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."

_The Quarterly_, to do it justice, argued that Currer Bell was a man,
for only a man would have betrayed such ignorance of feminine resources
as to make Jane Eyre, on a night alarm, "hurry on a frock and shawl".
The reasoning passed. Nobody saw that such a man would be as innocent as
any parson's daughter. Nobody pointed out that, as it happe