Hall.  There are scenes, there are situations, in Anne’s amazing novel, which for sheer audacity stand alone in mid-Victorian literature, and which would hold their own in the literature of revolt that followed.  It cannot be said that these scenes and situations are tackled with a master-hand.  But there is a certain grasp in Anne’s treatment, and an astonishing lucidity.  Her knowledge of the seamy side of life was not exhaustive.  But her diagnosis of certain states, her realization of certain motives, suggests Balzac rather than any of the Brontes.  Thackeray, with the fear of Mrs. Grundy before his eyes, would have shrunk from recording Mrs. Huntingdon’s ultimatum to her husband.  The slamming of that bedroom door fairly resounds through the long emptiness of Anne’s novel.  But that door is the crux of the situation, and if Anne was not a genius she was too much of an artist to sacrifice her crux.

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 Bronte 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.