deception, and a body depraved by the infectious influence of the vice-polluted soul. I had suffered much from the forced and prolonged view of this spectacle.
Charlotte's letters also show she was ashamed of and losing patience with him. John Reed is spoken of as "a dissipated young man; they will never make much of him, I think.... Some people call him a fine-looking young man; but he has such thick lips." For obfuscation's sake he is "tall," and Mrs. Gaskell in speaking of Branwell's profile says:--"There are coarse lines about the mouth, and the lips, though handsome in shape, are loose and thick, indicating self-indulgence." Aunt Reed exclaims at the last of her favourite:--"John is sunken and degraded, his look is frightful--I feel ashamed for him when I see him." It was near the time that Aunt Branwell died at Haworth there was this decided degradation of her favourite nephew Branwell. For story purposes Charlotte Bront� makes her aunt a married woman in Jane Eyre, and places her nephew Branwell and her niece Eliza Branwell in the relation of children to her as John and Eliza Reed--Georgiana is no doubt a Bront� relative of whom we have not heard, and Charlotte thought vain. The fact that in Jane Eyre, Chapter XXI., her name is mentioned in connection with "a title," would show Currer Bell early apportioned her a place in the book by reason of Montagu's reference to a Lady Georgiana.
A child, sympathetic and intensely emotional, Charlotte Bront�, evidently, felt injustices with an acuteness not easy to understand without reading her Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre by aid of The Key to the Bront� Works. It would be like Maria Bront� to protest with her younger sister on her holding resentment against Aunt Branwell; and with the inference that she herself had endured her harshness, she says as Helen Burns:--"What a singularly deep impression her injustice seems to have made on your heart! No ill-usage so brands its record on my feelings. Would it not be happier if you tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited?"
Of Eliza Reed (Cousin Eliza Branwell), as seen by Jane at the death of Aunt Reed, we are told: "she was now very thin, and there was something ascetic in her look." She wore "a nun-like ornament of a string of ebony beads and a crucifix. This I felt sure was Eliza, though I could trace little resemblance to her former self in that elongated and colourless visage." In 1840 Charlotte Bront� wrote of her "Cousin Eliza Branwell" that she spoke of nothing but botany, her own conversion, Low Church, Evangelical clergy, and the Millennium.[43] And thus in Jane Eyre we read of Cousin Eliza Reed, by way of emphasis on this side of her character:--
Eliza ... had no time to talk, ... yet it was difficult to say what she did.... Three times a day she studied a little book which I found ... was a Common Prayer Book. I asked her once what was the great attraction of that volume, and she said 'the Rubric.' Three hours she gave to stitching, with gold thread, the border of a square crimson cloth; ... she informed me it was ... for the altar of a new church.... Two hours she devoted to ... working by herself in the kitchen garden. [Cousin Eliza's parterre is also referred to in Chapter IV. of Jane Eyre.] Eliza [attended] a saint's-day service at ... church--for in matters of religion she was a rigid formalist: no weather ever prevented the punctual discharge of what she considered her devotional duties; fair or foul she went to church thrice every Sunday, and as often on week-days as there were prayers. And by way of climax, Jane Eyre tells us that Cousin Eliza says:--"I shall devote myself ... to the examination of the Roman Catholic dogmas, and to a careful study of the workings of their system; if I find it to be, as I half suspect it is, the one best calculated to ensure the doing of all things decently and in order, I shall embrace the tenets of Rome and probably take the veil."
The river Reed, I may remark, has its rise close to the Cheviot Hills, within about five miles of the source of the Keeldar Burn, which name Charlotte Bront� used later in Shirley for the surname of Shirley Keeldar who, the world knows, is really Emily Bront�. To quote a ballad of Leyden,
"The heath-bell blows where Keeldar flows, By Tyne the primrose pale."
The Reed has a Rochester near, which doubtless provided a name for Charlotte's hero.
Having now the key to this method of Charlotte Bront�, we also discover portrayed in Jane Eyre an utterly neglected sister of Currer Bell in Julia Severn, called after a river. Remembering that Emily Bront� would be younger than Charlotte, we perceive Julia must mean Elizabeth Bront�, born, like Emily, in July. We almost had forgotten this sister was at the Clergy Daughters' School. One of two things was responsible, it seems, for the choice of "Julia": either her natal month or her going to the above school in July. Elizabeth Bront�, the second sister of Charlotte Bront�, was born at Hartshead, near Dewsbury.
"Miss Temple," cries Mr. Brocklehurst, "... what--what is that girl with curled hair--red hair, ma'am, curled--curled all over?"
"It is Julia Severn," replies Miss Temple quietly, ... "Julia's hair curls naturally."
Thus from this discovery the world learns for the first time that Diana Rivers represents Emily Bront�, afterwards Shirley Keeldar;[44] Mary Rivers, Annie or Anne Bront�; St. John Eyre Rivers, the Rev. Patrick Bront�; and the elderly Hannah, the old, dialect-speaking Tabitha Aykroyd--the original of Charlotte Bront�'s Mrs. Dean and Bessie; that Aunt Reed represents Aunt Branwell; Cousin Eliza Reed, Cousin Eliza Branwell; John Reed, Charlotte Bront�'s brother Branwell; and Julia Severn, her sister Elizabeth Bront�, all of whom but for The Key to the Bront� Works would have remained for ever hidden and unrecognized in Jane Eyre.
I have refrained from extending this volume with full extracts from the Bront� books, once having indicated the place and nature of my references. I must emphasize, however, that in dealing with the Rivers family Charlotte Bront� gives most appealing portrayals of the various phases of the life at Haworth Parsonage:--The studying, the painting,[45] the minor interesting domestic incidents dear to her memory, the parting of the Bront� sisters with St. John (Mr. Bront�), the "house-cleaning"--so very "Yorkshire"!--the preparations for Christmas, the return home of the Bront� girls, and many other facts and associations that render Jane Eyre in the light of The Key to the Bront� Works the surpassing of all Bront� biographies. Presented for posterity by her own sure hand, Charlotte Bront�'s picture is bright and exhilarating; and as we glance uneasily again to Mrs. Gaskell's sombre portrayal, we on a sudden remember that biographer wrote in the shadow of death. But it is with life we have to do.
CHAPTER IX.
THE ORIGIN OF THE YORKSHIRE ELEMENT IN CHARLOTTE BRONT�'S HUNSDEN OF "THE PROFESSOR"; HEATHCLIFFE OF "WUTHERING HEIGHTS"; ROCHESTER OF "JANE EYRE"; AND YORKE OF "SHIRLEY."
M. H�ger, Miss Bront�'s Brussels friend, by the showing of all evidence was essentially the original of her leading male characters.[46] M. Sue's Miss Mary and its "Manuscript of Mdlle. Lagrange," which I present farther on, are sufficient testimony that M. H�ger was the original of the inner Heathcliffe and Rochester, and Charlotte Bront�'s other chief male characters. An inquiry, therefore, is at once required as to the significance of Mrs. Gaskell's statement that she suspected Charlotte Bront� drew from the sons of the Taylor family[47] "all that was of truth in the characters of the heroes of her first two works." That the Yorkshire element of her heroes was provided by a living model or models from one family, is proved by a consistency of the characterization in this regard. I find, truly enough, that male members of the Taylor family were indeed the originals to which she referred in the composition of a Yorkshire-H�ger.[48] The Taylors, of the Red House, Gomersall, (obviously the Briarmains of the Yorkes), and of Hunsworth, were mill-owner friends, and Independents, with whom Charlotte Bront� visited. In Shirley Miss Bront� ostensibly portrayed Mr. Taylor and his two daughters, her friends Mary and Martha, as Mr. Yorke and Rose and Jessie. Mary and Martha Taylor were at school with Charlotte at Roe Head, near Dewsbury and Huddersfield. They were also at Brussels with Charlotte, though not at the H�gers'. Martha was taken ill and died at Brussels; a touching reference to her death is made where she is portrayed as Jessie Yorke, in Shirley, Chapter XXIII. Mary Taylor (Rose Yorke) was in New Zealand when Charlotte Bront� died. Her fondness for travel is mentioned in the Shirley chapter named. The male members of this family were thought by Currer Bell most characteristic Yorkshire folk, hence the name of Yorke. I mention Yorke Hunsden as one of the Yorkshire-H�gers of Miss Bront�'s method of dual portraiture. I believe this important character in The Professor will be found, like his fellows, to be entirely a Taylor-H�ger. The name for Hunsden was apparently dictated by the Taylors' connection with Hunsworth, and it may be noted his Christian name of Yorke came to be later the surname of Mr. Taylor as portrayed in Shirley.
But the H�ger element was always superior to the Yorkshire element in Charlotte Bront�'s heroes. The latter might provide useful and necessary external characteristics, but the "intensitives" were the lines she drew from her model, M. H�ger. Of him as M. Pelet in The Professor, she writes:--
His face was pale, his cheeks were sunk, and his eyes hollow; his features ... had a French turn, ... the degree of harshness softened by ... a melancholy, almost suffering expression of countenance; his physiognomy was fine et spirituelle.
This "melancholy almost suffering expression of countenance" she thus described was evidently once a marked characteristic of M. H�ger's physiognomy. A reference to it occurs in M. Sue's Miss Mary, in the French and "adapted" version, where we find M. de Morville, whom I identify as a phase of M. H�ger, sitting in a reverie:--
... l'expression de l�g�re souffrance habituelle � sa physionomie, d'ailleurs si ouverte, s'est compliqu�e d'une sorte de contrainte lorsqu'il se trouve au milieu de sa famille. Seul, et ne subissant pas cette contrainte ... M. de Morville semble profond�ment attrist�.
Thus, of Yorke Hunsden in The Professor, we read:--
His general bearing intimated complete ... satisfaction, ... yet, at times, an indescribable shade passed like an eclipse over his countenance, and seemed to me like the sign of a sudden and strong inward doubt of himself, ... an energetic discontent, ... perhaps ... it might only be a bilious caprice.
And again of Hunsden, in the same vein:--
I discerned ... there would be contrasts between his inward and outward man; contentions too.... Perhaps in these incompatibilities of the "physique" with the "morale" lay the secret of that fitful gloom; he would but could not, and the athletic mind scowled scorn on its more fragile companion, ... his features ... character had set a stamp upon ... expression re-cast them at her pleasure, and strange metamorphoses she wrote, giving him now the mien of a morose bull, and anon, that of an ... arch girl.
Regarding these facial metamorphoses Charlotte Bront� wrote similarly concerning M. H�ger.[49]
I remark that M. H�ger's harshness evidently had impressed Charlotte Bront� considerably at first, and thus reflects her thoughts on this point in the introduction of the phases she gives of him in her books. So we read of Yorke Hunsden, of Heathcliffe, and of Rochester:--
The Professor. Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre.
I said to myself "his Heathcliffe's "walk There was something rough freedom pleases in" expressed the in the forced, stiff me not at all."... sentiment "Go to bow, in the There was something the Deuce."[50]... impatient, yet formal in Mr. Hunsden's I think that tone which seemed ... point-blank mode of circumstance to express: "What the speech which rather determined me Deuce is it to me pleased me than to accept the whether Miss Eyre be otherwise, because it invitation; I felt there or not?[50] At set me at my ease. interested in a this moment I am not I continued the man who seemed disposed to accost conversation with more exaggeratedly her." I sat down, a degree of reserved than quite disembarrassed. interest.... myself. A reception of Hunsden's manner now finished politeness bordered on the would probably have impertinent, still confused me, ... but his manner did not harsh caprice laid me offend me in the under no slightest--it only obligation.... piqued my curiosity; Besides, the I wanted him to go eccentricity of the on. proceeding was piquant. I felt interested to see how he would go on.
We read of Rochester:--"The frown, the roughness of the stranger set me at my ease"; and in Villette, we read of M. H�ger as M. Paul:--"Once ... I held him harsh and strange, ... the darkness, the manner displeased me. Now ... I preferred him before all humanity," which explains why Charlotte Bront� wrote of Rochester:--"The sarcasm that had repelled, the harshness that had startled me once, were only like keen condiments in a choice dish," and explains why she admits to the piquancy in exploiting the possibilities of Heathcliffe's startling harshness.
And again, as further evidence of the influence of M. H�ger over her Yorkshire Hunsden, we find this character in the close of The Professor implicated with a mysterious "Lucia," whom he would have married but could not, which Lucia we discover to have meant really the original of the Lucy Snowe of Villette--Charlotte Bront� herself.
It is obvious that while Currer Bell, for "story" and other purposes, made use of a composite method in presenting a portrait, she drew from characters who possessed much in common: as with the composite character of the Rev. Mr. Helstone, meant for her father, a clergyman, but presenting also a phase of another clergyman, the Rev. Hammond Roberson; and as with Dr. John Bretton, a composite character drawn from the two Scotsmen, Mr. Smith her publisher, and the Rev. A. B. Nicholls, who subsequently became her husband. Doubtless, characteristics in the Taylors were similar to some of M. H�ger's. Perhaps the fact that they spoke French and sojourned on the Continent, accentuated to her these characteristics. In a letter, Miss Bront� described all the Taylors as "Republicans." And so of Yorke Hunsden in The Professor, Chap. XXIV., we read, "republican, lord-hater, as he was, Hunsden was proud of his old ----shire blood ... and family standing." Thus, in Shirley, Chap. IV., in which work that character appears stripped of the H�ger element, as Mr. Yorke, we read of the latter:--
Kings and nobles and priests ... were to him an abomination.... The want of ... benevolence made him very impatient of ... all faults which grated on his strong, shrewd nature: it left no check to his ... sarcasm. As he was not merciful, he would sometimes wound ... without ... caring how deep he thrust.... Mr. Yorke's family was the first and oldest in the district.
Vi� Yorke Hunsden of The Professor and Mr. Yorke of Shirley the reader has returned to a character who typified more than any other of Charlotte Bront�'s Yorkshire-H�ger portrayals the merciless, strong and shrewd-natured Taylor--Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights. But the Yorkshire element in Heathcliffe was a caricature and an exaggeration for the purposes of the "cuckoo story," resulting from the tale Montagu tells of a foundling; and the emphasis laid upon his barbarity was largely a result, too, of the consideration I mention in the chapters entitled "The Recoil," which consideration had to do with the H�ger phase of Heathcliffe. The fact that evidence shows Heathcliffe to have been, like Hunsden and Rochester, a composite character drawn from a dual model--the Taylor-H�ger model--traceable in origin absolutely to Charlotte Bront�'s idiosyncratic estimate of two male characters who are shown to have seriously interested her, in itself sufficiently demonstrates her authorship of Wuthering Heights, and is indeed of great interest.
If reference be made to a letter written by Charlotte Bront� in 1846, the year when she offered Wuthering Heights to a publisher, it will be found she mentioned that one of the Taylors had--like Heathcliffe--suffered in the teens of years from hypochondria, "a most dreadful doom," Charlotte called it, and related she herself had endured it for a year.[51]
Having herself suffered thus, there was a temptation--at what I elsewhere call the dark season of Charlotte Bront�'s inner life, at the season of the recoil--to present in her work Wuthering Heights the Yorkshire-H�ger with the hypochondria of her Yorkshire model, and let his demon be the original of her Catherine Earnshaw--be herself. To this temptation Charlotte Bront� gave no opposition, much to her regret later. Herewith we have the origin of Heathcliffe's miserable hypochondria and monomania--his digging for Catherine in the grave till his spade scraped the coffin, in Wuthering Heights, Chap. XXIX., and his saying because his "preternatural horror" always haunted, but never abided with him:--
"She showed herself, ... a devil to me! And, since then ... I've been the sport of that intolerable torture! Infernal--keeping my nerves at such a stretch that, if they had not resembled catgut, they would long ago have relaxed.... It racked me! I've groaned aloud.... It was a strange way of killing! not by inches, but by fractions of hairbreadths, ... through eighteen years!" Mr. Heathcliffe paused, ... his hair wet with perspiration, ... the brows not contracted, but raised next the temples; diminishing the grim aspect of his countenance, but imparting a peculiar look of trouble, and a painful appearance of mental tension towards one absorbing subject.
In the light of the foregoing, therefore, we may understand the truth of Charlotte Bront�'s narration in The Professor, Chap. XXIII.:--
My nerves ... jarred ... A horror of great darkness fell upon me; I felt my chamber invaded by one I had known formerly, ... I was ... a prey to hypochondria. She had been ... my guest ... before ... for a year.... I had her to myself in secret; she lay with me, she ate with me, showing me nooks in woods, hollows in hills, where we could sit together, and where she could drop her drear veil over me, and so hide sky and sun, grass and green tree; taking me entirely to her death-cold bosom and holding me with arms of bone. What tales she would tell me at such hours!... How she would discourse to me of her own country--the grave.... I was glad when ... I could ... sit ... freed from the dreadful tyranny of my demon.
Both by reason of Mrs. Gaskell's suspicion that she had drawn from them in the portrayals of the heroes of her first books and by reason of the undeniable evidence of her works, we must accept the Taylors as the originals of most that was "Yorkshire" in Charlotte Bront�'s Yorke Hunsden, Heathcliffe, Rochester, and Yorke, understanding the term in Currer Bell's implication of "independent," "hard," and "open-spoken." But M. H�ger contributed what Charlotte Bront� calls in Chap. XXVII. of Villette, in speaking of him as M. Paul Emanuel--"that swart, sallow, southern darkness which spoke his Spanish blood," and this gave colour to the physiognomy of "the swart, sallow" Heathcliffe and Rochester.[52]
In the succeeding chapters I deal more particularly with the relation of Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights, to Rochester of Jane Eyre, and I promise my readers to present therein most important and sensational revelations.
CHAPTER X.
HEATHCLIFFE OF "WUTHERING HEIGHTS" AND ROCHESTER OF "JANE EYRE" ONE AND THE SAME.
Without herewith further entering into the question as to the original of the morose and harsh characters who were the heroes of Charlotte Bront�'s novels, I will at once show she had drawn from the same model in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. I have given in the foregoing chapter the introduction of Lockwood to Heathcliffe and that of Jane to Rochester side by side. Let us also read the following:--
Heathcliffe. Rochester.
With a stubborn countenance ... Most people would have thought Heathcliffe is a dark-skinned Mr. Rochester an ugly man; yet gipsy in aspect, in dress and there was an unconscious pride manners a gentleman; ... rather in his port; so much ease in his slovenly, perhaps, yet not demeanour; such a look of looking amiss with his complete indifference to his own negligence, because he has an appearance ... that ... one erect and handsome figure; and inevitably shared the rather morose. Possibly some indifference, and even in a people might suspect him of a blind sense put faith in his degree of under-bred pride; I confidence.... He was proud, have a sympathetic cord within sardonic; ... in my secret soul that tells me it is nothing of I knew his kindness to me was the sort: I know by instinct his balanced by unjust severity to reserve springs from an aversion others. He was moody, too, ... to showy displays of feeling--to and when he looked up a morose, manifestations of mutual almost a malignant, scowl kindliness. He'll love and hate blackened his features. equally under one cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again. No, I am running on too fast; I bestow my own attributes over liberally on him.
Heathcliffe and Rochester are both black-avised, stubborn of countenance, negligent as to external appearance, moody, proud in carry, and morose. Charlotte Bront� tells us of one that on external judgment "most people would have thought him" possessed of a disqualification, and of the other that "some people might suspect him" of having a disqualification. And in each case a similar offset--the internal reading of the man's character--is brought forth by Charlotte Bront� as Lockwood or Jane:--"A sympathetic cord within" tells the former that Heathcliffe's reserve read as under-bred pride springs from an aversion to "manifestations of mutual kindliness"; and Jane, commenting on Rochester's being proud and sardonic, says, "In my secret heart I knew ... his kindliness to me was balanced by unjust severity to others."
I find the singular expression indicated by the "hell's light" epithets applied to Heathcliffe's eyes was an expression Charlotte Bront� had apparently noticed in the original of this character. Rochester's eyes in Jane Eyre have "strange gleams," and we are told "his eye had a tawny--nay, a bloody light in its gloom," and so forth. Indeed, Heathcliffe's eyes, which were "clouded windows of hell" with "black-fire in them," are seen in Rochester's clearly enough, and the singular "hell's light" is associated with them at considerable length, in
Jane Eyre:--
And as for the vague something--was it a sinister or a sorrowful ... expression?--that opened upon a careful observer ... in his eye, and closed again before one could fathom the strange depth partially disclosed; that something which used to make me fear and shrink, as if I had been wandering amongst volcanic-looking hills, and had suddenly felt the ground quiver and seen it gape.
The following description of Heathcliffe could be read as of Rochester, whose "olive cheek" and "deep eyes" Jane describes:--
Wuthering Heights.
His cheeks were sallow and half-covered with black whiskers, the brows were lowering, the eyes deep-set and singular. I remembered the eyes. His upright carry suggested his having been in the army [M. H�ger had fought as a soldier] ... His countenance ... looked intelligent. A half-civilized ferocity lurked in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire, but it was subdued, and his manner was even dignified, though too stern for grace.
In view of the general evidence that Heathcliffe, like Rochester, was drawn by Charlotte Bront� from M. H�ger, her Brussels friend the professor, it is not surprising that Heathcliffe's was "a deep voice and foreign in sound." Her reference in Wuthering Heights to his Spanish extraction reminds us of M. Paul Emanuel's "jetty hair and Spanish face" in Villette, and of course it is well known M. Paul Emanuel was drawn by Currer Bell from M. H�ger.
CHAPTER XI.
CATHERINE AND HEATHCLIFFE OF "WUTHERING HEIGHTS" AS JANE AND ROCHESTER OF "JANE EYRE."
We have already seen Catherine in Wuthering Heights represented Charlotte Bront� as intimately portrayed by herself in the work, and that Heathcliffe was drawn by her from the original of the Rochester of Jane Eyre. So faithfully did Charlotte Bront� tell again in Jane Eyre the history of her life in relation to her family and M. H�ger, that she gives the main lines of her biography in both works. I will show them side by side.
For the literal parallels when not given in this chapter see the index. My amazing discovery on the return of the runaway Heathcliffe to Catherine and the return of the runaway Jane to Rochester I give literally herewith.
Opening scene: A rainy day in Opening scene: A rainy day in Catherine's (Charlotte Bront�'s) Jane's (Charlotte Bront�'s) childhood. She is treated childhood. She is treated unkindly by the rest of the unkindly by the rest of the household. It is impossible to household. It is impossible to go out on account of the rain. go out on account of the rain. She had been commanded to keep She had been commanded to keep aloof from the family group. aloof from the family group. This group included in This group included in particular, little Catherine particular, little Jane tells us tells us with bitter feeling, with bitter feeling, John Reed Hindley Earnshaw (Branwell (Branwell Bront�), who Bront�), who luxuriated in the luxuriated in the warmth of the warmth of the fire with other fire with other members of the members of the family. family.
Nevertheless, though banished, Nevertheless, though banished Catherine (Charlotte Bront�) herself, Jane (Charlotte Bront�) makes herself snug in a recess makes herself snug in a recess behind a curtain, and believes behind a curtain, and believes herself secure, when Hindley herself secure, when John Reed Earnshaw (Branwell Bront�), (Branwell Bront�), coming up coming up from his paradise on from his paradise on the hearth, the hearth, makes her come out makes her come out of the recess of the recess precipitantly, precipitantly. He hurls the book after she has hurled the book she was reading. Little Jane she was reading. Little (Charlotte Bront�) sees a tyrant Catherine (Charlotte Bront�) in John Reed (Branwell Bront�). sees a tyrant in Hindley He tells her that he is the Earnshaw (Branwell Bront�). He master of the house, or soon tells her that he is the master will be. of the house.
Later, Catherine complains to Later, Jane complains to herself herself of her brother Hindley's of John Reed's (Branwell's) (Branwell's) tyrannies. He has tyrannies. He has made her cry made her cry and her head ached, and her head ached, she says, as she says, as a result of his a result of his behaviour. behaviour.
Little Catherine (Charlotte Little Jane (Charlotte Bront�), Bront�), although she was held although she was held to be to be passionate, and was passionate, and was treated treated harshly and almost as an harshly and almost an outsider outsider by the rest of the by the rest of the household, household, finds a kind, but finds a kind, but apparently apparently unsympathetic, friend unsympathetic, friend in a in a woman-servant, Nelly Dean, woman-servant, Bessie, who has a who has a remarkable gift of remarkable gift of narrative, narrative, like Tabitha Aykroyd, like Tabitha Aykroyd, whom whom Charlotte Bront� loved, and Charlotte Bront� loved, and who who came to the Haworth came to the Haworth parsonage parsonage when Charlotte was when Charlotte was about nine about nine years of age. But years of age. But even Bessie even Nelly Dean (Tabitha (Tabitha Aykroyd) sometimes Aykroyd) sometimes tasked and tasked and scolded Jane scolded Catherine (Charlotte (Charlotte Bront�) unreasonably, Bront�) unreasonably, and and mistrusted her. mistrusted her.
She even believes that Catherine She even believes that Jane (Charlotte Bront�) is an actor (Charlotte) is an actor and and feigns in regard to certain feigns in regard to certain fits fits of frenzy. of frenzy.
On the occasion of one of these On the occasion of one of these bouts of frenzy, Catherine bouts of frenzy, Jane (Charlotte (Charlotte Bront�) is in a room, Bront�) is in a room, the door the door of which has been of which has been locked. locked.
In a paroxysm of alarm, In a paroxysm of alarm, Jane Catherine (Charlotte Bront�) (Charlotte Bront�) summons summons Mrs. Dean (Tabitha Bessie (Tabitha Aykroyd) Aykroyd) frantically, and with a frantically, and with a piercing piercing scream. The latter scream. The latter enters enters annoyed, and quite annoyed, and quite unsympathetic. unsympathetic.
It is suggested Catherine was It is suggested Jane was only only acting, and Catherine acting, and Jane overhears this. overhears this. She had desired She finds Bessie (Tabitha Mrs. Dean (Tabitha Aykroyd) to Aykroyd) at the foot of her bed bring her a basin of gruel. with a basin in her hand.
