The Three Brontës · Chapter 5Introduction (3)
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And in its abrupt and pitiful end her life rang true; it sustained the tragic harmony. It was the fulfilment of secret prophecies, forebodings, premonitions, of her reiterated "It was not to be." You may say that in the end life cheated and betrayed her.
And inevitably; for she had loved life, not as Emily loved it, like an equal, with power over it and pride and an unearthly understanding, virgin and unafraid. There was something slightly subservient, consciously inferior, in Charlotte's attitude to life. She had loved it secretly, with a sort of shame, with a corroding passion and incredulity and despair. Such natures are not seldom victims of the power they would propitiate. It killed her in her effort to bring forth life.
When the end came she could not realize it. For the first time she was incredulous of disaster. She heard, out of her last stupor, her husband praying that God would spare her, and she whispered, "Oh, I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us; we have been so happy."
You can see her youth rising up beside that death-bed and answering, "That is why."
And yet, could even Charlotte's youth have been so sure as to the cheating and betrayal? That happiness of hers was cut short in the moment of its perfection. She was not to suffer any disenchantment or decline; her love was not to know any cold of fear or her genius any fever of frustration. She was saved the struggle we can see before her. Arthur Nicholls was passionately fond of Charlotte. But he was hostile to Charlotte's genius and to Charlotte's fame. A plain, practical, robust man, inimical to any dream. He could be adorably kind to a sick, submissive Charlotte. Would he have been so tender to a Charlotte in revolt? She was spared the torture of the choice between Arthur Nicholls and her genius. We know how she would have chosen. It is well for her, and it is all one to literature, that she died, not "in a time of promise", but in the moment of fulfilment.
* * * * *
No. Of these tragic Brontës the most tragic, the most pitiful, the most mercilessly abused by destiny, was Anne. An interminable, monstrous exile is the impression we get of Anne's life in the years of her girlhood. There is no actual record of them. Nobody kept Anne's letters. We never hear her sad voice raised in self-pity or revolt. It is doubtful if she ever raised it. She waited in silence and resignation, and then told her own story in Agnes Grey. But her figure remains dim in her own story and in the classic "Lives". We only know that she was the youngest, and that, unlike her sisters, she was pretty. She had thick brown curling hair, and violet-blue eyes, and delicate dark eyebrows, and a skin rose and white for her sisters' sallow, that must have given some ominous hint of fever. This delicate thing was broken on the wheel of life. They say of Anne perpetually that she was "gentle". In Charlotte's sketch of her she holds her pretty head high, her eyes gaze straight forward, and you wonder whether, before the breaking point, she was always as gentle as they say. But you never see her in any moment of revolt. Her simple poems, at their bitterest, express no more than a frail agony, an innocent dismay. That little raising of the head in conscious rectitude is all that breaks the long plaint of Agnes Grey.
There is no piety in that plaint. It is purely pagan; the cry of youth cheated of its desire. Life brought her no good gifts beyond the slender ineffectual beauty that left her undesired. Her tremulous, expectant womanhood was cheated. She never saw so much as the flying veil of joy, or even of such pale, uninspired happiness as she dreamed in Agnes Grey. She was cheated of her innocent dream.
And by an awful irony her religion failed her. She knew its bitterness, its terrors, its exactions. She never knew its ecstasies, its flaming mysteries, nor, even at her very last, its consolations. Her tender conscience drew an unspeakable torment from the spectacle of her brother's degradation.
For it was on Anne, who had no genius to sustain her, that poor Branwell, with the burden of his destiny, weighed most hard. It was Anne at Thorp Green who had the first terrible misgivings, the intolerable premonitions.
