They say that he struggled to his feet and died standing, to prove the
strength of his will; but some biographer has robbed him of this poor
splendour. It was enough for his sisters--and it should be enough for
anybody--that his madness left him with the onset of his illness, and
that he went from them penitent and tender, purified by the mystery and
miracle of death.

That was on Sunday, the twenty-fourth of September. From that day Emily
sickened. She caught cold at Branwell's funeral. On September the
thirtieth she was in church listening to his funeral sermon. After that,
she never crossed the threshold of the Parsonage till in December her
dead body was carried over it, to lie beside her brother under the
church floor.

In October, a week or two after Branwell's death, Charlotte wrote:
"Emily has a cold and cough at present." "Emily's cold and cough are
very obstinate. I fear she has pain in her chest, and I sometimes catch
a shortness in her breathing when she has moved at all quickly." In
November: "I told you Emily was ill, in my last letter. She has not
rallied yet. She is very ill.... I think Emily seems the nearest thing
to my heart in all the world." And in December: "Emily suffers no more
from pain or weakness now ... there is no Emily in time, or on earth
now.... We are very calm at present. Why should we be otherwise? The
anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of
death is gone by: the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No
need to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not
feel them. She died in a time of promise.... But it is God's will, and
the place where she has gone is better than that which she has left."

It could have been hardly daylight on the moors the morning when
Charlotte went out to find that last solitary sprig of heather which she
laid on Emily's pillow for Emily to see when she awoke. Emily's eyes
were so drowsed with death that she could not see it. And yet it could
not have been many hours later when a fire was lit in her bedroom, and
she rose and dressed herself. Madame Duclaux[A] tells how she sat before
the fire, combing her long, dark hair, and how the comb dropped from her
weak fingers, and fell under the grate. And how she sat there in her
mortal apathy; and how, when the servant came to her, she said dreamily:
"Martha, my comb's down there; I was too weak to stoop and pick it up."

[Footnote A: "Emily Brontë": _Eminent Women Series_.]

She dragged herself down to the sitting-room, and died there, about two
o'clock. She must have had some horror of dying in that room of death
overhead; for, at noon, when the last pains seized her, she refused to
be taken back to it. Unterrified, indomitable, driven by her immortal
passion for life, she fought terribly. Death took her as she tried to
rise from the sofa and break from her sisters' arms that would have laid
her there. Profoundly, piteously alienated, she must have felt that Anne
and Charlotte were in league with death; that they fought with her and
bound her down; and that in her escape from them she conquered.

Another month and Anne sickened. As Emily died of Branwell's death, so
Emily's death hastened Anne's. Charlotte wrote in the middle of
January: "I can scarcely say that Anne is worse, nor can I say she is
better.... The days pass in a slow, dull march: the nights are the test;
the sudden wakings from restless sleep, the revived knowledge that one
lies in her grave, and another, not at my side, but in a separate and
sick bed." And again in March: "Anne's decline is gradual and
fluctuating, but its nature is not doubtful." And yet again in April:
"If there were no hope beyond this world ... Emily's fate, and that
which threatens Anne, would be heartbreaking. I cannot forget Emily's
death-day; it becomes a more fixed, a darker, a more frequently
recurring idea in my mind than ever. It was very terrible. She was torn,
conscious, panting, reluctant, though resolute, out of a happy life."

Mrs. Oliphant has censured Emily Brontë for the manner of her dying. She
might as well have censured Anne for drawing out the agony. For Anne was
gentle to the end, utterly submissive. She gave death no trouble. She
went, with a last hope, to Scarborough, and died there at the end of
May. She was buried at Scarborough, where she lies alone. It is not easy
to believe that she had no "preference for place", but there is no doubt
that even to that choice of her last resting-place she would have
submitted--gently.

"I got here a little before eight o'clock. All was clean and bright,
waiting for me. Papa and the servants were well, and all received me
with an affection that should have consoled. The dogs seemed in strange
ecstasy. I am certain that they regarded me as the harbinger of others.
The dumb creatures thought that as I was returned, those who had been so
long absent were not far behind.... I felt that the house was all
silent, the rooms were all empty. I remembered where the three were
laid--in what narrow, dark dwellings--never more to reappear on
earth.... I cannot help thinking of their last days, remembering their
sufferings, and what they said and did, and how they looked in mortal
affliction.... To sit in a lonely room, the clock ticking loud through a
still house...." Charlotte could see nothing else before her.

It was July. She had come home after a visit to Miss Nussey.

In that month she wrote that chapter of _Shirley_ which is headed "The
Valley of the Shadow". The book (begun more than eighteen months before)
fairly quivers with the shock that cut it in two.

It was finished somewhere in September of that year of Anne's death.
Charlotte went up to London. She saw Thackeray. She learned to accept
the fact of her celebrity.

Somehow the years passed, the years of Charlotte's continuous celebrity,
and of those literary letters that take so disproportionate a part in
her correspondence that she seems at last to have forgotten; she seems
to belong to the world rather than to Haworth. And the world seems full
of Charlotte; the world that had no place for Emily. And yet _Wuthering
Heights_ had followed _Shirley_. It had been republished with
Charlotte's introduction, her vindication of Emily. It brought more fame
for Charlotte, but none--yet--for Emily.

