The Key to the Bronte Works Part 8

Thus from this discovery the world learns for the first time that Diana Rivers represents Emily Bronte, afterwards s.h.i.+rley Keeldar;[44] Mary Rivers, Annie or Anne Bronte; St. John Eyre Rivers, the Rev. Patrick Bronte; and the elderly Hannah, the old, dialect-speaking Tabitha Aykroyd--the original of Charlotte Bronte's Mrs. Dean and Bessie; that Aunt Reed represents Aunt Branwell; Cousin Eliza Reed, Cousin Eliza Branwell; John Reed, Charlotte Bronte's brother Branwell; and Julia Severn, her sister Elizabeth Bronte, all of whom but for _The Key to the Bronte Works_ would have remained for ever hidden and unrecognized in _Jane Eyre_.

I have refrained from extending this volume with full extracts from the Bronte books, once having indicated the place and nature of my references. I must emphasize, however, that in dealing with the Rivers family Charlotte Bronte gives most appealing portrayals of the various phases of the life at Haworth Parsonage:--The studying, the painting,[45] the minor interesting domestic incidents dear to her memory, the parting of the Bronte sisters with St. John (Mr. Bronte), the "house-cleaning"--so very "Yorks.h.i.+re"!--the preparations for Christmas, the return home of the Bronte girls, and many other facts and a.s.sociations that render _Jane Eyre_ in the light of _The Key to the Bronte Works_ the surpa.s.sing of all Bronte biographies. Presented for posterity by her own sure hand, Charlotte Bronte's picture is bright and exhilarating; and as we glance uneasily again to Mrs. Gaskell's sombre portrayal, we on a sudden remember that biographer wrote in the shadow of death. But it is with life we have to do.

CHAPTER IX.

THE ORIGIN OF THE YORKs.h.i.+RE ELEMENT IN CHARLOTTE BRONTe'S HUNSDEN OF "THE PROFESSOR"; HEATHCLIFFE OF "WUTHERING HEIGHTS"; ROCHESTER OF "JANE EYRE"; AND YORKE OF "s.h.i.+RLEY."

M. Heger, Miss Bronte's Brussels friend, by the showing of all evidence was essentially the original of her leading male characters.[46] M.

Sue's _Miss Mary_ and its "Ma.n.u.script of Mdlle. Lagrange," which I present farther on, are sufficient testimony that M. Heger was the original of the inner Heathcliffe and Rochester, and Charlotte Bronte's other chief male characters. An inquiry, therefore, is at once required as to the significance of Mrs. Gaskell's statement that she suspected Charlotte Bronte drew from the sons of the Taylor family[47] "all that was of truth in the characters of the heroes of her first two works."

That the Yorks.h.i.+re element of her heroes was provided by a living model or models from one family, is proved by a consistency of the characterization in this regard. I find, truly enough, that male members of the Taylor family were indeed the originals to which she referred in the composition of a Yorks.h.i.+re-Heger.[48] The Taylors, of the Red House, Gomersall, (obviously the Briarmains of the Yorkes), and of Hunsworth, were mill-owner friends, and Independents, with whom Charlotte Bronte visited. In _s.h.i.+rley_ Miss Bronte ostensibly portrayed Mr. Taylor and his two daughters, her friends Mary and Martha, as Mr. Yorke and Rose and Jessie. Mary and Martha Taylor were at school with Charlotte at Roe Head, near Dewsbury and Huddersfield. They were also at Brussels with Charlotte, though not at the Hegers'. Martha was taken ill and died at Brussels; a touching reference to her death is made where she is portrayed as Jessie Yorke, in _s.h.i.+rley_, Chapter XXIII. Mary Taylor (Rose Yorke) was in New Zealand when Charlotte Bronte died. Her fondness for travel is mentioned in the _s.h.i.+rley_ chapter named. The male members of this family were thought by Currer Bell most characteristic Yorks.h.i.+re folk, hence the name of Yorke. I mention Yorke Hunsden as one of the Yorks.h.i.+re-Hegers of Miss Bronte's method of dual portraiture. I believe this important character in _The Professor_ will be found, like his fellows, to be entirely a Taylor-Heger. The name for Hunsden was apparently dictated by the Taylors' connection with Hunsworth, and it may be noted his Christian name of Yorke came to be later the surname of Mr. Taylor as portrayed in _s.h.i.+rley_.

