[From _The Quarterly Review_, December, 1848]
1. _Vanity Fair; a Novel without a Hero._ By WILLIAM MAKEPEACE
THACKERAY. London, 1848.
2. _Jane Eyre; an Autobiography._ Edited by CURRER BELL. In 3 vols.
London. 1847.
A remarkable novel is a great event for English society. It is a kind of
common friend, about whom people can speak the truth without fear of
being compromised, and confess their emotions without being ashamed. We
are a particularly shy and reserved people, and set about nothing so
awkwardly as the simple art of getting really acquainted with each
other. We meet over and over again in what is conventionally called
"easy society," with the tacit understanding to go so far and no
farther; to be as polite as we ought to be, and as intellectual as we
can; but mutually and honourably to forbear lifting those veils which
each spreads over his inner sentiments and sympathies. For this purpose
a host of devices have been contrived by which all the forms of
friendship may be gone through, without committing ourselves to one
spark of the spirit. We fly with eagerness to some common ground in
which each can take the liveliest interest, without taking the slightest
in the world in his companion. Our various fashionable manias, for
charity one season, for science the next, are only so many clever
contrivances for keeping our neighbour at arm's length. We can attend
committees, and canvass for subscribers, and archaeologise, and
geologise, and take ether with our fellow Christians for a twelvemonth,
as we might sit cross-legged and smoke the pipe of fraternity with a
Turk for the same period--and know at the end of the time as little of
the real feelings of the one as we should about the domestic relations
of the other. But there are ways and means for lifting the veil which
equally favour our national idiosyncrasy; and a new and remarkable novel
is one of them--especially the nearer it comes to real life. We invite
our neighbour to a walk with the deliberate and malicious object of
getting thoroughly acquainted with him. We ask no impertinent questions--
we proffer no indiscreet confidences--we do not even sound him, ever so
delicately, as to his opinion of a common friend, for he would be sure
not to say, lest we should go and tell; but we simply discuss Becky
Sharp, or Jane Eyre, and our object is answered at once.
There is something about these two new and noticeable characters which
especially compels everybody to speak out. They are not to be dismissed
with a few commonplace moralities and sentimentalities. They do not fit
any ready-made criticism. They give the most stupid something to think
of, and the most reserved something to say; the most charitable too are
betrayed into home comparisons which they usually condemn, and the most
ingenious stumble into paradoxes which they can hardly defend. Becky and
Jane also stand well side by side both in their analogies and their
contrasts. Both the ladies are governesses, and both make the same move
in society; the one, in Jane Eyre phraseology, marrying her "master,"
and the other her master's son. Neither starts in life with more than a
moderate capital of good looks--Jane Eyre with hardly that--for it is
the fashion now-a-days with novelists to give no encouragement to the
insolence of mere beauty, but rather to prove to all whom it may concern
how little a sensible woman requires to get on with in the world. Both
have also an elfish kind of nature, with which they divine the secrets
of other hearts, and conceal those of their own; and both rejoice in
that peculiarity of feature which Mademoiselle de Luzy has not
contributed to render popular, viz., green eyes. Beyond this, however,
there is no similarity either in the minds, manners, or fortunes of the
two heroines. They think and act upon diametrically opposite principles--
at least so the author of "Jane Eyre" intends us to believe--and each,
were they to meet, which we should of all things enjoy to see them do,
would cordially despise and abominate the other. Which of the two,
however, would most successfully _dupe_ the other is a different
question, and one not so easy to decide; though we have our own ideas
upon the subject.
We must discuss "Vanity Fair" first, which, much as we were entitled to
expect from its author's pen, has fairly taken us by surprise. We were
perfectly aware that Mr. Thackeray had of old assumed the jester's
habit, in order the more unrestrainedly to indulge the privilege of
speaking the truth;--we had traced his clever progress through "Fraser's
Magazine" and the ever-improving pages of "Punch"--which wonder of the
time has been infinitely obliged to him--but still we were little
prepared for the keen observation, the deep wisdom, and the consummate
art which he has interwoven in the slight texture and whimsical pattern
of "Vanity Fair." Everybody, it is to be supposed, has read the volume
by this time; and even for those who have not, it is not necessary to
describe the order of the story. It is not a novel, in the common
acceptation of the word, with a plot purposely contrived to bring about
certain scenes, and develop certain characters, but simply a history of
those average sufferings, pleasures, penalties, and rewards to which
various classes of mankind gravitate as naturally and certainly in this
world as the sparks fly upward. It is only the same game of life which
every player sooner or later makes for himself--were he to have a
hundred chances, and shuffle the cards of circumstance every time. It is
only the same busy, involved drama which may be seen at any time by any
one, who is not engrossed with the magnified minutiae of his own petty
part, but with composed curiosity looks on to the stage where his
fellow-men and women are the actors; and that not even heightened by the
conventional colouring which Madame de Staël philosophically declares
that fiction always wants in order to make up for its not being truth.
