Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  The inception and the progress of these three novels was, like that of the poems, kept secret. Charlotte, in her constant and detailed letters to Ellen Nussey, in which she records the phases of Branwell’s deterioration, gives not the slightest hint that any literary project was on the board, and it is equally certain from what happened after the publication of Jane Eyre (which was the first of the novels to appear) that Mr. Brontë, sitting in the parlour more sundered now every week from the visible world by reason of his failing eyesight, for which an operation was being mooted, knew nothing whatever of these renewed activities: whether Branwell knew is a question that will presently require a more detailed investigation. Nor was there less silence and secrecy between the authors themselves, and we must picture them busy but wholly uncommunicative to each other about their progress, in spite of Mrs. Gaskell’s fascinating account of how they read new chapters of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights to each other, as they came hot from the glowing workshops. She says:

  The sisters retained their old habit which was begun in their aunt’s lifetime, of putting away their work at nine o’clock, and commencing their study, pacing up and down the sitting-room. At this time, they talked over the stories they were engaged upon, and described their plots. Once or twice a week, each read to the others what she had written and heard what they had to say about it ... the readings were of great and stirring interest to them all.

  But to out infinite chagrin we find that nothing of the sort took place, for Charlotte, referring to the writing of these very books, says:

  Formerly we used to show each other what we wrote, but of late years this habit of communication and consultation had been discontinued: hence it ensued that we were mutually ignorant of the progress we might respectively have made.

  Nothing unfortunately can be clearer than that, and though we must abandon the delightful idea of these readings we are left with a reality far more characteristic of the isolation of the three in their common aim.

  They still wrote chiefly in the evening, for there was housework to do, and how long were the busy silences! Anne would be sitting to-night at the table in the dining-room with her desk in front of her. She was getting towards the end of Agnes Grey. Emily had gone to give the dogs their supper, and they had heard her go upstairs, for she often did her writing in her bedroom. Mr. Brontë had just looked in to say good-night and tell them not to sit up late. He wound up the clock as, now nearly blind, he groped his way upstairs to the room where he and Branwell slept together. Charlotte sat on the hearth-rug, writing by the firelight. She had a board on her knees, and she wrote in her minute hand on scraps of paper which next day she copied out for her finished manuscript. She was getting on well with The Professor. Then the long silence would be broken by the sound of the opening of the front door; so Branwell was back from the ‘Black Bull,’ and he stumbled as he shuffled along the passage. To-night he looked into the dining-room and came and sat close to Charlotte to warm himself, for it was a cold night, and the north wind blew, specked with snow, from the moor. Charlotte had nothing to say to him; she did not even look up, but stiffened and drew a little away from him, for he kept coughing, and his breath was foully sweet with whisky. He would have liked to ask Charlotte what she was writing, but he was afraid of her, and she might say something biting in return. So as his reception was not encouraging, he soon left them: Emily was gone upstairs, and he tapped at the door of her room — that slip of a room just over the front door — to have a few words with her, if she was not yet gone to bed, for he had an idea in his head to talk about. He stumbled off, forgetting to shut the door.

  Not a word did the two sisters exchange about him: silence descended again, and, when the clock struck midnight, Anne put her papers into her desk — perhaps locking it — and left Charlotte still absorbed in her work, her face close to the paper. For the last day or two she had been thinking much about Branwell and his frantic folly, his making love to a woman in her husband’s house, and the disgusting creature he was, with his foul breath and his tipsiness and his maudlin lamentations. To-night she was engaged on the twentieth chapter of The Professor, and she had been describing how William Crimsworth was leaving the Professor’s house, ‘where a practical modern French novel seemed likely to materialise.’

  I had once [he reflected] the opportunity of contemplating, near at hand, an example of the results produced by a course of interesting and romantic domestic treachery. No golden halo of fiction was about this example, I saw it bare and real: and it was very loathsome. I saw a mind degraded by the habit of perfidious deception, and a body depraved by the infective influence of the vice-polluted soul. I had suffered much from the forced and prolonged view of this spectacle....

