Page:A note on Charlotte Brontë (IA note00swinoncharlottebrich).pdf/102

 splendid influence of her own genius; for such studies as Madame Beck and Miss Fanshawe she doubtless had the sitters in her mind's eye as clearly and as close as under the lens of a photographic machine: but how she came first to conceive and finally to fashion that perfect study of noble and faultful and suffering manhood remains one of the most insoluble riddles ever set by genius as a snare or planned as a maze for the judgment of any lesser intelligence than its own. There in any case is the result—alive at all events, and deathless; defiant alike of explanation or reproduction by any critic or copyist. The incredible absurdity and the ineffable impertinence of one solution proposed at the time, which sought in the dedication of the book for a hint at the