Page:Life and Works of the Sisters Bronte - Volume I.djvu/18

 stunned and miserable Jane to scout law and convention, and fly with him to love and foreign parts. He shows her the lunatic, in all the odious horror of her state, and Jane for- gives him on the spot, having never indeed, so far as ap- pears, felt any deep resentment of his conduct. Neverthe- less, she summons up courage to leave him. She steals away by night, and, after days of wandering and starvation, she finds a home with the Rivers family, who ultimately turn out to be her cousins. St. John Rivers, the brother of the fam- ily, an Evangelical clergyman possessed with a fanatical en- thusiasm for missionary life, observes the girl's strong and energetic nature, and makes up his mind to marry her, not in the least because he loves her, but because he thinks her fitted to be a missionary's wife. Her will is on the point of yielding to his, when she hears a mysterious midnight call from Rochester ; she hurries back to her master, to find him blinded and maimed by the fire which has destroyed his house and his mad wife together; and of course the end is happiness.

Now certainly there never was a plot, which pretended to be a plot, of looser texture than that of ' Jane Eyre.' It abounds with absurdities and inconsistencies. The critics of Charlotte Bronte's time had no difficulty in pointing them out ; they He, indeed, on the surface for all to see. That such incidents should have happened to Jane Eyre in Mr. Rochester's house as did happen, without awakening her sus- picions ; that the existence of a lunatic should have been commonly known to all the servants of the house, yet wholly concealed from the governess; that Mr. Rochester should have been a man of honour and generosity, a man with whom not only Jane Eyre, but clearly the writer herself, is in love, and yet capable of deliberately betraying and deceiving a girl of twenty placed in a singularly helpless position ; these are the fundamental puzzles of the story. Mrs. Fairfax is a mystery throughout. How, knowing what she did, did she not inevitably know more? what was her real relation to Rochester ? to Jane Eyre ? These are questions that no one can answer out of the four corners of the book. The country-house party is a tissue of extravagance throughout;