The Key to the Bronte Works Part 1

The Key to the Bronte Works.

by John Malham-Dembleby.

PREFACE.

_The Key to the Bronte Works_ is the absolutely necessary companion volume to Charlotte Bronte's _Wuthering Heights_, _Jane Eyre_, _s.h.i.+rley_, _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 Bronte, set aside any other consideration. It could be no compliment to my learned and distinguished subscribers to a.s.sume importance would attach to _The Key to the Bronte Works_ were the volume a mere skimming of extant Bronte biography, albeit that has its province of interest. _The Key to the Bronte Works_, I repeat, is the only book which shows us the life and works of Charlotte Bronte 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 Bronte 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 Bronte 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 Bronte we find to be a greater luminary the closer we approach her."

The utmost possible interest attaches to my sensational evidence, now first showing Charlotte Bronte 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 Bronte did not write _Wuthering Heights_. _The Key to the Bronte Works_ in his hands, every reader is an expert upon the subject. By resort to each indexed reference to Charlotte Bronte'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 a.s.sertion that Charlotte Bronte 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 Brontes[1] says _Wuthering Heights_ contains nothing whatsoever biographically, or in any way, suggestive of Emily Bronte and her personality, and admits upon the other hand that the characteristic of Charlotte Bronte'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 a.s.sociated with this fundamental admission.

The same significant truth is voiced still more recently by another writer, who says: "_Wuthering Heights_ reveals nothing of Emily Bronte.

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 Bronte herself and M. Heger. Apparently she did not wish to end _Wuthering Heights_ without a picture of reconciled relations between two characters who could present a phase of M. Heger and herself. The teacher and pupil relations between Miss Bronte and M.

Heger were most dear and gladdening to her memory. We have a glimpse of them in _Villette_, _s.h.i.+rley_, and in _The Professor_, Chapter XIX., where Crimsworth is reading a book with Francis Evans Henri, whom he is teaching to read and p.r.o.nounce English. These two characters represent M. Heger and Charlotte Bronte; and Miss Bronte taught M. Heger to read and p.r.o.nounce English out of her own favourite old books, "consecrated to her by other a.s.sociations," to quote her own words in _Wuthering Heights_, Chapter x.x.xI., though often in _The Professor_ she alternates the position of the characters by an interchange of the s.e.xes, a method of Miss Bronte 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 Eugene Sue and Charlotte Bronte's old copy in English of _The Imitation of Christ_ at Brussels, and in the light of the "reading and p.r.o.nouncing" scenes in Chapters x.x.x., x.x.xI., and x.x.xII., of _Wuthering Heights_;

Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre were of course M. Heger and Miss Bronte. 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 Bronte and M. Heger of the school at Brussels.

Discovering _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_ are practically as the same book, I have disclosed their relations.h.i.+p 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 Bronte from her own life, she herself being the original of the heroine in each book, and her friend M. Heger in the main the original of the hero thereof. Charlotte Bronte's brother, Branwell Bronte, 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 cla.s.s.

I will not occupy my preface with an enumeration of the many important and interesting Bronte discoveries I have been enabled to make and present herewith in _The Key to the Bronte 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 Bronte immortalized not only herself and M. Heger, but also her father, the Rev. Patrick Bronte, her brother, four sisters, her aunt and a cousin, and Tabitha Aykroyd, the Bronte servant or housekeeper; the discovery first revealing the history of Charlotte Bronte's life at Brussels and friends.h.i.+p with M. Heger, the original of her chief heroes; and the discovery of the most sensational fact that Charlotte Bronte and not Emily wrote _Wuthering Heights_, and was herself the original of the heroine and M. Heger 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Bronte Veil: A New Study of the Bronte 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 Bronte in her second edition dedicated _Jane Eyre_--for her kind permission to use in _The Key to the Bronte Works_ what her ladys.h.i.+p had written me privately in regard to her sitting at dinner beside Charlotte Bronte on June 12th, 1850, with Mr. Thackeray and Mr. George Smith the publisher, when Miss Bronte was wearing a light green dress, an incident that has relation to the green dress in the interesting Heger portrait of Charlotte Bronte drawn in 1850, now the property of the nation and in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

I desire to express my grat.i.tude to Miss Catherine Galbraith Welch, who introduced an outline of my Bronte discoveries to the readers of _The New York Times Sat.u.r.day 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 Bronte's Brussels experiences and her relations with the Hegers 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 importance of my discovery I dealt with in my article "The Key to _Jane Eyre_" in _The Sat.u.r.day Review_.

I would like to give a pressure of the hand to my subscribers for the first edition of _The Key to the Bronte Works_. Your kind letters to me and your active interest in _The Key to the Bronte 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 Bronte Works_ will love Charlotte Bronte 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 Brontes is placed out of date by my discoveries.

JOHN MALHAM-DEMBLEBY.

THE KEY TO THE BRONTe WORKS.

CHAPTER I.

OUTLINE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTe'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, Yorks.h.i.+re, whose living gave sustenance to the family of the restless, ambitious son of Erin, Patrick Bronte.[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 circ.u.mscription came to be written the works of Charlotte Bronte, and herefrom the words of a Messenger went out to the uttermost parts of the world.

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 Bronte's childhood, and upon those quaint little efforts [Greek: peri ton apiston], 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 Bronte 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 divertis.e.m.e.nt 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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 circ.u.mstantial 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 Bronte'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. Heger, of her Brussels school--the original of this character--were not preserved. In the day of high fame, when she corresponded 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 cla.s.s I have previously mentioned, Mrs. Gaskell in the main wrote her famous biography. The Charlotte Bronte known of the recipients of this correspondence her biographer presented, backed with the necessary local colour. She had enjoyed in the days of Miss Bronte's popularity a short acquaintance with her; and when, at the death of Currer Bell, Mr. Bronte requested her to write his daughter's "life," she was eminently fitted to give the world Charlotte Bronte as known by her acquaintances.

