Safe in secret power from lurking human snare;
What loves me no word of mine shall e'er betray,
Though for faith unstained my life must forfeit pay.
Burn then, little lamp; glimmer straight and clear--
Hush! a rustling wing stirs, methinks, the air;
He for whom I wait, thus ever comes to me:
Strange Power! I trust thy might; trust thou my constancy.
Those who can see nothing in this poem but the idealization of an
earthly passion must be strangely and perversely mistaken in their Emily
Brontë. I confess I can never read it without thinking of one of the
most marvellous of all poems of Divine Love: "En una Noche Escura".
EN UNA NOCHE ESCURA[A]
Upon an obscure night
Fevered with Love's anxiety
(O hapless, happy plight!)
I went, none seeing me,
Forth from my house, where all things quiet be.
* * * * *
Blest night of wandering
In secret, when by none might I be spied,
Nor I see anything;
Without a light to guide
Save that which in my heart burnt in my side.
That light did lead me on
More surely than the shining of noontide,
Where well I knew that One
Did for my coming bide;
Where he abode might none but he abide.
O night that didst lead thus;
O night more lovely than the dawn of light;
O night that broughtest us
Lover to lover's sight,
Lover to loved, in marriage of delight!
[Footnote A: "St. John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul."
Translated by Arthur Symons in vol. ii. of his _Collected Poems_.]
* * * * *
We know what love is celebrated there, and we do not know so clearly
what manner of supernal passion is symbolized in Emily Brontë's
angel-lover. There is a long way there between Emily Brontë and St.
John of the Cross, between her lamp-lit window and his "Dark Night of
the Soul", and yet her opening lines have something of the premonitory
thrill, the haunting power of tremendous suggestion, the intense,
mysterious expectancy of his. The spiritual experience is somewhat
different, but it belongs to the same realm of the super-physical; and
it is very far from Paganism.
She wrote of these supreme ardours and mysteries; and she wrote that
most inspired and vehement song of passionate human love, "Remembrance":
Cold in the earth--and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee....
But "Remembrance" is too well known for quotation here. So is "The Old
Stoic".
These are perfect and unforgettable things. But there is hardly one of
the least admirable of her poems that has not in it some unforgettable
and perfect verse or line:
And oh, how slow that keen-eyed star
Has tracked the chilly grey!
What, watching yet? how very far
The morning lies away.
That is how some watcher on Wuthering Heights might measure the long
passage of the night.
"The Lady to her Guitar", that recalls the dead and forgotten player,
sings:
It is as if the glassy brook
Should image still its willows fair,
_Though years ago the woodman's stroke
Laid low in dust their Dryad-hair_.
She has her "dim moon struggling in the sky", to match Charlotte's "the
moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale, glad as if she gave herself to
his fierce caress with love". At sixteen, in the schoolroom,[A] she
wrote verses of an incomparable simplicity and poignancy:
A little while, a little while,
The weary task is put away,
And I can sing and I can smile,
Alike, while I have holiday.
Where wilt thou go, my harassed heart--
What thought, what scene invites thee now?
What spot, or near or far apart,
Has rest for thee, my weary brow?
* * * * *
The house is old, the trees are bare,
Moonless above bends twilight's dome;
But what on earth is half so dear--
So longed for--as the hearth of home?
The mute bird sitting on the stone,
The dank moss dripping from the wall,
The thorn-trees gaunt, the walks o'ergrown,
I love them--how I love them all!
Still, as I mused, the naked room,
The alien firelight died away,
And, from the midst of cheerless gloom,
I passed to bright, unclouded day.
A little and a lone green lane
That opened on a common wide;
A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain
Of mountains circling every side.
A heaven so clear, an earth so calm.
So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air;
And, deepening still the dream-like charm,
Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere.
[Footnote A: Madame Duclaux assigns to these verses a much later
date--the year of Emily Brontë's exile in Brussels. Sir William
Robertson Nicoll also considers that "the 'alien firelight' suits
Brussels better than the Yorkshire hearth of 'good, kind' Miss Wooler".
To me the schoolroom of the Pensionnat suggests an "alien" stove, and
not the light of any fire at all.]
* * * * *
There was no nostalgia that she did not know. And there was no funeral
note she did not sound; from the hopeless gloom of
In the earth--the earth--thou shalt be laid,
A grey stone standing over thee;
Black mould beneath thee spread,
And black mould to cover thee.
Well--there is rest there,
So fast come thy prophecy;
The time when my sunny hair
Shall with grass-roots entwined be.
But cold--cold is that resting-place
Shut out from joy and liberty,
And all who loved thy living face
Will shrink from it shudderingly.
From that to the melancholy grace of the moorland dirge:
The linnet in the rocky dells,
The moor-lark in the air,
The bee among the heather-bells
That hide my lady fair:
The wild deer browse above her breast;
The wild birds raise their brood;
And they, her smiles of love caressed,
Have left her solitude.
* * * * *
Well, let them fight for honour's breath,
Or pleasure's shade pursue--
The dweller in the land of death
Is changed and careless too.
And if their eyes should watch and weep
Till sorrow's source were dry,
She would not, in her tranquil sleep,
Return a single sigh.
Blow, west wind, by the lowly mound,
And murmur, summer-streams--
There is no need of other sound
To soothe my lady's dreams.
There is, finally, that nameless poem--her last--where Emily Brontë's
creed finds utterance. It also is well known, but I give it here by way
of justification, lest I should seem to have exaggerated the mystic
detachment of this lover of the earth:
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life--that in me has rest,
As I--undying Life--have power in thee!
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of immortality.
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou--THOU art Being and Breath,
And what THOU art may never be destroyed.
It is not a perfect work. I do not think it is by any means the finest
poem that Emily Brontë ever wrote. It has least of her matchless,
incommunicable quality. There is one verse, the fifth, that recalls
almost painfully the frigid poets of Deism of the eighteenth century.
But even that association cannot destroy or contaminate its superb
sincerity and dignity. If it recalls the poets of Deism, it recalls no
less one of the most ancient of all metaphysical poems, the poem of
Parmenides on Being:
[Greek: pos d' an epeit apoloito pelon, pos d' an ke genoito;
ei ge genoit, ouk est', oud ei pote mellei esesthai.
* * * * *
tos, genesis men apesbestai kai apiotos olethros.
oude diaireton estin, epei pan estin homoion
oude ti pae keneon....
....eon gar eonti pelazei.]
Parmenides had not, I imagine, "penetrated" to Haworth; yet the last
verse of Emily Brontë's poem might have come straight out of his [Greek:
ta pros halaetheiaen]. Truly, an astonishing poem to have come from a
girl in a country parsonage in the 'forties.
But the most astonishing thing about it is its inversion of a yet more
consecrated form: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are
restless till they rest in Thee". Emily Brontë does not follow St.
Augustine. She has an absolutely inspired and independent insight:
Life--that in me has rest,
As I--undying Life--have power in Thee!
For there was but little humility or resignation about Emily Brontë.
Nothing could be prouder than her rejection of the view that must have
been offered to her every Sunday from her father's pulpit. She could not
accept the Christian idea of separation and the Mediator. She knew too
well the secret. She saw too clearly the heavenly side of the eternal
quest. She heard, across the worlds, the downward and the upward rush of
the Two immortally desirous; when her soul cried she heard the answering
cry of the divine pursuer: "My heart is restless till it rests in Thee."
It is in keeping with her vision of the descent of the Invisible, who
comes
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.