Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle Part 2

'BROOKROYD, _October_ 22_nd_, 1856.

'MY DEAR MRS. GASKELL,--If you go to London pray try what may be done with regard to a portrait of dear Charlotte. It would greatly enhance the value and interest of the memoir, and be such a satisfaction to people to see something that would settle their ideas of the personal appearance of the dear departed one. It has been a surprise to every stranger, I think, that she was so gentle and lady-like to look upon.

'Emily Bronte went to Roe Head as pupil when Charlotte went as teacher; she stayed there but two months; she never settled, and was ill from nothing but home-sickness. Anne took her place and remained about two years. Emily was a teacher for one six months in a ladies'

school in Halifax or the neighbourhood. I do not know whether it was conduct or want of finances that prevented Branwell from going to the Royal Academy. Probably there were impediments of both kinds.

'I am afraid if you give me my name I shall feel a prominence in the book that I altogether shrink from. My very last wish would be to appear in the book more than is absolutely necessary. If it were possible, I would choose not to be known at all. It is my friend only that I care to see and recognise, though your framing and setting of the picture will very greatly enhance its value.--I am, my dear Mrs. Gaskell, yours very sincerely,

'ELLEN NUSSEY.'

The book was published in two volumes, under the t.i.tle of _The Life of Charlotte Bronte_, in the spring of 1857. At first all was well. Mr.

Bronte's earliest acknowledgment of the book was one of approbation. Sir James Shuttleworth expressed the hope that Mr. Nicholls would 'rejoice that his wife would be known as a Christian heroine who could bear her cross with the firmness of a martyr saint.' Canon Kingsley wrote a charming letter to Mrs. Gaskell, published in his _Life_, and more than once reprinted since.

'Let me renew our long interrupted acquaintance,' he writes from St.

Leonards, under date May 14th, 1857, 'by complimenting you on poor Miss Bronte's _Life_. You have had a delicate and a great work to do, and you have done it admirably. Be sure that the book will do good. It will shame literary people into some stronger belief that a simple, virtuous, practical home life is consistent with high imaginative genius; and it will shame, too, the prudery of a not over cleanly though carefully white-washed age, into believing that purity is now (as in all ages till now) quite compatible with the knowledge of evil. I confess that the book has made me ashamed of myself.

_Jane Eyre_ I hardly looked into, very seldom reading a work of fiction--yours, indeed, and Thackeray's, are the only ones I care to open. _Shirley_ disgusted me at the opening, and I gave up the writer and her books with a notion that she was a person who liked coa.r.s.eness. How I misjudged her! and how thankful I am that I never put a word of my misconceptions into print, or recorded my misjudgments of one who is a whole heaven above me.

'Well have you done your work, and given us the picture of a valiant woman made perfect by suffering. I shall now read carefully and lovingly every word she has written, especially those poems, which ought not to have fallen dead as they did, and which seem to be (from a review in the current _Fraser_) of remarkable strength and purity.'

It was a short-lived triumph, however, and Mrs. Gaskell soon found herself, as she expressed it, 'in a veritable hornet's nest.' Mr.

Bronte, to begin with, did not care for the references to himself and the suggestion that he had treated his wife unkindly. Mrs. Gaskell had a.s.sociated him with numerous eccentricities and ebullitions of temper, which during his later years he always a.s.serted, and undoubtedly with perfect truth, were, at the best, the fabrications of a dismissed servant. Mr. Nicholls had also his grievance. There was just a suspicion implied that he had not been quite the most sympathetic of husbands. The suspicion was absolutely ill-founded, and arose from Mr.

Nicholls's intense shyness. But neither Mr. Bronte nor Mr. Nicholls gave Mrs. Gaskell much trouble. They, at any rate, were silent. Trouble, however, came from many quarters. Yorkshire people resented the air of patronage with which, as it seemed to them, a good Lancashire lady had taken their county in hand. They were not quite the backward savages, they retorted, which some of Mrs. Gaskell's descriptions in the beginning of her book would seem to suggest. Between Lancashire and Yorkshire there is always a suspicion of jealousy. It was intensified for the moment by these sombre pictures of 'this lawless, yet not unkindly population.' {17} A son-in-law of Mr. Redhead wrote to deny the account of that clergyman's a.s.sociation with Haworth. 'He gives another as true, in which I don't see any great difference.' Miss Martineau wrote sheet after sheet explanatory of her relations with Charlotte Bronte. 'Two separate householders in London _each_ declares that the first interview between Miss Bronte and Miss Martineau took place at _her_ house.' In one pa.s.sage Mrs. Gaskell had spoken of wasteful young servants, and the young servants in question came upon Mr. Bronte for the following testimonial:--

'HAWORTH, _August_ 17_th_, 1857.

