THE KEY TO THE
BRONTË WORKS.

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.

CONTENTS.

APPENDIX.

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."

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 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.:—

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. 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 importance 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.

THE KEY TO THE BRONTË WORKS.

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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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 Brontë poem publishing 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 Brontë Works does not require that we ask by what miracle the "contented" Emily Brontë, 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 Brontë's return from Brussels the degeneracy of her only brother, Patrick Branwell Brontë, 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 sex gave him over her seniority, more especially as he seems to have been brutal to her:—See "A Rainy Day in Charlotte Brontë's Childhood," in The Key to the Brontë Works.

It may be observed Charlotte Brontë 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. Brontë 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 associations. 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 Brontë to the highest recognition.

Wuthering Heights had been published as Ellis Bell's work, a nom de guerre that also had appeared over Emily Brontë'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 Brontë's acknowledging her authorship 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 Shirley that despite her nervous apprehensions, and her letters show she was very much afraid of this Mr. Newby, who afterwards asserted she wrote Wuthering Heights, she therein carefully placed significations of her authorship 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 Brontë. Her father outlived her by six years. The last survivor of the young Brontës, 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 Brontë, 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.

THE ORIGIN OF THE CANDLE-BEARING BEDSIDE VISITANT AND THE UNCOUTH SERVANT IN "WUTHERING HEIGHTS" AND "JANE EYRE."

My evidence shows that between 1837 and 1847 Charlotte Brontë was perusing very attentively a little volume entitled Gleanings in Craven, or the Tourist's Guide, by one Frederic Montagu of Lincoln's Inn, son of Basil Montagu, second (natural) son of John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, whose ancestor brought Charles II. over from Holland on the Restoration in 1660 and therefor received his earldom.[11] The book, which had never been associated by any person with the name or works of Charlotte Brontë till I wrote my article, "The Key to Jane Eyre," upon it for The Saturday Review, was in the form of "Six letters to a friend in India," addressed as, "My dear Howard ... now at Bombay," and was dedicated by special permission to the Duke of Devonshire, a fact not mentioned save in the early editions. It was printed at Briggate, Leeds, by A. Pickard, and published at Skipton-in-Craven in 1838. Messrs. Simpkin, Marshall & Co. were the London publishers.

Frederick Montagu was a gentleman travelling in Yorkshire for his health's sake it seems, and it occurred to him to relate in epistolary form the story of his adventures. He had read the local writers, but it is most clear Charlotte Brontë was particularly influenced in the construction of her great masterpieces, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, by his purely personal contributions. It was not only as a gleaner of local hearsay that Montagu wrote the long panegyric upon Miss Currer which obviously resulted in Charlotte Brontë's choosing the name, but as one whose attention had been drawn to her literary eminence. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, who in his Reminiscences of a Literary Life (1836) spoke so good a word for Basil Montagu, Frederic's father,[12] under whom he had studied for the bar, also devoted in those Reminiscences many pages to Miss Currer and Eshton Hall. Thus we read in Montagu's Gleanings in Craven:—

And now as to literature ... Miss Currer is the head of all the female bibliopolists (sic) in Europe, the library of Eshton Hall fully bearing out this truth.... In taking my leave of Eshton Hall, there is a subject upon which I must say a word: it is only the repetition of the echo I have heard about Eshton.... There was one name connected by every person with worth and excellence—one who in the continual performance of charity, like a pure but imbedded stream, silently pursues her kind course, nourishing all within her sweet influence:—I believe it may be truly said no person is more deservedly loved and respected than Miss Currer.

As to "Bell," which like "Currer," came to be chosen by Charlotte Brontë from Montagu's book for her pen-name in the poem publishing project of autumn 1845—only some months before Wuthering Heights was supposed to have been written—Montagu says:—

Kirkby-Lonsdale is a neat, stone-built town, and has a free Grammar School.... It was at this school that the celebrated lawyer, and one of his late Majesty's Counsels, the late John Bell, Esq., received his education.

And three lines before this Montagu has described the views of the Lune, "and the prospect from the churchyard, taking in Casterton Hall."[13] This is the very background of the early chapters of Jane Eyre. Indeed, Casterton Hall was the original of Brocklehurst Hall in Jane Eyre, and here resided the Rev. W. Carus-Wilson, the original of Mr. Brocklehurst, "the black marble clergyman" of the school at Lowood; while Kirkby-Lonsdale was the original of Lowton of Jane Eyre. These facts compel us to perceive that Charlotte Brontë would naturally be led by Montagu's words, to recall she too as regards her education had been associated with the locality mentioned. These references seem to have made Currer Bell relate in Jane Eyre her experiences in that district. Neither Miss Brontë nor Mrs. Gaskell, her biographer, gave any information as to the origin of the "Currer" and "Bell" of Currer Bell, but it is known the "Bell" was not chosen from the name of the Rev. A. Bell Nicholls whom she afterwards married.[14]

A further personal contribution by Montagu, one he based on gossip rather than on tradition, was the story of a foundling who, he says, was discovered by a shepherd on a rocky elevation. This I find Charlotte Brontë evolved into "a cuckoo story." The circumstance that this male child was found on the craggy summit of a hill may have dictated to her the name of the foundling Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights.

I moreover find that, influenced by Montagu's quaint descriptions of the wild and remote neighbourhood, Charlotte Brontë made Malham and the valley of Malham the background of her story, Wuthering Heights. With Malham, Montagu associated the names of Linton and Airton (Hareton); the Fairy Cave, the Crags, glens, mists; a grey old church in the valley, the "Kirk" by Malham, Kirkby Malham Church, which Charlotte Brontë calls in Wuthering Heights Gimmerton Kirk; a rapid stream and a Methodist chapel. And he draws attention to Malham, being at the foot of a range of steep mountains—"the Heights," and having an annual sheep fair, when over one hundred thousand sheep are shown at one time, the which observation was, we now discover, responsible for Charlotte Brontë's choice of "Gimmerton" and "Gimmerden," from "gimmer," a female sheep, and meaning respectively the village of sheep and the valley of sheep, a characteristic of hers being that she often chose her names on what she termed the lucus a non lucendo principle.[15]

Having in Wuthering Heights made so pointed a reference to the Fairy Cave in the neighbourhood of Gimmerton, and having therein associated with it the names of Airton (Hareton) and Linton, which Montagu connected with Gimmerton or Malham, Charlotte Brontë had not openly mentioned in that work the Fairy Janet referred to by Montagu, though she hinted at "the mysteries of the Fairy Cave." But I find that her "elfish" imagination induced her later, in Jane Eyre, to appropriate for herself the rôle of the Fairy Janet, the Queen of the Malhamdale or Gimmerden elves, who ruled in the neighbourhood of Gimmerton and of Wuthering Heights, the home of Catherine Earnshaw. Thus we see Charlotte Brontë primarily associated both Catherine Earnshaw, the heroine of Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, the heroine of Jane Eyre, with Malham. And discovering the impetuosity of her imaginative nature and its romantic turn, I doubt not she was impatient to begin the tale of the "fairy-born and human-bred" heroine whose surname she took from the River Aire or Ayre, which sprang, as Montagu carefully indicates, from Malham, or Gimmerton, as Charlotte Brontë would say in her Wuthering Heights. From this came the suggestion of the "Rivers" family, with which I deal later, the names employed by Charlotte Brontë being River(s), Burn(s), Aire or Eyre, Severn, Reed, and Keeldar.

Another of Montagu's personal contributions which greatly influenced Charlotte Brontë was on the leaf before the mention of John Bell, Esq., and on the same leaf as the mention of Casterton Hall, headed "A Night's Repose." This was the narration of a night's adventure, Montagu telling how he went to a lonely hostelry and found an unwillingness in the hostess to give him bed and shelter. He also discovered a mystery surrounded the hostess and a peculiar, harsh-voiced country-bred man-servant—who came to be the original of Joseph of Wuthering Heights. At night the apparition of the hostess appears at Montagu's bedside, white-faced and lighted candle in hand. It is plain the peculiar man-servant appealed very strongly to Charlotte Brontë, and thus in both her Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre transcriptions of the midnight incident this characteristic is marked and recognizable: in Joseph; and in Grace Poole, by what I have termed Charlotte Brontë's Method I., interchange of the sexes of characters. In Wuthering Heights, by her same Method I., Montagu's inhospitable hostess became the inhospitable host Heathcliffe; but in each of Charlotte Brontë's versions—Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre—a central figure of the incidents she based upon Montagu's story of "A Night's Repose" was the uncouth, coarse-voiced country-bred servant.

We also shall see that Montagu's reference to lunacy being an exception to his objection against the separation of husband and wife, and the use he made of a verse in his Malham letter, likening the moon to

"A ... lady lean and pale
Who totters forth wrapt in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,"

were responsible for the "plot" of Jane Eyre including an insane lady who wanders out of her chamber at night and dons a vapoury veil.

And evidence of the enthusiasm with which Charlotte Brontë applied herself to Jane Eyre is the fact that she at once took from Montagu's little volume for this her second story based upon the book's suggestions, the names of

Broughton, Poole (from Pooley), Eshton, Georgiana, Lynn (from Linton), Lowood (from Low-wood), Mason, Ingram, Helen,[16] and possibly Millcote (from Weathercote).

Thus far we see Charlotte Brontë drew Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre from the same source; that in a word, Jane Eyre, was Charlotte's second attempt to utilize and amplify the suggestions in Montagu's work which had appealed to her when she began Wuthering Heights, and we see the suggestions she utilized in Jane Eyre always bear unmistakable relationship to those she had utilized in her Wuthering Heights. But the use Charlotte Brontë made of Montagu's book was not in the nature of literary theft; that volume simply afforded suggestions which she enlarged upon.

