The Bronte Family Volume Ii Part 9

Mr. Grundy's account of this interview is inconsistent in itself. Of course, if his friend had really been so far gone as he represents, it is incredible that Mr. Bronte would have been privy to his son's visit to the inn. It is quite clear that Mr. Grundy's recollection of the interview, and of Branwell's appearance, at this distance of time, with Mrs. Gaskell's account before him, has received a new significance. I incline to the belief that the truth of the matter is this: that, in the spirit of his letters to Leyland, Branwell acted a part, and imposed this ruse upon his friend to gratify the peculiar humour that was then upon him, an episode which the latter, with his erroneous impression as to the date, has been led to depict in somewhat lurid colours. It is most probable, indeed, that, like Hamlet, he 'put an antic disposition on.' Something confirmatory of this view will appear in the next chapter. Among his friends, as I know, Branwell would now and then a.s.sume an indignant, and sometimes a furious mood, and put on airs of wild abstraction from which he suddenly recovered, and was again calm and natural, smiling, indeed, at his successful impersonation of pa.s.sions he scarcely felt at the time. The absence of further correspondence between Branwell and Mr.

Grundy, and the fact that the Skipton and Bradford railway, for hich that gentleman was resident engineer, was fully opened more than a year before Branwell's death, seem to indicate that further intercourse ceased between the two at this date. It would not, perhaps, have been necessary to trouble the reader with these explanations, had not Mr. Grundy's narrative of his last evening with Branwell appeared to receive some sort of confirmation through its republication by Miss Robinson, in her picture of the brother of Emily Bronte shortly before his end.

Again Branwell wrote to Leyland:

'DEAR SIR,

'I had a letter written, and intended to have been forwarded to you a few days after I last left the ensnaring town of Halifax.

'That letter, from being kept so long in my pocket-book, has gone out of date, so I have burnt it, and now send a short note as a precursor to an awfully lengthy one.

'I have much to say to you with which you would probably be sadly bored; but, as it will be only asking for advice, I hope you will feel as a cat does when her hair is stroked down towards her tail.

She _purrs_ then; but she _spits_ when it is stroked upwards.

'I wish Mr. ---- of ---- would send me my bill of what I owe him, and the moment that I receive my outlaid cash, or any sum that may fall into my hands, I shall settle it.

'That settlement, I have some reason to hope, will be shortly.

'But can a few pounds make a fellow's soul like a calm bowl of creamed milk?

'If it can, I should like to drink that bowl dry.

'I shall write more at length (Deo Volente) on matters of much importance to me, but of little to yourself.

'Yours in the bonds,

'SANCTUS PATRICIUS BRANWELLIUS BRONTeIO.'

With the foregoing letter, Branwell enclosed a page containing three spirited sketches. The first is a scene in which the sculptor and Branwell are the princ.i.p.al actors. They are seated on stools, facing one another, each holding a wine gla.s.s, and, between them on the ground, is a decanter. Behind the sculptor is placed the mutilated statue of Theseus. A copy of Cowper's 'Anatomy' is open at the t.i.tle-page; and, leaning over it, is a figure of Admodeus, Setebos, or some other winged imp, taking sight at the two. The second sketch is of Branwell himself, represented as a rec.u.mbent statue, resting on a slab, under which are the following mournful lines:--

'Thy soul is flown, And clay alone Has nought to do with joy or care; So if the light of light be gone, There come no sorrows crowding on, And powerless lies DESPAIR.'

The third drawing is a landscape, having in the foreground a head-stone, with a skull and crossbones in the semi-circular head. On the stone are carved the words, HIC JACET. Distant peaked hills bound the view. Two pines are to the right of the picture, and the crescent moon, which represents a human profile, is accommodated with a pipe.

Underneath it is inscribed the sentence:

'MARTINI LUIGI IMPLORA ETERNA QUIETE!'

