separated undertakings; but capable, if conscientiously employed, of conveying far more of the proper pleasure and refreshment of romance to an enormously greater number of people. It is no more identical with artistic ability than patience is identical with genius; yet it is a most desirable complement of the higher gift, like the alloy which makes practicable the circulation of the precious metals among the masses of mankind. It is the kind of power which one instinctively associates with a masculine physique, — with steadiness of nerve, and toughness of fibre, and insensibility to fatigue, both mental and physical; yet one of the most conspicuous illustrations of it in our own day, offering a singular parallel to Mr. Trollope's case in some respects, and in others even more remarkable, is furnished by a woman, the very turn of whose genius is essentially feminine, by Mrs. Oliphant, whose life-work, already long, but, happily, not yet complete, it is proposed briefly to review.

It is close upon forty years since this prolific writer,1 to whom an entire generation has been indebted for so much wholesome delight, began her literary career by the publication of sundry quiet but clever sketches of Scottish life and character. Some Passages in the Life of Mistress Margaret Maitland

1 Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland (1849); Mirkland, a Tale of Scottish Life; Caleb Field, a Tale of the Puritans (1851); Memoirs and Resolutions of Adam Graeme (1852); Harry Muir; Katie Stewart (1853); Magdalene Hepburn, a Story of the Reformation (1854); Lilliesleaf (1855); Zaidee, a Romance (1856); The Days of My Life; The Athelings (1857); Sundays; The Laird of Norlaw; Orphans (1858); Agnes Hopetoun's Schools and Holidays (1859); Lucy Crofton (1860); The House on the Moor (1861); The Last of the Mortimers; The Life of Edward Irving (1862); The Chronicles of Carlingford; Salem Chapel; Miss Marjoribanks; The Rector and Doctor's Family; The Perpetual Curate; Heart and Cross (1863); Agnes (1866); Madonna Mary (1867); The Brownlows (1868); Historical Sketches of the Reign of George II.; The Minister's Wife (1869); John, a Love Story; Three Brothers (1870); Squire Arden; Francis of Assisi (1871); At his Gates; Ombra; Memoir of Count

of Sunnyside was followed by Harry Muir, The Laird of Norlaw, Adam Graeme of Mossgray, and a few others, all redolent of the author's ancestral soil, for Mrs. Oliphant, though born in the north of England, is nothing if not Scotch, and presenting with a good deal of skill and pathos, although with nothing like the power which she afterwards revealed, certain types of character with which her youth had been familiar. A little later, but still before the days of George Eliot's Scenes from Clerical Life, the readers of Blackwood detected a new hand at the serials of Maga, a light, pleasing, gently individualized touch, which gratified the sensibilities even of those pampered epicures in fiction, and whose results that vigilant and faithful forager, Littell, lost no time in appropriating and presenting to American readers. Of this second group of tales, comprising The Athelings, The Quiet Heart, and others, and which intervened, roughly speaking, between the Scotch sketches and the famous Chronicles of Carlingford, the most memorable, perhaps, was Zaidee. It was a highly romantic and sufficiently improbable tale, but it fascinated the reader most of all by the unmistakable dawn of that peculiar humor of Mrs. Oliphant's, of which hardly a gleam is discernible in the more serious early Charles de Montalembert (1872); Innocent; May (1873); A Rose in June; For Love and Life (1874); The Story of Valentine and his Brother; Whiteladies (1875); The Curate in Charge; The Makers of Florence; Phoebe Junior (1876); A Son of the Soil; Young Musgrave; Carità; Mrs. Arthur (1877); Dress (one of the Art at Home series); The Primrose Path; A Chapter in the Annals of Fife (1878); Within the Precincts; He that Will Not when He May (1879); A Beleaguered City; Dante, Moliere, Cervantes (3 vols. of the Series of Foreign Classics for English Readers); The Greatest Heiress in England (1880); Harry Joscelyn (1881); In Trust; The Literary History of England at the End of the 18th and Beginning of the 19th Century; A Little Pilgrim in the Unseen (1882); Sheridan (in the English Men of Letters series); Hester; It was a Lover and his Lass (1883); The Ladies Lindores; Old Lady Mary; The Wizard's Son; Sir Tom (1884); Madam (1885).

