shortcomings. He has been charged with first spoiling the boy, and then
neglecting him. In reality his only error (a most unusual one in an
early Victorian father) was that he believed in his son's genius. When
London and the Royal Academy proved beyond him he had him taught at
Bradford. He gave him a studio there. He had already given him an
education that at least enabled him to obtain tutorships, if not to keep
them. The Parsonage must have been a terrible place for Branwell, but it
was not in the Vicar's power to make it more attractive than the Bull
Inn. Branwell was not a poet like his sisters, and moors meant nothing
to him. To be sure, when he went into Wales and saw Penmaenmawr, he
wrote a poem about it. But the poem is not really about Penmaenmawr. It
is all about Branwell; Penmaenmawr _is_ Branwell, a symbol of his
colossal personality and of his fate. For Branwell was a monstrous
egoist. He was not interested in his sisters or in his friends, or
really in Mrs. Robinson. He was interested only in himself. What could a
poor vicar do with a son like that? There was nothing solid in Branwell
that you could take hold of and chastise. There was nothing you could
appeal to. His affection for his family was three-fourths
sentimentalism. Still, what the Vicar could do he did do. When Branwell
was mad with drink and opium he never left him. There is no story more
grim and at the same time more poignant and pathetic than that which
Mrs. Gaskell tells of his devotion to his son in this time of the boy's
ruin. Branwell slept in his father's room. He would doze all day, and
rage all night, threatening his father's life. In the morning he would
go to his sisters and say: "The poor old man and I have had a terrible
night of it. He does his best, the poor old man, but it is all over with
me." He died in his father's arms while Emily and little Anne looked on.
They say that he struggled to his feet and died standing, to prove the
strength of his will; but some biographer has robbed him of this poor
splendour. It was enough for his sisters--and it should be enough for
anybody--that his madness left him with the onset of his illness, and
that he went from them penitent and tender, purified by the mystery and
miracle of death.
That was on Sunday, the twenty-fourth of September. From that day Emily
sickened. She caught cold at Branwell's funeral. On September the
thirtieth she was in church listening to his funeral sermon. After that,
she never crossed the threshold of the Parsonage till in December her
dead body was carried over it, to lie beside her brother under the
church floor.
In October, a week or two after Branwell's death, Charlotte wrote:
"Emily has a cold and cough at present." "Emily's cold and cough are
very obstinate. I fear she has pain in her chest, and I sometimes catch
a shortness in her breathing when she has moved at all quickly." In
November: "I told you Emily was ill, in my last letter. She has not
rallied yet. She is very ill.... I think Emily seems the nearest thing
to my heart in all the world." And in December: "Emily suffers no more
from pain or weakness now ... there is no Emily in time, or on earth
now.... We are very calm at present. Why should we be otherwise? The
anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of
death is gone by: the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No
need to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not
feel them. She died in a time of promise.... But it is God's will, and
the place where she has gone is better than that which she has left."
It could have been hardly daylight on the moors the morning when
Charlotte went out to find that last solitary sprig of heather which she
laid on Emily's pillow for Emily to see when she awoke. Emily's eyes
were so drowsed with death that she could not see it. And yet it could
not have been many hours later when a fire was lit in her bedroom, and
she rose and dressed herself. Madame Duclaux[A] tells how she sat before
the fire, combing her long, dark hair, and how the comb dropped from her
weak fingers, and fell under the grate. And how she sat there in her
mortal apathy; and how, when the servant came to her, she said dreamily:
"Martha, my comb's down there; I was too weak to stoop and pick it up."
[Footnote A: "Emily Brontë": _Eminent Women Series_.]
She dragged herself down to the sitting-room, and died there, about two
o'clock. She must have had some horror of dying in that room of death
overhead; for, at noon, when the last pains seized her, she refused to
be taken back to it. Unterrified, indomitable, driven by her immortal
passion for life, she fought terribly. Death took her as she tried to
rise from the sofa and break from her sisters' arms that would have laid
her there. Profoundly, piteously alienated, she must have felt that Anne
and Charlotte were in league with death; that they fought with her and
bound her down; and that in her escape from them she conquered.
