BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR 4168.S61 1912 
 
 The three Brontes. 
 
 3 1924 013 440 445 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013440445 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 Crown 8vo. 6s, each. 
 
 THE CREATORS. 
 
 THE DIVINE FIRE. 
 
 TWO SIDES OF A QUESTION. 
 
 THE HELPMATE. 
 
 KITTY TAILLEUR. 
 
 MR. AND MRS. NEVILL TYSON. 
 
:^/j 
 
 
 
 (//. -yj1(i//ft' /■Vni/.f .//Jw//tc. 
 
The portrait of Charlotte Bronte was drawn in 
 crayons, from life, in 1850, by George Richmond, R.A., 
 and presented to her by Mr. George Smith, of Smith, 
 Elder &Co., her publishers . The picture was subsequently 
 bequeathed to the National Portrait Gallery by Charlotte 
 Bronte's husband, the Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls. 
 
 Emily Bronte's portrait is from, the family group 
 roughly painted by Patrick Branwell Bronte, and re- 
 produced from, a photograph of the picture owned by Mr. 
 Clement Shorter, with the heads of the sisters, initialed 
 by Miss Ellen Nussey. 
 
 Anne Bronte's portrait is from a picture by 
 Charlotte Bront'i, the original of which is now in the 
 possession of Mr. Clement Shorter. 
 
THE 
 
 THREE BRONTES 
 
 BY 
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 WITH A FRONTISPIECE 
 
 London: HUTCHINSON & CO. 
 Paternoster Row s=*=^ ^===5) 191 2 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 My thanks are due, first and chiefly, to Mr. Clement 
 
 K. Shorter who placed all his copyright material at my 
 
 disposal ; and to Mr. G. M. Williamson and Mr. Robert 
 
 H. Dodd, of New York, for allowing me to draw so 
 
 largely from the Poems of Emily Bronte, published by 
 
 Messrs. Dodd, Mead, and Co. in 1902; also to Messrs. 
 
 Hodder and Stoughton, the publishers of the Complete 
 
 Poems of Emily Bronte, edited by Mr. Shorter ; and to 
 
 Mr. Alfred Sutro for permission to use his translation of 
 
 Wisdom and Destiny. Lastly, and somewhat late, to 
 
 Mr. Arthur Symons for his translation from St. John of 
 
 the Cross. If I have borrowed from him more than I 
 
 had any right to without his leave, I hope he will 
 
 forgive me. 
 
 MAY SINCLAIR. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 fags; 
 
 INTRODUCTION 1 
 
 THE THREE BRONTES . . .... 7 
 
 APPENDIX I 241 
 
 APPENDIX II 248 
 
 INDEX 261 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 When six months ago Mr. Thomas Seccombe suggested 
 that I should write a short essay on ' The Three Brontes ' 
 for Messrs. Constable's series of ' Modern Biographies,' I 
 agreed with some misgiving. 
 
 Yet that deed was innocent compared with what I 
 have done now ; and, in any case, the series afforded the 
 offender a certain shelter and protection. But to come 
 out like this, into the open, with another Bronte book, 
 seems not only a dangerous, but a futile and a fatuous 
 adventure. All I can say is that I did not mean to do it. 
 I certainly never meant to write so long a book. 
 
 It grew, insidiously, out of the little one. Things 
 happened. New criticisms opened up old questions. 
 When I came to look carefully into Mr. Clement Shorter's 
 collection of the Complete Poems of Emily Bronte, I 
 found a mass of material (its existence I, at any rate, 
 had not suspected) that could not be dealt with in the 
 limits of the original essay. 
 
 The book is, and can only be, the slightest of all slight 
 appreciations. None the less it has been hard and 
 terrible for me to write it. Nat only had I said nearly 
 all that I had to say already, but I was depressed at the 
 very start by that conviction of the absurdity of trying 
 to say anything at all, after all that has been said, about 
 Anne, or Emily, or Charlotte Bronte. 
 
 A 
 
2 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Anne's case, perhaps, was not so difficult. For obvious 
 reasons, Anne Bronte will always be comparatively virgin 
 soil. But it was impossible to write of Charlotte after 
 Mrs. Gaskell ; impossible to say more of Emily than 
 Madame Duclaux has said ; impossible to add one single 
 little fact to the vast material, so patiently amassed, so 
 admirably arranged by Mr. Clement Shorter. And when 
 it came to appreciation there were Mr. Theodore Watts 
 Dunton, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, Mr. Birrell, 
 and Mrs. Humphry Ward, lying along the ground. 
 When it came to eulogy, after Mr. Swinburne's Note on 
 Charlotte Bronte, neither Charlotte nor Emily have any 
 need of praise. 
 
 And on Emily Bronte, M. Maeterlinck has spoken the 
 one essential, the one perfect and final and sufficient 
 word. I have ' lifted ' it unblushingly ; for no other 
 word comes near to rendering the unique, the haunting, 
 the indestructible impression that she makes. 
 
 So, because all the best things about the Brontes have 
 been said already, I have had to fall back on the humble 
 day-labour of clearing away some of the rubbish that has 
 gathered round them. 
 
 Round Charlotte it has gathered to such an extent 
 that it is difficult to see her plainly through the mass of 
 it. Much has been cleared away ; much remains. Mrs. 
 Oliphant's dreadful theories are still on record. The 
 excellence of Madame Duclaux's monograph per- 
 petuates her one serious error. Mr. Swinburne's Note 
 immortahses his. M. Heger was dug up again the other 
 day. 
 
 It may be said that I have been calling up ghosts for 
 the mere fun of laying them ; and there might be some- 
 
INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 thing in it, but that really these ghosts still walk. At 
 any rate many people believe in them, even at this time 
 of day. M. Dimnet believes firmly that poor Mrs. 
 Robinson was in love with Branwell Bronte. Some of 
 us still think that Charlotte was in love with M. Heger. 
 They cannot give him up any more than M. Dimnet can 
 give up Mrs. Robinson. 
 
 Such things would be utterly unimportant but that 
 they tend to obscure the essential quality and greatness 
 of Charlotte Bronte's genius. Because of them she has 
 passed for a woman of one experience and of one book. 
 There is still room for a clean sweep of the rubbish that 
 has been shot here. 
 
 In all this, controversy was unavoidable, much as I 
 dislike its ungracious and ungraceful air. If I have been 
 inclined to undervalue certain things — ' the sojourn in 
 Brussels,' for instance — which others have considered of 
 the first importance, it is because I believe that it is 
 always the inner life that counts, and that with the 
 Brontes it supremely counted. 
 
 If I have passed over the London period too lightly, it 
 is because I judge it extraneous and external. If I have 
 tried, cruelly, to take from Charlotte the little beige 
 gown that she wore at Mr. Thackeray's dinner-party, 
 it is because her home-made garments seem to suit her 
 better. She is more herself in skirts that have brushed 
 the moors and kept some of the soil of Haworth in their 
 hem. 
 
 I may seem to have exaggerated her home-sickness for 
 Haworth. It may be said that Haworth was by no 
 means Charlotte's home as it was Emily's. I am aware 
 that there were moments — hours — when she longed to 
 
 "* 
 
4 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 get away from it. I have not forgotten how Mary 
 Taylor found her in such an hour, not long after her 
 return from Brussels, when her very flesh shrank from 
 the thought of her youth gone and * nothing done ' ; 
 nothing before her but long, empty years in Haworth. 
 The fact remains that she was never happy away from 
 it, and that in Haworth her genius most certainly found 
 itself at home. And this particular tone of misery and 
 unrest disappeared from the moment when her genius 
 declared itself, so that I am inclined to see in it, a little 
 personal dissatisfaction, if you will, but chiefly the un- 
 speakable restlessness and misery of power unrecognised 
 and suppressed. ' Nothing done ! ' That was her 
 reiterated cry. 
 
 Again, if I have overlooked the complexities of Char- 
 lotte's character, it is that the great lines that underlie it 
 may be seen. In my heart I agree with M. Dimnet that 
 the Brontes were not simple. AH the same I think that 
 his admirable portrait of Charlotte is spoiled by his 
 attitude of pity for ' la pauvrefille,' as he persists in calling 
 her. I think he dwells a shade too much on her small 
 asperities and acidities, and on that ' ton de critique mes- 
 quine,^ which he puts down to her provincialism. No 
 doubt there were moments of suffering and of irritation, 
 as well as moments of uncontrollable merriment, when 
 Charlotte lacked urbanity, but M. Dimnet has almost 
 too keen an eye for them. 
 
 In making war on theories I cannot hope to escape a 
 countercharge of theorising. Exception may be taken 
 to my own suggestion as to the effect of Wuthering 
 Heights on Charlotte Bronte's genius. If anybody likes 
 to fling it on the rubbish heap they may. I may have 
 
INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 theorised a little too much in laying stress on the super- 
 natural element in Wuthering Heights. It is because 
 M. Dimnet has insisted too much on its brutality. I 
 may have exaggerated Emily Bronte's ' mysticism.' 
 It is because her * paganism ' has been too much in 
 evidence. It may be said that I have no more authority 
 for my belief that Emily Bronte was in love with the 
 Absolute than other people have for theirs, that Charlotte 
 was in love with M. Heger. 
 
 Finally, much that I have said about Emily Bronte's 
 hitherto unpublished poems is pure theory. But it is 
 theory, I think, that careful examination of the poems 
 will make good. I may have here and there given as 
 a ' Gondal ' poem what is not a ' Gondal ' poem at all. 
 Still, I believe, it will be admitted that it is in the cycle 
 of these poems, and not elsewhere, that we should look 
 for the first germs of Wuthering Heights. The evidence 
 only demonstrates in detail — what has never been 
 seriously contested — that the genius of Emily Bronte 
 found its sources in itself. 
 
 10th October 1911. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 It is impossible to write of the three Brontes and forget 
 the place they lived in, the black-grey, naked village, 
 bristling like a rampart on the clean edge of the moor ; 
 the street, dark and steep as a gully, climbing the hill to 
 the Parsonage at the top ; the small oblong house, naked 
 and grey, hemmed in on two sides by the graveyard, its 
 five windows flush with the wall, staring at the graveyard 
 where the tombstones, grey and naked, are set so close 
 that,the grass hardly grows between. The church itself 
 is a burying ground ; its walls are tombstones, and its 
 floor roofs the forgotten and the unforgotten dead. 
 
 A low wall and a few feet of barren garden divide the 
 PaJSonage from the graveyard, a few feet between the 
 door of the house and the door in the wall where its dead 
 were carried through. But a path leads beyond the grave- 
 yard to ' a little and a lone green lane,' Emily Bronte's 
 lane that leads to the open moors. 
 
 It is the genius of the Brontes that made their place 
 immortal ; but it is the soul of the place that made their 
 genius what it is. You cannot exaggerate its importance. 
 They drank and were saturated with Haworth. When 
 they left it they hungered and thirsted for it ; they 
 sickened till the hour of their return. They gave them- 
 selves to it with passion, and their works ring with the 
 
 7 
 
8 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 shock and interchange of two immortalities. Haworth 
 is saturated with them. Their souls are henceforth no 
 more to be disentangled from its soul than their bodies 
 from its earth. All their poetry, their passion and their 
 joy is there, in this place of their tragedy, visible, palpable, 
 narrow as the grave and boundless. 
 
 In the year eighteen-twenty the Reverend Patrick 
 Bronte and his wife Maria brought their six children, 
 Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick Bran well, Emily, and 
 Anne, from Thornton, where they were born, to Haworth. 
 Mr. Bronte was an Irishman, a village schoolmaster who 
 won, marvellously, a scholarship that admitted him to 
 Cambridge and the Church of England. Tales have been 
 told of his fathers and his forefathers, peasants and peasant 
 farmers of BaUynaskeagh in County Down. They seem 
 to have been notorious for their energy, eccentricity, 
 imagination, and a certain tendency to turbulence and 
 excess. Tales have been told of Mr. Bronte himself, of 
 his temper, his egotism, his selfishness, his fits of morose 
 or savage temper. The Brontes' biographers, from Mrs. 
 Gaskell and Madame Duclaux* to Mr. Birrell, have all been 
 hard on this poor and unhappy and innocent old man. It 
 is not easy to see him very clearly through the multitude of 
 tales they tell : how he cut up his wife's silk gown in a fit of 
 passion ; how he fired off pistols in a series of fits of passion ; 
 how, in still gloomier and more malignant fits, he used to 
 go for long solitary walks. And when you look into the 
 matter you find that the silk gown was, after all, a cotton 
 one, and that he only cut the sleeves out, and then 
 walked into Keighley and brought a silk gown back with 
 him instead ; that when he was a young man at Drum- 
 ' A. Mary F. Robinson. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 9 
 
 ballyroney he practised pistol firing, not as a safety valve 
 for temper but as a manly sport, and that as a manly sport 
 he kept it up. As for solitary walks, there is really no 
 reason why a father should not take them ; and if Mr. 
 Bronte had insisted on accompanying Charlotte and Emily 
 in their walks, his conduct would have been censured just 
 the same, and I think with considerably more reason. 
 As it happened, Mr. Bronte, rather more than most 
 fathers, made companions of his children when they were 
 little. This is not quite the same thing as making him- 
 self a companion for them, and the result was a terrific 
 outburst of infant precocity ; but this hardly justifies 
 Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux. They seem to have 
 thought that they were somehow appeasing the outraged 
 spirits of Emily and Charlotte by blackening their father 
 and their brother ; whereas, if anything could give pain 
 to Charlotte and Emily and innocent Anne in heaven, it 
 would be the knowledge of what Mrs. Gaskell and Madame 
 Duclaux have done for them. 
 
 There was injustice in all that zeal as well as indis- 
 cretion, for Mr. Bronte had his good points as fathers 
 go. Think what the fathers of the Victorian era could 
 be, and what its evangelical parsons often were; and 
 remember that Mr. Bronte was an evangelical parson, 
 and the father of Emily and Charlotte, not of a brood 
 of gentle, immaculate Jane Austens, and that he was 
 confronted suddenly and without a moment's warning 
 with Charlotte's fame. Why, the average evangelical 
 parson would have been shocked into apoplexy at the 
 idea of any child of his producing Wuthering Heights 
 or Jane Eyre. Charlotte's fame would have looked to 
 him exceedingly like infamy. We know what Charles 
 
10 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Kingsley, the least evangelical of parsons, once thought of 
 Charlotte. And we know what Mr. Bronte thought of 
 her. He was profoundly proud of his daughters' genius; 
 there is no record and no rumour of any criticism on his 
 part, of any remonstrance or amazement. He was loyal 
 to Charlotte to the last days of his life, when he gave 
 her defence into Mrs. Gaskell's hands; for which con- 
 fidence Mrs. Gaskell repaid him shockingly. 
 
 But he was the kind of figure that is irresistible to 
 the caustic or humorous biographer. There was some- 
 thing impotently fiery in him, as if the genius of 
 Charlotte and Emily had flicked him in irony as it 
 passed him by. He wound himself in yards and yards 
 and yards of white cravat, and he wrote a revolutionary 
 poem called ' Vision of Hell.' It is easy to make fun of 
 his poems, but they were no worse, or very little worse, 
 than his son Branwdl's, so that he may be pardoned if 
 he thought himself more important than his children. 
 Many fathers of the Victorian era did. 
 
 And he was important as a temporary vehicle of the 
 wandering creative impulse. It struggled and strove in 
 him and passed from him, choked in yards and yards of 
 white cravat, to struggle and strive again in Branwell and 
 in Anne. As a rule the genius of the race is hostile to the 
 creative impulse, and the creative impulse is lucky if it 
 can pierce through to one member of a family. In the 
 Brontes it emerges at five different levels, rising from 
 abortive struggle to supreme achievement — ^from Mr. 
 Bronte to his son Branwell, from Branwell to Anne, 
 from Anne to Charlotte, and from Charlotte to Emily. 
 And Maria, who died, was an infant prodigy. 
 
 And Mr. Bronte is important because he was the tool 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 11 
 
 used by their destiny to keep Charlotte and Emily in 
 Haworth. 
 
 The tragedy we are too apt to call their destiny began 
 with their babyhood, when the mother and six children 
 were brought to Haworth Parsonage and the prospect 
 of the tombstones. They had not been there eighteen 
 months before the mother sickened and died horribly 
 of caiicer. 
 
 She had to be isolated as far as possible. The Parsonage 
 house was not large, and it was built with an extreme and 
 straight simplicity ; two front rooms, not large, right 
 and left of the narrow stone-flagged passage, a bedroom 
 above each, and between, squeezed into the small spare 
 space above the passage, a third room, no bigger than 
 a closet and without a fireplace. This third room is 
 important in the story of the Brontes, for, when their 
 mother's illness declared itself, it was in this incredibly 
 small and insufferably unwholesome den that the five 
 little girls were packed, heaven knows how, and it was 
 here that the seeds of tuberculosis were sown in their 
 fragile bodies. After their mother's death the little fatal 
 room was known as the children's study (you can see, in 
 a dreadful vision, the six pale little faces, pressed together, 
 looking out of the window on to the graves below). It 
 was used again as a night- nursery, and later still as the 
 sleeping-place shared by two, if not three, of the sisters, 
 two of whom were tuberculous. 
 
 The mother died and was buried in a vault under the 
 floor of the church, not far from the windows of her house. 
 Her sister. Miss Branwell, came up from Penzance to 
 look after the children. You can see this small, middle- 
 aged, early Victorian spinster, exiled for ever from the 
 
12 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 sunshine of the town she loved, dragging out her sad, 
 fastidious Ufe in a cold and comparatively savage country 
 that she unspeakably disliked. She took possession of the 
 room her sister died in (it was the most cheerful room in 
 the house), and lived in it. Her nieces had to sit there 
 with her for certain hours while she taught them sewing 
 and all the early Victorian virtues. Their father made 
 himself responsible for the rest of their education, which 
 he conducted with considerable vigour and originality. 
 Maria, the eldest, was the child of promise. Long before 
 Maria was eleven he ' conversed ' with her on ' the leading 
 topics of the day, with as much pleasure and freedom as 
 with any grown-up person.' 
 
 For this man, so gloomy, we are told, and so morose, 
 found pleasure in taking his tiny children out on to the 
 moors, where he entertained them alternately with poli- 
 tics and tales of brutality and horror. At six years old 
 each Uttle Bronte had its view of the political situation ; 
 and it was not until a plague of measles and whooping- 
 cough found out their tender youth that their father 
 realised how very young and small and delicate they 
 were, and how very little, after all, he understood about 
 a nursery. In a sudden frantic distrust of the climate 
 of Haworth, of Miss Branwell, and his own system, he 
 made up his mind to send Maria and Elizabeth and 
 Charlotte and Emily to school. 
 
 And there was only one school within his means, the 
 Clergy Daughters' School, established at Cowan Bridge 
 in an imwholesome valley. It has been immortalised in 
 Jaiie Eyre, together with its founder and patron, the 
 Reverend Carus Wilson. There can be no doubt that the 
 early Victorian virtues, self-repression, humility, and 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 13 
 
 patience under affliction, were admirably taugbt at 
 Cowan Bridge, And if the carnal nature of the Clergy 
 Daughters resisted the militant efforts of Mr. Cams Wilson, 
 it was ultimately subdued by low diet and primitive 
 drainage working together in an unwholesome valley. 
 Mr. Carus Wilson, indeed, was inspired by a sublime 
 antagonism to the claims of the perishable body ; but 
 he seems to have pushed his campaign against the flesh 
 a bit too far, and was surprised at his own success when, 
 one after another, the extremely perishable bodies of 
 those children were laid low by typhus. 
 
 The fever did not touch the four little Brontes. They 
 had another destiny. Their seed of dissolution was 
 sown in that small stifling room at Haworth, and was 
 reaped now at Cowan Bridge. First Maria, then Eliza- 
 beth, sickened, and was sent home to die. Charlotte 
 stayed on for a while with Emily. She ran wild, and 
 hung about the river, watching it, and dabbling her feet 
 and hands in the running water. Their doom waited 
 for Charlotte and for Emily. 
 
 There is no record of Elizabeth except that like Anne 
 Bronte, she was ' gentle.' But Maria lived in Charlotte's 
 passionate memory, and will live for ever as Helen Bums, 
 the school-fellow of Jane Eyre. Of those five infant 
 prodigies, she was the most prodigious. She was the 
 first of the children to go down into the vault under 
 Haworth Church ; you see her looking back on her sad 
 way, a small, reluctant ghost, lovely, infantile, and yet 
 maternal. Under her name on the flat tombstone a 
 verse stands, premonitory, prophetic, calling to her 
 kindred : ' Be ye also ready.' 
 
 Charlotte was nine years old when her sisters died. 
 
14 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Tragedy tells at nine years old. It lived all her life in her 
 fine nerves, reinforced by shock after shock of terror and 
 of anguish. 
 
 But for the next seven years, spent at the Parsonage 
 without a break, tragedy was quiescent. Day after day, 
 year after year passed, and nothing happened. And the 
 children of the Parsonage, thrown on themselves and 
 on each other, were exuberantly happy. They had the 
 freedom of the moors, and of the worlds, as wild, as 
 gorgeous, as lonely, as immeasurable, which they them- 
 selves created. They found out that they were not 
 obliged to be the children of the Parsonage ; they could 
 be, and they were, anything they chose, from the Duke 
 of WelUngton down to citizens of Verdopolis. For a 
 considerable number of years they were the ' Islanders.' 
 ' It was in 1827 ' (Charlotte, at thirteen, records the date 
 with gravity — it was so important) ' that our plays were 
 established : Young Men, June 1826 ; Our Fellows, 
 July 1827 ; The Islanders, December 1827. These are 
 our three great plays that are not kept secret.' 
 
 But there were secret plays, Emily's and Charlotte's ; 
 and these you gather to be the shy and solitary flights 
 of Emily's and Charlotte's genius. They seem to have 
 required absolutely no impulsion from without. The 
 difficult thing for these small children was to stop writing. 
 Their fire consumed them, and left their bodies ashen 
 white, fragile as ashes. And yet they were not, they 
 could not have been, the sedentary, unwholesome little 
 creatures they might seem to be. The girls were kept 
 hard at work with their thin arms, brushing carpets, 
 dusting furniture, and making beds. And for play they 
 tramped the moors with their brother; they breasted 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 15 
 
 the keen and stormy weather ; the sun, the moon, 
 the stars, and the winds knew them ; and it is of these 
 fierce, radiant, elemental things that Charlotte and Emily- 
 wrote as no women before them had ever written. Con- 
 ceive the vitality and energy implied in such a life ; and 
 think, if you can, of these two as pimy, myopic victims 
 of the lust of literature. It was from the impressions 
 they took in those seven years that their immortahty 
 was made. 
 
 And then, for a year and a half, Charlotte went to 
 school again, that school of Miss Wooler's at Roe Head, 
 where Ellen Nussey found her, ' a silent, weeping, dark 
 little figure in the large bay-window.' She was then 
 sixteen. 
 
 Two years later she went back to Miss Wooler's school 
 as a teacher. 
 
 In the register of the Clergy Daughters' School there 
 are two immortal entries : — 
 
 ' Charlotte Bronte. . . , Left school, June 1st, 1825 — 
 Governess.' 
 
 ' Emily Bronte. . . . Left, June 1st, 1825. Subsequent 
 career — Governess.' 
 
 They did not question the arrangement. They were 
 not aware of any other destiny. They never doubted 
 that the boy, Branwell, was the child of promise, who 
 was to have a glorious career. In order that he should 
 have it the sisters left Haworth again and again, forcing 
 themselves to the exile that destroyed them, and the 
 work they hated. It was Charlotte and Anne who 
 showed themselves most courageous and determined 
 in the terrible adventure ; Emily, who was courage 
 and determination incarnate, failed. Homesickness had 
 
16 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 become a disease with them, an obsession, almost a 
 madness. They longed with an immitigable longing for 
 their Parsonage-house, their graveyard, and their moors. 
 Emily was consumed by it ; Anne languished ; Charlotte 
 was torn between it and her passion for knowledge. 
 
 She took Emily back with her to Roe Head as a pupil, 
 and Emily nearly died of it. She sent Emily home, and 
 little Anne, the last victim, took Emily's place. She 
 and Charlotte went with the school when it was removed 
 to Dewsbury Moor. Then Emily, who had nearly died 
 of Roe Head, shamed by Charlotte's and Anne's example, 
 went to Halifax as a teacher in Miss Patchett's Academy 
 for Young Ladies. She was at Halifax — ^Halifax of all 
 places — for six months, and nearly died of Halifax. And 
 after that Charlotte and Anne set out on their careers as 
 nursery-governesses. 
 
 It was all that they considered themselves fit for. 
 Anne went to a Mrs. Ingham at Blake Hall, where she 
 was homesick and miserable. Charlotte went to the 
 Sidgwicks at Stonegappe near Skipton, where ' one of the 
 pleasantest afternoons I spent — ^indeed, the only one at 
 all pleasant — was when Mr. Sidgwick walked out with his 
 children, and I had orders to follow a little way behind.' 
 You have an impression of years of suffering endured at 
 Stonegappe. As a matter of fact, Charlotte was there 
 hardly three months — May, June, July, eighteen-thirty- 
 nine. 
 
 And most of the time their brother Branwell was 
 either at Bradford or at Haworth, dreaming of greatness, 
 and drinking at the Black Bull. The Black Bull stands 
 disastrously near to the Parsonage, at the corner of the 
 churchyard, with its parlour windows looking on the 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 17 
 
 graves. Branwell was the life and soul of every party 
 of commercial travellers that gathered there. Con- 
 viviality took strange forms at Haworth. It had a 
 Masonic Lodge of the Three Graces, with John Brown, 
 the grave-digger, for Worshipful Master. Branwell was 
 at one and the same time secretary to the Three Graces 
 and to the Haworth Temperance Society. When he was 
 not entertaining bagmen, he was either at Bradford 
 painting bad portraits, or at Haworth pouring out verses, 
 fearfully long, fatally fluent verses, and writing hysterical 
 letters to the editor of Blackwood's Magazine. One 
 formidable letter (the third he sent) is headed in large 
 letters : * Sir, read what I write.' It begins : ' And 
 would to Heaven you would believe in me, for then you 
 would attend to me and act upon it,' and ends : ' You 
 lost an able writer in James Hogg, and God grant you 
 may get one in Patrick Branwell Bronte,' Another 
 followed, headed, ' Sir, read now at last,' and ending, 
 ' Condemn not unheard.' In a final letter Branwell 
 inquires whether Mr. Blackwood thinks his magazine 
 ■ so perfect that no addition to its power would be either 
 possible or desirable,' and whether it is pride that actuates 
 him, or custom, or prejudice ? and conjures him : ' Be 
 a man, sir ! ' 
 
 Nothing came of it. Mr. Blackwood refused to be a 
 man. 
 
 Yet Branwell had his chance. He went to London, 
 but nothing came of it. He went to Bradford and had 
 a studio there, but nothing came of it. He lived for a 
 brief period in a small provincial Bohemia. It was his 
 best and happiest period, but nothing came of it beyond 
 the letters and the reams of verse he sent to Leyland 
 
 B 
 
18 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 the sculptor. There was something brilliant and fan- 
 tastic about the boy that fascinated Leyland. But a 
 studio costs money, and Branwell had to give his up and 
 go back to Haworth and the society of John Brown the 
 stone-mason and grave-digger. That John Brown was 
 a decent fellow you gather from the fact that on a journey 
 to Liverpool he had charge of Branwell, when Branwell 
 was at his worst. They had affectionate names for each 
 other. Branwell is the Philosopher, John Brown is the 
 Old Knave of Trumps. The whole trouble with Bran- 
 well was that he could not resist the temptation of im- 
 pressing the grave-digger. He himself was impressed by 
 the ironic union in the Worshipful Master of conviviality 
 and a sinister occupation. 
 
 A letter of Branwell's (preserved by the grave-digger in 
 a quaint devotion to his friend's memory) has achieved 
 an immortality denied to his ' Effusions.' Nothing having 
 come of the ' Effusions,' Branwell, to his infinite credit, 
 followed his sisters' example, and became tutor with a 
 Mr. Postlethwaite. The irony of his situation pleased 
 him, and he wrote to the Old Knave of Trumps thus : 
 ' I took a half-year's farewell of old friend whisky at 
 Kendal on the night after I left. There was a party of 
 gentlemen at the Royal Hotel, and I joined them. We 
 ordered in supper and whisky-toddy as hot as hell ! 
 They thought I was a physician, and put me in the chair. 
 I gave several toasts that were washed down at the same 
 time till the room spun round and the candles danced 
 in our eyes. ... I found myself in bed next morning 
 with a bottle of porter, a glass, and a corkscrew beside 
 me. Since then I have not tasted anything stronger 
 than milk-and-water, nor, I hope, shall, till I return at 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 19 
 
 midsummer ; when we will see about it. I am getting 
 as fat as Prince William at Springhead, and as godly as 
 his friend Parson Winterbotham. My hand shakes 
 no longer. I ride to the banker's at Ulverston with 
 Mr. Postlethwaite, and sit drinking tea, and talking 
 scandal with old ladies. As for the young ones ! I 
 have one sitting by me just now — ^fair-faced, blue-eyed, 
 dark-haired, sweet eighteen — she little thinks the devil 
 is so near her!' — and a great deal more in the same 
 silly, post-Byronic strain. 
 
 In his postscript Branwell says : ' Of course you won't 
 show this letter,' and of course John Brown showed it 
 all round. It was far too good to be kept to himself ; 
 .John Brown's brother thought it so excellent that he 
 committed it to memory. This was hard on Branwell. 
 The letter is too fantastic to be used against him as 
 evidence of his extreme depravity, but it certainly lends 
 some support to Mrs. Gaskell's statements that he had 
 begun already, at two-and-twenty, to be an anxiety to 
 his family. Haworth, that schooled his sisters to a high 
 and beautiful austerity, was bad for Branwell. 
 
 He stayed with Mr. Postlethwaite for a month longer 
 than Charlotte stayed with the Sidgwicks. 
 
 Then, for a whole year, Charlotte was at Haworth, 
 doing housemaid's work, and writing poems, and amusing 
 herself at the expense of her father's curates. She had 
 begun to find out the extent to which she could amuse 
 herself. She also had had ' her chance.' She had 
 refused two offers of marriage, preferring the bondage 
 and the exile that she knew. Nothing more exhilarating 
 than a proposal that you have rejected. Those proposals 
 did Charlotte good. But it was not marriage that she 
 
20 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 wanted. She found it (for a year) happiness enough to 
 be at Ha worth, to watch the long comedy of the curates 
 as it unrolled itself before her. She saw most things that 
 summer (her twenty-fifth) with the ironic eyes of the 
 comic spirit, even Branwell. She wrote to Miss Nussey : 
 ' A distant relation of mine, one Patrick Boanerges, has 
 set off to seek his fortune in the wild, wandering, knight^ 
 errant-like capacity of clerk on the Leeds and Manchester 
 Railroad.' And she goes on to chaff Miss Nussey about 
 Celia Amelia, the curate. ' I know Mrs. Ellen is burning 
 with eagerness ta hear something about W. Weightman, 
 whom she adores in her heart, and whose image she 
 cannot efface from her memory.' 
 
 Some of her critics, including Mrs. Oliphant (far less 
 indulgent than the poor curates who forgave her nobly), 
 have grudged Charlotte her amusement. There is 
 nothing, from her fame downwards, that Mrs. Oliphant 
 did not grudge her, Mr. Birrell sternly disapproves ; 
 even Mr. Swinburne, at the height of his panegyric, is 
 put off. Perhaps Charlotte's humour was not her most 
 attractive quality ; but nobody seems to have seen the 
 pathos and the bravery of it. Neither have they seen 
 that Miss Nussey was at the bottom of its worst develop- 
 ment, the ' curate-baiting.' Miss Nussey used to go and 
 stay at Haworth for weeks at a time. Haworth was not 
 amusing, and Miss Nussey had to be amused. All this 
 school-girlish jesting, the perpetual and rather tiresome 
 banter, was a playing down to Miss Nussey. It was a 
 kind of tender ' baiting ' of Miss Nussey, who had tried 
 on several occasions to do Charlotte good. And it was 
 the natural, healthy rebound of the little Irish gamine 
 that lived in Charlotte Bronte, bursting with cleverness 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 21 
 
 and devilry. I, for my part, am glad to think that for 
 one happy year she gave it full vent. 
 
 She was only twenty-four. Even as late as the mid- 
 Victorian era to be twenty-four and unmarried was to be 
 middle-aged. But (this cannot be too much insisted on) 
 Charlotte Bronte was the revolutionist who changed all 
 that. She changed it not only in her novels but in her 
 person. Here again she has been misrepresented. 
 There are no words severe enough for Mrs. Oliphant's 
 horrible portrait of her as a plain-faced, lachrymose, 
 middle-aged spinster, dying, visibly, to be married, 
 obsessed for ever with that idea, for ever whining over 
 the frustration of her sex. What Mrs. Oliphant, ' the 
 married woman,' resented in Charlotte Bronte, over and 
 above her fame, was Charlotte's unsanctioned knowledge 
 of the mysteries, her intrusion into the veiled places, her 
 unbaring of the virgin heart. That her genius was chiefly 
 concerned in it does not seem to have occurred to Mrs. 
 Oliphant, any more than it occurred to her to notice the 
 impression that Charlotte Bronte made on her male 
 contemporaries. It is doubtful if one of them thought 
 of her as Mrs. Oliphant would have us think. They gave 
 her the tender, deferent affection they would have given 
 to a charming child. Even the very curates saw in her, 
 to their amazement, the spirit of undying youth. Small 
 as a child, and fragile, with soft hair and flaming eyes, 
 and always the pathetic, appealing plainness of a plain 
 child, with her child's audacity and shyness, her sudden, 
 absurd sallies and retreats, she had a charm made the more 
 piquant by her assumption of austerity. George Henry 
 Lewes was gross and flippant, and he could not see it ; 
 Branwell's friend, Mr. Grundy, was Branwell's friend and 
 
22 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 he missed it. Mrs. Oliphant ranges herself with Mr. 
 Grundy and George Henry Lewes. 
 
 But Charlotte's fun was soon over, and she became a 
 nursery-governess again at Mrs. White's, of Rawdon. 
 Anne was with Mrs. Robinson, at Thorp Green. 
 
 Emily was at Haworth, alone. 
 
 That was in eighteen-forty-one. Years after their 
 death, a little black box was found containing four tiny 
 scraps of paper, undiscovered by Charlotte when she 
 burnt every line left by Anne and Emily except their 
 poems. Two of these four papers were written by 
 Emily, and two by Anne ; each sister keeping for the 
 other a record of four years. They begin in eighteen- 
 forty-one. Emily was then twenty-four and Anne a 
 year and a half younger. Nothing can be more child- 
 like, more naive. Emily heads her diary : — 
 
 A PAPER to be opened 
 
 when Anne is 
 
 25 years old, 
 
 or my next birthday after 
 
 if 
 
 all be well, 
 
 Emily Jane Bronte. July the 80th, 1841. 
 
 She says : ' It is Friday evening, near nine o'clock — wild 
 rainy weather. I am seated in the dining-room, having 
 just concluded tidjdng our desk -boxes, writing this 
 document. Papa is in the parlour — aunt upstairs in 
 her room. . . . Victoria and Adelaide are ensconsed in 
 the peat-house. Keeper is in the kitchen — ^Hero in his 
 cage.' 
 Having accounted for Victoria and Adelaide, the tame 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 23 
 
 geese. Keeper, the dog, and Hero, the hawk, she notes the 
 whereabouts of Charlotte, Branwell, and Anne. And 
 then (with gravity) : 
 
 ' A scheme is at present in agitation for setting us up in 
 a school of our own.' . . . ' This day four years I wonder 
 whether we shall be dragging on in our present condition 
 or established to our hearts' content.' 
 
 Then Emily dreams her dream. 
 
 ' I guess that on the time appointed for the opening of 
 this paper we, i.e. Charlotte, Anne, and I, shall be all 
 merrily seated in our own sitting-room in some pleasant 
 and flourishing seminary, having just gathered in for the 
 midsummer holiday. Our debts will be paid off and we 
 shall have cash in hand to a considerable amount. Papa, 
 aunt, and Branwell, will either have been or be coming 
 to visit us.' 
 
 And Anne writes with equal innocence (it is delicious, 
 Anne's diary) : ' Four years ago I was at school. Since 
 then I have been a governess at Blake Hall, left it, come 
 to Thorp Green, and seen the sea and York Minster.' . . . 
 'We have got Keeper, got a sweet little cat and lost 
 it, and also got a hawk. Got a wild goose which has 
 flown away, and three tame ones, one of which has been 
 killed.' 
 
 It is Emily who lets out the dreary secret of the dream 
 — the debts which could not be paid ; probably Branwell's. 
 
 But the ' considerable amount of cash in hand ' was 
 to remain a dream. Nothing came of Branwell's knight- 
 errantry. He muddled the accounts of the Leeds and 
 Manchester Railroad and was sent home. It was not 
 good for Branwell to be a clerk at a lonely wayside station. 
 His disaster, which they much exaggerated, was a shock 
 
24 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 to the three sisters. They began to have misgivings, 
 premonitions of Branwell's destiny. 
 
 And from Mrs. White's at Rawdon, Charlotte sends 
 out cry after desolate cry. Again we have an impression 
 of an age of exile, but really the exile did not last long, 
 not much longer than Emily's imprisonment in the 
 Academy for Young Ladies, nothing like so long as 
 Anne's miserable term. 
 
 The exile really began in 'forty-two, when Charlotte and 
 Emily left England for Brussels and Madame Heger's 
 Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the Rue d'Isabelle. It is 
 supposed to have been the turning point in Charlotte's 
 career. She was then twenty-six, Emily twenty-four. 
 
 It is absurd and it is pathetic, but Charlotte's supreme 
 ambition at that time was to keep a school, a school of 
 her own, like her friend Miss Wooler. There was a great 
 innocence and humility in Charlotte. She was easily 
 taken in by any of those veiled, inimical spectres of the 
 cross-roads that youth mistakes for destiny. She must 
 have refused to look too closely at the apparition ; it was 
 enough for her that she saw in it the divine thing — ^liberty. 
 Her genius was already struggling in her. She had begun 
 to feel under her shotdders the painful piercing of her 
 wings. Her friend, Mary Taylor, had written to her from 
 Brussels telling her of pictures and cathedrals. Charlotte 
 tells how it woke her up. ' I hardly know what swelled 
 in my breast as I read her letter : such a vehement im- 
 patience of restraint and steady work ; such a strong wish 
 for wings — wings such as wealth can furnish ; such an 
 urgent desire to see, to know, to learn ; something internal 
 seemed to expand bodily for a minute. I was tantalised 
 by the consciousness of faculties unexercised.' But 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 25 
 
 Charlotte's * wings ' were not ' such as wealth can furnish.' 
 They were to droop, almost to die, in Brussels. 
 
 Emily was calmer. Whether she mistook it for her 
 destiny or not, she seems to have acquiesced when 
 Charlotte showed her the veiled figure at the cross-roads, 
 to have been led blindfold by Charlotte through the 
 ■ streaming and starless darkness ' that took them to 
 Brussels. The rest she endured with a stem and terrible 
 resignation. It is known from her letters what the 
 Pensionnat was to Charlotte. Heaven only knows what 
 it must have been to Emily. Charlotte, with her un- 
 djing passion for knowledge and the spectacle of the 
 world, with her psychological interest in M. Heger and 
 his wife, Charlotte hardly came out of it with her soul 
 alive. But Emily was not interested in M. Heger nor in 
 his wife, nor in his educational system. She thought his 
 system was no good and told him so. What she thought 
 of his wife is not recorded. 
 
 Then, in their first year of Brussels, their old aunt. 
 Miss Branwell, died. That was destiny, the destiny that 
 was so kind to Emily. It sent her and her sister back to 
 Haworth and it kept her there. Poor Anne was fairly 
 launched on her career ; she remained in her * situation,' 
 and somebody had to look after Mr. Bronte and the 
 house. Things were going badly and sadly at the 
 Parsonage. Branwell was there, drinking ; and Charlotte 
 was even afraid that her father also — sometimes — 
 perhaps 
 
 She left Emily to deal with them and went back to 
 Brussels as a pupil teacher, alone. She went in an agony 
 of self-reproach, desiring more and more knowledge, a 
 perfect, inalienable, indestructible possession of the 
 
26 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 German language, and wondering whether it were right 
 to satisfy that indomitable craving. By giving utter- 
 ance to this self-reproach, so passionate, so immense, so 
 disproportioned to the crime, the innocent Charlotte 
 laid herself open to an unjust suspicion. Innocent 
 and unaware she went, and — ^it is her own word — she 
 was ' punished ' for it. 
 
 Nothing that she had yet known of homesickness could 
 compare with that last year of solitary and unmitigated 
 exile. It is supposed, even by the charitable, that 
 whatever M. Heger did or did not do for Charlotte, he 
 did everything for her genius. As a matter of fact, it was 
 at Brussels that she suffered the supreme and ultimate 
 abandonment. She no longer felt the wild unknown 
 thing stirring in her with wings. So little could M. Heger 
 do for it that it refused to inhabit the same house with him. 
 She records the result of that imprisonment a few weeks 
 after her release : ' There are times now when it appears 
 to me as it all my ideas and feelings, except a few friend- 
 ships and affections, are changed from what they used to 
 be ; something in me, which used to be enthusiasm, is 
 tamed down and broken.' 
 
 At Brussels surely enlightenment must have come to 
 her. She must have seen, as Emily saw, that in going 
 that way, she had mistaken and done violence to her 
 destiny. 
 
 She went back to Haworth where it waited for her, 
 where it had turned even the tragedy of her family to 
 account. Everything conspired to keep her there. The 
 school was given up. She tells why. ' It is on papa's 
 account ; he is now, as you know, getting old, and it 
 grieves me to tell you that he is losing his sight. I have 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 27 
 
 felt for some months that I ought not to be away froiix 
 him ; and I feel now that it would be too selfish to leave 
 (at least as long as Branwell and Anne are absent) to 
 pursue selfish interests of my own. With the help of 
 God I will try to deny myself in this matter, and to wait.' 
 
 And with the help of God she waited. 
 
 There are three significant entries in Emily's sealed 
 paper for eighteen-forty-five. ' Now I don't desire a 
 school at all, and none of us have any great longing for 
 it.' ' I am quite contented for myself . . . seldom or 
 never troubled with nothing to do and merely desiring 
 that everybody could be as comfortable as myself and as 
 undesponding, and then we should have a very tolerable 
 world of it.' 'I have plenty of work on hand, and writ- 
 ing. . . .' This, embedded among details of an incom- 
 parable innocence : ' We have got Flossy ; got and lost 
 Tiger ; lost the hawk. Hero, which, with the geese, was 
 given away, and is doubtless dead,' 
 
 And Anne, as naive as a little nun, writes in her sealed 
 paper : ' Emily is upstairs ironing. I am sitting in the 
 dining-room in the rocking-chair before the fire with 
 my feet on the fender. Papa is in the parlour. Tabby 
 and Martha are, I think, in the kitchen. Keeper and 
 Flossy are, I do not know where. Little Dick is hopping 
 in his cage.' And then, ' Emily ... is writing some 
 poetry. ... I wonder what it is about ? ' 
 
 That is the only clue to the secret that is given. These 
 childlike diaries are full of the ' Gondal Chronicles,' ^ an 
 interminable fantasy in which for years Emily colla- 
 borated with Anne. They flourished the 'Gondal 
 Chronicles ' in each other's faces, with positive bravado, 
 ^ See supra, pp. 193 to 210. 
 
28 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 trying to see which could keep it up the longer. Under 
 it all there was a mystery ; for, as Charlotte said of their 
 old play, ' Best plays were secret plays,' and the sisters 
 kept their best hidden. And then suddenly the ' Gondal 
 Chronicles ' were dropped, the mystery broke down. All 
 three of them had been writing poems ; they had been 
 writing poems for years. Some of Emily's dated from 
 her first exile at Roe Head. Most of Anne's sad songs were 
 sung in her house of bondage. From Charlotte, in her 
 Brussels period, not a line. 
 
 But at Haworth, in the years that followed her return 
 and found her free, she wrote nearly all her maturer 
 poems (none of them were excessively mature) : she 
 wrote The Professor, and close upon The Professor, Jane 
 Eyre. In the same term that found her also, poor child, 
 free, and at Haworth, Anne wrote Agnes Grey and The 
 Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 
 
 And Emily wrote Wuthering Heights. 
 
 They had found their destiny — at Haworth. 
 
 Every conceivable theory has been offered to account 
 for the novels that came so swiftly and incredibly from 
 these three sisters. It has been said that they wrote 
 them merely to pay their debts when they found that 
 poems did not pay. It would be truer to say that they 
 wrote them because it was their destiny to write them, 
 and because their hour had come, and that they published 
 them with the dimmest hope of a return. 
 
 Before they knew where they were, Charlotte found 
 herself involved in what she thought was a business-like 
 and masculine correspondence with publishing firms. 
 
 The Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, appeared 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 29 
 
 first, and nothing happened. The Professor travelled 
 among publishers, and nothing happened. Then, towards 
 the end of the fourth year there came Jane Eyre, and 
 Charlotte was famous. 
 
 But not Emily. Wuthering Heights appeared also, and 
 nothing happened. It was bound in the same volume 
 with Anne's humble tale. Its lightning should have 
 scorched and consumed Agnes Grey, but nothing hap- 
 pened. Ellis and Acton Bell remained equals in obscurity, 
 recognised only by their association with the tremendous 
 Currer. When it came to publishing The Tenant of 
 Wildfell Hall, and association became confusion, Char- 
 lotte and Anne went up to London to prove their separate 
 identity. Emily stayed at Haworth, superbly indifferent 
 to the proceedings. She was imseen, undreamed of, 
 unreahsed, and in aU her life she made no sign. 
 
 But, in a spirit of reckless adventure, Charlotte and 
 Anne walked the seven miles to Keighley on a Friday 
 evening in a thunder-storm, and took the night train up. 
 On the Saturday morning they appeared in the oflBce 
 at Cornhill to the amazement of Mr, George Smith and 
 Mr. Williams. With childlike innocence and secrecy 
 they hid in the Chapter Coffee-house in Paternoster Row, 
 and called themselves the Misses Brown. When enter- 
 tainment was offered them, they expressed a wish to hear 
 Dr. Croly preach. They did not hear him ; they only 
 heard The Barber of Seville at Covent Garden, They 
 tried, with a delicious solemnity, to give the whole thing 
 an air of business, but it was really a breathless, infantile 
 escapade of three days. Three days out of four years. 
 
 And in those four years poor Branwell's destiny found 
 
30 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 him also. After many minor falls and penitences and 
 relapses, he seemed at length to have settled down. He 
 had been tutor for two and a half years with the Robinsons 
 at Thorp Green, in the house where Anne was a governess. 
 He was happy at first ; an ominous happiness. Then 
 Anne began to be aware of something. 
 
 Mr, Birrell has said rather unkindly that he has no use 
 for this young man. Nobody had any use for him. 
 Not the editors to whom he used to write so hysterically. 
 Not the Leeds and Manchester Railway Company. And 
 certainly not Mrs. Robinson, the lady for whom he con- 
 ceived that insane and unlawful passion which has been 
 made to loom so large in the lives of the Brontes. After 
 all the agony and indignation that has gathered round 
 this episode, it is clear enough now, down to the last 
 sordid details. The feverish, degenerate, utterly irre- 
 sponsible Branwell not only declared his passion, but 
 persuaded himself, against the evidence of his senses, 
 that it was returned. The lady (whom he must have 
 frightened horribly) told her husband who instantly 
 dismissed Branwell. 
 
 Branwell never got over it. 
 
 He was destined to die young, and, no doubt, if there 
 had been no Mrs. Robinson, some other passion would 
 have killed him. Still, it may be said with very little 
 exaggeration that he died of it. He had not hitherto 
 shown any signs of tuberculosis. It may be questioned 
 whether without this predisposing cause he would have 
 developed it. He had had his chance to survive. He 
 had never been packed, like his sisters, first one of five, 
 then one of three, into a closet not big enough for one. 
 But he drank harder after the Robinson affair than he 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 31 
 
 had ever drunk before, and he added opium to drink. 
 Drink and opium gave frightful intensity to the hallu- 
 cination of which in a sense he died. 
 
 It took him more than three years, from July, eighteen- 
 forty-five, the date of his dismissal, to September, 
 eighteen-forty-eight, the date of his death. 
 
 The Incumbent of Haworth has been much blamed for 
 his son's shortcomings. He has been charged with first 
 spoiling the boy, and then neglecting him. In reality 
 his only error (a most unusual one in an early Victorian 
 father) was that he believed in his son's genius. When 
 London and the Royal Academy proved beyond him he 
 had him taught at Bradford. He gave him a studio there. 
 He had already given him an education that at least 
 enabled him to obtain tutorships, if not to keep them. 
 The Parsonage must have been a terrible place for 
 Branwell, but it was not in the Vicar's power to make 
 it more attractive than the Bull Inn. Branwell was not 
 a poet like his sisters, and moors meant nothing to him. 
 To be sure, when he went into Wales and saw Penmaen- 
 mawr, he wrote a poem about it. But the poem is not 
 really about Penmaenmawr. It is all about Branwell ; 
 Penmaenmawr is Branwell, a symbol of his colossal 
 personality and of his fate. For Branwell was a mon- 
 strous egoist. He was not interested in his sisters or in 
 his friends, or really in Mrs. Robinson. He was interested 
 only in himself. What could a poor vicar do with a son 
 like that ? There was nothing solid in Branwell that 
 you could take hold of and chastise. There was nothing 
 you could appeal to. His affection for his family was 
 three-fourths sentimentalism. Still, what the Vicar 
 could do he did do. When Branwell was mad with drink 
 
32 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 and opium he never left him. There is no story more grim 
 and at the same time more poignant and pathetic than 
 that which Mrs. Gaskell tells of his devotion to his son 
 in this time of the boy's ruin. Branwell slept in his 
 father's room. He would doze all day, and rage all 
 night, threatening his father's life. In the morning he 
 would go to his sisters and say : ' The poor old man and 
 I have had a terrible night of it. He does his best, the 
 poor old man ! but it is all over with me.' He died in 
 his father's arms while Emily and little Anne looked oh. 
 
