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Rumor has it that there be Americans who are never happy unless passing
for Englishmen. And I think I have discovered a like anomaly on the part
of the sons of Ireland—a wish to pass for Frenchmen. On Continental
hotel-registers the good, honest name of O'Brian often turns queer
somersaults, and more than once in "The States" does the kingly
prefix of O evolve itself into Van or De, which perhaps is quite proper,
seeing they all mean the same thing. One cause of this tendency may lie in
the fact that Saint Patrick was a native of France; although Saint Patrick
may or may not have been chosen patron saint on account of his
nationality. But the patron saint of Ireland being a Frenchman, what more
natural, and therefore what more proper, than that the whole Emerald Isle
should slant toward the people who love art and rabbit-stew! Anyway, from
the proud patronymic of Patricius to plain Pat is quite a drop, and my
heart is with Paddy in his efforts to get back.
When Patrick Prunty of County Down, Ireland, shook off the shackles of
environment, and the mud of the peat-bog, and went across to England,
presenting himself at the gates of Saint John's College, Cambridge, asking
for admittance, I am glad he handed in his name as Mr. P. Bronte, accent
on the last syllable.
There is a gentle myth abroad that preachers are "called,"
while other men adopt a profession or get a job, but no Protestant
Episcopal clergyman I have ever known, and I have known many, ever made
any such claim. They take up the profession because it supplies honors and
a "living." Then they can do good, too, and all men want to do
good. So they hie them to a divinity school and are taught the mysteries
of theological tierce and thrust; and interviewing a clerical tailor they
are ready to accept the honors and partake of the living. After a careful
study of the life of Patrick Bronte I can not find that his ambition
extended beyond the desirable things I have named—that is to say,
inclusively, honors and a living.
He was tall, athletic, dark, and surely a fellow of force and ambition
to set his back on the old and boldly rap for admittance at the gates of
Cambridge. He was a pretty good student, too, although a bit quarrelsome
and sometimes mischievous—throwing his force into quite unnecessary
ways, as Irishmen are apt to do. He fell in love, of course, and has not
an Irishman in love been likened to Vesuvius in state of eruption? We know
of at least one charming girl who refused to marry him, because he
declined, unlike Othello, to tell the story of his life. And it was
assumed that any man who would not tell who "his folks" were,
was a rogue and a varlet and a vagrom at heart.
And all the while Monsieur Bronte had nothing worse to conceal than that
he was from County Down and his name Prunty. He wouldn't give in and tell
the story of his life to slow music, and so the girl wept and then
stormed, and finally Bronte stormed and went away, and the girl and her
parents were sure that the Frenchman was a murderer escaping justice.
Fortunate, aye, thrice fortunate is it for the world that neither Bronte
nor the girl wavered even in the estimation of a hair.
Bronte got through school and came out with tuppence worth of honors.
When thirty, we find him established as curate at the shabby little town
of Hartshead, in Yorkshire. Little Miss Branwell, from Penzance, came up
there on a visit to her uncle, and the Reverend Mr. Bronte at once fell
violently in love with her dainty form and gentle ways. I say
"violently," for that's the kind of man Bronte was. Darwin says,
"The faculty of amativeness is not aroused except by the
unfamiliar." Girls who go away visiting, wearing their best bib and
tucker, find lovers without fail. One-third of all marriages in the United
States occur in just this way: the bib and tucker being sprung on the
young man as a surprise, dazzles and hypnotizes him into an avowal and an
engagement.
And so they were married—were the Reverend Patrick Bronte and Miss
Maria Branwell. He was big, bold and dictatorial; she was little, shy and
sensitive. The babies came—one in less than a
year, then a year apart. The dainty little woman had her troubles, we are
sure of that. Her voice comes to us only as a plaintive echo. When she
asked to have the bread passed, she always apologized. Once her aunt sent
her a present of a pretty silk dress, for country clergymen's wives do not
have many luxuries—don't you know that?—and Patrick Bronte cut the
dress into strips before her eyes and then threw the pieces, and the
little slippers to match, into the fireplace, to teach his wife humility.
