ss comes to deal
with great passions, and represent morbid characters, we find that she
is out of her element. The character of Rochester is the character of
a mechanical monster. The authoress has no living idea of the kind of
person she attempts to describe. She desires to represent a reckless
man, made bad by circumstances, but retaining many marks of a noble
character, and she fills his conversation with slang, makes him
impudent and lustful, a rascal in every sense of the word, without the
remotest idea of what true chivalric love for a woman means; and this
mechanical automaton, whose every motion reveals that he moves not by
vital powers but by springs and machinery, she makes her pure-minded
heroine love and marry.

There has been a great deal of discussion about the morality of this
part of the novel. The question resolves itself into a question of
art, for we hold that truth of representation and morality of effect
are identical. Immoral characters may be introduced into a book, and
the effect be moral on the reader's mind, but a character which is
both immoral and unnatural ever produces a pernicious effect. Now the
authoress of Jane Eyre has drawn in Rochester an unnatural character,
and she has done it from an ignorance of the inward condition of mind
which immorality such as his either springs from or produces. The
ruffian, with his fierce appetites and Satanic pride, his mistresses
and his perjuries, his hard impudence and insulting sarcasms, she
knows only verbally, so to speak. The words which describe such a
character she interprets with her fancy, enlightened by a reminiscence
of Childe Harold and the Corsair. The result is a compound of vulgar
rascalities and impotent Byronics. Every person who interprets her
description by a knowledge of what profligacy is, cannot fail to see
that she is absurdly connecting certain virtues, of which she knows a
good deal, with certain vices, of which she knows nothing. The
coarseness of portions of the novel, consisting not so much in the
vulgarity of Rochester's conversation as the _naive_ description of
some of his acts--his conduct for three weeks before his intended
marriage, for instance, is also to be laid partly to the ignorance of
the authoress of what ruffianism is, and partly to her ignorance of
what love is. No woman who had ever truly loved could have mistaken so
completely the Rochester type, or could have made her heroine love a
man of proud, selfish,