by E. F. Benson
Thus the gentle narrative rambles mildly on, telling of minute happenings and of the general outlook on life of this quiet soul, and helping us perhaps to understand that her apparent colourlessness is not due to our imperfect knowledge of her, but was a quality in her character, as indeed Agnes Grey abundantly testifies. But neither Anne’s paper with its figured silk, its resolve to get up early, its information about the canary and the dogs, nor the cheerful contents of Emily’s, justify Mrs. Gaskell’s lurid estimate of the doom which Branwell had wrought in the lives of his sisters— ‘The premature death,’ she tells us, ‘of two at least of the sisters, — all the great possibilities of their lives snapped short — may be dated from Midsummer 1845.’ Indeed, it is impossible to conjecture what she means by the snapping short of all their great possibilities (unless she alludes to the school scheme which had already been given up a year before, as no pupils could be obtained), for the great possibilities of their lives, all the achievements without which the name of Brontë would be unknown to this day, were as a matter of fact just about to be manifested.
Charlotte, as we have seen, could not take the same cheerful view as her sisters; all her plans had failed, she was prey to a miserable devotion, and now there was this fresh trouble about Branwell. From the moment of her arrival at Haworth to find him discharged with ignominy from his tutorship at Thorp Green, down to the day of his death, rather more than three years later, she held him in unmitigated hatred and contempt, which, so far from keeping to herself, she constantly expressed in her letters to her friend. No word of pity for her brother, no faintest indication of sympathy for the grievous pass into which his weakness and self-indulgence had already brought him oozed from her pen, but regularly and succinctly, month by month, she sent Ellen the stark bulletins of his deterioration. He came back from his trip with John Brown, and already in August she writes:
My hopes ebb low indeed about Branwell. I sometimes fear he will never be fit for much. His bad habits seem more deeply rooted than I thought. The late blow to his prospects and feelings has quite made him reckless. It is only absolute want of means that acts as any check to him. One ought, indeed, to hope to the very last; but occasionally hope, in his case, seems a fallacy.
Later in the same month she records that his health and temper have been a little better, but only ‘because he has been forced to abstain.’ Next month she tells Ellen that ‘Branwell makes no effort to seek a situation, and while he is at home, I will invite no one to come and share our discomfort.’ In November, however, he tried through his friend Francis Grundy to get employment again on the railway, but could not obtain it, and Charlotte again wrote, saying that
Branwell still remains at home, and while he is here — you shall not come. I am more confirmed in that resolution the more I know of him. I wish I could say one word to you in his favour, but I cannot. Therefore I will hold my tongue.
To Miss Wooler she gave the same reason why she could not ask her to Haworth; and again she writes to Ellen in December, saying: ‘You say well that no sufferings are so awful as those brought on by dissipation: alas! I see the truth of this observation daily proved.’ Bitter had been her disappointment with him, and deep was her disgust. Once he had been her chosen ally; she had seen in front of him a brilliant career in art or letters, but nothing of that was realised owing to the instability of his character. The artist had degenerated into a ticket-collector at a wayside station, and had proved himself entirely untrustworthy. Thereafter his downward course had been swift, and now he was a drunken, good-for-nothing philanderer, unfit for any employment that demanded reasonable steadiness.
