Famous Reviews by Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

E >> Editor: R. Brimley Johnson >> Famous Reviews

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43

Without a shilling and without a friend.

Thus the great deed of self-conquest is accomplished; Jane has passed
through the fire of temptation from without and from within; her
character is stamped from that day; we need therefore follow her no
further into wanderings and sufferings which, though not unmixed with
plunder from Minerva-lane, occupy some of, on the whole, the most
striking chapters in the book. Virtue of course finds her reward. The
maniac wife sets fire to Thornfield Hall, and perishes herself in the
flames. Mr. Rochester, in endeavouring to save her, loses the sight of
his eyes. Jane rejoins her blind master; they are married, after which
of course the happy man recovers his sight.

Such is the outline of a tale in which, combined with great materials
for power and feeling, the reader may trace gross inconsistencies and
improbabilities, and chief and foremost that highest moral offence a
novel writer can commit, that of making an unworthy character
interesting in the eyes of the reader. Mr. Rochester is a man who
deliberately and secretly seeks to violate the laws both of God and man,
and yet we will be bound half our lady readers are enchanted with him
for a model of generosity and honour. We would have thought that such a
hero had had no chance, in the purer taste of the present day; but the
popularity of Jane Eyre is a proof how deeply the love for illegitimate
romance is implanted in our nature. Not that the author is strictly
responsible for this. Mr. Rochester's character is tolerably consistent.
He is made as coarse and as brutal as can in all conscience be required
to keep our sympathies at a distance. In point of literary consistency
the hero is at all events impugnable, though we cannot say as much for
the heroine.

As to Jane's character--there is none of that harmonious unity about it
which made little Becky so grateful a subject of analysis--nor are the
discrepancies of that kind which have their excuse and their response in
our nature. The inconsistencies of Jane's character lie mainly not in
her own imperfections, though of course she has her share, but in the
author's. There is that confusion in the relations between cause and
effect, which is not so much untrue to human nature as to human art. The
error in Jane Eyre is, not that her character is this or that, but that
she is made one thing in the eyes of her imaginary companions, and
another in that of the actual reader. There is a perpetual disparity
between the account she herself gives of the effect she produces, and
the means shown us by which she brings that effect about. We hear
nothing but self-eulogiums on the perfect tact and wondrous penetration
with which she is gifted, and yet almost every word she utters offends
us, not only with the absence of these qualities, but with the positive
contrasts of them, in either her pedantry, stupidity, or gross
vulgarity. She is one of those ladies who puts us in the unpleasant
predicament of undervaluing their very virtues for dislike of the person
in whom they are represented. One feels provoked as Jane Eyre stands
before us--for in the wonderful reality of her thoughts and
descriptions, she seems accountable for all done in her name--with
principles you must approve in the main, and yet with language and
manners that offend you in every particular. Even in that _chef-d'oeuvre_
of brilliant retrospective sketching, the description of her
early life, it is the childhood and not the child that interests you.
The little Jane, with her sharp eyes and dogmatic speeches, is a being
you neither could fondle nor love. There is a hardness in her infantine
earnestness, and a spiteful precocity in her reasoning, which repulses
all our sympathy. One sees that she is of a nature to dwell upon and
treasure up every slight and unkindness, real or fancied, and such
natures we know are surer than any others to meet with plenty of this
sort of thing. As the child, so also the woman--an uninteresting,
sententious, pedantic thing; with no experience of the world, and yet
with no simplicity or freshness in its stead. What are her first answers
to Mr. Rochester but such as would have quenched all interest, even for
a prettier woman, in any man of common knowledge of what was nature--and
especially in a _blase_ monster like him?

