Shorter, by the report of an interviewer who recorded his opinions in the Times, 30th July, immediately after the publication of these Letters, 'is one of the noblest figures in life as well as in literature; and these Letters place her on a higher pedestal than ever.'

Let me quote from the same report in the Times the further statement of his opinions given by this well-known critic, as to the sentiments revealed in these Letters:

'Mr. Shorter,' affirmed the interviewer, 'welcomed the publication of the letters in the Times "as giving the last and final word on an old and needless controversy." "Personally," he said, "I have always held the view that those letters were actuated only by the immense enthusiasm of a woman desiring comradeship and sympathy with a man of the character of Professor Heger. There was no sort of great sorrow on her part because Professor Heger was a married man, and it is plain in her letters that she merely desired comradeship with a great man. When Charlotte Brontë made her name famous with her best-known novel, she experienced much the same adulation from admirers of both sexes as she had already poured upon her teacher. She found that literary comradeship she desired in half a dozen male correspondents to whom she addressed letters in every way as interesting as those written by her to Professor Heger. There is nothing in those letters of hers, published now for the first time, that any enthusiastic woman might not write to a man double her age, who was a married man with a family, and who had been her teacher. When one considers that half a dozen writers have, in the past, declared that Charlotte Brontë was in love with Professor Heger, it is a surprising thing that Dr. Heger did not years ago publish the letters. They are a complete vindication both of her and of his father, and, as such, I welcome them, as I am sure must all lovers of the Brontës."'

In his first contention Mr. Clement Shorter is undeniably right: it is quite true that 'the publication of these Letters places Charlotte Brontë on a higher pedestal than ever.' But why is this true? Because these are love-letters of a very rare and wonderful character; because the passionate tragical emotion that throbs through them is a love that, recognised as hopeless, as unrequited, makes only one claim; that, precisely because it makes no other, it has a right to be accepted and to live. Now this sort of love is a very rare and wonderful emotion, that only a noble being can feel; and that although it is hopeless, tragical, is nevertheless a splendid fact, that renders it absurd to deny that sublime unselfishness is a capacity of human nature. And, again, these letters place Charlotte Brontë 'on a higher pedestal than ever,' because in them her vocation and gift of expressing her own emotions in a way that makes them 'vibrate' in us like living feelings is here carried to its height. So that these personal letters, more even than the pictured emotions of Lucy Snowe, stand out as a record of romantic love that (in so far as I know) has never before been rivalled. It is true we have the romantic love-letters of Abelard and Héloïse, and the letters in the New Héloïse of Saint-Preux to Julie, and of Julie to Saint-Preux, after their separation, as beautiful examples of love surviving hope of happiness; and Sainte-Beuve has quoted, as examples of the tragical disinterested passion of a love that claims no return, but only the right to exist, the letters of some eighteenth-century women: Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse, Madame de la Popelinière, and Mademoiselle d'Aissé. But in none of these historic love-letters (so, at least, it seems to me) does one feel, with the same truth and strength as in these recently published letters of Charlotte Brontë to M. Heger, the 'vibration' of this tragical, hopeless, romantic love, that asks for nothing but acceptance, that does not 'seek its own'—the love that only asks to give, compared with which all other sorts of love, that do seek their own and claim return, are as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.

But now, if we were to accept the view of these letters, that they do not express love at all, but merely the writer's 'desire of comradeship with a great man': and that 'after she had become famous "she found that literary comradeship she desired, in half a dozen male correspondents, to whom she addressed letters in every way as interesting as those written by her to M. Heger"'; and that 'there is nothing in these letters that any enthusiastic woman might not write to a man double her age, who was a married man with a family, and who had been her teacher'—if we could accept all these views, could we then hold the opinion that 'the publication of these letters places Charlotte on a higher pedestal than ever'?

It seems to me, on the contrary, that then we should find ourselves compelled to admit that Charlotte Brontë had fallen very much in our esteem as a result of the publication of these Letters. For whilst romantic love is a noble sentiment that does honour to the heart that feels it, an 'immense enthusiasm for literary comradeship with great men' is not necessarily, nor generally even, a commendable sentiment. It is very often merely a rather vulgar and selfish persistency in claiming the time and attention of busy people who don't want the comradeship; and I suppose there are very few people in the least degree famous who have not been rightly harassed by the 'enthusiasm' of professing admirers who have nothing to do themselves, and who want busy men or women of letters to correspond with them. And if a desire of comradeship with M. Heger had really been the sentiment and motive of Charlotte's letters to him, after she left Bruxelles, then the fact that she continued to write to him although he did not answer her letters would prove that she was insisting upon being the 'comrade' of some one who did not want her. Again, if the tone and terms of these Letters to M. Heger in 1845 were the same that she employed with 'half a dozen other male correspondents,' after she became a famous writer, well Charlotte would fall in our estimation, both as a writer, who ought to know how to avoid extravagant language, and as a self-respecting woman who should not have allowed her enthusiasm for literary comradeship to induce her to repeat experiences that, without loss of dignity, one cannot pass through more than once in a lifetime.

Happily, however, attention to facts proves that none of the conditions that, if they had existed, would have rendered the writing of these Letters discreditable to Charlotte's reputation, can be accepted as in the least credible. It is not credible that her sentiment for M. Heger was that of intellectual enthusiasm for a great man double her age; because, to begin with, M, Heger was not double Charlotte Brontë's age, but only seven years her senior. About this question there can be no dispute. M. Heger was born in 1809; and Charlotte Brontë in 1816. In 1844 Charlotte then was twenty-eight, and M. Heger thirty-five years of age, and given the fact that women lose their youth first, M. Heger had precisely the age that would render him most sympathetic to a woman who was still young but who had left girlhood behind her. Again, M. Heger was not a 'Great Man,' in the sense of being either a celebrity, or an original genius with gifts or qualities of an order calculated to kindle intellectual hero-worship; and he was further a dictatorial and ingrained Professor, the very last person on earth to offer literary comradeship to a former pupil. The Director of the Pensionnat in the Rue d'Isabelle, and the former Préfet des Études at the Brussels Athénée (who had resigned this post when religious instruction, made a free subject, was excluded, as a compulsory Catholic training from the college curriculum) was a man of talent, who had weight in