Charlotte Brontë and her sisters

LITERARY
LIVES

EDITED BY

W. ROBERTSON
NICOLL

CHARLOTTE

BRONTE

AND HER

SISTERS.

CHARLOTTE

BRONTE

AND HER

SISTERS

BY CLEMENT K. SHORTER

MTERARY LIVES

LONDON: HODDER AND
STOUGHTON MDCCCCV

R

4- 1£>

Cop

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CONTENTS

PAGE
I

THE FATHER OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE' ... I

II

THE MOTHER OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE . . . II

III

THORNTON . . . . . . . .18

IV

CHILDHOOD AT HAWORTH . 26

SCHOOLDAYS -34

VI
GOVERNESS LIFE 41

VII

THE PENSION HEGER, BRUSSELS ... 60

VIII
POEMS 77

v b

vi Contents

PAGE
IX

BRANWELL BRONTE ..... .87

X

THE PUBLICATIONS OF MR. NEWBY . . . 107

XI

"WUTHERING HEIGHTS" ..... 122

XII
ANNE BRONTE 139

XIII
"JANE EYRE" 152

XIV
"SHIRLEY" ij(,

XV

" VlLLETTE " AND " THE PROFESSOR " . . . 196

XVI
MARRIAGE AND DEATH 220

XVII
THE GLAMOUR OF THE BRONTES . . . 234

INTRODUCTION

THIS book may seem at first sight only
an untoward 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 Life, to
which I was privileged to add many notes,
vii

viii Introduction

The Ha worth 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added certain other unpublished material to
this little book although this will be dis-
cerned 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 my friend Mrs. Wilfrid
Meynell for reading my proof-sheets.

The Father of Charlotte Bronte

PATRICK BRONTE,1 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

1 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 Hartshead " 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 genuine, 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, BrontS or Bronte*. Not until he
arrived at Haworth do we find his signature as Bronte.

Charlotte Bronte

came from the " Black North," from that
particular part of Ireland where Protestantism
flourishes, largely through the infusion of
English and 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 corn kiln. The book to which we
owe the only glimpse of Patrick's parentage,
The Brontes in Ireland, by Dr. Wright, is so
full of invention that it is difficult to derive
therefrom fragments of truth concerning the
earlier Brontes, or Bruntys. It would seem
clear, however, that Hugh Brunty married
one Alice McClory, who had been brought up
in the Roman Catholic faith, but who, after
her marriage in the Protestant Church of
Magherally, adopted the religion of her hus-
band.1 Ten children were born to Hugh and

1 The Brontts 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 of Charlotte Bronte 3

Alice Brunty, and of these Patrick, the eldest,
alone has any interest for us.

After such education as the village school
afforded, young Patrick Brunty became a
weaver, 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, during his three years of schoolmaster-
ing, it is suggested that he may have saved the
sum of a hundred pounds or so. This enabled
him to leave Ireland for Cambridge, r where
he entered himself at St. John's College on
October I, 1802, changing his name from
Brunty to Bronte at this time.1 In April of that
year another Irishman, Henry John Temple,
who was also educated at St. John's, succeeded

1 Whether the name was assumed in honour of Nelson
who about this time became Duke of Bront6, 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.

Charlotte Bront'e'

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 peasant were never on speaking terms.
Palmerston was 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 influ-
ence 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, himself afterwards a clergy-
man. Nunn renewed 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

The Father of Charlotte Bronte 5

astonish his relatives in County Down with
remittances — a duty that he fulfilled all his
days.

Mr. Bronte's first curacy was at Wethers-
field in Essex, where his name is to be found
in the church books in October 1806. His
vicar was Dr. Jowett — a non-resident — who
published a volume of Village 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. Burder. Mrs.
Burder was the mother of four children, of
whom the eldest daughter, Mary, was at the
time eighteen years of age, and the court-
ship of Irish curate and Essex lass was a
matter of course. A stern uncle, watching
over his niece's heritage, interrupted the
correspondence ; there was much heart-break,
doubtless many tears, and finally Mr. Bronte
took flight from Wethersfield.1 Mary Burder
waited long for intercepted letters that never

1 Life of Charlotte Bronte, by Augustine Birrell, 1887.

Charlotte Bronte'

came, and she was still unwed when her
old lover became a widower in 1821. She
then received by letter a further offer of
marriage from Mr. Bronte, to which she
answered " No," and thus denied to the
Bronte children a kind stepmother. Three
years later Mary Burder became Mrs. Silree,
the wife of a Nonconformist 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 unpleasant conditions, has com-
municated with that old college friend, John
Nunn. Mr. Nunn held a curacy at Shrews-
bury at this time. From him Mr. Bronte
learnt that there was a vacancy at Wellington,
not far away. Of this parish John Eyton, the
famous antiquarian, was Vicar. Bronte ap-
plied for and obtained the curacy, and with it
renewed pleasant intercourse with his old
college friend. But in a few months every-
thing was changed. John Nunn married, and
the friendship was snapped asunder. Patrick
Bronte, with the remembrance of Mary

The Father of Charlotte Bronte 7

Burder's apparent faithlessness 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 of sojourn. Before we accompany
him to Dewsbury, however, I may as well
recall a pleasant sequel to this friendship with
Mr. Nunn that belongs 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 familiar. 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

8 Charlotte Bronte

letters and said, ' These were written by
Patrick Bronte. They relate to his spiritual
state. I have read them once more and now
I destroy them.' '

It was in January 1809 that this Wellington
episode commenced, and at the end of the
same year Mr. Bronte began his long asso-
ciation with^-Yorkshire as curate of Dewsbury.
Mr. Bronte always seemed able to secure
" literary " vicars, and his new vicar, Mr.
Buckmaster, had some title to fame as a
hymn writer and a contributor to the maga-
zines of the day. He was, moreover, the
successor at Dewsbufly to the Rev. Matthew
Powley, who married the only daughter of
Mary Unwin — Cowper's " Mary " — and was
a regular correspondent of the poet.

At Dewsbury Mr. Bronte stayed two years,
and we may well assume that his vicar's literary
activities 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.1 It contains

1 It is an interesting fact that Mr. Bronte was not the
first of his own family with an inclination for writing.

The Father of Charlotte Bronte 9

"An Epistle to the Rev. J B while

journeying for the recovery of his health," and
there is much more of no great distinction.
Patrick Bronte did not publish Cottage

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 : —

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
ye 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 O'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.

io Charlotte Bronte

Poems until he reached his next curacy at
Hartshead-cum-Clifton. A slight disagree-
ment, the remark of a churchwarden that
Mr. Buckmaster 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
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 Harts-
head-cum-Clifton— and it was here that the
young Irishman met the woman who was to be-
come his wife — the mother of Charlotte Bronte.

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 mar-
riage. 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 fol-
lowed him to the grave in the following year.
They had one son and six daughters. Mr.
Branwell is described as " Assistant to the
Corporation," whatever that official's duties
may have been. He left his daughters not

12 Charlotte Bronte

entirely unprovided 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 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 Fennells. Mr. Morgan
was engaged to Maria Branwell's cousin, Jane
Fennell. Patrick Bronte speedily lost his
heart. The couple were engaged in August,
1812; there were a few love-letters, and the
marriage was celebrated on December 29th of
that year, when at Guiseley Church Maria
Branwell became Mrs. Bronte. There was an
added touch of romance in the very wed-
ding. A sister and a cousin of Mrs.
Bronte were married on the same days,
the sister Charlotte Branwell in far away
Penzance to her cousin Joseph Branwell, and

The Mother of Charlotte Bronte 1 3

Jane Fennell to Mr. Morgan. Mr. Morgan
performed the marriage ceremony for Mr.
and Mrs. Bronte, and Mr. Bronte in return
officiated a few moments later to make his
wife's cousin Mrs. Morgan.

It was stated by a niece who died a year or
two ago that all three marriages were " pro-
foundly 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 giving 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 sun-
shine in the married life of her poor mother.
Mr. Bronte may have been a good husband.
On the whole, he was doubtless thoroughly

1 Letter to the author from the late Miss Branwell, of
Penzance.

14 Charlotte Bronte

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 to his wife. We may be sure, however,
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 Hartshead. 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

The Mother of Charlotte Bronte i 5

sad and sweet, to find that mind of a truly
fine, pure, and elevated order. They were
written to papa before they were married.
There is a rectitude, a refinement, a con-
stancy, a modesty, a sense, a gentleness in
them indescribable. 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
succession 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
1 Letter to Ellen Nussey.

1 6 Charlotte Bronte

him, the first being named Maria and the
second Elizabeth. During this period Mr.
Bronte became an industrious author.

He published in Halifax, as has already been
said, a little volume of verse entitled Cottage
Poems in 1811, and in 1813, 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 Hartshead, 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,
offered to exchange the living of Thornton for
that of Hartshead, and the exchange was effec-
ted. Mr. Atkinson is of interest to us as the
godfather of Charlotte Bronte. His wife was
also her godmother. 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

The Mother of Charlotte Bronte i 7

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.

Ill
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 something of
material good in his desire to be near his
future wife, with whom he acquired a com-
petency. 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
1815, with her two little children — one a babe
of three months old — still stands. It is a
plain, unpicturesque structure, rendered more

Photo J. J. Stead

Charlotte Bronte's Birthplace

Thornton, Yorkshire, where Mr. Bronte was curate
from 1816 to 1820

Thornton 1 9

plain and unpicturesque by the fact that half
of its frontage has been converted into a
butcher's shop. Near by there stands a new
church, in the registers of which are recorded
the baptisms of the famous 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 officiated, and a local
magnate, Mr. Firth, and his daughter were
godfather and godmother, while the second
godmother was Miss Elizabeth Branwell, 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

20 Charlotte Bronte'

Charlotte and Emily Bronte were both born
in this unpretentious cottage in Thornton
— Charlotte on April 21, 1816, and Emily Jane
on July 30, 1818. The only boy, who was
christened Patrick Branwell, was born here on
June 26, 1817. 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
indeed that he still wrote verses and prose
stories of a kind, and that he contributed a
sermon on " Conversion " to the Pastoral
Visitor. He had his modest share of recog-
nition 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, just before his daughters had made him
famous, one Newsam, in his Poets of Yorkshire,
devoted no less than five lines of appreciation
(with eighteen lines of quotation) to Mr.
Bronte as a poet.1 Mr. Bronte's work was,

1 " The Poets of Yorkshire, comprising sketches and the

Thornton

2 I

however, mediocre, and would long since have
been forgotten were it not for his daughter's
fame. It is more pleasant to meet him in
Thornton as a social rather than as a literary
personage, and, although our knowledge of him
is scanty in this respect, it is interesting 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 1815, the Rev.
Patrick 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 acquaintance with Mrs.
Bronte, and, as we have seen, became one of
the child Elizabeth's godmothers.

Lives and Specimens of the writing of those ' Children of
Song ' 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 5/. 250
copies printed. London : Groombridge & Sons. Sheffield :
Ridge & Jackson. 1 845 .

22 Charlotte Bronte

Miss Firth kept a diary, a diary all too scanty.
It consisted of 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 five years. Mr. Bronte is seen as a most
sociable individual, and constant records of tea-
drinking are noted. On July 26, 1816, we
learn that " Miss Branwell returned to Pen-
zance," 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 in-
debted for the actual dates of birth of all
the Bronte children. On January 17, 1820,
we find the announcement of another acces-
sion to the Bronte family. This was the
day that Anne was born. In that month also
is the record, " Gave at Anne's christening,
one pound." Altogether, one sighs over the

Thornton 2 3

fact that Mistress Elizabeth Firth was not a
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 Charlotte or Emily, one saying of the
poor mother pitilessly hurrying to her doom,
would have been pathetically interesting.
Two months after Anne's birth we find the
entry, " Mr. and Mrs. Bronte came to din-
ner," 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
incumbent of Thornton was called " minister."
Thomas Atkinson, who preceded Mr. Bronte,
was " minister," and so also was William
Bishop, who succeeded 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
external sordidness, it has had a wide-reaching
spiritual activity. Here, a century before

24 Charlotte Bronte

Mr. Bronte's arrival had flourished eminent
divines of Nonconformity, 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
tradition, and his wife's uncle, Mr. Fennell,
who about this time abandoned Wesleyanism
and became a clergyman of the Church of

Thornton 2 5

England, helped to keep him in toleration for
all aspects of the evangelical creed. Appar-
ently he never quarrelled with Nonconformity,
although at a much later date some of his
curates at Ha worth 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.

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 remem-
bered 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 altitude, and pleasantly jutting on
the glorious moors. Given genuine health,

Childhood at Haworth 2 J

Mrs. Bronte could have been happy enough
at Haworth — happier than at Thornton. But
physical health she had not, nor 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 ser-
vices from February, but it is clear that he
left his family behind him then as the guests
of the Firths, at Kipping House. As a stal-
wart walker, the journey to and fro could
never have troubled him. His visits to Thorn-
ton continue to be recorded in Miss Firth's
diary many times during this year 1820. In
September of that year, after less than six
months of life in Haworth, Mrs. Bronte died.
If we are to believe gossip, the bereaved
husband tried in two quarters to find a step-
mother for his little children. He first ap-
plied to Mary Burder, of Wethersfield, as we
have seen, and then to Elizabeth Firth, of
Thornton. Twice refused, he turned to his

28 Charlotte Bronte

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 were accepted and faithfully performed
for twenty-two years.

