Miss Ingelow and Mrs. Walford

THERE appears to be a peculiar and perennial fascination, for people of our race at least, about the novel of English life as such. We Americans feel it with especial force, perhaps, just as we feel the fascination of the actual English life, because there we find people altogether such as ourselves, — our next of spiritual and intellectual kin, speaking our language, informed with our instincts, moved by our own very sentiments and aspirations, and all firmly based upon stable (or seemingly stable) social conditions, surrounded by a mellow and harmonious environment, with a background of landscape as appropriate to the figures that move in it as the austere hills, pure skies, and feathery

trees of Perugino to his abstracted saints, or the rose and golden atmosphere of Venice, to ducal fêtes and ecclesiastical processions. We are hard at work among ourselves just now, expending a huge amount of energy and talent, in trying to prove that we also, in America, have a distinct school of fiction; trying to make finished pictures out of the great mass we undoubtedly have of new and striking, but heterogeneous and unclassified material. It is of no use ; we can but make sketches as yet, and jot down memoirs pour servir. Crystals do not readily form in a boiling liquid. Life must be still for an instant, at least, before it can be even successfully photographed.

But after all, our appetite for English fiction, though seemingly more accountable, is hardly more omnivorous than that of the English themselves. It is doubtful whether any known method of computation would suffice accurately to estimate the number of three-volume novels which issue from the British press in the course of a single year. Those which are caught up and reproduced by our shrewd raiders constitute but a small fraction of the whole. I had once the honor of being conducted by a great scholar through the Bodleian Library ; not the noble and charming old reading-room, with its venerable alcoves and beautiful ceiling, but that vast magazine of letters which lies below it. The Bodleian, as the reader knows very well, is one of two or three great libraries, which claim, for reasons best known to themselves, a copy of every published book. Accordingly, after following our Savio gentile through broad realms of science and long reaches of history, through the halls appropriated to the immortalities of Greece and Rome, and those others consecrated to that lore of the Orient which he himself has done so much to illuminate and impart, we came upon a sort of terrain vague of seemingly illimitable extent, entirely occupied by the English novels, mostly in three volumes, of the last twenty or thirty years. What a limbo ! There they swarmed : in triple rows upon the walls, and crowded stacks upon the floors; their backs brave with gold, their sides clad in all the colors of the spectrum, and reflecting amusingly enough the fluctuations of fashion in hue, from the crude blues, arsenic greens, and sickly groseilles of the Second Empire, through a brief period of brazen Bismarck brown, to the dim tints of the æsthetic revival. But their bravery did but intensify their obscurity. Titles and names of authors were alike unknown to fame. This innumerable multitude of fine new books was as the leaves of last year’s forest, or the uncounted dust of what Mr. Fitzgerald calls “ yesterday’s ten thousand years.”

Nevertheless, as the depth of the leafmould measures in some sort the vigor of the forest, so this enormously excessive supply of a certain class of light reading is, in itself, indicative of an immense demand. “ The many fail, the few succeed ; ” therefore where the many succeed, what wonder if an infinite number fail ? It must needs be ; so I said to myself at the time, as we traversed those gayly lined catacombs, and so I have often reflected since, that all those three-volume futilities aimed, at least, at depicting the sort of life which is fullest of interest, the dearest, most intime, most desirable of all, to the nations comprising the greatest readers (I do not say the greatest students) in the world.

And so it is ; and the fact is to our race’s credit, upon the whole. For the truer the art, the more sympathetic and impartial the temper of the would-be dramatist of that English life the very thought of which gives des vapeurs to the ordinary Gaul, the more likely he will be to picture a state of society founded upon veracity and braced by honor, enlivened by humor and by varied intellectual interests, refined by a sincere humanity, and sweetened by an undercurrent of simple and unfeigned religion. Grief and crime he will treat — since treat of them he must, and extensively, in any complete picture of any known society — with a just seriousness and delicacy ; with a certain grave frankness also, since the one thing of which he is constitutionally and utterly incapable is the innuendo. If this should seem too optimistic a view to the inveterate reader of a certain sensational class of modern English novels, let him reflect how very ephemeral, if intense, for the moment, is the interest of those productions; what need their authors feel, to put them forth in rapid succession ; and how truly what we have said applies, in the main, to the work of the greatest artists of all, and to the large majority of the classics of English fiction : to Richardson and Scott and Miss Austen ; to Dickens and Thackeray ; to George Eliot and John Shorthouse. Let him compare, but for a moment, the kind and degree of emotion with which he read for the first time, and has often, it may be, re-read, the tale of the fall of Effie Deans, or the fate of Hetty Sorrel, or the flight with her early lover of Barnes Newcome’s unhappy wife, with the complex sentiments which are evidently required of him in view of the ordeal of Richard Feverel and the sacrifice of Miss Brown, and he will see clearly what we mean by insisting upon the plain manliness and moral simplicity of legitimate English fiction of the highest order. Its cleanliness is fundamental ; the sources of its most enduring interest all open, and therefore innocent.

