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The other class-rooms, used for less advanced pupils, are smaller. In one of them, the third, Miss Bronté had ruled as monitress after her return from Haworth. The large dormitory of the pensionnat was above the long class-room, and in the time of the Brontés most of the boarders about twenty in number slept here.
An inordinate baby stares; a little boy flies, hideous, from some hideous terror. Authorship prevails in nurseries at least in some nurseries. In many it is probably a fitful game, and since the days of the Brontes there has not been a large family without its magazine. The weak point of all this literature is its commonplace.
It may, therefore, I think, be legitimately said that the externals of the Brontës' life, though singularly picturesque in themselves, matter less than the externals of almost any other writers. It is interesting to know whether Jane Austen had any knowledge of the lives of the officers and women of fashion whom she introduced into her masterpieces.
He is important chiefly in relation to the youngest of the Brontës. Oddly enough, this boy, who was once thought greater than his sister Emily, was curiously akin to the weak and ineffectual Anne. He shows the weird flickering of the flame that pulsed so feebly and intermittently in her. He had Anne's unhappy way with destiny, her knack of missing things. She had a touch of his morbidity.
If the house had only been placed a little higher up the hill, and been built to face the south, it is conceivable that the Brontës would have enjoyed better health and a less melancholy and tragic outlook on life.
Even now the isolated site of the parsonage, its environment of graves and wild-moors, its exposure to the fierce winds of the long winters, make it unspeakably dreary; in the Brontes' time it must have been cheerless indeed. Its influence darkened the lives of the inmates and left its fateful impression upon the books here produced.
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.
Angus Mackay in The Brontës, Fact and Fiction, gives us this fiction for a fact. He is pleased with what he calls the "pathetic significance" of his "discovery". There was somebody, there had to be, and it had to be M. Héger, for there wasn't anybody else. Mr. Mackay draws back the veil with a gesture and reveals the love-affair. He is very nice about it, just as nice as ever he can be.
Americans had not appeared upon the horizon in Miss Mitford's time, or in Miss Austen's, or in the Brontes' the type not having entirely detached itself from that of the red Indian. It struck him, however, that Miss Austen might have done the best work with this affair if she had survived beyond her period. Her finely demure and sly sense of humor would have seen and seized upon its opportunities.
Behind the vicarage a savage expanse of gorse and heather rises to the horizon and stretches many miles away; a path oft-trodden by the Brontes leads between low walls from their home to this open moor, their habitual resort in childhood and womanhood.
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