Another month and Anne sickened. As Emily died of Branwell's death, so
Emily's death hastened Anne's. Charlotte wrote in the middle of
January: "I can scarcely say that Anne is worse, nor can I say she is
better.... The days pass in a slow, dull march: the nights are the test;
the sudden wakings from restless sleep, the revived knowledge that one
lies in her grave, and another, not at my side, but in a separate and
sick bed." And again in March: "Anne's decline is gradual and
fluctuating, but its nature is not doubtful." And yet again in April:
"If there were no hope beyond this world ... Emily's fate, and that
which threatens Anne, would be heartbreaking. I cannot forget Emily's
death-day; it becomes a more fixed, a darker, a more frequently
recurring idea in my mind than ever. It was very terrible. She was torn,
conscious, panting, reluctant, though resolute, out of a happy life."
Mrs. Oliphant has censured Emily Brontë for the manner of her dying. She
might as well have censured Anne for drawing out the agony. For Anne was
gentle to the end, utterly submissive. She gave death no trouble. She
went, with a last hope, to Scarborough, and died there at the end of
May. She was buried at Scarborough, where she lies alone. It is not easy
to believe that she had no "preference for place", but there is no doubt
that even to that choice of her last resting-place she would have
submitted--gently.
"I got here a little before eight o'clock. All was clean and bright,
waiting for me. Papa and the servants were well, and all received me
with an affection that should have consoled. The dogs seemed in strange
ecstasy. I am certain that they regarded me as the harbinger of others.
The dumb creatures thought that as I was returned, those who had been so
long absent were not far behind.... I felt that the house was all
silent, the rooms were all empty. I remembered where the three were
laid--in what narrow, dark dwellings--never more to reappear on
earth.... I cannot help thinking of their last days, remembering their
sufferings, and what they said and did, and how they looked in mortal
affliction.... To sit in a lonely room, the clock ticking loud through a
still house...." Charlotte could see nothing else before her.
It was July. She had come home after a visit to Miss Nussey.
In that month she wrote that chapter of _Shirley_ which is headed "The
Valley of the Shadow". The book (begun more than eighteen months before)
fairly quivers with the shock that cut it in two.
It was finished somewhere in September of that year of Anne's death.
Charlotte went up to London. She saw Thackeray. She learned to accept
the fact of her celebrity.
Somehow the years passed, the years of Charlotte's continuous celebrity,
and of those literary letters that take so disproportionate a part in
her correspondence that she seems at last to have forgotten; she seems
to belong to the world rather than to Haworth. And the world seems full
of Charlotte; the world that had no place for Emily. And yet _Wuthering
Heights_ had followed _Shirley_. It had been republished with
Charlotte's introduction, her vindication of Emily. It brought more fame
for Charlotte, but none--yet--for Emily.
Two years later came _Villette_. Charlotte went up to London a second
time and saw Thackeray again. And there were more letters, the admirable
but slightly self-conscious letters of the literary woman, artificially
assured. They might deceive you, only the other letters, the letters to
Ellen Nussey go on; they come palpitating with the life of Charlotte
Brontë's soul that had in it nothing of the literary taint. You see in
them how, body and soul, Haworth claims her and holds her, and will not
let her go.
Nor does she desire now to be let go. Her life at Haworth is part of
Emily's life; it partakes of the immortality of the unforgotten dead.
London and Thackeray, the Smiths, Mrs. Gaskell, and Miss Martineau, Sir
John and Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, her celebrity and the little train of
cheerful, unfamiliar circumstances, all these things sink into
insignificance beside it. They are all extraneous somehow, and out of
keeping. Nothing that her biographers have done (when they have done
their worst) can destroy or even diminish the effect her life gives of
unity, of fitness, of profound and tragic harmony. It was Mrs. Gaskell's
sense of this effect that made her work a masterpiece.
And in her marriage, at Haworth, to her father's curate, Arthur
Nicholls, the marriage that cut short her life and made an end of her
celebrity, Charlotte Brontë followed before all things her instinct for
fitness, for unity, for harmony. It was exquisitely in keeping. It did
no violence to her memories, her simplicities and sanctities. It found
her in the apathy of exhaustion, and it was yet one with all that was
passionate in her and undying. She went to it one morning in May, all
white and drooping, in her modest gown and that poor little bridal
bonnet with its wreath of snowdrops, symbolic of all the timidities, the
reluctances, the cold austerities of spring roused in the lap of winter,
and yet she found in it the secret fire of youth. She went to it afraid;
and in her third month of marriage she still gives a cry wrung from the
memory of her fear. "Indeed, indeed, Nell, it is a solemn and strange
and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife."