Indeed, so far from taking any advantage of this novelist's licence, Mr.
Thackeray has hardly availed himself of the natural average of
remarkable events that really do occur in this life. The battle of
Waterloo, it is true, is introduced; but, as far as regards the story,
it brings about only one death and one bankruptcy, which might either of
them have happened in a hundred other ways. Otherwise the tale runs on,
with little exception, in that humdrum course of daily monotony, out of
which some people coin materials to act, and others excuses to doze,
just as their dispositions may be.
It is this reality which is at once the charm and the misery here. With
all these unpretending materials it is one of the most amusing, but also
one of the most distressing books we have read for many a long year. We
almost long for a little exaggeration and improbability to relieve us of
that sense of dead truthfulness which weighs down our hearts, not for
the Amelias and Georges of the story, but for poor kindred human nature.
In one light this truthfulness is even an objection. With few exceptions
the personages are too like our every-day selves and neighbours to draw
any distinct moral from. We cannot see our way clearly. Palliations of
the bad and disappointments in the good are perpetually obstructing our
judgment, by bringing what should decide it too close to that common
standard of experience in which our only rule of opinion is charity. For
it is only in fictitious characters which are highly coloured for one
definite object, or in notorious personages viewed from a distance, that
the course of the true moral can be seen to run straight--once bring the
individual with his life and circumstances closely before you, and it is
lost to the mental eye in the thousand pleas and witnesses, unseen and
unheard before, which rise up to overshadow it. And what are all these
personages in "Vanity Fair" but feigned names for our own beloved
friends and acquaintances, seen under such a puzzling cross-light of
good in evil, and evil in good, of sins and sinnings against, of little
to be praised virtues, and much to be excused vices, that we cannot
presume to moralise upon them--not even to judge them,--content to
exclaim sorrowfully with the old prophet, "Alas! my brother!" Every
actor on the crowded stage of "Vanity Fair" represents some type of that
perverse mixture of humanity in which there is ever something not wholly
to approve or to condemn. There is the desperate devotion of a fond
heart to a false object, which we cannot respect; there is the vain,
weak man, half good and half bad, who is more despicable in our eyes
than the decided villain. There are the irretrievably wretched
education, and the unquenchably manly instincts, both contending in the
confirmed _roué_, which melt us to the tenderest pity. There is the
selfishness and self-will which the possessor of great wealth and
fawning relations can hardly avoid. There is the vanity and fear of the
world, which assist mysteriously with pious principles in keeping a man
respectable; there are combinations of this kind of every imaginable
human form and colour, redeemed but feebly by the steady excellence of
an awkward man, and the genuine heart of a vulgar woman, till we feel
inclined to tax Mr. Thackeray with an under estimate of our nature,
forgetting that Madame de Staël is right after all, and that without a
little conventional rouge no human conplexion can stand the stage-lights
of fiction.
