The family of the Staveleys is in this way perhaps the most characteristic group which Mr. Trollope has as yet produced. They are thoroughly successful, and their success is well deserved; they have a calm, well-ordered, and healthily unobtrusive religion; they are quite above intrigue, shabbiness, or malevolence. Lady Staveley is a model as wife, mother, and mother-in-law; and Madeline, though she falls rather more precipitately in love than that bien rangée young lady should, is on the whole just such a daughter as a Lady Staveley would wish to have. The Christmas party at Noningsby could have been written only by a man who had experienced and appreciated the enjoyment of a well-ordered, hospitable, unpretentious country-house, where there are plenty of children, wealth enough to rob life of its embarrassments, simplicity enough to allow of a little romping and flirtation, and where every member of the family is on confidential terms with all the rest. Among the guests are a vulgar scheming young woman, the daughter of a London barrister; a nice simple lad, heir to a neighbouring baronet; and Felix Graham, clever, talkative, and agreeable, but ugly and penniless, and encumbered moreover with "an angel of light," in the shape of a young lady whom he has rescued from poverty, supplied with the rudiments of education, and promised, some day or other, to make his wife. Every thing is, however, perfectly innocent; and Graham, having been guilty of nothing but a generous indiscretion, proceeds forthwith to throw the angel of light into the background, and to fall in love with the young lady of the house. There are Christmas games in the evening for the children; and Graham is selected by one of them as her champion, and effects on her behalf a successful raid upon the snap-dragon, over which Miss Staveley is presiding as ghost and dragoness.

"Now Marian,' he says, bringing her up in his arms.

'But it will burn, Mr. Felix; look there, see, there are a great many at that end. You do it.'

I must have another kiss, then.'

'Very well, yes, if you get five;' and then Felix dashed his hand in among the flames and brought out a fistful of fruit, which imparted to his fingers and wristband a smell of brandy for the rest of the evening.

If you take so many at a time, I shall rap your knuckles with the spoon,' said the ghost, as she stirred up the flames to keep them alive.

But the ghost shouldn't speak,' said Marian, who was evidently unacquainted with the best ghosts in tragedy.

'But the ghost must speak when such large hands invade the caldron; and then another raid was effected, and the threatened blow

was given. Had any one told her in the morning that she would that day have rapped Mr. Graham's knuckles with a kitchen-spoon, she would not have believed that person. But it is so that hearts are lost

and won."

All the point in this sort of scene depends on the innocence of the performers; and it is because Mr. Trollope can manufacture passages of the kind in any quantity required, that he has made himself the favourite writer of the day. The people on whose behalf he interests one are thoroughly sterling, warmhearted, and excellent. Every body would be glad to spend Christmas at Noningsby, to go for a walk on Sunday afternoon with the good-natured old judge, to have a chat with Lady Staveley, and to receive a rap on the knuckles from Miss Madeline. What every body would be glad to do, every body likes to read about, and hence a universal popularity without either an exciting plot or forcible writing, or the least pretence at real thoughtfulness, to support it. Contrast Mr. Trollope in this respect with such a writer as the author of Guy Livingston, his superior certainly in melodramatic conception, in vivid scene-painting, brilliant dialogue, and in familiarity with several amusing phases of life. Not all the ability, however, of Guy Livingston and its successors can force them into popularity against the steady dislike and disapproval which their loose tone excites. Throughout them there is an aroma of indelicacy, a half-admiration of profligacy, a familiarity with crime, which an English audience finds it impossible to forgive. There are, no doubt, sets of people whose proceedings and sentiments they correctly represent; but the great mass of readers regard them with aversion, and if they consent, for the sake of an amusing story, to make a transient acquaintance with the personages who play it out, accord them no welcome to their memories, and reject the whole picture as a libel upon modern society. When M. Forgues assures us that we are corrupt, and that our novels prove it, it would be enough, as regards this country, to contrast the fate of such books as Sword and Gown with that of Orley Farm, and, with respect to France, to remind him that such a volume as has within the last few weeks proceeded from the pen of M. Edmond About, at one time the most decent as well as the wittiest of his profession, would be unhesitatingly refused admission to every English library or railway-stall, and would certainly forfeit for its author not only literary reputation and general popularity, but would make him an outcast from all respectable society.

But if we reject the imputation of one kind of degeneracy, it should be admitted that the success of Mr. Trollope's school of writing suggests the possibility of another. Such delinea

tions are, to say the truth, but very low art; and while they do not corrupt the morals, they may degrade the tastes, and foster the weaknesses of those for whose edification they are contrived. Mr. Trollope, it has been truly said, is a mere photographer; he manipulates with admirable skill, he groups his sitters in the most favourable attitudes, he contrives an endless series of interesting positions; but he never attains to the dignity of an artist. He has a quick eye for external characteristics, and he paints exclusively from without. He does not make us intimate with his characters, for the excellent reason that he is very far from being intimate with them himself. He watches their behaviour, their dress, their tone of voice, their expression of countenance, and he makes very shrewd guesses at their dispositions; but there is a veil in each one of their characters, behind which he is not privileged to pass, and where real conceptive genius could alone suffice to place him. Almost every nature has depths about it somewhere, with all sorts of moral curiosities at the bottom, if one has plummet deep enough to sound them. It is the inclination to do this, and the mental energy to do it with ability and discrimination, that constitute poetic power, and which give to writers like Charlotte Brontë or the authoress of Adam Bede so deep a hold over the interests and affections of the reader. When they have finished a portrait, one seems to have seen it through and through: it is a conception, created in their minds and brought visibly before their readers, by scenes so contrived as to bring the most secret passions into play, "to try the very reins and the heart," and to show the true nature of the actor more clearly even than he sees it himself. Mr. Trollope sets to work in quite another fashion. He arms himself, in the first place, with a number of commonplaces on religion, morals, politics, social and domestic philosophy. These supply his theory of life, and beyond them, in his most imaginative moments, he never raises his eye; but, accepting them as a creed, and as the ultimate explanation of all around him, he watches the society in which he lives, and elaborates a series of complications, which interest, partly from the sympathy one feels for pretty, nicely-dressed, and well-behaved young ladies, and partly from a natural curiosity to see how the author will get himself out of the scrape into which the evolution of the story has brought him. This sort of writing can never produce a profound emotion, and leaves us at last with a sense of dissatisfaction. Mr. Trollope himself seems to feel that it falls short of the requirements of a real emergency, and screens the defect by implying conversations, feelings, and expressions which he does not choose precisely to delineate. It is precisely these that we want to have, if we are to care in the

