Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  A rather dreadful little scene; she was hot and irritated, and having lost her temper and shocked her father, felt that she had nothing to blame herself with. But she was saving up these experiences of the empty-headed race.

  All contacts chafed her: she went to stay with her friends the Taylors at Hunsworth, and during the visit she suffered from headache and listlessness of spirits, and was sure that everyone except perhaps Mary was glad when she departed. She found that Mary’s brother had sadly deteriorated. Eight years ago she would have been ‘indignant’ if anyone had accused him of ‘being a worshipper of mammon,’ now she laughed at her vanished illusion about him.

  The world with its hardness and selfishness has utterly changed him. He thinks himself wiser than the wisest ... his feelings have gone through a process of petrification which will prevent them from ever warring against his interest, but Ichabod! all glory of principle and much elevation of character is gone!

  This bleak censoriousness of others was coupled with utter pessimism regarding the future and the past, and she did not believe that the world held happiness in store for anyone. She looked on people and prospects alike from the standpoint of her own hopelessness of anticipation, and miserably regretted that ‘irresistible impulse’ out of which had come those abject and yearning letters she wrote to Brussels and the sickness of deferred hope with which she awaited the coming of the barren post-hour.

  The summer of 1845 arrived. In June Anne left her situation at Thorp Green for good, after being there for four and a half years, and went off with Emily for a jaunt to York: these were the only two nights that Emily spent away from Haworth from the time of her return from Brussels in 1842 until her death. They played at Gondals all the time, and Emily in her secret paper of July records how they impersonated Ronald Macalgin, Henry Angora, Julia Augusteena, and many other mystical folk ‘escaping from the palaces of instruction to join the Royalists who are hard driven at present by the victorious Republicans.’ She was writing a work on the First Gondal War, and Anne a book under the name of ‘Henry Sophona.’ Anne, though not quite so enthusiastic (for she found the Gondals were not ‘in first-rate playing condition’), records that: ‘The Unique Society, about half a year ago, were wrecked on a desert island as they were returning from Gaul.’ She mentions also that Emily was writing poetry, and wondered what it was about. Branwell had come home for the holidays with Anne, while Mr. and Mrs. Robinson and the family went to Scarborough, and, as at present arranged, he would return to his post when the holidays were over. Charlotte, when her sisters had got back to Haworth, went off for a three weeks’ visit to her friend Ellen at Hathersage. She found when she returned that the curtain had already risen on a drama which is surely among the grimmest of domestic chronicles.

  She wrote next day to Ellen:

  It was ten o’clock at night when I got home. I found Branwell ill: he is so very often owing to his own fault. I was not therefore shocked at first, but when Anne informed me of the immediate cause of his present illness, I was greatly shocked. He had last Thursday received a note from Mr. Robinson sternly dismissing him, intimating that he had discovered his proceedings, which he characterized as bad beyond expression, and charging him on pain of exposure to break off instantly and for ever all communication with every member of his family. We have had sad work with Branwell ever since. He thought of nothing but stunning or drowning his distress of mind. No one in the house could have rest. At last we have been obliged to send him from home with someone to look after him: he has written to me this morning, and expresses some sense of contrition for his frantic folly; he promises amendment on his return, but so long as he remains at home, I scarce dare hope for peace in the house.

  Now Mrs. Gaskell, in the first edition of her Life of Charlotte Brontë, makes narrative of the above letter, and defines the reason for Branwell’s dismissal. He had been dismissed by his employer because of his guilty intrigue with his wife. Her account ran as follows:

  All the disgraceful incidents came out. Branwell was in no state to conceal his agony of remorse, or, strange to say, his agony of guilty love, from any dread of shame. He gave passionate way to his feelings, he shocked and distressed those loving sisters inexpressibly: the blind father sat stunned, sorely tempted to curse the profligate woman who had tempted his boy — his only son — into the deep disgrace of deadly crime.

  All the variations of spirits and of temper — the reckless gaiety, the moping gloom of many months were now explained. There was a reason deeper than any mean indulgence of appetite to account for his intemperance; he began his career as an habitual drunkard to drown remorse.

