The Three Brontes.
by May Sinclair.
PREFATORY NOTE
My thanks are due, first and chiefly, to Mr. Clement K. Shorter who placed all his copyright material at my disposal; and to Mr. G.M.
Williamson and Mr. Robert H. Dodd, of New York, for allowing me to draw so largely from the Poems of Emily Bronte, published by Messrs. Dodd, Mead, and Co. in 1902; also to Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, the publishers of the Complete Poems of Emily Bronte, edited by Mr. Shorter; and to Mr. Alfred Sutro for permission to use his translation of _Wisdom and Destiny_. Lastly, and somewhat late, to Mr. Arthur Symons for his translation from St. John of the Cross. If I have borrowed from him more than I had any right to without his leave, I hope he will forgive me.
MAY SINCLAIR.
INTRODUCTION
When six months ago Mr. Thomas Seccombe suggested that I should write a short essay on "The Three Brontes" I agreed with some misgiving.
Yet that deed was innocent compared with what I have done now; and, in any case, the series afforded the offender a certain shelter and protection. But to come out like this, into the open, with _another_ Bronte book, seems not only a dangerous, but a futile and a fatuous adventure. All I can say is that I did not mean to do it. I certainly never meant to write so long a book.
It grew, insidiously, out of the little one. Things happened. New criticisms opened up old questions. When I came to look carefully into Mr. Clement Shorter"s collection of the _Complete Poems of Emily Bronte_, I found a ma.s.s of material (its existence I, at any rate, had not suspected) that could not be dealt with in the limits of the original essay.
The book is, and can only be, the slightest of all slight appreciations.
None the less it has been hard and terrible for me to write it. Not only had I said nearly all that I had to say already, but I was depressed at the very start by that conviction of the absurdity of trying to say anything at all, after all that has been said, about Anne, or Emily, or Charlotte Bronte.
Anne"s case, perhaps, was not so difficult. For obvious reasons, Anne Bronte will always be comparatively virgin soil. But it was impossible to write of Charlotte after Mrs. Gaskell; impossible to say more of Emily than Madame Duclaux has said; impossible to add one single little fact to the vast material, so patiently ama.s.sed, so admirably arranged by Mr. Clement Shorter. And when it came to appreciation there were Mr.
Theodore Watts-Dunton, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, Mr. Birrell, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, lying along the ground. When it came to eulogy, after Mr. Swinburne"s _Note on Charlotte Bronte_, neither Charlotte nor Emily have any need of praise.
And on Emily Bronte, M. Maeterlinck has spoken the one essential, the one perfect and final and sufficient word. I have "lifted" it unblushingly; for no other word comes near to rendering the unique, the haunting, the indestructible impression that she makes.
So, because all the best things about the Brontes have been said already, I have had to fall back on the humble day-labour of clearing away some of the rubbish that has gathered round them.
Round Charlotte it has gathered to such an extent that it is difficult to see her plainly through the ma.s.s of it. Much has been cleared away; much remains. Mrs. Oliphant"s dreadful theories are still on record. The excellence of Madame Duclaux"s monograph perpetuates her one serious error. Mr. Swinburne"s _Note_ immortalizes his. M. Heger was dug up again the other day.
It may be said that I have been calling up ghosts for the mere fun of laying them; and there might be something in it, but that really these ghosts still walk. At any rate many people believe in them, even at this time of day. M. Dimnet believes firmly that poor Mrs. Robinson was in love with Branwell Bronte. Some of us still think that Charlotte was in love with M. Heger. They cannot give him up any more than M. Dimnet can give up Mrs. Robinson.
Such things would be utterly unimportant but that they tend to obscure the essential quality and greatness of Charlotte Bronte"s genius.
Because of them she has pa.s.sed for a woman of one experience and of one book. There is still room for a clean sweep of the rubbish that has been shot here.
In all this, controversy was unavoidable, much as I dislike its ungracious and ungraceful air. If I have been inclined to undervalue certain things--"the sojourn in Brussels", for instance--which others have considered of the first importance, it is because I believe that it is always the inner life that counts, and that with the Brontes it supremely counted.
