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
less than the externals of almost any other writers. It is interesting
to know whether Jane Austen had any knowledge of the lives of the
officers and women of fashion whom she introduced into her masterpieces.
It is interesting to know whether Dickens had ever seen a shipwreck or
been inside a workhouse. For in these authors much of the conviction is
conveyed, not always by adherence to facts, but always by grasp of them.
But the whole aim and purport and meaning of the work of the Brontës is
that the most futile thing in the whole universe is fact. Such a story
as "Jane Eyre" is in itself so monstrous a fable that it ought to be
excluded from a book of fairy tales. The characters do not do what they
ought to do, nor what they would do, nor it might be said, such is the