Produced by Suzanne Shell, Linda Cantoni and PG Distributed Proofreaders
By the same Author:
by
1912
My thanks are due, first and chiefly, to Mr. Clement K. Shorter whoplaced all his copyright material at my disposal; and to Mr. G.M.Williamson and Mr. Robert H. Dodd, of New York, for allowing me to drawso largely from the Poems of Emily Brontë, published by Messrs. Dodd,Mead, and Co. in 1902; also to Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, thepublishers of the Complete Poems of Emily Brontë, edited by Mr. Shorter;and to Mr. Alfred Sutro for permission to use his translation of Wisdomand Destiny. Lastly, and somewhat late, to Mr. Arthur Symons for histranslation from St. John of the Cross. If I have borrowed from him morethan I had any right to without his leave, I hope he will forgive me.
When six months ago Mr. Thomas Seccombe suggested that I should write ashort essay on "The Three Brontës" I agreed with some misgiving.
Yet that deed was innocent compared with what I have done now; and, inany case, the series afforded the offender a certain shelter andprotection. But to come out like this, into the open, with anotherBrontë book, seems not only a dangerous, but a futile and a fatuousadventure. All I can say is that I did not mean to do it. I certainlynever meant to write so long a book.
It grew, insidiously, out of the little one. Things happened. Newcriticisms opened up old questions. When I came to look carefully intoMr. Clement Shorter's collection of the Complete Poems of EmilyBrontë, I found a mass of material (its existence I, at any rate, hadnot suspected) that could not be dealt with in the limits of theoriginal essay.
The book is, and can only be, the slightest of all slight appreciations.None the less it has been hard and terrible for me to write it. Not onlyhad I said nearly all that I had to say already, but I was depressed atthe very start by that conviction of the absurdity of trying to sayanything at all, after all that has been said, about Anne, or Emily, orCharlotte Brontë.
Anne's case, perhaps, was not so difficult. For obvious reasons, AnneBrontë will always be comparatively virgin soil. But it was impossibleto write of Charlotte after Mrs. Gaskell; impossible to say more ofEmily than Madame Duclaux has said; impossible to add one single littlefact to the vast material, so patiently amassed, so admirably arrangedby Mr. Clement Shorter. And when it came to appreciation there were Mr.Theodore Watts-Dunton, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, Mr. Birrell, andMrs. Humphry Ward, lying along the ground. When it came to eulogy, afterMr. Swinburne's Note on Charlotte Brontë, neither Charlotte nor Emilyhave any need of praise.
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