Emily Brontë
"On a sunny brae, alone I lay
One summer afternoon;
It was the marriage-time of May
With her young lover, June.
* * * * *
"The trees did wave their plumy crests,
The glad birds carolled clear;
And I, of all the wedding guests,
Was only sullen there.
* * * * *
"Now, whether it were really so,
I never could be sure,
But as in fit of peevish woe,
I stretched me on the moor,
"A thousand thousand gleaming fires
Seemed kindling in the air;
A thousand thousand silvery lyres
Resounded far and near:
"Methought, the very breath I breathed
Was full of sparks divine,
And all my heather-couch was wreathed
By that celestial shine!
"And, while the wide earth echoing rung
To their strange minstrelsy,
The little glittering spirits sung,
Or seemed to sing, to me."
* * * * *
What they sang is indeed of little moment enough--a strain of the vague
pantheistic sentiment common always to poets, but her manner of
representing the little airy symphony is charming. It recalls the
fairy-like brilliance of the moors at sunset, when the sun, slipping
behind a western hill, streams in level rays on to an opposite crest,
gilding with pale gold the fawn-coloured faded grass; tangled in the
film of lilac seeding grasses, spread, like the bloom on a grape, over
all the heath; sparkling on the crisp edges of the heather blooms, pure
white, wild-rose colour, shell-tinted, purple; emphasising every
grey-green spur of the undergrowth of ground-lichen; striking every
scarlet-splashed, white-budded spray of ling: an iridescent, shimmering,
dancing effect of white and pink and purple flowers; of lilac bloom, of
grey-green and whitish-grey buds and branches, all crisply moving and
dancing together in the breeze on the hilltop. I have quoted that windy
night in a line--
"The dim moon struggling in the sky."
Here is another verse to show how well she watched from her bedroom's
wide window the grey far-stretching skies above the black far-stretching
moors--
"And oh, how slow that keen-eyed star
Has tracked the chilly grey;
What, watching yet! how very far
The morning lies away."
Such direct, vital touches recall well-known passages in 'Wuthering
Heights:' Catharine's pictures of the moors; that exquisite allusion to
Gimmerton Chapel bells, not to be heard on the moors in summer when the
trees are in leaf, but always heard at Wuthering Heights on quiet days
following a great thaw or a season of steady rain.
But not, alas! in such fantasy, in such loving intimacy with nature,
might much of Emily's sorrowful days be passed. Nor was it in her nature
that all her dreams should be cheerful. The finest songs, the most
peculiarly her own, are all of defiance and mourning, moods so natural
to her that she seems to scarcely need the intervention of words in
their confession. The wild, melancholy, and elevating music of which
Charlotte wisely speaks is strong enough to move our very hearts to
sorrow in such verses as the following, things which would not touch us
at all were they written in prose; which have no personal note. Yet
listen--
"Death! that struck when I was most confiding
In my certain faith of joy to be--
Strike again, Time's withered branch dividing
From the fresh root of Eternity!
"Leaves, upon Time's branch, were growing brightly,
Full of sap, and full of silver dew;
Birds beneath its shelter gathered nightly;
Daily round its flowers the wild bees flew.
"Sorrow passed, and plucked the golden blossom."
Solemn, haunting with a passion infinitely beyond the mere words, the
mere image; because, in some wonderful way, the very music of the verse
impresses, reminds us, declares the holy inevitable losses of death.
A finer poem yet is 'Remembrance,' written two years later, in the March
of 1845; here the words and the thought are worthy of the music and the
mood. It has vital passion in it; though it can scarcely be personal
passion, since, "fifteen wild Decembers" before 1845, Emily Bronte was a
girl of twelve years old, companionless, save for still living sisters,
Branwell, her aunt, and the vicarage servants. Here, as elsewhere in the
present volume, the creative instinct reveals itself in imagining
emotions and not characters. The artist has supplied the passion of the
lover.
"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,
Severed at last by Time's all-severing wave?
"Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover
Over the mountains, on that northern shore,
Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover
Thy noble heart for ever, evermore?
"Cold in the earth--and fifteen wild Decembers,
From those brown hills, have melted into spring:
Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!
"Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee,
While the world's tide is bearing me along;
Other desires and other hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong.
"No later light has lightened up my heaven,
No second morn has ever shone for me;
All my life's bliss from thy dear life was given,
All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee.
"But, when the days of golden dreams had perished,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.
"Then did I check the tears of useless passion--
Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to that tomb already more than mine.
