" The work of Charlotte Bronte--produced under a
fervent admiration for "the satirist of Vanity Fair," whom she deemed
"the first social regenerator of his day"--is, with all its
occasional morbidness of sensitive feeling, far more bracing in moral
tone, more inspiring in its scorn of baseness and glorifying of
goodness, than is the work of recent Positivist emulators of the
achievements of George Eliot. Some romances of this school are vivid
and highly finished pictures of human misery, unredeemed by hope, and
hardly brightened by occasional gleams of humour, of the sardonic
sort which may stir a mirthless smile, but never a laugh. Herein they
are far inferior to their model, whose melancholy philosophy is half
hidden from her readers by the delightful freshness and truth of her
"Dutch painter's" portraying of every-day humanity, by her delicately
skilful reproduction of its homely wit and harmless absurdity.
Happily neither these writers, nor the purveyors of mere sensation
who cannot get on without crime and mystery, exhaust the list of our
romancers, many of whom are altogether healthful, cheerful, and
helpful; and it is no unreasonable hope that these may increase and
their gloomier rivals decrease, or at least grow gayer and wiser.
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