Chapter VII: Part 7

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 Brontë 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 Brontë 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 Brontësque.

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

"Brontë 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 Brontë'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 Brontë, 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 Brontë had written. It was awful and mysterious in its loneliness.

But I believe that "Remembrance" also may be placed in the Gondal legend without any violence to its mystery.

For supreme in the Gondal legend is the idea of a mighty and disastrous passion, a woman's passion for the defeated, the dishonoured, and the outlawed lover; a creature superb in evil, like Heathcliff, and like Heathcliff tragic and unspeakably mournful in his doom. He or some hero like him is "Honour's Martyr".

To-morrow, Scorn will blight my name,
And Hate will trample me,
Will load me with a coward's shame--
A traitor's perjury.

False friends will launch their covert sneers
True friends will wish me dead;
And I shall cause the bitterest tears
That you have ever shed.

Like Heathcliff, he is the "unblessed, unfriended child"; the child of the Outcast Mother, abandoned on the moor.

Forests of heather, dark and long,
Wave their brown branching arms above;
And they must soothe thee with their song,
And they must shield my child of love.

* * * * *

Wakes up the storm more madly wild,
The mountain drifts are tossed on high;
Farewell, unblessed, unfriended child,
I cannot bear to watch thee die.

In an unmistakable Gondal song Geraldine's lover calls her to the tryst on the moor. In the Gondal poem "Geraldine", she has her child with her in a woodland cavern, and she prays over it wildly:

"Bless it! My Gracious God!" I cried,
"Preserve Thy mortal shrine,
For Thine own sake, be Thou its guide,
And keep it still divine--

"Say, sin shall never blanch that cheek,
Nor suffering change that brow.
Speak, in Thy mercy, Maker, speak,
And seal it safe from woe."

* * * * *

The revellers in the city slept,
My lady in her woodland bed;
I watching o'er her slumber wept,
As one who mourns the dead.

Geraldine therefore is the Outcast Mother. In "The Two Children" the doom gathers round the child.

Heavy hangs the raindrop
From the burdened spray;
Heavy broods the damp mist
On uplands far away.

Heavy looms the dull sky,
Heavy rolls the sea;
And heavy throbs the young heart
Beneath that lonely tree.

Never has a blue streak
Cleft the clouds since morn
Never has his grim fate
Smiled since he was born.

Frowning on the infant,
Shadowing childhood's joy.
Guardian-angel knows not
That melancholy boy.

* * * * *

Blossom--that the west wind
Has never wooed to blow,
Scentless are thy petals,
Thy dew is cold as snow!

Soul--where kindred kindness
No early promise woke,
Barren is thy beauty,
As weed upon a rock.

Wither--soul and blossom!
You both were vainly given:
Earth reserves no blessing
For the unblest of Heaven.

The doomed child of the outcast mother is the doomed man, and, by the doom, himself an outcast. The other child, the "Child of delight, with sun-bright hair", has vowed herself to be his guardian angel. Their drama is obscure; but you make out that it is the doomed child, and not Branwell Brontë, who is "The Wanderer from the Fold".

How few, of all the hearts that loved,
Are grieving for thee now;
And why should mine to-night be moved
With such a sense of woe?

Too often thus, when left alone,
Where none my thoughts can see,
Comes back a word, a passing tone
From thy strange history.

* * * * *

An anxious gazer from the shore--
I marked the whitening wave,
And wept above thy fate the more
Because--I could not save.

It recks not now, when all is over;
But yet my heart will be
A mourner still, though friend and lover
Have both forgotten thee.

Compare with this that stern elegy in Mr. Shorter's collection, "Shed no tears o'er that tomb." A recent critic has referred this poem of reprobation also to Branwell Brontë--as if Emily could possibly have written like this of Branwell:

Shed no tears o'er that tomb,
For there are angels weeping;
Mourn not him whose doom
Heaven itself is mourning.

* * * * *

... he who slumbers there
His bark will strive no more
Across the waters of despair
To reach that glorious shore.

The time of grace is past,
And mercy, scorned and tried,
Forsakes to utter wrath at last
The soul so steeled by pride.

That wrath will never spare,
Will never pity know;
Will mock its victim's maddened prayer,
With triumph in his woe.

Shut from his Maker's smile
The accursed man shall be;
For mercy reigns a little while,
But hate eternally.

