The clear
charm of her unequalled style--a style quite classical in its economy
of material and its dignified reserve--is a charm frequently caught in
the wit and fine malice of one's unmarried aunts; but it is, none the
less, the very epitome of maternal humor. As a creative realist,
giving to her characters the very body and pressure of actual life, no
writer, living or dead, has surpassed her. Without romance, without
philosophy, without social theories, without pathological curiosity,
without the remotest interest in "Nature," she has yet managed to
achieve a triumphant artistic success; and to leave an impression of
serene wisdom such as no other woman writer has equaled or approached.
62. EMILY BRONTE. WUETHERING HEIGHTS.
Of all the books of all the Brontes, this one is the supreme
masterpiece. Charlotte has genius and imagination. She has passion
too. But there is a certain demonic violence about Emily which carries
her work into a region of high and desperate beauty forbidden to the
gentler spirit of her sister. The love of Heathcliff and Catherine
breaks the bonds of ordinary sensual or sentimental relationship and
hurls itself into that darker, stranger, more unearthly air, wherein
one hears the voices of the great lovers; and where Sappho and
Michaelangelo and Swift and Shelley and Nietzsche gasp forth their
imprecations and their terrible ecstasies.
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