CHAPTER VII.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË ON WUTHERING HEIGHTS -CHARLOTTE AND EMILY IN BRUSSELSCHARLOTTE'S STYLE-THE PROFESSOR

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HARLOTTE BRONTË puts into brilliant and picturesque language a theory, partly explanatory, partly apologetic, on the subject of such literary work as we have in Wuthering Heights. "Whether," she says, "it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master-something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will, perhaps, for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent to 'harrow the valleys, or be bound with a band in the furrow '-when it laughs at the multitude of the city, and regards not the crying of the driver'-when, re

fusing absolutely to make ropes out of sea-sand any longer, it sets to work on statue-hewing, and you have a Pluto or a Jove, a Tisiphone or a Psyche, a Mermaid or a Madonna, as Fate or Inspiration direct. Be the work grim or glorious, dread or divine, you have little choice left but quiescent adoption. As for you— the nominal artist-your share in it has been to work passively under dictates you neither delivered nor could question-that would not be uttered at your prayer, nor suppressed nor changed at your caprice.' That genius is apt to lay imperative commands on its possessor, and that there is the inspiration of genius in Wuthering Heights, I should be the last to dispute ; but it were rash to admit that genius is not responsible for its creations. And even if this were granted, it would remain incontrovertible that the characteristic creations of literary genius-the portraits it delights to depict, the scenes it loves to describe, the incidents it habitually invents-are trustworthy indications of the nature of the artist. Even the religious inspiration, which is more intense and transforming in its potency than the literary inspiration, has been held by all wise theologians to irradiate but never to obliterate or misrepresent the natural character. Both the poems and the prose work of Emily Brontë lie in pessimistic shadow as dark and deep as that cast by the stormclouds on the sea in Turner's murkiest pictures of shipwreck. We ought, indeed, to recollect that she died young; that young persons of genius are apt to lay stress upon the tragic tones in life; that, if she

Charlotte on Wuthering Heights.

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had lived to be sixty, she might have produced so many sunny and healthy works, that the grim grotesque of her 'prentice hand would have been thrown into the background. Against this, however, we must in fairness set the fact, that the execution of Wuthering Heights is singularly mature the style such as practised and consummate writers use, the sentiment free of young-mannish bravura, and, still more, of young-womanish syllabub. The author never seems for one moment to lose her self-possession and self-command. Had Shakespeare written Lear before he was thirty, and died, we should have had a right to believe that he took a pessimistic view of life; and of Emily Brontë we must hold that she was morbidly pessimistic. "I am oppressed," says Charlotte, after reading the book anew in 1850: "the reader is scarcely ever permitted a taste of unalloyed pleasure; every beam of sunshine is poured down through black bars of threatening cloud; every page is surcharged with a sort of moral electricity."

It is, however, the sunny book-above all, it is the sunny novel-that the world most cordially takes to; and we may doubt whether Emily Brontë's name would ever have obtained a place in the chronicles of English literature, if the more buoyant and happy genius of her sister had not fairly scaled the horizon, and drawn all eyes to the wonder that had appeared somewhere among the Yorkshire hills.

Mr. Wemyss Reid seems to me to be correct in deciding that the main determining incident in

Charlotte Brontë's life was not the death of her brother, but her own residence, at two successive periods, in Brussels. When the change-to her immense from native Yorkshire to the Belgian capital took place, she was twenty-six years old, but had very much to learn. M. Heger, the head of the seminary to which she went as a pupil, declared that she and her sister Emily knew nothing of French. He meant, I presume, that they had no extensive or finely accurate acquaintance with the language, and set about drilling them in the fashion adopted with his advanced French and Belgian pupils. His experience with the sisters was what we should have expected. Emily," says Mrs. Gaskell, summarising the Belgian headmaster's estimate, "had a head for logic, and a capability for argument, unusual in a man, and rare, indeed, in a woman." He thought Emily abler than Charlotte; but, unfortunately, "a stubborn tenacity of will," "impairing" in his view the force of her genius, rendered her occasionally impervious to his instructions," where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned." We may interpret this to mean that she chose to retain in her compositions the idiom of her native English, and in conventional morals her "heretic " and Protestant ideas, rather than to have her forms of expression and her notions of truth passed through M. Heger's mill. The style of Emily Brontë is thoroughly English.

In Charlotte's case M. Heger had not to deplore any tenacity of will resisting his influence.

She

Charlotte and M. Heger.

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delighted in feeling herself once more a schoolgirl. "It is natural," she said, "to me to submit, and very unnatural to command." I believe the characterisation to be just. It would be correct also, if applied to Mrs. Barrett Browning, and, I think, though some might dispute the fact, to George Eliot. But there are women to whom it does not apply, women to whom it is unnatural and painful to submit, and natural and pleasant to command. Emily Brontë, I take it, was one of these last. Whether submission would have been so pleasant for Charlotte if M. Heger had not been what he was, may remain a question. Him she describes as "a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament." The words describe the essential characteristic of Charlotte Brontë's pet hero, be his name Rochester, or be it Moore, or be it Paul Emanuel. A clever man, with strongly-marked features, who is fervently in love with a plain girl, to whom, while he longs to clasp her to his heart, he talks harshly, is the man whom Charlotte Brontë always hero-worships.

Under M. Heger's auspices and instruction, Charlotte learned to write French so well that her English style became thenceforward characteristically French. Her devoir on the death of Napoleon is written in French which I may err in pronouncing classic of the best modern French school; but it certainly has a tone and air characteristically French, and yet it reads exactly like a passage from her English prose translated into French. "Napoléon "-this is the