early, fleecy, gleaming air streamed like
raiment round it; light, tinted with carnation, coloured what seemed
face and limbs; a large star shone with still lustre on an angel's
forehead--" But the angel ruins it.

And this is all, and it leaves the dreariness more dreary. In _The
Professor_ you wander through a world where there is no sound, no
colour, no vibration; a world muffled and veiled in the stillness and
the greyness of the hour before dawn. It is the work of a woman who is
not perfectly alive. So far from having had her great awakening,
Charlotte is only half awake. Her intellect is alert enough and avid,
faithful and subservient to the fact. It is her nerves and senses that
are asleep. Her soul is absent from her senses.

* * * * *

But in _Jane Eyre_, she is not only awakened, but awake as she has never
been awake before, with all her virgin senses exquisitely alive, every
nerve changed to intense vibration. Sometimes she is perniciously awake;
she is doing appalling things, things unjustifiable, preposterous;
things that would have meant perdition to any other writer; she sees
with wild, erroneous eyes; but the point is that she sees, that she
keeps moving, that from the first page to the last she is never once
asleep. To come to _Jane Eyre_ after _The Professor_ is to pass into
another world of feeling and of vision.

It is not the difference between reality and unreality. _The Professor_
is real enough, more real in some minor points--dialogue, for
instance--than _Jane Eyre_. The difference is that _The Professor_ is a
transcript of reality, a very delicate and faithful transcript, and
_Jane Eyre_ is reality itself, pressed on the senses. The pressure is so
direct and so tremendous, that it lasts through those moments when the
writer's grip has failed.

For there are moments, long moments of perfectly awful failure in _Jane
Eyre_. There are phrases that make you writhe, such as "the etymology of
the mansion's designation", and the shocking persistency with which
Charlotte Bronte "indites", "peruses", and "retains". There are whole
scenes that outrage probability. Such are the scenes, or parts of
scenes, between Jane and Rochester during the comedy of his courtship.
The great orchard scene does not ring entirely true. For pages and pages
it falters between passion and melodrama; between rhetoric and the _cri
de coeur_. Jane in the very thick of her emotion can say, "I h