There is no record of what Mr Brontë thought of his son’s new venture: any letters he may have written on the subject were not kept. Like many other parents, he was silent about his daughters’ achievements until after they were dead and one of them was famous: he was consistently silent about his boy. His only known comment on Branwell refers to the time when the plan for the Royal Academy had failed: in a letter to Mrs Gaskell, written after he had read her life of Charlotte, he told her that ‘the picture of my brilliant and unhappy son… is a masterpiece’. That he was devoted to Branwell is plain from Charlotte’s letter to W. S. Williams when her brother died: ‘My poor father naturally thought more of his only son than of his daughters’, and: ‘Branwell was his father’s and his sisters’ pride and hope in boyhood, but since manhood the case has been otherwise.’
If Charlotte had been doubtful of the success of the tutorship at Broughton-in-Furness, she was equally dubious about the railway undertaking. Telling the news to Ellen Nussey as a half-joke that did not quite come off, she wrote:
A distant relative of mine, one Patrick Boanerges, has set off to seek his fortune in the wild, wandering, adventurous, romantic, knight-errant-like capacity of clerk on the Leeds and Manchester Railroad. Leeds and Manchester, where are they? Cities in a wilderness—like Tadmor, alias Palmyra—are they not?
The allusion to an oasis in the Syrian desert which reached its zenith in the first or second century A.D. under a Queen Zenobia was not likely to convey much to Ellen. Charlotte perhaps had picked up the reference from Branwell himself, for Percy’s third wife was called Zenobia.
She considered that the brilliant brother whom she loved, the pride and hope of the family, should have achieved something with his brains by this time. He was twenty-three. His friend Joseph Leyland had exhibited at Leeds, Manchester and London at his age. Local poets without a quarter of Branwell’s talent had their work in print. There had been so much talk, always, of what he would become, and now… a booking-clerk.
In fairness to Branwell, the post must have had prospects. A clerkship on the railway in 1840 must have seemed as promising to a young man then as a position in an atomic energy centre would today. To ignore the railway was to ignore progress, to close an eye to the future. There was money to be made in the railways, and the post of booking-clerk at a small station might lead to a better-paid and more important job in one of the large towns like Manchester or Leeds. Branwell, if he did well, could be earning a comfortable income in ten years’ time, with leisure in his spare hours for writing.
These were the arguments Branwell must have put to his family, and they were no doubt accepted as reasonable. What Charlotte would fear was lack of steady purpose, the swing of mood, the high spirits—so infectious in boyhood—which reached a peak and dropped to zero, when, if no one was by who understood, the result might be calamitous. It seemed to her, as the oldest, the planner of the family, that some measure of self-support must be obtained for all four of them. Their father was sixty-three. His health might fail at any time. If the worst should happen, if he should die, they would have to leave the parsonage to make way for his successor. This would be the moment when a brother should become head of the family and help to support his sisters.
The Taylor brothers were already hard at work for fear of this contingency. Their father Joshua, the jovial, stirring personality whose republican sympathies, and ability to speak French like a Frenchman, had often cast him as hero in Charlotte’s Angrian romances, was now a sick man, and likely to die at any time. The Taylor brothers would never permit Mary and Martha to go out as governesses, which both Charlotte and Anne were to do again the following year. Martha would probably marry, if she found anyone to suit her; but Charlotte did not consider marriage by any means every girl’s answer. Independence was the goal—for herself, for her sisters and above all for Branwell. He must, wherever he worked, develop a sense of responsibility.
Branwell, lodging at the Pear Tree Inn, just above Sowerby Bridge station, and close to Brockwell, where the Deardens lived, found a sense of responsibility difficult to acquire when his immediate superior lacked this very quality. The station-master was famous for drinking ten pints of beer, one after the other, before he started his morning duties; and with the Pear Tree so handy and the Royal Oak just up the hill—besides the Old Wharf Inn and the Navigation Inn near the canal—a contest soon developed between station-master and booking-clerk as to who had the greater capacity.
The ‘offices’, too, were far from comfortable. The station was in its infancy; stone buildings were considered ‘frills’, and Branwell and his superior were housed in wooden cabins. The ‘up’ and ‘down’ trains made the excitement of the day, and when the station-master stepped out to have another pint of beer, leaving the booking-clerk in charge, Branwell had little to do but stare up at White Windows, the great three-storied house on the hill which dominated the whole of Sowerby. It was the dwelling of Mr George Priestley, to whom the poor inhabitants would doff their hats and curtsy whenever the carriage rolled by, coachman and footmen resplendent in sky blue livery and crimson vest.
The glories of White Windows were not for a booking-clerk. The hospitality of Mr George Richardson, the ‘wharfinger’ of the bridge, in charge of the wharf and all the business of the canal, was nearer; here was the true life of Sowerby Bridge. The new chugging trains from Normanton lacked colour beside the barges, carrying everything from coal to timber, from wheat to wool; and the boaties themselves were more fascinating than engine-driver, fireman and guard.
When Branwell was off duty and the weather was fine, he would walk along the tow-path by the canal, or climb from the valley to the moors, or, better still, he would visit Halifax, only two-and-a-half miles away, and call upon Leyland. Here he could believe himself an artist once more, watching the sculptor at work on a group of five warriors intended for exhibition at Manchester. Perhaps Wilson Anderson would wander in, who painted landscapes and kept a beer cellar, and Joe Drake, the carver and gilder. Later they would visit the Talbot, the Cock, the Commercial or the Rose and Crown, where Drake had his premises. The point was to go where the landlord—or landlady—allowed ‘tick’, for all four were invariably short of money.
Leyland, of course, was the giant among small fry. His friend Illidge in London told him he was wasting his talent in the provinces, but already inertia was creeping upon him, time was slipping by, he had too many humdrum orders he must finish before thinking of London again. It was simpler to forget work and debts, and drink at the Talbot instead, amusing himself with the obvious hero-worship of young Branwell Brontë.
Whether drink alone was the cause of Leyland’s slow decline, or whether he, like Branwell, took opium in some form as an experiment and became an addict, no record shows. That studio in No. 10, The Square, was the setting for bravado and strange dreams. A curious fate hung upon Leyland’s work. His group of warriors was smashed in transit from the Manchester Exhibition to its new home at Gisburn, Lord Ribblesdale’s house; his Theseus lost its hands and feet, and another monument years later crashed to pieces. Today there is no trace of Spartacus or Satan. The one-time favourite of the critics is unknown. Some flaw in the material may have caused his work to crumble, but the fault was in the sculptor too; like his own Spartacus he began, at this time, to soften and decay.
It was in 1841 that Leyland’s brother Francis—who, like their father, was a painter and bookseller—met Branwell for the first time at Sowerby Bridge, and some forty-odd years later described him thus:
The young railway clerk was of gentleman-like appearance, and seemed to be qualified for a much better position than the one he had chosen. In stature he was a little below middle height. He was slim and agile in figure, yet of well-formed outline. His complexion was clear and ruddy, and the expression of his face, at the time, lightsome and cheerful. His voice had a ringing sweetness, and the utterance and use of his English was perfect. Branwell appeared to be in excellent spirits, and showed none of those traces of intemperance with which some writers have unjustly credited him about this period of his life.
My brother had often spoken to me of Branwell’s poetical abilities, his conversational powers, and the polish of his education; and, on a personal acquaintance, I found nothing to question in this estimate of his mental gifts, and of his literary attainments.
The description suggests that respectable Mr Francis was not taken to the Navigation Inn on the wharf to meet the boaties, nor was he invited to enter a beer-drinking contest with the station-master. Leyland, the sculptor, and Brontë, the booking-clerk, knew how to behave in front of family, and because of it Francis defended both men to the end of his days.
Branwell’s ‘prospects’ on his appointment had been six months as booking-clerk at Sowerby Bridge and then promotion. Promotion came, but not what his family had expected. He was moved two miles down the line to Luddenden Foot. True, he was his own boss, and his position that of station-master, as he was careful to point out, though to be more truthful he shared his duties with that same Mr Woolven whom he had met for the first time at the Castle Tavern, Holborn, London, some six years before. Luddenden Foot was not a junction, like Sowerby Bridge. The duties were not arduous. The trains were few. It was farther still from Halifax and Leyland’s studio. But the canal ran close, and the Basin was near. Here the barges moored, and the boaties who stopped overnight to make merry in The Woodman or the Weavers Arms were prodigal of hospitality. So were George and William Thompson, who owned the corn-mill by the canal, and James Titterington, wild young son of the wealthy worsted spinner and manufacturer Ely Titterington, who owned mills on the hill-top at Midgley, and a house called Old Ridings overlooking the Luddenden valley. James Titterington was two years older than Branwell, and always ‘on the razzle’. He was also an enthusiastic member of the Luddenden Reading Society, which met at the Lord Nelson Inn in the village of Luddenden itself, a mile or so from Luddenden Foot Station. It was possibly Titterington who introduced Branwell to the other members of the Reading Society, though Branwell’s name is not on the list of members. Young Titterington read a book a week, so he, at least, did not waste every evening in the bar parlour.
The Reading Society at the Lord Nelson could at least discuss the books the members read, which would give them an advantage over the boaties in the Basin. So Branwell must have thought, torn between the more rarefied climate of the Nelson and the opaque atmosphere of the Weavers Arms.
At first the Nelson held priority. The landlord, Timothy Wormold, was himself a member of the Society, as well as clerk to the church across the way. John Whitworth, manufacturer, with a mill at Longbottom by the canal and a fine home, Peel House, beyond Luddenden, and John Garnett of Holm House, another manufacturer, also belonged. These men obeyed the rules of the Society, one of which was
that if any of the members come to the said meeting drunk so that he be offensive to the company, and not fit to do his business, he shall forfeit twopence. Swearing on oath, or using any other kind of bad language judged by a majority of the members to be offensive, also calls for a fine of twopence.
The books were a mixed collection, and perhaps the most thumbed were the volumes of the Newgate Calendar, consisting of the lives, crimes, trials and tortures of the most notorious murderers of the century. Tales of the Genii which was also on the shelves, would bring nostalgia to Branwell, if he was given the opportunity of borrowing it. These divinities who accompanied man through life, the one bringing happiness, the other misery, were so constantly at war in himself that the Chief Genius Brannii of childhood days had become lost somewhere between the two of them.
The pendulum of his spirits swung between high and low. High when he was with lads younger than himself, like Francis Grundy, the railway engineer—related, surely, to the Richard Grundy who first drove the Manchester train to the Calder Valley; and high, too, with William Heaton, a handloom weaver who had taught himself to read and write by copying the tombstones in Luddenden churchyard. Both men in after years remembered Branwell with affection. Grundy, bluff, hearty, wildly inaccurate, when it came to recalling dates and meetings, gave a more down-to-earth description of the Luddenden station-master than that of the restrained printer, Francis Leyland. Branwell, according to Grundy, was
almost insignificantly small—one of life’s trials. He had a mass of red hair, which he wore brushed high off his forehead—to help his height, I fancy; a great, bumpy, intellectual forehead, nearly half the size of the whole facial contour; small ferrety eyes, deep, sunk, and still further hidden by the never removed spectacles; prominent nose, but weak lower features. He had a downcast look, which never varied, save for a rapid momentary glance at long intervals. Small and thin of person, he was the reverse of attractive at first sight. He took to me amazingly…
It is interesting to compare this description with a passage from one of Branwell’s own sketches, The Wool Is Rising:
A colour grinder presented himself, and in answer said something in so hurried a tone that Edward could not catch its meaning. This grinder was a fellow of singular aspect. He was a lad of perhaps seventeen years of age, but from his appearance he seemed at least half-a-score years older, and his meagre freckled visage and large Roman nose, thatched by a thick mat of red hair, constantly changed and twisted themselves into an endless variety of restive movements. As he spoke, instead of looking his auditor straight in the face he turned his eyes—which were further beautified by a pair of spectacles—away from him, and while one word issued stammering from his mouth it was straight way contradicted or confused by a chaos of a strange succeeding jargon.
It was with Grundy that Branwell used to walk the countryside, leaving the ticket collector, William Woolven, in charge of the station and discoursing
with wondrous knowledge upon subjects moral, intellectual, and philosophical… in his fits of passion driving his doubled fist through the panel of a door. At times we would drive over in a gig to Haworth and visit his people. He was then at his best, and would be eloquent and amusing, although sometimes he would burst into tears when returning, and swear that he meant to amend.
One of Grundy’s most significant revelations was that Branwell had a ‘habit of making use of the word “sir” when addressing even his most intimate friends’, which would account for the formality of the many letters which he later wrote to Joseph Leyland.
Heaton, the self-taught poet-weaver, knew nothing of Branwell’s passion. ‘His temper,’ he told the sculptor’s brother, ‘was always mild towards me. I shall never forget his love for the sublime and beautiful works of nature, and I have heard him dilate on the sweet strains of the nightingale… He was blithe and gay, but at times appeared downcast and sad…’
Like most people with Irish blood, Branwell knew how to adapt himself to an audience of one person or a dozen. Older than Grundy, he could play man-of-the-world, philosopher, to the engineer; younger than Heaton the weaver, with all the advantages of education and a more subtle mind, he could make patronage appear a gift and never a condescension. The rising young manufacturers of his acquaintance presented a tougher problem. A classical scholar was no one if he did not have brass; these men had been working in their fathers’ mills and factories when Branwell was scribbling in the nursery study with his sisters. They could spend a day in the Piece Hall in Halifax on business, finish up with their clients at the Talbot or the Old Cock afterwards, put away more hard liquor in a couple of hours than Branwell had been used to taking in months, and then do a stiff day’s work back in the mill next morning. If the bright spark of a station-master at Luddenden Foot wanted to keep pace with these lads, then he must quit quoting Latin and Greek on every occasion, learn to hold his liquor and not be sorry later, and prove himself a man when a skirt showed round the corner.
Talk was not enough. How about action? ‘You little epitome of the leavings of nature’s workshop, you compound of all sorts and sexes, you little whey-faced hermaphrodite…’ This strange outburst from Percy’s friend O’Connor in an early Angrian story perhaps found echoes now in Luddenden. A letter to Grundy, written 1842, when both had left Luddenden, points to a course of conduct unknown to the engineer.
I would rather give my hand than undergo again the grovelling carelessness, the malignant yet cold debauchery, the determination to find how far mind could carry body without both being chucked into hell, which too often marked my conduct when there [at Luddenden], lost as I was to all I really liked, and seeking relief in the indulgence of feelings which form the black spot on my character.
The language is Alexander Percy’s, strained, exaggerated, but not entirely false; some measure of sincerity escaped from Mr Brontë’s conscience-stricken son. Though ‘cold debauchery’ smacks of Angrian licence, excessive drinking with the boaties in the Basin might conjure up the flames of hell to one nurtured beneath the parsonage roof. Nor were the boaties the only source of real or imagined contamination. Numbers of Liverpool Irish, despised by the local workmen, and employed by the rich mill-owners because they sold their labour cheap, herded together, squatter-fashion, near the canal at Luddenden Foot. That Branwell counted these among his aquaintances seems clear from a curious entry in his notebook at that time.
At R. Col last night with
G. Thompson
J. Titterington
R. L. Col
H. Killiner and another.
I quarrelled with J.T. about going but after a wrestle met him on the road and became friends—quarrelled almost on the subject with G. Thompson. Will have no more of it.
August 18th, 1841.
P.B.B.
The Cols, Colls, McColls and Killiners were all Irish families, brought over to work in the mills. It was among these people that Titterington the young worsted-spinner and Thompson the corn-merchant amused themselves of a summer evening, persuading the station-master, against his conscience, to do the same. Did Branwell, once involved, become enmeshed, all the Irish in him drawn to these folk who spoke with a brogue harsher than his father’s yet equally familiar, who laughed and cursed and cried all in a matter of seconds, as he did himself, calling upon their Saviour and the Devil in the same breath, loving with momentary fervour and lying with equal facility?
The entries in his notebook at this time are scattered with the name of Jesu. ‘Jesu… Jesu… Jesu…’ comes at random among five shillings given to sweeps, and two-and-sixpence for cups. ‘Jesu Rex’ is scribbled beside the London address of the Mottet Society, whose object was the collection of ancient church music. It is easy enough to believe that the Liverpool Irish of Luddenden Foot, with their slovenly, charming ways, Catholic every one of them, were the cause of all the Jesu’s and the tortured conscience too.
The truth is that Branwell Brontë, born and bred in Yorkshire, was not a Yorkshireman at all. He had none of their determination, none of their strength of character; he might mimic their ways and customs, but he was not one of them. The heights of Haworth, the chimneys of Bradford and Halifax, the wheels of the Manchester trains that rattled through the Calder valley, were all fundamentally alien to his nature. He belonged, by blood and by temperament, to the first feckless group from across the water which might beckon him; to the eloquent, unpublished poets of many a Dublin side-street, to the painters with canvases untouched, to the musicians with notes unscored, to the fierce arguing politicians of the Liffeyside pubs who had failed in their exams for Trinity College. He belonged to the great company of gifted, wasted Irishmen who, in their mother country, are content to fail and dream, but transplanted to another, break in body and soul. ‘Holy Jesu… Jesu Salvator…’ is scattered among ‘Have some curled greens for Mr Woolven’—no Cornish or Yorkshire Methodism here, but a Catholic cry for succour from Elinor McClory’s grandson.
He would never have the courage to attend Mass in the Assembly room which the Irish workpeople rented on Sundays and Holy Days; the Pope was still anti-Christ to one brought up in an evangelical tradition, and Catholicism itself the Scarlet Woman. Here, perhaps, lay the deep attraction. To those Revivalists who shouted their Hallelujahs in the hills around Haworth and whom he so much despised, yes, and to his freemason brethren also, Rome was anathema. Temptation lay in those bleeding Crucifixes, those cheap, too brightly coloured statuettes of Mother and Child, the heady smell of incense, the veiled and sinister glance of the black-robed visiting priest. The squalid cabins of the Liverpool Irish had a glow to them, a glorious dirty warmth pervading Branwell’s senses, clouding his intellect; whisky, lust and possibly laudanum too creating an image even more benign and merciful than that of his dead sister Maria, or of the other Mary, Percy’s second wife. Years earlier, in his account of that Mary’s death, Branwell had put into the mouth of her grief-stricken husband the words: ‘Had’st thou never been alive, I should not now be alive.’ An echo of that cry is to be found in one of his poems dating from the Luddenden Foot days:
Amid the world’s wide din around,
I hear from far a solemn sound
That says, ‘Remember me!
And though thy lot be widely cast
From that thou picturedst in the past
Still deem me dear to thee,
Since to thy soul some glow of heaven,
To give thy earth some glow of heaven,
And, if my beams from thee are driven,
Dark, dark, thy night will be!’
What was that sound? ’Twas not a voice
From ruby lips and sapphire eyes,
Nor echoed back from sensual joys,
Nor a forsaken fair one’s sighs.
I, when I heard it, sat amid
The bustle of a town-like room
’Neath skies, with smoke-stained vapours hid –
By windows, made to show their gloom.
The desk that held my ledger book
Beneath the thundering rattle shook
Of engines passing by;
The bustle of the approaching train
Was all I hoped to rouse the brain
Or startle apathy.
And yet, as on the billow swell
A Highland exile’s last farewell
Is borne o’er Scotland’s sea,
And solemn as a funeral knell,
I heard that soft voice, known so well,
Cry—‘Oh remember me!’
This is only part of a poem, one among many that scatter the pages of Branwell’s Luddenden notebook. None of them shows outstanding talent: they abound in ‘o’er’ and ‘ ’neath’ and forced rhymes picked at random in the manner of William Dearden and other minor poets. Some attempt was, however, made to sketch out a series of poems on famous men. Their names were listed underneath the address of a Mr Warburton’s warehouse, No. 10, Pall Mall (not London, as might be supposed, but Pall Mall, Manchester):
Alexander of Macedon
Oliver Cromwell
Samuel Johnson
Robert Burns
Horatio Nelson
Napoleon Bonaparte
Michelangelo
Scylla of Rome
Julius Caesar
Walter Scott
John Wilson
Henry Brougham
Danton
Columbus
This heterogeneous list was compiled without regard to period or claim to immortality, and the inevitable Holy Jesu was scribbled alongside. A fragment of Burns survives, allusions to Johnson in another scrap and an interminable elegy on the life and death of Nelson, which Branwell probably thought his best poem but which is quite easily his worst. If it was read aloud to the members of the Luddenden Reading Club it must have fetched loud applause and so encouraged its creator. The theme was vigorous, for Nelson was a popular hero. And lines such as:
A vessel lies in England’s proudest port
Where venerating thousands oft resort…
would make landlord Timothy Wormold nod his head in understanding. ‘Aye, that’s Portsmouth!’
A prostrate form lies ’neath a double shade
By stifling smoke and blackened rafters made,
With head that backward rolls whene’er it tries
From its hard thunder-shaken bed to rise…
And so on and so on, until:
The guns were thundering fainter on his ear,
More, fading fast from sight that cabin drear;
The place, the hour became less clearly known;
He only felt that his great work was done,
That one brave heart was kneeling at his side,
So, murmuring ‘Kiss me, Hardy’ Nelson, smiling, died.
The whole of this poem was later sent for criticism to Leigh Hunt and Miss Martineau, not by Branwell himself but by his young engineer friend Grundy. ‘All,’ declared Grundy in his reminiscences, ‘spoke in high terms of it.’
More interesting than the laboured verse are the cryptic notes and sketches; the title of a book, Manhood, the Cause of its Preservation and Decline; the memorandum for Sunday, October 24th, 1841—‘Next Monday visit The Creation at Assembly Rooms, Halifax’ (this would be a performance of Haydn’s Creation given at the Rooms next to the Talbot Inn); the tortured profile of a long-haired man flanked by a jotting concerning three wagons for Sowerby and topped by a ‘Holy Jesu’; and, most intriguing of all, the full-length sketch of a man seated cross-legged in a high-backed chair, his tall hat on his head, above him the letters:
IΩANNEΣ MγPΓATPOIΔEΣ
and below him:
ΓHΩPΓE PIXAPΔΣΩN
John Murgatroyd and George Richardson—the first a wealthy woollen manufacturer of Oats Roy, Luddenden, thirty-two years old and lately widowed, employer of the Liverpool Irish; the second the wharfinger of Sowerby Bridge, controller of the warehouses and wharfs. Why were they represented in a composite portrait, their dual identity thinly disguised by Greek lettering? Did they come together to the bar parlour of the Lord Nelson Inn, or the Anchor and Shuttle, symbolizing—to the young draughtsman sketching in the opposite corner—a single man of substance, great in power, to whom boaties bowed and weavers touched their forelocks?
The mystery, if mystery there was, stayed hidden in the notebook. ‘Poor, brilliant, gay, moody, moping, wildly excitable, miserable Brontë’, as Grundy the engineer described him, never disclosed it. The sketches were only doodles, perhaps, drawn to offset a phase of growing despair, with the autumn closing in, the trees dripping in Luddenden churchyard, so deep in the valley that the sun never found it once October had passed, the swollen mill-stream sounding in his ears, even in Turn Lea cottages up the hill where he lodged, his bedroom window looking out over the hills to those Ewood estates once owned by poor Johnny Grimshaw.
‘Once tha’ carriest an angel, and now tha’ carriest a devil!’ What demon, Branwell must have wondered, drove Johnny, so soon to die, on horseback through those woods? Now they were all dead, Grimshaws, Lockwoods, Sutcliffes, most of them buried down in Luddenden below. Increasing apathy came upon him, not only here at his lodging, but even down at the Nelson, or trudging to his station work at Luddenden Foot; for while his prospects had diminished through the months, so that he foresaw the impossibility of ever rising above the miserable status of station-master on a branch line, his weekly wage spent before it was earned, letters came from home full of high hopes and plans. There was talk of the girls running a school backed financially by his aunt, and then, when this project dimmed, a new idea of travel, Charlotte and Emily to follow the Taylor sisters to Brussels, Anne perhaps to join them later, aunt and father both in warm approval. But never a hint that he might have done the same, that he too could have travelled, escorting the girls as one of the Taylor brothers had escorted Mary and Martha, no word or suggestion that his presence would be missed. He had been given his chance in Bradford. He had failed. Now he must make do with his branch-line in a valley. It was his own choice, his own decision. The turn of his sisters had come.
