By Prof. H. Sunder Rao,
M.A.
EXACTLY a hundred years ago, there passed away one
of the most fascinating and enigmatic personalities in English literature.
While the world knows a great deal about her more famous sister, Charlotte
Bronte, we know so little of Emily that it is difficult to arrive at a proper
estimate of her personality and genius. She is the most elusive of the Bronte
sisters. That she was a genius, there is no doubt. The Brontes, in fact, were an
extraordinary family, and as it usually happens in such cases, a great deal of
eccentricity was mixed up with their talents. Undoubtedly, this eccentricity is
at least partly to be traced to their father, the Rev. Patrick Bronte, a
clergyman of Irish descent, who had more than his share of that ‘quizzicality’
which is the most characteristic trait of the Irish race. We are told, for
example, that this man suffered from an unreasonable terror of fire which made
him taboo carpets and curtains in the house; and also that he had his own
quixotic theories of education which, assuredly, should have embittered the
lives of his children.
A lot of legends have gathered round Emily
Bronte–which is nothing strange in the case of a person of whom the world knows
so little. But stripped of all the accretions which have entered into it, the
story of Emily Bronte is a fascinating story. Who does not know of her
life-long devotion to her wastrel brother, Branwell; her supreme courage in the
face of the loneliness and frustration which surrounded her brief years; her
pathetic quest for love and happiness; her stoic, and almost stubborn, defiance
of death when she lay ill and broken; her superhuman strength of will with
which she at last faced the ‘inevitable hour’; of her ‘lithesome, graceful
figure’, her beautiful hair, pale complexion, and ‘kind, kindling eyes which
were sometime dark grey and at others dark blue; her silent, reserved nature,
her passion for beauty, for something ‘afar’?
But behind this impenetrable reserve, there lay a
nature endowed with an unusual sensitiveness to the mystery and tragedy of
life. Emily never made a fuss of her talents and no one in the family circle
ever guessed that this pale girl full of gloom and harsh reserve had any
creative genius. It was not until 1845 (three years before her death) when her
elder sister Charlotte discovered the little ‘washing-book’ in which Emily had
written her poems in her small delicate hand, that any one knew the depths
which were hidden under Emily’s reserved nature. To Charlotte who had, like so
many others, looked upon Emily as an ordinary, commonplace person, this was a
revelation as disturbing as it was joyful–disturbing because of a remorseful
realisation that she had so long failed to appreciate her younger sister at her
true value and gain her confidence, and joyful because of the sudden glimpse
she was enabled to have into a nature so responsive to the finer and higher
things of life. However, it was too late, for in December 1848, death stepped
in and took poor Emily away beyond the reach of either her sister’s
indifference or appreciation. The fact was that Charlottee and Emily could
never be kindred spirits. Charlotte was practical, censorious, and domineering,
though kindly and helpful in her own way, while Emily was silent, sensitive,
and extraordinarily shy and reticent by nature, and her mind and imagination
worked in quite a different manner from her elder sister’s.
It is in her writings that this shy, reserved woman
reveals some thing of the depths of her personality. Emily Bronte’s writings
are not many; they consist only of some poems and a novel. But meagre as her
literary output is, it has a quality that belongs only to great things. Her
poems reveal a nature that was intensely conscious of asense of loneliness and
weighed down at times by a heavy burden of the sorrows and frustrations of
life. But like all frustrated and deeply sensitive and highly gifted natures,
Emily looked beyond the narrow horizons of her own existence and derived consolation
and sustenance from a world of spiritual values and visions. It is difficult to
reconstruct any coherent philosophy or system of thought from the ideas which
she scatters through her poems. But it must be admitted that for spiritual
courage and intensity these few poems are unsurpassed in Victorian literature.
For, even at moments when the world looked dreary and empty (as well it might
in the grey and grim surroundings of Haworth) Emily drew solace and strength by
identifying her spirit with the elemental forces of Nature. The following lines
from one of her early poems show this:
I’ll walk when my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding,
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.
Emily’s poetry is predominantly the poetry of
mental pain and solitude and of a faith that sternly rejected the transitory
consolations of earthly pleasures and contacts, and accepted courageously the
assurance of a reality that lay beyond the realms of mortal comprehension. Like
Shelley, Emily was convinced of the identity of the individual with the life
universal, and this conviction, which she must have derived only from a deep
study of Shelley’s poetry, is continually expressed in her poems. One of her
greatest poems is called Last Lines. It is a triumphant declaration of
her steadfast faith in immortality and in spite of its rather declamatory
style, it is one of the most moving she has written. It is, in fact, her last
testament–a final summing-up of her creep. “No coward soul is mine,” declares
Emily, “No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere.” This poem should be
read with Browning’s Prospice. There is in Emily’s poem the same heroic
contempt for death as in Browning’s more famous piece. There is no doubt that
the major thought of her poem, her belief in the one spirit which pervades all
life was inspired by Shelley’s famous passage in Adonais which declares
that the Great Power which has withdrawn to its own the spirit of Adonais,
Wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above.
