surpassed or otherwise gainsaid) finds in it a tragedy of inherited
evil. She thinks that Emily Brontë was greatly swayed by the doctrine of
heredity. "'No use,' she seems to be saying, 'in waiting for the
children of evil parents to grow, of their own will and unassisted,
straight and noble. The very quality of their will is as inherited as
their eyes and hair. Heathcliff is no fiend or goblin; the untrained,
doomed child of some half-savage sailor's holiday, violent and
treacherous. And how far shall we hold the sinner responsible for a
nature which is itself the punishment of some forefather's crime?'"
All this, I cannot help thinking, is alien to the spirit of _Wuthering
Heights_, and to its greatness. It is not really any problem of heredity
that we have here. Heredity is, in fact, ignored. Heathcliff's race and
parentage are unknown. There is no resemblance between the good old
Earnshaws, who adopted him, and their son Hindley. Hareton does not
inherit Hindley's drunkenness or his cruelty. It is not through any
physical consequence of his father's vices that Hareton suffers. Linton
is in no physical sense the son of Heathcliff. If Catherine Linton
inherits something of Catherine Earnshaw's charm and temper, it is
because the younger Catherine belongs to another world; she is an
inferior and more physical creature. She has nothing in her of Catherine
Earnshaw's mutinous passion, the immortal and unearthly passion which
made that Catherine alive and killed her. Catherine Linton's "little
romance" is altogether another affair.
The world of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a world of spiritual
affinities, of spiritual contacts and recoils where love begets and
bears love, and hate is begotten of hate and born of shame. Even Linton
Heathcliff, that "whey-faced, whining wretch", that physical degenerate,
demonstrates the higher law. His weakness is begotten by his father's
loathing on his mother's terror.
Never was a book written with a more sublime ignoring of the physical.
You only get a taste of it once in Isabella's unwholesome love for
Heathcliff; that is not passion, it is sentiment, and it is thoroughly
impure. And you get a far-off vision of it again in Isabella's fear of
Heathcliff. Heathcliff understood her. He says of her, "'No brutality
disgusted her.... I've sometimes relented, from pure lack of invention,
in my experiments on what she could endure and still creep shamefully
back.'" This civilized creature is nearer to the animals, there is more
of the earth in her than in Catherine or in Heathcliff. They are
elemental beings, if you like, but their element is fire. They are
clean, as all fiery, elemental things are clean.
True, their love found violent physical expression; so that M.
Maeterlinck can say of them and their creator: "We feel that one must
have lived for thirty years under chains of burning kisses to learn what
she has learned; to dare so confidently set forth, with such minuteness,
such unerring certainty, the delirium of those two lovers of _Wuthering
Heights_; to mark the self-conflicting movements of the tenderness that
would make suffer, and the cruelty that would make glad, the felicity
that prayed for death, and the despair that clung to life, the repulsion
that desired, the desire drunk with repulsion--love surcharged with
hatred, hatred staggering beneath its load of love."[A]
[Footnote A: _Wisdom and Destiny_, translated by Alfred Sutro.]
True; but the passion that consumes Catherine and Heathcliff, that burns
their bodies and destroys them, is nine-tenths a passion of the soul. It
taught them nothing of the sad secrets of the body. Thus Catherine's
treachery to Heathcliff is an unconscious treachery. It is her innocence
that makes it possible. She goes to Edgar Linton's arms with blind
eyes, in utter, childlike ignorance, not knowing what she does till it
is done and she is punished for it. She is punished for the sin of sins,
the sundering of the body from the soul. All her life after she sees her
sin. She has taken her body, torn it apart and given it to Edgar Linton,
and Heathcliff has her soul.
"'You love Edgar Linton,' Nelly Dean says, 'and Edgar loves you ...
where is the obstacle?'
"_'Here!_ and _here_!' replied Catherine, striking one hand on her
forehead, and the other on her breast: 'in whichever place the soul
lives. In my soul and in my heart, I'm convinced I'm wrong.'... 'I've no
more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if
the wicked man in there hadn't brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't
have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he
shall never know how I love him, and that, not because he's handsome,
Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are
made of, his and mine are the same.'"
