Why we should read Part 2

No--the real ending of _Wuthering Heights_ does not lie in any concluding words of benign skies and quiet earth.

The real end is the tale told by the shepherd whom Lockwood meets on the moor after Heathcliff is dead.

"I was going to the Grange one evening--a dark evening, threatening thunder--and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and I supposed the lambs were skittish and would not be guided.

"'What is the matter, my little man?' I asked.

"'There's Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under t' Nab,' he blubbered, 'un' I darenut pa.s.s 'em.'"

There is no question of redemption or moral problems here. She reveals a point of view above good and evil. In her artistry and technique she is thorough. The minor characters all preserve their individuality from Joseph, the bitter, ranting Calvinist, to Nelly Dean, the teller of the tale. Emily Bronte's accuracy in transcribing the Yorks.h.i.+re dialect is astonis.h.i.+ng. She certainly listened to those Haworth rustics to some advantage, even if she rarely exchanged a word with them. She is as well able to paint the civilised, over-refined type who inhabit Thrushcross Grange as she is to depict the primitive, half-savage inhabitants of Wuthering Heights.

The sensual sentimentalist Isabella rouses the devil in Catherine and loathing in Heathcliff; the illusion of refinement in Edgar results in the terrible divorce of Catherine's body from her soul.

In these two and many other instances we see an unerring psychology in Emily Bronte. Heathcliff's one solitary human feeling, as Charlotte Bronte realised, was not his love for Catherine, which was "a sentiment fierce and inhuman," but his "half-confessed regard for Hareton Earnshaw--the young man whom he has ruined."

Seldom has the spirit of a place brooded over a book as does the spirit of the moors over _Wuthering Heights_. Emily Bronte's descriptions of scenery are as famous as those of Thomas Hardy: they are even less laboured.

"Gimmerton chapel bells were still ringing; and the full, mellow flow of the beck in the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet subst.i.tute for the yet absent murmur of the summer foliage, which drowned that music about the Grange when the trees were in leaf. At Wuthering Heights it always sounded on quiet days following a great thaw or a season of steady rain."

Exact.i.tude marks her time, her scene and her depiction of pa.s.sions and emotions.

Her faults are as glaring as her virtues. Probably there has never been a worse-constructed tale. It has to be read many times before one can grasp its great qualities. There is scene within scene, tale within tale of extraordinary intricacy. It is hard enough to remember who is speaking; it is trebly hard to remember who everyone is. But her genius is so all-powerful that once you are gripped by the story you simply don't notice the clumsiness or the creaking of the machinery.

Of a piece with her genius is her style. It is perfect in its simplicity, strength and beauty, very different from that of Charlotte with her "peruse" and "indite." Nor does Emily's dramatic instinct ever fail her: her scenes of pa.s.sion follow nature and always ring true.

The picture we get of her personality from Mrs Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte Bronte_, the tall, the strong, the unconquerable, the lover of the moors and the lover of animals, makes her stand out from that book as of a heroic, lovable but altogether mysterious type.

It is to M. Maeterlinck, however, that we owe the last word on Emily herself. To him she is the supreme instance of the self-sufficing soul, independent and regardless of the material event. She shows the insignificance of all "experience" as compared with the spirit.

"Not a single event," he writes, "ever paused as it pa.s.sed 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 with 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?...

"If to her there came nothing of all that pa.s.ses in love, sorrow, pa.s.sion or anguish, still did she possess all that abides when emotion has faded away."

And what, you may well ask, has Emily's personality got to do with us who are concentrating our attention on _Wuthering Heights_? Let Swinburne supply the answer:

"The book is what it is because the author was what she was; this is the main and central fact to be remembered. Circ.u.mstances have modified the details; they have not implanted the conception.... The love which devours life itself, which devastates the present and desolates the future with unquenchable and raging fire, has nothing less pure in it than flame or sunlight. And this pa.s.sionate and ardent chast.i.ty is utterly and unmistakably spontaneous and unconscious. Not till the story is ended, not till the effect of it has been thoroughly absorbed and digested, does the reader even perceive the simple and natural absence of any grosser element, any hint or suggestion of a baser alloy in the ingredients of its human emotion than in the splendour of lightning or the roll of a gathered wave. Then, as on issuing sometimes from the tumult of charging waters, he finds, with something of wonder, how absolutely pure and sweet was the element of living storm with which his own nature has been for a while made one; not a grain in it of soiling sand, not a waif of clogging weed."

