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On the contrary, when a man has done a hard day's work, what can he do better than fall to and read the novels of Walter Scott, or the Brontes, or Mrs. Gaskell, or some of our living writers. I am rather a voracious reader of fiction myself. I do not, therefore, point to it as a reproach or as a source of discouragement, that fiction takes so large a place in the objects of literary interest.
I wrote them with fear and trembling, and I must add that I wrote them without any kind of encouragement from outside, other than that which I received from Miss Nussey herself. The general impression among the editors and critics of the day was that there was nothing new to be said about the Brontes, and that, even if there were, the public would not care to hear 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.
When Darcy, in finally confessing his faults, says, "I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice though not in theory," he gets nearer to a complete confession of the intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the Brontës' heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot's.
Greatly interested, like most of his fellow-countrymen, in the story of the Brontes, he got me to accompany him on a pilgrimage to Haworth, to see the world-famed parsonage and church. Shortly before this time, I had been concerned in raising an agitation against the destruction of the church, and had, in consequence, incurred the hostility of the incumbent, a certain Mr.
All that was not so dark a gray as to look black was dull brown; and not a single window-pane had a gleam of intelligence for the unwelcome strangers. I could imagine no merriment in Haworth, nor any sound of laughter; yet the Brontës were happy when they were children at least, they thought they were; but it would be too tragic if children didn't think themselves happy.
Stark moorland life had not encouraged humor in the Brontes, and village patronage had not roused in Miss Mitford a sense of ironic contrasts. Yes, Jane Austen would have done it best. That the story should be related by Mrs. Braddle gave it extraordinary flavor. No man or woman of his own class could have given such a recounting, or revealed so many facets of this jewel of entertainment.
One of the present teachers in the pensionnat had been a classmate of Charlotte's here. The Brontés had not been popular with the school.
And yet there was more in her than gentleness. There was, in this smallest and least considerable of the Brontës, an immense, a terrifying audacity. Charlotte was bold, and Emily was bolder; but this audacity of Anne's was greater than Charlotte's boldness or than Emily's, because it was willed, it was deliberate, open-eyed; it had none of the superb unconsciousness of genius.
The Brontës died young, but mainly because they lived in the midst of a damp old churchyard and inherited tubercular tendencies. The graves and old box tombs crowd the very walls of the parsonage, and are so thick you hardly can walk between them.
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