This is obviously related to "The Two Children", and that again to "The Wanderer from the Fold". Obviously, too, the woman's lament in "The Wanderer from the Fold" recalls the Gondal woman's lament for her dishonoured lover. For there are two voices that speak and answer each other, the voice of reprobation, and the voice of passion and pity. This is the "Gondal Woman's Lament":

Far, far is mirth withdrawn:
'Tis three long hours before the morn,
And I watch lonely, drearily;
So come, thou shade, commune with me.

Deserted one! thy corpse lies cold,
And mingled with a foreign mould.
Year after year the grass grows green
Above the dust where thou hast been.

I will not name thy blighted name,
Tarnished by unforgotten shame,
Though not because my bosom torn
Joins the mad world in all its scorn.

Thy phantom face is dark with woe,
Tears have left ghastly traces there,
Those ceaseless tears! I wish their flow
Could quench thy wild despair.

They deluge my heart like the rain
On cursed Zamorna's howling plain.
Yet when I hear thy foes deride,
I must cling closely to thy side.

Our mutual foes! They will not rest
From trampling on thy buried breast.
Glutting their hatred with the doom
They picture thine beyond the tomb.

(Which is what they did in the song of reprobation. But passion and pity know better. They know that)

... God is not like human kind,
Man cannot read the Almighty mind;
Vengeance will never torture thee,
Nor hurt thy soul eternally.

* * * * *

What have I dreamt? He lies asleep,
With whom my heart would vainly weep;
_He_ rests, and _I_ endure the woe
That left his spirit long ago.

This poem is not quoted for its beauty or its technique, but for its important place in the story. You can track the great Gondal hero down by that one fantastic name, "Zamorna". You have thus four poems, obviously related; and a fifth that links them, obviously, with the Gondal legend.

It is difficult to pick out from the confusion of these unsorted fragments all the heroes of Emily Brontë's saga. There is Gleneden, who kills a tyrant and is put in prison for it. There is Julius Angora, who "lifts his impious eye" in the cathedral where the monarchs of Gondal are gathered; who leads the patriots of Gondal to the battle of Almedore, and was defeated there, and fell with his mortal enemy. He is beloved of Rosina, a crude prototype of Catherine Earnshaw. "King Julius left the south country" and remained in danger in the northern land because a passion for Rosina kept him there. There is also Douglas of the "Ride". He appears again in the saga of the Queen Augusta, the woman of the "brown mountain side". But who he was, and what he was doing, and whether he killed Augusta or somebody else killed her, I cannot for the life of me make out. Queen Augusta, like Catherine Earnshaw, is a creature of passion and jealousy, and her lover had been faithless. She sings that savage song of defiance and hatred and lamentation: "Light up thy halls!"

Oh! could I see thy lids weighed down in cheerless woe;
Too full to hide their tears, too stern to overflow;
Oh! could I know thy soul with equal grief was torn,
This fate might be endured--this anguish might be borne.

How gloomy grows the night! 'Tis Gondal's wind that blows;
I shall not tread again the deep glens where it rose,
I feel it on my face----Where, wild blast! dost thou roam?
What do we, wanderer! here, so far away from home?

I do not need thy breath to cool my death-cold brow;
But go to that far land where she is shining now;
Tell her my latest wish, tell her my dreary doom;
Say that my pangs are past, but _hers_ are yet to come.

And there is Fernando, who stole his love from Zamorna. He is a sort of shadowy forerunner of Edgar Linton.

There is the yeoman Percy, the father of Mary whom Zamorna loved. And there is Zamorna.

A large group of poems in the legend refer, obviously, I think, to the same person. Zamorna is the supreme hero, the Achilles of this northern Iliad. He is the man of sin, the "son of war and love", the child "unblessed of heaven", abandoned by its mother, cradled in the heather and rocked by the winter storm, the doomed child, grown to its doom, like Heathcliff. His story is obscure and broken, but when all the Zamorna poems are sorted from the rest, you make out that, like Heathcliff, he ravished from her home the daughter of his mortal enemy (with the difference that Zamorna loves Mary); and that like Heathcliff he was robbed of the woman that he loved. The passions of Zamorna are the passions of Heathcliff. He dominates a world of savage loves and mortal enmities like the world of _Wuthering Heights_. There are passages in this saga that reveal the very aspect of the soul of Heathcliff. Here are some of them.

