Now in the first three chapters of _Villette_, Charlotte Brontë
concentrated all her strength and all her art on the portrait of little
Polly. The portrait of little Polly is drawn with the most delicate care
and tender comprehension, and the most vivid and entire reality. I
cannot agree with Mr. Swinburne that George Eliot, with her Totty and
Eppie and Lillo, showed a closer observation of the ways, or a more
perfect understanding of the heart of a child. Only little Maggie
Tulliver can stand beside little Polly in _Villette_. She is an answer
to every critic, from Mr. Swinburne downwards, who maintains that
Charlotte Brontë could not draw children.
But Lucy at fourteen is drawn with slight and grudging strokes,
sufficient for the minor part she is evidently to play. Lucy at Bretton
is a mere foil to little Polly. Charlotte Brontë distinctly stated in
her letters that she did not care for Miss Snowe. "Lucy must not marry
Dr. John; he is far too youthful, handsome, bright-spirited, and
sweet-tempered; he is a 'curled darling' of Nature and of fortune, and
must draw a prize in life's lottery. His wife must be young, rich,
pretty; he must be made very happy indeed. If Lucy marries anybody, it
must be the Professor--a man in whom there is much to forgive, much to
'put up with'. But I am not leniently disposed towards Miss Frost: from
the beginning I never meant to appoint her lines in pleasant places."
"As to the character of Lucy Snowe, my intention from the first was that
she should not occupy the pedestal to which Jane Eyre was raised by some
injudicious admirers. She is where I meant her to be, and where no
charge of self-laudation can touch her."
But Lucy is _not_ altogether where she was meant to be. When she
reappears at the Pensionnat it is with "flame in her soul and lightning
in her eyes". She reminds M. Paul "of a young she wild creature, new
caught, untamed, viewing with a mixture of fire and fear the first
entrance of the breaker-in".
"'You look,' said he, 'like one who would snatch at a draught of sweet
poison, and spurn wholesome bitters with disgust.'"
There is no inconsistency in this. Women before now have hidden a soul
like a furnace under coldness and unpleasantness, and smothered
shrieking nerves under an appearance of apathy. Lucy Snowe is one of
them. As far as she goes, Lucy at Bretton is profoundly consistent with
Lucy in _Villette_. It is not Lucy's volcanic outbreaks in the
Pensionnat that do violence to her creator's original intention. It is
the debasement of Polly and the exaltation of Lucy to her tragic rôle,
the endowment of Lucy with Polly's rarest qualities, to the utter
impoverishment of Pauline de Bassompierre. Polly in _Villette_ is a mere
foil to Lucy.
Having lavished such care and love on Polly, Charlotte Brontë could not
possibly have meant to debase her and efface her. How then did it happen
that Polly was debased and Lucy sublimely exalted?
It happened, I think, partly because for the first time Charlotte Brontë
created a real living man. The reality of M. Paul Emanuel was too
strong both for Lucy and for Charlotte Brontë. From the moment when he
seized her and dragged her to the garret he made Lucy live as Charlotte
Brontë had never contemplated her living. He made her live to the utter
exclusion and extinction of Pauline de Bassompierre.
And "the despotic little man" dominates the book to an extent that
Charlotte never contemplated either. Until the storm carried him out of
her sight, she was, I think, unaware of his dominion. Dr. John was her
hero. She told Mr. George Smith, his prototype, that she intended him
for the most beautiful character in the book (which must have been very
gratifying to Mr. George Smith). He was the type she needed for her
purpose. But he does not "come off", if only for the reason that she is
consciously preoccupied with him. Dr. John was far more of an obsession
to her than this little man, Paul Emanuel, who was good enough for Lucy
Snowe. Pauline de Bassompierre was to be finished and perfected to match
the high finish and perfection of Dr. John. Yet neither Pauline nor Dr.
John "came off". Charlotte Brontë cared too much for them. But for Paul
Emanuel she did not care. He comes off in a triumph of the detached,
divinely free "Creative Impulse".
Charlotte, with all her schemes, is delivered over to her genius from
the moment when Lucy settles in Villette. To Charlotte's inexperience
Brussels was a perfect hotbed for the germs of the real. That, I think,
can be admitted without subscribing to the view that it was anything
more. Once in the Pensionnat, Lucy entered an atmosphere of the most
intense reality. From that point onward the book is literally inspired
by the sense of atmosphere, that sense to which experience brings the
stuff to work on. All Charlotte's experience and her suffering is there,
changed, intensified, transmuted to an experience and a suffering which
were not hers.
