Chapter 14

It is not surprising, therefore, that the world should be callous to Emily Brontë. What you are not prepared for is the appearance of indifference in her editors. They are pledged by their office to a peculiar devotion. And the circumstances of Emily Brontë's case made it imperative that whoever undertook this belated introduction should show rather more than a perfunctory enthusiasm. Her alien and lonely state should have moved Mr. Clement Shorter to a passionate chivalry. It has not even moved him to revise his proofs with perfect piety. Perfect piety would have saved him from the oversight, innocent but deplorable, of attributing to Emily Brontë four poems which Emily Brontë could not possibly have written, which were in fact written by Anne: "Despondency", "In Memory of a Happy Day in February", "A Prayer", and "Confidence."[A] No doubt Mr. Shorter found them in Emily's handwriting; but how could he, how _could_ he mistake Anne's voice for Emily's?

[Footnote A: Published among Charlotte Brontë's posthumous "Selections" in 1850.]

My God (oh let me call Thee mine, Weak, wretched sinner though I be), My trembling soul would fain be Thine; My feeble faith still clings to Thee.

It is Anne's voice at her feeblest and most depressed.

It is, perhaps, a little ungrateful and ungracious to say these things, when but for Mr. Shorter we should not have had Emily's complete poems at all. And to accuse Mr. Shorter of present indifference (in the face of his previous achievements) would be iniquitous if it were not absurd; it would be biting the hand that feeds you. The pity is that, owing to a mere momentary lapse in him of the religious spirit, Mr. Shorter has missed his own opportunity. He does not seem to have quite realized the splendour of his "find". Nor has Sir William Robertson Nicoll seen fit to help him here. Sir William Robertson Nicoll deprecates any over-valuation of Mr. Clement Shorter's collection. "It is not claimed," he says, "for a moment that the intrinsic merits of the verses are of a special kind." And Mr. Clement Shorter is not much bolder in proffering his treasures. "No one can deny to them," he says, "a certain bibliographical interest."

Mr. Shorter is too modest. His collection includes one of the profoundest and most beautiful poems Emily Brontë ever wrote,[A] and at least one splendid ballad, "Douglas Ride".[B] Here is the ballad, or enough of it to show how live it is with sound and vision and speed. It was written by a girl of twenty:

What rider up Gobeloin's glen Has spurred his straining steed, And fast and far from living men Has passed with maddening speed?

I saw his hoof-prints mark the rock, When swift he left the plain; I heard deep down the echoing shock Re-echo back again.

* * * * *

With streaming hair, and forehead bare, And mantle waving wide, His master rides; the eagle there Soars up on every side.

The goats fly by with timid cry, Their realm rashly won; They pause--he still ascends on high-- They gaze, but he is gone.

O gallant horse, hold on thy course; The road is tracked behind. Spur, rider, spur, or vain thy force-- Death comes on every wind.

* * * * *

Hark! through the pass with threatening crash Comes on the increasing roar! But what shall brave the deep, deep wave, The deadly pass before?

Their feet are dyed in a darker tide, Who dare those dangers drear. Their breasts have burst through the battle's worst, And why should they tremble here?

* * * * *

"Now, my brave men, this one pass more, This narrow chasm of stone, And Douglas for our sovereign's gore Shall yield us back his own."

I hear their ever-rising tread Sound through the granite glen; There is a tall pine overhead Held by the mountain men.

That dizzy bridge which no horse could track Has checked the outlaw's way; There like a wild beast turns he back, And grimly stands at bay.

Why smiles he so, when far below He spies the toiling chase? The pond'rous tree swings heavily, And totters from its place.

They raise their eyes, for the sunny skies Are lost in sudden shade: But Douglas neither shrinks nor flies, He need not fear the dead.

[Footnote A: See pp. 207, 208.]

[Footnote B: I have removed the title from the preceding fragment to the ballad to which it obviously belongs.]

