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CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE

The controversy here is with those who admire Charlotte Bronte throughout
her career. She altered greatly. She did, in fact, inherit a manner of
English that had been strained beyond restoration, fatigued beyond
recovery, by the "corrupt following" of Gibbon; and there was within her
a sense of propriety that caused her to conform. Straitened and serious
elder daughter of her time, she kept the house of literature. She
practised those verbs, to evince, to reside, to intimate, to peruse. She
wrote "communicating instruction" for teaching; "an extensive and
eligible connexion"; "a small competency"; "an establishment on the
Continent"; "It operated as a barrier to further intercourse"; and of a
child (with a singular unfitness with childhood) "For the toys he
possesses he seems to have contracted a partiality amounting to
affection." I have been already reproached for a word on Gibbon written
by way of parenthesis in the course of an appreciation of some other
author. Let me, therefore, repeat that I am writing of the corrupt
following of that apostle and not of his own style. Gibbon's grammar is
frequently weak, but the corrupt followers have something worse than poor
grammar. Gibbon set the fashion of "the latter" and "the former." Our
literature was for at least half a century strewn with the wreckage of
Gibbon. "After suppressing a competitor who had assumed the purple at
Mentz, he refused to gratify his troops with the plunder of the
rebellious city," writes the great historian. When Mr. Micawber
confesses "gratifying emotions of no common description" he conforms to a
lofty and a distant Gibbon. So does Mr. Pecksniff when he says of the
copper-founder's daughter that she "has shed a vision on my path
refulgent in its nature." And when an author, in a work on "The Divine
Comedy," recently told us that Paolo and Francesca were to receive from
Dante "such alleviation as circumstances would allow," that also is a
shattered, a waste Gibbon, a waif of Gibbon. For Johnson less than
Gibbon inflated the English our fathers inherited; because Johnson did
not habitually or often use imagery, whereas Gibbon did use habitual
imagery, and such use is what deprives a language of elasticity, and
leaves it either rigid or languid, oftener languid. Encumbered by this
drift and refuse of English, Charlotte Bronte yet achieved the miracle of
her vocabulary. It is less wonderful t