The following letter, written to Leyland a little later, shows again the stormy perturbations of Branwell's mind. He still clings to the fond imagination that he is the object of the lady's unwavering devotion; and, with the incoherency of the monomania with which he continues to be afflicted, he solemnly declares to the sculptor that he had said to no one what he is then saying to him; while, in truth, he was telling the story of his disappointed hopes to all who would hear the recital. The theme is that of a wild, eager, and unavailing love--whose joys and sorrows he tells in vivid words--which he believes to be returned with equal energy and pa.s.sion.

'MY DEAR SIR,

'I am going to write a scrawl, for the querulous egotism of which I must entreat your mercy; but, when I look _upon_ my past, present, and future, and then _into_ my own self, I find much, however unpleasant, that yearns for utterance.

'This last week an honest and kindly friend has warned me that concealed hopes about one lady should be given up, let the effort to do so cost what it may. He is the ----, and was commanded by ----, M.P. for ----, to return me, unopened, a letter which I addressed to ----, and which the Lady was not permitted to see.

She too, surrounded by powerful persons who hate me like h.e.l.l, has sunk into religious melancholy, believes that her weight of sorrow is G.o.d's punishment, and hopelessly resigns herself to her doom.

G.o.d only knows what it does cost, and will, hereafter, cost me, to tear from my heart and remembrance the thousand recollections that rush upon me at the thought of four years gone by. Like ideas of sunlight to a man who has lost his sight, they must be bright phantoms not to be realized again.

'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, falling on one now ill-fitted to bear it.

That ill-fittedness rises from causes which I should find myself able partially to overcome, had I bodily strength; but, with the want of that, and with the presence of daily lacerated nerves, the task is not easy. I have been, in truth, too much petted through life, and, in my last situation, I was so much master, and gave myself so much up to enjoyment, that now, when the cloud of ill-health and adversity has come upon me, it will be a disheartening job to work myself up again, through a new life's battle, from the position of five years ago, to that from which I have been compelled to retreat with heavy loss and no gain. My army stands now where it did then, but mourning the slaughter of Youth, Health, Hope, and both mental and physical elasticity.

'The last two losses are, indeed, important to one who once built his hopes of rising in the world on the possession of them. n.o.ble writings, works of art, music, or poetry, now, instead of rousing my imagination, cause a whirlwind of blighting sorrow that sweeps over my mind with unspeakable dreariness; and, if I sit down and try to write, all ideas that used to come, clothed in sunlight, now press round me in funereal black; for really every pleasurable excitement that I used to know has changed to insipidity or pain.

'I shall never be able to realize the too sanguine hopes of my friends, for at twenty-nine I am a thoroughly _old man_, mentally and bodily--far more, indeed, than I am willing to express. G.o.d knows I do not scribble like a poetaster when I quote Byron's terribly truthful words--

'"No more--no more--oh! never more on me The freshness of the heart shall fall like dew, Which, out of all the lovely things we see, Extracts emotions beautiful and new!"

'I used to think that if I could have, for a week, the free range of the British Museum--the library included--I could feel as though I were placed for seven days in Paradise; but now, really, dear sir, my eyes would rest upon the Elgin marbles, the Egyptian saloon, and the most treasured columns, like the eyes of a dead cod-fish.

'My rude, rough acquaintances here ascribe my unhappiness solely to causes produced by my sometimes irregular life, because they have known no other pains than those resulting from excess or want of ready cash. They do not know that I would rather want a s.h.i.+rt than want a springy mind, and that my total want of happiness, were I to step into York Minster now, would be far, far worse than their want of a hundred pounds when they might happen to need it; and that, if a dozen gla.s.ses, or a bottle of wine, drives off their cares, such cures only make me outwardly pa.s.sable in company, but _never_ drive off mine.

'I know only that it is time for me to be something, when I am nothing, that my father cannot have long to live, and that, when he dies, my evening, which is already twilight, will become night; that I shall then have a const.i.tution still so strong that it will keep me years in torture and despair, when I should every hour pray that I might die.

