Biographical Notes on the Pseudonymous Bells | Page 5

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.
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