'I beg leave to state to all whom it may concern, that Nancy and Sarah Garrs, during the time they were in my service, were kind to my children, and honest, and not wasteful, but sufficiently careful in regard to food, and all other articles committed to their charge.

P. BRONTE, A.B., '_Inc.u.mbent of Haworth_, _Yorkshire_.'

Three whole pages were devoted to the dramatic recital of a scandal at Haworth, and this entirely disappears from the third edition. A casual reference to a girl who had been seduced, and had found a friend in Miss Bronte, gave further trouble. 'I have altered the word "seduced" to "betrayed,"' writes Mrs. Gaskell to Martha Brown, 'and I hope that this will satisfy the unhappy girl's friends.' But all these were small matters compared with the Cowan Bridge controversy and the threatened legal proceedings over Branwell Bronte's suggested love affairs. Mrs.

Gaskell defended the description in _Jane Eyre_ of Cowan Bridge with peculiar vigour. Mr. Carus Wilson, the Brocklehurst of _Jane Eyre_, and his friends were furious. They threatened an action. There were letters in the _Times_ and letters in the _Daily News_. Mr. Nicholls broke silence--the only time in the forty years that he has done so--with two admirable letters to the _Halifax Guardian_. The Cowan Bridge controversy was a drawn battle, in spite of numerous and glowing testimonials to the virtues of Mr. Carus Wilson. Most people who know anything of the average private schools of half a century ago are satisfied that Charlotte Bronte's description was substantially correct.

'I want to show you many letters,' writes Mrs. Gaskell, 'most of them praising the character of our dear friend as she deserves, and from people whose opinion she would have cared for, such as the Duke of Argyll, Kingsley, Greig, etc. Many abusing me. I should think seven or eight of this kind from the Carus Wilson clique.'

The Branwell matter was more serious. Here Mrs. Gaskell had, indeed, shown a singular recklessness. The lady referred to by Branwell was Mrs.

Robinson, the wife of the Rev. Edmund Robinson of Thorp Green, and afterwards Lady Scott. Anne Bronte was governess in her family for two years, and Branwell tutor to the son for a few months. Branwell, under the influence of opium, made certain statements about his relations with Mrs. Robinson which have been effectually disproved, although they were implicitly believed by the Bronte girls, who, womanlike, were naturally ready to regard a woman as the ruin of a beloved brother. The recklessness of Mrs. Gaskell in accepting such inadequate testimony can be explained only on the a.s.sumption that she had a novelist's satisfaction in the romance which the 'bad woman' theory supplied. She wasted a considerable amount of rhetoric upon it. 'When the fatal attack came on,' she says, 'his pockets were found filled with old letters from the woman to whom he was attached. He died! she lives still--in May Fair. I see her name in county papers, as one of those who patronise the Christmas b.a.l.l.s; and I hear of her in London drawing-rooms'--and so on.

There were no love-letters found in Branwell Bronte's pockets. {19} When Mrs. Gaskell's husband came post-haste to Haworth to ask for proofs of Mrs. Robinson's complicity in Branwell's downfall, none were obtainable.

I am a.s.sured by Mr. Leslie Stephen that his father, Sir James Stephen, was employed at the time to make careful inquiry, and that he and other eminent lawyers came to the conclusion that it was one long tissue of lies or hallucinations. The subject is sufficiently sordid, and indeed almost redundant in any biography of the Brontes; but it is of moment, because Charlotte Bronte and her sisters were so thoroughly persuaded that a woman was at the bottom of their brother's ruin; and this belief Charlotte impressed upon all the friends who were nearest and dearest to her. Her letters at the time of her brother's death are full of censure of the supposed wickedness of another. It was a cruel infamy that the word of this wretched boy should have been so powerful for mischief.

