world awoke almost for the first time to the conception of literary freedom and to the full power of human thought and language. The revival of learning was a period of similar awakening after a long pressure of the yoke of ecclesiastical restraint. The glory of the Elizabethan literature was the fruit of the long brooding life of the Middle Ages. And the great literary era to which Mr. Gladstone referred was chiefly due to that sudden break up of the conventionalisms of the eighteenth century caused by the French Revolutions; for the long reign of a literary oligarchy or aristocracy, and the habit which such an aristocracy forms of constraining into fixed channels the life and taste of the rising generations, are at least as effective for a considerable period in restricting and, as it were, banking up many kinds and moods of feeling, as that direct discouragement of all literary expression which precedes the first burst of a new literature. But in our own day the enormous facilities for expressing everything that is felt, and for fostering much that is not really felt, but only fancied as possible to be felt, useful as they are for spreading equally among all classes the culture hitherto attained, are positive premiums on literary diffuseness, feebleness, and attenuation. Just as a perfect system of drainage, if completed without proper arrangements for storing rain, carries back far too soon all the water - supply through millions of rivulets to the great streams, and through the great streams to the ocean, so a perfect organisation of facilities for expression carries off far too soon everything in the shape of literary feeling and thought into the public mind, without giving it time to grow to what is great

and forcible. And this tendency to multiply the runlets, the dwindling runlets of literary power, instead of multiplying those great reservoirs of the imagination by which alone the highest life can be fed, is increased to a very great extent by the gradual relaxation of that stern discipline of childhood and youth which marked almost all the ages up to our own. I am far from pleading for that stern discipline, for it is certain that many good effects of this relaxation-perhaps better in their total result than this one evil effect-could

be adduced. The young people who are thus relieved from the high pressure of the discipline imposed on former generations certainly grow up in many respects more amiable and more reasonable, less moody, less self-willed, less passionate than their fathers. But they too often grow up less strenuous also, and with much less stored power. It is the damming up of driblets of feeling and thought which really creates great supplies of such feeling and thought. It is the resistance to cherished purposes which accumulates these purposes into something capable of striking the eye and the imagination. As Dr. Newman long ago said:

Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control,
That o'er thee swell and throng,
They will condense within thy soul,

And swell to purpose strong.

But he who lets his feelings run

In soft luxurious flow,

Shrinks when hard service must be done,

And faints at every woe.

And what is true of moral purpose is equally true of literary impressions. It is the age of reserve

which prepares the way for the age of literary splendour; it is the youth of brooding thoughts and emotions which prepares the way for the manhood of great genius. And unquestionably the lighter pressure under which children are now placed during the time of discipline, the larger amount of sympathy which they now attract,—that cultus of children which makes the loneliness of children and of childhood and youth so comparatively rare, while they produce a great number of good effects, do also produce this bad effect,-that there is far less opportunity than there was for the silent maturing of strong purposes and deep feelings.

It is curious to note in the lives of Miss Martineau and Miss Brontë how the very conditions which seem to have produced the peculiar strength they had, are just those which it is the tendency of the feelings excited by their writings to render rarer and feebler for the future. Miss Martineau complains of the want of sympathy for children manifested in her home in her youth, and the terrible aggravation of those evils caused later by the unwise mode in which her deafness was treated, so as to isolate her even more completely from her fellow-creatures than she would otherwise have been isolated. Yet I strongly believe that these were just the conditions which enabled powers of not very much more than ordinary calibre to produce really good results of their kind. doubt she "kept silence, yea, even from good words," and "it was pain and grief" to her; but it was during this enforced silence that the "fire kindled," and when at last she spoke with her tongue, she spoke with the accumulated force of years of brooding, and if my judgment is worth

No

C

anything, it was much more this, than the natural power and breadth of her imagination and understanding which made her what she undoubtedly was a very remarkable woman of her kind, who, with less repression in childhood and less deprivation in youth, might have been but a clever woman and nothing more. Yet the remarkable effect produced by repression, reticence, and reserve, in accumulating power is still more curiously illustrated in the lives of the Brontës, especially Emily and Charlotte. Of course, reserve and slow accumulation will do little for powers which are from the beginning commonplace, as was apparently the case with Anne Brontë. But how much they will do for women of real genius who are yet not women of such great breadth and luxuriance of imagination that, spread themselves as they may, their imagination would still work vividly, the very interesting story which Mr. Reid has told us of the Brontës, by way of supplement to Mrs. Gaskell's biography of Charlotte, shows with very great force. The highest power of reserve which was probably ever concentrated in any human life whose outlines are well known to us, was that under the steady stress of which Emily Brontë's short career was passed. She, like her sisters, lived with a father of whom they were afraid, amidst wild and gloomy moors, where they had no companions but themselves, yet, unlike her sisters, she could hardly tell even to them the imaginations of her own heart. We are told by Mr. Reid how hopeless her efforts proved to enter into anything like the ordinary intercourse with her fellowcreatures, how again and again she returned home after efforts to gain her own bread, which failed solely from her complete failure to open easy re

lations with her kind,—how in her last illness she would not admit, even to her sisters, her illness till within two hours of her death, but then whispered faintly, "If you send for a doctor, I will see him. now," when she was almost in the agonies of death. In Emily Brontë the restraining power of reserve assuredly amounted to something very near mental disease. Yet what a wonderful force it gave to her genius! Highly as Mr. Reid appreciates Wuthering Heights, he almost makes one laugh at him as if he were thoroughly unable to appreciate it, when he compares it, even for a moment, with such trash as Lord Lytton's Strange Story. The passage he quotes, for instance, from Wuthering Heights as to the way in which Catherine's image haunted Heathcliff after her death, is, when compared with anything Lord Lytton ever achieved, like a stroke of lightning to the glimmer of a rushlight. There is more concentrated fire and power in that weird, wild tale, not merely than in all the pinchbeck novels Lord Lytton ever wrote (which is saying nothing), but than in any single story known to me in the English language. The capacity for expressing imaginative intensity surpasses, to my mind, any achievement in the same space in the whole of our prose literature. I should rank Wuthering Heights, eccentric and lurid as it is, as an effort of genius far above not only Villette, which seems to me Charlotte Brontë's greatest effort, but the Bride of Lammermoor, which is the nearest thing to it in Sir Walter Scott's imaginative writings. In Wuthering Heights the concentrated power of a great imagination gave one brilliant. flash and disappeared. No doubt the repressive force of Emily Brontë's reserve was something like