Epilogue
EPILOGUE To estimate the sheer passion of the Evangelical Revival of Religion it is necessary to work the problem backwards.
Emily Bronté has herself done this and has put the key to the mystery into our hands.
It was she who clapped Jabez Bunting between the covers of Wuthering Heights, and it was she who made Heathcliffe, in his passion of love for Catherine, behave just as a Methodist in the morn of conversion.
She might be a stranger to earthly love, but to the vagaries of Divine passion she was as to the manner born.
The meeting of her own parents had been in that very atmosphere of religious emotion and hymn singing.
It befell in that year of the revival at Woodhouse Grove School when boys' voices had sung
Charles Wesley's hymns far into the night and Patrick Bronté and Maria Branwell had walked among the trees there and had talked of love and of God.
It was entirely in the tradition that Maria Bronté should bring to Haworth, as part of her marriage portion, a copy of a Kempis abridged by Wesley.
After the death of her mother Emily Bronté was entrusted, for all her upbringing, to a Methodist aunt from Cornwall where that particular type of Methodism is at its intensest.
The tinge of Celtic melancholy in the Delectable Duchy gives fine edge to escape and to love.
SON
TO SUSANNA
At Haworth again Emily Bronté fell heir to that whole Grimshaw legend and even to the market language of Wesley's friend and preacher in the Yorkshire Round.
In fact that old parsonage where Wesley and Grace Murray tied up their horse was but a stone's throw from Emily's home.
In addition she had the old Methodist magazines, which Charlotte Bronté mentions, to piece out imperfect knowledge and from which to imbibe visions, conversions and ecstasy at her own sweet will.
She was shut in with Methodism upon a moor, and became, as it were, a connoisseur of this strange inheritance. When she came to try her hand at a novel, here was her stock-in-trade.
The monster Heathcliffe is sexless and appears rather as religious passion transmuted and forced into a grotesque body.
He draws human breath awkwardly, and when he woos he does so in the language of Divine love. To show the ecstasy of Heathcliffe's passion for the dead Catherine, Emily
Bronté can describe it only in this way: "He has just come home at dawn and gone upstairs to his chamber, locking himself in.. There he has continued praying like a Methodist: only the Deity he implored in senseless dust and ashes—till he grew hoarse and his voice was strangled in his throat."
Grace Murray might perish to keep these diverse kinds of love in their right order, but Emily Bronté confuses the Divine and the human in a glorious burst of passion.
So was the English novel transformed, and so stands Methodism, torn from its context, and seen in a starkness of outline and an iridescence of flame.
EPILOGUE And how does a Methodist pray?
There was a boy once at Woodhouse Grove School who became the friend of Ruskin and Rossetti, and he can give the answer.
He was a contemporary of that other schoolboy who heard Jabez Bunting preach that riotous sermon in Woodhouse Grove Chapel which Emily Bronté makes into the uproarious dream one of Jabez Branderham.
The artist, James Smetham, has given a picture of the praying Methodist in his description of one of God's saints: "He sold a bit of tea, and had a little pension, and staggered along in June days with a tendency to hernia, and prayed as if he had a fortune of ten thousand a year."
Today there has been made a new Recall to Religion, but we seem to lack that passion and that faith which can so call on the Capital of God.
At the heart of the problem is an unspoken fear.
What if those Heavenly Reserves are themselves overdrawn?
What if Religion itself is bankrupt?
In this new age of reason we know that we spin all faith, all love and all passion, like the spider, out of ourselves.
We are obsessed with complexities, inhibitions, glands and blood. We have killed romance and passion, for we have chained them fast to the flesh.
There remains no longer the wisdom which cometh from above.
Who knows what secrets of a horrid past might not be revealed by the relentless analysis of the praying spirit? But if we could still pray with abandon, there would be no more fitting petition than Wesley's theme of passionate adoration:
SON
TO SUSANNA
"© Thou who camest from above The pure celestial fire to impart, Kindle a flame of sacred love On the mean altar of my heart."
It was no anemic "Sweet Saviour," caricature of religion, that turned the world upside down.
It was rather something as fierce and elemental as a flash of lightning.
William Grimshaw of Haworth called it the fire of God in the soul, and Grace Murray thought of it as the strength that could keep her from fainting in hell. Wesley knew it as a force of consuming fire to shrivel the falsehood from the souls of men.
Between gasps of choking breath, with their voices strangled in their throats, even as Heathcliffe, the Methodists sang:
"In vain Thou strugglest to get free; I never will unloose my hold!
Art Thou the Man that died for me?
The secret of Thy love unfold:
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go, Till I Thy name, Thy nature know."
Emily Bronté believed it a power worthy to challenge the constancy of her own wild heart, and awaited, breathless, the consummation of God's own good time:
"Burn, then, little lamp; glimmer straight and clear.
Hush! A rustling wing stirs, methinks, the air.
EPILOGUE He, for whom I wait, thus often comes to me.
Strange power!
I trust Thy might; trust Thou my constancy."
Where did that uneducated, inexperienced girl get her profound knowledge?
It is unlikely that she picked it up in her brief sojourn at Miss Wooler's Academy for Young Ladies near Birstall. That school must have been, at least, advanced could children come by all the experience and all the knowledge of a John Donne there.
Yet Emily Bronté could rival his fierce lines and would have known exactly what he meant when he said:
"Batter my heart, three person'd God; for you As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee and bend Your force to break, blowe, burn and make mee new.
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I, Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee."
Now Charlotte Bronté said that her sister did not get her knowledge from books, but that the secret lay in herself.
It was in her own warmed heart that she, with the Methodists, apprehended truth.
She and they knew, and had always' known, that terrible as an army with banners was the passion of Redeem- ' ing Love.
SON
TO SUSANNA
The significance of John Wesley lies just there.
He made that tremendous experience possible for all men.
Over his own battered heart he opened up a way into the Eternal Mystery without fear of election or favor of priest.
In that stupendous flash-point of Refining Fire the veriest clod-hopper at the ploughtail was made heir to the wisdom of all the ages.