I shall presently show how I find Jane Eyre is the second attempt of Currer Bell to enlarge upon suggestions that had appealed to her when she first read Montagu. For a commencement I will refer to the early construction of her Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. As simple stories they both are based upon the description Montagu gives of an isolated hostelry with an inhospitable hostess, a midnight apparition, and an air of mystery that surrounds the hostess and a peculiar, uncouth servant, to whom I have already alluded. The stage properties of this narrative, the characters, and the "action" or plot, I will give side by side, as they appear severally, first in Montagu, next in Wuthering Heights, and finally in Jane Eyre. Herewith the reader will have excellent examples of the two chief methods I find Charlotte Brontë employed often when she drew from a character in more than one work or instance, or when she desired to veil the identity of her originals. Charlotte Brontë's Methods I. and II., being discovered equally in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre show, as conclusively as any other evidence, that she was the author of both works. No consideration whatsoever can alter the iron fact or depreciate from its significance, that it was absolutely my discovery of Charlotte Brontë's Methods I. and II., which revealed to me the sensational verbal and other parallels between Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre I give in The Key to the Brontë Works:—

Read carefully:—

Charlotte Brontë's Method I.—The interchange of sexes. Thus the original of A may be a woman, and the original of B a man; but A may be represented as a man, and B as a woman.

Charlotte Brontë's Method II.—Altering the age of a character portrayed. Thus the original of C may be young, and the original of D old; but C may be represented as old, and D as young.

The literal extracts to which I have referred I print as occurring in the three works:—Montagu the original, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre. I will first give the substance, or subject matter, side by side:—

In the literal extracts I now give the reader will perceive that in the description of the bedside, candle-bearing apparition in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë followed Montagu almost word for word, and in the whole staging of the midnight episode at the house of the inhospitable host in Wuthering Heights followed him entirely in outlining the story. Both the Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre versions give unequivocal evidence of being refractions from Montagu conveyed through one brain alone, the peculiar idiosyncrasy and elective sensitiveness of which are undeniably recognizable as Charlotte Brontë's:—

Truly Montagu's description of the coarse-voiced, thick-set, country-bred servant, and his implication with the mystery of the lonely house had impressed Charlotte Brontë considerably. Whether she portrayed him as the Joseph of Wuthering Heights or, by her Method I., as the Grace Poole of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë respects the original associations of this character as they were figured to her by Frederic Montagu's little fiction of "A Night's Repose." Herewith have we evidence as to mental idiosyncrasy and elective-sensitiveness recognizable as Charlotte Brontë's—proof that her brain and none other was responsible for both the Wuthering Heights and the Jane Eyre versions of the midnight incident from Montagu.

CHAPTER III.

ORIGIN OF THE FOUNDLING HEATHCLIFFE AND HIS NAME IN "WUTHERING HEIGHTS"—ORIGIN OF THE INSANE LADY AND THE WHITE VEIL SCENE IN "JANE EYRE."

We have now seen that Montagu's book provided Charlotte Brontë with the idea for a lonely house of mystery—a mystery which should surround a host with a peculiar, harsh-voiced, uncouth, north-country servant, and I have shown how that idea was adopted by her for Wuthering Heights and afterwards for Jane Eyre. At one time Charlotte Brontë wrote the Tale of a Foundling, and she certainly read with interest a remarkable story told by Montagu of a foundling who, he tells us in the letter next before the Malham letter, was discovered by a shepherd on the top of a craggy "mountain," a circumstance which perhaps led her in making use of this foundling story to name the child Heathcliffe. I will place the substance of the two stories side by side:—

The cuckoo story derived obviously from the history Montagu gives of the foundling became thus the backbone of Wuthering Heights; but it is possible that the cuckoo story requiring the foundling should be painted with all the viciousness and cruelty of character necessary to his part, Charlotte Brontë found herself dissatisfied with the story. And portraying herself in the narrative as Catherine Earnshaw, her hero became M. Héger. This naturally led to an awkward clashing. Whether the extreme "demonism" of Heathcliffe must be understood as being in the main due to his rôle as the "cuckoo," who was to oust the poor farmer's offspring "like unfledged dunnocks," to quote Mrs. Dean, I will not in this chapter inquire.

Turning again to Montagu's book, Charlotte saw a further suggestion that contained excellent "plot" possibilities. This was the question of lunacy being an exception to the objection against the separation of husband and wife, Montagu's relation being Barry Cornwall (to whom, by the way, Thackeray dedicated Vanity Fair), who was a Metropolitan Commissioner in Lunacy. To Charlotte Brontë, however, the subject came simply as a useful suggestion. She had no views upon it, and she desired only that her heroine would marry Rochester, the hero with an insane wife. At heart Charlotte was indifferent as to the vital point, even nullifying the very theme of the plot by making Rochester aver that if Jane Eyre had been the mad wife, he would still have loved and cherished her.

It would appear that in conjunction with Montagu's remarks on lunacy and the separation of husband and wife, an extract he gives from Shelley is also responsible for a wife's lunacy being the theme of the plot of Jane Eyre. The extract which Montagu quotes in the Malham letter is where the poet speaks of "The Waning Moon" as like—

"A ... lady lean and pale
Who totters forth wrapt in a gauzy veil
Out of her chamber led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain."

Thus was evidently suggested to Charlotte Brontë the hanging up in the closet of the "vapoury veil" for the stage purposes of the "insane lady"; and in Jane Eyre Montagu's night-wandering, candle-bearing hostess became a lady who passed, after the manner of the lines he quoted,—

Out of her chamber led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain—

became Mrs. Rochester. Norton Conyers, a house near Ripon, it is said, is associated with the story that a mad woman was once confined there.[17] If Charlotte Brontë was familiar with this story, and we are told the interior is somewhat similar to the descriptions of Thornfield, we can understand that, perusing Montagu's book at the time when she was utilizing his narrative of the candle-bearing, hideous-faced, white-clad midnight visitant in a house of mystery, she would the more readily appropriate the further suggestions his work contained in regard to a wife's insanity, and the "veil-clad" apparition of a night-roaming insane lady. It is important to note, however, that the evidence of my preceding chapter proves indubitably the "mad woman" was but a secondary suggestion—the primary suggestion responsible for the plot of Jane Eyre being that of Montagu's midnight apparition. And just as the thick-set country-bred servant denotes in the question as to the origin and author of the candle-bearing bedside visitant in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, the "gauzy veil" likewise denotes as to the origin of the mad woman of Jane Eyre. So we read in the beginning of Chapter XXV. of Jane Eyre, that Jane leaves the vapoury veil in the closet:—

To conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour ... gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment. "I will leave you by yourself, white dream," I said.

Then farther on we read that:—

The moon shut herself wholly within her chamber, and drew close her curtain of cloud,

which is simply an antithetical paraphrase of Montagu's quoted verse on "The Waning Moon" which, like

A ... lady ... pale ... totters forth wrapt in a gauzy veil, out of her chamber.

And in the same chapter of Jane Eyre we read finally that the insane lady, who has come out of her chamber,

"... took my veil from its place; she held it up, gazed at it long, and then she threw it over her head, and turned to the mirror ... it removed my veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts, and flinging both on the floor, trampled on them."

CHAPTER IV.

A RAINY DAY IN CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S CHILDHOOD: THE OPENING INCIDENT IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF THE HEROINES OF "WUTHERING HEIGHTS" AND "JANE EYRE."

Seeing Catherine Earnshaw, the heroine of Wuthering Heights, was drawn, as I find, by Charlotte Brontë for her autobiographical self, the real commencement of that work, in so far as personal narrative was concerned, is the diary extract she wrote of herself in her earliest childhood.[18] In Jane Eyre she placed her earliest childhood memories at the beginning of the story. I will give extracts side by side, when it will be seen they agree practically word for word. It is of course undeniable that none but Charlotte Brontë herself would or could have penned these incidents of her own childhood.

Thus we see the "volume-hurling" incident with which John Reed is associated had its origin in some incident connected with Charlotte Brontë's childhood and her brother Branwell. As Catherine, Charlotte Brontë calls Hindley "a tyrant" in this connection, and as Jane Eyre she calls John Reed "a tyrant" here. Branwell, as John Reed, is made to tell Jane in connection with this incident that "all this house belongs to me, or will do"; and as Hindley Earnshaw he tells his sister Catherine, "You forget you have a master here." By Charlotte Brontë's Method II., altering the age of a character portrayed, Branwell is represented in the Wuthering Heights scene as a man in years. Without further appeal it was likely enough that Hindley Earnshaw, Catherine's brother, was drawn for Charlotte Brontë's brother, seeing Catherine was Charlotte. Herewith we find an explanation for a fact Mr. Francis A. Leyland has strongly emphasized in his work The Brontë Family, that in Wuthering Heights incidents (the carving-knife incident, etc.) and epithets known by his intimates to have been common to Branwell Brontë are associated with Hindley Earnshaw in the days of his moral deterioration. That deterioration is reflected in the portrayal of the latter end of John Reed in Jane Eyre; in Wuthering Heights it is given in detail. As for Emily Brontë, she always liked and commiserated with Branwell Brontë.[20]

I hope the attempt to interfere with this tradition recently has no relation to the fact that I briefly stated in my Fortnightly Review article that John Reed and Hindley Earnshaw were one and the same. It is plain to see that if Emily really liked Branwell, as people stated who gleaned from hearsay, she could not have portrayed him as Hindley Earnshaw. But a wrong estimate of the nature of the evidence I promised to bring has been formed if it were thought I should base my book upon such a point. It is enough that Charlotte Brontë's private letters regarding Branwell are quite in agreement with her own harsh portrayals of him in her Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.

