her mode of approaching her subject, even in the turn of the sentences, especially in the use of participles, which is French rather than English. All the books testify to her pride in her French culture. She had won it at great cost ; it had opened fresh worlds to her, and she makes free use of it in numerous scenes of ' Shirley ' and ' Villette,' and in the whole portraiture of the Moores.
The differences, of course, between her and the author of 'Jacques' are great and fundamental. Charlotte Bronte's main stuff "is English, Protestant, law-respecting, conventional even. No judgment was ever more foolish than that which detected a social rebel in the writer of ' Jane Eyre.' She thought the French books, as we have seen, ' clever, wicked, sophistical, and immoral.' But she read them ; and for all her revolt from them, they quickened and fertilised her genius. More than this. The influence which she absorbed from them has given her a special place in our literature of imagination. She stands between Jane Austen, the gentle and witty successor of Miss Burney and Richardson, and George Eliot, upon whom played influences of quite another kind German, critical, scientific representing the world which succeeded the world of ' Hernani.' Midway appears the work of Charlotte Bronte, linked in various significant ways with the French romantic movement, which began with ' Atala' in 1801, and had run its course abroad before 1847, the year of 'Jane Eyre.' One may almost say of it, indeed, that it belongs more to the European than to the special Eng- lish tradition. For all its strongly marked national and pro- vincial elements, it was very early understood and praised in France ; and it was of a French critic, and a French critic only, that Charlotte Bronte said with gratitude, in the case of Shirley, ' he follows Currer Bell through every winding, dis- cerns every point, discriminates every shade, proves himself master of the subject, and lord of the aim.'
- MARY A. WARD.