The bitterness of realizing that he had failed through his own fault, through want of spirit, through lack of concentration, must somehow be blotted out, and for this whisky was the only panacea, because it temporarily turned despair into muffled ease, and drear acquaintances into jovial friends. Let the girls go to Brussels if they wanted—they would see precious little of life shut up in a pension. Whereas on the barges, or with the Irish down by the canal, or any come-by-chance companion who rolled tipsily off the Halifax coach and called for laughter, he could find the essence of all living and all pain, the zenith of twisted pleasure.
Both Branwell and Emily wrote poems on December 19th, 1841. One was at Luddenden, the other at Haworth. Neither poem is particularly good. Emily’s forms part of her Gondal saga, and represents a sister speaking to a brother, both mourning their dead mother; yet the theme suggests a thought winging its way to Luddenden. Branwell’s is more personal, himself at the crossroads. Emily’s was headed ‘A.S. to G.S. December 19th, 1841.’
I do not weep, I would not weep;
Our Mother needs no tears;
Dry thine eyes too, ’tis vain to keep
This causeless grief for years.
What though her brow be changed and cold,
Her sweet eyes closed for ever?
What though the stone—the darksome mould
Our mortal bodies sever?
What though her hand smooth ne’er again
Those silken locks of thine –
Nor through long hours of future pain
Her kind face o’er thee shine?
Remember still she is not dead,
She sees us, Gerald, now,
Laid where her angel spirit fled
’Mid heath and frozen snow.
And from that world of heavenly light
Will she not always blend,
To guide us in our lifetime’s night
And guard us to the end?
Thou knowest she will, and well may’st mourn
That we are left below,
But not that she can ne’er return
To share our earthly woe.
Branwell’s poem was headed ‘Dec. 19, 1841, at Luddenden Church. P.B.B.’
O God! while I in pleasure’s wiles
Count hours and years as one,
And deem that, wrapt in pleasure’s smiles,
My joys can ne’er be done.
Give me the stern sustaining power
To look into the past,
And see the darkly shadowed hour
Which I must meet at last:
The hour when I must stretch this hand
To give a last adieu
To those sad friends that round me stand,
Whom I no more must view.
For false though bright the hours that lead
My present passage on,
And when I join the silent dead
Their light will all be gone.
Then I must cease to seek the light
Which fires the evening heaven,
Since to direct through death’s dark night
Some other must be given.
What is interesting about both poems is the similarity of style, the choice of words and metres. Even the themes are interwoven—the one could be the reflection of the other. Both show the influence of hymn-book jingle, absorbed in babyhood, now part of the blood-stream, though Emily’s later poems were free of it.
Now the sister, for the first time since Roe Head, was to meet in Brussels competition in the classroom, and, better still, submit to the discipline of the French language taught by an expert. This, and the nine months’ break from home, must have played an incalculable part in bringing latent genius to the surface; without such a stimulus it might have stayed fitful and immature.
The brother had no such opportunity. No fierce Belgian professor would run a blue pencil through his essays, or force him to read Montaigne or Racine. He had never measured his intellect against any competitor; his criterion of excellence was William Dearden. If Branwell could have had nine months’ intensive concentration upon French, German or any other language under a master of perception and personality, as Charlotte and Emily experienced with Monsieur Héger in the rue d’Isabelle, the talent he possessed might have flowered instead of withered, and the brilliance that still waited, poised, to expand and glitter would not have shrunk back into a dulled exhaustion, a pitiful reminder of what might have been.
In February 1842 Charlotte and Emily left for Brussels. Anne was away as governess near York. Brothers and sisters had never been more divided and apart. It was at the end of March that Branwell was dismissed from his post as station-master at Luddenden Foot because of negligence.