d fitness. It is a pity that Mr. Swinburne did not pay attention to
Charlotte's dream.

All her life, I think, she suffered because of the perpetual insurgence
of this secret, impassioned, maternal energy. Hence the sting of Lewes's
famous criticism, beginning: "The grand function of woman, it must
always be remembered" (as if Charlotte had forgotten it!) "is
Maternity"; and, working up from his criticism of that chapter in
_Shirley_ to a climax of adjuration: "Currer Bell, if under your heart
had ever stirred a child; if to your bosom a babe had ever been
pressed--that mysterious part of your being, towards which all the rest
of it was drawn, in which your whole soul was transported and
absorbed--never could you have _imagined_ such a falsehood as that!" It
was impossible for Charlotte to protest against anything but the
abominable bad taste of Lewes's article, otherwise she might have told
him that she probably knew rather more about those mysteries than he
did. It was she who gave us that supreme image of disastrous love. "I
looked at my love; it shivered in my heart like a suffering child in a
cold cradle!"

And this woman died before her child was born.

* * * * *

Then there is Mrs. Oliphant again. Though she was not one of those who
said Charlotte Bronte was not fond of children, though she would have
died rather than have joined Lewes in his unspeakable cry against her,
Mrs. Oliphant made certain statements in no better taste than his. She
suggests that Charlotte, fond or not fond of children, was too fond of
matrimonial dreams. Her picture (the married woman's picture) is of an
undesired and undesirable little spinster pining visibly and shamelessly
in a parsonage. She would have us believe that from morning till night,
from night till morning, Charlotte Bronte in the Parsonage thought of
nothing but of getting married, that her dreams pursued, ruthlessly, the
casual visitor. The hopelessness of the dream, the undesirability of
Charlotte, is what makes her so irresistible to her sister novelist.

There was "one subject", she says, "which Charlotte Bronte had at her
command, having experienced in her own person, and seen her nearest
friends under the experience, of that solitude and longing of women of
which she has made so remarkable an exposition. The long silence of life
without an adventure or a change, the forlorn gaze out of windows which
never show anyone coming who can