Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (559 page)

TO MRS. GASKELL, Manchester

‘Brookroyd,
October
22
nd
, 1856.

‘My dear Mrs. Gaskell, — If you go to London pray try what may be done with regard to a portrait of dear Charlotte.  It would greatly enhance the value and interest of the memoir, and be such a satisfaction to people to see something that would settle their ideas of the personal appearance of the dear departed one.  It has been a surprise to every stranger, I think, that she was so gentle and lady-like to look upon.

‘Emily Brontë went to Roe Head as pupil when Charlotte went as teacher; she stayed there but two months; she never settled, and was ill from nothing but home-sickness.  Anne took her place and remained about two years.  Emily was a teacher for one six months in a ladies’ school in Halifax or the neighbourhood.  I do not know whether it was conduct or want of finances that prevented Branwell from going to the Royal Academy.  Probably there were impediments of both kinds.

‘I am afraid if you give me my name I shall feel a prominence in the book that I altogether shrink from.  My very last wish would be to appear in the book more than is absolutely necessary.  If it were possible, I would choose not to be known at all.  It is my friend only that I care to see and recognise, though your framing and setting of the picture will very greatly enhance its value. — I am, my dear Mrs. Gaskell, yours very sincerely,

‘Ellen Nussey.’

The book was published in two volumes, under the title of
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
, in the spring of 1857.  At first all was well.  Mr. Brontë’s earliest acknowledgment of the book was one of approbation.  Sir James Shuttleworth expressed the hope that Mr. Nicholls would ‘rejoice that his wife would be known as a Christian heroine who could bear her cross with the firmness of a martyr saint.’  Canon
 
Kingsley wrote a charming letter to Mrs. Gaskell, published in his
Life
, and more than once reprinted since.

‘Let me renew our long interrupted acquaintance,’ he writes from St. Leonards, under date May 14th, 1857, ‘by complimenting you on poor Miss Brontë’s
Life
.  You have had a delicate and a great work to do, and you have done it admirably.  Be sure that the book will do good.  It will shame literary people into some stronger belief that a simple, virtuous, practical home life is consistent with high imaginative genius; and it will shame, too, the prudery of a not over cleanly though carefully white-washed age, into believing that purity is now (as in all ages till now) quite compatible with the knowledge of evil.  I confess that the book has made me ashamed of myself. 
Jane Eyre
I hardly looked into, very seldom reading a work of fiction — yours, indeed, and Thackeray’s, are the only ones I care to open. 
Shirley
disgusted me at the opening, and I gave up the writer and her books with a notion that she was a person who liked coarseness.  How I misjudged her! and how thankful I am that I never put a word of my misconceptions into print, or recorded my misjudgments of one who is a whole heaven above me.

‘Well have you done your work, and given us the picture of a valiant woman made perfect by suffering.  I shall now read carefully and lovingly every word she has written, especially those poems, which ought not to have fallen dead as they did, and which seem to be (from a review in the current
Fraser
) of remarkable strength and purity.’

It was a short-lived triumph, however, and Mrs. Gaskell soon found herself, as she expressed it, ‘in a veritable hornet’s nest.’  Mr. Brontë, to begin with, did not care for the references to himself and the suggestion that he had treated his wife unkindly.  Mrs. Gaskell had associated him with numerous eccentricities and ebullitions of temper, which during his later years he always asserted, and
 
undoubtedly with perfect truth, were, at the best, the fabrications of a dismissed servant.  Mr. Nicholls had also his grievance.  There was just a suspicion implied that he had not been quite the most sympathetic of husbands.  The suspicion was absolutely ill-founded, and arose from Mr. Nicholls’s intense shyness.  But neither Mr. Brontë nor Mr. Nicholls gave Mrs. Gaskell much trouble.  They, at any rate, were silent.  Trouble, however, came from many quarters.  Yorkshire people resented the air of patronage with which, as it seemed to them, a good Lancashire lady had taken their county in hand.  They were not quite the backward savages, they retorted, which some of Mrs. Gaskell’s descriptions in the beginning of her book would seem to suggest.  Between Lancashire and Yorkshire there is always a suspicion of jealousy.  It was intensified for the moment by these sombre pictures of ‘this lawless, yet not unkindly population.’
 
