142 Mr. J. H. Balfour Browne [June 1, 



Charlotte herself ; Madame Beck was Madame Heger ; Emily Bronte 

 was Shirley Keeldar ; Dr. John was Mr. George Smith, one of her 

 publisher's firm ; and St. John Rivers was Henry Nussey. The 

 Mr. Macarthy, with his "steady going clerical faults" mentioned at 

 the end of '* Shirley " as the successor of the " rampant boistrous " 

 Mr. Malone, is Mr. A. Nichols, who was afterwards her husband. 

 It was these guesses which delighted the readers who have a keen 

 scent for scandal, and some of them were good guesses — indeed, in 

 some cases the portraiture is so exact that none with eyes could miss 

 the likeness. 



Much of the literature about Charlotte Bronte has been occupied 

 with this identification of the bodies of the dead, and it has been 

 quite a surprise to some that Charlotte does not seem to have got 

 others that she knew, like Mrs. Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Sir D. K. 

 Shuttle worth and Thackeray in her Tussaud Waxworks, and even 

 some of them in the Chamber of Horrors with Mr. Brocklehurst and 

 Madame Beck.* 



So far has this process been carried, not without excuse in the 

 case of Charlotte, that some have applied the same inquisition to the 

 pages of " Wuthering Heights " ; and one writer, of some ability, has 

 found M. Heger again in Heathcliff, and the ravings of Cathy in 

 the distemper of Charlotte Bronte after her very wise return from 

 Brussels. This dissection — for the vivisection which had to be done 

 in the time of Mrs. Gaskell has ceased, and we are now only in a 

 kind of Morgue — has been carried too far. It is not really literary 

 criticism at all, but a spurious kind of silly curiosity. Every writer 

 has to draw, not for inspiration but for facts, on their experiences, 

 and every writer has, like the spider, to make his web by means of 

 his spinneret out of his own inner being. In this way every book, 

 however fictional, if it is great, is history and biography, and in 

 every work the writer writes himself down on every page. Many 

 have no need, as Dogberry had, of the " AVatch," whom he asked to 

 *' Write me down an ass ! " They can do that for themselves ! 



* But not only that the critics found that all the characters in her books 

 can be identified with persons then living, they have in their indefatigable 

 researches denied to her the credit of inventing the plots of her stories. Mrs. 

 Gaskell tells whsbt happened in Charlotte's youth in the neighbourhood of 

 Leeds. "A young lady, who held the situation of a governess, had been 

 wooed and married by a gentleman holding some subordinate position in the 

 commercial firm to which the young lady's employer belonged. A year after 

 her marriage, during which she had given birth to a child, it was discovered 

 that he whom she called her husband had another wife, lieport now says 

 that the first wife was deranged, and that he had made this an excuse to 

 himself for his subsequent marriage." 



But Professor Jack, of the University of Aberdeen, writing in " The 

 Cambridge History of English Literature," has found almost the whole Jane 

 Eyre story in a tale by J. Sheridan Le Fanu in the " Dublin University 

 Magazine " of 1839. There you have the wife that was no wife, the attempt 

 to murder, and all the rest of it. 



