CHARLOTTE BRONTË

[Pg ii]

Charlotte Brontë
(1850)
From a drawing by George Richmond, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.

[Pg iii]

CHARLOTTE BRONTË
BY
E. F. BENSON

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
LONDON ♦ NEW YORK ♦ TORONTO
1932

[Pg iv]

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[Pg v]

INTRODUCTION

‘And what was he like when he wasn’t writing books?’ asked the small boy to whom I had just been reading a chapter out of Treasure Island. ‘He wasn’t really grown up, was he?’

Such were the two questions which came from those unsophisticated lips, and surely it was a very laudable curiosity that inspired them. This chapter of Treasure Island had been entrancing: it was proper to want to know something about the man who held so thrilling a pen. I sympathise with that desire and uphold it, in spite of those austere purists who tell us that a book must be judged on its merits and on them alone. The reading of it has kindled in us an excitement or has awakened a perception of beauty: for these (the purists say) the book alone is responsible, and the emotions which the reading of it has aroused are concerned only with what lies between its covers. The merchant of pearls (they argue) does not want to ascertain the conditions under which this valuable bivalve lived: it is enough for him that a thing of beauty and of great price lies in his hand. So why, if we read a book or look at a picture that kindles our imagination, should we want to know about the circumstances which helped or handicapped the author or the artist who produced it? They are irrelevant.

The answer is that the book has kindled our imagination, and this very fact makes us demand to know the[Pg vi] intimate and personal history of it. We want to see it not on the flat page only, but in the round, and to be curious about the author and the circumstances in which he wrote it is by no means an irrelevant inquisitiveness. We legitimately wish to know how and why he wrote like that: we find it humanly impossible not to desire to learn about him as well as to enjoy his work.

For a fine flower of literature is not a sundered phenomenon, as is a pearl in Bond Street. It grew from a soil, and not only do its colour and its fragrance, its manner of growth and of foliage concern us, but the nature of the soil which nourished it. Was it a natural product of that soil, or was there in it so fiery and individual a particle that it grew there in spite of its soil? So far from such an inquiry being irrelevant there is nothing more justly interesting, for, indeed, until we know about the author we cannot really judge of his work. Some elements in it, even though it is a masterpiece, may seem to us false or crude or biased, but an understanding of the author’s life may show us that he could not have looked at the world of which he treats from any other angle. It is our business, if we want to understand a book which is worth our study and our admiration, to look at it through our author’s eyes before making conclusions on the evidence of our own. For an ultimate, if not for an elementary appreciation of the finest work, a knowledge of its genesis is essential. To know that Shelley’s Adonais was a lament for the death of Keats expands our just appreciation of it, and we are the poorer because we do not know the genesis of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

There is another reason as well that redeems from the charge of idle inquisitiveness our desire to know all we can about the private lives of certain individuals. A man may have been eminent in action or distinguished in the arts, but it is not to enhance our appreciation of[Pg vii] his achievements that we study his private life. We do not, for instance, read the most entrancing biography in the world in order to enlarge our appreciation of Rasselas: in fact, the more we enjoy Boswell’s Life the more we regret that so entrancing a companion as Johnson ever spent in writing the precious hours he might have devoted to conversation. We want to know more and yet more about the man and his ways and his robust oddities and squalor and nobility, for the sake of acquaintance with him himself, and for no other reason whatever. I do not know how many people nowadays read Rasselas, but they cannot amount to one per cent. of those who read Boswell, and even of that one per cent. a large fraction must have embarked on their task because they already knew the biography. Johnson in fact no longer connotes to us the classical author of his day, but the subject of Boswell’s book, and we want to learn about him not for what he wrote but for what he was.

In the case of the Brontës our interest in their private lives is justified by both these reasons: they were in themselves of most strange and unusual individuality, and two of them, Charlotte and Emily, produced books that profoundly stir our interest and our imagination: it is no desire to pry into private life that makes us want to see these books in the round. A noble flower of literature sprang from a soil which we should have thought was of so arid a nature that the budding and blossoming of such, miraculous in itself by reason of its power or its beauty, is doubly miraculous, by reason of the very unlikelihood, on a priori grounds, of its having blossomed there at all. And when we find that, in the living-room of a grim and meagre parsonage, girt about by moors and graveyard and charged with an atmosphere of hatred and heroism, of thwarted ambitions and acclaimed achievement, there worked two[Pg viii] sisters who, vastly differing in talent and temperament, have for ever enriched English literature, the one by a romance of supreme genius and by a few lyrics whose authentic magic ranks them with Kubla Khan and Keats’s Ode to the Nightingale, the other by two novels which, easily outlasting ephemeral foibles, will always hold their place among classical masterpieces, it is inevitable that we should want to learn all we can not only about the books themselves, but about the strange solitary girls who wrote them. Anything in their lives that throws real light on their books, anything in their books which can be shown to throw real light on their lives, is our legitimate concern.

The earliest of the books about the Brontës, and the only one whose author knew any of them personally, is the admirable Life of Charlotte Brontë, which, at her father’s request, was written by Mrs. Gaskell and published, two years after Charlotte’s death, in 1857. Though she did not come in contact with Charlotte till within five years of her death and never saw her sisters or her brother, she at once became an esteemed though never an intimate friend. Her task was a labour of love. ‘I weighed every line,’ she said, ‘with my whole power and heart, so that every line should go to its great purpose of making her known and valued.’ That surely is a very proper spirit for the biographer, and Mrs. Gaskell produced an admirable book which will always rank high for its technical excellence. But it is possible to have too much of the proper spirit, if the biographer’s object is to produce a human and a faithful portrait. He has no right to suppress or soften harsh features and characteristic traits in his hero because they would interfere with the impression, founded on his own admiration, which he desires to produce. We do not ask that failings should be exaggerated, and limitations too hardly defined, but[Pg ix] we are right to demand from the biographer such presentation of them as is necessary to a true picture. We know from Charlotte’s own letters that there was a vast deal of hardness and intolerance in her nature, and Mrs. Gaskell’s image of her, as entirely tender and loving and patient under cruel trials and disappointments, robs her, with the best motives, of her actual individuality. These suppressions, which render her so much less real, were deliberate: we find that Mrs. Gaskell, with the evidence of Charlotte’s letters in front of her, leaves out important passages which clearly convey what she was at pains to suppress.

Sometimes these omissions are simply puerile. Charlotte, for instance, writing to Ellen Nussey when her authorship of Shirley, which she vainly hoped to conceal, became known at Haworth, exclaimed ‘God help, keep and deliver me!’: Mrs. Gaskell, though transcribing from the letter in front of her, emends: ‘Heaven help, keep and deliver me.’ Such small though numerous alterations are of no consequence, but when it comes to Mrs. Gaskell quoting from Charlotte’s letters to M. Héger and deliberately suppressing all that showed that she was writing love-letters to him, the omission becomes serious, because it leaves out crucial and essential experiences. This point is more fully dealt with in its place. Moreover, though she brought to her task those excellent gifts which had already placed her high in the ranks of English novelists, her skilled instincts as a novelist were often a snare to her. The late Sir Edmund Gosse, one of our finest critics, once said to me, ‘Nobody but a novelist should be allowed to write a biography, but he must remember that he is not now writing a novel,’ and it must be confessed that Mrs. Gaskell was terribly forgetful of that. In her admirable zeal to make her friend known and valued she sometimes fobs us off[Pg x] with fiction, forgetting that, though a novelist’s business is to create characters, it is the business of a biographer to render them, and that the tact of omission, when too unscrupulous, becomes a falsification.

The first edition of Mrs. Gaskell’s book appeared in two volumes, and she soon found herself the centre of a swarm of hornets. Forgetful that she ought to have been dealing with facts, she had taken very insufficient pains about establishing them, and not only was she threatened with two libel actions, but Mr. Brontë, at whose request she had undertaken the work, was furious, as we shall presently see, with what she had said about him. She had to issue a public apology in The Times to avert one of these threatened actions, and when her book was reissued make important omissions: references to these will be made in their due place. She had been inconceivably careless in accepting as true unsifted gossip, always with the intention of blackening the shadows round her central figure and thereby increasing the lustre of its shining, and now she retracted and omitted and, in fact, did all she possibly could to minimise the pain her carelessness had given others, and incidentally to save herself from serious consequences. But subsequent authors of Brontë-Saga have not scrupled to repeat as accredited facts what Mrs. Gaskell was obliged to withdraw because they were not, and many of these have taken their place in what we may call the Canon: it is for this reason alone that I have called attention to the passages which Mrs. Gaskell herself withdrew. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these writers were aware of what they were doing: such passages only appear in the earliest editions of her book, and the history of their excision must have been within the knowledge of subsequent authors.

