EMILY BRONTË

 

THE name of Emily Brontë - why does it produce in one's mind so strange and startling a feeling, unlike that produced by any other famous writer?

      It is not easy to answer such a question.  Certain great souls seem to gather to themselves, as their work accumulates its destined momentum in its voyage down the years, a power of arousing our imagination to issues that seem larger than those which can naturally be explained as proceeding inevitably from their tangible work.

      Our imagination is roused and our deepest soul stirred by the mention of such names without any palpable accompaniment of logical analysis, without any well-weighed or rational justification.

      Such names touch some response in us which goes deeper than our critical faculties, however desperately they may struggle.  Instinct takes the place of reason; and our soul, as if answering the appeal of some translunar chord of subliminal music, vibrates in response to a mood that baffles all analysis.

      We all know the work of Emily's sister Charlotte; we know it and can return to it at will, fathoming easily and at leisure the fine qualities of it and its impassioned and romantic effect upon us.

      But though we may have read over and over again that one amazing story - "Wuthering Heights" - and that handful of unforgettable poems which are all that Emily Brontë has bequeathed to the world, which of us can say that the full significance of these things has been ransacked and combed out by our conscious reason; which of us can say that we understand to the full all the mysterious stir and ferment, all the far-reaching and magical reactions, which such things have produced within us?

      Who can put into words the secret of this extraordinary girl?  Who can define, in the suave and plausible language of academic culture, the flitting shadows thrown from deep to deep in the unfathomable genius of her vision?

      Perhaps not since Sappho has there been such a person.  Certainly she makes the ghosts of de Staël and Georges Sand, of Eliot and Mrs Browning, look singularly homely and sentimental.

      I am inclined to think that the huge mystery of Emily Brontë's power lies in the fact that she expresses in her work - just as the Lesbian did - the very soul of womanhood.  It is not an easy thing to achieve, this.  Women writers, clever and lively and subtle, abound in our time, as they have abounded in times past; but for some inscrutable reason they lack the demonic energy, the occult spiritual force, the instinctive fire, wherewith to give expression to the ultimate mystery of their own sex.

      I am inclined to think that, of all poets, Walt Whitman is the only one who has drawn his reckless and chaotic inspiration straight from the uttermost spiritual depths of the sex-instincts of the male animal; and Emily Brontë has done for her sex what Walt Whitman did for his.

      It is a strange and startling commentary upon the real significance of our sexual impulses that, when it comes to the final issue, it is not the beautiful rufffianism of a Byron, full of normal sex-instinct though that may be, or the eloquent sentiment of a Georges Sand, penetrated with passionate sensuality as that is, which really touch the indefinable secret.  Emily Brontë, like Walt Whitman, sweeps us, by sheer force of inspired genius, into a realm where the mere animalism of sexuality, its voluptuousness, its lust, its lechery, are absolutely merged, lost, forgotten; fused by that burning flame of spiritual passion into something which is beyond all earthly desire.

      Emily Brontë - and this is indicative of the difference between woman and man - goes even further than Walt Whitman in the spiritualising of this flame.  In Whitman there is, as we all know, a vast mass of work, wherein, true and magical though it is, the earthly and bodily elements of the great passion are given enormous emphasis.  It is only at rare moments - as happens with ordinary men in the normal experience of the world - that he is swept away beyond the reach of lust and voluptuousness.  But Emily Brontë seems to dwell by natural predilection upon these high summits and in these unsounded depths.  The flame of the passion in her burns at such quivering vibrant pressure that the fuel of it - the débris and rubble of our earth-instincts - is entirely absorbed and devoured.  In her work the fire of life licks up, with its consuming tongue, every vestige of materiality in the thing upon which it feeds, and the lofty tremulous spires of its radiant burning ascend into the illimitable void.

      It is of extraordinary interest, as a mere psychological phenomenon, to note the fact that when the passion of sex is driven forward by the flame of its conquering impulse beyond a certain point it becomes itself transmuted and loses the earthly texture of its original character.

