The Three Brontës · Chapter 17En Una Noche Escura[a] (4)
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But the trouble began again after Charlotte's death. Emily herself had no legend; but her genius was perpetually the prey of rumours that left her personality untouched. Among the many provoked by Mrs. Gaskell's Life, there was one attributing Wuthering Heights to her brother Branwell.[A] Mr. Francis Grundy said that Branwell told him he had written Wuthering Heights. Mr. Leyland believed Mr. Grundy. He believed that Branwell was a great poet and a great novelist, and he wrote two solid volumes of his own in support of his belief.
[Footnote A: The curious will find a note on this point in Appendix II.]
Nobody believes in Mr. Grundy, or in Mr. Leyland and his belief in Branwell now. All that can be said of Branwell, in understanding and extenuation, is that he would have been a great poet and a greater novelist if he could have had his own way.
This having of your own way, unconsciously, undeliberately, would seem to be the supreme test of genius. Having your own way in the teeth of circumstances, of fathers and of brothers, and of aunts, of school-mistresses,[A] and of French professors, of the parish, of poverty, of public opinion and hereditary disease; in the teeth of the most disastrous of all hindrances, duty, not neglected, but fulfilled. By this test the genius of Emily Brontë fairly flames; Charlotte's stands beside it with a face hidden at times behind bruised and darkened wings. By this test even Anne's pale talent shows here and there a flicker as of fire. In all three the having of their own way was, after all, the great submission, the ultimate obedience to destiny.
[Footnote A: It was Miss Wooler who taught Charlotte to "peruse".]
For genius like theirs is destiny. And that brings us back to the eternal question of the Sources. "Experience" will not account for what was greatest in Charlotte. It will hardly account for what was least in Emily. With her only the secret, the innermost experience counted. If the sources of Wuthering Heights are in the "Gondal Poems", the sources of the poems are in that experience, in the long life of her adventurous spirit. Her genius, like Henry Angora and Rosina and the rest of them, flew from the "Palaces of Instruction". As she was Henry Angora, so she was Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.
It is a case of "The Horse I rode at the battle of Zamorna", that is all.
There has been too much talk about experience. What the critic, the impressionist, of the Brontës needs is to recover, before all things, the innocence of the eye. No doubt we all of us had it once, and can remember more or less what it was like. To those who have lost it I would say: Go back and read again Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë.
Years and years ago, when I was a child, hunting forlornly in my father's bookshelves, I came upon a small, shabby volume, bound in yellow linen. The title-page was adorned with one bad wood-cut that showed a grim, plain house standing obliquely to a churchyard packed with tombstones—tombstones upright and flat, and slanting at all angles. In the foreground was a haycock, where the grave grass had been mown. I do not know how the artist, whose resources were of the slenderest, contrived to get his overwhelming but fascinating effect of moorland solitude, of black-grey nakedness and abiding gloom. But he certainly got it and gave it. There was one other picture, representing a memorial tablet.
Tombstones always fascinated me in those days, because I was mortally afraid of them; and I opened that book and read it through.
I could not, in fact, put it down. For the first time I was in the grip of a reality more poignant than any that I had yet known, of a tragedy that I could hardly bear. I suppose I have read that book a score of times since then. There are pages in it that I shrink from approaching even now, because of the agony of realization they revive. The passing bell tolled continually in the prelude; it sounded at intervals throughout; it tolled again at the close. The refrain of "Here lie the Remains" haunted me like a dolorous song. It seemed to me a decorous and stately accompaniment to such a tale, and that wood-cut on the title-page a fitting ornament. I knew every corner of that house. I have an impression (it is probably a wrong one) of a flagged path going right down from the Parsonage door through another door and plunging among the tombs. I saw six little white and wistful faces looking out of an upper window; I saw six little children going up and up a lane, and I wondered how the tiny feet of babies ever got so far. I saw six little Brontë babies lost in the spaces of the illimitable moors. They went over rough stones and walls and mountain torrents; their absurd petticoats were blown upwards by the wind, and their feet were tangled in the heather. They struggled and struggled, and yet were in an ecstasy that I could well understand.
I remember I lingered somewhat long over the schooldays at Cowan Bridge and that I found the Brussels period dull; M. Héger struck me as a tiresome pedant, and I wondered how Charlotte could ever have put up with him. There was a great deal about Branwell that I could not understand at all, and so forgot. And I skipped all the London part, and Charlotte's literary letters. I had a very vague idea of Charlotte apart from Haworth and the moors, from the Parsonage and the tombstones, from Tabby and Martha and the little black cat that died, from the garden where she picked the currants, and the quiet rooms where she wrote her wonderful, wonderful books.
But, for all that skipping and forgetting, there stood out a vivid and ineffaceable idea of Emily; Emily who was tall and strong and unconquerable; Emily who loved animals, and loved the moors; Emily and Keeper, that marvellous dog; Emily kneading bread with her book propped before her; Emily who was Ellis Bell, listening contemptuously to the reviews of Wuthering Heights; Emily stitching at the long seam with dying fingers; and Emily dead, carried down the long, flagged path, with Keeper following in the mourners' train.
And, all through, an invisible, intangible presence, something mysterious, but omnipotently alive; something that excited these three sisters; something that atoned, that not only consoled for suffering and solitude and bereavement, but that drew its strength from these things; something that moved in this book like the soul of it; something that they called "genius".
Now that, as truly as I can set it down, is the impression conveyed to a child's mind by Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. And making some deductions for a child's morbid attraction to tombstones, and a child's natural interest in children, it seems to me even now that this innocent impression is the true one. It eliminates the inessential and preserves the proportions; above all, it preserves the figure of Emily Brontë, solitary and unique.
Anyhow, I have never been able to get away from it.
September 1911.