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Wisdom and Destiny, essay(s) by Maurice Maeterlinck |
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_ 93. No day can be uneventful, save in ourselves alone; but in the day that seems most uneventful of all, there is still room for the loftiest destiny; for there is far more scope for such destiny within ourselves than on the whole continent of Europe. Not by the extent of empire is the range of destiny governed, but, indeed, by the depth of our soul. It is in our conception of life that real destiny is found; when at last there is delicate balance between the insoluble questions of heaven and the wavering response of our soul. And these questions become the more tranquil as they seem to comprise more and more; and to the sage, whatever may happen will still widen the scope of the questions, still give deeper confidence to the reply. Speak not of destiny when the event that has brought you joy or sadness has still altered nothing in your manner of regarding the universe. All that remains to us when love and glory are over, when adventures and passions have faded into the past, is but a deeper and ever-deepening sense of the infinite; and if we have not that within us, then are we destitute indeed. And this sense of the infinite is more than a mere assemblage of thoughts, which, indeed, are but the innumerable steps that thither lead. There is no happiness in happiness itself, unless it help our comprehension of the rest, unless it help us in some measure to conceive that the very universe itself must rejoice in existence. The sage who has attained a certain height will find peace in all things that happen; and the event that saddens him, as other men, tarries but an instant ere it goes to strengthen his deep perception of life. He who has learned to see in all things only matter for unselfish wonder, can be deprived of no satisfaction whatever without there spring to sudden life within him, from the mere feeling that this joy can be dispensed with, a high protecting thought that enfolds him in its light. That destiny is beautiful wherein each event, though charged with joy or sadness, has brought reflection to us, has added something to our range of soul, has given us greater peace wherewith to cling to life. And, indeed, the accident that robs us of our love, that leads us along in triumph, or even that seats us on a throne, reveals but little of the workings of destiny; which, indeed, lie far more in the thoughts that arise in our mind as we look at the men around us, at the woman we love; as we dwell on the feelings within us; as we fix our eyes on the evening sky with its crown of indifferent stars. 94. A woman of extraordinary beauty and talent, possessed of the rarest qualities of mind and soul, was one day asked by a friend, to whom she seemed the most perfect creature on earth: "What are your plans? Can any man be worthy of your love? Your future puzzles me. I cannot conceive a destiny that shall be lofty enough for a soul such as yours." He knew but little of destiny. To him, as to most men, it meant thrones, triumphs, dazzling adventures: these things seemed to him the sum of a human destiny; whereby he did but prove that he knew not what destiny was. And, in the first place, why this disdain of to-day? To disdain to-day is to prove that yesterday has been misunderstood. To disdain to-day is to declare oneself a stranger, and what can you hope to do in a world where you shall ever pass as a stranger? To-day has this advantage over yesterday, that it exists and was made for us. Be to-day what it will, it has wider knowledge than yesterday; and by that alone does it become more beautiful, and vaster. Why should we think that the woman I speak of would have known a more brilliant destiny in Venice, Florence, or Rome? Her presence might have been sought at magnificent festival, and her beauty have found a fitting surrounding in exquisite landscape. She might have had princes and kings, the elect of the world, at her feet; and perhaps it had needed but one of her smiles to add to a great nation's gladness, to ennoble or chasten the thought of an epoch. Whereas here all her life will be spent among four or five people--four or five souls that know of her soul, and love her. It may be that she never shall stir from her dwelling; that of her life, of her thoughts, and the strength that is in her, there will remain not a trace among men. It may be that her beauty, her force and her instinct for good, will be buried within her: in her heart and the hearts of the few who are near. And even then, and if this be so, the soul of this woman doubtless shall find its own thing to do. The mighty gates through which we must pass to a helpful and noteworthy life no longer grate on their hinges with the deafening clamour of old. They are smaller, perhaps, than they were; less vast and imposing; but their number is greater to-day, and they admit us, in silence, to paths that extend very far. And even though the home of this woman be not brightened by one single gleam from without, will she have failed to fulfil her destiny because her life