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 unwilling to remedy:  such reminder, in forcing on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of an obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease and shakes their self-complacency.  Old maids, like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world:  the demand disturbs the happy and rich:  it disturbs parents....  Men of England!  Look at your poor girls, many of them fading round you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating to sour old maids—­envious, back-biting, wretched, because life is a desert to