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Varied Types

By

G.K. Chesterton

Author of "The Defendant," etc.

New York: Dodd, Mead and Company

Published September, 1905

NOTE

G. K. Chesterton

CONTENTS

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Objection is often raised against realistic biography because it revealsso much that is important and even sacred about a man's life. The realobjection to it will rather be found in the fact that it reveals about aman the precise points which are unimportant. It reveals and asserts andinsists on exactly those things in a man's life of which the man himselfis wholly unconscious; his exact class in society, the circumstances ofhis ancestry, the place of his present location. These are things whichdo not, properly speaking, ever arise before the human vision. They donot occur to a man's mind; it may be said, with almost equal truth, thatthey do not occur in a man's life. A man no more thinks about himself asthe inhabitant of the third house in a row of Brixton villas than hethinks about himself as a strange animal with two legs. What a man'sname was, what his income was, whom he married, where he lived, theseare not sanctities; they are irrelevancies.

A very strong case of this is the case of the Brontës. The Brontë is inthe position of the mad lady in a country village; her eccentricitiesform an endless source of innocent conversation to that exceedingly mildand bucolic circle, the literary world. The truly glorious gossips ofliterature, like Mr. Augustine Birrell and Mr. Andrew Lang, never tireof collecting all the glimpses and anecdotes and sermons and side-lightsand sticks and straws which will go to make a Brontë museum. They arethe most personally discussed of all Victorian authors, and thelimelight of biography has left few darkened corners in the dark old