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 sweep four-fifths of it away, all the legends and half the letters, and sort and set out what remains, observing values and proportions, and you get an outer life where no great and moving event ever came, saving only death (Charlotte’s marriage hardly counts beside it); an outer life of a strange and almost oppressive simplicity and silence; and an inner life, tumultuous and profound in suffering, a life to all appearances frustrate, where all nourishment of the emotions was reduced to the barest allowance a woman’s heart can depend on and yet live; and none the less a life that out of that starvation diet raised enough of rich and vivid and superb emotion to decorate a hundred women’s lives; an inner life which her genius fed and was fed from, for which no reality, no experience, could touch its own intensity of realization.  And, genius apart, in the region of actual and ostensible emotion, no one of us can measure the depth of her adoration of duty, or the depth, the force and volume of her passion for her own people, and for the earth trodden by their feet, the earth that covered them.  Beside it every other feeling was temporary and insignificant.  In the light of it you see Charlotte Bronte’s figure for ever simple and beautiful and great; behind her for ever the black-grey setting of her village and the purple of her moors.  That greatness and beauty and simplicity is destroyed by any effort to detach her from her background.  She may seem susceptible to the alien influences of exile; but it is as an exile that she suffers; and her most inspired moments are her moments of return, when she wrote prose like this:  “The moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale; as glad as if she gave herself to his fierce caress with love.  No Endymion will watch for his goddess to-night:  there are no flocks on the mountains.”