And it is there, first of all, in that unfaltering, unchanging quality of style that she stands so far above her sister. She has no purple patches, no decorative effects. No dubiously shining rhetoric is hers. She does not deal in metaphors or in those ponderous abstractions, those dreadful second-hand symbolic figures--Hope, Imagination, Memory, and the rest of them, that move with every appearance of solidity in Charlotte's pages. There are no angels in her rainbows. Her "grand style" goes unclothed, perfect in its naked strength, its naked beauty. It is not possible to praise Charlotte's style without reservations; it is not always possible to give passages that illustrate her qualities without suppressing her defects. What was a pernicious habit with Charlotte, her use of words like "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 Brontë 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.