But a fervour of excitement, almost a religious[Pg xi] enthusiasm, seems often to inspire the pens of those who write about the Brontës, and we find that under the spell and fascination of their subject they are apt to become a little careless about facts and very prolific in fancy. Usually they select one of the sisters as the particular object of their adoration: there are Emily-ites; there are Charlotte-ites; there are, faintly and less fervently, Anne-ites, each of whom sets up a golden image of its goddess and omits the feet of clay. In a minor degree there are those who espouse the cause of the unhappy brother Branwell, and seek to sponge off a little of the blackness with which all the rest unanimously daub him. But this partisanship, with all its fanatical suppressions and inventions, tends to defeat its own object, and, instead of elucidating, only succeeds in piling up round the object of its devotion cartloads of apocryphal rubbish which were better away, and while it decks the adored image with highly coloured robes of splendour, obscures its figure and its face. Charlotte and Emily alike lose all power of movement under the hieratic robes into which they have been thrust: they have become, in certain of these books, as doll-like as Madonnas decked out for ecclesiastical festival by Sisters of Charity, and, under this pious decoration of rouge and jewels and haloes, are stiffened into immobility. Such embellishments do not become them, and part of the object of the ensuing pages is to clear some of them away.

But the difficulties in the way of anyone who seeks, without sentimentality on the one hand or malice on the other, to get as near as may be to the truth about the immortal denizens of Haworth Parsonage, are of the most baffling sort, so full of contradictions and discrepancies are the authorities which must be consulted. Infinitely the most important of these is Charlotte Brontë herself, for her letters and certain biographical notices[Pg xii] she wrote about her sisters supply us with at least nine-tenths of our first-hand knowledge about the family. Yet even she falls into such extraordinary errors about their ages and simple matters of that sort that the harassed biographer knows not where to look for the most trivial certainties. Three times, for instance, in her letters and biographical notices of her sisters does she misstate Emily’s age: she published certain posthumous poems saying that Emily wrote them in her sixteenth year, when Emily was at least in her eighteenth year; she says that Emily was twenty when she went to Brussels, whereas she was twenty-three; and when Emily, in her thirty-first year, lay dying, she wrote to a doctor saying that she was in her twenty-ninth year. This consistency of error, in fact, makes us think that Charlotte did not know how old Emily was.

Such wrong information as this accounts for the despair of the biographer in arriving at what I have called ‘trivial certainties,’ which are not, however, of much importance except to pedants. But no one can consider trivial anything that concerns the intimate and psychical history of the sisters and their books, and when the biographer addresses himself to these more important matters, he finds himself encumbered by so great a cloud of witnesses and so belligerent an array of the furious partisans of individual sisters, who contradict each other (and occasionally themselves) with so copious an outpouring of vials of scorn on any who take views divergent from their own, that in the end his wisest course is to reject as possibly apocryphal any romantic conjecture, often given as firm fact, which is not endorsed by some such basic authority as Charlotte Brontë’s letters, or by inferences that can with certainty be drawn from the books themselves. But well-merited confusion and disaster awaits him who attempts to reconcile the conflicting statements made by enthusiastic[Pg xiii] partisans of different sisters, so rich are they in suppressions and omissions which would have invalidated their theories, and in inventions which support them, and I have founded my narrative almost completely on Charlotte’s letters.

But, indeed, to take part in so controversial but fascinating a subject as this is rather like entering a den of lions without believing oneself to be in any way a Daniel, and my bones, I am aware, may presently be scattered before the pit.

E. F. Benson.

[Pg xiv]

NOTE

The executors of the late Mr. Clement Shorter have most generously given me leave to use and quote from all the letters of Charlotte Brontë of which he held the copyright. Without such permission it would have been impossible to present the ensuing picture of her, derived as it is, almost entirely, from this copyright material. I therefore wish to acknowledge my full and grateful sense of the indulgence they have so liberally given to me. These letters are a mine of material, and their permission has enabled me to coin, so to speak, with whatever awkwardnesses and failures in striking, much unminted treasure.

All extracts from letters come out of Mr. Clement Shorter’s book The Brontës (Hodder & Stoughton, 1908), unless it is stated otherwise. To avoid an endless array of footnotes, individual references are not given to these unless for some reason they are difficult to find.

E. F. Benson.

[Pg xv]

NOTE

On a Spurious Portrait of Charlotte Brontë

There is another supposed portrait of Charlotte Brontë in the National Portrait Gallery, though not on exhibition, besides that by George Richmond. It is a water-colour sketch signed ‘Paul Hegér [sic] 1850,’ and the inscription on the back declares it to be a sketch of her from life by M. Héger. The reasons against its being genuine are numerous and convincing:

(i) Charlotte never went to Brussels after her return to England in 1844, nor was M. Héger in England in 1850. The picture, therefore, could not have been done from life.

(ii) M. Héger’s name was not Paul Héger, but Constantin Héger. He appears in Villette as ‘Paul Emmanuel,’ which may account for the confusion in the mind of the person who signed it.

