Wisdom and Destiny

by Maurice Maeterlinck

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."

102. I am well aware that here we are dealing with a woman of genius; but genius only throws into bolder relief all that can, and actually does, take place in the lives of all men; otherwise were it genius no longer, but incoherence or madness. It becomes clear to us, after a time, that genius is by no means confined to the extraordinary; and that veritable superiority is composed of elements that every day offers to every man. But we are not considering literature now; and indeed, not by her literary gifts, but by her inner life, was Emily Bronte comforted; for it by no means follows that moral activity waits on brilliant literary powers. Had she remained silent, nor ever grasped a pen, still had there been no diminution of the power within her, of the smile and the fulness of love; still had she worn the air of one who knew whither her steps were tending; and the profound certainty that dwelt within her still had proclaimed that she had known how to make her peace, far up on the heights, with the great disquiet and misery of the world. We should never have known of her—that is all.

There is much to be learned from this humble life, and yet were it perhaps not well to hold it forth as an example to such as already incline overmuch to resignation, for these it might mislead. It is a life that would seem to have been wholly passive—and to be passive is not good for all. She died a virgin in her twenty-ninth year: and it is sad to die a virgin. Is it not the paramount duty of every human being to offer to his destiny all that can be offered to the destiny of man? And indeed we had far better leave behind us work unfinished than life itself incomplete. It is good to be indifferent to vain or idle pleasures; but we have no right almost voluntarily to neglect the most important chances of indispensable happiness. The soul that is unhappy may have within it cause for noble regret. To look largely on the sadness of one's life is to make essay, in the darkness, of the wings that shall one day enable us to soar high above this sadness. Effort was lacking, perhaps, in Emily Bronte's life. (In her soul there was wealth of passion and freedom and daring, but in her life timidity, silence, inertness, conventions, and prejudice; the very things that in thought she despised.) This is the history often of the too-meditative soul. But it is difficult to pass judgment on an entire existence; and here there were much to be said of the devotion wherewith she sacrificed the best years of her youth to an undeserving, though unfortunate, brother. Our remarks then, in a case such as this, must be understood generally only; but still, how long and how narrow is the path that leads from the soul to life! Our thoughts of love, of justice and loyalty, our thoughts of bold ambition—what are all these but acorns that fall from the oak in the forest? and must not thousands and tens of thousands be lost and rot in the lichen ere a single tree spring to life? "She had a beautiful soul," said, speaking of another woman, the woman whose words I quoted above, "a wide intellect, and tender heart, but ere these qualities could issue forth into life they had perforce to traverse a straitened character. Again and again have I wondered at this want of self-knowledge, of return to self. The man who would wish us to see the deepest recess of his life will begin by telling us all that he thinks and he feels, will lead as to his point of view; we are conscious, perhaps, of much elevation of soul; then, as we enter with him still further into his life, he tells of his conduct, his joys and his sorrows; and in these we detect not a gleam of the soul that had shone through his thoughts and desires. When the trumpet is sounded for action, the instincts rush in, the character hastens between; but the soul stands aloof: the soul, which is man's very highest, being like the princess who elects to live on in arrogant penury rather than soil her hands with ordinary labour." Yes, alas, all is useless till such time as we have learned to harden our hands; to transform the gold and silver of thought into a key that shall open, not the ivory gate of our dreams, but the very door of this our dwelling—into a cup that shall hold, not only the wondrous water of dreams, but the living water that falls, drop by drop, on our roof—into scales, not content vaguely to balance schemes for the future, but that record, with unerring accuracy, what we have done to-day. The very loftiest ideal has taken no root within us, so long as it penetrate not every limb, so long as it palpitate not at our finger-tip. Some there are whose intellect profits by this return to self; with others, the character gains. The first have clearest vision for all that concerns not themselves, that calls them not to action; but it is above all when stern reality confronts them, and time for action has come, that the eyes of the others glow bright. One might almost believe in there being an intellectual consciousness, languidly resting for ever upon an immovable throne, whence she issues commands to the will through faithless or indolent envoys, and a moral consciousness, incessantly stirring, afoot, at all times ready to march. It may be that this latter consciousness depends on the former—indeed who shall say that she is not the former, wearied from long repose, wherein she has learned all that was to be learned; that has at last determined to rise, to descend the steps of inactivity and sally forth into life? And all will be well, if only she have not tarried so long that her limbs refuse their office. Is it not preferable sometimes to act in opposition to our thoughts than never dare to act in accord with them? Rarely indeed is the active error irremediable; men and things are quickly on the spot, eager to set it right; but they are helpless before the passive error that has shunned contact with the real. Let all this, however, by no means be construed into meaning that the intellectual consciousness must be starved, or its growth arrested, for fear lest it outpace the moral consciousness. We need have no fear; no ideal conceived by man can be too admirable for life to conform with it. To float the smallest act of justice or love requires a very torrent of desire for good. For our conduct only to be honest we must have thoughts within us ten times loftier than our conduct. Even to keep somewhat clear of evil bespeaks enormous craving for good. Of all the forces in the world there is none melts so quickly away as the thought that has to descend into everyday life; wherefore we must needs be heroic in thought for our deeds to pass muster, or at the least be harmless.

