Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  So Patrick Brunty on his magic carpet went up to Cambridge, and took his new name and his degree. A volunteer movement, anticipating the larger and later organisation, was being developed all over the country as a defence against possible invasion by the French, and Lord Palmerston, who came up to St. John’s College the year after Patrick Brontë, was a member of the same corps as he: Mr. Brontë told Mrs. Gaskell that they drilled together. He was ordained in 1806, and appointed to a curacy in the parish of Wethersfield, Essex, where he became engaged to a girl named Mary Burder. There was some opposition on the part of the girl’s uncle to the match, but the end of the matter was that Mr. Brontë broke the engagement. He did not apparently mention this episode to Mrs. Gaskell, nor the sequel to it which will appear later. He then moved to Yorkshire, where he was curate first at Dewsbury, and then at Hartshead. While there he published, in 1811 and 1813, two volumes of poems: these are Cottage Poems and The Rural Minstrel. Many of them are definitely religious, and all have a moral. It is difficult to quote from them: some rather discouraging verses sent To a Lady on her Birthday may be taken as typical of his muse:

  In thoughtful mood your parents dear, Whilst joy shines through the starting tear, Give approbation due, As each drinks deep in mirthful wine Your rosy health, and looks benign Are sent to heaven for you.

  But let me whisper, lovely fair, That joy may soon give place to care, And sorrow cloud this day; Full soon your eyes of startling blue, And velvet lips of scarlet hue Discoloured, may decay.

  As bloody drops on virgin snows, So vies the lily with the rose Full on your dimpled cheek, But ah! the worm in lazy coil May soon prey on this putrid spoil, Or leap in loathsome freak.

  Fond wooers come with flattering tale, And load with sighs the passing gale, And love-distracted rave; But hark, fair maid! whate’er they say, You’re but a breathing mass of clay, Fast ripening for the grave.

  These volumes cannot have fallen flatter than the poems published by his daughters thirty-three years later, of which only two copies were sold, and of them but one line survives, because it is identical with that heart’s-cry of Jane Eyre’s, which was singled out by Mr. Swinburne as the supreme utterance of Charlotte’s genius. This was taken verbatim from one of Mr. Brontë’s poems, and thus he is responsible for: ‘To the finest fibre of my nature, sir.’

  At Hartshead Mr. Brontë met Miss Maria Branwell, third daughter of a Methodist merchant in Penzance. Her father and mother were both dead, and she was on a visit — visits in those days were affairs that lasted for many weeks — to an aunt who had married a Methodist preacher, Mr. John Fennel, who was Governor of the Wesleyan Academy at Wood House Grove, near Bradford. Mr. Brontë, after a brief acquaintance, proposed to her and was accepted. He kept some letters of hers written to him during their engagement, gave them in after years to Charlotte, and they were published for the first time in their entirety by Mr. Clement Shorter. They convey a wholly delightful impression of the writer; there is about them, as Charlotte felt when first she saw them thirty years after her mother’s death, a wonderful sweet charm and fineness, a sincere affection and piety. They are like egg-shell china for transparent delicacy; they are fresh and virginal as a primrose growing on some be-smoked Yorkshire moor.

  I will frankly confess [she writes in the earliest of these] that your behaviour and what I have seen and heard of your character has excited my warmest esteem and regard, and be assured that you shall never have cause to repent of any confidence you may think proper to place in me, and that it will always be my endeavour to deserve the good opinion which you have formed, although human weakness may in some instances cause me to fall short. I do not depend upon my own strength, but I look to Him who has been my unerring guide through life and in whose continued protection and assistance I confidently trust.

  Then, so we gather, Mr. Brontë made some lover-like demand that she should protest her affection for him, and very properly she proceeds:

  The politeness of others can never make me forget your kind attentions, neither can I walk our accustomed rounds without thinking on you, and, why should I be ashamed to add, wishing for your presence. If you knew what were my feelings while writing this, you would pity me. I wish to write the truth and give you satisfaction yet fear to go too far, and exceed the bounds of propriety.

