hed. 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 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