The Three Brontes Part 21

APPENDIX I

THE KEY TO THE BRONTe WORKS

More than once Mr. Malham-Dembleby has approached us with his mysterious "Key". There was his "Key to _Jane Eyre_", published in the _Sat.u.r.day Review_ in 1902; there was his "Lifting of the Bronte Veil", published in the _Fortnightly Review_ in 1907; and there was the correspondence that followed. Now he has gathered all his evidence together into one formidable book, and we are faced with what he calls his "miraculous and sensational" discovery that it was Charlotte and not Emily Bronte who wrote _Wuthering Heights_, and that in _Wuthering Heights_ she immortalized the great tragic pa.s.sion of her life, inspired by M. Heger, who, if you please, is Heathcliff.

This is Mr. Malham-Dembleby's most important contribution to the subject. M. Heger, Mr. Malham-Dembleby declares, was Heathcliff before he was M. Pelet, or Rochester, or M. Paul. And as it was Charlotte and not Emily who experienced pa.s.sion, Charlotte alone was able to immortalize it.

So much Mr. Malham-Dembleby a.s.sumes in the interests of psychology. But it is not from crude psychological arguments that he forges his tremendous Key. It is from the internal evidence of the works, supported by much "sensational" matter from the outside.

By way of internal evidence then, we have first the sensational discovery of a work, _Gleanings in Craven, or The Tourists' Guide_, by "one Frederic Montagu", published at Skipton-in-Craven in 1838, which work the author of _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_ must have read and drawn upon for many things, names (including her own pseudonym of Currer Bell), descriptions of scenery, local legends, as of that fairy Jannet, Queen of the Malhamdale Elves, who haunted the sources of the Aire and suggested Rochester's Queen of Elves, his fairy, Janet Eyre.

Parallel pa.s.sages are given showing a certain correspondence between Montagu's traveller's tale and the opening scene of _Wuthering Heights_.

Montagu goes on horseback to a solitary house, like Lockwood, and, like Lockwood, is shown to bed, dreams, and is awakened by a white-faced apparition (his hostess, not his host), who holds a lighted candle, like Heathcliff, and whose features, like Heathcliff's, are convulsed with diabolical rage, and so on. Mr. Malham-Dembleby, in a third parallel column, uses the same phrases to describe Jane Eyre's arrival at Rochester's house, her dreams, and the appearance of Rochester's mad wife at her bedside; his contention being that the two scenes are written by the same hand.

All this is very curious and interesting; so far, however, Mr.

Malham-Dembleby's sensational evidence does no more for us than suggest that Charlotte and Emily may very likely have read Montagu's book.

But the plot thickens. Mr. Malham-Dembleby first prints parallel pa.s.sages from Montagu's book and _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_, then, extensively, scene after scene from _Jane Eyre_ and _Wuthering Heights_.

Some of these coincidences seem on the first blush of it remarkable, for instance, the child-phantom which appears both to Jane Eyre and to Nelly Dean in _Wuthering Heights_; or the rainy day and the fireside scene, which occur in the third chapter of _Wuthering Heights_ and the opening chapter of _Jane Eyre_. Others again, such as the parallel between the return of Heathcliff to Catherine and that of Jane to Rochester, will not bear examination for a moment. Of this and most of Mr.

Malham-Dembleby's parallels it may be said that they only maintain their startling character by the process of tearing words from their sentences, sentences from their contexts, contexts from their scenes, and scenes from the living body of each book. Apparently to Mr.

Malham-Dembleby, a book, at any rate a Bronte book, is not a living body; each is a box of German bricks, and he takes all the boxes and tumbles them out on the floor together and rearranges them so as to show that, after all, there was only one box of bricks in the family, and that was Charlotte's. Much of his argument and the force of his parallel pa.s.sages depends on the identification of the characters in the Bronte works, not only with their a.s.sumed originals, but with each other. For Mr. Malham-Dembleby's purposes poor M. Heger, a model already remorselessly overworked by Charlotte, has to sit, not only for M.

Pelet, for Rochester and Yorke Hunsden, for Robert and for Louis Moore, but for Heathcliff, and, if you would believe it, for Hareton Earnshaw; because (parallel pa.s.sage!) the younger Catherine and Hareton Earnshaw were teacher and pupil, and so (when she taught him English) were Charlotte and M. Heger.

Mr. Malham-Dembleby's work of identification is made easier for him by his subsidiary discovery of Charlotte's two methods, Method I, interchange of the s.e.x; Method II, alteration of the age of her characters. With this licence almost any character may be any other.

Thus Hareton Earnshaw looking at Catherine is Jane Eyre looking at Mr.

