And not only was Anne revolutionary in her handling of moral situations, she was an insurgent in religious thought. Not to believe in the dogma of eternal punishment was, in mid-Victorian times and evangelical circles, to be almost an atheist. When, somewhere in the late 'seventies, Dean Farrar published his Eternal Hope, that book fell like a bomb into the ranks of the orthodox. But long before Dean Farrar's book Anne Brontë had thrown her bomb. There are two pages in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that anticipate and sum up his now innocent arguments. Anne fairly let herself go here. And though in her "Word to the Elect" (who "may rejoice to think themselves secure") she declares that
None shall sink to everlasting woe
Who have not well deserved the wrath of Heaven,
she presently relents, and tacks on a poem in a lighter measure, expressing her hope
That soon the wicked shall at last
Be fitted for the skies;
And when their dreadful doom is past
To light and life arise.
It is said (Charlotte said it) that Anne suffered from religious melancholy of a peculiarly dark and Calvinistic type. I very much suspect that Anne's melancholy, like Branwell's passion, was pathological, and that what her soul suffered from was religious doubt. She could not reach that height where Emily moved serenely; she could not see that
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain.
There was a time when her tremulous, clinging faith was broken by contact with Emily's contempt for creeds. When Anne was at Haworth she and Emily were inseparable. They tramped the moors together. With their arms round each other's shoulders, they paced up and down the parlour of the Parsonage. They showed the mysterious attraction and affinity of opposites. Anne must have been fascinated, and at the same time appalled, by the radiant, revealing, annihilating sweep of Emily's thought. She was not indifferent to creeds. But you can see her fearful and reluctant youth yielding at last to Emily's thought, until she caught a glimpse of the "repose" beyond the clash of "conquered good and conquering ill". You can see how the doctrine of eternal punishment went by the board; how Anne, who had gone through agonies of orthodox fear on account of Branwell, must have adjusted things somehow, and arrived at peace. Trust in "the merits of the Redeemer" is, after all, trust in the Immensity beyond Redeemer and redeemed. Of this trust she sang in a voice, like her material voice, fragile, but sweet and true. She sang naïvely of the "Captive Dove" that makes unheard its "joyless moan", of "the heart that Nature formed to love", pining, "neglected and alone". She sang of the "Narrow Way", "Be it," she sings, "thy constant aim
"To labour and to love,
To pardon and endure,
To lift thy heart to God above,
And keep thy conscience pure."
She hears the wind in an alien wood and cries for the Parsonage garden, and for the "barren hills":
Where scarce the scattered, stunted trees
Can yield an answering swell,
But where a wilderness of heath
Returns the sound as well.
For yonder garden, fair and wide,
With groves of evergreen,
Long winding walks, and borders trim
And velvet lawns between.
Restore to me that little spot,
With grey hills compassed round,
Where knotted grass neglected lies,
And weeds usurp the ground.
For she, too, loved the moors; and through her love for them she wrote two perfect lines when she called on Memory to
Forever hang thy dreamy spell
Round mountain star and heather-bell.
The critics, the theorists, the tale-mongers, have left Anne quiet in that grave on the sea-coast, where she lies apart. Her gentle insignificance served her well.
* * * * *
But no woman who ever wrote was more criticized, more spied upon, more lied about, than Charlotte. It was as if the singular purity and poverty of her legend offered irresistible provocation. The blank page called for the scribbler. The silence that hung about her was dark with challenge; it was felt to be ambiguous, enigmatic. Reserve suggests a reservation, something hidden and kept back from the insatiable public with its "right to know". Mrs. Gaskell with all her indiscretions had not given it enough. The great classic Life of Charlotte Brontë was, after all, incomplete. Until something more was known about her, Charlotte herself was incomplete. It was nothing that Mrs. Gaskell's work was the finest, tenderest portrait of a woman that it was ever given to a woman to achieve; nothing that she was not only recklessly and superbly loyal to Charlotte, but that in her very indiscretions she was, as far as Charlotte was concerned, incorruptibly and profoundly true.
