was not without some good is acknowledged by all who knew him. He had
kindly feelings towards most people, and he delighted in the stern
rectitude which distinguished many of his Yorkshire flock. When his
daughter became famous, no one was better pleased at the circumstance
than he was. He cut out of every newspaper every scrap which referred
to her; he was proud of her achievements, proud of her intellect, and
jealous of her reputation. But throughout his whole life there was but
one person with whom he had any real sympathy, and that person was
himself. Passionate, self-willed, vain, habitually cold and distant
in his demeanor towards those of his own household, he exhibited
in a marked degree many of the characteristics which Charlotte
Brontë afterwards sketched in the portrait of the Mr. Helstone of
‘Shirley.’... Among the many stories told of him by his children, there
is one relating to the meek and gentle woman who was his wife....
Somebody had given Mrs. Brontë a very pretty dress, and her husband,
who was as proud as he was self-willed, had taken offence at the gift.
A word to his wife, who lived in habitual dread of her lordly master,
would have secured all he wanted; but in his passionate determination
that she should not wear the obnoxious garment, he deliberately cut it
to pieces, and presented her with the tattered fragments. Even during
his wife’s lifetime he formed the habit of taking his meals alone; he
constantly carried loaded pistols in his pockets, and when excited he
would fire these at the doors of the out-houses, so that the villagers
were quite accustomed to the sound of pistol-shots at any hour of
the day in their pastor’s house. It would be a mistake to suppose
that violence was one of the weapons to which Mr. Brontë habitually
resorted. However stern and peremptory might be his dealings with
his wife (who soon left him to spend the remainder of his life in a
dreary widowhood), his general policy was to secure his end by craft
rather than by force. A profound belief in his own superior wisdom was
conspicuous among his characteristics, and he felt convinced that no
one was too clever to be outwitted by his diplomacy. He had also an
amazing persistency, which led him to pursue any course on which he had
embarked with dogged determination. It happened in later years, when
his strength was failing, and when at last he began to see his daughter
in her true light, that he quarreled with her regarding the character
of one of their friends [Mr. Nicholls]. The daughter, always dutiful
and respectful, found that any effort to stem the torrent of his bitter
and unjust wrath when he spoke of the friend who had offended him, was
attended by consequences which were positively dangerous. The veins of
his forehead swelled, his eyes glared, his voice shook, and she was
fain to submit lest her father’s passion should prove fatal to him.
But when, wounded beyond endurance by his violence and injustice, she
withdrew for a few days from her home, and told her father she would
receive no letters from him in which this friend’s name was mentioned,
the old man’s cunning took the place of passion. He wrote long and
affectionate letters to her on general subjects; but accompanying each
letter was a little slip of paper, which professed to be a note from
Charlotte’s dog, Flossy, to his “much-respected and beloved mistress,”
in which the dog, declaring that he saw “a good deal of human nature
that was hid from those who had the gift of language,” was made to
repeat the attacks upon the obnoxious person which Mr. Brontë dared no
longer to make in his own character.
[Sidenote: Childhood of the Brontës.]
The parson’s children were not allowed to associate with their little
neighbors in the hamlet; their aunt, who came to the parsonage after
their mother’s death, had scarcely more sympathy with them than their
father himself; their only friend was the rough but kindly servant
Tabby, who pitied the bairns without understanding them.... So they
grew up strange, lonely, old-fashioned children, with absolutely no
knowledge of the world outside; so quiet and demure in their habits,
that years afterward, when they had invited some of their Sunday
scholars up to the parsonage, and wished to amuse them, they found
that they had to ask the scholars to teach them how to play--they had
never learned. Carefully secluded from the rest of the world, the
little Brontë children found out fashions of their own in the way of
amusement, and curious fashions they were. While they were still in the
nursery, when the oldest of the family, Maria, was barely nine years
old, and Charlotte, the third, was just six, they had begun to take a
quaint interest in literature and politics. Heaven knows who it was who
first told these wonderful pigmies of the great deeds of a Wellington
or the crimes of a Bonaparte; but at an age when other children are
generally busy with their bricks or their dolls, and when all life’s
interests are confined for them within the walls of a nursery, these
marvellous Brontës were discussing the life of the Great Duke, and
maintaining the Tory cause as ardently as the oldest and sturdiest of
the village politicians in the neighboring inn.