We read _Wuthering Heights_ then for its exquisite purity of description:--"The snow has quite gone down here, darling, and I only see two white spots on the whole range of moors: the sky is blue, and the larks are singing, and the becks and brooks are all brim full"--the perfection of her style. "If she be cold, I'll think it is this north wind that chills me, and if she be motionless, it is sleep," and "I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my cheek frozen against hers," the stark-naked grandeur of its genius.

"_Wuthering Heights_," says Charlotte Bronte, "was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur--power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant's foot."

III

CHARLES LAMB

Everything in the end comes back to a question of taste. Why should one prefer a Corona cigar to a "gasper," a turkey to tripe, a magnum of Mumm to a quart of "swipes," _crepe de Chine_ and georgette to ninon, Gerald du Maurier to a patter comedian in a suburban pantomime, t.i.tian to Kirchner, or a Savile Row suit to a "reach-me-down"?

It isn't only a question of expense or even of comfort; it's more a question of palate; man needs must love the highest when he sees it. We are most of us too dull of vision and too vitiated by gross familiarity with the commonplace and the vulgar to "see" in the true sense of the word.

There are few benefactors so admirable as those who effect an introduction between our insignificant selves and some genius who has the power to translate us into realms undreamt of in our puny imagination.

Among these geniuses Charles Lamb stands out pre-eminently for one most important reason: he wears no august cloak of ceremony to frighten us away; of all great writers he is the most human and the most lovable.

Begin by listening to his preface prefixed to _The Last Essay of Elia_.

There you will hear from his own lips the kind of writing he undertakes to give you--"a sort of unlicked, incondite things--villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases."

Of himself we read with a grin of delight that "he never cared for the society of what are called good people" ... that "he herded always, while it was possible, with people younger than himself" ... that "his manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The _toga virilis_ never sate gracefully on his shoulders."

He is more honest about his weaknesses than any other man of a like fame.

He was certainly not of the "unco' guid," which may have accounted partially for his dislike of Scotsmen, and he affected no indifferences.

As a writer he matters just in so far as he felt "the difference of mankind--to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste.... I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices ... the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies."

The hatred with which he views death shows us how completely a lover of life he was:

"I am not content to pa.s.s away 'like a weaver's shuttle.' Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity, and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny.

I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacles here. I am content to stand still, at the age to which I am arrived.... I do not want ... to drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. Any alteration, on this earth of mine ...

puzzles and discomposes me ... a new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful gla.s.s, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and _irony itself_--do these things go out with Life?"

If you can resist this, which to me is perhaps the most beautiful piece of English prose in existence, you must be a little less than human yourself. So you ask me again why you should read Lamb, and I answer: (1) because he has always something to say and conveys his thought "without smothering it in blankets"; (2) because in antique fancy, quip, oddity, whimsical jest, humour, wit and irony, rare gifts all, he is a supreme master; (3) because his limitations and tragedies were, like ours, many, but his courage in facing them, unlike ours, was cheerful and invincible; the best dramatic and literary critic of his time, he yet had no ear for music ("to read a book, _all stops_, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter"). He was prevented from becoming an actor by an impediment in his speech; drink went to his head at once and he was fond of it; himself the s.h.i.+ning example of the sanity of true genius, his sister killed her father in a mad frenzy; holding women in reverence more than any man, he yet failed to marry the girl of his choice; designed by nature to be a scholar and an Oxford don, he was denied a university education and condemned to thirty-six years of drudgery in a city office ... the list of Life's little ironies in his case can be piled mountain high, but the supreme irony is that this sufferer at the hands of the malignant fates is our greatest humorist; and (4) because he takes the homely and familiar for his subjects and sheds fresh and beautiful light upon them, making even the most soured among us reconsider life and its possibilities.