That is sufficiently unlike the Emily Brontë whom Charlotte edited. And there is one other poem that stands alone among her poems with a strange exotic beauty, a music, a rhythm and a magic utterly unlike any of the forms we recognize as hers:

Gods of the old mythology Arise in gloom and storm; Adramalec, bow down thy head, Reveal, dark fiend, thy form. The giant sons of Anakim Bowed lowest at thy shrine, And thy temple rose in Argola, With its hallowed groves of vine; And there was eastern incense burnt, And there were garments spread, With the fine gold decked and broidered, And tinged with radiant red, With the radiant red of furnace flames That through the shadows shone As the full moon when on Sinai's top Her rising light is thrown.

It is undated and unsigned, and so unlike Emily Brontë that I should not be surprised if somebody were to rise up and prove that it is Coleridge or somebody. Heaven forbid that this blow should fall on Mr. Clement Shorter, and Sir William Robertson Nicoll, and on me. There is at least one reassuring line. "Reveal, dark fiend, thy form", has a decided ring of the Brontësque.

And here again, on many an otherwise negligible poem she has set her seal, she has scattered her fine things; thus:

No; though the soil be wet with tears, How fair so'er it grew, The vital sap once perished Will never flow again; _And surer than that dwelling dread, The narrow dungeon of the dead, Time parts the hearts of men._

And again, she gives a vivid picture of war in four lines:

In plundered churches piled with dead The heavy charger neighed for food, The wounded soldier laid his head 'Neath roofless chambers splashed with blood.

Again, she has a vision:

In all the hours of gloom My soul was rapt away. I stood by a marble tomb Where royal corpses lay.

A frightful thing appears to her, "a shadowy thing, most dim":

And still it bent above, Its features still in view; _It seemed close by; and yet more far Than this world from the farthest star That tracks the boundless blue._

Indeed 'twas not the space Of earth or time between, But the sea of deep eternity, The gulf o'er which mortality Has never, never been.

The date is June 1837, a year earlier than the ballad. And here is the first sketch or germ of "The Old Stoic":

Give we the hills our equal prayer, Earth's breezy hills and heaven's blue sea, _I ask for nothing further here Than my own heart and liberty._

And here is another poem, of a sterner and a sadder stoicism:

There was a time when my cheek burned To give such scornful words the lie, Ungoverned nature madly spurned The law that bade it not defy. Oh, in the days of ardent youth I would have given my life for truth.

For truth, for right, for liberty, I would have gladly, freely died; And now I calmly bear and see The vain man smile, the fool deride, Though not because my heart is tame, Though not for fear, though not for shame.

My soul still chokes at every tone Of selfish and self-clouded error; My breast still braves the world alone, Steeled as it ever was to terror. Only I know, howe'er I frown, The same world will go rolling on.

October 1839. It is the worldly wisdom of twenty-one!

* * * * *

If this, the ballad and the rest, were all, the world would still be richer, by a wholly new conception of Emily Brontë, of her resources and her range.

But it is by no means all. And here we come to the opportunity which, owing to that temporary decline of fervour, Mr. Shorter has so unfortunately missed.

He might have picked out of the mass wherein they lie scattered, all but lost, sometimes barely recognizable, the fragments of a Titanic epic. He might have done something to build up again the fabric of that marvellous romance, that continuous dream, that stupendous and gorgeous fantasy in which Emily Brontë, for at least eleven years, lived and moved and had her being.

Until the publication of the unknown poems, it was possible to ignore the "Gondal Chronicles". They are not included in Mr. Clement Shorter's exhaustive list of early and unpublished manuscripts. Nobody knew anything about them except that they were part of a mysterious game of make-believe which Emily and the ever-innocent Anne played together, long after the age when most of us have given up make-believing. There are several references to the Chronicles in the diaries of Emily and Anne. Emily writes in 1841: "The Gondaland are at present in a threatening state, but there is no open rupture as yet. All the princes and princesses of the Royalty are at the Palace of Instruction." Anne wonders "whether the Gondaland will still be flourishing" in 1845. In 1845 Emily and Anne go for their first long journey together. "And during our excursion we were Ronald Macalgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Angusteena, Rosabella Esmaldan, Ella and Julian Egremont, Catharine Navarre, and Cordelia Fitzaphnold, escaping from the palaces of instruction to join the Royalists, who are hard pressed at present by the victorious Republicans. "The Gondals," Emily says, "still flourish bright as ever." Anne is not so sure. "We have not yet finished our 'Gondal Chronicles' that we began three years and a half ago. When will they be done? The Gondals are at present in a sad state. The Republicans are uppermost, but the Royalists are not quite overcome. The young sovereigns, with their brothers and sisters, are still at the Palace of Instruction. The Unique Society, about half a year ago, were wrecked on a desert island as they were returning from Gaul. They are still there, but we have not played at them much yet."

