• NOVELISTS UEEN VICTORIAS -RE

/Tftook ofJTppreciations cj' ^Mrs.O 'Mrs.lynn-Linton, J/rs. JIlexanderJMrs. ^facquou (¥rs. ^farshalt, Qiarlotte tM.Yong^ Adeline ¥ Edna tiilL

WOMEN NOVELISTS

of

QUEEN VICTORIA'S REIGN

Women Novelists

Of

Queen Victoria's Reign

A Book of Appreciations

By

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Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Lynn Linton

Mrs. Alexander, Mrs. Macquoid, Mrs. Parr

Mrs. Marshall, Charlotte M. Yonge

Adeline Sergeant ©* Edna Lyall

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London Hurst SP Blackett, Limited

13 Great Marlborough Street

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Wt

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co. At the Ballantyne Press

CONTENTS

THE SISTERS BRONTE

'By MRS. OLIPHANT Page I

GEORGE ELIOT

'By MRS. LYNN LINTON page 61

U-^MRS. GASKELL

'By EDNA LYALL page 117

MRS. CROWE

MRS. ARCHER CLIVE

MRS. HENRY WOOD

"By ADELINE SERGEANT Page 149

LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON MRS. STRETTON

ANNE MANNING

'By CHARLOTTE M. YONGE Page 193

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CONTENTS

DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)

'By MRS. PARR PW 217

JULIA KAVANAGH

AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS

'By MRS. MACQUOID page 249

MRS. NORTON

'By MRS. ALEXANDER page 275

"A. L. O. E." (MISS TUCKER) MRS. EWING

T$y MRS. MARSHALL page 291

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PUBLISHERS' NOTE

TJTAVING been concerned for many years in the publication of works of fiction by feminine writers, it has occurred to us to offer, as our contri- bution to the celebration of " the longest Reign" a volume having for its subject leading Women Novelists of the Victorian Era.

In the case of living lady fictionists, it is too early to assess the merit or forecast the future of their works. The present book, therefore, is restricted to Women Novelists deceased.

It was further necessary to confine the volume within reasonable limits, and it was decided, consequently, that it should deal only with Women who did all their work in Fiction after the accession of the Queen. This decision excludes not only such writers as Lady Morgan, Mrs. Ofie, Miss Ferrier, Miss Mitford, Mrs. Shelley, and Miss Jane Porter, who, although

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PUBLISHERS' NOTE

they died after 1837, published all their most notable stories early in the century ; but also such writers as Mrs. Gore, Mrs. Bray, Mrs. S. C. Hall, Mrs. Trollope, Lady Blessington, and Mrs. Marsh, who made their debuts as novelists between 1823 and

1834. As regards some of the last-named, it might be

urged that the works they produced have now no interest other than historical, and can be said to live only so far as they embody more or less accurate descriptions of Society early in the Reign, tfhe " Deerbrook " and " The Hour and the Man " of Miss Martineau are still remembered, and, perhaps, still read; but it is as a political economist and miscellaneous writer, rather than as a Novelist, that their author ranks in literature ; while of the tales by Miss Par doe, Miss Geraldine Jews bury, and others once equally popular, scarcely the titles are now recollected.

On the other hand, the eminence and permanence of the Brontes, Qeorge Eliot, and Mrs. Qaskell are universally recognised ; the popularity of Mrs. Craik and Mrs. Henry Wood is still admittedly great ; the personality of Mrs. Norton will always send students to her works; Mrs. Crowe and Mrs. Clive were

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PUBLISHERS' NOTE

pioneers in domestic and " sensational " fiction ; Lady Qeorgiana Fullerton -produced a typical religious novel ; Miss Manning made pleasing and acceptable the autobiographico-historical narrative ; the authors of " The Valley of a Hundred Fires" of " 'Barbaras History" and of " Adele," have even now their readers and admirers ; while "A. L. 0. E." and Mrs. Ewing were among the most successful caterers for the young.

It has seemed to us that value as well as interest would attach to critical estimates of, and biographical notes upon, these representative Novelists, supplied by living mistresses of the craft; and we are glad to have been able to secure for the purpose, the services of the contributors to this volume, all of whom may claim to discourse with some authority upon the art they cultivate. It is perhaps scarcely necessary to say that each contributor is responsible only for the essay to which her name is appended.

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THE SISTERS BRONTE By MRS. OLIPHANT

THE SISTERS BRONTE

I HE effect produced upon the general mind by the appearance of Charlotte Bronte in literature, and afterwards by the record of her life when that was over, is one which it is nowadays somewhat difficult to understand. Had the age been deficient in the art of fiction, or had it followed any long level of mediocrity in that art, we could have comprehended this more easily. But Charlotte Bronte appeared in the full flush of a period more richly endowed than any other we know of in that special branch of literature, so richly endowed, indeed, that the novel had taken quite fictitious importance, and the names of Dickens and Thackeray ranked almost higher than those of any living writers except perhaps Tennyson, then young and on his promotion too. Anthony Trollope and Charles Reade who, though in their day extremely popular, have never had justice from

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a public which now seems almost to have forgotten them, formed a powerful second rank to these two great names. It is a great addition to the value of the distinction gained by the new comer that it was acquired in an age so rich in the qualities of the imagination.

But this only increases the wonder of a triumph which had no artificial means to heighten it, nothing but genius on the part of a writer possessing little experience or knowledge of the world, and no sort of social training or adventitious aid. The genius was indeed unmistakable, and possessed in a very high degree the power of expressing itself in the most vivid and actual pictures of life. But the life of which it had command was seldom attractive, often narrow, local, and of a kind which meant keen personal satire more than any broader view of human existence. A group of commonplace clergymen, intense against their little parochial background as only the most real art of portraiture, intensified by individual scorn and dislike, could have made them : the circle of limited interests, small emulations, keen little spites and rancours, filling the atmosphere of a great boarding school, the Brussels Pensionnatdesfilles — these were the two spheres chiefly por- trayed : but portrayed with an absolute untempered force which knew neither charity, softness, nor even impartiality, but burned upon the paper and made everything round

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By MRS. OLIPHANT

dim in the contrast. I imagine it was this extraordinary naked force which was the great cause of a success, never perhaps like the numerical successes in literature of the present day, when edition follows edition, and thousand thousand, of the books which are the favourites of the public : but one which has lived and lasted through nearly half a century, and is even now potent enough to carry on a little literature of its own, book after book following each other not so much to justify as to repro- claim and echo to all the winds the fame originally won. No one else of the century, I think, has called forth this persevering and lasting homage. Not Dickens, though perhaps more of him than of any one else has been dealt out at intervals to an admiring public ; not Thackeray, of whom still we know but little ; not George Eliot, though her fame has more solid foundations than that of Miss Bronte. Scarcely Scott has called forth more continual droppings of elucidation, explanation, remark. Yet the books upon which this tremendous reputation is founded though vivid, original, and striking in the highest degree, are not great books. Their philosophy of life is that of a schoolgirl, their knowledge of the world almost »/7, their conclusions confused by the haste and passion of a mind self-centred and working in the narrowest orbit. It is rather, as we have said, the most incisive and realistic

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art of portraiture than any exercise of the nobler arts of fiction — imagination, combination, construction — or humorous survey of life or deep apprehension of its problems — upon which this fame is built.

The curious circumstance that Charlotte Bronte was, if the word may be so used, doubled by her sisters, the elder, Emily, whose genius has been taken for granted, carrying the wilder elements of the common inspiration to extremity in the strange, chaotic and weird romance of " Wuthering Heights," while Anne diluted such powers of social obser- vation as were in the family into two mildly disagreeable novels of a much commoner order, has no doubt also en- hanced the central figure of the group to an amazing degree. They placed her strength in relief by displaying its separate elements, and thus commending the higher skill and larger spirit which took in both, understanding the moors and wild country and rude image of man better than the one, and misunderstanding the common course of more subdued life less than the other. The three together are for ever inseparable ; they were homely, lowly, somewhat neglected in their lives, had few opportunities and few charms to the careless eye : yet no group of women, undistinguished by rank, unendowed by beauty, and known to but a limited circle of friends as unimportant as them- selves have ever, I think, in the course of history —

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By MRS. OLIPHANT

certainly never in this century — come to such universal recognition. The effect is quite unique, unprecedented, and difficult to account for ; but there cannot be the least doubt that it is a matter of absolute fact which nobody can deny.

These three daughters of a poor country clergyman came into the world early in the century, the dates of their births being 1816, 1818, 1820, in the barest of little parsonages in the midst of the moors — a wild but beautiful country, and a rough but highly charac- teristic and keen-witted people. Yorkshire is the very heart of England ; its native force, its keen practical sense, its rough wit, and the unfailing importance in the nation of the largest of the shires has given it a strong individual character and position almost like that of an independent province. But the Brontes, whose name is a softened and decorated edition of a common Irish name, were not of that forcible race : and perhaps the strong strain after emotion, and revolt against the monotonies of life, which were so conspicuous in them were more easily traceable to their Celtic origin than many other developments attributed to that cause. They were motherless from an early age, children of a father who, after having been depicted as a capricious tyrant,

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seems now to have found a fairer representation as a man with a high spirit and peculiar temper, yet neither unkind to his family nor uninterested in their welfare. There was one son, once supposed to be the hero and victim of a disagreeable romance, but apparent now as only a specimen, not alas, uncommon, of the ordinary ne'er-do- well of a family, without force of character or self-control to keep his place with decency in the world.

These children all scribbled from their infancy as soon as the power of inscribing words upon paper was acquired by them, inventing imaginary countries and compiling vision- ary records of them as so many imaginative children do. The elder girl and boy made one pair, the younger girls another, connected by the closest links of companionship. It was thought or hoped that the son was the genius of the family, and at the earliest possible age he began to send his effusions to editors, and to seek admission to magazines with the mingled arrogance and humility of a half- fledged creature. But the world knows now that it was not poor Branwell who was the genius of the family ; and this injury done him in his cradle, and the evil report of him that everybody gives throughout his life, awakens a certain pity in the mind for the unfortunate youth so unable to keep any supremacy among the girls whom he must have considered his natural inferiors and vassals.

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By MRS. OLIPHANT

We are told by Charlotte Bronte herself that he never knew of the successes of his sisters, the fact of their successive publications being concealed from him out of tenderness for his feelings ; but it is scarcely to be credited that when the parish knew the unfortunate brother did not find out. The unhappy attempt of Mrs. Gaskell in writing the lives of the sisters to make this melancholy young man accountable for the almost brutal element in Emily Bronte's conception of life, and the strange views of Charlotte as to what men were capable of, has made him far too important in their history ; where, indeed, he had no need to have appeared at all, had the family pride consisted, as the pride of so many families does, in veiling rather than exhibiting the faults of its members. So far as can be made out now, he had as little as possible to do with their development in any way.

There was nothing unnatural or out of the common in the youthful life of the family except that strange gift of genius, which though consistent with every genial quality of being, in such a nature as that of Scott, seems in other developments of character to turn all the elements into chaos. Its effect upon the parson's three daughters was, indeed, not of a very wholesome kind. It awakened in them an uneasy sense of superiority which gave double force to every one of the little hardships

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which a girl in a great school of a charitable kind, and a governess in a middle-class house, has to support : and made life harder instead of sweeter to them in many ways, since it was full of the biting experience of conditions less favourable than those of many persons round them whom they could not but feel inferior to themselves.

The great school, which it was Charlotte Bronte's first act when she began her literary career to invest with an almost tragic character of misery, privation, and wrong, was her first step from home. Yorkshire schools did not at that period enjoy a very good reputation in the world, and Nicholas Nickleby was forming his acquaintance with the squalid cruelty of Dotheboys Hall just about the same time when Charlotte Bronte's mind was being filled with the privations and discontents of Lowood. In such a case there is generally some fire where there is so much smoke, and probably Lowood was under no very heavenly regime : but at the same time its drawbacks were sharply accentuated by that keen criticism which is suggested by the constant sense of injured worth and consciousness of a superiority not acknowledged. The same feeling pursued her into the situations as governess which she occupied one after another, and in which her indignation at being expected to feel affection for the children put under her

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By MRS. OLIPHANT

charge, forms a curious addition to the other grievances with which fate pursues her life. No doubt there are many temptations in the life of a governess ; the position of a silent observer in a household, looking on at all its mistakes, and seeing the imperfection of its management with double force because of the effect they have on herself — especially if she feels herself competent, had she but the power, to set things right — must always be a difficult one. It was not continued long enough, how- ever, to involve very much suffering ; though no doubt it helped to mature the habit of sharp personal criticism and war with the world.

At the same time Charlotte Bronte made some very warm personal friendships, and wrote a great many letters to the school friends who pleased her, in which a somewhat stilted tone and demure seriousness is occasionally invaded by the usual chatter of girl- hood, to the great improvement of the atmosphere if not of the mind. Ellen Nussey, Mary Taylor, women not manifestly intellectual but sensible and independent without either exaggeration of sentiment or hint of tragic story, remained her close friends as long as she lived, and her letters to them, though always a little demure, give us a gentler idea of her than anything else she has written. Not that there is much charm either of style or subject

THE SISTERS BRONTE

in them : but there is no sort of bitterness or sense of insufficient appreciation. Nothing can be more usual and commonplace, indeed, than this portion of her life. As in so many cases, the artificial lights thrown upon it by theories formed afterwards, clear away when we examine its actual records, and it is apparent that there was neither exceptional harshness of circumstance nor in- ternal struggle in the existence of the girl who, though more or less in arms against everybody outside — especially when holding a position superior to her own, more especially still when exercising authority over her in any way — was yet quite an easy-minded, not unhappy, young woman at home, with friends to whom she could pour out long pages of what is, on the whole, quite moderate and temperate criticism of life, not without cheerful allusion to now and then a chance curate or other young person of the opposite sex, suspected of " paying attention " to one or other of the little coterie. These allusions are not more lofty or dignified than are similar notes of girls of less exalted pretensions, but there is not a touch in them of the keen pointed pen which afterwards put up the Haworth curates in all their imper- fections before the world.

The other sisters at this time in the background, two figures always clinging together, looking almost like one,

By MRS. OLIPHANT

have no great share in this softer part of Charlotte's life. They were, though so different in character, completely devoted to each other, apparently forming no other friendships, each content with the one other partaker of her every thought. A little literature seems to have been created between them, little chapters of recollection and commentary upon their life, sealed up and put away for three years in each case, to be opened on Emily's or on Anne's birthday alternately, as a pathetic sign of their close unity, though the little papers were in themselves simple in the extreme. Anne too became a governess with something of the same experience as Charlotte, and uttering very hard judgments of unconscious people who were not the least unkind to her. But Emily had no such trials. She remained at home perhaps because she was too uncompromising to be allowed to make the experiment of putting up with other people, perhaps because one daughter at home was indis- pensable. The family seems to have had kind and trusted old servants, so that the cares of housekeeping did not weigh heavily upon the daughter in charge, and there is no evidence of exceptional hardness or roughness in their circumstances in any way.

In 1842, Charlotte and Emily, aged respectively twenty-six and twenty-four, went to Brussels. Their

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design was "to acquire a thorough familiarity with French," also some insight into other languages, with the view of setting up a school on their own account. The means were supplied by the aunt, who had lived in their house and taken more or less care of them since their mother's death. The two sisters were nearly a year in the Pensionnat Heger, now so per- fectly known in every detail of its existence to all who have read " Villette." They were recalled by the death of the kind aunt who had procured them this advantage, and afterwards Charlotte, no one quite knows why, went back to Brussels for a second year, in which all her impressions were probably strengthened and intensified. Certainly a more clear and lifelike picture, scathing in its cold yet fierce light, was never made than that of the white tall Brussels house, its class rooms, its gardens, its hum of unamiable girls, its sharp display of rancorous and shrill teachers, its one inimitable professor. It startles the reader to find — a fact which we had for- gotten— that M. Paul Emmanuel was M. Heger, the husband of Madame Heger and legitimate head of the house : and that this daring and extraordinary girl did not hesitate to encounter gossip or slander by making him so completely the hero of her romance. Slander in its commonplace form had nothing to do with such

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a fiery spirit as that of Charlotte Bronte : but it shows her perfect independence of mind and scorn of comment that she should have done this. In the end of '43 she returned home, and the episode was over. It was really the only episode of possible practical significance in her life until we come to the records of her brief literary career and her marriage, both towards its end.

The prospect of the school which the three sisters were to set up together was abandoned ; there was no more talk of governessing. We are not told if it was the small inheritance of the aunt — only, Mr. Clement Shorter informs us, ^1500 — which enabled the sisters henceforward to remain at home without thought of further effort : but certainly this was what happened. And the lives of the two younger were drawing so near the end that it is a comfort to think that they enjoyed this moment of comparative grace together. Their life was extremely silent, secluded, and apart. There was the melancholy figure of Bran well to distract the house with the spectacle of heavy idleness, drink, and disorder ; but this can scarcely have been so great an affliction as if he had been a more beloved brother. He was not, however, veiled by any tender attempt to cover his follies or wickedness, but openly complained of to all their friends,

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which mitigates the affliction : and they seem to have kept very separate from him, living in a world of their own.

In 1 846 a volume of poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, was published at their own cost. It had not the faintest success ; they were informed by the publisher that two copies only had been sold, and the only satis- faction that remained to them was to send a few copies to some of the owners of those great names which the enthusiastic young women had worshipped from afar as stars in the firmament. These poems were republished after Charlotte Bronte had attained her first triumph, and people had begun to cry out and wonder over "Wuthering Heights." The history of "Jane Eyre," on the other hand, is that of most works which have been the beginning of a career. It fell into the hands of the right man, the "reader" of Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co., Mr. Williams, a man of great intelligence and literary insight. The first story written by Charlotte Bronte, which was called "The Pro- fessor," and was the original of "Villette," written at a time when her mind was very full of the emotions raised by that singular portion of her life, had been rejected by a number of publishers, and was also rejected by Mr. Williams, who found it at once too crude and

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too short for the risks of publication, three volumes at that period being your only possible form for fiction. But he saw the power in it, and begged the author to try again at greater length. She did so ; not on the basis of the " Professor " as might have seemed natural — probably the materials were still too much at fever-heat in her mind to be returned to at that moment — but by the story of " Jane Eyre," which at once placed Charlotte Bronte amid the most popular and powerful writers of her time.

I remember well the extraordinary thrill of interest which in the midst of all the Mrs. Gores, Mrs. Marshs, &c. — the latter name is mentioned along with those of Thackeray and Dickens even by Mr. Williams — came upon the reader who, in the calm of ignorance, took up the first volume of " Jane Eyre." The period of the heroine in white muslin, the immaculate creature who was of sweetness and goodness all compact, had lasted in the common lines of fiction up to that time. Miss Austen indeed might well have put an end to that abstract and empty fiction, yet it continued, as it always does continue more or less, the primitive ideal. But " Jane Eyre " gave her, for the moment, the coup de grace. That the book should be the story of a governess was perhaps necessary to the circumstances of the writer : and the governess was

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already a favourite figure in fiction. But generally she was of the beautiful, universally fascinating, all-enduring kind, the amiable blameless creature whose secret merits were never so hidden but that they might be perceived by a keen sighted hero. I am not sure, indeed, that anybody believed Miss Bronte when she said her heroine was plain. It is very clear from the story that Jane was never un- noticed, never failed to please, except among the women, whom it is the instinctive art of the novelist to rouse in arms against the central figure, thus demonstrating the jealousy, spite, and rancour native to their minds in respect to the women who please men. No male cynic was ever stronger on that subject than this typical woman. She cannot have believed it, I presume, since her closest friends were women, and she seems to have had perfect faith in their kindness : but this is a matter of conven- tional belief which has nothing to do with individual experience. It is one of the doctrines unassailable of the art of fiction ; a thirty-ninth article in which every writer of novels is bound to believe.

