readers has even opened, seems to us to have only narrowly missed being one of the great romances of the age of Queen Victoria. It is full of beauty, of power, and of pathos. Some of its characters are so drawn that they not merely stand out as if in life before us, but they enable us to enter into all their thoughts and anticipate all their purposes. We can conjecture beforehand what they will do in a given condition of things, just as we can tell how some friend of our own is likely to act when we hear what the circumstances are under which he is called upon to take a decision. This story too is not overladen, as others of Mr. Meredith's unluckily are, by epigram and antithesis, by curiosities of phrase which it is difficult to follow, and conceits which rather dazzle the eyes of the reader than light up the page. If Mr. Meredith's novels were to be examined according to their intellectual worth, they would deserve and demand a much fuller analysis than has been attempted here. But in these pages we are looking. at the literature of the time from the chronicler's rather than the critic's point of view. We tell that a certain soldier won a battle or statesman gained a political victory, although we may ourselves be of opinion that the victory was better deserved on the other side. In the same spirit we record the fact that Mr. Meredith has not yet succeeded in gaining that place in fiction which our own judgment of his capacity would say that he is surely well qualified to attain.

Mr. Blackmore's 'Lorna Doone' seems to us on

the whole the best novel of the second class produced in England in our time. That is to say, we rank it distinctly below the great novels of Dickens and Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, but above any novel produced by any writer short of these, and above the inferior works of these great artists themselves. Mr. William Black is the head of a school of fiction which he himself called into existence. Scottish scenery and Scottish character, alternating with certain phases of London life, are the field in which he works, and in which he has no rival. He has not as yet shown himself great in passion or in pathos. The deeper emotions of the human heart, the sterner phases of human life, he has apparently not often cared to touch. But in his own province, somewhat narrow though that be, his art approaches to perfection. He can paint not merely scenery, but even atmosphere, with a delicacy and strength of touch which in themselves constitute an art. Mr. Hardy has done something the same for certain English counties that Mr. Black has done for Scotland. He is occasionally stronger than Mr. Black, but he has not his subtle sweetness, charm, and tender grace, and he is far less equal, far less surely master of his own craft. A word must be said of the delicate porcelain of Miss Thackeray's work in fiction-her tender, gentle, womanly stories, nor should we fail to record the fact that Mrs. Craik's 'John Halifax, Gentleman,' was one of the literary successes of the day.

A style of novel peculiar to this age, and very

THE 'ROARING GIRL' OF FICTION.

553

unlike that of Miss Thackeray or Mrs. Craik, deserves a word of mention. That is the novel which records the lives, the rompings, the ambitions, the flirtations, and the sufferings of what we may call the Roaring Girl of the Victorian age. With tousled unkempt hair, disorderly dress, occasionally dirty hands, and lips bubbling over with perpetual slang, this strange young woman has bounced into fiction. She has always a true and tender heart under her somewhat uncouth appearance and manners. When she falls in love, she falls in love very intensely, and although she may have had all manner of flirtations, she generally clings to the one true passion, and is not uncommonly found dying of a broken heart at the end of the novel. Perhaps the one merit about this kind of fiction, when it is really honest and at its best, is that it recognises the fact that women are not a distinct angelic order of beings, but that they have their strong passions and even their coarse desires like men. Such advantage as there may be in setting this fact plainly before the world, on the authority of writers who are women themselves, the school may claim to have. claim to have. It is not a high, or refined, or noble, or in any way commendable school of fiction, but at its best it is sincere. At its worst—and it very soon reached its worst-it may be described as

insufferable.

The fiction of this later period is, like the poetry, inferior to that of the period which we had to consider in our former survey. It has more names, but not such great names. It would almost seem as if the

present school of fiction is, to borrow a phrase from French politics, exhausting its mandate. The sensation novel has had its day, and its day was but an episode, an interruption. Realism has now well-nigh done all it can. Its close details, its trivial round of common cares and ambitions, its petty trials and easy loves, seem now at last to have spent their attractive power, and to urge with their fading breath the need of some new departure for the novelist. Perhaps the one common want in the more modern novel may suggest the new source of supply. Perhaps, in order to give a fresh life to our fiction, it will have to be dipped once again in the old holy well of romance.

THE END.

INDEX.