 They say that he struggled to his feet and died standing, 
 to prove the strength of his will ; but some biographer 
 has robbed him of this poor splendour. It was enough 
 for his sisters — and it should be enough for anybody — 
 that his madness left him with the onset of his illness, 
 and that he went from them penitent and tender, purified 
 by the mystery and miracle of death. 
 
 That was on Sunday, the twenty-fourth of September. 
 From that day Emily sickened. She caught cold at 
 Branwell's funeral. On September, the thirtieth, she was 
 in church listening to his funeral sermon. After that, 
 she never crossed the threshord^of the Parsonage till in 
 December her dead body was carried over it, to lie beside 
 her brother under the church floor. 
 
 In October, a week or two after Branwell's death, 
 Charlotte wrote : ' Emily has a cold and cough at present.' 
 ' Emily's cold and cough are very obstinate. I fear she 
 has pain in her chest, and I sometimes catch a shortness 
 in her breathing when she has moved at all quickly.' 
 In November : ' I told you Emily was ill, in my last 
 letter. She has not rallied yet. She is very ill. ... I 
 think Emily seems the nearest thing to my heart in all 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 83 
 
 the world.' And in December : ' Emily suffers no more 
 from pain or weakness now . , . there is no Emily in 
 time, or on earth now. . . . We are very calm at present. 
 Why should we be otherwise ? The anguish of seeing 
 her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death 
 is gone by : the funeral day is past. We feel she is at 
 peace. No need to tremble for the hard frost and the 
 keen wind. Emily does not feel them. She died in a 
 time of promise. . , . But it is God's will, and the place 
 where she has gone is better than that which she has 
 left.' 
 
 It could have been hardly daylight on the moors the 
 morning when Charlotte went out to find that last sohtary 
 sprig of heather which she laid on Emily's pillow for 
 Emily to see when she awoke. Emily's eyes were so 
 drowsed with death that she could not see it. And yet 
 it could not have been many hours later when a fire was 
 lit in her bedroom, and she rose and dressed herself. 
 Madame Duclaux ^ tells how she sat before the fire, combing 
 her long, dark hair, and how the comb dropped from her 
 weak fingers, and fell under the grate. And how she sat 
 there in her mortal apathy ; and how, when the servant 
 came to her, she said dreamily : ' Martha, my comb 's 
 down there ; I was too weak to stoop and pick it up.' 
 
 She dragged herself down to the sitting-room, and died 
 there, about two o'clock. She must have had some horror 
 of dying in that room of death overhead ; for, at noon, 
 when the last pains seized her, she refused to be taken 
 back to it. Unterrified, indomitable, driven by her 
 immortal passion for life, she fought terribly. Death 
 took her as she tried to rise from the sofa and break from 
 ' ' Emily Bronte ' : Eminent Women Series. 
 C 
 
34 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 her sisters' arms that would have laid her there. Pro- 
 foundly, piteously alienated, she must have felt that 
 Anne and Charlotte were in league with death ; that they 
 fought with her and bound her down ; and that in her 
 escape from them she conquered. 
 
 Another month and Anne sickened. As Emily died 
 of Branwell's death, so Emily's death hastened Anne's. 
 Charlotte wrote in the middle of January : ' I can scarcely 
 say that Anne is worse, nor can I say she is better. . . . 
 The days pass in a slow, dull march : the nights are the 
 test ; the sudden wakings from restless sleep, the revived 
 knowledge that one lies in her grave, and another, not 
 at my side, but in a separate and sick bed.' And again 
 in March : ' Anne's decline is gradual and fluctuating, 
 but its nature is not doubtful.' And yet again in April : 
 ' If there were no hope beyond this world . . . Emily's 
 fate, and that which threatens Anne, would be heart- 
 breaking. I cannot forget Emily's death-day; it be- 
 comes a more fixed, a darker, a more frequently recurr- 
 ing idea in my mind than ever. It was very terrible. 
 She was torn, conscious, panting, reluctant, though 
 resolute, out of a happy life.' 
 
 Mrs. Oliphant has censured Emily Bronte for the 
 manner of her dying. She might as well have censured 
 Anne for drawing out the agony. For Anne was gentle 
 to the end, utterly submissive. She gave death no 
 trouble. She went, with a last hope, to Scarborough, 
 and died there at the end of May. She was buried at 
 Scarborough, where she lies alone. It is not easy to 
 believe that she had no ' preference for place,' but there 
 is no doubt that even to that choice of her last resting- 
 place she would have submitted — ^gently. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES J 35 
 
 ' I got here a little before eight o'clock. All was clean 
 and bright, waiting for me. Papa and the servants were 
 well, and all received me with an affection that should 
 have consoled. The dogs seemed in strange ecstasy. 
 I am certain that they regarded me as the harbinger of 
 others. The dumb creatures thought that as I was 
 returned, those who had been so long absent were not 
 far behind. ... I felt that the house was all silent, the 
 rooms were all empty. I remembered where the three 
 were laid — ^in what narrow, dark dweUings — never more 
 to reappear on earth. ... I cannot help thinking of 
 their last days, remembering their sufferings, and what 
 they said and did, and how they looked in mortal afflic- 
 tion. ... To sit in a lonely room, the clock ticking 
 
 loud through a still house ' Charlotte could see 
 
 nothing else before her. 
 
 It was July. She had come home after a visit to 
 Miss Nussey. 
 
 In that month she wrote that chapter of Shirley which 
 is headed ' The Valley of the Shadow.' The book (begun 
 more than eighteen months before) fairly quivers with 
 the shock that cut it in two. 
 
 It was finished somewhere in September of that year of 
 Anne's death. Charlotte went up to London. She saw 
 Thackeray. She learned to accept the fact of her celebrity. 
 Somehow the years passed, the years of Charlotte's 
 continuous celebrity, and of those literary letters that 
 take so disproportionate a part in her correspondence 
 that she seems at last to have forgotten ; she seems to 
 belong to the world rather than to Haworth. And the 
 world seems full of Charlotte ; the world that had no 
 place for Emily. And yet Wuthering Heights had followed 
 
86 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Shirley. It had been republished with Charlotte's intro- 
 duction, her vindication of Emily. It brought more fame 
 for Charlotte, but none — yet— for Emily. 
 
 Two years later came Villette. Charlotte went up to 
 London a second time and saw Thackeray again. And 
 there were more letters, the admirable but slightly self- 
 conscious letters of the literary woman, artificially assured. 
 They might deceive you, only the other letters, the letters 
 to Ellen Nussey go on ; they come palpitating with the 
 life of Charlotte Bronte's soul that had in it nothing of 
 the literary taint. You see in them how, body and soul, 
 Haworth claims her and holds her, and will not let her go. 
 
 Nor does she desire now to be let go. Her life at Haworth 
 is part of Emily's life ; it partakes of the immortality 
 of the unforgotten dead. London and Thackeray, the 
 Smiths, Mrs. Gaskell, and Miss Martineau, Sir John and 
 Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, her celebrity and the little 
 train of cheerful, unfamiliar circumstances, all these 
 things sink into insignificance beside it. They are all 
 extraneous somehow, and out of keeping. Nothing that 
 her biographers have done (when they have done their 
 worst) can destroy or even diminish the effect her life 
 gives of unity, of fitness, of profound and tragic harmony. 
 It was Mrs. Gaskell's sense of this effect that made her 
 work a masterpiece. 
 
 And in her marriage, at Haworth, to her father's curate, 
 Arthur NichoUs, the marriage that cut short her life and 
 made an end of her celebrity, Charlotte Bronte followed 
 before all things her instinct for fitness, for unity, for 
 harmony. It was exquisitely in keeping. It did no 
 violence to her memories, her simplicities and sanctities. 
 It found her in the apathy of exhaustion, and it was yet 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 37 
 
 one with all that was passionate in her and undying. 
 She went to it one morning in May, all white and drooping, 
 in her modest gown and that poor little bridal bonnet with 
 its wreath of snowdrops, symbolic of all the timidities, 
 the reluctances, the cold austerities of spring roused in 
 the lap of winter, and yet she found in it the secret fire 
 of youth. She went to it afraid ; and in her third month 
 of marriage she still gives a cry wrung from the memory 
 of her fear. ' Indeed, indeed, Nell, it is a solemn and 
 strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife.' 
 
 And yet for all that, after London, after fame and 
 friendships in which her dead had no share, her marriage 
 was not the great departure ; it was the great return. 
 It was the outcome of all that had gone before it ; the 
 fruit of painful life, which is recognition, acceptance, the 
 final trust in destiny. There were to be no more false 
 starts, no more veiled ghosts of the cross-roads, pointing 
 the disastrous way. 
 
 And in its abrupt and pitiful end her life rang true ; 
 it sustained the tragic harmony. It was the fulfilment 
 of secret prophecies, forebodings, premonitions, of her 
 reiterated ' It was not to be.' You may say that in the 
 end life cheated and betrayed her. 
 
 And inevitably ; for she had loved life, not as Emily 
 loved it, like an equal, with power over it and pride and 
 an unearthly understanding, virgin and unafraid. There 
 was something slightly subservient, consciously inferior, 
 in Charlotte's attitude to life. She had loved it secretly, 
 with a sort of shame, with a corroding passion and 
 incredulity and despair. Such natures are not seldom 
 victims of the power they would propitiate. It killed 
 her in her effort to bring forth life. 
 
38 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 When the end came she could not reahse it. For the 
 first time she was incredulous of disaster. She heard, 
 out of her last stupor, her husband praying that God 
 would spare her, and she whispered, ' Oh, I am not going 
 to die, am I ? He will not separate us ; we have been 
 so happy.' 
 
 You can see her youth rising up beside that death-bed 
 and answering, ' That is why.' 
 
 And yet, could even Charlotte's youth have been so 
 sure as to the cheating and betrayal ? That happiness of 
 hers was cut short in the moment of its perfection. She 
 was not to suffer any disenchantment or decline ; her love 
 was not to know any cold of fear or her genius any fever of 
 frustration. She was saved the struggle we can see before 
 her. Arthur NichoUs was passionately fond of Char- 
 lotte. But he was hostile to Charlotte's genius and to 
 Charlotte's fame. A plain, practical, robust man, inimical 
 to any dream. He could be adorably kind to a sick, 
 submissive Charlotte. Would he have been so tender to 
 a Charlotte in revolt ? She was spared the torture of the 
 choice between Arthur Nicholls and her genius. We 
 know how she would have chosen. It is well for her, 
 and it is all one to literature, that she died, not ' in a time 
 of promise,' but in the moment of fulfilment. 
 
 No. Of these tragic Brontes the most tragic, the most 
 pitiful, the most mercilessly abused by destiny, was Anne. 
 An interminable, monstrous exile is the impression we 
 get of Anne's life in the years of her girlhood. There is 
 no actual record of them. Nobody kept Anne's letters. 
 We never hear her sad voice raised in self-pity or revolt. 
 It is doubtful if she ever raised it. She waited in silence 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 39 
 
 and resignation, and then told her own story in Agnes 
 Grey. But her figure remains dim in her own story and 
 in the classic ' Lives.' We only know that she was the 
 youngest, and that, unlike her sisters, she was pretty. 
 She had thick brown curling hair and violet blue eyes 
 and delicate dark eyebrows, and a skin, rose and white 
 for her sisters' sallow, that must have given some ominous 
 hint of fever. This delicate thing was broken on the wheel 
 of life. They say of Anne perpetually that she was 
 ' gentle.' In Charlotte's sketch of her she holds her 
 pretty head high, her eyes gaze straight forward, and you 
 wonder whether, before the breaking point, she was always 
 as gentle as they say. But you never see her in any 
 moment of revolt. Her simple poems, at their bitterest, 
 express no more than a frail agony, an innocent dismay. 
 That little raising of the head in conscious rectitude is all 
 that breaks the long plaint of Agnes Grey. 
 
 There is no piety in that plaint. It is purely pagan ; 
 the cry of youth cheated of its desire. Life brought her 
 no good gifts beyond the slender ineffectual beauty that 
 left her undesired. Her tremulous, expectant womanhood 
 was cheated. She never saw so much as the flying veil 
 of joy, or even of such pale, uninspired happiness as she 
 dreamed in Agnes Grey. She was cheated of her innocent 
 dream. 
 
 And by an awful irony her religion failed her. She 
 knew its bitterness, its terrors, its exactions. She never 
 knew its ecstasies, its flaming mysteries, nor, even at her 
 very last, its consolations. Her tender conscience drew 
 an unspeakable torment from the spectacle of her brother's 
 degradation. 
 
 For it was on Anne, who had no genius to sustain her. 
 
40 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 that poor Branwell, with the burden of his destiny, 
 weighed most hard. It was Anne at Thorp Green who 
 had the first terrible misgivings, the intolerable pre- 
 monitions. 
 
 That wretched story is always cropping up again. 
 The lady whom Mrs. Gaskell, with a murderous selection 
 of adjectives, called ' that mature and wicked woman,' 
 has been cleared as far as evidence and common-sense 
 could clear her. But the slander is perpetually revived. 
 It has always proved too much for the Bronte biographers. 
 Madame Duclaux published it again twenty years after, 
 in spite of the evidence and in spite of Mrs. Gaskell's 
 retractation. You would have thought that Branwell 
 might have been allowed to rest in the grave he dug for 
 himself so well. But no, they will not let him rest. 
 Branwell drank, and he ate opium ; and, as if drink and 
 opium and erotic madness were not enough, they must 
 credit him with an open breach of the seventh com- 
 mandment as well. M. Dimnet, the most able of recent 
 critics of the Brontes, thinks and maintains against all 
 evidence that there was more in it than Branwell's 
 madness. He will not give up the sordid tragedy h trois. 
 He thinks he knows what Anne thought of Branwell's 
 behaviour, and what awful secret she was hinting at, and 
 what she told her sisters when she came back to Haworth. 
 He argues that Anne Bronte saw and heard things, and 
 that her testimony is not to be set aside. 
 
 What did Anne Bronte see and hear ? She saw her 
 brother consumed by an illegitimate passion ; a passion 
 utterly hopeless, given the nature of the lady. The lady 
 had been kind to Anne, to Branwell she had been angeli- 
 cally kind. Anne saw that his behaviour was an atrocious 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 41 
 
 return for her kindness. Further than that the lady 
 hardly counted in Anne's vision. Her interest was 
 centred on her brother. She saw him taking first to 
 drink and then to opium. She saw that he was going 
 mad, and he did go mad. One of the most familiar 
 symptoms of morphia mania is a tendency to erotic 
 hallucinations of the precise kind that Branwell suffered 
 from. Anne was unable to distinguish between such a 
 hallucination and depravity. But there is not a shadow 
 of evidence that she thought what M. Dimnet thinks, or 
 that if she had thought it she made Charlotte and Emily 
 think it too. Branwell's state was quite enough in itself 
 to break their hearts. His letters to Leyland, to John 
 Brown, the sexton, to Francis Grundy, record with 
 frightful vividness every phase of his obsession. 
 
 It is inconceivable that such letters should have been 
 kept, still more inconceivable that they should have been 
 published. It is inconceivable that Mrs. Gaskell should 
 have dragged the pitiful and shameful figure into the light. 
 Nobody can save poor Branwell now from the dreadful 
 immortaUty thrust on him by his enemies and friends with 
 equal zeal. All that is left to us is a merciful understand- 
 ing of his case. Branwell's case, once for all, was purely 
 pathological. There was nothing great about him, not 
 even his passion for Mrs. Robinson. Properly speaking, 
 it was not a passion at all, it was a disease. Branwell 
 was a degenerate, as incapable of passion as he was of 
 poetry. His sisters, Anne and Charlotte, talked with an 
 amazing innocence about Branwell's vices. Simple and 
 beautiful souls, they never for a moment suspected that 
 his worst vice was sentimentalism. In the beginning, 
 before it wrecked him, nobody enjoyed his own emotions 
 
42 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 more than Branwell. At his worst he wallowed voluptu- 
 ously in the torments of frustration. At the end, what 
 with drink and what with opium, he was undoubtedly 
 insane. His letters are priceless pathological documents. 
 They reveal all the workings of his peculiar mania. He 
 thinks everybody is plotting to keep him from Mrs. 
 Robinson. Faced at every turn Avith the evidence of this 
 lady's complete indifference, he gives it all a lunatic twist 
 to prove the contrary. He takes the strangest people 
 into his confidence, John Brown, the sexton, and the 
 Robinson's coachman. Queer flames of lucidity dart 
 here and there through this madness : ' The probability 
 of her becoming free to give me herself and estate ever 
 rose to drive away the prospect of her decline under her 
 present grief.' ' I had reason to hope that ere very long 
 I should be the husband of a lady whom I loved best in the 
 world, and with whom, in more than competence, I might 
 live at leisure to try to make myself a name in the world 
 of posterity, without being pestered by the small but 
 countless botherments, which, like mosquitoes, sting us 
 in the world of work-day toil. That hope and herself 
 are gone — she to wither into patiently pining decline — 
 it to make room for drudgery.' It is all sordid as well as 
 terrible. We have no right to know these things. Mrs, 
 Oliphant is almost justified in her protest against Charlotte 
 as the first to betray her brother. 
 
 But did Charlotte betray Branwell ? Not in her letters. 
 She never imagined — how could she ? — ^that those letters 
 would be published. Not in her novels. Her novels 
 give no portrait of Branwell and no hint that could be 
 easily understood. It is in her prefaces to her sisters' 
 novels that he appears, darkly. Charlotte, outraged by 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 43 
 
 the infamous article in the Quarterly, was determined 
 that what had been said of her should never be said 
 of Anne and Emily. She felt that their works offered 
 irresistible provocation to the scandalous reviewer. She 
 thought it necessary to explain how they came by their 
 knowledge of evil. 
 
 This vindication of her sisters is certainly an indict- 
 ment of her brother to anybody who knew enough to 
 read between the lines, Charlotte may have innocently 
 supposed that nobody knew or ever would know enough. 
 Unfortunately, Mrs. Gaskell knew ; and when it came 
 to vindicating Charlotte, she considered herself justified 
 in exposing Charlotte's brother because Charlotte herself 
 had shown her the way. 
 
 But Charlotte might have spared her pains. Branwell 
 does not account for Heathchff any more than he accounts 
 for Rochester. He does not even account for Huntingdon 
 in poor Anne's novel. He accounts only for himself. 
 He is important chiefly in relation to the youngest of 
 the Brontes. Oddly enough, this boy, who was once 
 thought greater than his sister Emily, was curiously akin 
 to the weak and ineffectual Anne. He shows the weird 
 flickering of the flame that pulsed so feebly and inter- 
 mittently in her. He had Anne's unhappy way with 
 destiny, her knack of missing things. She had a touch of 
 his morbidity. She was given to silences which in any- 
 body but Anne would have been called morose. It was 
 her fate to be associated with him in the hour and in the 
 scene of his disgrace. And he was offered up unwittingly 
 by Charlotte as a sacrifice to Anne's virtue. 
 
 Like Branwell, Anne had no genius. She shows for ever 
 
44 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 gentle, and, in spite of an unconquerable courage, con- 
 quered. And yet there was more in her than gentleness. 
 There was, in this smallest and least considerable of the 
 Brontes, an immense, a terrifying audacity. Charlotte 
 was bold, and Emily was bolder ; but this audacity of 
 Anne's was greater than Charlotte's boldness or than 
 Emily's, because it was willed, it was deliberate, open- 
 eyed ; it had none of the superb unconsciousness of genius. 
 Anne took her courage in both hands when she sat down 
 to write The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. There are scenes, 
 there are situations, in Anne's amazing novel, which for 
 sheer audacity stand alone in mid- Victorian literature, 
 and which would hold their own in the literature of 
 revolt that followed. It cannot be said that these scenes 
 and situations are tackled with a master-hand. But 
 there is a certain grasp in Anne's treatment, and an 
 astonishing lucidity. Her knowledge of the seamy side 
 of life was not exhaustive. But her diagnosis of certain 
 states, her realisation of certain motives, suggests Balzac 
 rather than any of the Brontes. Thackeray, with the 
 fear of Mrs. Grundy before his eyes, would have shrunk 
 from recording Mrs. Huntingdon's ultimatum to her 
 husband. The slamming of that bedroom door fairly 
 resounds through the long emptiness of Anne's novel. 
 But that door is the crux of the situation, and if Anne was 
 not a genius she was too much of an artist to sacrifice 
 her crux. 
 
 And not only was Anne revolutionary in her handling 
 of moral situations, she was an insurgent in religious 
 thought. Not to believe in the dogma of eternal punishment 
 was, in mid- Victorian times and evangelical circles, to be 
 almost an atheist. When, somewhere in the late seventies. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 45 
 
 Dean Farrar published his Eternal Hope, that book fell 
 like a bomb into the ranks of the orthodox. But long 
 before Dean Farrar's book Anne Bronte had thrown her 
 bomb. There are two pages in The Tenant of Wildfell 
 Hall that anticipate and sum up his now innocent argu- 
 ments. Anne fairly let herself go here. And though in 
 her ' Word to the Elect ' (who ' may rejoice to think 
 themselves secure ') she declares that — 
 
 ' None shall sink to everlasting woe 
 Who have not well deserved the wrath of Heavenj' 
 
 she presently relents, and tacks on a poem in a lighter 
 measure, expressing her hope — 
 
 'That soon the wicked shall at last 
 
 Be fitted for the skies ; 
 And when their dreadful doom is past 
 To light and life arise.' 
 
 It is said (Charlotte said it) that Anne suffered from 
 religious melancholy of a peculiarly dark and Calvinistic 
 type. I very much suspect that Anne's melancholy, like 
 Branwell's passion, was pathological, and that what her 
 soul suffered from was religious doubt. She could not 
 reach that height where Emily moved serenely ; she 
 could not see that 
 
 ' Vain are the thousand creeds 
 That move men's hearts : unutterably vain.' 
 
 There was a time when her tremulous, clinging faith was 
 broken by contact with Emily's contempt for creeds. 
 When Anne was at Haworth she and Emily were in- 
 separable. They tramped the moors together. With 
 their arms round each other's shoulders, they paced up 
 and down the parlour of the Parsonage. They showed 
 
46 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 the mysterious attraction and affinity of opposites. Anne 
 must have been fascinated, and at the same time appalled, 
 by the radiant, revealing, annihilating sweep of Emily's 
 thought. She was not indifferent to creeds. But you 
 can see her fearful and reluctant youth yielding at last 
 to Emily's thought, until she caught a glimpse of the 
 ' repose ' beyond the clash of ' conquered good and con- 
 quering ill.' You can see how the doctrine of eternal 
 punishment went by the board ; how Anne, who had 
 gone through agonies of orthodox fear on account of 
 Bran well, must have adjusted things somehow, and 
 arrived at peace. Trust in ' the merits of the Redeemer ' 
 is, after all, trust in the Immensity beyond Redeemer 
 and redeemed. 
 
 Of this trust she sang in a voice, like her material voice, 
 fragile, but sweet and true. She sang naively of the 
 ' Captive Dove ' that makes unheard its 'joyless moan,' 
 of ' the heart that Nature formed to love,' pining, 
 * neglected and alone.' She sang of the ' Narrow Way,' 
 ' Be it,' she sings, ' thy constant aim ' — 
 
 ' To labour and to love. 
 
 To pardon and endure. 
 To lift thy heart to God above. 
 And keep thy conscience pure.' 
 
 She hears the wind in an alien wood and cries for the 
 
 Parsonage garden, and for the ' barren hills ' — 
 
 ' Where scarce the scattered, stunted trees 
 Can yield an answering swell. 
 But where a wilderness of heath 
 Returns the sound as well. 
 
 For yonder garden, fair and wide, 
 
 With groves of evergreen. 
 Long winding walks, and borders trim 
 
 And velvet lawus between ; 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 47 
 
 Restore to me that little spot, 
 
 With grey hills compassed round. 
 Where knotted grass neglected lies. 
 
 And weeds usurp the ground.' 
 
 For she too loved the moors ; and through her love 
 for them she wrote two perfect lines when she called on 
 Memory to — 
 
 ' Forever hang thy dreamy spell 
 Round mountain star and heather-hell.' 
 
 The critics, the theorists, the tale-mongers, have left 
 Anne quiet in that grave on the sea-coast, where she lies 
 apart. Her gentle insignificance served her well. 
 
 But no woman who ever wrote was more criticised, 
 more spied upon, more lied about, than Charlotte. It 
 was as if the singular purity and poverty of her legend 
 offered irresistible provocation. The blank page called 
 for the scribbler. The silence that hung about her was 
 dark with challenge ; it was felt to be ambiguous, enig- 
 matic. Reserve suggests a reservation, something hidden 
 and kept back from the insatiable public with its ' right to 
 know.' Mrs. Gaskell with all her indiscretions had not 
 given it enough. The great, classic Life of Charlotte 
 Bronte was, after all, incomplete. Until something more 
 was known about her, Charlotte herself was incomplete. 
 It was nothing that Mrs. Gaskell's work was the fuiest, 
 tenderest portrait of a woman that it was ever given to a 
 woman to achieve ; nothing that she was not only reck- 
 lessly and superbly loyal to Charlotte, but that in her 
 very indiscretions she was, as far as Charlotte was con- 
 cerned, incorruptibly and profoundly true. 
 
 Since Mrs. Gaskell's time, other hands have been at 
 
48 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 work on Charlotte, improving Mrs. Gaskell's masterpiece. 
 A hundred little touches have been added to it. First, 
 it was supposed to be too tragic, too deliberately and 
 impossibly sombre (that sad book of which Charlotte's 
 friend, Mary Taylor, said that it was * not so gloomy as the 
 truth '). So first came Sir Wemyss Reid, conscientiously 
 worldng up the high lights till he got the values all wrong. 
 ' If the truth must be told,' he says, ' the life of the author 
 of Jane Eyre was by no means so joyless as the world 
 now believes it to have been.' And he sets out to give us 
 the truth. But all that he does to lighten the gloom is 
 to tell a pleasant story of how ' one bright June morning 
 in 1833, a handsome carriage and pair is standing opposite 
 the Devonshire Arms at Bolton Bridge.' In the hand- 
 some carriage is a young girl, Ellen Nussey, waiting for 
 Charlotte Bronte and her brother and sisters to go with 
 her for a picnic to Bolton Abbey. 
 
 ' Presently,' says Sir Wemyss Reid, ' on the steep road 
 which stretches across the moors to Keighley, the sound 
 of wheels is heard, mingled with the merry speech and 
 merrier laughter of fresh young voices. Shall we go 
 forward unseen,' he asks, ' and study the approaching 
 travellers whilst they are still upon the road ? Their 
 conveyance is no handsome carriage, but a rickety 
 dog-cart, unmistakably betraying its neighbourship to 
 the carts and ploughs of some rural farmyard. The 
 horse, freshly taken from the fields, is driven by a youth 
 who, in spite of his countrified dress, is no mere bumpkin. 
 His shock of red hair hangs down in somewhat ragged 
 locks behind his ears, for Branwell Bronte esteems himself 
 a genius and a poet, and, following the fashion of the times, 
 has that abhorrence of the barber's shears which genius 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 49 
 
 is supposed to affect. But the lad's face is a handsome 
 and striking one, full of Celtic fire and humour, untouched 
 by the slightest shade of care, hopeful, promising, even 
 brilliant. How gaily he jokes with his three sisters ; 
 with what inexhaustible volubility he pours out quotations 
 from his favourite poets, appljdng them to the lovely 
 scenes around him ; and with what a mischievous delight 
 in his superior nerve and mettle, he attempts the feats 
 of charioteering, which fill the heart of the youngest 
 of the party with sudden terrors ! Beside him, in a 
 dress of marvellous plainness and ugliness, stamped with 
 the brand " home-made " in characters which none can 
 mistake, is the eldest of the sisters. Charlotte is talking 
 too ; there are bright smiles upon her face ; she is enjoy- 
 ing everything around her, the splendid morning, the 
 charms of leafy trees and budding roses, and the ever 
 musical stream ; most of all, perhaps, the charm of her 
 brother's society, and the expectation of that coming 
 meeting with her friends, which is so near at hand. 
 Behind sits a pretty little girl, with fine complexion and 
 delicate regular features, whom the stranger would pick 
 out as the beauty of the company, and a tall, rather 
 angular figure, clad in a dress exactly resembhng Char- 
 lotte's. Emily Bronte does not talk so much as the rest 
 of the party, but her wonderful eyes, brilliant and un- 
 fathomable as the pool at the foot of a waterfall, but 
 radiant also with a wealth of tenderness and warmth, 
 show how her soul is expanding under the influences of 
 the scene ; how quick she is to note the least prominent 
 of the beauties around her, how intense is her enjoyment 
 of the songs of the birds, the brilliancy of the sunshine, 
 the rich scent of the flower-bespangled hedgerows. If 
 
50 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 she does not, like Charlotte and Anne, meet her brother's 
 ceaseless flood of sparkling words with opposing currents 
 of speech, she utters a strange, deep guttural sound which 
 those who know her best interpret as the language of a 
 joy too deep for articulate expression. Gaze at them 
 as they pass you in the quiet road, and acknowledge that, 
 in spite of their rough and even uncouth exteriors, a 
 happier four could hardly be met with in. this favourite 
 haunt of pleasure-seekers during a long summer's day.' 
 And you do gaze at them and are sadder, if anything, 
 than you were before. You see them, if anything, more 
 poignantly. You see their cheerful biographer doing 
 all he knows, and the light he shoots across the blackness 
 only makes it blacker. 
 
 ' Nessun maggior dolore 
 Che ricordarsi di tempo felice 
 Nella miseria ' ; 
 
 and in the end the biographer with all his cheerfulness 
 succumbs to the tradition of misery, and even adds a dark 
 contribution of his own, the suggestion of an unhappy 
 love-affair of Charlotte's. 
 
 After Sir Wemyss Reid came Mr. Francis Grundy with 
 his little pictures. Pictures of the Past, presenting a 
 dreadfully unattractive Charlotte. 
 
 Then came Mr. Leyland, following Mr. Grundy, with 
 his glorification of Branwell and his hint that Charlotte 
 made it very hard at home for the poor boy. He repeats 
 the story that Branwell told Mr, George Searle Phillips, 
 how he went to see a dying girl in the village, and sat 
 with her half an hour, and read a psalm to her and a 
 hymn, and how he felt like praying with her too, but he 
 was not ' good enough,' how he came away with a heavy 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 51 
 
 heart and fell into melancholy musings, ' Charlotte 
 observed my depression,' Bran well said, ' and asked 
 what ailed me. So I told her. She looked at me with a 
 look which I shall never forget — if I live to be a hundred 
 years old — ^which I never shall. It was not like her at 
 all. It wounded me as if some one had struck me a 
 blow in the mouth. It involved ever so many things in 
 it. It ran over me, questioning and examining, as if I 
 had been a wild beast. It said, " Did my ears deceive me, 
 or did I hear aright ? " And then came the painful, 
 baffled expression, which was worse than all. It said, 
 " I wonder if that 's true ? " But, as she left the room, 
 she seemed to accuse herself of having wronged me, and 
 smiled kindly upon me, and said, " She is my little 
 scholar, and I will go and see her." I replied not a word. 
 I was too much cut up ! When she was gone, I came 
 over here to the Black Bull, and made a note of it. . . .' 
 
 You see the implication ? It was Charlotte who drove 
 him to the Black Bull. That was Branwell's impression 
 of Charlotte. Just the sort of impression that an opium- 
 eater would have of a beloved sister. 
 
 But Branwell's impression was good enough for 
 Madame Duclaux to found her theory on. Her theory is 
 that Charlotte was inferior to Emily in tenderness. It 
 may well be so, and yet Charlotte would remain above 
 most women tender, for Emily's wealth would furnish 
 forth a score of sisters. The simple truth is that Char- 
 lotte had nerves, and Branwell was extremely trying. 
 And it is possible that Emily had less to bear, that in 
 her detachment she was protected more than Charlotte 
 from Branwell at his worst. 
 
 Meanwhile tales were abroad presenting Charlotte in 
 
52 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 the queerest lights. There is that immortal story of 
 how Thackeray gave a party for Currer Bell at his house 
 in Young Street, and how Currer Bell had a headache and 
 lay on a sofa in the back drawing-room, and refused to 
 talk to anybody but the governess ; and how Thackeray 
 at last, very late, with a finger on his lip, stole out of the 
 house and took refuge in his club. No wonder if this 
 quaint and curious Charlotte survived in the memory of 
 Thackeray's daughter. But, even apart from the head- 
 ache, you can see how it came about, how the sight of the 
 governess evoked Charlotte Bronte's unforgotten agony. 
 She saw in the amazed and cheerful lady her own sad 
 youth, slighted and oppressed, solitary in a scene of gaiety 
 — she could not have seen her otherwise — and her warm 
 heart rushed out to her. She was determined that that 
 governess should have a happy evening if nobody else 
 had. Her behaviour was odd, if you like, it was even 
 absurd, but it had the sublimity of vicarious expiation. 
 Has any one ever considered its significance, the magnitude 
 of her deed ? For Charlotte, to be the guest of honour 
 on that brilliant night, in the house of Thackeray, her 
 divinity, was to touch the topmost height of fame. And 
 she turned her back on the brilliance and the fame and 
 the face of her divinity, and offered herself up in flames 
 as a sacrifice for all the governesses that were and had 
 ever been and would be. 
 
 And after the fine stories came the little legends — 
 things about Charlotte when she was a governess herself 
 at Mrs. Sidgwick's, and the tittle-tattle of the parish. 
 One of the three curates whom Charlotte made so shock- 
 ingly immortal avenged himself for his immortality by 
 stating that the trouble with Charlotte was that she 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 53 
 
 would fight for mastery in the parish. Who can beheve 
 him ? If there is one thing that seems more certain than 
 another it is Charlotte's utter indifference to parochial 
 matters. But Charlotte was just, and she may have 
 objected to the young man's way with the Dissenters ; 
 we know that she did very strongly object to Mr. Wilham 
 Weightman's way. And that, I imagine, was the 
 trouble between Charlotte and the curates. 
 
 As for the Sidgwicks, Charlotte's biographers have been 
 rather hard on them. Mr. Leslie Stephen calls them 
 ' coarse employers.' They were certainly not subtle 
 enough to divine the hidden genius in their sad little 
 governess. It was, I imagine, Charlotte's alien, enigmatic 
 face that provoked a little Sidgwick to throw a Bible at 
 her. She said Mrs. Sidgwick did not know her, and 
 did not 'intend to know her.' She might have added 
 that if she had intended Mrs. Sidgwick could not possibly 
 have known her. And when the Sidgwicks said (as they 
 did say to their cousin, Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson) 
 that if Miss Bronte ' was invited to walk to church with 
 them, she thought she was being ordered about like a 
 slave ; if she was not invited she imagined she was 
 being excluded from the family circle,' that was simply 
 their robust view of the paralysed attitude of a shy girl 
 among strangers, in an agony of fear lest she should cut 
 in where she was not wanted. 
 
 And allowances must be made for Mrs. Sidgwick. 
 She was, no doubt, considerably annoyed at finding that 
 she had engaged a thoroughly incompetent and appar- 
 ently thoroughly morbid young person who had offered 
 herself as a nursery-governess and didn't know how to 
 keep order in the nursery. Naturally there was trouble 
 
54 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 at Stonegappe. Then one fine day Mrs. Sidgwick dis- 
 covered that there was, after all, a use for that incom- 
 prehensible and incompetent Miss Bronte. Miss Bronte 
 had a gift. She could sew. She could sew beautifully. 
 Her stitching, if you would believe it, was a dream. 
 And Mrs. Sidgwick saw that Miss Bronte's one talent 
 was not lodged in her useless. So Charlotte sat alone 
 all evening in the schoolroom at Stonegappe, a small 
 figure hidden in pure white, billowy seas of muslin, and 
 lamented thus : ' She cares nothing in the world about 
 me except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity 
 of labour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end 
 she overwhelms me with oceans of needlework, yards of 
 cambric to hem, muslin night-caps to make, and above 
 all things, dolls to dress.' And Mrs. Sidgwick complained 
 that Charlotte did not love the children, and forgot how 
 little she liked it when the children loved Charlotte, and 
 was unaware, poor lady, that it was recorded of her, and 
 would be recorded to all time, that she had said 'Love 
 the governess, my dear ! ' when her little impulsive boy 
 put his hand in Charlotte's at the dinner-table, and cried 
 ' I love 'ou, Miss Bronte.' It was the same little im- 
 pulsive boy who threw the Bible at Charlotte, and also 
 threw a stone which hit her. 
 
 No wonder that Miss Bronte's one and only ' pleasant 
 afternoon ' was when Mr. Sidgwick went out walking in 
 his fields with his children and his Newfoundland dog, 
 and Charlotte (by order) followed and observed him from 
 behind. 
 
 Of course all these old tales should have gone where 
 Mrs. Sidgwick's old muslin caps went ; but they have 
 not, and so it has got about that Charlotte Bronte was 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 55 
 
 not fond of children. Even Mr, Swinburne, at the height 
 of his magnificent eulogy, after putting crown upon 
 crown upon her head, pauses and wonders : had she any 
 love for children ? He finds in her ' a plentiful lack of 
 inborn baby-worship ' ; she is unworthy to compare in 
 this with George Eliot, ' the spiritual mother of Totty, 
 of Eppie, and of Lillo.' ' The fiery-hearted Vestal of 
 Ha worth,' he says, ' had no room reserved in the palace 
 of her passionate and high-minded imagination as a 
 nursery for inmates of such divine and delicious quality.' 
 There was little Georgette in Villette, to say nothing of 
 Polly, and there was Ad^le in Jane Eyre. But Mr. Swin- 
 burne had forgotten about little Georgette. Like George 
 Henry Lewes he is ' wellnigh moved to think one of the 
 most powerfully and exquisitely written chapters in Shirley 
 a chapter which could hardly have been written at all 
 by a woman, or, for that matter, by a man, of however 
 noble and kindly a nature, in whom the instinct, or nerve, 
 or organ of love for children was even of average natural 
 strength and sensibility ' ; so difficult was it for him to 
 believe in ' the dread and repulsion felt by a forsaken 
 wife and tortured mother for the very beauty and dainty 
 sweetness of her only new-born child, as recalling the 
 cruel, sleek charm of the human tiger that had begotten 
 it.' And so he crowns her with all crowns but that of 
 ' love for children.' He is still tender to her, seeing in 
 her that one monstrous lack ; he touches it with sorrow 
 and a certain shame. 
 
 Mr. Birrell follows him. ' Miss Bronte,' he says with 
 confidence, ' did not care for children. She had no eye 
 for them. Hence it comes about that her novel-children 
 are not good.' He is moved to playful sarcasm when he 
 
56 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 tells how in August of eighteen-fifty-three ' Miss Bronte 
 suffered a keen disappointment.' She went to Scotland 
 with some friends who took their baby with them. The 
 parents thought the baby was ill when it wasn't, and 
 insisted on turning back, and Charlotte had to give up 
 her holiday. ' All on account of a baby,' says Mr. Birrell, 
 and refers you to Charlotte's letter on the subject, im- 
 plying that it was cold-blooded. The biographer can 
 quote letters for his purpose, and Mr. Birrell omits to 
 tell us that Charlotte wrote ' had any evil consequences 
 followed a prolonged stay, I should never have forgiven 
 myself.' You are to imagine that Charlotte could have 
 forgiven herself perfectly well, for Charlotte ' did not care 
 for children.' 
 
 Mrs. OUphant does not echo that cry. She was a 
 woman and knew better. 
 
 For I believe that here we touch the very heart of the 
 mystery that was Charlotte Bronte. We would have no 
 right to touch it, to approach it, were it not that other 
 people have already violated all that was most sacred and 
 most secret in that mystery, and have given the world 
 a defaced and disfigured Charlotte Bronte. I believe 
 that this love of children which even Mr. Swinburne has 
 denied to her, was the key to Charlotte's nature. We 
 are face to face here, not with a want in her, but with an 
 abyss, depth beyond depth of tenderness and longing 
 and frustration, of a passion that found no clear voice in 
 her works, because it was one with the elemental nature 
 in her, imdefined, unuttered, unutterable. 
 
 She was afraid of children ; she was awkward with them ; 
 because such passion has shynesses, distances, and terrors 
 unknown to the average comfortable women who become 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 57 
 
 happy mothers. It has even its perversions, when love 
 hardly knows itself from hate. Such love demands before 
 all things possession. It cries out for children of its own 
 blood and flesh. I believe that there were moments when 
 it was pain for Charlotte to see the children born and 
 possessed by other women. It must have been agony 
 to have to look after them, especially when the rule was 
 that they were not to ' love the governess.' 
 
 The proofs of this are slender, but they are sufficient. 
 There is little Georgette, the sick child that Lucy nurses 
 in the Pensionnat : ' little Georgette still piped her plain- 
 tive wail, appealing to me by her familiar term, " Minnie, 
 Minnie, me very poorly ! " till my heart ached ' . . . 
 ' I affected Georgette ; she was a sensitive and loving 
 child ; to hold her in my lap, or carry her in my arms, was 
 to me a treat. To-night she would have me lay my head 
 on the pillow of her crib ; she even put her little arms 
 round my neck. Her clasp and the nestling action with 
 which she pressed her cheek to mine made me almost 
 cry with a sort of tender pain.' 
 
 Once during a spring-cleaning at Upperwood House 
 Charlotte was Mrs. White's nursemaid as well as her 
 governess, and she wrote : ' By dint of nursing the fat 
 baby it has got to know me and be fond of me. I suspect 
 myself of growing rather fond of it.' Years later she 
 wrote to Mrs. Gaskell, after staying with her : ' Could 
 you manage to convey a small kiss to that dear but 
 dangerous little person, Julia ? She surreptitiously pos- 
 sessed herself of a minute fraction of my heart, which 
 has been missing ever since I saw her.' Mrs. Gaskell 
 tells us that there was ' a strong, mutual attraction ' 
 between Julia, her youngest little girl, and Charlotte 
 
58 THE THiiEE BRONTES 
 
 Bronte. ' The child,' she says, ' would steal her httle 
 hand into Miss Bronte's scarcely larger one, and each 
 took pleasure in this apparently unobserved caress.' 
 May I suggest that children do not steal their little 
 hands into the hands of people who do not care for 
 them ? Their instinct is infallible. 
 
 Charlotte Bronte tried to give an account of her 
 feeling for children ; it was something like the sacred 
 awe of the lover. ' Whenever I see Florence and Julia 
 again I shall feel like a fond but bashful suitor, who 
 views at a distance the fair personage to whom, in his 
 clownish awe, he dare not risk a near approach. Such 
 is the clearest idea I can give you of my feeling towards 
 children I like, but to whom I am a stranger — and to 
 what children am I not a stranger ? ' 
 
 Extraordinary that Charlotte's critics have missed the 
 pathos of that cri de cceur. It is so clearly an echo from 
 the ' house of bondage,' where Charlotte was made a 
 stranger to the beloved, where the beloved threw stones 
 and Bibles at her. You really have to 'allow for the 
 shock of an experience so blighting. It is all part of 
 the perversity of the fate that dogged her, that her 
 feeling should have met with that reverse. But it was 
 there, guarded with a certain shy austerity. She ' sus- 
 pected ' herself of getting rather fond of the baby. 
 
 She hid her secret even from herself, as women will 
 hide these things. But her dreams betrayed her after 
 the way of dreams. Charlotte's dream (premonitory, she 
 thought, of trouble) was that she carried a little crying 
 child, and could not still its cry. ' She described herself,' 
 Mrs. Gaskell says, ' as having the most painful sense of 
 pity for the little thing, lying inert, as sick children do. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 59 
 
 while she walked about in some gloomy place with it, 
 such as the aisle of Haworth Church.' This dream she 
 gives to Jane Eyre, unconscious of its profound sig- 
 nificance and fitness. It is a pity that Mr. Swinburne 
 did not pay attention to Charlotte's dream. 
 
 All her life, I think, she suffered because of the per- 
 petual insurgence of this secret, impassioned, maternal 
 energy. Hence the sting of Lewes's famous criticism, 
 beginning : ' The grand function of woman, it must always 
 be remembered ' (as if Charlotte had forgotten it !) 'is 
 Maternity ' ; and, working up from his criticism of that 
 chapter in Shirley to a climax of adjuration : ' Currer Bell ! 
 if under your heart had ever stirred a child; if to your 
 bosom a babe had ever been pressed — ^that mysterious 
 part of your being, towards which all the rest of it was 
 drawn, in which your whole soul was transported and 
 absorbed — ^never could you have imagined such a false- 
 hood as that ! ' It was impossible for Charlotte to pro- 
 test against anything but the abominable bad taste of 
 Lewes's article, otherwise she might have told him that 
 she probably knew rather more about those mysteries 
 than he did. It was she who gave us that supreme 
 image of disastrous love. ' I looked at my love ; it 
 shivered in my heart like a suffering child in a cold 
 cradle ! ' 
 
 And this woman died before her child was bom. 
 
 Then there is Mrs. Oliphant again. Though she was 
 not one of those who said Charlotte Bronte was not fond 
 of children, though she would have died rather than 
 have joined Lewes in his unspeakable cry against her, 
 Mrs. Oliphant made certain statements in no better 
 
60 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 taste than his. She suggests that Charlotte, fond or not 
 fond of children, was too fond of matrimonial dreams. 
 Her picture (the married woman's picture) is of an 
 undesired and undesirable little spinster pining visibly 
 and shamelessly in a parsonage. She would have us 
 believe that from morning till night, from night till 
 morning, Charlotte Bronte in the Parsonage thought of 
 nothing but of getting married, that her dreams pursued, 
 ruthlessly, the casual visitor. The hopelessness of the 
 dream, the undesirability of Charlotte, is what makes 
 her so irresistible to her sister novelist. ^ 
 T There was ' one subject,' she says, * which Charlotte 
 Bronte had at her command, having experienced in her 
 own person, and seen her nearest friends under the ex- 
 perience, of that solitude and longing of women of which 
 she has made so remarkable an exposition. The long 
 silence of life without an adventure or a change, the 
 forlorn gaze out of windows which never show any one 
 coming who can rouse the slightest interest in the mind, 
 the endless years and days which pass and pass, canying 
 away the bloom, extinguishing the lights of youth, 
 bringing a dreary middle age before which the very soul 
 shrinks, while yet the sufferer feels how strong is the 
 current of life in her own veins, and how capable she is 
 of all the active duties of existence — this was the essence 
 and soul of the existence she knew best. Was there no 
 help for it? Must the women wait and see their lives 
 thrown away, and have no power to save themselves ! ' 
 
 ' The position,' she goes on, ' in itself so tragic, is one 
 which can scarcely be expressed without calling forth 
 inevitable ridicule, a laugh at the best, more often a sneer, 
 at the women whose desire for a husband is thus betrayed. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 61 
 
 Shirley and Caroline Helstone both cried out for that 
 husband with an indignation, a fire and impatience, a 
 sense of wrong and injury, which stopped the laugh for 
 the moment. It might be ludicrous, but it was horribly 
 genuine and true.' (This is more than can be said of 
 Mrs. Oliphant's view of the adorable Shirley Keeldar 
 who was Emily Bronte. It is ludicrous enough, and it 
 may be genuine, but it is certainly not true.) But 
 Mrs. Oliphant is careful not to go too far. ' Note,' she 
 says, ' there was nothing sensual about these young 
 women. It was life they wanted ; they knew nothing 
 of the grosser thoughts which the world with its jeers 
 attributes to them : of such thoughts they were un- 
 conscious in a primitive innocence which, perhaps, only 
 women understand.' Yet she characterises their 'out- 
 cry ' as ' indelicate.' ' All very well to talk of women 
 working for their living, finding new channels for them- 
 selves, establishing their independence. How much have 
 we said of all that ' (Mrs. Oliphant thinks that she is 
 rendering Charlotte Bronte's thought), ' endeavouring to 
 persuade ourselves ! Charlotte Bronte had the courage 
 of her opinions. It was not education nor a trade that 
 her women wanted. It was not a living, but their share 
 in life . . . Miss Bronte herself said correct things ' 
 (observe that insincerity is insinuated here) ' about the 
 protection which a trade is to a woman, keeping her 
 from a mercenary marriage ; but this was not in the 
 least the way of her heroines.' (Why, you naturally 
 wonder, should it have been ?) ' They wanted to be 
 happy, no doubt, but above all things they wanted their 
 share in life, to have their position by the side of men, 
 which alone confers a natural equality, to have their 
 
62 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 shoulder to the wheel, their hands on the reins of common 
 life, to build up the world and link the generations each 
 to each.' (And very proper of them, too.) ' In her 
 philosophy marriage was the only state which procured 
 this, and if she did not recommend a mercenary marriage 
 she was at least very tolerant about its conditions, in- 
 sisting less upon love than was to be expected ' (1) ' and 
 with a covert conviction in her mind, that if not one man, 
 then another was better than any complete abandonment 
 of the larger path. Lucy Snowe for a long time had her 
 heart very much set on Dr. John and his placid breadth of 
 Englishism ; but when she finally found out that to be 
 impossible her tears were soon dried by the prospect of 
 Paul Emanuel, so unlike him, coming into his place.' 
 
 The obvious answer to all this is that Charlotte Bronte 
 was writing in the mid- Victorian age, about mid- Victorian 
 women, the women whom she saw around her ; writing, 
 without any 'philosophy' or 'covert conviction, 'in the days 
 before emancipation, when marriage was the only chance 
 of independence that a woman had. It would have been 
 marvellous, if she had not had her sister Emily before 
 her, that in such an age she should have conceived and 
 created Shirley Keeldar. As for poor little Lucy with her 
 two men, she is not the first heroine who mistook the 
 false dawn for the true. Besides, Miss Bronte's ' philo- 
 sophy ' was exactly the opposite to that attributed to 
 her, as anybody may see who reads Shirley. In these 
 matters she burned what her age adored, and adored 
 what it burned, a thorough revolutionary. 
 