Zamorna, in prison, cries out to his "false friend and treacherous guide":

"If I have sinned; long, long ago
That sin was purified by woe.
I have suffered on through night and day,
I've trod a dark and frightful way."

It is what Heathcliff says to Catherine Earnshaw: "I've fought through a bitter life since I last heard your voice."

And again:

If grief for grief can touch thee,
If answering woe for woe,
If any ruth can melt thee,
Come to me now.

It is the very voice of Heathcliff calling to Cathy.

Again, he is calling to "Percy", the father of Mary, his bride, the rose that he plucked from its parent stem, that died from the plucking.

Bitterly, deeply I've drunk of thy woe;
When thy stream was troubled, did mine calmly flow?
And yet I repent not; I'd crush thee again
If our vessels sailed adverse on life's stormy main.
But listen! The earth is our campaign of war,

* * * * *

Is there not havoc and carnage for thee
Unless thou couchest thy lance at me?

He proposes to unite their arms.

Then might thy Mary bloom blissfully still
This hand should ne'er work her sorrow or ill.

* * * * *

What! shall Zamorna go down to the dead
With blood on his hands that he wept to have shed?

The alliance is refused. Percy is crushed. Mary is dying, the rose is withering.

Its faded buds already lie
To deck my coffin when I die.
Bring them here--'twill not be long,
'Tis the last word of the woeful song;
And the final and dying words are sung
To the discord of lute strings all unstrung.

* * * * *

Have I crushed you, Percy? I'd raise once more
The beacon-light on the rocky shore.
Percy, my love is so true and deep,
That though kingdoms should wail and worlds should weep,
I'd fling the brand in the hissing sea,
The brand that must burn unquenchably.
Your rose is mine; when the sweet leaves fade,
They must be the chaplet to wreathe my head
The blossoms to deck my home with the dead.

Zamorna is tenderer than Heathcliff. He laments for his rose.

On its bending stalk a bonny flower
In a yeoman's home close grew;
It had gathered beauty from sunshine and shower,
From moonlight and silent dew.

* * * * *

Keenly his flower the yeoman guarded,
He watched it grow both day and night;
From the frost, from the wind, from the storm he warded
That flush of roseate light.
And ever it glistened bonnilie
Under the shade of the old yew-tree.

* * * * *

The rose is blasted, withered, blighted
Its root has felt a worm,
And like a heart beloved and slighted,
Failed, faded, shrunk its form.
Bud of beauty, bonny flower,
I stole thee from thy natal bower.

I was the worm that withered thee....

And he sings of Mary, on her death-bed in her delirium. He will not believe that she is dying.

Oh! say not that her vivid dreams
Are but the shattered glass
Which but because more broken, gleams
More brightly in the grass.
Her spirit is the unfathomed lake
Whose face the sudden tempests break
To one tormented roar;
But as the wild winds sink in peace
All those disturbed waves decrease
Till each far-down reflection is
As life-like as before.

Her death is not the worst.

I cannot weep as once I wept
Over my western beauty's grave.

* * * * *

I am speaking of a later stroke,
A death the dream of yesterday,
Still thinking of my latest shock,
A noble friendship torn away.
I feel and say that I am cast
From hope, and peace, and power, and pride

* * * * *

Without a voice to speak to you
Save that deep gong which tolled my doom,
And made my dread iniquity
Look darker than my deepest gloom.

But the crucial passage (for the sources) is the scene in the yeoman's hall where Zamorna comes to Percy. He comes stealthily.

That step he might have used before
When stealing on to lady's bower,
Forth at the same still twilight hour,
For the moon now bending mild above
Showed him a son of war and love.
His eye was full of that sinful fire
Which oft unhallowed passions light.
It spoke of quickly kindled ire,
Of love too warm, and wild, and bright.
Bright, but yet sullied, love that could never
Bring good in rising, leave peace in decline,
Woe to the gifted, crime to the giver....

* * * * *

Now from his curled and shining hair,
Circling the brow of marble fair,
His dark, keen eyes on Percy gaze
With stern and yet repenting rays.

* * * * *

He loves Percy whose rose was his, and he hates him, as Heathcliff might have loved and hated, but with less brutality.

Young savage! how he bends above
The object of his wrath and love,
How tenderly his fingers press
The hand that shrinks from their caress.

