lor. The really important and interesting point is that, if she had
been, if he had thus obtained the reality with which passion endows its
object, her imagination would have had no use for him; its work would
have been done for it.

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 Bronte 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 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 u