  But it was late and the fire was burning low. Charlotte went upstairs, pausing before she entered the room, once Aunt Branwell’s, now occupied by her and Anne, for she heard Branwell’s voice coming from Emily’s room. It was strange that she could tolerate his disgusting presence.

  CHAPTER XI

  In the spring of 1846 (or at the beginning of the year, if Charlotte’s statement about the three books vainly seeking a publisher for a year and a half is correct) Wuthering Heights was finished; it is necessary to go into the much-derided suggestion that Branwell was the author of it. It was published under the nom de plume, Ellis Bell, which Emily had already adopted for her contribution to the joint volume of poems, and Charlotte tells in the Biographical Notice to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, how ‘Ellis Bell produced Wuthering Heights, Acton Bell, Agnes Grey, and Currer Bell also wrote a narrative (The Professor) in one volume.’ That would certainly seem to settle the question once and for all, and no doubt Charlotte believed that Emily was the sole and entire author of the book. Moreover, she wrote after Branwell’s death to Mr. W. S. Williams of the firm of Smith, Elder & Co., making the following statement concerning her brother’s complete ignorance of all the buzz of literary activity that was going on at the Parsonage:

  My unhappy brother never knew what his sisters had done in literature — he was not aware that they had ever published a line. We could not tell him of our efforts for fear of causing him too deep a pang of remorse for his own time misspent and talents misapplied.

  Now it is frankly impossible to accept that statement. For the last two years of Branwell’s life printed proofs were constantly arriving for the sisters, one packet of which was perhaps opened by Branwell himself by mistake: six presentation authors’ copies, Charlotte tells us, were sent to Emily and Anne on the publication of their books, and to her also, as well as multitudes of reviews which she always insisted on seeing. Mr. Brontë, when Jane Eyre had begun to boom, was informed by Charlotte that she was the author; Charlotte and Anne went up to London more than a year before Branwell died, to disclose themselves to Smith, Elder & Co.; Mrs. Gaskell tells us how, when Charlotte had sent the manuscript of The Professor to a publisher, and had received no acknowledgment, she consulted Branwell himself as to the reason of his silence. For all these reasons it is ludicrous to suppose that Branwell knew nothing about his sisters’ publications; the most we can believe, but that readily, is that Charlotte, who found it difficult to remain in the same room with him or to speak to him at all, never herself said a word to him about them. As for the reason she assigned for his not being told of them, because the sense of his own wasted life in comparison with his sisters’ would cause him remorse, it is better, considering her implacable treatment of him, to refrain from comment altogether.

  Returning, then, to the main question as to whether or no Branwell was responsible in whole or in part for Wuthering Heights, there is so much queer and seemingly strong evidence that he not only knew about it, but had something to do with it, that it would be a mere dishonesty to disregard it entirely, or to dismiss it unexamined. The principal documents are as follows:

  (1) On September 10, 1845 (that is, at the beginning of the autumn when the literary activity of the three sisters started again), Bran
well wrote thus to his friend J. B. Leyland the sculptor, who executed the bas-relief profile of his head, seen by Mrs. Gaskell at Haworth:

  I have, since I saw you at Halifax, devoted every hour of time, snatched from downright illness, to the composition of a three volume novel, one volume of which [notebook?] is completed, and, along with the two forthcoming ones, has been really the result of half a dozen long-past years of thoughts about, and experience in, this crooked path of life. I feel that I must rouse myself to attempt something, while roasting daily and nightly over a slow fire, to while away my torments.

  (2) Mr. William Dearden, author of The Demon Queen and other poems, published in the Halifax Guardian in June 1867 a remarkable story concerning himself and Branwell. They agreed to hold a sort of poetic tournament at the Cross Roads Inn, near Haworth, each reading his own poem. J. B. Leyland was appointed umpire in this contest. Dearden continues:

  I read the first act of The Demon Queen, but when Branwell dived into his hat — the usual receptacle of his fugitive scraps, where he supposed he had deposited his MS. poem, he found he had by mistake placed there a number of stray leaves of a novel on which he had been trying his ‘prentice hand.... Both friends earnestly entreated him to read them, as they felt a curiosity to see how he could wield the pen of a novelist. After some hesitation, he complied with the request and riveted our attention for about an hour.... The scene of the fragment which Branwell read, and the characters introduced in it, — so far as then developed, — were the same as those in Wuthering Heights, which Charlotte confidently asserts was the production of her sister Emily.