But the Heger element was always superior to the Yorks.h.i.+re element in Charlotte Bronte's heroes. The latter might provide useful and necessary external characteristics, but the "intensitives" were the lines she drew from her model, M. Heger. Of him as M. Pelet in _The Professor_, she writes:--

His face was pale, his cheeks were sunk, and his eyes hollow; his features ... had a French turn, ... the degree of harshness softened by ... a melancholy, almost suffering expression of countenance; his physiognomy was _fine et spirituelle_.

This "melancholy almost suffering expression of countenance" she thus described was evidently once a marked characteristic of M. Heger's physiognomy. A reference to it occurs in M. Sue's _Miss Mary_, in the French and "adapted" version, where we find M. de Morville, whom I identify as a phase of M. Heger, sitting in a reverie:--

... l'expression de legere souffrance habituelle a sa physionomie, d'ailleurs si ouverte, s'est compliquee d'une sorte de contrainte lorsqu'il se trouve au milieu de sa famille. Seul, et ne subissant pas cette contrainte ... M. de Morville semble profondement attriste.

Thus, of Yorke Hunsden in _The Professor_, we read:--

His general bearing intimated complete ... satisfaction, ... yet, at times, an indescribable shade pa.s.sed like an eclipse over his countenance, and seemed to me like the sign of a sudden and strong inward doubt of himself, ... an energetic discontent, ... perhaps ... it might only be a bilious caprice.

And again of Hunsden, in the same vein:--

I discerned ... there would be contrasts between his inward and outward man; contentions too.... Perhaps in these incompatibilities of the "physique" with the "morale" lay the secret of that fitful gloom; he _would_ but _could_ not, and the athletic mind scowled scorn on its more fragile companion, ... his features ... character had set a stamp upon ... expression re-cast them at her pleasure, and strange metamorphoses she wrote, giving him now the mien of a morose bull, and anon, that of an ... arch girl.

Regarding these facial metamorphoses Charlotte Bronte wrote similarly concerning M. Heger.[49]

I remark that M. Heger's harshness evidently had impressed Charlotte Bronte considerably at first, and thus reflects her thoughts on this point in the introduction of the phases she gives of him in her books.

So we read of Yorke Hunsden, of Heathcliffe, and of Rochester:--

_The Professor._ _Wuthering Heights._ _Jane Eyre._

I said to myself "his Heathcliffe's "walk There was something rough freedom pleases in" expressed the in the forced, stiff me not at all."... sentiment "Go to bow, in the There was something the Deuce."[50]... impatient, yet formal in Mr. Hunsden's I think that tone which seemed ...

point-blank mode of circ.u.mstance to express: "What the speech which rather determined me Deuce is it to me pleased me than to accept the whether Miss Eyre be otherwise, because it invitation; I felt there or not?[50] At set me at my ease. interested in a this moment I am not I continued the man who seemed disposed to accost conversation with more exaggeratedly her." I sat down, a degree of reserved than quite disembarra.s.sed.

interest.... myself. A reception of Hunsden's manner now finished politeness bordered on the would probably have impertinent, still confused me, ... but his manner did not harsh caprice laid me offend me in the under no slightest--it only obligation....

piqued my curiosity; Besides, the I wanted him to go eccentricity of the on. proceeding was piquant. I felt interested to see how he would go on.

We read of Rochester:--"The frown, the roughness of the stranger set me at my ease"; and in _Villette_, we read of M. Heger as M.

Paul:--"Once ... I held him harsh and strange, ... the darkness, the manner displeased me. Now ... I preferred him before all humanity,"

which explains why Charlotte Bronte wrote of Rochester:--"The sarcasm that had repelled, the harshness that had startled me once, were only like keen condiments in a choice dish," and explains why she admits to the piquancy in exploiting the possibilities of Heathcliffe's startling harshness.

And again, as further evidence of the influence of M. Heger over her Yorks.h.i.+re Hunsden, we find this character in the close of _The Professor_ implicated with a mysterious "Lucia," whom he would have married but could not, which Lucia we discover to have meant really the original of the Lucy Snowe of _Villette_--Charlotte Bronte herself.

