and delayed her on her way, and kept her a long time standing on her
bridge. For in her novels, and her novels only, Charlotte was a poet. In
her poems she is a novelist, striving and struggling for expression in a
cramped form, an imperfect and improper medium. But most indubitably a
novelist. Nearly all her poems which are not artificial are impersonal.
They deal with "situations", with "psychological problems", that cry
aloud for prose. There is the "Wife" who seems to have lived a long,
adventurous life with "William" through many poems; there is the
deserted wife and mother in "Mementos"; there is "Frances", the deserted
maiden; there is "Gilbert" with his guilty secret and his suicide, a
triple domestic tragedy in the three acts of a three-part ballad; there
is the lady in "Preference", who prefers her husband to her passionate
and profoundly deluded lover; there is the woman in "Apostasy", wrecked
in the conflict between love and priestcraft; and there is little else
beside. These poems are straws, showing the way of the wind that bloweth
where it listeth.

* * * * *

Too much has been written about Charlotte Bronte, and far too much has
been read. You come away from it with an enormous mass of printed stuff
wrecked in your memory, letters, simply hundreds of letters, legends and
theories huddled together in a heap, with all values and proportions
lost; and your impression is of tumult and of suffering, and of a
multitude of confused and incongruous happenings; funerals and
flirtations, or something very like flirtations, to the sound of the
passing bell and sexton's chisel; upheavals of soul, flights to and from
Brussels, interminable years of exile, and of lurid, tragic passion;
years, interminable, monotonous years of potato-peeling and all manner
of household piety; scenes of debauchery, horrors of opium and of drink;
celebrity, cataclysmal celebrity, rushings up to town in storm and
darkness, dim coffee-houses in Paternoster Row, dinner-parties; deaths,
funerals, melancholia; and still celebrity; years, interminable,
monotonous years of blazing celebrity, sounds of the literary workshop
overpowering the sexton's chisel; then marriage, sudden and swift; then
death. And in the midst of it all, one small and rather absurd and
obscure figure, tossed to and fro, said to be Charlotte Bronte.

What an existence!

This is the impression created by the bibliographical total. But swee