John Malham-Dembleby

“ Again and again, true artist as she was, she cleared her presentations, till finally the world had those great works which stand as a signal testimony to the high value of the true artist, and as testimony to the divine origin of real inspiration. And now priest, statesman, writer—whatsoever a man may be, he will discover in the works of Charlotte Brontë salutary instruction, and at the same time will perceive with thrilling admiration the greatness of Art when she is at one with Genius. ”

“ On the evening of the 15th of October, in the latter end of the Eighteen Hundred and Eighties, as the sun sank greyly behind the distant skyline of those wild hills that stretch from Malham and away into the North of Yorkshire, a solitary horseman pushed his way over a hard moorland road to a little deserted hamlet, where only one soul lived, and that a hag whose fame had spread as a dabbler in the black art and the mischievous doctrines. ”

“ I should be extremely miserable.... I dreamt once ... I was there, ... heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out ... on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. [71] ... I cannot express it; but surely you ... have a notion that there is ... an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliffe's miseries ... my great thought in living is himself. ”

“ And in all innocence he had asked her to revive the frame of mind in which, to use the words in Jane Eyre, her heart had been "weeping blood"!
Wuthering Heights was wrought near the furnace of Charlotte Brontë's fiery ordeal, and gives at its intensest that which glows through her other works, finally to flash up and smoulder out in Villette. By reason of its clear portrayal of woman when she is very woman Wuthering Heights towers above all common literary artistry, one of the finest novels in the world, an abiding monument to the vital genius of Charlotte Brontë. ”

“ Gaskell could tell us virtually nothing. Neither could she, nor any succeeding biographer, throw light upon Miss Brontë's Brussels life, or upon the subject of her friendship with M. Héger, who is discovered by internal evidence to be the original of Currer Bell's chief heroes. Charlotte Brontë's was an intensely reserved nature. She built to herself a universe which she peopled in secret. Her real life she lived out again in her books. Therein appeared the real Charlotte Brontë, and see we her life and its people as known to herself. ”

“ Life is not a placid lake: the lethal lightnings play, and faith and happiness are threatened continually and on the whole horizon.
Charlotte Brontë, with memory of her own life-storm which has left us her Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and her other great prose works, wrote her introduction to Emily's poems in the spirit of one who looked upon her pieces as the reflections of an uneventful life in the inner sense of vital soul-conflict. ”

“ But my sisters would have had to copy out the manuscripts for the printers from my first drafts, and in every way possible to merit and to establish association with the books as authors. And how indignant we would have been—nay, alarmed, had there been a "Newby arrangement," at some daring critic, like Lady Eastlake and Sydney Dobell, imputing they were the work of one mind! Would we not have appealed to clerical testimony? With a more practised hand Charlotte Brontë in her days of fame corrected and edited Wuthering Heights. Emily was dead. ”

“ Herein we see the imperfections and shortcomings of human nature, and Charlotte Brontë herself is shown standing in the slippery places. Before our eyes flits the procession of the people who moved about her, and the air [Pg 16] is filled with the atmosphere through which her genius saw the world. In this new light of revelation we perceive her great message is—the Martyrdom of Virtue. A more poignant message I know not! And Charlotte Brontë was martyr in this moving drama—nay, I believe there also was another. ”

“ Her voice, at all times so meek and low, dwindled away to that thin and tiny sound to which we listen as to something absent—already gone—something that comes from above or below us—that is not living amongst us—not breathing as we breathe—a retreating echo, rather than a living voice—a sigh, and not a sound.... ”

“ Thus in Wuthering Heights, Chapter XV., when Catherine is embraced by Heathcliffe, she says bitterly:—
"I wish I could hold you till we were both dead! I shouldn't care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn't you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say ... 'That's the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. ”

“ The utmost possible interest attaches to my sensational evidence, now first showing Charlotte Brontë to be the author and heroine of Wuthering Heights, a book many have declared "the finest work of genius written by a woman," and some look upon as "one of the greatest novels in our or any other literature." ”

“ Behind the lives of the great was ever an influence to do: blind may be the early groping of Genius, stumbling her feet on the rugged road of a darksome journey begun in the veiling mist of life's dawn, but onward and ever onward is she impelled to the journey's end. ”

“ Thus in her last verses, considered her masterpiece, she says the "thousand creeds" which move men's hearts were "vain" to "waken doubt" in her creed, blind to the fact that truth and worship finally converge to one point, howsoever diverse their starting-places. The very unbeliever is a witness to man's innate seeking for truth and right: he is a non-believer in this or that because he conceives truth to be remote from it. ”

“ To her initial impulse, therefore, owe we the literary compositions that came from the pens of Emily, Anne, and Branwell. Evidence of this truth is the fact that Emily, Anne, and Branwell, in their writing, never got "right away," as the hunting phrase has it.
There are many definitions of genius: may I define it as a message? Charlotte Brontë had a message. Emily had none. Wuthering Heights and all the other works of Charlotte Brontë, prose and verse, had a vital message. ”

“ And discovering the impetuosity of her imaginative nature and its romantic turn, I doubt not she was impatient to begin the tale of the "fairy-born and human-bred" heroine whose surname she took from the River Aire or Ayre, which sprang, as Montagu carefully indicates, from Malham, or Gimmerton, as Charlotte Brontë would say in her Wuthering Heights. ”

“ I stated in a letter to The Academy, August 1st, 1908, that "were it possible by application of a cipher code to discover the words 'Emily Brontë' in every sentence of Wuthering Heights, I could not even then say any one wrote the book but Charlotte Brontë." If people write before they think, then importance can be attached to clerical testimony and external associations to the disadvantage of internal and literal evidence. ”

“ Lagrange's "Kitty Bell the Orphan" is mysterious in its allusions. As when Catherine Bell says she does not like a French lady teacher. The seed-cake incident of Chapter VIII. of Jane Eyre, which is given at length in "Lagrange's Manuscript," is herewith worked in again:—
"I don't like Madame Dubois...." ”

“ Rochester observes of Jane's efforts in drawing:—"You have secured the shadow of your thought, but no more probably. You had not enough of the artist's skill and science to give it being," for this is the truth concerning Charlotte Brontë's efforts of the kind. Nevertheless, I find evidence of a Brussels tradition in the eighteen-fifties that she was clever as a painter, M. Sue giving ability to his Miss Mary in this direction. It is more emphasized in his feuilleton than volume portrayal of this "Institutrice," both of which works we shall see presented phases of Miss Brontë as she was known. ”

“ Often do we discover references to the elective affinities in regard to M. Héger and Charlotte Brontë in Currer Bell's works. Thus we did not need that Rochester should say in the last chapter but one of Jane Eyre:—"I am not better than the old lightning-struck chestnut," for we had understood by the touching apostrophe in Jane Eyre, Chapter XXV., that he and Jane were implied. The words were:—"The cloven halves were not broken from each other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below; ... they might be said to form one tree—a ruin, but an entire ruin. ”

“ Perhaps she could not expect her retractions would be understood of all men, but it pleased her inmost soul, and having a final sense of justice, and a softening of her heart for her vehement passionateness, she continued in all her works subsequent to her Wuthering Heights to reconstruct this her early version. ”

“ Evidence shows it was in her dark season when Charlotte Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights, and that she portrayed M. Héger therein with all the vindictiveness of a woman with "a riven outraged heart," the wounds in which yet rankled sorely. Thus may we understand her saying in her famous preface to Wuthering Heights:—
Heathcliffe betrays one solitary human feeling, and that is not his love for Catherine, which is a sentiment fierce and inhuman: a passion such as might boil and glow in the bad essence of some evil genius [see my reference to "Robin-a-Ree"; and to the Craven Satyr, page 142] ”

“ John Reed we have now seen was, like Hindley Earnshaw, Catherine's [Pg 79] brother, drawn by Charlotte Brontë from her brother Branwell Brontë. Always she wrote of him vindictively, and with a retributive justice, her strong characteristic. At about the period when Currer Bell was penning Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre Branwell was a source of considerable distress to her. He was disgraced; his habits were the reverse of temperate, and it was daily feared that in a fit of delirium he might make an attempt upon his own life. ”

“ The readers of The Key to the Brontë Works will love Charlotte Brontë more and know her better than ever they have loved or known her in the past. They will see her books are rich with new-found treasures, and will recognize her to be a world's writer—a character of signal eminence, one of the most illustrious of women. ”

