Page:Life and Works of the Sisters Bronte - Volume I.djvu/34

 with which the news of Catholic Emancipation was received at Haworth Parsonage, and spent her leisure time at school, when she was fifteen, in fighting a Radical schoolfellow on behalf of the Duke and against Reform.

Thus strongly were the foundations laid, deep in the rich main soil of English life and letters. The force and freedom with which these lonely girls wrote and thought from the be- ginning they owed largely to this first training. Later on, both in Charlotte and in Emily, certain foreign influences come in. Just as Emily certainly owed something to Hof- mann's Tales, so Charlotte probably owed much more, I am inclined to believe, than has yet been recognised to the books of French Romanticism, that great movement starting from Chateaubriand at the beginning of the century, and already at its height before 'Jane Eyre' was written. There are one or two pieces of evidence that bear on this point. In 1840, before the visit to Brussels, Charlotte writes that she has received ' another bale of French books from G '--- apparently from the Taylors 'containing upwards of forty volumes. They are like the rest, clever, wicked, sophistical and immoral. The best of it is, that they give one a thor- ough idea of France and Paris.' If these were contempo- rary books, as, from the last sentence, one might suppose they were, it is worth while to inquire what writers were probably among them. By 1840 Victor Hugo had written 'Marion Delorme,' ' Hernani,' 'Le Roi s'amuse,' ' Ruy Bias,' six volumes of poems, ' Notre Dame de Paris,' and much else. Alfred de Musset, who was thirty in 1840, had done all his work of importance, and sunk into premature exhaustion ; 'Premieres Poesies,' 'Rolla,' 'Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle,' ' Espoir en Dieu' were they in the packet that reached Charlotte in 1840? George Sand, making her first great suc- cess with 'Indiana' in 1832, had produced 'Valentine,' ' Le'- lia,' 'Jacques,' 'Ldone Leoni,' 'Andre,' ' Mauprat,' and some others. Balzac, herald of another age and another world, had been ten years at work on the 'Comedie Humaine.' We know, however, from a letter of Charlotte's in 1848, that she never read a novel of Balzac's till after the publication of 'Jane Eyre.'