Part 18 (2/2)
We would not leave our nature home For _any_ world beyond the tomb
No,rest, Or waken but to share with thee A mutual ihts_; the spirit of Catherine Earnshaw's drearaveyard It is instinct with a ic earth, adored because of her tragedy
It would be dangerous to assert positively that ”Re-cycle; but it undoubtedly belongs to the same cycle, or rather cyclone, of passion; the cyclone that rages in the hearts of Heathcliff and of Catherine The genius of Emily Bronte was so far dramatic that, if you could divide her poems into the personal and impersonal, the impersonal would be found in a mass out of all proportion to the other But, with very few exceptions, you cannot so divide the dream, the vision that lasted for at least eleven years of her life, frohteen-thirty-four, the earliest date of any known Gondal poeend, she _was_ these people; she lived, indistinguishably and interchangeably, their tumultuous and passionate life Sometimes she is the lonely spirit that looks on in iood and evil More often she is a happy God, i in this hts and rides, who loves and hates, and suffers and defies She heads one poele that I rode at the Battle of Zalorious, it would be (when you think what her life was in that Parsonage)For, as she could dare the heavenly, divine adventure, so there was no wild and ardent adventure of the earth she did not claim
Love of life and passionate adoration of the earth, adoration and passion fiercer than any pagan knew, burns in _Wuthering Heights_ And if that were all, it would be ianis Heights_ we are plunged apparently into a world of most unspiritual lusts and hates and cruelties; into the very darkness and thickness of elemental matter; a world that would be chaos, but for the iron Necessity that brings its own terrible order, its own iotten, hate upon hate, and cruelty upon cruelty, through the generations of Heathcliffs and of Earnshaws
Hindley Earnshaw is brutal to the foundling, Heathcliff, and degrades hi with the interest due He is brutal beyond brutality to Hindley Earnshaw, and he degrades Hareton, Hindley's son, as he hiraded; but he is not brutal to him The frustrated passion of Catherine Earnshaw for Heathcliff, and of Heathcliff for Catherine, hardly knows itself fro for hopeless pang When Catherine ar's sister, in order that he ar and Isabella His justice is more than poetic The love of Catherine Earnshaas all that he possessed He knows that he has lost it through the degradation that he owes to Hindley Earnshaw It is because an Earnshaw and a Linton between them have robbed him of all that he possessed, that, when his hour co the Lintons and the Earnshaws of all that _they_ possess, their Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights He loathes above all loathely creatures, Linton, his own son by Isabella The white-blooded thing is so sickly that he can hardly keep it alive But with an unearthly cruelty he cherishes, he nourishes this spawn till he can er Catherine, the child of Catherine Earnshaw and of Edgar Linton This supreme deed accoe ed by his bare deeds, Heathcliff seems a monster of evil, a devil without any fiery infernal splendour, a mean and sordid devil
But--and this is what makes Ee Heathcliff by his bare deeds Properly speaking, there are no bare deeds to judge hila a cloud of supernatural splendour The whole drama moves on a plane of reality superior to any deed The spirit of it, like Eardless of the oes Heathcliff is singularly inert He never sees take their course He lets Catherine ar Linton and remain married to him He lets Isabella's passion satisfy itself He lets Hindley Earnshaw drink himself to death He lets Hareton sink to the level of a boor He lets Linton die His er Catherine And even there he takes advantage of the accident that brings her to the door of Wuthering Heights He watches and bides his ti spirit that in all s seeks its own He eance, like his passion for Catherine, is an i He sho little he thinks of sordid, tangible possession; for, when his vengeance is coar Linton and Linton Heathcliff are dead and their lands and houses are his, he becomes utterly indifferent He falls into a melancholy He neither eats nor drinks He shuts hi on Cathy's bed
If there never was anything less heavenly, less Christian, than this draan There is no name for it It is above all our consecrated labels and distinctions It has been called a Greek tragedy, with the Aeschylean motto, [Greek: to drasanti pathein] But it is not Greek any more than it is Christian; and if it has a moral, its moral is far more [Greek: to pathonti pathein] It is the dra, and confined strictly within the boundaries of the soul
