gested-it is not unworthy to be ranked with Lockhart's Life of Burns or Southey's of Wesley. Neither are the readers of "Blackwood's Magazine" likely soon to forget the ripe and sagacious criticism, often brilliant, ever shrewd and ever kindly, which she contributed to its pages over a tract of many years.

Yet we believe that in fiction Mrs. Oliphant's genius found its truest and most adequate expression, and that the qualities which characterize her historical, biographical, and critical writings are there displayed in even greater intensity.

No one, we take it, familiar with the long series of her novels could doubt that their author held firm and well-fixed views on many subjects. That the whole bent of her opinion was Conservative is manifest enough, and her code of ethics was as old-fashioned as the Ten Commandments. She was too wise to believe in panaceas for the distemper of mankind, or to suppose that human nature could be revolutionized by the invention of a taking formula or the turning of a felicitous phrase. Towards the opening of her literary career the world was engaged in schemes for regenerating the masses; and she laughed goodhumoredly in her earlier notable novel,

Margaret Maitland," at lectures, popular education, and all such early-Victorian prescriptions for hastening the millennium. Towards its close the world was agitated by projects which, professing to aim at the salvation of "the social organism," to borrow a cant phrase, were, in reality, subversive of civilized society altogether. If the reader of her novels fails to find a vigorous and sustained polemic on behalf of those institutions on which the very existence of the community depends, he must remember that since the time of the Anti-Jacobin considerations of taste, decency, and good sense, if not of principle, have forbidden violent attacks upon the family, or the open proclamation of the gospel of free love.

Mere theories of life, of course, and mere opinions on ethics or theology, however tenaciously held, are poor stuff in themselves to make a novel out of, as several notorious examples in recent years have taught us. From one point of view they may be thought an actual disqualification for the business of an imaginative writer, as tending to contract the

range of the sympathies and to check the flow of the more generous emotions. It may even be contended-though we think the contention unfounded - that Mrs. Oliphant's cast of thought is specially apt to be mischievous in this respect. However the fact may be in other cases, no such result assuredly is apparent in her work. On the contrary, she invariably shows herself keenly susceptible of new impressions, and acutely sensitive to ideas “ in the air." One aspect of this sensibility is revealed in the adroitness with which she would pick up some vexed question, or some craze of the hour, and interweave it with the novel she happened to be writing at the time. Just as she availed herself of an extraordinary group of religious phenomena occurring in the west of Scotland, and made it serve as the basis of "The Minister's Wife," so, when people were chattering in magazines about "euthanasia," she seized upon the problem and presented it in concrete form with extraordinary force and poignancy in the earlier part of "Carità;" and so, later on, the "Crofter question" was made to play its part in "The Wizard's Son."

Perhaps the most curious illustration of this readiness in making use of some passing fashion or mode of thought is supplied by "Kirsteen," which was written just about the time when fine ladies took to keeping milliners' shops. Borrowing the hint, Mrs. Oliphant made her heroine turn "mantua-maker," but with some temerity threw the date of the story sixty or seventy years back, with a result by no means unpleasing, if artistically rather unsatisfactory. The truth is that some risk is involved in the exercise of a gift more suited to the journalist than to the writer of fiction; and to be "up-to-date," which is essentially the function of the former, means too often for the latter to be behind the times in the reckoning of posterity.

But Mrs. Oliphant displayed this sympathetic and sensitive quality in a much. more important and legitimate manner, by showing her ability to enter into and to understand views of life and conduct towards which in the abstract she can have felt nothing but antipathy. neither distorts nor exaggerates them, but rather puts the best possible face on them, and brings into prominence the element of reason or justice which may,

She

perhaps, lie hidden under a mountain of discontent that resembles 'contrariness," and complaint that sounds no more rational than the grumbling of a spoilt child. No one, we should suppose, had more scorn than she for the "New Woman" movement, or for the attempt that has been made to overthrow the accepted laws which regulate the relations between the sexes, and to substitute for them, not even the least elevated of ideals, but the actual working standard of a portion of the male sex. Yet we doubt if the root-idea of the feminine revolt has ever been more clearly and temperately set forth than in the following passage from "The Wizard's Son:"

All women are not born self-denying. When they are young the blood runs as warmly in their veins as in that of men; they, too, want life, movement, sunshine, and happiness. The mere daylight, the air, a new frock, however hardly obtained, a dance, a little admiration, suffice for them when they are very young; but when the next chapter comes and the girl learns to calculate that, saving some great matrimonial chance, there is no prospect for her but the narrowest and most meagre and monotonous existence under heaven, the life of a poor, very poor single woman who cannot dig, and to beg is ashamed. - is it to be wondered at that she makes a desperate struggle anyhow (and alas! there is but one how) to escape. Perhaps she likes, too, poor creature, the little excitement of flirtation, the only thing which replaces to her the manifold excitement which men of her kind indulge in- the tumultuous joys of the turf, the charms of the play, the delights of the club, the moors and sport in general, not to speak of all those developments of pleasure, so-called, which are impossible to women. She cannot dabble a little in vice as a man can do, and yet return again and be no worse thought of than before. Both for amusement and profit she has this one way, which, to be sure, answers the purpose of all the others, of being destructive of the best part in her, spoiling her character and injuring her reputation-but for how much less a cause, and with how little recompense in the way of enjoyment! The husband-hunting girl is fair game to whosoever has a stone to throw, and very few are so charitable as to say, "Poor soul!"

