Page:The common reader.djvu/231

. The staple of their prose is awkward and unyielding. But both with labour and the most obstinate integrity by thinking every thought until it has subdued words to itself, have forged for themselves a prose which takes the mould of their minds entire; which has, into the bargain, a beauty, a power, a swiftness of its own. Charlotte Brontë, at least, owed nothing to the reading of many books. She never learnt the smoothness of the professional writer, or acquired his ability to stuff and sway his language as he chooses. “I could never rest in communication with strong, discreet, and refined minds, whether male or female,” she writes, as any leader-writer in a provincial journal might have written; but gathering fire and speed goes on in her own authentic voice “till I had passed the outworks of conventional reserve and crossed the threshold of confidence, and won a place by their hearts’ very hearthstone”. It is there that she takes her seat; it is the red and fitful glow of the heart’s fire which illumines her page. In other words, we read Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of character—her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy—hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life—hers is that of a country parson’s daughter; but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, who, as we should say in real life, have only to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order