Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (522 page)

CHAPTER III.

THE REV. PATRICK BRONTË.

Character of the Rev. P. Brontë — Charges against Him — Serious Allegations of Biographers — Injustice of the Charges — Mr. Brontë’s indignant Denial of the Imputations — Testimony of Nancy Garrs — Mrs. Brontë and the Silk-Dress Episode — Mr. Brontë, the Supposed Prototype of Mr. Helstone — The Pistol-shots Theory — Mr. Brontë on Science Knowledge — Miss Branwell.

The character of the Rev. Patrick Brontë, who was responsible, after the death of his wife, for the education of his children, if we may believe the accounts given of it by those who have admired their genius, had many deplorable peculiarities. It would be difficult, indeed, to find anywhere the record of such passionate outbreaks, such unreasoning prejudices, and such unbending will as are revealed in the stories which are told of him. But we shall see presently that most of these charges have no foundation in fact, while others are, probably, the result of total misconception.

Mrs. Gaskell gives an account of these peculiarities. On one occasion, she tells us, after the children had been out on the wet moors, the nurse had rummaged out certain coloured boots given to them by the Rev. Mr. Morgan, who had been sponsor for Maria at Hartshead, and had arranged them before the fire. Mr. Brontë observing this, and thinking the bright colours might foster pride, heaped the boots upon the coals, and filled the house with a very strong odour of burnt leather. ‘Long before this,’ she says, ‘some one had given Mrs. Brontë a silk gown …. she kept it treasured up in her drawers. One day, however, while in the kitchen, she remembered that she had left the key in the drawer, and, hearing Mr. Brontë upstairs, she augured some ill to her dress, and, running up in haste, she found it cut into shreds…. He did not speak when he was annoyed or displeased, but worked off his volcanic wrath by firing pistols out of the back-door in rapid succession…. Now and then his anger took a different form, but still was speechless. Once he got the hearth-rug, and, stuffing it up the grate, deliberately set it on fire, and remained in the room in spite of the stench until it had smouldered and shrivelled away into uselessness. Another time he took some chairs, and sawed away at the backs till they were reduced to the condition of stools.’
 
 

Mr. Wemyss Reid, who implicitly adopts the ‘pistol shots’ and ‘pretty dress’ stories, while paying a high tribute to Mr. Brontë’s rectitude, and to his just pride in the celebrity of his daughters, says of him, ‘He appears to have been a strange compound of good and evil. That he was not without some good is acknowledged by all who knew him. He had kindly feelings towards most people…. But throughout his whole life there was but one person with whom he had any real sympathy, and that person was himself.’ He was ‘passionate, self-willed, vain, habitually cold and distant in his demeanour towards those of his own household.’ His wife ‘lived in habitual dread of her lordly master…. It would be a mistake to suppose that violence was one of the weapons to which Mr. Brontë habitually resorted … his general policy was to secure his end by craft rather than by force.’
 
 

Miss Robinson, without hesitation, repeats the censures on Mr. Brontë published by Mrs. Gaskell and Mr. Reid, asking, ‘Who dare say if that marriage was happy? Mrs. Gaskell, writing in the life and for the eyes of Mr. Brontë, speaks of his unwearied care, his devotion in the night-nursing. But, before that fatal illness was declared, she lets fall many a hint of the young wife’s loneliness … of her patient suffering, of his violent temper.’
 
 

It will thus be seen that the disposition of Mr. Brontë must have been a sad one indeed, if all these statements are true; and marvellous that, with ‘such a father,’ the young and sterling faculties of the ‘six small children’ should have been so admirably directed and trained that, of the four who lived to later years, three at least occupy an exalted and prominent position among women of letters in the present century. And it would be still more strange that these children were especially distinguished for the gentleness of their dispositions, and the refinement of their ideas. It may be hoped that the readers of this volume, with their additional knowledge of the affectionate, but often wayward, Branwell, will sympathize with the sentiment which Monsieur Héger expressed in his letter to Mr. Brontë, that,
en jugeant un père de famille par ses enfants on ne risque pas de se tromper
. For we can scarcely doubt that the characteristics of the children, which I have named, were due, in fact, in great measure, to Mr. Brontë’s affectionate supervision and education of them. He had graduated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, as we have seen; and the culture and tone of the university were brought under the roof of his house, where his children — more especially Branwell — were subjected to its influence. Moreover, whatever may be thought of Mr. Brontë’s intellectual gifts, or of the talent he displayed in his poems and prose writings, we may be sure that he possessed, in a marked degree, a deep sympathy with a higher mental training, and with the truth and simplicity of a pastoral life.