Just at present, however, we have no concern with the very great masters, except by way of indicating the tone which they have happily given to a very extensive literature. There are plenty of those of the second and even third order, to whose modest art we are indebted for an incalculable amount of cheerful solace and wholesome amusement. A little while ago we had occasion to consider the voluminous and varied productions of Mrs. Oliphant ; and since then our attention has been directed to the work of two other English female novelists of moderate pretension, but, as it seems to us, of very marked merit,—to Jean Ingelow and the marvelously clever author of Mr. Smith and The Baby’s Grandmother.

They both belong to what may be called the school of Miss Austen ; that is to say, they rely for the interest of their work on the minute study of certain frequent and probable, nay, in some cases, flagrantly commonplace types of character ; and on the homely but harmonious accessories, and (with certain exceptions in Miss Ingelow’s case, to be noted hereafter) the natural and unforced combinations, and evolutions, and eventualities of the every-day life of English gentlefolk and their dependents. They are essentially feminine writers both, seldom taxing their powers with the effort to depict scenes which must, almost of necessity, lie outside the range of a lady’s experience. When a woman does this successfully, — witness George Eliot’s ale-house and election scenes, and hundreds in the works of that other great George, across the Channel, and many even in those of Mrs. Oliphant, — it constitutes one of the most signal proofs of exceptional power. When she tries it and does not succeed, she furnishes an equally signal measure of her limitations. These two show a wise modesty in usually refraining from the attempt; although Mrs. Walford has proved that she can make men of the world talk naturally among themselves, which is, in itself, no small achievement for any woman.

Miss Ingelow has always seemed to us to suffer, as a novelist, from the obstinate reluctance of the world to accord to any individual the possession of more than one kind of ability. Do we not all naturally take it as a sort of impertinence or affront, — at the least, as evidence of a very grasping disposition,— when one who has fairly established his claim to the honors of a certain specialty asks for our suffrages in a new direction ? Miss Ingelow was a poet, — a minor poet to be sure, but extremely popular as such. Perhaps none but minor poets are ever largely popular in their own day. It must be secretly grievous to a man of the highest poetic aims and sensibilities to have produced poems as widely read and universally admired as Hiawatha or The Light of Asia ! Miss Ingelow, however, had opened a slender vein of poesy which was all her own. She had written a few ballads and lyrics which had instantly found their place, and will probably always retain it, in all standard collections of the gems of English song. She had developed a certain originality of rhyme and rhythm, and had shown a graceful command of a quaint, sometimes a trifle too quaint, English vocabulary. It was this which secured her the honor of poor Fly-Leaf Calverley’s most delightful raillery, but she shared that honor with the Laureate and Mr. Browning, which might, one would think, have contented anybody.

But Miss Ingelow was not content. She tried her hand at children’s tales, and produced, in Mopsa the Fairy, a really charming fantasy, where many of the best qualities of her poetry were found allied to a certain artless charm of transparent and direct prose diction, — where indeed some of her most exquisite poetical bits first appeared, as captions to the chapters, or songs sung by the characters. Her first attempts at the portrayal of actual English life were less successful. They may be found in a small volume characteristically entitled Studies for Stories, curious and interesting chiefly as revealing the serious and systematic manner in which Miss Ingelow went to work to win her laurels in prose fiction. These little sketches are exactly what they profess to be, — studies : conscientious efforts at the delineation of scparate figures ; attentive observation of salient characteristics, with usually an effort, a little too pronounced and palpable, at deducing a moral from their interaction. The lady was evidently bent on mastering an untried art, and was not in the least shy about letting the public perceive the humility of her first attempts. Several years — as many as seven or eight at the least — must have elapsed between the publication of these preliminary sketches and the appearance of Miss Ingelow’s first novel proper, Off the Skelligs. It was immediately evident that her studies had borne fruit. The opening chapters of Off the Skelligs possess an entirely fresh and quite extraordinary charm. The childhood of Tom and Dorothea Graham is less profoundly studied, no doubt, than that of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, but it is in a wholly different genre, and what with the qnaintness of the juvenile types portrayed, and the exceptional character of their surroundings, it is hardly less fascinating in its way than that immortal chronicle. The picture of those two precocious but perfectly simple, babyish, and unconscious mites of humanity — Snap and Missy, the boy of eight and the girl of six — declaiming scenes from Shakespeare in their nursery, and wrangling over the rules of a universal language of their own invention, is altogether captivating. They had a literary mother, poor things, who was endeavoring to make money by her pen, shut up in the solemn and inviolable privacy of a remote chamber; and we feel a lively sympathy with the superstitious emotions of the nurse, who found “ something awful in their play-acting,” and with the consternation of the successive tutors who were engaged to superintend this untimely intellectual development, and of whom the varying degrees of dismay are most amusingly described : —