 But this is not the worst. Mrs. Oliphant professes 
 to feel pity for her victim. ' Poor Charlotte Bronte ! 
 She has not been as other women, protected by the grave 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 63 
 
 from all betrayal of the episodes in her own life.' (You 
 would imagine they were awful, the episodes in Charlotte 
 Bronte's life.) ' Everybody has betrayed her, and all she 
 thought about this one, and that, and every name that 
 was ever associated with hers. There was a Mr. Taylor 
 from London, about whom she wrote with great freedom 
 to her friend, Miss Nussey, telling how the little man had 
 come, how he had gone away without any advance in the 
 affairs, how a chill came over her when he appeared and 
 she found him much less attractive wnen at a distance, 
 yet how she liked it as little when he went away, and was 
 somewhat excited about his first letter, and even went 
 so far as to imagine with a laugh that there might possibly 
 be a dozen little Joe Taylors before all was over,' 
 
 This is atrocious. But the malice and bad taste of it 
 are nothing to the gross carelessness and ignorance it 
 reveals — ignorance of facts and identities and names. 
 Charlotte's suitor was Mr. James Taylor and not Joe. 
 Joe, the brother of her friend, Mary Taylor, was married 
 already to a lady called Amelia, and it is of Joe and his 
 Amelia that Charlotte writes. ' She must take heart ' 
 (Amelia had been singularly unsuccessful), 'there may 
 yet be a round dozen of little Joe Taylors to look after — 
 run after — to sort and switch and train up in the way 
 they should go.' 
 
 Of Mr. James Taylor she writes more decorously. 
 Miss Nussey, as usual, had been thinking unwarrantable 
 things, and had made a most unbecoming joke about 
 Jupiter and Venus, which outraged Charlotte's ' common- 
 sense.' ' The idea of the Uttle man,' says Charlotte, 
 ' shocks me less. He still sends his little newspaper ; 
 and the other day there came a letter of a bulk, volume. 
 
64 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 pith, judgment and knowledge, fit to have been the 
 product of a giant. You may laugh as much and as 
 wickedly as you please, but the fact is, there is a quiet 
 constancy about this, my diminutive and red-haired 
 friend, which adds a foot to his stature, turns his sandy 
 locks dark, and altogether dignifies him a good deal in 
 my estimation.' This is all she says by way of apprecia- 
 tion. She says later, ' his manners and his personal 
 appearance scarcely pleased me more than at the first 
 interview. ... I feel that in his way he has a regard 
 for me ; a regard which I cannot bring myself entirely 
 to reciprocate in kind, and yet its withdrawal leaves 
 a painful blank.' Miss Nussey evidently insists that 
 Charlotte's feelings are engaged this time, arguing pos- 
 sibly from the ' painful blank ' ; and Charlotte becomes 
 exphcit. She speaks of the disadvantages of the alleged 
 match, and we gather that Miss Nussey has been urging 
 her to take the little man. ' But there is another thing 
 which forms a barrier more difficult to pass than any of 
 these. Would Mr. Taylor and I ever suit ? Could I ever 
 feel for him enough love to accept him as a husband ? 
 Friendship — gratitude — esteem I tave, but each moment 
 he came near me, and that I could see his eyes fastened 
 on me, my veins ran ice. Now that he is away, I feel 
 far more gently to him j it is only close by that I grow 
 rigid — stiffening with a strange mixture of apprehension 
 and anger — which nothing softens but his retreat, and a 
 perfect subduing of his manner.' And again, ' My 
 conscience, I can truly say, does not now accuse me of 
 having treated Mr. Taylor with injustice or unkindness 
 . . . but with every disposition and with every wish, with 
 every intention even to look on him in the most favourable 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 65 
 
 point of view at his last visit, it was impossible to me in 
 my inward heart to think of him as one that might one 
 day be acceptable as a husband.' Could anything be 
 more explicit ? There is a good deal more of it. After 
 one very searching criticism of Mr. Taylor : ' One does 
 not like to say these things, but one had better be honest.' 
 And of her honesty Charlotte's letters on this subject 
 leave no doubt. There is not the smallest ground for 
 supposing that even for a moment had she thought of 
 Mr. James Taylor as 'one that one day might be* ac- 
 ceptable,' much less is there for Mr. Clement Shorter's 
 suggestion that if he had come back from Bombay she 
 would have married him. 
 
 But Joe or James, it is all one to Mrs. Oliphant, with 
 her theory of Charlotte Bronte. ' For her and her class, 
 which did not speak of it, everything depended upon 
 whether the women married or did not marry. Their 
 thoughts were thus artificially fixed to one point in the 
 horizon.' The rest is repetition, ending in the astounding 
 verdict : ' the seed she thus sowed has come to many 
 growths that would have appalled Charlotte Bronte. 
 But while it would be very unjust to blame her for the 
 vagaries that have followed, and to which nothing could 
 be less desirable than any building of the house or growth 
 of the race, any responsibility or service, we must still 
 believe that it was she who drew the curtain first aside 
 and opened the gates to imps of evil meaning, polluting 
 and profaning the domestic hearth.' 
 
 That is Mrs. Oliphant on Charlotte Bronte. 
 
 And even Mr. Clement Shorter, who has dealt so 
 admirably with outrageous legends, goes half the way 
 with the detractor. He has a theory that Charlotte 
 
66 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Bronte was a woman of morbid mood, ' to whom the pro- 
 blem of sex appealed with all its complications,' and that 
 she ' dwelt continually on the problem of the ideal mate.' 
 Now Charlotte may have dreamed of getting married 
 (there have been more criminal dreams) ; she Tnay have 
 brooded continually over the problem of the ideal mate, 
 only of all these dreams and broodings there is not one 
 atom of evidence — not one. Not a hint, not a trace, 
 either in her character as we know it, or in her very 
 voluminous private correspondence. The facts of her 
 life disprove it. Her letters to Ellen Nussey (never 
 meant for publication) reveal the workings of Charlotte's 
 feminine mind when applied to ' the sex problem ' ; a 
 mind singularly wholesome and impersonal, and singu- 
 larly detached. Charlotte is full of lights upon this awful 
 subject of matrimony, which, by the way, had consider- 
 ably more interest for Miss Nussey than it had for her. 
 In fact, if it had not been for Miss Nussey it would not 
 have appeared so often as it did in Charlotte's letters. 
 If you pay attention to the context (a thing that theorists 
 never do) you see, what is indeed obvious, that a large 
 portion of Charlotte Bronte's time was taken up in ad- 
 vising and controlling Ellen Nussey, that amiable and 
 impulsive prototype of Caroline Helstone. She is called 
 upon in all Miss Nussey's hours of crisis, and there seem 
 to have been a great many of them. ' Do not,' she writes, 
 ' be over-persuaded to marry a man you can never 
 respect — I do not say love, because I think if you can 
 respect a person before marriage, moderate love at least 
 will come after ; and as to intense passion, I am convinced 
 that that is no desirable feeling. In the first place, it 
 seldom or never meets with a requital ; and in the second 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 67 
 
 place, if it did, the feeling would be only temporary ; it 
 would last the honeymoon, and then, perhaps, give place 
 to disgust, or indifference, worse perhaps than disgust. 
 Certainly this would be the case on the man's part ; and 
 on the woman's — God help her, if she is left to love 
 passionately and alone.' 
 
 ' I am tolerably well convinced that I shall never marry 
 at all.' 
 
 And again, to Miss Nussey, six months later. ' Did 
 you not once say to me in all childlike simplicity, " I 
 thought Charlotte, no young lady should fall in love till 
 the offer was actually made ? " I forgot what answer 
 I made at the time, but I now reply, after due considera- 
 tion. Right as a glove, the maxim is just, and I hope you 
 will always attend to it. I will even extend and confirm 
 it : no young lady should fall in love till the offer has 
 been made, accepted, the marriage ceremony performed, 
 and the first half-year of wedded life has passed away. 
 A woman may then begin to love, but with great pre- 
 caution, very coolly, very moderately, very rationally. 
 If she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a cold 
 look cuts her to the heart, she is a fool. If she ever loves 
 so much that her husband's will is her law, and that she 
 has got into a habit of watching his looks in order that 
 she may anticipate his wishes, she will soon be a neglected 
 fool. Did I not tell you of an instance . . . ? ' 
 
 What could be more lucid, more light-hearted, and 
 more sane ? And if Charlotte is suspicious of the dangers 
 of her own temperament, that only proves her lucidity 
 and sanity the more. 
 
 Later, at Brussels, when confronted with ' three or four 
 people's ' idea that • the future epoucc of Miss Bronte is 
 
68 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 on the Continent,' she defends herself against the ' silly 
 imputation.' ' Not that it is a crime to marry, or a crime 
 to wish to be married ; but it is an imbecility, which I 
 reject with contempt, for women, who have neither 
 fortune or beauty, to make marriage the principal object 
 of their wishes and hopes, and the aim of all their actions ; 
 not to be able to convince themselves that they are un- 
 attractive, and that they had better be quiet, and think 
 of other things than wedlock.' Can anything be clearer ? 
 
 So much for herself. But she has to deal with Miss 
 Nussey, in difficulties again, later : ' Papa has two or 
 
 three times expressed a fear that since Mr. paid 
 
 you so much attention, he will, perhaps, have made an 
 impression on your mind which will interfere with your 
 comfort. I tell him I think not, as I believe you to be 
 mistress of yourself in those matters. Still, he keeps 
 saying that I am to write to you and dissuade you from 
 thinking of him. I never saw papa make himself so 
 uneasy about a thing of the kind before ; he is usually 
 very sarcastic on such subjects. 
 
 ' Mr. be hanged ! I never thought very well of 
 
 him, and I am much disposed to think very ill of him at 
 this blessed minute. I have discussed the subject fully, 
 for where is the use of being mysterious and constrained ? 
 — ^it is not worth while.' 
 
 And yet again it is Ellen Nussey. ' Ten years ago I 
 should have laughed at your account of the blunder you 
 made in mistaking the bachelor doctor of Bridlington 
 for a married man. I should have certainly thought you 
 scrupulous over-much, and wondered how you could 
 possibly regret being civil to a decent individual merely 
 because he happened to be single instead of double. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 69 
 
 Now, however, I can perceive that your scruples are 
 founded on common-sense. I know that if women wish 
 to escape the stigma of husband-seeking, they must act 
 and look like marble or clay — cold, expressionless, blood- 
 less; for every appearance of feeling, of joy, sorrow, 
 friendUness, antipathy, admiration, disgust, are alike 
 construed by the world into the attempt to ' (I regret 
 to say that Charlotte wrote) ' to hook a husband.' 
 
 Later, she has to advise her friend Mr. Williams as to 
 a career for his daughter Louisa. And here she is miles 
 ahead of her age, the age that considered marriage the 
 only honourable career for a woman. ' Your daughters 
 — ^no more than your sons — should be a burden on your 
 hands. Your daughters — as much as your sons — should 
 aim at making their way honourably through life. Do 
 you not wish to keep them at home. Believe me, 
 teachers may be hard-worked, ill-paid and despised, but 
 the girl who stays at home doing nothing is worse off 
 than the hardest-wrought and worst-paid drudge of a 
 school. Whenever I have seen, not merely in humble but 
 in affluent houses, families of daughters sitting waiting 
 to be married, I have pitied them from my heart. It is 
 doubtless well — very well — if Fate decrees them a happy 
 marriage ; but, if otherwise, give their existence some 
 object, their time some occupation, or the peevishness 
 of disappointment, and the hstlessness of idleness will 
 infallibly degrade their nature. . . . Lonely as I am, 
 how should I be if Providence had never given me courage 
 to adopt a career . . . ? How should I be with youth 
 past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where 
 there is not a single educated family ? In that case I 
 should have no world at all. As it is, something like a 
 
70 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 hope and a motive sustains me still. I wish all your 
 daughters — I wish every woman in England, had also 
 a hope and a motive.' 
 
 Whatever the views of Charlotte Bronte's heroines 
 may or may not have been, these were her own views — 
 sober, sincere, and utterly dispassionate. Mrs. Oliphant 
 set them aside, either in criminal carelessness, or with 
 still more criminal deliberation, because they interfered 
 with her theory. They are certainly not the views of a 
 woman given to day-dreaming and window-gazing. 
 Lucy Snowe may have had time for window-gazing, but 
 not Charlotte Bronte, what with her writing and her 
 dusting, sweeping, ironing, bed-making, and taking the 
 eyes out of the potatoes for poor old Tabby, who was 
 too blind to see them. Window-gazing of all things ! 
 Mrs. Oliphant could not have fixed upon a habit more 
 absurdly at variance with Charlotte's character. 
 
 For she was pure, utterly and marvellously pure from 
 sentimentalism, which was (and she knew it) the worst 
 vice of the Victorian age. Mr. Leslie Stephen said that 
 ' Miss Bronte's sense of humour was but feeble.' It was 
 robust enough when it played with sentimentalists. 
 But as for love, for passion, she sees it with a tragic 
 lucidity that is almost a premonition. And her attitude 
 was by no means that of the foredoomed spinster, making 
 necessity her virtue. There was no necessity. She had 
 at least four suitors (quite a fair allowance for a little 
 lady in a lonely parish), and she refused them all. Twice 
 in her life, in her tempestuous youth, and at a crisis of 
 her affairs, she chose ' dependence upon coarse employers ' 
 before matrimony. She was shrewd, lucid, fastidious, 
 and saw the men she knew without any glamour. To the 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 71 
 
 cold but thoroughly presentable Mr, Henry Nussey she 
 replied thus : ' It has always been my habit to study the 
 character of those among whom I chance to be thrown, and 
 I think I know yours and can imagine what description of 
 woman would suit you for a wife. The character should 
 not be too marked, ardent and original, her temper should 
 be mild, her piety undoubted, and her personal attractions 
 sufficient to please your eyes and gratify your just pride. 
 As for me you do not know me . . .' She was only three- 
 and-twenty when she wrote that, with the prospect of 
 Stonegappe before her. For she had not, and could not 
 have for him, * that intense attachment which would 
 make me willing to die for him ; and if ever I marry it 
 must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my 
 husband.' Later, in her worst loneliness she refused that 
 ardent Mr. Taylor, who courted her by the novel means 
 of newspapers sent with violent and unremitting regu- 
 larity through the post. He represented to some degree 
 the larger life of intellectual interest. But he offended 
 her fastidiousness. She was sorry for the little man with 
 his little newspaper, and that was all. She refused 
 several times the man she ultimately married. He served 
 a long apprenticeship to love, and Charlotte yielded to 
 his distress rather than to her own passion. She de- 
 scribes her engaged state as ' very calm, very expectant. 
 What I taste of happiness is of the soberest order. I 
 trust to love my husband. I am grateful for his tender 
 love for me . . . Providence offers me this destiny. 
 Doubtless then it is the best for me.' 
 
 These are not the words, nor is this the behaviour of 
 Mrs. Oliphant's Charlotte Bronte, the forlorn and des- 
 perate victim of the obsession of matrimony. 
 
72 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 I do not say that Charlotte Bronte had not what is 
 called a ' temperament ' ; her genius would not have 
 been what it was without it ; she herself would have 
 been incomplete ; but there never was a woman of genius 
 who had her temperament in more complete subjection 
 to her character ; and it is her character that you have 
 to reckon with at every turn. 
 
 The little legends and the little theories have gone far 
 enough. And had they gone no farther they would not 
 have mattered much. They would at least have left 
 Charlotte Bronte's genius to its own mystery. 
 
 But her genius was the thing that irritated, the enig- 
 matic, inexplicable thing. Talent in a woman you can 
 understand, there's a formula for it — tout talent defemme 
 est un bonheur manque. So when a woman's talent 
 baffles you, your course is plain, cherchez I'homme. Char- 
 lotte's critics argued that if you could put your finger on 
 the man you would have the key to the mystery. This, 
 of course, was arguing that her genius was, after all, only 
 a superior kind of talent j but some of them had already 
 begun to ask themselves, Was it, after all, anything 
 more ? So they began to look for the man. They were 
 certain by this time that there was one. 
 
 The search was difficult ; for Charlotte had concealed 
 him well. But they found him at last in M. Constantin 
 Heger, the little Professor of the Pensionnat de Demoi- 
 selles in the Rue d'Isabelle. Sir Wemyss Reid had 
 suggested a love-affair in Brussels to account for Char- 
 lotte's depression, which was unfavourable to his theory 
 of the happy life. Mr. Leyland seized upon the idea, for 
 it nourished his theory that Branwell was an innocent 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 73 
 
 lamb who had never caused his sisters a moment's misery. 
 They made misery for themselves out of his harmless 
 peccadilloes. Mr. Angus Mackay in The Brontes, Fact 
 and Fiction, gives us this fiction for a fact. He is pleased 
 with what he calls the ' pathetic significance ' of his 
 ' discovery.' There was somebody, there had to be, and 
 it had to be M. Heger, for there wasn't anybody else. 
 Mr, Mackay draws back the veil with a gesture and 
 reveals — the love-affair. He is very nice about it, just 
 as nice as ever he can be. ' We see her,' he says, ' sore 
 wounded in her affections, but unconquerable in her will. 
 The discovery . . . does not degrade the noble figure 
 we know so well. . . . The moral of her greatest works — 
 that conscience must reign absolute at whatever cost — 
 acquires a greater force when we realise how she herself 
 came through the furnace of temptation with marks of 
 torture on her, but with no stain on her soul.' 
 
 This is all very well, but the question is : did Charlotte 
 come through a furnace ? Did she suffer from a great and 
 tragic passion ? It may have been so. For all we know 
 she may have been in fifty furnaces ; she may have gone 
 from one fit of tragic passion to another. Only (apart 
 from gossip, and apart from the argument from the 
 novels, which begs the question) we have no evidence to 
 prove it. What we have points all the other way. 
 
 Gossip apart, believers in the tragic passion have 
 nourished their theory chiefly on that celebrated passage 
 in a letter of Charlotte's to Ellen Nussey : ' I returned 
 to Brussels after aunt's death, prompted by what then 
 seemed an irresistible impulse. I was punished for my 
 selfish folly by a withdrawal for more than two years of 
 happiness and peace of mind.' 
 
74 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Here we have the great disclosure. By 'irresistible 
 impulse ' and ' selfish folly,' Charlotte could only mean 
 indulgence in an illegitimate passion for M. H^ger's 
 society. Peace of mind bears but one interpretation. 
 
 Mr. Clement Shorter, to his infinite credit, will have 
 none of this. He maintains very properly that the 
 passage should be left to bear the simple construction 
 that Miss Nussey and Mr. NichoUs put upon it. But I 
 would go farther. I am convinced that not only does 
 that passage bear that construction, but that it will not 
 bear the weight of any other. 
 
 In eighteen-forty-two Charlotte's aunt died, and 
 Charlotte became the head of her father's household. 
 She left her father's house in a time of trouble, 
 prompted by ' an irresistible impulse ' towards what 
 we should now call self-development. Charlotte, more 
 than two years later, in a moment of retrospective 
 morbidity, called it ' selfish folly.' In that dark mid- 
 Victorian age it was sin in any woman to leave her home 
 if her home required her. And with her aunt dead, and 
 her brother Branwell drowning his grief for his relative 
 in drink, and her father going blind, and beginning in his 
 misery to drink a little too, Charlotte felt that her home 
 did require her. Equally she felt that either Emily or 
 she had got to turn out and make a living, and since it 
 couldn't possibly be Emily it must be she. The problem 
 would have been quite simple even for Charlotte — ^but 
 she wanted to go. Therefore her tender conscience vacil- 
 lated. When you remember that Charlotte Bronte's 
 conscience was, next to her genius, the largest, and at 
 the same time the most delicate part of her, and that 
 her love for her own people was a sacred passion, her 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 75 
 
 words are sufficiently charged with meaning. A passion 
 for M. Heger is, psychologically speaking, superfluous. 
 You can prove anything by detaching words from their 
 context. The letter from which that passage has been 
 torn is an answer to Ellen Nussey's suggestions of work 
 for Charlotte. Charlotte says * any project which infers 
 the necessity of my leaving home is impracticable to me. 
 If I could leave home I should not be at Haworth now. 
 I know life is passing away, and I am doing nothing, 
 earning nothing — a very bitter knowledge it is at moments 
 — but I see no way out of the mist'; and so on for 
 another line or two, and then : ' These ideas sting me 
 keenly sometimes ; but whenever I consult my conscience 
 it affirms that I am doing right in staying at home, and 
 bitter are its upbraidings when I yield to an eager desire 
 for release.' And then, the passage quoted ad nauseam, 
 to support the legend of M. Heger. 
 
 A ' total withdrawal for more than two years of 
 happiness and peace of mind.' This letter is dated 
 October 1846 — more than two years since her return 
 from Brussels in January, eighteen-forty-four. In those 
 two years her father was threatened with total blindness, 
 and her brother Branwell achieved his destiny. The 
 passage refers unmistakably to events at Haworth. It 
 is further illuminated by another passage from an earlier 
 letter. Ellen Nussey is going through the same crisis — 
 torn between duty to herself and duty to her people. 
 She asks Charlotte's advice, and Charlotte gives judg- 
 ment : ' The right path is that which necessitates the 
 greatest sacrifice of self-interest.' The sacrifice, observe, 
 not of happiness, not of passion, but of self-interest, 
 the development of self. It was self-development, and 
 
76 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 not passion, not happiness, that she went to Brussels 
 for. 
 
 And Charlotte's letters from Brussels — ^from the scene 
 of passion in the year of crisis, eighteen-forty-three — 
 sufficiently reveal the nature of the trouble there. 
 Charlotte was alone in the Pensionnat without Emily. 
 Emily was alone at Haworth. The few friends she had 
 in Brussels left soon after her arrival. She was alone 
 in Brussels, and her homesickness was terrible. You 
 can trace the malady in all its stages. In March she 
 writes : ' I ought to consider myself well off, and to be 
 thankful for my good fortune. I hope I am thankful ' 
 (clearly she isn't thankful in the least !), ' and if I could 
 always keep up my spirits and never feel lonely or long 
 for companionship or friendship, or whatever they call it, 
 I should do very well.' In the same letter you learn that 
 she is giving English lessons to M. Heger and his brother- 
 in-law, M. Chapelle. ' If you could see and hear the 
 efforts I make to teach them to pronounce like English- 
 men, and their unavailing attempts to imitate, you would 
 laugh to all eternity.' Charlotte is at first amused at 
 the noises made by M. Heger and his brother-in-law. 
 
 In May the noises made by Monsieur fail to amuse. 
 Still, she is ' indebted to him for all the pleasure or amuse- 
 ment ' that she had, and in spite of her indebtedness, 
 she records a ' total want of companionship.' ' I lead 
 an easeful, stagnant, silent life, for which ... I ought 
 to be very thankful ' (but she is not). May I point out 
 that though you may be ' silent ' in the first workings of 
 a tragic and illegitimate passion, you are not " stagnant,' 
 and certainly not ' easeful.' 
 
 At the end of May she finds out that Madame H6ger 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 77 
 
 does not like her, and Monsieur is ' wondrously influenced ' 
 by Madame. Monsieur has in a great measure 'with- 
 drawn the light of his countenance,' but Charlotte 
 apparently does not care. In August the vacances are at 
 hand, and everybody but Charlotte is going home. She 
 is consequently ' in low spirits ; earth and heaven are 
 dreary and empty to me at this moment.' . . . ' I can 
 hardly write, I have such a dreary weight at my heart.' 
 But she will see it through. She will stay some months 
 longer ' till I have acquired German.' And at the end : 
 ' Everybody is abundantly civil, but homesickness comes 
 creeping over me. I cannot shake it off.' That was in 
 September, in M. Heger's absence. Later, she tells Emily 
 how she went into the cathedral and made ' a real con- 
 fession to see what it was like.' Charlotte's confession has 
 been used to bolster up the theory of the ' temptation.' 
 Unfortunately for the theory it happened in September, 
 when M. Heger and temptation were not there. In 
 October she finds that she no longer trusts Madame Heger. 
 At the same time ' solitude oppresses me to an excess.' 
 She gave notice, and M, Heger flew into a passion and 
 commanded her to stay. She stayed very much against, 
 not her conscience, but her will. In the same letter and 
 the same connection she says, ' I have much to say — 
 many little odd things, queer and puzzling enough — 
 which I do not like to trust to a letter, but which one 
 day perhaps, or rather one evening — if ever we should 
 find ourselves by the fireside at Haworth or Brookroyd, 
 with our feet on the fender curling our hair — I may com- 
 municate to you.' 
 
 Charlotte is now aware of a situation ; she is interested 
 in it, intellectually, not emotionally. 
 
78 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 In November : ' Twinges of homesickness cut me to 
 the heart, now and then.' On hoHdays ' the silence and 
 loneliness of all the house weighs down one's spirits like 
 lead. . . . Madame Heger, good and kind as I have de- 
 scribed her ' (i.e. for all her goodness and kindness), ' never 
 comes near me on these occasions.' . . . ' She is not 
 colder to me than she is to the other teachers, but they 
 are less dependent on her than I am.' But the situation 
 is becoming clearer. Charlotte is interested. ' I fancy 
 I begin to perceive the reason of this mighty distance and 
 reserve ; it sometimes makes me laugh, and at other times 
 nearly cry. When I am sure of it I will tell you.' 
 
 There can be no doubt that before she left Brussels 
 Charlotte was sure ; but there is no record of her ever 
 having told. 
 
 The evidence from the letters is plain enough. But the 
 first thing that the theorist does is to mutilate letters. 
 He suppresses all those parts of a correspondence which 
 tell against his theory. When these torn and bleeding 
 passages are restored piously to their contexts they are 
 destructive to the legend of tragic passion. They show 
 (as Mr. Clement Shorter has pointed out) that throughout 
 her last year at Brussels Charlotte Bronte saw hardly 
 anything of M. Heger. They also show that before very 
 long Charlotte had a shrewd suspicion that Madame had 
 arranged it so, and that it was not so much the absence 
 of Monsieur that disturbed her as the extraordinary 
 behaviour of Madame. And they show that from first 
 to last she was incurably homesick. 
 
 Now if Charlotte had been in any degree, latently, or 
 increasingly, or violently in love with M. Heger, she 
 would have been as miserable as you like in M. Heger's 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 79 
 
 house, but she would not have been homesick ; she 
 would not, I think, have worried quite so much about 
 Madame's behaviour ; and she would have found the 
 clue to it sooner than she did. 
 
 To me it is all so simple and self-evident that, if the 
 story were not revived periodically, if it had not been 
 raked up again only the other day,^ there would be no 
 need to dwell upon anything so pitiful and silly. 
 
 It rests first and foremost on gossip, silly, pitiful gossip 
 and conjecture. Gossip in England, gossip in Brussels, 
 conjecture all round. Above all, it rests on certain feline 
 hints supplied by Madame Heger and her family. Char- 
 lotte's friends were always playfully suspecting her of 
 love-affairs. They could never put their fingers on the 
 man, and they missed M. Heger. It would never have 
 occurred to their innocent mid- Victorian minds to sus- 
 pect Charlotte of an attachment to a married man. It 
 would not have occurred to Charlotte to suspect herself 
 of it. But Madame Heger was a Frenchwoman, and she 
 had not a mid- Victorian mind, and she certainly sus- 
 pected Charlotte of an attachment, a flagrant attachment 
 to M. Heger, It is well known that Madame made state- 
 ments to that effect, and it is admitted on all hands that 
 Madame had been jealous. It may fairly be conjectured 
 that it was M, Heger and not Charlotte who gave her 
 cause, slight enough in all conscience, but sufficient for 
 Madame Heger. She did not understand these Platonic 
 relations between English teachers and their French 
 professors. She had never desired Platonic relations 
 with anybody herself, and she saw nothing but annoyance 
 in them for everybody concerned. Madame's attitude 
 1 See The Key to the Bronti Works, by J. Mallam-Dembleby, 191 1. 
 
80 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 is the clue to the mystery, the clue that Charlotte found. 
 She accused the dead Charlotte of an absurd and futile 
 passion for her husband ; she stated that she had had to 
 advise the living Charlotte to moderate the ardour of her 
 admiration for the engaging professor ; but the truth, 
 as Charlotte in the end discovered, was that for a 
 certain brief period Madame was preposterously jealous. 
 M. Heger confessed as much when he asked Charlotte 
 to address her letters to him at the Athenee Royale 
 instead of the Pensionnat. The correspondence, he said, 
 was disagreeable to his wife. 
 
 Why, in heaven's name, disagreeable, if Madame Heger 
 suspected Charlotte of an absurd and futile passion ? 
 And why should Madame Heger have been jealous of an 
 absurd and futile woman, a woman who had seen so little 
 of Madame Heger' s husband ? and who was then in 
 England ? I cannot agree with Mr. Shorter that M. Heger 
 regarded Charlotte with indifference. He was a French- 
 man, and he had his vanity, and no doubt the frank 
 admiration of his brilliant pupil appealed to it vividly in 
 moments of conjugal depression. Charlotte herself must 
 have had some attraction for M. Heger. Madame per- 
 ceived the appeal and the attraction, and she was jealous ; 
 therefore her interpretation of appearances could not 
 have been so unflattering to Charlotte as she made out. 
 Madame, in fact, suspected, on her husband's part, the 
 dawning of an attachment. We know nothing about 
 M. Heger's attachment, and we haven't any earthly 
 right to know ; but from all that is known of M. Heger 
 it is certain that, if it was not entirely intellectual, not 
 entirely that 'affection presque paternelle' that he once 
 professed, it was entirely restrained and innocent and 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 81 
 
 honourable. It is Madame Heger with her jealousy who 
 has given the poor gentleman away. Monsieur's state 
 of mind — extremely temporary — probably accounted for 
 ' those many odd little things, queer and puzzling enough,' 
 which Charlotte would not trust to a letter ; matter for 
 curl-paper confidences and no more. 
 
 Of course there is the argument from the novels, from 
 The Professor, from Jane Eyre, from Villette. I have not 
 forgotten it. But really it begs the question. It moves 
 in an extremely narrow and an extremely vicious circle. 
 Jane Eyre was tried in a furnace of temptation, there- 
 fore Charlotte must have been tried. Lucy Snowe and 
 Frances Henri loved and suffered in Brussels. Therefore 
 Charlotte must have loved and suffered there. And if 
 Charlotte loved and suffered and was tried in a furnace 
 of temptation, that would account for Frances and for 
 Lucy and for Jane. 
 
 No ; the theorists who have insisted on this tragic 
 passion have not reckoned with Charlotte Bronte's 
 character, and its tremendous power of self-repression. 
 If at Brussels any disastrous tenderness had raised its 
 head it wouldn't have had a chance to grow an inch. But 
 Charlotte had large and luminous ideas of friendship. 
 She was pure, utterly pure from all the illusions and 
 subtleties and corruptions of the sentimentalist, and 
 she could trust herself in friendship. She brought to it 
 ardours and vehemences that she would never have 
 allowed to love. If she let herself go in her infrequent 
 intercourse with M. Heger, it was because she was so far 
 from feeling in herself the possibility of passion. That 
 was why she could say, ' I think, however long I live, 
 I shall not forget what the parting with M, Heger cost 
 
82 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 me. It grieved me so much to grieve him who has been 
 so true, kind, and disinterested a friend.' That was how 
 she could bring herself to write thus to Monsieur : ' Savez- 
 vous ce que je ferais, Monsieur ? J'ecrirais un livre «t 
 je le dedierais k mon maitre de litterature, au seul maltre 
 que j'aie jamais eu — k vous Monsieur ! Je vous ai dit 
 souvent en frangais combien je vous respecte, combien je 
 suis redevable k votre bonte, k vos conseils. Je voudrais 
 le dire une f ois en anglais . . . le souvenir de vos bontes 
 ne s'effacera jamais de ma memoire, at tant que ce sou- 
 venir durera le respect que vous m'avez inspire durera 
 aussi,' For 'je vous respecte ' we are not entitled to read 
 'je vous aime.' Charlotte was so made that kindness shown 
 her moved her to tears of gratitude. When Charlotte 
 said * respect ' she meant it. Her feeling for M. Heger 
 was purely what Mr. Matthew Arnold said religion was, 
 an affair of ' morality touched with emotion.' All her 
 utterances, where there is any feeling in them, no matter 
 what, have a poignancy, a vibration which is Brontesque 
 and nothing more. And this Brontesque quality is what 
 the theorists have (like Madame Heger, and possibly 
 Monsieur) neither allowed for nor understood. 
 
 For this " fiery-hearted Vestal,' this virgin, sharp- 
 tongued and sharper-eyed, this scorner of amorous 
 curates, had a genius for friendship. This genius, like her 
 other genius, was narrow in its range and opportunity, 
 and for that all the more ardent and intense. It fed on 
 what came to its hand. It could even grow, like her other 
 genius, with astounding vitality out of strange and hostile 
 soil. She seems to have had many friends, obscure and 
 great ; the obscure, the Dixons, the Wheelrights, the 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 83 
 
 Taylors, the Nusseys, out of all proportion to the great. 
 But properly speaking she had only two friends, Mary 
 Taylor, and Ellen Nussey, the enchanting, immortal 
 ' Nel.' 
 
 There is something at first sight strange and hostile 
 about Mary Taylor, the energetic, practical, determined, 
 terribly robust person you see so plainly trying, in the 
 dawn of their acquaintance, to knock the nonsense out 
 of Charlotte. Mary Taylor had no appreciation of the 
 Brontesque. When Charlotte told Mary Taylor that at 
 Cowan Bridge she used to stand in the burn on a stone, 
 to watch the water flow by, Mary Taylor told Charlotte 
 that she should have gone fishing. When Jane Eyre 
 appeared she wrote to Charlotte in a strain that is amusing 
 to posterity. There is a touch of condescension in her 
 praise. She is evidently surprised at anything so great 
 coming out of Charlotte. ' It seemed to me incredible 
 that you had actually written a book.' ' You are very 
 different from me,' she says, ' in having no doctrine to 
 preach. It is impossible to squeeze a moral out of your 
 production.' She is thinking of his prototype when she 
 criticises the character of St. John Rivers. ' A missionary 
 either goes into his office for a piece of bread, or he goes 
 for enthusiasm, and that is both too good and too bad a 
 quality for St. John. It 's a bit of your absurd charity 
 to believe in such a man.' As an intellectual woman 
 Mary Taylor realised Charlotte Bronte's intellect, but it 
 is doubtful if she ever fully realised what, beyond an 
 intellect, she had got hold of in her friend. She was a 
 woman of larger brain than Ellen Nussey, she was loyal 
 and warm-hearted to the last degree, but it was not 
 given to her to see in Charlotte Bronte what Ellen 
 
84 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Nussey, little as you would have expected it, had seen. 
 She did not keep her letters. She burnt them ' in a fit of 
 caution,' which may have been just as well. 
 
 But Mary Taylor is important. She had, among her 
 more tender qualities, an appalling frankness. It was she 
 who told poor little Charlotte that she was very ugly. 
 Charlotte never forgot it. You can feel in her letters, in 
 her novels, in her whole nature, the long reverberation 
 of the shock. She said afterwards : ' You did me a great 
 deal of good, Polly,' by which she meant that Polly had 
 done her an infinity of harm. 
 
 Her friends all began by trying to do her good. Even 
 Ellen Nussey tried. Charlotte is very kindly cautioned 
 against being ' tempted by the fondness of my sisters to 
 consider myself of too much importance,' and in a paren- 
 thesis Ellen Nussey begs her not to be offended. ' Oh ! 
 Ellen,' Charlotte writes, ' do you think I could be offended 
 by any good advice you may give me ? ' She thanks her 
 heartily, and loves her ' if possible all the better for it.' 
 Ellen Nussey in her turn asks Charlotte to tell her of her 
 faults and ' cease flattering her.' Charlotte very sensibly 
 refuses ; and it is not till she has got away from her sisters 
 that her own heart-searchings begin. They are mainly 
 tiresome, but there is a flash of revelation in her reply to 
 ' the note you sent me with the umbrella.' ' My darling, 
 if I were like you, I should have to face Zionwards, though 
 prejudice and error might occasionally fling a mist over 
 the glorious vision before me, for with all your single- 
 hearted sincerity you have your faults, but / am not like 
 you. If you knew my thoughts ; the dreams that absorb 
 me, and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up, 
 and makes me feel society, as it is, wretchedly insipid, you 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 85 
 
 would pity me, and I dare say despise me,' Miss Nussey 
 writes again, and Charlotte trembles ' all over with 
 excitement ' after reading her note. ' I will no longer 
 shrink from your questions,' she replies. ' I do wish to 
 be better than I am. I pray fervently sometimes to be 
 made so . . . this very night I will pray as you wish me.' 
 
 But Charlotte is not in the least like Ellen Nussey, and 
 she still refuses to be drawn into any return of this 
 dangerous play with a friend's conscience and her nerves. 
 ' I will not tell you all I think and feel about you, Ellen. 
 I will preserve unbroken that reserve which alone enables 
 me to maintain a decent character for judgment ; but 
 for that, I should long ago have been set down by all 
 who knows me as a Frenchified fool. You have been 
 very kind to me of late, and gentle, and you have spared 
 me those little sallies of ridicule, which, owing to my 
 miserable and wretched touchiness of character, used 
 formerly to make me wince, as if I had been touched with 
 hot iron. Things that nobody else cares for enter into 
 my mind and rankle there like venom. I know these 
 feelings are absurd, and therefore I try to hide them, but 
 they only sting the deeper for concealment. I 'm an 
 idiot ! ' 
 
 Miss Nussey seems to have preserved her calm through 
 all the excitement and to have never turned a hair. 
 But nothing could have been worse for Charlotte than 
 this sort of thing. It goes on for years. It began in 
 eighteen-thirty-three, the third year of their friend- 
 ship, when she was seventeen. In 'thirty-seven it is at 
 its height. Charlotte writes from Dewsbury Moor : 
 ' If I could always live with you, if your lips and mine 
 could at the same time drink the same draught at the 
 
86 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 same pure fountain of mercy, I hope, I trust, I might 
 one day become better, far better than my evil, wander- 
 ing thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit and 
 warm to the flesh, will now permit me to be. I often 
 plan the pleasant life we might lead, strengthening each 
 other in the power of self-denial, that hallowed and 
 glowing devotion which the past Saints of God often 
 attained to.' 
 
 Now a curious and interesting thing is revealed by this 
 correspondence. These religious fervours and depressions 
 come on the moment Charlotte leaves Haworth and 
 disappear as soon as she returns. All those letters were 
 written from Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor, while the 
 Haworth letters of the same period are sane and light- 
 hearted. And when she is fairly settled at Haworth, 
 instead of emulating the Saints of God, she and Miss 
 Nussey are studying human nature and the art of flirta- 
 tion as exhibited by curates. Charlotte administers 
 to her friend a formidable amount of worldly wisdom, 
 thus avenging herself for the dance Miss Nussey led her 
 round the throne of grace. 
 
 For, though that morbid excitement and introspection 
 belonged solely to Charlotte's days of exile. Miss Nussey 
 was at the bottom of it. Mary Taylor would have been 
 a far robuster influence. But Charlotte's friendship 
 for Mary Taylor, warm as it was, strikes cold beside her 
 passionate affection for Ellen Nussey. She brought her 
 own fire to that, and her own extraordinary capacity for 
 pain. Her letters show every phase of this friendship, 
 its birth, its unfolding ; and then the sudden leaping 
 of the flame, its writhing and its torture. She writes 
 with a lover's ardour and impatience, ' Write to me 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 87 
 
 very soon and dispel my uncertainty, or I shall get 
 impatient, almost irritable.' ' I read your letter with 
 dismay. Ellen — what shall I do without you ? Why 
 are we to be denied each other's society ? It is an 
 inscrutable fatality. . . . Why are we to be divided ? ' 
 (She is at Roe Head, and Roe Head suggests the answer.) 
 ' Surely, Ellen, it must be because we are in danger of 
 loving each other too well — of losing sight of the Creator 
 in idolatry of the creature.' She prays to be resigned, and 
 records ' a sweet, placid sensation like those that I re- 
 member used to visit me when I was a little child, and on 
 Sunday evenings in summer stood by the window reading 
 the life of a certain French nobleman who attained a 
 purer and higher degree of sanctity than has been known 
 since the days of the Early Martyrs. I thought of my 
 
 own Ellen ' ' I wish I could see you, my darling ; 
 
 I have lavished the warmest affections of a very hot 
 tenacious heart upon you ; if you grow cold, it is over.' 
 She was only twenty-one. 
 
 A few more years and the leaping and the writhing 
 and the torture cease, the fire bums to a steady, inex- 
 tinguishable glow. There is gaiety in Charlotte's tender- 
 ness. She is ' infuriated ' on finding a jar in her trunk. 
 ' At first I hoped it was empty, but when I found it 
 heavy and replete, I could have hurled it all the way 
 back to Birstall. However, the inscription A. B. softened 
 me much. You ought first to be tenderly kissed, and 
 then as tenderly whipped. Emily is just now sitting on 
 the floor of the bedroom where I am writing, looking 
 at her apples. She smiled when I gave them and the 
 collar as your presents, with an expression at once well 
 pleased and slightly surprised.' 
 
88 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 The religious fervours and the soul-searchings have 
 ceased long ago, so has Miss Nussey's brief spiritual 
 ascendency. But the friendship and the letters never 
 cease. They go on for twenty years, through exile 
 and suffering, through bereavement, through fame and 
 through marriage, uninterrupted and, except for one 
 brief period, unabridged. There is nothing in any 
 biography to compare with those letters to Ellen Nussey. 
 If Charlotte Bronte had not happened to be a great 
 genius as well as a great woman, they alone would have 
 furnished forth her complete biography. There is no 
 important detail of her mere life that is not given in 
 them. Mrs. Gaskell relied almost entirely on them, 
 and on information supplied to her by Miss Nussey. 
 And each critic and biographer who followed her, from 
 Sir Wemyss Reid to Mr. Clement Shorter, drew from 
 the same source. Miss Nussey was almost the only 
 safe repository of material relating to Charlotte Bronte. 
 She had possessed hundreds of her letters and, with 
 that amiable weakness which was the defect of her 
 charming quality, she was unable to withhold any of 
 them from the importunate researcher. There seems 
 to have been nothing, except one thing, that Charlotte 
 did not talk about to Miss Nussey when they sat with 
 their feet on the fender and their hair in curl-papers. 
 That one thing was her writing. It is quite possible that 
 in those curl-paper confidences Miss Nussey learnt the 
 truth about Charlotte's friend, M. Heger. She never 
 learnt anything about Charlotte's genius. In every- 
 thing that concerned her genius Charlotte was silent 
 and secret with her friend. That was the line, the very 
 sharp and impassable line she drew between her ' dear, 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 89 
 
 dear Ellen,' her ' dearest Nel,' and her sisters, Anne 
 and Emily. The freemasonry of friendship ended there. 
 You may search in vain through even her later corre- 
 spondence with Miss Nussey for any more than per- 
 functory and extraneous allusions to her works. It 
 was as if they had never been. Every detail of her 
 daily life is there, the outer and the inner things, the 
 sewing and ironing and potato-peeling, together with 
 matters of the heart and soul, searchings, experiences, 
 agonies ; the figures of her father, her brother, her 
 sisters, move there, vivid and alive; and old Tabby 
 and the curates ; and the very animals, Keeper and 
 Flossie, and the little black cat, Tom, that died and made 
 Emily sorry ; but of the one thing not a word. The 
 letters to Ellen Nussey following the publication of 
 Jane Eyre, are all full of gossip about Miss Ringrose 
 and the Robinsons. Presently Ellen hears a rumour 
 of publication. Charlotte repudiates it and friction 
 follows, 
 
 Charlotte writes : ' Dear Ellen, — Write another letter 
 and explain that note of yours distinctly. . . . Let me 
 know what you heard, and from whom you heard it. 
 You do wrong to feel pain from any circumstance, or 
 to suppose yourself slighted. . . .' ' Dear Ellen, — 
 All I can say to you about a certain matter is this : 
 the report . . . must have had its origin in some absurd 
 misunderstanding. I have given no one a right to 
 afiBrm or hint in the most distant manner that I am 
 publishing (humbug !). Whoever has said it — ^if any 
 one has, which I doubt — is no friend of mine. Though 
 twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none, 
 I scout the idea utterly. Whoever, after I have dis- 
 
90 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 tinctly rejected the charge, urges it upon me, will do 
 an unkind and ill-bred thing.' If Miss Nussey is asked, 
 she is authorised by Miss Bronte to say, ' that she repels 
 and disowns every accusation of the kind. You may 
 add, if you please,- that if any one has her confidence, 
 you believe you have, and she has made no drivelling 
 confessions to you on that subject.' ' Dear Ellen, — 
 I shall begin by telling you that you have no right to 
 be angry at the length of time I have suffered to slip 
 by since receiving your last, without answering it ; 
 because you have often kept me waiting much longer, 
 and having made this gracious speech, thereby obviating 
 reproaches, I will add that I think it a great shame, 
 when you receive a long and thoroughly interesting letter, 
 full of the sort of details you fully relish, to read the 
 same with selfish pleasure, and not even have the 
 manners to thank your correspondent, and express 
 how very much you enjoyed the narrative. I did enjoy 
 the narrative in your last very keenly. . . . Which of 
 the Miss Woolers did you see at Mr. Allbutts ? ' 
 
 A beautiful but most unequal friendship. ' The sort 
 
 of details you fully relish ' How that phrase must 
 
 have rankled ! You can hear the passionate protest : 
 ' Those details are not what I relish in the least. Putting 
 me oft with your Woolers and your Allbutts ! If only 
 you had told me about Jane Eyre ! ' For it turned out that 
 all the time Mary Taylor had been told. The inference 
 was that Mary Taylor, with her fits of caution, could 
 be trusted. 
 
 This silence of Charlotte's must have been most pain- 
 ful and incomprehensible to the poor Ellen who was 
 Caroline Helstone. She had been the first to divine 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 91 
 
 Charlotte's secret ; for she kept the letters. She must 
 have felt like some tender and worshipping wife to 
 whom all doors in the house of the beloved are thrown 
 open, except the door of the sanctuary, which is per- 
 sistently slammed in her charming face. There must 
 have come to her moments of terrible insight when she 
 felt the danger and the mystery of the flaming spirit 
 she had tried to hold. But Charlotte's friend can wear 
 her half-pathetic immortality with grace. She could 
 at least say : ' She told me things she never told any one 
 else. I have hundreds of her letters. And I had her 
 heart,' 
 
 Nothing so much as this correspondence reveals the 
 appalling solitude in which the Brontes lived. Here 
 is their dearest and most intimate friend, and she is 
 one to whom they can never speak of the thing that 
 interested them most. No doubt ' our best plays mean 
 secret plays ' ; but Charlotte, at any rate, suffered from 
 this secrecy. There was nothing to counteract Miss 
 Nussey's direful influence on her spiritual youth, ' Papa ' 
 highly approved of the friendship. He wished it to 
 continue, and it did ; and it was the best that 
 Charlotte had. I know few things more pathetic than 
 the cry that Charlotte, at twenty-one, sent out of her 
 solitude (with some verses) to Southey and to Words- 
 worth. Southey told her that ' Literature cannot be 
 the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. 
 The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less 
 leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment 
 and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet 
 been called, and when you are you will be less eager 
 
92 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 for celebrity.' A sound, respectable, bourgeois opinion 
 so far, but Southey went farther, ' Write poetry for 
 its own sake,' he said ; and he could hardly have said 
 better. Charlotte treasured the letter, and wrote on 
 the cover of it, ' Southey's advice, to be kept for iever.' 
 Wordsworth's advice, I am sorry to say, provoked her 
 to flippancy. 
 
 And that, out of the solitude, was all. Not the ghost, 
 not the shadow of an Influence came to the three sisters. 
 There never was genius that owed so little to influence 
 as theirs. 
 
 I know that in Charlotte's case there is said to have 
 been an Influence. An Influence without which she 
 would have remained for ever in obscurity, with Villette, 
 with Shirley, with Jane Eyre, with The Professor, unborn, 
 unconceived. 
 
 Need I say that the Influence is — M. Heger ? 
 
 ' The sojourn in Brussels,' says Mr. Clement Shorter, 
 ' made Miss Bronte an author,' and he is only following 
 Sir Wemyss Reid, who was the first to establish Brussels 
 as the turning-point. Mr. Shorter does not believe in 
 M. Heger as the inspirer of passion, but he does believe 
 in him as the inspirer of genius. He thinks it exceed- 
 ingly probable that had not circumstances led Charlotte 
 Bronte to spend some time at Brussels not only would 
 ' the world never have heard of her,' but it would never 
 have heard of her sisters. He is quite certain about 
 Charlotte anyhow ; she could not have ' arrived ' had 
 she not met M. Heger. ' She went,' he says, ' to Brussels 
 full of the crude ambitions, the semi-literary impulses 
 that are so common on the fringe of the writing world. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 93 
 
 She left Brussels a woman of genuine cultivation, of 
 educated tastes, armed with just the equipment that 
 was to enable her to write the books of which two 
 generations of her countrymen have been justly proud.' 
 
