Chapter III: The Irish Raconteur or Story-Teller

The Hakkawati is the oriental story-teller, the man who beyond all others relieves the tedium and wearisomeness of oriental life. I have often watched the oriental Hakkawati, seated in the centre of a large crowd, weaving stories with subtile plots and startling surprises, using pathos and passion and pungent wit, and always interspersing his narratives with familiar incidents, and laying on local color, to give an appearance of _vraisemblance_, or reality, to the wildest fancies.

The Arabian Hakkawati generally tells his stories at night, when the weird and wonderful are most effective. He has always a fire so arranged as to light up his countenance with a ruddy glow, so that the movements and contortions of a mobile face may add support to the narrative. He sometimes proceeds slowly, stumbling and correcting himself, like D'Israeli, as if his one great desire was to stick to the literal truth.

Without any apparent effort to please, the Hakkawati keeps his finger on the pulse of his audience. Should they show signs of weariness, he makes them smile by some pleasantry, and as the Arab holds that "smiles and tears are in the same _khury_," or wallet, he brings something of great seriousness on the heels of the fun, and works himself into a white heat of passion over it, the veins rising like cords on his forehead, and his whole frame convulsed and throbbing, the rapt audience following, in full sympathy with every mood.

I have seen the Arabs shivering and pale with terror, as the Hakkawati narrated the fearful deeds of some imaginary _jinn_, and I have seen them feeling for their daggers, and ready to spring to their feet, to avenge some dastard act of imaginary cruelty; and a few seconds after I have seen them melted to tears at the recital of some imaginary tale of woe. I never wearied in listening to the Hakkawati, or in watching the artlessness of his consummate art; and I have always looked on him as the most interesting of all orientals, a positive benefactor to his illiterate countrymen.

Hugh Bronte was an Irish Hakkawati, the last of an extinct race. I knew several men who had heard him when he was at his best. He would sit long winter nights in the logie-hole of his corn-kiln, in the Emdale cottage, telling stories to an audience of rapt listeners who thronged around him. Mrs. Bronte plied her knitting in the outer darkness of the kitchen, for there was no light except the glow from the furnace of the kiln, which lighted up old Hugh's face as he _beeked_ the kiln, and told his yarns.

The Reverend William McAllister, from whom I got most details as to Bronte's story-telling, had heard his father say that he spent a night in Bronte's kiln either in the winter of 1779 or 1780. Bronte's fame was then new. The place was crowded to suffocation. At that time he reserved a place near the fire for Mrs. Bronte, and Patrick, then a baby, was lying on the heap of seeds from which the fire was fed, with his eyes fixed on his father, and listening, like the rest, in breathless silence.

Hugh Bronte seems to have had the rare faculty of believing his own stories, even when they were purely imaginary, and he would sometimes conjure up scenes so unearthly and awful that both he and his hearers were afraid to part company for the night. Frequently his neighbors could not face the darkness alone after one of Hugh's gruesome stories, and lay upon the _shelling_ seeds till day dawned.

The farmers' sons of the whole neighborhood used to gather round Bronte at night to hear his narratives, and he continued to manufacture stories of all descriptions as long as he lived.

I have always understood that Hugh Bronte's stories, though sometimes rough in texture and interspersed with emphatic expletives, after the manner of the time, had always a healthy moral bearing. As a genuine Irishman he never used an immodest word, or by gesture, phrase, or innuendo suggested an impure thought. On this point all my informants were unanimous. He neither used unchaste words himself, nor permitted any one to do so in his house. Tyranny and cruelty of every kind he denounced fiercely. Faithlessness and deceit always met condign punishment in his romances, and in cases where girls had been betrayed, either the ghost of the injured woman, or the devil himself, in some awful form, wreaked unutterable vengeance on the betrayer.

Hugh Bronte was a great moral teacher and a power for good, as far as his influence extended. There are still some old men living in his neighborhood who never understood him, and who are disposed to think he was in league with the devil.

It is always at his peril that any man dares to live before his time, or to leave the beaten track of the commonplace. The reformers have all, without exception, been mad, or worse, in the eyes of dull conservatism. Bronte dared to teach his neighbors by allowing them to see as well as hear, and those who were too stupid to understand were clever enough to denounce.

