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It was about this time that I had an amusing experience of my own in connection with Haworth and the Brontes. I was staying with my wife and children at a country inn at Burnsall, a delightful spot on the Upper Wharfe above Bolton Abbey.
The servants of the household appear to have been much impressed with the little Brontës' extraordinary cleverness. Yet she and the servants always lived on good terms with each other. . . ." I return to the father's letter.
But I suspect that they had no "children's books," and that their eager minds "browzed undisturbed among the wholesome pasturage of English literature," as Charles Lamb expresses it. The servants of the household appear to have been much impressed with the little Brontes' extraordinary cleverness. Yet she and the servants always lived on good terms with each other."
It is interesting to know whether Dickens had ever seen a shipwreck or been inside a workhouse. For in these authors much of the conviction is conveyed, not always by adherence to facts, but always by grasp of them. But the whole aim and purport and meaning of the work of the Brontës is that the most futile thing in the whole universe is fact.
May dropped the blind with a wearied gesture, and turned within the room, examining its contents as if she had not seen them before: the wardrobe, the chest of drawers, which was also a dressing-table, the washstand, the dwarf book-case with its store of Edna Lyalls, Elizabeth Gaskells, Thackerays, Charlotte Yonges, Charlotte Brontës, a Thomas Hardy or so, and some old school-books.
I intend to force myself to take another situation when I can get one, though I hate and abhor the very thoughts of governess-ship. But I must do it; and, therefore, I heartily wish I could hear of a family where they need such a commodity as a governess." The year 1840 found all the Brontes living at home, except Anne.
"Whiles some Americans come to see the church, but nobody else," was the statement made to me when I asked the sexton if there were many visitors to the home of the Brontes. My visit furnished me with a theme for a descriptive article which was printed in Chambers's Journal in 1867, and, having written it, I believed that my connection with the Brontes was at an end.
The churchyard is, to a large extent, closely paved with tombstones dating back to the seventeenth century, laid flat, and on to this dismal piece of ground the chief windows of the Brontës' house looked, as they continue to do to-day. It is exceedingly strange that such an unfortunate arrangement of the buildings on this breezy hill-top should have given a gloomy outlook to the parsonage.
Bret Harte could not have written it unless he had really understood the triumph of the Brontës, the triumph of asserting that great mysteries lie under the surface of the most sullen life, and that the most real part of a man is in his dreams. This kind of parody is for ever removed from the purview of ordinary American humour.
So she marched him in, and there indeed was a crowd in the little ugly church, congregated especially at the east end, where the Brontes' pew still stood awaiting demolition at the hands of a reforming vicar.
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