Part 8 (1/2)
It was thus that Charlotte Bronte glorified passion The passion that she glorified being of the finest fibre, it was naturally not understood by people whose fibres were not fine at all
It was George Henry Lewes (not a person of the finest fibre) who said of _Jane Eyre_ that ”the grand secret of its successas of all great and lasting successes was its reality” In spite of crudities, absurdities, ily alive In _Jane Eyre_ Charlotte Bronte codos; in her narrow range she is , whether she is describing the agony of the child Jane shut up in that terrible red roo-day that brought no wedding Or take the scene of Jane's flight from Thornfield, or that other scene, unsurpassed in its passion and tenderness, of her return to Rochester at Ferndean
”To this house I ca ale, and continued s rain Even within a very short distance of the rew the tiranite pillars showed h theht of close-ranked trees There was a grass-grown track descending the forest aisle, between hoar and knotty shafts and under branched arches I followed it, expecting soon to reach the dwelling; but it stretched on and on, it wound far and farther: no sign of habitation or grounds was visible At last my way opened, the trees thinned a little; presently I beheld a railing, then the house--scarce, by this direen were its decaying walls Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch, I stood around, from which the wood swept away in a searden-beds; only a broad gravel-walk girdling a grass-plat, and this set in the heavy fraables in its front; the ere latticed and narrow: the front-door was narrow too, one step led up to it It was still as a church on a week-day; the pattering rain on the forest leaves was the only sound audible
”I heard a , and soe
”It opened slowly; a figure caht and stood on the step; a man without a hat: he stretched forth his hand as if to feel whether it rained Dark as it was I had recognized hi and stalwart contour as ever But in his countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding--that reed and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished, ain--Rochester hears Jane's voice in the room where she comes to him
”'And where is the speaker? Is it only a voice? Oh! I _cannot_ see, but I must feel or roped I arrested his wandering hand, and prisoned it in both ht fingers! If so, there must be more of her'
”The muscular hand broke from my custody; my arathered to him
”I pressed my lips to his once brilliant and now rayless eyes--I swept back his hair from his brow and kissed that too He suddenly seemed to rouse himself: the conviction of the reality of all this seized him
”'It is you--is it, Jane? You are come back to me then?'
”'I am'”
The scene as it stands is far fro an illusion of passion through so many lapses
And all that passion counts for noeffect of reality she produces Before _Jane Eyre_ there is no novel written by a wohts_, that conveys so poignant an is seen and heard, of the earth and sky; of weather; of the aspects of houses and of rooests a positive exaltation of the senses of sound and light, an ecstasy, an enchantible world It is not a h few painters have possessed so incorruptibly the innocence of the eye) It is an almost supernatural intentness; sensation raised to the _n_th power Take the description of the awful red room at Gateshead
”A bed supported onwith curtains of deep red dae ith their blinds always draere half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a soft fawn colour, with a flush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly-polished old lared white the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles counterpane Scarcely less prominent was an ample, cushi+oned easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne Mr Reed had been dead nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his last; here he lay in state; hence his coffin was borne by the undertaker's uarded it fro be more horrible than that red room? Or take the descriptions of the school at Lohere the horror of pestilence hangs over house and garden Through all these Gateshead and Lowood scenes Charlotte is unerring and absolute in her reality
Her very style, so uncertain in its rendering of hues as this: ”It was three o'clock; the church-bell tolled as I passed under the belfry: the charliding and pale-bea sun
I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autu a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose If a breath of air stirred, it reen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white, worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no cattle nosed; and the little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like single russet leaves about to drop
”This lane inclined up-hill all the way to Hay I then turned eastward
”On the hill-top abovemomently; she looked over Hay which, half lost in trees, sent up a blue smoke from its few chimneys; it was yet a mile distant, but in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life
My ear, too, felt the flow of currents; in what dales and depths I could not tell: but there weretheir passes That evening calh of the s and whisperings, at once so far away and so clear: a positive tramp, tras; as, in a picture, the solid reat oak, drawn in dark and strong on the foreground, efface the aerial distance of azure hill, sunny horizon, and blended clouds, where tint melts into tint
”The din sounded on the causeway”
Flawless this, too, of the sky after sunset: ”Where the sun had gone down in simple state--pure of the poht of red jewel and furnace flah and wide, soft and still softer, over half heaven”
And this of her own reat moors behind and on each hand of me; there are waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley at my feet The population here ers on these roads: they stretch out east, west, north and south--white, broad, lonely; they are all cut in the e”
She has given the secret of the moor country in a phrase: ”I felt the consecration of its loneliness” In that one line you have the real, the undying Charlotte Bronte
It is such is that make the difference between _Jane Eyre_ and _The Professor_ So immeasurable is that difference that it al an ”experience” to account for it, an experience falling between the dates of _The Professor_ and _Jane Eyre_