Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (1916)
Of the hundred years that have passed since Charlotte Brontë was born,
she, the centre now of so much legend, devotion, and literature, lived
but thirty-nine. It is strange to reflect how different those legends
might have been had her life reached the ordinary human span. She might
have become, like some of her famous contemporaries, a figure familiarly
met with in London and elsewhere, the subject of pictures and anecdotes
innumerable, the writer of many novels, of memoirs possibly, removed
from us well within the memory of the middle-aged in all the splendour
of established fame. She might have been wealthy, she might have been
prosperous. But it is not so. When we think of her we have to imagine
some one who had no lot in our modern world; we have to cast our minds
back to the ’fifties of the last century, to a remote parsonage upon the
wild Yorkshire moors. In that parsonage, and on those moors, unhappy and
lonely, in her poverty and her exaltation, she remains for ever.
These circumstances, as they affected her character, may have left their
traces on her work. A novelist, we reflect, is bound to build up his
structure with much very perishable material which begins by lending it
reality and ends by cumbering it with rubbish. As we open _Jane Eyre_
once more we cannot stifle the suspicion that we shall find her world of
imagination as antiquated, mid-Victorian, and out of date as the
parsonage on the moor, a place only to be visited by the curious, only
preserved by the pious. So we open _Jane Eyre_; and in two pages every
doubt is swept clean from our minds.
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left
were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from
the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of
my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered
a pale blank of mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat
shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and
lamentable blast.
There is nothing there more perishable than the moor itself, or more
subject to the sway of fashion than the “long and lamentable blast”. Nor
is this exhilaration short-lived. It rushes us through the entire
volume, without giving us time to think, without letting us lift our
eyes from the page. So intense is our absorption that if some one moves
in the room the movement seems to take place not there but up in
Yorkshire. The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road,
makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to
forget her.[12] At the end we are steeped through and through with the
genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Brontë. Remarkable
faces, figures of strong outline and gnarled feature have flashed upon
us in passing; but it is through her eyes that we have seen them. Once
she is gone, we seek for them in vain. Think of Rochester and we have to
think of Jane Eyre. Think of the moor, and again, there is Jane Eyre.
Think of the drawing-room, even, those “white carpets on which seemed
laid brilliant garlands of flowers”, that “pale Parian mantelpiece” with
its Bohemia glass of “ruby red” and the “general blending of snow and
fire”—what is all that except Jane Eyre?
The drawbacks of being Jane Eyre are not far to seek. Always to be a
governess and always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world
which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the other.
The characters of a Jane Austen or of a Tolstoi have a million facets
compared with these. They live and are complex by means of their effect
upon many different people who serve to mirror them in the round. They
move hither and thither whether their creators watch them or not, and
the world in which they live seems to us an independent world which we
can visit, now that they have created it, by ourselves. Thomas Hardy is
more akin to Charlotte Brontë in the power of his personality and the
narrowness of his vision. But the differences are vast. As we read _Jude
the Obscure_ we are not rushed to a finish; we brood and ponder and
drift away from the text in plethoric trains of thought which build up
round the characters an atmosphere of question and suggestion of which
they are themselves, as often as not, unconscious. Simple peasants as
they are, we are forced to confront them with destinies and questionings
of the hugest import, so that often it seems as if the most important
characters in a Hardy novel are those which have no names. Of this
power, of this speculative curiosity, Charlotte Brontë has no trace.
She does not attempt to solve the problems of human life; she is even
unaware that such problems exist; all her force, and it is the more
tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, “I love”, “I
hate”, “I suffer”.
For the self-centred and self-limited writers have a power denied the
more catholic and broad-minded. Their impressions are close packed and
strongly stamped between their narrow walls. Nothing issues from their
minds which has not been marked with their own impress. They learn
little from other writers, and what they adopt they cannot assimilate.
Both Hardy and Charlotte Brontë appear to have founded their styles
upon a stiff and decorous journalism. The staple of their prose is
awkward and unyielding. But both with labour and the most obstinate
integrity by thinking every thought until it has subdued words to
itself, have forged for themselves a prose which takes the mould of
their minds entire; which has, into the bargain, a beauty, a power, a
swiftness of its own. Charlotte Brontë, at least, owed nothing to the
reading of many books. She never learnt the smoothness of the
professional writer, or acquired his ability to stuff and sway his
language as he chooses. “I could never rest in communication with
strong, discreet, and refined minds, whether male or female,” she
writes, as any leader-writer in a provincial journal might have written;
but gathering fire and speed goes on in her own authentic voice “till I
had passed the outworks of conventional reserve and crossed the
threshold of confidence, and won a place by their hearts’ very
hearthstone”. It is there that she takes her seat; it is the red and
fitful glow of the heart’s fire which illumines her page. In other
words, we read Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of
character—her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for
comedy—hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life—hers
is that of a country parson’s daughter; but for her poetry. Probably
that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering
personality, who, as we should say in real life, have only to open the
door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity
perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them
desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently. This very
ardour, rejecting half shades and other minor impediments, wings its way
past the daily conduct of ordinary people and allies itself with their
more inarticulate passions. It makes them poets, or, if they choose to
write in prose, intolerant of its restrictions. Hence it is that both
Emily and Charlotte are always invoking the help of nature. They both
feel the need of some more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering
passions in human nature than words or actions can convey. It is with a
description of a storm that Charlotte ends her finest novel _Villette_.
