Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (549 page)

‘My dear Sir,

‘I am going to write a scrawl, for the querulous egotism of which I must entreat your mercy; but, when I look
upon
my past, present, and future, and then
into
my own self, I find much, however unpleasant, that yearns for utterance.

‘This last week an honest and kindly friend has warned me that concealed hopes about one lady should be given up, let the effort to do so cost what it may. He is the —
 
— , and was commanded by —
 
— , M.P. for —
 
— , to return me, unopened, a letter which I addressed to —
 
— , and which the Lady was not permitted to see. She too, surrounded by powerful persons who hate me like Hell, has sunk into religious melancholy, believes that her weight of sorrow is God’s punishment, and hopelessly resigns herself to her doom. God only knows what it does cost, and will, hereafter, cost me, to tear from my heart and remembrance the thousand recollections that rush upon me at the thought of four years gone by. Like ideas of sunlight to a man who has lost his sight, they must be bright phantoms not to be realized again.

‘I had reason to hope that ere very long I should be the husband of a Lady whom I loved best in the world, and with whom, in more than competence, I might live at leisure to try to make myself a name in the world of posterity, without being pestered by the small but countless botherments, which, like mosquitoes, sting us in the world of work-day toil. That hope and herself are
gone
—
she
to wither into patiently pining decline, —
it
to make room for drudgery, falling on one now ill-fitted to bear it. That ill-fittedness rises from causes which I should find myself able partially to overcome, had I bodily strength; but, with the want of that, and with the presence of daily lacerated nerves, the task is not easy. I have been, in truth, too much petted through life, and, in my last situation, I was so much master, and gave myself so much up to enjoyment, that now, when the cloud of ill-health and adversity has come upon me, it will be a disheartening job to work myself up again, through a new life’s battle, from the position of five years ago, to that from which I have been compelled to retreat with heavy loss and no gain. My army stands now where it did then, but mourning the slaughter of Youth, Health, Hope, and both mental and physical elasticity.

‘The last two losses are, indeed, important to one who once built his hopes of rising in the world on the possession of them. Noble writings, works of art, music, or poetry, now, instead of rousing my imagination, cause a whirlwind of blighting sorrow that sweeps over my mind with unspeakable dreariness; and, if I sit down and try to write, all ideas that used to come, clothed in sunlight, now press round me in funereal black; for really every pleasurable excitement that I used to know has changed to insipidity or pain.

‘I shall never be able to realize the too sanguine hopes of my friends, for at twenty-nine I am a thoroughly
old man
, mentally and bodily — far more, indeed, than I am willing to express. God knows I do not scribble like a poetaster when I quote Byron’s terribly truthful words —

‘“No more — no more — oh! never more on me

The freshness of the heart shall fall like dew,

Which, out of all the lovely things we see,

Extracts emotions beautiful and new!”

‘I used to think that if I could have, for a week, the free range of the British Museum — the library included — I could feel as though I were placed for seven days in Paradise; but now, really, dear sir, my eyes would rest upon the Elgin marbles, the Egyptian saloon, and the most treasured columns, like the eyes of a dead cod-fish.

‘My rude, rough acquaintances here ascribe my unhappiness solely to causes produced by my sometimes irregular life, because they have known no other pains than those resulting from excess or want of ready cash. They do not know that I would rather want a shirt than want a springy mind, and that my total want of happiness, were I to step into York Minster now, would be far, far worse than their want of a hundred pounds when they might happen to need it; and that, if a dozen glasses, or a bottle of wine, drives off their cares, such cures only make me outwardly passable in company, but
never
drive off mine.

‘I know only that it is time for me to be something, when I am nothing, that my father cannot have long to live, and that, when he dies, my evening, which is already twilight, will become night; that I shall then have a constitution still so strong that it will keep me years in torture and despair, when I should every hour pray that I might die.

‘I know that I am avoiding, while I write, one greatest cause of my utter despair; but, by G —
 
— , sir, it is nearly too bitter for me to allude to it!’ Here follow a number of references to the subject, with which the reader is already familiar, and therefore it is unnecessary to repeat them here. Then Branwell continues:

‘To no one living have I said what I now say to you, and I should not bother yourself with my incoherent account, did I not believe that you would be able to understand somewhat of what I meant — though
not all
, sir; for he who is without hope, and knows that his clock is at twelve at night, cannot communicate his feelings to one who finds
his
at twelve at noon.’

CHAPTER X.

BRANWELL BRONTË AND ‘WUTHERING HEIGHTS.’

‘Wuthering Heights’ — Reception of the Book by the Public — It is Misunderstood — Its Authorship — Mr. Dearden’s Account — Statements of Mr. Edward Sloane and Mr. Grundy — Remarks by Mr. T. Wemyss Reid — Correspondences between ‘Wuthering Heights’ and Branwell’s Letters — The ‘Carving-knife Episode’ — Further Correspondences — Resemblances of Thought in Branwell and Emily.

We have now become acquainted with the principal features of Branwell’s career, have obtained some insight into his character, and learned much respecting his genius. We have gained also some knowledge of the history of the Brontë sisters in that most crucial period of their lives, when they returned again to literature with the new earnest which led them to fame.

We have seen that it was Branwell who first seriously undertook the production of a novel, and we have noticed Mr. Grundy’s statement concerning the authorship of ‘Wuthering Heights.’ Here, then, is the proper place in which to say something on this question; for there have not been wanting others also to assert that Branwell was, in great part, the writer of it. Miss Robinson, in her ‘Emily Brontë,’ dismisses the assertion as altogether untrue; but she rightly says, as all will agree, that ‘in the contemptuous silence of those who know their falsity, such slanders live and thrive like unclean insects under fallen stones.’ It cannot, therefore, be inappropriate, in such a work as the present, to record, as clearly and succinctly as may be, what has been said on the subject, and to make a suggestion — for it is nothing more — as to what is the truth of the matter.

When ‘Wuthering Heights,’ after its slow progress through the press, was given to the world in the December of 1847, neither the critics nor the public were very well able to grasp its meaning. Reviewers, to quote Charlotte Brontë, ‘too often remind us of the mob of Astrologers, Chaldeans, and Soothsayers gathered before the “writing on the wall,” and unable to read the characters or make known the interpretation.’ In ‘Wuthering Heights’ they found the subject disagreeable, the characters brutal, the conception crude, and the object of the work wholly unintelligible. The most that could be made of it, was that some rude soul in the north of England, burning with spite against his species, had set himself, with intent little short of diabolical, to lay open the most vicious depths of selfishness and crime, which he had embodied in the actions of characters so lost and revolting, that the mind recoiled with a shudder from the perusal of the monstrosity he had created. One critic, who dwelt at some length on the want of ‘tone’ and polish in the book, surmised that the writer of it had suffered, ‘not disappointment in love, but some great mortification of pride,’ which had so embittered his spirit that he had prepared this stinging story in vengeance on his species, and had flung it, crying, ‘There, take that!’ with cynical pleasure, in the very teeth of humankind.

This writer even felt it his duty to caution young people against the book. ‘It ought to be banished from refined society,’ he says. ‘The whole tone of the book smacks of lowness.’ — ‘A person may be ill-mannered from want of delicacy of perception or cultivation, or ill-mannered intentionally; the author of “Wuthering Heights” is both.’ — ‘But the taint of vulgarity in our author extends deeper than mere snobbishness; he is rude, because he prefers to be so.’ I quote these remarks, as an extreme instance, to show that a critic, who could recognize the great imaginative power, the subtlety, the keen insight, and the fine dramatic character of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ yet felt such a strong repugnance to its unknown author that he thought him unfit to associate with his fellow-men. It never crossed the minds of the critics in those times that the book could be by any but a man of strong personal character, and one with a wide experience of the dark side of human nature.