is lived in the shade? Cannot destiny be beautiful and complete in itself, without help from without? As the soul that has truly conquered surveys the triumphs of the past, it is glad of those only that brought with them a deeper knowledge of life and a nobler humility; of those that lent sweeter charm to the moments when love, glory, and enthusiasm having faded away, the fruit that a few hours of boiling passion had ripened was gathered in meditation and silence. When the feasting is over: when charity, kindness and valorous deed all lie far behind us: what is there left to the soul but some stray recollections, a gain of some consciousness, and a feeling that helps us to look on our place in the world with more knowledge and less apprehension--a feeling blent with some wisdom, from the numberless things it has learned? When the hour for rest has sounded--as it must sound every night and at every moment of solitude--when the gaudy vestments of love, and glory, and power fall helplessly round us; what is it we can take with us as we seek refuge within ourselves, where the happiness of each day is measured by the knowledge the day has brought us, by the thoughts and the confidence it has helped us to acquire? Is our true destiny to be found in the things which take place about us, or in that which abides in our soul? "Be a man's power or glory never so great," said a philosopher, "his soul soon learns how to value the feelings that spring from external events; and as he perceives that no increase has come to his physical faculties, that these remain wholly unchanged, neither altered nor added to, then does the sense of his nothingness burst full upon him. The king who should govern the world must still, like the rest of his brothers, revolve in a limited circle, whose every law must be obeyed; and on his impressions and thoughts must his happiness wholly depend." The impressions his memory retains, we might add, because they have chastened his mind; for the souls that we deal with here will retain such impressions only as have quickened their sense of goodness, as have made them a little more noble. Is it impossible to find--it matters not where, nor how great be the silence--the same undlssolvable matter that lurks in the cup of the noblest external existence? and seeing that nothing is truly our own till it faithfully follow us into the darkness and silence, why should the thing that has sprung to life there be less faithful in silence and darkness? But we will pursue this no farther, for it leads to a wisdom of over-much theory. For all that a brilliant exterior destiny is not indispensable, still should we always regard it as wholly desirable, and pursue it as keenly as though we valued it highly. It behoves the sage to knock at the door of every temple of glory, of every dwelling where happiness, love, and activity are to be found. And if his strenuous effort and long expectation remain unrewarded, if no door fly open, still may he find, perhaps, in the mere expectation and effort an equivalent for all the emotions and light that he sought. "To act," says Barres, "is to annex to our thoughts vaster fields of experience." It is also, perhaps, to think more quickly than thought, as more completely; for we no longer think with the brain alone, but with every atom of life. It is to wrap round with dream the profoundest sources of thought, and then to confront them with fact. But to act is not always to conquer. To attempt, to be patient, and wait--these, too, may be action; as also, to hear, to watch, and be silent. If the lot of the woman we speak of had been cast in Athens, or Florence, or Rome, there had been, in her life, certain motives of grandeur, occasions for beauty and happiness, that she may well never meet with to-day. And she is the poorer for lacking the efforts she might have put forth, the memory of what might have been done; for in these lies a force that is precious and vital, that often indeed will transform many more things within us, than a thought which is morally, mentally worth many thousand such efforts and memories. And indeed it is therefore alone that we should desire a brilliant, feverish destiny; because it summons to life certain forces and feelings that would otherwise never emerge from the slumberous peace of an over-tranquil existence. But from the moment we know, or even suspect, that these feelings lie dormant within us, we are already giving life to all that is best in those feelings; and it is as though we were, for one brief moment, looking down upon a glorious external destiny from heights such destiny shall only attain at the end of its days; as though we were prematurely gathering the fruit of the tree, which it shall itself still find barren until many a storm has passed. 