MRS. OLIPHANT.1

THIS book is divided almost equally between what is an autobiography written by Mrs. Oliphant for her children, begun in 1860 and breaking off abruptly in 1894, after the death of her last surviving son "Cecco," and a collection of letters from 1850 to 1897 edited and arranged by Mrs. Harry Coghill. The two halves of the book are of very unequal value and interest. We confess to finding the account Mrs. Oliphant gives of herself much more entertaining than the impression one gets of her through her letters, which we found rather dull and uninteresting reading. This perhaps is due to the fact that the largest portion of her correspondence preserved in this volume is with her life-long friends and publishers, the famous Blackwood family, and deals too much with matters of a purely literary and business nature to give one a very deep insight into her personal life and char

acter.

But while in her letters she seems to draw a veil over her private life, in her autobiography she writes and speaks of herself with the most charming frankness and freedom from self-consciousness. The thread of the story is often broken, and there are many wide gaps in the narrative and much that is obscure, except to one thoroughly conversant with her family history, yet in spite of its lack of orderly arrangement and its decidedly sketchy character this memoir remains a most transparently sincere and lifelike portraiture.

The interest of the book for the general reader will not be found in any events of a stirring romantic nature which it recounts, but in the record it gives of a life of singular nobilily, earnestness, and unselfishness. In a literary career extending over nearly a half century, we scarcely know whether to admire most the woman or the author. Perhaps it

1 The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant, arranged and edited by Mrs. Harry Coghill. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. 1899.

would be safer to say that the two are so inseparably associated that it is impossible to admire one without being drawn to the other. There have, of course, been many greater novelists than Mrs. Oliphant; but few, if any, have surpassed her in the astonishing variety of her work or have maintained throughout the same high degree of excellence. That she attempted too much and wrote too hurriedly to leave anything of permanent value behind is a conclusion which would, we think, be accepted by a majority of her critics, as, in the main, a just estimate of her work. Even her most ardent admirers must admit that some of her later literary ventures, especially in the field of historical criticism, were decided failures. The wonder, however, is not that she wrote some things poorly, but that she wrote so many things well and achieved such marked success in so many different fields of literature. And yet, with all due recognition of her merits, one may be pardoned for expressing the regret that the stern necessity laid upon her of earning a livelihood for herself and her children made it impossible for her to practise that self-restraint which would have given more time and leisure for the pursuit of the higher objects of her art.

Merely to classify her books will give the reader some idea of the range of her literary powers. To some hundred novels, many of them of unequal value, she added a number of biographies of well-known men, among the best of these being her lives of Edward Irving, Count De Montalembert, Principal Tulloch, and the brilliant sketches of the principal characters of the reign of George II., including such interesting personalities as Wesley the reformer, Hume the skeptic, and Hogarth the painter. But perhaps the work which she liked best and upon which rests her surest claim to fame is that rather remarkable series of books inaugurated in 1876 by "Makers of Florence," and followed at intervals by "Makers of Venice," "Rome," and "Jerusalem." But none of her writings show such imaginative power, originality of conception, and deep spiritual insight as those which are most intimately connected with the loss of her husband and children,

and which give the conclusions of a very devout and inquiring mind, meditating intently upon the state of the departed after death. The most remarkable of her studies in this direction are "A Little Pilgrim in the Unseen," "A Beleaguered City," and "The Land of Suspense," in which she seems to have worked out for herself a sort of philosophy of the other life.

But the present memoir treats not so much of the versatile writer and the laborious student as it does of the devoted wife, mother, and friend. As her intimate friend and editor Mrs. Coghill says of her: "Her life was for her children first, and after them for the small circle of loving and intimate friends who closely surrounded her." One has only to read her journal to see how true a description this is. It is as a mother, first and last, that she impresses us and wins our admiration and sympathy. How true a touch of the motherheart is this on page 33! She is speaking of her own mother's death and comparing her grief on that occasion with what she had suffered in the recent loss of an infant daughter: "My dearest mother, who had been everything to me, all my life, and to whom I was everything; the companion, friend, counselor, minstrel, story-teller; with whom I had never wanted for constant interest, entertainment, and fellowship-did not give me, when she died, a pang so deep as the loss of the little helpless baby, eight months old. I miss my mother till this moment, when I am nearly as old as she was (sixty June 10, 1888); I think instinctively still of asking her something, referring to her for information, and I dream constantly of being a girl with her at home. But at that moment her loss was nothing to me in comparison with the loss of my little child."

