Part 12 (1/2)
And he must have, further, a sense of the reality behind the illusion
It is through her undying sense of it that Ereat She had none of the proud appearances of the metaphysical e Eliot, whole systems of philosophy in her early youth Her passionate pantheism was not derived; it was established in her own soul She was a ious vocation, but by temperament and by ultimate vision She offers the apparent anomaly of extreme detachment and of an unconquerable love of life
It was the highest and the purest passion that you can well conceive
For life gave her nothing in return It treated her worse than it treated Charlotte She had none of the things that, after all, Charlotte had; neither praise nor fame in her lifetime; nor friendshi+p, nor love, nor vision of love All these things ”passed her by with averted head”; and she stood in her inviolable serenity and watched the out her hand to one of theesture of desire or regret And, unlike Charlotte, she made it impossible for you to pity her
It is this superb attitude to life, this independence of the material event, this detachment from the stream of circumstance, that marks her from her sister; for Charlotte is at moments pitifully immersed in the stream of circumstance, pitifully dependent on the material event It is true that she kept her head above the stream, and that the failure of the material event did not frustrate or hinder her ultimate achievement
But Charlotte's was not by any led and hankered after the unattainable What she attained and realized she realized and attained in her i of the soul's ination waited to some extent upon experience When Charlotte wrote of passion, of its tragic suffering, or of its ultiht have happened to her But when E that, so far as she personally was concerned, not only was not and had not been, but never could be It was true enough of Charlotte that she created But of Emily it was absolutely and supree of frustration, but of co possession It may seem marvellous in the mouth of a woman destitute of all emotional experience, in the restricted sense; but the real wonder would have been a _Wuthering Heights_ born of any personal eh her personal destitution that her genius was so virile and so rich At its hour it found her virgin, not only to passion but to the bare idea of passion, to the inner and ireat, not only through her stupendous iination, but because it fed on the still more withdrawn and secret sources of her soul If she had had no genius she would yet be great because of what took place within her, the fusion of her soul with the transcendent and enduring life
It was there that, possessing nothing, she possessed all things; and her secret escapes you if you are aware only of her splendid paganisnation like Anne and Charlotte It is most unlikely that she relied, openly or in secret, on ”the merits of the Redeeion As she bowed to no disaster and no grief, consolation would have been the last thing in any religion that she looked for But, for height and depth of supernatural attainrip of divine reality and poor Anne's spas clutch; and none between Charlotte's piety, her ”God willing”; ”I suppose I ought to be thankful”, and Emily's acceptance and endurance of the event
I am reminded that one event she neither accepted nor endured She fought death Her spirit lifted the pathetic, febrile struggle of weakness with corruption, and turned it to a splendid, titanic, and unearthly combat
And yet it was in her life rather than her death that she was splendid
There is so and repellent in her last defiance It shrieks discord with the endurance and acceptance, braver than all revolt, finer than all resignation, that was the secret of her genius and of her life
There is no need to reconcile this supreh _Wuthering Heights_, or with the passion for life and adoration of the earth that burns there, an imperishable flame; or with Catherine Earnshaw's dream of heaven: ”heaven did not see to coHeights; where I woke sobbing for joy”
Catherine Earnshaw's dream has been cited innuan I do not knohat it does prove, if it is not the absolute and i as she undoubtedly did dwell, in the secret and invisible world, she could yet conceive and bring forth Catherine Earnshaw
It is not possible to diminish the force or to take away one word of Mr
Swinburne's enius of Emily Bronte”, ”a dark, unconscious instinct as of primitive nature-worshi+p” That here she was so poised and so complete; that she touches earth and heaven, and is at once intoxicated with the splendour of the passion of living, and holds her spirit in security and her heart in peace She plunged with Catherine Earnshaw into the thick of the tumult, and her detachment is not more wonderful than her immersion
It is our own imperfect vision that is bewildered by the union in her of these antagonistic attitudes It is not only entirely possible and compatible, but, if your soul be comprehensive, it is inevitable that you should adore the forms of life, and yet be aware of their impermanence; that you should affirm with equal fervour their illusion and the radiance of the reality thatif not comprehensive There was no distance, no abyss too vast, no antagonis for her e soul Without a hint, so far as we know, froenius she pierced to the secret of the world and crystallized it in two lines:
The earth that wakes _one_ hu Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and hell
It is doubtful if she ever read a line of Blake; yet it is Blake that her poems perpetually recall, and it is Blake's vision that she has reached there She too knehat it was
To see a world in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, To hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour
She sees by a flash what he saw continuously; but it is by the sa thebetween its vision of transparent unity and its love of earth for earth's sake There are at least four poems of hers that show this entirely natural oscillation
In one, a nameless poem, the Genius of Earth calls to the visionary soul:
Shall earth no more inspire thee, Thou lonely dreamer now?
Since passion may not fire thee, Shall nature cease to bow?
Thy ions dark to thee; Recall its useless roving, Coiven On earth so wildly pine; Yet feould ask a heaven More like this earth than thine
”The Night-Wind” sings the sa, lures with the sa: