It is true (though the idea should not be exaggerated) that this
deficiency was largely due to her being cut off from all those
conceptions that had made the fiction of a Muse; the deep idea that
there are really demons and angels behind men. Certainly the increasing
atheism of her school spoilt her own particular imaginative talent: she
was far less free when she thought like Ladislaw than when she thought
like Casaubon. It also betrayed her on a matter specially requiring
common sense; I mean sex. There is nothing that is so profoundly false
as rationalist flirtation. Each sex is trying to be both sexes at once;
and the result is a confusion more untruthful than any conventions. This
can easily be seen by comparing her with a greater woman who died before
the beginning of our present problem. Jane Austen was born before those
bonds which (we are told) protected woman from truth, were burst by the
Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that
Jane Austen knew much more about men than either of them. Jane Austen
may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth
that was protected from her. When Darcy, in finally confessing his
faults, says, "I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice
_though not in theory_," he gets nearer to a complete confession of the
intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the
Brontës' heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot's. Jane
Austen, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of her
later rivals; but I have always believed in the victory of small
nationalities.

The Brontës suggest themselves here; because their superficial
qualities, the qualities that can be seized upon in satire, were in this
an exaggeration of what was, in George Eliot, hardly more than an
omission. There was perhaps a time when Mr. Rawjester was more widely
known than Mr. Rochester. And certainly Mr. Rochester (to adopt the