  The pitiable part, as far as he was concerned, was the yearning love he still bore to the woman who had got so strong a hold upon him. It is true that she professed equal love; we shall see how her profession held good. There was a strange lingering of conscience, when meeting her clandestinely by appointment at Harrogate some months afterwards, he refused to consent to the elopement which she proposed: there was some good left in this corrupted, weak young man, even to the very last of his miserable days.... A few months later (I have the exact date but for obvious reasons withhold it) the invalid husband of the woman with whom he had intrigued, died. Branwell had been looking forward to this event with guilty hopes. After her husband’s death, his paramour would be free. Strange as it seems the young man still loved her passionately, and now he imagined the time was come when they might look forward to being married, and might live together without reproach or blame. She had offered to elope with him; she had written to him perpetually, she had sent him money — twenty pounds at a time — she had braved shame and her children’s menaced disclosures for his sake, he thought she must love him: he little knew how bad a depraved woman can be. Her husband had made a will, in which what property he left her was bequeathed solely on the condition that she should never see Branwell Brontë again. At the very time that the will was read, she did not know but that he might be on his way to her, having heard of her husband’s death. She despatched a servant in hot haste to Haworth. He stopped at the ‘Black Bull’ and a messenger was sent up to the Parsonage for Branwell. He came down to the little inn and was shut up with the man for some time. Then the groom came out, paid his bill, mounted his horse and was off. Branwell remained in the room alone. More than an hour elapsed before sign or sound was heard; then those outside heard a noise like the bleating of a calf, and, on opening the door, he was found in a kind of fit, succeeding to the stupor of grief which he had fallen into on hearing that he was forbidden by his paramour ever to see her again, as, if he did, she would forfeit her fortune. Let her live and flourish! He died, his pockets filled with her letters, which he had carried about his person, in order that he might read them as often as he wished.... When I think of him, I change my cry to heaven. Let her live and repent!

  As soon as this was brought to Mrs. Robinson’s notice, she determined to sue Mrs. Gaskell for libel, but consented not to do so if these passages and all other reference to her were omitted from future editions, and a public apology and retraction of them was made. This appeared in the advertisement pages of the Times of May 26, 1857, in the form of a letter from Mrs. Gaskell’s solicitors to Mrs. Robinson’s:

  Dear Sir, — As solicitor for and on behalf of the Rev. W. Gaskell, and of Mrs. Gaskell his wife, the latter of whom is authoress of the Life of Charlotte Brontë, I am instructed to retract every statement contained in that work which imputes to a widowed Lady, referred to but not named therein, any breach of her conjugal, of her maternal, or of her social duties, and more especially of the statement ... which imputes to the lady in question a guilty intercourse with the late Branwell Brontë. All those statements were made upon information believed to be well founded, but which, upon investigation, with the additional evidence furnished to me by you, I have ascertained not to be trustworthy. I am therefore authorized not only to retract the statements in question, but to express the deep regret of Mrs. Gaskell that
she should have been led to make them.

  I am, dear Sirs, yours truly,

  William Shaen.

  There followed on this apology some exceedingly pungent remarks in the Athenæum, which had previously spoke in high praise of Mrs. Gaskell’s book, on the wantonness of publishing ‘a gratuitous tale so dismal as concerns the dead, so damaging to the living, unless it was severely, strictly true.’ Even then, the writer might have added, such sacerdotal comminations are as ludicrous as they are irrelevant to the story of Charlotte Brontë’s life.