Miss Bronte did not know fine ladies, and there- fore, in spite of herself and a mind the reverse of vulgar, she made the competitors for Mr. Rochester's favour rather brutal and essentially vulgar persons, an error, curiously enough, which seems to have been

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followed by George Eliot in the corresponding scenes in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story," where Captain Wybrow's fiancee treats poor Tiny very much as the beauty in Mr. Rochester's house treats Jane Eyre. Both were imagi- nary pictures, which perhaps more or less excuses their untruthfulness in writers both so sincere and life-like in treating things they knew. It is amusing to remember that Jane Eyre's ignorance of dress gave a clinching argument to Miss Rigby in the Quarterly to decide that the writer was not and could not possibly be a woman. The much larger and more significant fact that no man (until in quite recent days when there have been instances of such effeminate art) ever made a woman so entirely the subject and inspiration of his book, the only interest in it, was entirely overlooked in what was, notwithstanding, the very shrewd and telling argument about the dress.

The chief thing, however, that distressed the candid and as yet unaccustomed reader in "Jane Eyre," and made him hope that it might be a man who had written it, was the character of Rochester's confidences to the girl whom he loved — not the character of Rochester, which was com- pletely a woman's view, but that he should have talked to a girl so evidently innocent of his amours and his mistresses. This, however, I think, though, as we should have thought, a subject so abhorrent to a young woman

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such as Charlotte Bronte was, was also emphatically a woman's view. A man might have credited another man of Rochester's kind with impulses practically more heinous and designs of the worst kind : but he would not have made him err in that way.

In this was a point of honour which the woman did not understand. It marks a curious and subtle differ- ence between the sexes. The woman less enlightened in practical evil considers less the risks of actual vice ; but her imagination is free in other ways, and she innocently permits her hero to do and say things so completely against the code which is binding on gentlemen whether vicious or otherwise that her want of perception becomes conspicuous. The fact that the writer of the review in the Quarterly was herself a woman accounts for her mistake in supposing that the book was written if not by a man, by " a woman unsexed ; " "a woman who had forfeited the society of her sex." And afterwards, when Mrs. Gaskell made her disastrous statements about Branwell Bronte and other associates of Charlotte's youth, it was with the hope of proving that the speech and manners of the men to whom she had been accustomed were of a nature to justify her in any such misapprehension of the usual manners of gentlemen. It was on the contrary, as I think, only the bold and unfettered imagination of a

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woman quite ignorant on all such subjects which could have suggested this special error. The mind of such a woman, casting about for something to make her wicked but delightful hero do by way of demonstrating his wickedness, yet preserving the fascination which she meant him to retain, probably hit upon this as the very wickedest thing she could think of, yet still attrac- tive : for is there not a thrill of curiosity in searching out what such a strange being might think or say, which is of itself a strong sensation ? Miss Bronte was, I think, the first to give utterance to that curiosity of the woman in respect to the man, and fascination of interest in him — not the ideal man, not Sir Kenneth, too reverent for anything but silent worship — which has since risen to such heights of speculation, and imprints now a tone upon modern fiction at which probably she would have been horrified.

There were numberless stories in those days of guilty love and betrayal, of how " lovely woman stoops to folly," and all the varieties of that endless subject ; but it was, except in the comic vein, or with grotesque treatment, the pursuit of the woman by the man, the desire of the lover for the beloved which was the aim of fiction. A true lady of romance walked superior : she accepted (or not)

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the devotion : she stooped from her white height to reward her adorer : but that she herself should condescend to seek him (except under the circumstances of fashion- able life, where everybody is in quest of a coronet), or call out for him to heaven and earth when he tarried in his coming, was unknown to the situations of romantic art. When the second of Charlotte Bronte's books appeared, there was accordingly quite a new sensation in store for the public. The young women in "' Shirley " were all wild for this lover who, though promised by all the laws of nature and romance, did not appear. They leaned out of their windows, they stretched forth their hands, calling for him — appealing to heaven and earth. Why were they left to wear out their bloom, to lose their freshness, to spend their days in sewing and dreaming, when he, it was certain, was about somewhere, and by sheer perversity of fate could not find the way to them ? Nothing was thought of the extra half-million of women in those days ; perhaps it had not begun to exist ; but that " nobody was coming to marry us, nobody coming to woo " was apparent.

Young ladies like Miss Charlotte Bronte and Miss Ellen Nussey her friend, would have died rather than give vent to such sentiments ; but when the one of them to whom that gift was given found that her pen had

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become a powerful instrument in her hand, the current of the restrained feeling burst all boundaries, and she poured forth the cry which nobody had suspected before. It had been a thing to be denied, to be indignantly con- tradicted as impossible, if ever a lovesick girl put herself forth to the shame of her fellows and the laugh of the world. When such a phenomenon appeared, she was con- demned as either bad or foolish by every law : and the idea that she was capable of " running after " a man was the most dreadful accusation that could be brought against a woman. Miss Bronte's heroines, however, did not precisely do this. Shirley and Caroline Helstone were not in love so much as longing for love, clamouring for it, feeling it to be their right of which they were somehow defrauded. There is a good deal to be said for such a view. If it is the most virtuous thing in the world for a man to desire to marry, to found a family, to be the father of children, it should be no shameful thing for a woman to own the same desire. But it is somehow against the instinct of primitive humanity, which has decided that the woman should be no more than responsive, maintaining a reserve in respect to her feelings, subduing the expression, unless in the "once, and only once, and to One only " of the poet.

Charlotte Bronte was the first to overthrow this super-

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stition. Personally I am disposed to stand for the super- stition, and dislike all transgression of it. But that was not the view of the most reticent and self-controlled of maidens, the little governess, clad in all the strict pro- prieties of the period, the parson's daughter despising curates, and unacquainted with other men. In her secret heart, she demanded of fate night and day why she, so full of life and capability, should be left there to dry up and wither ; and why Providence refused her the completion of her being. Her heart was not set on a special love ; still less was there anything fleshly or sensual in her imagination. It is a shame to use such words in speaking of her, even though to cast them forth as wholly inapplicable. The woman's grievance — that she should be left there unwooed, unloved, out of reach of the natural openings of life : without hope of motherhood : with the great instinct of her being unfulfilled — was almost a philosophical, and entirely an abstract, grievance, felt by her for her kind : for every woman dropped out of sight and unable to attain the manner of existence for which she was created. And I think it was the first time this cry had been heard out of the mouth of a perfectly modest and pure-minded woman, nay, out of the mouth of any woman ; for it had nothing to do with the shriek of the Sapphos for love. It was more startling, more confusing

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to the general mind, than the wail of the lovelorn. The gentle victim of " a disappointment," or even the soured and angered victim, was a thing quite understood and familiar : but not the woman calling upon heaven and earth to witness that all the fates were conspiring against her to cheat her of her natural career.

So far as I can see this was the great point which gave force to Charlotte Bronte's genius and conferred upon her the curious pre-eminence she possesses among the romancers of her time. In this view " Shirley," though I suppose the least popular, is the most characteristic of her works. It is dominated throughout with this complaint. Curates ? Yes, there they are, a group of them. Is that the thing you expect us women to marry ? Yet it is our right to bear children, to guide the house. And we are half of the world, and where is the provision for us ?

This cry disturbed the critic, the reader, the general public in the most curious way ; they did not know what to make of it. Was it a shameless woman who was so crying out ? It is always the easiest way, and one which avoids all complications, to say so, and thus crush every question. But it was scarcely easy to believe this in face of other circumstances. Mrs. Gaskell, as much puzzled as any one, when Charlotte Bronte's short life was over, tried hard to account for it by " environment " as the

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superior persons say, that is by the wicked folly of her brother, and the coarseness of all the Yorkshiremen round ; and thus originated in her bewilderment, let us hope with- out other intention, a new kind of biography, as the subject of it inaugurated an entirely new kind of social revolution. The cry of the women indeed almost distressed as well as puzzled the world. The vivid genius still held it, but the ideas were alarming, distracting beyond measure. The 'Times blew a trumpet of dismay ; the book was revolu- tion as well as revelation. It was an outrage upon good taste, it was a betrayal of sentiments too widespread to be comfortable. It was indelicate if not immodest. We have outgrown now the very use of this word, but it was a potent one at that period. And it was quite a just reproach. That cry shattered indeed altogether the " delicacy " which was supposed to be the most exquisite characteristic of womankind. The softening veil is blown away, when such exhibitions of feeling are given to the world.

From that period to this is a long step. We have travelled through many years and many gradations of sentiment : and we have now arrived at a standard of opinion by which the " sex-problem " has become the most interesting of questions, the chief occupation of fiction, to be discussed by men and women alike with growing

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warmth and openness, the immodest and the indelicate being equally and scornfully dismissed as barriers with which Art has nothing to do. My impression is that Charlotte Bronte was the pioneer and founder of this school of romance, though it would probably have shocked and distressed her as much as any other woman of her

age. :;

-'•"••'- "•-• •

The novels of Emily and Anne Bronte were published shortly after " Jane Eyre," in three volumes, of which " Wuthering Heights " occupied the first two. I am obliged to confess that I have never shared the common sentiment of enthusiasm for that, to me, unlovely book. The absence of almost every element of sympathy in it, the brutality and misery, tempered only by an occasional gleam of the heather, the freshness of an occasional blast over the moors, have prevented me from appreciating a force which I do not deny but cannot admire. The figure of Heathcliffe, which perhaps has called forth more praise than any other single figure in the literature of the time, does not touch me. I can understand how in the jumble which the reader unconsciously makes, explaining him more or less by Rochester and other of Charlotte Bronte's heroes, he may take his place in a sort of system, and thus have humanities read into him, so to speak, which he does

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not himself possess. But though the horror and isolation of the house is powerful I have never been able to recon- cile myself either to the story or treatment, or to the estimate of Emily Bronte's genius held so strongly by so many people. There is perhaps the less harm in refrain- ing from much comment on this singular book, of which I gladly admit the unique character, since it has been the occasion of so many and such enthusiastic comments. To me Emily Bronte is chiefly interesting as the double of her sister, exaggerating at once and softening her character and genius as showing those limits of superior sense and judgment which restrained her, and the softer lights which a better developed humanity threw over the landscape common to them both. We perceive better the temper- ing sense of possibility by which Charlotte made her rude and almost brutal hero still attractive, even in his masterful ferocity, when we see Emily's incapacity to express anything in her hero except perhaps a touch of that tragic pathos, prompting to fiercer harshness still, which is in the soul of a man who never more, whatever he does, can set himself right. This is the one strain of poetry to my mind in the wild conception. There was no measure in the younger sister's thoughts, nor temper- ance in her methods.

The youngest of all, the gentle Anne, would have no

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right to be considered at all as a writer but for her associa- tion with these imperative spirits. An ordinary little novelette and a moral story, working out the disastrous knowledge gained by acquaintance with the unfortunate Branwell's ruinous habits, were her sole productions. She was the element wanting in Emily's rugged work and nature. Instead of being two sisters constantly entwined with each other, never separate when they could help it, had Anne been by some fantastic power swamped altogether and amalgamated with her best beloved, we may believe that Emily might then have shown herself the foremost^ of the three. But the group as it stands is more interesting than any single individual could be. And had Charlotte Bronte lived a long and triumphant life, a fanciful writer might have imagined that the throwing off of those other threads of being so closely attached to her own had poured greater force and charity into her veins. But we are baffled in all our suggestions for the amendment of the ways of Providence.

The melancholy and tragic year, or rather six months, which swept from Haworth Parsonage three of its inmates, and left Charlotte and her father alone to face life as they might, was now approaching ; and it seems so completely an episode in the story of the elder sister's

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genius as well as her life, that its history is like that of an unwritten tragedy, hers as much as her actual work. Bran- well was the first to die, unwept yet not without leaving a pathetic note in the record. Then came the extraordinary passion and agony of Emily, which has affected the imagination so much, and which, had it been for any noble purpose, would have been a true martyrdom. But to die the death of a Stoic, in fierce resistance yet subjection to Nature, regardless of the feelings of all around, for the sake of pride and self-will alone, is not an act to be looked upon with the reverential sympathy which, however, it has secured from many. The strange creature with her shoes on her feet and her staff in her hand, refusing till the last to acknowledge herself to be ill or to receive any help in her weakness, gives thus a kind of climax to her strange and painful work. Her death took place in December of the same year (1848) in which Bran well died. Anne, already delicate, would never seem to have held up her head after her sister's death, and in May 1 849 she followed, but in all sweetness and calmness, to her early grave. She was twenty- eight ; Emily twenty-nine. So soon had the fever of life worn itself out and peace come. Charlotte was left alone. There had not been to her in either of them the close companion which they had found in each other. But yet life ebbed away from her with their deaths, which

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occurred in such a startling and quick succession as always makes bereavement more terrible.

This occurred at the height of her mental activity. " Shirley " had been published, and had been received with the divided feeling we have referred to ; and when she was thus left alone she found, no doubt, the solace which of all mortal things work gives best, by resuming her natural occupation in the now more than ever sombre seclusion of the Parsonage, to which, however, her favourite friend, Ellen Nussey, came from time to time. One or two visits to London occurred after the two first publications in which, a demure little person, silent and shy, yet capable of expressing herself very distinctly by times, and by no means unconscious of the claim she now had upon other people's respect and admiration, Charlotte Bronte made a little sensation in the society which was opened to her, not always of a very successful kind. Everybody will remember the delightfully entertaining chapter in literary history in which Mrs. Ritchie, with charming humour and truth, recounts the visit of this odd little lion to her father's house, and Thackeray's abrupt and clandestine flight to his club when it was found that nothing more was to be made of her than an absorbed conversation with the governess in the back drawing-room, a situation like one in a novel, and so very like the act of

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modest greatness, singling out the least important person as the object of her attentions.

She is described by all her friends as plain, even ugly — a small woman with a big nose, and no other notable feature, not even the bright eyes which are generally attri- buted to genius — which was probably, however, better than the lackadaisical portrait prefixed to her biography, after a picture by Richmond, which is the typical portrait of a governess of the old style, a gentle creature depre- cating and wistful. Her letters are very good letters, well expressed in something of the old-fashioned way, but without any of the charm of a born letter-writer. Indeed, charm does not seem to have been hers in any way. But she had a few very staunch friends who held fast by her all her life, notwithstanding the uncomfortable experience of being " put in a book," which few people like. It is a gift by itself to put other living people in books. The novelist does not always possess it ; to many the realms of imagination are far more easy than the arid realms of fact, and to frame an image of a man much more natural than to take his portrait. I am not sure that it is not a mark of greater strength to be able to put a living and recognisable person on the canvas than it is to invent one. Anyhow, Miss Bronte possessed it in great perfection. Impossible to doubt that the characters of " Shirley " were

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real men ; still more impossible to doubt for a moment the existence of M. Paul Emmanuel. The pursuit of such a system requires other faculties than those of the mere romancist. It demands a very clear-cut opinion, a keen judgment not disturbed by any strong sense of the complexities of nature, nor troubled by any possibility of doing injustice to its victim.

One thing strikes us very strongly in the description of the school, Lowood, which was her very first step in literature, and in which there can now be no doubt, from her own remarks on the manner in which it was received, she had a vindictive purpose. I scarcely know why, for, of course, the dates are all there to prove the difference — but my own conclusion had always been that she was a girl of fourteen or fifteen, old enough to form an opinion when she left the school. I find, with much consternation, that she was only nine ; and that so far as such a strenuous opinion was her own at all, it must have been formed at that early and not very judicious age. That the picture should be so vivid with only a little girl's recollection to go upon is wonderful ; but it is not particularly valuable as a verdict against a great institution, its founder and all its ways. Nevertheless, it had its scathing and wounding effect as much as if the

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little observer, whose small judgment worked so pre- cociously, had been capable of understanding the things which she condemned. It would be rash to trust nineteen in such a report, but nine !

It was at a different age and in other circumstances that Charlotte Bronte made her deep and extraordinary study of the Brussels Pensionnat. She was twenty-seven ; she had already gone through a number of those years of self- repression during which, by dint of keeping silence, the heart burns. She was, if we may accept the freedom of her utterances in fiction as more descriptive of her mind than the measured sentences of her letters, angry with fate and the world which denied her a brighter career, and bound her to the cold tasks of dependence and the com- pany of despised and almost hated inferiors during the best of her life. Her tremendous gift of sight — not second sight or any visionary way of regarding the object before her, but that vivid and immediate vision which took in every detail, and was decisive on every act as if it had been the vision of the gods — was now fully matured. She saw all that was about her with this extraordinary clearness without any shadow upon the object or possibility of doubt as to her power of seeing it all round and through and through. She makes us also see and know the big white house, with every room

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distinct : the garden, with its great trees and alleys : the class-rooms, each with its tribune : the girls, fat and round and phlegmatic in characteristic foreignism, and herself as spectator, looking on with contemptuous in- difference, not caring to discriminate be ween them. The few English figures, which concern her more, are drawn keen upon the canvas, though with as little friendliness; the teachers sharply accentuated, Mdlle. Sophie, for in- stance, who, when she is in a rage, has no lips, and all the sharp contentions and false civilities of those banded Free Lances, enemies to everybody and to each other ; the image of watchful suspicion in the head of the house — all these are set forth in glittering lines of steel. There is not a morsel of compunction in the picture. Everybody is bad, worthless, a hater of the whole race. The mistress of the establishment moves about stealthily, watching, her eyes showing through a mist in every corner, going and coming without a sound. What a picture it is ! There is not a good meaning in the whole place — not even that beneficent absence of meaning which softens the view. They are all bent on their own aims, on gaining an advantage great or small over their neighbours ; nobody is spared, nobody is worth a revision of judgment — except one.

The little Englishwoman herself, who is the centre of all this, is not represented as more lovable than the rest.

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She is the hungry little epicure, looking on while others feast, and envying every one of them, even while she snarls at their fare as apples of Gomorrah. She cannot abide that they should be better off than she, even though she scorns their satisfaction in what they possess. Her wild and despairing rush through Brussels when the town is en fete, cold, impassioned, fever-hot with rancour and loneliness, produces the most amazing effect on the mind. She is the banished spirit for whom there is no place, the little half-tamed wild beast, wild with desire to tear and rend everything that is happy. One feels that she has a certain justification and realises the full force of being left out in the cold, of having no part or lot in the matter when other people are amused and rejoice. Many other writers have endeavoured to produce a similar effect with milder means, but I suppose because of a feeble- minded desire to preserve the reputation of their forlorn heroine and give the reader an amiable view of her, no one has succeeded like the author of " Villette," who is in no way concerned for the amiability of Lucy Snowe.

