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EDITOR’S PREFACE TO THE NEW
EDITION OF ‘WUTHERING HEIGHTS’
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| I have just read over ‘Wuthering
Heights,’ and, for the first time, have obtained a clear glimpse of what
are termed (and, perhaps, really are) its faults; have gained a definite
notion of how it appears to other people - to strangers who knew nothing
of the author; who are unacquainted with the locality where the scenes
of the story are laid; to whom the inhabitants, the customs, the natural
characteristics of the outlying hills and hamlets in the West Riding of
Yorkshire are things alien and unfamiliar.
To all such ‘Wuthering Heights’
must appear a rude and strange production. The wild moors of the
North of England can for them have no interest: the language, the manners,
the very dwellings and household customs of the scattered inhabitants of
those districts must be to such readers in a great measure unintelligible,
and - where intelligible - repulsive. Men and women who, perhaps,
naturally very calm, and with feelings moderate in degree, and little marked
in kind, have been trained from their cradle to observe the utmost evenness
of manner and guardedness of language, will hardly know what to make of
the rough, strong utterance, the harshly manifested passions, the unbridled
aversions, and headlong partialities of unlettered moorland hinds and rugged
moorland squires, who have grown up untaught and unchecked, except by Mentors
as harsh as themselves. A large class of readers, likewise, will
suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words
printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent
by the initial and final letter only - a blank line filling the interval.
I may as well say at once that, for this circumstance, it is out of my
power to apologise; deeming it, myself, a rational plan to write words
at full length. The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives
with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse,
strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile.
I cannot tell what good it does - what feeling it spares - what horror
it conceals. |
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| With regard to the rusticity
of ‘Wuthering heights,’ I admit the charge, for I feel the quality.
It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as
a root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise;
the author being herself a native and nursling of the moors. Doubtless,
had her lot been cast in a town, her writings, if she had written at all,
would have possessed another character. Even had chance or taste
led her to choose a similar subject, she would have treated it otherwise.
Had Ellis Bell been a lady or a gentleman accustomed to what is called
‘the world,’ her view of a remote and unreclaimed region, as well as of
the dwellers therein, would have differed greatly from that actually taken
by the home-bred country girl. Doubtless it would have been wider
- more comprehensive: whether it would have been more original or more
truthful is not so certain. As far as the scenery and locality are
concerned, it could scarcely have been so sympathetic: Ellis Bell did not
describe as one whose eye and taste alone found pleasure in the prospect;
her native hills were far more to her than a spectacle; they were what
she lived in, and by, as much as the wild birds, their tenants, or as the
heather, their produce. Her descriptions, then, of natural scenery
are what they should be, and all they should be. |
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Where delineation of human
character is concerned, the case is different. I am bound to avow
that she had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry amongst
whom she lived, than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass
her convent gates. My sister’s disposition was not naturally gregarious;
circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to
go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold
of home. Though her feeling for the people round was benevolent,
intercourse with them she never sought; nor, with very few exceptions,
ever experienced. And yet she know them: knew their ways, their language,
their family histories; she could hear of them with interest, and talk
of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but with them, she
rarely exchanged a word. Hence it ensued that what her mind had gathered
of the real concerning them, was too exclusively confined to those tragic
and terrible traits of which, in listening to the secret annals of every
rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress.
Her imagination, which was a spirit more sombre than sunny, more powerful
than sportive, found in such traits material whence it wrought creations
like Heathcliff, like Earnshaw, like Catherine. Having formed these
beings, she did not know what she had done. If the auditor of her
work, when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of
natures so relentless and implacable, of spirits so lost and fallen; if
it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes
banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell
would wonder what was meant, and suspect the complainant of affectation.
Had she but lived, her mind would of itself have grown like a strong tree,
loftier, straighter, wider-spreading, and its matured fruits would have
attained a mellower ripeness and sunnier bloom; but on that mind time and
experience alone could work: to the influence of other intellects it was
not amenable.
Having avowed that over much
of ‘Wuthering Heights’ there broods ‘a horror of great darkness’; that,
in its storm-heated and electrical atmosphere, we seem at times to breathe
lightning: let me point to those spots where clouded day-light and the
eclipsed sun still attest their existence. For a specimen of true
benevolence and homely fidelity, look at the character of Nelly Dean; for
an example of constancy and tenderness, remark that of Edgar Linton.
(Some people will think these qualities do not shine so well incarnate
in a man as they would do in a woman, but Ellis Bell could never be brought
to comprehend this notion: nothing moved her more than any insinuation
that the faithfulness and clemency, the long-suffering and loving-kindness
which are esteemed virtues in the daughters of Eve, become foibles in the
sons of Adam. She held that mercy and forgiveness are the divinest
attributes of the Great Being who made both man and woman, and that what
clothes the Godhead in glory, can disgrace no form of feeble humanity.)
There is a dry saturnine humour in the delineation of old Joseph, and some
glimpses of grace and gaiety animate the younger Catherine. Nor is
even the first heroine of the name destitute of a certain strange beauty
in her fierceness, or of honesty in the midst of perverted passion and
passionate perversity.
Heathcliff, indeed, stands
unredeemed; never once swerving in his arrow-straight course to perdition,
from the time when ‘the little black-haired swarthy thing, as dark as if
it came from the Devil,’ was first unrolled out of the bundle and set on
its feet in the farmhouse kitchen, to the hour when Nelly Dean found the
grim, stalwart corpse laid on its back in the panel-enclosed bed, with
wide-gazing eyes that seemed ‘to sneer at her attempt to close them, and
parted lips and sharp white teeth that sneered too.’
Heathcliff betrays one solitary
human feeling, and that is not his love for Catherine; which is a sentiment
fierce and inhuman: a passion such as might boil and glow in the bad essence
of some evil genius; a fire that might form the tormented centre - the
ever-suffering soul of a magnate of the infernal world: and by its quenchless
and ceaseless ravage effect the execution of the decree which dooms him
to carry Hell with him wherever he wanders. No; the single link that
connects Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely-confessed regard for Hareton
Earnshaw - the young man whom he has ruined; and then his half-implied
esteem for Nelly Dean. These solitary traits omitted, we should say
he was child neither of Lascar nor gipsy, but a man’s shape animated by
demon life - a Ghoul - an Afreet.
Whether it is right or advisable
to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.
But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something
of which he is not always master - something that, at times, strangely
wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles,
and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection;
and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when
it will no longer consent to ‘harrow the valleys, or be bound with a band
in the furrow’ - when it ‘laughs at the multitude of the city, and regards
not the crying of the driver’ - when, refusing absolutely to make ropes
out of sea-sand any longer, it sets to work on statue-hewing, and you have
a Pluto or a Jove, a Tisiphone or a Psyche, a Mermaid or a Madonna, as
Fate or Inspiration direct. Be the work grim or glorious, dread or
divine, you have little choice left but quiescent adoption. As for
you - the nominal artist - your share in it has been to work passively
under dictates you neither delivered nor could question - that would not
be uttered at your prayer, nor suppressed nor changed at your caprice.
If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve
praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as
little deserve blame.
‘Wuthering Heights’ was hewn
in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The
statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw
how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a
form moulded with at least one element of grandeur - power. He wrought
with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations.
With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal,
dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible
and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is
of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming
bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot.
CURRER BELL
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