After the allegations against Mr. Brontë had appeared in the first edition of the life of his daughter Charlotte, he never ceased to deny the scandalous reflections upon his character in that work. ‘They were,’ he said to me, ‘wholly untrue.’ He stated that he had ‘fulfilled every duty of a husband and a father with all the kindness, solicitude, and affection which could be required of him.’ And Mrs. Brontë herself had said, as quoted by Mrs. Gaskell, ‘Ought I not to be thankful that he never gave me an angry word?’ thus openly declaring that, whatever might have been the peculiarities of Mr. Brontë’s temper, his wife, at least, never suffered the consequences. The children also ever looked up to their father with reverence, gratitude, and devotion.

In a conversation I had with Mr. Brontë on the 8th of July, 1857, he spoke of the unjustifiable reflections upon himself which had been made public, and he said, ‘I did not know that I had an enemy in the world, much less one who would traduce me before my death, till Mrs. Gaskell’s “Life of Charlotte” appeared. Every thing in that book which relates to my conduct to my family is either false or distorted. I never did commit such acts as are there ascribed to me.’ At a later interview Mr. Brontë explained that by the word ‘enemies,’ he implied, ‘false informants and hostile critics.’ He believed that Mrs. Gaskell had listened to village scandal, and had sought information from some discarded servant.

Let us then examine the source of these allegations. Mrs. Gaskell tells us that her informant was ‘a good old woman,’ who had been Mrs. Brontë’s nurse in her illness. Now it is known that, whatever good qualities this person may be supposed to have had, her conscientiousness and rectitude, at least, were not of the first order, and she was detected in proceedings which caused Mr. Brontë to dismiss her at once. With the double effect of explaining her dismissal and injuring Mr. Brontë, this person gave an account of his temper and conduct, embellished with the stories which I have quoted from the first edition of the ‘Life of Charlotte,’ to a minister of the place; and it was in this way that Mrs. Gaskell became acquainted with her and them. Nancy Garrs, a faithful young woman who had been in Mr. Brontë’s service at Thornton, who continued with the family after the removal to Haworth, and who still survives — a widow, Mrs. Wainwright — at an advanced age, a well-known inhabitant of Bradford, informs me that the ‘silk dress’ which Mr. Brontë is said to have torn to shreds was a print dress, not new, and that Mr. Brontë, disliking its enormous sleeves, one day, finding the opportunity, cut them off. The whole thing was a joke, which Mrs. Brontë at once guessed at, and, going upstairs, she brought the dress down, saying to Nancy, ‘Look what he has done; that falls to your share.’ Nancy declares the other stories to be wholly unfounded. She speaks of Mr. Brontë as a ‘most affectionate husband; there never was a more affectionate father, never a kinder master;’ and ‘he was not of a violent temper at all; quite the reverse.’

