There has been a great deal of discussion about the morality of this part of the novel. The question resolves itself into a question of art, for we hold that truth of representation and morality of effect are identical. Immoral characters may be introduced into a book, and the effect be moral on the reader's mind, but a character which is both immoral and unnatural ever produces a pernicious effect. Now the authoress of Jane Eyre has drawn in Rochester an unnatural character, and she has done it from an ignorance of the inward condition of mind which immorality such as his either springs from or produces. The ruffian, with his fierce appetites and Satanic pride, his mistresses and his perjuries, his hard impudence and insulting sarcasms, she knows only verbally, so to speak. The words which describe such a character she interprets with her fancy, enlightened by a reminiscence of Childe Harold and the Corsair. The result is a compound of vulgar rascalities and impotent Byronics. Every person who interprets her description by a knowledge of what profligacy is, cannot fail to see that she is absurdly connecting certain virtues, of which she knows a good deal, with certain vices, of which she knows nothing. The coarseness of portions of the novel, consisting not so much in the vulgarity of Rochester's conversation as the _naive_ description of some of his acts--his conduct for three weeks before his intended marriage, for instance, is also to be laid partly to the ignorance of the authoress of what ruffianism is, and partly to her ignorance of what love is. No woman who had ever truly loved could have mistaken so completely the Rochester type, or could have made her heroine love a man of proud, selfish, ungovernable appetites, which no sophistry can lift out of lust. We accordingly think that if the innocent young ladies of our land lay a premium on profligacy, by marrying dissolute rakes for the honor of reforming them, _a la_ Jane Eyre, their benevolence will be of questionable utility to the world. There is something romantic to every inexperienced female mind in the idea of pirates and debauchees, who have sentiment as well as slang, miseries as well as vices. Such gentlemen their imaginations are apt to survey under the light of the picturesque instead of under the light of conscience. Every poet and novelist who addresses them on this weak side is sure of getting a favorable hearing. Byron's popularity, as distinguished from his fame, was mainly owing to the felicity with which he supplied the current demand for romantic wickedness. The authoress of Jane Eyre is not a Byron, but a talented woman, who, in her own sphere of thought and observation, is eminently trustworthy and true, but out of it hardly rises above the conceptions of a boarding-school Miss in her teens. She appears to us a kind of strong-minded old maid, but with her strong-mindedness greatly modified by the presumption as well as the sentimentality of romantic humbug.