But if these performers give us pain, we are not ashamed to own, as we
are speaking openly, that the chief actress herself gives us none at
all. For there is of course a principal pilgrim in Vanity Fair, as much
as in its emblematical original, Bunyan's "Progress"; only unfortunately
this one is travelling the wrong way. And we say "unfortunately" merely
by way of courtesy, for in reality we care little about the matter. No,
Becky--our hearts neither bleed for you, nor cry out against you. You
are wonderfully clever, and amusing, and accomplished, and intelligent,
and the Soho _ateliers_ were not the best nurseries for a moral
training; and you were married early in life to a regular blackleg, and
you have had to live upon your wits ever since, which is not an
improving sort of maintenance; and there is much to be said for and
against; but still you are not one of us, and there is an end to our
sympathies and censures. People who allow their feelings to be lacerated
by such a character and career as yours, are doing both you and
themselves great injustice. No author could have openly introduced a
near connexion of Satan's into the best London society, nor would the
moral end intended have been answered by it; but really and honestly,
considering Becky in her human character, we know of none which so
thoroughly satisfies our highest _beau idéal_ of feminine wickedness,
with so slight a shock to our feelings and properties. It is very
dreadful, doubtless, that Becky neither loved the husband who loved her,
nor the child of her own flesh and blood, nor indeed any body but
herself; but, as far as she is concerned, we cannot pretend to be
scandalized--for how could she without a heart? It is very shocking of
course that she committed all sorts of dirty tricks, and jockeyed her
neighbours, and never cared what she trampled under foot if it happened
to obstruct her step; but how could she be expected to do otherwise
without a conscience? The poor little woman was most tryingly placed;
she came into the world without the customary letters of credit upon
those two great bankers of humanity, "Heart and Conscience," and it was
no fault of hers if they dishonoured all her bills. All she could do in
this dilemma was to establish the firmest connexion with the inferior
commercial branches of "Sense and Tact," who secretly do much business
in the name of the head concern, and with whom her "fine frontal
development" gave her unlimited credit. She saw that selfishness was the
metal which the stamp of heart was suborned to pass; that hypocrisy was
the homage that vice rendered to virtue; that honesty was, at all
events, acted, because it was the best policy; and so she practised the
arts of selfishness and hypocrisy like anybody else in Vanity Fair, only
with this difference, that she brought them to their highest possible
pitch of perfection. For why is it that, looking round in this world, we
find plenty of characters to compare with her up to a certain pitch, but
none which reach her actual standard? Why is it that, speaking of this
friend or that, we say in the tender mercies of our hearts, "No, she is
not _quite_ so bad as Becky?" We fear not only because she has more
heart and conscience, but also because she has less cleverness.
No; let us give Becky her due. There is enough in this world of ours, as
we all know, to provoke a saint, far more a poor little devil like her.
She had none of those fellow-feelings which make us wondrous kind. She
saw people around her cowards in vice, and simpletons in virtue, and she
had no patience with either, for she was as little the one as the other
herself. She saw women who loved their husbands and yet teazed them, and
ruining their children although they doated upon them, and she sneered
at their utter inconsistency. Wickedness or goodness, unless coupled
with strength, were alike worthless to her. That weakness which is the
blessed pledge of our humanity, was to her only the despicable badge of
our imperfection. She thought, it might be, of her master's words,
"Fallen Cherub! to be weak is to be miserable!" and wondered how we
could be such fools as first to sin and then to be sorry. Becky's light
was defective, but she acted up to it. Her goodness goes as far as good
temper, and her principles as far as shrewd sense, and we may thank her
consistency for showing us what they are both worth.
It is another thing to pretend to settle whether such a character be
_primâ facie_ impossible, though devotion to the better sex might well
demand the assertion. There are mysteries of iniquity, under the
semblance of man and woman, read of in history, or met with in the
unchronicled sufferings of private life, which would almost make us
believe that the powers of Darkness occasionally made use of this earth
for a Foundling Hospital, and sent their imps to us, already provided
with a return-ticket. We shall not decide on the lawfulness or otherwise
of any attempt to depict such importations; we can only rest perfectly
satisfied that, granting the author's premises, it is impossible to
imagine them carried out with more felicitous skill and more exquisite
consistency than in the heroine of "Vanity Fair." At all events, the
infernal regions have no reason to be ashamed of little Becky, nor the
ladies either: she has, at least, all the cleverness of the sex.
The great charm, therefore, and comfort of Becky is, that we may study
her without any compunctions. The misery of this life is not the evil
that we see, but the good and the evil which are so inextricably twisted
together. It is that perpetual memento ever meeting one--
How in this vile world below
Noblest things find vilest using,
that is so very distressing to those who have hearts as well as eyes.
But Becky relieves them of all this pain--at least in her own person.
Pity would be thrown away upon one who has not heart enough for it to
ache even for herself. Becky is perfectly happy, as all must be who
excel in what they love best. Her life is one exertion of successful
power. Shame never visits her, for "'Tis conscience that makes cowards
of us all"--and she has none. She realizes that _ne plus ultra_ of
sublunary comfort which it was reserved for a Frenchman to define--the
blessed combination of _"le bon estomac et le mauvais coeur"_: for Becky
adds to her other good qualities that of an excellent digestion.
