and bucolic circle, the literary world. The truly glorious gossips of
literature, like Mr Augustine Birrell and Mr Andrew Lang, never tire of
collecting all the glimpses and anecdotes and sermons and side-lights
and sticks and straws which will go to make a Brontë museum. They are
the most personally discussed of all Victorian authors, and the
limelight of biography has left few darkened corners in the dark old
Yorkshire house. And yet the whole of this biographical investigation,
though natural and picturesque, is not wholly suitable to the Brontës.
For the Brontë genius was above all things deputed to assert the supreme
unimportance of externals. Up to that point truth had always been
conceived as existing more or less in the novel of manners. Charlotte
Brontë electrified the world by showing that an infinitely older and
more elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in which no person,
good or bad, had any manners at all. Her work represents the first great
assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilisation is a disguise as
tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a 'bal masqué.' She showed that
abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside a
manufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace spinster, with the dress of
merino and the soul of flame. It is significant to notice that Charlotte
Brontë, following consciously or unconsciously the great trend of her
genius, was the first to take away from the heroine not only the
artificial gold and diamonds of wealth and fashion, but even the natural
gold and diamonds of physical beauty and grace. Instinctively she felt
that the whole of the exterior must be made ugly that the whole of the
interior might be made sublime. She chose the ugliest of women in the
ugliest of centuries, and revealed within them all the hells and heavens
of Dante.

It may, therefore, I think, be legitimately said that the externals of
the Brontës' life, though singularly picturesque in themselves, matter