and delineated in the first instance, had they not been crystallised there and then in eccentric attitudes, from which they are never suffered to emerge. Miss Muloch's conception of a scientific man is an especially womanish caricature. Because Kenneth Reay cares for geology and astronomy, and is always ready to talk about the geological formation of the Campsie Hills, or Dumbarton Rock, why need he be represented as suggesting "great circle sailing," when he is near being swamped in a boat on Gare Loch? It may be an eccentricity to be scientific, in a woman's eyes; but even an eccentric man is not a delirious man, and is usually sobered by the very practical question of how to avoid drowning. Marmaduke Dugdale, again, raves in like manner about free trade, and Vanbrugh about art. It is an error in Miss Muloch to suppose that no man can have any strong abstract interest without being quite unequal to attending punctually to his meals, and understanding generally what money is worth. The sense of meals, especially, is deeper in the abstract mind than Miss Muloch supposes. In Miss Muloch's novels there is always some practical lively wife or sister to flutter about such a hero, and supplement his deficiencies. In fact, however, it might well be found that these airy beings were quite as much incapacitated for practical tasks by their levities of character, as the men, for whom they provide, by their abstruser studies.

One more piece of fault-finding, and we have done with this disagreeable side of our duty. We must observe that Miss Muloch's feminine "ideal," the suffering and resigned angels of her tales, are very feminine conceptions indeed. What we object to in the characters, is not their excellence, or resignation, but their want of practical vividness. They are the incarnations of a sentiment, not living figures. Anne Valery, in Agatha's Husband, is excessively distressing in this respect. Compare her with Mrs Gaskell's wonderful sketch of "Miss Matty" in Cranford. She, too, has been, and is, in love; she, too, has a sore place in her heart. But this is not constantly uppermost. She becomes tender-hearted over old letters; but she is interested, deeply interested, in the fashions of the day,-in gossip, in little kitchen arrangements,-in short, she is bound to the present as well as to the past. But Miss Muloch's suffering women live only "for others;" the "beautiful light" is always on their faces; their hands "work spasmodically" at least once in every two or three chapters; they are never suffered to surmount their griefs quietly, and take living and characteristic interests in the living world. Even the natural silences of human nature are too often compelled to be "full-hearted" in Miss Muloch's tales. Here, however, she is guilty of a feminine weakness into which not by any means all her sister-authoresses have fallen. We have now

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The Power of Portraying the Growth of Character. carped enough, and will point out some of the characteristic and representative feminine excellences of Miss Muloch's novels.

There is nothing more difficult than to paint the growth of a character. No masculine novelist, that we know of, has ever done so successfully, except Goethe and Thackeray,-men whose microscopic and flexible genius has rendered the secrets of mental expansion as open to them, as was the "metamorphose" of the seed into the stalk, leaf, and flower, to the poetic science of Goethe. If a child be finely drawn, like little Paul Dombey, for instance, in Dickens's tale, he must die to solve a problem too hard for the artist's genius. David Copperfield himself, admirable as a child, fades away into a very faintly outlined character. Even Miss Bronte could not develop the wonderful character she had sketched in the little "Paulina" of Villette, and the grown-up young lady would be recognised by no one. But we may notice in the novels of our best lady novelists much more of this continuous flexible delineation. Miss Yonge has succeeded in delineating admirably the growth of character in her extraordinarily clever, though rather uninteresting tale, called "The Daisy Chain." You see many of the characters grow before your eyes. Miss Sewell has succeeded in the same attempt in the Earl's Daughter, and some of her minor tales; and success of this kind is intrinsically suited to the patient and pliant genius of women. By our greatest novelist, Sir Walter Scott, the attempt was never made. He grasped firmly a strong and vivid conception, and vivified it with wonderful power; but his genius was too essentially masculine, his eye too graphic, as it were, to attempt so subtle a province of his art as this. Indeed, it does not usually accompany strong pictorial genius. A mind haunted by a picture will represent its conceptions always in the one striking attitude in which they have conceived it. Hence, perhaps, Mr Dickens's failure to delineate any mental or moral growth. Hence also, perhaps, Miss Bronte's, who photographs her characters just as she sees them, but presents us with a series of daguerreotypes, rather than a continuous moral history. Miss Muloch has much of this feminine power. She can mark, with delicate continuity and real success, the various graduations of moral experience through which some of her finer conceptions grow to maturity. True, she shows this power most in delineating characters which must be, more or less, drawn from her own experience in drawing the character of Olive, (evidently to some extent of this nature), and, most successfully of all, in the admirable delineation of the opening out of the heroine's character in Agatha's Husband. The vacancy of purpose with which an activeminded and notable, but not very sentimental, damsel is afflicted; the mode in which her mind is gradually lighted up by the desire

for affection first, and its reality afterwards; the art with which the shadow of a stronger character is represented as falling upon and fascinating her own,-constitute a series of pictures of very great and unusual interest. She marries rather from the trust and gratitude with which she is inspired by the resolute character and deep passion of her husband, than from any matured attachment. It is the object of the novelist to illustrate the trial so brought upon herself and her husband, and, at the same time, the natural influence of such trial in deepening this elementary affection into one of absorbing power.

Akin to this power of exhibiting the gradual growth of character, which is, if not exclusively, still in great degree, a feminine gift, is that other power which Miss Muloch also possesses of giving, in the widest sense, purpose to her fictions, without in any way making them didactic. There are three classes of fiction, distinguishable with respect to the use made of the narrative or circumstantial element. The lowest class, in an artistic point of view, is the didactic fiction, which so manages events as to point some very obvious moral, making all the mysterious complexities of life converge upon the punishment of some carefully selected fault, and the reward of the corresponding virtue. This is so obvious a falsification of the truth, that it has often produced a reaction in favour of what we may call the indifferent school of fiction, in which events are simply used to bring out and illustrate character, without affording any insight at all into the deeper moral and spiritual purposes of life. This is artistically faulty also; because, when life itself is so full of profound discipline to all men, the art which reproduces life should not leave out the deepest elements it finds there. At the same time, it is a necessary fault in all novelists who have not the power, of which we have spoken, of exhibiting the growth of character. If it is beyond the power of an artist to do this, if he can only exhibit successfully what we may call stationary types of character, then he must omit all the moral and spiritual lessons of Providential event. For these do not usually consist in visiting the meritorious action with immediate and visible reward, and punishing evil with immediate and visible suffering; but rather in that gradual expansion and deepening of character which is the result of accepting the moral alternatives presented to men in the right spirit, and that gradual contraction, or even corruption of character, which is the result of accepting those alternatives in the opposite spirit.

Now, we confess to preferring greatly what is here termed the indifferent school of fiction, to that which presses all the resources of art into the service of some small item of penal discipline or rewarding justice. It is a higher thing to exhibit even stationary

The Didactic Novel and the Purposeless Novel.

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types of character truly, than to misrepresent the Providence of life after the fashion of the didactic school of novelists. Nevertheless, it is higher still to represent, after some more or less complete fashion, the true Providence of life, which can be done by those who have the happy art of displaying the growth of any class of minds beneath the influence of events. This it is which Miss Muloch attempts, and has, indeed, with more or less success, achieved. She attempts to show how the trials, perplexities, joys, sorrows, labours, and successes of life, deepen or wither the character according to its inward bent. She cares to teach, not, how dishonesty is always plunging men into infinitely more complicated external difficulties than it would in real life, but how any continued insincerity gradually darkens and corrupts the very life-springs of the mind: not, how all events conspire to crush an unreal being who is to be the "example" of the story, but how every event, adverse or fortunate, tends to strengthen and expand a high mind, and to break the springs of a selfish or even merely weak and self-indulgent nature.

This highest purpose has evidently guided Miss Muloch throughout her artistic career; and we are happy to observe its influence in a direction in which she is probably not fully conscious of it herself,-the clearing away of a certain vein of turbid rose-water sentiment which deluged "the Ogilvies," and is not imperceptible even in her best and ablest tales. Her deeper study of life, for artistic purposes, has taught her that, in all genuine growth of character, this morbid element is rapidly absorbed and disappears. John Halifax, if not absolutely her most powerful tale, is certainly clearer from this consciousness of sweet feeling than any other, except Agatha's Husband, and contains broader sketches of the influence of ordinary and casual incident on the discipline of a vigorous mind. It has, so to say, a wider horizon. She does not limit herself in it to domestic conversations, and the mere shock of character on character: she includes a larger range of events, the influence of worldly successes and failures,-the risks of commercial enterprise, the power of social position,-in short, the various elements of a wider economy, than anything she had hitherto admitted into the scenery of her tales. If she were less fond of nursing her sentiments,dwelling on the "fatal woman-heart," and such like mawkish moods of thought, she might easily attain a far higher place in the literature of the day than she has ever yet reached. She has a true respect for her work, and never permits herself to "make books;" and yet she has evidently very great facility in making them. There are few writers who have exhibited a more marked progress, whether in freedom of touch or in depth of purpose, than the authoress of "The Ogilvies" and "John Halifax."

VOL. XXIX. NO. LVIII.

2 H

ART. VIII.-1. Minutes of the Committee of Council on Education; Correspondence; Financial Statements, etc.; Reports by Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools. 1857-8.

2. The Twenty-Third Report of the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland (for the year 1856). With Appendices.

2 vols. 1858.

3. Evidence taken before Her Majesty's Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of the Endowed Schools in Ireland. 2 vols. 1858.

Papers accompanying the Report of Her Majesty's Commissioners for Inquiring into Endowed Schools in Ireland. 1 vol.

Report of Her Majesty's Commissioners appointed to Inquire into the Endowments, Funds, and Actual Condition of all Schools Endowed for the Purpose of Education in Ireland. 1 vol. 1858.

4. Letter to the Right Hon. Sir G. Grey, Bart., M.P., G.C.B. By Arch. John Stephens, Esq., one of Her Majesty's late Commissioners of Inquiry into the Endowed Schools of Ireland. London.

5. Essays upon Educational Subjects. (Read at the Educational Conference of June 1857.) With a short Account of the Objects and Proceedings of the Meetings. Published by Authority of the Committee. London. 1857.

6. Punishment and Prevention. By Alex. Thomson, Esq., of Banchory. 1857.

7. The Reformatories, Refuges, and Industrial Schools of Great Britain and Ireland. Published by the Committee of the Reformatory and Refuge Union. London. 1857.

8. The State of our Educational Enterprises. A Report, etc., Prepared and Published at the Request of Gentlemen in Glasgow interested in National Education. By the Rev. WILLIAM FRASER, Paisley. Glasgow: Blackie and Son. 1858.

THE Educational aspects of Britain and Ireland have, within the last thirty years, almost completely changed. A brighter period has dawned. Public instruction has taken a higher form, and given to the interests of the common school a National value; and although our condition is still transitionary and experimental, encouraging results are appearing. While it is not possible to point to a single legislative proposal dealing comprehensively with the Educational necessities of the country, which has not been the signal for energetic and wide-spread opposition, it is interesting to trace, through all, the silent yet continuous advance and elevation of public instruction. While politicians, ecclesiastics, and mere speculatists, have been doing zealous-often disgraceful-battle over the shibboleths of competing abstractions,