V.
Five years later Lily sat one Sunday morning in the same lodgings. The poor old mother was gone, praying her with her last breath not to desert the boy. But of Charley not a word 449 had come to her—no news of any kind.
She was quite alone—in those days she was generally alone; she had kept her place at the post-office, but everybody knew of her trouble, and somehow it made a kind of barrier between herself and her sister clerks. The sorrows of love are sacred, but when they are mixed up with a criminal and a prison there is a feeling—a kind of a feeling—as if, well, one doesn’t like somehow to be mixed up with it. Lily was greatly to be pitied, no doubt; her lover had turned out shameful; but she ought to have given up the man long before he got so bad.
She was alone. The church bells were beginning to ring. She thought she would go to church. While she considered this point, she heard a woman’s step on the stairs, and there was a knock at the door.
It was a nurse or probationer, dressed in the now familiar garb—a young nurse.
“You are Lily Chesters?” she asked. “There is a patient just brought in to the London Hospital who wants to see you. He is named Charley, he says, and will give no other name. He wrote your address on paper. ‘Tell her,’ he said, ‘that it is Charley.’”
Lily rose quietly. “I will go to him.”
“He is your brother?”
“He is my lover. Is he ill?”
“He is very ill. He came in all in rags, dirty and penniless—he is very ill indeed. Prepare yourself. He is dying of pneumonia.”
I told you before what they call it.
Lily sat at the bedside of the dying man.
“It is all over,” he whispered. “I have reformed, Lily. I have quite turned over a new leaf. I have now resolved to taking the pledge. Kiss me, dear, and tell me that you forgive me.”
“Yes, yes, Charley. God knows that I forgive you. Why, you will come back to yourself in a very little while. Thank God for it, dear! Your own true self. You will be my dear old boy again—the boy that I have always loved; not the drinking, bad boy—the clever, bright boy. Oh, my dear, my dear! you will see mother again very soon, and she will welcome her boy, returned to himself again.”
“Yes,” he said, “that’s it. A serious reform this time. Lily, I dare say I shall be up and well again in a day or two. Then we will see what to do next. I am going out to Australia, where everybody has a chance—America is a fraud. I shall get rich there, and then you and mother will come to me, and we shall get married, and—oh! Lily, Lily, after all that we have suffered, we shall have—I see that we shall have”—he paused, and his voice grew faint—“we shall have—the most splendid time!”
“He is gone,” said the nurse.
AN OLD SONG.
Author Unknown.
As, t’other day, o’er the green meadow I pass’d,
A swain overtook me, and held my hand fast;
Then cried, “My dear Lucy, thou cause of my care,
How long must thy faithful young Thyrsis despair?
To grant my petition, no longer be shy;”
But, frowning, I answer’d, “O, fie, shepherd, fie!”
He told me his fondness like time should endure;
That beauty which kindled his flame ’twould secure;
That all my sweet charms were for homage design’d,
And youth was the season to love and be kind.
Lord, what could I say? I could hardly deny,
And faintly I uttered, “O, fie, shepherd, fie!”
He swore—with a kiss—that he could not refrain;
I told him ’twas rude, but he kissed me again.
My conduct, ye fair ones, in question ne’er call,
Nor think I did wrong—I did nothing at all!
Resolved to resist, yet inclined to comply,
I leave it for you to say, “Fie, shepherd, fie!”
STRANGER THAN FICTION.
LOVE IN A COTTAGE. THE IRISH STORY-TELLER. HUGH BRONTË AS A TENANT-RIGHTER.
Stories of the Brontë Family in Ireland.
By Dr. William Wright.
I.
LOVE IN A COTTAGE.
After a brief honeymoon, spent at Warrenpoint, Alice Brontë returned, on her brother’s invitation, to her old home, and Hugh went back to complete his term of service in Loughorne. It soon became desirable that his wife should have a home of her own, and he took a cottage in Emdale, in the parish of Drumballyroney, with which Drumgooland was united at the time.
The house stands near crossroads leading to important towns. In a direct line it is about three and three-quarters statute miles from Rathfriland, seven and three-quarters from Newry, twelve from Warrenpoint, and five and a quarter from Banbridge. The exact position of the house, is on the north-west side of the old road, leading, in Hugh Brontë’s day, to Newry and Warrenpoint. Almost opposite, on the other side of the road, there was a blacksmith’s shop, which still continues to be a blacksmith’s shop. The Brontë house remains, though partially in ruins.
The house is now used as a byre, but its dimensions are exactly the same as when it became the home of Hugh Brontë and his bride. The rent then would be about sixpence per week, and would, in accordance with the general custom, be paid by one day’s work in the week, with board, the work being given in the busy season.
The house consisted of two rooms. That over which the roof still stands was without chimney, and was used as bedroom and parlor, and the outer room, from which the roof has fallen, was used as a corn-kiln, and also as kitchen and reception-room.
A farmer’s wife, whose ancestors lived close to the Brontë house long before the Brontës were heard of in County Down, pointing to a spot in the corner of the byre opposite to the window, said: “There is the very spot where the Reverend Patrick Brontë was born.” Then she added, “Numbers of great folk have asked me about his birthplace, but och! how could I tell them that any dacent man was ever born in such a place!” This feeling on the part of the neighbors will probably account for the fact that everything written thus far regarding Patrick Brontë’s birthplace is wrong, neither the townland, nor even the parish of his birth, being correctly given.
In the lowly cottage in Emdale, now known as “The Kiln,” and used as a cowhouse, Patrick Brontë was born, on the 17th of March, 1777. Men have risen to fame from a lowly origin, but few men have ever emerged from humbler circumstances than Patrick Brontë.
Many a reader of Mrs. Gaskell’s life of Charlotte Brontë has been saddened by the picture of the vicar’s daughters amid their narrow and grim surroundings, but the gray vicarage of Haworth was a palace compared with the hovel in which the vicar himself was born and reared.
Besides, the Haworth vicarage was never really as sombre as Mrs. Gaskell painted it, for Miss Ellen Nussey was a constant visitor, and she assures me that the girls were bright and happy in their home, always engaged on some project of absorbing interest, and always enjoying life in their own sober and thoughtful way.