Upon the whole, we are not afraid to own that we rather enjoy her _ignis
fatuus_ course, dragging the weak and the vain and the selffish
[Transcriber's note: sic], through mud and mire, after her, and acting
all parts, from the modest rushlight to the gracious star, just as it
suits her. Clever little imp that she is! What exquisite tact she
shows!--what unflagging good humour!--what ready self-possession! Becky
never disappoints us; she never even makes us tremble. We know that her
answer will come exactly suiting her one particular object, and
frequently three or four more in prospect. What respect, too, she has
for those decencies which more virtuous, but more stupid humanity, often
disdains! What detection of all that is false and mean! What instinct
for all that is true and great! She is her master's true pupil in that:
she knows what is really divine as well as he, and bows before it. She
honours Dobbin in spite of his big feet; she respects her husband more
than ever she did before, perhaps for the first time, at the very moment
when he is stripping not only her jewels, but name, honour, and comfort
off her.
We are not so sure either whether we are justified in calling hers _"le
mauvais coeur."_ Becky does not pursue any one vindictively; she never
does gratuitous mischief. The fountain is more dry than poisoned. She is
even generous--when she can afford it. Witness that burst of plain
speaking in Dobbin's favour to the little dolt Amelia, for which we
forgive her many a sin. 'Tis true she wanted to get rid of her; but let
that pass. Becky was a thrifty dame, and liked to despatch two birds
with one stone. And she was honest, too, after a fashion. The part of
wife she acts at first as well, and better than most; but as for that of
mother, there she fails from the beginning. She knew that maternal love
was no business of hers--that a fine frontal development could give her
no help there--and puts so little spirit into her imitation that no one
could be taken in for a moment. She felt that that bill, of all others,
would be sure to be dishonoured, and it went against her conscience--we
mean her sense--to send it in.
In short, the only respect in which Becky's course gives us pain is when
it locks itself into that of another, and more genuine child of this
earth. No one can regret those being entangled in her nets whose vanity
and meanness of spirit alone led them into its meshes--such are rightly
served; but we do grudge her that real sacred thing called _love_, even
of a Rawdon Crawley, who has more of that self-forgetting, all-purifying
feeling for his little evil spirit than many a better man has for a good
woman. We do grudge Becky _a heart_, though it belong only to a
swindler. Poor, sinned against, vile, degraded, but still true-hearted
Rawdon!--you stand next in our affections and sympathies to honest
Dobbin himself. It was the instinct of a good nature which made the
Major feel that the stamp of the Evil One was upon Becky; and it was the
stupidity of a good nature which made the Colonel never suspect it. He
was a cheat, a black-leg, an unprincipled dog; but still "Rawdon _is_ a
man, and be hanged to him," as the Rector says. We follow him through
the illustrations, which are, in many instances, a delightful
enhancement to the text--as he stands there, with his gentle eyelid,
coarse moustache, and foolish chin, bringing up Becky's coffee-cup with
a kind of dumb fidelity; or looking down at little Rawdon with a more
than paternal tenderness. All Amelia's philoprogenitive idolatries do
not touch us like one fond instinct of "stupid Rawdon."
Dobbin sheds a halo over all the long-necked, loose-jointed,
Scotch-looking gentlemen of our acquaintance. Flat feet and flap ears
seem henceforth incompatible with evil. He reminds us of one of the
sweetest creations that have appeared from any modern pen--that plain,
awkward, loveable "Long Walter," in Lady Georgina Fullerton's beautiful
novel of "Grantley Manor." Like him, too, in his proper self-respect; for
Dobbin--lumbering, heavy, shy, and absurdly over modest as the ugly fellow
is--is yet true to himself. At one time he seems to be sinking into the
mere abject dangler after Amelia; but he breaks his chains like a man, and
resumes them again like a man, too, although half disenchanted of his
amiable delusion.
But to return for a moment to Becky. The only criticism we would offer
is one which the author has almost disarmed by making her mother a
Frenchwoman. The construction of this little clever monster is
diabolically French. Such a _lusus naturae_ as a woman without a heart
and conscience would, in England, be a mere brutal savage, and poison
half a village. France is the land for the real Syren, with the woman's
face and the dragon's claws. The genus of Pigeon and Laffarge claims it
for its own--only that our heroine takes a far higher class by not
requiring the vulgar matter of fact of crime to develop her full powers.
