poems than Branwell's or Anne's, but that does not make them very good.
Still, they are interesting, and they are important, because they are
the bridge by which Charlotte Brontë passed into her own dominion. She
took Wordsworth with his Poems and Ballads for her guide, and he misled
her and delayed her on her way, and kept her a long time standing on her
bridge. For in her novels, and her novels only, Charlotte was a poet. In
her poems she is a novelist, striving and struggling for expression in a
cramped form, an imperfect and improper medium. But most indubitably a
novelist. Nearly all her poems which are not artificial are impersonal.
They deal with "situations", with "psychological problems", that cry
aloud for prose. There is the "Wife" who seems to have lived a long,
adventurous life with "William" through many poems; there is the
deserted wife and mother in "Mementos"; there is "Frances", the deserted
maiden; there is "Gilbert" with his guilty secret and his suicide, a
triple domestic tragedy in the three acts of a three-part ballad; there
is the lady in "Preference", who prefers her husband to her passionate
and profoundly deluded lover; there is the woman in "Apostasy", wrecked
in the conflict between love and priestcraft; and there is little else
beside. These poems are straws, showing the way of the wind that bloweth
where it listeth.
* * * * *
Too much has been written about Charlotte Brontë, and far too much has
been read. You come away from it with an enormous mass of printed stuff
wrecked in your memory, letters, simply hundreds of letters, legends and
theories huddled together in a heap, with all values and proportions
lost; and your impression is of tumult and of suffering, and of a
multitude of confused and incongruous happenings; funerals and
flirtations, or something very like flirtations, to the sound of the
passing bell and sexton's chisel; upheavals of soul, flights to and from
Brussels, interminable years of exile, and of lurid, tragic passion;
years, interminable, monotonous years of potato-peeling and all manner
of household piety; scenes of debauchery, horrors of opium and of drink;
celebrity, cataclysmal celebrity, rushings up to town in storm and
darkness, dim coffee-houses in Paternoster Row, dinner-parties; deaths,
funerals, melancholia; and still celebrity; years, interminable,
monotonous years of blazing celebrity, sounds of the literary workshop
overpowering the sexton's chisel; then marriage, sudden and swift; then
death. And in the midst of it all, one small and rather absurd and
obscure figure, tossed to and fro, said to be Charlotte Brontë.
What an existence!
This is the impression created by the bibliographical total. But sweep
four-fifths of it away, all the legends and half the letters, and sort
and set out what remains, observing values and proportions, and you get
an outer life where no great and moving event ever came, saving only
death (Charlotte's marriage hardly counts beside it); an outer life of a
strange and almost oppressive simplicity and silence; and an inner life,
tumultuous and profound in suffering, a life to all appearances
frustrate, where all nourishment of the emotions was reduced to the
barest allowance a woman's heart can depend on and yet live; and none
the less a life that out of that starvation diet raised enough of rich
and vivid and superb emotion to decorate a hundred women's lives; an
inner life which her genius fed and was fed from, for which no reality,
no experience, could touch its own intensity of realization. And, genius
apart, in the region of actual and ostensible emotion, no one of us can
measure the depth of her adoration of duty, or the depth, the force and
volume of her passion for her own people, and for the earth trodden by
their feet, the earth that covered them. Beside it every other feeling
was temporary and insignificant. In the light of it you see Charlotte
Brontë's figure for ever simple and beautiful and great; behind her for
ever the black-grey setting of her village and the purple of her moors.
That greatness and beauty and simplicity is destroyed by any effort to
detach her from her background. She may seem susceptible to the alien
influences of exile; but it is as an exile that she suffers; and her
most inspired moments are her moments of return, when she wrote prose
like this: "The moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale; as glad as if
she gave herself to his fierce caress with love. No Endymion will watch
for his goddess to-night: there are no flocks on the mountains."
* * * * *
Around the figure of Emily Brontë there is none of that clamour and
confusion. She stands apart in an enduring silence, and guards for ever
her secret and her mystery. By the mercy of heaven the swarm of gossips
and of theorists has passed her by. She has no legend or hardly any. So
completely has she been passed over that when Madame Duclaux came to
write the Life of Emily Brontë she found little to add to Mrs. Gaskell's
meagre record beyond that story, which she tells with an incomparable
simplicity and reticence, of Emily in her mortal illness, sitting by the
hearth, combing her long hair till the comb slips from her fingers.
