For the greater action of the tragedy is entirely on the invisible and
immaterial plane; it is the pursuing, the hunting to death of an earthly
creature by an unearthly passion. You are made aware of it at the very
beginning when the ghost of the child Catherine is heard and felt by
Lockwood; though it is Heathcliff that she haunts. It begins in the
hour after Catherine's death, upon Heathcliff's passionate invocation:
"'Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest so long as I am living! 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! Only _do_ not leave me in this
abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unbearable! I _cannot_
live without my life! I _cannot_ live without my soul!'"

It begins and is continued through eighteen years. He cannot see her,
but he is aware of her. He is first aware on the evening of the day she
is buried. He goes to the graveyard and breaks open the new-made grave,
saying to himself, "'I'll have her in my arms again! If she be cold,
I'll think it is the north wind that chills _me_; and if she be
motionless, it is sleep.'" A sighing, twice repeated, stops him. "'I
appeared to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind.
I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by; but as certainly as
you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, though
it cannot be discerned, so certainly I felt Cathy was there; not under
me, but on the earth.... Her presence was with me; it remained while I
refilled the grave, and led me home.'"

But she cannot get through to him completely, because of the fleshly
body that he wears.

He goes up to his room, his room and hers. "'I looked round
impatiently--I felt her by me--I could _almost_ see her, and yet I
_could not_!... She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to
me! And since then, sometimes more and sometimes less, I've been the
sport of that intolerable torture!... When I sat in the house with
Hareton, it seemed that on going out I should meet her; when I walked on
the moors I should meet her coming in. When I went from home, I
hastened to return; she _must_ be somewhere at the Heights, I was
certain! And when I slept in her chamber--I was beaten out of that. I
couldn't lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was either
outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or
even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a
child; and I must open my lids to see. And so I opened and closed them a
hundred times a night--to be always disappointed! It racked me!... It
was a strange way of killing: not by inches, but by fractions of
hair-breadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eighteen
years!'"

In all Catherine's appearances you feel the impulse towards satisfaction
of a soul frustrated of its passion, avenging itself on the body that
betrayed it. It has killed Catherine's body. It will kill Heathcliff's;
for it _must_ get through to him. And he knows it.

Heathcliff's brutalities, his cruelties, the long-drawn accomplishment
of his revenge, are subordinate to this supreme inner drama, this
wearing down of the flesh by the lust of a remorseless spirit.

Here are the last scenes of the final act. Heathcliff is failing.
"'Nelly,' he says, 'there's a strange change approaching: I'm in its
shadow at present. I take so little interest in my daily life, that I
hardly remember to eat or drink. Those two who have left the room'"
(Catherine Linton and Hareton) "'are the only objects which retain a
distinct material appearance to me.... Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed
a personification of my youth, not a human being: I felt to him in such
a variety of ways that it would have been impossible to have accosted
him rationally. In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine
connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose
the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least: for
what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I
cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the
flags? In every cloud, in every tree--filling the air at night, and
caught by glimpses in every object by day--I am devoured with her image!
The most ordinary faces of men and women--my own features--mock me with
a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda
that she did exist, and that I have lost her.'...

"'But what do you mean by a _change_, Mr. Heathcliff?' I said, alarmed
at his manner....

"'I shall not know till it comes,' he said, 'I'm only half conscious of
it now.'"

A few days pass. He grows more and more abstracted and detached. One
morning Nelly Dean finds him downstairs, risen late.

"I put a basin of coffee before him. He drew it nearer, and then rested
his arms on the table, and looked at the opposite wall, as I supposed,
surveying one particular portion, up and down, with glittering, restless
eyes, and with such eager interest that he stopped breathing during half
a minute together....

"'Mr. Heathcliff! master!' I cried, 'don't, for God's sake stare as if
you saw an unearthly vision.'

"'Don't, for God's sake, shout so loud,' he replied. 'Turn round, and
tell me, are we by ourselves?'

"'Of course,' was my answer, 'of course we are.'

"Still, I involuntarily obeyed him, as if I were not quite sure. With a
sweep of his hand he cleared a space in front of the breakfast-things,
and leant forward more at his ease.

"Now I perceived that he was not looking at the wall; for, when I
regarded him alone, it seemed exactly that he gazed at something within
two yards' distance. And, whatever it was, it communicated, apparently,
both pleasure and pain in exquisite extremes: at least the anguished,
yet raptured, expression of his countenance suggested that idea. The
fancied object was not fixed: either his eyes pursued it with unwearied
diligence, and, even in speaking to me, were never weaned away. I vainly
reminded him of his protracted abstinence from food: if he stirred to
touch anything in compliance with my entreaties, if he stretched his
hand out to get a piece of bread, his fingers clenched before they
reached it, and remained on the table, forgetful of their aim."

He cannot sleep; and at dawn of the next day he comes to the door of his
room--Cathy's room--and calls Nelly to him. She remonstrates with him
for his neglect of his body's health, and of his soul's.

"'Your cheeks are hollow, and your eyes bloodshot, like a person
starving with hunger, and going blind with loss of sleep.'

"'It is not my fault that I cannot eat or rest,' he said.... 'I'll do
both as soon as I possibly can ... as to repenting of my injustices,
I've done no injustice, and I repent of nothing. I am too happy; and yet
I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but does not
satisfy itself.'" ... "In the afternoon, while Joseph and Hareton were
at their work, he came into the kitchen again, and, with a wild look,
bid me come and sit in the house: he wanted somebody with him. I
declined; telling him plainly that his strange talk and manner
frightened me, and I had neither the nerve nor the will to be his
companion alone.

"'I believe you think me a fiend,' he said, with his dismal laugh:
'something too horrible to live under a decent roof.' Then, turning to
Catherine, who was there, and who drew behind me at his approach, he
added, half sneeringly: 'Will _you_ come, chuck? I'll not hurt you. No!
to you I've made myself worse than the devil. Well, there is _one_ who
won't shrink from my company! By God! she's relentless. Oh, damn it!
It's unutterably too much for flesh and blood to bear--even mine.'"

It is Heathcliff's susceptibility to this immaterial passion, the fury
with which he at once sustains and is consumed by it, that makes him
splendid.

Peace under green grass could never be the end of Heathcliff or of such
a tragedy as _Wuthering Heights_. Its real end is the tale told by the
shepherd whom Lockwood meets on the moor.

"'I was going to the Grange one evening--a dark evening, threatening
thunder--and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little
boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and I
supposed the lambs were skittish and would not be guided.

"'What is the matter, my little man?' I asked.

"'There's Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under t' Nab,' he blubbered,
'un' I darnut pass 'em.'"

It is there, the end, in one line, charged with the vibration of the
supernatural. One line that carries the suggestion of I know not what
ghostly and immaterial passion and its unearthly satisfaction.

       *       *       *       *       *

And this book stands alone, absolutely self-begotten and self-born. It
belongs to no school; it follows no tendency. You cannot put it into any
category. It is not "Realism", it is not "Romance", any more than _Jane
Eyre_: and if any other master's method, De Maupassant's or Turgeniev's,
is to be the test, it will not stand it. There is nothing in it you can
seize and name. You will not find in it support for any creed or theory.
The redemption of Catherine Linton and Hareton is thrown in by the way
in sheer opulence of imagination. It is not insisted on. Redemption is
not the keynote of _Wuthering Heights_. The moral problem never entered
into Emily Brontë's head. You may call her what you will--Pagan,
pantheist, transcendentalist mystic and worshipper of earth, she slips
from all your formulas. She reveals a point of view above good and evil.
Hers is an attitude of tolerance that is only not tenderness because her
acceptance of life and of all that lives is unqualified and unstinting.
It is too lucid and too high for pity.

Heathcliff and Catherine exist. They justify their existence by their
passion. But if you ask what is to be said for such a creature as Linton
Heathcliff, you will be told that he does not justify his existence; his
existence justifies him.

  Do I despise the timid deer,
  Because his limbs are fleet with fear?
  Or, would I mock the wolf's death-howl,
  Because his form is gaunt and foul?
  Or, hear with joy the lev'ret's cry,
  Because it cannot bravely die?
  No! Then above his memory
  Let Pity's heart as tender be.

After all it _is_ pity; it is tenderness.

And if Emily Brontë stands alone and is at her greatest in the things
that none but she can do, she is great also in some that she may be said
to share with other novelists; the drawing of minor characters, for
instance. Lockwood may be a little indistinct, but he is properly so,
for he is not a character, he is a mere impersonal looker-on. But Nelly
Dean, the chief teller of the story, preserves her rich individuality
through all the tortuous windings of the tale. Joseph, the old
farm-servant, the bitter, ranting Calvinist, is a masterpiece. And
masterly was that inspiration that made Joseph chorus to a drama that
moves above good and evil. "'Thank Hivin for all!'" says Joseph. "'All
warks togither for gooid, to them as is chozzen and piked out fro' the
rubbidge. Yah knaw whet t' Scripture sez.'" "'It's a blazing shame, that
I cannot oppen t' blessed Book, but yah set up them glories to Sattan,
and all t' flaysome wickednesses that iver were born into the warld.'"

Charlotte Brontë said of her sister: "Though her feeling for the people
round her was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor,
with very few exceptions, ever experienced ... she could hear of them
with interest and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and
accurate; but _with_ them she rarely exchanged a word." And yet you
might have said she had been listening to Joseph all her life, such is
her command of his copious utterance: "'Ech! ech!' exclaimed Joseph.
'Weel done, Miss Cathy! weel done, Miss Cathy! Howsiver, t' maister sall
just tum'le o'er them brocken pots; un' then we's hear summut; we's hear
how it's to be. Gooid-for-naught madling! ye desarve pining fro' this to
Churstmas, flinging t' precious gifts o' God under fooit i' yer flaysome
rages! But I'm mista'en if ye shew yer sperrit lang. Will Hathecliff
bide sich bonny ways, think ye? I nobbut wish he may catch ye i' that
plisky. I nobbut wish he may.'"

Edgar Linton is weak in drawing and in colour; but it was well-nigh
impossible to make him more alive beside Catherine and Heathcliff. If
Emily's hand fails in Edgar Linton it gains strength again in Isabella.
These two are the types of the civilized, the over-refined, the delicate
wearers of silk and velvet, dwellers in drawing-rooms with pure white
ceilings bordered with gold, "with showers of glass-drops hanging in
silver chains from the centre". They, as surely as the tainted Hindley,
are bound to perish in any struggle with strong, fierce, primeval flesh
and blood. The fatal moment in the tale is where the two half-savage
children, Catherine and Heathcliff, come to Thrushcross Grange.
Thrushcross Grange, with all its sickly brood, is doomed to go down
before Wuthering Heights. But Thrushcross Grange is fatal to Catherine
too. She has gone far from reality when she is dazzled by the glittering
glass-drops and the illusion of Thrushcross Grange. She has divorced her
body from her soul for a little finer living, for a polished, a
scrupulously clean, perfectly presentable husband.

Emily Brontë shows an unerring psychology in her handling of the
relations between Isabella and Catherine. It is Isabella's morbid
passion for Heathcliff that wakes the devil in Catherine. Isabella is a
sentimentalist, and she is convinced that Heathcliff would love her if
Catherine would "let him". She refuses to believe that Heathcliff is
what he is. But Catherine, who _is_ Heathcliff, can afford to accuse
him. "'Nelly,'" she says, "'help me to convince her of her madness. Tell
her what Heathcliff is.... He's not a rough diamond--a pearl-containing
oyster of a rustic; he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.'" But Isabella
will not believe it. "'Mr. Heathcliff is not a fiend,'" she says; "'he
has an honourable soul, and a true one, or how could he remember her?'"
It is the same insight that made George Meredith represent Juliana, the
sentimental passionist, as declaring her belief in Evan Harrington's
innocence while Rose Jocelyn, whose love is more spiritual and therefore
more profoundly loyal, doubts. Emily Brontë, like George Meredith, saw a
sensualist in every sentimentalist; and Isabella Linton was a little
animal under her silken skin. She is ready to go to her end _quand
même_, whatever Heathcliff is, but she tricks herself into believing
that he is what he is not, that her sensualism may justify itself to her
refinement. That is partly why Heathcliff, who is no sensualist, hates
and loathes Isabella and her body.

But there are moments when he also hates the body of Catherine that
betrayed her. Emily Brontë is unswerving in her drawing of Heathcliff.
It is of a piece with his strangeness, his unexpectedness, that he does
not hate Edgar Linton with anything like the same intensity of hatred
that he has for Isabella. And it is of a piece with his absolute fiery
cleanness that never for a moment does he think of taking the lover's
obvious revenge. For it is not, I imagine, that Emily Brontë
deliberately shirked the issue, or deliberately rejected it; it is that
that issue never entered her head. Nor do I see here, in his abandonment
of the obvious, any proof of the childlikeness and innocence of Emily,
however childlike and innocent she may have been. I see only a
tremendous artistic uprightness, the rejection, conscious or
unconscious, of an unfitting because extraneous element. Anne, who was
ten times more childlike and innocent than Emily, tackles this peculiar
obviousness unashamed, because she needed it. And because she did not
need it, Emily let it go.

The evil wrought by Heathcliff, like the passion that inspired and
tortured him, is an unearthly thing. Charlotte showed insight when she
said in her preface to _Wuthering Heights_: "Heathcliff betrays one
solitary human feeling, and that is _not_ his love for Catherine; which
is a sentiment fierce and inhuman ... the single link that connects
Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely confessed regard for Hareton
Earnshaw--the young man whom he has ruined; and then his half-implied
esteem for Nelly Dean." But that Heathcliff is wholly inhuman--"a ghoul,
an afreet"--I cannot really see. Emily's psychology here is perforce
half on the unearthly plane; it is above our criticism, lending itself
to no ordinary tests. But for all his unearthliness, Heathcliff is
poignantly human, from his childhood when he implored Nelly Dean to make
him "decent", for he is "going to be good", to his last hour of piteous
dependence on her. You are not allowed for a moment to forget, that,
horrible and vindictive as he is, the child Heathcliff is yet a child.
Take the scene where the boy first conceives his vengeance.

"On my inquiring the subject of his thoughts, he answered gravely:

"'I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don't care how
long I wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before
I do!'

"'For shame, Heathcliff!' said I. 'It is for God to punish wicked
people. We should learn to forgive.'

"'No, God won't have the satisfaction that I shall,' he returned. 'I
only wish I knew the best way! Let me alone, and I'll plan it out: while
I'm thinking of that I don't feel pain.'"

It is very like Heathcliff. It is also pathetically like a child.

In Hareton Earnshaw Emily Brontë is fairly on the earth all the time,
and nothing could be finer than her handling of this half-brutalized,
and wholly undeveloped thing, her showing of the slow dawn of his
feelings and intelligence. Her psychology is never psychologic. The
creature reveals himself at each moment of his unfolding for what he is.
It was difficult; for in his degradation he had a certain likeness in
unlikeness to the degraded Heathcliff. It was Heathcliff's indomitable
will that raised him. Hareton cannot rise without a woman's hand to help
him. The younger Catherine again was difficult, because of her likeness
to her mother. Her temper, her vanity, her headstrong trickiness are
Catherine Earnshaw. But Catherine Linton is a healthy animal, incapable
of superhuman passion, capable only (when properly chastened by
adversity) of quite ordinary pity and devotion. She inspires
bewilderment, but terror and fascination never; and never the glamour,
the magic evoked by the very name of Catherine Earnshaw. Her escapades
and fantasies, recalling Catherine Earnshaw, are all on an attenuated
scale.

Yet Catherine Earnshaw seems now and then a less solid figure. That is
because her strength does not lie in solidity at all. She is a thing of
flame and rushing wind. One half of her is akin to the storms of
Wuthering Heights, the other belongs to her unseen abiding-place. Both
sides of her are immortal.

And they are of that immortality which is the spirit of place--the
spirit that, more than all spirits, inspired Emily Brontë. Two of
Charlotte's books, _The Professor_ and _Villette_, might have been
written away from Haworth; Emily's owes much of its outward character to
the moors, where it was brought forth. Not even Charlotte could paint,
could suggest scenes like Emily Brontë. There is nobody to compare with
her but Thomas Hardy; and even he has to labour more, to put in more
strokes to achieve his effect. In four lines she gives the storm, the
cold and savage foreground, and the distance of the Heights: "One may
guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the
excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a
range of gaunt thorns, all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving
alms of the sun."

See the finish of this landscape, framed in a window: "They sat together
in a window whose lattice lay back against the wall, and displayed,
beyond the garden trees and the wild green park, the valley of
Gimmerton, with a long line of mist winding nearly to its top (for very
soon after you pass the chapel, as you may have noticed, the sough that
runs from the marshes joins a beck which follows the bend of the glen).
Wuthering Heights rose above this silvery vapour; but our old house was
invisible; it rather dips down on the other side."

In six lines she can paint sound, and distance, and scenery, and the
turn of the seasons, and the two magics of two atmospheres. "Gimmerton
chapel bells were still ringing; and the full, mellow flow of the beck
in the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet substitute for
the yet absent murmur of the summer foliage, which drowned that music
about the Grange when the trees were in leaf. At Wuthering Heights it
always sounded on quiet days following a great thaw or a season of
steady rain."

That music is the prelude to Heathcliff's return, and to the passionate
scene that ends in Catherine's death.

And nothing could be more vivid, more concrete, than Emily Brontë's
method. Time is marked as a shepherd on the moors might mark it, by the
movement of the sun, the moon, and the stars; by weather, and the
passage of the seasons. Passions, emotions, are always presented in
bodily symbols, by means of the bodily acts and violences they inspire.
The passing of the invisible is made known in the same manner. And the
visible world moves and shines and darkens with an absolute illusion of
reality. Here is a road seen between sunset and moonrise: "... all that
remained of day was a beamless amber light along the west: but I could
see every pebble on the path, and every blade of grass, by the light of
that splendid moon".

The book has faults, many and glaring faults. You have to read it many
times before you can realize in the mass its amazing qualities. For it
is probably the worst-constructed tale that ever was written, this story
of two houses and of three generations that the man Lockwood is supposed
to tell. Not only has Lockwood to tell of things he could not possibly
have heard and seen, but sometimes you get scene within vivid scene,
dialogue within dialogue, and tale within tale, four deep. Sometimes you
are carried back in a time and sometimes forward. You have to think hard
before you know for certain whose wife Catherine Heathcliff really is.
You cannot get over Lockwood's original mistake. And this poor device of
narrative at second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand, is used to convey
things incredible, inconceivable; all the secret, invisible drama of the
souls of Catherine and Heathcliff, as well as whole acts of the most
visible, the most tangible, the most direct and vivid and tumultuous
drama; drama so tumultuous, so vivid, and so direct, that by no
possibility could it have been conveyed by any medium. It simply
happens.

And that is how Emily Brontë's genius triumphs over all her faults. It
is not only that you forgive her faults and forget them, you are not--in
the third reading anyhow--aware of them. They disappear, they are
destroyed, they are burnt up in her flame, and you wonder how you ever
saw them. All her clumsy contrivances cannot stay her course, or obscure
her light, or quench her fire. Things happen before your eyes, and it
does not matter whether Lockwood, or Nelly Dean, or Heathcliff, or
Catherine, tells you of their happening.

And yet, though Lockwood and Nelly Dean are the thinnest, the most
transparent of pure mediums, they preserve their personalities
throughout. Nelly especially. The tale only begins to move when Lockwood
drops out and Nelly takes it up. At that point Emily Brontë's style
becomes assured in its directness and simplicity, and thenceforward it
never falters or changes its essential character.

And it is there, first of all, in that unfaltering, unchanging quality
of style that she stands so far above her sister. She has no purple
patches, no decorative effects. No dubiously shining rhetoric is hers.
She does not deal in metaphors or in those ponderous abstractions, those
dreadful second-hand symbolic figures--Hope, Imagination, Memory, and
the rest of them, that move with every appearance of solidity in
Charlotte's pages. There are no angels in her rainbows. Her "grand
style" goes unclothed, perfect in its naked strength, its naked beauty.
It is not possible to praise Charlotte's style without reservations; it
is not always possible to give passages that illustrate her qualities
without suppressing her defects. What was a pernicious habit with
Charlotte, her use of words like "peruse", "indite", "retain", with
Emily is a mere slip of the pen. There are only, I think, three of such
slips in _Wuthering Heights_. Charlotte was capable of mixing her worst
things with her best. She mixed them most in her dialogue, where sins of
style are sinfullest. It is not always possible to give a scene, word
for word, from Charlotte's novels; the dramatic illusion, the illusion
of reality, is best preserved by formidable cutting.

But not only was Emily's style sinless; it is on the whole purest, most
natural, and most inevitable in her dialogue; and that, although the
passions she conceived were so tremendous, so unearthly, that she might
have been pardoned if she found no human speech to render them.

What is more, her dramatic instinct never fails her as it fails
Charlotte over and over again. Charlotte had not always the mastery and
self-mastery that, having worked a situation up to its dramatic climax,
leaves it there. A certain obscure feeling for rightness guides her in
the large, striding movement of the drama; it is in the handling of the
scenes that she collapses. She wanders from climax to climax; she goes
back on her own trail; she ruins her best effects by repetition. She has
no continuous dramatic instinct; no sense whatever of dramatic form.