That wretched story is always cropping up again. The lady whom Mrs. Gaskell, with a murderous selection of adjectives, called "that mature and wicked woman", has been cleared as far as evidence and common sense could clear her. But the slander is perpetually revived. It has always proved too much for the Brontë biographers. Madame Duclaux published it again twenty years after, in spite of the evidence and in spite of Mrs. Gaskell's retractation. You would have thought that Branwell might have been allowed to rest in the grave he dug for himself so well. But no, they will not let him rest. Branwell drank, and he ate opium; and, as if drink and opium and erotic madness were not enough, they must credit him with an open breach of the seventh commandment as well. M. Dimnet, the most able of recent critics of the Brontës, thinks and maintains against all evidence that there was more in it than Branwell's madness. He will not give up the sordid tragedy à trois. He thinks he knows what Anne thought of Branwell's behaviour, and what awful secret she was hinting at, and what she told her sisters when she came back to Haworth. He argues that Anne Brontë saw and heard things, and that her testimony is not to be set aside.
What did Anne Brontë see and hear? She saw her brother consumed by an illegitimate passion; a passion utterly hopeless, given the nature of the lady. The lady had been kind to Anne, to Branwell she had been angelically kind. Anne saw that his behaviour was an atrocious return for her kindness. Further than that the lady hardly counted in Anne's vision. Her interest was centred on her brother. She saw him taking first to drink and then to opium. She saw that he was going mad, and he did go mad. One of the most familiar symptoms of morphia mania is a tendency to erotic hallucinations of the precise kind that Branwell suffered from. Anne was unable to distinguish between such a hallucination and depravity. But there is not a shadow of evidence that she thought what M. Dimnet thinks, or that if she had thought it she made Charlotte and Emily think it too. Branwell's state was quite enough in itself to break their hearts. His letters to Leyland, to John Brown, the sexton, to Francis Grundy, record with frightful vividness every phase of his obsession.
It is inconceivable that such letters should have been kept, still more inconceivable that they should have been published. It is inconceivable that Mrs. Gaskell should have dragged the pitiful and shameful figure into the light. Nobody can save poor Branwell now from the dreadful immortality thrust on him by his enemies and friends with equal zeal. All that is left to us is a merciful understanding of his case. Branwell's case, once for all, was purely pathological. There was nothing great about him, not even his passion for Mrs. Robinson. Properly speaking, it was not a passion at all, it was a disease. Branwell was a degenerate, as incapable of passion as he was of poetry. His sisters, Anne and Charlotte, talked with an amazing innocence about Branwell's vices. Simple and beautiful souls, they never for a moment suspected that his worst vice was sentimentalism. In the beginning, before it wrecked him, nobody enjoyed his own emotions more than Branwell. At his worst he wallowed voluptuously in the torments of frustration. At the end, what with drink and what with opium, he was undoubtedly insane. His letters are priceless pathological documents. They reveal all the workings of his peculiar mania. He thinks everybody is plotting to keep him from Mrs. Robinson. Faced at every turn with the evidence of this lady's complete indifference, he gives it all a lunatic twist to prove the contrary. He takes the strangest people into his confidence, John Brown, the sexton, and the Robinsons' coachman. Queer flames of lucidity dart here and there through this madness: "The probability of her becoming free to give me herself and estate ever rose to drive away the prospect of her decline under her present grief." "I had reason to hope that ere very long I should be the husband of a lady whom I loved best in the world, and with whom, in more than competence, I might live at leisure to try to make myself a name in the world of posterity, without being pestered by the small but countless botherments, which, like mosquitoes, sting us in the world of work-day toil. That hope and herself are gone—she to wither into patiently pining decline—it to make room for drudgery." It is all sordid as well as terrible. We have no right to know these things. Mrs. Oliphant is almost justified in her protest against Charlotte as the first to betray her brother.
But did Charlotte betray Branwell? Not in her letters. She never imagined—how could she?—that those letters would be published. Not in her novels. Her novels give no portrait of Branwell and no hint that could be easily understood. It is in her prefaces to her sisters' novels that he appears, darkly. Charlotte, outraged by the infamous article in the Quarterly, was determined that what had been said of her should never be said of Anne and Emily. She felt that their works offered irresistible provocation to the scandalous reviewer. She thought it necessary to explain how they came by their knowledge of evil.