He used to practise with a pistol and shoot in the house to steady the
lady's nerves, and occasionally he got plain drunk. A man like Bronte in a
little town with a tired little wife, and with inferior people, is a
despot. He busies himself with trifles, looks after foolish details, and
the neighbors let him have his own way and his wife has to, and the result
is that he becomes convinced in his own mind that he is the people and
that wisdom will die with him.
And yet Bronte wrote some pretty good poetry, and had faculties that
rightly developed might have made him an excellent man. He should have
gone down to London (or up, because it is south) and there come into
competition with men as strong as himself. Fate should have seized him by
the hair and bumped his head against stone walls and cuffed him
thoroughly, and kicked him into line, teaching him humility, then out of
the scrimmage we might have gotten a really superior product.
Mrs. Bronte became a confirmed invalid. A man
can not always badger a woman; God is good—she dies. Little Maria
Branwell had been married eight years; when she passed out she left six
children, "all of a size," a neighbor woman has written. Over
her grave is a tablet erected by her husband informing the wayfarer that
"she has gone to meet her Savior." At the bottom is this warning
to all women: "Be ye also ready; for in such an hour as ye think not
the Son of Man cometh."
Five of these motherless children were girls and one a boy.
As you stand there in that stone church at Haworth reading the
inscription above Maria Branwell's grave, you can also read the death
record of the babes she left. The mother died on September Fifteenth,
Eighteen Hundred Twenty-one; her oldest daughter, Maria, on May Sixth,
Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five; Elizabeth, June Fifteenth, Eighteen Hundred
Twenty-five; Patrick Branwell, on September Twenty-fourth, Eighteen
Hundred Forty-eight; Emily, December Nineteenth, Eighteen Hundred
Forty-eight; Anne, May Twenty-eighth, Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine; and
Charlotte, on March Thirty-first, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five. Those whom
the gods love die young: the Reverend Patrick Bronte lived to be
eighty-five years old.
I got out of the train at Keighley, which you must pronounce "Keethley,"
and leaving my valise with the station-master started on foot for Haworth,
four miles away.
Keighley is a manufacturing town where various old mansions have been
turned into factories, and new factories have sprung up, square,
spick-span, trimmed-stone buildings, with fire-escapes and red tanks on
top.
One of these old mansions I saw had a fine copper roof that shone in
the sun like a monster Lake Superior agate. It stands a bit back from the
road, and on one great gatepost is a brass plate reading "Cardigan
Hall," and on the other a sign, "No Admittance—Apply at the
Office." So I applied at the office, which is evidently the ancient
lodge, and asked if Mr. Cardigan was in. Four clerks perched on high
stools, crouching over big ledgers, dropped their pens and turning on
their spiral seats looked at me with staring eyes, and with mouths wide
open. I repeated the question and one of the quartette, a wheezy little
old man in spectacles and with whiskers on his neck, clambered down from
his elevated position and ambled over near, walking around me, eying me
curiously.
"Go wan wi' yer wurruk, ye idlers!" he suddenly commanded the
others. And then he explained to me that Mr. Cardigan was not in, neither
was Mr. Jackson. In fact, Mr. Cardigan had not been in for a hundred
years—being dead. But if I wanted to look at goods I could be
accommodated with bargains fully five per cent below Lunnon market. The
little old man was in such serious earnest that I felt it would be a sin
to continue a joke. I explained that I was only a tourist in search of the
picturesque, and thereby did I drop ten points in the old man's
estimation. But this did I learn, that Lord Cardigan has won deathless
fame by attaching his name to a knit jacket, just as the name Jaeger will
go clattering down the corridors of time attached to a "combination
suit."
This splendid old mansion was once the ancestral home of a branch of
the noble family of Cardigan. But things got somewhat shuffled, through
too many hot suppers up to London (being south), and stacks of reds and
stacks of blues were drawn in towards the dealer, and so the old mansion
fell under the hammer of the auctioneer. What an all-powerful thing is an
auctioneer's hammer! And now from the great parlors, and the library, and
the "hall," and the guest-chambers echo the rattle of
spinning-jennies and the dull booming of whirling pulleys. And above the
song of whirring wheels came the songs of girls at their work—voices
that alone might have been harsh and discordant, but blending with the
monotone of the factory's roar were really melodious.
