En Una Noche Escura
Upon an obscure night
Fevered with Love’s anxiety
(O hapless, happy plight!)
I went, none seeing me,
Forth from my house, where all things quiet be.
Blest night of wandering
In secret, when by none might I be spied,
Nor I see anything;
Without a light to guide
Save that which in my heart burnt in my side.
That light did lead me on
More surely than the shining of noontide,
Where well I knew that One
Did for my coming bide;
Where he abode might none but he abide.
O night that didst lead thus;
O night more lovely than the dawn of light;
O night that broughtest us
Lover to lover’s sight,
Lover to loved, in marriage of delight!
We know what love is celebrated there, and we do not know so clearly what manner of supernal passion is symbolized in Emily Brontë’s angel-lover. There is a long way there between Emily Brontë and St. John of the Cross, between her lamp-lit window and his “Dark Night of the Soul”, and yet her opening lines have something of the premonitory thrill, the haunting power of tremendous suggestion, the intense, mysterious expectancy of his. The spiritual experience is somewhat different, but it belongs to the same realm of the super-physical; and it is very far from Paganism.
She wrote of these supreme ardours and mysteries; and she wrote that most inspired and vehement song of passionate human love, “Remembrance”:
Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee….
But “Remembrance” is too well known for quotation here. So is “The Old Stoic”.
These are perfect and unforgettable things. But there is hardly one of the least admirable of her poems that has not in it some unforgettable and perfect verse or line:
And oh, how slow that keen-eyed star
Has tracked the chilly grey!
What, watching yet? how very far
The morning lies away.
That is how some watcher on Wuthering Heights might measure the long passage of the night.
“The Lady to her Guitar”, that recalls the dead and forgotten player, sings:
It is as if the glassy brook
Should image still its willows fair,
Though years ago the woodman’s stroke
Laid low in dust their Dryad-hair.
She has her “dim moon struggling in the sky”, to match Charlotte’s “the moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale, glad as if she gave herself to his fierce caress with love”. At sixteen, in the schoolroom,[A] she wrote verses of an incomparable simplicity and poignancy:
A little while, a little while,
The weary task is put away,
And I can sing and I can smile,
Alike, while I have holiday.
Where wilt thou go, my harassed heart—
What thought, what scene invites thee now?
What spot, or near or far apart,
Has rest for thee, my weary brow?
The house is old, the trees are bare,
Moonless above bends twilight’s dome;
But what on earth is half so dear—
So longed for—as the hearth of home?
The mute bird sitting on the stone,
The dank moss dripping from the wall,
The thorn-trees gaunt, the walks o’ergrown,
I love them—how I love them all!
Still, as I mused, the naked room,
The alien firelight died away,
And, from the midst of cheerless gloom,
I passed to bright, unclouded day.
A little and a lone green lane
That opened on a common wide;
A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain
Of mountains circling every side.
A heaven so clear, an earth so calm.
So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air;
And, deepening still the dream-like charm,
Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere.
There was no nostalgia that she did not know. And there was no funeral note she did not sound; from the hopeless gloom of
In the earth—the earth—thou shalt be laid,
A grey stone standing over thee;
Black mould beneath thee spread,
And black mould to cover thee.
Well—there is rest there,
So fast come thy prophecy;
The time when my sunny hair
Shall with grass-roots entwined be.
But cold—cold is that resting-place
Shut out from joy and liberty,
And all who loved thy living face
Will shrink from it shudderingly.
From that to the melancholy grace of the moorland dirge:
The linnet in the rocky dells,
The moor-lark in the air,
The bee among the heather-bells
That hide my lady fair:
The wild deer browse above her breast;
The wild birds raise their brood;
And they, her smiles of love caressed,
Have left her solitude.
Well, let them fight for honour’s breath,
Or pleasure’s shade pursue—
The dweller in the land of death
Is changed and careless too.
And if their eyes should watch and weep
Till sorrow’s source were dry,
She would not, in her tranquil sleep,
Return a single sigh.
Blow, west wind, by the lowly mound,
And murmur, summer-streams—
There is no need of other sound
To soothe my lady’s dreams.
There is, finally, that nameless poem—her last—where Emily Brontë’s creed finds utterance. It also is well known, but I give it here by way of justification, lest I should seem to have exaggerated the mystic detachment of this lover of the earth:
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life—that in me has rest,
As I—undying Life—have power in thee!
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of immortality.
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou—THOU art Being and Breath,
And what THOU art may never be destroyed.
It is not a perfect work. I do not think it is by any means the finest poem that Emily Brontë ever wrote. It has least of her matchless, incommunicable quality. There is one verse, the fifth, that recalls almost painfully the frigid poets of Deism of the eighteenth century. But even that association cannot destroy or contaminate its superb sincerity and dignity. If it recalls the poets of Deism, it recalls no less one of the most ancient of all metaphysical poems, the poem of Parmenides on Being:
[Greek: pos d’ an epeit apoloito pelon, pos d’ an ke genoito; ei ge genoit, ouk est’, oud ei pote mellei esesthai.
tos, genesis men apesbestai kai apiotos olethros.
oude diaireton estin, epei pan estin homoion
oude ti pae keneon….
….eon gar eonti pelazei.]
Parmenides had not, I imagine, “penetrated” to Haworth; yet the last verse of Emily Brontë’s poem might have come straight out of his [Greek: ta pros halaetheiaen]. Truly, an astonishing poem to have come from a girl in a country parsonage in the ‘forties.
But the most astonishing thing about it is its inversion of a yet more consecrated form: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee”. Emily Brontë does not follow St. Augustine. She has an absolutely inspired and independent insight:
Life—that in me has rest,
As I—undying Life—have power in Thee!
For there was but little humility or resignation about Emily Brontë. Nothing could be prouder than her rejection of the view that must have been offered to her every Sunday from her father’s pulpit. She could not accept the Christian idea of separation and the Mediator. She knew too well the secret. She saw too clearly the heavenly side of the eternal quest. She heard, across the worlds, the downward and the upward rush of the Two immortally desirous; when her soul cried she heard the answering cry of the divine pursuer: “My heart is restless till it rests in Thee.” It is in keeping with her vision of the descent of the Invisible, who comes
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars, her vision of the lamp-lit window, and the secret, unearthly consummation.
There is no doubt about it. And there is no doubt about the Paganism either. It seems at times the most apparent thing about Emily Brontë.
The truth is that she revealed her innermost and unapparent nature only in her poems. That was probably why she was so annoyed when Charlotte discovered them.
Until less than ten years ago it was commonly supposed that Charlotte had discovered all there were. Then sixty-seven hitherto unpublished poems appeared in America. And the world went on unaware of what had happened.
And now Mr. Clement Shorter, in his indefatigable researches, has unearthed seventy-one more, and published them with the sixty-seven and with Charlotte’s thirty-nine.A
And the world continues more or less unaware.
I do not know how many new poets Vigo Street can turn out in a week. But I do know that somehow the world is made sufficiently aware of some of them. But this event, in which Vigo Street has had no hand, the publication, after more than sixty years, of the Complete Poems of Emily Brontë, has not, so far as I know, provoked any furious tumult of acclaim.
And yet there could hardly well have been an event of more importance in its way. If the best poems in Mr. Shorter’s collection cannot stand beside the best in Charlotte’s editions of 1846 and 1850, many of them reveal an aspect of Emily Brontë’s genius hitherto unknown and undreamed of; one or two even reveal a little more of the soul of Emily Brontë than has yet been known.
There are no doubt many reasons for the world’s indifference. The few people in it who read poetry at all do not read Emily Brontë much; it is as much as they can do to keep pace with the perpetual, swift procession of young poets out of Vigo Street. There is a certain austerity about Emily Brontë, a superb refusal of all extravagance, pomp, and decoration, which makes her verses look naked to eyes accustomed to young lyrics loaded with “jewels five-words long”. About Emily Brontë there is no emerald and beryl and chrysoprase; there are no vine-leaves in her hair, and on her white Oread’s feet there is no stain of purple vintage. She knows nothing of the Dionysiac rapture and the sensuous side of mysticism. She can give nothing to the young soul that thirsts and hungers for these things.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the world should be callous to Emily Brontë. What you are not prepared for is the appearance of indifference in her editors. They are pledged by their office to a peculiar devotion. And the circumstances of Emily Brontë’s case made it imperative that whoever undertook this belated introduction should show rather more than a perfunctory enthusiasm. Her alien and lonely state should have moved Mr. Clement Shorter to a passionate chivalry. It has not even moved him to revise his proofs with perfect piety. Perfect piety would have saved him from the oversight, innocent but deplorable, of attributing to Emily Brontë four poems which Emily Brontë could not possibly have written, which were in fact written by Anne: “Despondency”, “In Memory of a Happy Day in February”, “A Prayer”, and “Confidence.”A No doubt Mr. Shorter found them in Emily’s handwriting; but how could he, how could he mistake Anne’s voice for Emily’s?
My God (oh let me call Thee mine,
Weak, wretched sinner though I be),
My trembling soul would fain be Thine;
My feeble faith still clings to Thee.
It is Anne’s voice at her feeblest and most depressed.
