_By the same Author:_
THE CREATORS
THE DIVINE FIRE
TWO SIDES OF A QUESTION
THE HELPMATE
KITTY TAILLEUR
MR. AND MRS. NEVILL TYSON
ANN SEVERN AND THE FIELDINGS
ARNOLD WATERLOW: A LIFE
UNCANNY STORIES
THE RECTOR OF WYCK
THE ALLINGHAMS
A CURE OF SOULS
FAR END
HISTORY OF ANTHONY WARING
TALES TOLD BY SIMPSON
ETC.
THE THREE BRONTËS
_by_
MAY SINCLAIR
1912
PREFATORY NOTE
My thanks are due, first and chiefly, to Mr. Clement K. Shorter who
placed all his copyright material at my disposal; and to Mr. G.M.
Williamson and Mr. Robert H. Dodd, of New York, for allowing me to draw
so largely from the Poems of Emily Brontë, published by Messrs. Dodd,
Mead, and Co. in 1902; also to Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, the
publishers of the Complete Poems of Emily Brontë, edited by Mr. Shorter;
and to Mr. Alfred Sutro for permission to use his translation of _Wisdom
and Destiny_. Lastly, and somewhat late, to Mr. Arthur Symons for his
translation from St. John of the Cross. If I have borrowed from him more
than I had any right to without his leave, I hope he will forgive me.
MAY SINCLAIR.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE THREE BRONTËS
APPENDIX I
APPENDIX II
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
When six months ago Mr. Thomas Seccombe suggested that I should write a
short essay on "The Three Brontës" I agreed with some misgiving.
Yet that deed was innocent compared with what I have done now; and, in
any case, the series afforded the offender a certain shelter and
protection. But to come out like this, into the open, with _another_
Brontë book, seems not only a dangerous, but a futile and a fatuous
adventure. All I can say is that I did not mean to do it. I certainly
never meant to write so long a book.
It grew, insidiously, out of the little one. Things happened. New
criticisms opened up old questions. When I came to look carefully into
Mr. Clement Shorter's collection of the _Complete Poems of Emily
Brontë_, I found a mass of material (its existence I, at any rate, had
not suspected) that could not be dealt with in the limits of the
original essay.
The book is, and can only be, the slightest of all slight appreciations.
None the less it has been hard and terrible for me to write it. Not only
had I said nearly all that I had to say already, but I was depressed at
the very start by that conviction of the absurdity of trying to say
anything at all, after all that has been said, about Anne, or Emily, or
Charlotte Brontë.
Anne's case, perhaps, was not so difficult. For obvious reasons, Anne
Brontë will always be comparatively virgin soil. But it was impossible
to write of Charlotte after Mrs. Gaskell; impossible to say more of
Emily than Madame Duclaux has said; impossible to add one single little
fact to the vast material, so patiently amassed, so admirably arranged
by Mr. Clement Shorter. And when it came to appreciation there were Mr.
Theodore Watts-Dunton, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, Mr. Birrell, and
Mrs. Humphry Ward, lying along the ground. When it came to eulogy, after
Mr. Swinburne's _Note on Charlotte Brontë_, neither Charlotte nor Emily
have any need of praise.
And on Emily Brontë, M. Maeterlinck has spoken the one essential, the
one perfect and final and sufficient word. I have "lifted" it
unblushingly; for no other word comes near to rendering the unique, the
haunting, the indestructible impression that she makes.
So, because all the best things about the Brontës have been said
already, I have had to fall back on the humble day-labour of clearing
away some of the rubbish that has gathered round them.
Round Charlotte it has gathered to such an extent that it is difficult
to see her plainly through the mass of it. Much has been cleared away;
much remains. Mrs. Oliphant's dreadful theories are still on record. The
excellence of Madame Duclaux's monograph perpetuates her one serious
error. Mr. Swinburne's _Note_ immortalizes his. M. Héger was dug up
again the other day.
It may be said that I have been calling up ghosts for the mere fun of
laying them; and there might be something in it, but that really these
ghosts still walk. At any rate many people believe in them, even at this
time of day. M. Dimnet believes firmly that poor Mrs. Robinson was in
love with Branwell Brontë. Some of us still think that Charlotte was in
love with M. Héger. They cannot give him up any more than M. Dimnet can
give up Mrs. Robinson.
Such things would be utterly unimportant but that they tend to obscure
the essential quality and greatness of Charlotte Brontë's genius.
Because of them she has passed for a woman of one experience and of one
book. There is still room for a clean sweep of the rubbish that has been
shot here.
In all this, controversy was unavoidable, much as I dislike its
ungracious and ungraceful air. If I have been inclined to undervalue
certain things--"the sojourn in Brussels", for instance--which others
have considered of the first importance, it is because I believe that it
is always the inner life that counts, and that with the Brontës it
supremely counted.
If I have passed over the London period too lightly, it is because I
judge it extraneous and external. If I have tried, cruelly, to take from
Charlotte the little beige gown that she wore at Mr. Thackeray's
dinner-party, it is because her home-made garments seem to suit her
better. She is more herself in skirts that have brushed the moors and
kept some of the soil of Haworth in their hem.
I may seem to have exaggerated her homesickness for Haworth. It may be
said that Haworth was by no means Charlotte's home as it was Emily's. I
am aware that there were moments--hours--when she longed to get away
from it. I have not forgotten how Mary Taylor found her in such an hour,
not long after her return from Brussels, when her very flesh shrank from
the thought of her youth gone and "nothing done"; nothing before her but
long, empty years in Haworth. The fact remains that she was never happy
away from it, and that in Haworth her genius most certainly found itself
at home. And this particular tone of misery and unrest disappeared from
the moment when her genius declared itself, so that I am inclined to see
in it a little personal dissatisfaction, if you will, but chiefly the
unspeakable restlessness and misery of power unrecognized and
suppressed. "Nothing done!" That was her reiterated cry.
Again, if I have overlooked the complexities of Charlotte's character,
it is that the great lines that underlie it may be seen. In my heart I
agree with M. Dimnet that the Brontës were not simple. All the same, I
think that his admirable portrait of Charlotte is spoiled by his
attitude of pity for "_la pauvre fille_", as he persists in calling her.
I think he dwells a shade too much on her small asperities and
acidities, and on that "_ton de critique mesquine_", which he puts down
to her provincialism. No doubt there were moments of suffering and of
irritation, as well as moments of uncontrollable merriment, when
Charlotte lacked urbanity, but M. Dimnet has almost too keen an eye for
them.
In making war on theories I cannot hope to escape a countercharge of
theorizing. Exception may be taken to my own suggestion as to the effect
of _Wuthering Heights_ on Charlotte Brontë's genius. If anybody likes to
fling it on the rubbish heap they may. I may have theorized a little too
much in laying stress on the supernatural element in _Wuthering
Heights_. It is because M. Dimnet has insisted too much on its
brutality. I may have exaggerated Emily Brontë's "mysticism". It is
because her "paganism" has been too much in evidence. It may be said
that I have no more authority for my belief that Emily Brontë was in
love with the Absolute than other people have for theirs, that
Charlotte was in love with M. Héger.
Finally, much that I have said about Emily Brontë's hitherto unpublished
poems is pure theory. But it is theory, I think, that careful
examination of the poems will make good. I may have here and there given
as a "Gondal" poem what is not a "Gondal" poem at all. Still, I believe,
it will be admitted that it is in the cycle of these poems, and not
elsewhere, that we should look for the first germs of _Wuthering
Heights_. The evidence only demonstrates in detail--what has never been
seriously contested--that the genius of Emily Brontë found its sources
in itself.
_10th October, 1911._
The Three Brontës
It is impossible to write of the three Brontës and forget the place they
lived in, the black-grey, naked village, bristling like a rampart on the
clean edge of the moor; the street, dark and steep as a gully, climbing
the hill to the Parsonage at the top; the small oblong house, naked and
grey, hemmed in on two sides by the graveyard, its five windows flush
with the wall, staring at the graveyard where the tombstones, grey and
naked, are set so close that the grass hardly grows between. The church
itself is a burying ground; its walls are tombstones, and its floor
roofs the forgotten and the unforgotten dead.
A low wall and a few feet of barren garden divide the Parsonage from the
graveyard, a few feet between the door of the house and the door in the
wall where its dead were carried through. But a path leads beyond the
graveyard to "a little and a lone green lane", Emily Brontë's lane that
leads to the open moors.
It is the genius of the Brontës that made their place immortal; but it
is the soul of the place that made their genius what it is. You cannot
exaggerate its importance. They drank and were saturated with Haworth.
When they left it they hungered and thirsted for it; they sickened till
the hour of their return. They gave themselves to it with passion, and
their works ring with the shock and interchange of two immortalities.
Haworth is saturated with them. Their souls are henceforth no more to be
disentangled from its soul than their bodies from its earth. All their
poetry, their passion and their joy is there, in this place of their
tragedy, visible, palpable, narrow as the grave and boundless.
In the year eighteen-twenty the Reverend Patrick Brontë and his wife
Maria brought their six children, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick
Branwell, Emily, and Anne, from Thornton, where they were born, to
Haworth. Mr. Brontë was an Irishman, a village schoolmaster who won,
marvellously, a scholarship that admitted him to Cambridge and the
Church of England. Tales have been told of his fathers and his
forefathers, peasants and peasant farmers of Ballynaskeagh in County
Down. They seem to have been notorious for their energy, eccentricity,
imagination, and a certain tendency to turbulence and excess. Tales have
been told of Mr. Brontë himself, of his temper, his egotism, his
selfishness, his fits of morose or savage temper. The Brontës'
biographers, from Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux[A] to Mr. Birrell,
have all been hard on this poor and unhappy and innocent old man. It is
not easy to see him very clearly through the multitude of tales they
tell: how he cut up his wife's silk gown in a fit of passion; how he
fired off pistols in a series of fits of passion; how, in still gloomier
and more malignant fits, he used to go for long solitary walks. And when
you look into the matter you find that the silk gown was, after all, a
cotton one, and that he only cut the sleeves out, and _then_ walked into
Keighley and brought a silk gown back with him instead; that when he
was a young man at Drumballyroney he practised pistol firing, not as a
safety valve for temper but as a manly sport, and that as a manly sport
he kept it up. As for solitary walks, there is really no reason why a
father should not take them; and if Mr. Brontë had insisted on
accompanying Charlotte and Emily in their walks, his conduct would have
been censured just the same, and, I think, with considerably more
reason. As it happened, Mr. Brontë, rather more than most fathers, made
companions of his children when they were little. This is not quite the
same thing as making himself a companion for them, and the result was a
terrific outburst of infant precocity; but this hardly justifies Mrs.
