The Brontës: Charlotte and Emily
HASTINGS HOUSE, $3.50
IN WHAT hidden way does genius work? No better case histories for the investigation of this question could be chosen than those of the four Brontës, all of them gifted, but only two of them touched by the unmistakable flame of greatness. Thanks to much devoted research, the circumstances of their brief and limited lives are displayed for our examination as though under glass. The romances of their childhood, together with the poems, novels, and letters of their maturity, do not comprise an unmanageable body of writing. It is possible to scrutinize them from every angle.
What small deviations brought genius to successful flowering in Charlotte and Emily and doomed it to wither on the stalk in Anne and to putrefy in Branwell? Miss Hinkley sets clearly before herself the problem of determining how the writings of the four Brontës came out of their lives, and to the solution of the problem she brings remarkable qualities of sympathetic imagination and good judgment.
A work of artistic creation, according to Miss Hinkley, must be prepared by long gestation in the unconscious mind. It centers in an emotional vortex caused by some painful shock or devastating loss. The impetus of the life stream is blocked as by a dam, and behind the obstruction the waters mount up until the act of creation releases them. The placid Anne Brontë could not form such a reservoir of unconscious power, and hence the feebleness of her fiction. Branwell dribbled away his stock in futile dissipation. But in Charlotte and Emily the conditions of genius were complete. In each the vital tendencies denied fulfillment in actuality imperiously demanded an outlet in imaginative form. In both, the integrity of their natures kept their creative minds true to the essence of their experience. From the conscious use of what the unconscious had long stored came Charlotte’s supreme assertion of a love bursting through stilted conventions in Jane Eyre and Emily’s dynamic evocation of a love transcending death in Wuthering Heights.
Miss Hinkley’s foreword contains a dismaying list of the perils that beset the critical biographer: the perils of the romantic appeal, of the dramatic rearrangement of facts, of assuming a condition that did not exist, of transferring to the subject the writer’s private responses, of failing to test the assumptions of previous writers, and of seeing all things in relation to a pet theory. It is Miss Hinkley’s great distinction that she has skillfully avoided all these perils and has produced a genetic study of Charlotte and Emily Bronte full of penetrating insights into the workings of the mind of genius.
GEORGE F. WHICHER