Page:Life and Works of the Sisters Bronte - Volume I.djvu/16

 abroad, one may say with some confidence that the name and memory of the Brontes were never more alive than now, that 'Honour and Fame have got about their graves' for good and all, and that Charlotte and Emily Bronte are no less secure, at any rate, than Jane Austen or George Eliot or Mrs. Browning of literary recollection in the time to come.

But if the Brontes live, their books live also. There are some names of the past -- Byron -- Voltaire that are far greater now, more full of magic and of spell, than the books associated with them that are, in fact, separable from the books, and could almost live on without them. But Charlotte Brontë is Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe. You can- not think of her apart from what she has written, and every - thing that she wrote has the challenging quality of personal emotion or of passion, moving in a narrow range among very concrete things, and intimately fused throughout with the in - cidents and feelings of one small, intense experience : so that, if one finds, as one does find abundantly, that the Brontes are remembered, it must be that their books are read, that people still sit up into the night with 'Jane Eyre,' and are still as angry as they were at the first, that they can get no one to assure them of Paul Emmanuel's safe return.

So it must be; and so, indeed, the personal experience of most of us can vouch that it is. Nevertheless, here and there one may hear a protesting voice. Here and there a reader and generally a reader of more subtlety and range than his fellows struck with the union of certain extrava - gances and certain dogmatisms in Charlotte Brontë's work, with the weakness of Anne's and the crudity of Emily's, will dare to say, 'Not at all! The vitality of the Bronte fame does not mean primarily the vitality of the Bronte books. It is a vitality which springs from the English love of the pa- thetic and the picturesque, and the English tendency to sub- ordinate matters of art to matters of sentiment. Mrs. Gas- kell, herself an accomplished novelist, wrote an account of these lonely girls on a Yorkshire moor, struggling with pov- erty and consumption, developing genius in the very wrestle with death, taking the heaven of fame by violence, and per-