But there are no recognizable references to the Gondal poems. It is not certain whether Charlotte Brontë knew of their existence, not absolutely certain that Anne, who collaborated on the Gondals, knew.

"Brontë specialists" are agreed in dismissing the Chronicles as puerile. But the poems cannot be so dismissed. Written in lyric or ballad form, fluent at their worst and loose, but never feeble; powerful, vehement, and overflowing at their best, their cycle contains some of Emily Brontë's very finest verse. They are obscure, incoherent sometimes, because they are fragmentary; even poems apparently complete in themselves are fragments, scenes torn out of the vast and complicated epic drama. We have no clue to the history of the Gondals, whereby we can arrange these scenes in their right order. But dark and broken as they are, they yet trail an epic splendour, they bear the whole phantasmagoria of ancestral and of racial memories, of "old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago". These songs and ballads, strung on no discernible thread, are the voice of an enchanted spirit, recalling the long roll of its secular existences; in whom nothing lives but that mysterious, resurgent memory.

The forms that move through these battles are obscure. You can pick out many of the Gondal poems by the recurring names of heroes and of lands. But where there are no names of heroes and of lands to guide you it is not easy to say exactly which poems are Gondal poems and which are not. But after careful examination and comparison you can make out at least eighty-three of them that are unmistakable, and ten doubtful.

All the battle-pieces and songs of battle, the songs of mourning and captivity and exile, the songs of heroism, martyrdom, defiance, songs, or fragments of songs, of magic and divination, and many of the love songs, belong to this cycle. What is more, many of the poems of eighteen-forty-six and of eighteen-fifty are Gondal poems.

For in the Gondal legend the idea of the Doomed Child, an idea that haunted Emily Brontë, recurs perpetually, and suggests that the Gondal legend is the proper place of "The Two Children", and "The Wanderer from the Fold", which appear in the posthumous Selections of eighteen-fifty. It certainly includes three at the very least of the poems of eighteen-forty-six: "The Outcast Mother", "A Death-Scene", and "Honour's Martyr".

It does not look, I own, as if this hunt for Gondal literature could interest a single human being; which is why nobody, so far as I know, has pursued it. And the placing of those four poems in the obscure Gondal legend would have nothing but "a bibliographical interest" were it not that, when placed there, they show at once the main track of the legend. And the main track of the legend brings you straight to the courses of _Wuthering Heights_ and of the love poems.

The sources of _Wuthering Heights_ have been the dream and the despair of the explorer, long before Mrs. Humphry Ward tried to find them in the _Tales of Hoffmann_. And "Remembrance", one of the most passionate love poems in the language, stood alone and apart from every other thing that Emily Brontë had written. It was awful and mysterious in its loneliness.

But I believe that "Remembrance" also may be placed in the Gondal legend without any violence to its mystery.

For supreme in the Gondal legend is the idea of a mighty and disastrous passion, a woman's passion for the defeated, the dishonoured, and the outlawed lover; a creature superb in evil, like Heathcliff, and like Heathcliff tragic and unspeakably mournful in his doom. He or some hero like him is "Honour's Martyr".

To-morrow, Scorn will blight my name, And Hate will trample me, Will load me with a coward's shame-- A traitor's perjury.

False friends will launch their covert sneers True friends will wish me dead; And I shall cause the bitterest tears That you have ever shed.

Like Heathcliff, he is the "unblessed, unfriended child"; the child of the Outcast Mother, abandoned on the moor.

Forests of heather, dark and long, Wave their brown branching arms above; And they must soothe thee with their song, And they must shield my child of love.

