Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Now in September 1845, as we have seen, Branwell wrote to J. B. Leyland that he was writing a story. He gave an hour’s reading of the beginning of it to Leyland and Dearden: Dearden, when Wuthering Heights was published, recognised that the opening was what Branwell had read them. Branwell also read pieces to Sloane, who similarly recognised them; he affirmed to Grundy that he had written ‘a great portion’ of the book (which we decline to believe), and Grundy, when it came out, similarly recognised stories which Branwell had told him when a clerk at Luddenden Foot. My suggestion is that Messrs. Dearden, Leyland, Sloane and Grundy were not independent liars, who happened to hit on the same lie, but that Branwell planned with Emily a considerable part of the book and that he wrote and read to Leyland and Dearden the opening chapters, which make so awkward a misfit with the rest. We must also remember as a matter of evidential importance that Branwell’s letter to Leyland, saying that he had completed a volume — notebook — of his story, was dated September 10, 1845. Charlotte made the ‘discovery’ of Emily’s poems in the autumn of that year, and it was that which set going again the literary activities of the sisters. Emily (hitherto occupied with the Gondal History of the Emperor Julius) then took Wuthering Heights in hand with the connivance and collaboration of Branwell, retaining the first two chapters that open the book, which Branwell had already written.

  Dates, then, support the idea that what Branwell read his friends was the earliest chapters of Wuthering Heights. A more effective support is derived from the contents of those chapters which led to such awkwardnesses in the composition of the whole, and, in especial, from the style of them. Lockwood, at present the narrator, writes with the identical pomposity with which Branwell wrote to Southey, to Blackwood, and was now writing to his friends: he uses elaborate expressions and journalistic phrases, he employs a vast number of words derived from the Latin and Latin words; he displays a scholastic pretentiousness. Such sentences as these, all culled from those first two chapters, are characteristic of his style:

  I had no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting the penetralium.

  I detected a chatter of tongues and a clatter of culinary utensils.

  Imagining they (the dogs) would scarcely understand tacit insults, I unfortunately indulged in winking and making faces at the trio, and some turn of my physiognomy so irritated madam....

  Swayed by prudential considerations of the folly of offending a good tenant, he (Heathcliff) relaxed a little in the laconic style of chipping off his pronouns and auxiliary verbs.

  ‘Wretched inmates,’ I ejaculated mentally, ‘you deserve perpetual isolation from your species for your churlish inhospitality.’

  You are the favoured possessor of the beneficent fairy.

  A mingled guffaw from Heathcliff and Hareton put the cope-stone on my rage and humiliation.

  I ordered the miscreants to let me out, with several incoherent threats of retaliation that in their indefinite depth of virulency smacked of King Lear.

  Such extracts are typical of Lockwood’s style of writing when he opens the story of Wuthering Heights. Then he vanishes and is a mere listener to the lucid narrative of Nellie Dean. At the end of the book, when he takes up the story again, we should naturally expect him to resume the narrative style of the beginning; but what do we find?

  I lingered round them under that benign sky, watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

  Both the first two chapters and the end are supposedly Lockwood’s writing, but it is incredible that the same hand held the pen. The hand that wrote the pompous, swashbuckling but picturesque letter to John Brown beginning ‘Old Knave of Trumps,’ might easily have written the first two chapters of Wuthering Heights as narrated by Lockwood, Style 1, but never the conclusion by Lockwood, Style 2. No hand but one could have written that, or the narrative of Nellie Dean, or the wild moorland passion of the book, fierce and devouring, yet with hardly a touch of the flesh in it, and that was hers (not Branwell’s nor Charlotte’s), which had written thus of the power that possessed it:

  He comes with western winds, with evening’s wandering airs, With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars. Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire, And visions rise and change, that kill me with desire.

  To Branwell, then, we may assign these first two chapters, pompous and monstrous in style, with their Lockwood motif which once announced is heard no more, and then Emily took charge, but still in consultation with him. The ‘ruffianly bitch’ was his perhaps, so also, certainly, was the material for the half-savage country folk, such as Zillah and Joseph, whom he calls the ‘surly indigenæ.’ Charlotte herself, though fully believing that Emily wrote the book, as indeed she did, felt the difficulty of accounting for the intimate knowledge which she showed of Branwell’s indigenæ, for in her preface to the 1850 edition she says:

  I am bound to avow that she had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates ... except to go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home.

  How then could she have been able to draw them with that firm, minutely-etched delineation of their talk and their gestures that make them move and live before us in speech and habit and soul? But Branwell knew them; they were just the folk with whom he had always consorted at the ‘Black Bull,’ at the meetings of the ‘Lodge of the Three Graces,’ over interminable whisky-toddies, and his was the clay which he brought for Emily’s fashioning. He made his contributions too, as in the verbal coincidences already noted, the devil-eyes of Heathcliff, and Heathcliff’s ravings about the force of his love for Catherine compared with Linton’s, for just so did he rave about his passion for Mrs. Robinson, compared with her invalid husband’s tepidity and indifference. But of all this collaboration Charlotte knew nothing, just as she had known nothing about Emily’s poems till she had rifled her desk. The others had their secrets together, Emily and Anne played at Gondals, Emily and Branwell talked over Wuthering Heights. Branwell had begun it, and they retained those first two chapters, though that handicap entailed endless awkwardnesses in the rest of the telling.

