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But Charlotte's friend can wear her half-pathetic immortality with grace. She could at least say: "She told me things she never told anyone else. I have hundreds of her letters. And I had her heart." Nothing so much as this correspondence reveals the appalling solitude in which the Brontës lived.
Another effect of the intensity with which I hated my surroundings was that I read a lot of good novels George Eliot, the Brontës, Scott, Dickens, Jane Austen, Thackeray, Besant, etc. A book which I read over and over again was Arthur Benson's Hill of Trouble, and other Stories.
The sky was leaden, the sharp hill muddy; everything seemed to combine in giving an effect of grimness, as the car forged steadily up, up toward the poor home the Brontës loved. Isn't it a beautiful miracle, the banishing of black darkness by the clear light of genius? It was that light which had lured us away from all the charms of nature to a region of ugliness, even of squalor.
By-and-by, however, when the popular passion subsided, and the old alarm about Russia again became rampant, I found myself blamed for precisely the opposite reason. I was no longer assailed as a philo-Turk, but as a Russophil. A Visit to Haworth Feeling Against the Brontes in Yorkshire Miss Nussey and her Discontent with Mrs. Gaskell's "Me" Publication of "Charlotte Bronte: a Monograph" Mr.
I met more than one lady who had known the Brontes, and who, in reply to my eager questioning, spoke of them with undisguised contempt.
I did, indeed, write a story for my children, which came out in 1880 Milly and Olly; but that wrote itself and was a mere transcript of their little lives. And yet I venture to think it was, after all, the instinct for "making out," as the Brontes used to call their own wonderful story-telling passion, which rendered this historical work so enthralling to me.
That is, briefly, all the reason in the Brontës on this special subject: the rest is stark unreason. It can be most clearly seen in that sister of Charlotte Brontë's who has achieved the real feat of remaining as a great woman rather than a great writer. There is really, in a narrow but intense way, a tradition of Emily Brontë: as there is a tradition of St. Peter or Dr. Johnson.
This third room is important in the story of the Brontës, for, when their mother's illness declared itself, it was in this incredibly small and insufferably unwholesome den that the five little girls were packed, heaven knows how, and it was here that the seeds of tuberculosis were sown in their fragile bodies.
Other Bronte shrines have engaged us, Guiseley, where Patrick Bronte was married and Neilson worked as a mill-girl; the lowly Thornton home, where Charlotte was born; the cottage where she visited Harriet Martineau; the school where she found Caroline Helstone and Rose and Jessy Yorke; the Fieldhead, Lowood, and Thornfield of her tales; the Villette where she knew her hero; but it is the bleak Haworth hilltop where the Brontes wrote the wonderful books and lived the pathetic lives that most attracts and longest holds our steps.
And yet the whole of this biographical investigation, though natural and picturesque, is not wholly suitable to the Brontës. For the Brontë genius was above all things deputed to assert the supreme unimportance of externals. Up to that point truth had always been conceived as existing more or less in the novel of manners.
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