Branwell’s attempts to earn his living as a portrait painter in Bradford lasted some twelve months. Little of his work survives today. The most familiar portrait, that of his three sisters, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, must have been painted at home, as well as the profile of either Emily or Anne hanging beside it. Sentiment and tradition give this lovely profile to Emily, but the resemblance to the figure of Anne in the group would suggest otherwise.
It is a moving experience to look upon these portraits. The viewer senses that he is an intruder, standing on the threshold of Haworth parsonage. The faded colouring only enhances the curious dream quality of these three faces looking out upon the world from the canvas; gazing, it would seem, upon the infernal world of their own creation rather than the walls of Branwell’s studio-bedroom.
Close inspection of the group has lately shown that what was thought to be a pillar is, in reality, the painted-out head and shoulders of the artist himself. The broad high forehead, the hair puffed at the sides, the line of coat and collar, all are there. Perhaps Branwell did not consider that he had done his own face justice, and in a fit of irritation smudged himself into oblivion.
A second group existed once, with Branwell standing between his sisters, holding a gun in his hand. There must have been a third group too, from which the sensitive profile portrait of Emily or Anne was torn. This group is said to have been destroyed by Mr Nicholls, Charlotte’s husband, who did not think it did his wife or her sisters justice. That he was artistically at fault is proved by the surviving profile in the National Portrait Gallery.
Other drawings of the sisters surely graced the parsonage once. An artist models from his family again and again. Branwell would have drawn his father, his aunt, even the faithful Tabby. There is no trace of any such sketch today.
A few portraits have been rescued for posterity, and now hang in Branwell’s old room at the Parsonage museum. Those of John and William Brown hold pride of place. These two, before the recent changes at the Museum, used to hang in Mr Brontë’s bedroom, one on either side of the fireplace. They had not then been restored, but were just as Branwell left them, with the picture of William half-finished. Once again, to a layman’s eye they appeared impressive. These two men, passed over by all biographers of the Brontë sisters as merely the sexton and his brother, persons of humble origin and small importance, stood out here as living figures of Branwell’s infernal world. The Worshipful Master of the Three Graces Lodge held his ground with dignity, despite the threatening storm in the background; the eyes could rebuke when they pleased, the mouth purse itself to command. Yet what weak, facile sentiment lurked behind those eyes, what fleshy self-indulgence when the mouth relaxed, what corpulent and easily-prevailed-upon, sensuous charm.
William was different. No vivid colouring here, no stormy background. Before restoration the total impression was of a jaundiced yellow, and the embittered eyes and taut cruel mouth suggested a man who, away from his Sunday best or his masonic duties, would, in some shadowed corner of the church where pick-axes and digging tools and barrows were stored away, impart to ‘parson’s son’, in his tender years, the cruder facts of life. He was, in point of fact, just nine years Branwell’s senior.
These two portraits have lately been restored, William’s portrait has been ‘finished’—and the magic has gone.
The portraits of Mr and Mrs Kirby, Branwell’s host and hostess from Fountain Street, Bradford, show a genius for satire on the part of the mocking lodger. Mrs Kirby stares from her frame in disapproval, the large frilled bonnet emphasizing in delicious fashion the prominent drooping nose and tucked-in chin, while Mr Kirby, humourless and suspicious, has the set expression of one who, reluctantly sitting for his likeness, does so for the first and last time.
Miss Margaret Hartley, their niece, who lived with them, completes the trio. She appears to be a young woman of about the artist’s age. She is far from ill-looking; indeed, she has a certain charm. What Branwell thought of her it is impossible to say, but Miss Hartley herself (later Mrs Ingram) declared in after years, when biographers of Charlotte had traduced the Brontë brother as already a drunkard in his ‘teens, that young Mr Brontë, during the twelve months when she knew him in Bradford, ‘was steady, industrious and self-respecting’. She would not have known if she provided inspiration for any Angrian writings. It seems possible, for her parents were dead, and a young girl bereaved would have made good fare for Branwell’s pen.
Mrs Kirby herself had two children. One of them, according to a friend of Branwell’s, ‘a beautiful little girl, was his special favourite. At his frequent request she dined with him in his private sitting-room, her pleasant smiles and cheerful prattling always charming him.’
