156 Mr. J. H. Balfour Browne [June 1, 



might not write to a man double her age who was a married man 

 with a family, and who had been her teacher." 



^Ir. Shorter seems to have a somewhat unusual notion of ordinary 

 correspondence, and I question very much whether it is the ordinary 

 lot of teachers to receive such letters from the enthusiastic admirers 

 of their prelection methods. But Mr. Shorter is wrong in his facts 

 as well as his inferences. Professor Heger was not "double her age," 

 but only eight years older than she was. Charlotte was not w^hat 

 used to be called a " gashing girl," but a woman of twenty-eight. 

 Professor Heger was not a great man, although he was apparently a 

 competent teacher. As for the sorrow that he was a married man, 

 no one has suggested that ; but that a pure, honest unmarried 

 woman may hopelessly love a man who is married does not seem to 

 be beyond the bounds of po.ssibihty. And that a woman would, 

 under such untoward circumstances, suffer " loss of peace and 

 happiness " we can all believe. 



But it is curious that each of the best-known writers about Charlotte 

 Bronte has made a mistake. Mrs. Gaskell, with a tenderness which 

 is perhaps to her credit, thought that those two years of misery — 

 for which Charlotte herself vouches — were due to the anxiety she 

 felt at the unsteady career and sottish downfall of her brother 

 Bran well, and not to the pure passionate heart-hunger of the woman. 

 This explanation of the gloom of these two bad years was rejected by 

 Sir Wemyss Reid and by more recent writers, and there is next to 

 no evidence in support of Mrs. Gaskell's kind but erroneous view 

 of the cause of these storm-clouds. But Sir Wemyss Reid himself, 

 though he corrected Mrs. Ciaskell, fell into the error, persuaded to it 

 by " Lucy Snowe," that ^ladame Heger was a jealous, spying, cruel 

 woman. This, again, as I have said, and as Mrs. Macdonald shows 

 in her short but adequate book, Avas a mistake ; and it is a mistake 

 which did injustice to the memory of a quite worthy woman. That 

 the author of "Villette" made her as black as a pen could make her 

 was natural enough ; and there was a further excuse for the author — 

 that Madame Heger was under the thin veil of fictional treatment. 

 But the critic had no right to throw more mud at the dead woman. 

 Mr. Clement Shorter, too, in his mistaken admiration for Charlotte 

 Bronte, tries to make her a blue-stocking saint, instead of a real 

 living woman with a heart which has gone out, like Noah's dove, and 

 found no resting-place on the desolate world of waters. 



How these mistakes were possil)le, in the presence of Charlotte 

 Bronte's own candid and honest confessions in " Villette," and how 

 one of them can l)e persisted in since the publication of the letters of 

 1844-1S45, which are only, as it Were, a chapter in that novel, it is 

 difficult to conjecture. These are, as I have said, brimful of love. 

 It was love that made the pages of "Villette " so veracious, and make 

 much of it stand out now as if it had been written in letters of lire. 

 It was her love that was precious. That we are loved is a luxury. 



