Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (552 page)

CHAPTER XII.

BRANWELL’S FAILINGS. — PUBLICATION OF ‘JANE EYRE.’

Novel-writing — The Sisters’ Method of Work — Branwell’s Failing Health and Irregularities — ’Jane Eyre’ — Its Reception and Character — It was not Influenced by Branwell — Letter and Sketches of Branwell, 1848.

But, at this time, neither ‘Wuthering Heights’ nor ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ was before the public. It was not, indeed, till the summer of 1847 that the former, with ‘Agnes Grey,’ was accepted for publication. Meanwhile Anne was toiling away at her second book, and Charlotte was writing ‘Jane Eyre,’ under spells of inspiration.

Mrs. Gaskell has told us that the sisters were wont to put away their work at nine o’clock, and to walk about the sitting-room, talking over the plots of their stories, and discussing the incidents of them. Once or twice a week each was accustomed to read to the others what she had written, and hear the opinions they passed upon it. Mr. Brontë retired early to rest, and was in ignorance of the nature of the work going on, for his daughters never spoke to him of it, any more than they did to their friends. The writing of the sisters was, in fact, a secret shared only by their brother Branwell, who unquestionably gave his advice upon it, and instructed them on many points, besides, of practical value in their dealings with publishers and literary men, which their small knowledge of the world caused them to overlook.

But, at the time, Branwell’s health was visibly failing, and it became evident that, though naturally stronger than his sisters, he was not exempt from the consumptive tendency of his family. All his endeavours to obtain employment had proved futile. His physical health had long been giving way, and this soon rendered him incapable of sustained exertion. Much of his strange conduct arose probably from the reaction of this weakness on a mind endowed with so much intellectual power.

In most winters on these Yorkshire hills there are spells of severe frost and cold, and these were always times of suffering to the Brontës. Influenza would become epidemic at Haworth, and seldom neglected the inmates of the parsonage, close by the churchyard as the house was. Mr. Brontë had struggled hard to have proper drainage introduced into the village, but in vain. There was, indeed, ‘such a series of North-pole days’ in the December of 1846, as Charlotte did not remember; the sky looked like ice, and the wind was as keen as a two-edged blade. The consequence was that all the house was laid up with coughs and colds. Anne suffered from asthma; Mr. Brontë and Branwell had influenza and cough. Anxiously must they have watched every indication of change in the wind, and longed for the southwest breezes that, even in winter, sometimes came over the moors with all the softness of spring; and, on this occasion, they were not long disappointed, and Anne became much better. The novel writing went on as before. Branwell’s weakness and failings sometimes broke in upon this employment, but we do not find that, during the year 1847, he gave such trouble as would be likely to influence his sisters’ work. Of course he had little or no money at hand, and we know that he had contracted some small obligations during the period of distraction of the previous year. The result of this was that a sheriff’s-officer arrived at Haworth, and Branwell’s debts had to be paid, whereat his sister Charlotte seems to have been very angry, for she appears afterwards to accuse herself of being ‘too demonstrative and vehement.’ About three months later Charlotte was again in doubt about Branwell; she says his behaviour was ‘extravagant,’ and that he dropped ‘mysterious hints,’ which led her to believe that he had contracted further debts. In this, however, she was mistaken.

In the May of 1847, Charlotte invited ‘E.’ to visit her, and said that Branwell was quieter, for the good reason that he had got to the end of a considerable sum of money he became possessed of in the spring, and was obliged to restrict himself in some degree. ‘You must,’ she continues, ‘expect to find him weaker in mind, and the complete rake in appearance. I have no apprehension of his being uncivil to you; on the contrary, he will be as smooth as oil.’ It would appear that he had had some sum laid out, which he then recovered; but, as we have seen, he had got into debt before, and, in his alarm at the prospect of imprisonment in York Castle, it is said, told his friends, in the neighbourhood where he had been tutor, of his straits; upon which the widow of his late employer sent him money in kindness of heart, through a third person. At this period he expended much of his time at home in reading, and he wrote several poems.

