conception. The emotions with which they dealt were universal emotions,
emotions of the morning of existence, the springtide joy and the
springtide terror. Every one of us as a boy or girl has had some
midnight dream of nameless obstacle and unutterable menace, in which
there was, under whatever imbecile forms, all the deadly stress and
panic of "Wuthering Heights." Every one of us has had a day-dream of
our own potential destiny not one atom more reasonable than "Jane Eyre."
And the truth which the Brontës came to tell us is the truth that many
waters cannot quench love, and that suburban respectability cannot touch
or damp a secret enthusiasm. Clapham, like every other earthly city, is
built upon a volcano. Thousands of people go to and fro in the
wilderness of bricks and mortar, earning mean wages, professing a mean
religion, wearing a mean attire, thousands of women who have never found
any expression for their exaltation or their tragedy but to go on
working harder and yet harder at dull and automatic employments, at
scolding children or stitching shirts. But out of all these silent ones
one suddenly became articulate, and spoke a resonant testimony, and her
name was Charlotte Brontë. Spreading around us upon every side to-day
like a huge and radiating geometrical figure are the endless branches of
the great city. There are times when we are almost stricken crazy, as
well we may be, by the multiplicity of those appalling perspectives, the
frantic arithmetic of that unthinkable population. But this thought of
ours is in truth nothing but a fancy. There are no chains of houses;
there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses
is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of these
men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each of
these houses stands in the centre of the world. There is no single house
of all those millions which has not seemed to someone at some time the
heart of all things and the end of travel.