Two years later came _Villette_. Charlotte went up to London a second
time and saw Thackeray again. And there were more letters, the admirable
but slightly self-conscious letters of the literary woman, artificially
assured. They might deceive you, only the other letters, the letters to
Ellen Nussey go on; they come palpitating with the life of Charlotte
Brontë's soul that had in it nothing of the literary taint. You see in
them how, body and soul, Haworth claims her and holds her, and will not
let her go.

Nor does she desire now to be let go. Her life at Haworth is part of
Emily's life; it partakes of the immortality of the unforgotten dead.
London and Thackeray, the Smiths, Mrs. Gaskell, and Miss Martineau, Sir
John and Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, her celebrity and the little train of
cheerful, unfamiliar circumstances, all these things sink into
insignificance beside it. They are all extraneous somehow, and out of
keeping. Nothing that her biographers have done (when they have done
their worst) can destroy or even diminish the effect her life gives of
unity, of fitness, of profound and tragic harmony. It was Mrs. Gaskell's
sense of this effect that made her work a masterpiece.

And in her marriage, at Haworth, to her father's curate, Arthur
Nicholls, the marriage that cut short her life and made an end of her
celebrity, Charlotte Brontë followed before all things her instinct for
fitness, for unity, for harmony. It was exquisitely in keeping. It did
no violence to her memories, her simplicities and sanctities. It found
her in the apathy of exhaustion, and it was yet one with all that was
passionate in her and undying. She went to it one morning in May, all
white and drooping, in her modest gown and that poor little bridal
bonnet with its wreath of snowdrops, symbolic of all the timidities, the
reluctances, the cold austerities of spring roused in the lap of winter,
and yet she found in it the secret fire of youth. She went to it afraid;
and in her third month of marriage she still gives a cry wrung from the
memory of her fear. "Indeed, indeed, Nell, it is a solemn and strange
and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife."

And yet for all that, after London, after fame and friendships in which
her dead had no share, her marriage was not the great departure; it was
the great return. It was the outcome of all that had gone before it; the
fruit of painful life, which is recognition, acceptance, the final trust
in destiny. There were to be no more false starts, no more veiled ghosts
of the cross-roads, pointing the disastrous way.

And in its abrupt and pitiful end her life rang true; it sustained the
tragic harmony. It was the fulfilment of secret prophecies, forebodings,
premonitions, of her reiterated "It was not to be." You may say that in
the end life cheated and betrayed her.

And inevitably; for she had loved life, not as Emily loved it, like an
equal, with power over it and pride and an unearthly understanding,
virgin and unafraid. There was something slightly subservient,
consciously inferior, in Charlotte's attitude to life. She had loved it
secretly, with a sort of shame, with a corroding passion and incredulity
and despair. Such natures are not seldom victims of the power they would
propitiate. It killed her in her effort to bring forth life.

When the end came she could not realize it. For the first time she was
incredulous of disaster. She heard, out of her last stupor, her husband
praying that God would spare her, and she whispered, "Oh, I am not going
to die, am I? He will not separate us; we have been so happy."

You can see her youth rising up beside that death-bed and answering,
"That is why."

And yet, could even Charlotte's youth have been so sure as to the
cheating and betrayal? That happiness of hers was cut short in the
moment of its perfection. She was not to suffer any disenchantment or
decline; her love was not to know any cold of fear or her genius any
fever of frustration. She was saved the struggle we can see before her.
Arthur Nicholls was passionately fond of Charlotte. But he was hostile
to Charlotte's genius and to Charlotte's fame. A plain, practical,
robust man, inimical to any dream. He could be adorably kind to a sick,
submissive Charlotte. Would he have been so tender to a Charlotte in
revolt? She was spared the torture of the choice between Arthur Nicholls
and her genius. We know how she would have chosen. It is well for her,
and it is all one to literature, that she died, not "in a time of
promise", but in the moment of fulfilment.

       *       *       *       *       *

No. Of these tragic Brontës the most tragic, the most pitiful, the most
mercilessly abused by destiny, was Anne. An interminable, monstrous
exile is the impression we get of Anne's life in the years of her
girlhood. There is no actual record of them. Nobody kept Anne's letters.
We never hear her sad voice raised in self-pity or revolt. It is
doubtful if she ever raised it. She waited in silence and resignation,
and then told her own story in _Agnes Grey_. But her figure remains dim
in her own story and in the classic "Lives". We only know that she was
the youngest, and that, unlike her sisters, she was pretty. She had
thick brown curling hair, and violet-blue eyes, and delicate dark
eyebrows, and a skin rose and white for her sisters' sallow, that must
have given some ominous hint of fever. This delicate thing was broken on
the wheel of life. They say of Anne perpetually that she was "gentle".
In Charlotte's sketch of her she holds her pretty head high, her eyes
gaze straight forward, and you wonder whether, before the breaking
point, she was always as gentle as they say. But you never see her in
any moment of revolt. Her simple poems, at their bitterest, express no
more than a frail agony, an innocent dismay. That little raising of the
head in conscious rectitude is all that breaks the long plaint of _Agnes
Grey_.

There is no piety in that plaint. It is purely pagan; the cry of youth
cheated of its desire. Life brought her no good gifts beyond the slender
ineffectual beauty that left her undesired. Her tremulous, expectant
womanhood was cheated. She never saw so much as the flying veil of joy,
or even of such pale, uninspired happiness as she dreamed in _Agnes
Grey_. She was cheated of her innocent dream.

