be better, worthier. We are friends; do not ask me to say more -not yet. But my place is at your side" - her breath came and went, she freed her hands from his clasp. "You told me to be frank," she said, turning away. "Oh, be generous still

"Emilia-oh, there you are at last!" cried Clarice, running towards them, 'you must come, please. Mamma is ready-you know she cannot bear to be kept waiting, and she is so nervous this morning."

"You must go?" said Lawrence, "then I come too."

She put her hand into his once more. "Come," she said, with gentle decision. Then turning to her cousin,

Clarice," she said, "this is my husband. I want you to know him." E. F. POYNTER.

From The Modern Review. JANE AUSTEN AND CHARLOTTE BRONTE: A CONTRAST.

"I HAD not seen 'Pride and Prejudice' till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did find? An accurate, daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefullyfenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses."

The experiences of these two women were as different as their talents, with some curious apparent resemblances. Both were the daughters of clergymen ; both wrote novels; both passed the greater part of their lives within the quiet precincts of a country parsonage, and each died within a space of two years from her fortieth birthday.

Life was, however, actually very differ. ent for them. We can read so much in their writings without needing to turn to their biographies. Charlotte Brontë required the consciousness of passionate joy and attachment, at some time or other, past or present, to console her for the passionate pains of which her life was full. That life had not been well ordered by those who had the care of it; so intense a nature, struggling continually towards the right amid so many strange influences, could not struggle without suffering. Death played a large part in the drama of her existence; she saw those she loved depart one by one, leaving her alone at last with the strange old father. Her own health was shattered then, all buoyancy of spirit had departed from her, and her surroundings offered to her nothing but monotony and melancholy. Who that has visited her old home, and looked out along the hideous stretching valley, with hardly a tree and with many an ugly building on its undecorated sides, has not felt the misery of gazing day after day into such a scene, where nature is neither homelike nor picturesque? It was probably better in her days; the buildings were fewer; perhaps the hills were less dreary. We know that she loved her native moors, and behind her home they have just a hint of beauty; but before it! Mrs. Gaskell gives us no idea of the dreariness, the simple, bare monotony of those green slopes. Charlotte Brontë loved them, as she loved nearly all the persons and things interwoven in her life's story. She found possibilities of

This is the judgment which one great authoress passed on another, and that other the same of whom Macaulay has told us (without one voice of importance uttering a dissentient word) that she was a woman of whom England is justly proud; the same, too, whose especial talent Sir Walter Scott describes as the most wonderful I ever met with," adding, beauty there which no stranger would with the modesty of a truly great man, that her "exquisite touch, which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me."

And yet the judgment of Charlotte Brontë is not wonderful, is hardly even surprising. Her genius and that of Jane Austen were of opposite types. It was natural that one should judge the other hardly, and the one to pronounce the harshest sentence was likely enough to be the lesser genius of the two.

suspect; she cherished thoughts about them which no stranger could imagine. But, all the same, when we look upon that dreary, stony, manufacturing valley, we fancy that we see how its reflection would mirror itself as a terrible depression on her vividly impressible mind. We cannot wonder that she felt isolated, low-spirited, uninspired for work, when she looked out alone on the view from the parsonage windows.

Such a world to look at! - uncultured enough for solitude, peopled enough for

cheerfulness; yet possessing neither the | youthful when she had become actually wild beauty of a lonely place, nor the re-old. Although personally very much deeming civilization of a populous dis- more attractive than Charlotte Brontë, we trict. The people out there, who built stone mills and houses, and did not encourage a plant to grow about them; the nature out there, that reared hillsides against the sky, and hardly produced a tree to grow upon them, were they worth writing about or living for? Yet she managed so to write that the whole world read, and wondered what manner of wild, scenery this must be among which the author lived, and what manner of original characters with whom she passed her time.

do not hear that she actually received so many offers of marriage. Whatever offers she did receive were rejected, and there never seems to have been any consequent regret in her heart in after times. Nothing touched her of that bitterness, or that melancholy, or even that oddity, which so many men still believe (all the men of the last century seemed to be sure of it) must characterize any woman who is unfortunate enough to remain unmarried.

We cannot suppose that Jane Austen was a woman without tenderness; her letters and her novels prove her to have been the reverse; and, doubtless, if she had met among her acquaintance a Churchill or a Darcy, who had known how to commend himself to her so as to make her feel as well as to perceive the excellences of his character, she would have married him, and made him a good and happy wife.

She had witnessed, too, a terrible tragedy of temptation and sin in her own household. It had destroyed the character, genius, and life of her brother. She had known what it was for a home to be no covert from the troubles of the world, but only a hiding-place, a terrible secret dungeon in which to conceal the dreadful family disgrace and trouble, When she and her sisters went home and shut the door of the parsonage behind them, during Not meeting such a man, or not meetthe last years of Branwell's-life, they diding him in the right way at the right time, not shut out their worst dread and sor- she was incapable of longing for what she row; they shut themselves inside with it. had not, or regretting what she had given There was hardly, then, any trial of life up. She contained all the necessary elewhich Charlotte Brontë had not tasted, ments of her own happiness in her own and tasted so strongly that it left a flavor character, and did not require a particular of bitterness and futility in all her after combination of circumstances to bring success. Existence was emptied for her out her capabilities of usefulness or conof its hope, its buoyancy, its health; and tent. Being so complete a woman, having then the consolation of a wonderful re- the perception that there is hardly any nown was offered to the lonely, tired, and relationship of life into which we cannot, disheartened woman. if we choose, weave a sufficiency of affection and interest to keep our own lives healthy, she was independent of most of the chances and conditions to which the weaker of us are bound.

No such melancholy picture of life is woven round the figure of the other clergyman's daughter, who died when Charlotte Brontë was a year old. She was well nurtured, and carefully taught; she dwelt in a happy home, enjoyed cheer ful social relations, moved amongst pleasant scenes, was never brought into close contact with passion or crime; and whatever sorrows of life reached her did not come without the consolations of self-restraint in those around her and of serenity in her own heart.

No passionate disappointments had for her turned the word love into a symbol of anxiety and pain; she had not learned that to possess was suffering, and to have possessed a perpetual desolation. We see her always a sweet, serene figure kindly, cheerful, unimpatient, unambitious; willing to be put aside among the middle-aged while she was yet young, yet bright enough in spirit to have remained

Her genius was not unlike her character-self-sufficing, unambitious, serene.. It is only actual genius that can afford so to be; that need not long, strive, or struggle; that simply is, and so is excellent. It is like nature in that respect - sure of itself, unanxious about opportunities. It can afford, like nature, to possess numerous unexercised and unapparent capabilities; because it exists to answer, out of the fulness of its own capacity, the needs. of its own time and place. It does not require, like a smaller thing, that the requirements of the whole world should be adjusted to meet the development of its narrow talent. It is, therefore, independent of chance, certain of opportunity, and does not live in perpetual danger of failure and disappointment.

Jane Austen found subject enough for | est than "Jane Eyre." All its peculiarher genius in her own quiet experience. ities, all its exaggerations, all its limitaShe never had to search for material, to tions of vision tend to the deepening of stretch her imagination, or to reach be- the charm in which the reader is held. yond the limits of her natural sphere in We cannot wish that Charlotte Brontë had an effort to be great. She probably knew modified herself when she wrote this that she was great, but we are confident book. She threw the whole strength of that she never tried to be, and also that her genius, the whole original force of her she was cheerfully indifferent to the indif- character into its composition; and we ference of a world that had not learnt to accept it gladly, as it is, without wishing recognize her according to her merits. It that she had altered or improved anything was real success that she desired, the in it. achievement of good work rather than the praise of it.

provoking them. There is something | tative picture of any time or any place. very characteristic in her strong desire to The fact that so many of her characters have the question of sex left out of the were drawn from real life detracted from criticism of her works to be spoken of their value as permanent types. She had as a writer, and not as a woman. And not the highest artist's calmness and imwe should have thought more highly of partiality; she might be dowered with the the delicacy of judgment of her critic in poet's "scorn of scorn, and love of love; the Edinburgh Review of January, 1850, but, although she depreciated the style of if he had spared her the pain of a dis- Jane Austen as wanting in poetry, she course on this point, especially since he had not herself reached the level when had chosen to enter himself in the list of she could say, her private correspondents, and to add the claims of personal friendship to those of literary courtesy. He took a different view, however, and could even apply the adjective "cavalier to the style of Charlotte Brontë's very generous second letter to him on the subject.

Poets become such Through scorning nothing.

In all the characters which she created, and whose fortunes we have followed with so vivid an interest, there is not one for whom she did not indulge some strong personal feeling, whether of like or dislike. There is a tinge of bitterness in her description of disagreeable people which misses the highest tone of literature, if not of morals. The highest artist has learnt patience, and is wholly calm. Bitterness is a different thing from indignation, which may be found among the finest examples of poetical pictures. It is something just a little smaller and a great deal more personal. Our sympathies follow hers in the matter. We do not disagree with the opinion suggested; only, from an artistic point of view, the opinion had better not have been there. We want no personal coloring in our perfect illustrations of human life; the artist must be out of sight, and the picture should not be painted on toned paper.

Another contemporary critic of distinction Harriet Martineau - objected that the passion of love held too large a place in Charlotte Brontë's writing. To describe that passion with an intensity and reality hardly ever reached before was, however, Charlotte Brontë's speciality; and, indeed, the quality of her genius, its weird imaginativeness, its wild fervor of feeling, could not have worked so well on any other subject than this; for love, with its self-deceptions, its sudden awakenings, its uncertain issues, and the strange positions which it may develop, is, as a certain critic has told us, more capable of dramatic interpretation than any other sentiment which is common to the human race. Charlotte Brontë excelled in suggestions of natural scenery. She gave us none of the lengthened descriptions which are fashionable to-day, and in which colors are used as lavishly as in a painter's crudest study of a sunset; but there was a fitting relationship between her personages and the scenes in which they moved, so that each reflected a picturesque light upon the other.

ment

It is in this that Jane Austen so much excels Charlotte Brontë. She has found enough to write about without the intrusion of any prejudices or disappointments of her own." When we look at the world through her eyes the atmosphere is wholly clear. The picture is so perfect that we forget to praise the artist; it is simply Her command of language, also, was quite natural, quite true, and so, perhaps, very great, and conscientiously used, al- for some persons, wholly without interest. though here as sometimes in her senti- For there is a large class of readers to there is a tone of exaggeration. whom nature does not speak plainly We feel that it is too rich, too mellifluous enough, for whom real life is not intense for nature, which has a touch of rugged-enough. They fail to find in the one the ness in its sweetest sounds and sights. beauty the poets describe, and in the As a character-painter she did not at- other the passions they depict. Life and tain a very high place. She loved to nature must be translated for them into make studies of particular feelings or in-plainer expressions by some other mind, teresting situations; and this naturally limited her choice of persons and things, though the studies produced might surpass in interest any possible characterdrawings. All her sketches of persons were too strongly biased by her own feelings and experiences to form a represen

and the more theatrical light the other mind throws into these expressions the more satisfactory they are considered. Day by day we all walk through the same scenes without observing half the details of them; and if we are compelled to grope for the first time in the dark along

Some persons walk as blindly through life itself. They require a cleverer mind than their own to throw a background of fantastic color behind the objects among which they move. Only so can they perceive their true significance.

Such persons cannot be expected to appreciate Jane Austen's delicately tinted pictures of human life. Perhaps they must not even be required to realize what we mean when we are foolish enough to praise Shakespeare. A very intelligent young man of to-day, who reads novels with interest and attends theatres with pleasure, is so convinced of the absence of any surpassing merit in the mighty dramatist that he allows himself to believe that the enthusiasts for the poet are all pretending!

Another man, an elderly clergyman (also of to-day), an M.A. of Oxford, in early years a botanist and a dabbler in the natural sciences a man who thinks he appreciates Virgil, and has got every thing out of the poets that can be got by an intelligent mind has been heard to express, in a kind of confidential disgust at the stupidity of the world, the following astonishing sentiment: "Shakespeare? Shakespeare is a very much overrated man. I can't understand what people profess to see in him. But it's no use saying anything." So he leaves us all to our blindness.

most of the powerful writers employ their power in harrowing our feelings painfully, in weaving miseries out of circumstances which seem improbable, by means of actions which strike us as unnatural; in a time when the chief end of talent seems to be to pile up the agony sufficiently high, without caring about the reasonableness of the foundation on which it rests, we may well hesitate before expressing a regret that, in a series of half-a-dozen delightful novels, there is not one distressing death, not one terrible domestic trag. edy, not one horrible crime, not even one irresistible temptation. All can be good if they choose, and nearly all may be happy if they will.

We may say of these books that they are simply and entirely delightful. The cheerful reality of interest and the genial spirit of laughter which pervade them carry us on through pleasant and instruc tive pages to a pleasant and satisfactory end. We know none, except Jane Austen, who, by a few delicate touches, can so completely satisfy us concerning the disposal of a heroine at the close of a novel. After passionate quarrels the reconciliation generally seems tame; but we are wholly content with the fate of Emma in the novel which bears her name, of her favorite Lizzy in "Pride and Prejudice," and of the gentle heroine in "Persua sion."

There is no respect of persons in the works of this writer. A charming impar tiality and candor are to be found in all her portraits of friend or foe. Jane Aus. ten delights us as much in depicting the peculiarities of a pleasant old woman as in relating the fortunes of a blooming young one.

And the most extraordinary thing is that at a time when every other writer thought it necessary to write in another way, and to depend upon incident and plot for his interest, Jane Austen ventured to write in this way, and has so commended herself to this generation beyond her more brilliant contemporaries.

It is not to such men that we must recommend the study of Jane Austen's works, with their quiet humor, their quaint reality, their trenchant but good-natured criticism, their sober and unexaggerated tone, and that manner which, Macaulay has told us, approaches somewhat near to Shakespeare's own. There is such an absence of exciting scenes in Miss Aus- Even the king of novelists, Sir Walter ten's books that, with the exception of Scott, whose wonderful masterpieces of those passages in "Sense and Sensi- fiction we have all read with absorbing bility designed to illustrate the weak-delight and interest, must, in some points, ness of the heroine's sister, we can hardly as he has himself so generously acknowl remember any occasion of actual weep-edged, bend his head before this quiet and ing; agony and wild passion are alto- unobtrusive young woman, who never gether excluded. We may complain a made, and never seemed to wish to make, little of want of the pathetic, which can a sensation of any sort. less easily be spared than the exciting element; but even here we may be wrong to demur. In the present age, when

The fact that so little of the interest of Jane Austen's works depends on her inci. dents is in favor of a repeated perusal of