It is an affront to Becky's tactics to believe that she could ever be
reduced to so low a resource, or, that if she were, anybody would find
it out. We, therefore, cannot sufficiently applaud the extreme
discretion with which Mr. Thackeray has hinted at the possibly assistant
circumstances of Joseph Sedley's dissolution. A less delicacy of
handling would have marred the harmony of the whole design. Such a
casualty as that suggested to our imagination was not intended for the
light net of Vanity Fair to draw on shore; it would have torn it to
pieces. Besides it is not wanted. Poor little Becky is bad enough to
satisfy the most ardent student of "good books." Wickedness, beyond a
certain pitch, gives no increase of gratification even to the sternest
moralist; and one of Mr. Thackeray's excellences is the sparing quantity
he consumes. The whole _use_, too, of the work--that of generously
measuring one another by this standard--is lost, the moment you convict
Becky of a capital crime. Who can, with any face, liken a dear friend to
a murderess? Whereas now there are no little symptoms of fascinating
ruthlessness, graceful ingratitude, or ladylike selfishness, observable
among our charming acquaintance, that we may not immediately detect to
an inch, and more effectually intimidate by the simple application of
the Becky gauge than by the most vehement use of all ten commandments.
Thanks to Mr. Thackeray, the world is now provided with an _idea_,
which, if we mistake not, will be the skeleton in the corner of every
ball-room and boudoir for a long time to come. Let us leave it intact in
its unique fount and freshness--a Becky, and nothing more. We should,
therefore, advise our readers to cut out that picture of our heroine's
"Second Appearance as Clytemnestra," which casts so uncomfortable a
glare over the latter part of the volume, and, disregarding all hints
and inuendoes, simply to let the changes and chances of this moral life
have due weight in their minds. Jos had been much in India. His was a
bad life; he ate and drank most imprudently, and his digestion was not
to be compared with Becky's. No respectable office would have ensured
"Waterloo Sedley."
"Vanity Fair" is pre-eminently a novel of the day--not in the vulgar
sense, of which there are too many, but as a literal photograph of the
manners and habits of the nineteenth century, thrown on to paper by the
light of a powerful mind; and one also of the most artistic effect. Mr.
Thackeray has a peculiar adroitness in leading on the fancy, or rather
memory of his readers from one set of circumstances to another by the
seeming chances and coincidences of common life, as an artist leads the
spectator's eye through the subject of his picture by a skilful
repetition of colour. This is why it is impossible to quote from his
book with any justice to it. The whole growth of the narrative is so
matted and interwoven together with tendril-like links and bindings,
that there is no detaching a flower with sufficient length of stalk to
exhibit it to advantage. There is that mutual dependence in his
characters which is the first requisite in painting every-day life: no
one is stuck on a separate pedestal--no one is sitting for his portrait.
There may be one exception--we mean Sir Pitt Crawley, senior; it is
possible, nay, we hardly doubt, that this baronet was closer drawn from
individual life than anybody else in the book; but granting that fact,
the animal was so unique an exception, that we wonder so shrewd an
artist could stick him into a gallery so full of our familiars. The
scenes in Germany, we can believe, will seem to many readers of an
English book hardly less extravagantly absurd--grossly and gratuitously
overdrawn; but the initiated will value them as containing some of the
keenest strokes of truth and humour that "Vanity Fair" exhibits, and not
enjoy them the less for being at our neighbour's expense. For the
thorough appreciation of the chief character they are quite
indispensable too. The whole course of the work may be viewed as the
_Wander-Jahre_ of a far cleverer female, _Wilhelm Meister_. We have
watched her in the ups-and-downs of life--among the humble, the
fashionable, the great, and the pious--and found her ever new, yet ever
the same; but still Becky among the students was requisite to complete
the full measure of our admiration.
