Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (540 page)

The two sisters had now friends in Brussels, for they sometimes saw Mary and Martha T —
 
— who were staying there at the Château de Kokleberg, and these young ladies had cousins in the city, whose house was often a pleasant meeting-place. But Emily made little progress with these friendships.

The
grandes vacances
began in September, but Charlotte and Emily did not return home then as had been intended; all was well at Haworth, and there was no reason why they should. Madame Héger made a proposal that they should remain six months more, Charlotte as English teacher, and Emily to instruct some pupils in music; and they were to continue their studies and have board without payment, but they were offered no salary. These terms were at last accepted, and the sisters remained through the long
vacances
with a few boarders who were also there, and Charlotte, at least, was happy.

But a year later, when the rooms of the
pensionnat
were once more deserted, and Emily far away in the parsonage at Haworth, there can be no doubt that she became again subject to that melancholia which had previously been remarked in her when she was at Miss Wooler’s. The excitement of her first sojourn at Brussels wore off, she found no novelty in the things she saw, and she was left to solitary reflection a great deal. But her melancholy began with herself. ‘My youth is leaving me,’ she said to Mary; ‘I can never do better than I have done, and I have done nothing yet,’ and she seemed at such times, according to this friend, ‘to think that most human beings were destined by the pressure of worldly interests to lose one faculty and feeling after another, till they went dead altogether. I hope I shall be put in my grave as soon as I’m dead; I don’t want to walk about so,’ she added. Mary advised her to go home or elsewhere, when she was in this state, for the sake of change, and Charlotte thanked her for the advice, but did not take it.

‘That vacation! Shall I ever forget it? I think not,’ says Lucy Snowe…. ‘My heart almost died within me; miserable longings strained its cords. How long were the September days! How silent, how lifeless! How vast and void seemed the desolate premises! How gloomy the forsaken garden, — grey now with the dust of a town summer departed!’ To Lucy Snowe the future gave no promise of comfort; and a sorrowful indifference to existence often pressed upon her, — a ‘despairing resignation to reach betimes the end of all things earthly.’ She found the future but a hopeless desert: ‘tawny sands, with no green fields, no palm-tree, no well in view.’ And these were the thoughts, too, that oppressed Charlotte Brontë in Brussels and sorely weighed her down. It was in one of these fits of depression, overcome with melancholy, that she found consolation in the confessional, when she poured her tale of solitary sorrow into the ear of a priest — a Père Silas, like him in ‘Villette,’ who spoke of peace and hope to Lucy Snowe.

Troubles of another kind had, however, broken in sadly enough on the close of Charlotte’s first
vacances
in Brussels in 1842, when she and Emily were greatly shocked by the death of Martha T —
 
— at the Château de Kokleberg, after a very short illness. This was a great grief to the little circle in Brussels, for the dead girl had been a bright and affectionate companion, — bewailed under the name of Jessie in ‘Shirley,’ — and she was deeply lamented. But another grief awaited the Brontë sisters; they heard that their aunt Branwell was ill, — was dead; they were wanted at home; and at once, after very hasty preparation, they left Brussels, Emily not to return. They came back to the parsonage at Haworth, to find the funeral over, and the house deprived of one who had been its support and guardian for years.

Thus their stay in Brussels was suddenly cut short, and their studies were interrupted; but they had learned a good deal during their stay there. Monsieur Héger wrote to console Mr. Brontë on his loss; and said that in another year the two girls would have been secured against the eventualities of the future. They were being instructed, and, at the same time, were acquiring the art of instruction: Emily was learning the piano, and receiving lessons from the best Belgian professors; and she had little pupils herself.
‘Elle perdait donc à la fois un reste d’ignorance et un reste plus gênant encore de timidité.’
Charlotte was beginning to give French lessons, and to gain ‘cette assurance, cet aplomb si nécessaire dans l’enseignement.’ It was this kind letter from Monsieur Héger that afterwards induced Mr. Brontë to allow Charlotte to return to Brussels.

CHAPTER II.

OTHER POEMS.