* * * * *

But the crowning scene is the offer--governesses are said to be sly on
such occasions, but Jane out-governesses them all--little Becky would
have blushed for her. They are sitting together at the foot of the old
chestnut tree, as we have already mentioned, towards the close of
evening, and Mr. Rochester is informing her, with his usual delicacy of
language, that he is engaged to Miss Ingram--"a strapper! Jane, a real
strapper!"--and that as soon as he brings home his bride to Thornfield,
she, the governess, must "trot forthwith"--but that he shall make it his
duty to look out for employment and an asylum for her--indeed, that he
has already heard of a charming situation in the depths of Ireland--all
with a brutal jocoseness which most women of spirit, unless grievously
despairing of any other lover, would have resented, and any woman of
sense would have seen through. But Jane, that profound reader of the
human heart, and especially of Mr. Rochester's, does neither. She meekly
hopes she may be allowed to stay where she is till she has found another
shelter to betake herself to--she does not fancy going to Ireland--Why?

"It is a long way off, Sir." "No matter--a girl of your sense will not
object to the voyage or the distance." "Not the voyage, but the
distance, Sir; and then the sea is a barrier--" "From what, Jane?"
"From England, and from Thornfield; and--" "Well?" "From _you_, Sir."
--vol. ii, p. 205.

and then the lady bursts into tears in the most approved fashion.

Although so clever in giving hints, how wonderfully slow she is in
taking them! Even when, tired of his cat's play, Mr. Rochester proceeds
to rather indubitable demonstrations of affection--"enclosing me in his
arms, gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips"--Jane
has no idea what he can mean. Some ladies would have thought it high
time to leave the Squire alone with his chestnut tree; or, at all
events, unnecessary to keep up that tone of high-souled feminine
obtusity which they are quite justified in adopting if gentlemen will
not speak out--but Jane again does neither. Not that we say she was
wrong, but quite the reverse, considering the circumstances of the case--
Mr. Rochester was her master, and "Duchess or nothing" was her first
duty--only she was not quite so artless as the author would have us
suppose.

But if the manner in which she secures the prize be not inadmissible
according to the rules of the art, that in which she manages it when
caught, is quite without authority or precedent, except perhaps in the
servants' hall. Most lover's play is wearisome and nonsensical to the
lookers on--but the part Jane assumes is one which could only be
efficiently sustained by the substitution of Sam for her master. Coarse
as Mr. Rochester is, one winces for him under the infliction of this
housemaid _beau ideal_ of the arts of coquetry. A little more, and we
should have flung the book aside to lie for ever among the trumpery with
which such scenes ally it; but it were a pity to have halted here, for
wonderful things lie beyond--scenes of suppressed feeling, more fearful
to witness than the most violent tornados of passion--struggles with
such intense sorrow and suffering as it is sufficient misery to know
that any one should have conceived, far less passed through; and yet
with that stamp of truth which takes precedence in the human heart
before actual experience. The flippant, fifth-rate, plebeian actress has
vanished, and only a noble, high-souled woman, bound to us by the
reality of her sorrow, and yet raised above us by the strength of her
will, stands in actual life before us. If this be Jane Eyre, the author
has done her injustice hitherto, not we.

* * * * *

We have said that this was the picture of a natural heart. This, to our
view, is the great and crying mischief of the book. Jane Eyre is
throughout the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined
spirit, and more dangerous to exhibit from that prestige of principle
and self-control which is liable to dazzle the eye too much for it to
observe the inefficient and unsound foundation on which it rests. It is
true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength, but it is the
strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself. No Christian
grace is perceptible upon her. She has inherited in fullest measure the
worst sin of our fallen nature--the sin of pride. Jane Eyre is proud,
and therefore she is ungrateful too. It pleased God to make her an
orphan, friendless, and penniless--yet she thanks nobody, and least of
all Him, for the food and raiment, the friends, companions, and
instructors of her helpless youth--for the care and education vouchsafed
to her till she was capable in mind as fitted in years to provide for
herself. On the contrary, she looks upon all that has been done for her
not only as her undoubted right, but as falling far short of it. The
doctrine of humility is not more foreign to her mind than it is
repudiated by her heart. It is by her own talents, virtues, and courage
that she is made to attain the summit of human happiness, and, as far as
Jane Eyre's own statement is concerned, no one would think that she owed
anything either to God above or to man below. She flees from Mr.
Rochester, and has not a being 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.

