But there is more in the matter than that. Emily Bronte"s genius, by its abandonment to the pa.s.sion of which I have been speaking, does not only burn up and destroy all the elements of clay in what, so to speak, is above the earth and on its surface; but it also, burning downwards, destroys and annihilates all dubious and obscure materials which surround the original and primordial human will.
Round and about this lonely and inalienable will it makes a scorched and blackened plain of ashes and cinders. Ambiguous feelings are turned to ashes there; and so are doubts, hesitations, timidities, trepidations, cowardices. The aboriginal will of man, of the unconquerable individual, stands alone there in the twilight, under the grey desolate rain of the outer s.p.a.ces. Four-square it stands, upon adamantine foundations, and nothing in heaven or earth is able to shake it or disquiet it.
It is this isolation, in desolate and forlorn integrity, of the individual human will, which is the deepest element in Emily Bronte"s genius.
Upon this all depends, and to this all returns. Between the will and the spirit deep and strange nuptials are celebrated; and from the immortality of the spirit a certain breath of life pa.s.ses over into the mortality of the will, drawing it up into the celestial and invisible region which is beyond chance and change.
From this abysmal fusion of the "creator spiritus" with the human will rises that adamantine courage with which Emily Bronte was able to face the jagged edges of that crushing wheel of destiny which the malign powers of nature drive remorselessly over our poor flesh and blood. The uttermost spirit of the universe became in this manner _her_ spirit, and the integral ident.i.ty of the soul within her breast hardened into an undying resistance to all that would undermine it.
Thus she was able to endure tragedy upon tragedy without flinching.
Thus she was able to a.s.sert herself against the power of pain as one wrestling invincibly with an exhausted giant.
Calamity after calamity fell upon her house, and the stark desolation of those melancholy Yorkshire hills became a suitable and congruous background for the loneliness of her strange life; but against all the pain which came upon her, against all the aching pangs of remorseless fate, this indomitable girl held grimly to her supreme vision.
No poet, no novelist who has ever lived has been so profoundly affected by the conditions of his life as was this invincible woman.
But the conditions of her life--the scenery of sombre terror which surrounded her--only touched and affected the outward colour and rhythm of her unique style. In her deepest soul, in the courage of her tremendous vision, she possessed something that was not bounded by Yorkshire hills, or any other hills; something that was inhuman, eternal and universal, something that was outside the power of both time and s.p.a.ce.
By that singular and forlorn scenery--the scenery of the Yorkshire moors round about her home--she was, however, in the more flexible portion of her curious nature inveterately influenced. She does not precisely describe this scenery--not at any rate at any length--either in her poems or in "Wuthering Heights"; but it sank so deeply into her that whatever she wrote was affected by it and bears its desolate and imaginative imprint.
It is impossible to read Emily Bronte anywhere without being transported to those Yorkshire moors. One smells the smell of burning furze, one tastes the resinous breath of pine-trees, one feels beneath one"s feet the tough fibrous stalks of the ling and the resistant stems and crumpled leaves of the bracken.
Dark against that pallid greenish light of a dead sunset, which is more than anything else characteristic of those unharvested fells, one can perceive always, as one reads her, the sombre form of some gigantic Scotch-fir stretching out its arms across the sky; while a flight of rooks, like enormous black leaves drifting on the wind, sail away into the sunset at our approach.
One is conscious, as one reads her, of lonely marsh-pools turning empty faces towards a grey heaven, while drop by drop upon their murky waters the autumn rain falls, sadly, wearily, without aim or purpose.
And most of all is one made aware of the terrible desolation --desolation only rendered more desolate by the presence of humanity--of those half-ruined farm-houses, approached by windy paths or deep-cut lanes, which seem to rise, like huge fungoid things, here and there over that sad land.
It is difficult to conceive they have not sprung--these dwellings of these Earnshaws and Lintons--actually out of the very soil, in slow organic growth leading to slow organic decay. One cannot conceive the human hands which _built_ them; any more than one can conceive the human hands which planted those sombre hedges which have now become so completely part of the scenery that one thinks of them as quite as aboriginal to the place as the pine-trees or the gorse-bushes.
Of all shapes of all trees I think the shape of an old and twisted thorn-tree harmonises best with one"s impression of the "milieu" of Emily Bronte"s single tragic story; a thorn-tree distorted by the wind blowing from one particular quarter, and with its trunk blackened and hollowed; and in the hollow of it a little pool of rain-water and a few dead soaked leaves.
The extraordinary thing is that she can produce these impressions incidentally, and, as it were, unconsciously. They are so blent with her spirit, these things, that they convey themselves to one"s mind indirectly and through a medium far more subtle than any eloquent description.
