For it is not true
to manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost
always false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true,
emotion, the irreducible minimum, the indestructible germ. It would not
matter a single straw if a Bronte story were a hundred times more
moonstruck and improbable than "Jane Eyre," or a hundred times more
moonstruck and improbable than "Wuthering Heights." It would not matter
if George Read stood on his head, and Mrs. Read rode on a dragon, if
Fairfax Rochester had four eyes and St. John Rivers three legs, the
story would still remain the truest story in the world. The typical
Bronte character is, indeed, a kind of monster. Everything in him except
the essential is dislocated. His hands are on his legs and his feet on
his arms, his nose is above his eyes, but his heart is in the right
place.
The great and abiding truth for which the Bronte cycle of fiction stands
is a certain most important truth about the enduring spirit of youth,
the truth of the near kinship between terror and joy. The Bronte
heroine, dingily dressed, badly educated, hampered by a humiliating
inexperience, a kind of ugly innocence, is yet, by the very fact of her
solitude and her gaucherie, full of the greatest delight that is
possible to a human being, the delight of expectation, the delight of an
ardent and flamboyant ignorance. She serves to show how futile it is of
humanity to suppose that pleasure can be attained chiefly by putting on
evening dress every evening, and having a box at the theatre every first
night.
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