Why we should read. S. P. B. Mais
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."
But out of the raging discord that Emily Brontë creates in the stupendous passion of Catherine and Heathcliff she wrings a strange and terrible harmony. One cannot help but gasp at the quiet, peaceful ending:
"I lingered round them under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells, 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."
In the union of the younger Catherine and the redeemed Hareton one is expected to feel that the souls of the two giant characters are appeased, but we are not interested in that. The deaths of Catherine and Heathcliff matter no more than the death of Cæsar in the play. Catherine is never so much in the picture as when she has passed out of it physically for ever. The whole tragedy is conducted on an invisible and immaterial plane: it is really all written round one line of Browning inverted:
"The passion that left the sky to seek itself in the earth."
We are introduced to it at the very beginning of the book when Lockwood hears and feels the ghost of Catherine: it begins with Heathcliff's passionate outburst at her death: "Oh, God, it is unbearable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"
It continues without a break for eighteen years and by the side of it any passion that we have read of in modern English fiction seems so puny and frigid as to be almost laughable.
The fight of Catherine to get through to her lover, hampered by his flesh, forms really the great struggle of the book.
"I looked round impatiently"—it is Heathcliff's poignant cry—"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."
It is on reading passages like this that one realises the futility of trying to explain away genius. This could only have been written by one who had been whirled in a maelstrom of passion, racked and tortured on the wheel of life in a way that we know Emily Brontë was never called upon to endure, or—it is the result of a divine inspiration vouchsafed, one knows not how, irrespective of mortal experience.
This wearing down of the flesh by the lust of a remorseless spirit is one of the most deeply tragic, most deeply moving ideas ever presented to man.
"In every cloud," he says at the end of the drama, "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. … "
Again: "I am too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but do not satisfy itself. … "
And again: "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."
No—the real ending of Wuthering Heights does not lie in any concluding words of benign skies and quiet earth.
The real end is the tale told by the shepherd whom Lockwood meets on the moor after Heathcliff is dead.
"I was going to the Grange one evening—a dark evening, threatening thunder—and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and I supposed the lambs were skittish and would not be guided.
"'What is the matter, my little man?' I asked.
"'There's Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under t' Nab,' he blubbered, 'un' I darenut pass 'em.'"
There is no question of redemption or moral problems here. She reveals a point of view above good and evil. In her artistry and technique she is thorough. The minor characters all preserve their individuality from Joseph, the bitter, ranting Calvinist, to Nelly Dean, the teller of the tale. Emily Brontë's accuracy in transcribing the Yorkshire dialect is astonishing. She certainly listened to those Haworth rustics to some advantage, even if she rarely exchanged a word with them. She is as well able to paint the civilised, over-refined type who inhabit Thrushcross Grange as she is to depict the primitive, half-savage inhabitants of Wuthering Heights.
The sensual sentimentalist Isabella rouses the devil in Catherine and loathing in Heathcliff; the illusion of refinement in Edgar results in the terrible divorce of Catherine's body from her soul.
In these two and many other instances we see an unerring psychology in Emily Brontë. Heathcliff's one solitary human feeling, as Charlotte Brontë realised, was not his love for Catherine, which was "a sentiment fierce and inhuman," but his "half-confessed regard for Hareton Earnshaw—the young man whom he has ruined."
Seldom has the spirit of a place brooded over a book as does the spirit of the moors over Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë's descriptions of scenery are as famous as those of Thomas Hardy: they are even less laboured.
"Gimmerton chapel bells were still ringing; and the full, mellow flow of the beck in the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet substitute for the yet absent murmur of the summer foliage, which drowned that music about the Grange when the trees were in leaf. At Wuthering Heights it always sounded on quiet days following a great thaw or a season of steady rain."
Exactitude marks her time, her scene and her depiction of passions and emotions.
Her faults are as glaring as her virtues. Probably there has never been a worse-constructed tale. It has to be read many times before one can grasp its great qualities. There is scene within scene, tale within tale of extraordinary intricacy. It is hard enough to remember who is speaking; it is trebly hard to remember who everyone is. But her genius is so all-powerful that once you are gripped by the story you simply don't notice the clumsiness or the creaking of the machinery.
Of a piece with her genius is her style. It is perfect in its simplicity, strength and beauty, very different from that of Charlotte with her "peruse" and "indite." Nor does Emily's dramatic instinct ever fail her: her scenes of passion follow nature and always ring true.
The picture we get of her personality from Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë, the tall, the strong, the unconquerable, the lover of the moors and the lover of animals, makes her stand out from that book as of a heroic, lovable but altogether mysterious type.
It is to M. Maeterlinck, however, that we owe the last word on Emily herself. To him she is the supreme instance of the self-sufficing soul, independent and regardless of the material event. She shows the insignificance of all "experience" as compared with the spirit.
"Not a single event," he writes, "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? …
"If to her there came nothing of all that passes in love, sorrow,