One autumn day we find ourselves pondering the sad event of his last
sojourn in the great city, as we stand upon the spot where his
"truceless fight with disease" was ended, barely a fortnight after the
"Sentimental Journey" was issued. His wish to die "untroubled by the
concern of his friends and the last service of wiping his brows and
smoothing his pillow" was literally realized. During the publication of
the "Journey" he lodged in rooms above a silk-bag shop in Old Bond
Street; here he rapidly sank, and in the evening of March 18, 1768,
attended only by a hireling who robbed his body, and in the presence of
a staring footman, the dying man suddenly cried, "Now it is come!" and,
raising his hand as if to repel a blow, expired. A few furlongs distant,
opposite Hyde Park, we find an old cemetery hidden from the streets by
houses and high walls which shut out the din of the great city. Here, in
seclusion almost as complete as that of the graveyard of his own
Coxwold, Sterne was consigned to earth. The spot is overlooked by the
windows of Thackeray's sometime home. An old tree stands close by, and
in its boughs the birds twitter above us as we essay to read the
inscription which marks Sterne's poor sepulchre. But, mean and neglected
as it is, we may never know that his ashes found rest even here; a
report which has too many elements of probability and which never was
disproved, avers that the grave was desecrated and that a
horror-stricken friend recognized Sterne's mutilated corse upon the
dissecting-table of a medical school. "Alas, poor Yorick!"
HAWORTH AND THE BRONTES
_The Village--Black Bull Inn--Church--Vicarage--Memory-haunted
Rooms--Bronte Tomb--Moors--Bronte Cascade--Wuthering Heights--Humble
Friends--Relic and Recollection._
Other Bronte shrines have engaged us,--Guiseley, where Patrick Bronte
was married and Neilson worked as a mill-girl; the lowly Thornton home,
where Charlotte was born; the cottage where she visited Harriet
Martineau; the school where she found Caroline Helstone and Rose and
Jessy Yorke; the Fieldhead, Lowood, and Thornfield of her tales; the
Villette where she knew her hero; but it is the bleak Haworth hill-top
where the Brontes wrote the wonderful books and lived the pathetic lives
that most attracts and longest holds our steps. Our way is along
Airedale, now a highway of toil and trade, desolated by the need of
hungry poverty and greed of hungrier wealth: meads are replaced by
blocks of grimy huts, groves are supplanted by factory chimneys that
assoil earth and heaven, the once "shining" stream is filthy with the
refuse of many mills. At Keighley our walk begins, and, although we have
no peas in our "pilgrim shoon," the way is heavy with memories of the
sad sisters Bronte who so often trod the dreary miles which bring us to
Haworth. The village street, steep as a roof, has a pavement of rude
stones, upon which the wooden shoes of the villagers clank with an
unfamiliar sound. The dingy houses of gray stone, barren and ugly in
architecture, are huddled along the incline and encroach upon the narrow
street. The place and its situation are a proverb of ugliness in all the
countryside; one dweller in Airedale told us that late in the evening of
the last day of creation it was found that a little rubbish was left,
and out of that Haworth was made. But, grim and rough as it is, the
genius of a little woman has made the place illustrious and draws to it
visitors from every quarter of the world. We are come in the "glory
season" of the moors, and as we climb through the village we behold
above and beyond it vast undulating sweeps of amethyst-tinted hills
rising circle beyond circle,--all now one great expanse of purple bloom
stirred by zephyrs which waft to us the perfume of the heather.
[Sidenote: Black Bull Inn]
At the hill-top we come to the Black Bull Inn, where one Bronte drowned
his genius in drink, and from our apartment here we look upon all the
shrines we seek. The inn stands at the church-yard gates, and is one of
the landmarks of the place. Long ago preacher Grimshaw flogged the
loungers from its tap-room into chapel; here Wesley and Whitefield
lodged when holding meetings on the hill-top; here Bronte's predecessor
took refuge from his riotous parishioners, finally escaping through the
low casement at the back,--out of which poor Branwell Bronte used to
vault when his sisters asked for him at the door. This inn is a quaint
structure, low-eaved and cosy; its furniture is dark with age. We sleep
in a bed once occupied by Henry J. Raymond, and so lofty that steps are
provided to ascend its heights. Our meals are served in the
old-fashioned parlor to which Branwell came. In a nook between the
fireplace and the before-mentioned casement stood the tall arm-chair,
with square seat and quaintly carved back, which was reserved for him.
