Chapter 11

To the supreme artist the order of the actual event is one thing, and the order of creation is another. Their lines may start from the same point in the actual, they may touch again and again, but they are not the same, and they cannot run exactly parallel. There must always be this difference between the actual thing and the thing drawn from it, however closely, that each is embedded and enmeshed in a different context. For a character in a novel to be alive it must have grown; and to have grown it must have followed its own line of evolution, inevitably and in its own medium; and that, whether or not it has been "taken", as they say, "from life". The more alive it is the less likely is it to have been "taken", to have been seized, hauled by the scruff of its neck out of the dense web of the actual. All that the supreme artist wants is what Charlotte Brontë called "the germ of the real", by which she meant the germ of the actual. He does not want the alien, developed thing, standing in its own medium ready-made. Charlotte Brontë said that the character of Dr. John was a failure because it lacked the germ of the real. She should have said that it lacked the germ of many reals; it is so obviously drawn from incomplete observation of a single instance. I am inclined to think that she did "take" Dr. John. And whenever Charlotte Brontë "took" a character, as she took the unfortunate curates and Mr. St. John Rivers, the result was failure.

No supreme work of art was ever "taken". It was begotten and born and grown, the offspring of faithful love between the soul of the artist and reality. The artist must bring to his "experience" as much as he takes from it. The dignity of Nature is all against these violences and robberies of art. She hides her deepest secret from the marauder, and yields it to the lover who brings to her the fire of his own soul.

And that fire of her own soul was what Charlotte Brontë brought to her supreme creations. It was certainly what she brought to Paul Emanuel. Impossible to believe that M. Héger gave her more than one or two of the germs of M. Paul. Personally, I can only see the respectable M. Héger as a man whose very essence was a certain impassivity and phlegm under the appearance of a temperament. Choleric he was, with the superficial and temporary choler of the schoolmaster. A schoolmaster gifted with the most extraordinary, the most marvellous, the most arresting faculty for making faces, a faculty which in an Englishman would have argued him a perfect volcano of erratic temperament. But I more than suspect that when it came to temperament M. Héger took it out in faces; that he was nothing more than a benevolent, sentimental, passably intellectual bourgeois; but bourgeois to the core. Whereas, look at M. Paul! No wonder that with that tame and solid stuff before her it took even Charlotte Brontë's fiery spirit nine years (torturing the unwilling dross that checked its flight) before it could create Paul Emanuel. Because of her long work on him he is at once the most real and the best imagined of her characters.

I admit that in the drawing of many of her minor characters she seems to have relied upon very close and intimate observation of the living model. But in none of her minor characters is she at grips with the reality that, for her, passion is. Charlotte refused to give heroic rank to persons she had merely observed; she would not exalt them to the dignity of passion. Her imagination could not work on them to that extent. (That is partly why Caroline's delirium is so palpably "faked".) Even in her portrait of the heroic Shirley, who was frankly "taken" from her sister Emily, she achieved the likeness mainly by the artifice of unlikeness, by removing Shirley Keeldar into a life in which Emily Brontë had never played a part, whereby Shirley became for her a separate person. (You cannot by any stretch of the imagination see Emily falling in love with the schoolmaster, Louis Moore.)

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 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.

"I would have looked up at him, or held out my hand, or said a soothing word; but I was afraid, if I stirred, I should either laugh or cry; so odd, in all this, was the mixture of the touching and the absurd.

"I thought he had nearly done: but no, he sat down that he might go on at his ease.

"'While he, M. Paul, was on these painful topics, he would dare my anger for the sake of my good, and would venture to refer to a change he had noticed in my dress.'"

* * * * *

"'And if you condemn a bow of ribbon for a lady, monsieur, you would necessarily disapprove of a thing like this for a gentleman?' holding up my bright little chainlet of silk and gold. His sole reply was a groan--I suppose over my levity.

"After sitting some minutes in silence, and watching the progress of the chain, at which I now wrought more assiduously than ever, he inquired:

"'Whether what he had just said would have the effect of making me entirely detest him?'

"I hardly remember what answer I made, or how it came about; I don't think I spoke at all, but I know we managed to bid good night on friendly terms: and even after M. Paul had reached the door, he turned back just to explain that he would not be understood to speak in entire condemnation of the scarlet dress.'...

"'And the flowers under my bonnet, monsieur?' I asked. 'They are very little ones.'

"'Keep them little, then,' said he. 'Permit them not to become full-blown.'

"'And the bow, monsieur--the bit of ribbon?'

"'_Va pour le ruban_!' was the propitious answer.

"And so we settled it."

That is good; and when Lucy presents the watchguard it is better still.

"He looked at the box: I saw its clear and warm tint, and bright azure circlet, pleased his eyes. I told him to open it.

"'My initials!' said he, indicating the letters in the lid. 'Who told you I was called Carl David?'

"'A little bird, monsieur.'

"'Does it fly from me to you? Then one can tie a message under its wing when needful.'

"He took out the chain--a trifle indeed as to value, but glossy with silk and sparkling with beads. He liked that too--admired it artlessly, like a child.

