"Shirley," of its slow and dragging narrative, its paucity of incident, its exuberance of didactic dialogue, and so forth, we very partially concur; knowing at the outset, that if we expect moving accidents by flood and field, and a sterling guinea and a half's worth of dashing dramatics, we have come to the wrong "store." We come to Currer Bell not for narrative, but for delineation of character. We want, not her plot, but her reading of the heart of man—or rather of woman. Between her and the mere narrative novelist there is all the difference which exists (to use an illustration of Dr. Johnson's) between a man who knows how a watch is made, and a man who can tell the hour by looking at the dial-plate. And when character are fully developed, the narrative necessarily loiters.[1] The forte of Currer Bell lies in deep searchings of heart. She heads the school which devotes its fiction to this anatomy of psychology. The “strong-minded” "Jane Eyre” has been properly pronounced the most notable example of this school. "And if no question he raised of the morale, and if an undue reliance on self, unamiable, if not positively irreligious, in such a degree, can be excused, if allowance be made for a worse than unfeminine coarseness[2] of diction and even of sentiment, "Jane Eyre" with its more pleasing though less clever sister, stands at the head of this category, for their searching revelations of nature and deep vein of poetry.”[3] A prejudice is apt to rise against the chef of any literary section, from the tiresome and exhaustless swarms of imitators who deluge the market with their Brummagem ware, and cause a reaction against the entire system. Just now our ears are dinned with peals meant to ring with the true Bell-metal; but it shall not make us careless of again hearing the silver, clear, church-tower chimes, whensoever they again summon us to devotion on ground where we have met already a Jane Eyre and a Caroline Helstone, and where wo hope to see fresh faces, and to read new names in its book of life. We believe not what some allege, that these chimes have rung out all their changes. We shall yet hear them, we trust, on a new theme, and, as at the first, discoursing most eloquent music. Currer Bell is wise to restrain her hand for a season; but when once she has gathered enough from "fresh woods and pastures new," let her empty her bosom of its treasures, and confirm her part in the description—"Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh."
- ↑ "Whenever the narrative is rapid, which so much delights superficial readers, the characters cannot be very minutely featured." Disraeli, "Curiosities of Literature."
- ↑ Ellis Bell, in "Wuthering Heights," seems to revel in a gratuitous use of black-guardism in phraseology; Acton Bell affects it far too freely in "Agnes Grey" and the "Tenant of Wildfell Hall;" and Currer Bell is open to the same charge in a mitigated form. It is a compliment, however, to add, that when slang is introduced in "Jane Eyre" and in "Shirley," it is any but the slang a man would have indited. It is second-hand, and doesn't tell. But we would fain see the author's delete as a marginal reading to her bravura in this style.
- ↑ North British Review, August, 1851.
kind, he is forced to make some distinction, and either to invest his personage with less obvious and ordinary traits of character, or to place him in a new and less natural light. See Scott's "Life of Smollett."