Here, at any rate, Mrs. Gaskell did not show the caution which a masculine biographer, less p.r.o.ne to take literally a man's accounts of his amours, would undoubtedly have displayed.

Yet, when all is said, Mrs. Gaskell had done her work thoroughly and well. Lockhart's _Scott_ and Froude's _Carlyle_ are examples of great biographies which called for abundant censure upon their publication; yet both these books will live as cla.s.sics of their kind. To be interesting, it is perhaps indispensable that the biographer should be indiscreet, and certainly the Branwell incident--a matter of two or three pages--is the only part of Mrs. Gaskell's biography in which indiscretion becomes indefensible. And for this she suffered cruelly. 'I did so try to tell the truth,' she said to a friend, 'and I believe _now_ I hit as near to the truth as any one could do.' 'I weighed every line with my whole power and heart,' she said on another occasion, 'so that every line should go to its great purpose of making _her_ known and valued, as one who had gone through such a terrible life with a brave and faithful heart.' And that clearly Mrs. Gaskell succeeded in doing. It is quite certain that Charlotte Bronte would not stand on so splendid a pedestal to-day but for the single-minded devotion of her accomplished biographer.

It has sometimes been implied that the portrait drawn by Mrs. Gaskell was far too sombre, that there are pa.s.sages in Charlotte's letters which show that ofttimes her heart was merry and her life sufficiently cheerful.

That there were long periods of gaiety for all the three sisters, surely no one ever doubted. To few people, fortunately, is it given to have lives wholly without happiness. And yet, when this is acknowledged, how can one say that the picture was too gloomy? Taken as a whole, the life of Charlotte Bronte was among the saddest in literature. At a miserable school, where she herself was unhappy, she saw her two elder sisters stricken down and carried home to die. In her home was the narrowest poverty. She had, in the years when that was most essential, no mother's care; and perhaps there was a somewhat too rigid disciplinarian in the aunt who took the mother's place. Her second school brought her, indeed, two kind friends; but her shyness made that school-life in itself a prolonged tragedy. Of the two experiences as a private governess I shall have more to say. They were periods of torture to her sensitive nature.

The ambition of the three girls to start a school on their own account failed ignominiously. The suppressed vitality of childhood and early womanhood made Charlotte unable to enter with sympathy and toleration into the life of a foreign city, and Brussels was for her a further disaster. Then within two years, just as literary fame was bringing its consolation for the trials of the past, she saw her two beloved sisters taken from her. And, finally, when at last a good man won her love, there were left to her only nine months of happy married life. 'I am not going to die. We have been so happy.' These words to her husband on her death-bed are not the least piteously sad in her tragic story. That her life was a tragedy, was the opinion of the woman friend with whom on the intellectual side she had most in common. Miss Mary Taylor wrote to Mrs.

Gaskell the following letter from New Zealand upon receipt of the _Life_:--

'WELLINGTON, 30_th_ _July_ 1857.

'MY DEAR MRS. GASKELL,--I am unaccountably in receipt by post of two vols. containing the Life of C. Bronte. I have pleasure in attributing this compliment to you; I beg, therefore, to thank you for them. The book is a perfect success, in giving a true picture of a melancholy life, and you have practically answered my puzzle as to how you would give an account of her, not being at liberty to give a true description of those around. Though not so gloomy as the truth, it is perhaps as much so as people will accept without calling it exaggerated, and feeling the desire to doubt and contradict it. I have seen two reviews of it. One of them sums it up as "a life of poverty and self-suppression," the other has nothing to the purpose at all. Neither of them seems to think it a strange or wrong state of things that a woman of first-rate talents, industry, and integrity should live all her life in a walking nightmare of "poverty and self-suppression." I doubt whether any of them will.

'It must upset most people's notions of beauty to be told that the portrait at the beginning is that of an ugly woman. {22} I do not altogether like the idea of publishing a flattered likeness. I had rather the mouth and eyes had been nearer together, and shown the veritable square face and large disproportionate nose.

'I had the impression that Cartwright's mill was burnt in 1820 not in 1812. You give much too favourable an account of the black-coated and Tory savages that kept the people down, and provoked excesses in those days. Old Robertson said he "would wade to the knees in blood rather than the then state of things should be altered,"--a state including Corn law, Test law, and a host of other oppressions.

