Charlotte, five; Patrick Branwell, four; Emily, three; and Anne, one.
The little motherless brood were left alone for a year, when an elder
sister of their mother came to live at the parsonage, but she does not
seem to have had any real influence over them. She taught the girls to
stitch and sew, and to become proficient in various domestic arts, but
she had no sympathy or communion with them, and their real life was
lived quite apart from hers. As soon almost as they could read and write
at all, they began to compose plays and act them; they had no society
but each other’s; this, however, was all-sufficient for them. Their
power of invention and imagination was very marked; to the habit of
composing stories in their own minds they gave the name of “making out.”
As soon as the labour of writing became less formidable than it always
is to baby fingers, the stories thus “made out” were written down. In
fifteen months, when Charlotte was about twelve to thirteen years of
age, she wrote twenty-two volumes of manuscript, in the minutest hand,
which can hardly be deciphered except with the aid of a
magnifying-glass. The Duke of Wellington filled a large place in the
minds of the Brontës, and in their romances. Something of what the hero
was to them when they were children, Charlotte afterwards put into the
mouth of Shirley, the heroine of her novel of that name. After the
manner of imaginative children, she not only worshipped her hero from
afar, but identified herself with him or with members of his family. The
authorship of many of her childish romances and poems is ascribed, in
her imagination, to the Marquis of Douro, or Lord Charles Wellesley; and
when these “goodly youths” are not introduced as authors they often
become the chief personages of the story.
The shadow of death that casts so deep a gloom over the story of the
Brontë family, first fell on Maria and Elizabeth, the two elder
children. The four girls—Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Emily—had been
sent to a school, which was partly a charitable institution, at Cowan
Bridge, in Westmoreland. The living at Haworth parsonage was the reverse
of luxurious, but the food and the sanitary arrangements at Cowan Bridge
were so bad that the health of the little Brontës was seriously injured
by it. The food was repulsive from the want of cleanliness with which it
was prepared and placed on the table. The children frequently refused
food altogether, though sinking from the want of it, rather than drink
the “bingy” milk, and eat unappetising scraps from a dirty larder, and
puddings made with water taken from rain-tubs and impregnated with the
smell of soot and dust. Besides the faulty domestic arrangements of the
school, the discipline was harsh and tyrannical, and one teacher in
particular was guilty of conduct towards Maria Brontë that can only be
called brutal. Low fever broke out at the school, from which about forty
of the pupils suffered, but the Brontës did not take the disease. It was
evident that Maria was destined for another fate, that of consumption.
She was removed from the school only a few days before her death, and
Elizabeth followed her to the grave about six weeks later, in June 1825.
Even after this Mr. Brontë’s eyes were not opened to the danger his
children were in by their treatment at Cowan Bridge, and Charlotte and
Emily were still allowed to remain at the school. It soon, however,
became evident that they would not be long in following Maria and
Elizabeth unless they were removed; and they returned home before the
rigours of another winter set in. All the physical and mental tortures
she endured at Cowan Bridge, Charlotte afterwards described in the
account she gives of “Lowood” in _Jane Eyre_. It is not to be taken that
the account of “Lowood” is as strictly an accurate description of Cowan
Bridge as Charlotte Brontë would have given if she had been simply
writing a history of the school. The facts are, perhaps, magnified by
the lurid glow of passion and grief with which she recalled her sisters’
sufferings. She was only between nine and ten when she left Cowan
Bridge, and in the account she wrote of it twenty years later we see
rather the impression that was left on her imagination than a strictly
accurate history; but there is no doubt that in her account of Maria
Brontë’s angelic patience, and the cruel persecution to which she was
subjected by one of the teachers, the Lowood of _Jane Eyre_ is a
perfectly faithful transcript of what took place at Cowan Bridge. Mrs.
Gaskell says, “Not a word of that part of _Jane Eyre_ but is a literal
repetition of scenes between the pupil and the teacher. Those who had
been pupils at the same time knew who must have written the book from
the force with which Helen Burns’s sufferings are described.”
After the death of Maria and Elizabeth, the next great sorrow of the
Brontë family arose from the career of the only son, Patrick Branwell.