[Sidenote: Effect on Charlotte’s work in later life.]
It may be well to bear in mind the frequency with which the critics
have charged Charlotte Brontë with exaggerating the precocity of
children. What we know of the early days of the Brontës proves that
what would have been exaggeration in any other person was in the case
of Charlotte nothing but a truthful reproduction of her own experiences.
T. WEMYSS REID: ‘Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph.’ New York: Scribner,
Armstrong & Co., 1877.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Early reading.]
On their father’s shelves were few novels, and few books of poetry.
The clergyman’s study necessarily boasted its works of divinity and
reference; for the children there were only the wild romances of
Southey, the poems of Sir Walter Scott, left by their Cornish mother,
and “some mad Methodist magazines full of miracles and apparitions
and preternatural warnings, ominous dreams and frenzied fanaticism;
and the equally mad letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe ‘from the Dead to
the Living’,” familiar to readers of ‘Shirley.’ To counterbalance all
this romance and terror, the children had their interest in politics
and _Blackwood’s Magazine_, “the most able periodical there is,” says
thirteen-year-old Charlotte. They also saw _John Bull_, “a high Tory,
very violent, the _Leeds Mercury_, _Leeds Intelligencer_, a most
excellent Tory newspaper,” and thus became accomplished fanatics in all
the burning questions of the day.
[Sidenote: Their aunt’s training.]
Miss Branwell took care that the girls should not lack more homely
knowledge. Each took her share in the day’s work, and learned all
details of it as accurately as any German maiden at her cooking school.
Emily took very kindly to even the hardest housework; there she felt
able and necessary.
A. M. F. ROBINSON: ‘Emily Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Anecdote of Charlotte.]
There is a touching story of Charlotte at six years old which gives
us some notion of the ideal life led by the forlorn little girl at
this time, when, her two elder sisters having been sent to school,
she found herself living at home, the eldest of the motherless brood.
She had read ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ and had been fascinated, young
as she was, by that wondrous allegory. Everything in it was to her
true and real; her little heart had gone forth with Christian on his
pilgrimage to the Golden City, her bright young mind had been fixed
by the Bedford tinker’s description of the glories of the Celestial
Place; and she made up her mind that she too would escape from the
City of Destruction, and gain the haven towards which the weary
spirits of every age have turned with eager longing. But where was
this glittering city, with its streets of gold, its gates of pearl,
its walls of precious stones, its stream of life and throne of light?
Poor little girl! The only place which seemed to her to answer Bunyan’s
description of the celestial town was one which she had heard the
servants discussing with enthusiasm in the kitchen, and its name was
Bradford! So to Bradford little Charlotte Brontë, escaping from that
Haworth parsonage which she believed to be a doomed spot, set off one
day in 1822. Ingenious persons may speculate if they please upon the
sore disappointment which awaited her when, like older people, reaching
the place which she had imagined to be heaven, she found that it was
only Bradford. But she never even reached her imaginary Golden City.
When her tender feet had carried her a mile along the road, she came to
a spot where overhanging trees made the highway dark and gloomy; she
imagined that she had come to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and,
fearing to go forward, was presently discovered by her nurse cowering
by the road side.
T. WEMYSS REID: ‘Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Charlotte at fifteen.]
[Sidenote: First impressions of a school-mate.]
I first saw her coming out of a covered cart, in very old-fashioned
clothes, and looking very cold and miserable. She was coming to
school at Miss Wooler’s. When she appeared in the school-room, her
dress was changed, but just as old. She looked a little old woman, so
short-sighted that she always appeared to be seeking something, and
moving her head from side to side to catch a sight of it. She was very
shy and nervous, and spoke with a strong Irish accent. When a book was
given her, she dropped her head over it till her nose nearly touched,
and when she was told to hold her head up, up went the book after it,
still close to her nose, so that it was not possible to help laughing.
---- ----: _Communication_, quoted by MRS. GASKELL.
* * * * *
I can well imagine that the grave, serious composure, which, when I
knew her, gave her face the dignity of an old Venetian portrait, was
no acquisition of later years, but dated from that early age when
she found herself in the position of an elder sister to motherless
children. But in a girl only just entered on her teens, such an
expression would be called, (to use a country phrase) “old-fashioned;”
and in 1831 ... we must think of her as a little, set, antiquated
girl, very quiet in manners, and very quaint in dress; for, besides
the influence exerted by her father’s ideas concerning the simplicity
of attire befitting the daughters of a country clergyman, her aunt, on
whom the duty of dressing her nieces principally devolved, had never
been in society since she left Penzance, eight or nine years before,
and the Penzance fashions of that day were still dear to her heart.
MRS. GASKELL: ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Miss Nussey’s account of Charlotte at this period.]
[Sidenote: Combined ignorance and precocity.]
She never seemed to me the unattractive little person others designated
her, but certainly she was at this time anything but _pretty_; even her
good points were lost, her naturally beautiful hair of soft silky-brown
being then dry and frizzy-looking, screwed up in tight curls, showing
features that were all the plainer from her exceeding thinness and
want of complexion; she looked “dried in.” A dark, rusty green stuff
dress of old-fashioned make detracted still more from her appearance;
but let her wear what she might, or do what she would, she had ever
the demeanor of a born gentlewoman; vulgarity was an element that
never won the slightest affinity with her nature. Some of the elder
girls, who had been years at school, thought her ignorant. This was
true in one sense; ignorant she was indeed in the elementary education
which is given in schools, but she far surpassed her most advanced
school-fellows in knowledge of what was passing in the world at large,
and in the literature of her country. She knew a thousand things in
these matters unknown to them.
[Sidenote: Near-sightedness.]
[Sidenote: Her hands.]
Music she wished to acquire, for which she had both ear and taste, but
her near-sightedness caused her to stoop so dreadfully in order to see
her notes that she was dissuaded from persevering in the acquirement,
especially as she had at this time an invincible objection to wearing
glasses. Her very taper fingers, tipped with the most circular nails,
did not seem very suited for instrumental execution; but when wielding
the pen or the pencil, they appeared in the very office they were
created for.
[Sidenote: A vegetarian diet.]
[Sidenote: Conscientiousness.]
Her appetite was of the smallest; for years she had not tasted animal
food; she had the greatest dislike to it; she always had something
specially provided for her at our mid-day repast. Toward the close of
the first half-year she was induced to take, little by little, meat
gravy with vegetables, and in the second half-year she commenced taking
a very small portion of animal food daily. She then grew a little bit
plumper, looked younger and more animated, though she was never what
is called lively at this period. She always seemed to feel that a deep
responsibility rested upon her; that she was an object of expense to
those at home, and that she must use every moment to attain her purpose
for which she was sent to school, _i.e._, to fit herself for governess
life. She had almost too much opportunity for her conscientious
diligence. We were so little restricted in our doings, the industrious
might accomplish the appointed tasks of the day and enjoy a little
leisure, but she chose in many things to do double lessons when not
prevented by class arrangement or a companion.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A hard student.]
She did not play or amuse herself when others did. When her companions
were merry round the fire, or otherwise enjoying themselves during the
twilight, which was always a precious time of relaxation, she would be
kneeling close to the window occupied with her studies, and this would
last so long that she was accused of seeing in the dark.
ELLEN NUSSEY: Article on Charlotte Brontë, _Scribner’s Monthly_, now
_The Century_.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Life at home after Charlotte’s return from Miss Wooler’s.]
[Sidenote: Emily on the moors.]
Charlotte staid a year and a half at school, and returned in the
July of 1832 to teach Emily and Anne what she had learned in her
absence--French, English and Drawing was pretty nearly all the
instruction she could give. Happily genius needs no curriculum.
Nevertheless the sisters toiled to extract their utmost boon from
such advantages as came within their range. Every morning from nine
till half-past twelve they worked at their lessons; then they walked
together over the moors, just coming into flower. The moors knew
a different Emily to the quiet girl of fourteen who helped in the
housework and learned her lessons so regularly at home. On the moors
she was gay, frolicsome, almost wild. She would set the others laughing
with her quaint, humorous sallies and genial ways. She was quite at
home there, taking the fledgling birds in her hands so softly that
they were not afraid, and telling stories to them.
