Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  There is a very robust contempt for men in general in this spirited passage, and similar volleys of disdain are exceedingly common in her letters. Psycho-analytical commentators have interpreted this to mean that Charlotte was the victim of sex-obsession, that she was longing to get a husband, and, being unable to do so, vented her spite against the sex in these diatribes. But, while it is perfectly true that when she did marry she found the happiness that she had missed all her life, such a conclusion is altogether at variance with the facts. For three other men, Henry Nussey being the first, wanted to marry her and she refused them. It is more reasonable, in view of this passionate affection of hers for Ellen Nussey, to conclude that for a considerable period of her life her emotional reactions were towards women rather than men.

  CHAPTER V

  Charlotte left Miss Wooler’s when she was sixteen and returned to Haworth, where she remained for the next three years. She undertook the education of her two sisters, and with her brother Branwell continued to pour out that torrent of prose works with occasional poems, which had been interrupted during her schooldays. But now, as if the waters had been accumulating in a reservoir, they flowed in absolutely unparalleled volume. She wrote most of them under pseudonyms, and we see that the Duke of Wellington was still her demigod, for their authorship is chiefly attributed to Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley, and that gifted creature in 1833 alone wrote: Arthuriana: or Odds and Ends: Being a Miscellaneous Collection of Pieces in Prose and Verse; The Secret and Lily Hart (two tales); Visits in Verdopolis (two volumes); The Green Dwarf: A Tale of the Perfect Tense; and in 1834, My Angria and the Angrians; A Leaf from an Unopened Volume; Corner Dishes: Being a Small Collection of Trifles in Prose and Verse; High Life in Verdopolis; and The Spell, an Extravaganza. In addition to these there is The Foundling: A Tale of our Own Times, by Captain Tree (1833); Richard Cœur de Lion and Blondel, by Charlotte Brontë (1833); and The Scrap Book: A Mingling of Many Things, by Charlotte Brontë, and compiled by Lord C. A. F. Wellesley.

  Of this library of manuscript The Spell has been lately published by the Oxford University Press. It is the first tale in a very curious volume of Charlotte’s manuscripts in the British Museum, and with it are bound up High Life in Verdopolis, mentioned above, and The Scrap Book. The binding is French, the title on the cover is Manuscrits de Miss Charlotte Brontë (Currer Bell), and the book was purchased in the year 1892 in a second-hand bookshop in Brussels. What the previous history of it was is quite unknown. The suggestion has been made that Charlotte, when at the pensionnat in Brussels, gave these manuscripts to M. Héger, or left them behind when she went back to England, and that he, when she became famous, had them bound. There is no evidence to support the theory, but it is certainly a reasonable one.

  The Spell, therefore, is now accessible to readers, and we have in it a solid sample of the Angrian-Saga and of Charlotte’s style in this year 1834, when she was eighteen. The story is highly sensational, the plot utterly mystifying, and the writing of the purplest. It was worth printing as a curiosity, but solely because it was Charlotte Brontë who wrote it. Intrinsic merit cannot be claimed for it, nor is there in it any foreshadowing of that supreme talent which was so soon to develop in her. What is interesting is the devouring rage for literary expression that consumed her, and the enormous quantity of narrative which poured from her rather than its quality.

  Branwell in the same period, chiefly under the pseudonym of Captain John Flower, M.P., or the Right Honourable John Baron Flower, produced Real Life in Verdopolis; The Politics of Verdopolis; The Pirate; Thermopylæ (a poem); And the Weary are at Rest; The Wool is Rising, an Angrian adventure; Ode to the Pole Star, and other poems; and The Life of Field-Marshal the Right Honourable Alexander Percy, Earl of Northangerland (two volumes).