It is interesting to recall Branwell avowed he, and not Emily, wrote Wuthering Heights. This fact and the association of Branwell Brontë incidents and epithets with the book induced Mr. Leyland to advocate Branwell's authorship. The Key to the Brontë Works shows the absurdness of such a claim. Mr. Leyland suggested Branwell may have collaborated with Emily; and he professed to discover a break in the style. I find, however, that though there were violent psychical fluctuations in the mood of the writer of Wuthering Heights, the book is throughout the work of Charlotte Brontë. This may be proved alone by the Chapter III., with which I now deal: it is the "key" chapter, and is, so to speak, a microcosm of Wuthering Heights, as the reader will perceive by help of my index. Whosoever was the writer of this third chapter wrote the whole of Wuthering Heights, and we see it was Currer Bell.

By Charlotte Brontë's Method I., interchange of the sexes, the interloper Jane in the early chapters of Jane Eyre and the interloper Heathcliffe in the early chapters of Wuthering Heights become one and the same; and Hindley's tyrannizing over Heathcliffe is John Reed's (Branwell Brontë's) tyrannizing over Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë). Again, by Method I., interchange of the sexes, old Joseph, in Charlotte's Wuthering Heights version of the rainy day incident in her childhood, serves the part of the servant Tabitha Aykroyd, for whom Bessie in the Jane Eyre version of the rainy day incident was drawn. (See "Joseph" and his bit of garden, Wuthering Heights, Chapter XXXIII.; also my footnote on page 47.) Thus Charlotte Brontë as Catherine tells us that when she was banished from the comfortable fire "Joseph" sermonizes, and that she hoped he might give "a short homily for his own sake"; and in the scene in Jane Eyre drawn from the same incident Jane was left to Bessie, who "supplied the hiatus by a homily of an hour's length, in which she proved beyond a doubt that I was the most wicked and abandoned child ever reared under a roof."

Catherine's story of the rainy day in Wuthering Heights was written by her in childhood on "a 'red-hot' Methodist's tract." Hence it is interesting to read Charlotte Brontë's words in Villette, where as Lucy Snowe she says she had "once read when a child certain Wesleyan Methodist tracts seasoned with ... excitation to fanaticism." As Caroline Helstone[21] in Shirley, Charlotte tells us she had read "some mad Methodist magazines, full of miracles and apparitions, of preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism; ... from these faded flowers Caroline had in her childhood extracted the honey—they were tasteless to her now." Let the reader compare Charlotte Brontë's reference to Briar Chapel and the shouts, yells, ejaculations, frantic cries of "the assembly" in Chapter IX. of Shirley with the references in Chapter III. of Wuthering Heights to the frantic zeal of "the assembly" of the chapel of Gimmerden Sough. It will be at once recognized that the former is but the extension of the other, amplified by the same hand.

Thus, in the light of the name Branderham ("Brander'em," from "brander," a hot iron over a fire) for the name of the zealous Rev. Jabes Branderham,[22] of the chapel of Gimmerden Sough, of Wuthering Heights, we see a connection with the play Charlotte Brontë makes upon "burning and fire" in the hymn sung at Briar Chapel in Chapter IX. of Shirley:—

"For every fight
Is dreadful and loud—
The warrior's delight
Is slaughter and blood;
His foes overturning
Till all shall expire—
And this is with burning
And fuel and fire."

In the rainy day incident Charlotte Brontë as Catherine vowed "she hated a good book," and this rebellion against the thrusting upon her of religious "lumber," as she calls it in Wuthering Heights, was a characteristic of her childhood shown also in the "Jane Eyre and Mr. Brocklehurst" incident, where the latter asks—

"And the Psalms? I hope you like them?"

"No, sir," replied Jane.

"No? Oh, shocking!"

At heart, however, Charlotte Brontë was a true Christian, though disliking excessive zealousness in the demonstrations of the members of any church. Read what M. Emanuel says in Chap. XXXVI. of Villette; the last paragraph. Lockwood tells us in the incident connected with Catherine's diary that "a glare of white letters started from the dark as vivid as spectres—the air swarmed with Catherines." This, Charlotte Brontë's idea of spectral writing running in the air, occurs in Chap. XV. of Jane Eyre, where Rochester speaks of a phantom hag (see Charlotte Brontë's phantom hag in Chap. XII. of Wuthering Heights), who "wrote in the air a memento which ran in lurid hieroglyphics all along the house-front." Says Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, continuing:—"An immediate interest kindled within me for the unknown Catherine, and I began ... to decipher her hieroglyphics"—the diary.

CHAPTER V.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S FRIEND, TABITHA AYKROYD, THE BRONTËS' SERVANT, AS MRS. DEAN OF "WUTHERING HEIGHTS," AND AS BESSIE AND HANNAH OF "JANE EYRE."

It is a remarkable fact that of all the members of Charlotte Brontë's home circle the one to whom, excepting herself, she gave most prominence in her works was Tabitha Aykroyd, the Brontës' servant or housekeeper. For I find this good woman was portrayed by Charlotte Brontë as Mrs. Dean of Wuthering Heights, Bessie and Hannah of Jane Eyre, and, on occasion, as Mrs. Pryor of Shirley. Indeed, strange though it may sound to say, my discovery that Tabitha Aykroyd, as she appealed to Currer Bell, was the original of these characters, alone explains the chief mystery of Wuthering Heights, and shows clearly enough Charlotte Brontë was its heroine and its author. In a word, we see by this discovery that Wuthering Heights is book the first of Charlotte Brontë's life as told by herself from old Tabitha's standpoint, and Jane Eyre book the second, giving her life's story and confession as related by herself entirely from her own point of view.

Never in Wuthering Heights did Nelly Dean really understand Catherine, and "the honest but inflexible servant," as Currer Bell calls Tabitha as Hannah of Jane Eyre, never yielded herself to a surrender of her rough-hearted but genuine nature wherein Charlotte was concerned.

"Tabby," said Mrs. Gaskell, "had a Yorkshire keenness of perception into character, and it was not everybody she liked." That Tabitha Aykroyd would readily appeal to Charlotte Brontë as fitted for the narrator of the histories in Wuthering Heights we may easily perceive by reading Mrs. Gaskell's further words on this Brontë servant:—

"When Charlotte was little more than nine years old ... an elderly woman of the village came to live as servant at the parsonage. She remained there, as a member of the household, thirty years [Hannah was thirty years with the Rivers family in Jane Eyre—an approximate date, of course, when that work was written] and from the length of her faithful service, and the attachment and respect she inspired is deserving of mention. Tabby was a thorough specimen of a Yorkshire woman of her class, in dialect, in character. She abounded in strong, practical sense and shrewdness. Her words were far from flattering, but she would spare no deeds in the cause of those whom she kindly regarded. She ruled the children pretty sharply; and yet never grudged a little extra trouble to provide them with such small treats as came within her power. In return she claimed to be looked upon as a humble friend.... Tabby had lived in Haworth in the days when the pack-horses went through once a week.... What is more, she had known the 'bottom' or valley in those primitive days when the fairies frequented the margin of the 'beck' on moonlight nights, and had known folk who had seen them. [See references to 'Bessie's' fairy tales in Jane Eyre, Chaps. I., II., and IV.].... No doubt she had many a tale to tell of bygone days of the countryside: old ways of living, former inhabitants, decayed gentry, who had melted away, and whose places knew them no more; family tragedies and dark superstitious dooms; and in telling these things, without the least consciousness that there might ever be anything requiring to be softened down, would give at full length the bare and simple details."

Says Mrs. Dean, the Yorkshire servant who narrates the family tragedies of Wuthering Heights just after the manner of Tabitha Aykroyd:—

"But, Mr. Lockwood, I forget these tales cannot divert you, ... I could have told Heathcliffe's history, all that you need hear, in half-a-dozen words."

"Sit still, Mrs. Dean," cried Lockwood, "... you've done just right to tell the story leisurely. That is the method I like.... Excepting a few provincialisms, ... you have no marks of the manners ... peculiar to your class; ... you have been compelled to cultivate your reflective faculties for want of occasions for frittering your life away in silly trifles."

Mrs. Dean laughed. "I certainly esteem myself a steady, reasonable kind of body," she said; "not exactly from living among the hills and seeing one set of faces, and one series of actions, from year's end to year's end; but I have undergone sharp discipline which has taught me wisdom."

"Jane" says of Mrs. Dean as "Bessie" of Jane Eyre, Chap. IV., Method II., altering the age of characters portrayed:—

When gentle, Bessie seemed to me the ... kindest being in the world;... I wished ... intensely ... she would always be so pleasant and amiable, and never push about or scold, or task me unreasonably, as she was ... wont to do. Bessie Lee[23] must, I think, have been a girl of good natural capacity, for she was smart in all she did, and had a remarkable knack of narrative; so, at least, I judge from the impression made upon me by her nursery tales.... But she had a capricious and hasty temper and indifferent ideas of principle or justice ["Hannah" would have driven off the destitute Jane Eyre], still, such as she was, I preferred her to any one else at Gateshead Hall.

"Mrs. Dean"[24] in her turn says of "Catherine"—Charlotte Brontë:—

"She was never so happy as when we were all scolding her at once and she defying us.... I vexed her frequently by trying to bring down her arrogance; she never took an aversion to me though."

In Chap. IV. of Jane Eyre Bessie says to Jane Eyre, after the latter has asked her not to scold:—

"Well, I will, but mind you are a very good girl, and don't be afraid of me. Don't start when I chance to speak sharply."

"I don't think I shall ever be afraid of you again, Bessie, because I have got used to you."

Jane suggests Bessie dislikes her, to which is replied:—

"I don't dislike you.... I believe I am fonder of you than of all the others."

"You don't show it."

"You sharp little thing!... What makes you so venturesome and hardy?"

