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 Hall_. There are scenes, there are situations,
in Anne's amazing novel, which for sheer audacity stand alone in
mid-Victorian literature, and which would hold