Patrick Branwell Brontë and His ‘Horace.’
[In the following essay, privately printed in 1924, Drinkwater considers Brontë's poetic merits in light of the constant criticism that his was a talent unrealized and misused. Drinkwater finds Brontë's translations of the first book of Horace's Odes his finest poetic accomplishment.]
I
Patrick Branwell Brontë died in 1848, at the age of thirty-one. Little celebrated for any achievement of his own, he is a not unfamiliar figure to students of the ever-increasing volume of Brontë literature. Through the life-story of his more famous sisters, already sufficiently tragic in itself, his failure of character sounds, perhaps, the most unhappy note of all. The scourge of disease that destroyed the family, and the incessant problem of ways and means, could be faced with a greater fortitude than the constant betrayal of the hopes that were centered in a brother at once highly gifted, beloved, and incurably weak in fibre. Most of the biographers and critics have been agreed upon the matter, and the evidence is plain enough. Branwell made a mess of his life, and he was a cause of great suffering to three brave and devoted women. When drink and opium made an end—or hastened it, since by the latter he died of consumption like the others—natural affection can but have been conscious of a deep anxiety gone. But, while bad remains bad, there are aspects of the badness in this case that have, perhaps, been overlooked by Branwell's detractors.
Formal acknowledgment has generally been made of his gifts; they have even been allowed to have been brilliant. Mrs. Gaskell tells us how among the children, all pretty much of an age, busily writing their poems and romances, it was the brother who by common consent was to bring fame to the family; she adds, on her own account: “He was very clever, no doubt; perhaps to begin with, the greatest genius in this rare family.” We are told that his wit and talent were sought for the entertainment of strangers by the landlord of the “Black Bull” at Haworth, in return for a share in the bottle. Other writers, speaking in censure, have nevertheless allowed that the disaster of Branwell's life was the more miserable because of the promise betrayed. What this promise actually was we are not so clearly told. Mrs. Gaskell quotes only one fragment of his juvenile verse. It is not notable, but the poor opinion that the biographer expresses of it would be more convincing if she had not already given an equally indifferent specimen of Charlotte's writing as showing “remarkable poetical talent.” When the sisters published their book of poems in 1846, Branwell's work was not included, though it almost certainly must have been known to them, and was, in flashes, better than anything that the book contained with the exception of Emily's best poems.1 Francis A. Leyland, in The Brontë Family2 gave several examples of his work, which did not reappear in book form until Mr. A. C. Benson included a very clumsily edited selection in his Brontë Poems of 1915. Mr. Benson's Introduction pays a qualified tribute to Branwell's “instinct for poetry,” and a yet more qualified one to his expression. This was, perhaps, all that could be asked; it was, in any case, nearer justice than the merely uncritical petulance of Mary F. Robinson and some other writers. The poems recovered, carelessly enough, by Mr. Benson, had no more than traces of genius. But they had that. “Noah's Warning over Methuselah's Grave” and some twenty lines scattered among the other poems, were not enough to call up more than the ghost of a reputation for Branwell. But they are very good in themselves, and they have this interest: they are tokens of the something in him that gave rise to the tradition of his rare gifts that survives from the family records.