For the impartiality of this picture is as extraordinary as its power. Lucy Snowe is her own historian ; it is the hot blood of the autobiographist that rushes through her veins, yet no attempt is made to recommend her to the reader or gain his sympathy. She is much too real to think of these

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outside things, or of how people will judge her, or how to make her proceedings acceptable to their eyes, We do not know whether Charlotte Bronte ever darted out of the white still house, standing dead in the moonlight, and rushed through the streets and, like a ghost, into the very heart of the gaslights and festivities ; but it would be difficult to persuade any reader that some one had not done so, imprinting that phantasmagoria of light and darkness upon a living brain. Whether it was Charlotte Bronte or Lucy Snowe, the effect is the same. We are not even asked to feel for her or pity her, much less to approve her. Nothing is demanded from us on her account but merely to behold the soul in revolt and the strange workings of her despair. It was chiefly because of the indifference to her of Dr. John that Lucy was thus driven into a momentary madness ; and with the usual regardless indiscretion of all Charlotte Bronte's amateur biographers, Mr. Shorter intimates to us who was the living man who was Dr. John and occasioned all the commotion. The tragedy, however it appears, was unnecessary, for the victim got over it with no great difficulty, and soon began the much more engrossing interest which still remained behind.

Nothing up to this point has attracted us in " Villette," except, indeed, the tremendous vitality and reality of the

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whole, the sensation of the actual which is in every line, and which forbids us to believe for a moment that what we are reading is fiction. But a very different sentiment comes into being as we become acquainted with the black bullet-head and vivacious irascible countenance of M. Paul Emmanuel. He is the one only character in Miss Bronte's little world who has a real charm, whose entrance upon the stage warms all our feelings and awakens in us not interest alone, but lively liking, amusement and sym- pathy. The quick-witted, quick-tempered Frenchman, with all the foibles of his vanity displayed, as susceptible to any little slight as a girl, as easily pleased with a sign of kindness, as far from the English ideal as it is possible to imagine, dancing with excitement, raging with dis- pleasure, committing himself by every step he takes, cruel, delightful, barbarous and kind, is set before us in the fullest light, intolerable but always enchanting. He is as full of variety as Rosalind, as devoid of dignity as Pierrot, contradictory, inconsistent, vain, yet conquering all our prejudices and enchanting us while he performs every antic that, according to our usual code, a man ought not to be capable of. How was it that for this once the artist got the better of all her restrictions and overcame all her misconceptions, and gave us a man to be heartily loved, laughed at, and taken into our hearts ?

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I cannot answer that question. I am sorry that he was M. Heger, and the master of the establishment, and not the clever tutor who had so much of Madame Beck's confidence. But anyhow, he is the best that Miss Bronte ever did for us, the most attractive individual, the most perfect picture. The Rochesters were all more or less fictitious, notwith- standing the unconscious inalienable force of realism which gives them, in spite of themselves and us, a kind of overbearing life ; but Miss Bronte never did under- stand what she did not know. She had to see a thing before it impressed itself upon her, and when she did see it, with what force she saw ! She knew M. Paul Emmanuel, watching him day by day, seeing all his littlenesses and childishness, his vanity, his big warm heart, his clever brain, the manifold nature of the man. He stands out, as the curates stood out, absolutely real men about whom we could entertain no doubt, recog- nisable anywhere. The others were either a woman's men, like the Moors of Shirley, whose roughness was bluster (she could not imagine an Englishman who was not rough and rude), and their strength more or less made up ; or an artificial composition like St. John, an ideal bully like Rochester. The ideal was not her forte — she had few gifts that way : but she saw with overwhelming lucidity and keenness, and what she saw, without a

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doubt, without a scruple, she could put upon the canvas in lines of fire. Seldom, very seldom, did an object appear within reach of that penetrating light, which could be drawn lovingly or made to appear as a being to be loved. Was not the sole model of that species M. Paul ? It would seem that in the piteous poverty of her life, which was so rich in natural power, she had never met before a human creature in whom she could com- pletely trust, or one who commended himself to her entirely, with all his foibles and weaknesses increasing, not diminishing, the charm.

It is, in my opinion, a most impertinent inquiry to endea- vour to search out what were the sentiments of Charlotte Bronte for M. Heger. Any one whom it would be more impossible to imagine as breaking the very first rule of English decorum, and letting her thoughts stray towards another woman's husband, I cannot imagine. Her fancy was wild and her utterance free, and she liked to think that men were quite untrammelled by those proprieties which bound herself like bonds of iron in her private person, and that she might pluck a fearful joy by listening to their dreadful experiences : but she herself was as prim and Puritan as any little blameless governess that ever went out of an English parish. But while believing this I cannot but feel it was an intolerable spite of fortune that the one man

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whom she knew in her life, whom her story could make others love, the only man whom she saw with that real illumination which does justice to humanity, was not M. Paul Emmanuel but M. H^ger. This was why we were left trembling at the end of Lucy Snowe's story, not knowing whether he ever came back to her out of the wilds, fearing almost as keenly that nothing but loss could fitly end the tale, yet struggling in our imaginations against the doom — as if it had concerned our own happiness.

Was this new-born power in her, the power of represent- ing a man at his best, she who by nature saw both men and women from their worst side, a sign of the development of genius in herself, the softening of that scorn with which she had hitherto regarded a world chiefly made up of inferior beings, the mellowing influence of maturity ? So we might have said, had it not been that after this climax of produc- tion she never spake word more in the medium of fiction. Had she told the world everything she had to say ? Could she indeed say nothing but what she had seen and known in her limited experience — the trials of school and govern- essing, the longing of women, the pangs of solitude? That strange form of imagination which can deal only with fact, and depict nothing but what is under its eyes, is in its way perhaps the most impressive of all — especially when inspired by the remorseless lights of that keen out-

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ward vision which is unmitigated by any softening of love for the race, any embarrassing toleration as to feelings and motives. It is unfortunately true in human affairs that those who expect a bad ending to everything, and suspect a motive at least dubious to every action, prove right in a great number of cases, and that the qualities of truth and realism have been appropriated to their works by almost universal consent. Indeed there are some critics who think this the only true form of art. But it is at the same time a power with many limitations. The artist who labours, as M. Zola does, searching into every dust- heap, as if he could find out human nature, the only thing worth depicting, with all its closely hidden secrets, all its flying indistinguishable tones, all its infinite gradations of feeling, by that nauseous process, or by a roaring progress through the winds, upon a railway brake, or the visit of a superficial month to the most complicated, the most subtle of cities — must lay up for himself and for his reader many disappointments and deceptions : but the science of artistic study, as exemplified in him, had not been invented in Charlotte Bronte's day.

She did not attempt to go and see things with the intention of representing them ; she was therefore limited to the re- presentation of those things which naturally in the course of life came under her eyes. She knew, though only as a

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child, the management and atmosphere of a great school, and set it forth, branding a great institution with an insufferable stigma, justly or unjustly, who knows ? She went to another school and turned out every figure in it for our inspection — a community all jealous, spiteful, suspicious, clandestine : even the chance pupil with no particular relation to her story or herself, painted with all her frivolities for the edification of the world did not escape. "She was Miss So-and-So," say the army of commen- tators who have followed Miss Bronte, picking up all the threads, so that the grand-daughter of the girl who had the misfortune to be in the Brussels Pensionnat along with that remorseless artist may be able to study the character of her ancestress. The public we fear loves this kind of art, however, notwithstanding all its drawbacks.

On the other hand probably no higher inspiration could have set before us so powerfully the image of M. Paul. Thus we are made acquainted with the best and the worst which can be effected by this method — the base in all their baseness, the excellent all the dearer for their characteristic faults : but the one representation scarcely less offensive than the other to the victim. Would it be less trying to the in- dividual to be thus caught, identified, written out large in the light of love and glowing adoration, than in the more natural light of scorn ? I know not indeed which would be

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the worst ordeal to go through, to be drawn like Madame Beck, suspicious, stealthy, with watchful eyes appearing out of every corner, surprising every incautious word, than to be put upon the scene in the other manner, with all your peccadilloes exposed in the light of admiration and fondness, and yourself put to play the part of hero and lover. The point of view of the public is one thing, that of the victim quite another. We are told that Miss Bronte, perhaps with a momentary compunction for what she had done, believed herself to have pre- vented all injurious effects by securing that "Villette" should not be published in Brussels, or translated into the French tongue, both of them of course perfectly futile hopes since the very desire to hinder its appearance was a proof that this appearance would be of unusual interest. The fury of the lady exposed in all her stealthy ways could scarcely have been less than the confusion of her spouse when he found himself held up to the admiration of his town as Lucy Snowe's captivating lover. To be sure it may be said the public has nothing to do with this. These individuals are dead and gone, and no exposure can hurt them any longer, whereas the gentle reader lives for ever, and goes on through the generations, handing on to posterity his delight in M. Paul. But all the same it is a cruel and in reality an immoral art ; and it has this great

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disadvantage, that its area is extremely circumscribed, especially when the artist lives most of her life in a York- shire parsonage amid the moors, where so few notable persons come in her way.

There was however one subject of less absolute realism which Charlotte Bronte had at her command, having ex- perienced in her own person and seen her nearest friends under the experience, of that solitude and longing of women, of which she has made so remarkable an exposition. The long silence of life without an adventure or a change, the forlorn gaze out at windows which never show any one coming who can rouse the slightest interest in the mind, the endless years and days which pass and pass, carrying away the bloom, extinguishing the lights of youth, bringing a dreary middle age before which the very soul shrinks, while yet the sufferer feels how strong is the current of life in her own veins, and how capable she is of all the active duties of existence — this was the essence and soul of the existence she knew best. Was there no help for it? Must the women wait and long and see their lives thrown away, and have no power to save themselves ?

The position in itself so tragic is one which can scarcely be expressed without calling forth an inevitable ridicule, a laugh at the best, more often a sneer at the women whose

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desire for a husband is thus betrayed. Shirley and Caroline Helston both cried out for that husband with an indig- nation, a fire and impatience, a sense of wrong and injury, which stopped the laugh for the moment. It might be ludicrous but it was horribly genuine and true. Note there was nothing sensual about these young women. It was life they wanted ; they knew nothing of the grosser thoughts which the world with its jeers attributes to them : of such thoughts they were unconscious in a primitive innocence which perhaps only women understand. They wanted their life, their place in the world, the rightful share of women in the scheme of nature. Why did not it come to them ? The old patience in which women have lived for all the centuries fails now and again in a keen moment of energy when some one arises who sees no reason why she should endure this forced inaction, or why she should invent for herself inferior ways of working and give up her birthright, which is to carry on the world. The reader was horrified with these sentiments from the lips of young women. The women were half ashamed, yet more than half stirred and excited by the outcry, which was true enough if indelicate. All very well to talk of women working for their living, finding new channels for themselves, establishing their independence. How much have we said of all that, endeavouring to persuade our-

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selves ! Charlotte Bronte had the courage of her opinions. It was not education nor a trade that her women wanted. It was not a living but their share in life, a much more legitimate object had that been the way to secure it, or had there been any way to secure it in England. Miss Bronte herself said correct things about the protection which a trade is to a woman, keeping her from a mercenary marriage; but this was not in the least the way of her heroines. They wanted to be happy, no doubt, but above all things they wanted their share in life — to have their position by the side of men, which alone confers a natural equality, to have their shoulder to the wheel, their hands on the reins of common life, to build up the world, and link the generations each to each. In her philosophy marriage was the only state which procured this, and if she did not recommend a mercenary marriage she was at least very tolerant about its conditions, insisting less upon love than was to be expected and with a covert conviction in her mind that if not one man then another was better than any complete abandonment of the larger path. Lucy Snowe for a long time had her heart very much set on Dr. John and his placid breadth of Englishism : but when she finally found out that to be impossible her tears were soon dried by the prospect of Paul Emmanuel, so unlike him, coming into his place.

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Poor Charlotte Bronte ! She has not been as other women, protected by the grave from all betrayal of the esipodes in her own life. Everybody has betrayed her, and all she thought about this one and that, and every name that was ever associated with hers. There was a Mr. Taylor from London about whom she wrote with great freedom to her friend Miss Nussey, telling how the little man had come, how he had gone away without any advance in the affairs, how a chill came over her when he appeared and she found him much less attractive than when at a distance, yet how she liked it as little when he went away and was somewhat excited about his first letter, and even went so far as to imagine with a laugh that there might be possibly a dozen little Joe Taylors before all was over. She was hard upon Miss Austen for having no comprehen- sion of passion, but no one could have been cooler and less impassioned than she as she considered the question of Mr. Taylor, reluctant to come to any decision yet dis- appointed when it came to nothing. There was no longing in her mind for Mr. Taylor, but there was for life and action and the larger paths and the little Joes.

This longing which she expressed with so much vehemence and some poetic fervour as the burden of the lives of Shirley and her friends has been the key- note of a great deal that has followed — the revolts and

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rebellions, the wild notions about marriage, the " Sex Problem," and a great deal more. From that first point to the prevailing discussion of all the questions involved is a long way ; but it is a matter of logical progression, and when once the primary matter is opened, every enlargement of the subject may be taken as a thing to be expected. Charlotte Bronte was in herself the embodi- ment of all old-fashioned restrictions. She was proper, she was prim, her life was hedged in by all the little rules which bind the primitive woman. But when she left her little recluse behind and rushed into the world of imagination her exposure of the bondage in which she sat with all her sisters was far more daring than if she had been a woman of many experiences and knew what she was speaking of. She did know the longing, the dis- content, the universal contradiction and contrariety which is involved in that condition of unfulfilment to which so many grey and undeveloped lives are condemned. For her and her class, which did not speak of it, every- thing depended upon whether the woman married or did not marry. Their thoughts were thus artificially fixed to one point in the horizon, but their ambition was neither ignoble nor unclean. It was bold, indeed, in proportion to its almost ridiculous innocence, and want of percep- tion of any grosser side. Their share in life, their part in

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the mutual building of the house, was what they sought. But the seed she thus sowed has come to many growths which would have appalled Charlotte Bronte. Those who took their first inspiration from this cry of hers, have quite forgotten what it was she wanted, which was not emancipation but an extended duty. But while it would be very unjust to blame her for the vagaries that have followed and to which nothing could be less desirable than any building of the house or growth of the race, any responsibility or service — we must still believe that it was she who drew the curtain first aside and opened the gates to imps of evil meaning, polluting and profaning the domestic hearth.

The marriage which — after all these wild embodiments of the longing and solitary heart which could not consent to abandon its share in life, after Shirley and Lucy Snowe, and that complex unity of three female souls all unfulfilled, which had now been broken by death — she accepted in the end of her life, is the strangest com- mentary upon all that went before, or rather, upon all the literary and spiritual part of her history, though it was a quite appropriate ending to Mr. Bronte's daughter, and even to the writer of those sober letters which discussed Mr. Taylor, whether he should or should not be encouraged, and how it was a little disappointing after all to see him

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go away. Her final suitor was one of the class which she had criticised so scathingly, one who, it might have been thought, would scarcely have ventured to enter the presence or brave the glance of so penetrating an eye, but who would seem to have brought all the urgency of a, grand passion to the sombre parlour of the parsonage, to- the afternoon stillness of the lonely woman who would not seem to have suspected anything of the kind till it was poured out before her without warning. She was startled and confused by his declaration and appeal, never apparently having contemplated the possibility of any such occurrence ; and in the interval which followed the father raged and resisted, and the lover did not conceal his heartbroken condition but suffered without complaining while the lady looked on wistful, touched and attracted by the unlooked-for Jove, and gradually melting towards that, though indifferent to the man who offered it. Mr. Bronte evidently thought that if this now distinguished daughter who had been worshipped among the great people in London, and talked of in all the newspapers, married at all in her mature age, it should be some one distinguished like herself, and not the mere curate who was the natural fate of every clergyman's daughter, the simplest and least known.

THE SISTERS BRONTE

Charlotte meanwhile said no word, but saw the curate enact various tragic follies of love for her sake with a sort of awe and wonder, astonished to find herself thus possessed still of the charm which none are so sure as women that only youth and beauty can be expected to possess. And she had never had any beauty, and, though she was not old, was no longer young. It is a conventional fiction that a woman still in the thirties is beyond the exercise of that power. Indeed, it would be hard to fix the age at which the spell departs. Certainly the demeanour of Mr. Nicholls gave her full reason to believe that it had not departed from her. He faltered in the midst of the service, grew pale, almost lost his self- possession when he suddenly saw her among the kneeling figures round the altar ; and no doubt this rather shock- ing and startling exhibition of his feelings was more pardonable to the object of so much emotion than it was likely to have been to any other spectator. The romance is a little strange, but yet it is a romance in its quaint ecclesiastical way. And soon Charlotte was drawn still more upon her lover's side by the violence of her father. It was decided that the curate was to go, and that this late gleam of love-making was to be extinguished and the old dim at- mosphere to settle down again for ever. Finally, however, the mere love of love, which had always been more to her

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than any personal inclination, and the horror of that permanent return to the twilight of dreamy living against which she had struggled all her life, overcame her, and gave her courage ; but she married characteristically, not as women marry who are carried to a new home and make a new beginning in life, but retaining all the cir- cumstances of the old and receiving her husband into her father's house where she had already passed through so many fluctuations and dreamed so many dreams, and which was full to overflowing with the associations of the past.

We have no reason to suppose that it did not add to the happiness of her life ; indeed, every indi- cation is to the contrary, and the husband seems to have been kind, considerate and affectionate. Still this thing upon which so many of her thoughts had been fixed during her whole life, which she had felt to be the necessary condition of full development, and for which the little impassioned female circle of which she was the expositor had sighed and cried to heaven and earth, came to her at last very much in the form of a catastrophe. No doubt the circumstances of her quickly failing health and shortened life promote this feeling. But without really taking these into consideration the sensation remains the same. The strange little keen soul

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with its sharply fixed restrictions, yet intense force of per- ception within its limits, dropped out of the world into which it had made an irruption so brilliant and so brief and sank out of sight altogether, sank into the humdrum house between the old father and the sober husband, into the clerical atmosphere with which she had no sympathy, into the absolute quiet of domestic life to which no Prince Charming could now come gaily round the corner, out of the mists and moors, and change with a touch of his wand the grey mornings and evenings into golden days. Well ! was not this that which she had longed for, the natural end of life towards which her Shirley, her Caroline, her Lucy had angrily stretched forth their hands, indig- nant to be kept waiting, clamouring for instant entrance ? And so it was, but how different ! Lucy Snowe's little housekeeping, all the preparations which M. Paul made for her comfort and which seemed better to her than any palace, would not they too have taken the colour of perpetual dulness if everything had settled down and the Professor assumed his slippers by the domestic hearth ? Ah no, for Lucy Snowe loved the man, and Charlotte Bronte, as appears, loved only the love. It is a parable. She said a little later that she began to see that this was the fate which she would wish for those she loved best, for her friend Ellen, perhaps for her Emily if she had lived — the good

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man very faithful, very steady, worth his weight in gold — yet flatter than the flattest days of old, solidement nourri, a good substantial husband, managing all the parish business, full of talk about the Archdeacon's charge, and the diocesan meetings, and the other clergy of the moorland parishes. We can conceive that she got to fetching his slippers for him and taking great care that he was comfortable, and perhaps had it been so ordained might have grown into a contented matron and forgotten the glories and miseries, so inseparably twined and linked together, of her youth. But she only had a year in which to do all that, and this is how her marriage seems to turn into a catastrophe, the caging of a wild creature that had never borne captivity before, and which now could no longer rush forth into the heart of any shining /<?#, or to the window of a strange confessional, anywhere, to throw off the burden of the perennial contradiction, the ceaseless unrest of the soul, the boilings of the volcano under the snow.

