For there are moments, long moments of perfectly awful failure in Jane Eyre.  There are phrases that make you writhe, such as “the etymology of the mansion’s designation”, and the shocking persistency with which Charlotte Bronte “indites”, “peruses”, and “retains”.  There are whole scenes that outrage probability.  Such are the scenes, or parts of scenes, between Jane and Rochester during the comedy of his courtship.  The great orchard scene does not ring entirely true.  For pages and pages it falters between passion and melodrama; between rhetoric and the cri de coeur.  Jane in the very thick of her emotion can say, “I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence, with what I delight in—­with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind.  I have known you, Mr. Rochester, and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever.  I see the necessity for departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death.”  And the comedy is worse.  Jane elaborates too much in those delicious things she says to Rochester.  Rochester himself provokes the parodist. (Such manners as Rochester’s were unknown in mid-Victorian literature.)

“He continued to send for me punctually the moment the clock struck seven; though when I appeared before him now, he had no such honeyed terms as ‘love’ and ‘darling’ on his lips:  the best words at my disposal were ‘provoking’, ‘malicious elf,’ ‘sprite’, ‘changeling’, etc.  For caresses, too, I now got grimaces; for a pressure of the hand, a pinch on the arm; for a kiss on the cheek, a severe tweak of the ear.  It was all right:  at present I decidedly preferred these fierce favours to anything more tender.”

Yet there is comedy, pure comedy in those scenes, though never sustained, and never wrought to the inevitable dramatic climax.  Jane is delightful when she asks Rochester whether the frown on his forehead will be his “married look”, and when she tells him to make a dressing-gown for himself out of the pearl-grey silk, “and an infinite series of waistcoats out of the black satin”. The Quarterly was much too hard on the earlier cadeau scene, with Rochester and Jane and Adele, which is admirable in its suggestion of Jane’s shyness and precision.

"’N’est-ce pas, Monsieur, qu’il y a un cadeau pour Mademoiselle Eyre, dans votre petit coffre?’"

“‘Who talks of cadeaux?’ said he gruffly; ’did you expect a present, Miss Eyre?  Are you fond of presents?’ and he searched my face with eyes that I saw were dark, irate, and piercing.

“’I hardly know, sir; I have little experience of them; they are generally thought pleasant things.’”

Charlotte Bronte was on her own ground there.  But you tremble when she leaves it; you shudder throughout the awful drawing-room comedy of Blanche Ingram.  Blanche says to her mother:  “Am I right, Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park?” And her mother says to Blanche, “My lily-flower, you are right now, as always.”  Blanche says to Rochester, “Signor Eduardo, are you in voice to-night?” and he, “Donna Bianca, if you command it, I will be.”  And Blanche says to the footman, “Cease that chatter, blockhead, and do my bidding.”