The cherished hope for Branwell, however, was not as a poet but as a painter. When he was eighteen he was to be sent to the Royal Academy School, but the scheme came to nothing. Yet here, again, we hear of great promise, but when an occasional reference to performance is made, it is disparaging. And again, the evidence, slight though it is, is against disparagement. I have in my possession one of the touching little Haworth manuscripts, a play called Caractacus, written by Branwell in 1830, when he was thirteen. It has the charming colophon: “Begun June 26, Ended June 28. a.d. 1830. Therefore I have Finished It in 2 days Sunday which happened between being left out P. B. Brontë.” The play has unusual constructive power for a child, otherwise it is what we should look for in expression. But it is embellished with two or three marginal sketches that show a decided talent for drawing, and, moreover, the pages themselves are set out with a quite attractive sense of design. But of much greater importance is the portrait that Branwell painted of his three sisters, when he was older but still well under twenty. Mr. Benson uses it as a frontispiece to his edition, as an interesting record, but in speaking only of its roughness and “unskilled handling” he follows Mrs. Gaskell, who thinks that the likenesses are admirable, but that it was “not much better than sign-painting (there are signs and signs) as to manipulation,” and again refers to the “good likenesses, however badly executed.” Loving Charlotte as she did, it is not surprising that Mrs. Gaskell did not like what she knew of Branwell—she never met him—but her affections at least did not sharpen what was, perhaps, no great natural acumen as an art critic. The painting is in the National Portrait Gallery, and a moment's inspection of it shows it to be, as the production of an almost untutored boy,3 remarkable in more than promise. It has charming qualities of colour, design and characterization, immature but unmistakable. When, however, we pass from this to Branwell's later portrait of Emily, painted some ten years afterwards, immaturity has gone, and we are in the presence of startling achievement. Mr. Milner, the Director of the National Portrait Gallery, tells me that he and his predecessor, Sir Charles Holmes, have always looked upon the picture, since it was bought in 1914, as one of the most beautiful things in the collection. It has the simple tenderness of a Primitive in tone and colour, and it is admirably designed and drawn. As a revelation of Emily's character, moreover, it is astonishing. The stormy power of Wuthering Heights blends with the premonitions of approaching death. The portrait gives Branwell a modest place among the little masters. And yet even in this connection his assailants have refused to admit plain evidence. They merely betray an ignorance of what painting is, but it is amusing to speculate as to what they would have said if this could have been shown to be Charlotte's work instead of Branwell's.4
This, then, is the figure hitherto presented of the “contemptible caitiff” pilloried by Swinburne, whose moral indignations were sometimes the least impressive things about a great poet and a great gentleman. We find a sensitive and affectionate child, growing with charm into boyhood, talented by report rather than by admitted evidence, drifting into a dissolute young manhood, a drunkard, a sponge, “culpably negligent” in his employment, acquiring “all the cunning of the opium eater,” and wasting himself into a miserable and early death. That is the story as we have it, and, so far as it goes, it is clear. On the whole, Charlotte's letters must be allowed to outweigh even Leyland's testimony. But is there, perhaps, another side of the story that has not been very carefully considered? We have been told, and rightly, that Branwell was a disaster to his family. He cannot be absolved from that lamentable indecision of soul that makes love a bitterness. But even the worst case is never quite so simple as it seems. Is there not something to be said for considering also the disaster that he was to himself, and how it came about?
Of Branwell's misused talent more is to be said later. For the moment I wish to think a little more closely of the failure of character, but in order to do this I must take it for granted in advance that he had a real strain of the poet in him, that the family tradition was well founded, as I hope to show clearly it was. We remember, then, that he was the one boy in a bleak north country vicarage, with no mother, and a father who seems to have been fond but uncertain of temper and not very effective;5 the brother of three sisters whose rare moral sureness of touch was uncertain just in the one matter of looking upon any incipient weakness in him as a sign of budding manliness. It is no excuse for him to say that he was spoilt as a child, but it is to begin to understand something about him. Charlotte and Anne were not poets, Emily and Branwell were. These two had the wildness, the sense of loneliness, the ache for some indefinable thing called freedom, that mark the poet from infancy. The Haworth parsonage was bad lodging for such spirits. Emily found her escape from it on the moors, Branwell his in the “Black Bull.” His was a bad choice as it happened. He had not the resistance that thrives in taverns, and he was at once on easy terms with temptation. But it is not difficult to see why he was so early ripe for temptation when it came his way.
