Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  For a fine flower of literature is not a sundered phenomenon, as is a pearl in Bond Street. It grew from a soil, and not only do its colour and its fragrance, its manner of growth and of foliage concern us, but the nature of the soil which nourished it. Was it a natural product of that soil, or was there in it so fiery and individual a particle that it grew there in spite of its soil? So far from such an inquiry being irrelevant there is nothing more justly interesting, for, indeed, until we know about the author we cannot really judge of his work. Some elements in it, even though it is a masterpiece, may seem to us false or crude or biased, but an understanding of the author’s life may show us that he could not have looked at the world of which he treats from any other angle. It is our business, if we want to understand a book which is worth our study and our admiration, to look at it through our author’s eyes before making conclusions on the evidence of our own. For an ultimate, if not for an elementary appreciation of the finest work, a knowledge of its genesis is essential. To know that Shelley’s Adonais was a lament for the death of Keats expands our just appreciation of it, and we are the poorer because we do not know the genesis of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

  There is another reason as well that redeems from the charge of idle inquisitiveness our desire to know all we can about the private lives of certain individuals. A man may have been eminent in action or distinguished in the arts, but it is not to enhance our appreciation of his achievements that we study his private life. We do not, for instance, read the most entrancing biography in the world in order to enlarge our appreciation of Rasselas: in fact, the more we enjoy Boswell’s Life the more we regret that so entrancing a companion as Johnson ever spent in writing the precious hours he might have devoted to conversation. We want to know more and yet more about the man and his ways and his robust oddities and squalor and nobility, for the sake of acquaintance with him himself, and for no other reason whatever. I do not know how many people nowadays read Rasselas, but they cannot amount to one per cent. of those who read Boswell, and even of that one per cent. a large fraction must have embarked on their task because they already knew the biography. Johnson in fact no longer connotes to us the classical author of his day, but the subject of Boswell’s book, and we want to learn about him not for what he wrote but for what he was.

  In the case of the Brontës our interest in their private lives is justified by both these reasons: they were in themselves of most strange and unusual individuality, and two of them, Charlotte and Emily, produced books that profoundly stir our interest and our imagination: it is no desire to pry into private life that makes us want to see these books in the round. A noble flower of literature sprang from a soil which we should have thought was of so arid a nature that the budding and blossoming of such, miraculous in itself by reason of its power or its beauty, is doubly miraculous, by reason of the very unlikelihood, on a priori grounds, of its having blossomed there at all. And when we find that, in the living-room of a grim and meagre parsonage, girt about by moors and graveyard and charged with an atmosphere of hatred and heroism, of thwarted ambitions and acclaimed achievement, there worked two sisters who, vastly differing in talent and temperament, have for ever enriched English literature, the one by a romance of supreme genius and by a few lyrics whose authentic magic ranks them with Kubla Khan and Keats’s Ode to the Nightingale, the other by two novels which, easily outlasting ephemeral foibles, will always hold their place among classical masterpieces, it is inevitable that we should want to learn all we can not only about the books themselves, but about the strange solitary girls who wrote them. Anything in their lives that throws real light on their books, anything in their books which can be shown to throw real light on their lives, is our legitimate concern.

  The earliest of the books about the Brontës, and the only one whose author knew any of them personally, is the admirable Life of Charlotte Brontë, which, at her father’s request, was written by Mrs. Gaskell and published, two years after Charlotte’s death, in 1857. Though she did not come in contact with Charlotte till within five years of her death and never saw her sisters or her brother, she at once became an esteemed though never an intimate friend. Her task was a labour of love. ‘I weighed every line,’ she said, ‘with my whole power and heart, so that every line should go to its great purpose of making her known and valued.’ That surely is a very proper spirit for the biographer, and Mrs. Gaskell produced an admirable book which will always rank high for its technical excellence. But it is possible to have too much of the proper spirit, if the biographer’s object is to produce a human and a faithful portrait. He has no right to suppress or soften harsh features and characteristic traits in his hero because they would interfere with the impression, founded on his own admiration, which he desires to produce. We do not ask that failings should be exaggerated, and limitations too hardly defined, but we are right to demand from the biographer such presentation of them as is necessary to a true picture. We know from Charlotte’s own letters that there was a vast deal of hardness and intolerance in her nature, and Mrs. Gaskell’s image of her, as entirely tender and loving and patient under cruel trials and disappointments, robs her, with the best motives, of her actual individuality. These suppressions, which render her so much less real, were deliberate: we find that Mrs. Gaskell, with the evidence of Charlotte’s letters in front of her, leaves out important passages which clearly convey what she was at pains to suppress.

