intellect; whereas her intelligence was so coloured by her imagination, so subservient to her genius, that if one were to measure her by intellectual standards—with Harriet Martineau, for instance—she would remain as vastly Harriet's inferior in enthusiasm of humanity, in practical benevolence and warm interest in social reform, and in emancipations from prejudice and insularity and bigotry, as she was Harriet's superior in power of passionate feeling, in wealth of imagination, and in superb gift of expression. But any such comparison would be out of place. Let us admit that Charlotte's thoughts and aspirations, as we find them scattered through her writings, express the ordinary vigorous prejudices of an English gentlewoman of her period, brought up under the influences of a father who was a good sort of Tory clergyman; that her attitude of condescension toward, rather than of sympathy with, the 'common people,' regarded as the 'lower orders,' who should be kindly treated of course, but kept in their place, and taught to 'order themselves lowly and reverently to their betters,' indicates a defective humanitarianism; that her almost rabid patriotism—her conviction that not to be English is a misfortune, and a stamp of inferiority that weighs heavily as an impediment to nobility and virtue, upon every member of every other foreign race, is distinctly narrow; and that her staunch and straitened protestantism, leaves her as far away as the 'idolatrous priests' she denounced, from any claim to enlightened tolerance.

Yet this lack of any particular height or breadth or distinction in Charlotte Brontë's social, political, critical, or even religious views, does not in any way detract from the height, depth and distinction of her powers of noble emotion and splendid expression; nor from the rare gift of translating words into feelings that quicken her readers' sensibility to a finer perception of the ideal beauty that lies at the heart of common things.

Here is the gift by which we have to judge, or, to speak more becomingly, for which we have to praise and thank, our only English 'Romantic' novelist, who stands in rank with George Sand, and who has been studied in comparison with her by Swinburne. And we have to praise, and thank our Charlotte all the more, because she has a national as well as a personal note: and brings to this European literary movement the characteristic qualities of imagination and sentiment that belong to our English literary temperament, and that do us honour, as a romantic people who are romantic in our own, and nobody else's way.

But now if we want to appreciate the 'magic' of Charlotte Brontë as a Romantic we must not look for the sources of her inspiration at Haworth; nor in the circle of dull people, to whom she wrote, brilliant writer as she was, dull letters, because their mediocrity weighed upon her spirit like lead.

Twenty years ago, now, I attempted (but was not especially successful in the task) to establish upon the personal knowledge that my own residence as a pupil in the historical Pensionnat in the Rue d'Isabelle, at Bruxelles gave me of the facts of Charlotte Brontë's relationships to Monsieur and Madame Heger, right impressions about the experiences and emotions she underwent between 1842 and 1846, and that supply the key and clue to the right interpretation of her genius. Every opinion I then ventured to state, not upon the authority of any special power of divination or of psychological insight of my own, but solely upon the authority of this personal knowledge of Monsieur and Madame Heger in my early girlhood, and also of the information I owed to the friendship and kind assistance given me, in my endeavour to rectify false judgments, by the Heger family, has quite recently, not only been confirmed, but established upon entirely incontrovertible evidence, by the generous gift made to English readers throughout the world of the key needed to unlock once and for ever the tragical but romantic 'Secret' of Charlotte Brontë.

CHAPTER II

THE KEY TO THE PROBLEM

The common saying, that 'people must be just before they are generous,' becomes at once less common and more correct when it is formulated differently. 'One needs to be very generous before one can be really just' is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's way of stating the proposition. And one calls this sentence to remembrance when recognising how much generosity is revealed in the act of justice recently performed by Dr. Paul Heger in his gift to the British Museum (that is to say to English readers throughout the world) of the four tragical, but incomparably beautiful, Letters written by Charlotte Brontë to his father, the late Professor Constantin Heger, within two years of her return to England.

No doubt this gift was an act of justice. Without the conclusive evidence these Letters afford, there would have been no means of rectifying the arbitrary, false, and inadequate criticism of the personality, and thus, indirectly, of the writings, of a great novelist misjudged especially in her own country.

But whilst, for these reasons, the publication of these Letters was a duty to English literature, the son of the late Director and Directress of the Bruxelles Pensionnat—unwarrantably supposed to have their literal counterparts in the interesting Professor Paul Emanuel, and in the abominable Madame Beck—might well, in view of the unintelligent and ungenerous criticism of his parents by English readers, have refused to recognise any obligation on his side to concern himself with the rectification of the dull laudatory, or the malicious condemnatory, judgments passed, from a false standpoint, on the authoress of Villette.

We find Dr. Paul Heger able to rise entirely above all personal rancour, and to recognise that Charlotte Brontë herself is not to be made responsible because a good many of her critics have blundered. Indeed, the conduct of the whole Heger family since the publication of Villette, and the death of Charlotte Brontë, has been distinguished by this fine spirit of disinterestedness; and by a dignified indifference to undeserved reproaches. The answer to all charges, of unkindness to Charlotte on Madame Heger's part, or of injudicious kindness first, followed by heartless indifference, on M. Heger's side, was in their hands; and they had only to publish the present Letters to establish the facts as they really were. But this could not have been done in the time when Villette appeared, nor even immediately after Charlotte's death, without wounding others. Villette appeared in 1853. In 1854 Charlotte, then in her fortieth year, married the Rev. A.B. Nicholls; and she died less than a year after this marriage. Mr. Nicholls survived her more than forty years. No doubt he would have been wounded in his sensibilities by the disclosure of his late wife's entirely honourable, but very romantic and passionate earlier attachment to somebody else. Intimate personal friends of Charlotte, also, would have been afflicted, not by her revelations, but by the commentaries upon them that a certain type of critic would have infallibly indulged in. Whilst these conditions lasted, the Heger family scrupulously refrained from publishing these documents. Twenty years ago, when I was collecting the materials for my article published in the Woman at Home, and when, in the light of my own recollection of M. and Madame Heger, as their former pupil, I endeavoured to rectify, what I knew to be, false impressions about their relationships with Charlotte Brontë, I was told by my honoured and dearly loved friend, Mademoiselle Louise Heger, about the existence of these Letters; but they were not shown me. And I was further assured that, whilst they would be carefully preserved, they would not be published, until every one had disappeared who could in any way be offended by their disclosure. After the lapse of more than half a century since Charlotte's death,