THE BRONTES.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 249, 20 October 1928, Page 11 (Supplement)

THE BRONTES.

"IMMORTAL SISTERS OF THE

NORTH."

GENIUS AND TRAGEDY.

NJSW BOOKS ON THE FAMILY.

;CPy CHARLES WILSON.),

To me, as a Yorkshireman, and as one who knows the home of the famous Bronte sisters at Haworth well and who visited it as late as 1926, it is very pleasant to note a certain renaissance, I will not say popularity, but at least of interest, in the writings of those whom the poet, Lionel Johnson, has styled "The Immortal Sisters of the North," and in their strangely attractive personalities. A Frenchman, M. Ernest Dimet, has recently published a work on the Brontes, in which many new facts concerning them, more especially concerning Charlotte Bronte, the author of "Jane Eyre," have been set forth, facts which the French author has treated with as great a freshness and grace as did M. Andre Maurois those which he industriously collected about Shelley.

Then Miss Isabel Clarke has written in a volume called "Haworth Parsonage," a picture of the Bronte family, a book which deserves a place alongside the well known biography by Mrs. Gaskell. Yet again, a lady author whose novels, especially "The Death of Society," have rightly won her literary distinction, Miss Romer Wilson, herself a "Tyke," has penned in her book, "All Alone, the Life and Private History of Emily Bronte," an entirely new and in some details quite startlingly new view of the writer of "Wuthering Heights." All three books should be added to public libraries, for all give many new lights upon the romantic and, in some details, tragic history of the Brontes, that strangely gifted family who lived eo long a life of Bemi seclusion from a social world they were so well fitted by their undoubted talents to adorn with no small intellectual brilliance.

Even to-day Haworth is a cold, wild, ilmost ugly place, situated on the very :dge of the wild Yorkshire moorland, ibout lour or five miles from the smoky md busy West Hiding industrial centre >f Keighley. Here dwelt the Brontes in a gaunt stone parsonage, exposed to ill the winds of heaven, which—l can inawer for it —can blow there with a force not to be surpassed by those we laiow in Wellington. The father was in Irishman, their mother of Cornish birth. Patrick Bronte was a much gifted man, and always treated his clever daughters as equals in intellect, discussing such few new books as came to the lonely parsonage with them, and helping them with their education; neighbours were few and social intercourse limited. The two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died young. Consumption dogged the family, and eventually exacted a heavy toll. The children were first educated by an aunt, Miss Bramwell, and afterwards sent to school, first at a school for clergymen's daughters, where the eldest girls were, it is said, rather cruelly treated —you can read of this in the opening- scenes of "Jane Eyre'--~-but Charlotte was sent later to another school at Roe Head, between Leeds and Huddersfield. Here she met and made great friends with two girls named Taylor, and with Miss Ellen Nussey. The Taylors no doubt suggested the Rose and Jessy Yorke of j "Shirley," just as the three young parson! of the story were drawn from the author had known at Haworth. How' Charlotte went to Brussels to finish her education, and of her relations there with M. Paul Heges, the priggish and pragmatical Huguenot Professor, 'with whom she had a sentimental but quite platonic affection, a story unveiled with sueh honesty and grace in her novel we all know. She returned to Haworth, and as her feckless brother Bramwell had, by his imprudences and •xtravagances, entailed the necessity of economic* in the household, she had a disagreeable experience as a governess, and then returned to Brussels, where she taught English to "the Hegers. Eventually, although the Heber connection had nothing dishonourable about ft, Madame Heger made lerself so unpleasant that the girl came -back to j Haworth to find that Bramwell had be-1 & ,• ?;<some Inclined to drunken habits, and to mad* yet more gloomy by his ' addition t» the drug habit. Then, after '"Mk to starts a school to which—like -was one of poor Mrs. * enterprises—"no pupils ever the; sisters, who for long had fPT, f««?tly been writing stories, launched seriously into a literary career, . under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, Plf^Actou^BkL m&H* had written a novel, "The :; V : M"A J r °fesßor," based, to some extent, upon V£2; Brussels experiences, and Emily i "Wuthering Heights, M for many years 1 > destined to remain unrecognised as a .T?. rk genius* "The-Professor" itself \ , ver 7."flat, but Smith, Elders,! . ® ra y' fl . publishers,'..saw In it a of impressive talent, and | . brought joy to the author I commissioning her second and much ... 4 ' more, famous story, "Jane Eyre." Withthe aid of preliminary puffing or W? 1 ; r® an< * friendly logrolling "Jane ,v Eye" was at once pronounced a work J* genius, although tb sundry Vic-' Bit: * ori,n priggish tastes, the Rochester IIPHf e P I8 <»de gave offence. Charlotte Bronte once esteemed by the great majority of readers an author of the «rst rank, and her fame was henceforth solidly established. AH have read of her famous journey up to London with Si-. . " ep sister Anne, when she was so received by the great Thackp V There she revealed herself !//•/ J° «n admiring circle as the unknown Currer Bell, and' her liter?.®7 r eputation was henceforth estabImfMM'' «"hed. '

