It is, indeed, an almost impossible task to convey to the reader, in the pages of a biography, an idea which will, in an adequate degree, approach the intimate acquaintance which those who lived, saw, and spoke with its subject possessed. And, yet, how necessary is such knowledge to the right understanding of anyone’s letters! But with what chance of a true insight, then, shall we read the letters of Branwell Brontë and his sister, if we have an incorrect view of his character?
Miss Robinson has confidently concluded, from certain depreciatory references to himself, in his letters to Mr. Grundy, that, at this period, ‘he was manifestly, and by his own confession, too physically prostrate for any literary effort,’ with how much accuracy the reader has seen and will further see. And Mr. Wemyss Reid, with respect to the character of Mr. Brontë, adopting much of Mrs. Gaskell’s view of him, and relying upon his children’s letters, has produced a portrait of him to which, as he allows, ‘some of those who knew him in his later years, including one who is above all others entitled to an opinion on the subject, have objected as being over-coloured.’ We must not read, then, too literally all that we find in the letters. It would be folly to take word for word Charlotte’s account of her father’s anger when she announced to him a proposal of marriage which had been made to her, and which did not accord with his wish; or to believe that ‘compassion or relenting is no more to be looked for from papa than sap from firewood,’ when we know that he afterwards voluntarily gave way, and sacrificed his own opinion. Nor would it be right to accept any exaggerated confession of Charlotte about herself, in a literal sense. And thus it does not sound well in Mrs. Gaskell, after completing her account of the outward events of Branwell’s life, to say, ‘All that is to be said more about Branwell Brontë shall be said by Charlotte herself, not by me;’ and then to proceed to extract such portions of the sister’s letters as condemned him, and to summarize or repress anything favourable. But Miss Robinson has gone further. She, by extracting a few censures from various letters, apart in date, and leaving out all mention of the chance of the secretaryship in the letter of November the 4th, and the words ‘to him’ in another, has left her reader under the impression that, after his dismissal, Branwell would not seek employment. ‘Such was not his intention,’ she says. But Branwell’s efforts to obtain the secretaryship, to which Charlotte alludes, are sufficient evidence of a contrary disposition in him; and we shall find that he exerted himself in other directions also.
The failure of the school-keeping has likewise been duly laid to his charge, although, as we have seen, Mr. Brontë’s oncoming blindness, in the first place, and the difficulty of procuring pupils at Haworth, were the causes of its failure. To the reason why no attempt was made to open a school elsewhere, I shall have further to allude.
We have been told by Mrs. Gaskell that, some months after Branwell’s dismissal, he met the wife of his former employer clandestinely by appointment. ‘There was,’ she says, ‘a strange lingering of conscience, when … he refused to consent to the elopement which she proposed.’ Miss Robinson, who adopts this report, thinks that the phrase ‘herself and estate,’ in the letter he sent to Mr. Grundy, throws quite a new light upon Mrs. Gaskell’s opinion that there were any remains of conscience left in Branwell Brontë. She says he counselled ‘a little longer waiting,’ — that he might become possessed of the property, on the death of the lady’s husband. But if this incident of the proposed elopement had actually taken place, the delay suggested by Branwell should surely be held as proof that anything positively dishonourable was repulsive to him. The lady, too, had an ample fortune of her own, of which, had she proposed an elopement, she would have informed him. But, if we consider the possible sources from which such a story as this could arise, we may surmise that Mrs. Gaskell, — who first gave it to the public, and on whose authority it alone remains, — obtained it, with the many other incidents she has published, from the current scandal of Haworth, — where else could she have heard it? — and when we remember that the rumours of the village, though magnified a hundred-fold, had their origin in the infatuated belief and wild statements of Branwell himself, possibly we shall not be wrong if we conclude that it had no foundation whatever in fact. Certainly there is no sufficient evidence for it. And the story is in itself inherently improbable, for it alleges that the lady had been not only regardless of her reputation, but had cast to the winds all thoughts of those pecuniary considerations which, a little later, upon the death of her husband, are stated to have prevented her from marrying in honour the supposed object of her affections.