And by an awful irony her religion failed her. She knew its bitterness,
its terrors, its exactions. She never knew its ecstasies, its flaming
mysteries, nor, even at her very last, its consolations. Her tender
conscience drew an unspeakable torment from the spectacle of her
brother's degradation.

For it was on Anne, who had no genius to sustain her, that poor
Branwell, with the burden of his destiny, weighed most hard. It was Anne
at Thorp Green who had the first terrible misgivings, the intolerable
premonitions.

That wretched story is always cropping up again. The lady whom Mrs.
Gaskell, with a murderous selection of adjectives, called "that mature
and wicked woman", has been cleared as far as evidence and common sense
could clear her. But the slander is perpetually revived. It has always
proved too much for the Brontë biographers. Madame Duclaux published it
again twenty years after, in spite of the evidence and in spite of Mrs.
Gaskell's retractation. You would have thought that Branwell might have
been allowed to rest in the grave he dug for himself so well. But no,
they will not let him rest. Branwell drank, and he ate opium; and, as if
drink and opium and erotic madness were not enough, they must credit
him with an open breach of the seventh commandment as well. M. Dimnet,
the most able of recent critics of the Brontës, thinks and maintains
against all evidence that there was more in it than Branwell's madness.
He will not give up the sordid tragedy _à trois_. He thinks he knows
what Anne thought of Branwell's behaviour, and what awful secret she was
hinting at, and what she told her sisters when she came back to Haworth.
He argues that Anne Brontë saw and heard things, and that her testimony
is not to be set aside.

What did Anne Brontë see and hear? She saw her brother consumed by an
illegitimate passion; a passion utterly hopeless, given the nature of
the lady. The lady had been kind to Anne, to Branwell she had been
angelically kind. Anne saw that his behaviour was an atrocious return
for her kindness. Further than that the lady hardly counted in Anne's
vision. Her interest was centred on her brother. She saw him taking
first to drink and then to opium. She saw that he was going mad, and he
did go mad. One of the most familiar symptoms of morphia mania is a
tendency to erotic hallucinations of the precise kind that Branwell
suffered from. Anne was unable to distinguish between such a
hallucination and depravity. But there is not a shadow of evidence that
she thought what M. Dimnet thinks, or that if she had thought it she
made Charlotte and Emily think it too. Branwell's state was quite enough
in itself to break their hearts. His letters to Leyland, to John Brown,
the sexton, to Francis Grundy, record with frightful vividness every
phase of his obsession.

It is inconceivable that such letters should have been kept, still more
inconceivable that they should have been published. It is inconceivable
that Mrs. Gaskell should have dragged the pitiful and shameful figure
into the light. Nobody can save poor Branwell now from the dreadful
immortality thrust on him by his enemies and friends with equal zeal.
All that is left to us is a merciful understanding of his case.
Branwell's case, once for all, was purely pathological. There was
nothing great about him, not even his passion for Mrs. Robinson.
Properly speaking, it was not a passion at all, it was a disease.
Branwell was a degenerate, as incapable of passion as he was of poetry.
His sisters, Anne and Charlotte, talked with an amazing innocence about
Branwell's vices. Simple and beautiful souls, they never for a moment
suspected that his worst vice was sentimentalism. In the beginning,
before it wrecked him, nobody enjoyed his own emotions more than
Branwell. At his worst he wallowed voluptuously in the torments of
frustration. At the end, what with drink and what with opium, he was
undoubtedly insane. His letters are priceless pathological documents.
They reveal all the workings of his peculiar mania. He thinks everybody
is plotting to keep him from Mrs. Robinson. Faced at every turn with the
evidence of this lady's complete indifference, he gives it all a lunatic
twist to prove the contrary. He takes the strangest people into his
confidence, John Brown, the sexton, and the Robinsons' coachman. Queer
flames of lucidity dart here and there through this madness: "The
probability of her becoming free to give me herself and estate ever rose
to drive away the prospect of her decline under her present grief." "I
had reason to hope that ere very long I should be the husband of a lady
whom I loved best in the world, and with whom, in more than competence,
I might live at leisure to try to make myself a name in the world of
posterity, without being pestered by the small but countless
botherments, which, like mosquitoes, sting us in the world of work-day
toil. That hope and herself are gone--she to wither into patiently
pining decline--_it_ to make room for drudgery." It is all sordid as
well as terrible. We have no right to know these things. Mrs. Oliphant
is almost justified in her protest against Charlotte as the first to
betray her brother.

But did Charlotte betray Branwell? Not in her letters. She never
imagined--how could she?--that those letters would be published. Not in
her novels. Her novels give no portrait of Branwell and no hint that
could be easily understood. It is in her prefaces to her sisters' novels
that he appears, darkly. Charlotte, outraged by the infamous article in
the _Quarterly_, was determined that what had been said of her should
never be said of Anne and Emily. She felt that their works offered
irresistible provocation to the scandalous reviewer. She thought it
necessary to explain how they came by their knowledge of evil.

This vindication of her sisters is certainly an indictment of her
brother to anybody who knew enough to read between the lines. Charlotte
may have innocently supposed that nobody knew or ever would know enough.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Gaskell knew; and when it came to vindicating
Charlotte, she considered herself justified in exposing Charlotte's
brother because Charlotte herself had shown her the way.

