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Eminent Women Series

Edited by John H. Ingram

EMILY BRONTE

All Rights Reserved.




EMILY BRONTE

by

A. MARY F. ROBINSON

Second Edition.







London:
W. H. Allen and Co.
13, Waterloo Place
1883.

[All Rights Reserved]

London:
Printed by W. H. Allen and Co., 13 Waterloo Place. S.W.




CONTENTS.

                                                          PAGE

  Introduction                                               1

  CHAPTER I.
    Parentage                                                8

  CHAPTER II.
    Babyhood                                                18

  CHAPTER III.
    Cowan's Bridge                                          28

  CHAPTER IV.
    Childhood                                               40

  CHAPTER V.
    Going to School                                         53

  CHAPTER VI.
    Girlhood at Haworth                                     61

  CHAPTER VII.
    In the Rue d'Isabelle                                   77

  CHAPTER VIII.
    A Retrospect                                            92

  CHAPTER IX.
    The Recall                                             103

  CHAPTER X.
    The Prospectuses                                       111

  CHAPTER XI.
    Branwell's Fall                                        116

  CHAPTER XII.
    Writing Poetry                                         128

  CHAPTER XIII.
    Troubles                                               144

  CHAPTER XIV.
    Wuthering Heights: its Origin                          154

  CHAPTER XV.
    Wuthering Heights: the Story                           168

  CHAPTER XVI.
    'Shirley'                                              209

  CHAPTER XVII.
    Branwell's End                                         217

  CHAPTER XVIII.
    Emily's Death                                          223

  FINIS!                                                   233


       *       *       *       *       *


LIST OF AUTHORITIES.


 1846-56. The Works of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

    1857. Life of Charlotte Bronte. _Mrs. Gaskell. 1st and 2nd Editions._

    1877. Charlotte Bronte. _T. Wemyss Reid._

    1877. Note on Charlotte Bronte. _A. C. Swinburne._

    1881. Three Great Englishwomen. _P. Bayne._
          MS. Lecture on Emily Bronte. _T. Wemyss Reid._
          MS. Notes on Emily and Charlotte Bronte. _Miss Ellen Nussey._
          MS. Letters of Charlotte and Branwell Bronte.

    1879. Reminiscences of the Brontes. _Miss E. Nussey._

    1870. Unpublished Letters of Charlotte, Emily,
            and Anne Bronte. _Hours at Home._

    1846. Emily Bronte's Annotated Copy of her Poems.

    1872. Branwell Bronte: in the "Mirror." _G. S. Phillips._

    1879. Pictures of the Past. _F. H. Grundy._

    1830. Prospectus of the Clergymen's Daughters' School
            at Cowan's Bridge.

    1850. Preface to Wuthering Heights. _Charlotte Bronte._

    1850. Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell. _Charlotte Bronte._

    1850. Wuthering Heights: in the "Palladium." _Sydney Dobell._
          Personal Reminiscences of Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Ratcliffe, Mrs. Brown,
            and Mr. William Wood, of Haworth.

 1811-18. Poems of Patrick Bronte, B.A., Incumbent of Haworth.

    1879. Haworth: Past and Present. _J. Horsfall Turner._

       *       *       *       *       *




EMILY BRONTE.




INTRODUCTION.


There are, perhaps, few tests of excellence so sure as the popular
verdict on a work of art a hundred years after its accomplishment. So
much time must be allowed for the swing and rebound of taste, for the
despoiling of tawdry splendours and to permit the work of art itself to
form a public capable of appreciating it. Such marvellous fragments
reach us of Elizabethan praises; and we cannot help recalling the number
of copies of 'Prometheus Unbound' sold in the lifetime of the poet. We
know too well "what porridge had John Keats," and remember with
misgiving the turtle to which we treated Hobbs and Nobbs at dinner, and
how complacently we watched them put on their laurels afterwards.

Let us, then, by all means distrust our own and the public estimation of
all heroes dead within a hundred years. Let us, in laying claim to an
infallible verdict, remember how oddly our decisions sound at the other
side of Time's whispering gallery. Shall we therefore pronounce only on
Chaucer and Shakespeare, on Gower and our learned Ben? Alas! we are too
sure of their relative merits; we stake our reputations with no qualms,
no battle-ardours. These we reserve to them for whom the future is not
yet secure, for whom a timely word may still be spoken, for whom we yet
may feel that lancing out of enthusiasm only possible when the cast of
fate is still unknown, and, as we fight, we fancy that the glory of our
hero is in our hands.

But very gradually the victory is gained. A taste is unconsciously
formed for the qualities necessary to the next development of
art--qualities which Blake in his garret, Millet without the sou, set
down in immortal work. At last, when the time is ripe, some connoisseur
sees the picture, blows the dust from the book, and straightway blazons
his discovery. Mr. Swinburne, so to speak, blew the dust from 'Wuthering
Heights'; and now it keeps its proper rank in the shelf where Coleridge
and Webster, Hofmann and Leopardi have their place. Until then, a few
brave lines of welcome from Sydney Dobell, one fine verse of Mr.
Arnold's, one notice from Mr. Reid, was all the praise that had been
given to the book by those in authority. Here and there a mill-girl in
the West Riding factories read and re-read the tattered copy from the
lending library; here and there some eager, unsatisfied, passionate
child came upon the book and loved it, in spite of chiding, finding in
it an imagination that satisfied, and a storm that cleared the air; or
some strong-fibred heart felt without a shudder the justice of that
stern vision of inevitable, inherited ruin following the chance-found
child of foreign sailor and seaport mother. But these readers were not
many; even yet the book is not popular.

