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 Then sixty-seven hitherto unpublished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]
[Footnote A: _Complete Works of Emily Brontë._ Vol. I.--Poetry. (Messrs.
Hodder and Stoughton, 1910.)]
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?
[Footnote A: Published among Charlotte Brontë's posthumous "Selections"
in 1850.]
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.
[Footnote A: See pp. 207, 208.]
[Footnote B: I have removed the title from the preceding fragment to the
ballad to which it obviously belongs.]
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]
[Footnote A: _Wisdom and Destiny_, translated by Alfred Sutro.]
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.
