CHAPTER XVI.

'SHIRLEY.'

While 'Wuthering Heights' was still in the reviewer's hands, Emily

Bronte's more fortunate sister was busy on another novel. This book has

never attained the steady success of her masterpiece, 'Villette,'

neither did it meet with the _furor_ which greeted the first appearance

of 'Jane Eyre.' It is, indeed, inferior to either work; a very quiet

study of Yorkshire life, almost pettifogging in its interest in

ecclesiastical squabbles, almost absurd in the feminine inadequacy of

its heroes. And yet 'Shirley' has a grace and beauty of its own. This it

derives from the charm of its heroines--Caroline Helstone, a lovely

portrait in character of Charlotte's dearest friend, and Shirley

herself, a fancy likeness of Emily Bronte.

Emily Bronte, but under very different conditions. No longer poor, no

longer thwarted, no longer acquainted with misery and menaced by

untimely death; not thus, but as a loving sister would fain have seen

her, beautiful, triumphant, the spoiled child of happy fortune. Yet in

these altered circumstances Shirley keeps her likeness to Charlotte's

hardworking sister; the disguise, haply baffling those who, like Mrs.

Gaskell, "have not a pleasant impression of Emily Bronte," is very

easily penetrated by those who love her. Under the pathetic finery so

lovingly bestowed, under the borrowed splendours of a thousand a year,

a lovely face, an ancestral manor-house, we recognise our hardy and

headstrong heroine, and smile a little sadly at the inefficiency of this

masquerade of grandeur, so indifferent and unnecessary to her. We

recognise Charlotte's sister; but not the author of 'Wuthering Heights.'

Through these years we discern the brilliant heiress to be a person of

infinitely inferior importance to the ill-dressed and overworked Vicar's

daughter. Imperial Shirley, no need to wave your majestic wand, we have

bowed to it long ago unblinded; and all its illusive splendours are not

so potent as that worn-down goose-quill which you used to wield in the

busy kitchen of your father's parsonage.

Yet without that admirable portrait we should have scant warrant for our

conception of Emily Bronte's character. Her work is singularly

impersonal. You gather from it that she loved the moors, that from her

youth up the burden of a tragic fancy had lain hard upon her; that she

had seen the face of sorrow close, meeting that Medusa-glance with rigid

and defiant fortitude. So much we learn; but this is very little--a

one-sided truth and therefore scarcely a truth at all.

Charlotte's portrait gives us another view, and fortunately there are

still a few alive of the not numerous friends of Emily Bronte. Every

trait, every reminiscence paints in darker, clearer lines, the

impression of character which 'Shirley' leaves upon us. Shirley is

indeed the exterior Emily, the Emily that was to be met and known

thirty-five years ago, only a little polished, with the angles a little

smoothed, by a sister's anxious care. The nobler Emily,

deeply-suffering, brooding, pitying, creating, is only to be found in a

stray word here and there, a chance memory, a happy answer, gathered

from the pages of her work, and the loving remembrance of her friends;

but these remnants are so direct, unusual, personal, and characteristic,

this outline is of so decided a type, that it affects us more distinctly

than many stippled and varnished portraits do.

But to know how Emily Bronte looked, moved, sat and spoke, we still

return to 'Shirley.' A host of corroborating memories start up in

turning the pages. Who but Emily was always accompanied by a "rather

large, strong, and fierce-looking dog, very ugly, being of a breed

between a mastiff and a bulldog?" it is familiar to us as Una's lion; we

do not need to be told, Currer Bell, that she always sat on the

hearthrug of nights, with her hand on his head, reading a book; we

remember well how necessary it was to secure him as an ally in winning

her affection. Has not a dear friend informed us that she first obtained

Emily's heart by meeting, without apparent fear or shrinking, Keeper's

huge springs of demonstrative welcome?

Certainly "Captain Keeldar," with her cavalier airs, her ready disdain,

her love of independence, does bring back with vivid brilliance the

memory of our old acquaintance, "the Major." We recognise that pallid

slimness, masking an elastic strength which seems impenetrable to

fatigue--and we sigh, recalling a passage in Anne's letters, recording

how, when rheumatism, coughs, and influenza made an hospital of Haworth

Vicarage during the visitations of the dread east wind, Emily alone

looked on and wondered why anyone should be ill--"she considers it a

very uninteresting wind; it does not affect her nervous system." We know

her, too, by her kindness to her inferiors. A hundred little stories

throng our minds. Unforgotten delicacies made with her own hands for her

servant's friend, yet-remembered visits of Martha's little cousin to the

kitchen, where Miss Emily would bring in her own chair for the ailing

girl; anecdotes of her early rising through many years to do the hardest

work, because the first servant was too old, and the second too young to

get up so soon; and she, Emily, was so strong. A hundred little

sacrifices, dearer to remembrance than Shirley's open purse, awaken in

our hearts and remind us that, after all, Emily was the nobler and more

lovable heroine of the twain.

How characteristic, too, the touch that makes her scornful of all that

is dominant, dogmatic, avowedly masculine in the men of her

acquaintance; and gentleness itself to the poetic Philip Nunnely, the

gay, boyish Mr. Sweeting, the sentimental Louis, the lame, devoted

boy-cousin who loves her in pathetic canine fashion. That courage, too,

was hers. Not only Shirley's flesh, but Emily's, felt the tearing fangs

of the mad dog to whom she had charitably offered food and water; not

only Shirley's flesh, but hers, shrank from the light scarlet, glowing

tip of the Italian iron with which she straightway cauterised the wound,

going quickly into the laundry and operating on herself without a word

to any one.

Emily, also, singlehanded and unarmed, punished her great bulldog for

his household misdemeanours, in defiance of an express warning not to

strike the brute, lest his uncertain temper should rouse him to fly at

the striker's throat. And it was she who fomented his bruises. This

prowess and tenderness of Shirley's is an old story to us.

And Shirley's love of picturesque and splendid raiment is not without an

echo in our memories. It was Emily who, shopping in Bradford with

Charlotte and her friend, chose a white stuff patterned with lilac

thunder and lightning, to the scarcely concealed horror of her more

sober companions. And she looked well in it; a tall, lithe creature,

with a grace half-queenly, half-untamed in her sudden, supple movements,

wearing with picturesque negligence her ample purple-splashed skirts;

her face clear and pale; her very dark and plenteous brown hair fastened

up behind with a Spanish comb; her large grey-hazel eyes, now full of

indolent, indulgent humour, now glimmering with hidden meanings, now

quickened into flame by a flash of indignation, "a red ray piercing the

dew."

She, too, had Shirley's taste for the management of business. We

remember Charlotte's disquiet when Emily insisted on investing Miss

Branwell's legacies in York and Midland Railway shares. "She managed, in

a most handsome and able manner for me when I was in Brussels, and

prevented by distance from looking after our interests, therefore I will

let her manage still and take the consequences. Disinterested and

energetic she certainly is; and, if she be not quite so tractable or

open to conviction as I could wish, I must remember perfection is not

the lot of humanity, and, as long as we can regard those whom we love,

and to whom we are closely allied, with profound and never-shaken

esteem, it is a small thing that they should vex us occasionally by what

appear to us headstrong and unreasonable notions."[28]

So speaks the kind elder sister, the author of 'Shirley.' But there are

some who will never love either type or portrait. Sydney Dobell spoke a

bitter half-truth when, ignorant of Shirley's real identity, he

declared: "We have only to imagine Shirley Keeldar poor to imagine her

repulsive." The silenced pride, the thwarted generosity, the unspoken

power, the contained passion of such a nature are not qualities which

touch the world when it finds them in an obscure and homely woman. Even

now, very many will not love a heroine so independent of their esteem.

They will resent the frank imperiousness, caring not to please, the

unyielding strength, the absence of trivial submissive tendernesses, for

which she makes amends by such large humane and generous compassion. "In

Emily's nature," says her sister, "the extremes of vigour and simplicity

seemed to meet. Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial taste and

an unpretending outside, lay a power and fire that might have informed

the brain and kindled the veins of a hero; but she had no worldly

wisdom--her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life--she

would fail to defend her most manifest rights, to consult her legitimate

advantage. An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the

world. Her will was not very flexible and it generally opposed her

interest. Her temper was magnanimous, but warm and sudden; her spirit

altogether unbending."[29]

So speaks Emily's inspired interpreter, whose genius has not made her

sister popular. 'Shirley' is not a favourite with a modern public. Emily

Bronte was born out of date. Athene, leading the nymphs in their

headlong chase down the rocky spurs of Olympus, and stopping in full

career to lift in her arms the weanlings, tender as dew, or the

chance-hurt cubs of the mountain, might have chosen her as her

hunt-fellow. Or Brunhilda, the strong Valkyr, dreading the love of man,

whose delight is battle and the wild summits of hills, forfeiting her

immortality to shield the helpless and the weak; she would have

recognised the kinship of this last-born sister. But we moderns care not

for these. Our heroines are Juliet, Desdemona and Imogen, our examples

Dorothea Brooke and Laura Pendennis, women whose charm is a certain

fragrance of affection. 'Shirley' is too independent for our taste; and,

for the rest, we are all in love with Caroline Helstone.

Disinterested, headstrong, noble Emily Bronte, at this time, while your

magical sister was weaving for you, with golden words, a web of fate as

fortunate as dreams, the true Norns were spinning a paler shrouding

garment. You were never to see the brightest things in life. Sisterly

love, free solitude, unpraised creation, were to remain your most

poignant joys. No touch of love, no hint of fame, no hours of ease, lie

for you across the knees of Fate. Neither rose nor laurel will be shed

on your coffined form. Meanwhile, your sister writes and dreams for

Shirley. Terrible difference between ideas and truth; wonderful magic of

the unreal to take their sting from the veritable wounds we endure!

Neither rose nor laurel will we lay reverently for remembrance over the

tomb where you sleep; but the flower that was always your own, the wild,

dry heather. You, who were, in your sister's phrase, "moorish, wild and

knotty as a root of heath," you grew to your own perfection on the waste

where no laurel rustles its polished leaves, where no sweet, fragile

rose ever opened in the heart of June. The storm and the winter

darkness, the virgin earth, the blasting winds of March, would have

slain them utterly; but all these served to make the heather light and

strong, to flush its bells with a ruddier purple, to fill its cells with

honey more pungently sweet. The cold wind and wild earth make the

heather; it would not grow in the sheltered meadows. And you, had you

known the fate that love would have chosen, you too would not have

thrived in your full bloom. Another happy, prosperous north-country

matron would be dead. But now you live, still singing of freedom, the

undying soul of courage and loneliness, another voice in the wind,

another glory on the mountain-tops, Emily Bronte, the author of

'Wuthering Heights.'

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 28: Mrs. Gaskell.]

[Footnote 29: 'Biographical Notice.' C. Bronte.]