Shirley Keeldar—women read men more truly than men read women. Now, it has been very reasonably alleged, by a critic, too, of exceeding worth in the lady's declared opinion, that she, Currer Bell, thinks of the abstraction, man, with all the blissful ignorance of a boy's dreams of woman: to her, he is a thing to be studied present, and mused upon absent: he comes, and she owns her master; departs, and leaves the air full of vision. It was this very circumstance—-this idealising of the lord of creation—that determined some of her male reviewers that Currer Bell was not of their own sex. Mr. Rochester could not have sat for his portrait to any but a female artist. "Only a woman's eye could see man as Currer Bell sees him. The landscape is too near to us to glow with purple light. We cannot make a religion of man, for to us he has no mysteries." Jane Eyre’s state of feeling when she first sees Mr. Rochester, as she rests by the wayside in the gloaming, and overhears the tramp, tramp, of his steed along the winding lane—when, in utter unconsciousness of who is approaching, she invests the unseen presence with a halo of the supernatural—is significant of her entire habit of thought towards this illustrious stranger." As the horse approached, and as she watched for it to appear through the dusk, she remembered certain of Bessie's tales, wherein figured a North-of-England spirit. called a "Gytrash;" and the traveller's dog, as it glided by her, gave "form and pressure" to the tradition; nor is the illusion so utterly dispersed as Jane supposes, when the rider makes a clattering tumble—from the sublime to the ridiculous—and exclaims, in transitu, "What the douce is to do now?"
The pre-Raphaelite brotherhood love to select prize specimens of ugliness, to represent Saint This or That. In something of the same spirit Currer Bell fixes on a Mr. Rochester—though he is not quite so far gone as some of the saints. Jane Eyre protests that she could not have stood by the unhorsed rider that night, and helped him to his feet, had he been a "handsome, heroic-looking young gentleman." "I had," she continues, "a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination; but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known, instinctively, that they neither had nor could have sympathy with anything in me, and should have shunned them as one would fire, lightning, or anything else that is bright but antipathetic." We are to accept the hero as abnormal; that constitutes much of the spoil; and regarding him accordingly from the autobiographer's Standpunct, we must all own that there is a spell about him—an attraction, or at least a power, which canonical heroes of Apollo proportions and twenty-one summers, the walking gentlemen of every-day fiction, are entirely devoid of.
Of the minor characters, several are hit off with considerable effect: Aunt Reed, for instance, and her two daughters; Helen Burns, the "early called," whoso story,[1] apparently from real life, forms a touching
- ↑ The attachment formed between her and Jane is described with singular and unaffected interest—and in its refreshing reality it reminds us of Jean Paul's remark (Die unsichtbare Loge, § 10), "Wie heitern im steinigten Arabien der hassenden Welt Kinder wieder auf, die einander lieben und deren gute kleine Augen und kleine Lippen und kleine Hände noch keine Masken sind!" This must have been specially note-worthy at Lowood, under Mr. Brooklehurst.
