scene within vivid scene,
dialogue within dialogue, and tale within tale, four deep. Sometimes you
are carried back in a time and sometimes forward. You have to think hard
before you know for certain whose wife Catherine Heathcliff really is.
You cannot get over Lockwood's original mistake. And this poor device of
narrative at second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand, is used to convey
things incredible, inconceivable; all the secret, invisible drama of the
souls of Catherine and Heathcliff, as well as whole acts of the most
visible, the most tangible, the most direct and vivid and tumultuous
drama; drama so tumultuous, so vivid, and so direct, that by no
possibility could it have been conveyed by any medium. It simply
happens.

And that is how Emily Bronte's genius triumphs over all her faults. It
is not only that you forgive her faults and forget them, you are not--in
the third reading anyhow--aware of them. They disappear, they are
destroyed, they are burnt up in her flame, and you wonder how you ever
saw them. All her clumsy contrivances cannot stay her course, or obscure
her light, or quench her fire. Things happen before your eyes, and it
does not matter whether Lockwood, or Nelly Dean, or Heathcliff, or
Catherine, tells you of their happening.

And yet, though Lockwood and Nelly Dean are the thinnest, the most
transparent of pure mediums, they preserve their personalities
throughout. Nelly especially. The tale only begins to move when Lockwood
drops out and Nelly takes it up. At that point Emily Bronte's style
becomes assured in its directness and simplicity, and thenceforward it
never falters or changes its essential character.

And it is there, first of all, in that unfaltering, unchanging quality
of style that she stands so far above her sister. She has no purple
patches, no decorative effects. No dubiously shining rhetoric is hers.
She does not deal in metaphors or in those ponderous abstractions, those
dreadful second-hand symbolic figures--Hope, Imagination, Memory, and
the rest of them, that move with every appearance of solidity in
Charlotte's pages. There are no angels in her rainbows. Her "grand
style" goes unclothed, perfect in its naked strength, its naked beauty.
It is not possible to praise Charlotte's style without reservations; it
is not always possible to give passages that illustrate her qualities
without suppressing her defects. What was a pernicious habit with
Charlotte, her use of words like "