1917] on The Brontes: A Hundred Years After 147 



in her portrait of Madame Beck, if, as we are compelled to Ijelieve, 

 that was a likeness of ^ladame Heger. 



Charlotte Bronte's letters have tramped through auction rooms, 

 even a pitiful wisp of hair has been sold at an auction, there are 

 stacks of her correspondence at the British Museum, and there is 

 scarcely a fact in her private timid life that has not been exposed. 

 We are even told, with the trivial minuteness of those who pride 

 themselves on irrelevant details, that she made a chemise when she 

 was five years of age. All this lime-light business would have been 

 very distasteful to a woman with such sensitive modesty as the 

 writer of these masterful books. But she herself has pulled the 

 string of this shower-bath of words and criticisms, and she caunot 

 complain of the douche. 



But if, as I have said, their childhood was sad, if they were 

 isolated on those moors, if all their games were lessons, and if they 

 never were the wholesome laughing children they ought to have 

 been, their womanhood was equally depressing and uncomfortable. 

 It requires a saint or a mother to be a good governess. The only 

 one of them to come near saintliness was Anne, and she succeeded 

 better in that vocation than the other two. But motherliness was 

 not in Charlotte Bronte's nature, or, as far as we am make out, in 

 Emily's. The latter Hked dogs better than children. It is certain 

 Charlotte never took to children, and there are no real nursery 

 children in her books — nursery children who begin to lose their 

 wings when they begin to feel their feet.* 



But this want of motherliness in Charlotte Bronte's books — who 

 was a good house-mother at home — is a distinct defect in these great 

 monuments of genius. 



They were great teachers of men and women, but quite poor 

 teachers of little children. It was obvious that neither Charlotte 

 nor Emily made ideal governesses. It is odd to note that with such 

 a dull home as Haworth, the Bronte's were, when they were away 

 from it, home-sick. Thus, Emily, who went as a pupil to Miss 

 Wooler's at Roehead, when Charlotte returned there as a teacher, 

 " became literally ill from home-sickness," and Charlotte says, " I 

 felt in my heart she would die, if she did not go home, and with 

 this conviction obtained her recall." Then, when after some time, 

 Emily went as a governess to a school near Halifax, although there 



* Swinburne in his "Note," where he does more tban eloquent justice to 

 Charlotte Bronte's genius, and in doing so, like an impassioned critic, has 

 done less than justice to other great writers, has acknowledged rightly George 

 Eliot's superior claims in this respect, and admits George Eliot's adorable 

 fidelity in writing of children — and even mentions some of her little ones who 

 have the charm of infancy which secures for them unquestioned immortality. 

 That he was sometimes harsh in his critical comparisons is true. In speaking 

 of Charlotte Bronte's work, he says it will exist "when even Daniel Deronda 

 has gone the way of all waxworks ; when Miss Broughton no longer ' cometh 

 up as a flower ' ; and even Mrs. Oliphant is at length ' cut down like the grass."* 



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