e innermost altar.
The irresistible appeal of the book to the heart is due to the fact
that Jane Eyre never seems conscious of what she is giving, but only of
what she is receiving; and it is this that makes her gift so regal, so
splendid a thing.

Side by side with this book I would set a recent work, Miss
Cholmondeley's _Prisoners_. Fine and noble as the book is in many ways,
it is yet vitiated by the sense of the value of the gift of love from
the woman's point of view. Love is there depicted as the one redeeming
and transforming power in the world. But in order to prove the thesis,
the two chief characters among the men of the book, Wentworth and Lord
Lossiemouth, are not, like Mr. Rochester, strong men disfigured by
violent faults, but essentially worthless persons, one the slave of an
oldmaidish egotism and the other of a frank animalism. The result in
both cases is an _experimentum in corpore vili_. The authoress, instead
of presiding over her creations like a little Deity, is a strong
partisan; and the purpose seems to be to bring out more clearly the
priceless nature of the gift which comes near their hand. No one would
dispute the position that love is a purifying and transforming power;
but love, conscious of its worth, loses the humility and the
unselfishness in which half its power lies. Even Magdalen, the finest
character in the book, is not free from a quality of condescension. In
the great love-scene where she accepts Lord Lossiemouth, she comforts
him by saying, "You have not only come back to me. You have come back
to yourself." That is a false touch, because it has a flavour of
superiority about it. It reminds one of the lover in _The Princess_
lecturing the hapless Ida from his bed-pulpit, and saying, "Blame not
thyself too much," and "Dearer thou for faults lived over." One cannot
imagine Jane Eyre saying to Mr. Rochester that he had come back to
himself through loving her. It just detracts at the supreme moment from
the generosity of the scene; it has the accent of the priestess, not of
the true lover; and thus at the moment when one longs to be in the very
white-heat of emotion, one is subtly aware of an improving hand that
casts water upon the flame.

The love that lives in art is the love of Penelope and Antigone, of
Cordelia and Desdemona and Imogen, of Enid, of Mrs. Browning, among
women; and among men, the love of Dante, of Keats, of the lover of
Maud, of Pere Goriot, of Robert Browning.