Part 10

called brutal. Low fever broke out at the school, from which about forty of the pupils suffered, but the Brontës did not take the disease. It was evident that Maria was destined for another fate, that of consumption. She was removed from the school only a few days before her death, and Elizabeth followed her to the grave about six weeks later, in June 1825. Even after this Mr. Brontë’s eyes were not opened to the danger his children were in by their treatment at Cowan Bridge, and Charlotte and Emily were still allowed to remain at the school. It soon, however, became evident that they would not be long in following Maria and Elizabeth unless they were removed; and they returned home before the rigours of another winter set in. All the physical and mental tortures she endured at Cowan Bridge, Charlotte afterwards described in the account she gives of “Lowood” in _Jane Eyre_. It is not to be taken that the account of “Lowood” is as strictly an accurate description of Cowan Bridge as Charlotte Brontë would have given if she had been simply writing a history of the school. The facts are, perhaps, magnified by the lurid glow of passion and grief with which she recalled her sisters’ sufferings. She was only between nine and ten when she left Cowan Bridge, and in the account she wrote of it twenty years later we see rather the impression that was left on her imagination than a strictly accurate history; but there is no doubt that in her account of Maria Brontë’s angelic patience, and the cruel persecution to which she was subjected by one of the teachers, the Lowood of _Jane Eyre_ is a perfectly faithful transcript of what took place at Cowan Bridge. Mrs. Gaskell says, “Not a word of that part of _Jane Eyre_ but is a literal repetition of scenes between the pupil and the teacher. Those who had been pupils at the same time knew who must have written the book from the force with which Helen Burns’s sufferings are described.”

After the death of Maria and Elizabeth, the next great sorrow of the Brontë family arose from the career of the only son, Patrick Branwell. He was a handsome boy of exceptional mental powers. He had in particular the gift of brilliant conversation, and there was hardly anything he attempted in the way of talking, writing, or drawing which he did not do well. In one of Charlotte’s letters she says, “You ask me if I do not think that men are strange beings? I do, indeed. I have often thought so; and I think, too, that the mode of bringing them up is strange; they are not sufficiently guarded from temptation. Girls are protected as if they were something very frail and silly indeed, while boys are turned loose on the world, as if they of all beings in existence were the wisest and least liable to be led astray.” Poor Branwell, with his brilliant social qualities, was not sufficiently guarded from temptation. The easiest outlet from the narrow walls of Haworth parsonage was to be found at the little inn of Haworth village. The habit of the place was, when any stranger arrived at the inn, for the host to send for the brilliant boy from the parsonage to amuse the guest. The result will easily be guessed. The guiding principle of Charlotte’s character was her inexorable fidelity to duty; her whole nature turned with irresistible force to what was right rather than to what was pleasant. With Branwell the reverse was the case. Conventional propriety of course strictly guarded Charlotte from the possible dangers of associating with casual strangers at the village inn, although her strong resolute character would not have run a tenth part of the risk of contamination as did that of the weak, pleasure-seeking Branwell. It is needless to dwell on the details of his gradual degradation; the high ideals and hopes of his youth were given up; his character became at once coarse and weak. He was entirely incapable of self-government and of retaining any kind of respectable employment. His intemperance and other vices made the daily life of his sisters at the parsonage a nightmare of horrors. For eight years the young man, whose boyhood his family had watched with so much hope and pride, was a source of shame and anguish to them, all the more keenly felt because it could not be openly avowed. Many who knew the family affirmed that so far as purely intellectual qualities were concerned Branwell was even more eminently distinguished than his sisters; but mere intellect, without moral power to guide it, is as dangerous as a spirited horse without bit or bridle. Branwell was singularly deficient in that moral power in which his sisters were so strong, and his education did nothing to supply this natural deficiency. He died in 1848, at the age of thirty.

