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Title: Charlotte Bront
Author: Benson, Edward Frederic (1867-1940)
Date of first publication: 1932
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London, New York, and Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1932
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 16 May 2013
Date last updated: 16 May 2013
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1074

This ebook was produced by Delphine Lettau, Pat McCoy
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
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CHARLOTTE BRONT




  AS WE WERE:

  _A VICTORIAN PEEP-SHOW_

  By E. F. BENSON

  Cheap Edition. 5_s._ net.




  [Illustration: CHARLOTTE BRONT (1850)
  _From a drawing by George Richmond, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery._]




  CHARLOTTE BRONT

  BY

  E. F. BENSON

  _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_

  LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

  LONDON  NEW YORK  TORONTO

  1932




  LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. LTD.

  39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C.4
  6 OLD COURT HOUSE STREET, CALCUTTA
  53 NICOL ROAD, BOMBAY
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  LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

  55 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
  221 EAST 20TH STREET, CHICAGO
  88 TREMONT STREET, BOSTON
  128-132 UNIVERSITY AVENUE, TORONTO




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 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
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 Bronts 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 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 Bronts, and the only one whose
author knew any of them personally, is the admirable _Life of Charlotte
Bront_, 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 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. Hger 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 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. Bront, 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 Bront-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 enthusiasm, seems often
to inspire the pens of those who write about the Bronts, 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 Bront herself, for her letters
and certain biographical notices 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 Bront'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 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.




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 Bront 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
Bronts_ (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.




NOTE


_On a Spurious Portrait of Charlotte Bront_

There is another supposed portrait of Charlotte Bront in the National
Portrait Gallery, though not on exhibition, besides that by George
Richmond. It is a water-colour sketch signed 'Paul Hegr [_sic_] 1850,'
and the inscription on the back declares it to be a sketch of her from
life by M. Hger. 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. Hger in England in 1850. The picture, therefore, could
not have been done from life.

(ii) M. Hger's name was not Paul Hger, but Constantin Hger. 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 Hger 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 'Hegr' [_sic_] is misplaced.

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




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  CHARLOTTE BRONT (1850)                               _Frontispiece_
      _From the drawing by George Richmond, R.A., in
        the National Portrait Gallery._

  ANNE, EMILY AND CHARLOTTE BRONT                      _Facing p._ 53
      _From the painting by Branwell Bront in the
        National Portrait Gallery._

  EMILY BRONT                                               "      94
      _From a painting by Branwell Bront in the
        National Portrait Gallery._

  PATRICK BRANWELL BRONT                                    "     106
      _From a silhouette in the Bront Museum._

  CONSTANTIN HGER                                           "     134

  THE REV. PATRICK BRONT                                    "     190
      _From a photograph in the Bront Museum._

  THE REV. ARTHUR BELL NICHOLLS                              "     282
      _From a portrait taken during his curacy at
        Haworth._

  HAWORTH PARSONAGE (_circa_ 1850)                           "     292
      _From a photograph in the Bront Museum._




CHARLOTTE BRONT




CHAPTER I


When the Reverend Patrick Bront 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 Bront, a small farmer in County
Down, Ireland.

     There was some family tradition, [she tells us] that humble as Hugh
     Bront'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 Bront 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 Bruntee, and it was Patrick who abandoned the ancient
patronymic of his family and adopted the more modern Bront. Nelson, it
may be remarked, had been created Duke of Bront in 1799, and the new
name had a distinction. But it seems to have been of the ancient Bronts
of County Down (hitherto unknown) that Mr. Bront 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 Bront'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 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 Bront 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 the year after Patrick Bront, was a
member of the same corps as he: Mr. Bront 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. Bront broke
the engagement. He did not apparently mention this episode to Mrs.
Gaskell, nor the sequel to it which will appear later. He then moved to
Yorkshire, where he was curate first at Dewsbury, and then at Hartshead.
While there he published, in 1811 and 1813, two volumes of poems: these
are _Cottage Poems_ and _The Rural Minstrel_. Many of them are
definitely religious, and all have a moral. It is difficult to quote
from them: some rather discouraging verses sent _To a Lady on her
Birthday_ may be taken as typical of his muse:

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

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

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

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

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

At Hartshead Mr. Bront 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. Bront, 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.

[Footnote 1: Clement Shorter, _Charlotte Bront and her Circle_, p. 34
etc.]

     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. Bront made some lover-like demand that she
should protest her affection for him, and very properly she proceeds:

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

She takes a walk she had taken with him,

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

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

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

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

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

The final letter announces that they are busy at her uncle's house with
making the cakes for the wedding, and that she has already learned by
heart 'the pretty little hymn' he sent her, 'but cannot promise to sing
it scientifically, though I will endeavour to gain a little more
assurance.' Throughout this delicious little series of letters,
extending over four months, there runs the note of love and piety
crystal-clear in nave sincerity and sparkling with humorous touches of
demure merriment and chaff of her saucy Pat. Had Mrs. Bront 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 Bront took place at Guiseley
near Hartshead in December 1812, and never again did she return from
the moors and mists of the austere north to the prim home of her
brother, ex-Mayor of Penzance, where the grates were so beautifully
cleaned, and palm trees grew in those gardens to which the snows of the
Yorkshire moors and the long savage winters of the uplands were
strangers. She was wedded to her dear saucy Pat, and the bearing of his
children was business enough.

At Hartshead were born, in 1813 and 1815, her two eldest children, Maria
and Elizabeth. In 1815 Mr. Bront 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
Bronts,[2] and of the Bronts 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 Bronts. 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.

[Footnote 2: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, p. 410.]

At Thornton Mr. Bront wrote the second of his prose romances, called
_The Maid of Killarney, or Albion and Flora_.[3] _The Maid of Killarney_
contains some warnings against the carnal tendencies fostered by
dancing, and, like the rest of Mr. Bront's works, derives its sole
interest from the fact that the author was the father of his children.
Mrs. Bront, 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!

[Footnote 3: Mr. Bront's other printed pieces include several tracts
and sermons, and a poem called _The Phenomenon; or, an Account in Verse
of the Extraordinary Disruption of a Bog which took place in the Moors
of Haworth on the 12th day of September 1824_.]

Then came the final ecclesiastical 'step' for Mr. Bront, 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
Bront-drama, was laid at the Parsonage there. Standing at the top of
the steep hill up which the village climbs, it faces, across a small
oblong of walled-in garden, the west door of the Church of St. Michael.
It is girt about with the graveyard; the public-house, the 'Black Bull,'
is neighbourly; a 'short lone lane' leads to the moors. These four,
parsonage and church, public-house and moors, are the main furnishing of
the scene. Of them the church is the least significant and the moors the
most, for from the moors came _Wuthering Heights_.




CHAPTER II


The house was small for this family of eight persons. On the ground
floor to right and left of the flagged passage from the front door were
two parlours: that on the left was the dining-room and family
sitting-room; to the right was Mr. Bront'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 Bront-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. Bront 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. Bront's nurse in
her last illness. Mrs. Bront died in 1821, and thus it was thirty-four
years after the time to which it refers, when Mrs. Gaskell, collecting
materials for the _Life of Charlotte Bront_, 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. Bront 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. Bront a silk gown; either the make or the colour or the
     material was not according to his notions of consistent propriety,
     and Mrs. Bront 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. Bront 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. Bront, 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]

[Footnote 4: Mrs. Gaskell, _Life of Charlotte Bront_ (1st edition),
vol. i, pp. 51-54.]

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. Bront 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. Bront's nurse had been dismissed from his service. No doubt
when Mr. Bront 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 Bront children often walking out
hand in hand towards the moors, at the time when she was nursing their
mother. When Mrs. Bront 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 Bronts from
Thornton, while the other had entered Mr. Bront's service at Haworth.
He now gave them, as a counterblast to these accusations, a written
testimonial that they had not been wasteful but had been admirable
servants in all respects, and Nancy, the cook-general, deposed that the
children's dinner every day consisted of beef or mutton followed by milk
pudding. Not exciting, but not potatoes. In turn she gave a testimonial
to her old master, and said that 'there was never a more affectionate
father, never a kinder master.... He was not of a violent temper at all,
quite the reverse!'[5]

[Footnote 5: F. A. Leyland, _The Bront Family_, vol. i, pp. 46-50.]

Mr. Bront 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.

[Footnote 6: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 60.]

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. Bront 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
Bront 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 the day' from
their pastor's house: Mr. Bront 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. Bront'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. Bront 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 Bront-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.

[Footnote 7: T. W. Reid, _Charlotte Bront_, pp. 21, 22.]

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Bront 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. Bront 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. Bront 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 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. Bront'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 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.

Mr. Bront, after his sister-in-law's advent, made two attempts to marry
again. Miss Elizabeth Firth, who had been friends with the family at
Thornton, was his first choice, but the lady was already engaged to the
Rev. James Franks, Vicar of Huddersfield. Then he harked back to the
days of his curacy at Wethersfield, and wrote a quite amazing letter to
Miss Mary Burder, to whom he had once been engaged, but whom he had
subsequently thrown over, informing her how he had improved in the last
fifteen years, how popular he was in his parish (the Vicar of Dewsbury
would bear him out), and how eager to make up to her for the
disappointment he had caused her. She replied with singular clarity,
piously thanking God that He had already preserved her from the fate of
being his wife, but she wished him nothing but well. A second appeal
produced no sign of softening, and he resigned himself to celibacy.




CHAPTER III


For a little while yet as regards the early history of Mr. Bront's
children, we have, before we get to firmer ground, to continue to get
our information from what he told Mrs. Gaskell. They were studious and
highly intelligent children: Branwell, perhaps, was the most promising
of them all, but at the age of ten Maria used to study the Parliamentary
debates in the newspapers, and could discuss with her father the leading
topics of the day, with the grasp and perception of an adult. He
suspected that all of them thought more deeply than appeared on the
surface, and knowing that they were very shy, he adopted the strangest
device that ever entered a father's head to encourage fluency and
frankness in the mouths of these babes and sucklings. He found a mask in
his study; he set his children in a row, and bade them each assume it in
turn, so that they might speak boldly under cover of it, and answer the
cosmic questions he put to them. This unique plan, instead of terrifying
them, produced the most gratifying results. He began with the youngest,
and question and answer ran as follows:

     MR. BRONT. Anne, what does a child like you most want?

     ANNE (aged four). Age and experience.

     MR. BRONT. Emily, what had I best do with your brother Branwell,
     when he is a naughty boy?

     EMILY (aged five). Reason with him, and when he won't listen to
     reason, whip him.

     MR. BRONT. Branwell, what is the best way of knowing the
     difference between the intellects of man and woman?

     BRANWELL (aged six). By considering the difference between them as
     to their bodies.

     MR. BRONT. Charlotte, what is the best book in the world?

     CHARLOTTE (aged seven or eight). The Bible.

     MR. BRONT. And what is the next best, Charlotte?

     CHARLOTTE. The Book of Nature.

     MR. BRONT. Elizabeth, what is the best mode of education for a
     woman?

     ELIZABETH (aged eight or nine). That which would make her rule her
     house well.

     MR. BRONT. Maria, what is the best mode of spending time?

     MARIA (aged ten or eleven). By laying it out in preparation for a
     happy eternity.

Now Mr. Bront vouched for the substantial exactness of these answers to
his questions; they made (and no wonder) 'a deep and lasting impression'
on his memory, and the story must therefore be treated with the utmost
respect. But we cannot help wondering whether his memory of the manner
of the questions was as exact as that of the answers. We admit that they
were very remarkable children. We know, on indisputable evidence, that
at a very early age Charlotte and Branwell wrote prodigious quantities
of poems, tales, articles, dramas, magazines and novels, but we find
difficulty here in accepting the literal truth of Mr. Bront's account.
Take Anne. Anne, we have already seen, is recorded to have walked on the
moors with her brother and sisters when she was only twenty months old.
A baby who did that was almost _capable de tout_; but could even she, at
the age of four, when asked what a child like her most wanted, answer
straight off 'Age and experience'? There was surely a little prompting,
something like this:

     MR. BRONT. Now, Anne, take the mask and remember you are only four
     years old. Other people are much older. What do you lack?

     ANNE. Age.

     MR. BRONT. Excellent. And you have seen little of the world yet,
     nothing much has happened to you. What else do you lack?

     ANNE. Experience.

Our craving for probabilities demands something of this sort. Mozart, it
is true, composed fugues at the age of four, but then Mozart fulfilled
the promise of his extraordinary precocity, while Anne, gentle and
pious, gave birth to nothing worthy of her spontaneous insight at the
age of four. The replies of the other children are hardly less amazing,
Branwell's in particular, though it is difficult to see exactly what he
meant. Maria's reply is infinitely pathetic, for her preparation for
eternity was nearly accomplished.... With this episode Mr. Bront makes
his last contribution to the chronicles of his family.


II

There had been established in the year 1823 at Cowan Bridge in the West
Riding of Yorkshire a boarding-school for the education of the daughters
of indigent clergymen. The fees charged were 14 a year, with certain
small supplements, and the girls wore a uniform which was provided for
them: 3 was charged for this. So small a sum for board and education
did not cover the running expenses of the place, and the Reverend
William Carus Wilson, who was mainly responsible for its establishment,
had got together a body of annual subscribers, and their contributions
paid for the salaries of the mistresses and other outgoings. Mr. Bront
no doubt had heard well of the school, and in July 1824, a year after it
had been opened, he entered his two eldest daughters as pupils. Maria
and Elizabeth had lately suffered from measles and whooping-cough, and
it was doubtful whether they were well enough to go.

Mr. Bront took them there himself: he stayed at the school, he ate his
meals with the children, and he was shown over the whole establishment.
He must presumably have been satisfied that the pupils were well looked
after and cared for, for he returned there again in August, bringing
with him Charlotte, aged eight, and again in November, bringing Emily,
aged six. His four eldest daughters were thus all at Cowan Bridge
together. Of them individually during their schooldays we know little.
Maria was constantly in disgrace, owing to habits common to children who
have not sufficient physical control, and was often punished by a junior
mistress called Miss Andrews in a harsh and excessive manner. Elizabeth
had some accident in which she cut her head, and Miss Evans, the senior
mistress, looked after her with the greatest care, taking her to sleep
in her own room. Charlotte was described as a bright, clever little
child; the youngest, Emily, was the pet of the school. During the
ensuing spring of 1825 there broke out some epidemic spoken of as 'low
fever,' and probably allied to influenza. Mr. Carus Wilson did
everything possible for the girls sick of this 'low fever' in the way of
diet and medical attendance, and evidently the epidemic was not of any
severe or malignant type, for only one girl died, and that from
after-effects. None of the four Bront girls caught it, but in February
1825, while it was prevalent, Maria became seriously ill, and Mr.
Bront, who had not known that she was ailing, was sent for, and he took
her back to Haworth, where she died of consumption on May 6. He
certainly did not attribute her illness to ill-treatment or neglect, for
the other three girls remained at Cowan Bridge. Then, at the end of May,
Elizabeth was seen to be suffering from the same symptoms as Maria, and
was taken back to Haworth, and Charlotte and Emily went home a week
afterwards. Elizabeth died, also of consumption, on June 15.

The school continued to prosper, and was subsequently moved from Cowan
Bridge to Casterton, where in 1848 it was doing excellent work,
providing the pupils with places as governesses and starting them on
their careers. During these intervening years Charlotte, in her very
voluminous and intimate correspondence, never alluded to her own
schooldays at Cowan Bridge, nor to those of her sisters. But she was
pondering certain things in her heart, keeping them close, as in a
forcing-glass, and letting none of the heat and the bitterness in which
she grew them escape in trivial utterance. Then, in 1846, she took up
the forcing-glass of her silence and her concentration, and, in _Jane
Eyre_ (published the next year), branded with infamy the school which
she had left at the age of nine. Nowadays we know to some extent what
the psychological effect of such suppression is. Painful impressions
made on a child's mind grow to monstrous proportions, and the adult mind
fully believes in the actuality of its own distortions.

There is no need to go, with any detail, into those chapters in _Jane
Eyre_ which deal with the Orphan Asylum at Lowood. It suffices to say
that Charlotte Bront avowed that they were drawn accurately and
faithfully from life. 'Lowood' was Cowan Bridge; 'Helen Burns' was her
sister Maria; the black marble clergyman, 'Naomi Brocklehurst,' was Mr.
Carus Wilson; the epidemic was typhus, and it caused many girls to die
at their homes when they were removed there, others to die at school.
But by no possibility can the 'low fever' which broke out at Cowan
Bridge, when she was at school there, have been typhus; for typhus is an
exceedingly deadly fever, a plague of the Middle Ages, and the rate of
mortality among its victims is, in spite of the most skilled attendance
and nursing, about twenty-five per cent. Here, however, out of forty
cases there was, as a matter of fact, only one death, and that from
after-effects, and these in typhus are unknown. When once the crisis is
past, if the patient lives through it, convalescence is swift and
uninterrupted. Jane Eyre describes the infection as having been due to
damp air coming into the open windows of the school and the dormitories.

Charlotte expressed regret that Cowan Bridge was instantly identified,
on the publication of _Jane Eyre_, as being Lowood, but if a very vivid
and gifted writer uses the utmost of her skill to render unmistakable
the features of the place she describes, she has no business to be
surprised if recognition follows, and her regret must be suspect.
Indeed, it is clear that so far from regretting it she was pleased with
the identification, for she wrote to her friend, Mr. Williams, saying:

     I saw an elderly clergyman reading it (_Jane Eyre_) the other day,
     and had the satisfaction of hearing him exclaim, 'Why they have got
     ---- School, and Mr. ---- here, I declare, and Miss ----' (naming
     the originals of Lowood, Mr. Brocklehurst and Miss Temple). He had
     known them all. I wondered whether he would recognise the
     portraits, and was gratified to find that he did, and that,
     moreover, he pronounced them faithful and just. He said too, that
     Mr. ---- (Brocklehurst) deserved the chastisement he had got![8]

[Footnote 8: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 352.]

Since the age of nine she had nursed her bitterness of heart at the
death of her sisters till it became an obsession to her, for not only in
_Jane Eyre_, under the more licensed imagination of fiction, but in a
private letter to her old friend and mistress, Miss Wooler, who had
asked her for her opinion on Cowan Bridge, she made the following
indictment:

     Typhus fever decimated the school periodically and consumption and
     scrofula in every variety of form, which bad air and water, and
     bad, insufficient diet, can generate preyed on the ill fated
     pupils.

It is impossible to accept such a statement; it bears on the face of it
its own refutation, for no school periodically decimated by typhus can
possibly continue to exist. Years of bitter brooding had caused
Charlotte to imagine a state of affairs that was wildly exaggerated.

On the other hand, the awful moral precepts, the threats of hell and
damnation, which she put into the mouth of Mr. Brocklehurst, the 'black
marble clergyman' and effigy of Mr. Carus Wilson, were founded on fact.
He published, for instance, in 1828, an appalling little volume called
_Youthful Memoirs_, and edited and contributed poems to a magazine
called the _Children's Friend_, which teems with just such sentiments as
she attributed to him. A verse from one of these runs:

  It's dangerous to provoke a God
    Whose power and vengeance none can tell;
  One stroke of His almighty rod
    Can send young sinners quick to hell.

These volumes were, of course, accessible to Charlotte long before she
wrote _Jane Eyre_, but, whether she saw them or not, the man who wrote
them was certainly capable of the harangues of Mr. Brocklehurst.

Then came Mrs. Gaskell with the first edition of her _Life_, and her
definite disclosure that Lowood in _Jane Eyre_ was an accurate picture
of Cowan Bridge: it was no wonder that the hornets came about her. The
porridge for breakfast was often burned and had offensive foreign
fragments in it, the beef was high, the house morning, noon, and night
reeked of rancid fat, the water in which the rice was boiled was rain
water, drained from the roof into a wooden tub and thence drawn off for
the kitchen, the little Bronts, craving for food, could often eat
nothing whatever, and when Mr. Carus Wilson heard complaints about such
inedible diet he replied that the children were to be trained up to
regard higher things than dainty pampering of the appetite, and lectured
them on the sinfulness of their carnal propensities. The epidemic of
typhus is duly recorded, and its cause definitely assigned to the state
of semi-starvation in which the pupils were kept. Mrs. Gaskell did not,
she expressly tells us in a later edition of her book, get her
information from Charlotte Bront, who never spoke to her about Mr.
Carus Wilson at all, and only once alluded to Cowan Bridge and the
careless way in which the food was prepared, but she based her narrative
on _Jane Eyre_, collecting also stories that suited her picture without
verifying them or finding out whether there was rebutting evidence. She
was threatened with a libel action, she was bombarded with letters from
old pupils at Cowan Bridge, expressing the highest regard and affection
for Mr. Carus Wilson, and their appreciation of the admirable way in
which the school was conducted. As for the revolting diet, all that
could be substantiated was that there had once been a careless cook who
spoiled the porridge and was dismissed.

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 Bront-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 Bronts scarcely
ever knew what it was to be free from the pangs of hunger'[9]; another
called it 'the counterpart for girls of Mr. Squeers's Academy for Young
Gentlemen'[10]; 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.'[11] Whatever is the
truth about Cowan Bridge, and the sadist cruelties related in _Jane
Eyre_, we must remember that Mr. Bront was satisfied with the
management of the school, and that Mrs. Gaskell acknowledged that she
had not, in her _Life of Charlotte Bront_, 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_.[12]

[Footnote 9: T. W. Reid, _Charlotte Bront_, p. 26.]

[Footnote 10: Isabel Clarke, _Haworth Parsonage_, p. 32.]

[Footnote 11: May Sinclair, _The Three Bronts_, p. 13.]

[Footnote 12: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, pp. 447-462.]


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. Bront 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 Bronts 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_,[13] 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. BRONT. Aug. 3, 1830.

[Footnote 13: This story really is of a later date. Charlotte wrote it
in 1833.]

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.[14]...

[Footnote 14: Mrs. Gaskell, _Life of Charlotte Bront_, pp. 58-60.]

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. Bront'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. Bront 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. Bront 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 lacun 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
_schwrm_. 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.

At first Charlotte is evidently the predominant partner: she exhorts,
she encourages, she approves, she educates, and the lover has something
of the governess about her. She discusses literary topics and assures
Ellen that 'your natural abilities are excellent, and under the
direction of a judicious and able friend, you might acquire a decided
taste for elegant literature and even poetry.' Then there was some alarm
about Ellen's health, and Charlotte, in that laboured style that both
she and Branwell considered literary, hoped that

     your medical adviser is mistaken in supposing that you have any
     tendency towards a pulmonary affection. Dear Ellen, that would
     indeed be a calamity.... Guard against the gloomy impression that
     such a state of mind naturally produces.

That alarm passed off, and when Charlotte was eighteen Ellen went on a
visit to London, and Charlotte's letters unconsciously show not only
what the friendship was becoming to her, but give us, intimately and
inevitably, something of the ripening characteristics of her mind. At
first she was afraid that the distractions and gaiety of 'modern
Babylon' would prove too potent a diversion to Ellen, and take her mind
away from her adorer, but she found this was not so. Ellen remained not
only her friend, but her 'true friend.' Then in this letter follows a
passage in which devotion is strangely mingled with the approbation of a
governess who is satisfied with her pupil.

     I am really grateful [she writes] for your mindfulness of so
     obscure a person as myself, and I hope the pleasure is not purely
     selfish, I trust it is partly derived from the consciousness that
     my friend's character is of a higher and more steadfast order than
     I was once perfectly aware of. Few girls would have done as you
     have done--would have beheld the glare and glitter and dazzling
     display of London with dispositions so unchanged, hearts so
     uncontaminated. I see no affectation in your letter, no trifling,
     no frivolous contempt of pain, and weak admiration of showy persons
     and things.... Continue to spare a corner of your warm affectionate
     heart for your true and grateful friend.

But Ellen's mind, her intellectual advancement must still be seen to,
and when she wrote to Charlotte asking her for a list of books to read,
the instructress and moralist is altogether in the ascendant, and 'the
judicious and able friend' recommends 'Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson,
Goldsmith, Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth and Southey.'

     Now don't be startled [she writes] at the names of Shakespeare and
     Byron. Both these were great men, and their works are like them.
     You know how to choose the good and avoid the evil; the finest
     passages are always the purest, and the bad are invariably
     revolting. Omit the comedies of Shakespeare, and the _Don Juan_,
     perhaps the _Cain_ of Byron ... read the rest fearlessly: that must
     indeed be a depraved mind which can gather evil from _Henry VIII_,
     _Richard III_, from _Macbeth_, and _Hamlet_, and _Julius Caesar_.
     In fiction read Scott alone: all novels after his are worthless.
     For biography, read Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_, Boswell's _Life
     of Johnson_, Southey's _Life of Nelson_, etc., etc. For divinity
     your brother Henry will advise you.

This list is interesting, as showing how large a province in Charlotte's
mind was occupied by poetry; poetry to her taste, though she was a most
indifferent muse when she turned her hand to it herself, was the highest
form of literary expression, to an appreciation of which, if judiciously
guided, Ellen might attain. The list appears to have been enough to last
her friend for her lifetime, for literature is hardly mentioned again in
these letters. For a brief space before the Parliamentary election of
1835 Charlotte tried to kindle Ellen's interest in politics with
dithyrambic outbursts.

     The Election! The Election! [she writes] that cry has rung even
     amongst our lonely hills like the blast of a trumpet. How has it
     roused the populous neighbourhood of Birstall? Under what banner
     have your brothers ranged themselves? The Blue or the Yellow? Use
     your influence with them, entreat them, if it be necessary, on your
     knees to stand by their _country_ and religion in this day of
     danger.

But that passes too, and the personal relation, ripening into passion,
dethrones all other topics. So far from the schoolgirl _schwrm_ cooling
down into the mere warmth of friendship or the chill of indifference, it
begins to flame, reducing the governess and the politician to ashes, and
the growing human adoration feeds itself with the fuel of religious
aspirations.

     I am at this moment [wrote Charlotte, now in her twenty-first year]
     trembling all over with excitement after reading your note: it is
     what I never received before--it is the unrestrained pouring out of
     a warm, gentle, generous heart, it contains sentiments unrestrained
     by human motives, prompted by the pure God himself, it expresses a
     noble sympathy which I _do_ not, _cannot_ describe. Ellen, Religion
     has indeed elevated your character. I _do_ wish to be better than I
     am, I pray fervently to be made so. I have stings of
     conscience--visitings of remorse--glimpses of Holy, inexpressible
     things, which formerly I used to be a stranger to.... This very
     night I will pray as you wish me. May the Almighty hear me
     compassionately! and I humbly trust He will--for you will
     strengthen my polluted petition with your own pure requests.... If
     you love me, _do_, _do_ come on Friday. I shall watch and wait for
     you, and if you disappoint me, I shall weep....

Again she writes:

     At such times in such moods as these, Ellen, it is my nature to
     seek repose in some calm, tranquil idea, and I have now summoned up
     your image to give me rest. There you sit, upright and still in
     your black dress and white scarf, your pale marble-like face,
     looking so serene and kind--just like reality. I wish you would
     speak to me. It is from religion you derive your chief charm, and
     may its influence always preserve you as pure, as unassuming, and
     as benevolent in thought and deed as you are now. What am I
     compared to you? I feel my own utter worthlessness as I make the
     comparison. I am a very coarse, commonplace wretch, Ellen.... Give
     my love to both your sisters. The bonnet is too handsome for me. I
     dare write no more.

The flame of this furnace compounded of human passion and the religious
ecstasies and questionings which it kindled, mounts higher and licks the
skies. She writes:

     My Darling, if I were like you, I should have to face Zionward,
     though prejudice and error might occasionally fling a mist over the
     glorious vision before me ... but _I am not like you_. If you knew
     my thoughts, the dreams that absorb me, the fiery imagination that
     at times eats me up, and makes me feel society as it is,
     wretchedly insipid, you would pity and I daresay despise me. But I
     know the treasures of the Bible, and love and adore them. I can see
     the Well of Life in all its clearness and brightness, but when I
     stoop down to drink of the pure waters they fly from my lips as if
     I were Tantalus....

Again she writes:

     Ellen, I wish I could live with you always. I begin to cling to you
     more fondly than ever I did. If we had but a cottage and a
     competency of our own, I do think we might live and love on till
     _Death_ without being dependent on any third person for
     happiness....

Then there was a fear of Ellen leaving the neighbourhood of the school
where Charlotte was now a teacher, and, crying out against this
inscrutable fatality, she asks:

     Why are we to be divided? Surely, Ellen, it must be because we are
     in danger of loving each other too well, of losing sight of the
     _Creator_ in idolatry of the _creature_. At first I could not say
     'Thy Will be done.' I felt rebellious, but I knew it was wrong to
     feel so. Being left a moment alone this morning, I prayed fervently
     to be enabled to resign myself to _every_ decree of God's Will,
     though it should be dealt forth with a far severer hand than the
     present disappointment.

This love of the creature obscuring the Creator is in Charlotte's novels
her strongest expression of human love. Jane Eyre, for instance, speaks
of Rochester in precisely these terms: 'I could not in these days see
God for his creature of whom I had made an idol.' In _Villete_, Lucy
Snowe speaks of her love for Dr. John in the same way. Then this
temporary obstacle passes, there is a plan of Ellen's coming to stay at
Haworth, and Charlotte writes:

     If I could always live with you, if your lips and mine could at the
     same time drink the same draught at the same fountain of mercy, I
     hope, I trust, I might one day become better, far better than my
     evil wandering thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit and
     warm to the flesh, will now permit me to be.

Her heart was a 'hot-bed for sinful thoughts,' but Ellen's notes were
'meat and drink' to her. But she was not good enough for Ellen. Ellen
must be kept 'from the contamination of too intimate society.'

Now much comment has been expended on this fervency of religious
emotionalism, which has been represented as a morbid but temporary
hysterical affection: biographers, Mrs. Gaskell among them, slightly
bewildered at it, have preferred largely to suppress it as being a
disturbing and inharmonious feature in their preconceived portrait of
Charlotte. Certainly nothing can be more unlike any subsequent aspect of
her religious views than this Maenad mood; glaring, indeed, is the
contrast between this fervour of religion and the piety, almost prim and
proper (though heart-felt and sincere) and void of all spark of
excitement, which is so abundantly in evidence in her other letters,
while here she is dancing like David before the Ark in girded ecstasy,
instead of worshipping God in a Sunday bonnet. But it does not seem
impossible to find a reconcilement between the two, and the key to it, I
think, is this. Never again did she give her heart to anyone, man or
woman, in joy and exaltation, and it was her human adoration for Ellen
that kindled in her this religious emotionalism. Ellen was at the bottom
of it. It was her desire to make herself worthy of her friend that
caused Charlotte to lament her own deficiencies in a manner otherwise
alien to her, and pray that they should pass away from her; it was human
love that inspired those spiritual aspirations, and lit them with its
own passion for the perfect. They were in no sense whatever trumped-up
or insincere, they flowed out as spontaneously as did the water when
Moses struck the rock; but the source of them and their inspiration was
Ellen. Charlotte is even consciously aware of this, for in a later
letter she practically admits it, and puts her two passions in their
relatively correct places:

     In writing at this moment, [she says] I feel an intense disgust at
     the idea of using a single phrase that sounds like religious cant.
     I abhor myself, I despise myself, if the doctrine of Calvin be
     true, I am already an outcast. You cannot imagine how hard,
     rebellious and intractable all my feelings are. When I begin to
     study on the subject, I almost grow blasphemous and atheistical in
     my sentiments. Don't desert me, don't be horrified at me, you know
     what I am. I wish I could see you, my darling; I have lavished the
     very warmest affection of a very hot tenacious heart upon you--if
     you grow cold, it is over.

In the light of such passages as these, it is impossible to doubt the
source of her outbreaks of religious fervour. It was not primarily the
Throne of Grace before which she made her adoration but before
Ellen--Ellen was her Rock of Ages. Never again did she attain to such
soaring in her relations with any human being, for the strong and most
unhappy attachment to M. Hger, as we shall see, so far from giving her
that expansion of wing, rendered her merely abject, and she besought him
of his clemency just to write her a few words, crumbs from his table on
which she could feed. Nor was there such emotional fervour in her
marriage, happy though its briefness was, bringing her the content which
she had missed all her life, and drying up that well-spring of
bitterness in her temperament which had long caused her to be incapable
of enjoyment. Sexless though this passion for Ellen was, it was inspired
by the authentic ecstasy of love.

For four years this intense attachment continued to blaze, but in 1838,
when Charlotte was twenty-two, there comes just a hint of covert
reproach, usual with the more domineering and more dominant lover who
finds the adorable one too little responsive; for Ellen, though devoted
to Charlotte, kept her head, was calm and sensible, and did not indulge
in rhapsodies. Charlotte at that time had gone back to Miss Wooler's
school, pupil no longer but a mistress. She became thoroughly unhappy,
left rather suddenly, and wrote from Haworth to tell her friend why:

     I stayed as long as I was able, and at length I neither could nor
     dared stay any longer. My health and spirits had utterly failed me,
     and the medical man whom I consulted enjoined me, if I valued my
     life, to go home.... A calm and even mind like yours, Ellen, cannot
     conceive the feelings of the shattered wretch who is now writing to
     you, when after weeks of mental and bodily anguish, not to be
     described, something like rest and tranquillity began to dawn
     again.... I fear from what you say that I cannot rationally
     entertain hopes of seeing you before winter. For your own sake I am
     glad of it.

Next year, when Charlotte was close on twenty-three, a surprising
development occurred, and one quite unforeshadowed in her correspondence.
Henry Nussey, Ellen's brother, an amiable and blameless young clergyman,
wrote her a letter proposing marriage. She refused him, and wrote to
tell Ellen, who was certainly privy to her brother's intention, what she
had done. 'There were,' she said, 'in this proposal some things which
might have proved a strong temptation. I thought if I were to marry
Henry Nussey, his sister could live with me, and how happy I should be.'
Propinquity to a sister-in-law seems rather an unusual consideration in
favour of matrimony, and has probably never before, or since, been so
frankly acknowledged.

For more than seven years this eager devotion to her friend, though
expressed in less exuberant language, continued without abatement, and
Charlotte was unable to see any speck in her perfection, except that of
her comparative irresponsiveness. Then, coincident with and possibly in
consequence of her wretched experience at Brussels, where she fell in
love with M. Hger, the flame of it expired, and though to the end of
her life the friendship remained deep and stable, there was no more
excitement, religious or otherwise, in it, and she wrote to Ellen, 'In
the name of Common Sense, no more lovers' quarrels!' She began to see
flaws in the peerless crystal; the governess rose ascendant over the
lover, and Charlotte warned her of the 'danger of continued prosperity,
which might develop too much a certain germ of ambition latent in your
character. I saw this little germ putting out green shoots when I was
staying with you at Hathersage.' She warned her also against vanity and
the perishable nature of personal attractiveness, when Ellen was pleased
with a new white dress which set off her comeliness. Then Miss Ringrose
became a fellow-worshipper at Ellen's shrine, and wrote to Charlotte
with enthusiastic admiration of their mutual friend. Upon which
Charlotte again felt it laid upon her to be good for Ellen, and in her
most emphatic governess style told her that Miss Ringrose's feelings for
her were 'half truth, half illusion. No human being could altogether be
what she supposes you to be.' She also said that the notion of her being
jealous of the new friend was altogether too ludicrous.

The splendours had faded, no longer did the bugle blow a royal salute,
she could dissect with a calm hand what had dazzled her. 'Ellen,' she
wrote, 'is a calm, steady girl, not brilliant, but good and true. She
suits me and has always suited me well.' But now her defects had
hardened into qualities, and there was no longer the slightest chance of
Ellen's acquiring a taste for poetry, 'for she is without romance. If
she attempts to read poetry or poetic prose aloud, I am irritated and
deprive her of the book. If she talks of it, I stop my ears: but she is
good, she is true, she is faithful, and I love her.'

The long-continued ardour of this attachment which, when it cooled down,
subsided into a firm and deep friendship, is of great importance in
arriving at any true view of Charlotte's inner nature, especially when
we consider her often-expressed dislike of men as a sex. She thought
them coarse, selfish, and conceited. Charles Lamb's devotion to his
sister, for example, she pronounced to be 'an instance of abnegation of
self, scarcely, I think, to be paralleled in the annals of the coarser
sex.' Women, she believed, were infinitely finer, and it was a woman's
portion to be married 'to a mate who generically is inferior to herself
in their [_sic_] aim in making themselves agreeable.' She warned Ellen
against falling in love, and counselled her thus about marriage:

     After that ceremony is over and after you have had some months to
     settle down and to get accustomed to the creature you have taken
     for your worse half, you will probably make a most affectionate and
     happy wife.

She was all for a woman leading her own life, violently protesting
against the idea that she was always on the look out for a husband.

     I know [she wrote] that if women wish to escape the stigma of
     husband-seeking, they must act and look like marble or clay--cold,
     expressionless, bloodless, for every appearance of feeling, of joy,
     sorrow, friendliness, antipathy, admiration, disgust are all alike
     construed by the world into the attempt to hook a husband. Never
     mind! Well-meaning women have their own conscience to comfort them
     after all. Do not therefore be too much afraid of showing yourself
     as you are, affectionate, and good-hearted: do not too harshly
     repress sentiment and feelings excellent in themselves, because you
     fear that some puppy may fancy that you are letting them come out
     to fascinate him: do not condemn yourself to live only by halves,
     because if you showed too much animation some pragmatical thing in
     breeches might take it into his pate to imagine that you designed
     to dedicate your life to his inanity.

There is a very robust contempt for men in general in this spirited
passage, and similar volleys of disdain are exceedingly common in her
letters. Psycho-analytical commentators have interpreted this to mean
that Charlotte was the victim of sex-obsession, that she was longing to
get a husband, and, being unable to do so, vented her spite against the
sex in these diatribes. But, while it is perfectly true that when she
did marry she found the happiness that she had missed all her life, such
a conclusion is altogether at variance with the facts. For three other
men, Henry Nussey being the first, wanted to marry her and she refused
them. It is more reasonable, in view of this passionate affection of
hers for Ellen Nussey, to conclude that for a considerable period of her
life her emotional reactions were towards women rather than men.




CHAPTER V


Charlotte left Miss Wooler's when she was sixteen and returned to
Haworth, where she remained for the next three years. She undertook the
education of her two sisters, and with her brother Branwell continued to
pour out that torrent of prose works with occasional poems, which had
been interrupted during her schooldays. But now, as if the waters had
been accumulating in a reservoir, they flowed in absolutely unparalleled
volume. She wrote most of them under pseudonyms, and we see that the
Duke of Wellington was still her demigod, for their authorship is
chiefly attributed to Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley, and that
gifted creature in 1833 alone wrote: _Arthuriana: or Odds and Ends:
Being a Miscellaneous Collection of Pieces in Prose and Verse_; _The
Secret and Lily Hart_ (two tales); _Visits in Verdopolis_ (two volumes);
_The Green Dwarf: A Tale of the Perfect Tense_; and in 1834, _My Angria
and the Angrians_; _A Leaf from an Unopened Volume_; _Corner Dishes:
Being a Small Collection of Trifles in Prose and Verse_; _High Life in
Verdopolis_; and _The Spell, an Extravaganza_.[15] In addition to these
there is _The Foundling: A Tale of our Own Times_, by Captain Tree
(1833); _Richard Coeur de Lion and Blondel_, by Charlotte Bront (1833);
and _The Scrap Book: A Mingling of Many Things_, by Charlotte Bront,
and compiled by Lord C. A. F. Wellesley.

[Footnote 15: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, p. 431.]

Of this library of manuscript _The Spell_ has been lately published by
the Oxford University Press. It is the first tale in a very curious
volume of Charlotte's manuscripts in the British Museum, and with it are
bound up _High Life in Verdopolis_, mentioned above, and _The Scrap
Book_. The binding is French, the title on the cover is _Manuscrits de
Miss Charlotte Bront_ (_Currer Bell_), and the book was purchased in
the year 1892 in a second-hand bookshop in Brussels. What the previous
history of it was is quite unknown. The suggestion has been made that
Charlotte, when at the _pensionnat_ in Brussels, gave these manuscripts
to M. Hger, or left them behind when she went back to England, and that
he, when she became famous, had them bound. There is no evidence to
support the theory, but it is certainly a reasonable one.

_The Spell_, therefore, is now accessible to readers, and we have in it
a solid sample of the Angrian-Saga and of Charlotte's style in this year
1834, when she was eighteen. The story is highly sensational, the plot
utterly mystifying, and the writing of the purplest. It was worth
printing as a curiosity, but solely because it was Charlotte Bront who
wrote it. Intrinsic merit cannot be claimed for it, nor is there in it
any foreshadowing of that supreme talent which was so soon to develop in
her. What is interesting is the devouring rage for literary expression
that consumed her, and the enormous quantity of narrative which poured
from her rather than its quality.

Branwell in the same period, chiefly under the pseudonym of Captain John
Flower, M.P., or the Right Honourable John Baron Flower, produced _Real
Life in Verdopolis_; _The Politics of Verdopolis_; _The Pirate_;
_Thermopyl_ (a poem); _And the Weary are at Rest_; _The Wool is
Rising_, an Angrian adventure; _Ode to the Pole Star_, and other poems;
and _The Life of Field-Marshal the Right Honourable Alexander Percy,
Earl of Northangerland_ (two volumes).

The brain reels with the thought of Charlotte's activities during these
years. She was giving lessons to her younger sisters, she was teaching
in the Sunday school, she was entertaining district visitors to tea, she
was pouring out those oceans of literary work, she was sewing for hours
every day under the eye of Aunt Branwell. When everything sewable for
the use of the Parsonage and its inmates had been sewed, the industry of
her nieces was devoted to sewings for the needy of the parish, and from
after the midday dinner at half-past one till tea-time all needles were
busy. Sewing, according to that admirable letter-writer, Miss Mary
Taylor, who came to stay at Haworth during those years, was, in Aunt
Branwell's opinion, good for the sewers as well as the sewed for; it was
an essential part of woman's work in the world, and she presided at
these gatherings in her large mob cap of the period with auburn curls
attached to it, and took her snuff, and anticipating the refinements of
America she would not allow the word 'spit' to be used in her presence.
When tea came in, sewing was finished for the day, and after Mr. Bront
had read prayers to the household at eight, she went up to her bedroom
in her pattens and was seen no more till breakfast-time next morning. An
hour later Mr. Bront retired for the night, winding the clock on the
stairs as he passed, and called out, 'Don't sit up late, girls!' And
then the real day, the living exciting part of the day began, and Lord
Charles Albert Florian Wellesley was free, for till then there had not
been a moment's leisure, and he wrote like mad.

Somehow or other there was squeezed in the time for drawing lessons, and
the time for sketching and painting between the visits of Mr. William
Robinson of Leeds, a pupil of Sir Thomas Lawrence and of the delirious
Swiss artist Fuseli, who painted nightmares with so sure a hand. The
whole family had lessons at the inclusive fee of two guineas a visit,
and it is legitimate to trace, in the account of the pictures which Jane
Eyre showed Mr. Rochester, some influence of the pupil of Fuseli. These,
it may be remembered, comprised one of a cormorant sitting on the mast
of a ship sunk in a rough sea and holding a bracelet in its beak, which
it had taken from the arm of a drowned corpse that was visible through
the water. But Mr. William Robinson's morals, whatever his skill as an
artist, were not all they should be. Mrs. Gaskell alludes with such
discretion to some indiscretion on Mr. Robinson's part which caused Mr.
Bront to decide that he should teach his daughters no longer, that even
the hardiest biographers have not ventured to tell us what it was.

  [Illustration: (From left to right) ANNE, EMILY & CHARLOTTE BRONT
  _From a painting by Branwell Bront in the National Portrait Gallery._]

As the result of this tuition and the artistic promise shown by Branwell
at the age of eighteen, it was decided that he should adopt art as his
career, and go up to London in order to study at the Art Schools of the
Royal Academy. There is no evidence to show that he ever went, though he
wrote to the Secretary asking particulars about admission, and it is
probable that the idea was abandoned. He then tried to turn to account
his literary gifts, and wrote some truly amazing letters to the editor
of _Blackwood's Magazine_, and, somewhat in the style of Mr. Micawber,
told him that he was ready to write for him, and positively challenged
him to take him as a regular contributor either in prose or verse,
enclosing a specimen poem and promising to send prose if desired, on any
subject that Mr. Robert Blackwood might select. He enjoined him not to
condemn him unheard; he cautioned him not to behave like a commonplace
person and miss such an opportunity; he reminded him that 'you have lost
an able writer in James Hogg, and God grant you may get one in
Patrick Branwell Bront.' But Mr. Blackwood preferred to be commonplace,
though Branwell gave him four opportunities of showing a finer quality.
Somewhere about this time he painted a portrait group of his three
sisters, which Mrs. Gaskell saw when she stayed with Charlotte at
Haworth: Emily and Anne were linked together; Charlotte stood apart on
the right side of a column which nearly bisects the picture. Mrs.
Gaskell's verdict on it was that though it possessed little artistic
merit, the portrait of Charlotte was strikingly like her, and that it
was reasonable to suppose that those of the other two sisters were
equally faithful. Her description of this picture answers so closely to
the picture by Branwell now in the National Gallery, that it is
difficult to suppose that it was not this which she saw. On the other
hand, Mr. Shorter tells us that after Mr. Bront's death in 1861, Mr.
Nicholls took this picture to Ireland with him, and destroyed it,
keeping only the figure of Emily, which he considered to be like
her.[16] This also is now in the National Portrait Gallery, but there is
a question whether it does not represent Anne. The only explanation of
the confusion seems to be that Branwell painted two portrait groups of
his sisters, of which Mr. Nicholls destroyed one.

[Footnote 16: Clement Shorter, _Charlotte Bront and her Circle_, note,
pp. 123, 124.]

In these three years between Charlotte's leaving Miss Wooler's school
and returning there again as teacher, we still lack any glimpse beyond
the most misty of Emily. In person she was taller than the others, she
had beauty of feature, and Ellen Nussey, on her visits to the Parsonage,
was evidently very much struck with her. But she describes her in a way
that does not much help us to realise her, for though she was keenly
aware that 'there was depth and power in her nature,' that 'one of her
rare expressive looks was something to remember through life,' such
observations however appreciative are mere generalities, and we still
have to imagine Emily for ourselves, and clearly what impressed Ellen
most was Emily's impenetrable reserve. But it is something to be told
that when she was out on the moors she was a different person, brimful
of glee and the joy of life, absorbed in the affairs of tadpoles in a
pool; that she could poke fun at Charlotte, who was terrified of cows,
by luring her into a field where those fierce animals were grazing.
Ellen also tells us that Anne was her inseparable companion, and that
her piano-playing was really remarkable. Instructive too is the story
that one day when Charlotte was unwell, Emily was sent out a walk with
Ellen. This was a hazardous experiment, for Emily was capable of
remaining completely silent for indefinite periods, and so on their
return Charlotte naturally asked how her sister had behaved. This casual
question has been taken up, like a challenge, by one accomplished
Emily-ite, who triumphantly assures us that Emily had behaved well; 'she
had shown her true self, her noble energetic truthful soul.' But
Charlotte only wanted to know if Emily had spoken at all during the
walk, and whether she had is not recorded. Anne finally remains
mysterious, not because she was enigmatical, but because her only
characteristics were gentleness and piety, and from the dim, cool shade
of these excellences she never really emerges.

It is now that a side of Charlotte, ever afterwards characteristic of
her, definitely shows itself, and she begins to take command of the
family ship and its destinies, to set its sails and to direct its
course. Mr. Bront's income was 200 a year, Aunt Branwell had 50 a
year, and it was evident to Charlotte's intensely practical mind that
she and her sisters must do something to earn money. Branwell, in this
year 1835, according to plan, was to become a pupil at the Academy Art
Schools in London, and would be an additional drain on the family
finances, and she must make her living, or, at any rate, not be an
expense. Teaching offered the best if not the only opening, and for the
next nine years she devoted her energies towards making a career for
herself and her sisters in this direction, with the idea of eventually
setting up a school for girls. Experience was the first thing needed,
and now at the age of nineteen she became a teacher at Miss Wooler's
school where, three years before, she had been a pupil. She had already
received two offers for a post as private governess in a family, but she
naturally preferred to go to Miss Wooler, who was already a friend;
besides, Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey, with whom the passionate
friendship was now at its height, both lived within a few miles of Roe
Head. Then there were Emily and Anne to be thought of, for she was
acting for them too, and with a view to fitting Emily for the same
profession as herself, she arranged that she should accompany her to Roe
Head as a pupil and complete her education. Anne at present was only
fifteen, and she would continue her studies at home; her turn would come
later.

Charlotte looked forward to the adventure. 'My lines,' she wrote to her
friend, 'are fallen in pleasant places,' and it was a consolation to her
and Emily that they would be together. So in July the two sisters,
teacher and pupil, went to Miss Wooler's, but Anne's turn came sooner
than anyone had expected. Emily, unconsoled, pined for Haworth and the
moors; she became ill from home-sickness, and Charlotte believed that
her life was in danger. In a memoir she wrote after Emily's death, for a
selection of her poems, she says:

     I felt in my heart she would die, if she did not go home, and with
     this conviction obtained her recall. She had only been three
     months at school, and it was some years before the experiment of
     sending her from home was again ventured on.

This memoir contains several curious errors in actual fact. Charlotte
states in it that Emily was in her sixteenth year when she went to Roe
Head: she was really in her eighteenth year. Odder is the inaccuracy
that Emily, so acute was her nostalgia, causing great emaciation and
even danger to life, never left Haworth again for some years: the
experiment was too risky. For, as a matter of fact, within a year from
the time that Charlotte 'obtained her recall,' Emily, with no kind Miss
Wooler in charge and no sister to remind her of home, was a teacher in
Miss Patchett's school at Law Hill, Southorran, near Halifax. Emily's
life there, Charlotte told Ellen, was an intolerable slavery--she was at
work from six in the morning till eleven at night; and yet in the memoir
quoted above, Charlotte seems to have forgotten that Emily had left
Haworth again till after some years had passed, or, in other words, till
she took her to Brussels, as the same memoir states. Directly on Emily's
recall from Roe Head, Anne was sent for to take her place as pupil in
Miss Wooler's school, and there she remained, completing her education,
for two years.

The scheme of sending Branwell to study at the Art Schools of the Royal
Academy in London had been given up, and though getting on for twenty
years old, he was still at home, keen, apparently, on his painting and a
good scholar in Latin, but with no settled occupation of any sort. Mrs.
Gaskell tells us that, at this time, 'the young man seemed to have his
fate in his own hands. He was full of noble impulses as well as
extraordinary gifts.' As an instance of his literary ability, she speaks
of a fragment of his prose which she had seen. 'The actors in it are
drawn with much of the grace of characteristic portrait-painting in
perfectly pure and simple language which distinguishes so many of
Addison's papers in the _Spectator_.' This is high praise as coming from
one of so delicate a literary judgment, and must be received with all
respect. He had charm, it would appear, ability and ambition, but he was
without ballast and lacked the discipline through which alone ambition
can be fulfilled. He was still considered the genius of the family--he
had wit, a brilliant tongue and the vanity to demand an audience; and it
is hardly to be wondered at that on long winter evenings, with Aunt
Branwell immured in her bedroom, and his father in his study, with
Charlotte and Anne away, with Emily silent as the grave, he sought the
more congenial atmosphere of the bar at the 'Black Bull,' where he would
find talk and laughter and an atmosphere of good fellowship. Sometimes a
commercial traveller or such would be putting up there for the night,
and the landlord told him of this brilliant young fellow at the
Parsonage near by, who would certainly come down and have a chat with
him over a glass or two of whisky-toddy to pass the hour before bedtime.
So Branwell appeared, and perhaps he exhibited for the general
astonishment a remarkable faculty he had of writing simultaneously with
his right hand and his left two different letters. At other times there
would be farmers from the country round dropping in on market-day before
they set off again across the hills to scattered homesteads, and there
was just such talk and companionship as must have been Branwell's
father's before he left County Down for Cambridge.

Then, again, the 'Black Bull' was the headquarters of a village club,
'The Lodge of the Three Graces,' faintly masonic in title, of which John
Brown, the sexton of the church, at whose house in later days lodged
more than one curate of Haworth, was Master, and Branwell was Secretary.
What the official proceedings were or what sort of entries the
Secretary made in the book of minutes, we have no idea, but, as we shall
find excellent reason to believe, the proceedings were punctuated with
bawdy talk and whisky-toddy. Considering what the mode of life was at
the Parsonage, it is really little wonder that a young man, eminently
'clubbable,' fond of talk and talking with extreme brilliance, should
have frequented the 'Black Bull.'

In the holidays they were again all together, and though teaching was
the destiny that Charlotte was weaving for herself and her sisters,
literary ambitions, now taking second place, were not entirely
extinguished. Poetry was ascendant over prose, and in the Christmas
holidays of 1836-1837 she wrote, in that microscopic hand, twenty-six
pages of verse. She finished one of these poems, _We Wove a Web in
Childhood_, on December 19, and then conceived the daring project of
writing to Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, enclosing a specimen of
her own verse (probably this), and asking him for his opinion on it. We
may guess that this was a concerted plan between her and Branwell to
interest the eminent in their compositions, for Branwell gave the editor
of _Blackwood's Magazine_ another chance, telling him that he had
written a very lengthy and remarkable composition in prose which he was
ready to bring up to Edinburgh to show him. He rated him for his
silence, asking if it were prejudice which actuated it, and bidding him
be a man, sir! He wrote also to William Wordsworth, who succeeded
Southey in the Laureateship, enclosing, like Charlotte, a poem of his,
which he described as the

     Prefatory Scene of a much longer subject, in which I have striven
     to develop strong passions and weak principles struggling with a
     high imagination and acute feelings, till, as youth hardens towards
     age, evil deeds and short enjoyments end in mental misery and
     bodily ruin....

This is interesting, for the poor wretch was even now playing in his own
person the prefatory scene of just such a tragic career.

Wordsworth appears not to have answered this letter, though he kept it,
but eventually there came to Charlotte, long after she had gone back to
Miss Wooler's after the Christmas holidays, a reply from the Laureate.
It was a kind, a long and a careful letter, but it was very far from
being encouraging. He told her she had the faculty of verse, but
reminded her that this was no rare gift: he felt bound when any young
aspirant asked him for his advice about adopting literature as a
profession, to caution him 'against taking so perilous a course.' Then
came passages which surely laid an icy finger on her enthusiasm.

     The day-dreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce
     a distempered state of mind.... Literature cannot be the business
     for a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged
     in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even
     as an accomplishment and a recreation.... However ill what has been
     said may accord with your present views and temper, the longer you
     live the more reasonable it will appear to you....

This letter was, in fact, quite as discouraging as Wordsworth's silence
to Branwell, and its discouragement was, for the present, effective.
Charlotte wrote back saying, 'I trust I shall never more feel ambitious
to see my name in print: if the wish should rise, I'll look at Southey's
letter and suppress it.' She put away all literary ambition, and devoted
her energies to the task of gaining such experience in teaching for
herself and her sisters as should qualify them for the educational
career which she had chosen for them all.

       *       *       *       *       *

Southey lived long enough to see _Jane Eyre_ take the world by storm and
to know (if such information ever reached him) that the author of that
book and of _Shirley_ was the young lady to whom he had written that
literature neither could nor ought to be the business of a woman's life.
But it must be remembered that Charlotte had sent to him (as had
Branwell to Wordsworth) a specimen of her poetry, and, from what we know
of it, he was as certainly right to discourage her muse as was
Wordsworth in finding nothing to say to Branwell, for neither of them
had any real gift for poetry at all. But it was perhaps odd that neither
he nor Wordsworth perceived of what admirable prose (though that was not
submitted to their judgment) their correspondents were capable. Both of
them, when they were not being literary, wrote fine and apt English,
rhythmical and dignified, with that indefinable verbal inevitability
which is the hall-mark of the writer. Here, for instance, is a paragraph
from Branwell's letter to Wordsworth:

     Do pardon me, sir, that I have ventured to come before one whose
     work I have most loved in our literature, and who most has been
     with me a divinity of the mind, laying before him one of my
     writings, and asking of him a judgment of its contents. I must come
     before someone from whose sentence there is no appeal, and such a
     one is he who has developed the theory of poetry as well as its
     practice, and both in such a way as to claim a place in the memory
     of a thousand years to come.