  And Charlotte was the most solitary of them all. She had her heart’s secret which she shared with none, and, while her soul was filled with loathing for Branwell’s tipsy maunderings about the married woman for whom he had committed some ‘frantic folly,’ she could scarce help contrasting the indecency of such gabble with her own silent tortures of expectation when the post-hour drew near and the silent despair which followed, when it brought her no reply from M. Héger.

  CHAPTER XII

  Early in January 1846 there was a railway panic, following a railway boom. New companies had been floated with insufficient capital, and many unfortunate shareholders were ruined. The legacies which the three Brontë sisters had inherited from their aunt had been invested by Emily during Charlotte’s second sojourn in Brussels in the York and Midland Railway. This was a well-managed line with a sound financial basis, and in spite of the panic the capital value of the shares had been maintained. Charlotte was anxious that they should sell their shares and re-invest, though at a lower rate of interest, in something safer, but her sisters disagreed, and sooner than hurt Emily’s feelings she agreed to let her money stop where it was. ‘Disinterested and energetic (Emily) certainly is,’ so she wrote to Miss Wooler,’ and if she be not quite so tractable or open to conviction as I could wish, I must remember perfection is not the lot of humanity.’ A few years later Charlotte’s misgivings were justified, and she lost some considerable part of her legacy.

  A dreary account of Branwell follows in this letter, for to Miss Wooler as well as Ellen, Charlotte wrote her grim bulletins.

  He never thinks of seeking employment, and I begin to fear he has r
endered himself incapable of filling any respectable station in life; besides, if money were at his disposal he would only use it to his own injury: the faculty of self-government is, I fear, almost destroyed in him.

  She had already written to Ellen this month in the same strain. ‘Branwell offers no prospect of hope, he professes to be too ill to think of seeking for employment.’ And so throughout the spring it goes on, till one wearies of these incessant girdings, and bleeds for the unpitied brother more than for the pitiless sister. That complaint that he would not get a situation and thus rid Haworth of his odious, scarcely supportable presence, is always to the fore.

  I am thankful that papa is pretty well, though often made very miserable by Branwell’s wretched conduct. There — there is no change but for the worse,... You ask if we are more comfortable. I wish I could say anything favourable, but how can we be more comfortable so long as Branwell stays at home, and degenerates instead of improving? It has lately been intimated to him that he would be received again on the railroad where he was formerly stationed if he would behave more steadily but he refuses to make an effort; he will not work — and at home he is a drain on every resource — an impediment to all happiness....

  Intolerable as Branwell must have been, it is strange to find that his sister would sooner he went back to Luddenden Foot, where he had no companion of any sort but a porter, nor the slightest stimulus, ineffective though it seemed to be, of home and of relations to keep him from going more quickly and finally to ruin, than that he should be such an impediment at Haworth to all happiness. Nor was she right in saying that he made no effort to get employment, or that any such post had been offered him. Three times during this period did he beg his friend Grundy, an engineer on the line, to get him reappointed to some post, and each time his application was refused.

  No doubt in spite of the ruthlessness of her letters Charlotte tried to be more charitable towards him, but just as he was bound in those detestable chains that his weakness had so strongly wrought for him, so the very uprightness of her nature, the stern Puritanism of her principles, her revolt at the injustice of them all being made to suffer for his bestiality, fettered her capacity for pity. Something of this — this striving on both sides to do better than the self-indulgence of the one and the righteousness of the other permitted — appears in a certain statement which Branwell wrote down and read to his friend, Mr. George Searle Phillips, who came to see him at Haworth. The half-tipsy, self-pitying sentimentality of it is obvious and odious enough, but equally obvious is its underlying authenticity: nobody could have invented such a story. This is Mr. Phillips’s account:

  One of the Sunday-school girls in whom he and his house took much interest fell very sick, and they were afraid she would not live. ‘I went to see the poor little thing,’ Branwell said, ‘sat with her half an hour and read a psalm to her, and a hymn at her request. I felt very like praying with her too,’ he added, his voice trembling with emotion, ‘but, you see, I was not good enough. How dare I pray for another who had almost forgotten how to pray for myself! I came away with a heavy heart, for I felt sure she would die, and went straight home, where I fell into melancholy musings. I often do, but no kind word finds its way ever to my ears, much less to my heart. Charlotte observed my depression and asked what ailed me. So I told her. She looked at me with a look I shall never forget — if I live to be a hundred years old — which I never shall. It was not like her at all. It wounded me as if somebody had struck me a blow in the mouth. It involved so many things in it. It was a dubious look. It ran over me, questioning and examining, as if I had been a wild beast. It said, “Did my ears deceive me, or did I hear aright?” And then came the painful baffled expression, which was worse than all. It said, “I wonder if that’s true!” But as she left the room, she seemed to accuse herself of having wronged me, and smiled kindly upon me, and said, “She is my little scholar, and I will go and see her.” I replied not a word, I was too much cut up. When she was gone I came over here to the “Black Bull,” and made a note of it in sheer disgust and desperation. Why could they not give me some credit when I was trying to be good?’

