e rest much less lovingly, but she would have made them persons. Mrs.
Gaskell has left them mere types of amiable country-townishness in
respectable if not very lively times. Excessive respectability cannot be
charged against _Mary Barton_ and _Ruth_, but here the "problem"--the
"purpose"--interposes its evil influence: and we have got to take a side
with men or with masters, with selfish tempters of one class and deluded
maidens of another. _North and South_ is perhaps on the whole the best
place in which to study Mrs. Gaskell's art: for _Wives and Daughters_ is
unfinished and the books just named are tentatives. It begins by laying
a not inconsiderable hold on the reader: and, as it is worked out at
great length, the author has every opportunity of strengthening and
improving that hold. It is certain that, in some cases, she does not do
this: and the reason is the same--the failure to project and keep in
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-a