95. Last night, re-reading Saint-Simon--with whom we seem to ascend a lofty tower, whence our gaze rests on hundreds of human destinies, astir in the valley below--I understood what a beautiful destiny meant to the instinct of man. It would doubtless have puzzled Saint-Simon himself to have told what it was that he loved and admired in some of his heroes, whom he enwraps in a sort of resigned, and almost unconscious, respect. Thousands of virtues that he esteemed highly have ceased to exist to-day, and many a quality now seems petty indeed that he commended in some of his great ones. And yet are there, unperceived as it were by him, four or five men in the midst of the glittering crowd hard by the monarch's throne, four or five earnest benevolent faces on whom our eye still rests gladly; though Saint-Simon gives them no special attention or thought, for in his heart he looks with disfavour on the ideas that govern their life. Fenelon is there; the Dukes of Chevreuse and Beauvilliers; there is Monsieur le Dauphin. Their happiness is no greater than that of the rest of mankind. They achieve no marked success, they gain no resplendent victory, They live as the others live--in the fret and expectation of the thing that we choose to call happiness, because it has yet to come. Fenelon incurs the displeasure of the crafty, bigoted king, who, for all his pride, would resent the most trivial offence with the humbleness of humblest vanity; who was great in small things, and petty in all that was great--for such was Louis XIV. Fenelon is condemned, persecuted, exiled. The Dukes of Chevreuse and Beauvilliers continue to hold important office at Court, but none the less deem it prudent to live in a kind of voluntary retirement. The Dauphin is not in favour with the King; a powerful, envious clique are for ever intriguing against him, and they finally succeed in crushing his youthful military glory. He lives in the midst of disgrace, misadventure, disaster, that seem irreparable in the eyes of that vain and servile Court; for disgrace and disaster assume the proportions the manners of the day accord. Finally he dies, a few days after the death of the wife he had loved so tenderly. He dies--poisoned, perhaps, as she too; the thunderbolt falling just as the very first rays of kingly favour, whereon he had almost ceased to count, were stealing over his threshold. Such were the troubles and misfortunes, the sorrows and disappointments, that wrapped these lives round; and yet, as we look on this little group, standing firm and silent in the midst of the feverish, intermittent glitter of the rest, then do these four destinies seem truly beautiful to us, and enviable. Through all their vicissitudes one common light shines through them. The great soul of Fenelon illumines them all. Fenelon is faithful to his loftiest thoughts of piety, meekness, wonder, justice, and love; and the other three are faithful to him, who was their master and friend. And what though the mystic ideas of Fenelon be no longer shared by us: what though the ideas that we cling to ourselves, and deem the profoundest and noblest--the ideas that live at the root of our every conviction of life, that have served as the basis of all our moral happiness--what though these should one day fall in ruins behind us, and only arouse a smile among such as believe that they have found other thoughts still, which to them seem more human, and final? Thought, of itself, is possessed of no vital importance; it is the feelings awakened within us by thought that ennoble and brighten our life. Thought is our aim, perhaps; but it may be with this as with many a journey we take--the place we are bound for may interest us less than the journey itself, the people we meet on the road, the unforeseen that may happen. Here, as everywhere, it is only the sincerity of human feeling that abides. As for a thought, we know not, it may be deceptive; but the love, wherewith we have loved it, will surely return to our soul; nor can a single drop of its clearness or strength be abstracted by error. Of that perfect ideal that each of us strives to build up in himself, the sum total of all our thoughts will help only to model the outline; but the elements that go to construct it, and keep it alive, are the purified passion, unselfishness, loyalty, wherein these thoughts have had being. The extent of our love for the thing which we hold to be true is of greater importance than even the truth itself. Does not love bring more goodness to us than thought can ever convey? Loyally to love a great error may well be more helpful than meanly to serve a great truth; for in doubt, no less than in faith, are passion and love to be found. Some doubts are as generous and passionate as the very noblest convictions. Be a thought of the loftiest, surest, or of the most profoundly uncertain, the best that it has to offer is still the chance that it gives us of loving some one thing wholly, without reserve. Whether it be to man, or a God; to country, to world or to error, that I truly do yield myself up, the precious ore that shall some day be found buried deep in the ashes of love will have sprung from the love itself, and not from the thing that I loved. The sincerity of an attachment, its simplicity, firmness, and zeal--these leave a track behind them that time can never efface. All passes away and changes; it may be that all is lost, save only the glow of this ardour, fertility, and strength of our heart. 