Emily Brontë
Charlotte's friend, of more authority and weight on this matter than
those of any other person living, taken from a manuscript which she has
placed at my disposal:--
"Miss Branwell's letters showed that her engagement, though
not a prolonged one, was not as happy as it ought to have
been. There was a pathos of apprehension (though gently
expressed) in part of the correspondence lest Mr. Bronte
should cool in his affection towards her, and the readers
perceived with some indignation that there had been a just
cause for this apprehension. Mr. Bronte, with all his iron
strength and power of will, had his weakness, and one which,
wherever it exists, spoils and debases the character--he had
_personal vanity_. Miss Branwell's finer nature rose above
such weakness; but she suffered all the more from evidences
of it in one to whom she had given her affections and whom
she was longing to look up to in all things."
On the 29th of December, 1812, this disillusioned, loving little lady
was married to Patrick Bronte, from her uncle's parsonage near Leeds.
The young couple took up their abode at Hartshead, Mr. Bronte's curacy.
Three years afterwards they moved, with two little baby girls, Maria and
Elizabeth, to a better living at Thornton. The country round is desolate
and bleak; great winds go sweeping by; young Mrs. Bronte, whose husband
generally sat alone in his study, would have missed her cheerful home in
sunny Penzance (being delicate and prone to superstition), but that she
was a patient and uncomplaining woman, and she had scant time for
thought among her many cares for the thick-coming little lives that
peopled her Yorkshire home. In 1816 Charlotte Bronte was born. In the
next year Patrick Branwell. In 1818 Emily Jane. In 1819 Anne. Then the
health of their delicate and consumptive mother began to break. After
seven years' marriage and with six young children, Mr. and Mrs. Bronte
moved on the 25th of February, 1820, to their new home at Haworth
Vicarage.
The village of Haworth stands, steep and grey, on the topmost side of an
abrupt low hill. Such hills, more steep than high, are congregated
round, circle beyond circle, to the utmost limit of the horizon. Not a
wood, not a river. As far as eye can reach these treeless hills, their
sides cut into fields by grey walls of stone, with here and there a grey
stone village, and here and there a grey stone mill, present no other
colours than the singular north-country brilliance of the green grass,
and the blackish grey of the stone. Now and then a toppling, gurgling
mill-beck gives life to the scene. But the real life, the only beauty of
the country, is set on the top of all the hills, where moor joins moor
from Yorkshire into Lancashire, a coiled chain of wild free places.
White with snow in winter, black at midsummer, it is only when spring
dapples the dark heather-stems with the vivid green of the sprouting
wortleberry bushes, only when in early autumn the moors are one humming
mass of fragrant purple, that any beauty of tint lights up the scene.
But there is always a charm in the moors for hardy and solitary spirits.
Between them and heaven nothing dares to interpose. The shadows of the
coursing clouds alter the aspect of the place a hundred times a day. A
hundred little springs and streams well in its soil, making spots of
livid greenness round their rise. A hundred birds of every kind are
flying and singing there. Larks sing; cuckoos call; all the tribes of
linnets and finches twitter in the bushes; plovers moan; wild ducks fly
past; more melancholy than all, on stormy days, the white sea-mews cry,
blown so far inland by the force of the gales that sweep irresistibly
over the treeless and houseless moors. There in the spring you may take
in your hands the weak, halting fledgelings of the birds; rabbits and
game multiply in the hollows. There in the autumn the crowds of bees,
mad in the heather, send the sound of their humming down the village
street. The winds, the clouds, Nature and life, must be the friends of
those who would love the moors.
But young Mrs. Bronte never could go on the moors. She was frail and
weak, poor woman, when she came to live in the oblong grey stone
parsonage on the windy top of the hill. The village ran sheer down at
her feet; but she could not walk down the steep rough-paven street, nor
on the pathless moors. She was very ill and weak; her husband spent
nearly all his time in the study, writing his poems, his tracts, and his
sermons. She had no companions but the children. And when, in a very few
months, she found that she was sickening of a cancer, she could not bear
to see much of the children that she must leave so soon.
