"'Never,' said he, as he ground his teeth, 'never was anything so frail, and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand!' And he shook me with the force of his hold. 'I could bend her with my finger and thumb; and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage--with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it--the savage, beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want: not alone your brittle frame. Of yourself, you could come with soft flight and nestle against my heart, if you would; seized against your will you will elude the grasp like an essence--you will vanish ere I inhale your fragrance. Oh, come, Jane, come!'" It is the crucial scene of the book; and with all its power, with all its vehemence and passionate reality it is unconvincing. It stirs you and it leaves you cold. The truth is that in _Jane Eyre_ Charlotte Brontë had not mastered the art of dialogue; and to the very last she was uncertain in her handling of it. In this she is inferior to all the great novelists of her time; inferior to some who were by no means great. She understood more of the spiritual speech of passion than any woman before her, but she ignores its actual expression, its violences, its reticences, its silences. In her great scenes she is inspired one moment, and the next positively handicapped by her passion and her poetry. In the same sentence she rises to the sudden poignant _cri du coeur_, and sinks to the artifice of metaphor. She knew that passion is poetry, and poetry is passion; you might say it was all she knew, or ever cared to know. But her language of passion is too often the language of written rather than of spoken poetry, of poetry that is not poetry at all. It is as if she had never heard the speech of living men and women. There is more actuality in the half-French chatter of Adèle than in any of the high utterances of Jane and Rochester. And yet her sense of the emotion behind the utterance is infallible, so infallible that we accept the utterance. By some miracle, which is her secret, the passion gets through. The illusion of reality is so strong that it covers its own lapses. _Jane Eyre_ exists to prove that truth is higher than actuality. "'Jane suits me: do I suit her?' "'To the finest fibre of my nature, sir.'"