the whole book and fills every page.  Everything and every one appear, not as we see them and know them in the world, but as they look to a keen-eyed girl who had hardly ever left her native village.  Had the whole book been cast into the form of impersonal narration, this limitation, this huge ignorance of life, this amateur’s attempt to construct a romance by the light of nature instead of observation and study of persons, would have been a failure.  As the autobiography of Jane Eyre—­let us say at once of Charlotte Bronte—­it is consummate art.  It produces the illusion we feel in reading Robinson Crusoe.  In the whole range of modern fiction there are few characters whom we feel that we know so intimately as we do Jane Eyre.  She is as intensely familiar to us as Becky Sharp or Parson Adams.  Much more than this.  Not only do we feel an intimate knowledge of Jane Eyre, but we see every one by the eyes of Jane Eyre only.  Edward Rochester has not a few touches of the melodramatic villain; and no man would ever draw a man with such conventional and Byronic extravagances.  If Edward Rochester had been described in impersonal narrative with all his brutalities, his stage villain frowns, and his Grand Turk whims, it would have spoiled the book.  But Edward Rochester, the “master” of the little governess, as seen by the eyes of a passionate, romantic, but utterly unsophisticated girl, is a powerful character; and all the inconsistencies, the affectation, the savageries we might detect in him, become the natural love-dream of a most imaginative and most ignorant young woman.

A consummate master of style has spoken, we have just seen, of the “noble English” that Charlotte Bronte wrote.  It is true that she never reached the exquisite ease, culture, and raciness of Thackeray’s English.  She lapsed now and then into provincial solecisms; she “named” facts as well as persons; girls talk of a “beautiful man”; nor did she know anything of the scientific elaboration of George Eliot or the subtle grace of Stevenson.  But the style is of high quality and conscientious finish—­terse, pure, picturesque, and sound.  Like everything she did, it was most scrupulously honest—­the result of a sincere and vivid soul, resolved to utter what it had most at heart in the clearest tone.  Very few writers of romance have ever been masters of a style so effective, so nervous, so capable of rising into floods of melody and pathos.  There is a fine passage of the kind in one of her least-known books, the earliest indeed of all, which no publisher could be found in her lifetime to print.  The “Professor” has just proposed, has been accepted, and goes home to bed half-crazy and fasting.  A sudden reaction falls on his over-wrought nerves.