y.

I do not say that Charlotte Bronte had not what is called a
"temperament"; her genius would not have been what it was without it;
she herself would have been incomplete; but there never was a woman of
genius who had her temperament in more complete subjection to her
character; and it is her character that you have to reckon with at every
turn.

The little legends and the little theories have gone far enough. And had
they gone no farther they would not have mattered much. They would at
least have left Charlotte Bronte's genius to its own mystery.

But her genius was the thing that irritated, the enigmatic, inexplicable
thing. Talent in a woman you can understand, there's a formula for
it--_tout talent de femme est un bonheur manque_. So when a woman's
talent baffles you, your course is plain, _cherchez l'homme_.
Charlotte's critics argued that if you could put your finger on the man
you would have the key to the mystery. This, of course, was arguing that
her genius was, after all, only a superior kind of talent; but some of
them had already begun to ask themselves, Was it, after all, anything
more? So they began to look for the man. They were certain by this time
that there was one.

The search was difficult; for Charlotte had concealed him well. But they
found him at last in M. Constantin Heger, the little Professor of the
Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the Rue d'Isabelle. Sir Wemyss Reid had
suggested a love-affair in Brussels to account for Charlotte's
depression, which was unfavourable to his theory of the happy life. Mr.
Leyland seized upon the idea, for it nourished his theory that Branwell
was an innocent lamb who had never caused his sisters a moment's misery.
They _made_ misery for themselves out of his harmless peccadilloes. Mr.
Angus Mackay in _The Brontes, Fact and Fiction_, gives us this fiction
for a fact. He is pleased with what he calls the "pathetic significance"
of his "discovery". There _was_ somebody, there had to be, and it had to
be M. Heger, for there wasn't anybody else. Mr. Mackay draws back the
veil with a gesture and reveals--the love-affair. He is very nice about
it, just as nice as ever he can be. "We see her," he says, "sore
wounded in her affections, but unconquerable in her will. The discovery
... does not degrade the noble figure we know so well.... The moral of
her greatest works--that conscience must reign absolute at whatever
cost--acquires a greater force when we realize how she