the effect of it to the end of her
life, she certainly suffered severely at the time. It was responsible
for that impassioned defence of Anne and Emily which she would have been
wiser to have left alone.

It must be admitted that _Jane Eyre_ was an easy prey for the truculent
reviewer, for its faults were all on the surface, and its great
qualities lay deep. Deep as they were, they gripped the ordinary
uncritical reader, and they gripped the critic in spite of himself, so
that he bitterly resented being moved by a work so flagrantly and
obviously faulty. What was more, the passion of the book was so intense
that you were hardly aware of anything else, and its author's austere
respect for the ten commandments passed almost unobserved.

But when her enemies accuse Charlotte Bronte of glorifying passion they
praise her unaware. Her glory is that she did glorify it. Until she
came, passion between man and woman had meant animal passion. Fielding
and Smollett had dealt with it solely on that footing. A woman's gentle,
legalized affection for her husband was one thing, and passion was
another. Thackeray and Dickens, on the whole, followed Fielding. To all
three of them passion is an affair wholly of the senses, temporary,
episodic, and therefore comparatively unimportant. Thackeray intimated
that he could have done more with it but for his fear of Mrs. Grundy.
Anyhow, passion was not a quality that could be given to a good woman;
and so the good women of Dickens and Thackeray are conspicuously
without it. And Jane Austen may be said to have also taken Fielding's
view. Therefore she was obliged to ignore passion. She gave it to one
vulgar woman, Lydia Bennett, and to one bad one, Mrs. Rushworth; and
having given it them, she turned her head away and refused to have
anything more to do with these young women. She was not alone in her
inability to "tackle passion". No respectable mid-Victorian novelist
could, when passion had so bad a name.

And it was this thing, cast down, defiled, dragged in the mud, and
ignored because of its defilement, that Charlotte Bronte took and lifted
up. She washed it clean; she bathed it in the dew of the morning; she
baptized it in tears; she clothed it in light and flame; she showed it
for the divine, the beautiful, the utterly pure and radiant thing it is,
"the very sublime of faith, truth and devotion". She made it, this
spirit of fire and air, incarnate in the body of a woman who had no
sen