The idiosyncratic appeal Tabitha Aykroyd made to Charlotte is related identically wherever she is portrayed. That Charlotte Brontë had been initially entranced by her fairy tales, and the old songs she sang, is shown more especially in the phases she gives of Tabitha as Bessie and as Ellen Dean. Thus we read in Jane Eyre, Chap. IV., in the close of the scene just given:—

"That afternoon lapsed in peace and harmony; ... in the evening Bessie told me some of her most enchaining stories, and sang me some of her sweetest songs. Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine." And in Wuthering Heights, Chap. XXII., Ellen Dean says of Miss Catherine Linton (see my reference to this character as a phase of Charlotte Brontë, in my preface):—"From dinner to tea she would lie doing nothing except singing old songs—my nursery lore—to herself, ... half thinking, half dreaming, happier than words can express." So in the same work, Chap. XXIV., the same Catherine says:—"He was charmed with two or three pretty songs [I sang]—your songs, Ellen." The italics are Charlotte Brontë's.

Jane Eyre, Chap. III., says:—

Bessie had now finished ... tidying the room ... she sang:—

"In the days we went agipsying
A long time ago."

I had often heard the song before, and always with lively delight; for Bessie had a sweet voice—at least I thought so. But now, though her voice was still sweet, I found in its melody an indescribable sadness. Sometimes, preoccupied with her work, she sang the refrain very low, very lingeringly: "a long time ago," came like the saddest cadence of a funeral hymn. She passed into another ballad.

Tabby Aykroyd going to the Parsonage when the motherless Charlotte Brontë was but nine, Charlotte seems to have been drawn to look upon her as a new-found friend, and afterwards she idealized those memories associated with her. It is noticeable she had been impressed in childhood by her singing and the sympathetic sweetness of her voice. There is a world of meaning—a gracious waiving aside of qualifying fact in the sentence, "Bessie had a sweet voice—at least I thought so." Charlotte was fond of Scottish ballads, and in Villette, Chapter XXV., she identifies herself in her phase as Paulina (see my further reference to this phase of Charlotte Brontë) with a a love for a Scottish song. With Tabitha Aykroyd she loved to associate the singing of her favourite ballads, as we have seen in her reference to the songs of Tabitha in her phases as Bessie of Jane Eyre and Mrs. Dean of Wuthering Heights. And so it is we find Mrs. Dean telling us in Chapter IX. of Wuthering Heights, 'I was rocking Hareton on my knee, and humming a song that began:—

"It was far in the night and the bairnies grat,
The mither beneath the mools heard that."'

Whether traits of Nancy Garrs or her sister, or Martha Brown, the other Brontë servants, contributed to Charlotte's portrayal is doubtful. I think they did not. We see in this chapter the original of Bessie of Jane Eyre was certainly the original of Mrs. Dean of Wuthering Heights—Tabitha Aykroyd; and as Charlotte Brontë portrayed Mrs. Dean as an elderly woman servant, before she began Jane Eyre, we must decide the question of the real age of the original of Bessie by that fact. Confirming is the portrayal of the same character by Charlotte as the elderly Hannah in Jane Eyre. See my chapter on "The Rivers or Brontë Family."[25]

Of "Dean" or Tabitha Aykroyd in the rôle of Hannah of the family "Jane" says:—"I had a feeling that she did not understand me, ... that she was prejudiced against me." Nevertheless she says to her: "You ... have been an honest and faithful servant, I will say so much for you."

Much stress is placed by Tabitha Aykroyd, as Nelly Dean, and Bessie, on Charlotte Brontë's passionateness. Says Mrs. Dean of Catherine in Wuthering Heights:

"The doctor had said that she would not bear crossing much, she ought to have her own way; and it was nothing less than murder in his eyes, for any one to presume to stand up and contradict her, ... serious threats of a fit ... often attended her rages."

Thus I find there is a connection between Catherine's "fit of frenzy" and delirium in Wuthering Heights, Chapters XI. and XII., and the scenes attendant upon Jane's fit of frenzy in Jane Eyre, Chapters I., II., III. The one is told by Charlotte as from Tabitha Aykroyd's (Bessie's) standpoint, the other from Catherine's (Charlotte Brontë's), an inversion of attitude which proves Charlotte Brontë to be the author and heroine of Wuthering Heights.

By her Method II.: altering the age of a character portrayed, Charlotte Brontë gives us Tabitha Aykroyd as a young woman in Bessie; and by the same Method II, in the scene just read from Wuthering Heights, we have an instance of her presenting, as an incident in womanhood, an incident which the testimony of Jane Eyre and other evidences show occurred really in Charlotte's own childhood. As she relates in Jane Eyre, her dread was "such dread as children only can feel"; and she goes on to say "this incident [of the locked room] gave my nerves a shock of which I feel the reverberation to this day." Thus in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre Charlotte paints an excellent picture of the matter-of-fact but good-hearted Tabitha Aykroyd going to the room in response to her, Charlotte Brontë's, frantic appeal, sceptical and certainly unsympathetic.

The part played by the wild summoning of Tabitha to the room, the references to "a fit," the ghost and haunted chamber, the dread of the mirror, the suggestion that the frenzy of fear was wilfully assumed, the piercing scream, Tabitha Aykroyd with her basin and her final suggestion of sleep, are in themselves ample evidence that Charlotte Brontë in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre drew this scene from an experience of the kind in her own childhood. In each work stress is laid by her upon her own hypersensitiveness, and we learn how the Brontë household misunderstood her excessive passionateness and misread it as wicked acting[26].

We see Tabitha best in Mrs. Dean of Wuthering Heights, as Hannah of the Rivers family of Jane Eyre, and by Currer Bell's Method II., alteration of age of the character portrayed, as Bessie of that work. Tabitha Aykroyd lives and breathes her life through the pages of Charlotte Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre to-day, and ever will she remain in literature, a real Yorkshire woman amazingly translated from the wide Yorkshire hearth with its great, wind-whitened fire and smell of hot cakes, to the pages of two of the finest examples of the English novel. Her portrayal I declare to be one of the most admirable achievements in the works of Charlotte Brontë.

CHAPTER VI.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S CHILD APPARITION IN "THE PROFESSOR," "WUTHERING HEIGHTS," AND "JANE EYRE."

Mrs. Gaskell, the Brontë biographer, relates that a friend of Charlotte Brontë said Charlotte had told her "a misfortune was often preceded by the dream which she gives to Jane Eyre of carrying a wailing child. She, Charlotte Brontë, described herself as having the most painful sense of pity for the little thing.... The misfortunes she mentioned were not always to herself. She thought such sensitiveness to omens was ... present to susceptible people...." This in the main explains the origin of the child-apparition as an omen of disaster in Charlotte Brontë's works.

It would seem by Charlotte's statement in Jane Eyre that Tabitha Aykroyd, as "Bessie," was responsible for the origin of this little superstition; and it is instructive to find the child-apparition as an ill-omen in connection with Tabitha Aykroyd as Mrs. Dean in Wuthering Heights. I have shown John Reed and Hindley Earnshaw represent Branwell Brontë; we may notice, therefore, that the child-apparition is given equally in Wuthering Heights and in Jane Eyre as coming before disaster or disgrace to Branwell Brontë.

Branwell Brontë was not dead when Charlotte Brontë wrote those two versions, but it seems certain that an apparition of a child in some period of Charlotte's life preceded a further debasement of Branwell, the original of Hindley Earnshaw and John Reed. We may note Charlotte Brontë's Method II., in regard to Hindley.

In Charlotte Brontë's The Professor we find reference to her child-phantom wailing outside, and to the eerie, premonitory signal made against a lattice, as in her Wuthering Heights:—

In Wuthering Heights Charlotte Brontë has worked the child-phantom into the story proper, setting it for the spirit of the departed Catherine, who as a child again (Method II., altering age of the character portrayed) seeks Heathcliffe. The building of the child-phantom in the plot of Wuthering Heights created a peculiar state of affairs; but as we have seen by Charlotte Brontë's reference to it in the extract from The Professor, she was impressed by its possibilities of giving a weird spiritual atmosphere, and she did not extend the idea in The Professor. The substance of Charlotte Brontë's two versions of the child-phantom wailing outside a house for admittance is identical:—

Thus we perceive the famous child-phantom incident in Chapter III. of Wuthering Heights had its origin (1) in Montagu's lonely-house incident; (2) in Charlotte Brontë's awe of a child-apparition; (3) in Charlotte Brontë's Method II., alteration of age of character portrayed, by which Catherine the woman becomes a child again; and (4) in Charlotte Brontë's notion, as evidenced in Shirley, Chapter XXIV., that a loved dead one can "revisit those they leave"; can "come in the elements"; that "wind" could give "a path to Moor(e)"—Heath(cliffe), "passing the casement sobbing"; that the loved dead one could "haunt" the wind. These, then, we see were the notions in Charlotte Brontë's head responsible for Catherine's returning so sensationally to the abode of her lover as a child-spectre. For Catherine's love for Wuthering Heights was not simply because of the place and its moors, as so many writers have wrongly contended, but because it was associated with Heathcliffe.[29] Let my reader peruse again the "wailing child" passages I quote from Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in Chapter II. of The Key to the Brontë Works.

Truly the testimony of Charlotte Brontë's child-phantom were alone the sign-manual that she and none other wrote Wuthering Heights.

CHAPTER VII.

THE ORIGINALS OF GIMMERTON, GIMMERDEN, GIMMERTON KIRK AND CHAPEL, PENISTON CRAGS, THE FAIRY CAVE, ETC., IN "WUTHERING HEIGHTS," AND OF THE FAIRY CAVE AND THE FAIRY JANET IN "JANE EYRE."