The landlady denied that he was summoned to entertain travellers here:
"he never needed to be sent for, he came fast enough of himsel'." His
wit and conviviality were usually the life of the circle, but at times
he was mute and abstracted and for hours together "would just sit and
sit in his corner there." She described him as a "little, red-haired,
light-complexioned chap, cleverer than all his sisters put together.
What they put in their books they got from him," quoth she, reminding us
of the statement in Grundy's Reminiscences that Branwell declared he
invented the plot and wrote the major part of "Wuthering Heights."
Certain it is he possessed transcending genius and that in this room
that genius was slain. Here he received the message of renunciation from
his depraved mistress which finally wrecked his life; the landlady,
entering after the messenger had gone, found him in a fit on the floor.
Emily Bronte's rescue of her dog, an incident recorded in "Shirley,"
occurred at the inn door.
[Sidenote: Church--Bronte Tomb]
The graveyard is so thickly sown with blackened tombstones that there is
scant space for blade or foliage to relieve its dreariness, and the
villagers, for whom the yard is a thoroughfare, step from tomb to tomb:
in the time of the Brontes the village women dried their linen on these
graves. Close to the wall which divides the church-yard from the
vicarage is a plain stone set by Charlotte Bronte to mark the grave of
Tabby, the faithful servant who served the Brontes from their childhood
till all but Charlotte were dead. The very ancient church-tower still
"rises dark from the stony enclosure of its yard;" the church itself has
been remodelled and much of its romantic interest destroyed. No
interments have been made in the vaults beneath the aisles since Mr.
Bronte was laid there. The site of the Bronte pew is by the chancel;
here Emily sat in the farther corner, Anne next, and Charlotte by the
door, within a foot of the spot where her ashes now lie. A former
sacristan remembered to have seen Thackeray and Miss Martineau sitting
with Charlotte in the pew. And here, almost directly above her
sepulchre, she stood one summer morning and gave herself in marriage to
the man who served for her as "faithfully and long as did Jacob for
Rachel." The Bronte tablet in the wall bears a uniquely pathetic record,
its twelve lines registering eight deaths, of which Mr. Bronte's, at the
age of eighty-five, is the last. On a side aisle is a beautiful stained
window inscribed "To the Glory of God, in Memory of Charlotte Bronte, by
an American citizen." The list shows that most of the visitors come from
America, and it was left for a dweller in that far land to set up here
almost the only voluntary memento of England's great novelist. A worn
page of the register displays the tremulous autograph of Charlotte as
she signs her maiden name for the last time, and the signatures of the
witnesses to her marriage,--Miss Wooler, of "Roe Head," and Ellen Nussy,
who is the E of Charlotte's letters and the Caroline of "Shirley."
[Sidenote: Bronte Parsonage--Apartments]
The vicarage and its garden are out of a corner of the church-yard and
separated from it by a low wall. A lane lies along one side of the
church-yard and leads from the street to the vicarage gates. The garden,
which was Emily's care, where she tended stunted shrubs and borders of
unresponsive flowers and where Charlotte planted the currant-bushes, is
beautiful with foliage and flowers, and its boundary wall is overtopped
by a screen of trees which shuts out the depressing prospect of the
graves from the vicarage windows and makes the place seem less "a
church-yard home" than when the Brontes inhabited it. The dwelling is of
gray stone, two stories high, of plain and sombre aspect. A wing is
added, the little window-panes are replaced by larger squares, the stone
floors are removed or concealed, curtains--forbidden by Mr. Bronte's
dread of fire--shade the windows, and the once bare interior is
furbished and furnished in modern style; but the arrangement of the
apartments is unchanged. Most interesting of these is the Bronte parlor,
at the left of the entrance; here the three curates of "Shirley" used to
take tea with Mr. Bronte and were upbraided by Charlotte for their
intolerance; here the sisters discussed their plots and read each
other's MSS.; here they transmuted the sorrows of their lives into the
stories which make the name of Bronte immortal; here Emily, "her
imagination occupied with Wuthering Heights," watched in the darkness to
admit Branwell coming late and drunken from the Black Bull; here
Charlotte, the survivor of all, paced the night-watches in solitary
anguish, haunted by the vanished faces, the voices forever stilled, the
echoing footsteps that came no more. Here, too, she lay in her coffin.
