The Three Brontës

by May Sinclair

Branwell never got over it.

He was destined to die young, and, no doubt, if there had been no Mrs. Robinson, some other passion would have killed him. Still, it may be said with very little exaggeration that he died of it. He had not hitherto shown any signs of tuberculosis. It may be questioned whether without this predisposing cause he would have developed it. He had had his chance to survive. He had never been packed, like his sisters, first one of five, then one of three, into a closet not big enough for one. But he drank harder after the Robinson affair than he had ever drunk before, and he added opium to drink. Drink and opium gave frightful intensity to the hallucination of which, in a sense, he died.

It took him more than three years, from July, eighteen-forty-five, the date of his dismissal, to September, eighteen-forty-eight, the date of his death.

The Incumbent of Haworth has been much blamed for his son's shortcomings. He has been charged with first spoiling the boy, and then neglecting him. In reality his only error (a most unusual one in an early Victorian father) was that he believed in his son's genius. When London and the Royal Academy proved beyond him he had him taught at Bradford. He gave him a studio there. He had already given him an education that at least enabled him to obtain tutorships, if not to keep them. The Parsonage must have been a terrible place for Branwell, but it was not in the Vicar's power to make it more attractive than the Bull Inn. Branwell was not a poet like his sisters, and moors meant nothing to him. To be sure, when he went into Wales and saw Penmaenmawr, he wrote a poem about it. But the poem is not really about Penmaenmawr. It is all about Branwell; Penmaenmawr is Branwell, a symbol of his colossal personality and of his fate. For Branwell was a monstrous egoist. He was not interested in his sisters or in his friends, or really in Mrs. Robinson. He was interested only in himself. What could a poor vicar do with a son like that? There was nothing solid in Branwell that you could take hold of and chastise. There was nothing you could appeal to. His affection for his family was three-fourths sentimentalism. Still, what the Vicar could do he did do. When Branwell was mad with drink and opium he never left him. There is no story more grim and at the same time more poignant and pathetic than that which Mrs. Gaskell tells of his devotion to his son in this time of the boy's ruin. Branwell slept in his father's room. He would doze all day, and rage all night, threatening his father's life. In the morning he would go to his sisters and say: "The poor old man and I have had a terrible night of it. He does his best, the poor old man, but it is all over with me." He died in his father's arms while Emily and little Anne looked on.

They say that he struggled to his feet and died standing, to prove the strength of his will; but some biographer has robbed him of this poor splendour. It was enough for his sisters—and it should be enough for anybody—that his madness left him with the onset of his illness, and that he went from them penitent and tender, purified by the mystery and miracle of death.

That was on Sunday, the twenty-fourth of September. From that day Emily sickened. She caught cold at Branwell's funeral. On September the thirtieth she was in church listening to his funeral sermon. After that, she never crossed the threshold of the Parsonage till in December her dead body was carried over it, to lie beside her brother under the church floor.

In October, a week or two after Branwell's death, Charlotte wrote: "Emily has a cold and cough at present." "Emily's cold and cough are very obstinate. I fear she has pain in her chest, and I sometimes catch a shortness in her breathing when she has moved at all quickly." In November: "I told you Emily was ill, in my last letter. She has not rallied yet. She is very ill…. I think Emily seems the nearest thing to my heart in all the world." And in December: "Emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now … there is no Emily in time, or on earth now…. We are very calm at present. Why should we be otherwise? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone by: the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel them. She died in a time of promise…. But it is God's will, and the place where she has gone is better than that which she has left."

It could have been hardly daylight on the moors the morning when Charlotte went out to find that last solitary sprig of heather which she laid on Emily's pillow for Emily to see when she awoke. Emily's eyes were so drowsed with death that she could not see it. And yet it could not have been many hours later when a fire was lit in her bedroom, and she rose and dressed herself. Madame Duclaux[A] tells how she sat before the fire, combing her long, dark hair, and how the comb dropped from her weak fingers, and fell under the grate. And how she sat there in her mortal apathy; and how, when the servant came to her, she said dreamily: "Martha, my comb's down there; I was too weak to stoop and pick it up."

[Footnote A: "Emily Brontë": Eminent Women Series.]

She dragged herself down to the sitting-room, and died there, about two o'clock. She must have had some horror of dying in that room of death overhead; for, at noon, when the last pains seized her, she refused to be taken back to it. Unterrified, indomitable, driven by her immortal passion for life, she fought terribly. Death took her as she tried to rise from the sofa and break from her sisters' arms that would have laid her there. Profoundly, piteously alienated, she must have felt that Anne and Charlotte were in league with death; that they fought with her and bound her down; and that in her escape from them she conquered.