Authors, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Brontë family
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":
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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