“ In due time the tutor made his appearance. He came in with sufficient assurance. He heard us read — we lisped horribly. He saw us write — our writing was dreadful. He seemed a good youth enough. That he was very young was evident; we had been told that he had just left King’s College, London. So we treated him with great deference, and whatsoever he did, we admired. Thus, when he whistled while mending our pens, and when he cut his initials on the wooden desk, we thought these acts proofs of superiority.

He, however, did not seem as well pleased with us, for he had encouraged us to talk that he might discover what we knew, and he shortly began to look hot, uncomfortable, and perplexed.

“Finally he remarked that it was time to ‘ shut up shop,’ asked if there were any rabbits on the common, and affably decreed that we might come out with him and show him about.

“Off we all set, first to the mill for a dog, then to the heath, when finding our new friend gracious and friendly, we shortly began to chatter, and explain various things to him, and to argue with one another.

“ At last we sat down. Our tutor sank into silence, whistled softly, and stared from one of us to the other. Snap, in the joy of his heart, was describing our new language, and — oh, audacious act ! — was actually asking him whether he would like to learn it.

“ Not a word did he say, but a sort of alarm began to show itself in his face; and at length, at the end of a sharp argument between us, he started up and exclaimed, ‘ I say ! there ’s something wrong here — a child of six and talk about a strong preterite! Good gracious ! ’

“ So I tell her,’ said Snap. ‘ She ought to know better than to expect all our verbs to have strong preterites.’

“ ‘ Come home, young ones,’ said our tutor.

“ We rose, and he set off at a steady pace; we sneaked behind, aware that something was wrong. We wondered why he went so fast, for he was evidently tired and often wiped his forehead with his handkerchief.

“At the cottage door he met my mother. I hope you have had a pleasant walk,’ she said.

“ ‘ Oh, yes, thank you ! at least — not exactly. It’s — it’s not exactly what I expected.’ ”

And he left on the following day. The successor of this craven youth was not so easily routed. He was, as it afterward appeared, hopelessly in love with the squire’s daughter, and so had a personal motive for lingering in that forsaken neighborhood.

“Enter new tutor, introduced by my mother, — a tall cheerful young man, followed by two dogs. His countenance expressed great amusement, and when mamma had retired, he looked at us both with considerable attention, while his dogs lay panting at his feet with their tongues out.

“As for me, I was dreadfully abashed, and felt myself to be a kind of impostor, who must carefully conceal what I was, or the new tutor would run away.

“'Come here,’ said the new tutor to Snap, ‘and let the little fellow come, too. Oh, she’s a girl, I remember. Well, come here, both of you, and let me see what you are like. You, number one, I suppose, are at the head of this class ? ’

“'Yes, sir,’ said Snap. "'What ’s your name, youngster ? ’ "'Tom Graham, sir.’

“'Now, you just look at me, will you. I hear you are a very extraordinary little chap. I am very extraordinary myself. I shall never give double lessons when I am angry.’

“Encouraged by the gay tone of his voice, I looked up, on which he said, ‘And what can you do, little one, hey ? ’

“Being for once abashed, I shrank behind Snap, but was pulled out by the tutor’s long arm and set on his knee, while Snap, at his desire, gave an account of his acquirements and of my own.

“After this, the dogs were sent out, and the new tutor began to examine our books, and speedily won our love by the clear manner in which he explained and illustrated everything.

“ In the course of the morning it came out that I did not know how to work. ‘Not know how to work, and begin Greeks,’he exclaimed. ‘ Where’s the nurse? Fetch her in!’

“ In came nurse, curtseying.

“' Why, Mrs. What’s-your-name,’said our tutor, “I understand that this young lady cannot work.’

“ Nurse, taken by surprise, stammered out some excuse.

“' It’s a very great neglect,’ proceeded our tutor. ‘Fetch some of your gussets and things and let her begin directly.’

“'Now, sir ? ’ said nurse.

“'To be sure ! Set her going and I ’ll superintend. I can thread a needle with any man.’

“'Sir, she has n’t got a thimble.’