Who dare say if that marriage was happy? Mrs. Gaskell, writing in the
life and for the eyes of Mr. Bronte, speaks of his unwearied care, his
devotion in the night-nursing. But before that fatal illness was
declared, she lets fall many a hint of the young wife's loneliness
during her husband's lengthy, ineffectual studies; of her patient
suffering of his violent temper. She does not say, but we may suppose,
with what inward pleasure Mrs. Bronte witnessed her favourite silk dress
cut into shreds because her husband's pride did not choose that she
should accept a gift; or watched the children's coloured shoes thrown on
the fire, with no money in her purse to get new ones; or listened to her
husband's cavil at the too frequent arrival of his children; or heard
the firing of his pistol-shots at the out-house doors, the necessary
vent of a passion not to be wreaked in words. She was patient, brave,
lonely, and silent. But Mr. Wemyss Reid, who has had unexampled
facilities for studying the Bronte papers, does not scruple to speak of
Mr. Bronte's "persistent coldness and neglect" of his wife, his "stern
and peremptory" dealings with her, of her "habitual dread of her lordly
master"; and the manuscript which I have once already quoted alludes to
the "hard and inflexible will which raised itself sometimes into tyranny
and cruelty." It is within the character of the man that all this should
be true. Safely wed, the woman to whom he had made hot love would
experience no more of his impulsive tenderness. He had provided for her
and done his duty; her duty was to be at hand when he needed her. Yet,
imminent death once declared, all his uprightness, his sense of honour,
would call on him to be careful to the creature he had vowed to love and
cherish, all his selfishness would oblige him to try and preserve the
mother of six little children under seven years of age. "They kept
themselves very close," the village people said; and at least in this
last illness the husband and wife were frequently together. Their love
for each other, new revived and soon to close, seemed to exclude any
thought of the children. We hear expressly that Mr. Bronte, from natural
disinclination, and Mrs. Bronte, from fear of agitation, saw very little
of the small earnest babies who talked politics together in the
"children's study," or toddled hand in hand over the neighbouring moors.
Meanwhile the young mother grew weaker day by day, suffering great pain
and often unable to move. But repining never passed her lips. Perhaps
she did not repine. Perhaps she did not grieve to quit her harassed
life, the children she so seldom saw, her constant pain, the husband
"not dramatic enough in his perceptions to see how miserable others
might be in a life that to him was all-sufficient."[1] For some months
she lay still, asking sometimes to be lifted in bed that she might watch
the nurse cleaning the grate, because she did it as they did in
Cornwall. For some months she suffered more and more. In September,
1821, she died.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Mrs. Gaskell.]
CHAPTER II.
BABYHOOD.
After his wife's death the Rev. Mr. Bronte's life grew yet more
secluded from ordinary human interests. He was not intimate with his
parishioners; scarcely more intimate with his children. He was proud of
them when they said anything clever, for, in spite of their babyhood, he
felt at such moments that they were worthy of their father; but their
forlorn infancy, their helpless ignorance, was no appeal to his heart.
Some months before his wife's death he had begun to take his dinner
alone, on account of his delicate digestion; and he continued the habit,
seeing the children seldom except at breakfast and tea, when he would
amuse the elders by talking Tory politics with them, and entertain the
baby, Emily, with his Irish tales of violence and horror. Perhaps on
account of this very aloofness, he always had a great influence over the
children; he did not care for any dearer relation.
His empty days were filled with occasional visits to some sick person in
the village; with long walks alone over the moors, and with the
composition of his 'Cottage in the Wood' and those grandiloquent sermons
which still linger in the memory of Haworth. Occasionally a clergyman
from one of the neighbouring villages would walk over to see him; but as
Mrs. Bronte had died so soon after her arrival at Haworth their wives
never came, and the Bronte children had no playfellows in the vicarages
near; nor were they allowed to associate with the village children.
This dull routine life suited Mr. Bronte. He had laboured for many years
and now he took his repose. We get no further sign of the impatient
energies of his youth. He had changed, developed; even as those
sea-creatures develop, who, having in their youth fins, eyes and
sensitive feelers, become, when once they find their resting-place,
motionlessly attached to it, losing one after the other, sight,
movement, and even sensation, everything but the faculty to adhere.
Meanwhile the children were left alone. For sympathy and amusement they
only had each other to look to; and never were brother and sisters more
devoted. Maria, the eldest, took care of them all--she was an
old-fashioned, motherly little girl; frail and small in appearance, with
thoughtful, tender ways. She was very careful of her five little ones,
this seven-year-old mother of theirs, and never seems to have exerted
the somewhat tyrannic authority usually wielded by such youthful
guardians. Indeed, for all her seniority, she was the untidy one of the
family herself; it was against her own faults only that she was severe.
She must have been a very attaching little creature, with her childish
delinquencies and her womanly cares; protecting her little family with
gentle love and discussing the debates in Parliament with her father.
Charlotte remembered her to the end of her life with passionate clinging
affection and has left us her portrait in the pathetic figure of Helen
Burns.
This delicate, weak-chested child of seven was the head of the nursery.
Then came Elizabeth, less clearly individualised in her sisters' memory.
She also bore in her tiny body the seeds of fatal consumption. Next
came impetuous Charlotte, always small and pale. Then red-headed,
talkative Patrick Branwell. Lastly Emily and Anne, mere babies, toddling
with difficulty over the paven path to the moors.
Such a family demanded the closest care, the most exact attention. This
was perhaps impossible on an income of L200 a year, when the mother lay
upstairs dying of a disease that required constant nursing. Still the
conditions of the Brontes' youth were unnecessarily unhealthy. It could
not be helped that these delicate children should live on the bleak
wind-swept hill where consumption is even now a scourge; it could not be
helped that their home was bounded on two sides by the village
graveyard; it could not be helped that they were left without a mother