wondering what it was like, or how it would be--till at length,
sometimes after her story had been arrested at this one point for weeks,
she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had
in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word
for word, as it happened."

To a mind like that the germ of the actual was enough. Charlotte
Bronte's genius, in fact, was ardently impatient of the actual: it cared
only for its own. At the least hint from experience it was off. A
glance, a gesture of M. Heger's was enough to fire it to the conception
of Paul Emanuel. He had only to say a kind word to her, to leave a book
or a box of bon-bons in her desk (if he _did_ leave bon-bons) for
Charlotte's fire to work on him. She had only to say to herself, "This
little man is adorable in friendship; I wonder what he would be like in
love," and she saw that he would be something, though not altogether,
like Paul Emanuel. She had only to feel a pang of half-remorseful,
half-humorous affection for him, and she knew what Lucy felt like in her
love-sick agony. As for Madame Heger, Madame's purely episodic jealousy,
her habits of surveillance, her small inscrutabilities of behaviour,
became the fury, the treachery, the perfidy of Madame Beck. For
treachery and perfidy, and agony and passion, were what Charlotte wanted
for _Villette_.

And yet it is true that _Villette_ is a novel of experience, owing its
conspicuous qualities very much to observation. After all, a
contemporary novel cannot be made altogether out of the fire of the
great writer's soul. It is because Charlotte Bronte relied too much on
the fire of her own soul that in _Jane Eyre_ and parts of _Shirley_ she
missed that unique expression of actuality which, over and over again,
she accomplished in _Villette_. For the expression of a social _milieu_,
for manners, for the dialogue of ordinary use, for the whole detail of
the speech characteristic of an individual and a type, for the right
accent and pitch, for all the vanishing shades and aspects of the
temporary and the particular, the greatest and the fieriest writer is at
the mercy of observation and experience. It was her final mastery of
these things that made it possible to praise Charlotte Bronte's powers
of observation at the expense of her genius; and this mainly because of
M. Paul.

No offspring of genius was ever more alive, more rich in individuality,
than M. Paul. He is alive an