narratives. Here first she showed that charming power of half-sympathetic and wholly amiable raillery at the intellectual affectations of the passing day, which she has let play to such bright purpose since then over the extases of Ritualism, the ambitions of Dissent, and the conceits of Estheticism in the Carlingford Chronicles, and, in He that Will Not when He May, over the sadder absurdity of certain socialistic chimæras. The period of Zaidee was that of Mr. Ruskin's most sublime and solemn ascendency; when his code of doctrine was still supposed to have the integrity and indivisibility of a divine creed; when the audacity of critical examination and selection had hardly been thought of, and the more puzzling and inconsequent his deliverances appeared the deeper was held to be their mystical significance. Great, therefore, if a little guilty, was the sense of relaxation afforded even to the devout by the account in Zaidee of the grand new house builded by simple Mr. Burtonshaw, which was supplied, in deference to a recent recommendation of Mr. Ruskin's, with a species of richly sculptured spout, through which articles of food were "shunted" to the beggars, for whom comfortable seats had also been provided beneath the back porch,-a process which went on to the high satisfaction of all parties, until it was discovered that the family plate was rapidly disappearing by the same convenient channel.

In Zaidee, which appeared in 1856, Mrs. Oliphant also entered fully into that singularly favorable field for the higher comedy afforded by contemporary society in England; and she speedily proved herself a mistress there. No one has shown a keener eye for the delicate lights and shadows of that picturesque social system than she,a finer perception of its complicated personal relations, a more wistful respect for its traditions, or a clearer prevision of its perils. No novelwright of them

all, we think, has discovered there, and depicted to the life, so extensive a variety of the nobler and more endearing types of character. Not that she is at all prone to making her heroes and heroines perfect. Her forte lies rather in the analysis of mixed motives and the admission of inevitable inconsistencies. She pleads earnestly, almost passionately, at times, for the culprits whom she herself has created, and is perpetually making appeal, by implication if not directly, to the sentiment of common humanity in her reader. Mrs. Oliphant, in the Chronicles of Carlingford, like Mr. Trollope in those of Barsetshire, annexed and made triumphantly her own a little province of English life, which she developed thoroughly and delightfully, in all its grades of rank and shades of opinion. Good and bad, élite and vulgar, clergy and laity, the denizens of the ideal provincial town of twenty years ago, and of the ideal county, are equally real to our imaginations, and considerably more so, we fancy, to those of us who attended their birth and watched their growth than the traces retained by memory of the phantasmagoria of indifferent men and women, who have passed in flesh and blood before our veritable eyes during the same period.

The parallel holds good again in this respect that both writers attain, in their continued Chronicles, the full development of their power, find their happiest combination of character and circumstance, and produce work which can hardly fail, one would think, to be interesting for a considerable number of years to come. At the same time, the wonder is, in both cases, but especially in Mrs. Oliphant's, that from the time of the Chronicles onward, a period of nearly twenty-five years, she can have gone on writing at the rate of three or four good-sized volumes in a year, — having published thirty-four novels within that time, beside a large number of liter

Let us consider for a little, in this place, Mrs. Oliphant's studies of actual character. Her fame as a novelist has so far eclipsed, in the popular mind, her other claims to distinction as a writer that comparatively few of those who take their monthly installment of her unfailing novel with the same comfortable ingratitude with which they receive choice meals and good weather realize that she has also been signally successful in a graver, if not a higher, kind of literature. To be a good biographer is an exceedingly rare gift. To be a perfect biographer has been vouchsafed to not more than half a dozen individuals out of the entire human race. Mrs. Oliphant is not a perfect biographer, but in the midst of her other multifarious performances, which it is hardly possible to do more than catalogue in an article like this, she has told, with touching candor and discretion, the true story of two or three very memorable human lives. It is because her method as a biographer is so closely related to her method as a novelist, and throws so much light upon the latter, that we desire, before going more particularly into the merits of the great mass of readable fiction which she has produced, to dwell for a little upon her admirable memoirs of Edward Irving, St. Francis of Assisi, and Count Charles de Montalembert.