Catherine (Charlotte) relates Jane (Charlotte) relates her her fears of the locked room: fears of the locked room: How How she thought it haunted; she she thought it haunted; she showed fear of the mirror, and showed fear of the mirror, and describes excitedly to Mrs. Dean describes excitedly to Bessie (Tabitha) her terrifying (Tabitha) her terrifying sensations previous to her sensations previous to her losing consciousness, and how losing consciousness. She she supposed she must supposed she must immediately immediately have had a species have had a species of fit. of fit.
Mrs. Dean (Tabitha) suggests Bessie (Tabitha) suggests sleep sleep to Catherine (Charlotte to Jane (Charlotte Bront�). Bront�).
Mrs. Dean (Tabitha) believes Bessie (Tabitha) believes that that to see the apparition of a the apparition of a child is a child is a sign of calamity sign of calamity having befallen having befallen some one near some one near akin. Jane dreams akin. One day Mrs. Dean sees a of a child-apparition, and fears child-apparition, and fears it it may be a sign of calamity, may be a sign of calamity to and the day following Bessie's Catherine's (Charlotte's) husband brings word of the brother, Hindley Earnshaw disgrace of John Reed (Branwell (Branwell Bront�). He is really Bront�, Charlotte's brother). in disgrace.
Catherine falls in love with Jane falls in love with a a morose, "sallow-cheeked" morose, "olive-cheeked" individual with deep eyes, that individual with deep eyes, that have a singular expression, have a singular expression, which makes the narrator which makes the narrator associate "hell's light" with associate "hell's light" with them. He has a handsome, erect them. He has a handsome, erect carry, but is rather negligent carry, but is rather negligent in his apparel. His speech is in his apparel. His speech is abrupt. (His name is abrupt. (His name is Rochester.) Heathcliffe.)
But Catherine loved him, and he But Jane loved him, and he loved loved Catherine. Indeed, Jane. Indeed, Jane likens Catherine likens themselves to a themselves to a cloven tree, cloven tree by saying that which is one at the root, but whosoever would come between divided by storm. Thus she them to divide them would meet believes in the "twin-soul" or the fate of M�lo, who, of the elective affinities, and course, endeavoured to drive says of Rochester:-- asunder a cloven tree held firmly at its base, and was himself trapped by it for his pains. Thus she believes in the "twin-soul" or the elective affinities, and says:--
"It would degrade me to marry "I feel akin to him.... I have Heathcliffe now; so he shall something in my brain and heart never know how I love him; and that assimilates me mentally to that not because he's handsome, him.... I know I must conceal my ... but because he's more myself sentiments.... Yet, while I than I am. Whatever our souls breathe and think, I must love are made of, his and mine are him."[53] the same."[53]
However, Heathcliffe and However, Rochester and Jane Catherine part, Heathcliffe part, Jane running away running away unexpectedly. unexpectedly. (Method I., interchange of the sexes of characters.)
Catherine dreams she is in Jane finds refuge with the heaven, but broke her heart to Rivers family (the Bront� family come to earth again, upon which at Haworth). She is tempted to the angels flung her out near take to a religious Heathcliffe's abode, where she life:--"Angels beckoned, and awoke sobbing for joy: Catherine Heaven rolled together like a preferred her lover to scroll," but she heard heaven.[54] Rochester's voice calling, though he was miles away. Jane preferred her lover to heaven.[54]
The two parted lovers, however, The two parted lovers, however, meet again, and by Charlotte meet again, and by Charlotte Bront�'s Method I., (interchange Bront�'s Method I., (interchange of the sexes of characters of the sexes of characters portrayed), we arrive at another portrayed), we arrive at another of my sensational and important of my sensational and important Bront� discoveries. Bront� discoveries.
THE RETURN OF THE RUNAWAY LOVER THE RETURN OF THE RUNAWAY LOVER HEATHCLIFFE TO CATHERINE.[55] JANE TO ROCHESTER.[55]
Chapter X. Chapter XXXVII.
On [an] ... evening ... I was ... I came, just ere dark ... coming from the garden.... It the darkness ... of dusk had got dusk, ... the moon gathered.... I beheld the causing ... shadows to lurk in house--scarce by this dim light the corners of ... portions of distinguishable.... Entering a the building. I set my burden on portal fastened by a latch, ... the house steps by the ... door I stood.... The windows were and lingered to rest ... my back latticed, ... the front door was to the entrance, when I heard a narrow; ... one step led up to voice behind me say:-- it.... I heard a movement--that narrow front-door was unclosing, "... Is that you?" and some shape was about to issue from the grange. It was a deep voice, and foreign [Charlotte Bront�'s Wuthering in sound.... Something stirred Heights version of the returned in the porch; and moving nearer runaway lover, is also staged at I distinguished a tall man "the grange."] It opened slowly: dressed in dark clothes, with a figure came out into the dark face and hair. He leant twilight and stood on the step; against the side, and held his a man, ... he stretched forth fingers on the latch as if his hand.... Dusk as it was I intending to open for had recognized him--it was my himself.... A ray fell on his master ... Rochester. I stayed features; the cheeks were my step, almost my breath.... sallow, and half-covered with His form was of the same strong black whiskers; the brows and stalwart contour as ever: lowering, the eyes deep-set and his port was still erect, his singular. I remembered the eyes. hair was still raven-black: nor were his features altered or sunk.... But in his countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding--that reminded me of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe.... He closed the door. I now drew near and knocked: John's wife opened for me.... She started as if she had seen a ghost: I calmed her. To her hurried "Is it really you, "What!" I cried, uncertain Miss, come at this late whether to regard him as a hour...?" I answered by taking worldly visitor, and raised my her hand. hands in amazement. "What! you come back? Is it really you? Is "... Tell your master ... a it?" person wishes to speak to him."
"Yes; Heathcliffe," he replied When she returned, I inquired ... "where is she?... Is she what he had said. here? Speak! I want to have one word with her--your mistress "You are to send in your name [Catherine]. Go, and say some and business," she replied. person ... desires to see her." She then proceeded to fill a "... And you are Heathcliffe. glass of water, and place it on But altered!" a tray, together with candles.
... I could not persuade myself "Is that what he rang for?" I to proceed. At length I resolved asked. on making an excuse to ask if ... [Catherine] would have the "Yes; he always has candles candles lighted, and I opened brought in at dusk...." the door. [She] sat ... by a window whose lattice lay back. "Give the tray to me, I will carry it in." "What does he want?" asked Catherine. ... Mary opened the door for me.... Mr. Rochester turned "I did not question him," I mechanically. answered. "This is you, Mary, is it not?" ... Mr. Edgar inquired ... who it was? "Mary is in the kitchen," I answered. "Some one mistress does not expect," I replied. "That "Who is it? What is it? Who Heathcliffe.... Hush! you must speaks?" not call him ... names.... She'd be sadly grieved to hear you. "... I came only this evening," She was nearly heart-broken when I answered. he ran off. I guess his return will make a jubilee to her." "Great God!--what delusion has come over me? What sweet madness "Oh, ... Heathcliffe's come has seized me?... Oh! I cannot back--he is," panted Catherine. see.... Whatever--whoever you "... I'll ... secure my guest. are--be perceptible to my touch I'm afraid the joy is too great or I cannot live!" to be real!" I arrested his hand and prisoned "... Catherine, try to be glad it in both mine. without being absurd! The whole household need not witness the "Is that Jane?" sight of your welcoming a runaway servant." "... This is her voice," I added.... "My dear master, ... I I ... found Heathcliffe ... and am Jane Eyre:... I am come back ushered him into the presence of to you." the master and mistress. "In truth?--in the flesh? My ... Now, I was amazed [by] the living Jane?" transformation of Heathcliffe;... A half-civilized "You touch me, sir--you hold me. ferocity lurked yet in the I am not vacant like air, am I?" depressed brows and eyes full of black fire, but it was subdued, "... But I cannot be so blest quite divested of roughness, after all my misery. It is a though too stern for grace.... dream: such dreams I have He took a seat opposite had.... But I always woke and Catherine, who kept her gaze found it an empty mockery; and I fixed on him, as if she feared was desolate and abandoned." he would vanish were she to remove it. He did not raise his ... I began ... to withdraw to her often; a quick glance now myself from his arms--but he and then sufficed; but it eagerly snatched me closer:-- flashed back each time; ... the undisguised delight he drank "No, you must not go. No--I have from hers.... Catherine ... rose touched you, heard you; ... my and seized Heathcliffe's hands very soul demands you.... Who again, and laughed like one can tell what a dark, hopeless beside herself. life I have dragged on for months past? ... feeling but a "I shall think it a dream ceaseless sorrow, and at times a to-morrow!" she cried. "I shall very delirium of desire to not be able to believe that I behold my Jane again. Yes; for have seen and touched, and her restoration I longed.... spoken to you once more.... Will she not depart as suddenly Cruel Heathcliffe! You don't as she came? To-morrow ... I deserve this welcome. To be shall find her no more.... absent and silent for three Cruel, cruel deserter! O Jane, years, and never to think of what did I feel when I me!" discovered you had fled and left Thornfield?" "... I've fought through a bitter life since I last heard "Jane! ... my heart swells your voice, and you must forgive with gratitude to the beneficent me, for I struggled only for God of this earth just now.... I you!" did wrong: I would have sullied my innocent flower: the "... The event of this evening," Omnipotent snatched it from me. said Catherine, "has reconciled I, in my stiff-necked rebellion, me to God and humanity! I had almost cursed the dispensation: risen in angry rebellion against instead of bending to the decree Providence--oh, I've endured I defied it.... Of late, Jane, very, very bitter misery.... I ... I began to experience can afford to suffer anything remorse, repentance; the wish hereafter! Should the meanest for reconciliation to my thing alive slap me on the Maker.... Now I thank God." cheek, I'd not only turn the other, but I'd ask pardon for provoking it.... I'm an angel!"
(Later on in Wuthering Heights Charlotte Bront�, temporarily neglecting her use of Method I., interchange of the sexes, in this connection, makes Heathcliffe say to Catherine:--
"Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy?... You loved me, then what right had you to leave me?... Because misery and degradation and death and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you of your own will did it.").
The above parallel descriptions, it will be found, agree practically word for word. I will now give the substance side by side, and let the reader keep in mind Charlotte Bront�'s Method I., interchange of the sexes of characters:--
Catherine and Heathcliffe love Jane and Rochester love each each other, but Heathcliffe other, but Jane suddenly suddenly disappears. disappears.
One evening Heathcliffe as One evening Jane as suddenly suddenly returns. The narrator returns. The narrator of the of the return of the runaway return of the runaway Jane tells Heathcliffe tells us that it is us that it is evening, and she evening, and she is outside the is outside the house, when in house, when in the dim light she the dim light she distinguishes distinguishes the figure of a the figure of a man, a stranger man, a stranger she has not seen she has not seen for some time. for some time. Dusk as it is, Dusk as it is, she recognizes she recognizes Heathcliffe. Rochester.
In his countenance, however, In his countenance, however, there is "a transformation, ... there is "a change--that looked a half-civilized ferocity lurked desperate and brooding--that yet in his eyes full of black reminded ... of ... some fire, but was subdued." fettered wild beast ... dangerous to approach in his sullen woe."
"What! you come back? Is it "Is it really you, Miss, come at really you?" cries the servant, this late hour?" cries the "raising her hands, uncertain servant, "starting as if she had whether to regard him as a seen a ghost," addressing the worldly visitor," addressing the runaway Jane. runaway Heathcliffe.
"I want to have one word with "... Tell your master a person your mistress," says Heathcliffe wishes to see him," says Jane to to the servant. "Go and tell her the servant. some person ... desires to see her."
But there is a difficulty, and But there is a difficulty, and eventually, to accomplish the eventually, to accomplish the meeting of the parted lovers, meeting of the parted lovers, the taking in of the candles is the taking in of the candles is considered as a pretext. considered as a pretext.
Catherine cries:--"Heathcliffe's Rochester cries:--"... What come back--he is.... I'm afraid sweet delusion has come over me? the joy is too great to be What sweet madness has seized real!" me?"
"I shall think it a dream "I am come back to you," says to-morrow. I shall not be able Jane. to believe I have seen and touched and spoken to you once "I have touched you, heard more," says Catherine to you.... To-morrow I fear I shall Heathcliffe. And reproachfully find [you] no more," says he exclaims:-- Rochester to Jane. And reproachfully he exclaims:-- "I've fought through a bitter life since last I heard your "Who can tell what a dark, voice, and you must forgive me, hopeless life I have dragged on for I struggled only for you." for months past? ... feeling ... but ... a ceaseless sorrow and "Cruel Heathcliffe, you don't ... a very delirium of desire to deserve this welcome," says behold my Jane again. Yes; for Catherine; "to be absent ... and her restoration I longed.... never think of me." Cruel, cruel, deserter! O Jane, what did I feel when I discovered you had fled from Thornfield?" says Rochester.
Catherine had risen in angry Rochester had risen in angry rebellion against God because of rebellion against God because of the cruel fate that had divided the cruel fate that had divided her and Heathcliffe; but now him and Jane, but now that she that he was restored to her, she was restored to him, he was was reconciled, and was thankful reconciled, and was thankful of of heart. heart.
And thus, from the rainy day And thus, from the rainy day incident in Catherine's early incident in Jane's early childhood to the reconciliation childhood to the reconciliation of Catherine and Heathcliffe, we of Jane and Rochester, we have have the main narrative of the the main narrative of the heroine and hero of Wuthering heroine and hero of Jane Eyre, Heights, obviously written by obviously written by Charlotte Charlotte Bront� from facts in Bront� from facts in her own her own life. life.
The absolute dependence of Charlotte Bront�'s Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Villette upon her own inner life in relation to M. H�ger is proved by the evidence in the chapter on "The Rivers Family," in the chapters on "Eug�ne Sue and Charlotte Bront�'s Brussels Life," and in those entitled "The Recoil."
CHAPTER XII.
EUG�NE SUE AND CHARLOTTE BRONT�'S BRUSSELS LIFE.
I.
MDLLE. LAGRANGE AND HER MANUSCRIPT "CATHERINE BELL THE ORPHAN."
When Mrs. Gaskell published her Bront� biography it was discovered that while she had been enabled by aid of the mass of commonplace Bront� correspondence to present an interesting picture of the domestic conditions at the Haworth parsonage, she had yet been unable to throw any light upon that episode in Charlotte Bront�'s life which, it had been suspected, was responsible for the extraordinary love passages in the Bront� works and Miss Bront�'s insistence in choosing the hero of each of her books from the same model.
It is therefore most miraculous and sensational that after having found Montagu's Gleanings in Craven was the key to Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, I should further come to discover, what the world had thought would never be found: external evidence throwing light upon Miss Bront�'s real relations with the H�gers at Brussels, to whose pensionnat she went in the 'forties. This discovery was the subject of my article "The Lifting of the Bront� Veil" Mr. W. L. Courtney commissioned me to write in the Fortnightly Review. Therein I showed Eug�ne Sue had presented the whole history of M. H�ger's passion for Charlotte Bront�, and Madame H�ger's jealousy, in a work entitled Miss Mary ou l'Institutrice, published in 1850-51--seven years before the publication of Mrs. Gaskell's Life, and before the publication of either The Professor or Villette; and we saw that M. H�ger knew all Miss Bront�'s literary secrets in 1850.
Skilfully enough Eug�ne Sue in this story--the first version of which was issued serially in September 1850, from The Weekly Times Office, London, whence were published many of M. Sue's serials;[56] the second, an abridged and altered version for French readers, published in Paris in March 1851--gave two phases of Charlotte Bront�, something after the method we see Miss Bront� herself employed in Jane Eyre, wherein she gave two phases of Tabitha Aykroyd, one in the beginning as Bessie, another later on as Hannah of the Rivers family.[57]
Indeed it will be found that in this work Eug�ne Sue also imitated Charlotte Bront�'s Method I., interchange of the sexes of characters portrayed from life.
The two phases of Miss Bront� in this romance are Miss Mary Lawson, an Irish governess at the de Morville establishment; and Mademoiselle Lagrange, a former governess at the same house. The Mademoiselle Lagrange is, however, always referred to in the abstract, and serves to illustrate, it appears, Miss Bront� before her first departure from and return to Brussels, as well as after, for she was twice at the H�gers. And it may be observed that Charlotte Bront� was called "Mademoiselle Charlotte" at the H�ger pension when she was governess there in 1843. Certainly the choice of Lagrange for Miss Bront� was pertinent: la grange is French for "the barn," and may have been suggested by the Eyre of Jane Eyre, which to a French ear would recall aire--a barn floor. Mdlle. Lagrange who had left the de Morville (Anglic�, Morton. As we have seen, Morton of Jane Eyre was Haworth to Charlotte Bront�) establishment on account of the jealousy of Madame de Morville, whom I identify as Madame H�ger, is a plain-featured literary aspirant, and she writes a manuscript entitled not exactly Currer Bell, but "Kitty Bell, the Orphan."
This manuscript has been sent by the author for an opinion of its merits to M. de Morville, who reads it aloud to his family. It is a parody, as it were, of Jane Eyre, with an imitation of Charlotte Bront�'s methods of introducing private biographical facts. For instance, in presenting the Lowood school incidents it calls the school "the Kendall Institute," named after "a Mr. Kendall, its founder." Evidently the writer had heard, as only few indeed had at this early day, that the Lowood school of Jane Eyre was afterwards removed to Casterton in the Union of Kendal, or had heard that in a wise it was connected with a place of that name.
Other extraordinary facts with which he shows acquaintance are, that Charlotte Bront� had a sister Elizabeth at this school; that Helen Burns was her sister; that there was a West Indian girl at the school; that Charlotte Bront� was born on or about the 21st of April; that she might be called Kitty (Currer) Bell at home, but she must be called Catherine (Catherine Earnshaw); that Miss Bront� was the governess-daughter of an Irishman; that the original of John Reed was her brother and was no hero, and had shown strange signs of insanity during the last year or two, as it is now known he had at the time; that a female relative had provided Miss Bront� the money for the pensionnat; that skin disorders as well as the typhus fever were prevalent at the Clergy Daughters' School (it is in a private letter that Miss Bront� referred to scrofula at this school); that the original of Mr. Rochester was a foreigner and a resident abroad, an ex-soldier, and married to a lady who was not pretty, albeit "la vivacit�, l'agr�ment de sa physionomie expressive, suppl�aient � la beaut� qui lui manquait"; that Charlotte Bront� had had in her possession since her childhood an old copy in English of The Imitation of Christ; that Miss Bront� was called a bas bleu at the pensionnat; that to form an opinion of her character by Madame H�ger's estimate of her disposition would be completely erroneous; that M. H�ger was accustomed to read feuilletons aloud; that religious differences existed between her and others at the establishment where Charlotte Bront� was; that Catherine's (Catherine Earnshaw's) rival was Isabella (Heathcliffe's wife--Madame H�ger of the Rue d'Isabelle); that Miss Bront� travelled alone to Brussels and was accosted by deux jeunes gens--compare the opening chapters of Miss Mary with Lucy Snowe's arrival at Villette, evidently in some wise founded on fact, as to these two young men. See also The Professor, Chapter VII.
But to return to "Mdlle. Lagrange's Manuscript," the pseudo Jane Eyre, which of course at once identifies its author, Mdlle. Lagrange, as Charlotte Bront�, I find therein the whole Lowood school incidents--the typhus fever, the hair-cutting incident, the death of the consumptive Helen Burns, etc., amplified with biographical additions. For instance, take the hair-cutting incident of Jane Eyre as represented in "Lagrange's Manuscript"--
The master called out:--
"Elizabeth----"
... Meanwhile all the Elizabeths in the school must have felt the claws of the tiger in their necks, for who could tell which of them it was?...
"Superintendent of the Kendall Institute! you are aware, madam, one of the rules of this establishment enjoins you to cut short the hair of every new girl.... And yet what do I see? Six girls with long hair...."
The last of these had not been a week at the institution. She was a girl of fourteen, very dark, ... with a fine tinge of the Creole in her face. How well I thought did Isabella Hutchinson, with her dark, West Indian head, look by the side of the fair Yorkshire girl, Sophia Leigh, whose pale, straw-coloured locks, looked paler still by the side of that dark heap of hair, blacker than a raven's wing...[!]
We have seen in the chapter on "The Rivers or Bront� Family in Jane Eyre" that Charlotte Bront� portrayed in the character Julia Severn, who is first mentioned in connection with the hair-cutting incident, her sister Elizabeth, and it is most significant that M. Sue made play upon the name Elizabeth in the connection. In regard to the mention of a West Indian girl at the Lowood school and her being coupled with a fair-haired Yorkshire girl, it is important to note that no reference is made in Jane Eyre to a West Indian girl at this school. It is indeed astonishing how much M. Sue knew of Charlotte Bront�'s private life. Here we find him telling the world in 1850 of a West Indian girl being with Charlotte Bront� at the Clergy Daughters' School, and not till seven years later did Mrs. Gaskell learn of the Rev. Patrick Bront�--Charlotte Bront� was then dead--that a girl from the West Indies had been Charlotte's friend at this school. Her name, he thought, was Mellany Hane, so far as he could remember to pronounce it. Mysteriously enough, the words "West Indies" or "West Indian" in this connection have been deleted from the later editions of Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bront�. See the Second Edition.
"Lagrange's Manuscript" is of considerable length and interest, and can be drawn upon in future editions of The Key to the Bront� Works. Frequently it follows in parallel to Jane Eyre, but as parody interspersed with biographical details which must have been intended chiefly for Charlotte Bront� herself, as scarcely any one else could at that day have understood the pertinence of the references.[58] Take a Helen Burns incident whereby M. Sue shows he is aware she was a Bront� sister, older than Charlotte--Maria Bront� who died of consumption:--
But the inexorable hand ... was upon Agnes Jones [Helen Burns]. Day by day I saw her pretty cheeks growing thinner and thinner, her eyes sinking still more deeply into her head, her little mouth becoming more blue and ashy, her long, thin fingers more transparent. Her voice, at all times so meek and low, dwindled away to that thin and tiny sound to which we listen as to something absent--already gone--something that comes from above or below us--that is not living amongst us--not breathing as we breathe--a retreating echo, rather than a living voice--a sigh, and not a sound.... It was not much I had learned from Agnes [Helen] since I had been at the institution; but never till then had I known her spirit so genial, her heart so lovingly persuasive; the beneficent lessons of those days, burning like candles within me, have since guided me well through life: she spoke to me like a prophet, and I listened to her like a believer. Oh, I could have lived for ever in that chamber, and Agnes [Helen] might have been to me the world! How often, as our cheeks lay against each other have I wished that I, too, had been ill, so that I also might have died, as she was dying, in my innocence!... One evening, ... just at that pleasant hour of twilight when two of God's wonders--night and day--cross each other like ships on the sea, Agnes [Helen] said:--'Life has its holiness as well as death, Catherine [Jane]; and you may live in the world as purely and justly as those who die in the cradle.'
"The world is full of temptation?"
"So it is, but there lies the merit, my dear; wrestle with temptation and do what is right, ... you must not allow my death to afflict you much, since I rejoice at it.... If you think of me, think of me living, not dead. Think of your playfellow in the garden; think of your elder sister who lived with you for six years."
Maria Bront�, Charlotte's eldest sister, and the original of Helen Burns, died when Charlotte was eight or nine. It is sensational indeed, that M. Sue thus identified Helen Burns seven years before the publication of Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bront�. The death of this character in "Lagrange's Manuscript" is in perfect agreement with that of Helen Burns. I will place the two side by side:--
Jane Eyre. "Kitty Bell, the Orphan."
Chapter IX. By the Mademoiselle Lagrange, of Eug�ne Sue's Miss Mary ou By Currer Bell. L'Institutrice.
The death of Helen Burns. The death of Agnes Jones.
That forest dell, where Lowood The Master of the Kendall lay, was the cradle of ... Institution ... had ... been fog-bred pestilence, which ... very much shocked by the ravages crept into the Orphan Asylum, of typhus fever, and since the breathed typhus through [it] ... reports of Agnes's health had and transformed the seminary become serious, had sent several into a hospital.... One evening times to ascertain how she ... Mr. Bates came out, and ... was.... "Miss Bell, I am come to a nurse.... I ran up to her. inquire after our friend, Miss Jones." "How is Helen Burns?" "... Agnes is always calm and "Very poorly," was the easy-minded.... This is very answer.... Two hours later ... I kind of you." reached ... Miss Temple's room, ... I looked in. My eye sought ... As I was preparing to lie Helen, and feared to find down in the room, Agnes called death.... "Helen!" I whispered to me:-- softly; "are you awake?" "Catherine, my dear, I feel ... I got on to her crib and rather cold to-night; will you kissed her: her forehead was sleep with me?" cold, and her cheek both cold and thin, and so were her hand Of course I complied, and we lay and wrist, but she smiled as of talking in each other's arms old. until the sweet dove fell asleep. Poor Agnes, she was "Jane, ... lie down and cover indeed cold; a strange chill yourself with the quilt." came through me as I lay by her side.... I still heard my sister I did so: she put her arm over orphan breathe and pant.... Why me, and I nestled close to her. did I listen ... so greedily? Why--when the poor thing turned ... I clasped my arms closer round once in the night, and round Helen; she seemed dearer said: "Another kiss, to me than ever; I felt as if I Catherine!"--why did I feel in could not let her go; I lay with giving it her, as if a hundred my face hidden on her neck. steel arrows had gone through my Presently she said:--"... Don't heart? How long I lay awake and leave me, Jane; I like to have thinking--wondering at the cold you near me." emerging from the pure body at my side, I know not! I must have "I'll stay with you, dear slept, too; for I remember Helen; no one shall take me opening my eyes with the first away."... She kissed me, and I dawn, before the bells rang. her; and we soon slumbered. When I awoke it was day; an unusual "Agnes!" said I, softly; "are movement roused me. you awake?"
A day or two afterwards, I But there was no answer!... I learned that Miss Temple, on called again--then a third, and returning to her own room at a fourth time! But still ... no dawn, had found me laid in a reply! Wondering at this little crib; my face against silence, ... I listened for that Helen Burn's shoulder, my arms hard breathing I knew so well. round her neck. I was asleep, But nothing--not a sound could I and Helen was--dead. hear! Alarmed, but unwilling to trust my fears, I felt for her hand. Oh, God! it was cold as ice, and rigid as stone! Wild with affright, ... I started up ... and rushed out to call the Superintendent [Miss Temple]. I found her preparing to come to us.... When we entered the chamber, we found no Agnes there! No; her spirit had fled, and all we saw was the lifeless body of a poor houseless girl.
