"'Where is the other world? In what will another life consist? Why do I ask? Have I not cause to think that the hour is hasting but too fast when the veil must be rent for me? Do I not know the Grand Mystery is likely to break prematurely on me? Great Spirit, in whose goodness I confide; whom, as my Father, I have petitioned night and morning from early infancy, help the weak creation of Thy hands! Sustain me through the ordeal I dread and must undergo! Give me strength! Give me patience! Give me—oh, give me FAITH!'"
Jane Eyre has done worse than that, so has Rochester; but somehow, when they were doing their worst with it, they got their passion through. There is no live passion behind this speech of Caroline's, with its wild stress of italics and of capitals. What passion there was in Charlotte when she conceived Caroline was killed by Emily's death.
And Mrs. Pryor, revealing herself to Caroline, is even more terrible. She has all the worst vices of Charlotte's dramatic style. Mrs. Pryor calls to the spirit of Caroline's dead father: "'James, slumber peacefully! See, your terrible debt is cancelled! Look! I wipe out the long, black account with my own hand! James, your child atones: this living likeness of you—this thing with your perfect features—this one good gift you gave me has nestled affectionately to my heart and tenderly called me "mother". Husband, rest forgiven.'"
Even Robert Moore, otherwise almost a masterpiece, becomes improbable when, in his great scene, Shirley refuses him. When Mr. Yorke asks him what has gone wrong he replies: "The machinery of all my nature; the whole enginery of this human mill; the boiler, which I take to be the heart, is fit to burst."
Shirley herself is impossible with her "Lucifer, Star of the Morning, thou art fallen," 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 Brontë'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 Brontë'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 them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage, which to celibacy is denied. Fathers, cannot you alter these things?… You would wish to be proud of your daughters, and not to blush for them, then seek for them an interest and an occupation which shall raise them above the flirt, the manoeuvrer, the mischief-making talebearer. Keep your girl's minds narrow and degraded—they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes a disgrace to you: give them scope and work—they will be your gayest companions in health; your tenderest nurses in sickness; your most faithful prop in old age."
That is the argument from fathers, and it comes from Caroline Helstone, not from Shirley. And the fact that Caroline married Robert Moore, and Shirley fell in love when her hour came (and with Louis Moore, too!) does not diminish the force or the sincerity or the truth of the tirade.
Shirley may not be a great novel; but it is a great prophetic book. Shirley's vision of the woman kneeling on the hills serves for more than Emily Brontë's vision of Hertha and Demeter, of Eve, the Earth-mother, "the mighty and mystical parent"; it is Charlotte Brontë's vindication of Eve, her vision of woman as she is to be. She faced the world once for all with her vision: "I see her," she said, "and I will tell you what she is like."