CHAPTER XIV.

'WUTHERING HEIGHTS:' ITS ORIGIN.

A grey old Parsonage standing among graves, remote from the world on its

wind-beaten hill-top, all round the neighbouring summits wild with

moors; a lonely place among half-dead ash-trees and stunted thorns, the

world cut off on one side by the still ranks of the serried dead, and

distanced on the other by mile-long stretches of heath: such, we know,

was Emily Bronte's home.

An old, blind, disillusioned father, once prone to an extraordinary

violence of temper, but now grown quiet with age, showing his

disappointment with life by a melancholy cynicism that was quite

sincere; two sisters, both beloved, one, fired with genius and quick to

sentiment, hiding her enthusiasm under the cold demeanour of the

ex-governess, unsuccessful, and unrecognised; the other gentler, dearer,

fairer, slowly dying, inch by inch, of the blighting neighbourhood of

vice. One brother, scarce less dear, of set purpose drinking himself to

death out of furious thwarted passion for a mistress that he might not

marry: these were the members of Emily Bronte's household.

Herself we know: inexperienced, courageous, passionate, and full of

pity. Was it wonderful that she summed up life in one bitter line?--

"Conquered good and conquering ill."

Her own circumstances proved the axiom true, and of other lives she had

but little knowledge. Whom should she ask? The gentle Ellen who seemed

of another world, and yet had plentiful troubles of her own? The curates

she despised for their narrow priggishness? The people in the village of

whom she knew nothing save when sickness, wrong, or death summoned her

to their homes to give help and protection? Her life had given only one

view of the world, and she could not realise that there were others

which she had not seen.

"I am bound to avow," says Charlotte, "that she had scarcely more

practical knowledge of the peasantry among whom she lived than a nun has

of the country people that pass her convent gates. My sister's

disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favoured and

fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church, or to take a

walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. Though her

feeling for the people round her was benevolent, intercourse with them

she never sought, nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced; and

yet she knew them, knew their ways, their language, their family

histories; she could hear of them with interest and talk of them with

detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but with them she rarely

exchanged a word. Hence it ensued that what her mind had gathered of the

real concerning them was too exclusively confined to those tragic and

terrible traits of which, in listening to the secret annals of every

rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress.

Her imagination, which was a spirit more sombre than sunny, more

powerful than sportive, found in such traits materials whence it wrought

creations like Heathcliff, like Earnshaw, like Catharine. Having formed

these beings she did not know what she had done. If the auditors of her

work, when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of

natures so relentless and implacable--of spirits so lost and fallen; if

it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful

scenes banished sleep by night and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis

Bell would wonder what was meant and suspect the complainant of

affectation. Had she but lived, her mind would of itself have grown like

a strong tree--loftier and straighter, wider spreading--and its matured

fruits would have attained a mellower ripening and sunnier bloom; but on

that mind time and experience alone could work, to the influence of

other intellects it was not amenable."[26]

Yet no human being is wholly free, none wholly independent, of

surroundings. And Emily Bronte least of all could claim such immunity.

We can with difficulty just imagine her a prosperous heiress, loving and

loved, high-spirited and even hoydenish; but with her cavalier fantasy

informed by a gracious splendour all her own, we can just imagine Emily

Bronte as Shirley Keeldar, but scarcely Shirley Keeldar writing

'Wuthering Heights.' Emily Bronte away from her moors, her loneliness,

her poverty, her discipline, her companionship with genius, violence and

degradation, would have taken another colour, as hydrangeas grow now

red, now blue, according to the nature of the soil. It was not her lack

of knowledge of the world that made the novel she wrote become

'Wuthering Heights,' not her inexperience, but rather her experience,

limited and perverse, indeed, and specialised by a most singular

temperament, yet close and very real. Her imagination was as much

inspired by the circumstances of her life, as was Anne's when she wrote

the 'Tenant of Wildfell Hall,' or Charlotte's in her masterpiece

'Villette;' but, as in each case the imagination was of a different

quality, experience, acting upon it, produced a distinct and dissimilar

result; a result obtained no less by the contrariety than by the harmony

of circumstance. For our surroundings affect us in two ways; subtly and

permanently, tinging us through and through as wine tinges water, or, by

some violent neighbourhood of antipathetic force, sending us off at a

tangent as far as possible from the antagonistic presence that so

detestably environs us. The fact that Charlotte Bronte knew chiefly

clergymen is largely responsible for 'Shirley,' that satirical eulogy of

the Church and apotheosis of Sunday-school teachers. But Emily, living

in this same clerical evangelistic atmosphere, is revolted, forced to

the other extreme; and, while sheltering her true opinions from herself

under the all-embracing term "Broad Church," we find in her writings no

belief so strong as the belief in the present use and glory of life; no

love so great as her love for earth--earth the mother and grave; no

assertion of immortality, but a deep certainty of rest. There is no note

so often struck in all her work, and struck with such variety of

emphasis, as this: that good for goodness' sake is desirable, evil for

evil's sake detestable, and that for the just and the unjust alike there

is rest in the grave.

This quiet clergyman's daughter, always hearing evil of Dissenters, has

therefore from pure courage and revolted justice become a dissenter

herself. A dissenter in more ways than one. Never was a nature more

sensitive to the stupidities and narrowness of conventional opinion, a

nature more likely to be found in the ranks of the opposition; and with

such a nature indignation is the force that most often looses the gate

of speech. The impulse to reveal wrongs and sufferings as they really

are, is overwhelmingly strong; although the revelation itself be

imperfect. What, then, would this inexperienced Yorkshire parson's

daughter reveal? The unlikeness of life to the authorised pictures of

life; the force of evil, only conquerable by the slow-revolving process

of nature which admits not the eternal duration of the perverse; the

grim and fearful lessons of heredity; the sufficiency of the finite to

the finite, of life to life, with no other reward than the conduct of

life fulfils to him that lives; the all-penetrating kinship of living

things, heather-sprig, singing lark, confident child, relentless tyrant;

and, not least, not least to her already in its shadow, the sure and

universal peace of death.

A strange evangel from such a preacher; but a faith evermore emphasised

and deeper rooted in Emily's mind by her incapacity to acquiesce in the

stiff, pragmatic teaching, the narrow prejudice, of the Calvinists of

Haworth. Yet this very Calvinism influenced her ideas, this doctrine she

so passionately rejected, calling herself a disciple of the tolerant and

thoughtful Frederick Maurice, and writing, in defiance of its flames and

shriekings, the most soothing consolations to mortality that I remember

in our tongue.

Nevertheless, so dual-natured is the force of environment, this

antagonistic faith, repelling her to the extreme rebound of belief, did

not send her out from it before she had assimilated some of its sternest

tenets. From this doctrine of reward and punishment she learned that for

every unchecked evil tendency there is a fearful expiation; though she

placed it not indeed in the flames of hell, but in the perverted

instincts of our own children. Terrible theories of doomed incurable sin

and predestined loss warned her that an evil stock will only beget

contamination: the children of the mad must be liable to madness; the

children of the depraved, bent towards depravity; the seed of the

poison-plant springs up to blast and ruin, only to be overcome by

uprooting and sterilisation, or by the judicious grafting, the patient

training of many years.

Thus prejudiced and evangelical Haworth had prepared the woman who

rejected its Hebraic dogma, to find out for herself the underlying

truths. She accepted them in their full significance. It has been laid

as a blame to her that she nowhere shows any proper abhorrence of the

fiendish and vindictive Heathcliff. She who reveals him remembers the

dubious parentage of that forsaken seaport baby, "Lascar or Gipsy;" she

remembers the Ishmaelitish childhood, too much loved and hated, of the

little interloper whose hand was against every man's hand. Remembering

this, she submits as patiently to his swarthy soul and savage instincts

as to his swarthy skin and "gibberish that nobody could understand."

From thistles you gather no grapes.

No use, she seems to be saying, in waiting for the children of evil

parents to grow, of their own will and unassisted, straight and noble.