Any boy who at the age of nineteen could write that, had already a good
command of his material; equally excellent, though by no means superior,
and with a curious resemblance in rhythm and construction is the
following from Charlotte's letter to Southey. Her grip on words was
already firm, and, when she was not trying to be literary or to write
poetry, she had nothing to learn.

     At the first perusal of your letter I felt only shame and regret
     that I had ever ventured to trouble you with my crude rhapsody: I
     felt a painful heat rise to my face when I thought of the quires of
     paper I had covered with what once gave me so much delight, but
     which now was only a source of confusion; but after I had thought a
     little and read it again and again the prospect seemed to clear.

But the oracle had spoken, and in obedience to it she entirely dismissed
her dreams of Parnassus, and continued at Dewsbury Moor, where Miss
Wooler had moved her school from Roe Head. Emily had spent six months as
a teacher in Miss Patchett's school near Halifax, pursuing the same
object, but her health had broken down and she had returned to Haworth
and its moors and its liberties, away from which she seemed to lose all
health and happiness. Anne was still with Charlotte as a pupil at Miss
Wooler's, but just before the Christmas holidays of 1837 she began to
suffer from coughs and pains which put Charlotte in mind of the illness
of her two elder sisters at Cowan Bridge, and she thought these were
symptoms of consumption. All allowance must be made for her, for she was
overwrought and hysterical, and in a panic she went to Miss Wooler and,
in what must have been a horrid scene, flew, as she confessed, 'into a
regular passion,' which she considered perfectly justified, and told her
that Anne was extremely ill and that Miss Wooler was quite indifferent
to the danger. Miss Wooler was very much hurt at this monstrous
accusation and wrote to Mr. Bront, who, though he realised that
Charlotte had been unreasonable, settled that they should both leave
Dewsbury Moor and come home.

Miss Wooler, who had always shown the most motherly kindness and
consideration to Charlotte, had a tearful scene of reconciliation with
her before they went. Charlotte wrote to Ellen pouring scorn on the
poor lady's tears, but allowing that 'in spite of her cold repulsive
manners she had a considerable regard for me.' She seems not to have
realised that before. She went back after the Christmas holidays for
another term at Miss Wooler's, Anne and Emily and Branwell all remaining
at home; but now she had a nervous breakdown, and returned in the early
summer of 1838 to Haworth, where the whole family remained for a year.
All her plans and ambitions for herself and her sisters had come to
nothing as yet. Emily first, then Anne, and finally she herself had been
obliged, for reasons of health, to give up the education and the
experience in teaching which she had arranged with a view to their
career: the oracles had been dumb or deeply discouraging when consulted
about her poems and Branwell's, and there was nothing whatever ahead.
Never throughout her life was she optimistic; she expected little, as
she told Mrs. Gaskell in after years, and was always prepared for
disappointment, but no amount of disappointment, however embittering,
caused her to relax her efforts in securing anything on which she had
set her heart and which she believed was within attainment.

In the spring of 1839 Branwell, in pursuance of Art, left Haworth and
the conviviality of the 'Lodge of the Three Graces' and took a studio at
Bradford. His departure is perhaps commemorated in Emily's poem
_Absence_, dated April 19, 1839.

  One is absent, and for one
  Cheerless, chill is our hearthstone;
  One is absent, and for him
  Cheeks are pale and eyes are dim.

It is usually stated that this refers to Anne, who had just gone out as
governess to Mrs. Ingham: the gender of the pronoun, however, is hard to
explain. At Bradford he painted a few portraits, but seems to have
spent most of his time in the society of local artists and at the bars
of hotels, and after a few months his father stopped supplies, and
recalled him to Haworth. Much has been made of this incident: vivid
embroideries have been stitched over it, and we learn from the
Bront-Saga that 'he disappeared from Bradford heavily in debt and was
lost to sight until, unnerved, a drunkard and an opium eater, he came
back home.'[17] This lurid picture, however, has no shadow of foundation
in fact. He never disappeared at all, except for those hours in which he
was travelling back from Bradford to Haworth, nor is there any reason
for supposing that he was in debt or that he had yet taken to opium.

[Footnote 17: Miss A. M. F. Robinson, _Emily Bront_, p. 64.]

       *       *       *       *       *

In March of the same spring Henry Nussey, as we have already seen,
proposed to Charlotte. He was now a curate at Donnington in Sussex, and
wrote her a very businesslike letter, saying that after Easter he
intended to take pupils into his house, and intimated (as Charlotte told
his sister)

     that in due time he should want a wife to take care of his pupils,
     and frankly me to be that wife. Altogether the letter is written
     without cant or flattery, and in a common-sense style which does
     credit to his judgment.

Charlotte refused this proposal, though the prospect of having Ellen to
live with her was a strong temptation to accept it, on the very sensible
grounds that she did not love him, and her letter to him, giving 'a
decided negative,' was equally free from cant and flattery and might
have been written not by the girl he wanted to marry but by a
sententious aunt.

     In forming this decision [she told him] I trust I have listened to
     the dictates of conscience more than those of inclination. I have
     no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you, but I feel
     convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to
     form the happiness of a man like you. It has always been my habit
     to study the character of those among whom I chance to be thrown,
     and I think I know yours and can imagine what description of woman
     would suit you for a wife. The character should not be too marked,
     ardent, and original, her temper should be mild, her piety
     undoubted, her spirits even and cheerful, and her _personal
     attractions_ sufficient to please your eyes and gratify your just
     pride.[18]

[Footnote 18: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 153.]

This letter irresistibly reminds us of Jane Austen at her very best, and
it is indeed no wonder that Charlotte in later years was so entirely
incapable of appreciating her art, when we find her writing in all
seriousness passages that could be cited as admirable examples of Jane
Austen's humour. Henry Nussey, we may guess, was no more in love with
Charlotte than she with him, for little more than six months elapsed
before he wrote to tell her that he had secured another young lady to
look after the pupils at Donnington, and again she replied with just
such edifying sentiments as Jane Austen gives to Mr. Collins when he
retails the counsels of Lady Catherine de Bourgh on the subject of
matrimony. In her letter of congratulation she said:

     The step no doubt will by many of your friends be considered
     scarcely as a prudent one, _since_ fortune is not amongst the
     number of the young lady's advantages. For my own part I must
     confess that I esteem you the more for not hunting after wealth, if
     there be strength of mind, firmness of principle and sweetness of
     temper to compensate for the absence of that usually all powerful
     attraction.... The bread earned by honourable toil is sweeter than
     the bread of idleness, and mutual love and domestic calm are
     treasures far preferable to the possessions rust can corrupt and
     moths consume away.[19]

[Footnote 19: _Id._, p. 171.]

She continued to encourage and advise him, and wrote again to her
ex-suitor shortly before his marriage:

     From what you say of your future partner I doubt not she will be
     one who will help you to get cheerfully through the difficulties of
     this world and to obtain a permanent rest in the next; at least I
     hope such may be the case. You do right to conduct the matter with
     due deliberation, for on the step you are about to take depends the
     happiness of your whole lifetime.[20]

[Footnote 20: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 187.]

       *       *       *       *       *

Charlotte, when she thus refused matrimony as her destiny, had been
three-quarters of a year at Haworth, and during this period she seems to
have written nothing whatever: Southey's discouragement was evidently
potent with her. But Emily all the time was at work, secretly and
constantly, on her poems, and Charlotte knew nothing of them. Many of
them were concerned with the Gondals, and possibly therefore Anne, but
Anne alone, was privy to them. But Emily did not confide them to her
elder sister, for when, six years later, Charlotte 'discovered them,' as
she tells us in her memoir of her two sisters after their death, she
says that she was aware, but no more, that Emily did write poetry, but
up to that time she had seen none of it. Earlier, as she tells us, they
used to talk to each other about what they were writing, but that habit
must already have ceased, since the discovery of Emily's poems gave her
her first sight of them. This is rather important, for it goes against
the assertion, constantly made by Mrs. Gaskell, that there existed
between Emily and Charlotte a deep and intense intimacy. There is no
evidence for this. The evidence, in fact, which becomes cumulative, goes
to show that Emily and Charlotte were never intimate in any real sense,
and the first glimpse we get of that is that during this year at
Haworth, while the sisters were together and Emily wrote a considerable
number of poems, Charlotte knew nothing of them.

Anne meantime had regained such measure of strength as was ever hers,
and in April 1839 she went forth from Haworth again, and for five out of
the next six years was a governess. She went first to the family of Mrs.
Ingham at Blake Hall where, as Charlotte wrote to Ellen, she was very
kindly treated; she added, humorously no doubt, but rather acidly, that
owing to Anne's habit of silence she 'seriously apprehends that Mrs.
Ingham will sometime conclude that she has a natural impediment of
speech.' A month or so later Charlotte obtained a similar situation
herself and went as governess to the children of Mrs. John Benson
Sidgwick at Stonegappe, a few miles out of Skipton.

Less fortunate than Anne, she appears from her letters to have fallen
among fiends. The place, she wrote to Emily, was beautiful, and she
tried hard to be happy, but her life was an intolerable slavery. The
children were 'the most riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs ever born,'
and she refers to them as 'little devils incarnate.' Mrs. Sidgwick did
not know her, and did not want to know her. Her manners were

     fussily affable, she talks a great deal but little to the
     purpose.... She cares nothing in the world about me except to
     contrive how the greatest possible quantity of labour may be
     squeezed out of me, and to that end she overwhelms me with oceans
     of needlework.... I see now more clearly than I have ever done
     before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered
     as a living and rational being except as connected with the
     wearisome duties she has to fulfil.

Mr. Sidgwick was not such a brute as his wife, 'he has less bustling
condescension but a far kinder heart.... He never asks me to wipe the
children's smutty noses or tie their shoes or fetch their pinafores or
get them a chair.' The only pleasant afternoon that she spent at
Stonegappe was when he walked with his children and his dog, and
Charlotte had orders to 'follow a little behind.' She tells Emily not to
show this depiction of hell to her aunt or her father, or they would
think 'I am never satisfied wherever I am.' This caution is significant.

After a few weeks the whole family went to stay at Swarcliffe, near
Harrogate, a country house belonging to Mrs. Sidgwick's father, and, she
writes to Ellen, life was more miserable than ever. Mr. Greenwood had
filled his house with guests, who were gay and enjoyed themselves; there
was a large family party, 'proud as peacocks and wealthy as jews,' and
all the time, as Charlotte bitterly complains, she had a set of
'pampered, spoilt, and turbulent children' to look after. She was in
agonies of shyness and in the depth of depression, and to crown all,
Mrs. Sidgwick took her to task for her glum demeanour, and she broke
down and cried. Then she pulled herself together and reflected that
'Adversity is a good school--the Poor are born to labour, and the
Dependent to endure.' She recollected the fable of the Willow and the
Oak, and bent to the storm. Mrs. Sidgwick, she allowed, was generally
considered an agreeable woman, 'But, oh, Ellen, does this compensate for
the absence of every fine feeling, of every gentle and delicate
sentiment?'[21]

[Footnote 21: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, pp. 150-151.]

Now it wrings the heart to picture the woe and the wretchedness of this
extremely sensitive, self-conscious girl, whose shyness was such an
obsession to her that throughout her life the presence of a stranger
would plunge her into gulfs of silent misery, and it warms the heart to
think of her indomitable courage in going forth not once only but again
and again to take situations which necessarily threw her among
strangers, for the sake of contributing to the family finances, and
advancing the ambitions which she had determined to accomplish for
herself and her sisters. This iron willpower scorned the miseries which
were incidental to the working out of its purpose, and though she
bitterly complained, and increasingly formed the most censorious
conclusions about those who unwittingly incurred them, she never allowed
her unhappiness to deter her. Further instances of these characteristic
traits in her character, admirable and regrettable, emerge later. But
together with her memories of Stonegappe and Swarcliffe she brought away
some valuable material for the ruthless caricaturing in _Jane Eyre_ of
the guests, whose callous gaiety was etching itself in the mind of the
silent little governess, and was to be reproduced with ridicule that was
indeed ridiculous, in the figures of the smart party, 'Baroness Ingram
of Ingram Hall' and the rest, who swept about Mr. Rochester's house, and
told the footman 'to cease thy chatter, blockhead,' and took no notice
of Jane Eyre.

This wretched experience lasted but for three months, and once more,
exhausted and nerve-racked, she returned in July 1839 to Haworth. Here
she recovered her spirits and her speech: she was not shy at home, she
talked with ease among familiar faces, and within a week or two of her
return she received her second proposal of marriage, again from a
clerical admirer. There came to spend the day a former curate of Mr.
Bront's, now a vicar. With him Mr. Hodgson brought his own curate, Mr.
Bryce, who had lately left Dublin University. Mr. Bryce, Charlotte wrote
to Ellen, was a witty, lively young man, lacking in discretion and
dignity, but though she saw his faults, she was amused at his
originality, and laughed at his jests. Before the evening was over his
'Hibernian flattery' caused her to cool towards him, and off the
visitors went having left a pleasant though no permanent impression. A
few days afterwards, Charlotte, to her amazement and amusement, received
a proposal of marriage from young Mr. Bryce, ardently professing his
attachment. Another decided refusal followed. Six months later Mr. Bryce
died suddenly, and Charlotte confesses that when she heard of it she
felt both shocked and saddened; 'it was no shame to feel so, was it?'

Charlotte remained at Haworth, after leaving Mrs. Sidgwick's house of
bondage, for nearly two years before she took another situation as
governess, and her letters of the period, sometimes pungent and
censorious, sometimes elderly and hortatory, sometimes childlike and
brimming with eager enthusiasm and sly ironies, paint her own portrait
with a vividness and a fidelity that no biographer can hope to rival,
and one is tempted to believe that had she never written anything
whatever except letters, she would have won through them a niche in
English literature at least as permanent as Horace Walpole's. She
infuses her subject, whatever it is, with the intense interest which it
had for her, and at the same time enthralls us with a study of herself.
We read, for instance, how she and Ellen had made a plan to go together
to the seaside. Miss Branwell and Mr. Bront had given 'a reluctant
assent,' and Charlotte's box was packed. Then there was a difficulty
about her conveyance, for Haworth's only gig was at Harrogate, and
likely to remain there. Mr. Bront objected to Charlotte's going by
coach, and Miss Branwell changed her reluctant assent to the whole
scheme for 'decided disapproval,' and the visit was abandoned. But then
Ellen descended on Haworth with a carriage lent her for the occasion,
and like Perseus, rescued Andromeda. Charlotte wept with emotion when,
now for the first time, she saw the sea, and they had a marvellous
holiday together. She left her spectacles behind, and on her return to
Haworth could neither read, write, nor draw with any comfort, but hoped
that the landlady of their lodgings would not refuse to give them up.
Another pair of spectacles, apparently, was not to be thought of.
Trivial as all this is, the intensity of the experience to her renders
it enthralling, and it is because it is about a young lady of
twenty-three who lived in a remote parsonage, and tells us with
inimitable vividness about herself, and not in the least because that
young lady a few years afterwards wrote _Jane Eyre_, that we are
absorbed in what she has to say. Almost next day she wrote to Henry
Nussey, in a letter already quoted, as if she was his guardian aunt,
commending him for not seeking a wealthy wife; but we find these
edifications, which show the serious side of her character, hardly more
informative than the news that Tabby had become so lame that she left
the Parsonage and had gone to live with her sister.

     In the meantime Emily and I [she writes] are sufficiently busy as
     you may suppose: I manage the ironing and keep the rooms clean,
     Emily does the baking and attends to the kitchen. We are such odd
     animals that we prefer this mode of contrivance to having a new
     face amongst us.... Human feelings are queer things. I am much
     happier black-leading the stoves, making the beds, and sweeping the
     floor at home than I should be living like a fine lady anywhere
     else.

In leisure from housework she wrote, over the signature of Charles
Townsend, a story in three books called _Caroline Vernon_, and another
story, unnamed, with the same signature. Southey's discouragement of
poetry apparently still was potent, but the instinct for composition of
some sort was irresistible.




CHAPTER VI


In the familiar surroundings of home, with no strange faces to reduce
her to silence and aloof discomfort, and no immediate prospect of going
out again on educational exiles, Charlotte blossomed into a gaiety and
sense of fun that never again revisited her, and we rapturously read in
her letters the account of the loves of the Reverend William Weightman,
Mr. Bront's curate. Certainly there enters into it a very decent
allowance of acidity and of ridicule, but it is mixed with kindliness
and genuine laughter. It was not long before curates--the genus
'Curate'--became to her a target for peculiarly malicious arrows. She
could see no good in them; 'they were a self-seeking, vain, empty race,'
and in _Shirley_ she made them the butt of immortal and libellous
satire, designed to give pain. Later yet, by a providential irony of
kindlier humour than hers, it was with one of Mr. Bront's curates of
whom she had hitherto entertained the gloomiest opinions, that she
found, in marriage, the few months of real happiness which she had
missed all her life.

At present the Rev. William Weightman concerns us. He was a graduate of
Durham University, he was gay and handsome and an incorrigible flirt;
his brief history must be detached from the main narrative. Charlotte's
letters are full of him: she dubbed him, owing to an effeminacy of
manner and appearance, Miss Celia Amelia, and all the young ladies of
the neighbourhood were the objects of his passion and fell victims to
his invincible charms. There was Sarah Sugden, there was Caroline Dury,
and there was Agnes Walton, of whom Charlotte painted a portrait to
remind him of this charmer. 'You would laugh to see,' she wrote to
Ellen, 'how his eyes sparkle with delight when he looks at it, like a
pretty child pleased with a new plaything.' She painted his portrait as
well, and there were very many sittings required for this. Too many,
thought Ellen, and she warned Charlotte that she was falling in love
with Celia Amelia; in turn Charlotte warned Ellen that she was doing
precisely the same, and she must not lose her heart to him, for he made
eyes at every girl he saw. Even when he was performing his sacred
ministries he could not take his mind off them, and he sat opposite Anne
in church, 'sighing softly and looking out of the corner of his eyes to
win her attention!' He introduced unusual gaieties to the Parsonage; he
found that none of the three girls had ever received a Valentine, so he
sent them each one with an accompaniment of amorous verses, walking ten
miles to post them, so that Aunt Branwell should not suspect him of this
light conduct. He gave a lecture on some classical subject at Keighley,
and insisted that the three sisters should come to hear it: they did not
get back to the Parsonage till midnight, and Aunt Branwell, who had
prepared coffee for the girls only, found that more was required for
Celia Amelia and his chaperoning friend, and lost her temper. This
lecture was printed in a local paper, and Celia Amelia sent a copy of it
to Ellen, with a couple of ducks. Badinage abounded, and again and again
Charlotte counselled Ellen not to lose her heart to the all-conquering
curate, who thought her a fine-looking girl, for he was fickle as the
wind. He had an _inamorata_ at Swansea, but he quarrelled with her and
sent her back all her letters, while the more fortunate Caroline Dury
received 'a most passionate copy of verses.' He went to Ripon to pass
his examination for priest's orders, and enjoyed the balls there
immensely and twice more fell desperately in love. There were games at
the Parsonage now, drawing games, and Charlotte sent Ellen a sketch of a
horse's head 'by the sacred fingers of his reverence William Weightman
... you should have seen the vanity with which he afterwards regarded
his productions. One of them represented the flying figure of Fame
inscribing his own name on the clouds.' Charlotte sometimes signs these
sprightly letters to Ellen 'Charivari' or 'Caliban,' and addresses her
as 'Mrs. Menelaus.'

Now all this exuberant chaff which pervaded Charlotte's letters to Ellen
for a year and a half at the least was so unlike the picture which Mrs.
Gaskell had formed of her and of her deep and invariable seriousness of
character that, though she saw the letters, and quotes from them, she
omits the whole of these frivolities. They were not suitable: they could
not be recounted without spoiling the composition of that picture of
Charlotte, always grave and tender and loving, which she so misleadingly
painted. Out of these letters concerning Celia Amelia (though she does
not even hint at this frivolous nickname by which Charlotte habitually
speaks of him) all that she gives is the edifying information that he
preached a most violent sermon against Dissenters in Haworth Church,
that he was extremely kind to the poor, and picks out a few sentences in
which Charlotte, evidently in answer to badinage, assures Ellen that she
was not on very amiable terms with him. 'We are distant, cold and
reserved. We seldom speak, and when we do, it is only to exchange the
most trivial and commonplace remarks.' But, as a matter of fact,
throughout this period Charlotte's letters are effervescent with fun at
the kindly expense of Celia Amelia. Such a strain of gaiety is
certainly surprising, for at no other period of her life, except in the
last six months of it, is there any note of merriment, and it is
pleasant to know that there was this interlude of comedy bordering on
farce at the Parsonage.

But another Bront biographer has more than made up for Mrs. Gaskell's
suppressions, and Miss Isabel Clarke, in her charmingly written book,
_Haworth Parsonage_, has added to the Bront-Saga so amazing a romance
concerning Mr. Weightman and Emily Bront that it, and the grounds on
which it is based, must be briefly examined. The grounds are merely that
Miss Robinson (Madame Duclaux) stated in her book on Emily Bront that
'the first curate at Haworth (Mr. Weightman) was exempted from Emily's
liberal scorn.' Miss Clarke suggests that the information was derived
from Ellen Nussey, and on that somewhat bare stem proceeds to graft a
sumptuously flowering romance which, as far as can be ascertained, is
wholly imaginary. As follows:

Ellen Nussey on her visits to Haworth went for walks with Mr. Weightman,
and to check his amorous attentions Emily was sent out with them,
'ostensibly in the capacity of chaperon, thereby earning for herself the
nickname of the "Major."' But, Miss Clarke tells us,

     while he walked and flirted with Miss Nussey, he glanced with
     admiration and something of wonder at the tall slight form of the
     'Major.' He noticed her dark, soft kindling eyes, her thick hair,
     the strange, brooding, other-worldly look. He saw that this girl,
     destined to so tragic a doom, was not as the others. She loved him.

Now this is rather startling. All we actually know is that Emily did not
dislike Mr. Weightman as much as she disliked the curates who succeeded
him. Miss Clarke confesses that 'upon that subject Emily allowed no word
to pass her lips. If she made a confidante of Anne the younger sister
never betrayed that confidence, even after she had gone to her grave.'
Nor does Charlotte in all her numerous allusions to Weightman ever even
hint that Emily was attracted by him. She tells us that he made eyes at
Anne in church, that he flirted desperately with the Misses Walton,
Sugden and Dury, and for that reason (as Charlotte herself writes) she
warns Ellen not to allow herself to fall under his charm, for he made
love to every girl he met. But Miss Clarke tells us that this was not
the real reason. These love affairs were, as Charlotte knew, 'merely
ephemeral, for it was still Emily who held his heart.'[22] Then he was
in love with her too; Miss Clarke proves this triumphantly. She tells us
'that he loved her is undeniable, for she was the last woman in the
world to give her love unsought.'[23] In other words, having invented
the idea that Emily was in love with him, Miss Clarke asks us to deduce
that he must have been in love with Emily, because otherwise Emily would
not have allowed herself to be in love with him, and with this firmly
established and knit together, the romance proceeds blithely on its way.
Why, if Emily was deeply in love with Weightman and he deeply in love
with Emily, he did not tell her so and find that his passion was
returned, it would evidently be profane to inquire; the main fact of
their mutual passion is already proved. It follows, therefore, that when
Emily wrote her poem, _If grief for grief can touch thee_, ending with
the stanza

  Yes, by the tears I've poured,
    By all my hours of pain,
  O, I shall surely win thee,
    Beloved, again.

these lines were addressed to Weightman. Again, when Charlotte took
Emily to Brussels two years later, it was not, as the ignorant might
suppose, on the evidence of Charlotte's letters, for the purpose of
completing their education with a view to setting up a school, but that
she might 'take her sister away from a position that his (Weightman's)
gay philandering had rendered untenable.' Emily's unhappiness at
Brussels again was not due to the acute heart-sickness which she always
suffered from when she was away from Haworth, and which had caused her
recall from Miss Wooler's school, but to the craving for the presence of
Weightman. Weightman died while she was away, and so it is equally clear
that when she wrote _Remembrance_ it was he of whom she speaks as 'Sweet
Love of Youth.' It is true that she also speaks of 'fifteen wild
Decembers' having passed since his death, whereas there had been only
three, but that, we are assured, was mere camouflage. Finally, to clinch
the matter, Miss Clarke finds in _Wuthering Heights_ passages that were
'indubitably wrought out of a passionately emotional experience which
imagination alone could never have inspired.' 'Who else but Weightman,'
she asks us, 'could it have been?' To that certainly there is no answer,
but examine the evidence (or lack of it) as we may, we can find no sort
of reason for supposing that it was anybody.

[Footnote 22: Isabel Clarke, _Haworth Parsonage_, pp. 60-68.]

[Footnote 23: _Id._ p. 77.]

We have then two ardent Brontites, the one of whom, in dealing with the
'affaire Weightman,' suppresses all hint of Charlotte's intense
preoccupation and amusement with his numerous flirtations, while the
other finds therein a proof of the deep attachment that existed between
him and Emily. The middle way is perhaps the safest--namely, to accept
what Charlotte says about him, and to reject her complete silence as
being evidence for the existence of a romance of which she gives no
hint.


II

During this period Charlotte's scheme for the educational career of her
sisters and herself was for the present in abeyance. She had come back
from Mrs. Sidgwick's, and six months later Anne gave up her situation as
governess to Mrs. Ingham's children. The scheme of starting a joint
school, possibly at the Parsonage, was already being discussed, but
there could be no immediate prospect of that, and, during this winter of
1839-1840, she and Branwell, still allies, began their literary labours
again--he on the work of translating the Odes of Horace into English
verse, she on a Richardsonian novel of which she felt she had the
material for half-a-dozen volumes. Early in 1840 Branwell found a
tutorship in the family of Mr. Postlethwaite at Broughton-in-Furness, in
Westmorland, and from there wrote a highly vigorous and unedifying
letter to John Brown, the sexton at Haworth and President of the 'Lodge
of the Three Graces,' which strongly resembles some of those letters
which R. L. Stevenson wrote during his period of turbulent and
intemperate adolescence at Edinburgh.

     OLD KNAVE OF TRUMPS: Don't think I have forgotten you, though I
     have delayed so long in writing to you. It was my purpose to send
     you a yarn as soon as I could find materials to spin one with and
     it is only just now that I have had time to turn myself round and
     know where I am. If you saw me now you would not know me, and you
     would laugh to hear the character the people give me. Oh, the
     falsehood and hypocrisy of this world! I am fixed in a little
     retired town by the seashore, among wild woody hills that rise
     round me--huge, rocky and capped with clouds. My employer is a
     retired County Magistrate, a large landowner, and of a right hearty
     and generous disposition. His wife is a quiet, silent and amiable
     woman, and his sons are two fine spirited lads. My landlord is a
     respectable surgeon, two days out of seven is as drunk as a lord!
     His wife is a bustling, chattering, kind-hearted soul, and his
     daughter! oh! death and damnation! Well, what am I? That is, what
     do they think I am? A most calm, sedate, sober, abstemious,
     patient, mild-hearted, virtuous, gentlemanly philosopher--the
     picture of good works, and the treasure-house of righteous
     thoughts. Cards are shuffled under the table-cloth, glasses are
     thrust into the cupboard if I enter the room. I take neither
     spirits, wine, nor malt liquors, I dress in black, and smile like a
     saint or martyr. Everybody says 'What a good young gentleman is Mr.
     Postlethwaite's tutor!' This is a fact as I am a living soul, and
     right comfortably do I laugh at them. I mean to continue in their
     good opinion. I took a half-year's farewell of old friend whisky at
     Kendal on the night after I left. There was a party of gentlemen at
     the Royal Hotel and I joined them. We ordered a supper and
     whisky-toddy as 'hot as hell'! They thought I was a physician and
     put me in the chair. I gave sundry toasts, that were washed down at
     the same time, till the room spun round and the candles danced in
     our eyes. One of the guests was a respectable old gentleman with
     powdered head, rosy cheeks, fat paunch and ringed fingers. He gave
     'The Ladies' ... after which he brayed off with a speech; and in
     two minutes, in the middle of a grand sentence he stopped, wiped
     his head, looked wildly round, stammered, coughed, stopped again
     and called for his slippers. The waiter helped him to bed. Next a
     tall Irish squire and a native of the land of Israel began to
     quarrel about their countries, and, in the warmth of argument,
     discharged their glasses, each at his neighbour's throat instead of
     his own. I recommended bleeding, purging and blistering, but they
     administered each other a real 'Jem Warder,' so I flung my tumbler
     on the floor too, and swore I'd join 'Old Ireland!' A regular
     rumpus ensued, but we were tamed at last. I found myself in bed
     next morning with a bottle of porter, a glass and a corkscrew
     beside me. Since then I have not tasted anything stronger than milk
     and water, nor, I hope, shall till I return at Midsummer; when we
     will see about it. I am getting as fat as Prince William at
     Springhead, as godly as his friend Parson Winterbotham. My hand
     shakes no longer, I ride to the banker's at Ulveston with Mr.
     Postlethwaite, and sit drinking tea and talking scandal with old
     ladies. As to the young ones! I have one sitting by me just
     now--fair-faced, blue-eyed, dark-haired, sweet eighteen--and she
     little thinks the devil is so near her!

     I was delighted to see thy note, old Squire, but I do not
     understand one sentence--you will perhaps know what I mean. How are
     all about you? I long to hear and see thee again. How is the
     'Devil's Thumb'? whom men call ----, and the 'Devil in Mourning,'
     whom they call ----. How are ----, and ----, and the Doctor, and
     him who will be used as the tongs of hell--he whose eyes Satan
     looks out of, as from windows, I mean ----, esquire? How are little
     ----, 'Longshanks' ----[24] and the rest of them? Are they married,
     buried, devilled and damned? When I come I'll give them a good
     squeeze of the hand; till then I am too godly for them to think of.
     That bow-legged devil used to ask me impertinent questions which I
     answered him in kind, Beelzebub will make of him a walking stick!
     Keep to thy teetotalism, old squire, till I return, it will mend
     thy old body. Does 'little Nosey' think I have forgotten him? No,
     by Jupiter! nor his clock either. I'll send him a remembrance some
     of these days! But I must talk to some one prettier than thee; so
     goodnight, old boy, and believe me thine

       _The Philosopher_.

     Write directly. Of course you won't show this letter; and, for
     Heaven's sake, blot out all the lines scored with red ink.

[Footnote 24: These blanks are erasures in the manuscript, and no doubt
represent Christian and surnames of individuals.]

Now this letter is certainly no uplifting document. It is full of drink
and devil and cheap brag: the writer wished to exhibit himself as the
deuce of a fellow, and it shocked Mr. Swinburne very much. Evidently
Branwell was trying to be literary and impressive, and the style in
consequence is monstrously pompous and pretentious, though we cannot
deny that the description of the party at Kendal is vigorous and
picturesque. The letter would not be worth reprinting at all, except
that it furnishes us with an example of Branwell's style in narrative,
and will be useful for subsequent reference. It is not, moreover, quite
the letter we should have expected from one who was already supposedly
besotted and ruined by drink and drugs, and this is borne out by the
fact that Bramwell was now engaged in translating three books of
Horace's Odes into English verse. While tutor to Mr. Postlethwaite's
boys he met Hartley Coleridge, spent a day with him at Ambleside, and
sent him, asking for his opinion, his translation of two of these books.
What Coleridge thought of them there is no record, but Mr. John
Drinkwater, who privately printed them in 1910, bestowed on them his
high commendation. 'The first book,' he tells us, 'need, at their best,
fear comparison with no other version.' He finds in them passages of
clear lyrical beauty; he considers them 'excellent in themselves, and as
good as any English version I know.'

Charlotte had abandoned poetry altogether. 'Once indeed,' she writes to
Henry Nussey early in 1841, 'I was very poetical, when I was sixteen,
seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old, but now I am twenty-four,
approaching twenty-five, and the intermediate years are those which
begin to rob life of its superfluous colouring. I have not written
poetry for a long while....' But in peace at Haworth she had been busy
during 1839 on _Caroline Vernon_ and on a Richardsonian novel, and just
as Branwell and she, when they were children, had agreed to send their
poetical compositions to Wordsworth and Southey, so now, clearly by
arrangement, when Branwell sent his Odes to Hartley Coleridge, she sent
the opening chapters of one of these stories to Wordsworth. She signed
her letter to him 'C. T.', the initials of Charles Townsend under whose
name she wrote _Caroline Vernon_ and the unnamed story.

She received an answer from him, which is not extant, but the substance
of it can be gathered from her reply to it. Wordsworth must have been at
least as discouraging about her prose as Southey had been about her
verse, and have recommended her to give up writing, for she answers him:

     Authors are generally very tenacious of their productions, but I am
     not so much attached to them but that I can give it up without much
     distress. No doubt, if I had gone on, I should have made quite a
     Richardsonian concern of it.... I had material in my head for half
     a dozen volumes. Of course, it is with considerable regret I
     relinquish any scheme so charming as the one I have sketched.

She wishes she had lived fifty or sixty years ago, when the _Ladies'
Magazine_ was flourishing like a green bay tree.

     In that case I make no doubt my literary aspirations would have met
     with due encouragement, and I should have had the pleasure of
     introducing Messrs. Percy and West into the very best society, and
     recording all their sayings and doings in double-columned,
     close-printed pages.

She decidedly resented Wordsworth's letter, for she continues, deeply
sarcastic:

     I am pleased that you cannot quite decide whether I am an
     attorney's clerk or a novel-reading dressmaker. I will not help you
     at all in the discovery; and as to my handwriting, or the ladylike
     touches in my style and imagery, you must not draw any conclusions
     from that--I may employ an amanuensis.

Evidently Wordsworth touched her on the raw on this question of her sex,
just as in later years, when _Jane Eyre_ had made Currer Bell famous,
she bitterly resented any conjectures as to whether she was a man or a
woman.

The notion of sending part of an immense novel to Wordsworth (of all
arbiters!) was as infelicitous as his reply seems to have been, and,
failing to win encouragement for the second time in the eyes of the
mighty, Charlotte again gave up all idea of a literary career, and for
the next five years, till the autumn of 1845, she never set pen to paper
except to write her French exercises at Brussels and letters to her
friends. To go out as a governess again seemed the only thing to do, and
during this year (1840) she made one or two applications for posts of
the sort, but they came to nothing. She paid visits to Ellen and Mary
Taylor; Mary Taylor and her sister Martha came to Haworth, and with no
alien faces to render her tongue-tied and miserable, her letters
abounded in geniality and enjoyment, and in the intensest interest in
Celia Amelia's amours. But the moment strangers came to Haworth, even
though they were relations, she was quick to observe and to recount
their deficiencies. Of such were some family connections from Cornwall,
John Branwell Williams and his wife and daughter, and Charlotte's gimlet
eye bored ruthlessly into their pretensions.

     They reckon to be very fine folks indeed, and talk largely--I
     thought assumingly. I cannot say I much admired them; to my eye
     there seemed to be an attempt to play the great Mogul down in
     Yorkshire.... Mrs. Williams sets up for being a woman of great
     talents, tact, and accomplishment: I thought there was more noise
     than work. My cousin Eliza is a young lady intended by Nature to be
     a bouncing, good-looking girl: Art has trained her to be a
     languishing, affected piece of goods.

This visit seems to have been brief.

Branwell in the summer completed his engagement at Mr. Postlethwaite's
and returned home with his Horatian Odes. Painting and poetry alike had
failed, but he was anxious, or at least willing, to employ himself
somehow, and in September he became the booking-clerk at a small station
called Sowerby Bridge. It was a dismal _dgringolade_ from the brilliant
promise of his boyhood and from the bright hopes which Charlotte, above
all, had entertained about his career, and there is more than a touch
of sarcastic contempt in her announcement of this to Ellen Nussey. She
writes (September 1840):

     A distant relative of mine, one Patrick Boanerges,[25] has set off
     to seek his fortune in the wild, wandering, adventurous, romantic,
     knight-errant-like capacity of clerk on the Leeds and Manchester
     Railroad.

[Footnote 25: _i.e._ Son of Thunder: Bront.]

So off went Branwell to his ticket-office, and the three girls remained
at Haworth. Throughout Charlotte's voluminous correspondence during this
year, we get no glimpse at all of their relations to each other, for
Emily's name is never mentioned at all; Anne suffered from a cold, and
Celia Amelia made eyes at her in church. As for Aunt Branwell, all we
know of her is that she was vastly pleased with the knitting-needle case
which Ellen sent her, and on more than one occasion was 'precious
cross.' But the autumn winds blew across the hills, filling Charlotte
with rapture.

     I see everything [she wrote] _couleur de rose_, and am strongly
     inclined to dance a jig. I think I must partake of the nature of a
     pig or an ass--both which animals are strongly affected by a high
     wind. From which quarter the wind blows I cannot tell, for I never
     could in my life, but I should very much like to know how the great
     brewing tub of Bridlington Bay works, and what sort of yeasty froth
     rises just now on the waves.

Other causes besides the freedom and seclusion of Haworth contributed to
this joyful serenity, for that hysterical religious disquiet arising out
of her adolescent passion for Ellen had calmed down completely, and in
her letters, now and henceforth, there is not the smallest trace of
those spiritual aspirations and excitements. The blaze of that volcanic
human attachment, which gave the other birth, had cooled down also, and
a firm crust of friendship, never to be broken, had formed over these
fires, and now, when Ellen consults her about her own matrimonial
possibilities, it is indeed a grandmother (as Charlotte calls herself)
who tells Ellen that 'the majority of these worldly precepts whose
seeming coldness shocks and repels us in youth are founded in wisdom.'
With a somewhat ponderous humour, she pictures herself advising Ellen's
swain who, with a lover's diffidence, is slow to come to the point, and
bids him

     begin in a clear, distinct deferential, but determined voice. 'Miss
     Ellen, I have a question to put to you,--a very important question
     to put to you, Will you take me for your husband for better for
     worse? I am not a rich man, but I have sufficient to support us. I
     am not a great man but I love you honestly and truly. Miss Ellen,
     if you knew the world better you would see that this is not an
     offer to be despised, a kind attached heart and a moderate
     competency.' Do this, Mr. Vincent, and you may succeed. Go on
     writing sentimental love-sick letters to Henry and I would not give
     sixpence for your suit.

Then with a solemnity not less portentous she adjures Ellen not to wait
for _une grande passion_.

     My good girl, _une grande passion is une grande folie_.... No young
     lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted,
     the marriage ceremony performed, and the first half-year of wedded
     life has passed away. A woman may then begin to love, but with
     great precaution, very coolly, very moderately, very rationally. If
     she ever loves so much that a harsh word, or a cold look, cuts her
     to the heart, she is a fool....

The poor grandmother, so calm, so edifying, so pathetically ignorant of
the entire subject on which she was giving such comprehensive oracles
from the secluded shrine of Haworth! Presently she was to become very
much younger.




CHAPTER VII


Charlotte's determination that she and her sisters should teach, should
have a career, should 'get on,' was not only due to special necessities
in their individual case, but, not less, to her general principle that
girls as well as boys should stand on their own feet and make their way
in the world. The early Victorian view (and, indeed, the mid-Victorian
view) was that marriage was the only career for them, but Charlotte was
far in advance of her age. She wrote, for instance, a few years later to
her friend Mr. Williams, saying: 'Your daughters, as much as your sons,
should aim at making their way honourably through life. Do not wish to
keep them at home. Believe me, teachers may be hard-worked, ill-paid and
despised, but the girl who stays at home doing nothing is worse off than
the hardest-wrought and worst paid drudge of a school.' Considering how
miserable she had been in such situations, this is a most remarkable
utterance. Charlotte was indeed the pioneer of the movement for the
independence of women. No one before her, and none after her for at
least fifty years, thus stated that girls would be better off if working
in the most uncongenial surroundings than if they stayed at home.

So the caravans had to leave their oasis of peace, to travel once more
across alien sands, and in the spring of 1841 both Charlotte and Anne
went forth to new situations among strangers, while Emily remained at
Haworth. Anne went as governess to the children of the Reverend Edmund
Robinson, an invalid clergyman at Thorp Green, near York. Here she
remained for over four years, coming home for the holidays, disliking
the place from the first, but patiently and mildly enduring it without
complaint, and solacing herself with the adventures of Gondaland, and
secretly writing a story called _Solala Vernon's Life_. Hitherto Anne's
literary efforts had been entirely poetical; some poems she had written
under the name of Olivia Vernon. Of this story we know nothing, except
that by July 1841 she was engaged on the fourth volume or notebook of
it. Probably it was autobiographical.

Charlotte's situation was as governess to the two children, a girl of
eight and a boy of six, of Mr. and Mrs. John White of Upperwood House,
in the village of Rawdon, near Bradford. At once the misery that her
shyness among strangers caused her began to descend on her. She expected
them to behave shabbily to her; she was on the look out for slights and
want of consideration, and within a day of her arrival she wrote to
Ellen Nussey, 'I have _as yet_ had no cause to complain of want of
consideration or civility.' She hated her employment in itself. She
immediately noted that her pupils were wild and unbroken, though
apparently well disposed, and it does not bode well for the success of a
governess if, as Charlotte writes, 'she finds it hard to repel the rude
familiarities of children.' Her shyness was not less than an obsession,
of which she was aware, but against which she was powerless.

     I find it so difficult [she continues] to ask either servants or
     mistress for what I want, however much I want it. It is less pain
     to me to endure the greatest inconvenience than to request its
     removal. I am a fool. Heaven knows I cannot help it.

However, it was not so bad as Stonegappe. Charlotte liked Mr. White
extremely; also Ellen's home was within nine miles of Rawdon, and
meetings might be possible. But, rather ominously, she says, 'Respecting
Mrs. White I am for the moment silent. I am trying hard to like her.'
The effort was not successful. Charlotte asked her whether she might go
to spend a couple of nights with Ellen during term time, and Mrs. White
said '"Ye--e--es" in a reluctant cold tone,' adding that she had better
go on Saturday and return on Monday, so that the children should not
miss their lessons. That was enough: 'You _are_ a genuine Turk' thought
Charlotte, and it is evident there were no more efforts to like her.
Ellen's brother drove her back to Rawdon on Monday, and because he did
not go into the house Mrs. White got 'quite red in the face with
vexation.' Instantly Charlotte perceived that Mrs. White's cook, when
dressed, had much more the air of a lady than her mistress.

     Well can I believe [she writes] that Mrs. White has been an
     exciseman's daughter, and I am convinced also that Mr. White's
     extraction is very low. I was beginning to think Mrs. White a good
     sort of body in spite of all her bouncing and boasting, her bad
     grammar and worse orthography, but I have had experience of one
     little trait in her character which condemns her a long way with
     me. After treating a person in the most familiar terms of equality
     for a long time, if any little thing goes wrong, she does not
     scruple to give way to anger in a very coarse, unladylike manner. I
     think passion is the true test of vulgarity or refinement.

Then Mr. White wrote to Mr. Bront begging him to come and spend a week
at his house. But Charlotte would not permit that: 'I don't at all wish
papa to come; it would be like incurring an obligation,' and so papa did
not come.

This ungraciousness, this acutely censorious eye, was the result very
largely of her abnormal and invincible shyness, and the two throughout
her life reacted on each other. She was ill at ease with strangers, and
attributed the discomfort their presence caused her to their
disagreeable qualities. No efforts on their part, however well-meaning,
could deliver her from the prison of her unhappy temperament, and she
sat silent and unapproachable while they abandoned themselves to their
unfeeling gaieties, and noted their 'coarse imbecilities.' Her
occupation, moreover, was most uncongenial; 'no one but myself,' she
writes, 'is aware how utterly averse my whole mind and nature is to the
employment,' and though she had chosen it for herself and for her
sisters with a definite object in view and gallantly stuck to it, she
found it invariably odious. No one was ever less suited to be a
governess, for she took the same gloomy view of her charges as of their
parents, and the little Sidgwicks were devils incarnate, and the little
Whites 'noisy, over-indulged, and hard to manage.' The truth was that
she did not like children, and repelled their 'rude familiarities'; in
other words, when they manifested affection towards her, she did her
best to shut them up. She had, it is true, a tenderness for Mrs. White's
baby, but her admission of this softness takes the form of a confession.
'By dint of nursing the fat baby,' she writes, 'it has got to know me
and be fond of me. I suspect myself of growing rather fond of it.
Exertion of any kind is always beneficial.' Mrs. Gaskell and others have
divined from this an exquisite tenderness in her nature towards the
young; but was there ever a queerer expression of it than the admission
that by _dint_ of nursing the fat baby she had got fond of it, and that
exertion is always beneficial? She was surprised that she was growing
fond of it: it was odd to her.

Branwell meanwhile, after three months of ticket-collecting at Sowerby
Bridge, had been transferred to another station on the Leeds and
Manchester line called Luddenden Foot. Trains and passengers were few,
the station buildings consisted of one wooden hut, and the staff of
Branwell and a porter. Charlotte, writing to Emily, agrees that this
'_looks_ as if he was getting on at any rate.' What kind of progress
might be expected of a young man of social tastes and alcoholic
tendencies at a place where there was nothing for him to do and only a
porter to talk to, she does not specify. A more disastrous environment
could hardly be conceived.

After a while things shaped a little better at Upperwood House;
Charlotte wrote to Henry Nussey, her ex-suitor, that her employers were
'kind, worthy people in their way,' and returned to Haworth on the last
day of June for three weeks' holiday, after a tussle with Mrs. White,
who thought ten days would be enough. She found it was Paradise to be at
home again. Anne had already had her holiday and gone back to her
situation, and a small black kitten of the Parsonage was dead; 'every
cup,' Charlotte commented, 'however sweet, has its drop of bitterness in
it.' But Aunt Branwell was in high good humour, and this just now was a
most fortunate circumstance, for the project of the three girls setting
up a school, long cherished in secret, especially by Charlotte, was now
being discussed by their elders, and Aunt Branwell's help was necessary
to supply funds to start their enterprise. She had an invested capital
of about 1,500, which brought her in 50 a year, and though Charlotte
had always considered she was the last person who would offer a loan for
the purpose in question, Miss Branwell was willing to advance a sum of
100 or 150, provided that a suitable situation for the school could be
found and pupils were forthcoming; this offer Charlotte considered
'very fair.' At last, and at long last, there seemed a definite chance
that the long-cherished scheme of setting up a school might be realised.
She went back to Underwood House, after three weeks' holiday, full of
new hope. A long time might yet elapse before it could be carried out,
but sufficient capital was now forthcoming, and she began to consider
where the school should be started.

       *       *       *       *       *

At this point we get, owing to a rare felicity, something that has long
been lacking--namely, a glimpse, vivid and authentic, into the life of
the Parsonage as seen by those two inhabitants of it, hitherto so
shadowy, Emily and Anne. It came to Mr. Clement Shorter in the shape of
four folded pieces of paper sent him in a small box by Charlotte's
husband forty years after her death. These papers were covered with the
minute handwriting of Emily and Anne, two of each. As has been already
seen, they formed a group among the four children, with secrets of their
own and chronicles of Gondaland, and from these papers it appears that
it was their habit every four years separately to write a summary of
their doings and of the family affairs during that period, to be opened
four years later on Emily's birthday, July 30. Thus in the year 1841
they wrote the two summaries which first concern us, and which would be
opened on July 30, 1845. Again, on July 30, 1845, they wrote the
summaries of the years 1841-1845 which, had they lived, would have been
opened in due course. Emily's paper of 1841 is as follows:

  _A Paper to be opened
  when Anne is
  25 years old, or
  my next birthday after
  if
  all be well._

  _Emily Jane Bront. July the 30th 1841._

     It is Friday evening near 9 o'clock--wild rainy weather. I am
     seated in the dining room, having just concluded tidying our
     desk-boxes, writing this document. Papa is in the parlour--Aunt
     upstairs in her room. She has been reading _Blackwood's Magazine_
     to Papa. Victoria and Adelaide[26] are ensconsed in the peat-house,
     Keeper[27] is in the kitchen and Hero[28] in his cage. We are all
     stout and hearty, as I hope is the case with Charlotte, Branwell
     and Anne, of whom the first is at John White Esq: Upperwood House,
     Rawdon, the second is at Luddenden Foot, and the third is, I
     believe, at Scarborough, inditing perhaps a paper corresponding to
     this.

     A scheme is at present in agitation for setting us up in a school
     of our own, as yet nothing is determined, but I hope and trust it
     may go on and prosper, and answer our highest expectations. This
     day four years I wonder whether we shall still be dragging on in
     our present condition or established to our hearts' content. Time
     will show.

     I guess that at the time appointed for the opening of this paper,
     we, _i.e._, Charlotte, Anne, and I shall be all merrily seated in
     our own sitting room in some pleasant and flourishing seminary,
     having just gathered in from the midsummer lady-day. Our debts will
     be paid off, and we shall have cash in hand to a considerable
     amount. Papa, Aunt and Branwell will either have been or be coming
     to visit us. It will be a fine warm summer evening, very different
     from this bleak look-out, and Anne and I will perchance slip out
     into the garden for a few minutes to peruse our papers. I hope that
     either this or something better will be the case.

     The Gondaland are at present in a threatening state, but there is
     no open rupture as yet. All the princes and princesses of the
     Royalty are at the Palace of Instruction. I have a good many books
     on hand, but I am sorry to say that as usual I make small progress
     with any. However, I have just made a new regularity paper! and I
     must _verb sap_ to do great things. And now I close, sending from
     far an exhortation of courage, boys! courage, to exiled and
     harassed Anne, wishing she was here.

[Footnote 26: Tame geese. There had been three.]

[Footnote 27: Emily's bulldog.]

[Footnote 28: A hawk.]

Certainly this document presents a cheerful picture: there is no hint
of the tragic sibyl about the girl who so contentedly records the past,
and looks forward to the next four years in so optimistic a fashion. She
was alone with her aunt and her father, with a bulldog and a hawk,
looking forward to the moment four years hence when she and Anne will
'peruse' the papers they 'indited' to-day, and Anne will know that four
years ago she sent an exhortation of courage to the harassed exile.
Charlotte was exiled too, and, as her letters so volubly testify,
abundantly harassed by the vulgarities of the low-born, but to her
sufferings Emily makes no allusion. It is just worth while to notice
this, though without stressing it. The debts which she refers to and
hopes will be paid when the school prospers are clearly those which may
be incurred, owing to initial expenses. It has been suggested that they
were debts incurred by Branwell, but for this there is no particle of
evidence. It is, however, worth mentioning, since we abundantly find in
the Bront-Saga suggestions that the sisters went out as governesses and
tried to start a school in order to pay his debts.

It is the complete reticence of Emily concerning the fire, mystical and
rapturous and sombre, which we know inspired her, that strikes us most
in this domestic record. Not the tip of a red tongue of flame nor any
hot breath of the furnace escapes, nor yet the cold wind of the arctic
night which encompassed her when only a few days before the date of this
pleasant and contented chronicle she wrote that untitled poem beginning,

  I see around me tombstones grey
  Stretching their shadows far away.

Icy despair at the woes of this transitory life suffuses it, yet there
glows in it lambent fire, the hot, passionate love of the Earth, as
when, in _Wuthering Heights_, Catherine dreams that she was dead and so
miserable in Heaven that in anger the angels threw her out, and she
woke sobbing for joy to find herself once more in the heather of the
moor. To the record of her inner life Emily gave access to none--not
even to the secret eyes of Anne, who, four years later, as we shall see
in the second group of these papers, said that she knew only that Emily
was writing poetry, and wondered what it was about.

Herein we begin to see something of the vital difference between the
nature of Charlotte and Emily, the abysmal, impassable gulf that
separated the great talent of the one from the genius of the other.
Charlotte in her novels used not once, but over and over again, both in
motive and episode, the actual experiences of her life--its detested
occupations, the relationship between employer and employed as she
encountered them in her schoolings, bitterly caricaturing those who had
offended her. Emily, on the other hand, save in a few commemorative
poems, never drew from external experience--her inspiration, like that
of the mystic, came wholly from within, and her work glowed and was fed
by the fire and wine of the soul that dwelt apart.

Anne's corresponding paper, written at Scarborough, fills in the
hitherto faint outline of her piety and gentleness. She does not like
her present situation at Thorp Green and wishes to change it: owing to
Charlotte's plans, she actually remained there for four years more. She
gives almost precisely the same details about the past movements of the
family as Emily does, adding the exact ages of them all in years and
months. Charlotte's various situations are recorded in a short sentence,
and about Emily she makes a comment which is surely significant: 'We are
all of us,' she writes, 'doing something for our own livelihood, except
Emily, who, however, is as busy as any of us, and in reality earns her
food and raiment as much as we do.' We can certainly infer from this
that there had been a feeling in someone's mind--and there is no need to
ask in whose--that Emily should not be idling at home while her sisters
were earning their living. With regard to the future, Anne too hopes
that the idea of the joint school will materialise, but quotes from one
of her own poems:

  How little know we what we are,
    How less what we may be.

     ... What will the next four years bring forth? Providence only
     knows. But we have sustained very little alteration since that time
     [_i.e._ of the last papers four years ago]. I have the same faults
     that I had then, only I have more wisdom and experience, and a
     little more self-possession than I then enjoyed. I am now engaged
     in writing the fourth volume of _Solala Vernon's Life_.

These papers, then, beyond what they present to us of domestic
furnishings, are valuable as showing us Emily moving about content and
cheerful, but silent as Wuthering Heights itself lying white beneath its
winter snows about the things that truly concerned her, and of Anne,
uncomplaining and patient, meekly accepting the decrees of Providence
and busy, pathetically busy, over the fourth volume of _Solala Vernon's
Life_, for neither in verse nor prose had she more than the most
mediocre talent. These two sisters wrote solely for each other.
Charlotte has no part in their secret papers, and both their pens seem
to pass over her name without comment. But Emily sends a message of
encouragement to Anne, and Anne speaks up on Emily's behalf, as if
someone had unjustly reproached her for idleness.

       *       *       *       *       *

  [Illustration: EMILY BRONT
  _From a painting by Branwell Bront in the National Portrait Gallery._]

Charlotte had gone back to Dewsbury Moor before these papers were
written; now there came for her a letter from her friend Mary Taylor,
who, with her sister Martha, was at school at Brussels, and the gift of
a silk scarf and a pair of kid gloves. This letter first suggested to
her an idea which proved to have a profound effect on her life. She
wrote to Ellen about it:

     Mary's letter spoke of some of the pictures and cathedrals she had
     seen--pictures the most exquisite, cathedrals the most venerable. I
     hardly know what swelled to my throat as I read her letter: such a
     vehement impatience of restraint and steady work, such a strong
     wish for wings--wings such as wealth can furnish: such an earnest
     thirst to see, to know, to learn: something internal seemed to
     expand boldly for a minute. I was tantalised with the consciousness
     of faculties unexercised: then all collapsed, and I despaired.

But the collapse was but momentary. Mary's letter immediately kindled in
her a spark that should soon blaze high. It crept along in her mind and
presently it united itself with the other fire that always burned there,
namely, the school-keeping scheme. She began to wonder whether her
longing to see the pictures and cathedrals of which Mary spoke could not
be gratified in conjunction with the other. How much more likely she and
her sisters would be to succeed with their school if a further
education, the acquisition of a larger knowledge of French and German,
could be acquired at Brussels!

