This is only beaten by that lyric passage that ends Villette; that sonorous dirge that rings high above all pathos, which is somehow a song of triumph, inspired by the whole power and splendour and magnificence of storm and death.

"The sun passes the equinox; the days shorten, the leaves grow sere; but—he is coming.

"Frosts appear at night; November has sent his fogs in advance; the wind takes its autumn moan; but—he is coming.

"The skies hang full and dark—a rack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms—arches and broad radiations; there rise resplendent mornings—glorious, royal, purple, as monarch in his state; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest—so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. I know some signs of the sky, I have noted them ever since childhood. God, watch that sail! Oh, guard it!

"The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace, Banshee—'keening' at every window! It will rise—it will swell—it shrieks out long: wander as I may through the house this night, I cannot lull the blast. The advancing hours make it strong; by midnight all sleepless watchers hear and fear a wild south-west storm.

"That storm roared frenzied for seven days. It did not cease till the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks: it did not lull till the deeps had gorged their fill of substance. Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work, would he fold the wings whose waft was thunder—the tremor of whose plumes was storm."

* * * * *

After Villette, the Last Sketch, the Fragment of Emma; that fragment which Charlotte Bronte read to her husband not long before her death. All he said was, "The critics will accuse you of repetition."

The critics have fulfilled his cautious prophecy. The Fragment passed for one of those sad things of which the least said the better. It was settled that Charlotte Bronte had written herself out, that if she had lived she would have become more and more her own plagiarist. There is a middle-aged lady in Emma, presumably conceived on the lines of Mrs. Fairfax and Mrs. Pryor. There is a girls' school, which is only not Lowood because it is so obviously Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor. There is a schoolmistress with sandy hair and thin lips and a cold blue eye, recalling Madame Beck, though there the likeness ceases. And in that school, ill-treated by that schoolmistress, there is a little ugly, suffering, deserted child.

All this looks very much like repetition. But it does not shake my private belief that Emma is a fragment of what would have been as great a novel as Villette. There are indications. There is Mr. Ellin, who proves that Charlotte Bronte could create a live man of the finer sort, an unexploited masculine type with no earthly resemblance to Rochester or to Louis Moore or M. Paul. He is an unfinished sketch rather than a portrait, but a sketch that would not too shamefully have discredited Mr. Henry James. For there is a most modern fineness and subtlety in Emma; and, for all its sketchy incompleteness, a peculiar certainty of touch, an infallible sense of the significant action, the revealing gesture. With a splendid economy of means, scenes, passages, phrases, apparently slight, are charged with the most intense psychological suggestion. When Mr. Ellin, summoned on urgent business by Miss Wilcox, takes that preposterously long and leisurely round to get to her, you know what is passing in the mind of Mr. Ellin as well as if you had been told. In that brief scene between Mr. Ellin and the schoolmistress, you know as well as if you had been told, that Miss Wilcox has lost Mr. Ellin because of her unkindness to a child. When the child, Matilda Fitzgibbon, falls senseless, and Mr. Ellin gives his inarticulate cry and lifts her from the floor, the enigmatic man has revealed his innermost nature.

Now a fragment that can suggest all this with the smallest possible expenditure of phrases, is not a fragment that can be set aside. It is slight; but slightness that accomplishes so much is a sign of progress rather than of falling-off. We shall never know what happened to Matilda when Mr. Ellin took her from Miss Wilcox. We shall never know what happened to Mr. Ellin; but I confess that I am dying to know, and that I find it hard to forgive Mr. Nicholls for having killed them, so certain am I that they would have lived triumphantly if Charlotte Bronte had not married him.

Some of us will be profoundly indifferent to this issue; for Charlotte Bronte has no following in a certain school. She defies analysis. You cannot label her. What she has done is not "Realism", neither is it "Romance". She displeases both by her ambiguity and by her lack of form. She has no infallible dramatic instinct. Even in Villette she preserves some of her clumsiness, her crudity, her improbability. The progress of "the Novel" in our day is towards a perfection of form and a reality she never knew.

But "reality" is a large term; and, as for form, who cared about it in the fifties? As for improbability—as M. Dimnet says—she is not more improbable than Balzac.

