I cannot tell what good it does--
what feeling it spares--what horror it conceals.
With regard to the rusticity of 'Wuthering heights,' I admit the
charge, for I feel the quality. It is rustic all through. It is
moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it
natural that it should be otherwise; the author being herself a
native and nursling of the moors. Doubtless, had her lot been cast
in a town, her writings, if she had written at all, would have
possessed another character. Even had chance or taste led her to
choose a similar subject, she would have treated it otherwise. Had
Ellis Bell been a lady or a gentleman accustomed to what is called
'the world,' her view of a remote and unreclaimed region, as well
as of the dwellers therein, would have differed greatly from that
actually taken by the home-bred country girl. Doubtless it would
have been wider--more comprehensive: whether it would have been
more original or more truthful is not so certain. As far as the
scenery and locality are concerned, it could scarcely have been so
sympathetic: Ellis Bell did not describe as one whose eye and
taste alone found pleasure in the prospect; her native hills were
far more to her than a spectacle; they were what she lived in, and
by, as much as the wild birds, their tenants, or as the heather,
their produce.
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