Page:A note on Charlotte Brontë (IA note00swinoncharlottebrich).pdf/83

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of her magnetic hand. The phrase of 'passionate perfection,' devised by Mr. Tennyson to describe the rarest type of highest human character, is admirably applicable to her special style at its best. The figure of the young missionary St. John Rivers is by no means to be rated as one of her great unsurpassable successes in spiritual portraiture; the central mainspring of his hard fanatic heroism is never quite adequately touched; her own apparent lack of sympathy with this white marble clergyman (counterpart, as it were, of the 'black marble' Brocklehurst, who chills and darkens the dreary dawn of the story) seems here and there as though it scarcely could be held down by force of artistic conscience from passing into actual and avowed aversion; but the im-