unity, of fitness, of profound and tragic harmony. It was Mrs. Gaskell's
sense of this effect that made her work a masterpiece.

And in her marriage, at Haworth, to her father's curate, Arthur
Nicholls, the marriage that cut short her life and made an end of her
celebrity, Charlotte Brontë followed before all things her instinct for
fitness, for unity, for harmony. It was exquisitely in keeping. It did
no violence to her memories, her simplicities and sanctities. It found
her in the apathy of exhaustion, and it was yet one with all that was
passionate in her and undying. She went to it one morning in May, all
white and drooping, in her modest gown and that poor little bridal
bonnet with its wreath of snowdrops, symbolic of all the timidities, the
reluctances, the cold austerities of spring roused in the lap of winter,
and yet she found in it the secret fire of youth. She went to it afraid;
and in her third month of marriage she still gives a cry wrung from the
memory of her fear. "Indeed, indeed, Nell, it is a solemn and strange
and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife."

And yet for all that, after London, after fame and friendships in which
her dead had no share, her marriage was not the great departure; it was
the great return. It was the outcome of all that had gone before it; the
fruit of painful life, which is recognition, acceptance, the final trust
in destiny. There were to be no more false starts, no more veiled ghosts
of the cross-roads, pointing the disastrous way.

And in its abrupt and pitiful end her life rang true; it sustained the
tragic harmony. It was the fulfilment of secret prophecies, forebodings,
premonitions, of her reiterated "It was not to be." You may say that in
the end life cheated and betrayed her.