He spent hours over a map of London until he knew every street and byway in the city, and was able to tell a stranger at the inn of short cuts from Charing Cross, say, to Holborn. “My aim, sir,” he wrote, when he was nineteen, to Wordsworth, “is to push out into the open world.” He had been assured by all the opinion he knew, at home and in the village, that he was to make a great name. Nobody seems to have gone beyond this to stiffen resolution in himself to make it, and consumption was at work upon his vitality. He loved literature, and he was no poor scholar, as will be shown. It was this boy, sensitive, ambitious, flattered, diseased in a household of disease, who suddenly had placed before him the romantic adventure of going to London to study art. Mrs. Gaskell, wantonly as it seems to me, suggests that part of the attraction was that “he would have a license of action only to be found in crowded cities.” Here, at least, he might have had the benefit of the doubt. A temperament like Branwell's in youth is, on the whole, more likely to save itself in the release and preoccupations of London than in the restrictions of Haworth. London was the El Dorado of his imagination, not necessarily a vicious one, and he cared very much about a career in one or another of the arts. The enchanting project fell through. He did not go to the Royal Academy, and, save for a short and hopeless effort to make a living in Bradford in competition with the established artists, he did not become a painter by profession. He became, instead, in turn an usher, a private tutor, and a clerk on the Leeds and Manchester Railway.
It might have been expected to pacify Branwell's critics to reflect, from all the available evidence, that if for the short ten years of his manhood he was a great trial to his sisters, he was desperately unhappy himself. It was his own fault, no doubt, but the adage serves. His ambitions were defeated; his hunger for intellectual society was satisfied only by a stray acquaintance on his few visits to Manchester or Liverpool; he chafed in his routine employments as sorely as has many a young man of more effective spirit and determination. He was often at home without the society of his sisters, who were now spending much of their time away as schoolteachers, and even when he had not to be alone in what must have been a cheerless home, we may be allowed to wonder whether the companionship of Charlotte, at least, for all her affection, was a very happy one for him. She bore much, and heroically, but there is a grim little story in Leyland of an occasion when Branwell, by a small errand of mercy, made an attempted return to grace. He had done his best, but had failed in his mission, and was miserable about it. He told Charlotte. “She looked at me with a look I shall never forget. … It was not like her at all. … It was a dubious look. It ran over me, questioning, and examining, as if I had been a wild beast. … It said, ‘I wonder if that's true?’ But, as she left the room, she seemed to accuse herself of having wronged me, (and) smiled kindly upon me. … When she was gone I came over here to the ‘Black Bull,’ and made a note of it in sheer disgust and desperation. Why could they not give me some credit when I was trying to be good?” It is not a pleasing picture that Branwell gives of himself, but there is a touch of tragic colour in the story that does not come wholly from his own frailties.
He further became involved in a wretched love affair, that had neither health nor hope in it, and so the unhappy tale went on, to-day perhaps with a sheriff's officer at the door on a visit to B. inviting him either to pay his debts or to take a trip to York, to-morrow finding consolation in reading of the latest pugilistic heroes in Bell's Life at the “Black Bull.” And all the time the aspirations of the young poet were smouldering, the care for things of good report persisting. “He possessed then a familiar and extensive acquaintance with the Greek and Latin authors. He knew well the history and condition of Europe, and of this country, in past and present times,” says Leyland. It was not common stuff that was drifting to ruin. And he knew with a sad bitterness what was happening. “My heartfelt thanks to you,” he writes at the conclusion of one of his letters, “for your consideration for one who has none for himself.” At the end, according to the account given by Mrs. Gaskell, which, although it is disputed by Leyland, I hope is true, a moment of his beloved Emily's stubborn courage came to him out of some recess of his nature. “I have heard, from one who attended Branwell in his last illness, that he resolved on standing up to die. He had repeatedly said that as long as there was life there was strength of will to do what it chose; and when the last agony began, he insisted on assuming the position just mentioned.” Branwell was a tragedy to his sisters, but in his heart there may have been an even deeper tragedy than theirs.
II.