“The skies hang full and dark—a wrack sails from the west; the clouds
cast themselves into strange forms.” So she calls in nature to describe
a state of mind which could not otherwise be expressed. But neither of
the sisters observed nature accurately as Dorothy Wordsworth observed
it, or painted it minutely as Tennyson painted it. They seized those
aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt
or imputed to their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their
lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a
dull page or display the writer’s powers of observation—they carry on
the emotion and light up the meaning of the book.
The meaning of a book, which lies so often apart from what happens and
what is said and consists rather in some connection which things in
themselves different have had for the writer, is necessarily hard to
grasp. Especially this is so when, like the Brontës, the writer is
poetic, and his meaning inseparable from his language, and itself rather
a mood than a particular observation. _Wuthering Heights_ is a more
difficult book to understand than _Jane Eyre_, because Emily was a
greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with
eloquence and splendour and passion “I love”, “I hate”, “I suffer”. Her
experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there
is no “I” in _Wuthering Heights_. There are no governesses. There are no
employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily
was inspired by some more general conception. The impulse which urged
her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked
out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the
power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt
throughout the novel—a struggle, half thwarted but of superb
conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which
is not merely “I love” or “I hate”, but “we, the whole human race” and
“you, the eternal powers . . .” the sentence remains unfinished. It is
not strange that it should be so; rather it is astonishing that she can
make us feel what she had it in her to say at all. It surges up in the
half-articulate words of Catherine Earnshaw, “If all else perished and
_he_ remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained and
he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I
should not seem part of it”. It breaks out again in the presence of the
dead. “I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel
an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter—the eternity they
have entered—where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its
sympathy and joy in its fulness.” It is this suggestion of power
underlying the apparitions of human nature, and lifting them up into the
presence of greatness that gives the book its huge stature among other
novels. But it was not enough for Emily Brontë to write a few lyrics,
to utter a cry, to express a creed. In her poems she did this once and
for all, and her poems will perhaps outlast her novel. But she was
novelist as well as poet. She must take upon herself a more laborious
and a more ungrateful task. She must face the fact of other existences,
grapple with the mechanism of external things, build up, in recognisable
shape, farms and houses and report the speeches of men and women who
existed independently of herself. And so we reach these summits of
emotion not by rant or rhapsody but by hearing a girl sing old songs to
herself as she rocks in the branches of a tree; by watching the moor
sheep crop the turf; by listening to the soft wind breathing through the
grass. The life at the farm with all its absurdities and its
improbability is laid open to us. We are given every opportunity of
comparing _Wuthering Heights_ with a real farm and Heathcliff with a
real man. How, we are allowed to ask, can there be truth or insight or
the finer shades of emotion in men and women who so little resemble what
we have seen ourselves? But even as we ask it we see in Heathcliff the
brother that a sister of genius might have seen; he is impossible we
say, but nevertheless no boy in literature has so vivid an existence as
his. So it is with the two Catherines; never could women feel as they do
or act in their manner, we say. All the same, they are the most lovable
women in English fiction. It is as if she could tear up all that we know
human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparences with such a
gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of
all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts; with a few
touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by
speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.
[Footnote 11: Written in 1916.]
[Footnote 12: Charlotte and Emily Brontë had much the same sense of
colour. “. . . we saw—ah! it was beautiful—a splendid place carpeted
with crimson, and crimson-covered chairs and tables, and a pure white
ceiling bordered by gold, a shower of glass drops hanging in silver
chains from the centre, and shimmering with little soft tapers”
(_Wuthering Heights_). Yet it was merely a very pretty drawing-room, and
within it a boudoir, both spread with white carpets, on which seemed
laid brilliant garlands of flowers; both ceiled with snowy mouldings of
white grapes and vine leaves, beneath which glowed in rich contrast
crimson couches and ottomans; while the ornaments on the pale Parian
mantelpiece were of sparkling Bohemia glass, ruby red; and between the
windows large mirrors repeated the general blending of snow and fire.]