Chapter I: The Brontës Al Fresco

I proceed with this chapter in the first person, though the story came to me at second-hand. My tutor, the Reverend W. McAllister, narrated it to me, in the words in which he had heard it from a youthful cousin, and I am able to give it almost in the same words and in the form in which I wrote it out as an exercise in composition.

The scene described does not, however, rest on the authority of Mr. McAllister or his friend, but on the testimony of all who knew the Brontës in their home life. The same scene has been described to me by old men whose memory extended back to matters in the last century, and quite recently, when visiting the place, an aged neighbor pointed out the exact spot where he himself had witnessed the Brontës engaged in their amusements. The story is so characteristic that I give it _in extenso_, and with all details, as I got it:

“In 1824 I made my first great journey out into the big world, accompanied by my elder brother. I was then very young. The nature of our business obliged us to go on foot, and the distance traversed was two or three miles.

“Our errand brought us into the midst of the Brontës, and as we had to remain there six or seven hours, I had an opportunity of seeing, under various aspects, that extraordinary and unique family, whose genius came to be revealed a few years later by three little girls, on English soil.

“I first saw a group of the Brontë brothers together. I think there were six of them, and they were marching, in step, across a field towards a level road. Their style of marching, and whole appearance, arrested my attention. They were dressed alike, in home-spun and home-knitted garments, that fitted them closely, and showed off to perfection their large, lithe, and muscular forms. They were all over six feet high, but, with their close-fitting apparel and erect bearing, they appeared to me to be men of gigantic stature. They bounded lightly over all the fences that stood in their way, all springing from the ground and alighting together, and they continued to march in step without an apparent effort, until they reached the public road, and then they began, in a business-like way, to settle conditions, in preparation for a serious contest.

“A few men and boys watched the little group of Brontës timorously, from a distance, but curiosity drew my brother and myself close up to where they were assembled. They did not seem to notice us, or know that we were present, but proceeded with a match of rolling a large metal ball along the road. The ball seemed to be about six pounds weight, and the one who could make it roll furthest along the road would be declared the winner.

“The contest was to them an earnest business. Every ounce of elastic force in the great, muscular frames was called into action, and there was a profusion of strange, strong language that literally made my flesh to creep, and my hair to stand on end. The forms of expression which they used were as far from commonplace as anything ever written by the gifted nieces; and as the uncles’ lives were on a lower plane of civilization, and their scant education had not reduced their tongues to the conventional forms of speech, they gave utterance to their thoughts with a pent-up and concentrated energy never equalled in rugged force by the novelists.

“I had never seen men like the Brontës, and I had never heard language like theirs. The quaint conceptions and glowing thoughts and ferocious epithets that struggled for utterance, at the unlettered lips of the Irish Brontës, revealed the original quarry from which the vicar’s daughters chiselled the stones for their artistic castle-building, and disclosed the original fountain from which they drew their pathos and passion. Similar fierce originality and power are felt to be present in everything produced by the English Brontës, but in their case the intensity of energy is held in check by the Branwell temperament, and kept under restraint by education and culture.

“The match over, and the sweep-stakes secured, the brothers returned to their harvest labor as they went, clearing, like greyhounds, every fence that stood in their way. At that time no fame attached to the Brontë name, but the men that I had come upon were so different from the local gentry, farmers, flax-dressers, and such like people, who lived around them, that I became, all at once, deeply interested in them.

“From a distance I watched their shining sickles flashing among the golden grain, and caught snatches of song, which I afterwards found to be from Robert Burns. My interest, however, in the Brontës was shared by no one. They were then neither prophets nor heroes in their own country, and they were regarded with a kind of superstitious dread by their neighbors, rather than with interest or curiosity.

“Young as I then was, I persevered with my inquiries, and my curiosity was rewarded. I learned that the Brontës had a brother a clergyman in England, ‘a fine gentleman,’ then on a visit with them, and that the Brontë family were in the habit of holding an open-air concert every favorable afternoon in a secluded glen below their house. I remember wondering if the clergyman ever broke out in the vigorous vernacular of his kith and kin, but I was especially interested in the open-air concert.

“My brother and I, by the nature of our errand, could not return home till late in the evening, and as we were at leisure we made up our minds to assist at the concert. On pretence of gathering blackberries we explored the glen and discovered the place. No one would accompany us, and we were told, with looks of terror, that it would be at our peril if we went to the concert, as the brothers had ‘the black art,’ and were, above all men, to be avoided. We resolved notwithstanding to go as spectators, and waited with impatience till the day’s work should be over.

“About six o’clock a horn was blown, and the reapers suddenly dropped their sickles and strolled down leisurely to the concert glen. We had already preceded them, and taken our places on a high ridge bordering the glen, in a thicket of low brushwood.

“Three sisters were the first to arrive on the scene. They brought a spinning-wheel, a supply of oat-bread and buttermilk, and a green satchel which contained a violin. The men sat astride the trunk of a prostrate tree, and disposed of their afternoon collation in an incredibly short space of time, one wooden bowl, or _noggin_, supplying milk to each.

“Scarcely had the frugal meal been ended when one of the brothers began to thrum the fiddle, and quick as lightning two of the sisters and the other brothers were whirling and spinning airily over the grass. The other sister was busily plying her spinning-wheel and watching the moving scene. In turns each of the sisters took her place at the wheel, and the one relieved instantly plunged into the mazes of the dance.

