And that, out of the solitude, was all.  Not the ghost, not the shadow of an Influence came to the three sisters.  There never was genius that owed so little to influence as theirs.

I know that in Charlotte’s case there is said to have been an Influence.  An Influence without which she would have remained for ever in obscurity, with Villette, with Shirley, with Jane Eyre, with The Professor, unborn, unconceived.

Need I say that the Influence is—­M.  Heger?

“The sojourn in Brussels,” says Mr. Clement Shorter, “made Miss Bronte an author,” and he is only following Sir Wemyss Reid, who was the first to establish Brussels as the turning-point.  Mr. Shorter does not believe in M. Heger as the inspirer of passion, but he does believe in him as the inspirer of genius.  He thinks it exceedingly probable that had not circumstances led Charlotte Bronte to spend some time at Brussels not only would “the world never have heard of her”, but it would never have heard of her sisters.  He is quite certain about Charlotte anyhow; she could not have “arrived” had she not met M. Heger.  “She went,” he says, “to Brussels full of the crude ambitions, the semi-literary impulses that are so common on the fringe of the writing world.  She left Brussels a woman of genuine cultivation, of educated tastes, armed with just the equipment that was to enable her to write the books of which two generations of her countrymen have been justly proud.”

This is saying that Charlotte Bronte had no means of expression before she wrote devoirs under M. Heger.  True, her genius did not find itself until after she left Brussels, that is to say, not until she was nearly thirty.  I have not read any of her works as Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley, and I do not imagine they were works of genius.  But that only means that Charlotte Bronte’s genius took time.  She was one of those novelists who do not write novels before they are nearly thirty.  But she could write.  Certain fragments of her very earliest work show that from the first she had not only the means, but very considerable mastery of expression.  What is more, they reveal in germ the qualities that marked her style in its maturity.  Her styles rather, for she had several.  There is her absolutely simple style, in which she is perfect; her didactic style, her fantastic style, which are mere temporary aberrations; and her inspired style, in which at her worst she is merely flamboyant and redundant, and at her best no less than perfect.  You will find a faint, embryonic foreshadowing of her perfections in the fragments given by Mrs. Gaskell.  There is THE HISTORY OF THE YEAR 1829, beginning:  “Once Papa lent my sister Maria a book.  It was an old geography book; she wrote on its blank leaf, “Papa lent me this book.”  This book is a hundred and twenty years old; it is at this moment lying before me.  While I write this I am in the kitchen of the Parsonage, Haworth; Tabby,