which a more deliberative judgment would have dictated.1

And I take it that this delineation of known persons and places is a very different thing from the "local color" of the more modern novelists. With them it is the celebration of the district, the town, the street. Miss Brontë had no such artistic photography in mind. Her scenery was not intended to be recognized; she fancied she had concealed it behind fictitious names. She had an inherent terror of publicity, and wished the identity between Currer Bell and Charlotte Brontë to remain unknown. The things she had experienced came to her as the natural things to be described; and in the bright innocence of her heart, and the quaint self-deception of her seclusion, she wove her magic web around the people

1 Local tradition, according to Mr. Candy [Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 267, p. 415: Some Reminiscences of the author of 'Jane Eyre'] supports Charlotte's statement that "some died at the school and were buried quietly and quickly," notwithstanding Mrs. Gaskell's statement to the contrary. "In Leck churchyard, a short distance from Cowan's Bridge, are two gravestones, the inscriptions on which record the deaths of pupils at the school (one of the names is Becker) at the time of the epidemic described in the novel. If the date of the year which is somewhat illegible from age is correctly deciphered, the pathetic record in ‘Jane Eyre' is literally true." This writer also vouches, from personal investigation, for the general unsanitary situation of the place, and the unsuitability of the building for the purpose to which it was put. In this connection, it should be insisted that she is, distinctly, not a governess novelist." Anne might fairly be called that, but not Charlotte. She did not have the idea before her of righting any particular wrongs; the absolute freedom of her genius saved her from that. Her direct progression towards truth, taking the steady road of Realism, compelled her to write of the heartdepressing and brain-wearying trials of the one dependent life which she knew with a personal knowledge which inflamed her soul. She was not moved by the philanthropic impulse of Dickens; only thus could her mind flame out its painful message.

she knew, and made them move in the only paths which occurred to her, the paths her own feet had trod.

As a matter of fact, we learn but little of the customs and manners of the localities of which she writes. The subjective crowds the objective. We hear a little, it is true, of the peripatetic "missionary basket" of parochial fame; there is some mention of the Whitsuntide festivities of the neighborhood; and it may be discovered that in those days Mrs. Sweeney dispensed the soothing syrup which Mrs. Winslow has since made her own. But were Miss Brontë attempting "local color," surely we should find some description of the funeral arvils which the Nonconformist Yorkshire conscience reconciled itself to as a substitute for the Popish wake, and which had a tendency, it would seem from Mrs. Gaskell's description, to change griefs of the heart to pains in the head. She is silent, too, concerning that other Yorkshire custom referred to by her biographer, which would have furnished Mr. Bunner, let us say, with delicious morsels, had he been born in Thornton, that wedding anthem sung in chapel, upon the first appearance of a newly married couple, by a band of choristers who, with the earnings of the occasion, invariably spent the following night carousing in honor of Hymen, to the great scandal of the neighborhood. Another author- Hardy or Blackmore, for example would have made much more out of the Gytrash than Miss Brontë does in 'Jane Eyre.' Her first consideration was the portrayal of the radical elements of character, not the painting of scenery; and all the vivid beauty of her descriptive powers, and all the rare marvel of her rich poetic prose when engaged in the

depiction of woods and moors and weather, she would have held as secondary and accidental.

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In truth, she who in her own field is the most purely imaginative of all writers except Emily, is not an imaginative writer at all either in the portrayal of incidents or in the fashioning of character with other than her native clay. Yorkshire and Belgium are her only hall-marks. Her apocalyptic visions have other sources, which is, perhaps, why they are apocalyptic. Her stories are thin, and have little outward excitement, the maniacal adventures in 'Jane Eyre being the only really stirring exception. She could not romance for the mere pleasure of it. Only once did she break loose, when her affection lured her into the dream of Emily happily in love. But it may be that she was a better judge of her limitations than others, for Shirley' ranks below her two greatest works.

Hence the curates. Unlike George Eliot, she could not draw a really fine clergyman, never having met one. Mr. Hall's picture is kindly painted, but the talk of him is too didactically pious for our unregenerate taste. The purely priestly in Rivers is excellently, if sternly, emphasized, but the asceticism. drowns the humanity. The others seem to us mere caricatures. Caricatures they are not; they are of the type that came under her vision.

VIII

I would not say that Miss Brontë had the oldmaid's attitude towards children, for that would put an unjust classification in view, my observation being that among the best friends of children must be

reckoned their maiden aunts. Actual motherhood is not necessary to awaken the mother-love lying dormant in virgin breasts. But she was enveloped with the peculiar shyness which is as a repelling atmosphere to the approach of child-confidence. In regard to the little ones, we do not find in Currer Bell any of those sweet springs of understanding which are fed from the rills of a joyous instinctive uncritical affection. Not that she does not observe; she observes keenly, but too aloofly. She is too individual: her truthfulness to the special portrait stands in the way of a general truthfulness.

Knowing as we do some of the characteristics of Maria Brontë, we should hesitate to say that Helen Burns, her fictional representative, is an impossible child. On the contrary, this portrait is not a proof that Charlotte did not understand children, but is a proof that she did understand Helen Burns. But she is so individual that she is not typical, and we do not recognize any of childhood's qualities in the character. It is not that her talk is big; but when a precocious infant uses large words, what gives charm and humor to the situation is the incongruousness of the childish mind grappling with thoughts as yet imperfectly conceived, — the developing fancy trying to take root in an undeveloped intellect. His words share the fate of his building-blocks; they are apt to come tumbling about his head before they reach the upper stories. There is the undivorcible child-atmosphere even in the clever talk of unusual children; and what makes the conversation of an extraordinarily developed child quaint is the language in the atmosphere. But there is no such atmosphere about Helen Burns. She talks like an eighteenth-century

essayist. Her mind is not even a palimpsest, through the later writing of which you may discern the earlier. It is a grown-up mind of sixty years, without a trace of childhood. Currer Bell's children are portraits, but portraits only of extremely rare species, as if a natural historian should confine his observation to the grotesque in nature.

The subject suggests an interesting topic. Knowing a little of the originals of some of her extraordinary characters - Helen Burns, among others—is not this result of her labors an argument against a too keenly followed realism? Surely, the passion to set down all the accidents of each particular person is a mistaken attitude towards truth. For while there is no substance without accidents, actual specific observation should be toned into a conformity with general laws before it is set forth to view, unless it be of that kind which is of itself the cause of new law. Hence Romance, which supplies accidents as well as realism, and which supplies them when the resources of realism fail.

Miss Brontë's strongest characteristics are her truthfulness and her intensity. She is, indeed, intense in her truthfulness, which, when combined with a too insistent realism, irritates the attention. If the child Helen Burns, if the child Polly, if the Yorke children, are the outcomes of this truthfulness to particular details, are we not justified in asking for a little less concentration on the specific, and a little more evolution from the general?

This fault of particularization differs, however, from the fault which at first sight seems akin to it,

the fault

1 Remembering what the father said about Maria, what might have been ours if she and that other had lived!