p
four-fifths of it away, all the legends and half the letters, and sort
and set out what remains, observing values and proportions, and you get
an outer life where no great and moving event ever came, saving only
death (Charlotte's marriage hardly counts beside it); an outer life of a
strange and almost oppressive simplicity and silence; and an inner life,
tumultuous and profound in suffering, a life to all appearances
frustrate, where all nourishment of the emotions was reduced to the
barest allowance a woman's heart can depend on and yet live; and none
the less a life that out of that starvation diet raised enough of rich
and vivid and superb emotion to decorate a hundred women's lives; an
inner life which her genius fed and was fed from, for which no reality,
no experience, could touch its own intensity of realization. And, genius
apart, in the region of actual and ostensible emotion, no one of us can
measure the depth of her adoration of duty, or the depth, the force and
volume of her passion for her own people, and for the earth trodden by
their feet, the earth that covered them. Beside it every other feeling
was temporary and insignificant. In the light of it you see Charlotte
Bronte's figure for ever simple and beautiful and great; behind her for
ever the black-grey setting of her village and the purple of her moors.
That greatness and beauty and simplicity is destroyed by any effort to
detach her from her background. She may seem susceptible to the alien
influences of exile; but it is as an exile that she suffers; and her
most inspired moments are her moments of return, when she wrote prose
like this: "The moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale; as glad as if
she gave herself to his fierce caress with love. No Endymion will watch
for his goddess to-night: there are no flocks on the mountains."

* * * * *

Around the figure of Emily Bronte there is none of that clamour and
confusion. She stands apart in an enduring silence, and guards for ever
her secret and her mystery. By the mercy of heaven the swarm of gossips
and of theorists has passed her by. She has no legend or hardly any. So
completely has she been passed over that when Madame Duclaux came to
write the Life of Emily Bronte she found little to add to Mrs. Gaskell's
meagre record beyond that story, which she tells with an incomparable
simplicity and reticence, of Emily in her mortal illness, sitting by the
hearth, combing