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In another letter, however, written to a less familiar correspondent, to whom Miss Bronte, as the literary lady with a critical reputation to keep up, expresses herself in a different and more artificial tone, she again describes my grandmother as good and charming, but doubts her claim to "power and completeness of character."
Swinburne's Appreciation An Abortive Visit to the Poet Lecture on Emily Bronte and "Wuthering Heights" Miss Nussey's Visit to Haworth after Charlotte's Marriage. I have said that during the stormy days of the atrocities agitation I was engaged in other work than that of political writing.
There is no important detail of her mere life that is not given in them. Mrs. Gaskell relied almost entirely on them, and on information supplied to her by Miss Nussey. And each critic and biographer who followed her, from Sir Wemyss Reid to Mr. Clement Shorter, drew from the same source. Miss Nussey was almost the only safe repository of material relating to Charlotte Brontë.
The promise then given of faithful truth-speaking, Miss Martineau fulfilled when "Villette" appeared. Miss Bronte writhed under what she felt to be injustice. This seems a fitting place to state how utterly unconscious she was of what was, by some, esteemed coarse in her writings.
Consequently, teaching very young children was anything but a "delightful task" to the three Bronte sisters. With older girls, verging on womanhood, they might have done better, especially if these had any desire for improvement. But the education which the village clergyman's daughters had received, did not as yet qualify them to undertake the charge of advanced pupils.
It would not matter a single straw if a Brontë story were a hundred times more moonstruck and improbable than 'Jane Eyre, or a hundred times more moonstruck and improbable than 'Wuthering Heights. It would not matter if George Read stood on his head, and Mrs Read rode on a dragon, if Fairfax Rochester had four eyes and St John Rivers three legs, the story would still remain the truest story in the world.
And even so, it will have been better for that man if he had never been born. He will have done his best to destroy or to deface the loveliness of a figure unique in literature. And he will have ignored the one perfect, the one essentially true picture of Emily Brontë, which is to be found in Maurice Maeterlinck's Wisdom and Destiny.
But when her enemies accuse Charlotte Brontë of glorifying passion they praise her unaware. Her glory is that she did glorify it. Until she came, passion between man and woman had meant animal passion. Fielding and Smollett had dealt with it solely on that footing. A woman's gentle, legalized affection for her husband was one thing, and passion was another.
Those whom the gods love die young: the Reverend Patrick Bronte lived to be eighty-five years old. I got out of the train at Keighley, which you must pronounce "Keethley," and leaving my valise with the station-master started on foot for Haworth, four miles away.
To the care of their institutions, we leave with pious and reverent hands the ideals inspired by characters like Hypatia, Madame de Stael, the Misses Cobb, Martineau, Fuller, Bronte, by George Eliot, George Sand, and Mrs.
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