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.)