LITERARY LIVES EDITED BY W. ROBERTSON NICOLL CHARLOTTE BRONTE AND HER SISTERS LITERARY LIVES Edited by W. Robertson Nicoll, LL.D. MATTHEW ARNOLD. By G. W. E. Russell. CARDINAL NEWMAN. By William Barry, D.D. JOHN BUNYAN. By W. Hale White. COVENTRY PATMORE. By Edmund Gosse. ERNEST REN AN. By William Barry, D.D. CHARLOTTE BRONTE. By Clement K. Shorter. IN PREPARATION WALTER SCOTT. By A. Lang. R. H. HUTTON. By W. Robertson Nicoll. GOETHE. By Edward Dowden. HAZLITT. By Louise Imogen Guiney. Each Volume, Illustrated, $i.oo net. Postage lo cts. Xtterary !lLiv>e6 CHARLOTTE BRONTE AND HER SISTERS BY CLEMENT K. SHORTER n ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1905 Copyright, 1905, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published, October, 1905 • • • • • • • • • • • TROW DIRECTORY PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY NEW YORK Charlotte Bronte (Mrs. Arthur Bell Nlcholls) From the portrait by George RicJunond in the possession of Mr. A. B. NichoUs CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE The Father of Charlotte Bronte ... i CHAPTER II The Mother of Charlotte Bronte ... ii CHAPTER III Thornton 17 CHAPTER IV Childhood at Haworth ..„.,.. 25 CHAPTER V Schooldays. 1831-1835 33 CHAPTER VI Governess Life 39 V 227653 vi CONTENTS CHAPTER VII PAGE The Pension Heger, Brussels 57 CHAPTER VIII Poems 73 CHAPTER IX Branwell Bronte 83 CHAPTER X The Publications of Mr. Newby . . . .103 CHAPTER XI WuTHERiNG Heights 118 CHAPTER XII Anne Bronte 134 CHAPTER XIII Jane Eyre 147 CHAPTER XIV Shirley 171 CONTENTS vii CHAPTER XV PAGE ViLLETTE AND ThE PrOFESSOR . . . . , . I9I CHAPTER XVI Marriage and Death 215 CHAPTER XVII The Glamour of the Brontes 229 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Charlotte Bronte (Mrs. Arthur Bell Nicholls) Frontispiece FACING PAGE The Rev. Patrick Bronte 2 Charlotte Bronte's Birthplace, Thornton, York- shire 1 8 The Old Parsonage, Haworth, as it stood at the time that the Bronte family occupied it (1820-1861) 30 Haworth Old Church 40 Patrick Branwell Bronte 96 The first page of the manuscript of Jane Eyre 160 M. Paul Heger, the hero of Villette and The Professor 198 The Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls 224 INTRODUCTION This book may seem at first sight only an unto- ward accident, due to the exigencies of including all well known names in a series entitled " Literary Lives." Mrs. Gaskell, it may be said, wrote the only Life of Charlotte Bronte that everyone should read. This is, in a measure, true, but much new material has been published since Mrs. Gaskell wrote, and this material has not in the interval been gathered together into one brief narrative. I have to thank Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton for any facts of that kind previously published in my Charlotte Bronte and her Circle^ and Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. for the same indulgence with regard to the Haworth Edition of Mrs. Gaskell's L'lfe^ to which I was privileged to add many notes. The Haworth Edition of Mrs. Gaskell's Life must for ever hold the field against others by virtue of its mass of documents provided by the late Mr. George Smith. I have added certain other un- xii INTRODUCTION published material to this little book although this will be discerned only by the Bronte enthusiast who knows the subject, as my friend the late Lionel Johnson knew it, in its minutest detail. Perhaps I shall best disarm criticism by stating that I have tried to let Charlotte Bronte tell her own story through the letters by her that have been brought to light since Mrs. Gaskell wrote. I have to thank two kind friends who love the Brontes, Mrs. Wilfrid Meynell and Dr. Robert- son Nicoll, for reading my proof-sheets. CHAPTER I THE FATHER OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE Patrick Bronte/ or Brunty, the father of Charlotte Bronte, was an Irishman. He was born in a humble cottage in Emdale, County Down, on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1777. Although he came from the " Black North," from that partic- ular part of Ireland where Protestantism flour- ishes, largely through the infusion of English and ^ In the Baptismal Register of Drumballyroney the name is entered *' Brunty" and *' Bruntee"; in the books of St. John's College, Cambridge, on Patrick Bronte's admission in 1802-3 it is entered as Branty, in the Churchwardens' books at Harts- head "Brunty." But there seems to be no early signature of Patrick Bronte's extant, and certainly no signature of his Irish period, unless the inscription "Patrick Brunty, his book" which Dr. Wright saw in an old "Arithmetic" may be counted genu- ine, which I do not believe. A "Frank Prunty" was found by Mr. David Martin at Newtonbutler in Co. Fermanagh, and he claimed a distant relationship to the Brontes. At Cambridge Mr. Bronte signed "Bronte," at Wethersfield "Bronte," at Dewsbury Bronte or Bronte or Bronte. Not until he arrived at Haworth do we find his signature as Bronte. i-;-.'.:**'ii.. CHARLOTTE bronte Scots blood, there Is no evidence that there was a particle of blood other than Irish flowing In the veins of Patrick Brunty. His parents were of the peasant class, although his father, Hugh Brunty, would seem to have followed for a long period a number of varied occupations, Including work In a limekiln and work In a cornklln. The book to which we owe the only glimpse of Patrick's par- entage, The Brontes in Ireland^ by Dr. Wright, Is so full of Invention that It Is difficult to derive therefrom fragments of truth concerning the ear- lier Brontes, or Bruntys. It would seem clear, how- ever, that Hugh Brunty married one Alice Mc- Clory, who had been brought up In the Roman Catholic faith, but who, after her marriage In the Protestant Church of Magherally, adopted the re- ligion of her husband.^ Ten children were born to Hugh and Alice Brunty, and of these Patrick, the eldest, alone has any Interest for us. After such education as the village school af- forded, young Patrick Brunty became a weaver, ^ The Brontes in Ireland, or Facts Stranger than Fiction, by Dr. William Wright, 1893. Born March 17, 1777 Died June 7, 1861 The Rev. Patrick Bronte THE FATHER 3 an Industry then, as now, extensively cultivated through Ulster. He could not have been more than sixteen years of age when he took the position of teacher In the Glascar Presbyterian School, about a mile from the Brunty cottage at Emdale. A year or two later Patrick became teacher of the parish school of Drumballyroney, and there, dur- ing his three years of schoolmastering (It Is sug- gested that he may have saved the sum of a hun- dred pounds or so. This enabled him to leave Ireland for Cambridge, where he entered himself at St. John's College on October i, 1802, changing his name from Brunty to Bronte at this tlme.^ In April of that year another Irishman, Henry John Temple, who was also educated at St. John's, suc- ceeded his father as Viscount Palmerston. Years later Mr. Bronte wrote to the popular Minister on a local question, but the formality of his reply makes It probable that the peer and the whilom ^ Whether the name was assumed in honour of Nelson, who about this time became Duke of Bronte, or whether his early enthusiasm for Greek guided his change of name is not known. His eldest daughter long afterwards signed herself in play as Charlotte or rather as Charles Thunder. 4 CHARLOTTE BRONTE peasant were never on speaking terms. Palmer- stonwas at St. John's from April, 1803, to January, 1806. We have his own statement, written in a copy of Henry Kirke White's Verses^ that Bronte knew the unfortunate young poet from Nottingham. Kirke White became a sizar at St. John's in 1803, through the influence of the once famous divine, Charles Simeon. The one real friendship of young Bronte's college life, however, was with an enthusiastic disciple of Dr. Simeon, John Nunn, who afterwards became a clergyman. Nunn re- newed his acquaintance with Patrick Bronte some years later, as we shall see. This is pretty well all we know of Mr. Bronte at Cambridge, apart from the fact that he was very successful in eking out his slender means, winning three exhibitions for poor scholars attached to St. John's. He was thus able not only to support himself, but to astonish his relatives in County Down with remittances — a duty that he fulfilled all his days. Mr. Bronte's first curacy was at Wethersfield in Essex, where his name is to be found in the church THE FATHER 5 books in October, 1806. His vicar was Dr. Jowett — a non-resident — who published a volume of Fit- lage Sermons, The curate had, of course, all the parish work in his hands. He lodged at the house of an elderly maiden lady. Miss Mildred Davy, and this doubtless gave Patrick Bronte his intro- duction to the more lively home of Miss Davy's widowed sister, Mrs. Burden Mrs. Burder was the mother of four children, of whom the eldest daughter, Mary, was at the time eighteen years of age, and the courtship of Irish curate and Essex lass was a matter of course. A stern uncle, watch- ing over his niece's heritage, interrupted the cor- respondence ; there was much heart-break, 'doubt- less many tears, and finally Mr. Bronte took flight from Wethersfield.^ Mary Burder waited long for intercepted letters that never came, and she was still unwed when her old lover became a widower in 1 82 1. She then received by letter a further offer of marriage from Mr. Bronte, to which she an- swered " No," and thus denied to the Bronte chil- dren a kind stepmother. Three years later Mary ^ Life of Charlotte Brontey by Augustine Birrell, 1887. 6 CHARLOTTE BRONTE Burder became Mrs. Silree, the wife of a Non- conformist minister of Wethersfield. But this Is to anticipate. At present we are only concerned with a, for the moment, heartbroken young curate who, anxious to escape from un- pleasant conditions, has communicated with that old college friend, John Nunn. Mr. Nunn held a curacy at Shrewsbury at this time. From him Mr. Bronte learnt that there was a vacancy at WelHngton, not far away. Of this parish John Eyton, the famous antiquarian, was Vicar. Bronte applied for and obtained the curacy, and with it renewed pleasant intercourse with his old college friend. But in a few months everything was changed. John Nunn married, and the friendship was snapped asunder. Patrick Bronte, with the remembrance of Mary Burder's apparent faithless- ness still very vivid was little in the humour for comradeship with a married man. He seized the earliest opportunity for taking up parish work else- where, and this time his destiny took him to Yorkshire, which county was to be his home for the rest of his life. Dewsbury was his next place THE FATHER 7 of sojourn. Before we accompany him to Dews- bury, however, I may as well recall a pleasant sequel to this friendship with Mr. Nunn that be- longs to fifty years later. It is related in a letter to me from Mr. Nunn's niece : — "In 1857 I was staying with Mr. Nunn at Thorndon, in Suffolk, of which place he was rector. The good man had never read a novel in his life, and of course had never heard of the famous Bronte books. I was reading Mrs. Gaskell's Life with absorbed interest, and one day my uncle said, * I have heard lately a name mentioned with which I was well famihar. What is it all about? ' He was told, when he added, * Patrick Bronte was once my greatest friend.' Next morning my uncle brought out a thick bundle of old letters and said, * These were written by Patrick Bronte. They re- late to his spiritual state. I have read them once more and now I destroy them.' '' It was in January 1809 that this Wellington epi- sode commenced, and at the end of the same year Mr. Bronte began his long association with York- shire as curate of Dewsbury. Mr. Bronte always 8 CHARLOTTE BRONTE seemed to have secured '* literary " vicars, and his new vicar, Mr. Buckmaster, had some titles to fame as a hymn writer and a contributor to the magazines of the day. He was, moreover, the suc- cessor at Dewsbury to the Rev. Matthew Powley, who married the only daughter of Mary Unwin — Cowper's " Mary " — and was a regular corre- spondent of the poet. At Dewsbury Mr. Bronte stayed two years, and we may well assume that his vicar's literary activi- ties kindled some desire for a similar reputation. He wrote verses — and published them. In 1811 there was issued at Halifax a volume entitled Cottage Poems} It contains " An Epistle to the Rev. J B while journeying for the recov- ^ It is an interesting fact that Mr. Bronte was not the first of his own family with an inclination for writing. Dr. Douglas Hyde, the well known Gaelic scholar, has in his possession a manuscript volume in the Irish language, written by one Patrick O'Prunty in 1763. Patrick O'Prunty was, I should imagine, an elder brother of Mr. Bronte's father. The little book was called The Adventures of the Son of the Ice Counsel, and there is a colophon of which Dr. Douglas Hyde sends me the original and a translation; he also sends me the first quatrain of Patrick O'Prunty's poem: — THE FATHER 9 ery of his health," and there is much more of no great distinction. Patrick Bronte did not publish Cottage Poems until he reached his next curacy at Hartshead-cum-Clifton. A slight disagreement, the remark of a churchwarden that Mr. Buckmas- ter should not " keep a dog and bark himself," in other words, that the Vicar should not preach and pay a curate for preaching, excited Mr. Bronte's Colophon to the Adventures of the Son of Ice Counsel, Guidhim beannocht gach leightheora a n-anoir na Trio- noite agas na h-6ighe Muine air an sgribhneoir. Padruig ua Pronntuidh mhic Neill, mhic Seathain, etc. April y^ 20, 1763. I pray the blessing of each reader in honour of the Trinity and of the Virgin Mary on the writer, that is Patrick O'Prunty, son of Niall, son of Seathan, etc. April ye 20, 1763. First Quatrain of Patrick 0*Prunty^s poem. Nochad millean failte fior Uaim do theachta an airdriogh Thainic chugainn anois go mbuaidh Na stiughraighthoir os cionn priomhshluagh. Ninety millions of true welcomes From me to the coming of the high King Who is come to us now with victory As a guide over the chief-hosts. lo CHARLOTTE BRONTE anger, for it must be admitted that the curate was quick-tempered. He promptly resigned. Mr. Buckmaster, however, assisted his irascible friend to his next appointment, one of greater security of tenure — the incumbency of Hartshead-cum-Clifton — and it was here that the young Irishman met the woman who was to become his wife — the mother of Charlotte Bronte. CHAPTER II THE MOTHER OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE Curate then of Hartshead, we find Patrick Bronte at the age of thirty-four, healed, we may believe, of the wound inflicted upon his heart by a certain Essex romance and with mind bent on marriage. Here there enters upon the scene a quiet and gentle little woman from Cornwall — Maria Branwell. Miss Branwell is one of a large family, fairly prosperous, who reside in Penzance. A family vault in St. Mary's churchyard in that town records that Thomas Branwell died in 1808, and that his wife followed him to the grave in the following year. They had one son and six* daugh- ters. Mr. Branwell is described as " assistant to the corporation," whatever that official's duties may have been. He left his daughters not entirely un- provided for — I should judge with some thirty pounds a year apiece. Maria Branwell came into Yorkshire a year or two after her mother's death to 12 CHARLOTTE BRONTE see some friends. She was in any case to make a prolonged stay with her aunt, Mrs. Fennell, her father's sister. Mr. Fennell was the Headmaster of Woodhouse Green Wesleyan Academy, where Maria Branwell's brother was a student. It was no doubt his friendship with Mr. William Morgan, the curate of the neighbouring church of Guiseley, that gave Mr. Bronte his introduction to the Fen- nells. Mr. Morgan was engaged to Maria Bran- well's cousin, Jane Fennell. Patrick Bronte speed- ily lost his heart. There were a few love-letters between the engagement in August 1812 and the marriage on December 29th of that year, when at Guiseley Church Maria Branwell became Mrs. Bronte. There was a touch of romance in the very wedding. A sister and a cousin of Mrs. Bronte were married on the same day, the sister Charlotte Branwell in far away Penzance to her cousin Jo- seph Branwell, and Jane Fennell to Mr. Morgan. Mr. Morgan performed the marriage ceremony for Mr. and Mrs. Bronte, and Mr. Bronte in re- turn officiated a few moments later to make his wife's cousin Mrs. Morgan. THE MOTHER 13 It was stated by a niece who died a year or two ago that all three marriages were " profoundly happy." ^ There is no room to doubt this, although much ill-natured myth has gathered round Mr. Bronte as a husband. But there is no disguising the pathos of his wife's destiny. For her there were eight years of married life in the cold, bleak surroundings of Hartshead and Thornton, the giv- ing birth to six successive children, and then, all too quickly, death in the gaunt, comfortless rectory at Haworth. It has been said that Mrs. Gaskell exaggerated the tragedy of Charlotte Bronte's life, but not the most cheery optimist can find much sunshine in the married life of her poor mother. Mr. Bronte may have been a good husband. On the whole, he was doubtless thoroughly kind and considerate. But the best of men are prone to blindness in the face of a gentle, lonely woman's needs, and one suspects that the money spent in publishing his own well- nigh worthless verses had better have been given ^ Letter to the author from the late Miss Branwell, of Penzance. 14 CHARLOTTE BRONTE to his wife. But we may be sure that such a thought never entered her head. The pathos of Mrs. Bronte's brief married life is heightened by the love-letters that the world has been privileged to read. Maria Branwell at Wood House Grove exchanged letters with Patrick Bronte at Harts- head. Patrick's letters have not been preserved. Maria's were read long years afterwards by her daughter Charlotte, who remarked concerning them : — " A few days since a little incident happened which curiously touched me. Papa put into my hands a little packet of letters and papers, telling me that they were mamma's, and that I might read them. I did read them in a frame of mind I cannot describe. The papers were yellow with time, all having been written before I was born; it was strange now to peruse, for the first time, the records of a mind whence my own sprang, and most strange, and at once sad and sweet, to find that mind of a truly fine, pure, and elevated order. They were written to papa before they were mar- ried. There is a rectitude, a refinement, a con- THE MOTHER 15 stancy, a modesty, a sense, a gentleness in them in- describable. I wish that she had lived and that I had known her." ^ The letters of Mrs. Bronte well deserve her daughter's eulogy. They are beautiful letters, these love-letters of ninety years since, with their hopes of the future, their devotion, their playful affection. " My dear saucy Pat " is the opening line of one letter, which indeed continues with the question, " What will you say when you get a real right down scolding? " If ever a man secured the love of a good woman, one feels that Mr. Bronte was thus fortunate. But, as I have said, the sequel is not rose-coloured. There came a constant succes- sion of little children, and then the mother's death a few months after the birth of the last child, Anne. Mr. Bronte was five years at Hartshead-cum- Clifton, and here two children were born to him, the first being named Maria and the second Eliza- beth. During this period Mr. Bronte became an industrious author. He published in Halifax, as has already been * Letter to Ellen Nussey. i6 CHARLOTTE BRONTE said, a little volume of verse entitled Cottage Poems in 1811, and in 18 13, about the time when his first child was born, yet another volume, called The Rural Minstrel. This did not conclude his literary activity during his first five years at Harts- head, for a tiny prose volume, called The Cottage in the Wood^ was also issued by him in Halifax before he went to Thornton. During his married life at Hartshead Mr. Bronte lived in a house at the top of Clough Lane, Hightown. Then a friend, one Mr. Atkinson, of- \ fered to exchange the living of Thornton for that of Hartshead, and the exchange was effected. Mr. Atkinson is of interest to us as the godfather of Charlotte Bronte. His wife was also her god- mother. She was a Miss Walter, of Lascelles Hall, near Huddersfield, and it was to be near this lady that the young curate exchanged with Mr. Bronte. Mr. Atkinson remained In possession of the perpetual curacy at Hartshead until 1866, and he lived there until 1870. Both he and his wife were very kind to Mr. Bronte's children, we are told. CHAPTER III THORNTON Thornton Is even to-day a small, as it is also a very ugly, village. It is some three miles from Bradford in Yorkshire. We may assume that Mr. Atkinson, in exchanging livings, sacrificed some- thing of material good in his desire to be near his future wife, with whom he acquired a competency. Mr. Bronte also may have been influenced less by monetary considerations than by the nearness of Mr. Morgan, who, it will be remembered, was married to his wife's cousin, and who about this time became Vicar of Christ Church, Bradford. The house to which the young mother removed in May 1 8 15, with her two little children — one a babe of three months old — still stands. It is a plain, unpicturesque structure, rendered more plain and unpicturesque by the fact that half of its front- age has been converted into a butcher's shop. 17 1 8 CHARLOTTE BRONTE Near by there stands a new church, in the regis- ters of which are recorded the baptisms of the fa- mous Bronte children. Opposite the then " parsonage," if so mean a house could ever have been dignified by such a name, may be seen the ruin of the Old Bell Chapel, where Mr. Bronte preached and where five of his children were baptized. A baptism of one of them indeed marks the early months of Mr. Bronte's sojourn in Thornton. Elizabeth, who had been born in Hartshead in the previous May, was christened here in August. Mr. Fennell of- ficiated, and a local magnate, Mr. Firth, and his daughter were godfather and godmother, while the second godmother was Miss Elizabeth Bran- well, who had come from Penzance on her first visit to her married sister, staying fully a year at Thornton. That Old Bell Chapel, built as a chapel-of-ease to Bradford Parish Church, as was also Haworth Church, six miles away, was to have still more notable christenings. For Charlotte and Emily Bronte were both born in this unpretentious cot- Photo J. J. Stead Charlotte Bronte's Birthplace Thornton, Yorkshire, where Mr. Bronte was curate from 1816 to 1820 THORNTON 19 tage In Thornton — Charlotte on April 21, 18 16, and Emily Jane on July 30, 18 18. The only boy, who was christened Patrick Branwell, was born here on June 26, 18 17. Finally, the sixth and last child put In an appearance. This was Anne, who was born January 17, 1820, very shortly before her parents removed to Haworth. Of the life of Mr. Bronte during those five years at Thornton little is recorded. We know in- deed that he still wrote verses and prose stories of a kind, and that he contributed a sermon on '' Con- version " to the Pastoral Visitor, He had his modest share of recognition from the critics then and later. His friend Mr. Morgan described The Cottage in the Wood In the Pastoral Visitor as '' a very amusing and Instructive tale," and so late as 1845, J'^st before his daughters had made him fa- mous, one Newsam, In his Poets of Yorkshire, de- voted no less than five lines of appreciation (with eighteen lines of quotation) to Mr. Bronte as a poet.^ Mr. Bronte's work was, however, medio- ^ "The Poets of Yorkshire, comprising sketches and the Lives and Specimens of the writing of those 'Children of Song' 20 CHARLOTTE BRONTE ere, and would long since have been forgotten were it not for his daughter's fame. It is more pleas- ant to meet him in Thornton as a social rather than as a literary luminary, and, although our knowledge of him is scanty in this respect, it is in- teresting as far as it goes. One Miss Elizabeth Firth, who was in 1824 to become the wife of the Rev. James Franks, Vicar of Huddersfield, was eighteen years of age when, in 18 15, the Rev. Pat- rick Bronte removed from Hartshead to Thornton. She was living with her father at Kipping House, Thornton. She had been, by the way, a pupil of Miss Richmal Mangnall, the author of the once famous MangnaWs Questions. That lady was for many years a schoolmistress in the neighbourhood of Wakefield. Miss Firth made speedy acquaint- ance with Mrs. Bronte, and, as we have seen, be- came one of the child Elizabeth's godmothers. Miss Firth kept a diary, a diary all too scanty. who have been natives of, or otherwise connected with, the county of York. Commenced by the late William Cartwright Newsam, completed and published for the benefit of his family by John Holland." Price ^s. 250 copies printed. London: Groombridge & Sons. Sheffield: Ridge & Jackson. 1845. THORNTON 21 It consisted the merest notes in a pocket-book. " We drank tea at Mr. Bronte's," is one day's Item, and " Mr. Bronte and Mrs. Morgan drank tea here," Is another; and so on through the ^ve years. Mr. Bronte Is seen as a most sociable in- dividual, and constant records of tea-drlnking are noted. On July 26, 18 16, we learn that " Miss Branwell returned to Penzance," so that we know from this and from no other source that she was In attendance on the young mother when Charlotte was born. From one entry we learn that Miss Firth had a mind of her own in literature. " Read Old Mortality, Didn't like it," she says In her diary. But she is kinder to some of Sir Walter Scott's later books. It Is to Miss Firth alone that we are indebted for the actual dates of birth of all the Bronte chil- dren. On January 17, 1820, we find the announce- ment of another accession to the Bronte family. This was the day that Anne was born. In that month also is the record, " Gave at Anne's chris- tening, one pound." Altogether, one sighs over the fact that Mistress Elizabeth Firth was not a 22 CHARLOTTE BRONTE more voluble person. One real glimpse of Mrs. Bronte as she impressed a sister woman, one vivid picture of these years relative to the birth of Char- lotte or Emily, one saying of the poor mother piti- lessly hurrying to her doom, would have been pa- thetically interesting. Two months after Anne's birth we find the entry, " Mr. and Mrs. Bronte came to dinner," and so it seems that both husband and wife had their share of social life In those days, to say nothing of the companionship of the sister from Penzance. Let me explain here that Mr. Bronte as Incum- bent of Thornton was called " minister." Thomas Atkinson, who preceded Mr. Bronte, was " min- ister," and so also was William Bishop, who suc- ceeded him in 1820. Richard Henry Heap, who came to Thornton in 1855, was the first " vicar," the title that now obtains. It may be added that Thornton has a history quite apart from the Brontes. With all Its exter- nal sordidness, it has had a wide-reaching spiritual THORNTON 23 activity. Here, a century before Mr. Bronte's ar- rival had flourished eminent divines of Noncon- formity, whose ashes rest amid the ruins of the Old Bell Chapel. There, most notable of all, were Joseph Lister and his son Accepted, whose name savours so well of the older puritanism. Joseph Lister, indeed, in his Autobiography, a book that has had much fame in its day, explains the curious name of young *' Accepted." His wife was in great spiritual depression when the child was born. This depression, we are told, was lifted almost Immediately, and then, as Lister says In the quaint language of his age: — "... the Lord was pleased to shine in upon her soul again, to her great satisfaction, and she was filled with peace and joy through believing; in consideration of which we resolved to give him this name; and God hath made him acceptable to many souls, though it pleased the Lord to afflict him with a great weakness in his joints ..." Mr. Bronte came, then, into an evangelical tra- dition, and his wife's uncle, Mr. Fennell, who about this time abandoned Wesleyanism and be- 24 CHARLOTTE BRONTE came a clergyman of the Church of England, helped to keep him in toleration for all aspects of the evangelical creed. Apparently he never quar- relled with Nonconformity, although at a much later date some of his curates at Haworth did. Vigorous hatred of the tenets of the Church of Rome he had imbibed from his North of Ireland environment, and that sentiment was part of the inheritance of his brilliant children, notably of his daughter Charlotte. CHAPTER IV CHILDHOOD AT HAWORTH Charlotte Bronte was a little girl of six years of age when her father exchanged Thornton for Haworth. We have no glimpse of her at Thornton; we have little enough glimpse of the child and her brother and sisters in the first years at Haworth. When Mrs. Gaskell wrote, there were people who well remembered the departure of Mr. Bronte and his family — the carts laden with the minister's furniture, the delicate mother and her six little children, the eldest, Maria, only seven years of age. The change, if change were helpful, was all to that mother's advantage. The house was much better situated, at a healthier alti- tude, and pleasantly jutting on the glorious moors. Given genuine health, Mrs. Bronte could have been happy enough at Haworth — happier than at Thornton. But physical health she had not, nor 25 a6 CHARLOTTE BRONTE did her children inherit it from her, and therein lay more than half the tragedy of their lives, and the all too early death of every one of them. Mrs. Bronte's stay in that moorland home was not a long one. She and her family arrived at the vicarage somewhere in April 1820. Mr. Bronte, it is true, took the Haworth services from Feb- ruary, but it is clear that he left his family behind him then as the guests of the Firths, at Kipping House. As a stalwart walker, the journey to and fro could never have troubled him. His visits to Thornton continue to be recorded in Miss Firth's diary many times during this year 1820. In Sep- tember of that year, after less than six months of life in Haworth, Mrs. Bronte died. If we are to beheve gossip, the bereaved husband tried in two quarters to find a stepmother for his little children. He first applied to Mary Burder, of Wethers- field, as we have seen, and then to Elizabeth Firth, of Thornton. Twice refused, he turned to his wife's sister, Elizabeth Branwell, of Penzance, and asked her to come and be housekeeper and in a manner a mother to his little ones. The duties CHILDHOOD AT HAWORTH 27 were accepted and faithfully performed for twen- ty-two years. Returning for a moment to Mrs. Bronte, we find her life story to be a brief and unquestionably a pathetic one. She is preserved for us in her daugh- ter's biography by a number of love-letters and by a brief religious essay of no particular individual- ity.^ Mr. Bronte was deeply attached to his wife, and there is no reason to accept for a moment the various foolish stories of his treatment of her in those later days of her life. The value of the scandalous Haworth stories that have stuck to Mr. Bronte, although Mrs. Gaskell was compelled to withdraw them from later editions of her Life, may be gauged from the fact that Mr. Bronte had only, as we have seen, six months of married life at Ha- worth, while at Thornton he was in every way in- clined to sociability. Some measure of moroseness may, however, have come over Mr. Bronte in the period following his bereavement. Taking him- ^ The love-letters are in the possession of Mr. A. B. Nicholls. The manuscript entitled "The Advantages of Poverty in Re- ligious Concerns" is in my library. 