2
Wildfell Hall.'
p. xiv'Hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature. She hated her work, but would pursue it. It was written as a warning,'--so said Charlotte when, in the pathetic Preface of 1850, she was endeavouring to explain to the public how a creature so gentle and so good as Acton Bell should have written such a book as 'Wildfell Hall.' And in the second edition of 'Wildfell Hall,' which appeared in 1848, Anne Bronte herself justified her novel in a Preface which is reprinted in this volume for the first time. The little Preface is a curious document. It has the same determined didactic tone which pervades the book itself, the same narrowness
of view, and inflation of expression, an inflation which is really due not to any personal egotism in the writer, but rather to that very gentleness and inexperience which must yet nerve itself under the stimulus of religion to its disagreeable and repulsive task. 'I knew that such characters'--as Huntingdon and his companions--'do exist, and if I have warned one rash youth from following in their steps the book has not been written in vain.' If the story has given more pain than pleasure to 'any honest reader,' the writer 'craves his pardon, for such was far from my intention.' But at the same time she cannot promise to limit her ambition to the giving of innocent pleasure, or to the production of 'a perfect work of art.' 'Time and talent so spent I should consider wasted and misapplied.' God has given her unpalatable truths to speak, and she must speak them.
The measure of misconstruction and abuse, therefore, p. xvwhich her book brought upon her she bore, says her sister, 'as it was her custom to bear whatever was unpleasant, with mild, steady patience. She was a very sincere and practical Christian, but the tinge of religious melancholy communicated a sad shade to her brief, blameless life.'
In spite of misconstruction and abuse, however, 'Wildfell Hall' seems to have attained more immediate success than anything else written by the sisters before 1848, except 'Jane Eyre.' It went into a second edition within a very short time of its publication, and Messrs. Newby informed the American publishers with whom they were negotiating that it was the work of the same hand which had produced 'Jane Eyre,' and superior to either 'Jane Eyre' or 'Wuthering Heights'! It was, indeed, the sharp practice connected with this astonishing judgment which led to the sisters' hurried journey to London in 1848--the famous journey when the two little ladies in black revealed themselves to Mr. Smith, and proved to him that they were not one Currer Bell, but two Miss Brontes. It was Anne's sole journey to London--her only contact with a world that was not Haworth, except that supplied by her school-life at Roehead and her two teaching engagements.
And there was and is a considerable narrative ability, a sheer moral energy in 'Wildfell Hall,' which would not be enough, indeed,
to keep it alive if it were not the work of a Bronte, but still betray its kinship and source. The scenes of Huntingdon's wickedness are less interesting but less improbable than the country-house scenes of 'Jane Eyre'; the story of his death has many true and p. xvitouching passages; the last love-scene is well, even in parts admirably, written. But the book's truth, so far as it is true, is scarcely the truth of imagination; it is rather the truth of a tract or a report. There can be little doubt that many of the pages are close transcripts from Branwell's conduct and language,--so far as Anne's slighter personality enabled her to render her brother's temperament, which was more akin to Emily's than to her own. The same material might have been used by Emily or Charlotte; Emily, as we know, did make use of it in 'Wuthering Heights'; but only after it had passed through that ineffable transformation, that mysterious, incommunicable heightening which makes and gives rank in literature. Some subtle, innate correspondence between eye and brain, between brain and hand, was present in Emily and Charlotte, and absent in Anne. There is no other account to be given of this or any other case of difference between serviceable talent and the high gifts of 'Delos' and Patara's own Apollo.'
The same world of difference appears between her poems and those of her playfellow and comrade, Emily. If ever our descend-ants should establish the schools for writers which are even now threatened or attempted, they will hardly know perhaps any better than we what genius is, nor how it can be produced. But if they try to teach by example, then Anne and Emily Bronte are ready to their hand. Take the verses written by Emily at Roehead which contain the lovely lines which I have already quoted in an earlier p. xvii'Introduction.' [0] Just before those lines there are two or three verses which it is worth while to compare with a poem of Anne's called 'Home.' Emily was sixteen at the time of writing; Anne about twenty-one or twenty-two. Both sisters take for their motive
the exile's longing thought of home. Emily's lines are full of faults, but they have the indefinable quality--here, no doubt, only in the bud, only as a matter of promise--which Anne's are entirely without. From the twilight schoolroom at Roehead, Emily turns in thought to the distant upland of Haworth and the little stone-built house upon its crest:--
There is a spot, 'mid barren hills,
Where winter howls, and driving rain; But, if the dreary tempest chills,
There is a light that warms again.
The house is old, the trees are bare, Moonless above bends twilight's dome,
But what on earth is half so dear--
3
So longed for--as the hearth of home?
The mute bird sitting on the stone,
The dank moss dripping from the wall, The thorn-trees gaunt, the walks o'ergrown,
I love them--how I love them all!
Anne's verses, written from one of the houses where she was a governess, express precisely the same feeling, and movement of mind. But notice the instinctive p. xviiirightness and swiftness of Emily's, the blurred weakness of Anne's!--
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 gray walls compassed round, Where knotted grass neglected lies,
And weeds usurp the ground.
Though all around this mansion high
Invites the foot to roam,
And though its halls are fair within-- Oh, give me back my Home!
A similar parallel lies between Anne's lines 'Domestic Peace,'--a sad and true reflection of the terrible times with Branwell in 1846-- and Emily's 'Wanderer from the Fold'; while in Emily's 'Last Lines,' the daring spirit of the sister to whom the magic gift was granted separates itself for ever from the gentle and accustomed piety of the sister to whom it was denied. Yet Anne's 'Last Lines'--'I
hoped that with the brave and strong'--have sweetness and sincerity; they have gained and kept a place in English religious verse, and they must always appeal to those who love the Brontes because, in the language of Christian faith and submission, they record the death of Emily and the passionate affection which her sisters bore her.
And so we are brought back to the point from which p. xixwe started. It is not as the writer of 'Wildfell Hall,' but as the sister of Charlotte and Emily Bronte, that Anne Bronte escapes oblivion--as the frail 'little one,' upon whom the other two lavished a tender and protecting care, who was a witness of Emily's death, and herself, within a few minutes of her own farewell to life, bade Charlotte
'take courage.'
'When my thoughts turn to Anne,' said Charlotte many years earlier, 'they always see her as a patient, persecuted stranger,--more lonely, less gifted with the power of making friends even than I am.' Later on, however, this power of making friends seems to have belonged to Anne in greater measure than to the others. Her gentleness conquered; she was not set apart, as they were, by the lonely and self-sufficing activities of great powers; her Christianity, though sad and timid, was of a kind which those around her could understand; she made no grim fight with suffering and death as did Emily. Emily was 'torn' from life 'conscious, panting, reluctant,' to use Charlotte's own words; Anne's 'sufferings were mild,' her mind 'generally serene,' and at the last 'she thanked God that death was come, and come so gently.' When Charlotte