Flint Cut Flint
Tins author's name has lodged in my mind ever since, some years ago, I read her novel Martin Schuler. It was a remark- able book, carrying me away in a tumult of emotion, so that I was forced to bring all my judgment to bear upon the cause of such disturbance of my equanimity. Judgment endorsed my feelings, and I concluded that work of such simplicity and unerring directness was the expression of a rare personality.
Here is that same mind at work, more mature, more sure of itself, plunging with courage into the hopelessly over- worked problem of the Bronte family. Naturally she has singled out the most difficult side of that problem, the character and work of Emily Bronte.
I One always tends to linger at some distance from Emily, putting off, as it were, this uncomfortable being for future consideration, content at the moment to give an uneasy respect to this demon-woman. Miss Wilson will have none of that procrastination, for she compels us to an intimate acquaintance, at the same time naturalizing the horrors and making a humane relationship possible. Like a master musician, a Busoni or a Cortot, she interprets the involved composition and discovers it as a melodic coherence.
She is not dogmatic, however, and does not force her subject into the strait-jacket of preconceived theories. She approaches Emily reverently, as one understanding mortal to another, sharing her hopes, fears, and even horrors, as a mutual experience. Her book, therefore, is the living corn- Mentary of a friend speaking to Mends, and it moves the reader as only life itself does ; warm, swift, subtle, with all the ache and tenderness of the eternal contact of flesh and spirit.
She herself comes from the'sane part of the world as the Brontes, and knows the Yorkshire moors with the detailed intensity of a child. They moulded her first impressions of -life, and are part of her character. Her opening chapter sets the scene with as much vividness as though Emily herself were speaking. We are in the gaunt high country, victims- of it, scrutinized by the leering thorn trees, cold-shouldered by the few fir trees, intimidated by the hissing grass. Little secret beauties creep out to console us ; low-crouching bilberries gleaming in the sun ; the scent of ling ; the tender fingers of the south wind as it feels its way in the wake of the retreating north-easter. And round about these high places, cutting them off from civilization, is the sinister smoke-pall of the West Riding towns, issuing from blackened streets, where beauty finds no voice; but broods in half-maddened introspection.
Then we are shown the interior of the stone parsongge ; everything stone ; floors, walls, staircase. The windows look out on the graveyard and the narrow 'street beyond; with one or two iron lamp-sockets on the angles of grimy houses Behind that the moors rise, terribly permanent, but too frequently hidden under the blight of the east wind, or heavier fog, or the grey snow of this smoky world.
- This is where the thwarted intellectual, Patrick Bronte, brought his wife and six baby children, and where his wife shortly died of cancer. Maria, the eldest, about seven years old, undertook to educate and rear the rest of the brood. They clustered together at night in a sort of anteroom upstairs, five sickly mites, the brother Branwell sleeping with the father. Disease stalked round the house ; typhoid and consumption the leaders of the pack.
Then Aunt Branwell came up from the South to foster them. She was a dame of her own times, believing that children should be taught the fear of God by the aid of vigorous taps with a thimble, or shutting up in dark rooms. She had no mental interests, and lived in a little world of her own : stitchery and bonnets. The precocious children, with their reading of newspapers and discussion of politics round and in the cradle, were an enigma to her Emily, in particular, incensed her ; a sallow, matt-haired elf, secretive and defiant. The proud, abstracted father, too, looked askance at the imp, sensing rebellion and a formidable rival •in Satanic self- continence.
The child brooded over the resultant injustice, gathered together her resentments until they took shape, becoming a protective influence, a being, a Dark Hero, as Miss Wilson terms it. This secret companion at first sustained the child, whispering heroic things to her, convincing her of her noble and tragic isolation, calling her with flattering tongue a queen, his queen, queen of darkness, intimate yet rival of the creator of life, the God of mankind, who also made the open moors above Haworth where He could walk and breathe with her, this secret enemy and companion of His. For Emily dis- covered that she was really a male, was actually this Dark Hero, treading the world in disguise, waiting his time to strike and to crush an obtuse environment.
Then Aunt Branwell made a dreadful mistake. She shut Emily rip, one day, in the room where the mother had died. Darkness came on, and the passionate child saw a flashing of wings. It was actually the glint of a lamp through the chinks of the door. She knew it was the complement of her dark self ; the Fair Angel from beyond Death, coming to comfort her. The ecstasy was too much and she fell down in a fit.
From that time—such is Miss Wilson's belief—the three in one—the Dark Hero, the Fair Angel, and their secretive amanuensis, the drudgery-seeking Emily Bronto—lived aloof from the world of man, delivering themselves only when at liberty on the moors ; wrestling as it were with the sinister thorn trees, soaring in the talons of the Great-Auk winds that bore down from the north-east.
Charlotte, with her terrible sanity, and her brown, all-seeing eyes, was the only one who suspected this unholy trinity. With patience and persistence she tried to snatch Emily back, to instruct the defiant mind, to tame that spirit. She tried to " boss " her, preparing elaborate schemes of education, and even sending her away to school. All that happened was that Emily wilted, the sallow face turning paler and the body drooping. The haughty reserves were unbroken, the secret writings unread. It. must be remembered that-all the family wrote wrote'alriays, filling paper by the ream, running to and from the village shop buying paper and filling it with microscopic handwriting, the record of tremendous inward events and never-ending romances. - All took a hand in this factory of stories—except Emily She kept her work to herself. No one saw her poems, until belatedly, when they were terribly old, people in the early twenties, Charlotte found the poems and treacherously read them. 'The monitress was appalled ; but also she was awe- stricken by their beauty and power,: and she persuaded Emily to let her edit and print them. -'What did Emily care, since the real violation had been done ?, What worse could follow So Ellis, Acton, and Cuirer-Bill publlilied a book of their poems. Acton was the little,:nioon4gter Anne. The trinity was' still Unbroken. Indeed, it was merging more and more to a single ,entity, and at last contrived—after a lifelong agony of dissociation—to find a single voice. That voice was JVuthering Heights, the swan song of the Dark Hero (Heathcliff), The Fair Angel (Catherine Earnshaw), and of Emily Brontii.
Shortly after the publication of the book Emily caught cold, and, obstinately refusing treatment, let herself die, leaving a horrified Charlotte to cover up the traces of that Satanic career. Fortunately, Charlotte failed ; and now Miss Wilson, by some beautiful insight of her own, has discovered the Godhead that was really the directing genius of Emily's rebellious liaison with the powers of darkness.
RICHARD CHURCH.
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