A RETROSPECT.
"Poor, brilliant, gay, moody, moping, wildly excitable, miserable
Bronte! No history records your many struggles after the good--your wit,
brilliance, attractiveness, eagerness for excitement--all the qualities
which made you such 'good company' and dragged you down to an untimely
grave."
Thus ejaculates Mr. Francis H. Grundy, remembering the boon-companion of
his early years, the half-insane, pitiful creature that opium and brandy
had made of clever Branwell at twenty-two. Returned from Bradford, his
nervous system racked by opium fumes, he had loitered about at Haworth
until his father, stubborn as he was, perceived the obvious fact that
every idle day led his only son more hopelessly down to the pit of ruin.
At last he exerted his influence to find some work for Branwell, and
obtained for his reckless, fanciful, morbid lad the post of
station-master at a small roadside place, Luddendenfoot by name, on the
Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. Thither he went some months before
Charlotte and Emily left for Brussels. It was there Mr. Grundy met him;
a novel station-master.
"Had a position been chosen for this strange creature for the express
purpose of driving him several steps to the bad, this must have been it.
The line was only just opened. The station was a rude wooden hut, and
there was no village near at hand. Alone in the wilds of Yorkshire,
with few books, little to do, no prospects, and wretched pay, with no
society congenial to his better taste, but plenty of wild, rollicking,
hard-headed, half-educated manufacturers, who would welcome him to their
houses, and drink with him as often as he chose to come, what was this
morbid man, who couldn't bear to be alone, to do?"[10]
What Branwell always did, in fine, was that which was easiest to him to
do. He drank himself violent, when he did not drink himself maudlin. He
left the porter at the station to keep the books, and would go off for
days "on the drink" with his friends and fellow-carousers. About this
time Mr. Grundy, then an engineer at Halifax, fell in with the poor,
half-demented, lonely creature, and for a while things went a little
better.
Drink and riot had not embellished the tawny-maned, laughing, handsome
darling of Haworth. Here is his portrait as at this time he appeared to
his friend:
"He was insignificantly small--one of his life's trials. He had a mass
of red hair, which he wore brushed high off his forehead--to help his
height, I fancy--a great, bumpy, intellectual forehead, nearly half the
size of the whole facial contour; small ferrety eyes, deep-sunk and
still further hidden by the never-removed spectacles; prominent nose,
but weak lower features. He had a downcast look, which never varied,
save for a rapid momentary glance at long intervals. Small and thin of
person, he was the reverse of attractive at first sight."
Yet this insignificant, sunken-eyed slip of humanity had a spell for
those who heard him speak. There was no subject, moral, intellectual, or
philosophic too remote or too profound for him to measure it at a
moment's notice, with the ever-ready, fallacious plumb-line of his
brilliant vanity. He would talk for hours: be eloquent, convincing,
almost noble; and afterwards accompany his audience to the nearest
public-house.
"At times we would drive over in a gig to Haworth (twelve miles) and
visit his people. He was there at his best, and would be eloquent and
amusing, although sometimes he would burst into tears when returning,
and swear that he meant to amend. I believe, however, that he was half
mad and could not control himself."[11]
So must his friends in kindness think. Mad; if haunting, morbid dreads
and fancies conjured up by poisonous drugs and never to be laid; if a
will laid prostrate under the yoke of unclean habits; if a constitution
prone to nervous derangement and blighted by early excess; if such
things forcing him by imperceptible daily pressure to choose the things
he loathed, to be the thing he feared, to act a part abhorrent to his
soul; if such estranging and falsification of a man's true self may
count as lunacy, the luckless, worthless boy was mad.
It must have galled him, going home, to be welcomed so kindly, hoped so
much from, by those who had forgiven amply, and did not dream how heavy
a mortgage had since been laid upon their pardon; to have talked to the
prim, pretty old lady who denied herself every day to save an
inheritance for him; to watch pious, gentle Anne into whose dreams the
sins she prayed against had never entered; worst of all, the sight of
his respectable, well-preserved father, honoured by all the parish,
successful, placed by his own stern, continued, will high beyond the
onslaughts of temptation, yet with a temperament singularly akin to that
morbid, passionate son's.
So he would weep going home; weep for his falling off, and perhaps more
sincerely for the short life of his contrition. Then the long evenings
alone with his thoughts in that lonely place would make him afraid of
repentance, afraid of God, himself, night, all. He would drink.
He had fits of as contrary pride. "He was proud of his name, his
strength and his abilities." Proud of his name! He wrote a poem on it,
"Bronte," an eulogy of Nelson, which won the patronising approbation of
Leigh Hunt, Miss Martineau and others, to whom, at his special request,
it was submitted. Had he ever heard of his dozen aunts and uncles, the
Pruntys of Ahaderg? Or if not, with what sensations must the Vicar of
Haworth have listened to this blazoning forth and triumphing over the
glories of his ancient name?