 This is saying that Charlotte Bronte had no means 
 of expression before she wrote devoirs under M. Heger. 
 True,, her genius did not find itself until after she left 
 Brussels, that is to say, not until she was nearly thirty. 
 I have not read any of her works as Lord Charles Albert 
 Florian Wellesley, and I do not imagine they were works 
 of genius. But that only means that Charlotte Bronte's 
 genius took time. She was one of those novelists who 
 do not write novels before they are nearly thirty. But 
 she could write. Certain fragments of her very earliest 
 work show that from the first she had not only the 
 means, but very considerable mastery of expression. 
 What is more, they reveal in germ the qualities that 
 marked her style in its maturity. Her styles rather, 
 for she had several. There is her absolutely simple 
 style, in which she is perfect ; her didactic style, her 
 fantastic style, which are mere temporary aberrations ; 
 and her inspired style, in which at her worst she is 
 merely flamboyant and redundant, and at her best no 
 less than perfect. You will find a faint, embryonic fore- 
 shadowing of her perfections in the fragments given by 
 Mrs. Gaskell. There is The History of the Year 
 1829, beginning: 'Once Papa lent my sister Maria a 
 book. It was an old geography book ; she wrote on its 
 blank leaf, " Papa lent me this book." This book is a 
 hundred and twenty years old ; it is at this moment Ijdng 
 before me. While I write this I am in the kitchen of the 
 Parsonage, Ha worth ; Tabby, the servant, is washing up 
 
94 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 the breakfast things, and Anne, my youngest sister 
 (Maria was my eldest), is kneeling on a chair, looking at 
 some cakes, which Tabby has been baking for us.' You 
 cannot beat that for pure simplicity of statement. 
 There is another fragment that might have come straight 
 out of Jane Eyre. ' One night, about the time when the 
 cold sleet and stormy fogs of November are succeeded 
 by the snowstorms and high piercing night-winds of 
 confirmed winter, we were all sitting round the warm, 
 blazing, kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrel 
 with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, 
 from which she came off victorious, no candle having 
 been produced.' And there is a dream-story that 
 Mr. Clement Shorter gives. She is in the ' Mines of 
 Cracone,' under the floor of the sea. ' But in the midst 
 of all this magnificence I felt an indescribable sense of 
 fear and terror, for the sea raged above us, and by the 
 awful and tumultuous noises of roaring winds and dash- 
 ing waves, it seemed as if the storm was violent. And 
 now the massy pillars groaned beneath the pressure 
 of the ocean, and the glittering arches seemed about to 
 be overwhelmed. When I heard the rushing waters and 
 saw a mighty flood rolling towards me I gave a loud 
 shriek of terror.' The dream changes : she is in a 
 desert full of barren rocks and high mountains, where 
 she sees ' by the light of his own fiery eyes a royal Uon 
 rousing himself from his kingly slumbers. His terrible 
 eye was fixed upon me, and the desert rang, and the 
 rocks echoed with the tremendous roar of fierce delight 
 which he uttered as he sprang towards me.' And there 
 is her letter to the editor of one of their ' Little Maga- 
 zines ' : ' Sir, — It is well known that the Genii have 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 95 
 
 declared that unless they perform certain arduous duties 
 every year, of a mysterious nature, all the worlds in 
 the firmament will be burnt up, and gathered together 
 in one mighty globe, which will roll in solitary splendour 
 through the vast wilderness of space, inhabited only by 
 the four high princes of the Genii, till time shall be 
 succeeded by Eternity; and the impudence of this is 
 only to be paralleled by another of their assertions, 
 namely, that by their magic might they can reduce the 
 world to a desert, the purest waters to streams of livid 
 poison, and the clearest lakes to stagnant water, the 
 pestilential vapours of which shall slay all living creatures, 
 except the blood-thirsty beast of the forest, and the 
 ravenous bird of the rock. But that in the midst of 
 this desolation the palace of the chief Genii shall rise 
 sparkling in the wilderness, and the horrible howl of 
 their war-cry shall spread over the land at morning, 
 at noontide, and at night ; but that they shall have 
 their annual feast over the bones of the dead, and shall 
 yearly rejoice with the joy of victors. I think, sir, 
 that the horrible wickedness of this needs no remark, 
 and therefore I hasten to subscribe myself, etc' 
 
 Puerile, if you like, and puerile all the stuff that 
 Charlotte Bronte wrote before eighteen-forty-six ; but 
 her style at thirteen, in its very rhythms and cadences, 
 is the unmistakable embryo of her style at thirty ; 
 and M. Heger no more cured her of its faults than 
 he could teach her its splendours. Something that 
 was not Brussels made Miss Bronte a prodigious author 
 at thirteen. The mere mass of her Juvenilia testifies 
 to a most ungovernable bent. Read the list of works, 
 appalling in their length, which this child produced in 
 
96 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 a period of fifteen months ; consider that she produced 
 nothing but melancholy letters during her ' sojourn in 
 Brussels ' ; and compare M. Heger's academic precepts 
 witjb her practice, with the wild sweep and exuberance 
 of her style when she has shaken him oft, and her genius 
 gets possession of her. 
 
 I know there is a gulf fixed between Currer Bell and 
 Charles Townsend, who succeeded Lord Charles Albert 
 Florian Wellesley and the Marquis of Douro, about 
 eighteen-thirty-eight ; but it is bridged by the later 
 Poems which show Charlotte's genius struggling through 
 a wrong medium to the right goal. She does not 
 know — after the sojourn in Brussels she does not yet 
 know — that her right medium is prose. She knew 
 no more than she knew in November, eighteen-forty- 
 one, when, on the eve of her flight from Haworth, 
 she writes : ' The plain fact is, I was not, I am not 
 now, certain of my destiny.' It was not until two 
 years after she had returned to Haworth that she 
 received her certainty. For posterity, overpowered by 
 the labour of the Bronte specialists, it may seem as 
 if Charlotte Bronte's genius owed everything to her 
 flight from Haworth. In reality her flight merely 
 coincided with the inevitable shooting of its wings ; 
 and the specialists have mistaken coincidence for destiny. 
 
 Heaven only knows what would have happened to 
 her genius if, blind to her destiny, she had remained 
 in Brussels. For, once there, its wing-feathers left off 
 growing. Its way was blocked by every conceivable 
 hostile and obstructive thing. Madame Heger was 
 hostile, and Monsieur, I think, purely obstructive. 
 Emily saw through him, and denounced his method 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 97 
 
 as fatal to all originality. Charlotte, to be sure, called 
 him ' my dear master, the only master that I ever had,' 
 but if that was not her ' absurd charity,' it was only her 
 Brontesque way. There was no sense in which he was 
 her master. He taught her French ; to the very last the 
 habit of using " a few French words ' was the King 
 Charles's head in her manuscripts ; and the French he 
 taught her did her harm. The restraint he could and 
 would have taught her she never learnt until her genius 
 had had, in defiance and in spite of him, its full Sing. 
 
 And what a fling ! It is the way of genius to look 
 after itself. In spite of obstacles, Charlotte Bronte's 
 took hold of every man and woman that crossed and 
 barred its path, and ultimately it avenged itself on 
 Monsieur and on Madame Heger. Those two were made 
 for peaceful, honourable conjugal obscurity, but it was 
 their luck to harbour a half-fledged and obstructed 
 genius in their Pensionnat, a genius thirsting for ex- 
 perience ; and somehow, between them, they contrived 
 to make it suffer. That was their tragedy. Monsieur's 
 case is pitiful ; for he was kind and well-meaning, and 
 he was fond of Charlotte ; and yet, because of Charlotte, 
 there is no peace for him in the place where he has gone. 
 Her genius has done with him, but her ghost, like some 
 malign and awful destiny, pursues him. No sooner 
 does he sink back quiet in his grave than somebody 
 unearths him. Why cannot he be allowed to rest, 
 once for all, in his amiable unimportance ? He became, 
 poor man, important only by the use that Charlotte's 
 genius made of him. It seized him as it would have 
 seized on any other interesting material that came 
 its way. Without him we might have had another 
 
 G 
 
98 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Rochester, and we should not have had any Paul 
 Emanuel, which would have been a pity ; that is all. 
 
 There is hardly any hope that Bronte specialists will 
 accept this view. For them the sojourn in Brussels will 
 still stand as the turning-point in Charlotte Bronte's 
 career. Yet for her, long afterwards, Brussels must 
 have stood as the danger threatening it. She would 
 have said, I think, that her sojourn in Ha worth was 
 the turning-point. It was destiny that turned Emily 
 back to Haworth from the destruction that waited for 
 her at Brussels, so that she conceived and brought forth 
 Wuthering Heights ; her own destiny that she secretly 
 foreknew, consoling and beneficent. And, no doubt, 
 it was destiny of a sort, unforeknown, deceitful, appar- 
 ently malignant, that sent Charlotte back again to 
 Brussels after her aunt's death. It wrung from her her 
 greatest book, Villette. But Haworth, I think, would 
 have wrung from her another, and perhaps a greater. 
 
 For the first-fruits of the sojourn in Brussels was 
 neither Villette nor Jane Eyre, but The Professor. And 
 The Professor has none of the quahties of Jane Eyre or 
 of Villette ; it has none of the qualities of Charlotte's 
 later work at all ; above all, none of that master quality 
 which M. Heger is supposed to have specially evoked. 
 Charlotte, indeed, could not well have written a book 
 more destructive to the legend of the upheaval, the 
 tragic passion, the furnace of temptation and the flight. 
 Nothing could be less like a furnace than the atmo- 
 sphere of The Professor. From the first page to the last 
 there is not one pulse, not one breath of passion in it. 
 The bloodless thing comes coldly, slowly, tentatively, 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 99 
 
 from the birth. It is almost as frigid as a devoir written 
 under M. Heger's eye. The theorists, I notice, are 
 careful not to draw attention to The Professor ; and they 
 are wise, for attention drawn to The Professor makes 
 sad work of their theory. 
 
 Remember, on the theory, Charlotte Bronte has 
 received her great awakening, her great enlightenment ; 
 she is primed with passion ; the whole wonderful material 
 of Villette is in her hand ; she has before her her unique 
 opportunity. You ought, on the theory, to see her 
 hastening to it, a passionate woman, pouring out her 
 own one and supreme experience, and, with the brand 
 of Brussels on her, never afterwards really doing any- 
 thing else. Whereas the first thing the impassioned 
 Charlotte does (after a year of uninspired and ineffec- 
 tual poetising) is to sit down and write The Professor ; a 
 book, remarkable not by any means for its emotion, but 
 for its cold and dispassionate observation. Charlotte 
 eliminates herself, and is Crimsworth in order that she 
 may observe Frances Henri the more dispassionately. 
 She is inspired solely by the analytic spirit, and either 
 cannot, or will not, let herself go. But she does what 
 she meant to do. She had it in mind to write, not a 
 great work of imagination, but a grey and sober book, 
 and a grey and sober book is what she writes. A book 
 concerned only with things and people she has seen 
 and known ; a book, therefore, from which passion and 
 the poetry that passion is must be rigidly excluded, as 
 belonging to the region of things not, strictly speaking, 
 known. It is as if she had written The Professor in 
 rivalry with her sister Anne, both of them austerely 
 determined to put aside all imagination and deal with 
 
100 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 experience and experience alone. Thus you obtain 
 sincerity, you obtain truth. And with nothing but 
 experience before her, she writes a book that has no 
 passion in it, a book almost as bloodless and as gentle 
 as her sister Anne's. 
 
 Let us not disparage The Professor. Charlotte her- 
 self did not disparage it. In her Preface she refused to 
 solicit ' indulgence for it on the plea of a first attempt. 
 A first attempt,' she says, ' it certainly was not, as the 
 pen which wrote it had been previously worn in a 
 practice of some years.' In that Preface she shows 
 plainly that at the very outset of her career she had 
 no sterner critic than herself ; that she was aware of 
 her sins and her temptations, and of the dangers that 
 lurked for her in her imaginative style. ' In many a 
 crude effort, destroyed almost as soon as composed, 
 I had got over any such taste as I might have had for 
 ornamented and decorated composition, and come to 
 prefer what was plain and homely.' Observe, it is 
 not to the lessons of the ' master,' but to the creation 
 and destruction that went on at Haworth that she 
 attributes this purgation. She is not aware of the 
 extent to which she can trust her genius, of what will 
 happen when she has fairly let herself go. She is work- 
 ing on a method that rules her choice of subject. ' I 
 said to myself that my hero should work his way through 
 life, as I had seen real, living men work theirs — that he 
 should never get a shilling that he had not earned — 
 that no sudden turns should lift him in a moment to 
 wealth and high station ; that whatever small com- 
 petency he might gain should be won by the sweat of 
 his brow ; that before he could find so much as an 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 101 
 
 arbour to sit down in, he should master at least half 
 the ascent of the Hill Difficulty ; that he should not 
 marry even a beautiful girl or a lady of rank.' 
 
 There was no fine madness in that method ; but its 
 very soundness and sanity show the admirable spirit 
 in which Charlotte Bronte approached her art. She 
 was to return to the method of The Professor again and 
 yet again, when she suspected herself of having given 
 imagination too loose a rein. The remarkable thing 
 was that she should have begun with it. 
 
 And in some respects The Professor is more finished, 
 better constructed than any of her later books. There 
 is virtue in its extreme sobriety. Nothing could be 
 more delicate and firm than the drawing of Frances 
 Henri ; nothing in its grey style more admirable than 
 the scene where Crimsworth, having found Frances in 
 the cemetery, takes her to her home in the Rue Notre 
 Dame aux Neiges. 
 
 ' Stepping over a little mat of green wool, I found 
 myself in a small room with a painted floor and a square 
 of green carpet in the middle ; the articles of furniture 
 were few, but all bright and exquisitely clean — order 
 reigned through its narrow limits — such order as it 
 suited my punctilious soul to behold. . . . Poor the 
 place might be ; poor truly it was, but its neatness was 
 better than elegance, and had but a bright little fire 
 shone on that clean hearth, I should have deemed it 
 more attractive than a palace. No fire was there, how- 
 ever, and no fuel laid ready to light ; the lace-mender 
 was unable to allow herself that indulgence. . . . Frances 
 went into an inner room to take off her bonnet, and 
 she came out a model of frugal neatness, with her well- 
 
102 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 fitting black stuff dress, so accurately defining her elegant 
 bust and taper waist, with her spotless white collar 
 turned back from a fair and shapely neck, with her 
 plenteous brown hair arranged in smooth bands on her 
 temples and in a large Grecian plait behind : ornaments 
 she had none — neither brooch, ring, nor ribbon ; she 
 did well enough without them — ^perfection of fit, pro- 
 portion of form, grace of carriage, agreeably supplied 
 their place.' Frances lights a fire, having fetched wood 
 and coal in a basket. 
 
 ' " It is her whole stock, and she will exhaust it out 
 of hospitality," thought I. 
 
 ' " What are you going to do ? " I asked : " not surely 
 to light a fire this hot evening ? I shall be smothered." 
 
 ' " Indeed, Monsieur, I feel it very chilly since the 
 rain began ; besides, I must boil the water for my tea, 
 for I take tea on Sundays ; you will be obUged to bear 
 the heat." ' 
 
 And Frances makes the tea, and sets the table, and 
 brings out her pistolets, and offers them to Monsieur, 
 and it is all very simple and idyllic. So is the scene 
 where Crimsworth, without our knowing exactly how 
 he does it, declares himself to Frances. The dialogue 
 is half in French, and does not lend itself to quotation, 
 but it compares very favourably with the more daring 
 comedy of courtship in Jane Eyre. Frances is delicious 
 in her very solidity, her absence of abandonment. She 
 refuses flatly to give up her teaching at Crimsworth's 
 desire, Crimsworth, who will have six thousand francs 
 a year. 
 
 ' " How rich you are. Monsieur I " And then she 
 stirred uneasily in my arms. " Three thousand francs ! " 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 103 
 
 she murmured, " while I get only twelve hundred ! " 
 She went on faster. "However, it must be so for the 
 present ; and Monsieur, were you not saying something 
 about my giving up my place ? Oh no ! I shall hold 
 it fast " ; and her little fingers emphatically tightened 
 on mine. 
 
 ' " Think of marrying you to be kept by you, 
 Monsieur I I could not do it ; and how dull my days 
 would be ! You would be away teaching in close, noisy 
 schoolrooms, from morning till evening, and I should 
 be Ungering at home, unemployed and solitary. I 
 should get depressed and sullen, and you would soon 
 tire of me." 
 
 ' " Frances, you could yet read and study — ^two things 
 you like so well." 
 
 ' " Monsieur, I could not ; I like a contemplative 
 life, but I like an active better ; I must act in some 
 way, and act with you. I have taken notice. Monsieur, 
 that people who aet only in each other's company for 
 amusement, never really like each other so well, or 
 esteem each other so highly, as those who work together, 
 and perhaps suffer together ! " ' 
 
 To which Crimsworth replies, ' You speak God's 
 truth, and you shall have your own way, for it is the 
 best way.' 
 
 There is far more common-sense than passion in 
 the solid little Frances and her apathetic lover. It is 
 Frances Henri's situation, not her character, that recalls 
 so irresistibly Lucy Snowe. Frances has neither Lucy's 
 temperament, nor Lucy's terrible capacity for suffering. 
 She suffers through her circumstances, not through 
 her temperament. The motives handled in The Pro- 
 
104 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 fessor belong to the outer rather than the inner world ; 
 the pressure of circumstance, bereavement, poverty, 
 the influences of alien and unloved surroundings, these 
 are the springs that determine the drama of Frances 
 and of Crimsworth. Charlotte is displaying a deUberate 
 interest in the outer world and the material event. She 
 does not yet know that it is in the inner world that her 
 great conquest and dominion is to be. The people in 
 this first novel are of the same family as the people in 
 Jane Eyre, in Shirley, in Villette. Crimsworth is almost 
 reproduced in Louis Moore. Yorke Hunsden is the un- 
 mistakable father of Mr. Yorke and Rochester ; Frances, 
 a pale and passionless sister of Jane Eyre, and a first 
 cousin of Lucy. Yet, in spite of these relationships. 
 The Professor stands alone. In spite of its striking 
 resemblance to Villette there is no real, no spiritual 
 aflBnity. And the great gulf remains fixed between 
 The Professor and Jane Eyre. 
 
 This difference lies deeper than technique. It is a 
 difference of vision, of sensation. The strange greyness 
 of The Professor, its stillness, is not due altogether to 
 Charlotte's deliberate intention. It is the stillness, the 
 grejrness of imperfect hearing, of imperfect seeing. I 
 know it has one fine piece of word-painting, but not one 
 that can stand among Charlotte Bronte's masterpieces in 
 this kind. 
 
 Here it is. ' Already the pavement was drying ; a 
 balmy and fresh breeze stirred the air, purified by light- 
 ning ; I left the west behind me, where spread a sky 
 like opal, azure inmingled with crimson ; the en- 
 larged sun, glorious in Tjn-ian dyes, dipped his brim 
 already ; stepping, as I was, eastward, I faced a vast 
 
THE THREE BRONTfiS 105 
 
 bank of clouds, but also I had before me the arch of 
 an even rainbow ; a perfect rainbow — high, wide, vivid. 
 I looked long ; my eye drank in the scene, and I sup- 
 pose my brain must have absorbed it ; for that night, 
 after lying awake in pleasant fever a long time, watch- 
 ing the silent sheet-lightning, which still played among 
 the retreating clouds, and flashed silvery over the stars, 
 I at last fell asleep ; and then in a dream was reproduced 
 the setting sun, the bank of clouds, the mighty rainbow. 
 I stood, methought, on a terrace ; I leaned over a para- 
 peted wall ; there was space below me, depth I could 
 not fathom, but hearing an endless splash of waves, I 
 believed it to be the sea ; sea spread to the horizon ; 
 sea of changeful green and intense blue ; all was soft 
 in the distance ; all vapour-veiled. A spark of gold 
 glistened on the line between water and air, floated up, 
 appeared, enlarged, changed ; the object hung midway 
 between heaven and earth, under the arch of the 
 rainbow ; the soft but dark clouds diffused behind. 
 It hovered as on wings ; pearly, fleecy, gleaming air 
 streamed like raiment round it"; light, tinted with car- 
 nation, coloured what seemed face and limbs ; a large 
 
 star shone with still lustre on an angel's forehead ' 
 
 But the angel ruins it. 
 
 And this is all, and it leaves the dreariness more dreary. 
 In The Professor you wander through a world where 
 there is no sound, no colour, no vibration ; a world 
 muffled and veiled in the stillness and the greyness of 
 the hour before dawn. It is the work of a woman who 
 is not perfectly alive. So far from having had her great 
 awakening Charlotte is only half awake. Her intellect 
 is alert enough and avid, faithful and subservient to the 
 
106 THE THREE BRONTfiS 
 
 fact. It is her nerves and senses that are asleep. Her 
 soul is absent from her senses. 
 
 But in Jane Eyre, she is not only awakened, but 
 awake as she has never been awake before, with all 
 her virgin senses exquisitely alive, every nerve charged 
 to intense vibration. Sometimes she is perniciously 
 awake ; she is doing appalling things, things unjusti- 
 fiable, preposterous ; things that would have meant 
 perdition to any other writer ; she sees with wild, 
 erroneous eyes ; but the point is that she sees, that 
 she keeps moving, that from the first page to the last, 
 she is never once asleep. To come to Jane Eyre after 
 The Professor is to pass into another world of feeUng 
 and of vision. 
 
 It is not the difference between reality and unreality. 
 The Professor is real enough, more real in some minor 
 points — dialogue, for instance — than Jane Eyre. The 
 difference is that The Professor is a transcript of reality, 
 a very delicate and faithful transcript, and Jane Eyre 
 is reality itself, pressed on the senses. The pressure is 
 so direct and so tremendous, that it lasts through those 
 moments when the writer's grip has failed. 
 
 For there are moments, long moments of perfectly 
 awful failure in Jane Eyre. There are phrases that make 
 you writhe, such as ' the etjrraology of the mansion's 
 designation,' and the shocking persistency with which 
 Charlotte Bronte ' indites,' ' peruses,' and ' retains.' 
 There are whole scenes that outrage probability. Such 
 are the scenes, or parts of scenes, between Jane and 
 Rochester during the comedy of his courtship. The 
 great orchard scene does not ring entirely true. For 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 107 
 
 pages and pages it falters between passion and melo- 
 drama ; between rhetoric and the cri de cosur. Jane in 
 the very thick of her emotion can say, ' I have talked, 
 face to face, with what I reverence, with what I delight 
 in — ^with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I 
 have known you, Mr. Rochester ; and it strikes me with 
 terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn 
 from you for ever. I see the necessity for departure ; 
 and it is like looking on the necessity of death.' And 
 the comedy is worse. Jane elaborates too much in those 
 delicious things she says to Rochester. Rochester him- 
 self provokes the parodist, (Such manners as Rochester's 
 were unknown in mid- Victorian literature.) 
 
 ' He continued to sfend for me punctually the moment 
 the clock struck seven ; though when I appeared before 
 him now, he had no such honeyed terms as " love " 
 and " darling " on his lips : the best words at my dis- 
 posal were " provoking," " malicious elf," " sprite," 
 " changeling," etc. For caresses, too, I now got grimaces ; 
 for a pressure of the hand, a pinch on the arm ; for a 
 kiss on the cheek, a severe tweak of the ear. It was 
 all right : at present I decidedly preferred these fierce 
 favours to anything more tender.' 
 
 Yet there is comedy, pure comedy in those scenes, 
 though never sustained, and never wrought to the 
 inevitable dramatic climax. Jane is delightful when 
 she asks Rochester whether the frown on his forehead 
 will be his ' married look,' and when she tells him to 
 make a dressing-gown for himself out of the pearl-grey 
 silk, ' and an infinite series of waistcoats out of the 
 black satin.' The Quarterly was much too hard on 
 the earlier cadeau scene, with Rochester and Jane and 
 
108 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 AdMe, which is admirable in its suggestion of Jane's 
 shyness and precision. 
 
 ' " N'est-ce pas, Monsieur, qu'il y a un cadeau pour 
 Mademoiselle Eyre, dans votre petit coffre ? " 
 
 ' " Who talks of cadeaux ? " said he gruffly ; " did you 
 expect a present, Miss Eyre ? Are you fond of presents ? " 
 and he searched my face with eyes that I saw were dark, 
 irate, and piercing. 
 
 ' " I hardly know, sir ; I have little experience of them ; 
 they are generally thought pleasant things." ' 
 
 Charlotte Bronte was on her own ground there. But 
 you tremble when she leaves it ; you shudder through- 
 out the awful drawing-room comedy of Blanche Ingram. 
 Blanche says to her mother : ' Am I right. Baroness 
 Ingram of Ingram Park ? ' And her mother says to 
 Blanche, ' My lily-flower, you are right now, as always.' 
 Blanche says to Rochester, ' Signor Eduardo, are you 
 in voice to-night ? ' and he, ' Donna Bianca, if you com- 
 mand it, I will be.' And Blanche says to the footman, 
 ' Cease that chatter, blockhead, and do my bidding.' 
 
 That, Charlotte's worst lapse, is a very brief one, 
 and the scene itself is unimportant. But what can be 
 said of the crucial scene of the novel, the tremendous 
 scene of passion and temptation ? There is passion in 
 the scene before it, between Jane and Rochester on the 
 afternoon of the wedding-day that brought no wedding. 
 
 ' " Jane, I never meant to wound you thus. If the 
 man who had but one little ewe lamb that was dear 
 to him as a daughter, that ate of his bread, and drank 
 of his cup, and lay in his bosom, had by some mistake 
 slaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have 
 rued his bloody blunder more than I now rue mine. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 109 
 
 Will you ever forgive me ? " . . . " You know I am 
 a scoundrel, Jane ? " ere long he inquired -wistfully, 
 wondering, I suppose, at my continued silence and 
 tameness ; the result of weakness rather than of will. 
 
 ' " Yes, sir." 
 
 ' " Then tell me so roundly and sharply — don't spare 
 me." 
 
 ' " I cannot ; I am tired and sick. I want some 
 water." 
 
 ' He heaved a sort of shuddering sigh, and taking me 
 in his arms, carried me downstairs.' 
 
 But there are terrible lapses. After Rochester's cry, 
 ' " Jane, my little darling ... If you were mad, do you 
 think I should hate you," ' he elaborates his idea and he 
 is impossible : ' " Your mind is my treasure, and if it 
 were broken it would be my treasure still ; if you raved, 
 my arms should confine you and not a strait waistcoat — 
 your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me ; 
 if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morn- 
 ing, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as fond 
 as it would be restrictive." ' 
 
 And in the final scene of temptation there is a most 
 curious mingling of reality and unreality, of the passion 
 which is poetry, and the poetry which is not passion. 
 
 ' " Never," said he, as he ground his teeth, " never 
 was anything so frail, and so indomitable. A mere 
 reed she feels in my hand ! " And he shook me with 
 the force of his hold. " I could bend her with my 
 finger and thumb ; and what good would it do if I bent, 
 if I uptore, if I crushed her ? Consider that eye : con- 
 sider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, 
 defying me, with more than courage — with a stern 
 
110 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at 
 it — the savage, beautiful creature ! If I tear, if I rend 
 the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive 
 loose. Conqueror I might be of the house ; but the 
 inmate would escape to heaven before I could call my- 
 self possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, 
 spirit — with wiU and energy, and virtue and purity — 
 that I want : not alone your brittle frame. Of yourself, 
 you could come with soft fhght and nestle against my 
 heart, if you would ; seized against your will you will 
 elude the grasp like an essence — ^you will vanish ere 
 I inhale your fragrance. Oh ! come, Jane, come ! " ' 
 
 It is the crucial scene of the book ; and with all its 
 power, with all its vehemence and passionate reality 
 it is unconvincing. It stirs you and it leaves you cold. 
 
 The truth is that in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte had 
 not mastered the art of dialogue ; and to the very last 
 she was uncertain in her handling of it. In this she 
 is inferior to all the great novelists of her time ; inferior 
 to some who were by no means great. She understood 
 more of the spiritual speech of passion than any woman 
 before her, but she ignores its actual expression, its 
 violences, its reticences, its silences. In her great scenes 
 she is inspired one moment, and the next positively 
 handicapped by her passion and her poetry. In the 
 same sentence she rises to the sudden poignant cri du 
 cwur, and sinks to the artifice of metaphor. She knew 
 that passion is poetry, and poetry is passion ; you 
 might say it was all she knew, or ever cared to know. 
 But her language of passion is too often the language 
 of written rather than of spoken poetry, of poetry that 
 is not poetry at all. It is as if she had never heard the 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 111 
 
 speech of living men and women. There is more 
 actuality in the half-French chatter of Ad^le than in any 
 of the high utterances of Jane and Rochester. 
 
 And yet her sense of the emotion behind the utter- 
 ance is infallible, so infallible that we accept the utter- 
 ance. By some miracle, which is her secret, the passion 
 gets through. The illusion of reality is so strong that 
 it covers its own lapses. Jane Eyre exists to prove 
 that truth is higher than actuality. 
 ' " Jane suits me : do I suit her ? " 
 ' " To the finest fibre of my nature, sir." ' 
 If no woman alive had ever said that, it would yet be 
 true to Jane's feeling. For it is a matter of the finest 
 fibres, this passion of Jane's, that set people wonder- 
 ing about Currer Bell, that inflamed Mrs. Oliphant, as 
 it inflamed the reviewer in The Quarterly, and made 
 Charles Kingsley think that Currer Bell was coarse. 
 Their state of mind is incredible to us now. For what 
 did poor Jane do, after all ? Nobody could possibly 
 have had more respect for the ten commandments. 
 For all Rochester's raging, the ten commandments re- 
 main exactly where they were. It was inconceivable to 
 Charlotte Bronte that any decent man or woman could 
 make hay, or wish to make hay of them. And yet 
 Jane offended. She sinned against the unwritten code 
 that ordains that a woman may he till she is purple 
 in the face, but she must not, as a piece of gratuitous 
 information, tell a man she loves him ; not, that is to 
 say, in as many words. She may declare her passion 
 unmistakably in other ways. She may exhibit every 
 ignominious and sickly sign of it ; her eyes may glow 
 like hot coals ; she may tremble ; she may flush and 
 
112 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 turn pale ; she may do almost anything, provided she 
 does not speak the actual words. In mid- Victorian 
 times an enormous licence was allowed her. She might 
 faint, with perfect propriety, in public ; she might 
 become anaemic and send for the doctor, and be ordered 
 iron ; she might fall ill, horridly and visibly, and have 
 to be taken away to spas and places to drink the waters. 
 Everybody knew what that meant. If she had shrieked 
 her passion on the house-tops she could hardly have 
 published it more violently; but nobody minded. It 
 was part of the mid- Victorian convention. 
 
 Jane Eyre did none of these things. As soon as she 
 was aware of her passion for Mr. Rochester she thrust 
 it down into the pocket of her voluminous mid- Victorian 
 skirt and sat on it. Instead of languishing and faint- 
 ing where Rochester could see her, she held her head 
 rather higher than usual, and practised the spirited 
 arts of retort and repartee. And nobody gave her 
 any credit for it. Then Rochester puts the little thing 
 (poor Jane was only eighteen when it happened) to 
 the torture, and, with the last excruciating turn of the 
 thumbscrew, she confesses. That was the enormity 
 that was never forgiven her. 
 
 ' " You '11 like Ireland, I think," ' says Rochester in 
 his torturing mood ; ' " they are such kind-hearted people 
 there." 
 
 ' " It is a long way off, sir." 
 
 ' " No matter, a girl of your sense will not object to 
 the voyage or the distance." 
 
 ' " Not the voyage, but the distance : and then the 
 sea is a barrier." 
 
 ' " From what, Jane ? " 
 
THE THREE BRONTfiS 113 
 
 ' " From England and from Thornfleld, and " 
 
 ' " Well ? " 
 
 ' " From you, sir." ' 
 
 She had done it. She had said, or almost said the 
 words. 
 
 It just happened. There was magic in the orchard at 
 Thornfield ; there was youth in her blood ; and — ' Jane, 
 did you hear the nightingale singing in that wood ? ' 
 
 Still, she had done it. 
 
 And she was the first heroine who had. Adultery, 
 with which we are fairly familiar, would have seemed 
 a lesser sin. There may be extenuating circumstances 
 for the adulteress. There were extenuating circum- 
 stances for Rochester, He could plead a wife who 
 went on all fours. There were no extenuating circum- 
 stances for little Jane. No use for her to say that she 
 was upset by the singing of the nightingale ; that it 
 didn't matter what she said to Mr. Rochester when 
 Mr. Rochester was going to marry Blanche Ingram 
 anyway ; that she only flung herself at his head because 
 she knew she couldn't hit it ; that her plainness gave 
 her a certain licence, placing her beyond the code. Not 
 a bit of it. Jane's plainness was one thing that they 
 had against her. Until her time no heroine had been 
 permitted to be plain. Jane's seizing of the position 
 was part of the general insolence of her behaviour. 
 
 Jane's insolence was indeed unparalleled. Having 
 done the deed she felt no shame or sense of sin ; she 
 stood straight up and defended herself. That showed 
 that she was hardened. 
 
 It certainly showed — ^Jane's refusal to be abject — 
 that Jane was far ahead of her age, 
 
 H 
 
114 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 ' " I tell you I must go 1 " I retorted, roused to some- 
 thing like passion. " Do you think I can stay to become 
 nothing to you ? Do you think I am an automaton ? 
 -^a machine without feelings ? and can bear to have 
 my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my 
 drop of living water dashed from my cup ? Do you 
 think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, 
 I am soulless and heartless ? You think wrong I I 
 have as much soul as you, and full as much heart ! And 
 if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, 
 I should have made it as hard for you to leave me as 
 it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you 
 now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, 
 or even of mortal flesh : it is my spirit that addresses " ' 
 (' Addresses ? ' oh Jane !) ' " your spirit ; just as if both 
 had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's 
 feet, equal — as we are ! " ' 
 
 This, allowing for some slight difference in the 
 phrasing, is twentieth century. And it was this— 
 Jane's behaviour in the orchard, and not Rochester's 
 behaviour in the past — that opened the door to the 
 ' imps of evil meaning, polluting and defiHng the domestic 
 hearth.' 
 
 Still, though The Quarterly censured Jane's behaviour, 
 it was Rochester who caused most of the trouble and 
 the scandal by his remarkable confessions. In a sense 
 they were remarkable. Seldom, outside the pages of 
 French fiction, had there been so lavish and pubUc a 
 display of mistresses. And while it was agreed on 
 all hands that Rochester was incredible with his easy 
 references to Celine and Giacinta and Clara, still more 
 incredible was it that a young woman in a country par- 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 115 
 
 sonage should have realised so much as the existence of 
 Clara and Giacinta and Celine. But, when Mrs. Gaskell 
 and Madame Duclaux invoked Branwell and all his vices 
 to account for Charlotte's experience, they forgot that 
 Charlotte had read Balzac,^ and that Balzac is an ex- 
 perience in himself. She had also read Moore's Life of 
 Byron, and really there is nothing in Rochester's con- 
 fessions that Byron and a little Balzac would not account 
 for. So that they might just as well have left poor 
 Branwell in his grave. 
 
 Indeed, it was the manner of Rochester's confession 
 that gave away the secret of Currer Bell's sex ; her 
 handling of it is so inadequate and perfunctory. Rochester 
 is at his worst and most improbable in the telling of his 
 tale. The tale in itself is one of Charlotte's clumsiest 
 contrivances for conveying necessary information. The 
 alternate baldness and exuberant, decorated, swaggering 
 boldness (for Charlotte's style was never bolder than 
 when she was essaying the impossible) alone betrayed 
 the hand of an innocent woman. Curious that these 
 makeshift passages with their obviously second-hand 
 material, their palpably alien mise en scene should ever 
 have suggested a personal experience, and provoked 
 The Quarterly to its infamous and immortal utterance : 
 ' If we ascribe the book to a woman at all, we have no 
 alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some 
 suflSicient reason, long forfeited the society of her own 
 sex.' 
 
 The Quarterly, to do it justice, argued that Currer Bell 
 
 ' I am wrong. Charlotte did not read Balzac till later, when George 
 Henry Lewes told her to. But there were those twenty ' clever, wicked, 
 sophistical, and immoral French books ' that she read in eighteen-forty. 
 They may have served her purpose better. 
 
116 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 was a man, for only a man would have betrayed such 
 ignorance of feminine resources as to make Jane Ejo'e, 
 on a night alarm, ' hurry on a frock and shawl.' The 
 reasoning passed. Nobody saw that such a man would 
 be as innocent as any parson's daughter. Nobody pointed 
 out that, as it happened, Currer Bell had provided 
 her dowagers with ' vast white wrappers ' on the second 
 night alarm. And, after all, the sex of The Quarterly 
 reviewer itself remains a problem. Long ago, Mr. Andrew 
 Lang detected the work of two hands in that famous 
 article. You may say there were at least three. There 
 was, first, the genial reviewer of Vanity Fair, who revels 
 in the wickedness of Becky Sharpe, and who is going 
 to revel in the wickedness of Jane. Then suddenly 
 some Mr. Brocklebank steps in, and you get a ' black- 
 marble clergyman ' on Jane Eyre. 
 
 ' We have said,' says this person, ' that this was the 
 picture of a natural heart. This, to our view, is the 
 great and crying mischief of the book. Jane Eyre is 
 throughout the personification of an unregenerate and 
 undisciplined spirit, the more dangerous to exhibit from 
 that prestige of principle and self-control, which is liable 
 to dazzle the eyes too much for it to observe the in- 
 sufficient and unsound foundation on which it rests. It 
 is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength ; 
 but it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is 
 a law unto itself. . . . She has inherited the worst sin 
 of our fallen nature — the sin of pride.' 
 
 Jane, you see, should have sinned to show her Chris- 
 tian humility. The style, if not the reasoning, is pure 
 Brocklebank. He does 'not hesitate to say that the 
 tone of mind and thought, which has overthrown authority 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 117 
 
 and violated every code, human and divine, abroad, 
 and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the 
 same which has written Jane Eyre.'' 
 
 Ellis and Acton (poor Acton !) Bell get it even stronger 
 than that ; and then, suddenly again, you come on 
 a report on the ' Condition of Governesses,' palpably 
 drawn up by a third person. For years Miss Rigby, 
 who was afterwards Lady Eastlake, got the credit for 
 the whole absurd performance, for she was known to 
 have written the review on Vanity Fair. What hap- 
 pened seems to have been that Miss Rigby set out in all 
 honesty to praise Jane Eyre. Then some infuriated 
 person interfered and stopped her. The article was 
 torn from the unfortunate Miss Rigby and given to 
 Brocklebank, who used bits of her here and there. 
 Brocklebank, in his zeal, overdid his part, so the report 
 on Governesses was thrown in to give the whole thing 
 an air of seriousness and respectability. So that it is 
 exceedingly doubtful whether, after all, it was a woman's 
 hand that dealt the blow. 
 
 If Charlotte Bronte did not feel the effect of it to the 
 end of her life, she certainly suffered severely at the 
 time. It was responsible for that impassioned defence 
 of Anne and Emily which she would have been wiser 
 to have left alone. 
 
 It must be admitted that Jane Eyre was an easy prey 
 for the truculent reviewer, for its faults were all on the 
 surface, and its great qualities lay deep. Deep as they 
 were, they gripped the ordinary uncritical reader, and 
 they gripped the critic in spite of himself, so that he 
 bitterly resented being moved by a work so flagrantly 
 and obviously faidty. What was more, the passion of 
 
118 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 the book was so intense that you were hardly aware of 
 anything else, and its author's austere respect for the 
 ten commandments passed almost unobserved. 
 
 But when her enemies accuse Charlotte Bronte of 
 glorifying passion they praise her unaware. Her glory 
 is that she did glorify it. Until she came passion between 
 man and woman had meant animal passion. Fielding 
 and Smollett had dealt with it solely on that footing. 
 A woman's gentle, legalised affection for her husband 
 was one thing, and passion was another. Thackeray 
 and Dickens, on the whole, followed Fielding. To all 
 three of them passion is an affair wholly of the senses, 
 temporary, episodic, and therefore comparatively un- 
 important. Thackeray intimated that he could have 
 done more with it but for his fear of Mrs. Grundy. Any- 
 how, passion was not a quality that could be given 
 to a good woman ; and so the good women of Dickens 
 and Thackeray are conspicuously without it. And Jane 
 Austen may be said to have also taken Fielding's view. 
 Therefore she was obliged to ignore passion. She gave 
 it to one vulgar woman, Lydia Bennett, and to one bad 
 one, Mrs. Rushworth ; and having given it them, she 
 turned her head away and refused to have anything 
 more to do with these young women. She was not 
 alone in her inability to ' tackle passion.' No re- 
 spectable mid- Victorian novelist could, when passion 
 had so bad a name. 
 
 And it was this thing, cast down, defiled, dragged in 
 the mud, and ignored because of its defilement, that 
 Charlotte Bronte took and lifted up. She washed it 
 clean ; she bathed it in the dew of the morning ; she 
 baptized it in tears ; she clothed it in light and flame ; 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 119 
 
 she showed it for the divine, the beautiful, the utterly 
 pure and radiant thing it is, ' the very subUme of faith, 
 truth and devotion.' She made it, this spirit of fire and 
 air, incarnate in the body of a woman who had no sensual 
 charm. Because of it little Jane became the parent 
 of Caterina and of Maggie Tulliver ; and Shirley prepared 
 the way for Meredith's large-limbed, large-brained, 
 large-hearted women. 
 
 It was thus that Charlotte Bronte glorified passion. 
 The passion that she glorified being of the finest fibre, 
 it was naturally not understood by people whose fibres 
 were not fine at all. 
 
 It was George Henry Lewes (not a person of the finest 
 fibre) who said of Jane Eyre that ' the grand secret of 
 its success ... as of all great and lasting successes 
 was its reality.' In spite of crudities, absurdities, im- 
 possibilities, it remains most singularly and startlingly 
 alive. In Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte comes for the 
 first time into her kingdom of the inner life. She grasps 
 the secret, unseen springs ; in her narrow range she is 
 master of the psychology of passion and of suffering, 
 whether she is describing the agony of the child Jane 
 shut up in that terrible red room, or the anguish of 
 the woman on the morning of that wedding-day that 
 brought no wedding. Or take the scene of Jane's flight 
 from Thomfield, or that other scene, tmsurpassed in 
 its passion and tenderness, of her return to Rochester 
 at Femdean. 
 
 ' To this house I came just ere dark, on an evening 
 marked by the characteristics of sad sky, cold gale, and 
 continued small, penetrating rain. . . . Even within a 
 very short distance of the manor-house, you could see 
 
120 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 nothing of it ; so thick and dark grew the timber of the 
 gloomy wood about it. Iron gates between granite 
 pillars showed me where to enter, and passing through 
 them, I found myself at once in the twilight of close- 
 ranked trees. There was a grass-grown track descend- 
 ing the forest aisle, between hoar and knotty shafts 
 and under branched arches, I followed it, expecting 
 soon to reach the dwelling ; but it stretched on and 
 on, it wound far and farther : no sign of habitation or 
 grounds was visible. ... At last my way opened, the 
 trees thinned a little ; presently I beheld a railing, 
 then the house — scarce, by this dim Ught, distinguishable 
 from the trees; so dank and green were its decaying 
 walls. Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch, I 
 stood amidst a space of enclosed ground, from which 
 the wood swept away in a semicircle. There were no 
 flowers, no garden-beds ; only a broad gravel-walk 
 girdling a grass-plat, and this set in the heavy frame of 
 the forest. The house presented two pointed gables 
 in its front; the windows were latticed and narrow: 
 the front-door was narrow too, one step led up to it. . . . 
 It was still as a church on a week-day; the pattering 
 rain on the forest leaves was the only sound audible. . . . 
 
 ' I heard a movement — that narrow front-door was 
 unclosing, and some shape was about to issue from the 
 grange. 
 
 ' It opened slowly ; a figure came out into the twilight 
 and stood on the step ; a man without a hat : he 
 stretched forth his hand as if to feel whether it rained. 
 Dark as it was I had recognised him.' . . . 
 
 ' His form was of the same strong and stalwart contour 
 as ever. . . . But in his countenance I saw a change : 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 121 
 
 that looked desperate and brooding — that reminded me 
 of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, 
 dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The caged 
 eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished, 
 might look as looked that sightless Samson.' 
 
 Again — Rochester hears Jane's voice in the room where 
 she comes to him. 
 
 ' " And where is the speaker ? Is it only a voice ? 
 Oh ! I cannot see, but I must feel or my heart will stop 
 and my brain burst." . . . 
 
 ' He groped. I arrested his wandering hand, and 
 prisoned it in both mine. 
 
 ' " Her very fingers ! " he cried ; " her small, slight 
 fingers ! If so, there must be more of her." 
 
 ' The muscular hand broke from my custody ; my 
 arm was seized, my shoulder — neck — ^wrist — I was 
 entwined and gathered to him. . . . 
 
 ' I pressed my lips to his once brilliant and now ray- 
 less eyes — I swept back his hair from his brow and 
 kissed that too. He suddenly seemed to rouse himself : 
 the conviction of the reality of all this seized him. 
 
 ' " It is you — is it, Jane ? You are come back to 
 me then ? " 
 
 ' " I am." ' 
 
 The scene as it stands is far from perfect ; but only 
 Charlotte Bronte could sustain so strong an illusion of 
 passion through so many lapses. And all that passion 
 counts for no more than half in the astounding effect 
 of reality she produces. Before Jane Eyre there is no 
 novel written by a woman, with the one exception of 
 Wuthering Heights, that conveys so poignant an im- 
 pression of surroundings, of things seen and heard, of the 
 
122 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 earth and sky ; of weather ; of the aspects of houses 
 and of rooms. It suggests a positive exaltation of the 
 senses of sound and light, an ecstasy, an enchantment 
 before the visible, tangible world. It is not a matter 
 of mere faithful observation (though few painters have 
 possessed so incorruptibly the innocence of the eye). 
 It is an almost supernatural intentness ; sensation 
 raised to the mth power. Take the description of the 
 awful red room at Gateshead. 
 
 ' A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, 
 hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like 
 a tabernacle in the centre ; the two large windows with 
 their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in 
 festoons and falls of similar drapery ; the carpet was 
 red ; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with 
 a crimson cloth ; the walls were a soft fawn colour, with 
 a flush of pink in it ; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the 
 chairs were of darkly-polished old mahogany. Out 
 of these deep surrounding shades, rose high and glared 
 white, the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the bed, 
 spread with a snowy Marseilles counterpane. Scarcely 
 less prominent was an ample, cushioned easy-chair near 
 the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it ; 
 and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne. . . . 
 Mr. Reed had been dead nine years : it was in this 
 chamber he breathed his last ; here he lay in state ; 
 hence his coffin was borne by the undertaker's men ; 
 and since that day a sense of dreary consecration had 
 guarded it from frequent intrusion.' 
 
 Could anything be more horrible than that red room ? 
 Or take the descriptions of the school at Lowood where 
 the horror of pestilence hangs over house and garden. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 123 
 
 Through all these Gateshead and Lowood scenes Charlotte 
 is unerring and absolute in her reality. 
 
 Her very style, so uncertain in its rendering of human 
 speech, becomes flawless in such passages as this : 
 
 ' It was three o'clock ; the church-bell tolled as I 
 passed under the belfry : the charm of the hour lay in 
 its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and pale- 
 beaming sun. I was a mile from Thomfield, in a lane 
 noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and black- 
 berries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral 
 treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight 
 lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath 
 of air stirred, it made no sound here ; for there was not 
 a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped haw- 
 thorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white, worn 
 stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far 
 and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no 
 cattle now browsed; and the little brown birds, which 
 stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like single 
 russet leaves about to drop. 
 
 ' This lane inclined up-hill all the way to Hay. . . . 
 I then turned eastward. 
 
 ' On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon ; pale 
 yet as a cloud, but brightening momently ; she looked 
 over Hay which, half lost in trees, sent up a blue smoke 
 from its few chimneys ; it was yet a mile distant, but 
 in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs 
 of life. My ear too felt the flow of currents ; in what 
 dales and depths I could not tell : but there were many 
 hills beyond Hay, and doubtless many becks threading 
 their passes. That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle 
 of the nearest streams, the sough of the most remote. 
 
124 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 ' A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and whisper- 
 ings, at once so far away and so clear : a positive tramp, 
 tramp ; a metallic clatter, which effaced the soft wave- 
 wanderings ; as, in a picture, the solid mass of a crag, 
 or the rough boles of a great oak, drawn in dark and 
 strong on the foreground, efface the aerial distance of 
 azure hill, sunny horizon, and blended clouds, where 
 tint melts into tint. 
 
 ' The din sounded on the causeway. . . .' 
 
 Flawless this, too, of the sky after sunset : ' Where 
 the sun had gone down in simple state — pure of the 
 pomp of clouds — spread a solemn purple, burning with 
 the light of red jewel and furnace flame at one point, 
 on one hill-peak, and extending high and wide, soft and 
 still softer, over half heaven.' 
 
 And this of her own moors : ' There are great moors 
 behind and on each hand of me ; there are waves of 
 mountains far beyond that deep valley at my feet. The 
 population here must be thin, and I see no passengers on 
 these roads : they stretch out east, west, north and south 
 — white, broad, lonely ; they are all cut in the moor, and 
 the heather grows deep and wild to their very verge.' 
 
 She has given the secret of the moor country in a 
 phrase : ' I felt the consecration of its loneliness.' In that 
 one line you have the real, the undying Charlotte Bronte. 
 
 It is such immortal things that make the difference 
 between Jane Eyre and The Professor. So immeasurable 
 is that difference that it almost justifies the theorist in 
 assuming an ' experience ' to account for it, an . ex- 
 perience falling between the dates of The Professor and 
 Jane Eyre, Unfortunately there was none ; none in 
 the sense cherished by the researcher. Charlotte's 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 125 
 
 letters are an unbroken record of those two years that 
 followed her return from "Brussels. Her life is laid bare 
 in its long and cramped monotony, a life singularly 
 empty of ' experience.' 
 
 And yet an experience did come to her in that brief 
 period. If the researcher had not followed a false scent 
 across the Channel, if his flair for tragic passion had not 
 destroyed in him all sense of proportion, he could not 
 possibly have missed it ; for it stared him in the face, 
 simple, obvious, inevitable. But miss it he certainly 
 did. Obsessed by his idea, he considered it a negligible 
 circumstance that Charlotte should have read Wuthering 
 Heights before she wrote Jane Eyre. And yet, I think 
 that, if anything woke Charlotte up, it was that. Until 
 then, however great her certainty of her own genius, 
 she did not know how far she could trust it, how far it 
 would be safe to let imagination go. Appalled by the 
 spectacle of its excesses, she had divorced imagination 
 from the real. But Emily knew none of these cold 
 deliberations born of fear. Wut hering Heights was the 
 frui t of a divine freedom, a divine unconsciousness. It 
 is not possible that Charlotte, of all people, should have 
 read Wuthering Heights without a shock of enlighten- 
 ment ; that she should not have compared it with her 
 own bloodless work ; that she should not have felt the 
 wrong done to her genius by her self-repression. Emily 
 had dared Jo be herself ; she had not been afraid of her 
 own passion ; she had had no method ; she had accom- 
 plished a stupendous thing without laxosdog,, it, by 
 simply letting herself go. And Charlotte, I think, said 
 to herself, ' That is what I ought to have done. That 
 is what I will do next time.' And next time she did it. 
 