* * * * *

Wakes up the storm more madly wild, The mountain drifts are tossed on high; Farewell, unblessed, unfriended child, I cannot bear to watch thee die.

In an unmistakable Gondal song Geraldine's lover calls her to the tryst on the moor. In the Gondal poem "Geraldine", she has her child with her in a woodland cavern, and she prays over it wildly:

"Bless it! My Gracious God!" I cried, "Preserve Thy mortal shrine, For Thine own sake, be Thou its guide, And keep it still divine--

"Say, sin shall never blanch that cheek, Nor suffering change that brow. Speak, in Thy mercy, Maker, speak, And seal it safe from woe."

* * * * *

The revellers in the city slept, My lady in her woodland bed; I watching o'er her slumber wept, As one who mourns the dead.

Geraldine therefore is the Outcast Mother. In "The Two Children" the doom gathers round the child.

Heavy hangs the raindrop From the burdened spray; Heavy broods the damp mist On uplands far away.

Heavy looms the dull sky, Heavy rolls the sea; And heavy throbs the young heart Beneath that lonely tree.

Never has a blue streak Cleft the clouds since morn Never has his grim fate Smiled since he was born.

Frowning on the infant, Shadowing childhood's joy. Guardian-angel knows not That melancholy boy.

* * * * *

Blossom--that the west wind Has never wooed to blow, Scentless are thy petals, Thy dew is cold as snow!

Soul--where kindred kindness No early promise woke, Barren is thy beauty, As weed upon a rock.

Wither--soul and blossom! You both were vainly given: Earth reserves no blessing For the unblest of Heaven.

The doomed child of the outcast mother is the doomed man, and, by the doom, himself an outcast. The other child, the "Child of delight, with sun-bright hair", has vowed herself to be his guardian angel. Their drama is obscure; but you make out that it is the doomed child, and not Branwell Brontë, who is "The Wanderer from the Fold".

How few, of all the hearts that loved, Are grieving for thee now; And why should mine to-night be moved With such a sense of woe?

Too often thus, when left alone, Where none my thoughts can see, Comes back a word, a passing tone From thy strange history.

* * * * *

An anxious gazer from the shore-- I marked the whitening wave, And wept above thy fate the more Because--I could not save.

It recks not now, when all is over; But yet my heart will be A mourner still, though friend and lover Have both forgotten thee.

Compare with this that stern elegy in Mr. Shorter's collection, "Shed no tears o'er that tomb." A recent critic has referred this poem of reprobation also to Branwell Brontë--as if Emily could possibly have written like this of Branwell:

Shed no tears o'er that tomb, For there are angels weeping; Mourn not him whose doom Heaven itself is mourning.

* * * * *

... he who slumbers there His bark will strive no more Across the waters of despair To reach that glorious shore.

The time of grace is past, And mercy, scorned and tried, Forsakes to utter wrath at last The soul so steeled by pride.

That wrath will never spare, Will never pity know; Will mock its victim's maddened prayer, With triumph in his woe.

Shut from his Maker's smile The accursed man shall be; For mercy reigns a little while, But hate eternally.

This is obviously related to "The Two Children", and that again to "The Wanderer from the Fold". Obviously, too, the woman's lament in "The Wanderer from the Fold" recalls the Gondal woman's lament for her dishonoured lover. For there are two voices that speak and answer each other, the voice of reprobation, and the voice of passion and pity. This is the "Gondal Woman's Lament":

Far, far is mirth withdrawn: 'Tis three long hours before the morn, And I watch lonely, drearily; So come, thou shade, commune with me.

Deserted one! thy corpse lies cold, And mingled with a foreign mould. Year after year the grass grows green Above the dust where thou hast been.

I will not name thy blighted name, Tarnished by unforgotten shame, Though not because my bosom torn Joins the mad world in all its scorn.

Thy phantom face is dark with woe, Tears have left ghastly traces there, Those ceaseless tears! I wish their flow Could quench thy wild despair.

They deluge my heart like the rain On cursed Zamorna's howling plain. Yet when I hear thy foes deride, I must cling closely to thy side.

Our mutual foes! They will not rest From trampling on thy buried breast. Glutting their hatred with the doom They picture thine beyond the tomb.