Again, it is remarkable how much of Mrs. Oliphant's interest seems to centre in certain of her female characters, who, in real life, would by no means deserve unqualified approbation. If some of her heroines are mild and savorless, she is not the first great novelist against whom such a charge has been brought. But the study of a woman not, of course, vicious in the technical sense, but inspired by no very lofty aims, not succumbing to her "environment," but getting the

better of it, rising superior to every fresh difficulty, doggedly pursuing the ends she has set before herself, and employing in that pursuit the panoply of cunning and intrigue with which her sex is supposed to be endowed, seems to have attracted her irresistibly, and to have evoked her powers to their fullest extent.

Julia Herbert in "The Wizard's Son" (apropos of whom the passage we have just quoted was written), though her portrait can scarcely be called a fulllength, is sketched with wonderful directness, fidelity, and animation. Phoebe Beecham, in a last belated "Chronicle of Carlingford," is no less admirable, and her final triumph over old Mr. Copperhead, whose son she has determined to marry, must be hailed with acclamation by every kind-hearted reader. Best and greatest of all is Lucilla, the heroine of "Miss Marjoribanks," which is perhaps Mrs. Oliphant's most signal success as a piece of analysis and character-drawing. Besides its workmanship the cobwebs spun by the subtlest of other novelists seem composed of the coarsest packthread. Yet amidst the intricate tangle of motives and feelings, so delicate and slight that a heavier or less steady hand would have made sad work of them, there still beats a woman's heart; and to find a revelation of feminine character to match this one we must turn to Jane Austen's "Emma" or to George Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss."

Into some descriptions of character, it is true, Mrs. Oliphant seems to have been unable to enter, or at all events she was unable to reproduce them with distinctness and effect. What we may call the "actress" or "adventuress" type of woman, for example (a specimen of which may be found in "A Poor Gentleman"), had doubtless not come within her own immediate observation; and her attempt to depict it suggests many reminiscences of other people's novels. Adventuresses after all are kittle cattle, and few are the writers who have successfully dealt with them. Similarly Mrs. Oliphant's heart seems to fail her in the portrayal of villains. Jack Wentworth and the Miss Wodehouses' brother in "The Perpetual Curate" are not the real thing, and the raffish Underwood in "The Wizard's Son" does not abound in vitality. For precisely the opposite reason she is equally unsuccessful with

her millionaires and parvenus, who are painted in the most repulsive colors.

Even if this enumeration does not exhaust Mrs. Oliphant's failures, and we do not pretend that it does, the successes remain in a vast majority. There is that rabid evangelical Mrs. Kirkman in "Madonna Mary," worthy to hobnob with old Lady Southdown; and there is Winnie Percival, spoilt and incomprise, in the same book. There is Miss Charity Beresford, that pungent old lady in "Carità;" and there is the old maid of the helpless, weeping, and generally "fusionless" variety, exemplified by her niece Miss Cherry, or by Agatha Seton in "Madonna Mary." There are Miss Dora, Miss Leonora, and Miss Cecilia Wentworth, the aunts of the Perpetual Curate, whose place is with Jacky, Nicky, and Grizzy Douglas; and there is Mrs. Fred Rider in that short but telling sketch, "The Doctor's Family"the foolish and incapable wife of a selfish ne'er-do-weel, and almost the only female personage in her works towards whom the author's attitude is one of unqualified disapproval. Among men, there is Kirsteen's father, Douglas of Drumcarro, old West Indian slave-driver and West Highland laird; there is Lord Lindores (a portrait which strikes us as particularly true to nature), whose easy-going amiability is transformed into inexorable worldliness by unexpected accession to a title and a landed estate; there is his son, Rintoul, "rampant" in his ingenuous wordly wisdom, and as firmly set himself upon marrying a penniless beauty as he is upon his sister marrying riches and position; there is the father of the "Rose in June," Mr. Damerel, the embodiment of refined epicureanism and self-indulgence; and there is Dr. Marjoribanks, the hard-headed parent of the incomparable Lucilla.