But Charlotte might have spared her pains. Branwell does not account for
Heathcliff any more than he accounts for Rochester. He does not even
account for Huntingdon in poor Anne's novel. He accounts only for
himself. He is important chiefly in relation to the youngest of the
Brontës. Oddly enough, this boy, who was once thought greater than his
sister Emily, was curiously akin to the weak and ineffectual Anne. He
shows the weird flickering of the flame that pulsed so feebly and
intermittently in her. He had Anne's unhappy way with destiny, her knack
of missing things. She had a touch of his morbidity. He was given to
silences which in anybody but Anne would have been called morose. It was
her fate to be associated with him in the hour and in the scene of his
disgrace. And he was offered up unwittingly by Charlotte as a sacrifice
to Anne's virtue.

       *       *       *       *       *

Like Branwell, Anne had no genius. She shows for ever gentle, and, in
spite of an unconquerable courage, conquered. And yet there was more in
her than gentleness. There was, in this smallest and least considerable
of the Brontës, an immense, a terrifying audacity. Charlotte was bold,
and Emily was bolder; but this audacity of Anne's was greater than
Charlotte's boldness or than Emily's, because it was willed, it was
deliberate, open-eyed; it had none of the superb unconsciousness of
genius. Anne took her courage in both hands when she sat down to write
_The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_. There are scenes, there are situations,
in Anne's amazing novel, which for sheer audacity stand alone in
mid-Victorian literature, and which would hold their own in the
literature of revolt that followed. It cannot be said that these scenes
and situations are tackled with a master-hand. But there is a certain
grasp in Anne's treatment, and an astonishing lucidity. Her knowledge of
the seamy side of life was not exhaustive. But her diagnosis of certain
states, her realization of certain motives, suggests Balzac rather than
any of the Brontës. Thackeray, with the fear of Mrs. Grundy before his
eyes, would have shrunk from recording Mrs. Huntingdon's ultimatum to
her husband. The slamming of that bedroom door fairly resounds through
the long emptiness of Anne's novel. But that door is the _crux_ of the
situation, and if Anne was not a genius she was too much of an artist to
sacrifice her _crux_.

And not only was Anne revolutionary in her handling of moral situations,
she was an insurgent in religious thought. Not to believe in the dogma
of eternal punishment was, in mid-Victorian times and evangelical
circles, to be almost an atheist. When, somewhere in the late
'seventies, Dean Farrar published his _Eternal Hope_, that book fell
like a bomb into the ranks of the orthodox. But long before Dean
Farrar's book Anne Brontë had thrown her bomb. There are two pages in
_The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_ that anticipate and sum up his now
innocent arguments. Anne fairly let herself go here. And though in her
"Word to the Elect" (who "may rejoice to think themselves secure") she
declares that

  None shall sink to everlasting woe
  Who have not well deserved the wrath of Heaven,

she presently relents, and tacks on a poem in a lighter measure,
expressing her hope

  That soon the wicked shall at last
    Be fitted for the skies;
  And when their dreadful doom is past
    To light and life arise.

It is said (Charlotte said it) that Anne suffered from religious
melancholy of a peculiarly dark and Calvinistic type. I very much
suspect that Anne's melancholy, like Branwell's passion, was
pathological, and that what her soul suffered from was religious doubt.
She could not reach that height where Emily moved serenely; she could
not see that

        Vain are the thousand creeds
 That move men's hearts: unutterably vain.

There was a time when her tremulous, clinging faith was broken by
contact with Emily's contempt for creeds. When Anne was at Haworth she
and Emily were inseparable. They tramped the moors together. With their
arms round each other's shoulders, they paced up and down the parlour of
the Parsonage. They showed the mysterious attraction and affinity of
opposites. Anne must have been fascinated, and at the same time
appalled, by the radiant, revealing, annihilating sweep of Emily's
thought. She was not indifferent to creeds. But you can see her fearful
and reluctant youth yielding at last to Emily's thought, until she
caught a glimpse of the "repose" beyond the clash of "conquered good and
conquering ill". You can see how the doctrine of eternal punishment went
by the board; how Anne, who had gone through agonies of orthodox fear on
account of Branwell, must have adjusted things somehow, and arrived at
peace. Trust in "the merits of the Redeemer" is, after all, trust in the
Immensity beyond Redeemer and redeemed. Of this trust she sang in a
voice, like her material voice, fragile, but sweet and true. She sang
naïvely of the "Captive Dove" that makes unheard its "joyless moan", of
"the heart that Nature formed to love", pining, "neglected and alone".
She sang of the "Narrow Way", "Be it," she sings, "thy constant aim

  "To labour and to love,
    To pardon and endure,
  To lift thy heart to God above,
    And keep thy conscience pure."

She hears the wind in an alien wood and cries for the Parsonage garden,
and for the "barren hills":

  Where scarce the scattered, stunted trees
    Can yield an answering swell,
  But where a wilderness of heath
    Returns the sound as well.

  For yonder garden, fair and wide,
    With groves of evergreen,
  Long winding walks, and borders trim
    And velvet lawns between.

  Restore to me that little spot,
    With grey hills compassed round,
  Where knotted grass neglected lies,
    And weeds usurp the ground.

For she, too, loved the moors; and through her love for them she wrote
two perfect lines when she called on Memory to

  Forever hang thy dreamy spell
  Round mountain star and heather-bell.

The critics, the theorists, the tale-mongers, have left Anne quiet in
that grave on the sea-coast, where she lies apart. Her gentle
insignificance served her well.

