herself came
through the furnace of temptation with marks of torture on her, but with
no stain on her soul."

This is all very well, but the question is: _Did_ Charlotte come through
a furnace? _Did_ she suffer from a great and tragic passion? It may have
been so. For all we know she may have been in fifty furnaces; she may
have gone from one fit of tragic passion to another. Only (apart from
gossip, and apart from the argument from the novels, which begs the
question) we have no evidence to prove it. What we have points all the
other way.

Gossip apart, believers in the tragic passion have nourished their
theory chiefly on that celebrated passage in a letter of Charlotte's to
Ellen Nussey: "I returned to Brussels after Aunt's death, prompted by
what then seemed an irresistible impulse. I was punished for my selfish
folly by a withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of
mind."

Here we have the great disclosure. By "irresistible impulse" and
"selfish folly", Charlotte could only mean indulgence in an illegitimate
passion for M. Heger's society. Peace of mind bears but one
interpretation.

Mr. Clement Shorter, to his infinite credit, will have none of this. He
maintains very properly that the passage should be left to bear the
simple construction that Miss Nussey and Mr. Nicholls put upon it. But I
would go farther. I am convinced that not only does that passage bear
that construction, but that it will not bear the weight of any other.

In eighteen-forty-two Charlotte's aunt died, and Charlotte became the
head of her father's household. She left her father's house in a time of
trouble, prompted by "an irresistible impulse" towards what we should
now call self-development. Charlotte, more than two years later, in a
moment of retrospective morbidity, called it "selfish folly". In that
dark mid-Victorian age it was sin in any woman to leave her home if her
home required her. And with her aunt dead, and her brother Branwell
drowning his grief for his relative in drink, and her father going blind
and beginning in his misery to drink a little too, Charlotte felt that
her home did require her. Equally she felt that either Emily or she had
got to turn out and make a living, and since it couldn't possibly be
Emily it must be she. The problem would have been quite simple even for
Charlotte--but _she wanted to go_. Therefore her tender conscience
vacillated. When you remember that Charlotte Bronte's conscien