There seems to have arisen in the novel-reading world some doubts as to
who really wrote this book; and various rumours, more or less romantic,
have been current in Mayfair, the metropolis of gossip, as to the
authorship. For example, Jane Eyre is sentimentally assumed to have
proceeded from the pen of Mr. Thackeray's governess, whom he had himself
chosen as his model of Becky, and who, in mingled love and revenge,
personified him in return as Mr. Rochester. In this case, it is evident
that the author of "Vanity Fair," whose own pencil makes him grey-haired,
has had the best of it, though his children may have had the
worst, having, at all events, succeeded in hitting the vulnerable point
in the Becky bosom, which it is our firm belief no man born of woman,
from her Soho to her Ostend days, had ever so much as grazed. To this
ingenious rumour the coincidence of the second edition of Jane Eyre
being dedicated to Mr. Thackeray has probably given rise. For our parts,
we see no great interest in the question at all. The first edition of
Jane Eyre purports to be edited by Currer Bell, one of a trio of
brothers, or sisters, or cousins, by names Currer, Acton, and Ellis
Bell, already known as the joint-authors of a volume of poems. The
second edition the same--dedicated, however, "by the author," to Mr.
Thackeray; and the dedication (itself an indubitable _chip_ of Jane
Eyre) signed Currer Bell. Author and editor therefore are one, and we
are as much satisfied to accept this double individual under the name of
"Currer Bell," as under any other, more or less euphonious. Whoever it
be, it is a person who, with great mental powers, combines a total
ignorance of the habits of society, a great coarseness of taste, and a
heathenish doctrine of religion. And as these characteristics appear
more or less in the writings of all three, Currer, Acton, and Ellis
alike, for their poems differ less in degree of power than in kind, we
are ready to accept the fact of their identity or of their relationship
with equal satisfaction. At all events there can be no interest attached
to the writer of "Wuthering Heights "--a novel succeeding "Jane Eyre,"
and purporting to be written by Ellis Bell--unless it were for the sake
of more individual reprobation. For though there is a decided family
likeness between the two, yet the aspect of the Jane and Rochester
animals in their native state, as Catherine and Heathfield
[Transcriber's note: sic], is too odiously and abominably pagan to be
palatable even to the most vitiated class of English readers. With all
the unscrupulousness of the French school of novels it combines that
repulsive vulgarity in the choice of its vice which supplies its own
antidote. The question of authorship, therefore, can deserve a moment's
curiosity only as far as "Jane Eyre" is concerned, and though we cannot
pronounce that it appertains to a real Mr. Currer Bell and to no other,
yet that it appertains to a man, and not, as many assert, to a woman, we
are strongly inclined to affirm. Without entering into the question
whether the power of the writing be above her, or the vulgarity below
her, there are, we believe, minutiae of circumstantial evidence which at
once acquit the feminine hand. No woman--a lady friend, whom we are
always happy to consult, assures us--makes mistakes in her own _metier_--
no woman _trusses game_ and garnishes dessert-dishes with the same
hands, or talks of so doing in the same breath. Above all, no woman
attires another in such fancy dresses as Jane's ladies assume--Miss
Ingram coming down, irresistible, "in a _morning_ robe of sky-blue
crape, a gauze azure scarf twisted in her hair!!" No lady, we
understand, when suddenly roused in the night, would think of hurrying
on "_a frock_." They have garments more convenient for such occasions,
and more becoming too. This evidence seems incontrovertible. Even
granting that these incongruities were purposely assumed, for the sake
of disguising the female pen, there is nothing gained; for if we ascribe
the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to
one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of
her own sex.

ON GEORGE ELIOT

[From _The Quarterly Review_, October, 1860]

1. _Scenes of Clerical Life_ [containing _The Sad Fortunes of the
Reverend Amos Barton; Mr. Gilfil's Love Story_; and _Janet's
Repentance_]. By GEORGE ELIOT. Second Edition. 2 vols. Edinburgh and
London, 1859.