The stanza in Emily’s poem runs thus:
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years;
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears.
It was this poem which made Matthew Arnold declare
that Emily’s soul
Knew no fellow for might,
Passion, vehemence, grief,
Daring, since Byron died.
Arnold when he wrote these lines undoubtedly had in
mind that part of the poem in which Emily gives expression to a rebellious
rejection of creeds:
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered winds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.
But it would be a mistake to regard Emily Bronte as
a mere embodiment of the spirit of defiance. The word ‘Byronic’ can be applied
only in a limited sense to her, for there was another element in her nature
which made her accept the realities of life grimly and stoically. Her small
poem The Old Stoic is a very interesting piece of self-revelation. All
that she prays for, in life and death, is ‘courage to endure’. The limitations
of life at Haworth Parsonage did not encourage any grand passion to recreate
this old world and to inaugurate ‘a new heaven and a new earth’. Emily simply
accepted the inevitable, brooded over her loneliness and derived consolation
from her own inner resources and Wuthering Heights is a novel that
cannot perish. It is a novel which shows that she took any zealous interest in
the wider world which extended beyond the bleak moors that surrounded her home.
She had no curiosity to understand the lives of those in whose midst she lived.
It looks as though she deliberately chose loneliness and barred her own mind
and soul, as it were, in the presence of her fellowmen. It is this which fills
her work with a queer–almost disturbing–sense of solitude and a brooding desire
to escape from it. Occasionally this mood drove her to long for death as a
solution to all her troubles. We see this in her lines Sleep brings no joy
to me:
Sleep brings no thought to me;
No power reserved to brave;
I only sail a darker sea,
A wilder wave
Sleep brings no wish to fret
My harassed heart beneath;
My only wish is to forget
In endless sleep of death.
Out of this loneliness was also born Emily Bronte’s
feeling of harmony with the throbbing pulse of Nature and her assurance of
being absorbed into the Eternal Personality. As in the case of Wordsworth she
felt in Nature ‘a presence’ that disturbed her ‘with the joy of elevated
thoughts’, a presence ‘that knows no insulated spot, no chasm, no solitude’.
She is, in this respect, one of the most significant of mystic poets in
English. As she became more and more absorbed in the reality of the unseen
world, her sense of the reality of this world steadily weakened. Many of her
poems are an expression of this mystical experience. The most notable is The
Prisoner. It contains those superb stanzas which irresistibly take us back
to Blake and recall many notable utterances of other mystic poets. The
following lines explain themselves, and as one critic says, “They are the
clearest and the most persuasive description of mystical experience in our
language”:
But first, a hush of peace–a soundless calm
descends;
The struggle of distress and fierce impatience
ends.
Mute music soothes my breast–unuttered harmony
That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to
me.
Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth
reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels;
Its wings are almost free–its home, its harbour
found;
Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final
bound.
But before she ‘dared the final bound,’ Emily must
have passed through intense agony and despair. She too must have had her ‘dark
night of the soul’ before she was enabled to find her ‘home and harbour’. It is
what might be expected when her eyes were opened to the illumination of God’s
Light. In her own wonderful words,
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.
As the bodily eye is dazzled and tortured when it
gazes directly into the sun’s rays, so the eye of the soul is at first darkened
by the blinding light of the vision of God. It was an exhausting experience for
such a frail woman, and no wonder that her feeble physical frame broke down
under this stupendous strain.
Emily’s ecstatic passion for the Supreme Reality
was at least partly the result of her success in transmuting her own bodily
desires into something ‘rich and strange,’ into a consuming passion for the
Absolute. It is now idle to speculate whether she was in love with any person,
and, if so, what the course of that love was. A full history of not only her
inner life but also of her contacts and friendships with men has yet to be
written. But Poems like Remembrance could only spring from ‘a
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. To us it does not matter from where
these powerful feelings arose; we are only concerned with their effect upon a
mind which was not only readily responsive to them, but also gifted with a
power to give them memorable expression.