The Brontë cottage in Emdale was very poor, but it was brightened with the perennial sunshine of love. It was love in a cottage, in which the bare walls and narrow board were golden in the light of Alice Brontë’s smile. It was said in the neighborhood that Mrs. Brontë’s smile “would have tamed a mad bull,” and on her deathbed she thanked God that her husband had never looked upon her with a frown.
In their wedded love they were very poor, but very happy. Hugh’s constant, steady work provided for the daily wants of an ever-increasing family, but it made no provision for the strain of adverse circumstances. In fact, the Emdale Brontës lived like birds, and as happy as birds.
Hugh Brontë was one of the industrious poor. The salt of his life was honest, manly toil. He had forgotten the luxury of his childhood’s home, and he did not feel any degradation in his lowly lot.
In our artificial civilization we have come to place too much store on the accident of wealth. Our Blessed Saviour, whom all the rich and luxurious call “Lord,” was born in as lowly a condition of comfortless poverty as Patrick Brontë. Cows are now housed in Brontë’s birthplace, but our Lord was born among the animals in the caravansérai. And yet, in our social code, we have reduced the Decalogue to this one commandment, “Thou shalt not be poor.”
Hugh Brontë did not choose poverty as his lot, but, being a working man, like the carpenter of Nazareth, he did the daily work that came to his hand, and then, side by side with Alice, he found the fulness of each day sufficient for all its wants.
The happy home was soon crowded with children, and the family removed to a larger and better house, in the townland of Lisnacreevy. The parish register of Drumballyroney Church, to which the Brontës belonged, unfortunately goes no farther back than 1779, two years after the birth of Patrick. The register, which is now kept in the parish church of Drumgooland, belonged to the united parishes of Drumballyroney and Drumgooland, in which, when united, the Reverend Mr. Tighe was vicar for forty-two years. When Patrick Brontë was two years old, less one day, his brother William was baptized, and about every two succeeding years either a brother or a sister was added until the family numbered ten.
II.
THE DAILY ROUND.
Hugh Brontë and his wife could not live wholly on love in a cottage, and Hugh had to bestir himself. He was an unskilled laborer, but he understood the art of burning lime. There was no limestone, however, in that part of County Down to burn, and as he could not have a lime-kiln, he resolved to have a corn-kiln.
At the beginning of this century a corn-kiln in such a district in Ireland was a very simple affair. A floor of earthenware tiles, pierced nearly through from the underside, was arranged on a kind of platform or loft. Beneath there was a furnace, which was heated by burning the rough, dry seeds, or outer shelling, ground off the oats. In front of the furnace there was a hollow, called “the logie-hole,” in which the kiln man sat, with the shelling or seeds heaped up within arm’s length around him, and with his right hand he beeked the kiln, by throwing, every few seconds, a sprinkling of seeds on the flame. In this way he kept up a warm glow under the corn till it was sufficiently dried for the mill.
Such was the simple character of the ordinary corn-kiln in County Down at the beginning of the century. But I have been assured by the old men of the neighborhood that Hugh Brontë’s kiln was of a still more primitive structure. 453 The platform, or corn-floor, was constructed by laying iron bars across unhewn stones set up on end. On these bars straw matting was spread, and on the matting the corn was placed to dry. Such a structure was the immediate precursor of the pottery floored kiln. The design was the same in both, but the matting was always liable to catch fire, and required careful attention.
The kiln was erected in the part of the Brontë cottage now roofless, and, like the cottage itself, must have been a very humble affair. It has been suggested that the kiln may have stood elsewhere, but it is now established beyond all doubt, on the unanimous testimony of the inhabitants, that the Brontë kiln stood in the ruined room of the Brontë cottage, and, in fact, it is known by the name of “the Brontës’ kiln.”
Within those walls, now roofless, the grandfather of Charlotte Brontë began in 1776 to earn the daily bread of himself and his bride, by roasting his neighbors’ oats. His wage was known by the name of “muther,” and consisted of so many pounds of fresh oats taken from every hundredweight brought to him to be kiln-dried. The miller, too, was paid in kind, but his muther was taken by measure, after the shelling, or seeds, had been ground off the grain.
When Hugh Brontë had accumulated a sackful of muther he dried it on his kiln, took it to the mill, and paid his muther in turn to the miller, to have it ground into meal.
The meal, when taken home, was stored in a barrel, and with the produce of the rood of potatoes which Hugh had sod on his brother-in-law’s farm, became the food of himself and family. As the Brontës could not consume all the muther themselves, the surplus would be sold to provide clothing and other necessaries, and though there remains no trace of pig-stye or fowl-house, there can be little doubt that Mrs. Brontë would have both pigs and fowl to eke out her husband’s earnings.
Mrs. Brontë was a famous spinner, and she handed down the art to her daughters. She had always a couple of sheep grazing on her brother’s land. She carded and span the wool, her spinning-wheel singing all day beside her husband, as he beeked the kiln. Then, during the long, dark evenings, when they had no light but the red eye of the kiln, she knitted the yarn into hose and vest and shirt, and even head-gear, so that Hugh Brontë, like his sons in after years, was almost wholly clad in “homespun.”
This, probably, had something to do with the general impression, which still remains in the neighborhood, of the stately and shapely forms of the Brontë men and women. The knitted woollen garments fitted close, unlike the fantastic and shapeless habiliments that came from the hands of local tailors in those days.
Alice Brontë also span nearly all the garments which she wore, and her tall and comely daughters after her were dressed in clothes which their own hands had taken from the fleece.
On principle, as well as from necessity, the Brontës wore woollen garments, and the vicar carried the same taste with him to England, where his dislike of everything made of cotton was attributed by his biographer to dread of fire. The absurd servants’ gossip as to his cutting up his wife’s silk gown had possibly a grain of truth in it, owing to his preference for woollen garments; but the atrocity spun out of the gossip by Mrs. Gaskell was probably an exaggeration of an innocent act. At any rate, the old man characterized the statement, I believe truly, by a small but ugly word.