28 CHARLOTTE BRONTE self and his work seriously, he did not care to let that work be interrupted too much by his children. They therefore pursued their studies and partook of their meals very much under their aunt's guid- ance, their father frequently having his meals alone. They met in his study — the parlour — on the right-hand side of the doorway as you enter the house, for tea, but they saw little of him dur- ing the rest of the day. We may imagine, then, these six children work- ing the samplers that remain to us, at their aunt's knee, reading such little books as came into their hands — books, we may be sure, too " old " for the little people. They had the usual experiences of orphan children, much grim kindness from aunt and servants. The servants of that time, Sarah and Nancy Garrs, were asked for their impres- sions in later life, and then at least they were enthu- siastic. Never was so kind a master as Mr. Bronte, never so clever a little child as Charlotte. We may accept such testimony with a grain of salt, but the main fact remains that it was a reasonably happy home until the educational problem asserted CHILDHOOD AT HAWORTH 29 Itself. Education has always special credentials for the self-made man, and Mr. Bronte not un- naturally availed himself of the Clergy Daughters' School at Casterton, where a good subsidized education was provided at fourteen pounds a year. Maria, the eldest girl, entered the school on July I, 1824, and Elizabeth, aged nine, on the same day. Charlotte entered on August 10, 1824, and Emily November 25 of that year, the former being eight years old and the latter less than six. The school brought no happiness to the four delicate, anaemic children. No boarding school of that epoch would have done so. Such places are only possible for the physi- cally robust. But there is not much need to asso- ciate too closely the sad fate of Maria and Eliza- beth Bronte — both of whom left the school in 1825 to die — with the actual defects of the cheap boarding school system of the period. Maria left in February, and died in May; Elizabeth left in May, and died on June 15. On June i Charlotte and Emily returned to Haworth. Charlotte Bronte long years afterwards was to gibbet for all 30 CHARLOTTE BRONTE time the worst aspects of our inferior girls' schools in *' Lowood," of Jane Eyre^ as Dickens, a little later, was to gibbet the inferior boys' schools in " Dotheboys Hall '' of Nicholas Nicklehy, After Miss Bronte's death her biographer, Mrs. Gaskell, got into trouble for her identification of the Lo- wood of Jane Eyre with the Casterton presided over by the Rev. Carus Wilson. A very consider- able mass of opinion was brought together from old pupils to prove that, even when the little Brontes were there, Casterton was a most exem- plary institution. The point is scarcely worth dis- puting over now. Much more depends upon health in early childhood than at any other time. Food that to one child is a torture to eat, to another pro- vides a real gratification of appetite; an environ- ment that to one child is hell, to another is para- dise. The little Bronte girls had fragile constitu- tions and therein, it cannot be too often repeated, lay the whole tragedy of their lives. There was little of tragedy, but much of happi- ness, however, in the years immediately following their leaving Casterton and the death of the two I i CHILDHOOD AT HAWORTH 31 elder sisters. Miss Branwell was doubtless a very prim personage, although kindly withal. There is no reason to suppose but that she did her best for the four orphaned children, of whom Char- lotte, the eldest, was nine years of age when she left Cowan Bridge, and fourteen when she entered Roe Head School. Those five years were, as I have said, fairly happy. There is a copy of The Imitation of Christ extant, given to Charlotte in 1826, and there are other books that we know the children read during this period, including Scott's Tales of a Grandfather. They also commenced to write " original compositions," as so many chil- dren of precocious tendencies do — to the joy of fond and ambitious parents. But I am not sure that children often cultivate the minute handwrit- ing that was affected by the Bronte prodigies. There are perhaps a hundred little manuscript books in existence, principally the work of Char- lotte and Branwell, some few, however, by Emily and Anne. They were compiled in a micro- scopic handwriting probably from reasons of econ- omy. Pence, we may be sure, were scarce with the 32 CHARLOTTE BRONTE little ones. The booklets were stitched and cov- ered, sugar-paper being in most cases used for the wrappers. It is not possible to trace any particular talent in these little books, many of which bear the date 1829. Assuredly hundreds of children who have never come to fame have written quite as well. It was noteworthy, however, that the little Brontes had their heroes, who were also the heroes of the hour. They took the victorious Duke of Welling- ton to their hearts, and also the duke's sons, the Marquis of Douro and Lord Charles Wellesley, who figure largely in their tiny pages. It was a life of dreams, of a kind that children delight in, that indeed makes the life of childhood ever alter- nately beautiful and terrible. On the wild moors behind the house there must have been in any case much supreme happiness for the little Brontes in those early years that preceded the real schooldays now opening to them. CHAPTER V SCHOOLDAYS. 1831— 1835. In January 1831, Charlotte Bronte became a pupil at Roe Head, Dewsbury. The headmistress was a Miss Margaret Wooler, who survived her famous pupil by many long years, dying In 1885. There were never more than ten pupils during the year and a half that Charlotte was at school, but among them were two to whom we owe all of most interest concerning Miss Bronte In the years before fame came to her. These fellow pupils were Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, each of them fourteen years of age, that Is to say, a year younger than their friend. Of both Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey Miss Bronte has left vivid descriptions, full of Insight and characterization that time was to verify. Miss Taylor was business-like, matter-of- fact, '* Intellectual " ; Miss Nussey was simply pretty and lovable, but hero-worshipping to an al- 33 34 CHARLOTTE BRONTE most morbid degree. Both girls had to undergo great vicissitudes of fortune, their families falling on evil days in later years, but Miss Taylor was to have the wider experience, and the larger out- look upon life. She went to New Zealand to '' set up shop," as she expressed it, only returning to England when she had secured a competency.^ Miss Nussey lived to a good old age in the district where her childhood had been passed. From 1857, when she gave Mrs. Gaskell material assist- ance in her Life^ until her death in 1897, she was always accessible to the admirers of Charlotte Bronte, and she carefully preserved the volumi- nous correspondence of her friend, most of which has been published.^ It is to Ellen Nussey that we owe all the best glimpses of Charlotte Bronte as ^ Miss Mary Taylor wrote two books, Miss Miles, a Tale of Yorkshire Life, and The First Duty of Woman. The last thirty years of her life were spent at Gomersal, near her early home. Here she died in 1893. Miss Taylor refused to say anything about Charlotte Bronte during the twenty later years of her life and she destroyed all her friend's letters. 2 In Mrs. Gaskell's Life, Sir Wemyss Reid*s Monograph, and in Charlotte Bronte and her Circle. There were over five hundred letters in all. SCHOOLDAYS 35 she grows to womanhood; it is to Mary Taylor, however, that we owe the first impression of her in these years at Roe Head: — '' I first saw her coming out of a covered cart, in very old-fashioned clothes, and looking very cold and miserable. She was coming to school at Miss Wooler's. When she appeared in the schoolroom her dress was changed, but just as old. She looked a little old woman, so shortsighted that she always appeared to be seeking something, and moving her head from side to side to catch a sight of it. She was very shy and nervous, and spoke with a strong Irish accent. When a book was given to her she dropped her head over it till her nose nearly touched it, and when she was told to hold her head up, up went the book after it, still close to her nose, so that it was not possible to help laughing." ^ Mary Taylor goes on to describe the growth of her friendship with Miss Bronte, the keen political arguments that took place — for they were at school together in the year of the great Reform Bill. ^ From a letter written by Mary Taylor from New Zealand to Mrs. Gaskell. S6 CHARLOTTE BRONTE This was really a very happy time in Charlotte Bronte's life. She was devoted to her two friends, kindly disposed to the rest of her schoolfellows, and attached to Miss Wooler. The school was small enough for her nervous, shy temperament not to give her much concern, her holidays were passed at her friends' homes In the neighbourhood, her childhood's griefs, the loss of her elder sisters, were too remote, and there was at this time no premonition of trouble to come. She loved paint- ing and drawing, and there are very many speci- mens of her work extant that are of this period. They are not, however, of great merit. It was as an artist In words that Charlotte Bronte was to excel. To Roe Head also she owed a fair knowl- edge of French, as a translation by her of the first book of Voltaire's Henriade ^ indicates. With French as a spoken language she was to become acquainted by-and-by, as we shall see. Suffice to say that she went back to Haworth and to her family circle with a fairly presentable equipment for a girl of sixteen who had to " coach " her ^ In the possession of the present writer. SCHOOLDAYS 37 younger sisters and assist In many ways to make the vicar's slender stipend go as far as possible. In the middle of 1832, then, Charlotte Bronte returned to Haworth, and her life there Is best presented In an extract from a letter to Ellen Nussey : — " You ask me to give you a description of the manner In which I have passed every day since I left school. This Is soon done, as an account of one day Is an account of all. In the mornings from nine o'clock to half-past twelve I Instruct my sisters and draw, then we walk till dinner; after dinner I sew tin tea-time, and after tea I either read, write, do a little fancy-work, or draw, as I please. Thus In one delightful, though monotonous course, my life Is passed. I have only been out to tea twice since I came home. We are expecting company this afternoon, and on Tuesday next we shall have all the female teachers of the Sunday school to tea." This letter was written In 1832, and so three years were allowed to pass, their only tangible rec- ords for us to-day being certain drawings that bear 38 CHARLOTTE BRONTE the dates of this period, and certain little manu- scripts not greatly superior to those of the earlier childhood years, and giving no promise whatever of the literary success that was ultimately to come. The manuscripts of these later years were mainly written in verse form. In 1835 Mr. Bronte and his family apparently held a committee of ways and means. The children were growing up, and a grown-up family of three girls and one boy could not be expected permanent- ly to occupy the not very commodious parsonage. Branwell, moreover, was to be an artist, which in- volved expense. He was to go to London to study at the Royal Academy Schools, and his sisters real- ized that they also should think of some occupa- tion, and thus relieve the family exchequer. Char- lotte's turn came first. In July 1835 she returned to Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head as a govern- ess, the warm friendship that she had ever felt for her old schoolmistress justifying the supposition that here would be the career with the least possible chance of failure. CHAPTER VI GOVERNESS LIFE Charlotte returned to Roe Head as a govern- ess in July 1835, and she was accompanied by her sister Emily, who entered the school as a pupil. She writes as follows concerning her plans, to her friend Miss Nussey : — " I had hoped to have had the extreme pleasure of seeing you at Haworth this summer, but human affairs are mutable and human resolutions must bend to the course of events. We are all about to divide, break up, separate. Emily is going to school, Branwell is going to London, and I am go- ing to be a governess. This last determination I formed myself, knowing I should have to take the step sometime, and ' better sune as syne ' to use the Scotch proverb ; and knowing well that papa would have enough to do with his limited Income should Branwell be placed at the Royal Academy and Emily at Roe Head. Where am I going to reside? 39 40 CHARLOTTE BRONTE you will ask. Within four miles of yourself, dear- est, at a place neither of us are unacquainted with, being no other than the identical Roe Head men- tioned above. Yes, I am going to teach in the very school where I was myself taught. Miss Wooler made me the offer, and I preferred it to one or two proposals of private governess-ship, which I had before received. I am sad, very sad, at the thought of leaving home, but duty, necessity, these are stern mistresses who will not be disobeyed. Did I not once say, Ellen, you ought to be thankful for your independence? I felt what I said at the time, and I repeat it now with double earnestness; if anything would cheer me, it is the idea of being so near you. Surely you and Polly will come and see me; it would be wrong in me to doubt it ; you were never unkind yet. Emily and I leave home on the 29th of this month; the idea of being together consoles us both somewhat, and in truth, since I must enter a situation, ' my lines have fallen in pleasant places.' I both love and respect Miss Wooler. What did you mean, Ellen, by saying that you knew the reason why I wished to have a letter from •3 ^ GOVERNESS LIFE 41 your sister Mercy? The sentence hurt me, though I did not quite understand It. My only rea- son was a desire to correspond with a person I have a regard for. Give my love both to her and to S., and Miss Nussey." Charlotte Bronte's governess period Is however the least pleasant to survey of any aspect of her life. She was 111 adapted for the position of look- ing after a miscellaneous crowd of girls. She hated the work, and she had a bitter tongue when facing all the petty discomforts of such a position. Still less was she suited for her after-posltlon of a nur- sery governess. Great animal spirits. Immense self-confidence, all the qualities that made this ever arduous career possible although rarely pleasant, were utterly lacking to this shy retiring woman. Charlotte Bronte was little more than nineteen years of age when she went to Roe Head as gov- erness. The year following Miss Wooler removed her school to Dewsbury. This was just before the Christmas of 1836. Charlotte was but a year at this latter place when she returned home, broken In health and spirits. 42 CHARLOTTE BRONTE Emily, now aged seventeen, went with her sister as we have stated. After three months, however, she utterly broke down with this constant contact with strangers, and went back to Haworth, Anne taking her place in the school as a pupil. There is nothing to add to what has already been printed again and again concerning this period. What we know of it we owe to her two friends, Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. With both she corresponded regularly, and her Sundays were fre- quently spent at the house of one or the other. Ellen Nussey had her home at this time and un- til 1837 at The Rydings, near Birstall, a beautiful house in its own grounds which young Branwell Bronte described when he visited it as " paradise." It doubtless meant something in her development that at an impressionable age Charlotte should have been introduced occasionally to a prosper- ous, and even luxurious environment. She loved Ellen Nussey, moreover, although she had no common ground of intellectual interest. Her let- ters to her are frequent, and they are always affec- tionate. But she has herself well described the GOVERNESS LIFE 43 limitations of the friendship in a letter to a later friend : — " True friendship is no gourd, springing up in a night and withering In a day. When I first saw Ellen I did not care for her; we were schoolfel- lows. In course of time we learnt each other's faults and good points. We were contrasts — still, we suited. Affection was first a germ, then a sap- ling, then a strong tree — now, no new friend, how- ever lofty or profound in intellect, not even Miss Martlneau herself — could be to me what Ellen Is; yet she is no more than a conscientious, observant, calm, well-bred Yorkshire girl. She Is without ro- mance. 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." ^ Of more importance however In Miss Bronte's Intellectual growth was her friendship with Mary Taylor, the '' dear Polly " and " dear Pag " of many a letter unhappily destroyed. One would ^ Letter to W. S. Williams in Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 205. 44 CHARLOTTE BRONTE gladly have possessed a clearer picture than exists of that other home into which Charlotte was wel- comed in these dreary, governess days. The Tay- lors are, however, well depicted in the Yorkes, of Shirley, It was a pleasant house, this at Gomersal, and It may still be seen from the road from which It Is separated by a high brick wall. Here Mr. Taylor's family dwelt for many years, and when the young governess entered the circle we may be sure that argument waxed fast and furious. For Charlotte Bronte was " Church " to the backbone, and " State " as understood by the followers of Wellington equally to the backbone, while the Tay- lor family were Dissenters and Democrats. From those days onward it is clear that a larger religious toleration, a larger human sympathy than she had hitherto known gathered In Charlotte Bronte's mind, and Mary Taylor must have been mainly In- strumental In giving her this. " Mary alone," she says in one of her letters, " has more energy and power In her nature than any ten men you can pick out In the united parishes of Birstall and Ha- worth." Or we may take this other picture where GOVERNESS LIFE 45 she is presented as Rose Yorke In Shirley: — '' Rose is a still, and sometimes a stubborn girl now; her mother wants to make of her such a woman as she is herself — a woman of dark and dreary duties ; and Rose has a mind full-set, thick- sown, with the germs of ideas her mother never knew. It is agony to her often to have these ideas trampled on and repressed. She has never re- belled yet; but if hard driven, she will rebel one day, and then it will be once for all." The Christmas holidays of 1836 were spent at home, at Haworth, and even then some kind of lit- erary aspirations must have begun with the young people, for we find Charlotte corresponding with Southey, then Poet Laureate. We find Branwell Bronte also writing letters to the Editor of Black- wood's Magazine begging for the insertion of his contributions, and sending to Wordsworth drafts of his projected books. When the Christmas holi- days were over Charlotte returned to the Inevitable '' grind," as she called It, not this time to Roe Head but to the new school-house at Dewsbury Moor. In March of 1837 she obtained a long- 46 CHARLOTTE BRONTE delayed answer from Southey — a kind and consid- erate letter from a busy man to a stranger — advis- ing that she should not think about literature. A fragment of her reply is worth printing : — *' My father is a clergyman of limited though competent income, and I am the eldest of his chil- dren. He expended quite as much in my education as he could afford in justice to the rest. I thought it therefore my duty, when I left school, to become a governess. In that capacity I find enough to oc- cupy my thoughts all day long, and my head and hands too, without having a moment's time for one dream of the imagination. In the evenings, I con- fess, I do think, but I never trouble any one else with my thoughts. I carefully avoid any appear- ance of preoccupation and eccentricity, which might lead those I live amongst to suspect the na- ture of my pursuits. Following my father's ad- vice — who from my childhood has counselled me, just in the wise and friendly tone of your letter — I have endeavoured not only attentively to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfil, but to feel deeply interested in them. I don't always sue- GOVERNESS LIFE 47 ceed, for sometimes when I'm teaching or sewing I would rather be reading or writing; but I try to deny myself; and my father's approbation amply rewarded me for the privation. Once more allow me to thank you with sincere gratitude. 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." ^ At the end of 1837, as the Christmas holidays were coming on, Charlotte had a " breeze " with Miss Wooler concerning her sister Anne, who was still a pupil at the school. Robust in health her- self, Miss Wooler perhaps took little account of the ailments of others. Anne had what to the schoolmistress was merely a slight cold ; to her de- voted sister it was much more, and Charlotte was right; it was doubtless the beginning of that con- sumption which was all too soon to end her sister's life. The alienation was but temporary, and Miss Wooler and her pupil parted the best of friends. Charlotte and Anne went home, and the latter did ^ See Southey's Life, vol. vi. pp. 329-30, for two letters from Southey to Charlotte Bronte. 48 CHARLOTTE BRONTE not again return to Dewsbury. The three sisters were together for a time. Charlotte returned alone to Dewsbury after the Christmas holidays, but at the beginning of June, 1838, she went back to Haworth, " a shattered wreck,'' as she described herself in a letter to one of her friends. It was but a few months after this, while still at home at Haworth, she received her first offer of marriage — from a clergyman, Henry Nussey, the brother of her friend Ellen. He was at this time Curate of Donnlngton in Sussex; he afterwards became Rector of Hathersage in Derbyshire, and here Charlotte Bronte spent a memorable three weeks' holiday with Ellen Nussey some time later, with the result that she was able to introduce an element of Derbyshire scenery into her books.^ Charlotte Bronte went to stay at Hathersage with her friend Ellen while the vicar was on his honey- moon, for it did not take him long to recover from the blow of Miss Bronte's rejection of his suit. He had indeed told her frankly enough that he ^ In Hathersage Church is an altar tomb to Robert Eyre, who fought at Agincourt, and to his wife, Joan Eyre. Hather- sage is of course the village of Morton of Jane Eyre. GOVERNESS LIFE 49 wanted some one to look after his housekeeping, and Charlotte had sufficient romance in her com- position to feel that this was not quite an adequate courtship. That she had her own strong views on the subject is shown by a letter which I print here, written soon afterwards to a friend whose love- affair also came to nothing. It is dated November 20, 1840. " That last letter of thine treated of matters so high and important I cannot delay answering It for a day. Now, Ellen, I am about to write thee a discourse and a piece of advice which thou must take as If It came from thy grandmother, but In the first place, before I begin with thee, I have a word to whisper In the ear of Mr. Lincoln, and I wish it could reach him. " In the name of St. Chrysostom, St. Simeon and St. Jude, why does not that amiable young gentle- man come fon\'^ard like a man and say all he has to say to yourself personally, instead of trifling with kinsmen and kinswomen? Mr. Lincoln, I say, walk or ride over to Brookny some fine morning, where you will find Miss Ellen sitting in the draw- JO CHARLOTTE BRONTE ing room making a little white frock for the Jew's basket, and say, ' Miss Ellen, I want to speak to you.' Miss Ellen will of course civilly answer, ' I'm at your service, Mr. Lincoln,' and then when the room is cleared of all but yourself and herself, just take a chair near her, insist upon her laying down that silly Jew basket work, and listening to yoUf then begin in a clear, distinct, deferential but determined voice — ' Miss Ellen, I have a question to put to you, a very important question — will you take me as 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 bet- ter you would see that this is an offer not to be de- spised — a kind attached heart, and a moderate competency.' Do this, Mr. Lincoln, and you may succeed; go on writing sentimental and love-sick letters to Henry, and I would not give sixpence for your suit. " So much for Mr. Lincoln. Now, Ellen, your turn comes to swallow the black bolus — called a friendly advice. Here I am under difficulties, be- GOVERNESS LIFE 51 cause I don't know Mr. Lincoln; if I did I would give you my opinion roundly in two words. Is the man a fool? Is he a knave or humbug, a hypo- crite, a ninny, a noodle? If he is any or all of these things of course there is no sense in trifling with him — cut him short at once, blast his hopes with lightning rapidity and keenness. *' Is he something better than this? Has he at least common sense, a good disposition, a manage- able temper? Then, Ellen, consider the matter. You feel a disgust towards him now, an utter re- pugnance, very likely, but be so good as to remem- ber you don't know him, you have only had three or four days' acquaintance with him; longer and closer intimacy might reconcile you to a wonderful extent. And now I'll tell you a word of truth at which you may be offended or not as you like. From what I know of your character, and I think I know it pretty well, I should say you will never love before 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 52 CHARLOTTE BRONTE make a most affectionate and happy wife, even if the individual should not prove all you could wish, you will be indulgent towards his little foibles and will not feel much annoyance at them. This will especially be the case If he should have sense suffi- cient to allow you to guide him In important mat- ters. Such being the case, Ellen, I hope you will not have the romantic folly to wait for the waken- ing of what the French call ' Une Grande Passion J My good girl, ' Une grande passion ' is * une grande F jlie.' I have told you so before, and I tell It you again. Moderation in all things is wis- dom. V hen you are as old as I am (I am sixty at least, be'ng your grandmother) you will find that the maiority of those worldly precepts, whose seeming coldness shocks and repels us in youth, are founded Jn wisdom. Did you not once say to me in all chi] alike simplicity, ' I thought, Charlotte, no young ladles should fall In love till the offer was actually made? ' I forget what answer I made at the t» le, but I now reply after due consideration, * Rigiit as a glove, the maxim is just, and I hope you will always attend to It.' I will even extend GOVERNESS LIFE S3 and confirm it — 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 very great precaution, very coolly, very moderately, very rationally. If she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a cold look from her husband cuts her to the heart, she is a fool — if she ever loves so much thfet her hus- band's will is her law, and that she has -got into a habit of watching his look in order that she may anticipate his wishes, she will soon be a neglected fool. Did I not once tell you of an inst^,nce of a relative of mine who cared for a young Indy until he began to suspect that she cared more for him and then instantly conceived a sort of contempt for her? You know to whom I allude — never as you value your ears mention the circumstance^— but I have two studies, you are my study for the^success, the credit, and the respectability of a quiet tranquil character. Mary is my study — for the con^fempt, the remorse, the misconstruction which follcV the development of feelings in themselves noble, warm. 54 CHARLOTTE BRONTE generous, devoted and profound, but which being too freely revealed, too frankly bestowed, are not estimated at their real value. God bless her, I never hope to see in this world a character more truly noble — she would die willingly for one she loved, her intellect and her attainments are of the highest standard. Yet I doubt whether Mary will ever marry. " I think I may as well conclude the letter, for after all I can give you no advice worth receiving, all I have to say may be comprised in a very brief sentence. On one hand don't accept if you are certain you cannot tolerate the man — on the other hand don't refuse because you cannot adore him. As to little Walter M , I think he will not die of love of anybody — ^you might safely coquette with him a trifle if you were so disposed without fear of having a broken heart on your conscience. His reverence expresses himself very strongly on the subject of young ladies saying * No ' when they mean ' Yes.' He assures me he means nothing per- ' sonal. I hope not. I tried to find something ad- mirable in him and failed. GOVERNESS LIFE 55 " Assuredly I quite agree with him in his disap- probation of such a senseless course. It is folly indeed for the tongue to stammer a negative when the heart is proclaiming an affirmative. Or rather it is an act of heroic self-denial of which I for one confess myself wholly incapable. / would not tell such a lie to gain a thousand pounds. Write to me again soon and let me know how it all goes on." ^ Instead of plunging into matrimony, Charlotte Bronte twice entered upon the duties of a govern- ess in a private family. Her first " situation," as she calls it, was with a Mrs. Sidgwick, and we find her in June 1839 writing to her sister Emily from the Sidgwick family mansion at Stonegappe in Yorkshire, explaining that her life there was thor- oughly hateful to her. Mr. A. C. Benson, the well-known critic and a cousin of the Sidgwicks, has epitomised the situation when he says that she clearly had no gifts for the management of children; and also that she was In a very mor- ^ See Appendix for other letters. 56 CHARLOTTE BRONTE bid condition the whole time she was at Stone- gappe.i She seems to have been happier when, after a few months at home, she took up a second situa- tion as governess In the family of Mr. and Mrs. White at Upperwood House, Rawdon, Yorkshire, where she had only two pupils, a girl of eight and a boy of six; and where certainly the father of the family did his best now and hereafter to prove him- self a friend to Miss Bronte. It was he doubtless who assisted with his advice in the scheme for go- ing abroad, the enterprise which was the turning- point in Charlotte Bronte's career, and which un- doubtedly made her the famous author she event- ually became. ^ Life of Edward White Benson, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, by A. C. Benson. Mr. Benson asserts that one of the children told him that if Miss Bronte was desired to accom- pany them to church — "Oh, Miss Bronte, do run up and put on your things, we want to start " — she was plunged in dudgeon because she was being treated as a hireling. If, in consequence, she was not invited to accompany them, she was infinitely de- pressed because she was treated as an outcast and a friendless dependent. CHAPTER VII THE PENSION HEGER, BRUSSELS It is In my judgment exceedingly probable that had not circumstances led Charlotte Bronte to spend some time in Brussels, the world would never have heard of her and of her sisters. Charlotte was nearly twenty-six years of age when she went on the Continent, and she had accomplished noth- ing noteworthy. She had indeed written copiously In prose and verse, but her work will not bear any critical examination. Let It be remembered that she was of an age at which Fanny Burney had al- ready won renown with Evelina. At twenty-two Jane Austen had written Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility, two supremely great novels. Before John Keats had reached these years he had written his many immortal poems, and had gone to his grave. One has only to compare with the achievement of many of her peers in literature what SI 58 CHARLOTTE BRONTE Miss Bronte had accomplished up to this time, in spite of much strenuous literary ambition. Some of her earlier work has been printed, not on account of its merits, but through the rashness of hero-wor- ship, and much of it, still in manuscript, may be examined by the curious.^ Not the most lenient of critics can here discover the least suggestion of the genius that was to find its earliest expression in The Professor, the novel in which our author first attempted to woo the publishers and in which she also first described the entirely new world wherein her soul had been unbound. The sojourn in Brus- sels, I suggest again, made Miss Bronte an author. It had long been the desire of the three girls to set up school on their own account in the Haworth Parsonage. Each in turn had found her work as governess a position of absolute tragedy. Anne had held two such situations, Emily one, and Charlotte, as we have seen, also two. To Emily ^ There are MSS. in the British Museum and in the Bronte Museum, Haworth. See also The Adventures of Ernest Alem- bert, a fairy tale by Charlotte Bronte, edited by Thomas J. Wise, 1896; and Poems by Charlotte^ Emily and Anne Bronte^ now for the first time printed y Dodd, Mead & Co., 1902. THE PENSION HEGER, BRUSSELS 59 the thing must have been an unmitigated tragedy, and to all of them it was clearly unendurable. It was during this time that the school project was first mooted, and Charlotte wrote to her friend Ellen Nussey — " You will not mention our school scheme at present. A project not actually commenced is al- ways uncertain. ... I have one aching feeling at my heart ( I must allude to it, though I had re- solved not to) . 