Gaskell and Madame Duclaux. They seem to have thought that they were
somehow appeasing the outraged spirits of Emily and Charlotte by
blackening their father and their brother; whereas, if anything could
give pain to Charlotte and Emily and innocent Anne in heaven, it would
be the knowledge of what Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux have done for
them.
[Footnote A: A. Mary F. Robinson.]
There was injustice in all that zeal as well as indiscretion, for Mr.
Brontë had his good points as fathers go. Think what the fathers of the
Victorian era could be, and what its evangelical parsons often were; and
remember that Mr. Brontë was an evangelical parson, and the father of
Emily and Charlotte, not of a brood of gentle, immaculate Jane Austens,
and that he was confronted suddenly and without a moment's warning with
Charlotte's fame. Why, the average evangelical parson would have been
shocked into apoplexy at the idea of any child of his producing
_Wuthering Heights_ or _Jane Eyre_. Charlotte's fame would have looked
to him exceedingly like infamy. We know what Charles Kingsley, the least
evangelical of parsons, once thought of Charlotte. And we know what Mr.
Brontë thought of her. He was profoundly proud of his daughter's genius;
there is no record and no rumour of any criticism on his part, of any
remonstrance or amazement. He was loyal to Charlotte to the last days of
his life, when he gave her defence into Mrs. Gaskell's hands; for which
confidence Mrs. Gaskell repaid him shockingly.
But he was the kind of figure that is irresistible to the caustic or
humorous biographer. There was something impotently fiery in him, as if
the genius of Charlotte and Emily had flicked him in irony as it passed
him by. He wound himself in yards and yards and yards of white cravat,
and he wrote a revolutionary poem called "Vision of Hell". It is easy to
make fun of his poems, but they were no worse, or very little worse,
than his son Branwell's, so that he may be pardoned if he thought
himself more important than his children. Many fathers of the Victorian
era did.
And he _was_ important as a temporary vehicle of the wandering creative
impulse. It struggled and strove in him and passed from him, choked in
yards and yards of white cravat, to struggle and strive again in
Branwell and in Anne. As a rule the genius of the race is hostile to the
creative impulse, and the creative impulse is lucky if it can pierce
through to one member of a family. In the Brontës it emerges at five
different levels, rising from abortive struggle to supreme
achievement--from Mr. Brontë to his son Branwell, from Branwell to Anne,
from Anne to Charlotte, and from Charlotte to Emily. And Maria, who
died, was an infant prodigy.
And Mr. Brontë is important because he was the tool used by their
destiny to keep Charlotte and Emily in Haworth.
The tragedy we are too apt to call their destiny began with their
babyhood, when the mother and six children were brought to Haworth
Parsonage and the prospect of the tombstones. They had not been there
eighteen months before the mother sickened and died horribly of cancer.
She had to be isolated as far as possible. The Parsonage house was not
large, and it was built with an extreme and straight simplicity; two
front rooms, not large, right and left of the narrow stone-flagged
passage, a bedroom above each, and between, squeezed into the small
spare space above the passage, a third room, no bigger than a closet and
without a fireplace. This third room is important in the story of the
Brontës, for, when their mother's illness declared itself, it was in
this incredibly small and insufferably unwholesome den that the five
little girls were packed, heaven knows how, and it was here that the
seeds of tuberculosis were sown in their fragile bodies. After their
mother's death the little fatal room was known as the children's study
(you can see, in a dreadful vision, the six pale little faces, pressed
together, looking out of the window on to the graves below). It was used
again as a night-nursery, and later still as the sleeping-place shared
by two, if not three, of the sisters, two of whom were tuberculous.
The mother died and was buried in a vault under the floor of the church,
not far from the windows of her house. Her sister, Miss Branwell, came
up from Penzance to look after the children. You can see this small,
middle-aged, early Victorian spinster, exiled for ever from the sunshine
of the town she loved, dragging out her sad, fastidious life in a cold
and comparatively savage country that she unspeakably disliked. She took
possession of the room her sister died in (it was the most cheerful room
in the house), and lived in it. Her nieces had to sit there with her
for certain hours while she taught them sewing and all the early
Victorian virtues. Their father made himself responsible for the rest of
their education, which he conducted with considerable vigour and
originality. Maria, the eldest, was the child of promise. Long before
Maria was eleven he "conversed" with her on "the leading topics of the
day, with as much pleasure and freedom as with any grown-up person".
For this man, so gloomy, we are told, and so morose, found pleasure in
taking his tiny children out on to the moors, where he entertained them
alternately with politics and tales of brutality and horror. At six
years old each little Brontë had its view of the political situation;
and it was not until a plague of measles and whooping-cough found out
their tender youth that their father realized how very young and small
and delicate they were, and how very little, after all, he understood
about a nursery. In a sudden frantic distrust of the climate of Haworth,
of Miss Branwell, and his own system, he made up his mind to send Maria
and Elizabeth and Charlotte and Emily to school.