Branwell at the Parsonage: his Loneliness — ’The Epicurean’s Song’ — ’Song’ — Northangerland — ’Noah’s Warning over Methusaleh’s Grave’ — Letter to Mr. Grundy — Miss Branwell’s Death — Her Will — Her Nephew Remembered — Injustice done to Him in this Matter by the Biographers of his Sisters.

During the absence of his sisters Charlotte and Emily in Brussels, and while Anne was away as a governess, Branwell no doubt felt lonely at the parsonage at Haworth; but he appears to have sought consolation from his troubles in the soothing influences of music and poetry. He knew that these employments softened many of the difficulties that beset the road of human life, and that they introduced men into a purer and nobler sphere than that which is called reality. He felt that they led ‘the spirit on, in an ecstasy of admiration, of sweet sorrow, or of unearthly joy, to the music of harmonious, and not wholly intelligible words, raising in the mind beauteous and transcendent images.’ Whatever may have been said as to Branwell’s proneness to self-indulgence, and his enjoyment of society, even that of ‘The Bull,’ and of the corrupt of Haworth, none of his alleged depravity and coarseness of disposition disfigured his verses, however deficient his early effusions may have been in the higher excellencies of the Muse. From the general tenor of his writings, which is religious and sometimes philosophical, he seems, under his misfortunes, which were ever with him in one shape or another, to have sought consolation in the shadowed paths of poetry and reflection.

Some lights now and then diversify the general gloom of his stanzas; but, even then, an air of sadness still pervades them. More I shall find to say on the special features of Branwell’s poems in the later pages of the present work.

He wrote the following verses in 1842:

THE EPICUREAN’S SONG.

‘The visits of Sorrow

Say, why should we mourn?

Since the sun of to-morrow

May shine on its urn;

And all that we think such pain

Will have departed, — then

Bear for a moment what cannot return;

‘For past time has taken

Each hour that it gave,

And they never awaken

From yesterday’s grave;

So surely we may defy

Shadows, like memory,

Feeble and fleeting as midsummer wave.

‘From the depths where they’re falling

Nor pleasure, nor pain,

Despite our recalling,

Can reach us again;

Though we brood over them,

Nought can recover them,

Where they are laid, they must ever remain.

‘So seize we the present,

And gather its flowers,

For, — mournful or pleasant, —

‘Tis all that is ours;

While daylight we’re wasting,

The evening is hasting,

And night follows fast on vanishing hours.

‘Yes, — and we, when night comes,

Whatever betide,

Must die as our fate dooms,

And sleep by their side;

For
change
is the only thing

Always continuing;

And it sweeps creation away with its tide.’

Here Branwell, writing, contrary to his custom, in a gay mood, forgets the failures of the past, diverting his mind from them by seeking serenity in the diversions which now and then lighten his path. He is perfectly conscious of the fleeting nature of earthly things; and, with that natural and felicitous faculty of versification with which his images and figures are invariably described, he invests the Epicurean with the hopes of the Optimist, or with the indifference of the Stoic to the shadows which ever and anon dim the pleasures of human existence. There is nothing assuredly in this lyric of the ‘pulpit twang,’ to which Miss Robinson refers, nor is it a ‘weak and characterless effusion.’

To the year 1842 belongs the following song which in feeling reminds one of Burns’ ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ The subject, however, is distinct, and is pervaded by a profound sentiment of enduring affection, and is expressive of the deepest feeling in reference to it.

SONG.

‘Should life’s first feelings be forgot,

As Time leaves years behind?

Should man’s for ever changing lot

Work changes in the mind?

‘Should space, that severs heart from heart,

The heart’s best thoughts destroy?

Should years, that bid our youth depart,

Bid youthful memories die?

‘Oh! say not that these coming years

Will warmer friendships bring;

For friendship’s joys, and hopes, and fears,

From deeper fountains spring.

‘Its feelings to the
heart
belong;

Its sign — the glistening eye,

While new affections on the
tongue
,

Arise and live and die.

‘So, passing crowds may
smiles
awake

The passing hour to cheer;

But only old acquaintance’ sake

Can ever form a tear.’

