However faulty the story of "Shirley" may be as a whole, it abounds with narrative fragments of unquestionable power. Such are, for instance, the chapters recording the arrival of the rifled waggons at Gérard Moore's mill, and his subsequent interview with the deputation; Caroline and her uncle's first visit to Fieldhead; the midnight attack on the mill; Carolina in the "Valley of the Shadow of Death;" Shirley’s interview with Louis Moore, when she anticipates the strange and speedy horrors of hydrophobia; and the éclaircissement between puffy, fussy, fuming Uncle Sympson and his indomitable niece. Currer Bell's humour makes for itself "ample room and verge enough," in its dry, hard way, in such scenes as Mr. Donne's encounter with dog Tartar, that gentleman's "Exodus," Malone's courtship, Martin's tactics, &c. The long, excursive diatribes concerning woman's mission and destiny, are strained and somewhat Margaret Fuller-ish in tone; nor are they any too healthy in doctrine, implying, as one reviewer has said they do, a denial of the power of duty and self-sacrifice to bless the human agent with a serene or hopeful spirit, and virtually constituting a pleading for passion, rather than an enforcement of that practical faith which, knowing life to be a conflict, accepts the conditions of struggle as a necessity not to be evaded, but to be lovingly, firmly, cheerfully borne. Happily for the repute of "Shirley," such a doctrinal tendency is latent or unobvious to the many, patent only to the meditative few. But so far as the strictures are valid, they are fatal to Currer Bell's claims as a sound and earnest moral teacher. The heroine who cannot submit, nor try to reconcile herself to a cross imposed upon her, but will rather pine in green and yellow melancholy, and, with an aspect certainly not smiling at grief, will rather cast herself from the monument than sit like Patience upon it, is no heroine at all. The novel that can make its favourites happy only by letting them have their own way ad libitum, is perchance a little rickety in truth and morals—objectionable both as a picture of life and as a guide in ethics. For, between our notion of a safe code of ethics, profitable for doctrine, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, and any Wertherean exponent of "aching discontents and vague ambitions," there is a great gulf fixed. But enough—perhaps something too much—of this:
Non ragionam di lor, ma guardae passa!
Apart from the overstrained expectations which were disappointed in "Shirley," as following in the wake of "Jane Eyre," there is an intrinsic inferiority in the former, much*of it arising, we conjecture, from the author's solicitude to redeem the pledge already given. It is a common case; and an almost constant "corollary" is, that the author thinks best of the second venture, on account of the extra pains it involved. Scott has pointed this out as the explanation of that difference of opinion which sometimes occurs betwixt author and reader, respecting the comparative value of early and of subsequent publications.[1] In the complaint against
- ↑ "The author naturally esteems that most upon which he is conscious much more labour has been bestowed; while the public often remain constant to their first love, and prefer the facility and truth of the earlier work to the more elaborate execution displayed in those which follow it." The reason of the greater "facility and truth" which characterise the first-born, seems to be, that, when an author brings forth his first representation of any class of characters, he seizes on the leading and striking outlines, and therefore, in a second attempt of the same
