And what a fling!  It is the way of genius to look after itself.  In spite of obstacles, Charlotte Bronte’s took hold of every man and woman that crossed and barred its path, and ultimately it avenged itself on Monsieur and on Madame Heger.  Those two were made for peaceful, honourable conjugal obscurity, but it was their luck to harbour a half-fledged and obstructed genius in their Pensionnat, a genius thirsting for experience; and somehow, between them, they contrived to make it suffer.  That was their tragedy.  Monsieur’s case is pitiful; for he was kind and well-meaning, and he was fond of Charlotte; and yet, because of Charlotte, there is no peace for him in the place where he has gone.  Her genius has done with him, but her ghost, like some malign and awful destiny, pursues him.  No sooner does he sink back quiet in his grave than somebody unearths him.  Why cannot he be allowed to rest, once for all, in his amiable unimportance?  He became, poor man, important only by the use that Charlotte’s genius made of him.  It seized him as it would have seized on any other interesting material that came its way.  Without him we might have had another Rochester, and we should not have had any Paul Emanuel, which would have been a pity; that is all.

There is hardly any hope that Bronte specialists will accept this view.  For them the sojourn in Brussels will still stand as the turning-point in Charlotte Bronte’s career.  Yet for her, long afterwards, Brussels must have stood as the danger threatening it.  She would have said, I think, that her sojourn in Haworth was the turning-point.  It was destiny that turned Emily back to Haworth from the destruction that waited for her at Brussels, so that she conceived and brought forth Wuthering Heights; her own destiny that she secretly foreknew, consoling and beneficent.  And, no doubt, it was destiny of a sort, unforeknown, deceitful, apparently malignant, that sent Charlotte back again to Brussels after her aunt’s death.  It wrung from her her greatest book, Villette.  But Haworth, I think, would have wrung from her another and perhaps a greater.

For the first-fruits of the sojourn in Brussels was neither Villette nor Jane Eyre, but The Professor.  And The Professor has none of the qualities of Jane Eyre or of Villette; it has none of the qualities of Charlotte’s later work at all; above all, none of that master quality which M. Heger is supposed to have specially evoked.  Charlotte, indeed, could not well have written a book more destructive to the legend of the upheaval, the tragic passion, the furnace of temptation and the flight.  Nothing could be less like a furnace than the atmosphere of The Professor.  From the first page to the last there is not one pulse, not one breath of passion in it.  The bloodless thing comes coldly, slowly tentatively, from the birth.  It is almost as frigid as a devoir written under M. Heger’s eye.  The theorists, I notice, are careful not to draw attention to The Professor; and they are wise, for attention drawn to The Professor makes sad work of their theory.