And there was only one school within his means, the Clergy Daughters'
School, established at Cowan Bridge in an unwholesome valley. It has
been immortalized in _Jane Eyre_, together with its founder and patron,
the Reverend Carus Wilson. There can be no doubt that the early
Victorian virtues, self-repression, humility, and patience under
affliction, were admirably taught at Cowan Bridge. And if the carnal
nature of the Clergy Daughters resisted the militant efforts of Mr.
Carus Wilson, it was ultimately subdued by low diet and primitive
drainage working together in an unwholesome valley. Mr. Carus Wilson,
indeed, was inspired by a sublime antagonism to the claims of the
perishable body; but he seems to have pushed his campaign against the
flesh a bit too far, and was surprised at his own success when, one
after another, the extremely perishable bodies of those children were
laid low by typhus.
The fever did not touch the four little Brontës. They had another
destiny. Their seed of dissolution was sown in that small stifling room
at Haworth, and was reaped now at Cowan Bridge. First Maria, then
Elizabeth, sickened, and was sent home to die. Charlotte stayed on for a
while with Emily. She ran wild, and hung about the river, watching it,
and dabbling her feet and hands in the running water. Their doom waited
for Charlotte and for Emily.
There is no record of Elizabeth except that, like Anne Brontë, she was
"gentle". But Maria lived in Charlotte's passionate memory, and will
live for ever as Helen Burns, the school-fellow of Jane Eyre. Of those
five infant prodigies, she was the most prodigious. She was the first of
the children to go down into the vault under Haworth Church; you see her
looking back on her sad way, a small, reluctant ghost, lovely,
infantile, and yet maternal. Under her name on the flat tombstone a
verse stands, premonitory, prophetic, calling to her kindred: "Be ye
also ready."
Charlotte was nine years old when her sisters died. Tragedy tells at
nine years old. It lived all her life in her fine nerves, reinforced by
shock after shock of terror and of anguish.
But for the next seven years, spent at the Parsonage without a break,
tragedy was quiescent. Day after day, year after year passed, and
nothing happened. And the children of the Parsonage, thrown on
themselves and on each other, were exuberantly happy. They had the
freedom of the moors, and of the worlds, as wild, as gorgeous, as
lonely, as immeasurable, which they themselves created. They found out
that they were not obliged to be the children of the Parsonage; they
could be, and they were, anything they chose, from the Duke of
Wellington down to citizens of Verdopolis. For a considerable number of
years they were the "Islanders". "It was in 1827" (Charlotte, at
thirteen, records the date with gravity--it was so important) "that our
plays were established: _Young Men_, June 1826; _Our Fellows_, July
1827; _The Islanders_, December 1827. These are our three great plays
that are not kept secret."
But there were secret plays, Emily's and Charlotte's; and these you
gather to be the shy and solitary flights of Emily's and Charlotte's
genius. They seem to have required absolutely no impulsion from without.
The difficult thing for these small children was to stop writing. Their
fire consumed them, and left their bodies ashen white, fragile as ashes.
And yet they were not, they could not have been, the sedentary,
unwholesome little creatures they might seem to be. The girls were kept
hard at work with their thin arms, brushing carpets, dusting furniture,
and making beds. And for play they tramped the moors with their brother;
they breasted the keen and stormy weather; the sun, the moon, the stars,
and the winds knew them; and it is of these fierce, radiant, elemental
things that Charlotte and Emily wrote as no women before them had ever
written. Conceive the vitality and energy implied in such a life; and
think, if you can, of these two as puny, myopic victims of the lust of
literature. It was from the impressions they took in those seven years
that their immortality was made.
And then, for a year and a half, Charlotte went to school again, that
school of Miss Wooler's at Roe Head, where Ellen Nussey found her, "a
silent, weeping, dark little figure in the large bay-window". She was
then sixteen.
Two years later she went back to Miss Wooler's school as a teacher.
In the register of the Clergy Daughters' School there are two immortal
entries:
"Charlotte Brontë.... Left school, June 1st, 1825--Governess."
"Emily Brontë.... Left, June 1st, 1825. Subsequent career--Governess."
They did not question the arrangement. They were not aware of any other
destiny. They never doubted that the boy, Branwell, was the child of
promise, who was to have a glorious career. In order that he should have
it the sisters left Haworth again and again, forcing themselves to the
exile that destroyed them, and the work they hated. It was Charlotte and
Anne who showed themselves most courageous and determined in the
terrible adventure; Emily, who was courage and determination incarnate,
failed. Homesickness had become a disease with them, an obsession,
almost a madness. They longed with an immitigable longing for their
Parsonage-house, their graveyard, and their moors. Emily was consumed by
it; Anne languished; Charlotte was torn between it and her passion for
knowledge.
She took Emily back with her to Roe Head as a pupil, and Emily nearly
died of it. She sent Emily home, and little Anne, the last victim, took
Emily's place. She and Charlotte went with the school when it was
removed to Dewsbury Moor. Then Emily, who had nearly died of Roe Head,
shamed by Charlotte's and Anne's example, went to Halifax as a teacher
in Miss Patchett's Academy for Young Ladies. She was at Halifax--Halifax
of all places--for six months, and nearly died of Halifax. And after
that Charlotte and Anne set out on their careers as nursery-governesses.
It was all that they considered themselves fit for. Anne went to a Mrs.
Ingham at Blake Hall, where she was homesick and miserable. Charlotte
went to the Sidgwicks at Stonegappe near Skipton, where "one of the
pleasantest afternoons I spent--indeed, the only one at all
pleasant--was when Mr. Sidgwick walked out with his children, and I had
orders to follow a little way behind". You have an impression of years
of suffering endured at Stonegappe. As a matter of fact, Charlotte was
there hardly three months--May, June, July, eighteen-thirty-nine.
And most of the time their brother Branwell was either at Bradford or at
Haworth, dreaming of greatness, and drinking at the "Black Bull". The
"Black Bull" stands disastrously near to the Parsonage, at the corner of
the churchyard, with its parlour windows looking on the graves. Branwell
was the life and soul of every party of commercial travellers that
gathered there. Conviviality took strange forms at Haworth. It had a
Masonic Lodge of the Three Graces, with John Brown, the grave-digger,
for Worshipful Master. Branwell was at one and the same time secretary
to the Three Graces and to the Haworth Temperance Society. When he was
not entertaining bagmen, he was either at Bradford painting bad
portraits, or at Haworth pouring out verses, fearfully long, fatally
fluent verses, and writing hysterical letters to the editor of
_Blackwood's Magazine_.
One formidable letter (the third he sent) is headed in large letters:
"Sir, read what I write." It begins: "And would to Heaven you would
believe in me, for then you would attend to me and act upon it", and
ends: "You lost an able writer in James Hogg, and God grant you may get
one in Patrick Branwell Brontë." Another followed, headed: "Sir, read
now at last", and ending, "Condemn not unheard". In a final letter
Branwell inquires whether Mr. Blackwood thinks his magazine "so perfect
that no addition to its power would be either possible or desirable",
and whether it is pride that actuates him, or custom, or prejudice, and
conjures him: "Be a man, sir!"
Nothing came of it. Mr. Blackwood refused to be a man.
Yet Branwell had his chance. He went to London, but nothing came of it.
He went to Bradford and had a studio there, but nothing came of it. He
lived for a brief period in a small provincial Bohemia. It was his best
and happiest period, but nothing came of it beyond the letters and the
reams of verse he sent to Leyland the sculptor. There was something
brilliant and fantastic about the boy that fascinated Leyland. But a
studio costs money, and Branwell had to give his up and go back to
Haworth and the society of John Brown the stone-mason and grave-digger.
That John Brown was a decent fellow you gather from the fact that on a
journey to Liverpool he had charge of Branwell, when Branwell was at his
worst. They had affectionate names for each other. Branwell is the
Philosopher, John Brown is the Old Knave of Trumps. The whole trouble
with Branwell was that he could not resist the temptation of impressing
the grave-digger. He himself was impressed by the ironic union in the
Worshipful Master of conviviality and a sinister occupation.
A letter of Branwell's (preserved by the grave-digger in a quaint
devotion to his friend's memory) has achieved an immortality denied to
his "Effusions". Nothing having come of the "Effusions", Branwell, to
his infinite credit, followed his sisters' example, and became tutor
with a Mr. Postlethwaite. The irony of his situation pleased him, and
he wrote to the Old Knave of Trumps thus: "I took a half-year's farewell
of old friend whisky at Kendal on the night after I left. There was a
party of gentlemen at the Royal Hotel, and I joined them. We ordered in
supper and whisky-toddy as hot as hell! They thought I was a physician,
and put me in the chair. I gave several toasts that were washed down at
the same time till the room spun round and the candles danced in our
eyes.... I found myself in bed next morning with a bottle of porter, a
glass, and a corkscrew beside me. Since then I have not tasted anything
stronger than milk-and-water, nor, I hope, shall, till I return at
midsummer; when we will see about it. I am getting as fat as Prince
William at Springhead, and as godly as his friend Parson Winterbotham.
My hand shakes no longer. I ride to the banker's at Ulverston with Mr.
Postlethwaite, and sit drinking tea, and talking scandal with old
ladies. As for the young ones! I have one sitting by me just
now--fair-faced, blue-eyed, dark-haired, sweet eighteen--she little
thinks the devil is so near her!"--and a great deal more in the same
silly, post-Byronic strain.
In his postscript Branwell says: "Of course you won't show this letter",
and of course John Brown showed it all round. It was far too good to be
kept to himself; John Brown's brother thought it so excellent that he
committed it to memory. This was hard on Branwell. The letter is too
fantastic to be used against him as evidence of his extreme depravity,
but it certainly lends some support to Mrs. Gaskell's statements that he
had begun already, at two-and-twenty, to be an anxiety to his family.
Haworth, that schooled his sisters to a high and beautiful austerity,
was bad for Branwell.
He stayed with Mr. Postlethwaite for a month longer than Charlotte
stayed with the Sidgwicks.
Then, for a whole year, Charlotte was at Haworth, doing housemaid's
work, and writing poems, and amusing herself at the expense of her
father's curates. She had begun to find out the extent to which she
could amuse herself. She also had had "her chance". She had refused two
offers of marriage, preferring the bondage and the exile that she knew.
Nothing more exhilarating than a proposal that you have rejected. Those
proposals did Charlotte good. But it was not marriage that she wanted.