Another biographical passage occurs where Catherine Bell first sees the Miss Temple of "Lagrange's Manuscript," who herself, under the name of Ashton (Eshton),[59] is at times Miss Bront�, who took the name of the original of Miss Temple (Evans) for herself in the phase of Frances Evans Henri in The Professor, a work not published, we must note, till after Charlotte Bront�'s death:--
"I love you, madam," I said.
"Your name, I believe, is Catherine Bell, is it not?"
"Kitty Bell, if you please, madam," I answered.
"Kitty Bell at home, my dear, but here we must call you Catherine; for a school, you know, is where many forms must be observed. How old are you?"
"I shall be ten next birthday, madam."
"And when will that be?"
"On the 23rd of April."
"Shakespeare's Day, I declare!"
The above is, of course, not in Jane Eyre. There is a stroke of sarcasm in the last sentence. It would appear that Currer Bell playfully had moved her birthday forward two days, in her private conversation with one from whom M. Sue had gleaned information--and this could be only M. H�ger himself. Charlotte Bront�, as Lucy Snowe, in Villette, Chapter XLI., tells us that M. Paul Emanuel (M. H�ger) said:--
"I wanted to prove to Miss Lucy that I could keep a secret. How often has she taunted me with lack of dignified reserve and needful caution! How many times has she saucily insinuated that all my affairs are the secret of Polichinelle!" And this had doubtless a reference to some such indiscretions as resulted in M. Sue whilst at Brussels (and he was publishing L'Orgueil from Brussels in 1844, in the January of which year Charlotte Bront� arrived home from the Belgian capital), learning the literary secrets of Jane Eyre, and perhaps Wuthering Heights.
A further reference to Currer Bell's literary aspirations--in the spirit of Mdlle. Reuter's sneers, in The Professor, at Mdlle. Henri's literary ambition--occurs in M. Sue's feuilleton in another version of the fortune-telling incident of Jane Eyre:--
"Here," said I, to a brown, sunburnt damsel, ... "take this shilling and tell me when I shall be Empress of Morocco?"
I held out my hand.... The young girl looked at it, ... then shook her head doubtfully:--
"Your life, lady, will be a troubled one--full of hopes and fears!"
"So I suppose; most people's lives are pretty well divided in this manner."
"But not so much as yours will be.... First, you are without father or mother?... Without fortune, too?"
"True, what more?"
"You will be married and not married."
"That's impossible. What can you mean by married and not married?"
"That deserves another shilling!"
"No; I only want a shillingsworth, ... that will do for to-day."
"Mdlle. Lagrange's Manuscript" was bound in blue morocco leather, and the term "Empress of Morocco" may have a reference to a literary ambition, as has the "Shakspeare's Day, I declare!" passage.
For constructive purposes the West Indian girl, or Creole, in "Lagrange's Manuscript," is made to take the place of the Mrs. Rochester of Jane Eyre, who is therein represented as a Creole:--
I did my best [continues Catherine Bell] to make a friend of her, but to no purpose. Whatever was the reason she disliked me from the first. ["I am convinced she does not like me," wrote Charlotte to Emily of Madame H�ger.] I felt intuitively she was my enemy.... Had we been thrown together when I was a child [!] I should probably have suited her ... for at that time I was a little given to flattery myself. But that was before I had learned how many better things there are than mere beauty.... Perhaps ... I preferred more solid advantages, because my vanity assured me that I had them myself, whilst my personal appearance was insignificant compared with hers. I was certainly fond of talking of what I knew, which answered very well with those who knew as much, and was rather pleasing to those who knew more. [M. H�ger seems to have found pleasure in his intellectual talks with Currer Bell], but to Isabella [this, as I have said, is the name of Catherine's rival in Wuthering Heights, who was married to Heathcliffe] it was hateful. She imagined I wanted to expose her ignorance.
I have given some of the biographical facts respecting Miss Bront� embodied in Mdlle. Lagrange's story, and before closing this chapter dealing with that extraordinary manuscript I will print a further extract or so from it. The opening is as follows:--
"KITTY BELL, THE ORPHAN."
I was not above four years old when my mother died, my father having gone to his grave two years before.... Oh, it is a sad, sad thing to be an orphan!... My little head has been cut with more than one fall, and blood has flowed down my neck. But nobody cared.... It was only Kitty Bell.... There was no loving heart to take me to itself and soothe me.... I had been taken home by some relation of my mother, ... a widow [Mrs. Burke], and though she treated me with great rigour, she melted on her death-bed.
She is locked in the room wherein Mrs. Burke died, after the manner of the same incident in Jane Eyre, and the writer takes an opportunity of inserting the most distinctive feature of Jane Eyre, the light-bearing apparition, the original of which I have shown Charlotte Bront� found in Montagu's Gleanings in Craven:--
Suddenly there came a gleam of light through the key-hole, ... and now I could hear a short, heavy tread upon the stairs--it was coming up.... The gleam shot through the key-hole a third time, with treble radiance. But what had I seen?... Was it a vision? was it a ghost? It was a tall figure in white, like a winding sheet, with a hideous face and balls of gleaming fire where the eyes should be. The sight had stunned and levelled me almost like a blow on the temple.... I cannot say how long I continued in this swoon, but when I began to recover myself I was in my own bed.
She had received medical treatment, she learns as did Jane Eyre in the similar incident. The "ghost," however, had been only George Burke--the John Reed of Jane Eyre. Hence the choice of the name Burke by reason of its connection with the Hare of the Burke and Hare association, the writer by this choice showing his acquaintance with the fact that in real life the Reeds and Jane Eyre were relations. After this incident the story is for a while occupied with the petty happenings connected with this orphan who "was not yet nine years old." An aunt of the Burkes [? Aunt Branwell] comes to live with them, a "poor, quiet, elderly spinster who paid a small stipend in order to preserve her independence and keep up her dignity.... I must not attempt to describe her ... she was fully six feet high." This is palpably antithetical: Miss Branwell was not tall. And it is this aunt who provides the money for Catherine Bell to go to school. Under the guise of presenting the Lowood school in "Lagrange's Manuscript," M. Sue gives us often the H�ger pensionnat. Aunt Branwell provided Charlotte Bront� the money that enabled her to go to the H�gers'.
I will give in parallel columns the arrival of Charlotte Bront� at the Clergy Daughters' Institute as it is described in "Mademoiselle Lagrange's Manuscript," and in Jane Eyre the original:--
By the Mademoiselle Lagrange, By Currer Bell. of Eug�ne Sue's Miss Mary ou L'Institutrice.
The first days at the The first days at the Institution. Institution.
The coach door was open and ... We got to Kendall House.... I a servant was standing at it: I had been sitting near my trunk saw her ... by the light of the on the outside of the coach, and lamps. my legs were numb with cold. I was quite unable to move, so the "Is there a little girl called coachman lifted me down along Jane Eyre here?" she asked. I with my box. The door was open answered "Yes," and was lifted when the coach stopped; a out, my trunk was handed down. servant was standing there with a lamp. "Are you Catherine Bell we expects down here to-day?" she asked me.
"My name is Kitty Bell, if you please," replied I.
The servant led me ... into a The girl returned no answer, but room, with a fire, where she having ushered me into a left me alone.... I stood and spacious room with a fire in it, warmed my numbed fingers over she left me there by myself; ... the blaze; ... there was no there was no candle. I stood ... candle. warming my numb hands and limbs. I heard the door open ... and I The door opened, and an saw a face ... I never can individual entered, ... a tall forget. My heart told me lady with dark hair, dark eyes, directly it was Miss Ashton and a pale and large forehead [Eshton]. Dear, noble girl! her [Miss Temple. Her real name was face was rather large, but Miss Evans], her countenance was accurately oval--just as you see grave, her bearing erect. them in the fine sacred pictures of Murillo--those pictures of grand female beauty.
She considered me attentively Everything in that face was for a minute or two. great, open, frank, truthlike, ... and yet there was a grave ... "Are you tired?" she asked, ... melancholy overspreading placing her hand on my shoulder. that regal countenance.... It was singular to see a woman ... "A little, ma'am." acting as the manager of a benevolent institution and living apart from the world who might have shone in any court in Europe and ... perhaps had no equal on any throne ... [!] She advanced towards me stately, but kindly, touched my cheek with her finger, and then seeing me smile, she smiled in return, and, after scanning my features a moment, she lifted me up and kissed me.
"I love you, madam," I said. Then she set me down ... and, putting her hand upon my head, she asked me:--
"Your name is Catherine Bell, is it not?"... [Here follows the "Shakespeare's Day" reference I have already given.]
I have not ... alluded to the I had been at the Kendall visits of Mr. Brocklehurst [Rev. Institute about three weeks Mr. Carus Wilson]; his absence without seeing Mr. King [Mr. was a relief to me.... One Brocklehurst] the master or afternoon (I had ... been three registrar.... One morning when I weeks at Lowood) ... I woke up I heard the bells in the recognized almost instinctively dormitories ringing louder than that gaunt outline, ... it was ever.... Mr. Brocklehurst. I knew without being told this After some lines we have the strange man was Mr. King. hair-cutting incident I have quoted already from "Lagrange's "Catherine Bell!" called out Manuscript." This incident comes Miss Ashton. after and not before Catherine (Jane) has been commanded to stand before the class.
On hearing my name I left my place in the rank, and advanced....
"So! this is Catherine Bell, is it?" cried Mr. King. "I have heard her kind friends at home speak of Catherine Bell, and ... "Fetch that stool," said Mr. they tell me she is a naughty, Brocklehurst.... "Place the vicious, headstrong child--very child upon it." ungrateful to those for whose generosity she ought to have so And I was placed there. much respect and gratitude! Is this true, Catherine Bell?" "Miss Temple, ... children, it becomes my duty to warn you that "No, sir; not a word of it." this girl ... is a little castaway, ... this girl is--a "What, child!... Are you a liar!... Let her stand ... on little liar as well as an that stool." ingrate? Stand here!"
What my sensations were no The passions and feelings of a language can describe.... I child are only known to mastered the rising hysteria ... children. Grown-up people seem and took a firm stand on the to have forgotten them.[60] I stool. stood there with cheeks burning with shame, indignation, and anger.... My pride had been savagely assailed. I did not want pity. I wanted ... a refutation of the cruel charge; I was not a liar; and those who taxed me with ingratitude had no gratitude to claim from me. Great God! what emotions there were raging in my breast! and how my little heart did swell!
Often Mdlle. Lagrange's "Kitty Bell the Orphan" is mysterious in its allusions. As when Catherine Bell says she does not like a French lady teacher. The seed-cake incident of Chapter VIII. of Jane Eyre, which is given at length in "Lagrange's Manuscript," is herewith worked in again:--
"I don't like Madame Dubois...."
"Why so? she is a very good sort of a woman."
"That may be, but she takes snuff...."
"What is that to you or me, Catherine Bell? Surely it is no business of ours?"
"Sometimes it is, though.... I gave her a slice of my seed-cake yesterday, and she returned me half of it."
"That showed a good disposition in poor Madame Dubois; did it not?"
"Yes; but when I was going to eat it myself I was seized with a fit of sneezing, which I shall not forget in a hurry, I promise you!"
"You took snuff then, Catherine Bell, for the first time in your life?"
"ALL IN--ALL IN--FOR SCHOOL!" shouted the teachers and examples that moment.
The following is an extract dealing with the fever scenes of Jane Eyre:--
Fever and consumption had fixed their abode under the large roof of Kendall Institution, death was stealing along with its soft, wolf-like tread, to feed upon these poor children. The first symptoms I remember that startled me were certain cold shiverings and sudden fits of perspiration without warmth, which seized upon the younger children. Then sickness and nausea, followed immediately by vomiting. [M. Sue had been a surgeon.] ... Oh, how cruel, how bitter it was to us when we saw the first little coffin borne out of the school!... And now we began to hear, for the first time, the dismal word typhus uttered here and there in whispers through the school.... When we went to the church on Sundays, and saw the many little mounds of fresh black earth lying over our innocent playmates of yesterday, our heads sank upon our bosoms and we wept most sorrowfully.
Faithful to its model, "Lagrange's Manuscript" brings Isabella the Creole as the rival of Catherine Bell, and thus of the Creole's husband Catherine writes:--
Unwittingly, and quite unknown to myself, I became the object of his admiration--nay, of his marked preference; but I rejected indignantly the homage of an affection which he had sworn to another, and which it was his sacred duty to preserve undefiled.... In the hope of overcoming my persistency in refusing his so often proffered and as often rejected love, he urged on by every imaginable means the final decision, which in the eyes of man were to permit a second marriage, guilty in the sight of God. With the natural instinct of divination peculiar to female jealousy, his wife had guessed who was the deity at whose altar the captain was burning his incense.... Nor did she consider whether I encouraged or rebuked him. She suspected, she spied, she believed, and unscrupulously involved me in the hateful vengeance she swore to take both on her husband and myself.
For a portrait of Mdlle. Lagrange who, as the author of this version of Jane Eyre, is of course meant for Charlotte Bront�, we turn to the feuilleton itself:--
Meanwhile we have lost sight of our blue-stocking friend, Mdlle. Lagrange ['Madame herself deemed me a regular bas bleu,' says Lucy Snowe of Madame Beck (Madame H�ger) in Villette] ... her character ... remains to be described. Now, to form any opinion of it by Madame de Morville's [Madame H�ger's] appreciation of that girl's disposition, would be completely erroneous. Lagrange was not devoid of intellectual faculties; she possessed an imaginative mind, rather too fond of romance, and too little of practical truths; but, above all, cunning and ambition formed the main basis of her character: she had risen from nothing, and would become something. Imbued as she was with the ideas prevalent among the lower rank [Had Charlotte Bront� related her father's history to the H�gers? She had 'views' on money. M. Sue, however, never seems to have forgotten the rank of his own god-parents], she deemed it her right and duty to concentrate all the power of her faculties towards the end she sighed for--wealth and a name. Thus it was she displayed all the resources of her subtle nature to make every circumstance serve to the gratifying of her ambition. What, then, was to be her means of success? Marriage?--yes, that perpetual dream of maidens, and a dream which too often ends in an everlasting nightmare. But the task was not easy, for, it has been said, beauty had been forgotten by Dame Nature among the few gifts she had granted her.[61] What the appearance failed in, the mind should, at any cost, supply [!]. This had become her ruling desire. Thence the manuscript ['Catherine Bell, The Orphan'] we have already read had been the first ponderous lucubration of her fortune-seeking imagination: she had been praised for this first attempt by her friends, and also by one two distinguished critics.[62] This was already a point gained, and an encouragement to her literary propensities.
Thus far the Mdlle. Lagrange phase of Currer Bell according to Eug�ne Sue, and before the publication of The Professor, Villette, and Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bront�. The next chapter shall deal with Eug�ne Sue's relation of her as "Miss Mary," the leading character of this extraordinary feuilleton, whereby it will be proved finally that in her works Charlotte Bront� has written from her own life-story.
CHAPTER XIII.
II.
ACCUSATIONS AND PROTESTATIONS!
I have said Eug�ne Sue, in Miss Mary ou l'Institutrice, gave two phases of Charlotte Bront�. With the one as Mdlle. Lagrange I dealt in the preceding chapter, and now I write concerning that wherein Miss Bront� is openly represented as the Irish governess at the de Morville establishment.[63] Easy it is to recognize this character is a phase of Charlotte Bront�, but as her pupil Alphonsine puts it plainly in describing her, she is "Mdlle. Lagrange, avec la beaut� de plus"--Charlotte Bront�, with beauty and virtues exaggerated. The following incident I find only in the feuilleton (not the extant volume), the which circumstances support as history concerning the days of Miss Bront�'s dejection at the Brussels pensionnat. It should be read in the light of the lines in Chapter XIX. of The Professor, where she, as Frances Evans Henri, tells Crimsworth, obviously M. H�ger, that he remarked her devoirs dwelt a great deal on fortitude in bearing grief. In the evening Alphonsine, M. de Morville's daughter, who says many things we know must have issued from M. H�ger's lips--(this is in palpable imitation of Charlotte Bront�'s Method I., interchange of the sexes of characters portrayed from life. For further use of this method see also the close of Chapter XII. and elsewhere in The Professor, and my writing on Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre)--pays a visit to the chamber of the Irish governess:--
"Were you not reading?... I see a book on your work-table. May I look?... The Imitation of Christ!" exclaimed Alphonsine, after having read the title-page. "Oh! this is a beautiful book, is it not?"
"Truly beautiful!" answered Mary; "the cover is old, the pages worn out in many places. You must not wonder at it: from the age I began to read, I don't think I ever passed three nights without reading at least one chapter of this admirable work."
The Imitation of Christ in English was a book Charlotte Bront� was setting much store upon when she was but nine years of age.[64] Her copy was then an old one. Evidently she took the book with her to Brussels and read it at the pensionnat. It would seem M. H�ger, whom she instructed in English, requested to hear the work in this English translation:--
"Pray what chapter were you reading?" continues Alphonsine. "I should so much like to hear you read it to me: I have occasionally read a page of The Imitation, but always in French; now, if you would be so good as to read slowly and pronounce very distinctly, I think I could understand this pious work in your language."
She read:--
"THE NECESSITY OF HUMBLE SUBMISSION.
"Let your conscience be pure, and surely God will know how to defend you.... Learn to suffer in silence, without repining, and you will ... receive assistance from Him."
"What a truthful, becalming lesson!" observed Alphonsine; "you will read to me every evening some passage of your Imitation, will you not? English sounds so sweetly to my ear when spoken by you. We will begin to-morrow evening, n'est ce pas?"
Surely this is M. H�ger and his sympathetic, depressed English teacher.
There is in the opening chapter of Miss Mary a long conversation regarding the departed governess Lagrange, and Madame de Morville (Madame H�ger) avows she had been jealous of her, and that her harshness towards the governess had resulted in her abruptly leaving on a false plea of ill-health. Thus she says to M. de Morville:--
"I am speaking seriously to you of my foolish but most acute sufferings ... tandis que tu restais seul ici avec tes livres. You never suspected them;... I endeavoured to suppress them, to suffer no part of what I felt to transpire; for I must confess poor Lagrange was quite the lamb du bon Dieu, yet in spite of myself I sometimes broke out into fits of petulance and absurd irony, which wounded her. I saw it did by the sudden dejection of that excellent young person. But even this was not all."
"Louise! is it you who speaks thus? You whose kind, benevolent heart I have so often admired."
"Would you that I should avow something worse to you? What made me tolerate that poor Lagrange is that she was as ugly as the seven cardinal sins.... In fine, I cannot conceal from myself that the result of all this was that Mdlle. Lagrange gave up her situation on the plea of ill-health. ["Ah! she was not dismissed," said Mdlle. Reuter (Madame H�ger) in The Professor, Chapter XVIII., when the Professor asked whether Mdlle. Frances Henri[65] (Miss Bront�) had left voluntarily. "... No need to have recourse to such extreme measures, I assure you."] Enfin, it faut bien me l'avouer, le r�sultat de tout ceci a �t� que Mademoiselle Lagrange a demand� � quitter la maison, sous pr�texte de sant�; v�ritable pr�texte. For the rest I will do myself this justice, I would have suffered even to the end rather than have sent back that excellent girl."
The H�gers were surprised at Miss Bront�'s sudden resolution to leave them, but she is said to have had her father's failing eyesight as a reason. "I suffered much before I left Brussels," wrote Charlotte, and this was in mind, not body.
"I have long concealed the greater part of these resentful sentiments from you," continues Madame de Morville, "notwithstanding the implicit trust reposed in you. I wish I alone had suffered by them. But no, poor Lagrange doubtless could not endure the thousand vexations and spites ('taquineries sournoises') to which she was subjected, and was thereby driven from our house."
All this should be read as in connection with the departure of Miss Mary, the other phase of Miss Bront�, towards the end of the book. "I think, however long I live I shall not forget what the parting with M. H�ger cost me," said Charlotte Bront�.[66]
Here is M. Sue's version:--
M. de Morville started, then regarding the governess with stupor, for he could not believe what he heard, he cried:--
"Quoi! Miss Mary, vous dites?"
"I say, monsieur, that I return to England, where I am recalled by my family."
The real reason why Miss Bront� left is given in the Lagrange passages to which I have alluded.
"Partir! but that is impossible! A departure so brusque, si peu attendu!"
"Pray do not perceive, monsieur," says the Irish governess, "in this unlooked for departure any want of regard for you; ... il a fallu des raisons graves, very grave, to compel me to such a resolution."
"Partir!" wailed M. de Morville. "What! that this should be the last time that I should see you, that I should speak to you! But this is not possible! They do not kill a man thus by a single blow! For you well know that you kill me! You well know that I love you! Oh! do not say you were unaware of my unhappy love," he continues, "you know well enough what an irresistible charm has drawn me towards you, what happiness I have had to tell you my life, my secret thoughts, my wrongs even! A timid reserve followed the first entrancement, but it was the struggle of respect, of honour against a fatal passion. Ah! the traces of that struggle, should they not have been too evident to your eyes! What! have not you divined the cause of that sombre discouragement which made me seek solitude where I isolated myself from all interests, from all affection? And those nights without sleep passed in consuming my tears, exaggerating more the consequences of that fatal passion!... What! you have divined nothing, read nothing of mes traits, in my eyes red with tears and sleeplessness? Mon Dieu! mon Dieu! to have suffered so much ... suffered so much, and not to have even the consolation of saying: She knows that I have suffered."
The reader of Miss Mary will perceive throughout this scene in the extant and apparently re-written French volume that M. de Morville's unhappy love was that of an honourable and a loyal-hearted man, while the governess was also without reproach. (These extracts do not occur in the feuilleton as published in English.) As he asks:--
"Is it my fault if in the monotony of my existence est tout � coup apparue a person whose talents, education, and character have been appreciated by all and by me.... Have I attempted to pervert your mind, to seduce your heart? No, no! I have suffered, suffered in silence [see my reference to the Imitation of Christ], suffered alone, suffered always. And my crime, what is it?... It is to make to you the avowal of suffering on the day when you go to leave me for ever a prey to incurable despair!"
Thus have we real insight into the state of affairs at Brussels when Miss Bront� left. We see the divining, jealous Madame de Morville--Madame H�ger, of course--subjecting her to the "taquineries sournoises"; we hear Madame saying of her: "Ce que me faisait tol�rer cette pauvre Mdlle. Lagrange, c'est qu'elle �tait laide comme les sept p�ch�s mortels," and sneering at the excuse she made to leave the establishment, calling it a "v�ritable pr�texte" when the real reason was Madame's jealousy and its causes. Oh, the bitterness of it! And now in this light read the carefully worded representation of Mrs Gaskell that:--
Towards the end of 1843 various reasons conspired ... to make her [Charlotte Bront�] feel that her presence was absolutely and imperatively required at home, while she was ... no longer regarded with the former kindliness of feeling by Madame H�ger. In consequence of this state of things working down with a sharp edge into a sensitive mind, she suddenly announced to that lady her immediate intention of returning to England.
Something of the foregoing I gave in my article "The Lifting of the Bront� Veil" in The Fortnightly Review, and I have to thank the press generally for their kind acknowledgment of my important discovery. The Spectator, in consonance with others, says:--"Mr. Malham-Dembleby has found a feuilleton by Eug�ne Sue which is curious, as it certainly indicates a knowledge of Charlotte Bront� and of Monsieur and Madame H�ger at Brussels."
In the extant French copy Eug�ne Sue has given a dramatic version of the parting scene between "Miss Mary" and "Madame de Morville"--Charlotte Bront� and Madame H�ger. The latter had surprised her husband and the Irish governess, t�te-�-t�te in the lonely pavilion, late in the evening. Monsieur protests:--
"Madame," he cries, "... I will not permit you, in my presence, to dare to calumniate and outrage Mademoiselle Lawson."
Miss Mary asks him not to defend her, as she does not wish to be a cause of irritating discussion between them.
"That is charming!" cried Madame de Morville, with a burst of sardonic laughter--"Gr�ce au bon accord du m�nage, mademoiselle would desire to continue in perfect tranquillity the undignified r�le she has played at my house!"
Her husband protests that she outrages one of the purest characters in the world, but the governess interrupts by addressing the wife:--
"Madam, suspicions so odious, so senseless, are unable to wound an honourable soul.... I reply nothing to these words, which you will soon regret. The two years that I have been here [Charlotte Bront� was two years with the H�gers] I have learned to know you, madam; and if sometimes I have without complaint [see the Lagrange passages] suffered from the vivacit� de vos premiers mouvements, I have also often been able to appreciate your goodness of heart."
"Enough, mademoiselle, enough! Believe you that you can dupe me by your hypocrisies and base flatteries? Do you think you can impose my silence by that pretended resignation?"
So the scene continues until Madame de Morville accuses the other of wishing to take the affections of her husband. To this, the governess retorts:--
"You accuse me, madam, of wishing to win the affections of M. de Morville, and of desiring to dominate at your house? Here is my reply."
And her reply is that she is returning to England.
"You go away!" cried Madame de Morville.... "No, no, that is a lie or a trick!"... Madame ... fut compl�tement d�rout�e par l'annonce du d�part de Miss Mary.
The latter says she profoundly regrets if she had caused "malheurs," for she had been the involuntary cause.
"Involuntary or not," cried Madame de Morville, "you are un porte-malheur, and thus have been two years, since your arrival here. I have said it to M. de Morville, who, par pr�vision without doubt, took at once your part against me.... And on whom, then, will that responsibility fall!... We were all happy and peaceful before your advent here, and to-day, when you go you leave us dans le chagrin."
To which Miss Mary retorts:--
"Ah! madame, le jour le plus malheureux de ma vie serait celui o� je quitterais votre famille avec la douloureuse conviction que mon nom y serait maudit."