96. "Never did man possess his soul in such peace as he," says Saint-Simon of one of them, who was surrounded on all sides by malice, and scheming, and snares. And further on he speaks of the "wise tranquillity" of another, and this "wise tranquillity" pervades every one of those whom he terms the "little flock." The "little flock," truly, of fidelity to all that was noblest in thought; the "little flock" of friendship, loyalty, self-respect, and inner contentment, that pass along, radiant with peace and simplicity, in the midst of the lies and ambitions, the follies and treacheries, of Versailles. They are not saints, in the vulgar sense of the word. They have not fled to the depths of forest or desert, or sought egotistic shelter in narrow cells. They are sages, who remain within life and the things that are real. It is not their piety that saves them; it is not in God alone that their soul has found strength. To love God, and to serve Him with all one's might, will not suffice to bring peace and strength to the soul of man. It is only by means of the knowledge and thought we have gained and developed by contact with men that we can learn how God should be loved; for, notwithstanding all things, the human soul remains profoundly human still. It may be taught to cherish the invisible, but it will ever find far more actual nourishment in the virtue or feeling that is simply and wholly human, than in the virtue or passion divine. If there come towards us a man whose soul is truly tranquil and calm, we may be certain that human virtues have given him his tranquillity and his calmness. Were we permitted to peer into the secret recesses of hearts that are now no more, we might discover, perhaps, that the fountain of peace whereat Fenelon slaked his thirst every night of his exile lay rather in his loyalty to Madame Guyon in her misfortune, in his love for the slandered, persecuted Dauphin, than in his expectation of eternal reward; rather in the irreproachable human conscience within him, overflowing with fidelity and tenderness, than in the hopes he cherished as a Christian. 97. Admirable indeed is the serenity of this "little flock!" No virtue, here, to kindle dazzling fires on the mountain, but heart and soul that are alive with flame. No heroism but that of love, of confidence and sincerity, that remember and are content to wait. Some men there are whose virtue issues from them with a noise of clanging gates; in others it dwells as silent as the maid who never stirs from home, who sits thoughtfully by the fireside, always ready to welcome those who enter from the cold without. There is less need of heroic hours, perhaps, in a beautiful life, than of weeks that are grave, and uniform, and pure. It may be that the soul that is loyal and perfectly just is more precious than the one that is tender or full of devotion It will enter less wholly perhaps, and with less exaltation, into the more exuberant adventures of life; but in the events that occur every day we can trust it more fully, rely more completely upon it; and is there a man, after all, no matter how strange and delirious and brilliant his life may have been, who has not spent the great bulk of his time in the midst of most ordinary incident? In our very sublimest hour, as we stand in the midst of the dazzling circles it throws, are we not startled to find that the habits and thoughts of our soberest hour are whirling around with the rest? We must always come back to our normal life, that is built on the solid earth and primitive rock. We are not called upon to contest each day with dishonour, despair, or death; but it is imperative, perhaps, that I should be able to tell myself, at every hour of sadness, that there exists, somewhere, an unchangeable, unconquerable soul that has drawn near to my soul--a soul that is faithful and silent, blind to all that it deems not conformable with the truth. We can only have praise for heroism, and for surpassingly generous deeds; but more praise still--as it demands a more vigilant strength--for the man who never allows an inferior thought to seduce him; who leads a less glorious life, perhaps, but one of more uniform worth. Let us sometimes, in our meditations, bring our desire for moral perfection to the level of daily truth, and be taught how far easier it is to confer occasional benefit than never to do any harm; to bring occasional happiness than never be cause of tears. 98. Their refuge, their "firm rock," as Saint-Simon calls it, lay in each other, and, above all, in themselves; and all that was blameless within their soul became steadfastness in the rock. A thousand substances go to form the foundations of this "firm rock," but all that we hold to be blameless within us will sink to its centre and base. It is true that our standard of conduct may often be sadly at fault; and the vilest of men has a moment each night when he proudly surveys some detestable thought, that seems wholly blameless to him. But I speak of a virtue, here, that is higher than everyday virtue; and the most ordinary man is aware what a virtue becomes, when it is ordinary virtue no longer. Moral beauty, indeed, though it be of the rarest kind, never passes the