2. _Adam Bede_. By GEORGE ELIOT. Sixth Edition, 2 vols. 1859.

3. _The Mill on the Floss_. By GEORGE ELIOT. 3 vols. 1860.

We frequently hear the remark, that in the present day everything is
tending to uniformity--that all minds are taught to think alike, that
the days of novelty have departed. To us, however, it appears that the
age abounds in new and abnormal modes of thought--we had almost said,
forms of being. What could be so new and so unlikely as that the young
and irreproachable maiden daughter of a clergyman should have produced
so extraordinary a work as "Jane Eyre,"--a work of which we were
compelled to express the opinion that the unknown and mysterious "Currer
Bell" held "a heathenish doctrine of religion"; that the ignorance which
the book displayed as to the proprieties of female dress was hardly
compatible with the idea of its having been written by a woman; but
that, if a woman at all, the writer must be "one who had, for some
sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex."

In attempting to guess at the character and circumstances of the writer,
a reviewer could only choose among such types of men and women as he had
known, or heard, or read of. An early European settler in Australia, in
conjecturing whether his garden had been ravaged by a bird or by a
quadruped, would not light readily on the conception of an
ornithorhynchus; and assuredly no one accustomed only to ordinary men
and women could have divined the character, the training, and the
position of Charlotte Bronte, as they have been made known to us by her
biographer's unsparing revelations. It was not to be expected that any
one should have imagined the life of Howorth [Trasncriber's note: sic]
parsonage; the gifted, wayward, and unhappy sisterhood in their
cheerless home; the rudeness of the only society which was within their
reach; while their views of anything beyond their own immediate circle,
and certain unpleasing forms of school-life which they had known, were
drawn from the representations of a brother whose abilities they
regarded with awe, but who in other respects appears to have been an
utterly worthless debauchee; lying and slandering, bragging not only of
the sins which he had committed, but of many which he had not committed;
thoroughly depraved himself, and tainting the thoughts of all within his
sphere. There was, therefore, in "Jane Eyre," as the reviewer supposed,
the influence of a corrupt male mind, although this influence had been
exerted through an unsuspected medium. We now know how it was that a
clergyman's daughter, herself innocent, and honourably devoted to the
discharge of many a painful duty, could have written such a book as
"Jane Eyre" but without such explanations as Mrs. Gaskell has placed
(perhaps somewhat too unreservedly) before the world, the thing would
have been inconceivable. Indeed there is very sufficient evidence that
the Quarterly reviewer was by no means alone in entertaining the
opinions we have referred to: for the book was most vehemently cried up--
the society of the authoress, when she became known, was most eagerly
courted--assiduous attempts were made (greatly to her annoyance) to
enlist her, to exhibit her, to trade on her fame--by the very persons
who would have been most ready to welcome her if she had been such as
the reviewer supposed her to be. And it is clear that the gentleman who
introduced himself to her acquaintance on the ground that each of them
had "written a naughty book" must have drawn pretty much the same
conclusions from the tone of Miss Bronte's first novel as the writer in
this Review.

In like manner a great and remarkable departure from ordinary forms and
conditions has caused extreme uncertainty and many mistaken guesses as
to the new novelist who writes under the name of George Eliot. One
critic of considerable pretensions, for instance, declared his belief
that "George Eliot" was "a gentleman of high-church tendencies"; next
came the strange mystification which ascribed the "Eliot" tales to one
Mr. Joseph Liggins; and finally, the public learnt on authority that the
"gentleman of high church tendencies" was a lady; and that this lady was
the same who had given a remarkable proof of mastery over both the
German language and her own, but had certainly not established a
reputation for orthodoxy, by a translation of Strauss's "Life of Jesus."

