The Three Brontes Part 14

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 Bronte'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 G.o.d 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 anch.o.r.ed 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 Bronte 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 a.s.sociation 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 h.o.m.oion oude ti pae keneon....

....eon gar eonti pelazei.]

Parmenides had not, I imagine, "penetrated" to Haworth; yet the last verse of Emily Bronte'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 Bronte 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 Bronte.

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 Bronte.

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 Bronte._ 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 Bronte, 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 Bronte's genius. .h.i.therto unknown and undreamed of; one or two even reveal a little more of the soul of Emily Bronte 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 Bronte 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 Bronte, 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 Bronte 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 Bronte. 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 circ.u.mstances of Emily Bronte'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 pa.s.sionate 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 Bronte four poems which Emily Bronte 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 Bronte's posthumous "Selections"

in 1850.]

My G.o.d (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 Bronte 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s with threatening crash Comes on the increasing roar!

But what shall brave the deep, deep wave, The deadly pa.s.s before?