[67] As Rochester calls Jane his beneficent spirit, it is interesting to read that M. de Morville says to his wife:—"Je crois aux bons génies, aux bons anges."
"Aux bons anges?"
"Miss Mary, par exemple."
"Eh bien, Louise?"
"N'est-ce pas un bon génie, un bon ange, une bonne magicienne, enfin? Ne m'a-t-elle pas jeté un sort?"
[68] See my reference to Charlotte's Preface to Wuthering Heights in the second chapter of "The Recoil."
[69] See my references to Charlotte Brontë's poem "Apostasy"; and to St. John Rivers as a phase of Charlotte's Brussels Fénelon.
[70] See M. Paul and Lucy Snowe (M. Héger and Charlotte Brontë) in the close of Chapter XXI. of Villette.
[71] Mrs. Humphry Ward in her "Introductions" to the Haworth Edition of the Brontë novels instanced this passage as showing Emily Brontë's extravagant love for the moors, inferring she preferred the heath to heaven. But Mrs. Ward in these same "Introductions" even argued that Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre were dissimilar in characterization and style. Catherine's reference herewith in Wuthering Heights, to a "subliminal" existence in a lover and to the notion that the absence or loss of such a love (and hence, limiting of the bounds of existence,) would make the universe a blank, having no sympathy or relation—a stranger, is at one with Charlotte Brontë's further words in her poem, "Frances":—
"Unloved—I love; unwept—I weep;
. . . . . Vain is this anguish—fixed and deep;
. . . . .