Volume I Part 10 (2/2)
[28] 'Agnes Grey,' chap. i.
Anne Bronte was of a milder and more cheerful temperament than her sisters; she had not the fire, the morbid feeling, or the mental force that characterized Charlotte, yet she had more of the initiatory faculty than she had hitherto received credit for. But her gentle nature, her confiding piety, her more equable temper, enabled her to succeed better in the circ.u.mstances she had chosen. She had her troubles, her timidity, and her diffidence to contend with, but she made life supportable and even happy. 'Agnes Grey' thus speaks of her departure, which we cannot doubt is the experience of Anne Bronte:
'Some weeks more were yet to be devoted to preparation. How long, how tedious those weeks appeared to me! Yet they were happy ones in the main, full of bright hopes and ardent expectations. With what peculiar pleasure I a.s.sisted at the making of my new clothes, and, subsequently, the packing of my trunks! But there was a feeling of bitterness mingling with the latter occupation too; and when it was done--when all was ready for my departure on the morrow, and the last night at home approached--a sudden anguish seemed to swell my heart.
My dear friends looked sad, and spoke so very kindly, that I could scarcely keep my heart from overflowing; but I still affected to be gay. I had taken my last ramble with Mary on the moors, my last walk in the garden and round the house ... I had played my last tune on the old piano, and sung my last song to papa, not the last, I hoped, but the last for what appeared to me a very long time.'[29]
[29] 'Agnes Grey,' chap. i.
Charlotte and Emily made themselves busy in a.s.sisting Anne with her preparations for departure, and they were very sad and apprehensive when she left them on Monday, April 15th, 1839. She went alone, at her own wish, thinking she could manage better if left to her own resources, and when her failings were unwitnessed by those whose hopes she wished to sustain. However, she wrote, expressing satisfaction with the place she had secured, for the lady of the house was very kind. She had two of the eldest girls under her charge, the children being confined to the nursery, with which she had no concern.
Charlotte, although remarking in a letter to her friend on the cleverness and sensibility with which Anne could express herself in epistolary correspondence, had some fear that, such was the natural diffidence of her manner, her mistress would sometimes believe her to have an impediment in her speech.
Charlotte's eagerness to obtain a situation was now so great that she does not seem to have considered well the step she was about to take, and she obtained one that was not satisfactory to her. It was in the family of a wealthy Yorks.h.i.+re manufacturer; and we may well believe that the stylish surroundings of her employers differed materially from those of the family at Haworth. Here a large quant.i.ty of miscellaneous work was thrown on Charlotte, which displeased her and destroyed her comfort. In a letter to Emily, she says she is 'overwhelmed with oceans of needlework; yards of cambric to hem, muslin night-caps to make, etc.' She found the outside attractions of the house beautiful in 'pleasant woods, white paths, green lawns, and blue, suns.h.i.+ny sky;' but these surroundings did not compensate for the humiliations which her situation imposed upon her, and her mistress and she did not like each other; so Charlotte did not return to the place after the July holidays of 1839.
Branwell was as yet unemployed, and he sought, and took much pleasure in the scenery, the events and circ.u.mstances of the hills and valleys of the West-Riding of Yorks.h.i.+re, and was frequently from home. He went about the country, a.s.sociating with the people, and revelling in their ready wit, which enabled him afterwards, by such observations and experience, to give vivid pictures of life and character. At the time of the Haworth 'Rushbearing,' of July, 1839, he visited Liverpool with one or two friends, and, while there, in compliance with an injunction of his father, made a stenographic report, at St.
Jude's church, of a sermon by the Rev. H. McNeile, the well-known evangelical preacher. Here, a sudden attack of Tic compelled him to resort to opium, in some form, as an anodyne, whose soothing effect in pain he had previously known. Subsequently, pa.s.sing a music shop, in one of their rambles through the town, Branwell's attention was arrested by a copy of the oratorio of 'Samson,' by Handel, displayed in the window, the performance of which had always excited him to the highest degree, and he eagerly besought his friend to purchase it, as well as some Ma.s.s, and various oratorio music, which was done.
