'A calm and even mind like yours cannot conceive the feelings of the shattered wretch who is now writing to you, when, after weeks of mental and bodily anguish not to be described, something like peace began to dawn again. Mary is far from well. She breathes short, has a pain in her chest, and frequent flushings of fever. I cannot tell you what agony these symptoms give me; they remind me so strongly of my two sisters, whom no power of medicine could save. Martha is now very well; she has kept in a continual flow of good humour during her stay here, and has consequently been very fascinating….
'They are making such a noise about me, I cannot write any more. Mary is playing on the piano; Martha is chattering as fast as her little tongue can run; and Branwell is standing before her, laughing at her vivacity.'
Branwell, in these days, was well enough, and could be lively enough, when occasion served. He had his hopes, his enthusiasm yet: but, in after-years, he was to fall into a yet deeper and more serious depression than that through which Charlotte had passed.
CHAPTER X.
BRANWELL BRONTË AND HIS SISTERS' BIOGRAPHERS.
The Light in which Biographers have regarded Branwell—Bibliography —Mrs. Gaskell—The Causes which led her into Error—Resentment of Branwell's Friends—Mr. George Searle Phillips—Branwell as Depicted by Mr. T. Wemyss Reid—Mr. F. H. Grundy's Notice of Branwell—Miss A. Mary F. Robinson's Portrait of Branwell.
It will be well here—before we reach the periods of Branwell's life that have been misunderstood—to pause, in our sketch of the Brontë family, in order to consider certain circumstances regarding him, which it will be impossible for any future writer on the Brontës to disregard. It is especially necessary to consider them in a book which—while dealing with the Brontë sisters, their lives and their works—proposes, as a special aim, to make Branwell's position clear. When Derwent Coleridge wrote the short biography of his father, which is prefixed to the poet's works, he approached the subject in a somewhat regretful way, asking if the public has a right to inquire as to that part of a poet's life which does not influence his fellow-men after death, and declaring that the privacy of the dead is sacred. He felt too keenly that the sanctity of Coleridge's life had been broken in upon by those who lacked both accurate knowledge and just discretion. It is a source of sincere regret to the writer of this volume that he, too, is compelled by circumstances to treat a part of his work almost in a deprecatory spirit, and sometimes to assume the position of defence. For, if the failings of Coleridge have been discovered and fed upon by those whose curiosity leads them to delight in such things, what shall we say of Patrick Branwell Brontë, whose misdeeds have not only been sought out with a persistency worthy of a better cause, but have also been exaggerated and misrepresented to a great degree, and whose whole life, moreover, has been contorted by writers who have endeavoured to find in it some evidence for their own hypotheses? It has been the misfortune of Branwell that his life has, to some extent, been already several times written by those who have had some other object in view, and who, consequently, have not been studious to acquire a correct view of the circumstances of it. These writers, it will be seen, have therefore, perhaps unavoidably, fallen into many grievous errors regarding him, so that his name, at this day, has come to be held up as a reproach and even as a token of ignominy. If it be remembered that Mrs. Gaskell, in her 'Life of Charlotte Brontë,' describes him as a drunkard and an opium-eater, as one who rendered miserable the lives of his sisters, and might very well have shot his father; that Mr. T. Wemyss Reid, in his 'Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph,' has spoken of him as 'this lost and degraded man;' that Miss Robinson, in her 'Emily Brontë,' has called him a 'poor, half-demented lonely creature,' and has moralized upon his 'vulgar weakness,' his 'corrupt and loathsome sentimentality,' and his 'maudlin Micawber penitence;' and lastly that Mr. Swinburne, in a notice of the last-named work in the 'Athenæum,' has said, 'of that lamentable and contemptible caitiff—contemptible not so much for his common-place debauchery as for his abject selfishness, his lying pretension, and his nerveless cowardice—there is far too much in this memoir;' it may well appear that we have here a strange subject for a biography.
But, since the publication of Miss Robinson's 'Emily Brontë,'—in which Branwell is specially degraded,—it has been felt by many admirers of the Brontës that it was desirable his life should be treated independently of the theories and necessities of his sisters' biographers, and in a spirit not unfriendly to him; for there are many people who believe that Branwell's genius has never been sufficiently recognized, and there are a few who know that, notwithstanding his many failings and misdeeds, the charges made against him are, not a few of them, wholly untrue, while many more are grossly exaggerated, and that his disposition and character have been wholly misrepresented. Having in my possession many of his letters and poems, and having been personally acquainted with him, I have undertaken the task of telling the story of his life in connection with the lives of his sisters, for I think that there is much in his strange and sad history that ought to be known, while sufficient evidence exists of his mental power to prove that he was a worthy member of the intellectual family to which he belonged. It may not be amiss here, in order to illustrate circumstances that will be alluded to in parts of this work, to touch slightly upon the bibliography of Branwell's life, and endeavour to discover the causes which have contributed to the ill-repute in which he is generally held.
Mrs. Gaskell, who became acquainted with Charlotte Brontë after the deaths of her brother and sisters, when all that was most sorrowful in her life had been enacted, saw, or thought she saw, in her the evidences of a deep dejection, the result of a life passed under circumstances of misery and depression. In her 'Life of Charlotte Brontë,' this writer's endeavour to trace the successive influences of the trials of Charlotte's life upon her, and to find in them the explanation of what was, perhaps, in some measure, an idiosyncrasy of character, has led her, in the strength of her own preconception, to interpret many circumstances to the attestation of her theory. Such, at all events, is the explanation which Mr. T. Wemyss Reid has offered, in his 'Charlotte Brontë, a Monograph,' of the partial manner in which Mrs. Gaskell has dealt with certain of Miss Brontë's letters. If we conceive Mrs. Gaskell writing with this preconception, tending to give undue weight to all that was unhappy in the history of her heroine, we need feel little surprise that her account of the lives of the Brontës is too often a gloomy one, that their isolation at Haworth, their poverty, and their struggles have been exaggerated, or that, in order to throw in a sombre background to her picture, she was unduly credulous in listening to those unfounded stories with which she made Mr. Brontë to appear, in act, at least, diabolical, and which have helped to depict the career of Patrick Branwell Brontë in such dark and tragic colours. She had heard at Haworth the story of his disgrace, his subsequent intemperance, and his death. Herein she believed was the great sorrow of the sisters' minds, the care which had induced a morbid peculiarity in their writings, and cast a shadow upon their lives. Mrs. Gaskell seems to have thought it devolved upon her, not merely to picture beginnings of evil in the brother, and trace them to his ruin; but, also, to punish the lady whom she held responsible for what has been termed 'Branwell's fall.' To this end she thought it right to lay at the lady's door, in part, the premature deaths of the sisters; and, in sustaining the idea that the effect on them of the brother's disgrace was what she believed it to be, she was led to employ partial versions of the letters, and exaggerate the whole course of Branwell's conduct. Her book was read with astonishment by those whose characters were made to suffer by it, and she was obliged, in later editions, to omit the charges against the lady; and also those against Mr. Brontë. But Mrs. Gaskell still maintained that, whatever the cause, the effect was the same.