THE KEY TO THE BRONTË WORKS

THE KEY TO CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S "WUTHERING HEIGHTS," "JANE EYRE," AND HER OTHER WORKS.

SHOWING THE METHOD OF THEIR CONSTRUCTION AND THEIR RELATION TO THE FACTS AND PEOPLE OF HER LIFE.

BY JOHN MALHAM-DEMBLEBY.

London and Felling-on-Tyne: THE WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING CO., LTD. NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE. 1911.

All Rights Reserved.

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CONTENTS.

APPENDIX.

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PREFACE.

The Key to the Brontë Works is the absolutely necessary companion volume to Charlotte Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Shirley, The Professor, and Villette. Without it the reader cannot know the real Currer Bell and her people, or see her works as they were to herself. Great indeed and continuous has been the task of writing this volume: a comprehension of my duty to law and literature, to posterity and to Charlotte Brontë, set aside any other consideration. It could be no compliment to my learned and distinguished subscribers to assume importance would attach to The Key to the Brontë Works were the volume a mere skimming of extant Brontë biography, albeit that has its province of interest. The Key to the Brontë Works, I repeat, is the only book which shows us the life and works of Charlotte Brontë as intimately known to herself. Herein is my task accomplished; herewith is my reward. To quote my words from a private correspondence with Sir Charles Holroyd, Kt., Director of the National Gallery, London:—

"After her return from Brussels in 1844, Charlotte Brontë conceived the idea of perpetuating the drama of her life. Again and again, true artist as she was, she cleared her presentations, till finally the world had those great works which stand as a signal testimony to the high value of the true artist, and as testimony to the divine origin of real inspiration. And now priest, statesman, writer—whatsoever a man may be, he will discover in the works of Charlotte Brontë salutary instruction, and at the same time will perceive with thrilling admiration the greatness of Art when she is at one with Genius. As I pen these lines to you, Sir Charles, I am reminded of the evanescence of the halo of romance round so many historic characters and personages when sober history speaks apart; but Charlotte Brontë we find to be a greater luminary the closer we approach her."

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The utmost possible interest attaches to my sensational evidence, now first showing Charlotte Brontë to be the author and heroine of Wuthering Heights, a book many have declared "the finest work of genius written by a woman," and some look upon as "one of the greatest novels in our or any other literature." In view of my evidence it will be impossible hereafter to convince the world that Charlotte Brontë did not write Wuthering Heights. The Key to the Brontë Works in his hands, every reader is an expert upon the subject. By resort to each indexed reference to Charlotte Brontë's methods I have discovered, and named Methods I. and II., sensational ratification of all I say hereon will be found.

It will presently seem incredible the chief argument hitherto advanced against my assertion that Charlotte Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights was that Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are "totally dissimilar in style, thought, etc.," for my evidence is proof absolute to the opposite. A recent writer on the Brontës[1] says Wuthering Heights contains nothing whatsoever biographically, or in any way, suggestive of Emily Brontë and her personality, and admits upon the other hand that the characteristic of Charlotte Brontë's writing is her full and intimate self-revelation of the incidents of her own life. Nothing can recall these words. They are a frank, or an ingenuous, statement of irrefutable fact; and though the writer did not journey to the logical conclusion, it is well he is associated with this fundamental admission. The same significant truth is voiced still more recently by another writer, who says: "Wuthering Heights reveals nothing of Emily Brontë. Not one of the characters thought or felt as did the quiet, retiring" Emily[2].

Much detached yet valuable and interesting evidence I have omitted for the sake of clearness, but it has aided me in regard to the final discoveries I now present, and is ready further to substantiate my conclusions. One of these detached pieces of evidence shows that the younger Catherine and Hareton Earnshaw—the two lovers who at the close of Wuthering Heights become teacher and pupil—latterly were to Charlotte Brontë herself and M. Héger. Apparently she did not wish to end Wuthering Heights without a picture of reconciled relations between two characters who could [Pg ix]present a phase of M. Héger and herself. The teacher and pupil relations between Miss Brontë and M. Héger were most dear and gladdening to her memory. We have a glimpse of them in Villette, Shirley, and in The Professor, Chapter XIX., where Crimsworth is reading a book with Francis Evans Henri, whom he is teaching to read and pronounce English. These two characters represent M. Héger and Charlotte Brontë; and Miss Brontë taught M. Héger to read and pronounce English out of her own favourite old books,