But of the intimate Charlotte Bronte, and the origin of the Bronte 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 Bronte's Brussels life, or upon the subject of her friends.h.i.+p with M.

Heger, who is discovered by internal evidence to be the original of Currer Bell's chief heroes. Charlotte Bronte'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 Bronte, 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 Bronte Works_, that Charlotte Bronte, 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 Bronte herself is shown standing in the slippery places. Before our eyes flits the procession of the people who moved about her, and the air 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 Bronte was martyr in this moving drama--nay, I believe there also was another. Spending two years at a Brussels _pensionnat_ she gained the friends.h.i.+p of Monsieur Heger, 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 Bronte went twice to Brussels, on the first occasion being accompanied by her sister Emily.

Finally, Charlotte Bronte left Brussels abruptly on account, it has been said, of the harsh att.i.tude of Madame Heger, who even forbade her husband to correspond with Miss Bronte. Concerning this period and the incidents a.s.sociated therewith, I have been enabled to lift the veil. We have thus, for the first time, external evidence that shows Charlotte Bronte, at Brussels, endured the greatest ordeal through which it is the lot of a woman to pa.s.s. We see how she and M. Heger 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 Bronte 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 Bronte'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 perpetration, 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 Bronte's subsequent works were written in repentance: for in Heathcliffe and Catherine of _Wuthering Heights_ she had portrayed M.

Heger and herself.

In this dark hour of Charlotte Bronte's life, Emily Bronte, 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.

While making comparison between Emily's and Charlotte's standpoint at this time--and Charlotte obtained for herself the names of Currer Bell from Montagu's book which, as I show, contained the "plot," etc., of _Wuthering Heights_, for her own use in the Bronte poem publis.h.i.+ng project of 1845-46--it is most important to note that but some months after Emily's diary entry _Wuthering Heights_ was offered by Charlotte to Messrs. Aylott and Jones, with _The Professor_ and _Agnes Grey_--on April 6th, 1846. The literal evidence of _The Key to the Bronte Works_ does not require that we ask by what miracle the "contented" Emily Bronte, who had collaborated three and a half years with Anne on _The Gondal Chronicles_, and declared an intention at the end of July 1845 to "stick firmly" to their composition, could come, in addition to preparing her poems for the press, to begin and to finish _Wuthering Heights_ by or before April 6th, 1846.[9]

After Charlotte Bronte's return from Brussels the degeneracy of her only brother, Patrick Branwell Bronte, a young man ambitious, but not successful, as an artist, made him an object of her disgust and antipathy, and we find she portrayed him unflinchingly as Hindley Earnshaw of _Wuthering Heights_, and again as John Reed of _Jane Eyre_.

Emily, we have been told, liked her brother, though an attempt was made somewhat recently to dissipate the tradition.[10] But Charlotte, after the deaths of her elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, the eldest of the family, obviously was piqued from childhood by the advantage Branwell's s.e.x gave him over her seniority, more especially as he seems to have been brutal to her:--See "A Rainy Day in Charlotte Bronte's Childhood,"

in _The Key to the Bronte Works_.

It may be observed Charlotte Bronte went to three schools, and that each had a remarkable influence upon her life and literature. The first was the Clergy Daughters' School in the Kendal locality, to which her sisters Maria, Elizabeth, and Emily also went upon the death of the ailing Mrs. Bronte at Haworth. The second was Miss Wooler's school already mentioned, and the third the Brussels _pensionnat_. The fact that _Jane Eyre_ virtually opens with the Clergy Daughters' School incidents--incidents drawn from her child-memory regarding the temporary mismanagement of an establishment which subsequently has proved a most useful foundation--shows she began _Jane Eyre_ with the utmost possible fidelity to truth in so far as regarded herself and her a.s.sociations.

The story of how this famous work was sent in 1847 to a firm of publishers who had just declined her novel _The Professor_ is well known history, as is the relation of the subsequent success of the book and the elevation of Charlotte Bronte to the highest recognition.

_Wuthering Heights_ had been published as Ellis Bell's work, a _nom de guerre_ that also had appeared over Emily Bronte's poems. It was issued under the condition that the next book by its author went to the same publisher, a Mr. Newby, which, of course, made impossible thereafter Charlotte Bronte's acknowledging her authors.h.i.+p of this work, as the next book by the author of _Wuthering Heights_, her _Jane Eyre_, was published by another house. But there are evidences in _s.h.i.+rley_ that despite her nervous apprehensions, and her letters show she was very much afraid of this Mr. Newby, who afterwards a.s.serted she wrote _Wuthering Heights_, she therein carefully placed significations of her authors.h.i.+p of _Wuthering Heights_.

_Villette_ was published in January 1853, and in the June of 1854 Currer Bell married her father's curate, the Rev. A. B. Nicholls, whom she previously had refused. She married him, it may be, as a final immolation of herself on the altar of Right and Duty. Her married life was but for some few months--it was so short we yet call her Charlotte Bronte. Her father outlived her by six years. The last survivor of the young Brontes, she died in March 1855, within a month of old Tabitha Aykroyd, her best loved woman friend and companion apart from her own kinsfolk. Charlotte Bronte, with other members of her family, rests in the grey fabric which is the modern representative of that early described as the church of St. Michael the Archangel de Haworth. Her message is yet with us; the tablets of her life she has bequeathed to posterity, and the key to open the way to their repository is now in our hands. Her genius has shown the price of right-doing and the grim and dangerous valley through which Virtue must go ere break of Day.

CHAPTER II.