The very quality of their will is as inherited as their eyes and hair.

Heathcliff is no fiend or goblin; the untrained doomed child of some

half-savage sailor's holiday, violent and treacherous. And how far shall

we hold the sinner responsible for a nature which is itself the

punishment of some forefather's crime. Even for such there must be rest.

No possibility in the just and reverent mind of Emily Bronte that the

God whom she believed to be the very fount and soul of life could

condemn to everlasting fire the victims of morbid tendencies not chosen

by themselves. No purgatory, and no everlasting flame, is needed to

purify the sins of Heathcliff; his grave on the hillside will grow as

green as any other spot of grass, moor-sheep will find the grass as

sweet, heath and harebells will grow of the same colour on it as over a

baby's grave. For life and sin and punishment end with death to the

dying man; he slips his burden then on to other shoulders, and no

visions mar his rest.

"I wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the

sleepers in that quiet earth." So ends the last page of 'Wuthering

Heights.'

So much for the theories of life and evil that the clash of circumstance

and character struck out from Emily Bronte. It happened, as we know,

that she had occasion to test these theories; and but for that she could

never have written 'Wuthering Heights.' Not that the story, the

conception, would have failed. After all there is nothing more appalling

in the violent history of that upland farm than many a midland manor set

thick in elms, many a wild country-house of Wales or Cornwall could

unfold. Stories more socially painful than the mere brute violence of

the Earnshaws; of madness and treachery, stories of girls entrapped

unwillingly into a lunatic marriage that the estate might have an heir;

legends of fearful violence, of outcast children, dishonoured wives,

horrible and persistent evil. Who, in the secret places of his memory,

stores not up such haunting gossip? And Emily, familiar with all the

wild stories of Haworth for a century back, and nursed on grisly Irish

horrors, tales of 1798, tales of oppression and misery, Emily, with all

this eerie lore at her finger-ends, would have the less difficulty in

combining and working the separate motives into a consistent whole, that

she did not know the real people whose histories she knew by heart. No

memory of individual manner, dominance or preference for an individual

type, caught and disarranged her theories, her conception being the

completer from her ignorance. This much her strong reason and her

creative power enabled her to effect. But this is not all.