  Sometimes these omissions are simply puerile. Charlotte, for instance, writing to Ellen Nussey when her authorship of Shirley, which she vainly hoped to conceal, became known at Haworth, exclaimed ‘God help, keep and deliver me!’: Mrs. Gaskell, though transcribing from the letter in front of her, emends: ‘Heaven help, keep and deliver me.’ Such small though numerous alterations are of no consequence, but when it comes to Mrs. Gaskell quoting from Charlotte’s letters to M. Héger and deliberately suppressing all that showed that she was writing love-letters to him, the omission becomes serious, because it leaves out crucial and essential experiences. This point is more fully dealt with in its place. Moreover, though she brought to her task those excellent gifts which had already placed her high in the ranks of English novelists, her skilled instincts as a novelist were often a snare to her. The late Sir Edmund Gosse, one of our finest critics, once said to me, ‘Nobody but a novelist should be allowed to write a biography, but he must remember that he is not now writing a novel,’ and it must be confessed that Mrs. Gaskell was terribly forgetful of that. In her admirable zeal to make her friend known and valued she sometimes fobs us off with fiction, forgetting that, though a novelist’s business is to create characters, it is the business of a biographer to render them, and that the tact of omission, when too unscrupulous, becomes a falsification.

  The first edition of Mrs. Gaskell’s book appeared in two volumes, and she soon found herself the centre of a swarm of hornets. Forgetful that she ought to have been dealing with facts, she had taken very insufficient pains about establishing them, and not only was she threatened with two libel actions, but Mr. Brontë, at whose request she had undertaken the work, was furious, as we shall presently see, with what she had said about him. She had to issue a public apology in The Times to avert one of these threatened actions, and when her book was reissued make important omissions: references to these will be made in their due place. She had been inconceivably careless in accepting as true unsifted gossip, always with the intention of blackening the shadows round her central figure and thereby increasing the lustre of its shining, and now she retracted and omitted and, in fact, did all she possibly could to minimise the pain her carelessness had given others, and incidentally to save herself from serious consequences. But subsequent authors of Brontë-Saga have not scrupled to repeat as accredited facts what Mrs. Gaskell was obliged to withdraw because they were not, and many of these have taken their place in what we may call the Canon: it is for this reason alone that I have called attention to the passages which Mrs. Gaskell herself withdrew. It is diffic
ult to avoid the conclusion that these writers were aware of what they were doing: such passages only appear in the earliest editions of her book, and the history of their excision must have been within the knowledge of subsequent authors.

  But a fervour of excitement, almost a religious enthusiasm, seems often to inspire the pens of those who write about the Brontës, and we find that under the spell and fascination of their subject they are apt to become a little careless about facts and very prolific in fancy. Usually they select one of the sisters as the particular object of their adoration: there are Emily-ites; there are Charlotte-ites; there are, faintly and less fervently, Anne-ites, each of whom sets up a golden image of its goddess and omits the feet of clay. In a minor degree there are those who espouse the cause of the unhappy brother Branwell, and seek to sponge off a little of the blackness with which all the rest unanimously daub him. But this partisanship, with all its fanatical suppressions and inventions, tends to defeat its own object, and, instead of elucidating, only succeeds in piling up round the object of its devotion cartloads of apocryphal rubbish which were better away, and while it decks the adored image with highly coloured robes of splendour, obscures its figure and its face. Charlotte and Emily alike lose all power of movement under the hieratic robes into which they have been thrust: they have become, in certain of these books, as doll-like as Madonnas decked out for ecclesiastical festival by Sisters of Charity, and, under this pious decoration of rouge and jewels and haloes, are stiffened into immobility. Such embellishments do not become them, and part of the object of the ensuing pages is to clear some of them away.

  But the difficulties in the way of anyone who seeks, without sentimentality on the one hand or malice on the other, to get as near as may be to the truth about the immortal denizens of Haworth Parsonage, are of the most baffling sort, so full of contradictions and discrepancies are the authorities which must be consulted. Infinitely the most important of these is Charlotte Brontë herself, for her letters and certain biographical notices she wrote about her sisters supply us with at least nine-tenths of our first-hand knowledge about the family. Yet even she falls into such extraordinary errors about their ages and simple matters of that sort that the harassed biographer knows not where to look for the most trivial certainties. Three times, for instance, in her letters and biographical notices of her sisters does she misstate Emily’s age: she published certain posthumous poems saying that Emily wrote them in her sixteenth year, when Emily was at least in her eighteenth year; she says that Emily was twenty when she went to Brussels, whereas she was twenty-three; and when Emily, in her thirty-first year, lay dying, she wrote to a doctor saying that she was in her twenty-ninth year. This consistency of error, in fact, makes us think that Charlotte did not know how old Emily was.

  Such wrong information as this accounts for the despair of the biographer in arriving at what I have called ‘trivial certainties,’ which are not, however, of much importance except to pedants. But no one can consider trivial anything that concerns the intimate and psychical history of the sisters and their books, and when the biographer addresses himself to these more important matters, he finds himself encumbered by so great a cloud of witnesses and so belligerent an array of the furious partisans of individual sisters, who contradict each other (and occasionally themselves) with so copious an outpouring of vials of scorn on any who take views divergent from their own, that in the end his wisest course is to reject as possibly apocryphal any romantic conjecture, often given as firm fact, which is not endorsed by some such basic authority as Charlotte Brontë’s letters, or by inferences that can with certainty be drawn from the books themselves. But well-merited confusion and disaster awaits him who attempts to reconcile the conflicting statements made by enthusiastic partisans of different sisters, so rich are they in suppressions and omissions which would have invalidated their theories, and in inventions which support them, and I have founded my narrative almost completely on Charlotte’s letters.