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 pa- tient, persecuted stranger. I know what concealed susceptibility is in her nature when her feelings are wounded. I wish I could be with her, to adminis- ter a little balm. She is more lonely, less gifted with the power of making friends, even than I am." There would be more freedom in a home school, but then every one, with candid friendship, called attention to the fact that without " languages " an independent position as school-mistress was out of 6o CHARLOTTE BRONTE the question. Some of their old school friends had been to Brussels. Two of them, Mary and Mar- tha Taylor, were there at the time, but meanwhile there were some who strongly advised an " Institu- tion " at Lille. Finally, however, Brussels was de- cided on. A little earlier, writing from her gover- ness post at Mrs. White's, Charlotte had made an urgent appeal to the aunt to advance them some money. Miss Branwell had already promised her nieces the loan of £ioo from her savings for the school project, in order that furniture might be bought, circulars printed, and so on. Why not, Charlotte asks her aunt, advance the money to help us in Brussels? " In half a year," she says, " I could acquire a thorough familiarity with French. I could improve greatly in Italian, and even get a dash of German." The end of the letter is worth quoting in full — " I feel an absolute conviction that, if this ad- vantage were allowed us, it would be the making of us for life. Papa will perhaps think it a wild and ambitious scheme; but who ever rose in the world without ambition ? When he left Ireland to THE PENSION H^GER, BRUSSELS 6i go to Cambridge University, he was as ambitious as I am now. I want us all to go on. I know we have talents and I want them to be turned to ac- count. 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." Finally Miss Branwell acceded to her niece's appeal; the Maison d'Education of Madame Heger in the Rue d'Isabelle, Brussels, was decided on, and Charlotte and Emily went there in Feb- ruary, 1842, staying for two days in London on the way. Mr. Bronte accompanied his children on this expedition, giving himself his first and only visit to the Continent, while It gave his daughters their first view of London. Mr. Bronte stayed but one night in Brussels. The next morning he re- turned to England and to Haworth, and his daugh- ters devoted themselves strenuously to their work. They found themselves in a school once again, but now as pupils, not as teachers; and in a way they were fairly happy during their first six months in Brussels. There were forty day pupils, and twelve boarders. All the boarders slept In one long 62 CHARLOTTE BRONTE room, which, with its rows of little beds, and its passage between, after the fashion of the wards of a hospital may still be seen; and indeed the place had its sprinkling of English pupils until quite re- cent years. There are several Englishwomen still living who were pupils of Madame Heger in the generations that followed the Brontes. The pres- ent writer has spent more than one pleasant hour in a drawing-room in Bayswater where he has heard three amiable and cultivated gentlewomen recall with full hearts their old memories of the Pensionnat Heger. They were the daughters of a Dr. Wheelwright residing in Brussels for his health. One of them, Laetitia, became very inti- mate with Charlotte, another and younger sister Sarah Anne, was able to remember certain music lessons when Emily was her instructor, and proved, as the child thought, not too kindly a teacher to the little girl who indeed as an adult has clearly none of the admiration for Emily that she gave to Charlotte. There were two other English girls in Brussels at the time who have their place in this story: THE PENSION H^GER, BRUSSELS 61, Mary and Martha Taylor. The old schoolfellows of Dewsbury were not at the same school as Char- lotte, but at a more expensive establishment, the Chateau de Koekelberg. Here Martha fell 111 ^nd^ died, and but a few weeks later Charlotte and -iS««lvere hastily summoned home by the Illness of the' aunt to whose generosity they owed their few months In Brussels. Miss Branwell died on October 29, 1842. Her two nieces did not reach Haworth until the begin- ning of November. They found themselves mon- etarily the richer by their aunt's death. The three girls inherited some five hundred pounds apiece of the old lady's careful investments, not enough to enrich the household much, as the aunt's Income had died with her, but sufficient to make things easier as far as the school project was concerned. Now they need not go to Bridlington, as was con- templated earlier. They might alter the parson- age a little, utilize their aunt's bedroom, and take at least two or three pupils. But meanwhile Anne had still a " situation " that had in it many advantages. She was govern- 64 CHARLOTTE BRONTE ess to the daughters of a clergyman — Mr. Robin- son, of Thorpe Green. Why not let Emily keep house and Charlotte be allowed to spend yet an- other year at Brussels in order to make herself more thoroughly proficient? M. Heger had taken the keenest interest in his pupils and had written to their father expressing regret at their hasty departure from the school. He suggested that one or both of them might wish to return in a position of perfect independence as English governess. It was this offer that Charlotte determined to accept, and in January, 1843, she set out, this time alone, on her eventful journey, leaving Haworth on Friday morning, and reaching Brussels on Sun- day evening. Here a new life began. She was now a governess — Mademoiselle Charlotte — with many special privileges, working hard in her own time at German, and conducting the English class besides superintending other classes at times. To the native governesses she found herself in antag- onism — in fact, it must be admitted that Mes- dames Blanche, Sophie, and Hausse, her three col- THE PENSION HlfeCER, BRUSSELS 65 leagues, were not merely not tolerated, but were hated very cordially. There were compensations, however. She had the Wheelwright family and a certain Mary Dixon for friends in the city. She had also at the first the good will not only of M. Heger, but of his wife. " Whenever I turn back," she writes, " to compare what I am with what I w^as, my place here with my place at Mrs. Sidg- wick's, or Mrs. White's, I am thankful." Then will seem to have come a change. Writ- ing to her brother Branwell, she says — " Among 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. They have no sensations themselves, and they excite none. But one wearies from day to day of caring nothing, fearing nothing, liking nothing, hat- ing nothing, being nothing, doing nothing — ^yes, I 66 CHARLOTTE BRONTE teach, and sometimes get red In the face with im- patience at their stupidity. But don't think I ever scold or fly into a passion. If I spoke warmly, as warmly as I sometimes used to do at Roe Head, they would think me mad. 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. The black Swan, M. Heger, is the only sole veritable excep- tion 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 indebt- ed to him for all the pleasure or amusement I have. Except for the total want of companionship I have nothing to complain of." ^ Still more melancholy was her condition by Sep- tember when she wrote to her sister Emily the let- ^ Charlotte Bronte and her Circle. THE PENSION HEGER, BRUSSELS 67 ter which told of her confession to a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, an Incident so skilfully made use of In her novel Villette — " Yesterday I went on a pilgrimage to the cem- etery, and far beyond It on to a hill where there was nothing but fields as far as the horizon. When I came back It was evening, but I had such a repug- nance to return to the house, which contained noth- ing that I cared for, I still kept threading the streets in the neighbourhood of the Rue d'Isabelle and avoiding it. 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 be- gan. 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 con- fessionals. In two confessionals I saw a priest. I felt as if I did not care what I did, provided it was 68 CHARLOTTE BRONTE 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. Know- ing me as you do, you will think this odd, but when people are by themselves they have singular fan- cies. A penitent was occupied in confessing. They do not go into the sort of pew or cloister which the priest occupies, but kneel down on the steps and confess through a grating. Both the confessor and the penitent whisper very low, you can hardly hear their voices. After I had watched two or three penitents go and return 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 lean- ing his ear towards me. I was obliged to begin, and yet I did not know a word of the formula with which they always commence their confessions. It was a funny position. I felt precisely as I did when alone on the Thames at midnight. I commenced THE PENSION HEGER, BRUSSELS 69 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 morn- ing I was to go to the rue du Pare — to his house — and he would reason with me, and try to convince me of the error and enormity of being a Protes- tant! 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. He will not under- stand that it was only a freak, and will perhaps think I am going to turn Catholic." ^ This morbidness increased, and at the end of the year she resolved to go home, her father's increas- ing tendency to blindness fortifying her resolution. ^ Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle. 70 CHARLOTTE BRONTE Armed with a certificate from M. Heger that told of her qualifications for teaching the French language, she started for England, and was again in Haworth at the beginning of January 1844. A few days later she wrote to a friend — " Every one asks me what I am going to do, now that I am returned home ; and every one seems to expect that I should immediately commence a school. In truth, it is what I should wish to do. I desire it above all things. I have sufficient money for the undertaking, and I hope now sufficient qual- ifications to give me a fair chance of success; yet I cannot permit myself to enter upon life — to touch the object which seems now within my reach, and which I have been so long straining to attain. You will ask me why. It is on papa's account; he is now, as you know, getting old, and it grieves me to tell you that he is losing his sight. I have felt for some months that I ought not to be away from him ; and I feel now that it would be too selfish to leave him (at least as long as Branwell and Anne are absent) , in order to pursue selfish interests of THE PENSION HEGER, BRUSSELS 71 my own. With the help of God I will try to deny myself in this matter, and to wait. " I suffered much before I left Brussels. I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what the parting with M. Heger cost me; it grieved me so much to grieve him, who has been so true, kind and disinterested a friend. At parting he gave me a kind of diploma certifying my abilities as a teach- er, sealed with the seal of the Athenee Royal, of which he is professor. I was much surprised also at the degree of regret expressed by my Belgian pupils, when they knew I was going to leave. I did not think it had been in their phlegmatic nature. . . ." I have said that Brussels episode was the turn- ing-point of Charlotte Bronte's career. To what extent this was due to the personal influence of M. Heger, the first man of any real cultivation she had so far met — for Mr. Bronte's Cambridge ca- reer left him essentially illiterate, and his curates were worse — it is not easy to say. M. Heger kin- dled her intellectual impulses, and that was no small thing. That he won any very great control 72 CHARLOTTE BRONTE over her moral nature there is no reason to believe. Surely one takes the nature of an artist too pedan- tically to assume that her heroes in Villette and The Professor are primarily biographical. It is sufficient that M. Heger knew good litera- ture from bad, that he had a sense of perspective, and that his teaching, his criticism, his loans of books, all made for a sound education. Charlotte Bronte, despite her genius, could not, one may be- lieve, have " arrived " had she not met M. Heger. She went to Brussels full of the crude ambitions, the semi-literary impulses that are so common on the fringe of the writing world. She left Brussels a woman of genuine cultivation, of educated tastes, armed with just the equipment that was to enable her to write the books of which two generations of her countrymen have been justly proud. CHAPTER VIII POEMS The Idea of starting a school which had been the primary motive for the Brussels enterprise nat- urally gathered shape when Charlotte rejoined her sisters at Haworth In the beginning of 1844. As a first step applications were made to one or two friends — to Mrs. White, for example, In whose family Charlotte had been a nursery governess be- fore she left for Brussels. But these friends had already arranged for their children's education elsewhere, and there was nothing for It but adver- tisement. A circular was printed, offering board and education for £35 per annum, with sundry " extras," including the French and German that It had taken the girls so much trouble and expense to acquire. All was In vain, however. " Every one wishes us well, but there are no pupils to be had," Charlotte writes to a friend. Yet a little 73 74 CHARLOTTE BRONTE later she writes again: " We have made no alter- ations yet in our house. It would be folly to do so, while there is so little likelihood of ever getting pupils." So a year rolled on and still another in the quiet Yorkshire parsonage. Time made it clear that not only were there no pupils to be had but that they were not even desirable, Branwell, the once much loved brother was at home, hopelessly wrecking his life with dram drinking and drugs, the father fight- ing his son's malady as best he could, sleeping in the same room with him. " The poor old man and I have had a terrible night of it," Branwell is re- ported to have been heard to mutter one morning ; *' he does his best, the poor old man, but It is all over with me." " Meanwhile, life wears away," Charlotte writes In March, 1845 J *'I shall soon be thirty; and I have done nothing yet." But before that year had closed the three sisters were busy in the always exhilarating occupation of preparing a book for the press. This was a volume of poems. Char- lotte has herself recorded the circumstances under POEMS 75 which she, Emily and Anne published this little volume, through which they hoped to climb the ladder of fame. She has told us that in the au- tumn of 1845 she accidentally lighted upon a MS. volume of verse in Emily's handwriting which she considered to be '* condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine." " It took hours," her sister tells us, *' to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication." An interesting glimpse is here given us by Charlotte of Emily's remarkable aloofness. So shy was she that " on the recesses of her mind not even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed." Anne, less pain- fully reticent, speedily produced her compositions, '' intimating that, since Emily's had given me pleasure, I might like to look at hers." '' I could not," Charlotte continues, *' but be a partial judge, yet I thought that those verses, too, had a sweet, serene pathos of their own." The three sisters determined to publish. To find a publisher on any terms was, however, not easy. 76 CHARLOTTE BRONTE Many to whom they applied did not even trouble to answer. Finally they arranged with two young booksellers and stationers of Paternoster Row — Aylott & Jones — who did but little publishing, but who, a few years later, were to give their imprint to the four parts of The Germ, that Interesting adventure of the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren. From the correspondence with Aylott & Jones, which has been preserved, we learn that the three sisters paid £36 10^. for the printing and binding, and yet an- other £10 or £12 for advertising the book. Ten years later, when Charlotte had made a reputation with Jane Eyre, her publishers, Smith, Elder, gave her £24 for the copyright, and they reissued the book with a new title page, using up the old sheets. Even then there was no call for a second edition. The little book of less than 200 pages duly ap- peared. It was reviewed In the Athenaeum^ where the critic discovered that Ellis possessed " a fine quaint spirit '' and " an evident power of wing, that may reach heights not here attempted." There Is a letter from Charlotte extant in which she thanks the editor of The Dublin University POEMS 77 Magazine for " the Indulgent notice " that ap- peared In his last Issue.^ As an outcome of it all, but two copies only were sold. Undismayed at the world's coldness, Charlotte " used up " some of the copies by sending them to the leaders of con- temporary literature — to Wordsworth, Tennyson, Lockhart, and De Quincey among others. There were nineteen poems by Currer Bell In the little volume, twenty-one by Ellis, and the same number by Acton. Charlotte has said the last word on the collection when In the preface to her sister's Remains ^ she said: — *' The book was printed; It Is scarcely known, and all of it that merits to be known are the poems of Ellis Bell. The fixed conviction I held, and hold, of the worth of these poems has not indeed received the confirmation of much favourable crit- icism; but I must retain it notwithstanding." Ellis Bell, indeed, was the poet. Currer was to give one out of many demonstrations of the fact ^ It is given in full in a note to the Haworth Edition of Mrs. Gaskell's Life. 2 In the introduction to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. 78 CHARLOTTE BRONTE that a writer may be a most forcible and effective master of prose, and yet have no capacity whatever for verse that deserves to be called poetry. Anne Bronte, however, or '* Acton Bell," wrote verse that has at least found its way into some hymn- books. It is a distinction that would probably have pleased her more than any other kind of lit- erary fame. Ellis Bell was, it will ever be acknowledged, the one poet of a family many members of which at- tempted verse. The lines in this little volume en- titled " The Old Stoic " will certainly keep their place in English literature for all time: — Riches I hold in light esteem; And love I laugh to scorn; And lust of fame was but a dream That vanished with the morn: And if I pray, the only prayer That moves my lips for me Is, "Leave the heart that now I bear, And give me liberty!" Yes, as my swift days near their goal, *Tis all that I implore; In life and death, a chainless soul, With courage to endure. POEMS 79 In the '* Selections " from the poems by Ellis and Acton Bell that Charlotte Bronte added to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, there is contained a biographical fragment that is unap- proachable in its simple pathos. No biographer would be well advised to try to paraphrase what is here said, or indeed to change it by a line : — " My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hill-side her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights ; and not the least and best-loved was — liberty. " After the age of twenty, having meantime studied alone with diligence and perseverance, she went with me to an establishment on the Continent : the same suffering and conflict ensued, heightened by the strong recoil of her upright, heretic and English spirit from the gentle Jesuitry of the for- eign and Romish system. Once more she seemed sinking, but this time she rallied through the mere 8o CHARLOTTE BRONTE 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. She was never happy till she carried her hard-won knowl- edge back to the remote English village, the old parsonage-house, and desolate Yorkshire hills. A very few years more, and she looked her last on those hills, and breathed her last in that house, and under the aisle of that obscure village church she found her last lowly resting-place. Merciful was the decree that spared her when she was a stranger in a strange land, and guarded her dying bed with kindred love and congenial constancy." In those " Selections " also Charlotte Bronte has preserved for us a poem of supreme worth, a poem that will take its place as one of the very best in all literature written by a woman. '' They were," her sister tells us, " the last lines that Emily ever wrote " : — No coward soul is mine, No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere: I see Heaven's glories shine, And faith shines equal, arming me from fear. POEMS 8 I O God within my breast, Almighty, ever-present Deity! Life — that in me has rest, As I — undying Life — have power in Thee! Vain are the thousand creeds That move men's hearts: unutterably vain; Worthless as withered weeds, Or idlest froth amid the boundless main. To waken doubt in one Holding so fast by Thine infinity; So surely anchored on The steadfast rock of immortality. With wide-embracing love Thy spirit animates eternal years, Pervades and broods above, Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears. Though earth and man were gone. And suns and universes ceased to be, And Thou wert left alone. Every existence would exist in Thee. There is not room for Death, Nor atom that his might could render void: Thou — Thou art Being and Breath, And what Thou art may never be destroyed. Not less memorable perhaps are the stanzas that accompany the " Last Lines," and will be pre- 82 CHARLOTTE BRONTE served with them in all competent anthologies of English poetry: — Often rebuked, yet always back returning To those first feelings that were born with me, And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning For idle dreams of things which cannot be: To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region; Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear; And visions rising, legion after legion. Bring the unreal world too strangely near, I'll walk, but not in old heroic traces. And not in paths of high morality, And not among the half-distinguished faces, The clouded forms of long-past history. I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide: Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding, Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side. What have those lonely mountains worth revealing ? More glory and more grief than I can tell : The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell. CHAPTER IX BRANWELL BRONTE Branwell, or Patrick Branwell Bronte, was twenty-nine years of age when his three sisters is- sued their volume of poems, and he died two years later without, as Charlotte tells us, ever having known that his sisters had published a line, al- though Jane Eyre^ Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Wuthering Heights had all ap- peared before his death. In after years, when the whole family had become extinct, a rumour grew up, which found its origin in Haworth gossip, to the effect that Branwell wrote Wuthering Heights — that he had claimed to have done so. Such a rumour is discredited for any intelligent person by Charlotte's disclaimer which was conveyed in a let- ter to her friend, Mr. W. S. Williams, announcing BranwelPs death: — " My unhappy brother never knew what his sis- 83 84 CHARLOTTE BRONTE ters 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." It is discredited further, if that were necessary, from the fact that Branwell, with an " itch " for writing, seems never to have produced prose or poetry of any distinction. Charlotte's letters are always full of character, Branwell's always inef- fective, and his many little books that I have read in manuscript, some of them written long after he was twenty years of age, are singularly feeble. The braggadocio of the entirely worthless young man, anxious to shine and constantly talking of his literary talents — of what he was always going to achieve, could easily account for the fact that, look- ing backwards, some of his old friends and cronies would be persuaded that Branwell had actually as- sured them that he wrote the book which was only published ten months before his death — at a time when he was in the lowest depths of alcoholism. When he died JVuthering Heights had probably BRANWELL BRONTE 85 not sold a hundred copies, and its authorship was certainly an entire secret to these friends who did not say one word about the son's claims until his father had died thirteen years later. The growth of the legend as to Branwell's au- thorship is indeed amazing. We find for example that Mr. January Searle, writing in The Mirror,, gives a most circumstantial account of conversa- tions with Branwell concerning a story he had writ- ten, and indeed he is made to discuss pretty freely Charlotte's novel as well. Another acquaintance, Newman Dearden, contributed to the Halifax Guardian of 1867 some facts, as he called them, whence we learn that Branwell read to this and other friends, a large part of the story In manu- script exactly as it reads in Wuthering Heights. Yet another witness, Edward Sloane, of Halifax, made similar statements, and Francis Grundy is even more explicit as the following passage indicates : — " Patrick Bronte declared to me, and what his sister said bore out the assertion, that he wrote a great portion of Wuthering Heights himself. In- 86 CHARLOTTE BRONTE deed, it Is impossible for me to read that story with- out meeting with many passages which I feel cer- tain must have come from his pen. The weird fancies of diseased genius with which he used to entertain me in our long talks at Luddendenfoot reappear in the pages of the novel, and I am in- clined to believe that the very plot was his inven- tion rather than his sister's." ^ All this " evidence " causes little commotion in the mind of any one who has watched how legends grow and gather force. Branwell could not have written a line of Wuthering Heights, although he did doubtless furnish phrases for the mouth of this or that example of human wreckage flitting so tragically through Its pages. His last two years of life, the years of his three sisters' greatest lit- erary activity, were spent by him In utter debase- ment entirely outside all Intellectual Interests. He was the author of his sisters' books only so far as he was the shameful cause of their intense isolation during this period. " Branwell still remains at home, and while he Is here you shall not come. ^ Memories of the Pasty by Francis H. Grundy. BRANWELL BRONTE 87 I am more confirmed In that resolution the more I know of him," writes Charlotte to her friend, Ellen Nussey, in November 1845, ^^^ thence to his death, in September 1848, things grew worse and worse. Yet Branwell had started with high hopes and higher dreams on the part of his sisters, who began by thinking him so much more richly endowed than themselves. A letter written by Charlotte to her brother in 1832, when Branwell was fifteen years of age and she was sixteen, commences with the intimation that *' as usual " she addresses her week- ly letter to him, " because to you I find the most to say." This intimate affection seems to have pre- vailed until the time when Branwell took his flight from the nest. How much he was the spoilt child of the Haworth circle, the favourite in particular of the aunt, who would necessarily think more of him than of all her nieces put together, is shown by reference to Anne Bronte's novel. The Tenant of Wildfell HalU the book in which we have more glimpses than in any other of the Bronte home life; Mrs. Markham, in that story, is obviously a 88 CHARLOTTE BRONTE picture of Miss Branwell, and precisely as Gilbert Markham's sisters thought of their mother's par- tiality would Branwell's sisters think about the treatment meted out to their brother by his affec- tionate aunt: — " I was too late for tea: but my mother had kindly kept the tea-pot and muffin warm upon the hob, and, though she scolded me a little, readily admitted my excuses; and when I complained of the flavour of the overdrawn tea, she poured the remainder into the slop-basin, and bade Rose put some fresh into the pot, and reboil the kettle, which offices were performed with great commo- tion, and certain remarkable comments. " * Well ! — if it had been me now, I should have had no tea at all — If it had been Fergus, even, he would have to put up with such as there was, and been told to be thankful, for it was far too good for him; but you — we can't do too much for you. It's always so — if there's anything particularly nice at table, mamma winks and nods at me, to abstain from It, and if I don't attend to that, she whispers, " Don't eat so much of that. Rose; Gilbert will BRANWELL BRONTE 89 like It for his supper " — Fm nothing at all. In the parlour, it's " Come, Rose, put away your things, and let's have the room nice and tidy against they come In : and keep up a good fire ; Gilbert likes a cheerful fire." In the kitchen — '* Make that pie a large one. Rose; I dare say the boys'll be hungry; and don't put so much pepper in, they'll not like it, I'm sure," or " Rose, don't put so many spices In the pudding; Gilbert likes It plain," — or, " Mind you put plenty of currants In the cake, Fer- gus likes plenty." If I say, *' Well, mamma, I don't," I'm told I ought not to think of myself — " you know, Rose, in all household matters, we have only two things to consider, first, what's proper to be done, and, secondly, what's most agreeable to the gentlemen of the house — anything will do for the ladles." ' " * And very good doctrine too,' said my mother, * Gilbert thinks so I'm sure.' " Branwell's life story In Its concluding chapters Is not exhilarating. He was Intended for a painter, and there were dreams In the Haworth parsonage of great fame to be acquired after study 90 CHARLOTTE BRONTE at the Royal Academy Schools. He had already shown some moderate talent in this direction under the tuition of WilHam Robinson, a portrait painter of Leeds, at a time when it will be remembered every town had its portrait painter and no photog- rapher, when every sitting-room was decorated or disfigured by huge canvases, representing the heads of the family. Branwell had certainly as much talent for portrait painting as many of these " artists," and so to London he went with high hopes. But London, it is clear, taught him nothing that was of value to him; perhaps it gave the first impulse in his demoralization. In any case life in London was too costly for the son of a poorly paid village priest, and the boy returned home. This was in 1835. ^^^ the next three years he would have seemed to have done Httle but loaf about the village, nominally a portrait painter, actually the secretary of the Masonic Lodge at Haworth — " The Lodge of the Three Graces," and the boon companion of every one who enjoyed conviviality, a most unfortunate life for a young man of twenty. He did, however, continue his art studies under BRANWELL BRONTE 91 Robinson at Leeds, and painted many portraits there and at Bradford. There Is a very human picture of him In one of Charlotte's letters to a friend, dated 1838, when Branwell was twenty- one. Her friends, Mary and Martha Taylor, were visiting her : — " They are making such a noise about me, I cannot write any more. Mary Is playing on the piano; Martha Is chattering as fast as her little tongue can run; and Branwell Is standing before her, laughing at her vivacity." The beginning of January 1840 saw Branwell at Broughton-In-Furness, as tutor in the family of a Mr. Postlethwaite, concerning which experience of his all we know Is from a letter which says : — '' I am fixed in a little retired town by the sea- shore, among the wild woody hills that rise around me — huge, rocky, and capped with clouds. My employer Is a retired county magistrate, a large landowner, and of a right hearty and generous dis- position. His wife Is a quiet, silent and amiable woman, and his sons are two fine spirited lads." ^ ^ Leyland's Bronte Family, 92 CHARLOTTE BRONTE Branwell did not lodge with the family, but with a surgeon in the town. His tutorship was probably a dire failure, although Mr. Leyland declares that it ended at Mr. Bronte's instigation In June, that is, after five months. It is scarcely probable that Mr. Bronte could have desired that his son should once more enter upon the loafing life at Haworth, nor can Branwell's next effort to earn a living be con- sidered a rise in social position. In October 1840, he obtained a situation as clerk-in-charge at Sower- by Bridge Station, on the Leeds and Manchester Railway. Hence he was transferred after a few months to Luddendenfoot, on the same line. Here we have pictures of him from two quarters — Mr. Francis Grundy and Mr. William Heaton. The former was a railway engineer stationed In the district, who thus describes Branwell at this time : — " Insignificantly small; a mass of red hair, which he wore brushed high off his forehead — to help his height, I fancy; a great, lumpy, intellectual fore- head, nearly half the size of the whole facial con- tour; small ferrety eyes, deep-sunk, and still further BRANWELL BRONTE 93 hidden by the never removed spectacles; prominent nose, but weak lower features. Small and thin of person, he was the reverse of attractive at first sight." ^ Mr. Heaton apparently had a great admiration for the railway clerk, unless, as we suspect, this came like so many of the reminiscences of Bran- well, as a sentiment born of after knowledge of the genius of the family, when to have known any one of the dead and gone Brontes was to reap a kind of reflected glory throughout Yorkshire, and In- deed everywhere. That Branwell should have been able to quote scraps of popular poetry was, we see, a sign of power to this admirer: — " His talents were of a very exalted kind. I have heard him quote pieces from the Bard of Avon, from Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron, as well as from Butler's Hudihras, in such a manner as often made me wish I had been a scholar, as he was." ^ If he were a *' scholar," Branwell, unhappily, ^ Pictures of the Pasty by Francis H. Grundy, 1879. 