In the same way, Edward Rochester, if we take him simply as a cultured and travelled country gentleman, who was a magnate and great parti in his county, is barely within the range of possibility.  As St. John Rivers is a walking contradictory of a diabolic saint, so Edward Rochester is a violent specimen of the heroic ruffian.  In Emily Bronte’s gruesome phantasmagoria of Wuthering Heights there is a ruffian named Heathcliff; and, whatever be his brutalities and imprecations, we always feel in reading it that Wuthering Heights is merely a grisly dream, not a novel at all.  Edward Rochester has something of the Heathcliff too.  But Rochester is a man of the best English society, courted by wealth and rank, a man of cultivated tastes, of wide experience and refined habits, and lastly of most generous and heroic impulses—­and yet such a man swears at his people like a horse-dealer, teases and bullies his little governess, treats his adopted child like a dog, almost kicks his brother-in-law in his rages, plays shocking tricks with his governess at night, offers her marriage, and attempts to commit bigamy in his own parish with his living wife still under the same roof!  That a man of Rochester’s resource, experience, and forethought, should keep his maniac wife in his own ancestral home where he is entertaining the county families and courting a neighbouring peer’s sister, and that, after the maniac had often attempted murder and arson—­all this is beyond the range of probabilities.  And yet the story could not go on without it.  And so, Edward Rochester, man of the world as he is, risks his life, his home, and everything and every one dear to him in order that his little governess, Jane Eyre, should have the materials for inditing a thrilling autobiography.  It cannot be denied that this is the very essence of “sensationalism,” which means a succession of thrilling surprises constructed out of situations that are practically impossible.

Nor, alas! can we deny that there are ugly bits of real coarseness in Jane Eyre.  It is true that most of them are the effects of that portentous ignorance of the world and of civilised society which the solitary dreamer of Haworth Parsonage had no means of removing.  The fine ladies, the lords and soldiers in the drawing-room at Thornfield are described with inimitable life, but they are described as they appeared to the lady’s-maids, not to each other or to the world.  Charlotte Bronte perhaps did not know that an elegant girl of rank does not in a friend’s house address her host’s footman before his guests in these words—­“Cease that chatter, blockhead! and do my bidding.”  Nor does a gentleman speak to his governess of the same lady whom he is thought to be about to marry in these terms—­“She is a rare one, is she not, Jane?  A strapper—­a real strapper, Jane:  big, brown, and buxom.”  But all these things are rather the result of pure ignorance.  Charlotte Bronte, when she wrote her