of the explorer, long before Mrs. Humphry Ward tried to find them in the
_Tales of Hoffmann_. And "Remembrance", one of the most passionate love
poems in the language, stood alone and apart from every other thing that
Emily Brontë had written. It was awful and mysterious in its loneliness.
But I believe that "Remembrance" also may be placed in the Gondal legend
without any violence to its mystery.
For supreme in the Gondal legend is the idea of a mighty and disastrous
passion, a woman's passion for the defeated, the dishonoured, and the
outlawed lover; a creature superb in evil, like Heathcliff, and like
Heathcliff tragic and unspeakably mournful in his doom. He or some hero
like him is "Honour's Martyr".
To-morrow, Scorn will blight my name,
And Hate will trample me,
Will load me with a coward's shame--
A traitor's perjury.
False friends will launch their covert sneers
True friends will wish me dead;
And I shall cause the bitterest tears
That you have ever shed.
Like Heathcliff, he is the "unblessed, unfriended child"; the child of
the Outcast Mother, abandoned on the moor.
Forests of heather, dark and long,
Wave their brown branching arms above;
And they must soothe thee with their song,
And they must shield my child of love.
* * * * *
Wakes up the storm more madly wild,
The mountain drifts are tossed on high;
Farewell, unblessed, unfriended child,
I cannot bear to watch thee die.
In an unmistakable Gondal song Geraldine's lover calls her to the tryst
on the moor. In the Gondal poem "Geraldine", she has her child with her
in a woodland cavern, and she prays over it wildly:
"Bless it! My Gracious God!" I cried,
"Preserve Thy mortal shrine,
For Thine own sake, be Thou its guide,
And keep it still divine--
"Say, sin shall never blanch that cheek,
Nor suffering change that brow.
Speak, in Thy mercy, Maker, speak,
And seal it safe from woe."
* * * * *
The revellers in the city slept,
My lady in her woodland bed;
I watching o'er her slumber wept,
As one who mourns the dead.
Geraldine therefore is the Outcast Mother. In "The Two Children" the
doom gathers round the child.
Heavy hangs the raindrop
From the burdened spray;
Heavy broods the damp mist
On uplands far away.
Heavy looms the dull sky,
Heavy rolls the sea;
And heavy throbs the young heart
Beneath that lonely tree.
Never has a blue streak
Cleft the clouds since morn
Never has his grim fate
Smiled since he was born.
Frowning on the infant,
Shadowing childhood's joy.
Guardian-angel knows not
That melancholy boy.
* * * * *
Blossom--that the west wind
Has never wooed to blow,
Scentless are thy petals,
Thy dew is cold as snow!
Soul--where kindred kindness
No early promise woke,
Barren is thy beauty,
As weed upon a rock.
Wither--soul and blossom!
You both were vainly given:
Earth reserves no blessing
For the unblest of Heaven.
The doomed child of the outcast mother is the doomed man, and, by the
doom, himself an outcast. The other child, the "Child of delight, with
sun-bright hair", has vowed herself to be his guardian angel. Their
drama is obscure; but you make out that it is the doomed child, and not
Branwell Brontë, who is "The Wanderer from the Fold".
How few, of all the hearts that loved,
Are grieving for thee now;
And why should mine to-night be moved
With such a sense of woe?
Too often thus, when left alone,
Where none my thoughts can see,
Comes back a word, a passing tone
From thy strange history.
* * * * *
An anxious gazer from the shore--
I marked the whitening wave,
And wept above thy fate the more
Because--I could not save.
It recks not now, when all is over;
But yet my heart will be
A mourner still, though friend and lover
Have both forgotten thee.
Compare with this that stern elegy in Mr. Shorter's collection, "Shed no
tears o'er that tomb." A recent critic has referred this poem of
reprobation also to Branwell Brontë--as if Emily could possibly have
written like this of Branwell:
Shed no tears o'er that tomb,
For there are angels weeping;
Mourn not him whose doom
Heaven itself is mourning.
* * * * *
... he who slumbers there
His bark will strive no more
Across the waters of despair
To reach that glorious shore.
The time of grace is past,
And mercy, scorned and tried,
Forsakes to utter wrath at last
The soul so steeled by pride.
That wrath will never spare,
Will never pity know;
Will mock its victim's maddened prayer,
With triumph in his woe.
Shut from his Maker's smile
The accursed man shall be;
For mercy reigns a little while,
But hate eternally.