This vindication of her sisters is certainly an indictment of her brother to anybody who knew enough to read between the lines. Charlotte may have innocently supposed that nobody knew or ever would know enough. Unfortunately, Mrs. Gaskell knew; and when it came to vindicating Charlotte, she considered herself justified in exposing Charlotte's brother because Charlotte herself had shown her the way.
But Charlotte might have spared her pains. Branwell does not account for Heathcliff any more than he accounts for Rochester. He does not even account for Huntingdon in poor Anne's novel. He accounts only for himself. He is important chiefly in relation to the youngest of the Brontës. Oddly enough, this boy, who was once thought greater than his sister Emily, was curiously akin to the weak and ineffectual Anne. He shows the weird flickering of the flame that pulsed so feebly and intermittently in her. He had Anne's unhappy way with destiny, her knack of missing things. She had a touch of his morbidity. He was given to silences which in anybody but Anne would have been called morose. It was her fate to be associated with him in the hour and in the scene of his disgrace. And he was offered up unwittingly by Charlotte as a sacrifice to Anne's virtue.
* * * * *
Like Branwell, Anne had no genius. She shows for ever gentle, and, in spite of an unconquerable courage, conquered. And yet there was more in her than gentleness. There was, in this smallest and least considerable of the Brontës, an immense, a terrifying audacity. Charlotte was bold, and Emily was bolder; but this audacity of Anne's was greater than Charlotte's boldness or than Emily's, because it was willed, it was deliberate, open-eyed; it had none of the superb unconsciousness of genius. Anne took her courage in both hands when she sat down to write The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. There are scenes, there are situations, in Anne's amazing novel, which for sheer audacity stand alone in mid-Victorian literature, and which would hold their own in the literature of revolt that followed. It cannot be said that these scenes and situations are tackled with a master-hand. But there is a certain grasp in Anne's treatment, and an astonishing lucidity. Her knowledge of the seamy side of life was not exhaustive. But her diagnosis of certain states, her realization of certain motives, suggests Balzac rather than any of the Brontës. Thackeray, with the fear of Mrs. Grundy before his eyes, would have shrunk from recording Mrs. Huntingdon's ultimatum to her husband. The slamming of that bedroom door fairly resounds through the long emptiness of Anne's novel. But that door is the crux of the situation, and if Anne was not a genius she was too much of an artist to sacrifice her crux.
And not only was Anne revolutionary in her handling of moral situations, she was an insurgent in religious thought. Not to believe in the dogma of eternal punishment was, in mid-Victorian times and evangelical circles, to be almost an atheist. When, somewhere in the late 'seventies, Dean Farrar published his Eternal Hope, that book fell like a bomb into the ranks of the orthodox. But long before Dean Farrar's book Anne Brontë had thrown her bomb. There are two pages in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that anticipate and sum up his now innocent arguments. Anne fairly let herself go here. And though in her "Word to the Elect" (who "may rejoice to think themselves secure") she declares that
None shall sink to everlasting woe Who have not well deserved the wrath of Heaven,
she presently relents, and tacks on a poem in a lighter measure, expressing her hope
That soon the wicked shall at last Be fitted for the skies; And when their dreadful doom is past To light and life arise.
It is said (Charlotte said it) that Anne suffered from religious melancholy of a peculiarly dark and Calvinistic type. I very much suspect that Anne's melancholy, like Branwell's passion, was pathological, and that what her soul suffered from was religious doubt. She could not reach that height where Emily moved serenely; she could not see that
Vain are the thousand creeds That move men's hearts: unutterably vain.
There was a time when her tremulous, clinging faith was broken by contact with Emily's contempt for creeds. When Anne was at Haworth she and Emily were inseparable. They tramped the moors together. With their arms round each other's shoulders, they paced up and down the parlour of the Parsonage. They showed the mysterious attraction and affinity of opposites. Anne must have been fascinated, and at the same time appalled, by the radiant, revealing, annihilating sweep of Emily's thought. She was not indifferent to creeds. But you can see her fearful and reluctant youth yielding at last to Emily's thought, until she caught a glimpse of the "repose" beyond the clash of "conquered good and conquering ill". You can see how the doctrine of eternal punishment went by the board; how Anne, who had gone through agonies of orthodox fear on account of Branwell, must have adjusted things somehow, and arrived at peace. Trust in "the merits of the Redeemer" is, after all, trust in the Immensity beyond Redeemer and redeemed. Of this trust she sang in a voice, like her material voice, fragile, but sweet and true. She sang naïvely of the "Captive Dove" that makes unheard its "joyless moan", of "the heart that Nature formed to love", pining, "neglected and alone". She sang of the "Narrow Way", "Be it," she sings, "thy constant aim
"To labour and to love, To pardon and endure, To lift thy heart to God above, And keep thy conscience pure."
