Charlotte Bronte tried to give an account of her feeling for children; it was something like the sacred awe of the lover.  “Whenever I see Florence and Julia again I shall feel like a fond but bashful suitor, who views at a distance the fair personage to whom, in his clownish awe, he dare not risk a near approach.  Such is the clearest idea I can give you of my feeling towards children I like, but to whom I am a stranger—­and to what children am I not a stranger?”

Extraordinary that Charlotte’s critics have missed the pathos of that cri de coeur.  It is so clearly an echo from the “house of bondage”, where Charlotte was made a stranger to the beloved, where the beloved threw stones and Bibles at her.  You really have to allow for the shock of an experience so blighting.  It is all part of the perversity of the fate that dogged her, that her feeling should have met with that reverse.  But it was there, guarded with a certain shy austerity.  She “suspected” herself of getting rather fond of the baby.

She hid her secret even from herself, as women will hide these things.  But her dreams betrayed her after the way of dreams.  Charlotte’s dream (premonitory, she thought, of trouble) was that she carried a little crying child, and could not still its cry.  “She described herself,” Mrs. Gaskell says, “as having the most painful sense of pity for the little thing, lying inert, as sick children do, while she walked about in some gloomy place with it, such as the aisle of Haworth Church.”  This dream she gives to Jane Eyre, unconscious of its profound significance and 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.

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