Not only are they made of the same stuff, but Heathcliff _is_ her soul.
"'I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that
there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the
use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries
in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries ... my great thought in
living is himself.... Nelly! I _am_ Heathcliff! He's always, always in
my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to myself, but
as my own being.'"
That is her "secret".
Of course, there is Cathy's other secret--her dream, which passes for
Emily Brontë's "pretty piece of Paganism". But it is only one side of
Emily Brontë. And it is only one side of Catherine Earnshaw. When
Heathcliff turns from her for a moment in that last scene of passion,
she says: "'Oh, you see, Nelly, he would not relent a moment to keep me
out of the grave. _That_ is how I'm loved! Well, never mind. That is not
_my_ Heathcliff. I shall love mine yet; and take him with me: he's in my
soul. And,' she added musingly, 'the thing that irks me most is this
shattered prison, after all. I'm tired of being enclosed here. I'm
wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not
seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of
an aching heart; but really with it and in it. Nelly, you think you are
better and more fortunate than I; in full health and strength; you are
sorry for me--very soon that will be altered. I shall be sorry for
_you_. I shall be incomparably above and beyond you all.'"
True, adoration of Earth, the All-Mother, runs like a choric hymn
through all the tragedy. Earth is the mother and the nurse of these
children. They are brought to her for their last bed, and she gives them
the final consolation.
Yet, after all, the end of this wild northern tragedy is far enough from
Earth, the All-Mother. The tumult of _Wuthering Heights_ ceases when
Heathcliff sickens. It sinks suddenly into the peace and silence of
exhaustion. And the drama closes, not in hopeless gloom, the agony of
damned souls, but in redemption, reconciliation.
Catherine, the child of Catherine and of Edgar Linton, loves Hareton,
the child of Hindley Earnshaw. The evil spirit that possessed these two
dies with the death of Heathcliff. The younger Catherine is a mixed
creature, half-spiritualized by much suffering. Hareton is a splendid
animal, unspiritualized and unredeemed. Catherine redeems him; and you
gather that by that act of redemption, somehow, the souls of Catherine
and Heathcliff are appeased.
The whole tremendous art of the book is in this wringing of strange and
terrible harmony out of raging discord. It ends on a sliding cadence,
soft as a sigh of peace only just conscious after pain.
"I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next
the moor: the middle one grey and half-buried in heath; Edgar Linton's
only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff's
still bare.
"I lingered round them, 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."
* * * * *
But that is not the real end, any more than Lockwood's arrival at
Wuthering Heights is the beginning. It is only Lockwood recovering
himself; the natural man's drawing breath after the passing of the
supernatural.
For it was not conceivable that the more than human love of Heathcliff
and Catherine should cease with the dissolution of their bodies. It was
not conceivable that Catherine, by merely dying in the fifteenth
chapter, should pass out of the tale. As a matter of fact, she never
does pass out of it. She is more in it than ever.
For the greater action of the tragedy is entirely on the invisible and
immaterial plane; it is the pursuing, the hunting to death of an earthly
creature by an unearthly passion. You are made aware of it at the very
beginning when the ghost of the child Catherine is heard and felt by
Lockwood; though it is Heathcliff that she haunts. It begins in the
hour after Catherine's death, upon Heathcliff's passionate invocation:
"'Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest so long as I am living! You said
I killed you--haunt me, then! The murdered _do_ haunt their murderers, I
believe. I know that ghosts _have_ wandered on earth. Be with me
always--take any form--drive me mad! Only _do_ not leave me in this
abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unbearable! I _cannot_
live without my life! I _cannot_ live without my soul!'"
It begins and is continued through eighteen years. He cannot see her,
but he is aware of her. He is first aware on the evening of the day she
is buried. He goes to the graveyard and breaks open the new-made grave,
saying to himself, "'I'll have her in my arms again! If she be cold,
I'll think it is the north wind that chills _me_; and if she be
motionless, it is sleep.'" A sighing, twice repeated, stops him. "'I
appeared to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind.
I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by; but as certainly as
you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, though
it cannot be discerned, so certainly I felt Cathy was there; not under
me, but on the earth.... Her presence was with me; it remained while I
refilled the grave, and led me home.'"