The extant poems of Branwell Brontë, with three exceptions,6 are to be found in Leyland, and in various manuscripts. Of the last the most considerable is that printed for the first time in 1924. It consists of a complete translation, written out entirely in Branwell's own hand, of the first book of Horace's Odes, omitting the last, of which he says: “This Ode I have no heart to attempt, after having heard Mr. H. Coleridge's translation, on May Day, at Ambleside.”7 The manuscript is signed at the end, “P. B. Brontë,” and dated “Haworth, Nr. Bradford, Yorks, June 27, 1840.” On New Year's Day of that year, he had gone to Broughton-in-Furness, on the edge of the Lake District, as tutor in the family of a Mr. Postlethwaite, and he returned to Haworth in June, so that most of the translations were presumably made while he held that appointment. He was twenty-three years of age at the time. Just as the portrait of Emily is the most convincing proof of his gifts as a painter, so these translations seem to me to be his best achievement, so far as we can judge, as a poet. They are unequal, and they have many of the bad tricks of writing that come out of some deeply rooted defect of character. But they also have a great many passages of clear lyrical beauty, and they have something of the style that comes from a spiritual understanding, as apart from merely formal knowledge, of great models.
Horace has been a favourite mark for English translators, including many of our more considerable poets. Jonson, Cowley, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Prior, Congreve, Calverley—these and others have done occasionally what less famous writers have done systematically, and it cannot be said that on the whole they have done it any better. Cowley may bring off a line like
And trusts the faithless April of thy May,
or Dryden—
The half unwilling willing kiss,
but they are no surer of making a good poem in translation than the Creeches and the Sewells. And that is the only test. If you know Latin, you don't want an English translation of Horace unless into the bargain you get a good English poem; if you don't know Latin (as I don't), still you want the translation only on the same terms. Horace has been responsible for some good English poems, and a great many dull ones. Even Ben Jonson, in his translation The Art of Poetry (1640), in spite of a few splendid phrases, such as “The deeds of Kings, great Captains, and sad wars,” strangely demonstrates for the most part what poetry is not, and, as a later translator, Henry Ames, protests in 1727, “has trod so close upon the Heels of Horace, that he has not only crampt, but made him halt in (almost) every line.” The Earl of Roscommon's translation (1680) in blank verse gives the sense but little else. And so also it is generally with the Odes. Among the more or less complete translations are those of Sir Thomas Hawkins (1625, with later enlarged editions), Thomas Creech (1684), and miscellanies such as Alexander Brome's (1666), and Jacob Tomson's (1715), containing translation by various hands. In later days we have W. Sewell (1850), John Conington (1863-1869), and Sir Theodore Martin (1860). Scattered about these volumes are several beautiful versions of different poems, reasonably faithful to the original,8 and many more striking passages or stanzas. Now we get Hawkins with
no lot shall gaine
Thee a King's Title in a Taverne-raigne;
and then Richard Fanshawe with
What Stripling now thee discomposes
In Woodbine Rooms, on Beds of Roses,
and again Creech, mildly, with
But now I do repent the wrong
And now compose a softer Song
To make Thee just amends.
Recant the errors of my Youth
And swear those scandals were not Truth;
So You and I be friends.
Conington is, perhaps, the most consistently attractive of them all, and he does make many of the Odes into charming English verse. He often strikes the note as surely as in
O lovelier than the lovely dame
That bore you, sentence as you please
Those scurril verses, be it flame
Your vengeance craves, or Hadrian seas;
and no less an authority than Mr. A. E. Housman tells me that he considers Conington's to be the best English translations that he knows of Horace, and as among the best verse translations in the language.
Branwell Brontë's translations of the First Book of Odes need, at their best, fear comparison with none. They are not so uniformly good as Conington's, and there are the ugly blemishes here and there of which I have spoken. “Than thee” (XXIV.) is a lapse of a less unpleasant kind than “gushing gore” (II.), “swells my liver” and “boisterous bite” (XIII.). Also, I think he occasionally mistranslates, as in XIX. and XX., in the one of which he seems to be confused as to the women and in the other as to the wines. Sometimes, too, he chooses a bad measure, as in XII. and XXXII., sometimes he is unexpectedly halting, as in XXXI., and again flat or dull or heavy as in XXVI., XXIX., XXXV., and XXXVII. Then there are other cases where he just manages good average verse, making it more interesting on the whole than most of his competitors; XXVIII. is an instance. There remain more than half the Odes, of which it may be said that they are excellent in themselves, and as good as any English versions that I know, including Conington's. In a few instances I should say that they are decidedly the best of all. It is not only in frequent passages that Branwell sings with the right lyric ease, as in
Yet—shuddering too at poverty
Again he seeks that very sea—
and
If but Euterpe yield to me
Her thrilling pipe of melody,
If Polyhymnia but inspire
My spirit with her Lesbian lyre.
