Non-fiction ~ biography
Published 1932
Approx. 96,000 words
(First read 30/06/2013)
THE CRITICS
I do not think Charlotte was in the least like the
domineering little shrew he pictures her, anymore perhaps than she
was like the rather too saintly heroine of Mrs. Gaskell’s
biography. I do not put any faith in Benson’s theory that Branwell
wrote parts of Wuthering Heights and inspired the whole. There
is no foundation in the world for it beyond the assertion of two of
Branwell’s cronies that he read the first few chapters of it to
them and told them it was his own. They may have been telling the
truth, but I would not put the least confidence in any statement of
Branwell’s. He was entirely capable of reading someone else’s
manuscript and trying to pass it off as his own. No doubt he was more
in Emily’s confidence than Charlotte ever knew and had got
possession of her manuscript in some way. Benson blames Charlotte for
her unsympathetic attitude to Branwell. I imagine that an angel would
have found it rather difficult to be sympathetic. Benson cannot
understand a proud sensitive woman’s heart. I love Charlotte Brontë
so much that I am angry when anyone tries to belittle her.
In the introduction
to his admirably judicious presentation of the Brontë family, Mr.
Benson records a remark once made to him by Sir Edmund Gosse on the
subject of writing biography; "Nobody but a novelist," said
that scholarly bookman, "should be allowed to write a biography,
but he must remember that he is not writing a novel." We now
have two biographies of Charlotte Brontë, each of distinguished
achievement and both written by novelists—one, the famous
authorized biography by Mrs. Gaskell published a few years after
Charlotte's death, and the other this present one by Mr. Benson, now
published more than three quarters of a century after her death. Both
these works bear witness to the wisdom of Gosse's dictum — Mrs.
Gaskell's to the vice in its warning and Mr. Benson's to the virtue
in it. For after reading Mr. Benson's book we are compelled to agree
with him that Mrs. Gaskell was terribly forgetful that she was not
writing a novel. "In her admirable zeal to make her friend known
and valued," says Mr. Benson, "she (Mrs. Gaskell) sometimes
fobs us off with fiction, forgetting that, though a novelist's
business is to create characters, it is the business of a biographer
to render them, and that the tact of omission, when too unscrupulous,
becomes a fabrication." That this kind of tact was employed by
Mrs. Gaskell in her justly famous work will be abundantly evident to
any reader of Mr. Benson's book, which is at once a rendering of
characters and a convincing argument for the life values precipitated
by his rendition.
Since
the publication of the first edition of Mrs. Gaskell's Life
a heavy gray cloud of legends has hung over the remarkable
inmates who "dreed their wierds" in the isolated Haworth
rectory,
arousing
a wide and eager curiosity, and resulting in what Mr. Benson calls
the 'Brontë
Saga.'
This saga still finds its devoted students and expositors in the many
admirers of Jane Eyre
and Wuthering Heights,
in the faithful members of the Brontë
Society, and in the numerous pilgrims who make the Haworth Rectory
their Mecca.
In writing this
book, Mr. Benson has dissolved this cloud of legends and translated
the saga into the common prose of everyday life. Instead of a
mythology he has given us a biology in the literary sense of that
word—not of ordinary human beings, of course, but still of human
beings with human frailties and human strengths. And he has done this
with so engaging an urbanity of style, often tinged with quiet humor,
that we look at the pictures he presents as a fresh revelation, and a
natural one. Of this family of three young women and one young man,
each of whom was singularly gifted, and all of whom were more or less
tragically destined, mentally or physically, Emily alone still remains
'unguessed
at.'
Charlotte, the eldest, easily "abides our question," and
Mr. Benson very properly makes her the main subject of his work. With
the help of the many letters piously collected and preserved by Mr.