A. MARY F. ROBINSON: ‘Emily Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Emily’s appearance in girlhood.]
Emily Brontë had ... a lithesome, graceful figure. She was the tallest
person in the house, except her father. Her hair, which was naturally
as beautiful as Charlotte’s, was in the same unbecoming tight curl
and frizz; and there was the same want of complexion. She had very
beautiful eyes--kind, kindling, liquid eyes; but she did not often
look at you; she was too reserved. Their color might be said to be
dark-gray, at other times dark-blue, they varied so. She talked very
little. She and Anne were like twins--inseparable companions, and in
the very closest sympathy, which never had any interruption.
ELLEN NUSSEY: Article on Charlotte Brontë, _Scribner’s Monthly_, now
_The Century_.
* * * * *
All through her life her temperament was more than merely peculiar. She
inherited not a little of her father’s eccentricity untempered by her
father’s _savoir faire_. Her aversion to strangers has been already
mentioned. When the curates, who formed the only society of Haworth,
found their way to the parsonage, she avoided them as though they had
brought the pestilence in their train. On the rare occasions when she
went out into the world, she would sit absolutely silent in the company
of those who were unfamiliar to her. So intense was this reserve that
even in her own family, where alone she was at ease, something like
dread was mingled with the affection felt towards her.
[Sidenote: Love of animals.]
Her chief delight was to roam on the moors, followed by her dogs, to
whom she would whistle in masculine fashion. Her heart, indeed, was
given to the dumb creatures of the earth. She never forgave those who
ill-treated them, nor trusted those whom they disliked. One is reminded
of Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant” by some traits of Emily Brontë; like the
lady of the poem, her tenderness and charity could reach even
“----the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.”
[Sidenote: Personal courage.]
[Sidenote: Love of home.]
One instance of her remarkable personal courage is related in
‘Shirley,’ where she herself is sketched under the character of the
heroine. It is her adventure with the mad dog which bit her at the door
of the parsonage kitchen while she was offering it water. The brave
girl took an iron from the fire, where it chanced to be heating, and
immediately cauterized the wound on her arm, making a broad, deep scar,
which was there until the day of her death. Not until many weeks after
this did she tell her sisters what had happened. Passionately fond
of her home among the hills, and of the rough Yorkshire people among
whom she had been reared, she sickened and pined away when absent from
Haworth. A strange, untamed and untamable character was hers; and none
but her two sisters ever seem to have appreciated her remarkable merits.
T. WEMYSS REID: ‘Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Emily in 1833.]
In 1833 Emily was nearly fifteen, a tall, long-armed girl, full grown,
elastic of tread; with a slight figure that looked queenly in her
best dresses, but loose and boyish when she slouched over the moors
whistling to her dogs, and taking long strides over the rough earth. A
tall, thin, loose-jointed girl--not ugly, but with irregular features
and a pallid, thick complexion. Her dark-brown hair was naturally
beautiful, and in later days looked well loosely fastened with a tall
comb at the back of her head; but in 1833 she wore it in an unbecoming
tight curl and frizz. She had very beautiful eyes of hazel color....
She had an aquiline nose, a large expressive, prominent mouth. She
talked little. No grace or style in dress belonged to Emily, but under
her awkward clothes her natural movements had the lithe beauty of
the wild creatures that she loved.... Never was a soul with a more
passionate love of Mother Earth, of every weed and flower, of every
bird, beast and insect that lived. She would have peopled the house
with pets had not Miss Branwell kept her niece’s love of animals in due
subjection. Only one dog was allowed, who was admitted into the parlor
at stated hours, but out of doors Emily made friends with all the
beasts and birds. She would come home carrying in her hands some young
bird or rabbit, and softly talking to it as she came. “Ee, Miss Emily,”
the young servant would say, “one would think the bird could understand
you.” “I am sure it can,” Emily would answer. “Oh, I am sure it can.”
[Sidenote: A dual life.]
Two lives went on side by side in her heart, neither ever mingling with
or interrupting the other. Practical housewife with capable hands,
dreamer of strange horrors: each self was independent of the companion
to which it was linked by day and night. People in those days knew
her but as she seemed--“t’ Vicar’s Emily”--a shy, awkward girl, never
teaching in the Sunday-school like her sisters, never talking with the
villagers like merry Branwell, but very good and hearty in helping the
sick and distressed: not pretty in the village estimation--a “slinky
lass,” no prim, trim little body like pretty Anne, nor with Charlotte
Brontë’s taste in dress; just a clever lass with a spirit of her own.
