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 confess that I am dying to know, and that I find it hard to forgive Mr. Nicholls for having killed them, so certain am I that they would have lived triumphantly if Charlotte Bronte had not married him.

Some of us will be profoundly indifferent to this issue; for Charlotte Bronte has no following in a certain school.  She defies analysis.  You cannot label her.  What she has done is not “Realism”, neither is it “Romance”.  She displeases both by her ambiguity and by her lack of form.  She has no infallible dramatic instinct.  Even in Villette she preserves some of her clumsiness, her crudity, her improbability.  The progress of “the Novel” in our day is towards a perfection of form and a reality she never knew.

But “reality” is a large term; and, as for form, who cared about it in the fifties?  As for improbability—­as M. Dimnet says—­she is not more improbable than Balzac.