I have said it was difficult to account for the extreme interest still attaching to everything connected with Charlotte Bronte ; not only the story of her peculiar genius, but also of everybody connected with her, though the circle was in reality quite a respectable, humdrum, and

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uninteresting one, containing nobody of any importance except the sister, who was her own wilder and fiercer part. One way, however, in which these sisters have won some part of their long-lasting interest is due to the treatment to which they have been sub- jected. They are the first victims of that ruthless art of biography which is one of the features of our time ; and that not only by Mrs. Gaskell, who took up her work in something of an apologetic vein, and was so anxious to explain how it was that her heroine expressed certain ideas not usual in the mouths of women, that she was compelled to take away the reputation of a number of other people in order to excuse the peculiarities of these two remarkable women. But everybody who has touched their history since, and there have been many — for it would seem that gossip, when restrained by no bonds of decorum or human feeling, possesses a certain interest whether it is concerned with the household of a cardinal or that of a parish priest — has followed the same vicious way without any remonstrance or appeal for mercy. We have all taken it for granted that no mercy was to be shown to the Brontes. Let every rag be torn from Charlotte, of whom there is the most to say. Emily had the good luck to be no correspondent, and so has escaped to some degree the complete exposure of every confidence and every thought

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which has happened to her sister. Is it because she has nobody to defend her that she has been treated thus barbarously ? I cannot conceive a situation more painful, more lacerating to every feeling, than that of the father and the husband dwelling silent together in that sombre parsonage, from which every ray of light seems to depart with the lost woman, whose presence had kept a little savour in life, and looking on in silence to see their life taken to pieces, and every decent veil dragged from the inner being of their dearest and nearest. They com- plained as much as two voiceless persons could, or at least the father complained : and the very servants came hot from their kitchen to demand a vindication of their character : but nobody noted the protest of the old man amid the silence of the moors : and the husband was more patient and spoke no word. Even he, however, after nearly half a century, when that far-off episode of life must have become dim to him, has thrown his relics open for a little more revelation, a little more interference with the helpless ashes of the dead.

No dot is now omitted upon i, no t left uncrossed. We know, or at least are told, who Charlotte meant by every character she ever portrayed, even while the model still lives. We know her opinion of her friends, or rather acquaint-

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ances, the people whom she saw cursorily and formed a hasty judgment upon, as we all do in the supposed safety of common life. Protests have been offered in other places against a similar treatment of other persons ; but scarcely any protest has been attempted in respect to Charlotte Bronte. The resurrection people have been permitted to make their researches as they pleased. It throws a curious pathos, a not unsuitably tragic light upon a life always so solitary, that this should all have passed in silence because there was actually no one to interfere, no one to put a ban upon the dusty heaps and demand that no mere should be said. When one looks into the matter a little more closely, one finds it is so with almost all those who have specially suffered at the hands of the biographer. The Carlyles had no child, no brother to rise up in their defence. It gives the last touch of melancholy to the conclusion of a lonely life. Mrs. Gaskell, wise woman, defended herself from a similar treatment by will, and left children behind her to protect her memory. But the Brontes are at the mercy of every one who cares to give another raking to the diminished heap of dtfbris. The last writer who has done so, Mr. Clement Shorter, had some real new light to throw upon a story which surely has now been suffi- ciently turned inside out, and has done his work with

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perfect good feeling, and, curiously enough after so many exploitations, in a way which shows that interest has not yet departed from the subject. But we trust that now the memory of Charlotte Bronte will be allowed to rest.

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By MRS. LYNN LINTON

GEORGE ELIOT

this essay it is not intended to go into the vexed question of George Eliot's private life and character. Death has re- solved her individuality into nothingness, and the discrepancy between her lofty thoughts and doubtful action no longer troubles us. But her work still remains as common property for all men to appraise at its true value — to admire for its beauty, to reverence for its teaching, to honour for its grandeur, yet at the same time to determine its weaknesses and to confess where it falls short of the absolute perfection claimed for it in her lifetime.

For that matter indeed, no one has suffered from unmeasured adulation more than has George Eliot. As a philosopher, once bracketed with Plato and Kant; as a novelist, ranked the highest the world has seen; as a woman, set above the law and, while living in open and admired

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adultery, visited by bishops and judges as well as by the best of the laity ; her faults of style and method praised as genius — since her death she has been treated with some of that reactionary neglect which always follows on extravagant esteem. The mud-born ephemeridas of literature have dispossessed her. For her profound learning, which ran like a golden thread through all she wrote till it became tarnished by pedantry, we have the ignorance which mis- quotes Lempriere and thinks itself classic. For her outspoken language and forcible diction, wherein, however, she always preserved so much modesty, and for her realism which described things and feelings as they are, but without going into revolting details, we have those lusciously suggestive epithets and those unveiled presenta- tions of the sexual instinct which seem to make the world one large lupanar. For her accurate science and pro- found philosophy, we have those claptrap phrases which have passed into common speech and are glibly reproduced by facile parrots who do not understand and never could have created ; and for her scholarly diction we have the tawdriness of a verbal ragbag where grammar is as defective as taste. Yet our modern tinselled dunces have taken the place of the one who, in her lifetime, was made almost oppressively great — almost too colossal in her supremacy. But when all this rubbish has been thrown into the abyss

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of oblivion, George Eliot's works will remain solid and alive, together with Thackeray's, Scott's and Fielding's. Our Immortals will include in their company, as one of the " choir invisible " whose voice will never be stilled for man, the author of " Adam Bede " and " Romola," of the " Mill on the Floss " and " Middlemarch."

Her first essays in fiction, her " Scenes of Clerical Life," show the germs of her future greatness as well as the persistency of her aim. In " Janet's Repen- tance," which to our mind is the best of the three, those germs are already shaped to beauty. Nothing can be more delicately touched than the nascent love between Janet and Mr. Try on. No more subtle sign of Janet's besetting sin could be given than by that candlestick held "aslant;" while her character, compounded of pride, timidity, affectionateness, spiritual aspiration and moral degradation, is as true to life as it was difficult to portray. It would be impossible to note all the gems in these three stories. We can indicate only one or two. That splendid paragraph in " Mr. Gilfil's Love Story," beginning : " While this poor heart was being bruised " — the sharp summing up of Mr. Amos Barton's " middling " character — Lady Cheverel's silent criticisms contrasted with her husband's iridescent optimism — the almost Shakesperean

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humour of the men, the author's keen appraisement of the commonplace women ; such aphorisms as Mrs. Linnet's 41 It's right enough to be speritial — I'm no enemy to that — but I like my potatoes meally ; " — these and a thousand more, eloquent, tender, witty, deep, make these three stories masterpieces in their way, despite the improbability of the Czerlaski episode in "Amos Barton" and the inherent weakness of the Gilfil plot. We, who can remember the enthusiasm they excited when they first appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, on re-reading them in cooler blood can understand that enthusiasm, though we no longer share its pristine intensity. It was emphatically a new departure in literature, and the noble note of that religious feeling which is independent of creed and which touches all hearts alike, woke an echo that even to this day reverberates though in but a poor, feeble and attenuated manner.

"Adam Bede," the first novel proper of the long series, shows George Eliot at her best in her three most noteworthy qualities — lofty principles, lifelike delineation of character, and fine humour, both broad and subtle. The faults of the story are the all-pervading anachronism of thought and circumstance ; the dragging of the plot in the earlier half of the book ; and the occasional ugliness -of style, where, as in that futile opening sentence the

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author as I directly addresses the reader as You. The scene is laid in the year 1799 — before the Trades Unions had fixed a man's hours of work so accurately as to make him leave off with a screw half driven in, so soon as the clock begins to strike — before too the hour of leaving off was fixed at six. We older people can remember when workmen wrought up to eight and were never too exact even then. Precision of the kind practised at the present day was not known then ; and why were there no appren- tices in Adam's shop ? Apprentices were a salient feature in all the working community, and no shop could have existed without them. Nor would the seduction by the young squire of a farmer's niece or daughter have been the heinous crime George Eliot has made it. If women of the lower class held a somewhat better position than they did in King Arthur's time, when, to be the mother of a knight's bastard, raised a churl's wife or daughter far above her compeers and was assumed to honour not degrade her, they still retained some of the old sense of inferiority. Does any one remember that famous answer in the Yelverton trial not much more than a generation ago? In 1799 Hetty's mishap would have been condoned by all concerned, save perhaps by Adam himself ; and Arthur Donnithorne would have suffered no more for his escapade than did our well-known Tom Jones for his little diversions. Arid —

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were there any night schools for illiterate men in 1 799 ? And how was that reprieve got so quickly at a time when there were neither railroads nor telegraphs ? —indeed, would it have been got at all in days when concealment of birth alone was felony and felony was death ? Also, would Hetty have been alone in her cell? In 1799 all prisoners were herded together, young and old, untried and condemned ; and the separate system was not in existence. Save for Hetty's weary journey on foot and in chance carts, the story might have been made as of present time with more vraisemblance and harmoniousness.

These objections apart, how supreme the whole book is ! The characters stand out fresh, firm and living. As in some paintings you feel as if you could put your hand round the body, so in George Eliot's writings you feel that you have met those people in the flesh, and talked to them, holding them by the hand and looking into their eyes. There is not a line of loose drawing anywhere. From the four Bedes, with that inverted kind of heredity which Zola has so powerfully shown, to the stately egoism of Mrs. Irwine — from the marvellous portraiture of Hetty Sorrel with her soft, caressing, lusciously-loving outside, and her heart " as hard as a cherry-stone " according to Mrs. Poyser — from the weak-willed yet not conscienceless Arthur Don- nithorne to the exquisite purity of Dinah, the character-

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drawing is simply perfect. Many were people personally known to George Eliot, and those who were at all behind the scenes recognised the portraits. Down at Wirksworth they knew the Bedes, Dinah, the Poysers, and some others. In London, among the intimates of George Lewes, Hetty needed no label. Mrs. Peyser's good things were common property in the neighbourhood Jong before George Eliot crystallised them for all time, and embellished them by her matchless setting ; and Dinah's sermon was not all imaginary. But though in some sense her work was portraiture, it was portraiture passed through the alembic of her brilliant genius, from commonplace material distilled into the finest essence.

It is impossible here again to give adequate extracts of the wise, witty, tender and high-minded things scattered broadcast over this book — as, indeed, over all that George Eliot ever wrote. That paragraph beginning — " Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it " ; the description of Hetty's flower-like beauty, which fascinated even her sharp-tongued aunt ; phrases like " John considered a young master as the natural enemy of an old servant," and " young people in general as a poor contrivance for carrying on the world " ; that sharp little bit of moral and intellectual antithesis, with the learned man " meekly rocking the twins in the cradle with his left hand, while

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with his right he inflicted the most lacerating sarcasms on an opponent who had betrayed a brutal ignorance of Hebrew " — forgiving human weaknesses and moral errors as is a Christian's bounden duty, but treating as " the enemy of his race, the man who takes the wrong side on the momentous subject of the Hebrew points " ; how masterly, how fine are these and a dozen other unnoted passages !

Hetty in her bedroom, parading in her concealed finery, reminds one too closely of Gretchen with her fatal jewels to be quite favourable to the English version ; and we question the truth of Adam Bede's hypothetical content with such a Dorothy Doolittle as his wife. Writers of love stories among the working classes in bygone days forget that notableness was then part of of a woman's virtue — part of her claims to love and consi- deration— and that mere flower-like kittenish prettiness did not count to her honour any more than graceful movements and aesthetic taste would count to the honour of a Tommy in the trenches who could neither handle a spade nor load a rifle. Blackmore made the same mis- take in his " Lorna Doone," and George Eliot has repeated it in Adam's love for Hetty solely for her beauty and without " faculty " as her dower. In his own way Bartle Massey, misogynist, is as smart as Mrs. Poyser herself, as amusing

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and as trenchant ; but the coming-of-age dance is fifty years and more too modern, and the long dissertation at the beginning of the second book is a blot, because it is a clog and an interruption. Not so that glorious description of nature in August when "the sun was hidden for a moment and then shone out warm again like a recovered joy ; " — nor that deep and tender bit of intro- spection, setting forth the spiritual good got from sorrow as well as its indestructible impress.

Yet for all the beauty of these philosophic passages there are too many of them in this as in all George Eliot's works. They hamper the action and lend an air of pedantry and preaching with which a novel proper has nothing to do. It is bad style as well as bad art, and irritating to a critical, while depressing -to a sympathetic reader. But summing up all the faults together, and giving full weight to each, we gladly own the masterly residuum that is left. The dawning love between Adam and Dinah alone is enough to claim for " Adam Bede " one of the highest places in literature, had not that place been already taken by the marvellous truth, diversity and power of the character-drawing. Mrs. Peyser's epigrams, too, generally made when she was " knitting with fierce rapidity, as if her movements were a necessary function like the twittering of a crab's antennae," both too numerous

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and too well known to quote, would have redeemed the flimsiest framework and the silliest padding extant.

The light that seemed to flash on the world when this glorious book was published will never be forgotten by those who were old enough at the time to read and appre- ciate. By the way, is that would-be famous Liggins still alive ? When he sums it all up, how much did he get out of his bold attempt to don the giant's robe ?

If " Adam Bede " was partly reminiscent, " The Mill on the Floss " was partly autobiographical. There is no question that in the sensitive, turbulent, loving nature of Maggie Tulliver Marian Evans painted herself. Those who knew her when she first came to London knew her as a pronounced insurgent. Never noisy and never coarse, always quiet in manner, sensitive, diffident and shrinking from unpleasantness, she yet had not put on that " made " and artificial pose which was her dis- tinguishing characteristic in later years. She was still Maggie Tulliver, with a conscience and temperament at war together, and with a spiritual ideal in no way attained by her practical realisation. For indeed, the union between Marian Evans and George Lewes was far more incongruous in some of its details than was Maggie's love for Philip or her passion for Stephen. Philip appealed to

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her affection of old time, her pity and her love of art — Stephen to her hot blood and her sensuous love of beauty. But George Lewes's total want of all religiousness of feeling, his brilliancy of wit, which was now coarse now mere "persiflage^ his cleverness, which was more quickness of assimilation than the originality of genius, were all traits of character unlike the deeper, truer and more ponderous qualities of the woman who braved the world for his sake when first she linked her fate with his — the woman who did not, like Maggie, turn back when she came to the brink but who boldly crossed the Rubicon — and who, in her after efforts to cover up the conditions, showed that she smarted from the consequences.

Read in youth by the light of sympathy with insurgency, Maggie is adorable, and her brother Tom is but a better- looking Jonas Chuzzlewit. Read in age by the light of re- spect for conformity and self-control, much of Maggie's charm vanishes, while most of Tom's hardness becomes both respectable and inevitable. Maggie was truly a thorn in the side of a proud country family, not accustomed to its little daughters running off" to join the gipsies, nor to its grown girls eloping with their cousin's lover. Tom was right when he said no reliance could be placed on her ; for where there is this unlucky divergence between prin- ciple and temperament, the will can never be firm nor the

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walk steady. Sweet little Lucy had more of the true heroism of a woman in her patient acceptance of sorrow and her generous forgiveness of the cause thereof, than could be found in all Maggie's struggles between pas- sion and principle. The great duties of life lying at our feet and about our path cannot be done away with by the romantic picturesqueness of one character contrasted with the more prosaic because conventional limitations of the other ; nor is it right to give all our sympathy to the one who spoilt so many lives and brought so much dis- grace on her family name, merely because she did not mean, and did not wish, and had bitter remorse after terrible conflicts, which never ended in real self-control or steadfast pursuance of the right.

There is something in " The Mill on the Floss " akin to the gloomy fatalism of a Greek tragedy. In " Adam Bede " is more spontaneity of action, more liberty of choice ; but, given the natures by which events were worked out to their final issues in " The Mill on the Floss," it seems as if everything must have happened precisely as it did. An obstinate, litigious and irascible man like Mr. Tulliver was bound to come to grief in the end. Fighting against long odds as he did, he could not win. Blind anger and as blind precipitancy, against cool tenacity and clear per- ceptions, must go under ; and Mr. Tulliver was no match

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against the laws of life as interpreted by Mr. Wakem and the decisions of the law courts. His choice of a fool for his wife — was not Mrs. Tulliver well known at Coventry ? — was another step in the terrible March of Fate. She was of no help to him as a wife — with woman's wit to assist his masculine decisions — nor as a mother was she capable of ruling her daughter or influencing her son. She was as a passive instrument in the hands of the gods — one of those unnoted and unsuspected agents by whose unconscious action such tremendous results are produced. George Eliot never did anything more remarkable than in the union she makes in this book between the most com- monplace characters and the most majestic conception of tragic fate. There is not a stage hero among them all — not a pair of buskins for the whole company ; but the conception is ^Eschylean, though the stage is no bigger than a doll's house.

The humour in " The Mill on the Floss " is almost as rich as that of " Adam Bede," though the special qualities of the four sisters are perhaps unduly exaggerated. Sister Pullet's eternal tears become wearisome, and lose their effect by causeless and ceaseless repetition ; and surely sister Grigg could not have been always such an unmiti- gated Gorgon ! Mrs. Tulliver's helpless foolishness and tactless interference, moving with her soft white hands

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the lever which set the whole crushing machinery in motion, are after George Eliot's best manner ; and the whole comedy circling round sister Pullet's wonderful bonnet and the linen and the chaney — comedy at last linked on to tragedy — is of inimitable richness. The girlish bond of sympathy between sister Pullet and sister Tulliver, in that they both liked spots for their patterned linen, while sister Grigg — allays contrairy to Sophy Pullet, would have striped things — is repeated in that serio-comic scene of the ruin, when the Tullivers are sold up and the stalwart cause of their disaster is in bed, paralysed. By the way, would he have recovered so quickly and so thoroughly as he did from such a severe attack ? Setting that aside, for novelists are not expected to be very accurate pathologists, the humour of this part of the book is all the more striking for the pathos mingled with it.

" The head miller, a tall broad-shouldered man of forty, black-eyed and black-haired, subdued by a general mealiness like an auricula": — "They're nash things, them lop-eared rabbits — they'd happen ha' died if they'd been fed. Things out o' natur never thrive. God Almighty doesn't like 'em. He made the rabbit's ears to lie back, and it's nothing but contrariness to make 'em lie down like a mastiff dog's": — "Maggie's tears began

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to subside, and she put out her mouth for the cake and bit a piece ; and then Tom bit a piece, just for com- pany, and they ate together and rubbed each other's cheeks and brows and noses together, while they ate, with a humiliating resemblance to two friendly ponies": — Is there anything better than these in Mrs. Peyser's repertory ?