In grouping these names together, despite the immense and rather incongruous variety of associations which they connote, one immediately perceives the element which they have in common,

and fixes upon it, rightly no doubt, as that which gave Mrs. Oliphant so intimate a comprehension of them all. That element is an ardent piety, more or less tinged with mysticism, intense appreciation of the unseen, and constant familiarity with it. The latest and not the least interesting phase of Mrs. Oliphant's development as an imaginative writer which we shall have occasion to remark later on shows how prone she is to spiritualism in general; how eagerly concerned, not with the life that now is only, but with that which is to come. That a man should live with the spiritual world always vividly present to his consciousness, in any form, is enough to give her a sort of kinship with him, and afford her a clue to the intricacies of his nature; for the sum and substance of her method, in divining a human soul, is imaginative sympathy. She must be able to place herself in the centre of her subject, and identify herself with it, before she can establish its integrity and consistency, and follow its unfolding as this really took place from within. We are ourselves inclined to believe that this is the only sure and legitimate way of portraying human character. Certainly, it is akin to the method of the greatest portrait-painters in portraying the human face and form. That which proceeds upon the cold, mechanic principle of mere external observation, even the keenest and most scientific, may produce a likeness, indeed, but only the petrified and brutalized sort of likeness of which photography is capable. Doubtless the sympathetic method has its dangers, too, the danger of degenerating into mere partisanship and intemperate enthusiasm. But sympathy regulated by judgment, sympathy first and judgment afterwards, is as surely the golden. rule for the divination and representation of human character as love transcends knowledge in the scale of our common faculties. Nay, we may even venture, without irreverence, to point

out how high and sacred a sanction this interior method has for the Christian biographer, the central fact of whose belief is the assumption by Divinity itself of a lower nature, that the subject might never more doubt the sympathy of the sovereign, the creature that of his infinite Creator.

As

Such, at all events, has been the line followed by Mrs. Oliphant in tracing the history of three very eminent Christians; of three men as diverse as possible in character, circumstances, and traditions, but equally devoted to the service of Christian truth as they apprehended it. She has identified herself successively with the visionary monk of Assisi, and the visionary Dissenter of Annandale, and the chivalrous and fervent Catholic layman, the fils des croithe fils des croisés, as the patrician Montalembert was proud to call himself, and it would be difficult to say which of the three she has made most real to her readers. a literary performance the life of St. Francis is inferior to the other two. bears grievous marks of haste, like so much else which our indefatigable author has written; and it also bears marks, in parts, of a certain hesitation and constraint, inseparable, one would say, from the fact that she was writing the books for a Protestant Sunday library. But even here the steadily rising tide of her inexhaustible sympathy lifts her from her would-be rationalistic footing, and carries her high above the doctrinal difficulties of her undertaking; and the small volume, with its careless construction and its clap-trap illustrations, remains almost unique for the tenderness and reverence of its delineation by a non-Catholic hand of the most ultraCatholic of all saintly lives.

In the case of Edward Irving, Mrs. Oliphant's natural feeling for her subject was as different as possible from the mixture of involuntary awe and inconsequent love with which she regarded the great monastic founder. Herself NO. 332.