      Sex-passion when carried to a certain pitch of intensity loses its sexuality.  It becomes pure flame; immaterial, unearthly, and with no sensual dross left in it.

      It may even be said, by an enormous paradox, to become sexless.  And this is precisely what one feels about the work of Emily Brontë.  Sex-passion in her has been driven so far that it has come round "full circle" and has become sexless passion.  It has become passion disembodied, passion absolute, passion divested of all human weakness.  The "muddy vesture of decay" which "grossly closes in" our diviner principle has been burnt up and absorbed.  It has been reduced to nothing; and in its place quivers up to heaven the clear white flame of the secret fountain of life.

      But there is more in the matter than that.  Emily Brontë's genius, by its abandonment to the passion of which I have been speaking, does not only burn up and destroy all the elements of clay in what, so to speak, is above the earth and on its surface; but it also, burning downwards, destroys and annihilates all dubious and obscure materials which surround the original and primordial human will.  Round and about this lonely and inalienable will it makes a scorched and blackened plain of ashes and cinders.  Ambiguous feelings are turned to ashes there; and so are doubts, hesitations, timidities, trepidations, cowadices.  The aboriginal will of man, of the unconquerable individual, stands alone there in the twilight, under the grey desolate rain of the outer spaces.  Four-square it stands, upon adamantine foundations, and nothing in heaven or earth is able to shake it or disquiet it.

      It is this isolation, in desolate and forlorn integrity, of the individual human will, which is the deepest element in Emily Brontë's genius.  Upon this all depends, and to this all returns.  Between the will and the spirit deep and strange nuptials are celebrated; and from the immortality of the spirit a certain breath of life passes over into the mortality of the will, drawing it up into the celestial and invisible region which is beyond chance and change.

      From this abysmal fusion of the "creator spiritus" with the human will rises that adamantine courage with which Emily Brontë was able to face the jagged edges of that crushing wheel of destiny which the malign powers of nature drive remorselessly over our poor flesh and blood.  The uttermost spirit of the universe became in this manner her spirit, and the integral identity of the soul within her breast hardened into an undying resistance to all that would undermine it.

      Thus she was able to endure tragedy upon tragedy without flinching.  Thus she was able to assert herself against the power of pain as one wrestling invincibly with an exhausted giant.

      Calamity after calamity fell upon her house, and the stark desolation of those melancholy Yorkshire hills became a suitable and congruous background for the loneliness of her strange life; but against all the pain which came upon her, against all the aching pangs of remorseless fate, this indomitable girl held grimly to her supreme vision.

      No poet, no novelist who has ever lived has been so profoundly affected by the conditions of his life as was this invincible woman.  But the conditions of her life - the scenery of sombre terror which surrounded her - only touched and affected the outward colour and rhythm of her unique style.  In her deepest soul, in the courage of her tremendous vision, she possessed something that was not bounded by Yorkshire hills, or any other hills; something that was inhuman, eternal and universal, something that was outside the power of both time and space.

      By that singular and forlorn scenery - the scenery of the Yorkshire moors round about her home - she was, however, in the more flexible portion of her curious nature inveterately influenced.  She does not precisely describe this scenery - not at any rate at any length - either in her poems or in "Wuthering Heights"; but it sank so deeply into her that whatever she wrote was affected by it and bears its desolate and imaginative imprint.

      It is impossible to read Emily Brontë anywhere without being transported to those Yorkshire moors.  One smells the smell of burning furze, one tastes the resinous breath of pine-trees, one feels beneath one's feet the tough fibrous stalks of the ling and the resistant stems and crumpled leaves of the bracken.

      Dark against that pallid greenish light of a dead sunset, which is more than anything else characteristic of those unharvested fells, one can perceive always, as one reads her, the sombre form of some gigantic Scotch-fir stretching out its arms across the sky; while a flight of rooks, like enormous black leaves drifting on the wind, sail away into the sunset at our approach.

      One is conscious, as one reads her, of lonely marsh-pools turning empty faces towards a grey heaven, while drop by drop upon their murky waters the autumn rain falls, sadly, wearily, without aim or purpose.