“The girls were tall, like their brothers, and picturesque in their red tippets. Like their brothers, they were handsome and graceful. They were mature maidens, but they had not lost their elegant figures, or their fresh white and red complexions. Their homemade dresses, though of plain woollen material and simply made, fitted them well, and were in perfect harmony with their rustic surroundings. Their hair hung in ringlets round their shoulders, and they moved with unconscious gracefulness, whirling over the greensward as if they scarcely touched it, or mazing through a ‘country dance’ or an ‘eight-part reel,’ or waltzing round and round in a manner to make the onlooker giddy.

“There was nothing in the whole performance suggestive of the rough peasant, or the country clown. All was exquisite grace and courtesy. The musician was also relieved from time to time, each of the brothers taking his turn at the violin.

“The scene was of the most weird and romantic character. The place selected for the family dance was in a secluded widening of the glen, down which flows a little stream that makes a murmuring noise as it tumbles over stones, and among the roots of alder and willow. It was wide enough to give full scope for extended galops, and sufficient for all the exigencies of Sir Roger de Coverley. The ground was thickly carpeted with grass, and surrounded by large trees with overhanging branches. The trees were festooned with ivy and honeysuckle. Sweetbrier and wild roses overflowed the hedges in great profusion, and ‘Flowering Sally,’ in pink bunches, fringed the brook.

“The sun was sinking in the west, throwing dark shadows down the sides of the Newry mountains, and shedding a pale glory on Slieve Donard and the other lofty peaks of the Mourne range. Close by stood the Knock Hill, generally sombre and unpicturesque, but on that occasion it glowed in the parting rays. The little valley, as it dipped downward, opened out to the west, and through the opening the setting sun poured a rich flood of light on the animated groups, mating each dancer with a long, dark shadow, and doubling the number of figures that tripped lightly over the grass.

“As the sun dropped behind the ridge of Armagh the concert came to an end, after a long bout of Scotch jigs, in which two and two in a row danced opposite to each other, chased by their tall, unearthly shadows. The closing scene was a great effort of endurance, but none seemed to weary, and with a few skips into the air, the arms raised in curves above the head, and the fingers being made to crack, all was still.

“There were four spectators of this wonderful family gathering--my brother and myself, a goat that was quietly barking a tree beside us, and pausing occasionally to look at the frantic display, and, on the other side of the valley from where we were, the clergyman brother, who walked to and fro, in solemn black, apparently in meditation, and taking no notice of the gleeful recreation of his brothers and sisters.

“There was no dawdling when the dance was over. Each of the brothers bowed with an air of gallantry to each of the sisters, and then one of the brothers caught up the spinning-wheel, and, poising it on his shoulder, strode up the homeward side of the glen. All followed smartly and disappeared, in company with the sober figure in black.

“We slipped out of the bower where we had sat entranced, and hurried homeward, with feelings of uncertainty as to the reality of things, in the gathering darkness.”

This is the most complete account I have ever heard of the summer-evening concerts held by the Brontës. Others had often seen these large-limbed, sinewy children of Anak dancing on the green with their flying shadows; but they had failed to appreciate the sylphlike motions of the maidens, or the stately curvetting of the gigantic brothers, and looked on the whole exhibition as something uncanny, and as tending to confirm the popular belief that the Brontës had dealings with the powers of the nether world.

The unique forms and forceful language of the Brontës were lost on their commonplace neighbors, who looked on them as strange and dangerous people. In fact, they were not regarded with much favor by the people of the district, from whom they carefully held aloof; and the belief that they were in league with the devil received a certain amount of confirmation, as we shall see by and by.

When I first began to take an interest in the Brontës I was admonished, in a mysterious manner, to have nothing to do with such people. I was advised to keep out of their way, lest I should hear their odious language, and it was even hinted that they might in some Satanic way do me bodily harm.

I am bound to say that matters in this respect have not altered much since for the better. My attempts, recently, to get accurate information on special points, regarding the Brontës and their ways, have been looked upon as a kind of craze, out of which, I have been assured, I was never likely to reap much credit. And even educated people, when replying to my inquiries on matters of fact, have sometimes felt called on to remind me that I was taking much pains with regard to a dangerous and outlandish family.

In fact, the Brontës paid the penalty for being a little cleverer than the people with whom they came in contact, and with whom they never associated. The Brontës looked down on the people of their own rank in life, and permitted no familiarities of any kind; and the only person who ever joined in their dances, as far as is known, was Farmer Burns. As they held aloof from everybody, they were only known by their strange language and odd ways. Imagination filled up the unknown, and gossips, as usual, made the most of every little circumstance. The fact that Mrs. Brontë had once been a Catholic prejudiced in no small degree the minds of Protestants against the children.

The clergyman’s presence in no way restrained the mirthful exuberance of the dancers. Before he left home he was always one of the party, and on his visits from college and from his living he often joined in their mirth, as formerly. But on the occasion referred to by Mr. McAllister he seemed uninterested in the familiar scene.

He was probably thinking of his precocious little women, Maria and Elizabeth, whom he had left at Cowan Bridge school a month before; or his heart may have been in the Haworth vicarage with the motherless little girls, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, who were under the care of their prim maiden aunt. Even then the children were wise beyond their years, though, in their narrow world, they had scarcely begun to accumulate the experience which enabled them to give local form and color to their father’s stories.