In one passage of her life she may remind us of the little
colourless and thrifty hen-bird that Lowell watched nest-building with
her mate, and cutting short the flutterings and billings wherewith he
would joyously interrupt the business; Charlotte's nesting bird was a
clergyman. He came, lately affianced, for a week's visit to her
parsonage, and she wrote to her friend before his arrival: "My little
plans have been disarranged by an intimation that Mr.--is coming on
Monday"; and afterwards, in reference to her sewing, "he hindered me for
a full week."
In alternate pages _Villette_ is a book of spirit and fire, and a novel
of illiberal rancour, of ungenerous, uneducated anger, ungentle, ignoble.
In order to forgive its offences, we have to remember in its author's
favour not her pure style set free, not her splendour in literature, but
rather the immeasurable sorrow of her life. To read of that sorrow again
is to open once more a wound which most men perhaps, certainly most
women, received into their hearts in childhood. For the Life of
Charlotte Bronte is one of the first books of biography put into the
hands of a child, to whom _Jane Eyre_ is allowed only in passages. We
are young when we first hear in what narrow beds "the three are laid"--the
two sisters and the brother--and in what a bed of living insufferable
memories the one left lay alone, reviewing the hours of their death--alone
in the sealed house that was only less narrow than their graves.
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