       *       *       *       *       *

But no woman who ever wrote was more criticized, more spied upon, more
lied about, than Charlotte. It was as if the singular purity and poverty
of her legend offered irresistible provocation. The blank page called
for the scribbler. The silence that hung about her was dark with
challenge; it was felt to be ambiguous, enigmatic. Reserve suggests a
reservation, something hidden and kept back from the insatiable public
with its "right to know". Mrs. Gaskell with all her indiscretions had
not given it enough. The great classic _Life of Charlotte Brontë_ was,
after all, incomplete. Until something more was known about her,
Charlotte herself was incomplete. It was nothing that Mrs. Gaskell's
work was the finest, tenderest portrait of a woman that it was ever
given to a woman to achieve; nothing that she was not only recklessly
and superbly loyal to Charlotte, but that in her very indiscretions she
was, as far as Charlotte was concerned, incorruptibly and profoundly
true.

Since Mrs. Gaskell's time, other hands have been at work on Charlotte,
improving Mrs. Gaskell's masterpiece. A hundred little touches have been
added to it. First, it was supposed to be too tragic, too deliberately
and impossibly sombre (that sad book of which Charlotte's friend, Mary
Taylor, said that it was "not so gloomy as the truth"). So first came
Sir Wemyss Reid, conscientiously working up the high lights till he got
the values all wrong. "If the truth must be told," he says, "the life of
the author of _Jane Eyre_ was by no means so joyless as the world now
believes it to have been." And he sets out to give us the truth. But all
that he does to lighten the gloom is to tell a pleasant story of how
"one bright June morning in 1833, a handsome carriage and pair is
standing opposite the 'Devonshire Arms' at Bolton Bridge". In the
handsome carriage is a young girl, Ellen Nussey, waiting for Charlotte
Brontë and her brother and sisters to go with her for a picnic to Bolton
Abbey.

"Presently," says Sir Wemyss Reid, "on the steep road which stretches
across the moors to Keighley, the sound of wheels is heard, mingled with
the merry speech and merrier laughter of fresh young voices. Shall we go
forward unseen," he asks, "and study the approaching travellers whilst
they are still upon the road? Their conveyance is no handsome carriage,
but a rickety dog-cart, unmistakably betraying its neighbourship to the
carts and ploughs of some rural farmyard. The horse, freshly taken from
the fields, is driven by a youth who, in spite of his countrified dress,
is no mere bumpkin. His shock of red hair hangs down in somewhat ragged
locks behind his ears, for Branwell Brontë esteems himself a genius and
a poet, and, following the fashion of the times, has that abhorrence of
the barber's shears which genius is supposed to affect. But the lad's
face is a handsome and striking one, full of Celtic fire and humour,
untouched by the slightest shade of care, hopeful, promising, even
brilliant. How gaily he jokes with his three sisters; with what
inexhaustible volubility he pours out quotations from his favourite
poets, applying them to the lovely scenes around him; and with what a
mischievous delight in his superior nerve and mettle, he attempts the
feats of charioteering, which fill the heart of the youngest of the
party with sudden terrors! Beside him, in a dress of marvellous
plainness, and ugliness, stamped with the brand "home-made" in
characters which none can mistake, is the eldest of the sisters.
Charlotte is talking too; there are bright smiles upon her face; she is
enjoying everything around her, the splendid morning, the charms of
leafy trees and budding roses, and the ever musical stream; most of all,
perhaps, the charm of her brother's society, and the expectation of that
coming meeting with her friends, which is so near at hand. Behind sits a
pretty little girl, with fine complexion and delicate regular features,
whom the stranger would pick out as the beauty of the company, and a
tall, rather angular figure, clad in a dress exactly resembling
Charlotte's. Emily Brontë does not talk so much as the rest of the
party, but her wonderful eyes, brilliant and unfathomable as the pool at
the foot of a waterfall, but radiant also with a wealth of tenderness
and warmth, show how her soul is expanding under the influences of the
scene; how quick she is to note the least prominent of the beauties
around her, how intense is her enjoyment of the songs of the birds, the
brilliancy of the sunshine, the rich scent of the flower-bespangled
hedgerows. If she does not, like Charlotte and Anne, meet her brother's
ceaseless flood of sparkling words with opposing currents of speech, she
utters a strange, deep guttural sound which those who know her best
interpret as the language of a joy too deep for articulate expression.
Gaze at them as they pass you in the quiet road, and acknowledge that,
in spite of their rough and even uncouth exteriors, a happier four could
hardly be met with in this favourite haunt of pleasure-seekers during a
long summer's day."

And you do gaze at them and are sadder, if anything, than you were
before. You see them, if anything, more poignantly. You see their
cheerful biographer doing all he knows, and the light he shoots across
the blackness only makes it blacker.

        Nessun maggior dolore
  Che ricordarsi di tempo felice
  Nella miseria;

and in the end the biographer with all his cheerfulness succumbs to the
tradition of misery, and even adds a dark contribution of his own, the
suggestion of an unhappy love-affair of Charlotte's.

After Sir Wemyss Reid came Mr. Francis Grundy with _his_ little
pictures, _Pictures of the Past_, presenting a dreadfully unattractive
Charlotte.

Then came Mr. Leyland, following Mr. Grundy, with his glorification of
Branwell and his hint that Charlotte made it very hard at home for the
poor boy. He repeats the story that Branwell told Mr. George Searle
Phillips, how he went to see a dying girl in the village, and sat with
her half an hour, and read a psalm to her and a hymn, and how he felt
like praying with her too, but he was not "good enough", how he came
away with a heavy heart and fell into melancholy musings. "Charlotte
observed my depression," Branwell said, "and asked what ailed me. So I
told her. She looked at me with a look which 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 someone had struck me a blow in the
mouth. It involved ever so many things in it. 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...."

