Chapter XV: The Recoil

II.

A ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring, would have
been a meet emblem of my mind when I accused; ... the same ridge,
black and blasted after the flames are dead, would have
represented as meetly my subsequent condition when ... reflection
had shown me the madness of my conduct, and the dreariness of my
hated and hating position. Something of vengeance I had tasted....
As aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy; its
after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I
had been poisoned.... I would fain exercise some better faculty
than that of fierce speaking--fain find nourishment for some less
fiendish feeling than that of sombre indignation.

These words, written by Charlotte Brontë in _Jane Eyre_, Chapter IV., in relation to herself and "Mrs. Reed," give us an insight into her extraordinary alternations of mood. To inquire deeply into her determining initially to disavow the authorship of _Wuthering Heights_ requires a somewhat ruthless baring of the "fiendish" vindictiveness against M. Héger between the dates of 1844-46, that was a characteristic of the portrayals of him I have mentioned; but it also reveals her active turn to a spirit of repentance for past vindictive feeling, the which she acknowledges to have known.

It seems that it was in a spirit of reproach Charlotte Brontë wrote the vengeful scene between Heathcliffe and Catherine in _Wuthering Heights_, harsh in threat almost as her poem "Gilbert," wherein the man, satisfied with the affections of his wife and children, has banished the remembrance of her of whom he boasted--"She loved me more than life," and who is made to say, before her spirit in the form of a white-clad spectre comes to him:--

"As I am busied now,
I could not turn from such pursuit
To weep a broken vow."

Thus in _Wuthering Heights_, Chapter XV., when Catherine is embraced by Heathcliffe, she says bitterly:--

"I wish I could hold you till we were both dead! I shouldn't care
what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why
shouldn't you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy
when I am in the earth? Will you say ... 'That's the grave of
Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose
her; but it is past. I've loved many others since: my children are
dearer to me than she was; and at death, I shall not rejoice that
I am going to her; I shall be sorry that I must lose them!' Will
you say so, Heathcliffe?" Well might Catherine deem that heaven
would be a land of exile to her, unless with her mortal body she
cast away her mortal character also. [See my footnote in the
foregoing chapter, on Catherine's dream that the angels flung her
out of heaven.] Her present countenance had a wild
vindictiveness....

"Are you possessed with a devil," he pursued savagely, "to talk in
that manner to me when you are dying?"

And later, as though in answer to the apparent threat of the poem "Gilbert," wherein, as I have said, the spectre of the woman who has died broken-hearted through the neglect of her married lover haunts him and drives him mad, Heathcliffe, in the words of that poem, "Wild as one whom demons seize," cries:--

"Catherine Earnshaw ... you said I killed you--haunt me then! The
murdered _do_ haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts
_have_ wandered on earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive
me mad!"

Charlotte Brontë's poems, "Frances,"[82] "Gilbert," and "Preference" (wherein we have literature in allegory preferred to a lover), show there had been to her a season of darkest misery when, to quote _Villette_ concerning herself as Lucy Snowe, "all her life's hope was torn by the roots out of her riven outraged heart." Whether this was the time when, in the words of herself as Jane Eyre, "faith was blighted, confidence destroyed": a time to her when Mr. Rochester (M. Héger) was not to her "what she had thought him," the reader shall decide. But in _Villette_ and _Jane Eyre_ she "would not ascribe vice to him; ... would not say he had betrayed" her. She forgave him all: yet not in words, not outwardly; only at [her] heart's core. See the phase of M. Pelet in the _The Professor_.

Evidence shows it was in her dark season when Charlotte Brontë wrote _Wuthering Heights_, and that she portrayed M. Héger therein with all the vindictiveness of a woman with "a riven outraged heart," the wounds in which yet rankled sorely. Thus may we understand her saying in her famous preface to _Wuthering Heights_:--

Heathcliffe betrays one solitary human feeling, and that is _not_
his love for Catherine, which is a sentiment fierce and inhuman: a
passion such as might boil and glow in the bad essence of some
evil genius [see my reference to "Robin-a-Ree"; and to the Craven
Satyr, page 142]; a fire that might form the tormented centre--the
ever-suffering soul of a magnate of the infernal world: and by its
quenchless and ceaseless ravage effect the execution of the decree
which dooms him to carry Hell with him ... we should say he was a
man's shape animated by demon life.... Whether it is right or
advisable to create a being like Heathcliffe I do not know; I
scarcely think it is.

Even in _Villette_ there were recurrences of the spasmodic spirit of vindictiveness responsible for Charlotte Brontë's harsh portrayal of M. Héger as Heathcliffe, though "at her heart's core she then forgave him." In _Villette_, Chapter XX., she refers to M. Paul (M. Héger) antithetically, and all the more significantly, in a comparison of him with Dr. John Bretton, of whom she says:--

Who could help liking him? _He_ betrayed no weakness which
harassed all your feelings with considerations as to how its
faltering must be propped; from _him_ broke no irritability which
startled calm and quenched mirth; _his_ lips let fall no caustic
that burned to the bone; _his_ eye shot no morose shafts that went
cold, and rusty, and venomed through your heart.

_Wuthering Heights_, however, containing too humiliating a story of Charlotte Brontë's heart-thrall, her misery and her wild vindictiveness, and also for the reasons stated in the beginning of this chapter--her saving remorse--she seems early to have determined to repudiate her authorship of it; indeed, so largely is she now found to have used the work in _Jane Eyre_, we might say she once had contemplated destroying the manuscript. The subsequent arrangement made in the name of Ellis Bell that the work by the same author should go to Mr. Newby, the publisher of _Wuthering Heights_, gave finality to this tragedy of authorship which, but for the discoveries in this, _The Key to the Brontë Works_, would have remained for ever unrevealed, and a reproach to literature--a thing of untruth thickly hidden.

Had Charlotte Brontë destroyed _Wuthering Heights_ before its publication she would have saved this sensational disclosure. But she hesitated to destroy the manuscript at once, and as an alternative to identifying herself with its authorship, she sent forth her work under a _nom de guerre_, part of which had been employed by her sister Emily. We well know the difficulties that resulted; the judgment of scholars and thinkers was impugned and their sane pronouncements were pilloried. To cover Charlotte Brontë's regretful error were to connive against law and literature. _Wuthering Heights_ being published, the work was the world's property; it stood for public purposes, to submit to all criticism and research, and it came neither in Charlotte Brontë's province nor in that of any person to prevent its being subjected to the final inquiry with which the cold light of truth exposes all things.

Doubtless Charlotte Brontë perceived this, and regretting the facileness of her pen and the vituperativeness of her mood of that past and hateful night, she set herself, in her subsequent works, to make clear she had overdrawn the bitterness of the relations which one time had existed between herself and M. Héger. Perhaps she could not expect her retractions would be understood of all men, but it pleased her inmost soul, and having a final sense of justice, and a softening of her heart for her vehement passionateness, she continued in all her works subsequent to her _Wuthering Heights_ to reconstruct this her early version. Thus Charlotte Brontë as Caroline Helstone of _Shirley_ is Catherine Earnshaw of _Wuthering Heights_, with the distinction I mention. Moore is admitted, as I have said, to have been drawn from M. Héger[83]:--

_Wuthering Heights._ _Shirley._