This is obviously related to "The Two Children", and that again to "The
Wanderer from the Fold". Obviously, too, the woman's lament in "The
Wanderer from the Fold" recalls the Gondal woman's lament for her
dishonoured lover. For there are two voices that speak and answer each
other, the voice of reprobation, and the voice of passion and pity. This
is the "Gondal Woman's Lament":
Far, far is mirth withdrawn:
'Tis three long hours before the morn,
And I watch lonely, drearily;
So come, thou shade, commune with me.
Deserted one! thy corpse lies cold,
And mingled with a foreign mould.
Year after year the grass grows green
Above the dust where thou hast been.
I will not name thy blighted name,
Tarnished by unforgotten shame,
Though not because my bosom torn
Joins the mad world in all its scorn.
Thy phantom face is dark with woe,
Tears have left ghastly traces there,
Those ceaseless tears! I wish their flow
Could quench thy wild despair.
They deluge my heart like the rain
On cursed Zamorna's howling plain.
Yet when I hear thy foes deride,
I must cling closely to thy side.
Our mutual foes! They will not rest
From trampling on thy buried breast.
Glutting their hatred with the doom
They picture thine beyond the tomb.
(Which is what they did in the song of reprobation. But passion and pity
know better. They know that)
... God is not like human kind,
Man cannot read the Almighty mind;
Vengeance will never torture thee,
Nor hurt thy soul eternally.
* * * * *
What have I dreamt? He lies asleep,
With whom my heart would vainly weep;
_He_ rests, and _I_ endure the woe
That left his spirit long ago.
This poem is not quoted for its beauty or its technique, but for its
important place in the story. You can track the great Gondal hero down
by that one fantastic name, "Zamorna". You have thus four poems,
obviously related; and a fifth that links them, obviously, with the
Gondal legend.
It is difficult to pick out from the confusion of these unsorted
fragments all the heroes of Emily Brontë's saga. There is Gleneden, who
kills a tyrant and is put in prison for it. There is Julius Angora, who
"lifts his impious eye" in the cathedral where the monarchs of Gondal
are gathered; who leads the patriots of Gondal to the battle of
Almedore, and was defeated there, and fell with his mortal enemy. He is
beloved of Rosina, a crude prototype of Catherine Earnshaw. "King Julius
left the south country" and remained in danger in the northern land
because a passion for Rosina kept him there. There is also Douglas of
the "Ride". He appears again in the saga of the Queen Augusta, the woman
of the "brown mountain side". But who he was, and what he was doing, and
whether he killed Augusta or somebody else killed her, I cannot for the
life of me make out. Queen Augusta, like Catherine Earnshaw, is a
creature of passion and jealousy, and her lover had been faithless. She
sings that savage song of defiance and hatred and lamentation: "Light up
thy halls!"
Oh! could I see thy lids weighed down in cheerless woe;
Too full to hide their tears, too stern to overflow;
Oh! could I know thy soul with equal grief was torn,
This fate might be endured--this anguish might be borne.
How gloomy grows the night! 'Tis Gondal's wind that blows;
I shall not tread again the deep glens where it rose,
I feel it on my face----Where, wild blast! dost thou roam?
What do we, wanderer! here, so far away from home?
I do not need thy breath to cool my death-cold brow;
But go to that far land where she is shining now;
Tell her my latest wish, tell her my dreary doom;
Say that my pangs are past, but _hers_ are yet to come.
And there is Fernando, who stole his love from Zamorna. He is a sort of
shadowy forerunner of Edgar Linton.
There is the yeoman Percy, the father of Mary whom Zamorna loved. And
there is Zamorna.
A large group of poems in the legend refer, obviously, I think, to the
same person. Zamorna is the supreme hero, the Achilles of this northern
Iliad. He is the man of sin, the "son of war and love", the child
"unblessed of heaven", abandoned by its mother, cradled in the heather
and rocked by the winter storm, the doomed child, grown to its doom,
like Heathcliff. His story is obscure and broken, but when all the
Zamorna poems are sorted from the rest, you make out that, like
Heathcliff, he ravished from her home the daughter of his mortal enemy
(with the difference that Zamorna loves Mary); and that like Heathcliff
he was robbed of the woman that he loved. The passions of Zamorna are
the passions of Heathcliff. He dominates a world of savage loves and
mortal enmities like the world of _Wuthering Heights_. There are
passages in this saga that reveal the very aspect of the soul of
Heathcliff. Here are some of them.
Zamorna, in prison, cries out to his "false friend and treacherous
guide":
"If I have sinned; long, long ago
That sin was purified by woe.
I have suffered on through night and day,
I've trod a dark and frightful way."
It is what Heathcliff says to Catherine Earnshaw: "I've fought through a
bitter life since I last heard your voice."
And again:
If grief for grief can touch thee,
If answering woe for woe,
If any ruth can melt thee,
Come to me now.
It is the very voice of Heathcliff calling to Cathy.
Again, he is calling to "Percy", the father of Mary, his bride, the rose
that he plucked from its parent stem, that died from the plucking.
Bitterly, deeply I've drunk of thy woe;
When thy stream was troubled, did mine calmly flow?
And yet I repent not; I'd crush thee again
If our vessels sailed adverse on life's stormy main.
But listen! The earth is our campaign of war,
* * * * *
Is there not havoc and carnage for thee
Unless thou couchest thy lance at me?
He proposes to unite their arms.
Then might thy Mary bloom blissfully still
This hand should ne'er work her sorrow or ill.
* * * * *
What! shall Zamorna go down to the dead
With blood on his hands that he wept to have shed?
The alliance is refused. Percy is crushed. Mary is dying, the rose is
withering.
Its faded buds already lie
To deck my coffin when I die.
Bring them here--'twill not be long,
'Tis the last word of the woeful song;
And the final and dying words are sung
To the discord of lute strings all unstrung.
* * * * *
Have I crushed you, Percy? I'd raise once more
The beacon-light on the rocky shore.
Percy, my love is so true and deep,
That though kingdoms should wail and worlds should weep,
I'd fling the brand in the hissing sea,
The brand that must burn unquenchably.
Your rose is mine; when the sweet leaves fade,
They must be the chaplet to wreathe my head
The blossoms to deck my home with the dead.
Zamorna is tenderer than Heathcliff. He laments for his rose.
On its bending stalk a bonny flower
In a yeoman's home close grew;
It had gathered beauty from sunshine and shower,
From moonlight and silent dew.
* * * * *
Keenly his flower the yeoman guarded,
He watched it grow both day and night;
From the frost, from the wind, from the storm he warded
That flush of roseate light.
And ever it glistened bonnilie
Under the shade of the old yew-tree.
* * * * *
The rose is blasted, withered, blighted
Its root has felt a worm,
And like a heart beloved and slighted,
Failed, faded, shrunk its form.
Bud of beauty, bonny flower,
I stole thee from thy natal bower.
I was the worm that withered thee....
And he sings of Mary, on her death-bed in her delirium. He will not
believe that she is dying.
Oh! say not that her vivid dreams
Are but the shattered glass
Which but because more broken, gleams
More brightly in the grass.
Her spirit is the unfathomed lake
Whose face the sudden tempests break
To one tormented roar;
But as the wild winds sink in peace
All those disturbed waves decrease
Till each far-down reflection is
As life-like as before.
Her death is not the worst.
I cannot weep as once I wept
Over my western beauty's grave.
* * * * *
I am speaking of a later stroke,
A death the dream of yesterday,
Still thinking of my latest shock,
A noble friendship torn away.
I feel and say that I am cast
From hope, and peace, and power, and pride
* * * * *
Without a voice to speak to you
Save that deep gong which tolled my doom,
And made my dread iniquity
Look darker than my deepest gloom.
But the crucial passage (for the sources) is the scene in the yeoman's
hall where Zamorna comes to Percy. He comes stealthily.
That step he might have used before
When stealing on to lady's bower,
Forth at the same still twilight hour,
For the moon now bending mild above
Showed him a son of war and love.
His eye was full of that sinful fire
Which oft unhallowed passions light.
It spoke of quickly kindled ire,
Of love too warm, and wild, and bright.
Bright, but yet sullied, love that could never
Bring good in rising, leave peace in decline,
Woe to the gifted, crime to the giver....
* * * * *
Now from his curled and shining hair,
Circling the brow of marble fair,
His dark, keen eyes on Percy gaze
With stern and yet repenting rays.
* * * * *
He loves Percy whose rose was his, and he hates him, as Heathcliff might
have loved and hated, but with less brutality.
Young savage! how he bends above
The object of his wrath and love,
How tenderly his fingers press
The hand that shrinks from their caress.
The yeoman turns on "the man of sin".
What brought you here? I called you not
* * * * *
Are you a hawk to follow the prey,
When mangled it flutters feebly away?
A sleuth-hound to track the deer by his blood,
When wounded he wins to the darkest wood,
There, if he can, to die alone?
It might have been Heathcliff and a Linton.
So much for Zamorna.
Finally, there are two poems in Mr. Shorter's collection that, verse for
prose, might have come straight out of _Wuthering Heights_. One
(inspired by Byron) certainly belongs to the Zamorna legend of the
Gondal cycle.
