e
even faint and faltering suggestions of Ibsenic "duty to ourselves." Mr.
Danby (the characters regularly call each other "Mr.," "Mrs.," and
"Miss," even when they are husbands and wives, daughters or nieces, and
uncles or fathers) is a miss, and not quite a miss, of a very striking,
original, possible, and even probable character. His mother, with
something more of the Dickensian type-character, can stand by her
unpleasant self, and came ten years before "the Campaigner." Susan, her
pleasanter servant, is equally self-sufficing, and came five years
before Peggotty, to whom she is not without resemblances.[28]

[28] Another novel of Mrs. Marsh-Caldwell's, _Norman's Bridge_,
has strong suggestions of _John Halifax_, and is ten years
older.

But it is not so much the merits on the one hand, or the defects on the
other, of the book that deserve attention here and justify the place
given to it: it is the general "chip-the-shell" character. The shell is
only being chipped: large patches of it still hamper the chicken, which
is thus a half developed and half disfigured little animal. All sorts of
didactics, of Byronic-Bulwerish sentiment, of conventionalities of
various kinds, still hold their place; the language, as we have said, is
traditional and hardly even that; and the characters are partly drawn
from Noah's Arks of various dates, partly from the stock company of the
toy theatre. On the other hand, besides the touches of modernity already
mentioned, and assisting them, there is a great attention to
"interiors." The writer has, for her time, a more than promising sense
of the incongruity between Empire dress and furniture and the style of
George II.: and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte Street and
Chancery Lane show that she had either been a very early and forward
scholar of Dickens, or had discovered the thing on her own account. Her
age may excuse some of the weak points, but it makes the presence of the
strong ones all the more remarkable: and it shows all the more forcibly
how the general influences which were to produce the great central
growth of Victorian novel were at work, and at work almost violently, in
the business of pulling down the old as well as of building up the new.

Of that new novel it is not necessary to say much more. In the last
fifty or sixty years of the nineteenth century it did, as it seems to
me, very great things--so great that, putting poetry, which is supreme,