You see the implication? It was Charlotte who drove him to the "Black
Bull". That was Branwell's impression of Charlotte. Just the sort of
impression that an opium-eater would have of a beloved sister.

But Branwell's impression was good enough for Madame Duclaux to found
her theory on. Her theory is that Charlotte was inferior to Emily in
tenderness. It may well be so, and yet Charlotte would remain above most
women tender, for Emily's wealth would furnish forth a score of sisters.
The simple truth is that Charlotte had nerves, and Branwell was
extremely trying. And it is possible that Emily had less to bear, that
in her detachment she was protected more than Charlotte from Branwell at
his worst.

Meanwhile tales were abroad presenting Charlotte in the queerest lights.
There is that immortal story of how Thackeray gave a party for Currer
Bell at his house in Young Street, and how Currer Bell had a headache
and lay on a sofa in the back drawing-room, and refused to talk to
anybody but the governess; and how Thackeray at last, very late, with a
finger on his lip, stole out of the house and took refuge in his club.
No wonder if this quaint and curious Charlotte survived in the memory
of Thackeray's daughter. But, even apart from the headache, you can see
how it came about, how the sight of the governess evoked Charlotte
Brontë's unforgotten agony. She saw in the amazed and cheerful lady her
own sad youth, slighted and oppressed, solitary in a scene of
gaiety--she could not have seen her otherwise--and her warm heart rushed
out to her. She was determined that that governess should have a happy
evening if nobody else had. Her behaviour was odd, if you like, it was
even absurd, but it had the sublimity of vicarious expiation. Has anyone
ever considered its significance, the magnitude of her deed? For
Charlotte, to be the guest of honour on that brilliant night, in the
house of Thackeray, her divinity, was to touch the topmost height of
fame. And she turned her back on the brilliance and the fame and the
face of her divinity, and offered herself up in flames as a sacrifice
for all the governesses that were and had ever been and would be.

And after the fine stories came the little legends--things about
Charlotte when she was a governess herself at Mrs. Sidgwick's, and the
tittle-tattle of the parish. One of the three curates whom Charlotte
made so shockingly immortal avenged himself for his immortality by
stating that the trouble with Charlotte was that she _would_ fight for
mastery in the parish. Who can believe him? If there is one thing that
seems more certain than another it is Charlotte's utter indifference to
parochial matters. But Charlotte was just, and she may have objected to
the young man's way with the Dissenters; we know that she did very
strongly object to Mr. William Weightman's way. And that, I imagine, was
the trouble between Charlotte and the curates.

As for the Sidgwicks, Charlotte's biographers have been rather hard on
them. Mr. Leslie Stephen calls them "coarse employers". They were
certainly not subtle enough to divine the hidden genius in their sad
little governess. It was, I imagine, Charlotte's alien, enigmatic face
that provoked a little Sidgwick to throw a Bible at her. She said Mrs.
Sidgwick did not know her, and did not "intend to know her". She might
have added that if she _had_ intended Mrs. Sidgwick could not possibly
have known her. And when the Sidgwicks said (as they did say to their
cousin, Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson) that if Miss Brontë "was invited
to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about
like a slave; if she was not invited she imagined she was being excluded
from the family circle", that was simply their robust view of the
paralysed attitude of a shy girl among strangers, in an agony of fear
lest she should cut in where she was not wanted.

And allowances must be made for Mrs. Sidgwick. She was, no doubt,
considerably annoyed at finding that she had engaged a thoroughly
incompetent and apparently thoroughly morbid young person who had
offered herself as a nursery-governess and didn't know how to keep order
in the nursery. Naturally there was trouble at Stonegappe. Then one fine
day Mrs. Sidgwick discovered that there was, after all, a use for that
incomprehensible and incompetent Miss Brontë. Miss Brontë had a gift.
She could sew. She could sew beautifully. Her stitching, if you would
believe it, was a dream. And Mrs. Sidgwick saw that Miss Brontë's one
talent was not lodged in her useless. So Charlotte sat alone all evening
in the schoolroom at Stonegappe, a small figure hidden in pure white,
billowy seas of muslin, and lamented thus: "She cares nothing in the
world about me except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity of
labour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end she overwhelms me
with oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin night-caps
to make, and above all things, dolls to dress." And Mrs. Sidgwick
complained that Charlotte did not love the children, and forgot how
little she liked it when the children loved Charlotte, and was unaware,
poor lady, that it was recorded of her, and would be recorded to all
time, that she had said, "Love the _governess_, my dear!" when her
little impulsive boy put his hand in Charlotte's at the dinner-table,
and cried "I love 'ou, Miss Brontë." It was the same little, impulsive
boy who threw the Bible at Charlotte, and also threw a stone which hit
her.

No wonder that Miss Brontë's one and only "pleasant afternoon" was when
Mr. Sidgwick went out walking in his fields with his children and his
Newfoundland dog, and Charlotte (by order) followed and observed him
from behind.

