No; the theorists who have insisted on this tragic passion have not reckoned with Charlotte Bronte’s character, and its tremendous power of self-repression.  If at Brussels any disastrous tenderness had raised its head it wouldn’t have had a chance to grow an inch.  But Charlotte had large and luminous ideas of friendship.  She was pure, utterly pure from all the illusions and subtleties and corruptions of the sentimentalist, and she could trust herself in friendship.  She brought to it ardours and vehemences that she would never have allowed to love.  If she let herself go in her infrequent intercourse with M. Heger, it was because she was so far from feeling in herself the possibility of passion.  That was why she could say, “I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what the parting with M. Heger cost me.  It grieved me so much to grieve him who has been so true, kind, and disinterested a friend.”  That was how she could bring herself to write thus to Monsieur:  “Savez-vous ce que je ferais, Monsieur?  J’ecrirais un livre et je le dedierais a mon maitre de litterature, au seul maitre que j’aie jamais eu—­a vous Monsieur!  Je vous ai dit souvent en francais combien je vous respecte, combien je suis redevable a votre bonte a vos conseils.  Je voudrais le dire une fois en anglais ... le souvenir de vos bontes ne s’effacera jamais de ma memoire, et tant que ce souvenir durera le respect que vous m’avez inspire durera aussi.” For “je vous respecte” we are not entitled to read “je vous aime”.  Charlotte was so made that kindness shown her moved her to tears of gratitude.  When Charlotte said “respect” she meant it.  Her feeling for M. Heger was purely what Mr. Matthew Arnold said religion was, an affair of “morality touched with emotion”.  All her utterances, where there is any feeling in them, no matter what, have a poignancy, a vibration which is Brontesque and nothing more.  And this Brontesque quality is what the theorists have (like Madame Heger, and possibly Monsieur) neither allowed for nor understood.

* * * * *

For this “fiery-hearted Vestal”, this virgin, sharp-tongued and sharper-eyed, this scorner of amorous curates, had a genius for friendship.  This genius, like her other genius, was narrow in its range and opportunity, and for that all the more ardent and intense.  It fed on what came to its hand.  It could even grow, like her other genius, with astounding vitality out of strange and hostile soil.  She seems to have had many friends, obscure and great; the obscure, the Dixons, the Wheelrights, the Taylors, the Nusseys, out of all proportion to the great.  But properly speaking she had only two friends, Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey, the enchanting, immortal “Nel”.