"We cawn't keep the nasty things from singin'," said the old
man apologetically.
"Why should you?" I asked.
"Huh, mon! but they sing sacred songs, and chaunts, and
a' that, and say all together from twenty rooms, a hundred times a day, 'Aws
ut wuz in th' beginnin,' uz now awn ever shawl be, worl' wi'out end, Aamen.'
It's not right. I've told Mr. Jackson. Listen now, didn't I tell ye?"
"Then you are a Churchman?"
And the old man wiped his glasses and told me that he was a Churchman,
although an unworthy one, and had been for fifty-four years, come
Michaelmas. Yes, he had always lived here, was born only across the beck
away—his father was gamekeeper for Lord Cardigan, and afterwards agent.
He had been to Haworth many times, although not for ten years. He knew the
Reverend Patrick Bronte well, for the Incumbent from Haworth used to
preach at Keighley once a year, and sometimes twice. Bronte was a fine
man, with a splendid voice for intoning, and very strict about keeping out
all heresies and such. He had a lot of trouble, had Bronte: his wife died
and left him with eight or ten children, all smart, but rather wild. They
gave him a lot of bother, especially the boy. One of the girls married Mr.
Bronte's curate, Mr. Nicholls, a very decent kind of man who comes to
Keighley once a year, and always comes to the factory to ask how things
are going.
Yes, Mr. Nicholls' first wife died years and years ago. She used to
write things—novels; but no one should read novels; novels are stories
that are not so—things that never happened; they tell of folks that
never was.
Having no argument to present in way of
rebuttal, I shook hands with the old man and started away. He walked with
me to the road to put me on the right way to Haworth.
Looking back as I reached the corner, I saw four "clarks"
watching me intently from the office windows, and above the roar and
jangle of machinery was borne on the summer breeze the sound of sacred
song—shrill feminine voices:
"Aws ut wuz in th' beginnin', uz now awn ever shawl be, worl'
wi'out end—Aamen!"
As one moves out of Keighley the country becomes stony; the trees are
left behind, and there rises on all sides billow on billow of purple
heather. The way is rough as the Pilgrim's Progress road to Paradise.
These hillside moors are filled with springs that high up form rills, then
brooks, then cascades or "becks," and along the Haworth road,
wherever one of these hurrying, scurrying, dancing becks crosses the
highway, there is a factory devoted to keeping alive the name of Cardigan.
Next to the factory is a "pub.," and publics and factories
checker themselves all along the route. Mixed in with these are long rows
of tenement-houses well built of stone, with slate roofs, but with a grimy
air of desolation about them that surely drives their occupants to drink.
To have a home a man must build it himself. Forty houses in a row, all
alike, are not homes at all.
I believe an observant man once wrote of the hand being subdued to what
it works in. The man who wrote that surely never tramped along the Haworth
road as the bell rang for twelve o'clock. From out the factories poured a
motley mob of men, women and children, not only with hands dyed, but with
clothing, faces and heads as well. Girls with bright-green hair, and
lemon-colored faces, leered and jeered at me as they hastened pellmell
with hats askew, and stockings down, and dragging shawls, for home or
public-house. Red and maroon children ran, and bright-scarlet men smoked
stolidly, taking their time with genuine grim
Yorkshire sullen sourness.
"How far is it to Haworth?" I asked one such specimen.
"Ef ye pay th' siller for a double pot a' 'arf and 'arf. Hi might
tell ye"; and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward a ginshop
near by.
"Very well," said I; "I'll buy you a double pot of 'arf
and 'arf, this time."
The man seemed a bit surprised, but no smile came over his spattered
rainbow face as he led the way into the drink-shop. The place was crowded
with men and women scrambling for penny sandwiches and drinks fermented
and spirituous. Some of these women had babies at their breasts, the
babies being brought by appointment by older children who stayed at home
while the mothers worked. And as the mothers gulped their Triple XXX, and
swallowed hunks of black bread, the little innocents dined. The mothers
were rather kindly disposed, though, and occasionally allowed the
youngsters to take sips out of their foaming glasses, or at least to drain
them. Suddenly a woman with purple hair spied me and called in falsetto:
"Ah, Sawndy McClure has caught a gen'l'mon. Why didn't I see 'im
fust an' 'arve 'im fer a pet?"
