peruse", "indite", "retain", with
Emily is a mere slip of the pen. There are only, I think, three of such
slips in _Wuthering Heights_. Charlotte was capable of mixing her worst
things with her best. She mixed them most in her dialogue, where sins of
style are sinfullest. It is not always possible to give a scene, word
for word, from Charlotte's novels; the dramatic illusion, the illusion
of reality, is best preserved by formidable cutting.

But not only was Emily's style sinless; it is on the whole purest, most
natural, and most inevitable in her dialogue; and that, although the
passions she conceived were so tremendous, so unearthly, that she might
have been pardoned if she found no human speech to render them.

What is more, her dramatic instinct never fails her as it fails
Charlotte over and over again. Charlotte had not always the mastery and
self-mastery that, having worked a situation up to its dramatic climax,
leaves it there. A certain obscure feeling for rightness guides her in
the large, striding movement of the drama; it is in the handling of the
scenes that she collapses. She wanders from climax to climax; she goes
back on her own trail; she ruins her best effects by repetition. She has
no continuous dramatic instinct; no sense whatever of dramatic form.

These are present somehow in _Wuthering Heights_, in spite of its
monstrous formlessness. Emily may have had no more sense of form for
form's sake than Charlotte; she may have had no more dramatic instinct;
but she had an instinct for the ways of human passion. She knew that
passion runs its course, from its excitement to its climax and
exhaustion. It has a natural beginning and a natural end. And so her
scenes of passion follow nature. She never goes back on her effect,
never urges passion past its climax, or stirs it in its exhaustion. In
this she is a greater "realist" than Charlotte.

* * * * *

It is incredible that _Wuthering Heights_, or any line of it, any line
that Emily Bronte ever wrote, should have passed for Charlotte's. She
did things that Charlotte could never have done if she tried a thousand
years, things not only incomparably greater, but unique.

Yet in her lifetime she was unrecognized. What is true of her prose is
true also of her poems. They, indeed, did bring her a little praise,
obscure and momentary. No less she was unrecognized to such an extent
that _Wuthering Heights_ was said and believed to