And places in the mouth of Catherine of Wuthering Heights, Chapter IX., in the same connection:—
"If I were in heaven ... I should be extremely miserable.... I dreamt once ... I was there, ... heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out ... on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.[71] ... I cannot express it; but surely you ... have a notion that there is ... an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliffe's miseries ... my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. [See my remarks on Charlotte Brontë's belief in the elective affinities, page 96-7.] My love for Heathcliffe resembles the eternal rocks beneath.... I am Heathcliffe,—he's always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to myself—but as my own being—so don't talk of our separation again."
It is of the barriers which divided the woman of the verses "Apostasy" from her lover that the priest has reminded her. Thus she says:—
"... Did I need that thou shouldst tell
What mighty barriers rise
To part me from that dungeon-cell
Where my loved Walter lies?"
The whole history of Charlotte Brontë's Brussels life before us, the fact that an insurmountable barrier—his marriage—separated her from M. Héger, and the fact that she herself consulted[72] a Roman Catholic priest whom I designate as her "Fénélon," advising, like the Mentor of Télémaque,[73] the tempted one to "flee temptation," identify these "barriers" as a covert reference to the circumstances unhappily existing which made intimacy between Miss Brontë and M. Héger dangerous. To quote my words in The Fortnightly Review:—"We see why Miss Brontë, herself a Protestant, went to the confessional at Brussels.... We know this was no freak, as also that it was impossible for Charlotte to mention the subject to her sister without attributing it to a freak. More, we perceive now the nature of her confession, and, the "Flee temptation!" note of Fénélon's Les Aventures de Télémaque fresh in our minds, we see why she wrote of her father-confessor in Villette, Chapter XV.:—
There was something of Fénelon about that benign old priest; and whatever ... I may think of his Church and creed, ... of himself I must ever retain a grateful recollection. He was kind when I needed kindness; he did me good. May heaven bless him!
I mention that by her composite method of presenting characters, which Charlotte Brontë admitted to have employed, Dr. John Bretton, while often in the beginning representing Mr. Smith the publisher, becomes finally a representation of the Rev. Mr. Nicholls who married Miss Brontë.[74] So in Jane Eyre, St. John Rivers while in the main representing the Rev. Patrick Brontë, becomes associated temporarily with that priest I have called Charlotte Brontë's Brussels Fénélon. She tells us in Villette that she broke off the seduction of visiting this priest and says:—"The probabilities are that had I visited ... at the ... day appointed, I might just now ... have been counting my beads in the cell of a ... convent...." Miss Brontë admits he had had great influence with her, and this fact and the testimony of her poem "Apostasy" just quoted show this priest and his admonitions were in her mind when she wrote the final scene between herself and St. John Rivers in Jane Eyre (Chapter XXXV.). Therein, as in that poem and in Wuthering Heights, "Religion" and "Angels"[75] are set as being less to her than the vicinage of her lover. Indeed the India and the missionary life of Jane Eyre, and the marriage with St. John (see Chapter XXXIV.), may be said to have been in Miss Brontë's mind that life of religious consecration which in Villette she owns to have been the likely result of her further listening to the advice of the priest, to whom she had given "the ... outline of my experience," as she terms it.
Therefore it is interesting to observe that, as the woman in "Apostasy" suddenly hears the voice of her lover calling and says:—
"He calls—I come—my pulse scarce beats,
My heart fails in my breast.
Again that voice—how far away,
How dreary sounds that tone!
And I, methinks, am gone astray
In trackless wastes and lone.