"'For me?'

"'Yes, for you.'

"'This is the thing you were working at last night?'

"'The same.'

"'You finished it this morning?'

"'I did.'

"'You commenced it with the intention that it should be mine?'

"'Undoubtedly.'

"'And offered on my fête-day?'

"'Yes.'

"'This purpose continued as you wove it?'

"'Again I assented.'

"'Then it is not necessary that I should cut out any portion--saying, this part is not mine: it was plaited under the idea and for the adornment of another?'

"'By no means. It is neither necessary, nor would it be just.'

"'This object is _all_ mine?'

"'That object is yours entirely.'

"Straightway monsieur opened his paletot, arranged the guard splendidly across his chest, displaying as much and suppressing as little as he could: for he had no notion of concealing what he admired and thought decorative....

"'_À present c'est un fait accompli_,' said he, readjusting his paletot...."

To the last gesture of Monsieur it is superb.

I have taken those scenes because they are of crucial importance as indications of what Charlotte Brontë was doing in _Villette_, and yet would do. They show not only an enormous advance in technique, but a sense of the situation, of the _scène à faire_, which is entirely or almost entirely lacking in her earlier work.

If there be degrees in reality, Lucy and Pauline de Bassompierre are only less real than M. Paul. And by some miracle their reality is not diminished by Charlotte Brontë's singular change of intention with regard to these two. Little Polly, the child of the beginning, the inscrutable creature of nerves, exquisitely sensitive to pain, fretting her heart out in love for her father and for Graham Bretton, is hardly recognizable in Pauline, Countess de Bassompierre. She has preserved only her fragility, her fastidiousness, her little air of inaccessibility. Polly is obviously predestined to that profound and tragic suffering which is Lucy Snowe's.

"I watched Polly rest her small elbow on her small knee, her head on her hand; I observed her draw a square inch or two of pocket-handkerchief from the doll-pocket of her doll-skirt, and then I heard her weep. Other children in grief or pain cry aloud, without shame or restraint, but this being wept: the tiniest occasional sniff testified to her emotion."

Again (Polly is parted from her father): "When the street-door closed, she dropped on her knees at a chair with a cry--'Papa!'

"It was low and long; a sort of 'why hast thou forsaken me?' During an ensuing space of some minutes I perceived she endured agony. She went through, in that brief interval of her infant life, emotions such as some never feel; it was in her constitution: she would have more of such instants if she lived."

Polly is contrasted with the cold and disagreeable Lucy. "I, Lucy Snowe, was calm," Lucy says when she records that agony. The effect she gives, of something creepily insensitive and most unpleasant, is unmistakable in these early chapters. She watches Polly with a cold, analytic eye. "These sudden, dangerous natures--sensitive as they are called--offer many a curious spectacle to those whom a cooler temperament has secured from participation in their vagaries." When Polly, charming Polly, waits on her father at the tea-table, Lucy is impervious to her tiny charm. "Candidly speaking, I thought her a little busy-body." When Graham Bretton repulses Polly, Lucy has some thoughts of "improving the occasion by inculcating some of those maxims of philosophy whereof I had ever a tolerable stock ready for application."

There is no sign in the beginning that this detestable Lucy is to be heroine. But in Chapter Four Polly disappears and Lucy takes her place and plays her part. The child Polly had a suffering and passionate heart, for all her little air of fastidiousness and inaccessibility. It is the suffering and passionate heart of Polly that beats in Lucy of the Pensionnat. There is only enough of the original Lucy left to sit in judgment on Ginevra Fanshawe and "the Parisienne".

The child Polly had an Imagination. "'Miss Snowe,' said she in a whisper, 'this is a wonderful book ... it tells about distant countries, a long, long way from England, which no traveller can reach without sailing thousands of miles over the sea.... Here is a picture of thousands gathered in a desolate place--a plain spread with sand.... And here are pictures more stranger than that. There is the wonderful Great Wall of China; here is a Chinese lady with a foot littler than mine. There is a wild horse of Tartary; and here--most strange of all--is a land of ice and snow without green fields, woods, or gardens. In this land they found some mammoth bones; there are no mammoths now. You don't know what it was; but I can tell you, because Graham told me. A mighty goblin creature, as high as this room, and as long as the hall; but not a fierce, flesh-eating thing, Graham thinks. He believes if I met one in a forest, it would not kill me, unless I came quite in its way; when it would trample me down amongst the bushes, as I might tread on a grasshopper in a hay-field without knowing it.'"