There were, we see, conflicting views in Brussels social and literary circles, in the eighteen-forties, as to the degree of intimacy to which Charlotte Bront� and M. H�ger attained. It is when we perceive the ambiguity of the relations existing between Miss Bront� and the professor that we recognize the fidelity of Eug�ne Sue's portrayal of Currer Bell's Brussels life. Even Charlotte Bront� herself, in Villette, published after M. Sue's story, relates that M. Paul Emanuel (M. H�ger) said to her:--"I call myself your brother. I hardly know what I am--brother--friend--I cannot tell. I know I think of you--I feel I wish you well--but I must check myself; you are to be feared. My best friends point out danger and whisper caution." In Mdlle. Lagrange and Catherine Bell, Charlotte Bront� figures as represented by those who said ill of her; as Miss Mary Lawson, the Irish governess, she has "beauty, youth, and grace," which charms, Jane tells us, she possessed in Rochester's eyes. Of her, in the phase of Catherine Bell, we have many insinuations of a detractive character, the keynote to which is found in the fortune-telling incident, wherein Catherine is foretold she will be "married and not married"; while in Miss Mary Lawson we have a portrayal of un bon ange[67] of whom Madame de Morville is jealous, not without reason, though, to use Miss Mary's own words, she had been "la cause involontaire."
We must, therefore, set it to the credit of Eug�ne Sue that he placed two versions in the balance; and his evidence for ever sweeps away the illogical and unfair contention of some writers on the Bront�s, that Charlotte Bront� may have cared for M. H�ger, but that he, in his turn, had been only "intellectually" interested in her. M. Sue shows the attitude of M. H�ger was ever unequivocal as regards Charlotte Bront�; whether in her phase as "Lagrange," as "Catherine Bell," or as "Miss Mary Lawson"--she was loved by him. We now see Morton of Jane Eyre was Haworth to Charlotte Bront�, and Thornfield, the home of Mr. Rochester, the Pensionnat H�ger. And the flight from temptation at Thornfield and seeking refuge with the Rivers family were really representative of her leaving Brussels and returning home to her father and sisters. Obviously M. Sue wrote his feuilleton to aid, maliciously or not, in breaking the dangerous friendship between M. H�ger and Miss Bront�. Charlotte Bront�'s works are testimony it was not only Madame H�ger's harsh jealousy that led her to leave Brussels. In Chapter XX. of The Professor, published years after M. Sue's work, but written before it, she gives us the reason for this determination. By her Method I., Interchange of the sexes of characters portrayed from life, Professor Crimsworth, who is alternately Charlotte Bront� and M. H�ger, in this instance is Charlotte Bront�, while Mdlle. Reuter is M. H�ger. Crimsworth [Miss Bront�] says:--
I could not conceal ... that it would not do for me to remain.... Her [his] present demeanour towards me was deficient neither in dignity nor propriety; but I knew her [his] former feeling was unchanged. Decorum now repressed, and Policy masked it, but Opportunity would be too strong for either of these--Temptation would shiver their restraints. I was no pope, ... in short, if I stayed, the probability was that, in three months' time, a practical modern French novel would be in full process of concoction.... From all this resulted the conclusion that I must leave, ... and that instantly.... The Spirit of Evil ... sought to lead me astray.[68] Rough and steep was the path indicated by divine suggestion; mossy and declining the green way along which Temptation strewed flowers.
And thus at last do we understand why Charlotte Bront� asks herself as Jane Eyre when at home with the Rivers family--with her father, her sisters, and Tabby at Haworth:--
Which is better? To have surrendered to temptation; listened to passion; made no painful effort--no struggle; but to have sunk down in the silken snare; fallen asleep on the flowers covering it ... to have been now living in France, Mr. Rochester's mistress ... I shall never more know the sweet homage given to beauty, youth, and grace--for never to any one else shall I seem to possess these charms.... Whether is it better, I ask, to be a slave in a fool's paradise at Marseilles--fevered with delusive bliss one hour--suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next--or to be a village schoolmistress [The Bront� school project was under contemplation in 1844], free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England? Yes, I feel now that I was right when I adhered to principle and law, and crushed the insane promptings of a frenzied moment. God directed me to a correct choice: I thank His providence for the guidance.
And her fervent gratitude is as sincere when in the same connection she says in Villette of her confessor--her F�nelon[69]:--"He was kind when I needed kindness; he did me good. May Heaven bless him!" But we now see Charlotte Bront� did not suffer alone. Eug�ne Sue has given us an insight into the bitterness of M. de Morville's (M. H�ger's) life, which resulted from their unhappy love, and doubtless those words of Heathcliffe to Catherine in Wuthering Heights were uttered or written by M. H�ger in reproach to Charlotte Bront�:--
"Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy?... You loved me--then what right had you to leave me?... Because misery and degradation and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will did it. I have not broken your heart--you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong."
Charlotte Bront� tells us in Jane Eyre she loved to imagine she and Mr. Rochester had met under happier conditions; and if the meeting of the runaway lovers Charlotte Bront� repeats so faithfully in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre did not refer to a private meeting subsequent to the beginning of 1844, between her and M. H�ger, or to their meeting again when she returned to Brussels the second time, then have we evidence of the fact that she at one time perhaps believed Wuthering Heights would be never published. Assuredly nothing was sweeter to Currer Bell's fancy than a dream of the happiness that might have been hers, and well may she have written in the last sentences of Villette:--
Leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life.
Charlotte Bront� and M. Constantin Gilles Romain H�ger loved each other as those who are worshippers of two high ideals, when one of these ideals is love, the other honour. And this was tragedy. To the agonizing nature of unrequitable affection endured for honour's sake do we owe Charlotte Bront�'s Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE RECOIL.
The elements that conduce to reaction and recoil are sometimes fatal to the best proposed and ablest evolved schemes of man. Priests and counsellors may gravely devise; knight and maid may devoutly swear; the pious neophyte and the exalted religionist may make solemn pledge, but reaction often brings catastrophe. Thus the Christian Church is rightfully a watchful Body, a militant Force, preaches the weakness of man and cries "Ora continenter!" And herein lies the value of a ponderous state procedure. Irritating in its slow gravity and indifferent to the passionate appeals of emotionalism, such procedure yet withstands the backward wave which comes as answer to courageous but costly proposals.
The unsupported and undisciplined individual, like communities, cannot always safely stand alone, and finally resolves into an automaton at the service of unlicensed and unconsidered impulse when the day of reaction comes. The anthropologist and the pathologist relate how exacting straitness suddenly has broken down with a lamentable demonstration of most morbid prurience; and relentless history has chronicled grievous moral declensions in the lives of men and women whose careers in the greater part were records of generous and unselfish devotion to a noble cause or an honourable work. Until the day of reaction is safely fought through the battle is not won.
Perhaps it was to prevent all possibility of a final and definite reconciliation between M. H�ger and Miss Bront� that M. Sue, aided by his friends, ridiculed their attachment in his feuilleton, Miss Mary. Not that Eug�ne Sue would do this necessarily for Virtue's sake, but the position of moral reprehender gave him title to the r�le he had assumed. M. H�ger was sorely punished to lose Miss Bront�, as M. Sue has shown, and as we have seen Charlotte Bront� herself tells us in a letter; and the intensity of his affection for her is only further accentuated by the light M. Sue throws upon the subject in a conversation which occurs between Alphonsine and the jealous mother, concerning Mdlle. Lagrange in the opening chapters of his feuilleton. As I have stated, evidence compels us to perceive M. Sue often presented by imitation of Charlotte Bront�'s Method I., Interchange of the sexes for obfuscation's sake, M. H�ger in Alphonsine: Madame de Morville (Madame H�ger) has just said Mdlle. Lagrange (Miss Bront�) affected a little to speak of her humble origin.
"Elle affecter," replies Alphonsine, "... c'est une erreur. Quand, par hasard, elle parlait de sa famille, c'est que la conversation venait l�-dessus. D'ailleurs, �coute donc, Mademoiselle Lagrange e�t �t� fi�re qu'elle en avait le droit."
"Proud! what of? not of her face, poor girl."
"No, that is true."
Madame de Morville admits that Mdlle. Lagrange was endowed with patience, learning, and fortitude; and says, "Tu le sais, nous avions pour elle les plus grands �gards."
"Without doubt ... and myself, I loved her like a sister."
To which Madame de Morville retorts:
"A ce point que, pendant les premiers jours qui ont suivi son d�part je t'ai vue souvent pleurer, et que depuis je te trouve triste."
"Que veux-tu ... se quitter apr�s plus de trois ans d'intimit�, cela vous laisse du chagrin."
"This sensibility does credit to your heart, but after all it seems to me that you and I shall be able by our mutual tenderness to console each other for the loss d'une �trang�re."
"Une �trang�re!" says Alphonsine, na�vely; "dis donc une amie, une soeur.... Ainsi, toi ... tu es pour moi, n'est-ce pas, aussi affectueuse que possible; pourtant tu m'imposes toujours; il y a mille riens, mille folies, mille b�tises si tu veux, que je n'oserais jamais te dire, et qui nous amusaient et nous faisaient rire aux larmes avec cette pauvre Mademoiselle Lagrange; et puis ces causeries sans fin pendant les r�cr�ations, nos jeux m�mes, car elle �tait tr�s enfant quand elle s'y mettait[70]; all this made our temps de l'�tude pass like a dream, and that of recreation like a flash."
"Without doubt," replied Madame de Morville, with a forced smile; ... "and I, ... je ne jouissais de la soci�t� de ces demoiselles que lors de notre promenade d'avant d�ner, ou le soir jusqu'� l'heure du th�."
The irreparableness of the loss at first to M. H�ger is herein clearly shown. But whether he would confess himself to Miss Bront� afterwards is not certain. The tone of Charlotte Bront�'s successive writings suggests he did not, as do many points of evidence and the reference in Villette, Chapter XIX., to that "He was a religious little man, in his way: the self-denying and self-sacrificing part of the Catholic religion commanded the homage of his soul."
Likely enough it is that M. H�ger hailed, as do truly noble men, the day of trial, and elevated by the very agony of great sacrifice the personality which worshipped a conception of duty consonant with Divine law. It seems, though, that then the battle was won; his day of reaction was fought through. At the time of what M. Sue makes M. de Morville call "ce premier entra�nement" was the greatest danger, and abundant testimony goes to prove he would have gone the length of indiscretion but that Charlotte Bront�, herself innately honourable and influenced by her Christian upbringing, checked the mad rush of impetuous passion. Then the Church of M. H�ger intervened. As Charlotte Bront� tells us in Villette, Chapter XXXVI.: "We were under the surveillance of a sleepless eye: Rome watched jealously her son through that mystic lattice at which I had knelt once, and to which M. Emanuel drew nigh month by month--the sliding panel of the confessional." She was much gratified by M. H�ger's fervent admiration, though she had perforce to remember their circumstances. As M. Sue said of Lagrange so it had been with Miss Bront�:--
The girl had never before known love, save by reading and hearing of its magical influence. All the natural tenderness which lay in her heart she had year after year suppressed.
The references in her poems to a recognition of growing coldness in a lover--see "Frances," "Preference," etc., if we may read them in the biographical sense Mr. Mackay suggests, show there had been a day when she perceived external influences were dictating to M. H�ger a line of moral procedure. Obviously, while she herself had held temptation at bay she was strong; but once she discovered an ally was lessening the necessity of her defence her woman's nature awoke. She doubted the sincerity of the past protestations of passion; she saw in every eye a sinister spy; she found in the Roman Church nothing but a partisan of Madame H�ger (see Madame Beck and the Roman Church in Villette), and M. H�ger became to her a very impersonation of insincerity and treachery. Of the secret tempest which had begun to rage within herself she would disclose nothing to M. H�ger; and she would know that once the storm slept the end might be the worst. But Charlotte Bront� was not yet in the season of the recoil, though alone, wretched, and rapidly losing faith in God and man. As for M. H�ger, he was supported by the knowledge that the ideal of the good and pious is glorified by sacrifice. That "Hell holds no fury like a woman scorned" is a platitude, for a woman scorned in the meaning of the writer is a woman with a shattered life. In her fullest and native sense she ceases to exist thereafter. However, as in many cases Nature provides a remedy for her maimed, woman has given her dissimulation. But to quote Charlotte Bront�'s poem, "Frances":--
"Who can for ever crush the heart, Restrain its throbbing, curb its life? Dissemble truth with ceaseless art, With outward calm mask inward strife?"
It is a dangerous day when woman is her very self and thwarted. Then, and only then, can she utter the distressing blasphemies Charlotte Bront� places in the mouth of the speaker in her verses, "Apostasy":--
"Talk not of thy Last Sacrament, Tell not thy beads for me; Both rite and prayer are vainly spent, As dews upon the sea. Speak not one word of Heaven above Rave not of Hell's alarms; Give me but back my Walter's love, Restore me to his arms!
"Then will the bliss of Heaven be won; Then will Hell shrink away; As I have seen night's terrors shun The conquering steps of day. 'Tis my religion thus to love, My creed thus fixed to be; Not Death shall shake, nor Priestcraft break My rock-like constancy!"
And places in the mouth of Catherine of Wuthering Heights, Chapter IX., in the same connection:--
"If I were in heaven ... I should be extremely miserable.... I dreamt once ... I was there, ... heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out ... on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.[71] ... I cannot express it; but surely you ... have a notion that there is ... an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliffe's miseries ... my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. [See my remarks on Charlotte Bront�'s belief in the elective affinities, page 96-7.] My love for Heathcliffe resembles the eternal rocks beneath.... I am Heathcliffe,--he's always, always in my mind--not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to myself--but as my own being--so don't talk of our separation again."
It is of the barriers which divided the woman of the verses "Apostasy" from her lover that the priest has reminded her. Thus she says:--
"... Did I need that thou shouldst tell What mighty barriers rise To part me from that dungeon-cell Where my loved Walter lies?"
The whole history of Charlotte Bront�'s Brussels life before us, the fact that an insurmountable barrier--his marriage--separated her from M. H�ger, and the fact that she herself consulted[72] a Roman Catholic priest whom I designate as her "F�n�lon," advising, like the Mentor of T�l�maque,[73] the tempted one to "flee temptation," identify these "barriers" as a covert reference to the circumstances unhappily existing which made intimacy between Miss Bront� and M. H�ger dangerous. To quote my words in The Fortnightly Review:--"We see why Miss Bront�, herself a Protestant, went to the confessional at Brussels.... We know this was no freak, as also that it was impossible for Charlotte to mention the subject to her sister without attributing it to a freak. More, we perceive now the nature of her confession, and, the "Flee temptation!" note of F�n�lon's Les Aventures de T�l�maque fresh in our minds, we see why she wrote of her father-confessor in Villette, Chapter XV.:--
There was something of F�nelon about that benign old priest; and whatever ... I may think of his Church and creed, ... of himself I must ever retain a grateful recollection. He was kind when I needed kindness; he did me good. May heaven bless him!
I mention that by her composite method of presenting characters, which Charlotte Bront� admitted to have employed, Dr. John Bretton, while often in the beginning representing Mr. Smith the publisher, becomes finally a representation of the Rev. Mr. Nicholls who married Miss Bront�.[74] So in Jane Eyre, St. John Rivers while in the main representing the Rev. Patrick Bront�, becomes associated temporarily with that priest I have called Charlotte Bront�'s Brussels F�n�lon. She tells us in Villette that she broke off the seduction of visiting this priest and says:--"The probabilities are that had I visited ... at the ... day appointed, I might just now ... have been counting my beads in the cell of a ... convent...." Miss Bront� admits he had had great influence with her, and this fact and the testimony of her poem "Apostasy" just quoted show this priest and his admonitions were in her mind when she wrote the final scene between herself and St. John Rivers in Jane Eyre (Chapter XXXV.). Therein, as in that poem and in Wuthering Heights, "Religion" and "Angels"[75] are set as being less to her than the vicinage of her lover. Indeed the India and the missionary life of Jane Eyre, and the marriage with St. John (see Chapter XXXIV.), may be said to have been in Miss Bront�'s mind that life of religious consecration which in Villette she owns to have been the likely result of her further listening to the advice of the priest, to whom she had given "the ... outline of my experience," as she terms it.
Therefore it is interesting to observe that, as the woman in "Apostasy" suddenly hears the voice of her lover calling and says:--
"He calls--I come--my pulse scarce beats, My heart fails in my breast. Again that voice--how far away, How dreary sounds that tone! And I, methinks, am gone astray In trackless wastes and lone.
"I fain would rest a little while: Where can I find a stay, Till dawn upon the hills shall smile, And show some trodden way?[76] I come! I come! in haste she said, 'Twas Walter's voice I heard!" Then up she sprang--but fell back, dead, His name her latest word.
so in the scene in Jane Eyre: St. John ejaculates--
'My prayers are heard!' He pressed his hand firmer on my head, as if he claimed me; he surrounded me with his arm, almost as if he loved me ["That priest had arms which could influence me; he was naturally kind, with a sentimental French kindness, to whose softness I knew myself not wholly impervious. Without respecting some sorts of affection, there was hardly any sort having a fibre of root in reality, which I could rely on my force wholly to withstand."--Charlotte Bront� speaking of her Brussels F�n�lon in Villette, Chapter XV.], I say almost--I knew the difference--for I had felt what it was to be loved; but, like him, I now ... thought only of duty;... I sincerely, ... fervently longed to do what was right.... 'Show me, show me the path!' I entreated of Heaven.... My heart beat fast and thick.... I heard a voice somewhere cry 'Jane! Jane! Jane!' nothing more.... I had heard it--where or whence, for ever impossible to know! And it was ... a known, loved, well-remembered voice--that of Edward Fairfax Rochester.... 'I am coming!' I cried.... 'Wait for me! Oh, I will come!' I broke from St. John, who would have detained me. It was my time to assume ascendency. My powers were in play, and in force. I told him to forbear question or remark.... I mounted to my chamber ... fell on my knees, and prayed in my way--a different way to St. John's, but effective in its own fashion.... I rose from the thanksgiving--took a resolve--and lay down ... eager but for the daylight.
Mrs. Gaskell related that Charlotte Bront� in private conversation in reference to this preternatural crying of a voice, replied with much gravity and without further enlightenment that such an incident really did occur in her experience. Whether it occurred in connection with her Brussels F�n�lon and immediately preceded a reconciliation between herself and M. H�ger I know not. As, however, Charlotte Bront�'s expression of gratitude to this priest and the whole fervent story of thankfulness for the deliverance from dangerous temptation were written subsequently to her return from Brussels, it is clear there was never a reconciliation which cost either her or M. H�ger honour. I do not urge this as an advocate; I state it upon the strength of unmistakable evidence.
Miss Bront� believed it better to leave Brussels and avoid the possibilities of the peculiar situation--a situation always fraught with temptation. Hence her sudden resolve to return to England.
Arrived at Haworth the full recoil came. She had won through a great ordeal, and she knew that surrounded by his wife and family,[77] comforted by piety and the knowledge of his happy issue from involution in disastrous complications, M. H�ger would resume tranquilly his accustomed course of life. To Charlotte Bront�, who by the showing of all evidence was initially responsible for a morally gratifying outcome of their dangerous attachment, this was a galling picture. Knowing nothing of the ecstatic delights of the pietist in the sacrificial sense of M. H�ger, who was a devoted member of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and, as he is made to describe himself in Villette, "a sort of lay Jesuit," she became just a woman living in the world of her primal nature and conceiving but that she had lost. Miss Rigby--afterwards Lady Eastlake--who wrote the remarkable article on Jane Eyre in The Quarterly Review of 1849, perceived with a flash of real insight and the instinct of womanhood that Currer Bell's pen had presented ungarbed, vital relations of some man and woman identical in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. The circumstances were full difficult for the reviewer; she was irritated and encompassed. Wuthering Heights, which so soon had followed the appearance of Jane Eyre, she suddenly recognized as the very storm-centre of this literary tornado of passionate declamation; and she chastised that work in the name of Jane Eyre, for she could not know all the cruel truth, and she feared to popularize Wuthering Heights. Although Miss Rigby wrote:--"It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength," she added, "but it is the strength of a mere heathenish mind which is a law unto itself." And later, turning upon Wuthering Heights she says with a final vehemency, and most sensationally:--
There can be no interest attached to the writer of Wuthering Heights--a novel succeeding Jane Eyre ... and purporting [!] to be written by Ellis Bell--unless it were for the sake of a more individual reprobation. For though there is a decided family likeness between the two [!], yet the aspect of the Jane and Rochester animals in their native state as Catherine and Heathcliffe [!], is abominably pagan.
Miss Rigby thus excused herself a further consideration of Wuthering Heights. In the days of the gratification of discovering the one she loved in return loved her,[78] this recognition stood between Charlotte Bront� and "every thought of religion, as an eclipse between man and the broad sun," so in another sense truly did the contemplation of M. H�ger's self-pacification intervene in the time of reaction. The doubtings and agonizing emotions of her equivocal season in Brussels were now precipitated. Her poems "Gilbert," "Frances," and "Preference" are testimony to her vengeful and retaliative instinct; as are her portrayals of M. H�ger as M. Pelet of The Professor and as Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights. But as I show in the next chapter, Charlotte Bront� afterwards regretted her human weakness and her vituperations of the day of the recoil. She began to set forth the story of her ordeal more sanely and proportionately in Jane Eyre. As one who soberly rewrites of fact, she recited therein much that she already had given detachedly; and consistently she presented by aid of the frame-work of "plot" from Montagu's Gleanings in Craven which already had given her elemental suggestions for her Wuthering Heights, the history of her life in Jane Eyre--a work that stands as testimony to Charlotte Bront�'s love of truth as to her heroic battling in the days of fiercest temptation.
A constant yearning to fine a presentation from untruthfulness is the God-given attribute of the artist, and this was responsible for much that is called harsh in Charlotte Bront�'s character as a writer: she would not even spare her own physical and nervous imperfections in her self-portrayals. Emily Bront� would have presented Branwell Bront� as viewed through couleur de rose, yet Charlotte Bront� immortalized him as Hindley Earnshaw and John Reed--as she saw him: weak, tyrannical, a moral wreck. So she presented M. H�ger. She knew his faults--and they were many; but she loved him though she hated them. Her sense of truth and justice, albeit she had lost the rancour of the time of the reaction, determined her in Jane Eyre, it is obvious, to show the occultation of her life's happiness by the incidents of her Brussels life. She would show there had been a day when the barriers between them would have been rashly ignored by him. Thus Rochester is made to sing in Jane Eyre, Chap. XXIV.:--
"I dreamed it would be nameless bliss, As I loved, loved to be; And to this object did I press As blind as eagerly.
But wide as pathless[79] was the space That lay, our lives, between, And dangerous as the foamy race Of ocean-surges green.
And haunted as a robber-path Through wilderness or wood; For Might and Right, and Woe and Wrath, Between our spirits stood.[80]
I dangers dared; I hindrance scorned; I omens did defy: Whatever menaced, harassed, warned,[81] I passed impetuous by.
On sped my rainbow, fast as light; I flew as in a dream; For glorious rose upon my sight That child of Shower and Gleam.
Still bright on clouds of suffering dim Shines that soft, solemn joy; Nor care I now, how dense and grim Disasters gather nigh;
I care not in this moment sweet, Though all I have rushed o'er Should come on pinion, strong and fleet, Proclaiming vengeance sore."
It is clear the impediment of M. H�ger's marriage is suggested in these verses. But undeniable evidence as to Charlotte Bront�'s having escaped by flight what she considered a most dangerous temptation, is the fact that we find she was influenced to pen these lines, wherein M. H�ger (Rochester) is likened to a wild pursuer of a "shower and gleam" nymph who sped before him "fast as light" and "glorious rose upon his sight," by Montagu's reference, in Gleanings in Craven, to the story of a Craven nymph a satyr pursued yet lost by her being changed into a spring. Says Frederic Montagu:--
"In the Polyolbion, published in 1612, is the following passage:--
In all my spacious tract let them (so wise) survey Thy Ribble's rising banks, their worst and let them say; At Giggleswick, where I a fountain can you show, That eight times in a day is said to ebb and flow! Who sometime was a Nymph, and in the mountains high Of Craven, whose blue heads, for caps put on the sky, Among the Oreads there, and Sylvans, made abode (It was ere human foot upon these hills had trod), Of all the mountain kind, and since she was most fair; It was a Satyr's chance to see her silver hair Flow loosely at her back, as up a cliff she clame, Her beauties noting well, her features and her frame, And after her he goes; which when she did espy, Before him like the wind, the nimble Nymph did fly: They hurry down the rocks, o'er hill and dale they drive, To take her he doth strain, t' outstrip him she doth strive, Like one his kind that knew, and greatly feared.... And to the Topic Gods by praying to escape, They turned her to a Spring, which as she then did pant, When, wearied with her course, her breath grew wond'rous scant, Even as the fearful Nymph, then thick and short did blow, Now made by them a Spring, so doth she ebb and flow."
This is not all. We know now the truth regarding Charlotte Bront�'s Brussels life, and seeing she discovered a pertinence in the state of the Craven Nymph to her own--for it is undeniable Rochester's song was modelled upon the lines Montagu quotes--it is likely that what I term the "river" suggestion and the Craven Elf suggestion which resulted in Charlotte Bront�'s portraying herself in the r�le of the stream-named Craven elf, Janet Aire or Eyre, had to do with Montagu's mention of this nymph of Craven who escaped a dangerous persecution by becoming a spring. It seems, indeed, that if she did not at first utilize the parallel of this narrative in verse with her own experience, she yet in Wuthering Heights was influenced by it, in the days which I call the period of the recoil, to represent her hero Heathcliffe as a ruin-creating, semi-human being. Whether the lines--
"It was a Satyr's chance to see her silver hair Flow loosely at her back as up a cliff she clame,"
had in the connection to do with the "cliffe" in "that ghoul Heathcliffe's" name a reference to Charlotte Bront�'s Preface to Wuthering Heights, and her words on the creation of Heathcliffe, in my next chapter, may declare.
It is now impossible not to understand the origin of the Satyr and Nymph passage and its implication in the chapter of Jane Eyre containing Rochester's song, when he says to Jane in the very same chapter:--
"You shall sojourn at Paris, Rome, and Naples: at Florence, Venice, and Vienna: all the ground I've wandered over shall be retrodden by you: wherever I stamped my hoof, your sylph's foot shall step also."
CHAPTER XV.
A ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my mind when I accused; ... the same ridge, black and blasted after the flames are dead, would have represented as meetly my subsequent condition when ... reflection had shown me the madness of my conduct, and the dreariness of my hated and hating position. Something of vengeance I had tasted.... As aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy; its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.... I would fain exercise some better faculty than that of fierce speaking--fain find nourishment for some less fiendish feeling than that of sombre indignation.