It is, perhaps, a little ungrateful and ungracious to say these things, when but for Mr. Shorter we should not have had Emily’s complete poems at all. And to accuse Mr. Shorter of present indifference (in the face of his previous achievements) would be iniquitous if it were not absurd; it would be biting the hand that feeds you. The pity is that, owing to a mere momentary lapse in him of the religious spirit, Mr. Shorter has missed his own opportunity. He does not seem to have quite realized the splendour of his “find”. Nor has Sir William Robertson Nicoll seen fit to help him here. Sir William Robertson Nicoll deprecates any over-valuation of Mr. Clement Shorter’s collection. “It is not claimed,” he says, “for a moment that the intrinsic merits of the verses are of a special kind.” And Mr. Clement Shorter is not much bolder in proffering his treasures. “No one can deny to them,” he says, “a certain bibliographical interest.”
Mr. Shorter is too modest. His collection includes one of the profoundest and most beautiful poems Emily Brontë ever wrote,[A] and at least one splendid ballad, “Douglas Ride”.[B] Here is the ballad, or enough of it to show how live it is with sound and vision and speed. It was written by a girl of twenty:
What rider up Gobeloin’s glen
Has spurred his straining steed,
And fast and far from living men
Has passed with maddening speed?
I saw his hoof-prints mark the rock,
When swift he left the plain;
I heard deep down the echoing shock
Re-echo back again.
With streaming hair, and forehead bare,
And mantle waving wide,
His master rides; the eagle there
Soars up on every side.
The goats fly by with timid cry,
Their realm rashly won;
They pause—he still ascends on high—
They gaze, but he is gone.
O gallant horse, hold on thy course;
The road is tracked behind.
Spur, rider, spur, or vain thy force—
Death comes on every wind.
Hark! through the pass with threatening crash
Comes on the increasing roar!
But what shall brave the deep, deep wave,
The deadly pass before?
Their feet are dyed in a darker tide,
Who dare those dangers drear.
Their breasts have burst through the battle’s worst,
And why should they tremble here?
“Now, my brave men, this one pass more,
This narrow chasm of stone,
And Douglas for our sovereign’s gore
Shall yield us back his own.”
I hear their ever-rising tread
Sound through the granite glen;
There is a tall pine overhead
Held by the mountain men.
That dizzy bridge which no horse could track
Has checked the outlaw’s way;
There like a wild beast turns he back,
And grimly stands at bay.
Why smiles he so, when far below
He spies the toiling chase?
The pond’rous tree swings heavily,
And totters from its place.
They raise their eyes, for the sunny skies
Are lost in sudden shade:
But Douglas neither shrinks nor flies,
He need not fear the dead.
That is sufficiently unlike the Emily Brontë whom Charlotte edited. And there is one other poem that stands alone among her poems with a strange exotic beauty, a music, a rhythm and a magic utterly unlike any of the forms we recognize as hers:
Gods of the old mythology
Arise in gloom and storm;
Adramalec, bow down thy head,
Reveal, dark fiend, thy form.
The giant sons of Anakim
Bowed lowest at thy shrine,
And thy temple rose in Argola,
With its hallowed groves of vine;
And there was eastern incense burnt,
And there were garments spread,
With the fine gold decked and broidered,
And tinged with radiant red,
With the radiant red of furnace flames
That through the shadows shone
As the full moon when on Sinai’s top
Her rising light is thrown.
It is undated and unsigned, and so unlike Emily Brontë that I should not be surprised if somebody were to rise up and prove that it is Coleridge or somebody. Heaven forbid that this blow should fall on Mr. Clement Shorter, and Sir William Robertson Nicoll, and on me. There is at least one reassuring line. “Reveal, dark fiend, thy form”, has a decided ring of the Brontësque.
And here again, on many an otherwise negligible poem she has set her seal, she has scattered her fine things; thus:
No; though the soil be wet with tears,
How fair so’er it grew,
The vital sap once perished
Will never flow again;
And surer than that dwelling dread,
The narrow dungeon of the dead,
Time parts the hearts of men.
And again, she gives a vivid picture of war in four lines:
In plundered churches piled with dead
The heavy charger neighed for food,
The wounded soldier laid his head
’Neath roofless chambers splashed with blood.
Again, she has a vision:
In all the hours of gloom
My soul was rapt away.
I stood by a marble tomb
Where royal corpses lay.
A frightful thing appears to her, “a shadowy thing, most dim”:
And still it bent above,
Its features still in view;
It seemed close by; and yet more far
Than this world from the farthest star
That tracks the boundless blue.
Indeed ’twas not the space
Of earth or time between,
But the sea of deep eternity,
The gulf o’er which mortality
Has never, never been.
The date is June 1837, a year earlier than the ballad. And here is the first sketch or germ of “The Old Stoic”:
Give we the hills our equal prayer,
Earth’s breezy hills and heaven’s blue sea,
I ask for nothing further here
Than my own heart and liberty.
And here is another poem, of a sterner and a sadder stoicism:
There was a time when my cheek burned
To give such scornful words the lie,
Ungoverned nature madly spurned
The law that bade it not defy.
Oh, in the days of ardent youth
I would have given my life for truth.
For truth, for right, for liberty,
I would have gladly, freely died;
And now I calmly bear and see
The vain man smile, the fool deride,
Though not because my heart is tame,
Though not for fear, though not for shame.
My soul still chokes at every tone
Of selfish and self-clouded error;
My breast still braves the world alone,
Steeled as it ever was to terror.
Only I know, howe’er I frown,
The same world will go rolling on.
October 1839. It is the worldly wisdom of twenty-one!
If this, the ballad and the rest, were all, the world would still be richer, by a wholly new conception of Emily Brontë, of her resources and her range.
But it is by no means all. And here we come to the opportunity which, owing to that temporary decline of fervour, Mr. Shorter has so unfortunately missed.
He might have picked out of the mass wherein they lie scattered, all but lost, sometimes barely recognizable, the fragments of a Titanic epic. He might have done something to build up again the fabric of that marvellous romance, that continuous dream, that stupendous and gorgeous fantasy in which Emily Brontë, for at least eleven years, lived and moved and had her being.
Until the publication of the unknown poems, it was possible to ignore the “Gondal Chronicles”. They are not included in Mr. Clement Shorter’s exhaustive list of early and unpublished manuscripts. Nobody knew anything about them except that they were part of a mysterious game of make-believe which Emily and the ever-innocent Anne played together, long after the age when most of us have given up make-believing. There are several references to the Chronicles in the diaries of Emily and Anne. Emily writes in 1841: “The Gondaland are at present in a threatening state, but there is no open rupture as yet. All the princes and princesses of the Royalty are at the Palace of Instruction.” Anne wonders “whether the Gondaland will still be flourishing” in 1845. In 1845 Emily and Anne go for their first long journey together. “And during our excursion we were Ronald Macalgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Angusteena, Rosabella Esmaldan, Ella and Julian Egremont, Catharine Navarre, and Cordelia Fitzaphnold, escaping from the palaces of instruction to join the Royalists, who are hard pressed at present by the victorious Republicans. “The Gondals,” Emily says, “still flourish bright as ever.” Anne is not so sure. “We have not yet finished our ‘Gondal Chronicles’ that we began three years and a half ago. When will they be done? The Gondals are at present in a sad state. The Republicans are uppermost, but the Royalists are not quite overcome. The young sovereigns, with their brothers and sisters, are still at the Palace of Instruction. The Unique Society, about half a year ago, were wrecked on a desert island as they were returning from Gaul. They are still there, but we have not played at them much yet.”
But there are no recognizable references to the Gondal poems. It is not certain whether Charlotte Brontë knew of their existence, not absolutely certain that Anne, who collaborated on the Gondals, knew.
“Brontë specialists” are agreed in dismissing the Chronicles as puerile. But the poems cannot be so dismissed. Written in lyric or ballad form, fluent at their worst and loose, but never feeble; powerful, vehement, and overflowing at their best, their cycle contains some of Emily Brontë’s very finest verse. They are obscure, incoherent sometimes, because they are fragmentary; even poems apparently complete in themselves are fragments, scenes torn out of the vast and complicated epic drama. We have no clue to the history of the Gondals, whereby we can arrange these scenes in their right order. But dark and broken as they are, they yet trail an epic splendour, they bear the whole phantasmagoria of ancestral and of racial memories, of “old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago”. These songs and ballads, strung on no discernible thread, are the voice of an enchanted spirit, recalling the long roll of its secular existences; in whom nothing lives but that mysterious, resurgent memory.
The forms that move through these battles are obscure. You can pick out many of the Gondal poems by the recurring names of heroes and of lands. But where there are no names of heroes and of lands to guide you it is not easy to say exactly which poems are Gondal poems and which are not. But after careful examination and comparison you can make out at least eighty-three of them that are unmistakable, and ten doubtful.
All the battle-pieces and songs of battle, the songs of mourning and captivity and exile, the songs of heroism, martyrdom, defiance, songs, or fragments of songs, of magic and divination, and many of the love songs, belong to this cycle. What is more, many of the poems of eighteen-forty-six and of eighteen-fifty are Gondal poems.
For in the Gondal legend the idea of the Doomed Child, an idea that haunted Emily Brontë, recurs perpetually, and suggests that the Gondal legend is the proper place of “The Two Children”, and “The Wanderer from the Fold”, which appear in the posthumous Selections of eighteen-fifty. It certainly includes three at the very least of the poems of eighteen-forty-six: “The Outcast Mother”, “A Death-Scene”, and “Honour’s Martyr”.
