claimer.

But the trouble began again after Charlotte's death. Emily herself had
no legend; but her genius was perpetually the prey of rumours that left
her personality untouched. Among the many provoked by Mrs. Gaskell's
_Life_, there was one attributing _Wuthering Heights_ to her brother
Branwell.[A] Mr. Francis Grundy said that Branwell told him he had
written _Wuthering Heights_. Mr. Leyland believed Mr. Grundy. He
believed that Branwell was a great poet and a great novelist, and he
wrote two solid volumes of his own in support of his belief.

[Footnote A: The curious will find a note on this point in Appendix II.]

Nobody believes in Mr. Grundy, or in Mr. Leyland and his belief in
Branwell now. All that can be said of Branwell, in understanding and
extenuation, is that he would have been a great poet and a greater
novelist if he could have had his own way.

This having of your own way, unconsciously, undeliberately, would seem
to be the supreme test of genius. Having your own way in the teeth of
circumstances, of fathers and of brothers, and of aunts, of
school-mistresses,[A] and of French professors, of the parish, of
poverty, of public opinion and hereditary disease; in the teeth of the
most disastrous of all hindrances, duty, not neglected, but fulfilled.
By this test the genius of Emily Bronte fairly flames; Charlotte's
stands beside it with a face hidden at times behind bruised and darkened
wings. By this test even Anne's pale talent shows here and there a
flicker as of fire. In all three the having of their own way was, after
all, the great submission, the ultimate obedience to destiny.

[Footnote A: It was Miss Wooler who taught Charlotte to "peruse".]

For genius like theirs _is_ destiny. And that brings us back to the
eternal question of the Sources. "Experience" will not account for what
was greatest in Charlotte. It will hardly account for what was least in
Emily. With her only the secret, the innermost experience counted. If
the sources of _Wuthering Heights_ are in the "Gondal Poems", the
sources of the poems are in _that_ experience, in the long life of her
adventurous spirit. Her genius, like Henry Angora and Rosina and the
rest of them, flew from the "Palaces of Instruction". As she _was_ Henry
Angora, so she _was_ Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.

It is a case of "The Horse I rode at the battle of Zamorna", that is
all.

There has been too much talk about experience. What the critic, the