However, a feeling speedily grew up that ‘Wuthering Heights’ was an earlier and immature production, attempted to be palmed off upon the public, of the author of ‘Jane Eyre,’ against whom a charge of bad faith was thereby virtually made; and even Sydney Dobell (in the ‘Palladium’ of September, 1850), the first critic who had sympathy enough with genius to discern the nature and comprehend the significance of the book, did not escape this error. It is not necessary here to repeat the unfortunate consequences of this misunderstanding, which caused Charlotte eventually to throw off the disguise, and declare openly that ‘Wuthering Heights’ was the work of her sister Emily. ‘Unjust and grievous error!’ says Charlotte. ‘We laughed at it at first, but I deeply lament it now.’ In the face of her statement, further remark on the authorship was naturally silenced; but, from time to time, when the book was discussed, much astonishment was manifested that a simple and inexperienced girl, like Emily Brontë, had been able to draw, with such nervous and morbid analysis, so sombre a picture of the workings of passions which she could never have actually known, and of natures ‘so relentless and implacable, of spirits so lost and fallen,’ as those of Heathcliff and Hindley Earnshaw.

A writer in the ‘Cornhill Magazine’
  
who attributes to Emily Brontë the distinction that she has written a book ‘which stands as completely alone in the language as does “Paradise Lost,” or the “Pilgrim’s Progress,”‘ thus speaks of it: ‘Its power,’ he says, ‘is absolutely Titanic; from the first page to the last it reads like the intellectual throes of a giant. It is fearful, it is true, and perhaps one of the most unpleasant books ever written: but we stand in amaze at the almost incredible fact that it was written by a slim country girl, who would have passed in a crowd as an insignificant person, and who had had little or no experience of the ways of the world. In Heathcliff, Emily Brontë has drawn the greatest villain extant, after Iago. He has no match out of Shakespeare. The Mephistopheles of Goethe’s “Faust” is a person of gentlemanly proclivities compared with Heathcliff…. But “Wuthering Heights” is a marvellous curiosity in literature. We challenge the world to produce another work in which the whole atmosphere seems so surcharged with suppressed electricity, and bound in with the blackness of tempest and desolation.’

Perhaps this same grim and Titanic power of ‘Wuthering Heights’ is one reason why many readers do not understand it fully. ‘It is possible,’ Mr. Swinburne says, ‘that, to take full delight in Emily Brontë’s book, one must have something by natural inheritance of her instinct, and something by earlier association of her love of the special points of earth — the same lights, and sounds, and colours, and odours, and sights, and shapes of the same fierce, free landscape of tenantless, and fruitless, and fenceless moor.’

But the composition of ‘Wuthering Heights’ was in great part incomprehensible to Charlotte herself, though she endeavours to account for it by a consideration of her sister’s character and circumstances. For, as we have seen, she says, ‘I am bound to avow that she had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived, than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates.’

‘“Wuthering Heights,”‘ to quote Charlotte Brontë’s Preface to the new edition of it, ‘was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur — power. He wrought with a rude chisel, from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot.’

Many years ago, a writer in the ‘People’s Magazine,’ speaking of the authorship of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ said: ‘Who would suppose that Heathcliff, a man who never swerved from his arrow-straight course to perdition from his cradle to his grave, … had been conceived by a timid and retiring female? But this was the case.’ The perusal of this sentence led Mr. William Dearden — author of the ‘Star Seer’ and the ‘Maid of Caldene’ — who was acquainted with Branwell Brontë, to communicate to the ‘Halifax Guardian,’ in June, 1867, some facts, within his personal knowledge, touching the question, which he extracted from the MS. preface to his poem entitled, ‘The Demon Queen,’ not then published.

