1917] on The Brontes: A Hundred Years After 161 



Some foolisli people have called " Wuthering Heights " a dreadful 

 book, aud I have some reason to believe that even now it is not read 

 as it ought to be. Of course, as a story — to say the least of it— it is 

 not prepossessing. In some of its aspects it is almost repulsive. 

 The lurid thunderclouds which bang over the windy moors (that 

 Emily loved) are seldom relieved even by a short lucid interval of 

 sunshine. The hero, Heathcliff, although of course he does not 

 deserve to be called a hero, although human, is possessed of the 

 worst qualities we ascribe to the Devil. But the book blazes with 

 passion — passion sometimes on the verge of insanity. I deny that 

 Emily Bronte had a diseased or a morbid mind, as some have with a 

 near approach to imbecility, asserted. We all have our bad dreams, 

 and this " Wuthering Heights " is one of hers. But it is a dream 

 w^hich does not go when sleep is dissolved in waking, it lives on with 

 us even when day itself dawns to lighten our misery. 



Remember that the outer world was very liitle to Emily Bronte. 

 She held it at arm's length. She banished it. Liberty — the liberty 

 of aloofness, of a recluse — was, as Charlotte said, " the breath of 

 her nostrils." So far as she knew the world, and her experiences 

 were scarcely a handful, she had not found it a companionable place. 

 It was not a bland world. It had scowled at her like an enemy. 

 Even Brussels, which had made a lasting and harrowing impression 

 on Charlotte, seems to have failed to influence Emily in any way 

 whatever. It was the moors and the rough gnarled folk, which, like 

 the stunted prickly thorns, inhabit the hollows in them, that were 

 her most intimate experiences. 



Mrs. Dean and Joseph the Calvinist, they are truer to life than 

 any affidavit is to the fact. Joseph, " the wearisomest self-righteous 

 Pharisee that ever ransacked the Bible to rake all the promises to 

 himself and fling the curses to his neighbours," you might And in or 

 near Haworth to-day. But Heathcliff, the two Catherines, and 

 Hareton Earnshaw, although as real, are not folk that have ever 

 been born, but they are people who will never die. 



In these respects " Wuthering Heights " is one of the most 

 unique books that has been given to the world — and given by an 

 ignorant, nervous, untrained, untamed girl, who was educated only 

 by Divine inspiration. 



It is easy to depict wooden saints. Much even of good literature 

 is full of these in its niches ; but to paint a flesh-and-ldood man, 

 whose training has stunted any good that was in him, and whose 

 passion has developed into a mania, that is the work of a genius, and 

 it has been accomplished with the ease of strength by Emily Bronte, 

 and by none other. There is no haunted man in all our books so real 

 as Heathcliffe. Of course, " AVuthering Heights " is in prose, rugged 

 prose, but in the result it is a great tragic poem from beginning to end. 



These great works of Emily are a cry from a deep passionate 

 heart, but it passes the lips as melancholy music. 



Vol. XXII. (No. Ill) m 



