Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (542 page)

But at this period of his life Branwell is not known to have written much verse, his mind being otherwise occupied. The two following beautiful sonnets, however, are from his pen, dated May, 1845, and are, together, entitled:

THE EMIGRANT.

‘When sink from sight the landmarks of our home,

And, — all the bitterness of farewells o’er, —

We yield our spirit unto ocean’s foam,

And in the new-born life which lies before,

On far Columbian or Australian shore,

Strive to exchange time past for time to come:

How melancholy, then, if morn restore —

(Less welcome than the night’s forgetful gloom)

Old England’s blue hills to our sight again,

When we, our thoughts seemed weaning from her sky, —

That
pang
which wakes the almost silenced pain!

Thus, when the sick man lies, resigned to die,

A well-loved voice, a well-remembered strain,

Lets Time break harshly in upon Eternity.

When, after his long day, consumed in toil,

‘Neath the scarce welcome shade of unknown trees,

Upturning thanklessly a foreign soil,

The lonely exile seeks his evening ease, —

‘Tis not those tropic woods his spirit sees;

Nor calms, to him, that heaven, this world’s turmoil;

Nor cools his burning brow that spicy breeze.

Ah no! the gusty clouds of England’s isle

Bring music wafted on their stormy wind,

And on its verdant meads, night’s shadows lower,

While “Auld Lang Syne” the darkness calls to mind.

Thus, when the demon Thirst, beneath his power

The wanderer bows, — to feverish sleep consigned,

He hears the rushing rill, and feels the cooling shower.’

While Branwell’s mind was rendered bright by the sunny hopes of a happy future, he was enabled to write with pathos, coherency, and beauty, as is shown in the foregoing sonnets. But it was his misfortune that his mind was hung too finely upon the balance, and that, as the phantasy of his affections grew upon him, he became, as will hereafter be demonstrated, the victim of an ‘overheated and discursive imagination,’ and at last ‘betrayed that monomaniac tendency’ which Lucy Snowe says she ‘has ever thought the most unfortunate with which man or woman can be cursed.’ He became, in fact, almost as soon as the new passion had taken full possession of his heart, a miserable victim to that morbid tendency of the mind which, in far lesser degree, characterized his sister Charlotte, and of which she seems to have lived in occasional dread. It may be noted that when Lucy Snowe is seeking wildly the letter, which has been stolen away from her, she accuses herself of monomania. These mental perturbations grew upon Branwell day by day.

Time passed on; and, when he had been with his employer some two years and a half, during the concluding portion of which the control he had exercised over himself was giving way, he began to exhibit the strange irregularities of his disposition, and the irresistible fervour of his long-suppressed and feverish passion. Great patience and forbearance were exercised towards him by the lady of the house; and her sincere regard for the feelings of his family forbade her, on the first blush of the affair, to be the means of his dismissal from his employment. He was not, indeed, dismissed until the step became an absolute necessity. The banishment from his post was not, however, long delayed, for Branwell had lost his former self-control; and his imprudence overcame the reluctance of the lady, who at length made known to her husband, while Branwell was absent at home, on his holiday, in the July of 1845, what his conduct had been. A letter was at once sent to him by his employer, conveying the intimation of his dismissal.

We have been told much in Charlotte Brontë’s letters to her friend ‘E,’ and in the works of Mrs. Gaskell and other writers, concerning this event, which laid prostrate the hopes of Branwell, that requires both comment and correction. We have already seen to what a low state of mind and body Branwell was for a time reduced by his dismissal from Luddenden Foot; but his condition in both was as that of sound health, compared with his utter prostration on his expulsion from his last employment, — a condition which renders any adequate description impossible. He had, indeed, been supremely happy. For him, the sun of prosperity had shone with unsullied splendour, and the rivers of hope had flowed with music richer and deeper than any of earth. The roses that bloomed in the paradise of his fervid imagination, were brighter — and, as he thought, far more lasting — than those, far-famed, of Suristan, and the green pastures of his hopeful aspirations were more fertile and fragrant than he had ever thought possible to him in the years gone by. But, suddenly, the paradise which his poetic and imaginative spirit had created, was changed, without a moment’s warning, to a region of sleepless nights and wretched days, — ‘eleven continuous nights of sleepless horror’ he afterwards speaks of, — where his mind, dismayed and incoherent, reeled and shook in agony intense and ungovernable.