  (3) Mr. Edward Sloane, a friend of Branwell’s and of Mr. William Dearden’s, declared to the latter that ‘Branwell had read to him, portion by portion, the novel as it was produced at the time, insomuch that he no sooner began the perusal of Wuthering Heights when published than he was able to anticipate the characters and incidents to be disclosed.’

  (4) Branwell’s friend, Mr. F. H. Grundy, who first made his acquaintance when he was ticket clerk at Luddenden Foot Station in 1842, and paid at least two visits to him at Haworth, wrote in his memoirs:

  Patrick Brontë declared to me, and what his sister Emily said bore out the assertion, that he wrote a great portion of Wuthering Heights himself. Indeed it is impossible for me to read that story without meeting with many passages which I feel certain must have come from his pen. The weird fancies of diseased genius with which he used to entertain me in our long talks at Luddenden Foot reappear in the pages of his novel, and I am inclined to believe that the very plot was his invention rather than his sister’s.

  Now much of this evidence was not published till twelve years at least after Charlotte’s death. It is therefore remote from the events of which it treats. But there is one dated and contemporary document, namely, Branwell’s letter of September 10, 1845, to J. B. Leyland, which states that he had then written the first volume of a novel, and the rest of the evidence (the reading of the opening chapters of it to Mr. Dearden and Leyland, the recognition of what had then been read, when Wuthering Heights was published, and so forth) is in accordance with it. Unless, then, we assume that these gentlemen, Messrs. Dearden, Sloane, and Grundy, were confederated liars of remarkable constructive imagination, it must be confessed that there is a prima-facie case for Branwell’s having had knowledge of the book before it was published, and for his having had a hand in its writing. The case is carried further by certain internal evidence in the story itself.

  First come one or two verbal points of little importance in themselves, but contributory:

  (1) In a letter of Branwell’s (already quoted) addressed to ‘Old Knave of Trumps’ we find the rather remarkable phrase: ‘... he whose eyes Satan looks out of as from windows’; and in Wuthering Heights we find Nellie Dean admonishing Heathcliff as follows about his sulky face:

  Do you mark ... those thick brows, that instead of being arched, sink in the middle; and that couple of black fiends, so deeply buried, who never open the windows boldly but lurk glinting under them like devil’s spies?

  Again Isabel, speaking of Heathcliff, says: ‘I stared full at him and laughed scornfully. The clouded windows of hell flashed a moment towards me.’

  This is nothing in itself. Branwell’s letter to ‘Old Knave of Trumps’ was written in 1841, and he may easily have used the image of Satan looking out of a man’s eyes as from windows in Emily’s hearing, and she, struck with it, have twice closely paraphrased it. But the coincidence is curious, and Miss Robinson, who scouted the idea of Branwell having had anything to do with Wuthering Heights, certainly found it so, for in her admirable book Emily Brontë she quotes Branwell’s letter otherwise entire to show what a degraded wretch he was, but omits these few words.

  (2) In a letter of Branwell’s after his dismissal from his tutorship, in consequence of his conduct concerning Mrs. Robinson, he writes: ‘My own life without her will be hell. What can the so-called love of her wretched sickly husband be compared with mine?’

  In Wuthering Heights Heathcliff says to Nellie Dean:

  Two words would comprehend my future — death and hell; existence after losing her would be hell. Yet I was a fool to fancy for a moment that she valued Edgar Linton’s attachment more than mine. If he loved with all the power of his puny being, he couldn’t love in eighty years as I could in a day.

  This latter verbal coincidence is far more significant than the other, for Wuthering Heights was nearing completion when Branwell wrote the corresponding letter, and it looks therefore as if he must have been cognisant of the passage in Wuthering Heights. Taken in conjunction with his statement that he had written part of a novel, and the statement of three other witnesses that what Branwell on one occasion read them, and on another occasion told them, enabled them, when Wuthering Heights appeared, to recognise in it a story of which already they knew the outline and had heard a part, these coincidences support the suggestion that he had something to do with the book, and, as author, or collaborator, or confidant, knew about it.