'Once more I thank you for the book--the first copy, I believe, that arrived in New Zealand.--Sincerely yours,

'MARY TAYLOR.'

And in another letter, written a little later (28th January 1858), Miss Mary Taylor writes to Miss Ellen Nussey in similar strain:--

'Your account of Mrs. Gaskell's book was very interesting,' she says.

'She seems a hasty, impulsive person, and the needful drawing back after her warmth gives her an inconsistent look. Yet I doubt not her book will be of great use. You must be aware that many strange notions as to the kind of person Charlotte really was will be done away with by a knowledge of the true facts of her life. I have heard imperfectly of farther printing on the subject. As to the mutilated edition that is to come, I am sorry for it. Libellous or not, the first edition was all true, and except the declamation all, in my opinion, useful to be published. Of course I don't know how far necessity may make Mrs. Gaskell give them up. You know one dare not always say the world moves.'

We who do know the whole story in fullest detail will understand that it was desirable to 'mutilate' the book, and that, indeed, truth did in some measure require it. But with these letters of Mary Taylor's before us, let us not hear again that the story of Charlotte Bronte's life was not, in its main features, accurately and adequately told by her gifted biographer.

Why then, I am naturally asked, add one further book to the Bronte biographical literature? The reply is, I hope, sufficient. Forty years have gone by, and they have been years of growing interest in the subject. In the year 1895 ten thousand people visited the Bronte Museum at Haworth. Interesting books have been written, notably Sir Wemyss Reid's _Monograph_ and Mr. Leyland's _Bronte Family_, but they have gone out of print. Many new facts have come to light, and many details, moreover, which were too trivial in 1857 are of sufficient importance to-day; and many facts which were rightly suppressed then may honestly and honourably be given to the public at an interval of nearly half a century. Added to all this, fortune has been kind to me.

Some three or four years ago Miss Ellen Nussey placed in my hands a printed volume of some 400 pages, which bore no publisher's name, but contained upon its t.i.tle-page the statement that it was _The Story of Charlotte Bronte's Life_, _as told through her Letters_. These are the Letters--370 in number--which Miss Nussey had lent to Mrs. Gaskell and to Sir Wemyss Reid. Of these letters Mrs. Gaskell published about 100, and Sir Wemyss Reid added as many more as he considered circ.u.mstances justified twenty years back.

It was explained to me that the volume had been privately printed under a misconception, and that only some dozen copies were extant. Miss Nussey asked me if I would write something around what might remain of the unpublished letters, and if I saw my way to do anything which would add to the public appreciation of the friend who from early childhood until now has been the most absorbing interest of her life. A careful study of the volume made it perfectly clear that there were still some letters which might with advantage be added to the Bronte story. At the same time arose the possibility of a veto being placed upon their publication.

An examination of Charlotte Bronte's will, which was proved at York by her husband in 1855, suggested an easy way out of the difficulty. I made up my mind to try and see Mr. Nicholls. I had heard of his disinclination to be in any way a.s.sociated with the controversy which had gathered round his wife for all these years; but I wrote to him nevertheless, and received a cordial invitation to visit him in his Irish home.

It was exactly forty years to a day after Charlotte died--March 31st, 1895--when I alighted at the station in a quiet little town in the centre of Ireland, to receive the cordial handclasp of the man into whose keeping Charlotte Bronte had given her life. It was one of many visits, and the beginning of an interesting correspondence. Mr. Nicholls placed all the papers in his possession in my hands. They were more varied and more abundant than I could possibly have antic.i.p.ated. They included MSS.

of childhood, of which so much has been said, and stories of adult life, one fragment indeed being later than the _Emma_ which appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_ for 1856, with a note by Thackeray. Here were the letters Charlotte Bronte had written to her brother and to her sisters during her second sojourn in Brussels--to 'Dear Branwell' and 'Dear E.

J.,' as she calls Emily--letters even to handle will give a thrill to the Bronte enthusiast. Here also were the love-letters of Maria Branwell to her lover Patrick Bronte, which are referred to in Mrs. Gaskell's biography, but have never hitherto been printed.

'The four small sc.r.a.ps of Emily and Anne's ma.n.u.script,' writes Mr.

