soldiers round a camp-fire with the unseen enemy prowling in the
darkness just out of their sight--when we think of the strenuous vigil,
the intractable and indomitable persistence, the splendour of the
artistic result--we may console ourselves in our anger at the insults
they endured, by reflecting how little they cared. And their noble
indifference to opinion further endears them to us. We may repeat of
them all what Charlotte in a letter once said of Emily, "A certain
harshness in her powerful and peculiar character only makes me cling to
her more."

This insubmissiveness, which was the unconscious armour given to protect
her against the inevitable attacks of fortune, while, on the other hand,
it was the very sign-manual of Charlotte's genius, was, on the other, a
drawback from which she did not live long enough to emancipate her
nature. It is responsible for her lack of interest in what is delicate
and complex; it excused to herself a narrowness of vision which we are
sometimes tempted to find quite distressing. It is probably the cause of
a fault that never quits her for long, a tendency to make her characters
express themselves with a lyrical extravagance which sometimes comes
close to the confines of rodomontade. Charlotte Brontë never arrives at
that mastery of her material which permits the writer to stand apart
from his work, and sway the reader with successive tides of emotion
while remaining perfectly calm himself. Nor is she one of those whose
visible emotion is nevertheless fugitive, like an odour, and evaporates,
leaving behind it works of art which betray no personal agitation. On
the contrary, her revolt, her passion, all the violence of her
sensibility, are present on her written page, and we cannot read it with
serenity or with a merely captious curiosity, because her own eager
spirit, immortal in its active force, seems to throb beside it.