And now the house-dog stretched once more
His limbs upon the glowing floor;
The children half resume their play,
Though from the warm hearth scared away;
The good-wife left her spinning-wheel
And spread with smiles the evening meal;
The shepherd placed a seat and pressed
To their poor fare the unknown guest,
And he unclasped his mantle now,
And raised the covering from his brow,
Said, voyagers by land and sea
Were seldom feasted daintily,
And cheered his host by adding stern
He'd no refinement to unlearn.
Which is what Heathcliff would have said sternly. Observe the effect of
him.
A silence settled on the room,
The cheerful welcome sank to gloom;
But not those words, though cold or high,
So froze their hospitable joy.
No--there was something in his face,
Some nameless thing which hid not grace,
And something in his voice's tone
Which turned their blood as chill as stone.
The ringlets of his long black hair
Fell o'er a cheek most ghastly fair.
Youthful he seemed--but worn as they
Who spend too soon their youthful day.
When his glance dropped, 'twas hard to quell
Unbidden feelings' hidden swell;
And Pity scarce her tears could hide,
So sweet that brow with all its pride.
But when upraised his eye would dart
An icy shudder through the heart,
Compassion changed to horror then,
And fear to meet that gaze again.
It was not hatred's tiger-glare,
Nor the wild anguish of despair;
It was not either misery
Which quickens friendship's sympathy;
No--lightning all unearthly shone
Deep in that dark eye's circling zone,
Such withering lightning as we deem
None but a spirit's look may beam;
And glad were all when he turned away
And wrapt him in his mantle grey,
And hid his head upon his arm,
And veiled from view his basilisk charm.
That, I take it, is Zamorna, that Byronic hero, again; but it is also
uncommonly like Heathcliff, with "his basilisk eyes". And it is dated
July 1839, seven years before _Wuthering Heights_ was written.
The other crucial instance is a nameless poem to the Earth.
I see around me piteous tombstones grey
Stretching their shadows far away.
Beneath the turf my footsteps tread
Lie low and lone the silent dead;
Beneath the turf, beneath the mould,
For ever dark, for ever cold.
And my eyes cannot hold the tears
That memory hoards from vanished years.
For Time and Death and mortal pain
Give wounds that will not heal again.
Let me remember half the woe
I've seen and heard and felt below,
And heaven itself, so pure and blest,
Could never give my spirit rest.
Sweet land of light! Thy children fair
Know nought akin to our despair;
Nor have they felt, nor can they tell
What tenants haunt each mortal cell,
What gloomy guests we hold within,
Torments and madness, fear and sin!
Well, may they live in ecstasy
Their long eternity of joy;
At least we would not bring them down
With us to weep, with us to groan.
No, Earth would wish no other sphere
To taste her cup of suffering drear;
She turns from heaven a tearless eye
And only mourns that _we_ must die!
Ah mother! what shall comfort thee
In all this boundless misery?
To cheer our eager eyes awhile,
We see thee smile, how fondly smile!
But who reads not through the tender glow
Thy deep, unutterable woe?
Indeed no darling hand above
Can cheat thee of thy children's love.
We all, in life's departing shine,
Our last dear longings blend with thine,
And struggle still, and strive to trace
With clouded gaze thy darling face.
We would not leave our nature home
For _any_ world beyond the tomb.
No, mother, on thy kindly breast
Let us be laid in lasting rest,
Or waken but to share with thee
A mutual immortality.
There is the whole spirit of _Wuthering Heights_; the spirit of
Catherine Earnshaw's dream; the spirit that in the last page broods over
the moorland graveyard. It is instinct with a more than pagan adoration
of the tragic earth, adored because of her tragedy.
It would be dangerous to assert positively that "Remembrance" belongs to
the same song-cycle; but it undoubtedly belongs to the same cycle, or
rather cyclone, of passion; the cyclone that rages in the hearts of
Heathcliff and of Catherine. The genius of Emily Brontë was so far
dramatic that, if you could divide her poems into the personal and
impersonal, the impersonal would be found in a mass out of all
proportion to the other. But, with very few exceptions, you cannot so
divide them; for in her continuous and sustaining dream, the vision that
lasted for at least eleven years of her life, from eighteen-thirty-four,
the earliest date of any known Gondal poem, to eighteen-forty-five, the
last appearance of the legend, she _was_ these people; she lived,
indistinguishably and interchangeably, their tumultuous and passionate
life. Sometimes she is the lonely spirit that looks on in immortal
irony, raised above good and evil. More often she is a happy god,
immanent in his restless and manifold creations, rejoicing in this
multiplication of himself. It is she who fights and rides, who loves and
hates, and suffers and defies. She heads one poem naïvely: "To the Horse
Black Eagle that I rode at the Battle of Zamorna." The horse _I_ rode!