Returning for a moment to Mrs. Bronte, we
find her life story to be a brief and unques-
tionably a pathetic one. She is preserved for
us in her daughter's biography by a number
of love-letters and by a brief religious essay of
no particular individuality.1 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 scan-
dalous 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 Haworth, while at Thorn-
ton he was in every way inclined to sociability.

1 The love-letters are in the possession of Mr. A. B.
Nicholls. The manuscript entitled "The Advantages
of Poverty in Religious Concerns " is in my library.

Childhood at Hawortk 2 9

Some measure of moroseness may, however,
have come over Mr. Bronte in the period follow-
ing his bereavement. Taking himself 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 guidance, their father frequently having
his meals alone. They met in his study
on the right-hand side of the doorway as
you enter the house, for tea, but they saw
little of him during the rest of the day.

We may imagine, then, these six children
working 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 or-
phan children, much grim kindness from
aunt and servants. The servants of that
time, Sarah and Nancy Garrs, were asked
for their impressions in later life, and then at
least they were enthusiastic. Never was so
kind a master as Mr. Bronte, never so clever a
little child as Charlotte. We may accept

30 Charlotte Bronte

such testimony with a grain of salt, but the
main fact remains that it was a reasonably happy
home until the educational problem asserted
itself. Education has always special credentials
for the self-made man, and Mr. Bronte not
unnaturally 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 physically robust.
But there is not much need to associate too
closely the sad fate of Maria and Elizabeth
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 1 5 . On June I

Childhood at Hawortb 3 i

Charlotte and Emily returned to Haworth.
Charlotte Bronte long years afterwards was to
gibbet for all 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 Nickleby. After Miss
Bronte's death her biographer, Mrs. Gaskell,
got into trouble for her identification of the
Lowood of Jane Eyre with the Casterton
presided over by the Rev. Carus Wilson. A
very considerable mass of opinion was brought
together from old pupils to prove that, even
when the little Brontes were there, Casterton
was a most exemplary institution. The point
is scarcely worth disputing 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 provides
a real gratification of appetite ; an environment
that to one child is hell, to another is paradise.
The little Bronte girls had fragile constitutions
and therein, it cannot be too often repeated,
lay the whole tragedy of their lives.

There was little of tragedy, but much of

32 Charlotte Bronte

happiness, however, in the years immediately
following their leaving Casterton and the
death of the two elder sisters. Miss Branwell
was doubtless a very prim1 personage, although
kindly withal. There is no reason to suppose
but that she did her best for the four orphaned
children, of whom Charlotte, 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 Imita-
tion 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 com-
menced to write "original compositions," as
so many children of precocious tendencies do
— to the joy of fond and ambitious parents.
But I am not sure that children often cultivate
the minute handwriting that was affected by
the Bronte prodigies. There are perhaps a
hundred little manuscript books in existence,
principally the work of Charlotte and Branwell,
some few, however, by Emily and Anne.
They were compiled in a microscopic hand-

Childhood at Hawortb 3 3

writing probably from reasons of economy.
Pence, we may be sure, were scarce with
the little ones. The booklets were stitched
and covered, 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
Wellington 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 alternately 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

Schooldays. 1831—1835

IN January 1831, Charlotte Bronte be-
came 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,

Schooldays 3 5

" intellectual " ; Miss Nussey was simply
pretty and lovable, but hero-worshipping to
an almost 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 outlook 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.1 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 assistance
in her Life, until her death in 1897, she was
always accessible to the admirers of Charlotte
Bronte, and she carefully preserved the
voluminous correspondence of her friend,
most of which has been published.2 It is to

1 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.

36 Charlotte Bronte'

Ellen Nussey that we owe all the best glimpses
of Charlotte Bronte as she grows to woman-
hood ; 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 short-
sighted 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

1 From a letter written by Mary Taylor from New
Zealand to Mrs. Gaskell.

Schooldays 3 7

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. This was really a
very happy time in Charlotte Bronte's life.
She was devoted to her two friends, kindly dis-
posed 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 neighbour-
hood, 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 painting and drawing, and there are
very many specimens 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 knowledge
of French, as a translation by her of the first
book of Voltaire's Henriade 1 indicates. With
French as a spoken language she was to

1 In the possession of the present writer.

38 Charlotte Bronte

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 present-
able equipment for a girl of sixteen who had
to " coach " her 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 morn-
ings from nine o'clock to half-past twelve I
instruct my sisters and draw, then we walk till
dinner ; after dinner I sew till 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 com-
pany this afternoon, and on Tuesday next we

Schooldays 3 9

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
records for us to-day being certain drawings
that bear the dates of this period, and certain
little manuscripts 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 appar-
ently 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 permanently to occupy the not
very commodious parsonage. Branwell, more-
over, was to be an artist, which involved ex-
pense. He was to go to London to study at
the Royal Academy Schools, and his sisters
realized that they also should think of some
occupation, and thus relieve the family ex-
chequer. Charlotte's turn came first. In
July 1835 she returned to Miss Wooler's

4-O Charlotte Bronte

school at Roe Head as a governess, 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.

VI
Governess Life

CHARLOTTE returned to Roe Head as
a governess 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 going to be a governess.
This last determination I formed myself, know-
ing I should have to take the step sometime,
and * better sune as syne ' to use the Scotch
proverb ; and knowing well that papa would

42 Charlotte Bronte

have enough to do with his limited income
should Branwell be placed at the Royal Aca-
demy and Emily at Roe Head. Where am I
going to reside ? you will ask. Within four
miles of yourself, dearest, at a place neither of
us are unacquainted with, being no other than
the identical Roe Head mentioned 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, neces-
sity, 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,

Governess Life 43

' 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 your
sister Mercy ? The sentence hurt me, though
I did not quite understand it. My only reason
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 how-
ever the least pleasant to survey of any aspect
of her life. She was ill adapted for the task
of looking 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-position of a nursery 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 nine-
teen years of age when she went to Roe Head
as governess. The year following Miss Wooler
removed her school to Dewsbury. This was

44 Charlotte Bronte

just before the Christmas of 1836. Charlotte
was but a year at this latter place when she
returned home, broken in health and spirits.

Emily, now aged seventeen, went with her
sister to Roe Head. 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, Helen Nussey and Mary Taylor.
With both she corresponded regularly, and her
Sundays were frequently spent at the house of
one or the other.

Ellen Nussey had her home at this time and
until 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 prosperous, and even luxuri-
ous environment. She loved Ellen Nussey,

Governess Life 45

moreover, although she had no common
ground of intellectual interest. Her letters
to her are frequent, and they are always affec-
tionate. But she has herself well described
the 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
schoolfellows. 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 sapling, then a strong tree —
now, no new friend, however lofty or profound
in intellect, not even Miss Martineau 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
romance. If she attempts to read poetry, or
poetic prose, aloud, I am irritated and deprive
her of the book ; if she talks of it, I stop my
ears ; but she is good ; she is true ; she is
faithful, and I love her." 1

i Letter to W. S. Williams in Charlotte Bronte and Her
Circle, page 205.

46 Charlotte Bronte

Of more importance however in Miss
Bronte's intellectual growth was her friend-
ship with Mary Taylor, the " dear Polly " and
" dear Pag " of many a letter unhappily de-
stroyed. One would gladly have possessed a
clearer picture than exists of that other home
into which Charlotte was welcomed in these
dreary, governess days. The Taylors are, how-
ever, 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 Taylor
family were Dissenters and Democrats. From
those days onwards it is clear that a larger reli-
gious toleration, a larger human sympathy than
she had hitherto known gathered in Charlotte
Bronte's mind, and Mary Taylor must have
been mainly instrumental in giving her this.

Governess Life 47

" 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 Haworth." Or we may
take this other picture where 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
rebelled 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 literary aspirations must have begun with
the young people, for we find Charlotte cor-
responding with Southey, then Poet Laureate.
We find Branwell Bronte also writing letters
to the Editor of Blackwood? s Magazine begging
for the insertion of his contributions, and send-
ing to Wordsworth drafts of his projected
books. When the Christmas holidays were

48 Charlotte Bronte

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 sne
obtained a long-delayed answer from Southey
— a kind and considerate letter from a busy
man to a stranger — advising that she should
not think about literature. A fragment of
her reply teaches us much : —

" My father is a clergyman of limited though
competent income, and I am the eldest of his
children. 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 occupy my thoughts
all day long, and my head and hands too, with-
out having a moment's time for one dream of
the imagination. In the evenings, I confess,
I do think, but I never trouble any one else
with my thoughts. I carefully avoid any ap-
pearance of preoccupation and eccentricity,
which might lead those I live amongst to sus-
pect the nature of my pursuits. Following
my father's advice — who from my childhood

Governess Life 49

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 inter-
ested in them. I don't always succeed, 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 gra-
titude. I trust I shall never more feel ambi-
tious 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 herself, Miss Wooler perhaps took little
account of the ailments of others. Anne had
what to the schoolmistress was merely a slight
cold ; to her devoted sister it was much more,
and Charlotte was right ; it was doubtless the

1 See Southey's Life, vol. vi. pp. 329-30, for two letters
from Southey to Charlotte Bronte.

4

50 Charlotte Bronte

beginning of that consumption which was all
too soon to end her sister's life. The aliena-
tion was but temporary, and Miss Wooler and
her pupil parted the best of friends. Charlotte
and Anne went home, and the latter did 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 Donnington 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 ele-
ment of Derbyshire scenery into her books.1

1 In Hathersage Church is an altar tomb to Robert
Eyre, who fought at Agincourt, and to his wife, Joan Eyre.
Hathersage is of course the village of Morton of Jane Eyre.

Governess Life 5 i

Charlotte Bronte went to stay at Hathersage l
with, her friend Ellen while the vicar was on
his honeymoon, for it did not take him long to
recover from the blow of Miss Bronte's rejec-
tion of his suit. He had indeed told her
frankly enough that he wanted some one to
look after his housekeeping, and Charlotte had
sufficient romance in her composition to feel
that this was not quite an adequate courtship.
That she had her own strong views on the sub-
ject 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 answer-
ing it for a day. Now, Ellen, I am about to
write thee a discourse and a piece of advice

1 A little earlier — in September, 1839 — Charlotte had
her first view of the sea. She paid a short visit with Ellen
Nussey to Easton, near Bridlington, where the two friends
stayed with a Mr. John Hudson and his wife. A month
later she writes to Miss Nussey, " Have you forgotten the
sea by this time, Ellen ? Is it grown dim in your mind ?
or can you still see it, dark, blue and green, and foam-white,
and hear it roaring roughly when the wind is high, or
rushing softly down when it is calm ? "

52 Charlotte Bronte

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
gentleman come forward 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 Brookroyd
some fine morning, where you will find Miss
Ellen sitting in the drawing 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 you, then begin in a clear, distinct, deferen-
tial 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,

Governess Life 53

but I have sufficient to support us, I am not a
great man, but I love you honestly and truly.
Miss Ellen, if you knew the world better you
would see that this is 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, because 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 hypocrite, 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
manageable temper ? Then, Ellen, consider
the matter. You feel a disgust towards him
now, an utter repugnance, very likely, but be

54 Charlotte Bronte

so good as to remember you don't know him,
you have only had three or four days' acquaint-
ance 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 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 sufficient to
allow you to guide him in important matters.
Such being the case, Ellen, I hope you will
not have the romantic folly to wait for the
wakening of what the French call ' Une Grande
Passion? My good girl, * Une grande Passion '
is * une grande Folie.' I have told you so be-
fore, and I tell it you again. Moderation in

Governess Life 5 5

all things is wisdom. When you are as old as
I am (I am sixty at least, being your grand-
mother) you will find that the majority of
those worldly precepts, whose seeming cold-
ness shocks and repels us in youth, are founded
in wisdom. Did you not once say to me in all
childlike simplicity, ' I thought, Charlotte, no
young ladies should fall in love till the offer
was actually made ' ? I forget what answer
I made at the time, but I now reply after due
consideration, ' Right as a glove, the maxim is
just, and I hope you will always attend to it.'
I will even extend and confirm it — no young
lady should fall in love till the offer has been
made, accepted, the marriage ceremony per-
formed, 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
that her husband'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

56 Charlotte Bronte

will soon be a neglected fool. Did I not once
tell you of an instance of a relative of mine who
cared for a young lady 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 contempt, the remorse, the miscon-
struction which follow the development of
feelings in themselves noble, warm, 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 attain-
ments 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 re-
ceiving, all I have to say may be comprised in a
very brief sentence. On one hand don't accept

Governess Life 57

if you are certain you cannot tolerate the man —
on the other hand don't refuse because you can-
not adore him. As to little William Weightman,
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 rever-
ence expresses himself very strongly on the
subject of young ladies saying ' No ' when they
mean * Yes.' He assures me he means nothing
personal. I hope not. I tried to find some-
thing admirable in him and failed.

" Assuredly I quite agree with him in his
disapprobation 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."1

Instead of plunging into matrimony, Char-
lotte Bronte twice entered upon the duties of
a governess in a private family. Her first
1 See Appendix for other letters.

58 Charlotte Bronte

' situation," as she calls it, was with a Mrs. Sidg-
wick, and we find her in June 1839 writing to
her sister Emily from the Sidgwick family
mansion at Stonegappe in Yorkshire, explain-
ing that her life there was thoroughly hateful
to her. Mr. A. C. Benson, the well-known
critic and a cousin of the Sidgwicks, has epito-
mised the situation when he says that she
clearly had no gifts for the management of
children ; and also that she was in a very
morbid condition the whole time she was at
Stonegappe.1

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, York-
shire, 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 here-

1 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 accompany them to church — " Oh, Miss Brontg,
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 depressed because she
was treated as an outcast and a friendless dependent.

