uncompromising directness put them down as mere improper plays, the
amusing qualities of which were insufficient to excuse their
coarseness, and which were manifestly unfit for the "gentle Ellen's"
eyes.

In fact, humor would at all times have been the poorest excuse to
offer to Miss Bronte for any form of moral dereliction, for it was
the one quality she lacked herself and failed to tolerate in others.
Sam Weller was apparently as obnoxious to her as was Falstaff, for
she would not even consent to meet Dickens when she was being
lionized in London society--a degree of abstemiousness on her part
which it is disheartening to contemplate. It does not seem too much
to say that every shortcoming in Charlotte Bronte's admirable work,
every limitation in her splendid genius, arose primarily from her
want of humor. Her severities of judgment--and who more severe than
she?--were due to the same melancholy cause; for humor is the
kindliest thing alive. Compare the harshness with which she handles
her hapless curates and the comparative crudity of her treatment,
with the surprising lightness of Miss Austen's touch as she rounds
and completes her immortal clerical portraits. Miss Bronte tells us,
in one of her letters, that she regarded _all_ curates as
"highly uninteresting, narrow, and unattractive specimens of the
coarser sex," just as she found _all_ the Belgian schoolgirls
"cold, selfish, animal and inferior." But to Miss Austen's keen and
friendly eye the narrowest of clergymen was not wholly uninteresting,
the most inferior of schoolgirls not without some claim to our
consideration; even the coarseness of the male sex was far from
vexing her maidenly serenity, probably because she was unacquainted
with the Rochester type. Mr. Elton is certainly narrow, Mary Bennet
extremely inferior; but their authoress only laughs at them softly,