He was a handsome boy of exceptional mental powers. He had in particular
the gift of brilliant conversation, and there was hardly anything he
attempted in the way of talking, writing, or drawing which he did not do
well. In one of Charlotte’s letters she says, “You ask me if I do not
think that men are strange beings? I do, indeed. I have often thought
so; and I think, too, that the mode of bringing them up is strange; they
are not sufficiently guarded from temptation. Girls are protected as if
they were something very frail and silly indeed, while boys are turned
loose on the world, as if they of all beings in existence were the
wisest and least liable to be led astray.” Poor Branwell, with his
brilliant social qualities, was not sufficiently guarded from
temptation. The easiest outlet from the narrow walls of Haworth
parsonage was to be found at the little inn of Haworth village. The
habit of the place was, when any stranger arrived at the inn, for the
host to send for the brilliant boy from the parsonage to amuse the
guest. The result will easily be guessed. The guiding principle of
Charlotte’s character was her inexorable fidelity to duty; her whole
nature turned with irresistible force to what was right rather than to
what was pleasant. With Branwell the reverse was the case. Conventional
propriety of course strictly guarded Charlotte from the possible dangers
of associating with casual strangers at the village inn, although her
strong resolute character would not have run a tenth part of the risk of
contamination as did that of the weak, pleasure-seeking Branwell. It is
needless to dwell on the details of his gradual degradation; the high
ideals and hopes of his youth were given up; his character became at
once coarse and weak. He was entirely incapable of self-government and
of retaining any kind of respectable employment. His intemperance and
other vices made the daily life of his sisters at the parsonage a
nightmare of horrors. For eight years the young man, whose boyhood his
family had watched with so much hope and pride, was a source of shame
and anguish to them, all the more keenly felt because it could not be
openly avowed. Many who knew the family affirmed that so far as purely
intellectual qualities were concerned Branwell was even more eminently
distinguished than his sisters; but mere intellect, without moral power
to guide it, is as dangerous as a spirited horse without bit or bridle.
Branwell was singularly deficient in that moral power in which his
sisters were so strong, and his education did nothing to supply this
natural deficiency. He died in 1848, at the age of thirty.
Cowan Bridge was not the only experience Charlotte and Emily had of
school life. They went for a time to another school at Roe Head, where
Charlotte was very happy, and in 1835 she returned to the same school as
a teacher. In 1842 Charlotte and Emily went to a school in Brussels,
where the former stayed two years, the latter only one. All that
Charlotte saw and all the friends she made were afterwards portrayed in
her stories. One of her most intimate friends became the Caroline
Helstone of _Shirley_; the originals of Rose and Jessie Yorke were also
among her schoolfellows at Roe Head. There can be little doubt that M.
Paul Emanuel of Villette was M. Héger of the Brussels school. Every
trivial circumstance of an unusually uneventful life became food for her
imagination.
The development of Emily’s genius was different. Her love of the moors
around Haworth was so intense that it was impossible for her to thrive
when she was away from them. It became a fact recognised by all the
family that Emily must not be taken away from home. The solitude of the
wild, dark moors, and the communing with her own heart, together with
the dark tragedy of Branwell’s wasted life, were the sole sources of
Emily’s inspiration. Her poems have a wild, untameable quality in them,
and her one romance, _Wuthering Heights_, places her in the first rank
among the great imaginative writers of English fiction. There is
something terrible in Emily’s sternness of character, which she never
vented pitilessly on any one but herself. She was deeply reserved, and
hardly ever, even to her sisters, spoke of what she felt most intensely.
A friend who furnished Mrs. Gaskell with some particulars for her
biography, states that on one occasion she mentioned “that some one had
asked me what religion I was of (with the view of getting me for a
partisan), and that I had said that was between God and me. Emily, who
was lying on the hearth-rug, exclaimed, ‘That’s right.’ This was all,”
adds the friend, “I ever heard Emily say on religious subjects.” Emily’s
love for animals was intense; she was especially devoted to a savage old
bull-dog named Keeper, who owned no master but herself. The incident in
_Shirley_ of the heroine being bitten by a mad dog, and straightway
burning the wound herself with a red-hot Italian iron, was true of
Emily. Her last illness was a time of terrible agony to Charlotte and
Anne, not merely because they saw that she who, Charlotte said, was the
thing that seemed nearest to her heart in the world was going to be
taken from them, but because Emily’s resistance to the inroads of
illness was so terrible. She resolutely refused to see a doctor, and she
would allow no nursing and no tender helpfulness of any kind. It was
evident to her agonised sisters that she was dying, but she maintained
her savage reserve, suffering in solitary silence rather than admit her
pain and weakness. On the very day of her death she rose as usual,
dressed herself, and attempted to carry on her usual employments, and
all this with the catching, rattling breath and the glazing eye which
told that the hand of Death was actually upon her. Charlotte wrote in
this agonising hour, “Moments so dark as these I have never known. I
pray for God’s support to us all. Hitherto He has granted it.” At noon
on that day, when it was too late, Emily whispered in gasps, “If you
will send for a doctor, I will see him now.” A few days later Charlotte
wrote, “We are very calm at present. Why should we be otherwise? The
anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of
death is gone by; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No
need to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not
feel them.” The terrible anguish of those last days haunted the
surviving sisters like a vision of doom. Nearly six months later
Charlotte wrote again that nothing but hope in the life to come had kept
her heart from breaking. “I cannot forget,” she says, “Emily’s
death-day; it becomes a more fixed, a darker, a more frequently
recurring idea in my mind than ever. It was very terrible. She was torn,
conscious, panting, reluctant, though resolute, out of a happy life.”