Remembrance is one of the most beautiful poems she
has written. Its simple pathos and childlike sincerity of grief are not equaled
by any elegy in the language. Here are a few lines:
Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee,
While the world’s tide is bearing me along;
Other desires and other hopes beset me,
Hope which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong.
Here is again visible Emily’s stern decision to
wean herself away from the ‘golden dreams’ of youth and to dedicate herself to
things that transcend mortality–her determination ‘to check the tears of
useless passion’ and to live ‘without the aid of joy’. We also see in another
poem how intensely preoccupied she was at this time with ‘visions rising legion
after legion’, visions which, as she says, ‘bring the unreal world too
strangely near’. Emily’s self-imposed discipline was truly characteristic of
her inner spiritual greatness. Like all truly spiritual seekers, she
transformed an ordinary passion into something divine and transcendent. She
ceased to pine for that which she could never attain, and transferred her
craving for love to some one infinitely higher and more transcendent than any
mortal man could be. So she said:
What I love shall come like visitant of air
Safe in secret power from lurking human snare;
Who loves me, no word of mine shall e’er betray,
Though for faith unstained my life must forfeit
pay.
Often she could express her spiritual yearning only
in terms of mortal cravings, a practice common in all mystic utterances. Here
is an example:
Yes, Fancy, come, my Fairy Love!
These throbbing temples softly kiss;
And bend my lonely couch above,
And bring me rest, and bring me bliss.
She was content to let her love travel ‘through
boundless regions on’. She preferred to be a seeker, through endless ages, for
the being who alone could satisfy her deepest cravings. It is the mood in which
all mystics have realised the nature of their quest:
I’ve watched and sought my lifetime long;
Sought him in heaven, hell, earth, and air,
An endless search, and always wrong.
The last line is indicative of the eternity of the
quest on which so many utterances in the mystical literature of the world have
laid stress. We get some idea of the ecstasy which accompanied Emily in her
journey through these spiritual realms, from such lines as these:
Methought, the very breath I breathed
Was full of sparks divine,
And all my heather-couch was wreathed
By that celestial shine!
Lines after lines in her poems proclaim the same
hunger for the vision of the Absolute, for some experience of the transcendent
bliss which again and again seems to elude her.
A few words must be said about Emily’s solitary
novel Wuthering Heights. It is her chief claim to fame, though one
wonders if many people today are acquainted with the book. The novel itself is
a difficult piece of work to judge. It at once moves and exasperates the reader
as no other novel in literature does. We can well understand Charlotte’s
remark, after she read the book that Emily herself did not know what she had
done. Wuthering Heights is the most depressing thing in literature that
one can imagine, probably the result of the author’s own morbid conviction
about the inherent cruelty of all men. I do not know what credence can now be
given to the story that Emily herself once, in a furious rage, blinded her pet
bull-dog with blows from her clenched fists. But there is no doubt that there
was some streak of morbidity in her attitude to men. The story in the novel is
well-known. It is the story of an abnormal man, Heathcliff, who embodies the
loneliness and the passionate craving for a sexless love which haunt Emily’s
poetry. There are very few natural or normal characters in the novel–except
Nelly Deane who seems to be a more or less faithful portrait of Tabby Brown,
the devoted servant at Haworth Parsonage. In depicting Catherine’s passion for
Heathcliff, Emily was revealing her own passion for her ‘Absolute Visitant’ of
whom she speaks in her poems, In spite of its many artistic aberrations and its
pervading atmosphere of gloom, Wuthering Heights is a novel that cannot
perish. It is a novel which sweeps its way into our imagination by its
extraordinary power of creating a preternatural atmosphere. It is a work of
genius, because only a genius can make inanimate things live and breathe and
stir our imagination and even terrify us with their power and vitality. Emily’s
gift for creating an atmosphere reminds us of Hardy. The power by which Hardy
transforms Egdon Heath into a terrifying personality in his Return of the
Native is here also. We breathe in Emily’s novel the very life and
atmosphere of her native moorland, with its vast spaces, its bleakness and
wildness and its terrifying silences. Many of the descriptive passages in the
novel rise to heights of rare beauty and power. It is not a story but a spell;
and its appeal is not to our reason but to our imagination. Only a great artist
could have written this novel, and, with all its faults, it is one of the
greatest things we possess in English literature.
Emily Bronte died when she was thirty, a victim of
the hereditary family disease of consumption. There is something distant and
enigmatic about her which does not encourage either familiarity or affection on
our part. But it is impossible not to admire a woman for whom nothing held any
menace, and who was steadfast and courageous in the midst of all her difficulties
and disappointments, and who clung grimly to her faith in her God and her own
inner strength to the last moment of her mortal life.