To a mind like that the germ of the actual was enough. Charlotte Brontë'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. Héger'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 Héger, 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 Brontë 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 Brontë'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 and he is adorable, in his paletot and bonnet grec, from the moment when he drags Lucy up three pairs of stairs to the solitary and lofty attic and locks her in, to that other moment when he brings her to the little house that he has prepared for her. Whenever he appears there is pure radiant comedy, and pathos as pure. It is in this utter purity, this transparent simplicity, that Villette is great. There is not one jarring note in any of the delicious dialogues between Lucy and M. Paul, not one of those passages which must be erased if quotation is not to fail of its effect. Take the scene where Lucy breaks M. Paul's spectacles.
"A score of times ere now I had seen them fall and receive no damage—this time, as Lucy Snowe's hapless luck would have it, they so fell that each clear pebble became a shivered and shapeless star.
"Now, indeed, dismay seized me—dismay and regret. I knew the value of these lunettes: M. Paul's sight was peculiar, not easily fitted, and these glasses suited him. I had heard him call them his treasures: as I picked them up, cracked and worthless, my hand trembled. Frightened through all my nerves I was to see the mischief I had done, but I think I was even more sorry than afraid. For some seconds I dared not look the bereaved Professor in the face; he was the first to speak.
"'Là!' he said: 'me voilà veuf de mes lunettes! I think that Mademoiselle Lucy will now confess that the cord and gallows are amply earned; she trembles in anticipation of her doom. Ah, traitress, traitress! You are resolved to have me quite blind and helpless in your hands!'
"I lifted my eyes: his face, instead of being irate, lowering and furrowed, was overflowing with the smile, coloured with the bloom I had seen brightening it that evening at the Hotel Crécy. He was not angry—not even grieved. For the real injury he showed himself full of clemency; under the real provocation, patient as a saint."
Take the "Watchguard" scene.
"M. Paul came and stood behind me. He asked at what I was working; and I said I was making a watchguard. He asked, 'For whom?' And I answered, 'For a gentleman—one of my friends.'"
Whereupon M. Paul flies into a passion, and accuses Lucy of behaving to him, "'With what pungent vivacities—what an impetus of mutiny—what a fougue of injustice.'… 'Chut! à l'instant! There! there I went—vive comme la poudre.' He was sorry—he was very sorry: for my sake he grieved over the hopeless peculiarity. This emportement, this chaleur—generous, perhaps, but excessive—would yet, he feared, do me a mischief. It was a pity. I was not—he believed, in his soul—wholly without good qualities; and would I but hear reason, and be more sedate, more sober, less en l'air, less coquette, less taken by show, less prone to set an undue value on outside excellence—to make much of the attentions of people remarkable chiefly for so many feet of stature, des couleurs de poupée, un nez plus ou moins bien fait, and an enormous amount of fatuity—I might yet prove a useful, perhaps an exemplary character. But, as it was——And here the little man's voice was for a moment choked.