And all these things, the ambiguity, the formlessness and the rest, she was gradually correcting as she advanced. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance and significance of her attainment in Villette; there has been so much confused thinking in the consecrated judgment of that novel. Villette owes its high place largely to its superior construction and technique; largely and primarily to Charlotte Bronte's progress towards the light, towards the world, towards the great undecorated reality. It is odd criticism that ignores the inevitable growth, the increasing vision and grasp, the whole indomitable advance of a great writer, and credits "experience" with the final masterpiece. As a result of this confusion Villette has been judged "final" in another sense. Yes, final—this novel that shows every sign and token of long maturing, long-enduring power. If Charlotte Bronte's critics had not hypnotized themselves by the perpetual reiteration of that word "experience", it would have been impossible for them, with the evidence of her work before them, to have believed that in Villette she had written herself out.

She was only just beginning.

* * * * *

Of Charlotte Bronte's Poems there is not much to say. They are better poems than Branwell's or Anne's, but that does not make them very good. Still, they are interesting, and they are important, because they are the bridge by which Charlotte Bronte passed into her own dominion. She took Wordsworth with his Poems and Ballads for her guide, and he misled her and delayed her on her way, and kept her a long time standing on her bridge. For in her novels, and her novels only, Charlotte was a poet. In her poems she is a novelist, striving and struggling for expression in a cramped form, an imperfect and improper medium. But most indubitably a novelist. Nearly all her poems which are not artificial are impersonal. They deal with "situations", with "psychological problems", that cry aloud for prose. There is the "Wife" who seems to have lived a long, adventurous life with "William" through many poems; there is the deserted wife and mother in "Mementos"; there is "Frances", the deserted maiden; there is "Gilbert" with his guilty secret and his suicide, a triple domestic tragedy in the three acts of a three-part ballad; there is the lady in "Preference", who prefers her husband to her passionate and profoundly deluded lover; there is the woman in "Apostasy", wrecked in the conflict between love and priestcraft; and there is little else beside. These poems are straws, showing the way of the wind that bloweth where it listeth.

* * * * *

Too much has been written about Charlotte Bronte, and far too much has been read. You come away from it with an enormous mass of printed stuff wrecked in your memory, letters, simply hundreds of letters, legends and theories huddled together in a heap, with all values and proportions lost; and your impression is of tumult and of suffering, and of a multitude of confused and incongruous happenings; funerals and flirtations, or something very like flirtations, to the sound of the passing bell and sexton's chisel; upheavals of soul, flights to and from Brussels, interminable years of exile, and of lurid, tragic passion; years, interminable, monotonous years of potato-peeling and all manner of household piety; scenes of debauchery, horrors of opium and of drink; celebrity, cataclysmal celebrity, rushings up to town in storm and darkness, dim coffee-houses in Paternoster Row, dinner-parties; deaths, funerals, melancholia; and still celebrity; years, interminable, monotonous years of blazing celebrity, sounds of the literary workshop overpowering the sexton's chisel; then marriage, sudden and swift; then death. And in the midst of it all, one small and rather absurd and obscure figure, tossed to and fro, said to be Charlotte Bronte.

What an existence!

This is the impression created by the bibliographical total. But sweep four-fifths of it away, all the legends and half the letters, and sort and set out what remains, observing values and proportions, and you get an outer life where no great and moving event ever came, saving only death (Charlotte's marriage hardly counts beside it); an outer life of a strange and almost oppressive simplicity and silence; and an inner life, tumultuous and profound in suffering, a life to all appearances frustrate, where all nourishment of the emotions was reduced to the barest allowance a woman's heart can depend on and yet live; and none the less a life that out of that starvation diet raised enough of rich and vivid and superb emotion to decorate a hundred women's lives; an inner life which her genius fed and was fed from, for which no reality, no experience, could touch its own intensity of realization. And, genius apart, in the region of actual and ostensible emotion, no one of us can measure the depth of her adoration of duty, or the depth, the force and volume of her passion for her own people, and for the earth trodden by their feet, the earth that covered them. Beside it every other feeling was temporary and insignificant. In the light of it you see Charlotte Bronte's figure for ever simple and beautiful and great; behind her for ever the black-grey setting of her village and the purple of her moors. That greatness and beauty and simplicity is destroyed by any effort to detach her from her background. She may seem susceptible to the alien influences of exile; but it is as an exile that she suffers; and her most inspired moments are her moments of return, when she wrote prose like this: "The moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale; as glad as if she gave herself to his fierce caress with love. No Endymion will watch for his goddess to-night: there are no flocks on the mountains."