103. Let us once again, and for the last time, return to obscure destinies. They teach us that, physical misfortune apart, there is remedy for all; and that to complain of destiny is only to expose our own feebleness of soul. We are told in the history of Rome how a certain Julius Sabinus, a senator from Gaul, headed a revolt against the Emperor Vespasian, and was duly defeated. He might have sought refuge among the Germans, but only by leaving his young wife, Eponina, behind him, and he had not the heart to forsake her. At moments of disaster and sorrow we learn the true value of life; nor did Julius Sabinus welcome the idea of death. He possessed a villa, beneath which there stretched vast subterranean caverns, known only to him and two freedmen. This villa he caused to be burned, and the rumour was spread that he had sought death by poison, and that his body was consumed by the flames. Eponina herself was deceived, says Plutarch, whose story I follow, with the additions made thereto by the Comte de Champagny, the historian of Antoninus; and when Martialis the freedman told her of her husband's self-slaughter, she lay for three days and three nights on the ground, refusing all nourishment. When Sabinus heard of her grief, he took pity and caused her to know that he lived. She none the less mourned and shed floods of tears, in the daytime, when people were near, but when night fell she sought him below in his cavern. For seven long months did she thus confront the shades, every night, to be with her husband; she even attempted to help him escape; she shaved off his hair and his beard, wrapped his head round with fillets, disguised him, and then had him sent, in a bundle of clothes, to her own native city. But his stay there becoming unsafe, she soon brought him back to his cavern; and herself divided her stay between town and the country, spending her nights with him, and from time to time going to town to be seen by her friends. She became big with child, and, by means of an unguent wherewith she anointed her body, her condition remained unsuspected by even the women at the baths, which at that time were taken in common. And when her confinement drew nigh she went down to her cavern, and there, with no midwife, alone, she gave birth to two sons, as a lioness throws off her cubs. She nourished her twins with her milk, she nursed them through childhood; and for nine years she stood by her husband in the gloom and the darkness. But Sabinus at last was discovered and taken to Rome. He surely would seem to have merited Vespasian's pardon. Eponina led forth the two sons she had reared in the depths of the earth, and said to the Emperor, "These have I brought into the world and fed on my milk, that we might one day be more to implore thy forgiveness." Tears filled the eyes of all who were there; but Caesar stood firm, and the brave Gaul at last was reduced to demand permission to die with her husband. "I have known more happiness with him in the darkness," she cried, "than thou ever shalt know, O Caesar, in the full glare of the sunshine, or in all the splendour of thy mighty empire."