2 The Bronte Family ^ by Francis A. Leyland, 1886. 94 CHARLOTTE BRONTE lacked the practicality that would have made a competent railway booking-clerk, and after twelve months at Luddendenfoot he was dismissed by the Company, It having been found that the ac- counts at this station were in utter confusion. Pre- liminary to leaving he had to appear before some of the directors, when his most intimate friend, William Weightman — Mr. Bronte's curate at Ha- worth at the time — accompanied him. It was at this period, early in 1842, that a defi- nite deterioration took place in Branwell. His sis- ters Charlotte and Emily were in Brussels, Anne was in a situation as governess, the aunt was dying. Branwell was spending all his time In the village Inn. One last effort he made to earn a livelihood. He was engaged as tutor in the family where Anne was a governess — her second position of the kind. This was with Mr. Edmund Robinson, a wealthy clergyman not holding any living, but residing at Thorpe Green, Little Ouseburn, in Yorkshire. Here began — In 1842 — the sordid "romance," concerning which too much has been written. Branwell became enamoured of his employer's BRANWELL BRONTE 95 wife and persuaded himself and all his friends that he had received encouragement. That Mrs. Rob- inson, many years younger than her husband, did feel a certain kindliness for the eccentric youth Is undoubted. Anne Bronte, who was on the spot, clearly felt that she was considerably to blame. But that she was entirely guiltless of any serious wrong may now be accepted as Indisputable. The legend that grew up In the Haworth home had no basis but In the perfervid imagination of the now thoroughly debased Branwell, who talked contin- uously of his wrongs after Mr. Robinson had turned him out of the house, who declared that the woman loved him and would marry him when her fast-falling husband died. Mr. Robinson died, and Branwell spread the further legend that the widow would marry him had her husband not made a will which would render her penniless did she do so. The will of Mr. Robinson, who died In May 1846, demonstrates that he put no restraint whatever upon the future action of his wife. Bran- well succeeded in disgusting his sisters, and en- tirely alienating them, but at the same time they 96 CHARLOTTE BRONTE accepted too easily his own account of the affair. Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Nussey, for example, were both persuaded that Branwell Bronte's disastrous end was due to a wicked intrigue. So entirely had Mrs. Gaskell caught Charlotte Bronte's own view of her brother's end that she told Miss Nussey of her Intention to avenge him upon the " wicked woman." Throwing all discretion to the winds, she ventured, in the first edition of her Life of Charlotte Bronte^ upon an attack on Mrs. Robin- son that is surprising In Its vehemence and its libel- ousness. That she escaped with an apology and the withdrawal of the offending passages in later editions of the Life must be counted for greater good fortune than she recognised. Meanwhile let us turn to Branwell as we see him in his last days in his sister's correspondence. Writing to Ellen Nussey, in April 1846, Char- lotte says : — " Branwell stays at home, and degenerates In- stead of Improving. It has been lately intimated to him that he would be received again on the rail- road where he was formerly stationed if he would Born 1817 Died 1848 Patrick Branwell Bronte From a Silhouette in the possession of the Rev. A. B. Nicholls BRANWELL BRONTE 97 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 hap- piness." A year later things are no better, there Is the same story of wreckage and powerlessness of will. In May 1847 she writes: — " Branwell is quieter now, and for a reason : he has got to the end of a considerable sum of money, and consequently is obliged to restrict himself in some degree." In yet another year it Is the same, for in July 1848 we have the following: — " Branwell is the same in conduct as ever. His constitution seems much 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." Then, In September 1848 came the end, as one of Charlotte's letters describes It: — *' * We have hurried our dead out of our sight.' A lull begins to succeed the gloomy tumult of last week. It is not permitted us to grieve for him 98 CHARLOTTE BRONTE who Is gone as others grieve for those they lose. The removal of our only brother must necessarily be regarded by us rather In the light of a mercy than a chastisement. Branwell was his father's and his sisters' pride and hope In boyhood, but since manhood the case has been otherwise. It has been our lot to see him take a wrong bent ; to hope, ex- pect, wait his return to the right path ; to know the sickness of hope deferred, the dismay of prayer baffled ; to experience despair at last — and now to behold the sudden early obscure close of what might have been a noble career. " I do not weep from a sense of bereavement — there Is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost — but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light. My brother was a year my junior. I had aspirations and ambitions for him once, long ago — they have perished mournfully. Nothing remains of him but a memory of errors and suffer- ings. There is such a bitterness of pity for his life and death, such a yearning for the emptiness of his BRANWELL BRONTE 99 whole existence as I cannot describe. I trust time win allay these feelings. ** My poor father naturally thought more of his only son than of his daughters, and, much and long as he had suffered on his account, he cried out for his loss like David for that of Absalom — my son I my son ! — and refused at first to be comforted. " When I looked upon the noble face and fore- head of my dead brother (nature had favoured him with a fairer outside as well as a finer consti- tution than his sisters) and asked myself what had made him go ever wrong, tend ever downwards, when he had so many gifts to Induce to, and aid in, an upward course, I seemed to receive an oppres- sive revelation of the feebleness of humanity — of the inadequacy of even genius to lead to true great- ness if unaided by religion .and principle. In the value, or even the reality, of these two things he would never believe till within a few days of his end; and then all at once he seemed to open his heart to a conviction of their existence and worth. loo CHARLOTTE BRONTE The remembrance of this strange change now com- forts my poor father greatly. I myself, with pain- ful, mournful joy, heard him praying softly in his dying moments; and to the last prayer which my father offered up at his bedside he added, ' Amen/ How unusual that word appeared from his lips, of course you, who did not know him, cannot con- ceive. Akin to this alteration was that in his feel- ings towards his relations — all the bitterness seemed gone. '' When the struggle was over, and a marble calm began to succeed the last dread agony, I felt, as I had never felt before, that there was peace and forgiveness for him in Heaven. All his errors — to speak plainly, all his vices — seemed nothing to me in that moment: every wrong he had done, every pain he had caused, vanished; his sufferings only were remembered; the wrench to the natural affections only was left. If man can thus expe- rience total oblivion of his fellow's imperfections, how much more can the Eternal Being, who made man, forgive His creature? " Had his sins been scarlet in their dye, I believe BRANWELL BROiNTE" ' ' ''Uor now they are white as wool. He is at rest, and that comforts us all. Long before he quitted this world, life had no happiness for him." ^ A very substantial literature has been devoted to Branwell Bronte, a circumstance that can only be accounted for from the fact that he had so con- siderable an influence upon the life and work of his sisters. On that account alone we cannot say with Mr. Augustine Birrell, that we have " no use for this young man." Quite a collection of docu- ments concerning him are to be found in a book by Mr. Francis Leyland, called The Bronte Fam- ily. Mr. Leyland's two volumes were principally taken up with extracts from Branwell's writings, and he appeared to see in these indications of a genius which is certainly not there. Branwell must have had an interesting personality before his final deterioration, at least compared with the type of people among whom he was thrown; but he was not endowed with gifts of a very high order. Had it not been for the literary successes of his sisters 1 Extracts from two letters to W. S. Williams, in Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle. id2 GHARLOTTE BRONTE his name would long since have been forgotten. We do not owe to him a single memorable line. For the three or four years before his death he suc- ceeded in making every one in his home profound- ly miserable. Whether that was a gain to art or not cannot easily be decided; but even taking into consideration the indirect service to his sisters by the unconscious suggestion of " copy," one may yet say with unqualified emphasis that it would have been better for poor Branwell Bronte and for every one connected with him if he had never been born. CHAPTER X THE PUBLICATIONS OF MR. NEWBY It was in April 1846 that Charlotte Bronte wrote the first letter that gave indications that the little village of Haworth had in its midst three young women whose hearts were palpitating with ambition to shine in prose composition as well as in poetry. This letter was addressed to Aylott & Jones, the booksellers, who had engaged to is- sue for Charlotte and her sisters a little volume of poems. It was thus she wrote, signing her own name : — " 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 of the ordinary novel size, or separately as single vol- umes, as shall be deemed most advisable." The authors, Miss Bronte explained, still main- 103 I04 CHARLOTTE BRONTE taining the pleasant fiction that she was acting for three young men in her father's parish, were not prepared to publish at their own expense. Would Aylott & Jones, she asked, consider the MSS., and would they publish in the event of thinking its contents such as to warrant the expectation of suc- cess? Messrs. Aylott & Jones courteously re- plied that they did not wish to enter upon publish- ing ventures of this kind, but they gave advice as to the methods of approaching the various London houses which issued fiction, and for this Charlotte Bronte thanked them cordially in a later letter. The three novels that the sisters then cherished the hope of publishing were The Professor by Charlotte, JVuthering Heights by Emily, and Agnes Grey by Anne. The precise manner in which The Professor became detached from the books by Emily and Anne has never been made clear. All three sisters sent their books travelling from publisher to publisher, and Charlotte, in the hour of her success, more than once referred to the unfortunate journey of The Professor, which, it may be added, reached Smith and Elder in a wrap- PUBLICATIONS OF MR. NEWBY 105 per that bore other tell-tale addresses. To Mr. George Henry Lewes she wrote years later : — " My work (a tale In one volume) being com- pleted, I offered It to a publisher. He said It was original, faithful to nature, but he did not feel war- ranted In accepting It; such a work would not sell. I tried six publishers In succession ; they all told me it was deficient in ' startling interest ' and * thrill- ing excitement,' that it would never suit the circu- lating libraries, and as It was on those libraries the success of fiction mainly depended, they could not undertake to publish what would be overlooked there." ' Mrs. Gaskell records that some of the refusals were not over-courteously worded. Then came the oft-recorded triumph when the firm of Smith and Elder, In rejecting The Professor, declared that a work in three volumes would meet with care- ful attention — and Jane Eyre was accepted. At a much later date Charlotte tried, more than once, to persuade her publishers to print The Professor, and being refused, wrote half-angrlly, half-re- 1 Mrs. Gaskell, Haworth Edition, May 20, 1847. io6 CHARLOTTE BRONTE proachfully, to her friend Mr. George Smith, de- claring that the book had now been refused nine times by *' The Trade," three of the refusals hav- ing come from the house that had been so willing to publish her later books. " My feelings," she continued, " can only be paralleled by those of a doting parent towards an idiot child," Mr. Will- iams sharing with her, she declared, the distinction of being the only person who saw merit in it.^ But all this is to anticipate — yet it was a curious irony of fate that left the work of the one of the three sisters who was to obtain any substantial pop- ularity thus stranded, while the work of Emily and Anne found itself at least printed, although not published. It is clear that Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey also " travelled," but it is probable that The Professor was being retained for consid- eration at some other publisher's when the other stories fell into the hands of Mr. Newby. Miss Bronte afterwards said that they were accepted " on terms somewhat impoverishing to the two authors." In any case Charlotte speedily caught 1 Mrs. Gaskell, Haworth Edition, page 516. PUBLICATIONS OF MR. NEWBY 107 up in the race. Thus she writes to Mr. W. S. Will- iams on November 10, 1847: — *' A prose work, by Ellis and Acton, will soon appear ; it should have been out, indeed, long since, for the first proof sheets were already in the press at the commencement of last August, before Cur- rer Bell had placed the MS. of Jane Eyre in your hands. Mr. Newby, however, does not do busi- ness like Messrs. Smith and Elder ; a different spirit seems to preside at Mortimer Street to that which guides the helm at 6^^ Cornhill. . . . My re- lations have suffered from exhausting delay and procrastination, while I have to acknowledge the benefits of a management at once business-like and gentleman-like, energetic and considerate. I should like to know if Mr. Newby often acts as he has done to my relations, or whether this is an excep- tional instance of his method. Do you know, and can you tell me anything about him? " Mr. Newby, who thus accepted Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey^ the only novel by Emily Bronte, and the first novel by Anne, appears to have belonged to the order of publishers described io8 CHARLOTTE BRONTE by Robert Louis Stevenson when he said of the late Mr. Kegan Paul, " Kegan is a good fellow, but Paul is a d — d scoundrel." There would however appear to have been little of the " good fellow " about Newby, for although professing to be shocked at JVuthering Heights, he published it for a consideration, and when Jane Eyre had taken the world by storm, he gave out that his books by the Bells were by the same author, and promptly ac- cepted another novel by Anne — The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — on the fly-leaf of which he insert- ed an advertisement of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, containing " Opinions of the Press." The Spectator declares that " the work bears affin- ity to Jane Eyre!^ John Bull, that it is " written with considerable ability." Douglas Jerrold's Journal that " the work is strangely original. It reminds us of Jane Eyre, The author is a Salvator Rosa with his pen. We strongly recommend all our readers who love novelty to get this story, for we can promise them they never read anything like it before. It is like Jane Eyre.'' " It is a colos- sal performance," said the Atlas. PUBLICATIONS OF MR. NEWBY 109 In this connection It Is well worth while repeat- ing the review In the Athenaeum for December 25, 1847. There Is surely something very fascinating about old reviews of books that afterwards become classics : — ^^ Wuthering Heights^ by Ellis Bell; Agnes Grey, by Acton Bell; 3 vols. " Jane Eyre, It will be recollected, was edited by Mr. Currer Bell. Here are two tales so nearly related to Jane Eyre In cast of thought, Incident and language as to excite some curiosity. All three might be the work of one hand, but the first issued remains the best. In spite of much power and clev- erness, In spite of Its truth to life in the remote nooks and corners of England, Wuthering Heights Is a disagreeable story. The Bells seem to affect painful and exceptional subjects: the misdeeds and oppressions of tyranny, the eccentricities of ' wom- an's fantasy.' They do not turn away from dwell- ing upon those physical acts of cruelty which we know to have their warrant in the real annals of crime and suffering, but the contemplation of which true taste rejects. The brutal master of the lonely no CHARLOTTE BRONTE house on JVuthertng Heights — a prison which might be pictured from life — has doubtless had his prototype in those ungenial and remote districts where human beings, like the trees, grow gnarled and dwarfed and distorted by the inclement cli- mate; but he might have been indicated with far fewer touches, in place of so entirely filling the can- vas that there is hardly a scene untainted by his presence. It was a like dreariness, a like unfortu- nate selection of objects, which cut short the popu- larity of Charlotte Smith's novels, rich though they be in true pathos and faithful descriptions of na- ture. Enough of what is mean and bitterly pain- ful and degrading gathers round every one of us during the course of his pilgrimage through this vale of tears to absolve the artist from choosing his incidents and characters out of such a dismal catalogue; and if the Bells, singly or collectively, are contemplating future or frequent utterances in fiction, let us hope that they will spare us further interiors so gloomy as the one here elaborated with such dismal minuteness. In this respect Agnes Grey is more acceptable to us, though less power- PUBLICATIONS OF MR. NEWBY iii ful. It Is the tale of a governess who undergoes much that is In the real bond of a governess's en- durance ; but the new victim's trials are of a more Ignoble quality than those which awaited Jane Eyre. In the house of the Bloomfields the govern- ess is subjected to torment by terrible children (as the French have It) ; in that of the Murrays she has to witness the ruin wrought by false indulgence on two coquettish girls, whose coquetries jeopardise her own heart's secret. In both these tales there Is so much feeling for character, and nice marking of scenery, that we cannot leave them without once again warning their authors against what is eccen- tric and unpleasant. Never was there a period in our history of Society when we English could so ill afford to dispense with sunshine." But to return to Mr. Newby, who published, as we have seen, from Mortimer Street, Cavendish Square, and later (from 1850 to 1874) in Wel- beck Street. He seems to have cared only for mak- ing money out of his authors — nothing at all for the literary honours of the business. One of his own brothers said to Mrs. Riddell, the novelist — 112 CHARLOTTE BRONTE " Were I you I would not say that Newby had published anything for me." Altogether Newby published nine volumes for the Brontes, and these original nine volumes are before me as I write. Three volumes containing The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte, and three further volumes form a second edition of that book. To this Anne wrote a Preface. Far more valuable are the three volumes containing Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, A catalogue at the end of these volumes indicates that Mr. Newby had at any rate many good authors on his lists. There we find a book by George Grote — Letters on the Recent Politics of Switzerland — a book by Leopold von Ranke, A History of the Ro- man Monarchy and Captain Medwin's Life of Shelley, But for the most part the books are now long forgotten novels; association with Wuthering Heights would probably be Mr. Newby's one lit- erary distinction to-day were It not that one only remembers that he added additional bitterness to the always essentially unhappy life of Emily Bronte. PUBLICATIONS OF MR. NEWBY 113 In 1848 Charlotte Bronte frankly tells her friends of Smith and Elder, who were prepared to publish Ellis and Acton as well as Currer Bell, that her sisters are pledged to Newby for their next novels, that being one of his conditions for publi- cation of their first works. It was however a letter from Newby to an American firm, stating that to the best of his belief the three Bells were all one person, that made Charlotte and Anne start for London to disclose their separate Identities to Charlotte's own publishers. The best account of that visit Is contained In a letter that Charlotte wrote to her friend Mary Taylor, then In New Zealand. It Is dated Septem- ber 4, 1848, and In It she tells her friend that her sister Anne had published another book called The Tenant of Wild fell Hall, for which £25 had been paid; and she adds, " that as Acton Bell's publisher Is a shuffling scamp I expect no more." She does not say, as she might have done, that the book was selling solely on account of the enormous success of Jane Eyre, but she does tell Miss Taylor of Newby's assertion that Jane Eyre, Wuthering 114 CHARLOTTE BRONTE Heights, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were all the productions of one writer. " This," she adds, " is a lie, as Newby had been told repeatedly that they were the productions of three different authors." A letter from Smith and Elder stating their troubles in the matter led to the experience which Is best detailed in the following passage : — " The upshot of it was that on the very day I received Smith and Elder's letter Anne and I packed up a small box, sent it down to Keighley, set out ourselves after tea, walked through a snow- storm to the station, got to Leeds, and whirled up by the night train to London, with the view of proving our separate identity to Smith and Elder, and confronting Newby with his lie. " We arrived at the Chapter Coffee-house (our old place, Polly ; we did not well know where else to go) about eight o'clock In the morning. We washed ourselves, had some breakfast, sat for a few minutes, and then set off in queer Inward ex- citement to 6^, Cornhlll. Neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. Williams knew we were coming; they had PUBLICATIONS OF MR. NEWBY 115 never seen us ; they did not know whether we were men or women, but had always written to us as men." The recognition at 6^, Cornhlll, was very dra- matic, and the pleasant gossip with Mr. Smith and with his manager Mr. Williams, is related in de- tail. Then came visitors in the evening to that modest inn in Ivy Lane, Paternoster Row, — Mr. Smith in evening dress, and his sisters, " two elegant young ladies in full dress," the goal being the opera, where Charlotte, with a sick headache, was intensely self-conscious of what she called her " clownishness," while Anne " was calm and gentle as she always is." The following day Mr. Williams took the two sisters to church, and in the afternoon Mr. Smith went with his carriage to take them to dine with his mother at Bayswater. " The rooms, the drawing- room especially, looked splendid to us." On Mon- day came another round of pleasure, and on Tues- day the sisters returned to Haworth. This letter concludes with the statement, "We saw Mr. Newby ; but of him more another time." ii6 CHARLOTTE BRONTE It IS a pity we have not that further letter, but there are other glimpses of Mr. Newby and his dealings. We learn, for example, that a further £25 was paid by Mr. Newby on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, but no more. Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were published on condition that the authors shared the risks with the publisher, and they advanced £50 accordingly. There is no doubt that the other books sold sufficiently well to give more than that amount of author's profit — largely on the strength of the success of Jane Eyre, and the current belief that they were by the same au- thor — yet Newby would seem never to have re- turned the £50, although Charlotte tried to extract it from him. *' Do not give yourself much trouble about Mr. Newby," Charlotte writes later, "I have not the least expectation that you will be able to get anything from him. He has an evasive, shuf- fling plan of meeting, or rather eluding, such de- mands, against which it is fatiguing to contend " ; and to the same correspondent, her friend Mr. George Smith, she writes still later: " As to Mr. Newby, he charms me. First there is the fascinat- PUBLICATIONS OF MR. NEWBY 117 ing coyness with which he shuns your pursuit ..." and she goes on to animadvert in a simi- lar strain to the way in which she considered Mr. Newby had robbed her sisters, pretending he had spent all the profits of Wuthering Heights in ad- vertising it. There pretty well one may leave Mr. Newby, and pass on to the books the publication of which gave him his only distinction. CHAPTER XI WUTHERING HEIGHTS Emily Bronte has been called the Sphinx of our modern literature. Among English novelists she must always- hold a position of eminence, al- though by virtue only of one book — Wuthering Heights. That book has a place by itself. There are greater novels doubtless, novels replete with humour and insight — qualities that it has not. But there is no book that has so entirely won the suf- frage of some of the best minds of each genera- tion since it appeared. This recognition began with Sydney Dobell, the author of Balder; it was continued by Mr. Matthew Arnold, whose oft- quoted lines will be remembered, written concern- ing one : — . . . whose soul Knew no fellow for might, Passion, vehemence, grief, Daring, since Byron died. ii8 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 119 It culminated In the splendid eloquence of Mr. Swinburne, who places it with King Lear, the Duchess of Malfi, and The Bride of Lammer- moor,^ the well-weighed utterances of Mrs. Hum- phry Ward, to whom Emily Bronte's book is *' pure mind and passion," ^ and of Maurice Mae- terlinck,^ whose tribute is the more interesting in that Belgium was the only country that Emily Bronte visited. — Sydney DobelPs criticism has nat- urally the most Interest because It happens to be one of those contemporary verdicts which pos- terity has endorsed. In the Palladium of Septem- ber 1850, Mr. Dobell declared '' that there were passages In JVuthering Heights of which any nov- elist, past or present, might be proud." " There are few things in modern prose to sur- pass these pages for native power," Mr. Dobell says of the first part of Wuthering Heights. The critic who treats of contemporaries almost always hesitates and halts in the dispensing of praise un- ^ The Athenaeum, June l6, 1883. 2 The Haworth Edition of Wuthering Heights. Introduction by Mrs. Humphry Ward. 3 Wisdom and Destiny, by Maurice Maeterlinck. I20 CHARLOTTE BRONTE less supported by popular applause. There was lit- tle enough of popular applause to greet Wuthering Heights at its first advent, and Mr. Dobell proved himself a good judge of literature in saying as much as he did. He scarcely accepted, it is true, Currer Bell's repudiation of identity with Ellis. But he clearly felt that Ellis's work was a thing apart. He hinted, indeed, that Wuthering Heights was an earlier work by the author of Jane Eyre, but he evidently had grave doubts concerning his own suggestion. To decide on the merits of a book of prose is, he urged, very much a matter of time. Does it remain in our memories? Do those who come after us find it equally unforgettable ? Sydney Dobell quoted certain passages when he wrote of Wuthering Heights to demonstrate his point that when one had once read some of its de- scriptions one never forgot them. He selected for example that amazing account of Lockwood's dis- turbed night, the child's face at the window : — " Terror made me curse; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and WUTHERING HEIGHTS 121 fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed- clothes : still it wailed * Let me In ! ' and maintained its tenacious grip, almost maddening me with fear." This and the description of Heathcliff's anguish when Lockwood tells him of his nightmare are In- stanced by Dobell as unforgettable passages, and time has proved that his Instinct was sound. Writ- ing later concerning this review which concerned Itself with Jane Eyre as well, Charlotte Bronte said to Miss Martineau: — " One passage In It touched a deep chord. I mean when allusion is made to my sister Emily's novel Wuthering Heights; the justice there ren- dered comes Indeed late, the wreath awarded drops In a grave, but no matter — I am grateful." Yet, when all Is said It Is Charlotte Bronte's own tribute to her sister's novel that is the best of all : — " Wuthering Heights was hewn In a wild work- shop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a 122 CHARLOTTE BRONTE form moulded with at least one element of grand- eur — power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour the crag took human shape ; and there it stands colossal, dark and frowning, half-statue, half-rock; in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant's foot." ^ ^ ^ :i: ^ ^ The silent and perhaps rather grim Emily took no part in the Sunday School and social work at Haworth that occupied her two sisters ; she shrank away with her dogs from all human companionship whenever possible, roaming over those moors which brought her the only happiness and joy that she ever knew. She made no friends at Brussels, no single " comrade '' at Miss Wooler's school. When she died — before her thirtieth birthday — she was as isolated from all companionship but that of her sister Anne as she had been twenty years before. WUTHERING HEIGHTS 123 Not one scrap of self-revelation did Emily leave behind, two colourless letters to a friend of Char- lotte's being well nigh the only memorials in her handwriting that have been preserved.^ Her book also reveals nothing. Anne's novels were trans- parent transcripts from her narrow life. Charlotte transferred every incident of her experience into her books. Emily was never more aloof than in her great novel. It is dramatic, it is vivid and pas- sionate, but it is never self-revealing. Emily learned German when in Brussels, and must have read the weird tales of Hoffman ; she had, it may be, heard her father tell stories from Irish tradition as Dr. Wright and Miss Mary Robinson both as- sert. She had nearer home not only her own broth- er's miserable story with its mock heroics, but many other uncanny traditions of a kind to which York- shire is certainly as prone as County Down. Did she use any of these things? No one can say. All speculation as to sources of inspiration is far beside the mark in appraising Emily Bronte's gen- 1 These are apparently lost. The letters were given by Ellen Nussey to the late Lord Houghton, but have never been seen by his son the present Earl of Crewe. 