Maria brought their six children, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick
Branwell, Emily, and Anne, from Thornton, where they were born, to
Haworth. Mr. Brontë was an Irishman, a village schoolmaster who won,
marvellously, a scholarship that admitted him to Cambridge and the
Church of England. Tales have been told of his fathers and his
forefathers, peasants and peasant farmers of Ballynaskeagh in County
Down. They seem to have been notorious for their energy, eccentricity,
imagination, and a certain tendency to turbulence and excess. Tales have
been told of Mr. Brontë himself, of his temper, his egotism, his
selfishness, his fits of morose or savage temper. The Brontës'
biographers, from Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux[A] to Mr. Birrell,
have all been hard on this poor and unhappy and innocent old man. It is
not easy to see him very clearly through the multitude of tales they
tell: how he cut up his wife's silk gown in a fit of passion; how he
fired off pistols in a series of fits of passion; how, in still gloomier
and more malignant fits, he used to go for long solitary walks. And when
you look into the matter you find that the silk gown was, after all, a
cotton one, and that he only cut the sleeves out, and _then_ walked into
Keighley and brought a silk gown back with him instead; that when he
was a young man at Drumballyroney he practised pistol firing, not as a
safety valve for temper but as a manly sport, and that as a manly sport
he kept it up. As for solitary walks, there is really no reason why a
father should not take them; and if Mr. Brontë 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. Brontë, 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