Within a very short time the gentle youngest sister Anne also died, and
Charlotte was left with her father, the last survivor of the family of
six wonderful children who had come to Haworth twenty-nine years before.
In earlier and happier days the habit of the sisters had been, when
their aunt went to bed at nine o’clock, to put out the candles and pace
up and down the room discussing the plots of their novels, and making
plans and projects for their future life. Now Charlotte was left to pace
the room alone, with all that had been dearest to her in the world under
the church pavement at Haworth and in the old churchyard at Scarborough.
But Charlotte was not one to give way to self-indulgent idleness, even
in the hour of darkest despair. She was writing _Shirley_ at the time of
Anne’s last illness. After the death of this beloved and only remaining
sister, she resumed her task; but those who knew what her private
history at the time was, can trace in the pages of the novel what she
had gone through. The first chapter she wrote after the death of Anne is
called, “The Valley of the Shadow of Death.”
The first venture in authorship of the sisters was a volume of poems, to
which they each contributed. They imagined, probably with justice, that
the world was at that time prejudiced against literary women. Therefore
they were careful to conceal, even from their publishers, their real
identity. The poems were published as the writings of Currer, Ellis, and
Acton Bell.
_Jane Eyre_ was the first of Charlotte’s stories which was published,
but _The Professor_ was the first that was written with a view to
publication. The sisters each wrote a story—Charlotte, _The Professor_;
Emily, _Wuthering Heights_; and Anne, _Agnes Grey_, and sent them to
various publishers. Charlotte was the only one of the three sisters
whose manuscript was returned on her hands. But she was not discouraged
by the disappointment. Just at this time Mr. Brontë, who had been
suffering from cataract, was persuaded by his daughters to go to
Manchester for an operation. Charlotte accompanied him, and it was while
she was waiting on him, in the long suspense after the operation had
been performed, that she began _Jane Eyre_, the book that made her, and
ultimately the name of Brontë, famous. Nothing is more striking in
Charlotte’s personal history than the way in which she reproduced the
events and personages of her own circle into her novels. Probably the
belief that she was writing anonymously encouraged her in this. Her
father’s threatened blindness and her own fear of a similar calamity are
reflected, as it were, in the blindness of Rochester in _Jane Eyre_. The
success of _Jane Eyre_ was rapid and complete, and there was much
dispute whether its author were a man or a woman. The _Quarterly Review_
distinguished itself by the remark that if the author were a woman it
was evident “she must be one who for some sufficient reason has long
forfeited the society of her sex.” Sensitive as Charlotte Brontë was,
the coarseness of the insult could not wound her; it could at the utmost
be regarded as nothing worse than a trivial annoyance; for when the
words reached Charlotte, the grave had not long closed over Branwell’s
wasted life; Emily was just dead, and it was evident that Anne was
dying. The greatness of her grief and the anguish of her loneliness
dwarfed to their proper proportions the petty insults that at another
time would have caused her acute pain. On the whole she had nothing to
complain of in the way her book was received; she suffered no lack of
generous appreciation from the real leaders of the literary world.
Thackeray and G. H. Lewes, Miss Martineau, and Sidney Dobell were warm
in their praise of her work. Charlotte’s manner of making her literary
fame known to her father was characteristic. The secret of their
authorship had been very strictly kept by the sisters; but when the
success of _Jane Eyre_ was assured, Emily and Anne urged Charlotte that
their father ought to be allowed to share the pleasure of knowing that
she was the writer of the book. Accordingly one afternoon Charlotte
entered her father’s study and said, “Papa, I’ve been writing a book.”
When Mr. Brontë found that the book was not only written, but printed
and published, he exclaimed, “My dear, you’ve never thought of the
expense it will be! It will be almost sure to be a loss, for how can you
get a book sold? No one knows you or your name.”
“But, papa, I don’t think it will be a loss; no more will you, if you
will just let me read you a review or two, and tell you more about it.”
At tea that evening Mr. Brontë exclaimed to his other daughters, “Girls,
do you know that Charlotte has been writing a book, and it is much
better than likely?”
The pacing up and down of the sisters in the firelight, discussing the
plots of their novels, has been already mentioned. Mrs. Gaskell records
that Charlotte told her that these discussions seldom had any effect in
causing her to change the events in her stories, “so possessed was she
with the feeling that she had described reality.” This confirms what Mr.