Our list has been compiled, so to say, at random; it contains no character of more than secondary importance; and we have left the rich treasures of the Scottish stories and of the Carlingford series practically undrawn upon. Yet, such as it is, it may satisfy the most sceptical of the wide extent and diversified nature of Mrs. Oliphant's domain. Her talent was borné only if it be borné for an author to keep his head, to refuse either to clamor for the burning down of ninety-nine persons' houses in order that the hundredth

may have a meal of roast-pig, or to join in the shrill and importunate pleading of the socially mutilated fox in favor of tails being generally dispensed with.

The most conclusive proof, however, of Mrs. Oliphant's keen susceptibility to impressions is the remarkable vividness with which she could convey them. There is no more prominent feature in her art than the combined precision and delicacy with which the physical and social surroundings of her characters are indicated. Her novels are rich in "atmosphere;" the setting of the gem is a subject of anxious care; the background of the picture is not left to take care of itself; nor are the dramatis persona permitted to wander about seeking for a lost milieu, or a monde which once was theirs. Even the weakest of her books begins well. There is no beating about the bush. Miss Austen herself scarcely enjoyed more fully the gift of putting the reader au fait of the situation, or of mapping out in a few bold and sweeping strokes a serviceable carte du pays. du pays. The pity is that, in Mrs. Oliphant's case, her hand often seems to tire so soon, and that as the work proceeds the lines become somewhat vague and blurred. To us, in truth, it seems the merest paradox to pretend that she would not have written better had she written less. But take her at her best, and dissatisfaction vanishes.

What an acute perception Mrs. Oliphant had of the little matters that make all the difference between comfort and discomfort in externals! Again and again she reverts to the res angusta domi ̧* contrasting it with the results of opulence; and the large family living on narrow means is one of her favorite topics. It is the afternoon of a dull and soaking autumn day; the mother is worrying over her accounts in a vain endeavor to make two and two amount to five, or to three, as the case may be; the distracted father has perhaps slipped off to his "library" to write a sermon; the small and barely furnished sittingroom is full of children, the younger ones with jammy fingers and dirty pinafores, the older attempting to keep order, and wrangling among themselves. It needs but the entrance of an untidy maid-servant with an ill-trimmed and

* Straitened circumstances at home. - ED.

evil-smelling paraffin-lamp to give the finishing touch to a pathetic study of squalor and discomfort. What reader of Mrs. Oliphant but can call to mind more than one such picture?

In none of her stories is the effect of "atmosphere" more triumphantly attained than in those where the scene is situated in Scotland; for Mrs. Oliphant knew her native country, and she knew its people. And if we may discriminate where all is excellence, she seems to reach her very highest level when she sets foot in the Kingdom of Fife. "Katie Stewart," one of her most beautiful productions, and the first of a long series of stories to adorn the pages of "Maga; "John Rintoul," a simple yet affecting tale of life in a fishing village, and the "Romance of Ladybank," a slight but singularly graceful sketch-are all very different in kind from one another. Yet they have this in common, that each of them transplanted from the soil of Fife would forfeit the greater part of its peculiar charm and virtue.

It is in delineating the ordinary domestic relations and in recording the emotions to which they give rise that Mrs. Oliphant excels any novelist of her generation. The particular relation which seems to have interested her most was not the conjugal, though that was frequently her theme, and Dr. and Mrs. Morgan, for example, in "The Perpetual Curate,' are a couple whom Balzac need not have been ashamed to call his own. The relationship on which she dwells with most insistence, and to which she constantly reverts, is that of parent and child. This proposition scarcely stands in need of illustration.

Mrs. Oliphant seems somewhat to have distrusted her own power of doing anything like justice to scenes and circumstances which had not come within the range of her own direct observation and experience. But what, it may be asked, of the region which Mrs. Oliphant made peculiarly her own-the region believed by most people to be wholly beyond the scope of the senses, the region of the "unseen," of the supernatural?

Mrs.

Oliphant manifestly had a strong predilection for topics transcending the limits of ordinary human experience, and we believe that in yielding to it she at once gratified the taste and stimulated the interest of an immense section of the public.

We should rather conjecture, indeed, that she shared the illogical though widespread opinion that every well-attested case of a ghostly apparition is, somehow or other, an additional testimony to the truth of revealed religion. Whether such a belief contributes to the effective telling of a ghost story may, however, very well be doubted; and Mrs. Oliphant's ghost stories, though workmanlike and dexterous (for she never relapsed into the amateurish), are neither very favorable specimens of her powers nor comparable to the efforts of others who were perhaps less inclined to believe than she. She is even more disappointing when she employs the supernatural in a long story. The mysterious stranger in "The Wizard's Son" is excellent up to a certain point; but how is a being to be held in awe whose very existence (as we are told) comes to be doubted by the persons whose lives he has powerfully influenced? A spectre who is merely the means of conveying moral lessons, and who once incurs the suspicion of representing nothing more imposing than some great moral or immoral principle, has lost his true occupation.

