Brontës (135 page)

In externals, they were two unobtrusive women; a perfectly secluded life gave them retiring manners and habits. In Emily's nature the extremes of vigour and simplicity seemed to meet. Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero; but she had no worldly wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life; she would fail to defend her most manifest rights, to consult her most legitimate advantage. An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world. Her will was not very flexible, and it generally opposed her interest. Her temper was magnanimous, but warm and sudden; her spirit altogether unbending.

Anne's character was milder and more subdued; she wanted the power, the fire, the originality of her sister, but was well-endowed with quiet virtues of her own. Long-suffering, self-denying, reflective, and intelligent, a constitutional reserve and taciturnity placed and kept her in the shade, and covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with a sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted. Neither Emily nor Anne was learned; they had no thought of filling their pitchers at the well-spring of other minds; they always wrote from the impulse of nature, the dictates of intuition, and from such stores of observation as their limited experience had enabled them to amass. I may sum up all by saying, that for strangers they were nothing, for superficial observers less than nothing; but for those who had known them all their lives in the intimacy of close relationship, they were genuinely good and truly great.

This notice has been written, because I felt it a sacred duty to wipe the dust off their gravestones, and leave their dear names free from soil.
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If writing the preface was painful, the task of going through her sisters' papers was exquisitely so. Charlotte had decided that she would, after all, add a selection of her sisters' poems to the new edition. In the light of her earlier statement that she ‘would not offer a line to the publication of which my sisters themselves would have objected', her editorial policy on the poems was curious in the extreme. She selected seven of Anne's poems and eighteen of Emily's, seventeen of them from her fair copy books, but in virtually every one she made substantial editorial changes. In some cases these were undoubtedly what her sisters would have wanted, as for instance substituting ‘sister' for ‘Gerald' or ‘sheep' for ‘deer', to hide the Gondal origins of the poems.
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Others were purely technical, correcting faults in metre or rhyme, which again were uncontroversial. But there were a large number of ‘corrections' which were not demanded by the
texts and which were simply Charlotte's ‘improvements'. Some of these were unnecessary and capricious: in a line by Emily describing cornfields as ‘emerald and scarlet and gold', Charlotte changed ‘scarlet' to ‘vermeil', a pretentious word which would not have been in her sister's poetic vocabulary. In another poem, which she entitled ‘The Night-Wind', Charlotte changed the tenses in the last verse, creating a much more awkward last line, and substituted ‘church-aisle' for ‘church-yard'. These can only have been dictated by the fact that Emily herself had been buried in the church vaults rather than the churchyard – a fact irrelevant to the poem.
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To four poems, two of which were short extracts from longer originals, Charlotte actually added between four and eight lines of her own composition, usually to bring the poem to an end. In one case, ‘Silent is the House – all are laid asleep', this meant that out of twenty lines, only the first twelve were by Emily, the remainder of the poem being by Charlotte.
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None of this was indicated in either the text or Charlotte's accompanying notes.

Charlotte treated Anne's poems in an even more cavalier fashion. Her careful choice of only seven poems, of which six were entirely religious in theme, was dictated partly by her own perception of Anne as Emily's inferior – therefore Anne would not be allowed to speak on the same subjects as Emily – and partly by her desire to prove Anne's piety to her critics. Ignoring the large body of Gondal verse, Charlotte therefore selected poems which, in the main, depicted their author as a despondent but faithful Christian, struggling under the burden of her own sense of unworthiness. Again, however, she made substantial alterations to the manuscript originals, nearly always to tone down Anne's more despairing expressions. In ‘I have gone backward in the work', for instance, she removed one verse entirely and altered the last line from ‘And hear a wretch's prayer' to ‘Christ, hear my humble prayer!'
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In another, where the poet expresses a longing ‘To see the glories of his face', Charlotte unnecessarily substituted her own line ‘Like Moses, I would see his face.' Similarly, in a hymn where the refrain of one verse was ‘I know my heart will fall away', Charlotte changed the line to ‘Thy suppliant is a castaway.'
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The poem which suffered most from Charlotte's editorial policy was one which it is surprising she felt able to include at all, her sister's last lines on learning that she had consumption. Out of the original seventeen verses, Charlotte selected only eight for publication, thereby omitting all Anne's stronger expressions of grief and despair and creating a false impression of
calm resignation to the inevitable. In one verse, she perversely altered Anne's meaning: for Anne's original, referring to her own sufferings,

O thou hast taken my delight

& hope of life away

And bid me watch the painful night

& wait the weary day

Charlotte substituted

Thou, God, hast taken our delight

Our treasured hope away.

Thou bidst us now weep through the night

And sorrow through the day.
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Charlotte's version would seem to suggest that she thought the verse referred to Anne's grief at the death of Emily, and therefore she wished to associate herself with it by changing the pronouns from ‘my' to ‘our'. The resulting substitution is therefore not only a clumsier alternative but also a misinterpretation of the original.

One can well imagine that both her sisters would have been infuriated by Charlotte's unwarranted interference in their work: it was on a par with her many attempts to organize them during their lives. Nevertheless, Charlotte genuinely believed that she was performing her ‘sacred duty' in her self-appointed role as her sisters' interpreter to the world and the task had not been pleasant.

