Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/305

298 And much have the Aunt Reeds of society to answer for in defeating this "everlasting promise," in playing the iconoclast with these yet unbroken household gods. Few ate the Jane Eyres whose spirit survives the blight and malaria—whose constitution is at once sensitive and robust enough to outlive the dwarfing processes of such a home. Her lot, however, it is, to be cradled into right by wrongs, to have her strength made perfect in weakness, and herself made perfect through sufferings. The tracing out of this destiny, the illustrating it by manifold touches of spirit and life, the developing its subjective influences on an idiosyncrasy of memorable mould—how effectively Currer Bell has done all this! And yet it is commonly felt that there is a something repulsive, or unlovely, or at least unfeminine, in Jane's character; certainly, she is not the sort of girl with whom you could abandon yourself to the smallest of small-talk at a Christmas party, or who would simper appreciation of your threadbare jokes on Bloomerism, or consider you a conquest if you admired her achievements in crochet and Berlin-wool. Jane has a decided development of the strong-minded female about her. But these objections, from their very truthfulness, enhance the natural effect of the character—they guarantee its fidelity to life as it is—they vouch for the reality of the ideal. She is not the being whom, at a glance, all hearts worship; she is no universal enchantress, to be raved about by all estates and degrees of men among us—the idol of Oxford gownsmen and Manchester cotton-spinners, of army and navy clubmen and commercial travellers, of respectables who own a yacht, and respectables who keep a gig, of gentlemen and gents. Nine-tenths of them would probably find her only not disagreeable (and here a miss is not as good as a mile) in a tête-à-tête. All strong-minded females, it may be asserted, must be disagreeable. Jane, however, is redeemed from the disrepute attached to the class, technically speaking, by her freedom from the affectations and selfishness it conventionally involves. She is true to nature, to herself, to duty; and if circumstances have made her somewhat abrupt, determined, and forbidding—so that bland and bespectacled young men, and dove-eyed maidens of lisping propensities, agree they could never (no, never!) love her—still, these things pertain to the surface; they trouble not the strong under-current of character; they little affect that within which passeth show, that deep devotedness, that impulse chastened by self-discipline, that sensitive hankering to duty,who, in all her sternness, yet wearsqualities these, in Jane's character, which have an irresistible power of attraction, because of their entire genuineness. She is strong-minded;