poignancy, a vibration which is Brontësque and nothing more. And this
Brontësque quality is what the theorists have (like Madame Héger, and
possibly Monsieur) neither allowed for nor understood.

* * * * *

For this "fiery-hearted Vestal", this virgin, sharp-tongued and
sharper-eyed, this scorner of amorous curates, had a genius for
friendship. This genius, like her other genius, was narrow in its range
and opportunity, and for that all the more ardent and intense. It fed on
what came to its hand. It could even grow, like her other genius, with
astounding vitality out of strange and hostile soil. She seems to have
had many friends, obscure and great; the obscure, the Dixons, the
Wheelrights, the Taylors, the Nusseys, out of all proportion to the
great. But properly speaking she had only two friends, Mary Taylor and
Ellen Nussey, the enchanting, immortal "Nel".

There _is_ something at first sight strange and hostile about Mary
Taylor, the energetic, practical, determined, terribly robust person you
see so plainly trying, in the dawn of their acquaintance, to knock the
nonsense out of Charlotte. Mary Taylor had no appreciation of the
Brontësque. When Charlotte told Mary Taylor that at Cowan Bridge she
used to stand in the burn on a stone to watch the water flow by, Mary
Taylor told Charlotte that she should have gone fishing. When _Jane
Eyre_ appeared she wrote to Charlotte in a strain that is amusing to
posterity. There is a touch of condescension in her praise. She is
evidently surprised at anything so great coming out of Charlotte. "It
seemed to me incredible that you had actually written a book." "You are
very different from me," she says, "in having no doctrine to preach. It
is impossible to squeeze a moral out of your production." She is