  Now there is always a possibility that an author may be wise to withdraw libellous matter from his book with apologies, not because it is not true, but because he is unable to substantiate the truth of it, and will thus inevitably lose his case if an action is brought against him. But before we attempt to ascertain whether such was the case with Mrs. Gaskell, with regard to the main libellous matter, we must look into the rest of her story by way of test. We find it bristles with inconsistencies and inaccuracies. She states, for instance, that Mr. Robinson by his will bequeathed his property to his widow solely on the condition that she should never see Branwell again. Now Mr. Robinson died in May 1846, eleven years before Mrs. Gaskell’s book appeared, and his will was proved in September of the same year. An inspection of it, or a copy of it, would have shown her that it contained no such condition, and that Branwell’s name does not appear in it at all. Mrs. Robinson, therefore, would have been free to marry him had she wished to do so, without pecuniary loss, other than that consequent on her marrying again at all. Again, there is the story that Mrs. Robinson sent her groom to Haworth to see Branwell and acquaint him with this provision; the result of the interview was that Branwell was found in a fit, bleating like a calf. But apart from the fact that no one but a demented woman would have sent a groom to talk over affairs with her lover, and tell him he must never see his paramour again, Mrs. Robinson could have sent no such message, since the will did not contain any such provision. Again, the supposed meeting of Branwell and Mrs. Robinson at Harrogate and her proposal to him to elope (which, if he had accepted it, would quite assuredly have deprived her of her inheritance) are utterly inconsistent with her refusal to see him after her husband’s death, when she was at liberty to marry him. As for the story that on Branwell’s death his pockets were found to be full of Mrs. Robinson’s letters, we can only conclude that this was derived from some such source as that which gave Mrs. Gaskell so many details about Mr. Brontë’s violent habits; and it was contradicted by the Parsonage servant, Martha Brown, who was in the room when Branwell died; there were no such letters. In the face of such glaring inconsistencies, it looks at first sight as if the whole of Mrs. Gaskell’s account was a farrago of unverified gossip.

  But looking closer, we must acquit Mrs. Gaskell of any very culpable carelessness in compiling an account which, though far better omitted altogether, was evidently derived from Charlotte herself, and by Charlotte from Branwell. He was making no secret, when she returned from her visit to Ellen in July 1845, of the cause of his dismissal, he was drinking and crying out on fate with the unmanliest lamentation, and we can infer for certain what he told his sisters from a letter he wrote three months afterwards to his friend Francis H. Grundy:

  This lady (Mrs. Robinson), though her husband detested me, showed me a degree of kindness which, when I was deeply grieved one day at her husband’s conduct, ripened into declarations of more than ordinary feeling. My admiration of her mental and personal attractions, my knowledge of her unselfish sincerity, her sweet temper, and unwearied care for others, with but unrequited return where most should have been given ... although she is seventeen years my senior, all combined to an attachment on my part, and led to reciprocations which I had little looked for. During nearly three years I had daily ‘troubled pleasure, soon chastised by fear.’

  A shabbier avowal of all that a man is usually silent about (especially if there is truth in what he says) can scarcely be conceived, and clearly this was the version which Branwell gave his sisters, and which Charlotte passed on to Mrs. Gaskell when subsequently they met and became friends. Branwell, too, was the author of the fiction about Mr. Robinson’s will, for he wrote to his friend Grundy in a letter for which the contents supply the date:

  The gentleman with whom I have been is dead. His property is left in trust for the family, provided I do not see the widow; and if I do, it reverts to the executing trustees with ruin to her.

  What he thus wrote it is reasonable to suppose he raved about to his sisters, and in this particular we have the connecting-link between him and Mrs. Gaskell’s narrative in the shape of a letter that Charlotte wrote to Ellen in the month following Mr. Robinson’s death:

  Shortly after came news from all hands that Mr. Robinson had altered his will before he died, and effectually prevented all chance of a marriage between his widow and Branwell, by stipulating that she should not have a shilling of it if she ever ventured to reopen any communication with him....

