Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  So Mrs. Gaskell made the needful omissions and additions in her account, confessing that it had been one-sided; but here, again, her successors in the Brontë-Saga have adopted her original and discarded version, adding appropriate embroideries of their own. From one we learn that ‘during the whole time of their sojourn there the young Brontës scarcely ever knew what it was to be free from the pangs of hunger’; another called it ‘the counterpart for girls of Mr. Squeers’s Academy for Young Gentlemen’; another announced that Mr. Carus Wilson ‘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 these children were laid low by typhus.’ Whatever is the truth about Cowan Bridge, and the sadist cruelties related in Jane Eyre, we must remember that Mr. Brontë was satisfied with the management of the school, and that Mrs. Gaskell acknowledged that she had not, in her Life of Charlotte Brontë, stated her case against it fairly. After the publication of her book a highly acrimonious correspondence on the subject came out in the Halifax Guardian.

  III

  By midsummer 1825 the family, now consisting of the three sisters and Branwell, were back at Haworth, and there they remained for five years. They saw little or nothing of their neighbours. They made no friendships with children of their own age; for recreation they had walks on the moors, which already were beginning to work their spell in the heart of one of them, and they read omnivorously. The girls helped in the housework; they did their sewing with their aunt, their father’s library was open to them, and while he taught his son, Charlotte taught her sisters. And as in the darkness of the hive the unseen and furious industry of the bees generates the curtains of wax on which are built the honey cells, so in the dining-room of the sequestered parsonage and round the kitchen fire the weaving of dreams and the exercise of imagination were their passionate preoccupations, and in the case of Charlotte and Branwell took shape in ceaseless and profuse experiment in all forms of the written word. All that they came across in their father’s books and in the tales in Blackwood’s Magazine was material for this honey-gathering; the news in the daily papers contributed to it; the public characters of the nation were their pets and their heroes. The Duke of Wellington and his family generally were the property of Charlotte, Branwell was the patron of Napoleon; even the wooden soldiers his father bought for him were christened Field-Marshals. The Corn Laws, the Catholic question, Mr. Peel’s speech, Mr. Christopher North, editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, James Hogg, were all grist for their mills: never were four small children more personally and vividly concerned in the movements of the world from which they were so sundered. Nor was it only from the affairs of the world and from their lessons that they drew the substance of their dreams, for in the kitchen Tabby had begun her reign of thirty years over their dinners and their hearts, and Tabby had stories of fairies in the glen and moonlit folk of the moorland, and then it was Emily, now taller than the rest, and the prettiest of her plain sisters, whose dark eyes kindled. Tabby was far more than servant, and from the time she came to Haworth she held a peculiar place in the hearts of them all. She slipped on a film of ice one day going down the steep street of Haworth, and, falling, broke her leg. In the interval the girls did all the housework, but when she was recovered, Aunt Branwell and Mr. Brontë decided that she was not up to her work, and must go. Upon which all the children went on hunger-strike, and Tabby stayed. Later her lameness caused her to give up her post, and she lived with her sister in the village for four years. But the Brontës could not get on without her, and she returned and died at the age of over ninety, still in service at the Parsonage, a few weeks only before the last of her children followed her.

  Day-dreams and the Duke of Wellington, fairies by the beck, and riots at the mills, all went into one common vat, from which were brewed poems and dramas and magazines, and romances and essays. The children ‘established plays,’ to use Charlotte’s words; some were secret plays, and they were the best. Of these some seem to have been verbal romances; they constructed them only in talk, making up adventures; others were written down, and of such was a play called The Islanders. Each of them, as they chattered together by the fire, chose an island and peopled it with celebrated folk. Charlotte’s island was the Isle of Wight, and, needless to say, the Duke of Wellington and his two sons and Christopher North were the principal inhabitants. Out of such developed whole sagas of joint imagination. Two groups were formed. Charlotte and Branwell collaborated over a state called Angria, somewhere in the West of Africa, near the delta of the Niger. The Angrians were ruled by King Zamorna, and the affairs of the Angrians were celebrated in poems and chronicles. Emily and Anne had another kingdom of their own devising called Angora, a hyperborean and mountainous land inhabited by a folk called Gondals, and ruled by the Emperor Julius; it was the scene of Royalist and Republican wars. Originally, as we may guess from the similarity of the names, Angria and Angora were one, but Charlotte and Branwell preferred the tropics, Emily and Anne the Arctic regions, and the joint-play separated into two, and these in turn became secret plays not common to them all. The Angrian cycle was the less long-lived; Branwell wrote The Rising of the Angrians when he was nineteen and Charlotte twenty, and with that the Angrian-Saga was finished; but Emily and Anne continued secretly to play at Gondals with unabated enthusiasm up till the last years of their lives. Emily was very busy over Gondal poems at the time when that wondrous genius of hers was fashioning Wuthering Heights.