There was a guffaw at my expense and 'arf and 'arf as well, for all the
party, or else quarrel. As it was, my stout stick probably saved me from
the "personal touch." I stayed until the factory-bells rang, and
out my new-found friends scurried for fear of
being the fatal five minutes late and getting locked out. Some of them
shook my hand as they went, and others pounded me on the back for luck,
and several of the girls got my tag and shouted, "You're it!"
I used to think that Yorkshire folks were hopelessly dull and sublimely
stupid, quarrelsome withal and pigheaded to the thirty-second degree; but
I have partially come to the conclusion that their glum ways often conceal
a peculiar kind of grim humor, and beneath the tough husk is considerable
good nature.
The absence of large trees makes it possible to see the village of
Haworth several miles away. It seems to cling to the stony hillside as if
it feared being blown into space. There is a hurrying, rushing rill here,
too, that turns a little woolen-mill. Then there is a "Black
Bull" tavern, with a stable-yard at the side and rows of houses on
the one street, all very straight up and down. One misses the climbing
roses of the ideal merry England, and the soft turf and spreading yews and
the flowering hedgerows where throstles and linnets play hide-and-seek the
livelong day. It is all cold gray stone, lichen-covered, and the houses do
not invite you to enter, and the gardens bid no welcome, and only the
great purple wastes of moorland greet you as a friend and brother.
Outside the Black Bull sits a solitary hostler, who feels it would be a
weakness to show any good humor. So he bottles
his curiosity and scowls from under red, bushy eyebrows.
Turning off the main street is a narrow road leading to the
church—square and gray and cold. Next to it is the parsonage, built of
the same material, and beyond is the crowded city of the dead.
I plied the knocker at the parsonage door and asked for the rector. He
was away at Kendal to attend a funeral, but his wife was at home—a
pleasant, matronly woman of near sixty, with smooth, white hair. She came
to the door knitting furiously, but from her regulation smile I saw that
visitors were not uncommon.
"You want to see the home of the Brontes? That's right, come right
in. This was the study of the Reverend Patrick Bronte, Incumbent of this
Parish for fifty years."
She sang her little song and knitted and shifted the needles and
measured the foot, for the stocking was nearly done. It was a blue
stocking (although she wasn't) with a white toe; and all the time she led
me from room to room telling me about the Brontes—how there were the
father, mother and six children. They all came together. The mother died
shortly, and then two of the little girls died. That left three girls and
Branwell the boy. He was petted and made too much of by his father and
everybody. He was the one that always was going to do great things. He
made the girls wait on him and cuffed them if they didn't, and if they
did, and all the time told of the things he was going to do. But
he never did them, for he spent most of his time at the taverns. After a
while he died—died of the tremens.
The three Bronte girls, Emily, Charlotte and Annie, wrote a novel
apiece, and never showed them to their father or to any one. They called 'emselves
Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, and their novels were the greatest ever
written—they wrote them 'emselves with no man to help. Their father was
awful mad about it, but when the money began to come in he felt better.
Emily died when she was twenty-seven. She was the brightest of them all;
then Annie died, and only Charlotte and the old man were left. Charlotte
married her father's curate, but old Mr. Bronte wouldn't go to the
wedding: he went to the Black Bull instead. Miss Wooler gave the bride
away—some one had to give her away, you know. The bride was
thirty-eight. She died in less them a year, and old Mr. Bronte and
Charlotte's husband lived here alone together.
This was Charlotte's room; this is the desk where she wrote "Jane
Eyre"—leastwise they say it is. This is the chair she sat in, and
under that framed glass are several sheets of her manuscript. The writing
is almost too small to read; and so fine and yet so perfect and neat! She
was a wonderful tidy body, very small and delicate and gentle, yet with a
good deal of her father's energy.
Here are letters she wrote: you can look at them if you choose. This
footstool she made and covered herself. It is
filled with heather-blossoms—just as she left it. Those books were hers,
too—many of them given to her by great authors. See, there is
Thackeray's name written by himself, and a letter from him pasted inside
the front cover. He was a big man they say, but he wrote very small, and
Charlotte wrote just like him, only better, and now there are hundreds of
folks write like 'em both. Then here's a book with Miss Martineau's name,
and another from Robert Browning—do you know who he was?
