much soul as you, and fully as much heart!  And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to leave you.  I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh:  it is my spirit that addresses’” ("Addresses”? oh, Jane!) “’your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal—­as we are!’”

This, allowing for some slight difference in the phrasing, is twentieth century.  And it was this—­Jane’s behaviour in the orchard, and not Rochester’s behaviour in the past—­that opened the door to the “imps of evil meaning, polluting and defiling the domestic hearth.”

Still, though The Quarterly censured Jane’s behaviour, it was Rochester who caused most of the trouble and the scandal by his remarkable confessions.  In a sense they were remarkable.  Seldom, outside the pages of French fiction, had there been so lavish and public a display of mistresses.  And while it was agreed on all hands that Rochester was incredible with his easy references to Celine and Giacinta and Clara, still more incredible was it that a young woman in a country parsonage should have realized so much as the existence of Clara and Giacinta and Celine.  But, when Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux invoked Branwell and all his vices to account for Charlotte’s experience, they forgot that Charlotte had read Balzac,[A] and that Balzac is an experience in himself.  She had also read Moore’s Life of Byron, and really there is nothing in Rochester’s confessions that Byron and a little Balzac would not account for.  So that they might just as well have left poor Branwell in his grave.

[Footnote A:  I am wrong.  Charlotte did not read Balzac till later, when George Henry Lewes told her to.  But there were those twenty “clever, wicked, sophistical, and immoral French books” that she read in eighteen-forty.  They may have served her purpose better.]

Indeed, it was the manner of Rochester’s confession that gave away the secret of Currer Bell’s sex; her handling of it is so inadequate and perfunctory.  Rochester is at his worst and most improbable in the telling of his tale.  The tale in itself is one of Charlotte’s clumsiest contrivances for conveying necessary information.  The alternate baldness and exuberant, decorated, swaggering boldness (for Charlotte’s style was never bolder than when she was essaying the impossible) alone betrayed the hand of an innocent woman.  Curious that these makeshift passages with their obviously second-hand material, their palpably alien mise en scene, should ever have suggested a personal experience and provoked The Quarterly to its infamous and immortal utterance:  “If we ascribe the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex.”