at she may
observe Frances Henri the more dispassionately. She is inspired solely
by the analytic spirit, and either cannot, or will not, let herself go.
But she does what she meant to do. She had it in mind to write, not a
great work of imagination, but a grey and sober book, and a grey and
sober book is what she writes. A book concerned only with things and
people she has seen and known; a book, therefore, from which passion and
the poetry that passion is must be rigidly excluded, as belonging to
the region of things not, strictly speaking, known. It is as if she had
written _The Professor_ in rivalry with her sister Anne, both of them
austerely determined to put aside all imagination and deal with
experience and experience alone. Thus you obtain sincerity, you obtain
truth. And with nothing but experience before her, she writes a book
that has no passion in it, a book almost as bloodless and as gentle as
her sister Anne's.

Let us not disparage _The Professor_. Charlotte herself did not
disparage it. In her Preface she refused to solicit "indulgence for it
on the plea of a first attempt. A first attempt," she says, "it
certainly was not, as the pen which wrote it had been previously worn in
a practice of some years." In that Preface she shows plainly that at the
very outset of her career she had no sterner critic than herself; that
she was aware of her sins and her temptations, and of the dangers that
lurked for her in her imaginative style. "In many a crude effort,
destroyed almost as soon as composed, I had got over any such taste as I
might have had for ornamented and decorated composition, and come to
prefer what was plain and homely." Observe, it is not to the lessons of
the "master", but to the creation and destruction that went on at
Haworth that she attributes this purgation. She is not aware of the
extent to which she can trust her genius, of what will happen when she
has fairly let herself go. She is working on a method that rules her
choice of subject. "I said to myself that my hero should work his way
through life, as I had seen real, living men work theirs--that he should
never get a shilling that he had not earned--that no sudden turns should
lift him in a moment to wealth and high station; that whatever small
competency he might gain should be won by the sweat of his brow; that
before he could find so much as an arbour to sit down in, he should
master at least half the ascent of the Hill Difficulty; th