CHAPTER XVI.
‘SHIRLEY.’
While 'Wuthering Heights' was still in the reviewer's hands, Emily Brontë's more fortunate sister was busy on another novel. This book has never attained the steady success of her masterpiece, 'Villette,' neither did it meet with the furor which greeted the first appearance of 'Jane Eyre.' It is, indeed, inferior to either work; a very quiet study of Yorkshire life, almost pettifogging in its interest in ecclesiastical squabbles, almost absurd in the feminine inadequacy of its heroes. And yet 'Shirley' has a grace and beauty of its own. This it derives from the charm of its heroines—Caroline Helstone, a lovely portrait in character of Charlotte's dearest friend, and Shirley herself, a fancy likeness of Emily Brontë.
Emily Brontë, but under very different conditions. No longer poor, no longer thwarted, no longer acquainted with misery and menaced by untimely death; not thus, but as a loving sister would fain have seen her, beautiful, triumphant, the spoiled child of happy fortune. Yet in these altered circumstances Shirley keeps her likeness to Charlotte's hardworking sister; the disguise, haply baffling those who, like Mrs. Gaskell, "have not a pleasant impression of Emily Brontë," is very easily penetrated by those who love her. Under the pathetic finery so lovingly bestowed, under the borrowed splendours of a thousand a year, a lovely face, an ancestral manor-house, we recognise our hardy and headstrong heroine, and smile a little sadly at the inefficiency of this masquerade of grandeur, so indifferent and unnecessary to her. We recognise Charlotte's sister; but not the author of 'Wuthering Heights.' Through these years we discern the brilliant heiress to be a person of infinitely inferior importance to the ill-dressed and overworked Vicar's daughter. Imperial Shirley, no need to wave your majestic wand, we have bowed to it long ago unblinded; and all its illusive splendours are not so potent as that worn-down goose-quill which you used to wield in the busy kitchen of your father's parsonage.
Yet without that admirable portrait we should have scant warrant for our conception of Emily Brontë's character. Her work is singularly impersonal. You gather from it that she loved the moors, that from her youth up the burden of a tragic fancy had lain hard upon her; that she had seen the face of sorrow close, meeting that Medusa-glance with rigid and defiant fortitude. So much we learn; but this is very little—a one-sided truth and therefore scarcely a truth at all.
Charlotte's portrait gives us another view, and fortunately there are still a few alive of the not numerous friends of Emily Brontë. Every trait, every reminiscence paints in darker, clearer lines, the impression of character which 'Shirley' leaves upon us. Shirley is indeed the exterior Emily, the Emily that was to be met and known thirty-five years ago, only a little polished, with the angles a little smoothed, by a sister's anxious care. The nobler Emily, deeply-suffering, brooding, pitying, creating, is only to be found in a stray word here and there, a chance memory, a happy answer, gathered from the pages of her work, and the loving remembrance of her friends; but these remnants are so direct, unusual, personal, and characteristic, this outline is of so decided a type, that it affects us more distinctly than many stippled and varnished portraits do.
But to know how Emily Brontë looked, moved, sat and spoke, we still return to 'Shirley.' A host of corroborating memories start up in turning the pages. Who but Emily was always accompanied by a "rather large, strong, and fierce-looking dog, very ugly, being of a breed between a mastiff and a bulldog?" it is familiar to us as Una's lion; we do not need to be told, Currer Bell, that she always sat on the hearthrug of nights, with her hand on his head, reading a book; we remember well how necessary it was to secure him as an ally in winning her affection. Has not a dear friend informed us that she first obtained Emily's heart by meeting, without apparent fear or shrinking, Keeper's huge springs of demonstrative welcome?
Certainly "Captain Keeldar," with her cavalier airs, her ready disdain, her love of independence, does bring back with vivid brilliance the memory of our old acquaintance, "the Major." We recognise that pallid slimness, masking an elastic strength which seems impenetrable to fatigue—and we sigh, recalling a passage in Anne's letters, recording how, when rheumatism, coughs, and influenza made an hospital of Haworth Vicarage during the visitations of the dread east wind, Emily alone looked on and wondered why anyone should be ill—"she considers it a very uninteresting wind; it does not affect her nervous system." We know her, too, by her kindness to her inferiors. A hundred little stories throng our minds. Unforgotten delicacies made with her own hands for her servant's friend, yet-remembered visits of Martha's little cousin to the kitchen, where Miss Emily would bring in her own chair for the ailing girl; anecdotes of her early rising through many years to do the hardest work, because the first servant was too old, and the second too young to get up so soon; and she, Emily, was so strong. A hundred little sacrifices, dearer to remembrance than Shirley's open purse, awaken in our hearts and remind us that, after all, Emily was the nobler and more lovable heroine of the twain.