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-and-sister-novelists, but she set them to loose ends, to ends too high for her, to ends not worth achieving:  end thus produced (again as it seems to me) flawed and unsatisfactory work.  She “means” well in Herbert’s sense of the word:  but what is meant is not quite done.

To mention special books and special writers is not the first object of this survey, though it would be very easy to double and redouble its size by doing this, even within the time-limits of this, the last, and the next chapters.  It may, however, be added that in this remarkable central period, and in the most central part of it from 1840 to 1860, there appeared the first remarkable novel of Mr. George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), first of a brilliant series that was to illustrate the whole remaining years of the century; and the isolated masterpiece of Phantastes, which another prolific writer, George Macdonald, was never to repeat; while Mrs. Oliphant and Mrs. Craik, both of whom will also reappear in the next chapter, began as early as 1849.  In 1851 appeared the first of two remarkable books, Lavengro and The Romany Rye, in which George Borrow, if he did not exactly create, brought to perfection from some points of view what may be called the autobiographic novel.