for Charlotte's education there was principally in French literature, and indeed the language in common does away with the chief differences of race.) Alone among the innumerable writers who have made their comments upon Charlotte's life and works, M. Dimnet has set down a just judgment upon the bitter woman with her arrogant thoughts of herself and her truthfulness, and her wounding thoughts of others. He, nevertheless, takes up again the whole tradition of the English province when he shrinks with Charlotte into her parsonage watches with her the duty-ordered, sorrow-broken years go by.

and

M. Dimnet has the fine sense of English verbs and their characters that causes him to pause for a moment upon the rhetorical primness of these parts of speech as Charlotte Brontë used them in her earlier style. She did, in fact, inherit a manner of English that had been strained beyond rebound, fatigued beyond recovery, by the "corrupt following" of Gibbon; and there was within her a sense of propriety that caused her to conform. Straitened and serious elder daughter of her time, she kept the house of literature. She practised those verbs, to evince, to reside, to intimate, to peruse. She wrote "communicating instruction" for teaching; "an extensive and eligible connection"; "a small competency"; "an establishment on the Continent"; "It operated as a barrier to further intercourse"; and of a child (with a singular unfitness with childhood) "For the toys he possesses he seems to have contracted a partiality amounting to affection." I have been already rebuked for a criticism of Gibbon done by way of parenthesis in the course of an appreciation of some other author. Let me, therefore, repeat that I am writing of the corrupt following of that apostle and not of his own style. Gibbon's grammar is singularly weak, but

the corrupt followers have something worse than bad grammar. Gibbon was fond of "the latter" and "the former." "Oh, do not condemn me to the latter!" cries a lover in Mrs. Inchbald's novel, after a statement of his hopes and fears; and this was wreckage of Gibbon. "After suppressing a competitor who had assumed the purple at Mentz, he refused to gratify his troops with the plunder of the rebellious city," writes the great historian. When Mr. Micawber confesses "gratifying emotions of no common description" he conforms to a lofty and a distant Gibbon. And when an author, in a work on "The Divine Comedy," recently told us that Paolo and Francesca were to receive from Dante "such alleviation as circumstances would allow," that also is a shattered, a waste Gibbon, a waif of Gibbon. Encumbered by this drift and refuse of English, Charlotte Brontë yet achieved the miracle of her vocabulary. It is less wonderful that she should have appeared out of such a parsonage than that she should have arisen out of such a language.

A re-reading of her works is always a new amazing of her old reader who turns back to review the harvest of her English. It must have been with rapture that she claimed her own simplicity. And with what a moderation, how temperately, and how seldom she used her mastery! To the last she has an occasional attachment to her bonds; for she was not only fire and air. In one passage of her life she may remind us of the little colorless and thrifty henbird that Lowell watched nest-building with her mate, and cutting short the flutterings and billings wherewith he would now and then joyously interrupt the business; her building bird was a clergyman. He came, lately affianced, for a week's visit to her parsonage, and she wrote to her friend before his arrival: "My

an intimation that Mr. is coming on Monday"; and afterwards, in reference to her sewing, "he hindered me for a full week."

In

In alternate pages Villette is a book of spirit and fire, and a novel of illiberal rancour, of ungenerous, uneducated anger, ungentle, ignoble. order to forgive its offences, we have to remember in its author's favor not her pure style set free, not her splendor in literature, but rather the immeasurable sorrow of her life. Το read of that sorrow again is to open once more a wound which most men perhaps, certainly most women, received into their hearts in childhood. For the Life of Charlotte Brontë is one of the first books of biography put into the hands of a child, to whom Jane Eyre is allowed only in passages. We are young when we first hear in what narrow beds "the three are laid" -the two sisters and the brother-and in what a bed of living insufferable memories the one left lay alone, reviewing the hours of their deathalone in the sealed house that was only less narrow than their graves. The rich may set apart and dedicate a room, the poor change their street, but Charlotte Brontë, in close captivity of the fortunes of mediocrity, rested in the chair that had been her dying sister's, and held her melancholy bridals in the dining room that had been the scene of terrible and reluctant death.

born.

