le on this planet regard a
comet. Even the really delicate and sustained comedy of Paul Emanuel is
not quite free from this air of studying something alien. The reply may
be made that the women in men's novels are equally fallacious. The reply
is probably just.

What the Brontes really brought into fiction was exactly what Carlyle
brought into history; the blast of the mysticism of the North. They were
of Irish blood settled on the windy heights of Yorkshire; in that
country where Catholicism lingered latest, but in a superstitious form;
where modern industrialism came earliest and was more superstitious
still. The strong winds and sterile places, the old tyranny of barons
and the new and blacker tyranny of manufacturers, has made and left that
country a land of barbarians. All Charlotte Bronte's earlier work is
full of that sullen and unmanageable world; moss-troopers turned
hurriedly into miners; the last of the old world forced into supporting
the very first crudities of the new. In this way Charlotte Bronte
represents the Victorian settlement in a special way. The Early
Victorian Industrialism is to George Eliot and to Charlotte Bronte,
rather as the Late Victorian Imperialism would have been to Mrs. Humphry
Ward in the centre of the empire and to Miss Olive Schreiner at the edge
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 Brontes on
this special subject: the rest is stark unreason. It can be most clearly
seen in that sister of Charlotte Bronte'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 Bronte: 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 th