It does not look, I own, as if this hunt for Gondal literature could interest a single human being; which is why nobody, so far as I know, has pursued it. And the placing of those four poems in the obscure Gondal legend would have nothing but “a bibliographical interest” were it not that, when placed there, they show at once the main track of the legend. And the main track of the legend brings you straight to the courses of Wuthering Heights and of the love poems.
The sources of Wuthering Heights have been the dream and the despair of the explorer, long before Mrs. Humphry Ward tried to find them in the Tales of Hoffmann. And “Remembrance”, one of the most passionate love poems in the language, stood alone and apart from every other thing that Emily Brontë had written. It was awful and mysterious in its loneliness.
But I believe that “Remembrance” also may be placed in the Gondal legend without any violence to its mystery.
For supreme in the Gondal legend is the idea of a mighty and disastrous passion, a woman’s passion for the defeated, the dishonoured, and the outlawed lover; a creature superb in evil, like Heathcliff, and like Heathcliff tragic and unspeakably mournful in his doom. He or some hero like him is “Honour’s Martyr”.
To-morrow, Scorn will blight my name,
And Hate will trample me,
Will load me with a coward’s shame—
A traitor’s perjury.
False friends will launch their covert sneers
True friends will wish me dead;
And I shall cause the bitterest tears
That you have ever shed.
Like Heathcliff, he is the “unblessed, unfriended child”; the child of the Outcast Mother, abandoned on the moor.
Forests of heather, dark and long,
Wave their brown branching arms above;
And they must soothe thee with their song,
And they must shield my child of love.
Wakes up the storm more madly wild,
The mountain drifts are tossed on high;
Farewell, unblessed, unfriended child,
I cannot bear to watch thee die.
In an unmistakable Gondal song Geraldine’s lover calls her to the tryst on the moor. In the Gondal poem “Geraldine”, she has her child with her in a woodland cavern, and she prays over it wildly:
“Bless it! My Gracious God!” I cried,
“Preserve Thy mortal shrine,
For Thine own sake, be Thou its guide,
And keep it still divine—
“Say, sin shall never blanch that cheek,
Nor suffering change that brow.
Speak, in Thy mercy, Maker, speak,
And seal it safe from woe.”
The revellers in the city slept,
My lady in her woodland bed;
I watching o’er her slumber wept,
As one who mourns the dead.
Geraldine therefore is the Outcast Mother. In “The Two Children” the doom gathers round the child.
Heavy hangs the raindrop
From the burdened spray;
Heavy broods the damp mist
On uplands far away.
Heavy looms the dull sky,
Heavy rolls the sea;
And heavy throbs the young heart
Beneath that lonely tree.
Never has a blue streak
Cleft the clouds since morn
Never has his grim fate
Smiled since he was born.
Frowning on the infant,
Shadowing childhood’s joy.
Guardian-angel knows not
That melancholy boy.
Blossom—that the west wind
Has never wooed to blow,
Scentless are thy petals,
Thy dew is cold as snow!
Soul—where kindred kindness
No early promise woke,
Barren is thy beauty,
As weed upon a rock.
Wither—soul and blossom!
You both were vainly given:
Earth reserves no blessing
For the unblest of Heaven.
The doomed child of the outcast mother is the doomed man, and, by the doom, himself an outcast. The other child, the “Child of delight, with sun-bright hair”, has vowed herself to be his guardian angel. Their drama is obscure; but you make out that it is the doomed child, and not Branwell Brontë, who is “The Wanderer from the Fold”.
How few, of all the hearts that loved,
Are grieving for thee now;
And why should mine to-night be moved
With such a sense of woe?
Too often thus, when left alone,
Where none my thoughts can see,
Comes back a word, a passing tone
From thy strange history.
An anxious gazer from the shore—
I marked the whitening wave,
And wept above thy fate the more
Because—I could not save.
It recks not now, when all is over;
But yet my heart will be
A mourner still, though friend and lover
Have both forgotten thee.
Compare with this that stern elegy in Mr. Shorter’s collection, “Shed no tears o’er that tomb.” A recent critic has referred this poem of reprobation also to Branwell Brontë—as if Emily could possibly have written like this of Branwell:
Shed no tears o’er that tomb,
For there are angels weeping;
Mourn not him whose doom
Heaven itself is mourning.
… he who slumbers there
His bark will strive no more
Across the waters of despair
To reach that glorious shore.
The time of grace is past,
And mercy, scorned and tried,
Forsakes to utter wrath at last
The soul so steeled by pride.
That wrath will never spare,
Will never pity know;
Will mock its victim’s maddened prayer,
With triumph in his woe.
Shut from his Maker’s smile
The accursed man shall be;
For mercy reigns a little while,
But hate eternally.
This is obviously related to “The Two Children”, and that again to “The Wanderer from the Fold”. Obviously, too, the woman’s lament in “The Wanderer from the Fold” recalls the Gondal woman’s lament for her dishonoured lover. For there are two voices that speak and answer each other, the voice of reprobation, and the voice of passion and pity. This is the “Gondal Woman’s Lament”:
Far, far is mirth withdrawn:
’Tis three long hours before the morn,
And I watch lonely, drearily;
So come, thou shade, commune with me.
Deserted one! thy corpse lies cold,
And mingled with a foreign mould.
Year after year the grass grows green
Above the dust where thou hast been.
I will not name thy blighted name,
Tarnished by unforgotten shame,
Though not because my bosom torn
Joins the mad world in all its scorn.
Thy phantom face is dark with woe,
Tears have left ghastly traces there,
Those ceaseless tears! I wish their flow
Could quench thy wild despair.
They deluge my heart like the rain
On cursed Zamorna’s howling plain.
Yet when I hear thy foes deride,
I must cling closely to thy side.
Our mutual foes! They will not rest
From trampling on thy buried breast.
Glutting their hatred with the doom
They picture thine beyond the tomb.
(Which is what they did in the song of reprobation. But passion and pity know better. They know that)
… God is not like human kind,
Man cannot read the Almighty mind;
Vengeance will never torture thee,
Nor hurt thy soul eternally.
What have I dreamt? He lies asleep,
With whom my heart would vainly weep;
He rests, and I endure the woe
That left his spirit long ago.
This poem is not quoted for its beauty or its technique, but for its important place in the story. You can track the great Gondal hero down by that one fantastic name, “Zamorna”. You have thus four poems, obviously related; and a fifth that links them, obviously, with the Gondal legend.
It is difficult to pick out from the confusion of these unsorted fragments all the heroes of Emily Brontë’s saga. There is Gleneden, who kills a tyrant and is put in prison for it. There is Julius Angora, who “lifts his impious eye” in the cathedral where the monarchs of Gondal are gathered; who leads the patriots of Gondal to the battle of Almedore, and was defeated there, and fell with his mortal enemy. He is beloved of Rosina, a crude prototype of Catherine Earnshaw. “King Julius left the south country” and remained in danger in the northern land because a passion for Rosina kept him there. There is also Douglas of the “Ride”. He appears again in the saga of the Queen Augusta, the woman of the “brown mountain side”. But who he was, and what he was doing, and whether he killed Augusta or somebody else killed her, I cannot for the life of me make out. Queen Augusta, like Catherine Earnshaw, is a creature of passion and jealousy, and her lover had been faithless. She sings that savage song of defiance and hatred and lamentation: “Light up thy halls!”
Oh! could I see thy lids weighed down in cheerless woe;
Too full to hide their tears, too stern to overflow;
Oh! could I know thy soul with equal grief was torn,
This fate might be endured—this anguish might be borne.
How gloomy grows the night! ’Tis Gondal’s wind that blows;
I shall not tread again the deep glens where it rose,
I feel it on my face——Where, wild blast! dost thou roam?
What do we, wanderer! here, so far away from home?
I do not need thy breath to cool my death-cold brow;
But go to that far land where she is shining now;
Tell her my latest wish, tell her my dreary doom;
Say that my pangs are past, but hers are yet to come.
And there is Fernando, who stole his love from Zamorna. He is a sort of shadowy forerunner of Edgar Linton.
There is the yeoman Percy, the father of Mary whom Zamorna loved. And there is Zamorna.
A large group of poems in the legend refer, obviously, I think, to the same person. Zamorna is the supreme hero, the Achilles of this northern Iliad. He is the man of sin, the “son of war and love”, the child “unblessed of heaven”, abandoned by its mother, cradled in the heather and rocked by the winter storm, the doomed child, grown to its doom, like Heathcliff. His story is obscure and broken, but when all the Zamorna poems are sorted from the rest, you make out that, like Heathcliff, he ravished from her home the daughter of his mortal enemy (with the difference that Zamorna loves Mary); and that like Heathcliff he was robbed of the woman that he loved. The passions of Zamorna are the passions of Heathcliff. He dominates a world of savage loves and mortal enmities like the world of Wuthering Heights. There are passages in this saga that reveal the very aspect of the soul of Heathcliff. Here are some of them.
Zamorna, in prison, cries out to his “false friend and treacherous guide”:
“If I have sinned; long, long ago
That sin was purified by woe.
I have suffered on through night and day,
I’ve trod a dark and frightful way.”
It is what Heathcliff says to Catherine Earnshaw: “I’ve fought through a bitter life since I last heard your voice.”
And again:
If grief for grief can touch thee,
If answering woe for woe,
If any ruth can melt thee,
Come to me now.
It is the very voice of Heathcliff calling to Cathy.
