The whole incident is conceived with the most perfect reality; the plot is original, startling, and yet not wholly extravagant.  But it must be confessed that the plot is not worked out in details in a faultless way.  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 image into that of a sort of diabolic angel, is natural enough, and her conduct when she leaves Moor House is right and true, though we cannot say as much for Rivers’ words.  But the impression of the whole scene is right.