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a loyal Scot in race and a born Presbyterian, she knew by instinct, without even the trouble of imagination, the sources of that strange spirit, and all the conditions, both heroic and pathetic, of the bleak Lowland life into which it was born. The early struggles of Edward Irving; his piety and his ambition; the terrible test of his sudden and unparalleled London popularity, and that other test, no less terrible, of its sudden decline; the grotesque fanaticism which invaded his originally healthful mind, and disgraced him irremediably with the world polite; the tragedy of his expulsion from the fold of his fathers, and of his early death in uttermost humiliation and sadness, into all these experienceshis biographer could enter with scarce an effort; and, laying hold of the golden thread of sincerity which, though wofully overlaid at times, did undoubtedly rum straight through all these racking spiritual vicissitudes, she burst, as one may say, into tears of indignant pity, and constituted herself the impassioned apologist of Edward Irving. Never, apparently, were the perils which attend the method of sympathy better exemplified; and yet the last result of this almost wrathful partisanship has certainly been to disengage and fix firmly in the mind of the generation which has succeeded to his own the innermost truth about the eccentric founder of the so-called Catholic Apostolic Church. Forgotten, or well-nigh forgotten, for a time, amid the rush of subsequent events, Irving's early intimacy with Thomas and Jane Carlyle has caused the revival of his name and story, wherever have penetrated and where have they not?- the memoirs of that remarkable pair. there can be no doubt about it: now that the mist of controversy which involved the man's footsteps while he lived is cleared away, we know that the charitable conclusions of Mrs. Oliphant are more just than the cynical summary of that other woman, who, in her youth,

And

had loved and been loved by him, but who, among all her brilliant endow ments, had certainly not the gift of sympathy. "If Irving had married me, there would have been no 'tongues.''

But no haze of distance and unreality, or suffusion of too partial and personal a feeling, arises to blur the mas terly outline which Mrs. Oliphant has drawn for us of the career of that great contemporary, who was neither a coreligionist nor a compatriot of her own, - Charles de Montalembert. She had become familiar with the man and his milieu while making her translation of his monumental work on the Monks of the West. Her own powers were completely ripe at the moment when he passed away, and she brought to the estimation of his rare character and conspicuous course a thorough knowledge of the questions and the conflicts with which his name is identified, and an exquisite poise of judgment. Nothing is more puzzling in its nature and more baffling in its results, to the ordinary Protestant reader, than that last movement towards liberalism inside the Roman Catholic Church. How the three men whose names are associated with that short-lived publication which they so proudly called The Future, — how Lammenais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert could have been all that they were, and no more, - all so revolutionary, and two so reactionary; how, from the same point, and seemingly by the selfsame impulse, the two younger men should have been moved to a prostrate submission to the spiritual powers that be, the elder to incorrigible revolt; how the pair who yielded their convictions, and seemed to sacrifice their careers, should have held a certain place forever after as champions of freedom, while the one who risked all to maintain his own soul's independence lost his power and prestige from that moment, and sank swiftly into darkness, like a falling star, -all these curious and difficult questions, in

volving so much that is obscure to the intelligence of an outsider in race and religion, and foreign to his prepossessions, are patiently and respectfully investigated by Mrs. Oliphant, are luminously discussed and virtually decided. The key to the puzzle is in her hands, the solution ready for her readers. Study must have gone for much, in the formation of the instructive and disinterested conclusions at which she arrives, but sympathy went for more. Let us quote, as illustrating her truly extraordinary power of putting herself in the place of one whose conclusions are erroneous to her, and whose action she more than half deplores, her account of the way in which Lacordaire received the rebuff of the Holy See, when the three associates in the publication of L'Avenir had gone with so simple a confidence. to seek the papal sanction for their generous undertaking:

"The steady, long-persistent purpose (of the Church) seized hold of his imagination, he was overawed by it. After all, what were his own hot and sudden theories of a day, that he should come to vex with them the ear of this great Mother, intent to hear, over all the world, the marching of her sacred armies and the blessed footsteps of those who carry over mountain and desert the glad tidings of peace? He felt himself like a fretful child, thrusting its frivolous pains and troubles upon the mother, who is a queen, and whose mind is occupied with the affairs of a great kingdom. To such a child it is enough if the royal mother turns to him for a moment, lays her soothing hand upon his head, and passes on, without time to consider his plaints, to her own majestic business. He was half ashamed, half grieved, to have made his petty appeal, vexing her in the midst of her lofty cares. Before she had said a word in reply he had shrunk back, feeling his prayer out of place and untimely. To convert the world, to save souls, to