Of course, all these old tales should have gone where Mrs. Sidgwick's
old muslin caps went; but they have not, and so it has got about that
Charlotte Brontë was not fond of children. Even Mr. Swinburne, at the
height of his magnificent eulogy, after putting crown upon crown upon
her head, pauses and wonders: had she any love for children? He finds in
her "a plentiful lack of inborn baby-worship"; she is unworthy to
compare in this with George Eliot, "the spiritual mother of Totty, of
Eppie, and of Lillo". "The fiery-hearted Vestal of Haworth," he says,
"had no room reserved in the palace of her passionate and high-minded
imagination as a nursery for inmates of such divine and delicious
quality." There was little Georgette in _Villette_, to say nothing of
Polly, and there was Adèle in _Jane Eyre_. But Mr. Swinburne had
forgotten about little Georgette. Like George Henry Lewes he is
"well-nigh moved to think one of the most powerfully and exquisitely
written chapters in _Shirley_ a chapter which could hardly have been
written at all by a woman, or, for that matter, by a man, of however
noble and kindly a nature, in whom the instinct, or nerve, or organ of
love for children was even of average natural strength and sensibility";
so difficult was it for him to believe in "the dread and repulsion felt
by a forsaken wife and tortured mother for the very beauty and dainty
sweetness of her only new-born child, as recalling the cruel, sleek
charm of the human tiger that had begotten it". And so he crowns her
with all crowns but that of "love for children". He is still tender to
her, seeing in her that one monstrous lack; he touches it with sorrow
and a certain shame.

Mr. Birrell follows him. "Miss Brontë," he says with confidence, "did
not care for children. She had no eye for them. Hence it comes about
that her novel-children are not good." He is moved to playful sarcasm
when he tells how in August of eighteen-fifty-three "Miss Brontë
suffered a keen disappointment". She went to Scotland with some friends
who took their baby with them. The parents thought the baby was ill when
it wasn't, and insisted on turning back, and Charlotte had to give up
her holiday. "All on account of a baby," says Mr. Birrell, and refers
you to Charlotte's letter on the subject, implying that it was
cold-blooded. The biographer can quote letters for his purpose, and Mr.
Birrell omits to tell us that Charlotte wrote "had any evil consequences
followed a prolonged stay, I should never have forgiven myself". You are
to imagine that Charlotte could have forgiven herself perfectly well,
for Charlotte "did not care for children".

Mrs. Oliphant does not echo that cry. She was a woman and knew better.

For I believe that here we touch the very heart of the mystery that was
Charlotte Brontë. We would have no right to touch it, to approach it,
were it not that other people have already violated all that was most
sacred and most secret in that mystery, and have given the world a
defaced and disfigured Charlotte Brontë. I believe that this love of
children which even Mr. Swinburne has denied to her, was the key to
Charlotte's nature. We are face to face here, not with a want in her,
but with an abyss, depth beyond depth of tenderness and longing and
frustration, of a passion that found no clear voice in her works,
because it was one with the elemental nature in her, undefined,
unuttered, unutterable.

She was afraid of children; she was awkward with them; because such
passion has shynesses, distances, and terrors unknown to the average
comfortable women who become happy mothers. It has even its perversions,
when love hardly knows itself from hate. Such love demands before all
things possession. It cries out for children of its own flesh and blood.
I believe that there were moments when it was pain for Charlotte to see
the children born and possessed by other women. It must have been agony
to have to look after them, especially when the rule was that they were
not to "love the governess".

The proofs of this are slender, but they are sufficient. There is little
Georgette, the sick child that Lucy nurses in the Pensionnat: "Little
Georgette still piped her plaintive wail, appealing to me by her
familiar term, 'Minnie, Minnie, me very poorly!' till my heart ached."
... "I affected Georgette; she was a sensitive and loving child; to hold
her in my lap, or carry her in my arms, was to me a treat. To-night she
would have me lay my head on the pillow of her crib; she even put her
little arms round my neck. Her clasp and the nestling action with which
she pressed her cheek to mine made me almost cry with a sort of tender
pain."

Once during a spring-cleaning at Upperwood House Charlotte was Mrs.
White's nursemaid as well as her governess, and she wrote: "By dint of
nursing the fat baby it has got to know me and be fond of me. I suspect
myself of growing rather fond of it." Years later she wrote to Mrs.
Gaskell, after staying with her: "Could you manage to convey a small
kiss to that dear but dangerous little person, Julia? She
surreptitiously possessed herself of a minute fraction of my heart,
which has been missing ever since I saw her."

Mrs. Gaskell tells us that there was "a strong mutual attraction"
between Julia, her youngest little girl, and Charlotte Brontë. "The
child," she says, "would steal her little hand into Miss Brontë's
scarcely larger one, and each took pleasure in this apparently
unobserved caress." May I suggest that children do not steal their
little hands into the hands of people who do not care for them? Their
instinct is infallible.

Charlotte Brontë tried to give an account of her feeling for children;
it was something like the sacred awe of the lover. "Whenever I see
Florence and Julia again I shall feel like a fond but bashful suitor,
who views at a distance the fair personage to whom, in his clownish awe,
he dare not risk a near approach. Such is the clearest idea I can give
you of my feeling towards children I like, but to whom I am a
stranger--and to what children am I not a stranger?"

Extraordinary that Charlotte's critics have missed the pathos of that
_cri de coeur_. It is so clearly an echo from the "house of bondage",
where Charlotte was made a stranger to the beloved, where the beloved
threw stones and Bibles at her. You really have to allow for the shock
of an experience so blighting. It is all part of the perversity of the
fate that dogged her, that her feeling should have met with that
reverse. But it was there, guarded with a certain shy austerity. She
"suspected" herself of getting rather fond of the baby.