It is now too late to claim credit for having discovered the female
authorship before this disclosure of the fact. But it seems to us
impossible, when once the idea has been suggested, to read through these
books without finding confirmation of it in almost every page. There is,
indeed, power such as is rarely given to woman (or to man either); there
are traces of knowledge which is not usual among women (although some of
the classical quotations might at least have been more correctly
printed); there is a good deal of coarseness, which it is unpleasant to
think of as the work of a woman; and, as we shall have occasion to
observe more fully hereafter, the influence which these novels are
likely to exercise over the public taste is not altogether such as a
woman should aim at. But, with all this, the tone and atmosphere of the
books are unquestionably feminine. The men are a woman's men--the women
are a woman's women; the points on which the descriptions dwell in
persons of each sex are those which a woman would choose. In matters of
dress we are assured that "George Eliot" avoids the errors of "Jane
Eyre"; for no doubt she has had better opportunities of study than those
which were afforded by the Sunday finery of Howorth church. The sketches
of nature, of character, of life and manners, show female observation;
penetrating where it alone could penetrate, and usually stopping at the
boundaries beyond which it does not advance....

On looking at these very slight sketches we cannot but be struck by the
uniformly melancholy ending of the tales. The first culminates in the
death of the heroine (a word which in relation to these stories must be
very loosely interpreted), Mrs. Barton; the second, in the death of the
heroine, Mrs. Gilfil; the third, in the death of the hero, Mr. Tryan;
the fourth, in the death of one of the heroines, Hetty Sorrel; the
fifth, in the simultaneous death of the heroine and her brother, who is,
we suppose, to be regarded as the chief hero. Surely this is an
exaggerated representation of the proportion which sorrow bears to
happiness in human life; and the fact that a popular writer has (whether
consciously or not) brought every one of the five stories which she has
published to a tragical end gives a very uncomfortable idea of the tone
of our present literature. And other such symptoms are only too
plentiful--the announcement of a novel with the title of "Why Paul
Freeoll Killed his Wife" being one of the latest. With all respect for
the talents of the lady who offers us the solution of this question, we
must honestly profess that we would rather not know, and that we regret
such an employment of her pen.

And in "George Eliot's" writings there is very much of this kind to
regret. She delights in unpleasant subjects--in the representation of
things which are repulsive, coarse, and degrading. Thus, in "Mr.
Gilfil's Story," Tina is only prevented from committing murder by the
opportune death of her intended victim. In "Janet's Repentance," a
drunken husband beats his beautiful but drunken wife, turns her out of
doors at midnight in her night-dress, and dies of "_delirium tremens_
and _meningitis_." ...

So, in "Adam Bede" we have all the circumstances of Hetty's seduction
and the birth and murder of her illegitimate child; and in the "Mill on
the Floss" there are the almost indecent details of mere animal passion
in the loves of Stephen and Maggie. If these are, as the writer's more
thorough-going admirers would tell us, the depths of human nature, we do
not see what good can be expected from raking them up,--not for the
benefit of those whom the warnings may concern (for these are not likely
to heed any warnings which may be presented in such a form), but for the
amusement of ordinary readers in hours of idleness and relaxation.
Compare "Adam Bede" with that one of Scott's novels which has something
in common with it as to story--the "Heart of Midlothian." In each a
beautiful young woman of the peasant class is tried and condemned for
child-murder; but, although condemned on circumstancial evidence under a
law of peculiar severity, Effie Deans is really innocent, whereas Hetty
Sorrel is guilty. In the novel of the last generation we see little of
Effie, and our attention is chiefly drawn to the simple heroism of her
sister Jeanie. In the novel of the present day, everything about Hetty
is most elaborately described: her thoughts throughout the whole course
of the seduction, her misery on discovering that there is evidence of
her frailty, her sufferings on the journey to Windsor and back (for it
is the Edie and not the Jeanie of this tale that makes a long solitary
journey to the south), her despairing hardness in the prison, her
confession, her behaviour on the way to the gallows. That all this is
represented with extraordinary force we need not say; and doubtless the
partisans of "George Eliot" would tell us that Scott could not have
written the chapters in question. We do not think it necessary to
discuss that point, but we are sure that in any case he _would_ not have
written them, because his healthy judgment would have rejected such
matters as unfit for the novelist's art.