Now Charlotte’s view of the moral hopelessness of her brother thus early expressed was amply justified: he ruined his health by drink as he had ruined his position as tutor by his conduct (whatever it was) towards Mrs. Robinson. For publicans and sinners, for the weak, the self-indulgent, and the erring, Charlotte had no compassion nor any fellow-feeling, and she included her brother in her pitilessness. There was a special reason, apart from his sottishness, why she should do so. A woman of a nature less righteous than hers, and less austere, might have found in that reason a bond of sympathy with him; it was otherwise with her, and her experience of a hopeless attachment, intimate and her own, and somewhat similar to that in which Branwell had found himself, must vastly have added to her contempt for him when she contrasted her conduct with his. For she had been and still was in love with another woman’s husband, and she had not taken to drink, but had done her best to start a school. She had not committed any ‘frantic folly’; she had not raved about the hunger of her heart to her father and her sisters, but had refrained from mentioning to them even the name of M. Héger. How should she not then despise her brother for this unmanly lamentation and his sottish consolements? Hard and composed, with set mouth and unsoftening eyes, she wrote to Ellen that November bulletin, saying that she wished she could say one word in Branwell’s favour, but could not.... Then there was another letter, for it was three months since she had written to Brussels and had yet received no answer; and her eyes softened, and the stern mouth relaxed, and her head was bowed low over the paper, as by the light of the dining-room fire she told M. Héger how humiliating it was ‘to be the slave of a fixed and dominant idea which lords it over the mind.’ She entreated him to write again, for his last letter had been stay and prop to her for half a year, and she tells him how day by day she awaits the post hour to see if it will bring anything from him, and day by day disappointment flings her back into overwhelming sorrow, when the sweet delight of seeing his handwriting fails her, and fever takes her and she loses appetite and sleep and pines away.
But these were private appeals for the eye of M. Héger alone. What would have happened, we cannot help wondering, if, when Madame had rescued these letters from the waste-paper basket and carefully pieced them together, she had sent even one of them to Mr. Brontë? Pitiable for their very abjectness, for their utter surrender of that womanly pride, which she had counselled Ellen always to preserve, they really reveal a folly not less frantic than that for which she so bitterly blamed her brother. What would her sisters and her father and her brother have thought of her and her determination not to leave Brussels till she had got a grip of German?
Of all the members of that tragic family, now collected under the roof of the Parsonage in this autumn of 1845, there to remain together till, one by one, the brother and two of the three sisters were beckoned forth by the finger of death, we must look on Charlotte as being the loneliest and the most wretched. She was the continual prey of this torture of the nerves, and it is to that she refers when, a year later, remission had come.
Assuredly, [she writes] I can never forget the concentrated anguish of certain insufferable moments, and the heavy gloom of many long hours, besides the preternatural horror which seemed to clothe existence and nature, and which made life a continual waking nightmare. Under such circumstances the morbid nerves can know neither peace nor enjoyment. Whatever touches pierces them, sensation for them in suffering.
Emily and Anne, according to their secret papers, were very tolerably content, Branwell had the consolation of the ‘Black Bull’ and the luxury of his own lamentations, while Charlotte whose scholastic programme, for which she had schemed at such ruinous cost to her own peace, had utterly failed, whose literary ambitions were dead, whose heart bled with secret self-torture, whose righteousness was hard and pitiless and without consolation for her, was burning away with the sense of talents unused and abilities thwarted of their due fruition. But Anne was working at her Passages in the Life of an Individual; Branwell was working at a story also, with which by September he had filled, in a handwriting as minute as Charlotte’s, one notebook. Emily, for diversion, was writing the Gondal romance, The Emperor Julius’s Life, and, for happiness, her poems, which were her secret life, full, not of hunger-heart and bitterness, but of the all-sufficient rapture of a mystic who waited the coming of the spirit when the house wa
s still, even as the prophet waited for the temple to be filled by night with the glory of the Lord. Even so, she set her light in the window to show she was alert and ready.
Burn then, little lamp, glimmer straight and clear — Hush! a rustling wing stirs, methinks, the air; He for whom I wait thus ever comes to me; Strange Power! I trust thy might, trust thou my constancy.
But in Charlotte’s secret garden there were none of these night-flowering fragrances, and bitter alike to the mouth and to the belly were the herbs that grew for the succour of her solitude. She was the most sundered of them all, for Emily and Anne had their private alliance, and whereas she had turned her back on Branwell and gone by on the other side, Emily maintained a sisterly friendliness towards him that made yet another cause for distance and estrangement between Charlotte and her, and whatever private commerce she may have had with him, Charlotte had no more part in it than in Emily’s affairs with Anne. Something to plan, something to manage, a scheme to mature, an ambition to strive for — any of this would have given alleviation to this weight of unbroken joyless nothingness, made more unbearable by the authentic sense of power and vitality and energy boiling within her, by the absence of any engine into which to direct its driving force, and by the continual besotted presence of an intolerable brother.