* * * * *

Around the figure of Emily Bronte there is none of that clamour and confusion. She stands apart in an enduring silence, and guards for ever her secret and her mystery. By the mercy of heaven the swarm of gossips and of theorists has passed her by. She has no legend or hardly any. So completely has she been passed over that when Madame Duclaux came to write the Life of Emily Bronte she found little to add to Mrs. Gaskell's meagre record beyond that story, which she tells with an incomparable simplicity and reticence, of Emily in her mortal illness, sitting by the hearth, combing her long hair till the comb slips from her fingers.

That is worth all the reams, the terrible reams that have been written about Charlotte.

There can be no doubt that Emily Bronte found her shelter behind Charlotte's fame; but she was protected most of all by the unapproachable, the unique and baffling quality of her temperament and of her genius. Her own people seem to have felt it; Charlotte herself in that preface to Wuthering Heights, which stands as her last vindication and eulogy of her dead sister, even Charlotte betrays a curious reservation and reluctance. You feel that Emily's genius inspired her with a kind of sacred terror.

Charlotte destroyed all records of her sister except her poems. Between six and seven hundred of her own letters have been published; there are two of Emily's. They tell little or nothing. And there was that diary she kept for Anne, where she notes with extreme brevity the things that are happening in her family. There never was a diary wherein the soul of the diarist was so well concealed.

And yet, because of this silence, this absence of legend and conjecture, we see Emily Bronte more clearly than we can ever hope to see Charlotte now. Though hardly anything is known of her, what is known is authentic; it comes straight from those who knew and loved her: from Charlotte, from Ellen Nussey, from the servants at the Parsonage. Even of her outward and visible presence we have a clearer image. The lines are fewer, but they are more vivid. You see her tall and slender, in her rough clothes, tramping the moors with the form and the step of a virile adolescent. Shirley, the "bete fauve", is Emily civilized. You see her head carried high and crowned with its long, dark hair, coiled simply, caught up with a comb. You see her face, honey-pale, her slightly high, slightly aquiline nose; her beautiful eyes, dark-grey, luminous; the "kind, kindling, liquid eyes" that Ellen Nussey saw; and their look, one moment alert, intent, and the next, inaccessibly remote.

I have seen such kind and kindling eyes in the face of a visionary, born with a profound, incurable indifference to the material event; for whom the Real is the incredible, unapparent harmony that flows above, beneath, and within the gross flux of appearances. To him it is the sole thing real. That kind and kindling look I know to be simply a light reflected from the surface of the dream. It is anything but cold; it has indeed a certain tender flame; but you would be profoundly mistaken if you argued from it more than the faintest polite interest in you and your affairs. The kindling of Emily Bronte's eyes I take to have had at times something of the same unearthly quality. Strangers received from her an impression as of a creature utterly removed from them; a remoteness scarcely human, hard to reconcile with her known tenderness for every living thing. She seems to have had a passionate repugnance to alien and external contacts, and to have felt no more than an almost reluctant liking for the lovable and charming Ellen Nussey. Indeed, she regarded Charlotte's friend with the large and virile tolerance that refuses to be charmed.

And yet in the depths of her virginal nature there was something fiercely tender and maternal. There can be no doubt that she cared for Charlotte, who called her "Mine own bonnie love"; but she would seem to have cared far more for Anne who was young and helpless, and for Branwell who was helpless and most weak.

Thus there is absolutely nothing known of Emily that destroys or disturbs the image that Haworth holds of her; nothing that detaches her for a moment from her own people, and from her own place. Her days of exile count not at all in her thirty years of home. No separation ever broke, for one hour that counted, the bonds that bound her to her moors, or frustrated the divine passion of her communion with their earth and sky. Better still, no tale of passion such as they tell of Charlotte was ever told of Emily.

It may be told yet, for no secret thing belonging to this disastrous family is sacred. There may be somewhere some awful worshipper of Emily Bronte, impatient of her silence and unsatisfied with her strange, her virgin and inaccessible beauty, who will some day make up a story of some love-affair, some passion kindred to Catherine Earnshaw's passion for Heathcliff, of which her moors have kept the secret; and he will tell his tale. But we shall at least know that he had made it up. And even so, it will have been better for that man if he had never been born. He will have done his best to destroy or to deface the loveliness of a figure unique in literature. And he will have ignored the one perfect, the one essentially true picture of Emily Bronte, which is to be found in Maurice Maeterlinck's Wisdom and Destiny.

