lotte Bronte, unhappiness was more than juvenile
fretfulness. All her career was a revolt against conventionality,
against isolation, against irresistible natural forces, such as climate
and ill-health and physical insignificance. Would this insubmissive
spirit have passed out of her writings, as it passed, for instance, out
of those of George Sand? I am not sure, for we see it as strongly,
though more gracefully and skilfully expressed, in _Villette_ as in the
early letters which her biographers have printed. Her hatred of what was
commonplace and narrow and obvious flung her against a wall of
prejudice, which she could not break down. She could only point to it by
her exhausting efforts; she could only invite the generation which
succeeded her to bring their pickaxes to bear upon it. Hence, to the
very last, she seems, more than any other figure in our literature, to
be forever ruffled in temper, for ever angry and wounded and indignant,
rejecting consolation, crouched like a sick animal in the cavern of her
own quenchless pride. This is not an amiable attitude, nor is it
historically true that this was Charlotte Bronte's constant aspect. But
I will venture to say that her amiabilities, her yielding moods, are
really the unessential parts of her disposition, and that a certain
admirable ferocity is the notable feature of her intellectual character.

Her great heart was always bleeding. Here at Dewsbury, in the years we
are contemplating, the hemorrhage was of the most doleful kind, for it
was concealed, suppressed, it was an inward flow. When once she became
an author the pain of her soul was relieved. She said, in 1850, looking
back on the publication of the hapless first volume of poems, "The mere
effort to succeed gave a wonderful zest to existence." Then, a little
later, when no one had paid the slightest attention to the slender trio
of maiden voices, "Something like the chill of despair began to invade
their hearts." With a less powerful inspiration, they must have ceased
to make the effort; they must have succumbed in a melancholy oblivion.
But they were saved by the instinct of a mission. It was not their
private grief which primarily stirred them. What urged them on was the
dim consciousness that they gave voice to a dumb sense of the suffering
of all the world. They had to go on working; they had to pursue their
course, though it might seem sinister or fatal; their business was to
move mankind, not to indulge