In reality, then, the resemblance between Charlotte and Emily Brontë is comparatively superficial, arising from similarity of experience and the bleak atmosphere of the scenes and people among which they lived.[13] Emily can scarcely be called an exponent of human passion, since the beings she has created bear little or no resemblance to actual humanity.
Charlotte has told us that her sister’s impressions of scenery and locality are truthful, original, and sympathetic; the bleakness of the atmosphere is not exaggerated. But, on the other hand, we learn—as we should expect—that “she had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry among whom she lived, than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her gates.... She knew their ways, their language, their family histories: she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but with them she rarely exchanged a word.” Hence, having a naturally sombre mind, she drank in only “those tragic and terrible traits of which, in listening to the secret annals of every rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress.”
For those characteristics, more or less superficial, in which her dramatis personæ resemble real life, they are drawn, with marvellous insight and sympathy, from the moorlands; but they are not, themselves, moorland folk. They are sheer creations of the imagination. The terrible possibilities which lurk within us are used indeed in the compounding, but so combined and concentrated as to banish all human semblance. It is up to any of us to become such as Heathcliff and the rest, for she has not violated the possibilities; but a kinder fate, that grain of virtue and gentleness without which no human being was ever born and held his reason, has saved us from the absolutely elementary passions, tormenting and repining, of these strange beings.
She is as far from realism as an “unromantic” writer can well be; and, by sheer force of will or vividness of imagination, compels and fascinates us to accept, as worthy of study and full of interest, the characters she has created.
And because, as has been often noticed, women are—curiously enough—not usually pre-eminent in imagination, her work remains supreme for certain qualities, which we may vainly seek elsewhere in English literature.
Anne Brontë (1820-1849) sheds but a pale glimmer beside her fiery sisters. She produced two novels: Agnes Grey, the record of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a morbid picture of “talents misused and faculties abused”—both founded on personal experience. She worked quietly, but with mild resolution; reproducing exactly her own observations on life, never straying beyond what she believed to be literally the truth. “She hated her work, but would pursue it. When reasoned with on the subject, she regarded such reasonings as a temptation to self-indulgence. She must be honest: she must not varnish, soften, or conceal.”
Anne Brontë has left us her “warning”; and if the stories embodying the moral are not particularly stimulating or dramatic, they do, after a painstaking fashion, reveal character and reflect life. She had, moreover, a mild humour, entirely denied to Charlotte or Emily, as the following description of an “unchristian” rector may serve to show:
“Mr. Hatfield would come sailing up the aisle, or rather sweeping along like a whirlwind, with his rich silk gown flying behind him and rustling against the pew doors, mount the pulpit like a conqueror ascending his triumphal car; then, sinking on the velvet cushion in an attitude of studied grace, remain in silent prostration for a certain time; then mutter over a Collect, and gabble through the Lord’s Prayer, rise, draw off one bright lavender glove, to give the congregation the benefit of his sparkling rings, lightly pass his fingers through his well-curled hair, flourish a cambric handkerchief, recite a very short passage, or, perhaps, a mere phrase of Scripture, as a headpiece to his discourse, and, finally, deliver a composition which, as a composition, might be considered good.”
Like Charlotte, she prefers a plain heroine, seeming almost jealous of beauty in others, and regards man as the natural “master” of woman.