She hears the wind in an alien wood and cries for the Parsonage garden, and for the "barren hills":
Where scarce the scattered, stunted trees Can yield an answering swell, But where a wilderness of heath Returns the sound as well.
For yonder garden, fair and wide, With groves of evergreen, Long winding walks, and borders trim And velvet lawns between.
Restore to me that little spot, With grey hills compassed round, Where knotted grass neglected lies, And weeds usurp the ground.
For she, too, loved the moors; and through her love for them she wrote two perfect lines when she called on Memory to
Forever hang thy dreamy spell Round mountain star and heather-bell.
The critics, the theorists, the tale-mongers, have left Anne quiet in that grave on the sea-coast, where she lies apart. Her gentle insignificance served her well.
* * * * *
But no woman who ever wrote was more criticized, more spied upon, more lied about, than Charlotte. It was as if the singular purity and poverty of her legend offered irresistible provocation. The blank page called for the scribbler. The silence that hung about her was dark with challenge; it was felt to be ambiguous, enigmatic. Reserve suggests a reservation, something hidden and kept back from the insatiable public with its "right to know". Mrs. Gaskell with all her indiscretions had not given it enough. The great classic Life of Charlotte Brontë was, after all, incomplete. Until something more was known about her, Charlotte herself was incomplete. It was nothing that Mrs. Gaskell's work was the finest, tenderest portrait of a woman that it was ever given to a woman to achieve; nothing that she was not only recklessly and superbly loyal to Charlotte, but that in her very indiscretions she was, as far as Charlotte was concerned, incorruptibly and profoundly true.
Since Mrs. Gaskell's time, other hands have been at work on Charlotte, improving Mrs. Gaskell's masterpiece. A hundred little touches have been added to it. First, it was supposed to be too tragic, too deliberately and impossibly sombre (that sad book of which Charlotte's friend, Mary Taylor, said that it was "not so gloomy as the truth"). So first came Sir Wemyss Reid, conscientiously working up the high lights till he got the values all wrong. "If the truth must be told," he says, "the life of the author of Jane Eyre was by no means so joyless as the world now believes it to have been." And he sets out to give us the truth. But all that he does to lighten the gloom is to tell a pleasant story of how "one bright June morning in 1833, a handsome carriage and pair is standing opposite the 'Devonshire Arms' at Bolton Bridge". In the handsome carriage is a young girl, Ellen Nussey, waiting for Charlotte Brontë and her brother and sisters to go with her for a picnic to Bolton Abbey.
