and her speech to her mercenary uncle: "Sir, your
god, your great Bell, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a
demon."

What is worse than all, Louis Moore--Louis, the hero, Louis, the master
of passion, is a failure. He is Charlotte Bronte's most terrible, most
glaring failure. It is not true that Charlotte could not draw men, or
that she drew them all alike; Robert Moore, the hard-headed man of
business, the man of will and purpose, who never gives up, is not only
almost a masterpiece but a spontaneous masterpiece, one of the first
examples of his kind. But there is no blood in Louis' veins, no virility
in his swarthy body. He is the most unspeakable of schoolmasters. Yet
Charlotte lavished on this puppet half the wealth of her imagination.
She flings phrase after perfect phrase to him to cover himself
with--some of her best things have been given to Louis Moore to utter;
but they do not make him live. Again, she strangles him in his own
rhetoric. The courtship of Louis Moore and Shirley will not compare with
that of Jane and Rochester. There is no nightingale singing in their
wood.

Yet, for all that, _Shirley_ comes very near to being Charlotte Bronte's
masterpiece. It is inspired from first to last with a great intention
and a great idea. It shows a vision of reality wider than her grasp. Its
faults, like the faults of _Jane Eyre_, are all on the surface, only
there is more surface in _Shirley_. If it has not _Jane Eyre's_
commanding passion, it has a vaster sweep. It was literally the first
attempt in literature to give to woman her right place in the world.

From first to last there is not a page or a line in it that justifies
the malignant criticism of Mrs. Oliphant. Caroline Helstone does not
justify it. She is no window-gazing virgin on the look-out, in love
already before the man has come. She is a young girl, very naturally in
love with a man whom she has known for years, who is always on the spot.
As for Shirley, she flung herself with all the vehemence of her
prophetic soul on the hypocritical convention that would make every
woman dependent on some man, and at the same time despises her for the
possession of her natural instincts. And Caroline followed her. "I
observe that to such grievances as society cannot cure, it usually
forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn: this scorn being only a sort of
tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People hate to be reminded of
ills they are unable or unw