Of acute psychological vision is that fine bit on " plotting contrivance and deliberate covetousness " ; and the summing up of the religious and moral life of the Dodsons and Tullivers, beginning " Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers," is as good as anything in our language. No one theoretically knew human nature better than George Eliot. Practically, she was too thin-skinned to bear the slightest abrasion, such as necessarily comes to us from extended intercourse or the give and take of equality. But theoretically she sounded the depths and shallows, and knew where the bitter springs rose and where the healing waters flowed ; and when she translated what she knew into the conduct and analysis of her fictitious characters, she gave them a life and substance peculiarly her own.

Hitherto George Eliot has dealt with her own ex- periences, her reminiscences of old friends and well-known

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places, of familiar acquaintances, and, in Maggie Tulliver, of her own childish frowardness and affectionateness — her girlish desire to do right and facile slipping into wrong. In " Silas Marner " she ventures into a more com- pletely creative region ; and, for all the exquisite beauty and poetry of the central idea, she has failed her former excellence. The story is one of the not quite impossible but highly improbable kind, with a Deus ex machind as the ultimate setter-to -rights of all things wrong. As with " Adam Bede," the date is thrown back a generation or two, without the smallest savour of the time indicated, save in the fashion of the dresses of the sisters Lammeter — a Joseph substituted for a cloak, and riding on a pillion for a drive in a fly. Else there is not the least attempt to synchronise time, circumstances and sentiment, while the story is artificial in its plot and unlikely in its treatment. Yet it is both pretty and pathetic ; and the little intro- duction of fairyland in the golden-haired child asleep by the fire, as the substitute for the stolen hoard, is as lovely as fairy stories generally are. But we altogether question the probability of a marriage between the young squire and his drunken wife. Such a woman would not have been too rigorous, and was not ; and such a man as Godfrey Cass would not have married a low-born mistress from " a movement of compunction." As

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we said before, in the story of Hetty and Arthur, young squires a century ago were not so tender-hearted towards the honour of a peasant girl. It was a pity, of course, when things went wrong ; but then young men will be young men, and it behoved the lasses to keep themselves to themselves ! If the young squire did the handsome thing in money, that was all that could be expected of him. The girl would be none the worse thought of for her slip ; and the money got by her fault would help in her plenishing with some honest fellow who understood things. This is the sentiment still to be found in villages, where the love-children of the daughters out in service are to be found comfortably housed in the grandmother's cottage, and where no one thinks any the worse of the unmarried mother ; and certainly, a century ago, it was the universal rule of moral measurement. George Eliot undoubtedly made a chronological mistake in both stories by the amount of conscientious remorse felt by her young men, and the depth of social degrada- tion implied in this slip of her young women.

The beginning of " Silas Marner " is much finer than that of either of her former books. It strikes the true note of a harmonious introduction, and is free from the irritating trivialities of the former openings. In those early days of which " Silas Marner " treats, a man from the next

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parish was held as a " stranger " ; and even now a Scotch, Irish or Welsh man would be considered as much a foreigner as a " Frenchy " himself, were he to take up his abode in any of the more remote hamlets of the north or west. The state of isolation in which Silas Marner lived was true on all these counts — his being a " foreigner " to the autochthonous shepherds and farmers of Ravaloe — his half mazed, half broken-hearted state owing to the false accusation brought against him and the criminal neglect of Providence to show his innocence — and his strange and uncongenial trade. Yet, for this last, were not the women of that time familiar with the weaving industry ? — else what could they have done with the thread which they themselves had spun ? If it were disposed of to a travel- ling agent for the hand-loom weavers, why not have indicated the fact ? It would have been one touch more to the good of local colour and conditional accuracy. To be sure, the paints are laid on rather thickly throughout ; but eccentricities and folks with bees in their bonnets were always to be found in remote places before the broom of steam and electricity came to sweep them into a more common conformity ; and that line between oddity and insanity, always narrow, was then almost invisible.

The loss of the hoarded treasure and the poor dazed weaver's terrified flight to the Rainbow introduces us to

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one of George Eliot's most masterly of her many scenes of rustic humour.

" The more important customers, who drank spirits and sat nearest the fire, staring at each other as if a bet were depending on the first man who winked ; while the beer drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets and smock- frocks, kept their eyelids down and rubbed their hands across their mouths, as if their draughts of beer were a funereal duty attended with embarrassing sadness " — these, as well as Mr. Snell, the landlord, " a man of a neutral disposition, accustomed to stand aloof from human dif- ferences, as those of beings who were all alike in need of liquor " — do their fooling admirably. From the cautious discussion on the red Durham with a star on her forehead, to the authoritative dictum of Mr. Macey, tailor and parish clerk (were men of his social stamp called Mr. in those days?) when he asserts that "there's allays two 'pinions ; there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself" — from the gossip about the Lammeter land to the ghos'es in the Lammeter stables, it is all excellent — rich, racy and to the manner born. And the sudden appearance of poor, scared, weazen-faced Silas in the midst of the discussion on ghos'es, gives occasion for

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another fytte of humour quite as good as what has gone before.

Worthy of Mrs. Poyser, too, was sweet and patient Dolly Winthrop's estimate of men. "It seemed sur- prising that Ben Winthrop, who loved his quart-pot and his joke, got along so well with Dolly ; but she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that ' men would be so ' and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks." Good, too, when speaking of his wife, is Mr. Macey's version of the " mum " and " budget " of the fairies' dance. " Before I said 'sniff' I took care to know as she'd say ' snaff,' and pretty quick too. I wasn't a-going to open my mouth like a dog at a fly, and snap it to again, wi' nothing to swaller."

But in spite of all this literary value of " Silas Marner " we come back to our first opinion of its being unreal and almost impossible in plot. The marriage of Godfrey to an opium-eating (?) drab, and the robbery of Silas Marner's hoard by the squire's son were pretty hard nuts to crack in the way of probability ; but the timely death of the wife just at the right moment and in the right place — the adoption of a little girl of two by an old man as nearly " nesh " as was consistent with his power of living free

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from the restraint of care — the discovery of Dunsay's body and the restoration to the weaver of his long-lost gold — the impasse of Eppie, the squire's lawfully born daughter and his only legal inheritor, married to a peasant and living as a peasant at her father's gates : all these things make " Silas Marner " a beautiful unreality, taking it out of the ranks of human history and placing it in those of fairy tale and romance.

In " Felix Holt " we come back to a more actual kind of life, such as it was in the early thirties when the " democratic wave," which has swept away so much of the old parcelling out of things social and political, was first beginning to make itself felt. But here again George Eliot gives us the sense of anachronism in dealing too familiarly with those new conditions of the Reform Bill which gave Treby Magna for the first time a member, and which also for the first time created the Revising Barrister — while Trades Unions were still unrecognised by the law, and did their work mainly by rattening and violence. Any one who was an intelligent and wide- awake child at that time, and who can remember the talk of the excited elders, must remember things some- what differently from what George Eliot has set down. Radical was in those days a term of reproach, carrying

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with it moral obloquy and condemnation. The Tories might call the Whigs Radicals when they wanted to overwhelm them with shame, as we might now say Anarchists and Dynamiters. But the most advanced Gentleman would never have stood for Parliament as a Radical. Felix Holt himself, and the upper fringe of the working class, as also the lower sediment, might be Radicals, but scarcely such a man as Harold Transome, who would have been a Whig of a broad pattern. And as for the Revising Barrister, he was looked on as something akin to Frankenstein's Monster. No one knew where his power began nor where it ended ; and on each side alike he was dreaded as an unknown piece of machinery which, once set a-going, no one could say what it would do or where it would stop.

In its construction " Felix Holt " is perhaps the most unsatisfactory of all George Eliot's books. The ins and outs of Transome and Durfey and Scaddon and Bycliffe were all too intricate in the weaving and too confused in the telling to be either intelligible or interesting. In trying on the garment of Miss Braddon the author of " Felix Holt " showed both want of perception and a deplorable misfit. Also she repeats the situation of Eppie and her adopted father Silas in that of Esther and Rufus Lyon. But where it was natural enough for the contentedly

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rustic Eppie to refuse to leave her beloved old father for one new and unknown — her old habits of cottage simplicity, including a suitable lover, for the unwelcome luxuries of an unfamiliar state — natural in her though eminently un- natural in the drama of life — it was altogether inhar- monious with Esther's character and tastes to prefer poverty to luxury, Felix to Harold, Malhouse Yard to Transome Court. George Eliot's usually firm grip on character wavers into strange self-contradiction in her delineations of Esther Lyon. Even the situation of which she is so fond — the evolution of a soul from spiritual deadness to keen spiritual intensity, and the conversion of a mind from folly to seriousness — even in this we miss the masterly drawing of her better manner. The humour too is thinner. Mrs. Holt is a bad Mrs. Nickleby ; and the comic chorus of rustic clowns, which George Eliot always introduces where she can, is comparatively poor. She is guilty of one distinct coarseness, in her own character as the author, when she speaks of the cook at Treby Manor — "a much grander person than her lady- ship " — " as wearing gold and jewelry to a vast amount of suet."

When Esther has been taken up by the Transomes, George Eliot misses what would have been absolutely certain — these fine little points of difference between

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the high-bred lady of Transome Court and the half-bred Esther of Malhouse Yard ; and yet, quite unintentionally, she makes Esther as vulgar as a barmaid in her conversa- tions and flirtatious coquetries with Harold Transome. Nor, we venture to think, as going too far on the other side, would a girl of Esther's upbringing and surround- ings have used such a delightfully literary phrase as " im- portunate scents." On the whole we do not think it can be denied that, so far as she had gone in her literary career when she wrote " Felix Holt," it is undeniably her least successful work.

And yet, how many and how beautiful are the good things in it ! If Homer nods at times, when he is awake who can come near him ? The opening of the book is beyond measure fine, and abounds in felicitous phrases. " His sheep-dog following with heedless unofficial air as of a beadle in undress : " — " The higher pains of a dim political consciousness : " — " The younger farmers who had almost a sense of dissipation in talking to a man of his questionable station and unknown experience : " — " Her life would be exalted into something quite new — into a sort of difficult blessedness such as one may imagine in beings who are conscious of painfully growing into the possession of higher powers " (true for George Eliot her- self but not for such a girl as Esther Lyon) : — These are

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instances of literary supremacy taken at random, with many more behind.

Then how exquisite is that first love-scene between Felix and Esther ! It is in these grave and tender indications of Jove that George Eliot is at her best. Gentle as " sleeping flowers " — delicately wrought, like the most perfect cameos — graceful and suggestive, subtle and yet strong — they are always the very gems of her work. And in " Felix Holt " especially they stand out with more perfectness because of the inferior quality of so much that surrounds them.

Felix himself is one of George Eliot's masterpieces in the way of nobleness of ideal and firmness of drawing. Whether he would have won such a girl as Esther, or have allowed himself to be won by her, may be doubtful ; but for all the rugged and disagreeable honesty of his nature — for all his high ideals of life and hideous taste in costume — for all his intrinsic tendency and external bearishness, he is supreme. And with one of George Eliot's best aphorisms, made in his intention, we close the book with that kind of mingled disappointment and delight which must needs be produced by the inferior work of a great master. " Blows are sarcasms turned stupid ; wit is a form of force that leaves the limbs at rest."

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The last three books of the series are the most ponderous. Still beautiful and ever noble, they are like over-cultivated fruits and flowers of which the girth is inconvenient ; and in one, at least, certain defects already discernible in the earlier issues attain a prominence fatal to perfect work.

Never spontaneous, as time went on George Eliot became painfully laboured. Her scholarship degenerated into pedantry, and what had been stately and dignified accuracy in her terms grew to be harsh and inartistic techni- cality. The artificial pose she had adopted in her life and bearing reacted on her work; and the contradiction between her social circumstances and literary position coloured more than her manners. A.11 her teaching went to the side of self-sacrifice for the general good, of con- formity with established moral standards, while her life was in direct opposition to her words ; for though she did no other woman personal injustice, she did set an example of disobedience to the public law which wrought more mischief than was counteracted by even the noblest of her exhortations to submit to the restraints of righteous- ness, however irksome they might be. And it was this endeavour to co-ordinate insurgency and conformity, self- will and self-sacrifice, that made the discord of which every candid student of her work, who knew her history,

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was conscious from the beginning. Nowhere do we find this contradiction more markedly shown than in "Romola," the first of the ponderous last three.

Her noblest work, " Romola " is yet one of George Eliot's most defective in what we may call the scaffolding of the building. The loftiness of sentiment, the masterly delineation of character, the grand grasp of the political and religious movement of the time, the evidences of deep study and conscientious painstaking visible on every page, are combined with what seems to us to be the most extra- ordinary indifference to — for it cannot be ignorance of — the social and domestic conditions of the time. The whole story is surely impossible in view of the long arm of the Church — the personal restraints necessarily imposed on women during the turbulent unrest of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — the proud exclusiveness of the well- born citizens of any state.

Take the last first. Grant all the honour paid by Cosmo and Lorenzo to the learned men of all nations, especially to Greek scholars who, in the first fervour of the Renaissance, were as sons of the gods to those thirsting for the waters of the divine spring. Grant, too, the example set by Bartolommeo Scala, who had given his beautiful daughter Alessandra in marriage to the " soldier-poet " Marullo ; was it likely that even an

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eccentric old scholar like the blind Bardo de' Bardi should have so unreservedly adopted a nameless Greek adven- turer, flung up like a second Ulysses from the waves, unvouched for by any sponsor and unidentified by any document ? We allow that Bardo might have taken Tito as his scribe and secretary, seeing that the Cennini had already employed him, waif and stray as he was ; but that he should have consented to his daughter's marriage with this stranger, and that her more conservative and more suspicious godfather, Bernado del Nero, should have con- sented, even if reluctantly, was just about as likely as that an English country gentleman should allow his daughter to marry a handsome gipsy.

If we think for a moment of what citizenship meant in olden times, the improbability of the whole of Tito's career becomes still more striking. As, in Athens, the Sojourner never stood on the same plane with the autoch- thon, so in Rome the Peregrinus was ineligible for public office or the higher kind of marriage ; and though the stricter part of the law was subsequently relaxed in favour of a wider civic hospitality, the sentiment of exclusiveness remained, and indeed does yet remain in Italy. It seems more than improbable that Tito, a Greek adventurer, should have been employed in any political service, save perhaps as a base kind of scout and unhonoured spy.

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That he should ever have taken the position of an accredited public orator was so contrary to all the old traditions and habits of thought as to be of the same sub- stance as a fairy tale.

The character of Bardo, too, is non-Italian ; and his modes of life and thought were as impossible as are some other things to be hereafter spoken of. The Church had a long arm, as we said, and a firm grip ; and while it blinked indulgently enough at certain aberrations, it demanded the show of conformity in essentials. Lorenzo was a pagan, but he died receiving the Sacraments. The Borgias were criminals, but their professions of faith were loud-voiced and in true earnest. Men might inveigh against the evil lives of the clergy and the excesses of monks and nuns, but they had to confess God and the Church ; and their diatribes had to be carefully worded — as witness Rabelais — or a plea would certainly be found for the fire and faggot — as with Fra Dolcino and Savonarola. So with conformity to the usages of life which, then and now, are considered integral to morality. It could not have been possible for Bardo to bring up his daughter " aloof from the debasing influence " of her own sex, and in a household with only one old man for a servant. The times did not allow it ; no more than we should allow it now in this freer day. This womanless home for an

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Italian girl at any time, more especially in the Middle Ages, when even young wives were bound to have their companions and duennas, is a serious blot in workmanship. So, indeed, is the whole of Romola's life, being ana- chronism and simply nineteenth-century English from start to finish.

The things which both she and Tessa did, and were allowed to do, are on a par with " Gulliver's Travels " and " Peter Wilkins." It was as impossible for Tessa, a pretty young unmarried girl, contadina as she was, to come into Florence alone, as for a peasant child of three years old to be sent with a message on business into the City of London alone. To this day well-conducted women of any class do not wander about the streets of Italian cities unaccompanied ; and maidenhood is, as it always was, sacredly and jealously guarded. Nor could Romola have gone out and come in at her desire, as she is allowed by the author. With streets filled by the turbulent factions of the Bianchi and Neri, always ready for a fight or for a love-adventure, what would have happened to, and been thought of, a beautiful young woman slipping about within the city and outside the gates at all hours of the day and night ? She is said to be either quite alone (!), as when she goes to Tessa's house, or merely accompanied by Monna Brigida, as when she goes to the convent to see

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her dying brother — which also, by the way, was im- possible— or attended, at a distance, by old Maso when she attempts her flight as a solitary nun. She would have lost name and state had she committed these eccen- tricities ; and had she persisted in them, she would have been sent to a convent — that refuge for sorrow, that shelter from danger, that prison for contumacy — and her godfather would have been the first to consign her to what was then the only safe asylum for women. The scene she has with Tito before Nello's shop is ludicrously impossible — as is their English-like return home together, without retinue or lights, just like a man and wife of to-day when she has been to fetch him from the public- house, or, if she be of the better class, from his club. English, too, is Romola's sitting up for her husband in her queer womanless establishment, and opening the door to him when he comes home late at night. For the matter of that, indeed, Tito's solitary rambles are as much out of line with the time, and the circumstances of that time, as is Romola's strange daring. No man of any note whatever appeared alone in the streets when out on a mid- night expedition, either to commit murder or break the seventh commandment. He took some one with him, friend or servant, armed ; and to this day you will not find Italians willingly walk alone at night. The whole of

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this kind of life, if necessary for the story, is dead against truth and probability. So is Romola's flight, disguised as a nun. Splendid as is the scene between her and Savonarola, the vrai semblance is spoilt by this impossibility of condition. Nor could any woman of that time, brought up in a city, have felt a sense of freedom when fairly outside the walls by herself on a strange road, going to meet an unknown fate and bound to an unknown bourne. She would have felt as a purdah woman of India suddenly turned loose in the streets and environs of Delhi — as felt all those women whose evidence we read of in matters of crime and murder, when they came face to face with the desolation of unprotectedness. Modern women call it freedom, but in the Middle Ages such a feeling did not exist. All these things are anachronisms ; as much so as if a novelist of the twentieth century, writing of English life in the eighteenth, should clothe his women in knickerbockers, mount them on bicycles, and turn them into the football field and cricket-ground.

These exceptions taken to the scaffolding of the book, we are free to admire its glorious nobility of sentiment, its lofty purpose, its perfection of character-drawing, and the dramatic power of its various scenes. Nothing can excel the power with which Tito's character is shown in its gradual slipping from simple selfishness to positive crimi-

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nality. The whole action may be summed up in George Eliot's own words.

" When, the next morning, Tito put this determination into act, he had chosen his colour in the game, and had given an inevitable bent to his wishes. He had made it impossible that he should not from henceforth desire it to be the truth that his father was dead ; impossible that he should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the precise facts of his conduct should not remain for ever concealed. Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. The contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in the commission than in the conse- quent adjustment of our desires — the enlistment of our self-interest on the side of falsity ; as, on the other hand, the purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact that by it the hope in lies is for ever swept away, and the soul recovers its noble attitude of sincerity."

