Note 4 — STRANGER THAN FICTION. LOVE IN A COTTAGE. THE IRISH STORY-TELLER. HUGH BRONTË AS A TENANT-RIGHTER. Stories of the Brontë Family in Ireland. By Dr. William Wright.
Reading edition
Swinburne, in his “Note on Charlotte Brontë,” has alone had the poetic insight and artistic instinct to discern this fact. He is right when he says, “Charlotte evidently never worked so well as when painting more or less directly from nature.... In most cases, probably, the designs begun by means of the camera were transferred for completion to the canvas.”
Swinburne, however, falls short in discernment, when, in contrasting Charlotte with her sister, he says: “Emily Brontë, like William Blake, would probably have said, or at least presumably have felt, that such study after the model was to her impossible—an attempt but too certain to diminish her imaginative insight and disable her creative hand.”
Surely the highest imaginative insight and deftest creative hand work from the model, nature, but the result is not a mere portrait of the model.