Let us next take up the other two little scraps of paper. They are dated July the 30th, 1845, or Emily’s twenty-seventh birthday. Many things have happened, as she says.
She has been to Brussels, and she has settled definitely at home again. They are still keenly interested in literature, and we still hear of the Gondals. There is wonderfully little difference in the tone or spirit of the journals. The concluding ‘best wishes for this whole house till July the 30th, 1848, and as much longer as may be,’ contain no premonition of coming disaster. Yet July 1848 was to find Branwell Brontë on the verge of the grave, and Emily on her deathbed. She died on the 14th of December of that year.
Haworth, Thursday, July 30th, 1845.
My birthday—showery, breezy, cool. I am twenty-seven years old to-day. This morning Anne and I opened the papers we wrote four years since, on my twenty-third birthday. This paper we intend, if all be well, to open on my thirtieth—three years hence, in 1848. Since the 1841 paper the following events have taken place. Our school scheme has been abandoned, and instead Charlotte and I went to Brussels on the 8th of February 1842.
Branwell left his place at Luddenden Foot. C. and I returned from Brussels, November 8th 1842, in consequence of aunt’s death.
Branwell went to Thorp Green as a tutor, where Anne still continued, January 1843.
Charlotte returned to Brussels the same month, and, after staying a year, came back again on New Year’s Day 1844.
Anne left her situation at Thorp Green of her own accord, June 1845.
Anne and I went our first long journey by ourselves together, leaving home on the 30th of June, Monday, sleeping at York, returning to Keighley Tuesday evening, sleeping there and walking home on Wednesday morning. Though the weather was broken we enjoyed ourselves very much, except during a few hours at Bradford. And during our excursion we were, Ronald Macalgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Augusteena, Rosabella Esmaldan, Ella and Julian Egremont, Catharine Navarre, and Cordelia Fitzaphnold, escaping from the palaces of instruction to join the Royalists who are hard driven at present by the victorious Republicans. The Gondals still flourish bright as ever. I am at present writing a work on the First War. Anne has been writing some articles on this, and a book by Henry Sophona. We intend sticking firm by the rascals as long as they delight us, which I am glad to say they do at present. I should have mentioned that last summer the school scheme was revived in full vigour. We had prospectuses printed, despatched letters to all acquaintances imparting our plans, and did our little all; but it was found no go. Now I don’t desire a school at all, and none of us have any great longing for it. We have cash enough for our present wants, with a prospect of accumulation. We are all in decent health, only that papa has a complaint in his eyes, and with the exception of B., who, I hope, will be better and do better hereafter. I am quite contented for myself: not as idle as formerly, altogether as hearty, and having learnt to make the most of the present and long for the future with the fidgetiness that I cannot do all I wish; seldom or ever troubled with nothing to do, and merely desiring that everybody could be as comfortable as myself and as undesponding, and then we should have a very tolerable world of it.
By mistake I find we have opened the paper on the 31st instead of the 30th. Yesterday was much such a day as this, but the morning was divine.
Tabby, who was gone in our last paper, is come back, and has lived with us two years and a half; and is in good health. Martha, who also departed, is here too. We have got Flossy; got and lost Tiger; lost the hawk Hero, which, with the geese, was given away, and is doubtless dead, for when I came back from Brussels I inquired on all hands and could hear nothing of him. Tiger died early last year. Keeper and Flossy are well, also the canary acquired four years since. We are now all at home, and likely to be there some time. Branwell went to Liverpool on Tuesday to stay a week. Tabby has just been teasing me to turn as formerly to ‘Pilloputate.’ Anne and I should have picked the black currants if it had been fine and sunshiny. I must hurry off now to my turning and ironing. I have plenty of work on hands, and writing, and am altogether full of business. With best wishes for the whole house till 1848, July 30th, and as much longer as may be,—I conclude.
Emily Brontë.
Finally, I give Anne’s last fragment, concerning which silence is essential. Interpretation of most of the references would be mere guess-work.