      And most of all is one made aware of the terrible desolation - desolation only rendered more desolate by the presence of humanity - of those half-ruined farmhouses, approached by windy paths or deep-cut lanes, which seem to rise, like huge fungoid things, here and there over that sad land.

      It is difficult to conceive they have not sprung - these dwellings of these Earnshaws and Lintons - actually out of the very soil, in slow organic growth leading to slow organic decay.  One cannot conceive the human hands which built them; anymore than one can conceive the human hands which planted those sombre hedges which have now become so completely part of the scenery that one thinks of them as quite as aboriginal to the place as the pine-trees or the gorse-bushes.

      Of all shapes of all trees I think the shape of an old and twisted thorn-tree harmonises best with one's impression of the "milieu" of Emily Brontë's single tragic story; a thorn-tree distorted by the wind blowing from one particular quarter, and with its trunk blackened and hollowed; and in the hollow of it a little pool or rainwater and a few dead soaked leaves.

      The extraordinary thing is that she can produce these impressions incidentally, and, as it were, unconsciously.  They are so blent with her spirit, these things, that they convey themselves to one's mind indirectly and through a medium far more subtle than any eloquent description.

      I cannot think of Emily Brontë's work without thinking of a certain tree I once saw against a pallid sky.  A long way from Yorkshire it was where I saw this tree, and there were no limestone boulders scattered at its feet; but something in the impression it produced upon me - an impression that I shall not lightly forget - weaves itself strangely in with all I feel about her, so that the peculiar look of wintry boughs, sad and silent against a fading west, accompanied by that natural human longing of people who are tired to be safely buried under the friendly earth and "free among the dead", has come to be most indelibly and deeply associated with her tragic figure.

      Those who know those Yorkshire moors know the mysterious way in which the quiet country lanes suddenly emerge upon wide and desolate expanses; know how they lead us on, past ruined factories and deserted quarries, up the barren slopes of forlorn hills; know how, as one sees in front of one the long white road vanishing over the hilltop and losing itself in the grey sky, there comes across one's mind a strange, sad, exquisite feeling unlike any other feeling in the world; and we who love Emily Brontë know that this is the feeling, the mood, the atmosphere of the soul, into which her writings throw us.

      The power of her great single story, "Wuthering Heights", is in a primary sense the power of romance, and none can care for this book for whom romance means nothing.

      What is romance?  I think it is the instinctive recognition of a certain poetic glamour which an especial kind of grouping of persons and things - of persons and things seen under a particular light - is able to produce.  It does not always accompany the expression of passionate emotion or the narration of thrilling incidents.  These may arrest and entertain us when there is no romance, in my sense at any rate of that great word, overshadowing the picture.

      I think this quality of romance can only be evoked when the background of the story is heavily leaden with old, rich, dim, pathetic, human associations.  I think it can only emerge when there is an implication of thickly mingled traditions, full of sombre and terrible and beautiful suggestiveness, stimulating to the imagination like a draught of heavy red wine.  I think there must be, in a story of which the flavour has the true romantic magic, something darkly and inexplicably fatal.  I think it is necessary that one should hear the rush of the flight of the Valkyries and the wailing upon the wind of the voices of the Eumenides.

      Fate - in such a story - must assume a half-human, half-personal shape, and must brood, obscurely and sombrely, over the incidents and the character.

      The characters themselves must be swayed and dominated by Fate; and not only by Fate.  They must be penetrated through and through by the scenery which surrounds them and by the traditions, old and dark and superstitious and malign, of some particular spot upon the earth's surface.

      The scenery which is the background of a tale which has the true romantic quality must gather itself together and concentrate itself in some kind of symbolic unity; and this symbolic unity - wherein the various elements of grandeur and mystery are merged - must present itself as something almost personal and as a dynamic "motif" in the development of the plot.

      There can be no romance without some sort of appeal to that long-inherited and atavistic feeling in ordinary human hearts which is responsive to the spell and influence of old, unhappy, lovely, ancient things; things faded and falling, but with the mellowness of the centuries upon their faces.