"Presently," says Sir Wemyss Reid, "on the steep road which stretches across the moors to Keighley, the sound of wheels is heard, mingled with the merry speech and merrier laughter of fresh young voices. Shall we go forward unseen," he asks, "and study the approaching travellers whilst they are still upon the road? Their conveyance is no handsome carriage, but a rickety dog-cart, unmistakably betraying its neighbourship to the carts and ploughs of some rural farmyard. The horse, freshly taken from the fields, is driven by a youth who, in spite of his countrified dress, is no mere bumpkin. His shock of red hair hangs down in somewhat ragged locks behind his ears, for Branwell Brontë esteems himself a genius and a poet, and, following the fashion of the times, has that abhorrence of the barber's shears which genius is supposed to affect. But the lad's face is a handsome and striking one, full of Celtic fire and humour, untouched by the slightest shade of care, hopeful, promising, even brilliant. How gaily he jokes with his three sisters; with what inexhaustible volubility he pours out quotations from his favourite poets, applying them to the lovely scenes around him; and with what a mischievous delight in his superior nerve and mettle, he attempts the feats of charioteering, which fill the heart of the youngest of the party with sudden terrors! Beside him, in a dress of marvellous plainness, and ugliness, stamped with the brand "home-made" in characters which none can mistake, is the eldest of the sisters. Charlotte is talking too; there are bright smiles upon her face; she is enjoying everything around her, the splendid morning, the charms of leafy trees and budding roses, and the ever musical stream; most of all, perhaps, the charm of her brother's society, and the expectation of that coming meeting with her friends, which is so near at hand. Behind sits a pretty little girl, with fine complexion and delicate regular features, whom the stranger would pick out as the beauty of the company, and a tall, rather angular figure, clad in a dress exactly resembling Charlotte's. Emily Brontë does not talk so much as the rest of the party, but her wonderful eyes, brilliant and unfathomable as the pool at the foot of a waterfall, but radiant also with a wealth of tenderness and warmth, show how her soul is expanding under the influences of the scene; how quick she is to note the least prominent of the beauties around her, how intense is her enjoyment of the songs of the birds, the brilliancy of the sunshine, the rich scent of the flower-bespangled hedgerows. If she does not, like Charlotte and Anne, meet her brother's ceaseless flood of sparkling words with opposing currents of speech, she utters a strange, deep guttural sound which those who know her best interpret as the language of a joy too deep for articulate expression. Gaze at them as they pass you in the quiet road, and acknowledge that, in spite of their rough and even uncouth exteriors, a happier four could hardly be met with in this favourite haunt of pleasure-seekers during a long summer's day."
And you do gaze at them and are sadder, if anything, than you were before. You see them, if anything, more poignantly. You see their cheerful biographer doing all he knows, and the light he shoots across the blackness only makes it blacker.
Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi di tempo felice Nella miseria;
and in the end the biographer with all his cheerfulness succumbs to the tradition of misery, and even adds a dark contribution of his own, the suggestion of an unhappy love-affair of Charlotte's.
After Sir Wemyss Reid came Mr. Francis Grundy with his little pictures, Pictures of the Past, presenting a dreadfully unattractive Charlotte.
Then came Mr. Leyland, following Mr. Grundy, with his glorification of Branwell and his hint that Charlotte made it very hard at home for the poor boy. He repeats the story that Branwell told Mr. George Searle Phillips, how he went to see a dying girl in the village, and sat with her half an hour, and read a psalm to her and a hymn, and how he felt like praying with her too, but he was not "good enough", how he came away with a heavy heart and fell into melancholy musings. "Charlotte observed my depression," Branwell said, "and asked what ailed me. So I told her. She looked at me with a look which I shall never forget if I live to be a hundred years old—which I never shall. It was not like her at all. It wounded me as if someone had struck me a blow in the mouth. It involved ever so many things in it. It ran over me, questioning and examining, as if I had been a wild beast. It said, 'Did my ears deceive me, or did I hear aright?' And then came the painful, baffled expression, which was worse than all. It said, 'I wonder if that's true?' But, as she left the room, she seemed to accuse herself of having wronged me, and smiled kindly upon me, and said, 'She is my little scholar, and I will go and see her.' I replied not a word. I was too much cut up! When she was gone, I came over here to the 'Black Bull' and made a note of it…."
You see the implication? It was Charlotte who drove him to the "Black Bull". That was Branwell's impression of Charlotte. Just the sort of impression that an opium-eater would have of a beloved sister.
But Branwell's impression was good enough for Madame Duclaux to found her theory on. Her theory is that Charlotte was inferior to Emily in tenderness. It may well be so, and yet Charlotte would remain above most women tender, for Emily's wealth would furnish forth a score of sisters. The simple truth is that Charlotte had nerves, and Branwell was extremely trying. And it is possible that Emily had less to bear, that in her detachment she was protected more than Charlotte from Branwell at his worst.