Branwell had fits of passion, too, the repetition of his father's
vagaries. "I have seen him drive his doubled fist through the panels of
a door--it seemed to soothe him." The rough side of his nature got full
play, and perhaps won him some respect denied to his cleverness, in the
society amongst which he was chiefly thrown. For a little time the
companionship of Mr. Grundy served to rescue him from utter abandonment
to license. But, in the midst of this improvement, the crash came. As he
had sown, he reaped.
Those long absences, drinking at the houses of his friends, had been
turned to account by the one other inhabitant of the station at
Luddendenfoot. The luggage porter was left to keep the books, and,
following his master's example, he sought his own enjoyment before his
employers' gain. He must have made a pretty penny out of those escapades
of Branwell's, for some months after the Vicar of Haworth had obtained
his son's appointment, when the books received their customary
examination, serious defalcations were discovered. An inquiry was
instituted, which brought to light Branwell's peculiar method of
managing the station. The lad himself was not suspected of actual theft;
but so continued, so glaring had been his negligence, so hopeless the
cause, that he was summarily dismissed the company's service, and sent
home in dire disgrace to Haworth.
He came home not only in disgrace, but ill. Never strong, his
constitution was deranged and broken by his excesses; yet, strangely
enough, consumption, which carried off so prematurely the more
highly-gifted, the more strongly-principled daughters of the house,
consumption, which might have been originally produced by the vicious
life this youth had led, laid no claim upon him. His mother's character
and her disease descended to her daughters only. Branwell inherited his
father's violent temper, strong passions and nervous weakness without
the strength of will and moral fibre that made his father remarkable.
Probably this brilliant, weak, shallow, selfish lad reproduced
accurately enough the characteristics of some former Prunty; for Patrick
Branwell was as distinctly an Irishman as if his childhood had been
spent in his grandfather's cabin at Ahaderg.
He came home to find his sisters all away. Anne in her situation as
governess. Emily and Charlotte in Rue d'Isabelle. No one, therefore, to
be a check upon his habits, save the neat old lady, growing weaker day
by day, who spent nearly all her time in her bedroom to avoid the paven
floors of the basement; and the father, who did not care for company,
took his meals alone for fear of indigestion, and found it necessary to
spend the succeeding time in perfect quiet. The greater part of the day
was, therefore, at Branwell's uncontrolled, unsupervised disposal.
To do him justice, he does seem to have made so much effort after a new
place of work as was involved in writing letters to his friend Grundy,
and probably to others, suing for employment. But his offence had been
too glaring to be condoned. Mr. Grundy seems to have advised the hapless
young man to take shelter in the Church, where the influence of his
father and his mother's relatives might help him along; but, as Branwell
said, he had not a single qualification, "save, perhaps hypocrisy."
Parson's sons rarely have a great idea of the Church. The energy,
self-denial, and endurance which a clergyman ought to possess were
certainly not in Branwell's line. Besides, how could he take his degree?
Montgomery, it seems, recommended him to make trial of literature. "All
very well, but I have little conceit of myself and great desire for
activity. You say that you write with feelings similar to those with
which you last left me; keep them no longer. I trust I am somewhat
changed, or I should not be worth a thought; and though nothing could
ever give me your buoyant spirits and an outward man corresponding
therewith, I may, in dress and appearance, emulate something like
ordinary decency. And now, wherever coming years may lead--Greenland's
snows or sands of Afric--I trust, etc. 9th June, 1842."[12]
It is doubtful, judging from Branwell's letters and his verses, whether
anything much better than his father's 'Cottage in the Wood' would have
resulted from his following the advice of James Montgomery. Fluent ease,
often on the verge of twaddle, with here and there a bright, felicitous
touch, with here and there a smack of the conventional hymn-book and
pulpit twang--such weak and characterless effusions are all that is left
of the passion-ridden pseudo-genius of Haworth. Real genius is perhaps
seldom of such showy temperament.
Poor Branwell! it needed greater strength than his to retrieve that
first false step into ruin. He cannot help himself, and can find no one
to help him; he appeals again to Mr. Grundy (in a letter which must,
from internal evidence, have been written about this time, although a
different and impossible year is printed at its heading):--
"DEAR SIR,
"I cannot avoid the temptation to cheer my spirits by
scribbling a few lines to you while I sit here alone, all
the household being at church--the sole occupant of an
ancient parsonage among lonely hills, which probably will
never hear the whistle of an engine till I am in my grave.
