of it. The real strength there is in characters like Robert Moore, when
he is dealing with anything except women, is the romance of industry in
its first advance: a romance that has not remained. On such fighting
frontiers people always exaggerate the strong qualities the masculine
sex does possess, and always add a great many strong qualities that it
does not possess. That is, briefly, all the reason in the Brontës on
this special subject: the rest is stark unreason. It can be most clearly
seen in that sister of Charlotte Brontë's who has achieved the real
feat of remaining as a great woman rather than a great writer. There is
really, in a narrow but intense way, a tradition of Emily Brontë: as
there is a tradition of St. Peter or Dr. Johnson. People talk as if they
had known her, apart from her works. She must have been something more
than an original person; perhaps an origin. But so far as her written
works go she enters English letters only as an original person--and
rather a narrow one. Her imagination was sometimes superhuman--always
inhuman. _Wuthering Heights_ might have been written by an eagle. She is
the strongest instance of these strong imaginations that made the other
sex a monster: for Heathcliffe fails as a man as catastrophically as he
succeeds as a demon. I think Emily Brontë was further narrowed by the
broadness of her religious views; but never, of course, so much as
George Eliot.

In any case, it is Charlotte Brontë who enters Victorian literature. The
shortest way of stating her strong contribution is, I think, this: that
she reached the highest romance through the lowest realism. She did not
set out with Amadis of Gaul in a forest or with Mr. Pickwick in a comic
club. She set out with herself, with her own dingy clothes, and
accidental ugliness, and flat, coarse, provincial household; and
forcibly fused all such muddy materials into a spirited fairy-tale. If
the first chapters on the home and school had not proved how heavy and