"Jane Eyre," as a work, and one of equal popularity, is, in almost every
respect, a total contrast to "Vanity Fair." The characters and events,
though some of them masterly in conception, are coined expressly for the
purpose of bringing out great effects. The hero and heroine are beings
both so singularly unattractive that the reader feels they can have no
vocation in the novel but to be brought together; and they do things
which, though not impossible, lie utterly beyond the bounds of
probability. On this account a short sketch of the plan seems requisite;
not but what it is a plan familiar enough to all readers of novels--
especially those of the old school and those of the lowest school of our
own day. For Jane Eyre is merely another Pamela, who, by the force of
her character and the strength of her principles, is carried
victoriously through great trials and temptations from the man she
loves. Nor is she even a Pamela adapted and refined to modern notions;
for though the story is conducted without those derelictions of decorum
which we are to believe had their excuse in the manners of Richardson's
time, yet it stamped with a coarseness of language and laxity of tone
which have certainly no excuse in ours. It is a very remarkable book: we
have no remembrance of another combining such genuine power with such
horrid taste. Both together have equally assisted to gain the great
popularity it has enjoyed; for in these days of extravagant adoration of
all that bears the stamp of novelty and originality, sheer rudeness and
vulgarity have come in for a most mistaken worship.
The story is written in the first person. Jane begins with her earliest
recollections, and at once takes possession of the readers' intensest
interest by the masterly picture of a strange and oppressed child she
raises up in a few strokes before him. She is an orphan, and a dependant
in the house of a selfish, hard-hearted aunt, against whom the
disposition of the little Jane chafes itself in natural antipathy, till
she contrives to make the unequal struggle as intolerable to her
oppressor as it is to herself. She is, therefore, at eight years of age,
got rid of to a sort of Dothegirls Hall, where she continues to enlist
our sympathies for a time with her little pinched fingers, cropped hair,
and empty stomach. But things improve: the abuses of the institution are
looked into. The Puritan patron, who holds that young orphan girls are
only safely brought up upon the rules of La Trappe, is superseded by an
enlightened committee--the school assumes a sound English character--
Jane progresses duly from scholar to teacher, and passes ten profitable
and not unhappy years at Lowood. Then she advertises for a situation as
governess, and obtains one immediately in one of the midland counties.
We see her, therefore, as she leaves Lowood, to enter upon a new life--a
small, plain, odd creature, who has been brought up dry upon school
learning, and somewhat stunted accordingly in mind and body, and who is
now thrown upon the world as ignorant of its ways, and as destitute of
its friendships, as a shipwrecked mariner upon a strange coast.
Thornfield Hall is the property of Mr. Rochester--a bachelor addicted to
travelling. She finds it at first in all the peaceful prestige of an
English gentleman's seat when "nobody is at the hall." The companions
are an old decayed gentlewoman housekeeper--a far away cousin of the
squire's--and a young French child, Jane's pupil, Mr. Rochester's ward
and reputed daughter. There is a pleasing monotony in the summer
solitude of the old country house, with its comfort, respectability, and
dulness, which Jane paints to the life; but there is one circumstance
which varies the sameness and casts a mysterious feeling over the scene.
A strange laugh is heard from time to time in a distant part of the
house--a laugh which grates discordantly upon Jane's ear. She listens,
watches, and inquires, but can discover nothing but a plain matter of
fact woman, who sits sewing somewhere in the attics, and goes up and
down stairs peaceably to and from her dinner with the servants. But a
mystery there is, though nothing betrays it, and it comes in with
marvellous effect from the monotonous reality of all around. After
awhile Mr. Rochester comes to Thornfield, and sends for the child and
her governess occasionally to bear him company. He is a dark,
strange-looking man--strong and large--of the brigand stamp, with fine
eyes and lowering brows--blunt and sarcastic in his manners, with a kind
of misanthropical frankness, which seems based upon utter contempt for
his fellow-creatures and a surly truthfulness which is more rudeness than
honesty. With his arrival disappears all the prestige of country
innocence that had invested Thornfield Hall. He brings the taint of the
world upon him, and none of its illusions. The queer little governess is
something new to him. He talks to her at one time imperiously as to a
servant, and at another recklessly as to a man. He pours into her ears
disgraceful tales of his past life, connected with the birth of little
Adele, which any man with common respect for a woman, and that a mere
girl of eighteen, would have spared her; but which eighteen in this case
listens to as if it were nothing new, and certainly nothing distasteful.