That is worth all the reams, the terrible reams that have been written
about Charlotte.
There can be no doubt that Emily Brontë found her shelter behind
Charlotte's fame; but she was protected most of all by the
unapproachable, the unique and baffling quality of her temperament and
of her genius. Her own people seem to have felt it; Charlotte herself in
that preface to _Wuthering Heights_, which stands as her last
vindication and eulogy of her dead sister, even Charlotte betrays a
curious reservation and reluctance. You feel that Emily's genius
inspired her with a kind of sacred terror.
Charlotte destroyed all records of her sister except her poems. Between
six and seven hundred of her own letters have been published; there are
two of Emily's. They tell little or nothing. And there was that diary
she kept for Anne, where she notes with extreme brevity the things that
are happening in her family. There never was a diary wherein the soul of
the diarist was so well concealed.
And yet, because of this silence, this absence of legend and conjecture,
we see Emily Brontë more clearly than we can ever hope to see Charlotte
now. Though hardly anything is known of her, what _is_ known is
authentic; it comes straight from those who knew and loved her: from
Charlotte, from Ellen Nussey, from the servants at the Parsonage. Even
of her outward and visible presence we have a clearer image. The lines
are fewer, but they are more vivid. You see her tall and slender, in her
rough clothes, tramping the moors with the form and the step of a virile
adolescent. Shirley, the "_bête fauve_", is Emily civilized. You see her
head carried high and crowned with its long, dark hair, coiled simply,
caught up with a comb. You see her face, honey-pale, her slightly high,
slightly aquiline nose; her beautiful eyes, dark-grey, luminous; the
"kind, kindling, liquid eyes" that Ellen Nussey saw; and their look, one
moment alert, intent, and the next, inaccessibly remote.
I have seen such kind and kindling eyes in the face of a visionary, born
with a profound, incurable indifference to the material event; for whom
the Real is the incredible, unapparent harmony that flows above,
beneath, and within the gross flux of appearances. To him it is the sole
thing real. That kind and kindling look I know to be simply a light
reflected from the surface of the dream. It is anything but cold; it has
indeed a certain tender flame; but you would be profoundly mistaken if
you argued from it more than the faintest polite interest in you and
your affairs. The kindling of Emily Brontë's eyes I take to have had at
times something of the same unearthly quality. Strangers received from
her an impression as of a creature utterly removed from them; a
remoteness scarcely human, hard to reconcile with her known tenderness
for every living thing. She seems to have had a passionate repugnance to
alien and external contacts, and to have felt no more than an almost
reluctant liking for the lovable and charming Ellen Nussey. Indeed, she
regarded Charlotte's friend with the large and virile tolerance that
refuses to be charmed.
And yet in the depths of her virginal nature there was something
fiercely tender and maternal. There can be no doubt that she cared for
Charlotte, who called her "Mine own bonnie love"; but she would seem to
have cared far more for Anne who was young and helpless, and for
Branwell who was helpless and most weak.
Thus there is absolutely nothing known of Emily that destroys or
disturbs the image that Haworth holds of her; nothing that detaches her
for a moment from her own people, and from her own place. Her days of
exile count not at all in her thirty years of home. No separation ever
broke, for one hour that counted, the bonds that bound her to her moors,
or frustrated the divine passion of her communion with their earth and
sky. Better still, no tale of passion such as they tell of Charlotte was
ever told of Emily.
It may be told yet, for no secret thing belonging to this disastrous
family is sacred. There may be somewhere some awful worshipper of Emily
Brontë, impatient of her silence and unsatisfied with her strange, her
virgin and inaccessible beauty, who will some day make up a story of
some love-affair, some passion kindred to Catherine Earnshaw's passion
for Heathcliff, of which her moors have kept the secret; and he will
tell his tale. But we shall at least know that he had made it up. And
even so, it will have been better for that man if he had never been
born. He will have done his best to destroy or to deface the loveliness
of a figure unique in literature. And he will have ignored the one
perfect, the one essentially true picture of Emily Brontë, which is to
be found in Maurice Maeterlinck's _Wisdom and Destiny_.
