come back.”  That is a noble touch.  It may be true that Paul Emmanuel and Robert Moore cling too closely to the idea of rewarding their humble mistresses, after testing them harshly and even brutally, with the gift of their love—­though even this humility has a touching quality of beauty; but the supreme lover, Mr. Rochester, who, in spite of his ridiculous affectations, his grotesque hauteurs, his impossible theatricality, is a figure of flesh and blood, is absorbed in his passion in a way that shows the fire leaping on the innermost altar.  The irresistible appeal of the book to the heart is due to the fact that Jane Eyre never seems conscious of what she is giving, but only of what she is receiving; and it is this that makes her gift so regal, so splendid a thing.

Side by side with this book I would set a recent work, Miss Cholmondeley’s Prisoners.  Fine and noble as the book is in many ways, it is yet vitiated by the sense of the value of the gift of love from the woman’s point of view.  Love is there depicted as the one redeeming and transforming power in the world.  But in order to prove the thesis, the two chief characters among the men of the book, Wentworth and Lord Lossiemouth, are not, like Mr. Rochester, strong men disfigured by violent faults, but essentially worthless persons, one the slave of an oldmaidish egotism and the other of a frank animalism.  The result in both cases is an experimentum in corpore vili.  The authoress, instead of presiding over her creations like a little Deity, is a strong partisan; and the purpose seems to be to bring out more clearly the priceless nature of the gift which comes near their hand.  No one would dispute the position that love is a purifying and transforming power; but love, conscious of its worth, loses the humility and the unselfishness in which half its power lies.  Even Magdalen, the finest character in the book, is not free from a quality of condescension.  In the great love-scene where she accepts Lord Lossiemouth, she comforts him by saying, “You have not only come back to me.  You have come back to yourself.”  That is a false touch, because it has a flavour of superiority about it.  It reminds one of the lover in The Princess lecturing the hapless Ida from his bed-pulpit, and saying, “Blame not thyself too much,” and “Dearer thou for faults lived over.”  One cannot imagine Jane Eyre saying to Mr. Rochester that he had come back to himself through loving her.  It just detracts at the supreme moment from the generosity of the scene; it has the accent of the priestess, not of the true lover; and thus at the moment when one longs to be in the very white-heat of emotion, one is subtly aware of an improving hand that casts water upon the flame.

The love that lives in art is the love of Penelope and Antigone, of Cordelia and Desdemona and Imogen, of Enid, of Mrs. Browning, among women; and among men, the love of Dante, of Keats, of the lover of Maud, of Pere Goriot, of Robert Browning.