night-time of its desolation, — cried out from her bed, her "miserable bed, haunted with quick scorpions," - cried, and "with no language but a cry," for the natural life, which is the reverse of loneliness and wreckage, the blessed life of a home where love is,

and her divine handmaidens.

IV

This, joined to her unworldliness, is, I believe, the chief cause of the absence of wit in her novels. Suffering is sometimes the mother of wit, as with Heine; but with the more spiritual sort its bitterness does not warp the mind into aphorism. In the old original sense of "Wisdom" Charlotte Brontë had wit, for that is the clearest mark of elemental genius; but her passion was too deep and her life too unspotted from the world, too simple, in a word, to admit the worldly wisdom which we generally mean by "wit." There is a grim humor in some of her characterizations (as in Miss Ainley's attitude towards the curates, as if they were "sucking saints," in contrast with her own experimental knowledge to the contrary); but she could not work up humorous situations. Think what Jane Austen would have made out of the encounter of Donne with the dog Tartar! There is the gross material of humor, rather than the mined product. She had the capacity to realize, not the power to develop,

the sense, not the expression. The white light of her passion fills the room: we cannot distinguish the furniture.

I have referred to Miss Bronte's delineations of children under the head of her realism. There is another reason why they failed. The child pictures

are, no doubt, truthful, unless her intensity unwittingly deepened the colors, as intensity is liable to do. Her favorite characters, like herself, have a capacity for suffering, and she probably read some of the feeling of her own young life into Polly's, making it supersensitive beyond the limits of common experience. It was not love for children that made her tender of Georgette, nor was it latent motherhood: it was not the child she loved, but Love. It was a drop of water, and she was dying of thirst.

The truth is, children and animals (they go together) did not enjoy a natural place in her thought. She had to individualize too sharply or to pass by too carelessly; and, although her conscience would not allow any slipshod work, from this painful lack of vital concern there results either a too particular emphasis or a too hazy view. Contrast her description of Paul Emmanuel's dog

He... gave many an endearing word to a small spanieless (if one may coin such a word) that nominally belonged to the house, but virtually owned him as master, being fonder of him than of any inmate. A delicate, silky, loving, and lovable little doggie she was, trotting at his side, looking with expressive attached eyes into his face; and whenever he dropped his bonnet-grec, or his handkerchief, which he occasionally did in play, crouching beside it with the air of a miniature lion guarding a kingdom's flag

with the picture of another bachelor's dog, Bartle Masset's Vixen, in Adam Bede':

The moment he appeared at the kitchen door with the candle in his hand, a faint whimpering began in the chim

ney corner, and a brown-and-tan-colored bitch, of that wise-looking breed with short legs and long body, known to an unmechanical generation as turnspits, came creeping along the floor, wagging her tail, and hesitating at every other step, as if her affections were painfully divided between the hamper in the chimney corner and the master, whom she could not leave without a greeting.

"Well, Vixen, well then, how are the babbies?" said the schoolmaster, making haste towards the chimney corner, and holding the candle over the low hamper, where two extremely blind puppies lifted up their heads towards the light, from a nest of flannel and wool. Vixen could not even see her master look at them without painful excitement she got into the hamper and got out again the next moment, and behaved with true feminine folly, though looking all the while as wise as a dwarf with a large oldfashioned head and body on the most abbreviated legs.

See how George Eliot vitalizes such scenes, - George Eliot, who, by the way, would never have employed the word "spanieless." It is not more than pretty as it stands in Charlotte Brontë: George Eliot would have made it beautiful.

It may seem a small matter, but it points a moral. For the absence of a quality frequently means the engrossing presence of some other quality. Miss Brontë could give only a troubled attention to the little comforts and enjoyments, the straggling sunshine in the corners of a life, the joys of minor possessions, and the pleasures of that abundant existence. surrounding all mankind. She was absorbed in a large passion which consumed the thought which, might otherwise have been given to details.

She never posed the passion; it was hidden under the mantle of fiction. There was no hysterical diary

for the literary executor to exploit. She was the very opposite order of being from Marie Bashkirtseff, for whose outpourings she would have expressed unmitigated scorn. But she suffered all the more for the penting up.

V

'Wuthering Heights' is an absolutely unique book. Charlotte has been denominated, though foolishly, the foundress of the "governess novel." It is quite impossible to fit Emily into a class. In the 'Professor,' although the narrator is seemingly of the male, we know, before we have turned a dozen pages, that the author is of the female, gender. Not so in 'Wuthering Heights,' where even the oaths are men's oaths in the mouths of men.1 Crimsworth's "My God's " do not fool us for a moment, and the attempt at what she doubtless fancied distinctly male imagery, as when she makes the professor repulse Hypochondria "as one would a dreaded and ghastly concubine coming to embitter a husband's heart towards his young bride," are amusing failures. It was an almost superhuman task, indeed, for a woman like Charlotte Brontë to portray in the first person her idea of masculine power, the unconscious subtle essence of her womanhood almost of necessity changing the value of the paints. The result is, as I have suggested before, an

1 There are many instances of women authors sinking their identity so successfully as to completely baffle the investigator of sex; but I know of only one instance where a male author has metamorphosed himself into the female narrator of his story with such consummate charm as to cause the reader to rub his eyes and ask if it be possible that a man could have written thus. I refer to the 'Sir Percival' of Mr. Shorthouse.

evidence of her genius; for with a lesser writer the altered values would have negatived the portrait into colorlessness: with her, the genius burnt through the crudities, and merely heightened the colors beyond their proper tones.1

Emily's masterpiece is without type, and yet it swells with form. It is pure insight, of imagination all compact; and its revelation is of the lightning's flash. It sweeps like a tornado, it burns like a sirocco. To this wonderful vestal, as icy pure as Artemis, came the most terrible vision of mortal love ever vouchsafed to human genius. In all likelihood she knew nothing of Goethe's "elective affinities; yet here they are in this marvellous book. Just as in nature a power inherent in atoms will cause two of differing natures to rush together to form a new combination, so in human nature do the spirits “rush together" by the compulsion of a similar mysterious force. That is Love, glittering, transcendent; and it is not the chemical purity of the idea which makes 'Wuthering Heights' a dreaded book, that being more or less dimly recognized in all truly noble love stories; but it is, besides the dazzling conception of this analogy, dazzling things being painful things, the milieu which offends. Had the dramatis persona been of the familiar types, the "elective affinities" would have accomplished their predestined ends without any jar or smoke. But precisely be

1 I feel that it is a little unfair to criticise the 'Professor,' as Miss Brontë did not authorize its publication. We have it, however, and no Brontë lover is other than glad, for, notwithstanding its evident mistakes, it contains some of Currer Bell's best work. Nay, its errors emphasize the growth of her powers, as seen in the subsequent volumes. The chief error is due to this attempt at emptying herself into a male consciousness, an impossible feat for such a woman.