I have, earlier in this work, spoken of a poem on one of the traditions of Lancashire, by Mr. Peters, entitled: ‘Leyland’s Daughter,’ which is the story of a romantic elopement. Branwell, early in 1846, proposed to write a poem on Morley Hall, in the parish of Leigh, where the elopement took place in the reign of Edward VI., in which he also would touch upon the incident.
This tradition, and Branwell’s intended work on the subject, became often a topic of conversation both at Haworth and Halifax: and, it is not improbable that, some ten years afterwards, when Mrs. Gaskell was searching at the former place for materials for her work, the story of this ancient elopement had become mixed with the stories of the village respecting Branwell and the lady of his late employer, and thus, with them, was ready for Mrs. Gaskell’s hand, additions having been made as to time and place.
CHAPTER VII.
THE SISTERS’ POEMS AND NOVELS. — BRANWELL’S LITERARY OCCUPATIONS.
The Sisters as Writers of Poetry — They Decide to Publish — Each begins a Novel — The Spirit under which the Work was Undertaken — ‘The Professor’ — ’Agnes Grey’ — ’Wuthering Heights’ — Branwell’s Condition — A Touching Incident — ’Epistle from a Father to a Child in her Grave’ — Letter with Sonnet — Publication of the Sisters’ Poems.
If Branwell Brontë had devoted himself to literature under the impulse of his misfortune, his sisters were not long unoccupied ere they also entered upon its pursuit. ‘One day, in the autumn of 1845,’ says Charlotte, ‘I accidentally lighted on a MS. volume of verse in my sister Emily’s handwriting.’ The elder sister was not surprised, knowing that the younger could and did write verse; but she thought these were no common effusions. ‘To my ear,’ she says, ‘they had also a peculiar music — wild, melancholy, and elevating. My sister Emily was not a person of demonstrative character, nor one on the recesses of whose mind and feelings even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed; it took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication.’ Charlotte Brontë here grasped, with unfailing precision, the very secret spell which we find in Emily’s poetry; the strange, wild, weird voice, with which it speaks to us, spoke first of all to her, and she felt the heather-scented breath, even as we do, of the moorland air on which its music was borne. Anne also produced verses, which had ‘a sweet, sincere pathos of their own;’ and the three sisters, believing, after anxious deliberation, that they might get their respective productions accepted for publication in one volume, set on foot inquiries on the subject, and now adopted the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, which were afterwards to become so famous. It was not, however, to be expected that the effusions of inexperienced and unknown writers would be of such value as to induce any publisher to take them on his own risk. Indeed, Miss Brontë says ‘the great puzzle lay in the difficulty of getting answers of any kind from the publishers to whom we applied.’ She wrote to Messrs. Chambers, of Edinburgh, asking advice, and received a brief and business-like reply, upon which the sisters acted, and at last made way.
On the 28th of January, 1846, Charlotte, as we have been informed, wrote to Messrs. Aylott and Jones, asking if they would publish a one-volume, octavo, of poems; if not at their own risk, on the authors’ account. Messrs. Aylott and Jones did not hesitate to accept the latter proposal.
It must have been when the sisters b
ecame aware that publishers would not accept the poetry of unknown writers on any other terms, that they turned their thoughts to prose composition. Branwell, in his dire distress, had fixed his attention on the writing of a three-volume novel, principally as a refuge from mental disquiet; but his sisters, now, with very different feelings, each set to work on a one-volume tale. It had occurred to them, we are told, that by novel writing money was to be made. They were, in fact, influenced by precisely the view of the profit to be derived from fiction which Branwell had propounded in his remarkable letter to his friend Leyland. ‘Ill-success,’ says Charlotte, ‘failed to crush us: the mere effort to succeed had given a wonderful zest to existence; it must be pursued. We each set to work on a prose tale: Ellis Bell produced “Wuthering Heights,” Acton Bell, “Agnes Grey,” and Currer Bell also wrote a narrative in one volume.’