'I know that I am avoiding, while I write, one greatest cause of my utter despair; but, by G----, sir, it is nearly too bitter for me to allude to it!' Here follow a number of references to the subject, with which the reader is already familiar, and therefore it is unnecessary to repeat them here. Then Branwell continues:

'To no one living have I said what I now say to you, and I should not bother yourself with my incoherent account, did I not believe that you would be able to understand somewhat of what I meant--though _not all_, sir; for he who is without hope, and knows that his clock is at twelve at night, cannot communicate his feelings to one who finds _his_ at twelve at noon.'

CHAPTER X.

BRANWELL BRONTe AND 'WUTHERING HEIGHTS.'

'Wuthering Heights'--Reception of the Book by the Public--It is Misunderstood--Its Authors.h.i.+p--Mr. Dearden's Account--Statements of Mr. Edward Sloane and Mr. Grundy--Remarks by Mr. T. Wemyss Reid--Correspondences between 'Wuthering Heights' and Branwell's Letters--The 'Carving-knife Episode'--Further Correspondences-- Resemblances of Thought in Branwell and Emily.

We have now become acquainted with the princ.i.p.al features of Branwell's career, have obtained some insight into his character, and learned much respecting his genius. We have gained also some knowledge of the history of the Bronte sisters in that most crucial period of their lives, when they returned again to literature with the new earnest which led them to fame.

We have seen that it was Branwell who first seriously undertook the production of a novel, and we have noticed Mr. Grundy's statement concerning the authors.h.i.+p of 'Wuthering Heights.' Here, then, is the proper place in which to say something on this question; for there have not been wanting others also to a.s.sert that Branwell was, in great part, the writer of it. Miss Robinson, in her 'Emily Bronte,'

dismisses the a.s.sertion as altogether untrue; but she rightly says, as all will agree, that 'in the contemptuous silence of those who know their falsity, such slanders live and thrive like unclean insects under fallen stones.' It cannot, therefore, be inappropriate, in such a work as the present, to record, as clearly and succinctly as may be, what has been said on the subject, and to make a suggestion--for it is nothing more--as to what is the truth of the matter.

When 'Wuthering Heights,' after its slow progress through the press, was given to the world in the December of 1847, neither the critics nor the public were very well able to grasp its meaning. Reviewers, to quote Charlotte Bronte, 'too often remind us of the mob of Astrologers, Chaldeans, and Soothsayers gathered before the "writing on the wall," and unable to read the characters or make known the interpretation.' In 'Wuthering Heights' they found the subject disagreeable, the characters brutal, the conception crude, and the object of the work wholly unintelligible. The most that could be made of it, was that some rude soul in the north of England, burning with spite against his species, had set himself, with intent little short of diabolical, to lay open the most vicious depths of selfishness and crime, which he had embodied in the actions of characters so lost and revolting, that the mind recoiled with a shudder from the perusal of the monstrosity he had created. One critic, who dwelt at some length on the want of 'tone' and polish in the book, surmised that the writer of it had suffered, 'not disappointment in love, but some great mortification of pride,' which had so embittered his spirit that he had prepared this stinging story in vengeance on his species, and had flung it, crying, 'There, take that!' with cynical pleasure, in the very teeth of humankind.

This writer even felt it his duty to caution young people against the book. 'It ought to be banished from refined society,' he says. 'The whole tone of the book smacks of lowness.'--'A person may be ill-mannered from want of delicacy of perception or cultivation, or ill-mannered intentionally; the author of "Wuthering Heights" is both.'--'But the taint of vulgarity in our author extends deeper than mere sn.o.bbishness; he is rude, because he prefers to be so.' I quote these remarks, as an extreme instance, to show that a critic, who could recognize the great imaginative power, the subtlety, the keen insight, and the fine dramatic character of 'Wuthering Heights,' yet felt such a strong repugnance to its unknown author that he thought him unfit to a.s.sociate with his fellow-men. It never crossed the minds of the critics in those times that the book could be by any but a man of strong personal character, and one with a wide experience of the dark side of human nature.