“'It is a decided thing that she must have a thimble ? ’

“'Oh, yes, sir, that it is.’

“Mr. Smith was discomfited by this information, but not for long. Three days after, as Snap and I were playing on the common, we saw him strolling toward us with a large parcel under his arm.

“'Come here, you atom,’ he said to me. ‘I have something to show you.’ So I came, and crouched beside him, for he had seated himself on the grassy bank, and he had very shortly unfolded to my eyes one of the sweetest sights that can be seen by a little girl. It was a doll, a large, smiling wax doll. Beside it, he spread out several pieces of gay print and silk and ribbon. He had bought them, he said, at the town, and moreover he had bought me a thimble.

“To ask mamma’s help would have been of little use, and he scorned to ask that of nurse; but, by giving his mind to the task, and making his own independent observations, he designed, by the help of his compasses, several garments for the doll, and these in the course of time he and I made, thereby giving exceeding satisfaction to the servants and family at the mill, who used furtively to watch his proceedings with great amusement.”

The moral of this piquant scene is not mentioned, but it is happily unmistakable. To develop consistently, and with interest, the characters of these rather abnormal little beings would seem to be about as difficult a task as a novelist could essay, but Miss Ingelow acquits herself of it, as far as the girl, at least, is concerned, triumphantly. Tom is a disappointment, but the author’s art cannot be said to fail here, for so he would almost inevitably have been in real life. His brilliant boyhood had no suite. His marvelous mental power was accompanied by a corresponding moral weakness, which dragged him, eventually, as far behind his fellows as he had originally started in advance of them; and all that astonishing promise of his days of innocence remained but a rather heart-sickening memory. The tragedy is not striking and terrible, like that in which the lives of George Eliot’s brother and sister were involved, but how true it is to common experience, and the level tenor of life’s ordinary woe ! Dorothea, on the other hand, becomes a very proper little heroine, without ever losing her originality or her fascination. In her learned humility and gentle audacity, her fine mixture of spirit and softness, and her almost comical unconsciousness of her own personal charms, she remains always and unmistakably, the fairy-like " Missy ” of the strong preterites and the Shakespeare recitals, and one of the oddest and most engaging of all modern ingénues.

The preservation of her artless charm is the more remarkable, in that it is always she who tells her own and her brother’s story, and that is a nice art indeed which can make a naïf character reflect itself without injury to its own naïveté. Even Dickens’s Esther Summerson is priggish and self-righteous at times, but this mignonne Dorothea, not at all.

Miss Ingelow’s poetic and dramatic powers find scope in the really thrilling description of the wreck off the rocks from which the novel takes its name; and properly enough, since its true love-story begins then and there ; but it is in depicting the daily life at Wigfield that she first fully makes good her claim to be reckoned among the vivid and successful delineators of English domesticity. Affluent without ostentation ; pure, healthful, and humane; pious without austerity or pretension ; courteous and generous and gay ; monotonous, yet always mildly amusing, — this is that life of sweet decorum, of sobriety rather than of dullness, in which we do so well to take what seems by moments, even to ourselves, an inexplicable delight. This is that true beatitude of blameless Philistinism, equally removed from the exotic vices and the barbaric expensiveness, chronicled with so much gusto by Lord Beaconsfield and Ouida, and the fantastic tricks played before high heaven by certain small but highly conscious coteries, important chiefly through their impertinence, and conspicuous by their absurdity.

Miss Ingelow lingers too long over the pleasant life at Wigfield for the symmetry of her tale. There is too much about the elder brother’s philanthropies and there are too many of the younger brother’s jokes ; yet we speak for ourselves in averring that she never positively fatigues her reader, who is glad when the course of the story returns to that quiet place, after the somewhat forced episode of the heroine’s attempted labors in the London slums. The weak part of Off the Skelligs is its plot. That a person—even a very small and self-distrustful person — of Dorothea’s delightful common sense should have engaged herself to the volatile and insignificant, though amusing Valentine, when she had really given her heart to the staid and slightly magnificent Giles is hardly to be credited, and the manner in which the true lovers of the story are involved in the misunderstanding which delays their bliss implies even more than the elaborate imbecility usually displayed in such cases.