The

Mistress of some of the best prose of her century, Charlotte Brontë was subject to a Lewes, a Chorley, a Miss Martineau: that is, she suffered what in Italian is called soggezione in their presence. When she had met six minor contemporary writers-by-products of literature-at dinner, she had a headache and a sleepless night. She writes to her friend that these contributors to the quarterly press are greatly feared in literary London, and there is in her letter a sense of tremor and exhaustion. And what nights did the heads of the critics undergo after the meeting? Lewes, whose own romances are all condoned, all forgiven, by time and oblivion, who gave her lessons, who told her to study Jane Austen? others, whose reviews doubtless did their proportionate part in still further hunting and harrying the tired English of their day? And before Harriet Martineau she bore herself reverently. Harriet Martineau, albeit a woman of masculine understanding (we may imagine we hear her contemporaries give her the title), could not thread her way safely in and out of two or three negatives, but wrote about this very Charlotte Brontë: "I did not consider the book a coarse one, though I could not answer for it that there were no traits which, on a second leisurely reading, I might not dislike." Mrs. Gaskell quotes the passage with no consciousness of anything amiss.

As for Lewes's vanished lesson upon the methods of Jane Austen, it served one only sufficient purpose. Itself is not quoted by anyone alive, but Charlotte Brontë's rejoinder adds one to our little treasury of her incomparable pages. If they were twenty, they are twenty-one by the addition of this, written in a long-neglected letter and saved for us by Mr. Shorter's research,

for I believe his is the only record: "What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death-that Miss Austen ignores."

When the author of Jane Eyre faltered before six authors, more or less, at dinner in London, was it the writer of her second-class English who was shy? or was it the author of the passages here to follow?-and therefore one for whom the national tongue was much the better? There can be little doubt. The Charlotte Brontë who used the English of a world long corrupted by "one good custom"-the good custom of Gibbon's Latinity grown fatally popular-could at any time hold up her head amongst her reviewers; for her there was no sensitive interior solitude in that society. She who cowered was the Charlotte who made Rochester recall "the simple yet sagacious grace" of Jane's first smile; she who wrote: "I looked at my love; it shivered in my heart like a suffering child in a cold cradle"; who wrote: "To see what a heavy lid day slowly lifted, what a wan glance she flung upon the hills, you would have thought the sun's fire quenched in last night's floods." This new genius was solitary and afraid, and touched to the quick by the eyes and voice of judges. In her worse style there was no "quick." Latin-English, whether scholarly or unscholarly, is the mediate tongue. An unscholarly Latin-English is proof against the world. The scholarly Latin-English wherefrom it is disastrously derived is, in its own nobler measure, a defence against more august assaults than those of criticism. In the strength of it did Johnson hold parley with his profounder sorrows-hold parley (by his phrase), make terms (by his definition), give

them at last lodging and entertainment after sentence and treaty.

She

And the meaner office of protection against reviewers and the world was doubtless done by the meaner Latinity. The author of the phrase "The child contracted a partiality for his toys" had no need to fear any authors she might meet at dinner. Against Charlotte Brontë's sorrows her worse manner of English never stands for a moment. Those vain phrases fall from before her face and her bared heart. To the heart, to the heart she took the shafts of her griefs. She tells them therefore as she suffered them, vitally and mortally. "A great change approached. Affliction came in that shape which to anticipate is dread; to look back on, grief. My sister Emily first declined. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. made haste to leave us." "I remembered where the three were laid-in what narrow, dark dwellings." "Do you know this place? No, you never saw it; but you recognize the nature of these trees, this foliage-the cypress, the willow, the yew. Stone crosses like these are not unfamiliar to you, nor are these dim garlands of everlasting flowers. Here is the place." "Then the watcher approaches the patient's pillow, and sees a new and strange moulding of the familiar features, feels at once that the insufferable moment draws nigh." In the same passage comes another single word of genius, "the sound that so wastes our strength." And, fine as "wastes," is the "wronged" of another sentence"some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird."

It is easy to gather such words, more difficult to separate the best from such a mingled page as that on "Imagination:" "A spirit, softer and better than human reason, had descended with quiet flight to the waste;" and

"My hunger has this good angel appeased with food sweet and strange;" and "This daughter of Heaven remembered me to-night; she saw me weep, and she came with comfort; 'Sleep,' she said, 'sleep sweetly-I gild thy dreams.'' But here and there this one page has somewhat too easy and too loose a diction. Never does the true simplicity wear this aspect of excessive ease; this, for example, is simple and perfect: "Was this feeling dead? I do not know, but it was buried. Sometimes I thought the tomb unquiet."

Perhaps the most "eloquent" pages are unluckily those wherein we miss the friction-friction of water to the oar, friction of air to the pinion-friction that sensibly proves the use, the buoyancy, the act of language. Sometimes an easy eloquence resembles the easy labors of the daughters of Danaus. To draw water in a sieve is an easy art, rapid and relaxed.

