Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (529 page)

CHAPTER X.

BRANWELL BRONTË AND HIS SISTERS’ BIOGRAPHERS.

The Light in which Biographers have regarded Branwell — Bibliography — Mrs. Gaskell — The Causes which led her into Error — Resentment of Branwell’s Friends — Mr. George Searle Phillips — Branwell as Depicted by Mr. T. Wemyss Reid — Mr. F. H. Grundy’s Notice of Branwell — Miss A. Mary F. Robinson’s Portrait of Branwell.

It will be well here — before we reach the periods of Branwell’s life that have been misunderstood — to pause, in our sketch of the Brontë family, in order to consider certain circumstances regarding him, which it will be impossible for any future writer on the Brontës to disregard. It is especially necessary to consider them in a book which — while dealing with the Brontë sisters, their lives and their works — proposes, as a special aim, to make Branwell’s position clear. When Derwent Coleridge wrote the short biography of his father, which is prefixed to the poet’s works, he approached the subject in a somewhat regretful way, asking if the public has a right to inquire as to that part of a poet’s life which does not influence his fellow-men after death, and declaring that the privacy of the dead is sacred. He felt too keenly that the sanctity of Coleridge’s life had been broken in upon by those who lacked both accurate knowledge and just discretion. It is a source of sincere regret to the writer of this volume that he, too, is compelled by circumstances to treat a part of his work almost in a deprecatory spirit, and sometimes to assume the position of defence. For, if the failings of Coleridge have been discovered and fed upon by those whose curiosity leads them to delight in such things, what shall we say of Patrick Branwell Brontë, whose misdeeds have not only been sought out with a persistency worthy of a better cause, but have also been exaggerated and misrepresented to a great degree, and whose whole life, moreover, has been contorted by writers who have endeavoured to find in it some evidence for their own hypotheses? It has been the misfortune of Branwell that his life has, to some extent, been already several times written by those who have had some other object in view, and who, consequently, have not been studious to acquire a correct view of the circumstances of it. These writers, it will be seen, have therefore, perhaps unavoidably, fallen into many grievous errors regarding him, so that his name, at this day, has come to be held up as a reproach and even as a token of ignominy. If it be remembered that Mrs. Gaskell, in her ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë,’ describes him as a drunkard and an opium-eater, as one who rendered miserable the lives of his sisters, and might very well have shot his father; that Mr. T. Wemyss Reid, in his ‘Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph,’ has spoken of him as ‘this lost and degraded man;’ that Miss Robinson, in her ‘Emily Brontë,’ has called him a ‘poor, half-demented lonely creature,’ and has moralized upon his ‘vulgar weakness,’ his ‘corrupt and loathsome sentimentality,’ and his ‘maudlin Micawber penitence;’ and lastly that Mr. Swinburne, in a notice of the last-named work in the ‘Athenæum,’ has said, ‘of that lamentable and contemptible caitiff — contemptible not so much for his common-place debauchery as for his abject selfishness, his lying pretension, and his nerveless cowardice — there is far too much in this memoir;’ it may well appear that we have here a strange subject for a biography.

But, since the publication of Miss Robinson’s ‘Emily Brontë,’ — in which Branwell is specially degraded, — it has been felt by many admirers of the Brontës that it was desirable his life should be treated independently of the theories and necessities of his sisters’ biographers, and in a spirit not unfriendly to him; for there are many people who believe that Branwell’s genius has never been sufficiently recognized, and there are a few who know that, notwithstanding his many failings and misdeeds, the charges made against him are, not a few of them, wholly untrue, while many more are grossly exaggerated, and that his disposition and character have been wholly misrepresented. Having in my possession many of his letters and poems, and having been personally acquainted with him, I have undertaken the task of telling the story of his life in connection with the lives of his sisters, for I think that there is much in his strange and sad history that ought to be known, while sufficient evidence exists of his mental power to prove that he was a worthy member of the intellectual family to which he belonged. It may not be amiss here, in order to illustrate circumstances that will be alluded to in parts of this work, to touch slightly upon the bibliography of Branwell’s life, and endeavour to discover the causes which have contributed to the ill-repute in which he is generally held.

