are lines on the yonder side of imagery. So is this line also:
Sad with the promise of a different sun,
and
Piteous passion keen at having found,
After exceeding ill, a little good.
Shakespeare, Chaucer and Patmore yield us these great examples. Imagery
is for the time when, as in these lines, the shock of feeling (which must
needs pass, as the heart beats and pauses) is gone by:
Thy heart with dead winged innocence filled,
Even as a nest with birds,
After the old ones by the hawk are killed.
I cite these lines of Patmore's because of their imagery in a poem that
without them would be insupportably close to spiritual facts; and because
it seems to prove with what a yielding hand at play the poet of realities
holds his symbols for a while. A great writer is both a major and a
minor mystic, in the self-same poem; now suddenly close to his mystery
(which is his greater moment) and anon making it mysterious with imagery
(which is the moment of his most beautiful lines).
The student passes delighted through the several courts of poetry, from
the outer to the inner, from riches to more imaginative riches, and from
decoration to more complex decoration; and prepares himself for the
greater opulence of the innermost chamber. But when he crosses the last
threshold he finds this mid-most sanctuary to be a hypaethral temple, and
in its custody and care a simple earth and a space of sky.
Emily Bronte seems to have a nearly unparalleled unconsciousness of the
delays, the charms, the pauses and preparations of imagery. Her strength
does not dally with the parenthesis, and her simplicity is ignorant of
those rites. Her lesser work, therefore, is plain narrative, and her
greater work is no more. On the hither side--the daily side--of imagery
she is still a strong and solitary writer; on the yonder side she has
written some of the most mysterious passages in all plain prose. And
with what direct and incommunicable art! "'Let me alone, let me alone,'
said Catherine. 'If I've done wrong, I'm dying for it. You left me too
. . . I forgive you. Forgive me!' 'It is hard to forgive, and to look
at those eyes and feel those wasted hands,' he answered. '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?' They were silent, their
faces hid against each other, and washed by each other's tears." "So
much the worse for me that I am strong," cries Heathcliff in the same
scene. "Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you--Oh
God, would you like to live with your soul in the grave?"
Charlotte Bronte's noblest passages are her own speech or the speech of
one like herself acting the central part in the dreams and dramas of
emotion that she had kept from her girlhood--the unavowed custom of the
ordinary girl by her so splendidly avowed in a confidence that comprised
the world. Emily had no such confessions to publish. She contrived--but
the word does not befit her singular spirit of liberty, that knew nothing
of stealth--to remove herself from the world; as her person left no pen-
portrait, so her "I" is not heard here. She lends her voice in disguise
to her men and women; the first narrator of her great romance is a young
man, the second a servant woman; this one or that among the actors takes
up the story, and her great words sound at times in paltry mouths. It is
then that for a moment her reader seems about to come into her immediate
presence, but by a fiction she denies herself to him. To a somewhat
trivial girl (or a girl who would be trivial in any other book, but Emily
Bronte seems unable to create anything consistently meagre)--to Isabella
Linton she commits one of her most memorable passages, and one which has
the rare image, one of a terrifying little company of visions amid
terrifying facts: "His attention was roused, I saw, for his eyes rained
down tears among the ashes. . . The clouded windows of hell flashed for a
moment towards me; the fiend which usually looked out was so dimmed and
drowned." But in Heathcliff's own speech there is no veil or
circumstance. "I'm too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's
bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself." "I have to remind
myself to breathe, and almost to remind my heart to beat." "Being alone,
and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I
said to myself: 'I'll have her in my arms again.' If she be cold, I'll
think it is this north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, it
is sleep." What art, moreover, what knowledge, what a fresh ear for the
clash of repetition; what a chime in that phrase: "I dreamt I was
sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my
cheek frozen against hers."
Emily Bronte was no student of books. It was not from among the fruits
of any other author's labour that she gathered these eminent words. But
I think I have found the suggestion of this action of Heathcliff's--the
disinterment. Not in any inspiring ancient Irish legend, as has been
suggested, did Emily Bronte find her incident; she found it (but she
made, and did not find, its beauty) in a mere costume romance of Bulwer
Lytton, whom Charlotte Bronte, as we know, did not admire. And Emily
showed no sign at all of admiration when she did him so much honour as to
borrow the action of his studio-bravo.
Heathcliff's love for Catherine's past childhood is one of the profound
surprises of this unparalleled book; it is to call her childish ghost--the
ghost of the little girl--when she has been a dead adult woman twenty
years that the inhuman lover opens the window of the house on the
Heights. Something is this that the reader knew not how to look for.
Another thing known to genius and beyond a reader's hope is the
tempestuous purity of those passions. This wild quality of purity has a
counterpart in the brief passages of nature that make the summers, the
waters, the woods, and the windy heights of that murderous story seem so
sweet. The "beck" that was audible beyond the hills after rain, the
"heath on the top of Wuthering Heights" whereon, in her dream of Heaven,
Catherine, flung out by angry angels, awoke sobbing for joy; the bird
whose feathers she--delirious creature--plucks from the pillow of her
deathbed ("This--I should know it among a thousand--it's a lapwing's.
Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor. It wanted
to get to its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells and it felt
rain coming"); the only two white spots of snow left on all the moors,
and the brooks brim-full; the old apple-trees, the smell of stocks and
wallflowers in the brief summer, the few fir-trees by Catherine's window-
bars, the early moon--I know not where are landscapes more exquisite and
natural. And among the signs of death where is any fresher than the
window seen from the garden to be swinging open in the morning, when
Heathcliff lay within, dead and drenched with rain?
None of these things are presented by images. Nor is that signal passage
wherewith the book comes to a close. Be it permitted to cite it here
again. It has taken its place, it is among the paragons of our
literature. Our language will not lapse or derogate while this prose
stands for appeal: "I lingered . . . 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."
Finally, of Emily Bronte's face the world holds only an obviously
unskilled reflection, and of her aspect no record worth having. Wild
fugitive, she vanished, she escaped, she broke away, exiled by the
neglect of her contemporaries, banished by their disrespect outlawed by
their contempt, dismissed by their indifference. And such an one was she
as might rather have pronounced upon these the sentence passed by
Coriolanus under sentence of expulsion; she might have driven the world
from before her face and cast it out from her presence as he condemned
his Romans: "_I_ banish you."