Emily Brontë
Branwell's shames and sorrow is unconcerned with this, their sad and
necessary record. Only the lights and sunshine of my work I dedicate to
her. It may be that I have given too great a share to the shadows, to
the manifold follies and failures of Branwell Bronte. Yet in Emily
Bronte's life the shaping influences were so few, and the sins of this
beloved and erring brother had so large a share in determining the bent
of her genius, that to have passed them by would have been to ignore the
shock which turned the fantasy of the 'Poems' into the tragedy of
'Wuthering Heights.' It would have been to leave untold the patience,
the courage, the unselfishness which perfected Emily Bronte's heroic
character; and to have left her burdened with the calumny of having
chosen to invent the crimes and violence of her _dramatis personae_. Not
so, alas! They were but reflected from the passion and sorrow that
darkened her home; it was no perverse fancy which drove that pure and
innocent girl into ceaseless brooding on the conquering force of sin and
the supremacy of injustice.
She brooded over the problem night and day; she took its difficulties
passionately to heart; in the midst of her troubled thoughts she wrote
'Wuthering Heights.' From the clear spirit which inspires the end of her
work, we know that the storm is over; we know that her next tragedy
would be less violent. But we shall never see it; for--and it is by this
that most of us remember her--suddenly and silently she died.
She died, before a single word of worthy praise had reached her. She
died with her work misunderstood and neglected. And yet not unhappy. For
her home on the moors was very dear to her, the least and homeliest
duties pleasant; she loved her sisters with devoted friendship, and she
had many little happinesses in her patient, cheerful, unselfish life.
Would that I could show her as she was!--not the austere and violent
poetess who, cuckoo-fashion, has usurped her place; but brave to fate
and timid of man; stern to herself, forbearing to all weak and erring
things; silent, yet sometimes sparkling with happy sallies. For to
represent her as she was would be her noblest and most fitting
monument.
CHAPTER I.
PARENTAGE.
Emily Bronte was born of parents without any peculiar talent for
literature. It is true that her mother's letters are precisely and
prettily written. It is true that her father published a few tracts and
religious poems. But in neither case is there any vestige of literary or
poetical endowment. Few, indeed, are the Parish Magazines which could
not show among their contents poems and articles greatly superior to the
weak and characterless effusions of the father of the Brontes. The fact
seems important; because in this case not one member of a family, but a
whole family, is endowed in more or less degree with faculties not
derived from either parent.
For children may inherit genius from parents who are themselves not
gifted, as two streaming currents of air unite to form a liquid with
properties different from either; and never is biography more valuable
than when it allows us to perceive by what combination of allied
qualities, friction of opposing temperaments, recurrence of ancestral
traits, the subtle thing we call character is determined. In this case,
since, as I have said, the whole family manifested a brilliance not to
be found in either parent, such a study would be peculiarly interesting.
But, unfortunately, the history of the children's father and the
constitution of the children's mother is all that is clear to our
investigation.
Yet even out of this very short pedigree two important factors of genius
declare themselves--two potent and shaping inheritances. From their
father, Currer, Ellis, and Acton derived a strong will. From their
mother, the disease that slew Emily and Anne in the prime of their youth
and made Charlotte always delicate and ailing. In both cases the boy,
Patrick Branwell, was very slightly affected; but he too died young,
from excesses that suggest a taint of insanity in his constitution.
Insanity and genius stand on either side consumption, its worse and
better angels. Let none call it impious or absurd to rank the greatest
gift to mankind as the occasional result of an inherited tendency to
tubercular disease. There are of course very many other determining
causes; yet is it certain that inherited scrofula or phthisis may come
out, not in these diseases, or not only in these diseases, but in an
alteration, for better or for worse, of the condition of the mind. Out
of evil good may come, or a worse evil.
The children's father was a nervous, irritable and violent man, who
endowed them with a nervous organisation easily disturbed and an
indomitable force of volition. The girls, at least, showed both these
characteristics. Patrick Branwell must have been a weaker, more
brilliant, more violent, less tenacious, less upright copy of his
father; and seems to have suffered no modification from the patient and
steadfast moral nature of his mother. She was the model that her
daughters copied, in different degrees, both in character and health.
Passion and will their father gave them. Their genius came directly from
neither parent; but from the constitution of their natures.
In addition, on both sides, the children got a Celtic strain; and this
is a matter of significance, meaning a predisposition to the
superstition, imagination and horror that is a strand in all their work.
Their mother, Maria Branwell, was of a good middle-class Cornish family,
long established as merchants in Penzance. Their father was the son of
an Irish peasant, Hugh Prunty, settled in the north of Ireland, but
native to the south.
The history of the Rev. Patrick Bronte, B.A. (whose fine Greek name,
shortened from the ancient Irish appellation of Bronterre, was so
naively admired by his children), is itself a remarkable and interesting
story.