  But, indeed, to take part in so controversial but fascinating a subject as this is rather like entering a den of lions without believing oneself to be in any way a Daniel, and my bones, I am aware, may presently be scattered before the pit.

  E. F. Benson.

  NOTE

  The executors of the late Mr. Clement Shorter have most generously given me leave to use and quote from all the letters of Charlotte Brontë of which he held the copyright. Without such permission it would have been impossible to present the ensuing picture of her, derived as it is, almost entirely, from this copyright material. I therefore wish to acknowledge my full and grateful sense of the indulgence they have so liberally given to me. These letters are a mine of material, and their permission has enabled me to coin, so to speak, with whatever awkwardnesses and failures in striking, much unminted treasure.

  All extracts from letters come out of Mr. Clement Shorter’s book The Brontës (Hodder & Stoughton, 1908), unless it is stated otherwise. To avoid an endless array of footnotes, individual references are not given to these unless for some reason they are difficult to find.

  E. F. Benson.

  CHAPTER I

  When the Reverend Patrick Brontë arranged with Mrs. Gaskell that she should undertake to write the life of his daughter Charlotte he supplied her, by letters and interviews, with information about her subject, and included therein some slight history of his own early life. He was the eldest of the ten children of Hugh Brontë, a small farmer in County Down, Ireland.

  There was some family tradition, [she tells us] that humble as Hugh Brontë’s circumstances were, he was the descendant of an ancient family. But about this neither he nor his descendants have cared to enquire.... He opened a public school at the early age of sixteen, and this mode of living he continued to follow for five or six years.

  That makes a picturesque prelude: we feel interested at once in this remarkable boy who was to be the father of such illustrious children. But it was as well, for the sake of romantic origins, that further inquiries were not made in the parish of Drumballyroney, County Down, where, on March 17, 1777, Patrick Brontë was born, for it would have been found that his father was a stranger to the noble surname which his eldest son subsequently assumed, and had been always known as Hugh Brunty, peasant farmer. His family was numerous — ten sons and daughters had been born to him. All these had been entered in the register as Brunty or Bruntee, and it was Patrick who abandoned the ancient patronymic of his family and adopted the more modern Brontë. Nelson, it may be remarked, had been created Duke of Brontë in 1799, and the new name had a distinction. But it seems to have been of the ancient Brontës of County Down (hitherto unknown) that Mr. Brontë spoke to Mrs. Gaskell, and probably she was unaware of the existence of the humbler patronymic, or, knowing, she loyally concealed the family secret. As for Patrick Brunty, as he then was, having opened a public school at the age of sixteen, the fact was that he was an assistant master at the village school. These trifles, otherwise quite unimportant, have a certain significance, as being the earliest of those embroideries which have since disfigured rather than decorated the household images of the hearth at Haworth.

  Patrick Brontë’s early history is really more remarkable when stripped of the august details which he gave to Mrs. Gaskell. He taught at the village school for some five or six years, and then for three or four more was tutor to the family of Mr. Tighe, parson of the parish. From that remote occupation he was transported, as on a magic carpet, to the gate of St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he was admitted as an elderly under-graduate at the age of twenty-five in the year 1802. Boys then used to go up to the University at the ages of sixteen or seventeen, and he must have been older than many of the Fellows of the College. How he managed it, who paid the fees and the expenses of his year-long board and lodging and clothing (for he never went back to Ireland) is quite unknown. His father, Hugh Brunty, small peasant farmer, with ten children to rear, can hardly have done so, and it is improbable that he could have saved enough him
self. The most reasonable conjecture is that Parson Tighe helped him. Patrick was a tall, extremely handsome young man; he was full of intelligence, vitality, and ambition, and the guess (for it is no more) that this benevolent clergyman saw that money could not be better spent than in giving his children’s tutor a chance is probably true.

  It is worth noting how these instincts for self-education and for teaching, and this grit in triumphing over difficulties were transmitted by this young Irishman to his family, and in especial to Charlotte. From their earliest years learning was a passion with them all, and those who outlived childhood, Charlotte and Emily and Anne, were all governesses before they were out of their teens, and Branwell, a little later, a tutor. The idea of setting up a school (though not a public school) was one of the long-cherished dreams of Haworth, and to fit herself and her sisters for it Charlotte carried through a scheme for the further education of herself and Emily at Brussels, which was scarcely less improbable of accomplishment, when she conceived it, as that young Patrick Brontë should, forty years before, have succeeded in going up to Cambridge from Drumballyroney, County Down, and getting a University education. Indomitable will, the power to make and then grasp opportunities, teaching, authorship, were fruitful in the blood; while, in minor detail, even as Patrick Brunty, when he went incredibly forth to make his way in the world, assumed a more prepossessing surname, so his daughters, when their destiny declared itself, went forth to the world as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell for fear that an avowal of feminine authorship might prove a handicap to success.