Remember, on the theory, Charlotte Bronte has received her great awakening, her great enlightenment; she is primed with passion; the whole wonderful material of Villette is in her hand; she has before her her unique opportunity.  You ought, on the theory, to see her hastening to it, a passionate woman, pouring out her own one and supreme experience, and, with the brand of Brussels on her, never afterwards really doing anything else.  Whereas the first thing the impassioned Charlotte does (after a year of uninspired and ineffectual poetizing) is to sit down and write The Professor; a book, remarkable not by any means for its emotion, but for its cold and dispassionate observation.  Charlotte eliminates herself, and is Crimsworth in order that she may observe Frances Henri the more dispassionately.  She is inspired solely by the analytic spirit, and either cannot, or will not, let herself go.  But she does what she meant to do.  She had it in mind to write, not a great work of imagination, but a grey and sober book, and a grey and sober book is what she writes.  A book concerned only with things and people she has seen and known; a book, therefore, from which passion and the poetry that passion is must be rigidly excluded, as belonging to the region of things not, strictly speaking, known.  It is as if she had written The Professor in rivalry with her sister Anne, both of them austerely determined to put aside all imagination and deal with experience and experience alone.  Thus you obtain sincerity, you obtain truth.  And with nothing but experience before her, she writes a book that has no passion in it, a book almost as bloodless and as gentle as her sister Anne’s.

Let us not disparage The Professor.  Charlotte herself did not disparage it.  In her Preface she refused to solicit “indulgence for it on the plea of a first attempt.  A first attempt,” she says, “it certainly was not, as the pen which wrote it had been previously worn in a practice of some years.”  In that Preface she shows plainly that at the very outset of her career she had no sterner critic than herself; that she was aware of her sins and her temptations, and of the dangers that lurked for her in her imaginative style.  “In many a crude effort, destroyed almost as soon as composed, I had got over any such taste as I might have had for ornamented and decorated composition, and come to prefer what was plain and homely.”  Observe, it is not to the lessons of the “master”, but to the creation and destruction that went on at Haworth that she attributes this purgation.  She is not aware of the extent to which she can trust her genius, of what will happen when she has fairly let herself go.  She is working on a method that rules her choice of subject.  “I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life, as I had seen real, living men work theirs—­that he should never get a shilling that he had not earned—­that no sudden turns should lift him in a moment to wealth and high station; that whatever small competency he might gain should be won by the sweat of his brow; that before he could find so much as an arbour to sit down in, he should master at least half the ascent of the Hill Difficulty; that he should not marry even a beautiful girl or a lady of rank.”