diction of that other eminent country gentleman, Mr. Darcy) was simply
individualistic not only in practice, but in theory. Now any one may be
so in practice: but a man who is simply individualistic in theory must
merely be an ass. Undoubtedly the Brontës exposed themselves to some
misunderstanding by thus perpetually making the masculine creature much
more masculine than he wants to be. Thackeray (a man of strong though
sleepy virility) asked in his exquisite plaintive way: "Why do our lady
novelists make the men bully the women?" It is, I think, unquestionably
true that the Brontës treated the male as an almost anarchic thing
coming in from outside nature; much as people on this planet regard a
comet. Even the really delicate and sustained comedy of Paul Emanuel is
not quite free from this air of studying something alien. The reply may
be made that the women in men's novels are equally fallacious. The reply
is probably just.

What the Brontës really brought into fiction was exactly what Carlyle
brought into history; the blast of the mysticism of the North. They were
of Irish blood settled on the windy heights of Yorkshire; in that
country where Catholicism lingered latest, but in a superstitious form;
where modern industrialism came earliest and was more superstitious
still. The strong winds and sterile places, the old tyranny of barons
and the new and blacker tyranny of manufacturers, has made and left that
country a land of barbarians. All Charlotte Brontë's earlier work is
full of that sullen and unmanageable world; moss-troopers turned
hurriedly into miners; the last of the old world forced into supporting
the very first crudities of the new. In this way Charlotte Brontë
represents the Victorian settlement in a special way. The Early
Victorian Industrialism is to George Eliot and to Charlotte Brontë,
rather as the Late Victorian Imperialism would have been to Mrs. Humphry
Ward in the centre of the empire and to Miss Olive Schreiner at the edge