But, giving every weight to the natural weakness, sweetness and afFectionateness, as well as to the latent falsity of Tito's character, we cannot accept the Tessa episode as true to life in general, while it is eminently untrue to Italian life, especially of those times. Tessa herself, too, is wearisome with her tears and her kisses, her blue eyes and baby face, so incessantly repeated and

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harped on. She is as nauseating as she is impossible ; and the whole story from first to last is an ugly blot on the book.

In Romola and in .Savonarola we touch the heights. The " tall lily " is an exquisite conception and is supreme in human loveliness. Her two interviews with Savonarola are superbly done, and the gradual crushing down of her proud self-will under the passionate fervour of the priest is beyond praise both for style and psycho- logy. So, too, are the changes in the great preacher himself — the first, when his simple earnestness of belief in his mission degenerates into self-consciousness and personal assumption, as is the way with all reformers — the second, when he abandons his later attitude, and the dross is burnt away as the hour of trial comes on him, and the World no longer stands between God and his soul. The final scenes of the Prate's public life are powerfully wrought, with all George Eliot's mastery and eloquence and deep religious fervour ; but it is in scenes and cir- cumstances of this kind that she is ever at her best. In humour and psychologic insight she is greater than any English woman writer we have had ; in aphorisms she is unrivalled ; but in playfulness she is clumsy, and in catching the moral, intellectual and social tone of the times of which she writes, she is nowhere.

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Contrast Romola's character and manner of life — above all those two thoroughly English letters of hers — with all that we know of Vittoria Colonna, the purest and noblest woman of her day — which was Romola's — and at once we see the difference between them — the difference wrought by four centuries — Vittoria being essentially a woman of the time, though a head and shoulders above the ruck ; while Romola is as essentially a product of the nineteenth century, In spite of the local colour — which, after all, is only a wash — given by the descriptions of pageants and proces- sions, and by the history of which George Eliot so ably mastered the details, the whole book is nineteenth century, from Monna Brigida's characteristically English speech about Tessa's place in the house and the children's sweets,, to Romola's as characteristically English attitude and hygienic objections — from a little maiden, without a caretaker, carrying eggs to Piero, to Romola's solitary visit to the studio and night perambulations about the city.

All these shortcomings notwithstanding, " Romola " will ever remain one of the noblest works of our noblest author ; and, after all, did not Shakespeare make Hector quote Aristotle, and show all his Greeks and Romans and outlandish nondescripts from countries unknown to himself, as nothing but sturdy Englishmen, such as lived

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and loved in the times of the great Eliza ? Where we have so much to admire — nay, to venerate — we may let the smaller mistakes pass. Yet they must be spoken of by those who would be candid and not fulsome — -just and not flattering. By the way, did George Eliot know that •" Baldassare " is the name of one of the devils invoked to this day by Sicilian witches ?

The longest of all the novels, " Middlemarch," is the most interesting in its characters, its isolated scenes, its moral meaning and philosophic extension ; but it is also the most inartistic and the most encumbered with subordi- nate interests and personages. The canvas is as crowded as one of George Cruikshank's etchings ; and the work would have gained by what George Eliot would have called fission — a division into two. The stories of Dorothea and Casaubon and of Rosamond and Lydgate are essentially separate entities ; and though they are brought together at the last by an intermingled interest, the result is no more true unification than the Siamese twins or the Double-headed Nightingale represented one true human being. The contrast between the two beautiful young wives is well preserved, and the nicer shades of •difference are as clearly marked as are the more essential ; for George Eliot was far too good a workman to scamp

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in any direction, and the backs of her stories are as well wrought as the fronts. But if one-third of the book had been cut out — failing that fission, which would have been still better — the work would have gained in propor- tion to its compression.

The character of Dorothea marks the last stage in the development of the personality which begins with Maggie Tulliver, and is in reality Marian Evans's own self. Maggie, Romola and Dorothea are the same person in progressive stages of moral evolution. All are at cross corners with life and fate — all are rebellious against things as they find them. Maggie's state of insurgency is the crudest and simplest ; Romola's is the most passionate in its moral reprobation of accepted un worthiness ; Dorothea's is the widest in its mental horizon, and the most womanly in the whole-hearted indifference to aught but love, which ends the story and gives the conclusive echo. In its own way, her action in taking Will Ladislaw is like Esther's in marrying Felix Holt ; but it has not the unlikelihood of Esther's choice. It is all for love, if one will, but it runs more harmoniously with the broad lines of her character, and gives us no sense of that dislocation which we get from Esther's decision. And in its own way it is at once a parallel and an apology.

The most masterly bits of work in " Middlemarch " are

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the characters of Rosamond and Casaubon. Rosamond's unconscious selfishness, her moral thinness, and the super- ficial quality of her love are all portrayed without a flaw in the drawing ; while Casaubon's dryness, his literary indecision following on his indefatigable research, and his total inability to adjust himself to his new conditions, together with his scrupulous formality of politeness com- bined with real cruelty of temper, make a picture of supreme psychologic merit. They who think that Casaubon was meant for the late Rector of Lincoln know nothing about George Eliot's early life. They who do know some of those obscurer details, are well aware of the origin whence she drew her masterly portrait, as they know who was Mrs. Poyser, who Tom Tulliver, and who Hetty Sorel. Hetty, indeed, is somewhat repeated in that amazingly idiotic Tessa, who is neither English nor Italian, nor, indeed, quite human in her molluscous silli- ness ; but there are lines of relation which show them- selves to experts, and the absence of the " cherry stone " does not count for more than the dissimilarity always to be found between two copies.

No finer bit of work was ever done than the deep and subtle but true and most pathetic tragedy of Lydgate's married life. The character of Rosamond was a difficult one to paint, and one false touch could have been fatal.

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To show her intense selfishness and shallowness and yet not to make her revolting, was what only such a consum- mate psychologist as George Eliot could have done. And to show how Lydgate, strong man as he was and full of noble ambition and splendid aims, was necessarily subdued, mastered and ruined by the tenacious weakness and moral unworthiness of such a wife, yet not to make him contemptible, was also a task beyond the power of any but the few Masters of our literature. All the scenes between this ill-assorted pair are in George Eliot's best manner and up to her highest mark ; and the gradual declination of Rosamond's love, together with Lydgate's gradual awakening to the truth of things as they were, are portrayed with a touch as firm as it is tender.

That scene on the receipt of Sir Godwin's letter is as tragic in its own way as Othello or a Greek drama. It has in it the same sense of human helplessness in the presence of an overmastering fate. Rosamond was Lydgate's Fate. Her weakness, tenacity and duplicity — his stronger manhood, which could not crush the weaker woman — his love, which could not coerce, nor punish, nor yet control the thing he loved — all made the threads of that terrible net in which he was entangled, and by which the whole worth of his life was destroyed. It is a story that

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goes home to the consciousness of many men, who know, as Lydgate knew, that they have been mastered by the one who to them is " as an animal of another and feebler species " — who know, as Lydgate knew, that their energies have been stunted, their ambition has been frustrated, and their horizon narrowed and darkened because of that tyranny which the weaker woman so well knows how to exercise over the stronger man.

Casaubon is as masterly in drawing as is Rosamond or Lydgate. We confess to a sadly imperfect sympathy with Dorothea in her queer enthusiasm for this dry stick of a man. Learned or not, he was scarcely one to whom a young woman, full of life's strong and sweet emotions, would care to give herself as a wife. One can understand the more impersonal impulse which threw Marian Evans into an attitude of adoration before the original of her dry stick ; but when it comes to the question of marriage, the thing is simply revolting as done by the girl, not only of her own free-will but against the advice and prayers of her friends. Tom was to be excused for his harshness and irritation against Maggie ; and Celia's commonplaces of wisdom for the benefit of that self-willed and recalcitrant Dodo, if not very profound nor very stimulating, nor yet sympathetic, were worth more in the daily life and ordering of sane folk than Dorothea's blind and obstinate determina-

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tion. Beautiful and high-minded as she is, she is also one of those irritating saints whose virtues one cannot but revere, whose personal charms one loves and acknowledges, and whose wrongheadedness makes one Jong to punish them — or at least restrain them by main force from social suicide. And to think that to her first mistake she adds that second of marrying Will Ladislaw — the utter snob that he is ! Where were George Eliot's perceptions ? Or was it that in Ladislaw she had a model near at hand, whom she saw through coloured glasses, which also shed their rosy light on her reproduction, so that her copy was to her as idealised as the original, and she was ignorant of the effect produced on the clear- sighted ? Yet over all the mistakes made by her through defective taste and obstinate unwisdom, the beauty of Dorothea's character stands out as did Romola's — like a " white lily " in the garden. She is a superb creature in her own way, and her disillusionment is of the nature of a tragedy. But what could any woman expect from a man who could write such a love-letter as that of Mr. Casaubon's ?

The canvas of " Middlemarch " is overcrowded, as we said ; yet how good some of the characters are ! The sturdy uprightness, tempered with such loving sweetness, of Cabel Garth ; the commonplace negation of all great and all

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unworthy qualities of the Vincys — Celia and Sir James — Mr. Farebrother and Mr. and Mrs. Cadwallader — all are supreme. We confess we do not care much for the portraiture of Mr. Bulstrode and his spiteful delator Raffles — George Eliot is not good at melodrama ; also the whole episode of Mr. Featherstone's illness, with his watching family and Mary Garth, too vividly recalls old Anthony Chuzzlewit and all that took place round his death-bed and about his will, to give a sense of truth or novelty. George Eliot's power did not lie in the same direction as that of Charles Dickens, and the contrast is not to her advantage. Great humorists as both were, their humour was essentially different, and will not bear comparison.

No book that George Eliot ever wrote is without its wise and pithy aphorisms, its brilliant flashes of wit, its innumerable good things. Space will not permit our quoting one-tenth part of the good things scattered about these fascinating pages. Celia's feeling, which she stifled in the depths of her heart, that "her sister was too religious for family comfort. Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading or sitting down, or even eating : " — (But, farther on, what an unnecessary bit of pedantry ! — " In short, woman was a problem which, since Mr. Brooke's mind

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felt blank before it, could be hardly less complicated than the revolutions of an irregular solid.'"'} — Mrs. Cadwallader's sense of birth, so that a " De Bracy reduced to take his dinner in a basin would have seemed to her an ex- ample of pathos worth exaggerating ; and I fear his aristocratic vices would not have horrified her. But her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred : " — " Indeed, she (Mrs. Waule) herself was accus- tomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty's inten- tions about families : " — " Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind, against which native merit has urged itself in vain : " — " Ladislaw, a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley : " — " But it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences " — an observation wrung out of her own disturbed and inharmonious experience : — " That controlled self-consciousness of manner which is the expensive substitute for simplicity : " — These are a few picked out at random, but the wealth that remains behind is but inadequately represented by stray nuggets.

Before we close the volume we would like to note the one redeeming little flash of human tenderness

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in Mr. Casaubon when he had received his death- warrant from Lydgate, and Dorothea waits for him to come up to bed. It is the only tender and spon- taneous moment in his life as George Eliot has painted it, and its strangeness makes its pathos as well as its truth.

The last of the lengthy three, and the last novel she wrote, " Daniel Deronda " is the most wearisome, the least artistic, and the most unnatural of all George Eliot's books. Of course it has the masterly touch, and, for all its com- parative inferiority, has also its supreme excellence. But in plot, treatment and character it is far below its pre- decessors. Some of the characters are strangely unnatural. Grandcourt, for instance, is more like the French carica- ture of an English milord than like a possible English gentleman depicted by a compatriot. Deronda himself is a prig of the first water ; while Gwendolen is self-con- tradictory all through — like a tangled skein of which you cannot find the end, and therefore cannot bring it into order and intelligibility. Begun on apparently clear lines of self-will, pride, worldly ambition and personal self- indulgence — without either conscience or deep affections — self-contained and self-controlled — she wavers off into a condition of moral weakness, of vagrant impulses and

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humiliating self-abandonment for which nothing that went before has prepared us.

That she should ever have loved, or even fancied she loved, such a frozen fish as Grandcourt was impossible to a girl so full of energy as Gwendolen is shown to be. Clear in her desires of what she wanted, she would have accepted him, as she did, to escape from the hateful life to which else she would have been condemned. But she would have accepted him without even that amount of self-deception which is portrayed in the decisive interview. She knew his cruel secret, and she deliberately chose to ignore it. So far good. It is what she would have done. But where is the logic of making her " carry on " as she did when she received the diamonds on her wedding-day ? It was a painful thing, sure enough, and the mad letter that came with them was disagreeable enough ; but it could not have been the shock it is described, nor could it have made Gwendolen turn against her husband in such sudden hatred, seeing that she already knew the whole shameful story. These are faults in psychology ; and the conduct of the plot is also imperfect. George Eliot's plots are always bad when she attempts intricacy, attaining instead con- fusion and unintelligibility ; but surely nothing can be much sillier than the ] whole story of Deronda's birth and upbringing, nor can anything be more unnatural than the

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character and conduct of his mother. What English gentleman would have brought up a legitimately-born Jewish child under conditions which made the whole world believe him to be his own illegitimate son ? And what young man, brought up in the belief that he was an English gentleman by birth — leaving out on which side of the blanket — would have rejoiced to find himself a Jew instead ? The whole story is im- probable and far-fetched ; as also is Deronda's rescue of Mirah and her unquestioning adoption by the Meyricks. It is all distortion, and in no wise like real life ; and some of the characters are as much twisted out of shape as is the story. Sir Hugo Mallinger and Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne are the most natural of the whole gallery — the defect of exaggeration or caricature spoiling most of the others.

Of these others, Gwendolen herself is far and away the most unsatisfactory. Her sudden hatred of her husband is strained ; so is her love for Deronda ; so is her repent- ance for her constructive act of murder. That she should have failed to throw the rope to Grandcourt, drowning in the sea, was perhaps natural enough. That she should have felt such abject remorse and have betrayed herself in such humiliating unreserve to Deronda was not. All through the story her action with regard to Deronda is dead

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against the base lines of her character, and is compatible only with such an overwhelming amount of physical passion as does sometimes make women mad. We have no hint of this. On the contrary, all that Gwendolen says is founded on spiritual longing for spiritual improvement — spiritual direction with no hint of sexual impulse. Yet she acts as one overpowered by that impulse — throwing to the winds pride, reserve, womanly dignity and common sense. Esther was not harmonious with herself in her choice of Felix Holt over Harold Transome, but Esther was naturalness incarnate compared with Gwendolen as towards Daniel Deronda. And the evolution of Esther's soul, and the glimpse given of Rosamond's tardy sense of some kind of morality, difficult to be believed as each was, were easy sums in moral arithmetic contrasted with the birth and sudden growth of what had been Gwen- dolen's very rudimentary soul — springing into maturity in a moment, like a fully-armed Athene, without the need of the more gradual process. Add to all these defects, an amount of disquisition and mental dissection which impedes the story till it drags on as slowly as a heavily laden wain — add the fatal blunder of making long scenes which do not help on the action nor elucidate the plot, and the yet more fatal blunder of causeless pedantry, and we have to confess that our great master's last novel is also her

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worst. But then the one immediately preceding was incomparably her best.

We come now to the beauties of the work — to the inimitable force of some phrases — to the noble aim and meaning of the story — to the lofty spirit informing all those interrupting disquisitions, which are really inter- polated moral essays, and must not be confounded with padding. Take this little shaft aimed at that Gr<eculus esuriens Lush, that " half-caste among gentlemen " and the dme damnee of Grandcourt. " Lush's love of ease was well satisfied at present, and if his puddings were rolled towards him in the dust he took the inside bits and found them relishing." Again : " We sit up at night to read about Cakya-Mouni, Saint Francis and Oliver Cromwell, but whether we should be glad for any one at all like them to call on us the next morning, still more to reveal himself as a new relation, is quite another matter : " — " A man of refined pride shrinks from making a lover's approaches to a woman whose wealth or rank might make them appear presumptuous or low-motived ; but Deronda was finding a more delicate difficulty in a posi- tion which, superficially taken, was the reverse of that — though, to an ardent reverential love, the loved woman has always a kind of wealth which makes a man keenly susceptible about the aspect of his addresses." (We

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extract this sentence as an instance of George Eliot's fine feeling and delicate perception expressed in her worst and clumsiest manner.) " A blush is no language, only a dubious flag-signal, which may mean either of two con- tradictions."

" Grandcourt held that the Jamaican negro was a beastly sort of baptist Caliban ; Deronda said he had always felt a little with Caliban, who naturally had his own point of view and could sing a good song ; " " Mrs. Davilow observed that her father had an estate in Barbadoes, but that she herself had never been in the West Indies ; Mrs. Torring- ton was sure she should never sleep in her bed if she lived among blacks ; her husband corrected her by saying that the blacks would be manageable enough if it were not for the half-breeds ; and Deronda remarked that the whites had to thank themselves for the half- breeds."

It is in such " polite pea-shooting " as this that George Eliot shows her inimitable humour — the quick give-and-take of her conversations being always in harmony with her characters. But, indeed, unsatisfac- tory as a novel though " Daniel Deronda " is, it is full of beauties of all kinds, from verbal wit to the grandly colossal sublimity of Mordecai, and Deronda's outburst of passionate desire to weld the scattered Jews

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into one nation of which he should be the heart and brain.

Whatever George Eliot did bears this impress of massive sincerity — of deep and earnest feeling — of lofty pur- pose and noble teaching. She was not a fine artist, and she spoilt her later work by pedantry and overlay, but she stands out as the finest woman writer we have had or pro- bably shall have — stands a head and shoulders above the best of the rest. She touched the darker parts of life and passion, but she touched them with clean hands and a pure mind, and with that spirit of philosophic truth which can touch pitch and not be defiled. Yet prolific as she was, and the creator of more than one living character, she was not a flexible writer and her range was limited. She repeated situations and motives with a curious narrowness of scope, and in almost all her heroines, save Dinah and Dorothea, who are evoluted from the beginning, paints the gradual evolution of a soul by the ennobling influence of a higher mind and a religious love.

We come now to a curious little crop of errors. Though so profound a scholar — being indeed too learned for per- fect artistry — she makes strange mistakes for a master of the language such as she was. She spells " insistence " with an " a," and she gives a superfluous " c " to " Machiavelli."

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She sometimes permits herself to slip into the literary misdemeanour of no nominative to her sentence, and into the graver sin of making a singular verb govern the plural noun of a series. She says " frightened at " and " under circumstances " ; " by the sly " and " down upon " ; and she follows " neither " with " or," as also " never " and " not." She is " averse to " ; she has even been known to split her infinitive, and to say " and which " without remorse. Once she condescends to the iniquity of " pro- ceeding to take," than which " commencing " is only one stage lower in literary vulgarity ; and many of her sen- tences are as clumsy as a clown's dancing-steps. As no one can accuse her of either ignorance or indifference, still less of haste and slap-dash, these small flaws in the great jewel of her genius are instructive instances of the clinging effect of our carelessness in daily speech ; so that gramma- tical inaccuracy becomes as a second nature to us, and has to be unlearned by all who write.