It is obvious that while Currer Bell, for "story" and other purposes, made use of a composite method in presenting a portrait, she drew from characters who possessed much in common: as with the composite character of the Rev. Mr. Helstone, meant for her father, a clergyman, but presenting also a phase of another clergyman, the Rev. Hammond Roberson; and as with Dr. John Bretton, a composite character drawn from the two Scotsmen, Mr. Smith her publisher, and the Rev. A. B. Nicholls, who subsequently became her husband. Doubtless, characteristics in the Taylors were similar to some of M. Heger's. Perhaps the fact that they spoke French and sojourned on the Continent, accentuated to her these characteristics. In a letter, Miss Bronte described all the Taylors as "Republicans." And so of Yorke Hunsden in _The Professor_, Chap. XXIV., we read, "republican, lord-hater, as he was, Hunsden was proud of his old ----s.h.i.+re blood ... and family standing." Thus, in _s.h.i.+rley_, Chap.

IV., in which work that character appears stripped of the Heger element, as Mr. Yorke, we read of the latter:--

Kings and n.o.bles and priests ... were to him an abomination....

The want of ... benevolence made him very impatient of ... all faults which grated on his strong, shrewd nature: it left no check to his ... sarcasm. As he was not merciful, he would sometimes wound ... without ... caring how deep he thrust.... Mr. Yorke's family was the first and oldest in the district.

_Via_ Yorke Hunsden of _The Professor_ and Mr. Yorke of _s.h.i.+rley_ the reader has returned to a character who typified more than any other of Charlotte Bronte's Yorks.h.i.+re-Heger portrayals the merciless, strong and shrewd-natured Taylor--Heathcliffe of _Wuthering Heights_. But the Yorks.h.i.+re element in Heathcliffe was a caricature and an exaggeration for the purposes of the "cuckoo story," resulting from the tale Montagu tells of a foundling; and the emphasis laid upon his barbarity was largely a result, too, of the consideration I mention in the chapters ent.i.tled "The Recoil," which consideration had to do with the Heger phase of Heathcliffe. The fact that evidence shows Heathcliffe to have been, like Hunsden and Rochester, a composite character drawn from a dual model--the Taylor-Heger model--traceable in origin absolutely to Charlotte Bronte's idiosyncratic estimate of two male characters who are shown to have seriously interested her, in itself sufficiently demonstrates her authors.h.i.+p of _Wuthering Heights_, and is indeed of great interest.

If reference be made to a letter written by Charlotte Bronte in 1846, the year when she offered _Wuthering Heights_ to a publisher, it will be found she mentioned that one of the Taylors had--like Heathcliffe--suffered in the teens of years from hypochondria, "a most dreadful doom," Charlotte called it, and related she herself had endured it for a year.[51]

Having herself suffered thus, there was a temptation--at what I elsewhere call the dark season of Charlotte Bronte's inner life, at the season of the recoil--to present in her work _Wuthering Heights_ the Yorks.h.i.+re-Heger with the hypochondria of her Yorks.h.i.+re model, and let his demon be the original of her Catherine Earnshaw--be herself. To this temptation Charlotte Bronte gave no opposition, much to her regret later. Herewith we have the origin of Heathcliffe's miserable hypochondria and monomania--his digging for Catherine in the grave till his spade sc.r.a.ped the coffin, in _Wuthering Heights_, Chap. XXIX., and his saying because his "preternatural horror" always haunted, but never abided with him:--

"She showed herself, ... a devil to me! And, since then ... I've been the sport of that intolerable torture! Infernal--keeping my nerves at such a stretch that, if they had not resembled catgut, they would long ago have relaxed.... It racked me! I've groaned aloud.... It was a strange way of killing! not by inches, but by fractions of hairbreadths, ... through eighteen years!" Mr.

Heathcliffe paused, ... his hair wet with perspiration, ... the brows not contracted, but raised next the temples; diminis.h.i.+ng the grim aspect of his countenance, but imparting a peculiar look of trouble, and a painful appearance of mental tension towards one absorbing subject.

In the light of the foregoing, therefore, we may understand the truth of Charlotte Bronte's narration in _The Professor_, Chap. XXIII.:--

My nerves ... jarred ... A horror of great darkness fell upon me; I felt my chamber invaded by one I had known formerly, ... I was ... a prey to hypochondria. She had been ... my guest ... before ... for a year.... I had her to myself in secret; she lay with me, she ate with me, showing me nooks in woods, hollows in hills, where we could sit together, and where she could drop her drear veil over me, and so hide sky and sun, gra.s.s and green tree; taking me entirely to her death-cold bosom and holding me with arms of bone. What tales she would tell me at such hours!... How she would discourse to me of her own country--the grave.... I was glad when ... I could ... sit ... freed from the dreadful tyranny of my demon.

Both by reason of Mrs. Gaskell's suspicion that she had drawn from them in the portrayals of the heroes of her first books and by reason of the undeniable evidence of her works, we must accept the Taylors as the originals of most that was "Yorks.h.i.+re" in Charlotte Bronte's Yorke Hunsden, Heathcliffe, Rochester, and Yorke, understanding the term in Currer Bell's implication of "independent," "hard," and "open-spoken."

But M. Heger contributed what Charlotte Bronte calls in Chap. XXVII. of _Villette_, in speaking of him as M. Paul Emanuel--"that swart, sallow, southern darkness which spoke his Spanish blood," and this gave colour to the physiognomy of "the swart, sallow" Heathcliffe and Rochester.[52]

In the succeeding chapters I deal more particularly with the relation of Heathcliffe of _Wuthering Heights_, to Rochester of _Jane Eyre_, and I promise my readers to present therein most important and sensational revelations.

CHAPTER X.

HEATHCLIFFE OF "WUTHERING HEIGHTS" AND ROCHESTER OF "JANE EYRE" ONE AND THE SAME.

Without herewith further entering into the question as to the original of the morose and harsh characters who were the heroes of Charlotte Bronte's novels, I will at once show she had drawn from the same model in both _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre_. I have given in the foregoing chapter the introduction of Lockwood to Heathcliffe and that of Jane to Rochester side by side. Let us also read the following:--

_Wuthering Heights._ _Jane Eyre._

Heathcliffe. Rochester.

With a stubborn countenance ... Most people would have thought Heathcliffe is a dark-skinned Mr. Rochester an ugly man; yet gipsy in aspect, in dress and there was an unconscious pride manners a gentleman; ... rather in his port; so much ease in his slovenly, perhaps, yet not demeanour; such a look of looking amiss with his complete indifference to his own negligence, because he has an appearance ... that ... one erect and handsome figure; and inevitably shared the rather morose. Possibly some indifference, and even in a people might suspect him of a blind sense put faith in his degree of under-bred pride; I confidence.... He was proud, have a sympathetic cord within sardonic; ... in my secret soul that tells me it is nothing of I knew his kindness to me was the sort: I know by instinct his balanced by unjust severity to reserve springs from an aversion others. He was moody, too, ...

to showy displays of feeling--to and when he looked up a morose, manifestations of mutual almost a malignant, scowl kindliness. He'll love and hate blackened his features.

equally under one cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again. No, I am running on too fast; I bestow my own attributes over liberally on him.

Heathcliffe and Rochester are both black-avised, stubborn of countenance, negligent as to external appearance, moody, proud in carry, and morose. Charlotte Bronte tells us of one that on external judgment "most people would have thought him" possessed of a disqualification, and of the other that "some people might suspect him" of having a disqualification. And in each case a similar offset--the internal reading of the man's character--is brought forth by Charlotte Bronte as Lockwood or Jane:--"A sympathetic cord within" tells the former that Heathcliffe's reserve read as under-bred pride springs from an aversion to "manifestations of mutual kindliness"; and Jane, commenting on Rochester's being proud and sardonic, says, "In my secret heart I knew ... his kindliness to me was balanced by unjust severity to others."

I find the singular expression indicated by the "h.e.l.l's light" epithets applied to Heathcliffe's eyes was an expression Charlotte Bronte had apparently noticed in the original of this character. Rochester's eyes in _Jane Eyre_ have "strange gleams," and we are told "his eye had a tawny--nay, a b.l.o.o.d.y light in its gloom," and so forth. Indeed, Heathcliffe's eyes, which were "clouded windows of h.e.l.l" with "black-fire in them," are seen in Rochester's clearly enough, and the singular "h.e.l.l's light" is a.s.sociated with them at considerable length, in

_Jane Eyre_:--

And as for the vague something--was it a sinister or a sorrowful ... expression?--that opened upon a careful observer ... in his eye, and closed again before one could fathom the strange depth partially disclosed; that something which used to make me fear and shrink, as if I had been wandering amongst volcanic-looking hills, and had suddenly felt the ground quiver and seen it gape.