Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (551 page)

Yet there are two or three points noticeable in ‘Wuthering Heights,’ which are marked in Emily’s verse. Emily’s love of Nature, of the moors; her deep brooding on the mystery of being, which led her to look on the calm of death as an assurance of future rest for all, are to be found in her poetry; and, in a lesser degree, also in ‘Wuthering Heights.’ Thus we read, in Chapter xvi. of the story, of Linton and his dead wife: ‘Next morning — bright and cheerful out of doors — stole softened in through the blinds of the silent room, and suffused the couch and its occupant with a mellow, tender glow. Edgar Linton had his head laid on the pillow, and his eyes shut. His young and fair features were almost as death-like as those of the form beside him, and almost as fixed: but
his
was the hush of exhausted anguish, and
hers
of perfect peace. Her brow smooth, her lids closed, her lips wearing the expression of a smile; no angel in heaven could be more beautiful than she appeared. And I partook of the infinite calm in which she lay: my mind was never in a holier frame than while I gazed on that untroubled image of Divine rest. I instinctively echoed the words she had uttered a few hours before: “Incomparably beyond and above us all! Whether still on earth or now in heaven, her spirit is at home with God!”‘

The reflections suggested to Nelly Dean by the spectacle of repose presented by the dead Catherine seem to Mr. Reid to be characteristic of Emily, speaking ‘out of the fulness of her heart.’ ‘I don’t know if it be a peculiarity in me,’ says the narrator in the story, ‘but I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death, should no frenzied or despairing mourner share the duty with me. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter — the Eternity they have entered — where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fulness. I noticed on that occasion how much selfishness there is even in a love like Mr. Linton’s, when he so regretted Catherine’s blessed release! To be sure, one might have doubted, after the wayward and impatient existence she had led, whether she merited a haven of peace at last. One might doubt in seasons of cold reflection; but not then, in the presence of her corpse. It asserted its own tranquillity, which seemed a pledge of equal quiet to its former inhabitants.’ But Mr. Lockwood is made to say, speaking of the housekeeper’s anxiety to know if he thinks such people are happy in the other world, ‘I declined answering Mrs. Dean’s question, which struck me as something heterodox.’ The story also concludes, speaking of the head-stones of Edgar Linton, Heathcliff, and Catherine: ‘I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.’ But there is in these very points a remarkable coincidence of feeling between Branwell and Emily also. Indeed, in the expression of these thoughts, Branwell’s verse is well-nigh more powerful than Emily’s. We have known his desire for the oblivious peace of ‘Real Rest’; and, in his letters, he has sketched many head-stones, on one of which are the words: ‘I implore for rest’; and, in the ‘Epistle to a Child in her Grave,’ he has told us of the freedom from ill of that quiet and painless sepulchre. Here are a few stray lines of Branwell’s, which will serve as illustration of this coincidence:

‘Think not that Life is happiness,

But deem it
duty
joined with
care
;

Implore for
hope
in your distress,

And for your answers, get
despair
;

Yet travel on, for Life’s rough road

May end, at last, in rest with
God
!’

Again we may ask: did Branwell Brontë write ‘Wuthering Heights,’ or any part of it? The evidence that he did so is, probably, insufficient. But let it be remembered that, as stated in his letter to Leyland, he had clearly undertaken a three-volume novel, and, in one way or other, had written a volume of his story. The charge of falsehood brought against Branwell in his statement to Mr. Grundy will not now probably be renewed; but there may not be wanting some to say that Mr. Grundy is in error in connecting what his friend said to him about his own novel with some allusion of his sister’s to ‘Wuthering Heights,’ and that those gentlemen who believe the novel Branwell read to them to be the same as that attributed to Emily are in error also. It has been said that, on the rare occasions on which the father or brother entered the room where the sisters were writing their novels, nothing was said of the work in progress. But it must be confessed that these views meet with little encouragement from what we know of the history of that period.

