CHAPTER XVIII.

Emily's Death 223

FINIS! 233

* * * * *

LIST OF AUTHORITIES.

1846-56. The Works of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

1857. Life of Charlotte Bronte. _Mrs. Gaskell. 1st and 2nd Editions._

1877. Charlotte Bronte. _T. Wemyss Reid._

1877. Note on Charlotte Bronte. _A. C. Swinburne._

1881. Three Great Englishwomen. _P. Bayne._

MS. Lecture on Emily Bronte. _T. Wemyss Reid._

MS. Notes on Emily and Charlotte Bronte. _Miss Ellen Nussey._

MS. Letters of Charlotte and Branwell Bronte.

1879. Reminiscences of the Brontes. _Miss E. Nussey._

1870. Unpublished Letters of Charlotte, Emily,

and Anne Bronte. _Hours at Home._

1846. Emily Bronte's Annotated Copy of her Poems.

1872. Branwell Bronte: in the "Mirror." _G. S. Phillips._

1879. Pictures of the Past. _F. H. Grundy._

1830. Prospectus of the Clergymen's Daughters' School

at Cowan's Bridge.

1850. Preface to Wuthering Heights. _Charlotte Bronte._

1850. Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell. _Charlotte Bronte._

1850. Wuthering Heights: in the "Palladium." _Sydney Dobell._

Personal Reminiscences of Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Ratcliffe, Mrs. Brown,

and Mr. William Wood, of Haworth.

1811-18. Poems of Patrick Bronte, B.A., Incumbent of Haworth.

1879. Haworth: Past and Present. _J. Horsfall Turner._

* * * * *

EMILY BRONTE.

INTRODUCTION.

There are, perhaps, few tests of excellence so sure as the popular

verdict on a work of art a hundred years after its accomplishment. So

much time must be allowed for the swing and rebound of taste, for the

despoiling of tawdry splendours and to permit the work of art itself to

form a public capable of appreciating it. Such marvellous fragments

reach us of Elizabethan praises; and we cannot help recalling the number

of copies of 'Prometheus Unbound' sold in the lifetime of the poet. We

know too well "what porridge had John Keats," and remember with

misgiving the turtle to which we treated Hobbs and Nobbs at dinner, and

how complacently we watched them put on their laurels afterwards.

Let us, then, by all means distrust our own and the public estimation of

all heroes dead within a hundred years. Let us, in laying claim to an

infallible verdict, remember how oddly our decisions sound at the other

side of Time's whispering gallery. Shall we therefore pronounce only on

Chaucer and Shakespeare, on Gower and our learned Ben? Alas! we are too

sure of their relative merits; we stake our reputations with no qualms,

no battle-ardours. These we reserve to them for whom the future is not

yet secure, for whom a timely word may still be spoken, for whom we yet

may feel that lancing out of enthusiasm only possible when the cast of

fate is still unknown, and, as we fight, we fancy that the glory of our

hero is in our hands.

But very gradually the victory is gained. A taste is unconsciously

formed for the qualities necessary to the next development of

art--qualities which Blake in his garret, Millet without the sou, set

down in immortal work. At last, when the time is ripe, some connoisseur

sees the picture, blows the dust from the book, and straightway blazons

his discovery. Mr. Swinburne, so to speak, blew the dust from 'Wuthering

Heights'; and now it keeps its proper rank in the shelf where Coleridge

and Webster, Hofmann and Leopardi have their place. Until then, a few

brave lines of welcome from Sydney Dobell, one fine verse of Mr.

Arnold's, one notice from Mr. Reid, was all the praise that had been

given to the book by those in authority. Here and there a mill-girl in

the West Riding factories read and re-read the tattered copy from the

lending library; here and there some eager, unsatisfied, passionate

child came upon the book and loved it, in spite of chiding, finding in

it an imagination that satisfied, and a storm that cleared the air; or

some strong-fibred heart felt without a shudder the justice of that

stern vision of inevitable, inherited ruin following the chance-found

child of foreign sailor and seaport mother. But these readers were not

many; even yet the book is not popular.

For, in truth, the qualities that distinguish Emily Bronte are not those

which are of the first necessity to a novelist. She is without

experience; her range of character is narrow and local; she has no

atmosphere of broad humanity like George Eliot; she has not Jane

Austen's happy gift of making us love in a book what we have overlooked

in life; we do not recognise in her the human truth and passion, the

never-failing serene bitterness of humour, that have made for Charlotte

Bronte a place between Cervantes and Victor Hugo.

Emily Bronte is of a different class. Her imagination is narrower, but

more intense; she sees less, but what she sees is absolutely present: no

writer has described the moors, the wind, the skies, with her passionate

fidelity, but this is all of Nature that she describes. Her narrow

fervid nature accounted as simple annoyance the trivial scenes and

personages touched with immortal sympathy and humour in 'Villette' and

'Shirley'; Paul Emanuel himself appeared to her only as a pedantic and

exacting taskmaster; but, on the other hand, to a certain class of mind,

there is nothing in fiction so moving as the spectacle of Heathcliff

dying of joy--an unnatural, unreal joy--his panther nature paralysed,

_aneanti_, in a delirium of visionary bliss.