  The reader’s first feeling, no doubt, is of nausea at this ‘nobody-loves-me’ attitude, at the maudlin self-pity, at the writer’s going straight to the ‘Black Bull’ to console himself in the usual manner and ‘make a note’ of his sister’s cruelty. But he writhed under her whips: her attitude to him is what we should gather from her letters to Ellen. And yet, sickened to the soul at him, she was trying to do better.

  Then there was Anne. Anne’s sincere piety, her gentleness, her sense of duty, made a strange harvesting from her brother’s failings. As soon as she had finished Agnes Grey she at once set to work on her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which is largely concerned with a drunken monomaniac: of its genesis and the history of its production Charlotte gives a full account.

  The choice of subject was an entire mistake. Nothing less congruous with the writer’s nature could be conceived. The motives which dictated the choice were pure, but, I think, morbid. She (Anne) had, in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate near at hand and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused ... what she saw sank very deeply into her mind, it did her harm. She brooded over it till she believed it to be her duty to reproduce every detail ... as a warning to others. She hated her work, but would pursue it. When reasoned with on the subject she regarded such reasonings as a temptation to self-indulgence. She must be honest; she must not varnish, soften or conceal. This well-meant resolution brought on her misconstruction and some abuse....

  There can be no question as to whom Anne contemplated ‘near at hand’ and ‘for a long time’; the ‘talents misused’ were his whose ‘talents misapplied’ Charlotte lamented after Branwell’s death, and we picture Anne, pious and gentle, industriously, from a sense of duty, making copy out of Branwell. Nor can there be any question who misconstructed her motives and abused her. Not Charlotte, who understood her motives, though she thought her choice of subject morbid, but Emily.... Again the picture of the quiet dining-room at the Parsonage outlines itself with a little terrible detail added.

  The three sisters were together to-night in the dining-room, and Anne had just told Emily who was the model for the drunken wastrel in her new book. She sat silent, conscious of the rectitude and high moral aim of her intentions, while Emily stormed at her for the brutality of it. Charlotte, too, was dissuasive; she thought she was morbid to dwell on such a theme. When they had finished, Anne merely said she knew she was doing right — they must not tempt her — and patiently resumed her work. The words came easily to-night, for there had been a horrid scene with Branwell, who came back reeling and hiccoughing from the ‘Black Bull.’

  Charlotte escaped sometimes from the home which, if we may judge from her letters, had become to her, from various causes, so dark an abode of hate and misery, and on which soon far blacker shadows were to fall. This spring she spent a fortnight with Ellen, and heard encouraging news about the operation for cataract. On her return she went to see her father, who was now nearly blind, and cheered him up by telling him how successful the operation now was, for he dreaded the idea; also it was a relief to him to know that he might wait for a few months yet before he need submit to it. Charlotte’s letter to Ellen continues:

  I went into the room where Branwell was, to speak to him, about an hour after I got home; it was very forced work to address him. I might have spared myself the trouble, as he took no notice, and made no reply: he was stupefied. My fears were not in vain. I hear that he had got a sovereign from papa while I have been away under pretence of paying a pressing debt; he went immediately and changed it at a public house, and employed it as was to be expected. Emily concluded her account by saying that he was a hopeless being: it is too true. In his present state it is scarcely possible to stay in the room where he is.

  This letter contains a sentence on which much has been built.
It has been argued that, because Emily called her brother ‘a hopeless being,’ she gave him up with the same completeness as Charlotte had done. This view is shared by Mr. Clement Shorter, who concludes that ‘by now (March 1846) Branwell had reached that stage of physical and moral wreckage when even his most broadminded sister had to give him up.’ He refers again to this expression of Emily’s and says: ‘The fact is that Branwell’s state at that time was such that Emily, being only human, could not possibly have been more tolerant, — and rightly so — than her two sisters....’ Now it is with the greatest reluctance that one differs from Mr. Shorter, whose patient and careful research and whose fair treatment of all available data about the lives of the Brontës makes him so eminent an authority, but surely this conclusion, built on so slender a foundation, is unwarranted. We rather picture Emily telling Charlotte how Branwell had got a sovereign under false pretences from his father and spent it in the usual way, adding, merely cursorily, ‘Oh, he’s a hopeless being!’ Such an interpretation seems more likely than to ascribe to Emily, on this phrase alone, a fixed and justifiable determination to have nothing more to do with him. It does not seem consistent with the nature of one who was ‘full of ruth for others,’ or who was indignant with Anne for using Branwell as a model for the drunken Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, now on the stocks. Moreover, there is rebutting evidence that rests on a more solid foundation than this surmise.