quarters.  Yorkshire people resented the air of patronage with which, as it seemed to them, a good Lancashire lady had taken their county in hand.  They were not quite the backward savages, they retorted, which some of Mrs. Gaskell’s descriptions in the beginning of her book would seem to suggest.  Between Lancashire and Yorkshire there is always a suspicion of jealousy.  It was intensified for the moment by these sombre pictures of ‘this lawless, yet not unkindly population.’ [17]  A son-in-law of Mr. Redhead wrote to deny the account of that clergyman’s association with Haworth.  ‘He gives another as true, in which I don’t see any great difference.’  Miss Martineau wrote sheet after sheet explanatory of her relations with Charlotte Brontë.  ‘Two separate householders in London each declares that the first interview between Miss Brontë and Miss Martineau took place at her house.’  In one passage Mrs. Gaskell had spoken of wasteful young servants, and the young servants in question came upon Mr. Brontë for the following testimonial:—

‘Haworth, August 17th, 1857.

‘I beg leave to state to all whom it may concern, that Nancy and Sarah Garrs, during the time they were in my service, were kind to my children, and honest, and not wasteful, but

sufficiently careful in regard to food, and all other articles committed to their charge.

P. Brontë, A.B.,
‘Incumbent of Haworth, Yorkshire.’

Three whole pages were devoted to the dramatic recital of a scandal at Haworth, and this entirely disappears from the third edition.  A casual reference to a girl who had been seduced, and had found a friend in Miss Brontë, gave further trouble.  ‘I have altered the word “seduced” to “betrayed,”’ writes Mrs. Gaskell to Martha Brown, ‘and I hope that this will satisfy the unhappy girl’s friends.’  But all these were small matters compared with the Cowan Bridge controversy and the threatened legal proceedings over Branwell Brontë’s suggested love affairs.  Mrs. Gaskell defended the description in Jane Eyre of Cowan Bridge with peculiar vigour.  Mr. Carus Wilson, the Brocklehurst of Jane Eyre, and his friends were furious.  They threatened an action.  There were letters in the Times and letters in the Daily News.  Mr. Nicholls broke silence—the only time in the forty years that he has done so—with two admirable letters to the Halifax Guardian.  The Cowan Bridge controversy was a drawn battle, in spite of numerous and glowing testimonials to the virtues of Mr. Carus Wilson.  Most people who know anything of the average private schools of half a century ago are satisfied that Charlotte Brontë’s description was substantially correct.  ‘I want to show you many letters,’ writes Mrs. Gaskell, ‘most of them praising the character of our dear friend as she deserves, and from people whose opinion she would have cared for, such as the Duke of Argyll, Kingsley, Greig, etc.  Many abusing me.  I should think seven or eight of this kind from the Carus Wilson clique.’

The Branwell matter was more serious.  Here Mrs. Gaskell had, indeed, shown a singular recklessness.  The lady referred to by Branwell was Mrs. Robinson, the wife of the Rev. Edmund Robinson of Thorp Green, and afterwards Lady

Scott.  Anne Brontë was governess in her family for two years, and Branwell tutor to the son for a few months.  Branwell, under the influence of opium, made certain statements about his relations with Mrs. Robinson which have been effectually disproved, although they were implicitly believed by the Brontë girls, who, womanlike, were naturally ready to regard a woman as the ruin of a beloved brother.  The recklessness of Mrs. Gaskell in accepting such inadequate testimony can be explained only on the assumption that she had a novelist’s satisfaction in the romance which the ‘bad woman’ theory supplied.  She wasted a considerable amount of rhetoric upon it.  ‘When the fatal attack came on,’ she says, ‘his pockets were found filled with old letters from the woman to whom he was attached.  He died! she lives still—in May Fair.  I see her name in county papers, as one of those who patronise the Christmas balls; and I hear of her in London drawing-rooms’—and so on.  There were no love-letters found in Branwell Brontë’s pockets. [19]  When Mrs. Gaskell’s husband came post-haste to Haworth to ask for proofs of Mrs. Robinson’s complicity in Branwell’s downfall, none were obtainable.  I am assured by Mr. Leslie Stephen that his father, Sir James Stephen, was employed at the time to make careful inquiry, and that he and other eminent lawyers came to the conclusion that it was one long tissue of lies or hallucinations.  The subject is sufficiently sordid, and indeed almost redundant in any biography of the Brontës; but it is of moment, because Charlotte Brontë and her sisters were so thoroughly persuaded that a woman was at the bottom of their brother’s ruin; and this belief Charlotte impressed upon all the friends who were nearest and dearest to her.  Her letters at the time of her brother’s

death are full of censure of the supposed wickedness of another.  It was a cruel infamy that the word of this wretched boy should have been so powerful for mischief.  Here, at any rate, Mrs. Gaskell did not show the caution which a masculine biographer, less prone to take literally a man’s accounts of his amours, would undoubtedly have displayed.

Yet, when all is said, Mrs. Gaskell had done her work thoroughly and well.  Lockhart’s Scott and Froude’s Carlyle are examples of great biographies which called for abundant censure upon their publication; yet both these books will live as classics of their kind.  To be interesting, it is perhaps indispensable that the biographer should be indiscreet, and certainly the Branwell incident—a matter of two or three pages—is the only part of Mrs. Gaskell’s biography in which indiscretion becomes indefensible.  And for this she suffered cruelly.  ‘I did so try to tell the truth,’ she said to a friend, ‘and I believe now I hit as near to the truth as any one could do.’  ‘I weighed every line with my whole power and heart,’ she said on another occasion, ‘so that every line should go to its great purpose of making her known and valued, as one who had gone through such a terrible life with a brave and faithful heart.’  And that clearly Mrs. Gaskell succeeded in doing.  It is quite certain that Charlotte Brontë would not stand on so splendid a pedestal to-day but for the single-minded devotion of her accomplished biographer.

It has sometimes been implied that the portrait drawn by Mrs. Gaskell was far too sombre, that there are passages in Charlotte’s letters which show that ofttimes her heart was merry and her life sufficiently cheerful.  That there were long periods of gaiety for all the three sisters, surely no one ever doubted.  To few people, fortunately, is it given to have lives wholly without happiness.  And yet, when this is acknowledged, how can one say that the

picture was too