Branwell had a gift for children which his sisters did not share. As he did not have to teach them, but only paint them, his patience and good nature stood the test. In after years, the small boys to whom he gave handfuls of pennies in the street at Haworth remembered him with gratitude—not only his generosity, but also his sense of fun, his love of a practical joke. He gave one of his self-portraits to a favourite lad from Haworth Sunday School, telling him, slyly, that the portrait was of Sir Robert Peel. It was not until the boy got home that he discovered Branwell had been playing a trick on him. This same boy remembered Branwell showing him the private room at the Three Graces Lodge, perhaps as an antidote to Sunday School. As to the self-portrait, it has vanished, along with the one of Mrs Kirby’s little girl.
The young artist in Fountain Street must have charged Mr and Mrs Kirby for their portraits, but relatives and friends usually expected their sittings to be free. Although the cost of bed and board was paid for by the Reverend William Morgan, with his aunt probably contributing, Branwell would still have to find money for clothes and bare necessities. The scattering of pennies to the children of Haworth does not suggest that he was frugal. The tall hat, the black vest, the raven-grey trousers, the little rattan cane, all described in one of the Angrian stories by Charlotte, tongue-in-cheek, give hints of a young man who wished to please and appear to some advantage. Prospective Bradford sitters, manufacturers and mill-owners, would not give their custom to someone down-at-heel. Branwell would need to seek his clients in hostelries like the George Hotel, the haunt not only of the wealthy businessmen of the day but of a coterie of minor poets and painters. Among them was John James, later a historian of the district, but at this time clerk to a Bradford solicitor. He was the friend of Robert Story, Yorkshire poet and schoolmaster, well known locally for his enthusiasm in the Conservative cause.
Leeds, Halifax and Bradford all had their ‘bards’ who contributed to the newspapers. One of them was William Dearden, who wrote under the pseudonym of William Oakendale, the ‘bard of Caldene’. He was a classical schoolmaster by profession, and had married a Cumberland girl who was herself so proficient in Greek and Latin that they wrote their love letters to one another in these languages. William Dearden, some fifteen years senior to Branwell, may have met him at about this time, when he was teaching at Keighley grammar school, and it has been suggested that the original of the Caroline in Branwell’s poem, written in 1837, was indeed William Dearden’s cousin of that name, who had died ten years before of typhus fever. Any character, living or dead, served as fuel to Angrian fire.
One thing is certain. The name Caroline was something of an obsession, conscious or unconscious, with both Branwell and Charlotte. Caroline Vernon was the name of Percy’s illegitimate daughter, Caroline Helstone was one of the two heroines in Charlotte’s Shirley, and a dead Caroline is mourned in yet another of Branwell’s poems, The Wanderer. Poetically, the reason for the obsession could be the rhythmic quality of the name itself, and nothing more significant. The agonized Harriet, Caroline’s sister and Percy’s discarded mistress, found that it rhymed very suitably with ‘decline’ when she was striving to forget adulterous shame in memories of her dead sister. As for the name Harriet, it was borne not only by Percy’s mistress but, in real life, by eighteen-year-old Harriet Robinson from Stanbury, who in a year or two was to marry one of Branwell’s boyhood friends, Hartley Merrall of Springhead, near Haworth. Young Hartley himself, alternating between Bradford and his father’s mill, two years Branwell’s junior and a lively companion, might very well have served, at some time or other, as a model for the Angrian Hector Montmorency who married the Harriet of Branwell’s poem.
While he was in Bradford, or possibly just before he went there, Branwell was at last to meet the young sculptor whom he had for so long admired at a distance, the sardonic and temperamental Joseph Leyland. According to Leyland’s brother Francis, William Dearden took Branwell over to Halifax, where the sculptor was at that time working on a group of African bloodhounds. When this group was exhibited later in London, it was pronounced by the Art Journal as ‘unsurpassed by any sculpture of modern time’. The model for these animals was Leyland’s own bloodhound, which had escaped from a travelling circus and attached himself to the sculptor, actually dying on the stand when Leyland was casting him in clay. The sculptor, writing about it later, said:
I looked, and saw him raise himself upon his haunches, and endeavour to crawl towards me—it was his last effort, for looking up into my face he licked my hand and died. Believe me, I shall never forget the dying look of that bloodhound; and the grief I yet feel, when I think of him, is more like what I felt for a human being than a dog.
