CHAPTER XV.
‘WUTHERING HEIGHTS:’ THE STORY.
On the summit of Haworth Hill, beyond the street, stands a grey stone house, which is shown as the original of 'Wuthering Heights.' A few scant and wind-baffled ash-trees grow in front, the moors rise at the back stretching away for miles. It is a house of some pretensions, once the parsonage of Grimshaw, that powerful Wesleyan preacher who, whip in hand, used to visit the "Black Bull" on Sunday morning and lash the merrymakers into chapel to listen to his sermon. Somewhat fallen from its former pretensions, it is a farmhouse now, with much such an oak-lined and stone-floored house-place as is described in 'Wuthering Heights.' Over the door there is, moreover, a piece of carving: H. E. 1659, a close enough resemblance to "Hareton Earnshaw, 1500"—but the "wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys" are nowhere to be found. Neither do we notice "the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house and a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way as if craving alms of the sun," and, to my thinking, this fine old farm of Sowdens is far too near the mills of Haworth to represent the God-forsaken, lonely house of Emily's fancy. Having seen the place, as in duty bound, one returns more than ever impressed by the fact that while every individual and every site in Charlotte's novels can be clearly identified, Emily's imagination and her power of drawing conclusions are alone responsible for the character of her creations. This is not saying that she had no data to go upon. Had she not seen Sowdens, and many more such houses, she would never have invented 'Wuthering Heights;' the story and passion of Branwell set on her fancy to imagine the somewhat similar story and passion of Heathcliff. But in the process of her work, the nature of her creations completely overmastered the facts and memories which had induced her to begin. These were but the handful of dust which she took to make her man; and the qualities and defects of her masterpiece are both largely accounted for when we remember that her creation of character was quite unmodified by any attempt at portraiture.
Therefore in 'Wuthering Heights' it is with a story, a fancy picture, that we have to deal; in drawing and proportion not unnatural, but certainly not painted after nature. To quote her sister's beautiful comments—
"'Wuthering Heights' was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur—power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark and frowning, half-statue, half-rock; in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant's foot."
Of the rude chisel we find plentiful traces in the first few chapters of the book. The management of the narrative is singularly clumsy, introduced by a Mr. Lockwood—a stranger to the North, an imaginary misanthropist, who has taken a grange on the moor to be out of the way of the world—and afterwards continued to him by his housekeeper to amuse the long leisures of a winter illness. But, passing over this initial awkwardness of conception, we find a manner equal to the matter and somewhat resent Charlotte's eloquent comparison; for there are touches, fine and delicate, that only a practised hand may dare to give, and there is feeling in the book, not only "terrible and goblin-like," but patient and constant, sprightly and tender, consuming and passionate. We find, getting over the inexperienced beginning, that the style of the work is noble and accomplished, and that—far from being a half-hewn and casual fancy, a head surmounting a trunk of stone—its plan is thought out with scientific exactness, no line blurred, no clue forgotten, the work of an intense and poetic temperament whose vision is too vivid to be incongruous.
The first four chapters of 'Wuthering Heights' are merely introductory. They relate Mr. Lockwood's visit there, his surprise at the rudeness of the place in contrast with the foreign air and look of breeding that distinguished Mr. Heathcliff and his beautiful daughter-in-law. He also noticed the profound moroseness and ill-temper of everybody in the house. Overtaken by a snowstorm, he was, however, constrained to sleep there and was conducted by the housekeeper to an old chamber, long unused, where (since at first he could not sleep) he amused himself by looking over a few mildewed books piled on one corner of the window-ledge. They and the ledge were scrawled all over with writing, Catharine Earnshaw, sometimes varied to Catharine Heathcliff, and again to Catharine Linton. Nothing save these three names was written on the ledge, but the books were covered in every fly-leaf and margin with a pen-and-ink commentary, a sort of diary, as it proved, scrawled in a childish hand. Mr. Lockwood spent the first portion of the night in deciphering this faded record; a string of childish mishaps and deficiencies dated a quarter of a century ago. Evidently this Catharine Earnshaw must have been one of Heathcliff's kin, for he figured in the narrative as her fellow-scapegrace, and the favourite scapegoat of her elder brother's wrath. After some time Mr. Lockwood fell asleep, to be troubled by harassing dreams, in one of which he fancied that this childish Catharine Earnshaw, or rather her spirit, was knocking and scratching at the fir-scraped window-pane, begging to be let in. Overcome with the intense horror of nightmare, he screamed aloud in his sleep. Waking suddenly up he found to his confusion that his yell had been heard, for Heathcliff appeared, exceedingly angry that any one had been allowed to sleep in the oak-closeted room.
"If the little fiend had got in at the window she probably would have strangled me," I returned... "Catharine Linton or Earnshaw, or however she was called—she must have been a changeling, wicked little soul! She told me she had been walking the earth these twenty years; a just punishment for her mortal transgressions, I've no doubt.
"Scarcely were these words uttered when I recollected the association of Heathcliff's with Catharine's name in the books.... I blushed at my inconsideration—but, without showing further consciousness of the offence, I hastened to add, 'The truth is, sir, I passed the first part of the night in—.' Here I stopped afresh—I was about to say 'perusing those old volumes,' then it would have revealed my knowledge of their written as well as their printed contents; so I went on, 'in spelling over the name scratched on that window-ledge: a monotonous occupation calculated to set me asleep, like counting, or—.' 'What can you mean by talking in this way to me!' thundered Heathcliff with savage vehemence. 'How—how dare you, under my roof? God! he's mad to speak so!' And he struck his forehead with rage.