To M. Maeterlinck she is the supreme instance of the self-sufficing
soul, independent and regardless of the material event. She shows the
emptiness, the impotence, the insignificance of all that we call
"experience," beside the spirit that endures. "Not a single event ever
paused as it passed by her threshold; yet did every event she could
claim take place in her heart, with incomparable force and beauty, with
matchless precision and detail. We say that nothing ever happened; but
did not all things really happen to her much more directly and tangibly
than with most of us, seeing that everything that took place about her,
everything that she saw or heard was transformed within her into
thoughts and feelings, into indulgent love, admiration, adoration of
life...?
"Of her happiness none can doubt. Not in the soul of the best of all
those whose happiness has lasted longest, been the most active,
diversified, perfect, could more imperishable harvest be found, than in
the soul Emily Brontë lays bare. If to her there came nothing of all
that passes in love, sorrow, passion or anguish, still did she possess
all that abides when emotion has faded away."[A]
[Footnote A: _Wisdom and Destiny_, translated by Alfred Sutro.]
What was true of Charlotte, that her inner life was luminous with
intense realization, was a hundred times more true of Emily. It was so
true that beside it nothing else that can be said is altogether true. It
is not necessary for a man to be convinced of the illusory nature of
time and of material happenings in order to appreciate Charlotte's
genius; but his comprehension of Emily's will be adequate or otherwise,
according to the passion and sincerity with which he embraces that idea.
And he must have, further, a sense of the reality behind the illusion.
It is through her undying sense of it that Emily Brontë is great. She
had none of the proud appearances of the metaphysical mind; she did not,
so far as we know, devour, like George Eliot, whole systems of
philosophy in her early youth. Her passionate pantheism was not derived;
it was established in her own soul. She was a mystic, not by religious
vocation, but by temperament and by ultimate vision. She offers the
apparent anomaly of extreme detachment and of an unconquerable love of
life.
It was the highest and the purest passion that you can well conceive.
For life gave her nothing in return. It treated her worse than it
treated Charlotte. She had none of the things that, after all, Charlotte
had; neither praise nor fame in her lifetime; nor friendship, nor love,
nor vision of love. All these things "passed her by with averted head";
and she stood in her inviolable serenity and watched them go, without
putting out her hand to one of them. You cannot surprise her in any
piteous gesture of desire or regret. And, unlike Charlotte, she made it
impossible for you to pity her.
It is this superb attitude to life, this independence of the material
event, this detachment from the stream of circumstance, that marks her
from her sister; for Charlotte is at moments pitifully immersed in the
stream of circumstance, pitifully dependent on the material event. It
is true that she kept her head above the stream, and that the failure of
the material event did not frustrate or hinder her ultimate achievement.
But Charlotte's was not by any means "a chainless soul". It struggled
and hankered after the unattainable. What she attained and realized she
realized and attained in her imagination only. She knew nothing of the
soul's more secret and intimate possession. And even her imagination
waited to some extent upon experience. When Charlotte wrote of passion,
of its tragic suffering, or of its ultimate appeasing, she, after all,
wrote of things that might have happened to her. But when Emily wrote of
passion, she wrote of a thing that, so far as she personally was
concerned, not only was not and had not been, but never could be. It was
true enough of Charlotte that she created. But of Emily it was
absolutely and supremely true.
Hers is not the language of frustration, but of complete and satisfying
possession. It may seem marvellous in the mouth of a woman destitute of
all emotional experience, in the restricted sense; but the real wonder
would have been a _Wuthering Heights_ born of any personal emotion; so
certain is it that it was through her personal destitution that her
genius was so virile and so rich. At its hour it found her virgin, not
only to passion but to the bare idea of passion, to the inner and
immaterial event.
And her genius was great, not only through her stupendous imagination,
but because it fed on the still more withdrawn and secret sources of her
soul. If she had had no genius she would yet be great because of what
took place within her, the fusion of her soul with the transcendent and
enduring life.
