or please it. They "must be honest; they
must not varnish, soften, or conceal."

What Charlotte Bronte was learning to do in her grim and, let us admit
it, her unlovely probation on Dewsbury Moor, was to introduce a fresh
aspect of the relations of literature to life. Every great writer has a
new note; hers was--defiance. All the aspects in which life presented
itself to her were distressing, not so much in themselves as in herself.
She rebelled against the outrages of poverty, and she drank to its dregs
the cup of straitened circumstances. She was proud, as proud as Lucifer,
and she was forced into positions which suppleness and cheerfulness
might have made tolerable, if not agreeable. She wrung from these
positions their last drop of bitterness. A very remarkable instance of
this may be found in her relation to the Sidgwick family, who, by
universal report, were generous, genial, and unassuming. To Charlotte
Bronte these kindly, if somewhat commonplace folk, grew to seem what a
Turkish pasha seems to the inhabitants of a Macedonian village. It was
not merely the surroundings of her life--it was life itself, in its
general mundane arrangements, which was intolerable to her. She fretted
in it, she beat her wings against its bars, and she would have done the
same if those bars had been of gold, and if the fruits of paradise had
been pushed to her between them. This, I think, is why the expression of
her anger seems too often disproportionate, and why her irony is so apt
to be preposterous. She was born to resist being caged in any form. Her
defiance was universal, and often it was almost indiscriminate.

Do not let us presume to blame this insubmission. Still less let us
commit the folly of minimising it. A good cheerful little Charlotte
Bronte, who thought the best of everybody, who gaily took her place
without a grudging sigh, whose first aim was to make those about her
happy and to minister to their illusions, would have been a much more
welcome inmate of Miss Wooler's household than the cantankerous
governess whom nobody could please, whose susceptibilities were always
on edge, whose lonely arrogance made her feared by all but one or two
who timidly persisted in loving her. But such a paragon of the obvious
virtues would have passed as the birds pass and as the flowers. She
would have left no mark behind. She would never have enriched the
literature of England by one of its master-evidences of the force of
human wi