What did Anne Brontë see and hear? She saw her brother consumed by an
illegitimate passion; a passion utterly hopeless, given the nature of
the lady. The lady had been kind to Anne, to Branwell she had been
angelically kind. Anne saw that his behaviour was an atrocious return
for her kindness. Further than that the lady hardly counted in Anne's
vision. Her interest was centred on her brother. She saw him taking
first to drink and then to opium. She saw that he was going mad, and he
did go mad. One of the most familiar symptoms of morphia mania is a
tendency to erotic hallucinations of the precise kind that Branwell
suffered from. Anne was unable to distinguish between such a
hallucination and depravity. But there is not a shadow of evidence that
she thought what M. Dimnet thinks, or that if she had thought it she
made Charlotte and Emily think it too. Branwell's state was quite enough
in itself to break their hearts. His letters to Leyland, to John Brown,
the sexton, to Francis Grundy, record with frightful vividness every
phase of his obsession.

It is inconceivable that such letters should have been kept, still more
inconceivable that they should have been published. 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,