  She takes a walk she had taken with him,

  not wholly without a wish that I had your arm to assist me and your conversation to shorten the walk. Indeed, all our walks have now an insipidity in them which I never thought they would have possessed....

  Or she hears Mr. Watman preach a very excellent sermon.

  He displayed the character of our Saviour in a most affecting and amiable light. I scarcely ever felt more charmed with his excellencies, more grateful for his condescension, or more abased at my own unworthiness: but I lament that my heart is so little retentive of those pleasing and profitable impressions....

  Again and again, without exceeding the bounds of propriety (though once she addresses him as ‘dear saucy Pat,’ which was rather daring for those days), she assures him of her unalterable affection.

  With the sincerest pleasure do I retire from company to converse with him whom I love beyond all others. Could my beloved friend see my heart he would then be convinced that the affection I bear him is not at all inferior to that which he feels for me — indeed I sometimes think that in truth and constancy it excels.

  The final letter announces that they are busy at her uncle’s house with making the cakes for the wedding, and that she has already learned by heart ‘the pretty little hymn’ he sent her, ‘but cannot promise to sing it scientifically, though I will endeavour to gain a little more assurance.’ Throughout this delicious little series of letters, extending over four months, there runs the note of love and piety crystal-clear in naïve sincerity and sparkling with humorous touches of demure merriment and chaff of her saucy Pat. Had Mrs. Brontë lived to bring up the family, which soon arrived with such speed and regularity, who knows what kindlier quality, what more indulgent attitude towards the failings and imperfections of others might not have softened the judgments of one of her daughters, have redeemed her only son from a sordid and premature doom, and even have given to the genius of the family some solvent for that steely remoteness with which she surrounded herself? True, we cannot imagine Emily saying her prayers at her mother’s knee and yet remaining Emily, nor, if she would thereby have lost anything of her wild pagan mysticism, could we wish her capable of her mother’s pieties; but it is impossible not to wonder what would have happened if so lonely and supreme a soul could have had the opportunity of confiding something of its secret raptures and despairs to one whose essential tenderness and sympathy could not have failed to understand something of them.

  The marriage of Maria Branwell and Patrick Brontë took place at Guiseley near Hartshead in December 1812, and never again did she return from the moors and mists of the austere north to the prim home of her brother, ex-Mayor of Penzance, where the grates were so beautifully cleaned, and palm trees grew in those gardens to which the snows of the Yorkshire moors and the long savage winters of the uplands were strangers. She was wedded to her dear saucy Pat, and the bearing of his children was business enough.

  At Hartshead were born, in 1813 and 1815, her two eldest children, Maria and Elizabeth. In 1815 Mr. Brontë published at Halifax a romance in prose, called The Cottage in the Wood: or, The Art of Becoming Rich and Happy, and in the same year he was appointed curate of Thornton in the parish of Bradford, and was minister at a chapel of ease called the Bell Chapel. Here they were on the most intimate social terms with Mr. John Frith of Kipping House and his motherless daughter, Elizabeth. Elizabeth kept a diary, and it is a catalogue of tea-drinkings with the Brontës, and of the Brontës drinking tea or dining at Kipping House. Here there were born to him four more children, the story of whose lives, short as they were in the measure of years, forms the tragic and imperishable history of the Brontës. The eldest
of these children was Charlotte, born on April 21, 1816; the second was the only boy, Patrick Branwell — thereafter known as Branwell — born on June 26, 1817; the third Emily Jane, born on July 30, 1818; and the fourth Anne, born on January 17, 1820.

  At Thornton Mr. Brontë wrote the second of his prose romances, called The Maid of Killarney, or Albion and Flora. The Maid of Killarney contains some warnings against the carnal tendencies fostered by dancing, and, like the rest of Mr. Brontë’s works, derives its sole interest from the fact that the author was the father of his children. Mrs. Brontë, as well as her husband, had literary aspirations, and it was at Thornton that she wrote an essay entitled The Advantage of Poverty in Religious Concerns. It was intended for some religious periodical, but was never published till Mr. Clement Shorter unearthed it. There is a Calvinistic touch about it, for though the true Christian can be blithe, as she certainly was, in poverty, finding it a state which, taken rightly, is attended with innumerable blessings, it is not necessarily a sign of the Divine favour, and she concludes:

  But O, what words can express the great misery of those who suffer all the evils of poverty here, and that, too, by their bad conduct and have no hope of happiness hereafter, but rather have cause to fear the end of this miserable life will be the beginning of another, infinitely more miserable, never, never to have an end!

  Then came the final ecclesiastical ‘step’ for Mr. Brontë, and on that step he remained without further promotion for forty-one years. On February 25, 1820, he was licensed to the chapelry of Haworth, ten miles from Bradford and in the parish of that town. Though, strictly speaking, it was only a perpetual curacy, the incumbent to all intents and purposes was vicar. He did not at once go there, for we find that Anne, the youngest of the family, was baptized at Thornton a month later. But some time during the spring the move was made, and from thenceforth, with one exceedingly important exception, the setting of the Brontë-drama, was laid at the Parsonage there. Standing at the top of the steep hill up which the village climbs, it faces, across a small oblong of walled-in garden, the west door of the Church of St. Michael. It is girt about with the graveyard; the public-house, the ‘Black Bull,’ is neighbourly; a ‘short lone lane’ leads to the moors. These four, parsonage and church, public-house and moors, are the main furnishing of the scene. Of them the church is the least significant and the moors the most, for from the moors came Wuthering Heights.

  CHAPTER II

  The house was small for this family of eight persons. On the ground floor to right and left of the flagged passage from the front door were two parlours: that on the left was the dining-room and family sitting-room; to the right was Mr. Brontë’s study where, in later years, he took his midday dinner alone, being vexed with digestive troubles and preferring solitude. At the back was a kitchen, and a store-room big enough to be converted later into a studio for Branwell, when he took to painting and meant to make it his career. Upstairs were four bedrooms, and over the flagged passage of entrance a further slip of a room without a fireplace. We may dismiss therefore as apocryphal the lurid tale which has crept into the Brontë-Saga, with a view to heightening the picturesque horror of the early years of the sisters, that all five of them slept together in this closet, since there is no apparent reason why some or all of them should not sleep in the other bedrooms.

  Hitherto we have traced little more than the bare events in the life of Mr. Brontë up to the time of his appointment to Haworth, but in the first edition of Mrs. Gaskell’s work, which presently brought the hornets about her, she launches into details of the most lurid sort about his manners and his habits. She acquired her facts, she tells us, from a ‘good old woman in Haworth,’ who had been Mrs. Brontë’s nurse in her last illness. Mrs. Brontë died in 1821, and thus it was thirty-four years after the time to which it refers, when Mrs. Gaskell, collecting materials for the Life of Charlotte Brontë, obtained the information on which she founded the following account:

  She told me that one day when the children had been out on the moors and rain had come on, she thought their feet would be wet, and accordingly she rummaged out some coloured boots which had been given them by a friend.... These little pairs she ranged round the kitchen fire to warm, but, when the children came back, the boots were no where to be found, only a very strong odour of burned leather was perceived. Mr. Brontë had come in and seen them: they were too gay and luxurious for his children, and would foster the love of dress; so he had put them into the fire. He spared nothing that offended his antique simplicity. Long before this someone had given Mrs. Brontë a silk gown; either the make or the colour or the material was not according to his notions of consistent propriety, and Mrs. Brontë in consequence never wore it. But for all that she kept it treasured up in her drawers, which were generally locked. One day, however, while in the kitchen, she remembered that she had left the key in her drawer, and hearing Mr. Brontë upstairs, she augured some ill to her dress, and, running upstairs, she found it cut into shreds.... He did not speak when he was annoyed or displeased, but worked off his volcanic wrath by firing pistols out of the back door in rapid succession. Mrs. Brontë, lying in bed upstairs, would hear the quick explosions, and know that something had gone wrong: but her sweet nature thought invariably of the bright side, and she would say, ‘Ought I not to be thankful that he never gave me an angry word?’ Now and then his anger took a different form but still was speechless. Once he got the hearth-rug and stuffing it up the grate, deliberately set it on fire, and remained in the room, in spite of the stench, until it had smouldered and shrivelled away into uselessness. Another time he took some chairs, and sawed away at the backs till they were reduced to the condition of stools. I have named these instances of eccentricity in the father because I hold the knowledge of them to be necessary for a right understanding of a life of his daughter.