Who that has a heart within him can doubt the truth of her words, or think without longing of the darkness that so great a love illumined? Many a dreary, miserable hour must have crawled by as they crouched in their hiding-place; but are there any, even among those who care only for the pettiest pleasures of life, who would not rather love with such depth and fervour in what was almost a tomb, than flaunt a frigid affection in the heat and light of the sun? Eponina's magnificent cry is the cry of all those whose hearts have been touched by love; as it is also the cry of those whose soul has discovered an interest, duty, or even a hope, in life. The flame that inspired Eponina inspires the sage also, lost in monotonous hours as she in her gloomy retreat. Love is the unconscious sun of our soul; and it is when its beams are most ardent, and purest, that they bear most surprising resemblance to those that the soul, aglow with justice and truth, with beauty and majesty, has kindled within itself, and adds to, incessantly. Is not the happiness that accident brought to the heart of Eponina within reach of every heart, so the will to possess it be there? Is not all that was sweetest in this love of hers—the devotion of self, the transformation of regret into happiness, of pleasure renounced into joy that abides in the heart for ever; the interest awakened each day by the feeblest glimmer of light, so it fall on a thing one admires; the immersion in radiance, in happiness susceptible of infinite expansion, for one has only to worship the more—are not all these, and a thousand other forces no less helpful, no less consoling, to be found in the intensest life of our soul, of our heart, of our thoughts? And was Eponina's love other than a sudden lightning flash from this life of the soul, come to her, all unconscious and unprepared? Love does not always reflect; often indeed does it need no reflection, no search into self, to enjoy what is best in thought; but, none the less, all that is best in love is closely akin to all that is best in thought. Suffering seemed ever radiant in aspect to Eponina, because of her love; but cannot this thing that love brings about, all unknowing, by fortunate accident, be also achieved by thought, meditation, by the habit of looking beyond our immediate trouble, and being more joyous than fate would seem to demand? To Eponina there came not a sorrow but kindled yet one more torch in the gloom of her cavern; and does not the sadness that forces the soul back into itself, to the retreat it has made, kindle deep consolation there? And, as the noble Eponina has taken us back to the days of persecution, may we not liken such sorrow to the pagan executioner who, suddenly touched by grace, or perhaps admiration, in the very midst of the torture that he was inflicting, flung himself down headlong at the feet of his victim, speaking words of tenderest sympathy; who demanded to share her suffering, and finally besought, in a kiss, to be told the way to her heaven.

104. Go where we will, the plentiful river of life flows on, beneath the canopy of heaven. It flows between prison walls, where the sun never gleams on its waters; as it flows by the palace steps, where all is gladness and glory. Not our concern the depth of this river, or its width, or the strength of its current, as it streams on for ever, pertaining to all; but of deepest importance to us is the size and the purity of the cup that we plunge in its waters. For whatever of life we absorb must needs take the form of this cup, as this, too, has taken the form of our thoughts and our feelings; being modelled, indeed, on the breast of our intimate destiny as the breast of a goddess once served for the cup of the sculptor of old. Every man has the cup of his fashioning, and most often the cup he has learned to desire. When we murmur at fate, let our grievance be only that she grafted not in our heart the wish for, or thought of, a cup more ample and perfect. For indeed in the wish alone does inequality lie, but this inequality vanishes the moment it has been perceived. Does the thought that our wish might be nobler not at once bring nobility with it; does not the breast of our destiny throb to this new aspiration, thereby expanding the docile cup of the ideal—the cup whose metal is pliable, still to the cold stern hour of death? No cause for complaint has he who has learned that his feelings are lacking in generous ardour, or the other who nurses within him a hope for a little more happiness, a little more beauty, a little more justice. For here all things come to pass in the way that they tell us it happens with the felicity of the elect, of whom each one is robed in gladness, and wears the garment befitting his stature. Nor can he desire a happiness more perfect than the happiness which he possesses, without the desire wherewith he desired at once bringing fulfilment with it. If I envy with noble envy the happiness of those who are able to plunge a heavier cup, and more radiant than mine, there where the great river is brightest, I have, though I know it not, my excellent share of all that they draw from the river, and my lips repose by the side of their lips on the rim of the shining cup.