  A son-in-law of Mr. Redhead wrote to deny the account of that clergyman’s association with Haworth.  ‘He gives another as true, in which I don’t see any great difference.’  Miss Martineau wrote sheet after sheet explanatory of her relations with Charlotte Brontë.  ‘Two separate householders in London
each
declares that the first interview between Miss Brontë and Miss Martineau took place at
her
house.’  In one passage Mrs. Gaskell had spoken of wasteful young servants, and the young servants in question came upon Mr. Brontë for the following testimonial: —

‘Haworth,
August
17
th
, 1857.

‘I beg leave to state to all whom it may concern, that Nancy and Sarah Garrs, during the time they were in my service, were kind to my children, and honest, and not wasteful, but
 
sufficiently careful in regard to food, and all other articles committed to their charge.

P. Brontë, A.B.,
‘
Incumbent of Haworth
,
Yorkshire
.’

Three whole pages were devoted to the dramatic recital of a scandal at Haworth, and this entirely disappears from the third edition.  A casual reference to a girl who had been seduced, and had found a friend in Miss Brontë, gave further trouble.  ‘I have altered the word “seduced” to “betrayed,”’ writes Mrs. Gaskell to Martha Brown, ‘and I hope that this will satisfy the unhappy girl’s friends.’  But all these were small matters compared with the Cowan Bridge controversy and the threatened legal proceedings over Branwell Brontë’s suggested love affairs.  Mrs. Gaskell defended the description in
Jane Eyre
of Cowan Bridge with peculiar vigour.  Mr. Carus Wilson, the Brocklehurst of
Jane Eyre
, and his friends were furious.  They threatened an action.  There were letters in the
Times
and letters in the
Daily News
.  Mr. Nicholls broke silence — the only time in the forty years that he has done so — with two admirable letters to the
Halifax Guardian
.  The Cowan Bridge controversy was a drawn battle, in spite of numerous and glowing testimonials to the virtues of Mr. Carus Wilson.  Most people who know anything of the average private schools of half a century ago are satisfied that Charlotte Brontë’s description was substantially correct.  ‘I want to show you many letters,’ writes Mrs. Gaskell, ‘most of them praising the character of our dear friend as she deserves, and from people whose opinion she would have cared for, such as the Duke of Argyll, Kingsley, Greig, etc.  Many abusing me.  I should think seven or eight of this kind from the Carus Wilson clique.’

The Branwell matter was more serious.  Here Mrs. Gaskell had, indeed, shown a singular recklessness.  The lady referred to by Branwell was Mrs. Robinson, the wife of the Rev. Edmund Robinson of Thorp Green, and afterwards Lady
 
Scott.  Anne Brontë was governess in her family for two years, and Branwell tutor to the son for a few months.  Branwell, under the influence of opium, made certain statements about his relations with Mrs. Robinson which have been effectually disproved, although they were implicitly believed by the Brontë girls, who, womanlike, were naturally ready to regard a woman as the ruin of a beloved brother.  The recklessness of Mrs. Gaskell in accepting such inadequate testimony can be explained only on the assumption that she had a novelist’s satisfaction in the romance which the ‘bad woman’ theory supplied.  She wasted a considerable amount of rhetoric upon it.  ‘When the fatal attack came on,’ she says, ‘his pockets were found filled with old letters from the woman to whom he was attached.  He died! she lives still — in May Fair.  I see her name in county papers, as one of those who patronise the Christmas balls; and I hear of her in London drawing-rooms’ — and so on.  There were no love-letters found in Branwell Brontë’s pockets.
 