Miss Ingelow appears clearly to have perceived that her first novel had no proper intrigue, and to have resolved, come what might, to remedy this defect in her subsequent efforts. But first, she could not resist the temptation to develop a little further the fortunes of her first-born characters, for whom she had naturally conceived a lively affection, and whose existence had probably assumed for her a sort of importunate objectivity. The experiment is always a doubtful one. It cannot be said either to have failed or to have succeeded completely, in the by no means commonplace story entitled Fated to be Free. Once more the author’s lively imagination supplies her with a novel and highly picturesque opening to her tale. She introduces a strange set of characters, living in antiquated fashion in an out-ofthe-world nook, who prove, however, to have relations of the most important kind with some whom we have already seen in Off the Skelligs, moving in the broad daylight of every-day life. She devises a secret, which she is so anxious not to reveal prematurely that she can hardly be said ever to reveal it satisfactorily, and with the proper dramatic effect. She broaches a moral; and of all gravest questions, the one here involved is the everlastingly staggering question of the relations between necessity and freewill ! This is the way in which our author looks at it, and thus offers her suggestion for the reconcilement of the irreconcilable. An unalterable destiny gives us liberty of moral choice. We are subject to fate, but to a fate which makes us to a certain extent free. Valentine, the light, sparkling, incorrigible Valentine, who would so gladly have yielded himself wholly to the swaying of circumstance, Valentine was forced to take the responsibility of his own course, to say with a categorical yes or no whether he would enter upon his tempting but tainted and virtually forbidden inheritance ; and clearly to perceive at the last, just as his vain young life was slipping from him, that it had been so, and that his fate had been to have his fate in his own hands. The story is a short and rather sad one, though brightened by much unforced light talk, and lively nonsense of young and happy people, but the author’s genuine artistic instinct suffices to make it consistent and shapely, and, in fine, it has its charm.

By the time, however, that Fated to be Free was concluded, Miss Ingelow had become possessed, or so we divine, by certain definite theories about novelmaking which she was impatient more fully to develop. First of all, the truism that truth is stranger than fiction seems to have impressed itself upon her mind with new and extraordinary force. She is struck, as most of us have been, at one time or another, by the notion that if we would but remember what we hear, and dared tell what we actually know, it would become apparent that strange coincidences and grotesque combinations do frequently occur even in the most ordinary and conventional lives. The most probable defect of the novel of comfortable English life is, naturally, a lack of incident; but it is possible to conceive, even within these highly proper bounds, of a situation so strange that incidents in abundance would inevitably grow out of it. Accordingly, still with the same happy and engaging carelessness about making her experiments in public, Miss Ingelow set herself resolutely, as it would seem, to conjure up situations of this kind, and did actually contrive two, which, so far as we know, had never been thought of before, and proceeded to work them out, like problems, in Sarah de Berenger and Don John.

The conception of the former is the more entirely novel. A poor woman, of extraordinary character, the wife of a convict just transported for fourteen years, unexpectedly falls heir to a modest competence; and in order to secure it, for the benefit of her two baby girls, from the possible future claims of their worthless father, she assumes different names for herself and for them, takes the position of their servant, and brings them up as little orphan gentlefolk, of whose income, slender for their false position, although amounting to wealth for their true one, she passes for the scrupulously honest trustee. A great deal of skill is shown in the contrivance of slight chances, whereby the self-devoted author of this pious fraud is continually enabled to escape detection; and it was clever to conceive of her as aided above all, however unwittingly, by the inveterate folly and freakishness, the long pampered eccentricities, of the wealthy and addle - pated spinster who finally leaves her money to the convict’s children. The drawback is that the thing was, after all, so outrageous a fraud that our gratification at its success is felt to be uncomfortably immoral. Moreover the bizarre central figure of Sarah de Berenger, though happily enough imagined, is not well developed. She just fails of being an entirely credible, and therefore legitimately amusing character. The latter part of the story, from the time when the mother is forced finally to sever herself from her children and go back to her rehabilitated convict, is very painful, but, to our thinking, very powerful also; especially in the way in which we are forced to share both the poor wife’s dispassionate conviction of the reality of her wretched husband’s repentance, and her invincible repugnance for his person.

The motif of Don John seems, at first sight, to be more hackneyed; but it is not so, for here we have the timehonored expedient of changing children at nurse treated in an entirely unprecedented, and yet perfectly plausible fashion. The irresponsible young wetnurse, whose imagination has been fired, and her light head turned, by an immense consumption of the fiction furnished by a cheap circulating library, makes, in the first instance, in mere wantonness, the experiment of substituting her own child for the one which had been confided — somewhat too unquestioningly — to her care, while a severe epidemic of scarlatina took its long course through the nursery of her employers, the Johnstones. Again a chain of curious and very creditably devised chances favor — almost necessitate — the maintenance of the deception ; and at length it comes about, through the sudden death, by accident, of her accomplice in the dangerous game she had been playing, that the nurse herself is not entirely certain whether it is the Johnstone baby or her own which the family reclaim, while she is herself prostrated by severe illness. The frightened woman keeps her guilty and yet rather absurd secret for a little while, but then the miserable confession will out, and the unhappy parents who have been the victims of this enraging trick find that they can do no better than pack the unprincipled nurse off to Australia, adopt the other child, and bring up the twin boys exactly alike. The history of the growth of their characters, and the development of their fates, is a singular and affecting one. It is the best told of all Miss Ingelow’s tales, — the most direct and dramatic and symmetrical; and, in short, Don John is, to our mind, an exceedingly beautiful little story; a finished and charming specimen of that minor English fiction which is often as good, from a literary point of view, as the best produced elsewhere.

As in Fated to be Free the author had hovered about the eternally burning questions of fate, free-will, and foreknowledge absolute, so in the obviously recherchés plots of Sarah de Berenger and Don John, she finds scope for some curious speculations on the potency of education and the mysteries of heredity. It is a little difficult to make out her exact position; perhaps she has never fully defined it even to herself. Upon the whole, however, she would seem to make light of ancestral influences, and to intimate that the individual himself and his guardians and teachers in early years are alone responsible for his spiritual development and mundane destiny; thus reiterating her protest against those necessitarian doctrines which are commonly held so dangerously to benumb the moral sense.

It is to be observed, however, that the novelist who is born, not made, is not apt greatly to preoccupy himself with the illustration of points like these, or, other than incidentally, with any points whatever. Nor are we wont to perceive with him, as plainly as we cannot help doing in Miss Ingelow’s case, the growth of the design and the machinery of construction. The other novelist whose name we have associated, and whose work we have been interested to compare with hers has, above all others, the merits of spontaneity and unconsciousness. The opening chapters, indeed, of the first of Mrs. Walford’s works which created any sensation suggested the idea that she had been a very devout disciple of Miss Austen. Probably she had, but she soon proved herself a variante and not a copy. Mr. Smith: A Part of his Life had a flavor and a humor entirely its own. The artless vulgarities of the Hunt family could hardly have been more carefully studied or more faithfully represented by the creator of the immortal Mrs. Bennett herself; but in the conception of her hero, — the plain, modest, pious, instinctively chivalrous, and inevitably honorable English gentleman, — with the simplicity of his love, and the perfectly unconscious disinterestedness of his motives, Mrs. Walford gives proof of higher sympathies and deeper estimates of human nature than were often betrayed — whatever may have been felt — by her accomplished model. Lord Sauffrenden is another delightful type, not in the least romantic, or ideal, except in the fine touch, at once light and firm, with which he is drawn; and his wife is another; while the story of the vain, yet not ignoble heroine, and of her moral awakening and virtual regeneration by the brief, humble, wistful passage through her life of one thoroughly good man, is exactly as well told as possible. Indeed, excellent as is the faculty of characterization shown in Mr. Smith, and racy the humor, the most remarkable thing about the little book is a certain sober unity and masterly simplicity of method, — a resolute subordination of all details to the general design. In this respect it reminds us, even more than of Jane Austen, of that small masterpiece of George Eliot’s, Silas Marner, and is really, in the best sense of the term, what people mean, or ought to mean, when they call a tale artistic.

Apparently, however, it is not always possible for Mrs. Walford to exercise over herself the degree of restraint which had been requisite to render the unambitious narrative of a part of Mr. Smith’s life so symmetrical and so satisfying. The immediate successor of that tale, Pauline, was in no respect a repetition. For one thing, it abounded in scenery. Much is made, and skillfully, in the first and last parts of the story, of the local color of the Hebrides ; whereas Mr. Smith had been as innocent of landscape as Emma, or any other novel of the pre-Wordsworthian school. Moreover, there was an almost passionate intensity in certain portions of Pauline, suggesting another, and perhaps higher order of power than any which the earlier book had revealed, — one touching upon the veritably tragic. Still, it was unequal in its different parts, and imperfectly sustained. This book certainly had a moral. A good woman is not to marry a bad man with the vain hope of making him better. Such devotion is not useless, merely, but sinful. On this austere text, the author, in the person of her saint-like yet perfectly simple and natural heroine, not so much preaches a homily as makes a plea, — a tearful, regretful, yet inflexible plea. We recall few passages in modern fiction more seriously beautiful than the last scene vouchsafed to us of her pensive story, in which she receives the tidings — told carelessly and incidentally — of the violent end of the man she loved. She is again in her beloved Hebrides, where she had known him first. A terrible summer tempest has just swept over the islands. The devoted pastor of one or two solitary parishes, who had gone in a boat to visit a dying parishioner, had been drowned in the discharge of his humble duty, and Pauline is writing to a friend of the event which had deeply moved herself and all the countryside. “ He died as he had lived,” she was writing, and then she paused and lapsed into revery, —

“ What a grand death to die! No pain, — no weary waiting for the end ! He fell in his harness fighting the good fight. . . . How could I ever have thought him thrown away here ? Oh, what a good man has gone to his rest! How poor, how small we grow beside such giants! We fritter away the lives that might all, with God’s help, be great and glorious as his was. We clog ourselves, we forget that

“ ‘ Life, life, what is life ? ’ murmured Pauline, gazing into the fathomless heavens above with dreamy eye. ‘ A few winters and summers, a few pains and pleasures, a single love. Ah me !