I cannot think of Emily Bronte"s work without thinking of a certain tree I once saw against a pallid sky. A long way from Yorkshire it was where I saw this tree, and there were no limestone boulders scattered at its feet; but something in the impression it produced upon me--an impression I shall not lightly forget--weaves itself strangely in with all I feel about her, so that the peculiar look of wintry boughs, sad and silent against a fading west, accompanied by that natural human longing of people who are tired to be safely buried under the friendly earth and "free among the dead," has come to be most indelibly and deeply a.s.sociated with her tragic figure.
Those who know those Yorkshire moors know the mysterious way in which the quiet country lanes suddenly emerge upon wide and desolate expanses; know how they lead us on, past ruined factories and deserted quarries, up the barren slopes of forlorn hills; know how, as one sees in front of one the long white road vanishing over the hill-top and losing itself in the grey sky, there comes across one"s mind a strange, sad, exquisite feeling unlike any other feeling in the world; and we who love Emily Bronte know that this is the feeling, the mood, the atmosphere of the soul, into which her writings throw us.
The power of her great single story, "Wuthering Heights," is in a primary sense the power of romance, and none can care for this book for whom romance means nothing.
What is romance? I think it is the instinctive recognition of a certain poetic glamour which an especial kind of grouping of persons and things--of persons and things seen under a particular light--is able to produce. It does not always accompany the expression of pa.s.sionate emotion or the narration of thrilling incidents. These may arrest and entertain us when there is no romance, in my sense at any rate of that great word, overshadowing the picture.
I think this quality of romance can only be evoked when the background of the story is heavily laden with old, rich, dim, pathetic, human a.s.sociations. I think it can only emerge when there is an implication of thickly mingled traditions, full of sombre and terrible and beautiful suggestiveness, stimulating to the imagination like a draught of heavy red wine. I think there must be, in a story of which the flavour has the true romantic magic, something darkly and inexplicably fatal. I think it is necessary that one should hear the rush of the flight of the Valkyries and the wailing upon the wind of the voices of the Eumenides.
Fate--in such a story--must a.s.sume a half-human, half-personal shape, and must brood, obscurely and sombrely, over the incidents and the characters.
The characters themselves must be swayed and dominated by Fate; and not only by Fate. They must be penetrated through and through by the scenery which surrounds them and by the traditions, old and dark and superst.i.tious and malign, of some particular spot upon the earth"s surface.
The scenery which is the background of a tale which has the true romantic quality must gather itself together and concentrate itself in some kind of symbolic unity; and this symbolic unity--wherein the various elements of grandeur and mystery are merged--must present itself as something almost personal and as a dynamic "motif" in the development of the plot.
There can be no romance without some sort of appeal to that long-inherited and atavistic feeling in ordinary human hearts which is responsive to the spell and influence of old, unhappy, lovely, ancient things; things faded and falling, but with the mellowness of the centuries upon their faces.
In other words, nothing can be romantic which is _new._ Romance implies, above everything else, a long a.s.sociation with the human feelings of many generations. It implies an appeal to that background of our minds which is stirred to reciprocity by suggestions dealing with those old, dark, mysterious memories which belong, not so much to us as individuals, as to us as links in a great chain.
There are certain emotions in all of us which go much further and deeper than our mere personal feelings. Such are the emotions roused in us by contact with the mysterious forces of life and death and birth and the movements of the seasons; with the rising and setting of the sun, and the primordial labour of tilling the earth and gathering in the harvest. These things have been so long a.s.sociated with our human hopes and fears, with the nerves and fibres of our inmost being, that any powerful presentment of them brings to the surface the acc.u.mulated feelings of hundreds of centuries.
New problems, new adventures, new social groupings, new philosophical catchwords, may all have their vivid and exciting interest. They cannot carry with them that sad, sweet breath of planetary romance which touches what might be called the "imagination of the race" in individual men and women.
"Wuthering Heights" is a great book, not only because of the intensity of the pa.s.sions in it, but because these pa.s.sions are penetrated so profoundly with the long, bitter, tragic, human a.s.sociations of persons who have lived for generations upon the same spot and have behind them the weight of the burden of the sorrows of the dead.
It is a great book because the romance of it emerges into undisturbed amplitude of s.p.a.ce, and a.s.serts itself in large, grand, primitive forms unfretted by teasing irrelevancies.
The genius of a romantic novelist--indeed, the genius of all writers primarily concerned with the mystery of human character--consists in letting the basic differences between man and man, between man and woman, rise up, unimpeded by frivolous detail, from the fathomless depths of life itself.
The solitude in which Emily Bronte lived, and the austere simplicity of her granite-moulded character, made it possible for her to envisage life in larger, simpler, less blurred outlines than most of us are able to do. Thus her art has something of that mysterious and awe-inspiring simplicity that characterises the work of Michelangelo or William Blake.