126 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 The experience may seem insufficient, but it is of such 
 experiences that a great writer's life is largely made. 
 And if you must have an influence to account for Jane 
 Eyre, there is no need to go abroad to look for it. There 
 was influence enough in her own home. These three 
 Brontes, adoring each other, were intolerant of any 
 other influence ; and the strongest spirit, which was 
 Emily's, prevailed. To be sure, no remonstrances from 
 Emily or Charlotte could stop Anne in her obstinate 
 analysis of Walter Huntingdon ; but it was some stray 
 spark from Emily that kindled Anne. As for Charlotte, 
 her genius must have quickened in her when her nerves 
 thrilled to the shock of Wuthering Heights. This, I 
 know, is only another theory ; but it has at least the 
 merit of its modesty. It is not offered as in the least 
 accounting for, or explaining, Charlotte's genius. It 
 merely suggests with all possible humility a likely cause 
 of its release. Anyhow it is a theory that does Char- 
 lotte's genius no wrong, on which account it seems to 
 me preferable to any other. It is really no argument 
 against it to say that Charlotte never acknowledged her 
 sister's influence, that she was indeed unaware of it ; 
 for, in the first place, the stronger the spiritual tie between 
 them, the less likely was she to have been aware. In 
 the second place, it is not claimed that Wuthering Heights 
 was such an influence as the ' sojourn in Brussels ' is said 
 to have been — that it ' made Miss Bronte an author.' 
 It is not claimed that if there had been no Wuthering 
 Heights and no Emily Bronte, there would have been no 
 Jane Eyre ; for to me nothing can be more certain that 
 whatever had, or had not happened, Charlotte's genuis 
 would have found its way. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 127 
 
 Charlotte's genius indeed was so profoundly akin to 
 Charlotte's nature that its way, the way of its upward 
 progress, was by violent impetus and recoil. 
 
 In Shirley she revolts from the passion of Jane Eyre. 
 She seems to have written it to prove that there are 
 other things. She had been stung by The Quarterly's 
 attack, stung by rumour, stung by every adverse thing 
 that had been said. And yet not for a moment was she 
 ' influenced ' by her reviewers. It was more in defiance 
 than in submission that she answered them with Shirley. 
 Shirley was an answer to every criticism that had yet 
 been made. In Shirley she forsook the one poor play 
 of hearts insurgent for the vast and varied movement 
 of the world ; social upheavals, the clash of sects and 
 castes, the first grim hand-to-hand struggle between 
 capital and labour, all are there. The book opens 
 with a drama, not of hearts but of artisans insurgent ; 
 frame-breakers, not breakers of the marriage law. In 
 sheer defiance she essays to render the whole real world, 
 the complex, many-threaded, many-coloured world ; 
 where the tragic warp is woven with the bright comedy 
 of curates. It is the world of the beginnings ; the 
 world of the early nineteenth century that she paints. 
 A world with the immensity, the profundity, the dark- 
 ness of the brooding sea ; where the spirit of a woman 
 moves, troubling the waters ; for Charlotte Bronte 
 has before her the stupendous vision of the world as it 
 was, as it yet is, and as it is to be. 
 
 That world, as it existed from eighteen-twelve to Char- 
 lotte's own time, eighteen-fifty, was not a place for a 
 woman with a brain and a soul. There was no career 
 for any woman but marriage. If she missed it she 
 
128 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 missed her place in the world, her prestige, and her 
 privileges as a woman. What was worse, she lost her 
 individuality, and became a mere piece of furniture, 
 of disused, old-fashioned furniture, in her father's or 
 her brother's house. If she had a father or a brother 
 there was no escape for her from dependence on the 
 male ; and if she had none, if there was no male about 
 the house, her case was the more pitiable. And the 
 traditions of her upbringing were such that the real, 
 vital things, the things that mattered, were never men- 
 tioned in her presence. Religion was the solitary ex- 
 ception ; and religion had the reality and vitaUty taken 
 out of it by its dissociation with the rest of life. A 
 woman in these horrible conditions was only half alive. 
 She had no energies, no passions, no enthusiasms. Con- 
 vention drained her of her life-blood. What was left 
 to her had no outlet ; pent up in her, it bred weak, 
 anaemic substitutes for its natural issue, sentimentalism 
 for passion, and sensibility for the nerves of vision. This 
 only applies, of course, to the average woman. 
 
 Charlotte Bronte was born with a horror of the world 
 that had produced this average woman, this creature 
 of minute corruptions and hypocrisies. She sent out 
 Jane Eyre to purify it with her passion. She sent out 
 Shirley to destroy and rebuild it with her intellect. 
 Little Jane was a fiery portent. Shirley was a pro- 
 phecy. She is modern to her finger-tips, as modern as 
 Meredith's great women: Diana, or Clara Middleton, 
 or Carinthia Jane. She was born fifty years before 
 her time. 
 
 This is partly owing to her creator's prophetic insight, 
 partly to her sheer truth to Ufe. For Shirley was to a 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 129 
 
 large extent a portrait of Emily Bronte who was born 
 before her time. 
 
 It is Emily Bronte's spirit that bums in Shirley 
 Keeldar; and it is the spirit of Shirley Keeldar that 
 gives life to the unwilling mass of this vast novel. It 
 is almost enough immortality for Shirley that she is 
 the only living and authentic portrait of Emily Bronte 
 in her time. Charlotte has given her the ' wings that 
 wealth can give,' and they do not matter. She has 
 also given her the wings of Emily's adventurous soul, 
 the wealth of her inner life. 
 
 ' A still, deep, inborn delight glows in her young 
 veins ; unmingled — untroubled, not to be reached or 
 ravished by human agency, because by no human agency 
 bestowed : the pure gift of God to His creature, the 
 free dower of Nature to her child. This joy gives her 
 experience of a genii-life. Buoyant, by green steps, 
 by glad hills, all verdure and light, she reaches a station 
 scarcely lower than that whence angels looked down 
 on the dreamer of Bethel, and her eye seeks, and her 
 soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it.' 
 
 ' Her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of 
 
 life as she wishes it ' That was the secret of Emily's 
 
 greatness, of her immeasurable superiority to her sad 
 sisters. 
 
 And again : ' In Shirley's nature prevailed at times 
 an easy indolence : there were periods when she took 
 delight in perfect vacancy of hand and eye — moments 
 when her thoughts, her simple existence, the fact of 
 the world being around — and heaven above her, seemed 
 to yield her such fulness of happiness, that she did not 
 need to lift a finger to increase the joy. Often, after 
 
 I 
 
130 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 an active morning, she would spend a sunny afternoon 
 in lying stirless on the turf, at the foot of some tree of 
 friendly umbrage : no society did she need but that 
 of Caroline, and it sufficed if she were within call ; no 
 spectacle did she ask but that of the deep blue sky, and 
 such cloudlets as sailed afar and aloft across its span ; 
 no sound but that of the bee's hum, the leaf's whisper.' 
 
 There are phrases in Louis Moore's diary that bring 
 Emily Bronte straight before us in her swift and vivid 
 life. Shirley is ' Sister of the spotted, bright, quick- 
 fiery leopard.' ' Pantheress ! — ^beautiful forest-born ! — 
 wily, tameless, peerless nature ! She gnaws her chain. 
 I see the white teeth working at the steel ! She has 
 dreams of her wild woods, and pinings after virgin free- 
 dom.' ' How evanescent, fugitive, fitful she looked — 
 slim and swift as a Northern streamer ! ' ' . . . With 
 her long hair flowing full and wavy ; with her noiseless 
 step, her pale cheek, her eye full of night and lightning, 
 she looked, I thought, spirit-like — a thing made of an 
 element — the child of a breeze and a flame — the daughter 
 of ray and raindrop — a thing never to be overtaken, 
 arrested, fixed.' 
 
 Like Emily she is not ' caught.' ' But if I were,' she 
 says, ' do you know what soothsayers I would consult ? 
 . . . The little Irish beggar that comes barefoot to 
 my door ; the mouse that steals out of the cranny in 
 the wainscot ; the bird that in frost and snow pecks 
 at my window for a crumb ; the dog that licks my hand 
 and sits beside my knee.' 
 
 And yet again : ' She takes her sewing occasionally : 
 but, by some fatality, she is doomed never to sit steadily 
 at it for above five minutes at a time : her thimble is 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 131 
 
 scarcely fitted on, her needle scarce threaded, when a 
 sudden thought calls her upstairs : perhaps she goes 
 to seek some just- then-remembered old ivory-backed 
 needle-book, or older china-topped work-box, quite 
 unneeded, but which seems at the moment indispens- 
 able ; perhaps to arrange her hair, or a drawer which 
 she recollects to have seen that morning in a state of 
 curious confusion ; perhaps only to take a peep from 
 a particular window at a particular view where Briai^ 
 field Church and Rectory are visible, pleasantly bowered 
 in trees. She has scarcely returned, and again taken 
 up the slip of cambric, or square of half-wrought canvas, 
 when Tartar's bold scrape and strangled whistle are 
 heard at the porch-door, and she must run to open it for 
 him ; it is a hot day ; he comes in panting ; she must 
 convoy him to the kitchen, and see with her own eyes 
 that his water-bowl is replenished. Through the open 
 kitchen-door the court is visible, all sunny and gay, 
 and peopled with turkeys and their poults, peahens and 
 their chicks, pearl-flecked Guinea fowls, and a bright 
 variety of pure white, and purple-necked, and blue and 
 cinnamon-plumed pigeons. Irresistible spectacle to 
 Shirley ! She runs to the pantry for a roll, and she 
 stands on the doorstep scattering crumbs : around her 
 throng her eager, plump, happy, feathered vassals. . , . 
 There are perhaps some little calves, some little new- 
 yeaned Iambs — ^it may be twins, whose mothers have 
 rejected them : Miss Keeldar . . . must permit herself 
 the treat of feeding them with her own hand.' 
 
 Like Emily she is impatient of rituals and creeds. 
 Like Emily she adores the Earth. Not one of Char- 
 lotte's women except Shirley could have chanted that 
 
132 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 great prose hymn of adoration in which Earth worships 
 and is worshipped. ' " Nature is now at her evening 
 prayers ; she is kneeling before those red hills. I see 
 her prostrate on the great steps of her altar, praying 
 fdr a fair night for mariners at sea, for travellers in 
 deserts, for lambs on moors, and unfledged birds in 
 woods. ... I see her, and I will tell you what she is 
 like : she is like what Eve was when she and Adam 
 stood alone on earth." ' " And that is not Milton's Eve, 
 Shirley," says Caroline, and Shirley answers : " No, by 
 the pure Mother of God, she is not." Shirley is half 
 a Pagan. She would beg to remind Milton " that the 
 first men of the earth were Titans, and that Eve was 
 their mother : from her sprang Saturn, Hyperion, 
 Oceanus ; she bore Prometheus. ... I say, there were 
 giants on the earth in those days, giants that strove 
 to scale heaven. The first woman's breast that heaved 
 with life on this world yielded daring which could con- 
 tend with Omnipotence ; the strength which could bear 
 a thousand years of bondage — the vitality which could 
 feed that vulture death through uncounted ages — the 
 unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters 
 to immortality, which, after millenniums of crimes, 
 struggles, and woes, could conceive and bring forth a 
 Messiah. The first woman was heaven-born : vast 
 was the heart whence gushed the well-spring of the 
 blood of nations ; and grand the undegenerate head 
 where rested the consort-crown of creation." ' . . . 
 
 ' " You have not yet told me what you saw kneeling 
 on those hills." 
 
 ' " I saw — I now see — a woman-Titan ; her robe of 
 blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 133 
 
 yonder flock is grazing ; a veil, white as an avalanche, 
 sweeps from her head to her feet, and arabesques of 
 lightning flame on its borders. Under her breast I see 
 her zone, purple like that horizon : through its blush 
 shines the star of evening. Her steady eyes I cannot 
 picture ; they are clear — they are deep as lakes — they 
 are lifted and full of worship — they tremble with the 
 softness of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead 
 has the expanse of a cloud, and is paler than the early 
 moon, risen long before dark gathers : she reclines her 
 bosom on the edge of Stilbro' Moor ; her mighty hands 
 are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face, she 
 speaks with God." ' 
 
 It is the living sister speaking for the dead ; for Char- 
 lotte herself had little of Emily's fine Paganism. But 
 for one moment, in this lyric passage, her soul echoes 
 the very soul of Emily as she gathers round her all the 
 powers and • splendours (and some, alas I of the fatal 
 rhetoric) of her prose to do her honour. 
 
 It is not only in the large figure of the Titan Shirley 
 that Charlotte Bronte shows her strength. She has learnt 
 to draw her minor masculine characters with more of 
 insight and of accuracy — Caroline Helstone, the Yorkes, 
 Robert Moore, Mr. Helstone, Joe Scott, and Barraclough, 
 the ' joined Methody.' With a few strokes they stand 
 out living. She has acquired more of the art of dia- 
 logue. She is a past master of dialect, of the racy, 
 native speech of these men. Not only is Mr. Yorke 
 painted with unerring power and faithfulness in every 
 detail of his harsh and vigorous personality, but there 
 is no single lapse from nature when he is speaking. The 
 curates only excepted, Charlotte never swerves from 
 
134 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 this fidelity. But when she is handling her curates, it 
 is a savage, and utterly inartistic humour that inspires 
 her. You feel that she is not exercising the art of 
 comedy, but relieving her own intolerable boredom and 
 irritation. No object could well be more innocent, and 
 more appeaUng in its innocence, than little Mr. Sweeting, 
 curate of Nunnerly. Mr. Sweeting at the tea-table, 
 ' having a dish of tarts before him, and marmalade and 
 crumpet upon his plate,' should have moved the Comic 
 Spirit to tears of gentleness. 
 
 Curates apart, two-thirds of Shirley are written with 
 an unerring devotion to the real, to the very actual. 
 They have not, for all that, the profound reality of 
 Jane Eyre. The events are confused, somehow ; the 
 atmosphere is confusing ; the northern background is 
 drawn with a certain hardness and apathy of touch ; 
 the large outlines are obscured, delicate colours sharpened ; 
 it is hard and yet blurred, like a bad steel engraving. 
 Charlotte's senses, so intensely, so supematurally alive 
 in Jane Eyre, are only passably awake in Shirley. It 
 has some of the dulness of The Professor, as it has more 
 than its sober rightness. But, for three and twenty 
 chapters, the sobriety, the rightness triumph. There 
 are no improbabilities, no flights of imagination, none 
 of the fine language which was the shame when it was 
 not the glory of Jane Eyre. 
 
 Then suddenly there comes a break — a cleavage. It 
 comes with that Chapter Twenty-four, which is headed 
 ' The Valley of the Shadow of Death.' It was written 
 in the first months after Emily Bronte's death. 
 
 From that point Charlotte's level strength deserts her. 
 Ever after, she falls and soars, and soars and falls again. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 135 
 
 There is a return to the manner of Jane Eyre, the manner 
 of Charlotte when she is deeply moved ; there is at 
 times a relapse to Jane Eyre's worst manner. You get 
 it at once in ' The Valley of the Shadow ' chapter, in the 
 scene of CaroUne's love-sick delirium. 
 
 ' " But he will not know I am ill till I am gone ; and 
 he will come when they have laid me out, and I am sense- 
 less, cold and stiff. 
 
 ' " What can my departed soul feel then ? Can it 
 see or know what happens to the clay ? Can spirits, 
 through any medium, communicate with living flesh ? 
 Can the dead at all revisit those they leave ? Can they 
 come in the elements ? Will wind, water, fire lend me 
 a path to Moore ? 
 
 ' " Is it for nothing the wind sounds almost articulate 
 sometimes — sings as I have lately heard it sing at night 
 — or passes the casement sobbing, as if for sorrow to 
 come ? Does nothing then haunt it — ^nothing inspire 
 it ? " ' 
 
 The awful improbability of Caroline is more striking 
 because of its contrast with the inspired rightness of the 
 scene of Cathy's delirium in Wuihering Heights. It is 
 Charlotte feebly echoing Emily, and going more and 
 more wrong up to her peroration. 
 
 Delirious Caroline wonders : ' " What is that elec- 
 tricity they speak of, whose changes make us well or 
 ill ; whose lack or excess blasts ; whose even balance 
 revives ? . . ." 
 
 ' " Where is the other world ? In what will another 
 life consist ? Why do I ask ? Have I not cause to 
 think that the hour is hasting but too fast when the veil 
 must be rent for me ? Do I not know the Grand Mystery 
 
136 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 is likely to break prematurely on me ? Great Spirit ! 
 in whose goodness I confide ; whom, as my Father, I 
 have petitioned night and morning from early infancy, 
 help the weak creation of Thy hands ! Sustain me 
 through the ordeal I dread and must undergo ! Give 
 me strength ! Give me patience ! Give me — oh ! give 
 me Faith ! " ' 
 
 Jane Eyre has done worse than that, so has Rochester ; 
 but somehow, when they were doing their worst with it, 
 they got their passion through. There is no live passion 
 behind this speech of Caroline's, with its wild stress of 
 italics and of capitals. What passion there was in 
 Charlotte when she conceived Caroline was killed by 
 Emily's death. 
 
 And Mrs. Pryor, revealing herself to Caroline, is even 
 more terrible. She has all the worst vices of Charlotte's 
 dramatic style. Mrs. Pryor calls to the spirit of Caro- 
 line's dead father : ' " James, slumber peacefully ! See ! 
 your terrible debt is cancelled ! Look ! I wipe out 
 the long, black account with my own hand ! James, 
 your child atones : this living likeness of you — this 
 thing with your perfect features — this one good gift 
 you gave me has nestled affectionately to my heart 
 and tenderly called me " mother." Husband 1 rest 
 forgiven ! " ' 
 
 Even Robert Moore, otherwise almost a masterpiece, 
 becomes improbable when, in his great scene, Shirley 
 refuses him. When Mr, Yorke asks him what has gone 
 wrong he replies : ' The machinery of all my nature ; 
 the whole enginery of this human mill ; the boiler, 
 which I take to be the heart, is fit to burst.' 
 
 Shirley herself is impossible with her ' Lucifer, Star of 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 137 
 
 the Morning, thou art fallen,' and her speech to her 
 mercenary uncle : ' Sir, your god, your great Bel, your 
 fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon.' 
 
 What is worse than all, Louis Moore — Louis, the hero, 
 Louis, the master of passion, is a failure. He is Char- 
 lotte Bronte's most terrible, most glaring failure. It 
 is not true that Charlotte could not draw men, or that 
 she drew them all alike ; Robert Moore, the hard-headed 
 man of business, the man of will and purpose, who never 
 gives up, is not only almost a masterpiece but a spon- 
 taneous masterpiece, one of the first examples of his 
 kind. But there is no blood in Louis' veins, no virility 
 in his swarthy body. He is the most unspeakable of 
 schoolmasters. Yet Charlotte lavished on this puppet 
 half the wealth of her imagination. She flings phrase 
 after perfect phrase to him to cover himself with — some 
 of her best things have been given to Louis Moore to 
 utter ; but they do not make him live. Again, she 
 strangles him in his own rhetoric. The courtship of 
 Louis Moore and Shirley will not compare with that of 
 Jane and Rochester. There is no nightingale singing 
 in their wood. 
 
 Yet, for all that, Shirley comes very near to being 
 Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece. It is inspired from 
 first to last with a great intention and a great idea. It 
 shows a vision of reality wider than her grasp. Its 
 faults, like the faults of Jane Eyre, are all on the surface, 
 only there is more surface in Shirley. If it has not Jane 
 Eyre's commanding passion, it has a vaster sweep. It 
 was literally the first attempt in literature to give to 
 woman her right place in the world. 
 
 From first to last there is not a page or a line in it 
 
138 THE THREE BRONTKS 
 
 that justifies the malignant criticism of Mrs. Oliphant. 
 Carohne Helstone does not justify it. She is no 
 window-gazing virgin on the look-out, in love already 
 before the man has come. She is a young girl, very 
 naturally in love with a man whom she has known 
 for years, who is always on the spot. As for Shirley, 
 she flung herself with all the vehemence of her 
 prophetic soul on the hypocritical convention that 
 would make every woman dependent on some man, and 
 at the same time despises her for the possession of her 
 natural instincts. And Caroline followed her. ' I 
 observe that to such grievances as society cannot cure, 
 it usually forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn : this 
 scorn being only a sort of tinselled cloak to its deformed 
 weakness. People hate to be reminded of ills they are 
 unable or unwilling to remedy : such reminder, in forcing 
 on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more 
 painful sense of an obligation to make some unpleasant 
 effort, troubles their ease and shakes their self-com- 
 placency. Old maids, like the houseless and unemployed 
 poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in 
 the world : the demand disturbs the happy and rich : 
 it disturbs parents. . . . Men of England ! Look at 
 your poor girls, many of them fading round you, dropping 
 off in consumption or decline ; or, what is worse, de- 
 generating to sour old maids, — envious, back-biting, 
 wretched, because life is a desert to them ; or, what is 
 worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry 
 and debasing artifice, to gain that position and con- 
 sideration by marriage, which to celibacy is denied. 
 Fathers ! cannot you alter these things ? . . . You would 
 wish to be proud of your daughters, and not to blush for 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 139 
 
 them, then seek for them an interest and an occupation 
 which shall raise them above the flirt, the manceuverer, 
 the mischief -making tale-bearer. Keep your girls' minds 
 narrow and degraded — they will still be a plague and 
 a care, sometimes a disgrace to you : give them scope 
 and work — they will be your gayest companions in 
 health; your tenderest nurses in sickness; your most 
 faithful prop in old age.' 
 
 That is the argument from fathers, and it comes from 
 Caroline Helstone, not from Shirley. And the fact 
 that Caroline married Robert Moore, and Shirley fell 
 in love when her hour came (and with Louis Moore, too !) 
 does not diminish the force or the sincerity or the truth 
 of the tirade. 
 
 Shirley may not be a great novel ; but it is a great 
 prophetic book. Shirley's vision of the woman kneeling 
 on the hills serves for more than Emily Bronte's vision 
 of Hertha and Demeter, of Eve, the Earth-mother, ' the 
 mighty and mystical parent ' ; it is Charlotte Bronte's 
 vindication of Eve, her vision of woman as she is to be. 
 She faced the world once for all with her vision : ' I see 
 her,' she said, ' and I will tell you what she is like.' 
 
 Mrs. Oliphant did not see the woman kneeling on the 
 hills. Neither George Eliot nor Mrs. Gaskell saw her. 
 They could not possibly have told the world what she 
 was like. It is part of Charlotte Bronte's superior 
 greatness that she saw. 
 
 You do not see that woman in Villette. She has passed 
 with the splendour of Charlotte's vision of the world. 
 The world in Villette is narrowed to a Pensionnat de 
 Demoiselles, and centred in the heart of one woman. And 
 
140 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 never, not even in Jane Eyre, and certainly not in Shirley, 
 did Charlotte Bronte achieve such mastery of reality, 
 and with it such mastery of herself. Villette is the final 
 triumph of her genius over the elements that warred in 
 her. It shows the movement of her genius, which was 
 always by impulse and recoil. In The Professor she 
 abjured, in the interests of reality, the ' imagination ' 
 of her youth. In Jane Eyre she was urged forward by 
 the released impetus of the forces she repressed. In 
 Shirley they are still struggling with her sense of the 
 sober and the sane reality ; the book is torn to fragments 
 in the struggle, and in the end imagination riots. 
 
 But in Villette there are none of these battlings and 
 rendings, these Titanic upheavals and subsidences. 
 Charlotte Bronte's imagination, and her sense of the real, 
 are in process of fusion. There are few novels in which 
 an imagination so supreme is wedded to so vivid a vision 
 of actuality. It may be said that Charlotte Bronte 
 never achieved positive actuality before. The Pen- 
 sionnat de Demoiselles is almost as visibly and palpably 
 actual as the Maison Vauquer in P^re Goriot. It is a 
 return to the method of experience with a vengeance. 
 Charlotte's success, indeed, was so stunning that for all 
 but sixty years Villette has passed for a roman h clef, 
 the novel, not only of experience, but of personal ex- 
 perience. There was a certain plausibility in that view. 
 The characters could all be easily recognised. And 
 when Dr. John was identified with Mr. George Smith, 
 and his mother with Mr. George Smith's mother, and 
 Madame Beck with Madame Heger, and M. Paul Emanuel 
 with Madame Heger's husband, the inference was irresis- 
 tible : Lucy Snowe was, and could only be, Charlotte 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 141 
 
 Bronte. And as the figure of M. Paul Emanuel was ten 
 times more vivid and convincing than that of Rochester, 
 so all that applied to Jane Eyre applied with ten times 
 more force to Lucy. In Villette Charlotte Bronte was 
 considered to have given herself hopelessly away. 
 
 I have tried to show that this view cannot stand 
 before an unprejudiced examination of her life and 
 letters. No need to go into all that again. On the 
 evidence, Charlotte seems at the best of times to have 
 fallen in love with difficulty ; and she most certainly 
 was no more in love with ' the little man,' Paul Emanuel, 
 than she was with ' the little man,' Mr. Taylor. The 
 really important and interesting point is that, if she had 
 been, if he had thus obtained the reality with which 
 passion endows its object, her imagination would have 
 had no use for him ; its work would have been done for it. 
 
 To the supreme artist the order of the actual event 
 is one thing, and the order of creation is another. Their 
 lines may start from the same point in the actual, they 
 may touch again and again, but they are not the same, 
 and they cannot run exactly parallel. There must 
 always be this difference between the actual thing and 
 the thing drawn from it, however closely, that each is 
 embedded and emmeshed in a different context. For 
 a character in a novel to be alive it must have grown ; 
 and to have grown it must have followed its own hne 
 of evolution, inevitably and in its own medium ; and 
 that, whether or not it has been ' taken,' as they say, 
 ' from life.' The more alive it is the less likely is it to 
 have been ' taken,' to have been seized, hauled by the 
 scruff of its neck out of the dense web of the actual. 
 All that the supreme artist wants is what Charlotte 
 
142 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Bronte called ' the germ of the real,' by which she meant 
 the germ of the actual. He does not want the alien, 
 developed thing, standing in its own medium ready 
 made. Charlotte Bronte said that the character of 
 Dr. John was a failure because it lacked the germ of the 
 real. She should have said that it lacked the germ of 
 many reals ; it is so obviously drawn from incomplete 
 observation of a single instance. I am inclined to think 
 that she did ' take ' Dr. John. And whenever Charlotte 
 Bronte ' took ' a character, as she took the unfortunate 
 curates and Mr. St, John Rivers, the result was failure. 
 
 No supreme work of art was ever ' taken.' It was 
 begotten and born and grown, the offspring of faithful 
 love between the soul of the artist and reality. The 
 artist must bring to his ' experience ' as much as he 
 takes from it. The dignity of Nature is all against 
 these violences and robberies of art. She hides her 
 deepest secret from the marauder, and yields it to the 
 lover who brings to her the fire of his own soul. 
 
 And that fire of her own soul was what Charlotte 
 Bronte brought to her supreme creations. It was 
 certainly what she brought to Paul Emanuel. Im- 
 possible to believe that M. Heger gave her more than 
 one or two of the germs of M. Paul. Personally, I can 
 only see the respectable M. Heger as a man whose very 
 essence was a certain impassivity and phlegm under 
 the appearance of a temperament. Choleric he was, 
 with the superficial and temporary choler of the school- 
 master. A schoolmaster gifted with the most extra- 
 ordinary, the most marvellous, the most arresting faculty 
 for making faces, a faculty which in an Englishman 
 would have argued him a perfect volcano of erratic 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 143 
 
 temperament. But I more than suspect that when it 
 came to temperament M. Heger took it out in faces ; 
 that he was nothing more than a benevolent, senti- 
 mental, passably intellectual bourgeois ; but bourgeois 
 to the core. Whereas, look at M. Paul ! No wonder 
 that with that tame and solid stuff before her it took 
 even Charlotte Bronte's fiery spirit nine years (torturing 
 the unwilling dross that checked its flight) before it 
 could create Paul Emanuel. Because of her long work 
 on him he is at once the most real and the best imagined 
 of her characters. 
 
 I admit that in the drawing of many of her minor 
 characters she seems to have relied upon very close 
 and intimate observation of the living model. But in 
 none of her minor characters is she at grips with the 
 reality that, for her, passion is. Charlotte refused to 
 give heroic rank to persons she had merely observed ; 
 she would not exalt them to the dignity of passion. 
 Her imagination could not work on them to that extent. 
 (That is partly why Caroline's delirium is so palpably 
 ' faked.') Even in her portrait of the heroic Shirley, 
 who was frankly ' taken ' from her sister Emily, she 
 achieved the likeness mainly by the artifice of unlike- 
 ness, by removing Shirley Keeldar into a life in which 
 Emily Bronte had never played a part, whereby Shirley 
 became for her a separate person. (You cannot by 
 any stretch of the imagination see Emily falling in love 
 with the schoolmaster, Louis Moore.) 
 
 Lest there should be any doubt on the subject, Char- 
 lotte herself explained to Mrs. Gaskell how her imagina- 
 tion worked. ' I asked her,' Mrs. Gaskell says, ' whether 
 she had ever taken opium, as the description given of 
 
144 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 its effects in Villette was so exactly like what I had ex- 
 perienced — vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, 
 of which the outlines were indistinct, or lost in golden 
 mist, etc. She replied that she had never, to her know- 
 ledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but that j she 
 had followed the process she always adopted when she 
 had to describe anything that had not fallen within her 
 own experience ; she had thought intently on it for 
 many and many a night before falling asleep — wondering 
 what it was like, or how it would be — till at length, 
 sometimes after her story had been arrested at this one 
 point for weeks, she wakened up in the morning with 
 all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through 
 the experience, and then could describe it, word for 
 word, as it happened.' 
 
 To a mind like that the germ of the actual was enough. 
 Charlotte Bronte's genius, in fact, was ardently im- 
 patient of the actual : it cared only for its own. At 
 the least hint from experience it was off. A glance, a 
 gesture of M. Heger's was enough to fire it to the con- 
 ception of Paul Emanuel. He had only to say a kind 
 word to her, to leave a book or a box of bon-bons in her 
 desk (if he did leave bon-bons) for Charlotte's fire to 
 work on him. She had only to say to herself ' This 
 little man is adorable in friendship ; I wonder what he 
 would be like in love,' and she saw that he would be 
 something, though not altogether, like Paul Emanuel. 
 She had only to feel a pang of half-remorseful, half- 
 humorous affection for him, and she knew what Lucy 
 felt like in her love-sick agony. As for Madame Heger, 
 Madame's purely episodic jealousy, her habits of sur- 
 veillance, her small inscrutabilities of behaviour, became 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 145 
 
 the fury, the treachery, the perfidy of Madame Beck. 
 For treachery and perfidy, and agony and passion, were 
 what Charlotte wanted for Villette. 
 
 And yet it is true that Villette is a novel of experience, 
 owing its conspicuous qualities very much to observation. 
 After all, a contemporary novel cannot be made alto- 
 gether out of the fire of the great writer's soul. It is 
 because Charlotte Bronte relied too much on the fire 
 of her own soul that in Jane Eyre and parts of Shirley 
 she missed that unique expression of actuality which, 
 over and over again, she accomplished in Villette. For 
 the expression of a social milieu, for manners, for the 
 dialogue of ordinary use, for the whole detail of the 
 speech characteristic of an individual and a type, for 
 the right accent and pitch, for all the vanishing shades 
 and aspects of the temporary and the particular, the 
 greatest and the fieriest writer is at the mercy of obser- 
 vation and experience. It was her final mastery of these 
 things that made it possible to praise Charlotte Bronte's 
 powers of observation at the expense of her genius ; 
 and this mainly because of M. Paul. 
 
 No offspring of genius was ever more alive, more rich 
 in individuality, than M. Paul. He is alive and he is 
 adorable, in his paletot and bonnet grec, from the moment 
 when he drags Lucy up three pairs of stairs to the soli- 
 tary and lofty attic and locks her in, to that other 
 moment when he brings her to the little house that he 
 has prepared for her. Whenever he appears there is 
 pure radiant comedy, and pathos as pure. It is in this 
 utter purity, this transparent simplicity, that Villette 
 is great. There is not one jarring note in any of the 
 delicious dialogues between Lucy and M. Paul, not one 
 
146 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 of those passages which must be erased if quotation is 
 not to fail of its effect. Take the scene where Lucy 
 breaks M, Paul's spectacles. 
 
 ' A score of times ere now I had seen them fall and 
 receive no damage — this time, as Lucy Snowe's hapless 
 luck would have it, they so fell that each clear pebble 
 became a shivered and shapeless star. 
 
 ' Now, indeed, dismay seized me — dismay and regret. 
 I knew the value of these lunettes : M. Paul's sight was 
 peculiar, not easily fitted, and these glasses suited him. 
 I had heard him call them his treasures : as I picked 
 them up, cracked and worthless, my hand trembled. 
 Frightened through all my nerves I was to see the mis- 
 chief I had done, but I think I was even more sorry 
 than afraid. For some seconds I dared not look the 
 bereaved Professor in the face ; he was the first to 
 speak. 
 
 '" La ! " he said : " me voili veuf de mes lunettes ! I 
 think that Mademoiselle Lucy will now confess that the 
 cord and gallows are amply earned ; she trembles in 
 anticipation of her doom. Ah, traitress ! traitress ! 
 You are resolved to have me quite blind and helpless in 
 your hands 1 " 
 
 ' I lifted my eyes : his face, instead of being irate, 
 lowering and furrowed, was overflowing with the smile, 
 coloured with the bloom I had seen brightening it that 
 evening at the Hotel Crecy. He was not angry — ^not 
 even grieved. For the real injury he showed himself 
 full of clemency ; under the real provocation, patient 
 as a saint.' 
 
 Take the ' Watchguard ' scene. 
 
 ' M. Paul came and stood behind me. He asked at 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 147 
 
 what I was working ; and I said I was making a watch- 
 guard. He asked " For whom ? " And I answered, 
 " For a gentleman — one of my friends." ' 
 
 Whereupon M. Paul flies into a passion, and accuses 
 Lucy of behaving to him ' " With what pungent viva- 
 cities — ^what an impetus of mutiny — what a fougue of 
 injustice." ..." Chut ! k I'instant 1 There ! there I 
 went — ^vive comme la poudre." He was sorry — he 
 was very sorry : for my sake he grieved over the hope- 
 less peculiarity. This emportement, this chaleur — gener- 
 ous, perhaps, but excessive — ^would yet, he feared, do 
 me a mischief. It was a pity. I was not — he believed, 
 in his soul — wholly without good qualities ; and would 
 I but hear reason, and be more sedate, more sober, less 
 en Vair, less coquette, less taken by show, less prone to 
 set an undue value on outside excellence — to make 
 much of the attentions of people remarkable chiefly for 
 so many feet of stature, des couleurs de poupee, un nez 
 plus ou moins Men fait, and an enormous amount of 
 fatuity — I might yet prove an useful, perhaps an exem- 
 plary character. But, as it was And here the 
 
 little man's voice was for a moment choked. 
 
 ' I would have looked up at him, or held out my hand, 
 or said a soothing word ; but I was afraid, if I stirred, I 
 should either laugh or cry ; so odd, in all this, was the 
 mixture of the touching and the absurd. 
 
 ' I thought he had nearly done : but no, he sat down 
 that he might go on at his ease. 
 
 ' " While he, M. Paul, was on these painful topics, he 
 would dare my anger, for the sake of my good, and would 
 venture to refer to a change he had noticed in my dress." ' 
 
148 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 ' " And if you condemn a bow of ribbon for a lady, 
 monsieur, you would necessarily disapprove of a thing 
 like this for a gentleman ? " holding up my bright little 
 chainlet of silk and gold. His sole reply was a groan — 
 I suppose over my levity. 
 
 ' After sitting some minutes in silence, and watching 
 the progress of the chain, at which I now wrought more 
 assiduously than ever, he inquired : 
 
 ' " Whether what he had just said would have the effect 
 of making me entirely detest him ? " 
 
 ' I hardly remember what answer I made, or how it 
 came about ; I don't think I spoke at all, but I know 
 we managed to bid good-night on friendly terms : and 
 even after M. Paul had reached the door, he turned 
 back just to explain " that he would not be under- 
 stood to speak in entire condemnation of the scarlet 
 dress." . . . 
 
 ' " And the flowers under my bonnet, monsieur ? " 
 I asked. " They are very little ones." 
 
 ' " Keep them little, then," said he. " Permit them 
 not to become full-blown." 
 
 ' " And the bow, monsieur — the bit of ribbon ? " 
 
 ' " Va pour le ruban 1 " was the propitious answer. 
 
 ' And so we settled it.' 
 
 That is good ; and when Lucy presents the watch- 
 guard it is better still. 
 
 ' He looked at the box : I saw its clear and warm tint, 
 and bright azure circlet, pleased his eyes. I told him 
 to open it. 
 
 ' " My initials ! " said he, indicating the letters in the 
 lid. " Who told you I was called Cari David ? " 
 
 ' " A little bird, monsieur." 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 149 
 
 ' " Does it fly from me to you ? Then one can tie 
 a message under its wing when needful." 
 
 ' He took out the chain — a trifle indeed as to value, 
 but glossy with silk and sparkling with beads. He liked 
 that, too — admired it artlessly, like a child. 
 " For me ? " 
 " Yes, for you." 
 
 " This is the thing you were working at last night ? " 
 " The same." 
 
 " You finished it this morning ? " 
 " I did." 
 
 " You commenced it with the intention that it should 
 be mine ? " 
 
 " Undoubtedly." 
 " And offered on my fete-day ? " 
 " Yes." 
 
 " This purpose continued as you wove it ? " 
 Again I assented. 
 
 " Then it is not necessary that I should cut out any 
 portion — saying, this part is not mine : it was plaited 
 under the idea and for the adornment of another ? " 
 
 ' " By no means. It is neither necessary, nor would 
 it be just." 
 
 ' " This object is all mine ? " 
 ' " That object is yours entirely." 
 ' Straightway monsieur opened his paletot, arranged 
 the guard splendidly across his chest, displaying as much 
 and suppressing as little as he could : for he had no 
 notion of concealing what he admired and thought 
 decorative. . . . 
 
 ' " A present c'est un fait accompli," said he, re- 
 adjusting his paletot. . . ,' 
 
150 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 To the last gesture of Monsieur it is superb. 
 
 I have taken those scenes because they are of crucial 
 importance as indications of what Charlotte Bronte was 
 doing in Villette, and yet would do. They show not only 
 an enormous advance in technique, but a sense of the 
 situation, of the scene h faire, which is entirely or almost 
 entirely lacking in her earlier work. 
 
 If there be degrees in reality, Lucy and Pauline de 
 Bassompierre are only less real than M. Paul. And by 
 some miracle their reality is not diminished by Charlotte 
 Bronte's singular change of intention with regard to 
 these two. Little Polly, the child of the beginning, the 
 inscrutable creature of nerves, exquisitely sensitive to 
 pain, fretting her heart out in love for her father and 
 for Graham Bretton, is hardly recognisable in Pauline, 
 Countess de Bassompierre. She has preserved only 
 her fragility, her fastidiousness, her little air of inaccessi- 
 bility. Polly is obviously predestined to that profound 
 and tragic suffering which is Lucy Snowe's. 
 
 ' I watched Polly rest her small elbow on her small 
 knee, her head on her hand ; I observed her draw a 
 square inch or two of pocket-handkerchief from the doll- 
 pocket of her doll-skirt, and then I heard her weep. 
 Other children in grief or pain cry aloud, without shame 
 or restraint, but this being wept : the tiniest occasional 
 sniff testified to her emotion.' 
 
 Again (Polly is parted from her father) : ' When the 
 street-door closed, she dropped on her knees at a chair 
 with a cry — " Papa ! " 
 
 ' It was low and long ; a sort of " why hast thou for- 
 saken me ? " During an ensuing space of some minutes 
 I perceived she endured agony. She went through, in 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 151 
 
 that brief interval of her infant life, emotions such as 
 some never feel ; it was in her constitution : she would 
 have more of such instants if she lived.' 
 
 Polly is contrasted with the cold and disagreeable Lucy. 
 ' I, Lucy Snowe, was calm,' Lucy says when she 
 records that agony. The effect she gives, of something 
 creepily insensitive and most unpleasant, is unmis- 
 takable in these early chapters. She watches Polly 
 with a cold, analytic eye. 'These sudden, dangerous 
 natures — sensitive as they are called — offer many a 
 curious spectacle to those whom a cooler temperament 
 has secured from participation in their vagaries.' When 
 Polly, charming Polly, waits on her father at the tea- 
 table, Lucy is impervious to her tiny charm. ' Can- 
 didly speaking, I thought her a little busy-body.' 
 When Graham Bretton repulses Polly, Lucy has some 
 thoughts of ' improving the occasion by inculcating 
 some of those maxims of philosophy whereof I had ever 
 a tolerable stock ready for application.' 
 
 There is no sign in the beginning that this detestable 
 Lucy is to be heroine. But in Chapter Four Polly 
 disappears and Lucy takes her place and plays her part. 
 The child Polly had a suffering and passionate heart, 
 for all her little air of fastidiousness and inaccessibility. 
 It is the suffering and passionate heart of Polly that beats 
 in Lucy of the Pensionnat. There is only enough of the 
 original Lucy left to sit in judgment on Ginevra Fan- 
 shawe and ' the Parisienne.' 
 
 The child Polly had an Imagination. ' "Miss Snowe," 
 said she in a whisper, " this is a wonderful book . . 
 it tells about distant countries, a long, long way from 
 England, which no traveller can reach without sailing 
 
152 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 thousands of miles over the sea. . . . Here is a picture 
 of thousands gathered in a desolate place — a plain 
 spread with sand, . . . And here are pictures more 
 stranger than that. There is the wonderful Great Wall 
 of China ; here is a Chinese lady with a foot littler than 
 mine. There is a wild horse of Tartary ; and here — most 
 strange of all — ^is a land of ice and snow without green 
 fields, woods, or gardens. In this land they found some 
 mammoth bones ; there are no mammoths now. You 
 don't know what it was ; but I can tell you, because 
 Graham told me. A mighty goblin creature, as high 
 as this room, and as long as the hall ; but not a fierce, 
 flesh-eating thing, Graham thinks. He believes if I 
 met one in a forest, it would not kill me, unless I came 
 quite in its way ; when it would trample me down 
 amongst the bushes, as I might tread on a grasshopper 
 in a hay-field without knowing it." ' 
 
 It is Polly's Imagination that appears again in Lucy's 
 ' Creative Impulse.' ' I with whom that Impulse was 
 the most intractable, the most capricious, the most 
 maddening of masters ... a deity which sometimes, 
 under circumstances apparently propitious, would not 
 speak when questioned, would not hear when appealed 
 to, would not, when sought, be found ; but would stand, 
 all cold, all indurated, all granite, a dark Baal with 
 carven lips and blank eyeballs, and breast like the stone 
 face of a tomb ; and again, suddenly, at some turn, 
 some sound, some long-trembling sob of the wind, at 
 some rushing past of an unseen stream of electricity, 
 the irrational Demon would awake unsolicited, would 
 stir strangely alive, would rush from its pedestal like a 
 perturbed Dagon, calling to its votary for a sacrifice, 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 153 
 
 whatever the hour — to its victim for some blood or 
 some breath, whatever the circumstances or scene — 
 rousing its priest, treacherously promising vaticination, 
 perhaps filling its temple with a strange hum of oracles, 
 but sure to give half the significance to fateful winds, 
 and grudging to the desperate listener even a miserable 
 remnant — ^yielding it sordidly, as though each word had 
 been a drop of the deathless ichor of its own dark veins.' 
 
 That is Lucy. But when Polly reappears fitfully as 
 Pauline de Bassompierre, she is an ordinary, fastidious 
 little lady without a spark of imagination or of passion. 
 
 Now, in the first three chapters of Villette, Charlotte 
 Bronte concentrated all her strength and all her art on 
 the portrait of little Polly. The portrait of little Polly 
 is drawn with the most delicate care and tender compre- 
 hension, and the most vivid and entire reality. I cannot 
 agree with Mr. Swinburne that George Eliot, with her 
 Totty and Eppie and Lillo, showed a closer observation 
 of the ways, or a more perfect understanding of the heart 
 of a child. Only little Maggie Tulliver can stand beside 
 little Polly in Villette. She is an answer to every critic, 
 from Mr. Swinburne downwards, who maintains that 
 Charlotte Bronte could not draw children. 
 
 But Lucy at fourteen is drawn with slight and grudging 
 strokes, sufficient for the minor part she is evidently 
 to play. Lucy at Bretton is a mere foil to little Polly. 
 Charlotte Bronte distinctly stated in her letters that 
 she did not care for Miss Snowe. ' Lucy must not marry 
 Dr. John ; he is far too youthful, handsome, bright- 
 spirited, and sweet-tempered ; he is a " curled darling " 
 of Nature and of fortune, and must draw a prize in life's 
 lottery. His wife must be young, rich, pretty ; he 
 
134 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 must be made very happy indeed. If Lucy marries 
 anybody, it must be the Professor — a man in whom there 
 is much to forgive, much to " put up with." But I 
 am not leniently disposed towards Miss Frost : from 
 the beginning, I never meant to appoint her lines in 
 pleasant places.' ' As to the character of Lucy Snowe, 
 my intention from the first was that she should not 
 occupy the pedestal to which Jane Eyre was raised by 
 some injudicious admirers. She is where I meant her 
 to be, and where no charge of self-laudation can touch 
 her.' 
 
 But Lucy is not altogether where she was meant to 
 be. When she reappears at the Pensionnat it is with 
 ' flame in her soul and lightning in her eyes.' She 
 reminds M. Paul ' of a young she wild creature, new 
 caught, untamed, viewing with a mixture of fire and 
 fear the first entrance of the breaker-in.' 
 
 ' " You look," said he, " like one who would snatch 
 at a draught of sweet poison, and spurn wholesome 
 bitters with disgust." ' 
 
 There is no inconsistency in this. Women before 
 now have hidden a soul like a furnace under coldness and 
 unpleasantness, and smothered shrieking nerves under 
 an appearance of apathy. Lucy Snowe is one of them. 
 As far as she goes, Lucy at Bretton is profoundly con- 
 sistent with Lucy in Villette. It is not Lucy's volcanic 
 outbreaks in the Pensionnat that do violence to her 
 creator's original intention. It is the debasement of 
 Polly and the exaltation of Lucy to her tragic r61e, the 
 endowment of Lucy with Polly's rarest qualities, to the 
 utter impoverishment of Pauline de Bassompierre. 
 Polly in Villette is a mere foil to Lucy. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 155 
 
 Having lavished such care and love on Polly, Charlotte 
 Bronte could not possibly have meant to debase her and 
 efface her. How then did it happen that PoUy was 
 debased and Lucy sublimely exalted ? 
 
 It happened, I think, partly because for the first time 
 Charlotte Bronte created a real living man. The reality 
 of M. Paul Emanuel was too strong both for Lucy and 
 for Charlotte Bronte. From the moment when he seized 
 her and dragged her to the garret he made Lucy live as 
 Charlotte Bronte had never contemplated her living. 
 He made her live to the utter exclusion and extinction 
 of Pauline de Bassompierre. 
 
 And ' the despotic little man ' dominates the book 
 to an extent that Charlotte never contemplated either. 
 Until the storm carried him out of her sight, she was, 
 I think, unaware of his dominion. Dr. John was her 
 hero. She told Mr. George Smith, his prototype, that 
 she intended him for the most beautiful character in 
 the book (which must have been very gratifying to Mr. 
 George Smith). He was the type she needed for her 
 purpose. But he does not ' come off,' if only for the 
 reason that she is consciously preoccupied with him. 
 Dr. John was far more of an obsession to her than this 
 little man, Paul Emanuel, who was good enough for Lucy 
 Snowe. Pauline de Bassompierre was to be finished and 
 perfected to match the high finish and perfection of Dr. 
 John. Yet neither Pauline nor Dr. John ' came off.' 
 Charlotte Bronte cared too much for them. But for Paul 
 Emanuel she did not care. He comes off in a triumph 
 of the detached, divinely free ' Creative Impulse.' 
 
 Charlotte, with all her schemes, is delivered over to 
 her genius from the moment when Lucy settles in Villette. 
 
156 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 To Charlotte's inexperience Brussels was a perfect hot- 
 bed for the germs of the real. That, I think, can be 
 admitted without subscribing to the view that it was 
 anything more. Once in the Pensionnat, Lucy entered 
 an atmosphere of the most intense reality. From that 
 point onward the book is literally inspired by the sense 
 of atmosphere, that sense to which experience brings 
 the stuff to work on. All Charlotte's experience and 
 her suffering is there, changed, intensified, transmuted 
 to an experience and a suffering which were not hers. 
 
 This matured sense of actuality is shown again in the 
 drawing of the minor characters. There is a certain 
 vindictiveness about the portrait of Ginevra Fanshawe, 
 a touch of that fierce, intolerant temper that caused 
 Blanche Ingram to be strangled by the hands of her 
 creator. Ginevra is not strangled. She lives splendidly ; 
 she flourishes in an opulence of detail. 
 
 Experience may have partly accounted for Ginevra. 
 It could hardly have accounted for the little de Hamel, 
 and he is perfect as far as he goes. 
 
 It is because of this increasing mastery, • this new 
 power in handling unsympathetic types, because, in 
 short, of its all round excellence, that Villette must count 
 as Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece. It is marvellous 
 that within such limits she should have attained such 
 comparative catholicity of vision. It is not the vast 
 vision of Shirley, prophetic and inspired, and a little 
 ineffectual. It is the lucid, sober, unobstructed gaze of 
 a more accomplished artist, the artist whose craving for 
 ' reality ' is satisfied ; the artist who is gradually extend- 
 ing the limits of his art. When Charlotte Bronte wrote 
 Jane Eyre she could not appreciate Jane Austen ; she 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 157 
 
 wondered why George Henry Lewes liked her so much. 
 She objected to Jane Austen because there was no passion 
 in her, and therefore no poetry and no reality. When 
 she wrote Shirley she had seen that passion was not 
 everything ; there were other things, very high reahties, 
 that were not passion. By the time she wrote Villette, 
 she saw, not only that there are other things, but that 
 passion is the rarest thing on earth. It does not enter 
 into the life of ordinary people like Dr. John, and Madame 
 Beck, and Ginevra Fanshawe. 
 
