1917] on The Brontes: A Hundred Years After 141 



even when pretending to write about the lives of others, making 

 certain confessions as to his own thoughts and feelings, and every 

 writer must transcribe from the pages of his or her experience. It 

 is no surprise to us to learn that the wings of imagination are no use 

 without the feet of experience. 



But very few writers have made such literal transcripts from her 

 own past as Charlotte Bronte. Many of her pages read like a diary. 



Everyone, from the very first, has recognized, in " Jane Eyre " 

 and " Yillette " especially, works of great fiction, but also of intimate 

 biographical confession. Charlotte Bronte, in writing to her life- 

 long friend, Ellen Nussey, says, " Thou hast an honest soul as ever 

 animated human carcase, and a clean one, for it is not ashamed of 

 showing its inmost recesses — only be careful with whom you are 

 frank." 



It is true of Charlotte herself that she was not ashamed of 

 showing the inmost recesses of her fiery heart — and it is in that 

 that her merit lies — but she was " frank " with the public, and wrote 

 down not only her own painful history but her most secret feelings 

 in these great confessions of her books. 



But although it would seem by thus "making," in the old phrase, 

 "a clean breast of it," she had really left nothing for those who 

 essayed her biography to do, it is this very candour which has 

 apparently been the cause of all this vehement literature which has 

 been devoted to her, and to those who were associated with her. 



Beginning with the spite of the " Quarterly " Reviewer, who said 

 of the author of " Jane Eyre " that she was *' evidently a woman who 

 had long forfeited the society of her own sex " (it was only a woman 

 that could have written that calumny), the memories of these women 

 — Charlotte, " the fiery-hearted vestal of Haworth," according to 

 Swinburne, and Emily, the strongest writer of fiction of the century 

 — have been tormented by works of criticism. 



It was this quality of literal candour in Charlotte Bronte's books 

 which made them not only literature but conundrums. The critics 

 and the public were not only interested in the story, they were 

 delighted in the search for the various persons who had sat in 

 Charlotte's studio for such vivid portraiture. But her works were 

 not only a small portrait gallery — they were a gazetteer. 



All the places which are mentioned in them were identified. 

 Lowood was Cowan Bridge School ; Oakwell Hall was the Field- 

 head in "Shirley" ; Yillette was Brussels ; and so on. Indeed, you 

 cannot turn a page but you are in some place which has been 

 identified, or in the presence of someone who had a real existence 

 and was the model for her sometimes too literal sketch. Mr. Brockle- 

 hurst was Mr. Cams Wilson ; M. Pelet (in " The Professor "), 

 Rochester ; Robert Moore and Paul Emanuel were, according to 

 some, all drawn from M. Heger. Again, Jane Eyre, Caroline 

 Helston and Lucy Suowe were, according to those amateur detectives. 