The yeoman turns on "the man of sin".

What brought you here? I called you not

* * * * *

Are you a hawk to follow the prey,
When mangled it flutters feebly away?
A sleuth-hound to track the deer by his blood,
When wounded he wins to the darkest wood,
There, if he can, to die alone?

It might have been Heathcliff and a Linton.

So much for Zamorna.

Finally, there are two poems in Mr. Shorter's collection that, verse for prose, might have come straight out of _Wuthering Heights_. One (inspired by Byron) certainly belongs to the Zamorna legend of the Gondal cycle.

And now the house-dog stretched once more
His limbs upon the glowing floor;
The children half resume their play,
Though from the warm hearth scared away;
The good-wife left her spinning-wheel
And spread with smiles the evening meal;
The shepherd placed a seat and pressed
To their poor fare the unknown guest,
And he unclasped his mantle now,
And raised the covering from his brow,
Said, voyagers by land and sea
Were seldom feasted daintily,
And cheered his host by adding stern
He'd no refinement to unlearn.

Which is what Heathcliff would have said sternly. Observe the effect of him.

A silence settled on the room,
The cheerful welcome sank to gloom;
But not those words, though cold or high,
So froze their hospitable joy.
No--there was something in his face,
Some nameless thing which hid not grace,
And something in his voice's tone
Which turned their blood as chill as stone.
The ringlets of his long black hair
Fell o'er a cheek most ghastly fair.
Youthful he seemed--but worn as they
Who spend too soon their youthful day.
When his glance dropped, 'twas hard to quell
Unbidden feelings' hidden swell;
And Pity scarce her tears could hide,
So sweet that brow with all its pride.
But when upraised his eye would dart
An icy shudder through the heart,
Compassion changed to horror then,
And fear to meet that gaze again.

It was not hatred's tiger-glare,
Nor the wild anguish of despair;
It was not either misery
Which quickens friendship's sympathy;
No--lightning all unearthly shone
Deep in that dark eye's circling zone,
Such withering lightning as we deem
None but a spirit's look may beam;
And glad were all when he turned away
And wrapt him in his mantle grey,
And hid his head upon his arm,
And veiled from view his basilisk charm.

That, I take it, is Zamorna, that Byronic hero, again; but it is also uncommonly like Heathcliff, with "his basilisk eyes". And it is dated July 1839, seven years before _Wuthering Heights_ was written.

The other crucial instance is a nameless poem to the Earth.

I see around me piteous tombstones grey
Stretching their shadows far away.
Beneath the turf my footsteps tread
Lie low and lone the silent dead;
Beneath the turf, beneath the mould,
For ever dark, for ever cold.
And my eyes cannot hold the tears
That memory hoards from vanished years.
For Time and Death and mortal pain
Give wounds that will not heal again.
Let me remember half the woe
I've seen and heard and felt below,
And heaven itself, so pure and blest,
Could never give my spirit rest.
Sweet land of light! Thy children fair
Know nought akin to our despair;
Nor have they felt, nor can they tell
What tenants haunt each mortal cell,
What gloomy guests we hold within,
Torments and madness, fear and sin!
Well, may they live in ecstasy
Their long eternity of joy;
At least we would not bring them down
With us to weep, with us to groan.
No, Earth would wish no other sphere
To taste her cup of suffering drear;
She turns from heaven a tearless eye
And only mourns that _we_ must die!
Ah mother! what shall comfort thee
In all this boundless misery?
To cheer our eager eyes awhile,
We see thee smile, how fondly smile!
But who reads not through the tender glow
Thy deep, unutterable woe?
Indeed no darling hand above
Can cheat thee of thy children's love.
We all, in life's departing shine,
Our last dear longings blend with thine,
And struggle still, and strive to trace
With clouded gaze thy darling face.
We would not leave our nature home
For _any_ world beyond the tomb.
No, mother, on thy kindly breast
Let us be laid in lasting rest,
Or waken but to share with thee
A mutual immortality.

There is the whole spirit of _Wuthering Heights_; the spirit of Catherine Earnshaw's dream; the spirit that in the last page broods over the moorland graveyard. It is instinct with a more than pagan adoration of the tragic earth, adored because of her tragedy.