To M. Maeterlinck she is the supreme instance of the self-sufficing soul, independent and regardless of the material event. She shows the emptiness, the impotence, the insignificance of all that we call "experience," beside the spirit that endures. "Not a single event ever paused as it passed by her threshold; yet did every event she could claim take place in her heart, with incomparable force and beauty, with matchless precision and detail. We say that nothing ever happened; but did not all things really happen to her much more directly and tangibly than with most of us, seeing that everything that took place about her, everything that she saw or heard was transformed within her into thoughts and feelings, into indulgent love, admiration, adoration of life...?

"Of her happiness none can doubt. Not in the soul of the best of all those whose happiness has lasted longest, been the most active, diversified, perfect, could more imperishable harvest be found, than in the soul Emily Bronte lays bare. If to her there came nothing of all that passes in love, sorrow, passion or anguish, still did she possess all that abides when emotion has faded away."[A]

[Footnote A: Wisdom and Destiny, translated by Alfred Sutro.]

What was true of Charlotte, that her inner life was luminous with intense realization, was a hundred times more true of Emily. It was so true that beside it nothing else that can be said is altogether true. It is not necessary for a man to be convinced of the illusory nature of time and of material happenings in order to appreciate Charlotte's genius; but his comprehension of Emily's will be adequate or otherwise, according to the passion and sincerity with which he embraces that idea. And he must have, further, a sense of the reality behind the illusion. It is through her undying sense of it that Emily Bronte is great. She had none of the proud appearances of the metaphysical mind; she did not, so far as we know, devour, like George Eliot, whole systems of philosophy in her early youth. Her passionate pantheism was not derived; it was established in her own soul. She was a mystic, not by religious vocation, but by temperament and by ultimate vision. She offers the apparent anomaly of extreme detachment and of an unconquerable love of life.

It was the highest and the purest passion that you can well conceive. For life gave her nothing in return. It treated her worse than it treated Charlotte. She had none of the things that, after all, Charlotte had; neither praise nor fame in her lifetime; nor friendship, nor love, nor vision of love. All these things "passed her by with averted head"; and she stood in her inviolable serenity and watched them go, without putting out her hand to one of them. You cannot surprise her in any piteous gesture of desire or regret. And, unlike Charlotte, she made it impossible for you to pity her.

It is this superb attitude to life, this independence of the material event, this detachment from the stream of circumstance, that marks her from her sister; for Charlotte is at moments pitifully immersed in the stream of circumstance, pitifully dependent on the material event. It is true that she kept her head above the stream, and that the failure of the material event did not frustrate or hinder her ultimate achievement. But Charlotte's was not by any means "a chainless soul". It struggled and hankered after the unattainable. What she attained and realized she realized and attained in her imagination only. She knew nothing of the soul's more secret and intimate possession. And even her imagination waited to some extent upon experience. When Charlotte wrote of passion, of its tragic suffering, or of its ultimate appeasing, she, after all, wrote of things that might have happened to her. But when Emily wrote of passion, she wrote of a thing that, so far as she personally was concerned, not only was not and had not been, but never could be. It was true enough of Charlotte that she created. But of Emily it was absolutely and supremely true.

Hers is not the language of frustration, but of complete and satisfying possession. It may seem marvellous in the mouth of a woman destitute of all emotional experience, in the restricted sense; but the real wonder would have been a Wuthering Heights born of any personal emotion; so certain is it that it was through her personal destitution that her genius was so virile and so rich. At its hour it found her virgin, not only to passion but to the bare idea of passion, to the inner and immaterial event.

And her genius was great, not only through her stupendous imagination, but because it fed on the still more withdrawn and secret sources of her soul. If she had had no genius she would yet be great because of what took place within her, the fusion of her soul with the transcendent and enduring life.

It was there that, possessing nothing, she possessed all things; and her secret escapes you if you are aware only of her splendid paganism. She never speaks the language of religious resignation like Anne and Charlotte. It is most unlikely that she relied, openly or in secret, on "the merits of the Redeemer", or on any of the familiar consolations of religion. As she bowed to no disaster and no grief, consolation would have been the last thing in any religion that she looked for. But, for height and depth of supernatural attainment, there is no comparison between Emily's grip of divine reality and poor Anne's spasmodic and despairing clutch; and none between Charlotte's piety, her "God willing"; "I suppose I ought to be thankful", and Emily's acceptance and endurance of the event.

