Page:A note on Charlotte Brontë (IA note00swinoncharlottebrich).pdf/58

  'In Memoriam' was almost as grotesque in its ineptitude as that of M. Taine's very self; and under the gigantic shadow of Balzac's many-featured and colossal empire she would seem, like many if not most Englishwomen, to have come in as it were on the wrong side. The critical faculty in a woman of genius, if not well trained and cultivated with much labour of spiritual husbandry, seems naturally more prone to such flaws and lapses than the learned judgment of an intelligence duly warmed by the suns and watered by the streams of wide and fertilising study can ever claim the slightest excuse or plead the slightest apology for having shown itself at any time to be. Nor can we say that Miss Brontë's more proper and natural faculty of creative imagination was