But just then another opportunity came in view, and it looked as if the
prospect of setting up a school (or rather of taking over one that
already existed) was capable of instant realisation. Miss Margaret
Wooler, at whose establishment at Dewsbury Moor Charlotte had been a
teacher and Emily and Anne pupils, had now retired, leaving the place to
be carried on by her sister. Now this sister intended to give it up, for
it had not prospered lately, and Miss Wooler proposed to Charlotte that
she should take it on and try to revive it, singly at first, then in
conjunction with Emily and Anne; she also offered her the use of her
furniture. Charlotte cordially accepted this very generous proposal,
but pending its completion, she sat down to think. Her aunt had agreed
to advance a loan up to 150 to meet initial expenses, but now, since
the furniture of the house would be lent her, that loan might be used in
other ways. Before Miss Wooler answered her letter of acceptance, she
wrote to Aunt Branwell as follows:

     A plan has been approved by Mr. and Mrs. White and others, which I
     wish now to impart to you. My friends recommend me if I desire to
     secure permanent success, to delay commencing the school for six
     months longer, and by all means to contrive by hook or by crook, to
     spend the intervening time in some school on the continent. They
     say schools in England are so numerous, competition so great, that
     without some such step towards attracting superiority we shall
     probably have a very hard struggle and may fail in the end. They
     say, moreover, that the loan of 100, which you have been so kind
     as to offer us, will perhaps not be all required now, as Miss
     Wooler will lend us the furniture; and that, if the speculation is
     intended to be a good and successful one, half the sum at least
     ought to be paid out in the manner I have mentioned, thereby
     insuring a more speedy repayment both of interest and capital.

     I would not go to France or to Paris. I would go to Brussels in
     Belgium. The cost of the journey there, at the dearest rate of
     travelling, would be 5: living is there little more than half as
     dear as it is in England, and the facilities for education are
     equal or superior to any other place in Europe. In half a year I
     could acquire a thorough familiarity with French, and could improve
     greatly in Italian and even get a dash of German, _i.e._, provided
     my health continued as good as it is now. Martha Taylor is now
     staying in Brussels, at a first-rate establishment there. I should
     not think of going to the Chteau de Kockleberg, where she is
     resident, as the terms are much too high; but if I wrote to her,
     she, with the assistance of Mrs. Jenkins, the wife of the British
     Consul, would be able to secure me a cheap and decent residence and
     respectable protection. I should have the opportunity of seeing her
     frequently, she would make me acquainted with the city, and, with
     the assistance of her cousins, I should probably in time be
     introduced to connections far more improving, polished, and
     cultivated than any I have yet known.

     These are advantages which would turn to vast account, when we
     actually commenced a school--and, if Emily could share them with
     me, only for a single half year, we could take a footing in the
     world afterwards which we can never do now. I say Emily instead of
     Anne: for Anne might take her turn at some future period, if our
     school answered. I feel certain, while I am writing, that you will
     see the propriety of what I say: you always like to use your money
     to the best advantage, you are not fond of making shabby purchases:
     when you do confer a favour, it is often done in style, and depend
     upon it 50 or 100, thus laid out, would be well employed. Of
     course, I know of no other friend in the world to whom I could
     apply on this subject, except yourself. I feel an absolute
     conviction that, if the advantage were allowed us, it would be the
     making of us for life. Papa will perhaps think it a wild and
     ambitious scheme, but who can rise in the world without ambition?
     When he left Ireland to go to Cambridge, he was as ambitious as I
     am now. I want us _all_ to get on. I know we have talents, and I
     want them to be turned to account. I look to you, aunt, to help us.
     I think you will not refuse. I know, if you consent, it shall not
     be my fault if you ever repent your kindness.

A more tactful and diplomatic letter could not be conceived. Charlotte
had the support of the Whites and other friends for her suggestion. She
congratulated her aunt upon the wise way in which she always laid out
her money, a foe to shabby presents; she disarmed her father's possible
opposition by the flattering reminder that he, too, in his day had been
ambitious, or he, the son of an Irish peasant, would never have
succeeded in getting a University education, and she made a powerful
suggestion to her aunt that she was going to consent. Miss Branwell's
answer, though there were points yet to be settled, was favourable
enough to cause Charlotte to cancel her acceptance of Miss Wooler's
offer. She did so apparently without much sense of gratitude for it,
writing to Ellen:

     I am not going to Dewsbury Moor as far as I can see at present. It
     was a decent friendly proposal on Miss Wooler's part, and cancels
     all or most of her little foibles in my estimation; but Dewsbury
     Moor is a poisoned place to me, besides I burn to go somewhere
     else. I think, Nell, I see a chance of getting to Brussels....
     Dewsbury Moor was an obscure dreary place not adapted for a school.

She had finished with Dewsbury Moor.

Charlotte had now completely transformed the original idea of the school
to be started with Miss Branwell's assistance, where the three sisters
might be together, though that was to come later, with the prospect of
the greater success that their improved educational equipment would give
them. This entailed many changes in the first plan, which, with her
masterly efficiency, she now proceeded to make, for the sake of the
general object of them 'all getting on.' Emily, she settled with Miss
Branwell's approval, was to accompany her to Brussels. 'I wished for
one, at least, of my sisters,' she wrote to Ellen, 'to share the
advantage with me. I fixed on Emily. She deserved the reward, I knew.'
How far Emily appreciated that reward is another question: she had pined
with home-sickness when she had been only three months from Haworth at
Miss Wooler's school, and now she was to be transplanted to Brussels for
six. Indeed, Charlotte's plans went far beyond that, now that Miss
Branwell had sanctioned them so far, for in a few weeks she wrote to
Emily, saying:

     Before our half year in Brussels is completed, you and I will have
     to seek employment abroad. It is not my intention to retrace my
     steps home till twelve months if all continues well, and we and
     those at home retain good health.

Then there was Anne. A few months before, Charlotte had written to
Ellen most tenderly about her, for Anne was unhappy in her situation as
governess to the family of Mrs. Robinson:

     I have one aching feeling at my heart. It is about Anne; she has so
     much to endure; far, far more than I have. When my thoughts turn to
     her, they always see her as a patient persecuted stranger. I know
     what concealed susceptibility is in her nature, when her feelings
     are wounded. I wish I could be with her to administer a little
     balm. She is more lonely, less gifted with the power of making
     friends even than I am.

Now there is a very sincere and affectionate anxiety in these words; of
that there can be no doubt. But the Brussels plan, for the eventual
benefit of them all, now overrode in Charlotte's mind all other
considerations. 'Anne for the present,' as Charlotte wrote to Emily,
'seems omitted in it, but if all goes right I trust she will derive her
full share of benefit from it in the end.' But why, we cannot help
asking, should not Charlotte have arranged that Anne, over whose
loneliness she mourned, longing to be with her, should accompany her to
Brussels where they would be together, while Emily, who was abjectly
miserable away from Haworth, remained at home? The answer seems plain:
Emily was wasting her time at Haworth, she was doing nothing towards the
project of the school, for which further education at Brussels would be
of such assistance, and she was earning nothing. This seems to accord
with Anne's gentle protest in her secret paper that Emily was as busy as
any of them, and the implication that Charlotte thought otherwise. Anne,
on the other hand, was gaining experience in teaching, and was earning
her livelihood. So, much as she disliked the situation, and much as
Charlotte longed to be with her and comfort her loneliness, it was
better that Anne should remain at Thorp Green and continue, as Charlotte
wrote in her notes on Anne's poems, 'to taste the cup of life as it is
mixed for the class termed "governesses,"' while Emily came to Brussels.
They all must get on, and all must work, at whatever personal sacrifice.

There were still many inquiries to be made about a suitable
establishment at Brussels when the sisters were together again at
Haworth for Christmas, 1841. Branwell was expected, but did not arrive;
he had not been seen at Haworth for the last five months, though the
station at Luddenden Foot, where he had gone in what Charlotte
ironically called 'his wild, wandering, adventurous, romantic,
knight-errant-like capacity of ticket collector,' was not more than a
dozen miles off. When he did arrive in January 1842, it was because he
had been dismissed from his high estate. He had made a habit of leaving
the ticket-office in that solitary shanty in care of his colleague the
porter, and had spent his days drinking heavily in hospitable
farm-houses and pot-houses of the neighbourhood. His colleague had
pocketed the money which he received for the tickets, and when the audit
was made, the cash that should have been received by the ticket-collector
was far from tallying with the price of the tickets that had been
purchased. Though Branwell was not personally suspected of theft, his
neglect and carelessness of his duties had been monstrous, and it was no
wonder that the Leeds and Manchester Railway Company had no further use
for him.

Meantime there had arisen the question as to whether better educational
advantages would not be obtained at Lille than at Brussels, but further
inquiries made by Mr. Jenkins (who proved not to be British Consul in
Brussels, but chaplain to the British Embassy) led to the selection of
the _pensionnat_ kept by Madame Hger[29] in the Rue d'Isabelle.

[Footnote 29: Later the Hger family dropped the accent in their name.]

Emily and Charlotte, accompanied by their father, set off sometime
during February 1842. Mr. Bront remained in Brussels one night, and
then returned to Haworth. He had prudently written out for himself a
list of the French equivalents of the things he might be called upon to
ask for during his return journey when he would be without interpreters.
Charlotte's scheme had been carried out in bulk and detail. Just as her
father had gone up to Cambridge at the age of twenty-five, _in statu
pupillari_ after being a master at an Irish school, so she at the same
age, after being a mistress at Miss Wooler's and governess at Stonegappe
and Underwood House, became a pupil again in Madame Hger's
_pensionnat_.




CHAPTER VIII


The external features and internal arrangements of the _pensionnat_ were
reproduced by Charlotte with such accurate and photographic detail in
_The Professor_ and _Villette_, that it is unnecessary to describe them.
Mrs. Gaskell says that there were eighty to a hundred pupils there at
the time,[30] but Charlotte in a letter to Ellen states that there were
about forty day pupils and twelve boarders.[31] The terms for board and
tuition were 650 francs per annum, so that Miss Branwell's loan, even if
it was only 50, not 100, easily covered the total expenses of the two
girls for six months. The boarders all slept in one dormitory, at the
far end of which, withdrawn behind a curtain, were Charlotte's and
Emily's beds. Miss Branwell had paid something extra for this privilege,
and Charlotte 'considered it kind' of her. It felt strange to her at
first to be a pupil and once more 'to submit to authority instead of
exercising it,' but she liked it. She had come here to learn, in order
to fit herself for the future she had planned for herself and her
sisters, and the life was congenial and delightful compared with that of
a governess. The difference between the sisters and the other pupils in
the matter of age, nationality, and religion caused her and Emily to be
'completely isolated in the midst of numbers,' but constant occupation
and intense interest in it made the time pass only too quickly for her.
The great chance was hers, and she meant to drain the utmost drop of
profit from it.

[Footnote 30: Mrs. Gaskell, _Life of Charlotte Bront_, p. 166.]

[Footnote 31: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 237. In a later
letter, however, Charlotte says that there were nearly ninety pupils.]

Emily, on the other hand, was throughout her time here entirely
wretched. She was always unhappy away from Haworth, the presence of
strangers had a more appalling effect on her than even on Charlotte, and
when the two on school holidays went to see Mary and Martha Taylor, who
were being educated at the Chteau de Kockleberg, or visited Mrs.
Jenkins, Emily sat dumb and miserable. M. Hger and she, Charlotte
recorded, 'did not draw well together at all,' and otherwise in her
letters scarcely mentioned her. But the account she gave of Emily in the
prefatory memoir she wrote to her poems after her death is heartrending.
She alluded to the misery Emily experienced when at school, and

     now (at Brussels) the same suffering and conflict ensued,
     heightened by the strong recoil of her upright, heretic and English
     spirit from the gentle Jesuitry of the foreign and Romish system.
     Once more she seemed sinking, but this time she rallied through the
     mere force of resolution: with inward remorse and shame she looked
     back on her former failure, and resolved to conquer in this second
     ordeal. She did conquer, but the victory cost her dear.

It is possible that retrospective exaggeration tinges this account, but
Brussels was evidently an inferno to the unhappy girl. Charlotte is
strangely at error about Emily's age in this memoir; she says she was
twenty when she went to Brussels, whereas, as a matter of fact, having
been born in 1818, she passed her twenty-fourth birthday there.

During this first sojourn at Brussels, Charlotte wrote very few letters
to Ellen. Being amongst strangers produced its invariable reactions, and
she found the folk among whom she was thus isolated almost as
disagreeable as those of her days of bondage as governess. Madame Hger
came off best. She

     is a lady of precisely the same cast of mind, degree of
     cultivation, and quality of intellect as Miss Catherine Wooler. I
     think the severe points are a little softened, because she has not
     been disappointed and consequently soured. In other words, she is a
     married instead of a maiden lady.

(Perhaps this is not so much appreciation of Mme. Hger as depreciation
of Miss Wooler.) Then there were the three other mistresses--Mdlle.
Blanche, Mdlle. Sophie, Mdlle. Marie:

     The two first have no particular character. One is an old maid, the
     other will be one. Mademoiselle Marie is talented and original but
     of repulsive and arbitrary manners.

Then there is M. Hger:

     A man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in
     temperament: a little black being, with a face that varies in
     expression. Sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane
     tom-cat, sometimes those of a delirious hyena; occasionally but
     very seldom he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an
     air not above 100 degrees removed from mild and gentlemanlike....
     The few private lessons M. Hger has vouchsafed to give us are, I
     suppose, to be considered a great favour, and I can perceive they
     have already excited much spite and jealousy in the school.

Brussels, she found, was a selfish city, and this a selfish school.

     If the national character of the Belgians is to be measured by the
     character of most of the girls in this school, it is a character
     singularly cold, selfish, animal, and inferior ... their principles
     are rotten to the core.

Their religion was as vile as themselves.

     My advice to all Protestants who are tempted to do anything so
     besotted as to turn Catholics is, to walk over the sea on to the
     continent; to attend Mass sedulously for a time; to note well the
     mummeries thereof; also the idiotic mercenary aspect of all the
     priests; and _then_, if they are still disposed to consider
     Papistry in any other light than a most feeble, childish piece of
     humbug, let them turn Papists at once--that's all.

In spite of these disagreeable companions and uncongenial surroundings,
Charlotte found that Brussels was fulfilling her expectations; it is
evident also that Monsieur and Madame thought highly of the abilities of
both the sisters, for in an undated letter to Ellen, Charlotte writes:

     I consider it doubtful whether I shall come home in September or
     not. Madame Hger has made a proposal for both me and Emily to stay
     another half-year, offering to dismiss her English master, and take
     me as English teacher: also to employ Emily some part of the day in
     teaching music to a certain number of the pupils. For these
     services we are to be allowed to continue our studies in French and
     German, and to have board, etc., without paying for it: no
     salaries, however, are offered.

It is clear that this proposal must have been accepted by Charlotte on
behalf of Emily and herself, though by the original arrangement they
would have returned to England in August, at the end of their six
months, for they both stopped at Brussels, through the _vacances_, into
the new term which opened in September, and Charlotte began giving
English lessons to younger pupils and Emily was teaching them the piano.
Emily was now 'drawing together better' with M. Hger, and Charlotte,
with a dryness that contrasts curiously with the passionate and perhaps
remorseful tenderness of her subsequent memoir, says that 'Monsieur et
Madame Hger begin to recognise the valuable parts of her character,
under her singularities.'[32] Subsequently M. Hger spoke in the very
highest terms of Emily's abilities, ranking them far above Charlotte's,
both in mental grasp and in imaginative power.

[Footnote 32: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 239.]

The two sisters were therefore now installed as pupil teachers at the
_pensionnat_ for another half-year. Charlotte, it may be remembered, had
told Emily she did not propose to come back to England under twelve
months. Late in October, Martha Taylor, Mary's sister, died suddenly at
the Chteau de Kockleberg; Charlotte wrote of her very tenderly in
_Shirley_ as Jessie Yorke. Then on November 2nd Charlotte got news of
Miss Branwell's serious illness, and, on the next day, of her death. The
sisters sailed from Antwerp on the 6th, arriving at Haworth two days
afterwards, to find the funeral was over. Though Miss Branwell had
supplied the funds wherewith Charlotte had realised her dream of going
to Brussels, she had never had any affection for her aunt, and writing
to Ellen immediately afterwards, she expressed neither sorrow nor
gratitude. 'All was over,' she says. 'We shall see her no more. Papa is
pretty well'; then a fortnight later, inviting her friend to Haworth,
she says: 'Do not fear to find us melancholy or depressed, we are all
much as usual. You will see no difference from our former demeanour.'
There is no further allusion in her subsequent letters either to Miss
Branwell or to Mr. Weightman, Celia Amelia, whose death had preceded
Miss Branwell's by a few days.

       *       *       *       *       *

  [Illustration: PATRICK BRANWELL BRONT]

Branwell throughout this year had been living at Haworth since his
dismissal from Luddenden Foot. He had there made friends with a young
engineer on the Leeds and Manchester line, Francis H. Grundy, who was
immensely impressed, even as the commercial travellers at the 'Black
Bull' had been, by the brilliance of Branwell's conversation, and was
perfectly frank regarding his drunken habits. In his _Pictures of the
Past_ he tells us that Branwell, just before he made his acquaintance,
had been in the habit also of taking opium, in emulation of De Quincey,
but broke himself of it, though before the end of his life he resumed it
again. There are several letters from Branwell to him during this year.
Branwell had asked him if he could get him another appointment in the
employment of the railway, but was not surprised to hear that there was
no chance of it. He wisely rejected the idea of going into the Church,
remarking that 'I have not one mental qualification, save perhaps
hypocrisy, which would make me cut a figure in the pulpit.' He alone
seems to have felt any regret for Miss Branwell's death, whose favourite
he had always been, and refers to her, who, he said, had been his mother
for twenty years, with sincere feeling.[33] He cannot at this period
have been the utter wreck which he is represented to have been, for
after this year at Haworth he became tutor to Mr. Robinson's boys at
Thorp Green, where Anne was already governess; they went there together
directly after the Christmas holidays, and remained there for the next
two years and a half. This Christmas of 1842, Mrs. Gaskell tells us,
'they all enjoyed inexpressibly. Branwell was with them; that was always
a pleasure at this time.'

[Footnote 33: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, pp. 242, 253.]

Mrs. Gaskell makes some curiously erroneous statements with regard to
Miss Branwell's will and the disposition of her money. She states:

     The small property which she had accumulated by dint of personal
     frugality and self-denial, was bequeathed to her nieces. Branwell,
     her darling, was to have had his share: but his reckless
     expenditure had distressed the good old lady, and his name was
     omitted in her will.[34]

[Footnote 34: Mrs. Gaskell, _Life of Charlotte Bront_, p. 184.]

Subsequent biographers have followed her without troubling to verify her
information, and we find Miss Robinson (Mme. Duclaux), for instance,
closely paraphrasing Mrs. Gaskell. She says:

     The little property she (Miss Branwell) had saved out of her frugal
     income was all left to her three nieces. Branwell had been her
     darling, her only son, called by her name, but his disgrace had
     wounded her too deeply. He was not even mentioned in her will.[35]

[Footnote 35: Miss A. M. F. Robinson, _Emily Bront_, p. 102.]

These statements, which have passed into accredited Bront-Saga, are so
wide of the truth that it is worth while correcting their errors. The
facts are these: Miss Branwell's will was drawn up at York on April 30,
1833, and it was this will, made more than nine years before, which was
now proved. At the time when she made her will Branwell was fifteen
years old, and it is quite impossible that at that age 'his reckless
expenditure' or his 'disgrace' had caused his aunt to revoke a previous
will, and cut him off from the share she had intended for him; nor is
there the slightest reason to suppose that any such previous will ever
existed. He was, moreover, mentioned in her will: she left of her
personal effects an Indian workbox to Charlotte, her china-topped
workbox and an ivory fan to Emily, her Japan dressing-box to Branwell,
her watch and various trinkets to Anne. Again, she did not leave her
capital to her three nieces, but to four nieces, the Bront girls being
three of them, the fourth, Anne Kingston, being the daughter of another
sister. Her capital was proved at 'under 1500' (_i.e._ over 1400), and
her income of 50 a year was derived from it, and was not the result of
frugality; she had been left it by her father. A further provision in
her will was that her property should be divided between her nieces when
the youngest of them attained the age of twenty-one. Anne, the youngest,
at the time of her death was twenty-two, and therefore as soon as the
will was proved the three sisters each came into a sum of over 300.

On the sudden departure of Charlotte and Emily from Brussels owing to
their aunt's death, M. Hger wrote a letter to Mr. Bront, which they
brought with them. He spoke in it of his great regret, due to more than
one cause, at their leaving the school; and this letter certainly must
have carried great weight in determining the decision which so
profoundly affected Charlotte's future life and work. He wrote[36]:

     En perdant nos deux chres lves, nous ne devons pas vous cacher
     que nous prouvons  la fois et du chagrin et de l'inquitude; nous
     sommes affligs parce que cette brusque sparation vient briser
     l'affection presque paternelle que nous leur avons voue, et notre
     peine s'augmente  la vue de tant de travaux interrompus, de tant
     de choses bien commences, et qui ne demandent que quelque temps
     encore pour tre menes  bonne fin. Dans un an chacune de vos
     demoiselles et t entirement prmunie contre les ventualits de
     l'avenir; chacune d'elles acqurait  la fois et l'instruction et
     la science d'enseignement: ... encore un an tout au plus et l'oeuvre
     tait acheve et bien acheve. Alors nous aurions pu, si cela vous
     et convenu, offrir  mesdemoiselles vos filles ou du moins  l'une
     des deux une position qui et t dans ses gots, et qui lui et
     donn cette douce indpendance si difficile  trouver pour une
     jeune personne.... Nous savons, Monsieur, que vous pserez plus
     mrement et plus sagement que nous la consquence qu'aurait pour
     l'avenir une interruption complte dans les tudes de vos deux
     filles; vous dciderez ce qu'il faut faire, et vous nous
     pardonnerez notre franchise, si vous daignez considrer que le
     motif qui nous fait agir est une affection bien dsintresse et
     qui s'affligerait beaucoup de devoir dj se rsigner  n'tre plus
     utile  vos chres enfants.

[Footnote 36: This letter both in Mrs. Gaskell's and Mr. Clement
Shorter's books is dated '_Samedi 5 Obre_.' 'Obre' is an impossible
contraction for October, and the date required by facts is the 5th of
November. I suggest, therefore, that it should read _Samedi 5. 9bre_:
September being '7bre' in admissible French, October '8bre,' November
'9bre.']

The effect of so emphatic and so kindly a persuasion might easily and
naturally have determined Charlotte to go back to Brussels, as M. Hger
strongly advised; Madame also, who up till now was on excellent terms
with her, wrote her a kind and affectionate letter.[37] Indeed, on the
face of it, there seemed to be every reason for so doing. Emily, who, as
Charlotte says in her memoir, had barely with the utmost power of her
resolution got through the ordeal of living away from Haworth, would
remain at the Parsonage with her father, while she went back to complete
the education through which all the sisters would jointly profit when
their school was established. Moreover, there was now no difficulty
about money; they had, all three of them, come into a sum of 300, left
them by Miss Branwell; besides, as it turned out, Mme. Hger amended her
original offer of merely granting Charlotte board and tuition free, in
return for the English class she was to hold, and gave her in addition a
salary of 16. As the charges for board and tuition were only 26 a
year, Charlotte got food, lodging, and tuition for 10. Yet in spite of
all this, in spite of the fact that it was strictly in accordance with
her principles about all girls, not Bronts alone, making their way in
the world, that she should return to Brussels, and that Anne should go
back to her post as governess at Thorp Green, Charlotte subsequently
wrote to Ellen, saying:

     I returned to Brussels after aunt's death against my conscience,
     prompted by what then seemed an irresistible impulse. I was
     punished for my selfish folly by a withdrawal for more than two
     years of happiness and peace of mind.

[Footnote 37: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 274.]

Now these are strong expressions, and for many years controversy raged
over them. It was hard to understand why it should have been against
Charlotte's conscience to return there in accordance with M. Hger's
very kind and competent advice, and continue the course which had been
broken off by the purely extraneous circumstance of Miss Bramwell's
death, or why it should have been 'senseless folly' so to do, or why
this senseless folly, which apparently was so eminently reasonable and
wise, should have resulted in so long a forfeit of happiness and peace
of mind. The only conjecture that was made by those who knew Charlotte
best, namely, her friend Ellen Nussey and her subsequent husband Mr.
Nicholls, was that she felt she ought to have stopped at home to look
after her father, for he, like Branwell, drank too much, and her firm
presence at Haworth might have checked this tendency.[38] Therein we are
let into another grim secret of the life at the Parsonage, but, as
revelations which came out more than fifty years afterwards proved, this
conjecture was not the real reason.

[Footnote 38: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 255.]

Certain students of Charlotte's novels formed another theory. They knew
(as who does not?) that she used in her books every possible scrap of
personal experience: there was never an author of fiction who owed so
much to her own actual life. Cowan Bridge School, her sufferings as
governess, the curates, her friends Mary and Martha Taylor, her sister
Emily, the scenery and setting of her books, and, above all, she herself
are drawn often photographically and without disguise. These students,
working on a sound principle, found in _Villette_ numbers of such
portraits of M. Hger and the rest; the _pensionnat_ in the Rue
d'Isabelle was presented with the most exact fidelity, down to minute
details, and they conjectured that Lucy Snowe's passionate devotion to
her teacher, Paul Emmanuel, was a fictional but faithful transcript of
Charlotte's feelings for M. Hger. The whole of the book, so they
rightly pointed out, was a slice carved from her life: it was reasonable
to suppose that the central _motif_ was carved from it too. Such a
theory also explained the nature of 'the irresistible impulse' to return
to Brussels, and why this 'selfish folly' had so disastrous an effect on
her happiness: Charlotte would scarcely (so they argued) have applied
'irresistible impulse' to her desire to learn more German, nor, since
this acquisition was to result in benefit for her sisters as well, was
this scholastic ambition a selfish folly. There was something more. She
knew, they suggested, that she was falling in love with M. Hger and
could not resist that fatal and dangerous impulse to go back to him.

Such a notion, considered as degrading and disfiguring to the image of
Charlotte as presented by Mrs. Gaskell, brought down on these theorists
vials of scorn and opprobrium. Her champions felt it to be a monstrous
outrage that she should be suspected of having fallen in love with a
married man. No one had suggested that there was any semblance of an
actual love-affair arising out of this situation, or that Charlotte's
devotion to her professor was returned by him; but many ardent
Brontites, in no less ardent language, were unspeakably shocked by the
mere suggestion that she loved him, and a furious indignation inspired
their pens. They proved to their own satisfaction that not only was
there no evidence to support so malevolent a notion, but that anyone who
knew anything about Charlotte's puritanical uprightness must have known
also that she was incapable of such a spontaneous surrender, and they
proved it by a hurricane of arguments that swept all before it. Then,
nearly sixty years after her death, came the conclusive evidence that
all they had proved to be false was perfectly true.

Charlotte returned then to Brussels alone during the last week of
January 1843. Madame Hger, she wrote to Ellen, received her with great
kindness, and both she and her husband, for whom alone she felt regard
and esteem, did all they could to make her at home, telling her to use
their sitting-room as if it was her own, whenever she was not engaged in
the schoolroom. She gave lessons in English to M. Hger and his
brother-in-law, M. Chapelle, whose wife was the sister of M. Hger's
first wife. They were both quick in learning, especially M. Hger,
though the efforts they made to acquire an English pronunciation would
have made Ellen 'laugh to all eternity.' Apparently there had been an
idea that Ellen should have come out to Brussels with Charlotte, for she
wrote again early in April, saying: 'During the bitter cold weather we
had through February and the principal part of March, I did not regret
that you had not accompanied me.' She was occasionally lonely, but
happy, she affirmed, compared to what she had been when a governess.
Then we infer that there must have been some badinage on Ellen's part,
such as the two friends indulged in over the susceptible Mr. Weightman,
for Charlotte denies with considerable asperity the report that had
reached Ellen that she had gone back to Brussels 'in some remote hope of
entrapping a husband.' She lives, she assures her, in 'total seclusion,'
never speaking to any man except M. Hger, and seldom to him. Possibly,
then, the English lessons had already come to an end.

By May Charlotte had already been in Brussels for twelve months
altogether, and there must have been some idea that she would then
return, but in answer to an inquiry of Ellen's, Emily wrote to tell her
that 'Charlotte has never mentioned a word about coming home.' She adds
a somewhat acid comment: 'If you would go over for half a year, perhaps
you might be able to bring her back with you, otherwise she might
vegetate there till the age of Methuselah for mere lack of courage to
face the voyage.' Simultaneously Charlotte wrote to Branwell, saying:
'I grieve that Emily is so solitary; but, however, you and Anne will
soon be returning for the holidays, which will cheer the house for the
time.' Clearly, she had no intention of going home herself. Branwell, it
may be noticed, who had now been four months with Anne at Thorp Green,
must have been conducting himself decently, for Charlotte says: 'I have
received a general assurance that you do well and are in good odour.'

It is now that the first signs of trouble and disquietude begin to
manifest themselves. Charlotte, as she herself most truly says in this
same letter of May 1 to Branwell, 'grows exceedingly misanthropic and
sour.' She launches out into bitter diatribe against the Belgian world:

     Amongst 120 persons which compose the daily population of this
     house, I can discern only one or two who deserve anything like
     regard. This is not owing to foolish fastidiousness on my part, but
     to the absence of decent qualities on theirs. They have not
     intellect or politeness or good nature or good feeling. They are
     nothing. I don't hate them--hatred would be too warm a feeling. But
     one wearies from day to day of caring nothing, fearing nothing,
     liking nothing, hating nothing, being nothing, doing nothing,--yes,
     I teach and sometimes get red in the face with impatience at their
     stupidity. But don't think I ever scold or fly into a passion....
     Nobody ever gets into a passion here. Such a thing is not known.
     The phlegm that thickens their blood is too gluey to boil. They are
     very false in their relations with each other, but they rarely
     quarrel and friendship is a folly they are unacquainted with.

If this was not hate, it was surely a very fair imitation of it; then
follows a significant passage about M. Hger, lately 'a delirious
hyena,' and his wife, who had welcomed Charlotte back with such
kindness.

     The black swan, M. Hger, is the only sole veritable exception to
     this rule (for Madame always cool and always reasoning is not
     quite an exception). But I rarely speak to Monsieur now, for not
     being a pupil I have little or nothing to do with him. From time to
     time he shows his kind-heartedness by loading me with books, so
     that I am still indebted to him for all the pleasure and amusement
     I have.

Her bitter censoriousness of others, though now no longer strangers, did
not decrease. A month later she wrote to Emily about the three teachers,
Mdlles. Blanche, Sophie, and Marie Hauss, whom previously Charlotte
regarded with comparative indifference. These ladies appear to have had
less gluey phlegm in their blood than the rest; there is also a fresh
sidelight on Madame Hger:

     Mdlle Blanche and Mdlle Hauss are at present on a system of war
     without quarter. They hate each other like two cats. Mdlle Blanche
     frightens Mdlle Hauss by her white passions (for they quarrel
     venomously). Mdlle Hauss complains that when Mdlle Blanche is in
     fury, '_elle n'a pas de lvres_.' I find also that Mdlle Sophie
     dislikes Mdlle Blanche extremely. She says she is heartless,
     insincere, and vindictive, which epithets, I assure you, are richly
     deserved. Also I find she is the regular spy of Mme Hger, to whom
     she reports everything. Also she invents--which I should not have
     thought. I have now the entire charge of the English lessons. I
     have given two lessons to the first class. Hortense Jannoy was a
     picture on these occasions, her face was black as a 'blue-piled
     thunder-loft,' and her two ears were red as raw beef. To all
     questions asked, her reply was '_Je ne sais pas_.' It is a pity but
     her friends could meet with a person qualified to cast out a devil.
     I am richly off for companionship in these parts. Of late days, M.
     and Mme Hger rarely speak to me, and I really don't pretend to
     care a fig for anybody else in the establishment. You are not to
     suppose by that expression that I am under the influence of warm
     affection for Mme Hger. I am convinced she does not like me,--why,
     I can't tell, nor do I think she herself has any definite reason
     for the aversion; but for one thing, she cannot comprehend why I do
     not make intimate friends of Mesdames Blanche, Sophie, and Hauss.
     M. Hger is wondrously influenced by Madame, and I should not
     wonder if he disapproves very much of my unamiable want of
     sociability ... consequently he has in a great measure withdrawn
     the light of his countenance.... Except for the loss of M. Hger's
     good will (if I have lost it) I care for none of them.

Now this is very bitter invective about her pupils and her colleagues,
and though Charlotte was at all times censorious, such violence taken in
conjunction with the spyings of Madame and the coldness of Monsieur
would not unnaturally lead us to suppose a more intimate agitation than
any contempt of Belgian phlegm and furies would warrant. It reminds us
of bubbles coming up through dark waters, and just beginning to prick
the surface; we seem to hear a clamour, almost hysterical, designed
half-subconsciously to overscore, even for herself, disquieting whispers
within. There is some hidden agitation, some tumult in the heart of the
city.

But at present she had no thought of putting an end to the situation
which was already beginning to wreck her happiness and peace of mind. In
June she wrote a letter to her father, hoping that he and Emily were
well:

     I am afraid she will have a good deal of hard work to do now that
     Hannah [a servant at Haworth] is gone. I am exceedingly glad that
     you will keep Tabby, besides she will be company for Emily, who
     without her would be very lonely.

So Emily was left to do most of the housework and console herself for
her loneliness with the society of an old servant of over seventy years
of age, and Anne to continue in her situation at Thorp Green, which she
detested. After that there is no further letter from Charlotte till
August 6, a few days before the summer vacation, when the pupils would
disperse and the Hgers leave Brussels for a five weeks' holiday. She
was miserably home-sick, the prospect of being so much alone for all
those weeks appalled her, and it is impossible to find any reason, now
that Miss Branwell's legacy had put her in funds, why she should not
have gone back to Haworth for the holidays, except that she foresaw
difficulties in returning again to Brussels when the vacation was over.
'I will continue to stay (D.V.) some months longer,' she wrote, 'till I
have acquired German.'

She wrote to Emily again on September 2, when the holidays were more
than half over. Mlle. Blanche, who was Mme. Hger's spy, had returned.

     But [writes Charlotte] I am always alone except at meal times, for
     Mdlle Blanche's character is so false and so contemptible, I can't
     force myself to associate with her. She perceives my utter dislike,
     and never now speaks to me--a great relief.

Then follows this passage:

     ... So I go out and traverse the Boulevards and streets of
     Bruxelles sometimes for hours together. Yesterday I went on a
     pilgrimage to the cemetery, and far beyond it to a hill where there
     was nothing but fields as far as the horizon. When I came back it
     was evening.

Now Mrs. Gaskell clearly saw this letter for, though she does not
actually quote it, she describes Charlotte's days during the holidays as
follows:

     She went out and with weary steps would traverse the Boulevards and
     the streets sometimes for hours together.... Then up again ...
     anywhere but to the _pensionnat_--out to the cemetery where Martha
     lay--out beyond it to the hills, whence there is nothing to be seen
     but fields as far as the horizon. The shades of evening made her
     retrace her footsteps.[39]

[Footnote 39: Mrs. Gaskell, _Life of Charlotte Bront_, p. 197.]

No coincidence can possibly account for the identity of phrasing. Mrs.
Gaskell's narrative shows that she wrote this description with
Charlotte's letter to Emily in front of her. But the actual letter from
which with a bewraying fidelity Mrs. Gaskell paraphrased this
paragraph, immediately proceeded to describe a very astonishing
adventure, which she decided to omit, though it lay before her:

     I found myself opposite to Ste. Gudule, and the bell, whose voice
     you know, began to toll for evening _salut_. I went in quite alone
     (which procedure you will say is not much like me), wandered about
     the aisles, where a few old women were saying their prayers, till
     Vespers began. I stayed till they were over. Still I could not
     leave the church or force myself to go home--to school, I mean. An
     odd whim came into my head. In a solitary part of the Cathedral,
     six or seven people still remained kneeling by the confessionals.
     In two confessionals I saw a priest. I felt as if I did not care
     what I did, provided it was not absolutely wrong, and that it
     served to vary my life and yield a moment's interest. I took a
     fancy to change myself into a Catholic, and go and make a real
     confession to see what it was like.... I approached at last, and
     knelt down in a niche which was just vacated. I had to kneel there
     ten minutes waiting, for on the other side was another penitent
     invisible to me. At last that (one) went away, and a little wooden
     door inside the grating opened, and I saw the priest leaning his
     ear towards me. I was obliged to begin, and yet I did not know a
     word of the formula with which they commence their confessions....
     I commenced with saying I was a foreigner, and had been brought up
     a Protestant. The priest asked if I was a Protestant then. I
     somehow could not tell a lie, and said 'yes.' He replied that in
     that case I could not '_jouir du bonheur de la confesse_,' but I
     was determined to confess, and at last he said he would allow me
     because it might be the first step towards returning to the true
     church. I actually did confess--a real confession. When I had done,
     he told me his address, and said that every morning I was to go to
     the rue du Parc--to his house--and he would reason with me and try
     to convince me of the error and enormity of being a Protestant!!! I
     promised faithfully to go. Of course, however, the adventure stops
     there, and I hope I shall never see the priest again. I think you
     had better not tell papa of this.

That was certainly a wise precaution. Mr. Bront's adamantine
Protestantism would not have looked upon his daughter's going to a
Catholic confessional as merely an 'odd whim'; he would have called it
by a much harder name. So also at heart would she herself, for she had
already expressed her contempt of the Catholic religion in abundantly
emphatic terms; she had advised any Protestant who felt in danger of
changing his faith to attend Mass and note the 'idiotic mercenary aspect
of all the priests,' and, so Mrs. Gaskell tells us,

     one of the reasons for the silent estrangement between Mme Hger
     and Miss Bront is to be found in the fact that the English
     Protestant's dislike of Romanism increased with her knowledge of
     it, and its effects upon those who professed it: and when occasion
     called for an expression of opinion from Charlotte Bront she was
     uncompromising truth.

Yet in spite of her contempt for it, she now availed herself of one of
its Sacraments. It is true that she avowed herself a Protestant, when
kneeling in the Confessional, but for the sake of the relief which
confession would bring her, she insisted on making it, and 'promised
faithfully' to go and receive instruction from the priest, which
promise, she states, she had not the slightest intention of carrying
out. Was this confession then, so strangely made, merely an 'odd whim,'
as she told Emily, that 'should yield a moment's interest'? It is
impossible to believe that. She had something on her mind which, in her
lonely, nervous, hysterical state, she must confide to somebody for the
human relief that the mere communication of it would bring. What could
it possibly have been that lay so heavily and unhappily on her troubled
soul? Something serious, or she could never have had recourse to the
benefits of an institution which she so thoroughly despised. But there
must be no chance that this communication should be betrayed, and it
must be made under the seal of confession. Knowing what we do now, after
the publication of Charlotte's subsequent love-letters to M. Hger, we
cannot doubt the nature of that confession. All points to the desire,
which her essential uprightness of character abhorred, but which was
terribly insistent and made the absence of M. Hger on holiday so
intolerable.

Now Mrs. Gaskell having seen this letter (for she quotes from it) omits
the incident, for in _Villette_, which minutely and accurately describes
the _pensionnat_ in the Rue d'Isabelle, which portrays under the name of
Paul Emanuel the unmistakable lineaments of M. Hger, and under the name
of Madame Beck those of Madame Hger, and her espionage, Lucy Snowe,
though a Protestant, makes a precisely similar confession to a Roman
Catholic priest, and no doubt it was better not to let it be known that
that incident was a piece of authentic autobiography. It was discordant
with Charlotte's strongly expressed views about Catholicism, and it was
inconsistent with the reason Mrs. Gaskell had given for the coolness
between Charlotte and Madame Hger. On all counts, then, it was wise to
suppress the confessional, and especially so because her readers might
conceivably begin to conjecture what heart's need drove Charlotte to
make use of the benefits of a religion of which she was so contemptuous.
It would have been too truly directed a pointer to regions best left
unsuspected.

The Hgers returned during September, and the school reassembled again
for the new term. Charlotte had determined (D.V.) to stop some months
longer in order to acquire German, but the situation was beginning to
break her, and early in October she wrote to Ellen:

     I felt as if I could bear it no longer, and I went to Mme Hger and
     gave her notice. If it had depended on her, I should certainly have
     been soon at liberty; but M. Hger, having heard of what was in
     agitation, sent for me the day after, and pronounced with
     vehemence his decision that I should not leave. I could not, at
     that time, have persevered in my intention without exciting him to
     passion, so I promised to stay a little while longer....

How Charlotte, miserable though she was, must have adored his vehemence
in forbidding her to go, and secretly, in the way of a woman's heart,
have whispered to herself the interpretation which her reason told her
it could not bear! For M. Hger naturally did not want to lose his
English teacher at the beginning of the term; he was thinking of the
pupils learning English, not of their instructor, and there is no more
evidence for supposing that he was ever in the slightest degree in love
with Charlotte than that Mr. Weightman had been in love with Emily. But
now at last Charlotte began to suspect that Madame Hger had some
inkling of her secret, for writing to Ellen she hints at it:

     I have much to say--many odd little things, queer and puzzling
     enough--but which one day perhaps or rather one evening--if ever we
     should find ourselves by the fireside at Haworth or at Brookroyd
     with our feet on the fender, curling our hair--I may communicate to
     you.

In her next letter she became more explicit as to what these were: 'I
fancy I begin to perceive the reason for this (Mme. Hger's) mighty
distance and reserve; it sometimes makes me laugh and at other times
nearly cry.'

December came and once more Charlotte wrote to Emily, saying that she
had no thought of coming home yet; she lacked a 'real pretext' for doing
so. There was indeed every reason why she should go home and begin on
her project of starting the school, for the sake of which, and for the
further education it would give her, she had originally come to Brussels
for a period of six months. Now she had been here for nearly two years,
and still she could find no pretext to leave! She longed to get away,
she was wretched with this misbegotten passion, but she could not endure
to cut herself off from the source of it. She saw vivid and minute, in
calenture, what was going on this Sunday morning in the kitchen at the
Parsonage:

     I should like even to be cutting up the hash with the clerk and
     some register people at the other table, and you standing by,
     watching that I put enough flour, not too much pepper, and, above
     all, that I save the best piece of the leg of mutton for Tiger and
     Keeper, the first of which personages would be jumping about the
     dish and carving knife, and the latter standing like a devouring
     flame on the kitchen floor. To complete the picture, Tabby blowing
     the fire, in order to boil the potatoes to a sort of vegetable
     glue! How divine are these recollections to me at this moment![40]

[Footnote 40: Mrs. Gaskell, _Life of Charlotte Bront_, p. 200.]

But she intended to remain in Brussels, still clinging to the
protestation that she must acquire more German, and feeding her soul
with the sweet torture that racked her. Then, as was bound to happen,
came the breaking point. She suddenly wrote to Emily saying that she had
taken her determination and was coming home, assigning no cause. M.
Hger, we gather, was vexed at her going, for subsequently she wrote to
Ellen: 'I suffered much before I left Brussels. I think, however long I
live, I shall not forget what the parting with M. Hger cost me; it
grieved me so much to grieve him, who has been so true, kind and
disinterested a friend.' It was a tradition in the Hger family that on
parting with Mme. Hger she said '_Je me vengerai_'[41]; but that is the
kind of legend that may have arisen after the publication of _Villette_.

She arrived at Haworth on January 2, 1844.

[Footnote 41: M. H. Spielmann, _The Inner History of the Bront-Hger
Letters_, p. 3.]




CHAPTER IX


Branwell and Anne were home for the Christmas holidays, but presently
went back to their situations as tutor and governess to Mr. Robinson's
children at Thorp Green. Mrs. Gaskell says that 'agonizing suspicions'
about Branwell's conduct there had been one of the causes why Charlotte
returned from Brussels, but it seems impossible that this was the case,
for Charlotte wrote to Ellen, after she got back to Haworth, to say
'that Branwell and Anne were both wondrously valued in their
situations.'[42] Though she had longed to get away from the daily
renewal of the secret strain and struggle of her life at Brussels, she
found the quiet of home, with her father and Emily as companions,
unutterably flat and objectless. 'Something in me,' she wrote, 'which
used to be enthusiasm is toned down and broken. I have fewer illusions:
what I wish for now is active exertion.'

[Footnote 42: Mrs. Gaskell (_Life of Charlotte Bront_, pp. 202-203)
quotes at length from this letter but omits this sentence, which makes
havoc of her theory.]

She took up again the scheme for starting a school with her sisters.
Thanks to Miss Branwell's legacies there was now money enough. Emily's
six months at Brussels and her own year and three-quarters there had
greatly added to their qualifications, and M. Hger at parting had given
her a diploma certifying to her abilities as a teacher, and attached to
it was the seal of the Athne Royal at Brussels where he was professor
in Latin. But once more the scheme must be changed, for Mr. Bront was
growing old; he was threatened with the loss of his sight, also he was
disposed to drink too much, and it was no longer feasible that they
should all leave him. Miss Wooler's proposal had been possible while
Miss Branwell was still alive, but not now. So with her indomitable
courage Charlotte settled to turn the Parsonage into a school.

Before May she was seeking for pupils, and fixed the terms at 25 per
annum for board and English education, subsequently raising them to 35.
She made some personal applications, but these led to nothing. Mr.
White, to whose children she had been governess, regretted that his
daughter was settled elsewhere; Colonel Stott and Mr. Bousfeild were in
the same predicament. As soon as she could get the promise of only one
pupil, she proposed to issue a circular and begin making the necessary
alterations in the Parsonage.

About this time she had, as she wrote to M. Hger, an offer of the post
of head teacher in a girls' school at Manchester at the salary of 100 a
year; she refused that because she had high hopes of this school at
Haworth, where she hoped to take five or six boarders. In July, though
she had not secured any pupils, she printed her circular and sent it
round 'to all the friends on whom I have the slightest claim, and to
some on whom I have no claim.' She was sure she would succeed, for she
wrote to Ellen, saying: 'What an excellent thing perseverance is for
getting on in the world. Calm self-confidence (not impudence, for that
is vulgar and repulsive) is an admirable quality.'

The circular ran as follows:

  THE MISSES BRONTS' ESTABLISHMENT
  FOR
  THE BOARD & EDUCATION
  OF A LIMITED NUMBER OF
  YOUNG LADIES.

  _The Parsonage, Haworth,_
  _NEAR BRADFORD._

  TERMS.

  Board & education, including Writing, Arithmetic,        _s._   _d._
  History, Grammar, Geography, and
  Needle Work per annum:                              35     0      0
  French, German, Latin (Each per Quarter)             1     1      0
  Music, Drawing, each per Quarter                     1     1      0
  Use of Piano Forte, per Quarter                      0     5      0
  Washing, per Quarter                                 0    15      0

       *       *       *       *       *

  Each young lady to be provided with One Pair of Sheets,
  Pillow Cases, Four Towels, a Dessert and Tea Spoon.

       *       *       *       *       *

  A Quarter's notice, or a Quarter's Board, is required previous
  to the Removal of a Pupil.

Out went these circulars broadcast; Ellen had half a dozen for
distribution, but never an answer, beyond sympathy and regrets, came to
any single one of them. The months went on, and in October Charlotte
wrote to her friend saying, 'Everyone wishes us well, but there are no
pupils to be had.' She had done everything that careful thought and iron
determination could accomplish. She had qualified herself and Emily by
pupilage and teaching at Brussels, there was sufficient money, Mr.
Bront had consented to the scheme, and all was ready except the pupils,
whom no effort of will or circularisation would produce.

Whether her sisters had still any enthusiasm for the idea is doubtful.
Emily, in the private paper written on her birthday of 1845 for the
secret eyes of Anne, exhibits none, making the following entry with
regard to it:

     I should have mentioned that last summer (1844) the school scheme
     was revived in full vigour. We had prospectuses printed, despatched
     letters to all acquaintances, imparting our plans and did our
     little all: but it was found no go. Now I don't desire a school at
     all, and none of us have any great longing for it.

Anne, in her corresponding paper, was equally lukewarm. She says:

     When the last paper (1841) was written we were thinking of setting
     up a school. The scheme has been dropt, and long after taken up
     again, and dropt again, because we could not get pupils.

From the first the initiative and driving-power had been wholly
Charlotte's, but now, in the autumn of 1844, she gave it up, because in
spite of all her efforts no pupils would come. The abandonment of the
school has, of course, been laid at Branwell's door, and one notable
Bront biographer asks: 'How could she (Charlotte) receive children at
Haworth with this drugged and drunken wastrel in the house?'[43] But at
the time when it was finally abandoned Branwell was still in his
situation at Thorp Green, and was at home only for his holidays. We hear
no more about the school, for the sake of which she and her sisters had
taken abhorred situations as governesses, and for which Emily had
suffered a half-year's misery at Brussels. Anne was still 'in the house
of bondage' at Thorp Green, where she remained till the summer of 1845.

[Footnote 43: Isabel C. Clarke, _Haworth Parsonage_, p. 114.]

Charlotte's disappointment was bitter, but she drew, on behalf of
herself and her sisters, a moral lesson from it. 'They were not
mortified at defeat. The effort must be beneficial, whatever the result
may be, because it teaches us experience and an additional knowledge of
the world.' Now in spite of her efforts without ruth to herself or them,
the long-cherished idea for which she had worked for years had failed,
and she recognised that it was hopeless. Never again did she attempt to
revive it, or indeed allude to it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Throughout this year, while the withered leaves of her ambition for
herself and her sisters dropped from the tree, she had to bear, in
addition to this disappointment, a disquietude of which she could speak
to none. She had fallen in love with M. Hger, and she was writing to
him in terms that wring the heart of those who can now read what she
said in a few of these desolate and longing letters. Sometimes he
replied to them, but usually she got no answer. The first of these
letters that is extant was dated July 24, 1844, at the time when she was
sending out her circulars for the school, but there had been others
before, as these extracts from it show.[44]

[Footnote 44: They were written in French. The translation is that made
by Mr. M. H. Spielmann in the _Times_ of July 29, 1913, when they were
first published.]

     I am well aware that it is not my turn to write to you.... I once
     wrote you a letter that was less than reasonable because sorrow was
     at my heart: but I shall do so no more. I shall try to be selfish
     no longer, and even while I look upon your letters as one of the
     greatest felicities known to me, I shall wait the receipt of them
     in patience.

     I am firmly convinced that I shall see you again some day. I know
     not how or when--but it must be for I wish it so much....

     I should not know this lethargy if I could write. Formerly I spent
     whole days and weeks and months in writing, not wholly without
     result, for Southey and Coleridge, two of our best authors, to
     whom I sent certain MSS., were good enough to express their
     approval. Were I to write much I should become blind.... Otherwise
     I should write a book and dedicate it to my literature master....
     The career of letters is closed to me,--only that of teaching is
     open....

     Once more good-bye, Monsieur--it hurts to say good-bye even in a
     letter. Oh, it is certain I shall see you again some day: it must
     be so, for as soon as I have earned money enough to go to Brussels
     I shall go there--and I shall see you again if only for a moment!

There are one or two curious points about this letter. Charlotte was
very short-sighted, but never did she have nor was even threatened with
such trouble with her eyes as would prevent her from writing, and we
must put this wail that the career of literature was closed to her _ad
misericordiam_. Again, Southey had never expressed approval of the poems
she sent him; indeed, his reply was such that Charlotte resolved to give
up writing altogether. Wordsworth had been equally discouraging about
the opening chapters of the novel she sent him, and it was Branwell not
she who wrote to Hartley Coleridge for his verdict.

There was no answer returned to this letter; the next is dated three
months later, October 24, 1844. She now took advantage of Mary Taylor's
brother going to Brussels, and entrusted him to deliver it. In it she
wrote: 'I would only ask of you if you heard from me at the beginning of
May and again in the month of August,' Possibly she suspected that
Madame had intercepted these two other letters. Yet still M. Hger gave
no response, and once more she wrote to him on January 8, 1845:

     Mr. Taylor has returned. I asked him if he had a letter for me.
     'No, nothing.' 'Patience,' said I, 'his sister will be here soon.'
     Miss Taylor has returned. 'I have nothing for you from M. Hger,'
     says she, 'neither letter nor message.'

     Day and night I find neither rest nor peace. If I sleep I am
     disturbed by tormenting dreams in which I see you always stern,
     always grim and vexed with me.... You will tell me perhaps: 'I take
     not the slightest interest in you, Mdlle Charlotte. You are no
     longer an inmate of my house. I have forgotten you.'

     Well, Monsieur, tell me so frankly. It will be a shock to me. It
     matters not. It would be less dreadful than uncertainty.

The fourth letter that survives is dated 'Nov. 18,' without indication
of the year. But doubtless the year was 1845, not 1844, for in this
letter she says that her father's blindness has so increased that he can
neither read nor write, and that in a few months' time he will have an
operation on his eyes. This operation took place in the summer of 1846.
She writes:

     I have tried to forget you, for the remembrance of a person whom
     one thinks never to see again is too wearing to the spirit, and
     when one has suffered that kind of anxiety for a year or two one is
     ready to do anything to find peace once more.

     It is humiliating to be the slave of a fixed and dominant idea
     which lords it over the mind!

     For you to write will not be very interesting but for me it is
     life. Your last letter was stay and prop to me for half a year.
     When day by day I await a letter and when day by day disappointment
     comes to fling me back into overwhelming sorrow, and the sweet
     delight of seeing your handwriting and reading your counsel eludes
     me like a phantom vision, the fever takes me--I lose appetite and
     sleep and pine away.

These letters evoke our unstinted compassion and sympathy with the
writer. She had fallen in love with this man many years her senior, who
was a Catholic, who had a wife and five children, and who had no
interest in her save as a queer though clever pupil, and no feeling for
her, as far as any evidence goes, except the _affection presque
paternelle_, of which he had assured her father. They explain without
need of any further comment the nature of the 'irresistible impulse'
which took her back for the second time to Brussels against the warnings
of her own conscience and common sense; they define the 'selfish folly'
for which, as she wrote to Ellen, she was 'punished by a withdrawal for
more than two years of happiness and peace of mind.' She knew the
insanity of what she was doing, but she compounded with her accusing
conscience, telling herself, perhaps more than half convincing herself,
that she was going back to Brussels not for that reason at all, but in
order to fit herself better, by a completer knowledge of French and
German, for the school which she was determined to start with her
sisters. Then there was M. Hger's letter to her father: he had strongly
urged her to return, and by another year's work fulfil the remarkable
progress she had already made; surely it would be unwise to disregard
the advice of one so experienced. Such considerations were weighty; it
would be missing a chance of future success not to act as she had done.
But all the time her conscience told her not to go. She had gone, and at
once the harvest which she had herself sown began to ripen. Her
affection for him grew into a devotion and a surrender so abject, that
when finally, after long procrastinations, she returned home she could
not refrain from writing to him these love-letters, though all the time
she knew that Madame had long suspected her feelings for him, and for
months had spied on her. That gives the measure of her passion, and she
risked anything sooner than not have the bitter consolation of writing
to him and the eager suspense of waiting month by month for his rare
replies. Once, knowing nothing of what she was talking about, she had
been profuse in exhortations to Ellen, laying down with precision the
manner in which a girl should prudently and without undue haste allow
herself to fall in love with a man who wanted her, bidding her remember
the importance of her keeping herself well in hand, and warning her of
the monstrous folly of a _grande passion_. Now she had committed that
monstrous folly in the most undesirable manner; she had fallen
hopelessly in love with a man who felt nothing for her, and who could
not possibly marry her. Bitter was wisdom.

Then we must look at the affair from the point of view of M. Hger and
his wife. It was known to both of them, while Charlotte was still at
Brussels, that she had formed this strong attachment to him, for from
that arose Monsieur's coldness and Madame's spyings, and when these
letters began to arrive it was necessary to act with circumspection. A
girl who wrote in such a strain to the respectable father of a family
might do something more embarrassing yet; indeed, she had threatened in
one of them to visit Brussels again and see him. M. Hger behaved very
properly. He did not always answer Charlotte's letters, but, when he
did, he employed his wife as his amanuensis; this was no rare thing, for
he much disliked writing himself. It was wise and prudent that she
should know how he replied, and his answers, written by her, had thus
passed the conjugal censorship. What these replies were is unknown, for
either Charlotte destroyed them or her husband did so after her death,
but we shall find reasons for feeling sure that they were careful and
circumspect. M. Hger did not read to his wife Charlotte's letters to
him, but tore them up and threw the pieces into the waste-paper basket.
One he did not destroy, for he had noted on the back of it the address
of a Brussels bootmaker. Then, we assume, he imagined he had lost it,
and thought no more of it. That was M. Hger's share in the matter;
Madame had a policy of her own, which was disclosed many years later.

