By a very great effort Hugh Brontë learned to read, late in life. He began at Mount Pleasant, with no higher aim than that of being able to write letters to Alice McClory, when he could no longer visit her. He made rapid strides in learning under the tutelage of his master’s children, when he lived in Loughorne, and when he went to live in Emdale he knew the sweetness and solace of good books, and he had always a book on his knee, which he read by the light of the kiln fire, when he was alone. He knew the Bible, Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and Burns’s poems, well. Those were bookless days. The newspaper had not yet found its way to the people, and in a neighborhood of mental stagnation it was something to have one man who could hold the mirror up to nature, and lead his illiterate visitors into enchanted ground.
Many of Hugh’s stories were far removed from the region of romance, but he had the literary art of giving an artistic touch to everything he said, which added a charm to the narration, independent of the facts which he narrated.
The story of his early life, which I have tried to reduce to simple prose, was delivered in the rhapsodic style of the ancient bards, but simple enough to be understood by the most unlettered peasant. None of Brontë’s stories were so acceptable as the simple record of his early hardships.
Mingled with all his stories, shrewd maxims for life and conduct were interwoven; but in his oration on tenant-right he broke new ground, and showed that under different circumstances he might have been a great statesman, and saved his country from unutterable woe.
Hugh Brontë was superstitious, but while his superstitious character descended to all his children, the faculty of story-telling was inherited, as far as I have been able to ascertain, by Patrick alone. All the sons and daughters talked with a dash of genius—as one of their old acquaintances said, “They were very cliver with their tongues”—but I have never heard of any of them except Patrick trying to tell a story.
Patrick, at the age of two or three, used to lie on the warm shelling seeds and listen to his father’s entrancing stories, and he seems to have caught something of his father’s gift and power. Miss Nussey, Charlotte’s friend, “Miss E.,” has often told me of Patrick’s power to rivet the attention of his children, and awe them with realistic descriptions of simple scenes. All the girls used to sit in breathless silence, their prominent eyes starting out of their heads, while their father unfolded lurid scene after scene; but the greatest effect was produced on Emily, who seemed to be unconscious of everything else except her father’s story, and sometimes the descriptions became so vivid, intense, and terrible that they had to implore him to desist.
Miss Nussey had opportunities for observing the Brontë girls that no other person had. She became Charlotte’s friend at school, when both were homesick and needed friends. She continued to be her fast friend through life. Gentle Anne Brontë died in her arms, and she was Charlotte’s true consoler when the heroic Emily passed swiftly away. She early discovered the ring of genius in Charlotte’s letters, and preserved every scrap of them, and it is chiefly through those letters that the Brontës are known in England. She was Charlotte’s confidante in all private transactions and love matters, and she might have been a nearer friend still had Charlotte not refused an offer of marriage from her brother—an incident in the novelist’s life here for the first time made public.
Miss Nussey was not only Charlotte’s devoted friend, but she was a constant visitor at Haworth, and a keen observer. She had a great power of discernment in literary matters, and a very considerable literary gift herself. She had not to wait till “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” were published to learn that Charlotte and Emily Brontë were endowed with genius. We owe it to her penetrating sagacity that we know so much of the vicar’s daughters. She watched their growth of intellect and everything that ministered to it, and she believes firmly that the girls caught their inspiration 459 from their father, and that Emily got not only her inspiration but most of her facts from her father’s narratives.[4]