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Spectator,'-to the practical advantages which would be derived from the existence of such a body. Indeed, it must be admitted to be an anomaly, that while we have the Horse Guards to regulate the army, and the Admiralty to watch over the navy, we have provided no instrumentality whatever to superintend a department of the public service surely not less important. If muskets and uniforms require occasional alteraation, so also do sees and parishes. If regiments have been sometimes misgoverned, so have dioceses. Our coast defences may need repair to keep out the Pope, as well as to keep out the French. Imagine the condition in which both army and navy would now be, had they been left for a hundred and fifty years to the direct administration of Parliament, with no intermediate machinery provided for adapting them, from time to time, to the changing circumstances of the age.

We do not believe that Parliament would resist any well considered measures for giving the Church a machinery which should enable her to work efficiently. For if the State had ceased to believe in the principle of an Establishment — if it were convinced that the religious instruction of the people would be more wisely entrusted to the Voluntary System -it would carry out this conviction by disestablishing the Church. That is, it would appropriate (with due respect to vested interests) the ecclesiastical revenues to civil purposes. But to this course the Legislature has never yet shown the slightest inclination. It could not therefore consistently, while maintaining an Establishment, refuse to it that government which might be held, after mature consideration, most conducive to the ends for which, and for which alone, the Church has been established. We believe that the great body of the Church, both lay and clerical, are daily becoming more and more of one mind upon this question. And we are convinced that when those who thus agree come at last to learn their strength, and their unanimity, they will find all obstacles disappear before

them.

* Spectator of November 20. 1852.

ART. IV.— 1. The Head of a Family. London: 1852. 2. Agatha's Husband. London: 1853.

3. Villette. By the Author of 'Jane Eyre.' London: 1853. 4. Clare Abbey. By the Author of the Discipline of Life.'

1851.

WE E do not look upon prose works of fiction as constituting by any means an insignificant or trivial province of literature. In this, as in any other line of exertion, merit is to be measured, not by the department chosen, but by the degree of excellence reached in that department. The glory of an actor is not considered to be indicated by the dignity of the role assigned to him, but by the truth and vividness of his representation; and the confidantes, the valets, and the peasants are often the great characters of the piece, while the lovers, kings, and heroes are enacted by any one who can strut and declaim. In like manner, an author is not ennobled by the subject which he chooses, but by the power with which he handles it: an historian may sink below contempt, though he has chosen Europe for his arena, and the most stirring period of its annals for his epoch; a tragedian, though he depicts the most mysterious horrors which humanity has undergone, may justly be hissed off the stage for the imbecility of his performance; an epic poet, though Alfred be his theme, pursued through twelve cantos of sonorous versification, may be saved from damnation only by the obscurity which secures him from perusal ;— while the delineator of the simplest and humblest scenes of life, if his pictures be but faithful, his sentiments lofty, his perceptions just, and his colouring natural, may attain a deserved immortality, become a household name at every hearth, a favourite with all ages, and a blessing to all times. Genius stamps its own signet on every performance, whatever be the kind of work it takes in hand; and nowhere is its impress more deep and unmistakeable than in those volumes which reproduce in fiction the richest and most genial realities of life.

Considered merely as artist productions, we are disposed to place the ablest and finest works of fiction in a very high rank among the achievements of human intellect. Many of their characters are absolute creations, an addition to the mind's wealth, an everlasting possession,'-a positive contribution to the world's museum of enduring wonders and unfading beauties, existences as real as the heroes of ancient story or the worthies of private life. But even writers who do not aspire

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or cannot reach so high as this, often leave behind them enduring and beautiful records, which aftertimes will not willingly 'let die;' of conceptions lofty and refined, of beings who win their way to every heart; of domestic pictures which all must love and nearly all may emulate; of virtues at once so loving and so real, that scarcely any one can contemplate them without imbibing some good influence from the sight; of victories won in many a moral struggle, which irresistibly suggest a 'go and do 'thou likewise' to every reader. If novels and romances, of which the tone is low, and the taste bad, and the colouring voluptuous, and the morality questionable, are among the subtlest and deadliest poisons cast forth into the world, those of a purer spirit and a higher tendency are, we honestly believe, among the most effective agencies of good. Hundreds of readers who would sleep over a sermon, or drone over an essay, or yield a cold and barren assent to the deductions of an ethical treatise, will be startled into reflection, or won to emulation, or roused into effort, by the delineations they meet with in a tale which they opened only for the amusement of an idle hour.

" For truth in closest words shall fail,
When truth embodied in a tale

Shall enter in at lowly doors.'

