STEVENSON
THOMAS CARLYLE
TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF SIMPLICITY
SAVONAROLA
THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT




CHARLOTTE BRONTË


Objection is often raised against realistic biography because it reveals
so much that is important and even sacred about a man's life. The real
objection to it will rather be found in the fact that it reveals about a
man the precise points which are unimportant. It reveals and asserts and
insists on exactly those things in a man's life of which the man himself
is wholly unconscious; his exact class in society, the circumstances of
his ancestry, the place of his present location. These are things which
do not, properly speaking, ever arise before the human vision. They do
not occur to a man's mind; it may be said, with almost equal truth, that
they do not occur in a man's life. A man no more thinks about himself as
the inhabitant of the third house in a row of Brixton villas than he
thinks about himself as a strange animal with two legs. What a man's
name was, what his income was, whom he married, where he lived, these
are not sanctities; they are irrelevancies.

A very strong case of this is the case of the Brontës. The Brontë is in
the position of the mad lady in a country village; her eccentricities
form an endless source of innocent conversation to that exceedingly mild