It would be dangerous to assert positively that "Remembrance" belongs to the same song-cycle; but it undoubtedly belongs to the same cycle, or rather cyclone, of passion; the cyclone that rages in the hearts of Heathcliff and of Catherine. The genius of Emily Brontë was so far dramatic that, if you could divide her poems into the personal and impersonal, the impersonal would be found in a mass out of all proportion to the other. But, with very few exceptions, you cannot so divide them; for in her continuous and sustaining dream, the vision that lasted for at least eleven years of her life, from eighteen-thirty-four, the earliest date of any known Gondal poem, to eighteen-forty-five, the last appearance of the legend, she _was_ these people; she lived, indistinguishably and interchangeably, their tumultuous and passionate life. Sometimes she is the lonely spirit that looks on in immortal irony, raised above good and evil. More often she is a happy god, immanent in his restless and manifold creations, rejoicing in this multiplication of himself. It is she who fights and rides, who loves and hates, and suffers and defies. She heads one poem naïvely: "To the Horse Black Eagle that I rode at the Battle of Zamorna." The horse _I_ rode! If it were not glorious, it would be (when you think what her life was in that Parsonage) most mortally pathetic.

But it is all in keeping. For, as she could dare the heavenly, divine adventure, so there was no wild and ardent adventure of the earth she did not claim.

* * * * *

Love of life and passionate adoration of the earth, adoration and passion fiercer than any pagan knew, burns in _Wuthering Heights_. And if that were all, it would be impossible to say whether her mysticism or her paganism most revealed the soul of Emily Brontë.

In _Wuthering Heights_ we are plunged apparently into a world of most unspiritual lusts and hates and cruelties; into the very darkness and thickness of elemental matter; a world that would be chaos, but for the iron Necessity that brings its own terrible order, its own implacable law of lust upon lust begotten, hate upon hate, and cruelty upon cruelty, through the generations of Heathcliffs and of Earnshaws.

Hindley Earnshaw is brutal to the foundling, Heathcliff, and degrades him. Heathcliff, when his hour comes, pays back his wrong with the interest due. He is brutal beyond brutality to Hindley Earnshaw, and he degrades Hareton, Hindley's son, as he himself was degraded; but he is not brutal to him. The frustrated passion of Catherine Earnshaw for Heathcliff, and of Heathcliff for Catherine, hardly knows itself from hate; they pay each other back torture for torture, and pang for hopeless pang. When Catherine marries Edgar Linton, Heathcliff marries Isabella, Edgar's sister, in order that he may torture to perfection Catherine and Edgar and Isabella. His justice is more than poetic. The love of Catherine Earnshaw was all that he possessed. He knows that he has lost it through the degradation that he owes to Hindley Earnshaw. It is because an Earnshaw and a Linton between them have robbed him of all that he possessed, that, when his hour comes, he pays himself back by robbing the Lintons and the Earnshaws of all that _they_ possess, their Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. He loathes above all loathely creatures, Linton, his own son by Isabella. The white-blooded thing is so sickly that he can hardly keep it alive. But with an unearthly cruelty he cherishes, he nourishes this spawn till he can marry it on its death-bed to the younger Catherine, the child of Catherine Earnshaw and of Edgar Linton. This supreme deed accomplished, he lets the creature die, so that Thrushcross Grange may fall into his hands. Judged by his bare deeds, Heathcliff seems a monster of evil, a devil without any fiery infernal splendour, a mean and sordid devil.

But--and this is what makes Emily Brontë's work stupendous--not for a moment can you judge Heathcliff by his bare deeds. Properly speaking, there are no bare deeds to judge him by. Each deed comes wrapt in its own infernal glamour, trailing a cloud of supernatural splendour. The whole drama moves on a plane of reality superior to any deed. The spirit of it, like Emily Brontë's spirit, is superbly regardless of the material event. As far as material action goes Heathcliff is singularly inert. He never seems to raise a hand to help his vengeance. He lets things take their course. He lets Catherine marry Edgar Linton and remain married to him. He lets Isabella's passion satisfy itself. He lets Hindley Earnshaw drink himself to death. He lets Hareton sink to the level of a boor. He lets Linton die. His most overt and violent action is the capture of the younger Catherine. And even there he takes advantage of the accident that brings her to the door of Wuthering Heights. He watches and bides his time with the intentness of a brooding spirit that in all material happenings seeks its own. He makes them his instruments of vengeance. And Heathcliff's vengeance, like his passion for Catherine, is an immortal and immaterial thing. He shows how little he thinks of sordid, tangible possession; for, when his vengeance is complete, when Edgar Linton and Linton Heathcliff are dead and their lands and houses are his, he becomes utterly indifferent. He falls into a melancholy. He neither eats nor drinks. He shuts himself up in Cathy's little room and is found dead there, lying on Cathy's bed.