This matured sense of actuality is shown again in the drawing of the
minor characters. There is a certain vindictiveness about the portrait
of Ginevra Fanshawe, a touch of that fierce, intolerant temper that
caused Blanche Ingram to be strangled by the hands of her creator.
Ginevra is not strangled. She lives splendidly; she flourishes in an
opulence of detail.
Experience may have partly accounted for Ginevra. It could hardly have
accounted for the little de Hamel, and he is perfect as far as he goes.
It is because of this increasing mastery, this new power in handling
unsympathetic types, because, in short, of its all round excellence,
that _Villette_ must count as Charlotte Brontë's masterpiece. It is
marvellous that within such limits she should have attained such
comparative catholicity of vision. It is not the vast vision of
_Shirley_, prophetic and inspired, and a little ineffectual. It is the
lucid, sober, unobstructed gaze of a more accomplished artist, the
artist whose craving for "reality" is satisfied; the artist who is
gradually extending the limits of his art. When Charlotte Brontë wrote
_Jane Eyre_ she could not appreciate Jane Austen; she wondered why
George Henry Lewes liked her so much. She objected to Jane Austen
because there was no passion in her, and therefore no poetry and no
reality. When she wrote _Shirley_ she had seen that passion was not
everything; there were other things, very high realities, that were not
passion. By the time she wrote _Villette_ she saw, not only that there
are other things, but that passion is the rarest thing on earth. It does
not enter into the life of ordinary people like Dr. John, and Madame
Beck, and Ginevra Fanshawe.
In accordance with this tendency to level up, her style in _Villette_
attains a more even and a more certain excellence. Her flights are few;
so are her lapses. Her fearful tendency to rhetoric is almost gone. Gone
too are the purple patches; but there is everywhere delicate colour
under a vivid light. But there are countless passages which show the
perfection to which she could bring her old imaginative style. Take the
scene where Lucy, under the influence of opium, goes into Villette _en
fête_.
"The drug wrought. I know not whether Madame had over-charged or
under-charged the dose; its result was not that she intended. Instead of
stupor, came excitement. I became alive to new thought--to reverie
peculiar in colouring. A gathering call ran among the faculties, their
bugles sang, their trumpets rang an untimely summons....
"I took a route well known, and went up towards the palatial and royal
Haute-Ville; thence the music I heard certainly floated; it was hushed
now, but it might rewaken. I went on: neither band nor bell-music came
to meet me; another sound replaced it, a sound like a strong tide, a
great flow, deepening as I proceeded. Light broke, movement gathered,
chimes pealed--to what was I coming? Entering on the level of a Grande
Place, I found myself, with the suddenness of magic, plunged amidst a
gay, living, joyous crowd.
"Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the whole world seems
abroad; moonlight and heaven are banished: the town by her own
flambeaux, beholds her own splendour--gay dresses, grand equipage, fine
horses and gallant riders, throng the bright streets. I see even scores
of masks. It is a strange scene, stranger than dreams."
This is only beaten by that lyric passage that ends _Villette_; that
sonorous dirge that rings high above all pathos, which is somehow a song
of triumph, inspired by the whole power and splendour and magnificence
of storm and death.
"The sun passes the equinox; the days shorten, the leaves grow sere;
but--he is coming.
"Frosts appear at night; November has sent his fogs in advance; the wind
takes its autumn moan; but--he is coming.
"The skies hang full and dark--a rack sails from the west; the clouds
cast themselves into strange forms--arches and broad radiations; there
rise resplendent mornings--glorious, royal, purple, as monarch in his
state; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at
its thickest--so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. I know some
signs of the sky, I have noted them ever since childhood. God, watch
that sail! Oh, guard it!
"The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace, Banshee--'keening' at every
window! It will rise--it will swell--it shrieks out long: wander as I
may through the house this night, I cannot lull the blast. The advancing
hours make it strong; by midnight all sleepless watchers hear and fear a
wild south-west storm.
"That storm roared frenzied for seven days. It did not cease till the
Atlantic was strewn with wrecks: it did not lull till the deeps had
gorged their fill of substance. Not till the destroying angel of tempest
had achieved his perfect work, would he fold the wings whose waft was
thunder--the tremor of whose plumes was storm."
* * * * *
After _Villette_, the _Last Sketch_, the _Fragment of Emma_; that
fragment which Charlotte Brontë read to her husband not long before her
death. All he said was, "The critics will accuse you of repetition."
The critics have fulfilled his cautious prophecy. The _Fragment_ passed
for one of those sad things of which the least said the better. It was
settled that Charlotte Brontë had written herself out, that if she had
lived she would have become more and more her own plagiarist. There is a
middle-aged lady in _Emma_, presumably conceived on the lines of Mrs.
Fairfax and Mrs. Pryor. There is a girls' school, which is only not
Lowood because it is so obviously Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor. There is a
schoolmistress with sandy hair and thin lips and a cold blue eye,
recalling Madame Beck, though there the likeness ceases. And in that
school, ill-treated by that schoolmistress, there is a little ugly,
suffering, deserted child.
All this looks very much like repetition. But it does not shake my
private belief that _Emma_ is a fragment of what would have been as
great a novel as _Villette_. There are indications. There is Mr. Ellin,
who proves that Charlotte Brontë could create a live man of the finer
sort, an unexploited masculine type with no earthly resemblance to
Rochester or to Louis Moore or M. Paul. He is an unfinished sketch
rather than a portrait, but a sketch that would not too shamefully have
discredited Mr. Henry James. For there is a most modern fineness and
subtlety in _Emma_; and, for all its sketchy incompleteness, a peculiar
certainty of touch, an infallible sense of the significant action, the
revealing gesture. With a splendid economy of means, scenes, passages,
phrases, apparently slight, are charged with the most intense
psychological suggestion. When Mr. Ellin, summoned on urgent business by
Miss Wilcox, takes that preposterously long and leisurely round to get
to her, you know what is passing in the mind of Mr. Ellin as well as if
you had been told. In that brief scene between Mr. Ellin and the
schoolmistress, you know as well as if you had been told, that Miss
Wilcox has lost Mr. Ellin because of her unkindness to a child. When the
child, Matilda Fitzgibbon, falls senseless, and Mr. Ellin gives his
inarticulate cry and lifts her from the floor, the enigmatic man has
revealed his innermost nature.
Now a fragment that can suggest all this with the smallest possible
expenditure of phrases, is not a fragment that can be set aside. It is
slight; but slightness that accomplishes so much is a sign of progress
rather than of falling-off. We shall never know what happened to Matilda
when Mr. Ellin took her from Miss Wilcox. We shall never know what
happened to Mr. Ellin; but I confess that I am dying to know, and that I
find it hard to forgive Mr. Nicholls for having killed them, so certain
am I that they would have lived triumphantly if Charlotte Brontë had not
married him.
Some of us will be profoundly indifferent to this issue; for Charlotte
Brontë has no following in a certain school. She defies analysis. You
cannot label her. What she has done is not "Realism", neither is it
"Romance". She displeases both by her ambiguity and by her lack of form.
She has no infallible dramatic instinct. Even in _Villette_ she
preserves some of her clumsiness, her crudity, her improbability. The
progress of "the Novel" in our day is towards a perfection of form and a
reality she never knew.
But "reality" is a large term; and, as for form, _who_ cared about it in
the fifties? As for improbability--as M. Dimnet says--she is not more
improbable than Balzac.
And all these things, the ambiguity, the formlessness and the rest, she
was gradually correcting as she advanced. It is impossible to exaggerate
the importance and significance of her attainment in _Villette_; there
has been so much confused thinking in the consecrated judgment of that
novel. _Villette_ owes its high place largely to its superior
construction and technique; largely and primarily to Charlotte Brontë's
progress towards the light, towards the world, towards the great
undecorated reality. It is odd criticism that ignores the inevitable
growth, the increasing vision and grasp, the whole indomitable advance
of a great writer, and credits "experience" with the final masterpiece.
As a result of this confusion _Villette_ has been judged "final" in
another sense. Yes, final--this novel that shows every sign and token of
long maturing, long-enduring power. If Charlotte Brontë's critics had
not hypnotized themselves by the perpetual reiteration of that word
"experience", it would have been impossible for them, with the evidence
of her work before them, to have believed that in _Villette_ she had
written herself out.
She was only just beginning.
* * * * *
Of Charlotte Brontë's _Poems_ there is not much to say. They are better
poems than Branwell's or Anne's, but that does not make them very good.