Meanwhile tales were abroad presenting Charlotte in the queerest lights. There is that immortal story of how Thackeray gave a party for Currer Bell at his house in Young Street, and how Currer Bell had a headache and lay on a sofa in the back drawing-room, and refused to talk to anybody but the governess; and how Thackeray at last, very late, with a finger on his lip, stole out of the house and took refuge in his club. No wonder if this quaint and curious Charlotte survived in the memory of Thackeray's daughter. But, even apart from the headache, you can see how it came about, how the sight of the governess evoked Charlotte Brontë's unforgotten agony. She saw in the amazed and cheerful lady her own sad youth, slighted and oppressed, solitary in a scene of gaiety—she could not have seen her otherwise—and her warm heart rushed out to her. She was determined that that governess should have a happy evening if nobody else had. Her behaviour was odd, if you like, it was even absurd, but it had the sublimity of vicarious expiation. Has anyone ever considered its significance, the magnitude of her deed? For Charlotte, to be the guest of honour on that brilliant night, in the house of Thackeray, her divinity, was to touch the topmost height of fame. And she turned her back on the brilliance and the fame and the face of her divinity, and offered herself up in flames as a sacrifice for all the governesses that were and had ever been and would be.
And after the fine stories came the little legends—things about Charlotte when she was a governess herself at Mrs. Sidgwick's, and the tittle-tattle of the parish. One of the three curates whom Charlotte made so shockingly immortal avenged himself for his immortality by stating that the trouble with Charlotte was that she would fight for mastery in the parish. Who can believe him? If there is one thing that seems more certain than another it is Charlotte's utter indifference to parochial matters. But Charlotte was just, and she may have objected to the young man's way with the Dissenters; we know that she did very strongly object to Mr. William Weightman's way. And that, I imagine, was the trouble between Charlotte and the curates.
As for the Sidgwicks, Charlotte's biographers have been rather hard on them. Mr. Leslie Stephen calls them "coarse employers". They were certainly not subtle enough to divine the hidden genius in their sad little governess. It was, I imagine, Charlotte's alien, enigmatic face that provoked a little Sidgwick to throw a Bible at her. She said Mrs. Sidgwick did not know her, and did not "intend to know her". She might have added that if she had intended Mrs. Sidgwick could not possibly have known her. And when the Sidgwicks said (as they did say to their cousin, Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson) that if Miss Brontë "was invited to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about like a slave; if she was not invited she imagined she was being excluded from the family circle", that was simply their robust view of the paralysed attitude of a shy girl among strangers, in an agony of fear lest she should cut in where she was not wanted.
And allowances must be made for Mrs. Sidgwick. She was, no doubt, considerably annoyed at finding that she had engaged a thoroughly incompetent and apparently thoroughly morbid young person who had offered herself as a nursery-governess and didn't know how to keep order in the nursery. Naturally there was trouble at Stonegappe. Then one fine day Mrs. Sidgwick discovered that there was, after all, a use for that incomprehensible and incompetent Miss Brontë. Miss Brontë had a gift. She could sew. She could sew beautifully. Her stitching, if you would believe it, was a dream. And Mrs. Sidgwick saw that Miss Brontë's one talent was not lodged in her useless. So Charlotte sat alone all evening in the schoolroom at Stonegappe, a small figure hidden in pure white, billowy seas of muslin, and lamented thus: "She cares nothing in the world about me except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity of labour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end she overwhelms me with oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin night-caps to make, and above all things, dolls to dress." And Mrs. Sidgwick complained that Charlotte did not love the children, and forgot how little she liked it when the children loved Charlotte, and was unaware, poor lady, that it was recorded of her, and would be recorded to all time, that she had said, "Love the governess, my dear!" when her little impulsive boy put his hand in Charlotte's at the dinner-table, and cried "I love 'ou, Miss Brontë." It was the same little, impulsive boy who threw the Bible at Charlotte, and also threw a stone which hit her.
No wonder that Miss Brontë's one and only "pleasant afternoon" was when Mr. Sidgwick went out walking in his fields with his children and his Newfoundland dog, and Charlotte (by order) followed and observed him from behind.