The Reverend Patrick Bronte was one of the ten children of a peasant
proprietor at Ahaderg in county Down. The family to which he belonged
inherited strength, good looks, and a few scant acres of potato-growing
soil. They must have been very poor, those ten children, often hungry,
cold and wet; but these adverse influences only seemed to brace the
sinews of Patrick Prunty and to nerve his determination to rise above
his surroundings. He grew up a tall and strong young fellow, unusually
handsome with a well-shaped head, regular profile and fine blue eyes. A
vivacious impressible manner effectually masked a certain selfishness
and rigour of temperament which became plain in after years. He seemed a
generous, quick, impulsive lad. When he was sixteen years of age Patrick
left his father's roof resolved to earn a position for himself. At
Drumgooland, a neighbouring hamlet, he opened what is called in Ireland
a public school; a sort of hedge-school for village children. He stuck
to his trade for five or six years, using his leisure to perfect himself
in general knowledge, mathematics, and a smattering of Greek and Latin.
His efforts deserved to be crowned with success. The Rev. Mr. Tighe,
the clergyman of the parish, was so struck with Patrick Prunty's
determination and ability that he advised him to try for admittance at
one of the English universities; and when the young man was about
five-and-twenty he went, with Mr. Tighe's help, to Cambridge, and
entered at St. John's.
He left Ireland in July, 1802, never to visit it again. He never cared
to look again on the scenes of his early struggle. He never found the
means to revisit mother or home, friends or country. Between Patrick
Bronte, proud of his Greek profile and his Greek name, the handsome
undergraduate at St. John's, and the nine shoeless, hungry young Pruntys
of Ahaderg, there stretched a distance not to be measured by miles.
Under his warm and passionate exterior a fixed resolution to get on in
the world was hidden; but, though cold, the young man was just and
self-denying, and as long as his mother lived she received twenty pounds
a year, spared with difficulty from his narrow income.
Patrick Bronte stayed four years at Cambridge; when he left he had
dropped his Irish accent and taken his B.A. On leaving St. John's he was
ordained to a curacy in Essex.
The young man's energy, of the sort that only toils to reach a given
personal end, had carried him far on the way to success. At twenty
hedge-schoolmaster at Drumgooland, Patrick Bronte was at thirty a
respectable clergyman of the Church of England, with an assured position
and respectable clerical acquaintance. He was getting very near the
goal.
He did not stay long in Essex. A better curacy was offered to him at
Hartshead, a little village between Huddersfield and Halifax in
Yorkshire. While he was at Hartshead the handsome inflammable Irish
curate met Maria Branwell at her uncle's parsonage near Leeds. It was
not the first time that Patrick Bronte had fallen in love; people in the
neighbourhood used to smile at his facility for adoration, and thought
it of a piece with his enthusiastic character. They were quite right; in
his strange nature the violence and the coldness were equally genuine,
both being a means to gratify some personal ambition, desire, or
indolence. It is not an uncommon Irish type; self-important, upright,
honourable, yet with a bent towards subtlety: abstemious in habit, but
with freaks of violent self-indulgence; courteous and impulsive towards
strangers, though cold to members of the household; naturally violent,
and often assuming violence as an instrument of authority; selfish and
dutiful; passionate, and devoid of intense affection.
Miss Branwell was precisely the little person with whom it was natural
that such a man, a self-made man, should fall in love. She was very
small, quiet and gentle, not exactly pretty, but elegant and ladylike.
She was, indeed, a well-educated young lady of good connections; a very
Phoenix she must have seemed in the eyes of a lover conscious of a
background of Pruntyism and potatoes. She was about twenty-one and he
thirty-five when they first met in the early summer of 1812. They were
engaged in August. Miss Branwell's letters reveal a quiet intensity of
devotion, a faculty of judgment, a willingness to forgive passing
slights that must have satisfied the absolute and critical temper of her
lover. Under the devotion and the quietness there is, however, the note
of an independent spirit, and the following extract, with its capability
of self-reliance and desire to rely upon another, reminds one curiously
of passages in her daughter Charlotte's writings:--
"For some years I have been perfectly my own mistress,
subject to no control whatever; so far from it that my
sisters, who are many years older than myself, and even my
dear mother used to consult me on every occasion of
importance, and scarcely ever doubted the propriety of my
words and actions: perhaps you will be ready to accuse me of
vanity in mentioning this, but you must consider that I do
not boast of it. I have many times felt it a disadvantage,
and although, I thank God, it has never led me into error,
yet in circumstances of uncertainty and doubt I have deeply
felt the want of a guide and instructor."
Years afterwards, when Maria Branwell's letters were given into the
hands of her daughter Charlotte and that daughter's most dear and
faithful friend, the two young women felt a keen pang of retrospective
sympathy for the gentle independent little person who, even before her
marriage, had time to perceive that her guide and instructor was not the
infallible Mentor she had thought him at the first. I quote the words of