The Three Brontes by May Sinclair
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17 _By the same Author:_
THE CREATORS
THE DIVINE FIRE
TWO SIDES OF A QUESTION
THE HELPMATE
KITTY TAILLEUR
MR. AND MRS. NEVILL TYSON
ANN SEVERN AND THE FIELDINGS
ARNOLD WATERLOW: A LIFE
UNCANNY STORIES
THE RECTOR OF WYCK
THE ALLINGHAMS
A CURE OF SOULS
FAR END
HISTORY OF ANTHONY WARING
TALES TOLD BY SIMPSON
ETC.
THE THREE BRONTES
_by_
MAY SINCLAIR
1912
PREFATORY NOTE
My thanks are due, first and chiefly, to Mr. Clement K. Shorter who
placed all his copyright material at my disposal; and to Mr. G.M.
Williamson and Mr. Robert H. Dodd, of New York, for allowing me to draw
so largely from the Poems of Emily Bronte, published by Messrs. Dodd,
Mead, and Co. in 1902; also to Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, the
publishers of the Complete Poems of Emily Bronte, edited by Mr. Shorter;
and to Mr. Alfred Sutro for permission to use his translation of _Wisdom
and Destiny_. Lastly, and somewhat late, to Mr. Arthur Symons for his
translation from St. John of the Cross. If I have borrowed from him more
than I had any right to without his leave, I hope he will forgive me.
MAY SINCLAIR.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE THREE BRONTES
APPENDIX I
APPENDIX II
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
When six months ago Mr. Thomas Seccombe suggested that I should write a
short essay on "The Three Brontes" I agreed with some misgiving.
Yet that deed was innocent compared with what I have done now; and, in
any case, the series afforded the offender a certain shelter and
protection. But to come out like this, into the open, with _another_
Bronte book, seems not only a dangerous, but a futile and a fatuous
adventure. All I can say is that I did not mean to do it. I certainly
never meant to write so long a book.
It grew, insidiously, out of the little one. Things happened. New
criticisms opened up old questions. When I came to look carefully into
Mr. Clement Shorter's collection of the _Complete Poems of Emily
Bronte_, I found a mass of material (its existence I, at any rate, had
not suspected) that could not be dealt with in the limits of the
original essay.
The book is, and can only be, the slightest of all slight appreciations.
None the less it has been hard and terrible for me to write it. Not only
had I said nearly all that I had to say already, but I was depressed at
the very start by that conviction of the absurdity of trying to say
anything at all, after all that has been said, about Anne, or Emily, or
Charlotte Bronte.
Anne's case, perhaps, was not so difficult. For obvious reasons, Anne
Bronte will always be comparatively virgin soil. But it was impossible
to write of Charlotte after Mrs. Gaskell; impossible to say more of
Emily than Madame Duclaux has said; impossible to add one single little
fact to the vast material, so patiently amassed, so admirably arranged
by Mr. Clement Shorter. And when it came to appreciation there were Mr.
Theodore Watts-Dunton, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, Mr. Birrell, and
Mrs. Humphry Ward, lying along the ground. When it came to eulogy, after
Mr. Swinburne's _Note on Charlotte Bronte_, neither Charlotte nor Emily
have any need of praise.
And on Emily Bronte, M. Maeterlinck has spoken the one essential, the
one perfect and final and sufficient word. I have "lifted" it
unblushingly; for no other word comes near to rendering the unique, the
haunting, the indestructible impression that she makes.
So, because all the best things about the Brontes have been said
already, I have had to fall back on the humble day-labour of clearing
away some of the rubbish that has gathered round them.
Round Charlotte it has gathered to such an extent that it is difficult
to see her plainly through the mass of it. Much has been cleared away;
much remains. Mrs. Oliphant's dreadful theories are still on record. The
excellence of Madame Duclaux's monograph perpetuates her one serious
error. Mr. Swinburne's _Note_ immortalizes his. M. Heger was dug up
again the other day.
It may be said that I have been calling up ghosts for the mere fun of
laying them; and there might be something in it, but that really these
ghosts still walk. At any rate many people believe in them, even at this
time of day. M. Dimnet believes firmly that poor Mrs. Robinson was in
love with Branwell Bronte. Some of us still think that Charlotte was in
love with M. Heger. They cannot give him up any more than M. Dimnet can
give up Mrs. Robinson.
Such things would be utterly unimportant but that they tend to obscure
the essential quality and greatness of Charlotte Bronte's genius.