  This is a lurid picture, and even if Mrs. Gaskell would have gone bail for the memory and the accuracy of her aged informant, and really believed that the knowledge of these facts was necessary for the right understanding of the life of the daughter of so violent a lunatic, it was exceedingly rash of her to have picked up from an old woman in Haworth these unconfirmed stories of the man at whose request she was writing his daughter’s biography, and to have published them in his lifetime was scarcely decent. He was an old man and ailing, already close on his eightieth birthday; perhaps Mrs. Gaskell thought he would be dead before the book came out. Again he could no longer read much, and she may have thought that he would never ascertain what, on the authority of the good old woman, she had written about him. But justice and retribution decreed that he should still be alive, and that his son-in-law Mr. Nicholls, Charlotte’s widower, should read aloud to him these delirious paragraphs about himself. A milder man than he would have been annoyed, and Mr. Brontë was furious. He stated to Mr. William Dearden, who had been a friend of his son Branwell, that these stories were wholly untrue.

  ‘I did not know,’ he said, with a certain grim irony, ‘that I had an enemy in the world who would traduce me before my death till Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte appeared. Everything in that book which relates to my conduct to my family is either false or distorted. I never did commit such acts as are there ascribed to me.’

  Then he must have got hold of the source of these libels, for in a subsequent interview he told Mr. Dearden that Mrs. Gaskell had listened to village scandal and got her information from some discarded servant. That was precisely what had happened, for the good old woman who had been Mrs. Brontë’s nurse had been dismissed from his service. No doubt when Mr. Brontë said that some of these stories were ‘distorted,’ he alluded to his alleged habit of firing pistols out of the back door in rapid succession as a speechless method of expressing annoyance. That was founded on the fact that in the early days of his incumbency he was on the side of the law against the Luddites, and, as Mrs. Gaskell herself says, was unpopular among the mill-workers. He used, therefore, to carry a loaded pistol up to bed with him and disc
harge it next morning out of the window.

  We can test the general accuracy of the good old woman’s memory by the story she told Mrs. Gaskell of the six Brontë children often walking out hand in hand towards the moors, at the time when she was nursing their mother. When Mrs. Brontë died, Anne the youngest was only twenty months old, having been born in January 1820, and precocious as they all were, it is impossible to credit such early athleticism. The same informant, in a speech Mrs. Gaskell quotes verbatim, told her that the children were never given flesh-food of any sort; potatoes were their entire dinner. Also that with only young servants in the house there was, in the absence of a mistress’s supervision, much waste going on with regard to food. More retribution followed on these garrulities, for there were still living in Haworth, when Mrs. Gaskell’s book came out, two sisters, Nancy and Sarah Garrs, one of whom had come with the Brontës from Thornton, while the other had entered Mr. Brontë’s service at Haworth. He now gave them, as a counterblast to these accusations, a written testimonial that they had not been wasteful but had been admirable servants in all respects, and Nancy, the cook-general, deposed that the children’s dinner every day consisted of beef or mutton followed by milk pudding. Not exciting, but not potatoes. In turn she gave a testimonial to her old master, and said that ‘there was never a more affectionate father, never a kinder master.... He was not of a violent temper at all, quite the reverse!’

  Mr. Brontë then wrote to Mrs. Gaskell, saying that her whole narrative concerning him and his habits and his relations to his family were false, and requested her to cancel it in the next edition of her book. ‘To this,’ he said, ‘I received no other answer than that Mrs. Gaskell was unwell and not able to write.’ She was, as will appear, being threatened at the time by two libel actions arising out of other contents of her book, and no doubt was busy. Two editions of it had already appeared, but from the third edition onwards, these sensational and unfounded stories were omitted.