But no laxity is ever, I think, to be found in her brief passages of landscape. "The keen, still cold of the morning was succeeded, later in the day, by a sharp breathing from the Russian Wastes; the cold zone sighed over the temperate zone and froze it fast." "Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work would he fold the wings whose waft was thunder, the tremor of whose plumes was storm." "The night is not calm: the equinox still struggles in its storms. The wild rains of the day are abated: the great single cloud disappears and rolls away from Heaven, not passing and leaving a sea all sapphire, but tossed buoyant before a continued, long-sounding, high-rushing moonlight tempest. No Endymion will watch for his goddess to-night: there are no flocks on the mountains." See, too, this ocean: "The sway of the whole Great Deep above a herd of whales rushing through the livid and liquid

thunder down from the frozen zone." And this promise of the visionary Shirley: "I am to be walking by myself on deck, rather late of an August evening, watching and being watched by a full harvest moon: something is to rise white on the surface of the sea, over which that moon mounts silent, and hangs glorious. . . . I think I hear it cry with an articulate voice.

I show you an image fair as alabaster emerging from the dim wave."

Charlotte Brontë knew well the experience of dreams. She seems to have undergone that inevitable dream of mourners-the human dream of the Labyrinth, shall I call it? the uncertain spiritual journey in search of the waiting and sequestered dead, which is the obscure subject of the "Eurydice" of Coventry Patmore's Odes. There is the lately dead, in exile, remote, betrayed, foreign, sad, indifferent, forsaken by some vague malice or neglect, sought by troubled love astray.

In Charlotte Brontë's page there is an autumnal and tempestuous dream. "A nameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very tone of a visitation from eternity. . . Suffering brewed in temporal or calculable measure tastes not as this suffering tasted." Finally, is there any need to cite the passage of Jane Eyre that contains the avowal, the vigil in the garden? Those are not words to be forgotten. Some tell you that a fine style will give you the memory of a scene and not of the recording words that are the author's means. And others again would have the phrase to be remembered foremost. Here, then, in Jane Eyre, are both memories equal. The night is perceived, the phrase is an experience; both have their place in the reader's irrevocable past. "Custom intervened between me and what I naturally and inevitably loved." "Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing in the wood?" "A waft of wind came

sweeping down the laurel walk, and trembled through the boughs of the chestnut; it wandered away to an infinite distance. . . . The nightingale's voice was then the only voice of the hour; in listening I again wept."

Whereas Charlotte Brontë walked, with exultation and enterprise, upon the road of symbols, under the guidance of her own visiting genius, Emily seldom or never went out upon those avenues. She was one who practised little or no imagery. Her style had the key of an inner prose which seems to leave imagery behind in the way of approaches the apparelled and arrayed approaches and ritual of literature-and so to go further and to be admitted among simple realities and antitypes.

Charlotte Brontë also knew that simple goal, but she loved her imagery. In the passage of Jane Eyre that tells of the return to Thornfield Hall, in ruins by fire, she bespeaks her reader's romantic attention to an image which in truth is not all golden. She has moments, on the other hand, of pure narrative, whereof each word is such a key as I spoke of but now, and unlocks an inner and an inner plain door of spiritual realities. There is, perhaps, no author who, simply telling what happened, tells it with so great a significance: "Jane, did you hear that nightingale singing in the wood?" and "She made haste to leave us." But her characteristic calling is to images, those avenues and temples oracular, and to the vision of symbols.

. You may hear the poet of great imagery praised as a great mystic. Nevertheless, although a great mystical poet makes images, he does not do so in his greatest moments. He is a great mystic, because he has a full vision of the mystery of realities, not because he has a clear invention of similitudes.

Piteous passion keen at having found, After exceeding ill, a little good. Shakespeare, Chaucer and Patmore yield us these great examples. Imagery is for the time when, as in these lines, the shock of feeling (which must needs pass, as the heart beats and pauses) is gone by:

Thy heart with dead winged innocences filled,

Even as a nest with birds,

After the old ones by the hawk are killed.

I cite these last lines because they are lines of imagery in a poem that without them would be insupportably close to spiritual facts; and because it seems to prove with what a yielding hand at play the poet of realities holds his symbols for a while. A great writer is both a major and a minor mystic, in the self-same poem; now suddenly close to his mystery (which is his greater moment) and anon making it mysterious with imagery (which is the moment of his most splendid lines).

The student passes delighted through the several courts of poetry, from the outer to the inner, from riches to more imaginative riches, and from decoration to more complex decoration; and prepares himself for the greater opulence of the innermost chamber. But when he crosses the last threshold he finds this midmost sanctuary to be a hypæethral temple, and in its custody and care a simple earth and a space of sky.

Emily Brontë seems to have a quite