How admirable is this icy hush of nature in breathless expectation of the first coming of the master of Thornfield—of the master of Jane herself. And yet, how simple in phrase, how pure, how Wordsworthian in its sympathy with earth even in her most bare and sober hues! And then that storm which ushers in the story of the Vampyre woman tearing Jane's wedding veil at her bedside, when "the clouds drifted from pole to pole, fast following, mass on mass." And as Jane watches the shivered chestnut-tree, "black and riven, the trunk, split down the centre, gasped ghastly"—a strange but powerful alliteration. "The moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled the fissure; her disk was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud." An admirable overture to that terrific scene of the mad wife's visit to the rival's bed.
Charlotte Brontë is great in clouds, like a prose Shelley. We all recall that mysterious storm in which Villette darkly closes, and with it the expected bridegroom of Lucy Snowe—
The wind takes its autumn moan; but—he is coming. The skies hang full and dark—a rack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms—arches and broad radiations; there rise resplendent mornings—glorious, royal, purple as monarch in his state; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest—so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. . . . When the sun returned his light was night to some!
And into that night Lucy's master, lover, husband has for ever passed.
This sympathy with nature, and this power to invest it with feeling for the human drama of which it is the scene, lifts little Charlotte Brontë into the company of the poets. No one, however, can enter into all the art of her landscapes unless he knows those Yorkshire moors, the straggling upland villages, bare, cold, gray, uncanny, with low, unlovely stone buildings, and stern church towers and graveyards, varied with brawling brooks and wooded glens, and here and there a grim manor-house that had seen war. It is so often that the dwellers in the least picturesque and smiling countries are found to love their native country best and to invest it with the most enduring art. And the pilgrims to Haworth Parsonage have in times past been as ardent as those who flock to Grasmere or to Abbotsford.
Jane Eyre is full of this "pathetic fallacy," or aspect of nature dyed in the human emotions of which it is the mute witness. The storm in the garden at night when Rochester first offers marriage to his little governess, and they return to the house drenched in rain and melted with joy, is a fine example of this power. From first to last, the correspondence between the local scene and the human drama is a distinctive mark in Jane Eyre.
If I were asked to choose that scene in the whole tale which impresses itself most on my memory, I should turn to the thirty-sixth chapter when Jane comes back to have a look at Thornfield Hall, peeps on the battlemented mansion which she had loved so well, and is struck dumb to find it burnt out to a mere skeleton—"I looked with timorous joy toward a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin." The suddenness of this shock, its unexpected and yet natural catastrophe, its mysterious imagery of the loves of Edward Rochester and Jane Eyre, and the intense sympathy which earth, wood, rookery, and ruin seem to feel for the girl's eagerness, amazement, and horror, have always seemed to me to reach the highest note of art in romance. It is now forty-seven years since I first read that piece; and in all these years I have found no single scene in later fiction which is so vividly and indelibly burnt into the memory as is this. The whole of this chapter, and what follows it, is intensely real and true. And the very dénoûment of the tale itself—that inevitable bathos into which the romance so often dribbles out its last inglorious breath—has a manliness and sincerity of its own: "the sky is no longer a blank to him—the earth no longer a void."
The famous scene in the twenty-sixth chapter with the interrupted marriage, when Rochester drags the whole bridal party into the den of his maniacal wife, the wild struggle with the mad woman, the despair of Jane—all this is as powerful as anything whatever in English fiction. It is even a masterpiece of ingenious construction and dramatic action. It is difficult to form a cool estimate of a piece so intense, so vivid, and so artful in its mechanism. The whole incident is conceived with the most perfect reality; the plot is original, startling, and yet not wholly extravagant. But it must be confessed that the plot is not worked out in details in a faultless way. It is undoubtedly in substance "sensational," and has been called the parent of modern sensationalism. Edward Rochester acts as a Rochester might; but he too often talks like the "wicked baronet" of low melodrama. The execution is not always quite equal to the conception. The affiance of Jane and Edward Rochester, their attempted marriage, the wild temptation of Jane, her fierce rebuff of the tempter, his despair and remorse, her agony and flight—all are consummate in conception, marred here and there as they are in details by the blue fire and conventional imprecations of the stage.
The concluding chapters of the book, when Jane finally rejects St. John Rivers and goes back to Thornfield and to her "master," are all indeed excellent. St. John is not successful as a character; but he serves to produce the crisis and to be foil to Rochester. St. John, it is true, is not a real being: like Rochester, he is a type of man as he affects the brain and heart of a highly sensitive and imaginative girl. Objectively speaking, as men living and acting in a practical world, St. John and Rochester are both in some degree caricatures of men; and, if the narrative were a cold story calmly composed by a certain Miss Brontë to amuse us, we could not avoid the sense of unreality in the men. But the intensity of the vision, the realism of every scene, the fierce yet self-governed passion of Jane herself, pouring out, as in a secret diary, her agonies of love, of scorn, of pride, of abandonment,—all this produces an illusion on us: we are no longer reading a novel of society, but we are admitted to the wild musings of a girl's soul; and, though she makes out her first lover to be a generous brute and her second lover to be a devout machine, we feel it quite natural that Jane, with her pride and her heart of fire and her romantic brain, should so in her diary describe them.
St. John Rivers, if we take him coolly outside of Jane's portrait gallery, is little more than a puppet. We never seem to get nearer to his own mind and heart, and his conduct and language are hardly compatible with the noble attributes with which he is said to be adorned. A man of such refined culture, of such high intelligence, of such social distinction and experience, of such angelic character, does not treat women with studied insolence and diabolical cynicism. That a girl, half maddened by disappointed love, should romantically come to erect his image into that of a sort of diabolic angel, is natural enough, and her conduct when she leaves Moor House is right and true, though we cannot say as much for Rivers' words. But the impression of the whole scene is right.