sed
for one of those sad things of which the least said the better. It was
settled that Charlotte Bronte had written herself out, that if she had
lived she would have become more and more her own plagiarist. There is a
middle-aged lady in _Emma_, presumably conceived on the lines of Mrs.
Fairfax and Mrs. Pryor. There is a girls' school, which is only not
Lowood because it is so obviously Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor. There is a
schoolmistress with sandy hair and thin lips and a cold blue eye,
recalling Madame Beck, though there the likeness ceases. And in that
school, ill-treated by that schoolmistress, there is a little ugly,
suffering, deserted child.

All this looks very much like repetition. But it does not shake my
private belief that _Emma_ is a fragment of what would have been as
great a novel as _Villette_. There are indications. There is Mr. Ellin,
who proves that Charlotte Bronte could create a live man of the finer
sort, an unexploited masculine type with no earthly resemblance to
Rochester or to Louis Moore or M. Paul. He is an unfinished sketch
rather than a portrait, but a sketch that would not too shamefully have
discredited Mr. Henry James. For there is a most modern fineness and
subtlety in _Emma_; and, for all its sketchy incompleteness, a peculiar
certainty of touch, an infallible sense of the significant action, the
revealing gesture. With a splendid economy of means, scenes, passages,
phrases, apparently slight, are charged with the most intense
psychological suggestion. When Mr. Ellin, summoned on urgent business by
Miss Wilcox, takes that preposterously long and leisurely round to get
to her, you know what is passing in the mind of Mr. Ellin as well as if
you had been told. In that brief scene between Mr. Ellin and the
schoolmistress, you know as well as if you had been told, that Miss
Wilcox has lost Mr. Ellin because of her unkindness to a child. When the
child, Matilda Fitzgibbon, falls senseless, and Mr. Ellin gives his
inarticulate cry and lifts her from the floor, the enigmatic man has
revealed his innermost nature.

Now a fragment that can suggest all this with the smallest possible
expenditure of phrases, is not a fragment that can be set aside. It is
slight; but slightness that accomplishes so much is a sign of progress
rather than of falling-off. We shall never know what happened to Matilda
when Mr. Ellin took her from Miss Wilcox. We shall never know what
happened to Mr. Ellin; but I con