The Three Brontës

by May Sinclair

There was injustice in all that zeal as well as indiscretion, for Mr. Brontë had his good points as fathers go. Think what the fathers of the Victorian era could be, and what its evangelical parsons often were; and remember that Mr. Brontë was an evangelical parson, and the father of Emily and Charlotte, not of a brood of gentle, immaculate Jane Austens, and that he was confronted suddenly and without a moment's warning with Charlotte's fame. Why, the average evangelical parson would have been shocked into apoplexy at the idea of any child of his producing Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. Charlotte's fame would have looked to him exceedingly like infamy. We know what Charles Kingsley, the least evangelical of parsons, once thought of Charlotte. And we know what Mr. Brontë thought of her. He was profoundly proud of his daughter's genius; there is no record and no rumour of any criticism on his part, of any remonstrance or amazement. He was loyal to Charlotte to the last days of his life, when he gave her defence into Mrs. Gaskell's hands; for which confidence Mrs. Gaskell repaid him shockingly.

But he was the kind of figure that is irresistible to the caustic or humorous biographer. There was something impotently fiery in him, as if the genius of Charlotte and Emily had flicked him in irony as it passed him by. He wound himself in yards and yards and yards of white cravat, and he wrote a revolutionary poem called "Vision of Hell". It is easy to make fun of his poems, but they were no worse, or very little worse, than his son Branwell's, so that he may be pardoned if he thought himself more important than his children. Many fathers of the Victorian era did.

And he was important as a temporary vehicle of the wandering creative impulse. It struggled and strove in him and passed from him, choked in yards and yards of white cravat, to struggle and strive again in Branwell and in Anne. As a rule the genius of the race is hostile to the creative impulse, and the creative impulse is lucky if it can pierce through to one member of a family. In the Brontës it emerges at five different levels, rising from abortive struggle to supreme achievement—from Mr. Brontë to his son Branwell, from Branwell to Anne, from Anne to Charlotte, and from Charlotte to Emily. And Maria, who died, was an infant prodigy.

And Mr. Brontë is important because he was the tool used by their destiny to keep Charlotte and Emily in Haworth.

The tragedy we are too apt to call their destiny began with their babyhood, when the mother and six children were brought to Haworth Parsonage and the prospect of the tombstones. They had not been there eighteen months before the mother sickened and died horribly of cancer.

She had to be isolated as far as possible. The Parsonage house was not large, and it was built with an extreme and straight simplicity; two front rooms, not large, right and left of the narrow stone-flagged passage, a bedroom above each, and between, squeezed into the small spare space above the passage, a third room, no bigger than a closet and without a fireplace. This third room is important in the story of the Brontës, for, when their mother's illness declared itself, it was in this incredibly small and insufferably unwholesome den that the five little girls were packed, heaven knows how, and it was here that the seeds of tuberculosis were sown in their fragile bodies. After their mother's death the little fatal room was known as the children's study (you can see, in a dreadful vision, the six pale little faces, pressed together, looking out of the window on to the graves below). It was used again as a night-nursery, and later still as the sleeping-place shared by two, if not three, of the sisters, two of whom were tuberculous.

The mother died and was buried in a vault under the floor of the church, not far from the windows of her house. Her sister, Miss Branwell, came up from Penzance to look after the children. You can see this small, middle-aged, early Victorian spinster, exiled for ever from the sunshine of the town she loved, dragging out her sad, fastidious life in a cold and comparatively savage country that she unspeakably disliked. She took possession of the room her sister died in (it was the most cheerful room in the house), and lived in it. Her nieces had to sit there with her for certain hours while she taught them sewing and all the early Victorian virtues. Their father made himself responsible for the rest of their education, which he conducted with considerable vigour and originality. Maria, the eldest, was the child of promise. Long before Maria was eleven he "conversed" with her on "the leading topics of the day, with as much pleasure and freedom as with any grown-up person".

For this man, so gloomy, we are told, and so morose, found pleasure in taking his tiny children out on to the moors, where he entertained them alternately with politics and tales of brutality and horror. At six years old each little Brontë had its view of the political situation; and it was not until a plague of measles and whooping-cough found out their tender youth that their father realized how very young and small and delicate they were, and how very little, after all, he understood about a nursery. In a sudden frantic distrust of the climate of Haworth, of Miss Branwell, and his own system, he made up his mind to send Maria and Elizabeth and Charlotte and Emily to school.

And there was only one school within his means, the Clergy Daughters' School, established at Cowan Bridge in an unwholesome valley. It has been immortalized in Jane Eyre, together with its founder and patron, the Reverend Carus Wilson. There can be no doubt that the early Victorian virtues, self-repression, humility, and patience under affliction, were admirably taught at Cowan Bridge. And if the carnal nature of the Clergy Daughters resisted the militant efforts of Mr. Carus Wilson, it was ultimately subdued by low diet and primitive drainage working together in an unwholesome valley. Mr. Carus Wilson, indeed, was inspired by a sublime antagonism to the claims of the perishable body; but he seems to have pushed his campaign against the flesh a bit too far, and was surprised at his own success when, one after another, the extremely perishable bodies of those children were laid low by typhus.

The fever did not touch the four little Brontës. They had another destiny. Their seed of dissolution was sown in that small stifling room at Haworth, and was reaped now at Cowan Bridge. First Maria, then Elizabeth, sickened, and was sent home to die. Charlotte stayed on for a while with Emily. She ran wild, and hung about the river, watching it, and dabbling her feet and hands in the running water. Their doom waited for Charlotte and for Emily.