We have seen that, prior to the autumn of 1845, Branwell had been employed in writing his novel; a little later, we have reason to suspect that he is not going on with it, and we find him writing a poem with the same theme as a contemporary one of Emily’s. We then find the sisters taking up novel writing with precisely Branwell’s views of the profit to be derived from it. When he writes to Leyland on the 28th of April, 1846, shortly before the poems of his sisters were published, and while they are finishing their novels, Branwell has ceased to speak of his, but says that, if he were in London personally, he would try a certain publisher with his poems. Now it was an edition of Wordsworth by this same publisher that Charlotte had, four months earlier, fixed upon as a model for the sisters’ own volume of poems. Branwell, then, however strained his relations with his sister Charlotte might be at this late date, must have known that his sisters were writing their tales. Why, then, the change in his aims? Why is he, who had propounded that view of the superior advantages of prose over poetic writing, which afterwards determined the sisters to write novels, silent about his own, and thinking of publishing his poems? and never again do we hear of any attempt on his part to finish his novel, though he lived a year after his sisters’ works were published. What had become of his novel in the interim?

Perhaps there is evidence, then, to warrant us in throwing out a suggestion that there may have been some measure of collaboration between Branwell and his sister, that he originated the idea, moulded the characters, and wrote the earlier portion of the work, which she, taking, revised, amended, completed, and imbued with enough of an individual spirit to give unity to the whole. In support of this view, it may be noted that, though there is no break in the style of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ yet all the interests of the original story are, in a manner, completed in the seventeenth chapter — that is, something more than half-way through the book. In that first portion of it we trace the vehement passion of Heathcliff for Catherine up to her death. We see his enmity to Edgar Linton, which is satisfied by his possession of Linton’s sister, whom he hates and despises, but who is the mother of a child to be heir to Thrushcross Grange, and we see the death of this unhappy wife. In this first portion of the novel is unrolled also the gradual growth of Heathcliff’s hatred of Earnshaw, from the time when he says: ‘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,’ up to the death of that miserable character, whose son remains an ignorant dependent, because his drunken father has been lured to make away with his wealth at the gaming-table to his Mephistophelian pursuer. Here is depicted that dark and malevolent spirit which ranks Heathcliff with the demons, as where he says: ‘I have no pity — I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails. It is a moral teething, and I grind with greater energy in proportion to the increase of pain.’

In the second part of the story, opening with the eighteenth chapter, we are occupied with the fates of the children of Linton, Earnshaw, and Heathcliff. We learn how the latter trains up his miserable, puling son for the purpose of marrying the daughter of Linton, which he forcibly brings about, and thus completes his possession of the Grange; how he endeavours to pervert the youthful Hareton Earnshaw, to ‘see if one tree won’t grow as crooked as another with the same wind to twist it;’ and in the end how his vengeance is completely thwarted. Thus there are two distinct parts in ‘Wuthering Heights,’ one being the completion and complement of the other.

As some evidence for the view here thrown out, I may mention that, in reading ‘Wuthering Heights’ in order to discover what correspondences there might exist between it and Branwell’s writings, in letters, etc., I was very much struck with the fact that, for every five of such correspondences which I discovered in the first part of the novel, I could find only one in the latter. We need not, therefore, be surprised if, in the concluding half of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ Branwell has stood to the author as model for some details of character, though these can be very few. Yet Nelly Dean does say of Heathcliff’s love for Catherine: ‘He might have had a monomania on the subject of his departed idol; but on every other point his wits were as sound as mine.’
  

The collaboration which I have mentioned would by no means imply unfair action on the part of Emily Brontë: she was ever a kind, gentle, and faithful friend to Branwell, and had looked forward, perhaps more anxiously than her sisters, to his success in the world. There would be nothing extraordinary, then, in Branwell handing over to his favourite sister, to whom he was always grateful for her abiding affection, the work which he had begun, and which he, perhaps, felt himself dissatisfied with, or unable to complete, or in his supplying her with a plot, and assisting her with his experience in the delineation of the characters in any story she might wish to produce. To have done so would be quite consistent with what we know of him; and he never claimed the authorship, so far as I know, after the occasion of Mr. Grundy’s visit to the parsonage twelve months before the publication of the novel; and he read it to two or three personal friends only, and to these, if my supposition be correct, perhaps before his sister had taken up the work.

