And all these things, the ambiguity, the formlessness and the rest, she was gradually correcting as she advanced.  It is impossible to exaggerate the importance and significance of her attainment in Villette; there has been so much confused thinking in the consecrated judgment of that novel. Villette owes its high place largely to its superior construction and technique; largely and primarily to Charlotte Bronte’s progress towards the light, towards the world, towards the great undecorated reality.  It is odd criticism that ignores the inevitable growth, the increasing vision and grasp, the whole indomitable advance of a great writer, and credits “experience” with the final masterpiece.  As a result of this confusion Villette has been judged “final” in another sense.  Yes, final—­this novel that shows every sign and token of long maturing, long-enduring power.  If Charlotte Bronte’s critics had not hypnotized themselves by the perpetual reiteration of that word “experience”, it would have been impossible for them, with the evidence of her work before them, to have believed that in Villette she had written herself out.

She was only just beginning.

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Of Charlotte Bronte’s Poems there is not much to say.  They are better poems than Branwell’s or Anne’s, but that does not make them very good.  Still, they are interesting, and they are important, because they are the bridge by which Charlotte Bronte passed into her own dominion.  She took Wordsworth with his Poems and Ballads for her guide, and he misled her 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.

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