"consecrated to her by other associations," to quote her own words in Wuthering Heights, Chapter XXXI., though often in The Professor she alternates the position of the characters by an interchange of the sexes, a method of Miss Brontë I have discovered and termed her Method I. Let the reader peruse carefully the scene in The Professor in the light of my reference to Eugène Sue and Charlotte Brontë's old copy in English of The Imitation of Christ at Brussels, and in the light of the "reading and pronouncing" scenes in Chapters XXX., XXXI., and XXXII., of Wuthering Heights;

also:—

Note how in The Professor and Wuthering Heights the male lover is unable to devote himself to the reading lesson because of the distraction of the heroine's interesting physiognomy. In this connection we may glance at the following little parallel of the hen-killing figure, with which, like the foregoing, I do not deal in the course of The Key to the Brontë Works. Again we perceive Charlotte Brontë's Method I.:—

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Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre were of course M. Héger and Miss Brontë. It is indeed important and interesting to find at the old farmstead of Wuthering Heights scenes reminiscent of the intimately pedagogic relations that existed between Charlotte Brontë and M. Héger of the school at Brussels.

Discovering Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are practically as the same book, I have disclosed their relationship in parallel columns—the most satisfactory and conclusive evidence in the world. Herewith we see both volumes agree in scenes and chapters virtually word for word, and from beginning to end. Both works we now find are one in origin, each containing not less than four identical characters portrayed by Charlotte Brontë from her own life, she herself being the original of the heroine in each book, and her friend M. Héger in the main the original of the hero thereof. Charlotte Brontë's brother, Branwell Brontë, in agreement with her estimate of him as a wreck of selfishness, is the unhappy fool of both books; while her life-long companion, Tabitha Aykroyd, who was to her as nurse, mother, and friend, is therein the indispensable domestic servant and motherly good woman of the humble class.

I will not occupy my preface with an enumeration of the many important and interesting Brontë discoveries I have been enabled to make and present herewith in The Key to the Brontë Works. I may briefly indicate my chief sensational discoveries:—The discovery of the origin of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre; the discovery that in Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë immortalized not only herself and M. [Pg xi]Héger, but also her father, the Rev. Patrick Brontë, her brother, four sisters, her aunt and a cousin, and Tabitha Aykroyd, the Brontë servant or housekeeper; the discovery first revealing the history of Charlotte Brontë's life at Brussels and friendship with M. Héger, the original of her chief heroes; and the discovery of the most sensational fact that Charlotte Brontë and not Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, and was herself the original of the heroine and M. Héger that of the hero, as I have mentioned.

My warm thanks are due to Mr. Harold Hodge, who commissioned me to write my article "The Key to Jane Eyre" for The Saturday Review;[3] and to Mr. W. L. Courtney, M.A., LL.D., the editor of The Fortnightly Review, who commissioned me to write my article "The Lifting of the Brontë Veil: A New Study of the Brontë Family."[4] Mr. Courtney's words of encouragement—those of a true gentleman and an eminent literary scholar and author—have made bright to me the accomplishment of this work.

I thank Lady Ritchie—the gifted author-daughter of Thackeray the writer of Vanity Fair to whom Charlotte Brontë in her second edition dedicated Jane Eyre—for her kind permission to use in The Key to the Brontë Works what her ladyship had written me privately in regard to her sitting at dinner beside Charlotte Brontë on June 12th, 1850, with Mr. Thackeray and Mr. George Smith the publisher, when Miss Brontë was wearing a light green dress, an incident that has relation to the green dress in the interesting Héger portrait of Charlotte Brontë drawn in 1850, now the property of the nation and in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

I desire to express my gratitude to Miss Catherine Galbraith Welch, who introduced an outline of my Brontë discoveries to the readers of The New York Times Saturday Review of Books. I thank The Spectator, The Outlook, and other organs for their open acknowledgment of the fact that I have made a discovery at last throwing light upon Charlotte Brontë's Brussels experiences and her relations with the Hégers at Brussels. And I wish also to thank the anonymous and scholarly writer who penned the long and careful article in The Dundee Advertiser under the heading "The Original of Jane Eyre," containing an encouraging appreciation of the im[Pg xii]portance of my discovery I dealt with in my article "The Key to Jane Eyre" in The Saturday Review.

