The weekly herald. [volume] (Cleveland, Tenn.) 1876-1888, 1877-07-19
Literary Reserve. The Brontes.


The highest power Of reserve which
was ever concentrated In any human
life whose outlines were well known
TO us, was that under the steady stress
of which Emily Bronte's short career
was passed. She, like her sisters,
lived with father Of whom they were
afraid, amid wild and gloomy mOors,
where they had no companions but
themselves, yet, unlike her sisters, she
could hardly tell even to them the i'm
aginatiOns of her own heart. We are
told how hopeless her efforts proved to
enter into anything like the ordinary
intercourse with her fellow creatures
how again and again she returned
home after efforts to gain her own
bread, which failed solely from her
complete failure to open easy relations
with her kind-hOw in her last illness
she would not admit even to her sisters
her illness till within two hours of her
death, but then whispered family, "If
you will send for a doctor | will see
him now," when she was almost in the
agonies of death. In Emily BrOnte the
restraining power Of reserve assuredly
amounted to something very near men
tai disease. Yet what a wonderful
force it gave to her genius Highly as
Mr.. Reid, her late biographer, appreci-
ates "Wuthering Heights" he almost
makes one laugh at him, as if he were
thoroughly unable to appreciate 1t,
when he compares it even for a moment
with such trash as Lord Lytton's
"Strange Story" The passages be
quoted, for instance, from "Wuthering
Heights" as to the way in which
GATHERINGS image haunted Heathcliff
after her death, is, when compared
with anything Lord Lytton ever
achieved, like stroke of lightning to
the glimmer of a rushlight. There is
more concentrated power in that weird,
wild tale, not merely than in all the
pinchbeck novels Lord Lytton ever
wrote (Which is saying nothing), but
than in any single story ever known to
US in the English language. The capa-
city for expressing imaginative inten-
sity surpasses TO our mind any achiev-
ments in the same space in the whole of
our prose literature. We should rank
"Wuthering Helghts"-eccentriC and
lurld as it is--as an effort Of genius far
above not only "Yillette," which seems
to us Charlotte BrOnte's greatest effort,
but "The Bride of LammeTmOOr,"
which is the nearest thing to it in Sir
Walter Scott's imaginative writings. In
"Wuthering Heights" the concen.
trated power of great imagination
gave one brilliant flash and disappeared.
No doubt the repressive force of Emily
Bronte's reserve was something like
disease, but II had the effect of storing
power as nothing else in
the world could have stored it, and no
one who reads all that is told of her
could suppose for moment that had
her reserve been less than it was, we
should ever have had that one great !
flash of genius. Doubtless she would
have been broader, happier, in many
respects truer woman than she was,
if she had had more communication |
with her kind, but her genius would |
hardly have affected any one thing so |
great; she might have been far wider;
she could not have been so intense; she |
would never have gazed so deeply into |
those evil eyes of Heathcliff's-eyesI |
seen only in her reveries and never in
real life-which she so finely describes
as "the cloudy windows of hell, )" if she
had not stored up all the elastic force
of her reverie into that one single Great
i've effort. And so with Charlotte
Bronte's genius; 1t tcertainlY reached its
acme when her life was at its loneliest,
when she was robbed Of the sympathy
of both of her sisters. "Villette" is al
most as much greater than "Shirley"
or "Jane Eyre" as "The Bride of Lam
written in pain and under
stress of Illness, was greater than
'IvanhOe" or "Kenilworth. ."-Spectd-
tor.