Governess Life 5 9

after to prove himself a friend to Miss Bronte.
It was he doubtless who assisted with his ad-
vice in the scheme for going abroad, the enter-
prise which was the turning-point in Charlotte
Bronte's career, and which undoubtedly made
her the famous author she eventually became.

VII
The Pension Heger, Brussels

IT is in my judgment exceedingly probable
that had not circumstances led Char-
lotte 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
nothing 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 already 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

The Pension H^gery Brussels 61

with the achievement of many of her peers
in literature what Miss Bronte had accom-
plished 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-worship, and much of it, still in manu-
script, may be examined by the curious.1 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 also she ear-
liest described the entirely new world wherein
her soul had been unbound. The sojourn in
Brussels, 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

1 There are MSS. in the British Museum and in the
Bronte Museum, Haworth. See also The Adventures of
Ernest Alembert, 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, Dodd, Mead & Co.,
1902.

6 2 Charlotte Bronte

her work as governess a position of absolute
misery. Anne had held two such situations,
Emily one, and Charlotte, as we have seen,
also two. To Emily 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 always uncertain. ... I have one aching
feeling at my heart (I must allude to it, though
I had resolved 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 patient, persecuted
stranger. I know what concealed susceptibility
is in her nature when her feelings are wounded.
I wish I could be with her, to administer a
little balm. She is more lonely, less gifted
with the power of making friends, even than
I am."

There would be more freedom in a home

The Pension Htger, Brussels 63

school, but then every one, with candid friend-
ship, called attention to the fact that without
" languages " an independent position as school-
mistress was out of the question. Some of
their old school friends had been to Brussels.
Two of them, Mary and Martha Taylor,
were there at the time, but meanwhile there
were those who strongly advised an " Institu-
tion " at Lille. Finally, however, Brussels was
decided on. A little earlier, writing from her
governess 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 ^100 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
advantage were allowed us, it would be the

64 Charlotte Bronte

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 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 account.
I look to you, aunt, to help us. I think you
will not refuse. I know, if you consent, it shall
not be my fault if you ever repent your
kindness."

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 February, 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 returned to England and to Haworth,
and his daughters devoted themselves strenu-
ously to their work.

The Pension He'ger^ Brussels 65

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 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
recent years. There are several Englishwomen
still living who were pupils of Madame Heger
in the generations that followed the Brontes.
The present writer has spent more than one
pleasant hour in a drawing-room in Bayswater
where he has heard three amiable and culti-
vated gentlewomen recall with full hearts their
old memories of the Pension nat Heger. They
were the daughters of a Dr. Wheelwright
residing in Brussels for his health. One of
them, Laetitia, became very intimate 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

5

66 Charlotte Bronte

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.
Mary and Martha Taylor. The old school-
fellows of Dewsbury, were not at the same
school as Charlotte, but at a more expensive
establishment, the Chateau de Koekelberg.
Here Martha fell ill and died, and but a few
weeks later Charlotte and Anne were 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 beginning of November. They found
themselves monetarily 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, but sufficient to make things
easier as far as the school project was concerned.
Now they need not go to Bridlington, as was
contemplated earlier. They might alter the

The Pension Htger, Brussels 67

parsonage a little, utilize their aunt's bedroom,
and take at least two or three pupils as
boarders.

But meanwhile Anne had still a " situation "
that had in it many advantages. She was
governess to the daughters of a clergyman —
Mr. Robinson, of Thorpe Green. Why not,
it was thought, let Emily keep house and
Charlotte be allowed to spend yet another
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 fateful journey, leaving
Haworth on Friday morning, and reaching
Brussels on Sunday evening. Here a new life
began. She was now a governess — Mademoi-
selle Charlotte — with many special privileges,

68 Charlotte Bronte

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
antagonism — in fact, it must be admitted
that Mesdames Blanche, Sophie, and Hausse,
her three colleagues, 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 was, my place here with my place
at Mrs. Sidgwick's, or Mrs. White's, I am
thankful. "

Then will seem to have come a change.
Writing to her brother Branwell, she
says —

" Among 1 20 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 fastidious-
ness on my part, but to the absence of decent

The Pension Htger^ Brussels 69

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,
hating nothing, being nothing, doing nothing
— yes, I teach, and sometimes get red in the
face with impatience at their stupidity. But
don't think I ever scold or fly into a passion.
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 exception to this rule (for
Madame, always cool and always reasoning,
is not quite an exception). But I rarely speak
to Monsieur now, for not being a pupil I
have little or nothing to do with him. From

jo Charlotte Bronte

time to time he shows his kind-heartedness
by loading me with books, so that I am still
indebted to him for all the pleasure or amuse-
ment I have. Except for the total want of
companionship I have nothing to complain
of."1

Still more melancholy was her condition by
September when she wrote to her sister Emily
the letter 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
cemetery, 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 repugnance to return to the
house, which contained nothing 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
1 Charlotte Brontf and her Circle.

The Pension Hfger^ Brussels 71

is not much like me), wandered about the aisles
where a few old women were saying their
prayers, till vespers began. I stayed till
they were over. Still I could not leave the
church or force myself to go home — to school
I mean. An odd whim came into my head.
In a solitary part of the cathedral six or seven
people still remained kneeling by the con-
fessionals. In two confessionals I saw a priest.
I felt as if I did not care what I did, provided
it was not absolutely wrong, and that it served
to vary my life and yield a moment's interest.
I took a fancy to change myself into a Catholic
and go and make a real confession to see what
it was like. Knowing me as you do, you will
think this odd, but when people are by them-
selves they have singular fancies. 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

72 Charlotte Bronte

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 went away, and a little wooden door
inside the grating opened, and I saw the priest
leaning his ear towards me. I was obliged
to begin, and yet I did not know a word of the
formula with which they always commence
their confessions. It was a funny position.
I felt precisely as I did when alone on the
Thames at midnight. I commenced with
saying I was a foreigner, and had been brought
up a Protestant. The priest asked if I
was a Protestant then. I somehow could not
tell a lie, and said ' yes.' He replied that in
that case I could not ' jouir du bonheur de la
confesse ' ; but I was determined to confess ;
and at last he said he would allow me because
it might be the first step towards returning to
the true Church. I actually did confess — a
real confession. When I had done he told me
his address, and said that every morning I
was to go to the rue du Pare — to his house —
and he would reason with me, and try to con-
vince me of the error and enormity of being a

The Pension Htger^ Brussels 73

Protestant ! I promised faithfully to go.
Of course, however, the adventure stops there,
and I hope I shall never see the priest again.
I think you had better not tell papa of this.
He will not understand that it was only a
freak, and will perhaps think I am going to
turn Catholic." *

Her morbidness increased, and at the end
of the year she resolved to go home, her
father's increasing tendency to blindness forti-
fying her resolution. 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. j,

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 qualifications to give
me a fair chance of success ; yet I cannot
1 Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle.

74 Charlotte Bronte

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 1
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 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 teacher, 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.

The Pension Heger ^ Brussels 75

I did not think it had been in their phlegmatic
nature. . . ."

I have said that Brussels episode was the
turning-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 career left him essentially
illiterate, and his curates were worse — it is not
easy to say. M. Heger kindled her intellectual
impulses, and that was no small thing. That
he won any very great control over her moral
nature there is no reason to believe. Surely
one takes the nature of an artist too pedantically
to assume that her heroes in Villette and The
Professor are primarily biographical.

It is sufficient that M. Heger knew good
literature from bad, that he had a sense
of proportion, 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 believe, 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

7 6 Charlotte Bronte

on the fringe of the writing world. She left
Brussels a woman of genuine cultivation, of
educated tastes, armed with just the equip-
ment that was to enable her to write the books
of which two generations of her countrymen
have been justly proud.

VIII
Poems

THE idea of starting a school which had
been the primary motive for the
Brussels enterprise naturally 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
before she left for Brussels. But these friends
had already arranged for their children's educa-
tion elsewhere, and there was nothing for it but
advertisement. A circular was printed, offer-
ing 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,

77

78 Charlotte Bronte

but there are no pupils to be had," Charlotte
writes to a friend. Yet a little later she writes
again : " We have made no alterations 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. Bran-
well, the once much loved brother was at
home, hopelessly wrecking his life with dram
drinking and drugs, the father fighting 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
reported 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 ; " 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 occu-
pation of preparing a book for the press.

Poems 7 9

This was a volume of poems. Charlotte has
herself recorded the circumstances under
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 autumn of 1845 she accidentally
lighted upon a MS. volume of verse in Emily's
handwriting which she considered to be " con-
densed and terse, vigorous and genuine." " It
took hours," Miss Bronte tells us, " to recon-
cile her to the discovery I had made, and days
to persuade her that such poems merited
publication."

An interesting glimpse is here given
by Charlotte of Emily's remarkable aloof-
ness. So shy was she that " on the recesses
of her mind not even those nearest and
dearest to her could, with impunity, in-
trude unlicensed." Anne, less painfully
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."

8o Charlotte Bronte

The three sisters determined to publish.
To find a publisher on any terms was, however,
not easy. 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 adven-
ture of the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren. From the
correspondence with Aylott & Jones which has
been preserved, we learn that the three sisters
paid £36 lew. for the printing and binding,
and yet another .£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
appeared.1 It was reviewed in the Athenaeum,
where the critic discovered that Ellis possessed

1 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, London. Aylott
and Jones, 1846. " 4*. " marked on binding.

Poems 8 1

" 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 Magazine for " the indul-
gent notice " that appeared in his last issue.1
As an outcome of it all, but two copies only
were sold. Undismayed at the world's cold-
ness, Charlotte " used up " some of the copies
by sending them to the leaders of contem-
porary literature — to Wordsworth, Tennyson,
Lochkart, and De Quincey among others, — a
letter of precisely similar wording accom-
panying each volume.

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

1 It is given in full in a note to the Haworth Edition of
Mrs. Gaskell's Life.

a In the introduction to the 1850 edition of Wuthering
Heights and Agnes Grey.

6

82 Charlotte Bronte

are the poems of Ellis Bell. The fixed con-
viction I held, and hold, of the worth of these
poems has not indeed received the confirmation
of much favourable criticism ; but I must
retain it notwithstanding."

Ellis Bell, indeed, was the poet. Currer
was to give one out of many demonstrations of
the fact 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 literary
fame.

Ellis Bell was, it will ever be acknowledged,
the one poet of a family many members of
which attempted verse. The lines in this
little volume entitled "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 :

Poems 8 3

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.

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 unapproachable 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

84 Charlotte Bronte

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 foreign and Romish
system. Once more she seemed sinking, but
this time she rallied through the mere force
of resolution : with inward remorse and shame
she looked back on her former failure, and
resolved to conquer in this second ordeal.
She did conquer ; but the victory cost her
dear. She was never happy till she carried
her hard-won knowledge 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

Poems 8 5

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.

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.

86 Charlotte Bronte

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
preserved with them in all competent an-
thologies 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.

IX
Branwell Bronte

BRANWELL, or Patrick Branwell
Bronte, was twenty - nine years of
age when his three sisters issued
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,
although Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, The Tenant
of Wildfell Hall, and Wuthering Heights had all
appeared 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 hadclaimed to have
done so. Such a rumour is discredited for any
intelligent person by Charlotte's disclaimer
which was conveyed in a letter to her friend,

87

8 8 Charlotte Bronte

Mr. W. S. Williams, announcing Branwell's
death : —

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

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. Char-
lotte's letters are always full of character, Bran-
well's always ineffective, 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, looking
backwards, some of his old friends and cronies
would be persuaded that Branwell had actually
assured them that he wrote the book which
was only published ten months before his

Branwet! Bronte 89

death. — at a time when he was in the lowest
depths of alcoholism. When he died Wuther-
ing Heights had probably 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 Bran well's
authorship is indeed amazing. We find for
example that Mr. January Searle, writing in
The Mirror, gives a most circumstantial account
of conversations with Branwell concerning a
story he had written, and indeed he is made
to discuss pretty freely Charlotte's novel as
well. Another acquaintance, Newman Dear-
den, 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 manuscript
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

9 o Charlotte Bronte

his sister said bore out the assertion, that he
wrote a great portion of Wuthering Heights
himself. Indeed, it is impossible for me to
read that story without meeting with many
passages which I feel certain must have come
from his pen. The weird fancies of diseased
genius with which he used to entertain me in
our long talks at Luddendenfoot reappear in
the pages of the novel, and I am inclined to
believe that the very plot was his invention
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 literary activity, were
spent by him in utter debasement 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
1 Memories of the Past, by Francis H. Grundy. jj

Branwell Bronte 91

during this period. " Branwell still remains at
home, and while he is here you shall not come.
I am more confirmed in that resolution the
more I know of him," writes Charlotte to her
friend, Ellen Nussey, in November 1845, and
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 in-
timation that " as usual " she addresses her
weekly letter to him, " because to you I find
the most to say." This intimate affection
seems to have prevailed 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 refer-
ence to Anne Bronte's novel, The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall, the book in which we have more

92 Charlotte Bronte

glimpses than in any other of the Bronte home
life ; Mrs. Markham, in that story, is obviously
a picture of Miss Branwell, and precisely as
Gilbert Markham's sisters thought of their
mother's partiality would BranwelPs sisters
think about the treatment meted out to their
brother by his affectionate 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 com-
plained 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 commotion, 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

Branwell Bronte 93

I don't attend to that, she whispers, " Don't
eat so much of that, Rose ; Gilbert will like it
for his supper " — I'm 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, Fergus 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 agree-
able to the gentlemen of the house — anything
will do for the ladies."

