fess that I am dying to know, and that I
find it hard to forgive Mr. Nicholls for having killed them, so certain
am I that they would have lived triumphantly if Charlotte Bronte had not
married him.

Some of us will be profoundly indifferent to this issue; for Charlotte
Bronte has no following in a certain school. She defies analysis. You
cannot label her. What she has done is not "Realism", neither is it
"Romance". She displeases both by her ambiguity and by her lack of form.
She has no infallible dramatic instinct. Even in _Villette_ she
preserves some of her clumsiness, her crudity, her improbability. The
progress of "the Novel" in our day is towards a perfection of form and a
reality she never knew.

But "reality" is a large term; and, as for form, _who_ cared about it in
the fifties? As for improbability--as M. Dimnet says--she is not more
improbable than Balzac.

And all these things, the ambiguity, the formlessness and the rest, she
was gradually correcting as she advanced. It is impossible to exaggerate
the importance and significance of her attainment in _Villette_; there
has been so much confused thinking in the consecrated judgment of that
novel. _Villette_ owes its high place largely to its superior
construction and technique; largely and primarily to Charlotte Bronte's
progress towards the light, towards the world, towards the great
undecorated reality. It is odd criticism that ignores the inevitable
growth, the increasing vision and grasp, the whole indomitable advance
of a great writer, and credits "experience" with the final masterpiece.
As a result of this confusion _Villette_ has been judged "final" in
another sense. Yes, final--this novel that shows every sign and token of
long maturing, long-enduring power. If Charlotte Bronte's critics had
not hypnotized themselves by the perpetual reiteration of that word
"experience", it would have been impossible for them, with the evidence
of her work before them, to have believed that in _Villette_ she had
written herself out.

She was only just beginning.

* * * * *

Of Charlotte Bronte's _Poems_ there is not much to say. They are better
poems than Branwell's or Anne's, but that does not make them very good.
Still, they are interesting, and they are important, because they are
the bridge by which Charlotte Bronte passed into her own dominion. She
took Wordsworth with his Poems and Ballads for her guide, and he misled
her