The room behind the parlor was fitted by Charlotte for Nichols's study.
On the right was Bronte's study, and behind it the kitchen, where the
sisters read with their books propped on the table before them while
they worked, and where Emily (prototype of "Shirley"), bitten by a dog
at the gate of the lane, took one of Tabby's glowing irons from the fire
and cauterized the wound, telling no one till danger was past. Above the
parlor is the chamber in which Charlotte and Emily died, the scene of
Nichols's loving ministrations to his suffering wife. Above Bronte's
study was his chamber; the adjoining children's study was later
Branwell's apartment and the theatre of the most terrible tragedies of
the stricken family; here that ill-fated youth writhed in the horrors of
_mania-a-potu_; here Emily rescued him--stricken with drunken
stupor--from his burning couch, as "Jane Eyre" saved Rochester; here he
breathed out his blighted life erect upon his feet, his pockets filled
with love-letters from the perfidious woman who wrought his ruin. Even
now the isolated site of the parsonage, its environment of graves and
wild moors, its exposure to the fierce winds of the long winters, make
it unspeakably dreary; in the Bronte time it must have been cheerless
indeed. Its influence darkened the lives of the inmates and left its
fateful impression upon the books here produced. Visitors are rarely
admitted to the vicarage; among those against whom its doors have been
closed is the gifted daughter of Charlotte's literary idol, to whom
"Jane Eyre" was dedicated, Thackeray.
[Sidenote: The Moors]
By the vicarage lane were the cottage of Tabby's sister, the school the
Brontes daily visited, and the sexton's dwelling where the curates
lodged. Behind the vicarage a savage expanse of gorse and heather rises
to the horizon and stretches many miles away: a path oft trodden by the
Brontes leads between low walls from their home to this open moor, their
habitual resort in childhood and womanhood. The higher plateaus afford a
wide prospect, but, despite the August bloom and fragrance and the
delightful play of light and shadow along the sinuous sweeps, the aspect
of the bleak, treeless, houseless waste of uplands is even now
dispiriting; when frosts have destroyed its verdure and wintry skies
frown above, its gloom and desolation must be terrible beyond
description. Remembering that the sisters found even these usually
dismal moors a welcome relief from their tomb of a dwelling, we may
appreciate the utter dreariness of their situation and the pathos of
Charlotte's declaration, "I always dislike to leave Haworth, it takes so
long to be content again after I return." We trace the steps of the
Brontes across the moor to the cascade, called now the "Bronte Falls,"
where a brooklet descends over great boulders into a shaded glen. This
was their favorite excursion, and as we loiter here we recall their many
visits to the spot: first they came four children to play upon these
rocks; later came three grave maidens with Caroline Helstone or Rose
Yorke; later came two saddened women; and then Charlotte came alone,
finding the moor a featureless wilderness full of torturing reminders of
her dead, and seeing their vanished forms "in the blue tints, the pale
mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon." Later still, during her
few months of happiness, she came here many times with her husband, and
her last walk on earth was made with him to see the cascade "in its
winter wildness and power."
[Sidenote: Wuthering Heights]
Above the village was the parsonage of Grimshaw and the original
"Wuthering Heights." It was a sombre structure; a few trees grew about
it, the moors rose behind; the apartments were like the oak-lined,
stone-paved interior pictured in the tale, while the inscription above
the door, H E 1659, was changed to Hareton Earnshaw 1500 by Miss
Bronte, who described here much of her own grandfather's early life and
suffering and portrayed his wife in Catherine Linton. It is notable that
the name Earnshaw and other names in the Bronte books may be seen on
shop-signs along the way the sisters walked to Keighley.
[Sidenote: Recollections of the Brontes]
Among the villagers we meet some who remember the Brontes with affection
and pride. We find them so uniformly courteous that we are willing to
doubt Mrs. Gaskell's ascriptions of surly rudeness. They indignantly
deny the statements of Reid, Gaskell, and others regarding the character
of Mr. Bronte. One whose relations to that clergyman entitle him to
credence assures us that Bronte did not destroy his wife's silk dress,
nor burn his children's colored shoes, nor discharge pistols as a
safety-valve for his temper: "he didn't have that sort of a temper." It
would appear that many charges of the biographers were made upon the
authority of a peculating servant whom Bronte had angered by dismissal.
Some parishioners testify that "the Brontes had odd ways of their own,"
"went their gait and didn't meddle o'ermuch with us;" "nobody had a word
against them." Charlotte's husband, too, became popular after her death,
perhaps at first because of his tender care of her father: "to see the
good old man and Nichols together when the rest were dead, and Mr.
Bronte so helpless and blind, was just a pretty sight." We hear more
than once of Bronte's wonderful cravat: he habitually covered it
himself, putting on new silk without removing the old, until in the
course of years it became one of the sights of the place, having
acquired such phenomenal proportions that it concealed half his head.
Many still remember hearing him preach from the depths of this cravat,
while the sexton perambulated the aisles with a staff to stir up the
sleepers and threaten the lads. Mr. Wood, a cabinet-maker of the
village, was church-warden in Bronte's incumbency and an intimate friend
of the family till the death of the last member: his loving hands
fashioned the coffins for them all. He was sent for to see Richmond's
portrait of Charlotte on its arrival, and was laughed at by that lady
for not recognizing the likeness; while Tabby insisted that a portrait
of Wellington, which came in the same case, was a picture of Mr. Bronte.
That clergyman often complained to Wood that Mrs. Gaskell "tried to make
us all appear as bad as she could." We find some survivors of
Charlotte's Sunday-school class among the villagers. From one, who was
also singer in Bronte's church choir, we obtain pictures of the church
and rectory as they appeared in Charlotte's lifetime and a photographic
copy of Branwell's painting of himself and sisters, in which the
likenesses are said to be excellent. Charlotte is remembered as being
"good looking," having a wealth of lustrous hair and remarkably
expressive eyes. She was usually neatly apparelled in black, and was so
small that when Mrs. F. entered her class, at the age of twelve, the
pupil was larger than the teacher. Another of Charlotte's class
remembers her as being nervously quick in all her movements and a rapid
walker; a third stood in the church-yard and saw her pass from the
vicarage to the church on the morning of her marriage wearing a very
plain bridal dress and a white bonnet trimmed with green leaves. A few
brief months later this person, from the same spot, beheld the mortal
part of her immortal friend borne by a grief-stricken company along the
same path to her burial. In the hands of another of Charlotte's pupils
we see a volume of the original edition of the poems of the three
sisters, presented by Charlotte, and a Yorkshire collection of hymns
which contains some of Anne's sweet verses.
[Sidenote: Branwell Bronte--Bronte Relics]
It is evident that, of all the family, the hapless Branwell was most
admired by the villagers. They delight to extol his pleasant manners,
his ready repartee, his wonderful learning, his ambidextrousness, his
personal courage. On one occasion restraint was required to prevent his
attacking alone a dozen mill-rioters, "any one of whom could have put
him in his pocket." Holding a pen in each hand, he could simultaneously
write letters on two dissimilar subjects while he discoursed on a third.
Wood thought him naturally the brightest of the family, and believed
that lack of occupation, in a place where there was nothing to stimulate
mental effort, accounted for his vices and failures. He came often with
his sisters to Wood's house, and would talk by the hour of his projects
to achieve fame and fortune. One of his associates preserved some
letters received from him while he was "away tutoring," in which he
shamelessly recorded his follies and referred to himself as a "Joseph in
Egypt." A local society has collected in its museum some Bronte
mementos: a relative of Martha, Tabby's successor in the household,
saved a few,--Charlotte's silken purse, her thimble-case and some
articles of dress, elementary drawings made by the sisters, autograph
letters of Charlotte and her copies of the "Quarterly" and other
periodicals in which she had read the reviews of "Jane Eyre." Among the
treasures Wood preserved were sketches by Emily and Branwell; a
signatured set of Bronte volumes presented by Bronte the day before his
death; Charlotte's worn history containing annotations in her
microscopic chirography; a copy of "Jane Eyre" presented by Charlotte
before its authorship was ascertained; an article on "Advantages of
Poverty," by Mrs. Bronte; a highly graphic tale and religious poems by
Mr. Bronte. Comment upon the latter reminded Wood that Bronte had shown
him some poems by an Irish ancestor Hugh Bronte, and that he had met at
the vicarage an irate relative who came from Ireland with a shillalah to
"break the head" of a cruel critic of "Jane Eyre." Most of the Bronte
belongings were removed by Mr. Nichols. He served the parish
assiduously, as the people declare, for fifteen years, and at Bronte's
death they desired that Nichols should succeed him; but the living was
bestowed upon a stranger, and Nichols removed to the south of Ireland,
where he married his cousin and is now a gentleman farmer. Martha Brown,
the devoted servant of the family, accompanied him, and Nancy
Wainwright, the Brontes' nurse, died some years ago in Bradford
workhouse: so every living vestige of the family has disappeared from
the vicinage.