comprehension of the most narrow-minded of men; and no act is so readily understood as the act that is truly sublime. We may admire a deed profoundly, perhaps, and yet not rise to its height; but it is imperative that we should not abide in the darkness that covers the thing we blame. Many a happiness in life, as many a disaster, is due to chance alone; but the peace within us can never be governed by chance. Some souls, I know, for ever are building; others have preference for ruins; and others, still, will wander, their whole life through, seeking shelter beneath strange roofs. And difficult as it may be to transform the instincts that dwell in the soul, it is well that those who build not should be made aware of the joy that the others experience as they incessantly pile stone upon stone. Their thoughts, and attachments, and love; their convictions, deceptions, and even their doubts--all stand in good service; and when the passing storm has demolished their mansion, they build once again with the ruins, a little distance away, something less stately perhaps, but better adapted to all the requirements of life. What regret, disillusion, or sadness can shatter the homestead of him who, in choosing the stones for his dwelling, Was careful to keep all the wisdom and strength that regret, disillusion, and sadness contain? Or might we not say that it is with the roots of the happiness we cherish within as with roots of great trees? The oaks that are subject the most to the stress of the storm thrust their roots the most staunchly and firmly, deep down in eternal soil; and the fate that unjustly pursues us is no more aware of what comes to pass in our soul, than the wind is aware of what happens below in the earth. 99. Here let us note how great is the power, how mysterious the attraction, of veritable happiness. Something of a hush comes over Saint-Simon's stirring narrative as one of the members of the "little flock" passes through the careless, triumphant crowd, unceasingly busy with intrigue and salutation, petty love and petty triumph, amidst the marble staircases and magnificent halls of Versailles. Saint-Simon goes calmly on with his story; but for one second we seem to have compared all this jubilant vanity and ephemeral rejoicing, this brazen-tongued falsehood that secretly trembles, with the serene, unvarying loftiness of those strenuous, tranquil souls. It is as though there should suddenly appear in the midst of a band of children--who are plucking flowers, it may be, stealing fruit, or playing forbidden games--a priest or an aged man, who should go on his way, letting fall not one word of rebuke. The games are suddenly stopped; startled conscience awakens; and unbidden thoughts of duty, reality, truth, rush in on the mind; but with men no more than with children are impressions of long duration, though they spring from the priest, or the sage, or only the thought that has passed and gone on its way. But it matters not, they have seen; and the human soul, for all that the eyes are only too willing to close or turn away, is nobler than most men would wish it to be, for it often troubles their peace; and the soul is quick to declare its preference for that it has seen, and fain would abandon its enforced and wearisome idleness. And although we may smile and make merry as the sage disappears in the distance, he has, though he know it not, left a clear track in the midst of our error and folly, where, haply, it still will abide for a long time to come. And when the sudden hour of tears bursts upon us, then most of all shall we see it enwrapped in light. We find again and again, in Saint-Simon's story, that sorrow no sooner invades a soul somewhat loftier than others, somewhat nearer to life perhaps, than it speedily flies for comfort to one it has thus seen pass by in the midst of the uneasy silence and almost malevolent wonder, that in this world too often attend the footsteps of a blameless life. It is not our wont to question happiness closely in the days when we deem ourselves happy; but when sorrow draws nigh, our memory flies to the peace that somewhere lies hidden: the peace that depends not on the rays of the sun, or the kiss that has been withheld, or the disapproval of kings. At such moments we go not to those who are happy, as we once were happy; for we know that this happiness melts away before the first fretful gesture of fate. Would you learn where true happiness dwells, you have only to watch the movements of those who are wretched, and seek consolation. Sorrow is like the divining-rod that used to avail the seekers of treasure or of clear running water; for he who may have it about him unerringly makes for the house where profoundest peace has its home. And this is so true that we should be wise, perhaps, not to dwell with too much satisfaction on our own peace of mind and tranquillity, on the sincerity of our own acquiescence in the great laws of life, or rely too complacently on the duration of our own happiness, until such time as the instinct of those who suffer impels them to knock at our door, and their eyes can behold, shining bright on the threshold, the