Still, they are interesting, and they are important, because they are
the bridge by which Charlotte Brontë passed into her own dominion. She
took Wordsworth with his Poems and Ballads for her guide, and he misled
her and delayed her on her way, and kept her a long time standing on her
bridge. For in her novels, and her novels only, Charlotte was a poet. In
her poems she is a novelist, striving and struggling for expression in a
cramped form, an imperfect and improper medium. But most indubitably a
novelist. Nearly all her poems which are not artificial are impersonal.
They deal with "situations", with "psychological problems", that cry
aloud for prose. There is the "Wife" who seems to have lived a long,
adventurous life with "William" through many poems; there is the
deserted wife and mother in "Mementos"; there is "Frances", the deserted
maiden; there is "Gilbert" with his guilty secret and his suicide, a
triple domestic tragedy in the three acts of a three-part ballad; there
is the lady in "Preference", who prefers her husband to her passionate
and profoundly deluded lover; there is the woman in "Apostasy", wrecked
in the conflict between love and priestcraft; and there is little else
beside. These poems are straws, showing the way of the wind that bloweth
where it listeth.
* * * * *
Too much has been written about Charlotte Brontë, and far too much has
been read. You come away from it with an enormous mass of printed stuff
wrecked in your memory, letters, simply hundreds of letters, legends and
theories huddled together in a heap, with all values and proportions
lost; and your impression is of tumult and of suffering, and of a
multitude of confused and incongruous happenings; funerals and
flirtations, or something very like flirtations, to the sound of the
passing bell and sexton's chisel; upheavals of soul, flights to and from
Brussels, interminable years of exile, and of lurid, tragic passion;
years, interminable, monotonous years of potato-peeling and all manner
of household piety; scenes of debauchery, horrors of opium and of drink;
celebrity, cataclysmal celebrity, rushings up to town in storm and
darkness, dim coffee-houses in Paternoster Row, dinner-parties; deaths,
funerals, melancholia; and still celebrity; years, interminable,
monotonous years of blazing celebrity, sounds of the literary workshop
overpowering the sexton's chisel; then marriage, sudden and swift; then
death. And in the midst of it all, one small and rather absurd and
obscure figure, tossed to and fro, said to be Charlotte Brontë.
What an existence!
This is the impression created by the bibliographical total. But sweep
four-fifths of it away, all the legends and half the letters, and sort
and set out what remains, observing values and proportions, and you get
an outer life where no great and moving event ever came, saving only
death (Charlotte's marriage hardly counts beside it); an outer life of a
strange and almost oppressive simplicity and silence; and an inner life,
tumultuous and profound in suffering, a life to all appearances
frustrate, where all nourishment of the emotions was reduced to the
barest allowance a woman's heart can depend on and yet live; and none
the less a life that out of that starvation diet raised enough of rich
and vivid and superb emotion to decorate a hundred women's lives; an
inner life which her genius fed and was fed from, for which no reality,
no experience, could touch its own intensity of realization. And, genius
apart, in the region of actual and ostensible emotion, no one of us can
measure the depth of her adoration of duty, or the depth, the force and
volume of her passion for her own people, and for the earth trodden by
their feet, the earth that covered them. Beside it every other feeling
was temporary and insignificant. In the light of it you see Charlotte
Brontë's figure for ever simple and beautiful and great; behind her for
ever the black-grey setting of her village and the purple of her moors.
That greatness and beauty and simplicity is destroyed by any effort to
detach her from her background. She may seem susceptible to the alien
influences of exile; but it is as an exile that she suffers; and her
most inspired moments are her moments of return, when she wrote prose
like this: "The moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale; as glad as if
she gave herself to his fierce caress with love. No Endymion will watch
for his goddess to-night: there are no flocks on the mountains."
* * * * *
Around the figure of Emily Brontë there is none of that clamour and
confusion. She stands apart in an enduring silence, and guards for ever
her secret and her mystery. By the mercy of heaven the swarm of gossips
and of theorists has passed her by. She has no legend or hardly any. So
completely has she been passed over that when Madame Duclaux came to
write the Life of Emily Brontë she found little to add to Mrs. Gaskell's
meagre record beyond that story, which she tells with an incomparable
simplicity and reticence, of Emily in her mortal illness, sitting by the
hearth, combing her long hair till the comb slips from her fingers.
That is worth all the reams, the terrible reams that have been written
about Charlotte.
