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.