steady, unwavering flame of the lamp that burns on for ever. Yes; only they, it may be, have the right to deem themselves safe to whose arms there come to weep those whose eyes are heavy with tears. And indeed there are not a few in this world whose inner smile we can only behold when our eyes have been cleansed by the tears that lay bare the mysterious sources of vision; and then only do we begin to detect the presence of happiness that springs not from the favour or gleam of an hour, but from widest acceptance of life. Here, as in much beside, desire and necessity quicken our senses. The hungry bee will discover the honey, be it hid never so deep in the cavern; and the soul that mourns will spy out the joy that lies hidden in its retreat, or in most impenetrable silence. 100. Destiny begins when consciousness wakes, and bestirs itself within man; not the passive, impoverished consciousness of most souls, but the active consciousness that will accept the event, whatever it may be, as an imprisoned queen will accept a gift that is offered to her in her cell. If nothing should happen, your consciousness yet may create important event from the manner in which it regards the mere dearth of event; but perhaps to each man there occurs vastly more than is needed to satisfy the thirstiest, most indefatigable consciousness. I have at this moment before me the history of a mighty and passionate soul, whom every adventure that makes for the sorrow or gladness of man would seem to have passed by with averted head. It is of Emily Bronte I speak, than whom the first fifty years of this century produced no woman of greater or more incontestable genius. She has left but one book behind her, a novel, called "Wuthering Heights," a curious title, which seems to suggest a storm on a mountain peak. She was the daughter of an English clergyman, the Rev. Patrick Bronte, who was the most insignificant, selfish, lethargic, pretentious creature the mind can conceive. There were only two things in life that seemed of importance to him--the purity of his Greek profile, and solicitude for his digestion. As for Emily's unfortunate mother, her whole life would seem to have been spent in admiring this Greek profile and in studying this digestion. But there is scarcely need to dwell upon her existence, for she died only two years after Emily's birth. It is of interest to note, however--if only to prove once again that, in ordinary life, the woman is usually superior to the man she has had to accept--that long after the death of the patient wife a bundle of letters was found, wherein it was clearly revealed that she who had always been silent was fully alive to the indifference and fatuous self-love of her vain and indolent husband. We may, it is true, be conscious of faults in others from which we are ourselves not exempt; although to discover a virtue, perhaps, we must needs have a germ of it in us. Such were Emily's parents. Around her, four sisters and one brother gravely watched the monotonous flight of the hours. The family dwelling, where Emily's whole life was spent, was in the heart of the Yorkshire Moors, at a place called Haworth, a gloomy, desolate village; barren, forsaken, and lonely. There can never have been a childhood and youth so friendless, monotonous, and dreary as that of Emily and her sisters. There came to them none of those happy little adventures, bright gleams from the unexpected, which we broider and magnify as the years go by, and store at last in our soul as the one inexhaustible treasure acquired by the smiling memory of life. Each day was the same, from first to last--lessons, meals, household duties, work beside an old aunt, and long solitary walks that these grave little girls would take hand in hand, speaking but seldom, across the heather now gay with blossom, now white beneath the snow. At home the father they scarcely saw, who was wholly indifferent, who took his meals in his room, and would come down at night to the rectory parlour and read aloud the appallingly dreary debates of the House of Commons: without, the silence of the adjoining graveyard, the great treeless desert, and the moors that from autumn to summer were swept by the pitiless wind from the north. The hazard of life--for in every life some effort is put forth by fate--the hazard of life removed Emily three or four times from the desert she had grown to love, and to consider--as will happen to those who remain too long in one spot--the only place in the world where the plants, and the earth, and the sky were truly real and delightful. But after a few weeks' absence the light would fade from her ardent, beautiful eyes; she pined for home; and one or another of the sisters must hasten to bring her back to the lonely vicarage. In 1843--she was then twenty-five--she returned once again, never more to go forth until summoned by death. Not an event, or a smile, or a whisper of love in the whole of her life to the day of this final return. Nor was her memory charged with one of those griefs or deceptions, which enable the weaklings, or those who demand too little of life, to imagine that passive fidelity to something that