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



curiositj of a gaping public must be trying for the pachydermatous 

 self-conceit of any man. 



But it is not with such experiences as that, or with tlie apron- 

 string-checked affection of Mr. George Smith (her Dr. John) that 

 we need concern ourselves. As to Dr. John, I may say in passing 

 that it is quite easy to believe that he was as estimable as she made 

 him out to be ; but as Wemyss Reid told me, " Charlotte's common 

 sense, assisted by Dr. John's mother, who dreaded the idea of such a 

 union, came to the rescue, and she quietly put her good-looking and 

 prosperous adorer aside." He seems, from her account, to have 

 been a genial companion, but he was a publisher, and the payment 

 of only £500 for the copyright of " Villette," after the success of 

 "Jane Eyre" and "Shirley," was no doubt good business for the 

 firm, but it naturally disappointed the author. But this, of course, 

 was long before the Brussels days, and was, after all, a trivial episode 

 in Charlotte Bronte's life. 



Emily seems to have had a heart which could love as deeply, as 

 tragically, as her sister, but seems to have died heart-whole. Still, 

 that for a passionate heart is the worst of diseases. 

 ' Charlotte was certainly not heart-whole when she died, although 

 she had got over to some extent the fracture which was the most 

 poignant experience of her womanhood. 



There are few such tragedies connected with literature as this 

 one of Charlotte Bronte's. On the background of that forbidding 

 village on the hill-side of the grey Yorkshire moor, after her retui-n 

 from Brussels, there was tragic pain and suffering. Deaths ! the 

 history of the Brontes is little more than an obituary ! The vicarage 

 at Haworth was there surrounded with hundreds of gravestones, 

 records of hundreds of deaths. But death itself is not a tragedy. 

 It is the futility of life which calls for tears, and there are no annals 

 in all the range of literature of such sorrowful lives as those of 

 the great sisters which were lived in the loneliness and seclusion 

 of that paltry place. Of course it would be absurd to say that lives 

 which produced "Wuthering Heights," "The Old Stoic," "Jane 

 Eyre" and " Villette " were wasted. They were abundantly used. 

 They have left us magnificent legacies. But although the writers 

 have gone home, have they taken their wnges ? Xo ! Their 

 childhood was wasted, for they never had a child's joy ; their 

 womanhood was wasted, for their great heart stores were all in vain ; 

 and when they might have accomplished even greater things than 

 these remains give us, they were claimed by death, who had a mort- 

 gage of tubercle upon their property in life. 



There is one curious matter to be noted in connexion with 

 Charlotte Bronte's life and literature. No writer, as I say, has 

 written more about herself than she has. It is not that she hns 

 forced facts into lier service — she has made confessions like her own 

 confession to the priest in St. (Judule in Brussels. She has un- 