Nevertheless, with all her faults fully acknowledged and honestly shown, we ever return as to an inexhaustible fountain, to her greatness of thought, her supreme power, her nobility of aim, her matchless humour, her magnificent drawing, her wise philosophy, her accurate learning — as profound as it was accurate. Though we do not bracket her with Plato and Kant, as did one of her

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panegyrists, nor hold her equal to Fielding for naturalness, nor to Scott for picturesqueness, nor as able as was Thackeray to project herself into the conditions of thought and society of times other than her own, we do hold her as the sceptred queen of our English Victorian authoresses — superior even to Charlotte Bronte, to Mrs. Gaskell, to Harriet Martineau — formidable rivals as these are to all others, living or dead.

If she had not crossed that Rubicon, or, having crossed it, had been content with more complete insurgency than she was, she would have been a happier woman and a yet more finished novelist. As things were, her life and principles were at cross-corners ; and when her literary success had roused up her social ambition, and fame had lifted her far above the place where her birth had set her, she realised the mistake she had made. Then the sense of inharmoniousness between what she was and what she would have been did, to some degree, react on her work, to the extent at least of killing in it all passion and spontaneity. Her whole life and being were moulded to an artificial pose, and the " made " woman could not possibly be the spontaneous artist. Her yet more fatal blunder of marry- ing an obscure individual many years younger than herself, and so destroying the poetry of her first union by de- stroying its sense of continuity and constancy, would have

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still more disastrously reacted on her work had she lived. She died in time, for anything below " Theophrastus Such " would have seriously endangered her fame and lessened her greatness — culminating as this did in " Middlemarch," the best and grandest of her novels, from the zenith of which " Daniel Deronda," her last, is a sensible decline.

MRS. GASKELL

By EDNA LYALL

MRS. GASKELL

[F all the novelists of Queen Victoria's reign there is not one to whom the present writer turns with such a sense of love and gratitude as to Mrs. Gaskell. This feeling is undoubtedly shared by thousands of men and women, for about all the novels there is that wonderful sense of sympathy, that broad human interest which appeals to readers of every descrip- tion. The hard-worked little girl in the schoolroom can forget the sorrows of arithmetic or the vexations of French verbs as she pores over " Wives and Daughters " on a Saturday half-holiday, and, as George Sand remarked to Lord Houghton, this same book, " Wives and Daughters," " would rivet the attention of the most blast man of the world."

With the exception of her powerful " Life of Charlotte Bronte," Mrs. Gaskell wrote only novels or short stories.

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The enormous difficulties which attended the writing of a biography of the author of " Jane Eyre " would, we ven- ture to think, have baffled any other writer of that time. It is easy now, years after Charlotte Bronte's death, to criticise the wisdom of this or that page, to hunt up slight mistakes, to maintain that in some details Mrs. Gaskell was wrong. To be wise too late is an easy and, to some apparently, a most grateful task ; but it would, nevertheless, be hard to find a biography of more fasci- nating interest, or one which more successfully grappled with the great difficulty of the undertaking.

As Mr. Clement Shorter remarks, the " Life of Char- lotte Bronte " " ranks with Boswell's ' Life of Johnson ' and Lockhart's * Life of Scott.' ' It is pleasant, too, to read Charlotte Bronte's own words in a letter to Mr. Williams, where she mentions her first letter from her future friend and biographer :

"The letter you forwarded this morning was from Mrs. Gaskell, authoress of * Mary Barton.' She said I was not to answer it, but I cannot help doing so. The note brought the tears to my eyes. She is a good, she is a great woman. Proud am I that I can touch a chord of sympathy in souls so noble. In Mrs. Gaskell's nature it mournfully pleases me to fancy a remote affinity to my sister Emily. In Miss Martineau's mind I have always

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felt the same, though there are wide differences. Both these ladies are above me — certainly far my superiors in attainments and experience. I think I could look up to them if I knew them."

For lovers of the author of " Mary Barton " it is hard, however, not to feel a grudge against the " Life of Char- lotte Bronte" — or, rather, the reception accorded to it. Owing to the violent attacks to which it gave rise, to a threatened action for libel on the part of some of those mentioned in the book, and to the manifold annoyances to which the publication of the Biography subjected the writer, Mrs. Gaskell determined that no record of her own life should be written.

It is pleasant to find that there were gleams of light mixed with the many vexations. Charles Kingsley writes to Mrs. Gaskell in warm appreciation of the " Life " :

" Be sure," he says, " that the book will do good. It will shame literary people into some stronger belief that a simple, virtuous, practical home-life is consistent with high imaginative genius ; and it will shame, too, the prudery of a not over-cleanly, though carefully whitewashed, age, into believing that purity is now (as in all ages till now) quite compatible with the knowledge of evil. I confess that the book has made me ashamed of myself. * Jane Eyre ' I hardly looked into, very seldom reading a work

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of fiction — yours, indeed, and Thackeray's are the only ones I care to open. * Shirley ' disgusted me at the open- ing, and I gave up the writer and her books with the notion that she was a person who liked coarseness. How I misjudged her ! and how thankful I am that I never put a word of my misconceptions into print, or recorded my misjudgments of one who is a whole heaven above me. Well have you done your work, and given us a picture of a valiant woman made perfect by sufferings. I shall now read carefully and lovingly every word she has written."

Mrs. Gaskell's wish regarding her own biography has, of course, been respected by her family ; but the world is the poorer, and it is impossible not to regret that the life of so dearly loved a writer must never be attempted.

The books reveal a mind as delicately pure as a child's, wedded to that true mother's heart which is wide enough to take in all the needy. Looking, moreover, at that goodly row of novels — whether in the dear old shabby volumes that have been read and re-read for years, or in that dainty little set recently published in a case, which the rising generation can enjoy — one cannot help reflecting that here is " A Little Child's Monument," surely the most beautiful memorial of a great love and a

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great grief that could be imagined. It was not until the death of her little child — the only son of the family — that Mrs. Gaskell, completely broken down by grief, began, at her husband's suggestion, to write. And thus a great sorrow brought forth a rich and wonderful harvest, as grief borne with strength and courage always may do ; and the world has good reason to remember that little ten months' child whose short life brought about such great results.

A question naturally suggests itself at this point as to Mrs. Gaskell's birth and education. How far had she inherited her literary gifts ? And in what way had her mind been influenced by the surroundings of her child- hood and girlhood ? Her mother, Mrs. Stevenson, was a Miss Holland, of Sandlebridge, in Cheshire ; her father — William Stevenson — was at first classical tutor in the Manchester Academy, and later on, during his residence in Edinburgh, was editor of the Scots Magazine and a frequent contributor to the Edinburgh Review. He was next appointed Keeper of the Records to the Treasury, an appointment which caused his removal from Edinburgh to Chelsea ; and it was there, in Cheyne Row, that Eliza- beth Cleghorn Stevenson, the future novelist, was born.

Owing to the death of her mother, she was adopted when only a month old by her aunt, Mrs. Lumb, and

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taken to Knutsford, in Cheshire, the little town so wonder- fully described in " Cranford." For two years in her girlhood she was educated at Stratford-on-Avon, walking in the flowery meadows where Shakspere once walked, worshipping in the stately old church where he wor- shipped, and where he willed that his body should be left at rest ; nor is it possible to help imagining that the associations of that ideal place had an influence on the mind of the future writer, doing something to give that essentially English tone which characterises all her books.

After her father's second marriage she went to live with him, and her education was superintended by him until his death in 1829, when she once more returned to Knutsford. Here, at the age of twenty-two, she was married to the Rev. William Gaskell, M.A., of Cross Street Chapel, Manchester ; and Manchester remained her home ever after.

Such are the brief outlines of a life story which was to have such a wide and lasting influence for good. For nothing is more striking than this when we think over the well-known novels — they are not only consummate works of art, full of literary charm, perfect in style and rich with the most delightful humour and pathos — they are books from which that morbid lingering over the loathsome

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details of vice, those sensuous descriptions of sin too rife in the novels of the present day, are altogether excluded.

Not that the stories are namby-pamby, or unreal in any sense ; they are wholly free from the horrid prudery, the Pharisaical temper, which makes a merit of walking through life in blinkers and refuses to know of anything that can shock the respectable. Mrs. Gaskell was too genuine an artist to fall either into this error or into the error of bad taste and want of reserve. She drew life with utter reverence ; she held the highest of all ideals, and she dared to be true.

How tender and womanly and noble, for instance, is her treatment of the difficult subject which forms the motif of " Ruth " ! How sorrowfully true to life is the story of the dressmaker's apprentice with no place in which to spend her Sunday afternoons ! We seem ourselves to breathe the dreadful " stuffy " atmosphere of the work- room, to feel the dreary monotony of the long day's work. It is so natural that the girl's fancy should be caught by Henry Bellingham, who was courteous to her when she mended the torn dress of his partner at the ball ; so in- evitable that she should lose her heart to him when she witnessed his gallant rescue of the drowning child. But her fall was not inevitable, and one of the finest bits in the whole novel is the description of Ruth's hesitation

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in the inn parlour when, finding herself most cruelly and unjustly cast off by her employer, she has just accepted her lover's suggestion that she shall go with him to London, little guessing what the promise involved, yet intuitively feeling that her consent had been unwise.

" Ruth became as hot as she had previously been cold, and went and opened the window, and leant out into the still, sweet evening air. The bush of sweetbriar under- neath the window scented the place, and the delicious frag- rance reminded her of her old home. I think scents affect and quicken the memory even more than either sights or sounds ; for Ruth had instantly before her eyes the little garden beneath the window of her mother's room, with the old man leaning on his stick watching her, just as he had done not three hours before on that very afternoon." She remembers the faithful love of the old labouring man and his wife who had served her parents in their lifetime, and for their sake would help and advise her now. Would it not be better to go to them ?

"She put on her bonnet and opened the parlour door; but then she saw the square figure of the landlord standing at the open house door, smoking his evening pipe, and looming large and distinct against the dark air and land- scape beyond. Ruth remembered the cup of tea that she had drunk ; it must be paid for, and she had no money with

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her. She feared that he would not let her leave the house without paying. She thought that she would leave a note for Mr. Bellingham saying where she was gone, and how she had left the house in debt, for (like a child) all dilemmas appeared of equal magnitude to her; and the difficulty of passing the landlord while he stood there, and of giving him an explanation of the circumstances, appeared insuperable, and as awkward and fraught with inconvenience as far more serious situations. She kept peeping out of her room after she had written her little pencil note, to see if the outer door was still obstructed. There he stood motionless, enjoying his pipe, and looking out into the darkness which gathered thick with the coming night. The fumes of the tobacco were carried into the house and brought back Ruth's sick headache. Her energy left her ; she became stupid and languid, and incapable of spirited exertion ; she modified her plan of action to the determination of asking Mr. Bellingham to take her to Milham Grange, to the care of her humble friends, instead of to London. And she thought in her simplicity that he would instantly consent when he had heard her reasons."

The selfishness of the man who took advantage of her weakness and ignorance is finely drawn because it is not at all exaggerated. Henry Bellingham is no monster of

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wickedness, but a man with many fine qualities spoilt by an over-indulgent and unprincipled mother, and yielding too easily to her worldly-wise arguments.

Ruth first sees a faint trace of his selfishness — she calls it " unfairness " — when, on their arrival in Wales, he persuades the landlady to give them rooms in the hotel and to turn out on a false pretext some other guests into the dfyendance across the road. She understands his selfish littleness of soul only too well when, years after, she talks to him during that wonderfully described interview in the chapter called " The Meeting on the Sands." He cannot in the least understand her. " The deep sense of penitence she expressed he took for earthly shame, which he imagined he could soon soothe away." He actually has the audacity to tempt her a second time; then, after her indignant refusal, he offers her marriage. To his great amazement she refuses this too. " Why, what on earth makes you say that ? " asked he ....

" I do not love you. I did once. Don't say I did not love you then ; but I do not now. I could never love you again. All you have said and done since you came to Abermouth has only made me wonder how I ever could have loved you. We are very far apart ; the time that has pressed down my life like brands of hot iron, and scarred me for ever, has been nothing to you. You have talked

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of it with no sound of moaning in your voice, no shadow over the brightness of your face ; it has left no sense of sin on your conscience, while me it haunts and haunts ; and yet I might plead that I was an ignorant child ; only I will not plead anything, for God knows all. But this is only one piece of our great difference."

" You mean that I am no saint," he said, impatient at her speech. " Granted. But people who are no saints have made very good husbands before now. Come, don't let any morbid, overstrained conscientiousness interfere with substantial happiness — happiness both to you and to me — for I am sure I can make you happy — ay ! and make

you love me too, in spite of your pretty defiance

And here are advantages for Leonard, to be gained by you quite in a holy and legitimate way."

She stood very erect.

" If there was one thing needed to confirm me, you have named it. You shall have nothing to do with my boy by my consent, much less by my agency. I would rather see him working on the roadside than leading such

a life — being such a one as you are If at last I

have spoken out too harshly and too much in a spirit of judgment, the fault is yours. If there were no other reason to prevent our marriage but the one fact that it would bring Leonard into contact with you, that would be enough."

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Later on, a fever visits the town, and Ruth becomes a nurse. When she hears that the father of her child is ill and untended she volunteers to nurse him, and, being already worn out with work, she dies in consequence. The man's smallness of mind, his contemptible selfishness, are finely indicated in the scene where he goes to look at Ruth as she lies dead.

He was " disturbed " by the distress of the old servant Sally, and saying, " Come, my good woman ! we must all die," tries to console her with a sovereign ! !

The old servant turns upon him indignantly, then " bent down and kissed the lips from whose marble, unyielding touch he recoiled even in thought." At that moment the old minister, who had sheltered Ruth in her trouble, enters. Henry makes many offers to him as to providing for Ruth's child, Leonard, and says, " I cannot tell you how I regret that she should have died in con- sequence of her love to me." But from gentle old Mr. Benson he receives only an icy refusal, and the stern words, " Men may call such actions as yours youthful follies. There is another name for them with God."

The sadness of the book is relieved by the delightful humour of Sally, the servant. The account of the wooing of Jeremiah Dixon is a masterpiece ; and Sally's hesitation when, having found her proof against the attractions of

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u a four-roomed house, furniture conformable, and eighty pounds a year," her lover mentions the pig that will be ready for killing by Christmas, is a delicious bit of comedy.

" Well, now ! would you believe it ? the pig were a temptation. I'd a receipt for curing hams. . . . How- ever, I resisted. Says I, very stern, because I felt I'd been wavering, ' Master Dixon, once for all, pig or no pig, I'll not marry you.' '

The description of the minister's home is very beautiful. Here are a few lines which show in what its charm consisted :

" In the Bensons' house there was the same uncon- sciousness of individual merit, the same absence of intro- spection and analysis of motive, as there had been in her mother ; but it seemed that their lives were pure and good not merely from a lovely and beautiful nature, but from some law the obedience to which was of itself har- monious peace, and which governed them. . . . This household had many failings ; they were but human, and, with all their loving desire to bring their lives into har- mony with the will of God, they often erred and fell short. But somehow the very errors and faults of one individual served to call out higher excellences in another ; and so they reacted upon each other, and the result of short discords was exceeding harmony and peace."

MRS. GASKELL

The publication of " Ruth," with its brave, outspoken words, its fearless demand for one standard of morality for men and women, subjected the author to many attacks, as we may gather from the following warm-hearted letter by Charles Kingsley :

«7*/y25, 1853.

" I am sure that you will excuse my writing to you thus abruptly when you read the cause of my writing. I am told, to my great astonishment, that you had heard painful speeches on account of 'Ruth'; what was told me raised all my indignation and disgust. . . . Among all my large acquaintance I never heard, or have heard, but one unanimous opinion of the beauty and righteous- ness of the book, and that above all from really good women. If you could have heard the things which I heard spoken of it this evening by a thorough High Church, fine lady of the world, and by her daughter, too, as pure and pious a soul as one need see, you would have no more doubt than I have, that, whatsoever the * snobs ' and the bigots may think, English people, in general, have but one opinion of * Ruth,' and that is, one of utter satisfaction. I doubt not you have had this said to you already often. Believe me, you may have it said to you as often as you will by the purest and most

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refined of English women. May God bless you, and help you to write many more such books as you have already written, is the fervent wish of your very faithful servant,

"C. KlNGSLEY."

" Mary Barton," which was the first of the novels, was published in 1848, and this powerful and fascinating story at once set Mrs. Gaskell in the first rank of English novelists. People differed as to the views set forth in the book, but all were agreed as to its literary force and its great merits. Like " Alton Locke," it has done much to break (flnwr? r1qcc lv»tf ;»rc and make the rich try to under- stand,-the -.pox>r; and when we see the great advance in this direction which has been made since the date of its publication, we are able partly to realise how startling the first appearance of such a book must have been. The secret of the extraordinary power which the book exercises on its readers is, probably, that the writer takes one into the. very heart of the life she is describing.

Most books of the sort fail to arrest our attention. Why ? Because they are written either as mere " goody " books for parish libraries, and are carefully watered down lest they should prove too sensational and enthralling ; or because they are written by people who have only a

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surface knowledge of the characters they describe and the life they would fain depict. "David Copperfield" is probably the most popular book Dickens ever wrote, and is likely to outlive his other works, just because he him- self knew so thoroughly well all that his hero had to pass through, and could draw from real knowledge the charac- ters in the background. And at the present time we are all able to understand the Indian Mutiny in a way that has never been possible before, because Mrs. Steel in her wonderful novel, "On the Face of the Waters," has, through her knowledge of native life, given us a real insight into the heart of a great nation.

Brilliant trash may succeed for two or three seasons, but unless there is in it some germ of real truth which appeals to the heart and conscience it will not live. Sensationalism alone will not hold its ground. There must be in the writer a real deep inner knowledge of his subject if the book is to do its true work. And we venture to think that " Mary Barton," which for nearly half a century has been influencing people all over the world, owes its vitality very largely to the fact that Mrs. Gaskell knew the working people of Manchester, not as a professional doler out of tracts or charitable relief, not in any detestable, patronising way, but knew them as friends.

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This surely is the reason why the characters in the novel are so intensely real. What could be finer than the portrait of Mary herself, from the time when we are first introduced to her as the young apprentice to a milliner and dressmaker, to the end of the book, when she has passed through her great agony ? How entirely the reader learns to live with her in her brave struggle to prove her lover's innocence ! One of the most powerful parts of the book is the description of her plucky pursuit of the good ship John Cropper, on board of which was the only man who could save her lover's life by proving an alibi.

But it is not only the leading characters that are so genuine and so true to life. Old Ben Sturgis, the boat- man, rough of speech but with more heart than many a smooth-tongued talker ; his wife, who sheltered Mary when she had no notion what manner of woman she was ; Job Legh, who proved such a good friend to both hero and heroine in their trouble, and whose well-meaning deception of old Mrs. Wilson is so humorously de- scribed ; John Barton, the father, with the mournful failure at the close of his upright life ; old Mr. Carson, the rich father of the murdered man, with his thirst for vengeance, and his tardy but real forgiveness, when he let himself be led by a little child — all these are living men

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and women, not puppets ; while in the character and the tragic story of poor Esther we see the fruits of the writer's deep knowledge of the life of those she helped when released from gaol.