These words, written by Charlotte Bront� in Jane Eyre, Chapter IV., in relation to herself and "Mrs. Reed," give us an insight into her extraordinary alternations of mood. To inquire deeply into her determining initially to disavow the authorship of Wuthering Heights requires a somewhat ruthless baring of the "fiendish" vindictiveness against M. H�ger between the dates of 1844-46, that was a characteristic of the portrayals of him I have mentioned; but it also reveals her active turn to a spirit of repentance for past vindictive feeling, the which she acknowledges to have known.
It seems that it was in a spirit of reproach Charlotte Bront� wrote the vengeful scene between Heathcliffe and Catherine in Wuthering Heights, harsh in threat almost as her poem "Gilbert," wherein the man, satisfied with the affections of his wife and children, has banished the remembrance of her of whom he boasted--"She loved me more than life," and who is made to say, before her spirit in the form of a white-clad spectre comes to him:--
"As I am busied now, I could not turn from such pursuit To weep a broken vow."
Thus in Wuthering Heights, Chapter XV., when Catherine is embraced by Heathcliffe, she says bitterly:--
"I wish I could hold you till we were both dead! I shouldn't care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn't you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say ... 'That's the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I've loved many others since: my children are dearer to me than she was; and at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going to her; I shall be sorry that I must lose them!' Will you say so, Heathcliffe?" Well might Catherine deem that heaven would be a land of exile to her, unless with her mortal body she cast away her mortal character also. [See my footnote in the foregoing chapter, on Catherine's dream that the angels flung her out of heaven.] Her present countenance had a wild vindictiveness....
"Are you possessed with a devil," he pursued savagely, "to talk in that manner to me when you are dying?"
And later, as though in answer to the apparent threat of the poem "Gilbert," wherein, as I have said, the spectre of the woman who has died broken-hearted through the neglect of her married lover haunts him and drives him mad, Heathcliffe, in the words of that poem, "Wild as one whom demons seize," cries:--
"Catherine Earnshaw ... you said I killed you--haunt me then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad!"
Charlotte Bront�'s poems, "Frances,"[82] "Gilbert," and "Preference" (wherein we have literature in allegory preferred to a lover), show there had been to her a season of darkest misery when, to quote Villette concerning herself as Lucy Snowe, "all her life's hope was torn by the roots out of her riven outraged heart." Whether this was the time when, in the words of herself as Jane Eyre, "faith was blighted, confidence destroyed": a time to her when Mr. Rochester (M. H�ger) was not to her "what she had thought him," the reader shall decide. But in Villette and Jane Eyre she "would not ascribe vice to him; ... would not say he had betrayed" her. She forgave him all: yet not in words, not outwardly; only at [her] heart's core. See the phase of M. Pelet in the The Professor.
Evidence shows it was in her dark season when Charlotte Bront� wrote Wuthering Heights, and that she portrayed M. H�ger therein with all the vindictiveness of a woman with "a riven outraged heart," the wounds in which yet rankled sorely. Thus may we understand her saying in her famous preface to Wuthering Heights:--
Heathcliffe betrays one solitary human feeling, and that is not his love for Catherine, which is a sentiment fierce and inhuman: a passion such as might boil and glow in the bad essence of some evil genius [see my reference to "Robin-a-Ree"; and to the Craven Satyr, page 142]; a fire that might form the tormented centre--the ever-suffering soul of a magnate of the infernal world: and by its quenchless and ceaseless ravage effect the execution of the decree which dooms him to carry Hell with him ... we should say he was a man's shape animated by demon life.... Whether it is right or advisable to create a being like Heathcliffe I do not know; I scarcely think it is.
Even in Villette there were recurrences of the spasmodic spirit of vindictiveness responsible for Charlotte Bront�'s harsh portrayal of M. H�ger as Heathcliffe, though "at her heart's core she then forgave him." In Villette, Chapter XX., she refers to M. Paul (M. H�ger) antithetically, and all the more significantly, in a comparison of him with Dr. John Bretton, of whom she says:--
Who could help liking him? He betrayed no weakness which harassed all your feelings with considerations as to how its faltering must be propped; from him broke no irritability which startled calm and quenched mirth; his lips let fall no caustic that burned to the bone; his eye shot no morose shafts that went cold, and rusty, and venomed through your heart.
Wuthering Heights, however, containing too humiliating a story of Charlotte Bront�'s heart-thrall, her misery and her wild vindictiveness, and also for the reasons stated in the beginning of this chapter--her saving remorse--she seems early to have determined to repudiate her authorship of it; indeed, so largely is she now found to have used the work in Jane Eyre, we might say she once had contemplated destroying the manuscript. The subsequent arrangement made in the name of Ellis Bell that the work by the same author should go to Mr. Newby, the publisher of Wuthering Heights, gave finality to this tragedy of authorship which, but for the discoveries in this, The Key to the Bront� Works, would have remained for ever unrevealed, and a reproach to literature--a thing of untruth thickly hidden.
Had Charlotte Bront� destroyed Wuthering Heights before its publication she would have saved this sensational disclosure. But she hesitated to destroy the manuscript at once, and as an alternative to identifying herself with its authorship, she sent forth her work under a nom de guerre, part of which had been employed by her sister Emily. We well know the difficulties that resulted; the judgment of scholars and thinkers was impugned and their sane pronouncements were pilloried. To cover Charlotte Bront�'s regretful error were to connive against law and literature. Wuthering Heights being published, the work was the world's property; it stood for public purposes, to submit to all criticism and research, and it came neither in Charlotte Bront�'s province nor in that of any person to prevent its being subjected to the final inquiry with which the cold light of truth exposes all things.
Doubtless Charlotte Bront� perceived this, and regretting the facileness of her pen and the vituperativeness of her mood of that past and hateful night, she set herself, in her subsequent works, to make clear she had overdrawn the bitterness of the relations which one time had existed between herself and M. H�ger. Perhaps she could not expect her retractions would be understood of all men, but it pleased her inmost soul, and having a final sense of justice, and a softening of her heart for her vehement passionateness, she continued in all her works subsequent to her Wuthering Heights to reconstruct this her early version. Thus Charlotte Bront� as Caroline Helstone of Shirley is Catherine Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights, with the distinction I mention. Moore is admitted, as I have said, to have been drawn from M. H�ger[83]:--
Wuthering Heights. Shirley.
Chapter XII. Chapter XXIV.
Catherine's illness, and her Caroline's illness, and her doubting the absent lover, doubting the absent lover, Heath(cliffe). Mrs. Dean in Moor(e). Mrs Pryor in attendance. attendance.
"And I dying!" exclaimed "Am I ill?" asked Caroline of Catherine to Mrs. Dean. "I on Mrs. Pryor, and looked at the brink of the grave! My God! herself in the glass; ... she does he know how I'm altered?" felt ... her brain in strange continued she, staring at her activity.... Now followed a hot, reflection in a mirror.... How parched, restless night ... one dreary to meet death surrounded terrible dream seized her like a by their cold faces.... Edgar [? tiger ... a fever of mental Mr. Bront�] standing solemnly by excitement, and a languor of to see it over; then offering long conflict and habitual prayers of thanks to God for sadness had fanned the flame ... restoring peace to his house, and left a well-lit fire behind and going back to his books. it.... Tossing about, she increased her feverish bewilderment of "Oh!" exclaimed Caroline, "God madness, ... then, raising grant me a little comfort before herself, desired that ... [Mrs. I die!... But he [Moor(e)] will Dean] would open the window. come when I am senseless, cold, and stiff. What can my departed And farther on, in delirium, as soul feel then? Can it see or though her lover were present:-- know what happens to the clay? Can spirits through any medium "Heath(cliffe) ... they may bury communicate with living flesh? me twelve feet deep, and throw Can the dead at all re-visit the church down over me, and I those they leave? Can they come won't rest till you are with in the elements? Will wind, me!" ["Heath(cliffe), I only water, fire, lend me a path to wish us never to be parted, and Moor(e)? Is it for nothing the should a word of mine distress wind ... passes the casement you hereafter, think I feel the sobbing?... Does nothing haunt same distress underground," says it?" Catherine, in a further chapter] "I never will." She paused and When Catherine dies Heathcliffe resumed ... [Heath(cliffe's)] says:--"Catherine ... you said I considering--"He'd rather I'd killed you--haunt me then!" And come to him! Find a way haunt him she does. In the words then![84] not through that of Caroline Helstone of kirkyard. You are slow! Be Shirley she "revisits him she content, you always followed has left." She "goes in the me!" elements," "the wind lends her a path[84] to her lover," and it Mrs. Dean perceived it vain "to is not "for nothing the wind argue against her insanity." passes the casement of Wuthering Heights sobbing"--she "haunts it" as the wailing phantom that cries as a child [Method II., altering the age of character portrayed], "Let me in--let me in!" outside "the lattice." And Heathcliffe, wrenching open "the lattice," sobs, "Come in!... Cathy, do come.... Catherine at last!" The spectre gives no sign of being; but the snow and wind whirled ... through ... blowing out the light.
Chapter XIII.
Mrs. Dean continues:-- Convalescent, Caroline whispers:-- In those two months [Catherine] encountered and conquered the "... I am better now.... I feel worst shock of what was where I am: this is Mrs. Pryor denominated as brain fever. The near me.... I was dreaming.... first time she left the chamber Does the churchyard look ... on her pillow [was] a peaceful?... Can you see many handful of golden crocuses; her long weeds and nettles among the eye, long stranger to any gleam graves, or do they look turfy or of pleasure, caught them in flowery?" waking. "I see closed daisy-heads, "These are the earliest flowers gleaming like pearls on some at the Heights!... Is there not mounds," replied Mrs. Pryor.[85] a south wind, and is not the snow gone?"
It is in Shirley that Charlotte Bront� gives, inadvertently or purposely, the origin of the title of Wuthering Heights, and we see therewith why she came afterwards to choose for her autobiographical-self in Villette, the name of Lucy Snowe. We perceive she had been singularly impressed by an old Scottish ballad, entitled, "Puir Mary Lee," and it is important and interesting to note that Dr. Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary refers readers to this very same poem in connection with the origin of the northern word "wuthering," in the form of the verb "whudder," or "wuther." And so, in a letter to Mr. W. S. Williams, of November 6th, 1852, Miss Bront� wrote of Lucy Snowe[86]:--
As to the name of the heroine, I can hardly express what subtlety of thought made me decide upon giving her a cold name; but at first I called her 'Lucy Snowe' (spelt with an 'e'), which 'Snowe' I afterwards changed to 'Frost.' Subsequently I rather regretted the change, and wished it 'Snowe' again. If not too late, I should like the alteration to be made now throughout the MS. A cold name she must have; partly, perhaps on the lucus a non lucendo principle--partly on that of the 'fitness of things,' for she has about her an external coldness.
Thus we understand Charlotte Bront� was anxious that her autobiographical-self in Villette should be called Snowe. While, in mentioning the matter to her publishers, she endeavoured to show a superficial and commonplace reason for her singular choice, the truth underlies her words wherein she says she "can hardly express what subtlety of thought" made her decide upon "a cold name."
The subtlety of thought that dictated the choice of the "cold name" Snowe had, we shall see, a connection with the old Scottish ballad, "Puir Mary Lee," which evidence shows was responsible at the dark season to which I have referred for Charlotte Bront�'s choice of the title of Wuthering Heights--for her identifying her own bitterness with that of "Puir Mary Lee."
It is in Shirley, Chapter VII., that Charlotte Bront� writes:--
Nature ... is an excellent friend, sealing the lips, interdicting utterance, commanding a placid dissimulation; a dissimulation often wearing an easy and gay mien at first, settling down to sorrow and paleness in time, then passing away, and leaving a convenient stoicism, not the less fortifying because half-bitter. [As Lucy Snowe, Charlotte Bront� writes in Villette in perfect sympathy with this: "If I feel, may I never express? I groaned under her (Reason's) bitter sternness ... she could not rest unless I were altogether crushed, cowed, broken-in, and broken-down. According to her, I was born only to work for a piece of bread, to await the pains of death, and steadily through all life to despond. Reason might be right."] Who has read the ballad of 'Puir Mary Lee'?--that old Scotch ballad, written I know not in what generation nor by what hand. Mary had been ill-used--probably in being made to believe that truth which is falsehood; she is not complaining, but she is sitting alone in the snow-storm, and you hear her thoughts ... those of a deeply feeling, strongly resentful peasant girl. Anguish has driven her from the ingle-nook of home, to the white-shrouded and icy hills: crouched under the 'cauld drift,' she recalls every image of horror, ... she hates these, but 'waur' she hates 'Robin-a-Ree!'
"Oh! ance I lived happily by yon bonny burn-- The warld was in love wi' me; But now I maun sit 'neath the cauld drift and mourn, And curse black Robin-a-Ree!
"Then whudder awa' thou bitter biting blast, And sough through the scrunty tree, And smoor me up in the snaw fu' fast And ne'er let the sun me see!
"Oh, never melt awa' thou wreath o' snaw, That's sae kind in graving me; But hide me frae the scorn and guffaw O' villains like Robin-a-Ree!"
Thus internal evidence proves that the name of Wuthering Heights for the abode of the "deeply feeling, strongly resentful peasant girl," Catherine Earnshaw, was primarily chosen by Charlotte Bront� because of its special appeal to her own mood at a given period, in relation to the ballad of "Puir Mary Lee," and proves that the choice of the name of Snowe for her "cold and altered" autobiographical self in Villette was dictated by its connection therewith.
In this light glance at Charlotte Bront�'s poem "Mementos," and at the following verses from her "Frances":--
"And when thy opening eyes shall see Mementos, on the chamber wall, Of one who has forgotten thee, Shed not the tear of acrid gall.
* * * * *
"Vain as the passing gale, my crying; Though lightning-struck,[87] I must live on; I know, at heart, there is no dying Of love and ruined hope alone.
"The very wildness of my sorrow Tells me I yet have innate force; My track of life has been too narrow, Effort shall trace a broader course."
There is an apparent relationship of this last verse with the remarks in Chapter XXV. of The Professor, on Hunsden's "Lucia," of whom he says:--"I should ... have liked to marry her, and that I have not done so is a proof that I could not." Lucia's (Miss Bront�'s) "faculty" was literature: the physiognomy was obviously an obfuscation. It is significant that Charlotte Bront� again took "Lucia," for the Christian name of Lucia or Lucy Snowe. See my references to Hunsden as a phase of M. H�ger.
Perceiving, therefore, that Charlotte Bront� had likened herself to the heroine of "Puir Mary Lee," in so far as to be influenced by it to give the title of Wuthering Heights to one of her works, and to take the name of Snowe later for her autobiographical self, we understand why she wrote in Jane Eyre, Chapter XXVI.:--
Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent, expectant woman, ... was a cold, solitary girl again: her life was pale; her prospects were desolate. A Christmas frost [see my reference to the name of Lucy Frost] had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud [see "the snow-storm, the white-shrouded and frosty hills," the "cauld drift," the "whuddering blast," etc., of "Puir Mary Lee" in Shirley], lanes which last night blushed full of flowers to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, ... now spread waste, wild, and white as pine forests in wintry Norway. My hopes were all dead--struck with a subtle doom.... I looked at my love: that feeling which was my master's--which he had created; it shivered in my heart like a suffering child in a cold cradle; sickness and anguish had seized it; it could not seek Mr. Rochester's arms--it could not derive warmth from his breast. Oh, never more could it turn to him; for faith was blighted--confidence destroyed! Mr. Rochester was not to me what he had been.... I would not say he had betrayed me: but the attribute of stainless truth was gone from his idea [see "Robin-a-Ree"], and from his presence I must go; that I perceived well.... That bitter hour cannot be described: in truth, 'the waters came into my soul; I sank in deep mire; I felt no standing; I came into deep waters; the floods overflowed me.'
The inclusion in Shirley of the ballad of "Puir Mary Lee" and the remarks anent it were apparently digressive, but they are followed by the "subtle" disclaimer:--
But what has been said in the last page or two is not germane to Caroline Helstone's feelings, or to the state of things between her and Robert Moore. Robert had done her no wrong; he had told her no lie; it was she that was to blame, if any one was; what bitterness her mind distilled should and would be poured on her own head.
Indeed, there is evidence of a reconciliation between M. H�ger and Charlotte Bront�, this being most marked in Jane Eyre and Shirley. In connection with the reasons responsible for Charlotte Bront�'s choice of the title of Wuthering Heights, it is interesting to note some "subtlety of thought" dictated Charlotte's telling us in Shirley, Chapter XXXIII., of Caroline and her lover that:--
The air was now dark with snow; an Iceland blast was driving it wildly. This pair neither heard the long "wuthering" rush, nor saw the white burden it drifted; each seemed conscious but of one thing--the presence of the other.
After the close of 1850, Charlotte Bront� resolved into the mood which was an earlier characteristic; and the choice of the name of Snowe for herself and the extraordinary tenacity with which she held to the name, having it re-inscribed in Villette by the printers though she had herself changed it, show she had returned somewhat to that state in regard to her affection for M. H�ger responsible for the passionateness of her Wuthering Heights. And as following the completion of Villette she decided to marry a man she did not really love, I would say her mood was honestly in sympathy with that in which she wrote Wuthering Heights through bitter, adverse circumstances and the warping of destiny, and did not result from Sydney Dobell's advice to her when, having read Shirley and Jane Eyre, and despite her disclaimer in a preface, thinking she was the author of Wuthering Heights, he advised her to resume the frame of mind in which she had penned her Wuthering Heights.[88]
Dobell's supposition that she wrote the book had no connection whatsoever with my discovering Charlotte Bront� was the author of Wuthering Heights; neither had the fact that Miss Rigby--Lady Eastlake--in The Quarterly Review, spoke of Wuthering Heights as "purporting to be written by Ellis Bell" but having "a decided family likeness to Jane Eyre," and with still more point, identified "Catherine and Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights as Jane and Rochester of Jane Eyre in their native state." For I early found I must credit only the internal evidence of the Bront� works as my interpretative guide. Having written "The Key to Jane Eyre" nothing could prevent my discovery of that novel's kinship with Wuthering Heights; and so far back as August 29, 1902, I penned in a private letter enclosed with the proof sheets of my article to Mr. Harold Hodge, the editor of The Saturday Review, a confession that I was finding a strong kinship between the two novels. I owe to my persistent consciousness of this close kinship the fact that I finally discovered the amazing secrets of Wuthering Heights, and was enabled to state publicly in my Fortnightly Review article of March 1907, Charlotte Bront� and none other wrote Wuthering Heights. It was then I turned with interest to the remarks of Sydney Dobell, the author of Balder, and "a notable figure in the history of English thought" as he has been named, whose review of Charlotte Bront�'s works had resulted in her being acclaimed a leading author and a genius. It was in The Palladium of September 1850 Sydney Dobell said:--
That any hand but that which shaped Jane Eyre and Shirley cut out the rougher earlier statues [in Wuthering Heights] we should require more than the evidence of our senses to believe; ... the author of Jane Eyre need fear nothing in acknowledging these ... immature creations.[89]... When Currer Bell writes her next novel, let her remember ... the frame of mind in which she sat down to write her first [Wuthering Heights]. She will never sin so much against consistent drawing as to draw another Heathcliffe.... In Jane Eyre we find ... only further evidence of the same producing qualities to which Wuthering Heights bears testimony.
Charlotte Bront� warmly thanked him and protested. With eager honesty he again and again begged her to visit him and discuss the authorship of Wuthering Heights. Could Sidney Dobell but have been told the secret tragedy of Currer Bell's life and the bitterness of her cup, how he would have shrunk from inflicting her with an intrusive personal inquiry. And in all innocence he had asked her to revive the frame of mind in which, to use the words in Jane Eyre, her heart had been "weeping blood"!
Wuthering Heights was wrought near the furnace of Charlotte Bront�'s fiery ordeal, and gives at its intensest that which glows through her other works, finally to flash up and smoulder out in Villette. By reason of its clear portrayal of woman when she is very woman Wuthering Heights towers above all common literary artistry, one of the finest novels in the world, an abiding monument to the vital genius of Charlotte Bront�. After her return from Brussels her life was a long human conflict, with vain regrets, vindictive recriminations, and luring memories opposing heroic commandings in the name of right and virtue. All honour to her that she fought to win!
Had Charlotte Bront� and M. H�ger been characterless individuals of the common type who, knowing nothing of self-sacrifice and nobleness of life, yield to the call of immediate and unlicensed impulse, we could never have had these most vital representations, these most poignant revelations of the Martyrdom of Virtue--the works of our immortal Currer Bell. Her vehicle of confession--her dialect, was what men have termed fiction. But her heart was satisfied that truth has its ultimate appeal; and in the way of those sententious writers of old who garbed in an attractive vesture veritable and momentous records which would be preserved because they entertained, she gave the history of her life in a series of dramas we call the Bront� novels. For sixty years these have been read only as the creations of a brain that spun interesting fiction! Now, by aid of The Key to the Bront� Works, it is revealed they are more than this, and we discover the real greatness of Currer Bell and the high rank of her genius. Like that which creates the noblest and most enduring of the world's literature, the genius of Charlotte Bront� truthfully preserves the past, while it will intimately appeal to and have a salient lesson and an inspiring message for any one so ever who shall read, be it here and now, or in the time to come.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE BRONT� POEMS.
Charlotte Bront� loved her sisters Emily and Anne, but in her introduction to the poetical selections from their literary remains she says little concerning their verse, preferring to give of each sister a kind of short biographical memoir. In dealing with Emily she dwelt poetically upon the features of the Yorkshire moors, and thus extended to Emily's verses that atmosphere and charm which she (Charlotte) had fixed in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre; and in writing upon Anne she complained her verse gave evidence of a too melancholy religious feeling. The eldest surviving child in the Bront� family, after the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth, it was Charlotte Bront� who would first set the ideal of literary composition before the Bront� children. To her initial impulse, therefore, owe we the literary compositions that came from the pens of Emily, Anne, and Branwell. Evidence of this truth is the fact that Emily, Anne, and Branwell, in their writing, never got "right away," as the hunting phrase has it.
There are many definitions of genius: may I define it as a message? Charlotte Bront� had a message. Emily had none. Wuthering Heights and all the other works of Charlotte Bront�, prose and verse, had a vital message. Ellis Bell had no message. In a sort of idle, ruminative contemplation Emily Bront� constructed verse unburdened with purpose--verse that became involved at the moment it should have soared.
I believe we have the secret of what I may call Emily's "involved moments" in Charlotte Bront�'s description of her as Shirley Keeldar in Shirley, Chapter XXII., wherein we are told Emily saw visions, as it were, "faster than Thought can effect his combinations." We feel something of the clouded chaos of her moment of writing in her more impassioned or laboured verses; their illogic and incoherence fix it distressfully. Charlotte, to resume her reference to Emily in Shirley above quoted, further tells us that "so long as she is calm, indolence, indulgence, humour, and tenderness possess" her eye; "incense her, ... it instantly quickens to flame." And with her verse, so long as it was unburdened, indolent, it ran smoothly and pleasantly along with the simplicity of the insouciant; but confronted with magnitude the imagination flamed, reason and logic were involved, and there was an end of art. In her excited combativeness she hit out rashly. Thus in her last verses, considered her masterpiece, she says the "thousand creeds" which move men's hearts were "vain" to "waken doubt" in her creed, blind to the fact that truth and worship finally converge to one point, howsoever diverse their starting-places. The very unbeliever is a witness to man's innate seeking for truth and right: he is a non-believer in this or that because he conceives truth to be remote from it. He seeks truth albeit he is a wide wanderer.
In "The Old Stoic" we have a "stoic" in Emily's r�le of bold challenger of chimera. "Courage to endure" and "a chainless soul" are what this old stoic would ask for! The poet was ignorant of or indifferent to the fact that a true stoic, according to the rule of Epictetus, seeks to be not other than he is, and is content wheresoever he be, whatsoever his lot. The words of this poem are those of a bold neophyte, and they are interesting chiefly because we see advanced in them the hypothesis of punishment common to Emily's chimera-creating imagination. To repeat: so long as her mood was calm her verse ran pleasantly and smoothly along. But the saying tells us, "The good seaman is known in bad weather"; and so with the poet. Life is not a placid lake: the lethal lightnings play, and faith and happiness are threatened continually and on the whole horizon.
Charlotte Bront�, with memory of her own life-storm which has left us her Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and her other great prose works, wrote her introduction to Emily's poems in the spirit of one who looked upon her pieces as the reflections of an uneventful life in the inner sense of vital soul-conflict.
Anne Bront�'s gentle poems, like Emily's, will appeal particularly to such readers as have sympathetic temperaments; they will not call to the human heart like the clarion notes of Charlotte Bront�'s poem "Passion," but mayhap their low whisperings may waken sadly pleasant memories. With Currer Bell's poems I deal in various chapters, wherein we perceive their relationship to Wuthering Heights and her other books which resulted from the harsh rigours of her tempest-bestormed night.
And shall we not say a word for Branwell Bront�? He too wrote verse.[90] He was not a genius in the sense of my definition, but his verse is such as might appear in a member of a family a generation or a degree of kin removed from the genius of the house. Him we must remember compassionately as one physically weak, an unhappy victim of circumstances against which he had not the moral force to fight. Nor shall we forget that the Rev. Patrick Bront�, the father, wrote and published verse. His productions were printed in pamphlet form, and have been collected and republished.[91] As literature they are unimportant, but to the curious they may have a sort of interest.
MINOR IDENTIFICATIONS OF PERSONS AND PLACES IN THE BRONT� WORKS.
"WUTHERING HEIGHTS."
There is not satisfactory evidence to enable the identification of the originals of Wuthering Heights the abode, and Thrushcross Grange. Similar homesteads are found anywhere near the Yorkshire moors. Architectural peculiarities and appointments are ever accretive properties with the novelist of imagination and latitude. This observation should be kept in mind also in regard to Charlotte Bront�'s other works. See my remarks on page 57.
"JANE EYRE."
