Emily Brontë

It was over ten years ago that I read Wuthering Heights. Have just read it again aloud to E—— and am delighted and amazed. When I came to the dreadfully moving passages of talk between Cathy and Heathcliff —
‘"Let me alone, let me alone,” sobbed Catherine. “If I have done wrong, I’m dying for it. It is enough! You left me too! But I won’t upbraid you for it! I forgive you! Forgive me!”
‘"It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes and feel those wasted hands,” he answered. “Kiss me again, and don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive you what you have done to me. I love my murderer — but yours? How can I?"’ —
I had to stop and burst out laughing, or I should have burst into tears. E—— came over and we read the rest of the chapter together.
I can well understand the remark of Charlotte, a little startled and propitiatory — that having created the book, Emily did not know what she had done. She was the last person to appreciate her own work.
Emily was fascinated by the beaux yeux of fierce male cruelty, and she herself once, in a furious rage, blinded her pet bulldog with blows from her clenched fist. Wuthering Heights is a story of fiendish cruelty and maniacal love passion. Its preternatural power is the singular result of three factors in rarest combination — rare genius, rare moorland surroundings, and rare character. One might almost write her down as Mrs. Nietzsche — her religious beliefs being a comparatively minor divergence. However that may be, the young woman who wrote in the poem ‘A Prisoner’ that she didn’t care whether she went to Heaven or Hell so long as she was dead, is no fit companion for the young ladies of a seminary. ‘No coward soul is mine,’ she tells us in another poem, with her fist held to our wincing nose. I, for one, believe her. It would be idle to pretend to love Emily Brontë, but I venerate her most deeply. Even at this distance, I feel an immediate awe of her person. For her, nothing held any menace. She was adamant over her ailing flesh, defiant of death and the lightnings of her mortal anguish — and her name was Thunder!

W. N. P. Barbellion, 

To live is a continuous humiliation

To live is a continuous humiliation. Man was born with the desire to be free, yet everywhere he is in the hopeless shackles of mortality and of iron natural law. If Lucifer was proud, he was not so proud as I: it wounds my self-esteem not to be able to perform miracles, to move mountains, to play fast and loose with base clay, to be in direct telepathic rapport with the universe and its beauty. No one more than I could be readier to listen eagerly and encouragingly to the claims of Spiritualists and Christian Scientists. These claims do not surprise me. What does surprise me is that, as touching miracles, the evidence still seems to be on the side of David Hume. I ask myself, “What is the secret of the universe?” and I am staggered to find that I do not know. What an amazing thing it is that no one knows. “Avid of all dominion and all mightiness,” yet is man “successive unto nothing but patrimony of a little mould and entail of four planks.” That bumble-bee in the fox-glove yonder — how can I be about my human business until I know? Who is going to be busied over anything at all so long as overhead the sun shines unmolested and underneath his feet, secure in mystery, grows a single blade of grass? To be alive is so incredible that I can no more than lie still on my back between the immense vertical heights of my ignorance like a newborn babe sunk in the grand canon of Colorado. In the embrace of this mother Sphinx the earth, my own individuality shrinks to vanishing-point, I see myself through the wrong end of a telescope — a tiny speck crawling on a great hill.

“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?” (Pascal.)

W. N. P. Barbellion 

April 11, 1915