" ' 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 Ha-

94 Charlotte Bronte

worth parsonage of great fame to be acquired
after study at the Royal Academy Schools. He
had already shown some moderate talent in this
direction under the tuition of WiUiam Robinson,
a portrait painter of Leeds, at a time when it
will be remembered every town had its portrait
painter and no photographer, 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. For the
next three years he would have seemed to have
done little 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.

Branwell Bronte 95

He did, however, continue his art studies under
Robinson at Leeds, and painted many por-
traits 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 Bran-
well 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 disposition. His wife is a
quiet, silent and amiable woman, and his sons
are two fine spirited lads." *

1 Ley land's Bronte Family.

96 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. Ley-
land 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 Bran-
well'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 Sowerby Bridge Station, on the Leeds and
Manchester Railway. Hence he was trans-
ferred after a few months to Luddenden Foot,
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 forehead, nearly half the size of the
whole facial contour ; small ferrety eyes, deep-
sunk, and still further hidden by the never re-

Born 1817

Died 18

Patrick Branwell Bronte
From a Silhouette in the possession of the Rev. A . B. Nicholls

Branwell Bronte 97

moved 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 admira-
tion for the railway clerk, unless, as we suspect,
this came, like so many of the reminiscences of
Branwell, as a sentiment born of after know-
ledge 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 through-
out Yorkshire, and indeed 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 Hudibras, in such a
manner as often made me wish I had been a
scholar, as he was." a

If he were a "scholar," Branwell, unhappily,
lacked the practicality that \vould have made
a competent railway booking-clerk, and after

1 Pictures of the Past, by Francis H. Grundy, 1879.
> 'The Bronte Family, by Francis A. Leyland, 1886.

7

9 8 Charlotte Bronte

twelve months at Luddenden Foot he was
dismissed by the Company, it having been
found that the accounts at this station were
in utter confusion. Preliminary to leaving he
had to appear before some of the directors,
when his most intimate friend, William Weight-
man — Mr. Bronte's curate at Haworth at the
time — accompanied him.

It was at this period, early in 1842, that a de-
finite deterioration took place in Branwell. His
sisters 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 Thorp 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 wife
and persuaded himself and all his friends
that he had received encouragement. That

Branwell Bronte 99

Mrs. Robinson, 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 thor-
oughly debased Branwell, who talked con-
tinuously of his wrongs after Mr. Robinson had
turned him out of the house, and who declared
that the woman loved him and would marry
him when her fast-failing 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. Branwell
succeeded in disgusting his sisters, and entirely
alienating them, but at the same time they
accepted too easily his own account of the
affair. Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Nussey, for

ioo Charlotte Bronte

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. Robinson that is surprising in
its vehemence and its libellousness. 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 correspond-
ence. Writing to Ellen Nussey, in April 1846,
Charlotte says : —

" Branwell stays at home, and degenerates
instead of improving. It has been lately inti-
mated to him, that he would be received
again on the railroad where he was formerly
stationed if he would behave more steadily, but
he refuses to make an effort ; he will not work ;

Branwell Bronfe* 101

and at home he is a drain on every resource —
an impediment to all happiness."

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 conse-
quently 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 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 chastise-

102 Charlotte Bronte'

ment. 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,
expect, 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 un-
timely dreary extinction of what might have
been a burning and a shining light. My
brother was a year my junior. I had aspira-
tions and ambitions for him once, long ago —
they have perished mournfully. Nothing re-
mains 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 empti-
ness of his whole existence as I cannot describe.
I trust time will allay these feelings.

" My poor father naturally thought more of
his only son than of his daughters, and, much

Branwell Brontg 103

and long as he had suffered on his account, he
cried out for his loss like David for that of
Absalom — my son ! my son ! — and refused at

first to be comforted.

*****

" When I looked upon the noble face and
forehead of my dead brother (nature had
favoured him with a fairer outside as well as a
finer constitution 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 oppressive revelation of
the feebleness of humanity — of the inadequacy
of even genius to lead to true greatness if un-
aided 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.
The remembrance of this strange change now
comforts my poor father greatly. I myself,
with painful, mournful joy, heard him praying
softly in his dying moments ; and to the last
prayer which my father offered up at his bed-

104 Charlotte Bronte

side he added, ' Amen.' How unusual that
word appeared from his lips, of course you,
who did not know him, cannot conceive. Akin
to this alteration was that in his feelings 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 experience 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 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."1

1 Extracts from two letters to W. S. Williams, in
Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle.

Branwell Bronte' 105

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 considerable 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 documents concerning him
are to be found in a book by Mr. Francis Ley-
land, called The Bronte Family. Mr. Leyland's
two volumes were principally taken up with ex-
tracts 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 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 succeeded in
making every one in his home profoundly miser-
able. Whether that was a gain to art or not

106 Charlotte Bronte

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.

X

The Publications of Mr. Newby

IT was in April 1846 that Charlotte Bronte
wrote the first letter that gave indica-
tions 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 and Jones, the
booksellers who had engaged to issue for Char-
lotte 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 volumes, as shall be deemed
most advisable."

107

io8 Charlotte Bronte

The authors, Miss Bronte explained, still
maintaining 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 and Jones, she
asked, consider the MSS., and would they
publish in the event of thinking its contents
such as to warrant the expectation of success ?
Messrs. Aylott and Jones courteously replied
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 cher-
ished the hope of publishing were The Professor
by Charlotte, Wuthering Heights by Emily, and
Agnes Grey by Anne. The precise manner in
which The Processor 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

The Publications of Mr. Newby 109

of The Professor, which, it may be added,
reached Smith and Elder in a wrapper that
bore other tell-tale addresses. To Mr. George
Henry Lewes she wrote years later : —

" My work (a tale in one volume) being
completed, I offered it to a publisher. He said
it was original, faithful to nature, but he did
not feel warranted 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 ' thrilling excite-
ment,' that it would never suit the circulating
libraries, and as it was on those libraries the
success of fiction mainly depended, they could
not undertake to publish what would be over-
looked there." *

Mrs. Gaskell records that some of the re-
fusals 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 careful attention — and Jane Eyre
was accepted. At a much later date Charlotte
tried, more than once, to persuade her pub-
1 Mrs. Gaskell, Haworth Edition, May 20, 1847.

no Charlotte Bronte

Ushers to print The Professor, and being refused,
wrote half angrily, half reproachfully, to her
friend Mr. George Smith, declaring that the
book had now been refused nine times by " The
Trade," three of the refusals having 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. Williams
sharing with her, she declared, the distinc-
tion of being the only person who saw merit
in it.1

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 popularity 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 Pro-
fessor was being retained for consideration at
some other publisher's when the other stories
fell into the hands of Mr. Newby. Miss
Bronte afterwards said that they were accepted

1 Mrs. Gaskell's Life, Haworth Edition, page 516.

The Publications of Mr. Newby 1 1 1

" on terms somewhat impoverishing to the
two authors." In any case Charlotte speedily
caught up in the race. Thus she writes to
Mr. W. S. Williams 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 CurrerBell had placed the MS. oijane
Eyre in your hands. Mr. Newby, however, does
not do business like Messrs. Smith and Elder ;
a different spirit seems to preside at Mortimer
Street to that which guides the helm at 65,
Cornhill. . . . My relations have suffered from
exhausting delay and procrastination, while
I have to acknowledge the benefits of a man-
agement 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 exceptional instance of his method. Do
you know, and can you tell me anything
about him ? "

Mr. Newby, who thus accepted Wutkering
Heights and Agnes Grey, the only novel by

112 Charlotte Bronte

Emily Bronte, and the first novel by Anne,
appears to have belonged to the order of pub-
lishers described 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 Wuthering 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 accepted another novel by Anne —
The Tenant of WiUjell Hall— on the fly-leaf of
which he inserted an advertisement of Wuther-
ing Heights and Agnes Grey, containing
" Opinions of the Press." The Spectator
declares that " the work bears affinity 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 re-
commend all our readers who love novelty to
get this story, for we can promise them they

The Publications of Mr. Newby 113

never read anything like it before. It is like
Jane Eyre" " It is a colossal performance,"
said the Atlas.

In this connexion it is well worth while
repeating the review in the Athenaeum
for December 25, 1847. There is surely
something very fascinating about old re-
views 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 curi-
osity. All three might be the work of one
hand, but the first issued remains the best.
In spite of much power and cleverness, in spite
of its truth to life in the remote nooks and
corners of England, Wuthering Heights is a dis-
agreeable story. The Bells seem to affect
painful and exceptional subjects : the misdeeds
and oppressions of tyranny, the eccentricities
of ' woman's fantasy.' They do not turn
away from dwelling upon those physical acts

8

H4 Charlotte Bronte

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 house on Wuthering
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 climate;
but he might have been indicated with far
fewer touches, in place of so entirely filling the
canvas that there is hardly a scene untainted
by his presence. It was a like dreariness, a
like unfortunate selection of objects, which
cut short the popularity of Charlotte Smith's
novels, rich though they be in true pathos and
faithful descriptions of nature. Enough of
what is mean and bitterly painful and degrad-
ing 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 collect-
ively, are contemplating future or frequent,
utterances in fiction, let us hope that they will

7 he Publications of Mr. Newby 115

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 powerful. It is the tale of a
governess who undergoes much that is in the
real bond of a governess's endurance ; 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 governess is sub-
jected to torment by terrible children (as the
French have it) ; in that of the Murrays she
has to witness the ruin wrought by false indul-
gence on two coquettish girls, whose coquetries
jeopardise her own heart's secret. In both
these tales there is so much feeling for char-
acter, and nice marking of scenery, that we
cannot leave them without once again warning
their authors against what is eccentric and un-
pleasant. 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, Caven-
dish Square, and later (from 1850 to i8'/4) in
Welbeck Street. He seems to have cared only

1 1 6 Charlotte Bronte

for making 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 — " 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 con-
taining 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 Roman
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
literary distinction to-day were it not that
one only remembers that he added additional

The Publications of Mr. Newby 117

bitterness to the always essentially unhappy
life of Emily Bronte.

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 publication 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 Lon-
don 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 September 4, 1848, and in it she tells her
friend that her sister Anne had published
another book called The Tenant of Wildfell
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 enor-

1 1 8 Charlotte Bronte

mous success of Jane Eyre, but she does tell
Miss Taylor of Newby's assertion that Jane
Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey and The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall were all the pro-
ductions 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 Keigh-
ley, set out ourselves after tea, walked through
a snowstorm 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

The Publications of Mr. Newby 119

off in queer inward excitement to 65, Cornhill.
Neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. Williams knew we
were coming ; they had never seen us ; they
did not know whether we were men or women,
but had always written to us as men."

The recognition at 65, Cornhill, was very
dramatic, and the pleasant gossip with Mr.
Smith and with his manager Mr. Williams, is
related in detail. Then came visitors in the
evening to that modest inn in Ivy Lane, Pater-
noster 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 " clown-
ishness," 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 Monday came another
round of pleasure, and on Tuesday the sisters
returned to Haworth. This letter concludes

I2O Charlotte Bronte

with the statement, " We saw Mr. Newby ;
but of him more another time."

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. W utter-
ing Heights and Agnes Grey were published on
condition that the authors shared the risks with
the publisher, and they advanced .£50 accord-
ingly. 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
author — yet Newby would seem never to have
returned 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 expecta-
tion that you will be able to get anything
from him. He has an evasive shuffling
plan of meeting, or rather eluding, such de-
mands, against which it is fatiguing to con-
tend " ; and to the same correspondent, her

The Publications of Mr. Newby 121

friend Mr. George Smith, she writes still later :
" As to Mr. Newby, he charms me. First
there is the fascinating coyness with which he
shuns your pursuit ..." and she goes on to
animadvert in a similar 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 advertizing it.
There pretty well one may leave Mr. Newby,
and pass on to the books the publication of
which gave him his only distinction.

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, although
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 suffrage of some of the best minds
of each generation 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 concerning one : —

. . . whose soul
Knew no fellow for might.
Passion, vehemence, grief,
Daring, since Byron died.

" Wuthering Heights " 123

Praise culminated in the splendid elo-
quence of Mr. Swinburne, who places it with
King Lear, the Duchess of Malfi, and The Bride
of Lammermoor* the well-weighed utterances of
Mrs. Humphry Ward, to whom Emily Bronte's
book is " pure mind and passion." 2 and of
Maurice Maeterlinck,3 whose tribute is the
more interesting in that Belgium was the
only country that Emily Bronte visited. —
Sydney Dobell's criticism has naturally the most
interest because it happens to be one of those
contemporary verdicts which posterity has en-
dorsed. In the Palladium of September 1850,
Mr. Dobell declared " that there were passages
in Wuthering Heights of which any novelist, past
or present, might be proud." " There are
few things in modern prose to surpass these
pages for native power," Mr. Dobell says
of the first part of Wuthering Heights.

