‘Apologizing sincerely for what seems like whining egotism, and hardly daring to hint about the days when, in your company, I could sometimes sink the thoughts which “remind me of departed days,” I fear departed never to return, — I remain, etc.’
In this letter we see that Branwell details to Mr. Grundy the story about Mrs. — — , which he was publishing whenever he could obtain a hearing. He speaks, too, of his ill-health, the shattering of body and the breaking down of mind, which at the time prostrated him. Charlotte seems scarcely to have credited Branwell’s representations of the bodily condition into which he had fallen; for she says, in one of her letters, a little later, ‘Branwell offers no prospect of hope: he professes to be too ill to think of seeking employment.’ There are passages of a like tendency in others of Charlotte’s letters about this time; but we shall see presently that, whatever might be his condition of health, he was by no means so unsolicitous for employment, or so heedless of the future, as she supposed.
CHAPTER VI.
‘REAL REST.’ — ‘PENMAENMAWR.’
‘Real Rest’ — Comments — Spirit of Branwell and Emily Identical — Letter to Leyland — Branwell Broods on his Sorrows — ’Penmaenmawr’ — Comments — He still Searches and Hopes for Employment — Charlotte’s somewhat Overdrawn Expressions — The Alleged Elopement Proposal — Probable Origin of the Story.
Though Branwell Brontë was so feeble in health that, despite his wishes, he found physical labour impossible, and though the reaction from utter despair — through whose impetus he completed one volume of his novel — had been followed by a condition which led him to think worthy literary work beyond his power, we find him, almost at the same time, writing two of the finest poems which remain from his hand. It has been seen, in the letter addressed to Mr. Grundy, how he declares that, owing to the state of his mind, he is unable to undertake any literary work worth reading. But we have certain knowledge of an immediate movement of his genius, and that it found expression in verse, which gave a free course to his feelings. In the following poem we have perhaps the most powerful and weird expression of inconsolable sorrow ever penned. A strange calm had now succeeded the storms of feeling its author had passed through.
REAL REST.
‘I see a corpse upon the waters lie,
With eyes turned, swelled and sightless, to the sky,
And arms outstretched to move, as wave on wave
Upbears it in its boundless billowy grave.
Not time, but ocean, thins its flowing hair;
Decay, not sorrow, lays its forehead bare;
Its members move, but not in thankless toil,
For seas are milder than this world’s turmoil;
Corruption robs its lips and cheeks of red,
But wounded vanity grieves not the dead;
And, though those members hasten to decay,
No pang of suffering takes their strength away.
With untormented eye, and heart, and brain,
Through calm and storm it floats across the main;
Though love and joy have perished long ago,
Its bosom suffers not one pang of woe;
Though weeds and worms its cherished beauty hide,
It feels not wounded vanity nor pride;
Though journeying towards some far off shore,
It needs no care nor gold to float it o’er;
Though launched in voyage for eternity,
It need not think upon what is to be;
Though naked, helpless, and companionless,
It feels not poverty, nor knows distress.
‘Ah, corpse! if thou couldst tell my aching mind
What scenes of sorrow thou hast left behind,
How sad the life which, breathing, thou hast led,
How free from strife thy sojourn with the dead;
I would assume thy place — would long to be
A world-wide wanderer o’er the waves with thee!
I have a misery, where thou hast none;
My heart beats, bursting, whilst thine lies like stone;
My veins throb wild, whilst thine are dead and dry;
And woes, not waters, dim my restless eye;
Thou longest not with one well loved to be,
And absence does not break a chain with thee;
No sudden agonies dart through thy breast;
Thou hast what all men covet, — Real Rest.
I have an outward frame, unlike to thine,
Warm with young life — not cold in death’s decline;
An eye that sees the sunny light of Heaven, —
A heart by pleasure thrilled, by anguish riven —
But, in exchange for thy untroubled calm,
Thy gift of cold oblivion’s healing balm,
I’d give my youth, my health, my life to come,
And share thy slumbers in thy ocean tomb.’
