thing, standing in its own medium ready-made.  Charlotte Bronte 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 Bronte “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 Bronte brought to her supreme creations.  It was certainly what she brought to Paul Emanuel.  Impossible to believe that M. Heger gave her more than one or two of the germs of M. Paul.  Personally, I can only see the respectable M. Heger 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. 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.)