       *       *       *       *       *

Such was the superficial history of this correspondence, and there, as
far as M. Hger was aware, the matter stayed till after Charlotte's
death. But the inner and subsequent history of these four letters of
Charlotte's which survived and which are now in the British Museum is so
interesting and extraordinary that, though the story of them lies
outside the immediate sphere of the affairs of the Bronts, it must be
followed up, as revealed by Mr. Marion H. Spielmann,[45] who obtained it
from M. Hger's daughter, Mdlle. Louise Hger. An old lady of over
seventy years of age when these letters were published in 1913, she was
a girl of six when Charlotte left her mother's _pensionnat_. She
remembered her quite well, 'a little person, extremely narrow of chest,
with side-curls, large eyes (but not so large as in her portrait) and
sadly defective teeth--somewhat ill-favoured indeed, and unattractive to
look upon--and yet beloved by her.' The following is the account that
Mdlle. Hger gave to Mr. Spielmann.

[Footnote 45: Marion H. Spielmann, _The Inner History of the
Bront-Hger Letters_.]

Madame Hger had looked upon Charlotte when she was at Brussels as a
highly excitable, nervous girl, whom she did not at all understand. Her
farewell words when she left, _Je me vengerai_, were not pleasant, and
perhaps portended trouble; it was as well to bear them in mind. Then her
letters began to arrive; her husband (as we have seen) tore them up
after reading them, threw them into the waste-paper basket, and dictated
his replies to his wife. One (the first of those that survive) he did
not tear up, and his wife read it and kept it. Having found out in what
terms Charlotte was writing to him, she felt that her general
apprehensions as to what a hysterical girl like this might do were
justified, and when other letters came and he tore them up, she rescued
them from the waste-paper basket whenever she had the opportunity,
pieced them together and kept them also. They confirmed what she had
always thought, and in case there was trouble with Charlotte, it would
be useful to have them. At least one of them, moreover, had been
addressed to her husband, not at the _pensionnat_ in the Rue d'Isabelle,
but at the Athne Royal, where he held a Latin class for boys.[46] Then
in course of time the letters ceased, for after two years Charlotte
wrote no more, and as far as M. Hger then knew, no letter of hers to
him was in existence, for he had put them into the waste-paper basket.

[Footnote 46: This does not tally with Charlotte's account. She told her
friend Miss Laetitia Wheelwright that M. Hger had asked her to direct
her letters to the Athne Royal, as his wife did not approve of the
correspondence: knowing that, she wrote no more. It must be remembered,
however, that she had already written a good many letters, which she
must have known no wife would have approved.]

Over twenty years later, when the Bronts had become famous, there was a
lecture delivered at Brussels by a literary Frenchman on the subject of
'The Bronts.' Mdlle. Louise Hger attended it, and was horrified to
hear her father and mother held up to the execration of the audience for
their cruelty and barbarity to the two sisters when at Brussels; the
lecturer illustrated his remarks by quotations from _Villette_. She told
her mother on her return home what had been said, and in answer Mme.
Hger took her to her room, opened her jewel-case, and showed her the
four letters of Charlotte to her father which she had pieced together
and kept, bidding her read them. The devotion they showed towards him
adequately disposed of the idea that he had treated her with barbarity,
and shed an entirely new light on the situation. Mdlle. Louise
understood, and the letters were then replaced in their _cache_.

Madame Hger died in 1889, leaving to Louise her jewel-case and its
contents, among which were the letters. She took them to her father, who
was engaged in going through and destroying papers of his wife's. He
recognised them, and, astonished and ill-pleased to know that they were
still in existence, threw them once more into the waste-paper basket.
Louise thought that her father was not in the mood to give careful
consideration to the fate of these letters which her mother had been at
pains to preserve for so long; they should not be destroyed without due
reflection, and presently, when her father had left the room, she did
exactly as her mother had done forty-five years before, took them out of
the waste-paper basket, and again kept them. Thus though M. Hger, when
they were eventually published, was roundly abused (especially by those
who had so conclusively proved that Charlotte was never in love with
him) for having kept them at all, it turns out that, as far as his
intention was concerned, he had twice destroyed them. Mdlle. Louise then
consulted a French friend on the wisdom of keeping the letters. He
strongly recommended her to do so, since they were now of the highest
literary interest. After her father's death she showed them to her
brother, Professor Paul Hger, and eventually a family council was held
as to what should be done with them. One member of it maintained that
such fervour of expression pointed to guilty intercourse between M.
Hger and Charlotte, and it is certainly possible that this construction
might be put upon them by those who did not know the circumstances. But
neither Professor Hger nor his sister, to whom the letters belonged,
wished to destroy them, and in 1913 they brought them to England to
consult Mr. Marion Spielmann, whose judgment they trusted, about their
fate. On his advice they consented to the publication, and presented the
letters themselves to the British Museum.

  [Illustration: CONSTANTIN HGER]

Mdlle. Louise Hger's narrative, as here abridged, is obviously
trustworthy; she alone knew the history of the letters, and there is no
reason to suspect that it is other than completely reliable, and we can
accept it without reservations. But there is one point which may
already have struck the reader and which requires examination. It is
this.

Mdlle. Louise was not the only person who read these letters during
their incarceration in her mother's jewel-case. Mrs. Gaskell read them
also, for in her _Life of Charlotte Bront_ she quotes verbatim from
three of them, piecing together paragraphs of two of them, and giving a
few sentences from a third.[47] Nothing that she quotes gives the
faintest hint of their essential contents, there is not a word that a
girl might not with the utmost propriety have written to her master;
Charlotte thanks him for his kindness to her, she sends messages to
Madame and the children. But Mrs. Gaskell certainly read the letters,
and since they had remained in Brussels from the time when they were
written and posted at Haworth till they were brought to England in 1913,
she must therefore have seen them when she went to Brussels in 1856 to
collect materials and _mise en scne_ concerning Charlotte's life at the
_pensionnat_. But they were then, according to Mdlle. Louise's account,
reposing in her mother's jewel-case, having been rescued by her from the
waste-paper basket where M. Hger had thrown them, and pieced together.
Who, then, showed them to Mrs. Gaskell? Not Madame Hger, for, knowing
that she was a friend of Charlotte's, she refused to see her. It has
always been supposed that it was the delineation of herself in
_Villette_ that led to this refusal, but the French translation of the
book (Mme. Hger knew no English) had only just appeared, and it is a
pure assumption to suppose that Mme. Hger had read it.[48] But she had
read Charlotte's letters to her husband, and she had no need to seek
further for a reason for not consenting to see Mrs. Gaskell. In any case
she did not, and, since she is ruled out, the only person who could
have shown Mrs. Gaskell the letters was M. Hger himself. She had an
interview with him; she liked and respected him, and they talked about
his correspondence with Charlotte, for M. Hger begged her to read his
letters to her; he felt sure she would have kept them, and they
contained 'advice about her character, studies, mode of life.'[49] M.
Hger in fact, it becomes plain, showed Mrs. Gaskell Charlotte's letters
(from which she made judicious extracts) and was anxious that she should
see how properly he answered them. I therefore venture to suggest--it is
a theory only, but one that solves our difficulty--that Mme. Hger's
reason for not seeing Mrs. Gaskell was Charlotte's letters, and that she
said, in effect, to her husband: 'Show them to Mrs. Gaskell and she will
understand why I won't see her.' Out came the letters from the
jewel-case, and, Mrs. Gaskell having read them they were returned there
again.... This conjecture does not, however, invalidate the general
credibility of Mdlle. Louise's narrative to Mr. Spielmann. M. Hger knew
that in 1856 his wife was still keeping the letters, but it is no wonder
that on her death thirty-three years later it was a matter of surprise
to him that they were still in existence. Probably he had forgotten all
about them.

[Footnote 47: Mrs. Gaskell, _Life of Charlotte Bront_, pp. 211, 212,
214.]

[Footnote 48: Mr. Herbert E. Wroot, in the _Centenary Memorial of
Charlotte Bront_ (pp. 136-137), denies that such a translation ever was
published.]

[Footnote 49: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, p. 397.]

It remains to consider Mrs. Gaskell's decision to omit from her _Life of
Charlotte Bront_ the whole story of her having fallen in love with M.
Hger, of her having written those letters which so indubitably prove
it, and to exclude from her book any incident, any hint that might, in
her opinion, have given rise to conjecture. It was an important
decision, for she was the official biographer, and she must have thought
that her book, a model of apparently exhaustive research, would probably
remain for all time the final work on the family in general, and on
Charlotte in particular, for so ample a _Life_ would surely be
definitive. But she must also have known that she was omitting not only
the most profound emotional experience of her heroine herself, but one
out of which sprang her best and noblest work, for there can be no doubt
that without it _Villette_ would never have been written. Nothing more
important psychically or mentally ever happened to her, and Mrs.
Gaskell, knowing all, decided to say nothing about it, and remove all
traces of it. Nothing in her book suggests the possibility of such an
entanglement; she even invents a reason for Mme. Hger's coldness to
Charlotte. Some biographers, no doubt, if this decision had been
presented to them, would have abandoned their work altogether, sooner
than falsify its essential truth by such an omission; Mrs. Gaskell
thought otherwise, and having formed her loyal and admiring conception
of the figure she wished to present, scrapped (with or without
compunction) what she knew was of first-rate importance for a faithful
portrait.

But there is another side to the question. The disclosure which M. Hger
made to her of Charlotte's letters not only must have been a great shock
to her (so great that she could not biographically deal with it at all),
but would be equally or more shocking to Charlotte's father and to her
widower, at whose instance she had undertaken the work. They knew
nothing, so far as we know, of the whole Hger episode, or, at the most,
they had read the extremely proper answers which M. Hger had returned,
in the handwriting of his wife, to the letters which Mrs. Gaskell alone
had seen. She was full of enthusiasm for her task; she knew, rightly,
that it was in her power to make a charming picture of the woman whose
work she so admired, and for whom she had so genuine an affection.
Though she did publish gossipy stories about Mr. Bront which, owing to
his justifiable indignation she was obliged to withdraw, it was quite
another thing to publish far more serious matter which she was perfectly
able to substantiate. It was better to say nothing at all about it, to
delete anything that might point to it, to invent reasons why Mme. Hger
disliked and distrusted Charlotte, to account for her unhappiness at
Brussels by the supposition that Branwell was causing grave anxiety--to
do anything and everything in order to conceal what she imagined would
never be disclosed. The odds in her favour were enormous, but the
hundred-to-one chance went against her, and to us to-day Charlotte
Bront is a vastly more human and interesting figure than she ever could
have been if it had not.




CHAPTER X


For a year and a half after Charlotte's final return from Brussels, she
and Emily were alone with their father at the Parsonage, Branwell and
Anne coming there only for their holidays from Thorp Green. Her letters
during this period are few, and they all betoken the deep disquiet and
depression and the bitterness of heart that were growing on her. Indeed,
the lights were turned very low: her literary ambitions for the time
were dead (or, as she wrote to M. Hger, her failing eyesight made it
impossible for her to write), not a line of a poem nor a page of prose
seems to have been written by her during this period; her friend Mary
Taylor, despairing of occupation for an energetic young woman in
England, went out to New Zealand; Branwell, though still giving
satisfaction in his situation, was making trouble at home, and though
Charlotte says nothing definite we may assume that he was drinking. 'He
has been more than ordinarily tiresome and annoying of late; he leads
Papa a wretched life,' is one of her comments on the conduct of him with
whom she had once been the most intimate ally. She had come home from
Brussels admirably equipped, a competent scholar in French and German,
but no pupil sought to learn of her; she had obtained a certificate with
the seal of the Athne Royal at Brussels, bearing witness to her
efficiency as a teacher, and Constantin Hger had signed it, but his
name there served only to sharpen her heart's hunger. She had begged
for the crumbs that fell from his table to assuage it, but all she got
was letters in the handwriting of his wife, advising her about her
studies and her mode of life. Activity, some scheme, some ambition, over
which she could employ the self-poisoned energies of her soul, was what
she longed for; but the scheme that had occupied her for years was
derelict, her ambitions were dead, and her heart emptily aching. There
was only bitterness to look back on, and a blank to look forward to.

It is true that she had Emily with her, but in spite of the
oft-reiterated statement that there was a bond of passionate devotion
between the two sisters, we search in vain for any expression of it
during Emily's lifetime. Once, when Charlotte was governess at Mrs.
Sidgwick's, she wrote a letter to her sister beginning, 'Mine bonnie
love,' but otherwise, until Emily's short and final illness, we can find
no token in Charlotte's letters of the affection, nor yet of the love
that involuntarily betrays itself. As Emily's and Anne's quadrennial
papers show, it was they who were the united couple, and before now
estranging circumstances had occurred between the other two. Emily who,
as Charlotte knew, was wretched away from Haworth, had been taken to
Brussels, where had it not been for Miss Branwell's death she would have
remained for six months more; she had been desperately unhappy there,
and the only allusions Charlotte had made to her was that she and M.
Hger did not 'draw well together,' and that subsequently the Hgers
began to recognise 'her good points below her singularities.' Then
Charlotte had gone back to Brussels alone, and hearing of the burden of
household work that lay on Emily's shoulders, had hoped that her father
would soon get another servant. Emily was lonely, and she was glad that
old Tabby had returned to the Parsonage--she would be a companion for
her sister; but it did not occur to her to go back herself. Nor, on
Emily's side, is there the slightest expression of affection for
Charlotte: she hoped that Ellen might manage to go out to Brussels,
otherwise Charlotte might stop on there all the days of Methuselah
sooner than face the crossing. Emily, no doubt, was intensely reserved,
and not even to Anne did she show her secret life, but to Charlotte she
showed nothing at all. If she ever had any deep affection for her, it
was so completely concealed that not even when the shadow of death was
on her did she reach out a hand to her. At present, and indeed up to the
end, before which further cause for estrangement had occurred, Emily's
attitude towards Charlotte was one of resentful indifference. Such are
the only conclusions we can draw from their meagre references to each
other.

Throughout this year and a half there is no sign that Emily's
companionship was any consolation for the deadness of Charlotte's whole
life. They walked on the moors together, they sewed shirts, the little
cat died and Emily was sorry. But otherwise, as Charlotte wrote to her
friend towards the end of this period:

     I can hardly tell you how time gets on at Haworth. There is no
     event whatever to mark its progress. One day resembles another, and
     all have heavy, lifeless physiognomies. Sunday, baking day, and
     Saturday, are the only ones that have any distinctive mark.
     Meantime life wears away. I shall soon be thirty, and I have done
     nothing yet. Sometimes I get melancholy at the prospect before and
     behind me. Yet it is wrong and foolish to repine. Undoubtedly my
     duty directs me to stay at home for the present. There was a time
     when Haworth was a very pleasant place to me; it is not so now. I
     feel as if we are all buried here. I long to travel, to work, to
     lead a life of action.

It was now that Charlotte began to take notice, for future use in
_Shirley_, of the famous curates. Including Mr. A. B. Nicholls, of whom
she eventually became the devoted wife, there were four of them, though
only two were Mr. Bront's curates, and she viewed them all with the
most unfavourable eye, very different from that with which she had
observed that arch-flirt William Weightman, whose susceptibility had
supplied such thrilling interest to her and Ellen. He had died while
Charlotte was spending her first year with Emily at Brussels, and his
successor was James William Smith, who appears in _Shirley_ as Peter
Augustus Malone. She at first suspected him, as she had suspected Mr.
Weightman, of having matrimonial designs on Ellen, and she alludes to
him as the Rev. Lothario Smith. He had said in reference to Ellen: 'Yes,
she is a nice girl--rather quiet; I suppose she has money.' Charlotte
thought these words spoke volumes--'they do not prejudice me in favour
of Mr. Smith.' Mr. Bront shared these misgivings: they both thought
'that Mr. Smith is a very fickle man, that if he marries he will soon
get tired of his wife, and consider her as a burden, also that money
will be a principal consideration with him in marrying.' He went for a
six weeks' holiday to Ireland: 'Nobody regrets him, because nobody could
attach themselves to one who could attach himself to nobody.... Yet the
man is not without points that will be most useful to him in getting
through life. His good qualities, however, are all of the selfish
order.' While he was gone Joseph Brett Grant (Mr. Donne of _Shirley_),
master of the Haworth Grammar School, took his duty for the time, and
'filled his shoes decently enough--but one cares naught about these sort
of individuals, so drop them.' Then Mr. Smith left Haworth, took a
curacy at Keighley, four miles off, and was succeeded by A. B. Nicholls
(Mr. Macarthey of _Shirley_). A respectable young man: Charlotte hoped
he would give satisfaction. But those hopes were disappointed, for six
months afterwards she wrote to Ellen, saying: 'I cannot for my life see
those interesting germs of goodness in him you discovered, his
narrowness of mind strikes me chiefly. I fear he is indebted to your
imagination for the hidden treasure.' Nor did he rise at all in her
esteem, for in 1846, in answer to some sort of badinage on Ellen's part
with regard to a rumour that Charlotte might be going to marry him, she
told her that there was nothing but a 'cold, far away sort of civility
between them,' and that he and 'all the other curates are highly
uninteresting, narrow and unattractive members of the coarser sex.' As
for his parochial efficiency, we learn that when he went to Ireland on a
holiday 'many of the parishioners express a desire that he should not
trouble himself to recross the Channel. This is not the feeling that
ought to exist between shepherd and flock.'

The fourth, James Chesterton Bradley (figuring in _Shirley_ as David
Sweeting), was curate at Oakworth, a hamlet not more than a mile from
Haworth. Three of them thus lived close to the Parsonage, and, so
Charlotte writes to Ellen, 'God knows there is not one to mend another':
curates seemed to her 'a self-seeking, vain, empty race.' Indeed, they
were a sore trial.

     The other day [we read] they all three accompanied by Mr. Smidt[50]
     (of whom by the way I have grievous things to tell you) dropped or
     rather rushed in unexpectedly to tea. It was Monday (baking day)
     and I was hot and tired, still, if they had behaved quietly and
     decently I would have served them out their tea in peace, but they
     began glorifying themselves and abusing Dissenters in such a manner
     that my temper lost its balance, and I pronounced a few sentences
     sharply and rapidly, which struck them all dumb. Papa was greatly
     horrified also. I don't regret it....

[Footnote 50: Ex-curate and now at Keighley.]

A rather dreadful little scene; she was hot and irritated, and having
lost her temper and shocked her father, felt that she had nothing to
blame herself with. But she was saving up these experiences of the
empty-headed race.


All contacts chafed her: she went to stay with her friends the Taylors
at Hunsworth, and during the visit she suffered from headache and
listlessness of spirits, and was sure that everyone except perhaps Mary
was glad when she departed. She found that Mary's brother had sadly
deteriorated. Eight years ago she would have been '_indignant_' if
anyone had accused him of 'being a worshipper of mammon,' now she
laughed at her vanished illusion about him.

     The world with its hardness and selfishness has utterly changed
     him. He thinks himself wiser than the wisest ... his feelings have
     gone through a process of petrification which will prevent them
     from ever warring against his interest, but Ichabod! all glory of
     principle and much elevation of character is gone!

This bleak censoriousness of others was coupled with utter pessimism
regarding the future and the past, and she did not believe that the
world held happiness in store for anyone. She looked on people and
prospects alike from the standpoint of her own hopelessness of
anticipation, and miserably regretted that 'irresistible impulse' out of
which had come those abject and yearning letters she wrote to Brussels
and the sickness of deferred hope with which she awaited the coming of
the barren post-hour.

The summer of 1845 arrived. In June Anne left her situation at Thorp
Green for good, after being there for four and a half years, and went
off with Emily for a jaunt to York: these were the only two nights that
Emily spent away from Haworth from the time of her return from Brussels
in 1842 until her death. They played at Gondals all the time, and Emily
in her secret paper of July records how they impersonated Ronald
Macalgin, Henry Angora, Julia Augusteena, and many other mystical folk
'escaping from the palaces of instruction to join the Royalists who are
hard driven at present by the victorious Republicans.' She was writing
a work on the First Gondal War, and Anne a book under the name of 'Henry
Sophona.' Anne, though not quite so enthusiastic (for she found the
Gondals were not 'in first-rate playing condition'), records that: 'The
Unique Society, about half a year ago, were wrecked on a desert island
as they were returning from Gaul.' She mentions also that Emily was
writing poetry, and wondered what it was about. Branwell had come home
for the holidays with Anne, while Mr. and Mrs. Robinson and the family
went to Scarborough, and, as at present arranged, he would return to his
post when the holidays were over. Charlotte, when her sisters had got
back to Haworth, went off for a three weeks' visit to her friend Ellen
at Hathersage. She found when she returned that the curtain had already
risen on a drama which is surely among the grimmest of domestic
chronicles.

She wrote next day to Ellen:

     It was ten o'clock at night when I got home. I found Branwell ill:
     he is so very often owing to his own fault. I was not therefore
     shocked at first, but when Anne informed me of the immediate cause
     of his present illness, I was greatly shocked. He had last Thursday
     received a note from Mr. Robinson sternly dismissing him,
     intimating that he had discovered his proceedings, which he
     characterized as bad beyond expression, and charging him on pain of
     exposure to break off instantly and for ever all communication with
     every member of his family. We have had sad work with Branwell ever
     since. He thought of nothing but stunning or drowning his distress
     of mind. No one in the house could have rest. At last we have been
     obliged to send him from home with someone to look after him: he
     has written to me this morning, and expresses some sense of
     contrition for his frantic folly; he promises amendment on his
     return,[51] but so long as he remains at home, I scarce dare hope
     for peace in the house.

[Footnote 51: Mrs. Gaskell omits, though quoting from this letter, the
words 'he promises amendment on his return.']

Now Mrs. Gaskell, in the first edition of her _Life of Charlotte
Bront_, makes narrative of the above letter, and defines the reason for
Branwell's dismissal. He had been dismissed by his employer because of
his guilty intrigue with his wife. Her account ran as follows:

     All the disgraceful incidents came out. Branwell was in no state to
     conceal his agony of remorse, or, strange to say, his agony of
     guilty love, from any dread of shame. He gave passionate way to his
     feelings, he shocked and distressed those loving sisters
     inexpressibly: the blind father sat stunned, sorely tempted to
     curse the profligate woman who had tempted his boy--his only
     son--into the deep disgrace of deadly crime.

     All the variations of spirits and of temper--the reckless gaiety,
     the moping gloom of many months were now explained. There was a
     reason deeper than any mean indulgence of appetite to account for
     his intemperance; he began his career as an habitual drunkard to
     drown remorse.

     The pitiable part, as far as he was concerned, was the yearning
     love he still bore to the woman who had got so strong a hold upon
     him. It is true that she professed equal love; we shall see how her
     profession held good. There was a strange lingering of conscience,
     when meeting her clandestinely by appointment at Harrogate some
     months afterwards, he refused to consent to the elopement which she
     proposed: there was some good left in this corrupted, weak young
     man, even to the very last of his miserable days.... A few months
     later (I have the exact date but for obvious reasons withhold it)
     the invalid husband of the woman with whom he had intrigued, died.
     Branwell had been looking forward to this event with guilty hopes.
     After her husband's death, his paramour would be free. Strange as
     it seems the young man still loved her passionately, and now he
     imagined the time was come when they might look forward to being
     married, and might live together without reproach or blame. She had
     offered to elope with him; she had written to him perpetually, she
     had sent him money--twenty pounds at a time--she had braved shame
     and her children's menaced disclosures for his sake, he thought she
     must love him: he little knew how bad a depraved woman can be. Her
     husband had made a will, in which what property he left her was
     bequeathed solely on the condition that she should never see
     Branwell Bront again. At the very time that the will was read, she
     did not know but that he might be on his way to her, having heard
     of her husband's death. She despatched a servant in hot haste to
     Haworth. He stopped at the 'Black Bull' and a messenger was sent up
     to the Parsonage for Branwell. He came down to the little inn and
     was shut up with the man for some time. Then the groom came out,
     paid his bill, mounted his horse and was off. Branwell remained in
     the room alone. More than an hour elapsed before sign or sound was
     heard; then those outside heard a noise like the bleating of a
     calf, and, on opening the door, he was found in a kind of fit,
     succeeding to the stupor of grief which he had fallen into on
     hearing that he was forbidden by his paramour ever to see her
     again, as, if he did, she would forfeit her fortune. Let her live
     and flourish! He died, his pockets filled with her letters, which
     he had carried about his person, in order that he might read them
     as often as he wished.... When I think of him, I change my cry to
     heaven. Let her live and repent![52]

[Footnote 52: Mrs. Gaskell, _Life of Charlotte Bront_, 1st ed., vol. i,
pp. 327-332.]

As soon as this was brought to Mrs. Robinson's notice, she determined to
sue Mrs. Gaskell for libel, but consented not to do so if these passages
and all other reference to her were omitted from future editions, and a
public apology and retraction of them was made. This appeared in the
advertisement pages of the _Times_ of May 26, 1857, in the form of a
letter from Mrs. Gaskell's solicitors to Mrs. Robinson's:

     DEAR SIR,--As solicitor for and on behalf of the Rev. W. Gaskell,
     and of Mrs. Gaskell his wife, the latter of whom is authoress of
     the _Life of Charlotte Bront_, I am instructed to retract every
     statement contained in that work which imputes to a widowed Lady,
     referred to but not named therein, any breach of her conjugal, of
     her maternal, or of her social duties, and more especially of the
     statement ... which imputes to the lady in question a guilty
     intercourse with the late Branwell Bront. All those statements
     were made upon information believed to be well founded, but which,
     upon investigation, with the additional evidence furnished to me by
     you, I have ascertained not to be trustworthy. I am therefore
     authorized not only to retract the statements in question, but to
     express the deep regret of Mrs. Gaskell that she should have been
     led to make them.

       I am, dear Sirs, yours truly,
       WILLIAM SHAEN.

There followed on this apology some exceedingly pungent remarks in the
_Athenum_, which had previously spoke in high praise of Mrs. Gaskell's
book, on the wantonness of publishing 'a gratuitous tale so dismal as
concerns the dead, so damaging to the living, unless it was severely,
strictly true.' Even then, the writer might have added, such sacerdotal
comminations are as ludicrous as they are irrelevant to the story of
Charlotte Bront's life.

Now there is always a possibility that an author may be wise to withdraw
libellous matter from his book with apologies, not because it is not
true, but because he is unable to substantiate the truth of it, and will
thus inevitably lose his case if an action is brought against him. But
before we attempt to ascertain whether such was the case with Mrs.
Gaskell, with regard to the main libellous matter, we must look into the
rest of her story by way of test. We find it bristles with
inconsistencies and inaccuracies. She states, for instance, that Mr.
Robinson by his will bequeathed his property to his widow solely on the
condition that she should never see Branwell again. Now Mr. Robinson
died in May 1846, eleven years before Mrs. Gaskell's book appeared, and
his will was proved in September of the same year. An inspection of it,
or a copy of it, would have shown her that it contained no such
condition, and that Branwell's name does not appear in it at all. Mrs.
Robinson, therefore, would have been free to marry him had she wished
to do so, without pecuniary loss, other than that consequent on her
marrying again at all. Again, there is the story that Mrs. Robinson sent
her groom to Haworth to see Branwell and acquaint him with this
provision; the result of the interview was that Branwell was found in a
fit, bleating like a calf. But apart from the fact that no one but a
demented woman would have sent a groom to talk over affairs with her
lover, and tell him he must never see his paramour again, Mrs. Robinson
could have sent no such message, since the will did not contain any such
provision. Again, the supposed meeting of Branwell and Mrs. Robinson at
Harrogate and her proposal to him to elope (which, if he had accepted
it, would quite assuredly have deprived her of her inheritance) are
utterly inconsistent with her refusal to see him after her husband's
death, when she was at liberty to marry him. As for the story that on
Branwell's death his pockets were found to be full of Mrs. Robinson's
letters, we can only conclude that this was derived from some such
source as that which gave Mrs. Gaskell so many details about Mr.
Bront's violent habits; and it was contradicted by the Parsonage
servant, Martha Brown, who was in the room when Branwell died; there
were no such letters. In the face of such glaring inconsistencies, it
looks at first sight as if the whole of Mrs. Gaskell's account was a
farrago of unverified gossip.

But looking closer, we must acquit Mrs. Gaskell of any very culpable
carelessness in compiling an account which, though far better omitted
altogether, was evidently derived from Charlotte herself, and by
Charlotte from Branwell. He was making no secret, when she returned from
her visit to Ellen in July 1845, of the cause of his dismissal, he was
drinking and crying out on fate with the unmanliest lamentation, and we
can infer for certain what he told his sisters from a letter he wrote
three months afterwards to his friend Francis H. Grundy:

     This lady (Mrs. Robinson), though her husband detested me, showed
     me a degree of kindness which, when I was deeply grieved one day at
     her husband's conduct, ripened into declarations of more than
     ordinary feeling. My admiration of her mental and personal
     attractions, my knowledge of her unselfish sincerity, her sweet
     temper, and unwearied care for others, with but unrequited return
     where most should have been given ... although she is seventeen
     years my senior, all combined to an attachment on my part, and led
     to reciprocations which I had little looked for. During nearly
     three years I had daily 'troubled pleasure, soon chastised by
     fear.'[53]

[Footnote 53: F. H. Grundy, _Pictures of the Past_, p. 87.]

A shabbier avowal of all that a man is usually silent about (especially
if there is truth in what he says) can scarcely be conceived, and
clearly this was the version which Branwell gave his sisters, and which
Charlotte passed on to Mrs. Gaskell when subsequently they met and
became friends. Branwell, too, was the author of the fiction about Mr.
Robinson's will, for he wrote to his friend Grundy in a letter for which
the contents supply the date:

     The gentleman with whom I have been is dead.[54] His property is
     left in trust for the family, provided I do not see the widow; and
     if I do, it reverts to the executing trustees with ruin to her.[55]

[Footnote 54: Mr. Robinson died in May 1846.]

[Footnote 55: F. H. Grundy, _Pictures of the Past_, p. 89.]

What he thus wrote it is reasonable to suppose he raved about to his
sisters, and in this particular we have the connecting-link between him
and Mrs. Gaskell's narrative in the shape of a letter that Charlotte
wrote to Ellen in the month following Mr. Robinson's death:

     Shortly after came news from all hands that Mr. Robinson had
     altered his will before he died, and effectually prevented all
     chance of a marriage between his widow and Branwell, by stipulating
     that she should not have a shilling of it if she ever ventured to
     reopen any communication with him....

Whatever 'we hear from all hands' means, it is clear enough from
Branwell's letter to his friend that one of these hands was his, and can
infer with sufficient completeness that Charlotte supplied the
information upon which Mrs. Gaskell's account was founded, and that this
in turn rested entirely on Branwell's allegations and tipsy maunderings.
He made of himself a stricken and bawling martyr to the cruel fate which
parted impassioned lovers by the obstacle of a selfish and unsympathetic
husband, and when that obstacle was removed and it was clear that his
mistress (if she had ever been his mistress) had no intention of
marrying him, he invented the story of the will, adding to it that she
was distracted by these sorrows and anxieties to the verge of insanity.
But as she married Sir Edward Scott three years later, as soon as the
death of his wife in 1848 left him free, we must suppose that she had
her sane intervals. All that actually remains of the whole story is that
Branwell was summarily dismissed from his tutorship by Mr. Robinson on
account of some improper behaviour, and the reasonable conclusion is
that he had made love to his wife, who very properly had told her
husband. All the rest is directly traceable to Branwell's unsupported
assertions, for which no tittle of evidence could be found.

       *       *       *       *       *

Charlotte, then, on her return to Haworth to find Branwell drinking
heavily and bemoaning his stricken existence, took the same hopeless
view of him as she took just now of everything. He was in such a state,
she wrote, that it was necessary that he should leave home for a week
with someone to look after him; the choice of this attendant was a
strange one, for he was Branwell's boon companion, John Brown, the 'Old
Knave of Trumps,' and President of the 'Lodge of the Three Graces,'
which met at the 'Black Bull' to drink whisky and discuss women. While
he was gone Emily's birthday came round, and as usual she and Anne wrote
their secret papers for each other, to be opened (on this occasion after
three years) on July 30, 1848. In contrast with Charlotte's pessimistic
outlook Emily, though Branwell's disgrace was so recent, appeared to be
in exceedingly good spirits. She gives a short _rsum_ of events,
barely mentioning Charlotte, and a long account of her expedition with
Anne and the doings of the Gondals. She says that in spite of all
efforts the idea of the sisters keeping a school was 'no go,' and that
she, personally, did not want it at all, thereby emphasising that it was
Charlotte's scheme all along; she says that the family were all well,
but for Mr. Bront's trouble with his eyes, and for Branwell,

     who I hope will be better and do better hereafter. I am quite
     contented for myself; not as idle as formerly, altogether as
     hearty, and having learnt to make the most of the present and (not)
     long for the future with the fidgetiness that I cannot do all I
     wish; seldom or (n)ever troubled with nothing to do, and merely
     desiring that everybody could be as comfortable and as
     undesponding, and then we should have a very tolerable world of it.

Anne's corresponding paper, though not pitched in so robust a key,
betokens a very tranquil mind. Her news in the main is much the same as
Emily's; her mention of Branwell almost verbally identical, though she
possibly alludes to him again when, speaking of her situation at Thorp
Green, she said that she had 'some very unpleasant and undreamt-of
experience of human nature.'

Then there follows an interesting entry: 'Charlotte is thinking about
getting another situation. She wishes to go to Paris.' But was it Paris
that was her ultimate aim in wanting to go abroad again? Six months
before she had written to M. Hger saying, 'As soon as I have earned
enough money to go to Brussels I shall go there,' and later Dr. Paul
Hger (M. Hger's son) revised and passed an obituary notice of his
father in _L'Etoile Belge_, which stated that Charlotte had written to
the _pensionnat_ asking leave to return there, and was refused. Possibly
Charlotte's wish to go to Paris cloaked another destination.

Then we learn that Anne had begun the third volume of _Passages in the
Life of an Individual_. 'Volume,' as we have noticed before, means no
more than 'notebook,' but Anne by this time had certainly got some way
into the writing of the book which eventually appeared as _Agnes Grey_.
These few items of real information are islands in an ocean of the
merest chatter, which however gives us a minute little still-life
picture of this 'dismal, cloudy wet evening' at the Parsonage.

     Charlotte is sitting sewing in the dining-room. Emily is ironing
     upstairs. I am sitting in the dining-room in the rocking-chair by
     the fire with my feet on the fender. Papa is in the parlour. Tabby
     and Martha are, I think, in the kitchen. Keeper and Flossy are, I
     do not know where. Little Dick is hopping in his cage....
     (Charlotte) has let Flossie in, by the by, and he is now lying on
     the sofa.... This afternoon I began to set about making my grey
     figured silk frock that was dyed at Keighley. What sort of a hand
     shall I make of it? E. (Emily) and I have a great deal of work to
     do. When shall we sensibly diminish it? I want to get a habit of
     early rising. Shall I succeed?

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 Bront 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. Hger. 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. Hger 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. Hger 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. Bront? 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.[56]

[Footnote 56: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 340.]

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 was 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. Hger.

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.'[57]
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.'

[Footnote 57: Biographical Notice to _Wuthering Heights_.]

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 Bront 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. Bront 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.[58]

[Footnote 58: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 328.]

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.[59] 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. Bront, 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
Bront.' 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.[60] 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 10_s._

[Footnote 59: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 329.]

[Footnote 60: _Id._ vol. ii, p. 164.]

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.'[61] 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'[62] before any of them were accepted. But _Wuthering
Heights_ and _Agnes Grey_ were accepted for publication not later than
July 1847[63]; 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.

[Footnote 61: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 325.]

[Footnote 62: Charlotte Bront, 'Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton
Bell' in _Wuthering Heights_, p. xviii (World's Classics).]

[Footnote 63: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 367.]

The inception and the progress of these three novels was, like that of
the poems, kept secret. Charlotte, in her constant and detailed letters
to Ellen Nussey, in which she records the phases of Branwell's
deterioration, gives not the slightest hint that any literary project
was on the board, and it is equally certain from what happened after the
publication of _Jane Eyre_ (which was the first of the novels to appear)
that Mr. Bront, sitting in the parlour more sundered now every week
from the visible world by reason of his failing eyesight, for which an
operation was being mooted, knew nothing whatever of these renewed
activities: whether Branwell knew is a question that will presently
require a more detailed investigation. Nor was there less silence and
secrecy between the authors themselves, and we must picture them busy
but wholly uncommunicative to each other about their progress, in spite
of Mrs. Gaskell's fascinating account of how they read new chapters of
_Jane Eyre_ and _Wuthering Heights_ to each other, as they came hot from
the glowing workshops. She says:

     The sisters retained their old habit which was begun in their
     aunt's lifetime, of putting away their work at nine o'clock, and
     commencing their study, pacing up and down the sitting-room. At
     this time, they talked over the stories they were engaged upon,
     and described their plots. Once or twice a week, each read to the
     others what she had written and heard what they had to say about it
     ... the readings were of great and stirring interest to them all.

But to out infinite chagrin we find that nothing of the sort took place,
for Charlotte, referring to the writing of these very books, says:

     Formerly we used to show each other what we wrote, but of late
     years this habit of communication and consultation had been
     discontinued: hence it ensued that we were mutually ignorant of the
     progress we might respectively have made.[64]

[Footnote 64: Charlotte Bront, Biographical Notice to _Wuthering
Heights_, p. xvi (World's Classics).]

Nothing unfortunately can be clearer than that, and though we must
abandon the delightful idea of these readings we are left with a reality
far more characteristic of the isolation of the three in their common
aim.

       *       *       *       *       *

They still wrote chiefly in the evening, for there was housework to do,
and how long were the busy silences! Anne would be sitting to-night at
the table in the dining-room with her desk in front of her. She was
getting towards the end of _Agnes Grey_. Emily had gone to give the dogs
their supper, and they had heard her go upstairs, for she often did her
writing in her bedroom. Mr. Bront had just looked in to say good-night
and tell them not to sit up late. He wound up the clock as, now nearly
blind, he groped his way upstairs to the room where he and Branwell
slept together. Charlotte sat on the hearth-rug, writing by the
firelight. She had a board on her knees, and she wrote in her minute
hand on scraps of paper which next day she copied out for her finished
manuscript. She was getting on well with _The Professor_. Then the long
silence would be broken by the sound of the opening of the front door;
so Branwell was back from the 'Black Bull,' and he stumbled as he
shuffled along the passage. To-night he looked into the dining-room and
came and sat close to Charlotte to warm himself, for it was a cold
night, and the north wind blew, specked with snow, from the moor.
Charlotte had nothing to say to him; she did not even look up, but
stiffened and drew a little away from him, for he kept coughing, and his
breath was foully sweet with whisky. He would have liked to ask
Charlotte what she was writing, but he was afraid of her, and she might
say something biting in return. So as his reception was not encouraging,
he soon left them: Emily was gone upstairs, and he tapped at the door of
her room--that slip of a room just over the front door--to have a few
words with her, if she was not yet gone to bed, for he had an idea in
his head to talk about. He stumbled off, forgetting to shut the door.

Not a word did the two sisters exchange about him: silence descended
again, and, when the clock struck midnight, Anne put her papers into her
desk--perhaps locking it--and left Charlotte still absorbed in her work,
her face close to the paper. For the last day or two she had been
thinking much about Branwell and his frantic folly, his making love to a
woman in her husband's house, and the disgusting creature he was, with
his foul breath and his tipsiness and his maudlin lamentations. To-night
she was engaged on the twentieth chapter of _The Professor_, and she had
been describing how William Crimsworth was leaving the Professor's
house, 'where a practical modern French novel seemed likely to
materialise.'

     I had once [he reflected] the opportunity of contemplating, near at
     hand, an example of the results produced by a course of interesting
     and romantic domestic treachery. No golden halo of fiction was
     about this example, I saw it bare and real: and it was very
     loathsome. I saw a mind degraded by the habit of perfidious
     deception, and a body depraved by the infective influence of the
     vice-polluted soul. I had suffered much from the forced and
     prolonged view of this spectacle....

But it was late and the fire was burning low. Charlotte went upstairs,
pausing before she entered the room, once Aunt Branwell's, now occupied
by her and Anne, for she heard Branwell's voice coming from Emily's
room. It was strange that she could tolerate his disgusting presence.




CHAPTER XI


In the spring of 1846 (or at the beginning of the year, if Charlotte's
statement about the three books vainly seeking a publisher for a year
and a half is correct) _Wuthering Heights_ was finished; it is necessary
to go into the much-derided suggestion that Branwell was the author of
it. It was published under the _nom de plume_, Ellis Bell, which Emily
had already adopted for her contribution to the joint volume of poems,
and Charlotte tells in the Biographical Notice to the 1850 edition of
_Wuthering Heights_, how 'Ellis Bell produced _Wuthering Heights_, Acton
Bell, _Agnes Grey_, and Currer Bell also wrote a narrative (_The
Professor_) in one volume.' That would certainly seem to settle the
question once and for all, and no doubt Charlotte believed that Emily
was the sole and entire author of the book. Moreover, she wrote after
Branwell's death to Mr. W. S. Williams of the firm of Smith, Elder &
Co., making the following statement concerning her brother's complete
ignorance of all the buzz of literary activity that was going on at the
Parsonage:

     My unhappy brother never knew what his sisters had done in
     literature--he was not aware that they had ever published a line.
     We could not tell him of our efforts for fear of causing him too
     deep a pang of remorse for his own time misspent and talents
     misapplied.

Now it is frankly impossible to accept that statement. For the last two
years of Branwell's life printed proofs were constantly arriving for
the sisters, one packet of which was perhaps opened by Branwell himself
by mistake: six presentation authors' copies, Charlotte tells us,[65]
were sent to Emily and Anne on the publication of their books, and to
her also, as well as multitudes of reviews which she always insisted on
seeing. Mr. Bront, when _Jane Eyre_ had begun to boom, was informed by
Charlotte that she was the author; Charlotte and Anne went up to London
more than a year before Branwell died, to disclose themselves to Smith,
Elder & Co.; Mrs. Gaskell tells us how, when Charlotte had sent the
manuscript of _The Professor_ to a publisher, and had received no
acknowledgment, she consulted Branwell himself as to the reason of his
silence. For all these reasons it is ludicrous to suppose that Branwell
knew nothing about his sisters' publications; the most we can believe,
but that readily, is that Charlotte, who found it difficult to remain in
the same room with him[66] or to speak to him at all, never herself said
a word to him about them. As for the reason she assigned for his not
being told of them, because the sense of his own wasted life in
comparison with his sisters' would cause him remorse, it is better,
considering her implacable treatment of him, to refrain from comment
altogether.

[Footnote 65: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 375.]

[Footnote 66: _Id._ p. 321.]

Returning, then, to the main question as to whether or no Branwell was
responsible in whole or in part for _Wuthering Heights_, there is so
much queer and seemingly strong evidence that he not only knew about it,
but had something to do with it, that it would be a mere dishonesty to
disregard it entirely, or to dismiss it unexamined. The principal
documents are as follows:

(1) On September 10, 1845 (that is, at the beginning of the autumn when
the literary activity of the three sisters started again), Branwell
wrote thus to his friend J. B. Leyland the sculptor, who executed the
bas-relief profile of his head, seen by Mrs. Gaskell at Haworth:

     I have, since I saw you at Halifax, devoted every hour of time,
     snatched from downright illness, to the composition of a three
     volume novel, one volume of which [notebook?] is completed, and,
     along with the two forthcoming ones, has been really the result of
     half a dozen long-past years of thoughts about, and experience in,
     this crooked path of life. I feel that I must rouse myself to
     attempt something, while roasting daily and nightly over a slow
     fire, to while away my torments.[67]

[Footnote 67: F. A. Leyland, _The Bront Family_, vol. ii, p. 83.]

(2) Mr. William Dearden, author of _The Demon Queen_ and other poems,
published in the _Halifax Guardian_ in June 1867 a remarkable story
concerning himself and Branwell. They agreed to hold a sort of poetic
tournament at the Cross Roads Inn, near Haworth, each reading his own
poem. J. B. Leyland was appointed umpire in this contest. Dearden
continues:

     I read the first act of _The Demon Queen_, but when Branwell dived
     into his hat--the usual receptacle of his fugitive scraps, where he
     supposed he had deposited his MS. poem, he found he had by mistake
     placed there a number of stray leaves of a novel on which he had
     been trying his 'prentice hand.... Both friends earnestly entreated
     him to read them, as they felt a curiosity to see how he could
     wield the pen of a novelist. After some hesitation, he complied
     with the request and riveted our attention for about an hour....
     The scene of the fragment which Branwell read, and the characters
     introduced in it,--so far as then developed,--were the same as
     those in _Wuthering Heights_, which Charlotte confidently asserts
     was the production of her sister Emily.[68]

[Footnote 68: _Id._ p. 188.]

(3) Mr. Edward Sloane, a friend of Branwell's and of Mr. William
Dearden's, declared to the latter that 'Branwell had read to him,
portion by portion, the novel as it was produced at the time, insomuch
that he no sooner began the perusal of _Wuthering Heights_ when
published than he was able to anticipate the characters and incidents to
be disclosed.'[69]

[Footnote 69: F. A. Leyland, _The Bront Family_, vol. ii, p. 188.]

(4) Branwell's friend, Mr. F. H. Grundy, who first made his acquaintance
when he was ticket clerk at Luddenden Foot Station in 1842, and paid at
least two visits to him at Haworth, wrote in his memoirs:

     Patrick Bront declared to me, and what his sister Emily said bore
     out the assertion, that he wrote a great portion of _Wuthering
     Heights_ himself. Indeed it is impossible for me to read that story
     without meeting with many passages which I feel certain _must_ have
     come from his pen. The weird fancies of diseased genius with which
     he used to entertain me in our long talks at Luddenden Foot
     reappear in the pages of his novel, and I am inclined to believe
     that the very plot was his invention rather than his sister's.[70]

[Footnote 70: F. H. Grundy, _Pictures of the Past_, p. 80.]

Now much of this evidence was not published till twelve years at least
after Charlotte's death. It is therefore remote from the events of which
it treats. But there is one dated and contemporary document, namely,
Branwell's letter of September 10, 1845, to J. B. Leyland, which states
that he had then written the first volume of a novel, and the rest of
the evidence (the reading of the opening chapters of it to Mr. Dearden
and Leyland, the recognition of what had then been read, when _Wuthering
Heights_ was published, and so forth) is in accordance with it. Unless,
then, we assume that these gentlemen, Messrs. Dearden, Sloane, and
Grundy, were confederated liars of remarkable constructive imagination,
it must be confessed that there is a _prima-facie_ case for Branwell's
having had knowledge of the book before it was published, and for his
having had a hand in its writing. The case is carried further by certain
internal evidence in the story itself.

First come one or two verbal points of little importance in themselves,
but contributory:

(1) In a letter of Branwell's (already quoted) addressed to 'Old Knave
of Trumps' we find the rather remarkable phrase: '... he whose eyes
Satan looks out of as from windows'; and in _Wuthering Heights_ we find
Nellie Dean admonishing Heathcliff as follows about his sulky face:

     Do you mark ... those thick brows, that instead of being arched,
     sink in the middle; and that couple of black fiends, so deeply
     buried, who never open the windows boldly but lurk glinting under
     them like devil's spies?[71]

[Footnote 71: _Wuthering Heights_, ed. The World's Classics, p. 67.]

Again Isabel, speaking of Heathcliff, says: 'I stared full at him and
laughed scornfully. The clouded windows of hell flashed a moment towards
me.'[72]

[Footnote 72: _Id._ p. 224.]

This is nothing in itself. Branwell's letter to 'Old Knave of Trumps'
was written in 1841, and he may easily have used the image of Satan
looking out of a man's eyes as from windows in Emily's hearing, and she,
struck with it, have twice closely paraphrased it. But the coincidence
is curious, and Miss Robinson, who scouted the idea of Branwell having
had anything to do with _Wuthering Heights_, certainly found it so, for
in her admirable book _Emily Bront_ she quotes Branwell's letter
otherwise entire to show what a degraded wretch he was, but omits these
few words.

(2) In a letter of Branwell's after his dismissal from his tutorship, in
consequence of his conduct concerning Mrs. Robinson, he writes: 'My own
life without her will be hell. What can the so-called love of her
wretched sickly husband be compared with mine?'

In _Wuthering Heights_ Heathcliff says to Nellie Dean:

     Two words would comprehend my future--_death_ and _hell_; existence
     after losing her would be hell. Yet I was a fool to fancy for a
     moment that she valued Edgar Linton's attachment more than mine. If
     he loved with all the power of his puny being, he couldn't love in
     eighty years as I could in a day.[73]

[Footnote 73: _Wuthering Heights_, ed. The World's Classics, p. 184.]

This latter verbal coincidence is far more significant than the other,
for _Wuthering Heights_ was nearing completion when Branwell wrote the
corresponding letter, and it looks therefore as if he must have been
cognisant of the passage in _Wuthering Heights_. Taken in conjunction
with his statement that he had written part of a novel, and the
statement of three other witnesses that what Branwell on one occasion
read them, and on another occasion told them, enabled them, when
_Wuthering Heights_ appeared, to recognise in it a story of which
already they knew the outline and had heard a part, these coincidences
support the suggestion that he had something to do with the book, and,
as author, or collaborator, or confidant, knew about it.

But apart from and vastly outweighing the sum of such minor points,
apart from but curiously confirming the stubborn external evidence of
other witnesses, comes the internal evidence, both as regards
composition, verbal expression, and general texture, that _Wuthering
Heights_ is the work of two authors. The work of the first was merely a
handicap, though a serious one, on that of the second, and is a very
small portion of the whole, and in the 'fire and the mighty wind' of the
second we recognise the wild and visionary and mystical power which
inspires Emily's poems. In that Branwell had no part at all, and it
would be as ludicrous to suppose that he was in any real sense the
author of the book as that Charlotte was.[74] It was supposed by some
when the book first came out that it was an early and immature work of
hers, but she indignantly repudiated such a suggestion.

[Footnote 74: Mr. Malham-Deelaby has written a book to prove that she
was.]

To turn then to the book itself, which is among the greatest works of
fiction the world has ever seen, the composition and construction are
inconceivably awkward, and this awkwardness is entirely due to the
manner in which it begins. It opens--dated 1801--with the first-hand
narrative of Mr. Lockwood, the tenant of Thrushcross Grange, who goes to
visit his landlord Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights, and it is clear that
the intention of the writer was to make him a personage in the story. He
pays a second visit next day and is immensely struck with the younger
Catherine, whom he has not seen before. He pities her for being buried
alive with these savages: he thinks she is Hareton's wife.

     She has thrown herself away on that boor [he reflects] from sheer
     ignorance that better individuals existed! A sad pity--I must
     beware how I cause her to regret her choice. The last reflection
     may seem conceited: it was not. My neighbour struck me as bordering
     on repulsive; I knew through experience that I was tolerably
     attractive....

It is impossible to imagine a clearer indication of the writer's
intention to make a _motif_ out of Catherine's beauty and Lockwood's
complacent susceptibility. But nothing happens; the intention was
scrapped. Lockwood returns to Thrushcross Grange next morning, after
some bitter nocturnal experiences, and asks his housekeeper Nellie Dean
to tell him more about this strange family. Thereupon she becomes the
narrator, and talks to him that day for eighty pages. Next day he falls
ill, and is a month in bed. When he gets better, she resumes her
narrative, he merely listening. She began it from her earliest years and
now completes it up to the date at which the story opens, giving him the
entire history of the Earnshaws, of the Lintons, and of Heathcliff. We
lose sight of Lockwood altogether; he only listens to Nellie Dean as she
repeats verbatim long conversations, telling this voluminous history at
first hand as she witnessed it. She reads him a letter of eleven pages,
which Lockwood reproduces word for word; she oversees, she overhears,
and it is not till page 367, quite near the end of the book, that the
original narrator appears again to tell us that Mrs. Dean's story, which
has lasted for twenty-seven chapters, is over. Then Lockwood narrates
one chapter, describing his third visit to Wuthering Heights, and leaves
the district. After a break he dates his next chapter 1802, and when he
visits the Heights once more, Nellie Dean again tells him what has
happened while he has been away. From first page to last he has had
nothing whatever to do with the story to which, instead of narrating it
himself, as he began to do, he is merely audience, and writes down what
Nellie Dean has told him. He has no more to do with it than the occupant
of a stall in the theatre has to do with the action on the stage.

No single author could have planned a book in so topsy-turvy a manner.
It begins, in point of time, nearly at the end, the original narrator
drops completely out, and the actual narrator, whose story forms the
bulk of the book, tells it to him. But supposing that, for some reason,
the first few chapters had to be retained, this complete change of plan,
though productive of endless awkwardnesses, was necessary in order to
tell the story at all. Lockwood, the newly arrived tenant who
auto-biographically opens the book, could not know the previous history
of Heathcliff and the rest. So Nellie Dean must recount it to him, and
it takes so long that he must needs fall ill so that his convalescence
may be beguiled with it. Nobody planning a story from the first could
have begun with an episode so misplaced that such an awkward device must
be resorted to. Moreover, though from first to last Lockwood has nothing
to do with the story at all, there are those sure indications in the
early chapters that he was meant to play a part in it. He warns himself
that he must not make himself _too_ attractive, and cause the enchanting
Catherine (married, so he fancies, to the boorish Hareton) to fall in
love with him.

Now in September 1845, as we have seen, Branwell wrote to J. B. Leyland
that he was writing a story. He gave an hour's reading of the beginning
of it to Leyland and Dearden: Dearden, when _Wuthering Heights_ was
published, recognised that the opening was what Branwell had read them.
Branwell also read pieces to Sloane, who similarly recognised them; he
affirmed to Grundy that he had written 'a great portion' of the book
(which we decline to believe), and Grundy, when it came out, similarly
recognised stories which Branwell had told him when a clerk at Luddenden
Foot. My suggestion is that Messrs. Dearden, Leyland, Sloane and Grundy
were not independent liars, who happened to hit on the same lie, but
that Branwell planned with Emily a considerable part of the book and
that he wrote and read to Leyland and Dearden the opening chapters,
which make so awkward a misfit with the rest. We must also remember as a
matter of evidential importance that Branwell's letter to Leyland,
saying that he had completed a volume--notebook--of his story, was dated
September 10, 1845. Charlotte made the 'discovery' of Emily's poems in
the autumn of that year, and it was that which set going again the
literary activities of the sisters. Emily (hitherto occupied with the
Gondal History of the Emperor Julius) then took _Wuthering Heights_ in
hand with the connivance and collaboration of Branwell, retaining the
first two chapters that open the book, which Branwell had already
written.

Dates, then, support the idea that what Branwell read his friends was
the earliest chapters of _Wuthering Heights_. A more effective support
is derived from the contents of those chapters which led to such
awkwardnesses in the composition of the whole, and, in especial, from
the style of them. Lockwood, at present the narrator, writes with the
identical pomposity with which Branwell wrote to Southey, to Blackwood,
and was now writing to his friends: he uses elaborate expressions and
journalistic phrases, he employs a vast number of words derived from the
Latin and Latin words; he displays a scholastic pretentiousness. Such
sentences as these, all culled from those first two chapters, are
characteristic of his style:

     I had no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting
     the penetralium.

     I detected a chatter of tongues and a clatter of culinary utensils.

     Imagining they (the dogs) would scarcely understand tacit insults,
     I unfortunately indulged in winking and making faces at the trio,
     and some turn of my physiognomy so irritated madam....

     Swayed by prudential considerations of the folly of offending a
     good tenant, he (Heathcliff) relaxed a little in the laconic style
     of chipping off his pronouns and auxiliary verbs.

     'Wretched inmates,' I ejaculated mentally, 'you deserve perpetual
     isolation from your species for your churlish inhospitality.'

     You are the favoured possessor of the beneficent fairy.

     A mingled guffaw from Heathcliff and Hareton put the cope-stone on
     my rage and humiliation.

     I ordered the miscreants to let me out, with several incoherent
     threats of retaliation that in their indefinite depth of virulency
     smacked of King Lear.