(iii) Though Constantin Héger had a son called Paul, he was not in 1850 more than six or eight years old. The drawing is that of a trained and competent artist.

(iv) The accent on the name ‘Hegér’ [sic] is misplaced.

(v) The picture does not bear the smallest resemblance to George Richmond’s picture of Charlotte Brontë, which was drawn from life.

[Pg xvi]

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[Pg 1]

CHARLOTTE BRONTË
CHAPTER I

When the Reverend Patrick Brontë arranged with Mrs. Gaskell that she should undertake to write the life of his daughter Charlotte he supplied her, by letters and interviews, with information about her subject, and included therein some slight history of his own early life. He was the eldest of the ten children of Hugh Brontë, a small farmer in County Down, Ireland.

There was some family tradition, [she tells us] that humble as Hugh Brontë’s circumstances were, he was the descendant of an ancient family. But about this neither he nor his descendants have cared to enquire.... He opened a public school at the early age of sixteen, and this mode of living he continued to follow for five or six years.

That makes a picturesque prelude: we feel interested at once in this remarkable boy who was to be the father of such illustrious children. But it was as well, for the sake of romantic origins, that further inquiries were not made in the parish of Drumballyroney, County Down, where, on March 17, 1777, Patrick Brontë was born, for it would have been found that his father was a stranger to the noble surname which his eldest son subsequently assumed, and had been always known as Hugh Brunty, peasant farmer. His family was numerous—ten sons and daughters had been born to him. All these had been entered in the register as Brunty or[Pg 2] Bruntee, and it was Patrick who abandoned the ancient patronymic of his family and adopted the more modern Brontë. Nelson, it may be remarked, had been created Duke of Brontë in 1799, and the new name had a distinction. But it seems to have been of the ancient Brontës of County Down (hitherto unknown) that Mr. Brontë spoke to Mrs. Gaskell, and probably she was unaware of the existence of the humbler patronymic, or, knowing, she loyally concealed the family secret. As for Patrick Brunty, as he then was, having opened a public school at the age of sixteen, the fact was that he was an assistant master at the village school. These trifles, otherwise quite unimportant, have a certain significance, as being the earliest of those embroideries which have since disfigured rather than decorated the household images of the hearth at Haworth.

Patrick Brontë’s early history is really more remarkable when stripped of the august details which he gave to Mrs. Gaskell. He taught at the village school for some five or six years, and then for three or four more was tutor to the family of Mr. Tighe, parson of the parish. From that remote occupation he was transported, as on a magic carpet, to the gate of St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he was admitted as an elderly under-graduate at the age of twenty-five in the year 1802. Boys then used to go up to the University at the ages of sixteen or seventeen, and he must have been older than many of the Fellows of the College. How he managed it, who paid the fees and the expenses of his year-long board and lodging and clothing (for he never went back to Ireland) is quite unknown. His father, Hugh Brunty, small peasant farmer, with ten children to rear, can hardly have done so, and it is improbable that he could have saved enough himself. The most reasonable conjecture is that Parson Tighe helped him. Patrick was a tall, extremely handsome young man; he was full[Pg 3] of intelligence, vitality, and ambition, and the guess (for it is no more) that this benevolent clergyman saw that money could not be better spent than in giving his children’s tutor a chance is probably true.

It is worth noting how these instincts for self-education and for teaching, and this grit in triumphing over difficulties were transmitted by this young Irishman to his family, and in especial to Charlotte. From their earliest years learning was a passion with them all, and those who outlived childhood, Charlotte and Emily and Anne, were all governesses before they were out of their teens, and Branwell, a little later, a tutor. The idea of setting up a school (though not a public school) was one of the long-cherished dreams of Haworth, and to fit herself and her sisters for it Charlotte carried through a scheme for the further education of herself and Emily at Brussels, which was scarcely less improbable of accomplishment, when she conceived it, as that young Patrick Brontë should, forty years before, have succeeded in going up to Cambridge from Drumballyroney, County Down, and getting a University education. Indomitable will, the power to make and then grasp opportunities, teaching, authorship, were fruitful in the blood; while, in minor detail, even as Patrick Brunty, when he went incredibly forth to make his way in the world, assumed a more prepossessing surname, so his daughters, when their destiny declared itself, went forth to the world as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell for fear that an avowal of feminine authorship might prove a handicap to success.

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[Pg 4] 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:

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.[1] 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.

[Pg 6]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.

[Pg 7]

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[Pg 8] 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,[2] 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.[3] The Maid of Killarney contains some [Pg 9]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[Pg 10] 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.