There can be no doubt that Emily Brontë found her shelter behind
Charlotte's fame; but she was protected most of all by the
unapproachable, the unique and baffling quality of her temperament and
of her genius. Her own people seem to have felt it; Charlotte herself in
that preface to _Wuthering Heights_, which stands as her last
vindication and eulogy of her dead sister, even Charlotte betrays a
curious reservation and reluctance. You feel that Emily's genius
inspired her with a kind of sacred terror.
Charlotte destroyed all records of her sister except her poems. Between
six and seven hundred of her own letters have been published; there are
two of Emily's. They tell little or nothing. And there was that diary
she kept for Anne, where she notes with extreme brevity the things that
are happening in her family. There never was a diary wherein the soul of
the diarist was so well concealed.
And yet, because of this silence, this absence of legend and conjecture,
we see Emily Brontë more clearly than we can ever hope to see Charlotte
now. Though hardly anything is known of her, what _is_ known is
authentic; it comes straight from those who knew and loved her: from
Charlotte, from Ellen Nussey, from the servants at the Parsonage. Even
of her outward and visible presence we have a clearer image. The lines
are fewer, but they are more vivid. You see her tall and slender, in her
rough clothes, tramping the moors with the form and the step of a virile
adolescent. Shirley, the "_bête fauve_", is Emily civilized. You see her
head carried high and crowned with its long, dark hair, coiled simply,
caught up with a comb. You see her face, honey-pale, her slightly high,
slightly aquiline nose; her beautiful eyes, dark-grey, luminous; the
"kind, kindling, liquid eyes" that Ellen Nussey saw; and their look, one
moment alert, intent, and the next, inaccessibly remote.
I have seen such kind and kindling eyes in the face of a visionary, born
with a profound, incurable indifference to the material event; for whom
the Real is the incredible, unapparent harmony that flows above,
beneath, and within the gross flux of appearances. To him it is the sole
thing real. That kind and kindling look I know to be simply a light
reflected from the surface of the dream. It is anything but cold; it has
indeed a certain tender flame; but you would be profoundly mistaken if
you argued from it more than the faintest polite interest in you and
your affairs. The kindling of Emily Brontë's eyes I take to have had at
times something of the same unearthly quality. Strangers received from
her an impression as of a creature utterly removed from them; a
remoteness scarcely human, hard to reconcile with her known tenderness
for every living thing. She seems to have had a passionate repugnance to
alien and external contacts, and to have felt no more than an almost
reluctant liking for the lovable and charming Ellen Nussey. Indeed, she
regarded Charlotte's friend with the large and virile tolerance that
refuses to be charmed.
And yet in the depths of her virginal nature there was something
fiercely tender and maternal. There can be no doubt that she cared for
Charlotte, who called her "Mine own bonnie love"; but she would seem to
have cared far more for Anne who was young and helpless, and for
Branwell who was helpless and most weak.
Thus there is absolutely nothing known of Emily that destroys or
disturbs the image that Haworth holds of her; nothing that detaches her
for a moment from her own people, and from her own place. Her days of
exile count not at all in her thirty years of home. No separation ever
broke, for one hour that counted, the bonds that bound her to her moors,
or frustrated the divine passion of her communion with their earth and
sky. Better still, no tale of passion such as they tell of Charlotte was
ever told of Emily.
It may be told yet, for no secret thing belonging to this disastrous
family is sacred. There may be somewhere some awful worshipper of Emily
Brontë, impatient of her silence and unsatisfied with her strange, her
virgin and inaccessible beauty, who will some day make up a story of
some love-affair, some passion kindred to Catherine Earnshaw's passion
for Heathcliff, of which her moors have kept the secret; and he will
tell his tale. But we shall at least know that he had made it up. And
even so, it will have been better for that man if he had never been
born. He will have done his best to destroy or to deface the loveliness
of a figure unique in literature. And he will have ignored the one
perfect, the one essentially true picture of Emily Brontë, which is to
be found in Maurice Maeterlinck's _Wisdom and Destiny_.
To M. Maeterlinck she is the supreme instance of the self-sufficing
soul, independent and regardless of the material event. She shows the
emptiness, the impotence, the insignificance of all that we call
"experience," beside the spirit that endures. "Not a single event ever
paused as it passed by her threshold; yet did every event she could
claim take place in her heart, with incomparable force and beauty, with
matchless precision and detail. We say that nothing ever happened; but
did not all things really happen to her much more directly and tangibly
than with most of us, seeing that everything that took place about her,
everything that she saw or heard was transformed within her into
thoughts and feelings, into indulgent love, admiration, adoration of
life...?
