world of posterity, without being pestered by the small but countless botherments, which, like mosquitoes, sting us in the world of work-day toil.  That hope and herself are gone—­she to wither into patiently pining decline—­it to make room for drudgery.”  It is all sordid as well as terrible.  We have no right to know these things.  Mrs. Oliphant is almost justified in her protest against Charlotte as the first to betray her brother.

But did Charlotte betray Branwell?  Not in her letters.  She never imagined—­how could she?—­that those letters would be published.  Not in her novels.  Her novels give no portrait of Branwell and no hint that could be easily understood.  It is in her prefaces to her sisters’ novels that he appears, darkly.  Charlotte, outraged by the infamous article in the Quarterly, was determined that what had been said of her should never be said of Anne and Emily.  She felt that their works offered irresistible provocation to the scandalous reviewer.  She thought it necessary to explain how they came by their knowledge of evil.

This vindication of her sisters is certainly an indictment of her brother to anybody who knew enough to read between the lines.  Charlotte may have innocently supposed that nobody knew or ever would know enough.  Unfortunately, Mrs. Gaskell knew; and when it came to vindicating Charlotte, she considered herself justified in exposing Charlotte’s brother because Charlotte herself had shown her the way.

But Charlotte might have spared her pains.  Branwell does not account for Heathcliff any more than he accounts for Rochester.  He does not even account for Huntingdon in poor Anne’s novel.  He accounts only for himself.  He is important chiefly in relation to the youngest of the Brontes.  Oddly enough, this boy, who was once thought greater than his sister Emily, was curiously akin to the weak and ineffectual Anne.  He shows the weird flickering of the flame that pulsed so feebly and intermittently in her.  He had Anne’s unhappy way with destiny, her knack of missing things.  She had a touch of his morbidity.  He was given to silences which in anybody but Anne would have been called morose.  It was her fate to be associated with him in the hour and in the scene of his disgrace.  And he was offered up unwittingly by Charlotte as a sacrifice to Anne’s virtue.

* * * * *

Like Branwell, Anne had no genius.  She shows for ever gentle, and, in spite of an unconquerable courage, conquered.  And yet there was more in her than gentleness.  There was, in this smallest and least considerable of the Brontes, an immense, a terrifying audacity.  Charlotte was bold, and Emily was bolder; but this audacity of Anne’s was greater than Charlotte’s boldness or than Emily’s, because it was willed, it was deliberate, open-eyed; it had none of the superb unconsciousness of genius.  Anne took her courage in both hands when she sat down to write The Tenant of Wildfell