Emily Brontë
innocent a creature, absorbed all Charlotte's pity. There was none left
for Branwell.
But there was one woman's heart strong enough in its compassion to bear
the daily disgusts, weaknesses, sins of Branwell's life, and yet persist
in aid and affection. Night after night, when Mr. Bronte was in bed,
when Anne and Charlotte had gone upstairs to their room, Emily still sat
up, waiting. She often had very long to wait in the silent house before
the staggering tread, the muttered oath, the fumbling hand at the door,
bade her rouse herself from her sad thoughts and rise to let in the
prodigal, and lead him in safety to his rest. But she never wearied in
her kindness. In that silent home, it was the silent Emily who had ever
a cheering word for Branwell; it was Emily who still remembered that he
was her brother, without that remembrance freezing her heart to
numbness. She still hoped to win him back by love; and the very force
and sincerity of his guilty passion (an additional horror and sin in her
sisters' eyes) was a claim on Emily, ever sympathetic to violent
feeling. Thus it was she who, more than the others, became familiarised
with the agony, and doubts, and shame of that tormented soul; and if, in
her little knowledge of the world, she imagined such wrested passions to
be natural, it is not upon her, of a certainty, that the blame of her
pity shall be laid.
As the time went on and Branwell grew worse and wilder, it was well for
the lonely watcher that she was strong. At last he grew ill, and would
be content to go to bed early and lie there half-stupefied with opium
and drink. One such night, their father and Branwell being in bed, the
sisters came upstairs to sleep. Emily had gone on first into the little
passage room where she still slept, when Charlotte, passing Branwell's
partly-opened door, saw a strange bright flare inside.
"Oh, Emily!" she cried, "the house is on fire!"
Emily came out, her fingers at her lips. She had remembered her father's
great horror of fire; it was the one dread of a brave man; he would have
no muslin curtains, no light dresses in his house. She came out silently
and saw the flame; then, very white and determined, dashed from her room
downstairs into the passage, where every night full pails of water
stood. One in each hand she came upstairs. Anne, Charlotte, the young
servant, shrinking against the wall, huddled together in amazed
horror--Emily went straight on and entered the blazing room. In a short
while the bright light ceased to flare. Fortunately the flame had not
reached the woodwork: drunken Branwell, turning in his bed, must have
upset the light on to his sheets, for they and the bed were all on fire,
and he unconscious in the midst when Emily went in, even as Jane Eyre
found Mr. Rochester. But it was with no reasonable, thankful human
creature with whom Emily had to deal. After a few long moments, those
still standing in the passage saw her stagger out, white, with singed
clothes, half-carrying in her arms, half-dragging, her besotted brother.
She placed him in her bed, and took away the light; then assuring the
hysterical girls that there could be no further danger, she bade them go
and rest--but where she slept herself that night no one remembers now.
It must be very soon after this that Branwell began to sleep in his
father's room. The old man, courageous enough, and conceiving that his
presence might be some slight restraint on the drunken furies of his
unhappy son, persisted in this arrangement, though often enough the
girls begged him to relinquish it, knowing well enough what risk of life
he ran. Not infrequently Branwell would declare that either he or his
father should be dead before the morning; and well might it happen that
in his insensate delirium he should murder the blind old man.
"The sisters often listened for the report of a pistol in the dead of
the night, till watchful eye and hearkening ear grew heavy and dull with
the perpetual strain upon their nerves. In the mornings young Bronte
would saunter out, saying with a drunkard's incontinence of speech, 'The
poor old man and I have had a terrible night of it. He does his
best--the poor old man!--but it's all over with me'" (whimpering) "'it's
_her_ fault, _her_ fault.'"[20]
And in such fatal progress two years went on, bringing the suffering in
that house ever lower, ever deeper, sinking it day by day from bad to
worse.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 16: Mrs. Gaskell.]
[Footnote 17: 'Pictures of the Past.']
[Footnote 18: Mrs. Gaskell.]
[Footnote 19: Mrs. Gaskell.]
[Footnote 20: Mrs. Gaskell.]
CHAPTER XII.
WRITING POETRY.
While Emily Bronte's hands were full of trivial labour, while her heart
was buried with its charge of shame and sorrow, think not that her mind
was more at rest. She had always used her leisure to study or create;
and the dreariness of existence made this inner life of hers doubly
precious now. There is a tiny copy of the 'Poems' of Ellis, Currer, and
Acton Bell, which was Emily's own, marked with her name and with the
date of every poem carefully written under its title, in her own cramped
and tidy writing. It has been of great use to me in classifying the
order of these poems, chiefly hymns to imagination, Emily's "Comforter,"
her "Fairy-love;" beseeching her to light such a light in the soul that
the dull clouds of earthly skies may seem of scant significance.
The light that should be lit was indeed of supernatural brightness; a
flame from under the earth; a flame of lightning from the skies; a
beacon of awful warning. Although so much is scarcely evident in these
early poems, gleaming with fantastic glow-worm fires, fairy
prettinesses, or burning as solemnly and pale as tapers lit in daylight
round a bier, yet, in whatever shape, "the light that never was on sea
or land," the strange transfiguring shine of imagination, is present
there.