Clement K. Shorter, and the voluminous correspondence with
Charlotte's friend Ellen Nussey, and also with the strange light
thrown on Charlotte's sojourn in Brussels as revealed in the four
letters she wrote to M. Heger so remarkably saved from destruction,
and now public property, Mr. Benson rebuilds the Brontë
home and rehabilitates it. He does this not so much by the magic of a
sympathy as by the common sense of a cultured, judicious mind,
dealing dispassionately with the evidence largely furnished by
Charlotte Brontë
herself. The story as he now presents it is quite plain and
unvarnished, yet arrestingly dramatic, and it captures out
acquiescent interest by its sheer reasonableness and its fidelity to
the human qualities of both mind and heart, in the actors of this
unique drama.
We
now see that it was Charlotte who was the guiding and [illegible]
spirit of the home.
The mother died when the
children were young, and the
father was too self-centered a man to understand even his own
children; certainly he was not the kind of man to train and direct
them, even had they been willing to accept his ministrations. The
ruler of the household was Charlotte, a shy, homely, and tiny little
woman, but with an indomitable will and a
clear vision of what she wanted, and with the tact and perseverance
of a born diplomatist to get what she wanted when she wanted it. As
self-centered as her father, she had a natural gift for enlisting the
services of others to the satisfying of her ego, even in the belief
that such satisfaction was in the nature of things proper for her.
She could hate passionately what or whom in any way prevented that
satisfaction, and she could love just as passionately what or who
contributed to it.
The humor with
which Mr, Benson reveals these qualities in her is at times amusingly
engaging. It is especially so where he tells us of Charlotte's
decision to marry Mr. Nicholls, her father's curate, whom her father
detested and for whom she herself had no great liking. She had
rejected his suit more than once, but when she did finally decide to
accept him, she skilfully and quietly overcame all the difficulties
that were in the way of her marriage, and then she could write to
Ellen Nussey and tell her that Providence had offered her this
destiny. "Providence," says Mr. Benson, "would not
have much chance without her firm cooperation."
In several parts of
this book Mr. Benson's narrative rises to intensely moving
situations. The scene between Emily and Charlotte when Emily finds
her sister reading the poetry she had been writing in secret; the
story of the happenings prior to Branwell Brontë's death and
culminating in Emily's death; the tale of the discovery of
Charlotte's abject love letters to M. Heger and the mental anguish
she suffered because of his continued silence; the account of Emily's
relations with her brother Branwell and of her loyalty to him; all
these are dramatically set forth, compelling our heartfelt sympathy
and even pity.
Between Charlotte
and Emily, the two members of this family who have survived for
immortality, Mr. Benson sees a vital difference, an "abysmal,
impassable gulf that separated the great talent of the one from the
genius of the other."
“Charlotte in her novels used not once, but over and over again,
both in motive and episode, the actual experiences of her life—its
detested occupations, the relationship between employer and employed
as she encountered them in her schoolings, bitterly caricaturing
those who had offended her. Emily, on the other hand, save in a few
commemorative poems, never drew from external experience—her
inspiration, like that of the mystic, came wholly from within, and
her work glowed and was fed by the fire and wine of the soul that
dwelt apart.”
Mr. Benson has
written a winning book and has told a true story in so far as the
truth of the Brontë children can be extracted out of the documentary
evidence. But the truth of Emily Brontë is still only to be guessed
at, and even then by our intuition alone. Her elemental spirit was a
natural phenomenon the mystery of which must forever foil our human
searching.
~Temple Scott in The Saturday Review, 06/08/1932
There is something special about the
Brontës. They produce passionate partisans. They have produced,
also, according to Mr. Benson, numerous biographers from Mrs. Gaskell
down who
have recklessly juggled with facts and
theories in order to present their particular favorite in the best
possible light. In this excellent study, therefore —ostensibly of
Charlotte, but actually and inevitably of her whole strange,
ill-fated family — Mr. Benson has striven to be scrupulously fair
and to adhere to the actual record. This, to a large extent, he has
done. Ironically enough, however, he is quite unable to disguise the
fact that his heart and sympathies lie with Emily, and next with
Branwell. He is just to Charlotte; he admires her ability, her
practical intelligence, her grit and determination. Nevertheless it
is evident that the strain of intolerance and priggishness in her repels him, that he could never forgive
her for her harsh attitude towards Branwell, nor for her lack of any
real understanding of Emily. This is a delightful biography, free
from sentimentality and pseudo-interpretations, sharply real in
its descriptions of life at Haworth Parsonage. Nevertheless it is not
actually as brilliant, nor as full of warmth, as the really confirmed
Brontë fan would like to see it. One feels, at times, that the
essential quality in those four eludes Mr. Benson as it has eluded so
many others.
