es since. I know that
much of it is grotesque, but it seems to me that its grotesqueness is
not absurd, any more than the stiff animals and trees or hills in the
early Italian pictures are absurd; one smiles, not contemptuously, but
tenderly at it all.

Again, there are two ways of treating a work of art. If a portrait, for
instance, is intensely realistic and true to its original, one says,
"How lifelike!" If it is widely unlike the original, one can always
say, "How symbolical!" Of the first kind of portrait one may say that
it brings the man before you; of the latter you may say that the artist
has striven to paint the soul rather than the body. Well, I think it is
fair to call Jane Eyre symbolical. Some of the people depicted are very
true to life. The old, comfortable, good-humoured housekeeper, Mrs.
Fairfax; Bessie the nursemaid; Adele, the little French girl, Mr.
Rochester's ward; the two Rivers sisters--they are admirable portraits.
But Mr. Rochester, the haughty Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park, Miss
Ingram, who says to the footman, "Leave that chatter, blockhead, and do
my bidding," St. John Rivers, the blue-eyed fanatic--these are
caricatures or types, according as you like to view them. To me they
are types: characters finely conceived, and only exaggerated because
Charlotte Bronte had never mixed with people of that species in
ordinary life. But I think that one can see into the souls of these
people in spite of the exaggerations of speech and gesture and
behaviour which disfigure them. Yet it is not primarily for the
character-drawing that I value the book. What attracts me is the
romance, the beauty, the poetry of the whole, and a special union of
intellectual force, with passion at white heat, which breathes through
them. The love scenes have the same strange glow that I always feel in
Tennyson's "Come into the garden, Maud," where the pulse of the lover
thrills under one's hand with the love that beats from the heart of the
world. And then, too, Charlotte Bronte seems to me to have had an
incomparable gift of animating a natural scene with vivid human
emotions. The frost-bound day, when the still earth holds its breath,
when the springs are congealed, and the causeway is black with slippery
ice, in that hour when Jane Eyre first sees Mr. Rochester; and again
the scene in the summer garden, just before the thunderstorm, when Mr.
Rochester calls her to look at the great hawk-moth drinking from the
flower c