that which is now but darkly seen
shall be clear!

It is quite natural and right that Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, indeed all
who have spoken of the author of _Jane Eyre_, should insist primarily
on the personality of Charlotte Bronte. It is this intense personality
which is the distinctive note of her books. They are not so much tales
as imaginary autobiographies. They are not objective presentations of
men and women in the world. They are subjective sketches of a Bronte
under various conditions, and of the few men and women who occasionally
cross the narrow circle of the Bronte world. Of the three stories she
published, two are autobiographies, and the third is a fancy portrait
of her sister Emily. Charlotte Bronte is herself Jane Eyre and Lucy
Snowe, and Emily Bronte is Shirley Keeldar. So in _The Professor_, her
earliest but posthumous tale, Frances Henri again is simply a little
Swiss Bronte. That story also is told as an autobiography, but, though
the narrator is supposed to be one William Crimsworth, it is a woman
who speaks, sees, and dreams all through the book. The four tales,
which together were the work of eight years, are all variations upon a
Bronte and the two Bronte worlds in Yorkshire and Belgium. It is most
significant (but quite natural) that Mrs. Gaskell in her _Life of
Charlotte Bronte_ devotes more than half her book to the story of the
family before the publication of _Jane Eyre_. The four tales are not
so much romances as artistic and imaginative autobiographies.

To say this is by no means to detract from their rare value. The
romances of adventure, of incident, of intrigue, of character, of
society, or of humour, depend on a great variety of observation and a
multiplicity of contrasts. There is not much of Walter Scott, as a
man, in _Ivanhoe_ or of Alexander Dumas in the _Trois Mousquetaires_;
and Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Bulwer, Miss Edgeworth, Stevenson,
and Meredith--even Miss Austen and George Eliot--seek to paint men and
women whom they conceive and whom we may see and know, and not
themselves and their own home circle. But Charlotte Bronte told us her
own life, her own feelings, sufferings, pride, joy, and ambition. She
bared for us her own inner soul, and all that it had known and desired,
and this she did with a noble, pure, simple, but intense truth. There
was neither egoism, nor monotony, nor commonplace in it. It was all
coloured with native imagination and a se