Page:A note on Charlotte Brontë (IA note00swinoncharlottebrich).pdf/57

 natural passions condoned or consecrated by chivalry, and preposterous in certain eyes as are the conventional principles established or confirmed by its law, I am not reluctant, on behalf of the nation and its creed, to admit that it would be no less difficult to derive from a French origin or refer to a French example the taint of such a distemper as is implied by this distaste, than to inoculate with its infection the spirit of a Frenchman or a gentleman.

No outrage of this kind on womanly loyalty and manly instinct was among the possible errors of Charlotte Brontë's heroic soul. To errors of some gravity that great spirit was indeed liable on more lines than one; her critical judgment, for instance, on Tennyson's Mr.