These are present somehow in _Wuthering Heights_, in spite of its
monstrous formlessness. Emily may have had no more sense of form for
form's sake than Charlotte; she may have had no more dramatic instinct;
but she had an instinct for the ways of human passion. She knew that
passion runs its course, from its excitement to its climax and
exhaustion. It has a natural beginning and a natural end. And so her
scenes of passion follow nature. She never goes back on her effect,
never urges passion past its climax, or stirs it in its exhaustion. In
this she is a greater "realist" than Charlotte.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is incredible that _Wuthering Heights_, or any line of it, any line
that Emily Brontë ever wrote, should have passed for Charlotte's. She
did things that Charlotte could never have done if she tried a thousand
years, things not only incomparably greater, but unique.

Yet in her lifetime she was unrecognized. What is true of her prose is
true also of her poems. They, indeed, did bring her a little praise,
obscure and momentary. No less she was unrecognized to such an extent
that _Wuthering Heights_ was said and believed to be an immature work of
Charlotte's. Even after her death, her eulogist, Sydney Dobell, was so
far from recognizing her, that he seems to have had a lingering doubt as
to Ellis Bell's identity until Charlotte convinced him of his error.

And only the other day a bold attempt was made to tear from Emily Brontë
the glory that she has won at last from time. The very latest theory,[A]
offered to the world as a marvellous discovery, the fruit of passionate
enthusiasm and research, is the old, old theory that Charlotte, and not
Emily, wrote _Wuthering Heights_. And Sydney Dobell, with his little
error, is made to serve as a witness. In order to make out a case for
Charlotte, the enthusiast and researcher is obliged to disparage every
other work of Emily's. He leans rashly enough on the assumption that her
"Gondal Chronicles" were, in their puerility, beneath contempt, still
more rashly on his own opinion that she was no poet.

[Footnote A: _The Key to the Brontë Works_, by J. Malham-Dembleby. See
Appendix I.]

If this were the only line he took, this amusing theorist might be left
alone. The publication of the _Complete Poems_ settles him. The value,
the really priceless value, of his undertaking is in the long array of
parallel passages from the prose of Charlotte and of Emily with which he
endeavours to support it. For, so far from supporting it, these columns
are the most convincing, the most direct and palpable refutation of his
theory. If any uncritical reader should desire to see for himself
wherein Charlotte and Emily Brontë differed; in what manner, with what
incompatible qualities and to what an immeasurable degree the younger
sister was pre-eminent, he cannot do better than study those parallel
passages. If ever there was a voice, a quality, an air absolutely apart
and distinct, not to be approached by, or confounded with any other, it
is Emily Brontë's.

It was the glare of Charlotte's fame that caused in her lifetime that
blindness and confusion. And Emily, between pride and a superb
indifference, suffered it. She withdrew, with what seemed an obstinate
perversity, into her own magnificent obscurity. She never raised a hand
to help herself. She left no record, not a note or a word to prove her
authorship of _Wuthering Heights_. Until the appearance in 1910 of her
_Complete Poems_ the world had no proof of it but Charlotte's statement.
It was considered enough, in Charlotte's lifetime. The world accepted
her disclaimer.

But the trouble began again after Charlotte's death. Emily herself had
no legend; but her genius was perpetually the prey of rumours that left
her personality untouched. Among the many provoked by Mrs. Gaskell's
_Life_, there was one attributing _Wuthering Heights_ to her brother
Branwell.[A] Mr. Francis Grundy said that Branwell told him he had
written _Wuthering Heights_. Mr. Leyland believed Mr. Grundy. He
believed that Branwell was a great poet and a great novelist, and he
wrote two solid volumes of his own in support of his belief.

[Footnote A: The curious will find a note on this point in Appendix II.]

Nobody believes in Mr. Grundy, or in Mr. Leyland and his belief in
Branwell now. All that can be said of Branwell, in understanding and
extenuation, is that he would have been a great poet and a greater
novelist if he could have had his own way.

This having of your own way, unconsciously, undeliberately, would seem
to be the supreme test of genius. Having your own way in the teeth of
circumstances, of fathers and of brothers, and of aunts, of
school-mistresses,[A] and of French professors, of the parish, of
poverty, of public opinion and hereditary disease; in the teeth of the
most disastrous of all hindrances, duty, not neglected, but fulfilled.
By this test the genius of Emily Brontë fairly flames; Charlotte's
stands beside it with a face hidden at times behind bruised and darkened
wings. By this test even Anne's pale talent shows here and there a
flicker as of fire. In all three the having of their own way was, after
all, the great submission, the ultimate obedience to destiny.

[Footnote A: It was Miss Wooler who taught Charlotte to "peruse".]

For genius like theirs _is_ destiny. And that brings us back to the
eternal question of the Sources. "Experience" will not account for what
was greatest in Charlotte. It will hardly account for what was least in
Emily. With her only the secret, the innermost experience counted. If
the sources of _Wuthering Heights_ are in the "Gondal Poems", the
sources of the poems are in _that_ experience, in the long life of her
adventurous spirit. Her genius, like Henry Angora and Rosina and the
rest of them, flew from the "Palaces of Instruction". As she _was_ Henry
Angora, so she _was_ Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.

It is a case of "The Horse I rode at the battle of Zamorna", that is
all.

There has been too much talk about experience. What the critic, the
impressionist, of the Brontës needs is to recover, before all things,
the innocence of the eye. No doubt we all of us had it once, and can
remember more or less what it was like. To those who have lost it I
would say: Go back and read again Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte
Brontë_.

Years and years ago, when I was a child, hunting forlornly in my
father's bookshelves, I came upon a small, shabby volume, bound in
yellow linen. The title-page was adorned with one bad wood-cut that
showed a grim, plain house standing obliquely to a churchyard packed
with tombstones--tombstones upright and flat, and slanting at all
angles. In the foreground was a haycock, where the grave grass had been
mown. I do not know how the artist, whose resources were of the
slenderest, contrived to get his overwhelming but fascinating effect of
moorland solitude, of black-grey nakedness and abiding gloom. But he
certainly got it and gave it. There was one other picture, representing
a memorial tablet.

Tombstones always fascinated me in those days, because I was mortally
afraid of them; and I opened that book and read it through.

I could not, in fact, put it down. For the first time I was in the grip
of a reality more poignant than any that I had yet known, of a tragedy
that I could hardly bear. I suppose I have read that book a score of
times since then. There are pages in it that I shrink from approaching
even now, because of the agony of realization they revive. The passing
bell tolled continually in the prelude; it sounded at intervals
throughout; it tolled again at the close. The refrain of "Here lie the
Remains" haunted me like a dolorous song. It seemed to me a decorous and
stately accompaniment to such a tale, and that wood-cut on the
title-page a fitting ornament. I knew every corner of that house. I have
an impression (it is probably a wrong one) of a flagged path going right
down from the Parsonage door through another door and plunging among the
tombs. I saw six little white and wistful faces looking out of an upper
window; I saw six little children going up and up a lane, and I wondered
how the tiny feet of babies ever got so far. I saw six little Brontë
babies lost in the spaces of the illimitable moors. They went over
rough stones and walls and mountain torrents; their absurd petticoats
were blown upwards by the wind, and their feet were tangled in the
heather. They struggled and struggled, and yet were in an ecstasy that I
could well understand.

I remember I lingered somewhat long over the schooldays at Cowan Bridge
and that I found the Brussels period dull; M. Héger struck me as a
tiresome pedant, and I wondered how Charlotte could ever have put up
with him. There was a great deal about Branwell that I could not
understand at all, and so forgot. And I skipped all the London part, and
Charlotte's literary letters. I had a very vague idea of Charlotte apart
from Haworth and the moors, from the Parsonage and the tombstones, from
Tabby and Martha and the little black cat that died, from the garden
where she picked the currants, and the quiet rooms where she wrote her
wonderful, wonderful books.

But, for all that skipping and forgetting, there stood out a vivid and
ineffaceable idea of Emily; Emily who was tall and strong and
unconquerable; Emily who loved animals, and loved the moors; Emily and
Keeper, that marvellous dog; Emily kneading bread with her book propped
before her; Emily who was Ellis Bell, listening contemptuously to the
reviews of _Wuthering Heights_; Emily stitching at the long seam with
dying fingers; and Emily dead, carried down the long, flagged path, with
Keeper following in the mourners' train.

And, all through, an invisible, intangible presence, something
mysterious, but omnipotently alive; something that excited these three
sisters; something that atoned, that not only consoled for suffering and
solitude and bereavement, but that drew its strength from these things;
something that moved in this book like the soul of it; something that
they called "genius".

Now that, as truly as I can set it down, is the impression conveyed to a
child's mind by Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte Brontë_. And making
some deductions for a child's morbid attraction to tombstones, and a
child's natural interest in children, it seems to me even now that this
innocent impression is the true one. It eliminates the inessential and
preserves the proportions; above all, it preserves the figure of Emily
Brontë, solitary and unique.

Anyhow, I have never been able to get away from it.

_September_ 1911.




APPENDIX I

THE KEY TO THE BRONTË WORKS


More than once Mr. Malham-Dembleby has approached us with his mysterious
"Key". There was his "Key to _Jane Eyre_", published in the _Saturday
Review_ in 1902; there was his "Lifting of the Brontë Veil", published
in the _Fortnightly Review_ in 1907; and there was the correspondence
that followed. Now he has gathered all his evidence together into one
formidable book, and we are faced with what he calls his "miraculous and
sensational" discovery that it was Charlotte and not Emily Brontë who
wrote _Wuthering Heights_, and that in _Wuthering Heights_ she
immortalized the great tragic passion of her life, inspired by M. Héger,
who, if you please, is Heathcliff.

This is Mr. Malham-Dembleby's most important contribution to the
subject. M. Héger, Mr. Malham-Dembleby declares, was Heathcliff before
he was M. Pelet, or Rochester, or M. Paul. And as it was Charlotte and
not Emily who experienced passion, Charlotte alone was able to
immortalize it.

So much Mr. Malham-Dembleby assumes in the interests of psychology. But
it is not from crude psychological arguments that he forges his
tremendous Key. It is from the internal evidence of the works, supported
by much "sensational" matter from the outside.

By way of internal evidence then, we have first the sensational
discovery of a work, _Gleanings in Craven, or The Tourists' Guide_, by
"one Frederic Montagu", published at Skipton-in-Craven in 1838, which
work the author of _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_ must have read
and drawn upon for many things, names (including her own pseudonym of
Currer Bell), descriptions of scenery, local legends, as of that fairy
Jannet, Queen of the Malhamdale Elves, who haunted the sources of the
Aire and suggested Rochester's Queen of Elves, his fairy, Janet Eyre.
Parallel passages are given showing a certain correspondence between
Montagu's traveller's tale and the opening scene of _Wuthering Heights_.
Montagu goes on horseback to a solitary house, like Lockwood, and, like
Lockwood, is shown to bed, dreams, and is awakened by a white-faced
apparition (his hostess, not his host), who holds a lighted candle, like
Heathcliff, and whose features, like Heathcliff's, are convulsed with
diabolical rage, and so on. Mr. Malham-Dembleby, in a third parallel
column, uses the same phrases to describe Jane Eyre's arrival at
Rochester's house, her dreams, and the appearance of Rochester's mad
wife at her bedside; his contention being that the two scenes are
written by the same hand.