Again, he is calling to “Percy”, the father of Mary, his bride, the rose that he plucked from its parent stem, that died from the plucking.
Bitterly, deeply I’ve drunk of thy woe;
When thy stream was troubled, did mine calmly flow?
And yet I repent not; I’d crush thee again
If our vessels sailed adverse on life’s stormy main.
But listen! The earth is our campaign of war,
Is there not havoc and carnage for thee
Unless thou couchest thy lance at me?
He proposes to unite their arms.
Then might thy Mary bloom blissfully still
This hand should ne’er work her sorrow or ill.
What! shall Zamorna go down to the dead
With blood on his hands that he wept to have shed?
The alliance is refused. Percy is crushed. Mary is dying, the rose is withering.
Its faded buds already lie
To deck my coffin when I die.
Bring them here—’twill not be long,
’Tis the last word of the woeful song;
And the final and dying words are sung
To the discord of lute strings all unstrung.
Have I crushed you, Percy? I’d raise once more
The beacon-light on the rocky shore.
Percy, my love is so true and deep,
That though kingdoms should wail and worlds should weep,
I’d fling the brand in the hissing sea,
The brand that must burn unquenchably.
Your rose is mine; when the sweet leaves fade,
They must be the chaplet to wreathe my head
The blossoms to deck my home with the dead.
Zamorna is tenderer than Heathcliff. He laments for his rose.
On its bending stalk a bonny flower
In a yeoman’s home close grew;
It had gathered beauty from sunshine and shower,
From moonlight and silent dew.
Keenly his flower the yeoman guarded,
He watched it grow both day and night;
From the frost, from the wind, from the storm he warded
That flush of roseate light.
And ever it glistened bonnilie
Under the shade of the old yew-tree.
The rose is blasted, withered, blighted
Its root has felt a worm,
And like a heart beloved and slighted,
Failed, faded, shrunk its form.
Bud of beauty, bonny flower,
I stole thee from thy natal bower.
I was the worm that withered thee….
And he sings of Mary, on her death-bed in her delirium. He will not believe that she is dying.
Oh! say not that her vivid dreams
Are but the shattered glass
Which but because more broken, gleams
More brightly in the grass.
Her spirit is the unfathomed lake
Whose face the sudden tempests break
To one tormented roar;
But as the wild winds sink in peace
All those disturbed waves decrease
Till each far-down reflection is
As life-like as before.
Her death is not the worst.
I cannot weep as once I wept
Over my western beauty’s grave.
I am speaking of a later stroke,
A death the dream of yesterday,
Still thinking of my latest shock,
A noble friendship torn away.
I feel and say that I am cast
From hope, and peace, and power, and pride
Without a voice to speak to you
Save that deep gong which tolled my doom,
And made my dread iniquity
Look darker than my deepest gloom.
But the crucial passage (for the sources) is the scene in the yeoman’s hall where Zamorna comes to Percy. He comes stealthily.
That step he might have used before
When stealing on to lady’s bower,
Forth at the same still twilight hour,
For the moon now bending mild above
Showed him a son of war and love.
His eye was full of that sinful fire
Which oft unhallowed passions light.
It spoke of quickly kindled ire,
Of love too warm, and wild, and bright.
Bright, but yet sullied, love that could never
Bring good in rising, leave peace in decline,
Woe to the gifted, crime to the giver….
Now from his curled and shining hair,
Circling the brow of marble fair,
His dark, keen eyes on Percy gaze
With stern and yet repenting rays.
He loves Percy whose rose was his, and he hates him, as Heathcliff might have loved and hated, but with less brutality.
Young savage! how he bends above
The object of his wrath and love,
How tenderly his fingers press
The hand that shrinks from their caress.
The yeoman turns on “the man of sin”.
What brought you here? I called you not
Are you a hawk to follow the prey,
When mangled it flutters feebly away?
A sleuth-hound to track the deer by his blood,
When wounded he wins to the darkest wood,
There, if he can, to die alone?
It might have been Heathcliff and a Linton.
So much for Zamorna.
Finally, there are two poems in Mr. Shorter’s collection that, verse for prose, might have come straight out of Wuthering Heights. One (inspired by Byron) certainly belongs to the Zamorna legend of the Gondal cycle.
And now the house-dog stretched once more
His limbs upon the glowing floor;
The children half resume their play,
Though from the warm hearth scared away;
The good-wife left her spinning-wheel
And spread with smiles the evening meal;
The shepherd placed a seat and pressed
To their poor fare the unknown guest,
And he unclasped his mantle now,
And raised the covering from his brow,
Said, voyagers by land and sea
Were seldom feasted daintily,
And cheered his host by adding stern
He’d no refinement to unlearn.
Which is what Heathcliff would have said sternly. Observe the effect of him.
A silence settled on the room,
The cheerful welcome sank to gloom;
But not those words, though cold or high,
So froze their hospitable joy.
No—there was something in his face,
Some nameless thing which hid not grace,
And something in his voice’s tone
Which turned their blood as chill as stone.
The ringlets of his long black hair
Fell o’er a cheek most ghastly fair.
Youthful he seemed—but worn as they
Who spend too soon their youthful day.
When his glance dropped, ’twas hard to quell
Unbidden feelings’ hidden swell;
And Pity scarce her tears could hide,
So sweet that brow with all its pride.
But when upraised his eye would dart
An icy shudder through the heart,
Compassion changed to horror then,
And fear to meet that gaze again.
It was not hatred’s tiger-glare,
Nor the wild anguish of despair;
It was not either misery
Which quickens friendship’s sympathy;
No—lightning all unearthly shone
Deep in that dark eye’s circling zone,
Such withering lightning as we deem
None but a spirit’s look may beam;
And glad were all when he turned away
And wrapt him in his mantle grey,
And hid his head upon his arm,
And veiled from view his basilisk charm.
That, I take it, is Zamorna, that Byronic hero, again; but it is also uncommonly like Heathcliff, with “his basilisk eyes”. And it is dated July 1839, seven years before Wuthering Heights was written.
The other crucial instance is a nameless poem to the Earth.
I see around me piteous tombstones grey
Stretching their shadows far away.
Beneath the turf my footsteps tread
Lie low and lone the silent dead;
Beneath the turf, beneath the mould,
For ever dark, for ever cold.
And my eyes cannot hold the tears
That memory hoards from vanished years.
For Time and Death and mortal pain
Give wounds that will not heal again.
Let me remember half the woe
I’ve seen and heard and felt below,
And heaven itself, so pure and blest,
Could never give my spirit rest.
Sweet land of light! Thy children fair
Know nought akin to our despair;
Nor have they felt, nor can they tell
What tenants haunt each mortal cell,
What gloomy guests we hold within,
Torments and madness, fear and sin!
Well, may they live in ecstasy
Their long eternity of joy;
At least we would not bring them down
With us to weep, with us to groan.
No, Earth would wish no other sphere
To taste her cup of suffering drear;
She turns from heaven a tearless eye
And only mourns that we must die!
Ah mother! what shall comfort thee
In all this boundless misery?
To cheer our eager eyes awhile,
We see thee smile, how fondly smile!
But who reads not through the tender glow
Thy deep, unutterable woe?
Indeed no darling hand above
Can cheat thee of thy children’s love.
We all, in life’s departing shine,
Our last dear longings blend with thine,
And struggle still, and strive to trace
With clouded gaze thy darling face.
We would not leave our nature home
For any world beyond the tomb.
No, mother, on thy kindly breast
Let us be laid in lasting rest,
Or waken but to share with thee
A mutual immortality.
There is the whole spirit of Wuthering Heights; the spirit of Catherine Earnshaw’s dream; the spirit that in the last page broods over the moorland graveyard. It is instinct with a more than pagan adoration of the tragic earth, adored because of her tragedy.
It would be dangerous to assert positively that “Remembrance” belongs to the same song-cycle; but it undoubtedly belongs to the same cycle, or rather cyclone, of passion; the cyclone that rages in the hearts of Heathcliff and of Catherine. The genius of Emily Brontë was so far dramatic that, if you could divide her poems into the personal and impersonal, the impersonal would be found in a mass out of all proportion to the other. But, with very few exceptions, you cannot so divide them; for in her continuous and sustaining dream, the vision that lasted for at least eleven years of her life, from eighteen-thirty-four, the earliest date of any known Gondal poem, to eighteen-forty-five, the last appearance of the legend, she was these people; she lived, indistinguishably and interchangeably, their tumultuous and passionate life. Sometimes she is the lonely spirit that looks on in immortal irony, raised above good and evil. More often she is a happy god, immanent in his restless and manifold creations, rejoicing in this multiplication of himself. It is she who fights and rides, who loves and hates, and suffers and defies. She heads one poem naïvely: “To the Horse Black Eagle that I rode at the Battle of Zamorna.” The horse I rode! If it were not glorious, it would be (when you think what her life was in that Parsonage) most mortally pathetic.
But it is all in keeping. For, as she could dare the heavenly, divine adventure, so there was no wild and ardent adventure of the earth she did not claim.
Love of life and passionate adoration of the earth, adoration and passion fiercer than any pagan knew, burns in Wuthering Heights. And if that were all, it would be impossible to say whether her mysticism or her paganism most revealed the soul of Emily Brontë.