The business-like way in which the sisters went about their novel writing, forbids us to believe that they brooded very much on the conduct of their brother when the literary fervour was upon them; but Miss Robinson leads her readers to think that his character and failings had much to do with the tone which their works assumed. Writing under this belief, and with this intention, — as might have been expected, — she has found it necessary to paint every circumstance relating to him, and the inmates of the parsonage, in the darkest colours, and often has arrived at conclusions widely different from the actual facts. Moreover this writer, in supporting her views, has fallen into the serious error of placing the event which completed Branwell’s disappointment, and its consequences to him, four months earlier than they occurred.
The novels which the sisters wrote under the influence of these troubles do not, indeed, bear any marked traces of them. ‘The Professor,’ Charlotte’s story, which was not published until long after, is the direct outcome of her personal experiences in Brussels, and the few shadows that one finds in it are the record of such troubles as she had there. In this book, Currer Bell describes the life of endeavour, which seemed to her the most honourable, the treading of those paths in the outer world whose pleasures and pains she had found so keen. Already, in the March of 1845, she had written to a friend telling her that she was no longer happy at Haworth, though it was her duty to remain there. ‘There was a time when Haworth was a very pleasant place to me; it is not so now. I feel as if we were all buried here. I long to travel; to work; to live a life of action.’ Thus ‘The Professor’ is the story of the work and of the life of action for which the author herself was pining. William Crimsworth, neglected by his rich relations, cut off by his brutal brother, seeks his fortune in Brussels, and obtains a place as professor of English in a school there. He leads a life that Charlotte knows well; he is in the place she has learned to love; and he describes, with close observation, the character and the routine to which she is so well accustomed. Pelet, his master, is an original, as Paul Emanuel is, and Zoraïde Reuter is the prototype of Madame Beck. These characters are forcibly conceived, as is that of Mademoiselle Henri; but the book bears the traces of a novice’s hand. Thus, how unnatural does the proposal which Crimsworth makes to Frances read to us, where, while asking her to be his wife, demanding of her what regard she has for him, he says not a word of his own devotion to her; and where, even when she grants him all he has been hoping for so long, his sole remark is, ‘Very well, Frances!’ But a stronger point of interest for us in the book is the spirit which moves Crimsworth in his endeavours, where he struggles with might and main, just as Charlotte herself wished to do, for a competency; and there is the school, too, which his wife designs and establishes, the very pattern of that which was in Charlotte’s own mind. It is instructive and singular that in this book we find Crimsworth suffering from the hypochondria which beset its author, and that, too, at the time when he should have been happiest.
‘Man,’ he says, ‘is ever clogged with his mortality, and it was my mortal nature which now faltered and plained; my nerves, which jarred and gave a false sound, because the soul, of late rushing headlong to an aim, had over-strained the body’s comparative weakness. A horror of great darkness fell upon me; I felt my chamber invaded by one I had known formerly, but had thought for ever departed. I was temporarily a prey to hypochondria. She had been my acquaintance, nay, my guest, once before in boyhood; I had entertained her at bed and board for a year; for that space of time I had her to myself in secret; she lay with me, she ate with me, she walked out with me, showing me nooks in woods, hollows in hills, where we could sit together, and where she could drop her drear veil over me, and so hide sky and sun, grass and green tree; taking me entirely to her death-cold bosom, and holding me with arms of bone.’ This was the phantom that visited Charlotte also. Of the effect of her brother’s conduct on her I have found but two passages in ‘The Professor,’ — that which I have quoted respecting the youth of Victor Crimsworth earlier in this volume, and that, in Chapter xx., where William Crimsworth leaves Pelet’s house lest a ‘practical modern French novel’ should be in process beneath its roof. It was Charlotte’s design, in writing ‘The Professor,’ to lend it no charm of romance. Her hero was to work his way through life, and to find no sudden turn to endow him with wealth, for he was to earn every shilling he possessed, and he was not even to marry a beautiful girl or a lady of rank in the end. ‘In the sequel, however,’ says Charlotte, ‘I find that publishers in general scarcely approved of this system, but would have liked something more imaginative and poetical;’ and for this reason, probably, the book did not find a publisher so soon as ‘Agnes Grey,’ and ‘Wuthering Heights,’ which were sent from the parsonage with it.