Dearden wrote a poem on the hound’s death, which was published on July 25th, 1837.
A group of African bloodhounds, the model for which died tragically at his master’s feet—here was a scene that might have stepped straight out of Angrian history! And the sculptor himself, only twenty-six years old but already praised by all the art critics of the day, friend of many famous London artists, with the promise of an outstanding career before him, seemed to the aspiring Branwell everything that he himself would like to be. He was, in fact, another Alexander Percy, with his biting tongue, his scorn of religion, his contempt for those who disagreed with him, his decision to work only when it pleased him and damn the consequences, whether debt or failure, his generosity to his artistic friends, his ability to drink them under the table, his powerful, heavily built frame, his dark eyes, his mocking expression—these qualities combined to make the sculptor as full of potential charm and danger to Branwell as the Satan Leyland had cast in clay three years before.
Leyland also called himself a poet—another bond. And he too had lost, in infancy, a small brother and sister older than himself. Branwell, whose few friends hitherto had been the brethren of the Three Graces Lodge, and boyhood acquaintances like Hartley Merrall, found Joseph Leyland romantic fare.
It was stimulating to walk into the George at Bradford, and glimpse Joe Leyland talking to Edward Collinson or Richard Waller, the one a poet, the other a portrait painter, and have Leyland beckon him over for an introduction. Or, better still, to call with Dearden at the sculptor’s studio in Swan Coppice, Halifax, sit there awhile and watch him work, and drink with him afterwards at the Union Cross down the alley-way, never disclosing the fact that back at home in Haworth he was a member of the Temperance Society. To drink nothing would be to lose face. A tot of rum or a noggin of gin harmed nobody; besides, it set his brain working, fired his imagination, and he knew he would be twenty times more witty and amusing after a drink or two than if he sat sipping ginger wine like a teacher in Sunday school.
They shared the same literary tastes. Joe Leyland, who had sculptured Kilmeny, would quote James Hogg and The Queen’s Wake, only to be capped by Branwell, who would recite line after line from Pilgrims of the Sun, describing the strange flight of Cela and Mary Lee, as well as passages from Hogg’s more gruesome tales into the bargain. This, Branwell thought, was living at last. Halifax was better than Verdopolis (the new name for Glass-Town), Leyland more Lucifer-like than Percy, Earl of Northangerland, and himself—well, here was the puzzle, he could turn himself at will into any Angrian character he pleased. But Leyland returned to London, to exhibit his bloodhounds, and Branwell, back in Fountain Street, painting either the Reverend William Morgan or Mrs Kirby, neither of whom could have inspired him with anything but mild contempt, wondered whether after all he had chosen the right profession.
Both sitters sat from kindness—or could it be pity? Nobody seemed to want their portraits painted, or not, at least, if they had to pay for the pleasure. The trouble was that he would start a portrait, and then it would not please him; or suddenly, in the midst of it, all interest went. The faces of reality turned to fiction. Mr Kirby in flesh and blood would never have the vitality of Percy, so why waste paint on him? Branwell’s friends and acquaintances had an uncomfortable habit, unknown to themselves, of turning into Angrian characters, and he himself, while trying to behave like Branwell Brontë, the promising young portrait-painter, was forever considering the world and those about him with the jaundiced, cynical eye of Alexander Percy.
This latest Percy, who had behind him half a lifetime of experience of women and their ways, made an excellent double into whose exalted frame Branwell could slip at will and find himself at ease. The insignificant Brontë, bespectacled and small, who had not grown an inch since he turned fourteen, vanished with the flick of an eyelid, and Alexander Percy, a positive danger to female society, stood in his place; so that taking tea with Mrs Thompson, wife of his artist friend, became a mild excitement instead of sixty minutes’ discomfort. Mrs Thompson, did she but know it, was judged with an appraising eye; the polite young man who sat before her, balancing a teacup and saucer, could strip her in seconds. And not only Mrs Thompson; any maiden, wife or widow who walked the streets of Bradford or anywhere else would fall an easy prey to Percy, had he the mind to take them.