She hid her secret even from herself, as women will hide these things.
But her dreams betrayed her after the way of dreams. Charlotte's dream
(premonitory, she thought, of trouble) was that she carried a little
crying child, and could not still its cry. "She described herself," Mrs.
Gaskell says, "as having the most painful sense of pity for the little
thing, lying _inert_, as sick children do, while she walked about in
some gloomy place with it, such as the aisle of Haworth Church." This
dream she gives to _Jane Eyre_, unconscious of its profound significance
and fitness. It is a pity that Mr. Swinburne did not pay attention to
Charlotte's dream.

All her life, I think, she suffered because of the perpetual insurgence
of this secret, impassioned, maternal energy. Hence the sting of Lewes's
famous criticism, beginning: "The grand function of woman, it must
always be remembered" (as if Charlotte had forgotten it!) "is
Maternity"; and, working up from his criticism of that chapter in
_Shirley_ to a climax of adjuration: "Currer Bell, if under your heart
had ever stirred a child; if to your bosom a babe had ever been
pressed--that mysterious part of your being, towards which all the rest
of it was drawn, in which your whole soul was transported and
absorbed--never could you have _imagined_ such a falsehood as that!" It
was impossible for Charlotte to protest against anything but the
abominable bad taste of Lewes's article, otherwise she might have told
him that she probably knew rather more about those mysteries than he
did. It was she who gave us that supreme image of disastrous love. "I
looked at my love; it shivered in my heart like a suffering child in a
cold cradle!"

And this woman died before her child was born.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then there is Mrs. Oliphant again. Though she was not one of those who
said Charlotte Brontë was not fond of children, though she would have
died rather than have joined Lewes in his unspeakable cry against her,
Mrs. Oliphant made certain statements in no better taste than his. She
suggests that Charlotte, fond or not fond of children, was too fond of
matrimonial dreams. Her picture (the married woman's picture) is of an
undesired and undesirable little spinster pining visibly and shamelessly
in a parsonage. She would have us believe that from morning till night,
from night till morning, Charlotte Brontë in the Parsonage thought of
nothing but of getting married, that her dreams pursued, ruthlessly, the
casual visitor. The hopelessness of the dream, the undesirability of
Charlotte, is what makes her so irresistible to her sister novelist.

There was "one subject", she says, "which Charlotte Brontë had at her
command, having experienced in her own person, and seen her nearest
friends under the experience, of that solitude and longing of women of
which she has made so remarkable an exposition. The long silence of life
without an adventure or a change, the forlorn gaze out of windows which
never show anyone coming who can rouse the slightest interest in the
mind, the endless years and days which pass and pass, carrying away the
bloom, extinguishing the lights of youth, bringing a dreary middle age
before which the very soul shrinks, while yet the sufferer feels how
strong is the current of life in her own veins, and how capable she is
of all the active duties of existence--this was the essence and soul of
the existence she knew best. Was there no help for it? Must the women
wait and see their lives thrown away, and have no power to save
themselves!

"The position," she goes on, "in itself so tragic, is one which can
scarcely be expressed without calling forth inevitable ridicule, a laugh
at the best, more often a sneer, at the women whose desire for a husband
is thus betrayed. Shirley and Caroline Helstone both cried out for that
husband with an indignation, a fire and impatience, a sense of wrong and
injury, which stopped the laugh for the moment. It might be ludicrous,
but it was horribly genuine and true." (This is more than can be said of
Mrs. Oliphant's view of the adorable Shirley Keeldar who was Emily
Brontë. It is ludicrous enough, and it may be genuine, but it is
certainly not true.) But Mrs. Oliphant is careful not to go too far.
"Note," she says, "there was nothing sensual about these young women. It
was life they wanted; they knew nothing of the grosser thoughts which
the world with its jeers attributes to them: of such thoughts they were
unconscious in a primitive innocence which, perhaps, only women
understand." Yet she characterizes their "outcry" as "indelicate". "All
very well to talk of women working for their living, finding new
channels for themselves, establishing their independence. How much have
we said of all that" (Mrs. Oliphant thinks that she is rendering
Charlotte Brontë's thought), "endeavouring to persuade ourselves!
Charlotte Brontë had the courage of her opinions. It was not education
nor a trade that her women wanted. It was not a living, but their share
in life.... Miss Brontë herself said correct things" (observe that
insincerity is insinuated here) "about the protection which a trade is
to a woman, keeping her from a mercenary marriage; but this was not in
the least the way of her heroines." (Why, you naturally wonder, should
it have been?) "They wanted to be happy, no doubt, but above all things
they wanted their share in life, to have their position by the side of
men, which alone confers a natural equality, to have their shoulder to
the wheel, their hands on the reins of common life, to build up the
world and link the generations each to each." (And very proper of them,
too.) "In her philosophy, marriage was the only state which procured
this, and if she did not recommend a mercenary marriage she was at least
very tolerant about its conditions, insisting less upon love than was to
be expected" (!) "and with a covert conviction in her mind, that if not
one man, then another was better than any complete abandonment of the
larger path. Lucy Snowe for a long time had her heart very much set on
Dr. John and his placid breadth of Englishism; but when she finally
found out that to be impossible her tears were soon dried by the
prospect of Paul Emanuel, so unlike him, coming into his place."