In "A Little Pilgrim " Mrs. Oliphant of course approaches the unseen on a much more serious and solemn side a side on which no thinking man would willingly cast ridicule or contempt. We trust we are fully conscious of the simple and unaffected pathos, and of the deep and heartfelt reverence, with which the subject of the next world is treated; and we are sure that the pages of that little volume have carried consolation and refreshment to many a sorrowful and penitent heart. If the thing must be done, it could by no possibility be done better. Yet is not tu ne quæsieris a safe maxim in all such matters? The speculations of the great pagan poet as to the future state, couched in the noblest diction, and abounding in the most memorable and affecting passages, may be read and reread without any feeling of incongruity. But for the Christian (so it seems to us), the wiser course is to remain satisfied with such hints as revelation affords, and to refrain from attempting to penetrate a secret which the Supreme Lawgiver has involved in mystery. An indescribable sense of futility seems to be

* Forbear to inquire.—ED.

left behind by those excursions into the supernatural.

These, then, are two of the main qualities that mark Mrs. Oliphant's writings -the sympathetic and masterly delineation of character, and the vivid presentation both of external scenes and of the circumstances in which the action of her personages takes place. When these excellences co-exist-which they by no means always do-little room is left for plot; nor was plot one of Mrs. Oliphant's strong points. Not that she dealt in wild improbabilities, or inconceivable complications, or impossible disentanglements. Tact she never failed in. We can picture to ourselves how a writer of coarser fibre and more vulgar instincts would have revelled in marrying Mr. Vincent to Lady Western, or how one of a more sarcastic and fiery temperament would have made him abandon in disgust the errors of dissent and embrace "those of" the Church. Mrs. Oliphant knew better than either. Thus she kept well within the bounds of good sense and accuracy, and paid her readers the compliment of assuming that their intelligence was at least not below the average.

In reading Mrs. Oliphant's novels one does not stop to think of the fable. One may sometimes look back and admire the ingenuity which brings about unexpected combinations of the pieces on the board, as in "Phoebe, Junior," where the least likely thing in the world would seem to be the close friendship of Tozer's granddaughter, and Mr. Northcote, the dissenting firebrand, with the family of so excellent a churchman as Mr. May. But in nine cases out of ten the question one asks is not, What will the next conjuncture be? but, Given a certain conjuncture, how will the various characters comport themselves? When melodrama is introduced it is ineffective: the mysterious Mrs. Hilyard is the one blot on "Salem Chapel." Probably Mrs. Oliphant's most successful attempt in the tragic vein is "The Minister's Wife: " an impressive and powerful story for all its inordinate length. But, after all, what lingers in the memory is not the hero, or the heroine, or the villain, but the talk at John MacWhirter's smiddy, or the dialogue between the minister and Galbraith when the "materials have been brought in, and the toddy brewed."

The crowning grace of the novelist of manners is a gift of humorous observation, and it is one of which the Fates have been lavish to women. Miss Edgeworth (in her children's books), Miss Austen, Miss Ferrier, Miss Catherine Sinclair, and George Eliot-writers of very different degrees of merit-displayed it in rich measure. Even Miss Brontë had a little; and many a woman of comparatively mediocre abilities has written delightful novels merely by giving it full play. Mrs. Oliphant, as every reader knows, possessed it in abundance, and it brightens all her novels. Throughout her works many are the samples of a humor, spontaneous, refreshing, and free from any tincture of malice.

Differences of opinion must necessarily exist as to which of Mrs. Oliphant's novels is the best, and we should not be disposed to quarrel with any one who awarded the palm to "Margaret Maitland.” Modelled obviously upon Galt, it is a work of extraordinary finish and maturity for a young girl to have produced. The very idiom in which it is written is peculiarly attractive, and harmonizes perfectly with the subject and scope of the tale. No genuine Scot can surely fail to be grateful to Mrs. Oliphant for her pictures of his compatriots. What Scottish servant in the fiction of the last seventy years has not owed much to Andrew Fairservice and more to Caleb Balderston? All of Mrs. Oliphant's Scots characters come fresh from the mint, and bear the stamp of nature. If the present generation believes all it is told, it must be at a loss to form any consistent conception of the Caledonian of the humbler classes. According to one set of informants, he is a drivelling sentimentalist with a sob ever ready to be merged in an ostentatious cough on the shortest notice. According to another, his normal and habitual standard of thought, speech, and conduct is that of a hind returning from a hiring market. Mrs. Oliphant falls in with neither faction; but perhaps her pages convey a notion of her fellow-countrymen somewhat nearer the truth. John Galt and Sir Walter Scott, at least, seem to be on her side, which ought to count for something. Those, too, who are ecclesiastically minded may note that the feelings of the better sort of Non-Intrusionists at the time of the Disruption-the old High-Church