• t en ' however, she got back to the : A ""ely paraonage on the edge 6f the v ®°° r8 » 'reached a. sorely tried *ot a succession. of tragedies soon :■ afflicted the family. Poor Brarawell, i •trange, wayward, and, towards the «nd, half mad genius, had died. So, too, «n the following ye.ar, had the sisters Emily and Anne. It was a trying period | * or Poor Charlotte, who, however, went t fa Vith her work, producing first what x: shall always consider the brightest • a ® « not the strongest, the best, allr S?' 'Villette." She was far; away from . taose friends she had In London; ?' j of her stories, "Shirley," and lkter from George Cewies, «? - ever friendly and good Mrs. »- \,) Gaskell, from the stiff and father pomp* none the less very friendly Miss' But she hfcd 'fame to ■ com* ' ? xr5 r * wrdte, I think, to that .:-**£} * youthful friend who came out to New '■'k% f an d with whom she s6 long eor*»pond«l, AUu Taylor. "flow should I

live, me with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish] where there is not a eingle educated family." nij fli 0886 *8^ have no world at fiT" j , raven, weary of surveying the deluge and without an ark to return to, would be my type. Aa it is, sometiling like a hope and a motive sustain me still."

No doubt her position was none to be envied. Solitude and lost family affections preyed upon her, and there is little reason to question why she at last consented to marry good Mr. Nicholls, her father s curate, who had long loved her, and whom she had sketched with some considerable humour as one of the voune curates in "Shirley." She married, and •i 3 ,?f 00d to that ter short married life was one of comparative happiness. She died a year afterwards of a disease incidental to childbirth, her last words being, "Oh, I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy." Her life had been strangely and cruelly visited by trials and misfortune. Her early friend, Mia* laylor, whose own life in New Zealand had been one of sore trial, wrote of Mrs. Gaskell s biography that "it was not half so gloomy as the truth, but, as one of her bwwraphers has said, her fortitude remained unshaken. And that, who has read her life, shall say that Dr. Robertson Nicoll took a wrong view of this remarkable woman."

.°f Emily Bronte, Miss Homer Wilson gives an evidently carefully elaborated portrait. Emily no doubt was a genius in her own way, ever silent as to her work, loving long and solitary rambles along the moorland paths. You may still see the stones across a moorland stream upon which she used to sit in contemplative mood, but doomed like her sister, Anne, to whom, as Acton Bell we owe the quite different story of Agnes Grey.' Emily possessed a talent for poetry not shared by the other sisters, and Miss Romer Wilson reads a little into her character, for which I fail to gee much justification, SLiX" ' lt ° eetler '»

Poetical tributes to the talented trio [•re not few. The Belgian author, MaeterliMk, has penned a glowing tribute to Emily Bronte,, of whom he declared that "the first fifty years of the nineteenth century produced no woman of greater and more incontestable genius that she. Matthew Arnold, who had known Charlotte personally, and had learned from her own lips some of the details of her life, wrote a fine poem, .Haworth Churchyard" in which he sang:—

And she £n7J^ all , r „ Bing . her? Whose soul Knew no fellow for might. Passion, vehemence, grief, Daring, since Byron died — _ . She who sank Baffled, unknown, self-consumed. Sftrrort Mfc b ° W , d y} n « Stirred like a clarion blast, my soul. A less known and more latter day poet, Lionel Johnson, has added in a long poem, entitled simply "Haworth" a '.singularly fine tribute to the originality and other fine qualities displayed in the three sisters in their work. I quote a few lines:— Ch «fn! n of ..F lr l-_ I The Muses filled Hellas with shrines of gleaming stone. Your wasted hands had strength to build Grey sanctuaries, hard hewn, wind blown. Upon the mighty moorlands winds blow forth. Your mighty music storms our heart; Immortal sisters of the Korth, Daughters of Mature, Queens of Art.