This dual existence must have enabled life to be lived with greater enjoyment. The snubs and slights received by a young man endeavouring to make his way into a wider circle need not even be felt. Alexander Percy gave the snubs. His was the withering glance, the scorching tongue. The knowledge that he could at will assume this second personality must have become a source of secret delight to Branwell, and an ever-present remedy to pain.
Meanwhile, the financial rewards of portrait-painting were slow to come, and he had not given up hope of finding his way into print. If William Dearden was able to get his work published, there was no reason why Branwell should not succeed some day himself. So laying down brush and palette he would take up his pen again, and because ‘Oakendale, the bard of Caldene’ talked Greek to his wife, and had some local success, Branwell, with his usual lack of judgement, thought the schoolmaster’s style must be better than his own, and worthier of imitation—if imitation was a necessity—than anything written by Shakespeare or Keats.
Dearden’s Death of the African Bloodhound and The Star Seer, in Five Cantos were surely, Branwell decided, models of excellence. Not only that—they had actually been published, a fact which carried more weight with him than anything else. A quotation from the African Bloodhound shows what a modest place Dearden held in the rank of even minor poets.
Tis stilly night, and on the good old Town –
The autumnal moon, resting her silvery orb
On the white rondure of a fleecy cloud,
Fair sultaness of Heaven, serenely smiles…
Leyland’s bloodhounds might grace a London gallery, but Dearden’s epitaph upon them would not long be thumbed by a reverent reading public.
Peace to thy ashes, noble brute! thy death
To poor humanity reads a lesson loud
Of faithfulness unswerving. Would that all
The art of sculpture doth embalm,
Were worthy of thy praise—deserved the meed
Of immortality conferred on thee!
Peace to thy ashes, noble Dearden! The bard of Caldene little guessed, as he penned his tribute to the African hounds, that a hundred years later his only claim to fame would be that, sitting in the Cross Roads Inn, between Keighley and Haworth, he had—so he declared—heard Emily Brontë’s brother read aloud part of Wuthering Heights.
William Dearden does not mention the date of this memorable occasion, which will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Eleven. According to tradition it took place in 1842, but there is one curious clue which might suggest an earlier date. Dearden, writing of the incident in a letter to the Halifax Guardian, said that a contest had been arranged between himself and Branwell Brontë. Each was to write a poem, composed specially for the occasion, and set in some period before the flood. Joseph Leyland was to act as judge. But Branwell, according to Dearden, got his manuscripts mixed, and brought the opening chapters of a novel in mistake for the poem which he had written, and had called Azrael, or Destruction’s Eve. The point of interest is that Azrael, far from being freshly composed in the summer of 1842, had at that date already been in existence some four years. It was originally written, according to Branwell’s own Notebook, on April 30th, 1838, and transcribed on May 12th of the same year. Therefore if the literary encounter took place in 1842, Branwell had a poem back home at the parsonage which exactly fitted the occasion. If, on the other hand, he did specially compose Azrael for the meeting with Dearden—as the terms of the contest stipulated—then the encounter must have taken place in the early summer of 1838, when Branwell was in his Fountain Street lodgings.
The Wanderer was first written in the summer of the Bradford period, on July 31st, and revised and sent to Blackwood’s in September, 1842. A long and tedious poem, once thought to be by Emily, it tells how a serving officer, many years absent in India, returns to find himself and his home changed, and his lost sweetheart a shade.
Yet Branwell, when he forgot to copy the bard and wrote in the person of Percy, as he had done the year before in Percy’s Last Sonnet, came nearer to writing well than he gave himself credit for:
Cease, Mourners, cease the sorrowing o’er the Dead,
For if their life be lost its toils are o’er,
And woe and want shall visit them no more;
Nor ever slept they in an earthly bed
Such sleep as that which lulls them dreamless held
In the true chambers of the eternal shore,
Where sacred silence seals each guarded door.
Oh! Turn from tears for these thy bended head
And mourn the Dead alive, whose pleasure flies
And life departs before their benighted eyes,
Yet see no Heaven gleam through the joyless gloom.
These only feel the worm that never dies,
The quenchless fires, the horrors of the tomb.
During his year at Bradford he spent his weekends at Haworth. The parsonage once more rang with sound and life when all three girls were there. Emily and Anne were back home again now, Emily—according to Ellen Nussey—having survived her six months at Law Hill, while Anne had left Dewsbury Moor as early as Christmas, 1837, for reasons of ill-health. Perhaps it was the youngest sister’s breakdown that decided Emily to quit teaching under ‘the skilled horsewoman’ Miss Patchett.
Charlotte was still teaching at Miss Wooler’s school, but by the end of May, 1838, she too was home again, having abandoned her post after ‘weeks of mental and bodily anguish not to be described’. The fact that she plunged at once into an Angrian romance, in which the now aged Percy, Earl of Northangerland, discusses his mistress and his illegitimate daughter, Caroline, with his son-in-law Zamorna, husband of his legitimate daughter Mary, shows how easily Charlotte could throw off care once she was steeped again in the infernal world.
‘Where is Louisa now?’ [the father-in-law, Northangerland, enquires of Zamorna, speaking of the discarded mistress]. ‘Is she still in your custody?’
‘Yes, safe enough—I keep her at a little place on the other side of the Calabar… Why do you ask me so particularly? Surely you’re not jealous, old Puritan?’
Small wonder Charlotte told her friend Ellen: ‘A calm and even mind like yours cannot conceive the feelings of the shattered wretch who is now writing to you.’ If Ellen should ever discover the appalling licence of the world below… but the minute handwriting made every manuscript safe. Nor would Mary Taylor and her young sister Martha—the entrancing Patty—ever know, when they stayed at the parsonage a few days later, that Mary’s ‘lively spirits and bright chatter’ and ‘frequent flushes of fever’, and Martha, ‘chattering as fast as her little tongue can run, and Branwell standing before her, laughing at her vivacity’—all described in a letter to Ellen—would, the instant they left Haworth, send brother and sister rushing to their manuscripts in an ecstasy of creation, both intent on making nineteen-year-old Martha not only the offspring of illicit love but the prey of her dissolute brother-in-law Zamorna.
Branwell was sometimes torn between turning Charlotte’s friends into Angrian heroines and introducing characters not known to his sister. His prowess with a gun, after all, brought him invitations to join shooting parties of a rough and ready kind. Also, there were certain farmhouses, scattered here and there on Haworth and Stanbury moors, whose occupants were either brethren of the Three Graces Lodge, like the saturnine John Heaton of Well Head, or—and this could be capital fun—members of one of the local brass bands, with the Heatons of Ponden rivalling the band of the Merrall boys. One house in particular seems to have taken Branwell’s fancy. Whether it was indeed Ponden Hall, home of Mr Robert Heaton, or one of the three farmhouses some distance away in mid-moor, known as Low, Middle and Higher Withens, it would in any case appear, from Branwell’s description, to be the same house, part manor, part farm, that his sister Emily was to describe as Wuthering Heights. Branwell, in a sketch dated December, 1837, had called it Darkwall, its owner William Thurston and its owner’s wife, inevitably, Maria.
The farthest house was one which stood on the highest level of the far pasture land, with large black walls and mossy porch and a plantation of gloomy firs, one clump of which—the oldest and the highest—stretched their horizontal arms above one gable like the Genii of that desolate scene. Beyond this house its long-built walls made a line with the November sky, and the path across them led on to an interminable moor, whose tracks might furnish a long day’s sport after snipe or heathcock. But no birds flew near the house except the linnets twittering by hundreds on some wet old wall, and yet despite its loneliness this house was of no common note in the extensive parish, and half the fireside tales of times gone by were sure to take ‘Darkwall’ for their scene, and its owners for their subject.
At the time when the narrative opens Mr Thurston, who ‘was more addicted to vice than virtue’, had been absent from home for some time; but he was shortly expected back, and his wife was in the kitchen preparing ‘a kingly supper’ for her spouse and his cronies.
Suddenly a clatter was heard outside, heralding the arrival, not of Mr Thurston, but of ‘a man of such uncommon height attired in short green frock, white cord breeks, and top boots, with a white broad brim on his head, and immense orange whiskers on his face’.
