Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/174

 and promised to be one of its warmest supporters. . . . Few women have enjoyed a greater popularity than Mrs. Craik, or have better deserved it. It is sometimes said that John Halifax is not a real man, but only a woman's ideal of a man. Well, let us be grateful for such ideals. No one can read the story of which John Halifax is the hero without being the better for it. Mrs. Craik will live long in the affectionate memory of those who knew her, and one of her novels, at any rate, will always have a high and honourable place in English fiction. Indeed, for simple narrative, some of the chapters of 'John Halifax, Gentleman,' are almost unequalled in our prose literature."

In the same number, reviewing a novel written by a woman, he describes characterization as "the enemy of literary form." It is "such an essential part of the method of the modern writer of fiction that Nature has almost become to the novelist what light and shade are to the painter, the one permanent element of style." In the third series of Notes he develops at greater length his views on English fiction. "In England," he writes, "we have had no schools worth speaking of. The fiery torch lit by the Brontes has not passed' on to other hands; Dickens has only influenced journalism; Thackeray's delightful superficial philosophy, superb narrative power and clever social satire have formed no schools, nor has Trollope left any direct successors behind him, a fact which is not to be regretted however, as, admirable as Trollope undoubtedly is for rainy afternoons and tedious railway journeys, from the point of view of literature he is merely the perpetual curate of Pudlington Parva. As for George Meredith, who could hope to reproduce him? His style is chaos illuminated by brilliant flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language; as a novelist he can do everything except tell a story; as an artist he is everything except articulate. Too strange to be popular, too individual to have imitators, the author of 'Richard Feverel' stands