THE KEY TO THE BRONTË WORKS
More than once Mr. Malham-Dembleby has approached us with his mysterious "Key". There was his "Key to Jane Eyre", published in the Saturday Review in 1902; there was his "Lifting of the Brontë Veil", published in the Fortnightly Review in 1907; and there was the correspondence that followed. Now he has gathered all his evidence together into one formidable book, and we are faced with what he calls his "miraculous and sensational" discovery that it was Charlotte and not Emily Brontë who wrote Wuthering Heights, and that in Wuthering Heights she immortalized the great tragic passion of her life, inspired by M. Héger, who, if you please, is Heathcliff.
This is Mr. Malham-Dembleby's most important contribution to the subject. M. Héger, Mr. Malham-Dembleby declares, was Heathcliff before he was M. Pelet, or Rochester, or M. Paul. And as it was Charlotte and not Emily who experienced passion, Charlotte alone was able to immortalize it.
So much Mr. Malham-Dembleby assumes in the interests of psychology. But it is not from crude psychological arguments that he forges his tremendous Key. It is from the internal evidence of the works, supported by much "sensational" matter from the outside.
By way of internal evidence then, we have first the sensational discovery of a work, Gleanings in Craven, or The Tourists' Guide, by "one Frederic Montagu", published at Skipton-in-Craven in 1838, which work the author of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre must have read and drawn upon for many things, names (including her own pseudonym of Currer Bell), descriptions of scenery, local legends, as of that fairy Jannet, Queen of the Malhamdale Elves, who haunted the sources of the Aire and suggested Rochester's Queen of Elves, his fairy, Janet Eyre. Parallel passages are given showing a certain correspondence between Montagu's traveller's tale and the opening scene of Wuthering Heights. Montagu goes on horseback to a solitary house, like Lockwood, and, like Lockwood, is shown to bed, dreams, and is awakened by a white-faced apparition (his hostess, not his host), who holds a lighted candle, like Heathcliff, and whose features, like Heathcliff's, are convulsed with diabolical rage, and so on. Mr. Malham-Dembleby, in a third parallel column, uses the same phrases to describe Jane Eyre's arrival at Rochester's house, her dreams, and the appearance of Rochester's mad wife at her bedside; his contention being that the two scenes are written by the same hand.
All this is very curious and interesting; so far, however, Mr. Malham-Dembleby's sensational evidence does no more for us than suggest that Charlotte and Emily may very likely have read Montagu's book.
But the plot thickens. Mr. Malham-Dembleby first prints parallel passages from Montagu's book and Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, then, extensively, scene after scene from Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
Some of these coincidences seem on the first blush of it remarkable, for instance, the child-phantom which appears both to Jane Eyre and to Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights; or the rainy day and the fireside scene, which occur in the third chapter of Wuthering Heights and the opening chapter of Jane Eyre. Others again, such as the parallel between the return of Heathcliff to Catherine and that of Jane to Rochester, will not bear examination for a moment. Of this and most of Mr. Malham-Dembleby's parallels it may be said that they only maintain their startling character by the process of tearing words from their sentences, sentences from their contexts, contexts from their scenes, and scenes from the living body of each book. Apparently to Mr. Malham-Dembleby, a book, at any rate a Brontë book, is not a living body; each is a box of German bricks, and he takes all the boxes and tumbles them out on the floor together and rearranges them so as to show that, after all, there was only one box of bricks in the family, and that was Charlotte's. Much of his argument and the force of his parallel passages depends on the identification of the characters in the Brontë works, not only with their assumed originals, but with each other. For Mr. Malham-Dembleby's purposes poor M. Héger, a model already remorselessly overworked by Charlotte, has to sit, not only for M. Pelet, for Rochester and Yorke Hunsden, for Robert and for Louis Moore, but for Heathcliff, and, if you would believe it, for Hareton Earnshaw; because (parallel passage!) the younger Catherine and Hareton Earnshaw were teacher and pupil, and so (when she taught him English) were Charlotte and M. Héger.
Mr. Malham-Dembleby's work of identification is made easier for him by his subsidiary discovery of Charlotte's two methods, Method I, interchange of the sex; Method II, alteration of the age of her characters. With this licence almost any character may be any other. Thus Hareton Earnshaw looking at Catherine is Jane Eyre looking at Mr. Rochester. When he touches her Nelly Dean says, "He might have stuck a knife into her, she started in such a taking"; and Rochester says to Jane, "You stick a sly penknife under my ear" (parallel passage!). Lockwood at Wuthering Heights is Jane Eyre at Thornton Hall; Heathcliff appearing at Lockwood's bedside, besides being M. Héger and Rochester, is Rochester's mad wife. Heathcliff returning to Catherine is Jane returning to Rochester, and so on. But however varied, however apparently discriminated the characters, M. Héger is in all the men, and Charlotte is in all the women, in the two Catherines, in Jane Eyre and Frances Henri; in Caroline Helstone, in Pauline Bassompierre, and Lucy Snowe.
Now there is a certain plausibility in this. With all their vividness and individuality Charlotte Brontë's characters have a way of shading off into each other. Jane has much in common with Frances and with Lucy, and Lucy with Pauline. Her men incline rather to one type, that of the masterful, arbitrary, instructive male; that is the type she likes best to draw. Yorke Hunsden in The Professor splits up into Rochester and Robert Moore and Mr. Yorke; and there is a certain amount of Paul Emanuel in all of them. But life gives us our types very much that way, and there is a bit of somebody else in everybody. It is easy to suggest identity by exaggerating small points of resemblance and suppressing large and essential differences (which is what Mr. Malham-Dembleby does all the time). But take each whole living man and woman as they have been created for us, I don't care if Catherine Earnshaw and Jane Eyre did each have a fit of passion in a locked room, and if a servant waited upon each with gruel; there is no earthly likeness between the soul of Catherine and the soul of Jane. I don't care if there was "hell-light" in Rochester's eyes and Heathcliff's too, if they both swore by the "Deuce", and had both swarthy complexions like Paul Emanuel; for there is a whole universe between Heathcliff and Rochester, between Rochester and M. Paul. Beside Heathcliff, that Titan raging on a mountain-top, M. Paul is merely a little man gesticulating on an estrade.