All this is very curious and interesting; so far, however, Mr.
Malham-Dembleby's sensational evidence does no more for us than suggest
that Charlotte and Emily may very likely have read Montagu's book.

But the plot thickens. Mr. Malham-Dembleby first prints parallel
passages from Montagu's book and _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_,
then, extensively, scene after scene from _Jane Eyre_ and _Wuthering
Heights_.

Some of these coincidences seem on the first blush of it remarkable, for
instance, the child-phantom which appears both to Jane Eyre and to Nelly
Dean in _Wuthering Heights_; or the rainy day and the fireside scene,
which occur in the third chapter of _Wuthering Heights_ and the opening
chapter of _Jane Eyre_. Others again, such as the parallel between the
return of Heathcliff to Catherine and that of Jane to Rochester, will
not bear examination for a moment. Of this and most of Mr.
Malham-Dembleby's parallels it may be said that they only maintain their
startling character by the process of tearing words from their
sentences, sentences from their contexts, contexts from their scenes,
and scenes from the living body of each book. Apparently to Mr.
Malham-Dembleby, a book, at any rate a Brontë book, is not a living
body; each is a box of German bricks, and he takes all the boxes and
tumbles them out on the floor together and rearranges them so as to show
that, after all, there was only one box of bricks in the family, and
that was Charlotte's. Much of his argument and the force of his parallel
passages depends on the identification of the characters in the Brontë
works, not only with their assumed originals, but with each other. For
Mr. Malham-Dembleby's purposes poor M. Héger, a model already
remorselessly overworked by Charlotte, has to sit, not only for M.
Pelet, for Rochester and Yorke Hunsden, for Robert and for Louis Moore,
but for Heathcliff, and, if you would believe it, for Hareton Earnshaw;
because (parallel passage!) the younger Catherine and Hareton Earnshaw
were teacher and pupil, and so (when she taught him English) were
Charlotte and M. Héger.

Mr. Malham-Dembleby's work of identification is made easier for him by
his subsidiary discovery of Charlotte's two methods, Method I,
interchange of the sex; Method II, alteration of the age of her
characters. With this licence almost any character may be any other.
Thus Hareton Earnshaw looking at Catherine is Jane Eyre looking at Mr.
Rochester. When he touches her Nelly Dean says, "He might have stuck a
knife into her, she started in such a taking"; and Rochester says to
Jane, "You stick a sly penknife under my ear" (parallel passage!).
Lockwood at Wuthering Heights is Jane Eyre at Thornton Hall; Heathcliff
appearing at Lockwood's bedside, besides being M. Héger and Rochester,
is Rochester's mad wife. Heathcliff returning to Catherine is Jane
returning to Rochester, and so on. But however varied, however
apparently discriminated the characters, M. Héger is in all the men, and
Charlotte is in all the women, in the two Catherines, in Jane Eyre and
Frances Henri; in Caroline Helstone, in Pauline Bassompierre, and Lucy
Snowe.

Now there is a certain plausibility in this. With all their vividness
and individuality Charlotte Brontë's characters have a way of shading
off into each other. Jane has much in common with Frances and with Lucy,
and Lucy with Pauline. Her men incline rather to one type, that of the
masterful, arbitrary, instructive male; that is the type she likes best
to draw. Yorke Hunsden in _The Professor_ splits up into Rochester and
Robert Moore and Mr. Yorke; and there is a certain amount of Paul
Emanuel in all of them. But life gives us our types very much that way,
and there is a bit of somebody else in everybody. It is easy to suggest
identity by exaggerating small points of resemblance and suppressing
large and essential differences (which is what Mr. Malham-Dembleby does
all the time). But take each whole living man and woman as they have
been created for us, I don't care if Catherine Earnshaw and Jane Eyre
_did_ each have a fit of passion in a locked room, and if a servant
waited upon each with gruel; there is no earthly likeness between the
soul of Catherine and the soul of Jane. I don't care if there was
"hell-light" in Rochester's eyes and Heathcliff's too, if they both
swore by the "Deuce", and had both swarthy complexions like Paul
Emanuel; for there is a whole universe between Heathcliff and Rochester,
between Rochester and M. Paul. Beside Heathcliff, that Titan raging on a
mountain-top, M. Paul is merely a little man gesticulating on an
_estrade_.

So much for the identifications. Mr. Malham-Dembleby has been tempted to
force them thus, because they support his theory of M. Héger and of the
great tragic passion, as his theory, by a vicious circle, supports his
identifications. His procedure is to quote all the emotional passages he
can lay his hands on, from the _Poems_, from _Wuthering Heights_, from
_Jane Eyre_, from _Villette_ and _The Professor_, "... all her life's
hope was torn by the roots out of her own riven and outraged heart..."
(_Villette_) "... faith was blighted, confidence destroyed..." (_Jane
Eyre_) ... "Mr. Rochester" (M. Héger, we are informed in confidential
brackets) was not "what she had thought him". Assuring us that
Charlotte was here describing her own emotions, he builds his argument.
"Evidence" (the evidence of these passages) "shows it was in her dark
season when Charlotte Brontë wrote _Wuthering Heights_, and that she
portrayed M. Héger therein with all the vindictiveness of a woman with
'a riven, outraged heart', the wounds in which yet rankled sorely." So
that, key in hand, for "that ghoul Heathcliff!" we must read "that ghoul
Héger". We must believe that _Wuthering Heights_ was written in pure
vindictiveness, and that Charlotte Brontë repudiated its authorship for
three reasons: because it contained "too humiliating a story" of her
"heart-thrall"; because of her subsequent remorse (proof, the modified
animus of her portrait of M. Héger as Rochester and as M. Paul), and for
certain sound business considerations. So much for internal evidence.

Not that Mr. Malham-Dembleby relies on it altogether. He draws largely
upon legend and conjecture, and on more "sensational discoveries" of his
own. He certainly succeeds in proving that legend and conjecture in
Brussels began at a very early date. Naturally enough it fairly flared
after the publication of _Jane Eyre_. So far there is nothing new in his
discoveries. But he does provide a thrill when he unearths Eugène Sue's
extinct novel of _Miss Mary, ou l'Institutrice_, and gives us parallel
passages from that. For in _Miss Mary_, published in 1850-51[A] we have,
not only character for character and scene for scene, "lifted" bodily
from _Jane Eyre_, but the situation in _The Professor_ and _Villette_ is
largely anticipated. We are told that Eugène Sue was in Brussels in
1844, the year in which Charlotte left the Pensionnat. This is
interesting. But what does it prove? Not, I think, what Mr.
Malham-Dembleby maintains--that M. Héger made indiscreet revelations to
Eugène Sue, but that Eugène Sue was an unscrupulous plagiarist who took
his own where he found it, either in the pages of _Jane Eyre_ or in the
tittle-tattle of a Brussels salon. However indiscreet M. Héger may have
been, he was a man of proved gravity and honour. He would, at any rate,
have drawn the line at frivolous treachery. Nobody, however, can answer
for what Madame Héger and her friends may not have said. Which disposes
of Eugène Sue.

[Footnote A: Serially in the _London Journal_ in 1850; in volume form in
Paris, 1851. It is possible, but not likely, that Eugène Sue may have
seen the manuscript of _The Professor_ when it was "going the round".]

Then there is that other "sensational discovery" of the Héger portrait,
that little drawing (now in the National Portrait Gallery) of Charlotte
Brontë in curls, wearing a green gown, and reading _Shirley_. It is
signed Paul Héger, 1850, the year of _Shirley's_ publication, and the
year in which Charlotte sat to Richmond for her portrait. There are two
inscriptions on the back: "The Wearin' of the Green; First since Emily's
death"; and below: "This drawing is by P. Héger, done from life in
1850." The handwriting gives no clue.

Mr. Malham-Dembleby attaches immense importance to this green gown,
which he "identifies" with the pink one worn by Lucy in _Villette_. He
says that Lady Ritchie told him that Charlotte wore a green gown at the
dinner-party Thackeray gave for her in June, 1850; and when the green
gown turns out after all to be a white one with a green pattern on it,
it is all one to Mr. Malham-Dembleby. So much for the green gown. Still,
gown or no gown, the portrait _may_ be genuine. Mr. Malham-Dembleby says
that it is drawn on the same paper as that used in Mr. George Smith's
house, where Charlotte was staying in June 1850, and he argues that
Charlotte and M. Héger met in London that year, and that he then drew
this portrait of her from the life. True, the portrait is a very
creditable performance for an amateur; true, M. Héger's children
maintained that their father did not draw, and there is no earthly
evidence that he did; true, we have nothing but one person's report of
another person's (a collector's) statement that he had obtained the
portrait from the Héger family, a statement at variance with the
evidence of the Héger family itself. But granted that the children of M.
Héger were mistaken as to their father's gift, and that he did draw this
portrait of Charlotte Brontë from Charlotte herself in London in 1850,
I cannot see that it matters a straw or helps us to the assumption of
the great tragic passion which is the main support of Mr.
Malham-Dembleby's amazing fabrication.




APPENDIX II


Leyland's theory is that Branwell Brontë wrote the first seventeen
chapters of _Wuthering Heights_. It has very little beyond Leyland's
passionate conviction to support it. There is a passage in a letter of
Branwell's to Leyland, the sculptor, written in 1845, where he says he
is writing a three-volume novel of which the first volume is completed.
He compares it with "Hamlet" and with "Lear". There is also Branwell's
alleged statement to Mr. Grundy. And there is an obscure legend of
manuscripts produced from Branwell's hat, before the eyes of Mr. Grundy,
in an inn-parlour. Leyland argues freely from the antecedent probability
suggested by Branwell's letters and his verse, which he published by way
of vindication. He could hardly have done Branwell a worse service.
Branwell's letters give us a vivid idea of the sort of manuscripts that
would be produced, in inn-parlours, from his hat. As for his verse--that
formless, fluent gush of sentimentalism--it might have passed as an
error of his youth, but for poor Leyland's comments on its majesty and
beauty. There are corpses in it and tombstones, and girls dying of
tuberculosis, obscured beyond recognition in a mush of verbiage. There
is not a live line in it. One sonnet only, out of Branwell's many
sonnets, is fitted to survive. It has a certain melancholy, sentimental
grace. But it is not a good sonnet, and it shows Branwell at his best.
At his worst he sinks far below Charlotte at her worst, and, compared
with Emily or with Charlotte at her best, Branwell is nowhere. Even Anne
beats him. Her sad, virginal restraint gives a certain form and value
to her colourless and slender gift.