The critic who treats of contempor-
aries almost always hesitates and halts in the
dispensing of praise unless supported by

1 The Athenaeum, June 16, 1883.

a The Haworth Edition of Wuthering Heights. Intro-
duction by Mrs. Humphry Ward.

3 Wisdom and Destiny, by Maurice Maeterlinck

124 Charlotte Bronte

popular applause. There was little enough of
popular applause to greet Wuthering Heights
at its first advent, and Mr. Dobell proved him-
self 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 descriptions one never forgot
them. He selected for example that amazing
account of Lockwood's disturbed 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

" fluttering Heights " 125

rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down
and soaked the bed-clothes : still it wailed
* Let me in ! ' and maintained its tenacious
gripe, almost maddening me with fear."

This and also the description of HeathclifPs
anguish when Lockwood tells him of his night-
mare are instanced by Dobell as unforgettable
passages, and time has proved that his instinct
was sound. Writing later concerning this re-
view which concerned itself with 'Jane Eyre as
well, Charlotte Bronte said to Miss Martin-

eau : —
«

One passage in it touched a deep chord.
I mean when allusion is made to my sister
Emily's novel Wuthering Heights ; the jus-
tice there rendered comes indeed late, the
wreath awarded drops in a grave, but no
matter — I am grateful."

Yet, when everything is said, the fact re-
mains that 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
workshop, with simple tools, out of homely
materials. The statuary found a granite block
on a solitary moor ; gazing thereon he saw how

126 Charlotte Bronte

from the crag might be elicited a head, savage,
swart, sinister ; a form moulded with at least
one element of grandeur — 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 moor-
land moss clothes it ; and heath, with its
blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows
faithfully close to the giant's foot."

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.

" Wuthering Heights " 127

When she died — before her thirtieth birth-
day— she was as isolated from all com-
panionship but that of her sister Anne as she
had been twenty years before.

Scarcely a scrap of self-revelation did Emily
leave behind, two colourless letters to a friend
of Charlotte's being well nigh the only
memorials in her handwriting that have
been preserved.1 Her book also reveals
nothing. Anne's novels were transparent
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 passionate, but it is never self-reveal-
ing. Emily learned German when in Brussels,
and must have read the weird tales of Hoff-
mann ; she had, it may be, heard her father tell
stories from Irish tradition as Dr. Wright and
Miss Mary Robinson both assert. She had nearer
home not only her own brother's miserable story
with its mock heroics, but many other uncanny
traditions of a kind to which Yorkshire is cer-

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.

128 Charlotte Bronte

tainly 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 genius. 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 death-
bed is to recall sentences that stand out
boldly in the records of English fiction : —

" * That's a turkey's,' she murmured to her-
self, '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

" Wutbermg Heights " 129

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 fea-
ther was picked up from the heath, the bird
was not shot ; we saw its nest in the winter,
full of little skeletons. Heathcliff 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.'

" ' 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
Peniston 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 Peniston Crag ; and I'm con-

9

130 Charlotte Bronte

scious it's night, and there are two candles on
the table making the black press shine like
jet.'

*****

" * One time, however, we were near quarrel-
ling. He said the pleasantest manner of spend-
ing a hot July day was lying from morning till
evening 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 pour-
ing 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 undulat-
ing 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.' '

" tt^uthering Heights " 131

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 tragedy. Emily Bronte was
quite a young woman 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 anti-climax. It were better that Wuthering
Heights should stand, as does its author, 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 governess at Law Hill, near Hali-

132 Charlotte Bronte

fax,1 and a happier interval of a year in Brussels.
Very scanty, indeed, is the record of these
episodes. Only when her sisters had per-
suaded her to face the world in print does the
picture become clearer. Take for example the
following from a letter of Charlotte's to Mr.
Williams : —

" I should much — very much — like to take
that quiet view of the i great world ' you allude
to, but I have as yet won no right to give my-
self 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

1 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 account of her duties. Hard labour from six in the
morning until near eleven at night, with only one half-hour
of exercise between. This is slavery. I fear she will never
stand it."— Mrs. Gaskell's Life.

" Wuthering Heights" 133

and original than practical ; his reason may be
in advance of mine, but certainly it often
travels a different road. I should say Ellis
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 : —

" 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 re-
served nature occasions me great uneasiness of
mind. It is useless to question her — you get
no answers. It is still more useless to recom-
mend 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 ascer-
tain 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 ordinary avocations

134 Charlotte Bronte

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 in-
deed, and I think a certain harshness in her
powerful and peculiar character only makes
me cling to her more. But this is all family
egotism (so to speak) — excuse it, and, above all,
never allude to it, or to the name Emily, when
you write to me. I do not always show your
letters, but I never withhold them when they
are inquired after." *

Then we have the remarkable passage in a
further letter to Mr. Williams : —

" The North American Review is worth
reading ; 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

1 Charlotte Bronte and, her Circle.

" Wuthering Heights " 135

but now somewhat melancholy fireside, I
studied the two ferocious authors. Ellis, the
* man of uncommon talents, but dogged,
brutal, 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 and half in scorn as he
listened. Acton was sewing, 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
pourtrayed. 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 part-
nership, 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 mascu-
line hand that touched the MS. of Jane Eyre,

136 Charlotte Bronte

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 ladies and
gentlemen aided at the compilation of the
book. Strange patchwork it must seem to
them — 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 Decem-
ber 25, 1848. Emily having died on the I9th : —
" Emily is nowhere here now, her wasted
mortal remains are taken out of the house. We
have laid her cherished head under the church
aisle beside 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

" Wuthering Heights ' 137

feel the cutting keenness of the frost, in know-
ing that the elements bring her no more suffer-
ing ; their severity 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 conflict 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

1 Letter to Mr. W. S. Williams in Charlotte Bronte and
her Circle.

138 Charlotte Bronte

some imperishable poems and an equally im-
perishable 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."

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 unsupported by the envir-
onment that Mrs. Gaskell's biography has
made familiar to us all. Such books as Jane
Eyre and Villette, Shirley and Wuihering
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,

139

140 Charlotte Bronte'

less reason for their survival than for the works
of Mrs. Marsh and Miss Kavanagh, books that
had a very 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 auto-
biographical character, and they make pleasant
unpretentious reading even to-day. Agnes
Grey, the first of them, was, as we have seen,
bound up with Wuthering Heights, and such is
the frequent futility of contemporary criticism
that it is not surprising that many reviewers
found it preferable to the titanic story that
accompanied it. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
had indeed one very frank critic who loved its
author. It was pronounced "scarcely worth
republication " by Anne's devoted sister Char-
lotte 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
exhaustion 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

Anne Bronte 141

to recognize the potency of the personal
element in literature.

Both the novels of Anne Bronte are tran-
scripts of the life she knew and little more. This
is the factor that differentiates the man or wo-
man of genius from the merely average writer.
Anne was not capable of transmuting experi-
ence through that wonderful crucible that pro-
duces 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 photo-
graphic 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 like 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 Wildfell
Hall. If there is little imagination, there is at
least a clear narrative of her brother's escapades
as far as she had comprehended them, adding

142 Charlotte Bronte

thereto, as she doubtless did, sundry episodes
in the lives of others that scandal had conveyed
to her.

But it is scarcely necessary to take the novels
of Anne Bronte too seriously, even were criti-
cism the province of this little biography,
which it is not. It suffices that she was a soft-
ening, benign atmosphere in a house where
father, aunt and elder sisters, 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, re-
called 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, imaginations 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

Anne Bronte 143

from the outer world — Ellen Nussey, Mary
Taylor, or Laetitia Wheelwright. Charlotte
had a gift for friendship which stood her in
good stead when she found herself 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
mother'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 inseparable. We know next to
nothing of Anne's experiences as governess,
first with Mrs. Ingham of Blake Hall, and next
with Mrs. Robinson at Thorp Green. In-
deed it is only from Charlotte's letters that
we learn anything of material importance,
concerning Anne, although Miss Nussey writes
of the youngest sister as so much the
" prettiest " of the three, with " light
brown hair, violet blue eyes and pencilled
eyebrows, and an almost transparent com-
plexion." One would have liked to have
heard Anne's version of that sordid drama at
Thorp Green, where Branwell was, or professed

144 Charlotte Bronte

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
return to Haworth have insisted that Bran-
well's " love story " was purely imaginary. It
was the attitude of Anne on this subject that
persuaded Mr. Nicholls, with whom I dis-
cussed the question, thatBranwell was not en-
tirely to blame, that there had at least been
some indiscreet flirtation, calculated to dis-
arrange 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 other-
wise. Yet I was then at Thorp 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 wretch-
ed I should have been ; but during my stay
I have had some very unpleasant 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

Anne Bronte 145

stayed each time nearly a year. Emily has
been there too, and stayed nearly a year. Bran-
well has left Luddenden Foot, and been a tutor
at Thorp 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 suppose ; and we hope he will be
better and do better in future. This is a dis-
mal, cloudy, wet evening. We have had so far
a very cold wet summer. Charlotte has lately
been to Hathersage, in Derbyshire, 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 dining-
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.
Little Dick is hopping in his cage. When the
last paper was written we were thinking of
setting up a school. The scheme has been
dropt, and long after taken up again and dropt
again because we could not get pupils. Char-
lotte is thinking about getting another situa-
tion. She wishes to go to Paris. Will she go ?

10

1 4.6 Charlotte Bronte

She has let Flossy in, by-the-by, and he is now
lying on the sofa. Emily is engaged 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 wonder
what it is about ? I have begun the third vol-
ume of Passages in the Life of an Individual.
I wish I had finished it. This afternoon I be-
gan to set about making my grey figured silk
frock that was dyed at Keighley. What sort
of a hand shall I make of it ? " 1

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 Char-
lotte's going to Paris is noteworthy. Instead
of that, Charlotte and her sisters published
poems and novels, with the result that we all
know. The Poems appeared the follow-
ing year, Jane Eyre in October, 1847, and
Agnes Grey in December. The two editions
of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall appeared in
1 Charlotte Bront? and Her Circle.

Anne Bronte 147

1848, the year that Branwell and Emily died,
and Anne followed her 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 can-
not 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 ex-
amined her with the stethoscope. 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 bitter-
ness yet to taste. However, I must not look

148 Charlotte Bronte

forwards, nor must I look backwards. Too
often I feel like one crossing an abyss on a nar-
row plank — a glance round might quite un-
nerve.

" 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 rever-
ence 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 re-
newal 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
Scarborough, 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 con-
tinues : —

Anne Bronte' 149

" If Anne is to get any good she must have
every advantage. Miss Outhwaite, her god-
mother, 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 advis-
able 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 Scarboro' ; 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 de-
stination safely, having rested one night at
York. We found assistance wherever we needed
it ; there was always an arm ready to do for

150 Charlotte Bronte

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.

" 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
presence a solace. She is a calm, steady girl —
not brilliant, but good and true. She suits
and has always suited me well. I like her,
with her phlegm, repose, 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 : —

Anne Bronte 151

" MY DEAR SIR, — My poor sister is taken
quietly home at last. She died on Monday.
With almost her last breath she said she was
happy, and 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
Churchyard, where the inscription on her
tomb runs as follows : —

" Here lie the remains of Anne Bronte,
daughter 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 hymno-
logies 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.

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 publisher 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
literary 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
valued 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

163

" Jane Eyre '' 153

human, and often makes mistakes. Certainly
the five readers of the five publishing houses
which sent back The Professor with curt re-
fusals had reasons for regretting their mistake in
this instance — even from a merely commercial
point of view,1 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 Wuthering 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 mem-
ber of the staff, Mr. James Taylor, did not, and
after both had reported to their " chief," Mr.
George Smith, the letter went forth from the

1 The total sum paid for the entire copyright of Charlotte
Bronte's four novels was £1,750 — £500 each for Jane Eyre,
Shirley and Villette, and £250 for The Professor. Mr.
George Smith was once offered £500 for the manuscript
of Jane Eyre.

154 Charlotte Bronte

office in Cornhill which was to bring yet another
refusal to the mysterious but ever persever-
ing Mr. Currer Bell at Haworth. But Currer
Bell afterwards declared in print that this
refusal was " couched in language so delicate,
reasonable and courteous, as to be more cheering
than some acceptances." It assigned a lack of
varied interest in the tale as well as the length
as the cause of rejection, and thereupon 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.1

1 Charlotte Bronte was staying in Manchester during
August and September of 1846, with her father, Mr.
Bronte having gone to Manchester to consult an oculist,
as he was in danger of losing his eyesight. Father and
daughter stayed at 59, Boundary Street, off Oxford Road.
When Charlotte Bronte wrote from there the place was
called 83, Mount Pleasant; the house still stands, and
here, Mrs. Gaskell tells us, Jane Eyre was commenced, " in
those grey, weary, uniform streets, where all faces, save
that of her kind doctor, were strange and untouched with
sunlight'to her."

" Jane Eyre " 155

The critics were enthusiastic, the public more
so. " The most extraordinary 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 there
was good creative work produced in the forties
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 de-
lighted 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 For-
cade, 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 almost made Charlotte Bronte repent
its authorship. Yet Miss Rigby wrote with no
1 Letter to W. S. Williams, November 16, 1848.

156 Charlotte Bronte

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 1 — for in
her world no woman was so ignorant 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 country 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

1 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 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. Thackeray. But your skill in " dress " settles the
question of sex. I think, however, some women must
have assisted in the school scenes of Jane 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
Bell — 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." — Journals
and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, edited by her
nephew, Charles Eastlake Smith, 1895.