The reading over of papers, the renewal of remembrances brought back the pang of bereavement and occasioned a depression of spirits well nigh intolerable – for one or two nights I scarcely knew how to get on till morning – and when morning came I was still haunted with a sense of sickening distress –

Confessing this to Ellen, she added apologetically, ‘I tell you these things – because it is absolutely necessary to me to have some relief – You will forgive me – and not to trouble yourself – or imagine that I am one whit worse than I say.'
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So deep had her depression become that Charlotte even began to consider the possibility of leaving home again. ‘I feel to my deep sorrow – to my humiliation – that it is not in my power to
bear the canker of constant solitude –', she told Williams, explaining why she had been unable to make a real start on her next book,

I had calculated that when shut out from every enjoyment – from every stimulus but what could be derived from intellectual exertion, my mind would rouse itself perforce – It is not so: even intellect – even imagination will not dispense with the ray of domestic cheerfulness – with the gentle spur of family discussion – Late in the evenings and all through the nights – I fall into a condition of mind which turns entirely to the Past – to Memory, and Memory is both sad and relentless. This will never do –
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Chapter Twenty-Three

RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME

The ability to write would normally have provided Charlotte with a much-needed escape from the cloud of depression that threatened to overwhelm her, but the nature of her work over the previous few months had only added to her misery. Writing a biographical notice and an introduction to
Wuthering Heights
and editing her sisters' poems had only impressed upon her the loss she had suffered and the desolation of her present existence. The approach of winter, too, could only make things worse: as the days grew shorter and the light failed earlier, her evenings became interminable. Her eyesight was not good enough to permit her to read or write by artificial light and her father and the servants always retired to bed punctually at nine o'clock. Unable to occupy either her mind or her hands in the long hours she had once spent so happily with her sisters, the burden of her solitude became unbearable.

Visitors did come regularly, but they were not of Charlotte's seeking. In September 1850, William Forster, a wool merchant from Bradford who was
later to become a distinguished statesman, and his wife Jane, the eldest daughter of Thomas Arnold, called unexpectedly and were shown into ‘the little bare parlour' by Martha Brown. Patrick himself, preceded by Keeper, Emily's ‘superannuated mastiff', came to welcome them and then went out to get his daughter. She arrived after ‘a long interval', which was probably spent in rushing around trying to make herself look presentable for her august guests. She stayed and talked for a while, Patrick popping in again to give Mr Forster a newspaper, then she disappeared ‘for an age' to prepare the dinner, leaving her guests alone with Flossy, ‘a fat curly-haired dog'. Her reappearance, with Martha Brown and dinner, was greeted with relief and the Forsters finally departed in the middle of the afternoon, having extracted a promise that Charlotte would visit them in the spring. ‘Miss Brontë put me so in mind of her own “Jane Eyre'”, Mrs Forster wrote to her friend Mrs Gaskell. ‘She looked smaller than ever, and moved about so quietly, and noiselessly, just like a little bird … barring that all birds are joyous.'
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The Forsters were followed by a more sentimental visitor, John Stores Smith, a young man of twenty-two who belonged to the literary circles of Halifax. Despite his youth he had already written two striking books,
Mirabeau
and
Social Aspects
, published in 1848 and 1850 respectively, which he had sent to Charlotte earlier in the year. His reasons for doing so were not entirely altruistic: having heard the rumours that Currer Bell was Charlotte Brontë, his friends had persuaded him to send
Mirabeau
to Charlotte at Haworth; her reply, though signed ‘Currer Bell', was a tacit admission of her authorship. A few Sundays later, a couple of his friends had taken the opportunity to attend Haworth Church so that they could ogle the authoress but Smith had declined to accompany them. Instead, he sent her
Social Aspects
on its publication and was rewarded with a second letter, signed ‘CBrontë', offering her ‘sincere congratulations on the marked – the important progress made by the author'.
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Encouraged by her kindness, he had presumed to write again and, surprisingly, received an invitation to dinner. His arrival was scarcely propitious, for his dog attracted the attention of Keeper who had been lying asleep on the doorstep and, by the time he came face to face with Charlotte, he had his own terrier barking furiously under his arm and Keeper growling at his calves. Charlotte, suppressing a quiet smile, told him she had half an hour's writing to do before dinner and took him into her father's study. This was, of course, simply an excuse to give herself time to assist Martha in preparing the dinner.

Patrick was, in Smith's eyes, ‘the ruin of what had been a striking and singularly handsome man. He was tall, strongly built, and even then perfectly erect. His hair was nearly white, but his eyebrows were still black … He was dressed very carelessly, in almost worn out clothes, had no proper necktie, and was in slippers.' Smith spent an uncomfortable hour with Patrick before being summoned in to dinner with Charlotte, when he had an opportunity to scrutinize his hostess for the first time.

She was diminutive in height, and extremely fragile in figure. Her hand was one of the smallest I have ever grasped. She had no pretensions to being considered beautiful, and was as far removed from being plain. She had rather light brown hair, somewhat thin, and drawn plainly over her brow. Her complexion had no trace of colour in it, and her lips were pallid also; but she had a most sweet smile, with a touch of tender melancholy in it. Altogether she was as unpretending, undemonstrative, quiet a little lady as you could well meet.

Like most men, Smith was transfixed by her eyes: ‘they looked you through and through – and you felt they were forming an opinion of you … by a subtle penetration into the very marrow of your mind, and the innermost core of your soul'. After an equally uncomfortable dinner, Smith spent an unexpectedly happy two hours in conversation with his hostess. Reticent about herself, she was nevertheless voluble in describing London literary life, speaking with contempt of' the minor Guerillas and Bohemians of Letters' and with distaste of Charles Dickens, whose ostentatious extravagance she disliked. Without expressly trying to dissuade Smith from his intention of giving up commerce and going to London to earn his living as a writer, she made it clear that she thought he would fail: ‘she seemed to think the tamest Haworth life was preferable to the turning of the pen into a literary tightrope-dancing machine for gold'. They parted with Charlotte's ‘maternal' words of warning ringing in his ears: ‘seek out and gain the friendship of the highest and best in literature … but as for the general body of those who call themselves literary men avoid them as a moral pestilence'.
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