No one in the house ever saw what things Emily wrote in the moments of
pause from her pastry-making, in those brief sittings under the
currants, in those long and lonely watches for her drunken brother. She
did not write to be read, but only to relieve a burdened heart. "One
day," writes Charlotte in 1850, recollecting the near, vanished past,
"one day in the autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on a manuscript
volume of verse in my sister Emily's handwriting. Of course I was not
surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse. I looked it over,
and something more than surprise seized me,--a deep conviction that
these were not common effusions, not at all like the poetry women
generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and
genuine. To my ear, they had also a peculiar music, wild, melancholy and
elevating."
Very true; these poems with their surplus of imagination, their
instinctive music and irregular rightness of form, their sweeping
impressiveness, effects of landscape, their scant allusions to dogma or
perfidious man, are, indeed, not at all like the poetry women generally
write. The hand that painted this single line,
"The dim moon struggling in the sky,"
should have shaken hands with Coleridge. The voice might have sung in
concert with Blake that sang this single bit of a song:
"Hope was but a timid friend;
She sat without the grated den,
Watching how my fate would tend,
Even as selfish-hearted men.
"She was cruel in her fear;
Through the bars, one dreary day,
I looked out to see her there,
And she turned her face away!"
Had the poem ended here it would have been perfect, but it and many more
of these lyrics have the uncertainty of close that usually marks early
work. Often incoherent, too, the pictures of a dream rapidly succeeding
each other without logical connection; yet scarcely marred by the
incoherence, since the effect they seek to produce is not an emotion,
not a conviction, but an impression of beauty, or horror, or ecstasy.
The uncertain outlines are bathed in a vague golden air of imagination,
and are shown to us with the magic touch of a Coleridge, a Leopardi--the
touch which gives a mood, a scene, with scarce an obvious detail of
either mood or scene. We may not understand the purport of the song, we
understand the feeling that prompted the song, as, having done with
reading 'Kubla Khan,' there remains in our mind, not the pictured vision
of palace or dancer, but a personal participation in Coleridge's
heightened fancy, a setting-on of reverie, an impression.
Read this poem, written in October, 1845--
"THE PHILOSOPHER.
"Enough of thought, philosopher,
Too long hast thou been dreaming
Unlightened, in this chamber drear,
While summer's sun is beaming!
Space-sweeping soul, what sad refrain
Concludes thy musings once again?
"Oh, for the time when I shall sleep
Without identity,
And never care how rain may steep,
Or snow may cover me!
No promised heaven, these wild desires
Could all, or half fulfil;
No threatened hell, with quenchless fires,
Subdue this quenchless will!
"So said I, and still say the same;
Still, to my death, will say--
Three gods, within this little frame,
Are warring night and day;
Heaven could not hold them all, and yet
They all are held in me,
And must be mine till I forget
My present entity!
Oh, for the time, when in my breast
Their struggles will be o'er!
Oh, for the day, when I shall rest,
And never suffer more!
"I saw a spirit, standing, man,
Where thou dost stand--an hour ago,
And round his feet three rivers ran,
Of equal depth, and equal flow--
A golden stream, and one like blood,
And one like sapphire seemed to be;
But, where they joined their triple flood
It tumbled in an inky sea.
The spirit sent his dazzling gaze
Down through that ocean's gloomy night
Then, kindling all, with sudden blaze,
The glad deep sparkled wide and bright--
White as the sun, far, far more fair,
Than its divided sources were!
"And even for that spirit, seer,
I've watched and sought my life-time long;
Sought him in heaven, hell, earth and air--
An endless search, and always wrong!
Had I but seen his glorious eye
_Once_ light the clouds that 'wilder me,
I ne'er had raised this coward cry
To cease to think, and cease to be;
I ne'er had called oblivion blest,
Nor, stretching eager hands to death,
Implored to change for senseless rest
This sentient soul, this living breath--
"Oh, let me die--that power and will
Their cruel strife may close;
And conquered good, and conquering ill
Be lost in one repose!"
Some semblance of coherence may, no doubt, be given to this poem by
making the three first and the last stanzas to be spoken by the
questioner, and the fourth by the philosopher. Even so, the subject has
little charm. What we care for is the surprising energy with which the
successive images are projected, the earnest ring of the verse, the
imagination which invests all its changes. The man and the philosopher
are but the clumsy machinery of the magic-lantern, the more kept out of
view the better.
"Conquered good and conquering ill!" A thought that must often have
risen in Emily's mind during this year and those succeeding. A gloomy
thought, sufficiently strange in a country parson's daughter; one
destined to have a great result in her work.
Of these visions which make the larger half of Emily's contribution to
the tiny book, none has a more eerie grace than this day-dream of the
5th of March, 1844, sampled here by a few verses snatched out of their
setting rudely enough:--