“ The fact that evidence shows Heathcliffe to have been, like Hunsden and Rochester, a composite character drawn from a dual model—the Taylor-Héger model—traceable in origin absolutely to Charlotte Brontë's idiosyncratic estimate of two male characters who are shown to have seriously interested her, in itself sufficiently demonstrates her authorship of Wuthering Heights, and is indeed of great interest. ”

“ In the hope of overcoming my persistency in refusing his so often proffered and as often rejected love, he urged on by every imaginable means the final decision, which in the eyes of man were to permit a second marriage, guilty in the sight of God. ”

“ The whole history of Charlotte Brontë's Brussels life before us, the fact that an insurmountable barrier—his marriage—separated her from M. Héger, and the fact that she herself consulted [72] a Roman Catholic priest whom I designate as her "Fénélon," advising, like the Mentor of Télémaque, [73] the tempted one to "flee temptation," identify these "barriers" as a covert reference to the circumstances unhappily existing which made intimacy between Miss Brontë and M. Héger dangerous. ”

“ The reader of Miss Mary will perceive throughout this scene in the extant and apparently re-written French volume that M. de Morville's unhappy love was that of an honourable and a loyal-hearted man, while the governess was also without reproach. (These extracts do not occur in the feuilleton as published in English.) As he asks:—
"Is it my fault if in the monotony of my existence est tout à coup apparue a person whose talents, education, and character have been appreciated by all and by me.... ”

“ And Rochester tells Jane:—"You are my sympathy—my better self; ... a fervent ... passion ... wraps; my existence about you—and kindling in ... powerful flame, fuses you and me in one." M. Héger as M. Paul in Villette strikes the same note we hear in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre:—"We are alike—there is affinity between us.... Tremble! for where that is the case with mortals, the threads of their destinies are difficult to entangle."
[54] See Charlotte Brontë's poems "Regret" and "Apostasy." ”

“ It is noticeable she had been impressed in childhood by her singing and the sympathetic sweetness of her voice. There is a world of meaning—a gracious waiving aside of qualifying fact in the sentence, "Bessie had a sweet voice—at least I thought so." Charlotte was fond of Scottish ballads, and in Villette, Chapter XXV., she identifies herself in her phase as Paulina (see my further reference to this phase of Charlotte Brontë) with a a love for a Scottish song. ”

“ Anne Brontë's gentle poems, like Emily's, will appeal particularly to such readers as have sympathetic temperaments; they will not call to the human heart like the clarion notes of Charlotte Brontë's poem "Passion," but mayhap their low whisperings may waken sadly [Pg 158] pleasant memories. With Currer Bell's poems I deal in various chapters, wherein we perceive their relationship to Wuthering Heights and her other books which resulted from the harsh rigours of her tempest-bestormed night. ”

“ It is clear the impediment of M. Héger's marriage is suggested in these verses. But undeniable evidence as to Charlotte Brontë's having escaped by flight what she considered a most dangerous temptation, is the fact that we find she was influenced to pen these lines, wherein M. Héger (Rochester) is likened to a wild pursuer of a "shower and gleam" nymph who sped before him "fast as light" and "glorious rose upon his sight," by Montagu's reference, in Gleanings in Craven, to the story of a Craven nymph a satyr pursued yet lost by her being changed into a spring. ”

“ The Key to the Brontë Works, I repeat, is the only book which shows us the life and works of Charlotte Brontë as intimately known to herself. Herein is my task accomplished; herewith is my reward. To quote my words from a private correspondence with Sir Charles Holroyd, Kt., Director of the National Gallery, London:—
"After her return from Brussels in 1844, Charlotte Brontë conceived the idea of perpetuating the drama of her life. ”

“ A death is supposed to have occurred in the Rivers family; and when it is remembered Thornfield to Charlotte Brontë represented the Hégers' establishment at Brussels, and that she left Brussels the first time on account of the death of her aunt, Miss Elizabeth Branwell who, after being the female head of the parsonage some years, died there in the close of 1842, we may know for whom the Rivers family were really in mourning. Charlotte Brontë tells us that, looking through the window of Moor House—Haworth Parsonage ”

“ After Charlotte Brontë's return from Brussels the degeneracy of her only brother, Patrick Branwell Brontë, a young man ambitious, but not successful, as an artist, made him an object of her disgust and antipathy, and we find she portrayed him unflinchingly as Hindley Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights, and again as John Reed of Jane Eyre. ”