Nor, alas! can we deny that there are ugly bits of real coarseness in _Jane Eyre_. It is true that most of them are the effects of that portentous ignorance of the world and of civilised society which the solitary dreamer of Haworth Parsonage had no means of removing. The fine ladies, the lords and soldiers in the drawing-room at Thornfield are described with inimitable life, but they are described as they appeared to the lady's-maids, not to each other or to the world. Charlotte Bronte perhaps did not know that an elegant girl of rank does not in a friend's house address her host's footman before his guests in these words--"Cease that chatter, blockhead! and do my bidding." Nor does a gentleman speak to his governess of the same lady whom he is thought to be about to marry in these terms--"She is a rare one, is she not, Jane? A strapper--a real strapper, Jane: big, brown, and buxom." But all these things are rather the result of pure ignorance. Charlotte Bronte, when she wrote her first book, had hardly ever seen any Englishmen but a few curates, the villagers, and her degraded brother, with rare glimpses of lower middle-class homes. But Jane Eyre's own doings and sayings are hardly the effect of mere ignorance. Her nocturnal adventures with her "master" are given with delightful _naivete_; her consenting to hear out her "master's" story of his foreign amours is not pleasant. Her two avowals to Edward Rochester--one before he had declared his love for her, and the other on her return to him--are certainly somewhat frank. Jane Eyre in truth does all but propose marriage twice to Edward Rochester; and she is the first to avow her love, even when she believed he was about to marry another woman. It is indeed wrung from her; it is human nature; it is a splendid encounter of passion; and if it be bold in the little woman, it is redeemed by her noble defiance of his tainted suit, and her desperate flight from her married lover. But Jane Eyre's ignorances and simplicities, the improbabilities of her men, the violence of the plot, the weird romance about her own life, are all made acceptable to us by being shown to us only through the secret visions of a passionate and romantic girl. As the autobiography of a brave and original woman, who bares to us her whole heart without reserve and without fear, _Jane Eyre_ stands forth as a great book of the nineteenth century. It stands just in the middle of the century, when men were still under the spell of Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and yet it is not wholly alien to the methods of our latest realists.