ell's, so that he may be pardoned if he thought
himself more important than his children. Many fathers of the Victorian
era did.

And he _was_ important as a temporary vehicle of the wandering creative
impulse. It struggled and strove in him and passed from him, choked in
yards and yards of white cravat, to struggle and strive again in
Branwell and in Anne. As a rule the genius of the race is hostile to the
creative impulse, and the creative impulse is lucky if it can pierce
through to one member of a family. In the Brontes it emerges at five
different levels, rising from abortive struggle to supreme
achievement--from Mr. Bronte to his son Branwell, from Branwell to Anne,
from Anne to Charlotte, and from Charlotte to Emily. And Maria, who
died, was an infant prodigy.

And Mr. Bronte is important because he was the tool used by their
destiny to keep Charlotte and Emily in Haworth.

The tragedy we are too apt to call their destiny began with their
babyhood, when the mother and six children were brought to Haworth
Parsonage and the prospect of the tombstones. They had not been there
eighteen months before the mother sickened and died horribly of cancer.

She had to be isolated as far as possible. The Parsonage house was not
large, and it was built with an extreme and straight simplicity; two
front rooms, not large, right and left of the narrow stone-flagged
passage, a bedroom above each, and between, squeezed into the small
spare space above the passage, a third room, no bigger than a closet and
without a fireplace. This third room is important in the story of the
Brontes, for, when their mother's illness declared itself, it was in
this incredibly small and insufferably unwholesome den that the five
little girls were packed, heaven knows how, and it was here that the
seeds of tuberculosis were sown in their fragile bodies. After their
mother's death the little fatal room was known as the children's study
(you can see, in a dreadful vision, the six pale little faces, pressed
together, looking out of the window on to the graves below). It was used
again as a night-nursery, and later still as the sleeping-place shared
by two, if not three, of the sisters, two of whom were tuberculous.

The mother died and was buried in a vault under the floor of the church,
not far from the windows of her house. Her sister, Miss Branwell, came
up from Penzance to look after the children. You can see this small,
middle-aged, early Victori