y. It is undoubtedly in
substance "sensational," and has been called the parent of modern
sensationalism. Edward Rochester acts as a Rochester might; but he too
often talks like the "wicked baronet" of low melodrama. The execution
is not always quite equal to the conception. The affiance of Jane and
Edward Rochester, their attempted marriage, the wild temptation of
Jane, her fierce rebuff of the tempter, his despair and remorse, her
agony and flight--all are consummate in conception, marred here and
there as they are in details by the blue fire and conventional
imprecations of the stage.

The concluding chapters of the book, when Jane finally rejects St. John
Rivers and goes back to Thornfield and to her "master," are all indeed
excellent. St. John is not successful as a character; but he serves to
produce the crisis and to be foil to Rochester. St. John, it is true,
is not a real being: like Rochester, he is a type of man as he affects
the brain and heart of a highly sensitive and imaginative girl.
Objectively speaking, as men living and acting in a practical world,
St. John and Rochester are both in some degree caricatures of men; and,
if the narrative were a cold story calmly composed by a certain Miss
Bronte to amuse us, we could not avoid the sense of unreality in the
men. But the intensity of the vision, the realism of every scene, the
fierce yet self-governed passion of Jane herself, pouring out, as in a
secret diary, her agonies of love, of scorn, of pride, of
abandonment,--all this produces an illusion on us: we are no longer
reading a novel of society, but we are admitted to the wild musings of
a girl's soul; and, though she makes out her first lover to be a
generous brute and her second lover to be a devout machine, we feel it
quite natural that Jane, with her pride and her heart of fire and her
romantic brain, should so in her diary describe them.

St. John Rivers, if we take him coolly outside of Jane's portrait
gallery, is little more than a puppet. We never seem to get nearer to
his own mind and heart, and his conduct and language are hardly
compatible with the noble attributes with which he is said to be
adorned. A man of such refined culture, of such high intelligence, of
such social distinction and experience, of such angelic character, does
not treat women with studied insolence and diabolical cynicism. That a
girl, half maddened by disappointed love, should romantically come to
erect his