the turning-point
in Charlotte Bronte's career. Yet for her, long afterwards, Brussels
must have stood as the danger threatening it. She would have said, I
think, that her sojourn in Haworth was the turning-point. It was destiny
that turned Emily back to Haworth from the destruction that waited for
her at Brussels, so that she conceived and brought forth _Wuthering
Heights_; her own destiny that she secretly foreknew, consoling and
beneficent. And, no doubt, it was destiny of a sort, unforeknown,
deceitful, apparently malignant, that sent Charlotte back again to
Brussels after her aunt's death. It wrung from her her greatest book,
_Villette_. But Haworth, I think, would have wrung from her another and
perhaps a greater.

For the first-fruits of the sojourn in Brussels was neither _Villette_
nor _Jane Eyre_, but _The Professor_. And _The Professor_ has none of
the qualities of _Jane Eyre_ or of _Villette_; it has none of the
qualities of Charlotte's later work at all; above all, none of that
master quality which M. Heger is supposed to have specially evoked.
Charlotte, indeed, could not well have written a book more destructive
to the legend of the upheaval, the tragic passion, the furnace of
temptation and the flight. Nothing could be less like a furnace than the
atmosphere of _The Professor_. From the first page to the last there is
not one pulse, not one breath of passion in it. The bloodless thing
comes coldly, slowly tentatively, from the birth. It is almost as frigid
as a _devoir_ written under M. Heger's eye. The theorists, I notice, are
careful not to draw attention to _The Professor_; and they are wise, for
attention drawn to _The Professor_ makes sad work of their theory.

Remember, on the theory, Charlotte Bronte has received her great
awakening, her great enlightenment; she is primed with passion; the
whole wonderful material of _Villette_ is in her hand; she has before
her her unique opportunity. You ought, on the theory, to see her
hastening to it, a passionate woman, pouring out her own one and supreme
experience, and, with the brand of Brussels on her, never afterwards
really doing anything else. Whereas the first thing the impassioned
Charlotte does (after a year of uninspired and ineffectual poetizing) is
to sit down and write _The Professor_; a book, remarkable not by any
means for its emotion, but for its cold and dispassionate observation.
Charlotte eliminates herself, and is Crimsworth in order th