Since Mrs. Gaskell's time, other hands have been at work on Charlotte, improving Mrs. Gaskell's masterpiece. A hundred little touches have been added to it. First, it was supposed to be too tragic, too deliberately and impossibly sombre (that sad book of which Charlotte's friend, Mary Taylor, said that it was "not so gloomy as the truth"). So first came Sir Wemyss Reid, conscientiously working up the high lights till he got the values all wrong. "If the truth must be told," he says, "the life of the author of Jane Eyre was by no means so joyless as the world now believes it to have been." And he sets out to give us the truth. But all that he does to lighten the gloom is to tell a pleasant story of how "one bright June morning in 1833, a handsome carriage and pair is standing opposite the 'Devonshire Arms' at Bolton Bridge". In the handsome carriage is a young girl, Ellen Nussey, waiting for Charlotte Brontë and her brother and sisters to go with her for a picnic to Bolton Abbey.
"Presently," says Sir Wemyss Reid, "on the steep road which stretches across the moors to Keighley, the sound of wheels is heard, mingled with the merry speech and merrier laughter of fresh young voices. Shall we go forward unseen," he asks, "and study the approaching travellers whilst they are still upon the road? Their conveyance is no handsome carriage, but a rickety dog-cart, unmistakably betraying its neighbourship to the carts and ploughs of some rural farmyard. The horse, freshly taken from the fields, is driven by a youth who, in spite of his countrified dress, is no mere bumpkin. His shock of red hair hangs down in somewhat ragged locks behind his ears, for Branwell Brontë esteems himself a genius and a poet, and, following the fashion of the times, has that abhorrence of the barber's shears which genius is supposed to affect. But the lad's face is a handsome and striking one, full of Celtic fire and humour, untouched by the slightest shade of care, hopeful, promising, even brilliant. How gaily he jokes with his three sisters; with what inexhaustible volubility he pours out quotations from his favourite poets, applying them to the lovely scenes around him; and with what a mischievous delight in his superior nerve and mettle, he attempts the feats of charioteering, which fill the heart of the youngest of the party with sudden terrors! Beside him, in a dress of marvellous plainness, and ugliness, stamped with the brand "home-made" in characters which none can mistake, is the eldest of the sisters. Charlotte is talking too; there are bright smiles upon her face; she is enjoying everything around her, the splendid morning, the charms of leafy trees and budding roses, and the ever musical stream; most of all, perhaps, the charm of her brother's society, and the expectation of that coming meeting with her friends, which is so near at hand. Behind sits a pretty little girl, with fine complexion and delicate regular features, whom the stranger would pick out as the beauty of the company, and a tall, rather angular figure, clad in a dress exactly resembling Charlotte's. Emily Brontë does not talk so much as the rest of the party, but her wonderful eyes, brilliant and unfathomable as the pool at the foot of a waterfall, but radiant also with a wealth of tenderness and warmth, show how her soul is expanding under the influences of the scene; how quick she is to note the least prominent of the beauties around her, how intense is her enjoyment of the songs of the birds, the brilliancy of the sunshine, the rich scent of the flower-bespangled hedgerows. If she does not, like Charlotte and Anne, meet her brother's ceaseless flood of sparkling words with opposing currents of speech, she utters a strange, deep guttural sound which those who know her best interpret as the language of a joy too deep for articulate expression. Gaze at them as they pass you in the quiet road, and acknowledge that, in spite of their rough and even uncouth exteriors, a happier four could hardly be met with in this favourite haunt of pleasure-seekers during a long summer's day."
And you do gaze at them and are sadder, if anything, than you were before. You see them, if anything, more poignantly. You see their cheerful biographer doing all he knows, and the light he shoots across the blackness only makes it blacker.
Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi di tempo felice
Nella miseria;
and in the end the biographer with all his cheerfulness succumbs to the tradition of misery, and even adds a dark contribution of his own, the suggestion of an unhappy love-affair of Charlotte's.
After Sir Wemyss Reid came Mr. Francis Grundy with his little pictures, Pictures of the Past, presenting a dreadfully unattractive Charlotte.
Then came Mr. Leyland, following Mr. Grundy, with his glorification of Branwell and his hint that Charlotte made it very hard at home for the poor boy. He repeats the...