In Wuthering Heights we are plunged apparently into a world of most unspiritual lusts and hates and cruelties; into the very darkness and thickness of elemental matter; a world that would be chaos, but for the iron Necessity that brings its own terrible order, its own implacable law of lust upon lust begotten, hate upon hate, and cruelty upon cruelty, through the generations of Heathcliffs and of Earnshaws.
Hindley Earnshaw is brutal to the foundling, Heathcliff, and degrades him. Heathcliff, when his hour comes, pays back his wrong with the interest due. He is brutal beyond brutality to Hindley Earnshaw, and he degrades Hareton, Hindley’s son, as he himself was degraded; but he is not brutal to him. The frustrated passion of Catherine Earnshaw for Heathcliff, and of Heathcliff for Catherine, hardly knows itself from hate; they pay each other back torture for torture, and pang for hopeless pang. When Catherine marries Edgar Linton, Heathcliff marries Isabella, Edgar’s sister, in order that he may torture to perfection Catherine and Edgar and Isabella. His justice is more than poetic. The love of Catherine Earnshaw was all that he possessed. He knows that he has lost it through the degradation that he owes to Hindley Earnshaw. It is because an Earnshaw and a Linton between them have robbed him of all that he possessed, that, when his hour comes, he pays himself back by robbing the Lintons and the Earnshaws of all that they possess, their Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. He loathes above all loathely creatures, Linton, his own son by Isabella. The white-blooded thing is so sickly that he can hardly keep it alive. But with an unearthly cruelty he cherishes, he nourishes this spawn till he can marry it on its death-bed to the younger Catherine, the child of Catherine Earnshaw and of Edgar Linton. This supreme deed accomplished, he lets the creature die, so that Thrushcross Grange may fall into his hands. Judged by his bare deeds, Heathcliff seems a monster of evil, a devil without any fiery infernal splendour, a mean and sordid devil.
But—and this is what makes Emily Brontë’s work stupendous—not for a moment can you judge Heathcliff by his bare deeds. Properly speaking, there are no bare deeds to judge him by. Each deed comes wrapt in its own infernal glamour, trailing a cloud of supernatural splendour. The whole drama moves on a plane of reality superior to any deed. The spirit of it, like Emily Brontë’s spirit, is superbly regardless of the material event. As far as material action goes Heathcliff is singularly inert. He never seems to raise a hand to help his vengeance. He lets things take their course. He lets Catherine marry Edgar Linton and remain married to him. He lets Isabella’s passion satisfy itself. He lets Hindley Earnshaw drink himself to death. He lets Hareton sink to the level of a boor. He lets Linton die. His most overt and violent action is the capture of the younger Catherine. And even there he takes advantage of the accident that brings her to the door of Wuthering Heights. He watches and bides his time with the intentness of a brooding spirit that in all material happenings seeks its own. He makes them his instruments of vengeance. And Heathcliff’s vengeance, like his passion for Catherine, is an immortal and immaterial thing. He shows how little he thinks of sordid, tangible possession; for, when his vengeance is complete, when Edgar Linton and Linton Heathcliff are dead and their lands and houses are his, he becomes utterly indifferent. He falls into a melancholy. He neither eats nor drinks. He shuts himself up in Cathy’s little room and is found dead there, lying on Cathy’s bed.
If there never was anything less heavenly, less Christian, than this drama, there never was anything less earthly, less pagan. There is no name for it. It is above all our consecrated labels and distinctions. It has been called a Greek tragedy, with the Aeschylean motto, [Greek: to drasanti pathein]. But it is not Greek any more than it is Christian; and if it has a moral, its moral is far more [Greek: to pathonti pathein]. It is the drama of suffering born of suffering, and confined strictly within the boundaries of the soul.
Madame Duclaux (whose criticism of Wuthering Heights is not to be surpassed or otherwise gainsaid) finds in it a tragedy of inherited evil. She thinks that Emily Brontë was greatly swayed by the doctrine of heredity. “‘No use,’ she seems to be saying, ‘in waiting for the children of evil parents to grow, of their own will and unassisted, straight and noble. The very quality of their will is as inherited as their eyes and hair. Heathcliff is no fiend or goblin; the untrained, doomed child of some half-savage sailor’s holiday, violent and treacherous. And how far shall we hold the sinner responsible for a nature which is itself the punishment of some forefather’s crime?’”
All this, I cannot help thinking, is alien to the spirit of Wuthering Heights, and to its greatness. It is not really any problem of heredity that we have here. Heredity is, in fact, ignored. Heathcliff’s race and parentage are unknown. There is no resemblance between the good old Earnshaws, who adopted him, and their son Hindley. Hareton does not inherit Hindley’s drunkenness or his cruelty. It is not through any physical consequence of his father’s vices that Hareton suffers. Linton is in no physical sense the son of Heathcliff. If Catherine Linton inherits something of Catherine Earnshaw’s charm and temper, it is because the younger Catherine belongs to another world; she is an inferior and more physical creature. She has nothing in her of Catherine Earnshaw’s mutinous passion, the immortal and unearthly passion which made that Catherine alive and killed her. Catherine Linton’s “little romance” is altogether another affair.
The world of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a world of spiritual affinities, of spiritual contacts and recoils where love begets and bears love, and hate is begotten of hate and born of shame. Even Linton Heathcliff, that “whey-faced, whining wretch”, that physical degenerate, demonstrates the higher law. His weakness is begotten by his father’s loathing on his mother’s terror.
Never was a book written with a more sublime ignoring of the physical. You only get a taste of it once in Isabella’s unwholesome love for Heathcliff; that is not passion, it is sentiment, and it is thoroughly impure. And you get a far-off vision of it again in Isabella’s fear of Heathcliff. Heathcliff understood her. He says of her, “‘No brutality disgusted her…. I’ve sometimes relented, from pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what she could endure and still creep shamefully back.’” This civilized creature is nearer to the animals, there is more of the earth in her than in Catherine or in Heathcliff. They are elemental beings, if you like, but their element is fire. They are clean, as all fiery, elemental things are clean.
True, their love found violent physical expression; so that M. Maeterlinck can say of them and their creator: “We feel that one must have lived for thirty years under chains of burning kisses to learn what she has learned; to dare so confidently set forth, with such minuteness, such unerring certainty, the delirium of those two lovers of Wuthering Heights; to mark the self-conflicting movements of the tenderness that would make suffer, and the cruelty that would make glad, the felicity that prayed for death, and the despair that clung to life, the repulsion that desired, the desire drunk with repulsion—love surcharged with hatred, hatred staggering beneath its load of love.”A
True; but the passion that consumes Catherine and Heathcliff, that burns their bodies and destroys them, is nine-tenths a passion of the soul. It taught them nothing of the sad secrets of the body. Thus Catherine’s treachery to Heathcliff is an unconscious treachery. It is her innocence that makes it possible. She goes to Edgar Linton’s arms with blind eyes, in utter, childlike ignorance, not knowing what she does till it is done and she is punished for it. She is punished for the sin of sins, the sundering of the body from the soul. All her life after she sees her sin. She has taken her body, torn it apart and given it to Edgar Linton, and Heathcliff has her soul.
“‘You love Edgar Linton,’ Nelly Dean says, ‘and Edgar loves you … where is the obstacle?’
“‘Here! and here!’ replied Catherine, striking one hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast: ‘in whichever place the soul lives. In my soul and in my heart, I’m convinced I’m wrong.’… ‘I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there hadn’t brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him, and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.’”
Not only are they made of the same stuff, but Heathcliff is her soul.
“‘I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries … my great thought in living is himself…. Nelly! I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.’”
That is her “secret”.
Of course, there is Cathy’s other secret—her dream, which passes for Emily Brontë’s “pretty piece of Paganism”. But it is only one side of Emily Brontë. And it is only one side of Catherine Earnshaw. When Heathcliff turns from her for a moment in that last scene of passion, she says: “‘Oh, you see, Nelly, he would not relent a moment to keep me out of the grave. That is how I’m loved! Well, never mind. That is not my Heathcliff. I shall love mine yet; and take him with me: he’s in my soul. And,’ she added musingly, ‘the thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I’m tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it and in it. Nelly, you think you are better and more fortunate than I; in full health and strength; you are sorry for me—very soon that will be altered. I shall be sorry for you. I shall be incomparably above and beyond you all.’”
True, adoration of Earth, the All-Mother, runs like a choric hymn through all the tragedy. Earth is the mother and the nurse of these children. They are brought to her for their last bed, and she gives them the final consolation.
Yet, after all, the end of this wild northern tragedy is far enough from Earth, the All-Mother. The tumult of Wuthering Heights ceases when Heathcliff sickens. It sinks suddenly into the peace and silence of exhaustion. And the drama closes, not in hopeless gloom, the agony of damned souls, but in redemption, reconciliation.
Catherine, the child of Catherine and of Edgar Linton, loves Hareton, the child of Hindley Earnshaw. The evil spirit that possessed these two dies with the death of Heathcliff. The younger Catherine is a mixed creature, half-spiritualized by much suffering. Hareton is a splendid animal, unspiritualized and unredeemed. Catherine redeems him; and you gather that by that act of redemption, somehow, the souls of Catherine and Heathcliff are appeased.
The whole tremendous art of the book is in this wringing of strange and terrible harmony out of raging discord. It ends on a sliding cadence, soft as a sigh of peace only just conscious after pain.
“I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey and half-buried in heath; Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff’s still bare.
“I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”
But that is not the real end, any more than Lockwood’s arrival at Wuthering Heights is the beginning. It is only Lockwood recovering himself; the natural man’s drawing breath after the passing of the supernatural.
