"If you could see and hear "I heard him trying to read to
the efforts I make to teach himself, and pretty blunders he
[M. Héger] to pronounce ... and makes!... it was extremely funny
[his] unavailing attempts to ... still, he has no right to
imitate you would laugh to all appropriate what is mine, and
eternity."--Mrs. GASKELL'S make it ridiculous to me with
_Life of Charlotte Brontë_. his vile mistakes and
mispronunciations! Those books,
both prose and verse, are
consecrated to me by other
associations, and I hate to have
them debased and profaned in his
mouth."
Note how in _The Professor_ and _Wuthering Heights_ the male lover is
unable to devote himself to the reading lesson because of the
distraction of the heroine's interesting physiognomy. In this connection
we may glance at the following little parallel of the hen-killing
figure, with which, like the foregoing, I do not deal in the course of
_The Key to the Brontë Works_. Again we perceive Charlotte Brontë's
Method I.:--
_Wuthering Heights._ _Jane Eyre._
Chapter XXX. Chapter XIV.
Hareton contented himself with Mr. Rochester had been looking
... looking at Catherine instead ... at the fire, and I had been
of the book. She continued looking at him, when, turning
reading. His attention became suddenly, he caught my gaze
... quite centred in the study fastened on his physiognomy.
of her ... curls ... and perhaps
not quite aware to what he did "You examine me, Miss Eyre,"
... he put out his hand and said he; "do you think me
stroked one curl as gently as if handsome?"
it were a bird. He might have
stuck a knife into her neck, she "No sir."
started with such a taking....
"And so under the pretence of
stroking and soothing me into
placidity, you stick a sly
penknife under my ear."
Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre were of course M. Héger and Miss Brontë. It
is indeed important and interesting to find at the old farmstead of
Wuthering Heights scenes reminiscent of the intimately pedagogic
relations that existed between Charlotte Brontë and M. Héger of the
school at Brussels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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