has of itself collapsed is an act of virtue; that inactivity is justified by the tears wherein it is bathed; and that the duty of life is accomplished when suffering has been made to yield up all its resignation and sorrow. Here, in this virgin soul, whose past was a blank, there was nothing for memory or resignation to cling to; nothing before that last journey, as nothing after; unless it be mournful vigils by the side of the brother she nursed--the almost demented brother, whose life was wrecked by his idleness and a great unfortunate passion; who became an incurable opium-eater and drunkard. Then, shortly before her twenty-ninth birthday, on a December afternoon, as she sat in the little whitewashed parlour combing her long black hair, the comb slipped from the fingers that were too weak to retain it, and fell into the fire; and death came to her, more silent even than life, and bore her away from the pale embraces of the two sisters whom fortune had left her. 101. "No touch of love, no hint of fame, no hours of ease lie for you across the knees of fate," exclaims Miss Mary Robinson, who has chronicled this existence, in a fine outburst of sorrow. And truly, viewed from without, what life could be more dreary and colourless, more futile and icily cold, than that of Emily Bronte? But where shall we take our stand, when we pass such a life in review, so as best to discover its truth, to judge it, approve it, and love it? How different it all appears as we leave the little parsonage, hidden away on the moors, and let our eyes rest on the soul of our heroine! It is rare indeed that we thus can follow the life of a soul in a body that knew no adventure; but it is less rare than might be imagined that a soul should have life of its own, which hardly depends, if at all, on incident of week or of year. In "Wuthering Heights"--wherein this soul gives to the world its passions, desires, reflections, realisations, ideals, which is, in a word, its real history--in "Wuthering Heights" there is more adventure, more passion, more energy, more ardour, more love, than is needed to give life or fulfilment to twenty heroic existences, twenty destinies of gladness or sorrow. Not a single event ever paused as it passed by her threshold; yet did every event she could claim take place in her heart, with incomparable force and beauty, with matchless precision and detail. We say that nothing ever happened; but did not all things really happen to her much more directly and tangibly than unto most of us, seeing that everything that took place about her, everything that she saw or heard, was transformed within her into thoughts and feelings, into indulgent love, admiration, adoration of life? What matter whether the event fall on our neighbour's roof or our own? The rain-drops the cloud brings with it are for him who will hold out his vessel; and the gladness, the beauty, the peace, or the helpful disquiet that is found in the gesture of fate, belongs only to him who has learned to reflect. Love never came to her: there fell never once on her ear the lover's magical footfall; and, for all that, this virgin, who died in her twenty-ninth year, has known love, has spoken of love, has penetrated its most impenetrable secrets to such a degree, that those who have loved the most deeply must sometimes uneasily wonder what name they should give to the passion they feel, when she pours forth the words, exaltation and mystery of a love beside which all else seems pallid and casual. Where, if not in her heart, has she heard the matchless words of the girl, who speaks to her nurse of the man who is hated and harassed by all, but whom she wholly adores? "My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and HE remained, _I_ should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath--a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I AM Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. ... I do not love him because he's handsome, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." ... She has but little acquaintance with the external realities of love, and these she handles so innocently at times as almost to provoke a smile; but where can she have acquired her knowledge of those inner realities, that are interwoven with all that is profoundest and most illogical in passion, with all that is most unexpected, most impossible, and most eternally true? We feel that one must have lived for thirty years beneath burning chains of burning kisses to learn what she has learned; to dare so confidently set forth, with such minuteness, such unerring certainty, the delirium of those two predestined lovers of "Wuthering Heights"; to mark the self-conflicting movements of the tenderness that would make suffer and the cruelty that would make glad, 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. ... And yet it is known to us--for in this poor life of hers all lies open--that she neither loved nor was loved. May it be true then that the last word of an existence is only a word that destiny whispers low to what lies most hidden in our heart? Have we indeed an inner life that yields not in reality to the outer