The Three Brontës | Page 2

Dimnet believes firmly that poor Mrs. Robinson was in love with Branwell Bront?. Some of us still think that Charlotte was in love with M. H��ger. They cannot give him up any more than M. Dimnet can give up Mrs. Robinson.
Such things would be utterly unimportant but that they tend to obscure the essential quality and greatness of Charlotte Bront?'s genius. Because of them she has passed for a woman of one experience and of one book. There is still room for a clean sweep of the rubbish that has been shot here.
In all this, controversy was unavoidable, much as I dislike its ungracious and ungraceful air. If I have been inclined to undervalue certain things--"the sojourn in Brussels", for instance--which others have considered of the first importance, it is because I believe that it is always the inner life that counts, and that with the Bront?s it supremely counted.
If I have passed over the London period too lightly, it is because I judge it extraneous and external. If I have tried, cruelly, to take from Charlotte the little beige gown that she wore at Mr. Thackeray's dinner-party, it is because her home-made garments seem to suit her better. She is more herself in skirts that have brushed the moors and kept some of the soil of Haworth in their hem.
I may seem to have exaggerated her homesickness for Haworth. It may be said that Haworth was by no means Charlotte's home as it was Emily's. I am aware that there were moments--hours--when she longed to get away from it. I have not forgotten how Mary Taylor found her in such an hour, not long after her return from Brussels, when her very flesh shrank from the thought of her youth gone and "nothing done"; nothing before her but long, empty years in Haworth. The fact remains that she was never happy away from it, and that in Haworth her genius most certainly found itself at home. And this particular tone of misery and unrest disappeared from the moment when her genius declared itself, so that I am inclined to see in it a little personal dissatisfaction, if you will, but chiefly the unspeakable restlessness and misery of power unrecognized and suppressed. "Nothing done!" That was her reiterated cry.
Again, if I have overlooked the complexities of Charlotte's character, it is that the great lines that underlie it may be seen. In my heart I agree with M. Dimnet that the Bront?s were not simple. All the same, I think that his admirable portrait of Charlotte is spoiled by his attitude of pity for "_la pauvre fille_", as he persists in calling her. I think he dwells a shade too much on her small asperities and acidities, and on that "_ton de critique mesquine_", which he puts down to her provincialism. No doubt there were moments of suffering and of irritation, as well as moments of uncontrollable merriment, when Charlotte lacked urbanity, but M. Dimnet has almost too keen an eye for them.
In making war on theories I cannot hope to escape a countercharge of theorizing. Exception may be taken to my own suggestion as to the effect of Wuthering Heights on Charlotte Bront?'s genius. If anybody likes to fling it on the rubbish heap they may. I may have theorized a little too much in laying stress on the supernatural element in Wuthering Heights. It is because M. Dimnet has insisted too much on its brutality. I may have exaggerated Emily Bront?'s "mysticism". It is because her "paganism" has been too much in evidence. It may be said that I have no more authority for my belief that Emily Bront? was in love with the Absolute than other people have for theirs, that Charlotte was in love with M. H��ger.
Finally, much that I have said about Emily Bront?'s hitherto unpublished poems is pure theory. But it is theory, I think, that careful examination of the poems will make good. I may have here and there given as a "Gondal" poem what is not a "Gondal" poem at all. Still, I believe, it will be admitted that it is in the cycle of these poems, and not elsewhere, that we should look for the first germs of Wuthering Heights. The evidence only demonstrates in detail--what has never been seriously contested--that the genius of Emily Bront? found its sources in itself.
_10th October, 1911._

The Three Bront?s
It is impossible to write of the three Bront?s and forget the place they lived in, the black-grey, naked village, bristling like a rampart on the clean edge of the moor; the street, dark and steep as a gully, climbing the hill to the Parsonage at the top; the small oblong house, naked and grey, hemmed in on two sides by the graveyard, its five windows flush with