I am reminded that one event she neither accepted nor endured. She fought death. Her spirit lifted the pathetic, febrile struggle of weakness with corruption, and turned it to a splendid, Titanic, and unearthly combat.

And yet it was in her life rather than her death that she was splendid. There is something shocking and repellent in her last defiance. It shrieks discord with the endurance and acceptance, braver than all revolt, finer than all resignation, that was the secret of her genius and of her life.

There is no need to reconcile this supreme detachment with the storm and agony that rages through Wuthering Heights, or with the passion for life and adoration of the earth that burns there, an imperishable flame; or with Catherine Earnshaw's dream of heaven: "heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy". Catherine Earnshaw's dream has been cited innumerable times to prove that Emily Bronte was a splendid pagan. I do not know what it does prove, if it is not the absolute and immeasurable greatness of her genius, that, dwelling as she undoubtedly did dwell, in the secret and invisible world, she could yet conceive and bring forth Catherine Earnshaw.

It is not possible to diminish the force or to take away one word of Mr. Swinburne's magnificent eulogy. There was in the "passionate great genius of Emily Bronte", "a dark, unconscious instinct as of primitive nature-worship". That was where she was so poised and so complete; that she touches earth and heaven, and is at once intoxicated with the splendour of the passion of living, and holds her spirit in security and her heart in peace. She plunged with Catherine Earnshaw into the thick of the tumult, and her detachment is not more wonderful than her immersion.

It is our own imperfect vision that is bewildered by the union in her of these antagonistic attitudes. It is not only entirely possible and compatible, but, if your soul be comprehensive, it is inevitable that you should adore the forms of life, and yet be aware of their impermanence; that you should affirm with equal fervour their illusion and the radiance of the reality that manifests itself in them. Emily Bronte was nothing if not comprehensive. There was no distance, no abyss too vast, no antagonism, no contradiction too violent and appalling for her embracing soul. Without a hint, so far as we know, from any philosophy, by a sheer flash of genius she pierced to the secret of the world and crystallized it in two lines:

The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

It is doubtful if she ever read a line of Blake; yet it is Blake that her poems perpetually recall, and it is Blake's vision that she has reached there. She too knew what it was

To see a world in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, To hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.

She sees by a flash what he saw continuously; but it is by the same light she sees it and wins her place among the mystics.

Her mind was not always poised. It swung between its vision of transparent unity and its love of earth for earth's sake. There are at least four poems of hers that show this entirely natural oscillation.

In one, a nameless poem, the Genius of Earth calls to the visionary soul:

Shall earth no more inspire thee, Thou lonely dreamer now? Since passion may not fire thee, Shall nature cease to bow?

Thy mind is ever moving In regions dark to thee; Recall its useless roving, Come back, and dwell with me.

* * * * *

Few hearts to mortals given On earth so wildly pine; Yet few would ask a heaven More like this earth than thine.

"The Night-Wind" sings the same song, lures with the same enchantment; and the human voice answers, resisting:

Play with the scented flower, The young tree's supple bough, And leave my human feelings In their own course to flow.

But the other voice is stronger:

The wanderer would not heed me; Its kiss grew warmer still. "Oh, come," it sighed so sweetly; "I'll win thee 'gainst thy will.

"Were we not friends from childhood? Have I not loved thee long? As long as thou, the solemn night, Whose silence wakes my song.

"And when thy heart is resting Beneath the church-aisle stone, I shall have time for mourning, And thou for being alone."

There are nine verses of "The Night-Wind", and the first eight are negligible; but, as for the last and ninth, I do not know any poem in any language that renders, in four short lines, and with such incomparable magic and poignancy, the haunting and pursuing of the human by the inhuman, that passion of the homeless and eternal wind.

And this woman, destitute, so far as can be known, of all metaphysical knowledge or training, reared in the narrowest and least metaphysical of creeds, did yet contrive to express in one poem of four irregular verses all the hunger and thirst after the "Absolute" that ever moved a human soul, all the bewilderment and agony inflicted by the unintelligible spectacle of existence, the intolerable triumph of evil over good, and did conceive an image and a vision of the transcendent reality that holds, as in crystal, all the philosophies that were ever worthy of the name.