  The surviving fragments of prose and poetry that Charlotte and Branwell produced as children are of no striking merit. They are such as might have been written by any clever children with vivid imaginations. But such a sentence as this, written by Charlotte at the age of thirteen, not as a literary composition, but as a mere domestic chronicle, might give pause to anyone trained, when he reads, to listen for the sound of an individual voice.

  One evening, about the time when the cold sleet and stormy fogs of November are succeeded by the snow storms and high piercing winds of confirmed winter, we were all sitting round the warm blazing kitchen fire having just concluded a quarrel with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which she came off victorious, no candle having been produced....

  There is something there, a management of words, an economy in their use, so that they convey as simply as possible, yet very vividly, the complete scene, which can hardly fail to strike the connoisseur of style. Charlotte’s virtues are foreshadowed there, just as in an effusion about the Genii, who

  in their impudence assert that by their magic they can reduce the world to a desert, the purest water to streams of livid poison, and the clearest lakes to stagnant waters, the pestilential vapours of which will slay all living creatures except the bloodthirsty beasts of the forest, and the ravenous bird of the rock,

  she as clearly foreshadows some of the delirious imagery in Jane Eyre and Shirley.

  But we cannot accept Mrs. Gaskell’s account of the prodigious quantity of these early compositions. She describes how she had been given a packet of Charlotte’s early manuscripts, a page of which, the opening of a story called The Secret, she reproduced in lithographic facsimile. It is in a script so minute as to be almost indecipherable. In this packet we learn was a paper in Charlotte’s handwriting headed as follows: ‘Catalogue of my books with the period of their completion up to August 3rd, 1830.’ This catalogue gives the titles and short descriptions of the poems, stories, essays, dramas, magazines, and articles she had written up to date, and at the end of them there is the entry:

  Making in the whole twenty-two volumes.

  C. Brontë. Aug. 3, 1830.

  Mrs. Gaskell then proceeds:

  As each volume contains from sixty to a hundred pages, and the size of the page lithographed is rather less than the average, the amount of the whole seems very great if we remember it was all written in about fifteen months. So much for the quantity....

  The amount, indeed, is very great;
in fact, it is so incredible that there must be some mistake. For the lithographed page which Mrs. Gaskell reproduces for us contains not less than 1280 words. Each volume, so we are told, contained sixty to a hundred pages, so, if we take eighty pages as the average length of each volume, we find that each volume contains 102,400 words. There are twenty-two of these volumes, written within a period of fifteen months. In fifteen months, therefore, Charlotte produced literary compositions containing 2,252,800 words, or an amount equivalent to twenty-two substantial novels. There is a mistake somewhere. These volumes, which were small, paper-bound notebooks, could not have contained so many pages of closely written script as the page Mrs. Gaskell reproduced. Still, the literary activities of these five years were truly enormous. It may be noticed that they did not entirely meet with Mr. Brontë’s approval, for when, a few years later, Southey counselled Charlotte in answer to a letter of hers not to neglect her household duties for the sake of writing, she replied that her father had always held the same view.