      In other words, nothing can be romantic which is new.  Romance implies, above everything else, a long association with the human feelings of many generations.  It implies an appeal to that background of our minds which is stirred to reciprocity by suggestions dealing with those old, dark, mysterious memories which belong, not so much to us as individuals, as to us as links in a great chain.

      There are certain emotions in all of us which go much further and deeper than our mere personal feelings.  Such are the emotions roused in us by contact with the mysterious forces of life and death and birth and the movements of the seasons; with the rising and setting of the sun, and the primordial labour of tilling the earth and gathering in the harvest.  These things have been so long associated with our human hopes and fears, with the nerves and fibres of our inmost being, that any powerful presentment of them brings to the surface the accumulated feelings of hundreds of centuries.

      New problems, new adventures, new social groupings, new philosophical catchwords, may all have their vivid and exciting interest.  They cannot carry with them that sad, sweet breath of planetary romance which touches what might be called the "imagination of the race" in individual men and women.

      "Wuthering Heights" is a great book, not only because of the intensity of the passions in it, but because these passions are penetrated so profoundly with the long, bitter, tragic, human associations of persons who have lived for generations upon the same spot and have behind them the weight of the burden of the sorrows of the dead.

      It is a great book because the romance of it emerges into undisturbed amplitude of space, and asserts itself in large, grand, primitive forms unfretted by teasing irrelevancies.

      The genius of a romantic novelist - indeed, the genius of all writers primarily concerned with the mystery of human character - consists in letting the basic differences between man and man, between man and woman, rise up, unimpeded by frivolous detail, from the fathomless depths of life itself.

      The solitude in which Emily Brontë lived, and the austere simplicity of her granite-moulded character, made it possible for her to envisage life in larger, simpler, less blurred outlines than most of us are able to do.  Thus her art has something of that mysterious and awe-inspiring simplicity that characterises the work of Michelangelo or William Blake.

      No-one who has ever read "Wuthering Heights" can forget the place and the time when he read it.  As I write its name now, every reader of this page will recall, with a sudden heavy sigh of the passing of youth, the moment when the sweet tragic power of its deadly genius first took him by the throat.

      For me the shadow of an old bowed acacia-tree, held together by iron bands, was over the history of Heathcliff; but the forms and shapes of that mad drama gathered to themselves the lineaments of all my wildest dreams.

      I can well remember, too, how on a certain long straight road between Heathfield and Burwash, the eastern district of Sussex, my companion - the last of our English theologians - turned suddenly from his exposition of St Thomas, and began quoting, as the white dust rose round us at the passing of a flock of sheep, the "vain are the thousand creeds - unutterably vain!" of that grand and absolute defiance, that last challenge of the unconquerable soul, which ends with the sublime cry to the eternal spark of godhead in us all -

 

                                                                            "Thou, thou art being and breath;

                                                                  And what thou art can never be destroyed!"

 

      The art of Emily Brontë - if it can be called art, this spontaneous projection, in a shape rugged and savage, torn with the storms of fate, of her inmost identity - can be appreciated best if we realise with what skill we are plunged into the dark stream of the destiny of these people through the mediatory intervention of a comparative stranger.  By this method, and also by the crafty manner in which she makes the old devoted servant of the house of Earnshaw utter a sort of Sophoclean commentary upon the events which take place, we are permitted to feed the magnitude of the thing in true relief and perspective.

      By these devices we have borne in upon us, as in no other way could be done, the convincing sense which we require, to give weight and mass to the story, of the real continuity of life in those savage places.

      By this method of narration we have the illusion of being suddenly initiated into a stream of events which are not merely imaginary.  We have the illusion that these Earnshaws and Lintons are really, actually, palpably, undeniably, living - living somewhere, in their terrible isolation, as they have always lived - and that it is only by some lucky chance of casual discovery that we have been plunged into the mystery of their days.

      One cannot help feeling aware, as we follow the story of Heathcliff, how Emily Brontë has torn and rent at her own soul in the creation of this appalling figure.  Heathcliff, without father or mother, without even a Christian name, becomes for us a sort of personal embodiment of the suppressed fury of Emily Brontë's own soul.  The cautious prudence and hypocritical reserves of the discreet world of timid, kindly, compromising human beings has got upon the nerves of this formidable girl, and, as she goes tearing and rending at all the masks which cover our loves and our hates, she seems to utter wild discordant cries, cries like those of some she-wolf rushing through the herd of normal human sheep.

      Heathcliff and Cathy, what a pair they are!   What terrifying lovers!  They seem to have arisen from some remote unfathomed past of the world's earlier and less civilised passions.  And yet, one occasionally catches, as one goes through the world, the Heathcliff look upon the face of a man and the Cathy look upon the face of a woman.

      In a writer of less genius than Emily Brontë, Heathcliff would never have found his match; would never have found his mate, his equal, his twin-soul.

      It needed the imagination of one who had both Heathcliff and Cathy in her to dig them both out of the same granite rock, covered with yellow gorse and purple ling, and to hurl them into one another's arms.

      From the moment when they inscribed their initials upon the walls of that melancholy room, to the moment when, with a howl like a madman, Heathcliff drags her from her grave, their affiliation is desperate and absolute.

      This is a love which passes far beyond all sensuality, far beyond all voluptuous pleasure.  They get little good of their love, these two - little solace and small comfort.

      But one cannot conceive their wishing to change their lot with any happier lovers.  They are what they are, and they are prepared to endure what fate shall send them.

      When Cathy admits to the old servant that she intends to marry Linton because Heathcliff was unworthy of her and would drag her down, "I love Linton," she says - "but I am Heathcliff!"  And this "I am Heathcliff" rings in our ears as the final challenge to a chaotic pluralistic world full of cynical disillusionment, of the desperate spirit of which Emily Brontë was made.

      The wild madness of such love - passing the love of men and women - may seem to many readers the mere folly of an insane dream.

      Emily Brontë - as she was bound to do - tosses them forth, that inhuman pair, upon the voyaging homeless wind; tosses them forth, free of their desperation, to wander at large, ghosts of their own undying passions, over the face of the rain-swept moors.  But to most quiet and sceptical souls such an issue of the drama contradicts the laws of nature.  To most patient slaves of destiny the end of the ashes of these fierce flames is to mingle placidly with the dark earth of those misty hills and find their release in nothing more tragic than the giving to the roots of the heather and the bracken a richer soil wherein to grow.

      None of us know!  None of us can ever know!  It is enough that in this extraordinary story the wild strange link which once and again in the history of a generation binds so strangely two persons together, almost as though their association were the result of some æon-old everlasting Recurrence, is once more thrown into tragic relief and given the tender beauty of an austere imagination.

      Not everyone can feel the spell of Emily Brontë or care for her work.  To some she must always remain too ungracious, too savage, too uncompromising.  But for those who have come to care for her, she is a wonderful and a lovely figure; a figure whose full significance has not even yet been sounded, a figure with whom we must come more and more to associate that liberation of what we call love from the mere animalism of sexual passion, which we feel sometimes, and in our rarer moments, to be one of the richest triumphs of the spirit over the flesh.

      It may be that Emily Brontë is right.  It may be that a point can be reached - perhaps is already being reached in the lives of certain individuals - where sexual passion is thus surpassed and transcended by the burning of a flame more intense than any which lust can produce.

      It may be that the human race, as time goes on, will follow closer and closer this ferocious and spiritual girl in tearing aside the compromises of our hesitating timidity and plunging into the ice-cold waters of passions so keen and translunar as to have become chaste.  It may be so - and, on the other hand, it may be that the old sly earth-gods will hold their indelible sway over us until the "baseless fabric" of this vision leaves "not a rack behind"!  In any case, for our present purpose, the reading of Emily Brontë strengthens us in our recognition that the only wisdom of life consists in leaving all the doors of the universe open.