Nicholls, 'I found in the small box I send you; the others I found in the bottom of a cupboard tied up in a newspaper, where they had lain for nearly thirty years, and where, had it not been for your visit, they must have remained during my lifetime, and most likely afterwards have been destroyed.'

Some slight extracts from Bronte letters in _Macmillan's Magazine_, signed 'E. Balmer Williams,' brought me into communication with a gifted daughter of Mr. W. S. Williams. Mrs. Williams and her husband generously placed the whole series of these letters of Charlotte Bronte to their father at my disposal. It was of some of these letters that Mrs. Gaskell wrote in enthusiastic terms when she had read them, and she was only permitted to see a few. Then I have to thank Mr. Joshua Taylor, the nephew of Miss Mary Taylor, for permission to publish his aunt's letters.

Mr. James Taylor, again, who wanted to marry Charlotte Bronte, and who died twenty years afterwards in Bombay, left behind him a bundle of letters which I found in the possession of a relative in the north of London. {25} I discovered through a letter addressed to Miss Nussey that the 'Brussels friend' referred to by Mrs. Gaskell was a Miss Laet.i.tia Wheelwright, and I determined to write to all the Wheelwrights in the London Directory. My first effort succeeded, and _the_ Miss Wheelwright kindly lent me all the letters that she had preserved. It is scarcely possible that time will reveal many more unpublished letters from the author of _Jane Eyre_. Several of those already in print are forgeries, and I have actually seen a letter addressed from Paris, a city which Miss Bronte never visited. I have the a.s.surance of Dr. Heger of Brussels that Miss Bronte's correspondence with his father no longer exists. In any case one may safely send forth this little book with the certainty that it is a fairly complete collection of Charlotte Bronte's correspondence, and that it is altogether a valuable revelation of a singularly interesting personality. Steps will be taken henceforth, it may be added, to vindicate Mr. Nicholls's rights in whatever may still remain of his wife's unpublished correspondence.

CHAPTER I: PATRICK BRONTE AND MARIA HIS WIFE

It would seem quite clear to any careful investigator that the Reverend Patrick Bronte, Inc.u.mbent of Haworth, and the father of three famous daughters, was a much maligned man. We talk of the fierce light which beats upon a throne, but what is that compared to the fierce light which beats upon any man of some measure of individuality who is destined to live out his life in the quiet of a country village--in the very centre, as it were, of 'personal talk' and gossip not always kindly to the stranger within the gate? The view of Mr. Bronte, presented by Mrs.

Gaskell in the early editions of her biography of Charlotte Bronte, is that of a severe, ill-tempered, and distinctly disagreeable character.

It is the picture of a man who disliked the vanities of life so intensely, that the new shoes of his children and the silk dress of his wife were not spared by him in sudden gusts of pa.s.sion. A stern old ruffian, one is inclined to consider him. His pistol-shooting rings picturesquely, but not agreeably, through Mrs. Gaskell's memoirs. It has been already explained in more than one quarter that this was not the real Patrick Bronte, and that much of the unfavourable gossip was due to the chatter of a dismissed servant, retailed to Mrs. Gaskell on one of her missions of inquiry in the neighbourhood. The stories of the burnt shoes and the mutilated dress have been relegated to the realm of myth, and the pistol-shooting may now be acknowledged as a harmless pastime not more iniquitous than the golfing or angling of a latter-day clergyman.