Swinburne has said of her strongest characteristic as an author, that
she has the power of making the reader feel in every nerve that thus and
not otherwise it must have been. It must not, however, be thought that
the conversations with her sisters were therefore useless; no doubt they
were very stimulating to her imagination, and gave her creations more
solid reality than they would otherwise have had.
In 1854 Charlotte Brontë married Mr. Nicholls, an Irish gentleman, who
had for eight years been her father’s curate. She only lived nine months
after her marriage. She was happy in her husband’s love, and appreciated
his devotion to his parish duties. But the loving admirers of Charlotte
Brontë can never feel much enthusiasm for Mr. Nicholls. Mrs. Gaskell
states that he was not attracted by her literary fame, but was rather
repelled by it; he appears to have used her up remorselessly, in their
short married life, in the routine drudgery of parish work. She did not
complain; on the contrary, she seemed more than contented to sacrifice
everything for him and his work; but she remarks in one of her letters,
“I have less time for thinking.” Apparently she had none for writing.
Surely the husband of a Charlotte Brontë, just as much as the wife of a
Wordsworth or a Tennyson, ought to be attracted by literary fame. To be
the life partner of one to whom the most precious of Nature’s gifts is
confided, and to be unappreciative of it and even repelled by it, shows
a littleness of nature and essential meanness of soul. A true wife or
husband of one of these gifted beings should rather regard herself or
himself as responsible to the world for making the conditions of the
daily life of their distinguished partners favourable to the development
of their genius. But pearls have before now been cast before swine, and
one cannot but regret that Charlotte Brontë was married to a man who did
not value her place in literature as he ought.
XII
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
SYDNEY SMITH, writing in 1810 upon the extraordinary folly of closing to
women all the ordinary means of literary education, remarked that one
consequence of their exclusion was that no woman had contributed
anything of lasting value to English, French, or Italian literature, and
that scarcely a single woman had crept into the ranks even of the minor
poets. While he was writing this, a little baby girl was beginning to
prattle, who within a very short time was destined to win a place among
the great poets of this century. The very great gifts of Elizabeth
Barrett were discernible from her earliest childhood. Her father was Mr.
Edward Moulton, of Burn Hall, Durham. The date and place of her birth
are disputed. Mrs. Richmond Ritchie states in the _National Dictionary
of Biography_ that the future poetess was born at Burn Hall, Durham, in
1809; Mr. J. H. Ingram says in his _Life of Mrs. Browning_ in the
Eminent Women Series that she was born in London in 1809; while Mr.
Browning has written to the papers to say that she was born at Carlton
Hall, Durham, in 1806. Three birthplaces and two birthdays are thus
assigned to her. It is not, however, disputed that she was christened by
the names of Elizabeth Barrett, and that her father afterwards exchanged
the name of Moulton for that of Barrett on inheriting some property from
a relative. At eight years old little Elizabeth could read Homer in the
original Greek, and was often to be seen with the _Iliad_ in one hand
and a doll in the other; this picture of her gives a beautiful type of
her future character, its depth of loving womanliness, combined with the
height of poetic inspiration and learning. She was certainly one of the
women of whom her brother poet, Tennyson, sings, who “gain in mental
breadth nor fail in childward care.” She says herself of her childhood
that “she dreamed more of Agamemnon than of Moses her black pony.” At
about eleven years old she wrote an epic poem in four books on _The
Battle of Marathon_, which her father caused to be printed. Her home,
during most of her childhood, was at Hope End, near Ledbury, in
Herefordshire. Many pictures of her happy childhood among the beautiful
hills and orchards of the West country are to be found in the poems,
especially in “Hector in the Garden” and in her “Lost Bower.” Much of
her young life, too, is described in the earlier part of her greatest
work, _Aurora Leigh_. We do not hear much about the mother of the
poetess, but her grandmother, it is said, looked with much disfavour on
the little lady’s learning, and said she would “rather hear that
Elizabeth’s hemming were more carefully finished than of all this
Greek.” Her father, however, was a worthy guardian of the wonderful
child that had been entrusted to him; he fostered and encouraged her
genius by all means in his power. He must have had a singular power of
self-devotion and self-sacrifice; and it is probable that much of his
daughter’s beautiful moral nature was inherited from him. When Elizabeth
was about twenty, her mother lay in her last illness, and simultaneously
money troubles, brought on by no fault of his own, fell upon Mr.
Barrett. He would allow no knowledge of this to disturb his wife during
her illness; and in order effectually to hide the truth from her, he
made an arrangement with his creditors which very materially reduced his
income for life, so that no reduction of his establishment should take
place as long as his wife lived.