" y ane Eyre" 157

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 for-
feited the society of her sex " — would have
fallen harmless. 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 be sure, enjoy being
called " Mr. Babbletongue Macaulay " by
The Times. In any case, many compensa-
tions 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 remem-
brance of another containing 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

158 Charlotte Bronte

" nauseous hypocrite," as Mr. Augustine
Birrell rather extravagantly calls her. A
generation that has been brought up upon
" sex " novels has other standards 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 ?

To those who take no account of the quali-
ties of style, imagination and " point of view "
in literature, Jane Eyre would now make no
appeal. To such, Hamlet would make no
appeal. Is not the whole story of the mur-
dered king, the son who feigns madness to re-
venge 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 de-
tailed autobiography 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 experiences at Cowan Bridge, at any

" J am Eyre" 159

rate of her idea of the school as it came back
to her after an interval 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, has however unearthed some
of the actual literary efforts of the Reverend
Carus Wilson, the prototype of Mr. Brockle-
hurst.1 This critic has been studying the wri-
tings of Mr. Wilson, particularly certain books
for the young by him, which Charlotte 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
forme. I am fonder of death." Mr. Brockle-
hurst says to Jane Eyre, " Children younger
than you die daily. I buried a little child

1 Mr. J. Angus Mackay, in the Bookman.

160 Charlotte Bronte

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 children. 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."
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 num-
ber of such little boys in Youthful Memoirs.
At the close of the interview with Jane Eyre,
Mr. Brocklehurst gives her a tract entitled,
" The Child's Guide ; containing an account
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,

/&

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 £500 for this MS., the actual sum

paid for the original novel

Eyre" 161

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. Carus
Wilson was substantially accurate, however
much she may have exaggerated the dements
of the place itself; and in spite of the fact
that the original of the heroic Miss Temple,
a Mrs. Harben, would seem to have repudiated
the description 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 humour,
the masterful manner of M. Paul Heger ; in
her book she attributes these qualities to Fair-

II

1 62 Charlotte Bronte

fax Rochester. The author spends three
weeks at Hathersage in Derbyshire, and to that
neighbourhood 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. All the villagers are en-
gaged in the manufacture of needles, as are
those of Hathersage to-day. Thornfield Hall,
the seat of Mr. Rochester, has been easily iden-
tified with Norton Conyers near Ripon, which
was in Miss Bronte's day the seat of Mr. Green-
wood, the father of Mrs. Sidgwick. Miss
Bronte visited the house when staying with her
pupils at Swarcliffe, Mr. Greenwood's summer
residence. Mr. Rochester's other house, where
Jane Eyre found him in his blindness, Fern-
dean 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 Cunliffe, had some of the traits
associated with Rochester. Moor House,
where the Rivers family lived, has been iden-
tified with Moor Seats near Hathersage.

Eyre ': 163

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 with persons. For the raw material of her
book Miss Bronte went to material available
to all the world. Some time ago there ap-
peared in the Saturday Review a letter calling
attention to a little book entitled Gleanings in
Craven ; or, The Tourists' 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. In-
gram. To describe Gleanings in Craven as a
" key " to Jane Eyre is, however, to ignore any
number of other " keys " provided by the long

164 Charlotte Bronte'

years of apprenticeship 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 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 Nicholls, 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 in-
cident to that where Jane hears the voice of
Rochester calling her, although he is many
miles away.

Moll calls in distress to Jemmy, her " Lan-
cashire 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 re-
turned and told her that twelve miles off

"Jane Eyre " 165

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 'Jane Eyre,
because Moll has a lover at Bath who has a
" distempered," 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 un-
faithful, 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 essen-
tial originality of Jane Eyre. Charlotte
Bronte's love of the preternatural would have
induced her to remember that incident in M oil
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
happened ! " 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 ex-
perience, and in any case she had probably

1 66 Charlotte Bronte'

forgotten her reading of M oil 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 up his wife in a castle
for fifteen years, although the fact is un-
known 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 1 has found traces of Richard-
son's Pamela and Harriet Martineau'sZ)^r&r00&.

The real power of Jane Eyre is quite un-
affected 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.
1 Dr. Robertson Nicoll in his Introduction to Jane Eyre.

"Jane Eyre" 167

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
affection ; but there is no real resemblance
between Rivers and Mr. Nussey. I have
had the advantage of reading a volume
of Mr. Nussey's Diary and, Sermons.1 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 satisfaction, " This evening at a
full meeting Mr. Heald exhorted from 2 Cor-
inthians vi. 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

1 This volume is in MSS., and is in the possession of Mr.
J. J. Stead, of Heckmondwike, Yorks, to whose courtesy I
am indebted for a perusal.

1 68 Charlotte Bronte

propriety and feel the necessity of this line of
conduct " ; and once more, Mr. Nussey writes
in his diary : " Friday, 1 1 June, 1839. Obtained
an advance of j£i from Mr. Wakeford, a farmer
and coal-merchant in Earnley, with whom I
spent the evening at his house. He unfor-
tunately became offended at something Mr.
Browne once uttered in the pulpit, and there-
upon 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 wilful-
ness. May he be brought back again, wander-
ing 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, sen-
sible 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,

Eyre " 169

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 unfavour-
able reply from ' C. B.' The will of the Lord
be done." " C. B.," of course, is Charlotte
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
Charlotte 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 in-
clined to think that the real prototype of
Rivers existed for her not in life but in litera-
ture ; that she had read from the Keighley
Library Sargent's Memoir of Henry Martyn,
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 Col-

170 Charlotte Bronte

lege, 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 preacher, who led Martyn to become
a missionary. Martyn, it will be remembered,
translated the New Testament into Hindus-
tani. There are points also in the relations
with Miss Lydia Grenfell, who 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
independent 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

1 Curiously enough, Henry Martyn has been made the
hero of a novel called Her Title of Honour, published in
1871 by Holm Lee.

" Jane Eyre " 171

the first place, the writer had a style, a vigorous,
forcible style ; a style full of picturesque
phraseology, characterized by that intense sin-
cerity which is ever one of 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.1 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."

" 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."

*****

1 Alice Meynell, in the Pall Mall Magazine, May 24, 1899.

172 Charlotte Brontg

" The night is not calm ; the equinox still
struggles in its storms. The wild rains of the
day are abated ; the great single cloud dis-
parts, and rolls away from Heaven, not passing
and leaving a sea of sapphire, but tossing buoy-
ant before a continued, long-sounding, high-
rushing moonlight tempest. . . . No Endy-
nion will watch for his goddess to-night : there
are no flocks on the mountains."

But style alone does not add to the perma-
nent 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 humanity around her, in that
little world of rough, rude men and common-
place women. To her had come dreams of a
wider, freer life, of profound love, of heroic
sacrifice. She had thought out all the possi-

Eyre" 173

bilities of a great passion in which love was
king. In her own life she was the most self-
suppressed of human beings. She saw her de-
based 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 per-
emptorily attempted to prevent her marriage :
finally she married to retain 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 impart-
ing of which was to throw English society into
a fever of interest. After the current novels of
her day, Jane Eyr e was a model of outspoken-
ness, a veritable 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

174 Charlotte Bronte

would another Jane who wrote a 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 dis-
crimination, so far as the men were concerned,
as to the borderline. 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. Alto-
gether, it is not in the least difficult to com-
prehend 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

Eyre" 175

of the Quarterly * was most to be regretted,
in that it frightened her, and tended to
make her conventional. The bad influences
of this criticism is traceable in Shirley, which
would otherwise probably have been a very
much greater book than it actually is.

1 The article is called Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, and
Governesses, and appeared in the Quarterly for Decem-
ber, 1848.

cc

XIV
Shirley

IN taking up a copy of Charlotte Bronte's
Shirley we find ourselves in an atmo-

sphere more easy of interpretation than
that of any other book written by the three
sisters. Birstall, near Batley, in Yorkshire, is
the real centre of the story ; not very far away
you may come to Oakwell Hall, the " Field-
head " 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

,1 when an assault by some hundreds of

1 Her original idea was to call her story Hollow's Mill and
not Shirley.

176

"Shirley" 177

starving cloth-dressers, armed with, pistols,
hatchets and bludgeons, was made upon the
factory of Mr. Cartwright at Rawfolds, be-
tween Huddersfield and Leeds. Mr. Cart-
wright, like Mr. Moore, had foreign blood in
his veins, dark eyes and complexion ; and Mr.
Cartwright's successful defence of his mill was
but retold in picturesque form in Shirley.
Then in Mr. Helstone we have the prototype
of a Mr. Hammond Robertson 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. Gas-
kell's relation of the actual circumstance. Al-
most every incident 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 ex-
periences of Charlotte Bronte's life in her York-
shire home.

Equally plain is the presentation of the vari-

12

i78

Charlotte Bronte

ous characters. Not only Matthew Helstone
and Mr. Cartwright are real, but far more
sharply denned are the three curates and
the Yorke family. Mr. Donne, the curate of
Whinbury, for example, has been easily iden-
tified as Mr. Grant of Oxenhope ; Mr. Malone,
the curate of Briarfield, as Mr. Smith of Ha-
worth ; while Mr. Sweeting, the curate of
Nunnerley, was Mr. Bradley of Oakworth —
the only one of the three who is still living.1

1 " The very curates, poor fellows ! show no resentment,"
says Miss Bronte in one of her letters, "each character-
istically finds solace for his own wounds in crowing over
his brethren. Mr. Donne was, at first, a little disturbed ;
for a week or two he was in disquietude, but he is now
soothed down ; only yesterday I had the pleasure of making
him a comfortable cup of tea, and seeing him sip it with
revived complacency. It is a curious fact that since he
read Shirley, he has come to the house oftener than ever,
and been remarkably meek and assiduous to please. Some
people's natures are veritable enigmas ; I quite expected to
have had one good scene at least with him ; but as yet nothing
of 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
to Mr. Bronte at Haworth. He had graduated at Trinity
College, Dublin, and after a two years' curacy at Haworth

"Shirley"' 179

The interesting Mr. Yorke who lived at Briar-
mains 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 conver-

he became 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
Chesterton 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 always found great
pleasure in recalling the fact that he was the prototype of
Mr. Sweeting in Shirley, although he declares that the meet-
ings of the curates at each other's lodgings were exclusively
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, 1902.

i8o Charlotte Bronte'

sation with Charlotte in which she stated that
the character was meant for her sister Emily.1
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 pros-
perity. As to Caroline Helstone, there is some
discrepancy as to the prototype. Miss Ellen
Nussey believed herself to have been intended
for Caroline Helstone, while on the other hand
Miss Bronte's husband 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 pleasant 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 suppose any of the characters in Shirley
intended as literal portraits," she writes to
1 Life, Haworth Edition, page 30.

"Shirley" 181

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 Mooresto represent ? "
It is not easy to give an answer to that ques-
tion as regards Robert Moore, although Mrs.
Gaskell remarks that from the sons of the Tay-
lor family Miss Bronte drew " all that there
was of truth in the character of the heroes of
her first two works." Robert Gerard Moore
is obviously a very composite character, but his
brother Louis has, I think, most of the charac-
teristics of Monsieur Heger, who indeed appears
in each novel in succession. He is Professor
Crimsworth, Fairfax Rochester, Louis Moore,
and Paul Emanuel, under different conditions.
The critics who have made much of the enthusi-
asm with which Charlotte Bronte regarded her
1 Mrs. Gaskell's Life, page 232, Haworth Edition.

1 82 Charlotte Bronte

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 com-
fortable home of his remarkable pupil. M.
Heger, we know, admired Emily Bronte very
much more than he did her sister, and rated
her genius higher. The suggestion of the ex-
istence of a wild and undisciplined passion for
M. Heger, which has been more than once
hinted at, might be rejected by any thoughtful
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 case, I am not so sure." Mr. Swin-
burne is equally contemptuous. Nevertheless

"Shirley" 183

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
conceptions 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 Shirley'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 circum-
stances. The first and second volumes were
finished while her brother and two sisters were
living, the third was begun and the book com-
pleted after all three were gone from her. The
earlier volumes, written in the turmoil of hope
deferred, of melancholy anticipation of the
inevitable, §hpw a great falling off from the

184 Charlotte Bronte

power of Jane Eyre ; but the last volume,
written in the unutterable loneliness of bereave-
ment, 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 pub-
lishers 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, Mon-
sieur ; I shall deem it an honour to know you.J
I could not say so much of the mass of the Lon-
don critics." At the end of November she
paid her fourth visit to London — the first that
had in it anything of a social character. 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
her book sent to Harriet Martineau with the
following note enclose^ ; —

"Shirley" 185

" Currer Bell offers a copy of Shirley to Miss
Martineau's acceptance, in acknowledgment of
the pleasure and profit -ske (sic) he had derived
from her works. When C. B. first read Deer-
brook he tasted a new and keen pleasure, and
experienced a genuine benefit. In his mind
Deerbrook ranks with the writings that have
really done him good, added to his stock of
ideas and rectified his views of life." *

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 appear-
ance of " Miss Bronte," whom the footman
announced as " Miss Brogden." " I thought her
the smallest creature I had ever seen, except at
a fair," was Miss Martineau's first impression.
Miss Bronte saw others of her literary idols,
Thackeray in particular, to whom the second

1 Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, vol. ii.

