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In the Brontës it emerges at five different levels, rising from abortive struggle to supreme achievement from Mr. Brontë 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. Brontë is important because he was the tool used by their destiny to keep Charlotte and Emily in Haworth.
Whoever, after I have distinctly rejected the charge, urges it upon me, will do an unkind and ill-bred thing." If Miss Nussey is asked, she is authorized by Miss Brontë to say, "that she repels and disowns every accusation of the kind. You may add, if you please, that if anyone has her confidence, you believe you have, and she has made no drivelling confessions to you on that subject."
Puerile, if you like, and puerile all the stuff that Charlotte Brontë wrote before eighteen-forty-six; but her style at thirteen, in its very rhythms and cadences, is the unmistakable embryo of her style at thirty; and M. Héger no more cured her of its faults that he could teach her its splendours. Something that was not Brussels made Miss Brontë a prodigious author at thirteen.
For Johnson less than Gibbon inflated the English our fathers inherited; because Johnson did not habitually or often use imagery, whereas Gibbon did use habitual imagery, and such use is what deprives a language of elasticity, and leaves it either rigid or languid, oftener languid. Encumbered by this drift and refuse of English, Charlotte Bronte yet achieved the miracle of her vocabulary.
A world with the immensity, the profundity, the darkness of the brooding sea; where the spirit of a woman moves, troubling the waters; for Charlotte Brontë has before her the stupendous vision of the world as it was, as it yet is, and as it is to be. That world, as it existed from eighteen-twelve to Charlotte's own time, eighteen-fifty, was not a place for a woman with a brain and a soul.
Emily was then twenty-four and Anne a year and a half younger. Nothing can be more childlike, more naïve. Emily heads her diary: A PAPER to be opened when Anne is 25 years old, or my next birthday after if all be well. Emily Jane Brontë. July the 30th, 1841. She says: "It is Friday evening, near nine o'clock wild rainy weather.
The reason why Miss Bronte was so anxious to preserve her secret, was, I am told, that she had pledged her word to her sisters that it should not be revealed through her. The dilemmas attendant on the publication of the sisters' novels, under assumed names, were increasing upon them.
It is almost enough immortality for Shirley that she is the only living and authentic portrait of Emily Brontë in her time. Charlotte has given her the "wings that wealth can give", and they do not matter. She has also given her the wings of Emily's adventurous soul, the wealth of her inner life.
What was peculiar to Yorkshire was the fact that, if you mentioned the name of Bronte in any average company, the chances were in favour of your being met with an indignant snort from someone who protested that Charlotte's stories were a disgraceful libel upon the district, and that "Wuthering Heights" was a book so dreadful in its character that its author would only have met with her deserts if she had been soundly whipped for writing it.
What a man's name was, what his income was, whom he married, where he lived, these are not sanctities; they are irrelevancies. A very strong case of this is the case of the Brontës. The Brontë is in the position of the mad lady in a country village; her eccentricities form an endless source of innocent conversation to that exceedingly mild and bucolic circle, the literary world.
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