Leyland was himself a poet, as I have said, and a literary critic of ability and judgment. Branwell submitted some poems to him for opinion, and he advised his friend to publish them with his name appended, rather than under the pseudonym of ‘Northangerland,’ for he considered them creditable to his genius. But Branwell, on July 12th, 1842, writing to Leyland, asking some technical questions, says, in a postscript, ‘Northangerland has so long wrought on in secret and silence that he dare not take your kind encouragement in the light which
vanity
would prompt him to do.’

On August 10th, 1842, he wrote to Leyland in reference to a monument, which that sculptor had recently put up at Haworth, and he concluded by saying:

‘When you see Mr. Constable — to whom I shall write directly, — be kind enough to tell him that — owing to my absence from home when it arrived, and to the carelessness of those who neglected to give it me on my return, — I have only
now
received his note. Its injunctions shall be gladly attended to; but he would better please me by refraining from any slurs on the fair fame of Charles Freeman or Benjamin Caunt, Esquires.’

Branwell did not lose his early interest in the ‘noble science,’ but continued it with a half-serious constancy. Constable and Leyland regarded the pugilistic encounters of the ‘Ring’ as brutal and degrading, but Branwell always professed to defend its champions with energy and zeal; and in this letter he playfully alludes to two of them. Among his literary labours of the year 1842 is the following poem. It is entitled:

NOAH’S WARNING OVER METHUSALEH’S GRAVE.

‘Brothers and men! one moment stay

Beside your latest patriarch’s grave,

While God’s just vengeance yet delay,

While God’s blest mercy yet can save.

‘Will you compel my tongue to say,

That underneath this nameless sod

Your hands, with mine, have laid to-day

The
last
on earth who walked with God?

‘Shall the pale corpse, whose hoary hairs

Are just surrendered to decay,

Dissolve the chain which bound our years

To hundred ages passed away?

‘Shall six-score years of warnings dread

Die like a whisper on the wind?

Shall the dark doom above your head,

Its blinded victims darker find?

‘Shall storms from heaven
without
the world,

Find wilder storms from hell
within
?

Shall long-stored, late-come wrath be hurled;

Or, — will you, can you turn from sin?

‘Have patience, if too plain I speak,

For time, my sons, is hastening by;

Forgive me if my accents break:

Shall
I
be saved and
Nature
die?

‘Forgive that pause: — one look to Heaven

Too plainly tells me, he is gone,

Who long with me in vain had striven

For earth and for its peace alone.

‘He’s gone! — my Father — full of days, —

From life which left no joy for him;

Born in creation’s earliest blaze;

Dying — himself, its latest beam.

‘But he is gone! and, oh, behold,

Shown in his death, God’s latest sign!

Than which more plainly never told

An Angel’s presence His design.

‘By it, the evening beams withdrawn

Before a starless night descend;

By it, the last blest spirit born

From this beginning of an end;

‘By all the strife of civil war

That beams within yon fated town;

By all the heart’s worst passions there,

That call so loud for vengeance down;

‘By that vast wall of cloudy gloom,

Piled boding round the firmament;

By all its presages of doom,

Children of men — Repent! Repent!’

This poem has also the impress of sadness, but the onward sweep and dignity of its verse are not ruffled by the turbulent undercurrents of Branwell’s mood. The idea of the piece is well borne out in majestic and suitable language, though some instances of that incoherence and indefiniteness which, at intervals, distinguish the earlier poems of his sisters, may be noticed in it.

In the latter part of the year 1842 the state of Miss Branwell’s health became a cause of anxiety to the Brontë family. Acquainted as they had been, in years gone by, with sickness and death, they sorrowed, in anticipation of the inevitable loss of the lady, who had been for long years as a mother to them. Under the shadow which spread over their home, Branwell wrote to his friend — Mr. Grundy — referring to it, saying that he was attending the death-bed of his aunt who had been for twenty years as his mother. In another letter to Mr. Grundy, of the 29th of October, Branwell thus alludes in affectionate terms to her death: