Lest there should be any doubt on the subject, Charlotte herself explained to Mrs. Gaskell how her imagination worked.  “I asked her,” Mrs. Gaskell says, “whether she had ever taken opium, as the description given of its effects in Villette was so exactly like what I had experienced—­vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, of which the outlines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, etc.  She replied that she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to describe anything that had not fallen within her own experience; she had thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling asleep—­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.