It is one hundred years to a month--I write in August--that Emily
Brontë was born; she was born in August, 1818, and died December 19th,
1848, at the age of thirty. The stoic in woman has been seen once only,
and that in the only woman in whom there is seen the paradox of passion
without sensuousness. She required no passionate experience to endow her
with more than a memory of passion. Passion was alive in her as flame is
alive in the earth. Her poems are all outcries, as her great novel,
_Wuthering Heights_, is one long outcry. Rossetti in 1854 wrote: "I've
been greatly interested in _Wuthering Heights_, the first novel I've
read for an age, and the best (as regards power and style only) for two
ages, except _Sidonia._ But it is a fiend of a book. The action is laid
in hell--only it seems places and people have English names there." He
is not altogether right in what he says, and yet there is hell in the
heart of Heathcliff, that magnificent and malevolent gypsy, who, to my
mind, can only be compared with Borrow's creations in _Lavengro_ and
_The Romany Rye_--such as the immortal Jasper Petilengro and the immoral
Ursula--and with the lesser creations of Meredith's in _The Adventures
of Harry Richmond_ (in spite of the savage and piteous and fascinating
Kiomi--I have seen a young gypsy girl of this name the other day,
tragical).
When Charlotte says of Emily that what "her mind had gathered of the
real concerning the people around her was too exclusively confined to
their tragic and terrible traits, out of which she created Earnshaw and
Catherine, and that having formed these beings, she did not know what
she had done," there is no doubt that on the whole she is right. For
these spirits are relentless and implacable, fallen and lost spirits,
and it is only in this amazing novel that I find maledictions and curses
and cries of anguish and writhings of agony and raptures of delight and
passionate supplications, such as only abnormal creatures could contrive
to express, and within the bounded space of the moors, made sad by
somber sunrises and glad by radiant sunsets. It is sad colored and
desolate, but when gleams of sunlight or of starlight pierce the clouds
that hang generally above it a rare and sunny beauty comes into the bare
outlines, quickening them with living splendor.
In the passionately tragic genius of Emily I find a primitive
nature-worship; so strangely primitive that that wonderful scene of mad
recrimination between the dying Catherine and the repentant Heathcliff,
when she cries "I forgive you! Forgive me!" and he answers: "Kiss me
again; and don't let me see your eyes. I forgive what you have done to
me. I love _my_ murderer--but _yours?_ How can I?" is almost comparable
with a passage in _Macbeth_ where Banquo speaks of "the temple-haunting
Martlet" and its loved masonry which preludes Lady Macbeth's entrance
from under the buttresses as the delicate air bears witness to the
incarnate murder that swarms, snake-like, hidden under grass. Something
of Emily's saturnine humor comes into the mouth of the Calvinistic
farm-servant, whose jests are as grim and as deadly and as plague-like
as the snow-storms that make winter unendurable.
Yes, this creator has, in herself and in her imagination, something
solitary and sorrowful--that of a woman who lived, literally, alone--and
whose genius had no scorn. She, who believed in the indestructible God
within herself, was silenced forever; herself and her genius which had
moved as a wind and moved as the sea in tumult and moved as the
thunderclouds in fury upon the tragical and perilous waters of passion
that surround "the topless towers" of _Wuthering Heights._
In one who, like Emily Brontë, was always dying of too much life, one
can imagine the sensitive reticences, the glowing eyes, and the strain
of the vehemences of that inner fire that fed on itself, which gave her
her taciturnity. "It is useless to ask her; you get no answers. The
awful point was that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had
no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling
hand, the unnerved limbs, the fading eyes, the same service was exacted
as they had rendered in health."
"The spirit inexorable to the flesh:" there is the whole secret of what
in her life was her genius. Alone with herself--with her soul and her
body--she allows herself no respite: for she was always of an unresting
nature. So in the words of Pater--who told me of his enormous admiration
for her prose--"we are all _condamnés à mort avec des sursis
indéfinis_; we have our interval and then our place knows us no more."
How she spent these "intervals" must be forever unknown. Not in high
passions, I imagine, nor in wisdom, nor in care for material things; but
in moods of passion, in intellectual excitement, in an inexhaustible
curiosity, in an ironical contemplation "of the counted pulses of a
variegated, dramatic life." But never, I am certain, was she ever
capable--as she watches the weaving and unweaving of herself--of the
base corruption of what his existence was to Beardsley. "That he should
be so honest with his fear," I have written of him, "that he should sit
down before its face and study it feature by feature: that he should
never turn aside his eyes for more than one instant, make no attempt to
escape, but sit at home with it, travel with it, see it in his mirror,
taste it in the sacrament: that is the marvellous thing, and the sign of
his fundamental sincerity in life and art."
Emily Brontë's passionate and daring genius attains this utmost limit
of tragedy, and with this a sense--an extreme sense--of the mystery of
terror which lurks in all the highest poetry as certainly in her lyrical
prose; a quality which distinguishes such prose and verse from all that
is but a little lower than the highest. Her genius is somber in the
sense that Webster's is, but much less dramatic. Neither his tragedies
nor her novel are well-constructed; and in her case something is
certainly lacking; for her narrative is dominated by sheer chance, and
guided by mere accident. And I think that she, with her sleepless
imagination, might have said as the child Giovanni in Webster's Tragedy
says: "I have not slept these six nights. When do the dead walk?" and is
answered: "When God shall please." When in disguise she sings of the
useless rebellions of the earth, rarely has a more poignant cry been
wrenched out of "a soul on the rack"--that is to say since Santa Teresa
sang:--
A soul in God hidden from sin,
What more desires for thee remain,
Save but to love, and love again
And, all on flame, with love within,
Love on, and turn to love again?
than this stanza:
O! dreadful is the shock--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.
At times there is a tragic sublimity in her imagination, which gathers
together, as it were, the winds from the world's four quarters, that
howled in winter nights across the moor around the house she lived in.
Indeed the very storm of her genius hovers in the air between things
sublime and things hideous. "There never was such a thunderstorm of a
play," said Swinburne on Cyril Tourneur's _Revenger's Tragedy._ I am
inclined to add: "There never was such a thunderstorm of a novel as
_Wuthering Heights._" And it is blood-stained with the blood of the
roses of sunsets; the heavy atmosphere is sultry as the hush and heat
and awe of midnoon; sad visions appear with tragic countenances,
fugitives try in vain to escape from the insane brooding of their
consciences. And there are serviceable shadows; implacable
self-devotions and implacable cruelties; vengeances unassuaged; and a
kind of unscrupulous ferocity is seen not only in Heathcliff but in one
of his victims. And there are startling scenes and sentences that, once
impressed on the memory, are unforgettable: as scarlet flowers of evil
and as poisonous weeds they take root in one.