(Which is what they did in the song of reprobation. But passion and pity know better. They know that)

... God is not like human kind, Man cannot read the Almighty mind; Vengeance will never torture thee, Nor hurt thy soul eternally.

* * * * *

What have I dreamt? He lies asleep, With whom my heart would vainly weep; _He_ rests, and _I_ endure the woe That left his spirit long ago.

This poem is not quoted for its beauty or its technique, but for its important place in the story. You can track the great Gondal hero down by that one fantastic name, "Zamorna". You have thus four poems, obviously related; and a fifth that links them, obviously, with the Gondal legend.

It is difficult to pick out from the confusion of these unsorted fragments all the heroes of Emily Brontë's saga. There is Gleneden, who kills a tyrant and is put in prison for it. There is Julius Angora, who "lifts his impious eye" in the cathedral where the monarchs of Gondal are gathered; who leads the patriots of Gondal to the battle of Almedore, and was defeated there, and fell with his mortal enemy. He is beloved of Rosina, a crude prototype of Catherine Earnshaw. "King Julius left the south country" and remained in danger in the northern land because a passion for Rosina kept him there. There is also Douglas of the "Ride". He appears again in the saga of the Queen Augusta, the woman of the "brown mountain side". But who he was, and what he was doing, and whether he killed Augusta or somebody else killed her, I cannot for the life of me make out. Queen Augusta, like Catherine Earnshaw, is a creature of passion and jealousy, and her lover had been faithless. She sings that savage song of defiance and hatred and lamentation: "Light up thy halls!"

Oh! could I see thy lids weighed down in cheerless woe; Too full to hide their tears, too stern to overflow; Oh! could I know thy soul with equal grief was torn, This fate might be endured--this anguish might be borne.

How gloomy grows the night! 'Tis Gondal's wind that blows; I shall not tread again the deep glens where it rose, I feel it on my face----Where, wild blast! dost thou roam? What do we, wanderer! here, so far away from home?

I do not need thy breath to cool my death-cold brow; But go to that far land where she is shining now; Tell her my latest wish, tell her my dreary doom; Say that my pangs are past, but _hers_ are yet to come.

And there is Fernando, who stole his love from Zamorna. He is a sort of shadowy forerunner of Edgar Linton.

There is the yeoman Percy, the father of Mary whom Zamorna loved. And there is Zamorna.

A large group of poems in the legend refer, obviously, I think, to the same person. Zamorna is the supreme hero, the Achilles of this northern Iliad. He is the man of sin, the "son of war and love", the child "unblessed of heaven", abandoned by its mother, cradled in the heather and rocked by the winter storm, the doomed child, grown to its doom, like Heathcliff. His story is obscure and broken, but when all the Zamorna poems are sorted from the rest, you make out that, like Heathcliff, he ravished from her home the daughter of his mortal enemy (with the difference that Zamorna loves Mary); and that like Heathcliff he was robbed of the woman that he loved. The passions of Zamorna are the passions of Heathcliff. He dominates a world of savage loves and mortal enmities like the world of _Wuthering Heights_. There are passages in this saga that reveal the very aspect of the soul of Heathcliff. Here are some of them.

Zamorna, in prison, cries out to his "false friend and treacherous guide":

"If I have sinned; long, long ago That sin was purified by woe. I have suffered on through night and day, I've trod a dark and frightful way."

It is what Heathcliff says to Catherine Earnshaw: "I've fought through a bitter life since I last heard your voice."

And again:

If grief for grief can touch thee, If answering woe for woe, If any ruth can melt thee, Come to me now.

It is the very voice of Heathcliff calling to Cathy.

Again, he is calling to "Percy", the father of Mary, his bride, the rose that he plucked from its parent stem, that died from the plucking.

Bitterly, deeply I've drunk of thy woe; When thy stream was troubled, did mine calmly flow? And yet I repent not; I'd crush thee again If our vessels sailed adverse on life's stormy main. But listen! The earth is our campaign of war,

* * * * *

Is there not havoc and carnage for thee Unless thou couchest thy lance at me?

He proposes to unite their arms.