The newcomer was, needless to say, none other than Alexander Percy himself.
‘Now, my girls,’ he said, ‘let me see your lady as soon as you can.’
And therewith he strode to the fire, standing with his back towards it on the hearth, and placing his hat on a table. The servants crowded together, giggling to note the celebrated man, and he looked a noble fellow enough with his superb white forehead and head of auburn curls and cheeks so richly haloed, though their marked lines of dissipation and the athwart glance of his eyes took somewhat from the gazers’ admiration, and left a sensation akin to fear. She who had done his bidding returned to usher him into a parlour, but he swore he was not so loath to leave them, and began a verbal salute that made them hardly know where to look for smiling, till the door opening hushed them, and Mrs Thurston entered, who, now dressed with wreathing curls and snow white neck and shoulders, looked as handsome as she before had looked ladylike. Each warmly advancing shook hands and, ‘By God,’ he said. ‘I could not have thought to see my little Maria so much improved by time, it spoils all that I know but it has mended thee…’
The brief description of Darkwall, and the arrival of Alexander Percy upon the scene—after which the manuscript breaks off abruptly—is chiefly remarkable for the naïveté of the writer. Here was Branwell, aged twenty and a classical scholar, writing with fair narrative power but with a lamentable ignorance of punctuation and spelling, and now and then betraying an ingenuousness that would be expected in a child of twelve. This suggests that his home upbringing and his sister’s company had indeed brought him to an age of maturity in a state of almost childlike innocence. The rough quips of village cronies, the coarse humour of moorland acquaintances, both had left him untouched. He knew no more of ‘life’ at twenty than he had done at ten, and his ‘dissipated’ hero was a little boy’s image of what a bold, bad man should be.
The poem Azrael, or Destruction’s Eve, which has already been mentioned, was intended to be sterner stuff than the Percy narrative. This was the rebellion of Man before the Flood. It opened with Noah standing before Methuselah’s grave, calling on men to turn away from Sin, and Repent! Repent! Noah had barely finished his exhortation when he was interrupted:
And one arose—upon whose face,
Passions and crime had left their trace,
Contending with a tameless pride
That Man and God alike defied.
Branwell called his rebel Azrael (the Masonic symbol for ‘Perfect Intellect’, and also the Muslim Angel of Death), but once again he was, of course, Percy under another guise. Azrael protested against Noah, Jehovah, Fate and all tradition, and called on mankind to follow him rather than listen to the threats of an angry God.
The story hardly matters, or the verse either. Azrael is interesting because it is Branwell shouting the inevitable young man’s challenge to accepted thought and accepted teaching, to his aunt’s hymn-book and his father’s sermons, to the spectre of death and disease lurking around the corner, which no amount of prayer could evade. The vision of Marah, Azrael’s dying wife, who appeared suddenly to warn him of the approaching flood, was not only Mary, warning the young Percy of the dangers of an evil life, but also the spirit of the dead Maria, Branwell’s oldest sister, whose shadow was forever lurking in that Haworth grave, rebuking the boy who would forget her.
Maria… Mary… Marah… Branwell could no more escape from the phantom that pervaded his dreams than he could banish his second self; at twenty he was still asking the question he asked at eleven—where to… which way… which hand, my right or left?
We say this world was made by One
Who’s seen or heard or known by none.
We say that He, the Almighty God
That framed Creation with a nod,
His wondrous work so well fulfilled
That—in an hour—it All rebelled!
That though he loves our race so well
He hurls our spirits into Hell –
That though He bids us turn from sin
He hedges us with tempters in –
That though He says the world shall stand
Eternal—perfect—from his hand,
He’s just about to whelm it o’er
With utter ruin—evermore!
And all for deeds that we have done
Though he has made us every one!
Yes, WE—the image of his form!
We! The dust to feed the worm!
The poem breaks off abruptly with Azrael pledging Moloch in a glass of wine—Moloch, the harsh god who commanded men to sacrifice that which they cherished most dearly.
The poem remained incomplete. Perhaps Branwell did not consider it worth finishing. It was enough to throw down the gauntlet to the voice of authority, heard in his father’s pulpit, symbolizing a faith which he himself no longer held and a way of life he had no wish to follow.