124 CHARLOTTE BRONTE ius, Wuthering Heights is a book by Itself, with less indebtedness to earlier literature than most great novels. In my judgment it is the greatest book ever written by a woman. Those who have read it again and again and have found that It gripped them more forcibly at each succeeding reading have put it to a test indeed. Quotation from the book conveys little Idea of its sustained power, although to quote such a passage as the one where Catherine Linton Is in the Incoherencies of her deathbed Is to recall sentences that stand out boldly In the records of English fiction : — *' ' That's a turkey's,' she murmured to herself, * and this is a wild duck's, and this is a pigeon's. Ah, they put pigeons' feathers In the pillows — no wonder I couldn't die ! Let me take care to throw It on the floor when I lie down. And here Is a moorcock's; and this — I should know It among a thousand — It's a lapwing's. Bonny bird, wheeling over our heads In the middle of the moor. It wanted to get to Its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells, and It felt rain coming. This feather was picked up from the heath, the bird was not WUTHERING HEIGHTS 125 shot; we saw Its nest In the winter, full of little skeletons. Heathcllff set a trap over It, and the old ones dare not come. I made him promise he'd never shoot a lapwing after that, and he didn't. Yes, here are more! Did he shoot my lapwings, Nelly ? Are they red, any of them ? Let me look.' 3|C «|C 9|C 5)C 3|C S|C " * I see In you, Nelly,' she continued dreamily, * an aged woman ; you have grey hair and bent shoulders. This bed Is the fairy cave under Penis- ton Crag, and you are gathering elf-bolts to hurt our heifers; pretending while I am near that they are only locks of wool. That's what you'll come to fifty years hence; I know you are not so now. I'm not wandering; you're mistaken, or else I should believe you really were that withered hag, and I should think I was under Penlston Crag; and I'm conscious it's night, and there are two candles on the table making the black press shine like jet.' Hj * * * * * " * One time, however, we were near quarrel- ling. He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening 126 CHARLOTTE BRONTE on a bank of heath In the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up over head, and the blue sky, and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly. That was his most perfect idea of heaven's happiness — mine was rocking in a rustling green tree, with a west wind blowing, and bright, white clouds flitting rapidly above; and not only larks, but throstles, and blackbirds, and linnets, and cuckoos pouring out music on every side, and the moors seen at a distance, broken into cool dusky dells; but close by great swells of long grass undulating in waves to the breeze ; and woods and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy. He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee.' " These passages and many like them may be read again and again, but indeed I know of no novel that may be read repeatedly with more satisfaction. The whole group of tragic figures pass before us, and we are moved as In the presence of great trag- edy. Emily Bronte was quite a young woman WUTHERING HEIGHTS 127 when she wrote this book. One almost feels that it was necessary that she should die. Any further work from her pen must almost have been in the nature of an anteclimax. It were better that Wuthering Heights should stand, as does its au- thor, in splendid isolation. Let us picture for a moment, as well as we are able, the author of this remarkable novel. We meet her as a child of five at the Clergy Daughters' School at Casterton, where attached to her name inscribed in the books we are told that she " reads very prettily "; after that her home was all in all to her for many years, with a brief interval of three unhappy months at Miss Wooler's school. Then came certain miserable months as a govern- ess at Law Hill, near Halifax,^ and a happier in- ^ Charlotte writes from Dewsbury Moor (October 2, 1836) : — "My sister Emily is gone into a situation as teacher in a large school of near forty pupils, near Halifax. I have had one letter from her since her departure — it gives an appalling ac- count of her duties. Hard labour from six in the morning until near eleven at night, with only one half-hour of exercise be- tween. This is slavery. I fear she will never stand it." — Mrs. Gaskell's Life. 128 CHARLOTTE BRONTE terval of a year in Brussels. Very scanty, indeed, is the record of these episodes. Only when her sis- ters had persuaded her to face the world in print does the picture become clearer. Take for ex- ample the following from a letter of Charlotte's to Mr. Williams : — " I should much — very much — like to take that quiet view of the ' great world ' you allude to, but I have as yet won no right to give myself such a treat: it must be for some future day — when, I don't know. Ellis, I imagine, would soon turn aside from the spectacle in disgust. I do not think he admits it as his creed that ' the proper study of mankind is man ' — at least not the artificial man of cities. In some points I consider Ellis somewhat of a theorist: now and then he broaches ideas which strike my sense as much more daring and original than practical; his reason may be in ad- vance of mine, but certainly it often travels a dif- ferent road. I should say EUis will not be seen in his full strength till he is seen as an essayist." And this sadder passage from a letter to Miss Ellen Nussey: — WUTHERING HEIGHTS 129 " I feel much more uneasy about my sisters than myself just now. Emily's cold and cough are very obstinate. I fear she has pain In the chest, and I sometimes catch a shortness In her breathing, when she has moved at all quickly. She looks very, very thin and pale. Her reserved nature occasions me great uneasiness of mind. It Is useless to question her — you get no answers. It Is still more useless to recommend remedies — they are never adopted.'' And again to Mr. Williams : — " I would fain hope that Emily Is a little better this evening, but It Is difficult to ascertain this. She Is a real stoic In Illness : she neither seeks nor will accept sympathy. To put any questions, to offer any aid. Is to annoy ; she will not yield a step before pain or sickness till forced; not one of her ordi- nary avocations will she voluntarily renounce. You must look on and see her do what she Is unfit to do, and not dare to say a word — a painful necessity for those to whom her health and existence are as precious as the life In their veins. When she is ill there seems to be no sunshine in the world for me. The tie of sister is near and dear indeed, and I I30 CHARLOTTE BRONTE think a certain harshness in her powerful and pe- culiar character only makes me cling to her more. But this is all family egotism (so to speak) — ex- cuse it, and, above all, never allude to it, or to the name Emily, when you write to me. I do not al- ways show your letters, but I never withhold them when they are inquired after." ^ Then we have the remarkable passage in a fur- ther letter to Mr. Williams : — " The North American Review is worth read- ing; there is no mincing the matter there. What a bad set the Bells must be ! What appalling books they write! To-day, as Emily appeared a little easier, I thought the Review would amuse her, so I read it aloud to her and Anne. As I sat between them at our quiet but now somewhat melancholy fireside, I studied the two ferocious authors. Ellis, the * man of uncommon talents, but dogged, bru- tal, and morose,' sat leaning back in his easy chair drawing his impeded breath as he best could, and looking, alas ! piteously pale and wasted ; it is not his wont to laugh, but he smiled half-amused 1 Charlotte Bronte and her Circle. WUTHERING HEIGHTS 131 and half In scorn as he listened. Acton was sew- ing, no emotion ever stirs him to loquacity, so he only smiled too, dropping at the same time a single word of calm amazement to hear his character so darkly portrayed. I wonder what the reviewer would have thought of his own sagacity could he have beheld the pair as I did. Vainly, too, might he have looked round for the masculine partner In the firm of ' Bell & Co.' How I laugh In my sleeve when I read the solemn assertions that Jane Eyre was written In partnership, and that It ' bears the marks of more than one mind and one sex.' " The wise critics would certainly sink a degree in their own estimation If they knew that yours or Mr. Smith's was the first masculine hand that touched the MS. of Jane Eyre, and that till you or he read It no masculine eye had scanned a line of its contents, no masculine ear heard a phrase from its pages. However, the view they take of the matter rather pleases me than otherwise. If they like, I am not unwilling they should think a dozen ladles and gentlemen aided at the compilation of the book. Strange patchwork it must seem to them 132 CHARLOTTE BRONTE — this chapter being penned by Mr., and that by Miss or Mrs. Bell; that character or scene being delineated by the husband, that other by the wife ! The gentleman, of course, doing the rough work, the lady getting up the finer parts. I admire the idea vastly." And the final scene in a letter written December 25, 1848. Emily having died on the 19th: — *' Emily is nowhere here now, her wasted mor- tal remains are taken out of the house. We have laid her cherished head under the church aisle be- side my mother's, my two sisters' — dead long ago — and my poor, hapless brother's. But a small remnant of the race is left — so my poor father thinks. " Well, the loss Is ours, not hers, and some sad comfort I take, as I hear the wind blow and feel the cutting keenness of the frost, in knowing that the elements bring her no more suffering ; their se- verity cannot reach her grave ; her fever is quieted, her restlessness soothed, her deep, hollow cough is hushed for ever ; we do not hear it in the night nor listen for it in the morning; we have not the con- WUTHERING HEIGHTS 133 flict of the strangely strong spirit and the fragile frame before us — relentless conflict — once seen, never to be forgotten. A dreary calm reigns round us, in the midst of which we seek resignation. " I will not now ask why Emily was torn from us in the fullness of our attachment, rooted up in the prime of her own days, in the promise of her powers; why her existence now lies like a field of green corn trodden down, like a tree in full bearing struck at the root. I will only say, sweet is rest after labour and calm after tempest, and repeat again and again that Emily knows that now." ^ To add anything to these words of Charlotte Bronte's would be little less than sacrilege. Emily died young, but she left behind her some imperish- able poems and an equally Imperishable novel, of which Mr. Swinburne has written: " It may be true that not many will ever take it to their hearts ; it is certain that those who do like it will like nothing very much better in the whole world of poetry or prose." 1 Letter to Mr. W. S. Williams in Charlotte Bronte and her Circle. CHAPTER XII ANNE BRONTE Those who write or talk as If books live only by their intrinsic merits, ignore the fact that a very slight accident may often cause the survival of a work of very moderate power. There cannot be a doubt, for example, but that the novels of Anne Bronte would scarcely have maintained their place had their author been an isolated writer unsupport- ed by the environment that Mrs. Gaskell's biogra- phy has made familiar to us all. Such books as Jane Eyre and Villette, Shirley and Wuthering Heights must in any case have been certain of a permanent place in literature, but Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wild fell Hall would almost undoubtedly have died. There seems, If we examine them carefully, less reason for their survival than for the works of Mrs. Marsh and Miss Kavanagh, books that had a very 134 ANNE BRONTE 135 great vogue In the '' forties " and " fifties." Let us grant then that Anne Bronte's stories are not great books ; they nevertheless attract us by virtue of their autobiographical character, and they make pleasant unpretentious reading even to-day. Agnes Grey, the first of them, was, as we have seen, bound up with JVuthering Heights, and such Is the frequent futility of contemporary criticism that It is not surprising that many reviewers found it pref- erable to the titanic story that accompanied it. The Tenant of Wild fell Hall had indeed one very frank critic who loved Its author. It was pro- nounced " scarcely worth republication " by Anne's devoted sister Charlotte when she wrote a preface to a new edition of It. Yet such Is the " glamour " of the Brontes, that edition after edition of the book has been issued and sold In our time, the ex- haustion of the copyright forty-two years after first publication having given occasion for at least four or five new Issues by separate publishers. Here then It Is clearly imperative to recognize the po- tency of the personal element In literature. Both the novels of Anne Bronte are transcripts 136 CHARLOTTE BRONTE of the life she knew and little more. This is the factor that differentiates the man or woman of genius from the merely average writer. Anne was not capable of transmuting experience through that wonderful crucible that produces the highest truth of literature, that subtle presentation which carries conviction to our souls and makes us say — here is great art. She had no genius, no passion. The photographic quality that she possessed has, however, its value. We go to Anne Bronte more readily than to Charlotte and Emily for a picture of what life was Hke for a nursery governess in the " forties," and we find her pictures in Agnes Grey thoroughly interesting in consequence; we may go to her also for a very clear impression of the family circle at Haworth, and of the life she saw and heard of outside the rectory walls, when we read The Tenant of JVildfell Hall If there is little imagination, there is at least a clear narrative of her brother's escapades as far as she had compre- hended them, adding thereto, as she doubtless did, sundry episodes in the lives of others that scandal had conveyed to her. ANNE BRONTE 137 But it Is scarcely necessary to take the novels of Anne Bronte too seriously, even were criticism the province of this little biography, which it is not. It suffices that she was a softening, benign atmos- phere In a house where father, aunt and elder sis- ters, whatever their other fine qualities, would seem to have lacked softness and benignity. The father was ever an egoist, the aunt the embodiment of kindness, but severe, Charlotte, as we know, was strenuous, and Emily profoundly melancholy. But Mr. NIcholls, writing fifty years after her death, recalled the '' gentle " Anne; and that influence of gentleness must have run like a silken cord through the somewhat tumultuous lives of the two clever sisters, both of whom had hearts ever aflame, im- aginations ever alert for action outside the narrow walls of that simple prosaic home. Emily, we are told, was inseparable from Anne in the years during which the elder sister Charlotte seemed to lean upon some friend from the outer world — Ellen Nussey, Mary Taylor, or Laetltia Wheelwright. Charlotte had a gift for friendship which stood her in good stead when she found her- ijS CHARLOTTE BRONTE self alone in the world. Her sisters had not this gift, and were thrown back upon one another's company. Anne Bronte, as we have seen, was carried as a baby from Thornton to Haworth while her moth- er's life was ebbing away. Perhaps this was why she was her aunt's favourite, always by her side in her earliest years. Later she and Emily were in- separable. We know next to nothing of Anne's experiences as governess, first with Mrs. Ingram of Blake Hall, and next with Mrs. Robinson at Thorpe Green. Indeed it is only from Charlotte's letters that we learn anything of material impor- tance concerning Anne, although Miss Nussey writes of the youngest sister as so much the " pret- tiest " of the three, with " light brown hair, violet blue eyes and pencilled eyebrows, and an almost transparent complexion." One would have liked to have heard Anne's version of that sordid drama at Thorpe Green, where Branwell was, or professed to be, carrying on a flirtation with the mistress of the house. Anne must have seen something to vex her innocent soul, or she would on her ANNE BRONTE 139 return to Haworth have insisted that Branwell's " love story " was purely imaginary. It was the attitude of Anne on this subject that persuaded Mr. Nicholls, with whom I discussed the question, that Branwell was not entirely to blame, that there had at least been some indiscreet flirtation, calcu- lated to disarrange further an already ill-balanced mind. Writing in her diary in July, 1845, Anne says, recalling what she had written four years earlier : — " How many things have happened since it was written — some pleasant, some far otherwise. Yet I was then at Thorpe Green, and now I am only just escaped from it. I was wishing to leave it then, and if I had known that I had four years longer to stay how wretched I should have been; but during my stay I have had some very unpleas- ant and undreamt-of experience of human nature. Others have seen more changes. Charlotte has left Mr. White's and been twice to Brussels, where she stayed each time nearly a year. Emily has been there too, and stayed nearly a year. Branwell has I40 CHARLOTTE BRONTE left Luddendenfoot, and been a tutor at Thorpe Green, and had much tribulation and ill health. He was very ill on Thursday, but he went with John Brown to Liverpool, where he now is, I sup- pose ; and we hope he will be better and do better in future. This is a dismal, cloudy, wet even- ing. We have had so far a very cold wet summer. Charlotte has lately been to Hathersage, in Derby- shire, on a visit of three weeks to Ellen Nussey. She is now sitting sewing in the dining-room. Emily is ironing upstairs. I am sitting in the din- ing-room in the rocking-chair before 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. Lit- tle Dick is hopping in his cage. When the last pa- per was written we were thinking of setting up a school. The scheme has been dropped, and long after taken up again and dropped again because we could not get pupils. Charlotte is thinking about getting another situation. She wishes to go to Paris. Will she go ? She has let Flossy in, by-the- by, and she is now lying on the sofa. Emily is en- ANNE BRONTE 141 gaged In writing the Emperor Julius's life. She has read some of It, and I want very much to hear the rest. She Is writing some poetry, too. I won- der what It Is about? I have begun the third volume of Passages in the Life of an Individual. I wish I had finished It. This afternoon I began to set about making my grey figured silk frock that was dyed at Kelghley. What sort of a hand shall I make of it?"^ This Is but a fragment of the published diary, but It contains many points of Interest. The " very unpleasant and undreamt-of experience of human nature " must have referred to the trouble between her brother and the mother of her pupils. The speculation as to Charlotte's going to Paris Is note- worthy. Instead of that, Charlotte and her sisters published poems and novels, with the result that we all know. The Poems appeared the following year, Jane Eyre in October, 1847, ^^^ Agnes Grey in December. The two editions of The Tenant of JVildfell Hall appeared In 1848, the year that Branwell and Emily died, and Anne followed her ^ Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle. 142 CHARLOTTE BRONTE brother and sister in 1849. As we have traced Emily's pathway to the grave, so we may trace Anne's In her sister's melancholy letters : — " Anne and I sit alone and in seclusion as you fancy us, but we do not study. Anne cannot study now, she can scarcely read; she occupies Emily's chair ; she does not get well. A week ago we sent for a medical man of skill and experience from Leeds to see her. He examined her with the steth- oscope. His report I forbear to dwell on for the present — even skilful physicians have often been mistaken in their conjectures. *' My first Impulse was to hasten her away to a warmer climate, but this was forbidden : she must not travel; she is not to stir from the house this winter ; the temperature of her room is to be kept constantly equal. " When we lost Emily I thought we had drained the very dregs of our cup of trial, but now when I hear Anne cough as Emily coughed, I tremble lest there should be exquisite bitterness yet to taste. However, I must not look forwards, nor must I look backwards. Too often I feel like one cross- ANNE BRONTE 143 ing an abyss on a narrow plank — a glance round might quite unnerve. " Anne is very patient In her illness, as patient as Emily was unflinching. I recall one sister and look at the other with a sort of reverence as well as affection — under the test of suffering — neither has faltered. " Anne continues a little better — the mild weather suits her. At times I hear the renewal of hope's whisper, but I dare not listen too fondly; she deceived me cruelly before. A sudden change to cold would be the test. I dread such change, but must not anticipate. Spring lies before us, and then summer — surely we may hope a little ! '' But hope was slight Indeed, as a letter to Ellen Nussey, describing a projected visit to Scarbor- ough, indicated. Anne had been to Scarborough three or four times during her governess days, and wished to see the place again. After stating that they had secured rooms on the cliffs with a sea view, she continues : — " If Anne Is to get any good she must have every advantage. Miss Outhwaite, her godmoth- 144 CHARLOTTE BRONTE er, left her in her will a legacy of £200, and she cannot employ her money better than in obtaining what may prolong existence, if it does not restore health. We hope to leave home on the 23rd, and I think it will be advisable to rest at York, and stay all night there. I hope this arrangement will suit you. We reckon on your society, dear Ellen, as a real privilege and pleasure. We shall take little luggage, and shall have to buy bonnets and dresses and several other things either at York or Scar- boro'; which place do you think would be best? Oh, if it would please God to strengthen and revive Anne, how happy we might be together ! His will, however, must be done, and if she is not to recover, it remains to pray for strength and patience." Then we have a letter from Scarborough to Mr. Smith Williams : — '* I am thankful to say we reached our destina- tion safely, having rested one night at York. We found assistance wherever we needed it ; there was always an arm ready to do for my sister what I was not quite strong enough to do : lift her in and out of the carriage, carry her across the line, etc. ANNE BRONTE 145 " It made her happy to see both York and its Minster, and Scarboro' and its bay once more. There is yet no revival of bodily strength — I fear indeed the slow ebb continues. People who see her tell me I must not expect her to last long — ^but it is something to cheer her mind. " Our lodgings are pleasant. As Anne sits at the window she can look down on the sea, which this morning is calm as glass. She says if she could breathe more freely she would be comfortable at this moment — but she cannot breathe freely. " My friend Ellen is with us. I find her pres- ence a solace. She is a calm, steady girl — not bril- liant, but good and true. She suits and has always suited me well. I like her, with her phlegm, re- pose, sense, and sincerity, better than I should like the most talented without these qualifications.'' And then the scene closes with this last little note, written to her friend Mr. Williams : — " My dear Sir, — My poor sister is taken quiet- ly home at last. She died on Monday. With al- most her last breath she said she was happy, and 146 CHARLOTTE BRONTE thanked God that death was come, and come so gently. I did not think it would be so soon." Anne Bronte is buried in Scarborough Church- yard, where the inscription on her tomb runs as follows : — " Here lie the remains of Anne Bronte, daugh- ter of the Rev. P. Bronte, Incumbent of Haworth, Yorkshire. She died, aged 28, May 28th, 1849." She also left behind her some " last verses," which have found their way into the hymnologies of many of the Churches : — I hoped that with the brave and strong My portioned task may lie, To toil amid the busy throng With purpose pure and high. CHAPTER XIII JANE EYRE Charlotte Bronte was thirty-one years and SIX months old when Jane Eyre was published. The passing of her first novel from publisher to pub- lisher has already been noted. In a fortunate hour the manuscript of The Professor fell into the hands of Mr. Smith Williams the " reader '' to Smith, Elder & Co. Mr. Williams, who was born in 1800 and died in 1875, possessed a genuine liter- ary faculty. He was the brother-in-law of Charles Wells, the author of Joseph and his Brethren, When Keats left England for an early grave in Rome it was Mr. Williams who saw him off. Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Thackeray and Ruskin val- ued highly his judgment. He compiled a volume of Selections from Mr. Ruskin's writings which Is still much prized by the curious. The publisher's " reader " or book-taster Is but human, and often 147 148 CHARLOTTE BRONTE makes mistakes. Certainly the five readers of the five publishing houses which sent back The Pro- fessor with curt refusals had reasons for regret- ting their mistake In this Instance — even from a merely commercial point of vlew,^ and perhaps more from the point of view of glory. Mr. Williams recognized the undoubted ability of The Professor^ but those were the days when the three-volumed novel was a fetish. We have seen the way in which Mr. Newby bound up Wuth- ering Heights and Agnes Grey In order to make them look like a single three-volumed book. By no possibility could The Professor have been made to stretch to more than two volumes. Besides this, although Mr. Williams liked It another Influential member of the staff, Mr. James Taylor, did not, and after both had reported to their " chief," ^ The total sum paid for the entire copyright of Charlotte Bronte's four novels was £i,ys^ — £5^'^ ^^ch for Jane Eyre, Shirley and Fillettey and ;^25o for The Professor. In the year i860 — twelve years after the publication of Jane Eyre — the ; publishers admitted to having made a clear profit of ;^io,ooo.| Mr. George Smith was once oflFered ^^500 for the manuscript | of Jane Eyre. JANE EYRE 149 Mr. George Smith, the letter went forth from the office In Cornhill which was to bring yet another refusal to the mysterious but ever persevering Mr. Currer Bell at Haworth. But Currer Bell after- wards declared In print that this refusal was " couched In language so delicate, reasonable and courteous, as to be more cheering than some ac- ceptances." It assigned a lack of varied interest in the tale as well as the length as the cause of rejec- tion, therefore Currer Bell replied that he had nearly completed a novel In three volumes, and this Mr. Williams asked to see. On August 24, 1847, the manuscript of Jane Eyre was sent to Cornhill, and then there was no hesitation. The author was reading proof sheets during September, and In the middle of October the book was published. The critics were enthu- siastic, the public more so. " The most extraordi- 1 nary production that has issued from the press for years," said the Weekly Chronicle, " Decidedly the best novel of the season," said the Westminster Review. In looking through these old reviews one is struck by their judgment and insight. If I50 CHARLOTTE BRONTE there was good creative work produced in the " for- ties " and " fifties/' there was also good criticism. Miss Bronte enjoyed to the full the burst of sympathetic and appreciative criticism that came to her. Perhaps the critique that delighted her most was one by Eugene Forcade in the Revue des Deux Mondes, the one that gave her actual and indeed deep-rooted pain the article by Miss Rigby in the Quarterly Review, " The subtle-thoughted, keen- eyed, quick-feeling Frenchman " is her judgment of Forcade, and his notice of Jane Eyre is " the most acceptable to the author of any that has yet appeared." ^ As for the review of Jane Eyre in the Quarterly, it is not too much to say that it al- most made Charlotte Bronte repent its authorship. Yet Miss Rigby wrote with no desire to be other than fair. She was a staunch Conservative, and the book seemed to her to be wildly Radical. She believed the author to be a man — as her editor did ^ — for in her world no woman was so ignorant ^ Letter to W. S. Williams, November i6, 1848. 2 Lockhart, her editor, writes as follows to his contributor, Miss Rigby, after he had received the first part of her review: — "I know nothing of the writers, but the common rumour is that JANE EYRE 151 of the daintier aspects of life : the fitting garment for this or that occasion, the delicacies of refined cookery! How could Miss Rigby have guessed that it was the timid, sensitive daughter of a coun- try clergyman, herself a warm adherent of Church and State, who had written this extraordinary book ! The author she thought was clearly a man, and if it had been a man the sentence that so pained Miss Bronte — the suggestion that if the author were a woman it must be one " who had forfeited the society of her sex " — would have fallen harm- less. The sentence was not more cruelly personal than every author was liable to suffer from in those days. A certain great historian did not, we may they are brothers of the weaving order in some Lancashire town. At first it was generally said Currer was a lady, and Mayfair circumstantializes by making her the chere amie of Mr. Thack- eray. But your skill in "dress" settles the question of sex. I think, however, some women must have assisted in the school scenes oijane Eyre, which have a striking air of truthfulness to me. I should say you might as well glance at the novels by Acton and Ellis 'QtW—Wuthering Heights is one of them. If you have any friend about Manchester, it would, I suppose, be easy to learn accurately as to the position of these men." — Jour- nals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, edited by her nephew, Charles Eastlake Smith, 1895. 152 CHARLOTTE BRONTE be sure, enjoy being called " Mr. Babbletongue Macaulay " by The Times. In any case, many compensations for a young writer might have been found in the Quarterly article had not the author criticized been the sensitive Charlotte Bronte. The '' equal popularity " of Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair is referred to, and the reviewer admits that the book is " remarkable." It is true that she adds that *' we have no remembrance of another con- taining such undoubted power with such horrid taste." Certainly judged by the standards — the Conservative standards — of those days, when the majority of well-nurtured women were brought up on strictly conventional lines, the taste of the book was bound to be called in question, and the critic who did so was not necessarily a " nauseous hypo- crite," as Mr. Augustine Birrell rather extrava- gantly calls her. A generation that has been brought up upon " sex " novels has other stand- ards of taste. It was its very unconventionality which made the book so popular sixty years since. What is it that makes the book's appeal to us to-day ? JANE EYRE 153 To those who take no account of the qualities of style, imagination and " point of view " in litera- ture, Jane Eyre would now make no appeal. To such, Hamlet would make no appeal. Is not the whole story of the murdered king, the son who feigns madness to revenge his father's murder, all set down for us in Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish chronicler? In the actual incidents, in the plot of Jane Eyre there is but little originality. It is called " an autobiography," and in one sense it is, as are all Miss Bronte's books, a very detailed au- tobiography of the writer — of her reading life as well as of her actual life. The period during which Jane Eyre was at Lowood School was but a reflection of Charlotte Bronte's actual expe- riences at Cowan Bridge, at any rate of her idea of the school as it came back to her after an in- terval of more than twenty years. It is quite clear that her wonderful memory enabled her to reproduce much of that child life of hers, in a manner for the accuracy of which credit has scarcely been given until quite recently. A student of the Bronte story, Mr. Angus Mackay, 154 CHARLOTTE BRONTE has however unearthed some of the actual literary efforts of the Reverend Carus Wilson, the proto- type of Mr. Brocklehurst.^ This critic has been studying the writings of Mr. Wilson, particularly certain books for the young by him, which Char- lotte Bronte could never have seen. There was one called Youthful Memoirs ^ published in 1828, full of deathbed scenes of little children, all of whom were made to be singularly in love with death. One little boy of three or four years of age, for example, when asked whether he would choose death or life, replied, " Death for me. I am fonder of death." Mr. Brocklehurst says to Jane Eyre, " Children younger than you die daily. / I burled a little child five years old only a day or [ two since, a good little child, whose soul is now in Heaven." Mr. Wilson's Youthful Memoirs is full of the deathbeds of these good little chil- dren. He says to Jane Eyre, " You have a wicked heart, and you must pray God to change it, to give you a new and clean heart, to take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." 