So the village judged her. At home they loved her with her strong
feelings, untidy frocks, indomitable will and ready contempt for the
commonplace; she was appreciated as a dear and necessary member of the
household. Of Emily’s deeper self, her violent genius, neither friend
nor neighbor dreamed in those days.
A. MARY F. ROBINSON: ‘Emily Brontë.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The turning-point in Charlotte’s career.]
It was Charlotte’s visit to Brussels, first as pupil and afterwards as
teacher in the school of Madame Héger, which was the turning-point in
her life, which changed its currents, and gave to it a new purpose and
a new meaning. Up to the moment of that visit she had been the simple,
kindly, truthful Yorkshire girl, endowed with strange faculties,
carried away at times by burning impulses, moved often by emotions
the nature of which she could not fathom, but always hemmed in by her
narrow experiences, her limited knowledge of life and the world. Until
she went to Belgium, her sorest troubles had been associated with her
dislike to the society of strangers, her heaviest burden had been
the necessity under which she lay of tasting that “cup of life as it
is mixed for governesses,” which she detested so heartily. Under the
belief that they could qualify themselves to keep a school of their
own if they had once mastered the delicacies of the French and German
languages, she and Emily set off for this sojourn in Brussels.
One may be forgiven for speculating as to her future lot had she
accepted the offer of marriage she received in her early governess
days, and settled down as the faithful wife of a sober English
gentleman. In that case ‘Shirley’ perhaps might have been written,
but ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Villette’ never. She learned much during her two
years’ sojourn in the Belgian capital; but the greatest of all the
lessons she mastered while there was that self-knowledge the taste of
which is so bitter to the mouth, though so wholesome to the life.
T. WEMYSS REID: ‘Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The sisters’ life in Brussels.]
The flower-market out of doors, with clove-pinks, tall Mary-lilies, and
delicate _roses d’amour_, filling the quaint mediæval square before the
beautiful old façade of the Hôtel de Ville; Sainte-Gudule, with its
spires and arches; the Montagne de la Cour (almost as steep as Haworth
Street), its windows ablaze at night with jewels; the little, lovely
park, its great elms just coming into leaf, its statues just bursting
from their winter sheaths of straw; the galleries of ancient pictures,
their walls a sober glory of colors, blues, deep as a summer night,
rich reds, brown-golds, most vivid greens. All this should have made an
impression on the two home-keeping girls from Yorkshire; and Charlotte,
indeed, perceived something of its beauty and strangeness. But Emily,
from a bitter sense of exile, from a natural narrowness of spirit,
rebelled against it all as an insult to the memory of her home--she
longed, hopelessly, uselessly, for Haworth. The two Brontës were very
different to the Belgian school-girls in Madame Héger’s Pensionnat.
They were, for one thing, ridiculously old to be at school--twenty-four
and twenty-six--and they seemed to feel their position; their speech
was strained and odd; all the “sceptical, wicked, immoral French
novels, over forty of them, the best substitute for French conversation
to be met with,” which the girls had toiled through with so much
singleness of spirit, had not cured the broadness of their accent
nor the artificial idioms of their Yorkshire French. Monsieur Héger,
indeed, considered that they knew no French at all. Their manners, even
among English people, were stiff and prim; the hearty, vulgar, genial
expansion of their Belgian school-fellows must have made them seem as
lifeless as marionettes. Their dress--Haworth had permitted itself
to wonder at the uncouthness of those amazing leg-of-mutton sleeves
(Emily’s pet whim in and out of fashion), at the ill-cut lankness of
those skirts, clumsy enough on round little Charlotte, but a very
caricature of mediævalism on Emily’s tall, thin, slender figure. They
knew they were not in their element, and kept close together, rarely
speaking. Yet, Monsieur Héger, patiently watching, felt the presence of
a strange power under those uncouth exteriors. It was with the delight
of a botanist discovering a rare plant in his garden, of a politician
detecting a future statesman in his nursery, that he perceived the
unusual faculty which lifted his two English pupils above their
school-fellows.... It was Emily who had the larger share of Monsieur
Héger’s admiration.... He gave her credit for logical powers, for a
capacity for argument unusual in a man, and rare, indeed, in a woman.
She, not Charlotte, was the genius in his eyes, although he complained
that her stubborn will rendered her deaf to all reason, when her own
determination, or her own sense of right, was concerned.