Nothing so much as this correspondence reveals the appalling solitude in which the Brontës lived. Here is their dearest and most intimate friend, and she is one to whom they can never speak of the thing that interested them most. No doubt "our best plays mean secret plays"; but Charlotte, at any rate, suffered from this secrecy. There was nothing to counteract Miss Nussey's direful influence on her spiritual youth. "Papa" highly approved of the friendship. He wished it to continue, and it did; and it was the best that Charlotte had. I know few things more pathetic than the cry that Charlotte, at twenty-one, sent out of her solitude (with some verses) to Southey and to Wordsworth. Southey told her that, "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity." A sound, respectable, bourgeois opinion so far, but Southey went farther. "Write poetry for its own sake," he said; and he could hardly have said better. Charlotte treasured the letter, and wrote on the cover of it, "Southey's advice, to be kept for ever." Wordsworth's advice, I am sorry to say, provoked her to flippancy.
And that, out of the solitude, was all. Not the ghost, not the shadow of an Influence came to the three sisters. There never was genius that owed so little to influence as theirs.
I know that in Charlotte's case there is said to have been an Influence. An Influence without which she would have remained for ever in obscurity, with _Villette_, with _Shirley_, with _Jane Eyre_, with _The Professor_, unborn, unconceived.
Need I say that the Influence is--M. Héger?
"The sojourn in Brussels," says Mr. Clement Shorter, "made Miss Brontë an author," and he is only following Sir Wemyss Reid, who was the first to establish Brussels as the turning-point. Mr. Shorter does not believe in M. Héger as the inspirer of passion, but he does believe in him as the inspirer of genius. He thinks it exceedingly probable that had not circumstances led Charlotte Brontë to spend some time at Brussels not only would "the world never have heard of her", but it would never have heard of her sisters. He is quite certain about Charlotte anyhow; she could not have "arrived" had she not met M. Héger. "She went," he says, "to Brussels full of the crude ambitions, the semi-literary impulses that are so common on the fringe of the writing world. She left Brussels a woman of genuine cultivation, of educated tastes, armed with just the equipment that was to enable her to write the books of which two generations of her countrymen have been justly proud."