Volume Ii Part 1 (2/2)

are Charlotte's types of the Belgian female--heavy, stolid, unimpressionable to good, sensual, gross, and unintellectual. The Laba.s.se-couriennes were 'a swinish mult.i.tude,' not to be driven by force; 'whenever a lie was necessary for their occasions, they brought it out with a careless ease and breadth, altogether untroubled by any rebuke of conscience;' and they were cold, animal, and selfish.

Nevertheless, occupied in her duties, Charlotte was happy, even with these companions. We have no actual means of knowing what Emily thought of them, for her life amongst them was never reproduced in her writings, and it made but little permanent impression upon her.

Charlotte said that her sister worked 'like a horse,' and that she did not get on well with Monsieur Heger.

The two sisters had now friends in Brussels, for they sometimes saw Mary and Martha T---- who were staying there at the Chateau de Kokleberg, and these young ladies had cousins in the city, whose house was often a pleasant meeting-place. But Emily made little progress with these friends.h.i.+ps.

The _grandes vacances_ began in September, but Charlotte and Emily did not return home then as had been intended; all was well at Haworth, and there was no reason why they should. Madame Heger made a proposal that they should remain six months more, Charlotte as English teacher, and Emily to instruct some pupils in music; and they were to continue their studies and have board without payment, but they were offered no salary. These terms were at last accepted, and the sisters remained through the long _vacances_ with a few boarders who were also there, and Charlotte, at least, was happy.

But a year later, when the rooms of the _pensionnat_ were once more deserted, and Emily far away in the parsonage at Haworth, there can be no doubt that she became again subject to that melancholia which had previously been remarked in her when she was at Miss Wooler's. The excitement of her first sojourn at Brussels wore off, she found no novelty in the things she saw, and she was left to solitary reflection a great deal. But her melancholy began with herself. 'My youth is leaving me,' she said to Mary; 'I can never do better than I have done, and I have done nothing yet,' and she seemed at such times, according to this friend, 'to think that most human beings were destined by the pressure of worldly interests to lose one faculty and feeling after another, till they went dead altogether. I hope I shall be put in my grave as soon as I'm dead; I don't want to walk about so,' she added. Mary advised her to go home or elsewhere, when she was in this state, for the sake of change, and Charlotte thanked her for the advice, but did not take it.

'That vacation! Shall I ever forget it? I think not,' says Lucy Snowe.... 'My heart almost died within me; miserable longings strained its cords. How long were the September days! How silent, how lifeless!

How vast and void seemed the desolate premises! How gloomy the forsaken garden,--grey now with the dust of a town summer departed!'

To Lucy Snowe the future gave no promise of comfort; and a sorrowful indifference to existence often pressed upon her,--a 'despairing resignation to reach betimes the end of all things earthly.' She found the future but a hopeless desert: 'tawny sands, with no green fields, no palm-tree, no well in view.' And these were the thoughts, too, that oppressed Charlotte Bronte in Brussels and sorely weighed her down. It was in one of these fits of depression, overcome with melancholy, that she found consolation in the confessional, when she poured her tale of solitary sorrow into the ear of a priest--a Pere Silas, like him in 'Villette,' who spoke of peace and hope to Lucy Snowe.

Troubles of another kind had, however, broken in sadly enough on the close of Charlotte's first _vacances_ in Brussels in 1842, when she and Emily were greatly shocked by the death of Martha T---- at the Chateau de Kokleberg, after a very short illness. This was a great grief to the little circle in Brussels, for the dead girl had been a bright and affectionate companion,--bewailed under the name of Jessie in 's.h.i.+rley,'--and she was deeply lamented. But another grief awaited the Bronte sisters; they heard that their aunt Branwell was ill,--was dead; they were wanted at home; and at once, after very hasty preparation, they left Brussels, Emily not to return. They came back to the parsonage at Haworth, to find the funeral over, and the house deprived of one who had been its support and guardian for years.

Thus their stay in Brussels was suddenly cut short, and their studies were interrupted; but they had learned a good deal during their stay there. Monsieur Heger wrote to console Mr. Bronte on his loss; and said that in another year the two girls would have been secured against the eventualities of the future. They were being instructed, and, at the same time, were acquiring the art of instruction: Emily was learning the piano, and receiving lessons from the best Belgian professors; and she had little pupils herself. 'Elle perdait donc a la fois un reste d'ignorance et un reste plus genant encore de timidite.'

Charlotte was beginning to give French lessons, and to gain 'cette a.s.surance, cet aplomb si necessaire dans l'enseignement.' It was this kind letter from Monsieur Heger that afterwards induced Mr. Bronte to allow Charlotte to return to Brussels.

CHAPTER II.

OTHER POEMS.

Branwell at the Parsonage: his Loneliness--'The Epicurean's Song'--'Song'--Northangerland--'Noah's Warning over Methusaleh's Grave'--Letter to Mr. Grundy--Miss Branwell's Death--Her Will--Her Nephew Remembered--Injustice done to Him in this Matter by the Biographers of his Sisters.

During the absence of his sisters Charlotte and Emily in Brussels, and while Anne was away as a governess, Branwell no doubt felt lonely at the parsonage at Haworth; but he appears to have sought consolation from his troubles in the soothing influences of music and poetry. He knew that these employments softened many of the difficulties that beset the road of human life, and that they introduced men into a purer and n.o.bler sphere than that which is called reality. He felt that they led 'the spirit on, in an ecstasy of admiration, of sweet sorrow, or of unearthly joy, to the music of harmonious, and not wholly intelligible words, raising in the mind beauteous and transcendent images.' Whatever may have been said as to Branwell's p.r.o.neness to self-indulgence, and his enjoyment of society, even that of 'The Bull,' and of the corrupt of Haworth, none of his alleged depravity and coa.r.s.eness of disposition disfigured his verses, however deficient his early effusions may have been in the higher excellencies of the Muse. From the general tenor of his writings, which is religious and sometimes philosophical, he seems, under his misfortunes, which were ever with him in one shape or another, to have sought consolation in the shadowed paths of poetry and reflection.

Some lights now and then diversify the general gloom of his stanzas; but, even then, an air of sadness still pervades them. More I shall find to say on the special features of Branwell's poems in the later pages of the present work.

He wrote the following verses in 1842:

THE EPICUREAN'S SONG.

'The visits of Sorrow Say, why should we mourn?

Since the sun of to-morrow May s.h.i.+ne on its urn; And all that we think such pain Will have departed,--then Bear for a moment what cannot return;

'For past time has taken Each hour that it gave, And they never awaken From yesterday's grave; So surely we may defy Shadows, like memory, Feeble and fleeting as midsummer wave.

'From the depths where they're falling Nor pleasure, nor pain, Despite our recalling, Can reach us again; Though we brood over them, Nought can recover them, Where they are laid, they must ever remain.

'So seize we the present, And gather its flowers, For,--mournful or pleasant,-- 'Tis all that is ours; While daylight we're wasting, The evening is hasting, And night follows fast on vanis.h.i.+ng hours.

'Yes,--and we, when night comes, Whatever betide, Must die as our fate dooms, And sleep by their side; For _change_ is the only thing Always continuing; And it sweeps creation away with its tide.'

Here Branwell, writing, contrary to his custom, in a gay mood, forgets the failures of the past, diverting his mind from them by seeking serenity in the diversions which now and then lighten his path. He is perfectly conscious of the fleeting nature of earthly things; and, with that natural and felicitous faculty of versification with which his images and figures are invariably described, he invests the Epicurean with the hopes of the Optimist, or with the indifference of the Stoic to the shadows which ever and anon dim the pleasures of human existence. There is nothing a.s.suredly in this lyric of the 'pulpit tw.a.n.g,' to which Miss Robinson refers, nor is it a 'weak and characterless effusion.'

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