The interior of Thornfield Hall, as I mention on page 35, has been identified with that of "Norton Conyers," near Ripon; externally it has been associated with "The Rydings," near Birstall. Ferndean Manor has been identified with Wycollar Hall, near Colne. A Bront� biographer says this place was set on fire by a mad woman,[92] but the story finds no mention in The Annals of Colne, 1878, or in Lancashire Legends, 1873, though "Wyecoller Hall" is dealt with at length in each work.
"SHIRLEY."
Gomersall and Birstall, near Batley, Yorkshire, contribute to the background of this story. "Field Head" has been identified with Oakwell Hall, an Elizabethan mansion. Evidence shows that intimately the Rectory in Shirley was in the main Haworth Parsonage to Charlotte Bront�. In The Dictionary of National Biography Leslie Stephen says:--"Bront�, ... a strong Churchman and a man of imperious and passionate character, ... is partly represented by Mr. Helstone in Shirley, though a [Rev.] Mr. Roberson ... supplied ... characteristic traits." And Mr. Francis Leyland, who drew much of his information from Nancy Garrs, a Bront� servant, says that the fourth chapter of Shirley, wherein Charlotte speaks of the grossly untrue reports of Mr. Helstone's dry-eyed mourning, etc., for his wife, is a defence really of Mr. Bront�. Helstone was a composite character, as also was Mrs. Pryor, to whom, without doubt, Miss Wooler contributed, though Charlotte Bront� once had a grave difference with her. Miss Nussey, who pathetically and wrongly believed herself Caroline Helstone, proclaimed Miss Wooler, her schoolmistress, as the prototype of Mrs. Pryor. Evidence declares, however, that in many regards this character was also drawn from Tabitha Aykroyd. And we see that Charlotte Bront�, years before, in her Wuthering Heights, had given an ecclesiastical name--that of Dean--to her portrayal of the one woman who alone ever took up the part of mother for her--Tabitha Aykroyd. Nevertheless Mrs. Pryor was in the main a composite character, largely at the service of "story" requirements. Sometimes she is Tabitha, sometimes Miss Wooler; elsewhile she is neither. Mr. Macarthey is said to represent the Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls, who became Charlotte Bront�'s husband.
The references in Shirley, Chapters XII. and XXVII., to Robin Hood's connection with Nunnwood and to the ruins of a nunnery, identify Nunnely in the circumstances, with Hartshead, near Brighouse and Dewsbury; Nunnely Church with Hartshead Church (Mr. Bront� was once vicar here), and the Priory with Kirklees Hall or Priory--Kirklees Park, as we may see by turning to Dr. Whitaker's Loidis and Elmete, pages 306-9 (1816), wherein we find mention of Robin Hood and an old Cistercian nunnery in connection with Kirklees, appropriately now the residence of Sir George J. Armytage, Bart., one of the founders of the Harleian Society. Whinbury has been identified with Dewsbury; but I do not know that it has been remarked the name Dewsbury may have suggested to Charlotte Bront� the dewberry, bramble, or blackberry, thus leading her to adopt "whinberry" and, finally, Whinbury. The attack on Hollow's Mill is said to have been founded on an attempt in 1812, when an assault was made on the factory of Mr. Cartwright near Dewsbury.
"THE PROFESSOR" AND "VILLETTE."
The Professor, Charlotte Bront� offered to Messrs. Aylott & Jones in April 1846, was not published till after her death. It is related to Villette in something of the way, though not so verbally and intimately, that Wuthering Heights is to Jane Eyre. The early chapters deal vaguely with a West Riding of Yorkshire town, but the scene quickly changes to Brussels. The H�ger pension is recognized as the original of the schools in both novels, but in Villette the place Villette occasionally becomes London as Charlotte Bront� knew it on her visits. Mr. George Smith, the Bront� publisher, and his mother, are portrayed as the Brettons. Mr. Smith showed Charlotte Bront� the sights of London: the theatres, picture galleries, churches, etc.; and we have reflected in Villette incidents associated with her seeing these places.[93] The reader will find a phase of Currer Bell in Paulina--Miss de Bassompierre, and a sympathetic phase of Mr. Bront� in her father, for after the deaths of Emily, Anne, and Branwell, Charlotte and her father were brought closer to each other. And like Mr. "Home" de Bassompierre, he had "no more daughters and no son."[94] Towards the close of Villette we may find a phase of the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, Charlotte Bront�'s husband, in Dr. John Bretton, my previous remarks upon whom observe. It was shortly after the completion of Villette Mr. Nicholls proposed successfully, but it would seem by the concluding chapters Miss Bront� expected this. The picture of the disappointment of the old father that his popular daughter would marry a plain character in life suggests to us the disappointment of the Rev. Patrick Bront� in regard to his daughter's marrying a curate. See Chapter XXXVII. Paulina, of course, is the feminine of Paul; and the original of M. Paul of this work we now well know. See footnote on page 120.
The chronological sequences in Charlotte Bront�'s novels are seldom carefully ordered: this should be remembered in reference to her record of events in her own life.
"AGNES GREY" AND "THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL."
Agnes Grey contains simple and natural portrayals of governess life in the eighteen-forties; and the following Wildfell Hall, we may conjecture, is built from evolved incidents founded on hearsay and experience. Whether Miss Bront� had assisted Anne or not, it is certain Wildfell Hall has something in common with Currer Bell's novels. The books connected with the name of Acton Bell, however, are not important as literature in the higher sense of the word; and though a member of Messrs. Smith & Elder remarked to Miss Bront� upon a similarity in the leading male characters of Wildfell Hall to Rochester, interest in it is merely dependent upon its association with the greater Bront� works, and the book does not call for sedulous inquiry.
THE H�GER PORTRAIT OF CHARLOTTE BRONT� IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY.
The Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, London, purchased in July 1906, a hitherto unheard of portrait of Charlotte Bront�, painted in water-colours in 1850, and stated to be by M. H�ger. A reproduction of the portrait was given in The Cornhill Magazine for October 1906, Mr. Reginald J. Smith, K.C., of Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co., the Bront� publishers, having to do with its discovery.
In the early autumn of 1906, Mr. Lionel Cust, M.V.O., Surveyor of the King's Pictures and Works of Art, then Director of the National Portrait Gallery, was busily corresponding with me in regard to this portrait of Charlotte Bront�, the authenticity of which became sensationally attacked. At once I pointed out the importance and significance of the portrait's being signed "Paul H�ger," instead of "Constantin H�ger"; and other matters. In March 1907, I appended a footnote[95] to my article, "The Lifting of the Bront� Veil," in The Fortnightly Review, and on May 16th, 1907, the literary editor of The Tribune, Mr. E. G. Hawke, having placed space at my disposal, I wrote as follows:--
CHARLOTTE BRONT�. THE H�GER PORTRAIT.
To the Editor of The Tribune.
SIR,--As the water-colour drawing by M. H�ger is now a valuable property of the nation, and gives a more intimately faithful and characteristic likeness of Charlotte Bront� than the Richmond portrait of "Currer Bell," now also hung in the National Portrait Gallery, kindly permit me publicly to present some of the many interesting facts connected with it. The portrait is signed "Paul H�ger, 1850" (the accent is correct), and it represents Miss Bront� with curls, and reading Shirley, on one leaf of which is a heart transfixed with an arrow. The dress that she wears is light green, and on the back of the drawing is inscribed:
The Wearin' of the Green; First since Emily's death; that being the first occasion on which Miss Bront� wore colours after the death of her sister.
And below:
This drawing is by P. Heg�r (accent thus), done from life in 1850. The pose was suggested first by a sketch done by her brother Branwell many years previous.
The Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery acquired the portrait from a lady whose family obtained it nigh on forty years ago from Mr. Thomas Baylis, a personal friend of Lord Lytton. Mr. Baylis stated that he himself had acquired the portrait from the H�ger family at Brussels. The children of the Mme. H�ger who refused to see Mrs. Gaskell because of her dislike to Miss Bront�, aver that M. H�ger never drew or painted. The statement, however, is directly opposed by indisputable evidence:
(1.) The portrait is authentic, and was drawn from life in 1850, and the inscriptions that it bears it is proved could have been inspired by none other than Charlotte Bront� herself or M. H�ger.
(2.) The statement of Mr. Thomas Baylis, a well-connected gentleman.
(3.) Eug�ne Sue, in his 1851 volume of Miss Mary ou l'Institutrice, gives, with a clouding of mystery, a lover--G�rard de Morville--drawing a portrait of Miss Mary "d'apr�s nature;" and M. Sue's feuilleton, as I showed in The Fortnightly Review for March, identifies Miss Mary and the de Morvilles as phases of Charlotte Bront� and the H�gers.[96]
(4.) Miss Bront�, in Shirley, herself presents M. H�ger--Louis G�rard Moore--as an artist, and refers to past drawing episodes.[97]
The authenticity of the inscriptions is not involved in the question as to whether Charlotte Bront� would use careless spelling, for, if she had written them, couching them in the third person, it is clear that she had not desired to be known as the writer. Upon the other hand, it is discovered to be utterly impossible for any one but Charlotte Bront� or M. H�ger to have inspired the inscriptions, whosoever wrote them.
SIGNIFICANT PIECES OF EVIDENCE.
I find that M. H�ger was Paul to none but Charlotte Bront� in 1850, and that before the publication, two years ago, of Charlotte Bront� and Her Sisters, by Mr. Clement Shorter, who, for reasons which he should explain, calls M. Constantin Gilles Romain H�ger "M. Paul H�ger," [Throughout that writer's correspondence in The Times, etc., and in Charlotte Bront� and Her Sisters: beneath the portrait of M. H�ger, facing page 198, and bearing the inscription:--M. Paul H�ger: The Hero of Villette and The Professor; and on page 161 of that work] no reference in print had been made to M. H�ger but as Constantin. The H�gers state that M. H�ger was not called Paul, and that Dr. Paul H�ger, his son, was the first member of the family named Paul.
A native of Haworth[98] who lived from 1830 till after the death of Charlotte Bront� in 1855, "within twenty yards of the Haworth Parsonage," her home, has pronounced the H�ger portrait of Miss Bront� to be a correct likeness and "just like her." He says that it reminds him of her as he knew her and as she was in her younger days, and he pointed out to me particularly that he had seen her with her hair as in the H�ger likeness, "scores of times before she went away"--this giving the clue to the reference in the inscription to a pose in a portrait by Branwell "many years previous" to 1850; and I have seen a reproduction of a sketch by Branwell wherein the Bront� sisters have curls. Moreover, I find that Miss Bront� really liked curls and disliked the other styles, though she conformed to the fashion.
I also find that the paper on which the H�ger portrait of Miss Bront� was drawn was that used in 1850 by the house where she was a guest in London in the early June of 1850, at the very time to within a day when, as there is indisputable evidence--despite assertions that she "never under any circumstances during the later period of her life wore a green dress"--Charlotte Bront� was wearing a light green dress. That was "the first occasion on which Miss Bront� wore colours," as the inscription tells us, and fact substantiates, after she had concluded the remarkably long mourning period for her sisters, which began with "the death of Emily" and did not end till twelve months after the death of Anne, who died on May 28th, 1849.
(Signed) J. MALHAM-DEMBLEBY. Scarr Hill, Eccleshill, Bradford, May 16th, 1907.
The publication of this letter ended the controversy.[99] Since it was published Mrs. Gaskell's daughters, who well knew Miss Bront�, have declared themselves fully satisfied as to the authenticity of the H�ger portrait of Charlotte Bront� and the faithfulness of the likeness. The testimony of Lady Ritchie, Thackeray's daughter, also supports this portrait. See my further references to my correspondence with her ladyship herewith. As regards the green dress, apart from the indisputable external evidence I referred to in the printed letter, I believe Charlotte Bront� speaks of it in Villette, though therein it is for obfuscation's sake (necessary indeed, since Villette was published only a short time after her London visit) made "pink" and "flounceless." In Chapter XXVIII. we find M. Paul saying--and it is interesting thus to have connected with the green dress a character whose prototype was M. H�ger--that:
"Pink or scarlet, yellow or crimson, pea-green or sky-blue, [the dress] was all one."[100]
As I stated to Lady Ritchie in 1907, I believe that in Chapter XX. of Villette we undoubtedly have a real glimpse of incidents connected with the wearing of the green dress; and it should be remembered that Mrs. Bretton and Dr. John Graham Bretton in this chapter represent Mrs. Smith, and her son Mr. George Smith, the publisher, whose guest Charlotte Bront� was in 1850, when she first wore the green dress:--
One morning, Mrs. Bretton ... desired me to ... show her my dresses; which I did, without a word.
"That will do," said she.... "You must have a new one."
... She returned presently with a dressmaker. She had me measured. "I mean," said she, "to follow my own taste, and to have my own way in this little matter."
Two days after came home--a pink [green] dress! "That is not for me," I said hurriedly, feeling that I would ... as soon clothe myself in the costume of a Chinese lady of rank.
... "You will wear it this ... evening."
I thought I should not; I thought no human force should avail to put me into it.... I knew it not. It knew not me. I had not proved it.
But wear it she did; and when Graham [Mr. George Smith] stood in the doorway looking at her, she tells us her uneasy aspiration was:--
"I do hope he will not think I have been decking myself out to draw attention."
Clearly Charlotte Bront� wished posterity to learn how it came about she was garbed in "light fabric and bright tint," because the green dress was a page in her life's history. In a green dress she sat down to dine, as Mr. Thackeray's daughter, Lady Ritchie has written me she well remembers, when Charlotte Bront� dined at Thackeray's house on June 12, 1850--not the event of the distinguished party, when Carlyle, Miss Perry, Mrs. Procter, and others were present, though Lady Ritchie had once confounded the two in writing upon the subject[101]. Mr. Thackeray's daughter was a young girl at the time to which she referred, but she has made clear to me she saw Miss Bront� three times; that the chief occasion was when Charlotte Bront� wore the light green dress. This, to quote her ladyship's words to me, was "not Mrs. Brookfield's party, when neither my sister and I nor our governess dined--though we came down in the evening. The second occasion was just casually at my father's lecture-room, when she did not speak to me, and the third, finally, at the Brookfield evening party, which seems to have been such a solemn affair[102]."
These facts fix the wearing of the light green dress by Miss Bront� as June 12, 1850. Lady Ritchie tells me that "It was at an early family dinner by daylight with Charlotte Bront�, my father, Mr. George Smith, my sister and our governess, that I remember sitting next Miss Bront� at dinner and gazing at her sleeve and mittens. Her dress was of some texture like one I had had myself, which I suppose impressed it upon me, and it had a little moss or coral pattern in green on a white ground. I only remember the sleeve, the straight look, and the smooth Victorian bandeaux of hair. I am sure she was differently dressed at the Brookfield evening party."
On June 12, 1850, Charlotte Bront� wrote to her friend, Miss Nussey, from the Smiths' in London, saying:--
Thackeray made a call.... If all be well, I am to dine at his house this evening.[103]
And this was when Miss Bront� sat in a light green dress at the Thackeray dinner-table.
The Richmond portrait of Charlotte Bront� being now also in the National Portrait Gallery, I may remark that Mrs. Gaskell herself says of this portrait:--"Those best acquainted with the original were least satisfied with the resemblance.... Mr. Bront� thought ... it looked good and lifelike." Charlotte Bront� herself said her father thought the portrait looked older than she. In view of the new interest now attaching to Tabitha Aykroyd and Charlotte, it is instructive to find the latter telling us Tabitha "maintains that it is not like," and also, that Tabitha thought it "too old looking." Then she apologized for the old servant in a sentence that pathetically recalls Mrs. Dean and Bessie of "Catherine's" and "Jane's" childhood--"Doubtless she confuses her recollections of me as I was in childhood, with present impressions."[104] We discover, therefore, that in the main there was really dissatisfaction at the "old looking" presentation, and we see Charlotte Bront� from the beginning must have wished she had had her hair arrangement in that portrait as was common to her at home and in her younger days. Hence do we get a further insight into the origin of the different pose in the more characteristic and intimately faithful H�ger portrait of Charlotte Bront�.
INDEX.
INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL KEY INDEX.
I stated in a letter to The Academy, August 1st, 1908, that "were it possible by application of a cipher code to discover the words 'Emily Bront�' in every sentence of Wuthering Heights, I could not even then say any one wrote the book but Charlotte Bront�." If people write before they think, then importance can be attached to clerical testimony and external associations to the disadvantage of internal and literal evidence. But inspiration, thought, and fact denote in questions of authorship, and therefore that is author of a work whose thoughts and words are expressed and inmost life revealed therein. Wuthering Heights, we now see, is Charlotte Bront�, and it matters not what amanuensis dealt with the relation--what sequence of complications resulted from her first day of handing over the work to her sister, and of conspiring to conceal her authorship.
Had not my own two sisters died, I might have been tempted to make them novelists: out of my bottom drawer I could have provided them with a novel each and one for a "follow-on," and yet have left myself some maturer works in hand. But my sisters would have had to copy out the manuscripts for the printers from my first drafts, and in every way possible to merit and to establish association with the books as authors. And how indignant we would have been--nay, alarmed, had there been a "Newby arrangement," at some daring critic, like Lady Eastlake and Sydney Dobell, imputing they were the work of one mind! Would we not have appealed to clerical testimony? With a more practised hand Charlotte Bront� in her days of fame corrected and edited Wuthering Heights. Emily was dead. Well might Charlotte say the labour left her "prostrate and entombed." What memories had it recalled!--what a history! It is obvious to all who consider carefully the letter Charlotte Bront� penned Wordsworth, to which I refer in the footnote on page 17 of The Key to the Bront� Works, that she wrote her books rapidly; and a review of the fact that the Bront� school project was renounced in favour of literary projects suggests Currer Bell in 1845-46 revealed to her sisters the advantages of having a bottom drawer. Let any reader use what I have termed the Key Index to the works of Charlotte Bront�, and it will be perceived quite easily that Wuthering Heights is irrefutably at one with Currer Bell and all her other books--that the works of Charlotte Bront� are all related to each other, to Charlotte Bront�, and to the facts and people of her life as seen and known by herself. The reader of a given Bront� work will glance down the list in the Key Index under the heading of the particular book in hand to find these very important and intensely interesting connections, now first shown to exist:--
THE KEY INDEX
TO THE LIFE AND WORKS OF CHARLOTTE BRONT�.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS.
Its relation to Charlotte Bront�'s life, vii.-xi.[105], 16-19, 32-3, 37-53, 55-7, 69, 78-9, 83, 85-103, 106, 108-112, 114-8, 120-1, 126-9, 130-155, 156-8, 160-1, 168
In relation to Branwell Bront�, x., 18, 37-40, 52-3, 78-9, 93-5, 139
---- Tabby Aykroyd, x., 38, 40-1, 43-53, 77, 94-5, 147-8, 160, 168
---- M. H�ger, viii., xi., 16, 17, 34, 56, 87, 89, 91-3, 96-103, 106, 111, 120-1, 128-9, 134-154, 157
---- Madame H�ger, 106-7, 117
---- Taylor of Hunsworth, 83-9
---- Rev. Patrick Bront�, 49, 147; the younger Cathy's father, 161
---- Maria Bront�, 37
---- Emily Bront�, viii., 17, 18, 40, 138, 146, 153, 156, 169
---- M. Sue, ix., 103-4, 106-112, 114, 121, 128, 132-142
---- Charlotte Bront�'s Poems, 56, 97, 128, 132-7, 139, 140-5, 150-1, 157-8
---- Montagu, x., 17, 20-35, 55, 57-68, 71, 141-5
---- Jane Eyre, vii., viii., x., 18, 20, 22-56, 58-68, 71-2, 79, 83, 85-103, 106, 108-112, 114-119, 121, 128-9, 134-146, 151-4, 157, 168
---- Shirley, ix., 18-9, 41, 43, 55-6, 83, 85-9, 136, 146-153, 160-1
---- The Professor, ix., x., 53-6, 78-9, 84-9, 121, 127-9, 138-9, 145, 151
---- Villette, ix., 92, 96-7, 103, 111, 121, 128-9, 136-8, 143-5, 148-154, 161
---- Charlotte Bront�'s Method I., viii.-x., 23-4, 25-31, 38, 40, 47, 97-103
---- ---- Method II., viii., 25-31, 38-9, 48-51, 53, 55
JANE EYRE.
Its relation to Charlotte Bront�'s life, vii., viii., x.,[105] 15, 18, 21-2, 30, 37-56, 69-119, 121-154, 157, 168
In relation to Branwell Bront�, x., xi., 18, 37-40, 52-3, 78-9, 93-5, 106, 139
---- Tabby Aykroyd, x., 40, 43-53, 77-8, 94-5, 105, 128, 168
---- M. H�ger, x., 14, 82-9, 92-3, 96-107, 111, 120, 126-9, 136-146, 148-154
---- Madame H�ger, 106-7, 112, 117
---- Rev. Patrick Bront�, xi., 70-2, 74-7, 81-2, 128, 136
---- Maria Bront�, xi., 24, 70-1, 80-1, 106, 108-110
---- Anne Bront�, xi., 70-4, 77-8, 81-2; Elizabeth Bront�, xi., 72, 81, 106-7
---- Emily Bront�, xi., 70-4, 78, 81
---- Aunt Branwell, xi., 70-3, 77-81
---- Cousin Eliza Branwell, xi., 69, 70-2, 79-81
---- M. Sue, ix., x., 82-3, 103-121, 126-9, 135
---- Charlotte Bront�'s Poems, 97, 128, 135-8, 140-5, 150-1, 157-8
---- Montagu, x., 20-36, 60-8, 71-2, 140-5
---- Wuthering Heights, same as opposite
---- Shirley, 81, 83-9, 136, 147-153
---- The Professor, 79, 83-9, 111, 127-9, 139-142, 145, 151
---- Villette, 42, 86, 89, 92, 103, 118-9, 126, 128-9, 132-154
---- Charlotte Bront�'s Method I., x., 23-4, 25-31, 97-103, 105
---- ---- Method II., 25-31, 45, 48-51, 72, 74
SHIRLEY.
Its relation to Charlotte Bront�'s life, vii., ix., 41, 43, 69, 75, 81, 83-4, 87-9, 120, 136, 146-153, 156-7, 159, 160, 163
In relation to Tabby Aykroyd, 43, 160
---- M. H�ger, ix., 69, 81, 83-4, 120, 136, 146-153, 163
---- Taylor of Hunsworth, 83-9; Martha and Mary, 83-4
---- Rev. Patrick Bront�, 41, 75, 159-161; Mrs. Bront�, 41, 159-161; Emily Bront�, 69, 81, 156-7
---- Rev. A. B. Nicholls, 160; M. Sue, 163; Miss Wooler, 160
---- Charlotte Bront�'s Poems, 136
---- Wuthering Heights. See Key Index for that work
---- Jane Eyre. " " "
---- The Professor, 83-9, 150-3
---- Villette, 41, 86, 89, 136-142, 146-154, 160-1
THE PROFESSOR.
Its relation to Charlotte Bront�'s life, vii., ix., 16, 18, 53-5, 63, 71, 79, 83-9, 111, 120-9, 138-9, 145, 150-2, 160
In relation to M. H�ger, ix., 16, 63, 83-9, 111, 120-9, 138-9, 145, 150-2, 160, 164
---- Madame H�ger, 16, 111, 122-8, 131-3
---- M. Sue, ix., 63, 84, 104, 107, 111, 120-9
---- Branwell Bront�, 79
---- Montagu, 63, 71
---- Charlotte Bront�'s Poems, 63, 71, 128, 139, 151, 158
---- Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Shirley. See Key Index for those works
---- Villette, ix., 86, 107, 111, 126-9, 139, 144-5, 149-151, 160
---- Charlotte Bront�'s Method I., ix., 121, 127-8, 131
VILLETTE.
Its relation to Charlotte Bront�'s life, vii., ix., 41, 47, 86, 89, 92, 97, 103, 107, 111, 118, 126, 128-9, 132-7, 140, 144-5, 148-154, 160-1, 166-7
In relation to M. H�ger, ix., 70, 86, 89, 92, 97, 103, 111, 118, 126, 128-9, 132-40, 145, 150-4, 166
---- Madame H�ger, 106, 118, 133
---- Taylor of Hunsworth, 89
---- M. Sue, ix., 103-4, 111, 118, 120-9, 130-5
---- Lady Ritchie, xi., 165-8
---- Mr. George Smith, 69, 160-1, 166-8; Mrs. Smith, 161, 166-8
---- Thackeray, 70, 165-8
---- Rev. Patrick Bront�, 77, 136, 161
---- Rev. A. B. Nicholls, 69, 86, 161
---- Charlotte Bront�'s Poems, 128, 132-7, 140-5, 149-152
---- Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Shirley, and The Professor. See Key Index for those works
END OF THE KEY INDEX TO CHARLOTTE BRONT�'S WORKS.
