Emily Bronte Part 9

"She had," says Charlotte in her 'Memoir,' "in the course of her life been called upon to contemplate, near at hand and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved and dejected nature; what she saw went very deeply into her mind; it did her harm."

The spectacle of this harm, coming undeserved to so dear, frail and innocent a creature, absorbed all Charlotte's pity. There was none left for Branwell.

But there was one woman's heart strong enough in its compa.s.sion to bear the daily disgusts, weaknesses, sins of Branwell's life, and yet persist in aid and affection. Night after night, when Mr. Bronte was in bed, when Anne and Charlotte had gone upstairs to their room, Emily still sat up, waiting. She often had very long to wait in the silent house before the staggering tread, the muttered oath, the fumbling hand at the door, bade her rouse herself from her sad thoughts and rise to let in the prodigal, and lead him in safety to his rest. But she never wearied in her kindness. In that silent home, it was the silent Emily who had ever a cheering word for Branwell; it was Emily who still remembered that he was her brother, without that remembrance freezing her heart to numbness. She still hoped to win him back by love; and the very force and sincerity of his guilty pa.s.sion (an additional horror and sin in her sisters' eyes) was a claim on Emily, ever sympathetic to violent feeling. Thus it was she who, more than the others, became familiarised with the agony, and doubts, and shame of that tormented soul; and if, in her little knowledge of the world, she imagined such wrested pa.s.sions to be natural, it is not upon her, of a certainty, that the blame of her pity shall be laid.

As the time went on and Branwell grew worse and wilder, it was well for the lonely watcher that she was strong. At last he grew ill, and would be content to go to bed early and lie there half-stupefied with opium and drink. One such night, their father and Branwell being in bed, the sisters came upstairs to sleep. Emily had gone on first into the little pa.s.sage room where she still slept, when Charlotte, pa.s.sing Branwell's partly-opened door, saw a strange bright flare inside.

"Oh, Emily!" she cried, "the house is on fire!"

Emily came out, her fingers at her lips. She had remembered her father's great horror of fire; it was the one dread of a brave man; he would have no muslin curtains, no light dresses in his house. She came out silently and saw the flame; then, very white and determined, dashed from her room downstairs into the pa.s.sage, where every night full pails of water stood. One in each hand she came upstairs. Anne, Charlotte, the young servant, shrinking against the wall, huddled together in amazed horror--Emily went straight on and entered the blazing room. In a short while the bright light ceased to flare. Fortunately the flame had not reached the woodwork: drunken Branwell, turning in his bed, must have upset the light on to his sheets, for they and the bed were all on fire, and he unconscious in the midst when Emily went in, even as Jane Eyre found Mr. Rochester. But it was with no reasonable, thankful human creature with whom Emily had to deal. After a few long moments, those still standing in the pa.s.sage saw her stagger out, white, with singed clothes, half-carrying in her arms, half-dragging, her besotted brother.

She placed him in her bed, and took away the light; then a.s.suring the hysterical girls that there could be no further danger, she bade them go and rest--but where she slept herself that night no one remembers now.

It must be very soon after this that Branwell began to sleep in his father's room. The old man, courageous enough, and conceiving that his presence might be some slight restraint on the drunken furies of his unhappy son, persisted in this arrangement, though often enough the girls begged him to relinquish it, knowing well enough what risk of life he ran. Not infrequently Branwell would declare that either he or his father should be dead before the morning; and well might it happen that in his insensate delirium he should murder the blind old man.

"The sisters often listened for the report of a pistol in the dead of the night, till watchful eye and hearkening ear grew heavy and dull with the perpetual strain upon their nerves. In the mornings young Bronte would saunter out, saying with a drunkard's incontinence of speech, 'The poor old man and I have had a terrible night of it. He does his best--the poor old man!--but it's all over with me'" (whimpering) "'it's _her_ fault, _her_ fault.'"[20]

And in such fatal progress two years went on, bringing the suffering in that house ever lower, ever deeper, sinking it day by day from bad to worse.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 16: Mrs. Gaskell.]

[Footnote 17: 'Pictures of the Past.']

[Footnote 18: Mrs. Gaskell.]

[Footnote 19: Mrs. Gaskell.]

[Footnote 20: Mrs. Gaskell.]

CHAPTER XII.

WRITING POETRY.

While Emily Bronte's hands were full of trivial labour, while her heart was buried with its charge of shame and sorrow, think not that her mind was more at rest. She had always used her leisure to study or create; and the dreariness of existence made this inner life of hers doubly precious now. There is a tiny copy of the 'Poems' of Ellis, Currer, and Acton Bell, which was Emily's own, marked with her name and with the date of every poem carefully written under its t.i.tle, in her own cramped and tidy writing. It has been of great use to me in cla.s.sifying the order of these poems, chiefly hymns to imagination, Emily's "Comforter,"

her "Fairy-love;" beseeching her to light such a light in the soul that the dull clouds of earthly skies may seem of scant significance.

The light that should be lit was indeed of supernatural brightness; a flame from under the earth; a flame of lightning from the skies; a beacon of awful warning. Although so much is scarcely evident in these early poems, gleaming with fantastic glow-worm fires, fairy prettinesses, or burning as solemnly and pale as tapers lit in daylight round a bier, yet, in whatever shape, "the light that never was on sea or land," the strange transfiguring s.h.i.+ne of imagination, is present there.