"After experiencing, since my return home, extreme pain and
illness, with mental depression worse than either, I have at
length acquired health and strength and soundness of mind,
far superior, I trust, to anything shown by that miserable
wreck you used to know under my name. I can now speak
cheerfully and enjoy the company of another without the
stimulus of six glasses of whisky. I can write, think and
act with some apparent approach to resolution, and I only
want a motive for exertion to be happier than I have been
for years. But I feel my recovery from _almost insanity_ to
be retarded by having nothing to listen to except the wind
moaning among old chimneys and older ash-trees--nothing to
look at except heathery hills, walked over when life had all
to hope for and nothing to regret with me--no one to speak
to except crabbed old Greeks and Romans who have been dust
the last five [_sic_] thousand years. And yet this quiet
life, from its contrast, makes the year passed at
Luddendenfoot appear like a nightmare, for I would rather
give my hand than undergo again the grovelling carelessness,
the malignant, yet cold debauchery, the determination to
find out how far mind could carry body without both being
chucked into hell, which too often marked my conduct when
there, lost as I was to all I really liked, and seeking
relief in the indulgence of feelings which form the blackest
spot in my character.
"Yet I have something still left me which may do me service.
But I ought not to remain too long in solitude, for the
world soon forgets those who have bidden it 'good-bye.'
Quiet is an excellent cure, but no medicine should be
continued after a patient's recovery, so I am about, though
ashamed of the business, to dun you for answers to ----.
"Excuse the trouble I am giving to one on whose kindness I
have no claim, and for whose services I am offering no
return except gratitude and thankfulness, which are already
due to you. Give my sincere regards to Mr. Stephenson. A
word or two to show you have not altogether forgotten me
will greatly please,
"Yours, etc."
Alas, no helping hand rescued the sinking wretch from the quicksands of
idle sensuality which slowly engulfed him! Yet, at this time, there
might have been hope, had he been kept from evil. Deliver himself he
could not. His "great desire for activity" seems to have had to be in
abeyance for some months, for on the 25th of October he is still at
Haworth. He then writes to Mr. Grundy again. The letter brings us up to
the time when--in the cheerless morning--Charlotte and Emily set out on
their journey homewards; it reveals to us how much real undeserved
suffering must have been going on side by side with Branwell's
purposeless miseries in the grey old parsonage at Haworth. The good
methodical old maiden aunt--who for twenty years had given the best of
her heart to this gay affectionate nephew of hers--had come down to the
edge of the grave, having waited long enough to see the hopeless fallacy
of all her dreams for him, all her affection. Branwell, who was really
tender-hearted, must have been sobered then.
He writes to Mr. Grundy in a sincere and manly strain:--
"MY DEAR SIR,
"There is no misunderstanding. I have had a long attendance
at the death-bed of the Rev. Mr. Weightman, one of my
dearest friends, and now I am attending at the death-bed of
my Aunt, who has been for twenty years as my mother. I
expect her to die in a few hours.
"As my sisters are far from home, I have had much on my
mind, and these things must serve as an apology for what was
never intended as neglect of your friendship to us.
"I had meant not only to have written to you, but to the
Rev. James Martineau, gratefully and sincerely acknowledging
the receipt of his most kindly and truthful criticism--at
least in advice, though too generous far in praise--but one
sad ceremony must, I fear, be gone through first. Give my
most sincere respects to Mr. Stephenson, and excuse this
scrawl; my eyes are too dim with sorrow to see well.
Believe me, your not very happy, but obliged friend and
servant,
"P. B. BRONTE."
But not till three days later the end came. By that time Anne was home
to tend the woman who had taken her, a little child, into her love and
always kept her there. Anne had ever lived gladly with Miss Branwell;
her more dejected spirit did not resent the occasional oppressions, the
little tyrannies, which revolted Charlotte and silenced Emily. And, at
the last, all the constant self-sacrifice of those twenty years, spent
for their sake in a strange and hated country, would shine out, and yet
more endear the sufferer to those who had to lose her.
On the 29th of October Branwell again writes to his friend:--
"MY DEAR SIR,
"As I don't want to lose a _real_ friend, I write in
deprecation of the tone of your letter. Death only has made
me neglectful of your kindness, and I have lately had so
much experience with him, that your sister would _not now_
blame me for indulging in gloomy visions either of this
world or of another. I am incoherent, I fear, but I have
been waking two nights witnessing such agonising suffering
as I would not wish my worst enemy to endure; and I have now
lost the pride and director of all the happy days connected
with my childhood. I have suffered such sorrow since I last
saw you at Haworth, that I do not now care if I were
fighting in India, or ---- since, when the mind is
depressed, danger is the most effectual cure."
Miss Branwell was dead. All was over: she was buried on a Tuesday
morning, before Charlotte and Emily, having travelled night and day,
got home. They found Mr. Bronte and Anne sitting together, quietly
mourning the customary presence to be known no more. Branwell was not
there. It was the first time he would see his sisters since his great
disgrace; he could not wait at home to welcome them.
Miss Branwell's will had to be made known. The little property that she
had saved out of her frugal income was all left to her three nieces.
Branwell had been her darling, the only son, called by her name; but his
disgrace had wounded her too deeply. He was not even mentioned in her
will.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 10: 'Pictures of the Past.' F. H. Grundy.]
[Footnote 11: 'Pictures of the Past.']
[Footnote 12: 'Pictures of the Past.']