The Three Brontës. Sinclair May
all, he understood about a nursery. In a sudden frantic distrust of the climate of Haworth, of Miss Branwell, and his own system, he made up his mind to send Maria and Elizabeth and Charlotte and Emily to school.
And there was only one school within his means, the Clergy Daughters' School, established at Cowan Bridge in an unwholesome valley. It has been immortalized in Jane Eyre, together with its founder and patron, the Reverend Carus Wilson. There can be no doubt that the early Victorian virtues, self-repression, humility, and patience under affliction, were admirably taught at Cowan Bridge. And if the carnal nature of the Clergy Daughters resisted the militant efforts of Mr. Carus Wilson, it was ultimately subdued by low diet and primitive drainage working together in an unwholesome valley. Mr. Carus Wilson, indeed, was inspired by a sublime antagonism to the claims of the perishable body; but he seems to have pushed his campaign against the flesh a bit too far, and was surprised at his own success when, one after another, the extremely perishable bodies of those children were laid low by typhus.
The fever did not touch the four little Brontës. They had another destiny. Their seed of dissolution was sown in that small stifling room at Haworth, and was reaped now at Cowan Bridge. First Maria, then Elizabeth, sickened, and was sent home to die. Charlotte stayed on for a while with Emily. She ran wild, and hung about the river, watching it, and dabbling her feet and hands in the running water. Their doom waited for Charlotte and for Emily.
There is no record of Elizabeth except that, like Anne Brontë, she was "gentle". But Maria lived in Charlotte's passionate memory, and will live for ever as Helen Burns, the school-fellow of Jane Eyre. Of those five infant prodigies, she was the most prodigious. She was the first of the children to go down into the vault under Haworth Church; you see her looking back on her sad way, a small, reluctant ghost, lovely, infantile, and yet maternal. Under her name on the flat tombstone a verse stands, premonitory, prophetic, calling to her kindred: "Be ye also ready."
Charlotte was nine years old when her sisters died. Tragedy tells at nine years old. It lived all her life in her fine nerves, reinforced by shock after shock of terror and of anguish.
But for the next seven years, spent at the Parsonage without a break, tragedy was quiescent. Day after day, year after year passed, and nothing happened. And the children of the Parsonage, thrown on themselves and on each other, were exuberantly happy. They had the freedom of the moors, and of the worlds, as wild, as gorgeous, as lonely, as immeasurable, which they themselves created. They found out that they were not obliged to be the children of the Parsonage; they could be, and they were, anything they chose, from the Duke of Wellington down to citizens of Verdopolis. For a considerable number of years they were the "Islanders". "It was in 1827" (Charlotte, at thirteen, records the date with gravity—it was so important) "that our plays were established: Young Men, June 1826; Our Fellows, July 1827; The Islanders, December 1827. These are our three great plays that are not kept secret."
But there were secret plays, Emily's and Charlotte's; and these you gather to be the shy and solitary flights of Emily's and Charlotte's genius. They seem to have required absolutely no impulsion from without. The difficult thing for these small children was to stop writing. Their fire consumed them, and left their bodies ashen white, fragile as ashes. And yet they were not, they could not have been, the sedentary, unwholesome little creatures they might seem to be. The girls were kept hard at work with their thin arms, brushing carpets, dusting furniture, and making beds. And for play they tramped the moors with their brother; they breasted the keen and stormy weather; the sun, the moon, the stars, and the winds knew them; and it is of these fierce, radiant, elemental things that Charlotte and Emily wrote as no women before them had ever written. Conceive the vitality and energy implied in such a life; and think, if you can, of these two as puny, myopic victims of the lust of literature. It was from the impressions they took in those seven years that their immortality was made.
And then, for a year and a half, Charlotte went to school again, that school of Miss Wooler's at Roe Head, where Ellen Nussey found her, "a silent, weeping, dark little figure in the large bay-window". She was then sixteen.
Two years later she went back to Miss Wooler's school as a teacher.
In the register of the Clergy Daughters' School there are two immortal entries:
"Charlotte Brontë. … Left school, June 1st, 1825—Governess."
"Emily Brontë. … Left, June 1st, 1825. Subsequent career—Governess."
They did not question the arrangement. They were not aware of any other destiny. They never doubted that the boy, Branwell, was the child of promise, who was to have a glorious career. In order that he should have it the sisters left Haworth again and again, forcing themselves to the exile that destroyed them, and the work they hated. It was Charlotte and Anne who showed themselves most courageous and determined in the terrible adventure; Emily, who was courage and determination incarnate, failed. Homesickness had become a disease with them, an obsession, almost a madness. They longed with an immitigable longing for their Parsonage-house, their graveyard, and their moors. Emily was consumed by it; Anne languished; Charlotte was torn between it and her passion for knowledge.
She took Emily back with her to Roe Head as a pupil, and Emily nearly died of it. She sent Emily home, and little Anne, the last victim, took Emily's place. She and Charlotte went with the school when it was removed to Dewsbury Moor. Then Emily, who had nearly died of Roe Head, shamed by Charlotte's and Anne's example, went to Halifax as a teacher in Miss Patchett's Academy for Young Ladies. She was at Halifax—Halifax of all places—for six months, and nearly died of Halifax. And after that Charlotte and Anne set out on their careers as nursery-governesses.
It was all that they considered themselves fit for. Anne went to a Mrs. Ingham at Blake Hall, where she was homesick and miserable. Charlotte went to the Sidgwicks at Stonegappe near Skipton, where "one of the pleasantest afternoons I spent—indeed, the only one at all pleasant—was when Mr. Sidgwick walked out with his children, and I had orders to follow a little way behind". You have an impression of years of suffering endured at Stonegappe. As a matter of fact, Charlotte was there hardly three months—May, June, July, eighteen-thirty-nine.
And most of the time their brother Branwell was either at Bradford or at Haworth, dreaming of greatness, and drinking at the "Black Bull". The "Black Bull" stands disastrously near to the Parsonage, at the corner of the churchyard, with its parlour windows looking on the graves. Branwell was the life and soul of every party of commercial travellers that gathered there. Conviviality took strange forms at Haworth. It had a Masonic Lodge of the Three Graces, with John Brown, the grave-digger, for Worshipful Master. Branwell was at one and the same time secretary to the Three Graces and to the Haworth Temperance Society. When he was not entertaining bagmen, he was either at Bradford painting bad portraits, or at Haworth pouring out verses, fearfully long, fatally fluent verses, and writing hysterical letters to the editor of Blackwood's Magazine.
One formidable letter (the third he sent) is headed in large letters: "Sir, read what I write." It begins: "And would to Heaven you would believe in me, for then you would attend to me and act upon it", and ends: "You lost an able writer in James Hogg, and God grant you may get one in Patrick Branwell Brontë." Another followed, headed: "Sir, read now at last", and ending, "Condemn not unheard". In a final letter Branwell inquires whether Mr. Blackwood thinks his magazine "so perfect that no addition to its power would be either possible or desirable", and whether it is pride that actuates him, or custom, or prejudice, and conjures him: "Be a man, sir!"
Nothing came of it. Mr. Blackwood refused to be a man.
Yet Branwell had his chance. He went to London, but nothing came of it. He went to Bradford and had a studio there, but nothing came of it. He lived for a brief period in a small provincial Bohemia. It was his best and happiest period, but nothing came of it beyond the letters and the reams of verse he sent to Leyland the sculptor. There was something brilliant and fantastic about the boy that fascinated Leyland. But a studio costs money, and Branwell had to give his up and go back to Haworth and the society of John Brown the stone-mason and grave-digger. That John Brown was a decent fellow you gather from the fact that on a journey to Liverpool he had charge of Branwell, when Branwell was at his worst. They had affectionate names for each other. Branwell is the Philosopher,