IV

JAMES BOSWELL

Boswell is essentially a book for the pocket, to be opened at random while waiting for a train or a doctor or a dentist; busy men of affairs like Lord Rosebery have recognised it as the finest "night-cap" in the world. It is the fallacy of thinking that "skipping" is the sign of a shallow mind that has led to the avoidance of what is really the most absorbing study in the world, the revelation of the lives and characters of men of fame. And of all subjects for biography Dr Johnson stands easily first, because he embodies all the essential features of the English character; we see in him "our own magnified and glorified selves."

Furthermore, he has a genius for his biographer; as Sir Walter Raleigh says: "The accident which gave Boswell to Johnson and Johnson to Boswell is one of the most extraordinary pieces of good fortune in literary history."

It is mainly by his conversations that his character is depicted, and it is worth remembering that his _mots_ are famous not only for their good sense and sound judgment, but for their freshness and unexpectedness.

"No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a s.h.i.+p is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned ... a man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company." "Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves." "Even ill-a.s.sorted marriages are preferable to cheerless celibacy." "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." "A peace will equally leave the warrior and relater of wars dest.i.tute of employment; and I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie." "I am always for getting a boy forward with his learning ... I would let him at first read _any_ English book ... because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book." "Sir, young men have more virtue than old men; they have more wit and humour and knowledge of life than we had; but then the dogs are not so good scholars."

Once started it is exceedingly difficult to avoid quoting extensively.

One feels in all that he says that Dr Johnson had at any rate cleared his mind of cant and proved to the hilt the truth of his aphorisms. You will have noticed how clear-cut and simple they are, clothed in language poles removed from that which tradition has chosen to a.s.sociate with the "sesquipedalian lexicographer." What sanity of outlook and healthiness of mind is expressed in such a robust sentence as "Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it"; or, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." What joy we feel in the thought that to appreciate such talk as his we need not be literary: it is enough to be English. "Books without the knowledge of life are useless; or what should books teach but the art of living?" We can trust a man who talks like that.

But it is not only for his superb common sense that we love Dr Johnson; it is for the complete portrait of a complex character, rich in virtue, human in its failings and limitations, that we owe Boswell an unpayable debt of grat.i.tude. "Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fullness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history." How well do we all recall that exquisite summing up of Macaulay. No novelist would dare to give us so paradoxical a picture. Here is a man full of reverence and piety who yet touches the posts as he walks to avert evil; a man notorious for his brusquerie and lack of manners, who describes himself as "well-bred to a degree of needless scrupulosity," and of whom Goldsmith said that he had nothing of the bear but his skin; a man far more apprehensive of death than most of us, who yet took the knife out of the surgeon's hands in order to operate on himself; afflicted by terrible diseases, he was yet one of the most jovial and sociable men of his age; by nature sluggish and averse from work, he yet did more actual drudgery than any ten ordinary mortals.

Practically starving himself, he yet clothed, housed and fed a mult.i.tude of ingrates; the great literary dictator of his time, he failed almost entirely to appreciate poetry, and (most paradoxical of all) the great giant of letters of the eighteenth century he has yet left practically nothing that the ordinary man ever reads. "This is the greatness of Johnson, that he is greater than his works. He thought of himself as a man, not as an author ... duties and friends.h.i.+ps and charities were more to him than fame and honour." But the wise man will not be content with the greatness of the man; "the reader who desires to have Johnson to himself for an hour, with no interpreter, cannot do better than turn to the notes on Shakespeare. They are written informally and fluently; they are packed full of observation and wisdom; and their only fault is that they are all too few."

It is hard to imagine that anyone who has read the n.o.ble preface to the _Dictionary_, the illuminating preface to and notes on Shakespeare, the thrilling _Life of Richard Savage_, and a selection of the sage essays in _The Rambler_ and _The Idler_ should rest content until he had read Johnson from end to end. This, then, is why one should read Boswell; you will get a full-length picture of the typical Englishman at his greatest, a lesson on the art of life, and an appet.i.te to read the works of one of the sanest, "all-round" writers who ever lived.