Passion

About depths of feeling, it's so clear that so much of what passes for 'passion' nowadays misses the mark completely. There was a time in film and music where much was left hidden and had an air of mystery about it. Nowadays 'anything goes' but it isn't passion and lacks depth. Most fascinating of all is the fact that the some of the people who are often described as 'cold' or viewed as remote are often those with the greatest depths of passion and feeling.

To cite but 3 examples: Prince Albert, Grand Duchess Elizabeth and Emily Bronte. Apart from being the love of Queen Victoria's life, Prince Albert is often seen as the epitome of Victorian coldness, yet here was a man who inspired not only the love of so passionate a woman, but also wrote music and painted with such depths of feeling. He died at only 42 and I think that had a lot to do with the power of his unexpressed feelings. Being the child of an unhappy marriage, he learned to hide his feelings at an early age but, looking at his art, his music, his social conscience, his devotion to his family, he was one of the most intensely passionate men ever to have lived.

Because she didn't have children and was married to someone who is often maligned, Grand Duchess Elizabeth is also often described as 'cold'. Her letters - filled with exclamation marks and dramatic expressions of endearment and passion - reveal a very different personality! Emily Bronte, because she longed always to be alone, is seen as another 'cold' person and yet she wrote the most passionate novel, and still more the most wonderful poetry of her century.

In an age where blatant and rather boring displays of short-lived sexuality passes for passion, it's small wonder that such people who were so 'whole' in their passion are dismissed as 'cold'. But, as Wordsworth rather clumsily wrote: "To me, the meanest flower the blows can give thoughts that lie too deep for human tears..." I often think that those with the deepest sensitivities, do not wear their hearts on their sleeves because they know that it would not be understood in a rather dispassionate world.

Perhaps it's not that people no longer have these sensibilities - it's that the most powerful feelings are frightening to most people and those who feel them most deeply feel it is better to remain silent about them.

Emily Bronte's Mystical World

What a mystical and complex person Emily Bronte was! Totally tongue-tied in the company of strangers, so absorbed in her own inner world and so deeply connected to nature that whenever she was forced to be away from the Moors she became physically ill. To all outward appearances she must have seemed to have lacked any real experience about which she could write, and yet not only "Wuthering Heights" but also her poetry is filled with such inner passion that must have startled the people of Haworth who saw her every day as the quiet daughter of their parson. Hour upon hour as she trudged through the 'wild and windy moors' speaking to the characters that populated her inner world and were far more real to her than the everyday people she passed on that cobbled road up to the parsonage, she must have reached depths of understanding that can only be found in silence and following her 'inner guides' until out of a short life came one of the most passionate and memorable novels ever written.

Just goes to show that it's not necessary to have a vast experience of travel or society or anything else, to create a masterpiece! It all must come from within.

The musical "Branwell" * opens when Rev. Bronte, following the death of all his children, opens the little books in which they wrote their stories of Angria and the Great Glass Town. He sings:

"Do impassioned souls find relief in dreams
Creating roles and enchanted scenes?
Of hidden worlds little fingers write
To ignite secret stars making their darkness bright.
A childish script on a tiny page
A pretty play on a paper stage
Was I too old?
How could I understand
The secret games, the names the dreams carved by their hands?

Theirs was a world that I barely saw
Like a glimpse of light
Through a half-closed door;
Like a whispered word that I almost heard
That faded with the echo of a sigh.
Theirs was a world that I could not know,
A trail of footprints in the snow
Once deep and clear then they disappear
And I am left alone to wonder why.

Was their loneliness so intense, so bleak,
That only dreams gave them tongues to speak?
Of secret scars their spirits write
To dispel hidden wounds haunting their sleepless nights.
A fairy tale or reality?
A children’s game or a desperate plea
I should have heard?
How could I ever know
The secret fears, the tears of years so long ago?

* (c. Croft & Croft 2005)