will be but slenderly portioned. Lady Kew said she would help them if I came to her-it is the welfare of those little people that depends upon me, Clive. Now do you see, brother, why you must speak to me so no more? There is the carriage. God bless you, dear Clive.'

"(Clive sees the carriage drive away after Miss Newcome has entered it without once looking up to the window where he stands. When it is gone he goes to the opposite windows of the salon, which are open, towards the garden. The chapel music begins to play from the convent, next door. As he hears it he sinks down, his head in his hands.)

"Enter Madame de Florac. (She goes to him with anxious looks.) 'What hast thou, my child? Hast. thou spoken?'

"Clive (very steadily). 'Yes.'

"Madame de F. 'And she loves thee? I know she loves thee.'

"Clive. 'You hear the organ of the convent?' "Madame de F. 'Qu'as tu?'

"Clive. 'I might as well hope to marry one of the sisters of yonder convent, dear lady.' (He sinks down. again and she kisses him.)

"Clive. 'I never had a mother, but you seem like one.'

"Madame de F. 'Mon fils! Oh, mon fils!'"

This is not melodrama; but it is the highest mood of the theatre, a supreme moment of genteel comedy that sends the play-goers home fancying they have been profoundly stirred. For the rest, does not Ethel talk a little too like an amateur of eighteenth-century English, who has been doing French exercises? Yet she is a genuine girl of the late forenoon or early afternoon of our century; a living personality; a true character, and a noble spirit in spite of her world. If you

compare her with some of the bad characters of the book you may say she is not so good as Mrs. Mackenzie, the mother-in-law of Clive; but then there are very, very few women in fiction as good as that horrible shrew, who afflicts the reader with the same quality of pain that Clive and his father suffer from her. She is wonderfully done; she surpasses in her narrower sphere even Becky Sharp, and no goodness can, æsthetically, hold a candle to her badness. But I incline to think that the goodness of Ethel is artistically better than the badness of Lady Kew; and Ethel's own touches of badness are extremely good. I am not sure that she is as perfectly done as poor, slight, sick Rosa, Clive's wife, but she was much harder to do.

III

The heroines of the mid-century English novelists can hardly be considered in a distinct chronological order. The greatest of these novelists were contemporaries and were synchronously writing the books by which they were best known. Bulwer was still thought a prime talent and was producing his most pretentious fiction when Dickens was of world-wide fame, and Thackeray, always of less popularity than Dickens, had taken a higher place. By this time Kingsley had written "Alton Locke" and was soon to write "Hypatia." George Eliot was beginning to make her way towards the primacy which she finally achieved; Charles Reade was corruscating with all the rockets and pin-wheels and Roman candles of his pseudo-realism; Trollope, a truer artist than any of them, was making himself known by the novels which, until we had Mr. Thomas Hardy's and Mr. George Moore's, reflected English life with a fidelity unapproached since that of Jane

Austen's books. Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Oliphant, and others were coming forward in the second order of talents; the weird genius who gave us "Paul Ferroll" had already made her vivid impression; from her isolation in the alien keeping of Bavaria, Baroness Tautphoeus had sent out that great and beautiful story, "The Initials," a product as purely English as if not "made in Germany." In the retrospect these writers seem simultaneous as well as contemporaneous, and one can as well be taken up first as another; but perhaps it will be generally allowed that the Brontë sisters, especially Charlotte and Emily, have a peculiar right to early mention because of the fresh and emphatic character of their contribution to fiction, and I feel it peculiarly fit to speak of Charlotte Brontë after Thackeray because of the malignant error which connected her first novel with his name as a supposed "satire" of the man whom she idolized as a novelist, and because of the noble-minded kindness with which he received the shy girl after she had hurried to London to own "Jane Eyre" to her publisher, and to deny the monstrous imputation. There is somewhere a story of Thackeray sitting by while Charlotte Brontë read with silent tears a cruel review of her book, and ignoring her anguish with silent compassion, which is enough to make one sorry for not finding his fiction always as great as his nature. It makes me feel it in a sort my misfortune that I cannot now give my whole heart and soul in admiration of his work as I used in my younger days; it makes me almost regret the more perfect models of art which I have since known in Jane Austen, in Hawthorne, in George Eliot, in Anthony Trollope, in Thomas Hardy, in George Moore, in Zola and Maupassant and Flaubert, in Tourguénief and Tolstoy, in Galdós and Valdés. How shall I venture to say, then, that no heroine of Thackeray's except Becky Sharp

seems to me quite so alive as the Jane Eyre of Charlotte Brontë, whom I do not class with him intellectually, any more than I class her artistically with the great. novelists I have mentioned? She was the first English novelist to present the impassioned heroine; impassioned not in man's sense, but woman's sense, in which love purifies itself of sensuousness without losing fervor.

IV

From the beginning to the ending of her story, Jane Eyre moves a living and consistent soul; from the child we know grow the girl and woman we know, vivid, energic, passionate, as well as good, conscientious, devoted. It was a figure which might have well astonished and alarmed the little fastidious world of fifty years ago, far more smug and complacent than the larger world of to-day, and far more intolerant of any question of religious or social convention; and it is no wonder that the young author should have been attainted of immorality and infidelity, not to name that blacker crime, impropriety. In fact, it must be allowed that "Jane Eyre" does go rather far in a region where women's imaginations are politely supposed not to wander; and the frank recognition of the rights of love as love, and its claims in Rochester as paramount to those of righteous self-will in St. John, is still a little startling. It is never pretended that Rochester is a good man, or that he is in any accepted sense worthy of the girl who listens so fearlessly to his account of the dubious life he has led. The most that can be said for him is that he truly values and loves her, and this is his best, his sole defence in his attempt to marry her while he still has a wife living under his own roof, a hopeless and horrible maniac. When the attempt is