No one in the house ever saw what things Emily wrote in the moments of pause from her pastry-making, in those brief sittings under the currants, in those long and lonely watches for her drunken brother. She did not write to be read, but only to relieve a burdened heart. "One day," writes Charlotte in 1850, recollecting the near, vanished past, "one day in the autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on a ma.n.u.script volume of verse in my sister Emily's handwriting. Of course I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse. I looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me,--a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, not at all like the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear, they had also a peculiar music, wild, melancholy and elevating."

Very true; these poems with their surplus of imagination, their instinctive music and irregular rightness of form, their sweeping impressiveness, effects of landscape, their scant allusions to dogma or perfidious man, are, indeed, not at all like the poetry women generally write. The hand that painted this single line,

"The dim moon struggling in the sky,"

should have shaken hands with Coleridge. The voice might have sung in concert with Blake that sang this single bit of a song:

"Hope was but a timid friend; She sat without the grated den, Watching how my fate would tend, Even as selfish-hearted men.

"She was cruel in her fear; Through the bars, one dreary day, I looked out to see her there, And she turned her face away!"

Had the poem ended here it would have been perfect, but it and many more of these lyrics have the uncertainty of close that usually marks early work. Often incoherent, too, the pictures of a dream rapidly succeeding each other without logical connection; yet scarcely marred by the incoherence, since the effect they seek to produce is not an emotion, not a conviction, but an impression of beauty, or horror, or ecstasy.

The uncertain outlines are bathed in a vague golden air of imagination, and are shown to us with the magic touch of a Coleridge, a Leopardi--the touch which gives a mood, a scene, with scarce an obvious detail of either mood or scene. We may not understand the purport of the song, we understand the feeling that prompted the song, as, having done with reading 'Kubla Khan,' there remains in our mind, not the pictured vision of palace or dancer, but a personal partic.i.p.ation in Coleridge's heightened fancy, a setting-on of reverie, an impression.

Read this poem, written in October, 1845--

"THE PHILOSOPHER.

"Enough of thought, philosopher, Too long hast thou been dreaming Unlightened, in this chamber drear, While summer's sun is beaming!

s.p.a.ce-sweeping soul, what sad refrain Concludes thy musings once again?

"Oh, for the time when I shall sleep Without ident.i.ty, And never care how rain may steep, Or snow may cover me!

No promised heaven, these wild desires Could all, or half fulfil; No threatened h.e.l.l, with quenchless fires, Subdue this quenchless will!

"So said I, and still say the same; Still, to my death, will say-- Three G.o.ds, within this little frame, Are warring night and day; Heaven could not hold them all, and yet They all are held in me, And must be mine till I forget My present ent.i.ty!

Oh, for the time, when in my breast Their struggles will be o'er!

Oh, for the day, when I shall rest, And never suffer more!

"I saw a spirit, standing, man, Where thou dost stand--an hour ago, And round his feet three rivers ran, Of equal depth, and equal flow-- A golden stream, and one like blood, And one like sapphire seemed to be; But, where they joined their triple flood It tumbled in an inky sea.

The spirit sent his dazzling gaze Down through that ocean's gloomy night Then, kindling all, with sudden blaze, The glad deep sparkled wide and bright-- White as the sun, far, far more fair, Than its divided sources were!

"And even for that spirit, seer, I've watched and sought my life-time long; Sought him in heaven, h.e.l.l, earth and air-- An endless search, and always wrong!

Had I but seen his glorious eye _Once_ light the clouds that 'wilder me, I ne'er had raised this coward cry To cease to think, and cease to be; I ne'er had called oblivion blest, Nor, stretching eager hands to death, Implored to change for senseless rest This sentient soul, this living breath--

"Oh, let me die--that power and will Their cruel strife may close; And conquered good, and conquering ill Be lost in one repose!"

Some semblance of coherence may, no doubt, be given to this poem by making the three first and the last stanzas to be spoken by the questioner, and the fourth by the philosopher. Even so, the subject has little charm. What we care for is the surprising energy with which the successive images are projected, the earnest ring of the verse, the imagination which invests all its changes. The man and the philosopher are but the clumsy machinery of the magic-lantern, the more kept out of view the better.

"Conquered good and conquering ill!" A thought that must often have risen in Emily's mind during this year and those succeeding. A gloomy thought, sufficiently strange in a country parson's daughter; one destined to have a great result in her work.

Of these visions which make the larger half of Emily's contribution to the tiny book, none has a more eerie grace than this day-dream of the 5th of March, 1844, sampled here by a few verses s.n.a.t.c.hed out of their setting rudely enough:--

"On a sunny brae, alone I lay One summer afternoon; It was the marriage-time of May With her young lover, June.

"The trees did wave their plumy crests, The glad birds carolled clear; And I, of all the wedding guests, Was only sullen there.

"Now, whether it were really so, I never could be sure, But as in fit of peevish woe, I stretched me on the moor,

"A thousand thousand gleaming fires Seemed kindling in the air; A thousand thousand silvery lyres Resounded far and near: