For the first-fruits of the sojourn in Brussels was neither _Villette_ nor _Jane Eyre_, but _The Professor_. And _The Professor_ has none of the qualities of _Jane Eyre_ or of _Villette_; it has none of the qualities of Charlotte's later work at all; above all, none of that master quality which M. Héger is supposed to have specially evoked. Charlotte, indeed, could not well have written a book more destructive to the legend of the upheaval, the tragic passion, the furnace of temptation and the flight. Nothing could be less like a furnace than the atmosphere of _The Professor_. From the first page to the last there is not one pulse, not one breath of passion in it. The bloodless thing comes coldly, slowly tentatively, from the birth. It is almost as frigid as a _devoir_ written under M. Héger's eye. The theorists, I notice, are careful not to draw attention to _The Professor_; and they are wise, for attention drawn to _The Professor_ makes sad work of their theory. Remember, on the theory, Charlotte Brontë has received her great awakening, her great enlightenment; she is primed with passion; the whole wonderful material of _Villette_ is in her hand; she has before her her unique opportunity. You ought, on the theory, to see her hastening to it, a passionate woman, pouring out her own one and supreme experience, and, with the brand of Brussels on her, never afterwards really doing anything else. Whereas the first thing the impassioned Charlotte does (after a year of uninspired and ineffectual poetizing) is to sit down and write _The Professor_; a book, remarkable not by any means for its emotion, but for its cold and dispassionate observation. Charlotte eliminates herself, and is Crimsworth in order that 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.