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; that he should not marry even a beautiful girl or a lady of rank." There was no fine madness in that method; but its very soundness and sanity show the admirable spirit in which Charlotte Brontë approached her art. She was to return to the method of _The Professor_ again and yet again, when she suspected herself of having given imagination too loose a rein. The remarkable thing was that she should have begun with it. And in some respects _The Professor_ is more finished, better constructed than any of her later books. There is virtue in its extreme sobriety. Nothing could be more delicate and firm than the drawing of Frances Henri; nothing in its grey style more admirable than the scene where Crimsworth, having found Frances in the cemetery, takes her to her home in the Rue Notre Dame aux Neiges.