image into that of a sort of diabolic angel, is natural
enough, and her conduct when she leaves Moor House is right and true,
though we cannot say as much for Rivers' words. But the impression of
the whole scene is right.

In the same way, Edward Rochester, if we take him simply as a cultured
and travelled country gentleman, who was a magnate and great _parti_ in
his county, is barely within the range of possibility. As St. John
Rivers is a walking contradictory of a diabolic saint, so Edward
Rochester is a violent specimen of the heroic ruffian. In Emily
Bronte's gruesome phantasmagoria of _Wuthering Heights_ there is a
ruffian named Heathcliff; and, whatever be his brutalities and
imprecations, we always feel in reading it that _Wuthering Heights_ is
merely a grisly dream, not a novel at all. Edward Rochester has
something of the Heathcliff too. But Rochester is a man of the best
English society, courted by wealth and rank, a man of cultivated
tastes, of wide experience and refined habits, and lastly of most
generous and heroic impulses--and yet such a man swears at his people
like a horse-dealer, teases and bullies his little governess, treats
his adopted child like a dog, almost kicks his brother-in-law in his
rages, plays shocking tricks with his governess at night, offers her
marriage, and attempts to commit bigamy in his own parish with his
living wife still under the same roof! That a man of Rochester's
resource, experience, and forethought, should keep his maniac wife in
his own ancestral home where he is entertaining the county families and
courting a neighbouring peer's sister, and that, after the maniac had
often attempted murder and arson--all this is beyond the range of
probabilities. And yet the story could not go on without it. And so,
Edward Rochester, man of the world as he is, risks his life, his home,
and everything and every one dear to him in order that his little
governess, Jane Eyre, should have the materials for inditing a
thrilling autobiography. It cannot be denied that this is the very
essence of "sensationalism," which means a succession of thrilling
surprises constructed out of situations that are practically impossible.

Nor, alas! can we deny that there are ugly bits of real coarseness in
_Jane Eyre_. It is true that most of them are the effects of that
portentous ignorance of the world and of civilised society which the
solitary dreamer of Haworth Parsonage had no means of rem