This view of these slanderous stories is fortunately also confirmed out of the mouth of Charlotte Brontë. In the fourth chapter of ‘Shirley,’ speaking of Mr. Helstone — whose character, though not absolutely founded on that of her father, is yet unquestionably influenced by her knowledge of his disposition, and of some incidents in which he had been concerned, — she says that on the death of his wife, ‘his dry-eyed and sober mourning scandalized an old housekeeper, and likewise a female attendant who had waited upon Mrs. Helstone in her sickness … they gossiped together over the corpse, related anecdotes with embellishments of her lingering decline, and its real or supposed cause; in short, they worked each other up to some indignation against the austere little man, who sat examining papers in an adjoining room, unconscious of what opprobrium he was the object. Mrs. Helstone was hardly under the sod when rumours began to be rife in the neighbourhood that she had died of a broken heart; these magnified quickly into reports of hard usage, and, finally, details of harsh treatment on the part of her husband: reports grossly untrue, but not less eagerly received on that account.’ It will thus be seen that the character of Mr. Helstone becomes in part a defence of Mr. Brontë. On the occasion above referred to, Mr. Brontë went on to say that, ‘while duly acknowledging the obligations he felt himself under to Mrs. Gaskell for her admirable memoir of his daughter, he could not but regard her uncalled-for allusions to himself, and the failings of his son Branwell, as the excrescences of a work otherwise ably carried out.’ He appeared, on this occasion, to be consoled by the thought that, owing to the remonstrances he had made, the objectionable passages would be expunged from the subsequent editions of the work, and that he would ultimately be set right with the public. He concluded with these words: — ‘I have long been an abstraction to the world, and it is not consoling now to be thus dragged before the public; to be represented as an unkind husband, and charged with acts which I never committed.’

The story of the pistol-shots admits of ready explanation. It is known that Mr. Brontë, like Helstone, had a strange fascination in military affairs, and he seems to have had almost the spirit of Uncle Toby. He lived, too, in the troublous times of the Luddites, and had kept pistols, for defence as Mr. Helstone did. That gentleman, it will be remembered, had two pairs suspended over the mantel-piece of his study, in cloth cases, kept loaded. As I have reason to know, Mr. Brontë, having been accustomed to the use of fire-arms, retained the possession of them for safety in the night; but, fearing they might become dangerous, occasionally discharged them in the day-time.

Mr. Brontë’s remonstrances and denials, and his refutation of the scandals attributed to him, had their effect; and the charges complained of were entirely omitted in the edition of the ‘Life of Charlotte,’ published in the year 1860. Mr. Brontë was in his eighty-fourth year when this tardy act of bare justice was done to him. It may be added that the people of Haworth, when they saw in print Mrs. Gaskell’s exaggerated and erroneous statements, loudly expressed their disapprobation. Mr. Wood, late churchwarden of Haworth, also denied the stories of the cutting up of Mrs. Brontë’s dress, and the other charges just referred to.

The truth about Mr. Brontë appears to be this: that though, like Mr. Helstone — many of the
traits
of whose character were derived from that of the incumbent of Haworth — he might have missed his vocation, like him he was ‘not diabolical at all,’ and that, like him, also, ‘he was a conscientious, hard-headed, hard-handed, brave, stern, implacable, faithful little man: a man almost without sympathy, ungentle, prejudiced, and rigid: but a man true to principle — honourable, sagacious, and sincere.’ Possibly we should not be wholly mistaken in saying that, like the parson in ‘Shirley,’ Nature never intended him ‘to make a very good husband, especially to a quiet wife.’ He lacked the fine sympathy and delicate perception that would have enabled him to make his family entirely happy; and when brooding over his politics, his pamphlets, and his sermons, like Mr. Helstone, he probably locked ‘his liveliness in his book-case and study-desk.’ Yet Mr. Helstone is neither brutal nor insane, ‘neither tyrannical nor hypocritical,’ but ‘simply a man who is rather liberal than good-natured, rather brilliant than genial, rather scrupulously equitable than truly just — if you can understand such superfine distinctions?’

It would not have been necessary, in this work, to defend at such length the character of the Rev. Patrick Brontë, had it not happened, unfortunately, that recent works, which have treated admirably of the writings of his daughters, have also acquiesced in, and to a great extent reiterated, the serious charges made against him. Moreover, it can never be a useless thing to retrieve a character which has been thoughtlessly taken away. This defence has now been made, and it may be hoped that the ‘six motherless children’ had a more amiable and affectionate father than is generally supposed, and that he paid careful and anxious attention to their bringing-up and to their education. Indeed, of this there need be no doubt. The death of his wife had placed them in his hands, he being their only support on earth, and it surely is not too much to say that he knew his duty, and did it well, as the lives of his children prove, on the ground of natural affection, and, perhaps, of higher motives also.