Only an imagination of the rarest power could conceive such a

denouement, requiting a life of black ingratitude by no mere common

horrors, no vulgar Bedlam frenzy; but by the torturing apprehension of a

happiness never quite grasped, always just beyond the verge of

realisation. Only an imagination of the finest and rarest touch,

absolutely certain of tread on that path of a single hair which alone

connects this world with the land of dreams. Few have trod that perilous

bridge with the fearlessness of Emily Bronte: that is her own ground and

there she wins our highest praise; but place her on the earth, ask her

to interpret for us the common lives of the surrounding people, she can

give no answer. The swift and certain spirit moves with the clumsy

hesitating gait of a bird accustomed to soar.

She tells us what she saw; and what she saw and what she was incapable

of seeing are equally characteristic. All the wildness of that moorland,

all the secrets of those lonely farms, all the capabilities of the one

tragedy of passion and weakness that touched her solitary life, she

divined and appropriated; but not the life of the village at her feet,

not the bustle of the mills, the riots, the sudden alternations of

wealth and poverty; not the incessant rivalry of church and chapel; and

while the West Riding has known the prototype of nearly every person and

nearly every place in 'Jane Eyre' and 'Shirley,' not a single character

in 'Wuthering Heights' ever climbed the hills round Haworth.

Say that two foreigners have passed through Staffordshire, leaving us

their reports of what they have seen. The first, going by day, will tell

us of the hideous blackness of the country; but yet more, no doubt, of

that awful, patient struggle of man with fire and darkness, of the grim

courage of those unknown lives; and he would see what they toil for,

women with little children in their arms; and he would notice the blue

sky beyond the smoke, doubly precious for such horrible environment. But

the second traveller has journeyed through the night; neither squalor

nor ugliness, neither sky nor children, has he seen, only a vast stretch

of blackness shot through with flaming fires, or here and there burned

to a dull red by heated furnaces; and before these, strange toilers,

half naked, scarcely human, and red in the leaping flicker and gleam of

the fire. The meaning of their work he could not see, but a fearful and

impressive phantasmagoria of flame and blackness and fiery energies at

work in the encompassing night.

So differently did the black country of this world appear to Charlotte,

clear-seeing and compassionate, and to Emily Bronte, a traveller through

the shadows. Each faithfully recorded what she saw, and the place was

the same, but how unlike the vision! The spectacles of temperament

colour the world very differently for each beholder; and, to understand

the vision, we too should for a moment look through the seer's glass. To

gain some such transient glance, to gain and give some such momentary

insight into the character of Emily Bronte, has been the aim I have

tried to make in this book. That I have not fulfilled my desire is

perhaps inevitable--the task has been left too long. If I have done

anything at all I feel that much of the reward is due to my many and

generous helpers. Foremost among them I must thank Dr. Ingham, my kind

host at Haworth, Mrs. Wood, Mr. William Wood, Mrs. Brown, and Mrs.

Ratcliffe of that parish--all of whom had known the now perished family

of Bronte; and my thanks are due no less to Mr. T. Wemyss Reid, as will

be seen further on, to Mr. J. H. Ingram, and to Mr. Biddell, who have

collected much valuable information for my benefit; and most of all do I

owe gratitude and thankfulness to Miss Ellen Nussey, without whose

generous help my work must have remained most ignorant and astray. To

her, had it been worthier, had it been all the subject merits, and yet

without those shadows of gloom and trouble enjoined by the nature of the

story; to her, could I only have spoken of the high noble character of

Emily Bronte and not of the great trials of her life, I should have

ventured to dedicate this study. But to Emily's friend I only offer

what, through her, I have learned of Emily; she, who knew so little of

Branwell's shames and sorrow is unconcerned with this, their sad and

necessary record. Only the lights and sunshine of my work I dedicate to

her. It may be that I have given too great a share to the shadows, to

the manifold follies and failures of Branwell Bronte. Yet in Emily

Bronte's life the shaping influences were so few, and the sins of this

beloved and erring brother had so large a share in determining the bent

of her genius, that to have passed them by would have been to ignore the

shock which turned the fantasy of the 'Poems' into the tragedy of

'Wuthering Heights.' It would have been to leave untold the patience,

the courage, the unselfishness which perfected Emily Bronte's heroic

character; and to have left her burdened with the calumny of having

chosen to invent the crimes and violence of her _dramatis personae_. Not

so, alas! They were but reflected from the passion and sorrow that

darkened her home; it was no perverse fancy which drove that pure and

innocent girl into ceaseless brooding on the conquering force of sin and

the supremacy of injustice.

She brooded over the problem night and day; she took its difficulties

passionately to heart; in the midst of her troubled thoughts she wrote

'Wuthering Heights.' From the clear spirit which inspires the end of her

work, we know that the storm is over; we know that her next tragedy

would be less violent. But we shall never see it; for--and it is by this

that most of us remember her--suddenly and silently she died.

She died, before a single word of worthy praise had reached her. She

died with her work misunderstood and neglected. And yet not unhappy. For

her home on the moors was very dear to her, the least and homeliest

duties pleasant; she loved her sisters with devoted friendship, and she

had many little happinesses in her patient, cheerful, unselfish life.

Would that I could show her as she was!--not the austere and violent

poetess who, cuckoo-fashion, has usurped her place; but brave to fate

and timid of man; stern to herself, forbearing to all weak and erring

things; silent, yet sometimes sparkling with happy sallies. For to

represent her as she was would be her noblest and most fitting

monument.