140 Mr. J. H. Balfour Browne [June 1, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING. 



Friday, June 1, 1917. 



His Grace The Duke of Northumberland, K.G. P.O. D.C.L. 

 F.R.S., President, in the Chair. 



J. H. Balfour Browne, K.C. D.L. J.P. LL.l). M.E.I. 



The Brontes: A Hundred Years After. 



It is one hundred and one years since Charlotte Bronte was born 

 at Thornton, and ninety-nine years since Emily Bronte was born, 

 and perhaps it is not improper to look upon this year as a sort of 

 centenary of both these remarkable women. There is a "close 

 season" for the dead, and daring that period, after the grave has 

 closed upon them, even Calumny shuts its mouth, and to some extent 

 Truth also is muzzled, out of respect to the feelings of the living. 

 It was under this disability — writing in that "close season" — that 

 Mrs. Gaskell achieved her admirable " Life of Charlotte Bronte," 

 which, even with its defects, is perhaps the most readable biography 

 in the language — a biography of which Thackeray said that it " was 

 necessarily incomplete, though most touching and admirable." 



It was burdened by the same restrictions that Sir AVemyss Reid 

 compiled, with the assistance of more of the many letters of Charlotte 

 Bronte, his excellent " Monograph," which was published in 1877. 

 Indeed, Sir Wemyss Reid, writing to me after the publication of his 

 book, said he had been accused of " not telling the whole truth about 

 Charlotte's residence in Brussels," and added, " But how could I, 

 whilst her husband still lives, and favours me with an occasional 

 letter of a by no means amicable kind." 



But now, after these sixty years, it is easier to speak the whole 

 truth than it w^as then, and even to point to errors which have been 

 made by writers of "lives" in their painstaking but "necessarily 

 incomplete " records of the Brontes. 



There is one curious circumstance to be noted in connexion with 

 the Bronte literature, and that is, that in the case — especially of 

 Charlotte — of writing many books there is no end. Biographies, 

 "Monographs," "Notes," "Circles" and "Mysteries" load the shelves 

 of our libraries, and the curious tiling is that all these have been 

 devoted to recording and explaining the life of the most auto- 

 biographical of all our novelists. Of course any writer of fiction is, 