Cowan Bridge was not the only experience Charlotte and Emily had of school life. They went for a time to another school at Roe Head, where Charlotte was very happy, and in 1835 she returned to the same school as a teacher. In 1842 Charlotte and Emily went to a school in Brussels, where the former stayed two years, the latter only one. All that Charlotte saw and all the friends she made were afterwards portrayed in her stories. One of her most intimate friends became the Caroline Helstone of _Shirley_; the originals of Rose and Jessie Yorke were also among her schoolfellows at Roe Head. There can be little doubt that M. Paul Emanuel of Villette was M. Héger of the Brussels school. Every trivial circumstance of an unusually uneventful life became food for her imagination.

The development of Emily’s genius was different. Her love of the moors around Haworth was so intense that it was impossible for her to thrive when she was away from them. It became a fact recognised by all the family that Emily must not be taken away from home. The solitude of the wild, dark moors, and the communing with her own heart, together with the dark tragedy of Branwell’s wasted life, were the sole sources of Emily’s inspiration. Her poems have a wild, untameable quality in them, and her one romance, _Wuthering Heights_, places her in the first rank among the great imaginative writers of English fiction. There is something terrible in Emily’s sternness of character, which she never vented pitilessly on any one but herself. She was deeply reserved, and hardly ever, even to her sisters, spoke of what she felt most intensely. A friend who furnished Mrs. Gaskell with some particulars for her biography, states that on one occasion she mentioned “that some one had asked me what religion I was of (with the view of getting me for a

## partisan), and that I had said that was between God and me. Emily, who

was lying on the hearth-rug, exclaimed, ‘That’s right.’ This was all,” adds the friend, “I ever heard Emily say on religious subjects.” Emily’s love for animals was intense; she was especially devoted to a savage old bull-dog named Keeper, who owned no master but herself. The incident in _Shirley_ of the heroine being bitten by a mad dog, and straightway burning the wound herself with a red-hot Italian iron, was true of Emily. Her last illness was a time of terrible agony to Charlotte and Anne, not merely because they saw that she who, Charlotte said, was the thing that seemed nearest to her heart in the world was going to be taken from them, but because Emily’s resistance to the inroads of illness was so terrible. She resolutely refused to see a doctor, and she would allow no nursing and no tender helpfulness of any kind. It was evident to her agonised sisters that she was dying, but she maintained her savage reserve, suffering in solitary silence rather than admit her pain and weakness. On the very day of her death she rose as usual, dressed herself, and attempted to carry on her usual employments, and all this with the catching, rattling breath and the glazing eye which told that the hand of Death was actually upon her. Charlotte wrote in this agonising hour, “Moments so dark as these I have never known. I pray for God’s support to us all. Hitherto He has granted it.” At noon on that day, when it was too late, Emily whispered in gasps, “If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now.” A few days later Charlotte wrote, “We are very calm at present. Why should we be otherwise? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone by; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel them.” The terrible anguish of those last days haunted the surviving sisters like a vision of doom. Nearly six months later Charlotte wrote again that nothing but hope in the life to come had kept her heart from breaking. “I cannot forget,” she says, “Emily’s death-day; it becomes a more fixed, a darker, a more frequently recurring idea in my mind than ever. It was very terrible. She was torn, conscious, panting, reluctant, though resolute, out of a happy life.” Within a very short time the gentle youngest sister Anne also died, and Charlotte was left with her father, the last survivor of the family of six wonderful children who had come to Haworth twenty-nine years before.

In earlier and happier days the habit of the sisters had been, when their aunt went to bed at nine o’clock, to put out the candles and pace up and down the room discussing the plots of their novels, and making plans and projects for their future life. Now Charlotte was left to pace the room alone, with all that had been dearest to her in the world under the church pavement at Haworth and in the old churchyard at Scarborough. But Charlotte was not one to give way to self-indulgent idleness, even in the hour of darkest despair. She was writing _Shirley_ at the time of Anne’s last illness. After the death of this beloved and only remaining sister, she resumed her task; but those who knew what her private history at the time was, can trace in the pages of the novel what she had gone through. The first chapter she wrote after the death of Anne is called, “The Valley of the Shadow of Death.”

