United States or Hong Kong ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A big, blusterous, genial brute of a Trollope could very fairly hold his own, and exact at all events an acceptable share in the profits of his work. A shrewd and vigorous man of business such as Dickens, aided by a lawyer who was his devoted friend, could do even better, and, in reaping sometimes more than his publisher, redress the ancient injustice. But pray, what of Charlotte Bronte?
The art of fiction, as Jane Austen knew it, declined from her through Scott, and Bulwer, and Dickens, and Charlotte Bronte, and Thackeray, and even George Eliot, because the mania of romanticism had seized upon all Europe, and these great writers could not escape the taint of their time; but it has shown few signs of recovery in England, because English criticism, in the presence of the Continental masterpieces, has continued provincial and special and personal, and has expressed a love and a hate which had to do with the quality of the artist rather than the character of his work.
Gaskell's sense of this effect that made her work a masterpiece. And in her marriage, at Haworth, to her father's curate, Arthur Nicholls, the marriage that cut short her life and made an end of her celebrity, Charlotte Brontë followed before all things her instinct for fitness, for unity, for harmony. It was exquisitely in keeping.
The very ancient church-tower still "rises dark from the stony enclosure of its yard;" the church itself has been remodeled and much of its romantic interest destroyed. No interments have been made in the vaults beneath the aisles since Mr. Bronte was laid there.
In repose his countenance shows a hint of melancholy: as Miss Bronté has said, "his physiognomy is fine et spirituelle;" one would hardly imagine it could ever resemble the "visage of a black and sallow tiger." His voice is low and soft, his bow still "very polite, not theatrical, scarcely French," his manner suave and courteous, his dress scrupulously neat.
It is not to be supposed or inferred that Miss Austen's methods, or her results, have appealed to everybody. Madame de Staël thought her vulgaire meaning, of course, not exactly our "vulgar" but "commonplace"; Charlotte Brontë was not much otherwise minded; her own Marianne Dashwood would doubtless have thought the same.
"The moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled the fissure; her disk was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud." An admirable overture to that terrific scene of the mad wife's visit to the rival's bed. Charlotte Brontë is great in clouds, like a prose Shelley.
To read of that sorrow again is to open once more a wound which most men perhaps, certainly most women, received into their hearts in childhood. For the Life of Charlotte Bronte is one of the first books of biography put into the hands of a child, to whom Jane Eyre is allowed only in passages.
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.
I found that I seldom differed from her, except that she was far too tolerant of stupid people, if they had a grain of kindness in them." It was about this time that Mr. Bronte provided his children with a teacher in drawing, who turned out to be a man of considerable talent, but very little principle.
Word Of The Day