I would like to give a pressure of the hand to my subscribers for the first edition of The Key to the Brontë Works. Your kind letters to me and your active interest in The Key to the Brontë Works will ever dwell among my pleasant memories. One I grieve will never see on earth these pages—the late Most Honourable Marquis of Ripon, K.G., who numbered with my earliest subscribers.

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

Truth will out, and facts have their appointed day of revelation; thus I cannot help it that more than sixty years of writing on the Brontës is placed out of date by my discoveries.

JOHN MALHAM-DEMBLEBY.

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CHAPTER I.

OUTLINE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S LIFE.

St. Michael the Prince of Messengers—to him was dedicated the little church on the hill at Haworth, in the Parish of Bradford, Yorkshire, whose living gave sustenance to the family of the restless, ambitious son of Erin, Patrick Brontë.[5] Is it for nothing that a spiritual banner is raised by man and appeal made for the beneficent influence of a conception of definite personal character? Within this sacred circumscription came to be written the works of Charlotte Brontë, and herefrom the words of a Messenger went out to the uttermost parts of the world.

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The mystery of impulse! The servant is not master, nor is the messenger he that sendeth. Behind the lives of the great was ever an influence to do: blind may be the early groping of Genius, stumbling her feet on the rugged road of a darksome journey begun in the veiling mist of life's dawn, but onward and ever onward is she impelled to the journey's end. Ere Night blots out Genius her Message has accomplished. Glancing back to the literary strivings of Charlotte Brontë's childhood, and upon those quaint little efforts περὶ τῶν ἀπίστων, which her young brother and sisters sought to emulate,[6] we see her responsive to some inward prompting that told her she must write.

Born on April 21st, 1816, at Thornton, near Bradford, during her father's curacy of that parish, Charlotte Brontë was one of a family of six, whose mother died in 1821. The story of her literary beginnings shows them to have been of the kind known to many aspirants. There were the rebuffs of editors and of at least one famous author; and, in addition, was the divertisement of her life as teacher and governess. Her correspondence is voluminous. It was ever written down to the intended recipient. As to the somewhat commonplace Ellen Nussey, whose friendship, begun at Roe Head, near Dewsbury, the school of a Miss Margaret Wooler, lasted to the end: she invariably discussed the domestic and social happenings of the acquaintances known by or of interest to them. Thus her letters[7] are commonly circumstantial and seldom soared beyond the capacity, or exceeded the limits of the departmental interests, of those for whom they were written.

This was primarily the result of Charlotte Brontë's nervous perception of character and recognition of the want of a truly psychical reciprocity with her friends. She tells us that of all living beings only "Rochester" understood her, and her letters to M. Héger, of her Brussels school—the original of this character—were not preserved. In the day of high fame, when she corresponded[Pg 15] with literary folk, she felt herself as on parade, rushed to make opinions, as say, on Miss Austen, whom she criticized somewhat adversely. Obviously she hated to be at the service of bookish letter-writers. Erratically she responded to their promptings, trying not to be ruffled, but she could not reveal her heart. From these letters, and the epistles of the class I have previously mentioned, Mrs. Gaskell in the main wrote her famous biography. The Charlotte Brontë known of the recipients of this correspondence her biographer presented, backed with the necessary local colour. She had enjoyed in the days of Miss Brontë's popularity a short

acquaintance with her; and when, at the death of Currer Bell, Mr. Brontë requested her to write his daughter's "life," she was eminently fitted to give the world Charlotte Brontë as known by her acquaintances.