Because of them she has passed for a woman of one experience and of one
book. There is still room for a clean sweep of the rubbish that has been
shot here.
In all this, controversy was unavoidable, much as I dislike its
ungracious and ungraceful air. If I have been inclined to undervalue
certain things--"the sojourn in Brussels", for instance--which others
have considered of the first importance, it is because I believe that it
is always the inner life that counts, and that with the Brontes it
supremely counted.
If I have passed over the London period too lightly, it is because I
judge it extraneous and external. If I have tried, cruelly, to take from
Charlotte the little beige gown that she wore at Mr. Thackeray's
dinner-party, it is because her home-made garments seem to suit her
better. She is more herself in skirts that have brushed the moors and
kept some of the soil of Haworth in their hem.
I may seem to have exaggerated her homesickness for Haworth. It may be
said that Haworth was by no means Charlotte's home as it was Emily's. I
am aware that there were moments--hours--when she longed to get away
from it. I have not forgotten how Mary Taylor found her in such an hour,
not long after her return from Brussels, when her very flesh shrank from
the thought of her youth gone and "nothing done"; nothing before her but
long, empty years in Haworth. The fact remains that she was never happy
away from it, and that in Haworth her genius most certainly found itself
at home. And this particular tone of misery and unrest disappeared from
the moment when her genius declared itself, so that I am inclined to see
in it a little personal dissatisfaction, if you will, but chiefly the
unspeakable restlessness and misery of power unrecognized and
suppressed. "Nothing done!" That was her reiterated cry.
Again, if I have overlooked the complexities of Charlotte's character,
it is that the great lines that underlie it may be seen. In my heart I
agree with M. Dimnet that the Brontes were not simple. All the same, I
think that his admirable portrait of Charlotte is spoiled by his
attitude of pity for "_la pauvre fille_", as he persists in calling her.
I think he dwells a shade too much on her small asperities and
acidities, and on that "_ton de critique mesquine_", which he puts down
to her provincialism. No doubt there were moments of suffering and of
irritation, as well as moments of uncontrollable merriment, when
Charlotte lacked urbanity, but M. Dimnet has almost too keen an eye for
them.
In making war on theories I cannot hope to escape a countercharge of
theorizing. Exception may be taken to my own suggestion as to the effect
of _Wuthering Heights_ on Charlotte Bronte's genius. If anybody likes to
fling it on the rubbish heap they may. I may have theorized a little too
much in laying stress on the supernatural element in _Wuthering
Heights_. It is because M. Dimnet has insisted too much on its
brutality. I may have exaggerated Emily Bronte's "mysticism". It is
because her "paganism" has been too much in evidence. It may be said
that I have no more authority for my belief that Emily Bronte was in
love with the Absolute than other people have for theirs, that
Charlotte was in love with M. Heger.
Finally, much that I have said about Emily Bronte's hitherto unpublished
poems is pure theory. But it is theory, I think, that careful
examination of the poems will make good. I may have here and there given
as a "Gondal" poem what is not a "Gondal" poem at all. Still, I believe,
it will be admitted that it is in the cycle of these poems, and not
elsewhere, that we should look for the first germs of _Wuthering
Heights_. The evidence only demonstrates in detail--what has never been
seriously contested--that the genius of Emily Bronte found its sources
in itself.
_10th October, 1911._
The Three Brontes
It is impossible to write of the three Brontes and forget the place they
lived in, the black-grey, naked village, bristling like a rampart on the
clean edge of the moor; the street, dark and steep as a gully, climbing
the hill to the Parsonage at the top; the small oblong house, naked and
grey, hemmed in on two sides by the graveyard, its five windows flush
with the wall, staring at the graveyard where the tombstones, grey and
naked, are set so close that the grass hardly grows between. The church
itself is a burying ground; its walls are tombstones, and its floor
roofs the forgotten and the unforgotten dead.
A low wall and a few feet of barren garden divide the Parsonage from the
graveyard, a few feet between the door of the house and the door in the
wall where its dead were carried through. But a path leads beyond the
graveyard to "a little and a lone green lane", Emily Bronte's lane that
leads to the open moors.
It is the genius of the Brontes that made their place immortal; but it
is the soul of the place that made their genius what it is. You cannot
exaggerate its importance. They drank and were saturated with Haworth.
When they left it they hungered and thirsted for it; they sickened till
the hour of their return. They gave themselves to it with passion, and
their works ring with the shock and interchange of two immortalities.