The uncommon stress Charlotte Brontë has laid upon the outlandishness of the Wuthering Heights country and its solitudes assuredly would have been absent from that work had she drawn her background from the comparatively characterless Haworth moors on the skirts of manufacturing towns, and not from impressions created in her mind by Montagu's description in his Gleanings in Craven of the wildest and weirdest scenery in Yorkshire. There has been a noticeable tendency on the part of town-bred, and also of romantic, biographers to be awed by the ordinary moorland surroundings of Haworth, and to associate with them all the wildness of the Craven or Scottish Highlands, though Miss Mary Robinson, whose work entitled Emily Brontë is in effect an "appreciation" of Wuthering Heights, says frankly regarding the house standing beyond the street on the summit of Haworth Hill, shown as the original of Wuthering Heights, that to her thinking "this fine old farm of the Sowdens is far too near the mills of Haworth to represent the God-forsaken, lonely house." But of course an author can place a given abode against any background. Wuthering Heights has been connected by some people with a locality called Withins—how wrongly a reference to the origin of Gimmerton and Gimmerden alone shows. The primary origin of the name and title of "Wuthering Heights" I reveal in the final chapter on "The Recoil."

The following passage from Wuthering Heights tells that Charlotte Brontë's imagination was enjoying the latitude of a half-realized, suggested background. It reads just like the traveller Montagu with his horse, attendant servant on horseback, roadside inns, hostlers, and description of country. But the connection of Montagu with Lockwood of Wuthering Heights we have already seen in the early chapters of The Key to the Brontë Works:—

1802—This September I was invited to devastate the moors of a friend in the North, and on my journey ... I unexpectedly came within fifteen miles of Gimmerton. The hostler at a roadside public-house was holding a pail of water to refresh my horses when a cart of very green oats ... passed by, and he remarked—

"Yon's frough Gimmerton, nah! They're allus three wick after other folk wi' ther harvest."

"Gimmerton?" I repeated; my residence in that locality had already grown dim and dreamy. "Ah, I know. How far is it from this?"

"Happen fourteen mile o'er th' hills; and a rough road." A sudden impulse seized me to visit Thrushcross Grange. It was scarcely noon, and I conceived that I might as well pass the night under my own roof as in an inn.... Having rested a while, I directed my servant to inquire the way to the village; and, with great fatigue to our beasts, we managed the distance in some three hours. I left him there, and proceeded ... down the valley alone. The grey church looked greyer, and the churchyard lonelier. I distinguished a moor sheep cropping the short turf on the graves.... The heat did not hinder me from enjoying the delightful scenery above and below; had I seen it nearer August, I'm sure it would have tempted me to waste a month among its solitudes. [Be it observed he would rather have done so than have gone to "the moors" of his friend.] In winter nothing more dreary than those glens shut in by hills,[30] and those bluff, bold swells of heath.

So we too would imagine, judging by Montagu's description of the district in his little work.

Throughout Wuthering Heights we hear mention of Gimmerton, but it is apparent the village was "dim and dreamy" to Charlotte Brontë—somewhere about the little valley we should imagine, to conclude by general observations. However, clear it is that Gimmerton and Gimmerden were drawn by Charlotte Brontë merely from impressions created in her mind by other than a personal acquaintance with the district. Where then, and in what peculiar circumstances, did Charlotte receive these suggestions—suggestions that must have appealed to her at a time immediately coincident with her commencing this foundling story with the house of mystery, the inhospitable host, the uncouth man-servant, and the candle-bearing bedside visitant—all from Montagu's book? My evidence declares these suggestions also came from Montagu's little work, and that the originals of Gimmerton in Wuthering Heights, and Gimmerden, or the valley of Gimmerton, were Malham and Malhamdale, or the valley of Malham. This district Montagu describes as being "most interesting ... in its own variety of wildness."

I believe Kilnsey Crags, which Montagu describes on the last page of the letter next to that written from Malham, figured in Charlotte Brontë's mind as the originals of Peniston Crags ("Peniston" may have been suggested by Montagu's mention of Pennigent). Montagu's description of Kilnsey Crags I will place side by side with the reference to Peniston Crags in Wuthering Heights:—

Clearly Joseph's "leading of lime" from Peniston Crags in Wuthering Heights was suggested to Charlotte Brontë by the "Kiln" of Kilnsea Crags, and Montagu's reference to the crags being limestone. Dean describes them to Cathy, and her words are simply Montagu's description—treated antithetically—of Gordale Scar in the Malham letter:—

In his Malham letter Montagu describes a Fairy Cave, and of course Gimmerton has the Fairy Cave in its neighbourhood. It is placed under the Crags, but we have no description in Wuthering Heights:—

The name of Linton appears in Montagu in the letter next that in which he describes the Fairy Cave. We may understand that Charlotte Brontë's romantic imagination was entranced, as she says Catherine Linton's was, with the mention of the Fairy Cave; and Jane Eyre is testimony that after writing Wuthering Heights she turned again to consider its possibilities of suggestion.

In fact, I find that Charlotte Brontë when she chose the name of Janet Eyre for herself was also calling herself the Fairy Janet. And where, then, read Charlotte Brontë of the fairy Janet Eyre? The evidence of Montagu's work proves that when she wrote the name Eyre, she was implying by this Derbyshire variant the name Aire or Ayre, meaning the river Ayre. Where acquired Charlotte Brontë so intimate an acquaintance with the history of the Fairy Janet of the Aire as to take upon herself poetically, the rôle of that Craven elf and her name?

Mr. Harry Speight recently, in The Craven Highlands, told us "the Fairy Jennet or Janet was queen of the Malhamdale elves" who frequented the enchanted ground round the source of the Aire. But prior to Montagu's dealing with Janet's Cave, the home of the Malhamdale fays, the queen-elf had been referred to as Gennet. Montagu spelt the name Jannet, and later writers having referred to him, the fairy cave now bears the name Janet's Cave. A Malham writer prior to Montagu referred only briefly to the Fairy Cave, and quite prosily. In his Malham letter Montagu says:—

"Leaving a farmhouse at the entrance of the vale to the left, we [he and his boy-guide] proceeded over two fields, then ascended about twenty yards, suddenly turned an acute angle, and penetrating some bushes we stood at the entrance of a deep and narrow glen, before a perpendicular fall of water. At the foot of this cascade is

Jannet's Cave.

It is so called from the queen or governess of a numerous tribe of faeries, which tradition assures us anciently held their court here; and as there may be some of my readers who may like at the moonlit hour to be entertained at one of Jannet's banquets, I will give an idea as to the mode of obtaining admission into such society.... On the evening when I first learned the mystic lore, the golden sun had kissed every flower, even unto the retiring lily, and was gliding westward when, from the heart's couch of a moss rose, there came the eldest daughter of faeryland, probably the self-same Jannet's daughter, saying:—

'I have come from whence
Peace with white sceptre wafting to and fro,
Smooths the wide bosom of the Elysian world,'

and who, upon being informed that I was desirous of swearing allegiance to her sweet mother, said that she would bring intelligence whether I might be admitted to her pretty vassalage; she then bade her attendants bring her car, which was a leaf of a favourite hyacinth, drawn by two lady-birds who were guided by reins of gossamer; the mellow horn of the herald bee summoned her attendants, who, to the number of twenty, obeyed the call; and taking the coronets from off their brows, made low obeisance to their young princess, which she pleasingly acknowledged. Then they each captured a sphere of thistle-down, and seating themselves thereon, followed their princess; who, attended by her guards, each armed with a maiden's eye-lash, journeyed onwards towards the realms of enchanted ground. I should think that not many minutes elapsed when the cavalcade returned, and the charter written upon the leaf of a 'forget-me-not,' with the gold from a butterfly's wing, was placed into my hand by 'a fay,' with injunctions not to divulge the secrets of the order. I would have promised but awoke from this pleasant dream."

We will now read Montagu's description of the Fairy Janet, and a fairy coming to him at sundown when adapted by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre.

Adèle asks Rochester whether she is to go to school without her governess, Jane Eyre:—

"Yes," he replied; ... "for I am to take mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcano tops, and mademoiselle shall live with me there, and only me."

"... But you can't get her there...."

"Adèle ... late one evening ... I sat down to rest me on a stile ... when something came up the path.... Our speechless colloquy was to this effect—

"It was a fairy, and come from Elf-land, it said.... It told me of the alabaster cave and silver vale.... I said I should like to go.... 'Oh,' returned the fairy.... 'Here is a talisman which will remove all difficulties' and she held out a pretty gold ring...."

"But what has mademoiselle [Jane Eyre] to do with it? I don't care for the fairy...."

"Mademoiselle [Jane Eyre] is a fairy," he said, whispering mysteriously.

But Adèle assures him she made no account of his "contes de fée."

For the present it is enough to know that in the main and ostensibly the Fairy Janet Eyre was Charlotte Brontë's adaptation of Montagu's Fairy Janet, the queen-elf of the Malhamdale fairies, said to frequent the enchanted land round the source of the Aire.

The fairy idea, Charlotte discovered, served well to give a certain gallantry to Rochester's bestowing of epithets. These the reader may have interest in finding in Jane Eyre. For instance, when Jane, returning from her visit to a dead relative, informs Rochester, he says:—

"A true Janian reply! [italics mine]. Good angels be my guard! She comes from the other world—from the abode of people who are dead, and tells me so when she meets me alone here in the gloaming! If I dared, I'd touch you, to see if you are substance or shadow, you elf!—but I'd as soon offer to take hold of a blue ignis-fatuus light in the marsh."

A few lines lower Rochester asks:—

"Tell me, now, fairy as you are—can't you give a charm?"

And then farther down:

"Pass, Janet: go up home and stay your weary little wandering feet at a friend's threshold."

When Rochester's bed is in flames, and he awakes to find Janet has thrown water upon it, he demands:—

"In the name of all the elves in Christendom, is that Jane Eyre?"

