Those Brontés

I am more terrifically and infernally and idiotically stupid than ever I was in the whole course of my incarnate existence. The above precious lines are the fruits of one hour's most agonizing labor between half-past six and half-past seven in the evening of July, 1836.

The inclusion in the edition of this remark of Emily's may perform a needed service to letters in aiding to clear that dull literary muddle in which the Brontés' lives are read into their work, and their work into their lives, until neither has any distinct or integral value. As Henry James has acutely observed:

The personal position of the three sisters, of the two in particular, had been marked with so sharp an accent that this accent has become for us the very tone of their united production. It covers and supplants their spirit, their style, their taste. .Literature is an objective, a projected result; it is life that is the unconscious, the agitated, the struggling, floundering cause. But the fashion has been, in looking at the Brontés, so to confuse the cause with the result that we cease to know, in the presence of such ecstasies, what we have held or what we are talking about. They represent, the ecstasies, the high-water mark of sentimental judg

ment.

While it is true that life gave the Brontés a deep knowledge of sadness, it must be remembered that melancholy was the conventional, poetical mood of the day-the day of the vogue of weeping willow trees, and of a species of satisfaction in being deserted. When even a person as devoted to inconstancy by nature, and it may almost be said by principle, as Lord Byron, wrote in the literary temper of

Though human, thou didst not deceive me;

Though woman, thou didst not forsake;

Though loved, thou forborest to grieve me

do you believe Charlotte Bronté says in Frances—

Unloved, I love; unwept I

weep;

Grief I restrain, hope I repress;

Vain is this anguish-fixed and deep;

Vainer, desires and dreams of bliss-

because she was unloved and unwept and in anguish? No more than Shakespeare wrote,

Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness,

because he had just lost an archbiscopric; or than Mr. Sargent painted Carmencita because he had been carrying a fan and dancing the Cachuca.

Charlotte's verses have a few, a very few, fine moments, and a distant family resemblance to poetry. Branwell's verses have for me no interest whatever but the signature of a brother of the Brontés. The distinct poetical endowment is Anne's and Emily's. The younger sister's contribution is very slight; much of it merely formal, merely pietistic. But in other instances, infinitely touching and genuinely religious, the material of her poetry is the very stuff of the music that dreams are made of-the mystery, the inexplicable deep sympathies of life. The most vivid element in the book is of course the poetry of Emily.

Though in Bronté Poems the two heretofore unpublished selections, disentangled from the difficult manuscript of her notebook, are characteristic; and though the whole text of her work in this edition, is, in my view, more sympathetically arranged than in the volume devoted exclusively to her own production, yet this volume is naturally more completely representative.

Emily Bronté's poetry, full of the profound charm of the

1

Those Brontés

shadowed things of life, like the stormy twilight she so often evokes for us, echoes with the

Wild words of an ancient song,

Undefined, without a name.

The beauty of the rain, the cold, the ways of nature that have no benison for man, she was one of the first to express. The acute sweetness of that song has been too little appreciated. She has suffered too untempered a fame, for one whose phrase, like Shakespeare's, has the rich power that swings with a full movement through both the passions and the dearnesses of existence:

Redbreast, early in the morning,
Dark and cold and cloudy gray,
Wildly tender is thy music
Chasing angry thought away.

Pain, bereavement, defeat, freedom and imprisonment, the prospect of death, a fast allegiance with suffering, the love of dumb creatures, the passion of human justice, the inmost life, the will's life, the intensest forces of meditation-she says them all. Some of her expression is clumsy, her rhyme weak and forced, but the root of the music that speaks inarticulately is always there, the communicative power of tonal design, though often only roughly sketched. On every page, something beckons, something gleams; plunging horse-hoofs gallop in the distance; a great light splinters on the point of a Valkyrie's spear; and deep in the reader's soul the splendor of a woman's voice calls out through the ride down the mountain-tops.

One is glad to see the heroic fragments, and the un-heroic, unfinished designs, which the book includes-too many, and

of too many kinds, to tell in detail. Death arrested the designer's hand, that yet left behind it the earnest of immortality, the very proof, as it were, of the truth of one of her most stirring and beautiful stanzas.

Nature's deep being thine shall hold,
Her spirit all thy spirit fold,

Her breath absorb thy sighs.

Mortal, though soon life's tale is told-
Who once lives, never dies!

Edith Wyatt

A BOOK BY LAWRENCE

Amores, by D. H. Lawrence. B. W. Huebsch, New York. The pages of this book are the record of a great struggle. Through these poems, and over them, we feel the beating and lashing of a restless, passionate soul, passionate in its loves and aspirations, that is clogged with flesh, caught in meshes of flesh and held prisoner. The ache of "brown hands", the throbbing of blood in the darkness-these are with Lawrence always. Seldom has anyone expressed with such vividness the tinge that stifled flesh gives to the universe, the urge that gives to flowers and stars the wine-color . of longing, and brings into tense, passionate relief details that otherwise were meaningless. Snap-dragon is perhaps the best poem of its kind in English.

Yet there is seldom any pagan joy in the things of the flesh. They come to him not as light, but as darkness, as something that clogs and hinders him, something that he must fight through and cannot-yet. And it is the vain

A Book by Lawrence

struggle to free himself that has given us the beauty of this book.

His aspirations are as passionate as his loves. What could be more spiritually impassioned than this from Dreams Old and Nascent?

Oh the terrible ecstasy of the consciousness that I am life!
Oh the miracle of the whole, the widespread, laboring concentration
Swelling mankind like one bud to bring forth the fruit of a dream!
Oh the terror of lifting the innermost I out of the sweep of the
impulse of life,

And watching the great Thing laboring through the whole round flesh of the world;

And striving to catch a glimpse of the shape of the coming dream,
As it quickens within the laboring, white-hot metal;
Catch the scent and color of the coming dream,

Then to fall back exhausted into the unconscious, molten life!

Yet, though the key-note of the book is this passionate struggle, there are calmer moments in it, moments that presage the later Lawrence who is already emerging from the welter. For the poems in this volume are for the most part early work, and a number more recent, already known to readers of POETRY, are not included. Here is a steady little picture in a quieter vein, called Patience.

A wind comes from the north
Blowing little flocks of birds
Like a spray across the town;
And a train, roaring forth,
Rushes stampeding down
With cries and flying curds

Of steam, out of the darkening north.

Whither I turn and set
Like a needle steadfastly,
Waiting ever to get

The news that she is free;