truth, and warm with the fire of the heart. So that at last, when pure pathos comes, when Helen sleeps herself to death in Jane's arms, when the struggle is over, and room is made for softness, for pity, the mind of the reader yields itself wholly, without reserve, to the working of an artist so masterful, so self-contained, so rightly frugal as to the great words and great emotions of her art. We are in the presence of the same kind of power as that which drew the death of Bazarov in ' Fathers and Sons ' a power which, in the regions covered by the experience of the mind behind it, ' nothing common does nor mean,' which shrinks from the borrowed and the imitated and the insincere, as the patriot shrinks from treason.
Personality then -- strong, free, passionate personality -- is the sole but the sufficient spell of these books. Can we analyse some of its elements ? so far, at least, as their literary expression is concerned ?
In the first place, has it ever been sufficiently recognised that Charlotte Bronte is first and foremost an Irishwoman, that her genius is at bottom a Celtic genius ? When she first appeared at the Roehead school in 1831, as a child of fourteen, it was noticed by the schoolfellow to whom we owe so many early remembrances of her, that she ' spoke with a strong Irish accent.' Her father came from an Irish cabin in County Down ; her mother was of a Cornish family. The main characteristics indeed of the Celt are all hers disinter- estedness, melancholy, wildness, a way ward force and passion, for ever wooed by sounds and sights to which other natures are insensible by murmurs from the earth, by colours in the sky, by tones and accents of the soul, that speak to the Celtic sense as to no other. ' We shall never build the Parthenon,' said Renan of his own Breton race ; ' marble is not for us ; but we know how to grip the heart and the soul ; we have an art of piercing that belongs to us alone ; we plunge our hands into the entrails of man, and, like the witches of " Macbeth," we draw them back full of the secrets of the infinite. The great marvel of our art is to know how to make a charm out of the very disease that plagues us. A spring of eternal
