Page:Life and Works of the Sisters Bronte - Volume I.djvu/30

 will, holding in its deep breast powers of passion and of drama unsuspected even by itself.

Amid this rude full-blooded keen-brained world grew up the four wonderful children who had survived their fragile mother and their two elder sisters. From the beginning they showed the Celtic qualities the Celtic vision that re- makes the world, throws it into groups and pictures, seen with a magical edge and sharpness. Are they gathered on a winter's night round the kitchen fire with Tabby for a com- panion ? Charlotte -a mere child- sees the little scene as a whole, as a poet or a painter would see it, notes the winter storm and wind outside, the glow within, the quick-witted children, the old servant, throws it all into a fragment of vivid dialogue and writes it down realised, on record, for ever. Or a tramp, talking the language of religious mania, comes to the door. Again Charlotte marks him, stamps him into words, makes a permanent representative figure out of him, a figure of the imagination. Yet all the time there are secret bonds between these four small creatures the chil- dren of an Irish father and a Cornish mother and the stern practical Yorkshire world about them. For they come not from the typical and Catholic Ireland, but from the Ireland of the North, on which commerce and Protestantism have set their grasp, the Ireland which has half yielded itself to England. In the girls, at any rate, the Bible and Puritanism have mingled with their Celtic blood. Economy, self-disci- pline, constancy, self-repression, order, these things come easily to them, so far as the outer conduct of life is concern- ed. They take their revenge in dreams, in the whims and passions of the imagination. But they cook and clean and sew, they learn all the household arts that their aunt and Tabby can teach them. They are docile, hard-working, hard- living. They are poor, saving, industrious, keenly alive to the value of money and of work, like the world about them.

And it is this mixture of Celtic dreaming with English realism and self-control which gives value and originality to all they do to Emily's 'Wuthering Heights,' to Charlotte's four stories. Lady Caroline Lamb, an Irishwoman like