But of the intimate Charlotte Brontë, and the origin of the Brontë works, the method of their construction, and their relation to the facts and people of her life, Mrs. Gaskell could tell us virtually nothing. Neither could she, nor any succeeding biographer, throw light upon Miss Brontë's Brussels life, or upon the subject of her friendship with M. Héger, who is discovered by internal evidence to be the original of Currer Bell's chief heroes. Charlotte Brontë's was an intensely reserved nature. She built to herself a universe which she peopled in secret. Her real life she lived out again in her books. Therein appeared the real Charlotte Brontë, and see we her life and its people as known to herself. Whether she thought the secrets of her works would be revealed I cannot tell; but as the traveller who in far distant lands inscribes on some lonely rock the relation of his experience, conscious that a future explorer will read the tale, so does Genius, with the faith which gave her being, leave her message in the hope of an early day of revelation, and in the

secure knowledge of the final penetration of truth.

We now, sixty years after, find by aid of the many discoveries I have made and present my readers in the pages of this, The Key to the Brontë Works, that Charlotte Brontë, penning in her connective works the story of her life, gave us the spectacle of a living drama wherein she was herself a leading actor. Herein we see the imperfections and shortcomings of human nature, and Charlotte Brontë herself is shown standing in the slippery places. Before our eyes flits the procession of the people who moved about her, and the air[Pg 16] is filled with the atmosphere through which her genius saw the world. In this new light of revelation we perceive her great message is—the Martyrdom of Virtue. A more poignant message I know not! And Charlotte Brontë was martyr in this moving drama—nay, I believe there also was another. Spending two years at a Brussels pensionnat she gained the friendship of Monsieur Héger, a devout Roman Catholic and a man of intellect who, himself once a teacher at the establishment, as was M. Pelet in The Professor at a

similar school, came to marry the mistress. Miss Brontë went twice to Brussels, on the first occasion being accompanied by her sister Emily. Finally, Charlotte Brontë left Brussels abruptly on account, it has been said, of the harsh attitude of Madame Héger, who even forbade her husband to correspond with Miss Brontë. Concerning this period and the incidents associated therewith, I have been enabled to lift the veil. We have thus, for the first time, external evidence that shows Charlotte Brontë, at Brussels, endured the greatest ordeal through which it is the lot of a woman to pass. We see how she and M. Héger emerged triumphantly from dangerous temptation, and how they were aided, the one by her Christian upbringing, the other by the influence of his Church.

It was in January 1844 when Charlotte Brontë returned finally from Brussels; and she and her sisters printed a circular in connection with a project of starting a private school at Haworth, but no progress was made. Charlotte Brontë's life at this period will be better understood by a reference to the chapters on "The Recoil" in this work—it was her darkest time: when the human in her cried out—as it has, alas! in so many at the bitter hour. She rebelled. Not violently; but by reproach. Only her own pen can tell how cruelly she suffered mentally. She had done no wrong and had resisted a great evil, but the recoil found her weak: it was the martyrdom of virtue. She was suffering for the sake of right; and that she cried aloud as in an agony showed her suffering was intense. The storm left the world Wuthering Heights. The tone of ribald caricature in dealing with the Pharisee Joseph; the impatient, vindictive pilloring of her own nervous and physical infirmities as "Catherine"; the ruthless baring of the flesh to show "Heathcliffe's"

heart was stone; the wilful plunging into an atmosphere of harsh levity, crude animalism, and repulsive hypochondria, all contributed to a sombre and powerful work of art grand in its per[Pg 17]petration, standing alone in solemn majesty like the black rack that stretches low athwart a clear sky—the rearward of the storm. But it bears the story of a sad Night, and Charlotte Brontë's subsequent works were written in repentance: for in Heathcliffe and Catherine of Wuthering Heights she had portrayed M. Héger and herself.

In this dark hour of Charlotte Brontë's life, Emily Brontë, to whom she afterwards gave Wuthering Heights, was writing, on July 30th, 1845,[8] that she, Emily, was "contented and undesponding," and was engaged upon and intended to continue some puerile compositions called The Gondal Chronicles, which she spoke of as "delighting" her and Anne. She and Anne had been engaged upon this effort three and a half years, and it was yet unfinished.