The first venture in authorship of the sisters was a volume of poems, to which they each contributed. They imagined, probably with justice, that the world was at that time prejudiced against literary women. Therefore they were careful to conceal, even from their publishers, their real identity. The poems were published as the writings of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

_Jane Eyre_ was the first of Charlotte’s stories which was published, but _The Professor_ was the first that was written with a view to publication. The sisters each wrote a story—Charlotte, _The Professor_; Emily, _Wuthering Heights_; and Anne, _Agnes Grey_, and sent them to various publishers. Charlotte was the only one of the three sisters whose manuscript was returned on her hands. But she was not discouraged by the disappointment. Just at this time Mr. Brontë, who had been suffering from cataract, was persuaded by his daughters to go to Manchester for an operation. Charlotte accompanied him, and it was while she was waiting on him, in the long suspense after the operation had been performed, that she began _Jane Eyre_, the book that made her, and ultimately the name of Brontë, famous. Nothing is more striking in Charlotte’s personal history than the way in which she reproduced the events and personages of her own circle into her novels. Probably the belief that she was writing anonymously encouraged her in this. Her father’s threatened blindness and her own fear of a similar calamity are reflected, as it were, in the blindness of Rochester in _Jane Eyre_. The success of _Jane Eyre_ was rapid and complete, and there was much dispute whether its author were a man or a woman. The _Quarterly Review_ distinguished itself by the remark that if the author were a woman it was evident “she must be one who for some sufficient reason has long forfeited the society of her sex.” Sensitive as Charlotte Brontë was, the coarseness of the insult could not wound her; it could at the utmost be regarded as nothing worse than a trivial annoyance; for when the words reached Charlotte, the grave had not long closed over Branwell’s wasted life; Emily was just dead, and it was evident that Anne was dying. The greatness of her grief and the anguish of her loneliness dwarfed to their proper proportions the petty insults that at another time would have caused her acute pain. On the whole she had nothing to complain of in the way her book was received; she suffered no lack of generous appreciation from the real leaders of the literary world. Thackeray and G. H. Lewes, Miss Martineau, and Sidney Dobell were warm in their praise of her work. Charlotte’s manner of making her literary fame known to her father was characteristic. The secret of their authorship had been very strictly kept by the sisters; but when the success of _Jane Eyre_ was assured, Emily and Anne urged Charlotte that their father ought to be allowed to share the pleasure of knowing that she was the writer of the book. Accordingly one afternoon Charlotte entered her father’s study and said, “Papa, I’ve been writing a book.” When Mr. Brontë found that the book was not only written, but printed and published, he exclaimed, “My dear, you’ve never thought of the expense it will be! It will be almost sure to be a loss, for how can you get a book sold? No one knows you or your name.”

“But, papa, I don’t think it will be a loss; no more will you, if you will just let me read you a review or two, and tell you more about it.” At tea that evening Mr. Brontë exclaimed to his other daughters, “Girls, do you know that Charlotte has been writing a book, and it is much better than likely?”

The pacing up and down of the sisters in the firelight, discussing the plots of their novels, has been already mentioned. Mrs. Gaskell records that Charlotte told her that these discussions seldom had any effect in causing her to change the events in her stories, “so possessed was she with the feeling that she had described reality.” This confirms what Mr. Swinburne has said of her strongest characteristic as an author, that she has the power of making the reader feel in every nerve that thus and not otherwise it must have been. It must not, however, be thought that the conversations with her sisters were therefore useless; no doubt they were very stimulating to her imagination, and gave her creations more solid reality than they would otherwise have had.

