t, but hardly
paradoxical, that Charlotte's verses are the worst of the three. How
many born writers of musical prose have persisted in manufacturing
verse of a curiously dull and unmelodious quality! The absolute
masters of prose and of verse in equal perfection hardly exceed
Shakespeare and Shelley, Goethe and Hugo. And Charlotte Bronte is an
eminent example of a strong imagination working with freedom in prose,
but which began by using the instrument of verse, and used it in a
manner that never rose for an instant above mediocrity.

Of the Brontes it is Charlotte only who concerns us, and of Charlotte's
work it is _Jane Eyre_ only that can be called a masterpiece. To call
it a masterpiece, as Thackeray did, is not to deny its manifold and
manifest shortcomings. It is a very small corner of the world that it
gives, and that world is seen by a single acute observer from without.
The plain little governess dominates the whole book and fills every
page. Everything and every one appear, not as we see them and know
them in the world, but as they look to a keen-eyed girl who had hardly
ever left her native village. Had the whole book been cast into the
form of impersonal narration, this limitation, this huge ignorance of
life, this amateur's attempt to construct a romance by the light of
nature instead of observation and study of persons, would have been a
failure. As the autobiography of Jane Eyre--let us say at once of
Charlotte Bronte--it is consummate art. It produces the illusion we
feel in reading _Robinson Crusoe_. In the whole range of modern
fiction there are few characters whom we feel that we know so
intimately as we do Jane Eyre. She is as intensely familiar to us as
Becky Sharp or Parson Adams. Much more than this. Not only do we feel
an intimate knowledge of Jane Eyre, but we see every one by the eyes of
Jane Eyre only. Edward Rochester has not a few touches of the
melodramatic villain; and no man would ever draw a man with such
conventional and Byronic extravagances. If Edward Rochester had been
described in impersonal narrative with all his brutalities, his stage
villain frowns, and his Grand Turk whims, it would have spoiled the
book. But Edward Rochester, the "master" of the little governess, as
seen by the eyes of a passionate, romantic, but utterly unsophisticated
girl, is a powerful character; and all the inconsistencies, the
affectation, the savageries we might detect in him, become the