to say these things, but one had better be honest.”  And of her honesty Charlotte’s letters on this subject leave no doubt.  There is not the smallest ground for supposing that even for a moment had she thought of Mr. James Taylor as “one that one day might be acceptable”, much less is there for Mr. Clement Shorter’s suggestion that if he had come back from Bombay she would have married him.

But Joe or James, it is all one to Mrs. Oliphant, with her theory of Charlotte Bronte.  “For her and her class, which did not speak of it, everything depended upon whether the women married or did not marry.  Their thoughts were thus artificially fixed to one point in the horizon.”  The rest is repetition, ending in the astounding verdict:  “The seed she thus sowed has come to many growths that would have appalled Charlotte Bronte.  But while it would be very unjust to blame her for the vagaries that have followed, and to which nothing could be less desirable than any building of the house or growth of the race, any responsibility or service, we must still believe that it was she who drew the curtain first aside and opened the gates to imps of evil meaning, polluting and profaning the domestic hearth.”

That is Mrs. Oliphant on Charlotte Bronte.

And even Mr. Clement Shorter, who has dealt so admirably with outrageous legends, goes half the way with the detractor.  He has a theory that Charlotte Bronte was a woman of morbid mood, “to whom the problem of sex appealed with all its complications”, and that she “dwelt continually on the problem of the ideal mate”.

Now Charlotte may have dreamed of getting married (there have been more criminal dreams); she may have brooded continually over the problem of the ideal mate, only of all these dreams and broodings there is not one atom of evidence—­not one.  Not a hint, not a trace, either in her character as we know it, or in her very voluminous private correspondence.  The facts of her life disprove it.  Her letters to Ellen Nussey (never meant for publication) reveal the workings of Charlotte’s feminine mind when applied to “the sex problem”; a mind singularly wholesome and impersonal, and singularly detached.  Charlotte is full of lights upon this awful subject of matrimony, which, by the way, had considerably more interest for Miss Nussey than it had for her.  In fact, if it had not been for Miss Nussey it would not have appeared so often as it did in Charlotte’s letters.  If you pay attention to the context (a thing that theorists never do) you see, what is indeed obvious, that a large portion of Charlotte Bronte’s time was taken up in advising and controlling Ellen Nussey, that amiable and impulsive prototype of Caroline Helstone.  She is called upon in all Miss Nussey’s hours of crisis, and there seem to have been a great many of them.  “Do not,” she writes, “be over-persuaded to marry a man you can never respect—­I do not say love, because I think if you can respect a person before marriage,