With the loss of her mother and the death of her child, Mrs. Oliphant seems to have entered upon a life of more than ordinary care and sadness. Her marriage with her cousin, Frank Oliphant, while the result of genuine attachment, was not the most advantageous that could have been made. Mr. Oliphant, who seems to have led a rather precarious existence as a painter and designer, was never very successful in his business. Whether it was that he was

lacking in enterprise and ambition, or whether his naturally weak health made it impossible for him to pursue his art with diligence sufficient to insure his making a living for himself and family, is hard to say, yet it is clear, from the account which the wife gives of their life in London, that from the first it was her literary labors that formed the chief source of their income. Perhaps the true explanation of his lack of business ability was that he was never very strong physically, and, as the event proved shortly after they had settled in London, he began to show symptoms of that dread disease, consumption, which finally took him off at Rome in 1859. One must read the journal itself to form any conception of the desolation and loneliness of that terrible winter in Rome, after her husband's death, when Mrs. Oliphant stood facing the world anew, with a debt of £1,000, and nothing to meet it with but a small insurance of £200 on her husband's life and her own brave heart, untiring energy, and extraordinary good health, which seldom failed her. Nothing could give a clearer idea of her really desperate condition than her own words (p. 63): "Frank died quite conscious, kissing me when his lips were already cold, quite free from anxiety, though he left me with two helpless children, and one unborn, and very little money and no friends but the Macphersons, who were as good to me as brother and sister, but had no power to help beyond that, if anything could be beyond that." From this time until the death of her son Cecco, who was born at Rome a few weeks after his father's death, Mrs. Oliphant's one aim in life was to live for the happiness and education of her children. In this, as the sequel shows, she was doomed to a bitter and cruel disappointment. By degrees her wonderfully brave and always hopeful spirit asserted itself, and she was able again to take up the burden of life with some degree of comfort and even cheerfulness; "the children being always bright," as she adds half apologetically, as though wondering herself at the "obstinate elasticity" of her nature. It was at this time that she wrote her famous "Carlingford Series," of which she speaks in her memoir

as having made "a considerable stir at the time, and almost made me one of the popularities of literature-almost, never quite, though Salem Chapel' really went very near it, I believe." With a curious mixture of modesty and pride she adds: "It has never been very much, never anything like what many of my contemporaries attained, and yet I have done very well for a woman, and a friendless woman, with no one to make the best of me, and quite unable to do that for myself."

It was in the winter of 1864 that Mrs. Oliphant, in company with some friends, went again to Rome, which was certainly, so far as she was concerned, an ill-fated city; for hardly had she arrived there before her only daughter Maggie, the "healthiest and happiest of all the children, was taken suddenly ill with gastric fever, died in a few days, and was laid to rest by her father's side in the English cemetery. Of this crushing blow the mother writes in the most heartbroken and inconsolable way: "My dearest love never knew nor imagined that she was dying; no shadow of dread ever came upon her sweet spirit. She got into heaven without knowing it, and God have pity upon me, who have thus parted with the sweetest companion, on whom, unconsciously, more than on any other hope of life, I have been calculating. I feared from the first moment her illness began, and yet I had a kind of underlying conviction that God would not take away my ewe lamb, my woman-child, from me." She seemed to feel especially the loneliness of her widowhood and the inability of any one to enter into her grief and understand her. "My boys," she writes, "are too little to feel it, and there is nobody else in the world to divide it with me. O Lord, thou wouldst not have done it but for good reason! Stand by the forlorn creature who faileth under thy hand, but whom thou sufferest not to die."

When we hear of Mrs. Oliphant again it is at the home at Windsor, near Eton, where she went to educate her two boys, and where she spent the happiest days of her life, watching over their education, all the while writing