Art. 7.-VICTORIANS IN LIMBO.

I HAVE been away on a visit to my literary past, renewing acquaintance with half-forgotten friends. It is a pathetic quest, accompanied with self-reproach. For inevitably we find the links of friendship, if not broken, at any rate relaxed. And we hardly know whether to ascribe the difference to something not quite up to our anticipation, and to our recollection, in them, or to a poor quality of faithlessness in ourselves. Of course, in a sense, the blame must be ours; for the reason of the difference is that something has changed; and we know there has been no change in them. Directly we say this, we find it a truism. We knew, of course, that we had changed. Our literary outlook, expectation, need, and custom all have changed; and perhaps the keenest zest about the dive into the limbo where those old friends lie is in the discovery of how that change will affect our appreciation of them.

Who are they, then-the old familiars with whom I re-sought acquaintance? To me, friends truly old are those who made way into my heart in the third quarter of last century. There is, indeed, a double reason why modern writers cannot take equal place with them: for the latter are too recent to have been forgotten and they did not come within my ken in that season of uncritical youth when heart and brain alike are generously responsive. Of course it is not of the greatest of the past that I speak. The true immortals do not languish in Limbo, that purgatory of the half-saved. I am referring to those, in the main so hearty, joyous, unanalytical and yet often excessively sentimental, whom we read in the late middle of the spacious 19th century: Smedley, Lever, James Payn, Ouida, Charlotte M. Yonge, Whyte Melville, and many another. Of all, as I looked back, it seemed to me that Whyte Melville brought more delight to my young heart than any other.

So I tried him in the persons of the 'Queen's Maries,' almost his best-known work. I will say, however, that, as I believe it to be his best-known, so also I deem it, in one particular, at least, his worst. It exhibits his most grievous sin in the most tedious

degree-his long lucubrations, platitudinous to a crime, on the character and caprice of 'Woman,' the eternal feminine-his plus-quam-Thackerayan moralisings on ter every conceivable occasion, and on no occasion. Of f course, he did commit a worse book-'Bones and I' -but then that was all, frankly, lucubrations! The lucubrations are doleful, and obvious enough, even there; but at least they are in place. In his novels they are out of place. Moreover, in his 'Queen's Maries,' see the task the poor fellow set himself-a novel with five heroines, no less! For we are obliged to count the Queen one, and indeed the chief, though not in the title rôle. And over her, how he bores! Perpetually, unceasingly, chanting her beauty, 'beauty beyond any other woman of her time, perhaps of any time.' So he sings-to us who have seen her portraits! As a good old Scottish aunt of mine, dead many a year-God rest her humorous soul-once said to me: We ought never to have let those pictures of Queen Mary come south of the Tweed. In Scotland we understand them. But we have told you she was so charming, and all we have to show is a woman with a thin face and sly eyes and a forehead like a bare knee.' Of course we, even of the strictest sect of the Sassenachs, ascribe to Mary, Queen of Scots, charm, compelling charm, Gallic charm that took captive' Caledonia stern and wild'; but when one of those Caledonian wild ones begins to talk to us of 'beauty beyond women of any time'-well, by Helen of Troy, and one or two besides, we bethink us that he protests too much. But who, even Scott, Thackeray, or Dickens, to name a great triumvirate, could do with five heroines to a tale-surely four too many? And Whyte Melville, good fellow, is not of their immortal quality. So I left the Queen's Maries' with a tear, though doubtless the book does, as is said, 'give a good picture of the times.'

I took up then a book better packed-with two heroines only, though with curiously quick exchanges of natures and likings-' Holmby House.' Again, fine pictures of the times, again tedious disquisitions, though not so tedious. The book opens at Holmby House, not in the Royalist and Cavalier period, which is the date of the story, but modernly, with a run of hounds as

finely described as can be read anywhere, and then one says, 'Oh, why did this fellow dive back into the years and bring out figures to which he had not genius to give life?' Why did he not write about the present, as he did now and again in 'Katerfelto,' and others of his hunting books? But Sarchedon!

Let us, however, give Whyte Melville, excellent sportsman and country gentleman as he was, the credit for at least having no illusions about his books. Often he laughed at them; said he knew they were bad; and even had the modesty truly to believe, as I think, that they were so—a rare quality in writing men. But he liked writing and he liked the money the books brought, for, as the son of a Scottish laird, he was not rich. And he had a vogue. So all was for the best with him. But, except for his 19th-century hunting books, we had best leave his literary bones at rest.