It appears, from this account, that Branwell and Mr. Dearden had entered into a friendly poetic contest. Each was to write a poem in which the principal character was to have a real or imaginary existence before the Deluge. They met, on the occasion, at the ‘Cross Roads,’ a hostel a little more than a mile from Haworth on the road to Keighley, where an evening was spent in the reading of their respective productions. Leyland was to decide upon the merits of the poems. In reference to this meeting Mr. Dearden says,

‘We met at the time and place appointed … I read the first act of the “Demon Queen;” but, when Branwell dived into his hat — the usual receptacle of his fugitive scraps — where he supposed he had deposited his MS. poem, he found he had by mistake placed there a number of stray leaves of a novel on which he had been trying his “prentice hand.” Chagrined at the disappointment he had caused, he was about to return the papers to his hat, when both friends earnestly pressed him to read them, as they felt a curiosity to see how he could wield the pen of a novelist. After some hesitation, he complied with the request, and riveted our attention for about an hour, dropping each sheet, when read, into his hat. The story broke off abruptly in the middle of a sentence, and he gave us the sequel,
vivâ voce
, together with the real names of the prototypes of his characters; but, as some of these personages are still living, I refrain from pointing them out to the public. He said he had not yet fixed upon a title for his production, and was afraid he should never be able to meet with a publisher who would have the hardihood to usher it into the world. The scene of the fragment which Branwell read, and the characters introduced in it — so far as then developed — were the same as those in “Wuthering Heights,” which Charlotte Brontë confidently asserts was the production of her sister Emily.’

Another friend of Branwell Brontë also, Mr. Edward Sloane of Halifax, author of a work entitled, ‘Essays, Tales, and Sketches,’ (1849) declared to Mr. Dearden that Branwell had read to him, portion by portion, the novel as it was produced, at the time, insomuch that he no sooner began the perusal of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ when published, than he was able to anticipate the characters and incidents to be disclosed.
  
Thus Mr. Dearden and the late Mr. Sloane claimed to have knowledge of ‘Wuthering Heights’ as the work of Branwell, before it was issued from the press; and we have seen that Mr. Grundy declares Branwell to have said, with the consent of his sister, that he had written ‘a great portion of “Wuthering Heights” himself,’ a statement which, remembering the ‘weird fancies of diseased genius’ with which Branwell had entertained him at Luddenden Foot, inclined Mr. Grundy to believe ‘that the very plot was his invention rather than his sister’s.’
  

The evidence for the original ascription of authorship is simple in the extreme. Charlotte Brontë has told us in the Biographical Notice, as well as in the Preface, which she has prefixed to ‘Wuthering Heights,’ that the book was the work of Ellis Bell; and clearly no shadow of doubt was on her mind at the time as to the accuracy of this statement; nor had the publisher of the book any uncertainty as to the matter. Moreover, the servant Martha is said to have seen Emily Brontë writing it. We are told, also, that it is impossible that the upright spirit of the gentle Emily could resort to the miserable fraud of appropriating a work which was not her own. And, lastly, modern critics have not found it difficult to believe that a woman might be the author of ‘Wuthering Heights.’ They see nothing incongruous or impossible in the possession, by a feminine intellect, of such a searching knowledge of sinister propensities as are developed in that book, nor of its descending to those chaotic depths of black moral distortion, where it is possible for Hindley Earnshaw, with hideous blasphemy, to drink damnation to his soul, that he may be able to ‘punish its Maker,’ and where the life-long vengeance of Heathcliff is drawn out, with wondrous power, to its ghastly and impotent end.

How far Charlotte’s statement is weakened by the fact that, up to the time when she discovered the volume of verse, and the three sisters commenced their novels — at which period it will be remembered one volume of Branwell’s work was written — they had made no communication to one another of the literary work which each had in progress, is, perhaps, a matter for personal opinion. The declaration of Martha would probably be of little value, unless we knew that what Emily was writing was entirely independent of Branwell’s work. And, again, those who have sought to defend Ellis Bell from the charge of fraud, have perhaps been over hasty; for, so far as I know, that charge has never been either made or implied.

As to the capability of Branwell to write ‘Wuthering Heights,’ not much need be said here. Those who read this book will see that, despite his weaknesses and his follies, Branwell was, indeed, unfortunate in having to bear the penalty, in ceaseless open discussion, of ‘une fanfaronnade des vices qu’il n’avait pas,’ and that, moreover, his memory has been darkened, and his acts misconstrued, by sundry writers, who have endeavoured to find in his character the source of the darkest passages in the works of his sisters.