Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/303

296, habit of fancy, and underlying current of thought, to warrant the conclusion that "Wuthering Heights" was composed under the same roof as "Jane Eyre"—that Ellis and Currer were close kinswomen, and had long taken sweet and sad and solemn counsel together, and together had studied rugged human nature as it lay, unshapely but characteristic enough, beside their sequestered northern homestead.

It has been said, that while Currer Bell has superiors in composition, in construction, in range of fancy, in delicacy of conception, in felicity of execution, in width of grasp, in height and depth of thought, she has no living rival in the faculty of imposing belief. Without subscribing unconditionally to this statement—for we think her sometimes unfortunate and unsuccessful in her attempts on our good-natured credulity—there can be no question as to the impressive effect of her earnest, realising manner. Those who scout her as forbidding and masculine, yet discover an inevitable spell in the hearty seriousness of her narrative. "We feel her power," they say, "though we do not like her." "Like me, forsooth!" we can suppose her to exclaim: as if I wrote to tickle your palates, or provide matter for your albums, or quotations for your love-letters. Because 1 write a novel, am I to be herded with your Rosa Matildas? Because I please to write, must 1 write to please? When you like me, it will be high time for my pen to stop. It is to tell you things you like not, but wholesome for these times, that I use it at all. The true novelist must have something of the seer, and be in advance of the age. Like the romancers of Belgravia and Tyburnia as fast as you please, like the silver-fork school ad libitum; but I pray you have me excused. If you think me anxious to secure my bad book a place in your good books, you know not what manner of spirit I am of."

In many respects "Shirley" is a more "likeable" work than "Jane Eyre," but it is correspondingly deficient in power and freshness. The more elaborate is the least effective, and lacks the ars celare artem which its predecessor possessed in so genial a way. "Jane Eyre" has been compared to the real spar, the slow deposit which the heart of genius filters from life's daily stream; "Shirley" to its companion, made to order, fair to look on, but wanting the internal crystal.

The opening of "Jane Eyre" at once rivets thought and feeling. It will not let us go until we bless it for its truth—its pathetic truth to the thoughts and feelings of childhood. Chateaubriand has said, that children lose their features of resemblance only in losing their innocence, which is the same everywhere. This is true enough to ensure universal sympathy with details so instinct with fidelity as those of little Jane's early trials at Gateshead Hall. The tutelage of an Aunt Reed, with all its hard restrictions, and heartless principles, and debasing motives, might well grind to dust and ashes the quick young heart that leaps up when a rainbow spans the sky—might well make it a curse, and not a boon, that the child is father of the man—might well make it impossible that days begun in total eclipse of gracious sunshine and its genial warmth, should be bound each to each by natural piety. A blighted childhood, an antedated manhood, is one of the saddest sights under heaven. Full soon, creature of spring-tide and promise, shall the summer heat smite thee by day, and the autumn moon chill thee by night: