My contention is that it is this romantic Love that reveals itself in Charlotte's letters to M. Heger. And for this reason, I agree with Mr. Clement Shorter that they put her upon a higher pedestal than ever. For to have a heart capable of this great and glorious, albeit often tragical, romantic Love, that 'seeketh not its own,' and compared with which all other sorts of love, that do seek their own, are as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal is, independently of deeds or works, greatly to serve mankind. For it is to stand as a witness, amongst the meannesses of mortal and worldly things, to the existence of Something personal and immortal in the soul and heart of man, helping him 'to gild his dross thereby.'[4] Something sovereign, that, quite independently of forms of belief, or fashions of opinion, 'rules by every school, till love and longing die.' Something indestructible, confined to no epoch, ancient, mediæval or modern, but, 'that was, or yet the lights were set, a whisper in the void; that will be sung in planets young when this is clean destroyed.' In other words, I esteem human nature honoured in Charlotte Brontë, and Charlotte Brontë honoured in these Letters, because they are love-letters of a rare and wonderful sort amongst the most beautiful, although they are the most sad ever written. If they were not love-letters, but expressed the enthusiasm of a woman wanting comradeship with a great man, I should esteem them discreditable to any hero-worshipper. Because one should not pester one's hero with letters, nor conceive the conceit of comradeship with an object of worship. And it is not true that Charlotte's letters to Thackeray, George Henry Lewes and other men of letters after she became famous, had the same character as these love-letters written to M. Heger before her name was known; because in her letters to different celebrated writers, Charlotte talked about books or the criticism of books. But to M. Heger she throws open the secret chamber of her heart: she pours out its treasures of passionate feelings (as pure as they were passionate) at the feet of the man she loves; all she asks for from him in return is not to reprove her, nor refuse the offering; not to withdraw himself from her life altogether. To let her hear from him sometimes: not to leave her utterly alone, in the darkness, without any knowledge of what good or evil may befall one so dear to her.

Unfortunately we do not possess the first Letters of this correspondence. The four Letters given by Dr. Paul Heger to the British Museum all belong to a period when the Professor, who had answered (one does not know precisely in what way) Charlotte's first epistles, had left off replying to her; and the consistent motive of these four appeals is for some tidings of him, some proof that the 'estrangement from her Master,' to which she says she will never 'voluntarily' consent, has not, in spite of her own unaltered devotion, irrevocably taken place.

'Tell me about anything you like, my Master,' she writes, 'only tell me something! No doubt, to write to a former under-mistress (no, I will not remember my employment as under-mistress, I refuse to recall it), but to write to an old pupil, cannot be, for you, an interesting occupation. I realise this; but for me, it is life. Your last letter served to keep me alive, to nourish me during six months. Now I must have another one; and you will give me one. Not because you bear me friendship (you cannot bear me much!), but because you have a compassionate soul, and because you would not condemn any one to slow suffering, simply to spare yourself a few moments of fatigue! To forbid me to write to you, to refuse to reply to me, would be to tear from me the only joy that I have in the world; to deprive me of my last privilege, a privilege which I will never voluntarily renounce. Believe me, my Master! by writing to me, you do a good action—so long as I can believe you are not angry with me, so long as the hope is left me of news of you, I can be tranquil, and not too sad. But when a gloomy and prolonged silence warns me of the estrangement from me of my Master, when from day to day I expect a letter, and when, day after day, comes disappointment, to plunge me in overwhelming grief; and when the sweet and dear consolation of seeing your handwriting, of reading your counsels, fades from me like a vain vision,—then fever attacks me, appetite and sleep fail: I feel that life wastes away.'[5]

This passage is quoted from the Letter dated by Charlotte 18th November, without any indication of the year. Mr. Spielmann (who is responsible for the order given the Letters in the Times) esteems this one to be the last of the series; that is to say, to have been written ten months after the Letter dated by Charlotte 8 January, supposed by him to belong to the year 1845. With Dr. Paul Heger, I believe, on the contrary, that the Letter of the 18th November is the first of the series: and that it belongs to the year 1844; that is to say, was written ten months after Charlotte's return to England. This opinion seems to me established by the contents of the Letter, and by the account it gives of the conditions of affairs at Haworth, which were those that we find (if we consult Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë) did prevail in November 1844, but not in November 1845, and still less in November 1846.

My father (she writes) is in good health, but his eyesight is all but gone; he can no longer either read or write: and yet the doctors advise waiting some months longer before attempting any operation. This winter will be for him one long night. He rarely complains: and I admire his patience. If Providence has the same calamity in reserve for me, may it grant me the same patience to endure it. It seems to me, Monsieur, that what is most bitter in severe physical afflictions, is that they compel us to share our sufferings with those who surround us. One can hide the maladies of the soul; but those that attack the body and enfeeble our faculties cannot be hidden. My father now allows me to read to and to write for him. He shows much more confidence in me than he has ever done before; and this is a great consolation to me.

Charlotte's account in this Letter of her father's patient resignation and increased confidence in her under the trial, to a man of his independent and somewhat domineering temper, of compulsory reliance on the assistance of a daughter from whom he had exacted complete submission heretofore and from her childhood upwards, is confirmed in Mrs. Gaskell's biography by the testimony of other letters belonging to the first year of her return from Belgium. But by November 1845 Mr. Brontë's philosophy, before his own unmerited misfortune, had been troubled and transformed into acute misery and anxious forebodings by the downfall, both moral and physical, of his favourite amongst his children, Bramwell, the unhappy son—the only one—in this family of gifted daughters, whose perversion seems also to have had something of the irresponsibility of genius about it. Writing on the 4th November 1845 to Ellen Nussey,[6] Charlotte says:—

I hoped to be able to ask you to come to Haworth. It almost seemed as if Bramwell had a chance of getting employment; and I waited to know the results of his efforts, in order to say 'Dear Ellen, come and see us.' But the place is given to another person. Bramwell still remains at home, and whilst he is here, you shall not come.'

Here is Mrs. Gaskell's account of Mr. Brontë's experiences in this period, that are not to be reconciled with the account given of his good health and philosophical patience and resignation to dependence upon Charlotte given by her a year earlier:

For the last three years of his life, Bramwell took opium habitually, by way of stunning conscience: he drank, moreover, whenever he could get the opportunity.... He slept in his father's room; and he would sometimes declare that either he or his father would be dead before the morning! The trembling sisters, sick with fright, would implore their father not to expose himself to this danger. But Mr. Brontë was no timid man; and perhaps he felt that he could possibly influence his son to some self-restraint more by showing trust in him than by showing fear. The sisters often listened for the report of a pistol in the dead of night, till watchful eye and hearkening ear grew heavy and dull with the perpetual strain upon their nerves. In the mornings, young Brontë would saunter out saying, with a drunkard's incontinence of speech, 'The poor old man and I have had a terrible night of it; he does his best, the poor old man, but it's all over with me.'

One may safely affirm that if Charlotte had been writing in November 1845 it would not have been only his patience under the trial of loss of sight that she would have found to admire in her father. In November 1846 Mr. Brontë had successfully undergone the operation for cataract that saved him from blindness: and Charlotte herself, ten months after the overwhelming evidence of her 'master's estrangement,' given in his silence after her Letter of the 8th January, had saved her own soul from the malady she had endured without sharing her sufferings with any one; and was already writing Jane Eyre ... so that the conclusion is surely forced upon us that the Letter of the 18th November belongs to the year 1844, and written ten months after her return to Haworth, 2nd January 1844, and represents the first, and not the last of these four Letters.