But she cannot get through to him completely, because of the fleshly
body that he wears.
He goes up to his room, his room and hers. "'I looked round
impatiently--I felt her by me--I could _almost_ see her, and yet I
_could not_!... She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to
me! And since then, sometimes more and sometimes less, I've been the
sport of that intolerable torture!... When I sat in the house with
Hareton, it seemed that on going out I should meet her; when I walked on
the moors I should meet her coming in. When I went from home, I
hastened to return; she _must_ be somewhere at the Heights, I was
certain! And when I slept in her chamber--I was beaten out of that. I
couldn't lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was either
outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or
even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a
child; and I must open my lids to see. And so I opened and closed them a
hundred times a night--to be always disappointed! It racked me!... It
was a strange way of killing: not by inches, but by fractions of
hair-breadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eighteen
years!'"
In all Catherine's appearances you feel the impulse towards satisfaction
of a soul frustrated of its passion, avenging itself on the body that
betrayed it. It has killed Catherine's body. It will kill Heathcliff's;
for it _must_ get through to him. And he knows it.
Heathcliff's brutalities, his cruelties, the long-drawn accomplishment
of his revenge, are subordinate to this supreme inner drama, this
wearing down of the flesh by the lust of a remorseless spirit.
Here are the last scenes of the final act. Heathcliff is failing.
"'Nelly,' he says, 'there's a strange change approaching: I'm in its
shadow at present. I take so little interest in my daily life, that I
hardly remember to eat or drink. Those two who have left the room'"
(Catherine Linton and Hareton) "'are the only objects which retain a
distinct material appearance to me.... Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed
a personification of my youth, not a human being: I felt to him in such
a variety of ways that it would have been impossible to have accosted
him rationally. In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine
connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose
the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least: for
what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I
cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the
flags? In every cloud, in every tree--filling the air at night, and
caught by glimpses in every object by day--I am devoured with her image!
The most ordinary faces of men and women--my own features--mock me with
a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda
that she did exist, and that I have lost her.'...
"'But what do you mean by a _change_, Mr. Heathcliff?' I said, alarmed
at his manner....
"'I shall not know till it comes,' he said, 'I'm only half conscious of
it now.'"
A few days pass. He grows more and more abstracted and detached. One
morning Nelly Dean finds him downstairs, risen late.
"I put a basin of coffee before him. He drew it nearer, and then rested
his arms on the table, and looked at the opposite wall, as I supposed,
surveying one particular portion, up and down, with glittering, restless
eyes, and with such eager interest that he stopped breathing during half
a minute together....
"'Mr. Heathcliff! master!' I cried, 'don't, for God's sake stare as if
you saw an unearthly vision.'
"'Don't, for God's sake, shout so loud,' he replied. 'Turn round, and
tell me, are we by ourselves?'
"'Of course,' was my answer, 'of course we are.'
"Still, I involuntarily obeyed him, as if I were not quite sure. With a
sweep of his hand he cleared a space in front of the breakfast-things,
and leant forward more at his ease.
"Now I perceived that he was not looking at the wall; for, when I
regarded him alone, it seemed exactly that he gazed at something within
two yards' distance. And, whatever it was, it communicated, apparently,
both pleasure and pain in exquisite extremes: at least the anguished,
yet raptured, expression of his countenance suggested that idea. The
fancied object was not fixed: either his eyes pursued it with unwearied
diligence, and, even in speaking to me, were never weaned away. I vainly
reminded him of his protracted abstinence from food: if he stirred to
touch anything in compliance with my entreaties, if he stretched his
hand out to get a piece of bread, his fingers clenched before they
reached it, and remained on the table, forgetful of their aim."
He cannot sleep; and at dawn of the next day he comes to the door of his
room--Cathy's room--and calls Nelly to him. She remonstrates with him
for his neglect of his body's health, and of his soul's.
"'Your cheeks are hollow, and your eyes bloodshot, like a person
starving with hunger, and going blind with loss of sleep.'
"'It is not my fault that I cannot eat or rest,' he said.... 'I'll do
both as soon as I possibly can ... as to repenting of my injustices,
I've done no injustice, and I repent of nothing. I am too happy; and yet
I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but does not
satisfy itself.'" ... "In the afternoon, while Joseph and Hareton were
at their work, he came into the kitchen again, and, with a wild look,
bid me come and sit in the house: he wanted somebody with him. I
declined; telling him plainly that his strange talk and manner
frightened me, and I had neither the nerve nor the will to be his
companion alone.
"'I believe you think me a fiend,' he said, with his dismal laugh:
'something too horrible to live under a decent roof.' Then, turning to
Catherine, who was there, and who drew behind me at his approach, he
added, half sneeringly: 'Will _you_ come, chuck? I'll not hurt you. No!
to you I've made myself worse than the devil. Well, there is _one_ who
won't shrink from my company! By God! she's relentless. Oh, damn it!
It's unutterably too much for flesh and blood to bear--even mine.'"
It is Heathcliff's susceptibility to this immaterial passion, the fury
with which he at once sustains and is consumed by it, that makes him
splendid.
Peace under green grass could never be the end of Heathcliff or of such
a tragedy as _Wuthering Heights_. Its real end is the tale told by the
shepherd whom Lockwood meets on the moor.
"'I was going to the Grange one evening--a dark evening, threatening
thunder--and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little
boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and I
supposed the lambs were skittish and would not be guided.
"'What is the matter, my little man?' I asked.
"'There's Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under t' Nab,' he blubbered,
'un' I darnut pass 'em.'"
It is there, the end, in one line, charged with the vibration of the
supernatural. One line that carries the suggestion of I know not what
ghostly and immaterial passion and its unearthly satisfaction.
* * * * *
And this book stands alone, absolutely self-begotten and self-born. It
belongs to no school; it follows no tendency. You cannot put it into any
category. It is not "Realism", it is not "Romance", any more than _Jane
Eyre_: and if any other master's method, De Maupassant's or Turgeniev's,
is to be the test, it will not stand it. There is nothing in it you can
seize and name. You will not find in it support for any creed or theory.
The redemption of Catherine Linton and Hareton is thrown in by the way
in sheer opulence of imagination. It is not insisted on. Redemption is
not the keynote of _Wuthering Heights_. The moral problem never entered
into Emily Brontë's head. You may call her what you will--Pagan,
pantheist, transcendentalist mystic and worshipper of earth, she slips
from all your formulas. She reveals a point of view above good and evil.
Hers is an attitude of tolerance that is only not tenderness because her
acceptance of life and of all that lives is unqualified and unstinting.
It is too lucid and too high for pity.
Heathcliff and Catherine exist. They justify their existence by their
passion. But if you ask what is to be said for such a creature as Linton
Heathcliff, you will be told that he does not justify his existence; his
existence justifies him.
Do I despise the timid deer,
Because his limbs are fleet with fear?
Or, would I mock the wolf's death-howl,
Because his form is gaunt and foul?
Or, hear with joy the lev'ret's cry,
Because it cannot bravely die?
No! Then above his memory
Let Pity's heart as tender be.
After all it _is_ pity; it is tenderness.
And if Emily Brontë stands alone and is at her greatest in the things
that none but she can do, she is great also in some that she may be said
to share with other novelists; the drawing of minor characters, for
instance. Lockwood may be a little indistinct, but he is properly so,
for he is not a character, he is a mere impersonal looker-on. But Nelly
Dean, the chief teller of the story, preserves her rich individuality
through all the tortuous windings of the tale. Joseph, the old
farm-servant, the bitter, ranting Calvinist, is a masterpiece. And
masterly was that inspiration that made Joseph chorus to a drama that
moves above good and evil. "'Thank Hivin for all!'" says Joseph. "'All
warks togither for gooid, to them as is chozzen and piked out fro' the
rubbidge. Yah knaw whet t' Scripture sez.'" "'It's a blazing shame, that
I cannot oppen t' blessed Book, but yah set up them glories to Sattan,
and all t' flaysome wickednesses that iver were born into the warld.'"