For it was not conceivable that the more than human love of Heathcliff and Catherine should cease with the dissolution of their bodies. It was not conceivable that Catherine, by merely dying in the fifteenth chapter, should pass out of the tale. As a matter of fact, she never does pass out of it. She is more in it than ever.
For the greater action of the tragedy is entirely on the invisible and immaterial plane; it is the pursuing, the hunting to death of an earthly creature by an unearthly passion. You are made aware of it at the very beginning when the ghost of the child Catherine is heard and felt by Lockwood; though it is Heathcliff that she haunts. It begins in the hour after Catherine’s death, upon Heathcliff’s passionate invocation: “‘Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest so long as I am living! You said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unbearable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!’”
It begins and is continued through eighteen years. He cannot see her, but he is aware of her. He is first aware on the evening of the day she is buried. He goes to the graveyard and breaks open the new-made grave, saying to himself, “‘I’ll have her in my arms again! If she be cold, I’ll think it is the north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, it is sleep.’” A sighing, twice repeated, stops him. “‘I appeared to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind. I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by; but as certainly as you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, though it cannot be discerned, so certainly I felt Cathy was there; not under me, but on the earth…. Her presence was with me; it remained while I refilled the grave, and led me home.’”
But she cannot get through to him completely, because of the fleshly body that he wears.
He goes up to his room, his room and hers. “‘I looked round impatiently—I felt her by me—I could almost see her, and yet I could not!… She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to me! And since then, sometimes more and sometimes less, I’ve been the sport of that intolerable torture!… When I sat in the house with Hareton, it seemed that on going out I should meet her; when I walked on the moors I should meet her coming in. When I went from home, I hastened to return; she must be somewhere at the Heights, I was certain! And when I slept in her chamber—I was beaten out of that. I couldn’t lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was either outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a child; and I must open my lids to see. And so I opened and closed them a hundred times a night—to be always disappointed! It racked me!… It was a strange way of killing: not by inches, but by fractions of hair-breadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eighteen years!’”
In all Catherine’s appearances you feel the impulse towards satisfaction of a soul frustrated of its passion, avenging itself on the body that betrayed it. It has killed Catherine’s body. It will kill Heathcliff’s; for it must get through to him. And he knows it.
Heathcliff’s brutalities, his cruelties, the long-drawn accomplishment of his revenge, are subordinate to this supreme inner drama, this wearing down of the flesh by the lust of a remorseless spirit.
Here are the last scenes of the final act. Heathcliff is failing. “‘Nelly,’ he says, ‘there’s a strange change approaching: I’m in its shadow at present. I take so little interest in my daily life, that I hardly remember to eat or drink. Those two who have left the room’” (Catherine Linton and Hareton) “’are the only objects which retain a distinct material appearance to me…. Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed a personification of my youth, not a human being: I felt to him in such a variety of ways that it would have been impossible to have accosted him rationally. In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least: for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the flags? In every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day—I am devoured with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features—mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her.’…
“‘But what do you mean by a change, Mr. Heathcliff?’ I said, alarmed at his manner….
“‘I shall not know till it comes,’ he said, ‘I’m only half conscious of it now.’”
A few days pass. He grows more and more abstracted and detached. One morning Nelly Dean finds him downstairs, risen late.
“I put a basin of coffee before him. He drew it nearer, and then rested his arms on the table, and looked at the opposite wall, as I supposed, surveying one particular portion, up and down, with glittering, restless eyes, and with such eager interest that he stopped breathing during half a minute together….
“‘Mr. Heathcliff! master!’ I cried, ‘don’t, for God’s sake stare as if you saw an unearthly vision.’
“‘Don’t, for God’s sake, shout so loud,’ he replied. ‘Turn round, and tell me, are we by ourselves?’
“‘Of course,’ was my answer, ‘of course we are.’
“Still, I involuntarily obeyed him, as if I were not quite sure. With a sweep of his hand he cleared a space in front of the breakfast-things, and leant forward more at his ease.
“Now I perceived that he was not looking at the wall; for, when I regarded him alone, it seemed exactly that he gazed at something within two yards’ distance. And, whatever it was, it communicated, apparently, both pleasure and pain in exquisite extremes: at least the anguished, yet raptured, expression of his countenance suggested that idea. The fancied object was not fixed: either his eyes pursued it with unwearied diligence, and, even in speaking to me, were never weaned away. I vainly reminded him of his protracted abstinence from food: if he stirred to touch anything in compliance with my entreaties, if he stretched his hand out to get a piece of bread, his fingers clenched before they reached it, and remained on the table, forgetful of their aim.”
He cannot sleep; and at dawn of the next day he comes to the door of his room—Cathy’s room—and calls Nelly to him. She remonstrates with him for his neglect of his body’s health, and of his soul’s.
“‘Your cheeks are hollow, and your eyes bloodshot, like a person starving with hunger, and going blind with loss of sleep.’
“‘It is not my fault that I cannot eat or rest,’ he said…. ‘I’ll do both as soon as I possibly can … as to repenting of my injustices, I’ve done no injustice, and I repent of nothing. I am too happy; and yet I’m not happy enough. My soul’s bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself.’” … “In the afternoon, while Joseph and Hareton were at their work, he came into the kitchen again, and, with a wild look, bid me come and sit in the house: he wanted somebody with him. I declined; telling him plainly that his strange talk and manner frightened me, and I had neither the nerve nor the will to be his companion alone.
“‘I believe you think me a fiend,’ he said, with his dismal laugh: ‘something too horrible to live under a decent roof.’ Then, turning to Catherine, who was there, and who drew behind me at his approach, he added, half sneeringly: ‘Will you come, chuck? I’ll not hurt you. No! to you I’ve made myself worse than the devil. Well, there is one who won’t shrink from my company! By God! she’s relentless. Oh, damn it! It’s unutterably too much for flesh and blood to bear—even mine.’”
It is Heathcliff’s susceptibility to this immaterial passion, the fury with which he at once sustains and is consumed by it, that makes him splendid.
Peace under green grass could never be the end of Heathcliff or of such a tragedy as Wuthering Heights. Its real end is the tale told by the shepherd whom Lockwood meets on the moor.
“‘I was going to the Grange one evening—a dark evening, threatening thunder—and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and I supposed the lambs were skittish and would not be guided.
“‘What is the matter, my little man?’ I asked.
“‘There’s Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under t’ Nab,’ he blubbered, ‘un’ I darnut pass ‘em.’”
It is there, the end, in one line, charged with the vibration of the supernatural. One line that carries the suggestion of I know not what ghostly and immaterial passion and its unearthly satisfaction.
And this book stands alone, absolutely self-begotten and self-born. It belongs to no school; it follows no tendency. You cannot put it into any category. It is not “Realism”, it is not “Romance”, any more than Jane Eyre: and if any other master’s method, De Maupassant’s or Turgeniev’s, is to be the test, it will not stand it. There is nothing in it you can seize and name. You will not find in it support for any creed or theory. The redemption of Catherine Linton and Hareton is thrown in by the way in sheer opulence of imagination. It is not insisted on. Redemption is not the keynote of Wuthering Heights. The moral problem never entered into Emily Brontë’s head. You may call her what you will—Pagan, pantheist, transcendentalist mystic and worshipper of earth, she slips from all your formulas. She reveals a point of view above good and evil. Hers is an attitude of tolerance that is only not tenderness because her acceptance of life and of all that lives is unqualified and unstinting. It is too lucid and too high for pity.
Heathcliff and Catherine exist. They justify their existence by their passion. But if you ask what is to be said for such a creature as Linton Heathcliff, you will be told that he does not justify his existence; his existence justifies him.
Do I despise the timid deer,
Because his limbs are fleet with fear?
Or, would I mock the wolf’s death-howl,
Because his form is gaunt and foul?
Or, hear with joy the lev’ret’s cry,
Because it cannot bravely die?
No! Then above his memory
Let Pity’s heart as tender be.
After all it is pity; it is tenderness.
And if Emily Brontë stands alone and is at her greatest in the things that none but she can do, she is great also in some that she may be said to share with other novelists; the drawing of minor characters, for instance. Lockwood may be a little indistinct, but he is properly so, for he is not a character, he is a mere impersonal looker-on. But Nelly Dean, the chief teller of the story, preserves her rich individuality through all the tortuous windings of the tale. Joseph, the old farm-servant, the bitter, ranting Calvinist, is a masterpiece. And masterly was that inspiration that made Joseph chorus to a drama that moves above good and evil. “‘Thank Hivin for all!’” says Joseph. “‘All warks togither for gooid, to them as is chozzen and piked out fro’ the rubbidge. Yah knaw whet t’ Scripture sez.’” “‘It’s a blazing shame, that I cannot oppen t’ blessed Book, but yah set up them glories to Sattan, and all t’ flaysome wickednesses that iver were born into the warld.’”
Charlotte Brontë said of her sister: “Though her feeling for the people round her was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced … 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.” And yet you might have said she had been listening to Joseph all her life, such is her command of his copious utterance: “‘Ech! ech!’ exclaimed Joseph. ‘Weel done, Miss Cathy! weel done, Miss Cathy! Howsiver, t’ maister sall just tum’le o’er them brocken pots; un’ then we’s hear summut; we’s hear how it’s to be. Gooid-for-naught madling! ye desarve pining fro’ this to Churstmas, flinging t’ precious gifts o’ God under fooit i’ yer flaysome rages! But I’m mista’en if ye shew yer sperrit lang. Will Hathecliff bide sich bonny ways, think ye? I nobbut wish he may catch ye i’ that plisky. I nobbut wish he may.’”
