The style of Currer Bell is one which will reward study for its own sake. Its tone may be somewhat too uniform, its balance and cadence too unvaried. Perhaps, also, there is too much of the abruptness of passion. It is certainly inferior to many styles, so far as the crimson and gold of literature are concerned. But there is no writer with whom we are acquainted, more deserving of praise for clearness, pointedness, and force. Would that any word of ours could recall the numerous admirers of morbid magnificence and barbarous dissonance, affected jargon and fantastic verbiage, laboured antithesis and false brilliance, and induce them to read night and day the novels of Currer Bell, for the sake of their style. In “Jane Eyre,” her most powerful work, published in October, 1847, it must be admitted that female delicacy is somewhat outraged; but its specimens of picturesque, resolute, straightforward writing, enable this tale to take a high place in the field of romantic literature.
Currer Bell’s love of nature was remarkable. A Yorkshire moor is for the most part wild and grotesque, but her eye brims with a “purple light,” intense enough to perpetuate the brief flower-flush of August on the heather, or the rare sunset smile of June. We might quote in illustration of these remarks, pictures of nature, so detailed, definite, and fresh, that they give us an assurance as of eyesight. Take the following bit of woodland painting from “Shirley,” published in October, 1849: “I know all the pleasantest spots: I know where we could get nuts in nutting time; I know where wild strawberries abound; I know certain lonely, quite untrodden glades, carpeted with strange mosses, some yellow as if gilded, some sober grey, some gem green. I know groups of trees that ravish the eye with their perfect picture-like effects: rude oak, delicate birch, glossy beech, clustered in contrast; and ash trees stately as Saul, standing isolated, and superannuated wood giants clad in bright shrouds of ivy.” Many similar, and even superior passages might be cited from this brilliant novel.
Works of fiction belong to the province of imagination; and this faculty was largely developed in Currer Bell, and has spread the unmistakable splendour of its embellishment over her pages. There are passages in her works, not only distinct from their general texture, but from anything we know in English literature. The personification of nature in “Shirley” is perhaps the finest. “I saw—I now see—a woman Titan; her robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing, a veil, white as an avalanche, sweeps from her head to her feet, and arabesques of lightning flame on its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple like the horizon; through its blush shines the star of evening. The steady eyes I cannot picture. They are clear, they are deep as lakes, they are lifted and full of worship, they tremble with the softness of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the expanse of a cloud, and is paler than the early moon, risen long before dark gathers; she reclines her bosom on the ridge of Stillbro’ Moor, her mighty hands are joined beneath it, so kneeling, face to face she speaks with God.” Apostrophic bursts are common enough in all our more imaginative prose writers; but the chiselling of the entire figure from the flameless marble, and the leaving it for ever in the loveliness of its beauty, is peculiar to the prose of Currer Bell.