Haworth is saturated with them. Their souls are henceforth no more to be
disentangled from its soul than their bodies from its earth. All their
poetry, their passion and their joy is there, in this place of their
tragedy, visible, palpable, narrow as the grave and boundless.
In the year eighteen-twenty the Reverend Patrick Bronte and his wife
Maria brought their six children, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick
Branwell, Emily, and Anne, from Thornton, where they were born, to
Haworth. Mr. Bronte was an Irishman, a village schoolmaster who won,
marvellously, a scholarship that admitted him to Cambridge and the
Church of England. Tales have been told of his fathers and his
forefathers, peasants and peasant farmers of Ballynaskeagh in County
Down. They seem to have been notorious for their energy, eccentricity,
imagination, and a certain tendency to turbulence and excess. Tales have
been told of Mr. Bronte himself, of his temper, his egotism, his
selfishness, his fits of morose or savage temper. The Brontes'
biographers, from Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux[A] to Mr. Birrell,
have all been hard on this poor and unhappy and innocent old man. It is
not easy to see him very clearly through the multitude of tales they
tell: how he cut up his wife's silk gown in a fit of passion; how he
fired off pistols in a series of fits of passion; how, in still gloomier
and more malignant fits, he used to go for long solitary walks. And when
you look into the matter you find that the silk gown was, after all, a
cotton one, and that he only cut the sleeves out, and _then_ walked into
Keighley and brought a silk gown back with him instead; that when he
was a young man at Drumballyroney he practised pistol firing, not as a
safety valve for temper but as a manly sport, and that as a manly sport
he kept it up. As for solitary walks, there is really no reason why a
father should not take them; and if Mr. Bronte had insisted on
accompanying Charlotte and Emily in their walks, his conduct would have
been censured just the same, and, I think, with considerably more
reason. As it happened, Mr. Bronte, rather more than most fathers, made
companions of his children when they were little. This is not quite the
same thing as making himself a companion for them, and the result was a
terrific outburst of infant precocity; but this hardly justifies Mrs.
Gaskell and Madame Duclaux. They seem to have thought that they were
somehow appeasing the outraged spirits of Emily and Charlotte by
blackening their father and their brother; whereas, if anything could
give pain to Charlotte and Emily and innocent Anne in heaven, it would
be the knowledge of what Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux have done for
them.
[Footnote A: A. Mary F. Robinson.]
There was injustice in all that zeal as well as indiscretion, for Mr.
Bronte had his good points as fathers go. Think what the fathers of the
Victorian era could be, and what its evangelical parsons often were; and
remember that Mr. Bronte was an evangelical parson, and the father of
Emily and Charlotte, not of a brood of gentle, immaculate Jane Austens,
and that he was confronted suddenly and without a moment's warning with
Charlotte's fame. Why, the average evangelical parson would have been
shocked into apoplexy at the idea of any child of his producing
_Wuthering Heights_ or _Jane Eyre_. Charlotte's fame would have looked
to him exceedingly like infamy. We know what Charles Kingsley, the least
evangelical of parsons, once thought of Charlotte. And we know what Mr.
Bronte thought of her. He was profoundly proud of his daughter's genius;
there is no record and no rumour of any criticism on his part, of any
remonstrance or amazement. He was loyal to Charlotte to the last days of
his life, when he gave her defence into Mrs. Gaskell's hands; for which
confidence Mrs. Gaskell repaid him shockingly.
But he was the kind of figure that is irresistible to the caustic or
humorous biographer. There was something impotently fiery in him, as if
the genius of Charlotte and Emily had flicked him in irony as it passed
him by. He wound himself in yards and yards and yards of white cravat,
and he wrote a revolutionary poem called "Vision of Hell". It is easy to
make fun of his poems, but they were no worse, or very little worse,
than his son Branwell's, so that he may be pardoned if he thought
himself more important than his children. Many fathers of the Victorian
era did.
And he _was_ important as a temporary vehicle of the wandering creative
impulse. It struggled and strove in him and passed from him, choked in
yards and yards of white cravat, to struggle and strive again in
Branwell and in Anne. As a rule the genius of the race is hostile to the
creative impulse, and the creative impulse is lucky if it can pierce
through to one member of a family. In the Brontes it emerges at five
different levels, rising from abortive struggle to supreme
achievement--from Mr. Bronte to his son Branwell, from Branwell to Anne,
from Anne to Charlotte, and from Charlotte to Emily. And Maria, who
died, was an infant prodigy.
And Mr. Bronte is important because he was the tool used by their
destiny to keep Charlotte and Emily in Haworth.
