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



Thej were too old for their age, too wise for their years, and 

 began to write and act little plays when they should have been 

 romping. Their games, if they could be called games, were poor 

 imitations of the pastimes of the old and effete, rather than the 

 great games of exuberant childhood. But these hard experiences 

 had the effect of making them shy and reserved with strangers. 

 Ciiarlotte had women friends, but they were rather satellites than 

 equals — Ellen Nussey, Mary Taylor and Margaret Wooler, were life- 

 long worshippers of hers. They shine in her light. She wrote 

 hundreds of letters to Miss Nussey which, although written for 

 private eyes, have been spread out by enterprising biographers before 

 the public. But Charlotte, notwithstanding these companionships, 

 was always a sad and subdued woman — except in the home circle. 

 With strangers she was shrinking and shy, as an untamed squirrel. 

 When she was visiting Mrs. Gaskell at Manchester a Mr. Potter 

 called. Mrs. Gaskell rose to welcome him, and turned round to 

 the chair near the window to present Charlotte Bronte to him. 

 She was surprised to find the chair empty, and she thought 

 Charlotte had escaped through the door into the dining-room. 

 When Mr. Potter left Charlotte appeared from behind the heavy 

 curtain which hung from the window, and explained that she 

 " wasn't able to face a stranger." And yet that was after she was 

 a famous writer of books. But her aloofness was nothing to that 

 of Emily. She doesn't seem to have had any women friends, and 

 no men lovers. She was as lonely as a great Alp ! But, after 

 all, is not that one of the dooms of greatness, that it cannot find 

 its mate ? 



Are not some great spirits severed from friends by the austerity 

 of their genius, and condemned to the solitary cell of their own great 

 imaginings ? 



Now, it is strange, in relation to Charlotte Bronte, that she should 

 have made one of the fullest confessions of the most secret heart- 

 matters that was ever made by the pen of a Avomen. In her books 

 she not only " stands and unfolds herself," but as we have seen, 

 every place where she has been, most of the persons she has met, 

 are in this her show. That she courted seclusion, and yet should 

 let the public into the closet of her heart, is a very strange fact in 

 literary history. It is, as I said, partly because of the fact that her 

 pictures are veritable bits of domestic history — that the people in 

 them are real people ; the actual schools and private houses are the 

 "- properties " of her theatre — that she has attained a publicity and 

 secured an interest which is not given to ordinary imaginative 

 literature, and which is withheld from Emily Bronte's more remark- 

 able book. It is because of this characteristic of Charlotte Bronte's 

 books that they have been the centre of a storm of criticism. She 

 has had ardent admirers and angry readers. Her portraiture was 

 often too true to be pleasant. Often she was scathingly unjust, as 