If it were not glorious, it would be (when you think what her life was
in that Parsonage) most mortally pathetic.
But it is all in keeping. For, as she could dare the heavenly, divine
adventure, so there was no wild and ardent adventure of the earth she
did not claim.
* * * * *
Love of life and passionate adoration of the earth, adoration and
passion fiercer than any pagan knew, burns in _Wuthering Heights_. And
if that were all, it would be impossible to say whether her mysticism or
her paganism most revealed the soul of Emily Brontë.
In _Wuthering Heights_ we are plunged apparently into a world of most
unspiritual lusts and hates and cruelties; into the very darkness and
thickness of elemental matter; a world that would be chaos, but for the
iron Necessity that brings its own terrible order, its own implacable
law of lust upon lust begotten, hate upon hate, and cruelty upon
cruelty, through the generations of Heathcliffs and of Earnshaws.
Hindley Earnshaw is brutal to the foundling, Heathcliff, and degrades
him. Heathcliff, when his hour comes, pays back his wrong with the
interest due. He is brutal beyond brutality to Hindley Earnshaw, and he
degrades Hareton, Hindley's son, as he himself was degraded; but he is
not brutal to him. The frustrated passion of Catherine Earnshaw for
Heathcliff, and of Heathcliff for Catherine, hardly knows itself from
hate; they pay each other back torture for torture, and pang for
hopeless pang. When Catherine marries Edgar Linton, Heathcliff marries
Isabella, Edgar's sister, in order that he may torture to perfection
Catherine and Edgar and Isabella. His justice is more than poetic. The
love of Catherine Earnshaw was all that he possessed. He knows that he
has lost it through the degradation that he owes to Hindley Earnshaw. It
is because an Earnshaw and a Linton between them have robbed him of all
that he possessed, that, when his hour comes, he pays himself back by
robbing the Lintons and the Earnshaws of all that _they_ possess, their
Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. He loathes above all loathely
creatures, Linton, his own son by Isabella. The white-blooded thing is
so sickly that he can hardly keep it alive. But with an unearthly
cruelty he cherishes, he nourishes this spawn till he can marry it on
its death-bed to the younger Catherine, the child of Catherine Earnshaw
and of Edgar Linton. This supreme deed accomplished, he lets the
creature die, so that Thrushcross Grange may fall into his hands. Judged
by his bare deeds, Heathcliff seems a monster of evil, a devil without
any fiery infernal splendour, a mean and sordid devil.
But--and this is what makes Emily Brontë's work stupendous--not for a
moment can you judge Heathcliff by his bare deeds. Properly speaking,
there are no bare deeds to judge him by. Each deed comes wrapt in its
own infernal glamour, trailing a cloud of supernatural splendour. The
whole drama moves on a plane of reality superior to any deed. The spirit
of it, like Emily Brontë's spirit, is superbly regardless of the
material event. As far as material action goes Heathcliff is singularly
inert. He never seems to raise a hand to help his vengeance. He lets
things take their course. He lets Catherine marry Edgar Linton and
remain married to him. He lets Isabella's passion satisfy itself. He
lets Hindley Earnshaw drink himself to death. He lets Hareton sink to
the level of a boor. He lets Linton die. His most overt and violent
action is the capture of the younger Catherine. And even there he takes
advantage of the accident that brings her to the door of Wuthering
Heights. He watches and bides his time with the intentness of a brooding
spirit that in all material happenings seeks its own. He makes them his
instruments of vengeance. And Heathcliff's vengeance, like his passion
for Catherine, is an immortal and immaterial thing. He shows how little
he thinks of sordid, tangible possession; for, when his vengeance is
complete, when Edgar Linton and Linton Heathcliff are dead and their
lands and houses are his, he becomes utterly indifferent. He falls into
a melancholy. He neither eats nor drinks. He shuts himself up in Cathy's
little room and is found dead there, lying on Cathy's bed.
If there never was anything less heavenly, less Christian, than this
drama, there never was anything less earthly, less pagan. There is no
name for it. It is above all our consecrated labels and distinctions. It
has been called a Greek tragedy, with the Aeschylean motto, [Greek: to
drasanti pathein]. But it is not Greek any more than it is Christian;
and if it has a moral, its moral is far more [Greek: to pathonti
pathein]. It is the drama of suffering born of suffering, and confined
strictly within the boundaries of the soul.