Page:Life and Works of the Sisters Bronte - Volume I.djvu/28

 the first chapter 6f 'Shirley,' which may serve both as an illustration of this defect, and as a landmark pointing to certain radical differences of feeling that separate 1900 from 1850. It occurs in the course of an address to the reader, warning him to expect neither sentiment, poetry, nor passion from the book before him. 'Calm your expectations; re- duce them to a lowly standard. ... It is not positively affirmed that you shall not have a taste of the exciting, per- haps towards the middle and close of the meal, but it is re- solved that the first dish set upon the table shall be one that a Catholic-- ''aye, even an Anglo-Catholic- might eat on Good Friday on Passion Week : it shall be fold lentils and vinegar without oil ; it shall be unleavened bread with bitter herbs, and no roast lamb. ' ''

These lines that I have thrown into italics were written in 1850, five years after Newman's secession, in the midst no doubt of a swelling tide of Liberal reaction, destined, how- ever, as we all know now, to interfere very little with the spread and power of those deep undercurrents setting from the Oxford Movement. The hasty arrogance, the failure in feeling and right instinct, which the passage shows, mark the chief limitation and weakness in the artist who wrote it. It is a weakness of taste, a limitation, as Mr. Leslie Stephen would perhaps insist, of thought and idea. Taken together with the country-house scenes in 'Jane Eyre,' with some of the curate scenes in ' Shirley,' with various passages of raw didactic and rather shrill preaching, this utterance, and some others like it, suggest a lack of social intelligence, of a wide outlook, of that sense, above all, for measure and urbanity which belongs to other and more perfect art like George Sand's or to a more exquisitely tempered instinct like that of Burns. One returns to Kenan's explanation : ' We Celts shall never build a Parthenon ; marble is not for us.' Our art is uncertain and wavering ; liable to many lapses and false notes. But ! ' we lay our grip on heart and soul, we bring up from the depths of the human spirit the secrets of the infinite.'