What will be the end of my love? Am I preparing to go as little cumbered as I may, or am I adding a weight to pull me down ? Not yet, can I know ‘ ” —

Her brother and his gay fiancée break in upon her here, with abundance of light chatter and news of the day. Death and distant calamity can cast no more than a passing shadow over their exuberant spirits.

“'Were there any letters ? ’ asks Pauline at last, interrupting their badinage.

“'No, I don’t think so. I had one. I say ! Poor Blundell has broken his neck riding a steeple-chase in Paris last Sunday! ’

“The ink was not dry upon the sheet, under Pauline’s hand. Over the words, He died as he hid lived, her fingers hung frozen, rigid, numbed.

“'Is n’t it strange,’ said Tom, still standing in the doorway, ‘that we should have had the news here! Do you remember ’ — he heard Elsie calling him, and went away caressing a puppy he held in his arms.

“The paper rustled in the draught of air, for he had left the door open. A dog bayed on the hillside, and a raven croaked overhead. The room felt cold. The sunshine crept away from it. Colder still sat that motionless figure bending over the desk. A step outside — she staggered to her feet, barred the door, and had her hour of agony unseen. . . . The end was this.”

This is admirable in its restraint. There is no parade of renunciation and consecration. The three words " a single love,” written before the blow fell, contain the whole sequel of the story, and tell as plainly as pages of sentiment could have done that Pauline would be henceforth a nun without a livery or a cloister, and all that was left of her life, an unuttered prayer for the dead.

From the high finish of simple Mr. Smith, and the fervor of emotion which

she had occasionally touched in Pauline, Mrs. Walford fell suddenly, inexplicably, in her two succeeding efforts to the grade of a third or fourth rate storyteller, the triviality of whose theme is not redeemed by any very conspicuous excellence of treatment. There were amusing scenes ; there was usually the charm which seems inalienable with this otherwise uncertain writer, of absolutely natural conversation ; but Cousins was a book to be forgotten as soon as read, and Troublesome Daughters, meandering, as it did, through three volumes of feeble improbabilities, flatly belied the possible humor of its theme, and almost sufficed to bury in oblivion the memory even of Mr. Smith. “How soon that writer wrote herself out! ” was wha people thought, if they thought of Mrs. Walford at all, amid the bewildering rush of new candidates for their favor. So fully was the fact of her fiasco accepted that when Blackwood began publishing, some years later, an anonymous serial, with the piquant title of The Baby’s Grandmother, and the story, which had opened well, was developed with much spirit and went on steadily deepening in interest, among the speculations which began to be rife as to its authorship, not one, so far as we remember, pointed in the right direction. The systematic and unremitting novelreader who neglects not the meanest serial, and receives with noble impartiality all that Tauchnitz sends, while thankful for the oases afforded by The Baby’s Grandmother in the desert of his life, perceived no more than a phantasmal resemblance to some manner previously known, in the free and graceful drawing of the figures of Matilda and Lotta, and the amusing incongruity of their relation as mother and child. Lady Matilda, bright, buoyant, exuberant in beauty and seemingly immortal in youth ; a girl still, to all intents and purposes, at thirty-seven, although a widow ; and, oh, exquisite jest of indisputable fact, a grandmother ! — an unaffected girl, too, with all a handsome girl’s involuntary fascination, plus a certain tranquil and seductive splendor of perfectly mature womanhood : and side by side with this radiant mamma, her absolutely insignificant child, plain, dull, congenitally old, but insufferably selfconceited withal, resolved to be everywhere conspicuous, delivering herself in season and out of season of pages of prim platitudes, in the style so well described by the indefensible word burbling, and reported for the reader’s benefit, as it were, stenographically, with a demure faithfulness which is in itself diverting ! It seems odd, but quite natural, under the circumstances, that the godfather of the important first-born of this dismal but importunately lifelike Lotta should fall in love over the christening font with the baby’s grandmother, whose home is with two bachelor brothers, both of whom adore her, and her affectionate relations with whom are charmingly depicted. Lord Overton the elder, the head of the family, is another simple, kindly, spotless English gentleman, of the Sauffrenden type ; the younger, the Hon. Teddy, is a past reprobate, but a very sweet fellow, and so plainly an intellectual innocent that it is impossible to be severe upon him. The hero of the book, James Challoner, is a very real but very doubtfully agreeable person. A certain vague distrust we are made to feel of him from the very first is most cleverly imparted and managed. He reveals, however, the somewhat rare faculty of loving both greatly and tenderly; and when we are told by the author that he had himself been loved by many women before Lady Matilda’s day dawned for him, we believe it readily, although doubting much whether any but her gracious and spirited self would have “ had a good time ” as his wife. All might have gone well, however, if the vanquished hero had not been already, unbeknown to his new friends, affianced and on the eve of marriage with a buxom heiress of no particular charms and an inferior social position ; and it is when the scene of the story changes from the easy and highbred home-life of Overton to the great manufacturing town where the Tufnells, the parents of Challoner’s betrothed, live and luxuriate in their honestly gotten gains, that Mrs. Walford’s truly marvelous power of relentless realization is first fully revealed.

