Part 2 (1/2)
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 pa.s.s '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 Bronte's accuracy in transcribing the Yorks.h.i.+re dialect is astonis.h.i.+ng. 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 Bronte. Heathcliff's one solitary human feeling, as Charlotte Bronte 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 Bronte'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 subst.i.tute 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.”
Exact.i.tude marks her time, her scene and her depiction of pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sion follow nature and always ring true.
The picture we get of her personality from Mrs Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte Bronte_, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.ses in love, sorrow, pa.s.sion or anguish, still did she possess all that abides when emotion has faded away.”
And what, you may well ask, has Emily's personality got to do with us who are concentrating our attention on _Wuthering Heights_? Let Swinburne supply the answer:
”The book is what it is because the author was what she was; this is the main and central fact to be remembered. Circ.u.mstances have modified the details; they have not implanted the conception.... The love which devours life itself, which devastates the present and desolates the future with unquenchable and raging fire, has nothing less pure in it than flame or sunlight. And this pa.s.sionate and ardent chast.i.ty is utterly and unmistakably spontaneous and unconscious. Not till the story is ended, not till the effect of it has been thoroughly absorbed and digested, does the reader even perceive the simple and natural absence of any grosser element, any hint or suggestion of a baser alloy in the ingredients of its human emotion than in the splendour of lightning or the roll of a gathered wave. Then, as on issuing sometimes from the tumult of charging waters, he finds, with something of wonder, how absolutely pure and sweet was the element of living storm with which his own nature has been for a while made one; not a grain in it of soiling sand, not a waif of clogging weed.”
We read _Wuthering Heights_ then for its exquisite purity of description:--”The snow has quite gone down here, darling, and I only see two white spots on the whole range of moors: the sky is blue, and the larks are singing, and the becks and brooks are all brim full”--the perfection of her style. ”If she be cold, I'll think it is this north wind that chills me, and if she be motionless, it is sleep,” and ”I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my cheek frozen against hers,” the stark-naked grandeur of its genius.
”_Wuthering Heights_,” says Charlotte Bronte, ”was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur--power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant's foot.”
III
CHARLES LAMB
Everything in the end comes back to a question of taste. Why should one prefer a Corona cigar to a ”gasper,” a turkey to tripe, a magnum of Mumm to a quart of ”swipes,” _crepe de Chine_ and georgette to ninon, Gerald du Maurier to a patter comedian in a suburban pantomime, t.i.tian to Kirchner, or a Savile Row suit to a ”reach-me-down”?
It isn't only a question of expense or even of comfort; it's more a question of palate; man needs must love the highest when he sees it. We are most of us too dull of vision and too vitiated by gross familiarity with the commonplace and the vulgar to ”see” in the true sense of the word.