family; its subject is
a group of two or three individuals whose interaction forms the whole
business of the book. There is no local colour in it, no complexity of
detail nor violence of contrast; the atmosphere is vague and neutral,
the action passes among ill-defined sitting-rooms, and the most poignant
scene in the story takes place upon a staircase which has never been
described. Thus the reader of modern novels is inevitably struck, in _A
Simple Story_, by a sense of emptiness and thinness, which may well
blind him to high intrinsic merits. The spirit of the eighteenth century
is certainly present in the book, but it is the eighteenth century of
France rather than of England. Mrs. Inchbald no doubt owed much to
Richardson; her view of life is the indoor sentimental view of the great
author of _Clarissa_; but her treatment of it has very little in common
with his method of microscopic analysis and vast accumulation. If she
belongs to any school, it is among the followers of the French classical
tradition that she must be placed. _A Simple Story_ is, in its small
way, a descendant of the Tragedies of Racine; and Miss Milner may claim
relationship with Madame de Cleves.

Besides her narrowness of vision, Mrs. Inchbald possesses another
quality, no less characteristic of her French predecessors, and no less
rare among the novelists of England. She is essentially a stylist--a
writer whose whole conception of her art is dominated by stylistic
intention. Her style, it is true, is on the whole poor; it is often
heavy and pompous, sometimes clumsy and indistinct; compared with the
style of such a master as Thackeray it sinks at once into
insignificance. But the interest of her style does not lie in its
intrinsic merit so much as in the use to which she puts it. Thackeray's
style is mere ornament, existing independently of what he has to say;
Mrs. Inchbald's is part and parcel of her matter. The result is that
when, in moments of inspiration, she rises to the height of her
opportunity, when, mastering her material, she invests her expression
with the whole intensity of her feeling and her thought, then she
achieves effects of the rarest beauty--effects of a kind for which one
may search through Thackeray in vain. The most triumphant of these
passages is the scene on the staircase of Elmwood House--a passage which
would be spoilt by quotation and which no one who has ever read it could
forget. But the same quality is to be f