What did Anne Bronte see and hear?  She saw her brother consumed by an illegitimate passion; a passion utterly hopeless, given the nature of the lady.  The lady had been kind to Anne, to Branwell she had been angelically kind.  Anne saw that his behaviour was an atrocious return for her kindness.  Further than that the lady hardly counted in Anne’s vision.  Her interest was centred on her brother.  She saw him taking first to drink and then to opium.  She saw that he was going mad, and he did go mad.  One of the most familiar symptoms of morphia mania is a tendency to erotic hallucinations of the precise kind that Branwell suffered from.  Anne was unable to distinguish between such a hallucination and depravity.  But there is not a shadow of evidence that she thought what M. Dimnet thinks, or that if she had thought it she made Charlotte and Emily think it too.  Branwell’s state was quite enough in itself to break their hearts.  His letters to Leyland, to John Brown, the sexton, to Francis Grundy, record with frightful vividness every phase of his obsession.

It is inconceivable that such letters should have been kept, still more inconceivable that they should have been published.  It is inconceivable that Mrs. Gaskell should have dragged the pitiful and shameful figure into the light.  Nobody can save poor Branwell now from the dreadful immortality thrust on him by his enemies and friends with equal zeal.  All that is left to us is a merciful understanding of his case.  Branwell’s case, once for all, was purely pathological.  There was nothing great about him, not even his passion for Mrs. Robinson.  Properly speaking, it was not a passion at all, it was a disease.  Branwell was a degenerate, as incapable of passion as he was of poetry.  His sisters, Anne and Charlotte, talked with an amazing innocence about Branwell’s vices.  Simple and beautiful souls, they never for a moment suspected that his worst vice was sentimentalism.  In the beginning, before it wrecked him, nobody enjoyed his own emotions more than Branwell.  At his worst he wallowed voluptuously in the torments of frustration.  At the end, what with drink and what with opium, he was undoubtedly insane.  His letters are priceless pathological documents.  They reveal all the workings of his peculiar mania.  He thinks everybody is plotting to keep him from Mrs. Robinson.  Faced at every turn with the evidence of this lady’s complete indifference, he gives it all a lunatic twist to prove the contrary.  He takes the strangest people into his confidence, John Brown, the sexton, and the Robinsons’ coachman.  Queer flames of lucidity dart here and there through this madness:  “The probability of her becoming free to give me herself and estate ever rose to drive away the prospect of her decline under her present grief.”  “I had reason to hope that ere very long I should be the husband of a lady whom I loved best in the world, and with whom, in more than competence, I might live at leisure to try to make myself a name in the