Emily Bronte BOOKS OF THE DAY

By E. F. BENSON

Miss VIRGINIA MOORE has added another specialised volume to the Brontë Saga. Her subject is Emily, and there appear

in it three new poems by her. These are printed in facsimile at the end of the book, but as they are in Emily's microscopic and much-faded handwriting, they are, even to a fervent and eagle-eyed reader, practically illegible. In the body of the book Miss Moore quotes from them at some length but gives no transcript of them in their entirety. It is difficult to guess why this was omitted, unless there was some restriction imposed as to copyright, for one at least,

" Come, the wind may never again Blow as now it blows for us,

And the stars may never again shine as now they shine '/

breathes throughout that mystical quality, that conscious union of Emily's spirit with nature that is typical of her finest ,poems. Another, " There shines the moon at noon of night," we are told, takes a " confused course " in its middle

stanzas. But all ought surely to be printed in full and it is to be hoped this will soon be done. These new poems come from a note-book of Emily's, once in the possession of Mr. R. T.

Smith of Smith Elder and Co., which is now in the British Museum. Miss Moore must be warmly congratulated on her discovery. She has also learned from the same source the dates of a number of poems hitherto unknown. Apart from

these, the most notable feature in Miss Moore's book is her deductions, from Emily's poems generally and from Wuthering Heights, of her emotional reactions and the secret soul-history

of the most mysterious and far the most gifted of the three sisters. Such a method is only sound up to a certain point.

The personal experiences of a great writer are, of course, grist for his work, but it is an error to read into his poetry or fiction anything like a statement of his inner life. Miss Moore is too lavish of this method. She distils actuality from work that was essentially imaginative. If it will not all fit her deductions, she gets rid of the snags by saying " Here the poem swerves," or " Here Emily enlarges." The poem may swerve or be enlarged inconveniently for Miss Moore's theory, but if so, so much the worse for the theory. This is particularly the case with regard to what she calls " The Momentous Year 1838," for which she gratuitously postulates that Emily fell violently and tragically in love. Her postulate runs :

" She met a person, loved that person, in a sense betrayed that person : yet in a sense it was that person who betrayed her— sometimes she thought the ono, sometimes the other, till at last she was firmly convinced of and ready to defend her honour."

And quoting the poem, " Why do I hate that lone green dell ?" Miss Moore suggests that Emily, then a teacher at Miss Patchett's, slipped out in her off-hours for clandestine meetings with the betrayed or the betraying lover. Emily did not quite know which.

Who, then, was that lover ? Miss Moore cannot name any individual, but her first astounding suggestion is that she was a woman, because it is to a woman that certain of these Gondal poems are addressed. She assembles evidence to show that Emily had a masculine nature, which everybody knew already, but it is a far cry to infer that Emily was therefore in love with a woman. Quotations from such poems as " Light up thy Halls," or the fact that Emily was at one time

nicknamed " the Major " (as a matter of fact, this was because she was sent out walking, like a military guard, with Ellen Nussey and William Weightman, in order to check the curate's amorous attentions) or that Miss Sinclair calls her " virile " (a word " derived," as Miss Moore enlightens us, "from the Latin word vir,' meaning man ") or that Charlotte says she was • "stronger than a man " does not bring us one The Life and Eager Death of Emily Brontë. By Virginia. Moore. (Rich and Cowan. 18s.) inch nearer this unwarranted suggestion. She pursues Emily's masculinity into Wuthering Heights, and tells us that_ " mournful boy " of the poems who developed into the "iron man " was certainly Emily, and that Emily " without a shadow of doubt " was Heathcliff. But if ever Emily embodied herself in a character, surely it is in Cathy that we find herand her mystical identity with Nature. Cathy dreams that she was in heaven and made herself sick with weeping to get back to the earth again. The angels cast her out, and she woke, sobbing for joy, on Wuthering Heights.

Miss Moore then immediately propounds another theory, and finds a man for Emily. In the Smith notebook of Einily's poems there is a familiar Gondal poem, " I knew not 'twas so dire a crime," and just above it in Charlotte's script are the words " Louis Parensell." Miss Moore believes this poem to be a personal love-poem, and on this evidence alone infers that Charlotte here wrote this gentleman's name, because it was he whom Emily had tragically loved. For further evidence she bids us remember that Shirley's lover was Louis Moore. We may take our choice between an unknown woman and Louis Parensell, otherwise unknown (enquiries at Haworth led to nothing) except that Charlotte wrote his name on a poem by Emily, but Miss Moore insists that Emily had a love-affair in this year 1838. But again we must not forget that another accomplished Bronteite, Miss Isabel Clarke, also insisting that Emily must have a lover, discovered that this was William Weightman. Her evidence is that Madame Duolaux wrote that " he was exempted from Emily's liberal scorn." William Weightrnan's claims seem about as strong as those of the others.

In discussing Wuthering Heights, Miss Moore tells us that the

book was not begun till early in 1846, was finished before the following November, and in December it was accepted for publication. But Charlotte says that for eighteen months before the joint book of poems was published, in June, 1847, the sisters' three novels " were perseveringly obtruded on

various publishers," in which case Wuthering Heights must have been finished, early in 1846. Again it and Agnes Grey

were accepted by Newby for publication not in December, 1846, but in July, 1847. As regards the authorship Miss Moore,

rightly pours scorn on the notion that Branwell was in any real

sense the writer, but leaves unexamined the curiously strong evidence that he had something to do with the first two chapters. Heatheliff, as already noticed, she identifies with Emily, Branwell was Hindley and subsequently Hareton ; then follow even more sensational assignments. Cathy is

Emily's female lover, the Linton represent " the world and the world's attitude which have weaned her beloved away," and Charlotte is Ellen Dean ! Finally Miss Moore regards Emily as having " killed herself off in the guise of Heatheliff, so that it was " something of an anomaly " that she continued to live at all. In the last months of her life she desired death, and in " her craving for the sweetness of the tomb " she committed virtual suicide by reffising to see doctors : indeed the very title of this book, Life and Eager Death of Emily Emile, stresses that theory. But Emily's secret papers, which she and Anne used to write for each other, do not bear out her view. True, the last was dated 1845, but •there Emily says, " I am quite contented for myself . . . merely desiring that every- body could be as comfortable and as undesponding," and thin- was written seven years after the tragical love-affair which seared her soul and cast a permanent shadow over her remain- ing years. Charlotte again tells us that, instead of longing for death, " Emily was torn, conscious, panting, reluctant, though resolute, out of a happy life." Suckfirst-hand docuinents of direct statement must have the "last and autliOrititive word.