And Charlotte Bronte was a true artist.  She was also more than this; a brave, sincere, high-minded woman, with a soul, as the great moralist saw, “of impetuous honesty.”  She was not seduced, or even moved, by her sudden fame.  She put aside the prospect of success, money, and social distinction as things which revolted her.  She was quite right.  With all her genius it was strictly and narrowly limited; she was ignorant of the world to a degree immeasurably below that of any other known writer of fiction; her world was incredibly scanty and barren.  She had to spin everything out of her own brain in that cold, still, gruesome Haworth parsonage.  It was impossible for any genius to paint a world of which it was as ignorant as a child.  Hence, in eight years she only completed four tales for publication.  And she did right.  With her strict limits both of brain and of experience she could not go further.  Perhaps, as it was, she did more than was needed. Shirley and Villette, with all their fine scenes, are interesting now mainly because Charlotte Bronte wrote them, and because they throw light upon her brain and nature. The Professor is entirely so, and has hardly any other quality.  We need not groan that we have no more than we have from her pen. Jane Eyre would suffice for many reputations and alone will live.

In considering the gifted Bronte family, it is really Charlotte alone who finally concerns us.  Emily Bronte was a wild, original, and striking creature, but her one book is a kind of prose Kubla Khan—­a nightmare of the superheated imagination.  Anne Bronte always seems but a pale reflection of the family.  In any other family she might be interesting—­just as “Barrel Mirabeau” was the good boy and fool of the Mirabeau family, though in another family he would have been the genius and the profligate.  And so, the poems of the whole three are interesting as psychologic studies, but have hardly a single stanza that can be called poetry at all.  It is significant, but hardly paradoxical, that Charlotte’s verses are the worst of the three.  How many born writers of musical prose have persisted in manufacturing verse of a curiously dull and unmelodious quality!  The absolute masters of prose and of verse in equal perfection hardly exceed Shakespeare and Shelley, Goethe and Hugo.  And Charlotte Bronte is an eminent example of a strong imagination working with freedom in prose, but which began by using the instrument of verse, and used it in a manner that never rose for an instant above mediocrity.

Of the Brontes it is Charlotte only who concerns us, and of Charlotte’s work it is Jane Eyre only that can be called a masterpiece.  To call it a masterpiece, as Thackeray did, is not to deny its manifold and manifest shortcomings.  It is a very small corner of the world that it gives, and that world is seen by a single acute observer from without.  The plain little governess dominates