rs told me that the three girls
looked after the poor in hard winters, often supplying whole families
with coal. Of course they led lives of a maddening monotony, but they
were neither hungry nor bitter, and at least two of them developed a
higher order of genius than was possible to the gifted Jane Austin in
her smug life of middle-class plenty, and, to my mind, far more
hampering restrictions.

Even if the Brontes had been sufficiently in advance of their times to
"light out" and seek adventure and development in the great world,
their low state of health would have kept them at home. So impressed
was I with the (to a Californian) terrible pictures of poverty in
which the Brontes were posed by their biographers that I grew up with
the idea that one never could develop a gift or succeed in the higher
manner unless one lived in a garret and half starved. I never had the
courage to try the regimen, but so deep was the impression that I
never have been able to work except in austere surroundings, and I
have worked in most abominably uncomfortable quarters with an
equanimity that was merely the result of the deathless insistence of
an old impression sunk deep into a mind then plastic.

Let me hasten to add that many successful authors work in the most
luxurious quarters imaginable. It is all a matter of temperament, or,
it may be, of accident. Moreover this outer evidence of prosperity
makes a subtle appeal to the snobbery of the world and to a certain
order of critic, by no means to be despised. Socially and in the arts
we Americans are the least democratic of people, partly because we are
so damnably unsure of ourselves; and if I were beginning my career
to-day I doubt if I should be so unbusiness-like as to take the lowly
Brontes as a model.

If I have digressed for a moment from the main theme of this book it
has been not only to show what the influence of such brave women as
the Brontes has been on later generations of writers, but that biology
must doff its hat at the tomb in Haworth Church. Their mental virility
and fecundity equalled that of any man that has attained an equal
eminence in letters, and they would have died young and suffered much
if they never had written a line. They had not a constitution between
the four of them and they spent their short lives surrounded by the
dust and the corruption of death.

IV

But when it comes to working like men for the sake of independence, of
avoiding marriag