‘Agnes Grey,’ Anne Brontë’s story, like ‘The Professor,’ is the picture of things its author had known, painted almost as she saw them. Anne’s experience as a governess had made her acquainted with certain phases of life, which she could not but reproduce. Hence Agnes Grey is thrown into the sphere of the careless and selfish family of the Bloomfields; and afterwards, with the Murrays at Horton Lodge, she sees a kind of personal character and social life which, on account of its coldness and worldliness, greatly repelled Anne Brontë, with her warm and sympathetic nature. She teaches the same lesson of the folly of mariages de convenance, and of the wrong of subjecting the affections, and bartering happiness for the sake of worldly position, which she afterwards dwells upon more strongly in ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.’ It is in this fictitious parallel of Anne Brontë’s own experience, if anywhere in her writings, that we might expect to find some reflection of the recent history of her brother’s fall. Mr. Reid has asserted that this formed the dark turning-point in her life, for ‘living under the same roof with him when he went astray,’ she ‘was compelled to be a closer and more constant witness of his sins and his sufferings than either Charlotte or Emily.’ Her letters home, it has been stated, conveyed the news of her dark forebodings. But, all the same, the story she wrote, almost under the shadow of her brother’s disgrace, is the simple, straightforward, humorous narrative of the gentle and pious Anne Brontë, revealing not so much as a suspicion of vice or thought of evil; and, in this respect, it presents a contrast to her second work. There is evidence that when the sisters wrote their novels they had already attributed monomania to Branwell, and could thus explain his history for themselves. It was not in the nature of ‘Agnes Grey’ to be successful as a novel, but we find in it that Anne possessed a faculty which scarcely appears in Charlotte’s writings, — that of humour. Look, for instance, at the way in which she sketches so forcibly, and with such droll perception, the character of the youthful Bloomfields, and, afterwards, of Miss Matilda Murray, with her equine propensities and masculine tastes.
‘Wuthering Heights,’ the work which Emily Brontë sent from the parsonage at the same time, incomparably finer in its powers than either ‘The Professor’ or ‘Agnes Grey,’ is a dramatic story of passion and tragic energy that astonished the world, — and with which it has been said Branwell’s life in those days had much concern. Inferentially
, it is contended that, without the darkening effect on her understanding of Branwell’s misfortunes, without the neighbourhood of the ‘brother of set purpose drinking himself to death out of furious thwarted passion for a mistress he might not marry,’ Emily Brontë could not have conceived it. It will, then, perhaps be better to defer the study of Emily’s production till something more has been said of the period in which it was written; and until some new light has been thrown upon Branwell’s character and career, and upon the anachronistic improprieties of previous writers.
Mrs. Gaskell passes over the period in which the sisters betook themselves to novel writing with little comment. But she keeps in remembrance the presence of Branwell while their literary labours continued, — ‘the black shadow of remorse lying over one in their home.’ What it was that the biographer of Charlotte supposed stung Branwell’s conscience is well-known; but, if there had been this cause for it in one of a naturally remorseful disposition, as his was, we must have met with some expression of it in his letters or poems, for
‘The Mind, that broods o’er guilty woes,
Is like the Scorpion girt by fire.’
Yet, perhaps, one of the most significant points to be observed in Branwell’s writings, and in studying his conduct, is the absence of any such remorse. He encouraged himself — after the first shock of his disappointment — with the hope that time would bring him the happiness he wished; and, as some believe, with good and sufficient reason. He was unhappy when he thought of the supposed ill-health and sufferings of the lady.
Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Page 468