And yet for all that, after London, after fame and friendships in which
her dead had no share, her marriage was not the great departure; it was
the great return. It was the outcome of all that had gone before it; the
fruit of painful life, which is recognition, acceptance, the final trust
in destiny. There were to be no more false starts, no more veiled ghosts
of the cross-roads, pointing the disastrous way.
And in its abrupt and pitiful end her life rang true; it sustained the
tragic harmony. It was the fulfilment of secret prophecies, forebodings,
premonitions, of her reiterated "It was not to be." You may say that in
the end life cheated and betrayed her.
And inevitably; for she had loved life, not as Emily loved it, like an
equal, with power over it and pride and an unearthly understanding,
virgin and unafraid. There was something slightly subservient,
consciously inferior, in Charlotte's attitude to life. She had loved it
secretly, with a sort of shame, with a corroding passion and incredulity
and despair. Such natures are not seldom victims of the power they would
propitiate. It killed her in her effort to bring forth life.
When the end came she could not realize it. For the first time she was
incredulous of disaster. She heard, out of her last stupor, her husband
praying that God would spare her, and she whispered, "Oh, I am not going
to die, am I? He will not separate us; we have been so happy."
You can see her youth rising up beside that death-bed and answering,
"That is why."
And yet, could even Charlotte's youth have been so sure as to the
cheating and betrayal? That happiness of hers was cut short in the
moment of its perfection. She was not to suffer any disenchantment or
decline; her love was not to know any cold of fear or her genius any
fever of frustration. She was saved the struggle we can see before her.
Arthur Nicholls was passionately fond of Charlotte. But he was hostile
to Charlotte's genius and to Charlotte's fame. A plain, practical,
robust man, inimical to any dream. He could be adorably kind to a sick,
submissive Charlotte. Would he have been so tender to a Charlotte in
revolt? She was spared the torture of the choice between Arthur Nicholls
and her genius. We know how she would have chosen. It is well for her,
and it is all one to literature, that she died, not "in a time of
promise", but in the moment of fulfilment.
* * * * *
No. Of these tragic Brontës the most tragic, the most pitiful, the most
mercilessly abused by destiny, was Anne. An interminable, monstrous
exile is the impression we get of Anne's life in the years of her
girlhood. There is no actual record of them. Nobody kept Anne's letters.
We never hear her sad voice raised in self-pity or revolt. It is
doubtful if she ever raised it. She waited in silence and resignation,
and then told her own story in _Agnes Grey_. But her figure remains dim
in her own story and in the classic "Lives". We only know that she was
the youngest, and that, unlike her sisters, she was pretty. She had
thick brown curling hair, and violet-blue eyes, and delicate dark
eyebrows, and a skin rose and white for her sisters' sallow, that must
have given some ominous hint of fever. This delicate thing was broken on
the wheel of life. They say of Anne perpetually that she was "gentle".
In Charlotte's sketch of her she holds her pretty head high, her eyes
gaze straight forward, and you wonder whether, before the breaking
point, she was always as gentle as they say. But you never see her in
any moment of revolt. Her simple poems, at their bitterest, express no
more than a frail agony, an innocent dismay. That little raising of the
head in conscious rectitude is all that breaks the long plaint of _Agnes
Grey_.
There is no piety in that plaint. It is purely pagan; the cry of youth
cheated of its desire. Life brought her no good gifts beyond the slender
ineffectual beauty that left her undesired. Her tremulous, expectant
womanhood was cheated. She never saw so much as the flying veil of joy,
or even of such pale, uninspired happiness as she dreamed in _Agnes
Grey_. She was cheated of her innocent dream.
And by an awful irony her religion failed her. She knew its bitterness,
its terrors, its exactions. She never knew its ecstasies, its flaming
mysteries, nor, even at her very last, its consolations. Her tender
conscience drew an unspeakable torment from the spectacle of her
brother's degradation.