However, a feeling speedily grew up that 'Wuthering Heights' was an earlier and immature production, attempted to be palmed off upon the public, of the author of 'Jane Eyre,' against whom a charge of bad faith was thereby virtually made; and even Sydney Dobell (in the 'Palladium' of September, 1850), the first critic who had sympathy enough with genius to discern the nature and comprehend the significance of the book, did not escape this error. It is not necessary here to repeat the unfortunate consequences of this misunderstanding, which caused Charlotte eventually to throw off the disguise, and declare openly that 'Wuthering Heights' was the work of her sister Emily. 'Unjust and grievous error!' says Charlotte. 'We laughed at it at first, but I deeply lament it now.' In the face of her statement, further remark on the authors.h.i.+p was naturally silenced; but, from time to time, when the book was discussed, much astonishment was manifested that a simple and inexperienced girl, like Emily Bronte, had been able to draw, with such nervous and morbid a.n.a.lysis, so sombre a picture of the workings of pa.s.sions which she could never have actually known, and of natures 'so relentless and implacable, of spirits so lost and fallen,' as those of Heathcliff and Hindley Earnshaw.

A writer in the 'Cornhill Magazine'[36] who attributes to Emily Bronte the distinction that she has written a book 'which stands as completely alone in the language as does "Paradise Lost," or the "Pilgrim's Progress,"' thus speaks of it: 'Its power,' he says, 'is absolutely t.i.tanic; from the first page to the last it reads like the intellectual throes of a giant. It is fearful, it is true, and perhaps one of the most unpleasant books ever written: but we stand in amaze at the almost incredible fact that it was written by a slim country girl, who would have pa.s.sed in a crowd as an insignificant person, and who had had little or no experience of the ways of the world. In Heathcliff, Emily Bronte has drawn the greatest villain extant, after Iago. He has no match out of Shakespeare. The Mephistopheles of Goethe's "Faust" is a person of gentlemanly proclivities compared with Heathcliff.... But "Wuthering Heights" is a marvellous curiosity in literature. We challenge the world to produce another work in which the whole atmosphere seems so surcharged with suppressed electricity, and bound in with the blackness of tempest and desolation.'

[36] Vol. xxviii, p. 54. 1873.

Perhaps this same grim and t.i.tanic power of 'Wuthering Heights' is one reason why many readers do not understand it fully. 'It is possible,'

Mr. Swinburne says, 'that, to take full delight in Emily Bronte's book, one must have something by natural inheritance of her instinct, and something by earlier a.s.sociation of her love of the special points of earth--the same lights, and sounds, and colours, and odours, and sights, and shapes of the same fierce, free landscape of tenantless, and fruitless, and fenceless moor.'

But the composition of 'Wuthering Heights' was in great part incomprehensible to Charlotte herself, though she endeavours to account for it by a consideration of her sister's character and circ.u.mstances. For, as we have seen, she says, 'I am bound to avow that she had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived, than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pa.s.s her convent gates.'

'"Wuthering Heights,"' to quote Charlotte Bronte's Preface to the new edition of it, 'was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur--power. He wrought with a rude chisel, from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant's foot.'

Many years ago, a writer in the 'People's Magazine,' speaking of the authors.h.i.+p of 'Wuthering Heights,' said: 'Who would suppose that Heathcliff, a man who never swerved from his arrow-straight course to perdition from his cradle to his grave, ... had been conceived by a timid and retiring female? But this was the case.' The perusal of this sentence led Mr. William Dearden--author of the 'Star Seer' and the 'Maid of Caldene'--who was acquainted with Branwell Bronte, to communicate to the 'Halifax Guardian,' in June, 1867, some facts, within his personal knowledge, touching the question, which he extracted from the MS. preface to his poem ent.i.tled, 'The Demon Queen,' not then published.