  But apart from and vastly outweighing the sum of such minor points, apart from but curiously confirming the stubborn external evidence of other witnesses, comes the internal evidence, both as regards composition, verbal expression, and general texture, that Wuthering Heights is the work of two authors. The work of the first was merely a handicap, though a serious one, on that of the second, and is a very small portion of the whole, and in the ‘fire and the mighty wind’ of the second we recognise the wild and visionary and mystical power which inspires Emily’s poems. In that Branwell had no part at all, and it would be as ludicrous to suppose that he was in any real sense the author of the book as that Charlotte was. It was supposed by some when the book first came out that it was an early and immature work of hers, but she indignantly repudiated such a suggestion.

  To turn then to the book itself, which is among the greatest works of fiction the world has ever seen, the composition and construction are inconceivably awkward, and this awkwardness is entirely due to the manner in which it begins. It opens — dated 1801 — with the first-hand narrative of Mr. Lockwood, the tenant of Thrushcross Grange, who goes to visit his landlord Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights, and it is clear that the intention of the writer was to make him a personage in the story. He pays a second visit next day and is immensely struck with the younger Catherine, whom he has not seen before. He pities her for being buried alive with these savages: he thinks she is Hareton’s wife.

  She has thrown herself away on that boor [he reflects] from sheer ignorance that better individuals existed! A sad pity — I must beware how I cause her to regret her choice. The last reflection may seem conceited: it was not. My neighbour struck me as bordering on repulsive; I knew through experience that I was tolerably attractive....

  It is impossible to imagine a clearer indication of the writer’s intention to make a motif out of Catherine’s beauty and Lockwood’s complacent susceptibility. But nothing happens; the intention was s
crapped. Lockwood returns to Thrushcross Grange next morning, after some bitter nocturnal experiences, and asks his housekeeper Nellie Dean to tell him more about this strange family. Thereupon she becomes the narrator, and talks to him that day for eighty pages. Next day he falls ill, and is a month in bed. When he gets better, she resumes her narrative, he merely listening. She began it from her earliest years and now completes it up to the date at which the story opens, giving him the entire history of the Earnshaws, of the Lintons, and of Heathcliff. We lose sight of Lockwood altogether; he only listens to Nellie Dean as she repeats verbatim long conversations, telling this voluminous history at first hand as she witnessed it. She reads him a letter of eleven pages, which Lockwood reproduces word for word; she oversees, she overhears, and it is not till page 367, quite near the end of the book, that the original narrator appears again to tell us that Mrs. Dean’s story, which has lasted for twenty-seven chapters, is over. Then Lockwood narrates one chapter, describing his third visit to Wuthering Heights, and leaves the district. After a break he dates his next chapter 1802, and when he visits the Heights once more, Nellie Dean again tells him what has happened while he has been away. From first page to last he has had nothing whatever to do with the story to which, instead of narrating it himself, as he began to do, he is merely audience, and writes down what Nellie Dean has told him. He has no more to do with it than the occupant of a stall in the theatre has to do with the action on the stage.

  No single author could have planned a book in so topsy-turvy a manner. It begins, in point of time, nearly at the end, the original narrator drops completely out, and the actual narrator, whose story forms the bulk of the book, tells it to him. But supposing that, for some reason, the first few chapters had to be retained, this complete change of plan, though productive of endless awkwardnesses, was necessary in order to tell the story at all. Lockwood, the newly arrived tenant who auto-biographically opens the book, could not know the previous history of Heathcliff and the rest. So Nellie Dean must recount it to him, and it takes so long that he must needs fall ill so that his convalescence may be beguiled with it. Nobody planning a story from the first could have begun with an episode so misplaced that such an awkward device must be resorted to. Moreover, though from first to last Lockwood has nothing to do with the story at all, there are those sure indications in the early chapters that he was meant to play a part in it. He warns himself that he must not make himself too attractive, and cause the enchanting Catherine (married, so he fancies, to the boorish Hareton) to fall in love with him.