I know there is a gulf fixed between Currer Bell and Charles Townsend, who succeeded Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley and the Marquis of Douro, about eighteen-thirty-eight; but it is bridged by the later _Poems_ which show Charlotte's genius struggling through a wrong medium to the right goal. She does not know--after the sojourn in Brussels she does not yet know--that her right medium is prose. She knew no more than she knew in November, eighteen-forty-one, when, on the eve of her flight from Haworth, she writes: "The plain fact is, I was not, I am not now, certain of my destiny." It was not until two years after she had returned to Haworth that she received her certainty. For posterity, overpowered by the labour of the Brontë specialists, it may seem as if Charlotte Brontë's genius owed everything to her flight from Haworth. In reality her flight merely coincided with the inevitable shooting of its wings; and the specialists have mistaken coincidence for destiny. Heaven only knows what would have happened to her genius if, blind to her destiny, she had remained in Brussels. For, once there, its wing-feathers left off growing. Its way was blocked by every conceivable hostile and obstructive thing. Madame Héger was hostile, and Monsieur, I think, purely obstructive. Emily saw through him, and denounced his method as fatal to all originality. Charlotte, to be sure, called him "my dear master, the only master that I ever had", but if that was not her "absurd charity", it was only her Brontësque way. There was no sense in which he was her master. He taught her French; to the very last the habit of using "a few French words" was the King Charles's head in her manuscripts; and the French he taught her did her harm. The restraint he could and would have taught her she never learnt until her genius had had, in defiance and in spite of him, its full fling.