At the end of July, Charlotte, as we have been told, consulted her brother as to the reason why Messrs. Smith and Elder, to whom she had sent ‘The Professor,’ did not reply. He at once set it down to her not having enclosed a postage stamp. On the 2nd of August, she wrote again, and promptly received the considerate answer which encouraged her to send to them, on the twenty-fourth of the same month, her three-volume work, ‘Jane Eyre.’ This was accepted, and given to the world in the following October. Meanwhile, in the beginning of August, ‘E.’ had paid her visit to the parsonage, and the friends had enjoyed the glorious weather in walking on the moors. Charlotte had returned the visit almost immediately, and the proofs of ‘Jane Eyre’ were corrected by her during her absence, sitting even at the same table with her friend, to whom, curiously enough, she said not a word about the work in hand. Upon her return to Haworth, she wrote: ‘I reached home, and found all well. Thank God for it.’ ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Agnes Grey’ still lingered in the hands of the publisher, from whom the authors had obtained but impoverishing terms; ‘a bargain,’ says Mrs. Gaskell, in mentioning the circumstance, ‘to be alluded to further.’ Nothing more, however, appears in the ‘Life of Charlotte’ on the subject; and we may hope that the celebrity which the novels of the ‘Messrs. Bell’ soon acquired, made a substantial difference in the first terms of the agreement. During the next three months, Charlotte was in correspondence with Messrs. Smith and Elder, Mr. G. H. Lewes, and Mr. W. S. Williams, in respect of the reviews of ‘Jane Eyre,’ which were then appearing.

‘Jane Eyre’ came upon the reading world of 1847 as a veritable revelation. It was a tragic story of the feelings, so different in character from the trite affectations of the commonplace novel of the day; it was informed with such a passionate energy, and filled with such soul-absorbing interests, that it was received at once as a monument of great and undoubted genius. Reading the book to-day, we can easily understand why Charlotte Brontë gained such a mastery over the spirits of her time, and earned for herself an imperishable renown. She would do the same now. The strange, lonely, unfriended childhood of Jane Eyre, the experiences she undergoes at Gateshead, and at the Lowood School, and her confidence and self-reliance through them all, mark the story as vitally true; but, when this plain little personage manifests the depths of her feelings, and calls forth our human sympathies in her hopes and her sorrows; when we read the terrific tragedy of her relationship with Rochester, and are shaken with the storm and stress of the feelings that move her; when, above all, we see her come out from the shadow, with her nobility and purity unsullied, though once more she is friendless and alone, we are carried beyond ourselves in admiration of the genius who has painted a picture at once so truly human and so very strange.

‘Jane Eyre,’ the book, was the natural and unforced outcome of its author’s personality, and, though Jane Eyre, the character, is not Charlotte Brontë in the sense in which Lucy Snowe is, yet in Charlotte Brontë were all the powers and capabilities that moved Jane Eyre. This book, then, came upon people in 1847 as a revelation; they felt themselves in the hands of a very Titan, and were carried on by an uncontrollable stream. But there were some amongst them who struggled against its influence, when they found that the shallow bounds of conventionality had been far overpassed, and when they saw that its author was little skilled in the ways of the world. These revolted against the power that made them, perforce, interested in a character, in Rochester, who had fallen away from the high Christian ideal. Hence arose that outcry against what was termed the ‘immorality’ of the book, against its ‘coarseness,’ its ‘laxity of tone,’ and the ‘heathenish doctrine of religion’ that filled it, which gave such pain, in the parsonage at Haworth, to the simple-minded girl, its author, against whom the dictum of the ‘Quarterly Review’ was written: ‘If we ascribe the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has for some sufficient reason long forfeited the society of her own sex.’

But such critics as these forgot that the people whom we love most in life, are not those who are supremely noble, absolutely perfect, superhuman, and angelic; but those who are beautiful and true in spite of their failings, and though clogged with all the faults with which our humanity has laden them; those who, like the child in Wordsworth’s ode, live ‘trailing clouds of glory’ with them from divinity, in the midst of the shame and sin of the world. These are the lights which illumine ‘Jane Eyre,’ with a loveliness that is truly and perfectly human. So the book made its way, after the wild fervour of its first reception, to a pinnacle in English literature where it must ever remain, as the work of a great and original genius, and, as we now know, of a true and noble woman.

Small need was there, then, that Mrs. Gaskell should seek to explain those features of Charlotte’s genius, which brought down upon ‘Jane Eyre’ and its author such expressions of blame as these, by references to her brother’s character and history, as she understood them. Whatever may have been the case with the novels of Emily and Anne, those of Charlotte were clearly the outcome of her own nature and of her own experience, and were uninfluenced in one way or other by her brother. If she takes a suggestion from his affairs at all, she deals with it coldly or sternly. Take for instance that passage I have quoted from ‘The Professor,’ where William Crimsworth speaks of his recollection of an instance of domestic treachery.

In December, 1847, appeared the works of Ellis and Acton Bell. The Christmas of that year found the three sisters noted in the world of authors — Currer Bell, famous. Not often can so much be recorded of a family. Branwell seems to have been considerably elated by their success, and the festivities of the season were indulged in by him to his injury. His feeble health was soon affected by things that would have had little influence upon ordinarily strong men, and he suffered the consequences. On the 11th of January, 1848, Charlotte writes: — ‘We have not been very comfortable here at home lately. Branwell has, by some means, continued to get more money from the old quarter, and has led us a sad life…. Papa is harassed day and night; we have little peace; he is always sick; has two or three times fallen down in fits; what will be the ultimate end, God knows. But who is without their drawback, their scourge, their skeleton behind the curtain? It remains only to do one’s best, and endure with patience what God sends.’ In this month the second edition of ‘Jane Eyre’ appeared.

It must have been in reference to this period that Mrs. Gaskell has said it might well have happened that Branwell had shot his father. But the statement is an exaggeration; and, indeed, I have been told, both by Martha Brown and Nancy Wainwright, that Branwell was not nearly so bad as Mrs. Gaskell has made him appear. ‘If he had wanted to shoot his father,’ says my informant, ‘he could easily have done it, for there were loaded guns and pistols hung over the bed-room door constantly.’ She relates that, on one occasion, she was occupied in tidying up the bed-room, and had just taken down the fire-arms to dust, when Mr. Brontë entered the room in great consternation, forbidding her, at any time thenceforth, on any account whatever, to meddle with them, for they were loaded even then, and might have been accidentally discharged to her own danger. He again hung up the arms himself. Mr. Brontë carried on this singular practice, and could not be induced to discontinue it; and, as the reader is aware, Branwell and his father occupied this bed-room.

Branwell himself was very conscious of his failings at this time, and somewhat ashamed of them. He writes to Leyland during the January of 1848: ‘I was
really
far enough from well when I saw you last week at Halifax; and, if you should happen to see Mrs. —
 
— of —
 
— , you would greatly oblige me by telling her that I consider her conduct towards me as most kind and motherly, and that, if I did anything during temporary illness, to offend her, I deeply regret it, and beg her to take my regret as my apology till I see her again; which I trust will be ere long.’ He continues, speaking in general terms of his literary work, and his poems, mentioning especially the poem of ‘Caroline,’ which he had written a long time before, and concludes by promising a longer letter later on.

There is prefixed to this letter a drawing, one of the strangest that Branwell ever made, — which he advises his friend to destroy, — a portrait of himself, head and shoulders, vigorously executed with the pen, and an admirable likeness too, in profile, grave and thoughtful, wearing his spectacles, but a portrait of Branwell in what a plight! For, just as the martyrs of old are represented with the knife planted in their breast, and the rope placed round their neck, so has Branwell pictured himself, with the halter about his throat, in the morbid martyrdom of his feverish imagination.