Читать книгу Dramatis Personæ - Symons Arthur - Страница 8

It is one hundred years to a month—I write in August—that Emily Brontë was born; she was born in August, 1818, and died December 19th, 1848, at the age of thirty. The stoic in woman has been seen once only, and that in the only woman in whom there is seen the paradox of passion without sensuousness. She required no passionate experience to endow her with more than a memory of passion. Passion was alive in her as flame is alive in the earth. Her poems are all outcries, as her great novel, Wuthering Heights, is one long outcry. Rossetti in 1854 wrote: "I've been greatly interested in Wuthering Heights, the first novel I've read for an age, and the best (as regards power and style only) for two ages, except Sidonia. But it is a fiend of a book. The action is laid in hell—only it seems places and people have English names there." He is not altogether right in what he says, and yet there is hell in the heart of Heathcliff, that magnificent and malevolent gypsy, who, to my mind, can only be compared with Borrow's creations in Lavengro and The Romany Rye—such as the immortal Jasper Petilengro and the immoral Ursula—and with the lesser creations of Meredith's in The Adventures of Harry Richmond (in spite of the savage and piteous and fascinating Kiomi—I have seen a young gypsy girl of this name the other day, tragical).

When Charlotte says of Emily that what "her mind had gathered of the real concerning the people around her was too exclusively confined to their tragic and terrible traits, out of which she created Earnshaw and Catherine, and that having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done," there is no doubt that on the whole she is right. For these spirits are relentless and implacable, fallen and lost spirits, and it is only in this amazing novel that I find maledictions and curses and cries of anguish and writhings of agony and raptures of delight and passionate supplications, such as only abnormal creatures could contrive to express, and within the bounded space of the moors, made sad by somber sunrises and glad by radiant sunsets. It is sad colored and desolate, but when gleams of sunlight or of starlight pierce the clouds that hang generally above it a rare and sunny beauty comes into the bare outlines, quickening them with living splendor.

In the passionately tragic genius of Emily I find a primitive nature-worship; so strangely primitive that that wonderful scene of mad recrimination between the dying Catherine and the repentant Heathcliff, when she cries "I forgive you! Forgive me!" and he answers: "Kiss me again; and don't let me see your eyes. I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours? How can I?" is almost comparable with a passage in Macbeth where Banquo speaks of "the temple-haunting Martlet" and its loved masonry which preludes Lady Macbeth's entrance from under the buttresses as the delicate air bears witness to the incarnate murder that swarms, snake-like, hidden under grass. Something of Emily's saturnine humor comes into the mouth of the Calvinistic farm-servant, whose jests are as grim and as deadly and as plague-like as the snow-storms that make winter unendurable.

Yes, this creator has, in herself and in her imagination, something solitary and sorrowful—that of a woman who lived, literally, alone—and whose genius had no scorn. She, who believed in the indestructible God within herself, was silenced forever; herself and her genius which had moved as a wind and moved as the sea in tumult and moved as the thunderclouds in fury upon the tragical and perilous waters of passion that surround "the topless towers" of Wuthering Heights.

In one who, like Emily Brontë, was always dying of too much life, one can imagine the sensitive reticences, the glowing eyes, and the strain of the vehemences of that inner fire that fed on itself, which gave her her taciturnity. "It is useless to ask her; you get no answers. The awful point was that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the fading eyes, the same service was exacted as they had rendered in health."

"The spirit inexorable to the flesh:" there is the whole secret of what in her life was her genius. Alone with herself—with her soul and her body—she allows herself no respite: for she was always of an unresting nature. So in the words of Pater—who told me of his enormous admiration for her prose—"we are all condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis; we have our interval and then our place knows us no more." How she spent these "intervals" must be forever unknown. Not in high passions, I imagine, nor in wisdom, nor in care for material things; but in moods of passion, in intellectual excitement, in an inexhaustible curiosity, in an ironical contemplation "of the counted pulses of a variegated, dramatic life." But never, I am certain, was she ever capable—as she watches the weaving and unweaving of herself—of the base corruption of what his existence was to Beardsley. "That he should be so honest with his fear," I have written of him, "that he should sit down before its face and study it feature by feature: that he should never turn aside his eyes for more than one instant, make no attempt to escape, but sit at home with it, travel with it, see it in his mirror, taste it in the sacrament: that is the marvellous thing, and the sign of his fundamental sincerity in life and art."

Emily Brontë's passionate and daring genius attains this utmost limit of tragedy, and with this a sense—an extreme sense—of the mystery of terror which lurks in all the highest poetry as certainly in her lyrical prose; a quality which distinguishes such prose and verse from all that is but a little lower than the highest. Her genius is somber in the sense that Webster's is, but much less dramatic. Neither his tragedies nor her novel are well-constructed; and in her case something is certainly lacking; for her narrative is dominated by sheer chance, and guided by mere accident. And I think that she, with her sleepless imagination, might have said as the child Giovanni in Webster's Tragedy says: "I have not slept these six nights. When do the dead walk?" and is answered: "When God shall please." When in disguise she sings of the useless rebellions of the earth, rarely has a more poignant cry been wrenched out of "a soul on the rack"—that is to say since Santa Teresa sang:—

A soul in God hidden from sin,

What more desires for thee remain,

Save but to love, and love again

And, all on flame, with love within,

Love on, and turn to love again?

than this stanza:

O! dreadful is the shock—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.

At times there is a tragic sublimity in her imagination, which gathers together, as it were, the winds from the world's four quarters, that howled in winter nights across the moor around the house she lived in. Indeed the very storm of her genius hovers in the air between things sublime and things hideous. "There never was such a thunderstorm of a play," said Swinburne on Cyril Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy. I am inclined to add: "There never was such a thunderstorm of a novel as Wuthering Heights." And it is blood-stained with the blood of the roses of sunsets; the heavy atmosphere is sultry as the hush and heat and awe of midnoon; sad visions appear with tragic countenances, fugitives try in vain to escape from the insane brooding of their consciences. And there are serviceable shadows; implacable self-devotions and implacable cruelties; vengeances unassuaged; and a kind of unscrupulous ferocity is seen not only in Heathcliff but in one of his victims. And there are startling scenes and sentences that, once impressed on the memory, are unforgettable: as scarlet flowers of evil and as poisonous weeds they take root in one.