Oh! Give thy friend a poet's name
And heaven shall hardly bound his fame;
and
O! brightest of his phalanx bright!
With shining shoulders veiled from sight,
Descend, Apollo Thou!
and many others (e.g., the opening lines of the last stanza of IV.), but in some whole poems, as in the lovely rendering of XXI., there is hardly a flaw from beginning to end. At his best he has melody and phrase, and he builds his stanzas well. Further, he was happier in verse with Horace's subject-matter than he generally was with the experience of his own confused and frustrated life. I do not wish to advance any extravagant claim for this little book, but I think it adds appreciably to the evidence that Branwell Brontë was the second poet in his family, and a very good second at that, and that it leaves no justification for anyone again to say that he “composed nothing which gives him the slightest claim to the most inconsiderable niche in the temple of literature.”
Notes
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The reason may well have been that the sisters, in their desire for pseudonymity, could not trust Branwell with the secret.
-
The Brontë Family, with special Reference to Patrick Branwell Brontë, by Francis A. Leyland. Two volumes. Hurst and Blackett, 1886.—Leyland's book is the most important plea that has been made for Branwell. Mr. Shorter, than whom the sisters have had no more devoted and generous student, but who shares the common inability to see any good in Branwell, dismisses the book as merely dull. I don't find it that. It is loosely put together, and it must be allowed that Leyland was no oracle upon literature. But I find it a very readable and informing book. It is also an extremely inconvenient one for the prosecution.
-
About this time Charlotte and Branwell were receiving lessons from William Robinson, an artist, of Leeds.
-
An interesting point arises on looking at these portraits, as Mr. Milner suggests. Following Mrs. Gaskell's description of the group, it has been accepted always that Charlotte is on the right of the picture as we look at it, Emily in the centre, and Anne on the left. But on comparing it with the later single portrait of Emily, the authenticity of which was vouched for by Mr. Nicholls, Charlotte's husband, there seems to be little doubt that Emily is the figure on the left, with Anne in the centre. Mrs. Gaskell had never seen either Emily or Anne.
-
The Rev. Patrick Brontë, too, made verses, sometimes wonderfully:
O! when shall we see our dear Jesus,
His presence from poverty frees us. …His Cottage Poems (1811) breathe an atmosphere of devastating piousness, but there lingers in them something of the eighteenth-century deportment, and in one or two, for example the Winter Night Meditations (published by Longman, separately and anonymously in 1810 as Winter Evening Thoughts), there is a real touch of Crabbe's power.
The prostitute with faithless smiles,
.....
Remorseless plays her tricks and wiles.
Her gesture bold, and ogling eye,
Obtrusive speech, and pert reply,
And brazen front, and stubborn tone,
Shew all her native virtue's flown.And, now, she practises the art,
.....
Which snared her unsuspecting heart;Averse to good, and prone to ill,
And dexterous in seducing skill;
To look, as if her eyes would melt;
T' affect a love, she never felt. …The preface, however, must be a unique monument of self-satisfaction, and Mr. Brontë was doubtless rather a discouraging person to live with.
-
Printed in Mrs. Oliphant's William Blackwood and his Sons, (1897).
-
Hartley Coleridge's translation of Book I., Ode xxxviii., is as follows:
Nay, nay, my boy—'tis not for me,
This studious pomp of eastern luxury:
Give me no various garlands—fine
With linden twine,
Nor seek, where latest lingering blows
The solitary rose.
Earnest I beg—add not, with toilsome pain,
One far-sought blossom to the myrtle plain,
For sure, the fragrant myrtle bough
Looks seemliest on thy brow;
Nor me mis-seems, while, underneath the vine,
Close interweaved, I quaff the rosy wine. -
There were the fashionable “Imitations” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Prior's Ode to Colonel George Villiers, which were freely topical adaptations.
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