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The garden, which was Emily's care, where she tended stunted shrubs and borders of unresponsive flowers and where Charlotte planted the currant-bushes, is beautiful with foliage and flowers, and its boundary wall is overtopped by a screen of trees which shuts out the depressing prospect of the graves from the vicarage windows and makes the place seem less "a churchyard home" than when the Brontes inhabited it.
The origin of the Brontës or Pruntys has, as well as their family history generally, been discussed with the curiously disproportionate minuteness characteristic of our time; but hardly anything need be said of the results of the investigation, except that they were undoubtedly Irish. Charlotte's mother died soon after the Rev.
And the more modern a classic is, the more it resembles the stuff of the year and the less it resembles the classics of the centuries, the more easy and enticing do you find that classic. Hence you are glad that George Eliot, the Brontës, Thackeray, are considered as classics, because you really *do* enjoy them.
Even if the Brontës had been sufficiently in advance of their times to "light out" and seek adventure and development in the great world, their low state of health would have kept them at home.
Now what attraction could there be in such a place as Haworth for a stranger from London unless it were the attraction of the Brontes? So I reasoned; and reasoned, as it appeared, most erroneously. "Oh, no," he said, in reply to my question, "I didn't go to Haworth because of the Brontes.
Moreover, the little Brontes had been brought up motherless; and from knowing nothing of the gaiety and the sportiveness of childhood from never having experienced caresses or fond attentions themselves they were ignorant of the very nature of infancy, or how to call out its engaging qualities.
She was our companion all the way down, always re-appearing after every gale we weathered, though often far behind. I remember, just as we were fairly under way, hearing a man sing out, "There's the old 'Brontes' coming out of the straits." My associations with the name were gloomy in the extreme.
At this house, the T.'s and the Brontes could look forward to meeting each other pretty frequently. There was another English family where Charlotte soon became a welcome guest, and where, I suspect, she felt herself more at her ease than either at Mrs. Jenkins', or the friends whom I have first mentioned.
The substance, however, was exactly what I have stated." The strange and quaint simplicity of the mode taken by the father to ascertain the hidden characters of his children, and the tone and character of these questions and answers, show the curious education which was made by the circumstances surrounding the Brontes. They knew no other children.
That wretched story is always cropping up again. The lady whom Mrs. Gaskell, with a murderous selection of adjectives, called "that mature and wicked woman", has been cleared as far as evidence and common sense could clear her. But the slander is perpetually revived. It has always proved too much for the Brontë biographers. Madame Duclaux published it again twenty years after, in spite of the evidence and in spite of Mrs. Gaskell's retractation. You would have thought that Branwell might have been allowed to rest in the grave he dug for himself so well. But no, they will not let him rest. Branwell drank, and he ate opium; and, as if drink and opium and erotic madness were not enough, they must credit him with an open breach of the seventh commandment as well. M. Dimnet, the most able of recent critics of the Brontës, thinks and maintains against all evidence that there was more in it than Branwell's madness. He will not give up the sordid tragedy
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