Part 3 (1/2)

You can see her youth rising up beside that death-bed and answering, ”That is why”

And yet, could even Charlotte's youth have been so sure as to the cheating and betrayal? That happiness of hers was cut short in the moment of its perfection She was not to suffer any disenchantment or decline; her love was not to know any cold of fear or her genius any fever of frustration She was saved the struggle we can see before her

Arthur Nicholls was passionately fond of Charlotte But he was hostile to Charlotte's genius and to Charlotte's fame A plain, practical, robust man, inimical to any dream He could be adorably kind to a sick, submissive Charlotte Would he have been so tender to a Charlotte in revolt? She was spared the torture of the choice between Arthur Nicholls and her genius We kno she would have chosen It is well for her, and it is all one to literature, that she died, not ”in a time of promise”, but in the ic Brontes the ic, the most pitiful, the most mercilessly abused by destiny, was Anne An interet of Anne's life in the years of her girlhood There is no actual record of them nobody kept Anne's letters

We never hear her sad voice raised in self-pity or revolt It is doubtful if she ever raised it She waited in silence and resignation, and then told her own story in _Agnes Grey_ But her figure remains dim in her own story and in the classic ”Lives” We only know that she was the youngest, and that, unlike her sisters, she was pretty She had thick brown curling hair, and violet-blue eyes, and delicate dark eyebrows, and a skin rose and white for her sisters' sallow, that iven so was broken on the wheel of life They say of Anne perpetually that she was ”gentle”

In Charlotte's sketch of her she holds her pretty head high, her eyes gaze straight forward, and you wonder whether, before the breaking point, she was always as gentle as they say But you never see her in any moment of revolt Her simple poeony, an innocent dis of the head in conscious rectitude is all that breaks the long plaint of _Agnes Grey_

There is no piety in that plaint It is purely pagan; the cry of youth cheated of its desire Life brought her no good gifts beyond the slender ineffectual beauty that left her undesired Her tremulous, expectant wo veil of joy, or even of such pale, uninspired happiness as she dreanes Grey_ She was cheated of her innocent dreaion failed her She knew its bitterness, its terrors, its exactions She never knew its ecstasies, its fla mysteries, nor, even at her very last, its consolations Her tender conscience drew an unspeakable torradation

For it was on Anne, who had no genius to sustain her, that poor Branwell, with the burden of his destiny, weighed most hard It was Anne at Thorp Green who had the first terrible s, the intolerable preain The lady whom Mrs

Gaskell, with a murderous selection of adjectives, called ”that mature and wicked woman”, has been cleared as far as evidence and common sense could clear her But the slander is perpetually revived It has always proved too raphers Madaain twenty years after, in spite of the evidence and in spite of Mrs

Gaskell's retractation You would have thought that Branwellfor himself so well But no, they will not let him rest Branwell drank, and he ate opium; and, as if drink and opiuh, they must credit him with an open breach of the seventh commandment as well M Dimnet, the most able of recent critics of the Brontes, thinks and ainst all evidence that there was ive up the sordid tragedy _a trois_ He thinks he knohat Anne thought of Branwell's behaviour, and what awful secret she was hinting at, and what she told her sisters when she caues that Anne Bronte saw and heard things, and that her testimony is not to be set aside

What did Anne Bronte see and hear? She saw her brother consuitiiven 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 hi first to drink and then to opiuo mad One of the most familiar symptoms of morphia mania is a tendency to erotic hallucinations of the precise kind that Branwell suffered frouish between such a hallucination and depravity But there is not a shadow of evidence that she thought what M Diht it she made Charlotte and Eh 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 shaht 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 aof 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

Branas a degenerate, as incapable of passion as he was of poetry

His sisters, Anne and Charlotte, talked with an a innocence about Branwell's vices Simple and beautiful souls, they never for a moment suspected that his worst vice was senti, before it wrecked him, nobody enjoyed his own emotions more than Branwell At his worst he ed voluptuously in the torments of frustration At the end, ith drink and ith opium, he was undoubtedly insane His letters are priceless pathological docus of his peculiarto keep him from Mrs Robinson Faced at every turn with the evidence of this lady's coives it all a lunatic twist to prove the contrary He takes the strangest people into his confidence, John Brown, the sexton, and the Robinsons' coachh this ive 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 hoht live at leisure to try topestered by the s us in the world of work-day toil That hope and herself are gone--she to wither into patiently pining decline--_it_ to ery” It is all sordid as well as terrible We have no right to know these things Mrs Oliphant is alainst Charlotte as the first to betray her brother

But did Charlotte betray Branwell? Not in her letters She never iined--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 cae of evil

This vindication of her sisters is certainly an indicth 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 ca Charlotte, she considered herself justified in exposing Charlotte's brother because Charlotte herself had shown her the way

But Charlotte ht 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 hiest of the Brontes Oddly enough, this boy, as 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 ith destiny, her knack of iven to silences which in anybody but Anne would have been called morose It was her fate to be associated with hirace 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 entleness There was, in this smallest and least considerable of the Brontes, an i audacity Charlotte was bold, and Ereater than Charlotte's boldness or than Emily's, because it illed, 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 Hall_ There are scenes, there are situations, in Anne's a 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 rasp in Anne's treate of the seanosis of certain states, her realization of certain ests Balzac rather than any of the Brontes Thackeray, with the fear of Mrs Grundy before his eyes, would have shrunk frodon's ulti of that bedroo 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 ht Not to believe in the dogelical circles, to be almost an atheist When, somewhere in the late 'seventies, Dean Farrar published his _Eternal Hope_, that book fell like a bo before Dean Farrar's book Anne Bronte had thrown her boes in _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_ that anticipate and suo 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,