Here it is. There are once more two voices: one of the Man, the other of the Seer:

THE PHILOSOPHER

Oh, for the time when I shall sleep Without identity. And never care how rain may steep, Or snow may cover me! No promised heaven, these wild desires Could all, or half fulfil; No threatened hell, with quenchless fires, Subdue this restless will.

So said I, and still say the same; Still, to my death, will say— Three gods, within this little frame, Are warring night and day; Heaven could not hold them all, and yet They all are held in me; And must be mine till I forget My present entity! Oh, for the time, when in my breast Their struggles will be o'er! Oh, for the day, when I shall rest, And never suffer more!

I saw a spirit, standing, man, Where thou dost stand—an hour ago, And round his feet three rivers ran, Of equal depth, and equal flow— A golden stream—and one like blood, And one like sapphire seemed to be; But where they joined their triple flood It tumbled in an inky sea. The spirit sent his dazzling gaze Down through that ocean's gloomy night; Then, kindling all, with sudden blaze,— The glad deep sparkled wide and bright— White as the sun, far, far more fair Than its divided sources were!

And even for that spirit, seer, I've watched and sought my lifetime long; Sought him in heaven, hell, earth and air, An endless search and always wrong. Had I but seen his glorious eye Once light the clouds that 'wilder me, I ne'er had raised this coward cry To cease to think, and cease to be; I ne'er had called oblivion blest, Nor, stretching eager hands to death, Implored to change for senseless rest This sentient soul, this living breath— Oh, let me die—that power and will Their cruel strife may close, And conquered good and conquering ill Be lost in one repose!

That vision of the transcendent spirit, with the mingled triple flood of life about his feet, is one that Blake might have seen and sung and painted.

The fourth poem, "The Prisoner", is a fragment, and an obscure fragment, which may belong to a very different cycle. But whatever its place, it has the same visionary quality. The vision is of the woman captive, "confined in triple walls", the "guest darkly lodged", the "chainless soul", that defies its conqueror, its gaoler, and the spectator of its agony. It has, this prisoner, its own unspeakable consolation, the "Messenger":

He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs, With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars. Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire, And visions rise and change that kill me with desire.

* * * * *

But, first, a hush of peace—a soundless calm descends; The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends; Mute music soothes my breast—unuttered harmony, That I could never dream, till earth was lost to me.

Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals; My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels: Its wings are almost free—its home, its harbour found, Measuring the gulf, it stoops and dares the final bound.

That is the language of a mystic, of a mystic who has passed beyond contemplation; who has known or imagined ecstasy. The joy is unmistakable; unmistakable, too, is the horror of the return:

Oh! dreadful is the check—intense the agony— When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again; The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

There is no doubt about those three verses; that they are the expression of the rarest and the most tremendous experience that is given to humanity to know.

If "The Visionary" does not touch that supernal place, it belongs indubitably to the borderland:

Silent is the house; all are laid asleep: One alone looks out o'er the snow-wreaths deep, Watching every cloud, dreading every breeze That whirls the wildering drift and bends the groaning trees.

Cheerful is the hearth, soft the matted floor; Not one shivering gust creeps through pane or door; The little lamp burns straight, the rays shoot strong and far I trim it well to be the wanderer's guiding-star.

Frown, my haughty sire! chide, my angry dame! Set your slaves to spy; threaten me with shame; But neither sire nor dame, nor prying serf shall know, What angel nightly tracks that waste of frozen snow.

What I love shall come like visitant of air, 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 Bronte. 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 Bronte's angel-lover. There is a long way there between Emily Bronte 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 Bronte'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 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 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 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 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 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 hitherto 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 circumstances 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 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 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 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 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 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 Bronte 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 Bronte 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 Brontesque.

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 Bronte, 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 Bronte, 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 Bronte knew of their existence, not absolutely certain that Anne, who collaborated on the Gondals, knew.

"Bronte 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 Bronte'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 Bronte, 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.

The sources of Wuthering Heights have been the dream and the despair 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 Bronte 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 Bronte, 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 Bronte—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 Bronte'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 Bronte 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 naively: "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 Bronte.

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 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 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.

Madame Duclaux (whose criticism of Wuthering Heights is not to be surpassed 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 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]