escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay
dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue
and purity--that I want: not alone your brittle frame. Of yourself, you
could come with soft flight and nestle against my heart, if you would;
seized against your will you will elude the grasp like an essence--you
will vanish ere I inhale your fragrance. Oh, come, Jane, come!'"

It is the crucial scene of the book; and with all its power, with all
its vehemence and passionate reality it is unconvincing. It stirs you
and it leaves you cold.

The truth is that in _Jane Eyre_ Charlotte Bronte had not mastered the
art of dialogue; and to the very last she was uncertain in her handling
of it. In this she is inferior to all the great novelists of her time;
inferior to some who were by no means great. She understood more of the
spiritual speech of passion than any woman before her, but she ignores
its actual expression, its violences, its reticences, its silences. In
her great scenes she is inspired one moment, and the next positively
handicapped by her passion and her poetry. In the same sentence she
rises to the sudden poignant _cri du coeur_, and sinks to the artifice
of metaphor. She knew that passion is poetry, and poetry is passion;
you might say it was all she knew, or ever cared to know. But her
language of passion is too often the language of written rather than of
spoken poetry, of poetry that is not poetry at all. It is as if she had
never heard the speech of living men and women. There is more actuality
in the half-French chatter of Adele than in any of the high utterances
of Jane and Rochester.

And yet her sense of the emotion behind the utterance is infallible, so
infallible that we accept the utterance. By some miracle, which is her
secret, the passion gets through. The illusion of reality is so strong
that it covers its own lapses. _Jane Eyre_ exists to prove that truth is
higher than actuality.

"'Jane suits me: do I suit her?'

"'To the finest fibre of my nature, sir.'"

If no woman alive had ever said that, it would yet be true to Jane's
feeling. For it is a matter of the finest fibres, this passion of
Jane's, that set people wondering about Currer Bell, that inflamed Mrs.
Oliphant, as it inflamed the reviewer in _The Quarterly_, and made
Charles Kingsley think that Currer Bell was coarse. Their state of mind
is incredible to us now. For what did poor Jane do, after