The story may not (and never should) have been written with a definite didactic aim; there may be little moralising and no formal exhortation, the less of either the better; yet the reader may find a chord struck which needed only striking to vibrate to the end of life, but to which the key-note had never yet been found: he may see there depicted with a life-like pencil, the contest with a temptation against which he is himself struggling, the termination of a career in which he has just taken the first hesitating step, the holy endurance and the happy issue of a trial similar to one which is at the moment darkening his own path: he may see how suffering is borne, how victories are won; by what moral alchemy, and through what dread alembic, peace and good may be made to spring out of evil, anguish, and conflict: he may meet with reflections and analogies which reflect a sudden light upon his soul and reveal to him the deepest and saddest secrets of his own being, - till the hour when he perused that humble volume becomes a date and an era in his existence. Nor are works which thus operate upon the reader by any means always or necessarily those which display the greatest genius in the writer: for the production of such effects, simple fidelity to nature, the intuition of real sym

VOL. XCVII. NO. CXCVIII.

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pathy, or some true and deep experience of life, are often more powerful than the most skilful and high-wrought delineations.

With these views of the possible influence for good of even the less remarkable and celebrated works of fiction, it is a labour of love to us to distinguish from the awful mass of rubbish which issues yearly from the Press, two or three recent novels which deserve a hearty appreciation and a ready welcome. Of writers like Bulwer, Thackeray, and Dickens, we have not a word to say they have reached a table-land at which the function of periodical criticism ceases. The first of these has now been before the world for a quarter of a century; —has tried first, the fashionable, and then the romantic and incidental, then the sentimental, then the historical, and lastly, the humoristic novel; has been eminently successful in every line, and immeasurably most successful in his latest phase. Nor shall we spend a single remark on the industrials of fictitious literature, like Mr. James, who writes novels as a hen lays eggs,―nearly as rapidly and at as uniform intervals, and with quite as few of the throes of parturition. There are other writers almost as voluminous, whom we cannot here pause to criticise, who, having by the exercise of real talent and consummate pains, produced one work of fiction of surpassing merit, which gave promise of great things for the future, have been ruined, but alas! not exhausted, by their first signal and merited success. Having struck a vein, not of mental but of material wealth, they have worked it with relentless diligence, but with no high standard of perfection in themselves, and no worthy conception of the dignity or the obligations of their calling. They have produced year by year novel after novel, each marked by fewer beauties and grosser carelessness than its predecessor; emptier of matter, fuller of grandiloquence; displaying a perpetually diminishing sense of the respect due to themselves, their audience, and their publishers, and deplorably falsifying all the bright promise of their youth. Having no root in themselves, they have withered away,'-till the author of The Admiral's Daughter,'-about the most exquisitely beautiful and powerful tale of the last thirty years, at length condescends to manufacture and send forth to the world the inanity and verbiage of Castle Avon.'

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There are others, again, who-commencing with a natural diffidence in their untried powers, a high standard at which to aim and by which to be guided, and an unfeigned sense of the responsibility which lies upon every one who undertakes to act in any manner on the public mind,-bring all their talents to the task before them; who grudge no labour, spare no pains, and consider no time or effort wasted which can add one redeeming

touch, one finishing perfection to the picture; and to whom, whatever measure of success they may achieve, is only a stimulus to greater exertion and more ceaseless care. When writers begin their career in such a spirit, and are endowed with any fair proportion of natural capacity, failure is scarcely possible, and defects and shortcomings are sure to be leniently dealt with; they are not spoilt by hearty appreciation, nor impervious to discriminating criticism; and, unless fundamentally deficient in the needful gifts, may calculate on steady improvement, and on the attainment in the end of a respectable if not a high position in the fraternity of authors. Of this class, the authoress of the two novels we have placed at the head of this Article is, perhaps, the most promising and successful whom late years have brought forward. Having been necessitated by circumstances to choose a vocation, and having chosen that of fictitious literature as most suited to her powers, she has not sought to evade its obligations, or to shrink from its toils, or to regard it as a merely a holiday amusement, to be got through in any manner and at any time; but has conscientiously kept faith, to the best of her ability, with the public she was addressing, and with her own fame. Her first work was entitled The Ogilvies': the style was careful, the narrative interesting, and the characters on the whole attractive, individual, and well-sustained; but it differed from the better sort of ordinary novels chiefly by a fresher spirit and a more thoughtful tone. Olive,' her second story, was similar in character and nearly equal in execution; but marked by a tendency to dwell with too prolonged minuteness on the details of severe mental struggles, always somewhat a morbid symptom. In The Head of a Family,' this had disappeared; and, in every respect, this tale was a marked improvement upon its predecessors: altogether it appeared to us one of the most pleasing and beautiful domestic fictions we had ever read; and Agatha's Husband,' which has just been published, is equal in interest, and superior in artistic merit. The author treads with a firmer step, handles the pencil with the consciousness of more assured power, and in her pictures and reflections displays the resources of a richer and maturer mind. In both works there is the same deep insight whether learned in the bitter school of experience, or by simple poetic intuition, we cannot say -into the retired recesses of the human and especially the female heart; the same quick and true comprehension of some of the saddest and rarest secrets in the whole range of the affections; the same gems of reflection, never intruded but scattered up and down when they most naturally suggest themselves; and what is perhaps the greatest charm of all, the same

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