  But even when we have eliminated the impossible and qualified the improbable, we are left with a picture of those five years which succeeded the deaths of the two eldest daughters and the return of Charlotte and Emily from Cowan Bridge, of unique and extraordinary interest. There was Mr. Brontë busy with his parochial work, taking his dinner by himself in his study, going long walks alone, being called in sometimes to settle disputes as to the respective genius in generalship of Hannibal and Napoleon, or tearing open the paper to read to his excited family a speech of the Duke of Wellington’s, but not having any part in the essential literary passions of his children; there was Aunt Elizabeth Branwell clattering about the house in pattens for fear of catching cold, and living chiefly in her bedroom among her work-boxes; there was Tabby making scones in the kitchen, with her stories of the fairies in the glens of the moor, and refusing to let the children have a candle; and there were the four children caring nothing for the games and ordinary pursuits of childhood, and seeing nobody but the inhabitants of the house. In the catalogue of their early compositions, Charlotte and Branwell alone seem to have written at this time, and all the interests of life, all the products of their imagination, were turned, as by some process of spontaneous transubstantiation, into poems and plays and tales of adventure. Whether Emily and Anne wrote anything during those years we do not know; no signed and dated manuscripts of theirs exist, but the theory that Charlotte after their deaths destroyed most of their manuscripts does not prove that there were any of this date. Perhaps at this time they conducted the affairs of Gondaland only by the spoken word, though in later years they both wrote poems about them, signing them by Gondal names, such as Julius Angora, A. G. Alsaida, Alexandrina Zenobia, and others of that turbulent and mysterious people. But Emily already was distilling drop by drop from the moor and from Tabby’s tales of fairies that finest ichor of all, feeding on a honey-dew unknown to the others.

  This completely sequestered life during the formative years of childhood had inevitable reactions upon them all; once only, till Charlotte went to school again, do any of the children appear to have left the Parsonage, when all together they paid a visit to their aunt, Mrs. Fennell, and employed their time in drawing. At the Parsonage itself they saw nobody but each other. This isolation, teeming though it was with inner interests, must have fostered, even if it did not produce, Charlotte’s abnormal shyness when she was among strangers, which was the curse of her maturer years. She was also the eldest of the four and, with Aunt Branwell immured in her bedroom and her father in his study, she naturally took the lead; she managed, she set the tune for them, and assumed that habit of controlling their destinies, which she continued to exercise to the end. Then there was Branwell, brilliant and unstable, Charlotte’s particular friend and confidant, and his aunt’s favourite. Quite unlike his sisters he was gregariously disposed, whereas they all fled from the face of a stranger. He liked the company of others, easily winning flattery, and more easily swallowing it, by the wit and intelligence of his tongue. He ought, of course, to have been sent to school, but Mr. Brontë preferred to conduct his mental education himself, and leave his morals free to develop in the direction of least resistance. Then there was Emily, essentially solitary and silent, whose shyness was such that she would steal from the kitchen on the knock of the butcher or the baker. On her Haworth and the open void of the moor cast such a spell that all her life she pined with home-sickness, whenever she was away from the bleak home. Then there was Anne, as unlike her two sisters as Branwell was unlike them all. Her bent was for gentleness and piety.

  CHAPTER IV

  An end came for the present to Charlotte’s colossal literary activities, when in January 1831 she went to school again. For that period of eighteen months she seems to have written nothing, though Branwell at home kept the sacred fire burning by composing The History of the Young Men, and six volumes (notebooks) of Letters from an Englishman. This new school was an establishment kept by Miss Margaret Wooler at Roe Head, not twenty miles from Haworth, and there Charlotte formed the three most lasting friendships of her life — one with the excellent Miss Wooler herself, the others with two of the pupils. Mary Taylor was one of these, and it is with the aid of her exceedingly vivid pen, in a letter to Mrs. Gaskell, that we get the first impression of how Charlotte struck others outside the family circle at the Parsonage. It was a forlorn little figure that got out of the cart with a hood to it that had brought her from Haworth, and she was dressed in the outlandish fashion thought suitable by Aunt Branwell for little girls of fourteen. It was a snowy day, and when she had seen Miss Wooler she came into the schoolroom, where seven or eight girls were playing, and stood looking out of the window, quietly crying. She was very small; so too, even in proportion to her diminutive stature, were her hands and feet. Her nose was enormous for that little face, her mouth was large and crooked, her eyes and hair were brown. She was desperately shy, and when she spoke it was with an Irish brogue. Then one of the girls stopped her play and came and spoke to her: she was to be the third and closest of her lifelong friends, Ellen Nussey, though at first Charlotte did not like her. Charlotte was abnormally short-sighted, the books which she was always reading must be held so close to her face that her eyes nearly touched them. For games she had no use at all, for there had been no game played in the parlour at Haworth; besides, her short sight entirely prevented her from seeing the ball when it came to her, and when games were in progress she stood under the trees and looked at the view.