 In accordance with this tendency to level up, her 
 style in Villette attains a more even and a more certain 
 excellence. Her flights are few ; so are her lapses. 
 Her fearful tendency to rhetoric is almost gone. Gone 
 too are the purple patches ; but there is everywhere 
 delicate colour under a vivid light. But there are 
 countless passages which show the perfection to which 
 she could bring her old imaginative style. Take thq. 
 scene where Lucy, under the influence of opium, goes 
 into Villette en fete. 
 
 ' The drug wrought. I know not whether Madame 
 had over-charged or under-charged the dose ; its result 
 was not that she intended. Instead of stupor, came 
 excitement. I became alive to new thought — to reverie 
 peculiar in colouring. A gathering call ran among the 
 faculties, their bugles sang, their trumpets rang an 
 untimely summons. . . .' 
 
 ' I took a route well known, and went up towards the 
 palatial and royal Haute- Ville ; thence the music I 
 heard certainly floated ; it was hushed now, but it might 
 rewaken. I went on : neither band nor bell-music 
 came to meet me ; another sound replaced it, a sound 
 
158 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 like a strong tide, a great flow, deepening as I proceeded. 
 Light broke, movement gathered, chimes pealed — to 
 what was I coming ? Entering on the level of a Grande 
 Place, I found myself, with the suddenness of magic, 
 plimged amidst a gay, living, joyous crowd. 
 
 ' Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination ; the 
 whole world seems abroad ; moonlight and heaven are 
 banished : the town by her own flambeaux, beholds 
 her own splendour — gay dresses, grand equipage, fine 
 horses and gallant riders, throng the bright streets. I 
 see even scores of masks. It is a strange scene, stranger 
 than dreams.' 
 
 This is only beaten by that lyric passage that ends 
 Villette ; that sonorous dirge that rings high above all 
 pathos, which is somehow a song of triumph, inspired 
 by the whole power and splendour and magnificence of 
 storm and death. 
 
 ' The sun passes the equinox ; the days shorten, the 
 leaves grow sere ; but — he is coming. 
 
 ' Frosts appear at night ; November has sent his fogs 
 in advance ; the wind takes its autumn moan ; but — 
 he is coming. 
 
 ' The skies hang full and dark — a rack sails from the 
 west ; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms — 
 arches and broad radiations ; there rise resplendent 
 mornings — ^glorious, royal, purple, as monarch in his 
 state ; the heavens are one flame ; so wild are they, 
 they rival battle at its thickest — so bloody, they shame 
 Victory in her pride. I know some signs of the sky, 
 I have noted them ever since childhood. God, watch 
 that sail ! Oh ! guard it ! 
 
 ' The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace. Banshee 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 159 
 
 — " keening " at every window ! It will rise — it will 
 swell — ^it shrieks out long : wander as I may through 
 the house this night, I cannot lull the blast. The ad- 
 vancing hours naake it strong ; by midnight all sleepless 
 watchers hear and fear a wild south-west storm. 
 
 ' That storm roared frenzied for seven days. It did not 
 cease till the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks : it did 
 not lull till the deeps had gorged their fill of substance. 
 Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved 
 his perfect work, would he fold the wings whose waft 
 was thunder — the tremor of whose plumes was storm.' 
 
 After Villette, the Last Sketch, the Fragment of Emma ; 
 that fragment which Charlotte Bronte read to her 
 husband not long before her death. All he said was 
 ' The critics will accuse you of repetition.' 
 
 The critics have fulfilled his cautious prophecy. The 
 Fragment passed for one of those sad things of Which 
 the least said the better. It was settled that Charlotte 
 Bronte had written herself out, that if she had lived she 
 would have become more and more her own plagiarist. 
 There is a middle-aged lady in Emma, presumably con- 
 ceived on the lines of Mrs. Fairfax and Mrs. Pry or. 
 There is a girls' school, which is only not Lowood because 
 it is so obviously Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor. There 
 is a schoolmistress with sandy hair and thin lips and a 
 cold blue eye, recalling Madame Beck, though there the 
 likeness ceases. And in that school, ill-treated by that 
 schoolmistress, there is a little ugly, suffering, deserted 
 child. 
 
 All this looks very much like repetition. But it does 
 not shake my private behef that Emma is a fragment 
 
160 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 of what would have been as great a novel as Villette. 
 There are indications. There is Mr. Ellin, who proves, 
 that Charlotte Bronte could create a live man of the 
 finer sort, an unexploited masculine type with no earthly- 
 resemblance to Rochester or to Louis Moore or M. Paul. 
 He is an unfinished sketch rather than a portrait, but a 
 sketch that would not too shamefully have discredited 
 Mr. Henry James. For there is a most modern fineness 
 and subtlety in Emma ; and, for all its sketchy incom- 
 pleteness, a peculiar certainty of touch, an infallible 
 sense of the significant action, the revealing gesture. 
 With a splendid economy of means, scenes, passages, 
 phrases apparently slight are charged with the most 
 intense psychological suggestion. When Mr. Ellin, 
 summoned on urgent business by Miss Wilcox, takes 
 that preposterously long and leisurely round to get to 
 her, you know what is passing in the mind of Mr. Ellin 
 as well as if you had been told. In that brief scene 
 between Mr. Ellin and the schoolmistress, you know 
 as well as if you had been told, that Miss Wilcox has 
 lost Mr. Ellin because of her unkindness to a child. 
 When the child, Matilda Fitzgibbon, falls senseless, and 
 Mr. Ellin gives his inarticulate cry and lifts her from 
 the floor, the enigmatic man has revealed his innermost 
 nature. 
 
 Now a fragment that can suggest all this with the 
 smallest possible expenditure of phrases, is not a frag- 
 ment that can be set aside. It is slight ; but slightness 
 that accomplishes so much is a sign of progress rather 
 than of falling-off. We shall never know what happened 
 to Matilda when Mr. Ellin took her from Miss Wilcox. 
 We shall never know what happened to Mr. Ellin ; but 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 161 
 
 I confess that I am dying to know, and that I find it 
 hard to forgive Mr. NichoUs for having killed them, so 
 certain am I that they would have lived triumphantly 
 if Charlotte Bronte had not married him. 
 
 Some of us will be profoundly indifferent to this issue ; 
 for Charlotte Bronte has no following in a certain school. 
 She defies analysis. You cannot label her. What she 
 has done is not ' Realism,' neither is it ' Romance.' She 
 displeases both by her ambiguity and by her lack of 
 form. She has no infallible dramatic instinct. Even 
 in Villette she preserves some of her clumsiness, her 
 crudity, her improbability. The progress of * the Novel ' 
 in our day is towards a perfection of form and a reality 
 she never knew. 
 
 But ' reality ' is a large term ; and, as for form, who 
 cared about it in the fifties ? As for improbability — as 
 M. Dimnet says — she is not more improbable than Balzac, 
 
 And all these things, the ambiguity, the formlessness 
 and the rest, she was gradually correcting as she ad- 
 vanced. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance 
 and significance of her attainment in Villette ; there has 
 been so much confused thinking in the consecrated 
 judgment of that novel. Villette owes its high place 
 largely to its superior construction and technique ; 
 largely and primarily to Charlotte Bronte's progress 
 towards the light, towards the world, towards the great 
 undecorated reality. It is odd criticism that ignores the 
 inevitable growth, the increasing vision and grasp, the 
 whole indomitable advance of a great writer, and credits 
 ' experience ' with the final masterpiece. As a result 
 of this confusion Villette has been judged ' final ' in 
 another sense. Yes, final — this novel that shows every 
 
 I. 
 
162 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 sign and token of long-maturing, long-enduring power. 
 If Chariotte Bronte's critics had not hypnotised them- 
 selves by the perpetual reiteration of that word ' ex- 
 perience,' it would have been impossible for them, with 
 the evidence of her work before them, to have believed 
 that in Villette she had written herself out. 
 She was only just beginning. 
 
 Of Charlotte Bronte's Poems there is not much to say. 
 They are better poems than Branwell's or Anne's, but 
 that does not make them very good. Still, they are 
 interesting, and they are important, because they are 
 the bridge by which Charlotte Bronte passed into her 
 own dominion. She took Wordsworth with his Poems 
 and Ballads for her guide, and he misled her and de- 
 layed her on her way, and kept her a long time standing 
 on her bridge. For in her novels, and her novels only, 
 Charlotte was a poet. In her poems she is a novelist, 
 striving and struggling for expression in a cramped 
 form, an imperfect and improper medium. But most 
 indubitably a novelist. Nearly all her poems which 
 are not artificial are impersonal. They deal with 
 ■ situations,' with ' psychological problems,' that cry 
 aloud for prose. There is the ' Wife ' who seems to have 
 lived a long, adventurous life with 'William' through 
 many poems ; there is the deserted wife and mother in 
 ' Mementos ' ; thpre is ' Frances,' the deserted maiden ; 
 there is ' Gilbert ' with his guilty secret and his suicide, a 
 triple domestic tragedy in the three acts of a three-part 
 ballad ; there is the lady in ' Preference,' who prefers her 
 husband to her passionate and profoundly deluded lover ; 
 there is the woman in ' Apostasy,' wrecked in the conflict 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 163 
 
 between love and priestcraft ; and there is little else 
 beside. These poems are straws, showing the way of 
 the wind that bloweth where it listeth. 
 
 Too much has been written about Charlotte Bronte, and 
 far too much has been read. You come away from it 
 with an enormous mass of printed stuff wrecked in your 
 memory, letters, simply hundreds of letters, legends and 
 theories huddled together in a heap, with all values and 
 proportions lost ; and your impression is of tumult and 
 of suffering, and of a multitude of confused and incon- 
 gruous happenings ; funerals and flirtations, or some- 
 thing very like flirtations, to the sound of the passing 
 bell and sexton's chisel ; upheavals of soul, flights to 
 and from Brussels, interminable years of exile, and of 
 lurid, tragic passion ; years, interminable, monotonous 
 years of potato-peeling and all manner of household 
 piety ; scenes of debauchery, horrors of opium and of 
 drink; celebrity, cataclysmal celebrity, rushings up to 
 town in storm and darkness, dim coffee-houses in 
 Paternoster Row, dinner-parties ; deaths, funerals, 
 melancholia ; and still celebrity ; years, interminable, 
 monotonous years of blazing celebrity, sounds of the 
 literary workshop overpowering the sexton's chisel ; 
 then marriage, sudden and swift ; then death. And in 
 the midst of it all, one small and rather absurd and 
 obscure figure, tossed to and fro, said to be Charlotte 
 Bronte. 
 
 What an existence ! 
 
 This is the impression created by the bibliographical 
 total. But sweep four-fifths of it away, all the legends 
 and half the letters, and sort and set out what remains. 
 
164 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 observing values and proportions, and you get an outer 
 life where no great and moving event ever came, saving 
 only death (Charlotte's marriage hardly counts beside 
 it) ; an outer life of a strange and almost oppressive 
 simplicity and silence; and an inner life, timiultuous 
 and profound in suffering, a life to all appearances frus- 
 trate, where all nourishment of the emotions was reduced 
 to the barest allowance a woman's heart can depend 
 on and yet live ; and none the less a life that out of 
 that starvation diet raised enough of rich and vivid and 
 superb emotion to decorate a hundred women's lives ; 
 an inner life which her genius fed and was fed from, 
 for which no reaUty, no experience, could touch its 
 own intensity of realisation. And, genius apart, in the 
 region of actual and ostensible emotion, no one of us 
 can measure the depth of her adoration of duty, or the 
 depth, the force and volume of her passion for her own 
 people, and for the earth trodden by their feet, the earth 
 that covered them. Beside it every other feeling was 
 temporary and insignificant. In the hght of it you see 
 Charlotte Bronte's figure for ever simple and beautiful 
 and great ; behind her for ever the black-grey setting 
 of her village and the purple of her moors. That great- 
 ness and beauty and simplicity is destroyed by any 
 effort to detach her from her background. She may 
 seem susceptible to the alien influences of exile ; but it 
 is as an exile that she suffers ; and her most inspired 
 moments are her moments of return, when she wrote 
 prose like this : ' The moon reigns glorious, glad of the 
 gale ; as glad as if she gave herself to his fierce caress 
 with love. No Endymion will watch for his goddess 
 to-night : there are no flocks on the mountains.' 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 165 
 
 Around the figure of Emily Bronte there is none of 
 that clamour and confusion. She stands apart in an 
 enduring silence, and guards for ever her secret and her 
 mystery. By the mercy of heaven the swarm of gossips 
 and of theorists has passed her by. She has no legend 
 or hardly any. So completely has she been passed over 
 that when Madame Duclaux came to write the Life of 
 Emily Bronte she found little to add to Mrs. Gaskell's 
 meagre record beyond that story, which she tells with 
 an incomparable simplicity and reticence, of Emily in 
 her mortal illness, sitting by the hearth, combing her 
 long hair till the comb slips from her fingers. 
 
 That is worth all the reams, the terrible reams that 
 have been written about Charlotte. 
 
 There can be no doubt that Emily Bronte found her 
 shelter behind Charlotte's fame ; but she was protected 
 most of all by the unapproachable, the unique and 
 bafiling quality of her temperament and of" her genius. 
 Her own people seem to have felt it ; Charlotte herself 
 in that preface to Wuthering Heights, which stands as 
 her last vindication and eulogy of her dead sister, even 
 Charlotte betrays a curious reservation and reluctance. 
 You feel that Emily's genius inspired her with a kind of 
 sacred terror. 
 
 Charlotte destroyed all records of her sister except 
 her poems. Between six and seven hundred of her own 
 letters have been published ; there are two of Emily's. 
 They tell little or nothing. And there was that diary 
 she kept for Anne, where she notes with extreme brevity 
 the things that are happening in her family. There 
 never was a diary wherein the soul of the diarist was so 
 well concealed. 
 
166 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 And yet, because of this silence, this absence of legend 
 and conjecture, we see Emily Bronte more clearly than 
 we can ever hope to see Charlotte now. Though hardly 
 anything is known of her, what is known is authentic ; 
 it comes straight from those who knew and loved her, 
 from Charlotte, from Ellen Nussey, from the servants 
 at the Parsonage. Even of her outward and visible 
 presence we have a clearer image. The lines are fewer, 
 but they are more vivid. You see her tall and slender, 
 in her rough clothes, tramping the moors with the form 
 and the step of a virile adolescent. Shirley, the ' bete 
 fauve,' is Emily civilised. You see her head carried high 
 and crowned with its long, dark hair, coiled simply, 
 caught up with a comb. You see her face, honey-pale, 
 her slightly high, slightly aquiline nose ; her beautiful 
 eyes, dark-grey, luminous ; the ' kjnd, kindling, liquid 
 eyes ' that Ellen Nussey saw ; and their look, one moment 
 alert, intent, and the next, inaccessibly remote. 
 
 I have seen such kind and kindling eyes in the face of 
 a visionary, born with a profound, incurable indifference 
 to the material event ; for whom the Real is the 
 incredible, unapparent harmony that flows above, 
 beneath, and within the gross flux of appearances. To 
 him it is the sole thing real. That kind and kindling 
 look I know to be simply a light reflected from the surface 
 of the dream. It is anything but cold ; it has indeed 
 a certain tender flame ; but you would be profoundly 
 mistaken if you argued from it more than the faintest 
 polite interest in you and your affairs. The kindling 
 of Emily Bronte's eyes I take to have had at times 
 something of the same unearthly quality. Strangers 
 received from her an impression as of a creature utterly 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 167 
 
 removed from them ; a remoteness scarcely human, hard 
 to reconcile with her known tenderness for every living 
 thing. She seems to have had a passionate repugnance 
 to alien and external contacts, and to have felt no more 
 than an almost reluctant liking for the lovable and 
 charming Ellen Nussey. Indeed, she regarded Charlotte's 
 friend with the large and virile tolerance that refuses 
 to be charmed. 
 
 And yet in the depths of her virginal nature there 
 was something fiercely tender and maternal. There 
 can be no doubt that she cared for Charlotte who called 
 her ' Mine own bonnie love ' ; but she would seem to 
 have cared far more for Anne who was young and help- 
 less, and for Branwell who was helpless and most weak. 
 
 Thus there is absolutely nothing known of Emily that 
 destroys or disturbs the image that Haworth holds of 
 her ; nothing that detaches her for a moment from her 
 own people, and from her own place. Her days of exile 
 count not at all in her thirty years of home. No separa- 
 tion ever broke, for one hour that counted, the bonds 
 that bound her to her moors, or frustrated the divine 
 passion of her communion with their earth and sky. 
 Better still, no tale of passion such as they tell of 
 Charlotte was ever told of Emily, 
 
 It may be told yet, for no secret thing belonging to 
 this disastrous family is sacred. There may be some- 
 where some awful worshipper of Emily Bronte, im- 
 patient of her silence and unsatisfied with her strange, 
 her virgin and inaccessible beauty, who will some day 
 make up some story of some love-affair, some passion 
 kindred to Catherine Earnshaw's passion for Heathclift, 
 of which her moors have kept the secret ; and he will 
 
168 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 tell his tale. But we shall at least know that he has 
 made it up. And even so, it will have been better for 
 that man if he had never been born. He will have done 
 his best to destroy or to deface the loveliness of a figure 
 unique in literature. And he will have ignored the 
 one perfect, the one essentially true picture of Emily 
 Bronte, which is to be found in Maurice Maeterlinck's 
 Wisdom and Destiny. 
 
 To M. Maeterlinck she is the supreme instance of the 
 self-sufBcing soul, independent and regardless of the 
 material event. She shows the emptiness, the impotence, 
 the insignificance of all that we call ' experience,' beside 
 the spirit that endures. ' Not a single event ever paused 
 as it passed by her threshold ; yet did every event she 
 could claim take place in her heart, with incomparable 
 force and beauty, with matchless precision and detail. 
 We say that nothing ever happened ; but did not all 
 things really happen to her much more directly and 
 tangibly than with most of us, seeing that everything 
 that took place about her, everything that she saw or 
 heard was transformed within her into thoughts and 
 feelings, into indulgent love, admiration, adoration of 
 life . . . ? ' 
 
 ' Of her happiness none can doubt. Not in the soul of 
 the best of all those whose happiness has lasted longest, 
 been the most active, diversified, perfect, could more 
 imperishable harvest be found, than in the soul Emily 
 Bronte lays bare. If to her there came nothing of all 
 that passes in love, sorrow, passion or anguish, still did 
 she possess all that abides when emotion has faded 
 away.' * 
 
 ^ Wisdom and Destiny, translated by Alfred Sutro. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 169 
 
 What was true of Charlotte, that her inner hfe was 
 luminous with intense realisation, was a hundred times 
 more true of Emily. It was so true that beside it 
 nothing else that can be said is altogether true. It is 
 not necessary for a man to be convinced of the illusory 
 nature of time and of material happenings in order to 
 appreciate Charlotte's genius ; but his comprehension 
 of Emily's will be adequate or otherwise, according to 
 the passion and sincerity with which he embraces that 
 idea. And he must have, further, a sense of the reality 
 behind the illusion. It is through her undying sense 
 of it that Emily Bronte is great. She had none of the 
 proud appearances of the metaphysical mind ; she did 
 not, so far as we know, devour, like George Eliot, whole 
 systems of philosophy in her early youth. Her pas- 
 sionate pantheism was not derived ; it was estabhshed 
 in her own soul. She was a mystic, not by religious 
 vocation, but by temperament and by ultimate vision. 
 She offers the apparent anomaly of extreme detachment 
 and of an unconquerable love of life. 
 
 It was the highest and the purest passion that you 
 can well conceive. For life gave her nothing in return. 
 It treated her worse than it treated Charlotte. She 
 had none of the things that, after all, Charlotte had ; 
 neither praise nor fame in her life-time ; nor friendship, 
 nor love, nor vision of love. All these things ' passed 
 her by with averted head ' ; and she stood in her in- 
 violable serenity and watched them go, without putting 
 out her hand to one of them. You cannot surprise 
 her in any piteous gesture of desire or regret. And, 
 unlike Charlotte, she made it impossible for you to 
 pity her. 
 
170 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 It is this superb attitude to life, this independence 
 of the material event, this detachment from the stream 
 of circumstance, that marks her from her sister ; for 
 Charlotte is at moments pitifully immersed in the stream 
 of circumstance, pitifully dependent on the material 
 event. It is true that she kept her head above the 
 stream, and that the failure of the material event did 
 not frustrate or hinder her ultimate achievement. But 
 Charlotte's was not by any means ' a chainless soul.' 
 It struggled and hankered after the unattainable. What 
 she attained and realised she realised and attained in 
 her imagination only. She knew nothing of the soul's 
 more secret and intimate possession. And even her 
 imagination waited to some extent upon experience. 
 When Charlotte wrote of passion, of its tragic suffering, 
 or of its ultimate appeasing, she, after all, wrote of things 
 that might have happened to her. But when Emily 
 wrote of passion, she wrote of a thing that, as far as 
 she personally was concerned, not only was not and 
 had not been, but never could be. It was true enough 
 of Charlotte that she created. But of Emily it was 
 absolutely and supremely true. 
 
 Hers is not the language of frustration, but of com- 
 plete and satisfying possession. I t may seem marvel - 
 lous in the mouth of a womanjdestitute of all^motional 
 experience, in the restricted sense ; but thejceal-wander 
 would have been a H^Mfftmn^ffe«^teJbjorn_iof .any_Eer- 
 sonal emotion ; so certain is it that, ii. was ^through 
 her personal^ destitution that her_ genius was so jvirile 
 and so rich. At its hour it found her virgin, not only 
 to passion but to the bare idea of passion, to the inner 
 and immaterial event. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 171 
 
 And her genius was great, not only through her stupen- 
 dous imagihatidn, but because it fed on the still more 
 withdrawn and secret sources of her soul. If she had 
 had no genius she would yet be great because of what 
 took^ace^ within hej^ the fusion of her soul with the 
 transcendent and enduring life. 
 
 It was there that, possessing nothing, she possessed 
 all things ; and her secret escapes you if you are aware 
 only of her splendid paganism. She never speaks the 
 language of religious resignation like Anne and Char- 
 lotte. It is most unlikely that she relied, openly or in 
 secret, on ' the merits of the Redeemer,' or on any of 
 the familiar consolations of religion. As she bowed to 
 no disaster and no grief, consolation would have been 
 the last thing in any religion that she looked for. But, 
 for height and depth of supernatural attainment, there 
 is no comparison between Emily's grip of divine reality 
 and poor Anne's spasmodic and despairing clutch ; 
 and none between Charlotte's piety, her ' God willing ' ; 
 ' I suppose I ought to be thankful,' and Emily's accept- 
 ance and endurance of the event. 
 
 I am reminded that one event she neither accepted 
 nor endured. She fought death. Her spirit lifted the 
 pathetic, febrile struggle of weakness with corruption, 
 and turned it to a splendid. Titanic, and unearthly 
 combat. 
 
 And yet it was in her life rather than her death that 
 she was splendid. There is something shocking and 
 repellent in her last defiance. It shrieks discord with 
 the endurance and acceptance, braver than all revolt, 
 finer than all resignation, that was the secret of her 
 genius and of her life. 
 
172 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 There is no need to reconcile this supreme detachment 
 with the storm and agony that rages through Wuthering 
 Heights, or with the passion for life and adoration of 
 the earth that burns there, an imperishable flame ; or 
 with Catherine Earnshaw's dream of heaven : ' 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 into the middle of the 
 heath on the top of Wuthering Heights ; where I woke 
 sobbing for joy.' Catherine Earnshaw's dream has been 
 cited innumerable times to prove that Emily Bronte 
 was a splendid pagan. I do not know what it does 
 prove, if it is not the absolute and immeasurable great- 
 ness of her genius, that, dwelling as she undoubtedly did 
 dwell, in the secret and invisible world, she could yet 
 conceive and bring forth Catherine Earnshaw. 
 
 It is not possible to diminish the force or to take away 
 one word of Mr. Swinb urne's magnificgnt_eulggy. There 
 was in the 'passionate great genius of ERiJly- Bronte,.' i^ 
 dark, unconscious^ instinct as of primitive nature: worshig.' 
 That was where she was so poised and so complete ; that 
 she touches earth and heaven, and is at once intoxicated 
 with the splendour of the passion of living, and holds her 
 spirit in security and her heart in peace. She plunged 
 with Catherine Earnshaw into the thick of the tumult, 
 and her detachment is not more wonderful than her 
 immersion. 
 
 It is our own imperfect vision that is bewildered 
 by the union in her of these antagonistic attitudes. It 
 is not only entirely possible and compatible, but, if 
 your soul be comprehensive, it is inevitable that you 
 should adore the forms of life, and yet be aware of 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 173 
 
 their impermanence ; that you should affirm with equal 
 fervour their illusion and the radiance of the reality 
 that manifests itself in them. JEmily Bronte was nothing' 
 ifjQot comprehensive. There was no distance, no abyss 
 Joo vas^ no antagonism, no contra,diction too,, violent 
 and appalling for h er e mbracing s oul. Without a hint, 
 so far as we know, from any philosophy, by a sheer flash 
 of genius she pierced to the secret of the world and 
 crystalhsed it in two lines : — 
 
 ' The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling 
 Can centre hoth the worlds of Heaven and Hell.' 
 
 It is doubtful if she ever read a line of Blake ; yet it 
 is Blake that her poems perpetually recall, and it is 
 Blake's vision that she has reached there. She too knew 
 what it was 
 
 ' To see a world in a grain of sand. 
 And a Heaven in a wild flower. 
 To hold Infinity in the palm of your hand. 
 And Eternity in an hour.' 
 
 She sees by a flash what he saw continuously ; but it 
 is by the same light she sees it and wins her place among 
 the mystics. 
 
 Her mind was not always poised. It swung between its 
 vision of transparent unity and its love of earth for 
 earth's sake. There are at least four poems of hers that 
 show this entirely natiu-al oscillation. 
 
 In one, a nameless poem, the Genius of Earth calls to 
 the visionary soul : 
 
 Shall earth no more inspire thee. 
 
 Thou lonely dreamer now .'' 
 Since passion may not fire thee, 
 
 Shall nature cease to bow ? 
 
174 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Thy mind is ever moving 
 In regions dark to thee ; 
 
 Recall its useless roving. 
 Come back, and dwell with me. 
 
 Few hearts to mortals given 
 
 On earth so wildly pine ; 
 Yet few would ask a heaven 
 
 More like this earth than thine. 
 
 ' The Night- Wind ' sings the same song, lures with the 
 
 same enchantment ; and the human voice answers, 
 
 resisting : 
 
 ' Play with the scented flower, 
 
 The young tree's supple bough. 
 And leave my human feelings 
 In their own course to flow.' 
 
 But the other voice is stronger : 
 
 The wanderer would not heed me ; 
 
 Its kiss grew warmer still. 
 ' Oh, come,' it sighed so sweetly ; 
 
 ' I '11 win thee 'gainst thy will. 
 
 Were we not friends from childhood ? 
 
 Have I not loved thee long? 
 As long as thou, the solemn night, 
 
 Whose silence wakes my song. 
 
 And when thy heart is resting 
 
 Beneath the church-aisle stone, 
 / shall have time for mourning. 
 
 And thou for being alone.' 
 
 There are nine verses of ' The Night- Wind,' and the first 
 eight are negligible ; but, as for the last and ninth, I 
 do not know any poem in any language that renders, in 
 four short lines, and with such incomparable magic and 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 175 
 
 poignancy, the haunting and pursuing of the human by 
 the inhuman, that passion of the homeless and eternal 
 wind. 
 
 And this woman, destitute, so far as can be known, of 
 all metaphysical knowledge or training, reared in the 
 narrowest and least metaphysical of creeds, did yet 
 contrive to express in one poem of four irregular verses 
 all the hunger and thirst after the ' Absolute ' that ever 
 moved a human soul, all the bewilderment and agony 
 inflicted by the unintelligible spectacle of existence, the 
 intolerable triumph of evil over good, and did conceive 
 an image and a vision of the transcendent reality that 
 holds, as in crystal, all the philosophies that were ever 
 worthy of the name. 
 
 Here it is. There are once more two voices : one of 
 the Man, the other of the Seer. 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER 
 
 'Ohj for the time when I shall sleep 
 
 Without identity. 
 And never care how rain may steep. 
 
 Or snow may cover me ! 
 No promised heaven, these wild desires 
 
 Could all, or half fulfil ; 
 No threatened hell, with quenchless fires. 
 
 Subdue this restless will. 
 
 ' So said I, and still say the same ; 
 
 Still, to my death, will say — 
 Three gods, within this little frame, 
 
 Are warring night and day ; 
 Heaven could not hold them all, and yet 
 
 They all are held in me ; 
 And must be mine till I forget 
 
 My present entity ! 
 
176 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Oh, for the time, when in my breast 
 
 Their struggles will be o'er ! 
 Oh, for the day, when I shall rest, 
 
 And never suffer more ! ' 
 
 ' I saw a spirit, standing, man, 
 
 Where thou dost stand — an hour ago. 
 And round his feet three rivers ran. 
 
 Of equal depth, and equal flow — 
 A golden stream — and one like blood. 
 
 And one like sapphire seemed to be ; 
 But where they joined their triple flood 
 
 It tumbled in an inky sea. 
 The spirit sent his dazzling gaze 
 
 Down through that ocean's gloomy night ; 
 Then, kindling all, with sudden blaze, — 
 
 The glad deep sparkled wide and bright — 
 White as the sun, far, far more fair 
 
 Than its divided sources were ! ' 
 
 ' And even for that spirit, seer, 
 
 I 've watched and sought my lifetime long ; 
 Sought him in heaven, hell, earth and air. 
 
 An endless search arid always wrong. 
 Had I but seen his glorious eye 
 
 Once light the clouds that 'wilder me, 
 I ne'er had raised this coward cry 
 
 To cease to think, and cease to be ; 
 I ne'er had called oblivion blest. 
 
 Nor, stretching eager hands to death. 
 Implored to change for senseless rest 
 
 This sentient soul, this living breath — 
 Oh, let me die — that power and will 
 
 Their cruel sti-ife may close, 
 And conquered good and conquering ill 
 
 Be lost in one repose ! ' 
 
 That vision of the transcendent spirit, with the mingled 
 triple flood of life about his feet, is one that Blake 
 might have seen and sung and painted. 
 
 The fourth poem, ' The Prisoner,' is a fragment, and an 
 
THE THREE BRONTfiS 177 
 
 obscure fragment, which may belong to a very different 
 cycle. But whatever its place, it has the same visionary 
 quality. The vision is of the woman captive, ' confined 
 in triple walls,' the ' guest darkly lodged,' the ' chainless 
 soul,' that defies its conqueror, its gaoler, and the spec- 
 tator of its agony. It has, this prisoner, its own un- 
 speakable consolation, the ' Messenger ' : 
 
 He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs, 
 With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars. 
 Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire, 
 And visions rise and change that kill me with desire. 
 
 But, first, a hush of peace — a soundless calm descends ; 
 The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends ; 
 Mute music soothes my breast — unuttered harmony. 
 That I could never dream, till earth was lost to me. 
 
 Then dawns the Invisible ; the Unseen its truth reveals ; 
 My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels : 
 Its wings are almost free— its home, its harbour found. 
 Measuring the gulf, it stoops and dares the final bound. 
 
 That is the language of a mystic, of a mystic who 
 has passed beyond contemplation; who has known or 
 imagined ecstasy. The joy is unmistakable; unmis- 
 takable, too, is the horror of the return : 
 
 Oh ! dreadful is the check — intense the agony — 
 When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see ; 
 When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again ; 
 The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain. 
 
 There is no doubt about those three verses ; that they 
 are the expression of the rarest and the most tremendous 
 experience that is given to humanity to know. 
 
178 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 If ' The Visionary ' does not touch that supernal place, it 
 belongs indubitably to the borderland. 
 
 Silent is the house ; all are laid asleep : 
 One alone looks out o'er the snow-wreaths deep, 
 "Watching every cloud, dreading every hreeze 
 That whirls the wildering drift and bends the groaning 
 trees. 
 
 Cheerful is the hearth, soft the matted floor ; 
 
 Not one shivering gust creeps through pane or door ; 
 
 The little lamp burns straight, the rays shoot strong 
 
 and far ; 
 I trim it well to be the wanderer's guiding-star. 
 
 Frown, my haughty sire ! chide, my angry dame ! 
 Set your slaves to spy ; threaten me with shame ; 
 But neither sire nor dame, nor prying serf shall know. 
 What angel nightly tracks that waste of frozen snow. 
 
 What I love shall come like visitant of air. 
 Safe in secret power from lurking human snare ; 
 What loves me no word of mine shall e'er betray. 
 Though for faith unstained my life must forfeit pay. 
 
 Burn then, little lamp ; glimmer straight and clear — 
 Hush ! a rustling wing stirs, methinks, the air ; 
 He for whom I wait, thus ever comes to me : 
 Strange Power ! I trust thy might ; trust thou my 
 constancy. 
 
 Those who can see nothing in this poem but the idealisa- 
 tion of an earthly passion must be strangely and per- 
 versely mistaken in their Emily Bronte, I confess I can 
 never read it without thinking of one of the most 
 marvellous of all poems of Divine Love : ' En una Noche 
 Escura.' 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 179 
 
 EN UNA NOCHE ESCURA> 
 
 Upon an obscure night 
 Fevered with Love's anxiety 
 (O hapless, happy plight !) 
 I went, none seeing me. 
 Forth from my house, where all things quiet be. 
 
 Blest night of wandering 
 In secret, when by none might I be spied. 
 Nor I see anything ; 
 Without a light to guide 
 Save that which in my heart burnt in my side. 
 
 That light did lead me on 
 More surely than the shining of noontide. 
 Where well I knew that One 
 Did for my coming bide ; 
 Where he abode might none but he abide. 
 
 O night that didst lead thus ; 
 O night more lovely than the dawn of light ; 
 O night that broughtest us 
 Lover to lover's sight. 
 Lover to loved, in marriage of delight ! 
 
 We know what love is celebrated there, and we do 
 not know so clearly what manner of supernal passion is 
 sjrmbolised in Emily Bronte's angel-lover. There is 
 a long way there between Emily Bronte and St. John 
 of the Cross, between her lamp-lit window and his ' Dark 
 Night of the Soul,' and yet her opening lines have some- 
 thing of the premonitory thrill, the haunting power of 
 tremendous suggestion, the intense, mysterious expec- 
 tancy of his. The spiritual experience is somewhat 
 
 1 ' St. John of the Cross : The Dark Night of the Soul.' Translated by 
 Arthur Symons in vol. ii. of his Collected Poems. 
 
180 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 different, but it belongs to the same realm of the 
 
 super-physical ; and it is very far from Paganism. 
 
 She wrote of these supreme ardours and mysteries ; 
 
 and she wrote that most inspired and vehement song of 
 
 passionate human love, * Remembrance ' : 
 
 Cold in the earth — and the deep snow piled ahove thee. 
 Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave ! 
 Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee. . . . 
 
 But ' Remembrance ' is too well known for quotation here. 
 So is 'The Old Stoic' 
 
 These are perfect and unforgettable things. But there 
 is hardly one of the least admirable of her poems that has 
 not in it some unforgettable and perfect verse or line : 
 
 And oh, how slow that keen-eyed star 
 
 Has tracked the chilly grey I 
 What, watching yet ? how very far 
 
 The morning lies away. 
 
 That is how some watcher on Wuthering Heights 
 might measure the long passage of the night. 
 
 ' The Lady to her Guitar,' that recalls the dead and 
 forgotten player, sings : 
 
 It is as if the glassy brook 
 
 Should image still its willows fair, 
 
 Though years ago the woodman's stroke 
 Laid low in dust their Dryad-hair. 
 
 She has her ' dim moon struggling in the sky,' 
 to match Charlotte's ' the moon reigns glorious, glad 
 of the gale, glad as if she gave herself to his fierce 
 caress with love.' At sixteen, in the schoolroom,^ 
 
 ' Madame Duclaux assigns to tliese verses a much later date — the year 
 of Emily Bronte's exile in Brussels. Sir William Robertson Nicoll also 
 considers that 'the " alien firelight " suits Brussels better than the York- 
 shire hearth of " good, kind " Miss Wooler.' To me the schoolroom of the 
 Pensionnat suggests an ' alien ' stove, and not the light of any fire at all. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 181 
 
 she wrote verses of an incomparable simplicity and 
 poignancy : 
 
 A little while, a little while. 
 
 The weary task is put away. 
 And I can sing and I can smile, 
 
 Alike, while I have holiday. 
 
 Where wilt thou go, my harassed heart — 
 What thought, what scene invites thee now ? 
 
 What spot, or near or far apart, 
 Has rest for thee, my weary brow ? 
 
 The house is old, the trees are bare. 
 Moonless above bends twilight's dome ; 
 
 But what on earth is half so dear — 
 So longed for — as the hearth of home ? 
 
 The mute bird sitting on the stone. 
 The dank moss dripping from the wall. 
 
 The thorn-trees gaunt, the walks o'ergrown, 
 I love them — how I love them all ! 
 
 Still, as I mused, the naked room. 
 
 The alien firelight died away. 
 And, from the midst of cheerless gloom, 
 
 I passed to bright, unclouded day. 
 
 A little and a lone green lane 
 
 That opened on a common wide ; 
 A distant,, dreamy, dim blue chain 
 
 Of mountains circling every side. 
 
 A heaven so clear, an earth so calm. 
 
 So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air ; 
 And, deepening still the dream-like charm. 
 
 Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere. 
 
 There was no nostalgia that she did not know. And 
 
182 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 there was no funeral note she did not sound ; from the 
 hopeless gloom of 
 
 In the earth — the earth — thou shalt be laid, 
 
 A grey stone standing over thee ; 
 Black mould beneath thee spread, 
 
 And black mould to cover thee. 
 
 ' Well — there is rest there, 
 
 So fast come thy prophecy ; 
 The time when my sunny hair 
 
 Shall with grass-roots entwined be.' 
 
 But cold — cold is that resting-place 
 
 Shut out from joy and liberty. 
 And all who loved thy living face 
 
 Will shrink from it shudderingly. 
 
 From that to the melancholy grace of the moorland dirge : 
 
 The linnet in the rocky dells. 
 
 The moor-lark in the air. 
 The bee among the heather-bells 
 
 That hide my lady fair : 
 
 The wild deer browse above her breast ; 
 
 The wild birds raise their brood ; 
 And they, her smiles of love caressed. 
 
 Have left her solitude. 
 
 Well, let them fight for honour's breath, 
 
 Or pleasure's shade pursue — 
 The dweller in the land of death 
 
 Is changed and careless too. 
 
 And if their eyes should watch and weep 
 
 Till sorrow's source were dry. 
 She would not, in her tranquil sleep. 
 
 Return a single sigh. 
 
 Blow, west wind, by the lowly mound. 
 
 And murmur, summer-streams — 
 There is no need of other sound 
 
 To soothe my lady's dreams. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 183 
 
 There is, finally, that nameless poem — her last — where 
 Emily Bronte's creed finds utterance. It also is well 
 known, but I give it here by way of justification, lest I 
 should seem to have exaggerated the mystic detachment 
 of this lover of the earth : 
 
 No coward soul is minej 
 No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere : 
 
 I see Heaven's glories shine. 
 And faith shines equal, arming me from fear. 
 
 O God within my breast. 
 Almighty, ever-present Deity ! 
 
 Life — that in me has rest, 
 As I — undying Life — have power in thee ! 
 
 Vain are the thousand creeds 
 That move men's hearts: unutterably vain; 
 
 Worthless as withered weeds. 
 Or idlest froth amid the boundless main, 
 
 To waken doubt in one 
 Holding so fast by thine infinity ; 
 
 So surely anchored on 
 The stedfast rock of immortality. 
 
 With wide-embracing love 
 Thy spirit animates eternal years. 
 
 Pervades and broods above. 
 Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears. 
 
 Though earth and man were gone. 
 And suns and universes ceased to be. 
 
 And Thou wert left alone. 
 Every existence would exist in Thee. 
 
 There is not room for Death,' 
 Nor atom that his might could render void : 
 
 Thou — Thou art Being and Breath, 
 And what Thou art may never be destroyed. 
 
 It is not a perfect work. I do not think it is by any 
 means the finest poem that Emily Bronte ever wrote. 
 
184 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 It has least of her matchless, incommunicable quality. 
 There is one verse, the fifth, that recalls almost pain- 
 fully the frigid poets of Deism of the eighteenth century. 
 But even that association cannot destroy or contaminate 
 its superb sincerity and dignity. If it recalls the poets 
 of Deism, it recalls no less one of the most ancient of all 
 metaphysical poems, the poem of Parmenides on Being : 
 
 ir(39 B' av eTreir' aTToAoiTO ttcAov, 7r<3s 8' av Kt yevoiro ; 
 ci ye yevotT', ovk ott', ov&' ef ttotc juIAAci ecrecrdai, 
 
 Tws, y€ve<Ti's /Mtv dire(Tl3((TTai Kai aino-Tos oKedpos. 
 ovSe Siatperov Icttiv, eirei nav e<TTiv o/jloIov 
 ovSi Ti rrrj Keveov .... 
 
 .... eov yap eovTi jreAafei. 
 
 Parmenides had not, I imagine, ' penetrated ' to 
 Haworth ; yet the last verse of Emily Bronte's poem 
 might have come straight out of his to. tt/oos oAij^eiijv. 
 Truly, an astonishing poem to have come from a girl in 
 a country parsonage in the 'forties. 
 
 But the most astonishing thing about it is its inver- 
 sion of a yet more consecrated form : ' Thou hast made 
 us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest 
 in Thee.' Emily Bronte does not follow St. Augustine. 
 She has an absolutely inspired and independent insight : 
 
 ' Life — that in me has rest, 
 As I — undying Life — have power in Thee ! ' 
 
 For there was but little humility or resignation about 
 Emily Bronte. Nothing could be prouder than her re- 
 jection of the view that must have been offered to her 
 every Sunday from her father's pulpit. She could not 
 accept the Christian idea of separation and the Mediator. 
 She knew too well the secret. She saw too clearly the 
 
THE THREE BRONTKS 185 
 
 heavenly side of the eternal quest. She heard, across 
 the worlds, the downward and the upward rush of the 
 Two immortally desirous ; when her soul cried she heard 
 the answering cry of the divine pursuer : ' My heart is 
 restless till it rests in thee.' It is in keeping with her 
 vision of the descent of the Invisible, who comes 
 
 ' With that clear dusk of heaven that hrings the thickest stars,' 
 
 her vision of the lamp-lit window, and the secret, unearthly 
 consummation. 
 
 There is no doubt about it. And there is no doubt 
 about the Paganism either. It seems at times the most 
 apparent thing about Emily Bronte. 
 
 The truth is that she revealed her innermost and un- 
 apparent nature only in her poems. That was probably 
 why she was so annoyed when Charlotte discovered 
 them. 
 
 UntU less than ten years ago it was commonly supposed 
 that Charlotte had discovered all there were. Then sixty- 
 seven hitherto unpublished poems appeared in America. 
 And the world went on unaware of what had happened. 
 
 And now Mr. Clement Shorter, in his indefatigable 
 researches, has unearthed seventy-one more, and pub- 
 lished them with the sixty-seven and with Charlotte's 
 thirty-nine.^ 
 
 And the world continues more or less unaware, 
 
 I do not know how many new poets Vigo Street can 
 turn out in a week. But I do know that somehow the 
 world is made sufficiently aware of some of them. But 
 
 ' Compute Works of Emily Bronte. Vol.1. — Poetry. (Messrs. Hodder 
 and Stoughton, 1910.) 
 
186 THE THREE BRONTfiS 
 
 this event, in which Vigo Street has had no hand, the 
 pubhcation, after more than sixty years, of the Complete 
 Poems of Emily Bronte, has not, so far as I know, pro- 
 voked any furious tumult of accleiim. 
 
 And yet there could hardly well have been an event 
 of more importance in its way. If the best poems in 
 Mr. Shorter's collection cannot stand beside the best 
 in Charlotte's editions of 1846 and 1850, many of them 
 reveal an aspect of Emily Bronte's genius hitherto 
 unknown and undreamed of ; one or two even reveal a 
 little more of the soul of Emily Bronte than has yet 
 been known. 
 
 There are no doubt many reasons for the world's in- 
 difference. The few people in it who read poetry at all 
 do not read Emily Bronte much ; it is as much as they 
 can do to keep pace with the perpetual, swift procession 
 of young poets out of Vigo Street. There is a certain 
 austerity about Emily Bronte, a superb refusal of all 
 extravagance, pomp, and decoration, which makes her 
 verses look naked to eyes accustomed to young lyrics 
 loaded with 'jewels five-words long.' About Emily 
 Bronte there is no emerald and beryl and chrysoprase ; 
 there are no vine-leaves in her hair, and on her white 
 Oread's feet there is no stain of purple vintage. She 
 knows nothing of the Dionysiac rapture and the sensuous 
 side of mysticism. She can give nothing to the young 
 soul that thirsts and hungers for these things. 
 
 It is not surprising, therefore, that the world should 
 be callous to Emily Bronte. What you are not prepared 
 for is the appearance of indifference in her editors. 
 They are pledged by their ofiBce to a peculiar devotion. 
 And the circumstances of Emily Bronte's case made it 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 187 
 
 imperative that whoever undertook this belated introduc- 
 tion should show rather more than a perfunctory en- 
 thusiasm. Her alien and lonely state should have moved 
 Mr. Clement Shorter to a passionate chivalry. It has not 
 even moved him to revise his proofs with perfect piety. 
 Perfect piety would have saved him from the oversight, 
 innocent but deplorable, of attributing to Emily Bronte 
 four poems which Emily Bronte could not possibly have 
 written, which were in fact written by Anne: 'Des- 
 pondency,' ' In Memory of a Happy Day in February,' 
 *A Prayer,' and 'Confidence.'^ No doubt Mr. Shorter 
 found them in Emily's handwriting ; but how could he, 
 how could he mistake Anne's voice for Emily's ? 
 
 ' My God (oh let me call Thee mine. 
 Weak, wretched sinner though I be). 
 
 My trembling soul would fain be Thine ; 
 My feeble faith still .clings to Thee.' 
 
 It is Anne's voice at her feeblest and most depressed. 
 
 It is perhaps a little ungrateful and ungracious to say 
 these things, when but for Mr. Shorter we should not 
 have had Emily's complete poems at all. And to 
 accuse Mr. Shorter of present indifference (in the face of 
 his previous achievements) would be iniquitous if it were 
 not absurd; it would be biting the hand that feeds 
 you. The pity is that, owing to a mere momentary 
 lapse in him of the religious spirit, Mr. Shorter has 
 missed his own opportunity. He does not seem to 
 have quite realised the splendour of his ' find.' Nor 
 has Sir William Robertson Nicoll seen fit to help him 
 here. Sir William Robertson Nicoll deprecates any 
 over-valuation of Mr. Clement Shorter's collection. ' It 
 ' Published among Charlotte Bronte's posthumous ' Selections ' in 1850. 
 
188 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 is not claimed,' he says, ' for a moment that the in- 
 trinsic merits of the verses are of a special kind.' And 
 Mr. Clement Shorter is not much bolder in proffering 
 his treasures. ' No one can deny to them,' he says, ' a 
 certain bibliographical interest.' 
 
 Mr. Shorter is too modest. His collection includes 
 one of the profoundest and most beautiful poems Emily 
 Bronte ever wrote,^ and at least one splendid ballad, 
 'Douglas' Ride.' 2 Here is the ballad, or enough of it 
 to show how live it is with sound and vision and speed. 
 It was written by a girl of twenty : 
 
 What rider up Gobeloin's glen 
 
 Has spurred his straining steed, 
 And fast and far from living men 
 
 Has passed with maddening speed ? 
 
 I saw his hoof-prints mark the rock, 
 
 When swift he left the plain; 
 I heard deep down the echoing shock 
 
 Re-echo back again. 
 
 With streaming hair, and forehead bare, 
 
 And mantle waving wide, 
 His master rides ; the eagle there 
 
 Soars up on every side. 
 
 The goats fly by with timid cry, 
 
 Their realm rashly won ; 
 They pause — he still ascends on high — 
 
 They gaze, but he is gone. 
 
 O gallant horse, hold on thy course ; 
 
 The road is tracked behind. 
 Spur, rider, spur, or vain thy force — 
 
 Death comes on every wind. 
 
 1 See pp. 2o8, 209. 
 
 - I have removed the title from the preceding fragment to the ballad to 
 which it obviously belongs. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 189 
 
 Hark ! through the pass with thi-eatening crash 
 
 Comes on the increasing roar ! 
 But what shall brave the deep, deep wave. 
 
 The deadly pass before ? 
 
 Their feet are dyed in a darker tide. 
 
 Who dare those dangers drear. 
 Their breasts have burst through the battle's worst. 
 
 And why should they tremble here ? 
 
 ' Now, my brave men, this one pass moi'e, 
 
 This narrow chasm of stone. 
 And Douglas for our sov'i-eign's gore 
 
 Shall yield us back his own.' 
 
 I hear their ever-rising tread 
 
 Sound through the granite glen ; 
 There is a tall pine overhead 
 
 Held by the mountain men. 
 
 That dizzy bridge which no horse could track 
 
 Has checked the outlaw's way; 
 There like a wild beast turns he back. 
 
 And grimly stands at bay. 
 
 Why smiles he so, when far belOw 
 
 He spies the toiling chase ? 
 The pond'rous tree swings heavily. 
 
 And totters from its place. 
 
 They raise their eyes, for the sunny skies 
 
 Are lost in sudden shade : 
 But Douglas neither shrinks nor flies, 
 
 He need not fear the dead. 
 
 That is sufficiently unlike the Emily Bronte whom 
 Charlotte edited. And there is one other poem that 
 stands alone among her poems with a strange exotic 
 
190 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 beauty, a music, a rhythm and a magic utterly unlike 
 any of the forms we recognise as hers : 
 
 Gods of the old mythology- 
 Arise in gloom and storm ; 
 AdramaleCj bow down thy head. 
 