The heavy father and the fat, fond mother; the loud,laughing, aggressively “ stylish ” daughters, of whom the bride to be is one, are successively impaled like so many entomological specimens, and exhibited for us ; and all the dreadful diversions of their prosperous and ambitious monde, depicted in detail. There is a chapter in which the arrangements are discussed for what was to be the great event of their “ season,” a fancy ball, from which we would gladly quote were it not a shame to divide so perfect a chrysolite. Nothing is extenuated here, and nothing overdone. In its way, it is faultless.

Good people are the Tufnells, — blameless and even bountiful, honorable also in instinct and practice, and full to overflowing of a certain demonstrative humanity; but how, even while striving to be impartial, does the author betray her detestation of them and their environment! But for this bitter grain of what we are fairly constrained to call personal despite, her searching realism might almost be compared with that of that transcendent, but as yet barely recognized genius, the Russian novelist Tolstoï, the colossal author of La Guerre et La Paix. Where he, however, is passionless, she is merciless. There was a trace, in her treatment of the Hunts in Mr. Smith, and of the Jermyns in Pauline, of the same fastidious aversion to the subjects of her unflinching study, — a something so nearly vicious in her unsparing accuracy, as quite to excite our sympathy for its victims. It is as if she had a sacred vendetta to accomplish on virtuous vulgarity. Excellent people ? Oh, heavens, yes ! but odiously free and easy in their good-nature ; purse-proud, yet with an uneasy jealousy of rank; their life showy, but inelegant and unlovely ; their speech a misery to ears polite. What were Challoner’s emotions likely to have been, when he found himself first hero and chief favorite in the Tufnell family-circle, and bound in all honor so to remain ?

Not very much is said by the author on this head. She leaves the facts to speak for themselves, which they do, as we have said, pitilessly. To give the particulars of Challoner’s treachery would be to forestall the interest of some who, not having yet read the story, may possibly be moved to do so, on our recommendation. Elements of tragedy are in the tale, and they are hardly less ably handled than the others. Still, as those of comedy predominate upon the whole, it is appropriate that the book should end “ well ” in the popular sense of the term. It need not, however, and ought not to have ended gleefully. The final union of those impassioned middle-aged lovers cost two lives, and, on the part of the heroine, at least, a terrible process of disillusion. They might have accepted one another after all this, and lived in what passes for content; but that they should have done so without many a sad and bitter reflection, wholly without remorse, in fact, but rather in the spirit of childish and almost silly delight which pervades the last chapter, is a supposition inconsistent with the alleged depth of their natures, and even belies the scope of their intelligence. Mrs. Walford is never secure when she lets herself go. She should be always cool, collected, moderate, watchful, as in Mr. Smith. The moment she yields unreservedly to emotion, even her own private and natural emotion toward her own characters, her art breaks down. It is a curious fact, moreover, that the moral of The Baby’s Grandmother, so far as it has one, precisely contradicts the moral of Pauline. Lady Matilda takes Challoner in the end, at the earnest insistence of the sensible and sympathetic Overton, confessedly to save him from going utterly to the bad.

It would appear, therefore, that this highly endowed but unequal writer has not even yet acquired the full command of her really noble powers. While Miss Ingelow furnishes an instance of a slender and somewhat artificial talent, carefully cherished and scientifically developed to its utmost capacity, in Mrs. Walford we observe the irregular action of a larger power, of which the possessor herself appears but fitfully conscious, but of which the perfect exercise would place her name very near the head of the list of female writers of fiction now living.

Harriet Waters Preston.