to turn to.  Why was this?  The excellence of the present institution at Casterton, which succeeded that of Cowan Bridge near Kirkby Lonsdale—­these being distinctly, as we hear, the original and the reformed Lowoods of the book—­is pretty generally known.  Jane had lived there for eight years with 110 girls and fifteen teachers.  Why had she formed no friendships among them?  Other orphans have left the same and similar institutions, furnished with friends for life, and puzzled with homes to choose from.  How comes it that Jane had acquired neither?  Among that number of associates there were surely some exceptions to what she so presumptuously stigmatises as “the society of inferior minds.”  Of course it suited the author’s end to represent the heroine as utterly destitute of the common means of assistance, in order to exhibit both her trials and her powers of self-support—­the whole book rests on this assumption—­but it is one which, under the circumstances, is very unnatural and very unjust.

Altogether the auto-biography of Jane Eyre is pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition.  There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God’s appointment—­there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in God’s word or in God’s providence—­there is that pervading tone of ungodly discontent which is at once the most prominent and the most subtle evil which the law and the pulpit, which all civilized society in fact has at the present day to contend with.  We do not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.

Still we say again this is a very remarkable book.  We are painfully alive to the moral, religious, and literary deficiencies of the picture, and such passages of beauty and power as we have quoted cannot redeem it, but it is impossible not to be spell-bound with the freedom of the touch.  It would be mere hackneyed courtesy to call it “fine writing.”  It bears no impress of being written at all, but is poured out rather in the heat and hurry of an instinct, which flows ungovernably on to its object, indifferent by what means it reaches it, and unconscious too.  As regards the author’s chief object, however, it is a failure—­that, namely, of making a plain, odd woman, destitute of all the conventional features of feminine attraction, interesting in our sight.  We deny that he has succeeded in this.  Jane Eyre, in spite of some grand things about her, is a being totally uncongenial to our feelings from beginning to end.  We acknowledge her firmness—­we respect her determination—­we feel for her struggles; but, for all that, and setting aside higher considerations, the impression she leaves on our mind is that of a decidedly vulgar-minded woman—­one whom we should not care for as an acquaintance, whom we should not seek as a friend, whom we should not desire for a relation, and whom we should scrupulously avoid for a governess.