Here the poet, his soul longing for freedom from mortality, his crushed and wounded spirit hovering above the salt and restless wave, contemplates the pale and ghastly body that floats thereon, and, holding communion with it, touches in melancholy and beautiful words its isolation and oblivion. Accompanying the dead in its watery wanderings, he sees, with keen sympathy, its utter disseverance from the world it has left, and contrasts with its condition the hopeless sorrow of his own disappointed youth. He delineates, in words of singular power and felicity, this weird and lonely picture; and, as an artist and a poet, paints wildly, but beautifully, the decay of the drowned in the ocean, and of the living, through the effects of long-continued woe. Branwell had loved, indeed, however unfortunately; and the misery of his passion caused him to turn his reflections within upon himself. As with the ‘Wandering Jew,’ who sees in every rock, in every bush, in every cloud, without hope of alleviation from his abiding woe, the via crucis of his suffering Lord — every thought of Branwell’s gifted mind, every conception of his fertile brain, every aspect, to him, of ocean, earth, and sky, — was, in one way or other, instinct with his own initial and irrepressible affection. Apart, however, from the illusions respecting the lady of his heart, under which he laboured, and which drove him to madness, there was a tendency to gloom and despondency implanted in his very nature, a disposition of mind in which his sister Emily largely resembled him. To such an extent was this the case that, in her poem of ‘The Philosopher,’ written in the October of 1845, she not only gives expression to similar weird thoughts and desires, but one might think there had been some interchange of ideas between the two, — that, perhaps, she had read his ‘Real Rest,’ and wrote the following words in half-censure of its tendency. She is speaking of an enlightening spirit:
‘Had I but seen his glorious eye
Once light the clouds that wilder me;
I ne’er had raised this coward cry
To cease to think, and cease to be;
I ne’er had called oblivion blest,
Nor stretching eager hands to death,
Implored to change for senseless rest
This sentient soul, this living breath —
Oh, let me die — that power and will
Their cruel strife may close;
And conquered good and conquering ill
Be lost in one repose!’
It is noteworthy that Charlotte, also, in the second part of her poem ‘Gilbert,’ has used the incident of a corpse floating upon the waters, which is seen by the unhappy man in his vision, not, indeed, to give him the calm of oblivion, but rather, in contrast to Branwell’s poem, to wake in him the pains of sorrow and remorse.
Again, on the 25th of November, 1845, Branwell wrote to Leyland. He could not free himself from the unfortunate ideas which had perverted his understanding, but on every other subject he wrote justly.
‘Haworth,
‘Bradford, Yorks.
‘My dear Sir,
‘I send you the enclosed, — and I ought to tell you why I wished anything of so personal a nature to appear in print.
; ‘I have no other way, not pregnant with danger, of communicating with one whom I cannot help loving. Printed lines, with my usual signature, “Northangerland,” could excite no suspicion — as my late unhappy employer shrank from the bare idea of my being able to write anything, and had a day’s sickness after hearing that Macaulay had sent me a complimentary letter; so he won’t know the name.
‘I sent through a private channel one letter of comfort in her great and agonizing present afflictions, but I recalled it through dread of the consequences of a discovery.
‘These lines have only one merit, — that of really expressing my feelings, while sailing under the Welsh mountain, when the band on board the steamer struck up, “Ye banks and braes!” God knows that, for many different reasons, those feelings were far enough from pleasure.
‘I suffer very much from that mental exhaustion which arises from brooding on matters useless at present to think of, — and active employment would be my greatest cure and blessing, — for really, after hours of thoughts which business would have hushed, I have felt as if I could not live, and, if long-continued, such a state will bring on permanent affection of the heart, which is already bothered with most uneasy palpitations.
‘I should like extremely to have an hour’s sitting with you, and, if I had the chance, I would promise to try not to look gloomy. You said you would be at Haworth ere long, but that “ere” has doubtless changed to “ne’er;” so I must wish to get to Halifax some time to see you.
‘I saw Murray’s monument praised in the papers, and I trust you are getting on well with Beckwith’s, as well as with your own personal statue of living flesh and blood.
‘Mine, like your Theseus, has lost its hands and feet, and I fear its head also, for it can neither move, write, nor think as it once could.
‘I hope I shall hear from you on John Brown’s return from Halifax, whither he has gone.
‘I remain, &c.,
‘P. B. Brontë.’
The poem enclosed was entitled:
PENMAENMAWR.
‘These winds, these clouds, this chill November storm
Bring back again thy tempest-beaten form
To eyes that look upon yon dreary sky
As late they looked on thy sublimity;
When I, more troubled than thy restless sea,
Found, in its waves, companionship with thee.
‘Mid mists thou frownedst over Arvon’s shore,
‘Mid tears I watched thee over ocean’s roar,
And thy blue front, by thousand storms laid bare,
Claimed kindred with a heart worn down by care.
No smile had’st thou, o’er smiling fields aspiring,
And none had I, from smiling fields retiring;
Blackness, ‘mid sunlight, tinged thy slaty brow,
I, ‘mid sweet music, looked as dark as thou;
Old Scotland’s song, o’er murmuring surges borne,
Of “times departed, — never to return,”
Was echoed back in mournful tones from thee,
And found an echo, quite as sad, in me;
Waves, clouds, and shadows moved in restless change,
Around, above, and on thy rocky range,
But seldom saw that sovereign front of thine
Changes more quick than those which passed o’er mine.