life; that is no less susceptible of experience and impression? Can we live, it matters not where, and love, and hate, listening for no footfall, spurning no creature? Is the soul self-sufficient; and is it always the soul that decides, a certain height once gained? Is it only to those whose conscience still slumbers that events can seem sad or sterile? Did not love and beauty, happiness and adventure--did not all that we go in search of along the ways of life congregate in Emily Bronte's heart? Day after day passed by, with never a joy or emotion; never a smile that the eye could see or the hand could touch; wherefore none the less did her destiny find its fulfilment, for the confidence within her, the eagerness, hope, animation, all were astir; and her heart was flooded with light, and radiant with silent gladness. Of her happiness none can doubt. Not in the soul of the best of all those whose happiness has lasted the longest, been the most active, diversified, perfect, could more imperishable harvest be found than in the soul Emily Bronte lays bare. If to her there came nothing of all that passes in joy and in love, in sorrow, passion, and anguish, still did she possess all that abides when emotion has faded away. Which of the two will know more of the marvellous palace--the blind man who lives there, or the other, with wide-open eyes, who perhaps only enters it once? "To live, not to live"--we must not let mere words mislead us. It is surely possible to live without thought, but not to think, without active life. The essence of the joy or sorrow the event contains lies in the idea the event gives birth to: our own idea, if we are strong; that of others, if we are weak. On your way to the grave there may come a thousand external events towards you, whereof not one, it may be, shall find within you the force that it needs to turn to moral event. Then may you truthfully say, and then only, "I have perhaps not lived." The intimate happiness of our heroine, as of every human being, was in exact proportion to her morality and her sense of the universe; and these indeed are the clearings in the forest of accidents whose area it is well we should know when we seek to measure the happiness a life has experienced. Who that had gained the altitude of peace and comprehension whereon her soul reposed would still be wrought to feeble, bitter, unrefreshing tears by the cares and troubles and deceptions of ordinary life? Who would not then understand why it was that she shed no tears, unlike so many of her sisters, who spend their lives in plaintive wanderings from one broken joy to another? The joy that is dead weighs heavy, and bids fair to crush us, if we cause it to be with us for ever; which is as though a wood-cutter should refuse to lay down his load of dead wood. For dead wood was not made to be eternally borne on the shoulder, but indeed to be burned, and give forth brilliant flame. And as we behold the names that soar aloft in Emily's soul, then are we as heedless as she was of the sorrows of the dead wood. No misfortune but has its horizon, no sadness but shall know comfort, for the man who in the midst of his suffering, in the midst of the grief that must come to him as to all, has learned to espy Nature's ample gesture beneath all sorrow and suffering, and has become aware that this gesture alone is real. "The sage, who is lord of his life, can never truly be said to suffer." wrote an admirable woman, who had known much sorrow herself. "It is from the heights above that he looks down on his life, and if to-day he should seem to suffer, it is only because he has allowed his thoughts to incline towards the less perfect part of his soul." Emily Bronte not only breathes life into tenderness, loyalty, and love, but into hatred and wickedness also; nay, into the very fiercest revengeful ness, the most deliberate perfidy; nor does she deem it incumbent upon her to pardon, for pardon implies only incomplete comprehension. She sees, she admits, and she loves. She admits the evil as well as the good, she gives life to both; well knowing that evil, when all is said, is only righteousness strayed from the path. She reveals to us--not with the moralist's arbitrary formula, but as men and years reveal the truths we have wit to grasp--the final helplessness of evil, brought face to face with life; the final appeasement of all things in nature as well as in death, "which is only the triumph of life over one of its specialised forms." She shows how the dexterous lie, begotten of genius and strength, is forced to bow down before the most ignorant, puniest truth; she shows the self-deception of hatred that sows, all unwilling, the seeds of gladness and love in the life that it anxiously schemes to destroy. She is, perhaps, the first to base a plea for indulgence on the great law of heredity; and when, at the end of her book, she goes to the village churchyard and visits the eternal resting-place of her heroes, the grass grows green alike over grave of tyrant and martyr; and she wonders how "any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." _ |
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