least about the characters of the tale, and in their absence we feel a void exactly proportionate to the interest previously excited. Take, for instance, the case of Lady Mason: nothing could be more exciting than the position assigned to her. She is beautiful, engaging, refined; an old country gentleman of high standing is her accepted lover, and she has just confessed to him that she has for twenty years been living on the proceeds of perjury and forgery, for which she is about, in a few weeks, to be brought into a court of justice. Sir Peregrine Orme, who was to have been her husband, sees of course the impossibility of his marriage; and Mrs. Orme, his widow daughter, and Lady Mason's confidential friend, proceeds to offer advice, consolation, and forgiveness. "Many," says Mr. Trollope, "will think that she was wrong to do so, and I fear it must be acknowledged that she was not strong-minded. By forgiving her, I do not mean that she pronounced absolution for the sin of past years, or that she endeavoured to make the sinner think that she was no worse for her sin. Mrs. Orme was a good churchwoman, but not strong individually in points of doctrine. All that she left mainly to the woman's conscience and her own dealings with her Saviour, merely saying a word of salutary counsel as to a certain spiritual pastor who might be of aid. But Mrs. Orme forgave her as regarded herself."

This seems to us about the most feeble way of getting through a striking scene that it is possible to conceive, and the suggestion of calling in the clergyman puts the finishing touch to the "mildness" of the whole. Contrast it, for instance, with the description of Miriam and Donatello, in Transformation, after the commission of the murder, or with that of the heroine of the Scarlet Letter after the discovery of her guilt. It is mere trifling to slur the scene over with hack religious phrases, to send for the parson just as one would for the parish engine, and calmly to pretermit the exact tragical dénouement to which the whole story has been leading up. Later on in the book we have a glimpse of the sort of consolation which, we suppose, the "certain spiritual pastor" administered on his arrival. lesson," the author more than once informs us, "is truer than that which teaches us that God does temper the wind to the shorn lamb." A shorn lamb! and this of a woman whose whole life has been one long lie, whose every act has been studied for a hypocritical purpose, and who is driven to reluctant confession at last, not from any sudden conviction of guilt, not because she finds the burden of her solitary crime becoming absolutely intolerable, not because in an agony of fatigue and remorse she tears off the mask she has worn with such suffering endurance, -but because she is not wretch enough to incur the infamy of

Ꭰ

"No

involving a noble old man in the disgrace and ruin which she knows, and which other people know, is shortly about to break upon herself.

There are, no doubt, people going about the world with secrets locked up in their hearts, to the safe custody of which, as of some ferocious wild beast, their whole existence is devoted. The Spartan lad with the hidden fox gnawing his flesh is probably no exaggeration of the agonies they endure, and the heroic self-restraint which concealment necessitates. "Let the great gods," cries Lear in the thunder-storm,

"Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,

That hast within thee undivulged crimes,

Unwhipped of justice: Hide thee, thou bloody hand;
Thou perjured, and thou simular man of virtue,
That art incestuous: Caitiff, to pieces shake,
That under covert and convenient seeming
Hast practised on man's life!"

The tragedy of such careers is a dark one, and the artist who essays to paint it must be prepared with a courageous hand, intense colouring, and shades and lights in more striking contrast than are to be found in the mere conventional routine of ordinary society. Hypocrisy is a painful trade, and must make itself felt over an entire character, where once its employment has become essential. Lady Mason, after twenty years of it, would have been something very different from the calm, handsome, well-dressed, but impressible and half-coquettish woman to whom Mr. Trollope introduces us. Her experience would have put her beyond the reach of such gentle ministrations as Mrs. Orme's, and would have made it impossible for her in the crisis of her fate to behave like a silly impressible school-girl. Imposture "should be made of sterner stuff," and the sternness should be evidenced by a resolution, a courage, prepared nerves, a daring spirit, a readiness to run risk and encounter disaster, such as we find no trace of in Mr. Trollope's creation. Repentance, when it comes, must be the result of something more than accident, and remorse, if it is to be real, must require deeper comfort than little bits of texts, pet curates, and pretty proverbs.

How tragical does such a position become in the hands of a really pathetic writer! Who has not almost shuddered at Hood's description of the utter isolation, the nervous watchfulness, the growing horror of the secret criminal living alone amid the crowd of innocent school-boys?

"Peace went with them one and all,
And each calm pillow spread;
But Guilt was my grim chamberlain
That lighted me to bed,

And drew my midnight curtains round
With fingers bloody red."