Mrs. Gaskell, who became acquainted with Charlotte Brontë after the deaths of her brother and sisters, when all that was most sorrowful in her life had been enacted, saw, or thought she saw, in her the evidences of a deep dejection, the result of a life passed under circumstances of misery and depression. In her ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë,’ this writer’s endeavour to trace the successive influences of the trials of Charlotte’s life upon her, and to find in them the explanation of what was, perhaps, in some measure, an idiosyncrasy of character, has led her, in the strength of her own preconception, to interpret many circumstances to the attestation of her theory. Such, at all events, is the explanation which Mr. T. Wemyss Reid has offered, in his ‘Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph,’ of the partial manner in which Mrs. Gaskell has dealt with certain of Miss Brontë’s letters. If we conceive Mrs. Gaskell writing with this preconception, tending to give undue weight to all that was unhappy in the history of her heroine, we need feel little surprise that her account of the lives of the Brontës is too often a gloomy one, that their isolation at Haworth, their poverty, and their struggles have been exaggerated, or that, in order to throw in a sombre background to her picture, she was unduly credulous in listening to those unfounded stories with which she made Mr. Brontë to appear, in act, at least, diabolical, and which have helped to depict the career of Patrick Branwell Brontë in such dark and tragic colours. She had heard at Haworth the story of his disgrace, his subsequent intemperance, and his death. Herein she believed was the great sorrow of the sisters’ minds, the care which had induced a morbid peculiarity in their writings, and cast a shadow upon their lives. Mrs. Gaskell seems to have thought it devolved upon her, not merely to picture beginnings of evil in the brother, and trace them to his ruin; but, also, to punish the lady whom she held responsible for what has been termed ‘Branwell’s fall.’ To this end she thought it right to lay at the lady’s door, in part, the premature deaths of the sisters; and, in sustaining the idea that the effect on them of the brother’s disgrace was what she believed it to be, she was led to employ partial versions of the letters, and exaggerate the whole course of Branwell’s conduct. Her book was read with astonishment by those whose characters were made to suffer by it, and she was obliged, in later editions, to omit the charges against the lady; and also those against Mr. Brontë. But Mrs. Gaskell still maintained that, whatever the cause, the effect was the same.

It was not believed at the time, by some, that, because Mrs. Gaskell had been obliged to withdraw the statements complained of, in the later editions of her work, they were necessarily untrue. Mr. Thackeray had said that the life was ‘necessarily incomplete, though most touching and admirable,’ and the original edition was still in circulation, and was pirated abroad.

The friends of Branwell Brontë, those who from actual acquaintance knew his mental power and real disposition, resented greatly the wrong that had been done to his memory; and several representations were made in his favour. One of these was in an article entitled: ‘A Winter’s Day at Haworth,’ published in ‘Chambers’s Journal,’ 1869. Mr. George Searle Phillips, in the ‘Mirror,’ of 1872, also published some valuable reminiscences which tended to show Branwell’s true elevation of character and gentleness of disposition.

The publication of Mr. Wemyss Reid’s ‘Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph,’ in the year 1877, while it called attention to the original view of Branwell’s life and character, did not aim to remove it. Mr. Reid repudiated, with success, the idea that the effect of Branwell’s career upon Charlotte and Emily was what Mrs. Gaskell represented it to have been, without expressing any dissent from the story itself. This writer does not, indeed, appear to have suspected that the explanation was to be found in the fact that Branwell was not so bad as he had been made to appear, or that Mrs. Gaskell had fallen into other errors besides those of the letters which he corrected. But, though Mr. Reid carefully avoided the reproduction of the details of Mrs. Gaskell’s account of Branwell’s life, what reference is made to him in the ‘Monograph,’ after the period of his youth, is always in terms of reprobation, which have done nothing to discourage belief in the suppressed scandal. Moreover, Mr. Reid revived some of the charges against Mr. Brontë, and painted a sinister portrait of him.