"And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?"
Better still, of a standard excellence, is a little poem, which, by some
shy ostrich prompting, Emily chose to call
"THE OLD STOIC.
"Riches I hold in light esteem;
And Love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream
That vanished with the morn:
"And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is, 'Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!'
"Yes, as my swift days near their goal,
'Tis all that I implore;
In life and death, a chainless soul,
With courage to endure."
Throughout the book one recognises the capacity for producing something
finer and quite different from what is here produced; one recognises so
much, but not the author of 'Wuthering Heights.' Grand impressions of
mood and landscape reveal a remarkably receptive artistic temperament;
splendid and vigorous movement of lines shows that the artist is a poet.
Then we are in a _cul-de-sac_. There is no hint of what kind of
poet--too reserved to be consistently lyric, there is not sufficient
evidence of the dramatic faculty to help us on to the true scent. All we
can say is that we have before us a mind capable of very complete and
real illusions, haunted by imagination, always fantastic, and often
terrible; a temperament reserved, fearless and brooding; a character of
great strength and ruggedness, extremely tenacious of impressions. We
must call in Monsieur Taine and his _Milieu_ to account for 'Wuthering
Heights.'
This first volume reveals an overpowering imagination which has not yet
reached its proper outlet. It is painful, in reading these early poems,
to feel how ruthless and horrible that strong imagination often was, as
yet directed on no purposed line. Sometimes, indeed, sweet fancies came
to Emily, but often they were visions of black dungeons, scenes of
death, and hopeless parting, of madness and agony.
"So stood I, in Heaven's glorious sun,
And in the glare of Hell;
My spirit drank a mingled tone,
Of seraph's song, and demon's moan;
What my soul bore, my soul alone
Within itself may tell!"
It is painful, indeed, to think that the surroundings of this violent
imagination, with its bias towards the capricious and the terrifying,
were loneliness, sorrow, enforced companionship with degradation; a life
so bitter, for a long time, and made so bitter through another's fault,
that Emily welcomed her fancies, even the gloomiest, as a happy outlet
from reality.
"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."
Such were the verses that Charlotte discovered one autumn day of 1845,
which surprised her, with good reason, by their originality and music.
Emily was not pleased by what in her eyes, so jealous of her liberty,
must have seemed a deliberate interference with her property. "My sister
Emily," continues Charlotte, "was not a person of demonstrative
character, nor one on the recesses of whose mind and feelings even those
nearest and dearest to her could intrude unlicensed; it took hours to
reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to persuade her that
such poems merited publication. I knew, however, that a mind like hers
could not be without some latent spark of honourable ambition, and
refused to be discouraged in my attempts to fan that spark to flame.
"Meantime, my younger sister quietly produced some of her own
compositions, intimating that since Emily's had given me pleasure, I
might like to look at some of hers. I could not but be a partial judge,
yet I thought that these verses, too, had a sweet sincere pathos of
their own."
Only a partial judge could find anything much to praise in gentle Anne's
trivial verses. Had the book an index of first lines, what a scathing
criticism on the contents would it be!
"Sweet are thy strains, celestial bard."
"I'll rest me in this sheltered bower."
"Oh, I am very weary, though tears no longer flow."
From such beginnings we too clearly foresee the hopeless bathos of the
end. Poor child, her real, deep sorrows, expressed in such worn-out
ill-fitting phrases, are as little touching as the beauty of a London
shopgirl under the ready-made cast-off adornments of her second-hand
finery.
Charlotte, however, knowing the real sorrow, the real meekness that
inspired them, not unnaturally put into the trivial verses the pathos of
the writer's circumstances. Of a truth, her own poems are not such as
would justify any great rigour of criticism. They are often, as poems,
actually inferior to Anne's, her manner of dragging in a tale or a moral
at the end of a lyric having quite a comical effect; yet, on the whole,
her share of the book clearly distinguishes her as an eloquent and
imaginative _raconteuse_, at the same time that it denies her the least
sprout, the smallest leaf, of that flowerless wreath of bays which Emily
might claim. But at that time the difference was not so clearly
distinguishable; though Charlotte ever felt and owned her sister's
superiority in this respect, it was not recognised as of a sort to quite
outshine her own little tales in verse, and quite outlustre Anne's pious
effusions.
A packet of manuscript was selected, a little packet written in three
different hands and signed by three names. The sisters did not wish to
reveal their identity; they decided on a _nom de plume_, and chose the