Then one day in this dreary autumn of 1845 Charlotte saw an opportunity and took hold of it with a grip of iron. Knowing from her letters and the secret papers of Emily and Anne the habit of life at Haworth, we may, without the aid of imagination, picture how it came to her.
Charlotte had been reading the daily paper one morning to her father, who was now very nearly blind; presently Mr. Nicholls came in to talk over parish affairs, and the rest of the day lay empty and objectless before her. Emily was making bread in the kitchen, for the day was Monday; there was a book propped up in front of her as she kneaded the dough, and her bulldog, Keeper, was lying by her. Anne was in the dining-room cleaning out the canary’s cage; her spaniel Flossy lay on the sofa. Of Branwell there was no sign; most likely he had gone out to the ‘Black Bull’ for a morning dram. Very soon Anne’s task was done and she went out quietly, to join Emily in the kitchen, and Charlotte was left alone in the dining-room, where once all four of them had been used to sit when the sewing tasks were done and Aunt Branwell gone up to bed, scribbling at poem or story, or walking round the table, discussing each other’s work. For years there had been no such councils in literature. Anne, Charlotte knew, was writing a story of some kind; Emily, she knew, wrote poems still, but there was now no exchange of confidences between them; she knew nothing of what her sisters were writing, and as for herself, ever since she first went to Brussels three and a half years ago, she had written nothing except letters to Ellen and a few friends, and to M. Héger.
The two desks in which Emily and Anne kept their private papers were lying on the side-table. Idly, almost accidentally, Charlotte opened Emily’s desk, and on the top of the papers within lay one of the notebooks of which Charlotte had filled so many. She took it up; it was full of those poems which she knew Emily wrote, but which neither she nor Anne had ever seen. They were surprising, they were more than surprising — she found them ‘condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine,’ not like the usual run of women’s poems. While she was still at it, Emily’s baking was finished and she came in and found Charlotte deep in her reading.
Emily was furious at this invasion of her privacies; ‘it took hours,’ Charlotte put it, ‘to reconcile her to the discovery I had made.’ The words ‘My discovery,’ if she used them, must have been peculiarly irritating, for what she had discovered was Emily’s inviolable and guarded treasure, and not otherwise does a burglar ‘discover’ some pearl of great price in the jewel-chest of the house he has entered. Nor did Charlotte mean to let go of that pearl, when its indignant owner demanded it back, for after Emily was reconciled to the discovery another surrender was demanded of her. Not only her sister but the public must see those condensed and terse poems; they must be published; they were remarkable. Over that Emily fought harder: it took days, Charlotte tells us, to persuade her, but she ‘knew that a mind like hers could not be without some spark of honourable ambition and refused to be discouraged.’
Though all our private sympathy is with Emily over this stern invasion of her secret life, which she had so firmly withheld from her sisters, we are unable not to thank God that Charlotte had no scruples about that, but wore down her opposition by the unyielding determination of her will. But for that, the world would perhaps never have seen Emily’s poems at all, and possibly none of the great Brontë novels; Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and Villette might never have been written. For the ‘discovery’ struck the spark from which the old flame was rekindled, and all three of the sisters began to burn again with those ambitions for a literary career which had so long lain covered with the ashes of discouragement. Charlotte raked the ashes off and blew on the coal. Once again there was something to do, something to work for, and, as before, when a scholastic career was contemplated, Charlotte took charge for the joint advantage of her sisters and herself. This time Anne was not left out, for seeing that Emily’s poems had pleased her sister she produced some of her own, and Charlotte found in them ‘a sweet sincere pathos.’ Hence arose the scheme, for Charlotte in her girlhood had written many poems herself, and she decided that they must bring out a joint volume. Branwell had written a good deal of verse too, of a quality certainly not inferior to Charlotte’s or Anne’s, but he was not asked to contribute, and neither he nor Mr. Brontë was told anything about the project. A selection of the poems was made, sufficient to run to 165 pages, and the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell were chosen, thus preserving the initials of the three authors, and avoiding publicity. The ‘ambiguous choice of these names,’ Charlotte states, ‘was dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming names positively masculine.’ This scruple was but ephemeral, for after the book appeared she wrote thanking the editor of the Dublin University Magazine for a favourable review in the name of herself and her brothers.
