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 that she should have appeared out
of such a parsonage than that she should have arisen out of such a
language.
A re-reading of her works is always a new amazing of her reader who turns
back to review the harvest of her English. It must have been with
rapture that she claimed her own simplicity. And with what a moderation,
how temperately, and how seldom she used her mastery! To the last she
has an occasional attachment to her bonds; for she was not only fire and
air.
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