ey fail to distinguish between his best
and his worst. Their fastidious seniors make too little of him, when
they note his many shortcomings and fail to see that in certain
elements of humour he has no equal and no rival. If we mean Charles
Dickens to live we must fix our eye on these supreme gifts alone.

VII

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

They who are still youthful in the nineties can hardly understand the
thrill which went through us all in the forties upon the appearance of
_Jane Eyre_, on the discovery of a new genius and a new style. The
reputation of most later writers grew by degrees and by repeated
impressions of good work. Trollope, George Eliot, Stevenson, George
Meredith, did not conquer the interest of the larger public until after
many books and by gradual widening of the judgment of experts. But
little Charlotte Bronte, who published but three tales in six years and
who died at the age of thirty-eight, bounded into immediate fame--a
fame that after nearly fifty years we do not even now find to have been
excessive.

And then, there was such personal interest in the writer's self, in her
intense individuality, in her strong character; there was so much
sympathy with her hard and lonely life; there was such pathos in her
family history and the tragedy which threw gloom over her whole life,
and cut it off in youth after a few months of happiness. To have lived
in poverty, in a remote and wild moorland, almost friendless and in
continual struggle against sickness, to have been motherless since the
age of five, to have lost four sisters and a brother before she was
more than thirty-three, to have been sole survivor of a large
household, to have passed a life of continual weakness, toil, and
suffering--and then to be cut off after nine months of marriage,--all
this touched the sympathies of the world as the private life of few
writers touches them. And then the shock of her sudden death came upon
us as a personal sorrow. Such genius, such courage, such perseverance,
such promise--and yet but three books in all, published at intervals of
two and of four years! There was meaning in the somewhat unusual form
in which Mrs. Gaskell opens her _Life of Charlotte Bronte_, setting out
verbatim in her first chapter the seven memorial inscriptions to the
buried family in Haworth Church, and placing on the title-page a
vignette of Haworth churchyard with its white tombstones. Charlotte
Bronte was a kind of prosaic