“‘How rich you are, Monsieur!’ And then she stirred uneasily in my arms.  ‘Three thousand francs!’ she murmured, ’while I get only twelve hundred!’ She went on faster.  ’However, it must be so for the present; and, Monsieur, were you not saying something about my giving up my place?  Oh no!  I shall hold it fast’; and her little fingers emphatically tightened on mine.

“’Think of marrying you to be kept by you, Monsieur!  I could not do it; and how dull my days would be!  You would be away teaching in close, noisy schoolrooms, from morning till evening, and I should be lingering at home, unemployed and solitary.  I should get depressed and sullen, and you would soon tire of me.’

“‘Frances, you could yet read and study—­two things you like so well.’

“’Monsieur, I could not; I like contemplative life, but I like an active better; I must act in some way, and act with you.  I have taken notice, Monsieur, that people who are only in each other’s company for amusement, never really like each other so well, or esteem each other so highly, as those who work together, and perhaps suffer together!’”

To which Crimsworth replies, “You speak God’s truth, and you shall have your own way, for it is the best way.”

There is far more common sense than passion in the solid little Frances and her apathetic lover.  It is Frances Henri’s situation, not her character, that recalls so irresistibly Lucy Snowe.  Frances has neither Lucy’s temperament, nor Lucy’s terrible capacity for suffering.  She suffers through her circumstances, not through her temperament.  The motives handled in The Professor belong to the outer rather than the inner world; the pressure of circumstance, bereavement, poverty, the influences of alien and unloved surroundings, these are the springs that determine the drama of Frances and of Crimsworth.  Charlotte is displaying a deliberate interest in the outer world and the material event.  She does not yet know that it is in the inner world that her great conquest and dominion is to be.  The people in this first novel are of the same family as the people in Jane Eyre, in Shirley, in Villette.  Crimsworth is almost reproduced in Louis Moore.  Yorke Hunsden is the unmistakable father of Mr. Yorke and Rochester; Frances, a pale and passionless sister of Jane Eyre, and a first cousin of Lucy.  Yet, in spite of these relationships, The Professor stands alone.  In spite of its striking resemblance to Villette there is no real, no spiritual affinity.  And the great gulf remains fixed between The Professor and Jane Eyre.

This difference lies deeper than technique.  It is a difference of vision, of sensation.  The strange greyness of The Professor, its stillness, is not due altogether to Charlotte’s deliberate intention.  It is the stillness, the greyness of imperfect hearing, of imperfect seeing.  I know it has one fine piece of word-painting, but not one that can stand among Charlotte Bronte’s masterpieces in this kind.