It was under these circumstances that Mr. F. H. Grundy, C.E., another friend of Branwell’s, in his ‘Pictures of the Past’ (1879), endeavoured to do some justice to his memory, and declared, notwithstanding his great failings, that his abilities were of a very high order, and his disposition one that should be admired. I have found Mr. Grundy’s materials of use in this work. But, unfortunately, this friend of Branwell’s wrote from recollection, and made such great mistakes in the chronology of his life that his account did not give a true interpretation of actual circumstances. Mr. Grundy, too, had evidently refreshed his memory with a perusal of Mrs. Gaskell’s volume, and so his information was considerably tinctured with that writer’s misconceptions. This notice had the very opposite effect to that which was intended, and has since been largely used by writers whose purpose has led them to rank Branwell with the fallen.

In Miss Robinson’s recently published ‘Emily Brontë,’ the scandal of Branwell’s life, which Mrs. Gaskell laid before the reading world, has been reproduced, and her evil report of his character greatly increased. ‘Why,’ it might well be asked, ‘should it be necessary to publish the records of a brother’s misdeeds as a conspicuous feature in a sister’s memoir? Why revive a scandal that has been so long suppressed?’ Miss Robinson has, indeed, given her reason, in that Branwell’s sins had so large a share in determining the bent of his sister’s genius, that ‘to have passed them by would have been to ignore the shock which turned the fantasy of the “poems” into the tragedy of “Wuthering Heights,”‘ and here, probably, is the only adequate purpose that could have been found in doing so; but it is scarcely sufficient to explain why Miss Robinson has, almost from her first mention of Branwell Brontë to her remarks on his death, treated every act of his life with contumely, censure, and contempt, or that she has, in opposition to every previous opinion, represented his abilities as almost void. While Mr. Reid suggested that Emily Brontë, in writing her novel, must have obtained some of her impressions from her brother’s conduct, Mr. Grundy had made a statement tending to show that Branwell had written a portion of the story himself. If Branwell’s abilities were no better than Miss Robinson says they were, she has disposed of Mr. Grundy’s assertion at once; but not the less does she employ other reasons for that end, and the degradation she has thought it necessary to show in Branwell, answers quite as much to prove the impossibility of his having written the work, as to picture the cause of brooding in Emily, under which she produced the tragedy of ‘Wuthering Heights.’

With views similar to those with which Mrs. Gaskell wrote, Miss Robinson, in following the biographer of Charlotte, has fallen into the same errors. In order to make it clear that the part Branwell had in the production of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ by his sister, was subjective, this writer has found it necessary to show in his life much of what is worst in the characters of the story. So completely has Miss Robinson carried out this portion of her work, that Mr. Swinburne was led to say, in his notice of it, that ‘Emily Brontë’s tenderness for the lower animals … was so vast as to include even her own miserable brother.’
 
 
But Miss Robinson has not succeeded so far without much unfairness to the victim of her theory, in omissions and errors of fact. I shall have occasion to treat at some length, later, Branwell’s relationship both to ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.’

I hope, indeed, to be able to prove that Branwell was (as all who personally knew him aver him to have been) a man of great and powerful intellectual gifts, to relieve his memory of much of the obloquy that has been heaped upon it, and to clearly show the remarkable individuality of his character. I shall find it necessary, in doing so, to take exception to the portions of Mrs. Gaskell’s ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë’ which deal with her brother, as to some extent I had to do to those which refer to Mr. Brontë. More especially, however, will it be necessary to deal with the fuller statements in the first edition of the work, and with their repetition and amplification in the more recent volumes of Mr. Reid and Miss Robinson.

I have thought it necessary to introduce these remarks in this place, in order that the reader, when he comes to the consideration of certain statements made by previous writers concerning Branwell, and his relationship with his sisters, may have a clear understanding of the views with which the works containing these statements have been written.