with the surprising lightness of Miss Austen's touch as she rounds
and completes her immortal clerical portraits. Miss Bronte tells us,
in one of her letters, that she regarded
all
curates as
"highly uninteresting, narrow, and unattractive specimens of the
coarser sex," just as she found
all
the Belgian schoolgirls
"cold, selfish, animal and inferior." But to Miss Austen's keen and
friendly eye the narrowest of clergymen was not wholly uninteresting,
the most inferior of schoolgirls not without some claim to our
consideration; even the coarseness of the male sex was far from
vexing her maidenly serenity, probably because she was unacquainted
with the Rochester type. Mr. Elton is certainly narrow, Mary Bennet
extremely inferior; but their authoress only laughs at them softly,
with a quiet tolerance and a good-natured sense of amusement at their
follies. It was little wonder that Charlotte Bronte, who had at all
times the courage of her convictions, could not and would not read
Jane Austen's novels. "They have not got story enough for me," she
boldly affirmed. "I don't want my blood curdled, but I like to have
it stirred. Miss Austen strikes me as milk-and-watery and, to say
truth, dull." Of course she did! How was a woman, whose ideas of
after-dinner conversation are embodied in the amazing language of
Baroness Ingram and her titled friends to appreciate the delicious,
sleepy small-talk in "Sense and Sensibility," about the respective
heights of the respective grandchildren? It is to Miss Bronte's
abiding lack of humor that we owe such stately caricatures as Blanche
Ingram and all the high-born, ill-bred company who gather in
Thornfield Hall, like a group fresh from Madame Tussaud's ingenious
workshop, and against whose waxen unreality Jane Eyre and Rochester,
alive to their very finger-tips, contrast like twin sparks of fire.
It was her lack of humor, too, which beguiled her into asserting that
the forty "wicked, sophistical and immoral French novels" which found
their way down to lonely Haworth gave her "a thorough idea of France
and Paris"—alas! poor, misjudged France!—and which made her think
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