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Another woman who has been set up by some writers on a pedestal almost as high-Charlotte Brontë, the author of 'Jane Eyre'-lived and died before George Eliot was heard of. Any comparison between the two would be a mistake. The three books upon which Charlotte Brontë's fame is founded were passionate narratives of a woman's mind and heart, pent up without outlet or companionship-reflections of an individual being, extremely vivid and forcible, but in no way, we think, to be compared with the far stronger, higher, and broader work which we have just discussed. There is but one strain of intense sentiment in these books

mother of many children, the there is somewhat too much of smiling domestic martyr, whose the dry bones of archæological relittle tragedy has taken a place search, but where the character of among our most cherished recollec- the handsome, poetic, crafty and tions as completely as if we had self-seeking Greek is extraordinary been members of the little rural in its relentless power. parliament which discussed her simple story. The power and the pathos of this most remarkable beginning, and its heart-breaking catastrophe, does not prevent it from being at the same time full of all the humours of a fresh and unexplored country, delightful in indications of rustic character, and in those wise sayings of village sages which afterwards rose in Mrs Poyser to the climax of proverbial wisdom. The books which followed this in succession-‘Adam Bede,' The Mill on the Floss,' and 'Silas Marner'-raised George Eliot's name to the very highest level of English writers. It is needless to dwell upon books which everybody knows so well. They are full of power and insight, of unfailing humour, and at the same time of the deepest pathos, sometimes rising to the height of tragedy. In this vein, we know of nothing more powerful than the journey of Hetty Sorrel in quest of her lover and betrayer, and the return home of the miserable girl, dazed with suffering and shame and weariness, and the dull despair of absolute helplessness and ignorance. There is nothing more impressive or more tragic in the language. The latter works of this great writer are, to our mind, injured by too much philosophy and the consciousness of being considered a public instructor; but there are very fine and original creations of character in them all. Rosamond in Middlemarch,' and Gwendoline in 'Daniel Deronda,' are exceedingly powerful conceptions, as is, perhaps the greatest of all, the wonderful Tito of the great Italian romance Romola,' where

the desire of a lonely creature longing for its mate, an all-engrossing thought which does not prevent the heroine from seeing everything around with wonderfully vivid perceptions, the eyes of genius, but which intensifies the sensations of solitude, and the vagrancy of the heart, into a force of passion with which perhaps no woman, either before or since, has expressed that yearning of the woman towards the man which formed part of the primeval curse, and which indeed has produced the greater part of all distinctively feminine distresses. The inevitable failure in dignity involved in this impassioned revelation has been forgiven to her on account of the force which it gives to her very remarkable bookswhich, it is only just to say, made an epoch among English works of fiction, more than did the works of George Eliot, though the latter were in every way greater. Emily and Anne Brontë have to some considerable extent shared their

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Thackeray's humour is far more pervasive, delicate, and human. His mind was a much more highly cultivated mind, and free from those associations and deprivations which make Dickens always at his least best (to use no stronger words) in the society of ladies and gentlemen. Thackeray was perfectly at home there, and required nothing extraordinary, no eccentricity nor absurdity of circumstance, to open up to him all that was humorous and strange in human life. He needed no more than a handful of the most ordinary figures, going about the most usual occupations, to find comedy and tragedy and all those intricacies of motive and feeling which make human creatures pitiful and laughable, and yet sometimes sublime and great. He preferred, perhaps, to show them in the former light, to turn them outside in, and reveal what they were thinking at the moment of their first appearance, and to open out with the grin of a delighted discoverer those pretences in which they had wrapped themselves about. But when he encountered among the creations of his genius (for it was Thackeray, we think, who was the first to say that the men and women in a book had a will of their own, and developed themselves, instead instead of allowing themselves to be manipulated, as the world believes, by the hand of their maker) one who was of nobler mettle, what a perfect tenderhearted gentleman, what an ideal man it was who rose under this cynic's touch! Henry Esmond and Colonel Newcome are men to ennoble a generation. He who professed to write a novel without a hero because the being was impracticable, produced these two at least, to prove how completely and with what supreme naturalness and truth the thing was to be done. He has not been so happy

in his women, perhaps because his imagination did not require so much for the feminine ideal; but his work throughout is so perfect, his characters so living, with such distinctness of atmosphere about them, crowded though every scene is, that this point of weakness tells the less. It is only the ideal women who are weak. Becky the inimitable, whom amid all her wrongdoings we cannot succeed in disliking, the wonderful old Lady Kew, Beatrix Esmond in her splendid youth and in her frightful age, are amazing in their force and vivid power.