For, in truth, the qualities that distinguish Emily Bronte are not those
which are of the first necessity to a novelist. She is without
experience; her range of character is narrow and local; she has no
atmosphere of broad humanity like George Eliot; she has not Jane
Austen's happy gift of making us love in a book what we have overlooked
in life; we do not recognise in her the human truth and passion, the
never-failing serene bitterness of humour, that have made for Charlotte
Bronte a place between Cervantes and Victor Hugo.

Emily Bronte is of a different class. Her imagination is narrower, but
more intense; she sees less, but what she sees is absolutely present: no
writer has described the moors, the wind, the skies, with her passionate
fidelity, but this is all of Nature that she describes. Her narrow
fervid nature accounted as simple annoyance the trivial scenes and
personages touched with immortal sympathy and humour in 'Villette' and
'Shirley'; Paul Emanuel himself appeared to her only as a pedantic and
exacting taskmaster; but, on the other hand, to a certain class of mind,
there is nothing in fiction so moving as the spectacle of Heathcliff
dying of joy--an unnatural, unreal joy--his panther nature paralysed,
_aneanti_, in a delirium of visionary bliss.

Only an imagination of the rarest power could conceive such a
denouement, requiting a life of black ingratitude by no mere common
horrors, no vulgar Bedlam frenzy; but by the torturing apprehension of a
happiness never quite grasped, always just beyond the verge of
realisation. Only an imagination of the finest and rarest touch,
absolutely certain of tread on that path of a single hair which alone
connects this world with the land of dreams. Few have trod that perilous
bridge with the fearlessness of Emily Bronte: that is her own ground and
there she wins our highest praise; but place her on the earth, ask her
to interpret for us the common lives of the surrounding people, she can
give no answer. The swift and certain spirit moves with the clumsy
hesitating gait of a bird accustomed to soar.

She tells us what she saw; and what she saw and what she was incapable
of seeing are equally characteristic. All the wildness of that moorland,
all the secrets of those lonely farms, all the capabilities of the one
tragedy of passion and weakness that touched her solitary life, she
divined and appropriated; but not the life of the village at her feet,
not the bustle of the mills, the riots, the sudden alternations of
wealth and poverty; not the incessant rivalry of church and chapel; and
while the West Riding has known the prototype of nearly every person and
nearly every place in 'Jane Eyre' and 'Shirley,' not a single character
in 'Wuthering Heights' ever climbed the hills round Haworth.

Say that two foreigners have passed through Staffordshire, leaving us
their reports of what they have seen. The first, going by day, will tell
us of the hideous blackness of the country; but yet more, no doubt, of
that awful, patient struggle of man with fire and darkness, of the grim
courage of those unknown lives; and he would see what they toil for,
women with little children in their arms; and he would notice the blue
sky beyond the smoke, doubly precious for such horrible environment. But
the second traveller has journeyed through the night; neither squalor
nor ugliness, neither sky nor children, has he seen, only a vast stretch
of blackness shot through with flaming fires, or here and there burned
to a dull red by heated furnaces; and before these, strange toilers,
half naked, scarcely human, and red in the leaping flicker and gleam of
the fire. The meaning of their work he could not see, but a fearful and
impressive phantasmagoria of flame and blackness and fiery energies at
work in the encompassing night.

So differently did the black country of this world appear to Charlotte,
clear-seeing and compassionate, and to Emily Bronte, a traveller through
the shadows. Each faithfully recorded what she saw, and the place was
the same, but how unlike the vision! The spectacles of temperament
colour the world very differently for each beholder; and, to understand
the vision, we too should for a moment look through the seer's glass. To
gain some such transient glance, to gain and give some such momentary
insight into the character of Emily Bronte, has been the aim I have
tried to make in this book. That I have not fulfilled my desire is
perhaps inevitable--the task has been left too long. If I have done
anything at all I feel that much of the reward is due to my many and
generous helpers. Foremost among them I must thank Dr. Ingham, my kind
host at Haworth, Mrs. Wood, Mr. William Wood, Mrs. Brown, and Mrs.
Ratcliffe of that parish--all of whom had known the now perished family
of Bronte; and my thanks are due no less to Mr. T. Wemyss Reid, as will
be seen further on, to Mr. J. H. Ingram, and to Mr. Biddell, who have
collected much valuable information for my benefit; and most of all do I
owe gratitude and thankfulness to Miss Ellen Nussey, without whose
generous help my work must have remained most ignorant and astray. To
her, had it been worthier, had it been all the subject merits, and yet
without those shadows of gloom and trouble enjoined by the nature of the
story; to her, could I only have spoken of the high noble character of
Emily Bronte and not of the great trials of her life, I should have
ventured to dedicate this study. But to Emily's friend I only offer
what, through her, I have learned of Emily; she, who knew so little of
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