Such things would be utterly unimportant but that they tend to obscure the essential quality and greatness of Charlotte Bronte’s genius.  Because of them she has passed for a woman of one experience and of one book.  There is still room for a clean sweep of the rubbish that has been shot here.

In all this, controversy was unavoidable, much as I dislike its ungracious and ungraceful air.  If I have been inclined to undervalue certain things—­“the sojourn in Brussels”, for instance—­which others have considered of the first importance, it is because I believe that it is always the inner life that counts, and that with the Brontes it supremely counted.

If I have passed over the London period too lightly, it is because I judge it extraneous and external.  If I have tried, cruelly, to take from Charlotte the little beige gown that she wore at Mr. Thackeray’s dinner-party, it is because her home-made garments seem to suit her better.  She is more herself in skirts that have brushed the moors and kept some of the soil of Haworth in their hem.

I may seem to have exaggerated her homesickness for Haworth.  It may be said that Haworth was by no means Charlotte’s home as it was Emily’s.  I am aware that there were moments—­hours—­when she longed to get away from it.  I have not forgotten how Mary Taylor found her in such an hour, not long after her return from Brussels, when her very flesh shrank from the thought of her youth gone and “nothing done”; nothing before her but long, empty years in Haworth.  The fact remains that she was never happy away from it, and that in Haworth her genius most certainly found itself at home.  And this particular tone of misery and unrest disappeared from the moment when her genius declared itself, so that I am inclined to see in it a little personal dissatisfaction, if you will, but chiefly the unspeakable restlessness and misery of power unrecognized and suppressed.  “Nothing done!” That was her reiterated cry.

Again, if I have overlooked the complexities of Charlotte’s character, it is that the great lines that underlie it may be seen.  In my heart I agree with M. Dimnet that the Brontes were not simple.  All the same, I think that his admirable portrait of Charlotte is spoiled by his attitude of pity for “la pauvre fille”, as he persists in calling her.  I think he dwells a shade too much on her small asperities and acidities, and on that “ton de critique mesquine”, which he puts down to her provincialism.  No doubt there were moments of suffering and of irritation, as well as moments of uncontrollable merriment, when Charlotte lacked urbanity, but M. Dimnet has almost too keen an eye for them.