  Whatever ‘we hear from all hands’ means, it is clear enough from Branwell’s letter to his friend that one of these hands was his, and can infer with sufficient completeness that Charlotte supplied the information upon which Mrs. Gaskell’s account was founded, and that this in turn rested entirely on Branwell’s allegations and tipsy maunderings. He made of himself a stricken and bawling martyr to the cruel fate which parted impassioned lovers by the obstacle of a selfish and unsympathetic husband, and when that obstacle was removed and it was clear that his mistress (if she had ever been his mistress) had no intention of marrying him, he invented the story of the will, adding to it that she was distracted by these sorrows and anxieties to the verge of insanity. But as she married Sir Edward Scott three years later, as soon as the death of his wife in 1848 left him free, we must suppose that she had her sane intervals. All that actually remains of the whole story is that Branwell was summarily dismissed from his tutorship by Mr. Robinson on account of some improper behaviour, and the reasonable conclusion is that he had made love to his wife, who very properly had told her husband. All the rest is directly traceable to Branwell’s unsupported assertions, for which no tittle of evidence could be found.

  Charlotte, then, on her return to Haworth to find Branwell drinking heavily and bemoaning his stricken existence, took the same hopeless view of him as she took just now of everything. He was in such a state, she wrote, that it was necessary that he should leave home for a week with someone to look after him; the choice of this attendant was a strange one, for he was Branwell’s boon companion, John Brown, the ‘Old Knave of Trumps,’ and President of the ‘Lodge of the Three Graces,’ which met at the ‘Black Bull’ to drink whisky and discuss women. While he was gone Emily’s birthday came round, and as usual she and Anne wrote their secret papers for each other, to be opened (on this occasion after three years) on July 30, 1848. In contrast with Charlotte’s pessimistic outlook Emily, though Branwell’s disgrace was so recent, appeared to be in exceedingly good spirits. She gives a short résumé of events, barely mentioning Charlotte, and a long account of her expedition with Anne and the doings of the Gondals. She says that in spite of all efforts the idea of the sisters keeping a school was ‘no go,’ and that she, personally, did not want it at all, thereby emphasising that it was Charlotte’s scheme all along; she says that the family were all well, but for Mr. Brontë’s trouble with his eyes, and for Branwell,

  who I hope will be better and do better hereafter. I am quite contented for myself; not as idle as formerly, altogether as hearty, and having learnt to make the most of the present and (not) long for the future with the fidgetiness that I cannot do all I wish; seldom or (n)ever troubled with nothing to do, and merely desiring that everybody could be as comfortable and as undesponding, and then we should have a very tolerable world of it.

  Anne’s corresponding paper, though not pitched in so robust a key, betokens a very tranquil mind. Her news in the main is much the same as Emily’s; her mention of Branw
ell almost verbally identical, though she possibly alludes to him again when, speaking of her situation at Thorp Green, she said that she had ‘some very unpleasant and undreamt-of experience of human nature.’

  Then there follows an interesting entry: ‘Charlotte is thinking about getting another situation. She wishes to go to Paris.’ But was it Paris that was her ultimate aim in wanting to go abroad again? Six months before she had written to M. Héger saying, ‘As soon as I have earned enough money to go to Brussels I shall go there,’ and later Dr. Paul Héger (M. Héger’s son) revised and passed an obituary notice of his father in L’Etoile Belge, which stated that Charlotte had written to the pensionnat asking leave to return there, and was refused. Possibly Charlotte’s wish to go to Paris cloaked another destination.

  Then we learn that Anne had begun the third volume of Passages in the Life of an Individual. ‘Volume,’ as we have noticed before, means no more than ‘notebook,’ but Anne by this time had certainly got some way into the writing of the book which eventually appeared as Agnes Grey. These few items of real information are islands in an ocean of the merest chatter, which however gives us a minute little still-life picture of this ‘dismal, cloudy wet evening’ at the Parsonage.

  Charlotte is sitting sewing in the dining-room. Emily is ironing upstairs. I am sitting in the dining-room in the rocking-chair by the fire with my feet on the fender. Papa is in the parlour. Tabby and Martha are, I think, in the kitchen. Keeper and Flossy are, I do not know where. Little Dick is hopping in his cage.... (Charlotte) has let Flossie in, by the by, and he is now lying on the sofa.... This afternoon I began to set about making my grey figured silk frock that was dyed at Keighley. What sort of a hand shall I make of it? E. (Emily) and I have a great deal of work to do. When shall we sensibly diminish it? I want to get a habit of early rising. Shall I succeed?