Madahts_ is not to be surpassed or otherwise gainsaid) finds in it a tragedy of inherited evil She thinks that Ereatly swayed by the doctrine of heredity ”'No use,' she see for the children of evil parents to grow, of their oill and unassisted, straight and noble The very quality of their will is as inherited as their eyes and hair Heathcliff is no fiend or goblin; the untrained, dooe sailor's holiday, violent and treacherous And how far shall we hold the sinner responsible for a nature which is itself the punishment of some forefather's cri, is alien to the spirit of _Wuthering Heights_, and to its greatness It is not really any problenored Heathcliff's race and parentage are unknown There is no reseood old Earnshaho adopted him, and their son Hindley Hareton does not inherit Hindley's drunkenness or his cruelty It is not through any physical consequence of his father's vices that Hareton suffers Linton is in no physical sense the son of Heathcliff If Catherine Linton inherits so of Catherine Earnshaw's chars to another world; she is an inferior andin her of Catherine Earnshaw's mutinous passion, the immortal and unearthly passion which made that Catherine alive and killed her Catherine Linton's ”little roether another affair
The world of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a world of spiritual affinities, of spiritual contacts and recoils where love begets and bears love, and hate is begotten of hate and born of sha wretch”, that physical degenerate, deotten by his father's loathing on his mother's terror
Never was a book written with a et a taste of it once in Isabella's unwholesome love for Heathcliff; that is not passion, it is sentiet a far-off vision of it again in Isabella's fear of Heathcliff Heathcliff understood her He says of her, ”'No brutality disgusted her I've sometimes relented, from pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what she could endure and still creep shamefully back'” This civilized creature is nearer to the animals, there is more of the earth in her than in Catherine or in Heathcliff They are eles, if you like, but their eles are clean
True, their love found violent physical expression; so that M
Maeterlinck can say of them and their creator: ”We feel that onekisses to learn what she has learned; to dare so confidently set forth, with suchcertainty, the deliriuhts_; tomovements of the tenderness that would lad, the felicity that prayed for death, and the despair that clung to life, the repulsion that desired, the desire drunk with repulsion--love surcharged with hatred, hatred staggering beneath its load of love”[A]
[Footnote A: _Wisdom and Destiny_, translated by Alfred Sutro]
True; but the passion that consumes Catherine and Heathcliff, that burns their bodies and destroys theht the of the sad secrets of the body Thus Catherine's treachery to Heathcliff is an unconscious treachery It is her innocence that ar Linton's ar what she does till it is done and she is punished for it She is punished for the sin of sins, the sundering of the body from the soul All her life after she sees her sin She has taken her body, torn it apart and given it to Edgar Linton, and Heathcliff has her soul
”'You love Edgar Linton,' Nelly Dean says, 'and Edgar loves you
where is the obstacle?'
”_'Here!_ and _here_!' replied Catherine, striking one hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast: 'in whichever place the soul lives In ' 'I've no ar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked ht Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never kno I love him, and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same'”
Not only are they made of the same stuff, but Heathcliff _is_ her soul
”'I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you What were the use of reat miseries in this world have been Heathcliff'sis himself Nelly! I _am_ Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any '”
That is her ”secret”
Of course, there is Cathy's other secret--her dreaanism” But it is only one side of Emily Bronte And it is only one side of Catherine Earnshaw When Heathcliff turns from her for a moment in that last scene of passion, she says: ”'Oh, you see, Nelly, he would not relent a rave _That_ is how I'm loved! Well, never mind That is not _my_ Heathcliff I shall love mine yet; and take hily, 'the thing that irks meenclosed here I'lorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dih the walls of an aching heart; but really with it and in it Nelly, you think you are better and th; you are sorry for me--very soon that will be altered I shall be sorry for _you_ I shall be incomparably above and beyond you all'”
True, adoration of Earth, the All-Mother, runs like a choric hyedy Earth is the ht to her for their last bed, and she gives them the final consolation
Yet, after all, the end of this wild northern tragedy is far enough frohts_ ceases when Heathcliff sickens It sinks suddenly into the peace and silence of exhaustion And the draony of damned souls, but in redemption, reconciliation
Catherine, the child of Catherine and of Edgar Linton, loves Hareton, the child of Hindley Earnshaw The evil spirit that possessed these two dies with the death of Heathcliff The younger Catherine is aHareton is a splendid animal, unspiritualized and unredeeather that by that act of redemption, somehow, the souls of Catherine and Heathcliff are appeased