But in _Jane Eyre_, she is not only awakened, but awake as she has never been awake before, with all her virgin senses exquisitely alive, every nerve changed to intense vibration. Sometimes she is perniciously awake; she is doing appalling things, things unjustifiable, preposterous; things that would have meant perdition to any other writer; she sees with wild, erroneous eyes; but the point is that she sees, that she keeps moving, that from the first page to the last she is never once asleep. To come to _Jane Eyre_ after _The Professor_ is to pass into another world of feeling and of vision.
It is not the difference between reality and unreality. _The Professor_ is real enough, more real in some minor points--dialogue, for instance--than _Jane Eyre_. The difference is that _The Professor_ is a transcript of reality, a very delicate and faithful transcript, and _Jane Eyre_ is reality itself, pressed on the senses. The pressure is so direct and so tremendous, that it lasts through those moments when the writer's grip has failed.
For there are moments, long moments of perfectly awful failure in _Jane Eyre_. There are phrases that make you writhe, such as "the etymology of the mansion's designation", and the shocking persistency with which Charlotte Brontë "indites", "peruses", and "retains". There are whole scenes that outrage probability. Such are the scenes, or parts of scenes, between Jane and Rochester during the comedy of his courtship. The great orchard scene does not ring entirely true. For pages and pages it falters between passion and melodrama; between rhetoric and the _cri de coeur_. Jane in the very thick of her emotion can say, "I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence, with what I delight in--with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester, and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity for departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death." And the comedy is worse. Jane elaborates too much in those delicious things she says to Rochester. Rochester himself provokes the parodist. (Such manners as Rochester's were unknown in mid-Victorian literature.)