All the Brontës, father, mother, sons, and daughters, to the number of twelve, were clad in wool, and they were the healthiest, handsomest, strongest, heartiest family in the whole country. They were a standing proof of the excellency of the woollen theory, and it is interesting to note how Hugh Brontë’s theory and practice have received approval in our own day. For a time the Brontës had to look to others to weave their yarn into the blankets and friezes that they required, but Patrick was taught to weave as soon as he was able to throw the shuttle and roll the beam, and then his father’s house manufactured 454 for themselves everything they wore, from the raw staple to the gracefully fitting corset.
Even the scarlet mantle for which “Ayles” Brontë is still remembered in Ballynaskeagh was carded, spun, knitted, and dyed by Mrs. Brontë’s own hands. The spirit of independence manifested by the Brontës in England was a survival of a still sturdier spirit that had had its origin in one of the humblest cabins in County Down.
As time passed Hugh Brontë became a famous ditcher. There is a very old man called Hugh Norton, living in Ballynaskeagh, who remembers him making fences and philosophizing at the same time. It is very probable that the introduction of corn-kilns constructed of burnt pottery may have left him without custom for his straw-mat kiln, just as the introduction of machinery at a later period left the country hand-looms idle.
In Hugh Brontë’s time more careful attention began to be given to the land. Bogs were drained, fields fenced, roads constructed, bridges made, houses built, with greater energy than had ever been known before, and, although the landlord generally raised the rent on every improvement effected by the tenant, the wave of prosperity and improvement continued. Hugh Brontë was a good, steady workman, and found constant employment, and at that time wages rose from sixpence per day to eightpence and tenpence. The sod fences made by him still stand as a monument of honest work, and there are few country districts where huntsmen would find greater difficulty with the fences than in Emdale and Ballynaskeagh.
As Hugh Brontë advanced in life he continued to prosper. He removed from the Emdale cottage to a larger house in Lisnacreevy, and from thence he and his family went home to live with Red Paddy, Mrs. Brontë’s brother. On the Ballynaskeagh farm the children found full scope for their energies, and they continued to prosper and purchase surrounding farms until they were in very comfortable circumstances. The Brontës were greatly advanced in their prosperity by a discovery made by one of their countrymen. John Loudon Macadam was a County Down surveyor. He wrote several treatises on road-making of a revolutionary character. His proposal was to make roads by laying down layers of broken stones, which he said would become hardened into a solid mass by the traffic passing over them.
For a time he was the subject of much ridicule, but he persevered, and proved his theory in a practical fashion. The importance of the invention was acknowledged by a grant from the government of ten thousand pounds, which he accepted, and by the offer of a baronetcy, which he declined. He lived to see the world’s highways improved by his discovery, and the English language enriched by his name.
The old, unscientific road-makers were too conservative to engage in the construction of macadamized roads, but the Brontës were shrewd enough to see the value of the new method, and they tendered for county contracts, and their tenders were accepted. Then the way to fortune lay open before them. They opened quarries on their own land, where they found an inexhaustible supply of stone, easily broken to the required size. With suitable stone ready to their hands they had a great advantage over all rivals, and for a generation the macadamizing of the roads in the neighborhood was practically a monopoly in the Brontë family.
I remember the excellent carts and horses employed by the Brontës on the road, and I also distinctly recollect that the names painted on the carts were spelled “Brontë,” the pronunciation being “Brontë,” never “Prunty,” as has been alleged.
With the lucrative monopoly of road-making added to their farm profits the Brontës grew in wealth. They raised on their farm the oats and fodder required by the horses, and, as the brothers did a large amount of the work themselves and had nothing to purchase, the money received for road-making was nearly all profit.
In those days the Brontës added field to field, until they farmed a considerable 455 tract of land, which they held from a model landlord called Sharman Crawford. That was the period at which a two-storied house was built, and there were houses occupied by the Brontës, from the two-storied house down to the thatched cottage. In fact, the house of Red Paddy McClory, in which Alice was born and reared, stood about half-way between the two-storied house and the cabin. The foundations of the house in which Charlotte Brontë’s Irish grandmother was born are still visible.
Shortly after the death of old Hugh, and in the time of the Brontë prosperity, one of the brothers, called Welsh, opened a public-house in the thatched cabin referred to, and from that moment, as far as I have been able to make out, the tide of the Brontë prosperity turned.
Everything the Brontës did was genuine. Their whiskey was as good in quality as their roads, and I fear it must be added that they were among the heartiest customers for their own commodities. They ceased to work on the roads, their hard-earned money slipped through their fingers, and the public-house became the meeting-place for the fast and wild youth of the locality.
Then another brother, called William, but known as Billy, opened on the Knock Hill another public-house, which also became a centre of demoralization to the young men of the district, and a source of degradation to the keeper. I remember both these pests in full force. They were much frequented by Orangemen, who, when tired playing “The Protestant Boys,” used to slake their thirst and fire their hatred of the Papishes by drinking Brontë’s whiskey.
I am bound to say distinctly that I do not believe any of Charlotte Brontë’s Irish uncles ever became confirmed drunkards. They took to the drink business too late in life to be wholly overmastered by the passion for alcohol. Besides, their father’s example, and the industrious habits of their youth and early manhood, had combined to give moral fibre to the stubborn Brontë character, which saved them from precipitate descent on the down grade.
I never saw any of the Brontës drunk, and I believe the occasional drinking of the family was limited to the two brothers who sold drink, and who would always feel bound in honor “to taste a drop” with their customers. The other brothers would drink like other people, in fairs and markets, where every transaction was ratified by a glass of grog, but I do not believe they often drank to excess.
In those days everybody drank. At births, at baptisms, at weddings, at wakes, at funerals, and in all the other leading incidents of life, intoxicating liquors were considered indispensable. If a man was too hot he drank, and if he was too cold he drank. He drank if he was in sorrow, and he drank when in joy. When his gains were great he drank, and he drank also when crushed by losses. The symbol of universal hospitality was the black bottle.