On their return from Liverpool, Branwell, being under some obligation to his friend, proffered to paint his portrait, to which Mr. M---- agreed. A sitting once a week was decided upon, to be in the room at the parsonage where Branwell studied and painted. On his visits, Mr.
M---- invariably noticed a row of potatoes, placed on the uppermost rib of the range to roast, Branwell being very fond of them done in this way, even as Jane Eyre was in the novel. 'That night,' she says, 'on going to bed, I forgot to prepare, in imagination, the Barmecide supper of hot roast potatoes ... with which I was wont to amuse my inward cravings.' When Mr. M---- paid his weekly visits to the parsonage he always heard some one speaking aloud in the room adjoining Branwell's studio; and, at last, his curiosity being excited, he inquired whom it was. Branwell answered that it was his father committing his Sunday's sermon to memory. When the portrait was ready for the finis.h.i.+ng touches, Mr. M---- discovered that Branwell had painted the names of Johann Sebastian Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Handel at each corner of the canvas respectively. He remonstrated, but Branwell was firm, maintaining that, as his friend was an accomplished musician, and could perform the most elaborate and difficult compositions of these immortal men, with expression and ease, he was, in every way, worthy of being a.s.sociated with them in the manner he designed. Mr. M---- complied. When the portrait was finished, Branwell pressed his friend to take a gla.s.s of wine; and, while the two were chatting over the affair, Mr. Bronte and his daughters entered the room to view Branwell's work on its completion.
They were pleased with it, and praised it as a truthful likeness and an excellent picture.
We may well imagine the enthusiasm with which Branwell would recount his experience of Liverpool. How much he would have to tell of the wonders of the Mersey, the great s.h.i.+ps that rode upon its surface, and its commerce with the new world, out across the ocean! His visit seems to have originated a proposal that the family should spend a week or a fortnight at that sea-port, but, almost at the same moment, Charlotte's friend suggested to her that they should visit Cleethorpes together, a suggestion that pleased her very much.
'The idea of seeing the sea,' she says, 'of being near it--watching its changes by sunrise, sunset, moonlight, and noon-day--in calm, perhaps in storm--fills and satisfies my mind. I shall be discontented at nothing. And then I am not to be with a set of people with whom I have nothing in common--who would be nuisances and bores.'
The visit of Charlotte to the sea-side seems to have been put off again and again, by often-recurring obstacles. The irresolution of her family in regard to the Liverpool project, and the manifest unwillingness that she should leave home on a visit anywhere else, put off, from time to time, the pleasure she had antic.i.p.ated for herself; but at last she decided to go. Her box was packed and everything prepared, but no conveyance could be procured. Mr. Bronte objected to her going by coach, and walking part of the way to meet her friend, and her aunt exclaimed against 'the weather, and the roads, and the four winds of heaven,' so Charlotte almost gave up hope. She told her friend that the elders of the house had never cordially acquiesced in the measure, and that opposition was growing more open, though her father would willingly have indulged her. Even he, however, wished her to remain at home. Charlotte was 'provoked'
that her aunt had deferred opposition until arrangements had been made. In the end 'E' was asked to pay a visit to the parsonage.
Owing to the circ.u.mstances indicated, Charlotte's visit to the sea-coast was put off until the following September, when an opportunity occurred favourable to the project, which does not seem to have been entirely abandoned; and she and her friend visited Easton where they spent a fortnight. Here for the first time Charlotte beheld the sea.
Afterwards she wrote, 'Have you forgotten the sea by this time, E.?
Is it grown dim in your mind? Or can you still see it, dark, blue and green and foam-white, and hear it roaring roughly when the wind is high, or rus.h.i.+ng softly when it is calm?' The Liverpool journey appears to have been finally abandoned.
It was in a letter, written about this time that Mrs. Gaskell found the first mention of a succession of curates who henceforth revolved round Haworth Parsonage. Three years earlier Mr. Bronte had sought aid from the 'Additional Curates' Society,' or some similar inst.i.tution, and was provided at once with a.s.sistance. The increasing duties of his chapelry had rendered this step necessary. It would seem also that a curate was appointed to Stanbury, while another became master of the National or Grammar School. These gentlemen were not infrequent in their visits to the parsonage, and they varied the life of its inmates, sometimes one way and sometimes another. This circ.u.mstance, at the same time, provided Charlotte Bronte with those living studies which she did not fail afterwards to remember in her delineation of the three curates in 's.h.i.+rley.' Emily, on the other hand, invariably avoided these gentlemen.
The arrival of the curates at Haworth was the occasion of increased activity in the affairs of the chapelry; and, the church-rate question being uppermost at this juncture, the new-comers entered into a crusade against the Dissenters who had refused to pay church-rates. Charlotte wrote a long letter in which she spoke of a violent public meeting held at Haworth about the affair, and of two sermons against dissent--one by Mr. W. a 'n.o.ble, eloquent, high-church, apostolical-succession discourse, in which he banged the Dissenters most fearlessly and unflinchingly;' the other by Mr. C., a 'keener, cleverer, bolder, and more heart-stirring harangue,' than Charlotte, perhaps, had ever heard from the Haworth pulpit. She, however, did not entirely agree with either of these gentlemen, and thought, if she had been a Dissenter, she would have 'taken the first opportunity of kicking or of horse-whipping both.'
In the winter of 1839-40, Charlotte employed her leisure in the composition of a story which she had commenced on a scale commensurate with one of Richardson's novels of seven or eight volumes. Mrs. Gaskell saw some fragments of the ma.n.u.script, written in a very small hand: but she was less solicitous to decipher it, as Charlotte had herself condemned it in the preface to 'The Professor.'
Branwell, to whom she submitted it, seems to have understood, at the time, that in its florid style of composition she was working in opposition to her genius, and he told her she was making a mistake.
It appears not unlikely that Branwell was himself similarly engaged on prose writing when he gave her this opinion. A few months later, however, Charlotte resolved to send the commencement of her tale to Wordsworth, and that an unfavourable judgment was the result, for which she was not altogether unprepared, may be gathered from the following letter she addressed to the poet:--
'Authors are generally very tenacious of their productions, but I am not so much attached to this but that I can give it up without much distress. No doubt if I had gone on I should have made quite a Richardsonian concern of it.... I had materials in my head for half-a-dozen volumes.... Of course it is with considerable regret I relinquish any scheme so charming as the one I have sketched. It is very edifying and profitable to create a world out of your own brains, and people it with inhabitants who are so many Melchisedecs, and have no father or mother but your own imagination.... I am sorry I did not exist fifty or sixty years ago, when the ”Ladies' Magazine”
was flouris.h.i.+ng like a green bay-tree. In that case, I make no doubt, my aspirations after literary fame would have met with due encouragement, and I should have had the pleasure of introducing Messrs. Percy and West into the best society, and recording all their sayings and doings in double-columned, close-printed pages.... I recollect, when I was a child, getting hold of some antiquated volumes, reading them by stealth with the most exquisite pleasure.
You give a correct description of the patient Grisels of these days.
My aunt was one of them, and to this day she thinks the tales of the ”Ladies' Magazine” infinitely superior to any trash of modern literature. So do I; for I read them in childhood, and childhood has a very strong faculty of admiration, but a very weak one of criticism.... I am pleased that you cannot quite decide whether I am an attorney's clerk or a novel-reading dressmaker. I will not help you at all in the discovery....'
In the midst of their literary endeavours, their efforts were not relaxed to obtain new places. Charlotte was obliged by circ.u.mstances to give up her subscriptions to the Jews, and she determined to force herself to take a situation, if one could be found, though she says, 'I hate and abhor the very thoughts of governess-s.h.i.+p.' An alternative which the sisters talked over in these holidays was the opening of a school at Haworth, for which an enlargement of the parsonage would be required.
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