Bront�, Charlotte, her life:--37-53, 93-103, 138-9, 153, 169; Frances and Catherine, 133-4; throughout the work of, 18, 40; drawn by her from Montagu, 22-36, 57-68, 141-2; Tale of a Foundling, 33; Alembert, 65; as the younger Catherine, viii., 46, 161; as the two Cathys, 16, 17, 34, 106-118, 161; Authoritative evidence of her Methods I. and II.:--viii., 25-6, 98-103, and of Key Index to the Bront� Works, 169, 170; gives it Emily, 17, 18, 169; offers it publishers, 17; story of a sad Night, 17; why she disavowed authorship of, 143-6; unable to admit authorship of, 18, 146, 153, 169; preface to, 142, 145; rainy day in her childhood, 37-42; fit of frenzy, 48-51; spectral writing, 42; phantom hag, 42; her childhood reading, 41; Rev. Jabez Bunting, 41; her cold, wailing child apparition, 28-30, 52-6; cloven tree, 96-7; and Heathcliffe's hypochondria, 16, 55-6, 87-8, 144; Isabella's rival, 106, 117-8; as Catherine of Malham, 23, 57-68; her mood in writing, 150-3; fears publisher, 18-9, 153, 169
Bront�, Emily, unimportance of her corrected copy of, and implication, 17, 169, 170; purporting to be by, 18, 138, 153, 169; Wuthering Heights, no internal evidence of, viii., 169, 170
Bront�, Branwell, and authorship of, 40; as Hindley, 18, 37-40, 52-3, 69; carving knife incident, 39
Bront�, Rev. Patrick, as Mr. Linton, 49, 147, 161
Aykroyd, Tabitha, as Mrs. Dean, 43-51, 59, 69, 72, 78, 81, 160, 168; her old songs, 46-7; her fairy tales, 44-5; as Joseph, 38, 40, 47-8
H�ger, M., in, 16, 17, 34. Also, see Key Index for foregoing names
Earnshaw, Catherine, and Heathcliffe, as Jane and Rochester, 93-103, 139
Heathcliffe, as Rochester, 89-92, 138-9, 153; as "that ghoul," 140-6; and Taylor, 83-9; return of the runaway, 93, 97-103; expression of eyes, 90-1; the foundling, 22; origin of name, 22, 142
Hareton, origin of name, 22-3, 60, 64, 66; and M. H�ger, viii.-x., 120-1
Joseph, original of, 23; as Poole of Jane Eyre and Montagu's uncouth servant, 23-8, 30-1
Lockwood as Montagu, 23-32, 57-60, 66; his boy guide, 60, 66
Newby, Mr. Thomas, publisher of, 19, 146, 153, 169
Malham as Gimmerton, and Gimmerden; Malhamdale as the valley of Gimmerton, 22-3, 57-68, 71; Glens, 58, 66, 68; Peniston Crags, 22-3, 59, 60, 65-6; Fairy Cave, 22-3, 59-66; Chapel, 22, 66-8, and Briar Chapel of Shirley, 41; Kirk in the lonely valley, 22, 64, 66-8; Fair, 22, 66-7; mists, 68; stream, 22, 68; sough, 66-68; Heights, 22, 66-7; Catherine, of, 23, 71
Montagu and, 20; Airton, 22-3; Airton, Robert, 60, 64, 71; Mrs., 60; lonely house of mystery and uncouth servant, 17, 23-32; cuckoo story or foundling "plot," 22-3, 33-4, 87; a night's repose and the candle-bearing bedside apparition, 21-32, 30-2
Brunty foundling controversy, 13; the key chapter, 40; origin of title, 56-7, 148-152; Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the abodes--originals not known, 159; Lady Eastlake and Dobell, 138-9, 153-4
Published later than Jane Eyre, 118, 138, 169
Bront�, Charlotte, her life, 37-53, 69-103, 106-119, 123-155, 168, 169-170; her second work based on Montagu, 23-36, 60-6, 68-72, 140-2; Rivers family, 23, 69-82; Burns, Helen, 23-4, 69-71, 80, and Charles I., 64, as Agnes Jones (death of), 106-110, and M. Sue, 108-110. "Rivers," origin of suggestion, 23, 71-2, 141-2, Diana and Mary, 70-8, 81-2, St. John as Mr. Bront�, 70-8, 81-2, as Charlotte's Brussels priest, 77, 132, 136-7, not Rev. Mr. Nussey, 77; Hannah, and Bessie (Tabitha Aykroyd), 40, 43-53, 69-73, 78, 81, fairy tales and old songs, 44-7; Reed, name (and Keeldar), 23, 81; aunt, 38, 70-1; John (and Hindley), 37-40, 52-3, 71, 79, 113; Eliza and Georgiana, 69, 79-82; Severn Julia, 23, 81, 107; Lowood school, 18, 21-2; fever, etc., at, 106-110, 117; Miss Temple of, 81, 110-1; Brocklehurst, 21, 81, 115; Morton (Haworth), Moor House, 70-82, 105; Charlotte as Jane Eyre and Catherine Earnshaw (also see Key Index), 37-42, 93-103, 150-2; rainy day in her childhood, 37-42; fit of frenzy, 48-51; spectral writing, 42; phantom hag, 42; cold, wailing child apparition, 28-30, 52-6, 151; cloven tree, 96-7; the Sidgwicks, 78; Gateshead Hall, 37-9, 45; her Thornfield, 72, 127-8; as Jane Eyre and Lucia Snowe, 148-152; as Jane Eyre, and Crimsworth of The Professor, ix.-x., 127-8; as Janet Aire or Jane Eyre of Malham, 22-3, 60-6, 70-2, 142; "Jane," a secondary adaptation, 71; Fairy Janet, Queen of the Malhamdale Elves, 23, 60-4; no views on lunacy, 34-6; Rochester's song, 140-2; the miraculous voice, 136-7; nymph and satyr, 141-2; missionary life and priest, 136-7; the runaway, 93, 97-103, 129; hen-killing figure in Wuthering Heights and, ix.-x; "Rydings," "Norton Conyers," and "Thornfield," 35, 159; Wycollar Hall, 159
---- Rochester (see Key Index for M. H�ger and the Taylors), x., 14, 145, and Wildfell Hall, 161; Jane Eyre the surpassing of all Bront� biographies, 82; "Key to Jane Eyre" The, xi., 20, 68, 153
Malham or Gimmerton, background of Jane Eyre, 22-3, 58-68; source of river Aire or Ayre, 23, 60-71; Jane of, 22-3, 60-6, 70-2; see Fairy Janet Aire or Eyre of Malham
Montagu, and opening of Jane Eyre, 21-2; lonely house of mystery, and uncouth servant (Grace Poole and Joseph), 17, 23-32 --Jane Eyre's and Lockwood's two dreams in, 28-30 --a night's repose and candle-bearing apparition in, 21, 23-32; origin of plot of insane lady, and of the white veil scene (Shelley), 24, 34-6; insane lady a secondary suggestion; suggests names, Aire or Eyre, Burns, Rivers, Reed, Keeldar, Broughton, Eshton, Georgiana, Helen, Ingram, Lowood, Lynn, Mason, Millcote, Poole, recalling perhaps a Rev. Mr. Pool, and Currer Bell, 21, 23-4
Bront�, Charlotte, as Shirley Keeldar, 81, 120; as Caroline Helstone (and Catherine Earnshaw), 41, 146-8, 152; her home the Rectory, 159; childhood reading, 41-2; Keeldar, name, 23; Shirley as Emily Bront�, 69, 156-7. Helstone, Mr., 86; original of, 75, 159-161; name, 41; and Rev. H. Roberson, 86, 159-160. H�ger, M., and the Moores, 89, 146-8; Louis, 163; Robert, 152. Cartwright, Mr., 89, 160. Mr. Macarthey, 160. Mrs. Pryor, 147-8; a composite character, 160; and Mrs. Dean and Tabby, 43; Miss Wooler, 160. Yorke (Taylor), Hiram, 83-4; Matthew, 83; Rose, 83-4; Jessie, death of, 84
Birstall, Batley, 159; "Briarmains," 83; "Field Head," 159; The Red House, Gomersall, 83, 159; Oakwell House, 159. Hartshead, Brighouse, 160; Nunnwood, Nunnerly and church, Robin Hood, Kirklees Park, Priory, 160; Hollows Mill, 160; Whinbury (Dewsbury), 160. Published in 1849
Bront�, Charlotte, as Henri Frances Evans, 71, 122; as Crimsworth, ix., 127-8; Fairy Janet, 63, 71; wailing child apparition, 53-5; Lucia, 86, 151
H�ger, M., as Crimsworth, 63, 127, 138; Hunsden, 83-9, 151; origin of name, 84; Pelet, 16, 84, 139, 145
H�ger, Madame, as Mdlle. Reuter, 111, 122
Offered to publishers, 17; published, 160
Bront�, Charlotte, as Lucy Snowe, 86, 131, 144, 120, 148-152; origin of name, 22, 56, 149, 151; childhood reading, 41; and Father Confessor, 77, 132, 136-7; as Paulina, 47, 120, and Cathy Linton, 161; Paulina and Mr. Home--Charlotte and Rev. Patrick Bront�, 161; final words in, 129
Bretton, Dr. John, Paulina's lover, 69, 161; as Mr. George Smith and Rev. A. B. Nicholls, 69, 86, 145, 160-1. Mrs. Bretton, 166
H�ger, M., as Paul Emanuel, 42, 96-7, 126, 131, 145; his harshness, 85-6; and Thackeray, 70
H�ger, Madame, as Madame Beck, 118, 133
Ritchie, Lady, and green dress, xi., 165-8
Villette as London and Brussels, 160-1
Published, 19; inception, 166
Agnes Grey and Wildfell Hall, 17, 161.
GENERAL INDEX.
Aire, or Ayre, Malham, source of the, 23, 60-1, 71
Armytage, Bart., Sir Geo. J., 160
Aykroyd, Tabby. See Bront� servants
Branwell, Maria, of Penzance, marries Patrick Bront�, 75; death of, 14, 159-161
---- Aunt (Elizabeth), and the H�gers, 113-4; Branwell Bront� her favourite, 37, 78-9; in mourning for, 72-3
---- Cousin Eliza, 68, 80
Bront�, Annie or Anne (Acton Bell), as understudy to Charlotte, 17, 169; Gondal Chronicles, 17; Agnes Grey and Wildfell Hall, 17, 161; appearance and life, 70-4, 77-8, 81-2; Poems, 156-8; death of, 161-5
---- Charlotte, birthplace, 14; birthday, 14, 106; appearance, 118, 131, 165, 168. Childhood: a rainy day, 18, 37-42, 78; curtain incident, 38; Branwell as "tyrant" makes her head ache, 18, 37-42; "volume-hurling," 38-9, 78; Methodist literature, 40-2; writings and Mrs. Gaskell, 14; Tabby, 38, 40-1, 43-51, 168 --her homily, 40 --old songs and fairy tales (Charlotte's love of Scottish ballads), 47, 149, 150; the locked chamber, 48-51; passionateness, 45-6, 48-51, 116. Elfish imagination, 23; schools, 14, 16, 18, 21-2, 81, 104, 106-117 --Clergy Daughters' School, 18, 21-2, 81, 106-117, Roe Head, 14, 16, 83, H�ger pension, 16, 18, 72, 104; drawings, 82; her life from childhood to womanhood, 93-103; no psychical reciprocity with friends, 14; Wordsworth and her facility in writing novels, 17, 169; at Brussels (the H�gers), teacher and pupil, viii.-x., 63, 82, 120-2, 131, 138, dejection at, 120-1, 124; M. H�ger, viii.-xi., 14-17, 93, 96-107, 111-2, 120-154, 162-8, and her literary secrets, 104, 162; Madame H�ger, 16, 104-7, 111-2, 117-9, 122-7, 133, forbids corresponding, 16; Charlotte as Mdlle., 105, as M. Sue's Mdlle. Lagrange and Miss Mary, ix., 82, 103-132, 163; Imitation of Christ, ix., 121-2; her priest, 77, 132-8; departure from Brussels, 16, 127; flight from temptation, 105, 141-2, 122-9, 151-2; the fiery ordeal, 154; parting with the H�gers, 122-132; origin of her works, vii., 15, 20-36, 138; Montagu, see Key Index for Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre; Alembert, 64-5; Currer Bell, 17, 21-2; perpetuates drama of her life, vii., 15, 16, 154; Branwell, 18, and his aunt, 79; at Haworth Parsonage, 69-82; school project given up, 16, 169. Poems publishing, 17: "Apostasy" and "Regret," 96-7, 133-7; "Frances," 132, 134, 144, 150-1; "Gilbert," 139, 143-4; "The Letter," 105; "Mementos," 150; "Apostasy," 133-7; "Preference," 132; "Passion," 157. Her hypochondria, 16, 87-8; "Puir Mary Lee," 45, 149, 150; the storm, 16, 17, 130-154, 157-8; vindictiveness against M. H�ger, 16, 17, 143-6, 152; Ghoul and Satyr notion, 140-6; H�ger and her heroes (see also the Taylors, 83-9), 83-92; heaven undesired by lover, 97, 133-4, 139; elective affinities, cloven tree, and "twin-soul," 96-7, 147-8; supernatural "way" to "twin-soul" lover (and the haunted wind), 55-6, 136-7, 140, 147-8; eerie signal against lattice, 28-30, 53-6, 147-8; dual portraiture, 69, 70, 77, 83-9, 120, 159, 160, 161; ice-cold wailing child apparition, 28-30, 52-6, 151; her two dreams preface to "bedside apparition," 28-30; name selection method, 22, 68; chronological sequences in her works, 161; character of her correspondence, 14, 15; H�ger portrait of, in National Portrait Gallery, xi., 162-8; Richmond Portrait in N.P.G., 168; Wuthering Heights complications (conspires to accredit and sustain Emily as author), 17, 146, 169; her fear of Mr. Newby, 19, 153, 169; limitations of Mrs. Gaskell's Life, 15 --disappointment of, 104; last survivor of the young Bront�s, 19, 161; Introduction to her sisters' poems, 156-7; Miss Austen, 15; Rev. A. B. Nicholls, marriage with, 19, 96-7, 161 --Catherine Winkworth on, 96; Wildfell Hall, 17, 161; at Thackeray's and the Smiths', xi., 166-8; dedicates Jane Eyre to Thackeray, xi.; Greenwood Dyson and, 164. Last days: father and daughter, 161; her resting-place, 19; her Message and high rank of her genius, 16, 155. Also see the Key Index to her works
---- Elizabeth, 18, 71-2, 106-7
---- Emily (Ellis Bell), as understudy to Charlotte, 17, 169; conspires with her to sustain r�le of author of Wuthering Heights, 17, 138, 146, 169; no internal evidence of her in Wuthering Heights, viii.; her life contrasted with Charlotte's, 17, 18, 156-7; relations with Branwell, 18, 39, 40, 139; appearance and life, 17, 72-4, 78, 81-2, 156-7; Poems, "Old Stoic," "Last Lines," 157; her literary limitations, 17, 156-7; death of, 161-5. See Key Index of Shirley
---- Maria (Helen Burns), 18, 41, 71. See Key Index; also M. Sue
---- Patrick Branwell, appearance, 79; artist, 18, 165-6; his verse, 158; enjoys the hearth, 37-8; a sign of trouble for, 52-3; evil days, 39, 78-9, 158; and Aunt Branwell, 78-9; and M. Sue, 106, 110. As Hindley and John Reed, x., 18, 37-8, 52-3, 69, 78-9, 139. See also Key Index for Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Professor
---- Rev. Patrick, parents, Hugh Brunty and Alice M'Clory, 13; at Ballynaskeagh and Drumballyroney, 13; at Cambridge, 13, 74-5; Wethersfield, 75, and Mary Burder; Dewsbury, 75; Vicar of Hartshead, 160; marries Maria Branwell, 18, 75, 159-161; Vicar of Thornton, 14; of Haworth, 13; appearance and life, 13, 70-7, 82, 147, 159-161, 167-8; verse, 13, 158; and Mrs. Gaskell's Life, 15. Also see Key Index
---- Poems, 156-8; Aylott and Jones, 17, 105, 160
---- servants: Aykroyd Tabitha, x.; as Nelly Dean and Bessie, 43-53, 168; does not understand Charlotte Bront�, 43, 45-6; and old songs, 45-7; also, 72, 77-8, 147-8, 160, 168; her homily, 40; her gift of narrative and fairy tales, 44-5; death of, 19, 96-7. Also see Key Index for Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Shirley. Brown, Martha, 47, 96, 161; Brown, Tabitha (Mrs. Ratcliffe), and Charlotte Bront�'s married life, 96; Garrs, Nancy, and sister, 47, 159
Brookfield, Mrs., 167-8
Carlisle, William, 167
Carus-Wilson, Rev. Mr., 115
Casterton Hall, 23; Clergy Daughters' School, 18, 81, 106, 108-111, 114-117
Cornwall, Barry, 34
Courtney, William Leonard, xi., 104
Cust, Lionel, 162
Devonshire, Duke of, 20
Dewsbury, 14, 83, 160; Hartshead, 81, 160
Dobell, Sydney, 153-4, 169
Dyson, Greenwood, and Charlotte Bront�, 164
Elf, of Craven, The, 60, 141-2
Evans, Miss (Miss Temple), 110, 114
Fairy Cave, The, and Fairy Janet: see Malham
Gaskell, Mrs., and M. H�ger, 15, 96, 104; Madame H�ger, 163; West Indian girl mystery, 108
---- Misses, 165
Hathersage, 70-1, 77
Haworth, 68, 70, 138, 164; Church, 13, 19, 164; Parsonage, 69, 72-82, 159, 161, 164
H�ger, M., as Charlotte Bront�'s pupil, viii.-x., 120, 122; original of her chief heroes, 14, 16-17, 83-6, 89-93, 96-7, etc.; not secretive, 111, 162; and Roman Catholic Church, 16, 132, 138; a great and religious personality, 121, 124, 126-9, 132-3, 137-8, 154, 166; Charlotte Bront�'s harsh portrayals of, 143-6; facial metamorphoses, 85; the bitterness of his life, 128-9, 130-2; "Paul," 162-6; as M. de Morville, 82, 104-6, 120-9, 132, 163. See Key Index for M. H�ger
---- Madame, 16; her jealousy, 104, 112, 117-8, 122-3, 121-2; appearance of, 106; as Madame de Morville, 106-133. See Key Index for Madame H�ger
Hawke, E. G., 163
Hodge, Harold, xi., 153
Holloway, Laura C., 77
Holmes, Professor Charles J., 165
Holroyd, Kt., Sir Charles, vii.
Kendal, 106; Kendall Institution, 114-7
Kirkby Malham Church, 64, 66-8
Lagrange's Manuscript "Catherine Bell," 104-119
Lambert family, 64
Lucan's "Pharsalia," 14
Lytton, Lord, 163
M'Clory, Alice, 13
Malham, original of Gimmerton of Wuthering Heights: home of Catherine Earnshaw, and of Janet Aire of Jane Eyre, 22-3, 57-68, 71; source of the Aire or Ayre, 71. See Key Index of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre for Malham in Montagu
Malham, or Malam, origin of family, 67
Malham and Kalderworth, 67
Malhamdale, enchanted land, 60, 71
Montagu or Mountagu, Admiral, and Charles II., 20, 64; De Ruyter, 20
Montagu, Basil, 20-1
Montagu, Frederic, his Gleanings in Craven provides the Malham background, and the plots of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, and Charlotte Bront�'s nom de guerre, Currer Bell, 20-36, 57-68, 141-2, 145. See Montagu in the Key Index for those works
Montagu, John, fourth Earl of Sandwich, 20
Morville de, M., Alphonsine, and G�rard, see M. H�ger; Madame, see Madame H�ger
National Portrait Gallery, and H�ger Portrait of Charlotte Bront�, xi., 162-8; Thomas Baylis, 163; and Richmond portrait, 168
Newby, Thomas, 19, 153, 169
Nicholls, Rev. A. B., see Charlotte Bront�; also Key Index for Villette
Nussey, Ellen or Nelly, 14, 45, 71, 77, 160, 168; Rev. Henry, 77
Procter, Mrs., and Miss Perry, 167
Rigby, Miss (Lady Eastlake), 138-9, 153, 169
Ripon, K.G., Marquis of, xii.
Ritchie, Lady, xi., 165-8
Shorter, Clement K., viii., 22, 77, 83, 147, 162, 164
Smith, George, xi., 86, 160-1, 166-8; Mrs. Smith, 166-7. See Key Index for Villette; Reginald John, K.C., 162; Smith Elder & Co., 161-2, 168
Sue, Eug�ne, ix., 16, 103-129. See Key Index to the Bront� works.
Taylor family of Hunsworth, 83-9 (see Key Index); Mary and Martha, 83-4
Thackeray, W. M., xi., 34, 167-8. See Key Index, Villette
Welch, Catherine Galbraith, xi.
West Indian Girl, mystery of, 106-8, 112
Winkworth, Catherine, 96
Wise, Thomas J., 64
Wooler, Margaret, 18, 160
Yates, W. W., 75
WORKS.
Key to the Bront� Works, John Malham-Dembleby:-- Its place and importance, vii.-xii., 15, 17-19, 25, 58, 64, 80-2, 104, 108, 146, 154. Importance of its Key Index, 169-171
Life of Charlotte Bront�, Mrs. Gaskell, 15, 22, 43-4, 52, 72, 83, 118, 123, 149, 161, 168; cause of its sombreness, 82; disappointment, and limitations, of, 15, 104; and Branwell Bront�, 121. Haworth Edition, 14, 17, 85, 121
Life of Charlotte Bront�, Augustine Birrell, 75
Bront�s: Life and Letters, Clement K. Shorter, 14, 73, 80, 87
Charlotte Bront� and Her Circle, Clement K. Shorter, 17, 135
Charlotte Bront� and Her Sisters, Clement K. Shorter, viii., 22, 77, 147, 159, 164
Bront� Country, Dr. Erskine Stuart, 35
Life of Emily Bront�, Miss Mary Robinson, 39; character of work, 57
Bront� Family, Francis Leyland, 39-40, 158
Bront�s, Fact and Fiction, Rev. Angus Mackay, 13, 41, 132, 144
Bront� Homeland, J. Ramsden, 13
Bront�s in Ireland, Dr. William Wright, 13
Charlotte Bront�: Monograph, Sir T. Wemyss Reid, 14
Father of the Bront�s, W. W. Yates, 75
Rev. Patrick Bront�'s Collected Works, Horsfall Turner, 13, 158
Thornton and the Bront�s, William Scruton, 161
Chapters from Some Memories, Lady Ritchie, 167
Craven Highlands, Harry Speight, 60
Dictionary of National Biography, Leslie Stephen, 21, 159
English Dialect Dictionary, Dr. Joseph Wright, 68, 149
Gleanings in Craven, Frederic Montagu, 20-36, 57-68; 141-2, 145; Leeds and Skipton, 20; dedicated to Duke of Devonshire, printed by A. Pickard, published by Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 20. Also see under Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, for Malham and Montagu, and Key Index to those works
Kalderworth, or Lawyer Vavasor's Secret, John Malham-Dembleby, Malham background of, 67; when written, and origin of title, 67; published by Joseph Cooke, Sir Edward Russell, Kt., and A. G. Jeans, 67
Memorials of Two Sisters: Susanna and Catherine Winkworth, 96
Miss Mary ou L'Institutrice, Eug�ne Sue, 82, 84, 105-6, 120, 126-7, 130, 163. See Key Index for M. Sue
Mrs. Brookfield and Her Circle, 167
Sydney Dobell's Life and Letters, 153-4
Woman's Work in English Fiction, Clara H. Whitmore, A.M., viii.
MAGAZINES, ETC.
Academy, 169
Cornhill Magazine, 162
Dundee Advertiser, xi.
Fortnightly Review, xi., 39, 70, 104, 125, 162-3
Liverpool Post, 67
London and Paris Courier, G. W. MacArthur Reynolds and M. Sue, 105
London Journal; Weekly Times, 105
New York Times Saturday Review, xi.
Outlook, xi.
Palladium, 153-4, 169
Quarterly Review, 138-9, 153, 169
Saturday Review, xi., xii., 20, 68, 153
Sheffield Independent, 67
Spectator, xi., 125
Times, 162, 164
Tribune, 162-5
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] Clement Shorter in Charlotte Bront� and her Sisters, p. 236; 1905.
[2] Clara H. Whitmore, A.M., in Woman's Work in English Fiction; 1910.
[3] The Saturday Review, September 6, 1902. A correspondence followed.
[4] The Fortnightly Review, March 1907.
[5] The Bront�s in Ireland, by Dr. William Wright, 1893, and The Bront� Homeland, by J. Ramsden, 1897, though they conflict, deal interestingly with Patrick Brunty's, or Bront�'s, relations. "Patrick ... after being a linen weaver secured the post of teacher in the Glascar School, Ballynaskeagh, then that of teacher at Drumballyroney." Eventually he got a scholarship and entered St. John's College, Cambridge, where he graduated and took Holy Orders. His father was a Hugh Brunty, who married a Roman Catholic, Alice McClory, or M'Clory. She is said to have become a Protestant, as was her husband. Of this marriage there were ten children, the eldest being Charlotte Bront�'s father, who early took to "larnin'," to quote the Irish hearsay. The Bront�s in Ireland has been challenged as presenting many statements impossible of verification. The assertion that an Irish Brunty foundling story suggested the foundling of Wuthering Heights raised a harsh and voluminous controversy. The Rev. Angus Mackay, in his little brochure The Bront�s--Fact and Fiction, 1897, controverted Dr. Wright, as did others elsewhere. The matter is summed up succinctly by Mr. Horsfall Turner, the Yorkshire genealogist, in The Rev. Patrick Bront�'s Collected Works, 1898, where, speaking of the Irish Bront�s and the foundling story, he says:--"The only one who could transmit this story was Hugh Brunty, and not one of his descendants ever heard of it before Dr. Wright's book was issued, not even the vaguest tradition."
[6] The "wild, weird writings" of her childhood, which awed homely Mrs. Gaskell, were merely badly, or I may say, childishly, assimilated fragments from English adaptations found in Dryden, Rowe, etc., of Lucan (Pharsalia, lib. 1, 73), and of other ancient writers.
[7] Her correspondence is given in Sir Wemyss Reid's Monograph on Charlotte Bront�, in Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bront�, Haworth Edition, and in Mr. Clement Shorter's The Bront�s: Life and Letters, 1908.
[8] Charlotte Bront� and Her Circle, by Clement Shorter.
[9] Charlotte Bront�, upon the other hand, was a most fluent writer of prose. She sent Wordsworth a story in 1840, and spoke of her facility in writing novels. (Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bront�, pages 189-190, Haworth Edition.) It is said Emily corrected misprints, etc., in her printed volume of Wuthering Heights; but whether or not she did this at Charlotte Bront�'s instigation is of little interest and no importance in view of the literal evidence in The Key to the Bront� Works. It may be Emily turned Charlotte's amanuensis; and it would not be difficult to show Anne Bront� also had been Charlotte's understudy. See my remarks on Wildfell Hall in Appendix.
[10] See my remarks, page 39.
[11] When King Charles II. was crowned, Montagu carried the sceptre. A historian states that the Admiral--who, I may say, had been a great friend of Richard Cromwell--perished in the sea-fight with De Ruyter, because he would not leave his ship by a piece of obstinate courage, provoked by a reflection that he took care more of himself than of the king's honour.
[12] For Basil Montagu see Dictionary of National Biography.
[13] On the other side of the same page Montagu concluded the narration of his "A Night's Repose," with which I deal later.
[14] Clement Shorter's Charlotte Bront� and Her Sisters, p. 164.
[15] See my observations on the name of Lucy Snowe.
[16] The name of "Helen Burns," that saintly sister of Charlotte Bront�, may have been suggested by the St. Helen's Well which Montagu states was near Miss Currer's home, Eshton Hall.
[17] The Bront� Country, by Dr. Erskine Stuart.
[18] A recognizable idiosyncrasy of Charlotte Bront�'s genius is the vivid minuteness with which she paints and records apparently unimportant details and happenings connected with her early childhood. (See footnote on page 41.)
[19] See footnote page 47.
[20] Emily Bront�, Miss Mary Robinson; 1883.
[21] Angus Mackay, in The Bront�s: Fact and Fiction (1897), identifies Miss Bront� with Caroline Helstone. Charlotte Bront�'s mother was a native of Penzance, near Helston.
[22] Catherine's diary was written on the margin of a printed sermon by the Rev. Jabes Branderham. Lockwood's "dream" in the connection was evidently a travesty on a sermon of the famous Rev. Jabes Bunting, a Wesleyan Methodist, and the zealousness of his hearers, concerning which preacher stories were possibly gathered by Charlotte Bront� from old Tabitha, who doubtless did occasional service as the old dialect-speaking Joseph. The Rev. Jabes Bunting was on the Halifax Circuit in the eighteen-twenties, and his sermons were printed in pamphlet form. Note the extract I have given from Villette on Lucy Snowe's having read as a child certain Wesleyan Methodist tracts.
[23] "Lee" may have been suggested by the name of the heroine of "Puir Mary Lee," a Scottish ballad, which I find influenced Charlotte Bront� greatly when she began to write Wuthering Heights.
[24] Called Nelly or Ellen Dean, perhaps because of Charlotte Bront�'s affection for her friend Nelly or Ellen Nussey.
[25] Of course Tabitha Aykroyd was twenty years younger when Charlotte was a child. Thus the early references to the more active Ellen Dean and Bessie in the main imply Tabby in the eighteen-twenties; those to her as the sedate and glum Mrs. Dean and Hannah, as Tabby in the eighteen-forties. We see Tabby quite in the caricature of Joseph in Charlotte's half-humorous references to her in the diary-like descriptions of the Bront� kitchen fireside life of her childhood in 1829, etc.--of which the rainy day incident in the childhood of little Catherine and Jane is so reminiscent--quoted by Mrs. Gaskell in the Bront� Life:--
"June the 21st, 1829.
"One night, about the time when the cold sleet of November [is] succeeded by the snowstorms and the high, piercing night winds of winter, we were all sitting round the warm, blazing kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrel with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which she came off victorious, no candle having been produced. A long pause succeeded, which was at last broken by Branwell saying, in a lazy manner, 'I don't know what to do.' This was echoed by Emily and Anne.
"Tabby: 'Wha ya may go t' bed.'
"Charlotte: 'Why are you so glum to-night, Tabby?'"
As time progressed Charlotte Bront� viewed more sentimentally the associations of her early childhood. Whenever Tabby was "Joseph" of Wuthering Heights Charlotte humorously caricatured her.
[26] See footnote on page 37.
[27] A remarkably recognizable idiosyncrasy of this child-phantom of Charlotte Bront�'s brain is the part the little hands of the child play. In Charlotte Bront�'s child-phantom of Wuthering Heights, Chapter III., the hand of the child takes a principal part, as in her above two versions.
[28] See note on "the hand" of Charlotte Bront�'s child-phantom, page 53.
[29] See the chapters on "The Recoil" for the origin of the title of Wuthering Heights, and of the name Lucy Snowe; also my remarks on Charlotte Bront�'s poem "Apostasy."
[30] "The breeze was sweet with scent of heath and rush, ... the hills shut us quite in; for the glen towards its head wound to their very core."--Jane Eyre, Chapter XXXIV.
[31] I have known for many years the wife and children of this Robert Airton. His father was, I believe, parish clerk for Coniston. Mrs. Airton once told me that when she first met her husband he was playing a violin in the entrance of a cave, under a crag in Malhamdale.
[32] It will be observed that in Chapter XXIII. of The Professor Charlotte Bront� practically calls Frances the heroine, "Jane." Of course she is the elf Janet (see Chapter XXV. of The Professor), and this sprite was also Jane Eyre--Charlotte Bront� herself. Read the verses in Chapter XXIII. in the light of my writing on "Eug�ne Sue and Charlotte Bront�'s Brussels Life" and "The Recoil."
[33] Mr. Thomas J. Wise has published and edited a valuable edition of this story, 1896.
[34] "I like Charles the First," says Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, Chapter VI.; "I respect him--I pity him, poor murdered king! Yes, his enemies were the worst: they shed blood they had no right to shed. How dared they kill him!" Montagu of course would know that his own ancestor brought over Charles the Second on the Restoration. Hence his warmth. We now understand the origin of the detached fragment in Jane Eyre.
[35] It is a remarkable coincidence that Malham was the background of my first novel, a work of the substantial number of 160,000 words, which I wrote in my teens. It was published serially in The Sheffield Independent by Mr. Joseph Cooke, beginning in May 1896 and running till September, under the title of Kalderworth, a name I had compounded from the Yorkshire river Calder. Afterwards the serial rights were also purchased by Sir Edward Russell and Mr. A. G. Jeans, of The Liverpool Post, wherein the story ran serially as Lawyer Vavasor's Secret. I did not choose Malham by reason of its being, as it is, the place from which our family of Malham, or Malam, sprung: I had cycled over to the remote village with my father. I was unaware that October 15 was an especial day at Malham, nevertheless I began my story--Kalderworth:--
"On the evening of the 15th of October, in the latter end of the Eighteen Hundred and Eighties, as the sun sank greyly behind the distant skyline of those wild hills that stretch from Malham and away into the North of Yorkshire, a solitary horseman pushed his way over a hard moorland road to a little deserted hamlet, where only one soul lived, and that a hag whose fame had spread as a dabbler in the black art and the mischievous doctrines."
I did not know of Montagu's book at the time; and of all the Bront� novels I had only read Jane Eyre. I remember once reflecting--while Kalderworth was being published--that Charlotte Bront� must have called her character Jane Eyre after the river Aire, just as I had called my loosely composite village up in Malhamdale Kalderworth, from the river Calder; and I thought Currer Bell, in her choice of the name "Jane Eyre," had been actuated poetically by the fact of the adjacency of the Yorkshire river Aire, or Ayre, and had changed the "A" in Aire, just as I the "C" in Calder. Nor was it till years later that I knew Charlotte Bront� had written in Shirley, Chapter XIX., of "Calder or Aire thundering in flood."
[36] That Gimmerton in Wuthering Heights means "the village of sheep" was admitted years ago. The etymology is very obvious. We now have the circumstances in which Charlotte Bront� chose the name.
[37] See my footnote, page 58.
[38] Thus she put her cousin Eliza Branwell under the same roof as herself and Branwell Bront� in Jane Eyre.
[39] The Poems prepared for publication in the autumn of 1845 bear evidence of the influence of Montagu's work. It was at this time Montagu's work provided Charlotte Bront�'s nom de guerre of Currer Bell. See my foot-note on Frances of The Professor as the Fairy Jane, page 63.
[40] A copy of this will is printed in The Bront�s: Life and Letters.
[41] Mr. Augustine Birrell in his Life of Charlotte Bront� (1887), gives a very interesting insight into a love episode of Mr. Bront�, during his first curacy, at Wethersfield, near Braintree, Essex. Mr. Bront� found a home with a Miss Mildred Davy, with whose niece, a "comely damsel of eighteen--a Miss Mary Mildred Davy Burder--with brown curls and blue eyes" he fell in love. A plotting guardian uncle, however, removed Miss Burder and wrongly intercepted all Mr. Bront�'s letters. Subsequently Mr. Bront� married Miss Maria Branwell, of Penzance, visiting in Yorkshire, whom he married at St. Oswald's Church, Guiseley, near Leeds. After the death of his wife, Mr. Bront� offered to marry Miss Burder, but was refused. She became the wife of the Rev. Peter Sibree, of Wethersfield. Mr. W. W. Yates' book, The Father of the Bront�s, 1897, shows us Mr. Bront� as a curate at Dewsbury. Mr. Yates, who is the originator of the Bront� Society and Museum, rightly associated Mr. Bront� with Mr. Helstone of Shirley, supporting his contention by evidence.
[42] For story and other purposes Miss Bront� makes St. John Rivers ask Jane's hand in marriage; and of course as the original of Moor House has been supposed to be at Hathersage in Derbyshire, and it was there the Rev. Henry Nussey lived--Miss Nussey's brother--who had offered to marry Charlotte Bront�, Mrs. Gaskell's Bront�'s Life and a following (including even a recent catalogue of the Bront� Museum, wherein reference is made to Mr. Nussey's portrait!) have given it forth that Mr. Nussey was the original of St. John Rivers--notwithstanding that Mr. Nussey was a married man when Charlotte was visiting at Hathersage. That Mr. Nussey and St. John Rivers are wholly dissimilar is contended at length in Charlotte Bront� and Her Sisters, pp. 166-170.
[43] The Bront�s: Life and Letters.
[44] In the love relations of Shirley Keeldar, however, we must expect to find phases of circumstances associated with Charlotte Bront� herself. Thus Shirley Keeldar is at times Currer Bell.
[45] Mr. Rochester's remarks in Jane Eyre, Chapter XII., on Jane's drawings would seem to show that though M. H�ger, the original of this character, was interested in Charlotte Bront�'s gift as an artist (and we know she sent M. H�ger a drawing of hers as late as August 1845), he spoke of them in disparagement--a fact that alone argues he was her superior in art, and understood drawing. Indeed, after seeing the various water-colour and other drawings of Charlotte Bront�, some thirty of which, including "a pencil drawing of Louis Philippe of France, drawn by C. Bront� during her stay in Brussels," are numbered with the Bront� relics, I may say we can take it as really the expression of M. H�ger concerning her sketches when Mr. Rochester observes of Jane's efforts in drawing:--"You have secured the shadow of your thought, but no more probably. You had not enough of the artist's skill and science to give it being," for this is the truth concerning Charlotte Bront�'s efforts of the kind. Nevertheless, I find evidence of a Brussels tradition in the eighteen-fifties that she was clever as a painter, M. Sue giving ability to his Miss Mary in this direction. It is more emphasized in his feuilleton than volume portrayal of this "Institutrice," both of which works we shall see presented phases of Miss Bront� as she was known. Hence we read, "Eh bien! monsieur, trouvez-vous qu'elle sait un peu dessiner, MA Miss Mary?" The italics, etc., are M. Sue's.
[46] Charlotte Bront� and Her Sisters, page 181.
[47] The James Taylor in the firm of her publishers, who corresponded with Miss Bront�, was not related to this Hunsworth family.
[48] See Matthew Yorke, Hiram Yorke's son, a character who has several traits in common with Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights.--Shirley, Chap. IX.
[49] Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bront�, Haworth edition, p. 230.
[50] Note that in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre it is assumed this character made silent reference to "the Deuce"; though he never uttered the name, his words seemed to "express" the sentiment.
[51] The Bront�s: Life and Letters, p. 340, vol. i.
[52] The Moores of Shirley were mainly drawn from M. H�ger, and though a Mr. Cartwright, supposed to have had foreign blood in his veins, is conjectured to have contributed to their creation because his mill was attacked with rioters, I find that the Yorkshire, or rather, "Taylor" element, as conceived by Charlotte Bront�, also entered into their composition.
[53] It is sad indeed to find Charlotte Bront� confessed, shortly before her marriage to the Rev Mr. Nicholls, that there was no such sympathy between herself and her prospective husband. See letters of Miss Catherine Winkworth in Memorials of Two Sisters: Susanna and Catherine Winkworth (1908). Miss Winkworth and Miss Bront� discussed the matter personally. Miss Catherine Winkworth wrote of Mr. Nicholls and Charlotte Bront�:--"I am sure she will be really good to him. But I guess the true love was Paul Emanuel [of Villette] after all ... but I don't know, and don't think that Lily [Mrs. Gaskell] knows." I should say that Mrs. Ratcliffe of Haworth--Tabitha Brown: her sister, Martha Brown, was one of the Bront� servants--at whose house Tabitha Aykroyd breathed her last, stated to me on February 21st, 1907, that as to Charlotte Bront�'s "wedded life, they lived happily together." Often do we discover references to the elective affinities in regard to M. H�ger and Charlotte Bront� in Currer Bell's works. Thus we did not need that Rochester should say in the last chapter but one of Jane Eyre:--"I am not better than the old lightning-struck chestnut," for we had understood by the touching apostrophe in Jane Eyre, Chapter XXV., that he and Jane were implied. The words were:--"The cloven halves were not broken from each other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below; ... they might be said to form one tree--a ruin, but an entire ruin. 'You did right to hold fast to each other,' I said, as if the monster splinters were living things; ... 'the time of pleasure and love is over with you; but ... each of you has a comrade to sympathize with.'" And Rochester tells Jane:--"You are my sympathy--my better self; ... a fervent ... passion ... wraps; my existence about you--and kindling in ... powerful flame, fuses you and me in one." M. H�ger as M. Paul in Villette strikes the same note we hear in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre:--"We are alike--there is affinity between us.... Tremble! for where that is the case with mortals, the threads of their destinies are difficult to entangle."
[54] See Charlotte Bront�'s poems "Regret" and "Apostasy."
[55] I discovered these most remarkable parallelisms by my knowledge and application of Charlotte Bront�'s Method I., a fact that finally declares her the author of both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.
[56] Mr. G. W. MacArthur Reynolds, the editor of The London Journal issued from The Weekly Times Office, which ran M. Sue's feuilleton, was well-known in French literary circles in the eighteen-forties. He founded in Paris The London and Paris Courier, and was likely enough a friend of M. Sue. It may be, indeed, there was some sort of understanding between him and Eug�ne Sue to set before the world an interpretation of Jane Eyre, with the extraordinary information come privily to M. Sue. Some time after its publication, Mr. Reynolds stated that "the main incidents in 'Mary Lawson' were founded on actual realities." This we shall find. It is a remarkable fact in the circumstances that The London Journal for August 1, 1846--a year before Jane Eyre was published, printed on one page the opening instalment of M. Sue's Martin the Foundling, and Charlotte Bront�'s poem "The Letter," with a footnote--"From a volume entitled Poems by Cuvier (sic), Ellis and Acton Bell; London, Aylott & Jones." The reader may perhaps recognize the original of Mr. Rochester in the person to whom the letter is being written.
[57] See my footnote, page 120.
[58] It may be relative to this fact that "Lagrange's Manuscript" is not printed in the extant French edition of Miss Mary.
[59] Great stress is laid in this feuilleton by M. Sue upon the fact that the trouble of this teacher is her dissolute brother. See my footnote on p. 24.
[60] See my footnote, p. 37.
[61] Mrs. Gaskell dwelt much on Charlotte Bront�'s plainness in her Life, published seven years after the above.
[62] Wuthering Heights with Agnes Grey had been accepted by Mr. Newby, its publisher, before Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. saw the manuscript of Jane Eyre, but Jane Eyre was published first.
[63] This artifice of presenting more than one phase of a character in the same work is equivalent to that practised by the portrait-painter who uses mirror effects to reveal some feature of his subject not in the ordinary line of vision. It was as difficult for M. Sue to present a complete portrait of the successful, f�ted Miss Bront� in poor Lagrange as it was for Charlotte Bront� to present a complete portrait of herself in the unhappy Lucy Snowe of Villette. So M. Sue also used the phase of Miss Mary, and Charlotte Bront� that of Paulina--just as she gave us M. H�ger as Crimsworth and occasionally as M. Pelet of The Professor, and just as she gave us herself in Shirley as Caroline Helstone and again (in regard only to her relations with M. H�ger) as Shirley Keeldar. Methods which were responsible for her first portraying herself as the elder Catherine of Wuthering Heights and then as the younger Catherine, in which work M. H�ger was portrayed by her often as Heathcliffe and finally as Hareton Earnshaw. With Charlotte Bront�, however, her secondary adaptations as portrayals, perhaps on account of their improvization, frequently give evidence of being unprepared. Thus the childhood of Paulina of Villette is scarcely Charlotte Bront�'s; and Hareton Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights, save for the lover and pupil phase, was never M. H�ger.
[64] Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bront�, Haworth Edition, p. 55. See my reference to Catherine teaching Hareton of Wuthering Heights, in the Preface.
[65] Instead of "Swiss" pastor's daughter, read Irish.
[66] Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bront�.
[67] As Rochester calls Jane his beneficent spirit, it is interesting to read that M. de Morville says to his wife:--"Je crois aux bons g�nies, aux bons anges."
"Aux bons anges?"
"Miss Mary, par exemple."
"Eh bien, Louise?"
"N'est-ce pas un bon g�nie, un bon ange, une bonne magicienne, enfin? Ne m'a-t-elle pas jet� un sort?"
[68] See my reference to Charlotte's Preface to Wuthering Heights in the second chapter of "The Recoil."
[69] See my references to Charlotte Bront�'s poem "Apostasy"; and to St. John Rivers as a phase of Charlotte's Brussels F�nelon.
[70] See M. Paul and Lucy Snowe (M. H�ger and Charlotte Bront�) in the close of Chapter XXI. of Villette.
[71] Mrs. Humphry Ward in her "Introductions" to the Haworth Edition of the Bront� novels instanced this passage as showing Emily Bront�'s extravagant love for the moors, inferring she preferred the heath to heaven. But Mrs. Ward in these same "Introductions" even argued that Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre were dissimilar in characterization and style. Catherine's reference herewith in Wuthering Heights, to a "subliminal" existence in a lover and to the notion that the absence or loss of such a love (and hence, limiting of the bounds of existence,) would make the universe a blank, having no sympathy or relation--a stranger, is at one with Charlotte Bront�'s further words in her poem, "Frances":--
"Unloved--I love; unwept--I weep; . . . . . . . . . . . . Vain is this anguish--fixed and deep; . . . . . . . . . . . .
"For me the universe is dumb, Stone-deaf, and blank, and wholly blind; Life I must bound, existence sum In the strait limits of one mind;
"That mind my own. Oh! narrow cell; Dark--imageless--a living tomb!"
[72] Charlotte Bront� and Her Circle.
[73] Mentor's advice to Telemachus when tempted and miserable on the island of Calypso is that given by the spirit of Jane Eyre's mother--"Flee temptation!" "Virtue," argues Mentor, "now calls you back to your country ... and forbids you to give up your heart to an unworthy passion.... Fly, fly, ... for love is conquered only by flight ... in retreat without deliberation, and ... looking back." "Neither Calypso nor Eucharis cared to fascinate Mentor" (Shirley, Chapter XXVII.). Evidently M. Sue knew Charlotte Bront� had read this book at Brussels, for he makes play upon it in "Lagrange's Manuscript," wherein "T�l�maque" is substituted for "Rasselas" in the equivalent scene in Jane Eyre.
[74] See chapter on the Yorkshire element in Charlotte Bront�'s heroes.
[75] "Religion called----Angels beckoned!----"
[76] See my reference to Catherine of Wuthering Heights and Caroline of Shirley, and their crying aloud when ill and delirious for "a way" to the absent lover, pp. 147-8.
[77] See the reproach of the dying Catherine to Heathcliffe I quote in the next chapter. See also Crimsworth's words in the beginning of Chapter XIX. of The Professor.
[78] See close of Chapter XXIV. of Jane Eyre.
[79] See my footnote on "the trodden way" on p. 136.
[80] See my reference to "the barriers" in "Apostasy."
[81] "I called myself your brother," says M. Paul to Lucy Snowe, the originals of whom were M. H�ger and Charlotte Bront�. "... I know I think of you--I feel I wish you well--but I must check myself; you are to be feared. My best friends point out danger and whisper caution."--Villette, Chap. xxxvi.
[82] Mr. Angus Mackay, in The Bront�s: Fact and Fiction, identifies Charlotte Bront� as the original of "Frances" of Charlotte's poem.
[83] Charlotte Bront� and Her Sisters, pp. 181-3.
[84] See pages 136 and 140.
[85] See my remarks on Mrs. Pryor in Appendix on Shirley.
[86] Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bront�.
[87] See footnote on page 97.
[88] Sydney Dobell: Life and Letters; 1878.
[89] Of course Mr. Dobell did not know that by the terms of arrangement with Mr. Newby, the publisher of Wuthering Heights, it was virtually impossible for Charlotte Bront�, after the success of Jane Eyre, to admit her authorship of Wuthering Heights publicly. See my remarks hereon in Chapter I.
[90] For this see Leyland's The Bront� Family.
[91] See footnote, page 13.
[92] Charlotte Bront� and her Sisters, page 162.
[93] Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bront�.
[94] The fact that towards the end great affection sprang up between the Rev. Patrick Bront� and his only surviving daughter cannot be too strongly emphasized. A most touching narration of him and the dying Currer Bell, related by Martha Brown, the Bront� servant, and herself the eye-witness, is given by Mr. William Scruton, in Thornton and The Bront�s, page 133 (1898):--"When Charlotte heard her father coming upstairs to her, she would strain every nerve to give him a pleasing reception. On his entering the room she would greet him with, 'See, papa, I am looking a little better.'" Mr. Home was "papa" to Paulina. Compare the lightsome Paulina with the younger Catherine of Wuthering Heights; and Mrs. Home's death, Villette, chap, xxiv., with Mrs. Helstone's Shirley, chap. iv.
[95] The letters in The Times in the close of 1906, and in the early part of 1907, attacking the authenticity of the H�ger portrait, were written by Mr. Shorter. My footnote in The Fortnightly ran:--"In attacking the water-colour portrait of Charlotte Bront� purchased by the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, the discovery of which, signed 'Paul H�ger, 1850,' was inimical to Mr. Clement Shorter's contention that Charlotte Bront� had but distantly interested M. H�ger, Mr. Shorter said, 'M. H�ger certainly did not know even in 1850 that Miss Bront�, his old pupil, and Currer Bell were identical,' and with another asserted M. H�ger and Charlotte Bront� never met after 1844. We shall see here, however, that M. H�ger knew all Miss Bront�'s literary secrets in 1850, and that they must have met after 1844, for M. H�ger could have acquired these secrets only in most intimate conversation with Currer Bell herself: to none other would she have revealed them."
[96] In this connection it is of interest to read the remarks of one of the jealous de Morville women on this portrait of the Irish governess:--"Patience! ... qui vivra verra. Je garde ce portrait de mademoiselle miss Mary, �a me fera souvent penser � elle--�a m'emp�chera de l'oublier. Je vais la clouer � quatre �pingles sur le papier de ma chambre".... She threatens to stick pins in it.... "Oui, oui, la belle Anglais!" she afterwards exclaims; "ce n'est pas seulement ton portrait que je perce � coups d'�pingle, c'est toi-m�me!" Which would suggest that a portrait of Charlotte Bront� could have remained at the H�ger establishment but at risk of being destroyed. I may observe these mysterious references occur only in the 1851 volume; not in the 1850 feuilleton.
[97] See my footnote on p. 82.
[98] Mr. Greenwood Dyson, born in 1830 in the Fold opposite the White Lion Hotel, in the house now a blacksmith's shop. "I was married in 1850," he stated to me, "and was living about twenty yards from Haworth Church when Charlotte Bront� gave a black silk dress to my wife." The Rev. Patrick Bront� signed a testimonial saying he well knew Mr. Dyson as being reliable and trustworthy, as also did the Rev. A. B. Nicholls, Miss Bront�'s husband. I have examined the document. An interesting glimpse of Charlotte Bront� I have not seen in any work is one of Mr. Dyson's reminiscences. He tells me that "there was a draw-well situated in the kitchen of the Rectory from which we boys used to draw water for domestic purposes." He added that often he drew water for Charlotte Bront� or others of the Bront� household before drawing for himself. "In one of the upper windows," he once wrote me, "a board had been placed instead of one of the panes of glass, in the centre of which was bored a hole in which Miss Bront� inserted a telescope to take observations." Perceiving in conversation with him the genuine pleasure the sight of the H�ger portrait of Charlotte Bront� gave Mr. Dyson, I later forwarded him a large photograph, taken direct from the original H�ger drawing of Charlotte Bront� in the National Portrait Gallery. I print his reply to me written on March 2, 1907:--
"DEAR SIR,--I received the likeness of Charlotte Bront� (which you were kind enough to send me) this morning, for which I should like to express my appreciation. It really is a very nice portrait. I think it is very much like her. With sincerest thanks, I remain, very truly yours, J. MALHAM-DEMBLEBY, Esq. (Signed) G. DYSON."
[99] Through the courtesy of Professor Charles J. Holmes, the present Director of the National Portrait Gallery, I am able to print herewith the N.P.G. references to this portrait.
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY TABLET ON PICTURE:--
CHARLOTTE BRONT� (Mrs. Arthur Bell Nicholls). 1816-1855. Novelist. Author of Jane Eyre and other works. Painted in 1850 by "Paul H�ger." Purchased, July 1906. (1444)
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY CATALOGUE:--
Painted in water-colours in 1850, and stated to be by "Paul" (or Constantin) H�ger, after an earlier portrait by her brother Branwell Bront�.
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY ILLUSTRATED CATALOGUE:--
Water-colour drawing stated to be by "Paul" (or Constantin) H�ger, after Branwell Bront�. (1444)
I may add that the inverted commas used in regard to M. H�ger's name are employed because "Paul" was not his common name. He was an active member of the Society of S. Vincent de Paul, and Charlotte Bront� portrayed him as M. Paul in her novel, Villette, commenced not later than the close of 1850 or the beginning of 1851.
[100] Italics mine.
[101] In Chapters from Some Memories, by Anne Thackeray Ritchie.
[102] By "Mrs. Brookfield's party" Lady Ritchie means the later distinguished party. In Mrs. Brookfield and her Circle, page 305, vol ii. (1905), a first dinner given by Mr. Thackeray for Charlotte Bront� in November 1849, is spoken of by Mrs. Brookfield as not having been a success; and the second great party at which some clever women were present, to meet Miss Bront� in 1851, is mentioned with the fact of the non-success of the 1849 party, on pages 355-6. All this now leaves clear the occasion of the 1850 private family dinner at Mr. Thackeray's house, when Charlotte Bront� sat next Lady Ritchie in a light green dress.
[103] Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bront�.
[104] Ibid.
[105] The Roman numerals refer to the Preface.
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