Ministers of the Gospel used to visit their people quarterly. On these visitations the minister was accompanied by one of his deacons. Into whatever house they entered they were immediately met by the hospitable bottle and two glasses, and they were always expected to fortify themselves with spirituous draughts before beginning their spiritual duties. As the visitors called at from twelve to twenty houses on their rounds, they must have been “unco fou” by the close of the day.
It is interesting to remember that when the drinking habits of the country were at their height the temperance reformation was begun in Great Britain, by the best friend the Brontës had, the Reverend David McKee. It is of still greater interest, in our present investigation, to know that Mr. McKee was moved to the action which has resulted in the great temperance reform by the Brontë public-houses at his door, and by the demoralization they were creating.
The little incident which has led to such momentous results came about in this way: the Reverend David McKee of Ballynaskeagh was the minister of the Presbyterian Church of Anaghlone. He had built his church, and he was 456 largely independent of his congregation. One Sunday he thought fit to preach on The Rechabites. In the sermon he ridiculed and denounced the drinking habits of the time. The sermon fell on the congregation like a thunderbolt from a cloudless sky. Blank amazement in the audience was succeeded by hot indignation.
On the following morning an angry deputation from the congregation waited on Mr. McKee. He listened to them with patient courtesy while they urged that the sermon should be immediately burnt, and that an apology should be tendered to the congregation on the following Sunday.
When the deputation had exhausted themselves and their subject, Mr. McKee began quietly to draw attention to the happy homes which had been desolated by whiskey, the brilliant young men whom it had ruined, the amiable neighbors whom it had hurried into drunkards’ graves, and then he pointed to the Brontës as an example of the baneful influence of the trade on the sellers of the stuff themselves.
The deputation, some of them Orangemen, were in no mood to listen to radical doctrines, subversive of their time-honored customs, and they began to threaten.
Mr. McKee, who was six feet six inches high, and of great muscular power, drew himself up to his full stature, and calling to his servant, then at breakfast in the kitchen, told him to saddle his best mare, as he wished to ride in haste to Newry, to publish his sermon in time for circulation on the following Sunday. Then, turning to the deputation, he thanked them for their early visit, which he hoped would bear fruit, and bowed them out of his parlor.
He rode the best horse in the whole district, and he never drew rein till he reached the printing-office in Newry, and he had the sermon ready for circulation on the following Sunday, and handed it to his people as they retired.
In 1798 Mr. McKee, then a youth, watched from a hill in his father’s land the battle of Ballynahinch. He had in his arms at the time a little nephew who had been left in his charge. The little nephew became the great Doctor Edgar of Belfast, who used to boast playfully that he was “up in arms” at the battle of Ballynahinch.
Mr. McKee sent a copy of The Rechabites to his eloquent nephew. Doctor Edgar read the sermon, and then, rising from his seat, proceeded swiftly to carry all the whiskey he had in the house into the street, and empty it into the gutter. With that drink offering Doctor Edgar inaugurated the great temperance reform. From Ireland he passed to Scotland, and from Scotland to England. The whole kingdom was mightily stirred, and the temperance cause has ever since continued to flourish. The little seed, stimulated at first by the Brontë public-houses, has become a great tree, the branches of which extend to all lands.
We have now seen the Brontës in the daily round of their common pursuits. In the next chapter we hope to see old Hugh in the light of his Brontë genius.
III.
THE IRISH RACONTEUR OR STORY-TELLER.
The Hakkawāti is the oriental story-teller, the man who beyond all others relieves the tedium and wearisomeness of oriental life. I have often watched the oriental Hakkawāti, seated in the centre of a large crowd, weaving stories with subtile plots and startling surprises, using pathos and passion and pungent wit, and always interspersing his narratives with familiar incidents, and laying on local color, to give an appearance of vraisemblance, or reality, to the wildest fancies.
The Arabian Hakkawāti generally tells his stories at night, when the weird and wonderful are most effective. He has always a fire so arranged as to light up his countenance with a ruddy glow, so that the movements and contortions of a mobile face may add support to the narrative. He sometimes proceeds slowly, stumbling and correcting himself, like D’Israeli, as if his one great desire was to stick to the literal truth.
Without any apparent effort to please, the Hakkawāti keeps his finger on the pulse of his audience. Should they show signs of weariness, he makes them smile by some pleasantry, and as the Arab holds that “smiles and tears are in the same khury,” or wallet, he brings something of great seriousness on the heels of the fun, and works himself into a white heat of passion over it, the veins rising like cords on his forehead, and his whole frame convulsed and throbbing, the rapt audience following, in full sympathy with every mood.
I have seen the Arabs shivering and pale with terror, as the Hakkawāti narrated the fearful deeds of some imaginary jinn, and I have seen them feeling for their daggers, and ready to spring to their feet, to avenge some dastard act of imaginary cruelty; and a few seconds after I have seen them melted to tears at the recital of some imaginary tale of woe. I never wearied in listening to the Hakkawāti, or in watching the artlessness of his consummate art; and I have always looked on him as the most interesting of all orientals, a positive benefactor to his illiterate countrymen.
Hugh Brontë was an Irish Hakkawāti, the last of an extinct race. I knew several men who had heard him when he was at his best. He would sit long winter nights in the logie-hole of his corn-kiln, in the Emdale cottage, telling stories to an audience of rapt listeners who thronged around him. Mrs. Brontë plied her knitting in the outer darkness of the kitchen, for there was no light except the glow from the furnace of the kiln, which lighted up old Hugh’s face as he beeked the kiln, and told his yarns.
The Reverend William McAllister, from whom I got most details as to Brontë’s story-telling, had heard his father say that he spent a night in Brontë’s kiln either in the winter of 1779 or 1780. Brontë’s fame was then new. The place was crowded to suffocation. At that time he reserved a place near the fire for Mrs. Brontë, and Patrick, then a baby, was lying on the heap of seeds from which the fire was fed, with his eyes fixed on his father, and listening, like the rest, in breathless silence.
Hugh Brontë seems to have had the rare faculty of believing his own stories, even when they were purely imaginary, and he would sometimes conjure up scenes so unearthly and awful that both he and his hearers were afraid to part company for the night. Frequently his neighbors could not face the darkness alone after one of Hugh’s gruesome stories, and lay upon the shelling seeds till day dawned.
The farmers’ sons of the whole neighborhood used to gather round Brontë at night to hear his narratives, and he continued to manufacture stories of all descriptions as long as he lived.
I have always understood that Hugh Brontë’s stories, though sometimes rough in texture and interspersed with emphatic expletives, after the manner of the time, had always a healthy moral bearing. As a genuine Irishman he never used an immodest word, or by gesture, phrase, or innuendo suggested an impure thought. On this point all my informants were unanimous. He neither used unchaste words himself, nor permitted any one to do so in his house. Tyranny and cruelty of every kind he denounced fiercely. Faithlessness and deceit always met condign punishment in his romances, and in cases where girls had been betrayed, either the ghost of the injured woman, or the devil himself, in some awful form, wreaked unutterable vengeance on the betrayer.
Hugh Brontë was a great moral teacher and a power for good, as far as his influence extended. There are still some old men living in his neighborhood who never understood him, and who are disposed to think he was in league with the devil.
It is always at his peril that any man dares to live before his time, or to leave the beaten track of the commonplace. The reformers have all, without exception, been mad, or worse, in the eyes of dull conservatism. Brontë dared to teach his neighbors by allowing them to see as well as hear, and those who were too stupid to understand were clever enough to denounce.
By a very great effort Hugh Brontë learned to read, late in life. He began at Mount Pleasant, with no higher aim than that of being able to write letters to Alice McClory, when he could no longer visit her. He made rapid strides in learning under the tutelage of his master’s children, when he lived in Loughorne, and when he went to live in Emdale he knew the sweetness and solace of good books, and he had always a book on his knee, which he read by the light of the kiln fire, when he was alone. He knew the Bible, Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and Burns’s poems, well. Those were bookless days. The newspaper had not yet found its way to the people, and in a neighborhood of mental stagnation it was something to have one man who could hold the mirror up to nature, and lead his illiterate visitors into enchanted ground.
Many of Hugh’s stories were far removed from the region of romance, but he had the literary art of giving an artistic touch to everything he said, which added a charm to the narration, independent of the facts which he narrated.
The story of his early life, which I have tried to reduce to simple prose, was delivered in the rhapsodic style of the ancient bards, but simple enough to be understood by the most unlettered peasant. None of Brontë’s stories were so acceptable as the simple record of his early hardships.
Mingled with all his stories, shrewd maxims for life and conduct were interwoven; but in his oration on tenant-right he broke new ground, and showed that under different circumstances he might have been a great statesman, and saved his country from unutterable woe.
Hugh Brontë was superstitious, but while his superstitious character descended to all his children, the faculty of story-telling was inherited, as far as I have been able to ascertain, by Patrick alone. All the sons and daughters talked with a dash of genius—as one of their old acquaintances said, “They were very cliver with their tongues”—but I have never heard of any of them except Patrick trying to tell a story.
Patrick, at the age of two or three, used to lie on the warm shelling seeds and listen to his father’s entrancing stories, and he seems to have caught something of his father’s gift and power. Miss Nussey, Charlotte’s friend, “Miss E.,” has often told me of Patrick’s power to rivet the attention of his children, and awe them with realistic descriptions of simple scenes. All the girls used to sit in breathless silence, their prominent eyes starting out of their heads, while their father unfolded lurid scene after scene; but the greatest effect was produced on Emily, who seemed to be unconscious of everything else except her father’s story, and sometimes the descriptions became so vivid, intense, and terrible that they had to implore him to desist.
Miss Nussey had opportunities for observing the Brontë girls that no other person had. She became Charlotte’s friend at school, when both were homesick and needed friends. She continued to be her fast friend through life. Gentle Anne Brontë died in her arms, and she was Charlotte’s true consoler when the heroic Emily passed swiftly away. She early discovered the ring of genius in Charlotte’s letters, and preserved every scrap of them, and it is chiefly through those letters that the Brontës are known in England. She was Charlotte’s confidante in all private transactions and love matters, and she might have been a nearer friend still had Charlotte not refused an offer of marriage from her brother—an incident in the novelist’s life here for the first time made public.
Miss Nussey was not only Charlotte’s devoted friend, but she was a constant visitor at Haworth, and a keen observer. She had a great power of discernment in literary matters, and a very considerable literary gift herself. She had not to wait till “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” were published to learn that Charlotte and Emily Brontë were endowed with genius. We owe it to her penetrating sagacity that we know so much of the vicar’s daughters. She watched their growth of intellect and everything that ministered to it, and she believes firmly that the girls caught their inspiration 459 from their father, and that Emily got not only her inspiration but most of her facts from her father’s narratives.[4]
Swinburne, in his “Note on Charlotte Brontë,” has alone had the poetic insight and artistic instinct to discern this fact. He is right when he says, “Charlotte evidently never worked so well as when painting more or less directly from nature.... In most cases, probably, the designs begun by means of the camera were transferred for completion to the canvas.”
Swinburne, however, falls short in discernment, when, in contrasting Charlotte with her sister, he says: “Emily Brontë, like William Blake, would probably have said, or at least presumably have felt, that such study after the model was to her impossible—an attempt but too certain to diminish her imaginative insight and disable her creative hand.”
Surely the highest imaginative insight and deftest creative hand work from the model, nature, but the result is not a mere portrait of the model.
“The dirty, ragged, black-haired child,” brought home by Mr. Earnshaw from Liverpool, is none other than the real dirty, naked, black-haired foundling, discovered on the boat between Liverpool and Drogheda, and taken home by Charlotte’s great-grandfather and great-grandmother to the banks of the Boyne. The artist, however, is not a mere copyist, and hence, while the story starts from existing facts, and follows the general outline of the real, it is not the very image of the real, and makes deviations from the original facts to meet the exigencies of art.
There is no difficulty, however, in recognizing the original of the incarnate fiend Heathcliff in the man Welsh, who tormented Hugh Brontë, Patrick’s father, in the old family home near Drogheda. Had Welsh never played the demon among the Brontës, Emily Brontë had never placed on the canvas Heathcliff, “child neither of lascar nor gypsy, but a man’s shape animated by demon life—a ghoul, an afrit.” Nelly Dean, the benevolent but irresolute medium of romance and tragedy, is Hugh’s Aunt Mary, clear-eyed as to right and duty, but ever slipping down before the force of circumstances. And old Gallagher, on the banks of the Boyne, with “the Blessed Virgin and all the saints” on his side, is none other than the original of the old hypocrite, Joe. Gallagher is Joe speaking the Yorkshire dialect.
And Edgar Linton is the gentle and forgiving brother of Alice, our friend Red Paddy McClory, who took his sister home after her runaway marriage with a Protestant, and finally took the whole Brontë family under his roof, and gave them all he possessed. Even Catherine Linton’s flight and marriage has solid foundation in fact, either in Alice Brontë’s romantic elopement with Hugh, or in the more tragic circumstances of Mary Brontë’s marriage with Welsh.
It is not credible that Patrick Brontë, in his story-telling moods, never narrated to his listening daughters the romance of their grandfather and grandmother. It is true Miss Nussey never heard any reference to the story, nor did the Brontës ever in her presence refer to their Irish home or friends or history, though, at the very time she was visiting Haworth, they were in constant communication with their Irish relatives, and, as we shall see, one of the uncles actually visited them, as Charlotte’s champion, and one of them had visited Haworth at an earlier date.
They were too proud to talk even to their most intimate friends of their Irish home, much less to expose the foibles of their immediate ancestors to phlegmatic English ears; but Patrick Brontë would not omit to tell his story-loving daughters the thrilling adventures of their ancestors, and the girls, having brooded over the incidents, reproduced them in variant forms, and in the sombre setting of their own surroundings.
The originals lived and died, acted and were acted upon, in Louth and Down; but on the steeps of “Wuthering Heights” they strut again, speaking the Yorkshire dialect, and braced by the tonic air of the northern downs.
None of the stories betray their origin so clearly as “Wuthering Heights,” just as none of the novelists were so fascinated with their father’s tales as Emily. But the stories are all Brontë stories, an echo of the thrilling narratives related by old Hugh, and retold, I believe, a hundred times by Patrick. Of course, all the stories are made to live again under new forms, each writer giving the stamp of her own character to the new creations. Artists of the Brontë stamp are not portrait painters, nor mere reproducers.
They never were content to be mere lackeys of nature. They were above nature, and everything without and within themselves they placed under contribution.
Even the rough and rugged characters that have come from the hand of Emily show the work of the artist. She added to the repulsive Heathcliff qualities of her own. She is perfectly serious when she says: “Possibly some people might suspect him [Heathcliff] of a degree of under-bred pride. I have a sympathetic chord within me that tells me it is nothing of the sort. I know by instinct his reserve springs from an aversion to showy display of feeling, to manifestations of mutual kindliness. He’ll love and hate equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again. No! I’m running on too fast. I bestow my own attributes over-liberally on him.”
Knowing the model from which Emily Brontë worked, there are few passages which throw more light on the artist than this. Catherine Linton was modelled on the lovely Alice McClory, who bequeathed to her clever granddaughters all the personal attractions they possessed; but here again Emily bestows attributes of herself and sisters on her stately and lily-like grandmother.
“She [Catherine] was slender, and apparently scarcely past girlhood. An admirable form, and the most exquisite little face I had ever had the pleasure of beholding; small features, very fair; flaxen ringlets, or rather golden, hanging loose on her delicate neck; and eyes, had they been agreeable in expression, that would have been irresistible.”
The picture is neither that of a Brontë of the Haworth vicarage nor is it a portraiture of the flower plucked in Ballynaskeagh by Hugh Brontë, but it is Alice McClory diluted with a dash of the Penzance Branwells, and the effect is a perfect and beautiful picture, more pleasing, indeed, than a life-like portrait, with all the radiant beauty of the charming Alice, when she rode off to Magherally Church with the dashing Hugh Brontë.
IV.
HUGH BRONTË AS A TENANT-RIGHTER.
Hugh Brontë worked up to his tenant-right doctrines by a series of assertions, negative and positive, on religious, political, and economic questions. His address, in which he set forth his views on such matters, approximated to the form of a lecture more nearly than any of his other talks, which were generally in the narrative form. The following are the chief points of the discourse, as given to me by my old tutor and friend, and the propositions were never varied, except in the mere wording, although the statement had never been formally written out.
Hugh Brontë always began with a little black Bible in his hand, or on his knee, and his first negative assertion was:
I. “The church is not Christ’s.”
Laying his hand on the little book he would declare that he found grace in the Bible, but in the church only greed. Once and only once he had appealed to a parson. He was hungry, naked, and bleeding, but the great double-chinned, red-faced man had looked on him as if he were a rat, and, without hearing his story, had him driven off by a grand-looking servant, who cracked a whip over his head and swore at him.
In Hugh Brontë’s eyes the parsons got their livings for political services, and not for learning or goodness. Enormous sums were paid them to do work that they did not do. They rarely visited their parishes, and their duties were performed by hungry and ill-paid curates. When they did return occasionally to their livings they were heard of at banquets, where they ate and drank too freely, and at other resorts, where they gambled recklessly. They were seen riding over the country after foxes and hounds, and sitting in judgment on the men whose grain they had trampled down, and sending them to penal servitude for trapping hares in their own gardens. They were said to be ignorant, but they were known to be irreligious, immoral, arrogant, 461 and cruel. They acted as the ministers of the gentry, before whom they were very humble, and they utterly despised the people who paid for their luxuries, and supported their own priests besides.
They gave the sanction of the church to violence, craft, and crime in high places, and they were as far removed as men could be, in origin, position, and practices, from the apostles of the New Testament. And yet, he added, they claimed, in the most haughty manner, that they and they alone were the successors of the apostles, although they showed no signs of apostolic spirituality or apostolic service.
Hugh Brontë declared that he could not submit to the Protestant parson, who despised him because he was poor, and could not aid in his promotion, nor could he yield obedience to the Catholic priest, who demanded utter subjection and prostration of both body and mind, and enforced his church’s claims by a stout stick. With these views it is not to be wondered at that Hugh Brontë did not belong to any church.
To us, now, his statements appear exaggerated and too sweeping, but it must be remembered that he spoke of the Irish clergy in the closing decades of the last century. He expressed himself fiercely regarding the parsons, and in return they dubbed him “atheist.”
His second negative assertion was:
II. “The world is not God’s.”
He knew from the Bible that God had made all things very good, and that he loved the world, but he held that a number of people had got in between God and his world, and made it very bad and hateful. They were known as kings and emperors, and they had seized on the world by fraud and force. They lived on the best of everything that the land produced, and when they disagreed among themselves they sent their people to kill each other on their account, while they sat at home in peace and luxury.
These usurpers not only held sway over the possessions and lives of men, but they decreed the exact thoughts men were to entertain concerning God, and the exact words they were to speak concerning God; and when men presumed to obey God rather than men they were tied to stakes and burned to death as blasphemers. For such sentiments as these Hugh Brontë was denounced as a socialist—a very bad and dangerous name at the beginning of the present century.
His third negative proposition was:
III. “Ireland is not the king’s.”
He understood that King George III. was not a wise man, but that he was a humane man. Ireland was not governed by King George III., but by a gang of rapacious brigands. They constantly invoked the king’s name, but only to serve more fully their own selfish ends. By the king’s authority they carried out their policy of systematic outrage, until he hated the very name of the king whom he always wished to love.
The chief business of the king’s representatives was to plunder his majesty’s poorer subjects. For this purpose the country was parcelled out and divided among a number of base and greedy adventurers, in return for odious services. Each of these adventurers became king, or landlord, in his own district, and lived on the wretched natives. Every meskin of butter made on the farm, every pig reared in the cabin, every egg laid by the hens that roosted in the kitchen, went to support the land-king.
The cottages were mud hovels. The land was bog and barren waste. The men and women were in rags. The children were hungry, pinched, and bare-footed. But the landlord carried off everything, except the potato crop, which was barely sufficient to sustain life.
The landlord was a very great man. He lived in London, near the king, in more than royal splendor. Or he passed his time in some of the great cities of Europe, spending as much on gay women as would have clothed and fed all the starving children on his estate. In English society his pleasantries were said to be most entertaining, regarding the poverty, misery, and squalor of his tenants, whom he fleeced; but he took 462 care never to come near them, lest his fine sensibilities should be shocked at their condition. His serious occupation was the making of laws to increase his own power for rapacity, and to take away from the people every vestige of rights that they might have inherited.
“The landlord takes everything and gives nothing,” was Hugh Brontë’s simple form of the fine modern phrase regarding landlords’ privileges and duties.
Hugh Brontë maintained that the landlord was a courteous gentleman, graced with polished manners, and that if he had lived among his people he might in time have developed a heart. At least, he could hardly have kept up a gentlemanly indifference, in the presence of squalor and misery. But he kept quite out of sight of his tenantry, or he would not have made so much merriment about the pig, which was being brought up among the children, to pay for his degrading extravagances. The landlord’s place among the people was taken by an agent, an attorney, and a sub-agent. The agent was a local potentate, whose will was law. The attorney’s business was to make the law square with the agent’s acts. And the under agent was employed to do mean and vile and inhuman acts, that neither the agent nor attorney could conveniently do.
The duty of the three was to find out, by public inspection and by private espionage, the uttermost farthing the tenants could pay, and extract it from them legally. In getting the rent for the landlord each got as much as he could for himself. The key of the situation was the word “eviction.”
Then Hugh told the story of his ancestors’ farm. The Brontës had occupied a piece of forfeited land, with well-defined obligations to a chief, or landlord. Soon the landlord succeeded in removing all legal restraints which in any way interfered with his absolute control of the place. Remonstrance and entreaty were alike unavailing. The alterations in title were made by the authority of “George III., by the grace of God King of England!”
Hugh’s great-grandfather drained the bog and improved the land, at enormous expense. Every improvement was followed by a rise in the rent. His grandfather built a fine house on the land, by money made in dealing, and again the rent was raised, on the increased value given to the place by the tenant’s industry. Then, the vilest creature in human form having ingratiated himself with the agent, by vile services, the place was handed over to him, without one farthing of compensation to the heirs of the man whose labor had made the place of value. All these things were done in the name of George III., though the king had no more to do with the nefarious transactions than the child unborn.
From this conclusion Hugh Brontë proceeded to his fourth negative proposition:
IV. “Irish law is not justice.”
He expressed regret that he was unable to respect the laws of the country. According to his views, the laws were made by an assembly of landlords, purely and solely to serve their own rapacious desires, and not in accordance with any dictates of right or wrong. As soon might the lambs respect the laws of the wolves as the people of Ireland respect the laws of the landlords.
From this point he naturally arrived at his fifth negative proposition:
V. “Obedience to law is not a duty.”
He said it might be prudent to obey a bad law, cruelly administered, because disobedience might entail inconvenient consequences; but there was no moral obligation impelling a man to obey a law which outraged decency, and against which every righteous and generous instinct revolted. Human laws should be the reflection of divine laws; but the landlord-made laws of Ireland had neither the approval of honest men nor the sanction of divine justice.
Hugh’s sixth and last negative proposition was:
VI. “Patriotism is not a virtue.”
He held that every man should love his country, and that every Irishman did; but he could not do violence to the most sacred instincts of his nature, 463 by any zeal to uphold a system of government which dealt with Ireland as the legitimate prey of plunderers.
In other lands men were patriotic because they loved their country. He loved his country too well to be a patriot. Love of country more than any other passion had prompted to the purest patriotism; but who would do heroic acts to maintain a swarm of harpies to pollute and lacerate his country? Who would have his zeal aglow to maintain the desolators of his native land?