By a very great effort Hugh Bronte learned to read, late in life. He began at Mount Pleasant, with no higher aim than that of being able to write letters to Alice McClory, when he could no longer visit her. He made rapid strides in learning under the tutelage of his master's children, when he lived in Loughorne, and when he went to live in Emdale he knew the sweetness and solace of good books, and he had always a book on his knee, which he read by the light of the kiln fire, when he was alone. He knew the Bible, Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," and Burns's poems, well. Those were bookless days. The newspaper had not yet found its way to the people, and in a neighborhood of mental stagnation it was something to have one man who could hold the mirror up to nature, and lead his illiterate visitors into enchanted ground.

Many of Hugh's stories were far removed from the region of romance, but he had the literary art of giving an artistic touch to everything he said, which added a charm to the narration, independent of the facts which he narrated.

The story of his early life, which I have tried to reduce to simple prose, was delivered in the rhapsodic style of the ancient bards, but simple enough to be understood by the most unlettered peasant. None of Bronte's stories were so acceptable as the simple record of his early hardships.

Mingled with all his stories, shrewd maxims for life and conduct were interwoven; but in his oration on tenant-right he broke new ground, and showed that under different circumstances he might have been a great statesman, and saved his country from unutterable woe.

Hugh Bronte was superstitious, but while his superstitious character descended to all his children, the faculty of story-telling was inherited, as far as I have been able to ascertain, by Patrick alone. All the sons and daughters talked with a dash of genius--as one of their old acquaintances said, "They were very cliver with their tongues"--but I have never heard of any of them except Patrick trying to tell a story.

Patrick, at the age of two or three, used to lie on the warm shelling seeds and listen to his father's entrancing stories, and he seems to have caught something of his father's gift and power. Miss Nussey, Charlotte's friend, "Miss E.," has often told me of Patrick's power to rivet the attention of his children, and awe them with realistic descriptions of simple scenes. All the girls used to sit in breathless silence, their prominent eyes starting out of their heads, while their father unfolded lurid scene after scene; but the greatest effect was produced on Emily, who seemed to be unconscious of everything else except her father's story, and sometimes the descriptions became so vivid, intense, and terrible that they had to implore him to desist.

Miss Nussey had opportunities for observing the Bronte girls that no other person had. She became Charlotte's friend at school, when both were homesick and needed friends. She continued to be her fast friend through life. Gentle Anne Bronte died in her arms, and she was Charlotte's true consoler when the heroic Emily passed swiftly away. She early discovered the ring of genius in Charlotte's letters, and preserved every scrap of them, and it is chiefly through those letters that the Brontes are known in England. She was Charlotte's confidante in all private transactions and love matters, and she might have been a nearer friend still had Charlotte not refused an offer of marriage from her brother--an incident in the novelist's life here for the first time made public.

Miss Nussey was not only Charlotte's devoted friend, but she was a constant visitor at Haworth, and a keen observer. She had a great power of discernment in literary matters, and a very considerable literary gift herself. She had not to wait till "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights" were published to learn that Charlotte and Emily Bronte were endowed with genius. We owe it to her penetrating sagacity that we know so much of the vicar's daughters. She watched their growth of intellect and everything that ministered to it, and she believes firmly that the girls caught their inspiration from their father, and that Emily got not only her inspiration but most of her facts from her father's narratives.[4]

[4] Swinburne, in his "Note on Charlotte Bronte," has alone had the
poetic insight and artistic instinct to discern this fact. He is
right when he says, "Charlotte evidently never worked so well as
when painting more or less directly from nature.... In most
cases, probably, the designs begun by means of the camera were
transferred for completion to the canvas."

Swinburne, however, falls short in discernment, when, in
contrasting Charlotte with her sister, he says: "Emily Bronte,
like William Blake, would probably have said, or at least
presumably have felt, that such study after the model was to her
impossible--an attempt but too certain to diminish her
imaginative insight and disable her creative hand."

Surely the highest imaginative insight and deftest creative hand
work from the model, nature, but the result is not a mere
portrait of the model.

"The dirty, ragged, black-haired child," brought home by Mr. Earnshaw from Liverpool, is none other than the real dirty, naked, black-haired foundling, discovered on the boat between Liverpool and Drogheda, and taken home by Charlotte's great-grandfather and great-grandmother to the banks of the Boyne. The artist, however, is not a mere copyist, and hence, while the story starts from existing facts, and follows the general outline of the real, it is not the very image of the real, and makes deviations from the original facts to meet the exigencies of art.

There is no difficulty, however, in recognizing the original of the incarnate fiend Heathcliff in the man Welsh, who tormented Hugh Bronte, Patrick's father, in the old family home near Drogheda. Had Welsh never played the demon among the Brontes, Emily Bronte had never placed on the canvas Heathcliff, "child neither of lascar nor gypsy, but a man's shape animated by demon life--a ghoul, an afrit." Nelly Dean, the benevolent but irresolute medium of romance and tragedy, is Hugh's Aunt Mary, clear-eyed as to right and duty, but ever slipping down before the force of circumstances. And old Gallagher, on the banks of the Boyne, with "the Blessed Virgin and all the saints" on his side, is none other than the original of the old hypocrite, Joe. Gallagher is Joe speaking the Yorkshire dialect.

And Edgar Linton is the gentle and forgiving brother of Alice, our friend Red Paddy McClory, who took his sister home after her runaway marriage with a Protestant, and finally took the whole Bronte family under his roof, and gave them all he possessed. Even Catherine Linton's flight and marriage has solid foundation in fact, either in Alice Bronte's romantic elopement with Hugh, or in the more tragic circumstances of Mary Bronte's marriage with Welsh.

It is not credible that Patrick Bronte, in his story-telling moods, never narrated to his listening daughters the romance of their grandfather and grandmother. It is true Miss Nussey never heard any reference to the story, nor did the Brontes ever in her presence refer to their Irish home or friends or history, though, at the very time she was visiting Haworth, they were in constant communication with their Irish relatives, and, as we shall see, one of the uncles actually visited them, as Charlotte's champion, and one of them had visited Haworth at an earlier date.

They were too proud to talk even to their most intimate friends of their Irish home, much less to expose the foibles of their immediate ancestors to phlegmatic English ears; but Patrick Bronte would not omit to tell his story-loving daughters the thrilling adventures of their ancestors, and the girls, having brooded over the incidents, reproduced them in variant forms, and in the sombre setting of their own surroundings.

The originals lived and died, acted and were acted upon, in Louth and Down; but on the steeps of "Wuthering Heights" they strut again, speaking the Yorkshire dialect, and braced by the tonic air of the northern downs.

None of the stories betray their origin so clearly as "Wuthering Heights," just as none of the novelists were so fascinated with their father's tales as Emily. But the stories are all Bronte stories, an echo of the thrilling narratives related by old Hugh, and retold, I believe, a hundred times by Patrick. Of course, all the stories are made to live again under new forms, each writer giving the stamp of her own character to the new creations. Artists of the Bronte stamp are not portrait painters, nor mere reproducers.

They never were content to be mere lackeys of nature. They were above nature, and everything without and within themselves they placed under contribution.

Even the rough and rugged characters that have come from the hand of Emily show the work of the artist. She added to the repulsive Heathcliff qualities of her own. She is perfectly serious when she says: "Possibly some people might suspect him [Heathcliff] of a degree of under-bred pride. I have a sympathetic chord within me that tells me it is nothing of the sort. I know by instinct his reserve springs from an aversion to showy display of feeling, to manifestations of mutual kindliness. He'll love and hate equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again. No! I'm running on too fast. I bestow my own attributes over-liberally on him."

Knowing the model from which Emily Bronte worked, there are few passages which throw more light on the artist than this. Catherine Linton was modelled on the lovely Alice McClory, who bequeathed to her clever granddaughters all the personal attractions they possessed; but here again Emily bestows attributes of herself and sisters on her stately and lily-like grandmother.

"She [Catherine] was slender, and apparently scarcely past girlhood. An admirable form, and the most exquisite little face I had ever had the pleasure of beholding; small features, very fair; flaxen ringlets, or rather golden, hanging loose on her delicate neck; and eyes, had they been agreeable in expression, that would have been irresistible."

The picture is neither that of a Bronte of the Haworth vicarage nor is it a portraiture of the flower plucked in Ballynaskeagh by Hugh Bronte, but it is Alice McClory diluted with a dash of the Penzance Branwells, and the effect is a perfect and beautiful picture, more pleasing, indeed, than a life-like portrait, with all the radiant beauty of the charming Alice, when she rode off to Magherally Church with the dashing Hugh Bronte.