One other circumstance, besides the disappearance of Branwell’s novel, finds explanation in this view of the matter: that Emily, who never undertook a second novel, produced, not only the most original and powerful of the contemporary tales of the sisters, but one that is also a much longer story than ‘The Professor,’ by Charlotte, and half as long again as ‘Agnes Grey,’ by Anne. Here, then, must probably remain the question of the origin of ‘Wuthering Heights.’

CHAPTER XI.

BRANWELL BRONTË AND ‘THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL.’

Statement of Charlotte that her Sister Anne wrote the Book in consequence of her Brother’s Conduct — Supposition of Some that Branwell was the Prototype of Huntingdon — The Characters are Entirely Distinct — Real Sources of the Story — Anne Brontë at Pains to Avoid a Suspicion that Huntingdon was a Portrait of Branwell.

Charlotte Brontë, who never dreamed of attributing the production of so dire a story as ‘Wuthering Heights,’ by her sister Emily, to brooding on Branwell’s misfortunes, has, however, in her remarks on Anne Brontë’s second novel, ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,’ — meant by its author as a tale of warning against the evils of intemperance, — intimated that it was carried out as a duty by Anne, in consequence of the impression made upon her by her brother’s conduct; and certain writers, questioning the statement of Charlotte that the characters are fictitious, have concluded that, in Arthur Huntingdon, we have ‘a picture’ and a ‘portrait’ of Branwell Brontë. It seems to me, rightly considered, a cruel thing to Anne Brontë to believe that she has given us a portrait of her brother in the character of the perfidious Huntingdon. Had her brother been thus vile, she could not have borne to write over the details of his character; were he not like Huntingdon, she could not have libelled him so.

As none of the biographers of the Brontë sisters ever knew Branwell, it is probable that the Branwell Brontë of the biographies owes more to the supposed Branwell of the novels, than the characters in the novels do to the brother of the Brontës. It is Huntingdon’s wit, superficial as it is, that has connected him with the ideal of Branwell Brontë. A few traits of his, indeed, there may be in Huntingdon, but they are not the worst of those depicted in that character. The contempt for gambling which Huntingdon expresses may be taken as an instance.

We shall, however, look in vain for any true resemblance between the characters of Arthur Huntingdon and Branwell Brontë, and, certainly, in almost every respect, one is a direct contrast to the other. The biographer of Emily Brontë says, indeed, that Branwell ‘sat to Anne sorrily enough for the portrait of Henry (
sic
) Huntingdon;’ but I would ask where that portraiture lies? Huntingdon, be it marked, is not only a drunkard, but he is a libertine, a man who has even the callous brutality to recount to his trusting wife, as she sits by him on the sofa, endeavouring to amuse him, the ‘stories of his former amours, always turning upon the ruin of some confiding girl, or the cozening of some unsuspecting husband; and when I express my horror and indignation,’ she says, ‘he lays it to the charge of jealousy, and laughs till the tears run down his cheeks.’ But it was different with Branwell, against whom it has never been charged that he sank to these low depths of criminal debauchery, indulgence, and treachery; and even those who have recounted the story of his passion for the wife of his employer, are compelled to say that he remained pure, and shrank in horror from the advances which they suppose she made. Huntingdon’s vicious disposition, too, is so sunk in selfishness, and there is in him such a cold brutality, — as where on many an occasion he triumphs over his powerless wife, — that he is placed in absolute contrast to Branwell, with his confiding, considerate, open-hearted, and generous nature.