It was there that, possessing nothing, she possessed all things; and her
secret escapes you if you are aware only of her splendid paganism. She
never speaks the language of religious resignation like Anne and
Charlotte. It is most unlikely that she relied, openly or in secret, on
"the merits of the Redeemer", or on any of the familiar consolations of
religion. As she bowed to no disaster and no grief, consolation would
have been the last thing in any religion that she looked for. But, for
height and depth of supernatural attainment, there is no comparison
between Emily's grip of divine reality and poor Anne's spasmodic and
despairing clutch; and none between Charlotte's piety, her "God
willing"; "I suppose I ought to be thankful", and Emily's acceptance and
endurance of the event.
I am reminded that one event she neither accepted nor endured. She
fought death. Her spirit lifted the pathetic, febrile struggle of
weakness with corruption, and turned it to a splendid, Titanic, and
unearthly combat.
And yet it was in her life rather than her death that she was splendid.
There is something shocking and repellent in her last defiance. It
shrieks discord with the endurance and acceptance, braver than all
revolt, finer than all resignation, that was the secret of her genius
and of her life.
There is no need to reconcile this supreme detachment with the storm and
agony that rages through _Wuthering Heights_, or with the passion for
life and adoration of the earth that burns there, an imperishable flame;
or with Catherine Earnshaw's dream of heaven: "heaven did not seem to be
my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and
the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the
heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy".
Catherine Earnshaw's dream has been cited innumerable times to prove
that Emily Brontë was a splendid pagan. I do not know what it does
prove, if it is not the absolute and immeasurable greatness of her
genius, that, dwelling as she undoubtedly did dwell, in the secret and
invisible world, she could yet conceive and bring forth Catherine
Earnshaw.
It is not possible to diminish the force or to take away one word of Mr.
Swinburne's magnificent eulogy. There _was_ in the "passionate great
genius of Emily Brontë", "a dark, unconscious instinct as of primitive
nature-worship". That was where she was so poised and so complete; that
she touches earth and heaven, and is at once intoxicated with the
splendour of the passion of living, and holds her spirit in security and
her heart in peace. She plunged with Catherine Earnshaw into the thick
of the tumult, and her detachment is not more wonderful than her
immersion.
It is our own imperfect vision that is bewildered by the union in her of
these antagonistic attitudes. It is not only entirely possible and
compatible, but, if your soul be comprehensive, it is inevitable that
you should adore the forms of life, and yet be aware of their
impermanence; that you should affirm with equal fervour their illusion
and the radiance of the reality that manifests itself in them. Emily
Brontë was nothing if not comprehensive. There was no distance, no abyss
too vast, no antagonism, no contradiction too violent and appalling for
her embracing soul. Without a hint, so far as we know, from any
philosophy, by a sheer flash of genius she pierced to the secret of the
world and crystallized it in two lines:
The earth that wakes _one_ human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.
It is doubtful if she ever read a line of Blake; yet it is Blake that
her poems perpetually recall, and it is Blake's vision that she has
reached there. She too knew what it was
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
To hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
She sees by a flash what he saw continuously; but it is by the same
light she sees it and wins her place among the mystics.
Her mind was not always poised. It swung between its vision of
transparent unity and its love of earth for earth's sake. There are at
least four poems of hers that show this entirely natural oscillation.
In one, a nameless poem, the Genius of Earth calls to the visionary
soul:
Shall earth no more inspire thee,
Thou lonely dreamer now?
Since passion may not fire thee,
Shall nature cease to bow?
Thy mind is ever moving
In regions dark to thee;
Recall its useless roving,
Come back, and dwell with me.
* * * * *
Few hearts to mortals given
On earth so wildly pine;
Yet few would ask a heaven
More like this earth than thine.
"The Night-Wind" sings the same song, lures with the same enchantment;
and the human voice answers, resisting:
Play with the scented flower,
The young tree's supple bough,
And leave my human feelings
In their own course to flow.
But the other voice is stronger:
The wanderer would not heed me;
Its kiss grew warmer still.
"Oh, come," it sighed so sweetly;
"I'll win thee 'gainst thy will.
"Were we not friends from childhood?
Have I not loved thee long?
As long as thou, the solemn night,
Whose silence wakes my song.
"And when thy heart is resting
Beneath the church-aisle stone,
_I_ shall have time for mourning,
And _thou_ for being alone."