The tragedy we are too apt to call their destiny began with their
babyhood, when the mother and six children were brought to Haworth
Parsonage and the prospect of the tombstones. They had not been there
eighteen months before the mother sickened and died horribly of cancer.
She had to be isolated as far as possible. The Parsonage house was not
large, and it was built with an extreme and straight simplicity; two
front rooms, not large, right and left of the narrow stone-flagged
passage, a bedroom above each, and between, squeezed into the small
spare space above the passage, a third room, no bigger than a closet and
without a fireplace. This third room is important in the story of the
Brontes, for, when their mother's illness declared itself, it was in
this incredibly small and insufferably unwholesome den that the five
little girls were packed, heaven knows how, and it was here that the
seeds of tuberculosis were sown in their fragile bodies. After their
mother's death the little fatal room was known as the children's study
(you can see, in a dreadful vision, the six pale little faces, pressed
together, looking out of the window on to the graves below). It was used
again as a night-nursery, and later still as the sleeping-place shared
by two, if not three, of the sisters, two of whom were tuberculous.
The mother died and was buried in a vault under the floor of the church,
not far from the windows of her house. Her sister, Miss Branwell, came
up from Penzance to look after the children. You can see this small,
middle-aged, early Victorian spinster, exiled for ever from the sunshine
of the town she loved, dragging out her sad, fastidious life in a cold
and comparatively savage country that she unspeakably disliked. She took
possession of the room her sister died in (it was the most cheerful room
in the house), and lived in it. Her nieces had to sit there with her
for certain hours while she taught them sewing and all the early
Victorian virtues. Their father made himself responsible for the rest of
their education, which he conducted with considerable vigour and
originality. Maria, the eldest, was the child of promise. Long before
Maria was eleven he "conversed" with her on "the leading topics of the
day, with as much pleasure and freedom as with any grown-up person".
For this man, so gloomy, we are told, and so morose, found pleasure in
taking his tiny children out on to the moors, where he entertained them
alternately with politics and tales of brutality and horror. At six
years old each little Bronte had its view of the political situation;
and it was not until a plague of measles and whooping-cough found out
their tender youth that their father realized how very young and small
and delicate they were, and how very little, after all, he understood
about a nursery. In a sudden frantic distrust of the climate of Haworth,
of Miss Branwell, and his own system, he made up his mind to send Maria
and Elizabeth and Charlotte and Emily to school.
And there was only one school within his means, the Clergy Daughters'
School, established at Cowan Bridge in an unwholesome valley. It has
been immortalized in _Jane Eyre_, together with its founder and patron,
the Reverend Carus Wilson. There can be no doubt that the early
Victorian virtues, self-repression, humility, and patience under
affliction, were admirably taught at Cowan Bridge. And if the carnal
nature of the Clergy Daughters resisted the militant efforts of Mr.
Carus Wilson, it was ultimately subdued by low diet and primitive
drainage working together in an unwholesome valley. Mr. Carus Wilson,
indeed, was inspired by a sublime antagonism to the claims of the
perishable body; but he seems to have pushed his campaign against the
flesh a bit too far, and was surprised at his own success when, one
after another, the extremely perishable bodies of those children were
laid low by typhus.
The fever did not touch the four little Brontes. They had another
destiny. Their seed of dissolution was sown in that small stifling room
at Haworth, and was reaped now at Cowan Bridge. First Maria, then
Elizabeth, sickened, and was sent home to die. Charlotte stayed on for a
while with Emily. She ran wild, and hung about the river, watching it,
and dabbling her feet and hands in the running water. Their doom waited
for Charlotte and for Emily.
There is no record of Elizabeth except that, like Anne Bronte, she was
"gentle". But Maria lived in Charlotte's passionate memory, and will
live for ever as Helen Burns, the school-fellow of Jane Eyre. Of those
five infant prodigies, she was the most prodigious. She was the first of
the children to go down into the vault under Haworth Church; you see her
looking back on her sad way, a small, reluctant ghost, lovely,
infantile, and yet maternal. Under her name on the flat tombstone a
verse stands, premonitory, prophetic, calling to her kindred: "Be ye
also ready."
Charlotte was nine years old when her sisters died. Tragedy tells at
nine years old. It lived all her life in her fine nerves, reinforced by
shock after shock of terror and of anguish.