These two great humorists, fictionists, creators, to whom it is scarcely just to give the commoner title of novelists, since their art was something distinct from the craft of the raconteur, were perhaps the most perfect artists of any who have arisen in this age.

The great female writer of the Victorian period is equally remarkable, perhaps even more so, as being the only woman who has yet attained the highest place in literature. The position of George Eliot is unique. Her books have been the object of a kind of worship, as she herself was while she lived; but that of its very nature is evanescent, and they have now to stand before a more difficult tribunal-a tribunal which has not yet given forth its last word on the subject. We, however, who are of her generation, have little doubt that the verdict will remain unchanged, at least in respect to her earlier works. The very first of these, produced without any previous indication of power in the maturity of her years, affected the world at once to enthusiasm, and she never struck a stronger or a deeper note than in the simple story of Amos, or rather of Milly Barton, the poor curate's mild and lovely wife, the

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Another woman who has been set up by some writers on a pedestal almost as high-Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre'-lived and died before George Eliot was heard of. Any comparison between the two would be a mistake. The three books upon which Charlotte Brontë's fame is founded were passionate narratives of a woman's mind and heart, pent up without outlet or companionship-reflections of an individual being, extremely vivid and forcible, but in no way, we think, to be compared with the far stronger, higher, and broader work which we have just discussed. There is but one strain of intense sentiment in these books

mother of many children, the there is somewhat too much of
smiling domestic martyr, whose the dry bones of archæological re-
little tragedy has taken a place search, but where the character of
among our most cherished recollec- the handsome, poetic, crafty and
tions as completely as if we had self-seeking Greek is extraordinary
been members of the little rural in its relentless power.
parliament which discussed her
simple story. The power and the
pathos of this most remarkable
beginning, and its heart-breaking
catastrophe, does not prevent it
from being at the same time full
of all the humours of a fresh and
unexplored country, delightful in
indications of rustic character, and
in those wise sayings of village
sages which afterwards rose in
Mrs Poyser to the climax of pro-
verbial wisdom. The books which
followed this in succession-' Adam
Bede,' The Mill on the Floss,' and
'Silas Marner'-raised George
Eliot's name to the very highest
level of English writers. It is need-
less to dwell upon books which
everybody knows so well. They are
full of power and insight, of un-
failing humour, and at the same
time of the deepest pathos, some-
times rising to the height of tra-
gedy. In this vein, we know of
nothing more powerful than the
journey of Hetty Sorrel in quest of
her lover and betrayer, and the re-
turn home of the miserable girl,
dazed with suffering and shame
and weariness, and the dull despair
of absolute helplessness and ignor-
ance. There is nothing more im-
pressive or more tragic in the
language. The latter works of
this great writer are, to our mind,
injured by too much philosophy
and the consciousness of being
considered a public instructor; but
there are very fine and original
creations of character in them all.
Rosamond in Middlemarch,' and
Gwendoline in 'Daniel Deronda,'
are exceedingly powerful concep-
tions, as is, perhaps the greatest of
all, the wonderful Tito of the great
Italian romance Romola,' where

the desire of a lonely creature longing for its mate, an all-engrossing thought which does not prevent the heroine from seeing everything around with wonderfully vivid perceptions, the eyes of genius, but which intensifies the sensations of solitude, and the vagrancy of the heart, into a force of passion with which perhaps no woman, either before or since, has expressed that yearning of the woman towards the man which formed part of the primeval curse, and which indeed has produced the greater part of all distinctively feminine distresses. The inevitable failure in dignity involved in this impassioned revelation has been forgiven to her on account of the force which it gives to her very remarkable bookswhich, it is only just to say, made an epoch among English works of fiction, more than did the works of George Eliot, though the latter were in every way greater. Emily and Anne Brontë have to some considerable extent shared their

sister's fame-one with some reason, things, and when her Majesty's as the writer of the extraordinary potent example tempered everyand feverish romance Wuthering thing, and kept the atmosphere Heights,' which in very painful- more clear than it has been since. ness and horror made an impres- Circulating libraries in wateringsion upon the mind of the public, places where Mudie is not yet greater perhaps than its intrinsic supreme, and where books remain merits justify. Perhaps, however, and accumulate, are the places to it was as much the remarkable make sure of Mrs Gaskell, and biography of Charlotte Brontë, in- even to bring one's self once more volving those of her sisters, written under the more powerful spell of by Mrs Gaskell, with a frankness Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre. of revelation new to the time, though sufficiently practised since, which brought this remarkable family under the observation of the world, and heightened the effect of all their literary performances, raising the two secondary figures to something of the same level as Charlotte. Mrs Gaskell herself was also well worthy of note as a novelist, and, like the Brontës, belongs altogether, beginning and end, to the Victorian period. Their lives and works take up but a short part of these fifty years, but already Mrs Gaskell has fallen into that respectful oblivion which is the fate of a writer who reaches a sort of secondary classical rank, and survives, but not effectually, as the greater classics do. Even for 'Jane Eyre,' though it has a much stronger power of survival than Mary Barton,' it is necessary now to look in private libraries, or in the old-fashioned circulating libraries of our youth, where such last. And indeed it would be a very profitable exercise for the gentle reader, when the moment comes when he (or she) goes to the seaside or any wateringplace, to take along with his waters or his baths a course of the novels which belong to the happy days of the Victorian era-those days when society was purer and manners better when the Queen was at the head of everything in her kingdom, its pleasures and its social habits, as well as more serious