Charlotte Brontë said of her sister: "Though her feeling for the people
round her was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor,
with very few exceptions, ever experienced ... she could hear of them
with interest and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and
accurate; but _with_ them she rarely exchanged a word." And yet you
might have said she had been listening to Joseph all her life, such is
her command of his copious utterance: "'Ech! ech!' exclaimed Joseph.
'Weel done, Miss Cathy! weel done, Miss Cathy! Howsiver, t' maister sall
just tum'le o'er them brocken pots; un' then we's hear summut; we's hear
how it's to be. Gooid-for-naught madling! ye desarve pining fro' this to
Churstmas, flinging t' precious gifts o' God under fooit i' yer flaysome
rages! But I'm mista'en if ye shew yer sperrit lang. Will Hathecliff
bide sich bonny ways, think ye? I nobbut wish he may catch ye i' that
plisky. I nobbut wish he may.'"
Edgar Linton is weak in drawing and in colour; but it was well-nigh
impossible to make him more alive beside Catherine and Heathcliff. If
Emily's hand fails in Edgar Linton it gains strength again in Isabella.
These two are the types of the civilized, the over-refined, the delicate
wearers of silk and velvet, dwellers in drawing-rooms with pure white
ceilings bordered with gold, "with showers of glass-drops hanging in
silver chains from the centre". They, as surely as the tainted Hindley,
are bound to perish in any struggle with strong, fierce, primeval flesh
and blood. The fatal moment in the tale is where the two half-savage
children, Catherine and Heathcliff, come to Thrushcross Grange.
Thrushcross Grange, with all its sickly brood, is doomed to go down
before Wuthering Heights. But Thrushcross Grange is fatal to Catherine
too. She has gone far from reality when she is dazzled by the glittering
glass-drops and the illusion of Thrushcross Grange. She has divorced her
body from her soul for a little finer living, for a polished, a
scrupulously clean, perfectly presentable husband.
Emily Brontë shows an unerring psychology in her handling of the
relations between Isabella and Catherine. It is Isabella's morbid
passion for Heathcliff that wakes the devil in Catherine. Isabella is a
sentimentalist, and she is convinced that Heathcliff would love her if
Catherine would "let him". She refuses to believe that Heathcliff is
what he is. But Catherine, who _is_ Heathcliff, can afford to accuse
him. "'Nelly,'" she says, "'help me to convince her of her madness. Tell
her what Heathcliff is.... He's not a rough diamond--a pearl-containing
oyster of a rustic; he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.'" But Isabella
will not believe it. "'Mr. Heathcliff is not a fiend,'" she says; "'he
has an honourable soul, and a true one, or how could he remember her?'"
It is the same insight that made George Meredith represent Juliana, the
sentimental passionist, as declaring her belief in Evan Harrington's
innocence while Rose Jocelyn, whose love is more spiritual and therefore
more profoundly loyal, doubts. Emily Brontë, like George Meredith, saw a
sensualist in every sentimentalist; and Isabella Linton was a little
animal under her silken skin. She is ready to go to her end _quand
même_, whatever Heathcliff is, but she tricks herself into believing
that he is what he is not, that her sensualism may justify itself to her
refinement. That is partly why Heathcliff, who is no sensualist, hates
and loathes Isabella and her body.
But there are moments when he also hates the body of Catherine that
betrayed her. Emily Brontë is unswerving in her drawing of Heathcliff.
It is of a piece with his strangeness, his unexpectedness, that he does
not hate Edgar Linton with anything like the same intensity of hatred
that he has for Isabella. And it is of a piece with his absolute fiery
cleanness that never for a moment does he think of taking the lover's
obvious revenge. For it is not, I imagine, that Emily Brontë
deliberately shirked the issue, or deliberately rejected it; it is that
that issue never entered her head. Nor do I see here, in his abandonment
of the obvious, any proof of the childlikeness and innocence of Emily,
however childlike and innocent she may have been. I see only a
tremendous artistic uprightness, the rejection, conscious or
unconscious, of an unfitting because extraneous element. Anne, who was
ten times more childlike and innocent than Emily, tackles this peculiar
obviousness unashamed, because she needed it. And because she did not
need it, Emily let it go.