 Reveal, dark fiend, thy form. 
 The giant sons of Anakim 
 
 Bowed lowest at thy shrine. 
 And thy temple rose in Argola, 
 
 With its hallowed groves of vine ; 
 And there was eastern incense burnt. 
 
 And there were garments spread. 
 With the fine gold decked and broidered. 
 
 And tinged with radiant red, 
 With the radiant red of furnace flames 
 
 That through the shadows shone 
 As the full moon when on Sinai's top 
 
 Her rising light is thrown. 
 
 It is undated and imsigned, and so unlike Emily Bronte 
 that I should not be surprised if somebody were to rise 
 up and prove that it is Coleridge or somebody. Heaven 
 forbid that this blow should fall on Mr. Clement Shorter, 
 and Sir William Robertson NicoU, and on me. There 
 is at least one reassuring line. ' Reveal, dark fiend, 
 thy form,' has a decided ring of the Brontesque. 
 
 And here again, on many an otherwise negligible poem 
 she has set her seal, she has scattered her fine things ; 
 thus : 
 
 No ; though the soil be wet with tears. 
 
 How fair so'er it grew. 
 The vital sap once perished 
 
 Will never flow again ; 
 And surer than that dwelling dread, 
 The narrow dungeon of the dead, 
 
 Time parts the hearts oj men. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 191 
 
 And again, she gives a vivid picture of war in four lines: 
 
 In plundered churches piled with dead 
 
 The heavy charger neig:hed for foodj 
 The wounded soldier laid his head 
 
 'Neath roofless chambers splashed with blood. 
 
 Again, she has a vision : 
 
 In all the hours of gloom 
 
 My soul was rapt away. 
 I stood by a marble tomb 
 
 Where royal corpses lay. 
 
 A frightful thing appears to her, ' a shadowy thing, most 
 
 dim ' : 
 
 And still it bent above, 
 
 Its features still in view ; 
 
 It seemed close hy, and yet more far 
 
 Than this world from the farthest star 
 
 That tracks the boundless blue. 
 
 Indeed 'twas not the space 
 Of earth or time between. 
 But the sea of deep eternity. 
 The gulf o'er which mortality 
 Has never, never been. 
 
 The date is June, 1837, a year earlier than the ballad. 
 And here is the first sketch or germ of ' The Old Stoic ' : 
 
 Give we the hills our equal prayer. 
 
 Earth's breezy hills and heaven's blue sea, 
 
 I ask for nothing further here 
 Than my own heart and liberty. 
 
 And here is another poem, of a sterner and a sadder 
 
 stoicism : 
 
 There was a time when my cheek burned 
 To give such scornful words the lie, 
 
 Ungoverned nature madly spurned 
 The law that bade it not defy. 
 
 Oh, in the days of ardent youth 
 
 1 would have given my life for truth. 
 
192 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 For truth, for right, for liberty, 
 
 I would have gladly, freely died ; 
 And now I calmly bear and see 
 
 The vain man smile, the fool deride. 
 Though not because my heart is tame. 
 Though not for fear, though not for shame. 
 
 My soul still chokes at every tone 
 
 Of selfish and self-clouded error ; 
 My breast still braves the world alone. 
 
 Steeled as it ever was to terror. 
 Only I know, howe'er 1 frown. 
 The same world will go rolling on. 
 
 October, 1839. It is the worldly wisdom of twenty-one ! 
 
 If this, the ballad and the rest, were all, the world 
 would still be richer by a wholly new conception of 
 Emily Bronte, of her resources and her range. 
 
 But it is by no means all. And here we come to the 
 opportunity which, owing to that temporary decline of 
 fervour, Mr. Shorter has so unfortunately missed. 
 
 He might have picked out of the mass wherein they 
 lie scattered, all but lost, sometimes barely recognisable, 
 the fragments of a Titanic epic. He might have done 
 something to build up again the fabric of that marvellous 
 romance, that continuous dream, that stupendous and 
 gorgeous fantasy in which Emily Bronte, for at least 
 eleven years, lived and moved and had her being. 
 
 Until the publication of the unknown poems, it was 
 possible to ignore the ' Gondal Chronicles.' They are not 
 included in Mr. Clement Shorter' s exhaustive list of early 
 and unpublished manuscripts. Nobody knew anything 
 about them except that they were part of a mysterious 
 game of make-believe which Emily and the ever-innocent 
 
THE THREE BRONTfiS 193 
 
 Anne played together, long after the age when most of 
 us have given up make-believing. There are several 
 references to the Chronicles in the diaries of Emily and 
 Anne, Emily writes in 1841 : ' The Gondaland are at 
 present in a threatening state, but there is no open 
 rupture as yet. All the princes and princesses of the 
 Royalty are at the Palace of Instruction.' Anne 
 wonders ' whether the Gondaland will still be flourishing ' 
 in 1845. In 1845 Emily and Anne go for their first long 
 journey together. ' And during our excursion we were 
 Ronald Macalgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Angusteena, 
 Rosabella Esmaldan, Ella and Julian Egremont, Catharine 
 Navarre, and Cordelia Fitzaphnold, escaping from the 
 palaces of instruction to join the Royalists, who are hard 
 pressed at present by the victorious Republicans. The 
 Gondals, ' Emily says, ' still flourish bright as ever. ' Anne 
 is not so sure. ' We have not yet finished our " Gondal 
 Chronicles " that we began three years and a half ago. 
 When will they be done ? The Gondals are at present 
 in a sad state. The Republicans are uppermost, but 
 the Royalists are not quite overcome. The young 
 sovereigns, with their brothers and sisters, are still 
 at the Palace of Instruction. The Unique Society, 
 about half a year ago, were wrecked on a desert 
 island as they were returning from Gaul. They are 
 still there, but we have not played at them much 
 yet.' 
 
 But there are no recognisable references to the Gondal 
 poems. It is not certain whether Charlotte Bronte 
 knew of their existence, not absolutely certain that Anne, 
 who collaborated on the Gondals, knew. 
 
 ' Bronte specialists ' are agreed in dismissing the 
 
 N 
 
194 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Chronicles as puerile. But the poems cannot be so 
 dismissed. Written in lyric or ballad form, fluent at 
 their worst and loose, but never feeble ; powerful, vehe- 
 ment, and overflowing at their best, their cycle contains 
 some of Emily Bronte's very finest verse. They are 
 obscure, incoherent sometimes, because they are frag- 
 mentary ; even poems apparently complete in them- 
 selves are fragments, scenes torn out of the vast and 
 complicated epic drama. We have no clue to the history 
 of the Gondals, whereby we can arrange these scenes in 
 their right order. But dark and broken as they are, 
 they yet trail an epic splendour, they bear the whole 
 phantasmagoria of ancestral and of racial memories, of 
 ' old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago.' 
 These songs and ballads, strung on no discernible thread, 
 are the voice of an enchanted spirit, recalling the long 
 roll of its secular existences ; in whom nothing lives but 
 that mysterious, resurgent memory. 
 
 The forms that move through these battles are obscure. 
 You can pick out many of the Gondal poems by the 
 recurring names of heroes and of lands. But where 
 there are no names of heroes and of lands to guide you 
 it is not easy to say exactly which poems are Gondal 
 poems and which are not. But after careful examina- 
 tion and comparison you can make out at least 
 eighty-three of them that are unmistakable, and ten 
 doubtful. 
 
 All the battle-pieces and songs of battle, the songs 
 of mourning and captivity and exile, the songs of heroism, 
 martyrdom, defiance, songs, or fragments of songs, of 
 magic and divination, and many of the love songs, 
 belong to this cycle. What is more, many of the 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 195 
 
 poems of eighteen-forty-six and of eighteen-fifty are 
 Gondal poems. 
 
 For in the Gondal legend the idea of the Doomed Child, 
 an idea that haunted Emily Bronte, recurs perpetually, 
 and suggests that the Gondal legend is the proper place 
 of ' The Two Children,' and ' The Wanderer from the 
 Fold,' which appear in the posthimious Selections of 
 eighteen-fifty. It certainly includes three at the very 
 least of the poems of eighteen-forty-six : ' The Outca,st 
 Mother,' ' A Death-Scene,' and ' Honour's Martyr.' 
 
 It does not look, I own, as if this hunt for Gondal 
 literature could interest a single human being ; which 
 is why nobody, so far as I know, has pursued it. And 
 the placing of those four poems in the obscure Gondal 
 legend would have nothing but ' a bibliographical 
 interest ' were it not that, when placed there, they show 
 at once the main track of the legend. And the main 
 track of the legend brings you straight to the sources of 
 Wuthering Heights and of the love poems. 
 
 The sources of Wuthering Heights have been the dream 
 and the despair of the explorer, long before Mrs. Humphry 
 Ward tried to find them in the Tales of Hoffman. And 
 ' Remembrance,' one of the most passionate love poems 
 in the language, stood alone and apart from every other 
 thing that Emily Bronte had written. It was awful 
 and mysterious in its loneliness. 
 
 But I believe that ' Remembrance ' also may be placed 
 in the Gondal legend without any violence to its 
 mystery. 
 
 For supreme in the Gondal legend is the idea of a 
 mighty and disastrous passion, a woman's passion for 
 the defeated, the dishonoured, and the outlawed lover ; 
 
196 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 a creature superb in evil, like Heathclift, and like Heath- 
 clift tragic and unspeakably mournful in his doom. 
 He or some hero like him is ' Honour's Martyr.' 
 
 To-morroWj Scorn will blight my name. 
 
 And Hate will trample me. 
 Will load me with a coward's shame — 
 
 A traitor's perjury. 
 
 False friends will launch their covert sneers ; 
 
 True friends will wish me dead ; 
 And I shall cause the bitterest tears 
 
 That you have ever shed. 
 
 Like Heathcliff, he is the ' unblessed, unfriended child ' ; 
 the child of the Outcast Mother, abandoned on the moor. 
 
 Forests of heather, dark and long. 
 Wave their brown branching arms above ; 
 
 And they must soothe thee with their song. 
 And they must shield my child of love. 
 
 Wakes up the storm more madly wild. 
 The mountain drifts are tossed on high ; 
 
 Farewell, unblessed, unfriended child, 
 I cannot bear to watch thee die. 
 
 In an unmistakable Gondal song Geraldine's lover 
 calls her to the tryst on the moor. In the Gondal 
 poem ' Geraldine,' she has her child with her in a wood- 
 land cavern, and she prays over it wildly : 
 
 ' Bless it ! My Gracious God ! ' I cried, 
 ' Preserve Thy mortal shrine. 
 For Thine own sake, be Thou its guide. 
 
 And keep it still divine- 
 Say, sin shall never blanch that cheek, 
 
 Nor suffering change that brow. 
 Speak, in Thy mercy. Maker, speak, 
 And seal it safe from woe. ' 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 197 
 
 The revellers in the city slept. 
 
 My lady in her woodland bed ; 
 I watching o'er her slumber wept, 
 
 As one who mourns the dead. 
 
 Geraldine therefore is the Outcast Mother. In ' The 
 Two Children ' the doom gathers round the child. 
 
 Heavy hangs the raindrop 
 
 From the burdened spray ; 
 Heavy broods the daihp mist 
 
 On uplands far away. 
 
 Heavy looms the dull sky. 
 
 Heavy rolls the sea ; 
 And heavy throbs the young heart 
 
 Beneath that lonely tree. 
 
 Never has a blue streak 
 
 Cleft the clouds since morn ; 
 Never has his grim fate 
 
 Smiled since he was born. 
 
 Frowning on the infant, 
 
 Shadowing childhood's joy. 
 Guardian-angel knows not 
 
 That melancholy boy. 
 
 Blossom — that the west wind 
 Has never wooed to blow, 
 
 Scentless are thy petals. 
 Thy dew is cold as snow ! 
 
 Soul — where kindred kindness 
 No early promise woke. 
 
 Barren is thy beauty. 
 As weed upon a rock. 
 
 Wither — soul and blossom ! 
 
 You both were vainly given : 
 Earth reserves no blessing 
 
 For the unblest of Heaven. 
 
198 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 The doomed child of the outcast mother is the doomed 
 man, and, by the doom, himself an outcast. The other 
 child, the ' Child of delight, with sun-bright hair,' has 
 vowed herself to be his guardian angel. Their drama 
 is obscure ; but you make out that it is the doomed 
 child, and not Branwell Bronte, who is ' The Wanderer 
 from the Fold.' 
 
 How few, of all the hearts that loved, 
 
 Are grieving for thee now ; 
 And why should mine to-night be moved 
 
 With such a sense of woe ? 
 
 Too often thus, when left alone. 
 
 Where none my thoughts can see, 
 Comes back a word, a passing tone 
 
 From thy strange history. 
 
 An anxious gazer from the shore — 
 
 I marked the whitening wave. 
 And wept above thy fate the more 
 
 Because — I could not save. 
 
 It recks not now, when all is over ; 
 
 But yet my heart will be 
 A mourner still, though friend and lover 
 
 Have both forgotten thee. 
 
 Compare with this that stern elegy in Mr. Shorter's 
 collection, ' Shed no tears o'er that tomb.' A recent 
 critic has referred this poem of reprobation also to 
 Branwell Bronte — as if Emily could possibly have 
 written like this of Branwell : 
 
 Shed no tears o'er that tomb, 
 
 For there are angels weeping ; 
 Mourn not him whose doom 
 
 Heaven itself is mourning. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 199 
 
 ... he who slumbers there 
 
 His bark will strive no more 
 Across the waters of despair 
 
 To reach that glorious shore. 
 
 The time of grace is past. 
 
 And mercy, scorned and tried. 
 Forsakes to utter wrath at last 
 
 The soul so steeled by pride. 
 
 That wrath will never spare, 
 
 Will never pity know ; 
 Will mock its victim's maddened prayer. 
 
 With triumph in his woe. 
 
 Shut from his Maker's smile 
 
 The accursed man shall be ; 
 For mercy reigns a little while. 
 
 But hate eternally. 
 
 This is obviously related to ' The Two Children,' and 
 that again to ' The Wanderer from the Fold.' Obvi- 
 ously, too, the woman's lament in ' The Wanderer from 
 the Fold ' recalls the Gondal woman's lament for her 
 dishonoured lover. For there are two voices that speak 
 and answer each other, the voice of reprobation, and 
 the voice of passion and pity. This is the ' Gondal 
 Woman's Lament ' : 
 
 Far, far is mirth withdrawn : 
 
 'Tis three long hours before the morn. 
 
 And I watch lonely, drearily ; 
 
 So come, thou shade, commune with me. 
 
 Deserted one ! thy corpse lies cold. 
 And mingled with a foreign mould. 
 Year after year the grass grows green 
 Above the dust where thou hast been. 
 
 I will not name thy blighted name. 
 Tarnished by unforgotten shame. 
 
200 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Though not because my bosom torn 
 Joins the mad world in all its scorn. 
 
 Thy phantom face is dark with woe. 
 Tears have left ghastly traces there. 
 Those ceaseless tears ! I wish their flow 
 Could quench thy wild despair. 
 
 They deluge my heart like the rain 
 On cursed Zamorna's howling plain. 
 Yet when I hear thy foes deride, 
 I must cling closely to thy side. 
 
 Our mutual foes ! They will not rest 
 From trampling on thy buried breast. 
 Glutting their hatred with the doom 
 They picture thine beyond the tomb. 
 
 (Which is what they did in the song of reprobation. 
 But passion and pity know better. They know that) 
 
 . . . God is not like human kind, 
 Man cannot read the Almighty mind ; 
 Vengeance will never torture thee. 
 Nor hurt thy soul eternally. 
 
 What have I dreamt .i* He lies asleep. 
 With whom my heart would vainly weep ; 
 He rests, and I endure the woe 
 That left his spirit long ago. 
 
 This poem is not quoted for its beauty or its technique, 
 but for its important place in the story. You can track 
 the great Gondal hero down by that one fantastic name, 
 ' Zamorna.' You have thus four poems, obviously 
 related ; and a fifth that links them, obviously, with 
 the Gondal legend. 
 
 It is difficult to pick out from the confusion of these 
 unsorted fragments all the heroes of Emily Bronte's 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 201 
 
 saga. There is Gleneden, who kills a tyrant and is put 
 in prison for it. There is Julius Angora, who ' lifts his 
 impious eye' in the cathedral where the monarchs of 
 Gondal are gathered ; who leads the patriots of Gondal 
 to the battle of Almedore, and was defeated there, and 
 fell with his mortal enemy. He is beloved of Rosina, 
 a crude prototype of Catherine Eamshaw. ' King 
 Julius left the south country ' and remained in danger 
 in the northern land because a passion for Rosina kept 
 him there. There is also Douglas of the ' Ride.' He 
 appears again in the saga of the Queen Augusta, the 
 woman of the ' brown mountain side.' But who he was, 
 and what he was doing, and whether he killed Augusta 
 or somebody else killed her, I cannot for the life of me 
 make out. Queen Augusta, like Catherine Earnshaw, 
 is a creature of passion and jealousy, and her lover has 
 been faithless. She sings that savage song of defiance 
 and hatred and lamentation : ' Light up thy halls ! ' 
 
 Oh ! could I see thy lids weighed down in cheerless woe ; 
 Too full to hide their tears, too stern to overflow ; 
 Oh ! could I know thy soul with equal grief was torn, 
 This fate might be endured— this anguish might be borne. 
 
 How gloomy grows the night! 'Tis Gondal's wind that blows ; 
 1 shall not tread again the deep glens where it rose, 
 I feel it on my face — Where, wild blast ! dost thou roam ? 
 What do we, wanderer ! here, so far away from home ? 
 
 I do not need thy breath to cool my death-cold brow ; 
 But go to that far land where she is shining now ; 
 Tell her my latest wish, tell her my dreary doom ; 
 Say that my pangs are past, but hers are yet to come. 
 
 And there is Fernando, who stole his love from 
 Zamorna. He is a sort of shadowy forerunner of Edgar 
 Linton. 
 
202 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 There is the yeoman Percy, the father of Mary whom 
 Zamorna loved. And there is Zamorna. 
 
 A large group of poems in the legend refer, obviously, 
 I think, to the same person. Zamorna is the supreme 
 hero, the Achilles of this northern Iliad. He is the man 
 of sin, the ' son of war and love,' the child ' unblessed 
 of heaven,' abandoned by its mother, cradled in the 
 heather and rocked by the winter storm, the doomed 
 child, grown to its doom, like Heathcliff. His story is 
 obscure and broken, but when all the Zamorna poems 
 are sorted from the rest, you make out that, like Heath- 
 cliff, he ravished from her home the daughter of his 
 mortal enemy (with the difference that Zamorna loves 
 Mary) ; and that like Heathcliff he was robbed of the 
 woman that he loved. The passions of Zamorna are 
 the passions of Heathcliff. He dominates a world of 
 savage loves and mortal enmities like the world of 
 Wuthering Heights. There are passages in this saga 
 that reveal the very aspect of the soul of Heathcliff. 
 Here are some of them. 
 
 Zamorna, in prison, cries out to his ' false friend and 
 treacherous guide ' : 
 
 ' If I have sinned ; long^ long ago 
 That sin was purified by woe. 
 I have suffered on through night and day, 
 I've trod a dark and frightful way.' 
 
 It is what Heathcliff says to Catherine Earnshaw : ' I 've 
 fought through a bitter life since I last heard your voice.' 
 And again : 
 
 If grief for grief can touch thee, 
 
 If answering woe for woe, 
 If any ruth can melt thee, 
 Come to me now. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 203 
 
 It is the very voice of Heathcliff calling to Cathy, 
 Again, he is calKng to ' Percy,' the father of Mary, his 
 
 bride, the rose that he plucked from its parent stem, that 
 
 died from the plucking. 
 
 Bitterly, deeply I Ve drunk of thy woe ; 
 
 When thy stream was troubled, did mine calmly flow ? 
 
 And yet I repent not ; I 'd crush thee again 
 
 If our vessels sailed adverse on life's stormy main. 
 
 But listen ! The earth is our campaign of war. 
 
 Is there not havoc and carnage for thee 
 Unless thou couchest thy lance at me ? 
 
 He proposes to unite their arms. 
 
 Then might thy Mary bloom blissfully still 
 This hand should ne'er work her sorrow or ill. 
 
 What ! shall Zamorna go down to the dead 
 
 With blood on his hands that he wept to have shed ? 
 
 The alliance is refused, Percy is crushed. Mary is 
 dying, the rose is withering. 
 
 Its faded buds already lie 
 To deck my cofSn when I die. 
 Bring them here — 'twill not be long, 
 'Tis the last word of the woeful song ; 
 And the final and dying words are sung 
 To the discord of lute strings all unstrung. 
 
 Have I crushed you, Percy ? I 'd raise once more 
 
 The beacon-light on the rocky shore. 
 
 Percy, my love is so true and deep. 
 
 That though kingdoms should wail and worlds should weep, 
 
 I 'd fling the brand in the hissing sea, 
 
 The brand that must burn unquenchably. 
 
 Your rose is mine ; when the sweet leaves fade. 
 
 They must be the chaplet to wreathe my head 
 
 The blossoms to deck my home with the dead. 
 
204 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Zamorna is tenderer than Heathcliff. He laments for 
 his rose. 
 
 On its bending stalk a bonny flower 
 
 In a yeoman's home close grew ; 
 It had gathered beauty from sunshine and shower. 
 
 From moonlight and silent dew. 
 
 Keenly his flower the yeoman guarded. 
 
 He watched it grow both day and night ; 
 From the frost, from the wind, from the storm he warded 
 
 That flush of roseate light. 
 And ever it glistened bonnilie 
 Under the shade of the old yew-tree. 
 
 The rose is blasted, withered, blighted 
 
 Its root has felt a worm. 
 And like a heart beloved and slighted. 
 
 Failed, faded, shrunk its form. 
 Bud of beauty, bonny flower, 
 I stole thee from thy natal bower. 
 
 I was the worm that withered thee . . . 
 
 And he sings of Mary, on her death-bed, in her dehrium. 
 He will not beUeve that she is dying. 
 
 Oh ! say not that her vivid dreams 
 
 Are but the shattered glass 
 Which but because more broken, gleams 
 
 More brightly in the grass. 
 Her spirit is the unfathomed lake 
 Whose face the sudden tempests break 
 
 To one tormented roar ; 
 But as the wild winds sink in peace 
 All those disturbed waves decrease 
 Till each far-down reflection is 
 
 As life-like as before. 
 
 Her death is not the worst. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 205 
 
 I cannot weep as once 1 wept 
 Over my western beauty's grave. 
 
 I am speaking of a later stroke, 
 
 A death the dream of yesterday, 
 Still thinking of my latest shock, 
 
 A noble friendship torn away. 
 I feel and say that I am cast 
 
 From hope, and peace, and power, and pride. 
 
 Without a voice to speak to you 
 Save that deep gong which tolled my doom. 
 
 And made my dread iniquity 
 
 Look darker than my deepest gloom. 
 
 But the crucial passage (for the sources) is the scene in 
 the yeoman's hall where Zamorna comes to Percy. He 
 comes stealthily. 
 
 ' That step he might have used before 
 When stealing on to lady's bower. 
 Forth at the same still twilight hour. 
 For the moon now bending mild above 
 Showed him a son of war and love. 
 His eye was full of that sinful fire 
 Which oft unhallowed passions light. 
 It spoke of quickly kindled ire. 
 Of love too warm, and wild, and bright. 
 Bright, but yet sullied, love that could never 
 Bring good in rising, leave peace in decline. 
 Woe to the gifted, crime to the giver. . . . 
 
 Now from his curled and shining hair. 
 Circling the brow of marble fair. 
 His dark, keen eyes on Percy gaze 
 With stern and yet repenting rays.' 
 
 He loves Percy whose rose was|his, and he hates him, 
 
206 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 as Heathcliff might have loved and hated, but with 
 less brutality. 
 
 ' Young savage ! how he bends above 
 The object of his wrath and love. 
 How tenderly his fingers press 
 The hand that shrinks from their caress.' 
 
 The yeoman turns on ' the man of sin.' 
 
 ' What brought you here ? I called you not ; 
 
 Are you a hawk to follow the prey. 
 
 When mangled it flutters feebly away ? 
 
 A sleuth-hound to track the deer by his blood. 
 
 When wounded he wins to the darkest wood. 
 
 There, if he can, to die alone ? 
 
 It might have been Heathcliff and a Linton. 
 
 So much for Zamoma. 
 
 Finally, there are two poems in Mr. Shorter's collection 
 that, verse for prose, might have come straight out of 
 Wuthering Heights. One (inspired by Byron) certainly 
 belongs to the Zamorna legend of the Gondal cycle. 
 
 ' And now the house-dpg stretched once more 
 His limbs upon the glowing floor ; 
 The children half resume their play. 
 Though from the warm hearth scared away ; 
 The good-wife left her spinning-wheel 
 And spread with smiles the evening meal ; 
 The shepherd placed a seat and pressed 
 To their poor fare the unknown guest. 
 And he unclasped his mantle now. 
 And raised the covering from his brow. 
 Said, voyagers by land and sea 
 Were seldom feasted daintily. 
 And cheered his host by adding stern 
 He'd no refinement to unlearn.' 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 207 
 
 Which is what Heathclift would have said sternly. Ob- 
 serve the effect of him. 
 
 ' A silence settled on the room, 
 The cheerful welcome sank to gloom ; 
 But not those words, though cold or high, 
 So froze their hospitable joy. 
 No — there was something in his face. 
 Some nameless thing which hid not grace. 
 And something in his voice's tone 
 Which turned their blood as chill as stone. 
 The ringlets of his long black hair 
 Fell o'er a cheek most ghastly fair. 
 Youthful he seemed — but worn as they 
 Who spend too soon their youthful day. 
 
 When his glance dropped, 'twas hard to quell 
 
 Unbidden feelings' hidden swell ; 
 
 And Pity scarce her tears could hide. 
 
 So sweet that brow with all its pride. 
 
 But when upraised his eye would dart 
 
 An icy shudder through the heart. 
 
 Compassion changed to horror then. 
 
 And fear to meet that gaze again. 
 
 It was not hatred's tiger-glare. 
 
 Nor the wild anguish of despair ; 
 
 It was not either misery 
 
 Which quickens friendship's sympathy ; 
 
 No — lightning all unearthly shone 
 
 Deep in that dark eye's circling zone, 
 
 Such withering lightning as we deem 
 
 None but a spirit's look may beam ; 
 
 And glad were all when he turned away 
 
 And wrapt him in his mantle grey. 
 
 And hid his head upon his arm. 
 
 And veiled from view his basilisk charm.' 
 
 That, I take it, is Zamorna, that Byronic hero, again ; 
 but it is also uncommonly like Heathcliff, with ' his 
 basilisk eyes.' And it is dated July 1839, seven years 
 before Wuthering Heights was written. 
 
208 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 The other crucial instance is a nameless poem to the 
 Earth. 
 
 I see around me piteous tombstones grey 
 
 Stretching their shadows far away. 
 
 Beneath the turf my footsteps tread 
 
 Lie low and lone the silent dead ; 
 
 Beneath the turf, beneath the mould, 
 
 For ever dark, for ever cold. 
 
 And my eyes cannot hold the tears 
 
 That memory hoards from vanished years. 
 
 For Time and Death and mortal pain 
 
 Give wounds that will not heal again. 
 
 Let me remember half the woe 
 
 I 've seen and heard and felt below. 
 
 And heaven itself, so pure and blest. 
 
 Could never give my spirit rest. 
 
 Sweet land of light ! Thy children fair 
 
 Know nought akin to our despair ; 
 
 Nor have they felt, nor can they tell 
 
 What tenants haunt each mortal cell. 
 
 What gloomy guests we hold within. 
 
 Torments and madness, fear and sin ! 
 
 Well, may they live in ecstasy 
 
 Their long eternity of joy ; 
 
 At least we would not bring them down 
 
 With us to weep, with us to groan. 
 
 No, Earth would wish no other sphere 
 
 To taste her cup of suffering drear ; 
 
 She turns from heaven a tearless eye 
 
 And only mourns that we must die ! 
 
 Ah mother ! what shall comfort thee 
 
 In all this boundless misery .'' 
 
 To cheer our eager eyes awhile, 
 
 We see thee smile, how fondly smile I 
 
 But who reads not through the tender glow 
 
 Thy deep, unutterable woe .'' 
 
 Indeed no darling hand above 
 
 Can cheat thee of thy children's love. 
 
 We all, in life's departing shine. 
 
 Our last dear longings blend with thine, 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 209 
 
 And struggle still, and strive to trace 
 With clouded gaze thy darling face. 
 We would not leave our nature home 
 For any world heyond the tomb. 
 Noj motherj on thy kindly breast 
 Let us be laid in lasting rest, 
 Or waken but to share with thee 
 A mutual immortality.' 
 
 There is the whole spirit of Wuthering Heights ; the 
 spirit of Catherine Eamshaw's dream ; the spirit that 
 in the last page broods over the moorland graveyard. 
 It is instinct with a more than pagan adoration of the 
 tragic earth, adored because of her tragedy. 
 
 It would be dangerous to assert positively that ' Re- 
 membrance ' belongs to the same song-cycle ; but it 
 undoubtedly belongs to the same cycle, or rather cyclone, 
 of passion ; the cyclone that rages in the hearts of 
 Heathclift and of Catherine. The genius of Emily 
 Bronte was so far dramatic that, if you could divide her 
 poems into the personal and impersonal, the impersonal 
 would be found in a mass out of all proportion to the 
 other. But, with very few exceptions, you cannot so 
 divide them ; for in her continuous and sustaining 
 dream, the vision that lasted for at least eleven years 
 of her life, from eighteen-thirty-four, the earliest 
 date of any known Gondal poem, to eighteen-forty- 
 five, the last appearance of the legend, she was these 
 people ; she lived, indistinguishably and interchange- 
 ably, their tumultuous and passionate life. Some- 
 times she is the lonely spirit that looks on in 
 immortal irony, raised above good and evil. More 
 often she is a happy god, immanent in his restless 
 and manifold creations, rejoicing in this multiplication 
 
 o 
 
210 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 of himself. It is she who fights and rides, who loves 
 and hates, and suffers and defies. She heads one poem 
 naively : ' To the Horse Black Eagle that I rode at the 
 Battle of Zamorna.' The horse / rode ! If it were 
 not glorious, it would be (when you think what her life 
 was in that Parsonage) most mortally pathetic. 
 
 But it is all in keeping. For, as she could dare the 
 heavenly, divine adventure, so there was no wild and 
 ardent adventure of the earth she did not claim. 
 
 _Love of life and passionate adoration of the earth, 
 adoration and passion fiercer than any pagan knew, burns 
 in Wuthering Heights. And if that were all, it would 
 be impossible to say whether her mysticism or her 
 paganism most revealed the soul of Emily Bronte. 
 
 In Wuthering Heights we are plunged apparently into 
 a world of most unspiritual lusts and hates and cruelties ; 
 into the very darkness and thickness of elemental matter ; 
 a world that would be chaos, but for the iron Necessity 
 that brings its own terrible order, its own implacable 
 law of lust upon lust begotten, hate upon hate, and 
 cruelty upon cruelty, through the generations of Heath- 
 cliffs and of Eamshaws. 
 
 Hindley Earnshaw is brutal to the foundling. Heath- 
 cliff, and degrades him. Heathcliff, when his hour comes, 
 pays back his wrong with the interest due. He is brutal 
 beyond brutality to Hindley Earnshaw, and he degrades 
 Hareton, Hindley's son, as he himself was degraded ; 
 but he is not brutal to him. The frustrated passion of 
 Catherine Earnshaw for Heathcliff, and of Heathcliff 
 for Catherine, hardly knows itself from hate ; they pay 
 each other back torture for torture, and pang for hopeless 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 211 
 
 pang. When Catherine marries Edgar Linton, Heath- 
 cliff marries Isabella, Edgar's sister, in order that he 
 may torture to perfection Catherine and Edgar and 
 Isabella. His justice is more than poetic. The love of 
 Catherine Earnshaw was all that he possessed. He 
 knows that he has lost it through the degradation that 
 he owes to Hindley Earnshaw. It is because an Earn- 
 shaw and a Linton between them have robbed him of 
 all that he possessed, that, when his hour comes, he pays 
 himself back by robbing the Lintons and the Earnshaws 
 of all that they possess, their Thrushcross Grange and 
 Wuthering Heights. He loathes above all loathly 
 creatures, Linton, his own son by Isabella. The white- 
 blooded thing is so sickly that he^can hardly keep it 
 alive. But with an unearthly cruelty he cherishes, he 
 nourishes this spawn till he can marry it on its death-bed 
 to the younger Catherine, the child of Catherine Earn- 
 shaw and of Edgar Linton. This supreme deed accom- 
 plished, he lets the creature die, so that Thrushcross 
 Grange may fall into his hands. Judged by his bare 
 deeds, Heathcliff seems a monster of evil, a devil without 
 any fiery infernal splendour, a mean and sordid devil. 
 
 But — and this is what makes Emily Bronte's work 
 stupendous — not for a moment can you judge Heathcliff 
 by his bare deeds. Properly speaking, there are no bare 
 deeds to judge him by. Each deed comes wrapt in its 
 own infernal glamour, trailing a cloud of supernatural 
 splendour. The whole drama moves on a plane of 
 reality superior to any deed. The spirit of it, like Emily 
 Bronte's spirit, is superbly regardless of the material 
 event. As far as material action goes Heathcliff is 
 singularly inert. He never seems to raise a hand to 
 
212 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 help his vengeance. He lets things take their course. 
 He lets Catherine marry Edgar Linton and remain 
 married to him. He lets Isabella's passion satisfy itself. 
 He lets Hindley Earnshaw drink himself to death. He 
 lets Hareton sink to the level of a boor. He lets Linton 
 die. His most overt and violent action is the capture 
 of the younger Catherine. And even there he takes 
 advantage of the accident that brings her to the door 
 of Wuthering Heights. He watches and bides his time 
 with the intentness of a brooding spirit that in all material 
 happenings seeks its own. He makes them his instru- 
 ments of vengeance. And Heathclift's vengeance, like 
 his passion for Catherine, is an immortal and immaterial 
 thing. He shows how little he thinks of sordid, tangible 
 possession ; for, when his vengeance is complete, when 
 Edgar Linton and Linton Heathcliff are dead and their 
 lands and houses are his, he becomes utterly indifferent. 
 He falls into a melancholy. He neither eats nor drinks. 
 He shuts himself up in Cathy's little room and is found 
 dead there, lying on Cathy's bed. 
 
 If there never was anything less heavenly, less Christian, 
 than this drama, there never was anything less earthly, 
 less pagan. There is no name for it. It is above all our 
 consecrated labels and distinctions. It has been called 
 a Greek tragedy, with the ^schylean motto, t^ Spda-avn 
 TraOdv. But it is not Greek any more than it is Christian ; 
 and if it has a moral, its moral is far more t<^ nadovrt iraOilv. 
 It is the drama of suffering born of suffering, and con- 
 fined strictly within the boundaries of the soul. 
 
 Madame Duclaux (whose criticism of Wuthering 
 Heights is not to be surpassed or otherwise gainsaid) 
 finds in it a tragedy of inherited evil. She thinks that 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 213 
 
 Emily Bronte was greatly swayed by the doctrine of 
 heredity. ' " No use," she seems to be saying, " in wait- 
 ing for the children of evil parents to grow, of their own 
 will and unassisted, straight and noble. The very quality 
 of their will is as inherited as their eyes and hair. 
 Heathcliff is no fiend or goblin; the untrained, doomed 
 child of some half-savage sailor's holiday, violent and 
 treacherous. And how far shall we hold the sinner 
 responsible for a nature which is itself the punishment 
 of some forefather's crime ? " ' 
 
 All this, I cannot help thinking, is alien to the spirit 
 of Wuthering Heights, and to its greatness. It is not 
 really any problem of heredity that we have here. 
 Heredity is, in fact, ignored. Heathcliff's race and 
 parentage are unknown. There is no resemblance 
 between the good old Earnshaws, who adopted him, 
 and their son Hindley. Hareton does not inherit 
 Hindley's drunkenness or his cruelty. It is not through 
 any physical consequence of his father's vices that 
 Hareton suffers. Linton is in no physical sense the son 
 of Heathcliff, If Catherine Linton inherits something of 
 Catherine Earnshaw's charm and temper, it is because 
 the younger Catherine belongs to another world ; she 
 is an inferior and more physical creature. She has 
 nothing in her of Catherine Earnshaw's mutinous passion, 
 the immortal and unearthly passion which made that 
 Catherine alive and killed her. Catherine Linton's 
 ' little romance ' is altogether another affair. 
 
 The world of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is 
 a world of spiritual affinities, of spiritual contacts and 
 recoils, where love begets and bears love, and hate is 
 begotten of hate and born of shame. Even Linton 
 
214 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Heathcliff, that ' whey-faced, whining wretch,' that 
 physical degenerate, demonstrates the higher law. His 
 weakness is begotten by his father's loathing on his 
 mother's terror. 
 
 Never was a book written with a more_sublime ignor- 
 ing of the pbysical. You only get a taste of it once in 
 Isabella's unwholesome love for Heathcliff ; that is not 
 passion, it is sentiment, and it is thoroughly impure. 
 And you get a far-off vision of it again in Isabella's fear 
 of Heathcliff. Heathchff understood her. He says of 
 her, ' " No brutality disgusted her. . . . I 've sometimes 
 relented, from pure lack of invention, in my experiments 
 on what she could endure and stiU creep shamefully 
 back." ' This civilised creature is nearer to the animals, 
 there is more of the earth in her than in Catherine or in 
 Heathcliff. They are elemental beings, if you like, but 
 their element is fire. They are clean, as all fiery, 
 elemental things are clean. 
 
 True, their love found violent physical expression ; 
 so that M. Maeterlinck can say of them and their creator : 
 ' We feel that one must have lived for thirty years under 
 chains of burning kisses to learn what she has learned ; 
 to dare so confidently set forth, with such minuteness, 
 such unerring certainty, the delirium of those two lovers 
 of Wuthering Heights ; to mark the self-conflicting 
 movements of the tenderness that would make suffer, and 
 the cruelty that would make glad, the felicity that 
 prayed for death, and the despair that clung to life, 
 the repulsion that desired, the desire drunk with repul- 
 sion — ^love surcharged with hatred, hatred staggering 
 beneath its load of love.' ^ 
 
 ' Wisdom and Destiny, translated by Alfred Sutro. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 215 
 
 True ; but the passion that consumes Catherine and 
 Heathclift, that burns their bodies and destroys them, 
 is nine-tenths a passion of the soul. It taught them 
 nothing of the sad secrets of the body. Thus Catherine's 
 treachery to HeathcHff is an unconscious treachery. 
 It is her innocence that makes it possible. She goes to 
 Edgar Linton's arms with blind eyes, in utter, childUke 
 ignorance, not knowing what she does till it is done 
 and she is punished for it. She is punished for the sin 
 of sins, the sundering of the body from the soul. All 
 her life after she sees her sin. She has taken her body, 
 torn it apart and given it to Edgar Linton, and Heath- 
 cliff has her soul. 
 
 ' " You love Edgar Linton," Nelly Dean says, " and 
 Edgar loves you . . . where is the obstacle ? " 
 
 ' " Here ! and here ! " rephed Catherine, striking one 
 hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast : 
 " in whichever place the soul lives. In my soul and in 
 my heart, I 'm convinced I 'm wrong." . . . " I 've 
 no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have 
 to be in heaven ; and if the wicked man in there hadn't 
 brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of 
 it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now ; so 
 he shall never know how I love him, and that, not because 
 he 's handsome, Nelly, but because he 's more myself 
 than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and 
 mine are the same." ' 
 
 Not only are they made of the same stuff, but Heath- 
 cliff is her soul. 
 
 ' " I cannot express it ; but surely you and every- 
 body have a notion that there is, or should be, an exist- 
 ence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my 
 
216 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 creation, if I were entirely contained here ? My great 
 miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries 
 . . . my great thought in living is himself. . . . Nelly ! 
 I am Heathcliff ! He 's always, always in my mind : 
 not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to 
 myself, but as my own being." ' 
 
 That is her " secret.' 
 
 Of course, there is Cathy's other secret — her dream, 
 which passes for Emily Bronte's ' pretty piece of Pagan- 
 ism.' But it is only one side of Emily Bronte. And 
 it is only one side of Catherine Earnshaw. When Heath- 
 cliff turns from her for a moment in that last scene of 
 passion, she says : ' " Oh, you see, Nelly, he would not 
 relent a moment to keep me out of the grave. That 
 is how I 'm loved ! Well, never mind. That is not 
 my Heathcliff. I shall love mine yet ; and take him 
 with me : he 's in my soul. And," she added musingly, 
 " the thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, 
 after all. I 'm tired of being enclosed here. I 'm weary- 
 ing to escape into that glorious world, and to be always 
 there : not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning 
 for it through the walls of an aching heart ; but really 
 with it and in it. Nelly, you think you are better and 
 more fortunate than I ; in full health and strength : 
 you are sorry for me — very soon that will be altered. 
 I shall be sorry for you. I shall be incomparably above 
 and beyond you all." ' 
 
 True, adoration of Earth, the All-Mother, runs like 
 a choric hymn through all the tragedy. Earth is the 
 mother and the nurse of these children. They are 
 brought to her for their last bed, and she gives them 
 the final consolation. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 217 
 
 Yet, after all, the end of this wild northern tragedy 
 is far enough from Earth, the All-Mother. The tumult 
 of Wuthering Heights ceases when Heathcliff sickens. 
 It sinks suddenly into the peace and silence of exhaustion. 
 And the drama closes, not in hopeless gloom, the agony 
 of damned souls, but in redemption, reconciliation. 
 
 Catherine, the child of Catherine and of Edgar Linton, 
 loves Hareton, the child of Hindley Earnshaw. The 
 evil spirit that possessed these two dies with the 
 death of Heathcliff. The younger Catherine is a mixed 
 creature, half-spiritualised by much suffering. Hareton 
 is a splendid animal, unspiritualised and unredeemed. 
 Catherine redeems him ; and you gather that by that 
 act of redemption, somehow, the souls of Catherine and 
 Heathcliff are appeased. 
 
 The whole tremendous art of the book is in this wring- 
 ing of strange and terrible harmony out of raging discord. 
 It ends on a sliding cadence, soft as a sigh of peace only 
 Just conscious after pain. 
 
 ' I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones 
 on the slope next the moor : the middle one grey and 
 half-buried in heath ; Edgar Linton's only harmonised 
 by the turf and moss creeping up its foot ; Heathcliff's 
 still bare. 
 
 ' I lingered round them, under that benign sky : 
 watched the moths fluttering among the heath and 
 hare-bells, 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 that is not the real end, any more than Loekwood's 
 arrival at Wuthering Heights is the beginning. It is 
 
218 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 only Lockwood recovering himself; the natural man's 
 drawing breath after the passing of the supernatural. 
 
 For it was not conceivable that the more than human 
 love of Heathcliff and Catherine should cease with the 
 dissolution of their bodies. It was not conceivable that 
 Catherine, by merely dying in the fifteenth chapter, 
 should pass out of the tale. As a matter of fact, she 
 never does pass out of it. She is more in it than ever. 
 
 For the greater action of the tragedy is entirely on 
 the invisible and immaterial plane ; it is the pursuing, 
 the hunting to death of an earthly creature by an un- 
 earthly passion. You are made aware of it at the very 
 beginning when the ghost of the child Catherine is heard 
 and felt by Lockwood ; though it is Heathcliff that she 
 haunts. It begins in the hour after Catherine's death, 
 upon Heathclift's passionate invocation : ' " Catherine 
 Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living ! 
 You said I killed you — haunt me, then ! The murdered 
 do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts 
 have wandered on earth. Be with me always — take 
 any form — drive me mad ! Only do not leave me in this 
 abyss, where I cannot find you ! Oh God ! it is un- 
 bearable ! I cannot live without my life ! I cannot 
 live without my soul ! " ' 
 
 It begins and is continued through eighteen years. 
 He cannot see her, but he is aware of her. He is first 
 aware on the evening of the day she is buried. He goes 
 to the graveyard and breaks open the new-made grave, 
 saying to himself, ' " I '11 have her in my arms again ! 
 If she be cold, I '11 think it is the north wind that chills 
 me ; and if she be motionless, it is sleep." ' A sighing, 
 twice repeated, stops him. '"I appeared to feel the 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 219 
 
 warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind. I 
 knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by; but 
 as certainly as you perceive the approach to some sub- 
 stantial body in the dark, though it cannot be discerned, 
 so certainly I felt Cathy was there ; not under me, but 
 on the earth. . . . Her presence was with me ; it re- 
 mained while I re-filled the grave, and led me home." ' 
 
 But she cannot get through to him completely, because 
 of the fleshly body that he wears. 
 
 He goes up to his room, his room and hers. ' " I looked 
 round impatiently — I felt her by me — I could almost see 
 her, and yet I could notl . . . She showed herself, as 
 she often was in life, a devil to me ! And since then, 
 sometimes more and sometimes less, I 've been the sport 
 of that intolerable torture ! . . . When I sat in the house 
 with Hareton, it seemed that on going out I should 
 meet her ; when I walked on the moors I should meet 
 her coming in. When I went from home, I hastened 
 to return; she must be somewhere at the Heights, I 
 was certain ! And when I slept in her chamber — I was 
 beaten out of that. I couldn't lie there ; for the moment 
 I closed my eyes, she was either outside the window, or 
 sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or even 
 resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did 
 when a child ; and I must open my lids to see. And so 
 I opened and closed them a hundred times a night — to 
 be always disappointed ! It racked me ! ... It was 
 a strange way of killing : not by inches, but by fractions 
 of hair-breadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a 
 hope through eighteen years 1 " ' 
 
 In all Catherine's appearances you feel the impulse 
 towards satisfaction of a soul frustrated of its passion. 
 
220 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 avenging itself on the body that betrayed it. It has 
 killed Catherine's body. It will kill Heathehff's ; for 
 it must get through to him. And he knows it. 
 
 Heathcliff's brutalities, his cruelties, the long-drawn 
 accomplishment of his revenge, are subordinate to this 
 supreme inner drama, this wearing down of the flesh by 
 the lust of a remorseless spirit. 
 
 Here are the last scenes of the final act. Heathclift is 
 failing. ' " Nelly," he says, " there 's a strange change 
 approaching : I 'm in its shadow at present. I take so 
 little interest in my daily life, that I hardly remember to 
 eat or drink. Those two who have left the room " 
 (Catherine Linton and Hareton) " are the only objects 
 which retain a distinct material appearance to me. . . . 
 Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed a personification of 
 my youth, not a human being : I felt to him in such a 
 variety of ways that it would have been impossible to 
 have accosted him rationally. In the first place, his 
 starthng likeness to Catherine connected him fearfully 
 with her. That, however, which you may suppose the 
 most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the 
 least : for what is not connected with her to me ? and 
 what does not recall her ? I cannot look down to this 
 floor, but her features are shaped in the flags ! In every 
 cloud, in every tree — filling the air at night, and caught 
 by glimpses in every object by day — I am devoured 
 with her image ! The most ordinary faces of men and 
 women — my own features — mock me with a resemblance. 
 The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda 
 that she did exist, and that I have lost her." . . . 
 
 ' " But what do you mean by a change, Mr. Heath- 
 cliff ? " I said, alarmed at his manner. . . . 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 221 
 
 ' " I shall not know till it comes," he said, " I 'm only 
 half conscious of it now." ' 
 
 A few days pass. He grows more and more abstracted 
 and detached. One morning Nelly Dean finds him 
 downstairs, risen late. 
 
 ' I put a basin of coffee before him. He drew it nearer, 
 and then rested his arms on the table, and looked at 
 the opposite wall, as I supposed, surveying one particular 
 portion, up and down, with glittering, restless eyes, and 
 with such eager interest that he stopped breathing during 
 half a minute together. . . . 
 
 ' " Mr. Heathcliff ! master ! " I cried, " don't, for 
 God's sake, stare as if you saw an unearthly vision." 
 
 ' " Don't, for God's sake, shout so loud," he replied. 
 " Turn round, and tell me, are we by ourselves ? " 
 
 ' " Of course," was my answer, " of course we are." 
 
 ' Still, I involuntarily obeyed him, as if I were not 
 quite sure. With a sweep of his hand he cleared a 
 space in front of the breakfast-things, and leant forward 
 more at his ease. 
 
 ' Now I perceived that he was not looking at the 
 wall ; for, when I regarded him alone, it seemed exactly 
 that he gazed at something within two yards' distance. 
 And, whatever it was, it communicated, apparently, 
 both pleasure and pain in exquisite extremes : at least 
 the anguished, yet raptured, expression of his counten- 
 ance suggested that idea. The fancied object was not 
 fixed: either his eyes pursued it with unwearied dili- 
 gence, and, even in speaking to me, were never weaned 
 away. I vainly reminded him of his protracted abstin- 
 ence from food : if he stirred to touch anything in 
 compliance with my entreaties, if he stretched his hand 
 
222 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 out to get a piece of bread, his fingers clenched before 
 they reached it, and remained on the table, forgetful 
 of their aim.' 
 
 He cannot sleep ; and at dawn of the next day he 
 comes to the door of his room — Cathy's room — ^and calls 
 Nelly to him. She remonstrates with him for his neglect 
 of his body's health, and of his soul's. 
 
 ' " Your cheeks are hollow, and your eyes bloodshot, 
 like a person starving with hunger, and going blind 
 with loss of sleep." 
 
 ' " It is not my fault that I cannot eat or rest," he said. 
 . . . " I '11 do both as soon as I possibly can ... as 
 to repenting of my injustices, I've done no injustice, 
 and I repent of nothing. I am too happy ; and yet I 'm 
 not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but 
 does not satisfy itself." ' . . . ' In the afternoon, while 
 Joseph and Hareton were at their work, he came into 
 the kitchen again, and, with a wild look, bid me come 
 and sit in the house : he wanted somebody with him. 
 I declined ; telling him plainly that his strange talk and 
 manner frightened me, and I had neither the nerve nor 
 the will to be his companion alone. 
 