"Of her happiness none can doubt. Not in the soul of the best of all
those whose happiness has lasted longest, been the most active,
diversified, perfect, could more imperishable harvest be found, than in
the soul Emily Brontë lays bare. If to her there came nothing of all
that passes in love, sorrow, passion or anguish, still did she possess
all that abides when emotion has faded away."[A]
[Footnote A: _Wisdom and Destiny_, translated by Alfred Sutro.]
What was true of Charlotte, that her inner life was luminous with
intense realization, was a hundred times more true of Emily. It was so
true that beside it nothing else that can be said is altogether true. It
is not necessary for a man to be convinced of the illusory nature of
time and of material happenings in order to appreciate Charlotte's
genius; but his comprehension of Emily's will be adequate or otherwise,
according to the passion and sincerity with which he embraces that idea.
And he must have, further, a sense of the reality behind the illusion.
It is through her undying sense of it that Emily Brontë is great. She
had none of the proud appearances of the metaphysical mind; she did not,
so far as we know, devour, like George Eliot, whole systems of
philosophy in her early youth. Her passionate pantheism was not derived;
it was established in her own soul. She was a mystic, not by religious
vocation, but by temperament and by ultimate vision. She offers the
apparent anomaly of extreme detachment and of an unconquerable love of
life.
It was the highest and the purest passion that you can well conceive.
For life gave her nothing in return. It treated her worse than it
treated Charlotte. She had none of the things that, after all, Charlotte
had; neither praise nor fame in her lifetime; nor friendship, nor love,
nor vision of love. All these things "passed her by with averted head";
and she stood in her inviolable serenity and watched them go, without
putting out her hand to one of them. You cannot surprise her in any
piteous gesture of desire or regret. And, unlike Charlotte, she made it
impossible for you to pity her.
It is this superb attitude to life, this independence of the material
event, this detachment from the stream of circumstance, that marks her
from her sister; for Charlotte is at moments pitifully immersed in the
stream of circumstance, pitifully dependent on the material event. It
is true that she kept her head above the stream, and that the failure of
the material event did not frustrate or hinder her ultimate achievement.
But Charlotte's was not by any means "a chainless soul". It struggled
and hankered after the unattainable. What she attained and realized she
realized and attained in her imagination only. She knew nothing of the
soul's more secret and intimate possession. And even her imagination
waited to some extent upon experience. When Charlotte wrote of passion,
of its tragic suffering, or of its ultimate appeasing, she, after all,
wrote of things that might have happened to her. But when Emily wrote of
passion, she wrote of a thing that, so far as she personally was
concerned, not only was not and had not been, but never could be. It was
true enough of Charlotte that she created. But of Emily it was
absolutely and supremely true.
Hers is not the language of frustration, but of complete and satisfying
possession. It may seem marvellous in the mouth of a woman destitute of
all emotional experience, in the restricted sense; but the real wonder
would have been a _Wuthering Heights_ born of any personal emotion; so
certain is it that it was through her personal destitution that her
genius was so virile and so rich. At its hour it found her virgin, not
only to passion but to the bare idea of passion, to the inner and
immaterial event.
And her genius was great, not only through her stupendous imagination,
but because it fed on the still more withdrawn and secret sources of her
soul. If she had had no genius she would yet be great because of what
took place within her, the fusion of her soul with the transcendent and
enduring life.
It was there that, possessing nothing, she possessed all things; and her
secret escapes you if you are aware only of her splendid paganism. She
never speaks the language of religious resignation like Anne and
Charlotte. It is most unlikely that she relied, openly or in secret, on
"the merits of the Redeemer", or on any of the familiar consolations of
religion. As she bowed to no disaster and no grief, consolation would
have been the last thing in any religion that she looked for. But, for
height and depth of supernatural attainment, there is no comparison
between Emily's grip of divine reality and poor Anne's spasmodic and
despairing clutch; and none between Charlotte's piety, her "God
willing"; "I suppose I ought to be thankful", and Emily's acceptance and
endurance of the event.
I am reminded that one event she neither accepted nor endured. She
fought death. Her spirit lifted the pathetic, febrile struggle of
weakness with corruption, and turned it to a splendid, Titanic, and
unearthly combat.
