ese strong imaginations that made the other
sex a monster: for Heathcliffe fails as a man as catastrophically as he
succeeds as a demon. I think Emily Bronte was further narrowed by the
broadness of her religious views; but never, of course, so much as
George Eliot.

In any case, it is Charlotte Bronte who enters Victorian literature. The
shortest way of stating her strong contribution is, I think, this: that
she reached the highest romance through the lowest realism. She did not
set out with Amadis of Gaul in a forest or with Mr. Pickwick in a comic
club. She set out with herself, with her own dingy clothes, and
accidental ugliness, and flat, coarse, provincial household; and
forcibly fused all such muddy materials into a spirited fairy-tale. If
the first chapters on the home and school had not proved how heavy and
hateful _sanity_ can be, there would really be less point in the
insanity of Mr. Rochester's wife--or the not much milder insanity of
Mrs. Rochester's husband. She discovered the secret of hiding the
sensational in the commonplace: and _Jane Eyre_ remains the best of her
books (better even than _Villette_) because while it is a human document
written in blood, it is also one of the best blood-and-thunder detective
stories in the world.

But while Emily Bronte was as unsociable as a storm at midnight, and
while Charlotte Bronte was at best like that warmer and more domestic
thing, a house on fire--they do connect themselves with the calm of
George Eliot, as the forerunners of many later developments of the
feminine advance. Many forerunners (if it comes to that) would have felt
rather ill if they had seen the things they foreran. This notion of a
hazy anticipation of after history has been absurdly overdone: as when
men connect Chaucer with the Reformation; which is like connecting Homer
with the Syracusan Expedition. But it is to some extent true that all
these great Victorian women had a sort of unrest in their souls. And the
proof of it is that (after what I will claim to call the healthier time
of Dickens and Thackeray) it began to be admitted by the great Victorian
men. If there had not been something in that irritation, we should
hardly have had to speak in these pages of _Diana of the Crossways_ or
of _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_. To what this strange and very local sex
war has been due I shall not ask, because I have no answer. That it was
due to votes or even little legal inequalities about marriage,