1 86 Charlotte Bronte

edition of 'Jane Eyre was dedicated, and with
whom as " A Titan of mind " — she felt " fear-
fully stupid." In John Forster, afterwards to
become known to all as the biographer of
Dickens, she discovered a " loud swagger."
The best account of the visit is contained in a
letter to her friend, Miss Wooler * : —

" Ellen Nussey, it seems, told you I spent a
fortnight 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 sight-
seeing, 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
prodigiously civil face to face. These gentle-
men seemed infinitely grander, more pompous,
dashing, showy, than the few authors I saw.
Mr. Thackeray, for instance, is a man of quiet

1 From Charlotte BrontZ and Her Circle, where the letter
is wrongly dated.

"Shirley" 187

simple demeanour ; he is however looked upon
with some awe and even distrust. His conver-
sation is very peculiar, too perverse to be plea-
sant. It was proposed to me to see Charles
Dickens, Lady Morgan, Mesdames Trollope,
Gore, and some others, but I was aware these
introductions would bring a degree of notoriety
I was not disposed to encounter ; I declined,
therefore, with thanks."

Taking up the thread of her life once more
at Haworth, Charlotte Bronte found the situa-
tion well nigh intolerable. Something of the
mental anguish that she presents so powerfully
as an episode in the life of Lucy Snowe in Vil-
lette would seem to have visited her at this time,
and she was not without her tribulations arising
out of the attitude of friends who had taken
their cue from the Quarterly Review article, or
similar pronouncements. There was her own
kindly but strait-laced governess, for example :

" 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 es-

1 8 8 Charlotte Bronte

teem. 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 ex-
ceptions at 'Jane Eyre, and that for their own
sakes I was sorry, as I invariably found them
individuals in whom the animal largely pre-
dominated 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 Edin-
burgh 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, not as a woman. However she was
able about this time to escape from Haworth
and to be the guest of Sir James Kay-Shuttle-
worth at Gawthorpe Hall, Lancashire. In
June of this year (1850) she was again in Lon-
don, and saw the Duke of Wellington, the hero

"Shirley" 189

of her girlhood, " a real grand old man," re-
ceived a morning call from Thackeray — " I was
moved to speak to him of some of his short-
comings," and had an interview with Lewes,
whose face reminded her of her sister Emily's
and " almost moved me to tears." This holi-
day 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 Exhibition of the Royal Academy, to the
Opera, and the Zoological Gardens. The
weather is splendid. I shall not stay longer
than a fortnight in London. The feverishness
and exhaustion beset me somewhat, but not
quite so badly as before."

During this stay in London she sat to
George Richmond for the only portrait of her

190 Charlotte Bront'e'

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 likeness " and " a graphic re-
presentation." i

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 momen-
tous friendships in her destiny. " I was truly
glad of her companionship. She is a woman
of most genuine talent, of cheerful, pleasing
and cordial manners, and I believe of a kind and
good heart." a

1 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. Nicholls in his house in Ireland. He has kindly
destined it for the National Portrait Gallery of London.

2 To Mrs. Gaskell she wrote upon her return to Haworth
a letter containing an interesting critique — Mr. Swinburne
calls it " inept " — uponTennyson's newly-published poem : —

"Shirley" 191

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 %ays, " 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 remembrances, brought
back the pang of bereavement, 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 achievements.
This book was published on December 10, 1850,
and a week later she was with Miss Martineau

" I have read Tennyson's In Memoriam, or rather part of
it ; I closed the book when I got about half-way. It is beau-
tiful ; it is mournful ; it is monotonous. Many of the feel-
ings expressed 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 monu-
ment 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."

192 Charlotte Bronte

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 dis-
pleases from its seeming foppery," and whose
theological opinions were, she regretted, " very
vague and unsettled." 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 fop-
pish 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 of his time, the possession of qualities
the most estimable and enduring."

At the end of May 1851, Miss Bronte is
again in London — the time for her longest and
most enjoyable visit — tempted thither by Mrs.
Smith on account of the Great Exhibition in
Hyde Park — the Crystal Palace, as it was called.

"Shirley" 193

She much enjoyed listening to one of Thackeray's
lectures in Willis's Rooms. Here she was intro-
duced 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 " marvellous, stirring and
bewildering sight, but it is not much in my
way." She enjoyed more her later visits, par-
ticularly 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 Vil-
lette will recall — " she is not a woman, she is a
snake." Then she was present at one of
Samuel Rogers's 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

13

194 Charlotte Bronte

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 henchmen, Wil-
liams and Taylor, had put her in possession of
a great quantity of modern literature, not per-
haps as helpful as the old romances and bio-
graphies 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
following years, indeed, her letters to her
London friends deal entirely with the books
she had borrowed from them, and they

cc

Shirley " 195

are consequently far more interesting letters
than those written in the period of obscurity
to the friends of her girlhood. '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 Charlotte
Bronte's life — the writing of Villette.

XV
"Villette" and « The Professor."

SOME ten years ago I visited the scene
of Villette^ the Pensionnat Heger at
Brussels. The school had just been
removed to another quarter of the city, and the
house was in an entirely dismantled condition.
This enabled me to make a perhaps more in-
timate acquaintance with the building than I
could otherwise have done. It permitted 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 intimately in Villette. Here
was the dormitory, now dismantled of its long
succession of beds, in one of which at the fur-
ther end, Lucy Snowe was frightened by the
supposed ghost of a nun. Then one came to
the oratory, with the niche no longer holding

196

" Villette " and" The Professor "197

a crucifix. Finally one passed into the pleasant
garden, with its 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 city she has called " Villette." There were
still to be seen the old pear-trees, the same vine-
clad berceau ; everything remained 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, including the most
magnificent law-courts in Europe.

It is truly wonderful how vegetation renews
itself year by year in much the same form for
incalculable periods. Those paths, and grass-
plats, could have undergone practically no
change whatever in the long interval that
separates the day when Charlotte and Emily
Bronte walked arm in arm through them,

198 Charlotte Bronte

strangely isolated from the mass of their fellow-
pupils, yet what changes have taken place in
the great world since those days in 1 842 !

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
professor, 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 another 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 in-
teresting 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
undoubtedly genuine. The attitude of the

Born 1809

M. Paul Heger

The Hero of " Villette " and " The Professor '

Died 1896

" Villette" and "The Professor " 199

Heger family had not always been so tolerant
as I found 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 num-
bers 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
indisputably cruel is the portrait of Madame
Beck of Villette and Mile. Reuter of The Pro-
fessor. We have indisputable 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 Madame Heger than
the portrait of Mrs. Reed in Jane Eyre

2OO Charlotte Bronte

resembled Mrs. Sidgwick, whom the writer also
doubtless had in her mind.

Genius is so frequently cruel in its portrait-
ure, and with a certain ostrich-like quality
superadded. It never knows that it is cruel
and it never anticipates identification. Charles
Dickens frequently denied that he had intended
Harold Skimpole to represent Leigh Hunt, and
he must have been astonished and aggrieved
that his friends should insist upon a recognition.
Charlotte Bronte was in no similar danger be-
cause there was no French translation of
Fillette 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. But if only we can
forgive its essential cruelty now the portrait
grips us. The clever, scheming schoolmistress,
watching all the threads of her large establish-
ment, with a Napoleonic energy, holds one
breathless.

"Villette" and "The Professor" 201

But biography insists upon identification,
especially 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 persistence 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 sub-
ject,1 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 moment from the path of

1 'The Bront?s — Fact and Fiction, by Angus Mackay,
1897.

202 Charlotte Bronte

strict moral action, that her 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 nothing more to be said on that point.
If Madame Heger had had a taste for writing
fiction and had been a governess say in Miss
Wooler's school at Roehead, she could have
made just as unamiable a portrait of Charlotte

" Villette " and " The Professor "203

as the latter did of 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 uncongenially mated, that
she may at times have allowed herself to con-
template the might-have-beens, the possibility
of this man as her own husband had circum-
stances willed it, or as her sister Emily's hus-
band, 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 inconsistent with a very strict moral
code. Certainly she is very fond of a situa-
tion 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.
Both heroines promptly crush their in-
clinations.

But surely the critics have made rather too
much of the autobiographic nature of Villette

204 Charlotte Bronte

They have not sufficiently grasped the fact that
an 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 miserable 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 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 bienveillance, and, perceiving that I

" Villette " and " The Professor "205

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
broadened doubtless with the years. The age
of Tennyson in poetry, Ruskin and Carlyle in
prose, a period when what was called the Broad
Church had captured some of the best
minds of the day, 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 assumed 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 im-
bibed in her childhood, and were of that
thoroughly Orange complexion which her

206 Charlotte Bronte

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 ab-
sent. A violent hatred of Roman Catholicism,
indeed, characterizes her first novel, The Pro-
fessor, and her last novel, Villette. Her girl
pupils in Brussels had an art of " bold, impu-
dent flirtation, or a loose, silly leer." " I am
not a bigot in matters of theology," she con-
tinues, " but I suspect the root of the preco-
cious 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
discovered that the root of the matter is else-
where 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 religion would permit her
to be so," in her account of one of the pupils in

" Villette " and " 7$£ Professor "207

this same novel, T/><? 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 Villette, things are even
worse, or better as the reader may choose to
interpret it. Methodism receives little more
favour. Her Dissenters are nearly all " en-
grained rascals," as she calls one of them.

But how unimportant it all is, although in-
teresting in a way. Every great writer in every
age has been very much in harmony with his
environment, and a later age with other views
of toleration cares for none of these things, but
asks only of the artistic achievement. Two
widely different contemporary writers, Char-
lotte Bronte and George Borrow were at one in
their hatred of Romanism. Yet both have re-
ceived 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, Paul Emanuel, was a
Roman Catholic, and that she herself " con-
fessed " in a Roman Catholic church.

2 o 8 Charlotte Bronte

Villette is one of the great novels of literature.
Mrs. Breton and Dr. John — pictures to some
extent of Mr. George Smith and his mother —
Ginevra 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 inten-
sity, 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
publishers three times during her lifetime de-
clined Miss Bronte's request to publish The
Professor. Apart from its size — the impossi-
bility of producing it as a three-volumed novel,
there were many elements of crudity. Young
Crimsworth could more easily have been
ten years at Eton then than now, but
he would certainly not have carried thence
a great capacity for reading and writing
French and German. In 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 repeated in

" Villette" and" The Professor "209

both stories, and Madame Beck and Mile.
Reuter indulge in much the same manoeuvres
with their scholars. Nevertheless The Pro-
fessor * is full of good things, and Frances Henri
is perhaps the only woman character in Char-
lotte Bronte's novels of real charm.

Villette was commenced at the beginning of
1851, 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^is time
we find her engaged in quite a copious corre-
spondence, now 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 in-

1 The original manuscript, now in the possession of Mr.
Thomas Wise, discloses that the book was first called The
Master.

2 I o Charlotte Bronte

finitely 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. Ruskin's Stones of
Venice ', which she had just read through. She
heard Cardinal Wiseman address a small meet-
ing. " He came swimming into the room,
smiling, simpering and bowing like a fat old
lady, and looked the picture of a sleek hypo-
crite. The Cardinal spoke in a smooth whining
manner, just like a canting Methodist preach-
er," 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 pub-
lication, she replied that " were she possessed
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
condition that the last number was written
before the first came out." Her loyalty to her
publisher was extreme, for in yet another letter

" Villette" and" The Professor "211

she expresses her deep regret that it was quite
impossible for her to oblige him over this ques-
tion 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 cer-
tainly 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 Provi-
dence 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 opportunity
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
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

212 Charlotte Bronte

such circumstances," she said, " nor were two-
thirds of Shirley" 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 in-
terests. 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-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 anybody it must be the Pro-
fessor— a man in whom there is much to for-
give, much to ' put up with.' But I am not
leniently disposed towards Miss Frost : from

" Villette" and" The Professor" 213

the beginning I never meant to appoint her
lines in pleasant places. The conclusion of
this third volume is 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 however 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, Villette was finished. " The
book, I think," she says, in sending it away,
" will not be considered pretentious, nor is it
of a character to excite hostility."

After this a week was spent with Ellen
Nussey at Brookroyd, a fortnight with Harriet
Martineau at Ambleside, and in January the
following year she was again in London, stay-
ing with her publishers, and correcting the

214 Charlotte Bronte

proof-sheets of her novel, the publication of
which she deferred until the end of the month
in order to give Mrs. Gaskell's 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 philanthropic
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.
Nearly all the reviews were favourable, the
principal exception being one written by Miss
Martineau in the Daily News. Miss Martin-
eau's points of disagreement were twofold —
she disagreed with the author on the question
of love, and she thought 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, truthful,
unselfish in this earth, as I comprehend recti-
tude, nobleness, fidelity, truth and disinter-

" Villette" and" The Professor" 2 i 5

estedness." In February she writes from
Haworth to thank Mr. George Smith for send-
ing her an engraving of Thackeray's portrait
by Lawrence. At this time interest in her
personality was growing steadily. The Bishop
of the diocese came to see Mr. Bronte, and
spent the night in the vicarage. 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 Man-
chester, 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
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 ; no-
thing disturbs the deep repose ; hardly a voice
is heard ; you catch the ticking of the clock in
the kitchen, or the buzzing of a fly in the par-
lour 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

2 1 6 Charlotte Bronte'

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
sweeping moors ; the heather bloom had been
blighted by a thunderstorm a day or two be-
fore, and was all of a livid brown colour, in-
stead 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 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 pre-
vailing colour of the room is crimson, to make
a warm setting for the cold grey landscape
without. There is her likeness by Richmond,

" Villette" and " The Professor" 217

and an engraving from Lawrence's picture of
Thackeray ; and two recesses, on each side of
the high, narrow, old-fashioned mantelpiece,
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 par-
lour to the left, and there I found Miss Bronte,
standing in the full light of the window, and I
had ample opportunity of fixing her upon my
memory, where her image is vividly present to
this hour. She was diminutive in height, and
extremely fragile. Her hand was one of the
smallest I ever grasped. She had no preten-
sions to being considered 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. Altogether
she was as unpretending, undemonstrative,

2 i 8 Charlotte Bronte

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 blend-
ing 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 noting of Lavaterish physiognomi-
cal 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 enforced absence,
and, as she did so, she looked right through me.
There was no boldness in the gaze, but an in-
tense, 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." 1

Through the closing months of 1853 and the
early part of 1854 Miss Bronte, living quietly

1 John Stores Smith in The Free Lance, March 14, 1868.

cc

Villette" and" The Professor" 219

at Haworth, was principally occupied in nurs-
ing 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.