The first difficulty was to get any answer at all from the publishers to whom Charlotte offered the book, though some warned her against publishing poems at all. Eventually, in January 1846, she got into practical touch with Messrs. Aylott & Jones of Paternoster Row, who agreed to publish the book on payment by the authors of thirty guineas, which was subscribed, we may suppose, between them. She went with untiring precision into questions of format, of type and of paper; she was anxious to correct all proof sheets herself, since the printer had set up ‘tumbling stars’ instead of ‘trembling stars,’ which threw ‘an air of absurdity over the whole poem’; and she conducted correspondence with the firm under her own initial and surname on behalf of the three ‘Bells,’ receiving replies addressed to ‘C. Brontë, Esq.’ Then some mistake occurred (did Branwell, perhaps, seeing a male address open an envelope of proof sheets?) and future letters were addressed to ‘Miss Brontë.’ Then there came the question of binding, of the periodicals to which advance copies were to be sent, and of the price of the book. Charlotte thought five shillings would be suitable, but if that was excessive for so slender a volume, four shillings. From a letter of hers to Mrs. Gaskell in 1850, we find that this was the price at which it was published. An additional sum of £5 was sent to defray the further cost and £10 for purposes of advertising, so that in all the sisters paid £46 10s.
The spirit of God had moved upon the face of those dark and stagnant waters, and there dawned the light that while English literature endures will know no wane. Long before the poems were even selected and offered to Messrs. Aylott & Jones, all three sisters blazing with the resuscitated flame of authorship were, during the autumn of 1845, each engaged on a novel. Anne, when she returned from Thorp Green, was already filling her third notebook with Passages in the Life of an Individual, which subsequently appeared as Agnes Grey. Charlotte began on The Professor, and Emily was engaged on Wuthering Heights. By
what date these three books were finished is not quite clear, for Charlotte gives irreconcilable pieces of information about it. Speaking of the book of poems she says: ‘Ill-success 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....’ This implies that the sisters did not begin their novels till the venture in poesy had failed. But this was not the case; they must have begun to write their novels (and written fast, too) in the autumn of 1845, while the poems were being selected and a publisher sought for, for we find Charlotte writing in April 1846 to Messrs. Aylott & Jones, who were then printing the poems, saying that ‘C., E., and A. Bell are now preparing for the press a work of fiction, consisting of three distinct and unconnected tales which may be published either together as a work of three volumes ... or separately as single volumes.’ The three stories, therefore, must have been complete or nearly so before the poems were published at all. Again, giving us another date for their completion, she tells us that these MSS. (Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and The Professor) ‘were perseveringly obtruded on various publishers for the space of a year and a half’ before any of them were accepted. But Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were accepted for publication not later than July 1847; they must therefore have been finished and going out on the dreary round by January 1846. In either case the sisters must have been writing their novels during the autumn of 1845, and I suggest, as a possible explanation of these discrepancies in date, that Agnes Grey, already far advanced in the summer, was finished by January 1846, and began its fruitless journeys then, and that The Professor and Wuthering Heights were ready a few months later. As to the implication that the ‘prose-tales’ were not begun till the ill-success of the poems was proved, the established dates make this quite impossible, for all the first three stories had been finished long before, and Jane Eyre, Charlotte’s second story in point of composition, was approaching completion.