  The brain reels with the thought of Charlotte’s activities during these years. She was giving lessons to her younger sisters, she was teaching in the Sunday school, she was entertaining district visitors to tea, she was pouring out those oceans of literary work, she was sewing for hours every day under the eye of Aunt Branwell. When everything sewable for the use of the Parsonage and its inmates had been sewed, the industry of her nieces was devoted to sewings for the needy of the parish, and from after the midday dinner at half-past one till tea-time all needles were busy. Sewing, according to that admirable letter-writer, Miss Mary Taylor, who came to stay at Haworth during those years, was, in Aunt Branwell’s opinion, good for the sewers as well as the sewed for; it was an essential part of woman’s work in the world, and she presided at these gatherings in her large mob cap of the period with auburn curls attached to it, and took her snuff, and anticipating the refinements of America she would not allow the word ‘spit’ to be used in her presence. When tea came in, sewing was finished for the day, and after Mr. Brontë had read prayers to the household at eight, she went up to her bedroom in her pattens and was seen no more till breakfast-time next morning. An hour later Mr. Brontë retired for the night, winding the clock on the stairs as he passed, and called out, ‘Don’t sit up late, girls!’ And then the real day, the living exciting part of the day began, and Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley was free, for till then there had not been a moment’s leisure, and he wrote like mad.

  Somehow or other there was squeezed in the time for drawing lessons, and the time for sketching and painting between the visits of Mr. William Robinson of Leeds, a pupil of Sir Thomas Lawrence and of the delirious Swiss artist Fuseli, who painted nightmares with so sure a hand. The whole family had lessons at the inclusive fee of two guineas a visit, and it is legitimate to trace, in the account of the pictures which Jane Eyre showed Mr. Rochester, some influence of the pupil of Fuseli. These, it may be remembered, comprised one of a cormorant sitting on the mast of a ship sunk in a rough sea and holding a bracelet in its beak, which it had taken from the arm of a drowned corpse that was visible through the water. But Mr. William Robinson’s morals, whatever his skill as an artist, were not all they should be. Mrs. Gaskell alludes with such discretion to some indiscretion on Mr. Robinson’s part which caused Mr. Brontë to decide that he should teach his daughters no longer, that even the hardiest biographers have not ventured to tell us what it was.

  (From left to right) Anne, Emily & Charlotte Brontë

  From a painting by Branwell Brontë in the National Portrait Gallery.

  As the result of this tuition and the artistic promise shown by Branwell at the age of eighteen, it was decided that he should adopt art as his career, and go up to London in order to study at the Art Schools of the Royal Academy. There is no evidence to show that he ever went, though he wrote to the Secretary asking particulars about admission, and it is probable that the idea was abandoned. He then tried to turn to account his literary gifts, and wrote some truly amazing letters to the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, and, somewhat in the style of Mr. Micawber, told him that he was ready to write for him, and positively challenged him to take him as a regular contributor either in prose or verse, enclosing a specimen poem and promising to send prose if desired, on any subject that Mr. Robert Blackwood might select. He enjoined him not to condemn him unheard; he cautioned him not to behave like a commonplace person and miss such an opportunity; he reminded him that ‘you have lost an able writer in James Hogg, and God grant you may get one in Patrick Branwell Brontë.’ But Mr. Blackwood preferred to be commonplace, though Branwell gave him four opportunities of showing a finer quality. Somewhere about this time he painted a portrait group of his three sisters, which Mrs. Gaskell saw when she stayed with Charlotte at Haworth: Emily and Anne were linked together; Charlotte stood apart on the right side of a column which nearly bisects the picture. Mrs. Gaskell’s verdict on it was that though it possessed little artistic merit, the portrait of Charlotte was strikingly like her, and that it was reasonable to suppose that those of the other two sisters were equally faithful. Her description of this picture answers so closely to the picture by Branwell now in the National Gallery, that it is
difficult to suppose that it was not this which she saw. On the other hand, Mr. Shorter tells us that after Mr. Brontë’s death in 1861, Mr. Nicholls took this picture to Ireland with him, and destroyed it, keeping only the figure of Emily, which he considered to be like her. This also is now in the National Portrait Gallery, but there is a question whether it does not represent Anne. The only explanation of the confusion seems to be that Branwell painted two portrait groups of his sisters, of which Mr. Nicholls destroyed one.

