with a quiet tolerance and a good-natured sense of amusement at their
follies. It was little wonder that Charlotte Bronte, who had at all
times the courage of her convictions, could not and would not read
Jane Austen's novels. "They have not got story enough for me," she
boldly affirmed. "I don't want my blood curdled, but I like to have
it stirred. Miss Austen strikes me as milk-and-watery and, to say
truth, dull." Of course she did! How was a woman, whose ideas of
after-dinner conversation are embodied in the amazing language of
Baroness Ingram and her titled friends to appreciate the delicious,
sleepy small-talk in "Sense and Sensibility," about the respective
heights of the respective grandchildren? It is to Miss Bronte's
abiding lack of humor that we owe such stately caricatures as Blanche
Ingram and all the high-born, ill-bred company who gather in
Thornfield Hall, like a group fresh from Madame Tussaud's ingenious
workshop, and against whose waxen unreality Jane Eyre and Rochester,
alive to their very finger-tips, contrast like twin sparks of fire.
It was her lack of humor, too, which beguiled her into asserting that
the forty "wicked, sophistical and immoral French novels" which found
their way down to lonely Haworth gave her "a thorough idea of France
and Paris"--alas! poor, misjudged France!--and which made her think
Thackeray very nearly as wicked, sophistical and immoral as the
French novels. Even her dislike for children was probably due to the
same irremediable misfortune; for the humors of children are the only
redeeming points amid their general naughtiness and vexing
misbehavior. Mr. Swinburne, guiltless himself of any jocose
tendencies, has made the unique discovery that Charlotte Bronte
strongly resembles Cervantes, and that Paul Emanuel is a modern
counterpart of Don Quixote; and well it is for our poet that the
irascible little professor never heard him hint at such a similarity.
Surely, to use one of Mr. Swinburne's own incomparable expressions,