It is but necessary to allude to Huntingdon’s hypocrisy to establish a further difference between his character and Branwell’s; and it is, moreover, very distinctive of Huntingdon’s mind that he is, throughout, utterly irreverent and irreligious, to such an extent that he jests at sacred things, and declares that his wife’s piety is enough to make him jealous of his Maker. Again he says, when he places her hand on the top of his head, and it sinks in a bed of curls, ‘rather alarmingly low, especially in the middle;’ ‘if God meant me to be religious, why didn’t He give me a proper organ of veneration?’ This irreverence he carries with him into domestic life, and he invades the sanctity of human affection, and the places the heart keeps holy, with his gross and insensate brutality. How different is this from Branwell Brontë, in whose character reverence and affection, above all things, were strong! Can we imagine Huntingdon dwelling so fondly in the affection of the long departed, as Branwell does in his poems of ‘Caroline;’ can we imagine him venerating as a precious possession to his dying day the sacred memories of his early years, as his supposed prototype did? What ‘swell of thought,’ seeming to fill ‘the bursting heart, the gushing eye’ with the memories of bygone years, could flood the shallow brain of the selfish and unfeeling Huntingdon? And Huntingdon, too, is afflicted with that well-known complaint of the continual drinker; he loses all interest in the affairs of life, and exists in perpetual levity. ‘There is always a “but” in this imperfect world,’ says his wife, ‘and I do wish he would sometimes be serious. I cannot get him to write or speak in real, solid earnest. I don’t much mind it now, but if it be always so what shall I do with the serious part of myself?’ I would ask when Branwell Brontë displayed this unseemly levity? if he did not always write and speak in solid earnest; if, indeed, he did not live in the very midst of that storm and stress of acute feeling which Huntingdon’s wretched nature was incapable of experiencing at all?

Lastly, Helen Huntingdon tells us that her husband is impenetrable to good and lofty thoughts, that he never reads anything but newspapers and sporting magazines, that she wishes he would take up some literary study, or learn to draw or play; and that, when deprived of his friends, his condition is comfortless, unalleviated as it is by the consolations of intellectual resources, and the answer of a good conscience towards God. What, then, were Branwell’s mental resources? His thoughts, on the contrary, were good and lofty enough; he was a student of literature, and especially a reader of the great poets; he had, indeed, taken up literary work; and he could and did both draw, and play on the organ; and when he was deprived of society, or cast into trouble, he found his consolation in his literary labours, and we have seen that, for the very purpose of obtaining alleviation in distress, he had written a volume of his novel. In short, he was, as far as his intellectual character and habits were concerned, exactly what Helen Huntingdon wished her husband might be.

If, then, there is no resemblance between Branwell Brontë’s disposition, character, and capabilities and those of Huntingdon in the novel, we might, after what has been said, surely expect to find that, in the unique point in which there is a correspondence of fact — their indulgence in drink — there would be some similar traits. But here, again, the resemblance is of the faintest, while the differences are radical. Huntingdon, for instance, is a continual and inveterate drinker; Branwell drank but occasionally, and had long periods of temperance: Huntingdon drinks for the love of drink; Branwell drank in order to drown his sorrows. It is, moreover, made a special point by the Brontë biographers that part of Branwell’s intemperance was in taking opium, but this feature does not exist in Huntingdon, though Anne was clearly acquainted with the practice, for she mentions in the novel that Lord Lowborough at one time took it.

But, for the character of Huntingdon, we must look elsewhere. The account Charlotte gave of one whom the Brontës had known well, will show from what sources Anne drew her plot.

‘You remember Mr. and Mrs. —
 
— ? Mrs. —
 
— came here the other day, with a most melancholy tale of her wretched husband’s drunken, extravagant, profligate habits. She asked papa’s advice; there was nothing, she said, but ruin before them. They owed debts which they could never pay. She expected Mr. —
 
— ‘s instant dismissal from his curacy; she knew, from bitter experience, that his vices were utterly hopeless. He treated her and her child savagely; with much more to the same effect. Papa advised her to leave him for ever, and go home, if she had a home to go to. She said this was what she had long resolved to do; and she would leave him directly, as soon as Mr. B —
 
— dismissed him. She expressed great disgust and contempt towards him, and did not affect to have the shadow of regard in any way. I do not wonder at this, but I do wonder she should ever marry a man towards whom her feelings must always have been pretty much the same as they are now. I am morally certain no decent woman could experience anything but aversion towards such a man as Mr. —
 