Yes, the church is always open. Go in and stay as long as you choose;
at the door is a poorbox and if you wish to put something in you can do
so—a sixpence most visitors put in, or a shilling if you insist upon it.
You know we are not a rich parish—the wool all goes to Manchester now,
and the factory-hands are on half-pay and times are scarce. You will come
again some time, come when the heather is in bloom, won't you? That's
right. Oh, stay! the boxwood there in the garden was planted by
Charlotte's own hands—perhaps you would like a sprig of it—there, I
thought you would!
All who write concerning the Brontes dwell on the sadness and the
tragedy of their lives. They picture Charlotte's earth-journey as one
devoid of happiness, lacking all that sweetens and makes for satisfaction.
They forget that she wrote "Jane Eyre," and that no person
utterly miserable ever did a great work; and I assume that they know not
of the wild, splendid, intoxicating joy that follows a performance well
done. To be sure, "Jane Eyre" is a tragedy, but the author of a
tragedy must be greater than the plot—greater than his puppets. He is
their creator, and his life runs through and pervades theirs, just as the
life of our Creator flows through us. In Him we live and move and have our
being. And I submit that the writer of a tragedy is not cast down or
undone at the time he pictures his heroic situations and conjures forth
his strutting spirits. When the play ends and the curtain falls on the
fifth act, there is still one man alive, and that is the author. He may be
gorged with crime and surfeited with blood, but there is a surging
exultation in his veins as he views the ruin that his brain has wrought.
Charlotte loved the great stretch of purple moors, hill on hill fading
away into eternal mist. And the wild winds that sighed and moaned at
casements or raged in sullen wrath, tugging at the roof, were her friends.
She loved them all, and thought of them as visiting spirits. They were her
properties, and no writer who ever lived has
made such splendid use of winds and storm-clouds and driving rain as did
Charlotte Bronte. People who point to the chasing, angry clouds and the
swish of dripping rosebushes blown against the cottage-windows as proof of
Charlotte Bronte's chronic depression know not the eager joy of a storm
walk. And I am sure they never did as one I know did last night: saddle a
horse at ten o'clock and gallop away into the darkness; splash, splash in
the sighing, moaning, bellowing, driving November rain. There's joy for
you! ye who toast your feet on the fender and cultivate sick headache
around the base-burner—there's a life that ye never guess!
But Charlotte knew the clouds by night and the swift-sailing moon that
gave just one peep out and disappeared. She knew the rifts where the stars
shone through, and out alone in the breeze that blew away her cares she
lifted her voice in thankfulness for the joy of mixing with the elements,
and that her spirit was one with the boisterous winds of heaven.
People who live in beautiful, quiet valleys, where roses bloom all the
year through, are not necessarily happy.
Southern California—the Garden of Eden of the world—evolves just as
many cases per capita of melancholia as bleak, barren Maine. Wild, rocky,
forbidding Scotland has produced more genius to the acre than beautiful
England: and I have found that sailor Jack, facing the North Atlantic
winter storms, year after year, is a deal
jollier companion than the Florida cracker whose chief adversary is the
mosquito.
Charlotte Bronte wrote three great books: "Jane Eyre,"
"Shirley" and "Villette." From the lonely, bleak
parsonage on that stony hillside she sent forth her swaying filament of
thought and lassoed the world. She lived to know that she had won. Money
came to her, all she needed, honors, friends and lavish praise. She was
the foremost woman author of her day. Her name was on every tongue. She
had met the world in fair fight; without patrons, paid advocates, or
influential friends she made her way to the very front. Her genius was
acknowledged. She accomplished all that she set out to do and more—far
more. The great, the learned, the titled, the proud—all those who
reverence the tender heart and far-reaching mind—acknowledged her as
queen.
So why prate of her sorrows! Did she not work them up into art? Why
weep over her troubles when these were the weapons with which she won? Why
sit in sackcloth on account of her early death, when it is appointed unto
all men once to die, and with her the grave was swallowed up in victory?
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