And so I might continue. It is observable Charlotte Brontë never allows Rochester to call Jane Eyre "Janet" and "fairy" in the same breath. She permits the use of Janet, however, when the fairy notion is concealed, as when Rochester says:

"Just put your hand in mine, Janet, that I may have the evidence of touch as well as sight, to prove you are near me."

Certain it is that in Charlotte Brontë's inmost heart her autobiographical self was called Janet Aire.[32]

Charlotte Brontë's conceptions, when she let her imagination have play and forgot the world of readers were, like Jane Eyre's thoughts, "elfish." See the fairy tale, The Adventures of Ernest Alembert (attributed by Charlotte Brontë to her pen in her fifteenth year). It has been remarked this story is not in the handwriting Charlotte Brontë affected at this period, and that the manuscript has not Charlotte's customary title-page.[33] In view of the evidence of The Key to the Brontë Works, it is of interest to make a comparison between Alembert and Montagu's Gleanings in Craven, published eight years later than the date Charlotte Brontë ascribed to its completion. The association of the family of Lambert with hypothetical high treason and with being extinct; with the Malham country as described by Montagu—the references, so frequent in his pages, to the awe inspired by the wildness of the scenery, to the underground torrent, the contrasting range of crags, the lake, the fairy cave, the fairy and the admittance into faerydom; to "the mellow hum of the bee," etc., are interesting in the extreme, seeing by aid of Montagu that Malham as presented by him became Gimmerton of Wuthering Heights. Whether "coincidence" has to do with this matter of Alembert and Montagu, or Charlotte Brontë has for some reason ante-dated Alembert, I leave to the reader to decide.

I have often wondered why no one has ever observed before that the hand which wrote The Adventures of Ernest Alembert must assuredly have written every line of Wuthering Heights. We may well understand why Charlotte Brontë in Wuthering Heights wrote of Catherine Linton that "the mentioning the Fairy Cave quite turned her head" with interest. And that the original of the Fairy Cave in Wuthering Heights was the Fairy Cave of Malhamdale Montagu mentions at such length in his Malham letter, the use of the names Linton and Airton in the connection irrefutably proves without other appeal: Hareton—that variant of Aire, cannot be associated with Derbyshire like "Eyre"; and despite the use of "Eyre," Aire was the name in Charlotte Brontë's mind, just as "Airton" was when she wrote "Hareton."

Both the "boy-guide" and "Gimmerton's mist" were obviously suggested to Charlotte Brontë for Wuthering Heights by Montagu, the original, as I have shown, of Lockwood:—

Montagu's frequent references to the mountainous character of the Malham country were doubtless responsible for Charlotte Brontë's choice of the word "heights" used in her title. Why the name of Gimmer, from "gimmer" a female sheep, and signifying with "ton" the place of sheep, was chosen by her for Gimmerton, is clear when we read the etymology Montagu gives of Skipton. He mentions Skibden and Skipton, proceeding to explain that "Skipton, or Sceptown (from the Saxon word 'scep,' a sheep)" meant "the town of sheep"; and Montagu tells us a native spoke of the village as "the town of Malham." Hence we perceive why Charlotte Brontë coined "Gimmerton," the village of sheep, and "Gimmerden," the valley of sheep, for Malham and Malhamdale with the source of the Aire, the Fairy Cave, the Sough, the adjacent crags, the heights, the glens, the rising mists, the Methodist chapel and kirk in the lonely vale, when in the light of all the foregoing we read in Montagu's work that:—

"Here [at Malham] there is an annual fair held on the 15th of October, appropriated entirely for the sale of sheep.[35] I am within the limit of fact when I say that upwards of one hundred thousand [sheep] have been shown at one time. [Joseph takes cattle to "Gimmerton Fair," of course not in October.] The houses are mostly built of limestone, and covered with grit slates, and irregularly situated at the base of a range of steep mountains"—"the Heights."

Malham he describes as "a small township, divided into east and west portions by a rapid stream"—"the beck down Gimmerton." "There is a Methodist chapel at Malham," he states, and says that the old church of Kirkby-Malham "is in the very bosom of the vale of Malham." Thus Gimmerton Kirk, in the lonely valley of Gimmerton,[36] was Charlotte Brontë's name in Wuthering Heights for the kirk by Malham, in the lonely vale of Malham. This insight into the origin of the name of "kirk" for a Yorkshire church excuses what, without it, would have been an anachronistic misnomer. As for the Nonconformists' place of worship, Dean is made to remark:—"They call the Methodists' or Baptists' place—I can't say which it is at Gimmerton—a chapel."

In the light of the foregoing evidence it is impossible to ignore the reference Montagu makes to "the sinks," where the water from Malham Tarn sinks underground for a considerable distance. Whether Charlotte Brontë thought this would produce a quag in the neighbourhood I cannot tell; but if she has used the word "sough" (pronounced suff) in its ordinary acceptance in Yorkshire, she originally meant "a subterranean passage or tunnel, draining water as from a sink," if I may quote a definition in Dr. Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary. There is every sign in her writings of a loose, composite adaptation of Montagu's topography, etc., yet Charlotte Brontë was ever jealous of associations, and under a guise or not she frequently preserved carefully recognizable characteristics necessary to locality and to personality; and we see Montagu had associated a sough with Malham. We have mention of Gimmerton Sough in Chapter III. of Wuthering Heights, and in Chapter X.:—"... the valley of Gimmerton, with a long list of mist winding nearly to its top (for very soon after you pass the chapel ... the sough that runs from the marshes joins a beck which follows the bend of the glen). Wuthering Heights rose above this silvery vapour." And we have read what Montagu says about the mists of Malham.

The influence of Montagu's descriptions of this wild locality is likewise observable in the scenery and the background of Jane Eyre,[37] as I mentioned in the article "The Key to Jane Eyre" I wrote in The Saturday Review. The yews and evergreens, mentioned by Montagu in connection with Malham, and introduced by Charlotte Brontë, with other trees of the fir-tribe, in descriptions of Morton in Jane Eyre, Chap. XXX., etc., and in Wuthering Heights, are not common to Haworth.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE RIVERS OR BRONTË FAMILY IN "JANE EYRE."

Charlotte Brontë, while she often portrayed the main characters of her stories from people in her own life, was quite at home with them in whatsoever condition or surroundings she placed them.[38] She loved the memory of Tabitha Aykroyd—that faithful servant, companion, and friend; hated the vices of her brother Branwell Brontë, and was obsessed by thoughts of M. Héger, her Brussels friend. So she placed the good old housekeeper of the parsonage—under an ecclesiastical cognomen truly—as Mrs. Dean at Wuthering Heights; set up her brother Branwell on the same premises as Hindley Earnshaw, and put her Brussels friend in the position of master of that abode.

In Jane Eyre Tabitha Aykroyd is Bessie of Mrs. Reed's household, and Hannah of the Rivers family; Branwell is among better surroundings as John Reed, and M. Héger is portrayed more proportionately as the master of Thornfield; while in the same work Charlotte Brontë portrays her own sister Maria Brontë, and makes her say she is a native of Northumberland and describe the scenery round her birthplace there!

In Shirley Charlotte admits to having placed Emily Brontë as "Shirley Keeldar," surrounded by the environment of a wealthy woman—a landed proprietress in the Dewsbury neighbourhood; and she gives us phases of M. Héger as a resident of Yorkshire, in the two Moores.

Villette contains in Dr. John, towards the close, a portrait of the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, who became her husband, as a resident of the foreign town Villette—for I find the character Dr. John was a portrait not wholly drawn, as is supposed, from Mr. Smith of Messrs. Smith & Elder, the Brontë publishers; and glimpses of Mr. Thackeray as a Villette lecturer appear in a flitting usurpation of M. Héger's rights as the original of M. Paul.

Charlotte Brontë's thus placing given characters against any background is doubtless responsible for the fact that when I wrote the Fortnightly Review article, "The Lifting of the Brontë Veil: A New Study of the Brontë Family," in March, 1907, nigh on sixty years of readers of the Brontë works had failed to recognize Charlotte Brontë had portrayed in Jane Eyre not only herself and her sister, Maria Brontë, as was commonly known, but also her brother, Branwell Brontë; her Aunt Branwell; her cousin, Eliza Branwell; her sister, Elizabeth Brontë; her sister, Emily Brontë; her sister, Anne Brontë; her father, the Rev. Patrick Brontë; and also Tabitha Aykroyd, the Brontë servant. Perhaps it was because readers believed Morton was Hathersage, Derbyshire, that a suspicion of the Rivers family being the Brontë family at Haworth never had been entertained.

I found, however, that all the above-mentioned members of the Brontë family were placed in Jane Eyre under a "Rivers" surname; and proceeding into the inquiry as to their identity, I perceived this discovery of the Brontë family in Jane Eyre numbered with the more important of my Brontë discoveries, and that despite her purposed and reasonable cross-scents—the spired church, the mention of knife-grinders, and the hinting at the proximity of Sheffield, all so necessary in her day to permit the portrayal of phases of the life at Haworth Parsonage—Morton to Charlotte Brontë was in the main Haworth. What importance would attach to a discovery of an unknown portrait group of his family deliberately painted from life by an old master! Such is the importance of this discovery of the Brontë family drawn by the pen of Charlotte Brontë herself in Jane Eyre. Currer Bell portrayed with unvarying truth; and with cunning artistry she brought forward in her literary legacy to the English novel the sure characteristics—the very soul, the shallowness, the pretty affectionateness, the cooing "dove-like voice," the "blue steel glance," of those she had watched and loved and feared.