Edgar Linton is weak in drawing and in colour; but it was well-nigh impossible to make him more alive beside Catherine and Heathcliff. If Emily’s hand fails in Edgar Linton it gains strength again in Isabella. These two are the types of the civilized, the over-refined, the delicate wearers of silk and velvet, dwellers in drawing-rooms with pure white ceilings bordered with gold, “with showers of glass-drops hanging in silver chains from the centre”. They, as surely as the tainted Hindley, are bound to perish in any struggle with strong, fierce, primeval flesh and blood. The fatal moment in the tale is where the two half-savage children, Catherine and Heathcliff, come to Thrushcross Grange. Thrushcross Grange, with all its sickly brood, is doomed to go down before Wuthering Heights. But Thrushcross Grange is fatal to Catherine too. She has gone far from reality when she is dazzled by the glittering glass-drops and the illusion of Thrushcross Grange. She has divorced her body from her soul for a little finer living, for a polished, a scrupulously clean, perfectly presentable husband.
Emily Brontë shows an unerring psychology in her handling of the relations between Isabella and Catherine. It is Isabella’s morbid passion for Heathcliff that wakes the devil in Catherine. Isabella is a sentimentalist, and she is convinced that Heathcliff would love her if Catherine would “let him”. She refuses to believe that Heathcliff is what he is. But Catherine, who is Heathcliff, can afford to accuse him. “‘Nelly,’” she says, “‘help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is…. He’s not a rough diamond—a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic; he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.’” But Isabella will not believe it. “‘Mr. Heathcliff is not a fiend,’” she says; “‘he has an honourable soul, and a true one, or how could he remember her?’” It is the same insight that made George Meredith represent Juliana, the sentimental passionist, as declaring her belief in Evan Harrington’s innocence while Rose Jocelyn, whose love is more spiritual and therefore more profoundly loyal, doubts. Emily Brontë, like George Meredith, saw a sensualist in every sentimentalist; and Isabella Linton was a little animal under her silken skin. She is ready to go to her end quand même, whatever Heathcliff is, but she tricks herself into believing that he is what he is not, that her sensualism may justify itself to her refinement. That is partly why Heathcliff, who is no sensualist, hates and loathes Isabella and her body.
But there are moments when he also hates the body of Catherine that betrayed her. Emily Brontë is unswerving in her drawing of Heathcliff. It is of a piece with his strangeness, his unexpectedness, that he does not hate Edgar Linton with anything like the same intensity of hatred that he has for Isabella. And it is of a piece with his absolute fiery cleanness that never for a moment does he think of taking the lover’s obvious revenge. For it is not, I imagine, that Emily Brontë deliberately shirked the issue, or deliberately rejected it; it is that that issue never entered her head. Nor do I see here, in his abandonment of the obvious, any proof of the childlikeness and innocence of Emily, however childlike and innocent she may have been. I see only a tremendous artistic uprightness, the rejection, conscious or unconscious, of an unfitting because extraneous element. Anne, who was ten times more childlike and innocent than Emily, tackles this peculiar obviousness unashamed, because she needed it. And because she did not need it, Emily let it go.
The evil wrought by Heathcliff, like the passion that inspired and tortured him, is an unearthly thing. Charlotte showed insight when she said in her preface to Wuthering Heights: “Heathcliff betrays one solitary human feeling, and that is not his love for Catherine; which is a sentiment fierce and inhuman … 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.” But that Heathcliff is wholly inhuman—“a ghoul, an afreet”—I cannot really see. Emily’s psychology here is perforce half on the unearthly plane; it is above our criticism, lending itself to no ordinary tests. But for all his unearthliness, Heathcliff is poignantly human, from his childhood when he implored Nelly Dean to make him “decent”, for he is “going to be good”, to his last hour of piteous dependence on her. You are not allowed for a moment to forget, that, horrible and vindictive as he is, the child Heathcliff is yet a child. Take the scene where the boy first conceives his vengeance.
“On my inquiring the subject of his thoughts, he answered gravely:
“‘I’m trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don’t care how long I wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before I do!’
“‘For shame, Heathcliff!’ said I. ‘It is for God to punish wicked people. We should learn to forgive.’
“‘No, God won’t have the satisfaction that I shall,’ he returned. ‘I only wish I knew the best way! Let me alone, and I’ll plan it out: while I’m thinking of that I don’t feel pain.’”
It is very like Heathcliff. It is also pathetically like a child.
In Hareton Earnshaw Emily Brontë is fairly on the earth all the time, and nothing could be finer than her handling of this half-brutalized, and wholly undeveloped thing, her showing of the slow dawn of his feelings and intelligence. Her psychology is never psychologic. The creature reveals himself at each moment of his unfolding for what he is. It was difficult; for in his degradation he had a certain likeness in unlikeness to the degraded Heathcliff. It was Heathcliff’s indomitable will that raised him. Hareton cannot rise without a woman’s hand to help him. The younger Catherine again was difficult, because of her likeness to her mother. Her temper, her vanity, her headstrong trickiness are Catherine Earnshaw. But Catherine Linton is a healthy animal, incapable of superhuman passion, capable only (when properly chastened by adversity) of quite ordinary pity and devotion. She inspires bewilderment, but terror and fascination never; and never the glamour, the magic evoked by the very name of Catherine Earnshaw. Her escapades and fantasies, recalling Catherine Earnshaw, are all on an attenuated scale.
Yet Catherine Earnshaw seems now and then a less solid figure. That is because her strength does not lie in solidity at all. She is a thing of flame and rushing wind. One half of her is akin to the storms of Wuthering Heights, the other belongs to her unseen abiding-place. Both sides of her are immortal.
And they are of that immortality which is the spirit of place—the spirit that, more than all spirits, inspired Emily Brontë. Two of Charlotte’s books, The Professor and Villette, might have been written away from Haworth; Emily’s owes much of its outward character to the moors, where it was brought forth. Not even Charlotte could paint, could suggest scenes like Emily Brontë. There is nobody to compare with her but Thomas Hardy; and even he has to labour more, to put in more strokes to achieve his effect. In four lines she gives the storm, the cold and savage foreground, and the distance of the Heights: “One may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns, all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun.”
See the finish of this landscape, framed in a window: “They sat together in a window whose lattice lay back against the wall, and displayed, beyond the garden trees and the wild green park, the valley of Gimmerton, with a long line of mist winding nearly to its top (for very soon after you pass the chapel, as you may have noticed, the sough that runs from the marshes joins a beck which follows the bend of the glen). Wuthering Heights rose above this silvery vapour; but our old house was invisible; it rather dips down on the other side.”
In six lines she can paint sound, and distance, and scenery, and the turn of the seasons, and the two magics of two atmospheres. “Gimmerton chapel bells were still ringing; and the full, mellow flow of the beck in the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet substitute for the yet absent murmur of the summer foliage, which drowned that music about the Grange when the trees were in leaf. At Wuthering Heights it always sounded on quiet days following a great thaw or a season of steady rain.”
That music is the prelude to Heathcliff’s return, and to the passionate scene that ends in Catherine’s death.
And nothing could be more vivid, more concrete, than Emily Brontë’s method. Time is marked as a shepherd on the moors might mark it, by the movement of the sun, the moon, and the stars; by weather, and the passage of the seasons. Passions, emotions, are always presented in bodily symbols, by means of the bodily acts and violences they inspire. The passing of the invisible is made known in the same manner. And the visible world moves and shines and darkens with an absolute illusion of reality. Here is a road seen between sunset and moonrise: “… all that remained of day was a beamless amber light along the west: but I could see every pebble on the path, and every blade of grass, by the light of that splendid moon”.
The book has faults, many and glaring faults. You have to read it many times before you can realize in the mass its amazing qualities. For it is probably the worst-constructed tale that ever was written, this story of two houses and of three generations that the man Lockwood is supposed to tell. Not only has Lockwood to tell of things he could not possibly have heard and seen, but sometimes you get scene within vivid scene, dialogue within dialogue, and tale within tale, four deep. Sometimes you are carried back in a time and sometimes forward. You have to think hard before you know for certain whose wife Catherine Heathcliff really is. You cannot get over Lockwood’s original mistake. And this poor device of narrative at second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand, is used to convey things incredible, inconceivable; all the secret, invisible drama of the souls of Catherine and Heathcliff, as well as whole acts of the most visible, the most tangible, the most direct and vivid and tumultuous drama; drama so tumultuous, so vivid, and so direct, that by no possibility could it have been conveyed by any medium. It simply happens.
And that is how Emily Brontë’s genius triumphs over all her faults. It is not only that you forgive her faults and forget them, you are not—in the third reading anyhow—aware of them. They disappear, they are destroyed, they are burnt up in her flame, and you wonder how you ever saw them. All her clumsy contrivances cannot stay her course, or obscure her light, or quench her fire. Things happen before your eyes, and it does not matter whether Lockwood, or Nelly Dean, or Heathcliff, or Catherine, tells you of their happening.
