Puerile, if you like, and puerile all the stuff that Charlotte Bronte wrote before eighteen-forty-six; but her style at thirteen, in its very rhythms and cadences, is the unmistakable embryo of her style at thirty; and M. Heger no more cured her of its faults that he could teach her its splendours. Something that was not Brussels made Miss Bronte a prodigious author at thirteen. The mere mass of her Juvenilia testifies to a most ungovernable bent. Read the list of works, appalling in their length, which this child produced in a period of fifteen months; consider that she produced nothing but melancholy letters during her “sojourn in Brussels”; and compare M. Heger’s academic precepts with her practice, with the wild sweep and exuberance of her style when she has shaken him off, and her genius gets possession of her.
I know there is a gulf fixed between Currer Bell and Charles Townsend, who succeeded Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley and the Marquis of Douro, about eighteen-thirty-eight; but it is bridged by the later Poems which show Charlotte’s genius struggling through a wrong medium to the right goal. She does not know—after the sojourn in Brussels she does not yet know—that her right medium is prose. She knew no more than she knew in November, eighteen-forty-one, when, on the eve of her flight from Haworth, she writes: “The plain fact is, I was not, I am not now, certain of my destiny.” It was not until two years after she had returned to Haworth that she received her certainty. For posterity, overpowered by the labour of the Bronte specialists, it may seem as if Charlotte Bronte’s genius owed everything to her flight from Haworth. In reality her flight merely coincided with the inevitable shooting of its wings; and the specialists have mistaken coincidence for destiny.
Heaven only knows what would have happened to her genius if, blind to her destiny, she had remained in Brussels. For, once there, its wing-feathers left off growing. Its way was blocked by every conceivable hostile and obstructive thing. Madame Heger was hostile, and Monsieur, I think, purely obstructive. Emily saw through him, and denounced his method as fatal to all originality. Charlotte, to be sure, called him “my dear master, the only master that I ever had”, but if that was not her “absurd charity”, it was only her Brontesque way. There was no sense in which he was her master. He taught her French; to the very last the habit of using “a few French words” was the King Charles’s head in her manuscripts; and the French he taught her did her harm. The restraint he could and would have taught her she never learnt until her genius had had, in defiance and in spite of him, its full fling.