d to a Pensionnat de Demoiselles, and centred in the heart of one
woman. And never, not even in _Jane Eyre_, and certainly not in
_Shirley_, did Charlotte Bronte achieve such mastery of reality, and
with it such mastery of herself. _Villette_ is the final triumph of her
genius over the elements that warred in her. It shows the movement of
her genius, which was always by impulse and recoil. In _The Professor_
she abjured, in the interests of reality, the "imagination" of her
youth. In _Jane Eyre_ she was urged forward by the released impetus of
the forces she repressed. In _Shirley_ they are still struggling with
her sense of the sober and the sane reality; the book is torn to
fragments in the struggle, and in the end imagination riots.

But in _Villette_ there are none of these battlings and rendings, these
Titanic upheavals and subsidences. Charlotte Bronte's imagination, and
her sense of the real, are in process of fusion. There are few novels in
which an imagination so supreme is wedded to so vivid a vision of
actuality. It may be said that Charlotte Bronte never achieved positive
actuality before. The Pensionnat de Demoiselles is almost as visibly and
palpably actual as the Maison Vauquer in _Pere Goriot_. It is a return
to the method of experience with a vengeance. Charlotte's success,
indeed, was so stunning that for all but sixty years _Villette_ has
passed for a _roman a clef_, the novel, not only of experience, but of
personal experience. There was a certain plausibility in that view. The
characters could all be easily recognized. And when Dr. John was
identified with Mr. George Smith, and his mother with Mr. George Smith's
mother, and Madame Beck with Madame Heger, and M. Paul Emanuel with
Madame Heger's husband, the inference was irresistible: Lucy Snowe was,
and could only be, Charlotte Bronte. And as the figure of M. Paul
Emanuel was ten times more vivid and convincing than that of Rochester,
so all that applied to Jane Eyre applied with ten times more force to
Lucy. In _Villette_ Charlotte Bronte was considered to have given
herself hopelessly away.

I have tried to show that this view cannot stand before an unprejudiced
examination of her life and letters. No need to go into all that again.
On the evidence, Charlotte seems at the best of times to have fallen in
love with difficulty; and she most certainly was no more in love with
"the little man", Paul Emanuel, than she was with "the little man", Mr.
Tay