If there never was anything less heavenly, less Christian, than this drama, there never was anything less earthly, less pagan. There is no name for it. It is above all our consecrated labels and distinctions. It has been called a Greek tragedy, with the Aeschylean motto, [Greek: to drasanti pathein]. But it is not Greek any more than it is Christian; and if it has a moral, its moral is far more [Greek: to pathonti pathein]. It is the drama of suffering born of suffering, and confined strictly within the boundaries of the soul.

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 Brontë was greatly swayed by the doctrine of heredity. "'No use,' she seems to be saying, 'in waiting for the children of evil parents to grow, of their own will and unassisted, straight and noble. The very quality of their will is as inherited as their eyes and hair. Heathcliff is no fiend or goblin; the untrained, doomed child of some half-savage sailor's holiday, violent and treacherous. And how far shall we hold the sinner responsible for a nature which is itself the punishment of some forefather's crime?'"

All this, I cannot help thinking, is alien to the spirit of _Wuthering Heights_, and to its greatness. It is not really any problem of heredity that we have here. Heredity is, in fact, ignored. Heathcliff's race and parentage are unknown. There is no resemblance between the good old Earnshaws, who adopted him, and their son Hindley. Hareton does not inherit Hindley's drunkenness or his cruelty. It is not through any physical consequence of his father's vices that Hareton suffers. Linton is in no physical sense the son of Heathcliff. If Catherine Linton inherits something of Catherine Earnshaw's charm and temper, it is because the younger Catherine belongs to another world; she is an inferior and more physical creature. She has nothing in her of Catherine Earnshaw's mutinous passion, the immortal and unearthly passion which made that Catherine alive and killed her. Catherine Linton's "little romance" is altogether another affair.

The world of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a world of spiritual affinities, of spiritual contacts and recoils where love begets and bears love, and hate is begotten of hate and born of shame. Even Linton Heathcliff, that "whey-faced, whining wretch", that physical degenerate, demonstrates the higher law. His weakness is begotten by his father's loathing on his mother's terror.

Never was a book written with a more sublime ignoring of the physical. You only get a taste of it once in Isabella's unwholesome love for Heathcliff; that is not passion, it is sentiment, and it is thoroughly impure. And you get a far-off vision of it again in Isabella's fear of Heathcliff. Heathcliff understood her. He says of her, "'No brutality disgusted her.... I've sometimes relented, from pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what she could endure and still creep shamefully back.'" This civilized creature is nearer to the animals, there is more of the earth in her than in Catherine or in Heathcliff. They are elemental beings, if you like, but their element is fire. They are clean, as all fiery, elemental things are clean.

True, their love found violent physical expression; so that M. Maeterlinck can say of them and their creator: "We feel that one must have lived for thirty years under chains of burning kisses to learn what she has learned; to dare so confidently set forth, with such minuteness, such unerring certainty, the delirium of those two lovers of _Wuthering Heights_; to mark the self-conflicting movements of the tenderness that would make suffer, and the cruelty that would make glad, the felicity that prayed for death, and the despair that clung to life, the repulsion that desired, the desire drunk with repulsion--love surcharged with hatred, hatred staggering beneath its load of love."[A]

[Footnote A: _Wisdom and Destiny_, translated by Alfred Sutro.]

True; but the passion that consumes Catherine and Heathcliff, that burns their bodies and destroys them, is nine-tenths a passion of the soul. It taught them nothing of the sad secrets of the body. Thus Catherine's treachery to Heathcliff is an unconscious treachery. It is her innocence that makes it possible. She goes to Edgar Linton's arms with blind eyes, in utter, childlike ignorance, not knowing what she does till it is done and she is punished for it. She is punished for the sin of sins, the sundering of the body from the soul. All her life after she sees her sin. She has taken her body, torn it apart and given it to Edgar Linton, and Heathcliff has her soul.

"'You love Edgar Linton,' Nelly Dean says, 'and Edgar loves you ... where is the obstacle?'

