Page:Life and Works of the Sisters Bronte - Volume I.djvu/27

 that London people talk a great deal of writers and books who mean nothing in the country, nothing to England at large. As to the shyness, it was the torment of both her physical and mental life. The Celtic craving for solitude, the Celtic shrinking from all active competitive existence they were part of Charlotte's inmost nature, although per- petually crossed and checked, no doubt, by other influences driving her to utterance, to production, to sustained effort. And for endurance did not her short life, divided between labour, fame, and calamity, make, first and chief upon all who knew it, the impression of an unshaken and indomitable spirit ? The ' chainless soul ' was hers no less than Emily's, though she was far saner and sweeter than Emily.

And all three qualities pride, shrinking, endurance are writ large in her books. With passion added, they are Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe. They supply the atmosphere, the peculiar note, of all the stories. A contempt for mean and easy living, for common gains, and common luxuries, breathes in them, and makes them harsh and bracing as the air of her own moors.

And one other Celtic quality there is in Charlotte Bronte and her books, which is responsible perhaps for half their defects. It is a quality of exuberance, of extravagance, of what her contemporaries called 'bad taste.' Charles Kings- ley threw ' Shirley' aside because the opening seemed to him vulgar. Miss Martineau expressed much the same judgment on ' Villette.' And there can be no doubt that there was in Miss Bronte a curious vein of recklessness, roughness, one might also say -hoydenism- that exists side by side with an exquisite delicacy and a true dignity, and is none the less Irish and Celtic for that. It disappears, so far as one can see. with the publication of 'Shirley;' but, up till then, it has to be reckoned with. It is conspicuous in the whole episode of ' the curates,' both in real life and in the pages of ' Shirley ; ' it is visible especially in certain recently published letters to Miss Nussey, which one could wish had been left imprinted; and it makes the one shadow of excuse for the inexcusable 'Quarterly' article. There is one sentence in