action definite and independent characters, and the attempt to make
weight and play with purposes and problems. The heroine's father--who
resigns his living and exposes his delicate wife and only daughter, if
not exactly to privation, to discomfort and, in the wife's case, fatally
unsuitable surroundings, because of some never clearly defined
dissatisfaction with the creed of the Church (_not_ apparently with
Christianity as such or with Anglicanism as such), and who dies
"promiscuously," to be followed, in equally promiscuous fashion, by a
friend who leaves his daughter Margaret a fortune--is one of those
nearly contemptible imbeciles in whom it is impossible to take an
interest. In respect to the wife Mrs. Gaskell commits the curious
mistake of first suggesting that she is a complainer about nothing, and
then showing her to us as a suffering victim of her husband's folly and
of hopeless disease. The lover (who is to a great extent a replica of
the masterful mill-owner in _Shirley_) is uncertain and impersonal: and
the minor characters are null. One hopes, for a time, that Margaret
herself will save the situation: but she goes off instead of coming on,
and has rather less individuality and convincingness at the end of the
story than at the beginning. In short, Mrs. Gaskell seems to me one of
the chief illustrations of the extreme difficulty of the domestic
novel--of the necessity of exactly proportioning the means at command to
the end to be achieved. Her means were, perhaps, greater than those of
most of her brother-and-sister-novelists, but she set them to loose
ends, to ends too high for her, to ends not worth achieving: end thus
produced (again as it seems to me) flawed and unsatisfactory work. She
"means" well in Herbert's sense of the word: but what is meant is not
quite done.

To mention special books and special writers is not the first object of
this survey, though it would be very easy to double and redouble its