Rochester. When he touches her Nelly Dean says, "He might have stuck a knife into her, she started in such a taking"; and Rochester says to Jane, "You stick a sly penknife under my ear" (parallel pa.s.sage!).

Lockwood at Wuthering Heights is Jane Eyre at Thornton Hall; Heathcliff appearing at Lockwood's bedside, besides being M. Heger and Rochester, is Rochester's mad wife. Heathcliff returning to Catherine is Jane returning to Rochester, and so on. But however varied, however apparently discriminated the characters, M. Heger is in all the men, and Charlotte is in all the women, in the two Catherines, in Jane Eyre and Frances Henri; in Caroline Helstone, in Pauline Ba.s.sompierre, and Lucy Snowe.

Now there is a certain plausibility in this. With all their vividness and individuality Charlotte Bronte's characters have a way of shading off into each other. Jane has much in common with Frances and with Lucy, and Lucy with Pauline. Her men incline rather to one type, that of the masterful, arbitrary, instructive male; that is the type she likes best to draw. Yorke Hunsden in _The Professor_ splits up into Rochester and Robert Moore and Mr. Yorke; and there is a certain amount of Paul Emanuel in all of them. But life gives us our types very much that way, and there is a bit of somebody else in everybody. It is easy to suggest ident.i.ty by exaggerating small points of resemblance and suppressing large and essential differences (which is what Mr. Malham-Dembleby does all the time). But take each whole living man and woman as they have been created for us, I don't care if Catherine Earnshaw and Jane Eyre _did_ each have a fit of pa.s.sion in a locked room, and if a servant waited upon each with gruel; there is no earthly likeness between the soul of Catherine and the soul of Jane. I don't care if there was "h.e.l.l-light" in Rochester's eyes and Heathcliff's too, if they both swore by the "Deuce", and had both swarthy complexions like Paul Emanuel; for there is a whole universe between Heathcliff and Rochester, between Rochester and M. Paul. Beside Heathcliff, that t.i.tan raging on a mountain-top, M. Paul is merely a little man gesticulating on an _estrade_.

So much for the identifications. Mr. Malham-Dembleby has been tempted to force them thus, because they support his theory of M. Heger and of the great tragic pa.s.sion, as his theory, by a vicious circle, supports his identifications. His procedure is to quote all the emotional pa.s.sages he can lay his hands on, from the _Poems_, from _Wuthering Heights_, from _Jane Eyre_, from _Villette_ and _The Professor_, "... all her life's hope was torn by the roots out of her own riven and outraged heart..."

(_Villette_) "... faith was blighted, confidence destroyed..." (_Jane Eyre_) ... "Mr. Rochester" (M. Heger, we are informed in confidential brackets) was not "what she had thought him". a.s.suring us that Charlotte was here describing her own emotions, he builds his argument.

"Evidence" (the evidence of these pa.s.sages) "shows it was in her dark season when Charlotte Bronte wrote _Wuthering Heights_, and that she portrayed M. Heger therein with all the vindictiveness of a woman with 'a riven, outraged heart', the wounds in which yet rankled sorely." So that, key in hand, for "that ghoul Heathcliff!" we must read "that ghoul Heger". We must believe that _Wuthering Heights_ was written in pure vindictiveness, and that Charlotte Bronte repudiated its authorship for three reasons: because it contained "too humiliating a story" of her "heart-thrall"; because of her subsequent remorse (proof, the modified animus of her portrait of M. Heger as Rochester and as M. Paul), and for certain sound business considerations. So much for internal evidence.

Not that Mr. Malham-Dembleby relies on it altogether. He draws largely upon legend and conjecture, and on more "sensational discoveries" of his own. He certainly succeeds in proving that legend and conjecture in Brussels began at a very early date. Naturally enough it fairly flared after the publication of _Jane Eyre_. So far there is nothing new in his discoveries. But he does provide a thrill when he unearths Eugene Sue's extinct novel of _Miss Mary, ou l'Inst.i.tutrice_, and gives us parallel pa.s.sages from that. For in _Miss Mary_, published in 1850-51[A] we have, not only character for character and scene for scene, "lifted" bodily from _Jane Eyre_, but the situation in _The Professor_ and _Villette_ is largely antic.i.p.ated. We are told that Eugene Sue was in Brussels in 1844, the year in which Charlotte left the Pensionnat. This is interesting. But what does it prove? Not, I think, what Mr.

Malham-Dembleby maintains--that M. Heger made indiscreet revelations to Eugene Sue, but that Eugene Sue was an unscrupulous plagiarist who took his own where he found it, either in the pages of _Jane Eyre_ or in the t.i.ttle-tattle of a Brussels salon. However indiscreet M. Heger may have been, he was a man of proved gravity and honour. He would, at any rate, have drawn the line at frivolous treachery. n.o.body, however, can answer for what Madame Heger and her friends may not have said. Which disposes of Eugene Sue.

