not the highest and
certainly not the widest art. Scott and Thackeray--even Jane Austen
and Maria Edgeworth--paint the world, or part of the world, as it is,
crowded with men and women of various characters. Charlotte Bronte
painted not the world, hardly a corner of the world, but the very soul
of one proud and loving girl. That is enough: we need ask no more. It
was done with consummate power. We feel that we know her life, from
ill-used childhood to her proud matronhood; we know her home, her
school, her professional duties, her loves and hates, her agonies and
her joys, with that intense familiarity and certainty of vision with
which our own personal memories are graven on our brain. With all its
faults, its narrowness of range, its occasional extravagances, _Jane
Eyre_ will long be remembered as one of the most creative influences of
the Victorian literature, one of the most poetic pieces of English
romance, and among the most vivid masterpieces in the rare order of
literary "Confessions."

VIII

CHARLES KINGSLEY

In this series of papers I have been trying to note some of the more
definite literary forces which tended to mould English opinion during the
epoch of the present Queen. I can remember the issue of nearly all the
greater products of the Victorian writers, or at least the heyday of
their early fame. I do not speak of any living writer, and confine
myself to the writers of our country. Much less do I permit myself to
speak of those living lights of literature from whom we may yet receive
work even surpassing that of those who are gone. My aim has been not so
much to weigh each writer in the delicate balance of mere literary merit,
but rather, from the point of view of the historian of ideas and of
manners, to record the successive influences which, in the last fifty
years or so, have moulded or reflected English opinion through printed
books, be they of the dogmatic or of the imaginative order. In so doing,
I have to speak of writers whose vogue is passing away with the present
generation, or those of whom we must admit very grave defects and
feebleness. Some of them may be little cared for to-day; though they
have a place in the evolution of British society and thought.

Charles Kingsley has such a place--not by reason of any supreme work or
any very rare quality of his own, but by virtue of his versatility, his
_verve_, his fecundity, his irrepressible gift of breaking out in some
n