1 Mr. J. Angus Mackay, in the Bookman, JANE EYRE 155 Almost these exact words occur in three of the stories ; one of the little girls here says to a naughty companion that " she must humble her pride and pray to God, and He would be sure to take away her heart of stone and give her a heart of flesh." Mr. Brocklehurst says, " I have a little boy younger than you who knows six psalms by heart." There are a number of such little boys in Youth- ful Memoirs. At the close of the interview with Jane Eyre, Mr. Brocklehurst gives her a tract entitled "The Child's Guide; containing an ac- count of the awfully sudden Death of Martha G., a naughty child addicted to falsehood." One of Mr. Wilson's little stories is actually entitled An Awful History, Altogether, the student of this unsavoury literature, Mr. Angus Mackay, has proved up to the hilt, long after the con- troversy is dead and buried, that Miss Bronte's description of the mental attitude of Mr. Ca- rus Wilson was substantially accurate, however much she may have exaggerated the demerits of the place itself; and in spite of the fact that the original of the heroic Miss Temple, a Mrs. 156 CHARLOTTE BRONTE Harben, would seem to have repudiated the de- scription altogether. It was the same with Miss Bronte's governess life, a hundred disagreeable incidents of which are reflected in Jane Eyre's experiences of Mrs. Reed. We know that a youthful Sidgwick threw a Bible at Miss Bronte on one occasion, as John Reed threw a copy of Bewick's Birds at Jane Eyre. It is little to the point that Mrs. Sidgwick may have been one of the kindest and best of women. Miss Bronte found her insufferable. Well-nigh every place and every person in the history of Jane Eyre has been identified with a prototype in the life story of Charlotte Bronte. In her letters Miss Bronte writes of the dark face, the sardonic hu- mour, the masterful manner of M. Paul Heger; in her book she attributes these qualities to Fairfax Rochester. The author spends three weeks at Hathersage In Derbyshire, and to that neighbour- hood she turns for much of the scenery of her novel. Morton, in Jane Eyre, Is easily identified with Hathersage; the one is ten miles from " S ," the other twenty miles from Sheffield. JANE EYRE 157 All the villagers are engaged In the manufacture of needles, as are those of Hathersage to-day. Thornfield Hall, the seat of Mr. Rochester, has been easily Identified with Norton Conyers near Ripon, which was In Miss Bronte's day the seat of Mr. Greenwood, the father of Mrs. SIdgwIck. Miss Bronte visited the house when staying with her pupils at Swarcllffe, Mr. Greenwood's summer residence. Mr. Rochester's other house, where Jane Eyre found him In his blindness, Ferndean Manor, Is Wycollar Hall near Colne, a hall which Is now a ruin, but which has attached to It the story of a madwoman having set It on fire; and also the tradition that the original owner, Squire Cunllffe, had some of the traits associated with Rochester. Moor House, where the Rivers fam- ily lived, has been identified with Moor Seats near Hathersage; Gateshead Hall, where Mrs. Reed lived, has been Identified with Stonegappe near Skipton, where, as we have seen, Charlotte Bronte was governess to the SIdgwicks. So we might go on for every village and every house mentioned in the novel. As it is with place-names, so it is 158 CHARLOTTE BRONTE with persons. For the raw material of her book Miss Bronte went to material available to all the world. Some time ago there appeared in the Sat- urday Review a letter calling attention to a little book entitled Gleanings in Craven; or, The Tour- ists' Guide. In this book may be found the names of Sir Ingram Clifford, of Skipton Castle ; of Miss Richardson Currer, of Eshton Hall; and many other names and places familiar to every resident in the West Riding of Yorkshire. I do not for a moment doubt but that Miss Bronte had read this little guide-book, a very discursive and ineffective production, although for the name of Ingram she need not have gone further than to the family doctor to Haworth Parsonage, Dr. Ingram. To describe Gleanings in Craven as a " key " to Jane Eyre is, however, to ignore any number of other " keys " provided by the long years of apprentice- ship to novel-writing. I am not disinclined to think indeed that whereas she had often heard of Miss Currer, the name of Bell may really have been suggested to her by the little book on Craven, where there is a reference to " the celebrated JANE EYRE 159 lawyer and one of his late Majesty's Counsels, the late John Bell, Esqr." It has been stated that she took the name of Bell from the second name of Mr. Arthur Bell Nlcholls, who was afterwards to become her husband; but I have Mr. Nicholls's assurance that this was not the case. I have said that there are many " keys " to Jane Eyre. One may find, for example, in Defoe's Moll Flanders — a book which Miss Bronte had of course read — a parallel incident to that where Jane hears the voice of Rochester calling her, al- though he is many miles away. Moll calls in distress to Jemmy, her " Lanca- shire husband," and Jemmy hears the cry. Moll, it will be remembered, burst into a fit of crying, calling him by his name, " O Jemmy! come back, come back." The husband returned and told her that twelve miles off in Delamere Forest he had heard her calling to him aloud, and that he had heard her voice calling " O Jemmy! O Jemmy! come back, come back." This Is not the only point in common between Moll Flanders and Jajie Eyre^ be- cause Moll has a lover at Bath who has a " distem- i6o CHARLOTTE BRONTE pered," Insane wife, and begs Moll not to let that be a bar to a marriage ; a little later, she is wooed by a bank clerk whose wife is unfaithful, and this man begs Moll Flanders to marry him without waiting for his divorce. Such parallels have a certain literary interest, although they in no way reflect upon the essential originality of Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte's love of the preternatural would have induced her to remember that incident in Moll Flanders^ although Mrs. Gaskell records that Miss Bronte once referring to Jane hearing Rochester's voice from a distance of many miles, replied, ''But, it is a true thing; it really hap- pened! " Did she mean by that, that it happened in Defoe's apparently true narrative, or that it came within her experience? It is quite possible that it did come within her experience, and in any case she had probably forgotten her reading of Moll Flanders when she sat down to write Jane Eyre. Certainly she must have read from the Keighley Library A Sicilian Romance^ by Mrs. Radcliffe, where it will be remembered Count Mazzini shuts C4yA.. Ct^ ^ '■i <^» ...^ ^^^^ -C^ J M^ t--- .^i^LoT- >-tv/ - iHrs^ ^-L i?^. ifc A ..^^ yjii.^-^aa Mar ..:^:) The first page of the Manuscript of Jane Eyre The Manuscript is in the possession of the publishers. Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. Mr. George Smith refused ;C5oo for this MS., the actual sum pa id for the original novel I I JANE EYRE i6i up his wife in a castle for fifteen years, although the fact is unknown to the rest of the inhabitants, who periodically hear noises and see strange things. Miss Bronte refers to Ann Radcliffe in Shirley, where Rose Yorke may be found reading The Italian. In addition to these one acute critic ^ has found traces of Richardson's Pamela and Har- riet Martineau's Deerbrook. The real power of Jane Eyre is quite unaffected by such small points as these, or even the, to me, more interesting point as to the original of St. John Rivers, one of the most striking characters in the book. Mrs. Gaskell started the idea that Rivers was intended for Mr. Henry Nussey, a clergyman of the Church of England, who held the living of Hathersage for a time, and was the brother of Charlotte Bronte's great friend, Ellen Nussey. Mr. Nussey, we know, offered marriage to Charlotte Bronte, influenced it would seem more by a keen desire for a housekeeper who would look after the schools and attend to the coal and blanket funds, than from any deep-seated af- ^ Dr. Robertson Nicoll in his Introduction to Jane Eyre. 1 62 CHARLOTTE BRONTE fection; but there Is no real resemblance between Rivers and Mr. Nussey. I have had the advan- tage of reading a volume of Mr. Nussey's Diary and Sermons} Mr. Nussey has one point at least In common with Rivers, In that during his days at Cambridge he more than once records In his diary that he has heard Mr. Simeon preach; and Simeon was the great Evangelical light of that epoch. Mr. Nussey certainly did not lack for rigour, for even when an undergraduate he recalls with satis- faction, " This evening at a full meeting Mr. Heald exhorted from 2 Corinthians vl. 14, on the action of a member having married a worldly- minded man "; on another occasion, that " Stayed to supper; never asked to take family prayers nor to say grace. Much hurt that they did not see the propriety and feel the necessity of this line of conduct " ; and once more, Mr. Nussey writes in his diary: " Friday, 11 June, 1839. Obtained an advance of £1 from Mr. Wakeford, a farmer and ^ This volume is in MSS., and is in the possession of Mr. J. J. Stead, of Heckmondwike, York, to whose courtesy I am indebted for its perusal. JANE EYRE 163 coal-merchant In Earnley, with whom I spent the evening at his house. He unfortunately became offended at something Mr. Browne once uttered In the pulpit, and thereupon left the Church and joined the Dissenters at Chichester, where he still continues. There seem some good traits In the man, and I think he errs through Ignorance rather than wilfulness. May he be brought back again, wandering sheep ! " Side by side with such quota- tions as these we have Mr. Nussey's matter-of-fact attempts to get a wife. He first asked the daughter of his former vicar, Lutwigge, whom he characterizes as "a steady, intelligent, sensible and, I trust, good girl, named Mary " ; she refused him, and we have the following lines in his diary : *' On Tuesday last received a decisive reply from M. A. L.'s papa; a loss, but I trust a providential one. Believe not her will, but her father's. All right, but God knows best what is good for us, for His church, and for His own glory. Write to a Yorkshire friend, C. B." A little later on, March 8, 1839, we find the record — *' Received an unfavourable reply from ' C. B.' The will of i64 CHARLOTTE BRONTE the Lord be done." " C. B.," of course, is Char- lotte Bronte, and some might find satisfaction in the fact that the marriage which this matter-of- fact individual attained to a very few months later should have turned out unhappily. In Mr. Nussey, however, we have not in the least Char- lotte Bronte's creation, St. John Rivers. There are a few references to missionary work in Mr. Nussey's diary, but on the whole it is the diary of a dull, uninspired person, with not sufficient brains to be a high-souled fanatic; and it is a high-souled fanatic that Miss Bronte depicts in her book. That is why I am inclined to think that the real prototype of Rivers existed for her not in life but in literature; that she had read from the Keighley Library Sargent's Memoir of Henry MartyUy that devoted missionary from Cornwall, of whom her aunt must have constantly spoken to her, and her father also, for he was practically contemporaneous with him at St. John's College, Cambridge, a fact which probably led her to give Rivers his Christian name of St. John. It was Charles Simeon again, her father's favourite JANE EYRE 165 preacher, who led Martyn to become a missionary. Martyn, it will be remembered, translated the New Testament Into Hindustani. There are points also In the relations with Miss Lydia Grenfell, whom he had hoped to take back with him to India when he died of the plague, that unquestionably recall St. John Rivers. Martyn has been described by Sir James Stephen as " the one heroic name which adorns the Church of England from the days of Queen Elizabeth to our own." ^ ****** We may readily thrust aside, however, all these inquiries as to '' keys " to Jane Eyre^ and go to the real heart of the book, which is quite Indepen- dent of plot and of prototype. It is in reality as original a novel as was ever submitted to the judgment of the reading public. Here Indeed was a work of extraordinary power. In the first place, the writer had a style, a vigorous, forcible style; a style full of picturesque phraseology, character- ized by that intense sincerity which is ever one of ^ Curiously enough, Henry Martyn has been made the hero of a novel called Her Title of Honour y published in 1871 by Holm Lee. i66 CHARLOTTE BRONTE the greatest things In literature. No other poet has better described the impressions made upon his mind by the sky, the air, the sea. " Mistress of some of the most great and simple prose of all this century " is the criticism of a distinguished woman critic of our day upon the work.^ One might make an anthology of the fine passages from her four books, as for example : — " I looked at my love; it shivered in my heart like a suffering child in a cold cradle.'' :): 4: :f: H: ^ * " To see what a heavy lid day slowly lifted, what a wan glance she flung upon the hills, you would have thought the sun's fire quenched In last night's floods." '' Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work would he fold the wings whose waft was thunder, the tremor of whose plumes was storm." ****** " The night is not calm; the equinox still strug- gles in Its storms. The wild rains of the day are 1 Alice Meynell, in the Pall Mall Magazine, May 24, 1899. JANE EYRE 167 abated; the great single cloud disparts, and rolls away from Heaven, not passing and leaving a sea of sapphire, but tossing buoyant before a con- tinued, long-sounding, hIgh-rushIng moonlight tempest. . . . No Endymlon will watch for his goddess to-night : there are no flocks on the moun- But style alone does not add to the permanent forces of literature. It Is but that quality added to the passionate sincerity of the writer that will make each succeeding generation read Jane Eyre^ for here we have a book In which are crowded all the deepest experiences of the human soul, a frank courageous attitude upon life, and death, and duty. Charlotte Bronte had read multitudes of books, and she had been an observer of the hu- manity around her, In that little world of rough, rude men and commonplace women. To her had come dreams of a wider, freer life, of profound love, of heroic sacrifice. She had thought out all the possibilities of a great passion in which love 1 68 CHARLOTTE BRONTE was king. In her own life she was the most self- suppressed of human beings. She saw her debased brother and her much-loved sisters taken from her and buried within a stone's throw of the house which was her home. Yet she clung to that home, and to the father who had so peremptorily attempted to prevent her marriage: finally she married to re- tain to her father the occupancy of the melancholy house which she might reasonably have hated and desired to quit for ever. A dull, prosaic life she had mapped out for herself at the call of duty; but meanwhile her imagination ran riot, and love, passionate love, a reckless throwing off of con- ventions, was a part of her dreams, the imparting of which was to throw English society into a fever of interest. After the current novels of her day, Jane Eyre was a model of outspokenness, a veri- table volcano. No wonder Miss Rigby said hard things about it, things which caused critics who wrote a generation later to be indignant. But really the little Jane was upsetting the conventional standards of her day, by sitting on Rochester's knees. What would another Jane who wrote a JANE EYRE 169 generation earlier have said? The fair Elizabeth Bennet of Miss Austen's imagination could never have caught the wealthy Mr. Darcy by such means. But Charlotte Bronte had been fed on strong literary food. She had been allowed to *' browse " in a library pretty indiscriminately, a thing which did not often happen to young girls in the first half of last century. The books that she obtained from Keighley must have included the works of such essentially frank writers as Swift and Defoe. Then, again, in her own home there was doubtless not too much discrimination so far as the men were concerned as to the border- line. Her father was, after all, a peasant, and in the habit of calling a spade a spade. If we may judge from some of the letters unpublished and unpublishable of the brother, Branwell Bronte, we see also that his mind was of essentially coarse fibre. Altogether, it is not in the least difficult to comprehend that Miss Bronte was able to take the attitude she did, and to write with a frankness which was somewhat new in her day and gen- eration. As a matter of fact, the criticism of the lyo CHARLOTTE BRONTE Quarterly ^ was most to be regretted, In that it frightened her, and tended to make her conven- tional. The bad Influences of this criticism Is traceable In Shirley^ which would otherwise prob- ably have been a very much greater book than It actually Is. 1 The article is called Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, and Govern^ esses, and appeared in the Quarterly for December, 1848. CHAPTER XIV SHIRLEY In taking up a copy of Charlotte Bronte's Shirley we find ourselves in an atmosphere more easy of interpretation than that of any other book written by the three sisters. Birstall in Yorkshire, near Batley, is the real centre of the story; not very far away you may come to Oakwell Hall, the " Fieldhead " where Shirley lived, and within easy reach also the Red House at Gomersall, known in the book as " Briarmains," where the family of Yorke lived. The school teacher, Miss Wooler, as Mrs. Gaskell tells us in detail, was in the habit of relating her memories of the great mill riots at the beginning of the century. The attack on Hollow's Mill in the book is but a picturesque record of an actual event in April, 1812,^ when an ^ Her original idea was to call her story Hollow's Mill and not Shirley. 171 172 CHARLOTTE BRONTE assault by some hundreds of starving cloth- dressers, armed with pistols, hatchets and blud- geons, was made upon the factory of Mr. Cart- wright at Rawfolds, between Huddersfield and Leeds. Mr. Cartwright, like Mr. Moore, had foreign blood in his veins, dark eyes and com- plexion; and Mr. Cartwright's successful defence of his mill was but retold in picturesque form in Shirley. Then in Mr. Helstone we have the pro- totype of a Mr. Hammond Roberson of Heald's Hall, who built a handsome church at Liversedge — a fine old Tory who was intimate with Cart- wright, and armed himself and his household in his defence. It is he of whom it is told in Shirley that he put the sweetheart of one of his servants under the pump ; " Fanny '' is the servant in Shirley; it is " Betty " in Mrs. Gaskell's relation of the actual circumstance. Almost every inci- dent in the book, as for example the meeting of the rival Dissenting and Church of England schools in a narrow lane, has its counterpart in the tradition or the actual experiences of Charlotte Bronte's life in her Yorkshire home. SHIRLEY 173 Equally plain is the presentation of the vari- ous characters, not only of Matthew Helstone as we have seen, and Mr. Cartwright, but far more sharply defined are the three curates and the Yorke family. Mr. Donne, the curate of Whinbury, for example, has been easily identified as Mr. Grant of Oxenhope; Mr. Malone, the curate of Briar- field, as Mr. Smith of Haworth; while Mr. Sweet- ing, the curate of Nunnerley, was Mr. Bradley of Oakworth — the only one of the three who is still living.^ The interesting Mr. Yorke who lived ^ "The very curates, poor fellows! show no resentment," says Miss Bronte in one of her letters, "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 yes- terday 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 at least with him; but as yet nothingof the sort has occurred." Mr. Donne or Joseph Brett Grant was the master of the Grammar School at the time. He became curate and after- wards vicar of Oxenhope, where he died immensely esteemed a quarter of a century later. Peter Augustus Malone, who was James William Smith in real life, was for two years curate 174 CHARLOTTE BRONTE at Briarmalns was Mr. Joshua Taylor, and his daughters Mary Taylor and Martha Taylor, are presented respectively as Rose and Jessie Yorke. Mrs. Pryor is Miss Margaret Wooler. As for the heroine, Shirley, Mrs. Gaskell recalls a to Mr. Bronte at Haworth. He had graduated at Trinity Col- lege, Dublin, and after a two years' curacy at Haworth he be- came curate of the neighbouring parish of Keighley. In 1847, his family having suffered frightfully from the Irish famine, he determined to try and build up a home for them in America, and sailed for Canada. The last that was heard of him was from Minnesota, where he was cutting down trees for lumbermen; and he probably perished on his way to the goldfields of California.* David Sweeting, the third curate, was the Rev. James Ches- terton Bradley (who had been educated at Queen's College, Oxford), from the neighbouring parish of Oakworth, to which he had been curate since 1845. He went in 1847 to All Saints', Paddington; in 1856 he went to Corfe Castle, Dorset, and in 1863 he became rector of Sutton-under-Brayles, Warwickshire, a living which he held until 1904 when he retired; and is still living at an advanced age at Richmond, Surrey. Mr. Bradley has al- ways found great pleasure in recalling the fact that he was the prototype of Mr. Sweeting in Shirley^ although he declares that the meetings of the curates at each other's lodgings were exclu- sively for a series of two-hours readings of the Greek fathers, and not for the drunken orgies described in Shirley. * See A Well Known Character in Fiction^ the true story of Mr. Peter Malone in Shirley, by his nephew, Robert Keating Smith, in The Tatler, April 2, 1 902. SHIRLEY 175 conversation with Charlotte In which she stated that the character was meant for her sister Emlly.^ She said that the presentation of Shirley was an attempt to draw Emily, as she would have been if placed In circumstances of health and prosperity. As to Caroline Helstone, there Is some discrepancy as to the prototype. Miss Ellen Nussey believed herself to have been Intended for Caroline Hel- stone, while on the other hand Miss Bronte's hus- band declared that his wife had distinctly denied this to him. Miss Bronte in one of her letters, says : — '' I regret exceedingly that it is not in my power to give any assurance of the substantial existence of Miss Helstone. You must be satisfied If that young lady has furnished your mind with a pleas- ant idea; she is a native of Dreamland." We may fairly assume that there was some- thing of Ellen Nussey, something of Anne Bronte, a fragment of herself, and something also of dreamland in " Caroline." " You are not to sup- pose any of the characters in Shirley intended as ^ Li fey Haworth Edition, page 30. 176 CHARLOTTE BRONTE literal portraits," she writes to a friend. " It would not suit the rules of art, nor of my own feelings, to write in that style. We only suffer reality to suggest^ never to dictate. The heroines are abstractions, and the heroes also. Qualities I have seen, loved and admired are here and there put In as decorative gems, to be preserved in that setting . . . since you say you could recognize the originals of all except the heroines, pray whom did you suppose the two Moores to represent? " It is not easy to give an answer to that question as regards Robert Moore, although Mrs. Gaskell remarks that from the sons of the Taylor family she drew " all that there was of truth in the char- acter of the heroes of her first two works." ^ Robert Gerard Moore is obviously a very compos- ite character, but his brother Louis has clearly most of the characteristics of Monsieur Heger, who in- deed appears In each novel in succession. He is Professor Crimsworth, Fairfax Rochester, Louis Moore, and Paul Emanuel, under different con- ditions. The critics who have made much of the ^ Mrs. Gaskell's Life^ page 232, Haworth Edition. SHIRLEY 177 enthusiasm with which Charlotte Bronte regarded her Brussels master and friend, might well take note that in Shirley she not only attempted to de- pict what her sister Emily would have been had fortune endowed her with a good estate, but also permitted her fancy to conceive what could have taken place had M. Constantin Heger chanced to have been a tutor exiled from Belgium and placed by accident in the comfortable home of his re- markable pupil. M. Heger, we are told, admired Emily Bronte very much more than he did her sister, and rated her genius higher. The sugges- tion of the existence of a wild and undisciplined passion for M. Heger, which has been more than once hinted at, might be rejected by any thought- ful reader of Shirley, recognizing as he will that Monsieur Heger and his counterpart Louis Moore have as many points in common as have Emily Bronte and Shirley. Mrs. Humphry Ward has demurred to Moore as a poor effort of creation, and quotes Miss Bronte's own confession: — "When I write about women I am sure of my ground — in the other 178 CHARLOTTE BRONTE case, I am not so sure." Mr. Swinburne is equally contemptuous. Nevertheless the book only attains to real distinction when Louis Moore appears on the scene. The earlier half of it is too didactic, too much concerned with the author's crude theories of social life, and not very profound con- ceptions of the social problem, of the relation of capital to labour. Not until she resumes the story after the death of her two sisters, not In fact until we reach the chapter entitled " The Valley of the Shadow of Death," do we find the writer on firm ground. It Is well to get away from the somewhat cheap satire on the curates, from the tiresome and insipid Caroline, to the various episodes of Shir- ley's quaint courtship — the interesting facing of the problem of a man's attitude to the woman he loves when she has means and he has none. Shirley was written under painful circumstances. The first and second volumes were finished while her brother and two sisters were living, the third was begun and the book completed after all three were gone from her. The earlier volumes, writ- ten in the turmoil of hope deferred, of melancholy SHIRLEY 179 anticipation of the inevitable, show a great falling off from the power of Jane Eyre; but the last volume, written in the unutterable loneliness of bereavement, is quite masterly. " The two human beings who understood me, and whom I under- stood, are gone," she writes. Yet with the quiet fortitude that was ever her characteristic, she brought her task to a conclusion. The publishers in Cornhill were entirely satisfied, and the book was published in October, 1849. Again, as with Jane Eyre, the criticism that she most appreciated came from Eugene Forcade in the Revue des Deux Mondes. " With that man," she writes, " 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 of the mass of the London critics." At the end of November she paid her fourth visit to London — the first that had in it anything of a social char- acter. She was the guest of her publisher, Mr. George Smith, then a young bachelor living with his mother at Westbourne Place, Bishop's Road. Before leaving Haworth she had had a copy of i8o CHARLOTTE BRONTE her book sent to Harriet Martineau with the fol- lowing note enclosed: — " Currer Bell offers a copy of Shirley to Miss Martineau's acceptance, in acknowledgment of the pleasure and profit (sic) he had derived from her works. When C. B. first read Deerhrook he tasted a new and keen pleasure, and experienced a genuine benefit. In his mind Deerhrook ranks with the writings that have really done him good, added to his stock of ideas and rectified his views of hfe." 1 Miss Martineau replied, addressing her letter to " Currer Bell, Esq.," but beginning it " Dear Madam." On December 8 she received a letter signed " Currer Bell," saying that the writer was in town and desired to see her. Miss Martineau has left an amusing account of the interview, the arrival of a male visitor six feet high, whom some of her friends believed to be the new author, and finally the appearance of " Miss Bronte," whom the footman announced as " Miss Brogden." " I thought her the smallest creature I had ever seen, ^ Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, vol. 2. SHIRLEY i8i except at a fair," was Miss Martineau's first im- pression. Miss Bronte saw others of her literary idols, Thackeray in particular, to whom the second edition of Jane Eyre was dedicated, and with whom as " A Titan of mind " — she felt " fear- fully stupid." In John Forster, afterwards to be- come known to all as the biographer of Dickens, she discovered a *' loud swagger." The best ac- count of the visit is contained In a letter to her friend. Miss Wooler ^ : — " Ellen Nussey, it seems, told you I spent a fort- night In London last September; they wished me very much to stay a month, alleging that I should in that time be able to secure a complete circle of acquaintance, but I found a fortnight of such excitement quite enough. The whole day was usually spent in sightseeing, and often the evening was spent in society ; it was more than I could bear for a length of time. On one occasion I met a party of my critics — seven of them ; some of them had been very bitter foes in print, but they were 1 From Charlotte Bronte and Her Circley where the letter is wrongly dated. 182 CHARLOTTE BRONTE prodigiously civil face to face. These gentlemen seemed infinitely grander, more pompous, dashing, showy, than the few authors I saw. Mr. Thack- eray, for instance, is a man of quiet simple de- meanour; he is however looked upon with some awe and even distrust. His conversation is very peculiar, too perverse to be pleasant. It was pro- posed to me to see Charles Dickens, Lady Mor- gan, Mesdames Trollope, Gore, and some others, but I was aware these introductions would bring a degree of notoriety I was not disposed to en- counter; I declined, therefore, with thanks.'* Taking up the thread of her life once more at Haworth, Charlotte Bronte found the situation well nigh intolerable. Something of the mental anguish that she presents so powerfully as an epi- sode in the life of Lucy Snowe in Villette would seem to have visited her at this time, and she was not without her tribulations arising out of the at- titude of friends who had taken their cue from the Quarterly Review article, or similar pronounce- ments. There was her own kindly but strait-laced governess, for example : SHIRLEY 183 " I had a rather foolish letter from Miss Wooler the other day. Some things in It nettled me, especially an unnecessary, earnest assurance that, In spite of all I had done in the writing line, I still retained a place in her esteem. My answer took strong and high ground at once. I said I had been troubled by no doubts on the subject; that I neither did her nor myself the injustice to suppose there was anything in what I had written to incur the just forfeiture of esteem. I was aware, I intimated, that some persons thought proper to take exceptions at 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, whatever they might be by education and principle." The reviews of Shirley moreover were not all enthusiastic. Mr. George Henry Lewes, had a not too favourable word to say in the Edinburgh Review, which hurt her, and The Times review she described as " acrimonious." In a letter to Lewes she demanded to be judged as an author, 1 84 CHARLOTTE BRONTE not as a woman. However she was able about this time to escape from Haworth and to be the guest of Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth at Gaw- thorpe Hall, Lancashire. In June of this year (1850) she was again in London, and saw the Duke of Wellington, the hero of her girlhood, " a real grand old man," received a morning call from Thackeray — '' I was moved to speak to him of some of his shortcomings," and had an inter- view with Lewes, whose face reminded her of her sister Emily's and *' almost moved me to tears." This holiday began at the Smiths', and concluded at the Wheelwrights', her Brussels friends. Writing to a friend from Mrs. Smith's new house at Gloucester Terrace, Hyde Park, she says : — " Here I feel very comfortable. Mrs. Smith treats me with a serene, equable kindness which just suits me. Her son is, as before, genial and kindly. I have seen very few persons, and am not likely to see many, as the agreement was that I was to be very quiet. We have been to the Ex- hibition of the Royal Academy, to the Opera, and SHIRLEY 185 the Zoological Gardens. The weather Is splendid. I shall not stay longer than a fortnight In London. The feverlshness and exhaustion beset me some- what, but not quite so badly as before." During this stay In London she sat to George Richmond for the only portrait of her that has any real value or authenticity — a crayon drawing presented by Mr. George Smith to her father, and pronounced by Mr. Bronte to be " a correct like- ness " and *' a graphic representation." * Then followed a short trip to Scotland, Mr. George Smith and his sister being of the party. A few weeks at Brookroyd with her friend Miss Nussey and at Haworth, and she was again on her travels, this time to be the guest of Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth at his house, " The Briery," near Bowness. Here she met Mrs. Gaskell, thus forming one of the most momentous friendships in her destiny. *' I was truly glad of her com- ^ This portrait, which has been many times reproduced, occupied the position of honour in the parlour at Haworth until Mr. Bronte's death. It is now hanging in the drawing-room of Mr. NichoUs in his house in Ireland. He has kindly destined it for the National Portrait Gallery of London. 1 86 CHARLOTTE BRONTE panlonshlp. She is a woman of most genuine talent, of cheerful, pleasing and cordial manners, and I believe of a kind and good heart." ^ Miss Martineau was away at the time, but Miss Bronte promised her a visit which was paid in December of this same year, 1850. She was glad to escape from her own morbid moods, and was quite unable, as she says, " to bear the canker of constant solitude." In the interval, however, at Haworth, she busied herself by editing her sister*s Remains. The task laid a great strain upon her, " The reading over of papers, the renewal of re- membrances, brought back the pang of bereave- ^ To Mrs. Gaskell she wrote upon her return to Haworth a letter containing an interesting critique — Mr. Swinburne calls it "inept" — upon Tennyson's newly-published poem: — " I have read Tennyson's In Memoriamy or rather part of it; I closed the book when I got about half-way. It is beautiful; it is mournful; it is monotonous. Many of the feelings ex- pressed bear, in their utterance, the stamp of truth; yes, if Arthur Hallam had been something nearer Alfred Tennyson, his brother instead of his friend, I should have distrusted this rhymed, and measured, and printed monument of grief. What change the lapse of years may work, I do not know; but it seems to me that bitter sorrow, while recent, does not glow in verse." SHIRLEY 187 ment, and occasioned a depression of spirits well- nigh intolerable." The " Introduction " that she wrote to the second edition of Wuthering Heights is one of the most striking of her literary achieve- ments. This book was published on December 10, 1850, and a week later she was with Miss Mar- tineau at Ambleside. " She is both hard and warm-hearted, abrupt and affectionate, liberal and despotic " — such was Miss Bronte's sufficient estimate of her hostess. At Ambleside she met Matthew Arnold, " whose manner displeases from its seeming foppery," and whose theological opin- ions were, she regretted, " very vague and unset- tled." Miss Bronte did not live to read Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible, nor could she have anticipated that the finest recognition of her and her sisters that poetry had to offer would come from the foppish youth she then met for the first and only time. However she tells her friend Miss Wooler, who had an interest in Dr. Arnold, that during this visit she had seen much of the Arnold family, " and daily admired In the widow and children of one of the greatest and best men i88 CHARLOTTE BRONTE of his time, the possession of qualities the most estimable and enduring." At the end of May, 185 1, Miss Bronte is again in London — the time for her longest and most en- joyable visit — tempted thither by Mrs. Smith on account of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park — the Crystal Palace, as it was called. She much enjoyed listening to one of Thackeray's lectures in Willis's Rooms. Here she was introduced to Lord Houghton and other notable contemporaries, and after the lecture she was mobbed by a crowd of admirers as she passed trembling and agitated to the doors. The Exhibition proved a " marvel- lous, stirring and bewildering sight, but it is not much in my way." She enjoyed more her later visits, particularly one with Sir David Brewster, but she was most at home in hearing D'Aubigne preach; " it was pleasant, half sweet, half sad, to hear the French language once more." How much Rachel, the great French actress — then in London — thrilled her every reader of Villette will recall — " she is not a woman, she is a snake." Then she was present at one of Samuel Rogers's SHIRLEY 189 famous breakfasts, which in writing to her father, who loved to hear of her recognition, she tactfully says are " celebrated throughout Europe for their peculiar refinement and taste." Returning from this visit she spent two days with Mrs. Gaskell at Manchester, and when back at home writes to Mrs. Smith, referring to the contrast of the life she has left and the life she is living. " Yet even Haworth Parsonage does not look gloomy in this bright summer weather." Altogether, the years 1850 and 1851, in which she wrote no single novel, were full of interesting impressions for Charlotte Bronte. With all its depressing moods, her life was no longer given up to ^' darning a stocking, or making a pie in the kitchen of an old parsonage in the obscurest of Yorkshire villages," as she had once described it. She corresponded with all her brothers and sisters of letters, in whose work she was interested: she had met most of them on equal terms. Moreover the kindness of George Smith and his two hench- men, Williams and Taylor, had put her In pos- session of a great quantity of modern literature, I90 CHARLOTTE BRONTE not perhaps as helpful as the old romances and biographies that she had borrowed so continuously from the Keighley Library, but none the less abounding in a new kind of interest for her ever alert intelligence. Throughout this and the fol- lowing years, indeed, her letters to these and other London friends deal entirely with the books she had borrowed from them, and they are consequent- ly far more interesting letters than those written in the period of obscurity to the friends of her girl- hood. Ruskin's Stones of Venice^ Thackeray's Esmond^ Borrow's Bible in Spain^ and many other books of importance are read and criticized with judgment. This last phase of her intellectual development could not but have had some effect upon the crowning literary achievement of Char- lotte Bronte's life — the writing of Villette. CHAPTER XV VILLETTE AND THE PROFESSOR Some ten years ago I visited the scene of Fil- lette, the Penslonnat Heger at Brussels. The school had just been removed to another quarter of the city, and the house was in an entirely dis- mantled condition. This enabled me to make a perhaps more intimate acquaintance with the build- ing than I could otherwise have done. It per- mitted my walking through the various rooms, and tracing in minute detail every aspect of the place that had been so vividly described, partly in The Professor, but more in detail in Villette. Here was the dormitory, now dismantled of its long succession of beds, in one of which at the further end, Lucy Snowe was frightened by the supposed ghost of a nun. Then we came to the oratory, with the niche no longer holding a crucifix. Fi- nally we passed into the pleasant garden, with its 191 192 CHARLOTTE BRONTE avenue of trees, and also the '' allee defendue " forbidden to all but the teachers, because it was overlooked by the neighbouring boys' school. A visit to this house in the Rue D'Isabelle enabled one to gauge the minuteness with which Charlotte Bronte had followed every detail of locality during her two years' sojourn in the cit}^ she has called " Villette." There were still actu- ally the old pear-trees, the same vine-clad berceau ; everything indeed seemingly unchanged during half a century in this quiet retired street in a city which has made huge strides in other directions during that period, which indeed has since then raised in its midst many stately buildings, includ- ing the most magnificent law courts in Europe. It is truly wonderful how vegetation renews it- self year by year in much the same form for in- calculable periods. Those paths, and grass-plats, could have undergone practically no change what- ever in the long interval that separates the day when Charlotte and Emily Bronte walked arm in arm through them, strangely isolated from the mass of their fellow-pupils, yet what changes have VILLETTE 193 taken place In the great world since those days in 1842! But here in the Brussels that I visited there were many living links with that long ago. I called upon M. Heger, who with his wife had kept this school for so many years. The old pro- fessor, who was eighty-five years old at this time, was too ill to see me, and he died two years later. His wife has already been dead for five years. But all his children were flourishing in Brussels, the son as a doctor of distinction, the daughters still retaining the old school, just removed to an- other building, which must for ever be associated with the Bronte story. It was my privilege to hold a long conversation with Mile. Heger, the youngest child, the " Georgette " of Villette. I found her kindly and communicative, and she gave me some interesting memorials of Charlotte and Emily — exercise books which It was wonderful should have survived from these pupils more than from hundreds of others that had attended the Pensionnat before and after, but which were un- doubtedly genuine. The attitude of the Heger family had not always been so tolerant as I found 194 CHARLOTTE BRONTE It, and truly it may be admitted that Villette was a hard and a cruel blow, as they and their friends may well have thought. It had been translated into French and read by numbers of acquaintances in Brussels who without being as malicious as the author implied that all Belgians were, yet could not have failed of an inclination to recognize and to identify. Thus one is not surprised to hear that when Mrs. Gaskell went to Brussels in order to search out material for the Life^ Madame Heger de- clined to see her, although M. Heger " was kind and communicative." M. Heger assuredly had less to forgive than his wife. But how indispu- tably cruel is the portrait of Madame Beck of Villette and Mile. Reuter of The Professor. We have undeniable evidence that Madame Heger was a good wife, that she was surrounded even to her death by a circle of friends who esteemed her. We have no reason to suppose that the picture of the Brussels schoolmistress In Villette was any more a moral counterpart of Charlotte Bronte's " Madame " than the portrait of Mrs. VILLETTE 195 Reed In Jane Eyre resembled Mrs. Sidgwick, whom the writer also doubtless had In her mind. Genius Is so frequently cruel In Its portraiture, and with a certain ostrlch-like quality superadded. It never knows that It Is cruel and It never antic- ipates Identification. Charles Dickens frequently denied that he had Intended Harold Sklmpole to represent Leigh Hunt, and he must have been as- tonished and aggrieved that his friends should in- sist upon a recognition. Charlotte Bronte was in no similar danger because there was no French translation of Villette In her lifetime, but had this not been so she would probably have urged, as is the way with authors, that here as elsewhere was merely a composite picture and not a portrait of an individual. If only such identifications could be thrust aside, our enjoyment and interest In the presentation would be the greater, but that Is not possible. Yet If only we can forget its essential cruelty, the portrait grips us. The clever, schem- ing schoolmistress, watching all the threads of her large establishment with a Napoleonic energy, holds one breathless. 196 CHARLOTTE BRONTE But biography insists upon identification, espe- cially when the writer is pre-eminently a satirist, and if Charlotte Bronte was cruel — artistically cruel — to a woman whom she did not love, that woman has been more than avenged by the per- sistence with which Miss Bronte's own life has been identified with her heroine Lucy Snowe. A ruthless criticism has punished her in assigning to her own nature, in all outward things so strong, so firm, so full of self-reliance, the sufferings of her heroine when brought face to face with Paul Emanuel. A substantial book has been devoted to this subject,^ and it would be absurd to ignore it. Hint and innuendo do more harm than a candid facing of the facts. Was Charlotte Bronte then in love with M. Heger? Was she in every respect the counterpart of Lucy Snowe, or Lucy Frost as in the original manuscript she is many times called? Many critics have urged the point while carefully qualifying their position by an insistence that Charlotte Bronte never swerved for a mo- ment from the path of strict moral action, that her ^ The Brontes — Fact and Fiction, by Angus MacKay, 1897. VILLETTE 197 life will bear the severest searching of the most censorious. But such writers are anxious to prove too much. From Dante to our day poets have cultivated a kind of moral hysteria side by side with a well-balanced common-sense outlook upon life. Charlotte Bronte was the first woman writer to whom the problem of sex appealed with all Its complications. Her mood was morbid if you will. She thought much on the question of love, and dwelt continually on the problem of the Ideal mate. M. Heger was the only man she had met with real individuality and power, real culture and capacity. The very fact that he recognized Emily Bronte's genius speaks volumes for his perspicuity. It is certain that no other man at that time had the slightest Inkling of it. Charlotte Bronte did not like Madame Heger; theirs were antipathetic natures, and there is noth- ing more to be said on that point. If Madame Heger had had a taste for fiction and had been a governess say in Miss Margaret Wooler's school at Roehead, she could have made just as unaml- able a portrait of Charlotte as the latter did of 198 CHARLOTTE BRONTE her. There Is however no derogation of the fair fame of Charlotte Bronte in the assumption of her critics, that she did think of M. Heger as uncon- genially mated, that she may at times have al- lowed herself to contemplate the might-have- beens, the possibility of this man as her own hus- band had circumstances willed it, or as her sister Emily's husband, as we see she did in Shirley. There was nothing wrong in all this, nothing that Mrs. Grundy's most sour disciple could possibly object to. If Charlotte Bronte preaches one thing more than another, it is that we are to conquer all inclinations that are the slightest degree in- consistent with a very strict moral code. Certainly she is very fond of a situation of the type that her critics have assigned to her. Jane Eyre, for example, it will be remembered, falls in love with a man whom she finds too late belongs to another, and so also does Lucy Snowe, in the case of John Bretton. But surely the critics have made rather too much of the autobiographic nature of Villette. They have not sufficiently grasped the fact that an Born 1809 M. Paul H^ger The Hero of Villette and The Professor Died \i VILLETTE 199 artist cultivates emotions in order to make good copy out of them. It Is nothing to the point that these emotions made Charlotte Bronte very miser- able at times. The real artist Is always a creature of moods. It is quite another thing however to suggest that when at Brussels, and suffering, as we know she did suffer, Charlotte Bronte was actually In anguish because she was not and could not be the wife of M. Heger. He was, it is perfectly clear, happily married. No one however has for a moment suggested that Miss Bronte ever at- tempted to draw from Madame Heger the love of her husband, and really all the letters that have come to light bearing upon that year at Brussels which commenced In the January of 1843, seem to show that she was far from seeing much of M. Heger, and that she was really frightfully lonely. She tells Branwell that she only sees M. Heger once a week or so, and she Informed Emily that he had scolded her for her want of sociability, and so concludes : — " He has already given me a brief lecture on universal hienveillance, and, perceiving that I 200 CHARLOTTE BRONTE don't improve in consequence, I fancy he has taken to considering me as a person to be let alone — left to the error of her ways." Yet another point has agitated the critics of Villette — Charlotte Bronte's religion. She broad- ened doubtless with the years. The age of Tenny- son in poetry, Ruskin and Carlyle in prose, a period when what was called the Broad Church had captured some of the best minds in the Estab- lished Religion, could not but have influenced her as she began late in her career to read modern writers. It is clear that her youth was formed upon the older authors, her father's theological guides and her own selection of books from the library at Keighley, where it may safely be as- sumed new books were seldom forthcoming. Not until W. S. Williams and George Smith began to send her books from London did her mind take on a new aspect of truth. But of this there are few traces in her novels. These reflect the views she had imbibed in her childhood, and were of VILLETTE aoi that thoroughly Orange complexion which her father had brought with him from Co. Down. When she insists that people should hold by what is '' purest in doctrine and simplest in ritual " it is clear that she implies that purity is only to be obtained when ornateness is absent. A violent hatred of Roman Catholicism, indeed, character- izes her first novel, The Professor^ and her last novel, Villette. Her girl pupils in Brussels had an art of " bold, impudent flirtation, or a loose, silly leer." " I am not a bigot in matters of theology," she continues, " but I suspect the root of the precocious impurity, so obvious, so general in Popish countries, is to be found in the discipline, if not the doctrines of the Church of Rome." If she had been able to contrast impartially the moral atmosphere of, let us say, an Irish village and a Yorkshire village, then or now she might have dis- covered that the root of the matter Is elsewhere to seek. Even her father's parish had more than one scandal in her own day. Not even ordinary truthfulness Is credited to the religion of the rival communion. " She Is even sincere, so far as her ao2 CHARLOTTE BRONTE religion would permit her to be so/' is her ac- count of one of the pupils in this same novel, The Professor^ and her heroine is made to say that she longs " to live once more among Protestants; they are more honest than Catholics: these all think it lawful to tell lies." When we come to Fillette, things are even worse, or better as the reader may choose to interpret it. Methodism receives little more favour. Her Dissenters are nearly all " engrained rascals," as she calls one of them. But how unimportant it all is, although inter- esting in a way. Every great writer in every age has been very much in harmony with his environ- ment, and a later age with other views of tolera- tion cares for none of these things, but asks only of the artistic achievement. Two widely different contemporary writers, Charlotte Bronte and George Borrow were at one in their hatred of Romanism. Yet both have received some of their most eloquent appreciation from members of that Church, and in any case it must not be forgotten that Charlotte Bronte's most impressive hero. VILLETTE ao3 Paul Emanuel, was a Roman Catholic, and that she herself '' confessed " in a Roman Catholic church. ****** Villette is one of the great novels of literature. Mrs. Bretton and Dr. John — pictures to some ex- tent of Mr. George Smith and his mother — Gin- evra Fanshawe and Paulina de Bassompierre are very subordinate to the three characters who play their fierce and spirited part on this tiny stage. It is the novel of greatest intensity, of most genuine passion, of most satiric strength in the period in which it appeared. The book will always rank as the principal achievement of its writer. It is not difficult to understand why her pub- lishers three times during her lifetime declined Miss Bronte's request to publish The Professor. Apart from its size — the impossibility of produc- ing it as a three-volumed novel, there were many elements of crudity. Young Cumsworth would scarcely have been ten years at Eton, and would certainly not have carried hence a great capacity for reading and writing French and German. In 204 CHARLOTTE BRONTE any case Villette was in many particulars but a rewriting of The Professor, The incident of shutting an unruly pupil up in a cupboard is re- peated in both stories, and Madame Beck and Mile. Reuter indulge in much the same manoeuvres with their scholars. Nevertheless The Professor ^ is full of good things, and Frances Henri is per- haps the only woman character In Charlotte Bronte's novels of real charm. Villette was commenced at the beginning of 185 1, but not before she had felt compelled to bow before a third and final refusal of her pub- lisher to accept The Professor^ a story for which she had evidently a peculiar affection. In May she pays yet another visit to London, this time to see the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. To that visit I have already referred. At this time we find her engaged in quite a copious correspondence, now ^ The original manuscript, now in the possession of Mr. Thomas Wise, discloses that the book was first called The Master. VILLETTE 205 with her old friends, and now again with her new friends In London. She writes for example to Ellen Nussey, describing a visit to Leeds for the purchase of a bonnet. " I got one which seemed grave and quiet there among all the splendours, but now it looks Infinitely too gay with its pink lining. I saw some beautiful silks of pale, sweet colours, but had not the spirit nor the means to launch out at the rate of five shillings per yard, and went and bought a black silk at three shillings after all." While to Mr. Smith she writes enthu- siastically concerning Mr. Ruskln's Stones of Venice^ which she had just read through. She heard Cardinal Wiseman address a small meeting. " He came swimming into the room, smiling, sim- pering and bowing like a fat old lady, and looked the picture of a sleek hypocrite. The Cardinal spoke in a smooth whining manner, just like a canting Methodist preacher," she added. We hear nothing about authorship until September, when in reply to a suggestion by Mr. George Smith that she should give him her next book for serial publication, she replied that " were she possessed 2o6 CHARLOTTE BRONTE of the experience of a Thackeray, or the animal spirit of a Dickens it might be possible, but even then she would not publish a serial except on con- dition that the last number was written before the first came out." Her loyalty to her publisher was extreme, for in yet another letter she expresses her deep regret that it was quite impossible for her to oblige him over this question of a serial. At the close of the year there came a long and serious illness, and as she was recovering she stayed for a time with Ellen Nussey. " The solitude of my life I have certainly felt very keenly this winter," she writes to a friend, " but every one has his own burden to bear, and when there is no available remedy it is right to be patient and trust that Providence will in His own good time lighten the load." The first few months of the year 1852 Miss Bronte was struggling back to health. In June of that year she went alone to Filey, on the Yorkshire coast, and took the oppor- tunity of looking at the tombstone of her sister Anne in the churchyard of the old church at Scar- borough. Then came a serious illness of her VILLETTE 207 father, and work on her novel was again post- poned. We do not hear more about Villette until the October of 1852, when she is able to send her publisher the first half of the book. She is agitated because there is no one to whom she is able to read a single line, or ask a word of counsel. " Jane Eyre was not written under such circum- stances," she said, '^ nor were two-thirds of Shir- ley^ She would have liked it to be published anonymously, or under some other pseudonym than that of '* Currer Bell," but gave way when told by her publishers that it would very much interfere with their interests. Writing to her publisher a little later, she expresses a regret that Villette touches no matter of public concern. " I cannot write books handling the topics of the day; it is of no use trying," she said. " Nor can I write a book for its moral." She is pleased that her publisher likes the opening sections of the book, and discusses with him its later stages, as follows : — *' Lucy must not marry Dr. John; he is far too youthful, handsome, bright-spirited, and sweet- ao8 CHARLOTTE BRONTE tempered; he is a ' curled darling ' of Nature and of Fortune, and must draw a prize in life's lottery. His wife must be young, rich, pretty; he must be made very happy indeed. If Lucy marries any- body it must be the Professor — a man in whom there is much to forgive, much to ' put up with.' But I am not leniently disposed towards Miss Frost: from the beginning I never meant to ap- point her lines in pleasant places. The conclusion of this third volume it still a matter of some anxiety." As a matter of fact it would seem that the conclusion of the book gave her considerable trouble. Her father, to whom she read it, was very anxious that it should end well, and that she should make her hero and heroine marry and live happily ever after. Her imagination had how- ever been seized with the idea that Paul Emanuel should lose his life at sea, hence the somewhat ambiguous ending to the book. She did not wish to hurt her father's feelings, but on the other hand she did not wish to go against her artistic conscience. At the end of November, 1852, Vil- VILLETTE 209 lette was finished. " The book, I think," she says, In sending It away, " will not be considered pre- tentious, nor Is It of a character to excite hostility." After this a week was spent with Ellen Nussey at Brookroyd, a fortnight with Harriet Mar- tlneau at Ambleside, and In January the follow- ing year she was again In London, staying with her publishers, and correcting the proof-sheets of her novel, the publication of which she deferred until the end of the month In order to give Mrs. GaskelFs Ruth the start In the papers; and on this matter she writes to her friend, Mrs. Gaskell, to the effect that '^ Villette has no right to push itself before Ruth; there Is a goodness, a philan- thropic purpose, a social use In the latter to which the former cannot for an Instant pretend." Villette was published on January 24, 1853, and was received with general acclamation. Near- ly all the reviews were favourable, the principal exception being one written by Miss Martlneau in the Daily News. Miss Martlneau's points of disagreement were twofold — she disagreed with the author on the question of love, and she thought 110 CHARLOTTE BRONTE her unfair to the Roman Catholic Church. On the first point, at any rate, Miss Bronte's reply to her friend was sufficiently effective — " I know what love Is, as I understand It, and if man or woman should be ashamed of feeling such love, then is there nothing right, noble, faithful, truth- ful, unselfish In this earth, as I comprehend recti- tude, nobleness, fidelity, truth and disinterested- ness.'' In February she writes from Haworth to thank Mr. George Smith for sending her an en- graving of Thackeray's portrait by Lawrence. At this time interest in her personality was grow- ing steadily. The Bishop of the diocese came to see Mr. Bronte, and spent the night in the vicar- age. Miss Mulock, the author of John Halifax^ Gentleman^ and other correspondents wrote to her for further particulars as to the fate of Paul Emanuel. In April she was again with Mrs. Gaskell at Manchester, and in September Mrs. Gaskell visited her at Haworth, and we owe to her quite the best description of Miss Bronte's home in these last years of her life. " I don't know that I ever saw a spot more VILLETTE an exquisitely clean; the most dainty place for that I ever saw. To be sure the life is like clockwork. No one comes to the house; nothing disturbs the deep repose; hardly a voice is heard; you catch the ticking of the clock in the kitchen, or the buzz- ing of a fly in the parlour all over the house. Miss Bronte sits alone in her parlour, breakfasting with her father in his study at nine o'clock. She helps In the house work; for one of their servants, Tabby, is nearly ninety, and the other only a girl. Then I accompanied her in her walks on the sweep- ing moors; the heather bloom had been blighted by a thunderstorm a day or two before, and was all of a livid brown colour, instead of the blaze of purple glory it ought to have been. Oh ! those high, wild, desolate moors, up above the whole world, and the very realms of silence ! Home to dinner at two. Mr. Bronte has his dinner sent in to him. All the small table arrangements had the same dainty simplicity about them. Then we rested, and talked over the clear bright fire; it is a cold country, and the fires gave a pretty warm dancing light all over the house. The parlour has 212 CHARLOTTE BRONTE been evidently refurnished within the last few years, since Miss Bronte's success has enabled her to have a little more money to spend. Everything fits into, and is in harmony with, the idea of a country parsonage, possessed by people of very moderate means. The prevailing colour of the room is crimson, to make a warm setting for the cold grey landscape without. There is her likeness by Richmond, and an engraving from Lawrence's picture of Thackeray; and two recesses, on each side of the high, narrow, old-fashioned mantel- piece, filled with books — books given to her, books she has bought, and which tell of her individual pursuits and tastes; not standard books." Not less interesting is the account of a mere stranger's visit to Miss Bronte at Haworth in these days of lonely success : — " I was shown across the lobby into the parlour to the left, and there I found Miss Bronte, stand- ing in the full light of the window, and I had am- ple opportunity of fixing her upon my memory, where her image is vividly present to this hour. She was diminutive in height, and extremely frag- VILLETTE 213 He. Her hand was one of the smallest I ever grasped. She had no pretensions to being con- sidered beautiful, and was as far removed from being plain. She had rather light brown hair, somewhat thin, and drawn plainly over her brow. Her complexion had no trace of colour in it, and her lips were pallid also ; but she had a most sweet smile, with a touch of tender melancholy in it. Al- together she was as unpretending, undemonstra- tive, quiet a little lady as you would well meet. Her age I took to be about five-and-thirty. But when you saw and felt her eyes, the spirit that created Jane Eyre was revealed at once to you. They were rather small, but of a very peculiar colour, and had a strange lustre and intensity. They were chameleon-like, a blending of various brown and olive tints. But they looked you through and through — and you felt they were forming an opinion of you, not by mere acute not- ing of Lavaterish physiognomical peculiarities, but by a subtle penetration into the very marrow of your mind, and the innermost core of your soul. Taking my hand again, she apologised for her en- 214 CHARLOTTE BRONTE forced absence, and, as she did so, she looked right through me. There was no boldness in the gaze, but an intense, direct, searching look, as of one who had the gift to read hidden mysteries, and the right to read them. I had a feeling that I never experienced before or since, as though I was being mesmerised." Through the closing months of 1853 ^^^ the early part of 1854 Miss Bronte, living quietly at Haworth, was principally occupied in nursing her father, who was getting very old and very blind. In April however she was able to announce to her friends that she was engaged to be married to her father's curate, and on June 29 of this year, 1854, Charlotte Bronte became Mrs. Arthur Bell Nicholls. CHAPTER XVI MARRIAGE AND DEATH *' I THINK he must be like all the curates I have seen," Charlotte Bronte writes of one of them. '' They seem to me a self -seeking, vain, empty- race." Her experience had certainly been excep- tionally wide, for until she went to Brussels at twenty-six years of age she had met but few other men In her father's house. Curates there had been In abundance. To the three Individuals described In Shirley^ one may add at least six others, and two of them desired to marry Miss Bronte — Mr. Bryce and Mr. Nussey. Mr. Bryce proposed by letter after one meeting, Mr. Nussey also declared himself In similar fashion, and received In return much good advice as to choosing a wife which, as we have seen, he quickly took — In a fashion. Miss Bronte had become famous when the next proposal of marriage came to her. This was from 215 21 6 CHARLOTTE BRONTE Mr. James Taylor, who was in the employment of her publishers. The firm suggested to Miss Bronte that Mr. Taylor should come to Haworth for the manuscript of Shirley ^ and her reply gave an interesting glimpse of her peculiarly isolated life. She told Mr. W. S. Williams that she could not offer any male society as companions In the neighbourhood, that her father " without being in the least misanthropical or sour-natured, habit- ually prefers solitude to society." Under these circumstances Miss Bronte suggests that if Mr. Taylor still desires to come for the manuscript, he should only stay the one day. Mr. Taylor came, and it is clear quickly lost his heart, and showed, moreover, much more persistency than earlier lovers. He began to lend her newspapers and books, and went so far as to half propose, only to be snubbed into silence for a period of nine months, when he reappeared, or rather his favourite newspaper, which came once again through the post to Haworth. It was the Athe- naum which formed the singular medium of this quaint courtship. There are many references in MARRIAGE AND DEATH 9.17 Charlotte Bronte's letters to her friend Ellen Nussey which seem to indicate that with still a little more persistency James Taylor — *' the little man," as she calls him — might have won his suit, the more particularly as he had a strong ally in her father, and touched her by a certain resem- blance to her brother Branwell. However his firm sent him to India, and he accepted as final Miss Bronte's definite refusal. He wrote to her occasionally from Bombay, and her letters to him have been published.