And yet it was in her life rather than her death that she was splendid.
There is something shocking and repellent in her last defiance. It
shrieks discord with the endurance and acceptance, braver than all
revolt, finer than all resignation, that was the secret of her genius
and of her life.
There is no need to reconcile this supreme detachment with the storm and
agony that rages through _Wuthering Heights_, or with the passion for
life and adoration of the earth that burns there, an imperishable flame;
or with Catherine Earnshaw's dream of heaven: "heaven did not seem to be
my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and
the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the
heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy".
Catherine Earnshaw's dream has been cited innumerable times to prove
that Emily Brontë was a splendid pagan. I do not know what it does
prove, if it is not the absolute and immeasurable greatness of her
genius, that, dwelling as she undoubtedly did dwell, in the secret and
invisible world, she could yet conceive and bring forth Catherine
Earnshaw.
It is not possible to diminish the force or to take away one word of Mr.
Swinburne's magnificent eulogy. There _was_ in the "passionate great
genius of Emily Brontë", "a dark, unconscious instinct as of primitive
nature-worship". That was where she was so poised and so complete; that
she touches earth and heaven, and is at once intoxicated with the
splendour of the passion of living, and holds her spirit in security and
her heart in peace. She plunged with Catherine Earnshaw into the thick
of the tumult, and her detachment is not more wonderful than her
immersion.
It is our own imperfect vision that is bewildered by the union in her of
these antagonistic attitudes. It is not only entirely possible and
compatible, but, if your soul be comprehensive, it is inevitable that
you should adore the forms of life, and yet be aware of their
impermanence; that you should affirm with equal fervour their illusion
and the radiance of the reality that manifests itself in them. Emily
Brontë was nothing if not comprehensive. There was no distance, no abyss
too vast, no antagonism, no contradiction too violent and appalling for
her embracing soul. Without a hint, so far as we know, from any
philosophy, by a sheer flash of genius she pierced to the secret of the
world and crystallized it in two lines:
The earth that wakes _one_ human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.
It is doubtful if she ever read a line of Blake; yet it is Blake that
her poems perpetually recall, and it is Blake's vision that she has
reached there. She too knew what it was
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
To hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
She sees by a flash what he saw continuously; but it is by the same
light she sees it and wins her place among the mystics.
Her mind was not always poised. It swung between its vision of
transparent unity and its love of earth for earth's sake. There are at
least four poems of hers that show this entirely natural oscillation.
In one, a nameless poem, the Genius of Earth calls to the visionary
soul:
Shall earth no more inspire thee,
Thou lonely dreamer now?
Since passion may not fire thee,
Shall nature cease to bow?
Thy mind is ever moving
In regions dark to thee;
Recall its useless roving,
Come back, and dwell with me.
* * * * *
Few hearts to mortals given
On earth so wildly pine;
Yet few would ask a heaven
More like this earth than thine.
"The Night-Wind" sings the same song, lures with the same enchantment;
and the human voice answers, resisting:
Play with the scented flower,
The young tree's supple bough,
And leave my human feelings
In their own course to flow.
But the other voice is stronger:
The wanderer would not heed me;
Its kiss grew warmer still.
"Oh, come," it sighed so sweetly;
"I'll win thee 'gainst thy will.
"Were we not friends from childhood?
Have I not loved thee long?
As long as thou, the solemn night,
Whose silence wakes my song.
"And when thy heart is resting
Beneath the church-aisle stone,
_I_ shall have time for mourning,
And _thou_ for being alone."
There are nine verses of "The Night-Wind", and the first eight are
negligible; but, as for the last and ninth, I do not know any poem in
any language that renders, in four short lines, and with such
incomparable magic and poignancy, the haunting and pursuing of the human
by the inhuman, that passion of the homeless and eternal wind.
And this woman, destitute, so far as can be known, of all metaphysical
knowledge or training, reared in the narrowest and least metaphysical of
creeds, did yet contrive to express in one poem of four irregular verses
all the hunger and thirst after the "Absolute" that ever moved a human
soul, all the bewilderment and agony inflicted by the unintelligible
spectacle of existence, the intolerable triumph of evil over good, and
did conceive an image and a vision of the transcendent reality that
holds, as in crystal, all the philosophies that were ever worthy of the
name.