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We will not touch upon the living professors of this branch of literature, though their name is legion. But there are two who have also passed away into silence, who cannot, in presence of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, be put in the first class of writers of fiction, but who are wronged by that overshadowing greatness, and have a right to a first class of their own. Anthony Trollope and Charles Reade are enough, indeed, to have made a generation happy. This is one of the evils of a too great wealth of genius pouring upon us, as that fitful inspiration does, not in proportion to the time, but like that wind of greater inspiration still, which bloweth where it listeth, and in defiance of all laws of evolution. It is but the other day that Trollope was among us, telling us those stories of ourselves and our neighbours which, if never reaching any supreme point of insight like Thackeray's, are so entirely like life, and the people we encounter, that we all found in his books a new circle of acquaintance, only so much more entertaining than those of flesh and blood, that we had their story presented concisely, and had not to follow it out in fragments through the years, and that their minds were as open to us as their acts, and more interesting. Amid all his groups of clerical people, what excellent company! The Grantleys in ordinary life would

not admit us to all their conferences as that pair do, with their anxieties for their family, and desire to see everybody belonging to them well established and comfortable, their little mutual disapprovals and criticisms, and impatience with the foolish other people who will always take their own way, the old Warden, so gentle, so persuadable, so immovable; and Elinor, almost as troublesome as he. Mrs Proudie be longs to heroic regions; she is a figure for all time: and there are touches in the tragic history of Mr Crawley, that martyr of poverty and mischance, and in Lady Mason's strange unexpected crime; and on the burlesque side, in that ludicrous tragedy of the unfaithful Crosbie, and his lady Alexandrina, which go to the very height of imaginative portraiture. When our grandchildren want to see us, as they surely will, in our habit as we lived, they will find the England of Queen Victoria's reign in Anthony Trollope's books with an admirable distinctness and reality which perhaps they will find nowhere else: for he takes no uncommon types, develops no unknown lines of living, but is all for the common strain of his generation, and draws it as it lived. Amid such a crowd of persons there must be some less well executed than the others; and it is not to be asserted that the strain of a life's work, which was never the work of a student, but done with a continual accompaniment of energetic living on his own part, was not sometimes felt. But the entertainment, the honest pleasure, the relief in hours of weariness, to be got out of Anthony Trollope's novels is endless, and their picture of society always animated and true.

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The spice of adventure, of excitement, and of extravagance in him belongs to a much higher imaginative level, but there is a sponding failure in the commonplaces wherein Trollope's strength lies. Charles Reade is a little impatient of that everyday level. He loves to tell an exciting story, to blow a pleasure-yacht out to sea in the midst of the quietest social arrangements, and to interpolate a thrilling event between two discussions of toilet, in the midst of a young lady's difficulties of choice between two lovers. Sometimes he carries us away altogether to a desert island, and plays all kinds of pranks like a science-professor gone mad, yet he keeps us breathless all the same. The Cloister and the Hearth' is like a piece of medieval life transported bodily into the midst of us. It is in literature what Nuremberg is in art, a thing as real as the old city. We hear that his biographers have foolishly tried to enhance the glory of a writer never sufficiently appreciated, by the suggestion that

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Romola' was more or less a plagiarism from this wonderful book, than which surely there could be no more extraordinary mistake. It needs no such enhancement of interest. We should say, putting aside Sir Walter and 'Notre Dame,' that there is no other such historical novel. To open Reade's masterpiece is to walk into a world of living folk, not in fictitious costume or charged with archæological detail, but at home among their natural surroundings, all individual, unconscious of our observation. His other works are full everywhere of the same easy grasp and power. He is a painter's painter, if we may use the words, or rather a writer's writer. The members of his own craft look on in delighted Charles Reade is at once less wonder when he takes his subject and more than his contemporary. in hand. He treats it as it pleases

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