 ' " I believe you think me a fiend," he said, with his 
 dismal laugh : " something too horrible to live under 
 a decent roof." Then, turning to Catherine, who was 
 there, and who drew behind me at his approach, he 
 added, half sneeringly : " Will you come, chuck ? I '11 
 not hurt you. No ! to you I 've made myself worse 
 than the devil. Well, there is one who won't shrink 
 from my company ! By God ! she 's relentless. Oh, 
 damn it ! It 's unutterably too much for flesh and 
 blood to bear — even mine." ' 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 223 
 
 It is Heathcliff's susceptibility to this immaterial 
 passion, the fury with which he at once sustains and 
 is consumed by it, that makes him splendid. 
 
 Peace under green grass could never be the end of 
 Heathclift or of such a tragedy as Wuthering Heights. Its 
 real end is the tale told by the shepherd whom Lockwood 
 meets on the moor, 
 
 ' " I was going to the Grange one evening — a dark 
 evening, threatening thunder — and, just at the turn 
 of the Heights, I encountered a little boy with a sheep 
 and two lambs before him ; he was crying terribly ; 
 and I supposed the lambs were skittish and would not 
 be guided. 
 
 ' " What is the matter, my little man ? " I asked. 
 
 ' " There 's Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under 
 t' Nab," he blubbered, " un' I darnut pass 'em." ' 
 
 It is there, the end, in one line, charged with the 
 vibration of the supernatural. One line that carries 
 the suggestion of I know not what ghostly and immaterial 
 passion and its unearthly satisfaction. 
 
 And this book stands alone, absolutely self-begotten 
 and self-born. It belongs to no school ; it follows no 
 tendency. You cannot put it into any category. It is 
 not ' Realism,' it is not ' Romance,' any more than Jane 
 Eyre: and if any other master's method, De Mau- 
 passant's or Turgeniev's, is to be the test, it will not 
 stand it. There is nothing in it you can seize and name. 
 You will not find in it support for any creed or theory. 
 The redemption of Catherine Linton and Hareton is 
 thrown in by the way in sheer opulence of imagination. 
 It is not insisted on. Redemption is not the key-note of 
 
224 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Wuthering Heights. The moral problem never entered 
 into Emily Bronte's head. You may call her what you 
 will — Pagan, pantheist, transcendentalist, mystic and 
 worshipper of earth, she slips from all your formulas. 
 She reveals a point of view above good and evil. Hers 
 is an attitude of tolerance that is only not tenderness 
 because her acceptance of life and of all that lives is 
 unqualified and unstinting. It is too lucid and too high 
 for pity. 
 
 Heathcliff and Catherine exist. They justify their 
 existence by their passion. But if you ask what is to 
 be said for such a creature as Linton Heathcliff, you will 
 be told that he does not justify his existence ; his 
 existence justifies him. 
 
 ' Do I despise the timid deer. 
 Because his limbs are fleet with fear ? 
 Or, would I mock the wolfs death-howl. 
 Because his form is gaunt and foul ? 
 Or, hear with joy the lev'ret's cry, 
 Because it cannot bravely die ? 
 No ! Then above his memory 
 Let Pity's heart as tender be. ' 
 
 After all it is pity ; it is tenderness. 
 
 And if Emily Bronte stands alone and is at her greatest 
 in the things that none but she can do, she is great also 
 in some that she may be said to share with other novelists ; 
 the drawing of minor characters, for instance. JLgckwppd. 
 may be a little indistinct, but he is properly so, for he is 
 not a character, he is a mere impersonal looker-on. 
 But Nelly ^ean, the chief teller of the story, preserves 
 her rich individuality through all the tortuous windings 
 of the tale. Joseph, the old farm-servant, the bitter, 
 ranting Calvinist, is a masterpiece. And masterly was 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 225 
 
 that inspiration that made Joseph chorus to a drama 
 that moves above good and evil. ' " Thank Hivin for 
 all ! " ' says Joseph. ' " All warks togither for gooid, to 
 them as is chozzen and piked out fro' the rubbidge. Yah 
 knaw whet t' Scripture sez." ' ' "It 's a blazing shame, 
 that I cannot oppen t' blessed Book, but yah set up them 
 glories to Sattan, and all t' flaysome wickednesses that 
 iver were bom into the warld." ' 
 
 Charlotte Bronte said of her sister : ' Though her feel- 
 ing for the people round her was benevolent, intercourse 
 with them she never sought ; nor, with very few excep- 
 tions, ever experienced . . . she could hear of them 
 with interest and talk of them with detail, minute, 
 graphic, and accurate ; but with them she rarely exchanged 
 a word.' And yet you might have said she had been 
 listening to Joseph all her life, such is her command 
 of his copious utterance : ' " Ech ! ech ! " exclaimed 
 Joseph. "Weel done. Miss Cathy! weel done, Miss 
 Cathy I Howsiver, t' maister sail just tum'le o'er them 
 brocken pots ; un' then we 's hear summut ; we 's hear 
 how it 's to be. Gooid-for-naught madling ! ye desarve 
 pining fro' this to Churstmas, flinging t' precious gifts 
 o' God under fooit i' yer flaysome rages ! But I 'm 
 mista'en if ye shew yer sperrit lang. Will Hathecliff 
 bide sich bonny ways, think ye ? I nobbut wish he may 
 catch ye i' that plisky. I nobbut wish he may." ' 
 
 Edgar Linton is weak in drawing and in colour ; but 
 it was wellnigh impossible to make him more alive 
 beside Catherine and Heathcliff. If Emily's hand fails 
 in Edgar Linton it gains strength again injkabella. 
 These two are the tjrpes of the civihsed, the over-refined, 
 the delicate wearers of silk and velvet, dwellers in draw- 
 
 p 
 
226 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 ing-rooms with pure white ceilings bordered with gold, 
 ' with showers of glass-drops hanging in silver chains 
 from the centre.' They, as surely as the tainted Hindley, 
 are bound to perish in any struggle with strong, fierce, 
 primeval flesh and blood. The fatal moment in the 
 tale is where the two half-savage children, Catherine 
 and Heathcliff, come to Thrushcross Grange. Thrush- 
 cross Grange, with all its sickly brood, is doomed to 
 go down before Wuthering Heights. But Thrushcross 
 Grange is fatal to Catherine too. She has gone far from 
 reality when she is dazzled by the glittering glass-drops 
 and the illusion of Thrushcross Grange. She has divorced 
 her body from her soul for a little finer living, for 
 a polished, a scrupulously clean, perfectly presentable 
 husband. 
 
 Emily Bronte shows an unerring psjchology in her 
 handling of the relations between Isabella and Catherine. 
 It is Isabella's morbid passion for Heathcliff that wakes 
 the devil in Catherine. Isabella is a sentimentalist, and 
 she is convinced that Heathcliff would love her if 
 Catherine would ' let him.' She refuses to believe that 
 Heathcliff is what he is. But Catherine, jwho is Heath- 
 cliff, can afford to accuse him. ' " Nelly," ' she says, 
 ' " help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what 
 Heathcliff is. . . . He 's not a rough diamond — a pearl- 
 containing oyster of a rustic ; he 's a fierce, pitiless, 
 wolfish man." ' But Isabella will not beUeve it. ' " Mr. 
 Heathcliff is not a fiend," ' she says ; ' " he has an honour- 
 able soul, and a true one, or how could he remember 
 her ? " ' It is the same insight that made George Meredith 
 represent Juliana, the sentimental passionist, as declaring 
 her belief in Evan Harrington's innocence while Rose 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 227 
 
 Jocelyn, whose love is more spiritual and therefore more 
 profoundly loyal, doubts. Emily Bronte, like George 
 Meredith, saw a sensualist in every sentimentalist ; and 
 Isabella Linton was a little animal under her silken skin. 
 She is ready to go to her end quand meme, whatever 
 Heathcliff is, but she tricks herself into believing that 
 he is what he is not, that her sensualism may justify 
 itself to her refinement. That is partly why Heathcliff, 
 who is no sensualist, hates and loathes Isabella and her 
 body. 
 
 But there are moments when he also hates the body 
 of Catherine that betrayed her. Emily Bronte is un- 
 swerving in her drawing of Heathcliff. It is of a piece 
 with his strangeness, his unexpectedness, that he does 
 not hate Edgar Linton with anything like the same 
 intensity of hatred that he has for Isabella. And it is 
 of a piece with his absolute fiery cleanness that never 
 for a moment does he think of taking the lover's obvious 
 revenge. For it is not, I imagine, that Emily Bronte 
 deUberately shirked the issue, or deliberately rejected it ; 
 it is that that issue never entered her head. Nor do I 
 see here, in this abandonment of the obvious, any proof 
 of the childlikeness and innocence of Emily, however 
 childlike and innocent she may have been. I see only 
 a tremendous artistic uprightness, the rejection, con- 
 scious or unconscious, of an unfitting because extraneous 
 element. Anne, who was ten times more childUke and 
 innocent than Emily, tackles this peculiar obviousness 
 unashamed, because she needed it. And because she 
 did not need it, Emily let it go. 
 
 The evil wrought by Heathcliff, like the passion that 
 inspired and tortured him, is an unearthly thing. Char- 
 
228 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 lotte showed insight when she said in her preface to 
 Wuthering Heights: 'Heathdiff betra_ys _Qne --solitary 
 human feeUng, and that is not his love for Catherine ; 
 which is a sentiment fierce and inhuman . , . the single 
 link that connects Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely 
 confessed regard for Hareton Earnshaw — the young 
 man whom he has ruined ; and then his half-impUed 
 esteem for Nelly Dean.' But that Heathcliff is wholly 
 inhuman — ' a ghoul, an afreet,'— I cannot really see. 
 Emily's psychology here is perforce half on the unearthly 
 plane ; it is above our criticism, lending itself to no 
 ordinary tests. But for all his unearthliness, Heathcliff 
 is poignantly human, from his childhood when he implored 
 Nelly Dean to make him ' decent,' for he is ' going to be 
 good,' to his last hour of piteous dependence on her. 
 You are not allowed for a moment to forget, that, horrible 
 and vindictive as he is, the child Heathcliff is yet a child. 
 Take the scene where the boy first conceives his vengeance. 
 
 ' On my inquiring the subject of his thoughts, he 
 answered gravely : 
 
 ' " 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 ! " 
 
 ' " For shame, Heathcliff ! " said I. " It is for God 
 to punish wicked people. We should learn to forgive." 
 
 ' " No, God won't have the satisfaction that I shall," 
 he returned. " I only wish I knew the best way 1 Let 
 me alone, and I '11 plan it out : while I 'm thinking of 
 that I don't feel pain." ' 
 
 It is very like Heathcliff. It is> also pathetically like 
 a child. ^-- ^ 
 
 In H areton Earnshaw Emily Bronte is fairly on the 
 
THE THREE BRONTfiS 229 
 
 earth all the time, and nothing could be finer than her 
 handling of this half-brutalised, and wholly undeveloped 
 thing, her showing of the slow dawn of his feelings and 
 intelligence. Her psychology is never psychologic. The 
 creature reveals himself at each moment of his unfolding 
 for what he is. It was difficult ; for in his degradation 
 he had a certain likeness in unlikeness to the degraded 
 Heatheliff. It was Heathcliff's indomitable will that 
 raised him. Hareton cannot rise without a woman's 
 hand to help him. The younger Catherine again was 
 difficult, because of her likeness to her mother. Her 
 temper, her vanity, her headstrong trickiness are Catherine 
 Earnshaw. But Catherine Linton is a healthy animal, 
 incapable of superhuman passion, capable only (when 
 properly chastened by adversity) of quite ordinary pity 
 and devotion. She inspires bewilderment, but terror 
 and fascination never ; and never the glamour, the 
 magic evoked by the very name of Catherine Earnshaw. 
 Her escapades and fantasies, recalling Catherine Earn- 
 shaw, are all on an attenuated scale. 
 
 Yet Catherine Earnshaw seems now and then a less 
 solid figure. That is because her strength does not lie 
 in solidity at all. She is a thing of flame and, rJishing 
 windL One half of her is akin to the storms of Wuthering 
 Heights, the other belongs to her unseen abiding-place. 
 Both sides of her are immortal. 
 
 And they are of that immortality which is the spirit 
 of place — the spirit that, more than all spirits, inspired 
 Emily Bronte. Two of Charlotte's books, The Professor 
 and Villette, might have been written away from Ha worth ; 
 Emily's owes much of its outward character to the moors, 
 where it was brought forth. Not even Charlotte could 
 
230 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 paint, could suggest scenery like Emily Bronte. There 
 is nobody to compare with her but Thomas Hardy ; and 
 even he has to labour more, to put in more strokes, to 
 achieve his effect. In four lines she gives the storm, 
 the cold and savage foreground, and the distance of the 
 Heights : ' One may guess the power of the north wind 
 blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few 
 stunted firs at the end of the house ; and by a range 
 of gaunt thorns, all stretching their limbs one way, 
 as if craving alms of the sun.' 
 
 See the finish of this landscape, framed in a window : 
 ' They sat together in a window whose lattice lay back 
 against the wall, and displayed, beyond the garden trees 
 and the wild green park, the valley of Gimmerton, with 
 a long line of mist winding nearly to its top (for very 
 soon after you pass the chapel, as you may have noticed, 
 the sough that runs from the marshes joins a beck which 
 follows the bend of the glen). Wuthering Heights rose 
 above this silvery vapour ; but our old house was 
 invisible ; it rather dips down on the other side.' 
 
 In six lines she can paint sound, and distance, and 
 scenery, and the turn of the seasons, and the two magics 
 of two atmospheres. ' Gimmerton chapel bells were 
 still ringing ; and the full, mellow flow of the beck in 
 the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet 
 substitute for the yet absent murmur of the summer 
 foliage, which drowned that music about the Grange 
 when the trees were in leaf. At Wuthering Heights it 
 always sounded on quiet days following a great thaw 
 or a season of steady rain.' 
 
 That music is the prelude to Heathcliff's return, and 
 to the passionate scene that ends in Catherine's death, 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 231 
 
 And nothing could be more vivid, more concrete than 
 Emily Bronte's method. Time is marked as a shepherd 
 on the moors might mark it, by the movement of the 
 sun, the moon, and the stars ; by weather, and the pas- 
 sage of the seasons. Passions, emotions, are always 
 presented in bodily symbols, by means of the bodily 
 acts and violences they inspire. The passing of the in- 
 visible is made known in the same manner. And the 
 visible world moves and shines and darkens with an 
 absolute illusion of reality. Here is a road seen between 
 sunset and moonrise : ' ... all that remained of day 
 was a beamless amber light along the west : but I could 
 see every pebble on the path, and every blade of grass, 
 by the light of that splendid moon.' 
 
 The book has faults, many and glaring faults. You 
 have to read it many times before you can realise in 
 the mass its amazing qualities. For it is probably the 
 worst-constructed tale that ever was written, this story 
 of two houses and of three generations that the man 
 Lockwood is supposed to tell. Not only has Lockwood 
 to tell of things he could not possibly have heard and 
 seen, but sometimes you get scene within vivid scene, 
 dialogue within dialogue, and tale within tale, four 
 deep. Sometimes you are carried back in time and 
 sometimes forward. You have to think hard before 
 you know for certain whose wife Catherine Heathclift 
 really is. You cannot get over Lockwood's original 
 mistake. And this poor device of narrative at second- 
 hand, third-hand, fourth-hand, is used to convey things 
 incredible, inconceivable ; all the secret, invisible drama 
 of the souls of Catherine and Heathclift, as well as whole 
 acts of the most visible, the most tangible, the most 
 
232 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 direct and vivid and tumultuous drama ; drama so 
 tumultuous, so vivid, and so direct, that by no possi- 
 bility could it have been conveyed by any medium. It 
 simply happens. 
 
 And that is how Emily Bronte's genius triumphs over 
 all her faults. It is not only that you forgive her faults 
 and forget them, you are not — ^in the third reading 
 anyhow — aware of them. They disappear, they are de- 
 stroyed, they are burnt up in her flame, and you wonder 
 how you ever saw them. All her clumsy contrivances 
 (^not stay her course, or obscure her light, or quench 
 her fire. Things happen before your eyes, and it does 
 not matter whether Lockwood, or Nelly Dean, or Heath- 
 cliff, or Catherine, tells you of their happening. 
 
 And yet, though Lockwood and Nelly Dean are the 
 thinnest, the most transparent of pure mediums, they 
 preserve their personalities throughout. Nelly especially. 
 The tale only begins to move when Lockwood drops 
 out and Nelly takes it up. At that point Emily Bronte's 
 style becomes assured in its directness and simplicity, 
 and thenceforward it never falters or changes its essential 
 character. 
 
 And it is there, first of all, in that unfaltering, un- 
 changing quality of style that she stands so far above 
 her sister. She has no purple patches, no decorative 
 effects. No dubiously shining rhetoric is hers. She 
 does not deal in metaphors or in those ponderous ab- 
 stractions, those dreadful second-hand symbolic figures 
 — Hope, Imagination, Memory, and the rest of them, 
 that move with every appearance of solidity in Char- 
 lotte's pages. There are no angels in her rainbows. 
 Her * grand style ' goes unclothed, perfect in its naked 
 
THE THREE BRONTfiS 233 
 
 strength, its naked beauty. It is not possible to praise 
 Charlotte's style without reservations ; it is not always 
 possible to give passages that illustrate her qualities 
 without suppressing her defects. What was a pernicious 
 habit with Charlotte, her use of words like ' peruse,' 
 ' indite,' ' retain,' with Emily is a mere slip of the pen. 
 There are only, I think, three of such slips in Wuthering 
 Heights, Charlotte was capable of mixing her worst 
 things with her best. She mixed them most in her 
 dialogue, where sins of style are sinfullest. It is not 
 always possible to give a scene, word for word, from 
 Charlotte's novels; the dramatic illusion, the illusion 
 of reality, is best preserved by formidable cutting. 
 
 But not only was Emily's style sinless ; it is on the 
 whole purest, most natural, and most inevitable in her 
 dialogue ; and that, although the passions she conceived 
 were so tremendous, so unearthly, that she might have 
 been pardoned if she found no human speech to render 
 them. 
 
 What is more, her dramatic instinct never fails her as 
 it fails Charlotte over and over again. Charlotte had 
 not always the mastery and self-mastery that, having 
 worked a situation up to its dramatic climax, leaves it 
 there. A certain obscure feeling for rightness guides 
 her in the large, striding movement of the drama ; it 
 is in the handling of the scenes that she collapses. She 
 wanders from climax to climax ; she goes back on 
 her own trail ; she ruins her best effects by repetition. 
 She has no continuous dramatic instinct ; no sense 
 whatever of dramatic, form. 
 
 These are present somehow in Wuthering Heights, in 
 spite of its monstrous formlessness. Emily may have 
 
234 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 had no more sense of form for form's sake than Char- 
 lotte ; she may have had no more dramatic instinct ; 
 but she had an instinct for the ways of human passion. 
 She knew that passion runs its course, from its excite- 
 ment to its climax and exhaustion. It has a natural 
 beginning and a natural end. And so her scenes of 
 passion follow nature. She never goes back on her 
 effect, never urges passion past its climax, or stirs it in 
 its exhaustion. In this she is a greater ' realist ' than 
 Charlotte. 
 
 It is inci edible that Wuthering Heights, or any line of 
 it, any line that Emily Bronte ever wrote, should have 
 passed for Charlotte's. She did things that Charlotte 
 could never have done if she tried a thousand years, 
 things not only incomparably greater, but unique. 
 
 Yet in her life-time she was unrecognised. What is 
 true of her prose is true also of her poems. They indeed 
 did bring her a little praise, obscure and momentary. 
 No less she was unrecognised to such an extent that 
 Wuthering Heights was said and believed to be an im- 
 mature work of Charlotte's. Even after her death, her 
 eulogist, Sydney Dobell, was so far from recognising 
 her, that he seems to have had a lingering doubt as to 
 Ellis Bell's identity until Charlotte convinced him of his 
 error. 
 
 And only the other day a bold attempt was made to 
 tear from Emily Bronte the glory that she has won at 
 last from time. The very latest theory,^ offered to the 
 world as a marvellous discovery, the fruit of passionate 
 
 ^ TAe Key to the Bronte Works, by J. Malham-Dembleby. See 
 Appendix I. 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 235 
 
 enthusiasm and research, is the old, old theory that 
 Charlotte, and not Emily, wrote Wuthering Heights. 
 And Sydney Dobell, with his little error, is made to 
 serve as a witness. In order to make out a case for 
 Charlotte, the enthusiast and researcher is obliged to 
 disparage every other work of Emily's. He leans rashly 
 enough on the assumption that her ' Gondal Chronicles ' 
 were, in their puerility, beneath contempt, still more 
 rashly on his own opinion that she was no poet. 
 
 If this were the only line he took, this amusing theorist 
 might be left alone. The pubhcation of the Complete 
 Poems settles him. The value, the really priceless value, 
 of his undertaking is in the long array of parallel passages 
 from the prose of Charlotte and of Emily with which 
 he endeavours to support it. For, so far from support- 
 ing it, these columns are the most convincing, the most 
 direct and palpable refutation of his theory. If any 
 uncritical reader should desire to see for himself wherein 
 Charlotte and Emily Bronte differed ; in what manner, 
 with what incompatible qualities, and to what an im- 
 measurable degree the younger sister was pre-eminent, 
 he cannot do better than study those parallel passages. 
 If ever there was a voice, a quality, an air absolutely 
 apart and distinct, not to be approached by, or con- 
 founded with any other, it is Emily Bronte's. 
 
 It was the glare of Charlotte's fame that caused in 
 her lifetime that blindness and confusion. And Emily, 
 between pride and a superb indifference, suffered it. 
 She withdrew, with what seemed an obstinate perversity, 
 into her own magnificent obscurity. She never raised 
 a hand to help herself. She left no record, not a note 
 or a word to prove her authorship of Wuthering Heights, 
 
236 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Until the appearance last year of her Complete Poems 
 the world had no proof of it but Charlotte's statement. 
 It was considered enough, in Charlotte's lifetime. The 
 world accepted her disclaimer. 
 
 But the trouble began again after Charlotte's death. 
 Emily herself had no legend ; but her genius was per- 
 petually 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.^ 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. 
 
 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, un- 
 deUberately, would seem to be the supreme test of 
 genius. Having your own way in the teeth of circum- 
 stances, of father and of brothers, and of aunts, of school- 
 mistresses,^ 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 Bronte fairly flames ; Charlotte's stands beside it 
 with a face hidden at times behind bruised and darkened 
 
 ' The curious will find a note on this point in Appendix II. 
 ^ It was Miss Wooler who taught Charlotte to ' peruse. ' 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 237 
 
 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. 
 
 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 thai 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 Heathclift 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 Brontes 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 Bronte. 
 
 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 hnen. 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 
 
238 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 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 realisation 
 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 Bronte 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 
 
THE THREE BRONTES 239 
 
 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 school- 
 days at Cowan Bridge and that I found the Brussels period 
 dull ; M. Heger 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 mourner's train. 
 
 And, all through, an invisible, intangible presence, 
 something mysterious, but omnipotently alive ; some- 
 thing 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.' 
 
240 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Now that, as truly as I can set it down, is the impres- 
 sion conveyed to a child's mind by Mrs. Gaskell's Life 
 of Charlotte Bronte. 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 elimi- 
 nates the inessential and preserves the proportions ; 
 above all, it preserves the figure of Emily Bronte, solitary 
 and unique. 
 
 Anyhow, I have never been able to get away from it. 
 
 September, 1911. 
 
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 
 Jaiie Eyre,' published in the Saturday Review in 1902; there 
 was his ' Lifting of the Bronte Veil/ published in the Fort- 
 nightly 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 
 immortalised the great tragic passion of her life, inspired 
 by M. Heger, who, if you please, is HeathclifF. 
 
 This is Mr. Malham-Dembleby's most important contribu- 
 tion 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 passion, Charlotte alone was able to 
 immortalise it. 
 
 So much Mr. Malham-Dembleby assumes 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 sensa- 
 tional 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 
 
 a 
 
242 THE THREE BRONTfiS 
 
 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 passages are given showing a certain 
 correspondence between Montagu's traveller's tale and the 
 opening scene of Wuthering Heights. Montagu goes on horse- 
 back 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 HeathclifFs, 
 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 passages from Montagu's book and JVuthering 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 
 
APPENDIX I 243 
 
 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 passages 
 depends on the identification of the characters in the Bronte 
 works, not only with their assumed 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 Heath- 
 cliff, and, if you would believe it, for Hareton Earnshaw ; 
 because (parallel passage ! ) 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 sex ; 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 passage!). 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. Heath- 
 cliff returning to Catherine is Jane returning to Rochester, 
 and so on. But however varied, however apparently dis- 
 criminated 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 Bassompierre and Lucy Snowe. 
 
244 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Now there is a certain plausibility in this. With all their 
 vividness and individuality Charlotte Bronte's characters 
 have a way of shading oflF 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 
 identity 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 passion 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 ' hell-light ' in Rochester's eyes and Heath- 
 clifTs 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 Titan 
 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. H6ger and of the great tragic passion, as 
 his theory, by a vicious circle, supports his identifications. 
 His procedure is to quote all the emotional passages 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. H6ger, we are informed in confidential brackets) was 
 
APPENDIX I 245 
 
 not ' what she had thought him.' Assuring us that 
 Charlotte was here describing her own emotions, he builds 
 his argument. ' Evidence ' (the evidence of these passages) 
 ' 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 stoi-y ' 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, on I' Instiiutrice, and 
 gives us parallel passages from that. For in Miss Mary, pub- 
 lished in 1850-51,^ 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 anticipated. 
 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 revela- 
 tions to Eugene Sue, but that Eugene Sue was an unscrupulous 
 plagiarist who took his own where he found it, either in the 
 
 ^ 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 
 manuscript of Tiie Professor when it was 'going the round.' 
 
246 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 pages of Jane Eyre or in the tittle-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. Nobody, however, 
 can answer for what Madame H6ger and her friends may not 
 have said. Which disposes of Eugene Sue. 
 
 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 oi 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 1 850.' 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 H6ger family, a statement at variance with 
 the evidence of the H6ger family itself. But granted that 
 the children of M. Heger were mistaken as to their father's 
 
APPENDIX I 247 
 
 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 assumption of the great 
 tragic passion which is the main support of Mr. Malham- 
 Dembleby's amazing fabrication. 
 
APPENDIX 11 
 
 Leyland's theory is that Branwell Bronte wrote the first 
 seventeen chapters of Wuthering Heights. It has very httle 
 beyond Leyland's passionate conviction to support it. There 
 is a passage 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 manuscripts 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 vindica- 
 tion. He could hardly have done Branwell a worse service. 
 Branwell's letters give us a vivid idea of the sort of manu- 
 scripts that would be produced, in inn-parlours, from his hat. 
 As for his verse — that foi-mless, fluent gush of sentimentalism 
 — it might have passed as an error of liis 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 
 
APPENDIX II 249 
 
 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 passion of this stupendous tale. And 
 where passion 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 manuscripts he produced from his hat. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Absolute, the, 5, 175. 
 Agnes Grey, 28, 29, 39. 
 Augustine, St., 184. 
 Austen, Jane, 118, 156, 157. 
 
 Ballynaskbagh, 8. 
 Balzac, 44, 115, 140, 161. 
 Bassompierre, Pauline de, in 
 
 Villette, 150-155. 
 Being, 183, 184. 
 
 Parmenides on, 184. 
 
 Birrell, Mr., 2, 20, 30, 55, 56. 
 Blake, William, 173, 176. 
 Branwell, Miss, at Haworth, 11, 
 
 12. 
 
 death of, 25. 
 
 Maria marries Rev. 
 
 Patrick Bronte, 8. 
 
 illness of, 11. 
 
 death of, 11. 
 
 Bronte — 
 Anne, 38-47. 
 
 15, 16. 
 
 at Thornton, 8. 
 
 at Haworth, 22, 28. 
 
 at Thorp Green, 22, 24, 
 
 26, 40, 41. 
 
 in London, 29. 
 
 character of, 38, 39, 44, 
 
 45. 
 
 death of, 34. 
 
 diary of, 23, 27, 193. 
 
 Poems of, 44-47, 187, 
 
 248. 
 
 novels of, 28, 39-44, 45. 
 
 and Branwell Bronte 
 
 compared, 44, 248. 
 
 Bronte — 
 
 Charlotte, 47-164. 
 
 at Thornton, 8. 
 
 at Haworth, 3, 4, 7, 8, 
 
 11, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 26, 
 
 28, 36, 36, 76, 86, 96, 98, 
 
 163, 238, 239. 
 
 at Cowan Bridge, 12, 13. 
 
 at Roe Head, 15, 16, 86, 
 
 87. 
 at Dewsbury Moor, 16, 
 
 85, 86. 
 
 at Stonegappe, 16, 61-64. 
 
 at Rawdon, 22, 67. 
 
 in Brussels, 3, 24-26, 72, 
 
 82, 246, 248. 
 in London, 3, 29, 36, 36, 
 
 246. 
 
 marriage of, 36, 37, 38. 
 
 death of, 37, 38. 
 
 character of, 4, 66 et seq., 
 
 70, 72, 74, 75, 81, 82, 164. 
 genius of, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 
 
 14, 24, 26, 72, 82, 96, 97, 
 
 125, 126, 169, 236. 
 — — ■ early writings of, 93-96. 
 
 novels of, 98-162. 
 
 Poems of, 28, 96, 167, 
 
 168. 
 her love of children, 56- 
 
 69. 
 and Emily Bronte com- 
 pared, 37, 169-171, 232-236, 
 
 236. 
 Mr. Swinburne on, 66. 
 
 66, 69. 
 Emily Jane, 165-237. 
 
 251 
 
252 
 
 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Bronte — 
 
 Emily Jane at Haworth, 7, 8, 
 
 11, 14, 16, 22, 25, 28, 29. 
 
 at Cowan Bridge, 12, 13. 
 
 at Roe Head, 16. 
 
 at Halifax, 16. 
 
 in Brussels, 24, 26. 
 
 death of, 32-34, 134, 136, 
 
 171. 
 
 character of, 16, 166- 
 
 171. 
 
 genius of, 6, 7, 8, 169, 
 
 171, 172, 186, 209, 210, 232, 
 236, 237, 239. 
 
 diary of, 22, 23, 27, 193. 
 
 Poems of, 28, 173-209, 
 
 234, 236. 
 
 novel of, 28, 209-237, 
 
 242-249. 
 
 mysticism of, 6, 166, 169, 
 
 172-180, 186. 
 paganism of, S, 131, 132, 
 
 172,185,209, 216. 
 
 and Charlotte Bronte 
 
 compared, 37, 169-171, 232- 
 236, 236. 
 
 M. Maeterlinck on, 2, 
 
 168, 214. 
 
 Mr. Swinburne on, 2, 
 
 172. 
 
 Maria, 8, 10. 
 
 at Cowan Bridge, 12, 13. 
 
 character of, 12, 13. 
 
 death of, 13. 
 
 Patrick Branwell, 3, 10, 16, 
 
 18, 19, 20, 25, 32, 48, 49, 
 60, 61, 64, 198. 
 
 at Thoniton, 8. 
 
 at Haworth, 16, 17, 18, 
 
 19, 25, 30-32. 
 
 at Bradford, 16, 17. 
 
 at Luddenden Foot, 23. 
 
 at Thorp Green, 30, 31. 
 
 character of, 30-32, 39- 
 
 43. 
 
 and Mrs. Robinson, 30, 
 
 31, 40-43. 
 death of, 32. 
 
 Bronte — 
 
 Patrick Branwell, Poems of, 
 17, 31, 236, 248. 
 
 authorship of Wuthering 
 
 Heights ascribed to, 236, 
 248, 249. 
 and Emily Bronte com- 
 pared, 248, 249. 
 and Anne Bronte com- 
 pared, 43, 236. 
 Patrick, Rev., 8-10, 12, 26, 26, 
 31, 32, 74. 
 
 at Thornton, 8. 
 
 at Haworth, 8. 
 
 in Ireland, 8. 
 
 character of, 8, 9, 10, 12. 
 
 works of, 10. 
 
 Brontes, The Fact and Fiction, by 
 
 Angus Mackay, 73. 
 Brown, John, 17, 18, 19, 43. 
 Brussels, Charlotte Bronte in, 
 3, 24-26, 72-82, 156, 245, 246. 
 
 Emily Bronte in, 24-26. 
 
 influence of, 3, 72-82, 166. 
 
 Byron, 115, 206, 207. 
 
 Dean, Nelly, in Wuthering 
 Heights, 226, 228, 232. 
 
 Destiny, 24, 26, 26, 28, 37, 38, 
 96, 98, 237. 
 
 Destiny, Wisdom and, 168, 214. 
 
 Dewsbury, Charlotte Bronte at, 
 16, 85, 86. 
 
 Dialogue, 110, 111, 135, 136, 
 146, 233. 
 
 Diary, Emily Bronte's, 22, 23, 
 27, 165, 193. 
 
 Anne Bronte's, 28, 27, 193. 
 
 Dickens, 118. 
 
 Dimnet, M., 3, 40, 41, 161. 
 
 his criticism of Char- 
 lotte Bronte, 4. 
 
 his criticism of Wuther- 
 ing Heights, 6. 
 
 Dobell,Sydney,on Emily Bronte, 
 234, 236. 
 
 Dramatic instinct of Charlotte 
 Bronte, 161, 233, 234. 
 
INDEX 
 
 253 
 
 Dramatic instinct of Emily 
 
 Bronte, 233, 234. 
 Duclaux, Madame, 2, 3, 51, 
 
 115. 
 her Emily Bronte, 2, 
 
 3, 9, 33, 40, 116, 166, 180. 
 
 on Wuthering Heights, 
 
 212, 213. 
 Dunton, Mr. Theodore Watts-,2. 
 
 Children, love of, 55-59, 153. 
 inCharlotteBronte'snovels, 
 
 65, 67, 69, 163. 
 in George Eliot's novels, 
 
 55, 163. 
 Cowan Bridge School, 12, 13, 
 
 15, 83. 
 Creative Impulse, the, 11, 162, 
 
 155. 
 Criticism of Charlotte Bronte, 
 
 4, 20-22, 65-66, 70-73, 111, 
 
 115, 117. 
 of Jane Eyre, 111-119, 106- 
 
 124. 
 of Shirley, 66, 59, 133, 134, 
 
 139 
 of Villette, 139-146, 150- 
 
 169, 161, 162. 
 
 of Emma, 159. 
 
 of Charlotte Bronte' s Poems, 
 
 162, 163. 
 of Emily Bronte's Poems, 
 
 173-210. 
 of Wuthering Heights, 210- 
 
 235. 
 
 of Agnes Grey, 38, 39. 
 
 of The Tenant of Wildfell 
 
 Hall, 44, 45. 
 of Anne Bronte's Poems, 
 
 44-47, 187, 248. 
 
 Earnshaw, Catherine, 209-229. 
 character of, 213-217, 
 
 229. 
 Hareton, 210, 211, 212, 
 
 213. 
 
 • character of, 217, 228, 
 
 229. 
 
 Earth, the, 122, 131, 132, 139, 
 
 172, 173, 208, 209, 216, 217. 
 Emily Bronte's love of, 
 
 131, 132, 172, 209, 210, 224. 
 
 Genius of, 173. 
 
 Poem to, 208, 209. 
 
 Ecstasy, 177. 
 
 Eliot, George, 55, 139, 153, 169. 
 
 Emanuel, Paul, 98, 140-143, 
 
 144-150, 156, 244, 245. 
 Emma, Fragment of, 169, 160. 
 Experience, 141 et seq., 168, 
 
 170, 237. 
 novel of, 99, 100, 140-146, 
 
 161. 
 how far important, 141, 
 
 142, 146, 237. 
 of Charlotte Bronte, 124, 
 
 125, 126, 170, 237. 
 Eyre, name whence derived, 
 
 242. 
 
 Fanshawe, GiNBVRA, character 
 
 of, 156, 167. 
 Fielding, 118. 
 
 Gaskell, Mrs., 8, 9, 10, 32, 36, 
 
 40, 41, 43, 47, 67, 58, 88, 93, 
 
 115, 139, 165. 
 Gaskell's, Mrs., Life of Charlotte 
 
 Bronte, 36, 47, 48, 237-240. 
 Genius, 237, 239. 
 of Charlotte Bronte, 3, 4, 
 
 7, 8, 10, 14, 24, 26, 72, 82, 
 
 96, 97, 126, 126, 169, 236, 
 
 237. 
 of Emily Bronte, 5, 7, 8, 
 
 169, 171, 172, 186, 209, 210, 
 
 232, 236, 237. 
 the, of Place, 7, 8, 229 
 
 230. 
 
 the, of Earth, 173, 174. 
 
 test of, 236, 237. 
 
 'Gondal Chronicles,' 27, 28, 192. 
 
 193, 235. 
 
 ' Poems,' 5, 192-210, 237. 
 
 Grundy, Francis, 21, 41, 60 
 
 236, 248. 
 
254 
 
 THE THREE BRONTES 
 
 Haworth, 3, 4, 7, 8, \\, 17, 26, 
 
 36, 167. 
 influence of, 7, 19, 28, 36, 
 
 86, 96, 98, 163, 164^ 229, 230, 
 
 238 239. 
 Heath'cliff, 196, 210-223, 224, 
 
 226, 227, 241-244. 
 character of, 210, 211, 212, 
 
 228. 
 
 and Zamorna, 202-207. 
 
 Heger, M. Constantin, 2, 3, 24, 
 
 25, 72-82, 231. 
 character of, 80, 81, 
 
 142, 143. 
 influence of, 25, 92, 
 
 93, 96-99. 
 Heger's, M. Constantin, rela- 
 tions with Charlotte Bronte, 
 
 2, 3, 72-82, 88, 92, 96, 98, 126, 
 
 240-247. 
 original of Paul 
 
 Emanuel, 98, 140-146, 240- 
 
 247. 
 Madame, 2, 3, 24, 25, 77- 
 
 81, 96, 97, 144, 146. 
 original of Madame 
 
 Beck, 140, 144, 145. 
 Helstone, Caroline, 133, 135, 
 
 136, 139. 
 
 and Miss Ellen 
 
 Nussey, 66, 90. 
 
 Henri, Frances, 101-104. 
 Heredity, 212, 213, 
 
 Imagination and the real, 125, 
 140. 
 
 Jam Eyre, 28, 29, 66, 81, 83, 
 89, 90, 92, 98, 104, 106-126, 
 127, 128, 134, 137, 140, 166, 
 241-246. 
 
 ■ dialogue in, 110, 
 
 111. 
 
 criticisms of, 106, 111- 
 
 119. 
 passion in, 110, 111, 
 
 118, 119. 
 reality of, 106, 119. 
 
 Jane Eyre, style in, 123, 124. 
 and The Professor 
 
 compared, 99, 104, 106, 106, 
 
 140. 
 and Shirley compared, 
 
 127. 
 and Villette compared, 
 
 140, 166. 
 quoted, 107-110, 112, 
 
 113, 114, 119-124. 
 John of the Cross, St., 178, 
 
 179. 
 
 Letters of Charlotte Bronte, 
 
 35, 36, 42, 66, 67, 76, 
 163. 
 
 — to Miss Ellen Nussey, 
 
 36, 66-69, 77, 84-91. 
 
 from Brussels, 76-78. 
 
 to M. Heger, 82. 
 
 to Southey, 91, 92. 
 
 to Wordsworth, 91, 
 
 92. 
 Leyland, Francis A., 60, 51. 
 ■ on Branwell Bronte, 
 
 72, 73, 236, 248, 249. 
 
 the sculptor, 17, 18, 41, 
 
 248. 
 
 Lewes, George Henry, 21, 116, 
 
 119. 
 
 on Shirley, 69. 
 
 Life of Charlotte Bront'e, Mrs. 
 
 Gaskell's, 2, 36, 47, 48, 237- 
 
 240. 
 Linton, Catherine, 213, 223, 
 
 229. 
 London, Charlotte Bronte in, 3, 
 
 29, 36, 36, 62, 246, 247. 
 
 Mackay, Mb. Angus, 73. 
 Maeterlinck, M., on Emily 
 
 Bronte, 2, 168, 214. 
 Malham - Dembleby, Mr. J., 
 
 234, 235, 241-247. 
 Marriage of Charlotte Bronte, 
 
 36-38. 
 
 Charlotte Bronte on, 60- 
 
 71, 137, 138. 
 
INDEX 
 
 255 
 
 Meredith, George^ 128, 226, 
 
 227. 
 Moore, Louis, 137. 
 
 Robert, 133, 136, 244. 
 
 Motherhood, d6-59. 
 Mysticism, 5, 166, 169, 172-180, 
 
 185. 
 
 Nature in Shirley, 131, 132, 133. 
 
 in Wuthering Heights, 172. 
 
 in Emily Bronte's Poems, 
 
 208, 209. 
 Nicholls, Rev. Arthur Bell, 36- 
 
 38, 74. 
 Nicoll, Sir William Robertson, 
 
 2, 180, 187, 190. 
 Note on Charlotte Bronte, by 
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne, 
 
 2, 65, 172. 
 Novel, the, 161. 
 Novels of Charlotte Bronte, 98- 
 
 162. 
 Anne Bronte, 39, 43, 
 
 44. 
 Emily Bronte, 209- 
 
 237. 
 Nussey, Miss Ellen, 16, 35, 48, 
 
 63, 64, 66-69, 76, 166, 167. 
 Charlotte Bronte's 
 
 friendship with, 83-91. 
 
 Charlotte Bronte's 
 
 letters to, 36, 66-69, 77, 84- 
 91. 
 
 Charlotte Bronte's 
 
 advice to, 66-69, 76. 
 
 influence of, 84-87. 
 
 Rev. Henry, 71. 
 
 original of St. John 
 
 Rivers, 83, 141. 
 
 Oliphant, Mrs., on Charlotte 
 Bronte, 20, 21, 22, 66, 59-66, 
 70, 71, 111. 
 
 on Shirley, 61, 62, 
 
 137-139. 
 
 Paganism, Emily Bronte's, 6, 
 131, 132, 172, 180, 186, 224. 
 
 Paganism in Wuthering Heights, 
 
 209, 210, 216. 
 Pantheism, Emily Bronte's, 169, 
 
 183. 
 Parraenides, Poem on Nature 
 
 184. 
 Passion, Charlotte Bronte's 
 
 treatment of, 99, 110, 117, 
 
 118, 119, 176. 
 
 Emily Bronte's treatment 
 
 of, 170, 214, 216. 
 
 Dickens' treatment of, 118. 
 
 Fielding's treatment of, 
 
 118. 
 Jane Austen's treatment of, 
 
 118. 
 
 Smollett's treatment of, 
 
 118. 
 
 Thackeray's treatment of, 
 
 118. 
 
 in Jane Eyre, 109, 110, 
 
 117-119, 121, 128. 
 
 in Shirley, 127, 137. 
 
 in Villette, 157. 
 
 in Wuthering Heights, 210, 
 
 213, 214, 216, 219, 223, 224, 
 
 226, 227. 
 
 in Emily Bronte's Poems, 
 
 178, 179, 181, 195, 199, 205, 
 209. 
 
 in Emily Bronte's soul, 
 
 168-170, 172, 210. 
 
 test of reality, 167. 
 
 ' Philosopher, The,' 174, 175. 
 Philosophy, Emily Bronte's, 
 
 169, 174, 175. 
 Pictures of the Past, by Francis 
 
 Grundy, 50, 61. 
 Poems of Anne Bronte, 28, 44- 
 
 47, 187, 248. 
 of Bran well Bronte, 17, 31, 
 
 236, 248. 
 
 of Charlotte Bronte, 28, 
 
 96, 162, 163, 248. 
 
 of Emily Bronte, 27, 28, 
 
 173-209, 234, 235. 
 
 The Complete, of Emily 
 
 Bronte, 186 et seq., 236, 236. 
 
256 
 
 THE THREE BRONTfiS 
 
 ' Poems, Gondal/ 6, 192-207, 236. 
 
 Professor, The, 81, 98-106, 134, 
 244, 245. 
 
 and Jane Eyre com- 
 pared, 98,99, 104, 106,106, 140. 
 
 and Villette compared, 
 
 98, 99, 103, 104. 
 
 quoted, 101-105. 
 
 Pryor, Mrs, 136. 
 
 Quarterly Review, The, on Jane 
 Eyre, 43, 111, 114-117, 127. 
 
 Real, the, 134, 166, 169. 
 
 Imagination and the, 126, 
 
 140. 
 germ of the, 142, 166, 171, 
 
 173. 
 Realism, 161, 223, 234. 
 Reality, 106, 119, 134, 137, 140, 
 
 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 156, 
 
 167, 161, 169, 171, 173, 175, 
 
 231, 233. 
 Reid, Sir T. Wemyss, 88, 92. 
 on Charlotte Bronte, 
 
 48, 60. 
 
 quoted, 48-60. 
 
 Rigby, Miss(LadyEastIake),ll7. 
 Rivers, St. John, 83, 142. 
 Robinson, Miss A. Mary F. 
 
 See Duclaux, Madame. 
 
 Mrs., 40-42. 
 
 and Branwell Bronte, 
 
 3, 30, 31, 40, 41. 
 
 vindicated, 30, 40, 41. 
 
 Rochester, character of, 107-116, 
 
 llD-121, 137, 141, 241-246. 
 Roe Head, 16, 16, 86, 87, 159. 
 
 SiDGWicK, Mb., 16, 64. 
 
 Mrs., 16, 62-54. 
 
 Shirley, 36, 36, 69, 62, 104, 119, 
 
 127-139. 
 portrait of Emily Bronte in, 
 
 61, 62, 129, 133, 143. 
 
 dialogue in, 135-137. 
 
 criticism of, 65, 59, 133, 
 
 134, 135. 
 
 Shirley style in, 134, 136, 136. 
 
 Woman in, 61, 62, 127, 128, 
 
 132, 133, 137, 139. 
 
 and Jane Eyre compared, 
 
 134, 137, 146. 
 
 and Villette compared, 104, 
 
 139, 146, 166, 157. 
 
 and Wuthering Heights com- 
 pared, 136. 
 
 quoted, 129-133, 136, 136, 
 
 137, 138, 139. 
 
 Shorter, Mr. Clement K., 1, 2, 
 66, 66, 74, 78, 80, 88, 92, 93, 
 94, 186-188, 190, 192. See 
 also Prefatory Note. 
 
 Smith, Mr. George, 29, 140, 165. 
 
 Smollett, 118. 
 
 Snowe, Lucy, 62, 81 , 154. 
 
 and Pauline de 
 
 Bassompierre, 160-154. 
 
 Sources of Wuthering Heights, 6, 
 
 196-210, 235. 
 South ey, Robert, Chai-lotte 
 
 Bronte's letter to, 91. 
 Southey's, Robert, advice to 
 
 Charlotte Bronte, 91, 92. 
 Stephen, Mr. Leslie, 53, 70. 
 Style, 93, 95, 96, 100, 123, 167, 
 
 158, 169, 232, 233, 236. 
 Sue, Eugene, 246, 246. 
 Supernatural, the, in Wuthering 
 
 Heights, 6, 212, 208-223. 
 Svifinburne, Mr., on Charlotte 
 
 Bronte, 2, 56, 67. 
 on Emily Bronte, 2, 
 
 172. 
 
 Taylor, Miss Maby, 4, 24, 48, 
 
 83, 84, 86, 90. 
 Mr. Joe, 63. 
 
 Mr. James, 63, 64, 71, 
 
 141. 
 
 Temperament, Charlotte 
 
 Bronte's, 67, 72. 
 Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 27, 44, 
 
 46. 
 
 audacity of, 44. 
 
 realism of, 44. 
 
INDEX 
 
 257 
 
 Tenant of Wild/ell Hall, and 
 Farrar's Eternal Hope, 45. 
 
 Thackeray, 3, 36, 36, 44, 52, 118. 
 
 Theories, 4, 6, 47-82, 92, 98, 99, 
 234-236, 240-249. 
 
 Thornton, 8. 
 
 ViUette, 36, 81, 98, 99, 139, 140- 
 162. 
 
 Lucy Snows in, 62, 81, 
 
 164. 
 
 M. Paul in. See Emanuel, 
 
 Paul. 
 dialogue in, 145. 
 
 germ of the real in, 142, 
 
 156. 
 
 reality of, 140, 141, 142, 
 
 143, 144, 146, 166, 167, 161. 
 
 realism of, 161. 
 
 style in, 157, 168, 169. 
 
 and The Professor com- 
 pared, 98, 99, 104. 
 
 and Jane Eyre compared, 
 
 140, 146, 166. 
 
 and Shirley, 104, 140, 145, 
 
 167. 
 
 quoted, 146-149, 150, 161- 
 
 163, 154. 
 
 Wakd, Mhs. Humphry, 2, 195. 
 Williams, Mr. W. S., 29. 
 
 Charlotte Bronte's 
 
 letter to, 69, 70. 
 
 Wilson, Rev. Carus, 12, 13. 
 
 Wisdom and Destiny quoted, 
 168, 214. ( 
 
 Woman, 61, 62, 111, 112, 127, 
 128, 132, 133, 137, 139. 
 
 mid- Victorian, 62, 112, 
 
 128. 
 
 modern, 128. 
 
 Woman's place in the world, 69, 
 
 70, 138, 138. 
 Women, Charlotte Bronte's, 61, 
 
 62, 128, 138. 
 Wooler, Miss, 15, 24, 90, 180. 
 Wordsworth, 91, 92. 
 Wuthering Heights, 27, 29, 35, 
 
 36, 98, 121, 125, 126, 170, 
 
 172, 209-237. 
 
 criticism of, 210-235. 
 
 dialogue in, 231, 233. 
 
 mysticism in, 172, 
 
 paganism in, 209, 210, 
 
 212, 216, 224. 
 passion in, 210, 213, 
 
 214, 216, 219, 223, 224, 226, 
 
 227. 
 
 realism of, 223, 234. 
 
 style in, 232, 233. 
 
 the supernatural in, 
 
 5, 212, 218-223. 
 
 sources of, 6, 196- 
 
 210, 237. 
 
 Zamobna, 196-207. 
 
 See Heathcliif. 
 
 See ' Gondal Poems.' 
 
 Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press