In 1854 Charlotte Brontë married Mr. Nicholls, an Irish gentleman, who had for eight years been her father’s curate. She only lived nine months after her marriage. She was happy in her husband’s love, and appreciated his devotion to his parish duties. But the loving admirers of Charlotte Brontë can never feel much enthusiasm for Mr. Nicholls. Mrs. Gaskell states that he was not attracted by her literary fame, but was rather repelled by it; he appears to have used her up remorselessly, in their short married life, in the routine drudgery of parish work. She did not complain; on the contrary, she seemed more than contented to sacrifice everything for him and his work; but she remarks in one of her letters, “I have less time for thinking.” Apparently she had none for writing. Surely the husband of a Charlotte Brontë, just as much as the wife of a Wordsworth or a Tennyson, ought to be attracted by literary fame. To be the life partner of one to whom the most precious of Nature’s gifts is confided, and to be unappreciative of it and even repelled by it, shows a littleness of nature and essential meanness of soul. A true wife or husband of one of these gifted beings should rather regard herself or himself as responsible to the world for making the conditions of the daily life of their distinguished partners favourable to the development of their genius. But pearls have before now been cast before swine, and one cannot but regret that Charlotte Brontë was married to a man who did not value her place in literature as he ought.

XII

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

SYDNEY SMITH, writing in 1810 upon the extraordinary folly of closing to women all the ordinary means of literary education, remarked that one consequence of their exclusion was that no woman had contributed anything of lasting value to English, French, or Italian literature, and that scarcely a single woman had crept into the ranks even of the minor poets. While he was writing this, a little baby girl was beginning to prattle, who within a very short time was destined to win a place among the great poets of this century. The very great gifts of Elizabeth Barrett were discernible from her earliest childhood. Her father was Mr. Edward Moulton, of Burn Hall, Durham. The date and place of her birth are disputed. Mrs. Richmond Ritchie states in the _National Dictionary of Biography_ that the future poetess was born at Burn Hall, Durham, in 1809; Mr. J. H. Ingram says in his _Life of Mrs. Browning_ in the Eminent Women Series that she was born in London in 1809; while Mr. Browning has written to the papers to say that she was born at Carlton Hall, Durham, in 1806. Three birthplaces and two birthdays are thus assigned to her. It is not, however, disputed that she was christened by the names of Elizabeth Barrett, and that her father afterwards exchanged the name of Moulton for that of Barrett on inheriting some property from a relative. At eight years old little Elizabeth could read Homer in the original Greek, and was often to be seen with the _Iliad_ in one hand and a doll in the other; this picture of her gives a beautiful type of her future character, its depth of loving womanliness, combined with the height of poetic inspiration and learning. She was certainly one of the women of whom her brother poet, Tennyson, sings, who “gain in mental breadth nor fail in childward care.” She says herself of her childhood that “she dreamed more of Agamemnon than of Moses her black pony.” At about eleven years old she wrote an epic poem in four books on _The Battle of Marathon_, which her father caused to be printed. Her home, during most of her childhood, was at Hope End, near Ledbury, in Herefordshire. Many pictures of her happy childhood among the beautiful hills and orchards of the West country are to be found in the poems, especially in “Hector in the Garden” and in her “Lost Bower.” Much of her young life, too, is described in the earlier part of her greatest work, _Aurora Leigh_. We do not hear much about the mother of the poetess, but her grandmother, it is said, looked with much disfavour on the little lady’s learning, and said she would “rather hear that Elizabeth’s hemming were more carefully finished than of all this Greek.” Her father, however, was a worthy guardian of the wonderful child that had been entrusted to him; he fostered and encouraged her genius by all means in his power. He must have had a singular power of self-devotion and self-sacrifice; and it is probable that much of his daughter’s beautiful moral nature was inherited from him. When Elizabeth was about twenty, her mother lay in her last illness, and simultaneously money troubles, brought on by no fault of his own, fell upon Mr. Barrett. He would allow no knowledge of this to disturb his wife during her illness; and in order effectually to hide the truth from her, he made an arrangement with his creditors which very materially reduced his income for life, so that no reduction of his establishment should take place as long as his wife lived.