105. It may be remembered perhaps that, before these digressions, we spoke of a woman whose friend asked her, wonderingly, "Can any man be worthy of your love?" The same question might have been asked of Emily Bronte, as indeed of many others; and in this world there are thousands of souls, of loftiest intention, that do yet forfeit the best years of love in constant self-interrogation as to the future of their affections. Nay, more—in the empire of destiny it is to the image of love that the great mass of complaints and regrets come flocking; the image of love around which hover sluggish desire, extravagant hope, and fears engendered of vanity. At root of all this is much pride, and counterfeit poetry, and falsehood. The soul that is misunderstood is most often the one that has made the least effort to gain some knowledge of self. The feeblest ideal, the one that is narrowest, straitest, most often will thrive on deception and fear, on exaction and petty contempt. We dread above all lest any should slight, or pass by unnoticed, the virtues and thoughts, the spiritual beauty, that exist only in our imagination. It is with merits of this nature as it is with our material welfare—hope clings most persistently to that which we probably never shall have the strength to acquire. The cheat through whose mind some momentary thought of amendment has passed, is amazed that we offer not instant, surpassing homage to the feeling of honour that has, for brief space, found shelter within him. But if we are truly pure, and sincere, and unselfish; if our thoughts soar aloft of themselves, in all simpleness, high above vanity or instinctive selfishness, then are we far less concerned than those who are near us should understand, should approve, or admire. Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Antoninus Pius are not known to have ever complained that men could not understand them. They hugged no belief to themselves that something extraordinary, incomprehensible, lay buried within them; they held, on the contrary, that whatever was best in their virtue was that which it needed no effort for all men to grasp and admit. But there are some morbid virtues that are passed by unnoticed, and not without reason—for there will almost always be some superior reason for the powerlessness of a feeling—morbid virtues to which we often ascribe far too great an importance; and that virtue will surely be morbid that we rate over highly and hold to deserve the respectful attention of others. In a morbid virtue there is often more harm than there is in a healthy vice; in any event it is farther removed from truth; and there is but little to hope for when we are divided from truth. As our ideal becomes loftier so does it become more real; and the nobler our soul, the less does it dread that it meet not a soul of its stature; for it must have drawn near unto truth, in whose neighbourhood all things must take of its greatness. When Dante had gained the third sphere, and stood in the midst of the heavenly lights, all shining with uniform splendour, he saw that around him naught moved, and wondered was he standing motionless there, or indeed drawing nearer unto the seat of God? So he cast his eyes upon Beatrice; and she seemed more beautiful to him; wherefore he knew that he was approaching his goal. And so can we too count the steps that we take on the highway of truth, by the increase of love that comes for all that goes with us in life; the increase of love and of glad curiosity, of respect and of deep admiration.

106. Men, as a rule, sally forth from their homes seeking beauty and joy, truth and love; and are glad to be able to say to their children, on their return, that they have met nothing. To be for ever complaining argues much pride; and those who accuse love and life are the ones who imagine that these should bestow something more than they can acquire for themselves. Love, it is true, like all else, claims the highest possible ideal; but every ideal that conforms not with some strenuous inward, reality is nothing but falsehood—sterile and futile, obsequious falsehood. Two or three ideals, that lie out of our reach, will suffice to paralyse life. It is wrong to believe that loftiness of soul is governed by the loftiness of desire or dream. The dreams of the weak will be often more numerous, lovelier, than are those of the strong; for these dreams absorb all their energy, all their activity. The perpetual craving for loftiness does not count in our moral advancement if it be not the shadow thrown by the life we have lived, by the firm and experienced will that has come in close kinship with man. Then, indeed, as one places a rod at the foot of the steeple to tell of its height by the shadow, so may we lead forth this craving of ours to the midst of the plain that is lit by the sun of external reality, that thus we may tell what relation exists between the shadow thrown by the hour and the dome of eternity.