The Charlotte Bronte who used the English of a
world long corrupted by "one good custom"--the good custom of Gibbon's
Latinity grown fatally popular--could at any time hold up her head
amongst her reviewers; for her there was no sensitive interior solitude
in that society. She who cowered was the Charlotte who made Rochester
recall "the simple yet sagacious grace" of Jane's first smile; she who
wrote: "I looked at my love; it shivered in my heart like a suffering
child in a cold cradle"; who wrote: "To see what a heavy lid day slowly
lifted, what a wan glance she flung upon the hills, you would have
thought the sun's fire quenched in last night's floods." This new genius
was solitary and afraid, and touched to the quick by the eyes and voice
of judges. In her worse style there was no "quick." Latin-English,
whether scholarly or unscholarly, is the mediate tongue. An unscholarly
Latin-English is proof against the world. The scholarly Latin-English
wherefrom it is disastrously derived is, in its own nobler measure, a
defence against more august assaults than those of criticism. In the
strength of it did Johnson hold parley with his profounder sorrows--hold
parley (by his phrase), make terms (by his definition), give them at last
lodging and entertainment after sentence and treaty.
And the meaner office of protection against reviewers and the world was
doubtless done by the meaner Latinity.
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