There are nine verses of "The Night-Wind", and the first eight are
negligible; but, as for the last and ninth, I do not know any poem in
any language that renders, in four short lines, and with such
incomparable magic and poignancy, the haunting and pursuing of the human
by the inhuman, that passion of the homeless and eternal wind.
And this woman, destitute, so far as can be known, of all metaphysical
knowledge or training, reared in the narrowest and least metaphysical of
creeds, did yet contrive to express in one poem of four irregular verses
all the hunger and thirst after the "Absolute" that ever moved a human
soul, all the bewilderment and agony inflicted by the unintelligible
spectacle of existence, the intolerable triumph of evil over good, and
did conceive an image and a vision of the transcendent reality that
holds, as in crystal, all the philosophies that were ever worthy of the
name.
Here it is. There are once more two voices: one of the Man, the other of
the Seer:
THE PHILOSOPHER
Oh, for the time when I shall sleep
Without identity.
And never care how rain may steep,
Or snow may cover me!
No promised heaven, these wild desires
Could all, or half fulfil;
No threatened hell, with quenchless fires,
Subdue this restless will.
So said I, and still say the same;
Still, to my death, will say--
Three gods, within this little frame,
Are warring night and day;
Heaven could not hold them all, and yet
They all are held in me;
And must be mine till I forget
My present entity!
Oh, for the time, when in my breast
Their struggles will be o'er!
Oh, for the day, when I shall rest,
And never suffer more!
I saw a spirit, standing, man,
Where thou dost stand--an hour ago,
And round his feet three rivers ran,
Of equal depth, and equal flow--
A golden stream--and one like blood,
And one like sapphire seemed to be;
But where they joined their triple flood
It tumbled in an inky sea.
The spirit sent his dazzling gaze
Down through that ocean's gloomy night;
Then, kindling all, with sudden blaze,--
The glad deep sparkled wide and bright--
White as the sun, far, far more fair
Than its divided sources were!
And even for that spirit, seer,
I've watched and sought my lifetime long;
Sought him in heaven, hell, earth and air,
An endless search and always wrong.
Had I but seen his glorious eye
_Once_ light the clouds that 'wilder me,
I ne'er had raised this coward cry
To cease to think, and cease to be;
I ne'er had called oblivion blest,
Nor, stretching eager hands to death,
Implored to change for senseless rest
This sentient soul, this living breath--
Oh, let me die--that power and will
Their cruel strife may close,
And conquered good and conquering ill
Be lost in one repose!
That vision of the transcendent spirit, with the mingled triple flood of
life about his feet, is one that Blake might have seen and sung and
painted.
The fourth poem, "The Prisoner", is a fragment, and an obscure fragment,
which may belong to a very different cycle. But whatever its place, it
has the same visionary quality. The vision is of the woman captive,
"confined in triple walls", the "guest darkly lodged", the "chainless
soul", that defies its conqueror, its gaoler, and the spectator of its
agony. It has, this prisoner, its own unspeakable consolation, the
"Messenger":
He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs,
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars.
Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
And visions rise and change that kill me with desire.
* * * * *
But, first, a hush of peace--a soundless calm descends;
The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends;
Mute music soothes my breast--unuttered harmony,
That I could never dream, till earth was lost to me.
Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels:
Its wings are almost free--its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulf, it stoops and dares the final bound.
That is the language of a mystic, of a mystic who has passed beyond
contemplation; who has known or imagined ecstasy. The joy is
unmistakable; unmistakable, too, is the horror of the return:
Oh! dreadful is the check--intense the agony--
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.
There is no doubt about those three verses; that they are the expression
of the rarest and the most tremendous experience that is given to
humanity to know.
If "The Visionary" does not touch that supernal place, it belongs
indubitably to the borderland:
Silent is the house; all are laid asleep:
One alone looks out o'er the snow-wreaths deep,
Watching every cloud, dreading every breeze
That whirls the wildering drift and bends the groaning trees.
Cheerful is the hearth, soft the matted floor;
Not one shivering gust creeps through pane or door;
The little lamp burns straight, the rays shoot strong and far
I trim it well to be the wanderer's guiding-star.
Frown, my haughty sire! chide, my angry dame!
Set your slaves to spy; threaten me with shame;
But neither sire nor dame, nor prying serf shall know,
What angel nightly tracks that waste of frozen snow.