It is important to establish this, because one has to read these Letters in their right order before one can understand the story they disclose of the long training in deferred hope, in expectation, crowned with disappointment, in vain pursuit of shadows that eluded her grasp, and of illusions that reveal themselves as forms of self-deceit only in the very hour when they have conquered belief; in other words, of the long training in personal suffering it took to create and fashion the genius of a writer whose magical gift was to be the power of transforming words into feelings.
Carrying through the examination of these documents by the rule that recognises the Letter of the 18th November as written ten months after Charlotte's return to England, we discover in the opening sentence the fact that the last letter Charlotte had received from her Professor must have been in May of this same year; that is to say, four months after the sentimental leave-taking with her Professor, which sent Charlotte home to England with illusions about the extent to which her own passionate grief at their separation was shared by M. Heger. By November these illusions have been dispelled; Charlotte understands perfectly now (although this does not make her any more just to Madame Heger) that the 'grief' of her 'Master,' that she had said she would 'never forget, never mind how long she might live,' was a very short-lived affair on his side; merely the transient regret of a teacher who will miss a favourite pupil from his class.
'Que ne puis-je avoir pour vous juste autant d'amitié que vous avez pour moi,' she writes to him, 'ni plus, ni moins? Je serais alors si tranquille, si libre: je pourrais garder le silence pendant six mois sans effort.'
There is a note of bitterness in this. In what precedes it there is no bitterness, but we have one of the passages in these wonderful letters that seem to me to place them above all the other love-letters preserved in the world, as immortal records of the Romantic Love that honours human nature in the hearts that cherish it.
'The six months of silence are over: we are now at the 18th of November,' she writes:—
I may, then, write to you, without breaking my promise. The summer and winter have seemed very long to me: in truth, it has cost me painful efforts to endure up to now the privation I have imposed upon myself. You, for your part, cannot understand this! But, Monsieur, try to imagine, for one moment, that one of your children is a hundred and sixty leagues away from you; and that you are condemned to remain for six months, without writing to him; without receiving any news from him; without hearing anything about him; without knowing how he is;—well, then you may be able to understand, perhaps, how hard is such an obligation imposed upon me.
In connection with the opening phrase, we must recognise in it the confirmation of an assertion made in my article in the Woman at Home published twenty years before these Letters were published, but which had for its authority the information given me by Dr. Paul Heger upon the occasion of a conversation, when he very kindly talked over with me the questions connected with events in his parents' life that, inasmuch as they happened before his birth, he knew as family traditions chiefly—but still as traditions derived from the only authentic sources of information that exist: Dr. Paul Heger's theory was that until Charlotte had left Bruxelles and commenced to write to his father letters in a tone of exaltation that announced an exaggerated attachment, Monsieur Heger himself had never suspected the existence of any such sentiment; and that he, and Madame Heger (?)—were disposed to regard it as an attack of morbid regret for the more animated life she had led in Bruxelles, and the dulness of her home surroundings. And that, acting upon this supposition, they had thought it advisable (and this in Charlotte's own interests chiefly) to let her know that they were both of them distressed and displeased by the tone of her letters; and that if she wished to keep up the correspondence, she must become more reasonable and temperate in her way of expressing herself; and that, as the exchange of letters between busy people became onerous, there must be only two letters every year at intervals of six months. We find Charlotte acknowledging this condition, as one that she had accepted, but that she complained of as a great 'privation': and she then goes on to explain (as only one taught by romantic, that is to say by unselfish, and unsensual, love, that 'does not seek its own,' could explain it) in what this 'privation' consists.
Did any woman, neglected by the man she loves, ever discover a device, at once so passionate, and so poetically pure as Charlotte's, who makes the man who does not love her, but whom she knows is an adoring father, try to realise what she feels, so far away from him, and left without tidings by asking him to picture what he would feel if separated by a hundred and sixty leagues from his little child, he were left without news of him?