"_'Here!_ and _here_!' replied Catherine, striking one hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast: 'in whichever place the soul lives. In my soul and in my heart, I'm convinced I'm wrong.'... 'I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there hadn't brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him, and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.'"

Not only are they made of the same stuff, but Heathcliff _is_ her soul.

"'I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries ... my great thought in living is himself.... Nelly! I _am_ Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.'"

That is her "secret".

Of course, there is Cathy's other secret--her dream, which passes for Emily Brontë's "pretty piece of Paganism". But it is only one side of Emily Brontë. And it is only one side of Catherine Earnshaw. When Heathcliff turns from her for a moment in that last scene of passion, she says: "'Oh, you see, Nelly, he would not relent a moment to keep me out of the grave. _That_ is how I'm loved! Well, never mind. That is not _my_ Heathcliff. I shall love mine yet; and take him with me: he's in my soul. And,' she added musingly, 'the thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I'm tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it and in it. Nelly, you think you are better and more fortunate than I; in full health and strength; you are sorry for me--very soon that will be altered. I shall be sorry for _you_. I shall be incomparably above and beyond you all.'"

True, adoration of Earth, the All-Mother, runs like a choric hymn through all the tragedy. Earth is the mother and the nurse of these children. They are brought to her for their last bed, and she gives them the final consolation.

Yet, after all, the end of this wild northern tragedy is far enough from Earth, the All-Mother. The tumult of _Wuthering Heights_ ceases when Heathcliff sickens. It sinks suddenly into the peace and silence of exhaustion. And the drama closes, not in hopeless gloom, the agony of damned souls, but in redemption, reconciliation.

Catherine, the child of Catherine and of Edgar Linton, loves Hareton, the child of Hindley Earnshaw. The evil spirit that possessed these two dies with the death of Heathcliff. The younger Catherine is a mixed creature, half-spiritualized by much suffering. Hareton is a splendid animal, unspiritualized and unredeemed. Catherine redeems him; and you gather that by that act of redemption, somehow, the souls of Catherine and Heathcliff are appeased.

The whole tremendous art of the book is in this wringing of strange and terrible harmony out of raging discord. It ends on a sliding cadence, soft as a sigh of peace only just conscious after pain.

"I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey and half-buried in heath; Edgar Linton's only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff's still bare.

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

* * * * *

But that is not the real end, any more than Lockwood's arrival at Wuthering Heights is the beginning. It is only Lockwood recovering himself; the natural man's drawing breath after the passing of the supernatural.

For it was not conceivable that the more than human love of Heathcliff and Catherine should cease with the dissolution of their bodies. It was not conceivable that Catherine, by merely dying in the fifteenth chapter, should pass out of the tale. As a matter of fact, she never does pass out of it. She is more in it than ever.

For the greater action of the tragedy is entirely on the invisible and immaterial plane; it is the pursuing, the hunting to death of an earthly creature by an unearthly passion. You are made aware of it at the very beginning when the ghost of the child Catherine is heard and felt by Lockwood; though it is Heathcliff that she haunts. It begins in the hour after Catherine's death, upon Heathcliff's passionate invocation: "'Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest so long as I am living! You said I killed you--haunt me, then! The murdered _do_ haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts _have_ wandered on earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad! Only _do_ not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unbearable! I _cannot_ live without my life! I _cannot_ live without my soul!'"

It begins and is continued through eighteen years. He cannot see her, but he is aware of her. He is first aware on the evening of the day she is buried. He goes to the graveyard and breaks open the new-made grave, saying to himself, "'I'll have her in my arms again! If she be cold, I'll think it is the north wind that chills _me_; and if she be motionless, it is sleep.'" A sighing, twice repeated, stops him. "'I appeared to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind. I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by; but as certainly as you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, though it cannot be discerned, so certainly I felt Cathy was there; not under me, but on the earth.... Her presence was with me; it remained while I refilled the grave, and led me home.'"

But she cannot get through to him completely, because of the fleshly body that he wears.

He goes up to his room, his room and hers. "'I looked round impatiently--I felt her by me--I could _almost_ see her, and yet I _could not_!... She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to me! And since then, sometimes more and sometimes less, I've been the sport of that intolerable torture!... When I sat in the house with Hareton, it seemed that on going out I should meet her; when I walked on the moors I should meet her coming in. When I went from home, I hastened to return; she _must_ be somewhere at the Heights, I was certain! And when I slept in her chamber--I was beaten out of that. I couldn't lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was either outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a child; and I must open my lids to see. And so I opened and closed them a hundred times a night--to be always disappointed! It racked me!... It was a strange way of killing: not by inches, but by fractions of hair-breadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eighteen years!'"

In all Catherine's appearances you feel the impulse towards satisfaction of a soul frustrated of its passion, avenging itself on the body that betrayed it. It has killed Catherine's body. It will kill Heathcliff's; for it _must_ get through to him. And he knows it.

Heathcliff's brutalities, his cruelties, the long-drawn accomplishment of his revenge, are subordinate to this supreme inner drama, this wearing down of the flesh by the lust of a remorseless spirit.

Here are the last scenes of the final act. Heathcliff is failing. "'Nelly,' he says, 'there's a strange change approaching: I'm in its shadow at present. I take so little interest in my daily life, that I hardly remember to eat or drink. Those two who have left the room'" (Catherine Linton and Hareton) "'are the only objects which retain a distinct material appearance to me.... Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed a personification of my youth, not a human being: I felt to him in such a variety of ways that it would have been impossible to have accosted him rationally. In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least: for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the flags? In every cloud, in every tree--filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day--I am devoured with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women--my own features--mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her.'...

"'But what do you mean by a _change_, Mr. Heathcliff?' I said, alarmed at his manner....

"'I shall not know till it comes,' he said, 'I'm only half conscious of it now.'"

A few days pass. He grows more and more abstracted and detached. One morning Nelly Dean finds him downstairs, risen late.

"I put a basin of coffee before him. He drew it nearer, and then rested his arms on the table, and looked at the opposite wall, as I supposed, surveying one particular portion, up and down, with glittering, restless eyes, and with such eager interest that he stopped breathing during half a minute together....

"'Mr. Heathcliff! master!' I cried, 'don't, for God's sake stare as if you saw an unearthly vision.'

"'Don't, for God's sake, shout so loud,' he replied. 'Turn round, and tell me, are we by ourselves?'

"'Of course,' was my answer, 'of course we are.'

"Still, I involuntarily obeyed him, as if I were not quite sure. With a sweep of his hand he cleared a space in front of the breakfast-things, and leant forward more at his ease.

"Now I perceived that he was not looking at the wall; for, when I regarded him alone, it seemed exactly that he gazed at something within two yards' distance. And, whatever it was, it communicated, apparently, both pleasure and pain in exquisite extremes: at least the anguished, yet raptured, expression of his countenance suggested that idea. The fancied object was not fixed: either his eyes pursued it with unwearied diligence, and, even in speaking to me, were never weaned away. I vainly reminded him of his protracted abstinence from food: if he stirred to touch anything in compliance with my entreaties, if he stretched his hand out to get a piece of bread, his fingers clenched before they reached it, and remained on the table, forgetful of their aim."

He cannot sleep; and at dawn of the next day he comes to the door of his room--Cathy's room--and calls Nelly to him. She remonstrates with him for his neglect of his body's health, and of his soul's.

"'Your cheeks are hollow, and your eyes bloodshot, like a person starving with hunger, and going blind with loss of sleep.'

"'It is not my fault that I cannot eat or rest,' he said.... 'I'll do both as soon as I possibly can ... as to repenting of my injustices, I've done no injustice, and I repent of nothing. I am too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself.'" ... "In the afternoon, while Joseph and Hareton were at their work, he came into the kitchen again, and, with a wild look, bid me come and sit in the house: he wanted somebody with him. I declined; telling him plainly that his strange talk and manner frightened me, and I had neither the nerve nor the will to be his companion alone.

"'I believe you think me a fiend,' he said, with his dismal laugh: 'something too horrible to live under a decent roof.' Then, turning to Catherine, who was there, and who drew behind me at his approach, he added, half sneeringly: 'Will _you_ come, chuck? I'll not hurt you. No! to you I've made myself worse than the devil. Well, there is _one_ who won't shrink from my company! By God! she's relentless. Oh, damn it! It's unutterably too much for flesh and blood to bear--even mine.'"

It is Heathcliff's susceptibility to this immaterial passion, the fury with which he at once sustains and is consumed by it, that makes him splendid.