When Villette appeared, Charlotte Brontë had been for some little time on very friendly terms with Harriet Martineau: and she did not fear to incur the risk—always a perilous one to friendship—of asking Harriet to tell her, quite frankly, what she thought of her book. Harriet responded with perfect frankness to the invitation; and the almost inevitable result followed. The event wrecked their friendship. And no one was to blame: Harriet Martineau, without disguise, but without malice, said what she thought was true. But neither was Charlotte in the wrong, for she felt herself unjustly judged; and her feeling was right, because Harriet used false standards.

'As for the matter which you so desire to know,' wrote the frank Harriet; 'I have but one thing to say: but it is not a small one. I do not like the love—either the kind or the degree of it—and its prevalence in the book, and effect on the action of it, help to explain the passages in the reviews which you consulted me about, and seem to afford some foundation for the criticism they afford.'

Charlotte was deeply offended: 'I protest against this passage,' she wrote; 'I know what love is as I understand it, and if man or woman should be ashamed of feeling such love, then there is nothing right, noble, faithful, truthful, unselfish in this earth, as I comprehend rectitude, nobleness, fidelity, truth and disinterestedness.'

Here spoke the Romantic. But Harriet Martineau was not a Romantic but an Intellectual, and she judged Charlotte's books and her genius through her own temperament, and by intellectual standards. She followed up the private rebuke to her friend for making too much of love, in a review of Villette, contributed to the Daily News.

'All the female characters,' she wrote, 'in all their thoughts and lives, are full of one thing, or are regarded in the light of that one thought, love! It begins with the child of six years old, of the opening (a charming picture), and closes with it at the last page. And so dominant is this idea, so incessant is the writer's tendency to describe the need of being loved, that the heroine, who tells her own story, leaves the reader at last under the uncomfortable impression of her having either entertained a double love, or allowed one to supersede another, without notification of the transition. It is not thus in real life. There are substantial, heartfelt interests for women of all ages, and, under ordinary circumstances, quite apart from love; there is an absence of introspection, an unconsciousness, a repose, in women's lives, unless under peculiarly unfortunate circumstances, of which we find no admission in this book; and to the absence of it may be attributed some of the criticism which the book will meet with from readers who are no prudes, but whose reason and taste will regret the assumption that events and characters are to be regarded through the medium of one passion only.'

The critical blunder in this judgment is that here the authoress of the Illustrations in Political Economy and of the Atkinson Letters sees the authoress of Villette through her own temperament, as an intellectual like herself:—a humane sociologist, and a philosophical freethinker, whose literary purpose is to use her talent as a writer in the service of her ideas and principles. Judging Villette and its authoress from this point of view and by these standards, Harriet Martineau decides that because 'all events and characters in Villette are regarded through the medium of one passion, love,' therefore the literary motive and purpose of the authoress must have been to deny—or at any rate to ignore—that 'there are substantial heartfelt interests for women of all ages, and in ordinary circumstances, quite apart from love.'

The mistake lay in assuming that Charlotte Brontë was an intellectual, instead of an imaginative genius; and that her literary purpose was to affirm, or deny, or ignore deliberately, any principle; or in any way to make her genius the servant of her intellect; whereas her intelligence was so coloured by her imagination, so subservient to her genius, that if one were to measure her by intellectual standards—with Harriet Martineau, for instance—she would remain as vastly Harriet's inferior in enthusiasm of humanity, in practical benevolence and warm interest in social reform, and in emancipations from prejudice and insularity and bigotry, as she was Harriet's superior in power of passionate feeling, in wealth of imagination, and in superb gift of expression. But any such comparison would be out of place. Let us admit that Charlotte's thoughts and aspirations, as we find them scattered through her writings, express the ordinary vigorous prejudices of an English gentlewoman of her period, brought up under the influences of a father who was a good sort of Tory clergyman; that her attitude of condescension toward, rather than of sympathy with, the 'common people,' regarded as the 'lower orders,' who should be kindly treated of course, but kept in their place, and taught to 'order themselves lowly and reverently to their betters,' indicates a defective humanitarianism; that her almost rabid patriotism—her conviction that not to be English is a misfortune, and a stamp of inferiority that weighs heavily as an impediment to nobility and virtue, upon every member of every other foreign race, is distinctly narrow; and that her staunch and straitened protestantism, leaves her as far away as the 'idolatrous priests' she denounced, from any claim to enlightened tolerance.

Yet this lack of any particular height or breadth or distinction in Charlotte Brontë's social, political, critical, or even religious views, does not in any way detract from the height, depth and distinction of her powers of noble emotion and splendid expression; nor from the rare gift of translating words into feelings that quicken her readers' sensibility to a finer perception of the ideal beauty that lies at the heart of common things.

Here is the gift by which we have to judge, or, to speak more becomingly, for which we have to praise and thank, our only English 'Romantic' novelist, who stands in rank with George Sand, and who has been studied in comparison with her by Swinburne. And we have to praise, and thank our Charlotte all the more, because she has a national as well as a personal note: and brings to this European literary movement the characteristic qualities of imagination and sentiment that belong to our English literary temperament, and that do us honour, as a romantic people who are romantic in our own, and nobody else's way.

But now if we want to appreciate the 'magic' of Charlotte Brontë as a Romantic we must not look for the sources of her inspiration at Haworth; nor in the circle of dull people, to whom she wrote, brilliant writer as she was, dull letters, because their mediocrity weighed upon her spirit like lead.