Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/461

Rh tangling a web of mystery, is displayed in such narratives aa "The Accusation," "Beggar and Burgomaster," and "The Tile-burner and his Family." Her revelations of social life are represented in "The Money-seekers," and her comic vein, not very broad, or deep, or richly flowing, is traceable in the head-gear afflictions of "The Two Miss Smiths." On the whole, the contents of these volumes read better in their original fugitive form, as magazine papers, than in the more imposing guise of guinea-and-a-half glorification. And, speaking for ourselves, we must own that these tales of terror did not cast over us such a spell as to elicit an unconditional assent and consent to their assumed right of reappearance in another form—of revisiting thus the glimpses of the moon, in the hope of making night hideous, and a second edition pay.

Nor are we over well-affected towards Mrs. Crowe's last venture, "The Adventures of a Beauty." If the invention of a labyrinthine plot is all-in-all, this novel is a triumph of high art; and as there are readers who decide in the affirmative, and who postpone all other qualities to that of intricately-woven story, it is sure of its section of the myriad-minded public. But if characterisation is of importance–if deep searchings of heart are in request–if the anatomising art of Hawthorne is desired, or Currer Bell's sounding of the soul's dark and heaving waters, or Thackeray's ironic cautery of conventional life,–then is this history of Agnes Grosvenor null and void. In this respect, it is a decline from "Lilly Dawson."–"L'originalité des caractères a disparu, et c'est elle qui seule peut rendre une fiction vivante." To this axiom, however, not all subscribers to circulating libraries will ex animo subscribe; some even have a notion, uttered or unexpressed, that the less une fiction has of philosophic character-delineation, the more vivante it necessarily is. "The Adventures of a Beauty" we have seen aptly compared to one of those puzzles in which you discover a number of rings shut up one within another; you cannot for the life of you tell how they got there, and are still more bewildered to know how they are to be got out again; but to Mrs. Crowe all this is perfectly easy. In her hands, "the perplexities of a plot through which the tangled threads of circumstances overlay the humanity, and render moral truths subordinate to a machinery of intricate incidents, may not only be endured with complacency. but enjoyed as one enjoys the feats of a conjurer who can make a card fly out of the pack into a gentleman's pocket or a lady's reticule, and restore it into its proper place with a wave of his wand." Yet one is scarcely resigned to a result which classes the author of "Aristodemus" with professors of the legerdemain of romance–though the seat assigned her be shared by the Houdins and Doeblers of their craft. The Wizard of the North–we mean Scott, not "Professor Anderson"–would never have attained to that title of facile princeps, had he confined his orbit to going round about the caldron of magic such as this.