She found it (for a year) happiness enough to be at Haworth, to watch
the long comedy of the curates as it unrolled itself before her. She saw
most things that summer (her twenty-fifth) with the ironic eyes of the
comic spirit, even Branwell. She wrote to Miss Nussey: "A distant
relation of mine, one Patrick Boanerges, has set off to seek his fortune
in the wild, wandering, knight-errant-like capacity of clerk on the
Leeds and Manchester Railroad." And she goes on to chaff Miss Nussey
about Celia Amelia, the curate. "I know Mrs. Ellen is burning with
eagerness to hear something about W. Weightman, whom she adores in her
heart, and whose image she cannot efface from her memory."
Some of her critics, including Mrs. Oliphant (far less indulgent than
the poor curates who forgave her nobly), have grudged Charlotte her
amusement. There is nothing, from her fame downwards, that Mrs. Oliphant
did not grudge her. Mr. Birrell sternly disapproves; even Mr. Swinburne,
at the height of his panegyric, is put off. Perhaps Charlotte's humour
was not her most attractive quality; but nobody seems to have seen the
pathos and the bravery of it. Neither have they seen that Miss Nussey
was at the bottom of its worst development, the "curate-baiting". Miss
Nussey used to go and stay at Haworth for weeks at a time. Haworth was
not amusing, and Miss Nussey had to be amused. All this school-girlish
jesting, the perpetual and rather tiresome banter, was a playing down to
Miss Nussey. It was a kind of tender "baiting" of Miss Nussey, who had
tried on several occasions to do Charlotte good. And it was the natural,
healthy rebound of the little Irish _gamine_ that lived in Charlotte
Brontë, bursting with cleverness and devilry. I, for my part, am glad to
think that for one happy year she gave it full vent.
She was only twenty-four. Even as late as the mid-Victorian era to be
twenty-four and unmarried was to be middle-aged. But (this cannot be too
much insisted on) Charlotte Brontë was the revolutionist who changed all
that. She changed it not only in her novels but in her person. Here
again she has been misrepresented. There are no words severe enough for
Mrs. Oliphant's horrible portrait of her as a plain-faced, lachrymose,
middle-aged spinster, dying, visibly, to be married, obsessed for ever
with that idea, for ever whining over the frustration of her sex. What
Mrs. Oliphant, "the married woman", resented in Charlotte Brontë, over
and above her fame, was Charlotte's unsanctioned knowledge of the
mysteries, her intrusion into the veiled places, her unbaring of the
virgin heart. That her genius was chiefly concerned in it does not seem
to have occurred to Mrs. Oliphant, any more than it occurred to her to
notice the impression that Charlotte Brontë made on her male
contemporaries. It is doubtful if one of them thought of her as Mrs.
Oliphant would have us think. They gave her the tender, deferent
affection they would have given to a charming child. Even the very
curates saw in her, to their amazement, the spirit of undying youth.
Small as a child, and fragile, with soft hair and flaming eyes, and
always the pathetic, appealing plainness of a plain child, with her
child's audacity and shyness, her sudden, absurd sallies and retreats,
she had a charm made the more piquant by her assumption of austerity.
George Henry Lewes was gross and flippant, and he could not see it;
Branwell's friend, Mr. Grundy, was Branwell's friend, and he missed it.
Mrs. Oliphant ranges herself with Mr. Grundy and George Henry Lewes.
But Charlotte's fun was soon over, and she became a nursery-governess
again at Mrs. White's, of Rawdon. Anne was with Mrs. Robinson, at Thorp
Green.
Emily was at Haworth, alone.
That was in eighteen-forty-one. Years after their death a little black
box was found, containing four tiny scraps of paper, undiscovered by
Charlotte when she burnt every line left by Anne and Emily except their
poems. Two of these four papers were written by Emily, and two by Anne;
each sister keeping for the other a record of four years. They begin in
eighteen-forty-one. Emily was then twenty-four and Anne a year and a
half younger. Nothing can be more childlike, more naïve. Emily heads her
diary:
A PAPER to be opened
when Anne is
25 years old,
or my next birthday after
if
all be well.
Emily Jane Brontë. July the 30th, 1841.
She says: "It is Friday evening, near nine o'clock--wild rainy weather.
I am seated in the dining-room, having just concluded tidying our
desk-boxes, writing this document. Papa is in the parlour--Aunt upstairs
in her room.... Victoria and Adelaide are ensconced in the peat-house.
Keeper is in the kitchen--Hero in his cage."
Having accounted for Victoria and Adelaide, the tame geese, Keeper, the
dog, and Hero, the hawk, she notes the whereabouts of Charlotte,
Branwell, and Anne. And then (with gravity):
"A scheme is at present in agitation for setting us up in a school of
our own."... "This day four years I wonder whether we shall be dragging
on in our present condition or established to our hearts' content."
Then Emily dreams her dream.
"I guess that on the time appointed for the opening of this paper we,
_i.e._ Charlotte, Anne, and I, shall be all merrily seated in our own
sitting-room in some pleasant and flourishing seminary, having just
gathered in for the midsummer holiday. Our debts will be paid off and we
shall have cash in hand to a considerable amount. Papa, Aunt, and
Branwell, will either have been or be coming to visit us."
And Anne writes with equal innocence (it is delicious, Anne's diary):
"Four years ago I was at school. Since then I have been a governess at
Blake Hall, left it, come to Thorp Green, and seen the sea and York
Minster."... "We have got Keeper, got a sweet little cat and lost it,
and also got a hawk. Got a wild goose which has flown away, and three
tame ones, one of which has been killed."
