must, be curbed."[1] Is she an Amazon, then? No; she is a strange being—so fair and girlish: not a manlike woman at all (so her cousin Henry describes her)—not an Amazon, and yet lifting her head above both help and sympathy. And yet she is neither so strong, nor has she such pride in her strength, as people think; nor is she so regardless of sympathy; but when she has any grief (this is her confession, meant for one ear alone), she fears to impart it to those she loves, lest it should pain them; and to those whom she views with indifference, she cannot condescend to complain. Independence of all but one is a condition to her very existence. She seems to say,
I'll walk where my own nature would be leading—
It vexes me to choose another guide—
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding,
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain's side.[2]
It needs a sort of tempest-shock to bring her to the point with "her master," Louis Moore: fettered she is, at last, to a fixed day—conquered by love, and bound with a vow; but when thus vanquished and restricted, she pines like any other chained denizen of deserts. The substratum of character in Caroline Helstone is similar, notwithstanding circumstantial diversity. Quiet as the gentle Cary looks, there is, as Shirley sees and says, a force and a depth somewhere within, not easily reached or appreciate; and for the novelist it is to sound this depth, to gauge this vital force. Cary is so "delicate, dexterous, quaint, quick, quiet"—Raffaelle in features, quite English in expression—all insular grace and purity. She is, in Louis Moore's figure, a lily of the valley, untinted, needing no tint; while Shirley is a rose, a sweet lively delight, guarded with prickly peril. But the contrast of this comparison is a little too broad; still more so in that between the mute monotonous innocence of the lamb or the nestling dove, and the fluttering and untamed energies of the restless merlin. There are many passages in Caroline's speech which are parallel to Shirley's most characteristic outbreaks: the difference is one in degree, not kind. So, too, with the brothers Moore. They are but a variation played on the same theme—one on a minor key. Neither of them is such a man as a man of genius would have drawn; but this no way negatives the claim of a woman of genius. None but a woman would, and none but a woman of genius could, have elaborated two such portraits. We do not believe in them; but we do believe in Currer Bell's faith in them, and in the reality of their features, as discerned by womanly vision. We see them, not as they are, but through the mystic and transfigurating medium of a dim religious light, idealised by the consecration and the poet's dream. These be thy gods, O woman!—gods of the mountain, and not of the plain—like stars, dwelling apart, dwelling afar off—indifferent to the strife of tongues, untainted by the madness of the people.
The other male characters, with one or two exceptions, are disagreeable; each forms, more or less, a nucleus for Currer Bell's powers of
