Harriet Martineau, albeit
a woman of masculine understanding (we may imagine we hear her
contemporaries give her the title), could not thread her way safely in
and out of two or three negatives, but wrote--about this very Charlotte
Bronte: "I did not consider the book a coarse one, though I could not
answer for it that there were no traits which, on a second leisurely
reading, I might not dislike." Mrs. Gaskell quotes the passage with no
consciousness of anything amiss.
As for Lewes's vanished lesson upon the methods of Jane Austen, it served
one only sufficient purpose. Itself is not quoted by anyone alive, but
Charlotte Bronte's rejoinder adds one to our little treasury of her
incomparable pages. If they were twenty, they are twenty-one by the
addition of this, written in a long-neglected letter and saved for us by
Mr. Shorter's research, for I believe his is the only record: "What sees
keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what
throbs fast and full, though hidden, what blood rushes through, what is
the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death--that Miss
Austen ignores."
When the author of _Jane Eyre_ faltered before six authors, more or
less, at dinner in London, was it the writer of her second-class English
who was shy? or was it the author of the passages here to follow?--and
therefore one for whom the national tongue was much the better? There
can be little doubt.
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