Such extracts are typical of Lockwood's style of writing when he opens
the story of _Wuthering Heights_. Then he vanishes and is a mere
listener to the lucid narrative of Nellie Dean. At the end of the book,
when he takes up the story again, we should naturally expect him to
resume the narrative style of the beginning; but what do we find?

     I lingered round them under that benign sky, watched the moths
     fluttering among the heath and hare-bells, listened to the soft
     wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could
     ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

Both the first two chapters and the end are supposedly Lockwood's
writing, but it is incredible that the same hand held the pen. The hand
that wrote the pompous, swashbuckling but picturesque letter to John
Brown beginning 'Old Knave of Trumps,' might easily have written the
first two chapters of _Wuthering Heights_ as narrated by Lockwood, Style
1, but never the conclusion by Lockwood, Style 2. No hand but one could
have written that, or the narrative of Nellie Dean, or the wild moorland
passion of the book, fierce and devouring, yet with hardly a touch of
the flesh in it, and that was hers (not Branwell's nor Charlotte's),
which had written thus of the power that possessed it:

  He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs,
  With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars.
  Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
  And visions rise and change, that kill me with desire.

To Branwell, then, we may assign these first two chapters, pompous and
monstrous in style, with their Lockwood _motif_ which once announced is
heard no more, and then Emily took charge, but still in consultation
with him. The 'ruffianly bitch' was his perhaps, so also, certainly, was
the material for the half-savage country folk, such as Zillah and
Joseph, whom he calls the 'surly indigen.' Charlotte herself, though
fully believing that Emily wrote the book, as indeed she did, felt the
difficulty of accounting for the intimate knowledge which she showed of
Branwell's indigen, for in her preface to the 1850 edition she says:

     I am bound to avow that she had scarcely more practical knowledge
     of the peasantry amongst whom she lived than a nun has of the
     country people who sometimes pass her convent gates ... except to
     go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the
     threshold of home.

How then could she have been able to draw them with that firm,
minutely-etched delineation of their talk and their gestures that make
them move and live before us in speech and habit and soul? But Branwell
knew them; they were just the folk with whom he had always consorted at
the 'Black Bull,' at the meetings of the 'Lodge of the Three Graces,'
over interminable whisky-toddies, and his was the clay which he brought
for Emily's fashioning. He made his contributions too, as in the verbal
coincidences already noted, the devil-eyes of Heathcliff, and
Heathcliff's ravings about the force of his love for Catherine compared
with Linton's, for just so did he rave about his passion for Mrs.
Robinson, compared with her invalid husband's tepidity and indifference.
But of all this collaboration Charlotte knew nothing, just as she had
known nothing about Emily's poems till she had rifled her desk. The
others had their secrets together, Emily and Anne played at Gondals,
Emily and Branwell talked over _Wuthering Heights_. Branwell had begun
it, and they retained those first two chapters, though that handicap
entailed endless awkwardnesses in the rest of the telling.

And Charlotte was the most solitary of them all. She had her heart's
secret which she shared with none, and, while her soul was filled with
loathing for Branwell's tipsy maunderings about the married woman for
whom he had committed some 'frantic folly,' she could scarce help
contrasting the indecency of such gabble with her own silent tortures of
expectation when the post-hour drew near and the silent despair which
followed, when it brought her no reply from M. Hger.




CHAPTER XII


Early in January 1846 there was a railway panic, following a railway
boom. New companies had been floated with insufficient capital, and many
unfortunate shareholders were ruined. The legacies which the three
Bront sisters had inherited from their aunt had been invested by Emily
during Charlotte's second sojourn in Brussels in the York and Midland
Railway. This was a well-managed line with a sound financial basis, and
in spite of the panic the capital value of the shares had been
maintained. Charlotte was anxious that they should sell their shares and
re-invest, though at a lower rate of interest, in something safer, but
her sisters disagreed, and sooner than hurt Emily's feelings she agreed
to let her money stop where it was. 'Disinterested and energetic (Emily)
certainly is,' so she wrote to Miss Wooler,' and if she be not quite so
tractable or open to conviction as I could wish, I must remember
perfection is not the lot of humanity.' A few years later Charlotte's
misgivings were justified, and she lost some considerable part of her
legacy.[75]

[Footnote 75: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, p. 77.]

A dreary account of Branwell follows in this letter, for to Miss Wooler
as well as Ellen, Charlotte wrote her grim bulletins.

     He never thinks of seeking employment, and I begin to fear he has
     rendered himself incapable of filling any respectable station in
     life; besides, if money were at his disposal he would only use it
     to his own injury: the faculty of self-government is, I fear,
     almost destroyed in him.

She had already written to Ellen this month in the same strain.
'Branwell offers no prospect of hope, he professes to be too ill to
think of seeking for employment.' And so throughout the spring it goes
on, till one wearies of these incessant girdings, and bleeds for the
unpitied brother more than for the pitiless sister. That complaint that
he would not get a situation and thus rid Haworth of his odious,
scarcely supportable presence, is always to the fore.

     I am thankful that papa is pretty well, though often made very
     miserable by Branwell's wretched conduct. There--there is no change
     but for the worse,... You ask if we are more comfortable. I wish I
     could say anything favourable, but how can we be more comfortable
     so long as Branwell stays at home, and degenerates instead of
     improving? It has lately been intimated to him that he would be
     received again on the railroad where he was formerly stationed if
     he would behave more steadily but he refuses to make an effort; he
     will not work--and at home he is a drain on every resource--an
     impediment to all happiness....

Intolerable as Branwell must have been, it is strange to find that his
sister would sooner he went back to Luddenden Foot, where he had no
companion of any sort but a porter, nor the slightest stimulus,
ineffective though it seemed to be, of home and of relations to keep him
from going more quickly and finally to ruin, than that he should be such
an impediment at Haworth to all happiness. Nor was she right in saying
that he made no effort to get employment, or that any such post had been
offered him. Three times during this period did he beg his friend
Grundy, an engineer on the line, to get him reappointed to some post,
and each time his application was refused.

No doubt in spite of the ruthlessness of her letters Charlotte tried to
be more charitable towards him, but just as he was bound in those
detestable chains that his weakness had so strongly wrought for him, so
the very uprightness of her nature, the stern Puritanism of her
principles, her revolt at the injustice of them all being made to suffer
for his bestiality, fettered her capacity for pity. Something of
this--this striving on both sides to do better than the self-indulgence
of the one and the righteousness of the other permitted--appears in a
certain statement which Branwell wrote down and read to his friend, Mr.
George Searle Phillips, who came to see him at Haworth. The half-tipsy,
self-pitying sentimentality of it is obvious and odious enough, but
equally obvious is its underlying authenticity: nobody could have
invented such a story. This is Mr. Phillips's account:

     One of the Sunday-school girls in whom he and his house took much
     interest fell very sick, and they were afraid she would not live.
     'I went to see the poor little thing,' Branwell said, 'sat with her
     half an hour and read a psalm to her, and a hymn at her request. I
     felt very like praying with her too,' he added, his voice trembling
     with emotion, 'but, you see, I was not good enough. How dare I pray
     for another who had almost forgotten how to pray for myself! I came
     away with a heavy heart, for I felt sure she would die, and went
     straight home, where I fell into melancholy musings. I often do,
     but no kind word finds its way ever to my ears, much less to my
     heart. Charlotte observed my depression and asked what ailed me. So
     I told her. She looked at me with a look I shall never forget--if I
     live to be a hundred years old--which I never shall. It was not
     like her at all. It wounded me as if somebody had struck me a blow
     in the mouth. It involved so many things in it. It was a dubious
     look. It ran over me, questioning and examining, as if I had been a
     wild beast. It said, "Did my ears deceive me, or did I hear
     aright?" And then came the painful baffled expression, which was
     worse than all. It said, "I wonder if that's true!" But as she left
     the room, she seemed to accuse herself of having wronged me, and
     smiled kindly upon me, and said, "She is my little scholar, and I
     will go and see her." I replied not a word, I was too much cut up.
     When she was gone I came over here to the "Black Bull," and made a
     note of it in sheer disgust and desperation. Why could they not
     give me some credit when I was trying to be good?'

The reader's first feeling, no doubt, is of nausea at this
'nobody-loves-me' attitude, at the maudlin self-pity, at the writer's
going straight to the 'Black Bull' to console himself in the usual
manner and 'make a note' of his sister's cruelty. But he writhed under
her whips: her attitude to him is what we should gather from her letters
to Ellen. And yet, sickened to the soul at him, she was trying to do
better.

Then there was Anne. Anne's sincere piety, her gentleness, her sense of
duty, made a strange harvesting from her brother's failings. As soon as
she had finished _Agnes Grey_ she at once set to work on her second
novel, _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_, which is largely concerned with a
drunken monomaniac: of its genesis and the history of its production
Charlotte gives a full account.

     The choice of subject was an entire mistake. Nothing less congruous
     with the writer's nature could be conceived. The motives which
     dictated the choice were pure, but, I think, morbid. She (Anne)
     had, in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate near
     at hand and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents
     misused and faculties abused ... what she saw sank very deeply into
     her mind, it did her harm. She brooded over it till she believed it
     to be her duty to reproduce every detail ... as a warning to
     others. She hated her work, but would pursue it. When reasoned with
     on the subject she regarded such reasonings as a temptation to
     self-indulgence. She must be honest; she must not varnish, soften
     or conceal. This well-meant resolution brought on her
     misconstruction and some abuse....

There can be no question as to whom Anne contemplated 'near at hand' and
'for a long time'; the 'talents misused' were his whose 'talents
misapplied' Charlotte lamented after Branwell's death, and we picture
Anne, pious and gentle, industriously, from a sense of duty, making copy
out of Branwell. Nor can there be any question who misconstructed her
motives and abused her. Not Charlotte, who understood her motives,
though she thought her choice of subject morbid, but Emily.... Again the
picture of the quiet dining-room at the Parsonage outlines itself with a
little terrible detail added.

The three sisters were together to-night in the dining-room, and Anne
had just told Emily who was the model for the drunken wastrel in her new
book. She sat silent, conscious of the rectitude and high moral aim of
her intentions, while Emily stormed at her for the brutality of it.
Charlotte, too, was dissuasive; she thought she was morbid to dwell on
such a theme. When they had finished, Anne merely said she knew she was
doing right--they must not tempt her--and patiently resumed her work.
The words came easily to-night, for there had been a horrid scene with
Branwell, who came back reeling and hiccoughing from the 'Black Bull.'

       *       *       *       *       *

Charlotte escaped sometimes from the home which, if we may judge from
her letters, had become to her, from various causes, so dark an abode of
hate and misery, and on which soon far blacker shadows were to fall.
This spring she spent a fortnight with Ellen, and heard encouraging news
about the operation for cataract. On her return she went to see her
father, who was now nearly blind, and cheered him up by telling him how
successful the operation now was, for he dreaded the idea; also it was a
relief to him to know that he might wait for a few months yet before he
need submit to it. Charlotte's letter to Ellen continues:

     I went into the room where Branwell was, to speak to him, about an
     hour after I got home; it was very forced work to address him. I
     might have spared myself the trouble, as he took no notice, and
     made no reply: he was stupefied. My fears were not in vain. I hear
     that he had got a sovereign from papa while I have been away under
     pretence of paying a pressing debt; he went immediately and changed
     it at a public house, and employed it as was to be expected. Emily
     concluded her account by saying that he was a hopeless being: it is
     too true. In his present state it is scarcely possible to stay in
     the room where he is.

This letter contains a sentence on which much has been built. It has
been argued that, because Emily called her brother 'a hopeless being,'
she gave him up with the same completeness as Charlotte had done. This
view is shared by Mr. Clement Shorter, who concludes that 'by now (March
1846) Branwell had reached that stage of physical and moral wreckage
when even his most broadminded sister had to give him up.'[76] He refers
again to this expression of Emily's and says: 'The fact is that
Branwell's state at that time was such that Emily, being only human,
could not possibly have been more tolerant,--and rightly so--than her
two sisters....' Now it is with the greatest reluctance that one differs
from Mr. Shorter, whose patient and careful research and whose fair
treatment of all available data about the lives of the Bronts makes him
so eminent an authority, but surely this conclusion, built on so slender
a foundation, is unwarranted. We rather picture Emily telling Charlotte
how Branwell had got a sovereign under false pretences from his father
and spent it in the usual way, adding, merely cursorily, 'Oh, he's a
hopeless being!' Such an interpretation seems more likely than to
ascribe to Emily, on this phrase alone, a fixed and justifiable
determination to have nothing more to do with him. It does not seem
consistent with the nature of one who was 'full of ruth for others,' or
who was indignant with Anne for using Branwell as a model for the
drunken Huntingdon in _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_, now on the stocks.
Moreover, there is rebutting evidence that rests on a more solid
foundation than this surmise.

[Footnote 76: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 321.]

Miss A. Mary F. Robinson (Madame Duclaux) published, in 1889, a book
called _Emily Bront_. It contains the following passage about Emily's
relations with her brother:

     There was one woman's heart strong enough in its compassion to bear
     the daily disgusts, weaknesses, sins of Branwell's life, and yet
     persist in aid and affection. Night after night, when Mr. Bront
     was in bed, when Anne and Charlotte had gone upstairs to their
     room, Emily still sat up waiting. She often had very long to wait
     in the silent house before the staggering tread, the muttered oath,
     the fumbling hand at the door, bade her rouse herself from her sad
     thoughts and rise to let in the prodigal, and lead him in safety to
     his rest. But she never wearied in her kindness. In that silent
     house, it was ever the silent Emily who had ever a cheering word
     for Branwell; it was Emily who remembered that he was her brother,
     without that remembrance freezing her heart to numbness.

Then follows a spirited account of a fire that broke out in Branwell's
room one night. He had gone to bed and fallen into a drugged or drunken
sleep, and his candle had upset, setting his sheets alight. Emily dashed
downstairs for a couple of pails of water, extinguished the flames and
rescued her brother. Miss Robinson's account is too full of vivid but
impossible details to be accepted entirely. We cannot, for instance,
believe that while Emily went to fetch water from downstairs Charlotte,
Anne, and the servant 'stood huddled together in amazed horror' against
the wall of the passage outside without making the slightest attempt to
pull Branwell off the burning bed, or see what could be done with the
water-jug, but Miss Robinson has stated that she derived the information
that Emily befriended and tried to help Branwell until the end, and that
she did thus rescue him when his bed was on fire, from Ellen Nussey
herself. This disposes of the suggestion that, because Emily allowed
that her brother was a 'hopeless being,' she therefore abandoned him,
and that this story of the fire was a mere myth incubated from the
similar incident in _Jane Eyre_ in which Jane rescues Rochester from the
bed to which his lunatic wife had set fire. Indeed, considering how
invariably Charlotte wove into her novels pieces of personal experience,
the fact that an identical scene occurs in her book points to its being
derived from the actual incident for which Ellen Nussey is the source.
We are thus also enabled to date this rescue by Emily of her brother as
having occurred before _Jane Eyre_ was begun in the summer of 1846.
Nature would otherwise be imitating Art with an almost indecent
fidelity. A further confirmation of this date is supplied by our
knowledge that for two years before his death Branwell slept in the same
room as his father: at the time of the fire he must still have been
occupying a room to himself.[77]

[Footnote 77: Mrs. Gaskell, _Life of Charlotte Bront_, p. 217; also A.
C. Swinburne, Bonchurch Edition, vol. iv, pp. 47-48.]

Finally, as regards Emily's unbroken friendship and pity for Branwell
during these appalling years when the other sisters watched him, with
aversion or to point a moral, being wrecked by self-indulgence and dying
of consumption, we have only to read her poem _The Wanderer from the
Fold_, which was the last she ever wrote[78] and was composed between
Branwell's death in September 1848 and her own in December of the same
year. It is not questioned that it refers to him:

[Footnote 78: Charlotte Bront, in her _Selection from Poems by Ellis
Bell_, states that the last lines Emily ever wrote were that noble poem
'No coward soul is mine.' They were, however, only the final draft, with
very slight alterations, of a poem composed nearly two years before and
dated by her Jan. 2, 1846. See C. W. Hatfield, _Complete Poems of Emily
Bront_, pp. 55-56.]

  How few of all the hearts that loved,
    Are grieving for thee now:
  And why should mine to-night be moved
    With such a sense of woe?

  Too often thus, when left alone
    Where none my thoughts can see,
  Comes back a word, a passing tone
    From thy strange history.

  Sometimes I seem to see thee rise,
    A glorious child again;
  All virtues beaming from thine eyes
    That ever honoured men;

  Courage and truth, a generous breast
    Where sinless sunshine lay:
  A being whose very presence blest
    Like gladsome summer day.

  Oh, fairly spread thy early sail,
    And fresh and pure and free
  Was the first impulse of the gale
    Which urged life's wave for thee!

  Why did the pilot, too confiding,
    Dream o'er that ocean's foam,
  And trust in Pleasure's careless guiding
    To bring his vessel home?

  For well he knew what dangers frowned,
    What mists would gather dim;
  What rocks and shelves and sands lay round
    Between his port and him.

  The very brightness of the sun,
    The splendour of the main,
  The wind that blew him wildly on
    Should not have warned in vain.

  An anxious gazer from the shore--
    I marked the whitening wave,
  And wept above thy fate the more
    Because--I could not save.

  It recks not now, when all is over:
    But yet my heart will be
  A mourner still, though friend and lover
    Have both forgotten thee!

In May 1846 occurred Mr. Robinson's death. 'It served Branwell,' wrote
Charlotte, 'for a pretext to throw all about him into hubbub and
confusion with his emotion, &c. &c.' Of that sufficient has already been
said; all that is solid about it is that the year before he had
doubtless made love to the woman, and that very properly she told her
husband about it, who dismissed him and told him not to hold any
communication with her. Probably she was sorry for him and had friendly
feelings towards him, as a perfectly respectable woman may towards a man
who has tried to make love to her, for more than once subsequently
Charlotte records that Branwell had been sent presents of money from
'the old quarter,' which is sufficiently explicit. All the rest we may
confidently consider a fiction on Branwell's part, composed with the
object of making himself a love-lorn and tragic figure. Unfortunately
Charlotte believed, though with hesitation,[79] his fantastic tale, for
her letters to Ellen contain several most bitter allusions to Mrs.
Robinson, as if it was she who, by making advances to Branwell and then
throwing him over, was responsible for his degradation. With that we may
dismiss the rest of the sordid episode as being in the main a drunkard's
imaginings, since every detail of it can be directly traced to Branwell
himself.

[Footnote 79: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 332.]

       *       *       *       *       *

Early in June 1846, to judge by the date of reviews in the _Critic_ and
_Athenum_, the joint book of poems by the three sisters was published.
The _Critic_ gave it a very good notice; the _Athenum_ declared that
Ellis Bell had a 'fine quaint spirit'; but for the present only one copy
was actually purchased, fourteen being sent out for review.

Meanwhile the three novels were going their weary journeys, and after
long intervals returned to their authors with uncommenting refusals; and
Mr. Bront's eyes were getting worse. He could grope about still, but no
longer could he see the face of his watch which he took with him into
the pulpit on Sunday to regulate the length of his discourse; from
habit, however, he still preached for a precise half-hour. But his eyes
were now ripe for the operation, and in August Charlotte accompanied him
to Manchester, having with admirable efficiency made all arrangements
with the surgeon and having engaged lodgings for herself and him. She
was racked with toothache which kept her awake at night; she had no idea
how to cater for the nurse who would attend her father after the
operation, and on the very morning when it took place a fatal parcel
arrived which she knew to be the manuscript of _The Professor_, which,
like the dove, had once more found no resting-place. At her father's
wish she was present in the room throughout the operation, and during
the days that followed, when he had to remain in the dark in charge of
the nurse whom, as a stranger, she disliked and distrusted, she set to
work on a new novel, _Jane Eyre_.

  [Illustration: THE REV. PATRICK BRONT]

It would be hard to find an instance of a more indomitable pluck, a more
iron determination not to be overborne by any phalanx of adverse
circumstances. There was nothing whatever in prospect at home: there was
a drunken brother for whom she felt nothing but loathing and contempt;
every scheme which she had made for the career of herself and her
sisters had crumbled, their poems were still-born, their novels found
no publisher; life was passing away, she was earning nothing, and those
acquirements for teaching which she had won at such cost to her peace
were rusting in disuse. Most keenly and most bitterly and with an
ever-growing pessimism did she feel these tribulations, but her will and
the fire of her imagination flamed up unquenched through the smoke and
the damp smouldering; indeed, she found fuel in what would have finally
extinguished a less ardent soul. She stoked up the fires of her
imagination and threw into them the bitterness of heart with which she
wrote of her schooldays at Cowan Bridge and the death of her sisters. A
year had already elapsed since her 'discovery' of Emily's poems had
kindled, after long ash-covered smouldering, the flame of literary
ambition, and though that year had brought forth nothing but
disappointment, it burned unquenched. Hermetically secret about it,
never a word or hint did she vouchsafe to Ellen about what she had
written, what she and her sisters had published, or what she was now
writing.

But she confided to Ellen a certain resolution she had made, of
sufficient importance to be printed in capitals in one of her letters:
'And if I were ever again to find myself among strangers I should be
solicitous to examine before I condemned.' This confession is striking.
She was aware of her censorious habit, she knew it led her into
erroneous conclusions, and yet it seemed an integral part of her
character. She was too much of a fighter to rank herself with the
non-combatants who suffer long and are kind; she was ever harshly
critical of those who made her suffer. Strangers made her suffer, and
the first thing she looked for in them was faults. She was abnormally
shy of them; her shyness to the end of her days was torture to her, and
she attributed her discomfort to their odious qualities. It was from
this largely that her censoriousness sprang, but it was also due to her
constitutional pessimism which, always expecting to find blemishes in
others, was seldom disappointed. She was alert to detect faults, she was
extreme to mark what was done amiss. Indeed this practice seemed rather
to be a principle of hers, for she deprecated any sort of optimism about
others.

     I believe you are prone [she wrote a year or two later to Mr. W. S.
     Williams] to think too highly of your fellow-creatures in
     general--to see too exclusively the good points of those for whom
     you have a regard. Disappointment must be the inevitable result of
     this habit.

There is a certain cynical truth in her comment, but what she did not
perceive was that her own habit of being over-eager to see faults was
exactly what caused her _not_ to arrive at a regard for others; nor did
she perceive that those who go through life as she did, prone to think
disparagingly of her fellow-creatures, lose more than they gain by
saving themselves such inevitable disappointments, for they miss the
vastly outweighing rewards which come to the kindlier disposition which
is on the look-out for amiable qualities. Her instinct was always to
judge, and this deprived her of all the unreflecting enjoyment which is
part of the natural equipment of a normal human being: the light touch,
the indulgence for herself and others which is like yeast in the
otherwise heavy dough of existence, never seem to have been hers, nor
that sense of humour that makes human failings endearing rather than
culpable. This rigidity, pessimistic and puritanical, had the defects of
its qualities, and it resulted in that absence of charity which revealed
on all sides a multitude of sins, and it was the root of much of her
unhappiness. Not until the last months of her life did she find the only
possible antidote to it.

An alleviation to the monotonous gloom of the Parsonage this autumn was
the recovery of Mr. Bront's eyesight. By November he was in full
harness again, and capable of taking three Sunday services by himself.
That was a matter for thankfulness, but it passed into routine, and in
the winter she writes to Ellen that nothing pleasant happens at Haworth,
and the only thing that has 'stung us into life' was the arrival of a
sheriff's officer for Branwell, 'inviting him either to pay his debts or
take a trip to York.' Bitterness was about her path, and when Ellen
tells her about a new white dress which she looks forward to wearing,
while Charlotte commends her frankness in telling her of her pleasure,
she warns her against indiscriminate frankness, and hopes that 'an
overdose of vanity will not spoil this blessing and turn it into a
misfortune.' She sends Ellen a piece of lace, but hopes that the
Bradford Post Office will not steal it--for the officials there usually
open letters that seem to contain something interesting. Then, though
she had been firmly resolved that Ellen should not come to Haworth while
Branwell was there, she now invites her, for

     Branwell is quieter now and for a good reason; he has got to the
     end of a considerable sum of money, and consequently is obliged to
     restrict himself in some degree. You must expect to find him weaker
     in mind and a complete rake in appearance.

But the visit fell through: Ellen's sister had already arranged to be
away from home, and she could not leave her mother. Upon which vials of
wormwood and gall are outpoured: Charlotte says that she may find it
more difficult next time to arrange for Ellen to come. This entirely
unreasonable letter she subsequently withdrew with apologies.

By the summer of 1847 the book of poems had been out for a year, and in
spite of favourable notices in the _Critic_, the _Athenum_, and the
_Dublin University Magazine_, only two copies in all had been sold.
Before the remainder were scrapped Charlotte sent copies to Wordsworth,
Tennyson, Lockhart, and De Quincey, with an identical letter of homage
to each, in the name of the three authors, referring to the painful
efforts their publishers must have made in getting rid of even two
copies. To-day either of these would fetch at least a hundred pounds in
the auction room. Southey, it may be noticed, who nine years before had
very decidedly discouraged Charlotte from attempting to write verse, was
not sent one. The poetical career for herself and her sisters had
closed, and there was nothing to be done but to send the rest of the
slender volumes to the trunk-makers for a paper lining to their boxes.
But we cannot help wondering what would have been their fate if these
volumes had been slenderer still, and had contained only Emily's poems.
As it was, these were sandwiched between the work of her two sisters,
and that work, to speak quite frankly, is destitute of all poetical
quality and distinction. There is not a stanza or even a line in it all
which gleams or sings. Charlotte, in after days, at any rate, knew that
herself: she says, 'All of it that merits to be known are the poems of
Ellis Bell.' It is strange that, when first she was arranging for the
publication, that should not have struck her, and that her business
sense should not have perceived how terribly Emily's work was
handicapped by being wedged in between plain, pious, ponderous pages by
herself and Anne. No doubt the glamour of the joint ambition dazzled
her.

Ellen's deferred visit took place in August 1847: she came, she stayed,
and she went away again in complete ignorance of all the excitement that
raged beneath the peaceful surface at the Parsonage. For by now
_Wuthering Heights_ and _Agnes Grey_ had both been accepted by the
publisher Mr. T. C. Newby, after their pedlar-pilgrimages, and though
_The Professor_ made yet one more unsuccessful journey to Messrs. Smith,
Elder & Co., it came back on Charlotte's hands not with the 'two hard
hopeless lines' that had up till now accompanied its return, but, though
refused, with a critical letter of two pages, showing, as Charlotte
quaintly put it, 'a discrimination so enlightened that this very refusal
cheered the author better than a vulgarly expressed acceptance would
have done.' The firm also intimated that a manuscript of a three-volume
novel would receive careful reading. _Jane Eyre_, begun just a year ago,
at Manchester, when Mr. Bront was lying in a dark room after his
operation, was now nearly finished, and it was sent off to the
publishers on August 24.

The reader for the firm, Mr. W. S. Williams, was enthusiastic about the
book, so also was Mr. Smith, and it was at once accepted for publication
in the autumn. Only a few weeks ago the prospect had been absolutely
blank: two copies only of the joint volume of poems had been sold, and
the three novels begun in the autumn of 1845 had journeyed wearily from
publisher to publisher, returning always to Haworth. Now each sister had
found a market for her wares, and among them was a book of supreme and
matchless passion and _Jane Eyre_. Had it not been for Charlotte's
discovery of Emily's poems two years before, and for the failure of her
scheme to set up school, it is possible that neither of them would have
been written. The Misses Bront would have had a boarding-school for
girls at Haworth Parsonage, and it would have kept them busy.




CHAPTER XIII


This visit of Ellen's to Haworth in August was returned by a visit of
Charlotte's to Brookroyd the next month. Proofs of _Jane Eyre_ were
coming in fast, for it was being hurried through the Press, and
Charlotte sat at the same table as her friend, with the printed galleys
in front of her, yet not a word of question or volunteered information
passed between them. Charlotte peered into her proofs and Ellen, with
that excellent tact which characterised her, was completely blind to
what was going on under her eyes. She must have been perfectly aware
that Charlotte was correcting proofs and had therefore written a book,
and the image of these two intimate friends sitting there in silence
with this so highly exciting evidence sprawling on the table between
them makes a pleasing picture.

She returned to Haworth and found her boxes stuffed with presents from
her kindly friend. There was an eye-screen for Mr. Bront, a peck of
apples and a collar for Emily, who was pleased but astonished, a 'crab
cheese' for Anne, that soothed her cough, a cap for Tabby, and a jar of
preserves for Charlotte, for all which bounties Ellen got duly scolded.
Other news from Haworth was that Mr. Nicholls was on holiday in Ireland,
and that Anne's delicate chest found the east winds troublesome. Mr.
Grant, the master of Haworth Grammar School, as yet unconscious that
Charlotte was taking note of his behaviour, and that he was to figure
among the curates of her next book, was full of unintelligible apologies
for not having made more of Ellen during her visit to Haworth. The
foolish creature! 'Why apologise for conduct which caused no suffering
whatever?...' But what about Miss Amelia Ringrose, a young lady who had
lately developed a _schwrm_ for Ellen? Charlotte had never seen her,
and had never been more interested about a total stranger. Of Branwell
not a word, and not a word of _Jane Eyre_.

Currer Bell's book was published on October 16, and was an instant
success not only with the ordinary fiction-reading public, but with the
literary world. Thackeray's praise, conveyed in a letter to the
publishers, was particularly pleasing to Charlotte, for she already
admired his work (_Vanity Fair_ was at the time coming out in parts),
and his admiration of _Jane Eyre_ accentuated her belief in his
judgment. 'No author,' she wrote, 'seems to distinguish so exquisitely
as he does dross from ore, the real from the counterfeit. I believed too
he had deep and true feelings under his seeming sternness. Now I am sure
he has....'

The popular enthusiasm over _Jane Eyre_ as well as that of the literary
world was not to be wondered at. The plot, though wholly incredible, is
highly exciting; it teems with the stimulating impossibilities of
shockers and best sellers. Mr. Rochester for years kept a lunatic wife
on the third floor of his country-house, in charge of a gin-drinking
maid, instead of putting her in an asylum, and none of the other
servants nor Jane Eyre, who was governess to Mr. Rochester's
illegitimate child, knew anything about it. The house resounded with her
demoniac laughter: she attempted to burn her husband in his bed, she bit
her brother, and on the eve of the wedding of Jane Eyre to Rochester,
she came to her room in the middle of the night and tore her bridal
veil in half. No scruple about committing bigamy ever entered
Rochester's head; he blandly proposed to marry the eighteen-year-old
governess of his illegitimate child, and his intention was only thwarted
by the intervention at the marriage-service itself of his brother-in-law
and his lawyer. He then suggested to Jane Eyre that, since he had been
prevented from tricking her into a bogus marriage, she should become his
mistress. This she refused to do, and, though still madly adoring him
and unresentful of his monstrous deception, ran away, and after spending
her last penny on a coach fare, left her belongings in the coach, and
scoured the country on foot for two days. Finally she dropped, dripping
and exhausted, on the threshold of the house where her three first
cousins happened to live, of whose existence she was not aware, but who
were the only relations she had in the world. She then found that she
was the heiress of an uncle who had died leaving her 20,000, which she
divided up between her cousins and herself. Her male cousin, Rev. St.
John Rivers, who was going out to be a missionary in India, decided that
she must accompany him. It would cause scandal if they were not married,
and so he told her that, though they were not in the least in love with
each other, she must become his wife. Previously she had felt not the
slightest interest in anything connected with missions, but she
consented to go out with him, though not as his wife, and for that
purpose learned Hindustanee. He still insisted on marriage, and she was
on the point of yielding when she heard a phantom voice coming from the
moonlit night calling 'Jane, Jane!' She knew it to be the voice of
Edward Rochester, and ran out into the garden exclaiming, 'Where are
you?' No answer came, and she commented: 'Down superstition. This is not
thy deception nor thy witchcraft, it is the work of nature. She was
roused and did--no miracle--but her best.' So she hurried back to
Thornfield, and found that Mrs. Rochester had again set fire to the
house, that a burning beam had fallen on her husband when he tried to
rescue her, and that he was stone blind. The maniac had jumped off the
roof and was killed. So Jane Eyre sought him out and married him. He
recovered his sight and they had a baby.

Such is the mere plot of _Jane Eyre_, a tissue of violences,
absurdities, and coincidences, not less ludicrous than those glimpses of
high life, in which Blanche Ingram of the 'raven ringlets and the
oriental eye' addresses her mother as 'Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park,'
and says to the footman, 'Cease thy chatter, blockhead, and do my
bidding.' The didactic passages, of which there are many, the hortatory
passages (as when Jane Eyre draws a picture of herself in chalks,
'smoothing away no displeasing irregularity,' and then an imaginary and
ideal portrait of Miss Ingram, in order to cure herself of her vain
aspirations towards Mr. Rochester) are written in a style of incredible
pomposity:

     Order! No Snivel--no sentiment--no regret! (thus she addresses
     herself) I will endure only sense and resolution. Recall the august
     yet harmonious lineaments, the Grecian neck and bust; let the round
     and dazzling arm be visible, and the delicate hand; omit neither
     diamond ring nor gold bracelet ... call it 'Blanche, an
     accomplished lady of rank.'

But over all such extravagances the greatness of the book rises
triumphant and supreme by reason of its beauty and its white-hot
sincerity: all its faults are consumed in that furnace. Never before in
the history of English fiction had there been anything to approach this
picture of pure passion, not only of a man for a woman, but of a woman
for a man. To the delicacies and pruderies of the early Victorian age
the shock must have been terrific, but high and low, rich and poor,
found that it was no use being shocked; they had to read it, and it was
its fiery splendour rather than the shock of it that left them gasping.
It was in no sense a designed revolt against the conventions of the day
in literature and living: it merely disregarded them, was unconscious of
them. Charlotte was not preaching, she was telling a story about an
insignificant little woman who knew what she meant when she spoke of
love, its sufferings and its fiery quality which burns up like dross all
sentimentality and softness. The message in her book spoke direct to the
soul of humanity, and instantly it had its architectural place in the
literature of the world, weight-bearing and massive. Often and often in
herself the larger vision, the sweep of the serene sky, was obscured as
with clouds and peevish squalls, with censoriousness and bitterness,
with want of compassion and decrying judgments, with the desire to
preach and to scold, but behind was this clear shining.

Naturally, as is always the case when something new and startling and
disturbing leaps to light, there were bitter criticisms of her work
which, as was equally natural in one of her temperament, she bitterly
resented. But she insisted on seeing all unfavourable reviews, and
though her avowed object was to profit by them, the real effect of them
was to make her blood boil with a sense of their injustice and
stupidity.

     It would take a good deal to crush me [she robustly wrote to Mr.
     Williams], because I know in the first place that my intentions
     were correct, that I feel in my heart a deep reverence for
     religion, that impiety is very abhorrent to me; and in the second I
     place firm reliance in the judgment of some who have encouraged me.

In fact, so far from being crushed, adverse criticism only caused her to
take the gloomiest views of the character of those who expressed it.

     I was aware [she wrote to her old mistress, Miss Wooler] that some
     persons thought proper to take exception to _Jane Eyre_, and that
     for their own sakes I was sorry, as I invariably found them
     individuals in whom the animal largely predominated over the
     intellectual, persons by nature coarse, by inclination sensual.[80]

[Footnote 80: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, p. 115.]

Most of all she resented any speculation as to the sex of Currer Bell;
that seemed a most unwarrantable prying into her private affairs and she
could not see that such a curiosity was legitimate. She believed that a
woman novelist was not taken seriously either by the public or the
critics; she did not have a chance, and Charlotte wanted her work to be
judged as if it were the work of a man. Besides, there was the secret of
Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell to keep, and though her publishers
suspected Currer Bell was a woman, she did not yet reveal herself even
to them.

It was not till December, when the success of _Jane Eyre_ had made it
what we now call 'the novel of the season,' that her sisters induced
Charlotte to tell Mr. Bront of her fame. She gave Mrs. Gaskell an
account of the announcement in a delicious bit of dialogue.

     'Papa, I've been writing a book.'

     'Have you, my dear?'

     'Yes, I want you to read it.'

     'I am afraid it will try my eyes too much.' [Charlotte wrote a
     microscopic hand.]

     'But it is not in manuscript; it is printed.'

     'My dear! You've never thought of the expense it will be. It will
     be almost sure to be a loss, for how can you get a book sold? No
     one knows you or your name.'

     'But, papa, I don't think it will be a loss; no more will you if
     you will just let me read you a review or two, and tell you more
     about it.'

     This was done, and he came in to tea, and said, 'Girls, do you know
     Charlotte has been writing a book and it is much better than
     likely?'[81]

[Footnote 81: Mrs. Gaskell, _Charlotte Bront_, p. 251.]

Evidently, then, Mr. Bront knew nothing about the joint book of poems,
or about _Wuthering Heights_, and _Agnes Grey_, which also came out in
December 1847. The sisters had paid 50 for the printing and publishing
of 350 copies, but it appears that the publisher only printed 250
copies.[82] There was journalistic speculation as to the actual
authorship of _Wuthering Heights_; it was suggested that it was an
earlier and immature work by the author of _Jane Eyre_, but Charlotte at
present took little heed of such attributions: 'the critics,' she wrote
to Mr. Williams, 'are welcome to confuse our identities as much as they
choose.'

[Footnote 82: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, p. 169.]

_Wuthering Heights_ appears to have sold decently,[83] but it attracted
no critical homage for many months yet, and Charlotte's occasional
allusions to it in her letters show how little appreciation she herself
had of it, and how profoundly she misunderstood it and the savagery of
its supreme genius. Writing, for instance, of Heathcliff, that
masterpiece of wild pagan passion, she says: 'The worst of it is some of
his spirit seems breathed through the whole narrative, in which he
figures, it haunts every moor and glen, and beckons in every fir-tree of
the Heights.' She did not see that the terrific and appalling impression
that moor and glen and fir-tree are permeated by Heathcliff is not 'the
worst of it,' but that in this very point, namely, that he is somehow
incarnate of the wild moorland, there lies the proof and the very seal
of the genius of the book. She unmistakably sounds a note of apology, of
excuse for Emily.

[Footnote 83: _Id._ vol. i, p. 395.]

     Ellis [she informed Mr. Williams] has a strong original mind, full
     of strange though sombre power. When he writes poetry that power
     speaks in language at once condensed, elaborated and refined, but
     in prose it breaks forth in scenes which shock more than they
     attract. Ellis will improve, however, because he knows his defects.

But she thought that neither poetry nor fiction were really Ellis's
_forte_, for to the same correspondent she writes, 'I should say Ellis
will not be seen in his full strength till he is seen as an essayist.'
It seems scarcely credible that she was writing about the author of
_Wuthering Heights_, and one vainly and impotently wonders what sort of
essay it would be and on what subject, that would reveal the full
strength of Emily Bront which _Wuthering Heights_ only partially
disclosed. Still, sticking up for her sister, Charlotte says she would
not be ashamed to have written it. Her maturer reflections about
_Wuthering Heights_, when she re-read it, belong to a later period. Of
_Agnes Grey_ all she says is that it is the mirror of the mind of the
writer. From this judgment it is impossible to differ.

       *       *       *       *       *

With the publication and success of _Jane Eyre_ the twilight of
nothingness, to which at one time there had seemed to Charlotte to be no
end but the complete darkness of age and death, had given place to the
most brilliant dawn. Her horizons and possibilities had endlessly
expanded, the tonic of success had vivified her. In January 1848 a
second edition of _Jane Eyre_ was issued, and she wrote a militant
preface to it, in which her views about her critics were expressed with
singular directness. She thanked the public and her publishers, and
portions of the Press, namely, the 'select reviewers' who 'had
encouraged her as only large-hearted and high-minded men know how.' Then
there were some resounding smacks for 'the timorous and carping few who
doubted the tendency of such books as _Jane Eyre_.' She reminded them
that: 'Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not
religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the
mask from the face of the Pharisee is not to lift an impious hand to the
Crown of Thorns.' Then followed a panegyric on Thackeray, to whom she
dedicated this second edition. He was an eagle compared with that
carrion-feeding vulture Fielding: he came before high Society like the
son of Imlah before the Kings of Israel and Judah, and hurled at it the
Greek fire of his sarcasm and the levin bolt of his denunciation: they
had better attend to him if they wished to escape a Ramoth-gilead.
Thackeray, she was afraid, did not much care for this dedication--which
seems probable, for, when thanking her for it, he told her that he, like
Mr. Rochester, had a mad wife, and people said that _Jane Eyre_ was
written by his governess.

This second edition sold well, and soon after there arose the question
of its dramatisation and production at some minor theatre. Charlotte
shuddered at the thought of seeing it, but steeled herself to endure the
'rant and whine, strut and grimace for the sake of the useful
observations to be collected in such a scene.' Nothing apparently came
of this, but a year afterwards it was dramatised by John Brougham and
produced in New York.

Among those who had been immensely struck with _Jane Eyre_ was G. H.
Lewes, who wrote to her that he intended to contribute a review of it to
_Fraser's Magazine_. Charlotte had not heard of him before, but she now
got his novel _Ranthorpe_, which she highly praised, and subsequently
_Rose Blanche and Violet_, of which the 'didactic passages profound and
acute' pleased her best. The correspondence between them is chiefly
notable for her views on Jane Austen. Lewes had held her up as a master
of technique, so Charlotte got _Pride and Prejudice_ on his
recommendation. It was a matter of amazement to her that anyone could
admire it. She only found

     an accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face: a
     carefully fenced highly cultivated garden with neat borders and
     delicate flowers: but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no
     open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should
     hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant
     but confined houses.

Shrewd and discreet Jane Austen might be, but nothing more. Lewes tried
again: he conceded that Jane Austen had no poetry, 'no sentiment,' but
told Charlotte that she '_must_ learn to acknowledge her as one of the
greatest artists, of the greatest painters of human nature, and one of
the writers with the nicest sense of means to an end that ever lived.'
But that lack of poetry condemned her to Charlotte's sense: Miss Austen
might be sensible, she might be real, but she could not be great. Years
after she tried _Emma_, but it was quite hopeless: her final conclusion
was that Jane Austen was a 'very incomplete and rather insensible (not
senseless) woman.' The explanation of her entire want of appreciation,
as has been already suggested, seems to be that Charlotte was, in actual
fact, entirely devoid of any subtle sense of humour, and therefore could
not understand Jane Austen's.

In her contract with Messrs. Smith, Elder for _Jane Eyre_, Charlotte had
promised them to give them the refusal of two further novels.[84] _Jane
Eyre_ must have been scarcely out before she set to work again, for less
than two months afterwards she had made three attempts to start a fresh
book, none of which satisfied her. One of these, probably, was the
fragment of thirty-six pages, unpublished in her lifetime, called _The
Moores_. It is usually assigned to a later date, _circa_ 1852, but it is
unlikely that after the publication of _Shirley_, in which the Moores
figure so largely, she should have chosen such a title. She then read
over the discarded _Professor_ again, finding the beginning very
feeble, and noting its deficiency in incident. 'Yet the middle and
latter portion of the work,' so she wrote to Mr. Williams,[85] 'all that
relates to Brussels and the Belgian school, etc., is as good as I can
write.' She therefore proposed to recast it and make a three-volume
novel of it, but asked Mr. Williams's advice on the subject, for _The
Professor_ had already been refused by his firm. We gather that he was
against it, for Charlotte dropped the idea and at once began on
_Shirley_, taking up, probably, one of her previous three attempts. It
is interesting to observe that the idea of doing something with _The
Professor_ had already entered her mind. She was right enough in her
depreciation of it, as it stood, and she was eminently right in
realising that the Brussels section contained the germ of a masterpiece.
Again she put it back to simmer in her mind and made it the stock-pot
for _Villette_.

[Footnote 84: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 432.]

[Footnote 85: December 14, 1847.]

With all these new interests and correspondences to occupy her,
Charlotte's letters to Ellen were few; perhaps she found it difficult to
write to so old a friend and refrain from any allusion to what filled
her mind and energies. She had bitter things to say about Mrs. Robinson.
'That woman is a hopeless being: calculated to bring a curse wherever
she goes, by the mixture of weakness, perversion and deceit in her
nature.' The reason for this outburst was evident, for in another letter
of close date she says:

     Branwell has, by some means, contrived to get more money from the
     old quarter, and has led us a sad life with his absurd and often
     intolerable conduct. Papa is harassed day and night; we have little
     peace: he (Branwell) is always sick, has two or three times fallen
     down in fits, what will be the ultimate end, God knows. But who is
     without these drawbacks, these scourges, these skeletons behind the
     curtain?

We gather that Miss Ringrose's devotion to Ellen still flourished, for
she had written to Charlotte almost entirely about her, with 'a kind of
gentle enthusiasm of affection enough to make one at once smile and
weep--her feelings are half truth, half illusion. No human being could
be what she supposes you to be.' The two friends exchanged birthday
letters in April, for their anniversaries fell on the same day, and
Charlotte, now thirty-two, felt that youth was irrevocably over; over
also was her own youthful devotion to Ellen which had once gilded her
with all the perfections that Miss Ringrose so pathetically found in her
still.

Then Ellen, who, some six months before, had seen Charlotte correcting
the proof sheets of _Jane Eyre_ under her very eyes, and who therefore
must have known all along that Charlotte had a book in the press,
summoned up her courage to break silence, and wrote that a report had
reached her that Charlotte had written a book. The vehemence of
Charlotte's reply probably carried conviction that this report was
perfectly true, for under cover of an indignant virtual denial she never
denied anything at all.

     I have given _no one_ [she wrote] a right either to affirm or hint,
     in the most distant manner, that I am 'publishing'--(humbug!).
     Whoever has said it,--if anyone has, which I doubt--is no friend of
     mine. Though twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none. I
     scout the idea utterly. Whoever, after I have distinctly rejected
     the charge, urges it upon me, will do an unkind and an ill-bred
     thing. The most profound obscurity is infinitely preferable to
     vulgar notoriety and that notoriety I neither seek nor will have.
     If therefore any Birstallian or Gomersallian should presume to bore
     you on the subject,--to ask what 'novel' Miss Bront has been
     'publishing'--you can just say with the distinct firmness of which
     you are perfect mistress, when you choose, that you are authorized
     by Miss Bront to say that she repels and disowns every accusation
     of the kind. You may add, if you please, that if any one has her
     confidence, you believe you have, and she has made no drivelling
     confession to you on the subject....

Surely the lady protested too much; had she not written a novel, she
could never have shown such heat in repelling the accusation.

It is difficult to determine when Ellen was told: Charlotte did not want
it to be known in the neighbourhood, and it was a secret in which her
sisters shared. But such discretion need not be observed with Mary
Taylor in New Zealand, and Charlotte sent her a copy of _Jane Eyre_,
making no mystery about it, before these strenuous disclaimers.

But soon a certain acknowledgment of authorship became necessary. Anne
having finished her second novel, _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_, sent it
to Mr. T. C. Newby, who had brought out _Wuthering Heights_ and _Agnes
Grey_, and he had been offered a high price for it by an American
publisher as being a new work by the author of _Jane Eyre_. He believed
(so he said) that the three Bront novels already published were by one
hand--in fact, that Currer Bell had really written them all. Meanwhile
Messrs. Smith, Elder, with whom Charlotte had contracted for her next
book, had promised it to another firm in America, and now found that
what purported to be Currer Bell's next book (_The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall_) was already being negotiated for there by Newby. Upon which Mr.
Smith naturally wrote to Currer Bell asking for explanations. It was
necessary, therefore, in order to establish their separate entities and
prove their good faith, that Charlotte and Anne should show themselves
to the firm, the one as the author of _Jane Eyre_, the other of _Agnes
Grey_ and the forthcoming _Tenant of Wildfell Hall_. Without wasting
time the two sisters packed a small box and walked through a snowstorm
(the month being July) to Keighley and took the night train for London.
They washed and breakfasted at the Chapter Coffee House, Paternoster
Row, where Charlotte had stayed in her journey to Brussels, and then set
off on foot for 65 Cornhill.

An extremely dramatic scene, quite in the style of Euripidean
recognition, followed. They asked for Mr. Smith, giving no names, and
were after some delay shown up to his room. A tall young man received
them, and Charlotte, having made sure that it was he, gave into his hand
the disquieting letter she had received from him the morning before,
directed to Currer Bell. He looked at it and asked where she had got it.
Then came the recognition: the little lady in spectacles, who now gave
her name as Miss Bront, was Currer Bell, author of _Jane Eyre_, and the
other one was Acton Bell. They all cursed the perfidious Newby, and Mr.
Williams, with whom Charlotte had been in effusive correspondence, was
introduced. He was pale, mild and fifty, and there was a long nervous
shaking of hands all round.

The business part of the expedition being thus accomplished, a whirl of
socialities followed. With a passion for further incognito the sisters
called themselves the Misses Brown for introduction to Mr. Smith's
friends, and wearing their 'plain high-made country garments' they went
that evening to the opera.

     Fine ladies and gentlemen [wrote Charlotte] glanced at us with a
     slight graceful superciliousness quite warranted by the
     circumstances. Still, I felt pleasantly excited in spite of
     headache and sickness and conscious clownishness, and I saw Anne
     was calm and gentle as she always is.

Next morning, the day being Sunday, they went to church with Mr.
Williams, and afterwards Mr. Smith and his mother took them out to their
'splendid house' in Bayswater, six miles from Cornhill; there was a fine
dinner but no appetite. On Monday there were visits to the Royal Academy
and the National Gallery, another dinner with Mr. Smith, and then tea at
Mr. Williams's 'comparatively humble but neat residence' with his
family of eight children, about one of whom Charlotte had already
counselled him, as to her becoming a governess. There was singing by a
daughter of Leigh Hunt's, and on Tuesday morning they returned to
Haworth laden with books. It had all been highly successful and
exciting, but very exhausting; social pleasures and the presence of
strangers had wrecked Charlotte.

     A more jaded wretch than I looked, when I returned, [she wrote] it
     would be difficult to conceive. I was thin when I went, but was
     meagre indeed when I returned; my face looked grey and very old
     with strange deep lines ploughed in it, my eyes stared
     unnaturally....

But successful though that expedition had been, and pleased though
Charlotte was at terminating with her publishers a mystery that had
become irksome, she found that in her disclosure of identities to Mr.
Smith she had gone too far, and when she returned to Haworth she was
made aware of it. For not only had she revealed herself and Anne as
being Currer and Acton Bell, but she had revealed Emily as being Ellis
Bell. Once more, as by the 'discovery' of her poems, she had invaded her
sister's privacy and Emily strongly resented it. In consequence
Charlotte wrote to Mr. Williams:

     Permit me to caution you not to speak of my sisters when you write
     to me; I mean do not use the word in the plural. Ellis Bell will
     not endure to be alluded to under any appellation other than the
     _nom de plume_. I committed a grand error in betraying his identity
     to you and Mr. Smith. It was inadvertent--the words 'we are three
     sisters' escaped me before I was aware. I regretted the avowal the
     moment I had made it: I regret it bitterly now, for I find it is
     against every feeling and intention of Ellis Bell.

This incident is significant. At the least it accentuates our sense of
the estrangement and misunderstandings between the two sisters, which
must have been rendered more acute by Emily's befriendings of Branwell
in these three years, during which Charlotte had recorded, in bulletins
to her friends, his growing degradation and her horror of him. To see
more in it than that is perhaps a mistake, though those who believe, not
without cause, that Branwell had something to do with _Wuthering
Heights_, argue from it, plausibly and ingeniously, Emily's repudiation
of sole authorship: she knew, though Charlotte did not, that there had
been a collaboration between her and the outcast brother. But Emily's
exasperation about Charlotte's original raid on her private papers is
sufficient to account for her resentment now against this second
disclosure.

For six months Charlotte had issued no news of Branwell, but in July
1848 she wrote to Ellen: 'Branwell is the same as ever and his
constitution seems shattered. Papa, and sometimes all of us, have sad
nights with him, he sleeps most of the day, and consequently will lie
awake at night.' This letter contains, as did the one in which she last
spoke of her brother in January, another fierce attack on Mrs. Robinson.
Her daughters, in almost daily correspondence with Anne, were about to
make, says Charlotte, loveless marriages in obedience to her wish. 'Of
their mother,' she writes: 'I have not patience to speak, a worse woman,
I believe, hardly exists; the more I hear of her, the more deeply she
revolts me.' This repeated coupling of Branwell's deterioration with
such expressions about Mrs. Robinson perhaps implies the belief that she
was originally responsible for Branwell's ruin, but Charlotte does not
definitely state that, nor does she show the slightest softening towards
him.

But the house was soon to be rid of its 'scourge and its skeleton behind
the curtain.' He was a complete wreck, and no longer to be accounted
sane. Consumption was making rapid inroads into a frame already
hopelessly debilitated by drink and drugs, and all the summer he had
been failing fast. We have but one glimpse more of him, which must be
given chiefly because it throws light on what his sisters and father
must have gone through during the past three years, living in the house
with him.

His friend Francis Grundy came to Haworth to see Branwell two days
before his death. He ordered dinner at the 'Black Bull,' and sent a
message up to the Parsonage to ask him to come. Mr. Grundy's account
proceeds:

     Whilst I waited his appearance his father was shewn in. Much of the
     Rector's old stiffness of manner was gone. He spoke of Branwell
     with more affection than I had ever heretofore heard him express,
     but he also spoke almost hopelessly. He said that when my message
     came, Branwell was in bed, and had been almost too weak to leave
     it: nevertheless he had insisted upon coming, and would be there
     immediately. We parted and I never saw him again.

     Presently the door opened cautiously and a head appeared. It was a
     mass of red, unkempt, uncut hair, wildly floating round a great
     gaunt forehead, the cheeks yellow and hollow, the mouth fallen, the
     thin white lips not trembling, but shaking; the sunken eyes once
     small, now glaring with the light of madness--all told the sad tale
     but too surely.... He glanced at me a moment and muttered something
     of leaving a warm bed to come out into the cold night. Another
     glass of brandy, and returning warmth gradually brought him back to
     something like the Bront of old. He even ate some dinner, a thing
     which he said he had not done for long: so our last interview was
     pleasant though grave. I never knew his intellect clearer. He
     described himself as waiting anxiously for death--indeed longing
     for it, and happy, in his sane moments, to think that it was so
     near. He once again declared that death would be due to the story I
     knew, and to nothing else.

     When at last I was compelled to leave, he quietly drew from his
     coat-sleeve a carving knife, placed it on the table, and holding
     me by both hands, said that having given up all thoughts of seeing
     me again, he imagined when my message came, that it was a call from
     Satan. Dressing himself, he took the knife, which he had long
     secreted, and came to the inn with a full determination to rush
     into the room and stab the occupant. In the excited state of his
     mind he did not recognise me when he opened the door, but my voice
     and manner conquered him, and 'brought him home to himself,' as he
     expressed it. I left him standing bareheaded in the road, with
     bowed form and dripping tears. A few days afterwards he died.[86]

[Footnote 86: F. H. Grundy, _Pictures of the Past_, pp. 90-92.]

Now doubt has been cast on this piteous story, because, if Branwell was
dying, he could not have left his bed; but, as Charlotte wrote to Ellen
Nussey, he was in bed for only one complete day, and went into the
village two days before his death,[87] without doubt for this meeting
with Grundy. He died on September 24, 1848.

[Footnote 87: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, pp. 445, 457.]

Charlotte neither felt nor made pretence of feeling any personal grief.
She wrote to her friend Mr. Williams:

     We have buried our dead out of sight. A lull begins to succeed the
     gloomy tumult of last week. It is not permitted us to grieve for
     him who is gone as others grieve for those they love. The removal
     of our only brother must necessarily be regarded by us in the light
     of a mercy rather than a chastisement.