Now, in the selection of a Christian name for the heroine Jane Eyre, in whom she had portrayed herself, there was every reason why Charlotte Brontë would be unlikely to adopt the second name of her sister, Emily Jane. We have seen, however, that Charlotte Brontë had been led by Montagu's mention of the Fairy Jannet, or Janet, poetically to make her heroine a Fairy Janet. This evidence shows, therefore, that "Jane" was really only secondary. The Fairy Cave which this fairy was supposed to frequent is near Malham or Gimmerton, and, as I have said, the Fairy Janet is termed "the queen of the Malhamdale elves that frequent the enchanted land round the source of the Aire." Montagu mentions the fact that the river Ayre takes its rise at Malham—at Malham Tarn, and hence Charlotte Brontë seems to have named her heroine originally Janet Aire. Obvious it is she would be led, naturally, to use later some variant of Aire or Ayre; and the fact that she visited in the summer of 1845 (evidence shows she had read Montagu at the time)[39] her friend Miss Nussey, then at Hathersage in Derbyshire, where Eyre is a common name, would suggest she was led to adopt this variant through her visit there. We already have seen Charlotte Brontë used the variant of "Hare" for "Air" in Wuthering Heights for the boy Hareton from Montagu's boy-guide, Robert Airton. And that she wished in Jane Eyre to break through the confines of the variant she had chosen for Aire, and give open expression to her original and poetic idea, is seen plainly enough where Adèle asks:—

"And Mademoiselle—what is your name?"

"Eyre—Jane Eyre."

"Aire? bah, I cannot say it."

Having made this interesting discovery, I further found that, not satisfied with appropriating for herself the "stream" surname, she placed such a surname upon those who were related to her and whom she had portrayed in Jane Eyre. So she used Burns from "burn," a stream spelt with an "s," for Maria Brontë; Rivers, from a river also spelt with an "s," for Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë, and the Rev. Patrick Brontë, with Tabitha Aykroyd in attendance as Hannah; Reed, from the river of that name for Charlotte's Aunt Branwell, her cousin Eliza Branwell, and her brother, Branwell Brontë; Severn, from the river of that name for her sister Elizabeth Brontë—just as she used Aire from the river of that name for herself, as Janet Aire.

A reference to Mrs. Gaskell's Brontë Life were sufficient to establish the identifications, when I say that by Charlotte Brontë's Method II. (the alteration of the age of a character portrayed) the Rev. Patrick Brontë is represented as a young man in the Rev. St. John Eyre Rivers—certainly a very necessary obfuscation, for it is to be seen the home at Morton gives a most enlightening insight into the life at the Haworth Parsonage. A death is supposed to have occurred in the Rivers family; and when it is remembered Thornfield to Charlotte Brontë represented the Hégers' establishment at Brussels, and that she left Brussels the first time on account of the death of her aunt, Miss Elizabeth Branwell who, after being the female head of the parsonage some years, died there in the close of 1842, we may know for whom the Rivers family were really in mourning. Charlotte Brontë tells us that, looking through the window of Moor House—Haworth Parsonage:—

I could see ... an elderly woman [Tabitha Aykroyd—the Mrs. Dean of Wuthering Heights], somewhat rough-looking, but scrupulously clean, like all about her, ... knitting a stocking.... Two young, graceful women [Emily and Anne Brontë]—ladies in every point—sat, one in a low rocking-chair, the other on a lower stool; both wore deep mourning, ... which sombre garb singularly set off very fair necks and faces: a large old ... dog [Emily had a favourite dog] rested his massive head on the knee of one girl—in the lap of the other was cushioned a black cat. A strange place was this humble kitchen for such occupants [but they were ever fond of it]. Who were they? They could not be the daughters of the elderly person at the table [Tabitha]; for she looked like a rustic, and they were all delicacy and cultivation. I had nowhere seen such faces as theirs; and yet, as I gazed on them I seemed intimate with every lineament. I cannot call them handsome—they were too pale and grave for the word: as they each bent over a book they looked thoughtful almost to severity. A stand between them supported a second candle and two great volumes to which they frequently referred; comparing them ... with the smaller books they held in their hands like people consulting a dictionary to aid ... in the task of translation. This scene was as silent as if all the figures had been shadows and the fire-lit apartment a picture.

"Listen, Diana [Emily Brontë]", said one of the absorbed students, ... and in a low voice she read ... in German.... The other girl, who had lifted her head to listen to her sister, repeated, while she gazed at the fire, a line.... "Good!" ... she exclaimed, while her dark and deep eyes sparkled, ... "I like it!"

"Is there ony country where they talk i' that way?" asked the old woman [Tabitha, using her Haworth Yorkshire dialect], and being told there is:—"Well, for sure case, I knawn't how they can understand t'one t'other: and if either o' ye went there, ye could tell what they said, I guess?"

"... Not all—for we are not as clever as you think us, Hannah. We don't speak German...."

"And what good does it do you?"

"We mean to teach it some time—or at least the elements, as they say; and then we shall get more money than we do now."

"Varry like; but give ower studying: ye've done enough for to-night."

"I think we have.... I wonder when St. John [the Rev. Patrick Brontë] will come home."

"Surely he will not be long now: it is just ten" (looking at a little gold watch she drew from her girdle). "It rains fast. Hannah, will you have the goodness to look at the fire in the parlour?"

Charlotte seems to have portrayed particularly those happy months at home in 1842, when, after the death of their aunt, all three sisters were together and their brother Branwell was away. It is Anne Brontë who, as Mary Rivers, consults her watch. For the circumstances in which she acquired this gold watch see the will of Miss Elizabeth Branwell, her aunt.[40]

The woman [Tabitha] rose: she opened a door, ... soon I heard her stir the fire in an inner room. She presently came back: "Ah childer!" said she, "it fair troubles me to go into yond room now: it looks so lonesome wi' the chair empty and set back in a corner."

The Brontë sisters were "always children in the eyes of Tabitha." Continuing her description of her sisters, Charlotte as Jane says:—

Both were fair complexioned and slenderly made; both possessed faces full of distinction and intelligence. One [Emily Brontë] to be sure had hair a shade darker than the other, and there was a difference in their style of wearing it: Mary's [Anne Brontë's] pale brown locks were parted and braided smooth; Diana's [Emily Brontë's] duskier tresses covered her neck with thick curls.... [She] had a voice toned to my ear, like the cooing of a dove. She possessed eyes whose gaze I delighted to encounter. Her whole face seemed to me full of charm, Mary's [Anne Brontë's] countenance was equally intelligent—her features equally pretty; but her expression was more reserved; and her manner, though gentle, more distant. Diana looked and spoke with a certain authority [it was Emily Brontë's manner]: she had a will.... It was my nature to feel pleasure in yielding to an authority supported like hers; and to bend, where my conscience and self-respect permitted, to an active will.

The following is the portrait of Charlotte Brontë's father (Method II., the altering the age of the character portrayed) as her imagination pictured him to have been in his young days. St. John's was the Rev. Patrick Brontë's college at Cambridge:—

Mr. St. John ... had he been a statue instead of a man ... could not have been easier. He was ... tall, slender; his face riveted the eye; it was like a Greek face, very pure in outline; quite a straight classic nose, quite an Athenian mouth and chin. It is seldom indeed an English face comes so near the antique models as did his.... His eyes were large and blue, ... his high forehead, colourless as ivory, was partially streaked over by careless locks of fair hair.... He ... scarcely impressed one with the idea of a gentle ... or even of a placid nature; ... there was something about his nostril, his mouth, his brow, which ... indicated elements within either restless, or hard or eager.

Charlotte Brontë's references herewith, and in other instances, to the passionate nature of her father are interesting reading, especially in view of the fact that this point has been the subject of controversy. To return to Jane Eyre:—

Mr. Rivers [Mr. Brontë] now closed his book, approached the table, and, as he took a seat, fixed his pictorial-looking eyes full upon me. There was an unceremonious directness, a searching, decided steadfastness in his gaze now which told that intention ... had hitherto kept it averted ... St. John's eyes, though clear enough in a literal sense, in a figurative one were difficult to fathom. He seemed to use them rather as instruments to search other people's thoughts, than as agents to reveal his own: the which combination of keenness and reserve was considerably more calculated to embarrass than to encourage.

Mrs. Gaskell states that even in his old age Mr. Brontë[41] was a tall and a striking-looking man, with a nobly shaped head and erect carriage, and that in youth he must have been unusually handsome. And to use the words of Hannah, "Mr. St. John when he grew up would go to college and be a parson." Continuing, Mrs. Gaskell further says:—

The course of his life shows a powerful and remarkable character, originating and pursuing a purpose in a resolute and independent manner—separating himself from his family. There was no trace of his Irish origin in his speech; he never could have shown his Celtic origin in the straight Greek lines and long oval of his face.

Another writer accentuating this says Mr. Brontë was "proud of his Greek profile," and we have now seen that Charlotte Brontë herself says his (St. John's) face was "like a Greek face, pure in outline." Mr. Brontë had also "fine blue eyes," like Mr. St. John. "His (Mr. Brontë's) passionate nature was compressed down with stoicism, but it was there, notwithstanding all his philosophic calm and dignity of demeanour, though he did not speak when displeased. He was an active walker, stretching away over the moors for many miles. He dined alone, and did not require companionship."

Which is, of course, all consonant with what we read of St. John Eyre Rivers. Charlotte Brontë continues:—

As to Mr. St. John, the intimacy which had arisen so naturally ... between me and ... [my] sisters did not extend to him. One reason of the distance ... observed between us was, that he was comparatively seldom at home: a large proportion of his time appeared devoted to visiting the sick and poor among the scattered population of his parish. No weather seemed to hinder him in these pastoral excursions: rain or fair, he would, when his hours of morning study were over, take his hat and ... go out on his mission of love and duty.... But, besides his frequent absences, there was another barrier to friendship with him: he seemed of a reserved, an abstracted, and even a brooding nature. Zealous in his ministerial labours, blameless in his life and habits, he yet did not appear to enjoy that mental serenity, that inward content which should be the reward of every sincere Christian and practical philanthropist. Often of an evening, when he sat at the window, his desk and papers before him, he would cease reading or writing, rest his chin on his hand, and deliver himself up to I know not what course of thought; but that it was perturbed and exciting might be seen in the frequent dilation of his eye.