If I have pa.s.sed over the London period too lightly, it is because I judge it extraneous and external. If I have tried, cruelly, to take from Charlotte the little beige gown that she wore at Mr. Thackeray"s dinner-party, it is because her home-made garments seem to suit her better. She is more herself in skirts that have brushed the moors and kept some of the soil of Haworth in their hem.
I may seem to have exaggerated her homesickness for Haworth. It may be said that Haworth was by no means Charlotte"s home as it was Emily"s. I am aware that there were moments--hours--when she longed to get away from it. I have not forgotten how Mary Taylor found her in such an hour, not long after her return from Brussels, when her very flesh shrank from the thought of her youth gone and "nothing done"; nothing before her but long, empty years in Haworth. The fact remains that she was never happy away from it, and that in Haworth her genius most certainly found itself at home. And this particular tone of misery and unrest disappeared from the moment when her genius declared itself, so that I am inclined to see in it a little personal dissatisfaction, if you will, but chiefly the unspeakable restlessness and misery of power unrecognized and suppressed. "Nothing done!" That was her reiterated cry.
Again, if I have overlooked the complexities of Charlotte"s character, it is that the great lines that underlie it may be seen. In my heart I agree with M. Dimnet that the Brontes were not simple. All the same, I think that his admirable portrait of Charlotte is spoiled by his att.i.tude of pity for "_la pauvre fille_", as he persists in calling her.
I think he dwells a shade too much on her small asperities and acidities, and on that "_ton de critique mesquine_", which he puts down to her provincialism. No doubt there were moments of suffering and of irritation, as well as moments of uncontrollable merriment, when Charlotte lacked urbanity, but M. Dimnet has almost too keen an eye for them.
In making war on theories I cannot hope to escape a countercharge of theorizing. Exception may be taken to my own suggestion as to the effect of _Wuthering Heights_ on Charlotte Bronte"s genius. If anybody likes to fling it on the rubbish heap they may. I may have theorized a little too much in laying stress on the supernatural element in _Wuthering Heights_. It is because M. Dimnet has insisted too much on its brutality. I may have exaggerated Emily Bronte"s "mysticism". It is because her "paganism" has been too much in evidence. It may be said that I have no more authority for my belief that Emily Bronte was in love with the Absolute than other people have for theirs, that Charlotte was in love with M. Heger.
Finally, much that I have said about Emily Bronte"s. .h.i.therto unpublished poems is pure theory. But it is theory, I think, that careful examination of the poems will make good. I may have here and there given as a "Gondal" poem what is not a "Gondal" poem at all. Still, I believe, it will be admitted that it is in the cycle of these poems, and not elsewhere, that we should look for the first germs of _Wuthering Heights_. The evidence only demonstrates in detail--what has never been seriously contested--that the genius of Emily Bronte found its sources in itself.
_10th October, 1911._
The Three Brontes
It is impossible to write of the three Brontes and forget the place they lived in, the black-grey, naked village, bristling like a rampart on the clean edge of the moor; the street, dark and steep as a gully, climbing the hill to the Parsonage at the top; the small oblong house, naked and grey, hemmed in on two sides by the graveyard, its five windows flush with the wall, staring at the graveyard where the tombstones, grey and naked, are set so close that the gra.s.s hardly grows between. The church itself is a burying ground; its walls are tombstones, and its floor roofs the forgotten and the unforgotten dead.
A low wall and a few feet of barren garden divide the Parsonage from the graveyard, a few feet between the door of the house and the door in the wall where its dead were carried through. But a path leads beyond the graveyard to "a little and a lone green lane", Emily Bronte"s lane that leads to the open moors.
It is the genius of the Brontes that made their place immortal; but it is the soul of the place that made their genius what it is. You cannot exaggerate its importance. They drank and were saturated with Haworth.
When they left it they hungered and thirsted for it; they sickened till the hour of their return. They gave themselves to it with pa.s.sion, and their works ring with the shock and interchange of two immortalities.