  The self-education system at Haworth had resulted in strange lacunæ in certain branches of knowledge. In spite of her literary compositions, Charlotte knew nothing technically about grammar, and in spite of the Angrian kingdom in the West of Africa, she knew nothing about geography. Miss Wooler, therefore, decided to place her in the second class among the junior girls of the school, but Charlotte’s tears of humiliation caused her to relent and put her in the first class, telling her she must work hard and catch up with the rest. There was never any question about Charlotte working hard, but it was soon evident that however hard the others worked they would never catch her up in those other branches of knowledge which had been part of the self-imposed curriculum at Haworth. If the first class was set to learn by heart some stanzas from an admired English poet suitable for young ladies, it was found that Charlotte knew them by heart already, and could proceed to spout the next page or two. If a political discussion arose about the Reform Bill and the young ladies were a little vague about the names of Ministers, Charlotte could repeat for them the complete list of the last two ministries. That naturally led on to the Duke of Wellington, and she told them the names of all his victories in the Peninsular War. Then she drew: it was a delight to her to get hold of some small print, and burying her face in it, copy it line by line and touch by touch, with minute accuracy. She was a marvellous story-teller of gruesome tales, and realised the highest ambition of the blood-curdling specialist when one night she frightened one of her listeners into
hysterics. Weekly she wrote to some member of the family at Haworth, and oftenest to Branwell, for she found she had more to say to him than to the others, and though during her year and a half at Roe Head she embarked on neither original romance nor magazine, nor poetical work, she was keeping her hand in with English composition. The following extract, written to her brother, has a cramped air about it, suggesting, perhaps, that Miss Wooler, in the approved style, looked over the girls’ letters home before they were sent.

  I am extremely glad that Aunt has consented to take in Fraser’s Magazine, for though I know from your description of its general contents, it will be rather uninteresting when compared with Blackwood, still it will be better than remaining the whole year without being able to obtain a sight of any periodical whatever: and such would assuredly be our case, as, in the little moorland village where we reside, there would be no possibility of borrowing a work of that description from a circulating library. I hope with you that the present delightful weather may contribute to the perfect restoration of our dear papa’s health and that it may give Aunt pleasant reminiscences of the salubrious climate of her native place.

  After that we feel Miss Wooler would have been quite safe not to censor any more of Charlotte’s letters home.

  II

  Here we must leave for a space the actual chronicle of events, and detach from it an emotional thread that for years was of vividest colour in Charlotte’s life, and continued, more soberly hued, to the end of it. This was her passionate affection for Ellen Nussey, whom she first saw when she arrived at Miss Wooler’s school, and whom at first she did not take to. But that indifference soon passed and gave place to one of those violent homosexual attachments which, so common are they among adolescents of either sex, must be considered normal rather than abnormal. They are full of yearnings and sentiment and aspirations, of blind devotion that tortures itself with enchanting fires, and presently burns out into cinders of indifference as often as it survives in the glow of friendship. But at the age of sixteen, Charlotte writes to her friend saying that she believes ‘our friendship is destined to form an exception to the general rule regarding school-friendships,’ and the sequel proved how right she was: this was not quite an ordinary schwärm. After she left Miss Wooler’s, a monthly correspondence was instituted, of which many of Charlotte’s letters remain, but she did not keep Ellen’s contributions, and our knowledge of the affair is unfortunately one-sided, though to some extent we can construct the complement.