— . Before I knew, or suspected his character, and when I rather wondered at his versatile talents, I felt it in an uncontrollable degree. I hated to talk with him — hated to look at him; though, as I was not certain that there was substantial reason for such a dislike, and thought it absurd to trust to mere instinct, I both concealed and repressed the feeling as much as I could; and, on all occasions, treated him with as much civility as I was mistress of. I was struck with Mary’s expression of a similar feeling at first sight; she said, when we left him, “That is a hideous man, Charlotte!” I thought, “He is indeed.”‘
  

And here is another case known to the Brontës. ‘Do you remember my telling you — or did I ever tell you — about that wretched and most criminal Mr. —
 
— ? After running an infamous career of vice, both in England and France, abandoning his wife to disease and total destitution in Manchester, with two children and without a farthing, in a strange lodging-house? Yesterday evening Martha came upstairs to say that a woman — “rather lady-like,” as she said — wished to speak to me in the kitchen. I went down. There stood Mrs. —
 
— , pale and worn, but still interesting-looking and cleanly and neatly dressed, as was her little girl who was with her. I kissed her heartily. I could almost have cried to see her, for I had pitied her with my whole soul when I heard of her undeserved sufferings, agonies, and physical degradation. She took tea with us, stayed about two hours, and frankly entered into a narrative of her appalling distresses…. She does not know where Mr. —
 
— is, and of course can never more endure to see him. She is now staying a few days at E —
 
— with the —
 
— s, who, I believe, have been all along very kind to her, and the circumstance is greatly to their credit.’
  

It was with cases like these before them that the Brontës wrought the infelicity of Heathcliff and Isabella, of Huntingdon and Helen. They felt themselves compelled to represent life as it appeared to them, they said.

Consumption and intemperance, the curses of our island and our climate, are found not the less in the West-Riding of Yorkshire. A cold and humid atmosphere, like poverty and want, begets a recourse to stimulants, and, with some natures, the bounds of moderation are soon passed. The prevalence of the latter evil had entered deeply into Anne’s thoughts. Her brother’s occasional indulgence had made it familiar to her; but we should clearly commit an error, as well as a great injustice to her, in supposing that, in the character of Huntingdon, she wished to present his failings to the public.

A careful study of the question has, indeed, convinced me, not only that Huntingdon is no portrait of Branwell Brontë, but that he is distinctly and designedly his very antitype. The author of ‘Wildfell Hall’ could scarcely have created a character so completely different from Branwell, unless she intended to do so; for, otherwise, writing under the influence of circumstances, and the inspiration of the moment, something of his strong personality must surely have found its way into the book. It is pleasant to be thus able to record, as an act of justice to Anne Brontë, that, though she had been compelled to witness the results of intemperance both in Branwell and in others, she purposely conveyed her lesson of these evils in the acts and thoughts of a character utterly distinct from her brother. Indeed, she was at considerable pains — which have unfortunately availed little — to prevent even a suspicion that her brother was the prototype of Huntingdon; for, to remove that impression, she has placed the hero of the story, Gilbert Markham, to a considerable extent, in Branwell’s very circumstances. There is no resemblance between Markham’s character and Branwell’s, beyond that of an ardent and generous temperament; but it should be observed that — exactly as with Branwell — Markham is enamoured of a married woman, the death of whose husband he anxiously awaits; that this passion is attributed to him as a monomania — ‘A monomania,’ says his brother Fergus, ‘but don’t mention it; all right but that;’ and, lastly, that Markham, too, thinks, as Branwell did, that the deceased husband of the lady ‘might have so constructed his will as to place restrictions upon her marrying again.’

It should likewise be observed that ‘Wildfell Hall’ is just as much a protest against
mariages de convenance
, as it is against intemperance; but what had this to do with the family circumstances of the Brontës? It had far more to do with such instances as that of ‘Mr. and Mrs. —
 
— ,’ quoted above from Charlotte’s letter, where infelicity was combined with intemperance, as it is in the case of Arthur and Helen Huntingdon.