Haworth is saturated with them. Their souls are henceforth no more to be disentangled from its soul than their bodies from its earth. All their poetry, their pa.s.sion and their joy is there, in this place of their tragedy, visible, palpable, narrow as the grave and boundless.
In the year eighteen-twenty the Reverend Patrick Bronte and his wife Maria brought their six children, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, Emily, and Anne, from Thornton, where they were born, to Haworth. Mr. Bronte was an Irishman, a village schoolmaster who won, marvellously, a scholarship that admitted him to Cambridge and the Church of England. Tales have been told of his fathers and his forefathers, peasants and peasant farmers of Ballynaskeagh in County Down. They seem to have been notorious for their energy, eccentricity, imagination, and a certain tendency to turbulence and excess. Tales have been told of Mr. Bronte himself, of his temper, his egotism, his selfishness, his fits of morose or savage temper. The Brontes"
biographers, from Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux[A] to Mr. Birrell, have all been hard on this poor and unhappy and innocent old man. It is not easy to see him very clearly through the mult.i.tude of tales they tell: how he cut up his wife"s silk gown in a fit of pa.s.sion; how he fired off pistols in a series of fits of pa.s.sion; how, in still gloomier and more malignant fits, he used to go for long solitary walks. And when you look into the matter you find that the silk gown was, after all, a cotton one, and that he only cut the sleeves out, and _then_ walked into Keighley and brought a silk gown back with him instead; that when he was a young man at Drumballyroney he practised pistol firing, not as a safety valve for temper but as a manly sport, and that as a manly sport he kept it up. As for solitary walks, there is really no reason why a father should not take them; and if Mr. Bronte had insisted on accompanying Charlotte and Emily in their walks, his conduct would have been censured just the same, and, I think, with considerably more reason. As it happened, Mr. Bronte, rather more than most fathers, made companions of his children when they were little. This is not quite the same thing as making himself a companion for them, and the result was a terrific outburst of infant precocity; but this hardly justifies Mrs.
Gaskell and Madame Duclaux. They seem to have thought that they were somehow appeasing the outraged spirits of Emily and Charlotte by blackening their father and their brother; whereas, if anything could give pain to Charlotte and Emily and innocent Anne in heaven, it would be the knowledge of what Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux have done for them.
[Footnote A: A. Mary F. Robinson.]
There was injustice in all that zeal as well as indiscretion, for Mr.
Bronte had his good points as fathers go. Think what the fathers of the Victorian era could be, and what its evangelical parsons often were; and remember that Mr. Bronte was an evangelical parson, and the father of Emily and Charlotte, not of a brood of gentle, immaculate Jane Austens, and that he was confronted suddenly and without a moment"s warning with Charlotte"s fame. Why, the average evangelical parson would have been shocked into apoplexy at the idea of any child of his producing _Wuthering Heights_ or _Jane Eyre_. Charlotte"s fame would have looked to him exceedingly like infamy. We know what Charles Kingsley, the least evangelical of parsons, once thought of Charlotte. And we know what Mr.
Bronte thought of her. He was profoundly proud of his daughter"s genius; there is no record and no rumour of any criticism on his part, of any remonstrance or amazement. He was loyal to Charlotte to the last days of his life, when he gave her defence into Mrs. Gaskell"s hands; for which confidence Mrs. Gaskell repaid him shockingly.
But he was the kind of figure that is irresistible to the caustic or humorous biographer. There was something impotently fiery in him, as if the genius of Charlotte and Emily had flicked him in irony as it pa.s.sed him by. He wound himself in yards and yards and yards of white cravat, and he wrote a revolutionary poem called "Vision of h.e.l.l". It is easy to make fun of his poems, but they were no worse, or very little worse, than his son Branwell"s, so that he may be pardoned if he thought himself more important than his children. Many fathers of the Victorian era did.
And he _was_ important as a temporary vehicle of the wandering creative impulse. It struggled and strove in him and pa.s.sed from him, choked in yards and yards of white cravat, to struggle and strive again in Branwell and in Anne. As a rule the genius of the race is hostile to the creative impulse, and the creative impulse is lucky if it can pierce through to one member of a family. In the Brontes it emerges at five different levels, rising from abortive struggle to supreme achievement--from Mr. Bronte to his son Branwell, from Branwell to Anne, from Anne to Charlotte, and from Charlotte to Emily. And Maria, who died, was an infant prodigy.
And Mr. Bronte is important because he was the tool used by their destiny to keep Charlotte and Emily in Haworth.
The tragedy we are too apt to call their destiny began with their babyhood, when the mother and six children were brought to Haworth Parsonage and the prospect of the tombstones. They had not been there eighteen months before the mother sickened and died horribly of cancer.
She had to be isolated as far as possible. The Parsonage house was not large, and it was built with an extreme and straight simplicity; two front rooms, not large, right and left of the narrow stone-flagged pa.s.sage, a bedroom above each, and between, squeezed into the small spare s.p.a.ce above the pa.s.sage, a third room, no bigger than a closet and without a fireplace. This third room is important in the story of the Brontes, for, when their mother"s illness declared itself, it was in this incredibly small and insufferably unwholesome den that the five little girls were packed, heaven knows how, and it was here that the seeds of tuberculosis were sown in their fragile bodies. After their mother"s death the little fatal room was known as the children"s study (you can see, in a dreadful vision, the six pale little faces, pressed together, looking out of the window on to the graves below). It was used again as a night-nursery, and later still as the sleeping-place shared by two, if not three, of the sisters, two of whom were tuberculous.
The mother died and was buried in a vault under the floor of the church, not far from the windows of her house. Her sister, Miss Branwell, came up from Penzance to look after the children. You can see this small, middle-aged, early Victorian spinster, exiled for ever from the sunshine of the town she loved, dragging out her sad, fastidious life in a cold and comparatively savage country that she unspeakably disliked. She took possession of the room her sister died in (it was the most cheerful room in the house), and lived in it. Her nieces had to sit there with her for certain hours while she taught them sewing and all the early Victorian virtues. Their father made himself responsible for the rest of their education, which he conducted with considerable vigour and originality. Maria, the eldest, was the child of promise. Long before Maria was eleven he "conversed" with her on "the leading topics of the day, with as much pleasure and freedom as with any grown-up person".
For this man, so gloomy, we are told, and so morose, found pleasure in taking his tiny children out on to the moors, where he entertained them alternately with politics and tales of brutality and horror. At six years old each little Bronte had its view of the political situation; and it was not until a plague of measles and whooping-cough found out their tender youth that their father realized how very young and small and delicate they were, and how very little, after all, he understood about a nursery. In a sudden frantic distrust of the climate of Haworth, of Miss Branwell, and his own system, he made up his mind to send Maria and Elizabeth and Charlotte and Emily to school.
And there was only one school within his means, the Clergy Daughters"
School, established at Cowan Bridge in an unwholesome valley. It has been immortalized in _Jane Eyre_, together with its founder and patron, the Reverend Carus Wilson. There can be no doubt that the early Victorian virtues, self-repression, humility, and patience under affliction, were admirably taught at Cowan Bridge. And if the carnal nature of the Clergy Daughters resisted the militant efforts of Mr.
Carus Wilson, it was ultimately subdued by low diet and primitive drainage working together in an unwholesome valley. Mr. Carus Wilson, indeed, was inspired by a sublime antagonism to the claims of the perishable body; but he 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 those children were laid low by typhus.
The fever did not touch the four little Brontes. They had another destiny. Their seed of dissolution was sown in that small stifling room at Haworth, and was reaped now at Cowan Bridge. First Maria, then Elizabeth, sickened, and was sent home to die. Charlotte stayed on for a while with Emily. She ran wild, and hung about the river, watching it, and dabbling her feet and hands in the running water. Their doom waited for Charlotte and for Emily.