I think, moreover, that Nature was not to him that treasury of delight it was to his [my] sisters. He once expressed, and but once in my hearing, a strong sense of the rugged charm of the hills, and an inborn affection for the dark roof and hoary walls he called his home; but there was more of gloom than pleasure in the tone and words in which the sentiment was manifested; and never did he roam the moors for the sake of their soothing silence—never to seek out or dwell upon the thousand peaceful delights they could yield.

Incommunicative as he was, some time elapsed before I had an opportunity of gauging his mind. I first got an idea of its calibre when I heard him preach in his own church.... I wish I could describe that sermon; but it is past my power. I cannot even render faithfully the effect it produced on me.

It began calm, and indeed, as far as delivery and pitch of voice went, it was calm to the end: an earnestly felt, yet strictly restrained zeal breathed soon in the distinct accents, and prompted the nervous language. This grew to force—compressed, condensed, controlled.... Throughout there was a strange bitterness; an absence of consolatory gentleness; stern allusions to Calvinistic doctrines—election, predestination, reprobation—were frequent.... It seemed to me ... that the eloquence to which I had been listening had sprung from a depth where lay turbid dregs of disappointment—where moved troubling impulses of insatiable yearnings and disquieting aspirations. I was sure St. John Rivers, pure-lived, conscientious, zealous as he was—had not yet found that peace of God which passeth all understanding: he had no more found it ... than had I: with my concealed and racking regrets for my broken idol and lost elysium.

"Charlotte Brontë," says Miss Laura C. Holloway, "early exhibited antagonistic feelings towards the Calvinistic views of her father." And so I might continue at great length. Excluding the love passages necessary to "story" and the missionary suggestions for which it seems that Brussels priest whom I may call Charlotte Brontë's Fénelon was originally responsible, the portrayal of the Rev. Patrick Brontë, like that of Charlotte's sisters, is absolutely true to prototype and fact.[42] We discover that at heart Charlotte Brontë loved her father, hence she honoured him—the head of the "Rivers" family—by giving him the final word in her autobiography, speaking of him as he appeared to her: an old man whose days were drawing to a close. Jane relates of Morton:—

Near the churchyard, and in the middle of the garden, stood a well-built though small house, which I had no doubt was the parsonage.

In Charlotte Brontë's mind this was Haworth Parsonage; but it is clear that, despite the church "spire" and other efforts at obfuscation, she did not dare to portray her sisters and father in the parsonage. Thus she placed the family in another house. And now we will have another glimpse of Tabitha Aykroyd, this time as "Hannah," speaking her Haworth Yorkshire dialect:—

"Have you been with the family long?"

"I've lived here thirty year. I nursed them all three.... I thowt more o' th' childer nor of mysel'.... They've like nobody to tak' care on 'em but me ... I'm like to look sharpish."

Hannah was evidently fond of talking [see my chapter on Tabitha Aykroyd]. While I picked the fruit and she made the paste for the pies, she proceeded to give me sundry details about ... her deceased ... mistress, and "the childer," as she called the young people.... There was nothing like them in these parts, nor ever had been; they had liked learning, all three, almost from the time they could speak; and they had always been "of a mak" of their own [had individual character]. They had lived very little at home for a long while, and were only come now to stay a few weeks on account of their father's [aunt's] death: but they did so like Marsh End and Morton [Haworth] and all these moors and hills about. They had been in ... many grand towns, but they always said there was no place like home; and then they were so agreeable with each other—never fell out nor "threaped" [asserted beyond the argumentative point]. She did not know where there was such a family for being united.

Emily Brontë as Diana says it is "a privilege we exercise in our home to prepare our own meals when ... so inclined, or when Hannah [Tabby] is baking, brewing, washing or ironing," which of course was true at Haworth Parsonage. To give yet another description:—

The Rivers [Brontës] clung to the purple moors behind and around their dwelling with a perfect enthusiasm of attachment. I could comprehend the feeling, and share both its strength and truth. I saw the fascination of the locality, ... my eye feasted on the outline of swell and sweep.... The strong blast and the soft breeze; the rough and the halcyon day; the hours of sunrise and sunset ... developed for me ... the same attraction as for them—wound round my faculties the same spell that entranced theirs.

Then follow pictures of the life at Haworth Parsonage, which tell us how Charlotte Brontë adored her sisters; and with the modesty of true genius she places herself at their feet, as it were. We have a sketch of Tabitha Aykroyd ironing Aunt Branwell's lace frills and crimping her nightcap borders in Jane Eyre, Chapter I., wherein both figure as Bessie and Aunt Reed. Years ago it came to be thought the original of Jane Eyre's Aunt Reed was Miss Branwell, the aunt of the Brontë children, though one writer identified her with a certain Mrs. Sidgwick whose son threw a book at Miss Brontë in her governess days, because "the son of Mrs. Reed" threw a Bible at Jane Eyre. The fact the rainy-day narrations in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre establish, that Charlotte Brontë associated a "volume-hurling" incident with her childhood and Branwell Brontë's "tyranny," disposed finally of the Sidgwick identifications. John Reed we have now seen was, like Hindley Earnshaw, Catherine's brother, drawn by Charlotte Brontë from her brother Branwell Brontë. Always she wrote of him vindictively, and with a retributive justice, her strong characteristic. At about the period when Currer Bell was penning Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre Branwell was a source of considerable distress to her. He was disgraced; his habits were the reverse of temperate, and it was daily feared that in a fit of delirium he might make an attempt upon his own life. Indeed Charlotte Brontë palpably writes of Branwell Brontë and those miserable associations which brought trouble upon Mrs. Gaskell's first edition of the Brontë Life, in The Professor, Chapter XX., where she says:—

Limited as had yet been my experience of life, I had once had the opportunity of contemplating, near at hand, an example of the results produced by a course of ... domestic treachery.... 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 infectious influence of the vice-polluted soul. I had suffered much from the forced and prolonged view of this spectacle.

Charlotte's letters also show she was ashamed of and losing patience with him. John Reed is spoken of as "a dissipated young man; they will never make much of him, I think.... Some people call him a fine-looking young man; but he has such thick lips." For obfuscation's sake he is "tall," and Mrs. Gaskell in speaking of Branwell's profile says:—"There are coarse lines about the mouth, and the lips, though handsome in shape, are loose and thick, indicating self-indulgence." Aunt Reed exclaims at the last of her favourite:—"John is sunken and degraded, his look is frightful—I feel ashamed for him when I see him." It was near the time that Aunt Branwell died at Haworth there was this decided degradation of her favourite nephew Branwell. For story purposes Charlotte Brontë makes her aunt a married woman in Jane Eyre, and places her nephew Branwell and her niece Eliza Branwell in the relation of children to her as John and Eliza Reed—Georgiana is no doubt a Brontë relative of whom we have not heard, and Charlotte thought vain. The fact that in Jane Eyre, Chapter XXI., her name is mentioned in connection with "a title," would show Currer Bell early apportioned her a place in the book by reason of Montagu's reference to a Lady Georgiana.

A child, sympathetic and intensely emotional, Charlotte Brontë, evidently, felt injustices with an acuteness not easy to understand without reading her Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre by aid of The Key to the Brontë Works. It would be like Maria Brontë to protest with her younger sister on her holding resentment against Aunt Branwell; and with the inference that she herself had endured her harshness, she says as Helen Burns:—"What a singularly deep impression her injustice seems to have made on your heart! No ill-usage so brands its record on my feelings. Would it not be happier if you tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited?"

Of Eliza Reed (Cousin Eliza Branwell), as seen by Jane at the death of Aunt Reed, we are told: "she was now very thin, and there was something ascetic in her look." She wore "a nun-like ornament of a string of ebony beads and a crucifix. This I felt sure was Eliza, though I could trace little resemblance to her former self in that elongated and colourless visage." In 1840 Charlotte Brontë wrote of her "Cousin Eliza Branwell" that she spoke of nothing but botany, her own conversion, Low Church, Evangelical clergy, and the Millennium.[43] And thus in Jane Eyre we read of Cousin Eliza Reed, by way of emphasis on this side of her character:—

Eliza ... had no time to talk, ... yet it was difficult to say what she did.... Three times a day she studied a little book which I found ... was a Common Prayer Book. I asked her once what was the great attraction of that volume, and she said 'the Rubric.' Three hours she gave to stitching, with gold thread, the border of a square crimson cloth; ... she informed me it was ... for the altar of a new church.... Two hours she devoted to ... working by herself in the kitchen garden. [Cousin Eliza's parterre is also referred to in Chapter IV. of Jane Eyre.] Eliza [attended] a saint's-day service at ... church—for in matters of religion she was a rigid formalist: no weather ever prevented the punctual discharge of what she considered her devotional duties; fair or foul she went to church thrice every Sunday, and as often on week-days as there were prayers. And by way of climax, Jane Eyre tells us that Cousin Eliza says:—"I shall devote myself ... to the examination of the Roman Catholic dogmas, and to a careful study of the workings of their system; if I find it to be, as I half suspect it is, the one best calculated to ensure the doing of all things decently and in order, I shall embrace the tenets of Rome and probably take the veil."

The river Reed, I may remark, has its rise close to the Cheviot Hills, within about five miles of the source of the Keeldar Burn, which name Charlotte Brontë used later in Shirley for the surname of Shirley Keeldar who, the world knows, is really Emily Brontë. To quote a ballad of Leyden,

"The heath-bell blows where Keeldar flows,
By Tyne the primrose pale."

The Reed has a Rochester near, which doubtless provided a name for Charlotte's hero.