And as wild winds and human hands, at length,
Have turned to scattered stones the mighty strength
Of that old fort, whose belt of boulders grey
Roman or Saxon legions held at bay;
So had, methought, the young, unshaken nerve —
That, when WILL wished, no doubt could cause to swerve,
That on its vigour ever placed reliance,
That to its sorrows sometimes bade defiance —
Now left my spirit, like thyself, old hill,
With head defenceless against human ill;
And, as thou long hast looked upon the wave
That takes, but gives not, like a churchyard grave,
I, like life’s course, through ether’s weary range,
Never know rest from ceaseless strife and change.
‘But, Penmaenmawr! a better fate was thine,
Through all its shades, than that which darkened mine;
No quick thoughts thrilled through thy gigantic mass
Of woe for what might be, or is, or was;
Thou hadst no memory of the glorious hour
When Britain rested on thy giant power;
Thou hadst no feeling for the verdant slope
That leant on thee as man’s heart leads on hope;
The pastures, chequered o’er with cot and tree,
Though thou wert guardian, got no smile from thee;
Old ocean’s wrath their charms might overwhelm,
But thou could’st still keep thy unshaken realm —
While I felt flashes of an inward feeling
As fierce as those thy craggy form revealing
In nights of blinding gleams, when deafening roar
Hurls back thy echo to old Mona’s shore.
I knew a flower, whose leaves were meant to bloom
Till Death should snatch it to adorn a tomb,
Now, blanching ‘neath the blight of hopeless grief,
With never blooming, and yet living leaf;
A flower on which my mind would wish to shine,
If but one beam could break from mind like mine.
I had an ear which could on accents dwell
That might as well say “perish!” as “farewell!”
An eye which saw, far off, a tender form,
Beaten, unsheltered, by affliction’s storm;
An arm — a lip — that trembled to embrace
My angel’s gentle breast and sorrowing face,
A mind that clung to Ouse’s fertile side
While tossing — objectless — on Menai’s tide!
‘Oh, Soul! that draw’st yon mighty hill and me
Into communion of vague unity,
Tell me, can I obtain the stony brow
That fronts the storm, as much unbroken now
As when it once upheld the fortress proud,
Now gone, like its own morning cap of cloud?
Its breast is stone. Can I have one of steel,
To endure — inflict — defend — yet never feel?
It stood as firm when haughty Edward’s word
Gave hill and dale to England’s fire and sword,
As when white sails and steam-smoke tracked the sea,
And all the world breathed peace, but waves and me.
‘Let me, like it, arise o’er mortal care,
All woes sustain, yet never know despair;
Unshrinking face the grief I now deplore,
And stand, through storm and shine, like moveless Penmaenmawr!’
These lines are shadowed, like all his other writings, with the grief that day and night oppressed him. Throughout the theme, his eager yearning for mental quiet is finely expressed; and in it he contrasts the strength and calm of the everlasting hill in its chequered history, and in the ceaseless changes, and the lights and shadows that fall upon it, with his own wild and stormy existence; the lady, whose charms have bewildered his imagination, supplying him with a subject for sorrowful recollections. The giant hill is the mighty image with which his perturbed soul communes, and he implores for strength to enable him to rise superior to his misfortunes, and to face, like ‘moveless Penmaenmawr,’ the storm, adversity, and ruin that threaten him. But there was little likelihood of the lady seeing these lines.
We find Branwell, at the time, making efforts to obtain some employment that would divert him from useless brooding upon the unfortunate circumstances that destroyed his peace. Scarcely, also, was he less anxious to be away from home, for his presence there had been his greatest humiliation when his family knew of his disgrace; yet, with a method of which he was master, he appears to have kept silence there on the subj
ect his madness made him so ready to repeat to others. However his sisters Emily and Anne might regard him, Charlotte, at least, looked upon him as one of the fallen. She thus writes to her friend concerning him on the 4th of November, 1845: ‘I hoped to be able to ask you to come to Haworth. It almost seemed as if Branwell had a chance of getting employment, and I waited to know the result of his efforts in order to say, dear — — , come and see us. But the place (a secretaryship to a railway committee) is given to another person. Branwell still remains at home; and while he is here, you shall not come. I am more confirmed in that resolution the more I see of him. I wish I could say one word to you in his favour, but I cannot. I will hold my tongue. We are all obliged to you for your kind suggestion about Leeds; but I think our school schemes are, for the present, at rest.’ Again, she says on December 31st of the same year: ‘You say well, in speaking of — — , that no sufferings are so awful as those brought on by dissipation; alas! I see the truth of this observation daily proved. — — and — — must have as weary and burdensome a life of it in waiting upon their unhappy brother. It seems grievous, indeed, that those who have not sinned should suffer so largely.’ Charlotte also, writing to Nancy Garrs, who at times assisted at the parsonage, complained of the conduct of her brother; but, later, requested that the letter should be destroyed. Her wish was complied with.
Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Page 467