She told him that religion and principle had never meant anything to
Branwell, and it was not till within a few days of his end that he
believed in them at all, and then came 'conviction of their existence
and worth,' and it was a 'strange change.' He said 'Amen' to the last
prayer Mr. Bront recited by his bedside. 'How unusual that word
appeared from his lips, of course you, who did not know him, cannot
conceive.' Charlotte felt she could now forgive all the wrong he had
done and the pain he had caused her, and adds, 'If man can thus
experience total oblivion of his fellow-creatures' imperfections, how
much more can the Eternal Being who made man, forgive His creatures?' It
is on her forgiveness of her brother that she chiefly dwells, and to
Ellen and her sister she repeats that. 'All his vices were and are
nothing now. We remember only his woes....' It was perhaps to be
regretted that she had not remembered some of his woes a little sooner,
and given him a glance of pity while he was able to receive it. Indeed
she had more compassion for the profligate and the insane wife of Mr.
Rochester in _Jane Eyre_ than she had for Branwell in his lifetime, for
she wrote to Mr. Williams with greater charity about her: 'Mrs.
Rochester indeed lived a sinful life before she was insane, but sin is
itself a species of insanity--the truly good behold and compassionate it
as such.'

The shadow which for the last three years had darkened and embittered
life for Charlotte was gone, and she put all thought of him from her;
only three times in her very voluminous correspondence did she make
further mention of Branwell. Once she says that Mr. James Taylor, who,
three years later, proposed marriage with her, was markedly like him,
adding that when he looked at her 'her veins ran ice'; once she fears
that Joe Taylor is going the same way as Branwell, and that a
prospective marriage between him and Amelia Ringrose must end in
hopeless misery; once she says that if she had a brother living she
would not let him read Thackeray's lecture on Fielding, for it made
light of such serious vices as drunkenness. His name was added to those
of his mother and his sisters Maria and Elizabeth on the tablet in
Haworth Church, and _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_, which Anne had
written to warn others concerning the wages of sin, went into a second
edition.




CHAPTER XIV


Charlotte had been taken ill and was confined to bed for a week
immediately after Branwell's death, and she could not go to his funeral,
nor, to her great regret, be of use in comforting her father, who 'cried
out for his loss like David for that of Absalom.' But hardly was the
gloom which had darkened the Parsonage for three years removed, and the
prospect of comfort restored, when death, instead of life, eclipsed the
sunshine again. Branwell's funeral was the last occasion on which Emily
left the house. She had a bad cold and cough, which grew worse, and
before the end of October it was clear that she was seriously ill. She
would not let a doctor see her, she would answer none of Charlotte's
questions, she would take no medicine. In every letter that Charlotte
wrote during these two months before Emily's death she wailed about this
barrier that her sister had set between them, agonising that she was not
permitted to approach her.

     Her reserved nature occasions me great uneasiness of mind.... To
     put any question, to offer any aid, is to annoy.... You must look
     on and see her do what is unfit to do, and not dare to say a
     word.... She will not give an explanation of her feelings, she will
     scarcely allow her illness to be alluded to.... Would that my
     sister added to her great qualities the humble one of
     tractability.... She neither seeks nor will accept sympathy:--

such sentences as these occur everywhere. Stoical and secret as Emily
was by nature, it is impossible not to see in so rigid an isolation of
herself some special token of an estrangement which she would not suffer
to be reconciled, and she fenced herself against any invasion even of
sympathy. More than once her privacy had been broken into, and she would
brook no further interference. For the last three years, too, there had
been that silent daily antagonism over Branwell growing between
Charlotte and her, and for these three months between his death and
hers, the memory of their brother stood between them. Charlotte had had
no pity for a publican and a sinner, and Emily, 'full of ruth for
others,' would not accept for herself the compassion that had been
withheld from him, nor allow her sister to pass the barrier which her
ruthlessness had helped to build. Yearn and agonise as she might for the
love and confidence which, partly by her own hardness, she had
forfeited, they were not to be granted her now. Her very uprightness,
the stern Puritanism of her nature, no doubt had invested her hardness
with the garb of duty, just as Anne, in order to save others from such a
career of profligacy and bestial self-indulgence as had brought her
brother to ruin, had felt it a matter of conscience to make copy of him
in the book that had come out a few months before his death. That, too,
had been monstrous in Emily's eyes. Anne no doubt, like Charlotte, could
forgive her brother now, but Emily, lover of the moor and the wild
things there, would not accept sympathy from these stern moralists, nor
soften to their appeal.

She went about her household work as long as her panting lungs would
suffer her to mount the stairs or knead the bread. She wrote her requiem
for her brother, and she revised and copied out her own salute to death.
Refusing till the end to stop in bed, she rose daily at seven, dressed
herself and came down, remaining there every night till ten o'clock, and
then once more she dragged herself upstairs, and set her lamp in the
window looking out over the snow-wreaths where once she had waited for
the rustle of wings that betokened the coming of the 'Strange Power'
that inspired her, and where now she waited for the sound of the wings
of the Angel of Death. It was cold weather; there was a fire in her
room, and one morning as she combed her hair, sitting before it, the
comb dropped from her hands into the grate, where it lay on the hot
cinders of the hearth. She was too weak to bend and pick it up, and
waited till Martha came in, who rescued it from the singeing; then she
finished her dressing and went downstairs. Almost to the end she fed the
dogs Keeper and Flossie after supper; she had set her wild hawk free;
there was the empty cage.

On the evening of December 18 Charlotte had been reading her an essay by
Emerson; seeing she was not listening she had stopped, intending to
finish it next day. In the morning Emily came downstairs as usual, and
the sisters and their father breakfasted together in the dining-room,
and then Mr. Bront went to his study across the flagged passage. The
meal was cleared and Emily took up her sewing.

But Charlotte, looking at her, saw that a change had come. It was no use
asking her questions, for she would not answer them, and presently she
went out. She walked up the lane to the moor which Emily loved: 'flowers
brighter than the rose bloomed for her there,' and her errand was to
search to see if even on this mid-December morning she could find just
one sprig of heather-bloom, however withered, to bring back. Emily would
understand what she meant. Peering short-sightedly in the more sheltered
hollows she found one and plucked it, and returned to the Parsonage. She
did not speak to her sister, but laid it on the table by her, as she
worked at her sewing. Emily glanced at it and no more. Yet she must
have known that it came from the moor; she must have guessed what
Charlotte meant by going out to pick it for her. But it was too late:
the withered sprig brought no message of its own, and as a token, mute
and infinitely pathetic, of her sister's longing to reach her and break
for a moment the ice of her reserve it was meaningless; the time for
such piteous signalling was over. Perhaps she struggled with herself to
give, if not a word, a look to show that she understood, or perhaps this
token seemed a mere sentimentality, a cheap attempt to undo the
irrevocable. She was as ruthless then to Charlotte as she was to
herself, and the sprig of heather lay by her unheeded.

Useless: and Charlotte drew up to the table and wrote to Ellen. Emily,
she said, was daily weaker; there was no word of hope to give. She
herself had written some days before to Dr. Epps, recommended by Mr.
Williams, a statement of Emily's symptoms; she had received but a vague
answer with some medicine, which Emily would not take. This letter can
hardly have been finished and sent to the post when the last struggle
began. Emily fought for life then; she whispered that she would see a
doctor now if he were sent for. But before he could come the cage was
empty, and the wild hawk flown.

       *       *       *       *       *

Those three years and a half, from that day in July 1845, when Charlotte
came home and learned for what reason Branwell would go back no more to
his tutorship, down to the winter day in December 1848 when Keeper
followed Emily's coffin to the church and then to the grave beside her
brother, comprise the most tragic act in the domestic drama of the
thrice tragic family. But now those tipsy bawlings, those opium dreams,
those silent animosities, those ruthlessnesses were over, and over were
the agonised questions to which no answer was given, for Branwell and
Emily both lay in the quiet earth, where she, at any rate, could not
imagine for herself and him unquiet slumbers. Yet from blighted days and
broken nights there had come forth the supreme felicity of the genius
and of the talent of those two sisters of whom one alone remained. Never
from stonier ground had there sprung so lordly a harvest, for _Wuthering
Heights_ was its fruit and so too was _Jane Eyre_. On that central act
of this unique drama the curtain was now rung down, and there were left
out of the five who had enacted it, three only. Mr. Nicholls, who was to
fill so large a part in the final scene, bringing brief happiness to one
who had never known it before, had as yet no share in it.

It was Charlotte who, torn with anguish for the silences of the past and
the seal that was now for ever set on them, kept the domestic stability
firm; without her the very pillars of the home must have crumbled. Her
work on _Shirley_, discontinued when Emily fell ill, was still
unhandled, for there was no energy to spare for anything but the daily
duties. 'My father,' so she wrote on Christmas Day to Mr. Williams,
'says to me almost hourly, "Charlotte, you must bear up. I shall sink if
you fail me."' Branwell's death was still recent, and he mourned his
Absalom; the very fact that Charlotte could give him no true sympathy
there made her task the heavier. But she shouldered it all, and with
that stern faith which carried her through these deep waters of the soul
she recorded her thankfulness that she was equal to it.

     God has hitherto most graciously sustained me, [she wrote] so far I
     have felt adequate to bear my own burden and even to offer a little
     help to others. I am not ill, I can get through the daily duties
     and do something towards keeping hope and energy alive in our
     mourning household.

It was well indeed that she found in herself this power of firm
constancy, for now a second tragedy (Branwell's death being confessedly
nothing of the sort to her) began to threaten. Emily was scarcely in her
grave when it became clear that Anne was suffering from the same dread
malady as she. But here there was no such fruitless agonising as over
Emily: Anne was patient and docile, and the doctors who were called in
met with no contemptuous refusals of the aid they sought to bring. There
was weakness, there was wasting, there were the nightly fevers and the
persistent coughing which all told their tale, but Anne took her
cod-liver oil and her carbonate of iron and wore the blisters which were
ordered, and, according to the medical wisdom of the day, was pent in a
room from which all fresh air was excluded, and hoped to wear the
respirator that Ellen sent, when the weather permitted her to go out.

She sat in Emily's chair, unable to work and scarcely able to read, and
when the specialist came from Leeds, his stethoscope but confirmed the
worst fears. And for Charlotte below the intolerable daily burden, the
heart-sickening fears, the glimpses of hope extinguished as soon as lit,
the consciousness that, in spite of brief rallies and betterments, Anne
was steadily losing ground, there was always the thought of Emily.

     The feeling of Emily's loss [she wrote] does not diminish as time
     wears on; it often makes itself most acutely recognised. It brings
     too an inexpressible sorrow with it, and then the future is dark.

Again she wrote:

     I cannot forget Emily's death-day: it becomes a more fixed, a
     darker, a more frequently recurring idea in my mind than ever. It
     was very terrible. She was torn, conscious, panting, reluctant,
     though resolute, out of a happy life. But _it will not do to dwell
     on such things_.

There spoke, with God knows what secret and incommunicable burden, that
undefeated spirit as resolute as Emily's own, which refused to let
itself be debilitated by despair, but turned with all its energy to the
ministries which the situation demanded. She put from her all thought of
her own work, her own feelings, so that the monstrous article on _Jane
Eyre_ which appeared in the _Quarterly_ this winter, in which the
author, Miss Rigby, knowing or guessing she was a woman, spoke of her as
one 'who had long forfeited the society of her sex,' was read by her
without a pang; ordinarily her sensitiveness would have writhed under so
infamous an attack. But now she felt no personal resentment, and only
regretted for Thackeray's sake that the old innuendo that in _Jane Eyre_
she had reproduced the circumstances of his domestic tragedy was
circulated again. Her own work on _Shirley_ she abandoned altogether,
sending the first volume of it to her publishers, so that, when she
could tackle the story again, she might have the benefit of their views,
and devoted herself entirely to Anne and her father, an unwearied nurse
to her and to him an unfailing stay when he feared that his eyes were
threatened again. For herself, she circumscribed the moment according to
the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius; each could be borne and profitably used
if she refused to contemplate anything but its immediate exigencies. 'I
must not look forward,' she wrote, 'nor must I look backward. Too often
I feel like one crossing an abyss on a narrow plank--a glance round
might quite unnerve.' She found her solace in the sense of God's
omnipotence. 'Fortitude is good,' she wrote, 'but fortitude itself must
be shaken under us to teach how weak we are.' Then came the support of
the everlasting arms: 'in sua Voluntade e nostra Pace.'

Throughout the spring of 1849 Anne grew steadily weaker, but the thought
of her death brought no wild anguish of regret to Charlotte, nor to
herself any horror.

     I wish it would please God to spare me, [Anne wrote to Ellen] not
     only for papa's and Charlotte's sakes, but because I long to do
     some good in the world before I leave it. I have many schemes in my
     head for future practice, humble and limited indeed, but still I
     should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have
     lived to so little purpose. But God's will be done....

A change to some seaside place had been recommended, and in this letter
Anne proposed that Ellen should accompany her. But Charlotte would not
permit that: if Anne, while they were away, got suddenly worse, it would
be terrible for her friend to be alone with her, and though it might be
difficult for her to leave her father alone, she must certainly come
too.

Finally this plan was adopted, and in the last week of May the two
sisters, joined by Ellen, started for Scarborough, which Anne already
knew, having stayed there with the Robinson family when she was
governess to the girls. The expense would be met out of a legacy of 200
which her godmother had left her. They spent the night at York, where
Anne managed to see the Minster, and on the day after their arrival at
Scarborough she drove in a donkey-chair on the sands; she thought the
donkey was being overtaxed and took the reins herself. Next day, being
Sunday, she wanted to go to church, but was dissuaded; she had a walk in
the afternoon. On Monday, like Emily on the last day of her life, she
rose at seven, dressed herself and came downstairs. During the morning
she felt that death was near, and wanted to leave for Haworth
immediately if there was a chance that she could get home alive. A
doctor was sent for, and in answer to her direct question said that her
time had come. Then she wholly and serenely surrendered herself,
commending Charlotte to her friend, and thanking them for their kindness
to her. There was a little restlessness, and she was carried from her
chair to the sofa. She said to Charlotte, 'Take courage, Charlotte, take
courage,' and then, without an uneven breath, she passed away, dying at
just the hour when Emily had died.

       *       *       *       *       *

Charlotte stayed on at Scarborough with Ellen for a couple of weeks, and
then went back alone to the Parsonage. Her father and Tabby and Martha
were well; the dogs seemed in a strange ecstasy. 'I am certain they
regarded me as the harbinger of others,' she wrote to Ellen. But the
light died from their eyes, for there were none but Charlotte to return.

Having seen her father, she went alone into the dining-room and shut
herself in.

     I felt that the house was all silent: the rooms were all empty. I
     remembered where the three were laid,--in what narrow dark
     dwellings--never more to reappear on earth. So the sense of
     desolation and bitterness took possession of me. The agony _that
     was to be undergone_, and was _not_ to be avoided came on.... The
     great trial is when evening closes, and night approaches. At that
     hour we used to assemble in the dining-room: we used to talk. Now I
     sit by myself: necessarily I am silent. I cannot help thinking of
     their last days, remembering their sufferings, and what they said
     and did, and how they looked in mortal affliction.

The clock ticked loud in the still house, Keeper lay outside Emily's
door; her desk and Anne's must some time be gone through to find what
papers they had left, and none now would resent such intrusions. The air
whispered with voices of the past and trembled with memories. 'But
crushed I am not yet,' she wrote, 'nor robbed of elasticity, nor of
hope, nor quite of endeavour.' She took up her book again, abandoned
since last October when Emily fell ill. Since then her hours had been
full with other ministries, now they were empty and must be filled.
Rather more than half of it had been written, now she began on the
chapter called 'The Valley of the Shadow of Death.' It was finished by
the end of August, and she knew that work had been her salvation, and
she wrote to Mr. Williams:

     The faculty of imagination lifted me when I was sinking three
     months ago: its active exercise has kept my head above water since:
     its results cheer me now, for I feel they have enabled me to give
     pleasure to others. I am thankful to God who gave me the faculty,
     and it is for me a part of my religion to defend this gift and to
     profit by its possession.

There was never a more magnificent fortitude in the face of so great
tribulations, and she had to bear as well a load of those minor ones
which can be taken lightly by an unburdened spirit, but which can so
easily prove the last straw, when the weight of affliction is already
accumulated to breaking point. She was in ill-health, she was sorely
troubled with headaches and bilious sickness, and on the top of all
these minor troubles came domestic trials. Of the two servants at the
Parsonage, Martha Brown was ill and in bed, Mr. Bront declaring that
she was in imminent danger, and Tabby, now over eighty, fell as she got
up from her chair with her head under the grate. Charlotte's frayed
nerves for once gave way, she simply sat and cried for ten minutes; then
called herself a fool and got Martha's sister in to help her with the
housework. She was always at her best when things were worst: hers was
one of those unflinching natures which trouble seems to anneal. Some are
broken by it, but she would have scorned to be of such brittle stuff;
some are softened by it, but she was not one of them. Even the death of
her sisters, the loss, as she said, of the only two people in the world
who understood her, had been as impotent to weaken essentially the iron
confidence in which she met such bereavement, as the sufferings of her
brother had been impotent, while he lived, to rouse her compassion. Life
was a fight, and she was not going to be beaten.


 2

As was her nature, so necessarily was her religion, and they both
emerged from these tragic years unshaken and unsoftened. Gone utterly,
burned out of her by searing experience, were those emotional,
half-hysterical aspirations of which in her adolescence Ellen had really
been the source; she no longer sought that water of Life, of which once
drinking she should never more thirst. She looked for no easy yoke or
light burden, nor expected rest for her soul, but travail. Nor was her
conception of the Omnipotence on which she leaned and to the decrees of
which she gave obedience any sort of mystic ecstasy; it was the very
antipodes of Emily's 'Strange Power,' that fiercely tender pagan force
which set the moorland heath abloom and the lapwings mating, and so
kindled the love of Catherine for the sheer beauty of the savage earth
and for Heathcliff's savage adoration that, dreaming she was dead, she
broke her heart with weeping to escape from the conventional tameness of
heaven, 'and the angels were so angry that they flung me into the middle
of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I awoke sobbing for
joy.' Not less antipodal to Charlotte's God was Anne's conception of the
loving and sustaining hand which led her, lacking nothing, so gently
through the valley of the shadow, that far from fearing the death of the
body, she rejoiced in the accomplishment of her serene journey. While
here, she had her work to do for Him, and it was in His service that she
had used the degradation of her brother to warn others of the disaster
that attends evil courses. God was her loving Shepherd, and she, mild
as Flossie, must bark at the wolves which threatened His flock.

But to Charlotte both such conceptions were incomprehensible: to her God
was no pagan Pan who fluted in the 'livid hollows' of the moor, nor yet
a compassionate Redeemer, but the lawgiver revealed on Sinai, who had
written His commandments very distinctly on stone tables, and was
powerful to save and infinite in mercy. That decalogue did not enjoin
loving indulgence of the weak, nor the duty of judging not, and the
charity that suffered long and was kind had no place in it. She was as
unsparing in her severity to herself as she was to others; she claimed
from herself, even as God claimed from her, a full account of the
talents He had given her, and never did she shirk the demands of duty
nor complain of the sternness of that lawgiver, but she never eased the
burden with the lighter yoke of love. She suffered much, she was ready
to acquiesce always in personal sacrifice, but she neither looked for
nor found in self-abnegation any particle of joy. Undeviatingly through
the wilderness she followed the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by
night, and she never expected to find therein any oasis for her rest and
refreshment. It was an arid journey, for on all sides she saw so much of
what she felt herself bound to disapprove; but as long as she followed
the gleam, smoky though it often was, she knew she was doing God's will,
and to that she referred every decision she had to make, and every pang
she had to bear. She was in constant ill-health, and it was to God's
help she looked that she would not break down, and that steeled her
will; the same strength enabled her firmly to face the inevitable end of
Anne's illness when 'reason unsupported by religion' would have failed
her.

Belief in God's guidance gave her resignation to His accomplished Will,
but (not exactly in opposition to it, but trying to range herself with
it) she put forth all her force in order to accomplish her own. Thus,
when in the last years of her life, in consequence of Mr. Bront's
violent objections to her marriage with Mr. Nicholls, the latter left
Haworth, and all seemed over, Charlotte believed that 'Providence is
over all: that is the only consolation.' But she successfully set to
work to get Mr. Nicholls back, and when her father's opposition was
withdrawn and the marriage permitted, she equally believed that this was
'the destiny which Providence in His goodness and wisdom seems to offer
me.' Again, when there was pleasure to be thankful for instead of
trouble to be resigned to, she blended, with a childlike simplicity, her
human satisfaction with her gratitude for the Divine favour bestowed.
When, for instance, she received favourable reviews of _Villette_, she
wrote: 'The import of all these notices is such as to make my heart
swell with thankfulness to Him who takes note both of my suffering and
work and motives. Papa is pleased too.'


 3

_Shirley_, then, was finished in August 1849, and now after ten years
there came to Charlotte another offer, the third, of marriage; for the
sake of continuity it will be better to dissect this odd episode out of
her letters during these years, and give it for the first time a
connected outline.

Mr. James Taylor was in her publisher's firm, and he had read and
criticised the portion of her book which she had sent to Smith, Elder in
the spring of this year;[88] possibly Charlotte had met him when she and
Anne had gone to London to disclose their identities. He was soon to
pass through Leeds on his return to London from his holiday, and Mr.
Williams suggested that he should come to Haworth and take the
newly-finished manuscript back with him. Charlotte, as serious as a
judge, wrote just the letter that Jane Austen's eyes would have twinkled
over, elaborately explaining why she could not offer the 'homely
hospitalities' of the Parsonage for a few days. Her father was not
strong enough to take walks with a visitor on the moors, and

     the peculiar retirement of papa's habits is such as to render it
     irksome to him to give much of his society to a stranger, even in
     the house. Without being in the least misanthropical, or
     sour-natured, papa habitually prefers solitude to society, and
     custom is a tyrant whose fetters it would now be impossible for him
     to break. Papa, I know, would receive any friend of Mr. Smith's
     with perfect kindness and goodwill but I likewise know that unless
     greatly put out of his way, he could not give a guest much of his
     company.

[Footnote 88: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, p. 30.]

But in case Mr. Taylor cared to come for the day, she gave the most
minute directions how he was to get to Haworth from Leeds, pointing out
the mischances that menaced him if he forgot to change at Shipley: in
fact, though rather fluttered, she did not discourage the visit at all.

Mr. Taylor came then, early in September, for the inside of a day, and
they met again in London in the winter, when Charlotte went to stay with
Mrs. Smith, her publisher's mother. He certainly made a strong
impression on her, though, as was usual with strangers, not wholly
agreeable, for he had

     a determined, dreadful nose in the middle of his face (which after
     all was the usual place) which when poked into my countenance cuts
     into my soul like iron. Still he is horribly intelligent, quick,
     searching, sagacious, and with a memory of relentless tenacity. To
     turn to Williams after him or to Smith himself, is to turn from
     granite to easy down or warm fur.

We may infer that he proposed to her then, for two passages in a letter
she wrote to Ellen in September 1850, just nine months afterwards,
strongly point to this. The first is:

'Doubtless there are men whom if I chose to encourage I might marry, but
no matrimonial lot is even remotely offered me which seems to me truly
desirable.'

She then refers to a letter she had received from Mr. Taylor ('the
little man').

     I was somewhat surprised to receive his letter, having concluded
     nine months ago that there would be no more correspondence from
     that quarter.... This little Taylor is deficient neither in spirits
     nor sense.

Something had evidently happened nine months ago which made her think
that Mr. Taylor would not write again. But he had spirit and the sense
to see that there was hope for him. So little Taylor persevered in his
suit, causing Charlotte to waver, for _ propos_ of some abstruse
badinage on Ellen's part about marriage (probably referring to George
Smith), she wrote to her:

     The idea of the 'little man' shocks me less--it would be a more
     likely match if 'matches' were at all in question, _which they are
     not_.... You may laugh as much and as wickedly as you please--but
     the fact is there is a quiet constancy about this, my diminutive
     and red-haired friend, which adds a foot to his stature--turns his
     sandy locks dark, and altogether dignifies him a good deal in my
     estimation.[89]

[Footnote 89: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, p. 196.]

This looked like yielding, and very likely she would have married him,
had he not accepted an appointment to open a branch of Messrs. Smith,
Elder in Bombay; this would take him out of England for five years.
Charlotte wrote him two very proper letters, hoping that 'the change of
climate would not bring a risk to health,' and referring to business as
'a Moloch which demanded personal touch in the mention of his
sacrifice, which was endorsed by the moral reflections that followed:
such sacrifices.' There is a faint but unmistakably personal touch in
the mention of his sacrifice, which was endorsed by the moral
reflections that followed:

     May your decision in the crisis through which you have gone result
     in the best effect on your happiness and welfare: and indeed,
     guided as you are by the wish to do right, and a high sense of
     duty, I trust it cannot be otherwise. The change of climate is all
     I fear, but Providence will overrule this, too, for the best--in
     Him you can believe and in Him only. You will want therefore
     neither solace nor support, though your lot will be cast as a
     stranger in a strange land.

He had asked for a farewell interview, and in this same letter she gave
him leave to come to Haworth and say good-bye. It would be a pleasure to
see him, though that pleasure would be tinged with sadness. He came--and
he said good-bye.

But it is evident that she had expected something different from this
last interview, and her letter to Ellen recording it is puzzled and
surprised. She magnified this appointment which he had 'reluctantly
accepted' into something tremendous. It was a 'post of honour and
danger' (though to open a branch in a publishing house in Bombay does
not seem desperately perilous), and duty had compelled him to take it.
Anyhow, 'he has been and is gone, things are just as they were. I feel
there is a mystery about the transaction yet.' The mystery really was
that she could not make up her mind whether she had done right in
refusing him, and she doubted it.

And then, curiously and characteristically, in order to persuade herself
of her wisdom in refusing him, she now began to see his bad points. 'He
looked much older and thinner. I saw him very near and once through my
glass; the resemblance to Branwell struck me forcibly, it is marked.'
The lines in his face showed 'an inflexibility and, I must add, a
hardness of character which do not attract. As he stood near me, as he
looked at me in his keen way, it was all I could do to stand my ground
tranquilly and steadily, and not to recoil as before, and his manners
were jarring.' But already she found that 'his absence, and the
exclusion of his idea from her mind,' left a blank she had not expected:
at once she felt lonely and despondent. She determined to wean her mind
from the subject, but with the very smallest measure of success, for her
letters teem with speculations about the little man. Something perhaps
had been said at that last interview as to whether, when he returned,
she would reconsider her decision, but she doubted whether he could ever
'be acceptable as a husband,' and found yet more reasons against it. He
had excellent and sterling qualities, but what discoveries of his
imperfections!

     I looked for something of the gentleman--something I mean of the
     natural gentleman ... I could not find one gleam, I could not see
     one passing glimpse of true good-breeding; it is hard to say, but
     it is true. In mind too, though clever, he is second-rate,
     thoroughly second-rate. One does not like to say these things, but
     one had better be honest. Were I to marry him my heart would bleed
     in pain and humiliation. I could not, _could_ not look up to him.
     No--if Mr. Taylor be the only husband Fate offers to me, single I
     must always remain. But yet at times I grieve for him and perhaps
     it is superfluous, for I cannot think he will suffer much; a hard
     nature, occupation and change of scene will befriend him....

Again she found from friends in London that his temper left much to be
desired; that was a point in favour of her decision, but against that
must be set the fact that Mr. Bront much liked him, and was extremely
kind when he said good-bye to him,

     exhorting him to be true to himself, his country and his God, and
     wishing him all good wishes.... Whenever he has alluded to him
     since it has been with significant eulogy. When I alluded that he
     was no gentleman he seemed out of patience with me for the
     objection.... I believe he thinks a prospective union deferred for
     five years with such a decorous reliable personage would be a very
     proper and advisable affair.

Perhaps Mr. Bront even expected an immediate engagement, for he said
that if she married now he would give up the Parsonage and live in
lodgings. Altogether Charlotte found it a very puzzling business: she
had refused Mr. Taylor and found a peck of admirable reasons for so
doing, but she wondered if she had been wise, and thought it better to
refer the responsibility of what she had done elsewhere. She had assured
him of the protection of Providence in Bombay, and Providence had
directed her also. 'Most true it is,' she wrote to Ellen after she saw
him for the last time, 'that we are overruled by one above us--that in
His hands our very will is as clay in the hands of the potter.'

So Mr. Taylor--'stern and abrupt little man'--went out to Bombay. He
wrote to Charlotte a rather realistic description of the processes of a
Turkish bath, which he had gone to see though not to indulge in. He
might have omitted, she thought, some of the details, but she found his
description amusing, and it tallied with what Thackeray had said about
the same pleasurable institution in Grand Cairo. But she could not
refrain from moral reflections in her answer:

     The usage seems to me a little rough, and I cannot help thinking
     that equal benefit might be obtained through less violent means,
     but I suppose without the previous fatigue the after-sensation
     would not be so enjoyable and no doubt it is that indolent
     after-sensation which the self-indulgent Mahomedans chiefly
     cultivate. I think you did right to disdain it.

She lamented, for his sake, 'the deficiency in all intellectual
attractions' at Bombay. She had not weaned him even yet from her mind,
for she wrote to Mr. Williams asking him for an 'impartial judgment' on
his character, and he spoke highly of him. But after that Mr. Taylor
seems to have written no more to her, and that made her uneasy; she
wondered whether the affair had come to an end. Once more, though less
poignantly than when she waited to see whether the post brought her a
letter from M. Hger, she was on the alert for the arrival of Indian
mails, but still there was nothing for her, and she confessed she was
disappointed. Several times Ellen asked if she had not heard, and
eventually Charlotte begged her not to refer to the subject again: 'All
is silent as the grave.' She never saw him again, for when at the end of
his five years in Bombay he returned to England, she was dead.




CHAPTER XV


To return to _Shirley_. In that trying interval, before its appearance,
of proof correcting and waiting for publication, Charlotte was in a high
state of nervous tension. The story had been read by three members of
the Smith, Elder firm (all of whom, of course, knew her identity, but
were bound to secrecy), and Mr. Williams had criticised the whole
presentation of the curates as being an irrelevant piece of caricature.
She replied that they were positive photographs, they were as real as
the Bible, they were True, and Truth was better than Art. She refused to
give them up, but her real reason for retaining them (and she must have
known it) was that she could not forgo the satisfaction of scarifying
Messrs. Grant, Smith and Bradley under disguises that would deceive
nobody, especially them. Once more she was extremely anxious that her
sex as author should not be suspected by reviewers or by the public. She
thought that a book by a woman was judged with 'pitiful contempt,' and
hoped that _Shirley_ would be considered so indubitably male in style
and treatment that any doubts (of which there were already many) about
the sex of the author of _Jane Eyre_ would be finally set at rest.

A more forlorn hope can scarcely be imagined, for though, in _Jane
Eyre_, Edward Rochester might be thought to be the creation of a man, no
male character in _Shirley_ could possibly be thought to be other than
the creation of a woman; no sign of a 'peard' can be detected beneath
their mufflers. But this longing to be considered male was indeed an
obsession with her, and she thought that everyone was leagued together
to unmask her. Mr. Williams, for instance, in sending her a packet of
proofs for correction had not sealed the cover securely, and it had been
resealed at the General Post Office in London, and then forwarded to
Haworth. Charlotte suspected in that a dark design against her secret,
and, forgetting that the packet had been resealed in London, was
convinced that it had been opened at the Post Office in Keighley. This
she was sure was the work of 'prying curiosity.... The gossiping
inquisitiveness of small towns is rife at Keighley. Those packets
passing backwards and forwards by the post have doubtless aggravated
their curiosity.' But how she could have thought that on the publication
of _Shirley_ her incognito, not only of sex but of individuality, would
not instantly be given away, passes understanding, for the book
practically consisted of sketches, portraits and caricatures of her
immediate circle. She allowed that she had seen and slightly knew the
'original' of Cyril Hall, but averred that he would no more suspect her
of having 'put' him into a novel, or indeed of having written a novel at
all, than he would have suspected that his dog had done so. But no
sooner did the Rev. W. M. Heald read _Shirley_ than he correctly
recognised himself and half a dozen characters as well, and applied to
Ellen, as an intimate friend of the 'unknown Currer Bell' (sending his
respects also to Mr. Bront so that there could be no mistake about his
meaning), for a key to the others. Again, Charlotte had sent to one of
the brothers of her friend Mary Taylor, before publication, those
chapters of the book which related to the 'Yorkes,' in which every
single member of his family, father, daughters (dead and alive) and sons
were daguerrotyped: his comment was that she had not drawn them strong
enough. Then there was Shirley herself, confessedly a portrait of Emily
Bront; there were the photographed curates; there was Mr. Nicholls in
the unmistakable guise of Mr. Macarthey; Hortense Moore was equally
photographic of Mlle. Hauss of the _pensionnat_ at Brussels. Yet even
when the book was out, Charlotte wrote, as Currer Bell, to G. H. Lewes,
who was to review it in the _Edinburgh Review_, saying 'I wish you did
not think I was a woman.'

But it was no use wishing anything of the sort. Charlotte, with an
optimism she recognised to be ostrich-like, had fondly hoped that if she
hid her head in the Parsonage she would be invisible, but her identity
leaked out in London, and poured out in spate at Haworth. It could not
possibly be otherwise: too many pointers were directed there; besides,
she had made too many her confidants. Mr. Nicholls had his lodgings at
the house of John Brown the sexton, and, when he read about himself,
Mrs. Brown 'seriously thought he had gone wrong in his head, as she
heard him giving vent to roars of laughter, clapping his hands and
stamping on the floor ... He would read all the scenes about the curates
aloud to papa, and triumphed in his own character.'

Then there were the curates themselves; they had often annoyed her, and
to serve them out she had dipped in her unkindest ink, and lavished on
them all her powers of contempt and ridicule. There was the master of
the Haworth Grammar School, once temporary curate to Mr. Bront, and
him, under the unmistakable lineaments of Mr. Donne, she had described
as of 'a coldly phlegmatic immoveably complacent densely self-satisfied
nature'; he was 'a frontless, arrogant, decorous slip of the
commonplace, conceited, inane, insipid.' She libellously stated that he
and the others met together for drunken orgies: as a matter of fact the
evenings that they spent together were passed in reading the Greek
Fathers.

But her whips and her scorpions were wasted.

     The very curates, poor fellows! [she dejectedly wrote to Mr.
     Williams] show no resentment, each characteristically finds solace
     for his own wounds in crowing over his brethren. Mr. Donne was at
     first a little disturbed; for a week or two he was in disquietude,
     but he is now soothed down: only yesterday I had the pleasure of
     making him a comfortable cup of tea and seeing him sip it with
     revived complacency. It is a curious fact that since he read
     _Shirley_ he has come to the house oftener than ever, and been
     remarkably meek and assiduous to please. Some people's natures are
     veritable enigmas: I quite expected to have had one good scene with
     him, but as yet nothing of the sort has occurred.

The gilt was off the gingerbread. Charlotte had meant and hoped and
desired that these truly Christian gentlemen should be hurt and
indignant at her savage attack on them, and she was truly chagrined at
their good humour; all she could make of it was that each was so
delighted with the venom she expended on his friends that he forgave her
for himself. They were enigmas; it was puzzling and disappointing to
find them so indulgent. She wanted to hurt them. That she ever knew that
her friend Mary Taylor wrote to Ellen from New Zealand saying that it
was rumoured that Charlotte Bront had been jilted by the three curates
one after the other is improbable.[90] Charlotte would not have been
amused.

[Footnote 90: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, p. 199.]

But though these insensitive creatures had treated her attack on them
with such good humour, it was otherwise with her and the unfavourable
reviews of _Shirley_, of which there were a good many that made her
writhe, as she had hoped the curates would do. She was furious with
their malice and their lies. She pronounced the critic of the _Daily
News_ to be to the last degree 'incompetent, ignorant and flippant.'
His review was unutterably false: it was revolting to be judged by such
a creature. The _Observer_ was equally trying; such praise as it
bestowed was more mortifying than its blame. The 'thundering _Times_'
attacked her fiercely, and it made her cry. The notice in the _Edinburgh
Review_ was 'brutal and savage.' G. H. Lewes had, as she knew, written
this, and he had committed the unpardonable crime of talking about her
sex. So she sent him a brief note: 'I can be on my guard against my
enemies, but God deliver me from my friends.' On the other hand,
critical praise gave her the same quality of childish rapture as
critical blame gave her of childish resentment. Just as her detractors
were liars and revolting dunces, so the admirers of _Shirley_ were
splendid in ability and discernment. Harriet Martineau and Mrs. Gaskell,
neither of whom she had at present met, were among these by reason of
their appreciation, and she considered them 'far her superiors in
attainment and experience.' For Miss Martineau she had 'a lively
admiration, a deep esteem,' while Mrs. Gaskell's praise, conveyed in a
letter 'brought tears to my eyes. She is a good, she is a great woman.
Proud am I that I can touch a chord of sympathy in souls so noble.' Then
there was Eugne Forade, who had already spoken highly of _Jane
Eyre_[91]: he wrote a review of _Shirley_ in the _Revue des deux
Mondes_, and it was refreshing to turn from the mouthings of the
entirely ignorant and incompetent to one 'whose heart feels, whose power
grasps the matter he undertakes to handle.' He praised _Shirley_ warmly,
and therefore he was 'a subtle-thoughted, keen-eyed, quick-feeling
Frenchman, who knew the true nature of things.'

[Footnote 91: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. i, p. 462.]

     He follows Currer Bell [she wrote to Ellen, to whom she sent this
     review] through every winding, discerns every point, discriminates
     every shade, proves himself master of the subject, and lord of the
     aim. With that man I would shake hands, if I saw him. I would say,
     'You know me, Monsieur, I shall deem it an honour to know you.' I
     could not say so much to the mass of English critics.

Forade, she reiterated to Mr. Williams, found no coarseness in
_Shirley_; that was the discovery reserved for smaller minds. Or an
anonymous correspondent wrote in a strain of wild enthusiasm about
_Shirley_: 'there is power in that letter--talent, it is at times
eloquently expressed.' The press she was sure, when she thought of the
unfavourable reviews, was a venal concern; only praise was sincere and
heartfelt. Those who saw faults in her work were not only mistaken but
moral reprobates, abounding in malice and falsehood; those who
appreciated it were not only discerning persons but good and great. All
this enthusiasm for the enthusiastic, this spitting on the scornful is
indicative of just that essentially youthful fire which Charlotte, like
Swinburne, always possessed. Her intolerance, her blacks and whites, her
rare but unqualified raptures, her censoriousness, were all typical of
adolescence. As Sir Edmund Gosse acutely remarked (rather shocking the
Bront Society), she never grew up, nor acquired the kindly indulgence
of the mature mind, off which the jagged egoistic edges have been
smoothed by the wholesome wear and tear of the world.

Soon after _Shirley_ appeared, Charlotte again turned her mind to _The
Professor_, which had lain on her shelf since her publishers had
dissuaded her from expanding it into three-volumed form. But now she
contemplated bringing it out as it stood, and wrote a preface to it. Not
a word of her intentions, so far as we can find in her letters, did she
communicate to anyone; nor is there the slightest allusion to the
subject when she discusses plans with her publishers. But after her
death her husband, Mr. Nicholls, consented to the publication of _The
Professor_, and it appeared in 1856 with the preface that Charlotte had
written for it, and an explanatory note in which he stated these facts,
adding: 'Being dissuaded from her intention, the authoress made some use
of the material in a subsequent work _Villette_.' It is possible that
the 'dissuasion' of which Mr. Nicholls speaks should refer to the
occasion when, after the publication of _Jane Eyre_, she contemplated
expanding _The Professor_ into three volumes, and that now she wrote the
preface and abandoned her intention again, for Mrs. Gaskell does not
mention it in her _Life of Charlotte Bront_, nor can we find any
allusion to this second intention elsewhere.

With regard to the book _Shirley_ itself, its faults are many and
patent, and it cannot be put in the same class as _Jane Eyre_ or
_Villette_. _Jane Eyre_ had its faults too, but in the white-hot furnace
of its sincerity and passion, they were utterly consumed, appearing
momentarily like specks of black in the glow of it, and then perishing.
But there is no such incandescent quality in _Shirley_: _Shirley_ was
observed rather than felt, and Charlotte never got into the living heart
of her work as she did with _Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_.

She took immense trouble with it; she strained and agonised and doubted
over it. But she wrote it from the outside, not the inside, and,
paradoxical though it sounds, this very industry and this painstaking
copying of her models are the cause of the lower level on which the book
moves; study takes the place of inspiration, and observation is not
fused and made molten in the furnace of imagination. Again, she wanted
to inculcate certain truths, such _imprimis_, as the supreme splendour
of equal love between man and woman; but whereas in _Jane Eyre_ she took
the live coal in the tongs from off the altar of its burning, in
_Shirley_, donning the fatal vestments of the preacher, she ascended
the pulpit and discoursed, with anathemas, on the world's sordid view of
love. She declaimed her gospel, instead of presenting without comment,
as in _Jane Eyre_, the evangelists of love. Never was there so hieratic
a homily as Caroline Helstone's pronouncement and her colloquy with
Shirley. Says Caroline:

     'Obtrusiveness is a crime; forwardness is a crime, and both
     disgust: but love!--no purest angel need blush to love! And when I
     hear or see either man or woman couple shame with love I know their
     minds are coarse, their associations debased. Many who think
     themselves refined ladies and gentlemen, and on whose lips the word
     "vulgarity" is for ever hovering, cannot mention "love" without
     betraying their own innate and imbecile degradation: it is a low
     feeling in their estimation, connected only with low ideas for
     them.'

     'You describe three-quarters of the world, Caroline.'

     'They are cold,--they are cowardly--they are stupid on the subject,
     Shirley! They never loved--they never were loved.'

     'Thou art right, Lina! And in their dense ignorance they blaspheme
     living fire, seraph-brought from a divine altar.'

     'They confound it with sparks mounting from Tophet.'

All very true no doubt. But did two girls ever talk so unnaturally and
so gratuitously, for nothing has occurred to warrant these diatribes?
Charlotte was in the pulpit, preaching not creating, and, incidentally,
punishing those who found coarseness in _Jane Eyre_, and putting into
the mouth of her characters the precise phrases with which she had
scolded them in her letters. She was lecturing on love, justifying her
view of it. The same spirit of irrelevant propaganda, again in defence
of _Jane Eyre_, inspires her indignation against the unfair treatment
which she thought that women novelists received.

     Their (men's) good woman [cries Shirley] is a queer thing,
     half-doll, half-angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. Then
     to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other's creations,
     worshipping the heroine of such a poem-novel-drama, thinking it
     fine--divine! If I spoke all I think on this point; if I gave my
     real opinion of some first-rate female character, in first-rate
     works, where should I be? Dead, under a cairn of avenging stones in
     half an hour. Women read men more truly than men read women. I'll
     prove that in a magazine paper some day when I have time....

Charlotte, through the mouthpiece of _Shirley_, is merely venting her
views on the literary arena.

It is this same personal motive which, with similar punishment in view,
turns her presentation of the curates into sheer caricature. They had
annoyed her, and her intention was to give them 'what for,' taking in
her hand not the rapier of satire but the bludgeon of abuse. These were
grotesque puppets which she set up, in order to knock them down, and her
observation of them was falsified by personal antipathy. These outbursts
of propaganda and vituperation are pieces of rubbish which might have
perished in the consuming heat of _Jane Eyre_, but in _Shirley_ there is
no such reverberating furnace. Louis Moore, Shirley's preordained mate,
personifying man's ideal love for woman, is so falsetto a troubadour
that, frankly, romance withers. The love-scenes are largely conveyed by
means of his highly rhetorical diary instead of by direct narrative;
Charlotte invites the reader to stoop over her shoulder and read what he
scribbles: 'Since Shirley has appealed to my strength,' he writes, 'I
abhor solitude. Cold abstraction--fleshless skeleton--daughter--mother
and mate of Death!...' Shirley was shy, 'but to my perception a delicate
splendour robed her.... I looked like a stupid block, I dare say: I was
alive with a life of Paradise, as she turned _her_ glance from _my_
glance, and softly averted her head to hide the suffusion of her cheek.'
Louis Moore retails page after page of dialogue between his mistress and
himself, and it is all tinsel and froth compared with the gleams of
those deep waters of passion that move us so profoundly when Jane Eyre
and Rochester are together. For their simplicity we get eloquence: Louis
calls her 'Sister of the spotted, bright, quick-fiery leopard,' and
after great fireworks, with the sun 'a dizzying scarlet blaze' and the
sky 'a violet vortex,' there is a dismal descent of the rocket stick,
and Shirley having accepted him, says (quite in the Jane Austen style):

     Mr. Moore, your judgment is well balanced; your heart is kind; your
     principles are sound. I know you are wise; I feel you are
     benevolent; I believe you are conscientious. Be my companion
     through life; be my guide where I am ignorant, be my master where I
     am faulty; be my friend always.

The same fault, that of mere external observation, marks and mars
Charlotte's presentation of Shirley herself. She confessedly meant
Shirley in this volume of 'sketches from the life' to be the full-length
portrait of her sister Emily. She noted and reproduced traits that were
characteristic of Emily, such as her long abstracted musings on the moor
as she gazed into some pool. She gave Shirley the fierce and devoted
Tartar who would not stand a blow, in reproduction of Emily's Keeper;
Shirley's refusals to admit she was ill were a trait of Emily's, as
Charlotte was bitterly aware ('_She_ say she is ill! I believe, sir, if
she were dying, she would smile and aver "Nothing ails me"'); the story
of Shirley being bitten by a dog, and cauterising the wound with a hot
iron is also traditionally ascribed to Emily, but all these traits and
incidents are observed only, and when it comes to that fusion of
observation and penetration through which is produced a portrait not a
photograph, we find that Charlotte has not penetrated; she has never got
to the heart of Emily, to the genius that made her what she was, and not
one glimpse of that mysterious soul is really revealed to us. In
nothing is this more plain than in Charlotte's attempt to render,
through Shirley's mouth, Emily's attitude towards Nature, that pagan
pan-theistic mysticism, that sense of the immanent and unifying Divinity
in man and beast and moor, which glows and throbs in her poems.
Charlotte could discover the poems themselves, but secret for ever from
her was the inspiration of them, and her attempt to reproduce it was
less photograph than parody. In Shirley's famous rhapsody Charlotte
definitely set herself to unveil Emily's soul.

     Nature is now at her evening prayers: she is kneeling before those
     red hills. I see her prostrate on the great steps of her altar,
     praying for a fair night for mariners at sea, for travellers in
     deserts, for lambs on moors, and unfledged birds in woods.
     Caroline, I see her! and I will tell you what she is like: she is
     like what Eve was when she and Adam stood alone on earth.... I
     saw--I now see--a woman Titan: her robe of blue air spreads to the
     outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing: a veil white
     as an avalanche sweeps from her head to her feet, and arabesques of
     lightning flame in its borders. Under her breast I see her zone,
     purple like that horizon; through its blush shines the star of
     evening. Her steady eyes I cannot picture: they are clear, they are
     deep as lakes--they are lifted and full of worship--they tremble
     with the softness of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead
     has the expanse of a cloud and is paler than the early moon, risen
     long before dark gathers; she reclines her bosom on the ridge of
     Stilbro' Moor; her mighty hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling,
     face to face she speaks with God. That Eve is Jehovah's daughter,
     as Adam was his son.

Now we may differ about the beauty and the force of this passage; some
may find it a piece of exquisite English, others a patch of rather
shrill purple, but all must agree that, as a rendering of Emily's
mysticism, it is a failure. Nor could it have been otherwise, for
Charlotte had no touch of the mystic in her religious perceptions; and
the very strength and sincerity of them made it impossible for her to
comprehend a rapture to which her soul was alien. When she attempted to
express it, her speech betrayed her.

But hear Emily:

  He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs,
  With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars,
  Winds take a pensive tone and stars a tender fire,
  And visions rise and change, that kill me with desire.

  But first a hush of peace--a soundless calm descends,
  The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends:
  Mute music soothes my breast--unuttered harmony,
  That I could never dream till Faith was lost to me.

  Then dawns the Invisible: the Unseen its truth reveals,
  My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels.
  Its wings are almost free--its home, its harbour found,
  Nearing the gulf it stops--and dares the final bound.

  Oh! dreadful is the check--intense the agony--
  When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see,
  When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again:
  The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

There is the true voice; the expression may fail because the singer
tells of things ineffable, but behind is the experience of the mystic's
sacramental communings, of his almost losing his identity because he is
so nearly made one with God immanent, of his racked return to himself as
to a prison, when the splendour fades. None but a mystic could have
written that, and all Charlotte's talent could not enable her to
reproduce, with any wealth of poetical imagery, the faintest semblance
of it. In this attempt to reveal Emily she only reveals her own
incomprehension of her.

_Shirley_ is often spoken of as Charlotte's memorial to Emily. That is
not quite the case, for nearly two-thirds of the book, down to the
chapter entitled 'The Valley of the Shadow of Death,' were written
before her death. She began it after hesitations as to whether to recast
_The Professor_ in three-volume form, as soon as _Jane Eyre_ was off her
hands; thus, while Anne was using Branwell as a model in _The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall_, Charlotte was using Emily in _Shirley_. Then her work
was interrupted by Emily's rapid decline in the autumn of 1848 and not
taken up again till after Anne's death in May 1849. Charlotte found this
break exceedingly difficult to bridge over, and it is permissible to
wonder whether there was not a change of plan at this point in the book.
Louis Moore, though the story was two-thirds done, had only made his
first appearance a couple of pages before; it looks as if his wooing and
winning of Shirley was possibly an afterthought. Already the book had
faltered; for several chapters before the break no development takes
place at all; Caroline Helstone's love story hung fire, a school-feast,
a guying of the curates were obvious padding; it is as if Charlotte was
feeling her way, uncertain of her direction. Then after the break she
made up her mind, and the book moves swiftly to its appointed end.




CHAPTER XVI


Charlotte went up to London in December of the year 1849 to stay with
her young publisher George Smith and his widowed mother. Mrs. Smith, she
tells Ellen, appeared to have received strict orders to pay her the
greatest attention; morning and evening there was a fire in her bedroom
and wax candles, and she felt she inspired respect and alarm in her
hosts. It was not till this wore off that she perceived that real
friendliness was at the bottom of these sybaritic arrangements, and she
'began to like' Mrs. Smith; her son also impressed her more favourably
than he had done at first sight, and she acknowledged that she saw no
reason to regret her decision to make her principal stay with them
instead of going, after a day or two, to the house of Laetitia
Wheelwright, who had been a school friend at Brussels. By now she was
known to be Currer Bell and no more concealment or vain hopes that her
books would be taken as products of a male brain were possible.

From this time onwards she ceased to be a hermit at Haworth, for in the
few years that were to elapse before her marriage, she paid four visits
to London, she went twice to Scotland, though once only for a single
night, and she stayed with new-found friends in the Lakes, Sir James
Kay-Shuttleworth and Miss Harriet Martineau (to whom she formed a
violent attachment, and as violently brought it to a sudden close). She
also formed a warm and cordial though never an intimate friendship with
Mrs. Gaskell, and stayed with her at Plymouth Grove, Manchester.

Moreover, high fame was personally hers; pilgrims came to Haworth to
follow the topography of her books and get a word from the author. More
especially in London the literary world was intensely curious about her,
eager to be friendly with her and to make her the lioness at home in
circles whose appreciation she most coveted. But fame had come too late
for her enjoyment; she had been through bitter waters and the salt still
clung to her, or perhaps she had always lacked the ease which springs
from geniality. She could not let herself go; her shyness and her
self-consciousness were by now an inveterate disease. To be brought up
against an unfamiliar face, even if it shone with kindliness, was always
discomforting; she distrusted strangers and was always apt to notice
their defects before their qualities, and a further misery-making
quality in her temperament lay in the habit of thought which suggested
that others saw the worst in her. She noticed, for instance (or thought
she noticed), that if any man got a good look at her, he would take
pains, after that, to avert his eyes from the quarter of the room in
which she sat. The natural reaction followed those uncomfortable
fancies; she never credited the casually encountered stranger with
goodwill towards her. Nowadays we should call this instinct an
inferiority complex dating from her schooldays, when it had been
impressed on her that she was ugly and insignificant. Indeed, she
designedly and auto-biographically made these physical disabilities a
feature in _Jane Eyre_. This morbid self-consciousness, this lack of
geniality, and a complete absence of any social effervescence made for
her one of the most unfortunate equipments for general intercourse, in
the rle of lioness, that it is possible to conceive.

There was a certain underlying ungraciousness also that unfitted her
for the part; at times she was silent and miserable, at times she roared
in a manner socially devastating. Twice during this visit she was taken
to see Macready act and subsequently wrote:

     I astonished a dinner-party by honestly saying I did not like him.
     It is the fashion to rave about his splendid acting--anything more
     false and artificial, less genuinely impressive than his whole
     style I could scarcely have imagined; the fact is, the stage system
     altogether is hollow nonsense, they act farce well enough, the
     actors comprehend their parts and do them justice. They comprehend
     nothing about tragedy or Shakespeare, and it is a failure. I said
     so, and by so saying produced a blank silence, a mute
     consternation. I was, indeed, obliged to dissent on many occasions,
     and to offend by dissenting. It seems now very much the custom to
     admire a certain wordy, intricate, obscure style of poetry, such as
     Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes. Some pieces were referred to
     about which Currer Bell was expected to be very rapturous, and
     failing in this he disappointed.... I think I should scarcely like
     to live in London, and were I obliged to live there, I should
     certainly go little into company, especially I should eschew the
     literary coteries.

Again, Mr. Smith brought together a dinner-party of critics, five of
them, representing leading papers, in her honour. She 'enjoyed the
spectacle of them greatly,' but fixed a deadly eye on Mr. Chorley.

     He is a peculiar specimen--one whom you could set yourself to
     examine, uncertain whether, when you had probed all the small
     reserves of his character the result would be utter contempt and
     aversion, or whether for the sake of latent good you would forgive
     obvious evil. One could well pardon his unpleasant features, his
     strange voice, even his very foppery and grimace, if one found
     these disadvantages connected with living talent and any spark of
     genuine goodness. If there is nothing more than acquirement,
     smartness, and the affectation of philanthropy, Chorley is a fine
     creature.

One wonders what the fine creature thought of the silent little lady
who drew such deadly conclusions from his small-talk.

But, it must be again repeated, it was chiefly her shyness that, by
making her miserable in the presence of strangers, rendered her
ill-disposed to them; it was like some acute physical pain which renders
abominable all that is experienced while it is in possession. Not being
herself at ease, her own discomfort led her to lay the blame of it on
them, even though the meeting had been desired and looked forward to on
both sides. This was very markedly so in the case of Thackeray, for
whom, before she met him, she had a wild hero-worship comparable with
that which, in the days of her childhood, she had cherished for the Duke
of Wellington. He was unique, he was a Titan, he was the legitimate high
priest of Truth, and 'a hundred years hence the thoughtful critic,
looking down on the deep waters, will see his work shining through them,
the pearl of great price. He is alone in his power, alone in his
simplicity, alone in his self-control.' He was a great knight-errant
gloriously tilting against and triumphantly overthrowing the pomps and
empty pretensions of the world, with his burnished spear of
noble-hearted satire.

Reality based on such glowing expectations was almost bound to prove a
disappointment, and the first meeting seems to have been a dreadful
fiasco. Thackeray was invited to dine at Mrs. Smith's to meet her, but
Charlotte had been out all morning, she had missed her lunch, and by
seven o'clock exhaustion and the excitement of meeting him had made
'savage work' of her. It must have been by her own wish that he was not
introduced to her before dinner, but he came up and shook hands.[92]
Afterwards he talked to her a little, but she could hardly reply to him
at all; everything was 'dreamlike.' 'Had I not been obliged to speak,'
she wrote to Mr. Williams, 'I could have managed well, but it behoved me
to answer when addressed and the effort was torture--I spoke stupidly.'
Unfortunately this meeting had been arranged in order that, at her wish,
she might get to know Thackeray, so speech could hardly be avoided. But
speech being torture, she chiefly listened, and, alas, she found his
talk 'very peculiar, too perverse to be pleasant'; he was 'cynical,
harsh and contradictory.' The torture of her own shyness, coupled with
the self-conscious sense that something 'brilliant, eccentric and
provocative was expected of the author of _Jane Eyre_' made her critical
of him. Though still an intellectual Titan, he lost something of his
moral stature, and the glamour began to fade from his work as well.

[Footnote 92: This letter of Charlotte's to her father (Clement Shorter,
_The Bronts_, vol. ii, p. 211) is dated November 1849. November is
clearly a mistake, since she did not go up to London till December.]

     I have come to the conclusion [she wrote to Mr. Williams] that
     whenever he (Thackeray) writes, Mephistopheles stands on his right
     hand and Raphael on his left: the great doubter and sneerer usually
     guides the pen; the Angel noble and gentle, interlines letters of
     light here and there. Alas, Thackeray, I wish your strong wings
     would lift you oftener above the smoke of cities into the pure
     region nearer heaven.[93]

[Footnote 93: Thackeray wrote to her after she had left London; his
letter was 'long, interesting and characteristic,' but he enjoined
privacy, otherwise he would not write again, or write only
conventionally. She replied, but did not know whether he would feel
satisfaction or displeasure at what she said. Probably the latter, for
the correspondence seems to have ceased.]

The preacher, we fear, who was never very far from Charlotte's right
hand, held the pen for her there, and when she next saw Thackeray in
London in June 1850, he inspired her tongue. Her shyness had worn off,
and, no doubt to his extreme astonishment, she went for the Titan.

     He made a morning call, [she wrote to Ellen] and sat about two
     hours. Mr. Smith only was in the room, the whole time. He described
     it afterwards as a 'queer scene,' and I suppose it was. The giant
     sat before me: I was moved to speak to him of some of his
     shortcomings (literary, of course); one by one the faults came into
     my mind, and one by one I brought them out, and sought some
     explanation or defence. He did defend himself like a great Turk and
     heathen; that is to say the excuses were often worse than the crime
     itself. The matter ended in decent amity; if all be well I am to
     dine at his house this evening.

A queer scene indeed! Only once before had he met her, and then she was
too awe-struck with him to utter more than a syllable; now for two hours
he was in the dock before this ferocious little lady, who cross-examined
him on his literary misdeeds and poured scorn on the pleading which only
aggravated his offence. It must have been in some trepidation that he
looked forward to that evening, for who could tell whether she might not
again arraign him before the distinguished company whom he had honoured
with an invitation to come in after dinner and see the great authoress?
But there was no real fear of that; the presence of strangers exercised
the usual paralysing effect on her. She was more tongue-tied than she
had been on the first occasion of their meeting, and there ensued the
most ghastly party ever recorded in the melancholy history of social
pleasure.

Lady Ritchie, Thackeray's daughter (whose admirable account of it I
follow), was present throughout the evening.[94] To her and her sister,
then young girls, the occasion was of the most thrilling, for they had
surreptitiously dipped into _Jane Eyre_, which, though chiefly
unintelligible, was highly stimulating. Her father went down to the
front door to receive his guest, and in she came, escorted by him and
Mr. Smith, 'in mittens, in silence, in seriousness,' tiny and hardly
reaching up to Thackeray's elbow. She was somewhat grave and stern,
thought Lady Ritchie, especially 'to forward little girls who wished to
chatter'; evidently Charlotte remembered, from the governess days, the
necessity and the difficulty of repelling the rude familiarities of
children. Then, after this family dinner, the brilliant company began to
assemble. Mrs. Crowe who wrote _The Nightside of Nature_ was there, and
Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Mrs. Proctor and her husband, Barry
Cornwall (who, so rumour had once said, were the joint authors of _Jane
Eyre_) and their daughter, Adelaide Anne Proctor, who wrote _The Lost
Chord_ and other poems.

[Footnote 94: It is clear that this dinner party did not take place, as
is generally recorded, on Charlotte's first visit to London in December
1849, for Lady Ritchie speaks of the 'hot summer evening.']

     Everyone waited (says Lady Ritchie) for the brilliant conversation
     which never began at all. Miss Bront retired to the sofa in the
     study and murmured a low word now and then to our kind governess,
     Miss Truelock. The room looked very dark, the lamp began to smoke a
     little, the conversation grew dimmer and more dim, the ladies sat
     round still expectant, my father was too much perturbed by the
     gloom and the silence to be able to cope with it at all. Mrs.
     Brookfield who was in the doorway by the study near the corner in
     which Miss Bront was sitting, leant forward with a little
     commonplace, since brilliance was not to be the order of the
     evening. 'Do you like London, Miss Bront?' she said; another
     silence, a pause, then Miss Bront answered 'Yes and no,' very
     gravely....

It is indeed little wonder that, after the lioness had gone, Thackeray
quietly let himself out of his house and spent the rest of the evening
at his club, quite unable to face his other guests. One is sorry for
them for having had so poor an entertainment, one is especially sorry
for the host, but most of all for Charlotte. Further acquaintance with
Thackeray in later visits to London, even now that she was no longer shy
of him, was productive only of ironical comments on his faults. She went
to a lecture of his at which the audience was 'the cream of London
society,' and she was surprised that he noticed her at all, when so many
'admiring duchesses and countesses were seated in rows before him.' When
he asked her afterwards if she had enjoyed it, she found this harmless
inquiry over-eager and nave. And what a snob!

     He postponed his next lecture at the earnest petition of the
     duchesses and marchionesses who, on the day on which it should have
     been delivered, were necessitated to go down with the Queen and
     Court to Ascot races. I told him I thought he did wrong to put it
     off an their account--and I think so still....

Then there was a fancy dress ball given by the Queen, and the

     great lords and ladies have been quite wrapt up in preparation for
     this momentous event. Their pet and darling, Mr. Thackeray, of
     course, sympathizes with them. He was here yesterday to dinner and
     left very early in the evening in order that he might visit
     respectively the Duchess of Norfolk, the Marchioness of
     Londonderry, Ladies Chesterfield and Clanricarde, and see them all
     in their fancy costumes of the reign of Charles II before they set
     out for the Palace.... Amongst others the Lord Chancellor attended
     his last lecture, and Mr. Thackeray says he expects a place from
     him: but in this I think he was joking. Of course Mr. T. is a good
     deal spoiled by all this, and indeed it cannot be otherwise.

It was a sad disenchantment, but indeed she was on the alert for
disenchantment, and there underlies her criticism of him an uneasy
jealousy of one who could enjoy his success while she could not enjoy
her own. Thackeray offered to introduce her to galaxies of great folk
who would receive her with open arms, but she thought '"society"
produced so ill an effect on him that she had better avoid it.' She can
no longer find an agreeable trait in him, and when Mr. Smith sent her an
engraving of his portrait by Lawrence, she noticed that 'the expression
of _spite_, most vividly marked in the original, is here softened.' And
his work also did follow him into the darkness of her disapproval. She
went to his lecture on Fielding: it was 'a painful hour,' and she had
nothing but horror for his lightness over evil and drunken ways.
Branwell, of course, was still bitterly and hardly in her mind, but
there was more cavilling than criticism in her indignation with the
lecturer: anyone would think that Thackeray had made an impassioned
address exhorting every young man to take to drink without further
delay.

     If only once [she wrote] the prospect of a promising life blasted
     at the outset by wild ways had passed close under his eyes, he
     _never_ could have spoken with such levity of what led to its
     piteous destruction. Had I a brother yet living, I should tremble
     to let him read Thackeray's lecture on Fielding. I should hide it
     away from him. If in spite of precautions it fell into his hands, I
     should earnestly pray him not to be misled by the voice of the
     charmer, charm he never so wisely.

Then Mr. Smith sent her an early copy of the first volume of _Esmond_,
and though, when she had finished the whole, she was generous in praise,
her first instinct was to find fault with Thackeray's motives.

     But what bitter satire, [she writes] what relentless dissection of
     diseased subjects! Well, and this too is right, or would be right,
     if the savage surgeon did not seem so fiercely pleased with his
     work. Thackeray likes to dissect an ulcer or an aneurism, he has
     pleasure in putting his cruel knife or probe into quivering, living
     flesh. Thackeray would not like all the world to be good; no great
     satirist would like society to be perfect.

It was indeed seldom in this new world of London, which so cordially
opened its arms to her in welcome and admiration, that she registered
agreeable first impressions of anybody: she was unchanged in that
respect from the days when she had first seen in M. Hger an insane
tom-cat and a delirious hyena. But Miss Harriet Martineau was an
exception. Charlotte was predisposed in her favour, for she had enjoyed
_Deerbrook_ and, writing to her before her first visit to London in the
name of Currer Bell, expressed the 'pleasure and profit he has derived
from her works,' and sent her a copy of _Shirley_. This erasure of the
pronoun of sex was evidently intentional, for Charlotte meant to
disclose herself, and Miss Martineau, firmly grasping the idea, wittily
addressed her envelope of reply to 'Currer Bell, Esq.,' but began her
letter 'Dear Madam.' Then the spirit of social comedy took this
promising situation in hand. Currer Bell, on going up to London for that
first visit in which Thackeray stocks went down, wrote to Miss Martineau
that 'he' was in town and would like to see her. There was a small
party, all eager to see Currer Bell, but, before he-she arrived, a male
guest six feet high was announced, and the party thought this was Currer
Bell. Then Currer Bell arrived, and, disclosing herself indistinctly to
the footman, she was announced not as 'Miss Bront,' but as 'Miss
Brogden,' and there entered, so Miss Martineau wrote, 'the smallest
creature I had ever seen except at a fair.' There for the present the
budding friendship stayed, to burst out into amazing bloom a year
afterwards.

Meantime, before Charlotte met Miss Martineau again, other friendships
had been forming; that with Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, an eminent
doctor now retired and rewarded with a baronetcy, had features
peculiarly characteristic of Charlotte's almost comical inability to let
herself go, easily and naturally. He was certainly a lion-hunter, and
his persistent stalking must have been tiresome, but his amiability was
undefeated. He and his wife appear first on the stage among those who
'came boring to Haworth on the wise errand of seeing the scenery
described in _Jane Eyre_ and _Shirley_' They insisted that she should
spend a few days with them at Gawthorpe, their place on the borders of
East Lancashire, and, since Mr. Bront would not hear of her refusing,
she was left 'without plea or defence.' The baronet was a fine-looking
man and quite 'unpretending,' but, with her habitual prejudice against
strangers which, in spite of her resolutions, remained as robust as
ever, Charlotte had fears that he might not be what he seemed. 'I wish
he may be as sincere as he is polished,' she wrote. 'He shows his white
teeth with too frequent a smile, but I will not prejudge him.' So to
Gawthorpe with some misgiving she went. The embarrassment of being
obliged to talk, which wrecked her first meeting with Thackeray, was
spared her, since 'the dialogues (perhaps I should say monologues, for I
listened far more than I talked) by the fireside in his antique
oak-panelled drawing-room, while they suited him, did not too much
oppress and exhaust me.' He was not at all well, his nerves were very
sensitive and the state of his health 'exaggerated sensitiveness into
irritability.' Still he was gracious and dignified, and his 'tastes and
feelings were capable of elevation.' Then there was Lady Shuttleworth,
rather handsome, without any pretensions to 'aristocratic airs,' frank,
good-humoured and active, but 'truth obliges me to say that, as it seems
to me, grace, dignity, fine feeling were not in the inventory of her
qualities.' Charlotte liked the German governess better than anyone in
the house, and had heart-to-heart talks with her. She was well treated
'for a governess,' but said she was homesick, 'and wore the usual pale,
despondent look of her class.'

So the visit passed off not amiss, but, writes Charlotte,

     the worst of it is, that there is now some menace hanging over my
     head of an invitation to go to them in London during the season....
     This was his (Sir James's) theme when I was at Gawthorpe. I then
     gave notice that I would not be lionised.... I shall probably go. I
     know what the effect and what the pain will be, how wretched I
     shall often feel, how thin and haggard I shall get, but he who
     shuns suffering will never win victory. If I mean to improve, I
     must strive and endure. The visit will, however, be short, as short
     as I can possibly make it; would to God it was well over! I have
     one safeguard. Sir James has been a physician, and looks at me with
     a physician's eye: he saw at once that I could not stand much
     fatigue nor bear the presence of many strangers. Papa is restless
     and eager for me to go, the idea of a refusal quite hurts him.

There is something truly pathetic about this letter. It shows us what
real torture she suffered from her morbid shyness and self-consciousness,
and how she strove to get the better of them. But if there had been a
serious operation hanging over her head, instead of a short visit to
London, and it was doubtful if she could stand the shock, she could not
have spoken more apprehensively of it. It becomes easy to understand how
her first impressions of strangers were always disagreeable, for they
were, so to speak, the surgeons and nurses who conducted the operation;
only the ansthetist was lacking. But, in spite of the prospective pain,
she meant to face it, and there was true courage, for that which to
others would be a pleasant experience was to her a real agony. At other
times the flesh was weak, and in order to justify on moral grounds her
profound hatred of sojourning among strangers, she says that
'indiscriminate visiting leads only to a waste of time and a vulgarising
of character ... besides' (as an afterthought) 'it would be wrong to
leave papa often.' But papa on this occasion was 'quite hurt' at the
thought of her refusing.

Further menaces were brewing. The persevering baronet now proposed that
she should go up with him and his wife to London by road, and stay at
several of his relations' houses on the way. Providence thwarted that
more formidable plan; Mr. Bront was ill, Charlotte did not like to
leave him, and with solemn thankfulness she records her relief. 'I
cannot say that I regret having missed this ordeal: I would as lief have
walked among red-hot ploughshares.' Eventually she got out of staying
with them at all, and when she went to London in June 1850, she stopped
at the more familiar house of her publisher instead. But Sir James
called with agonising proposals. 'To my great horror he talks of my
going with them to Hampton Court, Windsor, etc. God knows how I shall
get on, I perfectly dread it.' But she escaped from that snare of the
fowler.

It was on this visit to London that Charlotte, as we have seen,
arraigned and dined with Thackeray; she also saw the idol of her
childhood, the Duke of Wellington; she sat to George Richmond the artist
for the crayon portrait of her which Mr. George Smith commissioned and
gave to her father, and which was bequeathed to the nation by her
husband and now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. She also met G.
H. Lewes for the first time, whom she had taken to task for his review
of _Shirley_. She confessed that she felt 'half sadly, half tenderly'
towards him, his face almost moved her to tears, so wonderfully it
resembled Emily's; 'in consequence, whatever Lewes does or says, I
believe I cannot hate him.' There was less of social entertainment on
this visit, and less lionising, and in consequence she enjoyed it more
than her first. But what she called 'a trying termination' of it
remained, which she looked forward to with apprehension, but enjoyed
enormously. This was an expedition to Edinburgh with her young
publisher, George Smith, who was six or seven years younger than she,
and it showed a daring disregard of the Victorian conventions of 1850,
for she went there alone with him and his sister without any middle-aged
chaperon at all, feeling that 'my seniority and lack of all pretensions
to beauty, etc., are a perfect safeguard.' The expedition was a
glorious success; she found music and magic at Melrose and Abbotsford,
and London 'compared to Dun-Edin, "mine own romantic town," is prose
compared to poetry or as a great rumbling, rambling heavy epic compared
to a lyric, brief, bright, clear, and vital as a flash of lightning.'
The Scotch, too, had grand characters and that gave Scotland its charm
and greatness.

She went back from Scotland to Haworth, where she stayed a month; it was
like the return home after Anne's death. 'There was a reaction,' she
wrote, 'that sunk me to the earth: the deadly silence, solitude,
desolation, were awful; the craving for companionship, the hopelessness
of relief, were what I should dread to feel again.' She was morbidly
oppressed with the sense of the shortness of life, and of 'the sickness,
decay, the struggle of spirit and flesh' that must come before the end
of it. Her father was anxious about her health; this caused, she
thought, the gloomy thoughts that assailed her, and made a canker in her
mind, and she entreated him not to worry about her.

In turn she was anxious about him, and two people worrying about each
other, with little or no external diversion, brews a deadly atmosphere.
Charlotte's nerves were frayed, she had no literary project on hand and
she dwelt morbidly on the past, and thus grew apprehensive about the
future. 'I think grief,' she writes, 'is a two-edged sword, it cuts both
ways: the memory of one loss is the anticipation of another.'

Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, robbed of Charlotte's visit to him in
London, now urged her to come and stay with him at a house he had taken
near Bowness on Lake Windermere, and again Mr. Bront, who by no means
wanted her always to be with him at Haworth, said that her refusal to go
would much annoy him. Her dutifulness was rewarded, for it was now she
met Mrs. Gaskell for the first time and a friendship and a
correspondence began which, though never intimate, lasted to the end of
Charlotte's life. There was already a mutual predisposition, for Mrs.
Gaskell had written to Charlotte in praise of _Shirley_, and Charlotte
had therefore settled she was a great and a good woman. Now these
pleasant expectations were realised: Charlotte found her a kind and
cheerful companion of high talent. Mrs. Gaskell also was attracted and
interested: Charlotte's shyness and silence struck her first, and the
absence of 'any spark of merriment.' But her well-meaning host still
could not do right, for he took Charlotte for a drive in a carriage to
see the beauties of the Lake country. That sounds harmless, but no--she
writes to Miss Wooler: 'Decidedly it does not agree with me to prosecute
the search of the picturesque in a carriage; a waggon, a spring-cart,
even a post-chaise might do, but the carriage upsets everything.' But
could poor Sir James have foreseen this fatal flaw? Even if he had, and
if he had sent Charlotte out in a waggon, she would surely have founded
an even graver complaint at being supplied with so unusual a conveyance.
It was not really the carriage that worried her; it was the presence of
other people and her own self-consciousness. She was afraid of growing
in any degree enthusiastic, and thus drawing attention to the 'lioness,
the authoress, the artist.' Not till her next visit to the Lakes, in the
winter, when she stayed with Miss Martineau and fell victim to her
robust charm, did she realise Sir James's kindly intentions. 'I begin to
admit in my own mind,' she wrote, 'that he is sincerely benignant to
me.'

She went back home at the end of August, and was, as usual, much cheered
by an article in the _Palladium_, by Sidney Dobell, entitled 'Currer
Bell,' which expressed the warmest admiration not only for _Jane Eyre_
and _Shirley_, but for _Wuthering Heights_. It revived, however, the
suggestion that _Wuthering Heights_ and _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_
were also of Currer Bell's authorship. Mr. Williams had seen this
article, and he now wrote to Charlotte proposing to reissue _Wuthering
Heights_ and _Agnes Grey_ in one volume, with a biographical notice by
her which should make known the history of the three pseudonyms. Emily
and Anne were dead, and there was no longer any reason why the mystery
should not be authoritatively dispelled. He also made some suggestion
about reissuing _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_. Charlotte was opposed to
that: she did not think the book should be preserved. Anne had written
it under a strange, conscientious, half-ascetic notion of accomplishing
a painful penance and a severe duty: it had better drop out of
existence. But she warmly favoured the other suggestion, only the book
must be republished by Smith, Elder and not by its original publisher,
Newby. She also decided to make a selection from her sisters' manuscript
poems, not hitherto published, and issue them in the form of an
appendix.

She set to work at once, and before the end of September a rough copy of
the 'Biographical Notice' was in the hands of her publisher. She
described, with a simplicity she rarely attained, Emily's last illness;
none can read that page unmoved, so sincere and heart-broken is the
regret and the anguish for those estranged days that inspired it.

     Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay
     before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly, she made
     haste to leave us. Yet while physically she perished, mentally she
     grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw
     with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with an
     anguish of love and wonder. The awful point was that while full of
     ruth for others, on herself she had no pity: the spirit was
     inexorable to the flesh: from the trembling hand, the unnerved
     limbs, the faded eye, the same service was exacted as in health.
     To stand by and witness this and not dare to remonstrate was a pain
     no words can render....

Truly, if Charlotte was reaping the hardness she had sown, she made
expiation in that bitter harvesting.

Then, when the 'Biographical Notice' was finished, Charlotte read
_Wuthering Heights_ over again, and wrote a Preface regarding it to this
new edition. She tells us that she has now got a clear glimpse of its
faults, and craves indulgence for them:

     Had she (Emily) but lived, her mind would have grown like a strong
     tree, loftier, straighter, wider-spreading, and its matured fruits
     would have attained a mellower ripeness and sunnier bloom, but on
     that mind time and experience alone could work.

But we stare incredulous at such a conclusion. What does it mean? It is
as if Charlotte predicted that some dryad of the moor, in whose eyes
shone the knowledge of things veiled and primeval, would be tamed by
time and experience into losing her elemental quality, and be thereby
ripened and mellowed. Surely, had Emily lived, exactly the opposite must
have happened. What more would have been revealed to her by the 'Strange
Power' that inspired her we cannot tell, for the ways of genius are past
finding out, and its paths in the dark waters through which it alone can
lead us, but any such development as Charlotte predicted must have been
to the detriment of that supreme quality. She missed all that _Wuthering
Heights_ stands for: she shuddered at its 'horror of great darkness,'
she wished to cease 'to breathe lightning,' not knowing that the
darkness and the lightning are It; and, apologising for them, she
pointed out 'those spots where clouded daylight and eclipsed sun still
attest their existence.' Eagerly, defending the book, she calls our
attention to 'the homely benevolence of Nelly Dean,' to the 'constancy
and tenderness of Edgar Linton': Emily _could_ render such, and had she
lived she would have developed her power further in that regard. But
when it came to the true genius of the book, namely the loves of
Heathcliff and Catherine, that soaring of fierce eagles out of sight, or
to the passionate mystical yearning for the unsheathed beauty of the
world, for the wakening and being satisfied with it, she was blind:
Emily's 'descriptions of natural scenery are what they should be, and
all they should be.' As for the eagles, Heathcliff 'stands unredeemed
... except for his faint regard for Hareton,' and his 'half implied
esteem for Nelly Dean'; his love for Catherine 'is a passion such as
might boil and glow in the bad essence of some evil genius!' All she can
say for Catherine is that 'she is not destitute of a certain strange
beauty in her fierceness, or of honesty in the midst of her perverted
passion and passionate perversity.' Such was her estimate of the book
when loyally and lovingly she tried to appreciate and understand it.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is scarcely in the whole history of the family a more
heart-rending picture than that which Charlotte paints of herself
sitting in the dining-room of the Parsonage, in a loneliness which her
occupation accentuated and rendered the more intolerable, and going
through her sisters' papers. She spent hours peering into the minutely
written manuscripts, selecting the poems to be published, and writing
little lost explanatory notes: in one she said, 'the Genius of a
solitary region seems to address his wandering and wayward votary'; in
another, 'the same mind is in converse with a like abstraction'; in
another, 'the wakened soul struggles to blend with the storm by which it
is swayed....' As in her portrait of her sister in _Shirley_, as in her
Preface, these notes are mere external observations; Emily is beyond
her. She had thought, she wrote to Mr. Williams, that this intellectual
exertion would rouse her mind from the sense of despairing loneliness,
but it was not so. All turned to memory; memory was 'both sad and
relentless.'

     The reading over of papers, the renewal of remembrance brought back
     the pang of bereavement, and occasioned a depression of spirits
     well-nigh intolerable. For one or two nights I scarcely knew how to
     get on till morning; and when morning came I was still haunted with
     a sense of sickening distress.

She breakfasted with her father, she worked alone, and alone she walked
on the moors on days of autumn sunshine 'with solitude and memory for
companions, and Heathcliff haunted every glen and hollow.' She sat down
to her solitary dinner, for Mr. Bront dined by himself, and soon after
the early closing in of the shortening days began to darken. Now she
must put her work aside, for her eyes would not stand the strain of
deciphering these scripts by candle-light; also she dared not work in
the evening for fear of the sleepless nights that followed. Rainstorms
swept over the garden and glimmering tombstones of the graveyard, and
she drew the curtains across the panes, but still the voice of the wind
called from without, as of Cathy wailing 'Let me in!' and fingers tapped
at the pane.

Memory; everything was memory, and all memories were bitter. The silent
house was astir with ghosts, and these lonely evening hours were the
worst of all, for they were those in which once there had been
excitement and eager talk over plans, over literary ambitions, over
projects for keeping a school. The horror grew, and perhaps she would
take her knitting into the kitchen and talk with Tabby for an hour;
then, still alone, she supped and fed Anne's or Emily's dogs, whose
mistresses had not yet returned, unless it was their voices in the wind
from the moors. Mr. Bront went early to bed, winding, as he passed, the
clock on the stairs, whose ticking could be heard throughout the house;
but Charlotte sat up till midnight, for where was the use of lying
lonely in the dark? As one of those rare visitors to Haworth wrote to
Mrs. Gaskell, it seemed 'that joy can never have entered that house
since it was first built.'

Such was the autumn of 1850.




CHAPTER XVII


As soon as this new edition of _Wuthering Heights_ and _Agnes Grey_ was
out of her hands, Charlotte went to pay a long-promised visit to Miss
Martineau. She lived at Ambleside, but had been away when Charlotte was
staying with Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth in the summer, and they had not
met since she had been introduced a year ago as 'Miss Brogden.'
Instantly she succumbed to the breezy, efficient, rather masculine charm
of her new friend, who had the most vivifying effect on her after the
desolate, memory-haunted autumn. 'She is a great and a good woman,' she
wrote to Ellen, 'of course not without peculiarities, but I have seen
none as yet that annoy me.... Miss Martineau I relish inexpressibly.' It
was her tremendous vitality that was so bracing and admirable, and not
less her mental vigour. She was up at five in the morning, and after a
cold bath took a walk by starlight, and had finished breakfast and got
to work by seven.[95] The morning was spent in solitude; they walked and
talked till dinner; and after Miss Martineau conversed 'fluently and
abundantly,' and sat up for a couple of hours after Charlotte had gone
to bed at ten, writing letters. Charlotte wrote to her father with the
same rare unqualified enthusiasm:

     As to Miss Martineau I admire her and wonder at her more than I
     can say. Her powers of labour, of exercise, and social cheerfulness
     are beyond my comprehension. In spite of the unceasing activity of
     her colossal intellect, she enjoys robust health. She is very kind
     to me, though she must think I am a very insignificant person
     compared to herself.

[Footnote 95: Miss Martineau subsequently disclaimed the bulk of these
Spartan practices which Charlotte attributed to her.]

To Mr. Williams she wrote:

     Her animal spirits are as unflagging as her mental powers. It gave
     me no pain to feel insignificant, mentally and corporeally, in
     comparison with her.

To another friend she wrote:

     She is certainly a woman of wonderful endowments, both intellectual
     and physical, and though I share few of her opinions, and regard
     her as fallible on certain points of judgment, I must still accord
     her my highest esteem. The manner in which she combines the highest
     mental culture with the nicest discharge of feminine duties filled
     me with admiration, while her affectionate kindness earned my
     gratitude.

To Mr. Taylor she wrote:

     I find a worth and greatness in herself, and a constancy,
     benevolence, perseverance in her practices, such as wins the
     sincerest esteem and affection. She is not a person to be judged by
     her writings alone, but rather by her own deeds and life, than
     which nothing can be more exemplary and nobler. Faults she has, but
     to me they appear very trivial weighed in the balance against her
     excellences.

There is scarcely a qualifying phrase in these enthusiasms: Charlotte
let herself go in almost undiluted appreciation. She had never admired
any woman so unreservedly since the days of her adolescent passion for
Ellen, and it was almost as if the sunshine of the morning, long
obscured and eclipsed, had returned to her and warmed her into
uncritical enjoyment. Moreover, Charlotte could render her an
intellectual homage such as she had never been able to accord to Ellen,
and this homage was at present reciprocated, for Miss Martineau greatly
admired _Jane Eyre_ and _Shirley_, 'and,' wrote Charlotte, 'while she
testifies affectionate approbation, I feel the sting taken away from
another class of critics.'

Miss Martineau told Mrs. Gaskell two little anecdotes about this visit
which, though she relates them as independent, may have had a
connection. She had mesmeric powers (or as we should say now, hypnotic
powers), and Charlotte constantly urged her to mesmerise her. This she
refused to do, thinking that Charlotte was in a low nervous condition
and that harm might come. She made excuse, saying again and again that
she was tired. But there came a day when she could not plead fatigue,
and Charlotte 'fell under the influence.' In other words, she began to
go into a light trance, and Miss Martineau stopped. Soon after Miss
Martineau had to give a lecture: Charlotte sitting sideways to her never
took her eyes off her, and when the lecture was over came and stood by
her, and in Miss Martineau's 'very voice' repeated the words from
Shakespeare which she had quoted, 'Is my son dead?' They went home in
silence, and again Charlotte staring at her said, 'Is my son dead?' The
two stories seem connected; it looks as if some hypnotic influence had
been established which renewed itself when Charlotte fixed her eyes on
Miss Martineau.

She returned to Haworth, having spent Christmas with this tonic and
marvellous friend, vastly restored, rather severe on herself for having
been so feeble as to need a change, and full of critical impressions.
She had been to see Mrs. Arnold, widow of Dr. Arnold, and her family at
Fox How, and had surveyed them with a magisterial eye. Mrs. Arnold was
good and amiable, but intellect was not her strong point, and her manner
at first lacked genuineness and simplicity. The daughters were like her
both in their qualities and their defects; 'their opinions on literary
subjects were rather imitative than original, rather sentimental than
sound.' Matthew Arnold's manner was 'displeasing from its seeming
foppery,' and Charlotte regarded him at first with 'regretful surprise:
the shade of Dr. Arnold seemed to me to frown on his young
representative.' Also his theological opinions were very vague and
unsettled, but he like the rest of the family improved upon
acquaintance: the unfavourable first impression had only been the effect
which strangers always had on her. Then Amelia Wooler came in for some
rough handling. She had written Charlotte a letter full of 'claptrap
sentiment and humbugging attempts at fine writing.' Also she had asked
for Wordsworth's, Southey's, Miss Martineau's, and Charlotte's
autographs: this showed that the 'old trading spirit' was still alive.

Then there were matrimonial subjects to be discussed with Ellen: Mr.
James Taylor at this time, in spite of discouragement, was prosecuting
his suit, and Charlotte at present felt well-disposed to him. There are
also allusions to a younger man, not named, but certainly to be
identified with her young publisher, George Smith, with whom she had
made that daring expedition to Scotland. Ellen's badinage (there is no
other word for it) on this subject was frightfully arch, for she alluded
to him and Charlotte as Jupiter and Venus, and Charlotte, evidently
highly delighted, bade her have done with this 'heathen trash.' Towards
him she was more than well-disposed, perhaps she was a little in love
with him, for Jupiter, encouraged by the success of the Scottish visit,
had proposed to Venus that she should make a trip up the Rhine with him,
and she wrote to Ellen: 'I am not made of stone, and what is mere
excitement to him is fever to me.... I cannot conceive either his mother
or his sisters relishing it, and all London would gabble like a
countless host of geese.' Her common sense told her that it would never
do to marry him, even if he proposed to her. There was a great
difference of fortune between them, and it was part of her creed that
there should be approximate equality of means between husband and wife;
also he was considerably younger than she, and 'personal regard and
natural liking do not compensate for that.' She writes with admirable
wisdom: 'I am content to have him as a friend, and pray God to continue
to me the common sense to look on one so young, so rising, so hopeful in
no other light.' But there the matter stayed, and there is no kind of
reason to suppose that George Smith ever did propose to her.

Very soon a trial tested that high adoration for Miss Martineau, but it
stood firm. She, in collaboration with Mr. Atkinson, published early in
February 1851 a book called _Letters on the Nature and Development of
Man_. Though it is impossible to suppose that Charlotte, after all those
long intimate talks with her, had no inkling of what Miss Martineau's
theological opinions were, the publication of them shocked her a good
deal. Making allowance for the fact that she often worked herself up,
when pen in hand, to exaggerated statements of her feelings, it is
evident that she was much upset.

     It is the first exposition of avowed Atheism and Materialism [she
     wrote] that I have ever read: the first unequivocal declaration of
     disbelief in the existence of a God or a Future Life I have ever
     seen.... Sincerely--for my own part--do I wish to find and know the
     truth, but if this be truth, well may she guard herself with
     mysteries and cover herself with a veil. If this be Truth, Man or
     Woman who beholds her can but curse the day he or she was born....

Again she wrote: 'I deeply regret its publication for the lady's sake:
it gives a death blow to her future usefulness. Who can trust the word
or rely on the judgment of an avowed atheist?' But shocked though she
was, she did not let this crucial division on religious questions put
an end to the friendship, and she continued to correspond with her.[96]
She got into her head, though quite mistakenly, that Miss Martineau's
friends were as shocked as herself and that they had, one and all,
refused to have anything more to do with her. So she determined to stick
to her and, when questioned by Miss Wooler as to the wisdom of
friendship with an atheist, wrote a characteristic homily in reply:

     I do not feel it would be right to give Miss Martineau up entirely.
     There is in her nature much that is very noble. Hundreds have
     forsaken her, more I fear in the apprehension that their fair name
     may suffer if seen in connection with hers than for any pure
     conviction, such as you suggest, of harm consequent on her fatal
     tenets. With these fair weather friends I cannot bear to rank. And
     for her sin, is it not one of those which God and not man must
     judge?... If you had seen how she secretly suffers from
     abandonment, you would be the last to give her up: you would
     separate the sinner from the sin, and feel as if the right lay
     rather in quietly adhering to her in her strait, while that
     adherence is unfashionable and unpopular, than in turning your back
     when the world sets the example.

[Footnote 96: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, pp. 206, 226,
237, etc.]

These are certainly very creditable sentiments, and evince a much larger
charity than Charlotte sometimes showed; but we wonder whether she
really meant that nobody 'could trust the word of an avowed atheist.'
Anyhow, the friendship continued, and she sent Miss Martineau favourable
comments which she had received on her book, with the intention of
cheering her Coventry. But Miss Martineau, rather disconcertingly, was
not in the least in need of being cheered. She referred to Charlotte's
notion that her friends had forsaken her as 'an unaccountable delusion':
the book which Charlotte had averred had given the 'death blow to her
usefulness' had only earned for her a new world of sympathy.

The depression of solitude and silence at Haworth returned. Mr. James
Taylor had his final interview, which left the situation as it was, and
Charlotte began to reckon up what had happened. He would be absent for
five years; 'a dividing expanse of three oceans' would come between
them; and though it was entirely of her own choice that anything divided
them any more at all, she regretted what she had done, in spite of the
excellent reasons for refusing him, of which she found more, and Ellen's
'soft consolatory accents' did not console her. Her father was not well,
and she felt that having him to think about 'took her thoughts off other
matters, which have become complete bitterness and ashes.' The 'seeming
foundation of support and prospect of hope' had completely crumbled away
with James Taylor's departure to India, and there was nothing again to
look forward to.

And then, amazingly and uniquely (though only briefly), a new interest
enlivened her: dress. She was soon to pay a month's visit to Jupiter and
Jupiter's family in London, and she wanted all sorts of things:
chemisettes of small size, and a new bonnet, and in particular a lace
mantle to 'go with' a black satin dress. She had bought a black lace
mantle, but it looked 'brown and rusty' over the satin, and she
exchanged it for a white one, which looked better and was also cheaper,
for it cost only 1 14_s._ She went to Leeds to buy a new bonnet to wear
with the black satin, but when she tried it on 'its pink lining looked
infinitely too gay.' Then she wanted a new dress: there were 'beautiful
silks of pale sweet colours, but they were five shillings a yard,' so
she chose black silk at three shillings. For the moment Charlotte was
violently concerned with her frocks.

These vanities being duly provided, Charlotte went up to London again,
at the end of May 1851, to stay with her publisher and his mother and
sisters for a solid month. Everyone was disposed to make much of her:
she breakfasted at the house of Mr. Rogers the 'patriarch poet'; she was
asked to a big party at Grosvenor House but declined; she attended
Thackeray's lectures, and, though Thackeray did not repeat the
experiment of getting together a party to meet her, he pointed her out
to 'his grand friends,' and Lord Carlisle and Monckton Milnes introduced
themselves. When one of these lectures was over, so Mrs. Gaskell tells
us, the audience formed up in two lines and she had to pass down an
aisle between rows of eager and interested faces. She retailed these
social triumphs to her father and Ellen with considerable gusto: one
cannot but think that in her heart, especially when they were over, they
gave her a good deal of satisfaction, but at the time her shyness and
self-consciousness discounted them. She was not well, she suffered from
headache and sickness, and she felt inclined to murmur at Fate, 'which
compels me to comparative silence and solitude for eleven months in the
year, and in the twelfth, while offering social enjoyment, takes away
the vigour and cheerfulness which should turn it to account.' Her
malaise caused her to make some severe remarks about certain of these
entertainments. She went to a meeting of a Roman Catholic Society, at
which Cardinal Wiseman presided. He had a quadruple chin, a large mouth
with oily lips betokening greed. 'He came swimming into the room,
smiling, simpering and bowing like a fat old lady, and sat down very
demure in his chair, the picture of a sleek hypocrite.' Dark-looking,
sinister priests surrounded him; he spoke in a smooth, whining voice
like a canting Methodist preacher. A horrid spectacle, but she certainly
enjoyed telling Ellen about him. She went to see Rachel act:

     a wonderful sight, terrible as if the earth has cracked deep at
     your feet, and revealed a glimpse of hell. She made me shudder to
     the marrow of my bones: in her some fiend has certainly taken up
     its incarnate home. She is not a woman, she is a snake, she is the
     ----.

Rachel made a deep and horrible impression on her; months afterwards,
writing to Mr. Taylor in Bombay, she compared her acting to 'the
poisoned stimulants to popular ferocity' of gladiatorial shows. 'It is
scarcely human nature that she shows you: it is something wilder and
worse: the feelings and fury of a fiend. The great gift of genius she
undoubtedly has: but, I fear she rather abuses it than turns it to good
account.'[97]

[Footnote 97: Charlotte records this impression of Rachel in
_Villette_.]

Then there were visits to the Crystal Palace, no less than five of them.
It impressed her immensely; it was like a bazaar created by Eastern
genii, and arranged by supernatural hands. But it palled: it soon became
a bustling and fatiguing place, and she did not want to go so often but
was forced to. Her last days in London were spoiled because Sir James
Kay-Shuttleworth, from whom she had hitherto concealed her presence,
discovered her, and it was hard to ward off his eager hospitalities.

The chronicle of these pleasures reads but drearily. She had made
valiant efforts to overcome that deplorable killjoy shyness which turned
normal social intercourse into torture, but they seemed unavailing, and
her health could not stand the cheerful stir and bustle which is in
itself so enjoyable to others, but which, getting on her nerves, caused
her to look with a jaundiced eye on what others found entertaining. We
must not therefore imagine, as certain of her biographers state, that
except for the sense of duty and filial piety which kept her at Haworth
she would have led a brilliant life in London, the centre of some high
literary circle. She disliked London, and she affirmed that if she had
to live there she would studiously avoid literary circles. London life
was impossible for her; a few weeks of it was as much as she could
stand, and after that, according to her own rueful picture of herself,
she returned home meagre and old and hollow-eyed. Besides, it was at
Haworth only she was able to write, and writing was to her the sole
panacea for the weary fret of life, and for the morbid melancholy that
so often beset her. Once only again did she spend a holiday in London,
and then she avoided what she had learned, by repeated experience, gave
her more discomfort than pleasure.

On her way home she spent two days at Plymouth Grove, Manchester, the
house of Mr. and Mrs. Gaskell, and there suddenly a new trait of
tenderness towards children manifested itself. In her governess days,
perhaps because she could not manage them, perhaps because they formed
part of a _milieu_ she detested, she had certainly not cared for them,
and shrank from their tokens of affection. But now, as if surprised at
and distrustful of her own unwonted feelings, she wrote to Mrs. Gaskell
after her visit, asking her to manage 'to convey a small kiss to that
dear but dangerous little person Julia. She surreptitiously possessed
herself of a minute fraction of my heart, which has been missing ever
since I saw her.' It was a diffident, humble access; she 'felt like a
fond but bashful suitor who views at a distance the fair personage to
whom in his slavish awe he dare not risk a near approach.' She felt a
stranger to children.

Charlotte got home by the beginning of July, and set to work on her new
book. As may be remembered, she had thought of following up _Jane Eyre_
with an expanded version of _The Professor_, and had also thought, after
the publication of _Shirley_, of bringing it out as it stood, and even
wrote a preface for it, but nothing came of it. But she had never
personally abandoned the idea of using much of the material in a future
book, and she now did so in the writing of _Villette_. Instantly, as
always before, she found healing for her despondence and depression in
the exercise of her imagination; her letters to her friends much
diminish in volume and in vividness, for all her energy was being poured
into her work. It went well, for she was handling the molten stuff of
her experiences in Brussels which was still live fire; she got on
quickly, and hoped to have the book ready for publication in the spring
of the next year, 1852.[98] She refused to leave Haworth in spite of
invitations from Miss Martineau, Mrs. Gaskell and Ellen Nussey, for
while the wind of imagination blew she must sail before it. None of the
usual causes for dissatisfaction prevailed against her. Tabby got
influenza and Martha quinsy, and she nursed them both; her father got a
cold; Keeper, Emily's dog, died; but all burdens were light when her
work prospered.

[Footnote 98: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, p. 272.]

Then in the winter her health broke down, and she had many weeks of
illness and enforced idleness; headaches and bilious attacks continually
prostrated her; her letters are a catalogue of miserable symptoms and
ineffectual remedies. The spring brought improvement, but when she tried
to get to work again, the happy inspiration of the autumn would not
return, and, as she wrote to Mr. Williams, 'When the mood leaves me (it
has left me now, without vouchsafing so much as a word of a message when
it will return) I put by the MS. and wait till it comes back again.' For
more than four months this barrenness persisted; she slept ill at night,
and sat idle all day, longing to work but unable, and afraid sometimes
that the pain she suffered was a symptom of the disease of which her
four sisters and her brother had died. Then at last the blessed mood
returned, and before the end of March she was at work again.

There was no visit to London this summer; in June she went to Filey,
close to Scarborough, partly for the sake of sea-air, partly in order to
see to the re-lettering of the stone over Anne's grave. She must have
heard that there were some errors on it (and indeed found five), for she
referred to this as a duty that had long lain heavy. For some reason she
felt that she had to be alone for this task of piety; why, it is
impossible to say. Ellen had been with her at Scarborough when Anne
died, and she doubtless would have accompanied her now, but Charlotte
did not even let her know that she contemplated going, writing her when
she had got there a mysterious and rather melodramatic letter,
beginning:

     I am at Filey utterly alone. Do not be angry, the step is right. I
     considered it and resolved on it with due deliberation. I walk on
     the sands a good deal, and try not to feel desolate and melancholy.
     How sorely my heart longs for you, I need not say.

But she only had to tell Ellen she wanted her, and Ellen would have
come; clearly she just did not want anybody's company, and having
discharged her duty to the tombstone stayed there for three weeks in
great tranquillity and content. She bathed and it seemed to brace her;
she walked along the sands for three or four hours every day, as she had
been told that this was good for a torpid liver, and became as sunburnt
as a bathing-woman. She watched a rough sea with awe and admiration, she
saw a dog battling with the waves, she set out to go to Filey Bridge but
was frightened back by two cows, she went to church at some small and
shabby tabernacle, and could hardly help laughing at the ludicrous
seating arrangements, for the singers in the gallery turned their backs
on the congregation, and the congregation on the parson. She wished Mr.
Nicholls had been there to see it; he would certainly have laughed out,
and she sent him her kind regards. Her letters in her utter loneliness
were full of good spirits and cheerfulness, and this first kindly
mention of Mr. Nicholls is significant.

She was back at Haworth in July, and had a serious fright about her
father, who was threatened with a stroke of apoplexy. He was dangerously
ill for a while, but made a steady though slow recovery, and once more
Charlotte got to work on _Villette_, resolved not to quit her labours,
but not to hurry them, till the book was finished. There were fits of
depression when her work went ill, in which she confessed that she was
lonely and likely to remain lonely, but denied, still wondering whether
she had been right to refuse Mr. Taylor, that the thought of continuing
'single' was the cause of them. She felt she would neither 'know nor
taste pleasure' until the book was finished, and worked steadily on,
refusing for some weeks to let Ellen come to Haworth or to interrupt
herself by going to her. Before the end of October she had sent two of
the three volumes to her publishers, asking for criticisms. She
admitted, when she received them, that there was something in them, and
then refused to alter a single word. She could not write otherwise, as
she had told Mr. Williams before, and she must write in her own way or
not at all. But she was in an agony of nervous apprehension about the
whole; she even wanted the book to be published anonymously. Then by the
end of November the long task was finished, and she said her prayers.

She was still all to bits with the strain of her accomplished work and,
not less, with the reaction that followed, for receiving from her
publishers her cheque of 500 payable on delivery of the complete
manuscript without a line of comment on the third volume, she instantly
made up her mind to rush up to London and see whether this silence
betokened disapproval. The letter came next morning, and Charlotte
scolded George Smith soundly for not having sent it with the cheque,
reminding him that 'Inexplicable delays should be avoided when possible,
for they are apt to urge those subjected to their harassment to sudden
and impulsive steps.' As for his criticisms on the third volume, she
pronounced them just, and took no further notice of them.

Charlotte was right in not attempting to alter the book; she could no
more have done that than she could have added a cubit to her stature,
for _Villette_, to a far higher degree than anything she had ever
written, was herself, and it was composed of her own experience, her
character and her soul. The book, once written, was as real and as
inevitable as the past on which it was founded. Technically, _Villette_
has grave faults; it lacks unity; the interest is shifted from one set
of characters to another, Lucy Snowe falls in love with Dr. John, and
when she discovers that he regards her with absolute indifference, she
falls in love with Paul Emmanuel, who, though this affair is the _clou_
of the book, hardly appears till we are half-way through. All this had
been pointed out to Charlotte, but the book was written indelibly with
her heart's blood and it could not be otherwise. For into it she had
put, and now was done with, the bitterness of that second year at
Brussels, which had robbed her of all peace of mind for two years. Now
she externalised these miseries, and by the alchemy of her art
transmuted her pangs into pictures, and even as once she in her own
person had sought relief from them in the chapel of St. Gudule's under
the seal of confession, so now under the seal of fiction she told the
world what she had told a priest, and was rid of the perilous stuff.
With minute detail and with photographic fidelity she reproduced the
_pensionnat_ in the Rue d'Isabelle, and made eternally substantial the
phantoms which for her haunted its corridors. Her imagination fused and
made molten the actual, and the third volume of _Villette_, enacted by
Lucy Snowe, Paul Emmanuel, and Madame Beck, could never have been
written had it not been for the adventure of Charlotte Bront,
Constantin Hger, and Madame. Whether or no she actually muttered _Je me
vengerai_ to that lady when she left Brussels for the last time, she had
kept these things in her heart, even as she had nursed there the
miseries of Cowan Bridge, speaking of them to no living soul; and now
releasing them she took her revenge, and wrote immortally of them. Long
as she had waited, Madame Hger had to wait longer yet for the
justification of her spyings and suspicions as set forth in _Villette_;
and it was not till sixty years later, when all those immediately
concerned had long been dead, that there were published the four letters
of Charlotte's to Madame Hger's husband, which she had picked out of
the waste-paper basket and pieced together. They were quits.




CHAPTER XVIII


It was in December 1852, when _Villette_ was going through the press,
that the final act in the drama of Charlotte's life began. It started in
storm and trouble, it ended with a spell of such tranquil happiness as
she had never known.

Mr. Nicholls had now been curate at Haworth for over eight years, and
Charlotte had often alluded to him with disparagement and dislike. His
narrowness of mind was what chiefly struck her; he was just a 'highly
uninteresting narrow and unattractive specimen of the coarser sex,' she
could not see the germs of goodness which Ellen perceived in him. The
parishioners generally shared her view, and they hoped that when he went
for his holiday to Ireland he would not trouble to return. But by the
time she was writing _Shirley_ she regarded him with a kindlier eye, and
in her presentation of him as Mr. Macarthey, which amused him so
enormously, she allowed that he was 'decent, decorous and conscientious.'
Now for some months she had suspected that 'he cared something for me
and wanted me to care for him.' Her father, she thought, had suspected
the same, and alluded to his low spirits and ill-health with 'much
indirect sarcasm.' Charlotte wondered if Ellen, who was sometimes too
quick to observe the earliest symptom of the love-lorn, had noticed this
too. Ellen had: she had already been scolded by Charlotte for her
prospective match-making.

  [Illustration: THE REV. ARTHUR BELL NICHOLLS]

One evening in December Mr. Nicholls came to tea with her and her
father in Mr. Bront's study.

     After tea, [she wrote to Ellen] I withdrew to the dining-room as
     usual. As usual, Mr. Nicholls sat with papa till between eight and
     nine o'clock. I then heard him open the parlour door, as if going.
     I expected the clash of the front door. He stopped in the passage:
     he tapped: like lightning it flashed on me what was coming. He
     entered, he stood before me. What his words were you can guess: his
     manner you can hardly realize, nor can I forget it. Shaking from
     head to foot, looking deadly pale, speaking low, vehemently yet
     with difficulty, he made me for the first time feel what it costs a
     man to declare affection when he doubts response.

Charlotte promised him a reply next day, and when he had gone, she went
to her father and told him what had happened. A Bedlamite scene
followed.

     If I had _loved_ Mr. Nicholls, [she wrote] and had heard such
     epithets applied to him as were used, it would have transported me
     past my patience; as it was, my blood boiled with a sense of
     injustice. But papa worked himself up into a state not to be
     trifled with: the veins on his temples started up like whipcord and
     his eyes became suddenly bloodshot. I made haste to promise him
     that Mr. Nicholls should on the morrow have a distinct refusal....
     Attachment to Mr. Nicholls, you are aware, I never entertained, but
     the poignant pity inspired by his state on Monday evening by the
     hurried revelation of his sufferings for many months, is something
     galling and irksome.

This was not a promising beginning of a love affair, for the lady, so
she protested, had not the slightest feeling of affection towards her
suitor, and her father got blood to the head at the notion of her
marrying him. Normally, therefore, one would have thought that, when Mr.
Nicholls thereupon resigned his curacy, the affair was finished; as a
matter of fact, it had barely begun. Unsoftened by Charlotte's promise
that she would not marry Mr. Nicholls, Mr. Bront wrote him what
Charlotte called a 'pitiless despatch.' The poor man was already
'entirely rejecting his meals,' and so Charlotte accompanied the
pitiless despatch with a note dissociating herself from these violent
expressions, and she exhorted him to maintain his courage and spirits.
She had already taken sides against her father (whose violence certainly
suggests that there was some truth in the stories about him which Mrs.
Gaskell had to suppress), for she wished that Ellen could be at Haworth
now 'to see papa in his present mood: you would know something of him.'
She was afraid also that 'papa thinks a little too much about his want
of money: he says that the match would be a degradation, that I should
be throwing myself away, that he expects me, if I marry at all, to do
very differently.' Charlotte did not share these worldly views against
her marrying Mr. Nicholls, but she had some even more valid ones of her
own. 'My own objections,' she writes, 'arise from a sense of incongruity
and uncongeniality in feelings, tastes, principles.' Her 'dearest wish'
for the immediate future was that 'papa would resume his tranquillity,
and Mr. N. his beef and pudding.' The writing of the pitiless despatch,
however, seemed to have been a safety-valve to Mr. Bront's indignation,
for Charlotte adds a postscript to this remarkable letter, saying that
'the incipient inflammation in Papa's eye is disappearing.'

Elements of comedy began to enter into this extremely serious situation.
Mr. Nicholls, having received Charlotte's letter of exhortation, quitted
Haworth, leaving Mr. Bront to look after the parish alone. A week
afterwards he was back again, and wrote to Mr. Bront withdrawing his
resignation, clearly because of the contents of Charlotte's letter. Mr.
Bront allowed him to stop on, but only on condition of his giving a
promise in writing that he would never mention the word marriage again
either to him or Charlotte. Mr. Nicholls took no notice of that, but
remained. Ever since the first frightful disclosure which caused Mr.
Bront a return of his apoplectic symptoms, parson and curate had not
spoken to each other at all, nor met even in church, for Mr. Nicholls
got somebody to take his duty for him, and Charlotte wrote to Ellen that
'she feels persuaded the termination will be his departure for
Australia.' Meantime feeling at Haworth ran high against him. 'Martha,'
Charlotte gravely records, 'is bitter against him; John Brown (the
sexton) says "he should like to shoot him."' Her own state of mind
indeed defies unravelment, and she certainly could not unravel it
herself. She assembles public opinion about his presumption in proposing
to her, and yet writes to assure him of her sympathy in such terms that
he recanted his resignation.

The tenseness of the situation was temporarily relieved by Charlotte's
departure on the last visit she ever made to London, in order to see
_Villette_ through the press. She told her father that he must not write
her abusive letters about Mr. Nicholls, and he promised not to. But he
could not always cork up his virulence, and so he wrote her one letter
as from Flossie, Anne's dog; and Flossie, of course, could say what she
liked. This instance of humour at Haworth must be cherished: it was not
common in that tense atmosphere. On this visit, which Charlotte spent as
usual with Mr. George Smith and his mother and sisters, and which lasted
nearly a month, there was no lionising now nor any attempt to make her
mix with what she called 'the decorative side of life.' Social gaieties
were agony to her: it was no use trying to enjoy them. London, again, on
its side, had learned that she was not a satisfactory lioness, and made
no effort to induce her to roar. She had promised to let the importunate
baronet Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth know when she was in town, but she
evaded his hospitalities by not telling him till towards the end of her
stay, and thus was not vexed with 'his excited fuss.' She was allowed
her own choice in the way of engagements and sight-seeings, and selected
'the real side of life,' visiting two prisons, Newgate and Pentonville,
the Bank, the Exchange, the Foundling Hospital, and the lunatic asylum
at Bethlehem Hospital. Then there was work to be done on the proof
sheets of _Villette_: it must have been odd to correct them in the house
of George Smith, for he and his mother confessedly appeared in the book
as Dr. John and his mother. They were both perfectly aware of this, and
though the presentation of them was wholly appreciative they did not
entirely relish it. His comment on Lucy Snowe had been that she was 'an
odd fascinating little puss,' and that he was not in love with her.[99]

[Footnote 99: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, p. 291.]

Charlotte most considerately postponed the appearance of _Villette_ till
the end of January 1853, in order that it should not clash with the
publication of Mrs. Gaskell's _Ruth_. A week before it was issued she
wrote to Miss Martineau, her friendship with whom had survived the shock
of the latter's atheistical views, asking her for her frank criticism on
the forthcoming novel.

     I know [she said] that you will give me your thoughts upon my book
     as frankly as if you spoke to some near relative whose good you
     preferred to her gratification. I wince under the pain of
     condemnation like any other weak structure of flesh and blood; but
     I love, I honour, I kneel to truth. Let her smite me on the one
     cheek--good! the tears may spring to the eyes; but courage! there
     is the other side, hit again, right sharply.

No more forcible though rather rhetorical request for candour can be
imagined. Charlotte had also previously begged Miss Martineau to tell
her if she detected anything coarse in her work, as certain reviewers of
_Jane Eyre_ had done. It is, then, little wonder that Miss Martineau,
thus solemnly adjured, dealt frankly with her friend about _Villette_.
She wrote:

     As for the other side of the question, which you desire to know, I
     have but one thing to say, but it is not a small one. I do not like
     the love, either the kind or the degree of it; and its prevalence
     in the book, and effect on the action of it, help to explain the
     passages in the reviews which you consulted me about, and seem to
     afford some foundation for the criticisms they offered.[100]

[Footnote 100: Mrs. Gaskell, _Life of Charlotte Bront_, p. 410.]

The rest of the letter was suppressed by Mrs. Gaskell, but it must have
been laudatory, for Charlotte answered that it was fair, right, and
worthy of her, but against this passage she violently protested; it
struck her dumb. She did not turn the other cheek at all, but the tears
sprang to her eyes and an undying resentment to her heart. She replied:

     I know what _love_ is as I understand it; and if man or woman
     should be ashamed of feeling such love, then there is nothing
     right, noble, faithful, truthful, unselfish on this earth, as I
     comprehend rectitude, nobleness, fidelity, truth and
     disinterestedness.... To differ from you gives me keen pain.

Then Miss Martineau wrote an anonymous review of _Villette_ in the
_Daily News_, in which she made public the same sort of criticism as had
privately given Charlotte such deep offence, pointing out, as is indeed
true, that Lucy Snowe's love for Dr. John is superseded without recorded
transition by her love for Paul Emmanuel; she also accused her of
attacking Popery with virulence. That was enough, and more than enough.
Charlotte ascertained that the review was by her, and instantly
determined to have nothing more to do with her.

     She has shown with reference to the work [she wrote to Miss Wooler]
     a spirit so strangely and unexpectedly acrimonious, that I have
     gathered courage to tell her that the gulf of mutual difference
     between her and me is so wide and deep, the bridge of union so
     slight and uncertain that I have come to the conclusion that
     frequent intercourse would be most perilous and unadvisable and
     have begged to adjourn _sine die_ my long projected visit to her.
     Of course she is now very angry, and I know her bitterness will not
     be short-lived--but it cannot be helped.[101]

[Footnote 101: Mrs. Gaskell omits this letter which shows that the break
came from Charlotte's side.]

That was the end: Charlotte never saw Miss Martineau again, nor sent her
a notification of her marriage.

The reception of _Villette_ in spite of some severe reviews was
sufficiently favourable to please the author, and she returned to
Haworth to take up again the situation concerning Mr. Nicholls, which
had been left suspended in her absence. A great social event was
impending, namely, the visit of Dr. Longley, Bishop of Ripon, and
subsequently Archbishop of Canterbury, who spent a night at the
Parsonage. He was 'a charming little bishop, the most benignant little
gentleman that ever put on lawn sleeves,' and all passed off very well
except for Mr. Nicholls's conduct. He came to tea and supper, but made
no effort to be cheerful, rather he called attention to his dejection,
and showed temper in speaking to Mr. Bront. He dogged Charlotte up the
path to the vicarage after evening service, and when Charlotte went
upstairs, he cast after her some 'flaysome looks,' which 'filled
Martha's soul with horror,' for Martha, standing by the kitchen door,
had her eye on him, and reported these sinister glances. He got up a
'pertinacious dispute' with the Inspector of Schools, which revived all
Charlotte's unfavourable impressions of him; 'if he was a good man at
bottom, it is a sad thing that nature has not given him the faculty to
put goodness into a more attractive form.' He grew so gloomy and
reserved that the rest of his clerical brethren shunned his company.
'Papa has a perfect antipathy to him, and he, I fear, to papa. Martha'
(we are reminded for the third time) 'hates him. I think he might almost
be dying and they would not speak a friendly word to or of him.'
Charlotte even managed to doubt the genuineness of his love towards her.

     He was never agreeable or amiable, [she wrote] and is less so now
     than ever, and, alas! I do not know him well enough to be sure
     there is truth and true affection, or only rancour and corroding
     disappointment at the bottom of the chagrin. In this state of
     things I must be, and I am, _entirely_ passive.

In fact, in this letter to Ellen in the spring of 1853 Charlotte
collects, as for a criminal trial, every atom of evidence she could
find, including her cook's opinion of him, to demonstrate what a
thoroughly undesirable fellow Mr. Nicholls was.

But she was not trying to convince Ellen of that; she was trying to
convince herself, and without full success. She began to doubt her own
conclusions, and in the very letter in which she set forth this
formidable _dossier_ against him she completely betrayed herself. 'I may
be losing the purest gem, and to me far the most precious life can
give--genuine attachment--or I may be escaping the yoke of a morose
temper.' So, pending her own decision on the matter, she laid the
responsibility on her father. 'In this doubt,' she wrote, 'conscience
will not suffer me to take one step in opposition to papa's will,
blended as that will is with the most bitter and unreasonable
prejudice.' But all the time she knew that papa's will was not a
determining factor at all; she would see about papa's will when she had
made up her mind about her own, and she was looking out for some
convincing opportunity to tear up her _dossier_ altogether.

  Was ever woman in this humour wooed?
  Was ever woman in this humour won?

Her opportunity came. Mr. Nicholls found the situation intolerable; he
again resigned his curacy and was to leave Haworth at the end of May.
Whit-Sunday came, and next day Charlotte wrote to Ellen an account of
what had happened the day before at church:

     It seems as if I were to be punished for my doubts about the nature
     and truth of poor Mr. Nicholls's regard. Having ventured on Whit
     Sunday to stop to the sacrament, I got a lesson not to be repeated.
     He struggled, faltered, then lost command over himself, stood
     before my eyes and in the sight of all the communicants, white,
     shaking, voiceless. He made a great effort, but could only with
     difficulty whisper and falter through the service. I suppose he
     thought this would be the last time, he goes either this week or
     the next. I heard the women sobbing round, and I could not quite
     check my own tears. What had happened was reported to Papa either
     by Joseph Redman or John Brown; it excited only anger, and such
     expressions as 'unmanly driveller.' Compassion or relenting is no
     more to be looked for than sap from firewood.

It may be taken that from this moment Charlotte made up her mind to
marry him. She had surrendered, and, though his departure was imminent
and there were many difficulties in the way yet, she was convinced of
the sincerity of his devotion, and knew in her heart that he was her
man. There was a school feast at which Mr. Bront spoke to him 'with
constrained civility but still with _civility_.' He did not reply
civilly, he cut short further words. Considering that his vicar had not
spoken to him for months, this was hardly to be wondered at, and
Charlotte was justly afraid that they were both unchristian in their
mutual feelings. Then, in spite of Mr. Nicholls's apparently extreme
unpopularity in the parish, his flock got up a handsome testimonial for
him in the shape of a gold watch. Mr. Bront, not being very well,
absented himself from the presentation.

Mr. Nicholls came to the Parsonage to deliver up deeds and account-books
and to say good-bye to his future father-in-law. Charlotte would not
see him in her father's presence, and he left the house. But now she had
really chosen him as he had chosen her, and she could not let him go
like that.

     Perceiving that he stayed long before going out at the gate, and
     remembering his long grief, I took courage and went out trembling
     and miserable. I found him leaning against the garden door in a
     paroxysm of anguish, sobbing as women never sob. Of course I went
     straight to him. Very few words were interchanged, those few barely
     articulate. But he wanted such hope and encouragement as I could
     not give him.

He went, and Charlotte instantly perceived that it was not he only, but
she personally who was suffering. 'In all this,' she complains to Ellen,
'it is not I who am to be pitied at all, and, of course, nobody pities
me. They all think in Haworth that I have disdainfully refused him.'
That she had certainly done, assigning any amount of excellent reasons
for her decision, and endorsing it with the approval of Martha and John
Brown. But now she intended to marry him, and, though she could not at
parting give him any promise until her father's objections were
overcome, she set to work quietly and secretly, making no mention of
what she was doing in her letters at the time, and embarked on an
amazing and entrancing intrigue.

She had for secret ally and fellow-conspirator the Rev. Joseph Brett
Grant, master of Haworth Grammar School. She had pilloried him in
_Shirley_ as Mr. Donne, but he had borne her no grudge (rather
disconcertingly) for that, and now he proved his active good-will. For
in July, only two months after Mr. Nicholls had left Haworth, apparently
for good, he was staying _perdu_ with this admirable Mr. Grant at the
Grammar School, and there were meetings between Charlotte and him. He
had not therefore to wait long for the encouragement she had been
unable to give him when they parted at the gate of the Parsonage, and
instead of being 'entirely passive' she was taking some very romantic
measures 'in opposition to papa's will.' This manoeuvre, as yet unnoticed
by the devout biographer but proved by the indisputable evidence of her
own letters,[102] when the course of love ran smooth, is almost too
'wildly dear,' and we figure her, as demure and mouse-like and
determined as Jane Eyre herself, stealing from the Parsonage, when Mr.
Bront was safely occupied over his sermon, to keep her assignation with
her lover at the house of one of the _Shirley_ curates. Did Martha know,
we wonder? Did John Brown know? Then she kept in touch with him as well
by correspondence; but the correspondence weighed on her mind, and she
told her father that she was writing to him. That probably was a
well-calculated confession, for the new curate, Mr. de Renzi, Charlotte
perceived, did not suit her father nearly as well as Mr. Nicholls had
done, and the hint that Mr. Nicholls was not yet entirely severed from
Haworth would not be amiss. But Mr. Bront was told nothing about his
clandestine visit to the Grammar School, and his daughter's meetings
with him.

[Footnote 102: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, pp. 352, 354.]

While these hidden intrigues were in progress, life at the Parsonage
went on with its unswerving monotony. Charlotte paid visits to Ellen and
Mrs. Gaskell in the spring, and in company with Mr. and Mrs. Joe Taylor,
_ne_ Amelia Ringrose, and their baby went to Scotland in August; but
was in that country for one night only, since the baby had some slight
ailment, and the parents felt sure that the air of Scotland did not
agree with it. They retraced their steps at once to Ilkley, but
Charlotte lost her box, which was labelled to Kirkcudbright, and lack of
clothes compelled her to return after three days to Haworth.
Literally nothing else happened that summer except what was hidden from
all eyes until Mrs. Gaskell came to stay with Charlotte towards the end
of September.

  [Illustration: HAWORTH PARSONAGE
  (circa 1850)]

In her charmingly written account of her visit she dwells much on
minuti, describing the exquisite cleanness of the house, the clockwork
regularity of the routine, the silence, the undisturbed tranquillity,
the appearance of the parlour, the hours for meals, the walks on the
moor, the long talks they had over the fire; but this wealth of detail
over trivialities rather suggests that no very intimate intercourse in
conversation passed between them. But Charlotte must have given her then
her version of Branwell's affair with Mrs. Robinson, and she also spoke
a good deal of Emily, 'about whom,' says Mrs. Gaskell, 'she is never
tired of talking, nor I of listening. Emily must have been a remnant of
the Titans....'[103] It is curious, however, to notice that Mrs.
Gaskell, speaking elsewhere of Emily, says: 'All that I, a stranger,
have been able to learn about her has not tended to give either me or my
readers a pleasant impression of her.'[104] These constant talks with
Charlotte about Emily must have been in her mind when she wrote that,
and it is impossible not to wonder what these communications were which
produced the disagreeable impression. Some reflection, maybe, of
estrangements and of bitter days, when Emily befriended Branwell and
scolded Anne for using him as a model in _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_:
or the rather horrible story of Emily thrashing her dog? It is
impossible to tell, but it was thus that Charlotte's talk of Emily
struck the mild, kindly woman who listened to it.

[Footnote 103: Mrs. Gaskell, _Life of Charlotte Bront_, p. 424.]

[Footnote 104: _Id._ p. 302.]

Of Mr. Bront himself, Mrs. Gaskell shows high appreciation. 'He was a
most courteous host, and when he was with us--at breakfast in his study,
or at tea in Charlotte's parlour,--he had a sort of grand and stately
way of describing past times, which tallied well with his striking
appearance.' This favourable impression did not last, for when she saw
him again in 1860, she wrote of him to Mr. Williams: 'He still talks in
his pompous way, and mingles moral remarks and somewhat stale sentiment
with his conversation on ordinary subjects.'[105] But it must be
remembered that she had in the interval brought out her _Life_ of
Charlotte, and his indignation at what she had said about him had put
another complexion on his admirable stateliness. Mrs. Gaskell, finally,
knew that Mr. Bront was violently opposed to the idea of Charlotte's
marriage with Mr. Nicholls, and 'deeply admired the patient docility
which she displayed in her conduct towards her father.' But the docility
was not quite so patient as she imagined, for Charlotte was in
correspondence with her lover, and Mr. Nicholls was in Haworth, for the
second time since his departure, staying secretly once more with Mr.
Grant. Charlotte did not see so much of him as she had done in July, for
she had her duties to perform to her guest. But the household in the
Parsonage went early to bed, and Mrs. Gaskell records how she always
heard Charlotte come downstairs again when she was in her room. Is it
too much to hope that Mr. Nicholls was waiting in the churchyard?

[Footnote 105: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, p. 293.]

Throughout the autumn and winter Charlotte's correspondence with the
friends to whom for years she had written so regularly and voluminously
practically ceased. Five letters in four months was the meagre sum of
them. The correspondence with Mr. Nicholls may have occupied her, but of
the volume of it or of its contents we have no idea, for after her death
he seems to have destroyed every letter she had ever written to him.
Then in January 1854 she judged that the time was ripe for another move.
She arranged for him to come to Haworth once more and stay with Mr. and
Mrs. Grant, and now she told her father that he was here, and
'stipulated with papa for opportunity to become better acquainted. I had
it and all I learned inclined me to esteem and affection.' This reads
strangely, for Mr. Nicholls had been her father's curate for over eight
years, and one would have thought there must have been ample opportunity
for forming an acquaintance with him. Though Mr. Bront was still 'very
hostile, and bitterly unjust,' he was evidently getting used to the
idea; he consented to Charlotte's seeing her lover, and she saw much of
him during this ten days' stay. Off he went again without meeting his
late vicar, to resume his duty at Kirk Smeaton, where he had taken a
curacy, and again the process of detrition of Mr. Bront's hostility
went quietly on throughout the spring, and the plans of those who were
now lovers were complete before Mr. Nicholls paid his next visit to the
Grants at Easter. As Easter approached, Charlotte got into a slight
flutter about it, for she expected that her engagement would then be
formally settled, and she first wrote to Ellen asking her to come to
Haworth because Mr. Nicholls would be there ('perhaps too he might take
a walk with us occasionally'), and then revoked her invitation for
exactly the same reason, namely, that he _was_ going to be there.

He came, they were engaged, and their plans, which did equal credit to
their heads and their hearts, were disclosed in schedule to Mr. Bront.
The curate, Mr. de Renzi, who had always been unsatisfactory, would be
dismissed, and Mr. Nicholls would resume his duties at Haworth.
Charlotte would not leave her father, but Mr. Nicholls, when the
marriage took place in the summer, would come to live at the Parsonage.
Mr. Bront's 'seclusion and convenience' would be left uninvaded, and
Mr. Nicholls would subscribe to household expenses in so liberal a
manner that 'in a pecuniary sense the marriage would bring Mr. Bront
gain instead of loss.' These plans for his comfort caused him to give
his consent, 'and papa began really to take a pleasure in the prospect.'

Considering that little more than a year ago he had nearly had an
apoplectic fit at the presumption of the now accepted suitor,
Charlotte's management of the affair, and her quiet vanquishing of
difficulties that seemed insurmountable, must have been a work of
consummate strategy. She gave credit to Mr. Nicholls for his
perseverance, but granted that he wanted to marry her, all he had to do
was to carry out her orders: she was alone at Haworth with a singularly
obstinate father, and success in bringing him round was entirely due to
her. Ambition for her, paternal pride, 'ever a restless feeling,' as she
wrote to Ellen, she considered had been at the bottom of his opposition,
and 'now that this unquiet spirit is exorcised, justice, which was once
quite forgotten, is once more listened to, and affection, I hope,
resumes some power.'

Then having herself worked for and triumphantly carried her scheme to a
successful issue, she attributed it all to Providence. 'Providence,' she
wrote, 'offers me this destiny. Doubtless then it is the best for me.'
But, without questioning the supremacy of the Divine decrees, we must
observe that Providence had offered her that destiny a year and a half
ago, and she had rejected it because she had no affection for her lover.
Afterwards, coming round to the belief that it was best for her, and
that she really wanted it, she had by the exercise of tact, intrigue,
and will power secured it. Providence, in fact, would not have had much
chance without her firm co-operation.

She was certainly happy in the prospect of her marriage, but there was
no sort of ecstasy; she wrote that her happiness was 'of the soberest
order,' and she could analyse it exactly. She trusted that she would
love her husband, and she was grateful for his love. She believed him,
without glamour, to be an 'affectionate, a conscientious and
high-principled man,' and 'if with all this I should yield to regret,
that fine talents, congenial tastes and thoughts are not added, I should
be most presumptuous and thankless.' She was aware that this destiny
which, she repeats, Providence has offered her 'will not be generally
regarded as brilliant, but I trust I see in it some germs of happiness.'
There was nothing resembling any personal sense or anticipation of the
great thing that at last was coming to her: she hoped that 'this
arrangement will turn out more truly to papa's satisfaction than any
other it was in my power to achieve.' She looked into the future
tranquilly and serenely, but never for a moment did she foresee that her
marriage would bring her such happiness and forgetfulness of self as she
had missed all her life. One thing alone troubled her at all, and that
was Mr. Nicholls's rheumatism, and over this she grew very solemn. It
had been, she told Ellen, 'one of the strong arguments against her
marriage,' and there was fear that it was chronic, but Charlotte
'resolved to stand by him now whether in weal or woe.... And yet the
ultimate possibilities of such a case are appalling. You remember your
aunt?' But Mr. Nicholls had to do his part, too, in averting such a
fate, and his neglect of it brought on him a good wigging. He had
evidently had a strict dietetic supervision on the last of his visits to
Haworth, and had got much better, but on his return there he was worse,
and Charlotte was frightened till she found out that he had been
careless about himself at Kirk Smeaton, and his aches were entirely his
own fault; so what he needed was not sympathy but a sound rating. The
nature of it may be gathered from the remarks she made to Ellen on the
subject:

     Man is indeed an amazing piece of mechanism when you see, so to
     speak, the full weakness of what he calls his strength. There is
     not a female child above the age of eight but might rebuke him for
     spoilt petulance of his wilful nonsense. I bought a border for the
     table-cloth and have put it on....

Mr. Nicholls, we feel, would think twice before he was careless about
his rheumatism again. She took him in hand, too, in other ways. Ellen
had asked him to go to Brookroyd, but Charlotte did not give him the
message--'for it would be like tempting him to forget duty.'

There was sewing to be done, there was a modest _trousseau_ to be bought
of such new garments for the wedding-day as would come into use
afterwards. The storeroom by the kitchen in the Parsonage had to be
converted into a study for her husband; paper and curtains of green and
white matched each other well. Then there were the arrangements to be
made about the wedding itself. About that the utmost secrecy was
observed: only Ellen and Miss Wooler were to be bidden to it, and though
the parishioners at Haworth knew now that the marriage was to take
place, Mr. Nicholls, at Charlotte's wish, so managed it that not a soul
in the place should know the date except the officiating clergyman, and
as a further precaution the service was fixed for eight o'clock in the
morning, when there would be but few people about. To other friends of
the bride and bridegroom there would be sent out, when the ceremony was
over, a printed card making the announcement; Charlotte wished the
envelope to be plain with a silver initial on it. More of these had to
be ordered, 'for there was no end to Mr. Nicholls's string of parson
friends,' and he thought sixty would be required. Charlotte's own list
was much less numerous than his and consisted of only eighteen names.
The hermit-like seclusion in which she must have lived all her life is
witnessed to by the fact that only five of these were inhabitants of
Haworth and its neighbourhood. Among the rest were Mrs. Gaskell, George
Smith, his mother and his sisters, Mr. Williams and Mr. Monckton Milnes.
Neither Thackeray, Lewes, nor Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth received the
notification, nor, we regret to say, Miss Martineau.

Mr. Nicholls had wanted to be married in July, and though Charlotte, in
the early days of her engagement, thought that this was too soon, and
that some date of the later summer was time enough, it took place on
June 29. The officiating clergyman, the Rev. Sutcliffe Sowden, and the
bridegroom arrived the evening before, and stayed with Mr. Grant, whose
house had been so hospitable to the intrigue, and Ellen Nussey, the
solitary bridesmaid, and Miss Wooler were guests at the Parsonage: Mr.
Bront was to give Charlotte away. As the party at the Parsonage was
going to bed that night, this disconcerting parent suddenly announced
that he would take no part in the ceremony, and indeed not attend it at
all. What his reason was is quite unknown; but it seems likely that this
inconvenient gesture was intended to be a final protest against the
marriage, of which really he now entirely approved. The form for the
Solemnization of Matrimony in the Prayer Book was hurriedly examined,
and the happy discovery was made that Miss Wooler, as a friend of the
bride, might legitimately take his place. So Mr. Bront stayed in bed.




CHAPTER XIX


The wedding tour was made in Ireland: they did not visit the ancestral
home of the Bruntys in County Down, but after a tour to Killarney went
to Banagher, where relations of the bridegroom lived. They told
Charlotte that she was a very fortunate person in having got so good a
husband, and already she agreed with them. Indeed she had got more than
they knew, for now she had what her nature had long subconsciously
longed for as the medicament for her bitterness and her morbidity, and
it was a perfectly new kind of woman who came back to Haworth with her
husband in August. Henceforth, instead of her letters being full of
sharp criticism of others they abound in praises of Arthur: instead of
being so often concerned with the symptoms of her own ill-health, she is
jubilant about the improvement in his, for he had gone up twelve pounds
in weight in the month succeeding their marriage, and the sinister
anticipations of what might have been the issue of marrying a man with
rheumatic tendencies (remember your aunt) were thrust into limbo. Years
ago she had told Ellen, with the pontifical certainty of the spinster,
that after marriage a woman might allow herself prudently and cautiously
to fall in love with her husband, but now she did not stay to consider
the wisdom of such slow going. Like an echo from her own distant voice,
she could repeat that her marriage would secure papa comfort and aid in
his old age, but the newer voice was stronger.

She fell in love with her husband recklessly, as a good Victorian wife
should: his judgment was infallible, and she submitted everything to it.
When she asked Ellen to come and stay at Haworth it was no longer her
invitation but his: Arthur would be pleased to see her, and 'one
friendly word from him means as much as twenty from most people.' If she
wanted to pay a visit to a house where there had been a case of fever,
though she had no fear of infection on her own account, 'there are cases
where wives have to put their own judgments on the shelf, and do as they
are bid.' They entertained to tea and supper the Sunday and day-school
pupils and teachers, the choir and the bell-ringers, and Charlotte, who
in her maiden days would have been altogether unable to face such a
function, was thrilled with pride and with love, for Arthur's health was
proposed, and when the speaker alluded to him as a 'consistent Christian
and a kind gentleman' Charlotte, deeply touched, 'thought that to merit
and win such a character was better than to earn either wealth or fame
or power. I am disposed to echo that high and simple eulogium.'

The whole colour and temper of her life was changed. It is with glee
that she warns Ellen that 'a married woman can call but a very small
portion of her time her own'; the large stock of it which she was wont
to have on hand had been grabbed by her husband, but she grudged him not
a minute of it. She had regretted before her marriage that there were no
congenial tastes or thoughts common to him and herself, but now she
thinks it 'not bad for her that he should be so little inclined to the
literary and the contemplative.' She marvels how some wives grow
selfish: matrimony, in her experience, 'tends to draw you out of and
away from yourself.' Even in her most private and personal affairs she
now defers to the wishes of her 'dear boy,' who 'grows daily dearer,'
and she transmits a message to Ellen from him that he wished her to
burn all the letters that Charlotte now writes her. Ellen declined to
promise any such thing, and again Charlotte pressed the point.

     Arthur complains you do not promise to burn my letters as you
     receive them. He says you must give him a plain pledge to that
     effect, or he will read every line I write and elect himself censor
     of our correspondence.... Write him out the promise on a separate
     slip of paper in a legible hand, and send it in your next.

Whether Ellen gave this promise on the repetition of Arthur's wish we do
not know; if she did, she certainly broke it, for she continued to
preserve Charlotte's letters to her exactly as before, and he had to
content himself with reading them before they were sent.

A spirit of fun, of lightness, enters into them now, which had been
absent from them since the days when Celia Amelia had sent valentines
and passionate verse to all the young ladies of Haworth. Charlotte
describes, for instance, how that flighty Amelia Taylor, who had made
such a goose of herself over her baby when she went with them to
Scotland, paid them a visit. Amelia was a simpleton: no doubt she was
right not to be jealous about her husband's 'former flames,' but why
cultivate their society in that unnatural way? Arthur read that letter
before it was posted and was quite serious about it: he thought his wife
had 'written too freely about Amelia,' and Charlotte couldn't help
laughing at him. Such a precaution as burning these letters seemed to
her truly ridiculous, but Ellen must promise; otherwise she would
receive just such letters as he wrote to his clerical brethren, unspiced
by affection or critical comments on friends. Certainly if joy had never
come to the grim Parsonage since it was built, as one of Mrs. Gaskell's
friends felt, it had come now at long last.

But the days were full and Charlotte had little time for correspondence,
and though she wrote with regularity to Ellen, she addressed few letters
to anyone else, and her once voluminous correspondence with Mr. Williams
ceased altogether. Nor did she want visitors: Ellen came to Haworth
once, and once the steadfast Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth and a friend for
the Sunday. For this visit there was a particular and kindly reason: he
wanted to see Mr. Nicholls, and, liking him, he offered him the living
of Padiham, near his place at Gawthorpe. No thought of that could be
entertained, for he and Charlotte were both bound to remain at Haworth
while Mr. Bront lived, and though the offer was again pressed when they
went to stay for a few days at Gawthorpe in the winter, it was again
declined, evidently without any sort of regret that they were not free
to take it, for the contract to look after Mr. Bront was thankfully,
not grudgingly, performed.

     May God preserve him to us yet for some years [she wrote to Ellen].
     The wish for his continued life, together with a certain solicitude
     for his happiness and health seems, I scarcely know why, even
     stronger in me now than it was before I was married. Papa has taken
     no duty since we returned, and each time I see Mr. Nicholls put on
     gown or surplice I feel comforted to think that this marriage has
     secured papa good aid in his old age.

But though, whenever her husband was at leisure, Charlotte 'must have
occupations in which he can share,' he had practically the whole of the
work of the parish on his hands, for Mr. Bront took little or no duty,
and while Mr. Nicholls was busy she took up her writing again. Just as
she had done before getting embarked on _Shirley_, she made several
beginnings of a new novel[106]; one of these got as far as its fiftieth
page.[107] This renewed industry disposes of the supposition that her
husband discouraged her literary work, and he himself emphatically
denied that he had ever done so. She only wrote when the mood was on
her, and in the year and a half that had elapsed between the publication
of _Villette_ and her marriage she had only written a fragment of
eighteen pages called _Willie Ellin_. It was not till after she was
married that, as a matter of fact, she set to work again.

[Footnote 106: Clement Shorter, _The Bronts_, vol. ii, p. 366.]

[Footnote 107: _Id._ p. 397.]

The autumn passed into winter. Snow had fallen early, then melted again,
and one morning she and her husband walked out a distance of over three
miles to see the waterfall on the moor. Rain came on, and she returned
drenched, and never quite recovered the excellent health that she had
enjoyed ever since her marriage. She was well enough to go to Gawthorpe
for a day or two, early in January, and she had planned a visit to Ellen
for the end of the month. But before that could be paid, she became
really unwell and took to her bed.

She knew now that she was with child, and the doctor was reassuring:
these fits of sickness were normal symptoms. But she grew worse and
weaker, prostrated with the continued sickness and fever, though there
was as yet no acuteness of anxiety. From bed, in pencil, she wrote just
three more notes, and in them all, clear and unwavering, shone the lamp
of love which had illuminated these last months for her, with a light
serene and tranquil, such as she had never known before. To one friend
of the far-off Brussels days she wrote: 'No kinder, better husband than
mine, it seems to me, there can be in the world. I do not want now for
kind companionship in health and the tenderest nursing in sickness.' And
then to Ellen: 'I want to give you an assurance that will comfort
you--and that is that I find in my husband the tenderest nurse, the
kindest support--the best earthly comfort that ever woman had.'

Then came the third and last note: 'I cannot talk--even to my dear,
patient, constant Arthur I can say but few words at once.'

Then there seemed to be an improvement, and it was not till within a few
days of her death that her recovery was despaired of. She was conscious
till the end, speaking but seldom, and at the very last she turned her
dimmed eyes to her 'dear boy,' clinging to the life which his love had
made sweet for her. She whispered: 'Oh, I am not going to die, am I? He
will not separate us--we have been so happy.'

She died in the night of March 30, 1855.




INDEX


  Andrews, Miss, 22
  Angrian Saga, the, 29
  Arnold, Matthew, 269-70.
  Arnold, Mrs. (widow of Dr. Arnold) and family, 269-70
  _Athenum_, 148, 190, 194
  Atkinson, H. G., 271
  Austen, Jane, 64;
    Charlotte's views on, 64, 204-5
  Aylott & Jones, 162, 163

  'Beck, Mme.,' 120
  Bell, Acton, 3, 161, 168, 209
  Bell, Currer, 3, 81, 161, 201, 209, 247, 249, 256, 261
  Bell, Ellis, 161, 168
  Blanche, Mlle., 104, 115, 117
  Bousfeild, Mr., 124
  Bradley, Rev. James Chesterton, 143, 234
  Branwell, Elizabeth (Aunt Branwell), 17-8, 28, 32, 33, 35, 51, 69,
    83, 89;
     income, 54, 89;
      and the school project, 89, 96 _et seq._;
      death, 106, 107;
      will, 107-9
  Branwell, Marie. _See_ Bront, Mrs.
  'Brocklehurst, Naomi,' 23, 24, 25
  'Brogden, Miss,' 256, 267
  Bront, Anne: early years, 8, 9, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 27-9, 33;
      in Branwell's portrait group, 53;
      at Miss Wooler's school, 56, 61;
      health, 61, 62, 196;
      work as governess, 3, 62, 66, 77;
      at Thorp Green, 85, 86, 89, 93, 99, 107, 110, 114, 116, 123, 126,
        144, 152;
      literary compositions, 22, 86, 94;
      the Gondals, 29, 33, 86, 144, 145;
      attitude to school project at Haworth, 94, 126;
      and Aunt Branwell's will, 108;
      visit to London with Charlotte, 169, 208-9;
      illness, 220, 221-2;
      death, 222-3;
      grave, 278
    Birthday papers, 90-2, 93-4, 99, 126, 140, 145, 152-3, 157
    Characteristics, 21, 33, 34, 54, 66, 94, 99, 152, 153, 183, 220, 225
    Emily, relations with, 29, 65, 90, 93, 94, 99, 141, 184
    Pseudonyms, 86;
      Acton Bell, 3, 161, 209
    Writings:
      Early compositions, 22, 86, 94;
        Gondaland romances, 29, 33, 86, 144, 145;
        _Solala Vernon's Life_, 86, 94;
        _Henry Sophona_, 145
      _Agnes Grey_, 153, 163, 164, 165, 168, 183, 195, 202, 262;
        Charlotte's judgment on, 203
      _Passages in the Life of an Individual_, 153, 158, 163.
        See _Agnes Grey_
      Poems, 86, 161, 194
      _Tenant, The, of Wildfell Hall_, 183-4, 186, 208, 214, 216, 246,
        262, 293
    Otherwise mentioned, 62, 75, 83, 166, 211
  Bront, Branwell (Patrick Branwell):
      early years, 8, 17, 19-21, 27-29, 30, 32;
      tutorships, 3, 77, 82;
      ticket office clerkship, 82-3, 89, 100, 106;
      and Aunt Branwell, 17, 33, 107, 108;
      efforts to obtain employment, 107, 155, 181;
      attitude to idea of the Church, 107;
      tutorship at Thorp Green, 107, 114, 123, 126, 139, 145;
      dismissal by Mr. Robinson, 145 _et seq._, 189;
      awareness of his sisters' publications, 164, 168, 169;
      last days and death, 211-14
    Characteristics, 33, 34, 56-7, 63, 106, 108, 185;
      ambidexterity, 57;
      debts, 63, 92;
      drink, 63, 111, 139;
      at the 'Black Bull,' 57-8, 179;
      last visit, 212;
      letter to John Brown, 77-80;
      opium, 63, 107;
      abandonment of school project laid at his door, 126
    Literary ability, 56, 60, 177;
      compositions, 29, 30, 32, 35, 38, 49, 50-1, 158;
      _The Rising of the Angrians_, 29;
      _The History of the Young Men_, 35;
      _Letters from an Englishman_, 35;
      various compositions, 50-1;
      poetry, 50, 60, 62, 82, 161;
      translation of Horace's _Odes_, 77, 80;
      letters to _Blackwood's_, 52-3, 58, 177;
      letter to Wordsworth, 58, 60;
      collaboration in _Wuthering Heights_, 168 _et seq._, 179, 211
    Painting, 11, 52, 54, 56, 62, 63, 82;
      portrait groups of his sisters, 53;
      studio at Bradford, 62, 63
    Pseudonyms, 50
    Relations with:
      Charlotte, 29, 37, 139, 154, 155, 158, 166, 169, 180 _et seq._,
        189, 193, 197, 206, 211, 213-14, 255
      Emily, 152, 166, 167, 185-9, 211, 216, 293;
        rescued from fire, 186-7
    Otherwise mentioned, xi, 7, 106, 107, 165, 216, 293
  Bront, Charlotte, vi, viii, xi;
      early years, 8, 16, 20, 22, 27-9, 33;
      schooldays at Cowan Bridge, 22 _et seq._;
      early compositions, 20, 29, 30-2, 34, 49, 50, 70, 80;
      at Roe Head school, 35-6;
      undertakes education of her sisters, 49, 51;
      home life, 51, 82, 83;
      friendships, 35, 247;
      affection for Ellen Nussey, 38-48, 83;
      begins to take command of family affairs, 54-5, 58;
      as teacher at Roe Head, 3, 42, 45, 55, 62;
      literary ambitions, 49-50, 51, 58-9, 77;
      poetry, 41, 58, 60, 62, 80, 128;
      letter to Southey, 58-61 _passim_, 65, 70;
      writes to Wordsworth, 80, 81;
      abandons idea of a literary career, 59, 81-2, 128;
      nervous breakdown, 62;
      refuses Henry Nussey, 45, 63-5, 70;
      discovery of Emily's poems, 65, 160-1, 176, 195, 244;
      urges publication, 160;
      governess at Stonegappe, 66-8, 69, 77;
      refuses Mr. Bryce, 69;
      Harrogate, 69-70;
      painting, 72;
      situation at Rawdon, 86-7, 92;
      idea of setting up a school, 3, 54-5, 77, 89 _et seq._, 123-7;
      the offer of Dewsbury Moor, 95-7;
      Brussels scheme, 3, 95 _et seq._;
      Aunt Branwell's death and legacy, 106, 108, 180;
      return to Brussels, 110, 112;
      Brussels experiences, 103-6, 111 _et seq._, 144, 277;
      letters to M. Hger, 127 _et seq._;
      visit to confessional, 118-20, 280;
      departure from Brussels, 122;
      '_Je me vengerai_,' 122, 132, 281;
      Manchester post offered to, 124;
      solitariness, 157-9, 179;
      visits Ellen at Brookroyd, 196;
      visits to London, 169, 209-10, 247 _et seq._, 273-4, 285-6;
      visits to Scotland, 259-60, 292;
      social gaieties, 274-6, 285;
      visit to Miss Martineau, 267;
      courtship, 227, 282-5, 288-99 _passim_;
      marriage, 44, 48, 71, 299-305;
      death, 305
    Characteristics, ix, 3, 22, 33, 35-7, 48, 62, 67-8, 85, 88, 132,
      144, 190-2, 220-7, 248-50, 274;
      abnormal shyness, 33, 35, 67, 82, 88, 191, 250, 251, 274;
      shortsightedness, 36, 70, 128;
      practical mind, 54;
      in letters, 69-70;
      iron confidence, 62, 68, 190, 224;
      censorious habit, 68, 82, 87, 115, 144, 191-2;
      handwriting, 58, 201;
      health, 62, 274, 277;
      dislike of men, 47-8;
      attitude to children, 66, 86, 88, 253, 276;
      self-revelation in _Jane Eyre_, 249
    Counsels on marriage, 47, 64, 65, 70, 84, 85;
      exhortation to Ellen on falling in love, 84, 130, 300;
      on careers for girls, 85
    Friendships of, 35, 247;
      Ellen Nussey, 38-48, 83;
      Miss Martineau, 247, 286-8;
      Mrs. Gaskell, viii, 150, 248, 261, 276, 292, 293, 299
    Poems by the three sisters. _See under_ Poems
    Portraits, xvi, 53, 259
    Pseudonyms, 49, 70, 80;
      Currer Bell, 3, 81, 161, 201, 247
    Relations with:
      Anne, 99-100
      Branwell, 29, 37, 58, 77, 114, 139, 151, 158, 166, 169, 179,
        180-5, 189, 193, 197, 206, 211, 213-14, 255;
        attitude of hatred, 154;
        view of his moral hopelessness, 155
      Emily, 65, 66, 83, 92, 99, 140, 210, 293;
        estrangement, 211, 215-218;
        antagonism over Branwell, 211, 216;
        Charlotte's incomprehension of, 243-5, 264, 265
    Writings: personal reminiscences in, 42, 93, 111, 120, 248
      Early compositions, 20, 29, 30-2, 34, 37, 50, 70, 77, 80;
        _The Secret_, 30-1;
        _The Spell_, 49, 50;
        _Caroline Vernon_, 70, 80;
        other various titles, 49, 50;
        unnamed story, 80;
        manuscripts in the British Museum, 50
      _Jane Eyre_, vii, 23, 30, 42, 52, 68, 164, 169, 187, 190,
       195 _et seq._, 219, 241, 242, 253;
        plot of, 197-9;
        account of Cowan Bridge in, 23-4, 27;
        publication, 195, 197;
        appreciation, 197, 199-200, 204, 240;
        adverse criticism, 200, 221;
        success, 59, 201, 203;
        second edition, 203-4;
        question of dramatisation, 204;
        the innuendo regarding Thackeray, 204, 221;
        secrecy as to authorship, 164, 196, 197, 201, 234;
        denial to Ellen of authorship, 207-8
      Memoir to Emily's Poems, 55-6, 65, 103, 105, 110;
        errors in, xii, 8, 56, 103
      _Moores, The_, 205
      _Professor, The_, 163-6 _passim_, 169, 190;
        Smith, Elder's critical letter on, 195;
        Charlotte's depreciation of, 206;
        as stock-pot for _Villette_, 206, 240, 276;
        contemplated expanded issue, 239, 240, 246, 276;
        posthumous publication, 240
      _Shirley_, ix, 30, 141, 142, 205, 206, 219, 223, 227, 231, 234,
        236-246, 261;
        the curates in, 71, 141-3
      _Villette_, 42, 111, 120, 133, 135, 137, 206, 227, 240, 277,
        279-81, 285, 286, 288
      _Willie Ellin_, 304
    Otherwise mentioned, 5, 7
  Bront, Elizabeth, 8, 20, 22;
      death, 23
  Bront, Emily, vii, viii, xi;
      birth, 8;
      early years, 7, 20, 22, 23, 27, 28, 32, 33;
      literary compositions, 32;
      the Gondal poems and romances, 29, 33, 65, 90, 91, 144-5, 158,
        176;
      in Branwell's portrait group, 53;
      at Roe Head school, 55, 56;
      homesickness, 34, 55, 56, 61, 98, 103, 110, 140;
      at Miss Patchett's school, 3, 56, 61;
      home life at Haworth, 70, 86, 91-4, 116, 140, 141, 144, 216;
      and Weightman, 74-76, 121;
      Brussels, 75, 98 _et seq._;
      unhappiness at Brussels, 76, 103, 126, 140;
      return to Haworth, 106, 109;
      Aunt Branwell's will and legacy, 108, 180;
      attitude to school project at Haworth, 126, 152;
      visit to York, 144;
      and Charlotte's 'discovery' of her poetry, 65, 160-1, 176, 195,
        244;
      resents revelation of her pseudonym, 210;
      illness and death, 215 _et seq._
    Birthday papers, the, 90-2, 94, 126, 140, 144, 152, 157
    Characteristics, 7, 28, 33-4, 53-4, 92-3, 103, 180, 215-18;
      reserve, 7, 54, 92-3, 141, 215;
      differences between the nature of Charlotte and Emily, 93, 225;
      the mystic, 7, 93, 158, 245
    Pseudonym, 3, 161, 168;
      resents revelation of, 210
    Relations with:
      Anne, 29, 65, 90, 93, 94, 141
      Branwell, 152, 158, 166, 167, 185-9, 211, 216, 293;
        rescues Branwell from fire, 186-7
      Charlotte, 65-6, 83, 92, 99, 140, 210, 293;
        estrangement, 211, 215-18;
        antagonism over Branwell, 158, 211, 216;
        on Charlotte and return from Brussels, 113, 141;
        Charlotte's incomprehension of, 243-5, 264, 265
    Writings:
      Early compositions, 32;
        Gondal romances, 29, 33, 65, 90, 91, 144-5, 158, 176
      Poems, vii, 65, 66, 93, 145, 153, 173, 187 _n._, 245;
        _Absence_, 62;
        _If grief for grief can touch thee_, 75;
        _Remembrance_, 76;
        _The wanderer from the fold_, 187-9
        Charlotte's memoir to, xii, 55-6, 103, 105, 110
        Poems by the three sisters.
          _See heading_ Poems
      Wuthering Heights, vi, 10, 29, 76, 92, 168 _et seq._, 195, 202,
        219, 225, 262;
        composition and construction, 174-6;
        date of completion, 163, 164, 168;
        question of authorship, 168 _et seq._, 202, 211, 262;
        Branwell's collaboration, 169 _et seq._, 211;
        journalistic speculation as to authorship, 202;
        Mr. Bront and, 202;
        Charlotte's estimation of, 202-3, 263-4;
        Charlotte's 'Biographical Notice' to, 163, 169, 178, 262, 263
    Otherwise mentioned, 3, 66, 67, 111, 259
  Bront, Hugh, 1
  Bront, Maria, 8, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23;
      death, 22
  Bront, Rev. Patrick, early life, 1-4, 8, 57, 101;
      marriage, 7-8;
      publishes poems and prose romances, 4-5, 8 and _n._;
      appointment to curacy of Haworth, 9;
      income, 54;
      attempts to marry again, 18;
      and his daughters' literary activities, 32, 164, 169, 201;
      and _Jane Eyre_, 169, 201;
      journey to Brussels, 101;
      and Branwell, 212, 215, 219;
      and James Taylor, 231-2;
      illness, 258-259, 279;
      and Charlotte, 260;
      attitude to Mr. Nicholls' courtship, 227, 282-5 _passim_,
        288-96 _passim_, 299;
      after Charlotte's marriage, 303;
      and Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte Bront_, x, 1, 13, 14, 15,
        138, 294;
      death, 53
    Characteristics, 11 _et seq._, 212;
      Mrs. Gaskell's account of, 11 _et seq._, 137-8, 149, 284, 293-4;
      pistol firing legend, 14, 15;
      drink, 111, 124;
      eye trouble, 124, 129, 152, 164, 165, 190, 193, 195, 221
    Otherwise mentioned, 19 _et seq._, _passim_, 27, 28, 32, 33, 51, 52,
      57, 61, 69, 87, 212, 213, 265, 266, 273
  Bront, Mrs. (_ne_ Marie Branwell), 5 _et seq._, 12, 16;
      characteristics, 7, 17;
      letters during engagement, 5-7, 16;
      children, 8;
      literary aspirations, 9;
      death, 11, 16
  Bront Saga, the, x, xi, 15, 16, 26, 63, 74, 92, 108;
      partisanship, xi-xii
  Brookfield, Mrs., 253
  Brougham, John, 204
  Brown, John, 57, 77, 151, 154, 172, 178, 236, 285, 290, 291, 292
  Brown, Mrs. John, 236
  Brown, Martha, 149, 217, 223, 224, 277, 285, 288, 291, 292
  Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 249
  Bruntee, 2. _See_ Bront.
  Brunty, Hugh, 1, 2
  Brunty, Patrick, 2. _See_ Bront, Patrick.
  Bryce, Mr., 68-69
  Burder, Mary, 4, 18
  'Burns, Helen,' 23

  Carlisle, Lord, 274
  Carlyles, the, 253
  Carus Wilson, Rev. William, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26
  'Celia Amelia,' 71, 82, 83, 302. _See also_ Weightman, Rev. W.
  Chapelle, M. 113
  Chorley, Mr., 249
  Clarke, Miss Isabel, _Haworth Parsonage_, 74-6, 126
  Coleridge, Hartley, 80, 128
  Cornwall, Barry, 253
  Cowan Bridge boarding school, 21 _et seq._, 111, 281;
      the 'Lowood' of _Jane Eyre_, 23-7
  _Critic, The_, 190, 194
  Crowe, Mrs., 253
  Crystal Palace, 275
  Curates, the, in _Shirley_, 71, 141-3

  _Daily News, The_, 237, 287
  Dearden, William, 13, 170;
      and Branwell's collaboration in _Wuthering Heights_, 170, 171, 176
  De Quincey, 194
  de Renzi, Mr., 292, 295
  Dewsbury moor, 61, 94, 95, 98
  Dobell, Sidney, 261
  'Donne, Mr.,' 142, 236, 291
  Drinkwater, Mr. John, 80
  _Dublin University Magazine_, 161, 194
  Duclaux, Mme., 74. _See_ Robinson, Miss
  Dury, Caroline, 72, 75

  _Edinburgh Review_, 236, 238
  'Emmanuel, Paul,' 111, 120
  Epps, Dr., 218
  Evans, Miss, 22

  Fennel, John, 5
  Fennel, Mrs., 5, 33
  Fielding, 204
  Filey, 278
  Firth, Elizabeth, 8, 18
  Firth, John, 8
  Flower, Capt. John (pseudonym), 50
  Forade, Eugne, 238-9
  Franks, Rev. James, 18
  _Fraser's Magazine_, 214
  Fuseli, 51

  Garrs, Nancy, 14
  Garrs, Sarah, 14
  Gaskell, Rev. W., 147, 276
  Gaskell, Mrs., friendship with Charlotte, viii, 150, 247-8, 261, 276,
    292, 293, 299;
      visit to Haworth, 293;
    Charlotte's view of, 238, 261
    _Life of Charlotte Bront_, viii _et seq._, 12-16;
      amendments to, x, 15, 16, 26, 27, 137-8, 147;
      threatened libel actions, x, 15, 26, 147;
      account of the Rev. Patrick Bront, 12 _et seq._, 137-8, 149, 284,
        293-4;
      on Lowood, 25, 26, 27;
      account of Charlotte's early compositions, 30-1; on
      Branwell, 56-7, 107, 122_n._, 154;
      Branwell's dismissal, 145 _et seq._, 293;
      Aunt Branwell's will, 107;
      suppressions in delineation of Charlotte's character, ix, 43, 73;
      suppressions in dealing with the _affaire_ Weightman, 72-4, 76;
      the Brussels experiences, 112, 117-120;
      Hger-Bront correspondence, ix, 135-8;
      relations of the sisters in their literary activities, 65, 164-5;
      on Emily, 293
    _Ruth_, 286
    Otherwise mentioned, 2, 35, 52, 62, 88, 102, 107, 169, 170, 240,
      266, 269, 274, 277, 287, 288_n._, 294
  Gondals, the, 29, 33
  Gosse, Sir Edmund, ix, 239
  Grant, Rev. Joseph Brett, 142, 196, 234, 291, 294, 295, 299
  Grant, Mrs., 295
  Greenwood, Mr., 67
  Grundy, Francis H., 106, 150, 155, 171, 176, 181, 212;
    _Pictures of the Past_, 106-7

  _Halifax Guardian_, 27
  Hannah (servant), 116
  Hauss, Mlle., 115, 236
  Haworth Parsonage, vii, 9-10, 11;
      life at, 11, 27 _et seq._, 51, 90, 157 _et seq._;
      _The Islanders_, 29;
      interlude of comedy, 73-4;
      the school project at, 124-7
  Heald, Rev. W. M., 235
  Hger, M. Constantin, 50, 103, 104, 123-4;
      letter to Mr. Bront, 109-10, 130;
      Charlotte and, 44, 46, 104, 112, 113, 114-15, 121, 123,
        127 _et seq._, 139, 156, 157, 179, 255;
      the correspondence, 127 _et seq._, 140, 153, 156-157, 179, 233,
        281
  Hger, Mme., 100, 110, 112 _et seq. passim_, 128 _et seq._, 157,
    281;
      the _pensionnat_ of, 100, 102
  Hger, Mlle. Louise, narrative of the correspondence, 132 _et seq._
  Hger, Professor Paul, 134, 153
  Hodgson, Mr., 68
  Hunt, Miss Leigh, 210

  Ingham, Mrs., 62, 66, 77

  Jenkins, Mr., 100
  Jenkins, Mrs., 96, 103
  'John, Dr.' and his mother, 286

  Kay-Shuttleworth, Sir James, 247, 256-8, 260, 261, 267, 275, 285-6,
    299
  Kay-Shuttleworth, Lady, 257
  Keeper (Emily's dog), 159, 277
  Kingston, Anne, 108

  Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 51
  Lewes, G. H., 204, 205, 236, 238, 259, 299
  Leyland, J. B., 170, 171, 176
  Lockhart, 194
  Longley, Dr., 288
  'Lowood,' 23, 24, 25

  'Macarthey, Mr.,' 142, 236, 282
  Macready, 249
  Malham-Deelaby, Mr., 173 _n._
  'Malone, Peter Augustus,' 142
  Marie, Mlle., 104
  Martineau, Harriett, 238, 247, 256, 261, 267-8, 269, 271, 277, 286-8,
    299;
      Charlotte's visit to, 267-9;
      mesmeric powers, 269;
      _Letters on the Nature, etc., of Man_, 271-2;
      criticism of _Villette_, 287-8
  Milnes, Monckton, 274, 299
  'Moore, Hortense,' 236

  Newby, T. C., 195, 208, 209, 262
  Nicholls, Rev. A. B.;
      Charlotte's views on, 142-3, 227, 278-9, 282;
      reads _Shirley_, 236, 282;
      proposal and courtship, 283-5, 288 _et seq._;
      engagement and marriage, 296-305;
      and the portrait groups, 53;
      consents to publish _The Professor_, 240;
      bequest of Richmond portrait, 259;
      destroys letters after Charlotte's death, 131, 294.
      Otherwise mentioned, 13, 90, 111, 141, 159, 196, 219
  North, Christopher, 28, 29
  Nussey, Ellen, 36, 38-48, 53-4, 55, 68, 69, 74, 82, 83, 84, 86, 103,
    111, 113, 142, 143, 145, 164, 187, 191, 193, 196, 207, 213,
    267-74 _passim_, 278, 282, 288-9, 291-5, 299 _et seq._, _et passim_.
  Nussey, Henry, 45, 48, 63, 64, 70, 80, 89

  _Observer, The_, 238

  _Palladium, The_, 261
  Palmerston, Lord, 3
  Patchett's (Miss) school, 56
  Phillips, George Searle, 182
  Poems, the collected volume by E. A. and C. Bell, 5, 161-4, 190,
    193-5, 202
  Postlethwaite, Mr., 77, 82
  Proctor, Adelaide Anne, 253
  Proctor, Mrs., 253

  _Quarterly Review_, 221

  Rachel, 274-5
  Railway panic, 180
  Redman, Joseph, 290
  'Reed, Mrs.,' 17
  Reid, Sir T. Wemyss, 15
  _Revue des deux Mondes_, 238
  Richmond, George, crayon portrait of Charlotte, 259
  Rigby, Miss, 221
  Ringrose, Amelia (afterwards Mrs. Joe Taylor), 46, 197, 207, 214, 292
  Ritchie, Lady, 252 _and n._, 253
  Robinson, Miss A. Mary F. (Mme. Duclaux), 74, 108, 172, 186
  Robinson, Rev. Edmund, 86, 107, 145;
      death, 148, 150, 189
  Robinson, Mrs., 145-51 _passim_, 156, 179, 189, 293;
      threatens Mrs. Gaskell with action for libel, 147;
      Charlotte's attitude to, 189, 206, 211
  Robinson, William, 51, 52
  Rogers, Samuel, 274

  Scarborough, 222
  Scott, Sir Edward, 151
  Shorter, Mr. Clement, xv, 5, 9, 53, 90, 102 _n._, 185 _et passim_.
  Sidgwick, Mr. and Mrs. John Benson, 66-7, 88
  Sloane, Mr. Edward, 170, 171, 176
  Smith, Elder & Co., 168, 169, 195, 205, 208, 229, 234, 262
  Smith, Mrs., 228, 247, 250, 285, 286, 299;
      in _Villette_, 286
  Smith, George, 195, 209, 229, 247, 249, 251, 252, 254, 255, 259,
    270-1, 273, 279, 285, 286, 299;
      in _Villette_, 286
  Smith, Rev. James William, 142, 143, 234
  'Smith, Rev. Lothario,' 142
  'Snowe, Lucy,' 42, 111, 286
  Sophie, Mlle., 104, 115
  Southey, Robert, 32, 58, 59, 60, 65, 70, 80, 81, 127, 128, 194
  Sowden, Rev. Sutcliffe, 299
  Spielmann, Mr. Marion H., and the Bront-Hger letters, 127 _n._,
    132 and _n._, 134, 136
  Stevenson, R. L., 77
  Stott, Colonel, 124
  Sugden, Sarah, 72, 75
  'Sweeting, David,' 143
  Swinburne, Algernon, 5, 79, 239

  Tabby (servant), 28, 30, 32, 33, 70, 116, 122, 223, 224, 265, 277
  Taylor, Martha, 82, 94, 96, 103, 106, 111
  Taylor, Mary, 35, 51, 55, 82, 94-5, 103, 111, 139, 144, 208, 235, 237
  Taylor, Mr. (Mary's brother), 128, 144
  Taylor, James, 214, 227-33, 268, 270, 273;
    Charlotte and, 227 _et seq._, 270, 273, 275, 279
  Taylor, Joe, 214, 292, 302
  Taylor, Mrs. Joe, 292, 302.
    _See_ Ringrose, Amelia
  Tennyson, 194
  Thackeray, W. M., meetings with Charlotte, 250 _et seq._, 257, 274,
    299;
      praise of _Jane Eyre_, 197;
      lectures on Fielding, 214, 255;
      _Vanity Fair_, 197;
      _Esmond_, 255; and the innuendo regarding _Jane Eyre_, 204, 221;
      Charlotte's view of, 197, 250-5 _passim_;
      panegyric on, 204
  Tighe, Rev. Mr., 2
  _Times, The_, x, 238
  Townsend, Charles, pseudonym, 70, 80
  Truelock, Miss, 253

  Vernon, Olivia, pseudonym, 86

  Walton, Agnes, 72, 75
  Watman, Mr., 6
  Weightman, Rev. William, 71-6, 106, 113, 121, 142.
    _See also_ 'Celia Amelia'
  Wellington, Duke of, 28, 29, 36, 49, 250, 259
  Wheelwright, Miss Laetitia, 133 _n._, 247
  White, Mr. and Mrs. John, 86, 87, 88, 89, 96, 97, 124
  Williams, John Branwell, and family, 82
  Williams, W. S. (of Smith, Elder & Co.), 209;
      Charlotte's friend and correspondent, 24, 85, 168, 192, 195,
        200, 202, 206, 209, 213, 214, 218, 224, 227, 228, 234, 235,
        237, 239, 251, 262, 265, 268, 277, 279, 294, 299, 303
  Wiseman, Cardinal, 274
  Wooler, Amelia, 270
  Wooler, Margaret, 24, 35, 36, 37, 55, 61, 104, 155, 180, 200, 261,
    272, 287, 298, 299;
      affection for Charlotte, 61-2;
      offer of Dewsbury Moor, 95-8, 124
  Wordsworth, William, 58, 59, 60, 80, 128, 194
  Wroot, Mr. Herbert E., 135 _n._

  'Yorke, Jessie,' 106
  'Yorkes, the,' 235




  _Printed in England at_ THE BALLANTYNE PRESS
  SPOTTISWOODE, BALLANTYNE & CO. LTD.
  _Colchester, London & Eton._

       *       *       *       *       *

TRANSCRIBER NOTES:

    Missing punctuation has been added and obvious punctuation errors
    have been corrected.

    All printing errors, such as missing words or consistent spellings
    including hyphenation, have been retained with the exception of
    those listed below.

    Page 154: "cheeful" => "cheerful" ( its information about the canary
    and the dogs, nor the cheerful contents of Emily's).

    Page 242: "he" => "her" (and softly averted her head to hide the
    suffusion of her check.)

    Page 242: "dialogu" => "dialogue" ( Louis Moore retails page after
    page of dialogue between his mistress and himself).

    Page 242: "an" => "and" ( and it is all tinsel and froth compared
    with the gleams of those deep waters).

    Page 312: "porrait" => "portrait" (bequest of Richmond portrait).






[End of Charlotte Bront, by E. F. Benson]