[Pg 11]

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-[Pg 12]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.[4]

[Pg 13]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[Pg 14] 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 discharge 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[Pg 15] was never a more affectionate father, never a kinder master.... He was not of a violent temper at all, quite the reverse!’[5]

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.’[6] 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.

Now the trouble arose from Mrs. Gaskell’s forgetfulness that she was now writing a biography and not a romance. There is every reason to suppose that Mr. Brontë had a high, even a violent, temper, but she had obtained her instances of it from a tainted source, and they seem to have been unfounded. She did what she could, by withdrawing them, to repair the needless pain they had given, and having done that she had made such amends as were in her power for having published them at all. But the mischief did not end there, and these stories are believed by many Brontë students to this day, for regardless of the fact that she cancelled them, as being untrue, biographers who have followed her have had no hesitation in disinterring such discredited stuff from her unexpurgated editions and giving it renewed currency with comments. Sir T. Wemyss Reid, for instance, who, chronologically, is the next successor to Mrs. Gaskell, repeats the legend of the pistol firing, exuberantly adding fresh details. The villagers, he tells us, were quite accustomed to the sound of pistol shots ‘at any hour of [Pg 16]the day’ from their pastor’s house: Mr. Brontë not only deliberately cut to bits his wife’s pretty dress but ‘presented her with the tattered fragments.’ He tells us that it was Mrs. Brontë’s lot to ’submit to persistent coldness and neglect,’ and that she lived ‘in perpetual dread of her lordly master.’[7] This is falsification, for since he got these stories of violence from Mrs. Gaskell’s book, he must have found there also her record that Mrs. Brontë used to say, ‘Ought I not to be thankful that he never gave me an angry word?’ Unkindness to his wife was thus incorporated into the Brontë-Saga, and a monstrous disregard of the proper diet for young children has been deduced from the apocryphal story that they had only potatoes for dinner. My only object in referring to what Mrs. Gaskell withdrew is that, though it was withdrawn, it has been served up again by others.

Mrs. Brontë lived only eighteen months after the family came to Haworth, and died of internal cancer in September 1821. It is curious that Charlotte, whose childish memories were so extraordinarily vivid, and who was five and a half years old when she died, could remember practically nothing of her mother. She could recall only the picture of her playing with Branwell, then aged four, in the parlour. Towards the end, when too weak to move, Mrs. Brontë used to ask her nurse to raise her in bed, so that she might see the grate being cleaned, for the servant cleaned it in the way it was done in Cornwall. She was buried at Haworth, and practically the whole of what we know of her is derived from those letters she wrote to Mr. Brontë when she was engaged to him.

He was now left with six children, the youngest of whom, Anne, was still little more than eighteen months [Pg 17]old, and in the course of the next year there came to live at Haworth, in order to look after them, Miss Elizabeth Branwell, Mrs. Brontë’s eldest sister, and the Parsonage was her home until her death. She lived much in her bedroom, where she taught her nieces to sew, and where there were grouped round her a spinster’s household gods—an Indian workbox, a workbox with a china top, and a ‘Japan’ dressing-box: she took snuff out of a small gold box. After the warmth and sunny climate of Penzance, where snow and frost were as unknown as in the valley of Avilion, she hated this bleak and wintry upland, and habitually wore pattens in the house for fear of the chill of the stone stairs stabbing through her shoes. The Branwell family in Penzance mixed much in social circles, but here there were no circles of any sort: it was a dismal change, and we must credit her with having been a woman with a strong sense of moral obligation to have given up all that constituted life’s amenities at the call of duty. She had an income of her own, derived from investments, of £50 a year, out of which she contributed to household expenses, and shortly before her death she showed that she was a woman of generous impulses. Her favourite among the children was Branwell, and he of them all was the only one who ever wrote of her with affection, and, after her death, with regret. She seems to have been lacking in lightness and geniality. We can find, at any rate, no hint of the gentle gaiety and tenderness of her sister, and in the absence of such evidence she has been fashioned into a grim, forbidding personage. Commentators, with the passion for identifying all the characters in Charlotte’s novels with people whom she had known, have pounced on this poor lady as being the ‘original’ of Mrs. Reed in Jane Eyre, and have suggested that in the bedroom where she taught her nieces to sew, she kept a switch with which she used ‘to lace the quivering palm or shrinking neck’ for[Pg 18] misdeeds they had never committed. The evidence rests entirely on the fact that Charlotte and her sisters used to sew in Miss Branwell’s bedroom, and Jane Eyre used to be whipped in Mrs. Reed’s bedroom.