nder 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. Heger 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 Bronte'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
Bronte 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--