its colour and its perfume the environment of its root. The moral
constitution of the writer is reflected in the influence of the written
page. This is the incessant contention; on one hand the independence of
art asserts itself; on the other, it is impossible to escape from the
implicit influence of conduct upon art. There have been few writers of
any age in whom this battle raged more fiercely than it did in Charlotte
Brontë. Her books, and those of her sisters, seem anodyne enough to-day;
to readers of a sensitive species they seemed, when they were published,
as dangerous as _Werther_ had been, as seductive as the _Nouvelle
Heloïse_. The reason of this was, in the main, the spirit of revolt
which inspired them. There was something harsh and glaring in their
landscape; there was that touch of Salvator Rosa which one of their
earliest critics observed in them. But more essential was the
stubbornness, the unflinching determination to revise all accepted
formulas of conduct, to do this or that, not because it was usual to do
it, but because it was rational, and in harmony with human nature.

Into an age which had become almost exclusively utilitarian, and in
which the exercise of the imagination, in its real forms, was sedulously
discountenanced, Charlotte Brontë introduced passion in the sphere of
prose fiction, as Byron had introduced it in the sphere of verse thirty
years earlier. It was an inestimable gift; it had to come to us, from
Charlotte Brontë or another, to save our literature from a decline into
triviality and pretension. But she suffered, as Byron had suffered, in
the direct ratio of her originality. If a writer employs passion in an
age which has ceased to recognise it as one of the necessities of
literary vitality he is safe to be accused of perverting his readers.
Balzac says, "When nothing else can be charged against an author, the
reproach of immorality is thrown at his head." When we study the record
of the grim life of the sisters at Haworth, like that of three young