tic. Reserve suggests a
reservation, something hidden and kept back from the insatiable public
with its "right to know". Mrs. Gaskell with all her indiscretions had
not given it enough. The great classic _Life of Charlotte Bronte_ was,
after all, incomplete. Until something more was known about her,
Charlotte herself was incomplete. It was nothing that Mrs. Gaskell's
work was the finest, tenderest portrait of a woman that it was ever
given to a woman to achieve; nothing that she was not only recklessly
and superbly loyal to Charlotte, but that in her very indiscretions she
was, as far as Charlotte was concerned, incorruptibly and profoundly
true.

Since Mrs. Gaskell's time, other hands have been at work on Charlotte,
improving Mrs. Gaskell's masterpiece. A hundred little touches have been
added to it. First, it was supposed to be too tragic, too deliberately
and impossibly sombre (that sad book of which Charlotte's friend, Mary
Taylor, said that it was "not so gloomy as the truth"). So first came
Sir Wemyss Reid, conscientiously working up the high lights till he got
the values all wrong. "If the truth must be told," he says, "the life of
the author of _Jane Eyre_ was by no means so joyless as the world now
believes it to have been." And he sets out to give us the truth. But all
that he does to lighten the gloom is to tell a pleasant story of how
"one bright June morning in 1833, a handsome carriage and pair is
standing opposite the 'Devonshire Arms' at Bolton Bridge". In the
handsome carriage is a young girl, Ellen Nussey, waiting for Charlotte
Bronte and her brother and sisters to go with her for a picnic to Bolton
Abbey.

"Presently," says Sir Wemyss Reid, "on the steep road which stretches
across the moors to Keighley, the sound of wheels is heard, mingled with
the merry speech and merrier laughter of fresh young voices. Shall we go
forward unseen," he asks, "and study the approaching travellers whilst
they are still upon the road? Their conveyance is no handsome carriage,
but a rickety dog-cart, unmistakably betraying its neighbourship to the
carts and ploughs of some rural farmyard. The horse, freshly taken from
the fields, is driven by a youth who, in spite of his countrified dress,
is no mere bumpkin. His shock of red hair hangs down in somewhat ragged
locks behind his ears, for Branwell Bronte esteems himself a genius and
a poet, and, following the fashion of the times, has that abhorrence of
the barber's she