      Cursed be they who close any doors!  Let that be our literary as it is our philosophical motto.

      Little have we gained from books, little from our passionate following in the steps of the great masters, if, after all, we only return once more to the narrow prejudices of our obstinate personal convictions.

      From ourselves we cannot escape; but we can, unfortunately, hide ourselves from ourselves.  We can hide ourselves "full-fathom-five" under our convictions and our principles.  We can hide ourselves under our theories and our philosophies.  It is only now and again, when, by some sudden devastating flash, some terrific burst of the thunder of the great gods, the real lineaments of what we are show up clearly for a moment in the dark mirror of our shaken consciousness.

      It is well not to let the memory of those moments pass altogether away.

      The reading of the great authors will have been a mere epicurean pastime if it has not made us recognise that what is important in our life is something that belongs more closely to us than any opinion we have inherited or any theory we have gained or any principle as have struggled for.

      It will have been wasted if it has not made us recognise that in the moments when these outward things fall away, and the true self, beyond the power of these outward things, looks forth defiantly, tenderly, pitifully upon this huge strange world, there are intimations and whispers of something beyond all that the philosophers have ever dreamed, hidden in the reservoirs of being and ready to touch us with their breath.

      Our reading of these noble writings will have been no more than a gracious entertainment if we have not come to see that the enormous differences of their verdicts prove conclusively that no one theory, no one principle, can cover the tremendous field.  But such reading will have had but a poor effect if because of this radical opposition in the voices reaching us we give up our interest in the great quest.

      For it is upon our retaining our interest that the birthright of our humanity depends.

      We shall never find what we seek; that is certain enough.  We should be gods, not men, if we found it.  But we should be less than men, and beasts - if we gave up the interest of the search, the tremulous vibrating interest, which, like little waves of ether, hovers over the crossroads where all the great ways part.

      Something outside ourselves drives us on to seek it - this evasive solution of a riddle that seems eternal - and when, weary with the effort of refusing this or the other premature solution, weary with the effort of suspending our judgement and standing erect at that parting of the ways, we long in our hearts to drift at leisure down one of the many soothing streams, it is only the knowledge that it is not our intrinsic inmost self that so collapses and yields up the high prerogative of doubt, but some lesser self in us, some tired superficial self, which keeps us back from that betrayal.

      The courage with which Emily Brontë faced life, the equanimity with which she faced death, were in her case closely associated with the quiet desolate landscape which surrounded her.

      As my American poet says, it is only in the country that we can look upon these fatal necessities and see them as they are.  To be born and to die fall into their place when we are living where the smell of the earth can reach us.

      There will always be a difference between those who come from the country and those who come from the town; and if a time ever arrives when the cities of men so cover the earth that there will be room no longer for any country-bred persons in our midst, something will in that hour pass away forever from art and literature, and, I suspect, from philosophy too.

      For you cannot acquire this quality by any pleasant trips through picturesque scenery.  It is either in you or it is not in you.  You either have the slow, tenacious, humorous, patient, imaginative instincts of the country-born; or you have the smart, quick, clever, witty, fanciful, lively, receptive, caustic turn of mind of those bred in the great cities.

      We all come to the town, "some in rags and some in jags and some in velvet gowns"; but the country-born always recognises the country-born, and there is a natural affinity between them.  I suspect that those who have behind them no local, provincial traditions will find it difficult to understand Emily Brontë.

      She did not deal in elaborate description; but the earth-mould smells sweet, and the roots of the reeds of the pond-rushes show wavering and dim in the dark water, and "through the hawthorn blows the cold wind", and the white moon drifts over the sombre furze-covered hills; and all these things have passed into her style and have formed her style, and all these things are behind the tenacity with which she endures life, and behind the immense mysterious hope with which, while regarding all human creeds as "unutterably vain", she falls back so fiercely upon that "amor intellectualis Dei" which is the burning fire in her own soul.

 

                                                                            "Thou, thou art being and breath;

                                                                  And what thou art can never be destroyed!"