He is captious and Turk-like--she is one day his confidant, and another
his unnoticed dependant. In short, by her account, Mr. Rochester is a
strange brute, somewhat in the Squire Western style of absolute and
capricious eccentricity, though redeemed in him by signs of a cultivated
intellect, and gleams of a certain fierce justice of heart. He has a
_mind_, and when he opens it at all, he opens it freely to her. Jane
becomes attached to her "master," as Pamela-like she calls him, and it
is not difficult to see that solitude and propinquity are taking effect
upon him also. An odd circumstance heightens the dawning romance. Jane
is awoke one night by that strange discordant laugh close to her ear--
then a noise as if hands feeling along the wall. She rises--opens her
door, finds the passage full of smoke, is guided by it to her master's
room, whose bed she discovers enveloped in flames, and by her timely aid
saves his life. After this they meet no more for ten days, when Mr.
Rochester returns from a visit to a neighbouring family, bringing with
him a housefull of distinguished guests; at the head of whom is Miss
Blanche Ingram, a haughty beauty of high birth, and evidently the
especial object of the Squire's attentions--upon which tumultuous
irruption Miss Eyre slips back into her naturally humble position.
Our little governess is now summoned away to attend her aunt's death-bed,
who is visited by some compunctions towards her, and she is absent
a month. When she returns Thornfield Hall is quit of all its guests, and
Mr. Rochester and she resume their former life of captious cordiality on
the one side, and diplomatic humility on the other. At the same time the
bugbear of Miss Ingram and of Mr. Rochester's engagement with her is
kept up, though it is easy to see that this and all concerning that lady
is only a stratagem to try Jane's character and affection upon the most
approved Griselda precedent. Accordingly an opportunity for explanation
ere long offers itself, where Mr. Rochester has only to take it. Miss
Eyre is desired to walk with him in shady alleys, and to sit with him on
the roots of an old chestnut-tree towards the close of evening, and of
course she cannot disobey her "master"--whereupon there ensues a scene
which, as far as we remember, is new equally in art or nature; in which
Miss Eyre confesses her love--whereupon Mr. Rochester drops not only his
cigar (which she seems to be in the habit of lighting for him) but his
mask, and finally offers not only heart, but hand. The wedding day is
soon fixed, but strange misgivings and presentiments haunt the young
lady's mind. The night but one before her bed-room is entered by a
horrid phantom, who tries on the wedding veil, sends Jane into a swoon
of terror, and defeats all the favourite refuge of a bad dream by
leaving the veil in two pieces. But all is ready. The bride has no
friends to assist--the couple walk to church--only the clergyman and the
clerk are there--but Jane's quick eye has seen two figures lingering
among the tombstones, and these two follow them into church. The
ceremony commences, when at the due charge which summons any man to come
forward and show just cause why they should not be joined together, a
voice interposes to forbid the marriage. There is an impediment, and a
serious one. The bridegroom has a wife not only living, but living under
the very roof of Thornfield Hall. Hers was that discordant laugh which
had so often caught Jane's ear; she it was who in her malice had tried
to burn Mr. Rochester in his bed--who had visited Jane by night and torn
her veil, and whose attendant was that same pretended sew-woman who had
so strongly excited Jane's curiosity. For Mr. Rochester's wife is a
creature, half fiend, half maniac, whom he had married in a distant part
of the world, and whom now, in self-constituted code of morality, he had
thought it his right, and even his duty, to supersede by a more
agreeable companion. Now follow scenes of a truly tragic power. This is
the grand crisis in Jane's life. Her whole soul is wrapt up in Mr.
Rochester. He has broken her trust, but not diminished her love. He
entreats her to accept all that he still can give, his heart and his
home; he pleads with the agony not only of a man who has never known
what it was to conquer a passion, but of one who, by that same
self-constituted code, now burns to atone for a disappointed crime. There
is no one to help her against him or against herself. Jane had no friends
to stand by her at the altar, and she has none to support her now she is
plucked away from it. There is no one to be offended or disgraced at her
following him to the sunny land of Italy, as he proposes, till the
maniac should die. There is no duty to any one but to herself, and this
feeble reed quivers and trembles beneath the overwhelming weight of love
and sophistry opposed to it. But Jane triumphs; in the middle of the
night she rises--glides out of her room--takes off her shoes as she
passes Mr. Rochester's chamber;--leaves the house, and casts herself
upon a world more desert than ever to her--
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 _blasé_ 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 idéal_ 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 _métier_--
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.