[Sidenote: Charlotte Bronte's Husband]
A resident of near-by Wharfedale lately possessed a package of
Charlotte's essays, written at the Brussels school and amended by "M.
Paul." Study of these confirms the belief that she was for a time
tortured by a hopeless love for her preceptor, husband of "Madame Beck,"
and that it was this wretched passage in her life, rather than the fall
of her brother, which "drove her to literary speech for relief." Her
marriage with Nichols was eventually happy, but her own descriptions of
him show that his were not the attributes that would please her fancy or
readily gain her love. In "Shirley" she writes of him as successor of
Malone: "the circumstance of finding himself invited to tea with a
Dissenter would unhinge him for a week; the spectacle of a Quaker
wearing his hat in church, the thought of an unbaptized fellow-creature
being interred with Christian rites, these things would make strange
havoc in his physical and mental economy." In a letter to E. Charlotte
writes, "I am _not_ to marry Mr. Nichols. I couldn't think of mentioning
such a rumor to him, even as a joke. It would make me the laughing-stock
of himself and fellow-curates for half a year to come. They regard me as
an old maid, and I regard them, _one and all_, as highly uninteresting,
narrow, and unattractive specimens of the coarser sex." Why then did she
finally accept Mr. Nichols? Was it not from the same motive that had led
her to reject his addresses not long before, the desire to please her
father?
EARLY HAUNTS OF ROBERT COLLYER: EUGENE ARAM
_Childhood Home--Ilkley Scenes, Friends, Smithy, Chapel--
Bolton-Associations--Wordsworth--Rogers--Eliot--Turner--Aram's
Homes--Schools--Place of the Murder--Gibbet--Probable Innocence._
[Sidenote: Early Home--School]
The factory-town of Keighley,--amid the moors of western Yorkshire,--to
which the Bronte pilgrimage brings us, becomes itself an object of
interest when we remember it was the birthplace of Robert Collyer. On a
dingy side-street resonant with the din of spindles and looms and
sullied with soot from factory chimneys, of humble parentage, and in a
home not less lowly than that of another Yorkshire blacksmith in which
Faraday was born, our orator and author first saw the light. Collyer
came to Keighley "only to be born," and soon was removed to the lovely
Washburndale, a few miles away. Here we find the place of the boyhood
home he has made known to us--the cottage of two rooms with whitewashed
walls and floor of flags--occupied by the mansion of a mill-owner, and
the Collyer family vanished from the vicinage. "Little Sam," the
kind-hearted father, fell dead at his anvil one summer day; the
blue-eyed, fair-haired mother, of whom the preacher so loves to speak,
died in benign age; and the boisterous bairns who once filled the
cottage are scattered in the Old World and the New. A little way down
the sparkling burn is the picturesque old church of Fewston, where
Collyer was christened, where Amos Barton of George Eliot's tale later
preached, and where the poet Edward Fairfax--of the ancient family which
gave to Virginia its best blood--was buried with his child who "was held
to have died of witchcraft." Near by was Collyer's school, taught by a
crippled and cross-eyed old fiddler named Willie Hardie, who survived at
our first sojourn in the dale and had much to tell about his pupil
"Boab," whom he had often "fairly thrashed." Collyer's school education
ended in his eighth year, and he was early apprenticed at Ilkley, in the
next valley, where he grew to physical manhood and attained to a measure
of that intellectual stature which has since been recognized.
[Sidenote: Companions]
[Sidenote: Collyer's Humble Friends--The Smithy]