Here it is. There are once more two voices: one of the Man, the other of
the Seer:
THE PHILOSOPHER
Oh, for the time when I shall sleep
Without identity.
And never care how rain may steep,
Or snow may cover me!
No promised heaven, these wild desires
Could all, or half fulfil;
No threatened hell, with quenchless fires,
Subdue this restless will.
So said I, and still say the same;
Still, to my death, will say--
Three gods, within this little frame,
Are warring night and day;
Heaven could not hold them all, and yet
They all are held in me;
And must be mine till I forget
My present entity!
Oh, for the time, when in my breast
Their struggles will be o'er!
Oh, for the day, when I shall rest,
And never suffer more!
I saw a spirit, standing, man,
Where thou dost stand--an hour ago,
And round his feet three rivers ran,
Of equal depth, and equal flow--
A golden stream--and one like blood,
And one like sapphire seemed to be;
But where they joined their triple flood
It tumbled in an inky sea.
The spirit sent his dazzling gaze
Down through that ocean's gloomy night;
Then, kindling all, with sudden blaze,--
The glad deep sparkled wide and bright--
White as the sun, far, far more fair
Than its divided sources were!
And even for that spirit, seer,
I've watched and sought my lifetime long;
Sought him in heaven, hell, earth and air,
An endless search and always wrong.
Had I but seen his glorious eye
_Once_ light the clouds that 'wilder me,
I ne'er had raised this coward cry
To cease to think, and cease to be;
I ne'er had called oblivion blest,
Nor, stretching eager hands to death,
Implored to change for senseless rest
This sentient soul, this living breath--
Oh, let me die--that power and will
Their cruel strife may close,
And conquered good and conquering ill
Be lost in one repose!
That vision of the transcendent spirit, with the mingled triple flood of
life about his feet, is one that Blake might have seen and sung and
painted.
The fourth poem, "The Prisoner", is a fragment, and an obscure fragment,
which may belong to a very different cycle. But whatever its place, it
has the same visionary quality. The vision is of the woman captive,
"confined in triple walls", the "guest darkly lodged", the "chainless
soul", that defies its conqueror, its gaoler, and the spectator of its
agony. It has, this prisoner, its own unspeakable consolation, the
"Messenger":
He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs,
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars.
Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
And visions rise and change that kill me with desire.
* * * * *
But, first, a hush of peace--a soundless calm descends;
The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends;
Mute music soothes my breast--unuttered harmony,
That I could never dream, till earth was lost to me.
Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels:
Its wings are almost free--its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulf, it stoops and dares the final bound.
That is the language of a mystic, of a mystic who has passed beyond
contemplation; who has known or imagined ecstasy. The joy is
unmistakable; unmistakable, too, is the horror of the return:
Oh! dreadful is the check--intense the agony--
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.
There is no doubt about those three verses; that they are the expression
of the rarest and the most tremendous experience that is given to
humanity to know.
If "The Visionary" does not touch that supernal place, it belongs
indubitably to the borderland:
Silent is the house; all are laid asleep:
One alone looks out o'er the snow-wreaths deep,
Watching every cloud, dreading every breeze
That whirls the wildering drift and bends the groaning trees.
Cheerful is the hearth, soft the matted floor;
Not one shivering gust creeps through pane or door;
The little lamp burns straight, the rays shoot strong and far
I trim it well to be the wanderer's guiding-star.
Frown, my haughty sire! chide, my angry dame!
Set your slaves to spy; threaten me with shame;
But neither sire nor dame, nor prying serf shall know,
What angel nightly tracks that waste of frozen snow.
What I love shall come like visitant of air,
Safe in secret power from lurking human snare;
What loves me no word of mine shall e'er betray,
Though for faith unstained my life must forfeit pay.
Burn then, little lamp; glimmer straight and clear--
Hush! a rustling wing stirs, methinks, the air;
He for whom I wait, thus ever comes to me:
Strange Power! I trust thy might; trust thou my constancy.
Those who can see nothing in this poem but the idealization of an
earthly passion must be strangely and perversely mistaken in their Emily
Brontë. I confess I can never read it without thinking of one of the
most marvellous of all poems of Divine Love: "En una Noche Escura".
EN UNA NOCHE ESCURA[A]
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!
[Footnote A: "St. John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul."
Translated by Arthur Symons in vol. ii. of his _Collected Poems_.]
* * * * *
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.
[Footnote 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.]
* * * * *
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