Stricken in spirit, I passed to another old friend, James Payn. Almost before I had turned a page, my soul found balm. It was an atmosphere of moderate spiritual refreshment. Forthwith I was reminded of one, a Victorian, whom certainly modern appreciation is too just to leave in Limbo-Anthony Trollope. Payn is not an Anthony Trollope. He is a good deal less: at the same time he gives his readers somewhat more. Whatever else we may say about those Victorians, we are obliged to admit that they do weave a tale, they do tell a story. 'Story, God bless you, I have none to tell, Sir,' might be the motto of many an ultra-modern writer, concerned only with showing us the sly corners of the souls of some scarcely human people. But all the Victorians tell us a story. Payn does not make any attempt to ape the inimitable Trollope, though his tale does amble on in the same unhurried way. Yet it is a tale. We have a sense that he leads us somewhere, that there is a dénoûment; and we' want to know.' It is even conceivable that he may tempt us to the indiscretion of looking at the last chapter before we come to it. There is no such allure or risk with Trollope. Payn has the better of the better man just there.

To say which is the best of Payn's many novels is a hard matter-a question which one reader will answer differently from another. By Proxy' would be the

da verdict of a referendum, I expect; but the choice is large and open. Payn's people are nothing like so human, or humorous, as Trollope's, though Payn has wit; but they act their parts and speak their words, and the story moves. He does not fall into that sad snare, which so caught poor Whyte Melville, piously following in the glorious but sometimes tedious trail of Thackeray the Great. He does not moralise unduly. His wit is not sly and penetrating like Trollope's humour, but it is subtler than Melville's, and he seems to realise, as Melville did not, that he is not a master hand at pathos. So he evades that other snare, Dickensian rather than Thackerayan, of bathos; he cooks us a good plot and serves it up like an artist. He interests us in the drama of his tale. That is his great virtue-he is interesting. And how high in the scale that quality should be set let him tell us who has spent hours in reading modern novels for review.

I would like to say a word for a rather forgotten work of Payn's, The Mystery of Mirbridge.' Do not mistake-it is not a 'detective story.' There is a mystery, but it is mystery only to the people in the book. It is no mystery for the reader, whose eye is set on the developments to which the mystery gives rise. Thus he deals with it as, playwrights tell us, is the only right way of treating a stage secret-revealing it to the audience but keeping it from the players, unless, indeed, there be any to whose being it is vital. Payn was not really a dealer in detective fiction, although there is some detective work-not too effective-in the later chapters of 'Lost Sir Massingberd.' But that quite impossible baronet, together, perhaps, with Clara in 'The Mirbridge Mystery,' may indicate why it is that Payn is now forgotten. Their characteristics are crudely, inhumanly overdrawn, and their crudity is only typical of Payn's players. Therefore, they give us no illusion of life, make no appeal, do not touch us to sympathy. I hope I do him not less than justice; but consider what his people would look like on the stage beside some of Trollope's just as human as so many wax figures from the show windows of Harrod's or the Stores!

Detective stories have multiplied enormously since the Victorian era, but even in this kind of fiction that

great age produced the best. Wilkie Collins gave us 'The Moonstone' and 'The Woman in White.' Le Fanu, past master of the noble art of making the flesh creep, produced the gentlest, the most polished, the most loathly murderer in all fiction, Uncle Silas. Have we bettered or even equalled the works of those writers since ? In America Edgar Allan Poe was creating 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' and therewith-pace Sir A. Conan Doyle-siring that promising son, Sherlock Holmes, whom the Frenchmen Gaboriau and Du Boisgobey were swift to adopt long before our Doyle gave him his last avatar. Also in America was Bret Harte, with his 'Luck of Roaring Camp,' and so on; but he indubitably has his seat with the immortals-few in a radiance of brighter glory.

Neither can I rate Wilkie Collins as one of the halfsaved of Limbo. I cannot think that while man loves crime and mystery-that is, so long as he is man-he will allow Wilkie's memory to fade. But Wilkie had a namesake, far less known, yet held for a while in higher esteem with those to whom detective stories made little appeal, Mortimer Collins. He is not to be matched as anywhere near Wilkie, who was a very busy fellow, in the quantity of the entertainment that he gave. If we re-read him, we shall find, maybe, some reason to understand that estimate, but surely we shall differ from it. He can write; he has a style. Further, he can, and does, create ingeniously an intricate, intriguing, and quite improbable plot; and for the working of the plot he conjures to the stage persons, humanly speaking, still less credible. There, in a few words, lie his attraction and his weakness. He is melodramatic both in his actors and in their actions, and he stretches the long arm of coincidence until it audibly cracks. Besides being a novelist, he was something of a poet. There were those who deemed him more than merely something of a poet, and of novelist too, and amongst those holding that estimate of him was one most notably, Mortimer Collins himself. It is startling, almost painful, to find him putting on record his own estimate of himself in both kinds-what business, after all, has such estimate there, be it accurate or be it absurd ?-among the many adventures of his 'Sweet Anne Page.' 'I