But Mrs. Gaskell looked on both sides of the question. In "North and South," published in 1855, she deals with the labour question from the master's standpoint, and in Mr. Thornton draws a most striking picture of a manufacturer who is just and well-meaning — one who really respects and cares for the men he employs. The main interest of this book lies, however, in the character of the heroine, Margaret, who is placed in a most cruel dilemma by a ne'er-do-well brother whom she shields. By far the most dramatic scene is that in which, to enable Frederick to escape, Margaret tells a deliberate falsehood to the detective who is in search of him. The torture of mind she suffers afterwards for having uttered this inten- tional lie, and the difficult question whether under any circumstances a lie is warrantable, are dealt with in the writer's most powerful way.

In 1853 — the same year in which "Ruth" was pub- lished— the greatest of all Mrs. Gaskell's works appeared, the inimitable " Cranford." For humour and for pathos we have nothing like this in all the Victorian literature. It is a book of which one can never tire : yet it can scarcely

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be said to have a plot at all, being just the most delicate miniature painting of a small old-fashioned country town and its inhabitants. What English man or woman is there, however, who will not read and re-read its pages with laughter and tears ?

Cranford is said to be in many respects the Knutsford of Mrs. Gaskell's childhood and youth, and there is some- thing so wonderfully lifelike in the descriptions of the manners and customs of the very select little community that one is inclined to believe that there is truth in the assertion. They were gently bred, those old Cranford folk, with their " elegant economy," their hatred of all display, and their considerate tact. There is pathos as well as fun in the description of Mrs. Forrester pretend- ing not to know what cakes were sent up " at a party in her baby-house of a dwelling .... though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes ! "

There is an air of leisure and peacefulness in every page of the book, for there was no hurrying life among those dignified old people. " I had often occasion to notice the use that was made of fragments and small opportunities in Cranford : the rose-leaves that were gathered ere they fell to make into a pot-pourri for some one who had no

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garden ; the little bundles of lavender-flowers sent to some town-dweller. Things that many would despise, and actions which it seemed scarcely worth while to perform, were all attended to in Cranford."

Who has not laughed over Miss Betsy Barker's Alderney cow " meekly going to her pasture, clad in dark grey flannel " after her disaster in the lime-pit ! or over the masterly description of Miss Jenkyns, who " wore a cravat, and a little bonnet like a jockey-cap, and altogether had the appearance of a strong-minded woman ; although she would have despised the modern idea of women being equal to men. Equal, indeed ! she knew they were superior."

Dear old Miss Matty, however, with her reverence for the stronger sister, and her love affair of long ago, has a closer hold on the heart of the reader. The description of the meeting of the former lovers is idyllic ; and when Thomas Holbrook dies unexpectedly, soon after, the woman whose love-story had been spoilt by the home authorities reverses her own ordinance against " followers " in the case of Martha, the maid-servant, but otherwise makes no sign.

" Miss Matty made a strong effort to conceal her feel- ings— a concealment she practised even with me, for she has never alluded to Mr. Holbrook again, though the

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book he gave her lies with her Bible on the little table by her bedside. She did not think I heard her when she asked the little milliner of Cranford to make her caps something like the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson's, or that I noticed the reply :

" ' But she wears widows' caps, ma'am ! '

" ' Oh ? I only meant something in that style ; not widows', of course, but rather like Mrs. Jamieson's.' '

In the whole book there is not a character that we cannot vividly realise : the Honourable (but sleepy) Mrs. Jamieson ; brisk, cheerful Lady Glenmire, who married the sensible country doctor and sacrificed her title to become plain Mrs. Hoggins ; Miss Pole, who always with withering scorn called ghosts " indigestion," until the night they heard of the headless lady who had been seen wring- ing her hands in Darkness Lane, when, to avoid " the woebegone trunk," she with tremulous dignity offered the sedan chairman an extra shilling to go round another way ! Captain Brown with his devotion to the writings of Mr. Boz and his feud with Miss Jenkyns as to the superior merits of Dr. Johnson ; and Peter, the long-lost brother, who from first to last remains an inveterate prac- tical joker. One and all they become our life-long friends, while the book stands alone as a perfect picture of English country town society fifty years ago.

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Mrs. Gaskell's shorter stories are scarcely equal to the novels, yet some of them are very beautiful. " Cousin Phillis," for example, gives one more of the real atmo- sphere of country life than any other writer except Words- worth. We seem actually to smell the new-mown hay as we read the story.

Charming, too, is " My Lady Ludlow " with her genteel horror of dissenters subdued in the end by her genuine good feeling. How often one has longed for that comfortable square pew of hers in the parish church, in which, if she did not like the sermon, she would pull up a glass window as though she had been in her coach, and shut out the sound of the obnoxious preacher ! But, with all her peculiarities, she was the most courteous of women — a lady in the true sense of the word — and when people smiled at a shy and untaught visitor who spread out her handkerchief on the front of her dress as the foot- man handed her coffee, my Lady Ludlow with infinite tact and grace promptly spread her handkerchief exactly in the same fashion which the tradesman's wife had adopted.

Among the short tragic stories, the most striking is one called " The Crooked Branch," in which the scene at the assizes has almost unrivalled power ; while among the lighter short stories, " My French Master," with its delicate portraiture of the old refugee, and "-Mr. Harri-

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son's Confessions," the delightfully written love-story of a young country doctor, are perhaps the most enjoyable.

In 1863 the novel " Sylvia's Lovers " was published, and although, by its fine description of old Whitby and the pathos of the story, it has won many admirers, we infinitely prefer its successor, " Wives and Daughters." There is something very sad in the thought that this last and best of the writer's stories was left unfinished ; but happily very little remained to be told, and that little was tenderly touched in to the almost perfect picture of English home life by the daughter who had been not only Mrs. Gaskell's child but her friend. " Wives and Daughters " will always remain as a true and vivid and powerful study of life and character ; while Molly Gibson, with her loyal heart and sweet sunshiny nature, will, we venture to think, better represent the majority of English girls than the happily abnormal Dodos and Millicent Chynes of present-day fashion.

In Mr. Gibson's second wife the author has given us a most subtle study of a thoroughly selfish and false-hearted woman, and she is made all the more repulsive because of her outward charms, her soft seductive voice and her lavish employment of terms of endearment. Wonderfully clever, too, is the study of poor little Cynthia, her daughter, whose relations to Molly are most charmingly drawn.

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The story was just approaching its happy and whole- some ending, and the difficulties which had parted Roger Hamley and Molly had just disappeared, when death summoned the writer from a world she had done so much to brighten and to raise. On Sunday evening, November 12, 1865, Mrs. Gaskell died quite suddenly at Holybourne, Alton, Hampshire, a house which she had recently bought as a surprise for her husband. Sad as such a death must always be for those who are left behind, one can imagine nothing happier than " death in harness " for a worker who loves his work.

" . . . . There's rest above. Below let work be death, if work be love ! "

Her " last days," wrote one of those who knew her best, "had been full of loving thought and tender help for others. She was so sweet and dear and noble beyond words." That is the summing-up of the whole ; and, after all, what better could a long biography give us ? The motto of all of us should surely be the words of Mme. Viardot Garcia : " First I am a woman .... then I am an artist." And assuredly Mrs. Gaskell's life was ruled on those lines.

" It was wonderful " — wrote her daughter, Mrs. Hol- land, in a letter to me the other day — " how her writing

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never interfered with her social or domestic duties. I think she was the best and most practical housekeeper I ever came across, and the brightest, most agreeable hostess, to say nothing of being everything as a mother and friend. She combined both, being my mother and greatest friend in a way you do not often, I think, find between mother and daughter."

Some people are fond of rashly asserting that the ideal wife and mother cares little and knows less about the world beyond the little world of home. Mrs. Gaskell, however, took a keen interest in the questions of the day, and was a Liberal in politics ; while it is quite evident that neither these wider interests nor her philanthropic work tended to interfere with the home life, which was clearly of the noblest type.

The friend as well as the mother of her children, the sharer of all her husband's interests, she yet found time to use to the utmost the great literary gift that had been entrusted to her ; while her sympathy for those in trouble was shown not only in the powerful pleading of her novels, but in quiet, practical work in connection with prisoners. She was one of the fellow labourers of Thomas Wright, the well-known prison philanthropist, and was able to help in finding places for young girls who had been dis- charged from prison. For working women she also held

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classes, and both among the poor and the rich had many close friendships.

How far the characters in the novels were studied from life is a question which naturally suggests itself ; and Mrs. Holland replies to it as follows : " I do not think my mother ever consciously took her characters from special individuals, but we who knew often thought we recognised people, and would tell her, « Oh, so and so is just like Mr. Blank,' or something of that kind ; and she would say, ' So it is, but I never meant it for him.' And really many of the characters are from originals, or rather are like originals, but they were not consciously meant to be like."

For another detail which will interest Mrs. Gaskell's fellow workers I am indebted to the same source :

" Sometimes she planned her novels more or less before- hand, but in many cases, certainly in that of * Wives and Daughters/ she had very little plot made beforehand, but planned her story as she wrote. She generally wrote in the morning, but sometimes late at night, when the house was quiet."

Few writers, we think, have exercised a more thoroughly wholesome influence over their readers than Mrs. Gaskell. Her books, with their wide human sympathies, their tender comprehension of human frailty, their bright flashes of humour and their infinite pathos, seem to plead with us to

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love one another. Through them all we seem to hear the author's voice imploring us to " seize the day " and to " make friends," as she does in actual words at the close of one of her Christmas stories, adding pathetically: "I ask it of you for the sake of that old angelic song, heard so many years ago by the shepherds, keeping watch by night on Bethlehem Heights."

MRS. CROWE. MRS. ARCHER CLIVE. MRS. HENRY WOOD

By ADELINE SERGEANT

MRS. CROWE. MRS. ARCHER CLIVE. MRS. HENRY WOOD

[RS. CATHERINE CROWE, whose maiden name was Stevens, was born at Borough Green, in Kent, about 1800, and died in 1876. She married Colonel Crowe in 1822, and took up her resi- dence with him in Edinburgh. Her books were written chiefly between the years 1838 and 1859, and she is best known by her novel, " Susan Hopley," and her collection of ghost stories, " The Night Side of Nature." She was a woman of considerable ability, which appears, however, to have run into rather obscure and sombre channels, such as showed a somewhat morbid bent of mind, with a tendency towards depression, which culminated at last in a short but violent attack of insanity. But love of the unseen and supernatural does not seem to have blunted her keenness of observation in ordinary life, for her novels,

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the scenes of which are laid chiefly among homely and domestic surroundings, display alike soundness of judg- ment and considerable dramatic power. As a writer, indeed, Mrs. Crowe was extremely versatile ; she wrote plays, children's stories, short historical tales, romantic novels, as well as the ghost stories with which her name seems chiefly to be associated in the minds of this genera- tion. It is evident too, that she believed herself — rightly or wrongly — to be possessed of great philosophical dis- crimination ; but it must be acknowledged that her philosophical and metaphysical studies often led her into curious byways of speculation, into which the reader does not willingly wander.

It is worth noting that Mrs. Crowe's ideas respect- ing the status and education of women were, for the days in which she lived, exceedingly "advanced." In " Lilly Dawson," for instance, a story published in 1 847, she makes an elaborate protest against the kind of educa- tion which women were then receiving. " It is true," she says, " that there is little real culture amongst men ; there are few strong minds and fewer honest ones, but they have still more advantages. If their education has been bad, it has at least been a trifle better than ours. Six hours a day at Latin and Greek are better than six hours

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a day at worsted work and embroidery ; and time is better spent in acquiring a smattering of mathematics than in strumming Hook's lessons on a bad pianoforte."

Her views of women in general are well expressed in the following words from the same work of fiction. " If, as we believe, under no system of training, the intellect of woman would be found as strong as that of a man, she is compensated by her intuitions being stronger. If her reason be less majestic, her insight is clearer ; where man reasons she sees. Nature, in short, gave her all that was needful to enable her to play a noble part in the world's history, if man would but let her play it out, and not treat her like a full-grown baby, to be flattered and spoilt on the one hand, and coerced and restricted on the other, vibrating between royal rule and slavish serfdom." Surely we hear the voice of Nora Helmer herself, the very quintessence of Ibsenism ! It must have required con- siderable courage to write in this way in the year 1847, and Mrs. Crowe should certainly be numbered among the lovers of educational reform. In many ways she seems to have been a woman of strong individuality and decided opinions.

Her first work was a drama, " Aristodemus," published anonymously in 1838 ; it showed considerable ability and

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was well regarded by the critics. She then wrote a novel, "Men and Women, or Manorial Rights," in 1839 ; and in 1841 published her most successful work of fiction: " Susan Hopley, or the Adventures of a Maid-servant.'* This story was more generally popular than any other from her pen, but it is to be doubted whether it possesses more literary ability or points of greater interest than the rest.

Mrs. Crowe then embarked upon a translation of " The Seeress of Provorst," by Justinus Kerner, a book of revelations concerning the inner life of man ; and in 1848 she published a book called "The Night Side of Nature," a collection of supernatural tales gathered from many sources, probably the best storehouse of ghost stories in the English language. Its interest is a little marred by the credulity of the author. She seems never to disbelieve any ghost story of any kind that comes in her way. From the humble apologies, however, with which she opens her dissertation on the subject, it is easy to see how great a change has passed over people's minds in the course of the last fifty years, with respect to the supernatural. If Mrs. Crowe had lived in these days, she would have found herself in intimate relations with the Society for Psychical Research, and would have had no reason to excuse herself for the choice of her subject.

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She divides her book into sections, which treat of dreams (where we get Sir Noel Paton's account of his mother's curious vision ) ; warnings ; double-dreaming and trance, with the stories of Colonel Townshend's voluntary trance and the well-known legend of Lord Balcarres and the ghost of Claverhouse ; doppel-gangers and apparitions (including the stories of Lady Beresford's branded wrist and Lord Lyttleton's warning) ; and other chapters descriptive of haunted houses, with details concerning clairvoyance and the use of the crystal. It is interesting to find among these the original account of " Pearlin Jean," of which Miss Sarah Tytler has made such excellent use in one of her recent books. An account of the phe- nomena of stigmata^ and the case of Catherine Emmerich, are also described in detail. Lovers of the supernatural will find much to gratify their taste in a perusal of " The Night Side of Nature."

Mrs. Crowe did not exhaust the subject in this volume, for she issued a book on ghosts and family legends, a volume for Christmas, in the year 1859 ; a work full of the kind of stories which became so popular in the now almost obsolete Christmas Annual of succeeding years. It is also curious to note, that in 1848, Mrs. Crowe produced a work of an entirely different nature, namely, an excellent story for children, entitled " Pippie's

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Warning, or Mind Your Temper " — another instance of her versatility of mind.

"The Adventures of a Beauty" and "Light and Darkness" appeared in 1852. The latter is a collection of short tales from different sources, partly historical and partly imaginative, and certainly more in accordance with the taste of modern days than her elaborate domestic stories. Mrs. Crowe's taste for the horrible is distinctly perceptible in this collection. There is an account of the celebrated poisoners, Frau Gottfried, Madame Ursinus, and Margaret Zwanziger, whose crimes were so numerous that they themselves forgot the number of their victims ; and of Mr. Tinius, who went about making morning calls and murdering the persons whom he honoured with a visit. The histories of Lesurques, the hero of the " Lyons Mail," and of Madame Louise, Princess of France, who became a nun, are well narrated ; but nearly all the stories are concerned with horrors such as suggest the productions of Mr. Wilkie Collins. " The Priest of St. Quentin " and " The Lycanthropist " are two of the most powerful.

Her next novel, a more purely domestic one, was " Linny Lockwood," issued in 1854. A sentence from the preface to this book anticipates — rather early, as we may think — the approaching death of the three-volume novel :

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" Messrs. Routledge and Co. have been for some time soliciting me to write them an original novel for their cheap series ; and being convinced that the period for publishing at £i us. 6d., books of a kind that people generally read but once, is gone by, I have resolved to make the experiment."

She wrote another tragedy, " The Cruel Kindness," in 1853, and abridged "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for children. In 1859 a pamphlet on "Spiritualism and the Age we Live in," constituted the last of her more important works, although she continued, for some time after recovery from the attack of insanity which we have mentioned, to write papers and stories for periodicals.

In spite of Mrs. Crowe's love for the supernatural and the horrible, she is one of the pioneers of the purely domestic story — that story of the affections and the emotions peculiar to the Victorian Age. She is allied to the schools of Richardson and Fanny Burney rather than to those of Sir Walter Scott or Miss Austen ; for although her incidents are often romantic and even far-fetched, her characters are curiously homely and generally of humble environment. Thus, for instance, " Susan Hopley " is a maid-servant (though not of the Pamela kind nor with the faintest resemblance to Esther Waters) ; Lilly Dawson, although proved ultimately to be the daughter

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of a colonel, passes the greater part of her earlier life as a drudge and a dependent ; and Linny Lockwood, while refined and educated, is reduced to the situation of a lady's maid. The circumstances of her heroines are, as a rule, extremely prosaic, and would possibly have been condemned by writers of Miss Austen's school as hope- lessly vulgar ; but Mrs. Crowe's way of treating these characters and their surroundings bears upon it no stamp of vulgarity at all. Its great defect is its want of humour to light up the sordid side of the life which she describes. She is almost always serious, full of exalted and occasionally overstrained sentiment. And even when treating of childhood, it is rarely that she relaxes so far as (in " Lilly Dawson ") to describe the naughtiness of the little girl who insisted upon praying for the cat. This is almost the sole glimpse of a sense of fun to which Mrs. Crowe treats us in her numerous volumes.

To the present age "Susan Hopley," although so popular at the time of its publication, is less attractive than the stories of " Linny Lockwood " and " Lilly Dawson." The form adopted for the recital of Susan's narrative is extremely inartistic, for it comprises Susan's reminiscences, interspersed at intervals with narrative, and supposed to be told by her in mature age, when she is

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housekeeper to the hero of the story. Nevertheless, the plot is ingenious, turning on the murder of Susan's brother by a handsome and gentlemanly villain, and the subsequent exposure of his guilt by means of Susan's energy and the repentance of one of his victims. It has all the elements of a sensational story, with the exception of a " sympa- thetic " heroine or any other really interesting character ; for Susan Hopley, the embodiment of all homely virtues, is distinctly dull, and it is difficult to feel the attractiveness of the " beautiful and haughty " dairymaid, Mabel Light- foot, whose frailty forms an important element in the discovery of Gaveston's guilt.

" Lilly Dawson " may be said to possess something of a psychological interest, which redeems it from the charge of dulness brought against " Susan Hopley." The heroine is thrown as a child into the hands of a wild and lawless family, smugglers and desperadoes, who make of her a household slave ; and the child appears at first to be utterly stupid and apathetic. A touch of affection and sympathy is needed before her intellect awakes. In fear of being forced to marry one of the sons of the house in which she has been brought up, when she is only fifteen,