The Three Brontes Part 18

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, Compa.s.sion 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 h.o.a.rds 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 a.s.sert positively that "Remembrance" belongs to the same song-cycle; but it undoubtedly belongs to the same cycle, or rather cyclone, of pa.s.sion; the cyclone that rages in the hearts of Heathcliff and of Catherine. The genius of Emily Bronte was so far dramatic that, if you could divide her poems into the personal and impersonal, the impersonal would be found in a ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sionate life. Sometimes she is the lonely spirit that looks on in immortal irony, raised above good and evil. More often she is a happy G.o.d, 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 navely: "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 pa.s.sionate adoration of the earth, adoration and pa.s.sion 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 Bronte.

In _Wuthering Heights_ we are plunged apparently into a world of most unspiritual l.u.s.ts 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 l.u.s.t upon l.u.s.t 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 pa.s.sion 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 sp.a.w.n 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 Bronte'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 Bronte'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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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.

Madame Duclaux (whose criticism of _Wuthering Heights_ is not to be surpa.s.sed or otherwise gainsaid) finds in it a tragedy of inherited evil. She thinks that Emily Bronte 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 una.s.sisted, straight and n.o.ble. 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 pa.s.sion, the immortal and unearthly pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sion that consumes Catherine and Heathcliff, that burns their bodies and destroys them, is nine-tenths a pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.ses for Emily Bronte's "pretty piece of Paganism". But it is only one side of Emily Bronte. And it is only one side of Catherine Earnshaw. When Heathcliff turns from her for a moment in that last scene of pa.s.sion, 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 d.a.m.ned 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.