  When Mrs. Gaskell’s husband came post-haste to Haworth to ask for proofs of Mrs. Robinson’s complicity in Branwell’s downfall, none were obtainable.  I am assured by Mr. Leslie Stephen that his father, Sir James Stephen, was employed at the time to make careful inquiry, and that he and other eminent lawyers came to the conclusion that it was one long tissue of lies or hallucinations.  The subject is sufficiently sordid, and indeed almost redundant in any biography of the Brontës; but it is of moment, because Charlotte Brontë and her sisters were so thoroughly persuaded that a woman was at the bottom of their brother’s ruin; and this belief Charlotte impressed upon all the friends who were nearest and dearest to her.  Her letters at the time of her brother’s
 
death are full of censure of the supposed wickedness of another.  It was a cruel infamy that the word of this wretched boy should have been so powerful for mischief.  Here, at any rate, Mrs. Gaskell did not show the caution which a masculine biographer, less prone to take literally a man’s accounts of his amours, would undoubtedly have displayed.

Yet, when all is said, Mrs. Gaskell had done her work thoroughly and well.  Lockhart’s
Scott
and Froude’s
Carlyle
are examples of great biographies which called for abundant censure upon their publication; yet both these books will live as classics of their kind.  To be interesting, it is perhaps indispensable that the biographer should be indiscreet, and certainly the Branwell incident — a matter of two or three pages — is the only part of Mrs. Gaskell’s biography in which indiscretion becomes indefensible.  And for this she suffered cruelly.  ‘I did so try to tell the truth,’ she said to a friend, ‘and I believe
now
I hit as near to the truth as any one could do.’  ‘I weighed every line with my whole power and heart,’ she said on another occasion, ‘so that every line should go to its great purpose of making
her
known and valued, as one who had gone through such a terrible life with a brave and faithful heart.’  And that clearly Mrs. Gaskell succeeded in doing.  It is quite certain that Charlotte Brontë would not stand on so splendid a pedestal to-day but for the single-minded devotion of her accomplished biographer.

It has sometimes been implied that the portrait drawn by Mrs. Gaskell was far too sombre, that there are passages in Charlotte’s letters which show that ofttimes her heart was merry and her life sufficiently cheerful.  That there were long periods of gaiety for all the three sisters, surely no one ever doubted.  To few people, fortunately, is it given to have lives wholly without happiness.  And yet, when this is acknowledged, how can one say that the
 
picture was too gloomy?  Taken as a whole, the life of Charlotte Brontë was among the saddest in literature.  At a miserable school, where she herself was unhappy, she saw her two elder sisters stricken down and carried home to die.  In her home was the narrowest poverty.  She had, in the years when that was most essential, no mother’s care; and perhaps there was a somewhat too rigid disciplinarian in the aunt who took the mother’s place.  Her second school brought her, indeed, two kind friends; but her shyness made that school-life in itself a prolonged tragedy.  Of the two experiences as a private governess I shall have more to say.  They were periods of torture to her sensitive nature.  The ambition of the three girls to start a school on their own account failed ignominiously.  The suppressed vitality of childhood and early womanhood made Charlotte unable to enter with sympathy and toleration into the life of a foreign city, and Brussels was for her a further disaster.  Then within two years, just as literary fame was bringing its consolation for the trials of the past, she saw her two beloved sisters taken from her.  And, finally, when at last a good man won her love, there were left to her only nine months of happy married life.  ‘I am not going to die.  We have been so happy.’  These words to her husband on her death-bed are not the least piteously sad in her tragic story.  That her life was a tragedy, was the opinion of the woman friend with whom on the intellectual side she had most in common.  Miss Mary Taylor wrote to Mrs. Gaskell the following letter from New Zealand upon receipt of the
Life
: —

‘Wellington, 30
th
July
1857.

‘My dear Mrs. Gaskell, — I am unaccountably in receipt by post of two vols. containing the Life of C. Brontë.  I have pleasure in attributing this compliment to you; I beg, therefore, to thank you for them.  The book is a perfect success, in giving a true picture of a melancholy life, and you have
 
practically answered my puzzle as to how you would give an account of her, not being at liberty to give a true description of those around.  Though not so gloomy as the truth, it is perhaps as much so as people will accept without calling it exaggerated, and feeling the desire to doubt and contradict it.  I have seen two reviews of it.  One of them sums it up as “a life of poverty and self-suppression,” the other has nothing to the purpose at all.  Neither of them seems to think it a strange or wrong state of things that a woman of first-rate talents, industry, and integrity should live all her life in a walking nightmare of “poverty and self-suppression.”  I doubt whether any of them will.