It is Polly's Imagination that appears again in Lucy's "Creative Impulse". "I with whom that Impulse was the most intractable, the most capricious, the most maddening of masters ... a deity which sometimes, under circumstances apparently propitious, would not speak when questioned, would not hear when appealed to, would not, when sought, be found; but would stand, all cold, all indurated, all granite, a dark Baal with carven lips and blank eyeballs, and breast like the stone face of a tomb; and again, suddenly, at some turn, some sound, some long-trembling sob of the wind, at some rushing past of an unseen stream of electricity, the irrational Demon would awake unsolicited, would stir strangely alive, would rush from its pedestal like a perturbed Dagon, calling to its votary for a sacrifice, whatever the hour--to its victim for some blood or some breath, whatever the circumstances or scene--rousing its priest, treacherously promising vaticination, perhaps filling its temple with a strange hum of oracles, but sure to give half the significance to fateful winds, and grudging to the desperate listener even a miserable remnant--yielding it sordidly, as though each word had been a drop of the deathless ichor of its own dark veins."

That is Lucy. But when Polly reappears fitfully as Pauline de Bassompierre, she is an ordinary, fastidious little lady without a spark of imagination or of passion.

Now in the first three chapters of _Villette_, Charlotte Brontë concentrated all her strength and all her art on the portrait of little Polly. The portrait of little Polly is drawn with the most delicate care and tender comprehension, and the most vivid and entire reality. I cannot agree with Mr. Swinburne that George Eliot, with her Totty and Eppie and Lillo, showed a closer observation of the ways, or a more perfect understanding of the heart of a child. Only little Maggie Tulliver can stand beside little Polly in _Villette_. She is an answer to every critic, from Mr. Swinburne downwards, who maintains that Charlotte Brontë could not draw children.

But Lucy at fourteen is drawn with slight and grudging strokes, sufficient for the minor part she is evidently to play. Lucy at Bretton is a mere foil to little Polly. Charlotte Brontë distinctly stated in her letters that she did not care for Miss Snowe. "Lucy must not marry Dr. John; he is far too youthful, handsome, bright-spirited, and sweet-tempered; he is a 'curled darling' of Nature and of fortune, and must draw a prize in life's lottery. His wife must be young, rich, pretty; he must be made very happy indeed. If Lucy marries anybody, it must be the Professor--a man in whom there is much to forgive, much to 'put up with'. But I am not leniently disposed towards Miss Frost: from the beginning I never meant to appoint her lines in pleasant places." "As to the character of Lucy Snowe, my intention from the first was that she should not occupy the pedestal to which Jane Eyre was raised by some injudicious admirers. She is where I meant her to be, and where no charge of self-laudation can touch her."

But Lucy is _not_ altogether where she was meant to be. When she reappears at the Pensionnat it is with "flame in her soul and lightning in her eyes". She reminds M. Paul "of a young she wild creature, new caught, untamed, viewing with a mixture of fire and fear the first entrance of the breaker-in".

"'You look,' said he, 'like one who would snatch at a draught of sweet poison, and spurn wholesome bitters with disgust.'"

There is no inconsistency in this. Women before now have hidden a soul like a furnace under coldness and unpleasantness, and smothered shrieking nerves under an appearance of apathy. Lucy Snowe is one of them. As far as she goes, Lucy at Bretton is profoundly consistent with Lucy in _Villette_. It is not Lucy's volcanic outbreaks in the Pensionnat that do violence to her creator's original intention. It is the debasement of Polly and the exaltation of Lucy to her tragic rôle, the endowment of Lucy with Polly's rarest qualities, to the utter impoverishment of Pauline de Bassompierre. Polly in _Villette_ is a mere foil to Lucy.

Having lavished such care and love on Polly, Charlotte Brontë could not possibly have meant to debase her and efface her. How then did it happen that Polly was debased and Lucy sublimely exalted?

It happened, I think, partly because for the first time Charlotte Brontë created a real living man. The reality of M. Paul Emanuel was too strong both for Lucy and for Charlotte Brontë. From the moment when he seized her and dragged her to the garret he made Lucy live as Charlotte Brontë had never contemplated her living. He made her live to the utter exclusion and extinction of Pauline de Bassompierre.

And "the despotic little man" dominates the book to an extent that Charlotte never contemplated either. Until the storm carried him out of her sight, she was, I think, unaware of his dominion. Dr. John was her hero. She told Mr. George Smith, his prototype, that she intended him for the most beautiful character in the book (which must have been very gratifying to Mr. George Smith). He was the type she needed for her purpose. But he does not "come off", if only for the reason that she is consciously preoccupied with him. Dr. John was far more of an obsession to her than this little man, Paul Emanuel, who was good enough for Lucy Snowe. Pauline de Bassompierre was to be finished and perfected to match the high finish and perfection of Dr. John. Yet neither Pauline nor Dr. John "came off". Charlotte Brontë cared too much for them. But for Paul Emanuel she did not care. He comes off in a triumph of the detached, divinely free "Creative Impulse".

Charlotte, with all her schemes, is delivered over to her genius from the moment when Lucy settles in Villette. To Charlotte's inexperience Brussels was a perfect hotbed for the germs of the real. That, I think, can be admitted without subscribing to the view that it was anything more. Once in the Pensionnat, Lucy entered an atmosphere of the most intense reality. From that point onward the book is literally inspired by the sense of atmosphere, that sense to which experience brings the stuff to work on. All Charlotte's experience and her suffering is there, changed, intensified, transmuted to an experience and a suffering which were not hers.