And yet, though Lockwood and Nelly Dean are the thinnest, the most transparent of pure mediums, they preserve their personalities throughout. Nelly especially. The tale only begins to move when Lockwood drops out and Nelly takes it up. At that point Emily Brontë’s style becomes assured in its directness and simplicity, and thenceforward it never falters or changes its essential character.
And it is there, first of all, in that unfaltering, unchanging quality of style that she stands so far above her sister. She has no purple patches, no decorative effects. No dubiously shining rhetoric is hers. She does not deal in metaphors or in those ponderous abstractions, those dreadful second-hand symbolic figures—Hope, Imagination, Memory, and the rest of them, that move with every appearance of solidity in Charlotte’s pages. There are no angels in her rainbows. Her “grand style” goes unclothed, perfect in its naked strength, its naked beauty. It is not possible to praise Charlotte’s style without reservations; it is not always possible to give passages that illustrate her qualities without suppressing her defects. What was a pernicious habit with Charlotte, her use of words like “peruse”, “indite”, “retain”, with Emily is a mere slip of the pen. There are only, I think, three of such slips in Wuthering Heights. Charlotte was capable of mixing her worst things with her best. She mixed them most in her dialogue, where sins of style are sinfullest. It is not always possible to give a scene, word for word, from Charlotte’s novels; the dramatic illusion, the illusion of reality, is best preserved by formidable cutting.
But not only was Emily’s style sinless; it is on the whole purest, most natural, and most inevitable in her dialogue; and that, although the passions she conceived were so tremendous, so unearthly, that she might have been pardoned if she found no human speech to render them.
What is more, her dramatic instinct never fails her as it fails Charlotte over and over again. Charlotte had not always the mastery and self-mastery that, having worked a situation up to its dramatic climax, leaves it there. A certain obscure feeling for rightness guides her in the large, striding movement of the drama; it is in the handling of the scenes that she collapses. She wanders from climax to climax; she goes back on her own trail; she ruins her best effects by repetition. She has no continuous dramatic instinct; no sense whatever of dramatic form.
These are present somehow in Wuthering Heights, in spite of its monstrous formlessness. Emily may have had no more sense of form for form’s sake than Charlotte; she may have had no more dramatic instinct; but she had an instinct for the ways of human passion. She knew that passion runs its course, from its excitement to its climax and exhaustion. It has a natural beginning and a natural end. And so her scenes of passion follow nature. She never goes back on her effect, never urges passion past its climax, or stirs it in its exhaustion. In this she is a greater “realist” than Charlotte.
It is incredible that Wuthering Heights, or any line of it, any line that Emily Brontë ever wrote, should have passed for Charlotte’s. She did things that Charlotte could never have done if she tried a thousand years, things not only incomparably greater, but unique.
Yet in her lifetime she was unrecognized. What is true of her prose is true also of her poems. They, indeed, did bring her a little praise, obscure and momentary. No less she was unrecognized to such an extent that Wuthering Heights was said and believed to be an immature work of Charlotte’s. Even after her death, her eulogist, Sydney Dobell, was so far from recognizing her, that he seems to have had a lingering doubt as to Ellis Bell’s identity until Charlotte convinced him of his error.
And only the other day a bold attempt was made to tear from Emily Brontë the glory that she has won at last from time. The very latest theory,A offered to the world as a marvellous discovery, the fruit of passionate enthusiasm and research, is the old, old theory that Charlotte, and not Emily, wrote Wuthering Heights. And Sydney Dobell, with his little error, is made to serve as a witness. In order to make out a case for Charlotte, the enthusiast and researcher is obliged to disparage every other work of Emily’s. He leans rashly enough on the assumption that her “Gondal Chronicles” were, in their puerility, beneath contempt, still more rashly on his own opinion that she was no poet.
If this were the only line he took, this amusing theorist might be left alone. The publication of the Complete Poems settles him. The value, the really priceless value, of his undertaking is in the long array of parallel passages from the prose of Charlotte and of Emily with which he endeavours to support it. For, so far from supporting it, these columns are the most convincing, the most direct and palpable refutation of his theory. If any uncritical reader should desire to see for himself wherein Charlotte and Emily Brontë differed; in what manner, with what incompatible qualities and to what an immeasurable degree the younger sister was pre-eminent, he cannot do better than study those parallel passages. If ever there was a voice, a quality, an air absolutely apart and distinct, not to be approached by, or confounded with any other, it is Emily Brontë’s.
It was the glare of Charlotte’s fame that caused in her lifetime that blindness and confusion. And Emily, between pride and a superb indifference, suffered it. She withdrew, with what seemed an obstinate perversity, into her own magnificent obscurity. She never raised a hand to help herself. She left no record, not a note or a word to prove her authorship of Wuthering Heights. Until the appearance in 1910 of her Complete Poems the world had no proof of it but Charlotte’s statement. It was considered enough, in Charlotte’s lifetime. The world accepted her disclaimer.
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.
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 Brontë 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.
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 impressionist, of the Brontës needs is to recover, before all things, the innocence of the eye. No doubt we all of us had it once, and can remember more or less what it was like. To those who have lost it I would say: Go back and read again Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë.
Years and years ago, when I was a child, hunting forlornly in my father’s bookshelves, I came upon a small, shabby volume, bound in yellow linen. The title-page was adorned with one bad wood-cut that showed a grim, plain house standing obliquely to a churchyard packed with tombstones—tombstones upright and flat, and slanting at all angles. In the foreground was a haycock, where the grave grass had been mown. I do not know how the artist, whose resources were of the slenderest, contrived to get his overwhelming but fascinating effect of moorland solitude, of black-grey nakedness and abiding gloom. But he certainly got it and gave it. There was one other picture, representing a memorial tablet.
Tombstones always fascinated me in those days, because I was mortally afraid of them; and I opened that book and read it through.
I could not, in fact, put it down. For the first time I was in the grip of a reality more poignant than any that I had yet known, of a tragedy that I could hardly bear. I suppose I have read that book a score of times since then. There are pages in it that I shrink from approaching even now, because of the agony of realization they revive. The passing bell tolled continually in the prelude; it sounded at intervals throughout; it tolled again at the close. The refrain of “Here lie the Remains” haunted me like a dolorous song. It seemed to me a decorous and stately accompaniment to such a tale, and that wood-cut on the title-page a fitting ornament. I knew every corner of that house. I have an impression (it is probably a wrong one) of a flagged path going right down from the Parsonage door through another door and plunging among the tombs. I saw six little white and wistful faces looking out of an upper window; I saw six little children going up and up a lane, and I wondered how the tiny feet of babies ever got so far. I saw six little Brontë babies lost in the spaces of the illimitable moors. They went over rough stones and walls and mountain torrents; their absurd petticoats were blown upwards by the wind, and their feet were tangled in the heather. They struggled and struggled, and yet were in an ecstasy that I could well understand.
I remember I lingered somewhat long over the schooldays at Cowan Bridge and that I found the Brussels period dull; M. Héger struck me as a tiresome pedant, and I wondered how Charlotte could ever have put up with him. There was a great deal about Branwell that I could not understand at all, and so forgot. And I skipped all the London part, and Charlotte’s literary letters. I had a very vague idea of Charlotte apart from Haworth and the moors, from the Parsonage and the tombstones, from Tabby and Martha and the little black cat that died, from the garden where she picked the currants, and the quiet rooms where she wrote her wonderful, wonderful books.
But, for all that skipping and forgetting, there stood out a vivid and ineffaceable idea of Emily; Emily who was tall and strong and unconquerable; Emily who loved animals, and loved the moors; Emily and Keeper, that marvellous dog; Emily kneading bread with her book propped before her; Emily who was Ellis Bell, listening contemptuously to the reviews of Wuthering Heights; Emily stitching at the long seam with dying fingers; and Emily dead, carried down the long, flagged path, with Keeper following in the mourners’ train.
And, all through, an invisible, intangible presence, something mysterious, but omnipotently alive; something that excited these three sisters; something that atoned, that not only consoled for suffering and solitude and bereavement, but that drew its strength from these things; something that moved in this book like the soul of it; something that they called “genius”.
Now that, as truly as I can set it down, is the impression conveyed to a child’s mind by Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë. And making some deductions for a child’s morbid attraction to tombstones, and a child’s natural interest in children, it seems to me even now that this innocent impression is the true one. It eliminates the inessential and preserves the proportions; above all, it preserves the figure of Emily Brontë, solitary and unique.
Anyhow, I have never been able to get away from it.
September 1911.
Notes
A “St. John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul.”
Translated by Arthur Symons in vol. ii. of his Collected Poems.
A Madame Duclaux assigns to these verses a much later date—the year of Emily Brontë’s exile in Brussels. Sir William Robertson Nicoll also considers that “the ‘alien firelight’ suits Brussels better than the Yorkshire hearth of ‘good, kind’ Miss Wooler”. To me the schoolroom of the Pensionnat suggests an “alien” stove, and not the light of any fire at all.
A Complete Works of Emily Brontë. Vol. I.—Poetry. (Messrs.
Hodder and Stoughton, 1910.)
A Published among Charlotte Brontë’s posthumous “Selections” in 1850.
B I have removed the title from the preceding fragment to the ballad to which it obviously belongs.
A Wisdom and Destiny, translated by Alfred Sutro.
A The Key to the Brontë Works, by J. Malham-Dembleby. See
Appendix I.
A The curious will find a note on this point in Appendix II.
A It was Miss Wooler who taught Charlotte to “peruse”.