~The Forum, 09/1932
Three-quarters
of a century has gone by since Mrs. Gaskell brought a hurricane about
her ears by the publication of her Life of Charlotte
Brontë. Since then we have had
innumerable biographies of the Brontës, but we are as far as ever
from getting an impartial one. Something in the air of Haworth
Parsonage seems to go to the heads of chroniclers, and they emerge
from their researches in states of violent partisanship.
Although
Mr. Benson has made Charlotte the titular heroine of his book he
inclines to the Emily-cum-Branwell cult. Poor Charlotte emerges as an
acidulous, spinsterish little figure-of-fun, driving her talented
sisters and brother with her own furious ambition. Often Mr. Benson
seems aware that he is not presenting a woman who could by any sweep
of the imagination have been a genius, and at such moments he halts
his interpretation to recall to us, flatly, that he is writing of the
author of Jane Eyre
and Villette. But the
moment passes; we have again the resentful, driving, managing
creature before us, and the task of re-creating her as the mystery
she was is all to be done over again.
This
is not to say that Charlotte Brontë
is not an excellent book. It is one that should be on the shelf of
every Brontë-lover. In retrieving Mrs. Gaskell's error of presenting
Charlotte as a saint without stain, Mr. Benson occasionally leans too
far in the other direction, and presents her as something just short
of an hysteric. But he has had the inspiration to tell about her
straightforwardly as a woman who was capable of falling deeply,
wildly, and indiscreetly in love (though indeed how the indisputable
evidence of her love for M. Heger can still be ignored is
inexplicable). In building up the character of a woman capable of
deep emotion, Mr. Benson quotes extensively from Charlotte's letters to her
school companion, Ellen Nussey. These quotations are wild enough, in
all conscience, and yet perhaps a protest is again in order: in the
middle of the last century a Gothic madness was abroad in the land,
and many a good soul poured out the frenzied self-accusation that was
customary, that was in fact downright modish, who hadn't a sin to
bless herself with.
Mr.
Benson has a theory, to me, I confess, more ingenious than
convincing, that Branwell Brontë had much to do with Wuthering
Heights. It is well stated,
worth considering, and recommended to all who like insoluble
problems.
~Frederic Shepard in The Bookman, 09/1932
AN ICONOCLAST: E F BENSON ON THE
BRONTES
The flood of works published in
recent years upon the Brontës, their lives and their works, and the
support afforded from all parts of the English-speaking world to the
Brontë Society, show how strong a hold, even to fascination, this
'Yorkshire tragedy' has upon the imagination and the affections of
readers. But popularity is apt to invite depreciation. Admiration
is often mistaken by those who do not share it as adoration, earnest
students are regarded as fanatics, and the subject of their study
becomes in the eyes of the unbeliever a cult or an idolatry, and a
challenge to the iconoclast. Moreover, biography-writing itself is
subject to fashions. Certain writers have shown how easy it is to
give novelty and piquancy to their narrative by adopting the tone of
the discoverer and censor of scandals.
These differing attitudes of mind
are illustrated by the two brothers Benson. The late Arthur C
Benson, the essayist and poet, was moved some years ago to the
writing of a vivid and appreciative 'personal sketch' of Charlotte
Brontë, which he contributed to a volume published by the Brontë
Society, besides other addresses and writings appreciative of her
'message'. The other brother, Mr E F Benson, author of the famous
Dodo and fifty other books, approaches the subject
differently. Reading the life and letters of Charlotte Brontë with
a disposition to get as near as may be to the truth without
sentimentality and, as he expressly assures us, without malice, he
finds Charlotte a golden idol with feet of clay. He is not
inappreciative of the passion and sincerity, though keenly alive to
the technical defects, of her literary work, but it is with austerely
unsentimental eyes that he views her character as revealed in her
letters and, to a degree unusual to novelists, in her fiction.
'Personally Hard'
Arthur Benson recognised in
Charlotte's writings “the qualities which her deeply seated
diffidence prevented her from displaying in daily life. Her humour,
her penetrating insight, her delicate fancy, her liveliness, her
passionate affections, the noble scorn of all that was cold or mean,
all these flashed into life on her pages.” Mr E F Benson regards
her as personally hard, bitter, morbid ~ except perhaps that she
became more human in the few months of her married life ~ engrossed
in the symptoms of her own ill-health; to the end revengeful,
incapable of recognising the genius of her sister, Emily, with whom
she was, he thinks, never on intimate terms; and implacable towards
her brother, Branwell. He finds much that it is 'impossible to
accept' as true in her letters and in her poignant little memoirs of
her sisters, and he accounts for the tenderness of tone as
'remorseful'. The friendship of Charlotte with Ellen Nussey,
prolonged from schooldays to the last letters from her deathbed, is
to him evidence of a 'sex-obsession'.
Mrs Gaskell's life of Charlotte
Brontë is regarded as a book in which the novelist as creator of
characters gets the better of the biographer as mere recorder, and
the authoress is lashed very severely for her exaggerations and
suppressions, especially for softening the 'hard lines and
characteristic traits' in her portrait of Charlotte. With such a
Charlotte and such a Mrs Gaskell ever before his mental vision, Mr
Benson reviews the story of the Brontës, colouring afresh in what he
believes without malice to be the true tints in which the various
episodes should be presented. He has no new information to offer.
The reviewer has detected only one 'fact' which is new and maybe true
and a minor addition to our knowledge, but even that more probably is
a blunder. Mostly the book reminds one of the reflections of the
distorting glasses popular at fairs.
Who Wrote Wuthering Heights?
His new readings of character are
not limited to Charlotte alone, but involve Emily. He represents
Wuthering Heights as the result of a 'collaboration' of Emily
with Branwell. His only evidence is that Mr Dearden, more than
twenty years after the event, published a statement that at a poetic
tournament at the Cross Roads Inn, at Haworth, in 1845, Branwell read
a 'fragment' of a story with the same characters introduced as those
of Wuthering Heights. Mr Edward Sloane, a friend of
Branwell's and of Mr Dearden, declared to the latter that Branwell
had read to him, “portion by portion, the novel as it was produced
at the time”; and there is a third witness who 'felt certain' that
it must have come from Branwell's pen.
This evidence does not leave much
work for Emily, nor much basis for her reputation as a novelist. Yet
Emily, as 'Ellis Bell', had the effrontery more than a year and maybe
eighteen months before her brother's death in October 1848 to
negotiate for the publication of the book with, on the title-page,
her own pseudonym ~ the same she had used on the poems published in
1846. It is true that Emily about this time called Branwell 'a
hopeless being', but can we imagine her counting so surely on his
death as to steal the share of literary fame which, according to the
evidence, was rightfully his? Was she, less than Charlotte, imbued
with that 'noble scorn of all that was cold and mean'? Mr Benson has
not faced this question fairly and squarely.
Mrs Gaskell's worst offence as
biographer was the omission of any indication of the passionate
nature of the 'love-letters' of Charlotte to her old professor in
Brussels, Monsieur Heger ~ whose name Mr Benson persistently
misspells. He will not tolerate any excuse that Mrs Gaskell wrote
while yet both Monsieur and Madame Heger were alive. He is not sure
“whether or no she [Charlotte] actually muttered 'Je me vengerai'
to that lady when she left Brussels for the last time (but) she had
kept these things in her heart,” and when she wrote 'immortally'
her Villette “she took her revenge.” It was not till
sixty years later that there were published the letters which Madame
Heger had “picked out of the [her husband's] waste-paper basket and
pieced together,” but with their publication Mr Benson thinks
Madame Heger was 'quits' with Charlotte.
Such is Mr E F Benson's
contribution to what he calls 'the Brontë Saga'.
~Herbert E. Wroot in The Yorkshire Post, 16/04/1932