It is certain, were the matter of much interest to-day, that Mr. Bronte was fond of the use of firearms. The present Inc.u.mbent of Haworth will point out to you, on the old tower of Haworth Church, the marks of pistol bullets, which he is a.s.sured were made by Mr. Bronte. I have myself handled both the gun and the pistol--this latter a very ornamental weapon, by the way, manufactured at Bradford--which Mr. Bronte possessed during the later years of his life. From both he had obtained much innocent amus.e.m.e.nt; but his son-in-law, Mr. Nicholls, who, at the distance of forty years still cherishes a reverent and enthusiastic affection for old Mr. Bronte, informs me that the bullet marks upon Haworth Church were the irresponsible frolic of a rather juvenile curate--Mr. Smith. All this is trivial enough in any case, and one turns very readily to more important factors in the life of the father of the Brontes. Patrick Bronte was born at Ahaderg, County Down, in Ireland, on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1777. He was one of the ten children of Hugh Brunty, farmer, and his nine brothers and sisters seem all of them to have spent their lives in their Irish home, to have married and been given in marriage, and to have gone to their graves in peace. Patrick alone had ambition, and, one must add, the opportune friend, without whom ambition counts for little in the great struggle of life. At sixteen he was a kind of village schoolmaster, or a.s.sistant schoolmaster, and at twenty-five, stirred thereto by the vicar of his parish, Mr. Tighe, he was on his way from Ireland to St. John's College, Cambridge. It was in 1802 that Patrick Bronte went to Cambridge, and entered his name in the college books. There, indeed, we find the name, not of Patrick Bronte, but of Patrick Branty, {28} and this brings us to an interesting point as to the origin of the name. In the register of his birth his name is entered, as are the births of his brothers and sisters, as 'Brunty' and 'Bruntee'; and it can scarcely be doubted that, as Dr. Douglas Hyde has pointed out, the original name was O'Prunty. {29} The Irish, at the beginning of the century, were well-nigh as primitive in some matters as were the English of a century earlier; and one is not surprised to see variations in the spelling of the Bronte name--it being in the case of his brothers and sisters occasionally spelt 'Brontee.' To me it is perfectly clear that for the change of name Lord Nelson was responsible, and that the dukedom of Bronte, which was conferred upon the great sailor in 1799, suggested the more ornamental surname. There were no Irish Brontes in existence before Nelson became Duke of Bronte; but all Patrick's brothers and sisters, with whom, it must be remembered, he was on terms of correspondence his whole life long, gradually, with a true Celtic sense of the picturesqueness of the thing, seized upon the more attractive surname. For this theory there is, of course, not one sc.r.a.p of evidence; we only know that the register of Patrick's native parish gives us Brunty, and that his signature through his successive curacies is Bronte.

From Cambridge, after taking orders in 1806, Mr. Bronte moved to a curacy at Weatherfield in Ess.e.x; and Mr. Augustine Birrell has told us, with that singular literary charm of his, how the good-looking Irish curate made successful love to a young parishioner--Miss Mary Burder. Mary Burder would have married him, it seems, but for an obdurate uncle and guardian. She was spirited away from the neighbourhood, and the lovers never met again. There are doubtful points in Mr. Birrell's story. Mary Burder, as the wife of a Nonconformist minister, died in 1866, in her seventy-seventh year. This lady, from whom doubtless either directly or indirectly the tradition was obtained, may have amplified and exaggerated a very innocent flirtation. One would like further evidence for the statement that when Mr. Bronte lost his wife in 1821 he asked his old sweetheart, Mary Burder, to become the mother of his six children, and that she answered 'no'. In any case, Mr. Bronte left Weatherfield in 1809 for a curacy at Dewsbury, and Dewsbury gossip also had much to say concerning the flirtations of its Irish curate. His next curacy, however, which was obtained in 1811, by a removal to Hartshead, near Huddersfield, brought flirtation for Mr. Bronte to a speedy end. In 1812, when thirty-three years of age, he married Miss Maria Branwell, of Penzance. Miss Branwell had only a few months before left her Cornish home for a visit to an uncle in Yorkshire. This uncle was a Mr. John Fennell, a clergyman of the Church of England, who had been a Methodist minister. To Methodism, indeed, the Cornish Branwells would seem to have been devoted at one time or another, for I have seen a copy of the _Imitation_ inscribed 'M. Branwell, July 1807,' with the following t.i.tle-page:--

AN EXTRACT OF THE CHRISTIAN'S PATTERN: OR, A TREATISE ON THE IMITATION OF CHRIST. WRITTEN IN LATIN BY THOMAS A KEMPIS. ABRIDGED AND PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH BY JOHN WESLEY, M.A., LONDON. PRINTED AT THE CONFERENCE OFFICE, NORTH GREEN, FINSBURY SQUARE. G. STORY, AGENT. SOLD BY G. WHITFIELD, CITY ROAD. 1803. PRICE BOUND 1s.

The book was evidently brought by Mrs. Bronte from Penzance, and given by her to her husband or left among her effects. The poor little woman had been in her grave for five or six years when it came into the hands of one of her daughters, as we learn from Charlotte's hand-writing on the fly-leaf:--