The distress of the Brontë family on this reverse of Branwell’s prospects can scarcely be conceived in its entirety. So deeply agonizing was the then state of his affairs, that they could think of nothing else; and, in their sorrow, had no heart to contemplate the future. It was under the immediate influence of this misery that Anne Brontë wrote her pathetic poem, ‘Domestic Peace,’ in which she deplores the changed conditions of the family. Charlotte had just returned home from a visit to her friend, and found her brother in the condition I have described. Thus she speaks of it, under the date of July the 31st, 1845: ‘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 very greatly shocked. He had last Thursday received a note from Mr. —
 
— , sternly dismissing him…. We have had sad work with him since. He thought of nothing but stunning or drowning his distressed mind. No one in the house could have rest, and at last we have been obliged to send him from home for a week with some one 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. We must all, I fear, prepare for a season of distress and disquietude. I cannot now ask Miss —
 
— or anyone else.’

Branwell’s distress had proved so really acute at the disgrace which had befallen him that Mr. Brontë, becoming alarmed for the consequences, decided to send his son away to new scenes in the hope of diverting his mind from the subject. That this was, to some extent, successful is evident from Branwell’s letter to his sister, in which his natural feelings and repentant disposition found expression. Branwell had remembered his former visit to Liverpool, and selected that place on this occasion, and sailed thence to the coast of Wales. The sad feelings that impressed him on the voyage were afterwards expressed in verse.

CHAPTER IV.

‘
BRANWELL’S FALL,’ AS SET FORTH IN THE BIOGRAPHIES OF HIS SISTERS.

Branwell after his Disappointment — Parallel for his State of Mind in that of Lady Byron — Mrs. Gaskell’s Misconceptions — True State of the Case — Charlotte Illustrates it in her Poem of ‘Preference’ — She alludes to Branwell’s Condition in ‘The Professor’ — Mrs. Gaskell Compelled to Omit her Account in the Later Editions of her Work — Branwell’s Prostration and Ill-health at the Time.

After the first shock to his feelings had been sustained, and, by its own intensity, toned down to less oppressive anguish and pain, a strange calm succeeded in Branwell, more agonizing and appalling to his friends than the stormy ebullitions which had preceded it. There is evidence that his family at this time misunderstood the actual state of his mind, and that their very anxiety about him caused them — but more especially Charlotte — to regard his acts, irresponsible though they might be, as inveterate offences and habitual sins. It has indeed been said by some that Charlotte did not afterwards speak to him for the space of two years.

The reproaches of his sister were probably as unwise as they were passionate, unmeasured, and, in outward semblance, unfeeling; yet they were censures pronounced in momentary anger, utterances of the deep affection she had for her brother, and of sincere sorrow for his unhappy, hopeless, and insane passion. But Branwell’s friends and acquaintances saw clearly that on one subject, and one only, his mind had given way; and that was in his conception of the undoubted love which the lady of his heart bore him. They also saw, notwithstanding this morbid perversion of the ordinary powers of his mind in one particular illusion, that he was not affected in his faculty of reasoning correctly and consistently on all other subjects. They knew, if the Brontë family did not, that Branwell’s mind, naturally morbid and depressed, had been unhinged by the sudden and unexpected ruin of his hopes; and that his heart and his intellect had been so far bruised and wounded, that for many of the acts done, and the things said, under the abiding grief which followed it, he was irresponsible. This will shortly appear.

The sisters did not, however, long remain in ignorance of the true state of Branwell’s mind. They became aware that he suffered from monomania touching the object of his sorrow, and the circumstance impressed them exceedingly. In several of their novels they have, indeed, dwelt upon this condition, and have lamented the misery and mental prostration which it entails. Lucy Snowe suffers from it severely, as I have mentioned. But, in ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,’ one of the characters charges Gilbert Markham — whose circumstances are precisely those of Branwell in regard to his love for a married lady — with monomania in this very matter; and, in ‘Wuthering Heights,’ speaking of the events that preceded Heathcliff’s death, Nelly Dean alleges that he suffers from monomania in his love for the wife of Edgar Linton. Branwell’s sisters, however, never took the tragic view of his conduct that impressed Mrs. Gaskell.

For a time Branwell could talk of nothing but of the lady to whom he was attached, and he made statements of circumstances regarding her which had no foundation but in his own heated imagination. The lady, he said, loved him to distraction. She was in a state of inconceivable agony at his loss. Her husband, cruel, brutal, and unfeeling, threatened her with his dire indignation, and deprivation of every comfort. Branwell, indeed, told his friend W —
 
— , by letter, that, in consequence of this persecution, the suffering lady ‘had placed herself under his protection!’ and many other stories, equally unfounded, extravagant, and impossible, were circulated. In a word, he went about among his friends, telling to each, in strict confidence, the woes under which he suffered, and painting in gloomy colours the miseries which the lady of his love had been compelled to undergo. If all other proof were wanting of the unsound state of Branwell’s mind on this one point, it would be enough, in all conscience, that he proclaimed abroad, of the lady he undertook to protect, circumstances that must infallibly redound to her infamy; and which, indeed, in the hands of injudicious persons, gave rise to the public scandal of his life, and ultimately made his name, and that of the lady whom he had loved and traduced in the same breath, of reproach among men.
  

For Branwell’s state of mind at this time, and for the circumstances that followed upon it, we have an exact parallel in the case of Lady Byron, after her separation from her husband. This unhappy lady, living in retirement with her friends, had maintained, for more than five years after the poet’s death, relations of the most friendly nature with his sister, the Honourable Mrs. Leigh. But, at the end of that period, weakened by misfortunes and by brooding upon particular evils, her mind gave way on one point; and she made, in the full belief of their truth, the most horrible of charges against her dead husband and his sister. These charges were, by some people, believed for a time; but a very little reflection showed that Lady Byron’s mind must have been unhinged, for all the acts of her life went to disprove the statements she made. It was not in the nature of things possible that she could remain on affectionate terms with her sister-in-law, had she known — as in her monomania she asserted she did — the utter depth of that sister-in-law’s imagined infamy. But it is not to be supposed that the unhappy lady was visibly insane; she was, on the contrary, as all remarked, gifted with a clear and accurate observation, with a lucid and logical method of thought, and with an expression more than ordinarily calm and natural.

It was precisely the same with Branwell Brontë; for, when the paroxysm of his grief was over, though he was ordinarily calm and his thoughts always clear and logical, strange impressions and misinterpretations of facts grew upon him, and he made, with all the certainty of belief, statements of circumstances relating to the lady of his dearest affections, redounding to her shame — which, had he been of sound mind, he must not only have known to be false, but would have carried, had they been true, in secrecy to the grave.

Just, too, as Lady Byron whispered the story of her woes in strict faith to many people, so did Branwell Brontë make confidants of several friends, revealing to each the extent of his misfortunes. And, further, just as the story circulated by Lady Byron was confided among others to good, honest, well-meaning Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who, conceiving herself to be the chosen champion of oppressed virtue, rushed into print, in ‘Macmillan’ of September, 1869, with the literary
bonne-bouche
she had received; so did Mrs. Gaskell, clad in like panoply, with anger far over-riding discretion, publish to the world the scandal she had collected from the busy
gobe-mouches
of Haworth, to the utter undoing of the fair fame of Patrick Branwell Brontë, and of the lady on whom he had fixed his hopeless affection. The scandal which was spread about Lord Byron, through the delusions of his wife, was very soon overthrown; but that with which Branwell was concerned, though thirty-seven years have passed over his grave, has been republished and is still believed — all the biographers of his sisters having, with one accord, consigned his name to obloquy and contempt.

The stories originated by Branwell lost nothing in their circulation, but they gained immensely; and years had made the tales of disappointed love into scandals unfit to be detailed, when Mrs. Gaskell, eager for information, visited Haworth, and collected materials for her work from too-willing hands, who added their own embellishments to the original statements of Branwell.

In order to show how far Mrs. Gaskell deviated from the right direction in her account of these circumstances, it will be better to place before the reader much of what she has said in direct reference to it, so that the whole matter may be made plain; and, before he closes this book, he will probably be convinced that she was wholly misled in her version of the story.

Mrs. Gaskell writes: ‘All the disgraceful details 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 mere 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 professions held good. There was a strange lingering of conscience, when, meeting her clandestinely by appointment at Harrogate some months after, 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. The case presents the reverse of the usual features: the man became the victim; the man’s life was blighted, and crushed out of him by suffering, and guilt entailed by guilt; the man’s family were stung by keenest shame. The woman — to think of her father’s pious name — the blood of honourable families mixed in her veins — her early home, underneath whose roof-tree sat those whose names are held saint-like for their good deeds, — she goes flaunting about to this day in respectable society; a showy woman for her age; kept afloat by her reputed wealth. I see her name in county papers, as one of those who patronize the Christmas balls; and I hear of her in London drawing-rooms. Now let us read, not merely of the suffering of her guilty accomplice, but of the misery she caused to innocent victims, whose premature deaths may, in part, be laid at her door.’
  

Mrs. Gaskell further states: ‘A few months later the invalid husband of the woman with whom he had intrigued, died. Branwell had been looking forward to this event with guilty hope. 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 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; he remembered the criminal advances she had made; 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.’
  

As Mrs. Gaskell had formed no conception of the possible state of Branwell’s mind, she seems to have known no reason for doubting the absolute truth of what she had heard; and, with an overweening confidence, and with no deficient expression of righteous indignation, she deals with the episode in this startling manner.

In support of the charges thus made, Mrs. Gaskell refers to the contents of the will of the lady’s husband, by which, she says, what property he left to his wife was so left on the condition that she never saw Branwell again; and she adds that, on the death of her husband, the lady sent her coachman to Haworth; for, at the very time when the will was being read, she did not know but that Branwell might be on his way to her. Mrs. Gaskell furthers says that, after the interview with the coachman, Branwell was found utterly prostrated by the intimation that he must never again even see the lady whom he thought he might then marry.
  

The biographer of Charlotte, having obtained her information from the floating rumours of Haworth, formed an inconsiderate, erroneous, and hasty opinion on this affair and its supposed consequences. But she found many circumstances in the proceedings of Branwell and his sisters which failed to corroborate her views, and that were, in fact, at variance with what would naturally have been expected had Branwell’s misconduct really been of so deep a dye as she states. In order to bring out fully the force of what she here says, Mrs. Gaskell had, previously, as we have seen, in speaking of Charlotte’s stay in Brussels eighteen months before, alluded to intelligence from home calculated to distress Charlotte exceedingly with fears respecting Branwell. Yet, in the January of 1844, shortly after her return from Brussels, Charlotte told her friend ‘E’ that Anne and Branwell were ‘both wonderfully valued in their situations.’ And again, writing of the year 1845, Mrs. Gaskell says: ‘He was so beguiled by this mature and wicked woman, that he went home for his holidays reluctantly, stayed there as short a time as possible, perplexing and distressing them all by his extraordinary conduct — at one time in the highest spirits; at another, in the deepest depression — accusing himself of blackest guilt and treachery, without specifying what they were; and altogether evincing an irritability of disposition bordering on insanity. Charlotte and her sister suffered acutely from his mysterious behaviour … an indistinct dread was creeping over their minds that he might turn out their deep disgrace.’
  
And it must be added that, when in the expurgated edition the opening of this passage was omitted, Mrs. Gaskell inserted — following where she ascribes to the sisters an ‘indistinct dread,’ — these words: ‘caused partly by his own conduct, partly by expressions of agonizing suspicion in Anne’s letters home.’
  
But we know, from Charlotte’s letter to her friend, that, when she had returned home and found Branwell ill, which she says he was often, she was not therefore shocked at first, but, when Anne informed her of the immediate cause of his present illness, she was very greatly shocked, showing clearly enough that Branwell’s dismissal and its cause were a complete surprise to her when she heard of them. How, then, could Anne’s letters home have contained expressions of ‘agonizing suspicion’?