would still remain the truest story in the world. The typical Brontë
character is, indeed, a kind of monster. Everything in him except the
essential is dislocated. His hands are on his legs and his feet on his
arms, his nose is above his eyes, but his heart is in the right place.

The great and abiding truth for which the Brontë cycle of fiction stands
is a certain most important truth about the enduring spirit of youth,
the truth of the near kinship between terror and joy. The Brontë
heroine, dingily dressed, badly educated, hampered by a humiliating
inexperience, a kind of ugly innocence, is yet, by the very fact of her
solitude and her gaucherie, full of the greatest delight that is
possible to a human being, the delight of expectation, the delight of an
ardent and flamboyant ignorance. She serves to show how futile it is of
humanity to suppose that pleasure can be attained chiefly by putting on
evening dress every evening, and having a box at the theatre every first
night. It is not the man of pleasure who has pleasure; it is not the man
of the world who appreciates the world. The man who has learnt to do all
conventional things perfectly has at the same time learnt to do them
prosaically. It is the awkward man, whose evening dress does not fit
him, whose gloves will not go on, whose compliments will not come off,
who is really full of the ancient ecstasies of youth. He is frightened
enough of society actually to enjoy his triumphs. He has that element
of fear which is one of the eternal ingredients of joy. This spirit is
the central spirit of the Brontë novel. It is the epic of the
exhilaration of the shy man. As such it is of incalculable value in our
time, of which the curse is that it does not take joy reverently because
it does not take it fearfully. The shabby and inconspicuous governess of
Charlotte Brontë, with the small outlook and the small creed, had more
commerce with the awful and elemental forces which drive the world than
a legion of lawless minor poets. She approached the universe with real