^ When he returned to Eng- land in 1856 Charlotte Bronte was dead. Miss Bronte's fourth and this time successful lover was Mr. Arthur Bell NichoUs, her father's curate: one of that detested race which she had satirized so bitterly in Shirley, and made so many contemptuous references to in her letters. Of Mr. Nicholls, however, she had early formed a kindly judgment. Born in 18 17, he was a Scot by origin, an Irishman of Co. Antrim by birth. He was edu- cated at the Royal School at Banagher by his uncle, the Rev. Alan Bell, the headmaster. From ^ In Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle. 2i8 CHARLOTTE BRONTE Trinity College, Dublin, he passed in 1844 to the curacy of Haworth, in succession to Mr. Smith, the " Malone " of Shirley. In that novel, written, it will be remembered, in 1849, he is pictured as Mr. Macarthey : — " I am happy to be able to in- form you with truth that this gentleman did as much credit to his country as Malone had done it discredit. . . . He laboured faithfully in the parish: the schools, both Sunday and day-schools, flourished under his sway like green bay-trees. Being human, of course he had his faults; these however were proper, steady-going clerical faults, which many would call virtues: the circumstance of finding himself invited to tea with a Dissenter would unhinge him for a week. ..." In 1846 Miss Bronte repudiated her friend's suggestion that she was going to marry Mr. Nicholls. " He and his fellow curates," she said, " regard me as an old maid, and I regard them, one and all, as highly uninteresting, narrow and unattractive specimens of the coarser sex." Mr. Nicholls however had his moment of tri- umph, as we have seen, when Shirley appeared, MARRIAGE AND DEATH 219 and thereon Miss Bronte wrote to her friend that he had greeted the book with " roars of laughter." '' He would read all the scenes about the curates aloud to papa. He triumphed in his own char- acter." Two years later Mr. Nicholls appeared in a more tragic role. He asked his vicar's daughter to marry him. This was in December, 1852. The incident, indispensable in the life story of Charlotte Bronte, is best told in her own words : — '' On Monday evening Mr. Nicholls was here to tea. I vaguely felt without clearly seeing, as without seeing I have felt for some time, the mean- ing of his constant looks, and strange, feverish restraint. After tea 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 for- get it. Shaking from head to foot, looking deadly 220 CHARLOTTE BRONTE pale, speaking low, vehemently, yet with difficulty, he made me for the first time feel what it costs a man to declare affection where he doubts response. " The spectacle of one ordinarily so statue-like thus trembling, stirred, and overcome, gave me a kind of strange shock. He spoke of sufferings he had borne for months, of sufferings he could endure no longer, and craved leave for some hope. I could only entreat him to leave me then, and promise a reply on the morrow. I asked him if he had spoken to papa. He said he dared not. I think I half led, half put him out of the room. *^ When he was gone I immediately went to papa, and told him what had taken place. Agita- tion and anger disproportionate to the occasion ensued; if I had loved Mr. Nicholls 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 into a state not to be trifled with : the veins on his temples started up like whip- cord, and his eyes became suddenly bloodshot. I MARRIAGE AND DEATH aai made haste to promise that Mr. Nicholls should on the morrow have a distinct refusal. " You must understand that a good share of papa's anger arises from the Idea, not altogether groundless, that Mr. Nicholls has behaved with dislngenuousness In so long concealing his aim. I am afraid also that papa thinks a little too much about his want of money ; he says 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; In short, his manner of viewing the subject Is on the whole far from being one In which I can sympathize. My own objections arise from a sense of Incongruity and uncongeniallty in feelings, tastes, principles." Here clearly was the first lover who realized in a measure the Ideal of love that Charlotte Bronte had pictured In her dreams and in her stories — a passionate man full of devotion, above all sus- picion of wanting a wife for her intellectual at- tainments or literary achievements. Whatever un- congeniallty there may have been in these par- 222 CHARLOTTE BRONTE tlculars was more than atoned for by her father's action. A woman hates injustice to a man who pays her the compliment of being in love with her, and she is nearly always in love with love. As a natural consequence a few months found Charlotte Bronte deeply devoted to Mr. Nicholls, who had betaken himself to another curacy at Kirk-Smeaton by May of 1853, after five months of difficulty and unpleasantness with Mr. Bronte. His successor did not please, and to the complaints of her father Miss Bronte had a ready retort. She loved Mr. Nicholls, and corresponded with him. If she married him they could live at the rectory, and Mr. Bronte's old age would be se- cured from trouble. To a man, very old and very nearly blind, this was well-nigh an unanswer- able appeal, and Mr. Bronte relented. Mr. Nicholls exchanged back to Haworth, and the wedding took place at Haworth Church on June 29, 1854, Mr. Sutcliffe Sowden, one of Mr. Nicholls' friends, performing the ceremony. Miss Wooler giving the bride away, and Miss Ellen Nussey being the only bridesmaid. MARRIAGE AND DEATH 223 The honeymoon was passed in Ireland — in a run through Kerry and Cork Counties, and a stay with her husband's relatives at Banagher in Kings Co. " I must say I like my new relations," she writes, " my dear husband, too, appears in a new light in his own country. More than once I had deep pleasure in hearing his praises on all sides. ... I pray to be enabled to repay as I ought the affectionate devotion of a truthful, honourable man." And upon her return to Haworth she writes : " Dear Nell, during the last six weeks the colour of my thoughts is a good deal changed: I know more of the realities of life than I once did. I think many false ideas are propagated, perhaps unintentionally. I think those married women who indiscriminately urge their acquaintances to marry, much to blame. For my own part, I can only say with deepest sincerity and fuller signifi- cance what I always said in theory, ' Wait God's will.' Indeed, Indeed, Nell, it is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife. Man's lot Is far, far different. . . . Have 224 CHARLOTTE BRONTE I told you how much better Mr. NichoUs is? He looks quite strong and hale; he gained twelve pounds during the first four weeks in Ireland. To see this improvement in him has been a main source of happiness to me, and to speak truth, a subject of wonder too." The letters that follow clearly indicate that love had followed respect and esteem, as had been her " theory " of marriage, and that she was becom- ing entirely devoted to her husband. These few months of married life were, it is certain, quite the happiest of her life. We hear little, indeed, of authorship — but they know little of authorship who think that happiness in any robust sense and the writing of works of imagination are synony- mous terms. The months that Charlotte Bronte was writing her books were probably the most unhappy of her life. Now she took on domestic duties. " The married woman can call but a very small portion of each day her own," she writes. But her end was approaching. Charlotte Bronte had been but nine months a wife when she died of an illness incidental to childbirth on The Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls The husband of Charlotte Bronte, to whom she was married June 29, 1854 MARRIAGE AND DEATH 225 March 31, 1855. In a letter to a friend from her deathbed she writes, " I want to give you an as- surance which I know will comfort you: that is that I find in my husband the tenderest nurse, the kindest support, the best earthly comfort that ever woman had. His patience never fails, and it is tried by sad days and broken nights." Then came the last words to her husband — surely as pathetic as any in the whole range of literary biography. "I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy." Charlotte Nicholls was buried beside her mother, her brother Branwell, and her sister Emily in the family vault in Haworth Church. For the six years that followed his wife's death Mr. Nicholls stayed on at Haworth. At the death of Mr. Bronte he removed to Ireland, gave up the Church as a profession, and engaged in farming — an occupation he has pursued for nearly fifty years. The present writer first met Mr. Nicholls in 226 CHARLOTTE BRONTE 1895. It was on the anniversary of the great novelist's death-day — March 31 — fifty years ear- lier. Mr. Nicholls met me at Banagher station, as I alighted from the Dublin train. Banagher in Kings Co. is situated on the Shannon. It has been immortalized by a phrase — " That bangs Banagher." At the end of the village, near by the Protestant Church, stood the pleasant farm-house in which the former curate of Haworth was pass- ing his declining years. The house was singularly interesting in its multitude of Bronte relics. On the walls of the drawing-room were Richmond's portrait of Charlotte Bronte, the engravings of Thackeray and Wellington that so delighted her heart, water-colour drawings by all three sisters, perhaps most noticeable, crude but not the less in- teresting, Emily's picture of her dog " Keeper " and Anne's " Flossy." On the staircase was a por- trait of Branwell. I noted the two rocking-chairs so frequently occupied by the younger sisters in their last illness — in fact the whole house abounded in pathetic memories of that strangely different life in far away Yorkshire. It almost seemed as MARRIAGE AND DEATH 227 If the wraiths of the immortal sisters had revisited the land of their fathers — a land which with all its romance and poetry had made no impression upon them when they lived, although, as I have said, Charlotte Bronte spent some happy weeks there soon after marriage, and indeed had stayed in this very house. But what of Mr. Nicholls? I had almost been prepared for a narrow-minded, limited, austere man. I had read estimates of him that inclined to this view. Miss Ellen Nussey, the very per- sonification of loyalty to the memory of her dear friend, was nevertheless not kindly disposed to Mr. Nicholls. From her Mrs. Gaskell had im- bibed a prejudice that is expressed in more than one letter I have seen. Mr. Nicholls had his idiosyncrasies, as have most of us, and no one could face the life of a country village without incurring prejudice and misunderstanding. The author of Cranford might well realize that. In any case time, we may assume, had softened down many angularities in Mr. Nicholls, as it softens them with most men, and the genial man who shook hands with me at Banagher station, 228 CHARLOTTE BRONTE carried me off in his jaunting car to his pleasant home and Introduced me to his kindly family circle was an entirely benign and liberal-minded man, with no remnants in his nature of that intolerance and pedantry that may or may not have been in his nature half a century earlier. He was keenly interested in everything that was going on in the great world, very gratified at the universal recog- nition of his wife's genius, and greatly apprecia- tive of the homage that was now offered on all sides.^ 1 Mr. Nicholls was full of kindly memories of old Mr. Bronte. He denied the many rumours that had so long flourished about his eccentricities, while admitting that he had a temper on oc- casions. He thought the eariier opposition to his marriage not unnatural in a man who had learnt to value his daughter very highly. "I had less than a hundred a year at the time," he remarked. CHAPTER XVII THE GLAMOUR OF THE BRONTES Just as a love of Milton's Lycidas has been proclaimed to be a touchstone of taste In poetry, so I think may an appreciation of the Bronte novels be counted as a touchstone of taste in prose literature. This Is more particularly the case so far as Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights Is concerned. Not to realize the high quahtles of that masterpiece of fiction Is to be blind Indeed to all the conditions which go to make a great book. Wuthering Heights Is Indeed unique In modern literature; It Is entirely Independent of all the fic- tion that had gone before. Because Emily Bronte learnt German and doubtless read many an eerie German story, It has been suggested that this was a literature that Influenced her materially; because she had an Irish father, who may or may not have told tales by the fireside recalling his boy- 229 230 CHARLOTTE BRONTE hood, it has been claimed that here was the ma- terial upon which she worked. Not one of these suppositions will bear examination. The only ex- ternal influence that would seem to have made this wonderful book were those wild and silent moors that the writer loved so well, and where we are sure from earliest childhood she constantly kept solitary communion with all the weird phantasies of her brain. This element of mystery in all that concerned Emily Bronte, the absence of a single line from her to any correspondent furnishing some revela- tion of character, the non-existence even of a por- trait bearing the faintest resemblance to her, the few casual glimpses of a personality that loved dogs more than human beings, of a nature that was quite unlike to many thousands of her fellow countrywomen that were born into the world in these same days of the first quarter of the last century — all these, combined with the fact that every critic without exception that has been brought into contact with her poetry and prose has found it glorious, and you have here at least one GLAMOUR OF THE BRONTES 231 element that provides a glamour to the story of the Brontes. A second element of this glamour Is furnished by the circumstance of the very existence of a family of four children, all of them with a taste for writing, and all of them destined to die young. Branwell and Anne are but quite minor figures in this strange drama, but that one family should have produced two young girls of the calibre of Emily and Charlotte Is of Itself an unique cir- cumstance In English literature. Emily the reti- cent, whose pages give forth not one single scrap of self-revelation, who is as Impersonal as Shak- spere, revealed only In certain poems that hers was on the whole a sombre pagan outlook upon life, in which the riddle of the universe is found to be insoluble. Charlotte on the other hand offering us an entire contrast, taking us so abundantly into her confidence alike In her letters and her books. She has an opinion upon every subject. Here is indeed no lack whatever of self-revelation, and very piquant it all Is. We know Charlotte Bronte's attitude on the relation of capital and 232 CHARLOTTE BRONTE labour, on the virtues of revealed religion, by which she usually meant the tenets of the Church of England, on books and on men ; there was not a single human being, with the exception of her own father, that she did not permit herself to criticise with the utmost frankness. Her girl friends, and the literary friends of later years, every casual acquaintance indeed, equally came un- der that satiric touch. The personal note was not quite as common in literature then as it is to-day, and that is why Charlotte Bronte's correspondence will always have an attraction of its own. Added to this, it is indisputable that she was a singularly great novelist. It has recently been suggested that the popularity of her books is on the wane. The idea probably arises from the experiences of one or two publishers, but a dozen publishers at least are at present engaged in issuing the Bronte novels, and from inquiries I have made I am satis- fied that while not, and rightly, holding the same vogue as do Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray, she comes next to them in general acceptance among the English novelists of the past. GLAMOUR OF THE BRONTES 2:^3 It Is true she has limitations, most obvious in Shirley, but to be found in a measure in all her books ; a kindly benevolent outlook upon life there is not. Some of her pictures of men and women were grotesque even when written ; they are doubly grotesque to-day without being far enough away from us to enable us to feel that she is giving us a picture of a bygone era. But when all limita- tions are conceded, there still remain to us great books, full of Interest, of Imperishable character drawing. Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, Rochester and Paul Emanuel, with a number of minor char- acters are all drawn with a master touch, and while new books must necessarily ever displace the old with the majority of readers, there will never, we may be sure, be a time when a student of litera- ture will not find it essential to make the acquaint- ance of this famous gallery of creations, that filled so large a space In the reading of an earlier genera- tion. These books must be read if only for their style, If only for their fine passionate phrases, they must be read still more for their fine moral and intellectual quahtles, for the stern sense of duty 234 CHARLOTTE BRONTE that belongs to them, the scorn of all meanness and trickery, the wonderful grasp of the hard facts of life, of the stern facts of our being. " Life is a battle," she said. " God grant that we may all be able to fight it well." They will be read above all because more truly than any other writer in our fiction, Charlotte Bronte has pictured an ideal of love which will always make its appeal to many hearts. In her books we find the passionate devo- tion of one human being to another, growing more intense with time, based partly on intellectual sym- pathy, partly on spiritual affinity, and yet again upon absorbing passion. Most of our writers love only to depict the casual devotion based on a pretty face or a charming disposition. Further, they have not dared to go until our own time when the sex novelist has gone too far. Finally in considering this question of the glamour of the Brontes, we come again to the point of vivid interest that they have been able to excite through their own personality. What could be more marked in this way than the note GLAMOUR OF THE BRONTES 23s that Charlotte Bronte wrote five years before she died, concerning her sisters, some passages from which have already been quoted in this little book, and another and longer passage may well be quoted here: — " About five years ago," wrote Miss Bronte in 1850, "my two sisters and myself, after a pro- longed period of separation, found ourselves re- united, and at home. Resident in a remote district, where education had made little progress, and where, consequently, there was no inducement to social intercourse beyond our own domestic circle, we were wholly dependent on ourselves and each other, on books and study, for the enjoyments and occupations of life. The highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure, we had known from child- hood upwards lay in attempts at literary composi- tion. We had very early cherished the dream of becoming authors. This dream, never relin- quished, even when distance divided and absorbing tasks occupied us, now suddenly acquired strength and consistency. It took the character of a re- solve. We agreed to arrange a small selection of 22,6 CHARLOTTE BRONTE our poems, and, if possible, get them printed. Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because — without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called * feminine ' — we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality and for their reward a flattery which is not true praise. The bringing out of our little book was hard work. As was to be expected, neither we nor our poems were at all wanted; but for this we had been prepared at the outset. Though inexperienced ourselves, we had read the experience of others. Through many obstacles a way was at last made, and the book was printed; it did not obtain much favour- able criticism, and is scarcely known ; but ill-success failed to crush us; the mere effort to succeed had GLAMOUR OF THE BRONTES 237 given a wonderful zest to existence; it must be pursued. We each, therefore, set to work on a prose tale." And then that final tribute to her sisters' memo- ries: — ''I may sum up all by saying that for strangers they were nothing; for superficial ob- servers less than nothing; but for those who had known them all their lives in the intimacy of close relationship, they were genuinely good, and truly great." Some six years after this tribute had been paid, there came that splendid recognition by Mrs. Gas- kell, an accomplished writer who has added more than one book of enduring reputation to our liter- ature. With so fine an imagination it was only natural that she should write a beautiful book, a book calculated still further to kindle popular In- terest. It is not too much to say that Mrs. Gas- kell's Life of Charlotte Bronte has received as en- thusiastic praise from the critics as any one of her own novels, or even the novels of the friend whose 238 CHARLOTTE BRONTE fame she was to assist so largely. There are those who have read that biography who have never read the novels, and have found in its pathetic story so effectively told a charm which pertains to few biographies. I recall, however, a visit to Mr. Bronte's successor at Haworth,^ in which that gentleman, after courteously showing me over the house, in which he had made many marked im- provements, and to which he had added many ma- terial comforts, took down from a shelf his copy of Mrs. Gaskell's book and pointed out the old- fashioned engraving of the parsonage as the Brontes knew it. " Is that anything like the place?" he asked triumphantly, wishing to em- phasise what he considered the exaggeration of its dreariness. It is not much like the Haworth of to-day, but it is not unlike the spot as the Bronte children knew it, and indeed, Mary Tay- lor writing to thank Mrs. Gaskell for " a true picture of a melancholy life," declared that it was " not so gloomy as the truth," and that her friend ^ The Rev. John Wade, who was incumbent of Haworth from 1 86 1 to i8q8. GLAMOUR OF THE BRONTES 239 Charlotte Bronte, " a woman of first-rate talents, industry and integrity," had lived all her life " in a walking nightmare of ' poverty and self- suppression.' " Following upon Mrs. Gaskell's notable picture of the life of the Bronte sisters, we have had not a few brilliant criticisms of their books. A long succession of able men and women have in the succeeding years offered homage at this shrine. Mr. Swinburne has described Charlotte Bronte as " a woman of the first order of genius," and has not hesitated to place Emily still higher. But perhaps, after all, the finest tribute to the genius of Charlotte Bronte comes from Thackeray, who after her death introduced a fragment of her work called Emma ^ to the readers of the Cornhill Magazine. "I fancied an austere little Joan of Arc marching in upon us and rebuking our easy lives, our easy morals ! She gave me," he tells us, " the impression of being a very pure, and lofty, * There were only some three small fragments of manu- script left at Miss Bronte's death, all apparently written after Villette, but not one of them of any real significance. 240 CHARLOTTE BRONTE and high minded person. A great and holy rever- ence of right and truth seemed to be with her always. Who that has known her books has not admired the artist's noble English, the burning love of truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the in- dignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honour, so to speak, of the woman? What a story is that of the family of poets in their solitude yonder on the gloomy Yorkshire moors ! " APPENDIX The following letters written to the brother of the friend whose marriage was under contem- plation are interesting. The first is from Upper- wood House, Rawdon: — " I am about to employ part of a Sunday even- ing in answering your letter. You will perhaps think this hardly right, and yet I do not feel that I am doing wrong. Sunday evening is almost my only time of leisure, no one would blame me if I were to spend this spare time in a pleasant chat with a friend. Is it worse to spend it in writing a friendly letter? ^' I have just seen my little noisy charges depos- ited snugly in their cribs — and I am sitting alone in the schoolroom with the quiet of a Sunday evening pervading the grounds and gardens outside my window. I owe you a letter — can I choose a bet- ter time than the present for paying my debt? 241 242 CHARLOTTE BRONTE Now you need not expect any gossip or news, I have none to tell you — even If I had I am not at present in the mood to communicate them — you will excuse an unconnected letter. If I had thought you critical or captious I would have de- clined the task of corresponding with you. When I reflect indeed — it seems strange that I should sit down to write without a feeling of formality and restraint to an individual with whom I am personally so little acquainted as I am with your- self — ^but the fact Is, I cannot be formal in a letter ; If I write at all, I must write as I think. It seems your sister has told you that I am become a gov- erness again — as you say, It is indeed a hard thing for flesh and blood to leave home, especially a good home — not a wealthy or splendid one — my home Is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world — the profound and Intense affec- tion which brothers and sisters feel for each other when their minds are cast in the same mould, their Ideas drawn from the same source — when they have clung to each other from childhood and APPENDIX 243 when family disputes have never sprung up to divide them. " We are all separated now, and winning our bread amongst strangers as we can — my sister Anne is near York, my brother in a situation near Halifax, I am here, Emily is the only one left at home, where her usefulness and willingness make her Indispensable. Under these circumstances, should we repine? I think not — our mutual af- fection ought to comfort us under all difficulties — if the God on whom we must all depend will but vouchsafe us health and the power to continue in the strict line of duty, so as never under any temptation to swerve from it an inch — we shall have ample reason to be grateful and contented. " I do not pretend to say that I am always con- tented ; a governess must often submit to have the heart-ache. My employers, Mr. and Mrs. White, are kind, worthy people In their way, but the chil- dren are Indulged. I have great difficulties to con- tend with sometimes — perseverance will perhaps conquer them — and it has gratified me much to find that the parents are well satisfied with their 244 CHARLOTTE BRONTE children's improvement in learning since I came. But I am dwelling too much upon my own con- cerns and feelings. It is true they are interesting to me, but it is wholly impossible they should be so to you, and therefore I hope you will slip the last page, for I repent having written it. " A fortnight since I had a letter from your sister urging me to go to Brookwyd for a single day. I felt such a longing to have a respite from labour and to get once more amongst ' old familiar faces ' that I conquered diffidence and asked Mrs. White to let me go. She complied, and I went accordingly and had a most delightful holiday. I saw your mother, your sisters, and brothers ; all were well. Ellen talked of endeavouring to get a situation somewhere. I did not encourage the idea much — I advised her rather to go to you for a while. I think she wants a change, and I dare- say you would be glad to have her as a companion for a few months. " I inquired if there was any family of the name of Barrett in this neighbourhood, but I cannot hear of any such, though I understand there is a Mr., APPENDIX 245 Mrs., and Miss Barwick — the name in pronuncia- tion sounds very similar. " My time is out. With sincere good wishes for your welfare and kind love to your sister." " I think I told you I had heard something of Mr. Lincoln's affair before, but I thought from the long interval that had elapsed between his visit to Brookwyd and his late declaration that some impediment had occurred to prevent his proceed- ing further. I own I am glad to hear that this is not the case, for I know few things that would please me better than to hear of Ellen's being well married. This little adverb well is, however, a condition of importance; it implies a great deal — fitness of character, temper, pursuits, and com- petency of fortune. Your description of Mr. Lincoln seems to promise all these things; there is but one word in it that appears exceptionable — you say he is eccentric. If his eccentricity is not of a degrading or ridiculous character — if it does not arise from weakness of mind — I think Ellen would hardly be justified in considering it a serious 246 CHARLOTTE BRONTE objection; but there is a species of eccentricity which, showing Itself In silly and trifling forms, often exposes Its possessor to ridicule — this, as It must necessarily weaken a wife's respect for her husband, may be a great evil. I have advised Ellen as strongly as my limited knowledge of the business gives me a right to do, to accept Mr. Lincoln In case he should make decided proposals. In consequence of this advice, she seems to suspect that I have had some hand in helping * to cook a certain hash which has been concocted at Earn- ley.' I use her own words, which I cannot inter- pret, for I do not comprehend them — you can clear me of any such underhand and meddling dealings. What I have had to say on the subject has been said entirely to herself, and it amounted simply to this: * If Mr. Lincoln is a good, honour- able, and respectable man, take him, even though you should not at present feel any violent affec- tion for him — the folly of what the French call " une grande passion '* Is not consistent with your tranquil character; do not therefore wait for such a feeling. If Mr. Lincoln be sensible and good- APPENDIX 247 tempered, I do not doubt that in a little while you would find yourself very happy and comfortable as his wife.* " You will see by these words that I am no advocate for the false modesty which you com- plain of, and which induces some young ladies to say * No ' when they mean ' Yes.' But if I know Ellen, she is not one of this class — she ought not therefore to be too closely urged; let her friends state their opinion and give their advice, and leave it to her own sense of right and reason to do the rest. It seems to us better that she should be married — but if she thinks otherwise, perhaps she is the best judge. We know many evils are escaped by eschewing matrimony, and since so large a proportion of the young ladies of these days pursue that rainbow-shade with such unre- mitting eagerness, let us respect an exception who turns aside and pronounces it only a coloured vapour whose tints will fade on a close approach." 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