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 ex-
perience had certainly been exceptionally 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 de-
scribed 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 almost
similar fashion, and received in return much
good advice as to choosing a wife which, as
we have seen, he quickly took. Miss Bronte
had become famous when the next pro-

Marriage and Death 221

posal of marriage came to her. This was from
Mr. James Taylor, who was in the employment
of her publishers. The firm suggested to Miss
Bronte that Mr. Taylor should come to Ha-
worth for the manuscript of Shirley, and her
reply gave an interesting glimpse of her pecu-
liarly isolated life. She told Mr. W. S. Wil-
liams that she could not offer any male society
as companions in the neighbourhood, that her
father " without being in the least misanthro-
pical or sour-natured, habitually prefers soli-
tude 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
Athen&um which formed the singular medium
of this quaint courtship. There are many

222 Charlotte Bronte

references in 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 resemblance to her
brother BranweH. 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.1 When he returned to England in
1856 Charlotte Bronte was dead.

Miss Bronte's fourth and this time successful
lover was Mr. Arthur Bell Nicholls, 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 1817, he was a
Scot by origin, an Irishman of Co. Antrim by
birth. He was educated at the Royal School
at Banagher by his uncle, the Rev. Alan Bell,
the headmaster. From Trinity College, Dub-
1 In Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle,

Marriage and Death 223

lin, he passed in 1844 to the curacy of Ha worth,
in succession to Mr. Smith, the " Malone " of
Shirley. In that novel, written, it will be
remembered, in 1849, he is pictured as Mr.
Macartney : — " 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 triumph, when Shirley appeared, and
thereon Miss Bronte wrote to her friend

224 Charlotte Bronte

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 character." Two years
later Mr. Nicholls appeared in a less
successful role. He asked his vicar's daughter
to marry him. This was in December
1852. The incident is best told in Miss
Bronte's 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
meaning 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 forget
it. Shaking from head to foot, looking deadly

The Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls

The husband of Charlotte Bronte, to whom she was married
June 29, 1854

Marriage and Death 22 $

pale, speaking low, vehemently, yet with diffi-
culty, 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 suffer-
ings 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.
Agitation 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 made

id

226 Charlotte Bronte

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 alto-
gether groundless, that Mr. Nicholls has be-
haved with disingenuousness in so long con-
cealing 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 degra-
dation, 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 object
tions arise from a sense of incongruity and un-
congeniality 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 suspicion of wanting a wife for her in-
tellectual attainments or literary achievements.
Whatever uncongeniality there may have been
in these particulars was more than atoned for by

Marriage and Death 227

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. The gentleman had meanwhile
betaken himself to another curacy at Kirk-
Smeaton, 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 secured from trouble. To a man, very old
and very nearly blind, this was well-nigh an
unanswerable 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 cere-
mony, Miss Wooler giving the bride away, and
Miss Ellen Nussey being the only bridesmaid.
The honeymoon was passed in Ireland — in
a run through Kerry and Co. Cork, and a

228 Charlotte Bronte

stay with her husband's relatives at Banagher
in King's Co. " I must say I like my new re-
lations," 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 en-
abled to repay as I ought the affectionate devo-
tion 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 mar-
ried women who indiscriminately urge their
acquaintances to marry, much to blame. For
my own part, I can only say with deepest sin-
cerity and fuller significance what I always
said in theory, ' Wait God's will.' Indeed, in-
deed, 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 I told
you how much better Mr. Nicholls is ? He
looks quite strong and hale ; he gained twelve
pounds during the first four weeks in Ireland.

Marriage and Death 229

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 followed clearly indicated
that love had followed respect and esteem, as
had been her "theory" of marriage, and that she
was becoming 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 happi-
ness in any robust sense and the writing of
works of imagination are synonymous terms.
The months that Charlotte Bronte was writ-
ing her books were probably the most unhappy
of her life. Now she took to 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 March 13, 1855. In a letter to a friend
from her deathbed she writes, " I want to give
you an assurance which I know will comfort
you : that is that I find in my husband the

230 Charlotte Bronte

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
1895. It was on the anniversary of the great
novelist's death-day — March 31 — fifty years
earlier. Mr Nicholls met me at Banagher
station, as I alighted from the Dublin
train. Banagher is situated on the Shan-

Marriage and Death 231

non. It has been immortalized by a phrase
— " That bangs Banagher." At the end of
the village, near by the Protestant Church, I
found the pleasant farm-house in which the
former curate of Haworth was passing his de-
clining years. The house was singularly in-
teresting 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 interesting, Emily's picture of her dog
" Keeper " and Anne's " Flossy." On the stair-
case was a portrait 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 York-
shire. It almost seemed as 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

2 32 Charlotte Bronte

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 personification of loyalty to the memory
of her dear friend, was nevertheless not kindly
disposed to Mr. Nicholls. From her Mrs.
Gaskell had imbibed a prejudice that is ex-
pressed 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 misun-
derstanding. The author of Cranford might well
have realized that. In any case time, we may
assume, had softened down many angularities
in Mr. Nicholls, as it softens them with most
men; Certainly the genial man who shook hands
with me at Banagher station, 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. There
were no remnants in his nature of that intoler-
ance and pedantry that may or may not have

Marriage and Death 233

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 recognition of his wife's genius,
and greatly appreciative of the homage that
was now offered on all sides.1

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 occasions. He thought the earlier opposi-
tion to his marriage not unnatural in a man who had learnt
to value his daughter very highly. " I had less than a hun-
dred pounds a year at the time," he remarked.

XVII
The Glamour of the Brontes

JUST as a love of Milton's Lycidash&s been
proclaimed to be a touchstone of taste
in poetry, so I think may an apprecia-
tion of the Bronte novels be counted as a touch-
stone of taste in prose literature. This is more
particularly the case so far as Emily Bronte's
Wuthering Heights is concerned. Not to real-
ize the high qualities 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 fiction that
had gone before. Because Emily Bronte learnt
German and doubtless read many an eerie Ger-
man 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 boyhood, it has been claimed that here was

234

The Glamour of the Bronte's 235

the material upon which she worked. Not one
of these suppositions will bear examination.
The only external 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 child-
hood 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 re-
velation of character, the non-existence even
of a portrait 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 thou-
sands 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 with-
out exception that has been brought into con-
tact with her poetry and prose has found it
glorious, and you have here at least one ele-
ment that provides a glamour to the story of
the Brontes.

236 Charlotte Bronte

A second element of this glamour is fur-
nished by the circumstance of the very exist-
ence 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 Char-
lotte is of itself an unique circumstance in Eng-
lish literature. Emily the reticent, whose
pages give forth not one single scrap of self-
revelation, who is as impersonal as Shakspere,
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 sub-
ject. Here is indeed no lack whatever of self-
revelation, and very piquant it all is. We
know Charlotte Bronte's attitude on the rela-
tion of capital and labour, on the virtues of
revealed religion, by which she usually meant
the tenets of the Church of England, on books

The Glamour of the Bronte's 237

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 under 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 corre-
spondence 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
on issuing the Bronte novels, and from inquiries
I have made I am satisfied 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.

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

238 Charlotte Bronte

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 limitations 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 characters 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
literature will not find it essential to make the
acquaintance of this famous gallery of creations,
that filled so large a space in the reading interests
of an earlier generation. 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 qualities,
for the stern sense of duty 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,"

The Glamour of the Brontes 239

she said. " God grant that we may all be able to
fight it well." These books 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 stones we find the pas-
sionate devotion of one human being to an-
other, growing more intense with time, based
partly on intellectual sympathy, partly on
spiritual affinity, and yet again upon absorbing
passion. Most of our writers love only to de-
pict the casual devotion based on a pretty face
or a charming disposition. Further, they had
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
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 : —

240 Charlotte Bronte

" About five years ago," wrote Miss Bronte
in 1850, " my two sisters and myself, after a
prolonged period of separation, found ourselves
reunited, and at home. Resident in a remote
district, where education had made little pro-
gress, 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 childhood up-
wards lay in attempts at literary composition.
We had very early cherished the dream of be-
coming 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 resolve. We agreed to
arrange a small selection of 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 am-
biguous choice being dictated by a sort of
conscientious scruple at assuming Christian

The Glamour of the Brontes 241

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 pre-
judice ; we had noticed how critics sometimes
use for their chastisement the weapon of per-
sonality 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 pre-
pared 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 favourable criticism, and is
scarcely known ; but ill-success failed to
crush us ; the mere effort to succeed had
given a wonderful zest to existence ; it must
be pursued. We each, therefore, set to work
on a prose tale."

16

242 Charlotte Bronte

And then that final tribute to her sisters'
memories : — " I may sum up all by saying that
for strangers they were nothing ; for super-
ficial observers less than nothing ; but for
those who had known them all their lives in the
intimacy of close relationship, they were genu-
inely good, and truly great."

Some six years after this tribute had been
paid, there came that splendid recognition by
Mrs. Gaskell, an accomplished writer who has
added more than one book of enduring reputa-
tion to our literature. With so fine an imagi-
nation it was only natural that she should
write a beautiful book, a book calculated still
further to kindle popular interest. It is not
too much to say that Mrs. Gaskell's Life of
Charlotte Bronte has received as enthusiastic
praise from the critics as any one of her own
novels, or even the novels of the friend whose
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 a visit to Mr. Bronte's successor at

The Glamour of the Brontes 243

Haworth,1 in which that gentleman, after
courteously showing me over the house, in which
he had made many marked changes, and to
which he had added many material comforts,
took down from a shelf his copy of Mrs. Gas-
kell's book and pointing out the old-fashioned
engraving of the parsonage as the Brontes
knew it, asked triumphantly, wishing to em-
phasize what he considered the exaggeration
of its dreariness. " Is that anything like the
place ? " 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 Taylor/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 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 pic-
ture 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

1 The Rev. John Wade, who was incumbent of Haworth
from 1861 to 1898.

244 Charlotte Bronte

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 i
to the readers of the Cornbill 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 im-
pression of being a very pure, and lofty, 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 sim-
plicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sym-
pathy, the pious love and reverence, the passion-
ate honour, so to speak, of the woman ? What a
story is that of the family of poets in their soli-
tude yonder on the gloomy Yorkshire moors ! "

1 There were only some three small fragments of manu-
script left at Miss Bronte's death, all apparently written after
Fillette, but not one of them of any real significance.

Appendix

THE following letters written to the
brother of the friend whose marriage
was under contemplation are inter-
esting as a continuation of the correspondence
on pages 49-5 5 :—

" I am about to employ part of a Sunday
evening 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 charge
deposited snugly in their cribs — and I am
sitting alone in the schoolroom with the

24.6 Charlotte Bronte

quiet of a Sunday evening pervading the
grounds and gardens outside my window. I
owe you a letter — can I choose a better time
than the present for paying my debt ? 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 declined 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 indi-
vidual with whom I am personally so little
acquainted as I am with yourself — 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 gover-
ness 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 un-
attractive to strangers, but to me it contains
what I shall find nowhere else in the world —
the profound and intense affection which

Appendix 247

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
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 affection ought to
comfort us under all difficulties — if the God
on whom we must all depend will but vouch-
safe 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
contented ; a governess must often submit
to have the heart-ache. My employers, Mr.
and Mrs. White, are kind, worthy people in

248 Charlotte Bronte'

their way, but the children are indulged. I
have great difficulties to contend with some-
times— perseverance will perhaps conquer
them — and it has gratified me much to find
that the parents are well satisfied with their
children's improvement in learning since I
came. But I am dwelling too much upon
my own concerns and feelings. It is true
they are interesting to me, but it is wholly
impossible they should be so to you, and there-
fore 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 Brookroyd 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,

Appendix 249

and I daresay 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 under-
stand there is a Mr., Mrs., and Miss Barwick
— the name in pronunciation 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 Brookroyd and his late declara-
tion that some impediment had occurred to
prevent his proceeding 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
competency of fortune. Your description of

250 Charlotte Bronte

Mr. Lincoln seems to promise all these things ;
there is but one word in it that appears excep-
tionable— 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 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 Earnley.'
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

Appendix 251

is a good, honourable, and respectable man,
take him, even though you should not at
present feel any violent affection 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-
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
complain of, and which induces some young
ladies to say l 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-

2 $2 Charlotte Bronte

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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