  In these three years between Charlotte’s leaving Miss Wooler’s school and returning there again as teacher, we still lack any glimpse beyond the most misty of Emily. In person she was taller than the others, she had beauty of feature, and Ellen Nussey, on her visits to the Parsonage, was evidently very much struck with her. But she describes her in a way that does not much help us to realise her, for though she was keenly aware that ‘there was depth and power in her nature,’ that ‘one of her rare expressive looks was something to remember through life,’ such observations however appreciative are mere generalities, and we still have to imagine Emily for ourselves, and clearly what impressed Ellen most was Emily’s impenetrable reserve. But it is something to be told that when she was out on the moors she was a different person, brimful of glee and the joy of life, absorbed in the affairs of tadpoles in a pool; that she could poke fun at Charlotte, who was terrified of cows, by luring her into a field where those fierce animals were grazing. Ellen also tells us that Anne was her inseparable companion, and that her piano-playing was really remarkable. Instructive too is the story that one day when Charlotte was unwell, Emily was sent out a walk with Ellen. This was a hazardous experiment, for Emily was capable of remaining completely silent for indefinite periods, and so on their return Charlotte naturally asked how her sister had behaved. This casual question has been taken up, like a challenge, by one accomplished Emily-ite, who triumphantly assures us that Emily had behaved well; ‘she had shown her true self, her noble energetic truthful soul.’ But Charlotte only wanted to know if Emily had spoken at all during the walk, and whether she had is not recorded. Anne finally remains mysterious, not because she was enigmatical, but because her only characteristics were gentleness and piety, and from the dim, cool shade of these excellences she never really emerges.

  It is now that a side of Charlotte, ever afterwards characteristic of her, definitely shows itself, and she begins to take command of the family ship and its destinies, to set its sails and to direct its course. Mr. Brontë’s income was £200 a year, Aunt Branwell had £50 a year, and it was evident to Charlotte’s intensely practical mind that she and her sisters must do something to earn money. Branwell, in this year 1835, according to plan, was to become a pupil at the Academy Art Schools in London, and would be an additional drain on the family finances, and she must make her living, or, at any rate, not be an expense. Teaching offered the best if not the only opening, and for the next nine years she devoted her energies towards making a career for herself and her sisters in this direction, with the idea of eventually setting up a school for girls. Experience was the first thing needed, and now at the age of nineteen she became a teacher at Miss Wooler’s school where, three years before, she had been a pupil. She had already received two offers for a post as private governess in a family, but she naturally preferred to go to Miss Wooler, who was already a friend; besides, Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey, with whom the passionate friendship was now at its height, both lived within a few miles of Roe Head. Then there were Emily and Anne to be thought of, for she was acting for them too, and with a view to fitting Emily for the same profession as herself, she arranged that she should accompany her to Roe Head as a pupil and complete her education. Anne at present was only fifteen, and she would continue her studies at home; her turn would come later.

  Charlotte looked forward to the adventure. ‘My lines,’ she wrote to her friend, ‘are fallen in pleasant places,’ and it was a consolation to her and Emily that they would be together. So in July the two sisters, teacher and pupil, went to Miss Wooler’s, but Anne’s turn came sooner than anyone had expected. Emily, unconsoled, pined for Haworth and the moors; she became ill from home-sickness, and Charlotte believed that her life was in danger. In a memoir she wrote after Emily’s death, for a selection of her poems, she says:

  I felt in my heart she would die, if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall. She had only been three months at school, and it was some years before the experiment of sending her from home was again ventured on.

  This memoir contains several curious errors in actual fact. Charlotte states in it that Emily was in her sixteenth year when she went to Roe Head: she was really in her eighteenth year. Odder is the inaccuracy that Emily, so acute was her nostalgia, causing great emaciation and even danger to life, never left Haworth again for some years: the experiment was too risky. For, as a matter of fact, within a year from the time that Charlotte ‘obtained her recall,’ Emily, with no kind Miss Wooler in charge and no sister to remind her of home, was a teacher in Miss Patchett’s school at Law Hill, Southorran, near Halifax. Emily’s life there, Charlotte told Ellen, was an intolerable slavery — she was at work from six in the morning till eleven at night; and yet in the memoir quoted above, Charlotte seems to have forgotten that Emily had left Haworth again till after some years had passed, or, in other words, till she took her to Brussels, as the same memoir states. Directly on Emily’s recall from Roe Head, Anne was sent for to take her place as pupil in Miss Wooler’s school, and there she remained, completing her education, for two years.

  The scheme of sending Branwell to study at the Art Schools of the Royal Academy in London had been given up, and though getting on for twenty years old, he was still at home, keen, apparently, on his painting and a good scholar in Latin, but with no settled occupation of any sort. Mrs. Gaskell tells us that, at this time, ‘the young man seemed to have his fate in his own hands. He was full of noble impulses as well as extraordinary gifts.’ As an instance of his literary ability, she speaks of a fragment of his prose which she had seen. ‘The actors in it are drawn with much of the grace of characteristic portrait-painting in perfectly pure and simple language which distinguishes so many of Addison’s papers in the Spectator.’ This is high praise as coming from one of so delicate a literary judgment, and must be received with all respect. He had charm, it would appear, ability and ambition, but he was without ballast and lacked the discipline through which alone ambition can be fulfilled. He was still considered the genius of the family — he had wit, a brilliant tongue and the vanity to demand an audience; and it is hardly to be wondered at that on long winter evenings, with Aunt Branwell immured in her bedroom, and his father in his study, with Charlotte and Anne away, with Emily silent as the grave, he sought the more congenial atmosphere of the bar at the ‘Black Bull,’ where he would find talk and laughter and an atmosphere of good fellowship. Sometimes a commercial traveller or such would be putting up there for the night, and the landlord told him of this brilliant young fellow at the Parsonage near by, who would certainly come down and have a chat with him over a glass or two of whisky-toddy to pass the hour before bedtime. So Branwell appeared, and perhaps he exhibited for the general astonishment a remarkable faculty he had of writing simultaneously with his right hand and his left two different letters. At other times there would be farmers from the country round dropping in on market-day before they set off again across the hills to scattered homesteads, and there was just such talk and companionship as must have been Branwell’s father’s before he left County Down for Cambridge.

  Then, again, the ‘Black Bull’ was the headquarters of a village club, ‘The Lodge of the Three Graces,’ faintly masonic in title, of which John Brown, the sexton of the church, at whose house in later days lodged more than one curate of Haworth, was Master, and Branwell was Secretary. What the official proceedings were or what sort of entries the Secretary made in the book of minutes, we have no idea, but, as we shall find excellent reason
to believe, the proceedings were punctuated with bawdy talk and whisky-toddy. Considering what the mode of life was at the Parsonage, it is really little wonder that a young man, eminently ‘clubbable,’ fond of talk and talking with extreme brilliance, should have frequented the ‘Black Bull.’

  In the holidays they were again all together, and though teaching was the destiny that Charlotte was weaving for herself and her sisters, literary ambitions, now taking second place, were not entirely extinguished. Poetry was ascendant over prose, and in the Christmas holidays of 1836-1837 she wrote, in that microscopic hand, twenty-six pages of verse. She finished one of these poems, We Wove a Web in Childhood, on December 19, and then conceived the daring project of writing to Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, enclosing a specimen of her own verse (probably this), and asking him for his opinion on it. We may guess that this was a concerted plan between her and Branwell to interest the eminent in their compositions, for Branwell gave the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine another chance, telling him that he had written a very lengthy and remarkable composition in prose which he was ready to bring up to Edinburgh to show him. He rated him for his silence, asking if it were prejudice which actuated it, and bidding him be a man, sir! He wrote also to William Wordsworth, who succeeded Southey in the Laureateship, enclosing, like Charlotte, a poem of his, which he described as the

  Prefatory Scene of a much longer subject, in which I have striven to develop strong passions and weak principles struggling with a high imagination and acute feelings, till, as youth hardens towards age, evil deeds and short enjoyments end in mental misery and bodily ruin....

  This is interesting, for the poor wretch was even now playing in his own person the prefatory scene of just such a tragic career.