Thursday, July the 31st, 1845. Yesterday was Emily’s birthday, and the time when we should have opened our 1845 paper, but by mistake we opened it to-day instead. How many things have happened since it was written—some pleasant, some far otherwise. Yet I was then at Thorp Green, and now I am only just escaped from it. I was wishing to leave it then, and if I had known that I had four years longer to stay how wretched I should have been; but during my stay I have had some very unpleasant and undreamt-of experience of human nature. Others have seen more changes. Charlotte has left Mr. White’s and been twice to Brussels, where she stayed each time nearly a year. Emily has been there too, and stayed nearly a year. Branwell has left Luddenden Foot, and been a tutor at Thorp Green, and had much tribulation and ill health. He was very ill on Thursday, but he went with John Brown to Liverpool, where he now is, I suppose; and we hope he will be better and do better in future. This is a dismal, cloudy, wet evening. We have had so far a very cold wet summer. Charlotte has lately been to Hathersage, in Derbyshire, on a visit of three weeks to Ellen Nussey. She is now sitting sewing in the dining-room. Emily is ironing upstairs. I am sitting in the dining-room in the rocking-chair before the fire with my feet on the fender. Papa is in the parlour. Tabby and Martha are, I think, in the kitchen. Keeper and Flossy are, I do not know where. Little Dick is hopping in his cage. When the last paper was written we were thinking of setting up a school. The scheme has been dropt, and long after taken up again and dropt again because we could not get pupils. Charlotte is thinking about getting another situation. She wishes to go to Paris. Will she go? She has let Flossy in, by-the-by, and he is now lying on the sofa. Emily is engaged in writing the Emperor Julius’s life. She has read some of it, and I want very much to hear the rest. She is writing some poetry, too. I wonder what it is about? I have begun the third volume of Passages in the Life of an Individual. I wish I had finished it. This afternoon I began to set about making my grey figured silk frock that was dyed at Keighley. What sort of a hand shall I make of it? E. and I have a great deal of work to do. When shall we sensibly diminish it? I want to get a habit of early rising. Shall I succeed? We have not yet finished our Gondal Chronicles that we began three years and a half ago. When will they be done? The Gondals are at present in a sad state. The Republicans are uppermost, but the Royalists are not quite overcome. The young sovereigns, with their brothers and sisters, are still at the Palace of Instruction. The Unique Society, above half a year ago, were wrecked on a desert island as they were returning from Gaul. They are still there, but we have not played at them much yet. The Gondals in general are not in first-rate playing condition. Will they improve? I wonder how we shall all be and where and how situated on the thirtieth of July 1848, when, if we are all alive, Emily will be just 30. I shall be in my 29th year, Charlotte in her 33rd, and Branwell in his 32nd; and what changes shall we have seen and known; and shall we be much changed ourselves? I hope not, for the worse at least. I for my part cannot well be flatter or older in mind than I am now. Hoping for the best, I conclude.
Anne Brontë.
Exactly fifty years were to elapse before these pieces of writing saw the light. The interest which must always centre in Emily Brontë amply justifies my publishing a fragment in facsimile; and it has the greater moment on account of the rough drawing which Emily has made of herself and of her dog Keeper. Emily’s taste for drawing is a pathetic element in her always pathetic life. I have seen a number of her sketches. There is one in the possession of Mr. Nicholls of Keeper and Flossy, the former the bull-dog which followed her to the grave, the latter a little King Charlie which one of the Miss Robinsons gave to Anne. The sketch, however, like most of Emily’s drawings, is technically full of errors. She was not a born artist, and possibly she had not the best opportunities of becoming one by hard work. Another drawing before me is of the hawk mentioned in the above fragment; and yet another is of the dog Growler, a predecessor of Keeper, which is not, however, mentioned in the correspondence. Upon Emily Brontë, the poet, I do not propose to write here. She left behind her, and Charlotte preserved, a manuscript volume containing the whole of the poems in the two collections of her verse, and there are other poems not yet published. Here, for example, are some verses in which the Gondals make a slight reappearance.
‘May 21st, 1838.
GLENEDEN’S DREAM.
‘Tell me, whether is it winter?
Say how long my sleep has been.
Have the woods I left so lovely
Lost their robes of tender green?‘Is the morning slow in coming?
Is the night time loth to go?