But for the next seven years, spent at the Parsonage without a break,
tragedy was quiescent. Day after day, year after year passed, and
nothing happened. And the children of the Parsonage, thrown on
themselves and on each other, were exuberantly happy. They had the
freedom of the moors, and of the worlds, as wild, as gorgeous, as
lonely, as immeasurable, which they themselves created. They found out
that they were not obliged to be the children of the Parsonage; they
could be, and they were, anything they chose, from the Duke of
Wellington down to citizens of Verdopolis. For a considerable number of
years they were the "Islanders". "It was in 1827" (Charlotte, at
thirteen, records the date with gravity--it was so important) "that our
plays were established: _Young Men_, June 1826; _Our Fellows_, July
1827; _The Islanders_, December 1827. These are our three great plays
that are not kept secret."
But there were secret plays, Emily's and Charlotte's; and these you
gather to be the shy and solitary flights of Emily's and Charlotte's
genius. They seem to have required absolutely no impulsion from without.
The difficult thing for these small children was to stop writing. Their
fire consumed them, and left their bodies ashen white, fragile as ashes.
And yet they were not, they could not have been, the sedentary,
unwholesome little creatures they might seem to be. The girls were kept
hard at work with their thin arms, brushing carpets, dusting furniture,
and making beds. And for play they tramped the moors with their brother;
they breasted the keen and stormy weather; the sun, the moon, the stars,
and the winds knew them; and it is of these fierce, radiant, elemental
things that Charlotte and Emily wrote as no women before them had ever
written. Conceive the vitality and energy implied in such a life; and
think, if you can, of these two as puny, myopic victims of the lust of
literature. It was from the impressions they took in those seven years
that their immortality was made.
And then, for a year and a half, Charlotte went to school again, that
school of Miss Wooler's at Roe Head, where Ellen Nussey found her, "a
silent, weeping, dark little figure in the large bay-window". She was
then sixteen.
Two years later she went back to Miss Wooler's school as a teacher.
In the register of the Clergy Daughters' School there are two immortal
entries:
"Charlotte Bronte.... Left school, June 1st, 1825--Governess."
"Emily Bronte.... Left, June 1st, 1825. Subsequent career--Governess."
They did not question the arrangement. They were not aware of any other
destiny. They never doubted that the boy, Branwell, was the child of
promise, who was to have a glorious career. In order that he should have
it the sisters left Haworth again and again, forcing themselves to the
exile that destroyed them, and the work they hated. It was Charlotte and
Anne who showed themselves most courageous and determined in the
terrible adventure; Emily, who was courage and determination incarnate,
failed. Homesickness had become a disease with them, an obsession,
almost a madness. They longed with an immitigable longing for their
Parsonage-house, their graveyard, and their moors. Emily was consumed by
it; Anne languished; Charlotte was torn between it and her passion for
knowledge.
She took Emily back with her to Roe Head as a pupil, and Emily nearly
died of it. She sent Emily home, and little Anne, the last victim, took
Emily's place. She and Charlotte went with the school when it was
removed to Dewsbury Moor. Then Emily, who had nearly died of Roe Head,
shamed by Charlotte's and Anne's example, went to Halifax as a teacher
in Miss Patchett's Academy for Young Ladies. She was at Halifax--Halifax
of all places--for six months, and nearly died of Halifax. And after
that Charlotte and Anne set out on their careers as nursery-governesses.
It was all that they considered themselves fit for. Anne went to a Mrs.
Ingham at Blake Hall, where she was homesick and miserable. Charlotte
went to the Sidgwicks at Stonegappe near Skipton, where "one of the
pleasantest afternoons I spent--indeed, the only one at all
pleasant--was when Mr. Sidgwick walked out with his children, and I had
orders to follow a little way behind". You have an impression of years
of suffering endured at Stonegappe. As a matter of fact, Charlotte was
there hardly three months--May, June, July, eighteen-thirty-nine.
And most of the time their brother Branwell was either at Bradford or at
Haworth, dreaming of greatness, and drinking at the "Black Bull". The
"Black Bull" stands disastrously near to the Parsonage, at the corner of
the churchyard, with its parlour windows looking on the graves. Branwell
was the life and soul of every party of commercial travellers that
gathered there. Conviviality took strange forms at Haworth. It had a
Masonic Lodge of the Three Graces, with John Brown, the grave-digger,
for Worshipful Master. Branwell was at one and the same time secretary
to the Three Graces and to the Haworth Temperance Society. When he was
not entertaining bagmen, he was either at Bradford painting bad
portraits, or at Haworth pouring out verses, fearfully long, fatally
fluent verses, and writing hysterical letters to the editor of
_Blackwood's Magazine_.
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