no single lapse from nature when he
is speaking. The curates only excepted, Charlotte never swerves from
this fidelity. But when she is handling her curates, it is a savage and
utterly inartistic humour that inspires her. You feel that she is not
exercising the art of comedy, but relieving her own intolerable boredom
and irritation. No object could well be more innocent, and more
appealing in its innocence, than little Mr. Sweeting, curate of
Nunnerly. Mr. Sweeting at the tea-table, "having a dish of tarts before
him, and marmalade and crumpet upon his plate", should have moved the
Comic Spirit to tears of gentleness.

Curates apart, two-thirds of _Shirley_ are written with an unerring
devotion to the real, to the very actual. They have not, for all that,
the profound reality of _Jane Eyre_. The events are confused, somehow;
the atmosphere is confusing; the northern background is drawn with a
certain hardness and apathy of touch; the large outlines are obscured,
delicate colours sharpened; it is hard and yet blurred, like a bad steel
engraving. Charlotte's senses, so intensely, so supernaturally alive in
_Jane Eyre_, are only passably awake in _Shirley_. It has some of the
dulness of _The Professor_, as it has more than its sober rightness.
But, for three-and-twenty chapters, the sobriety, the rightness triumph.
There are no improbabilities, no flights of imagination, none of the
fine language which was the shame when it was not the glory of _Jane
Eyre_.

Then suddenly there comes a break--a cleavage. It comes with that
Chapter Twenty-four, which is headed "The Valley of the Shadow of
Death". It was written in the first months after Emily Bronte's death.

From that point Charlotte's level strength deserts her. Ever after, she
falls and soars, and soars and falls again. There is a return to the
manner of _Jane Eyre_, the manner of Charlotte when she is deeply moved;
there is at times a relapse to Jane Eyre's worst manner. You get it at
once in "The Valley of the Shadow" chapter, in the scene of Caroline's
love-sick delirium.

"'But he will not know I am ill till I am gone; and he will come when
they have laid me out, and I am senseless, cold and stiff.

"'What can my departed soul feel then? Can it see or know what happens
to the clay? Can spirits, through any medium, communicate with living
flesh? Can the dead at all revisit those they leave? Can they come in
the elements? Will wind, water, fire lend me a path to