It is Emily who lets out the dreary secret of the dream--the debts which
could not be paid; probably Branwell's.
But the "considerable amount of cash in hand" was to remain a dream.
Nothing came of Branwell's knight-errantry. He muddled the accounts of
the Leeds and Manchester Railroad and was sent home. It was not good for
Branwell to be a clerk at a lonely wayside station. His disaster, which
they much exaggerated, was a shock to the three sisters. They began to
have misgivings, premonitions of Branwell's destiny.
And from Mrs. White's at Rawdon, Charlotte sends out cry after desolate
cry. Again we have an impression of an age of exile, but really the
exile did not last long, not much longer than Emily's imprisonment in
the Academy for Young Ladies, nothing like so long as Anne's miserable
term.
The exile really began in 'forty-two, when Charlotte and Emily left
England for Brussels and Madame Héger's Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the
Rue d'Isabelle. It is supposed to have been the turning-point in
Charlotte's career. She was then twenty-six, Emily twenty-four.
It is absurd and it is pathetic, but Charlotte's supreme ambition at
that time was to keep a school, a school of her own, like her friend
Miss Wooler. There was a great innocence and humility in Charlotte. She
was easily taken in by any of those veiled, inimical spectres of the
cross-roads that youth mistakes for destiny. She must have refused to
look too closely at the apparition; it was enough for her that she saw
in it the divine thing--liberty. Her genius was already struggling in
her. She had begun to feel under her shoulders the painful piercing of
her wings. Her friend, Mary Taylor, had written to her from Brussels
telling her of pictures and cathedrals. Charlotte tells how it woke her
up. "I hardly know what swelled in my breast as I read her letter: such
a vehement impatience of restraint and steady work; such a strong wish
for wings--wings such as wealth can furnish; such an urgent desire to
see, to know, to learn; something internal seemed to expand bodily for a
minute. I was tantalized by the consciousness of faculties unexercised."
But Charlotte's "wings" were not "such as wealth can furnish". They were
to droop, almost to die, in Brussels.
Emily was calmer. Whether she mistook it for her destiny or not, she
seems to have acquiesced when Charlotte showed her the veiled figure at
the cross-roads, to have been led blindfold by Charlotte through the
"streaming and starless darkness" that took them to Brussels. The rest
she endured with a stern and terrible resignation. It is known from her
letters what the Pensionnat was to Charlotte. Heaven only knows what it
must have been to Emily. Charlotte, with her undying passion for
knowledge and the spectacle of the world, with her psychological
interest in M. Héger and his wife, Charlotte hardly came out of it with
her soul alive. But Emily was not interested in M. Héger nor in his
wife, nor in his educational system. She thought his system was no good
and told him so. What she thought of his wife is not recorded.
Then, in their first year of Brussels, their old aunt, Miss Branwell,
died. That was destiny, the destiny that was so kind to Emily. It sent
her and her sister back to Haworth and it kept her there. Poor Anne was
fairly launched on her career; she remained in her "situation", and
somebody had to look after Mr. Brontë and the house. Things were going
badly and sadly at the Parsonage. Branwell was there, drinking; and
Charlotte was even afraid that her father ... also sometimes ...
perhaps....
She left Emily to deal with them and went back to Brussels as a pupil
teacher, alone. She went in an agony of self-reproach, desiring more and
more knowledge, a perfect, inalienable, indestructible possession of
the German language, and wondering whether it were right to satisfy that
indomitable craving. By giving utterance to this self-reproach, so
passionate, so immense, so disproportioned to the crime, the innocent
Charlotte laid herself open to an unjust suspicion. Innocent and unaware
she went, and--it is her own word--she was "punished" for it.
Nothing that she had yet known of homesickness could compare with that
last year of solitary and unmitigated exile. It is supposed, even by the
charitable, that whatever M. Héger did or did not do for Charlotte, he
did everything for her genius. As a matter of fact, it was at Brussels
that she suffered the supreme and ultimate abandonment. She no longer
felt the wild unknown thing stirring in her with wings. So little could
M. Héger do for it that it refused to inhabit the same house with him.
She records the result of that imprisonment a few weeks after her
release: "There are times now when it appears to me as if all my ideas
and feelings, except a few friendships and affections, are changed from
what they used to be; something in me, which used to be enthusiasm, is
tamed down and broken."
At Brussels surely enlightenment must have come to her. She must have
seen, as Emily saw, that in going that way, she had mistaken and done
violence to her destiny.
She went back to Haworth where it waited for her, where it had turned
even the tragedy of her family to account. Everything conspired to keep
her there. The school was given up. She tells why. "It is on Papa's
account; he is now, as you know, getting old, and it grieves me to tell
you that he is losing his sight. I have felt for some months that I
ought not to be away from him; and I feel now that it would be too
selfish to leave (at least as long as Branwell and Anne are absent) to
pursue selfish interests of my own. With the help of God I will try to
deny myself in this matter, and to wait."
And with the help of God she waited.
There are three significant entries in Emily's sealed paper for
eighteen-forty-five. "Now I don't desire a school at all, and none of us
have any great longing for it." "I am quite contented for myself ...
seldom or never troubled with nothing to do and merely desiring that
everybody could be as comfortable as myself and as undesponding, and
then we should have a very tolerable world of it." "I have plenty of
work on hand, and writing...." This, embedded among details of an
incomparable innocence: "We have got Flossy; got and lost Tiger; lost
the hawk, Hero, which, with the geese, was given away, and is doubtless
dead."
And Anne, as naïve as a little nun, writes in _her_ sealed paper: "Emily
is upstairs ironing. I am sitting in the dining-room in the
rocking-chair before the fire with my feet on the fender. Papa is in the
parlour. Tabby and Martha are, I think, in the kitchen. Keeper and
Flossy are, I do not know where. Little Dick is hopping in his cage."
And then, "Emily ... is writing some poetry.... I wonder what it is
about?"
That is the only clue to the secret that is given. These childlike
diaries are full of the "Gondal Chronicles",[A] an interminable fantasy
in which for years Emily collaborated with Anne. They flourished the
"Gondal Chronicles" in each other's faces, with positive bravado, trying
to see which could keep it up the longer. Under it all there was a
mystery; for, as Charlotte said of their old play, "Best plays were
secret plays," and the sisters kept their best hidden. And then suddenly
the "Gondal Chronicles" were dropped, the mystery broke down. All three
of them had been writing poems; they had been writing poems for years.
Some of Emily's dated from her first exile at Roe Head. Most of Anne's
sad songs were sung in her house of bondage. From Charlotte, in her
Brussels period, not a line.
[Footnote A: See _supra_, pp. 193 to 209.]
But at Haworth, in the years that followed her return and found her
free, she wrote nearly all her maturer poems (none of them were
excessively mature): she wrote _The Professor_, and close upon _The
Professor_, _Jane Eyre_. In the same term that found her also, poor
child, free, and at Haworth, Anne wrote _Agnes Grey_ and _The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall_.
And Emily wrote _Wuthering Heights_.
They had found their destiny--at Haworth.
* * * * *
Every conceivable theory has been offered to account for the novels that
came so swiftly and incredibly from these three sisters. It has been
said that they wrote them merely to pay their debts when they found that
poems did not pay. It would be truer to say that they wrote them because
it was their destiny to write them, and because their hour had come, and
that they published them with the dimmest hope of a return.
Before they knew where they were, Charlotte found herself involved in
what she thought was a businesslike and masculine correspondence with
publishing firms.
The _Poems_ by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, appeared first, and
nothing happened. _The Professor_ travelled among publishers, and
nothing happened. Then, towards the end of the fourth year there came
_Jane Eyre_, and Charlotte was famous.
But not Emily. _Wuthering Heights_ appeared also, and nothing happened.
It was bound in the same volume with Anne's humble tale. Its lightning
should have scorched and consumed _Agnes Grey_, but nothing happened.
Ellis and Acton Bell remained equals in obscurity, recognized only by
their association with the tremendous Currer. When it came to publishing
_The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_, and association became confusion,
Charlotte and Anne went up to London to prove their separate identity.
Emily stayed at Haworth, superbly indifferent to the proceedings. She
was unseen, undreamed of, unrealized, and in all her life she made no
sign.
But, in a spirit of reckless adventure, Charlotte and Anne walked the
seven miles to Keighley on a Friday evening in a thunderstorm, and took
the night train up. On the Saturday morning they appeared in the office
at Cornhill to the amazement of Mr. George Smith and Mr. Williams. With
childlike innocence and secrecy they hid in the Chapter Coffee-house in
Paternoster Row, and called themselves the Misses Brown. When
entertainment was offered them, they expressed a wish to hear Dr. Croly
preach. They did not hear him; they only heard _The Barber of Seville_
at Covent Garden. They tried, with a delicious solemnity, to give the
whole thing an air of business, but it was really a breathless,
infantile escapade of three days. Three days out of four years.
* * * * *
And in those four years poor Branwell's destiny found him also. After
many minor falls and penitences and relapses, he seemed at length to
have settled down. He had been tutor for two and a half years with the
Robinsons at Thorp Green, in the house where Anne was a governess. He
was happy at first; an ominous happiness. Then Anne began to be aware of
something.
Mr. Birrell has said rather unkindly that he has no use for this young
man. Nobody had any use for him. Not the editors to whom he used to
write so hysterically. Not the Leeds and Manchester Railroad Company.
And certainly not Mrs. Robinson, the lady for whom he conceived that
insane and unlawful passion which has been made to loom so large in the
lives of the Brontës. After all the agony and indignation that has
gathered round this episode, it is clear enough now, down to the last
sordid details. The feverish, degenerate, utterly irresponsible Branwell
not only declared his passion, but persuaded himself, against the
evidence of his senses, that it was returned. The lady (whom he must
have frightened horribly) told her husband, who instantly dismissed
Branwell.
Branwell never got over it.
He was destined to die young, and, no doubt, if there had been no Mrs.
Robinson, some other passion would have killed him. Still, it may be
said with very little exaggeration that he died of it. He had not
hitherto shown any signs of tuberculosis. It may be questioned whether
without this predisposing cause he would have developed it. He had had
his chance to survive. _He_ had never been packed, like his sisters,
first one of five, then one of three, into a closet not big enough for
one. But he drank harder after the Robinson affair than he had ever
drunk before, and he added opium to drink. Drink and opium gave
frightful intensity to the hallucination of which, in a sense, he died.
It took him more than three years, from July, eighteen-forty-five, the
date of his dismissal, to September, eighteen-forty-eight, the date of
his death.