No one who has ever read "Wuthering Heights" can forget the place and the time when he read it. As I write its name now, every reader of this page will recall, with a sudden heavy sigh at the pa.s.sing of youth, the moment when the sweet tragic power of its deadly genius first took him by the throat.
For me the shadow of an old bowed acacia-tree, held together by iron bands, was over the history of Heathcliff; but the forms and shapes of that mad drama gathered to themselves the lineaments of all my wildest dreams.
I can well remember, too, how on a certain long straight road between Heathfield and Burwash, the eastern district of Suss.e.x, my companion--the last of our English theologians--turned suddenly from his exposition of St. Thomas, and began quoting, as the white dust rose round us at the pa.s.sing of a flock of sheep, the "vain are the thousand creeds--unutterably vain!" of that grand and absolute defiance, that last challenge of the unconquerable soul, which ends with the sublime cry to the eternal spark of G.o.dhead in us all--
"Thou, thou art being and breath; And what thou art can never be destroyed!"
The art of Emily Bronte--if it can be called art, this spontaneous projection, in a shape rugged and savage, torn with the storms of fate, of her inmost ident.i.ty--can be appreciated best if we realise with what skill we are plunged into the dark stream of the destiny of these people through the mediatory intervention of a comparative stranger. By this method, and also by the crafty manner in which she makes the old devoted servant of the house of Earnshaw utter a sort of Sophoclean commentary upon the events which take place, we are permitted to feel the magnitude of the thing in true relief and perspective.
By these devices we have borne in upon us, as in no other way could be done, the convincing sense which we require, to give weight and ma.s.s to the story, of the real continuity of life in those savage places.
By this method of narration we have the illusion of being suddenly initiated into a stream of events which are not merely imaginary. We have the illusion that these Earnshaws and Lintons are really, actually, palpably, undeniably, living--living somewhere, in their terrible isolation, as they have always lived--and that it is only by some lucky chance of casual discovery that we have been plunged into the mystery of their days.
One cannot help feeling aware, as we follow the story of Heathcliff, how Emily Bronte has torn and rent at her own soul in the creation of this appalling figure. Heathcliff, without father or mother, without even a Christian name, becomes for us a sort of personal embodiment of the suppressed fury of Emily Bronte"s own soul. The cautious prudence and hypocritical reserves of the discreet world of timid, kindly, compromising human beings has got upon the nerves of this formidable girl, and, as she goes tearing and rending at all the masks which cover our loves and our hates, she seems to utter wild discordant cries, cries like those of some she-wolf rushing through the herd of normal human sheep.
Heathcliff and Cathy, what a pair they are! What terrifying lovers!
They seem to have arisen from some remote unfathomed past of the world"s earlier and less civilised pa.s.sions. And yet, one occasionally catches, as one goes through the world, the Heathcliff look upon the face of a man and the Cathy look upon the face of a woman.
In a writer of less genius than Emily Bronte Heathcliff would never have found his match; would never have found his mate, his equal, his twin-soul.
It needed the imagination of one who had both Heathcliff and Cathy in her to dig them both out of the same granite rock, covered with yellow gorse and purple ling, and to hurl them into one another"s arms.
From the moment when they inscribed their initials upon the walls of that melancholy room, to the moment when, with a howl like a madman, Heathcliff drags her from her grave, their affiliation is desperate and absolute.
This is a love which pa.s.ses far beyond all sensuality, far beyond all voluptuous pleasure. They get little good of their love, these two--little solace and small comfort.
But one cannot conceive their wishing to change their lot with any happier lovers. They are what they are, and they are prepared to endure what fate shall send them.
When Cathy admits to the old servant that she intends to marry Linton because Heathcliff was unworthy of her and would drag her down, "I love Linton," she says--"but _I am_ Heathcliff!" And this _"I am_ Heathcliff" rings in our ears as the final challenge to a chaotic pluralistic world full of cynical disillusionment, of the desperate spirit of which Emily Bronte was made.
The wild madness of such love--pa.s.sing the love of men and women--may seem to many readers the mere folly of an insane dream.
Emily Bronte--as she was bound to do--tosses them forth, that inhuman pair, upon the voyaging homeless wind; tosses them forth, free of their desperation, to wander at large, ghosts of their own undying pa.s.sions, over the face of the rainswept moors. But to most quiet and sceptical souls such an issue of the drama contradicts the laws of nature. To most patient slaves of destiny the end of the ashes of these fierce flames is to mingle placidly with the dark earth of those misty hills and find their release in nothing more tragic than the giving to the roots of the heather and the bracken a richer soil wherein to grow.