[Footnote A: Serially in the _London Journal_ in 1850; in volume form in Paris, 1851. It is possible, but not likely, that Eugene Sue may have seen the ma.n.u.script of _The Professor_ when it was "going the round".]

Then there is that other "sensational discovery" of the Heger portrait, that little drawing (now in the National Portrait Gallery) of Charlotte Bronte in curls, wearing a green gown, and reading _Shirley_. It is signed Paul Heger, 1850, the year of _Shirley's_ publication, and the year in which Charlotte sat to Richmond for her portrait. There are two inscriptions on the back: "The Wearin' of the Green; First since Emily's death"; and below: "This drawing is by P. Heger, done from life in 1850." The handwriting gives no clue.

Mr. Malham-Dembleby attaches immense importance to this green gown, which he "identifies" with the pink one worn by Lucy in _Villette_. He says that Lady Ritchie told him that Charlotte wore a green gown at the dinner-party Thackeray gave for her in June, 1850; and when the green gown turns out after all to be a white one with a green pattern on it, it is all one to Mr. Malham-Dembleby. So much for the green gown. Still, gown or no gown, the portrait _may_ be genuine. Mr. Malham-Dembleby says that it is drawn on the same paper as that used in Mr. George Smith's house, where Charlotte was staying in June 1850, and he argues that Charlotte and M. Heger met in London that year, and that he then drew this portrait of her from the life. True, the portrait is a very creditable performance for an amateur; true, M. Heger's children maintained that their father did not draw, and there is no earthly evidence that he did; true, we have nothing but one person's report of another person's (a collector's) statement that he had obtained the portrait from the Heger family, a statement at variance with the evidence of the Heger family itself. But granted that the children of M.

Heger were mistaken as to their father's gift, and that he did draw this portrait of Charlotte Bronte from Charlotte herself in London in 1850, I cannot see that it matters a straw or helps us to the a.s.sumption of the great tragic pa.s.sion which is the main support of Mr.

Malham-Dembleby's amazing fabrication.

APPENDIX II

Leyland's theory is that Branwell Bronte wrote the first seventeen chapters of _Wuthering Heights_. It has very little beyond Leyland's pa.s.sionate conviction to support it. There is a pa.s.sage in a letter of Branwell's to Leyland, the sculptor, written in 1845, where he says he is writing a three-volume novel of which the first volume is completed.

He compares it with "Hamlet" and with "Lear". There is also Branwell's alleged statement to Mr. Grundy. And there is an obscure legend of ma.n.u.scripts produced from Branwell's hat, before the eyes of Mr. Grundy, in an inn-parlour. Leyland argues freely from the antecedent probability suggested by Branwell's letters and his verse, which he published by way of vindication. He could hardly have done Branwell a worse service.

Branwell's letters give us a vivid idea of the sort of ma.n.u.scripts that would be produced, in inn-parlours, from his hat. As for his verse--that formless, fluent gush of sentimentalism--it might have pa.s.sed as an error of his youth, but for poor Leyland's comments on its majesty and beauty. There are corpses in it and tombstones, and girls dying of tuberculosis, obscured beyond recognition in a mush of verbiage. There is not a live line in it. One sonnet only, out of Branwell's many sonnets, is fitted to survive. It has a certain melancholy, sentimental grace. But it is not a good sonnet, and it shows Branwell at his best.

At his worst he sinks far below Charlotte at her worst, and, compared with Emily or with Charlotte at her best, Branwell is nowhere. Even Anne beats him. Her sad, virginal restraint gives a certain form and value to her colourless and slender gift.

There is a psychology of such things, as there is a psychology of works of genius. Emily Bronte's work, with all its faults of construction, shows one and indivisible, fused in one fire from first to last. One cannot take the first seventeen chapters of _Wuthering Heights_ and separate them from the rest. There is no faltering anywhere and no break in the power and the pa.s.sion of this stupendous tale. And where pa.s.sion is, sentimentalism is not. And there is not anywhere in _Wuthering Heights_ a trace of that corruption which for the life of him Branwell could not have kept out of the ma.n.u.scripts he produced from his hat.

_By the same Author:_

THE CREATORS

THE DIVINE FIRE

TWO SIDES OF A QUESTION

THE HELPMATE

KITTY TAILLEUR

MR. AND MRS. NEVILL TYSON

ANN SEVERN AND THE FIELDINGS

ARNOLD WATERLOW: A LIFE

UNCANNY STORIES

THE RECTOR OF WYCK

THE ALLINGHAMS

A CURE OF SOULS

FAR END

HISTORY OF ANTHONY WARING

TALES TOLD BY SIMPSON

ETC.