found him at last in M. Constantin Héger, the little Professor of the
Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the Rue d'Isabelle. Sir Wemyss Reid had
suggested a love-affair in Brussels to account for Charlotte's
depression, which was unfavourable to his theory of the happy life. Mr.
Leyland seized upon the idea, for it nourished his theory that Branwell
was an innocent lamb who had never caused his sisters a moment's misery.
They _made_ misery for themselves out of his harmless peccadilloes. Mr.
Angus Mackay in _The Brontës, Fact and Fiction_, gives us this fiction
for a fact. He is pleased with what he calls the "pathetic significance"
of his "discovery". There _was_ somebody, there had to be, and it had to
be M. Héger, for there wasn't anybody else. Mr. Mackay draws back the
veil with a gesture and reveals--the love-affair. He is very nice about
it, just as nice as ever he can be. "We see her," he says, "sore
wounded in her affections, but unconquerable in her will. The discovery
... does not degrade the noble figure we know so well.... The moral of
her greatest works--that conscience must reign absolute at whatever
cost--acquires a greater force when we realize how she herself came
through the furnace of temptation with marks of torture on her, but with
no stain on her soul."

This is all very well, but the question is: _Did_ Charlotte come through
a furnace? _Did_ she suffer from a great and tragic passion? It may have
been so. For all we know she may have been in fifty furnaces; she may
have gone from one fit of tragic passion to another. Only (apart from
gossip, and apart from the argument from the novels, which begs the
question) we have no evidence to prove it. What we have points all the
other way.

Gossip apart, believers in the tragic passion have nourished their
theory chiefly on that celebrated passage in a letter of Charlotte's to