For it was on Anne, who had no genius to sustain her, that poor
Branwell, with the burden of his destiny, weighed most hard. It was Anne
at Thorp Green who had the first terrible misgivings, the intolerable
premonitions.
That wretched story is always cropping up again. The lady whom Mrs.
Gaskell, with a murderous selection of adjectives, called "that mature
and wicked woman", has been cleared as far as evidence and common sense
could clear her. But the slander is perpetually revived. It has always
proved too much for the Brontë biographers. Madame Duclaux published it
again twenty years after, in spite of the evidence and in spite of Mrs.
Gaskell's retractation. You would have thought that Branwell might have
been allowed to rest in the grave he dug for himself so well. But no,
they will not let him rest. Branwell drank, and he ate opium; and, as if
drink and opium and erotic madness were not enough, they must credit
him with an open breach of the seventh commandment as well. M. Dimnet,
the most able of recent critics of the Brontës, thinks and maintains
against all evidence that there was more in it than Branwell's madness.
He will not give up the sordid tragedy _à trois_. He thinks he knows
what Anne thought of Branwell's behaviour, and what awful secret she was
hinting at, and what she told her sisters when she came back to Haworth.
He argues that Anne Brontë saw and heard things, and that her testimony
is not to be set aside.
What did Anne Brontë see and hear? She saw her brother consumed by an
illegitimate passion; a passion utterly hopeless, given the nature of
the lady. The lady had been kind to Anne, to Branwell she had been
angelically kind. Anne saw that his behaviour was an atrocious return
for her kindness. Further than that the lady hardly counted in Anne's
vision. Her interest was centred on her brother. She saw him taking
first to drink and then to opium. She saw that he was going mad, and he
did go mad. One of the most familiar symptoms of morphia mania is a
tendency to erotic hallucinations of the precise kind that Branwell
suffered from. Anne was unable to distinguish between such a
hallucination and depravity. But there is not a shadow of evidence that
she thought what M. Dimnet thinks, or that if she had thought it she
made Charlotte and Emily think it too. Branwell's state was quite enough
in itself to break their hearts. His letters to Leyland, to John Brown,
the sexton, to Francis Grundy, record with frightful vividness every
phase of his obsession.
It is inconceivable that such letters should have been kept, still more
inconceivable that they should have been published. It is inconceivable
that Mrs. Gaskell should have dragged the pitiful and shameful figure
into the light. Nobody can save poor Branwell now from the dreadful
immortality thrust on him by his enemies and friends with equal zeal.
All that is left to us is a merciful understanding of his case.
Branwell's case, once for all, was purely pathological. There was
nothing great about him, not even his passion for Mrs. Robinson.
Properly speaking, it was not a passion at all, it was a disease.
Branwell was a degenerate, as incapable of passion as he was of poetry.
His sisters, Anne and Charlotte, talked with an amazing innocence about
Branwell's vices. Simple and beautiful souls, they never for a moment
suspected that his worst vice was sentimentalism. In the beginning,
before it wrecked him, nobody enjoyed his own emotions more than
Branwell. At his worst he wallowed voluptuously in the torments of
frustration. At the end, what with drink and what with opium, he was
undoubtedly insane. His letters are priceless pathological documents.
They reveal all the workings of his peculiar mania. He thinks everybody
is plotting to keep him from Mrs. Robinson. Faced at every turn with the
evidence of this lady's complete indifference, he gives it all a lunatic
twist to prove the contrary. He takes the strangest people into his
confidence, John Brown, the sexton, and the Robinsons' coachman. Queer
flames of lucidity dart here and there through this madness: "The
probability of her becoming free to give me herself and estate ever rose
to drive away the prospect of her decline under her present grief." "I
had reason to hope that ere very long I should be the husband of a lady
whom I loved best in the world, and with whom, in more than competence,
I might live at leisure to try to make myself a name in the world of
posterity, without being pestered by the small but countless
botherments, which, like mosquitoes, sting us in the world of work-day
toil. That hope and herself are gone--she to wither into patiently
pining decline--_it_ to make room for drudgery." It is all sordid as
well as terrible. We have no right to know these things. Mrs. Oliphant
is almost justified in her protest against Charlotte as the first to
betray her brother.