Tell me, are the dreary mountains
Drearier still with drifted snow?‘“Captive, since thou sawest the forest,
All its leaves have died away,
And another March has woven
Garlands for another May.‘“Ice has barred the Arctic waters;
Soft Southern winds have set it free;
And once more to deep green valley
Golden flowers might welcome thee.”‘Watcher in this lonely prison,
Shut from joy and kindly air,
Heaven descending in a vision
Taught my soul to do and bear.‘It was night, a night of winter,
I lay on the dungeon floor,
And all other sounds were silent—
All, except the river’s roar.‘Over Death and Desolation,
Fireless hearths, and lifeless homes;
Over orphans’ heartsick sorrows,
Patriot fathers’ bloody tombs;‘Over friends, that my arms never
Might embrace in love again;
Memory ponderous until madness
Struck its poniard in my brain.‘Deepest slumbers followed raving,
Yet, methought, I brooded still;
Still I saw my country bleeding,
Dying for a Tyrant’s will.‘Not because my bliss was blasted,
Burned within the avenging flame;
Not because my scattered kindred
Died in woe or lived in shame.‘God doth know I would have given
Every bosom dear to me,
Could that sacrifice have purchased
Tortured Gondal’s liberty!‘But that at Ambition’s bidding
All her cherished hopes should wane,
That her noblest sons should muster,
Strive and fight and fall in vain.‘Hut and castle, hall and cottage,
Roofless, crumbling to the ground,
Mighty Heaven, a glad Avenger
Thy eternal Justice found.‘Yes, the arm that once would shudder
Even to grieve a wounded deer,
I beheld it, unrelenting,
Clothe in blood its sovereign’s prayer.‘Glorious Dream! I saw the city
Blazing in Imperial shine,
And among adoring thousands
Stood a man of form divine.‘None need point the princely victim—
Now he smiles with royal pride!
Now his glance is bright as lightning,
Now the knife is in his side!‘Ah! I saw how death could darken,
Darken that triumphant eye!
His red heart’s blood drenched my dagger;
My ear drank his dying sigh!‘Shadows come! what means this midnight?
O my God, I know it all!
Know the fever dream is over,
Unavenged, the Avengers fall!’
There are, indeed, a few fragments, all written in that tiny handwriting which the girls affected, and bearing various dates from 1833 to 1840. A new edition of Emily’s poems, will, by virtue of these verses, have a singular interest for her admirers. With all her gifts as a poet, however, it is by Wuthering Heights that Emily Brontë is best known to the world; and the weirdness and force of that book suggest an inquiry concerning the influences which produced it. Dr. Wright, in his entertaining book, The Brontës in Ireland, recounts the story of Patrick Brontë’s origin, and insists that it was in listening to her father’s anecdotes of his own Irish experiences that Emily obtained the weird material of Wuthering Heights. It is not, of course, enough to point out that Dr. Wright’s story of the Irish Brontës is full of contradictions. A number of tales picked up at random from an illiterate peasantry might very well abound in inconsistencies, and yet contain some measure of truth. But nothing in Dr. Wright’s narrative is confirmed, save only the fact that Patrick Brontë continued throughout his life in some slight measure of correspondence with his brothers and sisters—a fact rendered sufficiently evident by a perusal of his will. Dr. Wright tells of many visits to Ireland in order to trace the Brontë traditions to their source; and yet he had not—in his first edition—marked the elementary fact that the registry of births in County Down records the existence of innumerable Bruntys and of not a single Brontë. Dr. Wright probably made his inquiries with the stories of Emily and Charlotte well in mind. He sought for similar traditions, and the quick-witted Irish peasantry gave him all that he wanted.
They served up and embellished the current traditions of the neighbourhood for his benefit, as the peasantry do everywhere for folklore enthusiasts. Charlotte Brontë’s uncle Hugh, we are told, read the Quarterly Review article upon Jane Eyre, and, armed with a shillelagh, came to England, in order to wreak vengeance upon the writer of the bitter attack. He landed at Liverpool, walked from Liverpool to Haworth, saw his nieces, who ‘gathered round him,’ and listened to his account of his mission. He then went to London and made abundant inquiries—but why pursue this ludicrous story further? In the first place, the Quarterly Review article was published in December 1848—after Emily was dead, and while Anne was dying. Very soon after the review appeared Charlotte was informed of its authorship, and references to Miss Rigby and the Quarterly are found more than once in her correspondence with Mr. Williams. [158]