This is the plot; but to make a character speak, act, rave, love, live,

die, through a whole lifetime of events, even as the readers feel

convinced he must have acted, must have lived and died, this demands at

least so much experience of a somewhat similar nature as may serve for a

base to one's imagination, a reserve of certainty and reassurance on

which to draw in times of perplexity and doubt. Branwell, who sat to

Anne sorrily enough for the portrait of Henry Huntingdon, served his

sister Emily, not indeed as a model, a thing to copy, but as a chart of

proportions by which to measure, and to which to refer, for correct

investiture, the inspired idea. Mr. Wemyss Reid (whose great knowledge

of the Bronte history and still greater kindness in admitting me to his

advantages as much as might be, I cannot sufficiently acknowledge)--this

capable critic perceives a _bona fide_ resemblance between the character

of Heathcliff and the character of Branwell Bronte as he appeared to his

sister Emily. So much, bearing in mind the verse concerning the leveret,

I own I cannot see. Branwell seems to me more nearly akin to

Heathcliff's miserable son than to Heathcliff. But that, in depicting

Heathcliff's outrageous thwarted love for Catharine, Emily did draw upon

her experience of her brother's suffering, this extract from an

unpublished lecture of Mr. Reid's will sufficiently reveal[27]:--

"It was in the enforced companionship of this lost and

degraded man that Emily received, I am sure, many of the

impressions which were subsequently conveyed to the pages

of her book. Has it not been said over and over again by

critics of every kind that 'Wuthering Heights' reads like

the dream of an opium-eater? And here we find that during

the whole time of the writing of the book an habitual and

avowed opium-eater was at Emily's elbow. I said that perhaps

the most striking part of 'Wuthering Heights' was that which

deals with the relations of Heathcliff and Catharine after

she had become the wife of another. Whole pages of the story

are filled with the ravings and ragings of the villain

against the man whose life stands between him and the woman

he loves. Similar ravings are to be found in all the letters

of Branwell Bronte written at this period of his career; and

we may be sure that similar ravings were always on his lips

as, moody and more than half mad, he wandered about the

rooms of the parsonage at Haworth. Nay, I have found some

striking verbal coincidences between Branwell's own language

and passages in 'Wuthering Heights.' In one of his own

letters there are these words in reference to the object of

his passion: 'My own life without her will be hell. What can

the so-called love of her wretched sickly husband be to her

compared with mine?' Now, turn to 'Wuthering Heights' and

you will read these words: 'Two words would comprehend my

future--death and hell; existence after losing her would be

hell. Yet I was a fool to fancy for a moment that she valued

Edgar Linton's attachment more than mine. If he loved with

all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love in eighty

years as much as I could in a day.'"

So much share in 'Wuthering Heights' Branwell certainly had. He was a

page of the book in which his sister studied; he served, as to an

artist's temperament all things unconsciously serve, for the rough block

of granite out of which the work is hewn, and, even while with

difficulty enduring his vices, Emily undoubtedly learned from them those

darker secrets of humanity necessary to her tragic incantation. They

served her, those dreaded, passionate outbreaks of her brother's, even

as the moors she loved, the fancy she courted, served her. Strange

divining wand of genius, that conjures gold out of the miriest earth of

common life; strange and terrible faculty laying up its stores and

half-mechanically drawing its own profit out of our slightest or most

miserable experiences, noting the gesture with which the mother hears of

her son's ruin, catching the faint varying shadow that the white

wind-shaken window-blind sends over the dead face by which we watch,

drawing its life from a thousand deaths, humiliations, losses, with a

hand in our sharpest joys and bitterest sorrows; this faculty was Emily

Bronte's, and drew its profit from her brother's shame.

Here ended Branwell's share in producing 'Wuthering Heights.' But it is

not well to ignore his claim to its entire authorship; for in the

contemptuous silence of those who know their falsity, such slanders live

and thrive like unclean insects under fallen stones. The vain boast of

an unprincipled dreamer, half-mad with opium, half-drunk with gin,

meaning nothing but the desire to be admired at any cost, has been given

too much prominence by those lovers of sensation who prefer any

startling lie to an old truth. Their ranks have been increased by the

number of those who, ignorant of the true circumstances of Emily's life,

found it impossible that an inexperienced girl could portray so much

violence and such morbid passion. On the contrary, given these

circumstances, none but a personally inexperienced girl could have

treated the subject with the absolute and sexless purity which we find

in 'Wuthering Heights.' How _infecte_, commonplace, and ignominious

would Branwell, relying on his own recollections, have made the thwarted

passion of a violent adventurer for a woman whose sickly husband both

despise! That purity as of polished steel, as cold and harder than ice,

that freedom in dealing with love and hate, as audacious as an infant's

love for the bright flame of fire, could only belong to one whose

intensity of genius was rivalled by the narrowness of her experience--an

experience limited not only by circumstances, but by a nature impervious

to any fierier sentiment than the natural love of home and her own

people, beginning before remembrance and as unconscious as breathing.

The critic, having Emily's poems and the few remaining verses and

letters of Branwell, cannot doubt the incapacity of that unnerved and

garrulous prodigal to produce a work of art so sustained, passionate,

and remote. For in no respect does the terse, fiery, imaginative style

of Emily resemble the weak, disconnected, now vulgar, now pretty

mannerisms of Branwell. There is, indeed, scant evidence that the writer

of Emily's poems could produce 'Wuthering Heights;' but there is, at any

rate, the impossibility that her work could be void of fire,

concentration, and wild fancy. As great an impossibility as that

vulgarity and tawdriness should not obtrude their ugly heads here and

there from under Branwell's finest phrases. And since there is no single

vulgar, trite, or Micawber-like effusion throughout 'Wuthering Heights;'

and since Heathcliff's passion is never once treated in the despicable

would-be worldly fashion in which Branwell describes his own sensations,

and since at the time that 'Wuthering Heights' was written he was

manifestly, and by his own confession, too physically prostrate for any

literary effort, we may conclude that Branwell did not write the book.

On the other side we have not only the literary evidence of the similar

qualities in 'Wuthering Heights' and in the poems of Ellis Bell, but the

express and reiterated assurance of Charlotte Bronte, who never even

dreamed, it would seem, that it could be supposed her brother wrote the

book; the testimony of the publishers who made their treaty with Ellis

Bell; of the servant Martha who saw her mistress writing it; and--most

convincing of all to those who have appreciated the character of Emily

Bronte--the impossibility that a spirit so upright and so careless of

fame should commit a miserable fraud to obtain it.

Indeed, so baseless is this despicable rumour that to attack it seems

absurd, only sometimes it is wise to risk an absurdity. Puny insects,

left too long unhurt, may turn out dangerous enemies irretrievably

damaging the fertile vine on which they fastened in the security of

their minuteness.

To the three favouring circumstances of Emily's masterpiece, which we

have already mentioned--the neighbourhood of her home, the character of

her disposition, the quality of her experience--a fourth must be added,

inferior in degree, and yet not absolutely unimportant. This is her

acquaintance with German literature, and especially with Hoffmann's

tales. In Emily Bronte's day, Romance and Germany had one significance;

it is true that in London and in prose the German influence was dying

out, but in distant Haworth, and in the writings of such poets as Emily

would read, in Scott, in Southey, most of all in Coleridge, with whose

poems her own have so distinct an affinity, it is still predominant. Of

the materialistic influence of Italy, of atheist Shelley, Byron with

his audacity and realism, sensuous Keats, she would have little

experience in her remote parsonage. And, had she known them, they would

probably have made no impression on a nature only susceptible to kindred

influences. Thackeray, her sister's hero, might have never lived for all

the trace of him we find in Emily's writings; never is there any single

allusion in her work to the most eventful period of her life, that sight

of the lusher fields and taller elms of middle England; that glimpse of

hurrying vast London; that night on the river, the sun slipping behind

the masts, doubly large through the mist and smoke in which the houses,

bridges, ships are all spectral and dim. No hint of this, nor of the

sea, nor of Belgium, with its quaint foreign life; nor yet of that

French style and method so carefully impressed upon her by Monsieur

Heger, and which so decidedly moulded her elder sister's art. But in the

midst of her business at Haworth we catch a glimpse of her reading her

German book at night, as she sits on the hearthrug with her arm round

Keeper's neck; glancing at it in the kitchen, where she is making bread,

with the volume of her choice propped up before her; and by the style of

the novel jotted down in the rough, almost simultaneously with her

reading, we know that to her the study of German was not--like French

and music--the mere necessary acquirement of a governess, but an

influence that entered her mind and helped to shape the fashion of her

thoughts.

So much preface is necessary to explain, not the genius of Emily Bronte,

but the conditions of that genius--there is no use saying more. The aim

of my writing has been missed if the circumstances of her career are not

present in the mind of my reader. It is too late at this point to do

more than enumerate them, and briefly point to their significance. Such

criticism, in face of the living work, is all too much like glancing in

a green and beautiful country at a map, from which one may, indeed,

ascertain the roads that lead to it and away, and the size of the place

in relation to surrounding districts, but which can give no recognisable

likeness of the scene which lies all round us, with its fresh life

forgotten and its beauty disregarded. Therefore let us make an end of

theory and turn to the book on which our heroine's fame is stationed,

fronting eternity. It may be that in unravelling its story and noticing

the manner in which its facts of character and circumstance impressed

her mind, we may, for a moment, be admitted to a more thorough and

clearer insight into its working than we could earn by the completest

study of external evidence, the most earnest and sympathising

criticism.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 26: 'Memoir.' Charlotte Bronte.]

[Footnote 27: 'Emily Bronte.' T. Wemyss Reid.]