But did Charlotte betray Branwell? Not in her letters. She never
imagined--how could she?--that those letters would be published. Not in
her novels. Her novels give no portrait of Branwell and no hint that
could be easily understood. It is in her prefaces to her sisters' novels
that he appears, darkly. Charlotte, outraged by the infamous article in
the _Quarterly_, was determined that what had been said of her should
never be said of Anne and Emily. She felt that their works offered
irresistible provocation to the scandalous reviewer. She thought it
necessary to explain how they came by their knowledge of evil.
This vindication of her sisters is certainly an indictment of her
brother to anybody who knew enough to read between the lines. Charlotte
may have innocently supposed that nobody knew or ever would know enough.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Gaskell knew; and when it came to vindicating
Charlotte, she considered herself justified in exposing Charlotte's
brother because Charlotte herself had shown her the way.
But Charlotte might have spared her pains. Branwell does not account for
Heathcliff any more than he accounts for Rochester. He does not even
account for Huntingdon in poor Anne's novel. He accounts only for
himself. He is important chiefly in relation to the youngest of the
Brontës. Oddly enough, this boy, who was once thought greater than his
sister Emily, was curiously akin to the weak and ineffectual Anne. He
shows the weird flickering of the flame that pulsed so feebly and
intermittently in her. He had Anne's unhappy way with destiny, her knack
of missing things. She had a touch of his morbidity. He was given to
silences which in anybody but Anne would have been called morose. It was
her fate to be associated with him in the hour and in the scene of his
disgrace. And he was offered up unwittingly by Charlotte as a sacrifice
to Anne's virtue.
* * * * *
Like Branwell, Anne had no genius. She shows for ever gentle, and, in
spite of an unconquerable courage, conquered. And yet there was more in
her than gentleness. There was, in this smallest and least considerable
of the Brontës, an immense, a terrifying audacity. Charlotte was bold,
and Emily was bolder; but this audacity of Anne's was greater than
Charlotte's boldness or than Emily's, because it was willed, it was
deliberate, open-eyed; it had none of the superb unconsciousness of
genius. Anne took her courage in both hands when she sat down to write
_The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_. There are scenes, there are situations,
in Anne's amazing novel, which for sheer audacity stand alone in
mid-Victorian literature, and which would hold their own in the
literature of revolt that followed. It cannot be said that these scenes
and situations are tackled with a master-hand. But there is a certain
grasp in Anne's treatment, and an astonishing lucidity. Her knowledge of
the seamy side of life was not exhaustive. But her diagnosis of certain
states, her realization of certain motives, suggests Balzac rather than
any of the Brontës. Thackeray, with the fear of Mrs. Grundy before his
eyes, would have shrunk from recording Mrs. Huntingdon's ultimatum to
her husband. The slamming of that bedroom door fairly resounds through
the long emptiness of Anne's novel. But that door is the _crux_ of the
situation, and if Anne was not a genius she was too much of an artist to
sacrifice her _crux_.
And not only was Anne revolutionary in her handling of moral situations,
she was an insurgent in religious thought. Not to believe in the dogma
of eternal punishment was, in mid-Victorian times and evangelical
circles, to be almost an atheist. When, somewhere in the late
'seventies, Dean Farrar published his _Eternal Hope_, that book fell
like a bomb into the ranks of the orthodox. But long before Dean
Farrar's book Anne Brontë had thrown her bomb. There are two pages in
_The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_ that anticipate and sum up his now
innocent arguments. Anne fairly let herself go here. And though in her
"Word to the Elect" (who "may rejoice to think themselves secure") she
declares that
None shall sink to everlasting woe
Who have not well deserved the wrath of Heaven,
she presently relents, and tacks on a poem in a lighter measure,
expressing her hope
That soon the wicked shall at last
Be fitted for the skies;
And when their dreadful doom is past
To light and life arise.
It is said (Charlotte said it) that Anne suffered from religious
melancholy of a peculiarly dark and Calvinistic type. I very much
suspect that Anne's melancholy, like Branwell's passion, was
pathological, and that what her soul suffered from was religious doubt.
She could not reach that height where Emily moved serenely; she could
not see that
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain.