_Wuthering Heights_ might have been written by an eagle. She is
the strongest instance of these strong imaginations that made the other
sex a monster: for Heathcliffe fails as a man as catastrophically as he
succeeds as a demon. I think Emily Bronte was further narrowed by the
broadness of her religious views; but never, of course, so much as
George Eliot.
In any case, it is Charlotte Bronte who enters Victorian literature. The
shortest way of stating her strong contribution is, I think, this: that
she reached the highest romance through the lowest realism. She did not
set out with Amadis of Gaul in a forest or with Mr. Pickwick in a comic
club. She set out with herself, with her own dingy clothes, and
accidental ugliness, and flat, coarse, provincial household; and
forcibly fused all such muddy materials into a spirited fairy-tale. If
the first chapters on the home and school had not proved how heavy and
hateful _sanity_ can be, there would really be less point in the
insanity of Mr. Rochester's wife--or the not much milder insanity of
Mrs. Rochester's husband. She discovered the secret of hiding the
sensational in the commonplace: and _Jane Eyre_ remains the best of her
books (better even than _Villette_) because while it is a human document
written in blood, it is also one of the best blood-and-thunder detective
stories in the world.
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