s really no reason why a
father should not take them; and if Mr. Bronte had insisted on
accompanying Charlotte and Emily in their walks, his conduct would have
been censured just the same, and, I think, with considerably more
reason. As it happened, Mr. Bronte, rather more than most fathers, made
companions of his children when they were little. This is not quite the
same thing as making himself a companion for them, and the result was a
terrific outburst of infant precocity; but this hardly justifies Mrs.
Gaskell and Madame Duclaux. They seem to have thought that they were
somehow appeasing the outraged spirits of Emily and Charlotte by
blackening their father and their brother; whereas, if anything could
give pain to Charlotte and Emily and innocent Anne in heaven, it would
be the knowledge of what Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux have done for
them.

[Footnote A: A. Mary F. Robinson.]

There was injustice in all that zeal as well as indiscretion, for Mr.
Bronte had his good points as fathers go. Think what the fathers of the
Victorian era could be, and what its evangelical parsons often were; and
remember that Mr. Bronte was an evangelical parson, and the father of
Emily and Charlotte, not of a brood of gentle, immaculate Jane Austens,
and that he was confronted suddenly and without a moment's warning with
Charlotte's fame. Why, the average evangelical parson would have been
shocked into apoplexy at the idea of any child of his producing
_Wuthering Heights_ or _Jane Eyre_. Charlotte's fame would have looked
to him exceedingly like infamy. We know what Charles Kingsley, the least
evangelical of parsons, once thought of Charlotte. And we know what Mr.
Bronte thought of her. He was profoundly proud of his daughter's genius;
there is no record and no rumour of any criticism on his part, of any
remonstrance or amazement. He was loyal to Charlotte to the last days of
his life, when he gave her defence into Mrs. Gaskell's hands; for which
confidence Mrs. Gaskell repaid him shockingly.

But he was the kind of figure that is irresistible to the caustic or
humorous biographer. There was something impotently fiery in him, as if
the genius of Charlotte and Emily had flicked him in irony as it passed
him by. He wound himself in yards and yards and yards of white cravat,
and he wrote a revolutionary poem called "Vision of Hell". It is easy to
make fun of his poems, but they were no worse, or very little worse,
than his son Branw