Hugh Brontë gave out his views with a warmth that betrayed animus arising from personal injury. He was therefore declared to be disloyal, and that at a time when there was danger in disloyalty. About the time Hugh Brontë was enunciating these sentiments the rising of the United Irishmen took place, and the pitched battle of Ballynahinch was fought, in 1798. It has always seemed to me strange that he should have passed through those times in peace, for the “Welsh horse” devastated the country far and wide after the battle, and hundreds of innocent people were shot down like dogs. Besides, William, his second son, was a United Irishman, and present at the battle of Ballynahinch. After the battle he was pursued by cavalry, who fired at him repeatedly, but he led them into a bog and escaped.
Hugh Brontë lived in a secluded glen; but the “Welsh horse” visited his house, and after a short parley with his wife, in which neither understood the other, one of the soldiers struck a light into the thatch. Hugh suddenly appeared and spoke to the Welsh soldiers in Irish, which it was supposed they understood, as being akin to their own language, and they joined heartily with him in extinguishing the flames. They joined still more heartily with Hugh in disposing of his stock of whiskey. The inability of Hugh’s neighbors to communicate with the Welsh may account for the fact that a man well known for such advanced and disloyal views passed safely through those troublous times.
Having completed his negative assertions, or paradoxes, Hugh Brontë proceeded to state his theories, or positive conclusions. He laid it down as an axiom that justice must be at the root of all good government, and he declared emphatically what O’Connell and Agent Townsend have since maintained, that the Irish were the most justice-loving people in the world. He also held that unjust laws were the fruitful source of all the turbulence and crime in Ireland.
Justice, he said, was nothing very grand. It meant simply that every man should have his own by legal right. This definition brought him to his tenant-right theory. In illustration he returned to the story of his ancestral home and the wrongs of his ancestors. He maintained that when his forefathers drained the bog and improved the land they were entitled to every ounce of improvement they had made. The landlord had done nothing for the land. He never went near it, and had never spent one farthing upon it, and he should not have been entitled to confiscate to his own profit the additional value given to it by the labor of another.
He further declared that a just and wise legislature should secure to every man, high and low, the fruits of his own labor, and he maintained that such simple, natural justice would produce confidence in Ireland, and that confidence would beget content and industry, and that a contented and industrious people would soon learn to love both king and country, and make Ireland happy and England strong. Just laws would silence the agitator and the blunderbuss, and range the people on the side of the rulers.
Hugh Brontë preached his revolutionary doctrines of simple justice in the cheerless east wind, but a little seed, carried I know not how, took root in genial soil, and the revolutionary doctrine of “Every man his own,” at which the political parsons used to cry “Anathema,” and the short-sighted politicians used to shout “confiscation,” has become one of the commonplaces of the modern reformation programme of fair play. The doctrine of common honesty enunciated by Hugh Brontë has lately received the approval of 464 Liberal and Conservative governments in what is known as “Tenant-Right,” or “The Ulster Custom.”
And here it is interesting to note that Hugh Brontë was a tenant on the estate of Sharman Crawford, a landlord who first took up the cause of Irish tenant-right, and after spending a long life in its advocacy, bequeathed its defence to his sons and daughters.
Whether Hugh Brontë’s doctrines on the relation of landlord and tenant ever came to the ears of the Crawford family, I know not. I think it is exceedingly probable that they heard of the remarkable man on their estate, and of his stories and theories. The Crawfords were never absentee landlords, and, as men of high Christian character, they always took a personal interest in their tenants, and would not, I believe, have failed to note any special intellectual activity among them. It is certain, however, that the Sharman Crawfords, father and son in succession, spent their lives largely in the propagation of Hugh Brontë’s views, both in the House of Commons and throughout the country, and it seems to me not only probable and possible, but almost certain, that Brontë’s eloquent and passionate arguments, dropped into the justice-loving minds of the Crawfords,[5] may have been the primary seeds of the great agrarian harvest which, with the full sanction of the legislature, is now being reaped by the farmers in Ireland.
In 1833 W. Sharman Crawford published a pamphlet embodying Hugh Brontë’s doctrines, and making suggestions for the good government of Ireland. The pamphlet was republished by Doctor W. H. Dodd, Q. C., in 1892. Councillor Dodd is an old pupil of the Ballynaskeagh school. He received his early education from Mr. McKee, the friend of the Brontës, and he was acquainted, as a student, with Charlotte Brontë’s uncles. The following is his summary of the political portion of the pamphlet:
“Mr. Crawford anticipates, as the probable result of refusing self government to Ireland, the growth of secret societies, the influence of agitation, and the necessity of resorting to force in the government of the country. He touches upon the question of private bill legislation, of a reform of the grand jury system, of county government. He points out that the creation of county councils, without having a central body to control them, is not desirable. And he suggests the creation of a local legislature for Irish affairs, combined with representation in the Imperial Parliament, as the true method of preserving the Union, as the surest bond of the connection between the two countries, and as essentially necessary to tranquillity in Ireland.
“He refers, among other measures, to the disestablishment of the Irish Church, and the reform of the relations between landlord and tenant, as being pressing.
“The arguments against his views are met and answered. One would think he had read some of the speeches lately delivered, so apt is his reply.
“It is curious to note the length of time Ireland has had to wait for the reforms he thought urgent, and it is sad to reflect how much suffering has been endured and how much blood has been shed because the men of his time would not listen to his words.”
Should my surmise be correct, and I have never doubted for forty years that it is so, great results have flowed from the inhuman treatment of a child. Had little Brontë been left in the luxury of his father’s home, it is not likely he would ever have been shaken up to original and independent thought; but the iron of cruel wrong had entered into his soul, and he felt that all was not well. He owed no gratitude to the existing order of things, and had no compunction in denouncing it; and having thought out and formulated a new theory, he proclaimed it with the strong conviction of an apostle who sees salvation in his gospel alone.
The daring character of Hugh Brontë’s speculations in their paradoxical form, combined with the fierce energy of his manner in making them known, secured for him an audience and an amount of consideration to which, as an uneducated working man, he could have had no claim. Indeed, Hugh Brontë’s revolutionary doctrines were known far beyond his own immediate neighborhood, and while many said he was mad, some declared that he only saw a little clearer than his contemporaries.